by Tim Parks
The dance has begun again and so has the nausea […] Every time it becomes more difficult - and I have the same sensation this time - darkness and complete emptiness and I know well where it comes from! To do philosophy in caricature! And not knowing where to begin. For control or none, for the end of the world or for Turati [the leader of the socialist party]? Total mystery and indecision. In addition, to think about all of these present and future problems makes me anxious, bewildered and sick to my stomach!
Clearly the situation demanded someone who knew his mind. The flamboyant poet D’Annunzio had shown the way, taking, on his own initiative, a small private army to occupy Fiume on the northern Adriatic coast, a territory the allies had denied to Italy after the war. Though the mission ultimately failed, it captured the imagination. Sironi, in a rare concession to the occasional, dedicated a painting to the event. One of his typical industrial scenes is just readable as the docks at Trieste, thanks to the masts of a ship rising above a wall. In what is a shallower canyon than most of his streets, a powerful figure sits on a vigorous white horse in, as always, dramatic chiaroscuro. For the first time one has the impression of the effort of will being superior to the weight it opposes. This is heroism. For the first time Sironi’s private preoccupations are clearly identifiable with a contemporary political figure.
Very soon, after the March on Rome, it would be Mussolini who embodied that heroic gesture. In the huge mosaic of 1936, Fascist Work, for example, the big foot definitely belongs to the Duce. As for the ubiquitous black truck of the earlier paintings, all too soon it would be unmistakably the vehicle of the Fascist squadristi, the thugs. And however complicated Sironi might have found politics throughout two decades of Fascism, he would never have any difficulty in offering a positive image of the exercise of will, the imposition of a decision, whatever it might be. In the thousands of pugnacious political illustrations he produced, the gesture is triumphant, almost an infantile fantasy of domination and control. In the paintings, it is for the most part thwarted, at best gloomily steadfast. ‘Will to power, will to life, will to grandeur,’ he wrote in 1933, ‘these passwords, these majestic words of Fascism, also express the style of our art. The private and political worlds had meshed.
But what was that style? Only a year after Sironi wrote those words, the musician Ildebrando Pizzetti commented:
Every time I come across a book, a brochure and article about Fascism and Fascist art, I read it from top to bottom, carefully, applying my intelligence to the utmost, and every time with renewed desire, the renewed hope, that I will come away from it having finally understood what is meant by Fascist art. No doubt it’s my own fault if I haven’t quite grasped what I read, but that desire, that hope, remains unfulfilled.
The question as to the existence or not of a Fascist style occupies the central pages of Emily Braun’s book and is intimately tied up with the question: How far was Sironi’s work the result of political expedience, acceptance of a group line, and how far was he his own man creating his own work? Did he really believe, as he claimed, that artistic genius was ‘the foremost quality of our race’ and Mussolini ‘the Man who will know how justly to esteem the force of our world-dominating art’? Or were these statements part of an exercise of group self-deception of the kind foreshadowed in Leopardi’s Discorso, though Leopardi, no doubt, would have found them even more grotesque than we do?
Some facts must be briefly stated, if only to grasp how complicated the issue becomes. Sironi supported Mussolini from beginning to end, from the March on Rome to the sad puppet show of Sale. He was personally responsible for the artwork at the huge Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista which turned the tenth anniversary of Fascist power into a quasi religious festival and deliberately distorted the facts about how Mussolini had come to power (Braun gives impressive and frightening photographs). Sironi was likewise responsible for official Italian pavilions at international exhibitions in Paris and Milan. By 1933, he had actually renounced easel painting as ‘too monotonous and trite for the complex orchestrations of modern life, too weak to capture the attention of men in this age of great myths and gigantic upheavals’. In short, by turning to the large-scale mural and mosaic, he identified even his ‘serious’ work, as opposed to the merely journalistic illustrations, with the Fascist cause.
On the other hand, it must also be said that his work for II popolo d’ltalia, became sporadic after the alliance with Germany. He never publicly supported (but never spoke out against) the anti-Semitic campaign. Incredibly and inexplicably, he did not become an official member of the Fascist Party until 1936. He did not grow rich through his support of the regime, was always underpaid, took no bribes. He was never admitted to the Reale Accademia d'Italia, an honour Mussolini extended to both Marinetti and Pirandello. Throughout the thirties he was constantly under fire from the right-wing Fascists, notably the arch-xenophobe Farinacci, who accused Sironi of polluting Italian art with foreign and Jewish influences.
Above all, though, it has to be said that there is a remarkable continuity to Sironi’s painting that seems to go beyond immediate political circumstance, or indeed artistic fashions. For although a cursory glance through the illustrations in Braun’s book will make it clear how much Sironi owed to the major artists and movements of his time, from Futurism, through metaphysical painting and the various phases of Picasso’s work, nevertheless to look at the paintings more carefully is to appreciate how completely his personal vision transforms each of these approaches into something immediately recognisable as his own. So much so that in its description of the canvas Drinker with Cup, the catalogue of the Museo del Novecento is unable to decide whether it was painted in the early 1930s or the 1950s (when Sironi returned to easel painting), so consistent is it with the artist’s manner throughout his long career. Which brings us back to the question of Fascist style: when there is no gesture to the iconography of Fascism it appears there is no distinctive Fascist style to help date the work.
The secret to these apparent contradictions no doubt lay in the ambiguous nature of Fascism itself, an ambiguity that suited Sironi. At first revolutionary, then reactionary, formed by socialists who became conservatives, Fascism prided itself on being an ‘anti-ideology’ whose only raison dêtre was the grandeur of Italy. It spoke of breaking decisively with the past, but also of a return to the greatness of Rome. Essentially, it was gesture without content, tension without consummation.
This vagueness was never more evident than in the establishment of the so-called Novecento movement into which Margherita Sarfatti gathered a number of the country’s foremost painters, including Sironi, immediately after the First World War. The declared inspiration of the movement was the desire to shift from criticism to construction. Futurism had been merely iconoclastic. Now the artist would play a privileged part in building a new social order, shaping a new and united national consciousness. But it was never clear what that order or consciousness would be and there was little homogeneity between the painters involved. ‘True Italian tradition is that of never having any tradition,’ was the kind of equivocal explanation often given, ‘since the Italian race is a race of innovators and constructors.’
There is a curious mixture of authoritarianism and anarchy here, elitism and laissez-faire. Thus Sironi would have agreed with Gentile, Mussolini’s minister for education, when he declared that the artist needed to be involved in the moral, political and economic life of the nation, creating myths and building consensus, putting in motion ‘the forces of sentiment and will’. But it was equally important that the content of what one painted never be imposed. And indeed Sironi met the stiftest criticism of his career over his organisation of the mural paintings at the 1933 Milan Triennale exhibition, with the critic Papini claiming that the sheer variety he had admitted created a ‘sense of anarchy’ giving the impression that nineteenth-century individualism was alive and well at the expense of Fascist discipline. But hadn’t Mussolini himself declared that he had no intention of crea
ting an ‘art of the state’ since art was ‘the domain of the individual’. ‘It would have indicated a scarce awareness of the aesthetic phenomenon,’ Sironi answered his critics, ‘to have demanded the representation of a given obligatory subject.’
Thus Sironi could invite De Chirico to paint a fresco in which, as was De Chirico’s way, the juxtaposition of classical and modern iconography generates an amused irony about the possibility of absolute meaning, while only a room away Sironi himself produced a fresco which, taking its tide from Hesiod’s Works and Days sought in a huge amalgam of classical and industrial figures to weld together past and present in a positive and emphatic dynamic. Alas, the impression of monumental permanence that Sironi always sought was belied by the very poor preparation of the murals’ surfaces. Before the exhibition was over the images were already flaking off.
But technical problems aside, was it really possible to separate style and content in this way, something no other totalitarian regime has ever tried, to allow freedom of content and insist only on a certain ‘style’ that, after all, no one could define, to the point that Mussolini ultimately stated that all he wanted of artists was that they produce works that were ‘strong and beautiful’?
Braun, along with others, suggests that this non-insistence on content was Mussolini’s astuteness. He gave artists enough freedom, not to mention subsidies and sweeteners, to prevent them from attacking him. And certainly there is an element of truth in this. After all, it was precisely the lack of any content behind Fascism’s gesturing that allowed even such an astute commentator as Benedetto Croce to say, as late as 1928 and after the assassination of Matteoti, that he saw in Fascism only ‘an episode of the post-war period, with some juvenile and patriotic traits, which would be dissipated without doing any harm, but on the contrary leaving behind some positive effects’. All the same, it is also true, I suspect, that the fact that no strict content was ever imposed on artists, tells us something about the ultimate weakness of Italian Fascism as compared with its tougher Nazi counterpart. The point can best be understood when we come to the perplexing question of the Fascist ‘exploitation of myth.
A myth, of course, is a story. It distinguishes itself from other stories by forming part of a larger group of intertwining narratives that, taken together, form the spell, as it were, under which a community lives. Nobody in particular invented these stories, rather all are in their thrall, until, with Leopardi’s ‘massacre of illusions’ they are cast off. Significantly, when the unhappy idea occurred that mythology might be at our beck and call and that it might be conjured up again to ‘manipulate the masses’, what is notably lacking is the narrative element. Sironi, but not only Sironi, created endless images suggesting the primacy of Italy and drawing on mythic figures and symbols. But all is static. The figures are rigidly separate. We can never say, this is the story where St Peter did this, or this is the story where Apollo did that.
Thus Fascist Work the impressive mosaic for the 1936 Triennale gives us a huge central figure of Italy - seated, powerful, determined - and then two tiers of symbolic figures: above are images from an antique past, an Etruscan priestess, a Roman horseman; below are representatives of modern Italy, a mother and child, a helmeted soldier. The only figure to break the division between the layers is a stalwart Mussolini busy with a spade. While the sense of awe, and solemnity, the ‘aesthetic aura’ Sironi said he sought to communicate, is certainly present and powerful, there is no narrative here, nor any sense of where all this might be going. It is rather as if we had a group of figures waiting for a story to happen to them. Or alternatively, for someone like De Chirico to alter one symbol, introduce just one incongruity, and reveal the whole thing as ironic. My Italian father-in-law assured me that nothing was more common, on the parade ground, than for a word or two of a Fascist song to be replaced by some rhyming absurdity, so that everyone could burst out laughing. The eventual narrative, on the other hand, when someone finally put these static figures in motion, would be no laughing matter.
Less than two years after Sironi completed Fascist Work, the Racial Laws were introduced, armies began to march, Mussolini was under Hitler’s thumb. In one of the strangest gestures of his life, when his close friends Carlo and Eloise Foa decided to flee to the States, Fascism’s official artist gave the departing Jewish couple his private papers for safekeeping. Despite ‘Italian supremacy’ Sironi was not convinced of victory in the forthcoming conflagration. Of reality and illusion, he wrote: “A11 of the Italians represent a centuries-old vortex of wilfulness, so much so that one can well say that they have generated an antinatural nature, a creative reality outside of and contrary to common reality.’ But now it seemed the dream of Italian Fascism and the reality of European history were on a calamitous collision course.
The papers Sironi gave to his friends told mainly of his unhappy marriage. Separated from his wife in 1930, only two years after the birth of a second daughter, he had begun an affair with the much younger Mimi Costa. Sironi was a misanthrope, Mimi a flirt. During preparations for the 1933 Triennale he locked her in his car for several hours rather than have her meet his colleagues. Painting murals for the masses now, he worked alone at night because he didn’t want the masses to see him. How hard to be the lonely genius underwriting a populist regime! Meanwhile the passion with Mimi couldn’t last. And the argument with his wife could never end. ‘I’ve told you over and over again,’ he writes to her in 1936, ‘that I just don’t earn very much.’ Proclaiming the innate genius of the Italian spirit, he despaired of incompetence ail around him. ‘Why aren’t all Italians like me?’ he demands in a letter to his daughters.
Throughout the war he continued to be a vegetarian, wrote of his love of animals, most particularly his dog, and condemned hunting, an activity he must have seen endlessly revered in the ancient artworks he ransacked for images of a noble Italy. So it is not surprising that he was carrying his exhausted dog when he was finally hunted down himself; he had walked thirty miles to Como from a heavily bombed Milan. Lined up for execution with other loyal Fascists, he was recognised by a young art student among the partisan executioners. Having preached since early socialist days that the artist was no different from any other worker, his special semi-divine status was recognised at just the right moment. They couldn’t kill a painter. Freed, he sketched his fellow Fascists’ execution.
Or perhaps it was just the wrong moment. For it is with some awe that one tries to imagine what Sironi’s inner life must have been in those post-war years. He was sixty now and everything had changed. In 1948 his second daughter committed suicide. Partly as a result, the first daughter broke off all communication. His reputation was gone, his very name a scandal. But doggedly he painted on, appropriating abstract expressionism now, the same way he had previously appropriated every other style. As steadfast and isolated as the figures he had always painted, there were no confessions and no explanations. When he died in 1961, he used his will for one last act of will. His wife Matilde was barred from attending his funeral.
To see the mosaic Fascist Work one has to make a telephone call. Transferred to the wall of an upper room in the Palazzo dei Giornalisti, Piazza Cavour, Milan, it looks down on a conference hall run by the Hilton Hotel organisation, representatives, surely, of that international bourgeois capitalism Sironi so hated. How solemn and gloomily powerful his figures are! And how strange to think of this thing being created for the masses to unite the Italian people and being seen now mainly by privileged foreign businessmen glancing up from their lists of statistics.
When I ask a disgruntled Hilton executive if people often ask to see the mosaic, he tells me ‘fortunately not’. Clearly he hardly notices it himself. But out on the street a Benetton advert showing a man on death row continues the Italian tradition of a radical split between rhetorical gesture - this sham international piety - and banal reality - a manufacturer’s need to sell its products. And in the Stazione Centrale too, one of Fascism’s finest pieces of architect
ure, the old imperial insignia high up on the lofty arches are barely noticed beside the bold and colourful images society now raises one after another in extravagant and solipsistic praise of itself. A boy’s huge grim frown on the left is altered, by a particular brand of sunglasses, to a huge bright smile on the right. As Emily Braun remarks in laconic conclusion to this excellent book, when it comes to creating social cohesion and shared vision, Sironi and company simply hadn’t grasped ‘the power of consumerism, whose persuasive myths would prove far more effective than Socialism or Fascist ultra-populist nationalism’. Ferreting through my bag on the train I find the glossy Hilton brochure someone put in my hand as I left what is now called ‘Lo spazio Sironi’. ‘For an unforgettable stay,’ it invites me, ‘in an oasis of refined efficiency’. Above an illuminated computer screen, a beautifully stern face from Sironi’s Fascist Work dominates the cover. The title of the mosaic is not mentioned.
Sightgeist
[José Saramago]
How many proverbs and clichés would have to change if everybody went blind? Could you say, ‘I know the place like the back of my hand,’ if the back of your hand were something you never saw? Could one usefully speak of ‘the blind leading the blind’, if other options were no longer available? Such considerations, you might think, would hardly be of the highest priority in a world suddenly and terribly afflicted by a loss of sight, yet of all the obstacles that Saramago has his characters blunder against in the dark world of his novel Blindness, language is perhaps the most frequent and the most perplexing. ‘Just imagine, remarks one girl stumbling in the entrance to her old apartment block, ‘stairs I used to go up and down with my eyes closed …’ In radically changed conditions, the inertia of common usage constantly generates absurdities. Not only is the shin scraped in contact with cement, but the mind humiliated as its mindless habits are exposed.