Introduction

Rome became a vibrant cultural centre in the postwar period and was a popular destination for abstract artists from around the world, many of them women. As this Introduction shows, these women artists working with abstraction came to Rome from different places around the world, not only the US and the UK, but also Turkey, Brazil, and former Yugoslavia. Given that they stayed in the city for various periods of time, travel is taken as the shared characteristic of this “affective community” of women artists, allowing for the inclusion of women artists and critics from Rome who also travelled to study, or develop their work, in the same period. As they outline here, this approach allows the editors to produce a focused study of a previously under-researched group of women artists, which developed distinct approaches to working with abstraction and formed an important transnational network for the exchange of artistic ideas on a global scale in the period between the 1940s and 1970s.

This is a comprehensive collection of essays about women artists working with abstraction in postwar Rome, from the late 1940s through the 1970s.

The diverse range of contributors from around the world analyse the individual artistic trajectories of more than fifteen women artists and critics, bringing their work together for the first time in a distinct contribution to the continuous rethinking of abstract art’s narrative in the wake of feminist as well as postcolonial theories. The book takes an international outlook with the women artists covered coming from places such as the US and the UK, Turkey, Iran, and Brazil, and considers how travel framed their work. As the book reveals, Rome’s unique cultural landscape was immensely important to these women, who worked across painting, sculpture, and printmaking, and it had a lasting impact on both the material and formal properties of their practices. As a transnational contact zone and a point of convergence for the exchange of ideas and working methodologies of a global artistic network, it enabled a dialogue between women abstract artists extending across the Mediterranean and beyond.

This book is ideal for researchers and students interested in modern art, postwar women artists, and abstraction.