Agenda

Call for Papers
Crossing Lines, Entangling Histories: Eastern European Art and Aesthetic Theories in Italy, 1945–1991 

Organizers
Matteo Bertelé, Centre for Studies in Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian Art, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Hana Gründler, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Sven Spieker, University of California Santa Barbara 

International Symposium
Centre for Studies in Russian, Central Asian and Caucasian Art (CSAR), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
December 3-4, 2026

Conference Theme
The aim of our symposium is twofold: on one hand we seek to investigate how art and aesthetic practices and theories from Eastern Europe were received, framed, contested, and circulated in Italy from 1945 to 1991. On the other, we wish to explore the understudied presence of artists and intellectuals from Eastern Europe in Italy, and to analyze their engagement with and critical transformation of Italian culture.
In the decades following the Second World War, Italy emerged as a crucial site of encounter between Eastern and Western Europe intellectually, economically, and culturally. As a geographic, political, and cultural crossroads, with the largest Communist Party in Western Europe and an influential leftist intelligentsia, Italy played a significant role in mediating, interpreting, and exhibiting artistic production from Eastern Europe during the Cold War and its aftermath. Yet the concrete exchange with artistic and intellectual figures from Eastern Europe as well as the reception of Eastern European, including Soviet, art in Italy—through exhibitions, criticism, collections, translations, and institutional exchanges—remains comparatively underexplored. By focusing on reception rather than production alone, the conference aims to illuminate the asymmetries, negotiations, and ideological filters that shaped Italian understandings of Eastern European art after 1945, while also showing how closely entangled the respective histories and realities were even during the Cold-War period.

For further information, please refer to the complete call for papers attached.

Submission deadline: July 31, 2026

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by the end of August.

matteo.bertele@unive.it; ResearchGroup-Gruendler@khi.fi.it; spieker@ucsb.edu