UCLA

In modern and contemporary art history, figuration has been characterized as propagandistic, anti-modernist, and invalid as a strategy for progressive creative practice in the twentieth century. This reading is especially well-supported by the history of postwar Italian art, largely defined by politicized cultural debates that set realism, primarily manifest in figurative painting, in conflict with abstraction, which ultimately emerged as the dominant form of vanguard Italian art post-Reconstruction. While scholarship has focused on abstraction’s importance for key developments in postwar and contemporary Italian art, the continued history of figuration, from neorealismo to the Transavanguardia, remains largely unattended.

This dissertation revises the understudied history of figuration in postwar Italian art and the politicized historiography against it. The work of Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, a central player within the European avant-gardes of the 1960s best known for his association with Arte Povera, is used as a case study. Background discussion of the artist’s early figurative paintings, design work, and writings from the late 1950s and early 1960s, some addressed here for the first time, frames close study of three bodies of later work to demonstrate how Pistoletto negotiated conventional figuration as a problem for postwar Italian art by remaking the figurative strategy into a figural one that straddles realism and reality. Chapter One, “Reality as Realism: The Plexiglasses, 1964,” addresses a set of plexiglass structures and assemblages, which presents imagistic elements as real, everyday objects in the space of the viewer. Chapter Two, “Cold Images: The Protest Pictures, 1965,” calls attention to a little-known series of highly polished, steel “mirror paintings,” collaged with life-size figures sourced from photographs of Italian protests. Chapter Three, “Poor Designs: The Minus Objects, 1965–1966,” re-examines a collection of design-inspired objects in relation to a “figural turn” in postwar Italian advertising.

Using formal, semiotic, and social art historical analysis supported by extensive archival and field research conducted in Italy, France, and the United States, this dissertation situates Pistoletto’s “conceptual figuration” within the politicized national and transatlantic context of postwar Italian art. Building upon post-structuralist and art historical theories of “the figural,” it finds in Pistoletto’s practice a new model of postwar avant-gardism motivated by a strategic reworking of figuration. It also identifies a new politicized language of figuration for art history as one of increased economic and political agency for 1960s leftist subjects.