The Power of Two: Inter-Gender Dialogue, Couples & Creative Partnerships in 20th C. Italian Culture

Adolf Goebbels
Published on Feb 10, 2023
Magazzino Italian Art presents a four-part lecture series â€œArte Povera: Art of Collaborationâ€ curated by 2020-21 Magazzino Scholar-in-Residence Teresa Kittler.

In The Power of Two: Inter-Gender Dialogue, Couples and Creative Partnerships in 20th-Century Italian Culture, Professor Lucia Re, Research Professor in the Department of Italian at UCLA, traces the paradigms, patterns, challenges and rewards of inter-gender dialogue and creative partnership across literature and the arts in 20th century Italian culture. Starting with the Gabriele Dâ€™Annunzio-Eleonora Duse collaboration in the theater at the turn of the century, the talk will progress to fascist-era artistic couples and conclude with a look at artists and writers of the post-World War II period. Although women fought to move beyond traditionally subordinate roles, the age-old paradigms of woman as Muse on one hand, and of Pygmalion as the artist creator and educator of woman on the other, remained powerful and pervasive in Italy well into the 20th century. Yet even while operating largely within these restrictive male paradigms, women writers and artists found ways to challenge and subvert them, sometimes together with men. In the early 1970s, feminists such as art critic Carla Lonzi and visual artist Carla Accardi promoted separatism as a necessary prerequisite to establish womenâ€™s autonomous creativity. While these took different forms, dialogues across the gender divide and collaboration within artist couples continued to foster both male and female creativity in ways that are yet to be fully explored and understood, and that may require rethinking conventional definitions of aesthetic production.