All against Mussolini

 

            After July 1943, when Benito Mussolini had been deposed, most people in Italy discovered to be antifascist. Mussolini embodied Italian Fascism, so it was only "natural" that his dead body was going to be mauled, like all the monuments and portraits of him were destroyed after his fall. But many artists who had participated in art contests sponsored by the Fascist government, and received awards, were presented in a recent art show by the Estorick Collection of London as opponents of the regime, mostly for what they did after 1943! That is, after Mussolini had been deposed. 

            Historical errors and dubious interpretations in an art exhibit of Italian anti-fascist works.

    By Sandro Barbagallo (Translated by L. Pavese)

    "The Opposition to the Regime on Display” was the subtitle of a London exhibition entitled “Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator,” that wished to present the Italian artistic production linked to the opposition against Benito Mussolini, especially after 1943 (!)

As the exhibit press release read, the art show wanted to offer the chance for an “ample and enlightening study of a not-well-investigated branch of Italian culture.” But, what were they talking about? And, above all, who?

Looking at the artwork, the first noticeable thing was a series of satirical cartoons deriding the Duce and his regime, dating between 1940 and 1943, all drawn by British illustrators commissioned by magazines like “Punch.” There was even Merlyn Evans, an English painter based in Italy in April of 1945, who witnessed the horror of Piazzale Loreto. With these authors the exhibit had already wandered off-topic, because it is really unlikely that those cartoons circulated in the autarchic Italy of that period. 

But who were the Italian artists who, according to the curators of the show, would have “swum against the current” with their anti-fascist works? Alberto Bazzoni, Nicola Neonato, Vittorio Magnani, Renato Cenni. All partisans and “Resistance” heroes who, with their works, documented the capture of German soldiers, fights on the mountains and the life of their comrades hiding in their refuges. Works that, according to the curators, “with their spontaneity and simplicity exemplify the rebirth in Italian art (!) of that Realism that became the dominant aesthetic element of the post-war years.” 

As everybody should know, Fascism fell on July 25, 1943 in Italy, following the approval of the Grandi motion, voted by nineteen “gerarchi,” or elder party officials. All the symbols and simulacrums of Fascism were torn down right away by enraged people. Therefore, this part of the London exhibit was also off-topic. As well as the reference to the rebirth of Realism which no-one could find in Italy’s Novecento, by any stretch of imagination. Unless by Realism the curators meant the “Return to Order” movement of the years following WWI, or the “Valori Plastici” movement which, however, have nothing to do with the German-origin “photographic” realism that was fashionable in those years.

       But the most surprising part of the exhibit was the list of the artists shown as examples of opposition to the regime. The several editions of the Premio Bergamo (Bergamo Award) held from 1939 to 1942, prove the contrary. 

We are talking, for example, about Mino Maccari, Mario Mafai and Renato Guttuso. All these artists were deeply involved with the “regime” that awarded them prizes and benefits, even though these prizes were awarded by the “frondeur” faction within Fascism of people like Giuseppe Bottai.

Here a caveat is necessary. It is impossible to make overzealous generalizing statements about Fascist cultural policies, because there were at least two paths taken by the party officials in charge of it. There was the one indicated by the pro- German Roberto Farinacci, promoter of the Premio Cremona (Cremona Award); and there was the way followed by Giuseppe Bottai, enlightened defender of a free art, who instituted the Premio Bergamo (Bergamo Award). Farinacci was an admirer of Adolf Hitler and of Nazism’s art as opposed to “modern” contemporary art branded as degenerate, and he had managed to secure funds to award rich prizes of up to £ 50,000 (Italian Liras) of the time. Giuseppe Bottai promoted an authentic European culture against the mediocre propaganda art, but he had at his disposal only £ 25,000. 

Among the judges of both prizes there was always Giulio Carlo Argan who, after WWII and after having become a communist, defended himself saying that Bottai, by means of the Bergamo Award, had attempted to prevent the destruction of Italian culture and save art. Argan himself admitted to having worked with the Fascist regime in order “to save as much as could be saved, although he was disgusted by the vulgarity of Fascism.” Then, to justify his presence among the judges of one pro-German Cremona Award (the theme that time was: “Listening to a radio speech by the Duce”), he said: “Mussolini didn’t care at all either about the Bergamo Award or the Cremona Award sponsored by the Nazis; nor, for that matter, cared much about cultural issues.” 

This a surprising statement, coming from probably the most illustrious Italian art historian. It also contradicts the widespread notion that the art of the twenty-year Fascist period was limited to a personality cult of Benito Mussolini. 

Mussolini was educated and counseled about art by Margherita Sarfatti, whom he tasked with visiting the ateliers of the contemporary artists to purchase their works. Moreover, sometimes among the judges and sometimes among the awardees of the Bergamo Prize there can be found the elite of the Italian art scene of that time: from Carrà to De Pisis, from Capogrossi to the Basaldella brothers, from Marussig to Pirandello, and from Rosai to Casorati, including of course Mafai, Maccari and Guttuso who were shown in the London exhibit. That proves how off-the-mark the motif of the art show was which, we remind the reader, would presume to illustrate the opposition to the Fascist regime. 

For example, in the forefront of the London art show there was represented Renato Guttuso, that is, the prince of the chameleons. The same man that his friend Maccari called “Il Tribuno Illustrato” (wordplay: La Tribuna Illustrata was a famous magazine. Tribuno, Tribune in the Roman republic was an advocate for the plebeians). The exhibit proposes, among others, a study by Guttuso for his famous work: Fuga dall'Etna (Flight from Etna), which won £ 10,000 in the 1940 Bergamo Award competition. The painting, rewarded by the Fascist regime, was justified by the London curators as follows: “The representation of terrified peasants from the eruption acquires a symbolic role, which led Guttuso to consider this painting as his first clear political work.” What was the need to stick on the controversial fame of Renato Guttuso another improbable antifascist label? 

Flight from Etna

Surely, in the 1950’s the Guttuso-Moravia-Fellini trio represented the power of Italian leftist culture. But we must not forget that the Sicilian master, labeled by his detractors “Picassata siciliana” (another wordplay: the “cassata” is a famous Sicilian cake) burned his talent for an excess of ubiquity. In other words, he wanted to be everywhere: in the cultural gatherings sponsored by countesses, in the squares rallying with the workers, in the Vatican with the Pope and at the Kremlin with Stalin (who was no better than the most loathed dictators). 

Desecrating and demonizing a fallen powerful man are nothing new in history. As far as ancient Egypt the names and the effigies of the disgraced pharaohs were chiseled off. Therefore, saying that in 1943 the monuments and portraits of Mussolini were taken down, as symbols of a dictator that had taken Italy to war, does not mean that the artists invited to the art shows of the regime refused to take part in them or that they gave back the monetary prizes. The London art exhibit failed to  show how the visual art “answered to a transitional period that is controversial to this day,” as the curators put it. 

The London art show seemed pointless, full of bad art works and bad intentions. Bad in the sense that they missed the mark. It is obvious that totalitarian regimes regarded all the artists with suspicion, due to their independent-mindedness and the difficulty to bend them to the needs of propaganda. Nevertheless, the Italian art world that had not been formed during the regime but found itself having to deal with it could count on some extraordinary names that remain great to this day. An example is Giacomo Balla who, in 1932, commissioned by Mussolini painted the La marcia su Roma (The March on Rome), but he did it on the back of a much more important picture painted in 1913, entitled Velocità Astratta (Abstract Speed). This was a cutting-edge work of art which gave sort of a wink to posterity. It was the message of an artist who had to give in for necessity, like everyone else, but could not give up. 

Parte de "La Marcia su Roma" di G. Balla

The irony is that Giacomo Balla was to suffer the ostracism of the Italian leftist culture until the 1970’s. He was labeled a Futurist, and therefore he was automatically considered a Fascist. He died poor and almost forgotten. While someone like Renato Guttuso was carried in triumph as a hero of the Resistance – that is also still to be proven – as well as a brilliant representative of Socialist Realism, an art current that also tried to delegitimize any avant-garde with pranks and jokes. 

Luckily, historic nemesis exists, and today Giacomo Balla is one of the better known and valued Italian artists, while Guttuso remains mainly an Italian phenomenon. 

It is not our habit to trash a foreign exhibit of Italian art, but the main defect of the London art show was trying to give it an angle that was naively ideological.

This article was originally published by the Osservatore Romano, on 9/30/2010 and then posted on the websire of the Gli Scritti cultural center on 1/30/2011, from which I took it at translated it.

Many thanks to Janice Jenkins for reviewing the English version.

Your comments, as always, will be very appreciated.

Thank you,

L. Pavese