Postmodernisme et antimodernisme dans l'historiographie de l'art italien du XXème siècle (1973-1983)

In this symposium I compare the historiographic methodologies that appeared in Italy at the beginning of the eighties with the opposite postmodernists theories sustained by critics like Benjamin Buchloch. The so-called “Return to painting” in Italy, including labels like “Transavanguardia”, tried to rehabilitate figures usually linked with anti-avantgardism and reactionarism, like Giorgio De Chirico after his disengagement with Surrealists, or Mario Sironi, who influenced Fascist style. Italian critics associated with neo-figurative tendencies rejected as outdated any ideological judgement regarding realistic painting and its claims to a national style, particularly those derived from the historicistic interpretation adopted by Giulio Carlo Argan, the most influential contemporary art historian in Italy after 1945. The exhibitions held after 1979, like “La Pittura Metafisica” or “Anni Venti”, proposed a new vision to re-evaluate Metafisica’s role, in opposition to Futurism’s supremacy based on an avanguardistic progression. This effort to revise the political reactionary engagement of figures like Sironi or De Chirico, was preceded by the ex-Communist historian Renzo De Felice’s broadly reconciliatory approach toward Fascism in his lengthy biography of Mussolini. At the same time, Communist Party, leaded by Enrico Berlinguer, began a renovating political strategy to emancipate itself from totalitarian policy of U.S.S.R. This change had a correspondent approach among art critics and historians close to the Party that culminated in the “Biennale del Dissenso” (1977) where artists persecuted by the sovietic regime can exposed their banished works. The Revisionist tendency -and its art-historical version- deeply influenced Jean Clair, who was, during the seventies, close to italian critics like Luigi Carluccio and who organized Les Réalismes (1981), the most fervent attempt to eliminate the “avant-garde” category in historical methodology. From the opposite side, Buchloch accused Clair of being a “new reactionary anti-modernist” and promoting an approach to the arts “outside the historical and political context”. Buchloch’s Postmodern thought aimed primarily to revise Greenberg’s Modernism while, at the same time, reaffirming some of its aspects (such as the distinction between the avant-garde and kitsch) thus contradicting Clair’s theory. In placing Greenberg’s theory at the center of Postmodernism’s change, Buchloch didn’t consider the possibility of other historical legacies in different political contexts such as Italy or France.