Italian Modernism

Bruschetti, Aereoveduta del Fiume, 1932

The following is a reproduction of the first two pages of Emily Braun's brilliant book Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, which was published by Cambridge University in 2000. Her book explains why Mario Sironi (I have previously written about him here) and many other Italian artists could, on the one hand, openly support Mussolini's repressive regime and, at the same time, produce avant-garde art that still fascinates us today. I have illustrated Emily's text with some paintings of "not so widely known" Italian artists.

 Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Viaggio tragico, 1925

"On 26 March 1923, at the inauguration of the exhibition Sette Pittori del Novecento (Seven Painters of the Twentieth Century) in Milan, Benito Mussolini first declared his intentions about state interventions in the arts. Installed as prime minister only five months earlier, on a wave of Fascist violence and parliamentary paralysis, he was more attuned to pressing matters of political consolidation than to the fine points of aesthetic discourse. 

 Carlo Sbisà, Il palombaro, 1931

Nonetheless, Mussolini astutely acknowledged both the privileged position of creative autonomy and the artist's role in shaping a Fascist Italy. In a shrewd, opportunistic statement, the new leader offered an arrangement of benign mutual support in the interest of the "human spirit":

I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like an art of the State. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The State has only duty: not to undermine art, to provide human conditions for artists, and to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view.

Cesare Sofianopulo, Maschere, 1930

Over the course of twenty years, as the Fascist movement was transformed into a regime, as revolution gave way first to normalization, then to dictatorship, and finally to totalitarian rule, Mussolini's liberal attitude toward the fine arts changed little. The credo that "art belongs to the domain of the individual" became one of the most potent means of drawing intellectuals to the Fascist state while creating an impression of the regime as an enlightened patron. 

 Alberto Savinio, Self Portrait in the Form of an Owl, c. 1930

As dictator, Mussolini never sanctioned an official style, despite concerted efforts by both intellectuals and party bureaucrats to forge an art of the state. Instead, the regime instigated a cultural policy based on a series of administrative controls, which aimed to discourage opposition with an insidious combination of coercion and tolerance. As a result, the Fascist period was marked by pluralism in the visual arts, which permitted the avantgarde and the retrograde, abstraction and neoclassicism, to be deftly absorbed by the State's eclectic patronage. 

 Alberto Martini, Ritratto di Wally Toscanini, 1925

Questions of style were generally left to the artists and critics, often resulting in bitter polemics that diverted attention to matters of form rather than content. Intentionally or not, Mussolini's hands.off policy had the effect of dividing and conquering the intellectual community. This made organizing a cultural opposition a remote possibility: the strategy of allowing a margin of creative freedom while awarding capitulation led the majority of artists to coexist with, if not openly support, the regime. Fascist Italy's tolerance of diversity in the fine arts was very different from the attitude of Nazi Germany, where a monolithic and absolute cultural policy dictated both the overall model of volkish culture and a specific style of illustrative realism. 

 Ernesto Thayaht, Il grande nocchiero, 1939

Moreover, unlike the totalitarian regimes of Germany and the Soviet Union, the Italian Fascist government did not persecute or subjugate the avant-garde, despite attempts to do so by hardliners. (The exception, of course, is Jewish artists, who were persecuted as Jews rather than as artists after the Racial Laws of 1938.) Instead, the Italian situation presents a unique set of historical and moral problems that is tainted by a less than heroic story of accomodation, opportunism, and outright support, rather than rebellion, among the cultural elite."

Max Beckmann - A Vision

I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality. (Max Beckmann)

 Max Beckmann, Galleria Umberto, 1925

We know that Mussolini was killed on April 28, 1945, by Italian partisans, and subsequently hung by his feet in the Piazzale Loreto in Milan. However, this scene was painted by Beckmann twenty years before Mussolini's death! Erhard Göpel, an art critic who often visited Beckmann in his exile in wartime Amsterdam, gives the following account: 

"When, in 1925, he promenaded through the Galleria Umberto in Naples, he saw the flood of fascism rising, he saw carabinieri saving drowning people and a body hung upside down by ropes. He saw this in broad daylight. When Mussolini's fall was reported, he fetched the painting from the closet and showed it in his studio. He considered it a vision even before he knew that he had also foreseen the manner of the dictator's end hanging head down."

Benito Mussolini (2nd from left) and his lover Clara Petacci (3rd from left) exposed in Milan on April 29th, 1945.

Galleria Umberto contains many odd features, the strangest of which is the crystal ball hanging from the glass ceiling. Did Beckmann have clairvoyance in mind when he invented this translucent globe? Consciously, he probably wanted only to satirize the Italy of 1925. The fascists' murder of Giacomo Matteotti was widely interpreted as a storm signal just then, and Beckmann saw that gay vacationland Italy' symbolized by the mandolin, the bather, and the tootling blonde, was swamped by political repression. An Italian flag is drowning in the foreground.

 

Ludwig Meidner, Apocalyptic Landscape, 1912


Locksley Hall
by
Alfred Lord Tennyson (1835)

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rain'd a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue;
 

Expressionist art offers several examples of this uncanny "second sight," the most literal being Ludwig Meidner's views of bombed and burning cities painted in 1913 (see above). And Beckmann pictured the Frankfurt synagogue in 1919 with its walls slanting as if they might topple at any moment:

 Max Beckmann, Die Synagoge in Frankfurt am Main, 1919

You can see more of Max Beckmann's works here on my Flickr page.