On the occasion of Rebirth of Rome, a program of interrelated exhibitions at The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, three Italian scholars will discuss the alliance between art, architecture, and ideology that helped to define Italian political identity during the period of Fascist dictatorship (1922–43). Though the regime controlled and censored most cultural production—from newspapers and school notebooks to radio and cinema—it always maintained an ambiguous attitude toward architecture and the arts, enabling it to appropriate seemingly opposed stylistic tendencies toward a unified concept of Italianità (Italian-ness).
This constant negotiation of classical precedent and modern innovation enlisted a wide array of creative disciplines to reconcile the challenges of establishing a modern state. These three presentations and the following discussion will focus on the design and construction of a “Third Rome,” the decoration of public works during the 1930s, and the reception of Italian art in the United States following the collapse of the Fascist regime.
Silvia Barisione, curator
The Wolfsonian–Florida International University, Miami Beach
The Birth of Rome. Five Visions for the Eternal City
Prominent architectural and urban planning projects—from the redevelopment of the Augustean zone to the Foro Mussolini physical education complex, the EUR, and the Italian pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair—give evidence to the lasting influence of ancient Rome on Italian national consciousness during the interwar period, when the city served both as an instrument of state mobilization and as the primary focus of efforts to reclaim Italy’s imperial past.
Matteo Fochessati, curator
Wolfsoniana–Fondazione Regionale per la Cultura e lo Spettacolo, Genoa
Mural Painting and Futurist Plastica Murale. Public Decoration in Italy in the 1930s
The dual spirit of Fascist propaganda—dedicated, on the one hand, to celebrating an illustrious past and, on the other, to glorifying the technological, social, and political achievement of the regime – found its most coherent artistic expression during the 1930s in Novecento mural painting and in Futurist experiments with polimaterismo.
Raffaele Bedarida, doctoral candidate
CUNY, The Graduate Center, NY
Botticelli or Boccioni? Promoting Italian Art in the US
The 1949 exhibit Twentieth Century Italian Art held at MoMA in 1949 was largely responsible for initiating a dominant narrative of Italian art from Futurism to Lucio Fontana. The backstage story of the show reveals how that narrative was part of the post-WWII construction of a new image for the Italian nation state – one distanced from the Fascist past. It also underscores issues of continuity between Fascist and post-Fascist Italy and between Fascist and Cold War rhetoric.