Un inedito di Lionello Venturi: la conferenza di Barcellona del 27 marzo 1931. La teoria della deformazione e l’arte moderna

Lionello Venturi held his last course at the University of Turin in the academic year 1930/31 on the idea of deformation from Romanesque sculpture to Cézanne’s painting. This topic, already present in his 1926 book Il gusto dei primitivi, reinforced his choice to champion Impressionists and modern art and placed deformation as a constant need in the artist’s search for expression. The unpublished manuscript of a conference held in Barcelona in March 1931 on the same subject, preserved in the Venturi Archive at the Sapienza University of Rome, therefore helps to understand how the scholar intended to strongly oppose any form of repression and limitation of creative freedom in the name of beauty and the classical ideal, a few months after he rejected the fascist oath.