HERETICAL AESTHETICS

One of Europe s most mythologized Marxist intellectuals of the 20th century Pier Paolo Pasolini was not only a poet filmmaker novelist and political martyr He was also a keen critic of painting An intermittently practicing artist in his own right Pasolini studied under the distinguished art historian Roberto Longhi whose lessons marked a life long affinity for figurative painting and its centrality to a particular cinematic sensibility Pasolini set out wilfully to contaminate art criticism with semiotics dialectology and film theory penning catalogue essays and exhibition reviews alongside poems autobiographical meditations and public lectures on painting His fiercely idiosyncratic blend of Communism and classicism localism and civic universalism iconophilia and aesthetic heresy animated and antagonized Cold War culture like few European contemporaries This book offers numerous texts previously available only in Italian each accompanied by an editorial note elucidating its place in the tumultuous context of post war Italian culture Prefaced by the renowned art historian T J Clark a historical essay on Pasolini s radical aesthetics anchors the anthology One hundred years after his birth Heretical Aesthetics sheds light on one of the most con