Tacitamente riabilitando il fascismo all'estero
luno...@hotmail.com
Il governo Italiano, proprio mentre taglia fondi a musei e universita'
e svende opere d'arte, contribuisce "generosamente" a una mostra
futurista a Londra che glorifica l'eccidio di Guernica.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1383351,00.html
The joke has gone far enough. Mel Brooks can own up now. The creator of
Springtime for Hitler is also the curator of the Estorick Collection in
Islington, north London - right?
For a while, it almost seemed that this small private museum dedicated
to 20th-century Italian art was a serious enterprise. It put on
exhibitions of Giorgio di Chirico, photography and design. But lately,
with startling frequency, its exhibitions have celebrated Italian art
in the 1930s, without mentioning the most important fact of Italian
life between 1923 and 1945.
At first it just seemed naive. Now, with Futurist Skies: Italian
Aeropainting, the Estorick has achieved a brilliant parody of art
collectors, art historians, and the Italian government, all of whom, we
are supposed to believe, have lent their support to an exhibition of
fascist paintings of bombers.
Like many readers probably, I received for Christmas Philip Roth's
novel The Plot Against America, his fantasy of a 1940s America, where
the aviator and Hitler sympathiser Charles Lindbergh became president.
But Roth's fiction pales beside what the Estorick has achieved. It is a
stupendous assault on good taste that begins with a wall text about
"aeropainting" - a subgenre of late futurism that flourished in
Mussolini's Italy - without mentioning Mussolini, or fascism, or the
invasion of Ethiopia, or any of the less-than-cosy connections that
anyone with even the slightest awareness of modern history might make
between flight, war and art in the 1930s.
To grasp the enormity of this silence, let's look at a painting of an
aeroplane by Guglielmo Sansoni, who called himself Tato. The plane
propels itself out of the stormy clouds, dark as a bird of prey. Such
images in 1930s Italian art represent, according to the curators of
Futurist Skies, a passion for the new perspectives and vertiginous
excitements of aviation - an innocent wonder we have lost in our age of
routine civilian flight. But Tato's painting does not simply depict a
plane. It is a picture of a bomber. You can see the machine-gun nest in
the nose, as it banks up after delivering its payload. The painting is
called Aerial Mission, making its military character plain.
Tato painted this piece of fascist crap in 1937. Does the date ring a
bell? It was on April 26 1937 that the Condor Legion of the German
Luftwaffe, in support of General Franco's war against the Spanish
Republic, bombed the Basque capital Guernica, on a market day, killing
1,654 people out of a population of 7,000. Pablo Picasso began Guernica
after he read about this new chapter in the story of human cruelty. It
seems plausible that Tato's painting Aerial Mission refers to the same
events. For more than half a century Picasso's Guernica has preserved
the memory of a town torn to pieces by aerial bombing. Now, at last,
Futurist Skies gives us the other point of view: that of the murderer
in the cockpit.
It's hard to see what other view we are given by Tullio Crali's
painting Nose-diving on the City. This is the most exciting image in
the exhibition, and it's on all the publicity. At first sight it seems
simply a manic futurist poem to speed and danger as the plane we are in
hurtles straight down into an abyss between mighty skyscrapers - a
stunning piece of aerobatics, a splintered dream of modernity in
motion. But again it's worth checking the date of the picture. It was
painted in 1939. Who, in 1939, would have got this kind of view of a
city, if not the pilot of a Stuka divebombing an east-European city? Is
there really any doubt this painting praises the dynamism of
Blitzkrieg?
Futurist Skies is not a joke. It is not a parody but an example of the
moronic complacency of the art world. And it really does have the
support of the Italian state. Silvio Berlusconi's government has meanly
and destructively starved museums of cash. But the director of the
Estorick Collection warmly thanks the Italian foreign ministry for its
"commitment" and "support" for this exhibition of meretricious art from
the golden age of Il Duce. At least it's good to know where the
Berlusconi government's cultural priorities lie. Claiming
"aeropainting" as a major 20th-century art amounts to rehabilitating
fascist kitsch.
In the end it all comes down to the two F-words and how they relate to
one another. The Estorick is trying its damnedest to insulate futurism,
the aesthetic movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, which
attempted to capture the speed and violence of modern life through
poetry, music, painting, sculpture and architecture, and whose purest
genre was always the declamatory manifesto, from the brutal political
movement led so successfully in the inter-war years by Marinetti's
friend and rival, Benito Mussolini.
Marinetti was an appalling genius. He campaigned against everything he
thought passé in Italy - even against pasta, which he condemns in The
Futurist Cookbook. He was the caffeine of Europe. But he was a fascist
- you can't get away from that. He was one of the loyal or desperate
band who stayed with Mussolini to the end in the tiny Republic of Salò
- dying in Bellagio in 1944, so he never had to answer for anything.
But this doesn't make futurist art worthless. On the contrary, the
diverse and brilliant ways in which artists, including Boccioni, Balla
and Severini, tried to translate the speed of modernity into glancing
images before the first world war will always be some of the central
works of modern art.
But that was before 1914, before the trenches, before aerial warfare -
before modernity turned sour. After the first world war, Marinetti
sailed on but futurism no longer had anything to say, except to
militarists who wanted to see flesh crushed by metal - to use a typical
futurist image.
Futurist Skies attempts to reclaim art made by Marinetti's 10th-rate
followers in the 1930s, insisting that futurism was still a vital
force. It is a fatuous argument. By this time futurism was old hat. The
painters and sculptors in this show have no claim at all to be taken
seriously as modern artists. Their work is mediocre, derivative,
clumsily uncertain whether it wants to be abstract or figurative. At
best, it passes as art deco design. Most of it is much tackier than
that.
Worst of all, though, and sickly hilarious, is the attempt to downplay
the other F-word. The catalogue makes much of the ambiguous
relationship between Marinetti and Mussolini, and it is true that
futurism never became the official art of Mussolini's Italy. But that
wasn't for lack of trying. Marinetti had to compete with other, more
neoclassical contenders for an official fascist style. Ideologically,
however, there was never any doubting the overtly military and
nationalist nature of Marinetti's shameful avant garde. "We will
glorify war - the world's only hygiene," declared Marinetti in 1909,
and he was still doing this when he volunteered for the invasion of
Ethiopia.
Previous exhibitions of futurist art of the 1920s and 30s at the
Estorick have avoided the issue of Mussolini but got away with it
because they looked at photography or furniture - areas of life that
don't instantly seem political. But to look at futurism and flight
while fantasising about the movement's innocence is an evasion too far.
Aviation was not a neutral subject in the 30s. Flight was a favourite
fascist theme; it was central to Italian and German propaganda.
Marinetti's "aeropoesia" and his encouragement of "aeropainting" were
deliberately aimed at Il Duce's love of aircraft. Mussolini was a
trained pilot, photographed in 1918 in his flying suit, getting out of
his biplane.
The biggest lie this exhibition tells is its claim that futurist
painting in 1930s Italy deserves to be seen as a glorious and
optimistic, even a moving example of modernism's love affair with the
aeroplane. The first powered flight by the Wright brothers in 1903 was
part of the revolutionary moment of modern art. Cubist paintings praise
the plane - although, to be fair, they also rave about the bicycle. But
the enthusiasm for flight shared by modern painters like Roger de la
Fresnay in his Conquest of the Air (1913; actually a portrait of
balloonists) vanished after the first world war. In dada and surrealist
art, flight is deathly. Max Ernst's collage Untitled (Aeroplane) of
1920 has a wounded soldier being carried across an ash-coloured no
man's land under the menacing spectre of a being that is part-biplane,
part-woman. During the Spanish civil war, René Magritte imagined a
terrible sky full of leaden monsters. Most of all, in the same year
that Tato commemorated an unnamed Aerial Mission, Picasso painted his
masterpiece in which no planes are seen - only the consequences of
their "mission".
Picasso, Magritte and Ernst represent the 20th-century tradition we
should remember, while futurist aeropaintings deserve to be buried and
forgotten for all eternity, or at least exhibited for what they are:
documents of barbarism.
· Futurist Skies: Italian Aeropainting is at the Estorick Collection
of Modern Italian Art, London N1, from tomorrow until February 20.
Details: 020-7704 9522.