The Seasons in the City. Artists and Rural Worlds in the Era of Calvino and Pasolini explores rurality in postwar Italy. Between 1958 and 1963, the country underwent an unprecedented yet uneven industrialisation, a period known as the Economic Miracle. Drawing on a relational and dynamic understanding of rural space provided by human geography, this thesis investigates the impact of these economic and socio-cultural transformations on the countryside, and on the ways in which the rural world was perceived and conceptualised in the following decades, especially by contemporary artists and intellectuals. Works of Gianfranco Baruchello, Claudio Costa, Piero Gilardi, Maria Lai, Ugo La Pietra, Antonio Paradiso, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, and Superstudio have been selected and analysed for the complex views on the topography of the country they convey, whilst challenging more conventional forms of art. Organised in themed chapters that find resonance in the contemporary works of two iconic Italian intellectuals, Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini, these artistic practices manifest the ways in which Marxist theory and anthropology contributed to artists' identification of rural landscapes and communities at the time. More importantly, this thesis offers an alternative geographical perspective on 1970s Italian art, one that challenges the pastoral myths that were constructed in the country's metropolitan centres.

Partant du constat de l'importance du sujet pour le peintre futuriste a une epoque ou les avant-gardes europeennes tendent a l'abstraction, la presente etude demontre que la ville fut un theme capital dans l'elaboration de l'esthetique futuriste. En effet, les peintres italiens ne cherchaient pas tant a depeindre l'apparence, l'aspect visible de la ville qu'a apprehender de facon conceptuelle les idees-forces qui en emanaient. A travers l'entite "ville", ils revelerent les concepts inherents au monde moderne et en etablirent les equivalents plastiques. / Ainsi, c'est a travers le sujet de la ville que s'expriment les idees-forces les plus originales du mouvement, telles que la modernolatrie, le dynamisme universel, la vitesse, le devenir, la transformation, l'unanimisme et le simultaneisme, illustres dans trois chapitres intitules 'La ville montante', 'La ville electrisee' et 'La ville simultanee'. Geux-ci demontrent comment certains motifs recurents du cadre urbain comme les echafaudages des chantiers de construction, les lampadaires, les foules ou les bolides sont transcendes par ces idees-forces. La representation de la ville par les futuristes ne releve pas simplement de la description mais d'un programme d'abord politique puis esthetique: l'avant-garde italienne a cree une nouvelle conception du beau, a revele la beaute de la ville moderne et des valeurs qui lui sont inherentes.

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This thesis examines how making extends artists' thoughts beyond their conceptions. Central to this is consideration of how an artist's statements and their work relate: this thesis argues that the relationship is neither of identity nor contradiction, but of a productive tension from which emerges a richer understanding of thought. A similar approach underscores this doctorate's relationship of studio and written components, both of which desire self-sufficiency. The studio work consists of discrete yet mutually informing series, all engaged with the specificity of a moment of exposure, whether here and now or recording a past moment. The notion of 'documentation' underscores these works, which include large chemical photographs, high-definition video, cyanotypes and extensive exploration of casting to reveal latent images. The written component is a thorough study of the various instances of Medardo Rosso's sculpture Ecce Puer, offering art-historical and theoretical grounding of hands-on making as a way pressing cultural issues inhere in a work at a more fundamental level than understood by its contemporaries or maker. The first chapter locates Rosso in his historical milieu. Chapter 2 assesses the elements constituting Ecce Puer; it argues that no definitions of a 'work' adequately encompass these, and coins the term 'complex work' to designate artworks indivisibly singular and plural, concrete and abstract. Chapter 3 offers phenomenological interpretation of Rosso's confused writings, illuminating them through Maurice Merleau-Ponty's late philosophy but understanding Rosso's thought as inadequate to the complexity of his work. Chapter 4 examines Rosso's photography, specifically his photography of photographs, connecting what this achieves to his phenomenology. Chapter 5 introduces a key notion of 'friendship' to understand how the connections between instances of Ecce Puer became 'meaningful'. Having offered a fundamentally new interpretation of Rosso's project, chapter 6 extends Michael Fried's history of French painting to relocate Rosso within early twentieth-century art.