Gabriella De Marco on Enrico Crispolti's Political Legacy

Gabriella De Marco, professor of contemporary art history at the University of Palermo, reflects on the legacy of Enrico Crispolti (1933–2018), who died on December 8 in Rome. She argues that the political dimension of Crispolti's work has been overlooked, framing him as a broad intellectual whose approach to art history was inherently political, not partisan. De Marco revisits Crispolti's defense of Renato Guttuso, a Sicilian realist painter often dismissed as outdated by avant-garde circles, and notes that Crispolti's scholarship helped secure Guttuso's place in the canon. She highlights Crispolti's work on Futurism, particularly his 1969 book 'Il Mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo,' which addressed the 'degenerate art' exhibition in Germany, racial laws in Italy, and Nazi-Fascist cultural policies. De Marco also mentions a planned conversation with Crispolti at a November 2018 conference in Palermo on 'Persona, comunità, strategie identitarie,' which could not take place due to his death. She emphasizes the importance of the Archivio Crispolti arte contemporanea in Rome, declared of national interest in 1992, containing 25,000 items including correspondence with Lucio Fontana and Scanavino. De Marco concludes that Crispolti's archive reflects his approach: not seeking academic modernism but contesting the art system, embodying a militant critic rather than a cultural mediator.