Antje K Gamble | Murray State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Antje K Gamble

The Murray State University chapter of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi organizes a Love of Lea... more The Murray State University chapter of The Honor Society of Phi Kappa Phi organizes a Love of Learning Panel to be held during the university\u27s Scholars Week each semester. This virtual presentation of members\u27 research and scholarly activity was recorded on Wednesday, April 14, 2021. Three faculty members and a master\u27s degree candidate (history) presented. These four Phi Kappa Phi members included (in speaking order) Dr. Miranda Sanford-Terry, chair of the MSU Department of Applied Health Sciences, associate professor of public and community health, and secretary of the Phi Kappa Phi chapter; Madelyn Eisele, master\u27s degree candidate in history and chapter student vice-president; Dr. Antje Gamble, assistant professor of art history; and Dr. Melony Shemberger, associate professor of mass communication and chapter president

Modern in the Making, 2020

At the close of World War II, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) laid the foundations for an exhibit... more At the close of World War II, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) laid the foundations for an exhibition of modern Italian art. 'Twentieth Century Italian Art' would be MoMA’s first exhibition to focus on artwork from an Axis nation. Co-curated by Alfred H. Barr, Director of Collections, and James Thrall Soby, Director of the Department of Painting and Sculpture, the 1949 Twentieth Century Italian Art was one of several surveys of modern art designed to celebrate the Museum’s twentieth anniversary, though the only one to have a national focus. This showcase of Italian art from the previous four decades emphasized both Barr’s curatorial and scholarly interest in European modernism and Soby’s specific interest in Italian modern art. At the same time, larger trans-Atlantic politics framed this exhibition, offering a glimpse into MoMA’s role in the so-called Cultural Cold War. In this light, Twentieth Century Italian Art was organized to present a new Italian democracy to the American public. Eds. Sandra Zalman and Austin Porter.

Modern in the Making: MoMA and the Modern Experiment, 1929–1949, 2020

Methodologies of Exchange: MoMA’s “Twentieth-Century Italian Art” (1949), monographic issue of Italian Modern Art, 3, 2020

Foregrounded as a kind of exploratory survey of work outside of the “two formidable counter-attra... more Foregrounded as a kind of exploratory survey of work outside of the “two formidable counter-attractions in Europe—the Parisian present and the Italian past,” Twentieth-Century Italian Art curated a particular view of Italian modern art. The 1949 exhibition at MoMA would become the precedent for international investigations of Italian modern and avant-garde art, and one that represented Italy as a modern democracy. In part to uphold this idea, curators Alfred H. Barr, Jr., and James Thrall Soby presented Italian modernism as apolitical aesthetic experiments.

In part, the works were selected by using Fascist art world contacts and exhibitions as guides, which helped shape Barr’s coalescing vision for a modernist hegemony. The installation also foregrounded a depoliticization of the cultural production of the former combatant country. The works were not presented in the more innovative manner seen in exhibitions like the prewar We Like Modern Art (1940–41) or the wartime Road to Victory (1942), which gained inspiration from the same avant-garde exhibition models that Fascist exhibitions like the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (1932–34) had evoked. Rather, the exhibition was installed in a more deadpan manner, with most works displayed with ample space at similar heights. Precedent for this installation style can be seen in MoMA as well as in Italy, particularly in the presentations at the Rome Quadriennale of the 1930s and 40s. Barr and Soby were able to visually reframe the production of Italian artists as part of a transatlantic modernist project, rather than an Italian Fascist one.

Italian Art Society Newsletter, 2019

Postwar Italian Art History Today, 2018

Chapter Abstract: "In his seminal 1952 essay "Cross-Breeding of Modern Sculpture," the American c... more Chapter Abstract: "In his seminal 1952 essay "Cross-Breeding of Modern Sculpture," the American critic Clement Greenberg characterized the Italian sculptor Marino Marini (1901-1980) as one of the new "Italian archaicizers." Though Greenberg's comment was meant as a slight, many American curators, critics and collectors championed Marini's sculpture in these very terms. Exhibitions like MoMA's 1949 Twentieth Century Italian Art singled out Marini's work as exemplary of a new post-war archaic modernism. The familiarity of his subjects, like dancers and equestrians, combined with Marini's innovative use of media solidified the sculptor's success with American collectors from Nelson Rockefeller to Alexandre Rosenberg. With this, Marini's sculpture was understood as an important connection to Europe's classical humanist tradition. The critical emphasis on Marini as representative of this Transatlantic exchange sprang from the politics of the burgeoning Cold War.
In this essay, I build on art historian David Getsy's work on the sculptural debates between Greenberg and British critic Herbert Read. Post-war critical reception of sculpture in the U.S. and Europe was shaped by the contemporary Transatlantic political climate. My essay not only shows that the critical purchase of Marini's sculpture relied on this Cold War rhetoric but also that Marini's success with collectors was likewise motivated by Cold War ideals. Collectors, critics and curators all bought into the importance of post-war Italian art, with its European humanist caché, as a means to legitimize American culture. Therefore, the American market for Italian art functioned politically in solidifying America's claims to cultural supremacy over the Soviet Union, the effects of which were long lasting. In the end, art historical understandings of Marini's post-war sculpture have been heavily influenced by this American-lead characterization of the sculptor's work."

Edited Volume Abstract: "Postwar Italian Art History Today" brings fresh critical consideration to the parameters and impact of Italian art and visual culture studies of the past several decades. Taking its cue from the thirty-year anniversary of curator Germano Celant's landmark exhibition at PS1 in New York – The Knot – this volume presents innovative case studies and emphasizes new methodologies deployed in the study of postwar Italian art as a means to evaluate the current state of the field. Included are fifteen essays that each examine, from a different viewpoint, the issues, concerns, and questions driving postwar Italian art history. The editors and contributors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of postwar Italian art, the terminology that is used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art in Italy and abroad.

Conference Presentations by Antje K Gamble

SECAC, 2019

A number of the most well known Italian sculptors of the postwar period engaged in formal experim... more A number of the most well known Italian sculptors of the postwar period engaged in formal experiments with the ceramic medium. As the most recent show at the Met Breuer highlighted, even the greats like Lucio Fontana worked extensively in the medium, which has been often relegated to discussions of non-art craft. The roots of the use of the ceramic medium by sculptors can be traced back to the inter-war period, with a rich interdisciplinary and intermedial history before the fall of Fascism.

Sculptors both engaged in a kind of avant-garde desire to make art that had a deeper engagement with life and also in a search for new forms for art after the fascist legacy. For example, Fausto Melotti’s use of clay to make both figurative teatrini (or “little theaters”) and also impractical bowls points to a rejection of his earlier search for pure abstraction, which had been coopted by the Fascist Regime. At the same time, the impossibly think sheets of ceramic lend to a reading of delicacy and fragility, perhaps connecting to a broader sentiment of the moment of the atomic age.
Paper for "Material Obsessions and Postwar Art" Session

This year’s Prada Foundation "Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918-1943" exhibiti... more This year’s Prada Foundation "Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918-1943" exhibition presented an innovative experience of Fascist-Era art. The integration of objects in recreated exhibition environments, with blown up views of original installations as backdrops, gave an unprecedented sense of visual context of the Fascist spectacle. Though the exhibition’s didactic text listed the major moments of the Fascist Regime, the exhibition ultimately offered only a partial view of artists’ relationship to Fascist ideology. Almost seventy years before, "Twentieth Century Italian Art" at MoMA presented a heavily-edited view of Fascist art, relegating it to the Novecento group and cleansing Futurism’s connection. Contemporary exhibitions of Fascist art like this one at Prada have opened up the complexity of Fascist art missing in the first post-WWII shows. What still remains missing, however, is the connection between critical engagement with Fascist spectacle, often found in the catalogues, and the viewers’ engagement with those ideas when seeing the exhibition. In this paper, I will discuss how both of these exhibitions presented a kind of Fascism lite in their disconnected presentation of aesthetic and political contexts. In so doing, I show how the exhibition with Fascist art and its curatorial framing has still to fully engaged the viewer with the coded visual language of Fascism and with it the implicit consent of artists during the Ventennio.
In the panel “Fascism in Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice” at CAA, College Art Association Conference, New York, NY, 13-16 February 2019

Heralded as the “largest museum show ever brought to this country to date,” the exhibition Italy ... more Heralded as the “largest museum show ever brought to this country to date,” the exhibition Italy at Work: her renaissance in design today traveled to twelve American museums and remained nearly constantly on view for three years, from November 1950 to November 1953. With over 2,500 works of Italian art, handicraft, and interior and industrial design this exhibition highlighted the mid-century mix of art, craft and industry. Co-organized by the Art Institute of Chicago’s Meyric R. Rogers and the Brooklyn Museum’s Charles Nagel this exhibition was largely financed by the U.S. Government under the Marshall Plan. It would afford American consumers access to new design and, at the same time, spark the Italian export economy.
From the marketing and sale of everything from sculpture to Vespas, this presentation showcased the interdisciplinarity of post-war experimentation among the artists, artisans, designers, and architects in Italy. At the same time, Italy at Work served as a kind of microcosm of the political stakes that culture played in the Trans-Atlantic post-war context. Italian culture came to reflect the Euro-American humanist culture that taste makers in the U.S. sought a connection.
In Session: “Midcentury Mix of Art, Craft and Industry,” SECAC 2018, Southeastern College Art Conference, Birmingham, AL; 17-20 October 2018

As the first major, nationalized support system for artistic production in the United States, the... more As the first major, nationalized support system for artistic production in the United States, the New Deal’s Federal Art Project (F.A.P.) strove to create a holistic vision of art for the American people. Debates among art historians and political pundits alike pointed to the perceived-lack of a truly-American modern art. Cultural critic Lewis Mumford articulated that, opposed to European Modernism, “[w]hat American taste recognizes [is] that there is more aesthetic promise in a McAn shoe store front, or in a Blue Kitchen sandwich palace than there is in the most sumptuous showroom of antiques…” In accordance, the F.A.P. supported artists’ individual creative freedom while encouraging the development of an aesthetic that was uniquely “American.” This new nationally-sponsored American art was championed as being accessible and admirable to everyone, from the farm hand to the First Lady.
One decade prior, a similar program was started in Italy. Since coming to power in 1922, Benito Mussolini saw a need for state patronage of an uniquely-Italian art, uncorrupted by international influence. Nationally supported art in Italy, like later-on in New Deal America, was meant reflect the contemporary native context. Artists were charged with creating a modern art, of their time, that reflected an uniquely Italian aesthetic. In the end, American New Deal and Italian Fascist arts both aspired to make a nationalist art but with unexpectedly multifaceted results.

Marino Marini’s acclaim among international critics remained unrivaled among European sculptors t... more Marino Marini’s acclaim among international critics remained unrivaled among European sculptors throughout the 1950s. Especially in the United States, the enthusiastic reception of Marini’s sculpture both critically and within the market allowed for his work to become an important marker for post-WWII European modernism. Critics like Clement Greenberg and Aline Louchheim championed Marini as first among his European contemporaries. His Cavaliere, Pomone and portrait sculptures collectively represented, for these critics, a novel connection with the humanist past without loosing the formalism of high modernist sculpture. Though the American critical reception of Marini’s work translated existing Italian archetypes, it also created a new framework in which to understand European modern sculpture and Italian culture, specifically, within the burgeoning Cultural Cold War.
The 1949 exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York set the rhetorical frame for the American translation of Marini work in the post-WWII international context. MoMA, in collaboration with the Italian Embassy and the U.S. State Department, organized this historic exhibition which surveyed avant-guard and modern artwork from before the Second World War as well as presented the most recent examples of Italian art. The larger political motives for this exhibition meant that Italian art had to not only create a connection between the US and European high culture, but also to the rich humanist tradition, unique to Italy.
Session: "Nation and Translation (II)"

In 1947, an exhibition at the House of Italian Handicrafts in New York City displayed a sculptura... more In 1947, an exhibition at the House of Italian Handicrafts in New York City displayed a sculptural series by Fausto Melotti called “Figures.” This exhibition, Handicraft as Fine Art, purported to present collaborations between artists and artisans, creating advanced Italian handicrafts for the American market in a scheme to boost Italy’s economic recovery. Works in this exhibition were publicized as both economic and cultural stimuli; American design standards inspiring Italian production.
Contrary to the exhibition’s assertions, however, Melotti’s “Figures” were not original sculptural contributions in collaboration with artisans, but instead had been created ten years prior for a Fascist State patron. The twelve plaster sculptures, entitled Corerenza uomo (Constant Man or Wise One), inhabited the 1936 Milan Triennale’s Sala della Coerenza (Room of Coherence), designed by architectural firm BBPR—within this context representing the Fascist “New Man.” Within the original, Fascist-sponsored exhibition of architecture and design, Melotti’s sculptures not only reinforced Fascist ideology but also represented the notion that Italian art’s power derived from its inter-medial character. Melotti’s sculptures’ subsequent exhibition in post-WWII America obfuscated the works’ original meanings and they became anonymous, apolitical representations of America’s post-war influence. This paper will consider two factors that are brought into relief through a consideration of Melotti’s contribution to this 1947 American exhibition: the repackaging of an existing forms of Italian sculptural engaged with craft as American, and the stripping of Fascist connotations in Italian artwork through its display in the US after the Second World War.
Session: "Form and Content: Considering the conflict between patronage and imagination in sculpture 1850-1945"

Dissertation Abstract by Antje K Gamble

My dissertation crosses the divide between the inter-war and post-war periods in closely examinin... more My dissertation crosses the divide between the inter-war and post-war periods in closely examining the sculptural production, exhibition, and critical reception from 1935 to 1959 of two Italian sculptors, Marino Marini (1901-1980) and Fausto Melotti (1901-1986). Since Italian culture has largely been segregated around the Second World War, a parentheses has been put around Fascist culture, largely because of the Regime’s wartime connection to Nazism. Yet, both Marini and Melotti were productive before, during, and after WWII. This dissertation brings attention to how these sculptors’ wartime production can be seen as both relating to and moving away from their inter-war artworks.
While many critics and scholars have praised Italian sculptors’ post-war production as a phoenix rising from the ashes of Fascism, my project posits that the beginnings of post-war vibrancy can be found during the war years. The intensification of totalitarian controls on culture resulting from both Mussolini’s empirical agenda and the Italo-German alliances of 1936 and 1939 led to a sense of urgency among many artists to make new work. This new post-Fascist work would be separate from their own earlier modernist works championed under early-Fascism. This paradigm shift in the mid-1930s did not result in a complete disavowal of their modernist projects however, but rather a continued challenging of the possibilities of sculptural modernism. Through an examination of the two case studies, Marini and Melotti, my dissertation provides a more dynamic understanding of modernist Italian sculpture across the Fascist divide.
Correspondingly, my dissertation sheds light on the post-war Trans-Atlantic critical frameworks that were used to understand these sculptors’ modernist sculpture. These works’ exhibition and reception reveal critical connections to the debates of the early Cold War. For Melotti, a new sculptural modernism blurred the lines between art and consumerism, being understood as Italy’s new robust democratic cultural labor in the aftermath of WWII. For Marini, his sculpture became embroiled within the Trans-Atlantic debates about Cold War ideals of modern sculpture, while at the same time being valued for its cultural cachet within American collections.

Books by Antje K Gamble

Routledge Press, 2023

Enriching the existing scholarship on this important exhibition, Italy at Work: Her Renaissance i... more Enriching the existing scholarship on this important exhibition, Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (1950–53), this book shows the dynamic role art, specifically sculpture, played in constructing both Italian and American culture after World War II (WWII).

Moving beyond previous studies, this book looks to the archival sources and beyond the history of design for a greater understanding of the stakes of the show. First, the book considers art’s role in this exhibition’s import—prominent mid-century sculptors like Giacomo Manzù, Fausto Melotti, and Lucio Fontana were included. Second, it foregrounds the particular role sculpture was able to play in transcending the boundaries of fine art and craft to showcase innovative formalist aesthetics of modernism without falling in the critiques of modernism playing out on the international stage in terms of state funding for art. Third, the book engages with the larger socio-political use of art as a cultural soft power both within the American and Italian contexts. Fourth, it highlights the important role race and culture of Italians and Italian-Americans played in the installation and success of this exhibition. Lastly, therefore, this study connects an investigation of modernist sculpture, modern design, post-war exhibitions, sociology, and transatlantic politics and economics to highlight the important role sculpture played in post-war Italian and American cultural production.

The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, design history, museum studies, Italian studies, and American studies.

Book Reviews by Antje K Gamble

Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art , 2023

Reviewed by: Antje Gamble The interdisciplinary nature of museum studies has often relegated the ... more Reviewed by: Antje Gamble The interdisciplinary nature of museum studies has often relegated the study of art exhibitions outside of the field of art history. Yet, as Caroline M. Riley clearly lays out in her book MoMA Goes to Paris in 1938: Building and Politicizing American Art, by repositioning the study of art exhibitions "at the center of American art history," scholars can make visible "manifestations of canon formation and the institutionalization of art history within the public sphere of the museum" (3). Riley's indepth analysis of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)'s exhibition Three Centuries of American Art, on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1938, highlights how artworks gain art-historical significance, political soft power, and market value when displayed to the public.
https://journalpanorama.org/article/moma-goes-to-paris/