FEATURED AUTHOR

Anthony White

Associate Professor
The University of Melbourne

Anthony White is an Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He is the author of Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism (Routledge, 2020); Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art (IB Tauris, 2016); and Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (MIT Press, 2011). His writing has appeared in the journals Grey Room, October, and Third Text, and in publications by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Subjects: Art & Visual Culture, History, Museum and Heritage Studies

Biography

Anthony White’s research focuses on the history of modern and contemporary art. He is the author of Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (MIT Press, 2011); with Grace McQuilten, of Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art (IB Tauris, 2016); and Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism (Routledge, 2019). He has written for several peer-reviewed journals including Grey Room, October, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, and Third Text, and for exhibition catalogues published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne. He is also a contributor to Artforum.

During his tenure as Curator of International Painting and Sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia from 2000 – 2002 he curated several exhibitions including Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism; Sol LeWitt Drawings, Prints and Books 1968-1988; and Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles. In 2008 he co-curated The Art of Making Sense at the Cunningham Dax Collection in Melbourne.

He has received several research awards from the Australian Research Council (2018, 2012, 2007) and the Ian Potter Foundation (2014) and was a named Collaborator on a project funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2012 - 2017). He has held visiting appointments at the Department of Italian Studies, New York University (2013), The Centre for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C. (2006), and the Humanities Research Centre at The Australian National University (2005). From 2014 – 2018 he was President of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand.

Education

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

Art History

Websites

Books

Featured Title

Articles

Futurism, Territory and War in the work of Fortunato Depero

Published: Apr 29, 2015 by Journal of War and Cultural Studies
Authors: Anthony White
Subjects: Art & Visual Culture

The work of the Italian futurist artist Fortunato Depero (1892 - 1960) conveys the geographic, cultural and personal dislocation brought about by military conflict. Taking as its subject a series of artworks by the artist from the late 1910s and early 1920s, this essay demonstrates how Depero's perception of Trentino – the region in which he was born – was transformed during WWI.

‘Surrealism in Italy? Sexuality and Urban Space in the Work of Scipione (1904 – 1933)’

Published: Dec 31, 2014 by Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Authors: Anthony White

This article discusses several artworks by Gino Bonichi (1904 – 1933), an Italian artist working in Rome during the late 1920s and early 1930s, who went by the name of ‘Scipione’. It argues that by drawing on the work of French surrealist artists and writers Scipione challenged normative ideas of sexuality and urban space during the period of Benito Mussolini’s reign over Italy.

Abstract Art, Ethics and Interpretation: The Case of Mario Radice

Published: Jun 30, 2004 by Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Authors: Anthony White
Subjects: Art & Visual Culture

Modernist abstract art can be interpreted as the expression of ethical ideals. I will demonstrate in this essay that a specific example of modernist abstraction, created in Italy during the 1930s, can be interpreted as responding to ethical principles articulated in the culture at large. I will also show that such principles are not inherent in the formal structure of such works, as the ethical meaning attributed to them depends upon the context in which they are received.