No. 7-8 (2024): Il Surrealismo e la cultura italiana. La critica, le mostre, le ricerche degli artisti
Studies

«An ordinary maladjustment»: gender identity in Massimo Campigli’s shows at the Julien Levy Gallery

pdf (Italiano)
  • Raffaele Bedarida
Raffaele Bedarida
Sapienza Università di Roma Dipartimento Storia Antropologia Religioni Arti Spettacolo
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/ladiana-3398

Published 2025-03-13

Keywords

  • Massimo Campigli,
  • Julien Levy,
  • Transatlantic transfers,
  • Fantastic Art,
  • Italian Surrealism,
  • Queer art
    • ...More
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How to Cite

Bedarida, R. (2025). «An ordinary maladjustment»: gender identity in Massimo Campigli’s shows at the Julien Levy Gallery . La Diana, (7-8), 267–284. https://doi.org/10.36253/ladiana-3398
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Known as Surrealism’s promoter, Julien Levy was also the only art dealer in the 1930s to promote a significant number of Italian artists in the United States. The main one among them was Massimo Campigli: Levy introduced him to the American public in the context of Surrealism and Fantastic art to which the gallery was associated, by emphasizing the psychological and destabilizing component of his work. Campigli participated in this interpretative approach by exploring and destabilizing his own gender identity in the work exhibited at the Levy Gallery according to strategies that today we would define as queer.

pdf (Italiano)