Carla Lonzi and Pierre Bourdieu : an encounter in the virtual museum of critical theory ?

The article examines the development of the critical thought of Carla Lonzi (1931-1982), first a brilliant young Italian art critic in the 1960s, later a founder of the Italian feminist movement in the 1970s, and today an international icon of radical feminism. In particular, both in her work as an art critic in the 1960s and in her most famous work, Autoritratto (1969) (Self-portrait), I will identify certain concepts that would later become central to the theories of the sociology of art of Pierre Bourdieu and Howard S. Becker, as well as to the new art history of Linda Nochlin. I'm referring to the concept of the social field, the role of relationships in the construction of the artwork, art as process, the end of the ideology of the artist as 'hero' and art as experience, but also the concept of the symbolic order, which she would develop particularly in her feminist writings of the 1970s. In Autoritratto, as a result of meetings and interviews with 14 of the most important Italian artists of the time, she carried out an extraordinary experiment in relational creativity-creation. In particular, the theoretical proximity between her idea of 'encounter-relation' and the concept of the intellectual field as a social field, formulated by Pierre Bourdieu in Les Temps Modernes in 1966, will be analysed. It is precisely the concept of the 'field', which moves from physics and social psychology to the social sciences and arrives in the art worlds, that will run through Carla Lonzi's 'new' art criticism, which constitutes an extraordinary and innovative practical and political experiment.