Former Andrew Heiskell Arts Director and Curator-at-Large Peter Benson Miller, a familiar and esteemed figure at the Academy, delivered a talk entitled, “The Great Collage: American Artists in Postwar Rome” in March this year, that analyzed the dynamic exchange between American and Italian artists in postwar Rome. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources and in conjunction to the release of his latest book American Artists in Postwar Rome: Art and Cultural Exchange (Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2025), he examined how these artists viewed the city as a more liberated alternative to New York, both artistically and culturally. His work also explores Rome’s queer subculture and the lesser-known contributions of female artists, challenging traditional narratives centered around male figures. He spoke to the significance of collage as a medium during the Cold War and how the technique became integral to the creative exchanges between American and Italian artists, shaping the modernist movement, in an exploration that moves beyond the usual focus on figures like Cy Twombly and Philip Guston, offering a deeper look at other influential contributors to Rome’s postwar art scene.
An independent art historian and curator, Miller returned to Rome after working at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, tracing the steps of Philip Guston in the city—a Resident of the American Academy in 1971—and served as the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director from 2013 to 2020. During his tenure, he curated exhibitions featuring artists such as Yto Barrada (2017 Resident), Paolo Gioli, Charles Ray (2017 Resident), and Cy Twombly, and collaborated with and invited emerging and influential Italian artists like Elisabetta Benassi and Francesco Arena. His editorial contributions include pivotal publications such as Philip Guston: Roma (2010) and Go Figure! New Perspectives on Guston (2015). Continuing to delve into the rich dialogue between contemporary and historical art, he most recently curated various shows at the Fondazione Nicola del Roscio, among which Paul Thek: Italian Hours (2022) and Ellsworth Kelly: Line, Form, Color (2023), emphasizing the enduring influence of Rome's cultural landscape on in artists active both on in the US and Europe.
American writer Eleanor Clark described Rome as a “great collage,” reflecting its layered history and material richness. How did these qualities attract and influence American artists in postwar Rome? Did they view collage not just as a technique but as a broader metaphor for their creative and social exchanges in the city?
In referring to Rome as “the great collage”—her working title before settling on Rome and a Villa (1952)—Clark conveyed its temporal layers and contrasting political and spatial perspectives, which often confounded artists. The city was “an impossible compounding of time, in which no century has respect for any other and all hit you in a jumble at every turn.” As much as it fascinated them, Rome eluded artists. One integrated American who stayed for many years, Peter Chinni, confessed that “Rome weighs heavily on the artist.”
Reinforcing the collage metaphor, Clark suggested that foreigners, and particularly Americans, brought to Rome “in art something like a splintered windshield; so, [they] are both enthralled and for a long time in nearly mortal conflict with it.” For these reasons, collage emerged as a crucial template for making sense of the city and their experience of it. They could only know it partially and in disparate fragments.
The material richness of Rome—walls pitted by time, graffiti and bullet holes, and plastered in overlapping political posters—also steered them towards collage. World War Two and the Holocaust had rendered traditional methods suspect, whereas artists like Alberto Burri and his colleagues in the Gruppo Origine incorporated unconventional material into works of art, what critic Cesare Vivaldi called a “new pictorial form.” Others, more critical, called these artists “the rag and paper extremists.”
Whether they were conscious of it or not, and despite the different ways in which it was employed as a medium and technique, collage did effectively draw artists, Italian and American, in Rome together into an entangled confederation, linked by their social and creative exchanges, and their shared use of similar materials.
Your book shifts focus from Cold War diplomacy to artists’ personal networks and narratives. How did artistic and social dynamics change in postwar Rome?
The shift of focus from diplomatic to social and artistic networks on the ground in Rome is central to the book’s transnational approach, emphasizing how these factors shaped the work of Americans working there. Most studies of cultural transfer have marginalized Rome in accounts of postwar American art; others have emphasized ideological tensions as an impediment to artistic dialogue. Without denying the ambivalence of many Italians, I am more interested in how Cold War initiatives—USIS, the Fulbright Commission, the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, to name just a few—fostered exchange even as they generated resistance.
This may seem contradictory, but Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones” as “social spaces” where “cultures meet, inform each other in uneven ways, and where they clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power,” helps us see how ideological tension in a postwar contact zone like Rome spurred innovative approaches. Until now, Americans, seen almost exclusively as cultural conquerors indifferent to artistic activity in Rome, have been left out of this equation.
Unlike Paris or New York, you argue that Rome fostered “alternative modernisms” and served as a catalyst for “new pictorial forms.” Why Rome? Why do you think these conversations were possible in this city—and how did this differ from trends elsewhere?
Confronted with the migration of American artists to Rome—Life Magazine reported in 1952 that they “have swarmed the hillsides and made Rome the rival of Paris as Art headquarters”—several articles attempted to explain the appeal of the Eternal City. They extolled the obvious benefits—the Mediterranean climate, a cheaper cost of living, inexpensive bronze foundries—but, more importantly, they underlined that, in Rome, artists could work in an unstructured environment, freer from the constraints imposed by national schools elsewhere. Art dealer Gaspero del Corso, whose Galleria dell’ Obelisco featured exhibitions of many American artists in this period, insisted that in Rome, unlike Paris, “the lid is off, and people can work in freedom, peace, and quiet. There is a healthier, more optimistic spirit here.” Similarly, Vivaldi attributed the artistic vitality of Rome and its “new pictorial form” to “an active and reciprocal ‘communication’ between avant-garde painting in Rome and that in America.” Clearly, the financial support from American institutions, designed to help shore up Italy as a bulwark against the spread of Communism, was an equally important factor.
But the distance from New York, and the experience of working abroad, provided unique, critical perspectives yielding alternative strategies. Clark suggests that Rome blurred both national and individual subjecthood; her walking companion in the late 1940s, the writer and translator William Weaver summed up the perspective of many of his peers in extolling the “hybrid position” afforded by Rome, “a special detachment, a capacity for seeing both Italy and America with a critical eye, belonging to both and to neither.”
The book attempts to document how this condition of apartness, a reprieve from national imperatives and Greenbergian dogma in the United States, clarified different strategies circulating in Rome, permitting dissent, licensing the freedom to experiment, borrow, sample. The critic Howard Devree, for example, investigating the “strange results” of artistic pilgrimages to Italy, was told by one artist, who he does not name, that “he came over […] to get away from the surfeit of abstraction in New York, only to be persuaded into it by the work of Italian painters who he met.”
At the same time, Rome attracted a host of important figures from the international avant-garde responsible for the cultural ferment in Paris in the interwar period. They included Marguerite Caetani, the editor and publisher of the literary journal Botteghe Oscure and a patron of young American artists; Janet Flanner, who wrote the “Letter from Rome” for the New Yorker; Neo-Romantic painter Pavel Tchelitchew and his lover Charles Henri Ford, the editor, with Parker Tyler, of the magazine View; Eugene Walter, a founder of the Paris Review, who moved to Rome at the behest of Caetani; the Neo-Romantic artist and stage designer Eugene Berman (1959 Resident); Caresse Crosby, the co-founder of the legendary Black Sun Press in Paris, who launched Portfolio: An International Quarterly; and Ada “Bricktop” Smith, the doyenne of café society in Paris, who opened Roma chez Bricktop on the via Veneto in 1949. All of them contributed to the cosmopolitan cultural “crossroads” in Rome underwriting alternative modernisms.
Your research highlights often marginalized voices working in Rome, including queer, African American, and women artists. What social, cultural, economic, and political challenges did minoritized people face and how did their work (and their resistance and resilience) change the Roman cultural scene?
Rome attracted many artists escaping racial injustice, political persecution, and homophobia in the United States during the height of McCarthyism. A major discovery as I explored these themes was James Chang Leong, a Chinese American artist from San Francisco, who worked at the American Academy before creating, in 1960, the Palazzo Pio Art Center in a building next to Campo de’ Fiori. He said later that he “rediscovered his own Chinese heritage in Rome.” Palazzo Pio, like the Academy, became a focal point, providing studios for such Americans as Cy Twombly, Ulfert Wilke, James Carroll, and Jack Zajac (1958 Fellow, 1968 Resident), among others. In a large salone, Leong organized public programs, including concerts given by, among others, John Eaton (1962 Fellow, 1978 Resident), a pioneer of electronic music.
Compounding the myriad challenges of voluntary exile, African American artists and writers working in Rome, including painters Harold Bradley, Carl Latimer, and Leonard Monroe, sculptors Barbara Chase-Riboud (1958 Affiliated Fellow), Richard Hunt, and John Rhoden (1954 Fellow), writers William Demby and Ralph Ellison (1957 Fellow), and translator Ben Johnson, as well as nightclub owner Bricktop, were caught up in the contradiction between the United States’ touting democratic freedoms abroad without dismantling its own racist, segregationist society at home. On this subject, I have learned a great deal from Melanie Masterson Sherazi (2023 Terra Foundation Fellow), whose research on Demby, in particular, explores the challenges faced by this community.
The Italian press regularly criticized the purportedly excessive influence of American women in Rome; Caetani, gallerists Frances McCann and Odyssia Skouras, and socialite Consuelo Crespi were perceived as threatening the traditional patriarchal order. While Ambassador Clare Boothe Luce was seen as doing a “manly job in Italy,” writer Alberto Moravia expressed a pervasive misogynistic anxiety when he told a gathering of the American Women’s Association of Rome in 1958 that they “had more power than was good for them,” explaining that “American women do too much because they want to be both men and women, which goes against the traditional side of women.” Still, while some women, like Claire Falkenstein, Ilse Getz, Beverly Pepper (1986 Resident), and Laura Ziegler, enjoyed artistic success in Rome, they were marginalized in later accounts. The book reconstitutes the Roman coordinates in their work.
Similarly, homophobic anxieties simmering in reviews of work by queer artists, including Berman, Carlyle Brown, Corrado Cagli, Tchelitchew, and others, alert us to their alternative strategies and what Tirza True Latimer has called “eccentric modernisms.” While Rome did offer a more tolerant atmosphere, it was by no means free of prejudice. The more permissive environment nonetheless licensed cross-fertilizations between painting, bricolage, and the decorative arts, for instance, which art historian Tom Folland has identified as one of the hallmarks of Rauschenberg’s “queering of representation,” an anti-essentialist questioning of Greenbergian hyper-masculine topes. This anti-conformist aesthetic, which flourished in Rome, in my view, colored Rauschenberg’s Combines and culminated in the work of Paul Thek, who spent several formative years in Rome in the early 1960s.
Having served as the Andrew Heiskell Arts Director of AAR and having lived for many years in Rome as a renowned and influential curator, how do you view the Academy’s role—both then and now—in shaping conversations and collaborations between American and Italian artists?
While it wasn’t necessarily my intention when I started writing, the Academy emerged as a key protagonist in the book. Far from aloof from the rest of Rome, the Academy was what William Weaver called “one of the most electric” of “several nerve centers in Rome.” Through the social and cultural events they orchestrated at Villa Aurelia, their unflagging support of the fellows, tireless attendance at openings, and their friendships with a wide range of artists and intellectuals, Laurance and Isabel Roberts, the postwar architects of a golden age at the Academy, were major catalysts for exchanges between American and Italian artists. Through their own collection, now sadly dispersed, which featured works by Americans and Italians working in Rome, the Robertses created yet another fulcrum for dialogue. The Italian artist Afro, an intimate of the Robertses, wrote that the Academy during their tenure “offered the possibility of stimulating encounters, meetings of the mind, and long-lasting friendships.”
This absolutely crucial aspect of the Academy’s mission must be cultivated further, especially now, as isolationist clouds gather. The Robertses’ urbane legacy resonates in such initiatives as the Italian Fellowship program, a cornerstone of the rich, mutually beneficial, transnational dialogues fostered across disciplines at the Academy. As arts director, I campaigned for a fellowship for curators, and so I was thrilled to see that the Academy has just named the duo Francesco Urbano Ragazzi as the inaugural Italian Fellows for curatorial research. Like Ilaria Gianni and Saverio Verini, who, with Lexi Eberspacher, suavely curated the annual fellows’ exhibitions during my tenure, inviting Italian artists to participate, they will shape ongoing conversations and generate exciting new ideas. In choosing Ilaria Puri Purini as the first Italian arts director, moreover, the Academy has demonstrated its commitment to international exchange and a cosmopolitan outlook.
It is hard to overstate how profoundly the Academy has shaped my book. The Library, the Photographic Archive, the Institutional Archive in New York, and the supportive community of staff and former fellows, all provided essential resources and sounding boards as I conducted my research. Its role as a cultural catalyst in the 1950s, a story largely overlooked until recently, offered fertile ground for reconsideration, but also a conceptual model. Methodologically, the Academy—a constantly challenging kaleidoscope of people and ideas, a generous and rigorous creative laboratory—opened new ways of thinking about American postwar art nourished by a foreign context.
As an institution, it embodies the concept of “entanglement,” which, as defined by Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton, underscores, among other things, the porosity of borders and the dynamism of intercultural processes. As Rome did for postwar artists, the Academy continues to offer critical distance, yielding breakthroughs for those who spend time there, even after they have returned home.