Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy

The Legacy of Carla Lonzi

Francesco Ventrella, Giovanna Zapperi, Francesco Ventrella, Giovanna Zapperi

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350187146
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

A renowned art critic of the 1960s, Carla Lonzi abandoned the art world in 1970 to found Rivolta Femminile, a pioneering feminist collective in Italy. Rather than separating the art world luminary from the activist, however, this book looks at the two together. It demonstrates that even as Lonzi refused art, she articulated how feminist spaces and communities drew strength from creativity. The eleven essays in this book document the artistic and feminist circles of postwar Italy, a time characterised both by radical protest and avant-garde aesthetics, using primary and archival sources never before translated into English. They map Lonzi's deep connections to the influential Italian Arte Povera movement, and explore her complicated relationship with female artists of the time, such as Carla Accardi and Suzanne Santoro. Carla Lonzi's written work and activism represents a crucial, but previously overlooked, feminist intervention in traditional art history from beyond the Anglo-American canon. This book is a timely and urgent addition to our understanding of radical politics, separatist feminism and art criticism in the postwar period.

Part One

Art writing against art

1

Carla Lonzi: Encountering American art

Judith Russi Kirshner

1

Carla Lonzi was more committed to artists than art, to creativity rather than criticality; her notoriety resulted not only from her brilliance as an art critic and art historian but also from her decision, in 1970, to shed what she deemed the false consciousness of criticism. Unable to resolve the contradictions between life and art, experience and culture, she abandoned one career, opting instead for the politics of feminism and becoming a guiding force in the Italian feminist movement. With the painter Carla Accardi and the writer Elvira Banotti, she launched Rivolta Femminile, one of the earliest Italian feminist groups, producing the manifesto Sputiamo su Hegel. In December of that same year, she published ‘La critica è potere’ (Critique is power), her final essay on criticism, in which she states her affinity with artists as opposed to the persuasive power of critics.¹

Prior to 1970 Lonzi’s exceptional faculties were largely focused on the realm of art in almost 200 critical works. Having escaped from the ‘paternal swindle’ – to adapt her phrase regarding fathers, professors and priests – Lonzi became one of the most important voices for contemporary Italian artists. Her book Autoritratto (1969) is crucial to our understanding of some of the central figures and issues underlying Italian contemporary art. In the preceding decades, Lonzi also fixed her exacting gaze on developments outside Italy: American art of the 1950s and 1960s. From 1955 until 1970 Lonzi published essays and reviews on American art that appeared in journals such as L’ Approdo letterario, marcatré, and Paragone. Her first foray into this material was an essay on Ben Shahn, penned in 1955 with Marisa Volpi, her closest friend and collaborator.² Subsequently, in Turin from 1957 to 1968, while affiliated with Luciano Pistoi’s Galleria Notizie, Lonzi published essays on figures that included Jackson Pollock, Louise Nevelson, Franz Kline and Cy Twombly. Finally, in 1967–68, she wrote about American art while in the United States, where she was living with her partner, Pietro Consagra. A recurrent theme is that of difference: the romantic mythology of the American geography and its indigenous people juxtaposed with the equally fictionalized image of an urban, unfettered spirit of experimental fervour, contrasted with the European restrictive tradition.

Comprising a small but significant fraction of her cultural writing, Lonzi’s texts on American art may be counted as one response among the complex, controversial reception of American art in Italy during the 1960s.³ For my purposes, these incisive essays also serve as a lens through which to explore her lifelong search for subjectivity, for an identity freed from the methodology of art history, the solitude of writing and the powerlessness of the critic. Indeed, Lonzi’s encounters with American art and artists both reinforced and intersected with her textual construction of her own yearnings for autonomy and self-actualization, giving rise to a mutually reinforcing combination that afforded a greater promise for agency.

This chapter relies on the important work of Lara Conte, Vanessa Martini and especially Laura Iamurri, who have compiled the entire corpus of Lonzi’s published art writings in the context of the journals and cities in which they appeared.⁴ It draws as well on a corollary to Lonzi’s published writing – the more than thirty letters she sent to Volpi in Rome from 1954 until 1962. Poignant revelations of her agonizing search for personhood, these letters offer us an introspective glimpse of the formative moments of Lonzi’s intellectual allegiances and art historical training under Roberto Longhi.⁵ They can also be read as a prologue to the diaries and Autoritratto, since they record informal interactions with friends, family and colleagues. Their immediacy and desire for reciprocity became hallmarks of Lonzi’s interviews with important artists of her time: Lucio Fontana, Luciano Fabro and Giulio Paolini, among others. I am extracting references to American art and politics from this correspondence, and will leave it to others to paint a picture of Lonzi’s relational psychology and the personal politics of this subset of artists, gallerists and writers in postwar Italy.

2

In Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War, culture was implicated as instrumental in the anti-American campaign mounted from the left by the Italian Communist Party, targeting capitalism in its attacks on the United States. Against the larger geopolitical backdrop, some members of the Italian left saw the United States as striving for global domination by means of the NATO alliance and the mass media. In this environment the rhetoric could be extreme, as when Harry Truman was compared to the likes of Adolf Hitler.⁶ As historian David Ellwood has written, America served as a symbol of modernity against which the Italian vision of culture was accommodated and opposed. The bifurcation of culture into expression and reflection, realism and abstraction, was part of an intense, ongoing polemic, scaffolded against the political divide between the Italian Communist Party and the Christian Democrats. In March 1948 the PCI (Partito Communista) issued ‘Per la salvezza della cultura italiana’, assailing ‘the colonization of Italian culture by American imperialism’. Yet, amid the politics of the Cold War and the $1.5 million Marshall Plan, the American model could be usefully deployed by commentators, be they Communists or Catholics, negatively inclined towards the effects of capitalism and the mass media.

The circuit of international artistic exchange was the Venice Biennale, which was resuscitated in 1948 following the war and the defeat of Fascism. Not only a platform for American and European cultural interaction at a moment when a Europeanist spirit was growing, that year’s Biennale, highlighting Impressionism as its modernist heritage, also dramatized the debates between realism and abstraction, seen in the complicated politics of Italian modernity; the Italians presented Fronte Nuovo abstractionists in their galleries, while the Greek Pavilion displayed Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, which included some American Abstract Expressionists. Italian arguments over the Biennale in the decade that followed were also informed by the language of existentialism, tying the anxiety of the human condition to ideology and culture. This vocabulary surfaces in Michel Tapié’s 1952 book Un Art autre and in Lonzi’s analysis of the difference between the representation and experience of reality, the latter embodying the qualities of gesture and process that she applauded in abstraction.

Italian society underwent such dramatic change at this time that art critics whose early formation was indebted to Benedetto Croce moved to the left, assimilated Antonio Gramsci’s theories and added political and economic layers to their analyses. Of particular significance was the conflict between the positions held by the art historians Lionello Venturi, whose approach emphasized history and context, and Roberto Longhi, an esteemed connoisseur. Commissioner of the 1950 Venice Biennale, Longhi published his ‘Proposte per una critica d’arte’ in the first issue of Paragone in 1950 and remained involved with the exposition until 1956. An influential historian who became Lonzi’s thesis advisor in Florence, Longhi was recognized for his scholarship on subjects ranging from Caravaggio to Giorgio Morandi, relying on the perceptual impact of the original work of art and the significance of historical connections.

The critic Francesco Arcangeli, another Longhi student and his successor at the University of Bologna, reviewed the American contribution at the 1956 Biennale in favourable terms. In his review Arcangeli, an admirer of Pollock, expressed his appreciation for what he regarded as a ‘state of autarchy’: the democratic freedoms and abstraction, which stood in notable contrast to the traditional restraint of Italy.⁷ A more interesting and subtle response to the debate may be seen in the discourse on a ‘third space’ posited by Fronte Nuovo artists, who sought to identify the link between art and life as a means of maintaining creativity’s separation from politics.⁸ Like many of her fellow Italian critics who championed American art, Lonzi was deeply immersed in ideological issues concerning the relationship between politics and formal experimentation, especially the question of whether claims of authenticity or representations of the bourgeois self were in fact false claims of realism. Despite assertions on behalf of the primacy of the quotidian, Lonzi was well read in Françoise Sagan and Simone de Beauvoir, art history and Marxist theory; Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno became guides for her explorations of modernism’s potential and threat of politicization.

Lonzi’s first writing on American art was prompted by her encounter with the American Pavilion at the Biennale of 1954, featuring work by Ben Shahn and Willem de Kooning. Given Shahn’s association with social protest rather than the progressive abstraction represented by De Kooning, this pairing – perhaps curious at first glance – was actually strategic. It fulfilled many of the cultural and ideological objectives of the American Cold War mission, particularly the Open Door Policy, which not only secured a market for American products but rejected Communism and left-wing governments. Cultural products played an important role in Truman’s tactic of challenging the US negative image in Europe; they were utilized to both inspire and convince Europeans of America’s ‘legitimate aspirations for freedom, progress, and peace’ as set forth by the United States Information Agency in 1954. The governmental funding and circulation of fine art, painting and sculpture aimed at literate audiences and distinct from popular culture such as Hollywood films and jazz would, it was believed, serve as ‘an indispensable tool of propaganda’, providing an effective means of countering Soviet influence.⁹

The 1954 Biennale, at which other national pavilions enjoyed governmental funding, constituted a global stage for the display of art and ideology at this moment of the Cold War.¹⁰ By coupling Shahn’s social realism with De Kooning’s abstraction, the spotlight was on an artist whose love of Italy and its artistic heritage was well known. Shahn was represented by such paintings as The Red Stairway (1944), Liberation (1945), and Spring (1947), alongside numerous early works, including The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti (1931), centred on the trial of that pair of Italian anarchists. Shahn’s Sacco and Vanzetti cycle had already gained favour in Italy, particularly among leftist viewers.

The American Pavilion was curated and underwritten by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the leading proponent of American avant-garde art in the United States. The MoMA funding was, in turn, supported by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund – a deliberate move designed to forestall criticism and encourage positive publicity. As Alfred Barr, the curator of the American Pavilion (and former director of MoMA), asserts: ‘Private ownership of the American pavilion will ensure, the Museum feels, a progressive spirit that is free from censure.’¹¹ In his article Barr points to Shahn’s popularity and acclaim not as a Communist social realist but as a muralist and an easel painter, whose message in support of the clas...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Against culture: Feminism and art in postwar Italy
• Part One: Art writing against art
• Part Two: Creativity and the feminist subject
• Part Three: Art as relation
• Part Four: Genealogies and resonances
• Index
• Imprint