American Artists in Postwar Rome

Art and Cultural Exchange

Peter Benson Miller author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Publishing:20th Feb '25

£95.00

This title is due to be published on 20th February, and will be despatched as soon as possible.

American Artists in Postwar Rome cover

An interdisciplinary study of reciprocal exchanges between American and Italian artists in Rome after World War Two.

Drawing on unpublished archival sources, this book reconstitutes the experiences of a wide range of American artists, critics, and writers working in Rome in a charged environment of “Cold War cosmopolitanism.”

After the Second World War, American artists flocked to Rome in record numbers, even as the United States shored up Italy as a bulwark against the spread of Communism. While the market for modern art in Rome was less vigorous as those in Paris and New York, numerous galleries, artist-run spaces, and other institutions acted as important catalysts, making Rome an international artistic hub. The city attracted now canonical figures Lee Bontecou, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Thek, and Cy Twombly, along with less well-known artists, such as Eugene Berman, Gene Charlton, Carlyle Brown, Peter Chinni, William Congdon, Claire Falkenstein, Marcia Hafif, John Heliker, James Leong, Beverly Pepper, and Laura Ziegler, among many others.

Rather than focusing on institutions and diplomatic relationships, the book centres the experience of artists, and also addresses Rome’s gay subculture and the role of female artists during the period, eschewing traditional narratives of the male “cultural ambassador.” Through case-study based investigation, Peter Benson Miller explores the reciprocal relationships between American modernist artists and Italian artists in postwar Rome, and reveals how these artists perceived Rome as less constrained by the demands of a national school, and as an alternative to New York. This congenial creative atmosphere yielded “new pictorial forms” developed in tandem with or absorbed from like-minded Italian artists, engaging the city and its multiple layers of history, from antiquity to the profound trauma inflicted by the recent conflict.

The book also establishes the entangled social networks, galleries, exhibitions, and institutions sustaining their work and providing entrée into local artistic circles. Focusing on a series of specific exchanges, this study contributes to our understanding American modernism in an international context.

Through precise and deep documentary research, Miller draws attention to the many personal and cultural threads converging in postwar Rome. In these pages, the city emerges as a formative laboratory for a diverse community of American artists and their original works created in confrontation with their Italian peers. * Francesco Tedeschi, Professor, Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Italy *
A deeply researched and richly textured account of the “heyday of the American artist in Rome”, this engaging book shows us that it was significantly the community of gay artists and writers who most splendidly ignored the strictures of Cold War binarisms, both political and aesthetic. * Romy Golan, Professor, PhD Program in Art History, City University of New York, USA *
Deeply researched and brimming with insight, this book vividly reconstructs a largely forgotten moment in the history of 20th-century art, tracing the various networks of transatlantic artistic exchange that inspired some of the most influential artists of the postwar generation. * Robert Slifkin, Edith Kitzmiller Professor of the History of Fine Arts, New York University, USA *
This long overdue study rightfully restores Rome to its proper place in postwar art history. Challenging the myth of American art exceptionalism in the 1950s and ‘60s, it reminds us that its art world stretched well beyond New York. * Catherine Dossin, Associate Professor of Art History, Purdue University, USA *
An important contribution to the growing scholarship on Italy-US cultural exchanges. Miller’s focus on Rome’s gay subculture and women is especially refreshing in a field that has largely embraced a white, male, heterosexual 'cultural ambassador' type of rhetoric. * Raffaele Bedarida, Associate Professor of Art History, Cooper Union, USA *

ISBN: 9781350446366

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

312 pages