Selling Italy: Craft and Italianness in Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (1950–53)

Abstract In the early 1950s an exhibition of modern Italian design toured the United States. Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today displayed a wide range of objects, the majority belonging to the category of handicrafts. The exhibition sought to promote modern Italian craft objects to an American audience in an effort to stimulate an export market for similar wares. The enterprise was part of a larger program of investment intended to rehabilitate the country’s post-war reputation and economy and help stem the spread of communism in Europe. This article explores how a new idea of Italy—one that set its sights firmly on craft—was developed in this exhibition and in simultaneous department store displays. Traditional associations with fine art were pushed aside in a strategy which exploited preconceived notions of Italy as a pre-industrial society and celebrated the country as a site of special artisanal creativity. The objects on display were positioned in a narrative which satisfied consumer tastes for the modern but were also invested with the aura of an age-old craft culture. It was a strategy that effectively made the nation a by-word for quality craftsmanship even within an industrial context.


Introduction
In the early 1950s an exhibition of modern Italian design toured the United States. 1 Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today travelled to twelve museums, starting at the Brooklyn Museum in November 1950 and ending at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1953. 2 It was one of several exhibitions of Italian art and design seen in the US in the decades following the Second World War, though the biggest to concentrate almost solely on craft. 3 It is only relatively recently that designers and design historians have come to acknowledge the importance of Italy's craft heritage to its post-war design success. 4 For the most part scholarship has been focused on processes and attitudes towards manufacturing, which were often smaller scale and, in Vittorio Gregotti's words, owed much to the "intelligence of the old-artisan type worker," whose skills of improvisation and adaptation were vital in the context of Italy's devastated post-war economy. 5 Less attention has been devoted to international views of Italy's craft heritage and the significance of national identities which were formed largely from an outsider's perspective, and which had craft at their core. While there is not scope in this article to address the breadth and detail of this issue, it contributes to the scholarship on this important American exhibition and the ways in which it sought to satisfy political and commercial ends by constructing an idea of Italy through craft.
While the exhibition travelled to a wide variety of locations, each with its own slightly different exhibition design, the exhibition handbook was the same at each venue. This provided an element of consistency which sustained the narrative set out by the exhibition's curators. The handbook and the associated press and archival material from the host venues involved comprises the core material for this case study.
While Italy at Work presented a handful of industrial design pieces, it was dominated by a broad spectrum of artisanal objects from glassware and ceramics to wooden furniture and straw work, as well as "five special interiors" created by leading Italian designers. 6 The selection aimed to capture what the show's curators perceived to be a new creative awakening in Italy, as stated in the introduction to the handbook: "out of a war-torn country is emerging again that stream of creative imagination," a new "Renaissance," one that combined age-old craft skill with a modern aesthetic sensibility. 7 The curators sought to raise these craft pieces to the level of art; they dismissed notions of function and prioritized appearance and visual appreciation over usefulness, asserting that objects were "grouped together in neutral settings, displayed with the respect they deserve, to be judged … on their aesthetic values alone." 8 The exhibition had glowing reviews and attracted considerable visitor numbers and press attention, with one reviewer in Chicago remarking that "the title does not even begin to do justice to the beauty that is on display" (Figure 1). 9 The lead curator of the show was the Anglo-American Meyric Rogers, curator of decorative arts at the Art Institute of Chicago. He was joined on the object selection committee by Charles Nagel, head of the Brooklyn Museum, the industrial designer Walter Dorwin Teague, and Ramy Alexander, the American Vice President of the Compagnia Nazionale Artigiana (National Society of Craft, henceforth referred to as C.N.A.), an Italian-American organization based in Italy that promoted and supported Italian crafts (Figure 2). 10 The exhibition was conceived and largely funded by the American government, part of a broader program that saw the US investing heavily in Italy's economic and cultural post-war recovery. It was hoped that an American export market could be opened up for a broad array of Italian goods, a move that would bolster one of the country's key industries and expand the possibilities of American exports to Italian consumers.

Craft as Soft Power
Craft production in Italy encompassed an extremely wide variety of consumer products, from food to fashion, homewares and furniture. As Catharine Rossi has written, the system of smaller scale, flexible production enabled Italian manufacturers to respond to new trends and adapt to shorter runs of innovative products. 11 It also helped that what they could provide, the US could not. In 1949, a letter from the US Undersecretary of Commerce, C.V. Whitney, to Meyric Rogers suggested the idea of an exhibition of Italian handicrafts, underscoring that craft items "not only represent an important Italian industry, but do not compete directly with similar American products." 12 The Italy at Work exhibition ( Figure 3) was also part of the battle for hearts and minds. In America, Italians and Italian-Americans were the target of considerable hostility during and after the Second World War and the USA was not only investing in a former enemy nation's economy, but encouraging Americans to buy Italian things. 13 There was a strong imperative to restore the reputation of Italy in the eyes of the American public and distance the nation from its recent Fascist past. The line between selling Italian goods and selling a new idea of Italy became thoroughly blurred. As we shall see, these twin ambitions even shared the same spaces, the museum and department store among them.
During the Cold War, one of the ways the US wielded its influence in Europe was through the promotion of domestic wares to European consumers-furniture, kitchen appliances and interior design items-which were instrumentalized in a propaganda war against perceived Soviet-driven anti-Americanism. This "soft power," as Greg Castillo has called it, found its ideal vehicle in touring exhibitions of shiny modern homewares. But this strategy was to have limited early success in Italy, whose economic development was uneven. 14 As a viewer of a 1955 House Beautiful display in Milan (one of the wealthier centers in Italy) observed, "Americans show us beautiful refrigerators, and these only show us how poor and ugly our own are … The exhibits don't relate to the reality of our life … and they seem … to cast a negative light on what we have struggled to accomplish." 15 Paolo Scrivano has also remarked on the limitations of Americanization in these years, noting how "the weekly magazine projected in cinemas during the intermission-frequently chronicled a domestic landscape punctuated by poverty and scarcity." 16 Clearly Italians' own standards of living would need to change before many of these products could be considered realistic aspirations. 17 Just as American design was deployed as a form of soft power in Europe, Italian craft took on its own potency in the US as part of a similar strategy. Italy's craft industries were identified as a potential major export market, helping to raise standards of living and encourage consumerism. They could provide, as one US senator put it, "a strong bulwark against communism, whose influence is waning as economic activity revives" 18 and exhibitions like Italy at Work were favored by the US government as valuable means of achieving this policy goal. In 1949, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art received a letter from the government agency set up to administer the Marshall Plan, which urged the museum "to cooperate in a venture which will not only stimulate interest among the public of Toledo but will also help in the larger plan of our Country in aiding the reconstruction of Europe." 19 The director agreed to host the touring exhibition, and was provided with press release materialfrom PR agents working for Nagel-that struck a similar tone; it stated that American support of Italian craft industries "has been a strong instrument in teaching men who had lived a short lifetime under totalitarianism, the desirability of democracy, American style." 20

Handmade in Italy
The exhibition's press and public engagement material frequently emphasized the moral imperatives for supporting Italian industry, their narrative necessarily painting Fascism as a blip in an otherwise great history. The craft industries were said to have been "warped out of shape" under Mussolini's regime, which was described in the accompanying handbook as the "long grey Fascist interim." 21 Craft was portrayed as having been both exploited and restricted under Fascism, the implication being that supporting it now would be akin to restoring a pre-fascist Italian sensibility. Selling Italian craft to America was in effect selling an idea of Italianness to Americans, one that built on preconceived notions of Italy's backwardness. 22 Paolo Scrivano notes that in this period "American ideas of Italy by and large remained anchored in a highly-romanticized pre-industrial view of the country." 23 This was precisely the image propagated in Italy at Work, where the handicraft content so overwhelmed the small industrial offering that the latter's significance was perhaps even diminished by being shown at all. Italy was so strongly aligned with the idea of craft in the exhibition handbook that it was conceived as almost un-industrial, unmodern, 24 with skill seen as inherent to the population. Yet, the objects on display were professed to be the thoroughly modern products of this deeply traditional culture. The curator's concern with a "renaissance" of craft in Italy that was both rooted in tradition and in step with modern aesthetics, meant that apparently nothing was included in the show from Sicily, Sardinia or much of the South where, Rogers insisted, craft industries had not been able to modernize their designs: "the omnipresent blight of poverty and lack of industrial resources … have as yet been too powerful to permit a constructive reaction to the destructive forces of war." 25 The old-world image of a rural, handmade Italy prevailed and it had a timely appeal for the American consumer tired of the cold, familiar, factory aesthetic. As one press release from the Art Institute of Chicago stated, the Italian items on display conveyed "a humanity and warmth that is so often lacking in contemporary design." 26 A journalist for the New York Herald Tribune echoed these sentiments when she wrote that the exhibition had succeeded in "convincing Americans that art has a place in their lives," a feeling only magnified by "the smoothest most efficiently operating machine-produced objects we surround ourselves with." 27 The unique character of individual items made by hand was emphasized by Rogers too, as a "necessary counter balance to the lifeless monotony of purely mechanical production." 28 Time and again the nourishing qualities of craft were emphasized as an antidote to the sterile production line. As Bruce Metcalf and Janet Koplos have highlighted, these comments were indicative of a broader shift in the late 1940s and early 1950s when "in effect," they write, "a gap opened up that craftspeople could fill." 29 The handbook for the Italy at Work exhibition describes at great length the circumstances in which the objects were made. The curators' two-month trip around the country selecting exhibits is painted in a detail unusual for a museum exhibition. This served to provide colorful origin stories, imbuing the items with a particular quality of authenticity through a vicarious sense of discovery, notably through the studio or workshop visit: You should have stood with us at Alfredo Barbini's fine new one-man furnace, on the Island of Murano, while he showed us how a blob of hot glass could become a lovely naked Eve, in the hands of the master glass blower he is. His tools were the crude traditional tools of his craft, a heavy blow pipe, a pair of clumsy shears, a pair of clippers, some slivers of wood; two or three assistants moved up and back like acolytes who knew their part in a ritual without a word spoken; and slowly, without our being able to see exactly how, the graceful little figure took shape. Barbini's art, modern as its forms are, has descended to him from his forefathers of Murano who, seven or eight hundred years ago, fought off invading Venetians with balls of hot glass on the ends of their blow pipes. 30 Evocative descriptions like this one call into question the curators' claims that objects were to be judged on "their aesthetic values alone" (Figure 4). Instead, the preoccupation with the skill of craft leads to a focus on the craftspeople themselves, and a kind of parallel exhibition is constructed in the handbook, one which fetishizes the artisan and their objects, attributing a value far beyond that of a simply useful or decorative item. Furthermore, in a departure from Walter Benjamin's conception of the "aura" in art, in which objects acquire an "aura" partly from their witnessing of history and the marks wrought on them by the passage of time, craft objects like Barbini's acquire an aura from the authenticity of the skill-passed down through generations-required to make them. 31 This craft skill allows for contemporary objects to retain that warmth and human touch that was apparently so lacking in industrial wares.
The unalienated activity of the craftsman is emphasized, his "crude tools" are itemized in all their rustic charm, the "clumsy shears" speaking not to the skill of the artisan-which we can intuit is far from clumsy-but to the unrefined atmosphere of his workshop, the fact that it is from him and not his instruments that the artistry emanates. The process of blowing glass is seen as alchemy, ritualized and unknowable by the outsider. As Rossi has noted, it is an "enchantment" which the curators experience on witnessing Barbini's enigmatic skill. 32 Rogers continually refers to "the Italian" as a monolithic group and is fixated on the artisans' origins. Speaking of the craftsperson's skill and sensitivity to material he writes, "Here it has its roots in the soil. Through the ages the Italian has kept an intimacy with the earth and its products that is almost animistic in quality." 33 Italians are cast as a deeply feeling people; their particular artisanal skill is an embodied one rather than a skill of intellect. Indeed, it is so bodily it needs no verbal facilitation-Barbini's workshop functioned "without a word spoken." 34 Just as Roland Barthes conceived of cultural myths as transforming history into nature, so Italy's history of craft production turns into the "inherent artistry, ingenuity, and craft skill of the Italian people." 35 The language is both mythologizing and othering, another key factor in perceptions of authenticity. Jean Baudrillard has called authenticity the "quest for an alibi," literally the search for another place, or perhaps another time. 36 The exhibition handbook, in stark contrast to the modernity of the displays, adopts an ethnographic view that contains Italy in a perpetual past, a temporal dislocation noted by Rossi, who cites Johannes Fabian: "just as Rogers repeatedly constructs Italy as a traditional, craft society rather than modern, industrial nation, so the anthropologist denies his subject coevalness." 37 The City Art Museum in St. Louis even considered harnessing a donkey to the traditional cart that appeared in the show, and having it parade the streets as a publicity stunt, suggestions which were not made regarding the Lambretta scooter which also featured. 38 It is tempting to read this ethnographic view, with its primitivizing and paternalistic qualities, as part of a more pervasive attitude during the years of the Marshall Plan, and there is doubtless some truth in this. However, it was also an effective strategy in the creation of a specifically Italian myth of authenticity that was ultimately used to sell goods. Passages describing ancient and inherited craft skills are, in effect, an exercise in branding; they are an inducement to buy a piece of this authentic place and are in some sense approximating a tourist experience. The handbook employs a "wish you were here" touristic mode that serves to strengthen the authority of the objects on display by making the visitor feel they have witnessed their creation. It contains several photographs of craftspeople in action including the "five stages in the shaping of a jug" at Guido Gambone's workshop ( Figure  5), and photographs of other artisans at work in their studios.
A display of dolls dressed in regional costume was arranged over a map of Italy ( Figure 6). The dolls highlighted the regional specificity of many of the other crafts on display, which were also loosely grouped by region due the tendency for different areas to specialize in different crafts: glass from Venice, straw work from Tuscany and Naples, furniture from Milan. The handbook contains short entries for each craft type and regularly describes the regions famed for different disciplines.
This approach chimed with the idea of vicarious travel evoked in the exhibition; when passing from one craft category to another the visitor was also touring different regions of the country. The overall approach reflected real life tourism in the decade, which saw a period of growth starting in the early 1950s. 39 The spate of glamorous Hollywood films shot in Italy during that time only added to the allure. As David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle write, "they all showed the Italy Americans wanted to see and which, in increasing numbers, they experienced as they came to the country as tourists." 40 Italian Craft Displays in American Department Stores Similar touristic strategies were employed when Italian products were introduced to American department stores during the same period. 41 Gimbles, Jordan Marsh and Macy's, among others, all had special sales of Italian goods that coincided with Italy at Work. 42 The items on display were products that had been Americanized to appeal to the US consumer but they were shown in the context of live craft demonstrations that emulated an authentic tourist experience. 43 It was possible to see Italian craftsmen tooling leather and blowing glass in an example of what Dean MacCannell has called "staged authenticity," the conscious recreation of an aspect of local culture meant to enhance the tourist experience. 44 Visitors to Macy's were offered a glimpse of Italian life, able to lunch on spaghetti and sample Perugian sweets. Similarly, the Robbiati coffeemaker in Italy at Work was made fully functional in some locations, installed in the cafeteria to provide authentic espresso as well as being admired for its cutting-edge design.
Macy's "Italian Fair" was set-dressed with Italian props, and reportedly featured a fullsize gondola as well as a traditional Sicilian cart decorated-in kitsch recognition of the political significance of the event-with the faces of Harry Truman and George Marshall. 45 While absent from the handbook, Italy at Work's object list also contained both a gondola (though it was a smaller replica), and a full-size Sicilian donkey cart. 46 An article in the New York Times compared Macy's fair to Italy at Work, remarking on similarities between their products, and differences in their intended markets; at Macy's, there was a "larger selection for the ordinary home decorator or gift buyer." 47 The touring exhibition succeeded in creating a desirable brand of Italianness that was simultaneously exploited by the likes of Macy's and their suppliers. 48 The ambition of the whole enterprise was revealed matter-of-factly by the European Cooperation Administration's Paul Hoffman in Time magazine when he said the department store fair "will give the Italians the opportunity of earning the dollars they so badly need for the purchase of essential American goods." 49

Conclusion
Both the department store and museum displays emphasized craft over industry and even over art. Remarking on the Italy at Work show, one journalist noted that while "much is being made" of "simple craftsmen," bona fide artists like Giacomo Manz u, Leoncillo Leonardi, Fausto Melotti and Agenore Fabbri snuck in under the auspices of design and craft in a stark reversal of the usual hierarchies applied to the decorative versus fine arts. 50 Nods to the Renaissance were present in backdrops at the Macy's fair, and there was even a replica of Saint Peter's Basilica, but these were not what attracted the crowds, the largest of which was reportedly seen around Guglielmo Brusso and his glass-blowing demonstration. 51 In the exhibition too, despite talk of a second "Renaissance," Italy was defined firmly in craft terms, a strategy made clear in Max Ascoli's address at the opening of Italy at Work in Brooklyn, where he began, "You are not going to see masterpieces by Leonardo or Michelangelo tonight. Most of the work has been done by simple artisans, poor, unsophisticated craftsmen." 52 While Elena Dellapiana notes that the folkloristic tendencies of Italy at Work went against what many designers in Italy were trying to achieve at the time, the appeal of Italy's craft heritage was embraced by others. 53 Grace Lees-Maffei has described how industrial design company Alessi presented itself as "quintessentially Italian," in part through an "emphasis on Northern Italian craft tradition," and associations with traditionally artisanal company structures centered on the family. 54 The association of Italy with quality craftsmanship was strong enough to be embedded within industrial concepts that suggested little or no trace of the handmade; indeed, Alberto Alessi Anghini described this time in the company's history as "a kind of handicraft made with the help of machines." 55 The Italian designer Andrea Branzi would look back on this period and note the important "rediscovery" of handicraft that had meant for some "renewed contact with the core of furnishing traditions," and for others "the possibility of using non-industrial techniques to produce individual objects." While the finished objects may have been, as Branzi writes, "wholly unrecognizable as traditional products," they nonetheless owed part of their definitive, expressive style to craft. 56 The opening section of Italy at Work appears to condense this complex dynamic in a single image-a Lambretta scooter positioned alongside a Sicilian cart 57 (Figure 7). Not only did the accompanying handbook claim that there were no items from this region in the exhibition, but the cart sat utterly outside the supposed curatorial ambition, unlikely to appeal as a consumer product and certainly not indicative of a modern aesthetic sensibility. It was wholly part of the myth-making operation of the exhibition which succeeded in creating a brand of Italianness that had craft at its core. It distilled a message which the whole exhibition then proceeded to confirm, that Italy and craft were practically synonymous. Whether the object was made from wood or metal made no difference; if it was Italian, it was quality craftsmanship. Rather than occupying opposite ends of the design spectrum the Milanese Lambretta was presented as an incarnation of the same history and skill embodied in the Sicilian cart; the inheritor of a craft tradition that could permeate even the most industrial of objects.

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