Reportage, Impression, Anemia. Mario Schifano’s landscapes between Rome and New York (1963-65

This paper explores Mario Schifano’s landscape paintings from 1963 to 1965. The artist lived in Rome and New York during this significant period, and focused intensely on painting. Additionally, in those years he developed a fondness for figurative subjects, particularly landscape. The essay investigates how his attitude towards the genre evolved over time and compares his interpretation of nature to that of his Italian and American colleagues’ at the time. The paper is divided into three sections. The first section presents a formal analysis of Schifano’s 1963 paintings, outlining how he manipulated the traditional landscape genre and detached from it. The historical interpretation of his 1963 paintings as “reportages” will be situated within the context of 1960s Rome. During this time, the contagious language of advertisements was becoming popular among artists, and had a meaningful impact on Schifano’s artistic practice, too. Second, landscape will be a lens to follow Schifano’s stay in New York in early 1964. During that year, his interactions with poets and artists significantly influenced his art. The focus of this section centers around his friendship and artistic partnership with poet and curator Frank O'Hara, and on their “impressionistic” collaboration entitled Words & Drawings. Ultimately, Schifano’s “anemic” canvases from 1965 point towards a new detachment from the genre. The painter consistently adhered to nature as a subject for his art, while simultaneously seeking to deny its inherent naturalness and recreate it artificially. The three sections therefore deal with Schifano’s ever-changing approach to landscape genre and, departing from the formal analysis of the artworks, they explore the relationship between Schifano’s pictorial choices and his attitudes towards the natural environment.