Sergio Cortesini, Invisible Canvases. Italian Painters and Fascist Myths Across The American Scene, American Art, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2011, Pp. 52-73.
Sergio Cortesini, Invisible Canvases. Italian Painters and Fascist Myths Across The American Scene, American Art, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2011, Pp. 52-73.
Sergio Cortesini, Invisible Canvases. Italian Painters and Fascist Myths Across The American Scene, American Art, Vol. 25, No. 1, Spring 2011, Pp. 52-73.
Invisible Canvases
Italian Painters and Fascist Myths across the American Scene
Author(s): Sergio Cortesini
Source: American Art, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 52-73
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660032 .
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Katherine Contini and Ida Minuti of Saint Paul with Lavandaie (The Laundresses), by Emanuele Cavalli at the
Minnesota State Fair, 1935. Photo, Kenneth M. Wright Studios, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul
Invisible Canvases
Italian Painters and Fascist Myths across the American Scene
Sergio Cortesini
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particular.27 The exhibition was considered the most controversial in recent years
and provoked discussions on degenerate
art. The purchase of Carlo Carrs After the
Bath (fig.9) for the Los Angeles County
Museum, thanks to a subscription begun
by collector Preston Harrison, sparked
a storm over Italian art.28 In Seattle,
many museum visitors were apparently
unprepared to see dislocated pieces of
anatomy in space, even in an exhibition of
modern art, and were left wondering about
their encounter with Fausto Pirandellos
enigmatic and erotic Stairway (fig.10).
A scantily dressed woman descending
a wooden staircase, two fragments of
leg climbing the other way, a detached
hand grasping the banister, and a marble
foot on the landing together suggested a
coming-and-going that attracted everyones notice immediately and sent them
hurrying off to ask any artist at hand just
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Notes
1 Dennis P. Doordan, Exhibiting Progress:
Italys Contribution to the Century
of Progress Exposition, in Chicago
Architecture and Design, 19231993:
Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis,
ed. John Zukowsky (Munich: PrestelVerlag, in association with the Art
Institute of Chicago, 1993), 21931.
2
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