| This dissertation explores the careers of the Bolognese painter Giorgio Morandi and the Tuscan painter and art critic Ardengo Soffici in order to highlight how their work represents a common cultural project. Their project sought to renew Italian painting by privileging classical purity as well as regionalism and ruralism over other strains of modern art, such as Futurism and Cubism. I examine Soffici's early career (1900-1920) and his influence on Morandi, reconstructing their relationship by analyzing together paintings and primary written sources authored by both figures. Thus, I describe how their landscapes and still lives created an alternative modernism whose ruralism and reliance on tradition caused their exclusion from standard histories of modernism, which tend to characterize modernism in terms of formal innovation and progressive politics. Moreover, I analyze Soffici and Morandi's strategies of self-promotion with respect to fascist history and ideology, the cultural institutions created by Fascism, and the rise of formalist art criticism. The dissertation concludes with a consideration of these figures' later artistic and critical fortunes in the 1950s and 1960s. In particular, I delineate the process through which Morandi gained international recognition as a painter after World War II, comparing his rise to fame with Soffici's fading reputation as well as the implications of these opposite trajectories in relation to the history of Italian fascism and modernism writ large. |
