Marshall Plan Modernism : Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia (Art History Publication Initiative)

Mansoor, Jaleh

Duke University Press（2016/09発売）

• 製本 Paperback:紙装版/ペーパーバック版／ページ数 288 p.
• 言語 ENG
• 商品コード 9780822362609
• DDC分類 700.411209045

Full Description

Focusing on artwork by Lucio Fontana, Alberto Burri, and Piero Manzoni, Jaleh Mansoor demonstrates and reveals how abstract painting, especially the monochrome, broke with fascist-associated futurism and functioned as an index of social transition in postwar Italy. Mansoor refuses to read the singularly striking formal and procedural violence of Fontana's slit canvasses, Burri's burnt and exploded plastics, and Manzoni's "achromes" as metaphors of traumatic memories of World War II. Rather, she locates the motivation for this violence in the history of the medium of painting and in the economic history of postwar Italy. Reconfiguring the relationship between politics and aesthetics, Mansoor illuminates how the monochrome's reemergence reflected Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni's aesthetic and political critique of the Marshall Plan's economic warfare and growing American hegemony. It also anticipated the struggles in Italy's factories, classrooms, and streets that gave rise to Autonomia in the 1960s. Marshall Plan Modernism refigures our understanding of modernist painting as a project about labor and the geopolitics of postwar reconstruction during the Italian Miracle.

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction. Labor, (Workers') Autonomy, (Art) Work  1

1. The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory  39

2. Lucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture  69

3. Alberto Burri's Plastics and the Political Aesthetics of Opacity  93

4. "We Want to Organicize Disintegration"  119

Conclusion. "Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike" or From Autonomy to Strike  167

Notes  207

Bibliography  249

Index  265