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."

Mario Sironi

  Mario Sironi, Il camion giallo, 1918

Mario Sironi (1885-1961) was born in Sassari on the island of Sardinia, but spent his childhood in Rome. He embarked on the study of engineering at the University of Rome but quit after a nervous breakdown in 1903, one of many severe depressions that would recur throughout his life. Thereafter he dedicated himself to painting, and attended the Scuola Libera del Nudo, where he met Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni. These artists, who would later become the leading Futurists, were then painting in a Neo-Impressionist style. Sironi's development closely tracked theirs, and he adopted the Futurist style by 1913.

 Mario Sironi, La Lampada, 1919

After service in World War I, Sironi's version of Futurism gave way to an art of massive, immobile forms. In paintings such as La Lampada of 1919 (above), mannequins substitute for figures, as in the metaphysical paintings of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà. Like many artists in the period following the war, Sironi looked to the art of the past for inspiration, and works such as Solitudine (Solitude) of 1926 (below) with their contained, geometric forms, bear some kinship to the neoclassicism evident in works produced at the same time by Picasso. 

  Mario Sironi, Solitude, 1926

In 1922, together with Ubaldo Oppi, Achille Funi and others, Sironi founded the artist group Novecento Italiano. Toward the end of the 1920s, Sironi's style became more painterly. Through all of his stylistic developments, Sironi's was always a somber and dramatic vision, characterized by blocky forms, stark oppositions of light and shadow, and a generally pessimistic air.

Mario Sironi, Urban Landscape, 1923

A supporter of Mussolini, he contributed a large number of cartoons - over 1700 in all - to Il Popolo d'Italia and La Rivista Illustrata del Popola d'Italia, the Fascist newspapers. Rejecting the art market and the concept of the easel painting, he became committed to the ideal of a fusion of decoration and architecture, as exemplified by Gothic cathedrals. He felt that the mural was the proper basis of a popular national art. 

 Mario Sironi, Italy Between the Arts and Sciences, 1935

The state commissioned from him several large-scale decorative works in the 1930s, such as the mural L'Italia fra le arti e le scienze (Italy Between the Arts and Sciences) of 1935, (above) and he also contributed to the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in 1932. Although his esthetic of brutal monumentality represented the dominant style of Italian Fascism, his work was attacked by right-wing critics for its lack of overt ideological content. 

Mario Sironi, The Motorcyclist, 1920s

As an artist closely identified with Fascism, his reputation declined dramatically in the post-World War II period. Embittered by the course of events, he also suffered the loss of his daughter Rossana by suicide in 1948. He had returned to easel painting in 1943, and worked now in relative isolation. The paintings of his later years sometimes approach abstraction, resembling assemblages of archaeological fragments, or juxtaposed sketches. He continued working until shortly before his death in 1961 in Milan.

 Mario Sironi,  Composizione con treno e figura, c. 1930

You can see more works of Sironi here in my Flickr set.