In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

122 The Critical Moment Lionello Venturi in America Romy Golan Lionello Venturi was the only art historian invited to come to the Pontigny encounters at Mount Holyoke, and he came twice.1 The decision to invite Venturi was significant. No European art historian in exile had his credentials as an anti-fascist. If his physical stature was unusual—a gentle giant in the photographs shot at Mount Holyoke, he is always towering somewhat clumsily above his colleagues—his moral stature was equally unusual, especially in the dismal moral landscape of the twenty years of Italian Fascism. Venturi was born into an old bourgeois family from Modena in central Italy. His father, Adolfo Venturi, was the patriarch of academic art history in Italy. Lionello was named professor of art history at the University of Turin in 1919. In August 1931 he was one of the very few professors—and the total number is truly striking, twelve in all—who refused to swear allegiance to Mussolini’s regime, as was required from all professors. As a result, these twelve had to step down from their academic positions and endure professional limbo. Whereas most of them were in their sixties and seventies and about to reach the age of retirement anyway, Venturi was entering the prime of his career. He had just been offered, and had accepted, his father’s position at the University of Rome, Italy’s most prestigious chair in the history of art. Neither a communist nor a Jew (the oath took place seven years before the racial laws were instituted, and only four of the twelve professors who refused to take it were Jewish), nor a particularly militant anti-Fascist, Venturi refused the oath simply as a liberal. And while the majority of those twelve professors chose to remain in Italy, hoping to keep a low profile,Venturi chose instead to leave.2 Venturi was the only art historian among the twelve professors (the others were in the sciences, law, or history), and the only Italian art historian of renown living in exile in the United States during the Second World War. He went first to Paris, but after the French defeat by the Germans in 1940 and the advent of the collaborationist Vichy regime, he decided to move on to America. He lived in New York City until 1945.Venturi had some independent means but still needed money. While living in Paris, he wrote books, advised art dealers and museum curators on acquisitions, and produced the first catalogue raisonné of Cézanne. Only in America, during the war years, did Venturi LionelloVenturiinAmerica 123 take on a more public stance. Joining what seems to have become a lecture circuit for many academic émigrés during those years, he spoke at Johns Hopkins in 1940, Berkeley in 1941, and Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Mexico City in 1942. In New York he taught at the New School for Social Research, the hub for European scholar émigrés, in 1943–44. It was toward the end of the war, when he was already contemplating a return to Italy, that he became, in the true sense of the word, an intellectuel engagé. In a series of articles written for the left-wing publication The New Leader, he lashed out at the Americans and the British for siding, after the liberation of Italy by the Allies and the fall of Mussolini, with the Italian monarchy and the corrupt government of General Pietro Badoglio.3 Calling for a clean break with the Fascists’ ventennio (their twenty years in power), Venturi co-signed, with six fellow Italian intellectuals in exile, “An Italian Manifesto.” The text, published in Life magazine in June 1944, condemned the Allies’ expedient support of what had been a Fascist monarchy and what they now called a“demo-fascist”government.4 It was his work, however, and not just his liberal political views that made Venturi’s position untenable after Mussolini’s takeover. The essence of his argument—from the time of the publication of his first book, Il gusto dei primitivi (The Taste of the Primitives), in 1926, to his History of Art Criticism of 1936 and its follow-up, Art Criticism Now, in 1941—was twofold. The first principle of his thought was that art criticism and art history were inextricably interwoven, indeed, that they were one and the same thing. As he posited at the outset of Art Criticism Now, the publication of the series of lectures he delivered at...

Share