by Tim Parks
But to make the perfect incision one must be operating from an absolutely stable vantage point. By suggesting that the self, patient’s and doctor’s, is constantly both product and producer of a group dynamic (family, workplace, society, nation) and never (even with all its chemistry in place) an objective given, to imply, that is, that in the long run a patient may respond as much to a ‘good morning’ as to a drug, that a doctor’s judgement may be unsettled by a schizophrenic’s antagonistic behaviour, is to shift the ground from under the feet of those who would heal the self with a perfect intervention from a detached position without.
Again and again in Neugeboren’s account of his brother’s vicissitudes one senses the importance of the element of taste. Quite simply, Robert’s psychiatrists retreat (and understandably!) from what would be the very bad taste of becoming involved in the patient’s messy life. They don’t want to know about the ugly incidents that took place some months or years or days before a psychotic crisis. They don’t want to decipher the patient’s incoherent obscenities or know how often he masturbates. A lower-paid social worker can be assigned the unpleasant task of sympathising and encouraging the patient to ‘behave’. Meanwhile, in the gleaming laboratory of the collective imagination, through years of tasteful dedication (and massive financial investment), a cure is being prepared. The magnificent gesture of the decisive intervention is at hand.
Fascist Work
[Mario Sironi]
Translating A Manual of Mythology by the English pedagogue the Reverend George W. Cox, Stéphane Mallarmé made one extraordinary and surely deliberate mistake. Inverting the sense of the original, he wrote: “If the gods do nothing unseemly, then they are no longer gods at all.’ This disturbing formula that turns Christian morality on its head, nevertheless seems quite familiar when applied to painters, poets and musicians. The sins and excesses of the artist confirm his genius rather than the opposite. We do not abandon Byron because he abandoned his daughter, not to mention the other women. Our admiration of Caravaggio’s stormy intensity is not marred by the reflection that his temper was such that he once killed a man over a game of tennis. Nor do we shy away from Picasso because he obliged a wife to share his house with a mistress. These men are demigods.
All the same, there is one crime that is not forgiven. The Italian artist Mario Sironi painted on behalf of the Fascist regime. That a pope should commission a painting and call the tune does not perturb us. Likewise when the patron is a rich merchant, from Florence, or from Amsterdam. But that a man should have dedicated his art to a totalitarian state, to the point of being largely responsible for creating the iconography by which we remember it, this is anathema. How should we think about Sironi? What are we to make of his paintings?
Moravia’s novel The Conformist offers a character study of the typical servant of Fascism. Marcello is frightened by violent instincts which he fears set him apart from others. Taking precautions, he does everything to conform, marries a sensible girl, settles down in the civil service; only to find one day that the state is inviting him to murder someone, asking him to indulge exactly the dangerous instincts he sought to repress. It’s a stereotype Susan Sontag develops in her essay, ‘Fascinating Fascism. And, as Emily Braun shows in her intriguing account of art under Mussolini, it is entirely inapplicable to its greatest exponent, Mario Sironi. This man was no conformist. On the contrary, he was independent and controversial even when most engaged in promoting the regime. Nor, so far as we know and despite the fiercest of tempers, was he ever involved in any act of political violence. He did, however, indulge in the delirium that his art might change the world. Are not painters, along with Shelley’s poets the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the universe’? Rightly, Braun sets out to show what kind of world it was and how he imagined he might transform it. Context is all.
Born in 1885, Sironi was eleven when his father died. Enrico Sironi had been a civil engineer. Mario’s maternal grandfather was an architect. The idea that a man can shape the environment was thus available to him from early on. Despite reduced means and six children to bring up, Mario’s mother didn’t forget the family’s cultural pretensions. The house in Rome was always open to painters and writers, and one of those who came was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, philosopher of Futurism and author, years later, of the notorious manifesto War, Sole Hygiene of the World.
Was it in this adolescent period that Sironi learned, partly from a mother’s desire to fare bella figura partly from the revolutionary opinions of her guests, that hatred of the borghesia that would accompany him all his life? But many brought up quite differently were to profess the same hatred throughout the first half of the twentieth century, extremists of both the right and the left, and even people who were not extremists at all. So much so that one sometimes suspects that this contempt for the bourgeoisie so-called had less to do with class and money than with a deep fear of spiritual complacency, of merely material well-being. The world had to be made new, because it had been found to be empty. ‘Take out your pickaxes,’ wrote Marinetti, ‘your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly.
Having begun a degree in engineering, the young Sironi fell into a profound depression and gave up the university for painting. A succession of nervous breakdowns stretching from his late teens to his mid-twenties would lead him to destroy almost all his early paintings and frighten his family into considering the possibility of a sanatorium. In 1910 his friend and fellow painter Umberto Boccioni would write: ‘Sironi is completely crazy, or at least neurasthenic. He is always at home and closed off in himself. He doesn’t move, speak, or study any more: it is truly painful.’
Needless to say the young, unhappy and, it must be said, handsome artist was reading Nietzsche, playing Wagner on the piano and modelling innumerable Greek heads in gesso. Significantly, his mental illnesses came to an end when he became a regular and successful illustrator for a cultural magazine. Sironi, it seemed, was looking for a yoke that would harness his energies. He needed a purpose that ‘bourgeois’ life couldn’t give.
Emily Braun’s Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism is the remarkable story of how that yoke was found; or, to put it another way, it is an account of the gradual meshing of a particular political and artistic context with a peculiar and potentially unstable psychology. Sironi himself was well aware that something was up. In 1914, almost thirty now, he wrote to Boccioni: ‘In Rome there has been a general strike for two days -a violent and anarchic atmosphere - a revelation of beauty in unison with my disfigured “ego”. Also, your article, the “Circle”, I liked it, and the rough tone was like a caress.’
A few months after that strike, desperate to overcome another depression, Sironi finally left the family home, moved to Milan and began working alongside Boccioni and other Futurists who, together with Mussolini, were campaigning to have the ever uncertain government intervene in the war. Not that they cared particularly for one side or another. But they wanted action. They felt Italy needed action, in order to become herself. By the autumn of 1915 they had got what they wanted. They were in the trenches together. They had volunteered. But, alas, it was a world quite different from the glamorous vision of national virility depicted in their magazine illustrations. Sironi was frequently ill. Nobody was prepared for the harsh conditions of the Alpine front where machine guns cancelled each other out across a desolate landscape of stone and ice. The troops tunnelled in the snow and were often buried there. Boccioni records how on one freezing night, ‘around midnight Sironi came to me, and together, with our legs entwined, we tried to sleep.
With this anecdote in mind it is with some emotion that one stands in II Museo del Novecento in Milan letting the eye move from a Boccioni canvas to a Sironi. There are many Boccionis, few Sironis, in inverse proportion to their output of course. For in 1916 Boccioni was dead, a death that exempted him from future sins and criticism, while Sironi was destined to survive not only this war but the next and was ever as prolific as he would rem
ain unrepentant.
Boccioni’s canvases are full of colour and bear bold, ingenuously didactic titles: Perpendicular spiral construction: woman sitting, reads one; Dynamism of a human body, claims another. Both paintings are seductive shakes of the artist’s kaleidoscope, a splendid whirl of bright wedges in which the moving figure is almost lost in the exhilaration of its own or the painter’s excitement.
In stark contrast, Sironi’s one Futurist canvas on show, Self-portrait (1913), is irretrievably gloomy, a fierce stare hidden beneath the most extravagant application of chiaroscuro. Rather than the dynamic movement Futurism was supposed to hail, here the familiar technique of breaking up the image into intersecting planes is used to generate the utmost stasis and a fierce psychological tension. As always with Sironi, the catalogue photograph does all it can to make the picture look brighter than it is. But in the gallery the sense of an enormous and doomed effort of will is entirely compelling. Whence, in 1918, would that will be turned?
Emily Braun is efficient and informative as she describes Sironi’s early commitment to socialism, his disenchantment with the left and adherence to the more exhilarating if directionless icono-clasm of Futurism. She gives a good picture of the general frustration with Italian parliamentary politics in the early years of the century, the growing desire for a gesture of nation-building and the way this desire was exacerbated rather than quelled by the calamities of the First World War. Her descriptions of the paintings, too, are never less than excellent, particularly the way Sironi just would not leave that chiaroscuro be, modelling figures, faces, trucks, buildings and chimneys out of a thick paste of black and white (but mainly black), and then, later in life, creating mosaics that seemed to be painted in chiaroscuro and even sculpting figures so encased in a sort of shell, or even coffin perhaps, as to create a marked chiaroscuro effect, the figure ever looming from a pool of black. The dark dynamism of the artist’s psyche is clear enough. Yet nothing she says quite prepares us for the turn events were to take after Sironi came back from the trenches: his total commitment to Mussolini’s camp. Here, perhaps, it may be worth reflecting for a moment on a trait that still divides the Italian mind from the Anglo-Saxon.
In 1915, claims a note in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, the collector Riccardo Jucker made Sironi an offer for a small painting entitled La piccola danzatrice. He was astonished when Sironi agreed to sell but insisted on lowering the price. The artist did not think his painting was worth so much (notably it is one of the few Sironis that is not gloomy). And throughout his life Sironi showed scant respect for his own work, signing very little of it, often walking over discarded temperas on the floor, not bothering to catalogue it. Needless to say, his opinion of his peers was even lower. Life in Rome, he remarked, immediately after leaving the city, was ‘a hell full of misery and conflict … where I placed everyone and everything in a heap of insult and loathing’.
Going back almost a hundred years, Giacomo Leopardi in his Discorso sopra lo stato présente dei costumi degl'italiani paints a picture of his country that, in concentrating on the problem of self-regard, in many ways looks forward to Fascism, and indeed is not without its appropriateness in Italy today. Leopardi starts from the premise that ‘the massacre of illusions’ that has swept away religion and philosophy in Europe has left no other basis for morality than the ‘good taste’ of ‘society’, by which, he makes clear, he means high society. This society existed, he felt in France and in England, where a man is ‘ashamed to do harm in the same way that he would be ashamed to appear in a conversation with a stain on his clothes’. But Italy, after centuries of poverty and division, found itself without such a society, without this taste, without self-respect. Thus if’the principal basis of the morality of an individual and a people is the constant and profound regard it has for itself, Italy, where conversation was no more than a ‘school for insults’, is an entirely immoral place where people do what they do out of the merest habit, laziness or selfishness, and in the most complete indifference, or even scorn, for the public gestures they make.
Leaving aside the virulence of Leopardi’s attack, which is not without a certain personal bitterness, what is striking about his reflections is the value they give to illusion, above all collective illusion, at the expense of truth, and the way this value is connected with self-respect. Anticipating by many years Nietzsche’s argument that morality was fundamentally a question of aesthetics, he praises the English in particular for the ludicrously high opinion they have of themselves. This illusion - for there is no real reason why the English should have such a high opinion of themselves - allows them to treat each other with great respect.
The Italians, on the other hand, living in the truth of total disillusionment, do nothing but sling mud at each other, each antagonist holding even himself in the lowest possible regard. Leopardi remarks: ‘thus not only does life in Italy have no substance or truth at all, something it doesn’t have elsewhere either, but it doesn’t even have the appearance of the same, so that we might be able to think of it as important.’
In one sense backward (they are without a homogeneous polite society), in another very important way the Italians are hence obliged to be the avant-garde: they must create a collective illusion deliberately and consciously, something that has never been done before. This is the direction in which, whether intentionally or not, the whole of Leopardi’s Discorso tends. A huge effort of will is required, a great act of collective self-deception. Bereft of religion (“Nor should anyone object that the Italians too have their religious practices, since in Italy, as I have said, these are usages and habits not moral customs and everybody laughs at them, nor do we any longer find real fanatics of any kind in Italy’), lacking the kind of benevolent social inertia that makes life possible in England or France, Italian society must enchant itself with its own imagined worth. Such a vision can only put enormous pressure on art and on the artistic elite from whom any such act must originate.
Back from the war, Sironi was by now all too aware of the need for self and mutual regard. Nor was he alien to enormous efforts of will. How else had he overcome his depressions? How else survived the trenches? Living in subsidised housing in the depressing suburbs of a rapidly industrialising Milan, he painted gloomy cityscapes where great masses of barren commercial architecture, windows remorselessly black, open up into deep canyon-like streets, at the bottom of which, in determined patrol, moves a tiny tram, or a small black truck. Alternatively, there are imposing nude figures in classical landscapes. The celebrated Melancholy (1919-20) shows a seated nude in an impossibly dramatic scenario. Like the trams or trucks of the urban pictures, she is at the bottom of a vast canyon with, in this case, a viaduct spanning distant peaks beneath a stormy sky. Knees covered with a drape so modelled in chiaroscuro as to seem carved in stone, she stares in grim determination at a marble sphere on a pedestal. It is with some amusement, in the gallery, that one moves from Sironi’s rendering of this theme to Achille Funi’s Melancholy (1930), only a couple of canvases away. Here, despite the generous fleshiness of the seated nude, we have only a pretty wistfulness, a sweet girl who for all her colourful bulk might float away at any moment. Certainly there appears to be something like a halo above her head. Turning back to the Sironi, the essential ingredients of his vision become clear: on the one hand the immense and desolate heaviness of existence, represented either in the flesh or the landscape, whether natural or urban; and then the equally immense effort of will, visible in furious face or dark truck, needed to focus it, to impose on it, to overcome it. Later, Sironi would be ridiculed for the huge feet that began to appear in his paintings. So much so that he would be known as ‘II piedone’ - big foot. Braun quotes as sarcastic the advice given to Sironi by the Minister of Education Giuseppe Bottai: ‘Tell your critics you make the feet of your figures so big so that they can kick them in the ass.’ Sarcastic he might have been, but close to the truth one suspects. Ever ready to kick out, those huge feet bring together the heavines
s of the painter’s vision, and the effort required to overcome that weight.
In 1919 Sironi married Matilde Fabbrini. ‘Their mutually abrasive relationship,’ writes Braun laconically, ‘would continue until his death.’ Marriage too, then, was to be a conflict requiring a constant exercise of will. At the beginning Matilde didn’t even want to leave Rome to be with her husband in Milan. But Sironi won this first round and soon she had borne him a daughter, Aglae, whom Mussolini managed to sit on his lap and promptly drop. For the little girl’s father was moving in very particular circles now. He was a close friend of Margherita Sarfatti, art critic of Mussolini’s newspaper II popolo d’Italia, and companion of his bed. How fitting that the first man to come to power through a modern use of propaganda should have an art critic for his mistress! Sironi, as sole and daily illustrator for II popolo d'Italia, from August 1921 through to 1923, was to be an essential instrument of that propaganda in the moment of crisis that brought Mussolini to power.
They were heady years. The First World War had brought the country to the brink of collapse. In a wave of industrial unrest the socialists were trying to push it over that brink. The workers occupied the factories. The Fascists claimed to represent the working class, but opposed the socialists, the factory occupations and the government. Theirs would be a ‘third way’ between capitalism and communism. The Futurists sided with the Fascists, then broke with them. It was all very confusing. Of his illustrations in that period, Sironi wrote to his wife just before she came to Milan: