Fascist Aesthetics: Ezra Pound’s Cultural Negotiations in 1930s Italy
Although the nature of Ezra Pound’s Fascism has generated substantial critical study, the mechanics of his actual engagement in the cultural projects of the Mussolini regime has received less attention. Using as its starting point lines from Pound’s controversial “Italian Canto” 72—explicit in its praise of the Fascist regime— the essay examines Pound’s correspondence with Italian cultural figures in the 1930s. Focusing on his relationship with the academic librarian Manlio Torquato Dazzi and the celebrated Futurist F.T. Marinetti, the essay demonstrates the blurred distinctions between aesthetic and political spheres in Pound’s engagements with Italian culture in the 1930s. The essay further argues that Pound’s avant-garde aesthetics and neo-platonic philosophy colored the way he engaged with the cultural projects of the regime, making his Fascism a mixture of spirituality, modernism and totalitarianism.
Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe
Preface Introduction PART ONE: EARLY AVANT-GARDE MODERNISM 1. Intellectuals, Commodity Culture, and Religions of Art in the Nineteenth Century 2. F.T. Marinetti 3. Guillaume Apollinaire 4. Wassily Kandinsky PART TWO: VARIETIES OF INTERWAR MODERNISM 5. The Rise and Fall of Design Modernism: Bauhaus, De Stijl, and Purism 6. Futurism and Its Modernist Rivals in Fascist Italy 7. Andre Breton's Surrealism 8. The Critical Modernism of Herbert Read Conclusion Notes Index
Marketing Modernism in Fin-de-Siècle Europe
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction3Ch. 1"This painting sells"18Ch. 2"The circle of dealers"49Ch. 3Rhetoric from the Battlefield: Innovation and Independence81Ch. 4The Retrospective107Ch. 5The Juste Milieu International138Ch. 6Secessionism167Ch. 7The Rise of the Impressionist Weltanschauung201Ch. 8Der Fall Meier-Graefe235Postscript: 1905264Appendix277Notes279Index349