Fascism, the Jews and Modern Art. Anti-Semitism in the Italian Art Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s.

peer-reviewed article

Diana Wasilewska

diana.wasilewska@up.krakow.pl
Pedagogical University of Krakow (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9146-6599

Abstract

The article constitutes an attempt to examine the characteristic features and the development of Italian anti-Semitism in the period of the fascist regime with special attention to the sphere of culture and to art criticism. In the first decade of the regime, the essayists of the day, with Mussolini at the fore, clearly denied that the “Jewish Question” existed in Italy. This changed significantly around the middle of the 1930s, and these changes were parallel to the directions in which the racist doctrine and the paradigm of fascist aesthetics were evolving at the time. Examining those changes, the author attempts to shed light on the characteristic features (the main lines of the debate, but also the applied rhetoric) of the anti-Jewish, and at the same time anti-Modernist witch-hunt launched especially in press publications edited by the charismatic Telesio Interlandi. The article is largely based on source texts of the era and refers to areas hitherto unexplored or only fragmentarily explored in specialist literature.


Keywords:

anti-Semitism, art criticism, fascism, Jews, fascist Modernism, fascist aesthetics

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Published
2022-12-30

Cited by

Wasilewska, D. (2022). Fascism, the Jews and Modern Art. Anti-Semitism in the Italian Art Criticism of the 1930s and 1940s. Biuletyn Historii Sztuki, 84(4), 947–980. https://doi.org/10.36744/bhs.1108

Authors

Diana Wasilewska 
diana.wasilewska@up.krakow.pl
Pedagogical University of Krakow Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9146-6599

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