Arte e comunismo in Italia 1943-1964

In recent years, except perhaps for Guttuso alone, little attention has been paid by italian art-historians to "communist" art in the transition from Stalinism to “Khrushchev Thaw". Neither the study of single artists or single artworks attributable to "socialist realism" in its various meanings is on the agenda here; nor an historical reconstruction to be kept within the devotional limits of "family histories". Instead, this essay is dedicated to the ideological and narrative infrastructure of italian "social-realism": cultural institutions; politicians like Togliatti, Sereni, Salinari and Alicata; newspapers, magazines, and publishing houses; cultural associations as Italy|USSR, active since 1944; "political pilgrimages" (and pilgrims) to USSR; ambivalent and unresolved attitudes, on communist side, towards Christianity and peninsular cultural heritage; and finally amnesias and removals suffered or perpetrated by those, artists, writers, intellectuals in general, who, in Italy indeed, want to be part of a world opposed to the Atlantic world - proof of such massive removal is the relatively late date, 1962, in which, in Italy, the existence of GULag definitely becomes a problem, and people start talking without restrictions about the genocidal nucleus inscribed in Soviet history.