Linford, SarahCaruso, MartinaGleizer, Evgeniia2024-09-192024-09-192018Gleizer, Evgeniia. "Environment of the first solo exhibition of Wassily Kandisnky in Italy : exhibition in Galleria Il Milione in April 1934, Milan". Master's Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2018.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/263Master of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Fall 2018.This thesis focusses on Wassily Kandinsky’s first monographic exhibition in Italy, which was held at the Galleria Il Milione, Milan, in 1934. It begins by retracing the motivations and negotiations that preceded the exhibition, both on the side of the artist and on that of the gallery owners, the Ghiringhelli brothers. The Ghiringhellis, spurred on by the Rationalist architect Sartoris, were extremely keen on exhibiting Kandinsky, whom they considered to be one of the founders of abstract painting, and an important representative of the international avant-garde. The Ghiringhellis’ gallery played a crucial role in the diffusion of modernism in Milan and they were militant proponents of the social, cultural and artistic transformation they believed the new painting could bring about in the new Italy. Kandinsky was not particularly eager to promote his art in Milan or Italy generally, but as recent exile to Paris from Germany, which he had just left in 1933, and as a foreigner in Paris, he accepted the Ghiringhellis invitation. Grateful for the possibility of exhibiting in a politically conservative and artistically experimental milieu, Kandinsky sent forty-five watercolours from his Bauhaus period to Milan hoping, at the very least, to sell some of the works. The exhibition opened in April 1934. While it cannot be said to have been a commercial success, despite the gallerists’ projections, it was well-attended by the Milanese public. The critical reaction and reception that the exhibition prompted is a telling panorama of the situation in Milan in 1934, and a revealing case-study of the thorny question of the reception of a foreign avant-gardist two years after the hardening of the Fascist doctrine. Moreover, Kandinsky’s sympathetic views towards Fascism, a fact occulted by the historiography of the artist, and evinced by the unpublished primary sources pertaining to the exhibition, shed new light on the varieties of “reactionary modernism” that characterized many of the debates in the 1930s.99 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Wassily Kandinsky, 1866-1944Thesis