About this product

Product Identifiers

PublisherPrinceton University Press

ISBN-100691059993

ISBN-139780691059990

eBay Product ID (ePID)412994

Product Key Features

Number of Pages360 Pages

LanguageEnglish

Publication NamePatrón State : Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy

SubjectArt & Politics, Political Ideologies / Fascism & Totalitarianism, World / European, History / General

Publication Year1998

TypeTextbook

Subject AreaArt, Political Science

AuthorMarla Stone

FormatTrade Paperback

Dimensions

Item Height0.9 in

Item Weight18 Oz

Item Length9 in

Item Width6 in

Additional Product Features

Intended AudienceCollege Audience

LCCN98-009449

Dewey Edition21

TitleLeadingThe

IllustratedYes

Dewey Decimal700/.945/09043

Table Of ContentList of Illustrations Acknowledgments Ch. 1 Introduction 3 Ch. 2 Bureaucratization, State Intervention, and the Search for a Fascist Aesthetic 23 Ch. 3 Aesthetic Pluralism Triumphant: The State as Patron, 1931-1936 61 Ch. 4 Challenging the Social Boundaries of Culture 95 Ch. 5 Fascist Mass Culture and the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution 128 Ch. 6 Italian Fascist Culture Wars 177 Ch. 7 The Rise and Fall of the Fascist Gesamtkunstwerk 222 Ch. 8 Conclusion 254 Notes 259 Bibliography 309 Index 325

SynopsisAs historians delve increasingly into the issues of political propaganda and visual art, Marla Stone provides a penetrating explanation of Italian Fascist arts patronage, one that explores the model of cultural consensus that set the Italian experience apart from that of Nazi Germany. In this book, Stone confronts some standard assumptions about the relationship between dictatorships and the arts. Even more so, she challenges conventional thinking on modernism and its political uses. In the case of Italy under Mussolini, authoritarian cultural politics were driven by a willingness to co-opt a spectrum of aesthetic movements, from modernist to neo-classical. Rather than legislate an "art of the state," the Fascist regime continually experimented with and revised its arts policy, as it pursued the support of artists and audiences. By exploring such events as the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista of 1932 and the evolution of the Venice Biennale, Stone offers an unparalleled analysis of the extensive system of official art exhibitions, purchases, and commissions that injected official taste into cultural production. At the same time, the author assesses the tensions implicit in state intervention in the arts--those between pluralism and propaganda, modernism and tradition, nationalism and regionalism--and the way in which a nondemocratic but modernizing and market-oriented polity handled them. Stone shows how official culture under Fascism mobilized modern and avant-garde aesthetics, emerging mass culture techniques, and a rhetoric of national culture to produce, during the 1930s, dynamic and vibrant cultural forms. Her inquiry into Fascist intervention in the art world is ultimately a cultural history of Fascist Italy, one with wide resonance and broad interest.

LC Classification NumberNX750.I8S76 1998