Aprire i confini. Alcune conseguenze storiografiche della mostra romana Piet Mondrian del 1956

Latently opting for art that the broader society could understand and openly prohibiting freedom of artistic expression, the enduring fascist nationalism led the Italian art system into blatant naivety towards modernist stylistic and conceptual traits. Once the regime’s hegemony over Italian culture had been overthrown, artists and critics could democratically refocus their sights on recent international artistic developments. Only after the middle of the century militant criticism would have laboriously accomplished the task of relaunching a modernised national art. The diverse historiographical developments that followed Mondrian’s exhibition at the “Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna” in Rome eloquently display this transition, revealing the internal paths and gradualness of an achievement that is both methodological and geographical.