The Politics of Abstract Art. Forma 1 and the Italian Communist Party

Este artículo examina el papel del grupo de artistas abstractos Forma 1 en relación con la política cultural del Partido Comunista Italiano durante la posguerra, como ejemplo de los intentos de superar la dicotomía establecida en Italia entre arte abstracto y realismo socialista y producir una alternativa a la confrontación entre ambos discursos estéticos. Mientras los artistas realistas socialistas subrayaban la necesidad de expresar contenidos políticos explícitos con un estilo que asegurase su máxima legibilidad para una audiencia de masas, los artistas de Forma 1 argumentaban que la abstracción significaba una crítica de la representación pictórica que podía contribuir a la crítica de la ideología burguesa, armonizando de este modo el marxismo con los desarrollos artísticos más avanzados. El PCI, por su parte, basaba su política artística en amplias alianzas de artistas e intelectuales antifascistas, que cada vez eran más difíciles de mantener en el clima de creciente confrontación política y cultural que siguió a la II Guerra Mundial

Batallas culturales en torno al clasicismo

Los valores fascistas calaron, de un modo u otro, en todas las manifestaciones del arte italiano de entreguerras. Sin embargo, no todas las manifestaciones del arte fascista fueron el resultado de nacionalismo exacerbado, provincialismo y aislacionismo. Los conceptos de ‘romanità’, ‘italianità’, ‘latinità, o ‘mediterraneità’, que caracterizaban la producción cultural italiana de esos años, actuaron originalmente como matriz de estilos diferentes y susceptibles de diversas interpretaciones

Políticas del urbanismo lúdico. Contracultura y ciudad del situacionismo al neohistoricismo (1943-1989)

Este artículo ofrece una introducción histórica a la teoría y la práctica situacionista en conexión con la arquitectura funcionalista, las economías urbanas, ejemplos de acción política contracultural y su reincorporación a las lógicas de organización tecnocrática de las ciudades. Ello permite definir, desde una perspectiva histórica, algunas claves interpretativas de los rasgos ideológicos y económicos fundamentales de los sistemas urbanos contemporáneos, lo cual, a su vez puede establecer un contexto desde el que reflexionar sobre las posibilidades actuales de un urbanismo socialmente comprometido

Numerical evaluation of the Green's functions for arbitrarily shaped cylindrical enclosures and their optimization by a new spatial images method

IIn this paper, a spatial image technique is used to efficiently calculate the mixed potential Green’s functions associated with electric sources, when they are placed inside arbitrarily shaped cylindrical cavities. The technique is based on placing electric dipole images and charges outside the cavity region. Their strength and orientation are thencalculated by imposing the appropriate boundary conditions for the fields at discrete points on the metallic wall. A method for the assessment of the potentials accuracy is proposed, and several optimization techniques are presented. Three cavities are analyzed to demonstrate the usefulness of the techniques. The cutoff frequencies and potentials patterns are compared to those obtained by a standard finite elements technique, showing excellent agreement. Finally, a band-pass filter based on coupled lines is analyzed, demonstrating the practical value of the technique.This work has been developed with support from the Spanish National Project (CICYT) with reference TEC2004-04313-C02-02/TCM, and the Regional Seneca Project with reference 02972/PI/0

Una composición poética tradicional turolense copiada hacia 1400

Este artículo da a conocer, sin más ambiciones, una breve pieza\ud poética vinculable a la lírica tradicional hispana que fue copiada por un\ud escribano, seguramente como simple entretenimiento, en las hojas libres de\ud un cuadernillo de papel perteneciente al fondo de la Comunidad de Aldeas\ud de Teruel. Aunque carece de cualquier precisión cronológica, por el tipo de\ud escritura y la calidad de papel, el momento de la transcripción puede datarse\ud a fines del siglo XIV o, menos probablemente, principios del XV.This article simply shows a short poetic fragment related to Traditional\ud Hispanic Poetry, that was copied by a court clerk, probably just for\ud entertainment, in a paper notebook’s free pages. That notebook belonged\ud to the Teruel Villages Community fund. Although it isn’t known its exact\ud chronology, according to the sort of handwriting and the paper’s quality, the\ud transcription moment could date at the end of XIV century, or even (although\ud is not as probable) at XV century beginning

Italian Communist Party cultural policies during the post-war period 1944-1951

This thesis considers the cultural politics of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) during the immediate post-war period in the context of Italian History, the artistic developments of the first half of the 20th Century and the ideological basis of the PCI. The text has been divided in two parts: The first part focuses on the cultural policy of the PCI from 1944 to 1951 and its relationship with contemporary Italian culture. In the second part, I discuss the influence of Communist cultural politics in post-war Italian art. I have identified two phases of the cultural politics of the PCI which correspond to two phases of the political developments in Italy after World War II: From 1944, the Italian Communists pursued a policy of alliances with nonproletarianised sectors of society and the other Italian anti-Fascist parties. This policy of alliances collapsed in 1947, when the PCI was expelled from the Government of national unity, which was controlled by the Christian Democrats. In the second part of the thesis, I explain how, similarly, Italian artists were heavily influenced by political allegiances in the wake of Fascism. But, precisely, anti-Fascism was a cornerstone for collaboration and understanding between representatives of disparate trends, and associations of artists from a broad political spectrum were organised. Artists with a PCI card were fully involved with such associations. After 1947, however, as a result of its marginalisation from government, the PCI Politics hardened in all fields, including culture. Party officials began to ask artists to put their skills at the service of the Communist's wider political programme and express Communist contents through their work in every case, with an 'understandable' style aimed to ideologically shape the uneducated proletariat. Nevertheless, this policy seemed unacceptable for those artists who equated Communism with political anti-fascism and free intellectual enquiry. The prestige of the PCI among intellectuals accordingly underwent a quick decline, and Communist officials had to develop a more relaxed cultural line from 1951. This substantially meant the return to the policy pursued in the wake of the war. After this, the relationship of the PCI with fine artists was recomposed. However, the political influence of this collective was fading away in the early 1950s, when new means of mass communication, such as cinema, radio and magazines, appeared in Italy and succeeded in shaping public opinion in a far more effective way than the fine arts