"ITALY IS MORE SURREALIST THAN THE POPE" (Salvador Dalí, 1935)

Bona. A Surrealist Journey through France and Italy

After completing her studies at the Accademia di Venezia, in 1950 Bona Tibertelli (1926–1900) relocated to Paris, where she matured Surrealist tendencies developed through her uncle, Filippo de Pisis, as well as through Italian medieval and Renaissance painting. De Pisis introduced her to the mosaics of Ravenna, the Senese and Ferrarese schools, the painters that worked in Pisa’s Campo Santo, but also to Giorgio de Chirico and Metaphysical art. Gaining access to André Breton’s circle through her husband, the critic and author André Pieyre de Mandiargues, she developed a personal Surrealist style through a broad network of contacts in Paris, Venice, Rome, and Milan with some of the main figures of Art Informel and Nuclear art.
Her paintings merge echoes of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian art with the styles of Salvador Dalí and Yves Tanguy in dreamlike landscapes where giant natural objects and miniature characters create unsettling atmospheres. In the mid-1950s she turned to Informel abstraction, in dialogue with Alberto Burri and Jean Dubuffet. Through intellectual exchanges with Enrico Baj, she developed the technique which she became most associated with, textile assemblage. She developed a style of figuration that features rich expressionist and primitivist elements, and explored themes related to the unconscious and insanity with psychological intensity and often humorous elements. During the 1970s, Bona strongly identified with her totemic animal, the snail, associated with the formless and the abject, and allusive to infinity through its spiral shell. This paper anticipates some of the topics explored in the forthcoming first monograph of the artist by the presenters.

Giuliana Altea is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Sassari, Italy, where she runs the CURL-Laboratorio di Pratiche Curatoriali and is the rector’s delegate to museums and cultural events. Since 2015 she is the President of Fondazione Costantino Nivola. Her research interests include art and applied art in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century; connections between the female experience, primitivism, and decoration; the relationship between art, architecture, and design; artistic exchanges between Italy and the United State following WWII; and figurative rationalism in the early twentieth century in Sardinia, for which she is the leading expert.

Antonella Camarda is an art historian and curator. She was the Director of Museo Nivola in Orani, Sardinia, from 2015 to 2022. A researcher in Museology, Art Criticism, and Conservation at the University of Sassari, she studies the relationships between museums and communities, history of art criticism, and the transcultural history of modernism. Specifically, her research concerns exchanges between Italian and U.S. art and the relationship between art, craftsmanship, and design. She has written, among other things, about emigree artist Costantino Nivola, artistic director Leo Lionni, pioneering gallerist Bertha Schaefer, and Lawrence Weiner’s travels in Italy.

“A grandiose vision of the cosmos and the unconscious”: Piero di Cosimo in Surrealism, with Notes on Paolo Uccello and Giuseppe Arcimboldo

The interest of French and international Surrealists in Italian Quattrocento and Cinquecento artists, including Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–93), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522), and Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), is generally noted but less often deeply explored. This paper will trace the reception, appropriation, and construction of the Florentine painter di Cosimo in the Surrealist artistic, literary, and art critical discourse from the 1920s to the 1960s. It will show how the artist was discursively positioned as a proto-Surrealist, by Surrealists themselves as much as by (non-Surrealist) art critics—the latter making use of superficial stylistic and iconographical resonances to reframe the artists within a distinctly modern, pseudo-psychological frame. Di Cosimo’s relative obscurity in the first half of the twentieth century easily allowed for a playing up of his supposed méconnaisance; an irresistible aspect to the Surrealists who considered themselves masters of the archive and curators of “forgotten” geniuses. The paper will trace the Surrealisation of this artist and compare that to the Surrealist claiming of other Italian artists. Works and sources discussed include periodicals such as Minotaure (1933–39), publications such as André Breton’s L’Art magique (1957), and art by Wolfgang Paalen and others.

Tessel M. Bauduin originally trained as a medievalist and has been specialized in (the art, culture, and heritage of) modernism and the avant-garde for twenty years. Based at the University of Amsterdam, Bauduin teaches Art History, Museum, and Heritage Studies, and Restitution Research. Bauduin’s current research projects focus on critical heritage ecologies; the decolonization of museum collections, especially modern(ist) and Surrealist collections; and modern curiosity cabinets. She is the editor of the volume Surrealism and the Tarot, which will be published in 2025 (Fulgur Press). Bauduin has been a member of the Board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism since 2022.

The Tarot Garten by Niki de Saint Phalle

The Tarot Garden created by Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) in Garavicchio, province of Grosseto, is arguably the largest Surrealist artwork on the Italian peninsula. It was inspired by some of the classic examples of architécture fantastique admired by André Breton and the Surrealists: Antoni Gaudí’s Parc Güell in Barcelona, the Parco dei Mostri in Bomarzo, the Palais Idéal by the Facteur Cheval (Joseph Ferdinand Cheval), and the Watts Towers by Simon Rodia. Built between 1980 and 1996, the Tarot Garden contains twenty-two monumental figures representing the mysteries of the Tarot constructed of reinforced concrete and covered with mirrors and ceramic mosaics
The Tarot game holds significant importance for the Surrealist movement, serving as a profound source of inspiration and a tool for creative exploration. Rooted in mysticism and symbolism, the Tarot’s imagery and themes resonated deeply with the Surrealists’ fascination with the unconscious mind, dreams, and the irrational. For Surrealist artists like Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst, the Tarot offered a visual and conceptual language that aligned with their quest to transcend rational thought and delve into the realms of the fantastical and the subconscious. The richly symbolic Tarot cards, with their archetypal figures and enigmatic narratives, provided a means to access and articulate the hidden layers of the human psyche, a central pursuit in Surrealist art. Moreover, the Tarot’s emphasis on chance and the unknown paralleled the Surrealists’ embrace of automatism and spontaneity as artistic techniques.

Tobia Bezzola worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Zurich from 1990–92. From 1992 to 1995, he was an assistant of the independent curator Harald Szeemann. From 1995 until 2012 he was a curator at the Kunsthaus Zurich. From 2013 to 2018 he was the Director of the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. Since 2018 he is the Director of the Museo d’arte della Svizzera italiana, Lugano. He has published widely and has curated numerous international exhibitions on modern and contemporary art and photography. He currently serves as a board member of numerous Swiss and international artistic and cultural institutions and foundations and as a lecturer at the Università della Svizzera italiana/Accademia di Architettura.

Towards a “Historical Morphology:” Matta’s Surrealism in Italy

In 1952, Chilean-born Surrealist artist Roberto Sebastian Matta (1911–2002) wrote about his intention to create a historical morphology by addressing social and political concerns. Matta began working on this concept in Italy, where he relocated following his time in exile in New York during WWII, leading to a significant transition in his artistic practice. After contributing to the development of automatism with his early abstract work, Matta shifted towards new visual languages and expanded the horizons of his painting through new themes. Materiality also became an effective tool for the artist to take the political dimension of Surrealism to new directions. A pivotal moment in Matta’s first years in Italy was his participation in the “Incontro internazionale della ceramica,” organized in Albisola, near Genoa, in 1954. This workshop gathered a group of international art critics and artists, including Enrico Baj, Corneille, Sergio Dangelo, and Asger Jorn, inviting them to experiment with ceramics under the guidance of Italian ceramist Tullio Mazzotti. This experience had a clear impact on Matta’s art in the following years, when the artist continued to work with earth materials, as seen in a series of paintings created with soil in the island of Panarea, near Sicily, in 1957 and in the mural Cuba es la capital, created during a visit to Havana in 1963. This paper will examine the impact of Matta’s experiences in Italy on his work, exploring his idea of historical morphology in the context of postwar Surrealism.

Paulina Caro Troncoso is a Leverhulme Trust Fellow at Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History, Rome. She is currently working on the monograph, Transnational Surrealism: Art and Politics in the Work of Roberto Matta, 1940s–1980s. She has published articles in the Bulletin of Latin American Research (2022) and the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas (2023), and contributed essays to The Routledge Companion to Surrealism (Routledge, 2022) and Surrealism and the Tarot: A Love Story (forthcoming in 2024).

A Cold Take on Surrealism in 1960s Emilia Romagna

In March 1964, a group of poets in the Italian provincial town of Reggio Emilia launched the new cultural magazine Malebolge (1964–67). They belonged to Gruppo 63, a collective of intellectuals determined to cause turmoil in what they considered a stagnant cultural landscape in 1960s Italy. Surrealism was a subject of extensive debates in Malebolge: responding to several voices that had declared Surrealism’s obsolescence after the 1950s, the magazine’s contributions pointed to the abiding strength of Surrealist methods in their mission of cultural rejuvenation. To this end, the Malebolge poets defined their practice as “Parasurrealism,” a contemporary approach which they articulated as “a Mannerism of Surrealism, a cold take on Surrealism, Surrealism squared”. Parasurrealism defined the group’s new poetic and visual production, as well as their political activism in the 1960s.
This paper examines the Parasurrealist position advanced by Malebolge, contextualizing it both in the reception of Surrealism in 1930s Italy and in the conception of a formalist “1960s sensibility” by art historians and critics, in the wake of the French nouveau roman—two traditions which Malebolge alternately engaged with and opposed. This paper will illustrate these points through an analysis of artworks by the poet Adriano Spatola (1941–88) —grotesque political posters protesting the Vietnam War as well as minimalist marks on canvas—and a series of Parasurrealist objects that Spatola produced in 1965 with Claudio Parmiggiani (b. 1943). These works exemplify the Parasurrealist revival of Surrealist poiesis applied to image-making, signaling an alternative route to the dominant narratives of artistic rebirth of postwar Italy. In this context, Malebolge offered conceptual futurity to Surrealism as a living method of artistic and literary desecration in the 1960s, contravening the widespread dismissal of Surrealism as a historical, and therefore irrelevant, enterprise.

Ambra D’Antone is a historian of modern art and art historiography, with a focus on Turkey and the Levant region. Ambra works as Curatorial Assistant at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Other current projects include working on a book of Turkish art historiography between 1920–60. She has co-curated an exhibition in The Courtauld Gallery Project Space entitled Drawing on Arabian Nights (2023). Her work has been published in Art History and The Journal of Art Historiography.

Jean-Jacques Lebel in Italy (1955–1961): Front Unique, Critical Front

The first solo exhibition by Jean-Jacques Lebel (b. 1936) was held at Galleria Numero, Florence, in 1955. The review of the first issue of Front Unique, published as a poster, accompanied the exhibition. Its subtitle read: “En faveur du comité d’action des intellectuels, pour un regroupement de la gauche”.
What brought a young Surrealist to Florence? This paper will look at Lebel’s career and his review Front Unique (1955–60), which was supported by Arturo Schwarz and built links with Italian cultural circles in Florence, Venice, and Milan. The interest of Front Unique is threefold: it sketched a political and artistic context undergoing renewal, following the anti-colonial struggles and de-Stalinization; it showed how Surrealism could be understood in the plural; it was a laboratory of ideas that helped shape an artist who was to play a major role in the 1960s, particularly in terms of the history of happening art in Europe. It was also in Italy that Lebel organized two Anti-Procès (in Venice and Milan), and it was the Milan Questura that sequestered the collective Grand Tableau Anti-fasciste collectif (1960) presented at Anti-Procès 3 (Milan, 1961). Studying Italy’s geography in Lebel’s work and activities is perhaps a way to develop a critical yet non-hostile relationship with the Surrealist movement.

Jérôme Duwa teaches philosophy at the École Estienne (École Supérieure des Arts et Industries Graphiques) in Paris. He holds a doctorate in contemporary art history, is an associate member of the Thalim joint research unit and holds an agrégation in philosophy. Since his thesis on Jean Schuster, his books and research have focused on the aesthetic and political issues raised by Surrealism. His latest publication is Front unique. La Traversée du surréalisme by Jean-Jacques Lebel (Les presses du réel, 2024).

The Exhibition “Têtes composées d’Arcimboldo” at the Galerie Furstenberg in the Spring of 1954

Although from its inception Surrealism sided against the great masters, its founders identified and elected a number Italian Renaissance figures as models, regarding them as true precursor of the Surrealist aesthetic. Among these were, as has been well documented, Paolo Uccello (1397–1475), already mentioned in the manifesto of 1924, and Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526–93). Over time, however, André Breton evolved his ideas on the role of these artists in Surrealist aesthetics and, as was the case with many contemporary members of the group, they were also the subject of reconsiderations and expulsions. Arcimboldo’s position, for instance, appears to have been called into question in the postwar years.
Therefore, it is curious that from March 30 to April 30, 1954, the Galerie Furstenberg, Paris, the gallery of “Surrealist and fantastic art” managed by Simone Collinet , opened an exhibition dedicated to Arcimboldo’s Têtes composées. On the occasion, six portraits by the Italian artist were exhibited in the new gallery, alongside eleven works by arcimboldesque artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
By engaging in an analysis of the genesis and reception of this exhibition, this paper aims to pinpoint the importance of Arcimboldo for Surrealism in the postwar years, as well as Collinet’s symbolic choice of selecting him as a key figure to inaugurate the gallery. This paper will also be an occasion to present part of the so far unpublished documentation regarding this event, from the recently discovered archives of the gallery managed by Collinet in 1954–65.

Alice Ensabella is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Grenoble Alpes. She completed her PhD in 2017 with a thesis titled The Art of the Fréres Voyant. Characteristics and Dynamics of the Surrealist Art Market in Paris (1919–1930). Her research focuses on Italian and French art in the interwar period, particularly Metaphysical art and Surrealism, collecting, the art market, and the main actors who supported modernist movements in the first half of the twentieth century. She has curated the exhibitions Giorgio de Chirico e Alberto Savinio. Una mitologia moderna (2019), Giorgio Morandi: Masterpieces from the Magnani Rocca Foundation (2021, 2023), and Surrealismo e l’Italia (2024).

“Our good friends the surrealists:” the Case of Marco Levi Bianchini

The psychiatrist Marco Levi Bianchini (1875–1961) was the first translator of Sigmund Freud into Italian, the director of an asylum near Salerno, Italy, and the founding editor of the Archivio Generale di Neurologia, Psichiatria e Psicoanalisi (1920–38). Beside the clinical contributions to this periodical, Levi Bianchini published book reviews that provide a remarkable perspective on contemporary culture. The scale of his reading was prodigious, eventually totaling 10,357 reviews. He concentrated on academic studies but ranged through publications on history, politics, sociology, economics, anthropology, literature, religion, and mysticism. On its farthest margins, and providing the material for this research, lay Surrealism.
Within the context of the diffusion of Surrealism and the resistance to it in Italy, Levi Bianchini’s overlooked activities mark him as an intellectual outlier. Having first translated Freud in 1915, he and Eduardo Weiss co-founded the Società Psicoanalitica Italiana in 1925. Over the period 1928–35 Surrealism caught his attention, making him a rare commentator on the movement in Italy. His reviews sketch a picture of how the writings of André Breton, René Crevel, Salvador Dalí and Paul Éluard were received there. Levi Bianchini’s interests also raise questions—to which no definitive answers can be offered—around his networks, but show how, in the later 1930s, his diffusion of a wider European culture could not be sustained within a Fascist Italy sliding into alliance with Nazi Germany.

Matthew Gale, curator and art historian, completed his PhD on Giorgio de Chirico at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He was a curator at the Tate in London, from 1995 until 2022, leading the curatorial team responsible for displaying the collection at Tate Modern between 2006 and 2021. Among his exhibitions and publications (as author or editor) are: Dada & Surrealism (Phaidon Press, 1997, 2002); Constantin Brancusi: The Essence of Things (with Carmen Giménez, 2004); Dalí & Film (2007); Arshile Gorky: Enigma and Nostalgia (2010); Joan Miró: The Ladder of Escape (with Marko Daniel, 2011); Paul Klee: Making Visible (2013); and, Surrealism Beyond Borders (with Stephanie D’Alessandro, 2021).

Edward James’ Casa dello Stregone: a Surrealist house?

This contribution presents a multi-screen video installation about the house of Edward James (1907–84), the English poet, friend, patron, and collector of Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte, and many other Surrealists. When he left Mexico in 1980, where he had spent more than twenty years creating a Surrealist sculpture garden, he decided to settle in the mountains of Liguria, Italy. The house is a space of passages, of architecturally accentuated thresholds. Passages—the crossing of a threshold into another unknown or even wonderful world—are genuine means in Surrealist painting and literature to reach a transcendental realm of fantasy, dreaming, the unconscious, or cosmic wisdom. In his architecture, James designed passages in various forms to translate these images found in Surrealist painting and literature into accessible and walkable spaces for bodily experience.
These three-dimensional passages in James’ Casa Dante, which have not only different forms but also different meanings, are the starting point for Ute Janssen’s videos, which offer us images of thresholds between the real world and the fantastic, the concrete world and the irrational dimension of dream, fantasy, and desire. The Canti di Casa D. Numero 1 picture cycle, is directed, produced, edited, and animated by Janssen, with music by Michele del Prete, Christopher Loy, and Nora Kümel (Italian, 2022–23, 4K, 33`). At the center of this symbiosis of essay, film poem, and “ciné, ma verité”—as defined by Janssen—is the architecture of the villa, which becomes the playing field of the film’s participants.

Hubertus Gassner studied art history, philosophy und sociology at university from 1968–1980, completing his dissertation, Alexandr Rodčenko and the Photography of Russian Constructivism. From 1981–91 he was Assistant Professor for Art History at the Academy of Fine Art/University of Kassel, Germany; in 1989–92 he was Director of the documenta Archiv, Kassel, Germany; from 1993–2002 he was Chief-Curator of Haus der Kunst, Munich; from 2002–06 he was the Director of Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany; and from 2006–16 the Director of Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg. Retired since 2016, Gassner has published over one hundred books, exhibition catalogues, and articles concerning the art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Russian and international Constructivism, Surrealism, and contemporary art.

Ute Janssen lives and works in Hamburg as an artist and lecturer for time-related media (with a particular focus on video, animation, and drawing). In her works, she questions and explores the optical, electronic, and digital recording of moving images with aesthetic means, and creates aesthetic image-spaces on the basis of previous cultural research. For her “ciné, ma vérité”, she stages image spaces involving performance art and architecture.

Manina’s Neon Magic in Postwar Venice

Manina (née Marianne Tischler, 1918–2010) spent over fifty years in Venice, painting and drawing semi-figurative worlds informed by postwar Surrealist esotericism. Hybrid bird-humans—so central to the chimeric symbolisms that permeate Venetian art and architecture—provide a central motif within Manina’s visual realm, with canvases such as Renaissance d’un Center (1962) and Day to Night (1973), and drawings including those illustrating her partner Alain Jouffroy’s violent short story Double Envol (first published in Le Surréalisme, même, 1959). Indeed, grotesque bird-human metamorphoses play such a complex role in Manina’s bright and intricately patterned paintings that Penelope Rosemont described her “neon ornithologers” as an essential component of women artists invading “the old order from below, astonishing us.”
Contrasts of bright light and darkness—from a neon cosmos in formation to a menacing pitch-black realm—equally inform Manina’s work. Light seeps and creeps through her paintings, sometimes in the form of an ambiguous entity, often underscoring the abyssal quality of Venice’s nighttime sky and waters. While this imagery is informed by Manina’s sustained interest and research into alchemy, the Kabbalah, and the I Ching, it is never far-removed from the recent historical context of war and Fascism. This paper will explore Manina’s Venice-centric use of magic, disguise, and transformation as methods of reconfiguring, as Rosemont put it, “the old order,” but also as a means of addressing trauma and dehumanization in a post-WWII context and beyond.

Terri Geis is Associate Professor of Art at New York University, Abu Dhabi. Geis studies international modernisms, most specifically Surrealism and its intersections in the Americas. Past exhibition projects include In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (2017) and Prometheus 2017: Four Artists from Mexico Revisit Orozco (2017). Recent publications include an essay for the exhibition Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales (2019), and an essay on the Surrealist Ted Joans for the journal Dada/Surrealism.

Italian Lands Burnt by Desire on the Beach of Cadaqués

During the famous “Surrealist summer” of 1929 in Cadaqués, Spain, Salvador Dalí (1904 –89) first met Gala Éluard and created, among others works, Les Accommodations des desires (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York ) after taking a walk with her alone on the beach on her last day in Spain, according to the artist’s account. The painting, widely acknowledged as reflecting the influence of the thoughts and methodologies of Surrealism on Dalí, shows seven “pebbles” on a dark ground understood as depicting the beach at Cadaqués. The painted or collaged images have been interpreted as rendering hallucinations, representing Dalí’s anxieties about what the future might hold for him.
This paper aims to show, however, that Dalí may have been inspired by a romantic documentation of natural processes in Southern Italy. The outlines, surfaces, shadows, as well as the composition of the pebbles, are linked to accurate observations of the burnt lands and rocks recorded in an illustration of volcanological research. This also sheds new light on the fact that René Magritte (1898–1967), also invited to Cadaqués that August, referred to Dalí’s composition in a drawing of his. Evidently, Italy played an indirect role during this common summer in Spain, a stay which was to become for both artists decisive to challenging reality in their work.

Annabelle Görgen-Lammers, M.A. Dipl.-Des., and Dr. Phil. wrote her doctorate on the Exposition internationale du surréalisme, in Paris in 1938, after studies in Hamburg, Braunschweig, and Paris. Since 2003 she is Curator of Exhibitions and Head of the Sculpture Collection at Hamburger Kunsthalle, and regularly guest lectures at different universities. She has conceived and organized numerous internationally travelling exhibitions of twentieth-century to contemporary art, among others TOYEN (receiving for it the German curator’s award 2022); De Chirico. Metaphysical Painting (2020); Surreal Encounters, the Collections of James, Penrose, Keiller, Pietzsch (2017); Giacometti. Playing fields (2013); Photography in Surrealism (2006), and is currently preparing a show on Elective Affinities - Surrealism and German Romanticism (forthcoming in 2025).

The Origins of Leonora Carrington’s Organic Cosmology in Renaissance Culture

“… are these pictures by Leonora today taken from her 16th Century godfathers [?] She is just as much of her Century—just as significant of the 20th—as those Renaissance artists were of their time.” In his introduction to Leonora Carrington’s (1917–2011) first solo exhibition in New York (Pierre Matisse Gallery, 1948), Edward James lauded the artist’s success in “digesting the contents” of Northern European and Italian Renaissance art, making them her own.
The influence of the Early Renaissance on Leonora Carrington’s work, apparent in her use of tempera and in her works’ compositional architecture, has already been extensively analyzed. This paper focuses on Carrington’s interest in Renaissance magico-alchemical doctrines, beginning with her outlining of an organic and anti-hierarchical cosmology in which the feminine and nature coincide. Indeed, magic became a tool for Carrington to reorder the cosmos and illuminate myths, beliefs, and esoteric rituals concealed by the modern world.
The theorizing of an “infinite, truly absolute universe, liberated, that is, from every barrier, from every internal and external constraint” (Eugenio Garin, Magia ed Astrologia nella cultura del Rinascimento, 1950), resonates profoundly in Carrington’s canvases. This correspondence is not bound to a distinct phase of the artist’s work but, as will emerge in the works here considered, encompasses her entire artistic production.

Giulia Ingarao is a Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Palermo. She completed her postgraduate studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexico City, where she worked and conducted research for some years. Her main research interests are Surrealism and gender studies. She has authored numerous essays and articles and has edited several volumes, including: Archetipi del femminile: Rappresentazioni di genere, identità e ruoli sociali nell’arte dalle origini a oggi (Mimesis Edizioni, 2017), and From the Visual to the Visionary: Surrealist Trajectories in Art (Mimesis International, 2024). She is the author of the first Italian scholarly monograph on Leonora Carrington (Mimesis Edizioni, 2014, revised edition 2022; Leonora Carrington: The Image of Dreams [Mimesis International, 2022]) and, for the EncyclopedieAZ collection by Electa, she has curated the volume Carrington A-Z (forthcoming).

Salvador Dalí’s Italian Campaign: Mysticism, Hiparxiologi, and the Divina Commedia

This paper examines Salvador Dalí’s (1904–89) illustrations for Dante’s Divina Commedia (1951–60), providing a brief history of their commission and newly discovered material concerning their relationship with Dante’s text (despite Dalí’s provocative 1973 claim that he never actually read it). The primary focus is on the images’ progression through the three realms of the Commedia—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—and how Dalí arguably projects his own artistic and spiritual journey onto the voyage of Dante’s Pilgrim; Inferno is populated by soft figures and skulls, typical of the artist’s Surrealist production of the 1930s; Purgatorio integrates paranoiac double images with religious iconography, reflective of his artistic output during his wartime exile in the United States in the 1940s; and Paradiso features atomic angels and hypercubes, resonating with his 1950s “Nuclear Mysticism.”
The paper posits that Dalí’s narrative may also knowingly correlate with a specific philosophical framework influenced by the Catalan philosopher Francesc Pujols, with whom the painter was in close dialogue during the execution of the Commedia illustrations. According to Pujols, all living beings are situated along a “staircase of life” that ascends from the vegetable realm to the angelic domain. Dalí’s Commedia illustrations, therefore, reveal themselves as profoundly autobiographical, signifying the artist’s sense of his development beyond the 1930s as well as his spiritual ascent in line with Pujols’ esoteric philosophical system, Hiparxiologi.

Elliott H. King is a Professor of Art History at Washington and Lee University, Virginia. His publications include Dalí, Surrealism, and Cinema (Kamera Books, 2007), Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance, co-edited with Abigail Susik (Penn State University Press, 2022), and contributions to Salvador Dalí and Surrealism exhibitions at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Palazzo delle Arti di Napoli, Naples. King is currently Vice President of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism and Reviews Co-Editor for The International Journal of Surrealism.

The Tower of the Surreal: Leonor Fini and the Italian Tradition

In the essay “Self Portrait” of 1983, the Surrealist artist Leonor Fini (1907–96) wrote of the importance of Italian art, especially the Renaissance artists “Pisanello, Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, Cosimo Tura, Pontormo,” and the contemporary metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico, for her career. From biographical accounts, we know the collections of Italy had informed Fini’s decision to pursue an art career in the first instance—as a young woman she often visited the Museo Revoltella in Trieste as well as visiting museums in Florence, Rome, Turin, and Venice, with her mother. And from archival photographs and correspondences, it is evident that the landscape of Italy consistently inspired her choice of composition and palette.
This paper assesses how Fini strove to resurrect the medium of painting for the avant-garde through her Italian ancestors, drawing on the style, symbolism, and surreal potential of the old to inform the new, especially in the summer of 1952 when Fini and her partner, the Italian painter Stanislao Lepri (1905–80), rented a medieval tower, the Torre San Lorenzo, in Latium, Italy. The locale and the tower motif not only evidence her homage to the Italian tradition but how it could be employed to enrichen the dynamic between sexuality and architectural space, text, and image, for the avant-garde.

Alyce Mahon is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968 (Thames and Hudson, 2005), Eroticism & Art (Oxford University Press, 2005 and 2007), The Marquis de Sade and the Avant-Garde (Princeton University Press, 2020), Dorothea Tanning : A Surrealist World (Yale University Press, forthcoming), the edited volumes Jean-Jacques Lebel: Barricades (Walther Konig, 2015) and Dorothea Tanning (Museo Reina Sofía and Tate Publishing, 2018), as well as numerous essays on Surrealism. As exhibition curator and advisor, recent projects include Leonor Fini: Theatre of Desire (2018–19), Dorothea Tanning (2018–19), SADE: Freedom or Evil (2023), and Ithell Colquhoun: A World Apart (forthcoming in 2025). Mahon is co-editor of the International Journal of Surrealism and serves on the Board of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism.

“Those hills of Tuscany remain on my brain. I fear I am possessed by Italy:” 1930s Paris, Surrealism, the Fascination with Italy and the Old Masters in Marie-Laure de Noailles’ Correspondence with Bernard Berenson

The Viscounts de Noailles’ correspondence with Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) is preserved in the archives of Villa I Tatti in Settignano, Florence. Covering a time span from the 1930s to the 1950s, Charles (1891–1981) and Marie-Laure (1923–70) de Noailles’ letters offer an unprecedented portrait of the couple who had once been the point of reference for the Parisian avant-garde and at the time seemed caught up in new and less transgressive interests. Although certainly conditioned in part by the tastes of the famous recipient, with whom Marie-Laure also did not fail to discuss the masters of Renaissance painting, the letters in question importantly also offer an interesting insight into Paris cultural life in the 1930s.
In the intimacy of the correspondence with Berenson everything appears from a new or at least unusual perspective. For example, the famous Villa Noailles in Hyères, France, the scene of Man Ray's film Les Mytères du château de dès (1929), turns out to be an uncomfortable and unloved place at a distance from that famous tournage. The viscountess continues to be portrayed by Man Ray and comments excitedly on Elsa Schiaparelli’s new creations, which she intends to show off, but in her letters the Surrealists now appear as distant figures and some of her judgments on their initiatives, particularly those on the 1938 Exposition international du surréalisme at the Galerie des Beaux-Arts, make it clear that during the 1930s Marie Laure felt less close to André Breton’s movement and was now taken up by new passions, including writing and, later on, painting.

Alessandro Nigro teaches History of Art Criticism at the University of Florence. He has studied Surrealism on several occasions, publishing essays and research papers including the book Ritratti e autoritratti surrealisti. Fotografia e fotomontaggio nella Parigi di André Breton (CLEUP, 2015) and the contribution "Le Muse inquietanti. Maestri del Surrealismo" à Turin en 1967. Histoire d’une exposition surréaliste mémorable" (Le Surréalisme et l'argent, arthistoricum.net, 2020). He curated the section Surrealism and Native Cultures, part of the exhibition Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray and Surrealism. Masterpieces from the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam (2023) and co-curated the exhibition Surrealism and Italy with Stefano Roffi and Alice Ensabella (2024).

A Surreal Game of Smoke and Mirrors: The Surrealist Collection of Giorgio de Chirico’s Artwork of the 1910s and 1920s

This paper seeks to readdress the complicated and contradictory relationship between Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) and the Surrealists during the first half of the 1920s alongside the artistic movement’s early development, via a reconstruction of the large number of Metaphysical paintings (1910–18) and later works (early 1920s) by de Chirico owned by the Surrealists themselves, including André Breton, Paul Éluard, Jean Paulhan, Marcel Raval, and Philippe Soupault. By closely examining these collections, with a particular focus on those built by Breton and Éluard, this paper raises questions over the sincerity of the public condemnation of de Chirico’s post-1918 work, in contrast to their critical adulation of his early Metaphysical paintings of the 1910s.
The discussion will investigate the Surrealist conflict of interests (both commercial and critical) involving their ownership of de Chirico’s early artwork. It will also examine Paul and Gala Éluard’s personal support and encouragement of de Chirico’s research of Old Master painting techniques, and their acquisition of early 1920s paintings, against backdrop of public Surrealist disapproval and disparagement. Finally, the paper will look at the thorny issue of intellectual copyright concerning de Chirico’s practice of producing replicas of his own work in relation to Breton’s commission of the first replica of a Metaphysical painting executed by the artist in 1924, Le muse inquietanti (1918, private collection). By analyzing Breton and de Chirico’s short-lived relationship (that ended in 1926) through the lens of the Surrealists’ acquisition, promotion, and staunch defense of the latter’s early work, this lesser-known fact will hopefully shed new light on one of the most litigiousness relationships of early twentieth-century art.

Victoria Noel-Johnson is an independent British art historian and curator based in Rome who specializes in early twentieth-century European art with a focus on Giorgio de Chirico’s artwork. Former Curator of Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico, Rome (2008–17), she received her doctorate from the University of Glasgow in 2018 with the thesis Taking possession of the past. De Chirico and the great masters. Recently-curated exhibitions include Giorgio de Chirico: Il volto della Metafisica (2019); Picasso, de Chirico, Dalí: Dialogo con Raffaello (2021); Lee Miller - Man Ray: Fashion, Love, War (2022–23); Joan Miró: L’Essence des choses passées et présentes (2022–23); Kay Sage – Yves Tanguy. Ring of Iron, Ring of Wool (2023); and Giorgio de Chirico. Metafisica continua (2023–24). She is currently working on the exhibition Giorgio de Chirico: 1924 (forthcoming, 2024–25).

Surrealist Bajography

The leading role played by Enrico Baj (1924–2003) in the Movimento arte nucleare from 1951 along with his involvement in the international group Phases led by Édouard Jaguer have been meticulously set out by Angela Sanna, as have the means by which this activity brought Baj into the larger circle of artists and writers close to or involved in Surrealism. This paper takes this biography and historiography as a cue to construct a Surrealist “Bajography”—that is, an examination of the ways Baj’s figures coincide with fundamental Surrealist themes—through a focus on his sub-oeuvre of generals and a single outcome of this, the volume Dames et Généraux (1963). Initially, the generals are discussed in relation to military portraiture as a preface to a closer analysis of Dames et Généraux, which is introduced by André Breton’s essay on Baj and consists of fragments of poems by Benjamin Péret with contributions from Marcel Duchamp and Arturo Schwarz, illustrated by Baj’s colored engravings featuring fatuous generals and preening bourgeois ladies. The context of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62) is crucial to their interpretation, but so is a history of anti-militarism in Surrealism that extends back as far as the tracts “The Revolution First and Always!” (1925) and “Open the Prisons/Disband the Army” (1925). With Surrealist precursors in Alfred Jarry’s Père Ubu and the grotesques of Francis Picabia, restyled by the monsters of U.S. science fiction movies of the 1950s, the registers of Dames et Généraux are further examined here by means of “monster theory” and its relationship with the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin to yield a new reading of the work of Baj, who shares a centenary with Surrealism.

Gavin Parkinson is Professor of European Modernism at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He has published numerous essays and articles, mainly on Surrealism. His books are Robert Rauschenberg and Surrealism: Art History, “Sensibility” and War (Bloomsbury, 2023), Enchanted Ground: André Breton, Modernism and the Surrealist Appraisal of Fin-de-Siècle Painting (Bloomsbury, 2018), Futures of Surrealism (Yale University Press, 2015), Surrealism, Art and Modern Science (Yale University Press, 2008), The Duchamp Book (Tate Publishing, 2008) and the edited collection Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics (Liverpool University Press, 2015).

“La poésie se fait dans les bois”. Botanical Elements and Dreams in Italy in the 1920s

The apparitions painted by several artists in Italy in the second half of the 1920s reveal strange multiform perspectives, like scenes observed through a kaleidoscope. From the exhibition Prima Esposizione del Novecento Italiano in 1926, curated by Margherita Sarfatti, to Filippo de Pisis and Scipione, a broad group of artists expressed a certain affinity with Surrealism. They were active at the same time as author Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960), a dreamer of sirens, faithful lovers, desperate Eves, and fortunetellers who read hair.
Bontempelli, who “transferred” the definition of Magical Realism to Italy, prescribed that everyone should create “their own mystery,” and that only imagination can “free us from repeating the past and foster the atmosphere for a new era.” However, he was not suggesting to embrace unbridled fantasy: he claimed that narrations and depictions must be founded on reality to cause a feeling of “intense disquiet, almost another dimension into which we project our lives.” Therefore, artists should not seek out magic or sorcery, but rather amazement, since “we crave adventure rather than fables.”
By exploring how the poetics of Magical Realism relate to Surrealism, this paper aims to highlight the role of botanical elements and small animals that emerge with peculiar harmonies. Furthermore, the Milan Triennale and Venice Biennale, as stages of several case studies, trace a cartography of works that reveal the power of psychic automatism as well as vertiginous and magnetic apparitions from the natural world, reflecting an interest in Mediterranean nature.

Stefania Portinari is Associate Professor in History of Contemporary Art at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and previously worked at the Soprintendenza for Cultural and Artistic Heritage of Venice. Her research focuses on art history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as design, and architecture; she has extensively studied the history of the Venice Biennale and has also devoted her publications to the reception of artists in the interstices between literature and art criticism and to women artists. She has recently curated an exhibition on portraits in the 1920s, Portrait of a Woman. The Dream of the 1920s and the Gaze of Ubaldo Oppi (2019–20).

Postwar Surrealism on View in Milan: The First International Surrealist Exhibition in Italy, 1959

Between April and May 1959, the first International Surrealist Exhibition in Italy was held at the Galleria Schwarz on Via S. Andrea 23 in Milan. A collaboration between the French Surrealist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel (b. 1936) and his Italian gallerist Arturo Schwarz (1924–2001), the exhibition showed paintings, drawings, collages, Surrealist objects, cadavres exquis, and a selection of prints by thirty-six Surrealist artists and Surrealist associates. A selection of international texts and printed ephemera showcasing Surrealist activities in Belgium, Chile, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the United States, and other European countries was also exhibited.
Advertised on the last page of the first issue of the new series of the French journal Front Unique, edited by Lebel and “Tristan Sauvage” (a penname for Schwarz) in the spring/summer of 1959, this first Mostra Internazionale del Surrealismo at the Galleria Schwarz represented their extended collaboration. Front Unique was originally issued as a set of six wall posters between 1955–58 and printed in Milan by Schwarz’s gallery, with subscriptions offered in France and Italy. The first issue of the new series, which appeared in 1959, featured a work by Lebel on the cover and an essay by Schwarz, “Presenza del Surrealismo,” on the rapport of Surrealism with Italian sources. Together, the 1959 issue and the Surrealist exhibition in Milan were meant to signal Surrealism’s secured place in Italy and the unified Surrealist front against the Algerian War.

Abigail Susik is Joint Editor of Bloomsbury’s Transnational Surrealism Series. She is the author of Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester University Press, 2021), the editor of Resurgence! Jonathan Leake, Radical Surrealism, and the Resurgence Youth Movement, 1964–1967 (Eberhardt Press, 2023), and the co-editor of the volumes Surrealism and Film after 1945: Absolutely Modern Mysteries (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Radical Dreams: Surrealism, Counterculture, Resistance (Penn State University Press, 2022). Two books are forthcoming in 2024–25: her anthology, Surrealism, Bugs Bunny, and the Blues: Selected Writings on Popular Culture 1965–2008, by Franklin Rosemont (PM Press); and her volume Surrealism and Animation: Transnational Connections, 1920–Present (Bloomsbury).

From Hartford to Rome: “Chick” Austin’s Tour to Italy in 1937

In August 1937, Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin (1900–57), Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, travelled across Italy from Venice to Rome and Naples. Accompanied by artists and friends, he absorbed the cultural riches of the country firsthand. His small group included the painters Leonid Berman and Pavel Tchelitchew, the poet Charles Henri Ford, as well as James Thrall Soby, critic, collector, and Curator of Contemporary Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum.
At the time, the Wadsworth was a vibrant staging ground for Surrealist art in the United States. The museum had recently hosted innovative exhibitions on Surrealism and Neo-Romanticism, and it had made important acquisitions by artists such as Salvador Dalí, Giorgio de Chirico, and Joan Miró. Simultaneously, Austin had organized exhibitions on Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and had bought numerous works from these schools. Italian art played a guiding role in Austin’s conception of the Wadsworth’s collection of Old Masters; however, the impact of Italy on the museum’s collection of modern art is far less understood. This little-studied trip sheds light on the close dialogue between Italian art and Surrealism in Hartford. Guided by Berman and Tchelitchew, the group visited numerous sites, museums, and collections. This paper will reconstruct the tour, analyze its significance, and explore its impact on the museums’ future direction.

Oliver Tostmann has been the Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, since 2013. Prior to joining the Wadsworth, he was the William Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Previously, he was a fellow in the department of Italian and Spanish paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Tostmann received his B.A., M.A., and Dr. phil. in art history from the Freie Universität, Berlin.

Pavel Tchelitchew and Charles Henri Ford Between the United States and Italy Following WWII

This paper aims to explore the relationships between Pavel Tchelitchew (1898–1957), Charles Henri Ford (1908–2002), a group of Neo-Romantic artists that converged in Italy in the early 1950s—such as a Eugène Berman and Carlyle Brown—and Italian “fantastic” artists, in particular Fabrizio Clerici and Leonor Fini. Research shows that Tchelitchew and Ford’s relation with the Italian art scene began through figures such as Alexander Iolas and Peter Lindamood (a member of the Psychological Warfare Branch of the Unite States Army). During his stay in Italy, the collection and art dealer Lindamood frequented the bookshop-gallery La Margherita in Rome—managed by Irene Brin and Gaspero del Corso, who showed a predilection for the Neo-Romantic, Surrealist, and fantastic art of Clerici, Fini, and Alberto Savinio. From 1952–57, Tchelitchew and Ford resided in Italy, first in Grottaferrata and then in Frascati, two small towns close to Rome, where they attended numerous events and participated in the Italian fantastic art scene. Tchelitchew exhibited his work in the most renowned Italian galleries at the time, such as L’Obelisco and Galleria Schneider in Rome, Il Naviglio in Milan, and Il Cavallino in Venice. Through (partly unpublished) documentation from the Archivio Fabrizio Clerici and Brown’s heirs, alongside research carried out in the last ten years, this paper aims to gain further insight into the careers of these two artists from the immediate postwar period through 1957, the year of Tchelitchew death.

Giulia Tulino is a research fellow and the lecturer for the History and Curatorial Practices course at La Sapienza University of Rome. She has published the monograph La Galleria dell’Obelisco. Surrealismo e Arte Fantastica (1943–1954) (De Luca editori, 2020), as well as papers and articles on Italian fantastic art, Neo-Romantic artists, and the reception of Surrealism in Italy. She has recently curated the exhibitions Fabrizio Clerici. L’atlante meraviglioso (2022), and Leonor Fini e Fabrizio Clerici. Insomnia (2023). She has been a member of the Scientific Commitee of the Archivio Fabrizio Clerici since 2020.

Legacies and Appropriations of Giorgio de Chirico in the Work of Kay Sage and Gertrude Abercrombie

This talk focuses on the legacy of the Metaphysical painting of Giorgio de Chirico in the mid-twentieth-century work of two U.S. artists: Surrealist Kay Sage (1898–1963) and Surrealist-adjacent Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–77). De Chirico’s influence can be seen in both artists’ recurring depiction of fragmented architectural features, distorted perspectives, and long shadows, as well as in the ambiance of estrangement and melancholy that envelops the desolate spaces in their work. Yet, while de Chirico’s Metaphysical paintings are often populated by inanimate mannequins or statues, and phallic symbols such as towers or chimneys, Sage and Abercrombie’s canvases center what might be termed more “feminine” objects and forms: witchlike female figures (in the case of Abercrombie), humanoid shapes draped in billowing fabric (in the case of Sage), and eggs (a frequent motif in both artists’ work).
This paper will suggest that these artists’ engagement with de Chirico’s Metaphysical painting needs to be framed in relation to a number of interconnected contexts. While they built on the earlier work of Surrealists such as Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, René Magritte, and Yves Tanguy (all of whom were in dialogue with de Chirico in various ways), their painting is also marked by the post-WWII Surrealist turn to myth and esoteric themes. Moreover, and most importantly, their work can be read as a distinctly feminine, and perhaps even feminist, extension of Italian Metaphysical painting, which showcases the individual imaginaries of these artists.

Anna Watz is Associate Professor of English at Uppsala University, Sweden. She has published extensively on feminist theory and on the art and writing of Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, and Dorothea Tanning. Watz is the author of Angela Carter and Surrealism: “A Feminist-Libertarian Aesthetic” (Routledge, 2016), editor of Surrealist Women’s Writing: A Critical Exploration (Manchester University Press, 2020) and A History of the Surrealist Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and co-editor of the two-volume Angela Carter’s Pasts / Angela Carter’s Futures (Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2025). Her second monograph, Surrealism and Feminine Difference, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2025.