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

In the spring of 1946, exactly one year after the liberation, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome opened the so titled “Mostra didattica di riproduzioni di pittura moderna”, one of the first projects dedicated to the spread of European modern artistic culture in the post-war Italy. The exhibition, a show made by colour reproductions of modern paintings, was supported by the Art Department of 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. This event was followed by a successful tour of the show to other Italian institutions, thus marking a turning point that would have led to further plans of circulating print exhibitions. On the background of the postwar cultural climate, the initiative reflected a reference horizon that – from a historiographical point of view – included it within a wide network of coeval events, that were aimed at experimenting similar strategies of narratives, from Europe, to United States, to South America, 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 and its milieu, the conference presentation aims to explore the migration in space, in time, in media 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, thus combining cultural, technological, political-diplomatic and social scenarios in a complex framework of mutually intertwined connections. A revolution made possible through colour, the material and symbolic features of colour reproduction.