Georgi, KarenFoster, LauraFoschi, Andrea2024-09-262024-09-262017Foschi, Andrea. "Ragioni d’una pittura: Retracing the story of Felice Casorati’s style in 1920s Italy". BA Thesis, John Cabot University, Rome, Italy. 2017.https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14490/362Thesis (B.A. in Art History)--John Cabot University, Fall 2017.In the 1924 Venice Biennale, an entire room was dedicated to a personal exhibition byFelice Casorati (1883-1993). The paintings on display shared a limpid volumetricplasticity and a naturalistic but geometrical figure style – features that the critics did nothesitate to describe as neoclassical, associating Casorati’s style to other tendencies of theso-called return to order. Six years later, in 1930, Casorati came back to the VeniceBiennale with a fresh set of paintings that marked a stark contrast with the previousworks: elegant deformations, softer hues, an emphasis on surfaces distinguished a newstyle that critics now recognized as dissonant from surrounding tendencies. The presentwork will study the shift in Casorati’s style exemplified by his 1924 and 1930 Biennaleexhibitions, with the aim of assessing its implications and presenting possibleexplanations behind it. The thesis reconnects to recent historiographical trends that haveassimilated investigations of individual artist’s styles with explorations of the period ofthe return to order. The examination of Casorati’s experience will be an opportunity toreflect on the validity of some approaches to the study of this period that rely on broad,overarching narratives and interpretative schematizations. A picture will emerge of theintricate urgency of discourses on style at the time, and will allow for an assessment ofthe capability of Casorati’s style to validate, evade, or undermine interpretative effortsand their frequent implicit attempts of exhortation, categorization, association, andappropriation. Further considerations on Casorati’s relationship with the surroundingartistic world will reveal that possible motivations for his stylistic change can be found inhis attitude towards state art and fashions, in his friendship with Gobetti, in his activityand philosophy as a teacher, and in his relationship with the Sei pittori di Torino.153 pagesenAttribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Felice Casorati, 1883-1963Italian artThesis