Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy

Description

Bringing together studies by art historians, historians, and political scientists, Fascist Visions explores the themes and paradigms that pervaded protofascist and fascist aesthetic discourse, cultural policy, and artistic production in France and Italy. Whether traditionalist or innovative in idiom, art functioned as the expression of fascism's ideological polarities: nihilism and idealism, modernism and antimodernism, revolution and reaction. This volume charts the unfolding of fascist aesthetics from its genesis in nationalist and antimaterialist ideologies before World War I to its full development during the interwar period and World War II. It also highlights the shared motivations of advocates of fascist aesthetics, including artists, art critics, political activists, and government officials, outside of Germany. The eight essays in this book investigate the intersection of fascist ideology and aesthetics through a wide range of historical examples. Topics include: theories of cultural regeneration in Italy from the Risorgimento to fascism; the impact of fascism upon the work of such artists and art critics as Ardengo Soffici, Mario Sironi, Valentine de Saint-Point, and Waldemar George; the theories of modernist urbanism developed by Georges Valois's Faisceau; and official sponsorship of painting and the decorative arts in Mussolini's Italy and in Vichy France. The contributors to this volume include Walter Adamson, Matthew Affron, Mark Antliff, Emily Braun, Michele Cone, Emilio Gentile, Nancy Locke, and Marla Stone.

Matthew Affron is Assistant Professor or Art History at the University of Virginia. He is currently writing a book on the work of Fernand Leger. Mark Antliff is Associate Professor of Art History at Queen's University in Canada. He is the author of Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton). A Guggenheim Fellow in 1995-96, he is completing a book entitled The Advent of Fascism: Myth, Art, and Ideology in France.

"Fascist Visions is an innovative, thoughtful, informative, and consistently intelligent collection of essays. The presentation of the complex interplay between art history and history of ideas and politics constitutes a major historiographical achievement, which will have a deep impact on the debate on fascism."-Zeev Sternhell, Hebrew University of Jerusalem