Colour Reproductions for Modern Art : Venturi and the Print Exhibitions in Post-war Italy

In the spring of 1946, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome opened the exhibition “Mostra didattica di riproduzioni di pittura moderna”, a display made by colour reproductions of modern paintings supported by the Ministry of Education and conceived by the museum direction under the guide of the art historian Lionello Venturi, who came back after the exile years during Fascism spent between France and the United States, where he published his crucial researches on Cézanne and the history of Impressionism. On the background of the Postwar cultural climate, the initiative reflected a reference horizon that included it within a wide network of coeval events aimed at experimenting similar strategies of art narratives, thus consecrating the international arise of an exhibition paradigm, alongside the diffusion of Malraux’s concept of “musée imaginaire”. Focusing on the investigation of Venturi’s operation from such unprecedent historiographical perspective, this paper aims to explore the migration of new models of dissemination through images in a crucial moment for the international historicization of modern art. The growing calls for bringing people closer to art languages – successfully evoked in the slogan “art for everyone” – contributed to redesign the status of photo-reproduction, its forms and consumption practices. A revolution made possible through the material and symbolic features of colour.