In conjunction with the release of his book, American Artists in Postwar Rome: Art and Cultural Exchange (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025), Peter Benson Miller in this lecture reconsiders the various, interconnected forms of collage created by artists in Rome. Eleanor Clark, in Rome and a Villa (1952), refers to Rome as the “great collage,” capturing the material and temporal layers that fascinated American artists. Innovative collage techniques contributed to what Italian critic Cesare Vivaldi called a “new pictorial form” developing in Rome – as opposed to Paris or New York – thanks to reciprocal exchanges between Italian and American artists.

Among the sites fostering these interactions were the American Academy in Rome, the Palazzo Pio Art Center, the Galleria L’Appunto, and the Rome-New York Art Foundation on the Tiber Island. Miller’s book, in reconstituting these fulcrums for productive exchange, underlines, too, alternative, hybrid modernisms developed by queer, African American and women artists working abroad during the height of the Cold War.

Praise for American Artists in Postwar Rome: Art and Cultural Exchange:

“A deeply researched and richly textured account of the “heyday of the American artist in Rome,” this engaging book shows us that it was significantly the community of gay artists and writers who most splendidly ignored the strictures of Cold War binarisms, both political and aesthetic.”

Romy Golan, Professor, Ph.D. Program in Art History, City University of New York.

Speaker

Peter Benson Miller is an independent art historian and curator based in Rome, Italy. From 2013 to 2020 he was the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director and then Curator-at Large at the American Academy in Rome. His exhibitions have featured the work of Yto Barrada, Paolo Gioli, Charles Ray, Paul Thek and Cy Twombly. He is the editor of Philip Guston: Roma (2010) and Go Figure! New Perspectives on Guston (2015).