Join us at CIMA for a book talk with author Laura Moure Cecchini presenting her latest book Baroquemania: Italian visual culture and the construction of national identity, 1898–1945 (Manchester University Press, 2022).

Laura’s book studies the cultural politics of the Baroque in Italian modernism. This book radically reconceptualises Italian post-unification visual culture by exploring an element that has, until now, been systematically ignored: its fraught entanglement with the Baroque.

Evoking a glorious past – the Roman Empire, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance – played a key role in constructing a common Italian identity following the country’s unification in 1861. But the Baroque was considered too extravagant, kitsch, and whimsical to serve the aggressive nation-building impulse that led to Fascism. Baroquemania sets out to redress this narrative. It interrogates a diverse range of media, from paintings, sculptures, and buildings to commercial illustrations, postcards, posters, pageants, photographs, films, and exhibitions. Situating Italy within European and Latin American reimaginings of the Baroque, the book proves how widespread use (and misuse) of the style was integral to articulating Italians’ ambivalent relationships with modernity and tradition.

Unravelling the Baroque’s protean afterlife in the work and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Armando Brasini, Adolfo Wildt, and Lucio Fontana, among others, this book reveals the Baroque’s role in pioneering a distinctively Italian approach to modern art, one that was neither anti-modernist nor fully committed to avant-garde values. By examining how the Baroque haunted Italian visual culture, Baroquemania offers a fresh look at an essential aspect of Italy’s development into a modern nation.

Light Refreshments will be served.

Laura Moure Cecchini is Assistant Professor (Ricercatore di tipo B) in the Department of Cultural Heritage at the Università di Padova (Padua, Italy). She was a recipient of the Lauro de Bosis Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University and Associate Professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University. Her research focuses on the transnational legacies of fascist visual and material culture. She is now at work on two projects, one analyzing artistic exchanges between Italy and Argentina in the context of transatlantic fascist diplomacy, and the other on the material ‘debris’ of Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia. Her work has appeared in The Art Bulletin, Selva, Third Text, Modernism/modernity, and Oxford Art Journal. Laura’s research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, CIMA- Center for Italian Modern Art, The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, and the Cesare Barbieri Fund at Trinity College, among other institutions.

Explore CIMA’s current exhibition From Depero to Rotella: Italian commercial posters between advertising and art through the lens of typographic design. Paul Shaw, noted calligrapher and design historian with an expertise in modernist typography, will take us on a visual survey of the posters in the show, to analyze the inventiveness and quality of their typographic solutions and contextualize them within the European modernist milieu of the ’20s through the ’60s.

Paul Shaw, an award-winning graphic designer, typographer, calligrapher and design historian in New York City, teaches at Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts. The designer or codesigner of eighteen typefaces, he is the coauthor of Blackletter: Type and National Identity (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998) and the author of Helvetica and the New York City Subway System (MIT Press). He writes about letter design in the blog Blue Pencil.

Meet author Raffaele Bedarida as he presents his latest book Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States from Futurism to Arte Povera (Routledge, 2022).

Raffaele Bedarida and his book will be introduced by Emily Braun, Distinguished Professor, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Raffaele Bedarida, associate professor or Art History at Cooper Union, is an art historian and curator specializing in transnational modernism and politics. Since he joined The Cooper Union full-time faculty in 2016, he has coordinated the History and Theory of Art program. Bedarida holds a Ph.D. from the Art History Department of the CUNY Graduate Center, New York as well as M.A. and B.A. degrees in Art History from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. His research has focused on cultural diplomacy, migration, and exchange between Italy and the United States. He has also worked on exhibition history, censorship, and propaganda under Fascism and during the Cold War, from Futurism to Arte Povera. Since 2008, when he founded and curated the residency program Harlem Studio Fellowship in New York, Bedarida has actively promoted programs of international exchange for emerging artists. In addition to his academic and curatorial activities, Bedarida has regularly lectured on modern and contemporary art topics at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and MoMA. Bedarida has authored three monographs: Bepi Romagnoni: Il Nuovo Racconto (Milan: Silvana, 2005); Corrado Cagli: la pittura, l’esilio, l’America (Rome: Donzelli, 2018; English edition: CPL Editions, in press); Exhibiting Italian Art in the US. Futurism to Arte Povera (London-New York: Routledge, 2022). He has also edited many volumes, among which: Methodologies of Exchange: Twentieth Century Italian Art at MoMA, 1949, with Davide Colombo and Silvia Bignami, special issue of Italian Modern Art, January 2020; Gianfranco Baruchello: Painters Ain’t Butterflies (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2021); Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, with Sharon Hecker (London-New York: Bloomsbury, 2022). His academic articles and essays have been published extensively in periodicals, such as Oxford Art Journal, International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Italian Modern Art, and Artforum, and in exhibition catalogues. Bedarida’s upcoming publications is: Author, Corrado Cagli: Exile, Painting, America 1938-1947, monograph (New York: Primo Levi Center Editions, in press).