Introduzione Michele Dantini e Emanuele Pellegrini

Arte e comunismo in Italia 1943-1964 Michele Dantini In recent years, except perhaps for Guttuso alone, little attention has been paid by italian art-historians to “communist” art in the transition from Stalinism to “Khrushchev Thaw”. Neither the study of single artists or single artworks attributable to “socialist realism” in its various meanings is on the…

La Nuova Pesa di Alvaro Marchini Fabio Benzi Through the story of the Galleria La Nuova Pesa in Rome (1959-1976), owned by the building contractor Alvaro Marchini (a tycoon closely linked to the Italian Communist Party), we can understand the mood of the dialectic between modern realist and abstract art, that marked the Italian context…

Un artista dopo due guerre. Le Demolizioni di Mario Mafai tra critica e militanza Michela Morelli Mario Mafai’s life and work is characterized by ideological and political interests concretized in certain iconographic and stylistic choices and, between 1945 and 1958, in his militancy in the ranks of the Italian Communist Party. These motives, in the…

«Il Contemporaneo»: l’arte attraverso gli occhi del Partito Comunista Italiano (1954-1964) Livia Garomersini Since the post-World War II period, the PCI’s relations with the art world have strongly characterised the national cultural scene. The magazines have always been a privileged starting point for understanding this relationship, including the cultural policy of the party itself. And…

Il PCI tra crisi del realismo e rifiuto dell’avanguardia (1955-1959) Alessandro Barile With the end of the 1950s, realism, understood as an artistic category, goes into crisis. The society, on the threshold of the economic boom, changed its face, and with it its cultural references. The Italian Communist Party reacts to the change first by…

Verso una biografia collettiva. Renato Guttuso e i ritratti dei compagni di partito negli anni di guerra Giorgio Motisi During World War II, Renato Guttuso’s atelier represented a crucial hub for several protagonists of the anti-fascist circles in Rome. In just a few years, the artist created portraits of numerous prominent members of the clandestine…

Realism from Italy – Socialism from Eastern Europe: The Sense of Place in the 1950s Jerome Bazin The article is about paintings and graphic art that circulated between Italy and Eastern Europe, principally the Soviet Union and Poland, in the 1950s. Selected images are various landscapes and images of land occupations. Those images were at…

Exhibiting Communist Italy Abroad: The 1956 Artist Delegation to the People’s Republic of China Martina Tanga e Yang Wang In the 1950s, Italian Communists looked not only to the USSR but to China’s nascent regime, the People’s Republic of China, for cultural exchange and collective inspiration. Italy sought alternative avenues toward a revolution and China…

Marxismo e marxisti perplessi. Una storia (dell’arte) ancora da scrivere Emanuele Pellegrini In 1980 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti published with Editoriale Nova of Milan Marxismo perplesso, a collection of his most important essays on Marxism, some of them still unpublished. Although largely ignored, the book shows an innovative perspective on Marxism and visual arts, which appears…