Abstract: By examining the career of the Italian painter Arturo Tosi, this article highlights his prominence during the interwar period. His success as the “perfect landscapist,” largely overlooked by scholarship, provides insight into fascist aesthetics and politics (from land reclamation to the appropriation of the classical past), as well as into the histories of tourism and industrial development. The article first traces Tosi’s critical reception in the 1920s and situates it within the development of modern Italian art under fascism. It then explores the centrality of cultivated land in his paintings, questioning the extent to which they pandered to the Virgilian myth of the rural landscape. Finally, it considers his paintings through the cultural, social, and environmental histories of the territories he depicted, with the aim of addressing art historical research with an increased ecological attention.
Abstract: This article reads Yosemite National Park as a modernist form that depended upon the legibility of Indigenous peoples as timeless, authentic relics of a premodern past. Through analyses of park photography, tourism promotion, housing, clothing, and basketry, it shows how Yosemite’s Native American inhabitants exceeded these primitivist expectations by adapting settler technologies and institutions to Indigenous purposes. Placing the park in conversation with Indigenous vaudeville and Pueblo modernism, the article argues that Native residents of the park produced Indigenous modernist forms that challenged colonial definitions of authenticity. In tracing these Indigenous modernist forms, the national park emerges as a distinctly modernist production.
Abstract: Tracing an evolution in the art and writing of Djuna Barnes, this article endeavors to make visible the manner in which Barnes’s texts “see.” The article begins by attending to the ethical violations that accompany Barnes’s highly detailed view of non-normative bodies in her poems from The Book of Repulsive Women (1915). Next, it shows how Barnes’s drawings from the same volume counteract the visual acuity of her poetry by adopting a dark and convoluted sense of perspective. This perspective anticipates the aesthetic of opacity that Barnes develops for her novel Nightwood (1936). The article then concludes by examining the impaired narrative perspective of that novel as a previously unseen connection point between disability aesthetics and modernist abstraction.
