Situating the self-taught artist Alberto Burri within the artistic and political worlds of postwar Rome, this text shows how he reset the course of Italian art

In 1946, Alberto Burri (1915–1995) returned to Italy after three years in prisoner-of-war camps in Tunisia and the United States. Having served in the Italian Fascist army as both an infantry platoon leader and a medical corps officer, Burri felt weary and disillusioned. He gave up his prewar profession as a doctor and embarked on a new life as an artist.

This book places Burri’s work within the artistic, political, and social climates of mid-twentieth-century Rome. It proposes that the fall of Fascism constituted the central motivation for Burri’s turn to artmaking and reframes his early artistic career to show that he sought to convey not a universal expression of wartime trauma, as is often argued, but a personal, subjective response to the war. Drawing on unexhibited and unpublished paintings, drawings, and collages, as well as ephemera and contemporary criticism, Katie M. J. Larson argues that Burri, as one of the first Italian artists to come to grips in a significant way with the prewar achievements of the Surrealists and the postwar production of the Abstract Expressionists, was a catalyst for a sea change in postwar Italian art.

This book features rarely seen material, including:

• Unexhibited paintings, drawings, and collages
• Exhibition ephemera
• Contemporary criticism