"A Time of Synthesis": Roman Art at Midcentury

Using the examples of Roman and Rome-based artists such as Mario Sironi, Scipione, Renato Guttuso, Leoncillo Leonardi, FORMA 1, the Gruppo degli Otto, and arte povera, this paper will rechart the decades of call and response that spanned from Fascism through the generation of Corrente and the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti to the generational revolutions of 1968. By reweaving the discourses of politics and art criticism around the works themselves, we are able to recount the ways in which the ebbs and flows of Italian politics offered artists content within which they could both reconcile their individual roles in the self-immolatory years of WWII and the Resistance and find footing amidst the constantly shifting fortunes of art and culture in the first decades of the Cold War.

Scientific Organization: Marica Antonucci

Adrian R. Duran is an Associate Professor and Head of the Art & Art History program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (USA). His book Painting, Politics and the New Front of Cold War Italy was reissued in 2018 by Routledge. He is beginning a project on Venetian art since Napoleon.