Symposium Speaker Bios and Abstracts — The Course of Empires

“Francesco Pezzicar's L’Abolizione della schiavitù in America across Empires”

Caitlin Beach is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art in North American and Atlantic spaces. Her dissertation, “Sculpture, Slavery, and Commerce in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World,” examines how the consumption and production of statuary intersected with the political economy of American slavery. Research for this project has been supported by fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Royal Academy of Arts. Beach has published articles on the sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller (Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art) and John Bell (Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide).

“Francesco Pezzicar's L’Abolizione della schiavitù in America across Empires”

Working from the imperial Austrian port city of Trieste 1873, the sculptor Francesco Pezzicar set out to create a work commemorating the abolition of slavery in the United States. Cast in bronze and standing nearly eight feet tall, L’Abolizione della schiavitù in America depicted an African American man holding overhead a fragment of bronze inscribed with text excerpted from the Emancipation Proclamation. While the sculpture remains best known for its display at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, it was also the subject of considerable commentary when exhibited in Trieste before and after the American fair. This paper attends to the place of the sculpture in late nineteenth-century Trieste, considering the cultural associations and appropriations of the figure of the freed American slave at a time of shifting national and imperial allegiances in Italy and Austria.

Pezzicar’s sculpture registered histories of empire on the Italian peninsula while refracting the course of its realities elsewhere. At a moment when a committed contingent of nationalists made increasing calls for Trieste’s freedom from Austrian imperial rule, the sculpture was distanced from the historic specificity of American Emancipation and instead appropriated into a mythos of Italian liberation that stretched from antiquity to the present. Significantly, the sculpture’s incorporation into these very discourses of liberation and italianità took place alongside the Kingdom of Italy’s concomitant campaigns of colonial expansion to eastern Africa. The paper concludes by considering the sculpture’s entry into the collections of Trieste’s Museo Revoltella in the late nineteenth century alongside Pietro Magni’s The Cutting of the Suez Canal, a white marble group that recast modern Italian expansion as a classical allegory, to further meditate on the relationship between courses of empire and constructions of race and nation.

“Eterna Primavera: When Hollywood Fell in Love with Modern Italian Art, 1954-1960”

Raffaele Bedarida is an assistant professor of art history at Cooper Union, New York. He holds a PhD from the art history department of the CUNY Graduate Center, New York, as well as MA and BA degrees in art history from the Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. He is an art historian and curator specializing in art, politics, and cultural diplomacy between Europe and America. His publications have focused on Italian Modernism from Futurism to Arte Povera in an international context. 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 the Museum of Modern Art.

“Eterna Primavera: When Hollywood Fell in Love with Modern Italian Art, 1954-1960”

As Italy moved from the decade of Reconstruction (1945-1955) to the Economic Miracle (1958-1963), an image of a new Italy emerged in the United States. Gone was the redemptive rhetoric of a destroyed and impoverished country resurfacing from the war’s rubble; what prevailed now was a modern, glamorous, and pleasing facade. Modern Italian art played a key role in reshaping Americans’ perception of Italy, and during the second half of the 1950s, that art enjoyed unprecedented success in this country. Nearly a dozen exhibitions of contemporary art from Italy toured the United States during these years. Beyond the art world, Italian artists such as Marino Marini, Massimo Campigli, Alberto Burri, and Afro Basaldella conquered Hollywood and the fashion world, and they seduced millions of Americans through mainstream TV programs, movies, and illustrated magazines.

The metaphor of Italy’s “new Renaissance,” which characterized the Reconstruction years, did not go out of fashion but instead changed meaning. In the immediate postwar moment, the expression signified the end of the fascist dark age (although fascism had frequently invoked the Renaissance, too). Now, compared to the vitality of spring and without allusion to a previous winter, the Renaissance paradoxically stood for the youth and energy of the new Italy while still finding validation in Italy’s glorious past. It was this combination of a lighthearted focus on the present and the cultural prestige of the nation that made Italy’s latest Renaissance in the arts especially successful in Hollywood. For example, the exhibition Eterna Primavera: Young Italian Artists (Eternal Youth), which circulated in the United States and ended in Beverly Hills (1953-1954), became the setting for Robert Aldrich’s science-fiction movie, Kiss Me Deadly (1955); Billy Wilder’s films Sabrina (1954) and The Apartment (1960) prominently featured artwork by Italian modernists Carlo Carrá, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Marini, and Campigli; and the large survey exhibition The New Italian Renaissance, held at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1958, was made possible through private loans from Hollywood stars such as Vincent Price, Norman Panama, and Kirk Douglas.

“American-Italian Artistic Exchange after World War II”

Ester Coen is an expert on Futurism, metaphysical art, and Italian and international avant-gardes in the first half of the twentieth century. Her research also encompasses the sixties and seventies and the contemporary scene, with numerous essays and other publications. In collaboration with Giuliano Briganti, she curated the exhibition Pittura Metafisica (Palazzo Grassi, 1979) and edited the catalogue. With Maurizio Calvesi, she edited the catalogue raisonné of Umberto Boccioni’s works (1983). With Bill Lieberman, she curated the Boccioni retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1988), and has since been involved in many international exhibitions. She organized Richard Serra’s exhibition at Trajan’s Market (1999), planned the Gary Hill show at the Colosseum (2005), and was one of the three committee members for the Futurism centenary exhibition (Centre Pompidou, Scuderie del Quirinale, and Tate Modern). Coen is a full professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Aquila.

“American-Italian Artistic Exchange after World War II”

America/Italy: a reality of political interactions that is reflected in the cultural history of two nations. How to understand such different courses—one of an imperialist state and one of a country that, amongst many difficulties, was unified in the second half of the nineteenth century and then went on to wage an artistic battle to enforce its contemporary relevance?

In postwar Italy, the real semantic rupture happened with Lucio Fontana, the most direct heir to the vision of time and space proclaimed by the Futurists, who carried their ideals beyond their canonical methods of painting. Correspondingly, in the United States, that rupture was enacted by Jackson Pollock and the unprecedented gravitational shift evidenced in his painting. Exploring American and Italian art of the fifties and sixties—among, for example, pop art, arte povera, and minimal art, or between conceptual and land art—allows us to rediscover encounters and intersections and above all differences in origins, sources, and cultural expressions.

“The Myth of the Italian Renaissance in New Deal Murals”

Sergio Cortesini is an assistant professor of modern and contemporary art history at the Università di Pisa. A recipient of postdoctoral fellowships from the Getty (2005) and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2006), Cortesini has published on Italian fascist and American New Deal art from comparative and transcultural perspectives, as well as on more contemporary artists (most recently on Emilio Vedova’s emotionally charged gestural paintings and Damien Hirst’s post-humanist treatment of death). He was awarded the inaugural Terra International Essay Prize from SAAM in 2010 for his essay “Invisible Canvases: Italian Painters and Fascist Myths across the American Scene,” published in American Art (vol. 25, no. 1). Cortesini holds a doctorate from Sapienza-Università di Roma and a diplome d’études approfondies in social anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

“The Myth of the Italian Renaissance in New Deal Murals”

Murals commissioned by the Section of Fine Arts of the Treasury Department between 1934 and 1943 have been discussed as examples of the American Scene and for the ideological implications inherent in the choices of subjects and style. Less attention has been paid to the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance as a—seemingly paradoxical—inspirational force for a modern government-sponsored mural movement expected to fashion the goals of the New Deal.

Indeed, the Renaissance was singled out as an authoritative reference by the directors of the Section—Edward Bruce, Forbes Watson, Christian J. Peoples—and stylistic echoes appeared in murals commissioned from George Biddle, Philip Guston, Ethel Magafan, and Lewis Rubenstein, among others. However, more than a visual prototype, the Italian Renaissance was thought of as a lost Eden where art functioned as an agent of social cohesion. The frescos of the Italian communes were simplistically idealized as the collaborative output of a social order based on interclass cooperation and artistic creativity expressing shared cultural values, and were, therefore, socially meaningful. In the Section’s discourse, murals resonated with the redefinition of the American artist as artist-citizen, one who was able to work cooperatively, on an equalized government payroll, who was connected to the community, and who shunned the eccentricities of individualism and the artificiality of the market values of pre-Depression capitalist speculation, cultural cosmopolitanism, and social unrootedness. While corroborating the lingering bias against aesthetic modernism, the Italian Renaissance resonated with the idea of American restructuring under the benevolent New Deal and provided artists and critics with a social fantasy admired and discreetly appropriated, despite the ostentatious quest for authentic styles and subjects drawn from America’s heartland.

Melissa Dabakis teaches American and modern European art history, serves as a member of the American studies faculty, and chairs the Department of Art History at Kenyon College. She is the founding director of the Kenyon-Rome Program and will serve as its on-site director in the fall of 2018. She is the author of Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture: Monuments, Manliness, and the Work Ethic, 1880-1935 (1999), A Sisterhood of Sculptors: American Artists in Nineteenth-Century Rome (2014), and many articles and essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American art. In the 2013-2014 academic year, Dabakis was the Terra Foundation Senior Fellow in American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has also held fellowships from the Huntington Library, the United States Capitol Historical Society, the J. Paul Getty Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

“Sargent’s and Duveneck’s Working-Class Venetian Muses”

Jane Ann Dini is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she received her PhD. Previously, she was Associate Curator of American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Assistant Curator of American Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Dini trained at Sotheby’s, London, and has held the NEA Curatorial Fellowship at the Harvard University Art Museums and a predoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She was also awarded the two-year Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship at California State University, Los Angeles. Among her publications are several essays on the artist John Singer Sargent, including one for the exhibition catalogue Sargent and Italy (2008). She also served as the editor of the NEA and NEH-funded exhibition catalogue Dance: American Art 1830-1960 (2016). Dini is currently preparing a book, “Unifying the Arts: John Singer Sargent’s Murals in Boston.”

“Sargent’s and Duveneck’s Working-Class Venetian Muses”

In 1882, John Singer Sargent painted Street in Venice, an image representing three commonly held nineteenth-century stereotypes of Italian people: the Italian beauty, depicted as the striding Venetian woman; the couple behind her, who represent old-fashioned labor; and the two conversing men dressed in dark coats, representing the swarthy Italian. Sargent’s Italian figures are agents of the picturesque in the fine arts. At the same time, and in the same painting, images of Italians in Italy embody concerns regarding the immigration of Italians to the United States. In the work of Sargent, the elevation of Italian beauty on the one hand and the deprecation of Italian behavior on the other created unusual and contradictory descriptions in American journalism, social reform, and immigration policy.

During the last decades of the nineteenth-century in the United States, there appeared simultaneously a taste for genre paintings depicting sentimental scenes of Italian peasants and, as the influx of Italian immigrants increased, a fear that this new immigrant population would contribute to the contamination of a native culture and the development of a mongrelized people. For the first time, both images of Italians and actual Italians were present in large numbers in the US. This historical coexistence offers an opportunity to understand how American audiences negotiated between a well-established romanticized ideal and a newly perceived social threat. What were the cultural paradoxes that this aestheticizing project provoked and sought to contain? And to what extent did Sargent and other American artists working in Venice participate in this process?

While every new wave of immigration has aroused fear and bigotry, Italian immigration operated in a unique way. From 1880 to 1914, the United States witnessed two seemingly contradictory but intertwined Italian stories. At the same time the greatest numbers of working-class Italians immigrated, historians such as Charles Eliot Norton and James Jackson Jarves reinvented and glorified the wonders of Italian civilization. The pedestrian version of this celebratory position frequently included images of working-class Italian women in exotic settings such as Frank Duveneck’s Water Carriers (1884), a painting of Venetian women carrying water from a canal. In American society, these depictions of picturesque labor mitigated debates on immigration and women’s entry into the workforce.

The tensions generated by Italian immigration heightened fine artists’ role in making and remaking popular cultural stereotypes depicted in guidebooks, journals, and cartoons. In Sargent’s and Duveneck’s work, the idealization of an old-fashioned feminine labor force not only portrayed the Italian as safely existing somewhere else (Italy and the past), but was also a response to the perceived threat of the foreign male laborer in the modern industrial United States. The paintings neutralized this threat by making all Italian labor appear to be feminine and nostalgic. Images of Venetian female laborers, then, acted against or tried to ameliorate two constraints: the problem of the Italian immigrant, male or female, and the problem of working women of all ethnicities and national origins. At the same time, within the aesthetic realm of high culture there existed the allegorical figure of the Renaissance muse, an Italian working woman of a different kind.

“Constantino Brumidi and his Roman-Inspired Murals for the US Capitol”

Tiarna Dohertyis currently in the curatorial track PhD program at the University of Delaware, where her area of study is early modern painting. Doherty served as Chief of Conservation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum from 2011 through August 2017. Previously, she worked for nine years as a paintings conservator at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. She holds bachelor’s degrees in both chemistry and art history from Tufts University and a master’s degree in painting conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware art conservation program. Doherty is a Directory Board member of the International Committee of Museums–Conservation Council, a Fellow of the International Institute for Conservation, a Professional Associate of the American Institute for Conservation, and a member of the Western Association for Art Conservation.

“Constantino Brumidi and his Roman-Inspired Murals for the US Capitol”

The painter Constantino Brumidi (1805–1880), who was born, trained, and grew to maturity in Rome, transported styles and symbols from the Roman Empire and the Italian Renaissance to America. After being imprisoned for his role in the republican revolution in Rome, he applied for American citizenship upon his arrival to the United States in 1852. Brumidi was passionate about the American fight for liberty and the achievements of the new nation, and he became the “artist of the Capitol” as a result of his expertise as an artist and his knowledge of mural painting, especially true fresco.

The subjects of many of Brumidi’s murals painted between 1855 and 1880 are leaders and events from the American Revolutionary period and new American inventions. In this paper, Brumidi’s experience and achievements in Rome will also be related to selected murals in the Capitol, beginning with his trial fresco Cincinnatus Called from the Plow. The paper will culminate with new insights into the development of the Capitol’s central and most monumental image, The Apotheosis of Washington, Brumidi’s masterwork, painted in 1865. A comparison of the three known oil studies for the fresco will highlight the radical changes he made to arrive at the final concept, which shows George Washington rising to the heavens in the center of the Capitol, thereby elevating him to the level of a god, like ancient Roman emperors or Renaissance saints. The final oil study was acquired by the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2012. During its conservation, analysis of X-radiographs and infrared imaging provided surprising new information about Brumidi’s techniques and design process.

“Death, Decay, and Ruination: Paul Thek’s Technological Reliquaries and the Muses of Italy”

Erika Doss (PhD, University of Minnesota) is a professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her wide-ranging interests in American art and visual culture are reflected in the breadth of her publications, including Benton, Pollock, and the Politics of Modernism: From Regionalism to Abstract Expressionism (1991, which received the Charles C. Eldredge Prize), Spirit Poles and Flying Pigs: Public Art and Cultural Democracy in American Communities (1995), Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Image (1999), Looking at Life Magazine (editor, 2001), Twentieth-Century American Art(2002), The Emotional Life of Contemporary Public Memorials: Towards a Theory of Temporary Memorials(2008), Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America (2010), and American Art of the 20th-21st Centuries(2017). The recipient of several Fulbright awards, Doss has also held fellowships at the Stanford Humanities Center, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

“Death, Decay, and Ruination: Paul Thek’s Technological Reliquaries and the Muses of Italy”

American artist Paul Thek (1933-1988) lived in Italy from 1962 to 1963 and 1967 to 1976, maintaining studios in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood and on the Mediterranean island of Ponza. In 1963, Thek and photographer Peter Hujar toured Palermo’s Catacombe dei Cappucini, where some 8,000 corpses interred from 1590 to 1920 are displayed—fully dressed, propped against walls, stacked on shelves, or lying in coffins—in motley states of decay. Thek was deeply moved by the visit, remarking, “It delighted me that bodies could be used to decorate a room, like flowers. We accept our thing-ness intellectually, but the emotional acceptance of it can be a joy.”¹ Shortly thereafter, he altered his artistic practice, shifting from a series of paintings based on mass media images (Television Analyzations) to sculptures focused on corporality, mortality, and Cold War anxiety: the Technological Reliquaries (1964-1967), a series of Plexiglas vitrines containing facsimiles of tainted flesh and body parts, rendered from beeswax, that intimated the apocalyptic consequences of modern mass destruction.

At a moment when “cool” styles of Pop and Minimalism dominated American art, Thek developed a highly personal, highly affective aesthetic shaped by his Catholic upbringing, his homosexuality, his abiding distaste for the commercialism of New York’s art world, and his encounters with Italian muses ranging from Capuchin catacombs and Roman ruins to Renaissance sculpture. Referencing, for instance, Michelangelo’s Portrait of Giuliano de Medici (ca. 1526-1534) in La Corazza di Michelangelo (1963), a plaster replica of a Roman breastplate that he bought in a souvenir shop in Rome and then covered in wax and acrylic to simulate raw meat, Thek destabilized the Italian artist’s rendering of an idealized male body to underscore the intrinsic vulnerability of human flesh. Likewise, in The Tomb (1967), the culminating work in the Technological Reliquaries series, Thek made a life-sized effigy of himself with putrefying skin, severed fingers, and a blackened tongue, laid on the floor inside a pink ziggurat.

Italy was a “muse” for many post-World War II American artists; as Catherine Dossin relates, “between 1949 and 1956, 121 of all the painters and sculptors who received a Fulbright went to Italy, whereas 83 went to France.”² For many of them, Italy was an interlude. For Thek, who received a Fulbright in 1967, Italy was a preferred habitus to work out personal, spiritual, and political fixations on death, decay, and modern ruination, fixations alleviated only by respites in Ponza, a fishing village that he considered a spiritual haven. Focusing on select examples from his Technological Reliquariesseries, this paper aims to contextualize Thek’s engagement with and in Italy.

1. Paul Thek quoted in G.R. Swenson, “Beneath the Skin, Interview with Paul Thek,” Art News 65, no. 2 (April 1966): 35.
2. Catherine Dossin, The Rise and Fall of American Art, 1940s-1980s: A Geopolitics of Western Art Worlds (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2015), 69.

“A Transatlantic Cultural Landscape: America in Rome at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”

Daniele Fiorentino is Professor of US History and International Relations at the Università degli Studi Roma Tre, where he also serves as the coordinator of the graduate program in International Studies and of the Erasmus Program, and as chair of the Library Committee of the Department of Political Science. Twice a Fulbright grantee, he taught for several years at the University of Macerata and was the director of the Center for American Studies in Rome between 1995 and 2003. A specialist in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Fiorentino has written extensively on American Indian history and on US-Italian relations during the process of Italian unification and the American Civil War. His most recent book is Gli Stati Uniti e il Risorgimento d’Italia, 1848-1901 (The United States and the Italian Risorgimento, 1848-1901) (2013). Fiorentino holds a PhD in American studies from Sapienza-Università di Roma and a PhD in American history from the University of Kansas.

“A Transatlantic Cultural Landscape: America in Rome at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century”

The thirty years between the Chicago World Exhibition of 1893 and the rise of fascism in Italy were a time of intense exchange and cross-fertilization across the Atlantic, especially between Italy and the United States. When studying those three decades, modern scholarship usually focuses on Italian emigration and the rise of the US to world power. At the time, however, an intense collaboration and cultural exchange between the two countries also took place. After the diplomatic crisis resulting from the so-called “New Orleans Lynching” of 1891 (the massacre of eleven Italians suspected of and tried for the murder of the New Orleans chief of police), relations resumed in 1893, becoming stronger by the beginning of the new century. In those years, several American intellectuals and professionals, in collaboration with Italian colleagues and friends, started and then developed the American Academy in Rome and the Centro Italiano di Studi Americani; the latter was also supported by the Italo-American Association.

The number of Americans in Rome, as well as in other major cities in Italy, grew significantly during these decades, mainly because of an increased interest in classical and Renaissance art and culture, but also as a result of the appreciation Americans had developed for the Italian process of unification. These cultural initiatives received the support of American diplomats and politicians, thanks to the interest of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, who assigned some of the most prominent men in the foreign service to Rome. They facilitated the establishment of the American Academy and supported the creation of an American library in Rome (which then became the Centro Italiano di Studi Americani). City authorities, starting with the cosmopolitan savant Ernesto Nathan, mayor between 1907 and 1913, sustained these initiatives, and the partnership between the two countries became stronger. By the end of World War I, both institutions had established themselves in the city’s cultural landscape and were a stronghold of the American presence in Rome.

This paper will discuss these aspects of American-Italian cultural relations, and especially the development of the two institutions and their role in Rome and in the American community living there. Novels, works of art, and scholarship produced in those intense and creative decades, along with American diplomatic documents and the private papers of some of the protagonists of that era, are the sources of a historical analysis supported by an interdisciplinary approach. They offer proof that the twentieth century opened under the most promising auspices for an American-Italian partnership, and that this transatlantic cultural relationship was probably second only in importance to that between the US and Paris. That experience laid the foundations for the intense collaboration that resumed during the Cold War.

Amelia Goerlitz is the fellowship and academic programs manager at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In addition to overseeing the museum’s residential fellowship program, she organizes scholarly symposia and lectures on American art and visual culture for internal and external audiences. She is the vice-chair of the Association of Research Institutes in Art History (ARIAH), a delegate to the Smithsonian Congress of Scholars, and a steering committee member for the Smithsonian’s lunchbag seminars in American art. She edited “Shifting Terrain” (2017), a package of essays for the thirtieth anniversary issue of American Art (vol. 31, no. 2); co-edited and wrote for East-West Interchanges in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship (2012); and contributed essays on Luis Camnitzer and José Luis Cuevas to the Jack S. Blanton Museum’s Latin American collection catalogue (2006). Goerlitz holds a master’s degree in art history from the University of Texas at Austin with a specialization in Latin American art.

Paul Kaplan has taught art history at Purchase College, SUNY, since 1988. He is a specialist in European and American images of people of color, from the late Middle Ages through the nineteenth century. He is the author of The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art (1985), and is also a major contributor to volumes 2, 3, and 4 of The Image of the Black in Western Art (2010-2012). He has a particular interest in Venetian art, and in 2003 he served as a project scholar for the artist Fred Wilson’s installation Speak of Me as I Am in the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale. His current research explores the intersection of art and race in the work of Civil War-era American travelers to Italy, such as Mark Twain and the sculptor Eugène Warburg.

“Thomas Cole’s Travels from Rome to Catskill: Republican Ideals”

Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (appointed in 2010), where she completed work on the new American Paintings and Sculpture Galleries, which opened in January 2012. She is currently working on the exhibition Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings, which opens at the Met in January 2018 and the National Gallery, London, in June 2018. Kornhauser served as the co-curator for the following exhibitions at the Met: Rediscovering Thomas Hart Benton’s “America Today” Murals (2014); Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham and the River (2015); and John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of the Arts: Artists, Writers, Actors, and Musicians (2015). Kornhauser has a PhD from Boston University with a specialty in American paintings and an MA from the Cooperstown Graduate Program, SUNY, in American folk art and culture.

“Thomas Cole’s Travels from Rome to Catskill: Republican Ideals”

By the time of his sudden death at forty-seven in 1848, Thomas Cole was recognized as the leading landscape painter in the United States. While previous accounts of Cole’s career have closely identified him with the young American nation, this talk will explore his career as one that was marked by transatlantic travel and engagement with the traditions of European art and thought. Cole’s global engagement would paradoxically fuel his ambition as a leader of the national landscape movement in the United States and inspire his spiritual and cultural commitment to the American wilderness. During his five-month residence in Rome in 1832, Cole absorbed the lessons of the classical and Renaissance past, and he visited St. Peter’s Basilica, the Vatican, the Pantheon, the Roman Forum, and the Colosseum. He was especially drawn to the Roman Campagna, one the favorite subjects of Claude Lorrain, whom he greatly admired. This paper will examine the ways in which this experience helped to shape his notions of Republican ideals. Cole’s paintings and oil studies of Rome and its surrounding ruins will be presented along with his later American landscapes, demonstrating a nexus between these works.

The artist’s conservative, pastoral vision of the American ideal was challenged upon his return to the United States in 1832, when he confronted the volatile commercial growth and brash imperial aspirations of the Jacksonian era. Cole’s historic five-part series, The Course of Empire (1834-36), which displayed the rise and decline of ancient civilizations, was presented to his viewers as an admonition of potential danger for the modern world. His now iconic painting, View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, after a Thunderstorm (The Oxbow) (1836), was a manifesto to the American public to preserve the nation’s republican ideals by protecting its wilderness lands.

Karen Lemmey has been the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s curator of sculpture since 2012. Recent projects include Isamu Noguchi, Archaic/Modern (2016), co-curated with Dakin Hart, senior curator at The Noguchi Museum; Measured Perfection: Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (2015); and an installation of twentieth-century direct carving drawn mostly from the museum’s permanent collection (2015). Before joining SAAM, Lemmey was a research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and served as the monuments coordinator for the City of New York’s Department of Parks & Recreation. She was an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellow at the New York Historical Society and an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she organized the exhibition Alexandre-Louis-Marie Charpentier (2006). Lemmey holds a doctorate in art history and a certificate in American studies from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

“Painting in the Contact Zone: American Artists in Postwar Rome”

Peter Benson Miller is the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director at the American Academy in Rome. An art historian and curator, he received a master’s degree from Williams College and a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts/New York University. He coordinated guest lectures and scholarly symposia at the Service Culturel at the Museé d’ Orsay and co-curated De Delacroix a Renoir: L’ Algérie des Peintres at the Institut du Monde Arabe in 2003. Philip Guston, Roma, which he curated at the Museo Carlo Bilotti-Aranciera di Villa Borghese, also traveled to the Phillips Collection. At the Academy, his exhibitions include: Cy Twombly, Photographer (2015); Studio Systems (2016); and Charles Ray, Mountain Lion Attacking a Dog (2017). He is the editor of Go Figure! New Perspectives on Guston, published in 2015 by New York Review Books.

“Painting in the Contact Zone: American Artists in Postwar Rome”

In the decades following the Second World War, Rome was a productive workplace for American artists and intellectuals. According to the internationally minded Italian artist Piero Dorazio, one of the founders of the group Forma 1, “Rome was like Paris, it had become the navel of art in Europe. Americans were no longer going to Paris—that had been in the twenties and thirties. In the fifties, Rome was full of artists.” The image of Rome as a “second Paris” was also broadcast in 1952 by an article in Life entitled “Americans in Italy,” which declared that “at the end of World War II artists from all over the U.S. began to head for Italy where, for the past six years, they have swarmed the hillsides and made Rome the rival of Paris as art headquarters.” Awed by historical grandeur and artistic forebears in Italy, American artists also encountered a complex contemporary art world of entangled Cold War cultural politics, ideological struggles, and aesthetic debates. This paper will reconsider several American artists in Rome in this period—focusing in particular on Philip Guston—traditionally viewed in biographical isolation, foregrounding instead the politicized artistic community and the challenges of painting in what cultural historian Mary Louise Pratt has termed a “contact zone.”

Renato Miracco has been the Cultural Attaché at the Embassy of Italy in Washington, DC, since 2009. He served as Lead Coordinator for the 2013 Year of Italian Culture in the United States and Head Curator and Branding Supervisor of Italy@150, a calendar of events and cultural activities, under the auspices of the President of the Italian Republic. Miracco recently facilitated a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on archaeology between the governments of Italy and the United States, receiving a letter of merit from the US State Department. He received a Green Card for exceptional skills in 2009. Previously, he served as President of the Scientific Committee of Italy’s House of Representatives in Rome and as Director of Cultural Affairs for the Italian Cultural Institute in New York. He has organized more than seventy-five exhibitions around the world, among them Giorgio Morandi, 1860-1964 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2008) and Beyond Painting: Burri, Fontana, Manzoni at the Tate Modern (2005).

“Ancient (and Modern) Rome on the Move: Three Stories on the Art of Displaying an Empire in Washington, DC, around 1900”

Alexander Nagel is a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. Originally from Germany, he received a PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, with a dissertation titled “Colors, Gilding and Painted Motifs in Persepolis: Approaching the Polychromy of Achaemenid Persian Architectural Sculpture, c. 550–330 BCE.” Nagel has conducted extensive archaeological fieldwork and research on the monuments and preservation of crafts in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, Iran, and Yemen. He collaborates with embassies, diplomats, and colleagues in the Middle East and has curated a series of exhibitions in Washington, DC. Former Assistant Curator of Ancient Near East at the Freer|Sackler Galleries of Asian Art, Nagel has been working on ancient materials at the Smithsonian Institution and around Washington, DC, since 2009. He has published widely on museums, polychromies, and aspects of heritage preservation, and a monograph titled “Pigments and Power: The Lost Polychromies of Persepolis” will be published soon.

“Ancient (and Modern) Rome on the Move: Three Stories on the Art of Displaying an Empire in Washington, DC, around 1900”

This paper will introduce a collection of ancient Roman materials and plaster casts in the collection of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History, highlighting a network of artists, collectors, curators, and enthusiasts who were influential in creating a legacy of ancient Rome in Washington, DC, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Based on new research in the archives and correspondences of the Smithsonian Institution, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the “Halls of the Ancients” that displayed ancient Roman art; diplomatic cables related to the acquisition and transport of materials; and our current understandings of the local DC public schools and university curricula around 1900, the paper will discuss the approaches taken by Americans and Italian-Americans to recreate an ancient and ideal Rome that would serve as an inspiration and model in aesthetics and art in the museum environment by the Potomac. Competing pedagogical concepts are reflected particularly in (1) archaeological materials excavated by Riccardo Mancini and Thomas Wilson in Orvieto in 1886 and shortly later displayed in the US National Museum—with some materials sold to collectors; (2) an impressive collection of plaster casts of ancient Roman art acquired by Corcoran curator William MacLeod; and (3) a group of European artists engaged in creating a spectacular thirty-foot-long panorama painting of ancient Rome considered a “Meisterwerk der Imagination” for the auditorium of Franklin W. Smith’s “Hall of the Ancients” on New York Avenue. How then were ancient Roman emperors and the art produced in Rome on display? What lessons were offered? And how did museum audiences, and especially younger generations, respond when visiting these three institutions? As I argue, a focused approach to recreating ancient Rome in Washington is particularly revealing for our understanding of individual careers, personalities, and politics in the museum landscape of the city around 1900.

Stephanie Stebich is the Margaret and Terry Stent Director at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She served as the executive director of the Tacoma Art Museum in Tacoma, Washington, from 2005 to 2017, and prior to that, as the assistant director at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Cleveland Museum of Art. She has served on the board of the Association of Art Museum Directors and currently serves on the board of the American Alliance of Museums. Stebich received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and her master’s degree at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, and is a graduate of the Getty Leadership Institute in Los Angeles. She was a fellow at the Guggenheim Museum and studied at the University of London’s University College.

“Sculpture in the (Ancient) City: Calder, Smith, and Smithson in Italy”

Marin R. Sullivan (PhD, University of Michigan) is an assistant professor of art history at Keene State College. Prior to her appointment, she served as a Henry Moore Foundation Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Sullivan recently published Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism (2017) and is co-editing Postwar Italian Art Today: Untying “the Knot” (2018). While on research leave during the 2017-18 academic year to work on a new book project, “Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury,” she will be a George Gurney Postdoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and a Tyson Scholar at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Sullivan is also co-curating a major retrospective exhibition on Harry Bertoia, scheduled to open at the Nasher Sculpture Center in 2019.

“Sculpture in the (Ancient) City: Calder, Smith, and Smithson in Italy”

Italy, and in particular the Italy of ancient Rome, has proved a perpetual source of inspiration for American sculptors, a physical and conceptual touchstone for a certain kind of epic grandeur and classical lineage. Two significant sculptural events took place in Italy during the 1960s, however, that radically reassessed this legacy of monumental sculpture within modern American art. The first occurred in the summer of 1962, when the Italian curator and art historian Giovanni Carandente organized Sculture nella città (Sculptures in the City), an exhibition of modern sculpture installed outdoors throughout the ancient hillside town of Spoleto, about an hour northeast of Rome. Alexander Calder and David Smith contributed pieces, and were also included in a select group asked to make work specifically for the exhibition in collaboration with the Italian national steel concern Italsider. The results proved significant, opening up new paths for each artist—with Smith having arguably the most productive phase of his career, resulting in the creation of his Voltri series— twenty-seven sculptures created in just thirty days—and Calder producing Teodelapio, his first large-scale public stabile sculpture, still in situ in front of the Spoleto train station. The second major event took place seven years later, in October 1969, when another American artist, Robert Smithson, realized Asphalt Rundown, his first large-scale outdoor sculpture or earthwork in a disused quarry just outside of Rome. Facilitated by Fabio Sargentini and his Galleria L’Attico, the work involved dumping several tons of hot, oozing asphalt down a hillside and in the process suggested a very different vision of sculpture from Calder and Smith’s seemingly autonomous abstractions. Though these two events, and the resulting works, certainly represent very different, perhaps even incongruous, moments of late modernism, this paper argues that collectively they suggest an acute engagement with the lasting legacy of what could be called an Italian artistic monumentality. Calder and Smith, along with the curatorial vision of Carandente, conjured powerful parallels between their work and the remnants of ancient, medieval, and Renaissance Italy making up the city of Spoleto. Smithson, though similarly guided by the help of his Italian collaborator Sargentini, instead evoked the legacies of Rome by attempting to create a ruin from the outset, questioning the feasibility and purpose of an eternal monument. All three, however, explored a notion of monumentality shaped by the histories embedded in Italian cities while reimagining such a notion through the use of new, industrial materials—conceptually and materially drawing on a vision of Rome that Smithson described as the “junk heap of history.”

Barbara Wolanin served as Curator for the Architect of the Capitol for thirty years, with a focus on managing the conservation of murals by Constantino Brumidi and others in the US Capitol. The book she prepared for the Congress, Constantino Brumidi: Artist of the Capitol, was published in 1998. She also managed the conservation of the murals in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress and of indoor and outdoor sculpture, including the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol’s dome, and she oversaw the records management and archives and photography branches. The Capitol Historical Society Fellowship she initiated in 1986 is ongoing. Wolanin received her PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin and master’s degrees from Oberlin College and Harvard University. She taught art history at Trinity College and James Madison University.