Marshall Plan Modernism

"Possessing the great gift of being able to bring art to life through language, Jaleh Mansoor offers new and illuminating readings of artworks that are among the most compelling objects from the last seventy-five years. She infuses the complex frameworks of recent Marxist thought with her own voice, thinking through the possibilities open to painting while deepening our understanding of postwar Italian culture and its contradictions. This book makes a powerful contribution to the discourses of art history and cultural criticism." - Rachel Haidu, author of The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers, 1964–1976

"Jaleh Mansoor’s Marshall Plan Modernism is a strong, tendentious, and convincing argument for the works of Alberto Burri, Lucio Fontana, and Piero Manzoni as symptomatic responses to the global ascension of postwar American painting, in one register, and to the economic and social displacements of Bretton Woods and the miracolo Italiano, in another. Written with intensity and critical commitment, Mansoor’s book presents their works as acts of resistance and antagonism—and political theory—that parallel and even prefigure the actions of Operaio and Autonomia against the assembly line and the new productivity, in sabotage and strike." - Howard Singerman, author of Art History, After Sherrie Levine

"Brilliantly highlighting the difference between Italian autonomy/autonomia and the far more general and metaphorical evocations of factory work in American-style pop art and minimalism, Mansoor is one among a small group of authors whose work consistently undercut the historicizing and pacifying ism in the concept of modernism. What we gain is an art historical account on par with the multiple upheavals of modernity and their various contingencies."
  - Ina Blom, Critical Inquiry

"Mansoor’s book is an inspiring investigation of Italian art in the post-war years, and an unprecedented attempt, at least in terms of a book-length study, to apply to artworks analytical tools derived from autonomous Marxism." - Jacopo Galimberti, Oxford Art Journal

"An ambitious book: it is literally brimming with questions and the invitation to further exploration. . . . It takes up the challenge to think differently about accepted narratives of the neo-avant-garde and of artistic practices in Europe after the Second World War." - Teresa Kittler, Art History