While Italian art flourished during the Renaissance, giving rise to artists such as Michelangelo, Leonardo, Titian, and Raphael, Peter Miller’s new book sheds light on a vital period in Rome many centuries later. “American Artists in Postwar Rome: Art and Cultural Exchange” looks at the diverse experiences and artistic contributions of American artists between 1948 and 1964. The city became a creative hub for artists such as Lee Bontecou, Philip Guston, Robert Rauschenberg, Paul Thek, and Cy Twombly, as well as other, lesser-known names. It was a rich atmosphere for artistic exchange, both among Americans and reciprocally with Italian colleagues, against a rich historical backdrop. Furthermore, Miller writes, “In Rome, unlike other European artistic capitals, Americans could work in a more unstructured environment, freer from the constraints imposed by a particular school.”
Miller explains in his book, “Many of the artists discussed here were marginalized in later histories because of their hybridity, in-betweenness, and commitment to exchange. Stylistic tendencies and modes of expression associated with African Americans, women, and queer artists converging in Rome, too, were often denigrated or ignored.”
Miller explores this and much more in his book, which he will be speaking about at the Chilmark Library on August 18 at 4 pm. But I was able to ask him a few questions about “American Artists in Rome” ahead of time.
What attracted you to focus on this period and subject matter?
I had been interested in American artists in Rome for some time, ever since curating the show at the Museo Bilotti in Rome and the Phillips Collection in Washington in 2010–2011, about Philip Guston’s ”Roma” pictures, created during his third and last sojourn in Rome. That led me to investigate Guston’s first extended stay in Rome, from 1948 to 1949. I discovered a whole host of Americans in Rome, some of them quite well known, although their Roman experiences were largely written out of later accounts. The book is an attempt to reconstitute Rome as a fulcrum for artistic exchange from 1948 to 1964 and give it its due as a major artistic center for Americans.
The book contains a wealth of rich information about many artists. Which three might you want us to learn about and why?
A completely forgotten but very compelling painter, Carlyle Brown, is typical of the kinds of artists in the book. He was a complete revelation as I conducted my research. Well-respected and widely collected in his lifetime, he has disappeared from the history of postwar American art. He is a case study of how the blind spots in postwar criticism and museum stewardship, and, dare I say it, a kind of ingrained homophobia, have produced a warped account of that period. He also provides important insight into the gay subculture in Rome, which cultivated a resistance to the strictures of Cold War cultural politics. Through him and others, including Cy Twombly, Robert Rauschenberg, and Paul Thek, we can begin to understand how Rome was a laboratory for these radical ideas that challenged mainstream modernism. I suggest that the critical distance offered by a place like Rome gave artists a unique perspective not only on the political situation in the United States but on artistic orthodoxy as well.
Lee Bontecou is a canonical figure, but her two-year sojourn in Rome in the late 1950s has mostly been overlooked. My book suggests that her pioneering wall-mounted constructions, hybrid objects blending painting and sculpture, owe a great deal to ideas and forms circulating in Rome.
Encapsulating the challenges of the artist in exile, Russian-born, naturalized American Eugene Berman, who traveled in Italy regularly ever since the 1920s and settled permanently in Rome in 1957, deserves a major reconsideration. He figures mostly as a lightning rod for (largely … negative) Italian preconceptions about Americans in Italy after the war. Conditioned by Italian resistance to American Cold War consumerism, Berman, in Italy, was often pegged as an exemplar of an artist who had sold out to commercial interests. Still, he is also an important pioneer of many of the innovations that American artists absorbed in the Italian capital. He confounds assumptions about nationality and artistic production, and so does Rome.
Finally, what would you like readers to “walk away with” from reading “American Artists in Postwar Rome”?
I think this is the most important takeaway from the book, that it contributes to unsettling the idea that New York was the exclusive crucible for American modernism in the postwar period. American artists were receptive to ideas circulating in Rome, and these ideas, along with a real productive artistic exchange with Italian colleagues, contributed in a significant way to their future work.
“American Artists in Postwar Rome: Art and Cultural Exchange” by Peter Miller, Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025. Available at Edgartown Books. Peter Miller will be speaking at the Chilmark library on August 18 at 4 pm.