SUZANNE SANTORO
SUZANNE SANTORO was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1946. She won a scholarship to the Brooklyn Museum Art School and later studied at the School of Visual Arts with Dore Ashton, Mel Bochner, and Salvatore Scarpitta. Thanks to Ashton, she was invited to accompany Mark Rothko and his family on a trip to Europe. Ending up in Rome, she began to study classical art, focusing on the representation of the female figure in ancient statuary.
Santoro settled permanently in Rome in 1969. It was a time when women artists began to give voice and visibility to their marginalization; the female body and its sexuality became symbolic of feminist demands. In 1970, Santoro joined the radical Roman feminist group Rivolta Femminile (Women’s Revolt), founded that year by art critic and philosopher Carla Lonzi together with artist Carla Accardi and political journalist Elvira Banotti. Santoro’s investigation into the representation of the female body led in 1974 to the publication of her now-iconic artist’s book, Per una espressione nuova/Towards New Expression. The publication originated in Santoro’s desire to align the two fundamental experiences she’d gathered in Rome: on the one hand, radical feminist consciousness; on the other, her studies of classical, archaic, and prehistoric statuary. Thus the book juxtaposes photographs of women’s sex organs with images of classical drapery and of natural forms, such as shells and leaves—shapes in which it is possible to perceive a symbolism that had been gradually covered up.
Presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, in 1976 as part of a group show of artists’ books, Santoro’s volume was immediately censored as obscene and offensive. It was not understood that the artist, through rigorous pictorial research, was aiming to chart the history of the image of female genitalia in the history of art from the classical period onward. Although she understood this would be seen as radical and subversive, her fundamental interest lay in a desire to explore a specific iconography that had been present yet hidden in Western art—at once idealized and annulled. Yet her controversial, militant oeuvre also displeased fellow feminists, including Lonzi, who held that women’s revolution could only take place in a field that was not dominated by men—and Lonzi considered art to be a male-dominated field. She accepted neither Accardi’s artistic work nor Santoro’s. For that reason, Santoro left Rivolta Femminile and in 1976 founded the Cooperativa Beato Angelico, the first women’s art space in Rome, together with ten other Italian women. That year, it hosted a now famous exhibition on Artemisia Gentileschi, at the time still an unknown figure. Santoro went on to exhibit internationally, giving lectures and publishing articles. In 1984 she began studying at Rome’s Istituto di Ortofonologia, from which she received a qualification in art therapy three years later. From then until 2009, she ran the painting and graphic design atelier at the institute, where she worked principally with deaf children. She considered her work to be heavily influenced by the graphic structures produced by these children in their early infancy. Since then, her artistic production has been mainly graphic. Using pen, pencil, and sometimes watercolor, she draws, with simple lines, vases, flowers, and images related to the female figure, taken from ancient cultures and diverse traditions. As much as it has changed over time, Santoro’s work continues to aim, through rigorous iconographic research, at a historical reconstruction of the female image in order to highlight, in a poetic way, its repression in the history of art.
Paola Ugolini is a curator at the Fondazione In Between Art Film in Rome and the author of Femminismo e artiste in Italia: Per una rilettura non egemone della Storia dell’Arte (Marinotti Editore Milano, 2023).
