Introduction

Rome became a vibrant cultural centre in the postwar period and was a popular destination for abstract artists from around the world, many of them women. As this Introduction shows, these women artists working with abstraction came to Rome from different places around the world, not only the US and the UK, but also Turkey, Brazil, and former Yugoslavia. Given that they stayed in the city for various periods of time, travel is taken as the shared characteristic of this “affective community” of women artists, allowing for the inclusion of women artists and critics from Rome who also travelled to study, or develop their work, in the same period. As they outline here, this approach allows the editors to produce a focused study of a previously under-researched group of women artists, which developed distinct approaches to working with abstraction and formed an important transnational network for the exchange of artistic ideas on a global scale in the period between the 1940s and 1970s.