Lionello Venturi e la storia dell'impressionismo 1932-1939

Perceived as foreign to French pictorial tradition that was being fashioned in the interwar years, Impressionism maintained, until the end of the third and the beginning of the fourth decade of the 20th century, an ambiguous image, hovering btwn a lost moment in time and the difficult transition into the field of history. In the wake of Focillon's historical research and Blanche's firsthand accounts, Lionello Venturi's studies take on an intricate and distinct quality, in which his contemporary activist engagement (with the anti-fascists in exile in Paris) are inseparable from his work as art historian. Among the first to tackle the issue of a modern discipline of art history based on methodology, Venturi launched a campaign to gather sources, brought together in Les Archives de l'Impressionnisme (Durand-Ruel, 1939).