The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 is the first book to bring together all aspects of Italian visual culture from this fascinating period. Through seventeen scholarly essays and hundreds of lavish full-color and duotone reproductions, this volume captures the era's greatest achievements in the fields of painting, sculpture, artists' crafts, literature, photography, cinema, fashion, architecture, and design.

This book, published on the occasion of a major exhibition mounted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, celebrates the flowering of Italian creativity in the twenty-five year period that began with the fall of the Fascist regime. The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943-1968 is the first book to bring together all aspects of Italian visual culture from this fascinating period. Through seventeen scholarly essays and hundreds of lavish full-color and duotone reproductions, this volume captures the era's greatest achievements in the fields of painting, sculpture, artists' crafts, literature, photography, cinema, fashion, architecture, and design. Also included are translations of major manifestos written by artists and critics, as well as an extensive chronology encompassing the cultural and political history of the period.

Margaret Plant presents a wide-ranging cultural history of the city from the fall of the Republic in 1797, until 1997, showing how it has changed and adapted and how perceptions of it have shaped its reality.

The behind-the-scene history of the fashion magazine Bellezza, the Italian Vogue founded in 1941, has never been submitted to scholarly attention. Its utopian function in defining a new culture of fashion and code of glamour contributed to the totalitarian project of building a 'new Italian woman'. The current volume fills this gap, using the case

Postwar Italian Art History Today brings fresh critical consideration to the parameters and impact of Italian art and visual culture studies of the past several decades. Taking its cue from the thirty-year anniversary of curator Germano Celant's landmark exhibition at PS1 in New York – The Knot – this volume presents innovative case studies and emphasizes new methodologies deployed in the study of postwar Italian art as a means to evaluate the current state of the field. Included are fifteen essays that each examine, from a different viewpoint, the issues, concerns, and questions driving postwar Italian art history. The editors and contributors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of postwar Italian art, the terminology that is used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art in Italy and abroad.

This rigorously compiled A-Z volume offers rich, readable coverage of the diverse forms of post-1945 Italian culture. With over 900 entries by international contributors, this volume is genuinely interdisciplinary in character, treating traditional political, economic, and legal concerns, with a particular emphasis on neglected areas of popular culture. Entries range from short definitions, histories or biographies to longer overviews covering themes, movements, institutions and personalities, from advertising to fascism, and Pirelli to Zeffirelli. The Encyclopedia aims to inform and inspire both teachers and students in the following fields: *Italian language and literature *Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences *European Studies *Media and Cultural Studies *Business and Management *Art and Design It is extensively cross-referenced, has a thematic contents list and suggestions for further reading.

Tracing the evolution of the Italian avant-garde’s pioneering experiments with art and technology and their subversion of freedom and control In postwar Italy, a group of visionary artists used emergent computer technologies as both tools of artistic production and a means to reconceptualize the dynamic interrelation between individual freedom and collectivity. Working contrary to assumptions that the rigid, structural nature of programming limits subjectivity, this book traces the multifaceted practices of these groundbreaking artists and their conviction that technology could provide the conditions for a liberated social life. Situating their developments within the context of the Cold War and the ensuing crisis among the Italian left, Arte Programmata describes how Italy’s distinctive political climate fueled the group’s engagement with computers, cybernetics, and information theory. Creating a broad range of immersive environments, kinetic sculptures, domestic home goods, and other multimedia art and design works, artists such as Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and others looked to the conceptual frameworks provided by this new technology to envision a way out of the ideological impasses of the age. Showcasing the ingenuity of Italy’s earliest computer-based art, this study highlights its distinguishing characteristics while also exploring concurrent developments across the globe. Centered on the relationships between art, technology, and politics, Arte Programmata considers an important antecedent to the digital age.

The first English-language monograph on Il Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, this study explores the rise and fall of this postwar Italian artists' group as a representative instance of the tensions facing Italian painting during the transition out of two decades of Fascism and into the global divisions of the Cold War. Adrian Duran argues that the binary structures of the era - realism vs. abstraction, Communism vs. democracy, conformism vs. freedom - have monopolized the discourse surrounding the Fronte Nuovo and, with it, the historiography of Italian painting during this period, 1944-50. Beginning with the dialogues that framed the formation of the Fronte Nuovo, this book reconsiders artists' works, correspondence, critical writings, and manifestos. These are married to examinations of specific exhibitions, the most important of which are the group's 1947 inaugural exhibition and the 1948 and 1950 Venice Biennali. The critical responses to these exhibitions are reconsidered in light of their groundings in the heated political debates of the period. In total, these diverse sources reveal the vast divide between the internal discourse of the arts, generated by the participant artists and their works, and the surrounding politics of Cold War Italy.

Baroque Tendencies in Contemporary Art is a collection of essays by an international cadre of scholars addressing current trends within the field of contemporary art and how artists and architects reflect upon past traditions and fold them into the present. Often referred to as the Neo-Baroque, scholarship on this topic first emerged in the 1980s with the publication of several notable studies in France (but not translated into English until the 1990s); in addition, a number of recent exhibitions have focused on contemporary responses to the Baroque. The Baroque and the Neo-Baroque are frequently defined as having a propensity for instability, seriality, reflexivity, fluidity, and spectacle. This is perhaps partly why, in the millennial period, there is so much interest in the Baroque—we are seeking ways to find parallels between the art of then and the art of our own diverse, pluralistic culture. This book provides context for how contemporary artists meet and deal with the Baroque both formally and conceptually. Among others, it provides discussions of the work of American artists John Currin, Jeff Koons, Frank Stella, Lisa Yuskavage; American architect, Frank Gehry; European artists Lucian Freud, Jenny Saville, Emilio Vedova; Latin American artists Monica Castillo, Raphael Cauduro, Yishai Judisman; and New Zealand artists, Richard Reddaway and Joanna Langford.