Laura Moure Cecchini
Assistant Professor of Art and Art History
Department/Office Information
Art and Art HistoryLauro De Bosis Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
BA, Philosophy, Universidad Iberoamericana (Mexico City), 2007
MPhil, Philosophy, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (Mexico City), 2009
PhD, Art, Art History, and Visual Studies, Duke University (Durham, North Carolina), 2016.
Transatlantic Avant-Gardes, Global Modernisms, Italian Art of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mexican Modernism, Visual Culture of Fascism, Art and Nationalism, Exhibition History, History and Theory of Photography, Historiography of Art History.
My research investigates how transnational networks and the internationalization of artistic forms have shaped the avant-garde and modernist canons, focusing on Italy and Mexico as case studies. Addressing cultural, historical, and geographical specificity, my research studies modernism as a cosmopolitan but contradictory phenomenon with profoundly different temporalities and geographic manifestations. Through an analysis of art practices and criticism, and collections and exhibitions, I study modern visual culture in relation to the social, cultural, and political upheavals that marked the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I am currently writing a book titled Baroquemania: the Allure of the Baroque in Italian Modern Visual Culture, 1898-1945, which charts how from the fin-de-siècle to the fall of the fascist regime prominent artists, writers, philosophers, and ideologues — such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Roberto Longhi, Giorgio de Chirico, Benedetto Croce, and Lucio Fontana, among others— reimagined the Baroque as a catalyst to the reshaping of modern identity and visual culture in Italy.
My next book project studies the Latin American responses to Italian art under fascism, with a particular attention to how Mexican and Argentinian artists, cultural promoters, and art critics addressed and represented fascist cultural politics.
I am also pursuing projects dedicated to Marius de Zayas’ promotion of Diego Rivera in the United States in the 1910s; the reception of Aztec art in avant-garde circles; and the fraught history of Latin American art at the Venice Biennale during the interwar period.
https://colgate.academia.edu/LauraMoureCecchini
Journal Articles
2020 “Positively the only person who is really interested in the show”: Romeo Toninelli collector and diplomat between Milan and New York,” Italian Modern Art, 3, January 2020
2019 “Can the Baroque Be Classical? The Seicento and the Return-To-Order in 1920s Italian Painting ,” Quaderni della Biblioteca Hertziana, forthcoming.
2019 “Baroque Futurism: Roberto Longhi and the Avant-Garde on the Eve of World War I,” The Art Bulletin, June 2019, 29-53.
2016 “The “Mostra del Quarantennio” and the Canon of Modern Art at the Venice Biennale in the Interwar Period," Il Capitale Culturale, Studies on the Value of Cultural Heritage "Museums and Exhibitions between WWI and WWII" 14: 223-252
2016 “The Nave Italia and the Politics of Latinità: Art, Commerce, and Cultural Colonization in the Early Days of Fascism,” Italian Studies 71 (November 2016)
2014 “Vincenzo Agnetti and the Poetics of Zeroing,” Art and Documentation (Sztuka i Dokumentacja) 10: 39-44.
2014 “Photodynamism and Vortography: The Futurist Anti-Portraits of Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Alvin Langdon Coburn,” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies: 477-503.
Book Chapters
2019 “Decadence and the Visual Arts,” Cambridge Cultural Concepts-Decadence, ed. by Jane Desmarais and David Weir (London-New York: Cambridge University Press), forthcoming.
2018 “A House No Longer Divided: Patronage, Pluralism and Creative Freedom In Italian Pre- And Postwar Art,” Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘the Knot’, ed. by Sharon Hecker and Marin Sullivan (London: Bloomsbury Press), 173-188.
2011 “Indias pin-up: la indígena como objeto erótico en los calendarios de los años ’40-‘50,” Los sueños de una nación. Un año después 2011 (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes:), 43-55.
Book Reviews
2018 Review of "International Yearbook of Futurist Studies- Vol.7: Latin America," Modernism/modernity
Digital Projects
2015-2017 "Portrait of a City- Jacopo de' Barbari's View of Venice," Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and Minneapolis Institute of Art
2014-2017 "Venice Interactive Visual Atlas" (VIVA), Wired! Group, Duke University