Erwin Panofsky e la modernità: pittura, fotografia, film

In 1958 the designer and art theorist György Kepes, professor at MIT, proposed to his friend Erwin Panofsky to write a contribution on contemporary art for the magazine “Daedalus”. The old German professor politely declined the offer, stating that he was not competent enough on the subject, and added, with his proverbial humour: «The only contribution I could make would be, as I told you at the Cambridge dinner, a brief report on Betsy, the painting ape». (Panofsky 1958). My thesis challenges this customary historiographical portrait of Panofsky as a “theorist in the ivory tower”, nurtured by the author himself, and revisits his production by revealing his abiding interest for the arts and the media transformations of his time. In doing so, I followed an approach that combined philological and archival research with art theory, embedding to the art-historical research insights from visual and media studies, and from photography and film theory. The thesis, organised in four chapters, investigates Panofsky’s interest in Modern art (Expressionism in the pre-emigration years, and Abstract Expressionism in the American years) and in the media of modernity (photography and film). The result is a complex picture, in which the achievements of 20th century visual culture are re-thought in the light of a long-lasting humanistic tradition, and vice-versa, opening interpretations and possibilities that overcome and challenge not only the classical reception of Panofsky's corpus, but also the modernist hegemony in the approach to contemporary art and media.