Feminism and Art in Postwar Italy

A renowned art critic of the 1960s, Carla Lonzi abandoned the art world in 1970 to found Rivolta Femminile, a pioneering feminist collective in Italy. Rather than separating the art world luminary from the activist, however, this book looks at the two together. It demonstrates that even as Lonzi refused art, she articulated how feminist spaces and communities drew strength from creativity.

The authors document the artistic and feminist circles of postwar Italy, a time characterised both by radical protest and avant-garde aesthetics, using primary and archival sources never before translated into English. They map Lonzi's deep connections to the influential Italian Arte Povera movement, and explore her complicated relationship with female artists of the time, such as Carla Accardi and Suzanne Santoro. Carla Lonzi's written work and activism represents a crucial, but previously overlooked, feminist intervention in traditional art history from beyond the Anglo-American canon. This book is a timely and urgent addition to our understanding of radical politics, separatist feminism and art criticism in the post-war period.

Giovanna Zapperi is Professor in Art History and Theory at the cole Nationale Suprieure dArt in Bourges, France. She is the author of the award-winning study The Artist is a Woman: Marcel Duchamps Modernity (2012) and is the editor of the French edition of Carla Lonzis Autoritratto. Previously, she has been Rudolf Arnheim guest professor at Humboldt University in Berlin, a fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Nantes, and a fellow at the Villa Medici, French Academy, Rome.

Francesco Ventrella is a Leverhulme Fellow and Lecturer in Art History at the University of Sussex. He is author of the forthcoming book Connoisseurial Intimacies, which looks at modernist art criticism, and is a former editor of parallax. His research on historiography, visual culture, modernism and feminism has been published in Art History, the Journal of European Popular Culture and the European Journal of Womens Studies, among others.