Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia

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Jaleh Mansoor

Marshall Plan Modernism

Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia

Jaleh Mansoor

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English

Duke University Press
30 September 2016

Colonial art

Series: Art History Publication Initiative

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.

By: Jaleh Mansoor
Imprint: Duke University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 18mm
Weight: 476g
ISBN: 9780822362609
ISBN 10: 0822362600
Series: Art History Publication Initiative
Pages: 288
Publication Date: 30 September 2016
Audience: General/trade , Professional and scholarly , ELT Advanced , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

"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"

Jaleh Mansoor is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of British Columbia and coeditor of Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, also published by Duke University Press.

Reviews for Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia

Brilliantly highlighting the difference between Italian autonomy/autonomia and the far more general and metaphorical evocations of factory work in American-style pop art and minimalism, Mansoor is one among a small group of authors whose work consistently undercut the historicizing and pacifying ism in the concept of modernism. What we gain is an art historical account on par with the multiple upheavals of modernity and their various contingencies. -- Ina Blom * Critical Inquiry * Mansoor's book is an inspiring investigation of Italian art in the post-war years, and an unprecedented attempt, at least in terms of a book-length study, to apply to artworks analytical tools derived from autonomous Marxism. -- Jacopo Galimberti * Oxford Art Journal * An ambitious book: it is literally brimming with questions and the invitation to further exploration. . . . It takes up the challenge to think differently about accepted narratives of the neo-avant-garde and of artistic practices in Europe after the Second World War. -- Teresa Kittler * Art History *