Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today 9781350229464, 9781350229457, 9781350229495, 9781350229471

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Curating Fascism

Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts Series Editor Dr. Sharon Hecker, Independent Art Historian Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts publishes innovative research into visual culture in modernist Italy, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities beyond this particular geographic, historic, and political boundary. The series invites cuttingedge scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designers across all media forms; it engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis, as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches, and seeks to encourage a dialogue amongst scholars in core disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research. Advisory Board Romy Golan, The Graduate Center, New York, USA Ara Merjian, New York University, USA Paolo Scrivano, Politecnico di Milano, Italy Arianna Arisi Rota, Università di Pavia, Italy Elena Dellapiana, Politecnico di Torino, Italy Rosetta Caponetto, Auburn University, USA Noa Steimatsky, Film Historian, USA Lucia Re, UCLA, USA Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding scholarly studies by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical, and methodological perspectives are welcome, especially those on colonialism, race, sexuality, gender, politics, and material history in twentieth- and twenty-first-century contexts. Titles in the Series Marisa Mori and the Futurists: “Italian Breasts in the Sun” and Beyond, by Jennifer S. Griffiths (forthcoming)

Curating Fascism Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today Edited by Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc ­50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Selection and editorial material © Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida, 2023 Individual chapters © their authors, 2023 Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Editors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. xxi–xxii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image: Rome, November 14, 2013. Ruth Gebresus photographed in front of the Cinema Impero. Photo: Rino Bianchi, courtesy of the photographer. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-2946-4 PB: 978-1-3502-2945-7 ePDF: 978-1-3502-2947-1 eBook: 978-1-3502-2948-8 Series: Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

­­The editors dedicate this volume to family members who experienced fascist persecutions: Piroska, Imre (Amerigo), Erzsi and Laci Katz and the Calabi and Ancona families Pia, Guido, Anna, Gabriele, and David Bedarida; Lea and Gastone Orefice “‫”אם יש את נפשך לדעת‬ ‫חיים נחמן ביאליק‬

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­Contents List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction  Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida Part 1  Rethinking Historical Exhibitions in Italy   1 Exhibiting Art of the Fascist Ventennio: Curatorial Choices, Installation Strategies, and Critical Reception from Arte Moderna in Italia 1915–1935 (Florence, 1967) to Annitrenta (Milan, 1982)  Luca Quattrocchi   2 Pluralism as Revisionism: Annitrenta at Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1982  Denis Viva   3 Interview with Renato Barilli, Curator of the Annitrenta Exhibition (Milan, 1982)  Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker   4 Art, Life, Politics, and the Seductiveness of Italian Fascism: Post Zang Tumb Tuuum at Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018  Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker    5 Italy’s Holocaust on Display: From Carpi-Fossoli to Auschwitz (to Florence)  Robert S. C. Gordon   6 Umbertino Umbertino: The Many Masks of Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni  Romy Golan Part 2  Exhibitions of Fascism around the World   7 Exhibiting and Collecting the F-word in Britain  Rosalind McKever   8 Novecento Brasiliano: Margherita Sarfatti, Ciccillo Matarazzo, and the Italian Collection of MAC USP  Ana Gonçalves Magalhães  9 Contextualizing Razionalismo in the Exhibition Photographic Recall (2019): Fascist Spaces in Contemporary German Photography  Miriam Paeslack 10 Feeling at Home: Exhibiting Design, Blurring Fascism  Elena Dellapiana and Jonathan Mekinda 11 Italian Jewish Artists and Fascist Cultural Politics: On Gardens and Ghettos at the Jewish Museum in New York (1989)  Emily Braun, interviewed by Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker

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Part 3  Absences 12 Exhibiting the Homoerotic Body, the Queer Afterlife of Ventennio Male Nudes  John Champagne 13 “Partigiano Portami Via”: Exhibiting Antifascism and the Resistance in Post-Fascist Italy  Raffaele Bedarida 14 Looking at Women and Mental Illness in Fascist Italy: An Exhibition’s Dialogical and Feminist Approach  Lucia Re 15 Silencing the Colonial Past: The 1993 Exhibition Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 in Bologna  Nicola Labanca 16 Recharting Landscapes in the Exhibition Roma Negata: Postcolonial Routes of the City (2014) and the Digital Project Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage  Shelleen Greene Part 4  Curatorial Practices 17 From MRF to Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: The Responsibilities of the Rehang  Vanessa Rocco 18 The Final Ramp: Addressing Fascism in Italian Futurism at the Guggenheim Museum  Vivien Greene and Susan Thompson 19 The Making of MART and the Archivio del Novecento: Interview with Gabriella Belli  Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida 20 Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Reconstructing Artists’ Studios in Exhibitions on Fascist-era Art  Sharon Hecker 21 Interview with Maaza Mengiste on Project3541: A Photographic Archive of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War  Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker Index

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I­ llustrations 0.1a Giacomo Balla, Velocità astratta (Abstract Velocity), 1913 (recto of Marcia su Roma) 0.1b Giacomo Balla, Marcia su Roma (March on Rome), pre-1934 (verso of Velocità astratta) 1.1 Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1967. Installation of a gallery on the second floor 1.2 Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1967. Installation of a gallery on the first floor 1.3 Annitrenta. Arte e cultura in Italia, Milano, 1982. Installation of the section titled Vita politica e sociale (Social and political life) in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan 1.4 Annitrenta. Arte e cultura in Italia, Milano, 1982. Installation of the section titled Arte e propaganda (Art and Propaganda) in the Sala delle Cariatidi, Palazzo Reale, Milan 1.5 Luciano Baldessari, Sala Aviazione e fascismo alla mostra dell’Aeronautica italiana (Gallery of Aviation and Fascism at the Italian Aeronautics Exhibition), Palazzo dell’Arte, Milan, 1934 2.1 Exhibition map of Annitrenta, 1982 2.2 Two 1930s streetcars displayed in front of the Duomo for Annitrenta, 1982 2.3 Cesare Colombo, Display of Annitrenta’s section on Graphic Illustration, 1982 2.4 Cover of the catalog of Annitrenta 2.5 Cesare Colombo, Display of Annitrenta’s section on Fashion, 1982 4.1 Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. 1932 room. Arturo Martini, L’aviatore (The Aviator), fired clay, 1931 4.2 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, reconstruction of Mussolini’s office at Il Popolo d’Italia in Room T, “The Mussolini room,” exhibition display by Leo Longanesi, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1932 4.3 Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. 1926 room 4.4 Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. 1938 room

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4.5 Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. Final room including the books utilized by the curatorial team 60 5.1 Museum-Monument to the Political and Racial Victims of Deportation, Carpi. View from Room 2 into Room 1 showing artwork by Alberto Longoni 67 5.2 Italian national memorial at Block 21, Auschwitz 69 6.1 Costantino Dardi, X Quadriennale, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1973 76 6.2 Piero Sartogo, installation for the entrance of Vitalità del Negativo, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1970 78 6.3 Adalberto Libera, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, facade for the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1922 79 6.4 Pages from L’Espresso, November 17, 1955 80 6.5 View of the installation of Room 1 (with Antonio Mascherini, Ritmi 84 and Minerva; Alberto Gerardi, L’archangelo), VII Quadriennale, 1955 8.1 Amedeo Modigliani, Autoritratto (Self-portrait), 1919 105 8.2 Achille Funi, L’Indovina (The Fortune-teller), 1924 106 8.3 Arturo Tosi, Ponte di Zoagli (Zoagli Bridge), 1937 107 8.4 Renato Guttuso, Natura morta con lume (Still Life with Lantern), 1940 109 8.5 Scipione (pseudonym for Gino Bonichi), Oceano Indiano/I sognatori (Indian Ocean/The Dreamers), 1930 110 9.1 Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall: Entrance with view onto Johanna Diehl’s wall display of selected works from Borgo, Alleanza, Romanità, quote and screen presenting propaganda videos118 9.2 Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall: Maps and Timeline 118 9.3 Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall120 9.4 Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall: Caterina Borelli, video screening room, The Date121 9.5 Installation photograph of the exhibition History of Reconstruction: Installation view 125 10.1 View of the exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, curated by Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018 130 10.2 The entry hall of the exhibition Italy at Work, Art Institute of Chicago, 1951132 10.3a/b Gio Ponti’s letter to Luigi Tazzini concerning the Urna vase dedicated to Mussolini, April 10, 1930 137

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10.4 Gio Ponti, “I ‘grandi pezzi’ della Triennale,” Domus no. 31 (July 1930): 17 138 10.5 Installation view, Chaos and Classicism Art in France, Italy, and Germany 1918 to 1936, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011 139 11.1 Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1989. Room installation view of “Bourgeoisie and Bohemia” with works by Amedeo Modigliani and Mario Cavaglieri 149 11.2 Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1989. Room installation view of “The Tonal Painters of the Roman School.” 150 11.3 Roberto Melli, Self-Portrait with a White Glove, 1944 151 11.4 Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1989. Room installation view of “Margherita Sarfatti and the Novecento.” 153 11.5 Carlo Levi, Portrait of Leone Ginzburg, 1933 154 12.1 Corrado Cagli, Il neofita (The Neophyte), 1933 160 12.2 Filippo de Pisis, Nudo disteso di spalle (Reclining Nude from Behind), 1930 161 12.3 Corrado Cagli, Il Bacchino (Little Bacchus), 1938 165 12.4 Filippo de Pisis, Nudo sulla pelle di tigre (Robert) (Nude on a Tiger 166 Skin [Robert]), c. 1931 13.1 Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 175 1918–1943, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018 13.2 Carlo Levi, L’eroe cinese (The Chinese Hero), 1931–32 177 13.3 Exhibition view of L’arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1967. Second from right, Carlo Levi, L’eroe cinese (The Chinese Hero), 1931–32 178 13.4 Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 180 1918–1943, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018 13.5 Page from Germano Celant, “Towards a Real and Contextual History,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art, Life, Politics. Italia 1918–1943 (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), 43 181 14.1 Catalog cover of I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016) 187 14.2 Some of the exhibition panels in Fano, I fiori del male188 14.3 Exhibition view, I fiori del male, Ascoli 190 14.4 Page from: I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016), 50 192

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14.5 Page from: I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016), 12 193 16.1 Rome, November 25, 2013. Somali Migrant Safia Omar Mamoud photographed on the Amedeo D’Aosta Bridge 212 16.2 Pontinia, July 26, 2014. Exhibition Paesaggi della memoria. Roma negata. percorsi postcoloniali nella città, Museo dell’Agro Pontino (MAP), in Pontinia, one of the cities built during the fascist ventennio213 16.3 Rome, November 14, 2013. Ruth Gebresus photographed in front of the Cinema Impero 216 16.4 Rome, July 20, 2014. The Stele di Dogali, erected as a memorial to the 584 fallen soldiers in the Battle of Dogali during the First ItaloEthiopian War of 1887–89 218 16.5 Rome, October 31, 2013. Amin Nour, Somali-Italian actor, photographed at the Termini station 220 17.1 Sala O of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), 1932 231 17.2 Sala 17 (“Anno 1922”) of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), 1937 232 17.3 Sala Ebraismo e massoneria of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, 1942233 17.4 Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943235 18.1 Installation view, overall view of rotunda, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New 241 York. February 21–September 1, 2014 18.2 Installation view, “Futurist Publications” bay, Ramp 4, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, Solomon R. 244 Guggenheim Museum, New York. February 21–September 1, 2014 18.3 Installation view, Entrance to “Expositions” bay, Ramp 6, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, Solomon R. 245 Guggenheim Museum, New York. February 21–September 1, 2014 20.1 Photograph of Adolfo Wildt in his studio on Corso Garibaldi with his granddaughter Mia, 1919, published in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art 258 Life Politics Italia 1918–1943 (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), 95 20.2 Felice Casorati, Lo studio (The Studio), 1922–23 259 20.3 Mario Mafai, Modelli nello studio (Models in the Studio), 1940 262 20.4 Photograph of Carlo Carrà painting in his studio/home in Forte dei Marmi after his easels were burned by the Nazis, c. 1945 264 20.5 Photograph of Mario Mafai in his studio between April 1944 and 1946 265 21.1 Two men standing in the shadow of a photographer c. 1935, Ethiopia 274

­Notes on Contributors The Editors Sharon Hecker (B.A. Yale University cum laude, M.A. and Ph.D. University of California at Berkeley) is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian art. She is a leading authority on Medardo Rosso and has published extensively on key twentieth-century Italian artists, including Lucio Fontana, Luciano Fabro, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, and Francesco Lo Savio. Her books include A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (University of California Press, 2017, awarded the Millard Meiss Publication Fund from the College Art Association); Postwar Italian Art History: Untying the Knot (co-edited with Marin R. Sullivan, Bloomsbury, 2018); Lead in Modern and Contemporary Art (coedited with Silvia Bottinelli, Bloomsbury, 2020); Finding Lost Wax: The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso (Brill, 2020), Posthumous Art, the Market and Art Law (co-edited with Peter J. Karol, Routledge, 2022). Hecker has received fellowships from the Getty, Fulbright, and Mellon Foundations. Her exhibitions include Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, with Harry Cooper (Harvard University Art Museums, 2004); Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form, with Tamara H. Schenkenberg (2017–18); and Medardo Rosso: Sight Unseen, with Julia Peyton-Jones DBE (2018). She is organizing an exhibition on Lucio Fontana’s ceramics at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2025). Raffaele Bedarida is Associate Professor of Art History at Cooper Union, New York where he coordinates the History and Theory of Art program. An art historian and curator specializing in twentieth-century Italian art and politics, Bedarida focuses on cultural diplomacy, migration, and cultural exchange between Italy and the United States. He is the author of three monographs, Bepi Romagnoni: Il Nuovo Racconto (Silvana Editoriale, 2005), Corrado Cagli: La pittura, l’esilio, L’America (Donzelli, 2018, English edition upcoming) and Exhibiting Italian Art in the United States: Futurism to Arte Povera. Like a Giant Screen (Routledge, 2022). He has published extensively in periodicals and edited volumes, including The International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Oxford Art Journal, Tate Modern’s In Focus, and Artforum. For his work on the exchange between Italy and the United States, Bedarida has received fellowships from the Center for Italian Modern Art (CIMA) and the Terra Foundation for American Art. He currently serves as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Massimo Campigli Archives, the Archivio Crispolti Arte Contemporanea and as the co-chair of the European Postwar and Contemporary Art Forum.

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The Contributors Renato Barilli is Emeritus Professor at the University of Bologna, Italy. His research interests include aesthetic philosophy and literary and art criticism. He has curated several exhibitions of Italian art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among Barilli’s many books: Scienza della cultura e fenomenologia degli stili (1982, most-recent ed. 2007), L’arte contemporanea (1984, most-recent ed. 2005), La neoavanguardia italiana (1995, most-recent ed. 2007), L’alba del contemporaneo (1995), Dal Boccaccio al Verga. La narrativa italiana in età moderna (2003), Maniera moderna e Manierismo (2004), Prima e dopo il 2000. La ricerca artistica 1970–2005 (2006), La narrativa europea in età moderna. Da Defoe a Tolstoj (2010), Autoritratto a stampa (2010), La narrativa europea in età contemporanea. Cechov, Joyce, Proust, Woolf, Musil (2014). He has published two art-historical survey books with the publisher Bollati Boringhieri: Storia dell’arte contemporanea in Italia. Da Canova alle ultime tendenze (2007) and Arte e cultura materiale in Occidente (2011). Gabriella Belli is Director of the Municipal Museums of Venice Foundation (“Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia”). She was a Commissioner at the Venice Biennale in 1995. From 1982 to 2001, she worked on the construction of the collection of the Museo d’Arte di Trento e Rovereto (MART), inaugurated in 2002. She was Director of MART from 1990 to 2011. Under her direction, the restored home of Fortunato Depero opened as the Depero Futurist Art Museum in 2009. In 2011 she was appointed director of the Municipal Museums of Venice Foundation, a structure created to bring together the administration of several of the most important palace museums in Venice, including the Doge’s Palace, Ca’ Rezzonico, the Correr Museum, Ca’ Pesaro Museum, and others. In 2003, Belli was awarded the Premio internazionale Civiltà Veneta (Venetian International Arts Prize). In 2011 she received from Guy Cogeval, on behalf of the French Cultural Ministry, a Knighthood of Arts and Literature and the ICOM Italy prize, when she was named as the best museologist of the year. Emily Braun is Distinguished Professor of Twentieth-Century European and American Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include the interaction between political ideologies and visual representation; the construction of gender and otherness in art criticism; the history of exhibitions and collecting; Cubism and popular culture; and theories of viewer reception. She also writes on European art from 1945. Since 1987 Braun has curated the Leonard A. Lauder Collection of Cubist Art. She is the author of Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (2000), hailed by historians and art historians as “landmark,” a “work that is as indispensable for cultural historians of twentieth-century Europe as it is for historians of the visual arts” (The Journal of Modern History, 2002). Most recently Braun co-curated Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection (2014) for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-edited the catalog, which won First Place from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC), as well as the Henry Allen Moe Prize, New York Historical Association, for Catalog of Distinction in the Arts. In 2016 she curated and authored

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Alberto Burri: The Trauma of Painting for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was honored with the 2016 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition Catalogue Award. Her other exhibitions include Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy (cocurator, 1989, The Jewish Museum, New York); and De Chirico and America (1996, Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, Hunter College) which was organized with her graduate students at Hunter College. John Champagne is Professor of English at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, USA. He is the author of two novels, The Blue Lady’s Hands (1988) and When the Parrot Boy Sings (1990). He is also the author of four scholarly monographs, The Ethics of Marginality (1995), Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (2013), and Italian Masculinity as Queer Melodrama, Caravaggio, Puccini, and Contemporary Cinema (2015), and Queer Ventennio: Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern (2019), a study on Filippo de Pisis, Giovanni Comisso, and Corrado Cagli. Champagne’s essays have appeared in such journals as Modern Italy, g/s/i, College English, College Literature, and boundary 2. Champagne was chosen as the 2018–2019 Penn State Laureate. Elena Dellapiana Ph.D. Architect, is full Professor of Architecture and Design History in the Department of Architecture & Design at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy. She is a scholar of architecture and town and design history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is among the authors of Storia dell’architettura italiana: L’Ottocento, ed. Amerigo Restucci (2005); and Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, ed. Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei (2013). Among her publications are: Il design della ceramica in Italia 1850–2000 (2010), Il design degli architetti italiani 1920–2000, with Fiorella Bulegato (2014), and Una storia dell’architettura contemporanea, with Guido Montanari (2015–2020). She recently edited Museographie. Musei in Europa negli anni tra le due guerre, with Maria Beatrice Failla and Franca Varallo (2020) and Bruno Zevi. History, Criticism and Architecture after WWII, with Matteo Cassani Simonetti (2021). Romy Golan is Professor of Twentieth-Century Art at the Graduate Center, CUNY, USA. She is the author of Modernity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France between the Wars; Muralnomad: The Paradox of Wall Painting, Europe  1927–1957 (1995 and 2009); and Flashback, Eclipse. The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s (2021). Among her recent publications are “Renato Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome (1953): A Geopolitical Tableau,” Art History (Winter 2020); “Is Fascist Realism a Magic Realism?” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics (Winter 2020); “Temporalités cachées dans Campo Urbano, Côme, 1969,” in Transbordeur: photographie/histoire/société (Editions Macula, 2017); “Realism as International Style” (co-authored with Nikolas Drosos) in Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 (Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2016). Robert S. C. Gordon is Serena Professor of Italian at Cambridge University, UK. He is the author or editor of over a dozen volumes on modern Italian literature, cinema, and cultural history, including a study of the writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini

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(Pasolini. Forms of Subjectivity) and several books on the work of Primo Levi (e.g., Primo Levi’s Ordinary Virtues: From Testimony to Ethics; Auschwitz Report; The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi). He has also published on the wider field of postwar cultural responses to the Holocaust, in the book The Holocaust in Italian Culture, 1944–2010, the co-edited collection Holocaust Intersections, and a special issue of the journal of Jewish history, Quest. He is co-editor of Culture, Censorship and the State in 20th-Century Italy and author of the BFI Film Classics volume Bicycle Thieves. He is also the author of a general account of modern Italian literature, A Difficult Modernity: An Introduction to Twentieth-Century Italian Literature. Shelleen Greene is an associate professor of Cinema and Media Studies in the Department of Film, Television and Digital Media at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA. Her research interests include Italian cinema, Black European studies, and postcolonial studies. Her book, Equivocal Subjects: Between Italy and Africa – Constructions of Racial and National Identity in the Italian Cinema (2012), examines the representation of mixed-race subjects of Italian and African descent in Italian cinema. Her work has also been published in Terrone to Extracommunitario: New Manifestations of Racism in Contemporary Italian Cinema (2010), Postcolonial Italy: Challenging National Homogeneity (2012), California Italian Studies, and Italian Culture. Vivien Greene is Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, USA. Her exhibitions and publications focus on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European art, concentrating on French and Italian modernism and international currents in turn-of-the-century art and culture. In 2017 she curated Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897. She also organized Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, named best exhibition in 2014 by the Association for Art Museum Curators; The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York, 1914–18; and Divisionism/NeoImpressionism: Arcadia and Anarchy. In addition to authoring catalogs associated with her exhibitions, Greene has written articles and essays for peer-reviewed journals and books, including the Journal for Modern Italian Studies and compendiums published by Oxford University Press. She has been awarded several fellowships and honors, among them a Fulbright to Italy and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017 she was made an Ufficiale dell’Ordine della Stella d’Italia. Greene serves on the Advisory Committee for the Center for Italian Modern Art and was a trustee of the Association of Art Museum Curators. She holds a Ph.D. in art history from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Nicola Labanca is full Professor of Contemporary History at the Department of Historical sciences and cultural heritage at the University of Siena, Italy. His research is especially related to Italian colonial expansion in Africa and the relationships between war, armed forces, and society in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Italy. Since 2002 Labanca has been President of the Centro interuniversitario di studi e ricerche storico militari (Interuniversity Center for military history and research)

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and since 2012 he has been the editor of Italia contemporanea, the peer-reviewed review of Istituto nazionale Ferruccio Parri, formerly Istituto nazionale per la storia del Movimento di Liberazione in Italia. Among his books, In marcia verso Adua (1993), Oltremare. Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (2002, French translation 2014), La guerra italiana per la Libia. 1911–1931 (2012), and La guerra d’Etiopia 1935–1941 (2015). In 1992 he edited L’Africa in vetrina. Storie di musei e di esposizioni coloniali in Italia. Ana Gonçalves Magalhães is an art historian, professor, and curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP), where she now holds the post of Director (2020–2024). Since 2008, she has been studying the modern Italian artworks in MAC USP,s collection and their importance to the Brazilian artistic milieu of the 1940s and 1950s. This research has been presented in exhibitions such as Classicism, Realism, Avant-Garde: Italian Painting in Between the Wars and the conference Latin Modernity: Italians and circles of modernism in South America (both organized in 2013). She also co-curated the exhibition The Italian Voyage: Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Brazil and Italy in the 1950s (2016). In 2018, she curated Boccioni: Continuity in Space at MAC USP. In 2016, she was a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute. She was also Visiting Professor at the University of Milan in 2011, at the Université de Paris 8 – Saint Denis in 2014, at the University of Vienna in 2018, and at the University of Hamburg in 2019. In 2019, she was Curator in Residence at the Biblioteca Hertziana, Rome, and chair of the Brazil-Italy Session for the 35th World Congress of the International Committee of Art History (CIHA), in Florence. Among her publications are Claude Monet. A canoa e a ponte [Claude Monet. The Canoe and the Bridge] (2000); Degas. O universo de um artista (2006); Classicismo, realismo, vanguarda: pintura italiana no entreguerras (2013); Discours aux Tupiniquins (2015); and Classicismo moderno. Margherita Sarfatti e a pintura italiana no MAC USP (2016); Um outro acervo do MAC USP. Prêmios-aquisição da Bienal de São Paulo, 1951–1963 and co-editing and co-curatorship of Atelier 17. Modern Printmaking in the Americas, in collaboration with the Terra Foundation of American Art (2019). Rosalind McKever is a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK. Previously at the National Gallery, she was assistant curator on exhibitions including Michelangelo & Sebastiano and Monet & Architecture. In 2015–16 she was the Jane and Morgan Whitney Senior Art History fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where she undertook a major study of Umberto Boccioni’s sculptures. She co-curated the exhibition Boccioni: Continuity in Space for the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo in 2018, published aspects of this research with the Getty Research Journal and the University of Barcelona, and is coeditor of the forthcoming volume Boccioni in Brazil. Her Ph.D., awarded by Kingston University, London, in 2012, addressed the temporality of futurism and the avantgarde. She has published elements of this in the journals Art History, The Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies, and Carte Italiane. She co-edited a volume on this aspect of modernism, Revival: Memories, Identities, Utopias (2015) for the Courtauld Institute. She regularly reviews exhibitions of and books on modern Italian art for The Burlington

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Magazine and Apollo. She graduated from the University of Leeds with a degree in History of Art with Italian in 2005. Jonathan Mekinda is an historian of architecture and design and an associate professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago School of Design, USA, where he directs the design studies program and serves as Associate Director for Faculty Affairs. His research focuses on the historical development of modern architecture and design during the middle decades of the twentieth century, particularly in Italy and the United States. Mekinda has received grants and awards from numerous organizations, among them the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Program and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, and his writing can be found in various journals and edited volumes, including Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America (2018); and Studi e ricerche di storia dell’architettura (2019). He received his AB (Honors) in architectural studies from Brown University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in the history of art from the University of Pennsylvania. Maaza Mengiste is a novelist and essayist. She is the author of the novel, The Shadow King, which was shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and was a 2020 LA Times Book Prize Fiction finalist. It was named best book of the year by The New York Times, NPR, Elle, Time, and more. Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the ten best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of 2010 by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe, and other publications. She is the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the Premio il ponte, and fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Creative Capital. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the BBC, among other places. Miriam Paeslack is Associate Professor of Arts Management at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), USA. Her research spans European and North American urban imagery and culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Trained as an art historian and historian of law in Germany, Italy, and the United States, she specializes in the analysis of visual representations of urban spaces and concepts of architectural and urban memory, heritage, and cultural identity. Paeslack is the author of Constructing Imperial Berlin: Photography and the Metropolis (2018); and editor of Ineffably Urban: Imaging Buffalo (2013). Her essays and research are published in journals, such as Future Anterior, the Journal of Architecture, and Fotogeschichte. Recent essays include “Taking Stock: Chad Ress’s Photographs of the Recovery Act,” in America Recovered, edited by Chad Ress and Jordan Carver (2019) and “Aesthetics of Reappearance,” in Spaces of Uncertainty – Berlin Revisited edited by Kenny Cupers and Marcus Miessen (2018). Her exhibition project, Photographic Recall: Italian Rationalist Architecture in Contemporary German Art, at the UB Anderson Gallery is concerned with the interpretive role of architectural and urban photography in Germany’s processing of its fascist past.

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Luca Quattrocchi is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Architecture History at the University of Siena, Italy. Before Siena, he conducted research at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, Czech Republic; the Institut Technologique d’Art, d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme of the University of Tunis, Tunisia; and La Sapienza University in Rome, Italy. His research interests include Art Nouveau, contemporary architecture, and the relationship between art, literature, and music between the end of the nineteenth century and the Second World War. He has published extensively on Gaudí, Rodin, Michelazzi, Tiffany, Gallé, Klimt, Sant’Elia, Piranesi, Bazzani, Čiurlionis, Fontana, the Bohemian Secession, colonial architecture, and fascist architecture. Lucia Re (Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Yale University) is Research Professor of Italian at UCLA, USA and also holds an appointment in the Department of Gender Studies. Her principal fields of study and teaching are modern and contemporary literature and culture. Her interests include poetry and the novel, women writers and artists, feminist theory, modernism, futurism and the avant-garde, Italy, the Mediterranean and Africa, race studies, and literary translation. Her book Calvino and the Age of Neorealism won the 1992 Marraro Prize of the Modern Language Association. For the edition of Amelia Rosselli’s volume of poetry, War Variations (translated with Paul Vangelisti), she was awarded the 2006 PEN USA literary translation award, as well as the Flaiano Prize for International Italian Studies. A new bilingual edition of War Variations was published in 2016 (Otis Books), with a new critical introduction by Prof. Re (“Amelia Rosselli: A Life in Poetry”). Prof. Re has published more than eighty scholarly articles and essays on authors ranging from Gabriele d’Annunzio to Anna Maria Ortese and Amara Lakhous. Her study of contemporary arte povera artist Marisa Merz, entitled “The Mark on the Wall: Marisa Merz and a History of Women in Postwar Italy,” appeared in the volume Marisa Merz: The Sky is a Great Space, edited by Connie Butler (2017) and published in conjunction with the 2017 Merz retrospective at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the MET Breuer in New York. Her work on Italian modernism and Africa includes the essay “Italy’s First Postcolonial Novel and the End of (Neo)Realism,” a study of Ennio Flaiano’s 1947 novel Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill), published in the journal The Italianist (2017). Vanessa Rocco is Associate Professor of Humanities and Fine Arts at Southern New Hampshire University in Manchester, NH, USA, and former Associate Curator at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. She is co-editor with Elizabeth Otto of The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s to the 1960s (2011, paperback 2012). Rocco organized numerous exhibitions and publications at the ICP, including Louise Brooks and the New Woman in Weimar Cinema (2007), Expanding Vision: Moholy-Nagy’s Experiments of the 1920s (2004), and Rise of the Picture Press (2002, co-organized with Christopher Phillips). She served as Curatorial Advisor on the 2008–09 MACBA project Universal Archive and catalog author for the accompanying publication, Public Photographic

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Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda from Pressa to the Family of Man (1928–1955). Her reviews and articles about photography and exhibitions have appeared in the journals History of Photography, Aperture, CAA.reviews, SF Camerawork, NKA, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Afterimage. Rocco has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a 2016 Getty Research Institute Library Grant Award. Her latest book, Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy, was published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts in 2020. Susan Thompson is a curator and writer based in Brooklyn, USA. From 2009 to 2020, she worked as a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she organized several exhibitions, including the two-part project Implicit Tensions: Mapplethorpe Now (2019–20), Simone Leigh: Loophole of Retreat (2019), Anicka Yi: Life is Cheap (2017), and Italian Futurism, 1909–1945: Reconstructing the Universe (2014), among others. Her writing has appeared in various volumes, including Ghada Amer (2022), Black Matrilineage, Photography, and Representation: Another Way of Knowing (2022), Mernet Larsen (2021), Danh Vo: Take My Breath Away (2018), Adam Pendleton: The Black Dada Reader (2017), and Visionaries: Creating a Modern Guggenheim (2017). Thompson holds an M.A. in modern art from Columbia University and a BA in art history and political science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Denis Viva is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of Trento, Italy. His main fields of research are Italian contemporary art, postmodern art and art history, the invention of a genealogy in artistic practices, the artistic remediation of visual resources, and the relationship between photography and the display of the history of art. He is director of the journal Palinsesti (https://teseo.unitn.it/palinsesti) and one of the founders of the online database www.capti.it dedicated to the digitizing of Italian art reviews. Simultaneously, he has been art curator at MART in Rovereto (2012–14), the Quadriennale in Rome (2016), and the Museum of Contemporary Art Casa Cavazzini, in Udine, for the project Paradoxa on Far East Asian art (2016–18).

A ­ cknowledgments The editors would like to thank the editorial team at Bloomsbury Visual Arts who supported the project through to publication. We are especially grateful to editors April Peake and Ross Fraser-Smith who oversaw the book’s production. A particular thanks goes to David Olsen for his careful and thorough editing and formatting of our essays. For their thoughtful and encouraging comments, we are grateful to the anonymous reviewers of the manuscript. We thank all our authors for their hard work that made this volume possible, and for patiently answering our many questions during the process: it was a true labor of love. We would like to thank the artists’ families, interviewees, librarians, and archivists who facilitated the authors’ research process. Our gratitude also goes to the image rights holders—including artists’ estate, photographers, and institutions—for giving us permission to publish their work. Special thanks to Igiaba Scego, who could not contribute to the volume but connected us with Rino Bianchi, who allowed us to publish his photographs of their exhibition, Roma Negata. Thanks also to Ruth Gebresus for her appearance in our cover photo and Jeffrey Schnapp and Ester Coen for their feedback on the manuscript. We thank the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Castello Sforzesco, Milan; Fondazione Carlo Levi, Rome; Archivio Corrado Cagli, Rome; Fondazione Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, Lucca; Fondazione Prada, Milan; and the Archivio della Quadriennale, Rome. Andrea Goffo and Nicolò Scialanga of Fondazione Prada generously assisted us with the images of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Our deepest gratitude goes to Nada Ayad, Romy Golan, Vivien Greene, Laura Mattioli, and Lucia Re for their help connecting us to contributors in the volume. We would like to thank Antje Gamble and Marla Stone, who participated in our online workshop entitled Curating Fascism, hosted by Cooper Union from January 18 to 28, 2021. Many thanks to Fern Greene for transcribing our interview with Maaza Mengiste. We benefited immensely from four venues in which we were invited to present our initial ideas about curating fascism over the past years. We would like to thank both the organizers, Maria Bremer and Tristan Weddigen, and the participants in the workshop, Exhibiting (and) History, held at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute of Art History, Rome, December 6–7, 2018; Miriam Paeslack and the participants of the panel Fascisms Past in Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice, College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, New York, February 16, 2019; Denis Viva, who invited us to give a talk at the University of Trento, November 30, 2020; Ara Merjian, who asked us to speak at the Casa Italiana, New York University on April 18, 2019 and to his doctoral seminar, Fascism and Culture: Methodological Problems and Methodological Totalitarianisms, at the Università degli Studi di Milano on May 11, 2021; Germano Maifreda generously welcomed us on the latter occasion. The lively

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discussions and feedback from these and other exchanges have been crucial for the development of the ideas behind this book. In addition to those thanked above and by authors in each essay, Sharon Hecker would like to thank: Roberto Dulio, Chiara Costa, and Chiara Spangaro at the Fondazione Prada, Emilio Gentile, Luigi Zoja, Paolo Valesio, Elena Gigli, Federica Pirani, Alessandra Quarto, Luca Carrà, and Giulia Mafai, who sadly passed away during the preparation of this book. Raffaele Bedarida would like to thank: Franco Baldasso, Daniele Biffanti, Paolo Bolpagni, Laura Moure Cecchini, Sergio Cortesini, Daniela Fonti, Atina Grossmann, Francesco Guzzetti, Laura Iamurri, Antonella Lavorgna, Assunta Porciani, Alessandro Sagramora, and Barry Schwabsky.

Introduction Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida

In 2000, an enormous painting by the Italian futurist Giacomo Balla titled Velocità astratta (Abstract Velocity, 1913) was displayed at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome in the exhibition Novecento, Arte e storia in Italia.1 For the first time since the fall of Benito Mussolini, this canonical futurist artwork publicly revealed its unsettling verso: on its back, upside down, was a previously unseen hyper-realistic painting by Balla that commemorated Il Duce’s March on Rome (Figures 0.1a and 0.1b). According to the exhibition’s curator, Maurizio Calvesi (1927–2020), Balla had probably painted this celebration of fascism on the occasion of the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, which commemorated the tenth anniversary of the fascist power grab. Balla’s unexpected two-sided painting was the highlight of the 2000 show, attracting widespread admiration despite the fact that it clearly showed the enmeshment of this major figure of Italian modernism with fascism. Although the futurists’ affiliation with fascism was old news by 2000, the daily newspaper La Repubblica asked: “Were even great artists opportunistic shapeshifters (trasformisti)?” and immediately provided its own answer: “It certainly looks like they were.”2 Calvesi, who had lived with his parents on the floor below the Balla family on via Oslavia in Rome, remembered seeing a gigantic Marcia su Roma (March on Rome) hanging in Balla’s studio as early as 1934, suggesting that the artist chose to display the painting on its fascist verso side in his home and that at some point he turned it back to its futurist recto. Over the years, the painting—but only in its recto form—was in several major exhibitions and reproduced in publications, with its verso always kept out of sight in the shows. In 2000 Calvesi chose to display the painting so that both sides became visible to the public. After the big sensation and a feast of newspaper titles about the “reversed” “upside-down” or “double face”3 fascist painting, Balla’s artwork was again turned back to its more reassuring, one-sided, futurist recto side. This suggests that Calvesi’s momentary exhibition of the other side of the painting had no lasting effect on the public’s conception of art made during fascism. Calvesi himself focused on the stylistic juxtaposition of the abstract and photo-realistic sides rather than on the work’s disturbing political message. Marcia su Roma’s aesthetic quality, he remarked, was

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Figure  0.1a  Giacomo Balla, Velocità astratta (Abstract Velocity), 1913 (recto of Marcia su Roma). Oil on canvas. 260 × 332 cm. Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.

“beautiful” and a “masterpiece.”4 As late as 1994, Calvesi commented that the verso side filled him “with great joy” and should be retrieved from its silence and exhibited, for he believed it was a painting on which “no anathema should weigh any longer.”5 As part of the prominent private collection of industrialist Gianni Agnelli, the painting went on to be permanently exhibited, but in its recto identity as Velocità astratta, in the Pinacoteca Gianni e Marella Agnelli in Turin, designed by architect Renzo Piano. Prominently installed high up above a staircase, in what Piano calls the Pinacoteca’s scrigno (coffer), the painting is preserved among the collection’s “extraordinary masterpieces.”6 A similar form of historical shapeshifting has recently occurred with Balla’s house in Rome. Restored and opened to the public in 2021 as a futurist Gesamtkunstwerk, the Casa Balla caused an international sensation. As the world hoped to emerge from the dimmest phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, visitors especially appreciated Balla’s lighthearted and joyful art. The New York Times critic Gisella Williams described the “amoebalike shapes in bright yellow and green that seemed to dance against a peachcolored background. Dozens of square and wildly colorful abstract paintings were mounted on the upper portion of the walls, concealing exposed water pipes and little cubbies.”7 Calvesi’s childhood memory of the life-sized depiction of Mussolini and his black-shirted acolytes now seemed to be substituted by the image of an artist who wanted to “cheer up the universe,”8 with Balla’s fervent political commitment to and explicit visual representation of fascism all but erased.

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Figure 0.1b  Giacomo Balla, Marcia su Roma (March on Rome), pre-1934 (verso of Velocità astratta) Oil on canvas. 260 × 332 cm. Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome.

What is a viewer to make of these two sides of Balla, of futurism, of art under fascism? How can these two sides be held together? Could curatorial choices achieve that goal in a meaningful way in the space of an exhibition? Such questions are far from unique to the case of Balla: they go to the heart of the problem of art made under fascism and the ways this art has been exhibited to the public since the end of Mussolini’s regime. They also remind us of the ever-present specter of fascism, rendered invisible but lurking in the shadows of politics, art, and life. Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today seeks to examine how exhibitions after the Second World War and until our times have shaped collective memory, historical narratives, and political discourse around the Italian ventennio, as the fascist twenty-year period was called. The volume that follows treats fascism as both a historical moment and a major paradigm. It strives to understand how art and fascism intersected with contemporary politics in different postwar decades. What are the main curatorial strategies and what is the continued cultural relevance of art exhibitions focusing on the fascist period? Are there differences when exhibitions on Italian art under fascism are mounted in Italy or abroad? What voices have been excluded from these exhibitions, what absences can be detected and why? What are the responsibilities of art institutions, academics, curators, and other cultural mediators when shaping the narrative of art under fascism

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for the public? Finally, what different strategies could be implemented in future shows to grapple with these questions? We have invited an international and interdisciplinary group of art historians, architectural historians, design historians, and cultural historians, both early-career and established, as well as authors, museum directors, and curators, to discuss exhibitions on fascism. We have been particularly careful to include historically marginalized voices of women and authors of color. Interweaving historical perspectives, critical theory, and direct accounts of exhibitions by people who conceived them, studied them, or experienced them, the volume presents an innovative approach to the growing field of exhibition history. It takes into account the multifaceted and often unexamined specificity of art shows, including architecture and exhibition design, curatorial choices and institutional history, cultural diplomacy and political history, theories of viewership and the construction of collective memory. Studies of exhibition history have tended to focus on either the institutional history and politics or the curatorial and experiential components.9 To date, no critical study has been dedicated to the history of postwar exhibitions on fascism, or the intersections between scholarly studies and curatorial practices on this subject. In the book that follows, we contend that there are interconnections among exhibitions’ content and form and that these relationships are historically relevant. Our goal is to participate in an intellectual history of exhibitions. Beyond exhibition studies, we aim to provide new perspectives on the historiography, memory, and understanding of fascist art and culture from a contemporary standpoint. After the end of the Cold War, a generation of scholars in Italy and abroad significantly revised a largely formalist history of fascist art by exploring art’s role in defining fascist ideology and constructing consensus, and countless monographic studies have delved into specific figures, movements, or themes.10 As right-wing populism emerged internationally, beginning in the 2010s, scholars have explored with increasing attention the legacy—both physical and cultural—of fascism and its presence in the current historical moment. Authors have researched the haunting persistence of the fascist past in contemporary art practice of the postwar decades and have investigated the physical presence of fascist monuments in contemporary modes of representation, from legislation and literature to art and cinema.11 Curating Fascism builds on this growing field of study, adding to it the question of the current relevance and political responsibility of curating fascism. We are conscious that scholarship and exhibitions have different aims, requirements, and institutional parameters. We have chosen to examine a variety of exhibitions, both large and small, traditional and experimental, curated by professional curators, scholars, and non-traditional figures such as fiction writers, historians, and photojournalists. Considering the various ways through which exhibition catalogs have functioned in these shows, Curating Fascism assesses how catalogs bridge scholarship and curatorial practice. In addition, the book ponders the ways catalogs function as repositories for the nuances or critical issues that are avoided in the shows. We therefore raise questions about how information about fascism is communicated in exhibitions, and to whom. Is the information addressing the general public or the specialist? Is it aimed at the local community or international audiences, actual exhibition visitors or future readers?

Introduction

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This book feels particularly timely to us, not least because it will be published during the upcoming centenary of the rise of the Fascist regime. The near future promises several important new contributions to the field, especially in the growing areas of colonial studies.12 Given the current international debate about the haunting presence of a troubling past through art and monuments, it seems crucial to consider that we can no longer continue to “celebrate only one side of a painful shared history,”13 as Neil MacGregor, former director of the National Gallery in London, has perceptively noted. Through exhibitions, as with monuments and art, “we are writing not so much our imagined history as our hoped-for future.”14 The image we selected to illustrate the book’s cover hopefully does that: part of Roma Negata, a collaborative exhibition project between photographer Rino Bianchi and author Igiaba Scego, it portrays Ruth Gebresus, an Ethiopian-Italian educator, standing in front of the fascist-era Cinema Impero in Rome. As we look at the modernist architecture and the elegant signage of this movie theater, the word “IMPERO” (empire) reminds us of a history of violence, which is tangibly present but has been traditionally erased from exhibitions and historical narratives. The word, emblazoned on the walls of a cinema,  may further lead us to reflect on the fascist empire’s deep reliance on grand displays of spectacle and theatricality, themes that continue to permeate postwar exhibitions on fascist-era art. Gebresus’s presence, her gaze toward the camera, and her activity as an educator speak to the political responsibility and the pedagogical potential of exhibitions. We have organized Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today into four thematic parts. Part I, titled “Rethinking Historical Exhibitions in Italy,” critically examines key questions on how shows on fascism have evolved since the postwar period, from curatorial practices to architectural settings and the politics of memory. The continuing phenomenon of exhibitions mounted on the subject of art under fascism is vast. In the last decade alone, many major shows have been dedicated to periods, themes, individual movements, critics, or artists. For this volume, we have selected three representative case studies of survey exhibitions: Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s 1967 Arte moderna in Italia, 1915–1935 in Florence, Renato Barilli’s 1982 Annitrenta in Milan, and Germano Celant’s 2018 Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics, Italia 1918–1943, also in Milan. These shows exemplify three versions of the mega-exhibition model, curated by influential male curators, characterized by huge curatorial efforts, important venues, hundreds of works, remarkable public success, and fierce intellectual debate. In the volume’s opening essay, art and architectural historian Luca Quattrocchi compares the curatorial choices behind the first two shows. He contends that different contemporary political discourse in the 1960s and 1980s shaped these shows’ respective public and critical receptions. Ragghianti chose works based on what he believed to be ideologically neutral formalism as an antidote to fascist propaganda. While his art for art’s sake approach contributed to the show’s public triumph, astute critics intuited a dangerous rehabilitation of fascist culture in the separation of art from politics. Two decades later, Barilli’s decision to exhibit all forms of visual culture, both high and low, evoking the ventennio’s exhibition models, was enormously successful with the general public but provoked harsh and politically conscious criticism on the part of influential intellectuals of the time, who considered the exhibition euphoric and even nostalgic.

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Further reflecting on the Annitrenta exhibition, art historian Denis Viva contextualizes the Milanese show as part of the tendency toward individualism and political disengagement in Italy in the 1980s. He contends that Barilli justified his socalled “ethnographic” approach, aimed at documenting the painting, design, fashion, music, and atmosphere of the 1930s and extending the exhibition beyond the museum walls into the city of Milan, through contemporary notions of pluralism and willful historical detachment from the fascist period. Viva links this call for heterogeneity and non-hierarchical history to the Italian politics of pluralism prominent in the 1980s, which were used to address fragmentation, social conflicts, and political radicalisms. Viva’s essay is followed by a brief interview with Barilli, the curator of Annitrenta, who takes the reader behind the scenes of his show while looking back on it from today’s perspective. Barilli discusses the delicate political diplomacy behind such a monumental endeavor, explaining the convergence of the political agenda of Milan’s socialist mayor, Carlo Tognoli, and the curator’s vision for the show. Despite the harsh criticism, Barilli defends his show as an innovative one that presented the 1930s in all its complexity, blurring high and low, and anticipating later curatorial strategies such as those used by Celant for Post Zang Tumb Tuuum in 2018. In the next chapter, the volume’s editors examine Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics Italia 1918–1943, privately mounted by the Prada Foundation. We contend that Celant’s ambition to represent an era in its totality developed precedents set by Ragghianti and Barilli, which depoliticized fascist art and celebrated its desirability, although each critic’s political trajectory was different. Like previous shows, contemporary politics shaped Post Zang Tumb Tuuum, reflecting its historical moment’s rise of right-wing political voices in Italy and the world. This Italian show was the first to include international scholarship in the catalog and elicited responses around the world. We unpack Celant’s curatorial premises of totality, neutrality, and transparency. When Post Zang Tumb Tuuum is taken as a series of open questions, it can become a starting point for reflecting on new models for exhibiting the art of this troubling period. Other kinds of exhibition in Italy have been devoted to tragic aspects of this historical moment such as the Shoah. In his chapter, cultural historian Robert Gordon examines the role of exhibitions in constructing the memory and history of the Holocaust in post-fascist Italy. The author charts the creation and migrating staging of the exhibition and museum-monument to deportation near Fossoli in Central Italy— the principal transit camp for Italian Jews and others destined for Auschwitz. The networks of cultural operators, aesthetics, and complex debates that surrounded this project from its conception in the 1970s, its closure in the 2000s, and today’s temporary installation in Florence, illustrate the tensions involved in Italy’s still unresolved coming-to-terms with the Shoah and the wider history and memory of fascism. Often ignored in studies of exhibition histories are the architectural sites in which the shows are housed. Part I closes with an essay by art historian Romy Golan on the ways architectural containers used during fascism negotiate their past functions in postwar exhibitions. Golan argues that postwar exhibitions functioned as palimpsests, superimposing traces of past exhibitions that took place in the same space. She compares exhibition designs during the ventennio to those designed in post-fascist

Introduction

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Italy, with particular attention to pre- and post-war continuity in the use of Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, examining how exhibitions staged in this space after the war contended with their container’s historical past. Postwar exhibitions of fascist-era art are not unique to Italy. As a subject for shows, they have generated large audiences outside Italy and raise questions regarding how to display the art of this period to non-Italian viewers. Part II of the volume, entitled “Exhibitions of Fascism around the World,” will widen the lens to examine shows about Italian fascism in other countries such as the UK, Brazil, Germany, and the USA. As these essays show, in different ways each country has shaped exhibitions of fascist-era art according to its own national needs, interests, and public, in most cases following the Italian lead of diplomatically avoiding uncomfortable or potentially problematic presentations of the fascist past. Art historian and curator Rosalind McKever considers how exhibitions of modern Italian art held in Britain throughout the ventennio reveal the country’s changing relationship with the Fascist regime and modern art. She shows that postwar exhibitions of fascist-era art were connected to the collecting practices of the Londonbased American Eric Estorick (1913–93). Examining these little-known exhibitions, McKever believes that the avoidance of political interpretations in exhibitions earlier in the twentieth century is crucial to how art made under the regime has been framed by institutions in recent decades, in whose titles what she calls “the F-word” rarely appears. Brazil’s postwar history is intertwined with Italian immigration during the war. This connection between Italy and Brazil has complicated exhibitions of Italian fascistera art in Brazil. Art historian and museum director Ana Magalhães discusses a group of Italian paintings acquired by Italian-Brazilian industrialist, Francisco (Ciccillo) Matarazzo Sobrinho (1898–1977), on the advice of the powerful Italian fascist art critic and Mussolini’s lover, Margherita Sarfatti (1880–1961), for South America’s first museum of modern art, the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM) (now part of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo [MAC USP]). Magalhães contends that Brazilian historiography has struggled with these works due to their association with the fascist ventennio. She ponders how to study them and the figures behind them as a legacy for the most important Brazilian collection of twentieth-century art. In a nuanced reframing of curating fascism, art historian and curator Miriam Paeslack examines the curatorial strategies she employed in Photographic Recall: Rationalist Italian Architecture in Contemporary German Art, a small show organized at the Anderson Art Gallery, University at Buffalo (SUNY) in 2019. Like Golan, Paeslack focuses on fascist-era architecture, but she does so from a different perspective. Her exhibition confronts a schism in Italy’s and Germany’s processing of the architectural traces of fascism in their respective landscapes. Following the German term to capture this processing of the past, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, postwar German and Italian artists engaged architecture through photographs and videos to recapture the enduring relevance of fascism’s cultural, aesthetic, and personal repercussions. Paeslack shows that the interplay of contemporary photography with its subject—and its curatorial conceptualization through

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selection of works, texts, maps, and programming—can contribute to a new dialogue amongst museum professionals, scholars, artists, and the public. Many exhibitions of fascist-era art both in Italy and abroad include design objects from the period. Design historians Elena Dellapiana and Jonathan Mekinda contend that these are far from the neutral objects they purport to be: whether included in shows mounted in Italy or abroad, they give the viewer a misleading and uncritical sense of “feeling at home” through period rooms, displays of intimate objects, furniture, and textiles made with exquisite craftsmanship related to the country’s postwar “Made in Italy” identity. Tracing a set of vases by Gio Ponti made for Mussolini and his lover back to its fascist roots, the authors argue for the need to extract these objects from the context of “decoration” and for the importance of reconstructing their histories and design processes to provide a more critical understanding of this period. Part II concludes with an interview with art historian and curator Emily Braun on her 1990 exhibition, Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, shown in New York and Ferrara. This was the first exhibition to broach the fraught topic of Jewish artists under fascism, a theme regularly omitted from shows on fascist-era art, which fail to examine the repercussions of antisemitic laws and the Holocaust on artistic production. Braun describes the complex international politics involved and the relationships she constructed with family members of the artists, as well as the importance of considering the historical context unapologetically, both for Jewish and non-Jewish viewers. Braun’s chapter, like Gordon’s, opens the question of the absence or downplaying of the Holocaust in many exhibitions devoted to this epoch, leading into Part III of the book, where we pinpoint what we call “Absences,” or areas of curatorial practices where we note exclusions, silences, and blind spots. The first chapter is by literary historian John Champagne, who addresses the absence of discussions of homosexuality in exhibitions on fascist-era art. Despite the claim that the repression of homosexuality was fundamental to fascism’s anthropological revolution, prominent male artists had male lovers and explored homoerotic feelings via the male nude. Champagne investigates how postwar exhibitions have coped with the troubling nudes by Corrado Cagli and Filippo de Pisis, arguing that the instability of these representations leaves them open to fascist, antifascist, and non-fascist readings. Such instability is queer in its refusal to know fascism’s relationship to male homoeroticism. Raffaele Bedarida’s chapter analyzes the narratives through which exhibitions have presented antifascist artists, from Arte contro la barbarie organized in 1944 immediately  after the liberation of Rome, to the 2018 Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. By focusing on The Chinese Hero and Concentration Camp, two paintings by Giustizia e Libertà activist Carlo Levi, who was persecuted but also exhibited by the regime, Bedarida argues that post-fascist shows in Italy consistently included but failed to address pre-Civil War antifascism, ultimately reiterating a strategy utilized by the Fascist regime to neutralize dissent. Major exhibitions on fascist-era art have excluded critical questions of gender. Literary historian Lucia Re provides a compelling example of a smaller show that addressed this absence: I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista (2016–19). Through a tactful use of photographs from the archives of Sant’Antonio

Introduction

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Abate psychiatric hospital in Teramo, and documents from the fascist era pertaining to women’s roles, the show provided a thought-provoking account of gender norms, ideas of racial degeneration, the demographic campaign, the control of sexuality and eroticism, the criminalization of abortion and birth control, and the fascist reinvention of hysteria as a category to legitimate women’s confinement and punishment. Still another excluded voice has been Italy’s colonial past. Discussing the 1993 exhibition Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940, historian Nicola Labanca grapples with Italy’s belated and inadequate public discourse on its colonial history and the enduring myth of the “good Italians” (italiani brava gente). Dedicated to Italian architecture in the African colonies, Architettura italiana d’oltremare was the first show after the ventennio to focus on Italian colonialism and is still to date the largest on this subject. The author argues that despite the merit of showcasing an overlooked aspect of Italian history and initiating a phase of more rigorous archival research, the exhibition ultimately celebrated Italian colonial architecture for its beauty and as an act of modernization. We close Part III with an essay by visual studies scholar Shelleen Greene, who examines both the submerged histories of Italian colonialism and an innovative recent exhibition that responds to this absence: Roma negata: percorsi postcoloniali nella città (2014). Organized not by established Italian curators but rather by the Italian writer of Somali origin Igiaba Scego and the Italian photojournalist Rino Bianchi, and not inside a public museum or private foundation, Roma Negata moves out into the city by examining the remnants of the empire that are still present in Roman quotidian life. Bianchi photographs African Italians in proximity to the city’s architectural spaces and monuments, thereby (re)activating memories of the colonial past as they persist in the present. Scego’s essays recount her walk through the city, mapping out a physical and psychic territory that connects the fascist ventennio to the geopolitical present, characterized by violent anti-immigration policies and the rise of “Fortress Europe.” Greene’s chapter opens the door to innovative strategies for curating fascism today and the final part of the volume, titled “Curatorial Practices.” What new, ethical, and critical curatorial possibilities could be imagined for future exhibitions on fascistera art? Certain current exhibition practices, such as reconstructing the past, can be both challenging and misleading and need to be carefully rethought, according to art historian Vanessa Rocco. She examines the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), a phantasmagoric propaganda triumph mounted by the regime in Rome in 1932, 1937, and 1942, where people were encouraged to submit pro-fascist artifacts and worship “fact-based” photographs. Comparing original installation shots with a 2018 “reenactment” of the MRF at the Prada Foundation’s Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics Italia 1918–1943, Rocco explores ways of rehanging an original nefarious exhibition without fetishizing it, addressing the need for responsibility when engaging in rehangs. Rocco shows that the responsibility to educate viewers lies in sensitive curatorial practices. Vivien Greene and Susan Thompson, the curators of the exhibition Italian Futurism (1909–1944): Reconstructing the Universe at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2014, discuss their strategies for alerting the viewer to the problematic historical moment under consideration. The curators assembled an

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international advisory committee to help address their greatest challenge: the final ramp, which focused on the 1930s, the decade most haunted by Italian fascism. As visitors ascended the historic rotunda, they experienced a shift in tenor, which ended with an uncomfortable confluence of aesthetics and politics. Thoughtful didactics, an audio guide, a documentary film, and uneasy music underlined the tangled associations between futurism and fascism. The problem of how to represent fascist-era art is relevant not only for temporary exhibitions but also for museums. To discuss this, we interviewed Gabriella Belli, the founding director of the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART). Between 1987 and 1991, Belli created one of Italy’s most prominent collections of Italian modernism, which includes a large amount of art from the fascist era. We asked her to comment on her curatorial choices dealing with the difficult heritage of fascist art and its centrality in Italy’s modernist canon. In addition to discussing the art collection, Belli addresses the importance of MART’s archival collection and the museum’s acquisition of the papers of Margherita Sarfatti, fascism’s most prominent curator and Mussolini’s lover. Turning to future possible exhibition strategies, art historian and curator Sharon Hecker ponders an ethical way to show the art of this epoch in a manner that effectively intertwines its aesthetic intensity with the realities of human tragedy. She suggests presenting the art alongside photographic and painted representations by artists of their studios, as a way to add to the glittering visual dynamics of their artworks the often troubling personal and collective circumstances of each artist’s trajectory under fascism. She suggests that this approach could lead viewers to look behind the art’s visual power to glimpse the makers in their real or imagined workspaces, eliciting the contradictions, dissonances, complexities, and tragedies of the context in which artists moved and artworks were produced, while mitigating the risk of lionizing, fetishizing, spectacularizing, or romanticizing the artists or their workplaces. We close the book with an interview with author and curator Maaza Mengiste, in which she discusses her ongoing online exhibition, Project 3541. Mengiste intends her project to be “an artistic and educational endeavor that uses written, visual, and oral histories to provide an intimate perspective on the global and personal consequences of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War.”15 As with Roma Negata, which was not conceived by professional curators, Mengiste, a recognized author, moves beyond the museum setting and into the global, public internet. She invites the world into the curatorial process by asking people to contribute personal family photographs, letting the photos tell their own stories about the consequences of Italian colonialism on Ethopians. Mengiste suggests that an engagement with the private register can open new channels of communication to begin to address the sensitive topic of Italian fascism, which includes finding a new language for ownership of the past, including its painful or shameful sides. Instead of erasing or avoiding the tragic past, mistakes such as colonialism are kept visible and can therefore be processed. We realize that every book, like every exhibition, is a product of its time. From the inception of Curating Fascism to its publication, the political landscape on both sides of the Atlantic, and the use of the word “fascism,” have changed. A world pandemic has transformed the way we live and experience exhibitions. Germano Celant, who had

Introduction

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agreed to conduct an interview with us, tragically contracted COVID-19 and passed away. We see this book as a document of the present moment and hope that it will open new doors and raise critical questions for future scholarship and curatorial practices.

­Notes 1 Novecento. Arte e Storia in Italia, exh. cat., Scuderie Papali al Quirinale, Mercati Traianei (Milan: Skira, 2001), ill. II.9 and II.9a, 102–3 and 143–4, including bibliography and exhibition history. 2 Ludovico Pratesi, “La marcia capovolta del futurista Balla,” La Repubblica, December 30, 2000, https://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2000/12/30/lamarcia-capovolta-del-futurista-balla.html (accessed September 15, 2021). 3 Not all reviewers focused on this work: see, for example, Adriana Polveroni, “‘Novecento’, l’arte racconta la storia,” La Repubblica, December 29, 2000, https:// www.repubblica.it/online/cultura_scienze/scuderie/scuderie/scuderie.html (accessed September 15, 2021). 4 Maurizio Calvesi, Giacomo Balla. Dall’Autospalla all’Autodolore. Opere 1902–1947, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 1994), 7. 5 Ibid. 6 Website, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, https://www.pinacoteca-agnelli.it/ visit/lo-scrigno/ (accessed September 22, 2021). Only the futurist recto side of the work is mentioned: “a painting by Balla of 1913 on the theme of the speed of the automobile.” Calvesi gives some information about the verso in the collection catalog, including a small reproduction of Marcia su Roma following a full-page reproduction of the futurist recto side. Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli al Lingotto (Milan: Bompiani, 2002), 106–8. 7 Gisela Williams, “In Rome, an Apartment Rich in Color and History Opens to the Public,” The New York Times, June 11, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/11/tmagazine/casa-balla-rome-design.html (accessed April 22, 2022). 8 Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, “Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo” (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe). Leaflet (Milan: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, 1915). 9 Literature in English language includes, most prominently, foundational essays such as Brian O’Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986) and Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations 4 (Spring 1988): 73–102. A milestone for institutional history with emphasis on curatorial practice is Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). Bruce Altshuler’s two-volume collection of primary sources shows how exhibition history achieved recognition as a field of study: Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, 1863–1959 (London and New York: Phaidon, 2008); and Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History, 1962–2002 (London and New York: Phaidon, 2013). 10 The literature is vast. English-language publications include Mark Antliff and Matthew Affron, eds., Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture &

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Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities. Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004); Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum, eds., Donatello among the Blackshirts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Among the many excellent Italian publications, the most comprehensive is Sileno Salvagnini, Il Sistema delle Arti in Italia: 1919–1943 (Bologna: Minerva Edizioni, 2000). See also Davide Lacagnina, ed., Immagini e forme del potere. Arte, critica e istituzioni in Italia fra le due guerre (Palermo: Edizioni di Passaggio, 2011). 11 Among others: Noa Steimatsky, Italian Locations: Reinhabiting the Past in Postwar Cinema (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Marcello Flores, Simon Levis Sullan, Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci, and Enzo Traverso, eds., Storia della Shoah in Italia. Vicende, memorie, rappresentazioni, Vol II: Memorie, rappresentazioni, eredità (Turin: UTET, 2010); Emilia Héry, Caroline Pane, Claudio Pirisino, eds., Mémoires du ­Ventennio. Représentations et enjeux mémoriels du régime fasciste de 1945 à aujourd’hui (Neuville sur Sarone: Éditions Chemins de tr@ verse, 2019); Michele Dantini, ed., “Continuità|discontinuità nella storia dell’arte e della cultura italiane del Novecento. Arti visive, società e politica tra fascismo e neoavanguardie,” Piano B 3, no. 1 (special issue, 2018); Romy Golan, Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021). 12 Upcoming publications include Carmen Belmonte, ed., A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlife of Fascist-Era Architecture, Monuments, and Works of Art in Italy, (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, expected in 2022), based on the eponymous conference at the Bibliotheca Hertziana and the American Academy in Rome (2019); Carmen Belmonte and Laura Moure Cecchini, eds., “Modern Italy: Visualizing Italian Colonial Culture,” Modern Italy (special issue, expected in 2022); Charles Burdett, Charles Leavitt, Giacomo Lichtner, Giuliana Pieri, and Guido Bartolini, eds., “Fascism in Italian Culture, 1945–2022,” Annali di Italianistica (special issue, expected in 2023). 13 Neil MacGregor, “Destroying Public Symbols of the Past Will Not Lead to a Juster Society. We Must Keep Our Mistakes Visible,” The Art Newspaper, September 6, 2021, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2021/09/06/destroying-public-symbols-of-thepast-will-not-lead-to-a-juster-society-we-must-keep-our-mistakes-visible (accessed November 7, 2021). 14 Ibid. 15 See https://www.project3541.com/ (accessed June 23, 2021).

­Part One

­Rethinking Historical Exhibitions in Italy

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1

Exhibiting Art of the Fascist Ventennio: Curatorial Choices, Installation Strategies, and Critical Reception from Arte Moderna in Italia 1915–1935 (Florence, 1967) to Annitrenta (Milan, 1982) Luca Quattrocchi Translated by Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker

In republican Italy, the historical and critical elaboration of artistic and architectural production during the fascist ventennio was a slow, belated process that advanced with sudden jolts. It was spoiled by aprioristic ideological oppositions rather than proceeding, without absences or nostalgia, by a coherent, conscious reflection comforted by considerable documentary evidence. Amidst controversy, censure, and exploitation, exhibitions played a fundamental role, given the opportunity and enormous responsibility of reaching a wider, more heterogeneous public than the specialist audience to whom scholarly essays are addressed. This responsibility is longlasting: the first major Italian exhibitions on the art of the fascist ventennio have greatly conditioned the practice of “curating fascism” in Italy today, with their approach to history and memory—from marginal to edulcorated—and to exhibition methods from the uncritical juxtaposition of artworks to the theatricalization of exhibition design.1 The large exhibition Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935 opened at Palazzo Strozzi in Florence in February 1967 (Figures 1.1 and 1.2), a few months late due to the disastrous flood of November 4, 1968. It was curated by art historian and critic Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti with authoritative scholars.2 This was the first attempt in Italy to respond to why, in Ragghianti’s words, “a past to which we are so closely connected has receded so far from presence and memory to the point of becoming forgotten, of not intervening in critical consciousness.”3 Ragghianti’s courageous temporal cutoff date does not coincide with Mussolini’s twenty-year rule: on the one hand, Ragghianti showed art under fascism, especially during the 1920s, as a continuation of previous tendencies and poetics of fascism; on the other hand, even if not stated, 1935 is considered the threshold beyond which the interference of politics in art became more pressing, its ideological and propagandistic use gaining

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Figure 1.1  Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1967. Installation of a gallery on the second floor. Fototeca Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Courtesy of Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca.

Figure 1.2  Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1967. Installation of a gallery on the first floor. Fototeca Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. Courtesy of Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca.

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the upper hand. Ragghianti’s exhibition was not intended to be about the relationship between art and fascism or a political exhibition: it was an exhibition of paintings and sculptures, a vast review of Italian artistic production between 1915 and 1935. Basing his vision on a rigorous Crocean approach, Ragghianti presented a panorama of “pure” art, convinced that art is an autonomous expression, not an appendix, to a dominant culture or political practice: in over fifty rooms, Palazzo Strozzi’s four floors displayed over 2,100 pieces by 241 artists selected for their self-sufficient, intrinsic “qualitative dignity.”4 Impressive for its richness and completeness, although with some imbalances among the artists, the exhibition proposed a “census, as vast and capillary as possible.”5 Research for the exhibition occupied Ragghianti and his collaborators for a long time and included many who had lived during that era, including critics Giuseppe Marchiori, Raffaele De Grada, Fortunato Bellonzi, and Antonello Trombadori; art historian Cesare Gnudi; architects and theorists Agnoldomenico Pica and Alberto Sartoris; and painter Virgilio Guzzi. While excluding, due to expediency and non-responsiveness to the criterion of “qualitative dignity,” the openly encomiastic works of the regime and most fascist “public art,” the exhibition aimed to represent the tendencies of the period, from late Symbolism and Divisionism to Futurism, Metaphysical Art to the Novecento, Second Futurism to the Six of Turin, the Roman School to the Naïfs, Chiaristi to Lombard Abstractionists, the Italiens de Paris, and isolated personalities, with few significant absences.6 Beyond the declared autonomy of the artistic facts, Ragghianti did not shy away from addressing art’s relationship to fascism, which “was of interest to artists as never before”7 through union organization, exhibitions, competitions, prizes, promotion abroad, and the growth of art schools. However, according to Ragghianti, despite clumsy, ineffective attempts, a totalitarian policy of the arts was never implemented, unwittingly offering the beginning of a “neutral” vision of art under fascism that, distorting and simplifying Ragghianti’s thinking, was destined to become a hasty collective self-absolution: “there was never a compression or an imposition of political service, such as occurred in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. More often corruption was preferred.”8 Ragghianti adds that “during the period politically dominated by fascism, art was produced in substantial and unwanted freedom,”9 before concluding, scandalously, that “in my opinion, this period was a splendid season of art in Italy, for the intensity and richness of artistic and human messages.”10 In contrast to the anti-historicism that denies everything produced under fascism, Ragghianti proposed an exhibition that was “historical or namely, born of rethinking and revision,”11 therefore experimental and questioning, since the historian’s task is to replace schemes and conventions with “a problematic reconstruction that opens up and arouses objective possibilities of understanding and the capacity to distinguish.”12 According to a conception based on a Fiedlerian matrix,13 this was to be an exhibition that proposed not judgments but “facts,” with works that must first be fact-checked and then assessed for their intrinsic qualities rather than prejudicial schemes. For Ragghianti exhibitions do not serve to demonstrate but, tautologically, to show. To show in order to see, and to see in order to understand: in this sense the Florentine exhibition

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is a work of “virtually active” knowledge, since “it comes from a problematic process rather than from questionable certainties or, even worse, from applied formulas.”14 The purovisibilità (pure visibility) idealism of Ragghianti’s choices, which today are difficult to agree with given the deliberate marginalization of the consistent, widespread political conditioning to which artistic production was subjected, should be situated within the social and cultural context of the 1960s. This epoch was not ready to deal directly with the thorny and, for many, embarrassing question of the relationship between art and fascism, to which it preferred a convenient erasure that today, almost a century after fascism, leaves many issues unresolved, especially the need for an exhibition that represents the art of the fascist era in all its complexity. Ragghianti’s moral stature as an antifascist, a partisan, and a political prisoner, besides being a guarantee of anti-revisionism, proved to be an effective tool for presenting an unprecedented, unprejudiced reasoning about art under fascism and for opening further research that would consider those relationships. The exhibition’s public success (over sixty thousand visitors) was predictably matched by numerous and discordant, often opposing, critical responses. Beyond the “elephantiasis” and “congestion” noted by all, and beyond the appreciations of collaborators such as Virgilio Guzzi15 and Agnoldomenico Pica16 and the right-wing press (Il Tempo, Il Secolo XIX) or center-right press (Il Popolo) who saw in the exhibition a great, necessary “historical-critical revision”17 of a “heroic period,”18 for many critics the show’s problem was its voluntary abstraction from the period’s historical facts and their connections with artistic facts, to which was associated, partly as a consequence, insufficient selection of the works, uncritically aligned. Historian and art critic Roberto Tassi insisted on the invalidating absence of historical facts, starting with the show’s chronological ends, which he considered arbitrary.19 He noted a need for contextualization, considering it inescapable regarding such a complex, controversial period. If the primary need of criticism “is that of a thorough, conscious and severe revision of values,”20 the Florence exhibition was, for Tassi, inadequate and ineffective, since “by reiterating illusory values and worse, by exhuming dead ones, placing everything on the same level again as if there were no perspective, it causes that face to drown again in the indiscriminate magma, so that light is once again suffocated, once again the contours are blurred or erased.”21 This is a radically different conception of the role of exhibitions from the one Ragghianti employed: against the horizontal vision of an “autonomous signification” of the artwork, left to the visitor to evaluate, Tassi sustained the need, especially in an exhibition on the ventennio, for active and proactive critical recognition that selects and interprets with clarity. But one must acknowledge that, on this occasion, the “accurate, rigorous and severe revision of values”22 Tassi hoped for is shortsighted, for “it is necessary to give life to studies that bring artists such as Spadini, Balla, Severini, Sironi, Campigli back to their rightful scaled-down position.”23 Historian and art critic Antonio Del Guercio’s position was similar but more nuanced. He agreed with the idea of a large exhibition that would match the qualitative production with a wider, more heterogeneous general fabric, but disagreed with the chronological terms, considering the initial segment false24 and the final cutoff date of 1935—rather than the end of the war—incongruous. Even for Del Guercio,

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who collaborated on the exhibition, history’s absence constituted a conspicuous, anachronistic weakness of the show: he believed that Ragghianti could not resolve the problem of “value judgement and the art-society relationship” by “issuing a blank bill of exchange to the most radical idealism.”25 But it was especially the exhibition design that, according to Del Guercio, thwarted the praiseworthy organizational commitment to the detriment of readability and comprehension, since “it contributes to softening the contrasts, the diversions, the points of novelty,” so that “the different levels and different cultural and historical situations unfold along undifferentiated, anonymous exhibition segments.”26 The spartan installation, entrusted to the City of Florence’s architect, Emanuele Marcelli, was tiring and unfortunate. To gain exhibition space, he inattentively used crude wooden panels and canvas-covered frames, cluttering and dividing up the spaces without any possibility, given the quantity of works to be exhibited, of establishing a relationship with the rooms of the Renaissance palace. The effect, both labyrinthine and uniform, impeded viewers from orienting themselves critically: even if in its undifferentiated alignment of a cataloging rather than museological nature, the layout seemed to reflect Ragghianti’s horizontal, census-like reading of the period. (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Despite their reservations—on the absence of fascism, critical abstention, excess of works, congested setting—many commentators acknowledged the exhibition as an opening that offered much material from which to start reasoning. Painter and art critic Leonardo Borgese noted that the “fascist stamp or tone is almost not understood,” while “ethically engrained, and also aesthetically”;27 art critic Lorenza Trucchi felt that the exhibition setting “ends up being in its double assumption idealistic and experimental, dangerously equivocal” because Ragghianti had “mythologized a bit of everything and everyone”28; and art historian and critic Mario De Micheli believed that Ragghianti’s orchestrated operation was an important starting point and stimulus for future indepth studies, in order to move from the repertoire “to a free and unprejudiced critical examination.”29 There was also condemnation without appeal, especially from art critics close to or aligned with the Communist Party. Filiberto Menna considered the exhibition a serious episode of “cultural backwardness” in which “we are simply witnessing the juxtaposition of an endless number of works absolutely devoid of any artistic value,”30 overturning Ragghianti’s formalist standard from a Marxist perspective. Nello Ponente defined the exhibition as an interminable roll call of the dead, living, departed, and forgotten, wherein the dead outnumbered the living: it was “an attempt at an impossible discourse” because “the idea behind the exhibition is reactionary,”31 speciously cloaked in a philologism that is an end in itself, devoid of verification or ideological analysis. The fiercest criticism came from art historian and expert in twentieth-century art, Giuliano Briganti, who, in L’Espresso, began: “Enough bad things have already been said about this Florentine exhibition … about this new sad sub specie flood of squalid painting … but perhaps not all the bad things that it deserves have been said yet.”32 The exhibition’s worst defect, “which involves an equally serious responsibility of a cultural order,” is in the lack of method that leads to inevitable “formless confusion”; for Briganti, the chronological limits distorted the real course of events, and he

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found confused and anti-historical intentions, an unheard-of imbalance in the representation of the artists, and a lack of selective spirit “due to a lack of knowledge on the subject.”33 Briganti ungenerously states this because in addition to those who had lived through the period, among the contributors were well-equipped young scholars like Marco Rosci, Enrico Crispolti, Antonio Del Guercio, and Corrado Maltese. For Briganti the show lacked “an adequate historical reconstruction including connections, unfolding of events, reciprocal relationships, analogies, connivance and (few) contrasts with Fascism, and finally a renewed judgment of value,” concluding that “the Novecento, whether we wanted it or not, had to be the pivot of the exhibition.”34 The relationship between art and the Fascist regime, for Briganti, had to be central and analyzed with a view to an unprecedented historical and critical assessment in which aesthetic evaluations, political reasons, and an exercise in collective self-awareness could converge. Italy was not prepared for this assessment: indeed, the only review among the hundreds on the exhibition that explicitly mentions the Fascist regime in its title appears in the American Saturday Review, “Art under Mussolini.” Its author, art historian and curator Katharine Kuh, considered the exhibition “an immense art show of considerable historic if not always of aesthetic interest”: in a labyrinthine layout that does not facilitate the visit, Italian art between the two wars demonstrates, according to Kuh, all its weakness, its passive dependence on Paris, and “sterile uniformity,” a sudden “fallow interlude” between two periods of productivity and creativity such as the avant-garde (futurism, metaphysics) and the “modern renaissance.”35 She agreed with Ragghianti that “during Fascism, Italian art remained relatively free,” but noted that the regression of painting and sculpture in the 1920s and 1930s coincided with Mussolini’s twenty-year rule.36 This simplistic view considers the art of the fascist era as a circumscribed and removable accident. It is also ill-informed, especially when Kuh thoughtlessly stated that “today only a few clumsy buildings and an occasional posturing statue remind us visually that Mussolini ever existed.”37 Despite her Italian frequentations (as curator of the 1956 Venice Biennale’s US Pavilion), her gaze on the recent architectural landscape and the immense, unwieldy fascist legacy was evidently distracted. Ragghianti responded indirectly to the criticisms with a double monographic issue of his magazine Critica d’arte dedicated to the exhibition a few months after its closure. The rich issue, which reproduces over three hundred of the displayed works, is introduced by Raffaele Monti,38 Ragghianti’s “deputy” as the secretary general of the exhibition’s technical committee. Monti reiterates Ragghianti’s principles behind the choices that guided the exhibition organizers, but with less convincing and more approximate arguments, insisting on the “marginality of the phenomenon”39 in reference to the interference of fascism in artistic production. To those who had reproached the exhibition for the way that “fascism seemed not to have existed,” he replied succinctly and somewhat thoughtlessly: “But documenting such a situation was not the task of an exhibition of this kind, rather someone who wanted, with a grotesque and essentially necrophilic taste, to draw attention to phenomena of political custom with which we are all familiar and that offer nothing new.”40

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On the contrary, many novelties, especially regarding the intricate relationship of artists with the regime, which was still under-investigated, would emerge in later years. Arte moderna in Italia succeeded, as Ragghianti desired, in opening the field to critical revisions and better-documented, in-depth research on the artistic facts and personalities of the fascist period in studies during the 1970s by Crispolti, Fernando Tempesti, Rossana Bossaglia, and Guido Armellini; more timely was research on architecture, from Cesare De Seta and Luciano Patetta to the important exhibition, curated by Patetta and Silvia Danesi, Il Razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo at the 1976 Venice Biennale. The next exhibition of dimensions and ambitions comparable to the Florentine one would only open in 1982: the Milan mega-show Gli Annitrenta: Arte e cultura in Italia. The grandiose event, which filled the Palazzo Reale and neighboring venues, was one of Italy’s first mass exhibition events, advertised through an effective marketing campaign, extraordinary media coverage, and public success.41 Curated by a group of scholars led by critic and art historian Renato Barilli, Annitrenta, as the subtitle suggests, did not focus on painting and sculpture alone, like Ragghianti’s exhibition, but attempted a comprehensive reconstruction of the decade through nineteen sections, including figurative arts, architecture and urban planning, graphics, decorative arts, design, photography, cinema, music, theater, fashion, and political and social life.42 Fifteen years after Florence, the Milanese show presented itself as an impressive, scrupulous summary of the state of research on 1930s art, with sections that were entrusted to specialists in each area. Visual culture’s relationship with the regime was central this time, even if, paradoxically, the weakest contribution was that of historians:43 “it can be asserted—Barilli affirmed retrospectively—that the great exhibition did not present significant novelties, if examined analytically sector by sector. Its strength came entirely from the spirit of synthesis, from totality.”44 A totality exhibited in spectacular installations created by Alfonso Grassi’s Milanese Studio MID, with multiple environment reconstructions populated by lictorian emblems and memorabilia. This theatrical and immersive approach risked appearing nostalgic if not celebratory; the organizers called it an “overview of ‘the years of consensus,’”45 but, given the difficult balance between replicas and expunctions from the fascist past, the show could appear almost consensual with the regime. What was interesting and new for Italy was the choice to take the exhibition metaphorically out of the museum, to bring fine art into the cultural and social flux of its time and approach visual culture beyond painting and sculpture’s aesthetic autonomy. However, the curators’ operational tools seemed inspired by the ventennio: Annitrenta responded to fascism’s aestheticization of politics with an aestheticization of culture. The result was homologating and distracting, when not occulting, thereby inaugurating in Italy a deplorable exhibition mode under the guise of spectacular superstructure, which has culminated with the recent exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum (2018). In an era in which reviews were occasions for critical interventions and stimuli to debate, unlike today, the controversy surrounding Annitrenta was enormous and heated; this induced Barilli to add a resentful preface to the catalog’s second edition, in which he responded to criticism and reiterated his positions and goals: to reconstruct an era in all its complexities and facets, protagonists and supporting actors, public

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and independent art, regime cults and daily life, in the belief that fascism was “a superstructure, an epiphenomenon, a broad umbrella called to cover, to protect profound movements that are very different from each other.”46 Criticism focused on the fact that the totality Barilli flaunted had been subjected to what art historian Antonio Pinelli described as a “showy process of purification from the most unpleasantly fascist aspects,”47 consequently giving a captivating and distorted, if unambiguous, image of the period. If, rightly, for architecture historian Franco Borsi it would have been desirable to have, in addition to the valid art historians, “some closer participation of historians,”48 critic Gillo Dorfles, who had lived through the 1930s, underlined the danger inherent in the theatrical reconstruction of the environments. For him this was one of the least “pleasant” periods in recent history, “and such as not to deserve an exhibition … an exaltation of too equivocal values that could overturn some of the few convictions acquired by the younger generations: that of the actual mediocrity of many artistic operations linked to fascism.”49 Tassi, the severe critic of Ragghianti’s show, took a more nuanced position: he appreciated some aspects of Annitrenta but feared that fascism’s true face “may be obliterated, veiled or forgotten, not helping the exhibition to overcome such an erasure,” and leading to equivocal interpretations.50 Briganti and the writer and poet Antonio Porta had serious doubts about the usefulness of an exhibition dealing with a complex, elusive problem such as the artistic and intellectual class’s relationship with fascism. The former, who ruthlessly commented on the 1967 show, disputed the ecumenical, non-selective curatorial choices, which risked flattening and confusing an already complex panorama. The exhibition’s meaning was supposed “to make the public understand … what was positive, … alive, … not entirely provincial, within the framework of fascism,” and in this sense “the exhibition does not help us much.”51 Porta, who saw the fascist state as a “Theater of the State”—a provincial and criminal staging between propaganda and unrealism— believed that the exhibition did not address the central knot of those years, namely, artists’ ambiguous relationship with power: “You cannot hide the missing answers by proposing … the great Theater.”52 The many installations boldly and casually mixed spectacularization and selfcensorship, through a glossy styling operation aimed at lightening up the most indigestible aspects of the regime’s “grand theater” evoked by Porta. One example, in the section “Political and Social Life,” was the reconstruction in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele of the metal structure in Mannesmann tubes built in 1934 by Persico and Nizzoli in the same place: a structure that was also used to support advertising billboards, but was created to propagate 1934’s fake political elections (PNF obtained 99.84 percent of the votes and 400 parliamentarians out of 400) through the repetition of Mussolini’s quotations and images, which the reconstruction purged, keeping the bare, anodyne framework (Figure  1.3). The “grand theater” showed even more through the reconstruction, in the “Art and Propaganda” section in Palazzo Reale’s Sala delle Cariatidi, of Baldessari’s installation created for the room on “Aviation and Fascism” at Milan’s 1934 Mostra dell’Aeronautica: the reconstruction repeated the slender structure with parabolic arches, but contradictorily avoided its blatantly propagandistic iconographic apparatus, which was integral to it politically and

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Figure  1.3  Annitrenta. Arte e cultura in Italia, Milano, 1982. Installation of the section titled Vita politica e sociale (Social and political life) in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. From Annitrenta. Arte e cultura in Italia, exh. cat., 2nd edn. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983), xiii.

culturally, incongruously comparing Baldessari’s structure to Nervi rather than, as is historically sensible, to Lissitzky (Figures 1.4 and 1.5). There was no shortage of appreciation, such as that of writer Giovanni Testori, and no lack of harsh criticism.53 For art critic Lea Vergine it was a “mephitic operation”;54 “a revival, remake, camouflage, reviled (but with reserve) and reproachable as a whole”; the “ghostly décor of a miserable Italy”;55 “the most erroneous reinterpretation of the decade that was to lead to the tragedies of [19]43–45”; and conducted with “incomprehensible arrogance and superficiality.”56 The architecture historian and critic Bruno Zevi dubbed it as “a dirty mess,” a “planned hodgepodge” that cynically mixed servants of power and critical voices; he stigmatized the “oceanic crowds that, driven

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Figure  1.4  Annitrenta. Arte e cultura in Italia, Milano, 1982. Installation of the section titled Arte e propaganda (Art and Propaganda) in the Sala delle Cariatidi in Palazzo Reale. Milan. Courtesy of Archivio Zita Mosca Baldessari.

by the unconscious of the Littorio, crowd the super-exhibition Annitrenta, unloading repressed nostalgia and unavowable affinities.”57 Vergine correctly wrote: “it is not the lictorian unconscious that comes out of the Milanese cauldron, but that of the PSI [Italian Socialist Party],” which saw in those years party secretary Bettino Craxi’s triumphal rise and firmly held power in Milan, governed from 1976 by socialist mayor Carlo Tognoli.58 Beyond the understandably disturbingly carefree installation, inevitable absences, and errors of evaluation, Annitrenta represented an important contribution, mostly anthologizing and summarizing, to knowledge of the art of the period. Certainly, it was partly a missed opportunity, where spectacularization was preferred to reflection

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Figure  1.5 Luciano Baldessari, Sala Aviazione e fascismo alla mostra dell’Aeronautica italiana (Gallery of Aviation and Fascism at the Italian Aeronautics Exhibition), Palazzo dell’Arte, Milan, 1934. Archivio Fotografico La Triennale di Milano.

and aesthetic hedonism led to self-censorship of the regime’s most sinister aspects, but it cannot be accused of revisionism, as demonstrated by the authoritative scholars’ catalog essays, still useful if dated. The most questionable part was the 1930s/1980s parallelism on which Barilli greatly insisted (and from which Fagone wisely kept distant), which he seemed to present as the exhibition’s main interpretive key and among its original motives. Under the banner “everything ‘returns’,”59 Barilli reinterpreted in contemporary fashion artistic events of the 1930s, which in his view were like distant incunabula or symmetrical situations of the 1980s’ triumphant, rampant postmodernism: it is legitimate to argue that the dilemma that opened in the 1930s, in architecture, between rationalists and monumentalists (Terragni or Piacentini?) prefigured the current one between the modern and the postmodern … it is admissible to join the lines of revivalism of the time and, for example, the great chapter opened by Sironi and his companions about public patronage, wall decoration of buildings for social use, with the analogous decorativism we are interested in today, or perhaps with the problem of urban furniture.60

Barilli went so far as to consider post-Novecento and the Scuola Romana as anticipations of the return to painting and figuration by contemporary so-called citazionismo and neo-expressionism artists.

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If one rightly recognizes that contemporary facts shed new light on past ones, often helping to exhume them from historical-critical oblivion, this is not the same as reading and interpreting them according to current issues in a light, profoundly ahistorical perspective. For Barilli, the 1930s and postmodernism shared a predilection for monumentalism, quotation, and eclecticism. But even if it were (certainly eclecticism did not connote art and architecture of the 1930s), fundamental aspects of postmodernism were lacking in the fascist years, such as light and sometimes lighthearted irony, the taste for quotation, decontextualized in easy dialogue with history and stories, making fun of one’s own game: all that could not be further from the rhetorical, heroic, pedantic, and didactic public and official art of the 1930s, or from the intimism or anxiety of artists not complicit with the regime, and sometimes of the complicit ones (such as Sironi). Barilli wrote that in the exhibition’s architecture section “the pole represented by architect Piacentini received its rightful importance (required by the current postmodern taste).”61 To consider Piacentini a precursor of postmodernism and devote ample space to him by virtue of this consideration is absurd, since Piacentini’s “rightful importance” cannot derive from an unreliable progeny, but from having been a key figure in mastering fascism’s politics of art (not only of architecture). Predictably, Barilli’s presentism was perplexing to many critics and elicited ferocious sarcasm from enemies of postmodernism, which had just celebrated its international triumph at the first Venice Architecture Biennale in 1980, accompanied by controversy. The fierce critical voices underlined what for them was an open confession: “if then this approach—commented Zevi with his usual caustic tone—serves to prove that postmodernism boasts numerous precedents in the rubbish and filth of the ventennio, very well.”62 Indirectly, even Ragghianti took a position on Annitrenta, when, after agreeing to participate in a conference on architecture of the 1930s connected to the exhibition, he had a clear, and clearly motivated, change of mind, refusing the invitation. Ragghianti wrote a courteous but firm letter to Mayor Tognoli: Neither as a historian, nor as an exponent of antifascism and resistance, can I approve of an undertaking which, due to inadequate culture, uncritically presents the Fascist regime, without its characteristics of oppression, violence and state crime. The history of the 1930s is the history of fascism and opposition to fascism: the terms of an objective judgment must not be subtracted from the public, excluded and replaced by an overwhelming image of fascism imposed by the force of persuasion and visual propaganda.63

­In his equally courteous reply, Tognoli, regretting Ragghianti’s resignation, was keen to specify that Annitrenta’s organization was not his, and that the practice of realization could raise “plausible perplexities.”64 Tognoli’s vaguely but honestly evoked “perplexities” constituted for Ragghianti the inevitable, serious results of a prejudicial distortion of historical vision: for Ragghianti it was unacceptable to present the regime and its work uncritically, favoring a primacy of imagery implemented with the same tools used by fascism itself: persuasion, propaganda, and spectacle.

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This was an absence of history that bore similarity to the criticism by commentators fifteen years earlier regarding the Florentine exhibition. The difference, fundamental for Ragghianti, was that the 1967 exhibition was of paintings and sculptures, while that of 1982 claimed to represent not only art, but the cultural, political, and social life of the 1930s, namely history—the history of a decade firmly in the hands of the fascist dictatorship and marked by its atrocities, which should not be forgotten.

Notes 1 See Luca Quattrocchi, “Esporre l’arte dell’era fascista. Cronache e storia,” Italia contemporanea 279 (2015): 529–44; and Luca Quattrocchi, “Ripensare l’arte del ventennio fascista: scelte espositive, allestimenti e ricezioni critiche. Dalla mostra fiorentina del 1967 a ‘Gli Annitrenta’ a Milano nel 1982,” in Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e l’arte in Italia tra le due guerre: Nuove ricerche intorno e a partire dalla mostra del 1967 Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, ed. Paolo Bolpagni and Mattia Patti (Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti Studi sull’arte, 2020), 33–44. 2 See Gioela Massagli, “Firenze, 1967: la mostra Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935,” Luk–Studi e attività della Fondazione Ragghianti 16 (2010): 215–23. 3 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, “Presentazione,” in Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935 (Florence: Marchi e Bertolli, 1967), ii. 4 Ibid., x. Published in April 1967, these numbers may be imprecise. 5 Ibid., ii. 6 The best-represented artists, based on the catalog: Filippo De Pisis (47 works), Giorgio Morandi (44), Ottone Rosai (38), Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, Osvaldo Licini (36 each), Felice Casorati and Pietro Marussig (32 each). Each of the following had over twenty works: Marino Marini, Pio Semeghini, Giacomo Manzù, Gino Rossi, Primo Conti, Virgilio Guidi, Carlo Levi, ­Roberto Melli, Mario Sironi, Arturo Tosi, and Massimo Campigli. 7 Ragghianti, Arte moderna, iii. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., iv. 10 Ibid., x. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., vii. 13 Ragghianti expressed admiration for this nineteenth-century German art theorist in “Il significato dell’opera di Fiedler,” Introduction to Konrad Fiedler, L’attività artistica: tre saggi di estetica e teoria della pura visibilità (Venice: Neri Pozza, 1963), 6–43. 14 Ragghianti, Arte moderna, x. 15 Virgilio Guzzi, “Venti anni d’arte italiana,” Il Tempo, March 8, 1967. 16 Agnoldomenico Pica, “A Firenze a Palazzo Strozzi la grande mostra ‘Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935,’” Domus 449 (April 1967). 17 Silvano Giannelli, “1915–1935: un ventennio che non fu poi tanto nero,” Il Popolo, March 4, 1967. 18 Venturino Lucchesi, “Rilanciato il periodo eroico della moderna pittura italiana,” Il Tempo, February 27, 1967. 19 Roberto Tassi, “Arte italiana a Firenze,” Paragone 207/27 (May 1967): 53.

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20 Roberto Tassi, “La mostra di Palazzo Strozzi,” L’approdo letterario, January–March 1967, 135. 21 Ibid., 136. 22 Tassi, “Arte italiana a Firenze,” 54. 23 Tassi, “La mostra di Palazzo Strozzi,” 136. 24 He thought that “the old” (Boldini, Mancini, Gemito) “prevails over the new” (futurism). Antonio Del Guercio, “Pittura tra il ’15 e il ’35,” Rinascita, March 3, 1967, 23. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid. 27 Leonardo Borgese, “Vent’anni d’arte italiana esposti a Palazzo Strozzi,” Corriere della Sera, March 2, 1967. 28 See Lorenza Trucchi, “‘Mitizzati’ a Firenze maestri e discepoli,” Momento-Sera, February 28, 1967; and “Arte moderna in Italia,” La Fiera Letteraria, March 16, 1967. 29 Mario De Micheli, “Un ‘censimento’ delle forze dell’arte italiana,” l’Unità, March 14, 1967. 30 Filiberto Menna, “L’arte italiana a Palazzo Strozzi,” Il Mattino, April 12, 1967. 31 Nello Ponente, “Mostra patria a Firenze,” Quindici, June 1967, iii. 32 Giuliano Briganti, “Buonanotte Signor Fattori,” L’Espresso, March 19, 1967. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Katharine Kuh, “Art under Mussolini,” Saturday Review, June 24, 1967. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid. 38 Raffaele Monti, “Arte in Italia 1915–1935,” Critica d’arte, December 1967, 3–22. 39 Ibid., 13. 40 Ibid, 12–13. 41 Its attendance was about 300,000 visitors in four months. Sold out, the catalog was enlarged and reprinted in 1983. 42 The Scientific Committee included Barilli, Flavio Caroli, Vittorio Fagone, Mercedes Garberi, and Augusto Morello. Except Barilli and Fagone, other members’ catalog contributions were irrelevant. 43 Fagone wrote on art and politics; Bossaglia on “late Novecento”; Luciano Caramel, abstraction; Crispolti, second futurism; De Seta, Fulvio Irace, Guido Canella, and Riccardo Mariani on architecture and urban planning; Anty Pansera, design; Antonio Faeti and Paola Pallottino, illustration. Giordano Bruno Guerri wrote the only historical essay. 44 Renato Barilli, “Gli anni Trenta: radiografia di un successo,” in Gli Annitrenta: Arte e cultura in Italia, 2nd edn. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983), xiii. 45 MID design/comunicazioni visive, “Un ambiente solare,” in ibid., v. 46 Barilli, “Gli anni Trenta,” xv. ­47 Antonio Pinelli, “Di tutto, ma non tutto,” Il Messaggero, February 7, 1982. 48 Franco Borsi, “Anni Trenta, ritorno all’ordine,” La Nazione, March 1, 1982. 49 Gillo Dorfles, “Quei mediocri, provinciali Anni Trenta,” Corriere della Sera, January 24, 1982. 50 Roberto Tassi, “A chi piace Piacentini,” La Repubblica, March 2, 1982. 51 Giuliano Briganti, “Candidati al Premio Ignobel?” La Repubblica, February 21, 1982. 52 Antonio Porta, “Che ‘teatro di Stato,’” Corriere della Sera, February 14, 1982.

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53 Giovanni Testori, “Quale fu la dignità degli ‘Annitrenta,’” Corriere della Sera, February 1, 1982. 54 Lea Vergine, “Nessuno ricorda con rabbia?” Alfabeta, March 1982, 6. 55 Lea Vergine, “Nostalgia del futuro, e un futuro di nostalgia,” il manifesto, January 30, 1982. 56 Vergine, “Nessuno,” 6. 57 Bruno Zevi, “Anni Trenta, ma che nausea!” L’Espresso, February 28, 1982, 163. 58 Vergine, “Nessuno,” 6. 59 Renato Barilli, “Perché gli anni Trenta” in Gli Annitrenta, 9. 60 Barilli, Gli anni Trenta, XVIII. 61 Renato Barilli, “Dall’ago al pittore,” L’Espresso, January 31, 1982, 84. 62 Zevi, “Anni Trenta,” 164. 63 Ragghianti to Tognoli, Florence, February 18, 1982, fondo Carlo Tognoli, Archivio Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca. 64 Tognoli to Ragghianti, Milan, March 5, 1982, in ibid.

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Pluralism as Revisionism: Annitrenta at Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1982 Denis Viva Translation by Sylvia Notini

In the second edition of the catalog Annitrenta, Renato Barilli, the exhibition’s main curator, insisted that the need to reprint the catalog and the constant flow of visitors (around 300,000 in total) were the best legitimization for a show dedicated to such a controversial period as fascism’s “consensus years.” Enthusiasm for the event’s popularity allowed for one concern to surface, however: three times, in that short introduction, Barilli sought to ward off potential allegations of an apology for fascism.1 The public success and the self-absolutory concern reveal a great deal about the cultural climate in which, in Italy, a historiographic recovery of the art of the ventennio had begun. In a near-total absence of a reflection on this difficult heritage,2 exhibitions had been among the few tools that stimulated debate: alongside their suspected monumentality—recall the imposing Arte moderna in Italia by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti3—these exhibitions had always accompanied a compensatory effort to distance themselves from the ideological context of their artworks. In short, this justifying scruple was the other side of the huge resurrections of a difficult past for which the desire was to rehabilitate with a holistic and liberating act, legitimized by the public’s appreciation and the political goodness of the intentions. Nonetheless, these strategies of distancing underwent a profound change with Annitrenta. Unlike its predecessors, this exhibition undermined the typical disconnection between the aesthetic and the ideological judgment with which these artworks were usually presented. In the case of an antifascist partisan and defender of art’s independence like Ragghianti, the works were still shown for their aesthetic relevance in the explicit absence of ideological intentions or, at most, as their redemption.4 Having been educated during the fascist years but within a liberal and idealist culture, Ragghianti was convinced that the best of the ventennio’s art had emerged despite the total lack of interest of the uncultured regime—which was mistakenly seen as tolerant.5 However, for a curator like Barilli, the de-ideologized aestheticization of the ventennio’s art had become a criterion of indulgent detachment from an entire

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era, a criterion that could be extended from the artworks to the broader cultural phenomena. Annitrenta included nineteen sections ranging from Pittura murale to abstract art, from graphic to urban design, combining, at times in a disorienting way, the aesthetic sphere with the historical reconstruction. Its concept was focused on a decade, rather than on a stylistic periodization, giving the impression of opting for pop models of historicization (so-called “sixties music,” “fifties fashion,” and so on). Added to this choice was a contextualization of the objects that overlooked the most cautious textual formulas of the expository mediation. Rather, Barilli was convinced that an exhibition should exalt the “sensitive impact on the ‘visitor’” of the “visible objects,” making them “capable of being appreciated [only] via the senses” without “loads of documents and educational labels.”6 In the case of fascism, this renunciation of a textual contextualism7—that is, a discursive framework for the objects displayed—could pave the way for a risky interpretative ambiguity, especially if we consider that the exhibition did not even resort to any “period room”: with a few exceptions, each category of objects was displayed in its own section (Figure 2.1),

Figure 2.1  Exhibition map of Annitrenta, 1982. From Annitrenta. Arte e Cultura in Italia, exh. cat., 2nd edn. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983), iv.

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while outside the exhibition, around the centrally located Duomo, the setting sought the spectacular effects of yesteryear—the tubular structure by Marcello Nizzoli and Edoardo Persico from 1934, or the refitting of some streetcars from that period (Figure 2.2). As a whole, Annitrenta’s display gave the impression of amphibiously mixing the typical aesthetic valorization of the museum display, the orderly presentation of a history museum (Figure 2.3), and the witty identification with a historical revival. The latter aspect was especially reinforced by the exhibition’s coordinated image, offering a “‘popular’ visual image with clear iconological recollections of the period in question.”8

Figure  2.2  Two 1930s streetcars displayed in front of the Duomo for Annitrenta, 1982. From Annitrenta, xiv.

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Figure 2.3  Cesare Colombo, Display of Annitrenta’s section on Graphic Illustration, 1982, digital photo from color slide. © Comune di Milano—CASVA, Fondo Marangoni (Studio MID). Courtesy Archivio Cesare Colombo, Milan.

This included using the same fonts (Figure 2.4), such as an Art Deco-like geometric bold type for the title, which had been used by futurists such as Fortunato Depero;9 the colors of the pop-fascist imaginary like the blue “de Pinedo,” an Italian version of the air force blue that referred to Francesco de Pinedo, a famous aviator during the fascist years; and even the “autarkic” materials for the installation itself, such as linoleum, a nineteenth-century material often used in the 1930s.10 By adopting the logic of vintage design, this coordinated image was anything but a formula for distancing: instead, it evoked the same nostalgic, folkloric, and movie-set effect that the cultural industry reserved for the past. The reason for this disorientation lay precisely in this unsolved mixture between aesthetic valorization, historical documentation, and the spectacularization typical of mass culture. Annitrenta was destined to arouse discontent on both sides of the debate on fascist art: one side against its aesthetic reevaluation, which it deemed too equivocal, and the other side convinced that any aesthetic revival should not take place with cross-pollination between art and historical context. Hence, in its ambivalent approach, Barilli’s exhibition raised several questions about the relationship between the exhibition format, mass culture, political ideology, and postmodern theory.

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Figure 2.4  Cover of the catalog of Annitrenta.

Reception Annitrenta was the last in a series of exhibitions that dealt with the art entre-deuxguerres. At first meant to shed light on a period that had been swept under the carpet, Annitrenta still distinguished itself from its precursors (Thirties: British Art and Design Before the War and La Metafisica: gli anni venti)11 because of its greater interdisciplinary lightness, which unhesitatingly added further historical sections. Furthermore, the periodization by decades was not an invention of the Milanese exhibition, but rather a choice that had already been used in other cases to disrupt the specialized

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historiographic approach. It was no accident that in many of the catalog essays’ need to justify this chronological format, as well as the catalog itself, square in shape and filled with disciplinary analyses, was a revisitation of the catalog—circumscribed to the history of the avant-gardes—that had been written for another exhibition dedicated to a decade: Tendenzen der Zwanziger Jahre, held in Berlin in 1977.12 Featuring the overview approach, these exhibitions aimed at the scalar effect of a great archeological find or the uncanny return of a forgotten, difficult heritage. For these reasons the reception of Barilli’s exhibition had a different fate from that of its predecessors, stirring up controversies that transcended the usual accusations of incompleteness or generosity in the selection, confusion in the display, or the desire to satisfy the market. In the over 140 reviews it received,13 there were four areas of discussion cogent to the early 1980s: the critique of modernism, the roots of postmodern art, historiographic revisionism,14 and, lastly, the relationship between art and ideology. The first of these issues interpreted the exhibition within a discursive frame triggered by shows like Jean Clair’s Les réalismes 1919–1939, held at the Centre Pompidou one year before15—an exhibition that deeply differed from Barilli’s approach. As part of this strand, the exhibition in Milan was a contribution to the critical revision of modernism, its aesthetic dogmas, the presumed flawlessness of its canon, and its geopolitical determinism (debunking a vision of modernism that was progressivist in politics and focused on the Paris-New York axis).16 Annitrenta demonstrated the existence in fascist Italy of a plurality of styles that was rather less repressive than other regimes and aimed at integrating those modernist options that were not in open dispute with the totalitarian ideology. As compared with the Nazis and the Soviets, the meddling of the fascists—as Vittorio Fagone affirmed in the catalog17—had been more astute and subliminal, granting the artists a social role by framing them within a system of corporative exhibitions and public commissions. The second issue for Annitrenta’s reception concerned the consequences of this critique of modernism. Indeed, its two main curators, Barilli and Flavio Caroli, did not spare the parallels between 1930s Italian art and that type of postmodern art, eclectic and newly devoted to traditional media, which they themselves promoted in the present.18 The fiercest criticism of this exhibition was fueled by the self-serving nature of the historiographic operation, which appeared like an attempt to legitimize certain postmodern art, reinforcing the schematic alternation between the avant-gardes and the “return to order.” The third topic was the awkward historical revisionism that had been sparked by the event. After the controversy aroused a few years before by Renzo De Felice’s historiographic hypothesis concerning the actual consensus achieved by the regime and its aspirations of modernity,19 Annitrenta seemed rather like the popularization of that same hypothesis. The historian involved in the exhibition, Giordano Bruno Guerri, had started out precisely in the wake of revisionism, examining “avant-gardist” cases such as that of the Fascist minister Giuseppe Bottai20 but ending up converting De Felice’s study tool par excellence, the biography (suffice it to recall his multivolume monographic text on Benito Mussolini),21 into formulas of biographism.22 And De Felice had not hesitated to distance himself from the exhibition that, in his opinion,

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risked mitigating the ethical opinion or the historical responsibility for some of the regime’s worst deeds, such as antisemitism.23 De Felice was perhaps alluding to Guerri’s affirmation concerning “the police-like suppression … that was not especially apparent in everyday life”24 in the 1930s, or their “everyday life … that today appears to be ‘graceful,’ appealing, and intriguing (and it was).”25 The fourth and final objection leveled against Annitrenta was the most inscrutable. According to many of its critics, it was a political maneuver by the PSI (Italian Socialist Party),26 which had supported the exhibition through the socialist mayor of Milano, Carlo Tognoli, to gain validation among the middle classes, the most conservative entrepreneurial elite, and the central parties (the foremost of which was the Christian Democratic Party, ever present in the government of the Italian Republic). In the anomalous situation of the Italian left—in which the socialists were in the minority with respect to their counterparts in the PCI (Italian Communist Party), still politically linked to the USSR—these cultural counteroffensive operations tried to relaunch the PSI as a reliable and pro-NATO government force capable of calmly coming to terms with its country’s difficult past. Whether or not they were founded, the accusations against Annitrenta were prophetic, sealing the formation of a five-party coalition (pentapartito) that brought together opposing forces, such as the liberals and the socialists, and the birth soon afterwards, in the summer of 1983, of the first government led by a socialist, the charismatic and controversial Bettino Craxi, who would turn the PSI into the focal point of Italian politics lasting until the sleaze trials known as “Clean Hands” in the early 1990s.27 Often interconnected, these four trajectories of Annitrenta’s reception have already been analyzed in the bibliography, albeit centering primarily on the art-historical aspects. For this reason, this chapter will focus instead on the revisionist and the political aspects, attempting, in the final section, to outline their convergence.

­Pastness and the Philology of the Simulacrum In his book on Italian history, Guido Crainz places Annitrenta at the start of a revisitation of the fascist past that, inspired by historiography, became a media and revivalist phenomenon. Indeed, after the success of the exhibition, a “great avalanche” of televised and film initiatives had dissolved Italians’ historical sense and fueled a consoling view of fascism in which “the regime’s gravest responsibilities were repressed or drastically reduced, the blame being put fully on Nazism.”28 Driven by an “interest in retro objects,” as in historical reenactments, such a revival did not just affect the culture of a single country, however. According to Fredric Jameson, the way in which mass culture—particularly cinema—recalled the past was the main reason for the historical amnesia that characterized the entire postmodern era. So-called “nostalgia films” were the emblem of this historical memory mediated through a stylization of the past, and every era was represented by resorting to its stylistic connotation alone—that is, disseminating a polished image of it, founded on the attributes typical of its style, on the stereotypes gathered by the collective imaginary, on the nostalgic memory of its consumption habits. In short, these “nostalgia films”

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replaced historical reflection with a pop history, thereby producing what Jameson refers to as pastness, or a melancholy and spectacular substitution for the elaboration of civic memory. Hence, the cultural industry allowed “the history of aesthetic styles” to replace “‘real’ history,”29 inventing, in turn, totally ahistorical stylistic categories such as 1950s-ness, i.e., a specific manner of self-representation divulged by Hollywood movies in the 1950s that had become the most credible scenario in which to set a story from that same era. The effect of pastness was to reduce historical time to a simulacrum among simulacra, not too far from Jean Baudrillard’s understanding of the simulacrum as an artificial sign that indefinitely harkens back to other artificial signs no longer concerned with a connection to the real. If we view it against this postmodern background, Annitrenta could be read as the exhibition version of Jameson’s pastness. Moreover, on display in some of the rooms was a philology of the simulacrum in which revival was combined with vintage. An example of this was the section dedicated to fashion, where the events were meticulously reconstructed, starting from documents that were already in themselves biased (glamour magazines, haute couture ideas, etc.).30 If we leave aside its classist perspective, the show did not even reconstruct fascist upper-class taste but rather the advertising stimuli addressed by the fashion houses to that same class. Indeed, this was a reconstruction of the imaginary, rather than of 1930s fashion, which is clearly visible if we look at its displays (Figure 2.5), where the studied poses

­ igure  2.5 Cesare Colombo, Display of Annitrenta’s section on Fashion, 1982, digital F photo from color slide. © Comune di Milano—CASVA, Fondo Marangoni (Studio MID). Courtesy Archivio Cesare Colombo, Milan.

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of the mannequins reiterated the plastic candor of the department stores in the 1980s. By removing any trace of the material conditions of life in the 1930s from its display, Annitrenta seemed rather to be the misunderstanding of some messages expressed by Italian cinema on fascism: of the surreal enchantment of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) and of the social duplicity of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970).31 The Milanese exhibition was thus situated at the pop intersection between the elaborate revisitation of fascism offered by 1970s Italian cinema and the aftereffects of the controversies aroused by “revisionist” books such as De Felice’s Intervista sul fascismo (1975).32 The marriage between film imaginary and historical debate led to an exhibition that intended to scenographically recast the past. Proof of this was again Guerri’s historical section, in which the main visual documents were the Luce fascistleaning propaganda newsreels: a rather debatable choice, justified by the lack of other materials,33 that risked amplifying the same self-narrative of fascism to the detriment of any critical distancing. Annitrenta thus raised major questions concerning the validity of the exhibition as a historiographic tool, openly admitting how this tool had ended up being visually contaminated by entertainment, the logic of the cultural industry, and those forms of de-ideologized revival spread by mass media.

The PSI and Exhibitions For what reason would a so solidly antifascist political party have wanted to promote such a problematic exhibition about the 1930s? Undoubtedly indeed, the organization of the event (spaces, fundraising, etc.) can be ascribed to Tognoli, the socialist mayor of Milan. Barilli himself, who admitted his involvement with the PSI at that time, stressed the mayor’s active role in Annitrenta in a recent commemoration.34 Furthermore, important socialist leaders like Claudio Martelli even went so far as to attribute the main thrust behind the exhibition directly to Craxi.35 However, to understand the political implications of the exhibition we must go back to that Italian political scene badly shaken by neofascist and radical-left terrorism and made even more unstable by the parliamentary fragmentation. When Bettino Craxi became Secretary of the PSI in 1976, he found himself before a rather atypical situation for a NATO country. Determined to the point of cynicism and a convinced libertine before Soviet authoritarianism, Craxi led a party that was split internally and both culturally and electorally submitted to the Communist Party. Condemned to low electoral percentages, the PSI in the 1970s had never succeeded in intercepting the votes of a new moderate left-wing electorate that had instead been cast for the Italian left’s true mass party, the PCI.36 Furthermore, the politics of the “historic compromise”—that is, the possibility of an unprecedented alliance between Communists and Christian Democrats to help the country out of its crisis—had further narrowed the PSI’s room for maneuver. The apparent willingness of Enrico Berlinguer, Secretary of the PCI, to enfranchise from the Soviet Union influence and to partially accept some capitalist

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fundaments had paradoxically increased the competition between the two leftwing parties. (After 1948, they had never again been allies at a national level.) It was for this strategic reason, therefore, that Craxi, close to the NATO alliance, sought to undermine the credibility of Berlinguer’s project: his goal was to demonstrate the PCI’s democratic immaturity and its reliance on the Soviets, and to thus bring the left-wing voters closer to the more moderate socialists, akin to the French example of François Mitterand. Craxi’s offensive had been conducted also at a cultural level, encouraging PSI initiatives such as the journal Mondoperaio, in which many intellectuals cast doubt on the democratic grip of the PCI’s Leninist and Gramscian roots.37 As part of this socialist strategy the exhibitions played a pivotal role: rather than being conceived as acts of enlightened patronage or electoral propaganda, they served the purpose of undermining the political opponent, showing its limits in the cultural tolerance and respect for the pluralism of opinions. This potential was revealed to the PSI by the 1977 Biennale del dissenso (Biennial of dissent), organized by the socialist Carlo Ripa di Meana, then president of the Venice Biennale.38 The exhibition was a multifarious view of “nonconformist” Soviet art (art that had either been censored or banned by the regime because it did not align with its cultural directives), which was not the first of its kind in the West.39 In Italy, however, it had had an explosive effect and led to a diplomatic crisis driven by the Soviet embassy. Shaken by the geopolitical escalation, some Italian Communist intellectuals had launched a counteroffensive,40 discrediting Ripa di Meana’s operation and providing the socialists the argument that the PCI was hardly capable of freeing itself from the USSR on a crucial topic like artistic freedom.41 In relation to these political events, Annitrenta could be seen as a similar attempt to drive out the cultural integralism of the Communists in the historiographic terrain of fascism: the exhibition, for instance, described a past regime that was less repressive than the present Soviet Union, but the risk, warned a skeptical review by Natalia Aspesi, was that “fascism does not only appear to be aesthetically appealing … but also conciliatory, liberal, the protector and not the repressor of artists and intellectuals.”42 In a season of political terrorism that had still not come to an end, the socialists flaunted their capacity to conduct a historical reexamination “with detachment, or at least a certain amount of tranquility,”43 turning a mildness in tones and opinions into proof of moderation and political tolerance. Turning the 1930s into a period that could be regarded lightheartedly, as the show suggested, may have had a dual electoral effect: attracting the moderate classes on the left (or even at the center) with a soothing sign of pacification after years of political extremism, and distancing the far-left with an intolerable provocation that dispelled dialectical thinking in the name of conciliation – “Does No One Remember the Anger?” was the eloquent title of a review by the art critic Lea Vergine.44 Despite its political goals, however, the greatest concern about Annitrenta regarded the fascination that such an exhibition might generate: the spectacularization of history, as claimed by Crainz’s reflections, still remains the thorniest aspect of this exhibition.

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­Pluralism as Revisionism Notwithstanding its polysemy, the word pluralism was used in a clear sense in the Italian politics of the 1980s. For philosophers like Norberto Bobbio, who was aligned with the PSI at the time, pluralism could be defined as the antithesis of totalitarianism—that is, as the decentralization, sharing, or dissemination of power between different social groups.45 Pluralism was a hoped-for characteristic of democracies, and its safeguarding could indicate their state of health. During Craxi’s period, this dispute around pluralism was fueled, once again, to delegitimize the PCI: for Bobbio, for instance, the “historic compromise” between Communists and Christian Democrats risked “blocking the development of a pluralistic society,”46 undermining the natural alternating of the government. In the same way, the incompatibility between a pluralistic conception and Communism had been highlighted by Craxi himself in a 1978 article, “Il vangelo socialista” (The Socialist Gospel), which had aroused a great deal of controversy and sanctioned the definitive hiatus between the PSI and the PCI.47 According to Craxi, pluralist Socialism, which was rooted in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon rather than Karl Marx, integrally differed from Leninist Communism that was “dominated by the ideal of the homogeneous, compact, undifferentiated society, and inescapably destined to become totalitarianism.”48 In the early 1980s, when the five-party alliance was established, pluralism was a key concept for political cohesion: in a climate of grosse koalition, pluralist virtues consisted of moderation between the partners and in the settling of conflicts within the unstable Italian situation. (For the entire period when the pentapartito ruled from 1981 to 1991, Craxi’s PSI took on the task of reconciling socialist reformism and a liberal mentality, unlike the more specifically Social Democratic governments of Mitterand in France or Felipe González in Spain.) What we can say about pluralism in comparison with exhibitions is that, if we mean pluralism in a broad sense—namely, as a multivocal attempt to afford space to identities, artistic proposals, or divergent ideas—an exhibition can be an efficient device to visualize plurality, offering the dizzying and reassuring effect of the variety of its display, the balanced proportion of the rooms, and the conciliated heterogeneity of its objects. After being a dispositif of nationalist education or of indoctrination in the rites of consumption,49 according to Tony Bennett the exhibition increasingly became, from postmodernism onwards, the fruit of a less univocal disciplinary knowledge that aimed at making visible the differences between cultures to the detriment of reinforcing specific narratives about identity.50 The ideological result of this mutation is that the exhibition was converted into an ostentation of liberal tolerance that leaves intact the power relationships between diversities and tends to represent them as unchanging and hypostatic entities. Other collateral effects of the “pluralist” exhibition can even be found in the field of ethnographic museography in the postmodern era. In discussing ways to display Chicano art in the United States, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto clarified how its inclusion in the museum displays “under the rubric of pluralism,” albeit “stemming from a democratic impulse to validate and recognize diversity … serves also to commodify

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art, disarm alternative representations, and deflect antagonisms.”51 Thus pluralist integration of Chicano art leads to a “classification that permissively allows a sort of supermarketlike array of choices among styles, techniques, and contents.”52 A similar risk of spectacularization was pointed out by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett who has discussed the setting in situ of ethnographic artifacts (re-creation of villages, rituals, etc.) as a potential “theatrical spectacle” that “will displace scientific seriousness” and “will overwhelm ethnographic artifact and curatorial intention” if “the artifice of the installation” is allowed to prevail.53 The pluralism of Annitrenta presented many of the aspects that I have just mentioned. First and foremost, it was the flaunting of a liberal tolerance toward an anti-democratic period such as the fascist one: all this provided diplomatic credentials to the socialists within the pentapartito coalition. In the second place, Annitrenta was an exhibition that expanded the already ecumenical extension of its precursors, including neglected phenomena like Pittura murale or imperial antiquity in architecture, and offering them along with abstract art or architectural Rationalism with no interpretative connection— that is, in the manner of a choice of taste. Arranged by stylistic and thematic criteria, the rooms were a celebration of a compartmentalized variety. Lastly, the reinstallation of the structures of Persico and Nizzoli, or of Luciano Baldessari, deprived of their original fascist message, were paradoxically converted into a scenographic monument: a mixture of pseudo-ethnographic authenticity and de-ideologized aestheticization that ultimately served to catch the eye of the passersby.54 Overall, Annitrenta was a significant alteration in the task of rewriting history that can be expected of an exhibition. If historical revisionism, as De Felice had introduced it, for instance, was the re-discussion of several historiographic themes, what Barilli and his colleagues proposed was a revisionism based on a pluralist expansion of the offer: a plurality of styles and objects was offered up to sensitive judgment, and therefore relegated to the trends in taste or subjective preferences of the viewer.

Notes 1 2

­3 4 5 6

Renato Barilli, “Gli anni trenta: Radiografia di un successo,” Annitrenta: Arte e Cultura in Italia, 2nd edn. (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983), xi. See Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2009); Nick Carter and Simon Martin, eds., The Difficult Heritage of Italian Fascism, monographic issue, Modern Italy 24, no. 2 (May 2019); and the conference A Difficult Heritage: The Afterlife of Fascist-Era Architecture, Monuments and Works of Art in Italy, curated by Carmen Belmonte (Rome: Bibliotheca Hertziana, 2019). Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, ed., Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, exh. cat. (Florence: Marchi e Bertolli, 1967). Sergio Cortesini, “Lo storicismo estetico di Ragghianti e altri miti critici nel 1967,” in Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e l’arte in Italia tra le due guerre, ed. Paolo Bolpagni and Mattia Patti (Lucca: Edizioni Fondazione Ragghianti, 2020), 55–65. Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, “Presentazione,” in Arte moderna, i–xi. Barilli, “Gli anni trenta,” xiv.

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7 See Stephen Greenblatt, “Resonance and Wonder,” in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 44. 8 MID Design/Comunicazioni visive, “‘Un ambiente solare’,” in Annitrenta, v. The following details about colors and materials are provided by MID Design itself. I am grateful to Elisabetta Pernich of CASVA, Milan, for the photos of MID Design’s exhibition display. 9 The graphic designer Diego Santambrogio is also a source; Annitrenta, 487. 10 On this material see Matteo Fochessati, “Linoleum,” in Francesca Cagianelli and Dario Mattoni, eds., Arte in Italia. Decò 1919–1939, exh. cat. (Milan: Silvana editoriale, 2009), 218–19. 11 Jennifer Hawkins and Marianne Hallis, eds., Thirties: British Art and Design before the War, exh. cat. (London: Art Council of Great Britain, 1979); and Renato Barilli, ed., La Metafisica: Gli anni venti, 2 vols. (Bologna: Grafis, 1980). 12 Rainer Wagner and Verena Haas, eds., Tendenzen der Zwanziger Jahre, exh. cat. (Berlin: Presse und Informationsamt des Landes Berlin, 1977). 13 See “Rassegna stampa essenziale sulla mostra ‘Gli Anni Trenta – Arte e Cultura in Italia’,” in Annitrenta, 659–60. 14 This term was used to refer to the studies on fascism begun by Renzo De Felice and on Nazism by George Mosse and Ernst Nolte. 15 Jean Clair, “Donnée d’un problème,” in Les réalismes 1919–1939, exh. cat. (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980), 8–15. See also Pepe Karmel, “Report from Milan: The ’30s: Art and Culture in Italy,” Art in America (October 1982): 43–7. 16 I am grateful to Romy Golan, Pepe Karmel, and Emily Braun for their input on this. See also Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Arts and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For the criticism of the modernism of these exhibitions see: Denis Viva, “Postmodernisme et antimodernisme dans l’historiographie de l’art italien du XXe siècle (1973–1983),” in Le Postmoderne: un paradigme pertinent dans le champ artistique?, ed. Fabien Danesi, Katia Schneller, and Hélène Trespeuch (Paris: HiCSA, 2013), 46–56. 17 Vittorio Fagone, “Arte, politica e propaganda in Italia negli anni trenta,” in Annitrenta, 43–57. 18 See Viva, “Postmodernisme et antimodernisme”; Luca Quattrocchi, “Ripensare l’arte del ventennio fascista,” in Bolpagni and Patti, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, 42–3; and Manuel Barrese, “L’orizzonte postmoderno e il contrastato recupero dell’arte italiana tra le due guerre,” in ibid., 50–4. 19 See Renzo De Felice, Intervista sul fascismo, ed. Michael A. Leeden (Rome: Laterza, 1975). 20 Giordano Bruno Guerri, Giuseppe Bottai, un fascista critico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976). 21 Renzo De Felice authored a five-volume biography of Benito Mussolini, published between 1965 and 1997. 22 Inspired by De Felice, Guerri wrote biographies of prominent fascists Galeazzo Ciano (Milan: Bompiani, 1979) and Curzio Malaparte (Milan: Bompiani, 1980). 23 See Susanna Arangio, “L’iconografia mussoliniana: Un percorso tra rimozioni e riscoperte nelle mostre italiane del secondo dopoguerra,” Piano b 3, no. 1 (2018): 59. 24 The title provocatively quoted Mussolini: Giordano Bruno Guerri, “‘Venti anni di fascismo non sono passati invano nella vita italiana ed è umanamente impossibile cancellarli’ (Mussolini, 24.6.1943),” in Annitrenta, 31.

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25 Ibid., 19. 26 See Quattrocchi, “Ripensare l’arte del ventennio fascista,” 42; and Barrese, “L’orizzonte postmoderno,” 50, 52, 54. ­27 Simona Colarizi and Marco Gervasoni, La cruna dell’ago: Craxi, il partito socialista e la crisi della Repubblica (Rome: Laterza, 2005). 28 Guido Crainz, Il paese reale: Dall’assassinio di Moro all’Italia di oggi (Rome: Donzelli, 2013), 129. 29 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 20. 30 Alessandra Gnecchi Ruscone, in Annitrenta, 339–58. 31 See Barrese, “L’orizzonte postmoderno,” 49. 32 De Felice, Intervista sul fascismo; and Tommaso Baris and Alessio Gagliardi, “Le controversie sul fascismo degli anni settanta e ottanta,” Studi storici 55, no. 1 (2014): 317–33. 33 Guerri, “‘Venti anni di fascismo,’” 33. 34 Renato Barilli, “Carlo Tognoli e la cultura a Milano: I ricordi di Renato Barilli,” Artribune, March 8, 2021, https://www.artribune.com/professioni-e-professionisti/ politica-e-pubblica-amministrazione/2021/03/morte-carlo-tognoli-cultura-milano/ (accessed April 23, 2022). 35 Claudio Martelli, L’antipatico: Bettino Craxi e la grande coalizione (Milan: La nave di Teseo, 2020), 63. 36 Colarizi and Gervasoni, La cruna dell’ago, 3–27. 37 Ibid., 27–47. 38 Enrico Crispolti and Gabriella Moncada, eds., La nuova arte sovietica: una prospettiva non ufficiale, exh. cat. (Venice: Marsilio, 1977). 39 For example: Nonkonformistische russische Maler: Sammlung Alexander Gleser, exh. cat. (Braunschweig: Kunstverein, 1975). 40 See Carlo Ripa di Meana and Gabriella Mecucci, L’ordine di Mosca: Fermate la Biennale del dissenso (Rome: Fondazione Liberal, 2007); Matteo Bertelé and Sandra Frimmel, eds., ZKK: Rereading: La nuova arte sovietica: una nuova prospettiva non ufficiale (Zurich: Schublade, 2014). 41 Maria-Kristiina Soomre, “Art, Politics and Exhibition: (Re)writing the History of (Re)presentations,” Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi, no. 21 (2012): 112–16. 42 Natalia Aspesi, “Mussolini mecenate,” La Repubblica, January 12, 1982. ­43 Carlo Tognoli, in Annitrenta, x. 44 Lea Vergine, “Nessuno ricorda con rabbia?,” Alfabeta, no. 32 (March 1982): 6. 45 Norberto Bobbio, Le ideologie e il potere in crisi: Pluralismo, democrazia, socialismo, comunismo, terza via e terza forza (Florence: Le Monnier, 1981), 3–11. 46 Ibid., 15. 47 See Bettino Craxi, Virgilio Dagnino, and Luciano Pellicani, Il vangelo socialista, ed. Giovanni Scirocco (Turin: Nino Aragno Editore, 2018). 48 Bettino Craxi, “Il vangelo socialista,” 1978, in ibid., 10. 49 See Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” New Formations, no. 4 (Spring 1988): 73–102. 50 Tony Bennett updated his ideas in “Exhibition, Truth, Power: Reconsidering ‘The Exhibitionary Complex,’” in The Documenta 14 Reader, ed. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2017), 39–52.

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51 Tomas Ybarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement/The Movement of Chicano Art,” in Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures, 146–7. This thesis recalls Hal Foster’s argumentations about postmodern art: Hal Foster, “The Problem of Pluralism,” Art in America, no. 70 (January 1982): 9–15. 52 Ybarra-Frausto, “The Chicano Movement,” 146. 53 Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” in Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures, 390. 54 Quattrocchi, “Ripensare l’arte del ventennio fascista,” 41.

­3

Interview with Renato Barilli, Curator of the Annitrenta Exhibition (Milan, 1982) Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker

We conducted the following interview with curator Renato Barilli through a series of emails exchanged in October 2018, a few months after he published in his blog a review of the exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, curated by Germano Celant at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018.1 Here, Barilli compared and, especially, contrasted the Prada show to Annitrenta, the exhibition that he had curated at Palazzo Reale and other venues in Milan in 1982. Whereas the Annitrenta exhibition and its reception are treated historically in this volume by Luca Quattrocchi and Denis Viva, this brief interview presents the curator’s retrospective reflection considering later developments in the field. Barilli did not accept requests for further elucidations. Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker (RB-SH): In your recent review of the Fondazione Prada exhibition, you say that Annitrenta had started with a certain idea about the relationship between artists and fascism, but then the research process for the exhibition changed your perception of that relationship. Can you explain in greater detail what the initial expectations were and how they changed? Renato Barilli: We were quite sure, in conceiving the Annitrenta exhibition, that it was time to free that decade [i.e., the 1930s] from the usucapion that the Fascist regime had imposed on it, it was a matter of distinguishing between the dictates of the regime on the one hand and the free creativity of artists on the other hand, recognizing that many of the artists adhered to the regime, but highlighting some positive traits, which existed, albeit mixed with many other negative aspects. RB-SH: Compared to the previous exhibitions that, starting after World War II, had presented the art of the ventennio (we are thinking especially of the 1949 MoMA exhibition, Twentieth-Century Italian Art, and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti’s 1967 show), what are the novelties that characterized Annitrenta?

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Curating Fascism Barilli: It was the first time anyone dared to clear the art of that decade. I do not know the 1949 exhibition at MoMA that you remember, but also given the early date, I doubt that it approached the problem in the same way as we did. As for the Ragghianti exhibition, it was an opportune recovery, but it approached the material as many isolated presences, without a link to ideological issues, and then it started too early, from the 1920s,2 which we deliberately excluded precisely because the regime had not yet developed its requirements. ­RB-SH: From the catalog, which is very rich in texts and reproductions of artworks, it is difficult to understand how the exhibition was presented to the visitor. Can you describe the main curatorial choices, the installation, and how the great variety of works and objects on display were presented to the public? Barilli: The exhibition had a troubled genesis, first because it was entrusted to a group of organizers appointed by the excellent mayor of the time, [Carlo] Tognoli, based on their affiliation to political parties. I represented the PSI, il garofano [literally, a carnation flower, or the symbol of the Italian Socialist Party, PSI], which was then in a dominant position in Milan, Flavio Caroli was of the PCI [Italian Communist Party], Vittorio Fagone tended even more to the left, [Augusto] Morello was of the almost nonexistent DC [Christian Democrats]. We also had to deal with Mercedes Garberi, the figure who was at the time at the head of the Municipal Collections, who felt usurped by us, and who tried to recover her rights. Furthermore, at first the Municipality did not believe in this exhibition very much, so much so that it postponed us, instead giving precedence to an exhibition dedicated to the horses of Venice [I Cavalli di San Marco, Palazzo Reale Milan, 1981]. And even the city Councilor for Culture of those years, [Guido] Aghina, believed that it was better to start by focusing on the 1950s, on the economic recovery. But in the end, Tognoli became convinced and helped us in several ways: first, by finding us a suitable venue, given that the natural one of Palazzo Reale was [largely] unavailable due to an interminable restoration, which continued for many more years. To give us space, he had the courage to clear out the underground subway, which was then occupied by a series of furniture shops. Thus, we had a more than sufficient area for the actual artworks, even if it had a somewhat low ceiling. Furthermore, Tognoli got us a sponsorship from Fernet Branca [a liquor brand] of 200 million lire, which was a considerable figure for those times. Even if we could not have the [whole] Palazzo Reale, we were given the adjacent Arengario, where we could install the various aspects of architecture, design, and photos. Indeed, a winning aspect of that exhibition was precisely to adopt a vision that extended to all aspects of visual culture, which for those times was an unusual, decidedly innovative approach. Another positive aspect was that we ourselves, on the Scientific Coordination Committee, took a step back, not curating the individual sections directly but instead inviting colleagues who were talented specialists to curate them. All of this went into

Interview with Renato Barilli a majestic catalog published by Mazzotta, and perhaps this too was at the beginning of the current vogue for weighty catalogs. Finally, a further happy and courageous decision by Tognoli was to allow us to set up a luxurious showcase for the exhibition in the Galleria [Vittorio Emanuele II], that is, in the most visited spot in the city, where we reconstructed the newsstand designed by the architect [Luciano] Baldessari specifically as a venue for the regime’s communication initiatives. Additionally, an entire collection of clothes, uniforms, and documents of the time was placed on the ground.3 RB-SH: There has been a lot of talk about the timing of Celant’s exhibition in relation to the current political climate. How did Annitrenta fit into the political climate of 1982? Barilli: Our exhibition came at the right moment, when it was necessary to remove Italian creativity from the limbo or purgatory into which the suspicion of collusion with the enemy, that is, with the Fascist regime, had forced it up to that time. Today this cause is widely won, so I do not think that a similar timing applies to Celant’s initiative, which preaches to a crowd that had been abundantly converted by many other exhibitions that followed ours. After all, behaving like a perfect “AmeriKano,” which is his normal nickname, he conceived it not so much for an Italian audience, but for an export to New York, so much so that he gave titles and captions directly in English.4 There he will certainly be able to do better than the premature initiative of 1949. RB-SH: What were the most significant responses from the public, art critics, and artists? Barilli: That our exhibition arrived at the right time was evident from the enormous success it had with the public. I believe that given the number of visitors and sales of catalogs, it remains, about thirty-five years later, the greatest success of the entire exhibition series that the Milan Municipality can boast. The success was so great that the municipal attendants themselves said, giggling, that by now their office had to take its name from that exhibition, since they were working almost exclusively for it. Naturally the die-hard, left-wing intellectuals did not fail to make war on us, [critic] Lea Vergine went so far as to say that the sight of the works exhibited in the Galleria had caused her to gag. My position was particularly difficult, since I still belonged to a leftist party, although Bettino Craxi’s Social Democracy was branded by the irreducible leftists as a coven of “social traitors.” A decade earlier, as an outspoken Social Democrat, I had been condemned by my colleagues of Group 63, who unfortunately at that moment, in 1968, had the unfortunate idea of “playing the pipe” for a revolution that, by the way, was nonexistent.5 Some part of that atmosphere was reborn with the magazine Alfabeta, in whose columns harshly critical reviews of our exhibition were published. But from that moment on the cause was won, no one doubted that in the 1930s we had innovative art, in step with Europe, more in the “applied” aspects of architecture, design, photography, advertising graphics, and cinema, than the more specifically artistic ones of painting and sculpture.

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Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Renato Barilli, “Una mostra su Italia 1918–1943, dove storia e politica vengono prima dell’arte,” April 13, 2018, https://www.renatobarilli.it/blog/una-mostra-su-italia-19181943-dove-storia-e-politica-vengono-prima-dellarte/ (accessed August 28, 2021). The show’s chronological span was actually earlier. It began in 1915. According to exhibition photos, these items were actually displayed in vitrines. “Amerika” and “amerikano” (as opposed to “America” and “americano”) are expressions traditionally utilized in Italian political protests aimed against American imperialism. The expression “playing the pipe of the revolution” (suonare il piffero della rivoluzione) derives from a 1947 controversy between the communist writer Elio Vittorini and the head of the Italian Communist Party, Palmiro Togliatti. To Togliatti’s critique about his inaccessible intellectualism Vittorini opposed artistic freedom as the approach of a true revolutionary: those artists who followed the instructions of the political party only paid lip service to the revolution (“playing the pipe”).

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Art, Life, Politics, and the Seductiveness of Italian Fascism: Post Zang Tumb Tuuum at Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018 Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker

This essay was born out of our respective reactions to the exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada in Milan (February 18–June 28, 2018). Like most viewers, we both found the show and its venue to be beautiful: the works were aesthetically spectacular, the installation was impeccable, and the preparatory archival research was copious. But we also found that beauty unsettling. We were uncomfortable with the fact that it was that same seductiveness— the idea of the desirability of fascist art—that contributed to fascism’s political success in the first place. We wondered how the act of viewing a show about the history, politics, and art of fascism could simultaneously feel so pleasing and so troubling. Our dialogue about the Prada show continued over the following three years. We periodically presented our findings in various Italian and US academic settings, soliciting feedback from our audiences of colleagues and advanced students, reflecting on the animated responses we received and incorporating these into our conversations.1 We had scheduled an interview with the show’s curator, Germano Celant, and he had accepted our offer, but unfortunately passed away a few months before the planned date of the interview. We therefore do not have a firsthand account of his curatorial strategies for the show and instead must glean them from the exhibition and interviews he gave about it to the press. We approached the show by asking several questions. These are: How did this show come to be and what were the mechanisms behind its creation? Could a relationship between it and previous shows on the same subject be traced, generating a typology or genealogy of exhibitions on fascist art, which culminated in Post Zang? How did Post Zang intersect with its historical and political moment and why might this connection be important to tease out? What were the curatorial premises of the show and their implications? What display strategies were chosen and what was the intended effect on the viewer? What responses did the show generate? Finally, what was shown and

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what was absent, what received prominence and what remained hidden? This led to a series of open-ended questions about the complexity and responsibility of curating exhibitions on fascist-era art. In line with the dialogic nature of our process, we decided to opt for a conversational format instead of a traditional academic essay. This approach allowed us to challenge, expand, and nuance our own and each other’s views as we wrote the text that follows.2 Sharon Hecker (SH): The exhibition was a titanic undertaking, with over 600 works by over 100 artists and a dizzying number of original documents on display. It included works by fascist supporters such as Mario Sironi and opponents like Renato Guttuso. Masterpieces were mixed with lesser-known works, design objects, and furniture. The sprawling show was organized chronologically, with each gallery devoted to a year of the regime, as well as through partially reconstructed private and public spaces, from the home of Futurism’s founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to the Universal Exhibition planned to be in Rome in 1942, to Venice Biennales, Rome Quadriennales, and the wildly popular 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista.3 The latter show was evoked in a warehouse area with gigantic screens projecting photos from the original exhibition. A New York firm, 2x4, was commissioned to design Post Zang, which was privately funded by the Prada Foundation. The chosen venue for the show was Prada’s contemporary art spaces, designed by international architects such as Rem Koolhaas. Accompanying the show was a lavish 659-page catalog containing eighty essays in Italian and English including major national and international scholars. The exhibition’s title referred to the 1914 poem, “Zang Tumb Tuuum,” an onomatopoeic evocation of the Battle of Adrianople penned by Marinetti. The word “Post” was reportedly added to the title to suggest what happened afterwards. Documents show that the exhibition title had been changed at the last minute: it was originally more prosaically called Arti in Italia, 1918–1940.4 The new title was intended to set a tone of excitement, as in the sound of drums beating for war, even though the show focused on one of the most tragic periods of Italian history. This was not lost on critics such as Jason Farago of The New York Times, who praised the exhibition but defined the title as a “car crash.”5 The chronological range also shifted during the preparation period: originally Post Zang did not intend to address art produced after 1940, apparently to avoid dealing with the war period, but for unspecified reasons it ended up encompassing the full duration of the Fascist regime.6 According to the curator, his aim was to give a “comprehensive [. . .] presentation”7 of art, life, and politics of the period. Despite declaring in the subtitle that the show would also address “life” during fascism, and the press release’s description of a focus on the personal lives of people and artists, not all realities of life under Mussolini’s regime were presented. Celant stated that he did not wish to put forward a personal or institutional viewpoint or interpretation, implying critical non-choice and presenting a show that he wanted to leave open for the public to judge.8

Art, Life, Politics, and Italian Fascism Raffaele Bedarida (RB): Many of Post Zang’s key features were not new but pointed to a genealogy of mega-shows on art of the ventennio. Two previous exhibitions discussed in essays in this volume are the most direct precedents for Post Zang, although unacknowledged as such in the exhibition catalog: Arte moderna in Italia, organized by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti in Florence in 1967, which was a first reflection on a period that was still largely taboo at the time; and Annitrenta, organized by Renato Barilli in Milan in 1982, which spectacularized that past and replicated some of the regime’s curatorial strategies.9 Although these are not the only shows on the ventennio, they are comparable to Post Zang for their monumental size, large number of visitors, and their ability to generate discussion among both scholars and the general public. They also introduced some strategies used by Celant. Ragghianti theorized open-endedness in 1967 as a strategy to approach a recent and burning past, yet avoiding predictable forms of rejection or condemnation.10 By doing so, he distanced himself from the ultimate fascist curator, Margherita Sarfatti, who had written that the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista did not exhibit (mostra) the Fascist Revolution but demonstrated it (dimostra).11 Ragghianti saw formalist and apolitical open-endedness as an antidote to fascist propaganda, forgetting that fascist biennials promoted depoliticized art in white cube contexts. As Celant would do later, Ragghianti amassed in his show artists from various stylistic groups (he identified “qualitative dignity”12 as the main selection method) and with various relationships with the regime, but avoided discussing those relationships or the link between the type of art and politics, proposing instead a “disinterested rethinking” of the period, which he described as a “splendid season of art in Italy.”13 Ragghianti anticipated some aspects of Celant’s installations too: in his significantly simpler and patchier installation, Ragghianti created small stages through removable panels and installed some artworks within and others outside the frames. The effect, like Post Zang, was a constant shift of curatorial register, which framed the act of exhibiting with a distancing effect, arguably in line with his intention to reevaluate fascist art from a distance. Unlike Celant, however, Ragghianti addressed his positionality as an antifascist activist, which functioned as a legitimization but also as a way to measure distance both in terms of political responsibility and generational specificity.14 Also, Post Zang framed artworks in stage-like settings, but next to traditional panels there were inflated archival photographs: visitors stepped onto black-and-white, life-size photographs of historical shows’ hardwood floors, saw paintings hanging against exhibition shots-turned-wallpaper, and encountered dramatically lit, three-dimensional sculptures replacing photographed ones. The Prada artworks, like the expressive bodies in a 1970s Francis Bacon painting, were confined and compressed through multiple framing structures. The theatricality of Arturo Martini’s L’aviatore (The Aviator, 1931, Figure 4.1), for example, installed as in the 1932 Biennale, was potentiated by the contrast between the sculpture’s terracotta color and the photo’s grayscale, and between photographed

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­Figure 4.1  Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. 1932 room. Arturo Martini, L’aviatore (The Aviator), fired clay, 1931. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada.

shadows and actual shadows. Although Celant explained his extensive use of documentary materials in historicist terms that recalled Ragghianti’s search for objective detachment, his show spectacularized documents as vehicles for an unfiltered encounter with the historical past. SH: Whether intentionally or not, the Prada show recalled some of the curatorial strategies utilized nearly forty years earlier by Barilli in the 1982 Annitrenta show. Both intended to present a total vision of the period and included documents and the applied arts, although Annitrenta limited its focus to the

Art, Life, Politics, and Italian Fascism 1930s. Both aimed for a spectacular approach that dazzled the viewer with the sheer quantity and variety of material presented. Yet there were also differences. Although both shows were held in Milan, the venues evoked different associations.15 The venue of Annitrenta, Palazzo Reale, was a historic Milanese site of power. Centrally located adjacent to the Duomo, for centuries it had been used by local and foreign rulers, from Visconti to Sforza and Spanish, Austrian, and Napoleonic invaders. It is also located next to Mussolini’s Arengario, constructed in 1936 with a balcony from which Il Duce gave fiery speeches to enthusiastic crowds—part of Annitrenta was installed in this space. In contrast, the Prada Foundation is a recently built private space at the city’s outskirts, owned by a leading international fashion brand. Whereas Annitrenta had spread throughout the city of Milan, Post Zang was confined within the Foundation’s spaces. The catalogs for the two shows also projected different styles. As distinct from the playful pop-fascist “air force blue”16 chosen for the Annitrenta catalog, Prada’s exhibition catalog was slick black—at once conjuring up associations with the fascist Blackshirts and Prada’s signature style. Both shows included catalogs with scholarly essays, but the Annitrenta catalog was in Italian, whereas the bilingual Prada catalog projected outwards to an audience beyond national confines, including international voices in the field. Both catalogs provided erudite viewers with critical information but some of that information alas was not displayed in the exhibition. This curatorial strategy of keeping the catalog discrete from the exhibition goes back as far as Ragghianti and has been of concern to critics, who observed that those who do not delve into the copious material presented in the catalog are left unaware of the complexities of the period. RB: For an exhibition on exhibitions (Celant described it as “showing the showing”17), the allure of fascism is twofold. Firstly, if any exhibition on a past era is, to some degree, a mirror and a forum for the present, the Fascist regime still functions as the ultimate historical paradigm against which, especially in Italy, people collectively define the present, from casual conversations to scholarly discourse. That Post Zang opened the day before Italy’s political elections in February 2018 made the use or misuse of the fascist past more apparent in a moment when comparisons with fascism were commonplace regarding Italy’s rising political leader Matteo Salvini (during Post Zang, he was sworn Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior) and his role model, Donald Trump, then in the middle of his controversial presidency. Secondly, Mussolini systematically exploited exhibitions to establish historical narratives, seduce the elite, entertain the masses, and aestheticize politics. The Fascist state became a prolific art patron, promoting a religiouslike celebration of fine art and the propaganda power of collective rituals, among which art exhibitions featured prominently.18 Accordingly, Post Zang mapped a wide range of fascist exhibition strategies. At the two poles were temples of aesthetic autonomy like the biennales and politicized, avant-garde

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Curating Fascism spaces like Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, which blurred art, life, and politics. Like previous shows on fascism, Post Zang raised questions such as: does showing mean reiterating or celebrating the original model? Does interpreting the past mean judging it moralistically? How much of the interpretive tools of scholarship can be translated into an exhibition without falling into the trap of didacticism? How much agency does the public get? Relevant to any effort to exhibit a historical moment, these questions are particularly charged both politically and ethically when dealing with a brutal regime such as fascism. SH: It is useful to further examine Post Zang’s curatorial practices in the context of those used in previous exhibitions. Celant wrote that his selection was “dictated”19 by the material, suggesting that he was a mere conduit and that the show curated itself. His idea seemed to be to create an open-ended show, in which the curator should “show without demonstrating,” exhibit without judging. What does the concept of a show that curates itself say about the curator’s role and ethical and intellectual responsibility? What kind of understanding of history does exhibiting documentary materials create? Inevitably, as in any exhibition, Celant made specific methodological and curatorial choices: from the title to the choice of chronology (including a temporal cutoff), how many and which artworks to include and which to exclude, the choice to use reconstructions and how to make these visible (here they were partial reconstructions—another choice—rather than full mise-en-scènes), to backdrops, wall colors, fonts, wall text (if any), placement/juxtaposition of art objects and documents, even lighting choices and the nature of the catalog. The venue itself was far from being a neutral container, signifying the foundation’s well-known fashion brand, its signature architecture, and mission to promote avant-garde contemporary art and fashion. Even the gallery guards, uniformed in Prada-designed gray tops and black pants, held meaning for audiences. RB: The initial response by the international press was overwhelmingly positive.20 Reviewers mostly appreciated two aspects of the show, which were also what the organizers emphasized: the massive use of documentary materials—especially the transformation of archival photographs into immersive environments; and the fact that the show avoided the white cube modernist framework and contextualized the artworks within the complexity of real life, allowing visitors, as Financial Times critic Jackie Wullschläger put it, to “walk into fascism.”21 Then, a few critical responses emerged. Curator Rosalind McKever, writing in Apollo, subtly pointed to a “utopian but depopulated vision” and noted how the “unsettling slickness” of the exhibition theater mimicked the fascist display aesthetics.22 Art historian Ester Coen published an uncompromising J’accuse on the popular website Dagospia.23 Coen had contributed a catalog essay, but after visiting the show, she rejected it as uncritical. Coen saw Post Zang as a show of beautiful art, but far from Celant’s claim of a “real and contextual history.”24 In her view, not only did the exhibit fail to present the

Art, Life, Politics, and Italian Fascism reality of violence and oppression under fascism but it actually covered that reality behind the aesthetically pleasing veil of fine art. Coen’s response also pointed to a phenomenon shared by other shows on art of the ventennio: the scholarly catalog confined critical perspectives that were absent from the show. SH: Before we can draw any conclusions about Post Zang, it seems important to unpack the idea of the show curating itself, examining to what extent such a curatorial approach was implemented here and what effect it might have on audiences. Claiming to only show what could be found in documents, the curator risked having his exhibition read as a vindication of the Fascist regime and its practices. This was addressed in a direct question to Celant by veteran journalist Natalia Aspesi in La Repubblica. She asked him whether the show could be taken for “an apologia for fascism by exposing and recounting the close union between almost all of our artists and a dictatorship that used them as a means of hammering propaganda?”25 Celant pivoted from the question with the reply: “We had that doubt, we feared inappropriate visitors, but there were none.”26 He apparently had considered the question of the show’s reception, but only in terms of undesired pro-fascist audiences. The actual audience makeup is hard to document since there are only official installation shots. No personal viewer photos were allowed, and thus no spontaneous images such as selfies with the busts of Mussolini can be found on social media or elsewhere. The idea of a curator taking a “neutral” position had first been claimed in 1967 by Ragghianti. As the curator of the first major show after the end of fascism to deal with that period, he declared his method of purovisibilità (pure visibility) as a way for someone who had experienced the regime—he was an antifascist activist and was imprisoned for his activities—to be able to reconsider that painful past twenty years later from a more detached and nuanced viewpoint. We felt that Celant’s reasons for allowing the documents to dictate the show’s contents may have been different. We also wondered: can there be objectivity and curatorial non-choice in an exhibition dedicated to such a charged and tragic period in Italian history? At what point does this curatorial approach begin to cede responsibility? A further question we pondered is where curatorial non-choice leaves the visitor. One comment I overheard at the Prada opening was between two elderly visitors, who sighed nostalgically, “Yes, what a beautiful period it was, if not for that stain of Fascism . . .” When I asked another visitor about the absence of the negative aspects of the period, she remarked that “Of course the curator could have also created a chamber of horrors to make this show realistic, but it would have marred the beauty of the installation.” The effect of normalizing, beautifying, distancing, and rendering the realities of the period indifferent became palpable in audience reactions, especially, as Raffaele notes, when we consider the historical moment in which this show opened: just before that year’s elections in Italy. Refraining from offering a clear narrative can be useful to someone with background knowledge of the period and the tools with which to interpret the works. But what tools does the curator offer

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Curating Fascism to the average viewer of the show, or the young observer who comes to the show to learn about fascism for the first time? How can a curator mediate the experience for non-specialized audiences? It is indeed a delicate task. RB: Celant rejected the white cube because it purportedly isolates artworks from their context, turning them into commodifiable objects.27 He resumed the “critica acritica” (acritical criticism) rhetoric of his Arte Povera moment of the late 1960s—right after the Ragghianti show.28 Paradoxically, Celant opposed Ragghianti’s Crocean approach but ultimately reached similar conclusions. Imbued with 1968 rhetoric, Celant rejected interpretation as an encrustation of meaning and a form of authority. He embraced neutrality and transparency as methods by, for example, ordering documents in a book as he had received them in the mail.29 Similarly, in Post Zang, Celant let archival photographs dictate both the selection of works and the way they were contextualized. We wondered what was the nature of his claim against the market fifty years later, in the branded spaces of the Prada Foundation. Plus, how do we situate Celant’s claim of transparency or non-choice in a show where archival documents were photoshopped and manipulated? The juxtaposition of black-and-white photos and the artwork in color in the show’s posters and catalog potentiated the sense of documentary authenticity of primary sources, while charging emotionally the reenactment of the past in a way that is comparable with the girl with the red coat in Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List (1994). The focus of Spielberg and Celant, as they worked on the same historical moment, was different: the movie showed the atrocities of the concentration camps, while the exhibition largely avoided fascist violence, bringing visitors into lofty living rooms and galleries. But they similarly utilized the induced authority of documentary truth to interpret a historical moment in ways that appear neutral. Spielberg explained his choice of black and white “to remain true to the spirit of documentaries and stills from the period,”30 although Schindler’s List was played by contemporary actors. By adding a girl wearing a red coat as the only trace of color, Spielberg charged the archival-like materials with individual emotionalism. Similarly, by reproducing individual artworks in color within black-and-white exhibition photographs, Celant turned the artworks into tangible terminals of an otherwise blurred past. As a result, the works in the Prada show functioned less as autonomous objects than as indexical references to situations and people from the period. For example, the catalog reproduces a black-andwhite shot of the 1942 Venice Biennale with the Nazi Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels looking at Arturo Martini’s sculpture Woman Swimming Underwater, which is rendered in color. When I found the same sculpture reinstalled at the Fondazione Prada as it was in Venice, I saw myself reenacting Goebbels’s gesture. Celant used the works in Post Zang to reflect back our act of looking:31 seeing ourselves impersonate Goebbels, Mussolini, and, more generally, the interwar Italian public, we could realize this was the same public that saw (and caused) the collapse of parliamentarianism, the fascist power grab, the enactment of the Racial Laws, and the disaster of the Second

Art, Life, Politics, and Italian Fascism World War. Celant did not directly address questions of spectatorship, but if we read the show as a question mark, we can find important avenues for new research. SH: Linked to the question of curatorial non-choice is the heightened seductiveness with which this show swept up the viewer. How does seduction—etymologically a form of leading astray—coexist with curatorial non-choice? When does seduction cross the line? The art might be aesthetically beautiful, and the documents may possess an equally powerful form of intellectual seductiveness, but the question would be how to break the spell. One strategy that has been used effectively in other shows is to build in moments of stopping for reflection that challenge and interrupt the flow, impeding viewers from being gradually sucked in by the beauty of the art or the lure of interesting documentation. Breaking up the show at key junctures can allow a curator to open space for unheard voices, especially the absent ones.32 These breaks make possible the consideration of different options for curating fascism.33 We’d like to end this essay by leaving our readers with four brief “flashes” from different moments in the Prada show and catalog. RB: “Room T” of Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista reconstructed Mussolini’s office as the director of the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (Figure 4.2). The room’s photograph, reproduced in the Prada catalog34 among installation views of Post Zang, functioned as a mise-en-abyme, revealing how the Fascist regime had originally mastered one of Celant’s strategies: the spectacularization of a historical narrative through carefully selected and manipulated documents. This juxtaposition further complicated questions of neutrality and transparency, showing how the archival documents utilized in Post Zang were filtered by the regime’s censorship before being selected and curated by Celant. Important questions that, therefore, emerge are: what documents did the regime preserve or censor? Which ones were lost or altered after the ventennio? How does taking a document out of an archive and exhibiting it affect its understanding? SH: Two “flashes” come to my mind. First, in the 1926 room, we see a vitrine displaying Margherita Sarfatti’s biography of Mussolini, Dux (1926) (Figure 4.3). Looking down into the vitrine, we see that the cover of the book is illustrated with Adolfo Wildt’s grand white marble relief of Mussolini’s face. Looking up above the vitrine, we see the actual enormous and imposing marble sculpture. The viewer’s eyes move up and down between document and artwork, comparing the two, and in doing so create an inescapable closed circuit of obedient bowing down to Il Duce. The document below becomes an “authority” that confirms the artwork above, and vice versa, the artwork is shown to match the document, so that both elements corroborate, support, and validate each other in a manner that forces the viewer into corresponding movements of obedience. This does not lead the viewer to a critical evaluation, nor does it leave room to stop and analyze the art and life of the period more critically.

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Figure  4.2  Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, reconstruction of Mussolini’s office at Il Popolo d’Italia in Room T, “The Mussolini room,” exhibition display by Leo Longanesi, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1932. Archivi Centrali dello Stato, Rome. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada.

A second “flash”: one of the most eerie rooms for me was the 1938 room, where there is no trace or documentation of the Fascist Racial Laws that were enacted in that year (Figure 4.4). It is impossible for any Jewish viewer, or any viewer at all for that matter, to consider that year with neutrality, or to continue to look at the beautiful art without also thinking of the fact that in 1938 Italian Jews were suddenly expelled from work and school, and that many had to go into hiding or flee the country to save their lives, while others would soon be killed in Italy or sent to their deaths in concentration camps.35 The tranquil tone and beauty of this room overlooks the traumatic human experience of living under Mussolini’s regime. RB: In the final room, which, unlike the others, was not assigned a year but presented post-1943 artworks, the public could flip through the books used by Celant to prepare for the show (Figure 4.5): again, a tool of transparency but also spectacularization. Strikingly similar to curator Harald Szeemann’s Museum of Obsessions (his library-turned-exhibition project), the mountain of books emphasized the curator’s Sisyphean effort, while celebrating him as a creative mastermind. Like Marinetti, who dominated the show from its

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Figure 4.3  Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. 1926 room: From left to right: Adolfo Wildt, La Vittoria (Victory), 1918−19; Adolfo Wildt, Il Duce, 1924; Adolfo Wildt, Cesare Sarfatti, 1927. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada.

title, poster, and first room, Szeemann was an ideal interlocutor for Celant, embodying an archetype of curator, creator, entrepreneur.36 This was the only room where the Holocaust appeared, including Jewish artist Corrado Cagli’s drawings of Buchenwald, but the historical narrative was over and the exhausted public’s attention was directed not to the walls but toward the center of the room where the books were displayed.

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Figure 4.4  Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. 1938 room. From left to right, in color: Felice Casorati, Ragazza in collina (Ragazza di Pavarolo) (Girl on the Hill [Girl of Pavarolo]), c. 1937; Felice Casorati, Le Rape (The Turnips), c. 1938; Felice Casorati, Le sorelle Pontorno (The Pontorno Sisters), 1937; Ardengo Soffici, Strada del poggio (Poggio Road), 1935; Ardengo Soffici, La toletta del bambino (Washing the Child), 1923. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada.

Figure 4.5  Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Fondazione Prada, 2018, Milan. Final room including the books utilized by the curatorial team. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada.

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Notes 1 We presented earlier versions of this study at the following venues: Exhibiting (and) History, workshop organized by Maria Bremer at the Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max Planck Institute of Art History, Rome, December 6–7, 2018; Fascisms Past in Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice, panel organized by Miriam Paeslack at the College Art Association (CAA) Annual Conference, New York, February 16, 2019; “Curating Fascism,” public talk moderated by Ara Merjian at the Casa Italiana, New York University on April 18, 2019. We were also invited to present our work as guest speakers in classes taught by Denis Viva, University of Trento, November 30, 2020; Atina Grossmann, Cooper Union, March 9, 2021; and Ara Merijan, University of Milan, May 11, 2021. A brief review was published by Raffaele Bedarida, “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum,” Artforum, September 2018: 307–8. 2 On the value of the dialogic approach, see Lucia Re’s essay in this volume. 3 See Vanessa Rocco’s essay in this volume. 4 Most shows in Italy and abroad choose not to use the word “fascism” in their titles (although sometimes it appears in subtitles). See Rosalind McKever’s essay in this volume. Some exhibitions avoid the subject. See Ana Gonçalves Magalhães’s essay in this volume. 5 Jason Farago, “A New Italy, Imagined by Artists and Demagogues,” The New York Times, March 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/21/arts/design/italian-artfondazione-prada-palazzo-strozzi.html (accessed April 25, 2022). 6 The original loan requests and descriptions of the exhibition bore this title. 7 Germano Celant, “Acknowledgements,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics Italia 1918–1943 (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), n.p. 8 This implied strategy of critical neutrality is found in reviews for which Celant was interviewed. See, for example, Rosalind McKever, “Displays of Power in Italian Art under Fascism,” Apollo, April 9, 2018, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/displays-ofpower-in-italian-art-under-fascism/ (accessed April 25, 2022). 9 See essays by Luca Quattrocchi and Denis Viva in this volume. 10 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, “Presentazione,” Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935 (Florence: Marchi e Bertelli, 1967), x. 11 Margherita Sarfatti, “Architettura, arte e simbolo alla Mostra del Fascismo,” Architettura 12 (1933): 1. See Luca Quattrocchi, “Esporre l’arte dell’era fascista,” Italia Contemporanea 279 (December 2015): 533. 12 Ragghianti, “Presentazione,” X. See Sergio Cortesini, “Lo storicismo estetico di Ragghianti e altri miti critici nel 1967,” in Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e l’arte in Italia tra le due guerre, ed. Paolo Bolpagni and Mattia Patti (Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti, 2020), 55–65. 13 Ibid. 14 Ragghianti’s essay began: “More than half a century has passed since 1915, the space of a generation since 1935.” He then posed the question of younger generations’ understanding of fascism. Ragghianti, “Presentazione,” i. 15 On architecture’s significance for exhibitions, see Romy Golan’s essay in this volume. 16 See Denis Viva’s essay in this volume. 17 Celant, “Toward a Real and Contextual History,” Post Zang, 30. 18 See Marla Stone, The Patron State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Stone, “Exhibitions and the Cult of Display in Fascist Italy,” Post Zang, 186–91.

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19 Celant, “Acknowledgements,” Post Zang, n.p. 20 Farago, “A New Italy”; Jackie Wullschläger, “Back to the Futurists: Italian Art in the Era of Fascism,” Financial Times, February 16, 2018; Natalia Aspesi, “Quanto era bella l’arte italiana nell’ora buia del fascismo,” La Repubblica, March 11, 2018; Riccardo Conti, “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum,” Domus, February 20, 2018. 21 Wullschläger, “Back to the Futurists.” 22 McKever, “Displays of Power.” 23 Ester Coen, “Contro l’applauditissima mostra milanese,” Dagospia, April 17, 2018, https://www.dagospia.com/rubrica-31/arte/critica-storica-ester-coen-contro-39applauditissima-nbsp-mostra-171754.htm (accessed April 25, 2022). 24 Celant, “Toward a Real,” 30–43. 25 Aspesi, “Quanto era bella.” 26 Ibid. 27 Celant, “Toward a Real,” 43. 28 Germano Celant, “Per una critica acritica,” Casabella no. 343 (December 1969): 42–4; Sipario no. 287 (March 1970): 19–20; Nac no. 1 (September 1970): 29–30. 29 Germano Celant, Arte Povera (Milan: Mazzotta, 1969). See Raffaele Bedarida, “Transatlantic Arte Povera,” in Postwar Italian Art History Today: Untying ‘The Knot’, ed. Sharon Hecker and Marin Sullivan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 194–213. 30 Jeffrey Shandler, “Schindler’s Discourses,” in Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, ed. Yosefa Loshitzky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997), 155. 31 This is a major theme of Arte Povera artists, from Giulio Paolini’s 1967 Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s juxtapositions of photographed images with reflected ones of people looking. 32 On absences in exhibitions on fascist-era art, see the essays by Robert Gordon, John Champagne, Nicola Labanca, Raffaele Bedarida, Lucia Re, and the interview with Emily Braun in this volume. 33 For different ways to curate exhibitions on fascism, see essays by Miriam Paeslack, Vivien Greene and Susan Thompson, Shelleen Greene, Elena Dellapiana and Jonathan Mekinda, Sharon Hecker, and interviews with Maaza Mengiste and Emily Braun in this volume. 34 Celant, Post Zang, 273. 35 On curating and the memory of Italian Jews in this period, see the essay by Robert Gordon and the interview with Emily Braun in this volume. 36 Celant’s reconstructed Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition, When Attitudes Become Form, Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice, 2013, anticipated Post Zang as the reenactment of a historical exhibition. See Vanessa Rocco’s essay in this volume.

­5

Italy’s Holocaust on Display: From Carpi-Fossoli to Auschwitz (to Florence) Robert S. C. Gordon

The long, uneven, and at times deeply ambivalent history of Italy’s postwar coming to terms with the Holocaust has been shaped by many different forces, filtered through changing categories of language and understanding, staged at many sites, events, and moments, and driven by a panoply of agents and operators both public and private, individual, communal, and institutional. For much of the postwar era, this complex process did not take place at the center of the cultural arena, however, but evolved instead at the margins, in the shadows of other, ostensibly dominant memory discourses and cultures focused on fascism, the war, and the Resistance, each of which was struggling with its own profound ambivalences and imbalances, and each of which stood in oblique relation to the emerging consciousness of the “world historical” event of the Shoah, as it took shape in the late twentieth century.1 As we shall see below, sites of memory of the Shoah struggled to gain purchase and were frequently slow to come to fruition, neglected, or noticed only in restricted circles, and they certainly did not garner the large-scale crowds and major critical attention, often with paradigmshifting effects, that attended some of the key postwar exhibitions on fascism and the art of the fascist era that other chapters of this book address. Nevertheless, a capillary process of profound historical and artistic importance was underway at these margins, building a field of cultural knowledge and cultural memory of the Holocaust in Italy that would come to powerful prominence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and tap into global cultural dynamics. This field of Holocaust knowledge was determined in no small measure by arenas of curated display and exhibition that were driven by evolving historical-pedagogical and artistic principles; conceived at a series of key moments of convergence; and constructed by contingent constellations of key agents of memory and transmission, and producers of culture and cultural knowledge. Furthermore, specific instances of the Holocaust on display can be shown to have had long trajectories of gestation and subsequent phases of reception, restaging, and reshaping, such that defining aspects of Italy’s postwar processing of the Holocaust can be tracked along their arcs of evolution, occasionally over periods of several decades. Such spaces and sites of display

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of the Holocaust and their related arcs of development are typically hybrid in form and function: not quite the conventional single, circumscribed space of the curated exhibition nor the official, permanent public display of the monument nor indeed the historical-pedagogical museum. In fact, they often partake of elements of all of these, and no little tension arises from the uneasy mix of functions and temporalities that results. These moments and the arcs that emanate from them, then—from conception to reception to legacy—work as powerful case studies of how public display and exhibition have taken place and taken shape within the wider Italian cultural field of the memorialization of the Shoah. This essay proposes to track, outline, and analyze two such examples, two such arcs, which together take us from the 1950s through to the present day. They entail a navigation of sites, events, and exhibitions staged across Italy and propelled by intersecting and overlapping clusters of agents and operators, but they are essentially anchored at two sites, two focal points on the historical and symbolic map of Italy’s Holocaust: first, Carpi, in Emilia-Romagna in central-northern Italy, the town nearest to Fossoli, where the principal prison and transit camp for Italian Jews and others deported to Auschwitz from Italy was located; and second, Auschwitz itself, and specifically the Italian national memorial and exhibit at the main Auschwitz-I camp.

Carpi-Fossoli, 1955/1973 The site of the Fossoli prison camp has its own complicated history before, during, and after the period of the 1940s deportations, but our focus here is less on Fossoli itself than on the ripples that extended from the somewhat isolated and at times abandoned fields of the camp to the municipal center of Carpi some 6 kilometers away.2 As part of a widespread national program of events to mark the tenth anniversary of the Liberation and the end of the Second World War, December 1955 saw the inauguration in the town’s historic central Castello dei Pio, overlooking the vast Piazza dei Martiri (renamed as such after the war to commemorate the victims of a 1944 Nazi massacre), of a major exhibition: the Mostra nazionale dei Lager nazisti (National Exhibition of the Nazi Concentration Camps). This exhibition was the first large-scale display dedicated to the concentration camps in Italy and marks a crucial staging-post in the recovery of attention to them and, to a degree, toward what would come to be called the Holocaust, previously broadly neglected or relegated to the margins of the national conversation following the war.3 As Marzia Luppi and Elisabetta Ruffini have meticulously reconstructed and documented, the exhibition included an extensive body of historical documents—deportation and concentration camp photographs, icons, documented life histories, and so on—that were largely focused on links between the antifascist Resistance and the camps, and indeed on the “Resistance in the Camps,” the title of the inaugural celebration events in December 1955. The experiences of  the approximately forty thousand Italian antifascist victims of deportation took center  stage.4 The exhibition drew large crowds from the intensely antifascist, proResistance civic authorities and public in both Carpi and the Emilia-Romagna region

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as a whole and it worked to insert the history of the camps into the “national” history of the struggle against the Nazis, as its title clearly signaled. The Mostra nazionale, presented in a relatively small provincial center but with a highly distinctive local history given its proximity to Fossoli, brought surprisingly dynamic energy and resonance to the nascent field of cultural work around the Holocaust in Italy. The exhibition traveled through large parts of central and northern Italy in various forms for four years following 1955,5 and the display material was variously adapted, reduced, and expanded as it visited approximately forty different regional venues, often prompting further local historical and memorializing initiatives among survivor groups, the young, political activists, local communities, associations, and parties.6 Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi was drawn into speaking in a public arena for one of the very first times when the exhibition reached Palazzo Carignano in Turin in 1959, and he wrote a cluster of early newspaper and magazine articles around related events in 1959 and 1960.7 The exhibition generated public debate and reflection on the concentration camps wherever it went, often for the first time since the war or with a new sense of openness, as well as polemics and hostility from reactionary quarters. The very genesis and conception—and ownership—of the Carpi exhibition were from the outset rooted in activist and associationist circles. The key player in this regard was ANED, the Associazione nazionale degli ex-deportati politici nei campi nazisti (National Association of Ex-Political Deportees to the Nazi Camps).8 Constituted as early as 1945 in support of deportation victims and their families, ANED became (and remains across the postwar era until today) the major agent and organizing force behind the collective memory of the concentration camps in Italy, developing a network of local groups and delegations as well as a national organizational structure. The association was the main sponsor and prime mover behind the Carpi exhibition and helped propel its national itinerary. It contributed archive material and images, often of an intensely personal nature linked to the wartime life stories of its leaders and members, and this accumulation of materials helped lay the foundations at local, regional, and national levels, as the exhibition circulated, of a new visual culture and memory bank of the camps and the Holocaust in Italy. This circulating, evolving corpus of iconography and material imagery, and the growing interest around it, also fed directly into the second stage of the Carpi arc that we are tracing here—that is, the conceptualization and realization of a project for a permanent “Museum-Monument,” as it came to be called, the Museo monumento al deportato politico e razziale (Museum-monument to the political and racial victim[s] of deportation), which would open, again in the Castello dei Pio, in 1973. As early as 1955 and accelerating after 1965, plans were set in place to gather material for the project, tapping into archives, images, and icons already present in the National Exhibition and drawing in a constellation of civic collaborators and sponsors. These included ANED and several other veteran, prisoner, and partisan organizations and research centers; individual survivors and former inmates of Fossoli; the longterm PCI (Communist Party) mayor of Carpi and former partisan Bruno Losi; and both the local Jewish community centered on the provincial capital of Modena and the national Jewish body, UCII, the Unione delle comunità israelitiche italiane (Union of Italian Jewish Communities). Interwoven with these civic, communal, and/or political

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players was a group of creative figures who would give aesthetic and formal shape to the display spaces of the museum-monument. This remarkable cluster of artists and designers is of crucial importance for our discussion here, since the transition from the 1955 exhibition to the 1973 museum-monument can be said to mark a signal shift in the mode of display and transmission of the memory of the concentration camps— in Carpi and, by extension, more widely in Italy—from a predominantly historicaldocumentary or denotative mode to a more aesthetic, symbolic, or connotative one. These creative collaborators included architects, designers, and scenographers, each with their own forceful artistic vision and each also with intense personal connections to the history of deportation and the concentration camps (in some cases specifically to Fossoli). The architectural project was led by the BBPR studio. The initials of this highly influential group stood for its founding partners Gian Luigi Banfi, Lodovico Barbiano di Belgiojoso, Enrico Peressutti, and Ernesto Nathan Rogers, for whom the war and the concentration camps evoked tragic personal histories: Banfi had died at Gusen-Mauthausen after fighting in the Resistance; Belgiojoso had followed the same path but survived; and Rogers had been forced to flee to Switzerland to avoid racial persecution, but his father died in Auschwitz. The BBPR studio would design not only the Carpi project but also several other concentration camp memorial projects in Italy and Austria, the earliest of which was the remarkable glass cube and metal sculpture in Milan’s monumental civic cemetery in 1945.9 The museum design and display project in Carpi was complemented by three other figures: Nelo Risi, poet, film director, and husband of the Hungarian Auschwitz survivor and writer Edith Bruck; and the couple Lica and Albe Steiner (or Licalbe Steiner as they sometimes designated themselves together), leading designers and graphic artists, both former partisans, and both with close family murdered by the Nazis.10 All these figures brought their formal, personal, and political concerns to bear on the project, in addition to their prior experience in design for related projects. One interesting illustration of the web of projects and perspectives that converged in the museum-monument was a parallel photo-book project on the Holocaust that Albe Steiner was working on in the late 1950s and early 1960s—tellingly a direct product of his personal involvement in the traveling Carpi National Exhibition and of his own personal archive—which then in turn fed into his work on the museum-monument. The book, co-edited with another concentration camp survivor Piero Caleffi, appeared in 1960 with the Communist publisher Feltrinelli under the declamatory title Pensaci, uomo! (Think of This, Man!) and consisting of a catalog-style sequence of thirteen short texts evoking the history of Nazi genocide followed by 160 archival images depicting the same in all its horrors.11 The design of thirteen rooms and the courtyard memorial of the museummonument was guided by BBPR and the others into a remarkable set of curated spaces. These spaces were not necessarily devoted to information, education, and record but rather to symbolic evocation through the spare presence of emblematic objects and icons encased in glass cabinets or affixed to the walls, framed in simple color patterns (mostly whites, reds, and blacks) alongside eloquent carved fragments of imagery and texts by victims or survivors. Each space set these relatively sparse elements in choreographed relation to each other, to the vaulted ceilings of the Castello buildings,

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and to a series of large-scale graphic artworks engraved and painted onto the walls (Figure  5.1). These latter works were the creation of a further remarkable group of external artist-collaborators—drawn in from both Italy and abroad, all once again broadly from the left and with a strong record of antifascism—who created original works or reworked existing motifs and images for the graffiti: Corrado Cagli, Renato Guttuso, Fernand Léger, Alberto Longoni, and Pablo Picasso.12 The museum-monument represented a powerful early example of the workings of constellations and arcs in the display history of Italy’s Holocaust and concentration camp memory. Its genesis was complex, lengthy, and multimedial, with many stages, stretching from 1955 to 1973 (and on to the present day), from public historical exhibition to something akin to a collaborative artwork and memorial installation. It was born of a convergence of players and networks of civic, political, personal, and institutional engagement out of which both a new awareness and a new model of representation of the Shoah emerged—one based as much on aesthetic force and connotative mood as on documentation and historical record. Many of the same elements, including some of the same names, groups, and acronyms, although in a different hybrid compound and at a very different site, recur in our second example.

­ igure 5.1  Museum-Monument to the Political and Racial Victims of Deportation, Carpi. F View from Room 2 into Room 1 showing artwork by Alberto Longoni. Photograph by the author. Permission from Fondazione Fossoli.

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Auschwitz (Florence), 1969/1980/2019 The Italian national pavilion and memorial at Auschwitz was opened on April 13, 1980, in Block 21 of the main Auschwitz-I Lager site, with the official title Memoriale in onore degli italiani caduti nei campi di sterminio nazisti (Memorial in honor of Italians fallen in the Nazi extermination camps). The creation of an Italian memorial was not an isolated case: the Auschwitz site was recognized by UNESCO as a world heritage site in 1979, and this coincided with a moment of marked change in its policy and international profile.13 A few national memorials had been present since the 1960s, particularly Polish and other Eastern European countries such as Hungary, but several new Western countries opened theirs in 1979 and 1980, including Austria, France, and Holland. Furthermore, 1978 had also seen the opening of a specific display dedicated to “the suffering and martyrdom of the Jews,” hitherto broadly subsumed within Polish or universalizing memorials, and 1979 saw the remarkable occasion of John Paul II, returning to Poland for the first time as Pope, reciting mass at Birkenau in front of a crowd of over a million people. The Italian memorial exhibit, like Carpi’s museum-monument, was planned and owned by ANED. The idea was born in 1969, but work progressed in fits and starts through the late 1970s. Indeed, its conception and development followed a pattern and a rhythm that quite closely echoed the Carpi project, suggesting something of an emerging model of production of Italy’s Holocaust memorial display culture and aesthetic. It required lengthy, not always easy negotiations amongst several stakeholders. With particular input from former Mauthausen deportee and president of the Association from 1978, Gianfranco Maris, ANED gathered key individual and institutional collaborators: national and local Jewish communities and civic authorities, Italian regional and state authorities, the Polish state and the Auschwitz camp authorities, and the International Auschwitz Committee (IAC).14 Overlaying and intersecting this network of civic, institutional, and political sponsorship and organization, another remarkable cluster of artists forged the formal substance and creative labor of the exhibition project, including several of the same figures involved at Carpi. BBPR, in particular Lodovico Belgiojoso, and Nelo Risi were once again actively engaged with the concept and design. A short historical text for display in Block 21 was written by Primo Levi: in a careful balancing act, Levi summarized the history of fascism—from 1919 in Italy to the rise of Nazism and the book burnings of 1933, through to genocide in the 1940s—and combined elements of Italian, European, Jewish, and universal history and memory in a characteristically pregnant work of synthesis, addressed “To the Visitor.”15 The avant-garde composer Luigi Nono added an aural ambient element, in the form of his 1966 work Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto ad Auschwitz (Remember What They Did to You at Auschwitz), which was in turn based on his work for the 1965 Berlin production of Peter Weiss’s play Der Ermittlung (The Investigation), a dramatization of the 1963–65 Frankfurt Auschwitz trials that marked a turning point in German artistic representations of the Shoah.16 And, finally, the narrow space of Block 21 was dominated by a large-scale work of art by Sicilian artist Mario (Pupino) Samonà, who created a disorienting, part-abstract, part-figurative

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Figure  5.2 Italian national memorial at Block 21, Auschwitz. Permission from Paweł Sawicki, Auschwitz Memorial.

collage following a spiral design suggested by BBPR (Figure 5.2). The spiral canvas was made up of fragments of imagery from newspapers, pen portraits, Hebrew lettering, sketches of barbed wire, industrial logos, and patchwork swathes of reds and yellows, all of which served to draw visitors through the memorial exhibition in a dramatic facsimile of the storm of history. The style and form were something of a hybrid, with evidence of Samonà’s avant-garde roots in the dynamism and use of collage materials— he was deeply marked by his encounter with Giacomo Balla in 1950s Rome—as well as a mix of abstract and figurative modes and a narrative drive informed by Levi’s text.17 Although the tone and sensibility are dramatically different, the synthesis of color, iconography, and object—and of text, fragment, and connotative metonymies— suggests clear lines of comparison with the museum-monument at Carpi: indeed one later defender of Block 21 would label it a “document-monument,” suggesting a notdissimilar hybridity of form.18 After 1980 the result of those eleven years of planning and conception was a striking albeit, according to its critics and the camp authorities, relatively little-visited and poorly maintained collaborative work of memorial art—a figure in more than one sense of Italy’s rich but also somewhat fragile or “thin” shared memory of the Holocaust. Whereas the Carpi museum-monument has remained intact, managed since 1996 by the publicly maintained Fossoli Foundation and tied into a dynamic program of education and part of a memory-scape combining several sites around Carpi, Fossoli, and nearby,19 the afterlife of Block 21 has been much more uncertain and at times controversial.

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In 2008 a lively debate broke out in the culture pages of the national press and within associationist and intellectual circles about the fate of this official national memorial at the central and defining site of the Shoah. The debate was prompted by historian Giovanni De Luna and drew in a series of other major historians, cultural commentators, and gatekeepers of Holocaust memory, several of whom had a history of involvement in this or similar projects and the networks behind them.20 The debate focused precisely on what was possible and appropriate for a twenty-first-century memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, in terms of aesthetics and the politics of aesthetics, with a particular anxiety over the ongoing value of the antifascist, engagé culture of the 1950s–1970s that had profoundly shaped the conception and genesis of the memorial and, we might add, of the project at Carpi. In 2008 De Luna described Block 21 as: almost incomprehensible for today’s visitors … a design that puts the emphasis more on symbolic abstraction than on storytelling, more on aesthetic suggestion than on thorough documentation … a vision that has a great deal to do with the spirit of the 1970s [when it was made] and very little to do with Auschwitz.21

Several lines of tension converged here, such that the memorial became a conduit for an ongoing debate over the decaying, after 1989, of Italy’s postwar, antifascist, Republican settlement, mingled with generational tensions that, paradoxically, saw a group of young activists linked to antifascist research institutes and artists take up the defense of this 1970s work of political art against older critics. This difficult mixture of generational, cultural, and political tension was characteristic of the confusions of coding and positions created by the post-1989 shift: how to be antifascist, and how to preserve the legacy of earlier generations of antifascism, in the face of an apparently post-fascist, post-communist, and even post-ideological present was no longer clear.22 In the same context and for some of the same reasons, response to the Shoah became a key battleground and site of value within the crisis of antifascist memory politics. Further tensions were thus manifest in the debate between a perceived zero-sum competition between “Jewish” memory and Resistance memory; between aesthetic, memorial, and educational functions in the public uses of history and memory; between state, civic, and private memory; and, finally, between the ethics and geography of historical tourism, including so-called “Holocaust tourism.” As De Luna pointed out, over fifty thousand Italians visited Auschwitz in 2007, and as literary critic and essayist on Jewish–Italian history Alberto Cavaglion glossed acidly, the first neo- (or post-) fascist mayor of Rome, Gianni Alemanno, elected in April 2008, had “reassured” the city in one of his first public pronouncements on taking office by declaring, “we will continue funding trips to Auschwitz.”23 The fault lines were not only Italian: post-1989 Polish cultural politics were also at stake, since in this period the Auschwitz authorities were also attempting to renew and modernize this (and other) memorials at the camp to include in their educational offering multimedia and digital resources in place of rhetorical and “political” works of memorial art. As a result, after a series of stalled negotiations, the Block 21 exhibit was

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summarily shut down in July 2011. The official Auschwitz press release announcing this blamed ANED for failing to take remedial action and commented: ­ is type of exhibit can be categorized as art of art’s sake and would be referred Th to in a gallery of contemporary art as an installation or performance. This type of art is not presented on the grounds of the former Auschwitz camp, where the educational dimension is connected with remembrance, education and making the younger generation aware of the tragedy of the victim of the Shoah …24

Following its closure, the case of Block 21 was something of a calvary of inaction, as frustrated efforts were made to “save” the memorial. ANED and researchers at the Resistance history research institute at Bergamo, together with art restorers at Milan’s Brera Academy,25 online manifestos, petitions, and crowdsourcing campaigns,26 networks close to Fossoli, regional politicians on the left and in national government— all worked to find a solution. A plan to salvage and transport the memorial to a site in Italy took shape and funding was put in place, although it struggled to find an appropriate location. Fossoli itself was mooted, as was the newly established memorial site at Platform 21 in Milan’s central train station where deportation convoys had departed for Auschwitz and elsewhere between 1943 and 1945.27 A new ANED appeal was launched in 2014 and led finally to the transfer of the memorial to Florence and to a meticulous work of restoration by the historic Florentine workshop, the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. Finally, nearly forty years after its first unveiling in Poland, the entire Block 21 “installation” was rehoused and opened to the public as a fixed installation at the Ex3 contemporary art center at Piazza Bartali in central Florence on May 8, 2019, with the public support of ANED, the Tuscan Region, and the leftist mayor Dario Nardella, among others, and accompanied by a curated display documenting its own history going back to 1969.28 What do the intersecting case studies of the Carpi museum-monument and Block 21 installation tell us about the Holocaust display during the long postwar era in Italy, and indeed about its role in larger processes of cultural work around the twentieth-century age of extremes?29 The question demands an answer on at least two distinct levels. First, the constellations and convergences that fed into the projects tell us something about processes of cultural production in this field and about the production of the very cultural field of which they form a key part. And, secondly, they tell us something about a history of cultural and aesthetic form as a living, evolving facet of the cultural memory of the Holocaust in Italy, taking on different, often clashing shapes, meanings, and connotations at different moments in a multigenerational trajectory of cultural memory formation. On the level of cultural production, our two arcs stretching over a period of sixty years and more, from 1955 to 2019, demonstrate vividly how complex the networks of operators and agents of cultural memory and knowledge production in a specific sector or subfield can be and, indeed, necessarily are. In a sense, however, our focus on the Holocaust and the concentrations camps has been artificially narrow, hiding the ways in which this one thread of cultural processing and production and the subfield of memory and knowledge it helped to produce—an Italian collective perception and

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image of the Holocaust—was in fact embedded in broad and deep processes of response, negotiation, and evasion in relation to war, resistance, fascism, and their legacies. The Carpi exhibition of 1955 was one small element in a tentative but important moment of national reckoning with fascism ten years after the war, a moment that would be extended over the subsequent five years leading up to another key anniversary: the centenary of Italy’s unification celebrated in 1960–61, which would, notoriously, coincide with the national government’s disastrous flirtation with revived forces of neofascism.30 As Filippo Focardi shows in his recent important study, “memory wars” in the intersecting processing of legacies of fascism, the Resistance, the Shoah, and Communist crimes at the northeastern border with Yugoslavia have consumed the cultural field and the dynamic energies of those networks of cultural operators over decades—to a significant degree, coming to define Italy’s very sense of its own democracy and its place in Europe.31 The lines of connection that link the cluster of individuals, civic associations, and attendant networks that in any one case come together to organize a single exhibition addressing profound questions of national identity, culture, and geopolitics are in this sense surprisingly continuous and sustained. Looming geopolitics should not, however, occlude the sphere of the aesthetic and the formal, which is at least as important as understanding the workings of cultural memory and cultural knowledge. The sites, events, exhibits, museums, monuments, and documents at Carpi and at Auschwitz trace, as we have seen, a history of visual and textual (and occasionally aural) form as media for the transmission of an image and an idea of the camps and of genocide. We have seen how a particular idiom based  on a variety of aesthetic rather than documentary modes emerged in these years in tension with—although never quite eliminating—rhetorical, historical, and pedagogical modes. We might also find these modes in tension with the ritualistic, pious function of traditional public spaces of mourning and commemoration. These tensions are ultimately dynamic and irresolvable, constantly renegotiated at every level from local to regional to national to transnational. Both the museum-monument and the “installation”-memorial that we have looked at here attempted, in their own way, to resolve the tension through artistic form in the shape of a heavily symbolic, connotative projection into a display space of something like an essence of the historical phenomenon of the Lager—and they were subsequently heavily criticized for this, in one case at least into the 2000s. But it is telling to note, finally, that the same tension is to be found globally wherever urban or civic landscapes of postwar Europe have attempted to mark the legacy of the Shoah in a site of display: from the memorial-cum-educational institution of the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah in Paris to the awkward but also stunning integration of the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin with the disorienting symbolic-experiential space of the Libeskind memorial building alongside it. The stories of Carpi and of Block 21 belong distantly to the same cultural conversation ongoing in Paris, Berlin, and many other sites across Europe and beyond about the visual and spatial legacy of the Shoah, a conversation illuminated also by eloquent and prolonged silences; not least, in the Italian case, by the nearly twenty-year-old project—still unrealized at the time of this writing in 2021—for a National Museum of the Shoah in Rome.32 For all their flaws, the museum-monument and Block 21 are also a powerful rebuke to such silences and absences.

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­Notes 1 On these large questions of memory and postwar reckoning in Italy, see, for example, Filippo Focardi, Nel cantiere della memoria (Rome: Viella, 2020); John Foot, Italy’s Divided Memory (London: Palgrave, 2009); and Robert S. C. Gordon, The Holocaust in Italian Culture 1944–2010 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 2 On Fossoli, see Liliana Picciotto Fargion, L’alba ci colse come un tradimento: gli ebrei nel campo di Fossoli 1943–1944 (Milan: Mondadori, 2010). On relations between the camp and the community of Carpi, see Alexis Herr, The Holocaust and Compensated Compliance in Italy: Fossoli di Carpi, 1942–1952 (New York: Palgrave 2016). 3 Primo Levi, himself deported from Fossoli to Auschwitz in 1944, lamented the almost complete oblivion of the concentration camps by 1955; see “Anniversario” (1955), in Primo Levi, Opere, ed. Marco Belpoliti (Turin: Einaudi, 2017), 2: 1291–3. 4 Marzia Luppi and Elisabetta Ruffini, eds., Immagini dal silenzio. La prima mostra nazionale dei Lager nazisti attraverso l’Italia 1955–1960 (Modena: Nuovagrafica, 2005). 5 Luppi and Ruffini list nine locations for the itinerary of the main mostra after Carpi (Modena, Ferrara, Verona, Rome, Bologna, Turin, Cuneo, Mantua, and Padua), as well as a further thirty-one locations throughout the center and north, where two further exhibitions and a smaller local version were shown. Immagini dal silenzio, 39. 6 Key players in the network, both here and up to the present day, are the regional Historical Institutes of the Resistance and the Contemporary Age (Istituti storici della Resistenza e dell’età contemporanea); see “Rete Parri,” Istituto Nazionale Ferruccio Parri, http://www.reteparri.it/chi-siamo/ (accessed April 20, 2021). 7 Luppi and Ruffini, Immagini dal silenzio, 38–45; and Levi, Opere, 2:1294–1307. 8 Bruno Maida, Il mestiere della memoria. Storia dell’Associazione nazionale ex deportati politici, 1945–2010 (Verona: Ombrecorte, 2014). ­9 On BBPR and their Lager memorials, see Triennale di Milano, Il segno della memoria 1945–1995. BBPR: monumento ai caduti nei campi nazisti (Milan: Electa, 1995); and Foot, Italy’s Divided Memory, 90–5. 10 On the Steiners, see Anna Steiner, ed., Licalbe Steiner: grafici partigiani (Mantua: Corraini, 2015). 11 Piero Caleffi and Albe Steiner, eds., Pensaci, uomo! (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1960). 12 The work of creating the graffiti onsite was carried out by local artisans from the Cooperative Muratori di Carpi, with Guttuso providing oversight. Longoni created an original work for the museum, whereas Picasso did not. Other cases are unclear given the state of archives where only some of the preparatory sketches survive. Carlo Levi, the writer and artist, also planned to contribute an artwork, but health problems prevented him from completing it. See Marika Losi, ed., Guida al Museo Monumento al Deportato politico e razziale di Carpi (Carpi: Fondazione Fossoli, 2016). Thanks to the Director of the Fondazione Fossoli, Marzia Luppi, for her insight and information. 13 The UNESCO report and approval can be found at “Auschwitz Birkenau,” UNESCO, https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/31/documents/ (accessed April 20, 2021). On UNESCO, see Paul Betts, Ruin and Renewal: Civilising Europe after the Second World War (London: Profile, 2020), 311–44. 14 On the gestation of the monument see Teo Ducci, Opere di architetti italiani. In Memoria della deportazione (Milan: Mazzotta, 1997), 56–65.

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15 Levi, Opere, 2:1495–6 (one of several versions of this text). 16 “Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto in Auschwitz,” Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono Onlus, http://www.luiginono.it/it/luigi-nono/opere/ricorda-cosa-ti-hanno-fatto-inauschwitz (accessed April 20, 2021). On the controversies surrounding Weiss’s Der Ermittlung as a response to the Holocaust, see, for example, Robert Cohen, “The Political Aesthetics of Holocaust Literature: Peter Weiss’s The Investigation and its Critics,” History and Memory 10, no. 2 (1998): 43–67. 17 On Samonà, see Giuseppe Arcidiacono and Sandro S­ carrocchia, eds., Il Memoriale italiano ad Auschwitz. Documentazione, conservazione e progetto di integrazione 2008–2012 (Bergamo: Sestante, 2014), 161–70, 213–19; and Giulia Ingarao, ed., Il Memoriale italiano di Auschwitz. L’astrattismo politico di Pupino Samonà (Palermo: Kalós, 2010). 18 “Manifesto Memoriale,” 2015, http://www.artalks.net/wordpress/wp-content/ uploads/2014/05/Manifesto_Memoriale_25_071.pdf (accessed April 20, 2021). 19 Fondazione Fossoli, https://www.fondazionefossoli.org/it/ (accessed April 20, 2021). 20 These figures include Alberto Cavaglion, Ernesto Galli della Loggia, Moni Ovadia, Sergio Luzzatto, and Michele Sarfatti, among others. 21 Giovanni De Luna, “Se questo è un memorial,” La stampa, January 21, 2008. 22 See Sergio Luzzatto, La crisi dell’antifascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 2004). 23 Alberto Cavaglion, “Le vacanze ad Auschwitz,” L’indice dei libri del mese 25, no. 9 (September 2008): 9. 24 “Italian Exhibition at the Auschwitz Museum Closed,” Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, January 7, 2011, http://auschwitz.org/en/museum/news/italian-exhibitionat-the-auschwitz-museum-closed,833.html (accessed April 20, 2021). 25 Elisabetta Ruffini and Sandro Scarrocchia, “Il Blocco 21 di Auschwitz: un cantiere di riflessione e di lavoro,” Studi e ricerche di storia contemporanea, 69 (June 2008): 9–32. 26 “Cittadini contro la distruzione del Memoriale italiano di Auschwitz – Blocco 21,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DICzg-HG6iU (accessed April 20, 2021). 27 “Il Memoriale di Milano,” Memoriale della Shoah di Milano, http://www. memorialeshoah.it/memoriale-milano/ (accessed April 20, 2021). 28 “Il memoriale di Auschwitz rinasce a Firenze,” Toscana Notizie, May 8, 2019, http:// www.toscana-notizie.it/-/il-memoriale-di-auschwitz-rinasce-a-firenze-video (accessed April 20, 2021). An intriguing side story relates the great cyclist Gino Bartali (after whom Piazza Bartali is named) to the Shoah: Bartali was c­ elebrated as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 2013 for having saved Jews by smuggling false documents in the frame of his bicycle. But this account has been questioned recently by Marco and Stefano Pivato, L’ossessione della memoria. Bartali e il salvataggio degli ebrei: una storia inventata (Rome: Castelvecchi, 2021), leading to fierce polemics. 29 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994). 30 Focardi, Nel cantiere della memoria, 173, 216. 31 Ibid. 32 Gordon, Holocaust, 14–24. The extended and often difficult histories of various other Holocaust memory sites in postwar Italy would be worth considering alongside our two case studies and the wider European context, including especially the Milan station memorial site at Binario 21 (Platform 21), noted above, which opened to visitors in 2013, and the MEIS (Museo dell’ebraismo italiano e della Shoah, National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah) in Ferrara, partially opened in 2017.

­6

Umbertino Umbertino: The Many Masks of Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni Romy Golan

More should be said about the way in which exhibitions relate ideologically, but also virtually—in the form of a palimpsest—to their architectural containers. Nowhere is this truer than for the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, built in 1883 in the Umbertinian style, the Italian equivalent of the Belle Époque, which hosted the most egregious exhibitions of Mussolini’s regime. This essay traces the repeated covering and uncovering of the Palazzo’s facade and its rotunda entrance—the two most emblematic parts of the building—from the tenth Quadriennale of 1973 back to the first, fascist Quadriennale of 1931. Umbertino Umbertino: “What lies behind Humbert Humbert’s name?” Vladimir Nabokov was asked by an interviewer for Life magazine after the publication of Lolita in 1958.1 “Humbug,” Nabokov answered. “A complicated European with backgrounds gleaming through backgrounds.” A humbug is a person or object that behaves in a deceptive way, a form of posturing. In another interview, in Playboy in 1964, Nabokov also said about Humbert Humbert’s name: “The double rumble is, I think, very nasty, very suggestive. It is a hateful name for a hateful person. It is also a kingly name, but I did need a royal vibration for Humbert the Fierce and Humbert the Humble.”2 By uncovering, however cryptically, one of the many wordplays he used for his protagonists, Nabokov made the link I want to establish between a history of masking and that of an ideologically problematic building. Quadriennale X articulated itself in five installments lasting from 1972 to 1977, an unprecedented format and length for the event. From May to June 1973, La ricerca estetica dal 1960 al 1970, the third installment, greeted its visitors with a full-scale translucent photographic enlargement of the Palazzo’s facade designed by the architect Costantino Dardi and placed in front of the actual facade (Figure  6.1).3 (Scheduled to open in 1969 and thus in preparation just as student uprisings were upending the 1968 Venice Biennale and wrecking the 1968 Milan Triennale, Quadriennale X had been repeatedly postponed.) This was the first time the Palazzo’s facade had been camouflaged since its most storied years during the fascist ventennio. In articles, interviews, and in the video news (videogiornale) screened in one of the rooms, Dardi

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Figure  6.1 Costantino Dardi, X Quadriennale, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1973. Courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma.

explained his exhibition design (allestimento) as an operational, interventional, and conceptual gesture in relation to the building: An attempt to verify one’s own articulation and linguistic richness without necessarily ending up embalming the enemy; to contest the pre-existing mechanisms without necessarily ending up masking them behind a new chassis; to open the dialectic between the true and the false toward some new outcomes, somewhat more articulate and perhaps even ambiguous, without denying oneself, through a categorical and apodictic refusal, the possibility of a more complex judgement.4

The intent, in the words of the Quadriennale’s curator Filiberto Menna, was to juxtapose the “cold” linguistic analytical operation on the public-facing facade along one of Rome’s major urban arteries and the “heated” political activism (impegno) indoors, namely the last part of the exhibition in the long gallery just behind the rotunda, “La Proposizione ideologica.” Aiming to reconnect with the participatory and communitarian spirit of 1968 assigned to the last and most political section of the exhibition, the gallery was fitted with steps on either side, turning it into a theater. There, two Arte Povera works were displayed next to each other: the anti-Vietnam Igloo Giap by Mario Merz (1968) and Luciano Fabro’s Italia d’oro (1968), hanging upside down by its boot. Che cosa è il fascimo? (1971), Fabio Mauri’s imaginary restaging of the Ludi Juveniles of the fascist youth—replete with fascist and Nazi insignia next to the  Jewish Star and snippets from newsreels of rallies culled from the Luce Film

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Archive—was performed either live in the gallery or projected at regular intervals on screens in the same gallery.5 The emphasis in La ricerca estetica dal 1960 al 1970 on pedagogy and communication—one that urged the public to learn and to judge (the videogiornale allowed spectators’ comments to be edited in so as to create a videoteca, for example)6— and Menna’s insistence that it be curated by committee should be understood in part as counter-gestures in relation to a controversial and provocative exhibition that had recently brought the Palazzo, after years of lackluster exhibitions, back to the fore: Vitalità del Negativo nell’arte Italiana 1960/70, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva in 1970.7 Vitalità, which covered the same decade as Menna’s exhibition, exposed the Palazzo to recriminations about its past. While I have argued elsewhere that its scenario was a strategy of “mimetic subversion” on the part of its curator,8 some reviews, especially those by those slightly older Roman critics further to the left, such as Enrico Crispolti, were unforgiving: Vitalità del negativo is not a problematic exhibition, it is in fact axiomatic, and in its own way even terroristic (in view of its performed officialdom), and one may even call it, if somewhat malignantly, littoria [viz. fascist] (without however wanting to push too far a noxious comparison with a certain exhibition concerning the revolution, which took place forty years ago in these very rooms).9

Vitalità had opened mid-November of 1970 at a difficult political juncture, and two violent events bracketed the exhibition itself: a failed coup by neofascists known as the Golpe Borghese three weeks after its opening and, four months later, firebombs that destroyed a number of trucks on the Pirelli tire-testing track in the Lainate neighborhood of Milan, the first action claimed by the Red Brigades. On December 20 L’Espresso published an article titled “Come nel 22?” (i.e., “As in the year of Mussolini’s March on Rome?”), and the Communist Rinascita ominously predicted “L’ondata di ritorno” (the returning wave).10 This climate of uncertainty was registered before one even entered the exhibition by the ambiguous inside/outside dynamic of the Palazzo’s facade. The upbeat banner that hung in the entrance archway featured a Pop photographic negative of Michelangelo’s David, while a row of ten closed-circuit color television monitors at street level broadcast images of visitors walking through the exhibition, signaling to the passersby that the outside world was but a sideshow to the scenario unfolding within. Inside, the visitor traversed rooms with installations alternating between a blinding light and immersive darkness, with each artist having their own individual room. Most compelling was the way the rotunda declared itself from the outset as a scenographic event of the most spectacular sort, with an architect, Piero Sartogo, upstaging the artists. “An obscuring of the cupola and a grazing lighting of the bands of black cloth to obtain a virtual doubling of the space”: this is how Bonito Oliva described it years later.11 Sartogo’s preparatory drawings, some of which were reproduced in Vitalità’s catalog, show black ribbons wrapped horizontally around the columns on the perimeter of the entry space—perspectival foreshortening giving the impression that they hung horizontally over the entrance hall (Figure 6.2). One could say that it was the X of the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista that Bonito Oliva

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Figure 6.2  Piero Sartogo, installation for the entrance of Vitalità del Negativo, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1970. Photograph: Massimo Piersanti. Courtesy of the Piero Sartogo Archive, Rome.

and Sartogo proceeded to overturn. At that Mostra, the X—which signified the tenth year of the regime while also resonating with the omnipresent word dux or duce, as well as the Christian cross—had been mounted in several places: on the exterior of the building, just inside above the doorway, and elsewhere (Figure 6.3). In Vitalità, the X was metaphorically deposed by being rotated ninety degrees in space. The space of the Palazzo was, in short, negated and subverted. The carefree mood of the decade-long economic boom from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, and even up to 1968, had not been congenial to historical self-reflection. An exception occurred in 1959 when a group of abstract artists declared their intention to set up a secessionist salon outside of the Quadriennali, prompting the critic of the communist daily L’Unità to remark that “Fascist paternalism still rules the Quadriennale.”12 For a month that summer—a minor exception within a reigning amnesia—the Palazzo housed the Mostra della deportazione nei campi nazisti.13 More interesting are the years 1951, when the Quadriennale first returned to its original home, and 1955, when—for reasons that will soon be apparent—the notso-Umbertinian-looking neoclassical Palazzo became a crucial site for the Roman rehabilitation of things Umbertinian, in praise of the outmoded. These were loud echoes of the philosopher Benedetto Croce’s famous claim, after the fall of the Fascist regime, that the ventennio was only a historical “parenthesis” on the country’s steady path toward liberalism since unification in the 1860s. Croce’s concept of a parenthesis

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Figure 6.3  Adalberto Libera, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, facade for the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1922. Public Domain.

was one that allowed for both a rhetoric of historical continuity—minus twenty years—with an idealized parliamentary democratic past, even during the monarchy, and, alternatively, one of rupture with totalitarianism. On November 17, 1955, the new illustrated Roman weekly L’Espresso published an article by Mino Guerrini titled “The Quadriennale: Born in an Italy that Believed Itself to Be Fascist while It Was in Fact Umbertinian” (Figure 6.4). The article reprinted a photograph from the opening day of the regime’s first Quadriennale on May 7, 1931, which showed King Victor Emmanuel III and his entourage on their way out of the exhibition, descending the steps of the Palazzo’s grand staircase, built by Pio Piacentini in 1883, with its ornate facade behind them. The king wears military (but not fascist) regalia, while the men standing next to him are in anachronistic tails and top hats. At the onset of the economic boom, Guerrini’s Espresso article imagines an all-too-Italian tragicomical historical mix-up: the “wrong” facade and the “wrong” clothes for a signal cultural fascist event, a mix-up that hinted at yet another form of doubling.14 It is thus worth quoting Guerrini at some length: Of all the exhibitions created by fascism this is the one that is holding longest and best. The Quadriennale is above all an occasion for Romans to measure the passing of time through the memory of those Quadriennales that preceded it: the wartime one of ’43, which was the saddest; that in ’47, the most euphoric and

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­Figure  6.4 Pages from L’Espresso, November 17, 1955. Courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma.

pugnacious; and others, such as the first two at the time of the battles between the Scuola Romana and the Novecento and then between the Scuola Romana and the modernists. … The first Quadriennale was held in 1931. At that point the early symptoms of the belligerent and Mussolinian climate, though beginning to take shape, were not yet capable of disturbing the habits of Umbertinian Italy. The pomp and circumstance of the inauguration were the same as ever. … Outside the Palazzo delle Esposizioni was a delegation of artists, in uniform and led by Cipriano Efisio Oppo, awaiting the royalty at the bottom of the staircase, on the edge of the red carpet adorned with plants. … Meanwhile the king had entered the rooms. He didn’t like painting or sculpture, and never bothered to look at them. And yet, faced with kilometers of artworks on exhibit, he managed to appear interested, as if acknowledging some while rejecting others. Mussolini shared with the king this boredom for artistic events. The painter Leonetta Cecchi Pieraccini, who took part in all the most important national exhibitions from 1920 onwards, remembers that, in November 1923, the first time Mussolini showed up at an opening of the Roman Biennial as head of the government, he wore a top hat and morning coat; but for all the others he went on his own; visiting them before

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the opening. … The Quadriennale is what it has always been: it would not be too risky to say that it is now going back to its origins, those of the Mostre sindacali (biennials of the unions), the spring biennials, which preceded it and from which it was born.15

Though absent from the Espresso’s photograph, Mussolini appears in a photograph held in the Quadriennale archive, surrounded by his escort in civilian clothes. (In 1931 he still presented himself as a civilian.) It was again 1931 when the vocal artarchitecture historian and curator Pietro Maria Bardi, in his Rapporto sull’architettura (per Mussolini), singled out our Palazzo in his attacks on the sluggishness of the regime in matters architectural and called for direct intervention by the state in support of a fascist modernism. Revisiting the iniquities of the father, Pio Piacentini, onto the son, Marcello Piacentini, then the top official architect of the regime and Bardi’s real bête noire, Bardi wrote: When praising the flourishing of present-day art, there is no need to indict the seasons past, those of the last century and the prewar period. Still, we need a backdrop against which to picture the new beginning launched by fascism if we wish to take the measure of the swift pace of what has happened. The Quadriennale gives us clues. This bulky building (palazzone) by old Pio Piacentini has been, truth be told, the theater of every possible kind of artistic farce, the dusty and gray setting for the most curious burlesques appealing to the tastes of our grandparents and our parents, from the skilled jacks-of-all-trades who solicitously prepared, in those decadent times, the glory of a little group of champions of the plastic arts … in contrast to the actions of our youths. Everyone knows something about the palazzone, now cleaned and rearranged to serve with a new dignity, the changed times.16

Bardi was soon to receive satisfaction with the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, when Pio Piacentini’s building was camouflaged for two years by Adalberto Libera’s metallic fasces, turning the gleaming facade into one of the most emblematic images of the regime’s armored modernism (see Figure 6.3). In 1937 it was a mocktriumphal arch ideated by a little-known architect reflecting the now-favored bombast of the “Stile Littorio” for the Mostra Augustea della Romanità that covered the building.17 The Palazzo, commandeered by the Allies and used as a military canteen at the end of the war, followed by a variety of municipal boards in need of accommodation, had emerged from the war in a derelict state. In 1948 it was decided that the first postwar/post-fascist Quadriennale would migrate to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in the Valle Giulia.18 While some critics called for its definite demise—the Roman daily Momento-Sera headline was “The Quadriennale is dead and there is no need to resurrect it”19—others welcomed it back: “Politics has cast out art from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni. But this major national exhibition had found its place and no contemporary artist has been left out,” wrote a reviewer in another Roman daily, Il Tempo.20 In search of absolution perhaps, the first large-scale exhibition scheduled in

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the refurbished Palazzo was the Mostra della Ricostruzione Nazionale from April 1950 to January 1951, for which various government ministries took over both floors to document their new infrastructure projects including irrigation, aqueducts, railroads, and the restoration of monuments.21 But even in 1945, the swift political upset that took place in Italy’s capital just a little over one year after the dramatic episodes of “Rome Open City” was the subject of an ironic commentary in Marcello Venturoli’s account of his visit to the Palazzo in his Interviste di frodo (1945): June 30 [1944]. Another point of reference for my artistic investigations became the Palazzo delle Esposizioni on Via Nazionale. I believed it to be “vacant”; recently, various people have informed me that a group of Communist painters had settled there, with the permission of the Allies. Where? How? Occupation? A new artists’ syndicate? The specter of Oppo troubled me for a while but confidence and curiosity together prevailed. So the day before yesterday I decided, without having been invited, to cross that threshold. I went to the wrong door and found myself in the gutted meanderings of that Babel that was the last Quadriennale: the papier-mâché, the screens and partitions, the lapidary inscriptions, the pedestals and the grand staircases still seemed to stretch an invisible net behind the dust of the deserted halls. A crowd of workers, porters, employees, navigated among the most variegated vestiges: monumental armchairs, rolled-up carpets, picture frames, ropes, and nails dispersed in the mare magnum of the floors. After Babel, the Apocalypse. Everywhere an atmosphere of liquidation, smoky, like that of a gigantic circus on the move. . . .[Entering another part of the building] I heard the words “democratically” and “comrades,” then … I found myself in a long, narrow room … in which I was able to distinguish, standing behind an immense charcoal “Stalin,” Guttuso. … Turcato, sitting on a chair, was resting, satisfied after having finished a “Lenin” of similar dimensions.22

In a reversal of signs, with the seventh Quadriennale returning to its premises and cohabitating for a month with the Mostra delle Ricostruzione, Bardi’s spiteful comments on the Palazzo turned into terms of endearment. Indeed I would argue that its being targeted by Bardi in 1931 rendered it the ideal candidate in 1951 for a new nostalgia for a pre-fascist Belle Époque. “The Palazzo delle Esposizioni is back, Umbertinian,” ran the headline of the Neapolitan daily Il Giornale: In truth, due to the relentless additions, remodeling, and uninterrupted updating over the last sixty-eight years, ever since the day of its inauguration, very few of us know or remember what it originally looked like. Naturally, the palazzo is what it is: the exponent of a period taste which is no longer ours and yet not remote enough to be ennobled with the epithet “ancient.” … And yet a certain affection and nostalgia have already begun to insinuate themselves for a period toward which until recently we reserved condescending smiles. We thus believe that the current “updating” pleases the public. And it is certainly hard to imagine a more characteristically “Umbertinian” building than this one.23

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Similarly, another journalist emoted: ­ or those who remember, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni was once regarded as a F shrine for major artistic events. Then, little by little, in a spirit of transformation characteristic of the rapid variation in tastes and times, with its facade modified to the point of assuming the menacing visage of a model for propaganda, the Palazzo delle Esposizioni today looks like a youthful grandfather who curls his white moustaches with one of those old-fashioned gizmos. … In short, this building, halfway between Palladian and Umbertinian—basically, we Romans wish it well.24

And the critic for Turin’s Gazzetta del Popolo wrote: “The Palazzo delle Esposizioni is rejuvenated. … It seems reconsecrated.” 25 Indeed, during Mussolini’s regime, not only the facade but also the Palazzo’s interior had been relentlessly redesigned. The cupola of what was then called the Salone d’Onore was remodeled in a succession of crisp, unadorned, shallow modernissimi saucers illuminated by recessed lighting. The Corinthian columns, too, were constantly revised, either encased in streamlined cylindrical shafts, as in 1931 and 1935, creating tall, slightly tapered niches, or, as in 1939 and 1943, hidden by a faux wall, prompting visitors to view it in the form of a palimpsest.26 As one reviewer of the 1935 Quadriennale wrote: “In re-entering the Palazzo delle Esposizioni about to be occupied by the next Quadriennale, one cannot forget the footprint of rooms at the Mostra della rivoluzione: here was the rotunda that was its lair (covo), and here, where they are now building a fountain, stood the Sacrario dei Martiri.”27 Revision had become part of the building’s identity. Not so after the war. In the presentation of his allestimento of the 1973 Quadriennale in L’Architettura, Dardi listed all of the major postwar Italian museum refurbishing, from the Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Rosso in Genoa to the Castello Sforzesco in Milan in the hands of Carlo Scarpa, Franco Albini, Ernesto Rogers, and others. The Palazzo delle Esposizioni, in contrast, was left as it was.28 In a clear decision to forgo the relentless mise-en-scène of the ventennio, not a single architect-exhibition designer for the Quadriennali had laid hands on Pio Piacentini’s Beaux Arts building. Attention was paid instead to the exhibits of individual artists, most of which comprised easel paintings in the more intimate spaces of the Palazzo.29 In contrast to the many photographs of the allestimenti reproduced in Domus, Casabella, and the albums of Ditta Giacomelli in Venice (the photo agency assigned to the Quadriennale’s reportage during the interwar years), almost no installation shots appear in the Quadriennale’s official catalogs; in the reviews, numerous though they were; or even in the archives pertaining to this period. One exception is a small photograph in the reduced-format catalog of the 1951 Quadriennali, where we find Arturo Martini’s La sete (1936, also called Il bevitore) installed in the entrance room. In order to attest to Rome’s prompt return to “life as usual,” the 1951 Quadriennale was more unwieldy than ever: 3,499 works were displayed along 3 kilometers of galleries in 104 rooms. And yet Martini’s Bevitore—which he had sculpted after seeing the plaster casts of the victims of the volcanic eruption among the ruins of Pompeii—lay prostrate and tragically alone on the arid expanse of the marble floor under the unforgiving monumentality of

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Piacentini’s dome. Made from the porous material of volcanic tufa stone, this survivor of some untold disaster had made a poignant return. Martini, an enthusiastic fascist demoted in 1945 from his position as director of the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, died embittered in 1947. In 1951 he was given a redemptive homage in the most auratic space of the building. Just four years later, in 1955, an incoherent scenario of three sculptures met the visitors in the rotunda at the 7th Quadriennale—Ritmi, a dancing female figure by Marcello Mascherini, the author of monumental sculptural groups for various Case del Fascio; an archaizing figure of a helmeted Minerva in stone by the same artist; and, at the center under the cupola, Arcangelo, a gesso of a wingless figure slaying a demon in the form of a dragon by Emilio Greco (Figure 6.5). At the ninth Quadriennale of 1965, the only Quadriennale between 1955 and 1973, it was again a carefree chorus of prancing and strutting bronze silhouettes sculpted in a somewhat ludicrous mix of Etruscan and Dior’s New Look hourglass by Mascherini that peopled the rotunda Indicative of a diminishing interest in the architectural aspect of its container, the official catalog of that Quadriennale didn’t include any ground plans of the exhibition. But let us return to Dardi’s photo-screen. In L’Espresso’s review, “Cos’è il fascismo alla 10 Quadriennale. Un archeologo che smonta le architetture,” the often critical and always politically alert architecture historian Bruno Zevi, borrowing his title from Mauri’s performance, praised Dardi’s intervention for its self-reflexive stance: “Architecture, even the triumphalist and dull type practiced by Pio Piacentini, speaks

Figure  6.5 View of the installation of Room 1 (with Antonio Mascherini, Ritmi and Minerva; Alberto Gerardi, L’archangelo), VII Quadriennale, 1955. Courtesy Fondazione La Quadriennale di Roma.

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in a polyvalent voice; here any possible negative ambiguity has been eliminated, so that it can reflect upon itself, upon its linguistic means, flattening itself into a two-dimensionality that privileges represented over lived space.”30 Yet I would argue that in the context of the violent Years of Lead—years rife with conspiracy theories on both the extra-parliamentary left and right—the political meaning of Dardi’s screen remains equivocal. What it signaled, in a quintessential postmodern gesture, is that there is no distinction between the mask and what stands behind it. Drop the mask and what you find is its double. But by stopping short below the pediment, it left unmasked the part where Pio Piacentini dedicated the Palazzo to his king Umberto I. Its message: the Belle Époque, that of the “stile Umbertino,” was belle only by name. Nicknamed “il re buono,” Umberto I was also known as “il re mitraglia” (the machinegun king) for his merciless violence against dissidents at home and in the colonies. Having survived two assassination attempts by anarchists—the first in 1878, less than a year after his ascent to the throne, the second in 1897—the king was killed by a third anarchist at Monza in 1900. Dardi’s facade was a warning against the one-too-many political/architectural rehabilitations that had taken place in this seemingly immortal building.

­Notes 1 2 3

4

5 6 7

8

Alfred Apple Jr., ed., The Annotated Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1991), 244–5. Vladimir Nabokov, “Interview with Vladimir Nabokov,” by Alvin Toffler, Playboy (January 1964), http://www.lib.ru/NABOKOW/Inter03.txt (accessed October 21, 2021). For a detailed account of Quadriennale X, see Francesca Zannella, Esporsi: Architetti, artisti, e critici a confronto in Italia negli anni Settanta (Verona: Scripta, 2012), 67–71. I would also like to thank Assunta Porciani at the Archivio Biblioteca Quadriennale di Roma (hereafter ABQ). Costantino Dardi, quoted in Filiberto Menna and Constantino Dardi, “L’allestimento della X Quadriennale nazionale d’arte di Roma,” L’architettura Cronache e storia 8 (1973): 428–37, emphasis in original. See also Michele Costanzo and Vincenzo Giorgi, eds., Costantino Dardi: architetture museali (Milan: Electa, 1992). All the translations in this essay are my own. The antifascist/Marxist position taken by the artists in this section was explicitly set forth in the catalog; see X Quadriennale Nazionale d’Arte (Rome: Stefano de Luca, 1973), 371. See Francesca Gallo, “I videogironali della X Quadriennale, trà documentazione e autorialità,” L’uomo nero, n.s., 15, no. 14–15 (March 2018): 289–302. During the 1960s an increasing number of exhibitions came to occupy the Palazzo aside from the Quadriennali, up to sixty a year and many of them small fare, such as Mostra regionale Sarda d’arti figurative in 1961; Mostra interregionale d’arte in 1963; Rassegna di arti figurative di Roma e del Lazio in 1965; and Mostra dei dipendenti comunali in 1967, with one exception being a large exhibition of Mexican art in 1962. See my article, “Vitalità del Negativo/Negativo della Vitalità,” October 150 (Winter 2014): 113–32; as well as my book, Flashback, Eclipse: The Political Imaginary of Italian Art in the 1960s (New York: Zone Books, 2021).

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9 Enrico Crispolti, “Il ‘salon’ dell’avanguardia,” NAC 2 (February 1971): 12. ­10 See Guido Panvini, Ordine nero, guerriglia rossa: La violenza politica nell’Italia degli anni Sessanta e Settanta (1966–1975) (Turin: Einaudi, 2009), 139; and Panvini, “Memorie in conflitto: L’uso politico della memoria nel neofascismo nella sinistra extraparlamentare,” Meridiana 64 (2009): 211–30. 11 Achille Bonito Oliva, “L’arte delle mostre,” in Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni di Roma (Rome: Pre Progetti, 2007), 65. 12 Dario Minacchi, “Il paternalismo fascista domina sempre la Quadriennale,” in the Communist daily L’Unità, November 14, 1959; quoted in Claudia Salaris, La quadriennale: Storia di una rassegna d’arte italiana dagli anni trenta a oggi (Venice: Marsilio, 2004), 112. 13 This exhibition was organized by the Associazione Nazionale ex deportati politici nei campi nazisti and ran from June 12 to July 17, 1959. 14 Noticing that my copy of the photo had the article’s title cut in two, I asked the Quadriennale archive to reshoot it. They sent me these four shots with a note explaining that it had been glued by an earlier archivist in 1955 in such a way that it was impossible to get the full title. The “flap problem” accidentally illustrates the dilemma: whether to be fascist or Umbertinian. 15 Mino Guerrini, “Quadriennale: nacque in un Italia che credeva d’essere fascista mentre era umbertina,” L’Espresso, November 27, 1955, clipped, ABQ. For a wonderful account of the Biennali that preceded the Quadriennali, which begins with another vignette from Pieraccini’s 1952 memoirs, see Federica Pirani, “Le Biennali Romane,” in Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1990), 181–3. 16 Pietro Maria Bardi, Rapporto sull’architettura: per Mussolini (Rome: Critica fascista, 1931), 12–13. The intense back and forth of the debate was first republished, significantly, at the time of Quadriennale X; see Luciano Patetta, ed., L’architettura in Italia 1919–1943: le polemiche (Milan: Clup, 1972), 119–274. 17 See Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Maddalena Carli, Vedere il fascismo: Arte e politica nelle espozizioni del regime (1928–1942) (Rome: Carocci, 2021). ­18 See XIV Quadriennale di Roma: Retrospettive 1931/1948 (Milan: Electa, 2005). 19 “La quadriennale è morta e non occorre la sua resurrezione,” Momento-Sera, April 1, 1947, clipped, ABQ. 20 Michele Biancale, “800 artisti con 1500 opere per la prima quadriennale del dopoguerra,” Il Tempo [Rome], March 28, 1948, clipped, ABQ. 21 See Adolfo Mignemi and Gabriella Solaro, eds., Un immagine dell’Italia: resistenza e ricostruzione: le mostre del dopoguerra in Europa (Milan: Skira, 2005). 22 Marcello Venturoli, Interviste di frodo (Rome: Sandon, 1945), 131–2. Venturoli’s scene was accompanied by a satirical cartoon by the artist Mino Maccari of the fascist hierarchs huddled around Oppo. 23 Laura Farini Moschini, “Ritorna umbertino il palazzo delle esposizioni,” Il Giornale [1951], clipped, ABQ. 24 Valerio Mariani, “Sesta Quadriennale” [1951], clipped, ABQ. 25 I. B., “Il palazzo senza finestre,” Gazzetta del Popolo [Turin], November 6, 1951, clipped, ABQ. 26 The first two Quadriennali were designed by the architect Pietro Aschieri—first in collaboration with Enrico Del Debbio, then with Eugenio Montuori. The third, in 1939, was designed by Mario Paniconi and Giulio Pediconi, and the fourth, in 1943, by Ernesto Puppo and Alessandro Mangione.

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27 G. C., La Nazione, January 25, 1935; quoted in Fabrizio Carli, “L’acceso dibattito sulla mise en scene: L’allestimento espositivo,” in La grande Quadriennale: 1935, la nuova arte italiana, ed. Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Electa, 2006), 121. See also Mario Quesada, “Palazzo delle esposizioni: Cinquant’anni di allestimenti (1883–1945),” in Il Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 77–87. 28 See Anna Chiara Cimoli, Musei Effimeri: Allestimenti di mostre in Italia 1949/53 (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2007); Marisa Dalai Emiliani, Per una critica della museografia del novecento in Italia: Il saper mostrare di Carlo Scarpa (Venice: Marsilio, 2008); Patricia Falguières, “Politics of the White Cube: The Italian Way,” Grey Room 64 (Summer 2016): 6–39; and Orietta Lanzarini, The Living Museums: Franco Albini– BBPR–Lina Bo Bardi–Carlo Scarpa (Udine: Nero, 2020). 29 See Silvio Pasquarelli, “La quadriennale di Roma: fra tradizione e innovazione,” Rassegna 10 (June 1982): 56–61. 30 Bruno Zevi, “Cos’è il fascismo alla 10 Quadriennale. Un archeologo che smonta le architetture,” L’Espresso, June 3, 1973, 21.

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­Part Two

­Exhibitions of Fascism around the World

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7

Exhibiting and Collecting the F-word in Britain Rosalind McKever

In a Guardian review of Futurist Skies: Italian Aeropainting at the Estorick Collection in 2005, the critic Jonathan Jones referred to modern Italian art’s two “F-words”: futurism and fascism.1 His phrasing was deliberate, indicating the conflation of twentiethcentury Italy’s most famed movements in art and politics and their need for censorship in the supposedly neutral art museum. This chapter contextualizes the recent history of exhibiting fascist-era art in Britain by tracing its little-known precedents during and after the ventennio. Drawing on newspaper reviews, it highlights the specifics of the British context—chiefly an extended antipathy to modern art, flirtation with fascist politics, and thriving postwar art market—and its connection to the reception of fascist-era art in the United States.

During the Ventennio Exhibitions of modern Italian art, ranging from eighty to two hundred works, took place in Britain’s commercial galleries and regional museums in 1925, 1926, and 1935. Compared to the 1930 exhibition Italian Art 1200–1900 at London’s Royal Academy of Arts—featuring nine hundred works, supported by Mussolini, and attended by 540,000 visitors—these were small, niche affairs. Nonetheless, the scant information in reviews indicates the haphazard early shaping of Italian fascist-era art within Britain’s cultural institutions compared to touring exhibitions staged in the United States in 1926 and 1935–36, and even more so to those held in Europe at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and Hamburg Kunsthalle in 1927 and the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1935.2 Modern Italian Art opened in June 1925 at London’s Lefevre Galleries, a longstanding commercial gallery that specialized in modern European art, especially French and British, and the show toured to municipal museums in northern England: Sunderland, Rochdale, and Leeds.3 The impetus came from neither the commercial nor public venues, however; the exhibition was organized by P. G. Konody, an art critic, Renaissance specialist, and secretary to the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and

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Michele De Benedetti, an artist and art writer who would later contribute to British publications, and it was supported by Sir Rennell Rodd, who had served as British Ambassador to Italy from 1908 to 1919. The exhibition was advertised as under the aegis of the Italian Ambassador to Britain, the Marquis della Torretta, but received no funding from the Italian state.4 In his catalog essay and an article in the Daily Mail, Konody describes the purpose of the exhibition as acquainting British audiences with Italian art since the death of Divisionist painter Giovanni Segantini in 1899, or, more pessimistically, informing them that Italy had produced artists since Canaletto.5 In the preceding decades there had been exhibitions of modern Italian art in London—most notably those of the futurists in the 1910s, of which Konody had been a hostile reviewer. And yet only one Italian artist entered Tate’s collection between the expansion of its acquisition policy to include modern art made outside Britain in 1917 and the opening of the “Modern Foreign and Sargent Galleries” in June 1926. This lone artist was the painter Antonio Mancini—a friend and contemporary of John Singer Sargent—who had worked in London and shown at the Royal Academy.6 The Lefevre exhibition brought together an eccentric selection of twenty-five artists, possibly with the aim of creating intergenerational connections. It mixed works by Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Magnelli, whose differing styles may not have been apparent in the still lifes and landscapes exhibited, with artists associated with the Novecento art movement, which espoused a postwar ‘call to order’, namely Piero Marussig, Achille Funi, Arturo Tosi, and Baccio Bacci, alongside the older generation of Divisionists, Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and Carlo Fornara. The inclusion of artists working in a more academic landscape tradition—Onorato Carlandi (b. 1848), Emma Ciardi (b. 1879), and Italico Brass (b. 1870)—suggests that this commercial exhibition was mindful of a British taste for picturesque Italian views. A review in the Connoisseur noted works by Carlandi and Brass, not mentioning the younger artists at all.7 The Times called the exhibition “a welcome reminder that the more traditional artistic activity still goes on.”8 Not everyone agreed. The Manchester Guardian called the show “disappointing in its lack of revelation of original and distinguished talent.”9 Their critic, who singled out de Chirico, Marussig, and Funi for praise, continued: “one would have liked to see something of painters like [Anselmo] Bucci, [Felice] Carena and the young nationalist group.” Frank Rutter, critic for the Sunday Times and fierce advocate of modern art in Britain, also expressed his disappointment at the “academic” selection at Lefevre.10 He lamented the absence of Mancini and the futurists and noted the relative conservatism of the de Chirico work on display. Rutter was also dissatisfied with the lack of modernism at the Exhibition of Modern Italian Art between February and April 1926 at the Public Art Galleries of Brighton, on the Sussex coast fifty miles south of London.11 Featuring 204 works across oil and watercolor painting, sculpture large and small, and a substantial section dedicated to graphic art, this larger exhibition shared with Lefevre a tendency towards landscapes as well as charming genre scenes, as well as a cross-generational approach. The sixtyeight artists, the majority of them living, spanned the bravura portraits of Mancini to the call-to-order cool of Giannino Marchig, forty-five years his junior.

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The Novecento was conspicuously absent. Of the core group of artists, only Marussig was shown in Brighton. In the catalog, the Novecento only receives mention in the biography of Aldo Carpi, who, unlike Marussig, had not been involved from the beginnings in 1923 and was soon to distance himself from the movement. The Brighton show opened a month after Mussolini spoke at the inauguration of the Novecento exhibition at the Palazzo della Permanente in Milan and many months before the debates around fascist art in Critica Fascista. It was too early for the regime to be promoting the Novecento as they would later in the aforementioned exhibitions in Hamburg and Amsterdam.12 Rutter noted that the exhibition was organized by the Italian state and the exhibitors were “limited to artists who have obtained official recognition in their own country.”13 The Ministero dell’Istruzione was behind the exhibition, and they also organized the 1926 exhibition that opened at New York’s Grand Central Galleries, which included many of the modernist artists absent from Brighton (Balla, Casorati, Depero, Modigliani, Sironi).14 The Brighton gallery’s director Henry D. Roberts, known for his avant-garde exhibitions,15 visited Rome in October 1925 where he was received and assisted by Pietro Fedele of the Ministero dell’Istruzione and Arduino Colasanti, Direttore Generale delle Antichità e Belle Arti. The Italian government paid for the insurance, transport, and posters.16 The exhibition was further supported by the Italian Ambassador in London, who was still the Marchese della Torretta, and the British Ambassador in Rome, Sir Ronald Graham, as well as King Victor Emmanuel III; it furthermore received the “personal blessing” of Mussolini himself. The iconography of Mussolini included was the exhibition’s most overt manifestation of fascist cultural policy. It featured the 1924 marble mask by Adolfo Wildt (lent by the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome) and the 1925 medal by Aurelio Mistruzzi with a profile bust of Il Duce on the obverse and the figure of a helmsman on the reverse. Rutter commented on the craftsmanship of Wildt and Mistruzzi, but not their subject. When the Brighton exhibition opened, Mussolini sent a message to the Observer: “Through the luminous fields of art this initiative cannot but add to the fortunate harmony of aims and thoughts from which spring sympathy and friendship between the British and the Italian peoples.”17 Mussolini was a known figure in Britain in the mid-1920s, esteemed predominantly, but not exclusively, by far-right politicians. Regular meetings with foreign secretary Austen Chamberlain and the Anglo-Italian Agreement of December 1925 kept the two countries close. In the period of the Brighton exhibition, fascist groups in Britain gained momentum in the run-up to the General Strike of May 1926. The “British Fascisti,” formed in 1923 following the March on Rome, were clearly indebted to the Italian political movement, yet they did not necessarily associate themselves directly. At a meeting of Brighton’s British Fascists (to which the British Fascisti had changed their name) in March 1926, a speaker claimed their organization should not be confused with Mussolini’s “Blackshirt Brigade.”18 The Brighton exhibition audience may not have connected images of Mussolini to British politics. By 1935 the two countries’ artistic and political landscapes had changed. The British Union of Fascists had eclipsed the British Fascists, and its leader, Oswald Mosley, had

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forged much closer links with Mussolini. As the arts magazine The Studio informed British readers, Italy’s network of state-sponsored exhibitions promoting Italian art had expanded.19 Figures such as Antonio Maraini and Cipriano Efisio Oppo, who ran the Venice Biennale and Rome Quadriennale, respectively, looked beyond the Novecento to the next generation of artists. ­The Franco-Italian Exhibition held at the commercial Wertheim Gallery in June and July 1935 displayed this generation, some of whom would go on to oppose, or distance themselves from, the regime: Birolli, Morandi, Mario Mafai, Carlo Levi, Corrado Cagli, Francesco Menzio, Aligi Sassu, Fausto Pirandello, Alberto Ziveri, Fiorenzo Tomea, Afro, and Oppo himself. Oppo and Maraini sat on the committee of L’Arte Oggi, the small organization that arranged the exhibition, headed by Marguerite Chapin Caetani, Principessa di Bassiano, alongside her husband Roffredo Caetani, and Margherita Sarfatti, Gino Severini, Giuseppe Bottai, Francesco Malipiero, Romano Romanelli, and Giuseppe Ungaretti. As reported in the Times, the exhibition was attended by members of the British aristocracy and leading figures who had played a role in Britain’s belated embrace of modern art: Kenneth Clark, Samuel Courtauld, Lord Duveen, and H. S. [Jim] Ede.20 Notably this list does not include the many members of the cultural establishment associated with the British Union of Fascists. This exhibition speaks more to the regime’s agenda to exhibit internationally than collaboration with British fascism. The rise of fascism in Britain in the mid-1930s coincided with its ruling government’s increased hostility to Mussolini. There would not be another group show dedicated to modern Italian art in Britain for a decade.21

After the War In the decade between 1946 and 1956, four exhibitions of modern Italian art in Britain featured work made during the ventennio. These were increasingly prestigious in venue and shifted from works borrowed from Italy to works bought there. As in the United States, this was connected to a growing art market and increased buying power. The market’s readiness to embrace Italian artists was matched by critics’ willingness to expunge any association with fascism. The first exhibition was Contemporary Italian Painting, held at London’s commercial Redfern gallery in June 1946 and organized by the Istituto Nazionale per le relazioni culturali con l’estero, with the cooperation of the Ministero dell’Istruzione (involved in the Brighton exhibition two decades previously). Its ninety works spanned the impressionism of Pio Semeghini to the abstraction of Giuseppe Capogrossi, with Tosi its eldest artist and Guttuso its youngest. In his catalog essay Lionello Venturi derided the Novecento and the neoclassicism that he associated with fascism, praised the painters who evaded the “triumph of rhetoric, and found their salvation in their own serious attitude to aesthetic experience” and actively connected modern Italian artists with their French contemporaries and antecedents.22 Also alive to the connections between French and Italian art was art historian and collector Douglas Cooper, who first mooted an exhibition of modern Italian art in

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London in late 1946. He secured the cooperation of the Italian embassy and sent his proposal to the Arts Council, a new government body set up in 1946 to support the arts and music along with organizing exhibitions. Cooper wanted a tight list of artists: 1­ 2 de Chirico (+4 in London), 9 Carrà, 6 Boccioni, 4 Severini, 5 Guttuso, 4 or 5 Campigli, 6 de Pisis, 2 or 3 Modigliani, 2 Casorati, 2 Birolli (+ 2 to fetch from his studio in Paris), 2 or 3 Scipione, 8 Morandi.23

While Cooper’s original proposal does not survive, the covering letter reads: “The period of Fascism is, as you will see, omitted!”24 This is the first and last time fascism is mentioned in the correspondence. Cooper’s plan soon collided with other exhibitions discussed for tours to London: 40 Jahre italienischer Kunst, organized by the Venice Biennale, curated by Palma Bucarelli, and staged at the Kunstmuseum Lucerne in spring 1947; then Twentieth Century Italian Art at the Museum of Modern Art in summer 1949. Cooper, ever forceful, wrote to Tate Director John Rothenstein: There has been a silly muddle & a succession of intrigues surrounding my Italian show, but it has never been dead, & in fact at this moment it is very much alive. For more reasons than one I think it would be a pity to take over the Museum of Modern Art show for the Tate. In the first place I think the English should organise a show of their own, for unlike the Americans they still belong to Europe & have some sense of the tradition.25

He continued to critique MoMA’s show on the grounds of being “a dealer’s racket, paid for by Toninelli & Cardazzo” that would “include every little pasticheur who has been able to pay for a dinner party.” Rothenstein replied that he had heard negotiations for Cooper’s show had broken down with the Italian lenders.26 In late 1949 the Arts Council agreed with the Italian embassy to take a different show, which would open at the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris in May 1950.27 Modern Italian Art: An Exhibition of Paintings and Sculpture held under the auspices of the Amici di Brera and the Italian Institute was held at the Tate Gallery in June and July 1950 and toured to the city art galleries of Leicester and Manchester.28 It featured nineteen artists, all living except Boccioni and Modigliani. Four had been included in the earlier exhibitions: Funi and Tosi in 1925; de Chirico in 1925 and 1926; and Morandi in 1935. As described in the catalog essay by Paolo D’Ancona, the focus was on 1910 to 1930, particularly prewar futurism and metaphysical painting and their legacies.29 The selection was made by Lamberto Vitali of the Amici di Brera and the museum’s director Fernanda Wittgens (who had worked on Italian Art 1200–1900 at the Royal Academy), both part of an antifascist milieu at the Brera. Both the London and New York exhibitions included artists associated with the Novecento and with closer links to the Fascist regime (Funi, Martini, and Sironi). None of the works on display was connected to regime commissions or had politicized subjects, and politics were kept squarely out of the catalog’s descriptions of movements and artist biographies. The F-word crept into one review in the Observer by Nevile

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Wallis, who had previously worked at the satirical magazine Punch: he described Manzù’s Crucifixion as having “a hint of caricature in the bloated Fascist Roman soldier.”30 This exhibition’s diversions from MoMA’s are notable. As the Manchester Guardian noted “Only one artist—the sculptor Manzù—is under fifty; the lively post-Fascist renaissance which we associate with Santomaso, Guttuso, Marini, Pizzinato, Morlotti, and the rest is otherwise quite unrepresented.”31 By contrast, the New York exhibition showed twenty-one artists born after 1900 compared to twenty-four born before. The Arts Council gave the younger, postwar artists the separate exhibition Contemporary Italian Art in 1955. The second departure from the MoMA show was the lack of local owners; the Amici di Brera exhibition was, understandably, heavily based on loans from Milanese private collections. However, in the exhibition (but not listed in the catalog) were a still life by Morandi, given to Tate by the Studio d’Arte Palma in 1947, and The Cardinal by Manzù, bought from the artist by Tate in 1948, thereby demonstrating the institution’s nascent interest in collecting and exhibiting modern Italian art.32 The key figure in transforming the London art market’s relationship with fascist-era art was Elihu (Eric) Estorick. The son of Jewish émigrés from Russia, Estorick was an American sociologist with an interest in European modernism that he developed in his native New York City. There, in the 1930s, he had frequently visited the Gallery of Living Art at New York University, which showed a collection of modernism developed by painter and patron Albert Eugene Gallatin, and he also met photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. In October 1947 Estorick married Salome Dessau and they settled in London. Dessau was born in Leipzig and had been living in Britain since 1932; she studied textile design at the Reimann School of Art and Design, which was, like her family, relocated from Germany to avoid persecution. The couple discovered Italian modernism on honeymoon in Switzerland through the Polish artist Arthur Bryks, who introduced them to Sironi. Estorick recalled: it was lucky for me really, that I had been introduced to the work of Sironi through reproductions … and knew very little about Sironi’s activities, his role, and so forth … because I might have decided not to visit Sironi. … The important thing was that I fell madly in love with his work.33

The Estoricks were politically liberal and both of Jewish heritage—and as a political biographer, Eric was undoubtedly well-informed—and yet their collecting eschewed politics. In addition to Sironi, Estorick also befriended and bought work from Massimo Campigli, who like Sironi had also worked for the Fascist regime; Guttuso, a committed antifascist and communist; and Zoran Music, who had been sent to Dachau. Much of Estorick’s collection was bought in Italy, directly from artists and from the dealers and collectors Benedetta Marinetti, Francesco Anfuso, and Galleria Il Milione in Milan; he used Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome for exports. These were some of the main sources also used by his compatriots Alfred Barr, Lydia and Harry Winston, and the dealer Sidney Janis. In 1950 Estorick became the English representative of Janis’s New York gallery while also working in the archives of clothing manufacturer

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and retailer Marks and Spencer. Estorick linked the British and American art markets throughout his career: in the mid-1950s he represented Hollywood stars in London’s auction rooms and maintained his American clientele when he founded the Grosvenor Gallery in London in 1960. Attuned to the commercial potential of modern Italian art, Estorick had involved himself in the London market from the outset of his collection. In autumn 1948 he was involved in the first exhibition of Sironi’s work in Britain at the St. George’s Gallery, and he lent work to a Campigli exhibition at the same venue the following summer. Estorick was not alone in turning a blind eye to the earlier politics of Sironi and Campigli— the St. George’s Gallery had been founded in 1943 by Lea Bondi Jaray and Otto Brill, Jewish art dealers who had been forced to flee Vienna following the Anschluss. In subsequent years London galleries including Leicester and Marlborough staged group and individuals shows, yet none could afford to specialize in Italian modernism.34 At the Grosvenor Gallery Estorick expanded his roster of artists beyond Italy. Estorick recognized the importance of working with museums. In 1952 he gave two Sironis to Tate: a 1916 still life The Syphon and Five Figures (1936), likely a sketch for the Palazzo di Giustizia in Milan.35 The following year he donated to MoMA Sironi’s Multiplication (c. 1941) and Campigli’s design for the mosaic floor of the Teatro Metropolitano in Rome (c. 1943).36 In 1969 Estorick gave about fifty Sironi drawings to the University of Cambridge, which are now held at Kettle’s Yard, the house museum of Jim Ede. In the mid-1950s Estorick exhibited his collection in two national tours, with transportation provided by the Arts Council. The first exhibition, Contemporary Italian Art, began at Wakefield Art Gallery in 1954 and was organized by its director, Helen Kapp. It toured across the north of England for nine months to Liverpool, Salford, Scarborough, Hull, Huddersfield, Newcastle upon Tyne, and York before traveling to Ireland. There were 136 works of art in the show, the majority owned by Estorick and fourteen by the American businessman Donald Blinken. In 1953 the pair had pooled their capital to buy and resell for profit futurist and metaphysical art, as well as works by other painters of interest from 1900 to 1925. The exhibition was generally well received, but a review of its Wakefield iteration points to its partiality. It opened “At two periods in the last fifty years Italian artists have made significant contributions to the main tradition of European painting and sculpture” namely 1910–20 and 1944–54, neatly exorcising the ventennio.37 Campigli, Casorati, Morandi, and Sironi were praised as artists of the “interwar” period, with no mention of Italian politics. The second tour, in 1956, Modern Italian Art from the Estorick Collection, demonstrated the collection’s growing status, beginning and ending at national museums: the Tate Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Wales, Cardiff. In between it toured venues across the country: the city art galleries of Plymouth and Birmingham, and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle upon Tyne. The exhibition went on to tour internationally as well, with iterations in Los Angeles, Ottawa, Amsterdam, and Vienna. From 1966 to 1975 the Estorick collection was on a long-term loan to Tate, and the presumption that this would become permanent arguably led to Tate not growing their

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holdings of modern Italian art. However, Estorick set up the Eric and Salome Estorick Foundation before his death in 1993, with a view to opening a museum, funded in part by the sale of other work. The Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art opened in January 1998.

Coda: 1989 Onwards In the decades prior to the Estorick opening and Jones’s F-word comment, museum audiences had grown exponentially while art history’s disciplinary shift toward the sociopolitical meant that a number of British exhibitions had irreversibly connected fascist Italy’s art and politics. Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900–1988 at the Royal Academy in 1989 came nearly sixty years after Italian Art 1200–1900. It was part of a series of exhibitions on countries’ artistic production in the twentieth century organized by Norman Rosenthal, which also addressed Germany (1985), Britain (1987), and the United States (1993). Reliant on exhibition ticket sales and corporate sponsorship, and not the recipient of public funding, the Academy did not foreground politics, but neither did they exclude artists affiliated with the regime. The exhibition featured work by Carrà and Sironi, Campigli and Morandi, Balla and Prampolini, Martini and Fontana, alongside Pirandello, Scipione, Guttuso, and Manzù. Sironi’s preparatory study for Italy between the Arts and Sciences (1935, private collection) was the closest to overtly fascist content. The catalog included essays by North American scholars Philip V. Cannistraro and Emily Braun tackling fascism and the first English-language essays by Enrico Crispolti on Second Futurism and Luciano Caramel on 1930s abstraction; the artist biographies also foregrounded some artists’ roles in the regime. Reviewers immediately picked up on the political dimension. According to James Hall in the Guardian, fascist-era art “lie[s] at the heart of the Royal Academy’s exhibition.”38 In the Observer, William Feaver noted the absence of a portrait of Mussolini, and how, in contrast to the 1985 exhibition of German art, the Italian exhibition had no intermission to mark the Second World War.39 The comparison with the German exhibition is notable. When the Hayward Gallery’s 1995 exhibition Art and Power: Europe Under the Dictators 1930–1945 situated art made under fascism within an international context focused on regimes in Germany, Spain, and Russia, the Italian section received scarcely any press attention. A few years later, in 2003, Scultura Lingua Morta: Sculpture from Fascist Italy,40 which included work by Martini and Fontana at the smaller, scholarly Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, caught critics’ attention.41 It received praise compared to the Institute’s 2001 show Taking Positions: Figurative Sculpture in the Third Reich. In the Times T2 John Russell Taylor wrote, “[Taking Positions] was interesting for being Nazi,” while in Scultura Lingua Morta, “the sculpture is interesting for being interesting.”42 In the Guardian, Jonathan Jones claimed “it’s a lot harder to pin down the art of fascism than we think.”43 Two years later, in the aforementioned Estorick review, Jones would claim to know fascist art when he saw it.

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Jones’s pivot suggests that these exhibitions between 1989 and 2001 had made the evasion of fascist politics untenable in Britain’s museums. This may account for the recent absence of exhibitions of modern Italian artists in the publicly funded museums that hosted exhibitions in the 1920s and 1950s. For the past two decades, such shows have been the preserve of the Estorick, which continues to stage thematic and monographic exhibitions of fascist-era art, sometimes overtly so, and London’s copious Italian art dealers who follow Estorick’s precedent in developing the commercial potential of modern Italian art. This is in direct contrast to the United States and Italy, where artists with connections to the regime are not restricted to specialist or commercial environments, but shown in major institutions, with the F-word largely absent from interpretation. In a sense, the collecting and exhibiting of fascist-era art in Britain has been the victim of its own success. The existence of a London gallery dedicated to Italian modern art has largely siloed its reception to the context of a postwar dealer and collector who eschewed politics. The exhibitions of modern Italian art held at other institutions have raised awareness of fascist cultural politics and in doing so have made it difficult for publicly funded institutions to justify exhibitions of artists associated with the regime. The lingering discomfort with the F-word risks its cancellation entirely, and a renewed cycle of discovery and disapproval for fascist-era art in Britain.

Notes

My thanks to Victoria Noel-Johnson for sharing with me the 1926 catalog and to Caterina Fiorani at the Fondazione Camillo Caetani for providing a scan of the 1935 catalog; to the editors and fellow contributors for their helpful comments; and to Selena Daly and Giuliana Pieri for encouraging this line of research. 1 Jonathan Jones, “Birds of Prey,” Guardian, January 5, 2005. https://www.theguardian. com/culture/2005/jan/05/1 (accessed April 26, 2022). 2 See Francesca Romana Morelli, “Exhibitions of Italian Art in Europe,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics Italia, 1918–1943, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), 412; and Sergio Cortesini, “Another History: Contemporary Italian Art in America before 1949,” Italian Modern Art 3 (2020): 1–36. 3 The exhibition was on view at Sunderland until October 7, 1925; at Rochdale until February 14, 1926; and at Leeds from February 20 to March 20, 1926. Britain’s network of such institutions was the product of Victorian educational attitudes and philanthropy. 4 “Arte Italiana a Londra,” Corriere della Sera, July 16, 1925, 3. 5 P. G. Konody, “Modern Italian Art,” Daily Mail, June 10, 1925, 14. 6 Mancini’s Portrait of the Artist’s Father (N03687) was donated to Tate in 1922 by L. A. Harrison. 7 “Modern Italian Art at Sunderland,” The Connoisseur 73 (September–December 1925): 122. 8 “Modern Italian Art,” Times, June 5, 1925, 9. 9 H. W., “Modern Italian Art,” Manchester Guardian, June 18, 1925, 13. The Manchester Guardian changed its name to the Guardian in 1959.

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10 Frank Rutter, “The Galleries. Modern Italian Art. Academic Painting,” Sunday Times, June 21, 1925, 10. 11 Frank Rutter, “The Galleries. Modern Italian Art at Brighton,” Sunday Times, February 28, 1926, 7. 12 See Victoria Noel-Johnson, De Chirico in Britain (Imola: Maretti, 2017), 206; and Franco Ragazzi, “Giorgio de Chirico and the Exhibitions of the ‘Novecento Italiano,’” Metafisica 7–8 (2008): 247. 13 Rutter, “The Galleries.” 14 Christian Brinton, ed., Exhibition of Modern Italian Art (New York: Italy America Society, 1926). 15 The first in this series, Modern French Art in 1910 had introduced British audiences to Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. 16 “Art Exhibitions. Sussex Pictures,” Times, December 21, 1925, 18. 17 “Italian Art at Brighton: Message from Signor Mussolini,” Observer, February 21, 1926, 15. 18 Brighton and Hove Herald, March 20, 1926; quoted in Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2005), 83. 19 Sam Smiles and Stephanie Pratt, Two-Way Traffic: British and Italian Art 1880–1980 (Plymouth: University of Plymouth, 1996), 10. 20 “Franco-Italian Exhibition,” Times, June 27, 1935, 21. 21 Cagli, then a US soldier, exhibited drawings of the war at Lefevre in 1944. 22 Lionello Venturi, “Pittura italiana contemporanea in una mostra a Londra,” Emporium (August 1946): 52. 23 Douglas Cooper to Philip James, May 10, 1947, Tate Archive TG92/80/1 Modern Italian Art 1950. ­24 Douglas Cooper to Philip James, December 3, 1946, Tate Archive TG92/80/1 Modern Italian Art 1950. 25 Douglas Cooper to John Rothenstein, August 11, 1948, Tate Archive TG92/80/1 Modern Italian Art 1950. 26 John Rothenstein to Douglas Cooper, August 17, 1948, Tate Archive TG92/80/1 Modern Italian Art 1950. 27 F. Montanari to Philip James, November 29, 1949, Tate Archive TG92/80/1 Modern Italian Art 1950. 28 The exhibition dates are London: June 28–July 30, 1950; Leicester: August 5–26, 1950; Manchester: September 4–30, 1950. 29 Paolo D’Ancona, “Introduction,” in Modern Italian Art (London: Arts Council, 1950), 5–8. 30 Nevile Wallis, “Around the Galleries: Italian Fanfare,” Observer, July 2, 1950, 6. 31 J. W., “Italian Art in Manchester: Subtleties and Shocks,” Manchester Guardian, September 8, 1950, 5. 32 An annotated version of the catalog indicating this is held in the Arts Council archive. The show did not include the Marini Horseman (1947) bought via Galleria Il Milione in 1949. In 1950 Tate would buy two works from Guttuso’s show at the Hanover Gallery, which ran concurrently with their exhibition. 33 Eric Estorick (unpublished manuscript, 1981, 93); quoted by Roberta Cremoncini, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art (Rome: Gangemi, 1999), 14. 34 Notable are Guttuso at Leicester Galleries in 1955, with a catalog essay by John Berger, at which Estorick himself bought Death of a Hero and Between Space and

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36

37 38 39 40 41

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Earth: Trends in Modern Italian Art at Marlborough in 1957, including the work of Lucio Fontana, with no hint of his earlier association with the Fascist regime. See Mario Sironi, “The Syphon, 1916,” Tate, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/ sironi-the-syphon-n06042; and Mario Sironi, “Five Fingers, c. 1936,” Tate, https:// www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sironi-five-figures-n06041 (both accessed April 26, 2022). See Mario Sironi, “Multiplication, c. 1941,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/79813; and Massimo Campigli, “Mosaic Design for Floor of Teatro Metropolitano, Rome, 1943,” Museum of Modern Art, New York, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/37068 (both accessed April 26, 2022). A. C. S., “Twentieth-Century Italian Art: A Comprehensive Review,” Manchester Guardian, April 7, 1954, 5. James Hall, “In a Fascist Embrace,” Guardian, January 16, 1989, 38. William Feaver, “Fresher Sweeter Italianità,” Observer, January 15, 1989, 45. This exhibition was a collaboration with the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. For comparison, the Royal Academy exhibition had 150,351 visitors, while the Henry Moore Institute welcomed 10,788. Mark Pomeroy, RA Archivist, email to the author, June 1, 2021; and Clare O’Dowd, HMI Research Curator, email to the author, June 21, 2021. John Russell Taylor, “Pals of Il Duce,” Times T2, June 18, 2003. https://www.thetimes. co.uk/article/pals-of-il-duce-8mlrrp93bp6 (accessed April 26, 2022). Jonathan Jones, “Roman Ruins,” Guardian, July 12, 2003, 19.

­8

Novecento Brasiliano: Margherita Sarfatti, Ciccillo Matarazzo, and the Italian Collection of MAC USP Ana Gonçalves Magalhães

Introduction This essay will discuss a collection of seventy-one modern Italian paintings that were purchased in Italy between 1946 and 1947 for the founding, in 1948, of the first museum dedicated to modern art in Brazil, the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM), now belonging to the collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). Despite the presence of works by internationally renowned Italian avant-garde artists such as Amedeo Modigliani, Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carrà, these paintings were connected to the context of Italian fascist cultural policies of the 1930s and the visual aesthetics of Novecento Italiano. This led to their being forgotten, and upon arrival at the University they were all but destined to reside in MAC USP storage rooms. The long silence around these works might be due to the fact that art critic and fascist ideologue Margherita Grassini Sarfatti (1880–1961) played a central role in mediating their acquisition while determining the way in which Brazilian art historians talked about them, associating them with the definition of Novecento Italiano that she helped to spread.1 According to her, this was an art of synthesis practiced by painters that revered the tradition of Italian Renaissance art.2 Sarfatti’s first visit to Brazil and Argentina in 1930, as the commissioner of an exhibition of Novecento Italiano and a representative of the Fascist regime, stimulated knowledge of it among South American art critics. The term was renewed in the aftermath of the Second World War—without much controversy about its links to fascist Italy—when a series of exhibitions of Italian modern art toured the capitals of South America. These exhibitions were coterminous with Sarfatti’s last years of exile in Argentina, during which she helped the São Paulo industrialist of Italian descent Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho buy the collection of Italian paintings for the creation of MAM.3 Although these works were partly shown on two previous occasions at MAC USP, there was no real understanding of them as a collection that corresponded to a coherent narrative of modern painting in Italy in the interwar period under the

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label Novecento Italiano. It was not until the 2013 MAC USP exhibition Classicismo, realismo, vanguarda: pintura italiana no entreguerras (Classicism, realism, avant-garde: Italian painting between the wars) that they were presented as a comprehensive set— one purchased to provide MAM with the core of its collections—and their link with fascist cultural policies was first openly discussed.4 The exhibition toured to Brasília in 2018 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil (CCBB), where it was sponsored by the Italian embassy during the transition of the Brazilian federal government to today’s cabinet. By then, the term fascism was in the headlines of the Brazilian media, and the atmosphere of autonomy for scholars to tackle the many contradictions of this group of artworks had faded away. This essay will examine the present author’s experience as organizer of an exhibition that “curated fascism” in 2013 and the challenges of curating fascism today, while also trying to look at these paintings from the viewpoint of the present moment.

Previous Exhibitions of Italian Modern Painting at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo It has always been clear to Brazilian art historians that MAC USP inherited a significant number of Italian artworks from MAM while also continuing to collect Italian artists due to the many cultural exchanges between Brazil and Italy. The second catalog of the museum’s collection, written and edited in 1988 by Brazilian art historian and MAC USP’s director Aracy Amaral, dedicates a special section to modern Italian artworks. It is the first to bring up the provenance and history of the Matarazzo purchases in the mid-1940s.5 However, Amaral did not tackle the fascist network that was behind the seventy-one paintings under discussion. Like other Brazilian peers, she admitted that the Italian artworks in the collection conveyed a conservative modernism of the interwar period that, in Italy, was represented by Sarfatti’s idea of Novecento Italiano. In addition to this, there were two exhibitions at MAC USP in the late 1970s and early 1980s in which these works appeared, albeit detached from the fascist background though still labeled as Novecento Italiano. The first was organized in 1977 by the museum’s first director and curator, Walter Zanini, and the second by Amaral in 1985. Zanini’s exhibition, Homenagem a Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho (Homage to Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho), was shown two months after Matarazzo’s death. Zanini selected thirty-six paintings from the set, privileging the big names: Modigliani, de Chirico, Carrà, Morandi, Severini, Tosi, Sironi, and Campigli.6 They were shown with other Italian works in MAC USP’s collection that had been purchased by Matarazzo in the 1950s, along with works by Brazilian and French artists also bought by Matarazzo in the same period. In the exhibition’s brochure, Zanini emphasized Matarazzo as a collector and pointed to the first pieces of information about their acquisition without mentioning their connections to fascism. Amaral’s exhibition of 1985, sponsored by the Istituto Italiano di Cultura/Instituto Cultural Ítalo Brasileiro in São Paulo, invited Brazilian art historian Annateresa Fabris to write on the various Italian artistic groups and movements represented at MAC USP,

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which was introduced by a short text by Lisbeth Rebollo Gonçalves on the history of the museum’s collections.7 Of the seventy-one paintings that I am addressing here, sixty-four were exhibited together with twelve other Italian works acquired through the Bienal de São Paulo award system in the 1950s or donated by the artists themselves. Fabris’s essay was key for Brazilian audiences to learn about Italian art of the twentieth century, although she did not question the narrative that had been constructed in the late 1930s and beginning of the 1940s when private collections of Italian modern art were formed in Italy to foster modern art in the peninsula. At the same time, she analyzed Novecento Italiano as the “official representative of Italian art” in the 1920s and 1930s, stating that: “Novecento” does not have a precise aesthetic program, only vague affirmations of “return to normality and constructive order,” but there are elements shared by its most celebrated artists, summed up by Margherita Sarfatti in the categories of “precision of gesture, decision in color, firmness in form, aspiration to concrete, to simplicity and to the definitive.”8

The timing of Artistas italianos na coleção do MAC between January and March of 1985 coincided with a period of great national turmoil following the loss of Brazil’s first civilian president elected by the congress after the end of the military dictatorship.9

Classicism, Realism, Avant-Garde: Italian Painting between the Wars (2013)—The Matarazzo Collection and its Connections to Fascist Italy Classicismo, realismo, vanguarda: pintura italiana no entreguerras occurred in a special moment in Brazilian history. A year before its opening, Brazil’s first woman president, Dilma Rousseff, created the Comissão Nacional da Verdade (CNV, National Committee of the Truth), whose aim was to investigate violations of human rights committed in Brazil between 1946 and 1988.10 This led to the opening of the archives of the period of Brazilian military dictatorship (1964–1985). The exhibition thus occurred in an atmosphere of great expectations on the consolidation of Brazilian democracy. Such a context of atonement and revaluation of the country’s past was parallel to a growing investigation of the origins of Brazilian cultural institutions and their links to the idea of modernity. In this sense, the research undertaken around the history of the São Paulo MAM was key for us to shed light on Sarfatti and other figures involved in the making of its collections. The paintings purchased for Matarazzo reveal an intricate social network of agents in São Paulo, Milan, and Rome who formed a modernizing, illustrious elite in both countries, attempting to survive above any political compromise with fascism in the aftermath of the Second World War. In 2013 Sarfatti’s legacy was key for understanding the connections between the Matarazzo collection and fascism. Sarfatti was the main mediator of the acquisition campaign, but she was not the only art critic whom Matarazzo consulted. Italian

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journalist, gallerist, and art critic Pietro Maria Bardi (1900–1999), who had also visited Brazil in 1933 and came back in 1946, contributed to some choices in the collection.11 Bardi was the first contact Matarazzo made in Italy to start the acquisitions and was responsible for the first purchase: Modigliani’s Self-Portrait (Figure 8.1).12 The fact that most of the works were purchased in Milanese galleries close to Sarfatti’s Novecento Italiano helped the collection to be interpreted in the framework of her ideas of modern art. For example, Achille Funi’s L’indovina (The fortune-teller), 1924 (Figure 8.2) was painted when he was involved with the rediscovery of primitive artists of his native Ferrara. It bears parallels with the Figura (Figure), 1922 that once

­Figure  8.1 Amedeo Modigliani, Autoritratto (Self-portrait), 1919, oil on canvas, 100 × 64.5 cm. Gift of Yolanda Penteado & Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). Photo: MAC USP—Nelson Kon.

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Figure 8.2  Achille Funi, L’Indovina (The Fortune-teller), 1924, oil on wood, 45.7 × 45.8 cm. Gift of Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). Photo: MAC USP—Romulo Fialdini.

belonged to Sarfatti.13 L’indovina, purchased at Galleria Il Milione in 1946, was the lens through which the collection was interpreted because of its direct connections to Sarfatti’s taste and the dissemination of her notion of Novecento Italiano in South America. Brazilian critics reaffirmed the association of Italian modern art with Italy’s classicizing traditions at the presentation of MAM’s paintings that ran parallel to a series of other exhibitions that toured the region in the aftermath of the Second World War (1946–1951). This was the case with Exposição de Pintura Italiana Moderna, organized by Bardi at the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro in May 1947.14 A review by Brazilian art critic Mário Pedrosa reminded his readers of the connections between Funi and the Italian Renaissance:

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Achiles [sic] Funi was born in Ferrara, and grew through the study and improvement of the classics of his own motherland, starting with Cosme Tura, the head of the Ferrara school in the quattrocento. … Funi imbibed this absorbing stylistic concern that makes him both a modern and a renaissance artist.15

Better known for his engagement with abstract art, Pedrosa exceptionally acknowledged Funi and other artists in Bardi’s show, detaching them from connections with fascism.16 His attention to these trends echoes the São Paulo group of painters who were at the forefront of the creation of MAM together with Matarazzo: The Grupo Santa Helena, formed by immigrants and artists associated with the working-class neighborhoods of São Paulo. Supported by São Paulo art critics and protagonists of the Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922, Mário de Andrade and Sérgio Milliet, the Grupo Santa Helena focused on landscapes and still lifes, and were key to the idea of a São Paulo painting school of classicizing modes.17 Their ideas resonate with Arturo Tosi’s Ponte di Zoagli (Zoagli Bridge), 1937 (Figure 8.3), also purchased by Matarazzo and first presented in São Paulo at the Italian delegation pavilion in a 1937 exhibition celebrating fifty years of immigration in the state of São Paulo.18 Tosi’s work was taken as a reference for the São Paulo painters for its “Cézannist” style, appreciated by Sarfatti and linked

Figure 8.3  Arturo Tosi, Ponte di Zoagli (Zoagli Bridge), 1937, oil on canvas, 70 × 90 cm. Gift of Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). Photo: MAC USP—Romulo Fialdini.

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to his works in European touring exhibitions of Italian modern art in the 1930s that highlighted his “Italianness.”19 Despite its contradictions, both Tosi’s Cézannisme and Italianness were at the core of Sarfatti’s argument that his work was key to her notion of Novecento Italiano. If Novecento Italiano was received in Brazil in the same context as Sarfatti’s exhibitions in Buenos Aires, Rosario, and Montevideo, where the promotion of her book Storia della pittura moderna (1930) was openly discussed in the Brazilian press, its local interpretation was most impacted by other exhibitions organized by the Italian government abroad in the 1930s and 40s, where the connections between the Renaissance and modernity were made to justify the prominence of Italian art. This is the case for at least two exhibitions that were known to Brazilian circles. The first was the 1935 inauguration of the Galerie d’Art Italien Contemporain at the Jeu de Paume that ran parallel to an exhibition of Italian Renaissance art and which resulted in the so-called Sarmiento Donation to French public collections.20 The second exhibition took place at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, less than one year after the city’s World’s Fair presented modern Italian art and architecture to a global audience. In 1939 Italians showed their most celebrated modern artists, while in 1940 the most precious Renaissance artworks were displayed in MoMA’s galleries.21 Events like these helped enhance an idea of continuity between tradition and modernity in Italy, which was also conveyed in the exhibitions of Italian modern art that toured South America in the late 1940s.22 These exhibitions recall the support that the Italian Fascist government had previously provided for private collections of modern Italian art in the second half of the 1930s, which resulted in the creation of a public award accompanied by the presentation of some of the works at the Galleria di Roma in the early 1940s, and in which the collections of Carlo Cardazzo and Rino Valdameri were shown to the Roman public.23 In the first purchases Bardi made for Matarazzo, for instance, there are seven paintings from Cardazzo’s collection, including at least three shown in two exhibitions that received great appreciation from Italian art critics in the 1930s and early 1940s.24 In the Matarazzo purchases, works that once belonged to Cardazzo and Valdameri appear among other names that had formed collections of Italian modern art in the 1930s, such as those of gallerist and collector Vittorio Barbaroux and collector Alberto della Ragione. The formation of such collections in the 1930s consolidated a postwar narrative of modern Italian art embedded in classical tradition.25 In this context, it is worth comparing Matarazzo’s purchases with della Ragione’s collection. Della Ragione, like Matarazzo, was a businessman, with a background as an engineer.26 His collection was shown for the first time in the famous exhibition of private collections at Cortina d’Ampezzo in 1941. He also sponsored the Gruppo Corrente di Vita Giovanile and supported the creation of the Galleria della Spiga e Corrente, through which he played an important role in fostering young artists who were at the core of Corrente since 1939. These were artists Renato Birolli, Aligi Sassu, and Bruno Cassinari, with the participation of Renato Guttuso in the early 1940s. They were interested in reconnecting with the international avant-garde groups (especially in France) and were engaged in antifascist activities in Italy. A still life by Guttuso now

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in São Paulo—alongside Modigliani’s self-portrait, a still life by Ardengo Soffici, and a painting by Scipione—connects the Matarazzo purchases with the collection of della Ragione. Guttuso’s Natura morta con lume (Still life with lantern, 1940, Figure 8.4) was purchased by Matarazzo at Galleria della Spiga in 1946. It was painted while Guttuso was under the protection of della Ragione in Genoa to avoid being arrested by the police for his antifascist activities. Guttuso had started painting still lifes in his Roman studio as early as 1938, and they are connected to his studies for his Crocifissione (Crucifixion, 1941, now at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome), a large composition with a still life at the lower front, for which Guttuso was awarded the

Figure 8.4  Renato Guttuso, Natura morta con lume (Still life with lantern), 1940, oil on wood, 60.7 × 48.5 cm. Gift of Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). Photo: MAC USP—Romulo Fialdini.

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Premio Bergamo in 1942.27 Its contorted forms and complex composition were already present in his experimentation with smaller still life paintings and reappeared in the series of illustrations that he made for the album Gott mit uns (God with us) in 1945.28 The other painting from della Ragione’s collection that should be considered here is Scipione’s Oceano indiano (Indian Ocean, 1930, Figure  8.5). It is through correspondence between della Ragione and the director of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Palma Bucarelli, while she was organizing a retrospective of the artist in 1954, that the collector confirmed the painting once belonged to him.29 Scipione had painted it to take part in the Prima mostra dell’animale nell’arte at the Roman zoo in 1930.30 The exhibition was an initiative of the director of the Roman zoo as an attempt—within the framework of the requalification of the institution—to raise funds for its renovation and as the first of a series of art exhibitions inside the park to promote Italy as a colonizing empire.31 It presented a large group of artworks

­Figure 8.5  Scipione (pseudonym for Gino Bonichi), Oceano indiano/I sognatori (Indian Ocean/The Dreamers), 1930, oil on wood, 54.2 × 59.7 cm. Gift of Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP). Photo: MAC USP—Romulo Fialdini.

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dating from ancient Rome in the tradition of the so-called “animalist” artists while also creating an award for young Italian artists, who were competing for a year of stipend in the Roman zoo. The many images of the works published in the exhibition catalog are mostly of realist-like paintings and sculptures. Scipione’s painting stands out for its surrealist approach and expressionistic qualities, starting from its original title, I sognatori (The Dreamers). The title “Oceano indiano,” adopted when it came to Brazil, was written in the background as the caption of an imaginary island or peninsula. On the right side of the composition is a melancholic orangutan. On the left is a parrot against a net. The painting is a kind of allegory, and the figure of the orangutan is anthropomorphized, bearing a gray beard. Whether it plays with the selfportrait of the artist is open to interpretation. In any case, the painting is somewhat caricatural and seems to be making open comments on Italy’s colonial ambitions: the Indian Ocean bathed Erithraia, the Italian colony in Africa, which would later have its territory augmented by the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. These elements gain an ironic quality when one thinks of Scipione’s title. Through works like Guttuso’s and Scipione’s, the Matarazzo purchases for MAM go far beyond Sarfatti’s Novecento Italiano, and some of which were definitely antiNovecento. This is especially true for the artists of the so-called Scuola di Via Cavour, rebranded and amplified as Scuola Romana di Pittura during the 1930s. In this sense, Bardi’s eye may have come in handy. In the case of Scipione, Bardi’s role as the director of the Galleria d’Arte di Roma allowed him to arrange the artist’s first exhibition in an institutional context, together with his partner Mario Mafai, in 1931. Their names would reappear together in the framework of the activities of Galleria La Cometa (1935–39) in Rome; sponsored by Countess Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt, and with artist Corrado Cagli as its main idealizer, the gallery promoted new trends in Roman circles and played an important role in fostering modern art in the Italian capital.32

Curating Fascism Today When Classicismo, realismo, vanguarda toured to Brasília in November 2018, the political climate had shifted again and the country saw the transition to a civilian presidency of clear fascist modes with blatant references to totalitarian regimes of the 1930s in Germany and Italy, while also pulling the strings of populist policies—just like Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo did in those days of the emergence of modern art institutions in the country.33 The show, held in Brazil’s capital, had to deal with the discomfort of the situation. To overcome it, the educational program proposed a series of activities in which issues of depictions of the body, landscape, and portraiture in the paintings provided a way to talk about gender, self-expression, and subjectivity. Scipione’s Oceano indiano (I sognatori), for instance, gained yet another meaning as we engaged the audience to relate it to other paintings in the collection through its surrealist and expressionist aspects. The way we have now proposed to read it might not have been possible if it were not for the many conversations undertaken with the educational coordinators.

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It is clear to us now that the reading of the output of these artists through classicizing trends helped reinforce their conservatism and would make their connection to fascism last forever. The fact that they formed a collection of paintings is also key for their perception as conservative. In addition to this, they are mostly small-format paintings that privileged the genres of landscape and still life, which tend to stress their understanding as components of a private collection—conceived for a domestic space, not for museum walls. This might be why Guttuso, Scipione, Mafai, Sassu, and Birolli were easily assimilated into Novecento Italiano. To shed new light on their contribution to the narrative of the visual arts in the twentieth century, it is thus vital to reconstruct their complexity.

­Notes 1 There are numerous biographies dedicated to Sarfatti, the most resourceful of which are Philip Cannistraro and Brian Sullivan, Il Duce’s Other Woman (New York: William Morrow, 1993); and Simona d’Urso, Margherita Sarfatti: dal mito del Dux al mito americano (Venice: Marsilio, 2003). 2 See Margherita Sarfatti, Storia della pittura moderna (Rome: Cremonese, 1930). 3 Francisco “Ciccillo” Matarazzo Sobrinho (1898–1977) was born into a family of Italian immigrants from the province of Salerno who made their fortune in Brazil. Ciccillo spearheaded modernizing initiatives in São Paulo in the late 1940s and 1950s, sponsoring the foundation of MAM, the Bienal de São Paulo, and the National Film Archive, among other cultural institutions in the city. 4 See Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Classicismo, realismo, vanguarda: pintura italiana no entreguerras, exh. cat. (São Paulo: MAC USP/Pró-Reitoria de Cultura e Extensão, 2013; 2nd edn., 2018). 5 Aracy Amaral, ed., Perfil de um acervo (São Paulo: Techint, 1988). 6 Walter Zanini, ed., Homenagem a Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho, exh. cat. (São Paulo: MAC USP, 1977). 7 Aracy Amaral, ed., Artistas italianos na coleção do MAC, exh. cat. (São Paulo: MAC USP, 1985). 8 Annateresa Fabris, “A arte italiana no acervo do MAC,” in Amaral, ed., Artistas italianos, 12, which quotes Sarfatti from Rossana Bossaglia, Novecento Italiano (Milan: Mondadori, 1979), 23. 9 President Tancredo Neves died before he was to be inaugurated. He had been projected by the Brazilian media as a defender of democracy due to his appearances during the popular manifestations of the free elections campaign that took to the streets of the country in early 1984, which were later defeated in congress. This process marked the transition of the country to democracy, which, despite its fragility, gave birth in 1988 to the most advanced constitution the country had ever had. ­10 See “Relatório da Comissão Nacional da Verdade,” Comissão Nacional da Verdade, December 10, 2014, http://cnv.memoriasreveladas.gov.br/ (accessed April 26, 2022). 11 Bardi made his career as an art critic and gallerist during the fascist era. He was nominated the first director of the Galleria d’Arte di Roma (the gallery of the fascist artists’ trade union) in 1931. In 1946 he emigrated to Brazil and became the first

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director of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (São Paulo Museum of Art, MASP), founded in 1947. See Paolo Rusconi, “‘Un’idea del Brasile’: Pietro Maria Bardi’s second life,” MODOS: Revista de História da Arte 4, no. 1 (2020): 241–53, https:// www.doi.org/10.24978/mod.v4i1.4537 (accessed April 26, 2022). 12 Modigliani was not favored by Sarfatti. For a study on Modigliani’s provenance, see Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, Marcia de Almeida Rizzutto, Dalva Lúcia Araújo de Faria, and Pedro Herzilio Ottoni Viviani de Campos, “Tracing the Material History of MAC USP’s Self-Portrait by Amedeo Modigliani,” Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material 27 (2019): 1–37, https://www.revistas.usp.br/anaismp/article/ view/150331 (accessed May 6, 2022). 13 See Arte moderna italiana: Achille Funi [essay by Margherita Sarfatti] (Milan: Hoepli Editori, 1925). On Funi’s L’indovina compared with Figura, see Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, “Achille Funi nella Collezione del MAC USP,” in L’Uomo Nero: Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità, ed. Antonello Negri (Milan: CUEM, 2011), 349–58. 14 See Pietro Maria Bardi, ed., Exposição de Pintura Italiana Moderna, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Studio d’Arte Palma, May 1947). 15 Mário Pedrosa, “Funi, ou o estilo através das épocas,” Correio da Manhã (Rio de Janeiro), May 30, 1947. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 16 Pedrosa (1900–1981) was a Trotskyist and political activist who played a central role in antifascist movements in Brazil in the late 1930s, which resulted in his exile in the United States during the Second World War. See Otília Fiori Arantes, Mário Pedrosa: Itinerário crítico (São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2004). ­17 The Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922 (The Week of Modern Art of 1922) was taken as the milestone of modern art in Brazilian art historiography, while Mário de Andrade (1893–1945) and Sérgio Milliet (1898–1966) are two of the most important modern art critics for this narrative. On the Grupo Santa Helena, see Walter Zanini, Arte no Brasil nas décadas de 1930–40: O Grupo Santa Helena (São Paulo: Nobel/ Edusp, 1991). For a reevaluation of these painters and their connections to Italy and the São Paulo industrial elite, see Patrícia Martins Santos Freitas, “O Grupo Santa Helena e o universo industrial paulista (1930–1970)” (master’s thesis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas, 2011). Parallel to Matarazzo’s purchases in Italy, he also acquired works by the Grupo Santa Helena artists for MAM. 18 For a study of works by Tosi in the MAC USP collections, see Dúnia Roquetti Saroute, “Política e Arte: Arturo Tosi na Coleção do Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo” (master’s thesis, Universidade de São Paulo, Graduate Program of Aesthetics and Art History, MAC USP, São Paulo, 2015). See also Esposizione commemorativa del cinquantenario dell’immigrazione ufficiale São Paulo del Brasile. Mostra d’arte del padiglione Italia, exh. cat. (São Paulo, 1937). 19 This is the case in the exhibition catalog of 22 artistes italiens modernes (Paris: Bernheim & Cie, 1932), to which French art critic Waldemar George wrote the foreword, saying that the Italian artists were “the enemy brothers of the painters of the North, their art proves, once and for all, that Romanness or Italianness are synonyms of universality.” My translation from the French. 20 For a study of this exhibition and the Sarmiento donation, see Emily Braun, “Leonardo’s Smile,” in Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in Visual Culture in Fascist Italy, ed. Claudia Lazzaro and Roger J. Crum (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 173–87; and Catherine Fraixe, “L’art au service de

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Curating Fascism la propagande fasciste: Les dons d’oeuvres italiennes à la France (1932–1936),” in Vers une Europe latine. Acteurs et enjeux des échanges culturels entre la France et l’Italie fasciste, ed. Catherine Fraixe, Lucia Piccioni, and Christophe Poupault (Paris/ Brussels: INHA / P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2014), 195–224. Italian Masters Lent by the Royal Italian Government, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, January–March 1940, of which installation images are available at https:// www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2978?locale=pt (accessed April 26, 2022). See Raffaele Bedarida, “Export/Import: The Promotion of Contemporary Italian Art in the United States, 1935–1969” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2016). The exhibition originated in San Francisco along with the modern artworks shown at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. This is the case of Bardi’s initiatives upon his arrival in Brazil. In November 1946 he first organized the exhibition Exposição de Pintura Italiana Antiga (Exhibition of Italian Old Painting). See Pietro Maria Bardi, ed., Exposição de Pintura Italiana Antiga, exh. cat. (Rio de Janeiro: Studio di Arte Palma, November 1946). The Italian government’s promotion of these private collections was made official after the Mostra delle Collezioni d’Arte Contemporanea at Cortina d’Ampezzo through a program of awards created by Giuseppe Bottai, himself a collector of modern Italian art and Minister of National Education. See Danka Giacon, “Cortina, 1941,” L’Uomo Nero: Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità 3, no. 2 (September 2005): 51–68. See also XLIII Mostra della Galleria di Roma con opere della raccolta di Carlo Cardazzo, Venezia, text by Giuseppe Marchiori, exh. cat. (April 1941); and LI–LII Mostra della Galleria di Roma con opere della collezione dell’avv. R. Valdameri, text by Massimo Bontempelli, exh. cat. (June/July 1942). Venetian publisher Carlo Cardazzo (1908–63) became a dealer and collector of great prestige in the late 1930s and was renowned internationally in the 1950s, as he befriended US collector and dealer Peggy Guggenheim. See Luca Massimo Barbero, ed., Carlo Cardazzo: una nuova visione dell’arte, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 2008). Rino Valdameri (1889–1943) was a lawyer who built his collection of modern Italian art in Milan in the 1930s. See Caterina Caputo, “Shaping an Identity for Italian Contemporary Art during the Interwar Period: Rino Valdameri’s Collection,” Italian Modern Art 4 (July 2020), https://www.italianmodernart.org/journal/articles/shaping-an-identity-for-italiancontemporary-art-during-the-interwar-period-rino-valdameris-collection/ (accessed April 26, 2022). The first was at the Mostra delle Collezioni d’Arte Contemporanea at Cortina d’Ampezzo, and then at the Galleria di Roma in the same year. See, for instance, Davide Lacagnina’s analysis of the perception of these collections through reviews in Emporium (one of the most important journals of its kind in the first half of the twentieth century in Italy). Davide Lacagnina, “Arte moderna italiana: collezionismo e storiografia fra le pagine di ‘Emporium’ (1938–43),” in Emporium: Parole e figure tra il 1895 e il 1964, ed. G. Bacci and M. Fileti Mazza (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 2014), 455–80. Chiara Toti, Alberto della Ragione. Collezionista e mecenate del Novecento (Florence: Olschki, 2017). See Enrico Crispolti, ed., Catalogo Ragionato Generale dei dipinti di Renato Guttuso, 3 vols. (Milan: Mondadori, 1983). For the relationship between Guttuso and della Ragione, see Luciano Caprile, ed., Guttuso a Genova nel nome della Ragione, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 1985). The Premio Bergamo was created by Giuseppe Bottai in 1939 as a more liberal counterpart to the Premio Cremona, which was conceived

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by extremist right-wing Roberto Farinacci in that same year with the explicit aim of celebrating the “deeds” and “conquests” of the Fascist regime. Renato Guttuso, Guttuso: Gott mit uns (Rome: La Margherita Libreria Editrice, 1945). See letter of Alberto della Ragione to Palma Bucarelli, February 9, 1954, Archivio della Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome: “From the various paintings by Scipione that belonged to me, but not for some time, I can say what follows: … ‘Mappamondo con uccello esotico’ … ,” next to which there is Montevideo in handwriting. My translation from Italian. An article dedicated to unknown Scipione’s works, published by Giuseppe Marchiori is the source to suggest that della Ragione’s Mappamondo con uccello esotico was at a museum in Montevideo, Uruguay, and that it was actually Oceano indiano; see Giuseppe Marchiori, ­“Presentazione di alcuni inediti di Scipione,” Emporium (November 1948): 226–32. Oceano indiano is reproduced as figure 10, titled L’orango by Marchiori. That the painting was understood as being at a museum in Montevideo might be linked to Sarfatti’s mediation for the Matarazzo purchases, as the Uruguayan capital was her summer home. See the Catalogo illustrato Prima Mostra dell’animale nell’arte, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Giardino Zoologico di Roma (March–April 1930), plate no. 12. See Giorgio Rossetti, Dal giardino zoologico al bioparco: Storia e architettura dello zoo di Roma (Viterbo: BetaGamma Editrice, 1998). Lucia Cavazzi, ed., Una collezionista e mecenate romana.: Anna Laetitia Pecci-Blunt, exh. cat. (Rome: Museo di Roma, 1991); and Maria Catalano, Federica Pirani, and Assunta Porciani, eds., Libero de Libero e gli artisti della Cometa (Rome: Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Roma Capitale, 2014). Sarfatti would attend the exhibitions of Galleria La Cometa, though not necessarily supporting its artists. Her connection to the gallery might have come through Corrado Cagli, who was a guest at her villa in Como in the summer of 1936, where he painted landscapes and still lifes. Paesaggio (1936) is probably one of them, purchased by Matarazzo and in the collections of MAC USP today. As this essay was being written, President Jair Bolsonaro’s links to fascism have become very concrete, as he received the leader of the ultra right-wing German party, Beatrix von Storch, the granddaughter of Hitler’s Finance Minister.

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Contextualizing Razionalismo in the Exhibition Photographic Recall (2019): Fascist Spaces in Contemporary German Photography Miriam Paeslack

Introduction The 2019 exhibition of photographs and video Photographic Recall: Italian Rationalist Architecture in Contemporary German Art at the UB Anderson Gallery at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) presented the built environments of the Mussolini era from the perspective of contemporary artists. The buildings and monuments of the era were therefore shown at critical remove from their original contexts; while the architecture presented came about mostly in the 1930s, the artworks shown were created between the 1980s and 2010s, and the exhibition itself was mounted during the Trump presidency. Curation was a meta-task, an agenda of chosen voices and perspectives. For this exhibition of contemporary artwork by (mostly) living artists, I chose a discursive rather than polemical role as curator, determining the exhibition’s makeup and composition through a dialogic process: interviews, studio visits, joint discussion with four of the seven artists, and exchanges during exhibition planning were essential for the show’s final form. This stance was as much a personal as a topically specific one, leaving the heavy hand of rhetoric to the minds of visitors. Context—geographic, spatial, cultural, and temporal—emerges as a key term in this scenario and in related exhibitions that deploy photography of the built environment. But where others such as Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 (Prada Foundation, Milan, 2018) and The History of Reconstruction – The Construction of History (Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, 2010) operate with an agenda of comprehensiveness, Photographic Recall embraced subtlety and diversity of positions. Instead of forging “a ‘cultural understanding’ of the complexity of the constellations of an era” (Post Zang)1 or presenting the wide range of practices of architectural reconstruction throughout the globe and ages (Reconstruction), Photographic Recall assembled a variety of artistic voices in dialogue with one another and with didactic supplemental materials.

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By comparing and contextualizing this exhibition and my experiences as its curator, I hope to show the potential for and limitations to a successful communication with one’s audiences when curating architecture-related photographic work; confronting general problems of distance from a subject; and addressing a complex topic such as fascism.

­The Show: Buffalo, New York Photographic Recall consisted of ten bodies of work (130 photographs and one video) by seven contemporary artists: one Italian, six Germans. They captured sites conceptualized in the service of Italy’s Fascist regime. Planned towns and large-scale building projects such as the EUR suburb in Rome or Sabaudia reappeared across the exhibition, while other fascist building efforts such as churches or housing were featured in individual projects. While this show represented themes that varied in genre between street photography and lush interiors, synthetic architectural documentation and carefully preplanned urban scenes, all of the projects were serial except the video. Instead of a singular image of an event or scene, these works only functioned through iteration and the plurality of the entire body of work. The show was laid out to accommodate the group display of these series, which varied between linear, gridded, and loosely grouped images. However, the exhibition layout also carefully considered how works related and responded to one another. The use of media ranged from analog to digital processes and from black-and-white to color imagery, which further distinguished each piece’s unique characteristics (Figure 9.1). Besides the works, the exhibition introduced two features that were intended to raise awareness of the political and cultural circumstances of these architectures and to alert the visitor to other uses of photography as a medium of propaganda. A horizontal scroll-like timeline featuring main events of “Power,” “Construction,” and “Propaganda” was displayed at the halfway point of the exhibition together with two large maps, one of Italy and one displaying the Italian colonies Libya, Ethiopia, and Somalia. Near the exhibition’s entry was a display of looped propaganda footage by Mussolini’s state-sponsored “Istituto Luce” depicting the constructions of EUR and of the borghi Sabaudia and Littoria (Figure 9.2). My dialogue with the artists was key to curating this exhibition, and I interviewed them about their works and their thoughts on their subjects’ fascist histories. Artists frequently addressed the relationship between Germany and Italy, and in particular how each country has been processing (or avoiding to process) its fascist past since the end of the Second World War. Germany is known to have a lengthy and active reckoning with its fascist history in education and public discourse at many levels. One example in the academic arena was the so-called “historians’ dispute” (Historikerstreit), “a vitriolic debate over the moral-historical meaning and uniqueness of Nazism and its extermination policies” that took place in 1986 across the political spectrum in opinion essays for two well-regarded German newspapers.2 School curricula, local historical research, and recently established memorial sites, such as Berlin’s Topography of Terror and Stauffenberg Street Memorial and Education Center, reflected a clear goal

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Figure  9.1  Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall: Entrance with view onto Johanna Diehl’s wall display of selected works from Borgo, Alleanza, Romanità, quote and screen presenting propaganda videos. Photograph: Biff Henrich.

Figure  9.2 Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall: Maps and Timeline. Photograph: Biff Henrich.

of engaging with the past “in an honest and open way” rather than “overcoming” it.3 And yet, most recently, scholars have wondered whether National Socialism “is not losing importance as a constitutive element of [German] culture in the face of current global crises.”4 In contrast, Italian educational and public discourse have been slow to confront the country’s fascist past. Rather, its “public memories are hazy, selective and

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unreliable”5 despite the fact that “Fascism is fundamental to the identity of republican Italy as an anti-Fascist state.”6 While Germany agreed on a common narrative of antifascism and remembering, “there is no shared national narrative of Fascism and little consensus as to what it means for Italy today.”7 These distinctions help explain why architecture built in the service of fascism in Italy intrigued German artists who had grown up considering fascism and its aesthetic expressions as repulsive.8 Raised in a culture of postwar introspection and examination, in Italy these artists came upon state-commissioned architecture and found themselves intrigued by the Italian conception of fascist architecture. The colloquial distinction in Germany between “bad” state-commissioned architecture of the 1930s and 1940s and “good” modernist architecture produced by the Bauhaus and its architects did not apply here.9 Instead, Italian razionalismo (rationalism) proved to be able to take on both roles and aesthetics: the neoclassicism of fascist architecture of power and the modernism of the “international style.”10 Another important aspect to consider here is the unique relationship between the two countries: there are deep bonds between Germany and Italy beginning during the Renaissance, in which Italy played a profound role as inspiration and projection space for German artistic and scholarly thought. In the late eighteenth century, the image of the “introspective, spiritual, melancholy Northern artist” longing “for the unencumbered pleasure and warmth of southern climes” emerged,11 which drew artists as well as waves of cultural mass tourism to Italy. And then there is the deep mark in Italian collective memory left by Germany’s invasion of Italy in 1943. Today’s German artists are not primarily searching for ruins and their nostalgic aura of a bygone past, but instead portray and reflect Italy’s contemporary reality and its past with a more analytical, conceptual mind. For them, both the bond between the countries and the scars left by the war directly or indirectly affects their approach. Most of the artists of Photographic Recall even had a particular professional occasion to spend time in Italy: they were recipients of a federally funded German residency program at the Villa Massimo or Casa Baldi in Rome, which provides a studio for three to twelve months for “inspiration and artistic orientation without financial concerns.”12 The career paths and backgrounds of the artists of Photographic Recall vary greatly: Caterina Borelli (b. 1959), the sole Italian artist in the show, is a self-trained videographer and filmmaker who is best known for her documentary about Asmara, the capital of Eritrea. She lives both in Rome and New York City. Johanna Diehl (b. 1977), a conceptual photographic artist, teaches at the School for Applied Arts in Würzburg and lives in Berlin. Günther Förg (1952–2013) was a well-known artist who picked up photography in the 1980s when he took a step back from his usual medium, painting. Eiko Grimberg (b. 1971) often works on long-term photographic projects and is interested in the transfer of images between exhibition display and book publications. He lives and works in Berlin. Thomas Ruff (b. 1958), a wellknown photographer and a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, is known for his conceptual and serial photography. He lives and works in Düsseldorf. Hans-Christian Schink (b. 1961) is a photographer who works with great patience and strategic planning to explore phenomena of his interests around the globe. He lives outside Berlin. Heidi Specker (b. 1962) teaches at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig and

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photographically investigates different aspects of architecture through her exploration of form, surface, and material. She lives in Berlin. In the following paragraphs, the work of Förg, Borelli, and Diehl will be discussed in greater detail to get a sense of the wide range of approaches in the show (Figure 9.3). Förg, who began photographing modernist architecture across Europe, the Soviet Union, and Israel in the 1980s, was presented in the exhibition by a large-format, blackand-white photograph of an outdoor spiral stairwell taken in the seaside resort ruins at Marina di Massa.13 As the earliest work in the show, it has influenced and served as a stylistic point of reference and object of critical interpretation for some of the other contemporary German positions. Still, in keeping with Förg’s own deliberate aesthetic understatement, the visitor encounters it only in the last room of the exhibition. In this work, he makes no attempt to negotiate between his perception and the original propagandistic ambitions of these buildings in his approach. He works through the architecture with an apparent fascination and blunt irreverence that is articulated through seemingly sloppily printed, at times dramatically enlarged (the piece in the show measured 49 x 108 inches), and distorted, grainy images. Förg’s black-and-white gaze looks slightly upward, and images are framed tightly, disorienting the observer ever so slightly. Two of Germany’s most influential photographers, the Bechers, made pristine, systematic typologies that stand in stark contrast to the rough works in which Förg seeks to uncover modernism’s underlying ideologies and promises. The Bechers sparked a debate on photography’s imminent potential between index and symbol; Förg instead embraces the subjective view. His photographs reveal modernism’s aging, seen in decay instead of timeless sets of motifs. This polarity between these two approaches to photographing architecture finds remarkable redefinitions in the subsequent generation of artists’ works (Figure 9.4).

Figure  9.3 Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall (left to right: Günther Förg, Marina di Massa; Heidi Specker, several pieces from the series Termini). Photograph: Biff Henrich.

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Figure 9.4  Installation photograph of the exhibition Photographic Recall: Caterina Borelli, video screening room, The Date. Photograph: Biff Henrich.

Borelli’s ten-minute video The Date is her most biographical work and tackles her experience of rationalist architecture most immediately. It recounts a young woman’s “date” with a mysterious suitor, who turns out to be one of the monumental male sculptures in the Stadio dei Marmi (Stadium of the marbles) in Rome, part of the Foro Italico (formerly Foro Mussolini) sports complex. This work was only the artist’s second video in her long career. After six years of journeys to London and South America and eventually settling in New York City, Borelli returned to Rome—a city and country from which she had felt disconnected when she left as a teenager—and made this video in 1984. The piece is personal and political at the same time, and Borelli calls it a part of her reconciliation with an Italy that her generation regarded with great ambivalence, divided between its communist and fascist affiliations. In the video, the Marmi share the classical reference and overscale of Michelangelo’s Moses or David but lack the mannerist logic; they make enigmatic claims to heritage in their abstraction and demonstrative poses. As Borelli’s protagonist approaches and caresses one of them, she physically stages attraction and repulsion. Setting this encounter in a known gay cruising spot of the 1980s adds a sense of irony to this intimacy. The poignancy in Borelli’s courtship, and her own position as an Italian who has viewed her home as an outsider, hint at the ambiguity found in the German depictions of Italian spaces. Like Borelli, the German artists address their own captivation with the architectures of fascism as spaces that dazzle and awe. Diehl, for example, identifies the seductive power in the theatricality of these spaces, sites that artist Eiko Grimberg

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describes as inducing “anxiety-fascination.” From 2011 to 2015 Diehl investigated the aura of power in fascist architecture. Through four series—Romanità, Alleanza, Borgo, and, most recently, Sets—she restaged interiors, architectures, and urban settings in order to challenge her own ambivalent sentiments as well as those of her audience. In each, Diehl deliberately maintains places’ aesthetic appeal while passing the task of critical response back to the viewer. Instead of expressing indignation and emphasizing the imposing nature of these structures, she aims at disrupting and breaking her objects’ seductive potency through photographic reframing. Diehl’s work prompts a close reading of the image, an inquiry to assist the contemporary observer’s ever-nervous and distracted gaze. She showed her work in Buffalo unframed, in a fairly crowded hanging, and in four different, intuitively arranged sizes. Across the exhibition’s thirtyfoot entry wall, she proposed a kind of index for the entire show, implying the need for tireless critical inquiry into what we see. By refusing the frame, she opens the potential for new dynamics and orders of perception. Förg’s, Borelli’s, and Diehl’s imagery of fascist spaces makes full use of their media, which have evolved since the 1980s when Förg started using photography as a means of interpretation and questioning. Looking at the range of aesthetic languages they use helps understand the curation of the aesthetics employed by Italy’s Fascist regime. Förg rejects any assumptions about how modernist architecture should be represented. His extensive photographic explorations of European modernism stand in stark contrast to works by an architectural photographer such as Julius Shulman, who gained his fame by setting a distinctly celebratory tone for California’s modernist architecture in his black-and-white photographs of the 1960s. Förg’s images are gloomy, slightly out of focus, and seemingly taken without care for the geometry of buildings. They recall John Berger’s 1968 observation that “we think of photographs as works of art, as evidence of a particular truth, as likenesses, as news items,” and we therefore underestimate that “every photograph is in fact a means of testing, confirming and constructing a total view of reality. Hence the necessity of our understanding a weapon which we can use and which can be used against us.”14 Förg embodies this as he clearly tests, confirms, and then constructs his own “total view of reality” of an era whose immediate repercussions affected him, born in the early postwar years, more than any of the other artists in the show. Borelli’s Date project was enabled by the artist leaving Italy. She explained in an interview in 2015 that this distance-taking persisted throughout her life as she spent half of it elsewhere (mostly in New York City). Only this distance from the stillpalpable tensions between those whose families aligned with the fascists and those who did not made the video possible. Borelli’s upbringing in a communist household with a mother who worked for an image archive of propaganda and other mass media trained her eye at an early age and prepared her for a critical engagement with built forms of fascist propaganda.15 Diehl photographs architectures that are sublime—sensuous and yet fraught, at times sites of trauma. She carefully captures details, surfaces, and materials; she uses cinematic strategies to mobilize her subject. Her works document and yet question the beauty of these forms in the way that they are displayed in context. In isolation, each image indeed looks like an aesthetically exultant artwork unaware of the charge

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that the documented structures hold. Displayed as a series, however, a new narrative emerges. The powerful effect of Diehl’s serial approach links her work to one of the most important representatives of experimental photography, the Bauhaus teacher László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946). Best known for his seminal texts Malerei, Fotografie, Film (Painting, Photography, Film, 1925) and The New Vision: From Material to Architecture (1932), he articulated his thoughts on seriality in photography in the posthumously published book Visions in Motion (1947). For Moholy-Nagy, the photographic series was “a logical culmination of photography” in which “the single picture loses its separate identity and becomes a part of the assembly; it becomes a structural element of the related whole which is the thing itself.” In this constellation, “a photographic series—photographic comics, pamphlets, books—can be either a potent weapon or tender poetry.”16 Diehl’s use of seriality and her deliberate use of the still image through this form confirms and expands Moholy-Nagy’s vision of the photographic image as alternately “potent weapon” or “tender poetry.” Förg, Borelli, and Diehl each demonstrate a means of critique that can, when part of a larger curatorial narrative, enhance our understanding of the contradictions of fascist aesthetics. Their formal and rhetorical tools—such as seriality and use of narrative, humor, and cultural reference—are particularly suited to both photography and the curation of politically loaded work. For the same reason that a good joke in one country can fall flat in another, these tools are also context-specific in their effectiveness. Associations and connotations—as with a modernist space, for example—shift dramatically when displaced. Even the temptation to didactically explain the history, as with wall text, generates complex repercussions for both the photograph and its subject. Precisely because fascist ideologies at some level told the public what to think, when curating images of fascist history, I needed to resist taking steps too far in that direction, even in a university gallery with a mandate to educate. The photographs were hung each in their own order. They were given indications of their origins in space, time, and in the artists’ own words. Visitors were left from there to draw their own conclusions.

­Comparisons: Milan and Munich Where photographs function in Photographic Recall as carriers of divergent voices, they serve altogether more unified and polemical curatorial roles in two much larger exhibitions that serve here for comparison: The History of Reconstruction – The Construction of History and Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943. These and several other art and architecture-focused exhibitions of the recent past have taken on the difficult task of critically pondering the relationships between art, architecture, and society in their historical contexts. The History of Reconstruction was organized by Munich’s Technical University’s Architecture Museum, curated by the museum’s director at the time, Winfried Nerdinger, and the curators Markus Eisen and Hilde Strobel, and took place at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2010. It focused on different definitions,

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motivations, and scenarios of architectural reconstruction since antiquity and across the globe from Asia to North America. This ambitious show featured eighty-five representative case studies with models and two hundred reconstructions supported by photographs, which each in its own way made the case for reconstruction. In their foreword to the scholarly catalog, Uta Hassler and Nerdinger explained that this exhibition was an attempt to generate an “open and differentiated discourse” out of “often-fixed patterns of thinking” about the “contentious theme of reconstruction.”17 Post Zang at the Prada Foundation in Milan was described in the catalog’s foreword by the heads of Prada, Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, as “an exhibition that attempts to recount official reality alongside the interferences that agitated it, presenting art and history together contemporarily.”18 The show’s creator and curator, Germano Celant, reveals his curatorial concern at the enormous scope of the exhibition in his catalog text, asking whether the “dialectics between art and its multilingual and multi-social context can be free from any coercion or imposition on the part of the organizer, curator, philosopher and narrator,” and whether they can be “put objectively on display in such a way that the theoretical and critical explanation is induced by the real spaces of their articulation in time.”19 The most spectacular curatorial feature of the show—created in close collaboration with the design firm 2x4—was its life-size partial reconstructions from period photographs of twentyfour exhibitions that took place publicly and privately, in Italy or abroad, “with works slotted into place against enlarged renderings.”20 While drastically blown-up photos here served as 3D templates, a substrate within which to hang those photos was also cropped to match the dimensions of the foundation’s exhibition spaces. Post Zang most prominently restaged La Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, a monumental 1932 propaganda exhibition celebrating the origins of fascism in Rome that was seen by 3.7 million people.21 The History of Reconstruction was marked by its formality in systematic documentation. Photographic renderings of buildings were installed to form a gridded display of three vertically arranged images of the building’s state that can be described respectively as “before destruction,” “after destruction,” and “after reconstruction.” Throughout the exhibition this principle was sustained while additional documentation (such as blueprints and archival materials) or models were featured nearby. While less spectacular than the large architectural models, photography was instrumentalized toward the curators’ intentions. The photographs created and displayed a broad range of strategies and came from different sources, but their differences were effaced in the service of the unifying grid in which they were hung. This had the effect of their appearing more like a homogenized set in which assembled images were lent a consistency in the principle of reconstruction. No matter where or when reconstruction happened, images documenting the original and destroyed or demolished state of a building served as proof for the need to reconstruct. Seeing the once pristine and intact structure and then its demise in destruction, as a ruin, a common response among viewers was likely the desire to reestablish and restore. The show leveraged photography’s historical association with truth and objectivity toward its polemic. Reconstruction as a proposition gains a force in repetition when photos are packaged in this gridded form (Figure 9.5).

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Figure 9.5  Installation photograph of the exhibition History of Reconstruction: Installation view. Photo: Ester Vletsos for Architekturmuseum der TUM.

Post Zang took advantage of and implemented into its concept the extensive use of various media by the fascists. The reconstructed exhibitions in most of the exhibition rooms counted on the viewer’s visual literacy to read the photographs of these spaces. This helped visitors to imagine themselves transported into the past. One particularly large space, the hangar-like Deposito gallery, was dedicated to a representation of La Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista. Here, large white banners were projected with lifesize images from the event in black and white. The visual materials from this exhibition were not reserved for painting and sculpture, but very intentionally used photography, film, and exhibition design to enhance the propagandistic message. Design historian Vanessa Rocco in her essay “Exhibiting Exhibitions: Designing and Displaying Fascism” argues convincingly that this exhibition made particularly sophisticated use of photography in which the mass medium was joined with “grandiose architectural forms” in the exhibition to overwhelm and lure the visitors.22 Both the Munich and Milan shows put photography to work for curatorial arguments. In the Munich show, this was both to demonstrate the exhibition’s claimed goal of promoting openness toward the idea of reconstruction and to visually undergird the conclusiveness of reconstruction as an act of completion or healing. The Milan

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exhibition dwelled in the rich visuality of Mussolini’s propaganda machinery, but also employed photography to trigger the visitor’s imagination and enthrall them with the show’s sheer magnitude. Both exhibitions took place in moments and even in sites where their political and built environments were under great public scrutiny and debate. These contexts were of enormous consequence in the exhibitions’ conception and reception. The Reconstruction of History—voluminous and ambitious in its attempt to reveal reconstruction through the prism of many different historical and cultural contexts— was probably a long time in the making. And yet it has to be understood as a timely response to the decades-old fight over the demolition of Berlin’s Palace of the Republic and the decision by the German parliament to replace it with a reconstruction of the city’s imperial castle. Post Zang’s focus dwelled on the years 1918 to 1943; it was likewise mammoth in research and scale and resulted from two years of preparation. And yet its appearance within a decidedly contemporary-oriented private foundation and during Italian elections in which the right-wing coalition was expected to show gains were significant in the show’s meaning to its visitors.

Conclusion Photographic Recall’s timing and location marked the curation and presumably also its reception. This is true of all of the exhibition’s contexts: its mounting in the United States, at a state university gallery, and in the sociopolitical climate under a presidential regime repressive to the press and many assumed civil liberties. Programming at Photographic Recall, like the exhibition itself, walked a line between a mandate to provide public access for all ages and a pedagogical role to the university community and the need for restraint around the history of fascism’s ideological and rhetorical forcefulness. Unlike the much larger Reconstruction and Post Zang exhibitions, Photographic Recall was created for and attracted an exclusively local and regional audience. In retrospect, this show would have benefited from more planning time. It was put together in nine months for scheduling reasons, which meant that it could not travel. My students collaborated with Buffalo Public Schools and brought in groups of high school students to discuss topics like fascism and its representation, but time for a more comprehensive programming effort would have allowed for deeper and broader engagement. Razionalismo—the architectural subject at the bottom of all these concerns and the one embedded most visibly in everything one saw—remains today in its beauty and its occasional decrepitude an ambiguous muse. It’s no wonder these built environments are subject to discussions of “difficult heritage.”23 Before fascism embraced modernism24 and its more neoclassical expression, the “stile littorio,” it had a life as avant-garde. Today, it can be read for its formal and material luxuries, with EUR notably now the site of Fendi’s headquarters.25 Its life as a host to ideologies of oppression is easily overlooked, most of all at a distance.

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Notes 1 Germano Celant, “Toward a Real and Contextual History,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943. (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), 38. 2 Rudy Koshar, “Germany’s Past Is Present Again: After Four Decades, People Look Honestly at Nazism,” Los Angeles Times, June 25, 1988, https://www.latimes.com/ archives/la-xpm-1988-06-25-me-4715-story.html (accessed April 26, 2022). For more on the Historikerstreit, see Rudolph Augstein, Historikerstreit: Die Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Historians’ Dispute: The Documentation of the Controversy about the Unique Nature of the National-Socialist Extinction of the Jews) (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1987). 3 Koshar, “Germany’s Past.” Koshar uses the controversial term “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (the overcoming of the past), which was often used in the decades immediately after the war. 4 Georgios Chatzoudis, “Es geht um die Frage, wer die Deutschen heute sind oder sein wollen” (About the Question who Germans Are Today or They Want To Be), interview by Matthias Lorenz and Torben Fischer, Science Portal of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, March 8, 2016, https://lisa.gerda-henkel-stiftung.de/lexikon_ver gangenheitsbewaeltigung(accessed April 26, 2022). 5 Hannah Malone, “Legacies of Fascism: Architecture, Heritage and Memory in Contemporary Italy,” in “The Force of History: Modern Italian Historiography and the Legacy of Christopher Duggan,” special issue, Modern Italy 22, no. 4 (November 2017): 445, https://doi.org/10.1017/mit.2017.51 (accessed April 26, 2022). 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. 8 Harald Bodenschatz, Introduction to Städtebau für Mussolini: Auf der Suche nach der neuen Stadt im faschistischen Italien (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2011). 9 Although scholars have complicated such distinctions in publications and exhibitions on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the foundations of Bauhaus in 2019, this dichotomy is still the basis for the dominant narrative. 10 Diane Yvonne Ghirardo, “Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist’s Role in Regime Building,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39, no. 2 (May 1980): 109–27, https://doi.org/10.2307/989580 (accessed April 26, 2022). 11 “Friedrich Overbeck, Italia and Germania (1811–28),” German Historical Institute, German History in Documents and Images, http://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/print_document. cfm?document_id=2638 (accessed April 26, 2022). 12 The German Academy Rome Villa Massimo (Deutschen Akademie Rom Villa Massimo), https://www.villamassimo.de/de/stipendiaten(accessed April 26, 2022). The academy was established in 1911, together with Casa Baldi accommodating artist studios and residences for recipients of the Rome Prize. 13 This 1986 photograph is titled Colonia “28, Ottobre,” Marina di Massa, 1986, blackand-white photograph on paper, 270 × 120 cm. Collection of ZKM, Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany. 14 John Berger, “Understanding a Photograph,” in Understanding a Photograph, ed. Geoff Dyer (London: Penguin, 2014), 21. 15 Caterina Borelli, in discussion with the author, June 6, 2015.

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16 László Moholy-Nagy, “Image Sequences/Series (1946),” in The Cinematic, ed. David Campany, Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 83, 208. 17 Wilfried Nerdinger, ed., Geschichte der Rekonstruktion/Konstruktion der Geschichte (Munich: Prestel, 2010), 6. 18 Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli, foreword to Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 (Milan: Prada Foundation, 2018). 19 Celant, “Toward a Real and Contextual History,” 38. 20 Hannah McGivern, “Milan’s Fondazione Prada Sheds Light on Italy’s Fascist Past on Eve of the Country’s Elections,” The Art Newspaper, March 6, 2018, https://www. theartnewspaper.com/2018/03/06/milans-fondazione-prada-sheds-light-on-italysfascist-past-on-eve-of-countrys-elections (accessed April 28, 2022). The global design consultancy 2x4 developed the exhibition’s “immersive contextual approach” and was in charge of “overall branding, advertising, exhibition design, and catalogue.” See “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943,” 2x4, https://2x4.org/ work/post-zang-tumb-tuuum-art-life-politics-italia-1918-1943-fondazione-prada/ (accessed April 26, 2022). 21 See Vanessa Rocco’s essay in this volume. ­22 Vanessa Rocco, “Exhibiting Exhibitions: Designing and Displaying Fascism,” in Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, ed. Grace Lees-Maffei and Kjetil Fallan (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 183. 23 This term emerged in the 2020s in literature about fascist architecture in Germany and beyond. See Sharon Macdonald, Difficult Heritage: Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2009). 24 Modernism and rationalism are often used synonymously, but Italian razionalismo describes the modernist architecture practiced by Italian architects such as Giuseppe Terragni, Adalberto Libera and Gino Pollini. According to Oxford Reference, Rationalism is a “term … mostly applied to mean the architectural principles behind the International Modern Movement led by such personalities as [Walter] Gropius and Mies van der Rohe subscribing to the so-called Machine Aesthetic and to Functionalism,” https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/ authority.20111011235516833 (accessed April 26, 2022). 25 See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?” New Yorker, October 5, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/whyare-so-many-fascist-monuments-still-standing-in-italy (accessed April 26, 2022).

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Feeling at Home: Exhibiting Design, Blurring Fascism Elena Dellapiana and Jonathan Mekinda

Set within the former industrial buildings now occupied by the Fondazione Prada, the display environment constructed for Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 was one of the chief implements of the exhibition’s ambition to “construct a totality of historical and social, poetic and aesthetic material, made up of documents of reality that serve to forge a ‘cultural understanding’ of the complexity of the constellations of an era.”1 Historical photographs of exhibitions and studios enlarged to life-size and stretched across walls and floors were the dominant feature of the environment. Their impact was heightened by specially designed wall panels covered with a subtly textured, muted-brown fabric that transformed the open spaces of the former factory into distinct rooms evocative of the exhibition spaces of an earlier era.2 Together, the wall panels and photographs defined an environment that reduced the boundary between past and present to thin lines on the floor and ceiling. Performing as both documentation and reconstruction, the photographs worked with the wall treatment to constitute a setting that invited visitors to imagine themselves alongside the artists, inhabiting their studios and exhibitions and even, if only for a moment, living as they lived. In other words, the exhibition encouraged visitors to make themselves at home in the past. The presentation of design was no less significant than the display environment for realizing that effect. From furniture and finely crafted decorative objects to posters, pamphlets, and other ephemera, design appeared in a wide variety of forms and functions. And like the photographs, works of design performed two distinct roles in the exhibition. The artworks, as the subjects of the exhibition, showcased the charged relationship among artistic convention, the emerging configurations of modern life, and the growing appeal to deploy every form of cultural production in the service of the regime that underpinned artistic activity under fascism. By contrast, the works of design acted as both subjects and objects, showcasing the same aesthetic qualities as the artworks while also exhibiting—through their “function” as advertisement, decoration, or furnishing—something of the ordinary demands and pleasures of life at home, at work, and in the piazza. By bringing the everyday into the exhibition,

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the works of design directed visitors to engage with the artworks as both aesthetic and historical subjects, open to sustained visual contemplation and at the same time comprehensible only in relation to the conditions in which they were produced. The role of design within the exhibition was especially clear in the staging of furniture. (Figure 10.1) Like the textured walls and life-size photographs, the furniture supplemented the dominant visuality of the artworks by offering visitors matter and space—both physical and imaginary—with which to occupy the past. Despite the curators’ ambition for “an almost anthropological re-creation of artistic production and its display in Italy from 1918 to 1943,”3 the doubling of the roles of photography and design—document and reconstruction, subject and object—did not yield a doubling of the exhibition’s capacity to convey the truth of the past. Instead, the presentation of photography and design functioned to solicit the suspension of disbelief necessary for the exhibition to convey a convincingly cohesive experience of art, life, and politics under fascism. Moreover, to the degree that it invited visitors to imagine themselves immersed in the flow of life that had sparked and nurtured the creation of the artworks on display—that is, to make themselves at home in the past—the presentation of design in the exhibition also encouraged the suspension of contemporary judgment. Precisely because of the rich spatial and material dimensions they afforded the everyday within the exhibition, the posters, vases, and chairs effectively effaced the distance between past and present, domesticating history and denying the estrangement necessary for judgment.

Figure 10.1  View of the exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918– 1943, curated by Germano Celant, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani & Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada.

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Focusing on the work of Gio Ponti—likely the most exhibited Italian designer of the twentieth century—this essay examines the function of works of design in exhibitions of modern Italian art and culture. Because of the durability of their seductive power, the ceramics that Ponti designed during the 1920s are particularly rich material for this investigation: since 1923, they have been almost continuously exhibited in a wide range of venues including commercial fairs, international expositions, and art museums. Tracing the path of Ponti’s ceramics through exhibitions in Italy and beyond, this essay argues that works of design typically act in exhibitions to blur the force of fascism in the modernization of Italy. As Post Zang Tumb Tuuum demonstrates, the challenge of curating fascism lies in the obligation to unpack complex, difficult, and frequently tragic historical realities with and within the works on display. Because of its particular capacity to represent the values of Italian culture in familiar visual, material, and functional forms, design seemingly offers a direct expression of those realities. But the sense of clarity and understanding that design typically invites within exhibitions is itself undependable.

Exhibiting Design, Exhibiting Culture: Italy at Work and the Tropes of Italian Design From art museums and galleries to cultural expositions, national pavilions, and even trade fairs, exhibitions have long advanced a distinct set of qualities for Italian design that effectively root it in a national popular culture conceived as a timeless constellation of values and customs untainted by fascism. Even as it focused explicitly on art, life, and politics under fascism, Post Zang Tumb Tuuum reiterated this understanding of Italian design and its corollary that Italian culture was only superficially influenced by the regime in its engagement with modernity. In doing so, the exhibition uncritically advanced the idea that design is a specific category of activity and material useful for assessing the characteristics and qualities of modern Italian culture. The emergence of that view in the years after the Second World War is exemplified by Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today. Organized chiefly by Meyric Rogers, curator of decorative and industrial arts at the Art Institute of Chicago, the exhibition traveled across the United States for three years beginning in late 1950.4 Entering the exhibition during its run at the Art Institute of Chicago, where it was on view from March 15 to May 13, 1951, visitors confronted a strikingly varied display (Figure 10.2). In two corners of the large hall, full-scale model interiors by Fabrizio Clerici and Gio Ponti showcased a Foyer for a Marionette Theater and a Dining Room, both handsomely ornamented with traditional materials and motifs. In the center of the room, a floor-level display juxtaposed an elaborately decorated Sicilian handcart and a Lambretta motor scooter. Arranged around a tall, tri-lobed panel, the two vehicles stood as discrete aesthetic objects even as their adjacency asserted a meaningful relationship between them. On the one hand, each vehicle embodied a distinct set of artistic values: an ongoing commitment to traditional crafts, materials, and customs in the case of the handcart, and, in the case of the scooter, an embrace of new technologies, formal

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Figure 10.2  The entry hall of the exhibition Italy at Work, Art Institute of Chicago, 1951. Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago / Art Resource NY.

languages, and modes of daily life made possible by industrialization. On the other hand, shared qualities emerged from their proximity: an appreciation for expressivity in form, material, and technique; an attention to craft and execution that imbues even ordinary objects with a sense of luxury; and an openness to individual creativity and experimentation with conventions. Instead of symbols of the past and the future of Italian design respectively, the decorated handcart and sculpted scooter appeared equally as products of the present. The mingling of wood and metal, handicraft and machine production, art and industry, past and present that confronted visitors in the entry hall was the central theme of Italy at Work, which posited exactly that mingling as the source of both Italy’s “renaissance in design” and the nation’s broader cultural rebirth in the wake of fascism. In advancing that view, the exhibition also asserted three distinct features for Italian design. First, it established a capacious definition of design by including a wide range of crafts, materials, and functional objects from jewelry and textiles to furniture and typewriters. Crucially, the organizers justified this diversity as responsive to the conditions they encountered in Italy, where handicraft continued to flourish alongside industrial production. Second, they linked the works on display to specific national-cultural characteristics, thereby positioning design as a privileged medium for the expression of the authentic spirit of the Italian people. This approach to design was not unusual at the time; since the mid-nineteenth century, many exhibitions had presented vernacular crafts and other materials from daily life alongside the highest achievements of art and industry to display national cultures. Italy at Work is notable,

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however, for the specific relationship it described between Italian culture and fascism. As the embodiments of a national popular culture that not only celebrated individual creativity and freedom but also had been suppressed by the regime, the works in the exhibition confirmed the Italian people’s inherent resistance to fascism and openness to the particular combination of liberal democracy and capitalism advanced by the United States. Third, the exhibition asserted an intimate association between domesticity and design in Italy that heightened design’s capacity to embody the values of an authentic popular culture. Except for only a few products from the office equipment manufacturer Olivetti, the works in the exhibition were devoted to personal pleasures, and the vast majority of these served specifically domestic functions and settings. Underpinning this selection was the view that the home was the primary site of Italian culture— the most vital space for the timeless customs and habits that defined daily life for the Italian people. Italian design was thus a genuine expression of national popular culture because it was fundamentally rooted in the private domain of the home. Given the grandiosity of the regime’s public displays, this assertion in particular supported the central claim of the exhibition that Italian culture was only superficially touched by fascism and therefore able to rejuvenate itself quickly in the wake of the war. Both that broader claim and the narrower assertions advanced by Italy at Work regarding the scope, politics, and domesticity of Italian design have proven remarkably durable. Indeed, as evidenced by their reappearance at Post Zang Tumb Tuuum, they have become well-worn tropes. The complicated path by which these tropes were established—a path that connects the postwar boosterism of Italy at Work to the knowing ambition of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum—can best be traced by considering the case of Gio Ponti. Likely the mastermind of Italy at Work, Ponti was the point of convergence for a formidable number of contacts between Italy and the United States.5 He was also the author of the dining room featured in the entry to the exhibition, where his Mani della Fattucchiera (Hands of the Sorceress) peeped out from the shelves among objects by Fausto Melotti and Edina Altara. These small, hand-shaped sculptures were produced as early as 1930, and they somehow broke the rule of Italy at Work, which asked only for designs produced after 1945. The inclusion of these and other objects by Ponti is a powerful mark of the centrality of his work and his renown, which grew internationally after the war but found strong roots in the beginning of the fascist ventennio in products of “earth and fire.” They also illustrate the ease with which his works of design, almost incognito, crossed the decades with their reordering of politics and taste.

Rooting the Passeggiata Archeologica Shown in all of the major exhibitions of fascist art and culture in recent decades, the ceramic objects designed by Ponti—the production of which he supervised as artistic director of the Tuscan manufacturer Richard Ginori for more than half a decade beginning in 1923—are in fact programmatically “out of time.”6 Heir in some ways to the production of the Tuscan district, which dates back at least to the commissioning

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of Francesco I De Medici in the second half of the sixteenth century, Ponti started from a ground zero that distanced him, without entirely separating him, from both the tradition of Ginori ceramics and the Art Deco fashions then in vogue. His source of inspiration was Le antichità di Ercolano esposte (The antiquities of Herculaneum on display, 1754–1799).7 These gave rise to details, shapes, and decorative textures that carry with them the iconographic datum and cultural heritage of the eighteenthcentury Grand Tour: young artists under the Mediterranean sun walking, drawing, and conversing about a past that was no longer made up only of monumental buildings or sculptural groups but also of everyday objects, “bourgeois” houses, life lived in otium, and the contemplation of beauty.8 The cists, urns, vases, and plates produced under Ponti’s direction at Richard Ginori are simple forms characterized by the effort to find a balance—perhaps the most typical attribute of the classical tradition—between the simplicity of rational forms and what critic Raffaello Giolli called the “calm breaths of measured proportions.”9 Passeggiata archeologica (Archaeological promenade, 1924), one of Ponti’s most successful decors, happily combines classical citation with the formal simplification typical of the modern world. The bases and backgrounds of the vases are marked by brick walls, small obelisks, and serlianas as well as painted architectures. In addition, the plates are crisscrossed with garlands, herms, and in some cases complete architectural orders. These motifs can also be found in Ponti’s work as an architect in the same years, from the model Domus for the 1925 Monza Biennale to the Via Randaccio house in Milan.10 The presence of classical quotations in his ceramics was due to Ponti’s efforts to bring the artifact back into the mainstream of design. He identified the “home”— living—as the focus of his research; architecture and domestic objects were two interchangeable planes, and he moved between them with ease in the name of the home. The leap in scale between architecture and object had little to do with modernist manifestos but was instead aimed at the transfer from architecture to objects, and vice versa, of an idea of decorating simple, essential forms by means of a classicism made up of “words”—that is, recognizable lemmas referring, with a degree of irony and playfulness, to the venerated roots of Mediterranean-classical culture. This classicism presented itself with frayed and elastic boundaries, a formal mode that emerged from Ponti’s training, interrupted by the First World War, and only concluded in 1921, and it positioned Ponti alongside other architects, artists, and intellectuals close to the regime such as Giovanni Muzio, Tomaso Buzzi, and Ugo Ojetti. This was not an isolated group: the whole of Italian culture, architectural and otherwise, from the 1920s onwards struggled between the poles of modernity and classicism, internationality and Italianità, reproducing and somehow pacifying the contradictions typical of fascism. After their first appearance at the 1923 Monza Biennale, Ponti’s vases were exhibited again at Monza in 1925 and, almost simultaneously, in Paris. The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes was a fundamental staging ground for the reputation of Ponti and the company he represented as well as the definition of his relations with key figures in the regime. The delegation led by Ojetti included Margherita Sarfatti, and Ponti dedicated a special piece to each of them: for Ojetti a cist and for Sarfatti an urn on the base of which he had painted two small daisies, the initials M. G. S., and the date 1925.11 The direction given by Sarfatti—a

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powerful intellectual and one of the most active organizers guiding the definition of an Italian project for the decorative and industrial arts—enabled Ponti to not only bring to Paris the products of the company he ran but also promote himself there as one of the most important amplifiers of Italian taste in the world. The ceramics were abundant and very successful both in the commercial stand at the Grand Palais and in the Italian pavilion overlooking the Seine, and Richard Ginori was awarded the Grand Prix of the exhibition.12 The Casa degli efebi (House of the Ephebes), a painted majolica amphora inspired by the form of the Cretan pithoi, held a place of honor at the exhibition, together with urns with various decorations that illustrated the duality between majolica—a relatively poor material rarely used by international competitors—and precious porcelain. During the years of fascism, up to the end of his tenure at Richard Ginori in 1930 and beyond, Ponti’s urns and vases were exhibited on many occasions as propaganda for the regime—celebrations of the synthesis of the classical tradition and modern industry proclaimed by fascism (Figures 10.3 and 10.4).13 In that light, the prominence of Ponti’s designs at Italy at Work is surprising; however, his ceramics continued to circulate widely in specialist circles and generalist forums in the aftermath of the Second World War. Almost independently of their designer, the vases and other objects by Ponti also began to appear in non-design exhibitions, accompanying paintings, sculptures, architecture, and other manifestations of the creative thought of the 1920s and 1930s and contributing to a comprehensive outline of the art—and culture—of the ventennio.

Chasing the Passeggiata Archeologica The first Italian exhibition after the war to examine art under fascism was organized in 1967 by the anti-fascist art historian Carlo Ragghianti in an attempt to answer the question of how “a past to which we are so closely connected has receded so far from our presence and memory that it has become forgotten and does not intervene in our critical consciousness.”14 It was not until the 1980s that everyday objects and the decorative arts were presented alongside the “high” arts in exhibitions of fascist art and culture, and Ponti’s ceramics were central to that new initiative. In 1980 Ponti’s vases appeared in La Metafisica: gli anni Venti in Bologna, one of the first exhibitions to tackle a slippery decade, following a season of smaller, local shows prompted by the rediscovery of the archives of the Biennali and Triennali and a renewed engagement of historians.15 Curated by Renato Barilli, the exhibition broke down the divisions between high languages and everyday objects. Alongside architecture, illustration, literature, theater, music, cinema, and photography—and together with a hundred or so objects—were an urn with the decoration Le passioni prigioniere (The Captive Passions) as well as other projects by Ponti including furniture and decorative objects. The significance attributed to these artifacts in the exhibition, which never explicitly mentioned their origin, emphasized continuity with the experiments of late Art Nouveau, the impact of new industrial processes, and the uniqueness of the decade. While conceding

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Figure  10.3 Gio Ponti’s letter to Luigi Tazzini concerning the Urna vase dedicated to Mussolini, April 10, 1930. Achivio di Stato di Firenze, Fondo Richard Ginori.

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Figure  10.4  Gio Ponti, “I ‘grandi pezzi’ della Triennale,” Domus no. 31 (July 1930): 17. Courtesy Politecnico di Torino Libraries System.

that objects continued to be protagonists on the creative scene during the following decade, the exhibition did not propose any relationship to the contemporaneous political situation, which was characterized as an attitude of petty-bourgeois and provincial closure. As a sort of trait d’union between two decades, a vase by Ponti and a large plate with Pontesca decoration as well as a series of tableware were included in a large exhibition in Milan dedicated to the Annitrenta in 1982, curated once again by Barilli.16 The starting point of the applied arts section was the Triennali, both before and after the move in 1933 to the Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan. These were described in the catalog as enclaves of experimentation, the scene of a never-too-bloody clash between traditionalists and innovators, and the only space for a truly international debate. As such, they provided material to intuit the ambiguities of the regime, which seemed to have not yet decided whether to adopt an official language for the decorative and industrial arts.17 The introduction of the minor arts reinforced the polyphonic environment of the exhibition, which avoided the logic of authorship and offered what Barilli called a “trancia” (slice) of the decade in which high and low arts together enabled the visitor to choose between the short circuits triggered by the different sections. These three major exhibitions on the ventennio—in 1967, 1980, and 1982—spurred many studies, especially on architecture but also on the decorative and applied arts. Company archives such as those of Richard Ginori, collections, and interiors soon became the subject of academic works and celebratory episodes as well as regular protagonists at auctions and in museums. It was from a private collection that the first exhibition of the 2000s to include Ponti’s ceramics originated: Under Mussolini: Decorative and Propaganda Arts of the Twenties and Thirties from the Wolfson

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Collection. Shown in London in 2002, the exhibit included the Vendemmia vases (1927–28) together with other objects and pictorial, sculptural, and graphic works.18 It was precisely through everyday objects that the regime’s need and ability to adapt to different and sometimes opposing tendencies—its trasformismo—was effectively exhibited. A different tone altogether was recorded in 2011 at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936. There, an urn and plate of the Passeggiata archeologica were a pendant, together with an etched glass bowl by Guido Balsamo Stella made in 1926 for the wedding anniversary of Ugo and Fernanda Ojetti, to Giorgio de Chirico’s painting The Eventuality of Destiny (1927) (Figure 10.5).19 In this exhibition, the message developed by the designers and intellectuals of the ventennio seems finally to have hit the target: describing Ponti as “key to translating the modern-cum-classical aesthetic to the decorative arts,” curator Kenneth Silver asserted that “Ponti’s charming approach to the new Romanità must have helped normalize Mussolini’s Fascist regime.”20 Referring to Mario Sironi as a fascist painter or Louis Marcoussis as a Parisian Cubist were equivalent qualifications in defining the refined fresco of an already torn Europe in which the only shared history was the end of the First World War and the only formal common denominator was the reference to the classical world in all its forms. This explicit overcoming of historical elaboration was continued with the inclusion of Ponti’s urns and cists in Anni Trenta: Arti in Italia oltre il Fascismo, a 2013 show in Florence that extended Ragghianti’s seminal exhibition of 1967.21 There an urn

Figure 10.5  Installation view, Chaos and Classicism Art in France, Italy, and Germany 1918 to 1936, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, October 1, 2010–January 9, 2011. Photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

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and a blue-and-gold bowl from the series I trionfi (c. 1930) presented a variation on forms already seen, which accentuated the use of ancient Roman iconography in the construction of the visual mythography of fascism. The interpretative key attributed to Ragghianti for the 1967 exhibition, which overcame postwar polemics with a Crocian vision centered on the quality of artistic products, was adopted in this exhibition. In particular it integrated a number of decorative objects, which provided an overview of the production of the period but failed to address critical elements—fascist iconography, for example—except by providing an objective datum: “The exhibition proposes an approach according to the perspective of the time,” declared the curators, “that is to say that we have endeavored to restore how the critics of the time considered the art of the 1930s, in order to try to free ourselves from the prejudices we have about this historical period.”22 The almost complete series of Ponti’s vases from the 1920s—the Passeggiata archeologica, La conversazione classica, and Mani della Fattucchiera—were also found in the 2015 exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, Dolce Vita? Du Liberty au Design Italien (1900–1940), which constituted a further departure from the critical examination of history.23 Based on recent acquisitions, the exhibition stemmed from the proposition that Italian decorative arts from the beginning of the century to the outbreak of the Second World War are characterized by a joyful vein, which becomes more pronounced as one approaches the néant.24 Although the shocking image of the corpses of Mussolini and his lover Clara Petacci on display in Piazzale Loreto can be found in the catalog, the selection of pieces of the highest level celebrates the decorative arts as evidence that the world of design was “during the period of fascism in Italy the unique domain in which subsisted a real, veritable free will.”25 Ponti’s ceramics, together with Paolo Venini’s glass, de Chirico’s paintings, and the hybrids of Enrico Prampolini and Nikolay Diulgheroff present a formal and technical quality that was associated preemptively with “Made in Italy” as the bearer of aesthetic values and good taste after the war—an assertion that completely disregards the historical framework in which Italian design was born. The objects, rather than the paintings or plastic works, were presented as the products of a lack of awareness on the part of the bourgeois and upper classes of Mussolini’s brutality. A similar attitude pervaded the rooms of the Fondazione Prada in 2018, where Ponti’s urn with motifs of the Passeggiata archeologica appeared once again, and, in front of a 1920 Prampolini tapestry, the large vase Casa degli efebi. Ponti’s vases as well as the futurists’ ceramics, the furniture by Ponti and Piero Bottoni, and even the commercial furnishings by Franco Albini, Luciano Baldessari, and Carlo Scarpa all imbued the exhibition with a domestic, bourgeois dimension, close to the taste and experience of the visitor, that blurred the aggression and violence inherent to the busts of the Duce and fascist iconography.

The Comforts of Home Assuming that fascism was a phase unlike any other in Italian history, and that it was a period unparalleled for the promotion of artists by the state, the presentation to

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contemporary audiences of handicrafts and industrial objects alongside artworks is a critical point. Since the 1930s, the musée d’ambientation technique has been used to show visitors tranches de vie and pacified historical phases, to provide an unambiguous image, often guided forcefully by designer-curators. Today it has become a quasientertainment approach, dear to culture managers looking to bring the largest possible audiences to artistic events. In this light, the urgency is to restore to works of design a power, a resignification, that distances them equally from the roles of both mere context and the work of art itself. Apparently harmless, objects and things are, on the contrary, the powerful frame and sharp tools to guide viewing and interpretations—or lack thereof.26 Precisely through its capacity to materialize ordinary realities, design affords exhibition viewers space and material with which make themselves at home in the past. Given such power, as Post Zang Tumb Tuuum demonstrates, scholars, designers, and curators need to attend closely to the distinctions between those techniques of display that invite viewers to feel at home and those that cultivate the distance that judgment requires. The comforts of home are appealing, but all too frequently erase the mechanisms of discrimination, exclusion, and control that make them possible.

Notes 1 Germano Celant, “Toward a Real and Contextual History,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), 38. 2 The exhibition display was designed by 2x4, a New York–based design practice that has worked extensively with museums and on commercial projects with Prada. 3 Celant, “Toward a Real and Contextual History,” 39. 4 Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today was exhibited at twelve American museums between November 1950 and November 1953, including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, where it began its tour, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. See Meyric R. Rogers, Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (Rome: CNA, 1951); Wava Carpenter, “Designing Freedom and Prosperity: The Emergence of Italian Design in Postwar America” (M.A. diss., Parsons/Cooper-Hewitt, 2006); Catherine Rossi, Crafting Design in Italy: From Post-war to Postmodernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); and Elena Dellapiana, “Italy Creates. Gio Ponti, America, and the Shaping of the Image of Italian Design,” Res Mobilis 7, no. 8 (2018): 19–48. 5 For more on Ponti’s role in the exhibition, see Dellapiana, “Italy Creates.” 6 Elena Dellapiana, Il design della ceramica in Italia 1850–2000 (Milan: Electa, 2010), 84–94. 7 Published from 1754 by the Regia Stamperia, Naples, these volumes collect drawings of the finds from Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabia. 8 Maria Teresa Giovanni, “Le ceramiche di Doccia disegnate da Gio Ponti: uno studio iconografico,” in Gio Ponti. La collezione del Museo Richard-Ginori della Manifattura di Doccia, ed. Livia Frescobaldi Malenchini, Maria Teresa Giovannini, and Oliva Ruccellai (Imola: Maretti, 2015), 23. 9 Raffaello Giolli (Dominio), “Sottovoce,” Problemi d’arte attuale 1 (October 1927).

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10 Massimiliano Savorra, “Case tipiche,” in Gio Ponti amare l’architettura, ed. Maristella Casciato and Fulvio Irace (Rome: MaXXI, 2019), 66–71; and Fulvio Irace, Gio Ponti. La casa all’italiana (Milan: Electa, 1988), 56–71. 11 Letter from Ponti to Luigi Tazzini, 1926, Fondo Richard Ginori, Archivio di Stato di Firenze. Another large cist was dedicated to Mussolini and shown at the 1930 Triennale; ibid., April 10, 1930; and Domus (July 1930), 17. 12 Frescobaldi Malenchini, Giovannini, and Ruccellai, Gio Ponti, 268. 13 Elena Dellapiana, Il design e l’invenzione del Made in Italy (Turin: Einaudi, 2022). 14 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti “Presentazione,” in Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935 (Florence: Marchi e Bertolli, 1967), 11. The exhibition was presented at the Palazzo Strozzi from February 26 to May 28, 1967; except for a few futurist tapestries, the decorative arts were absent. 15 Renato Barilli, ed., La Metafisica: gli anni Venti (Bologna: Graphis, 1980). The exhibition ran May through August 1980 at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna. 16 Renato Barilli, ed., Anni Trenta. Arte e cultura in Italia (Milan: Mazzotta, 1982), 642. The exhibition ran from January 29 to April 30, 1982, at the Palazzo Reale. For more on the exhibition, see the essays by Denis Viva and Luca Quattrocchi in this volume. 17 Anty Pansera, “Le Triennali,” ibid., 311–24. 18 Silvia Barisione, Matteo Fochessati, and Gianni Franzone, Under Mussolini. Decorative and Propaganda Arts of the Twenties and Thirties from the Wolfson Collection (Milan: Mazzotta, 2002). The exhibition ran from October 2 to December 22, 2002, at the Estorick Collection. For more on the exhibition, see the essay by Rosalind McKever in this volume. 19 Kenneth E. Silver, ed., Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy, and Germany, 1918–1936 (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2010). The exhibition ran from February 21 to May 15, 2011. 20 Ibid., 34. 21 Antonio Negri, ed., Anni Trenta: Arti in Italia oltre il Fascismo (Florence: Giunti, 2012). The exhibition ran from September 2, 2012, to January 27, 2013, at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. 22 Ibid., 14. 23 Guy Cogeval and Beatrice Avanzi, eds., Dolce Vita? Du Liberty au Design Italien (1900–1940) (Paris: Musée d’Orsay-Skira, 2015). The exhibition ran from April 14 to September 13, 2015. 24 Ibid., 10–15. 25 Ibid., 10. 26 On the signification of objects, see Robin Kinross, “The Rhetoric of Neutrality,” Design Issues 2, no. 2 (Autumn 1985): 18–30.

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Italian Jewish Artists and Fascist Cultural Politics: On Gardens and Ghettos at the Jewish Museum in New York (1989) Emily Braun, interviewed by Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker

From 1987 through 1990 Emily Braun served as guest curator for the modern section of Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy. Organized by Vivien Mann (1943– 2019), Curator of Judaica at the Jewish Museum in New York, the exhibition ran from September 17, 1989, to February 1, 1990; it subsequently traveled to the Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara. Two thousand years of Jewish cultural history unfolded over four chronological “chapters”: the Roman Empire (first to fifth centuries); the City States (1300–1550); the Jewish ghettos (1550–1848); and the Modern era (1848–1946). The galleries displayed over 300 hundred objects, from catacomb fragments, illuminated manuscripts, and baroque ceremonial art to paintings, photographs, and printed matter. The catalog, published by University of California Press, won the Henry Allen Moe Prize for catalog of Distinction in the Arts.1 Reviewers noted the stark divide between the pre- and post-Emancipation periods, which played out, respectively, on the Jewish Museum’s two floors.2 Entitled “From the Risorgimento to the Resistance,” the modern section was the first exhibition in the United States to address art under fascism and the regime’s cultural politics, and the first anywhere to focus on Jewish Italian artists. What follows is an interview with Emily Braun conducted via email from March to August 2021, documenting this milestone endeavor in “curating” fascism. Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker (RB-SH): Who originated the idea for the exhibition and what was the concept behind it? Emily Braun (EB): By 1986, Tullia Zevi (1919–2011), then President of the Unione delle Comunità’ Ebraiche Italiane (UCEI), had initiated the project in conversation with Vivien Mann, Curator of Judaica at the Jewish Museum in New York, and the Director, Joan Rosenbaum.3 Zevi (née Calabi) had been forced to leave Fascist Italy with the enactment of the 1938 Racial Laws; she returned to Italy immediately after the war. A journalist by profession, Zevi

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was a formidable Italian public intellectual and sensitive to the concerns of the different Italian Jewish community “stakeholders” in the exhibition.4 The overall project, however, was intellectually shaped by Mann. The aim was to present a cultural history of the Jews in Italy, the oldest continuous settlement in Europe, despite periods of segregation and persecution. The dialogical narrative emphasized their high degree of assimilation and interactions with the dominant culture. We documented the ways in which Jewish craftsmen, musicians, and artists drew from mainstream styles and iconography, but also moments of reverse influence: for example, Renaissance humanists studied Hebrew and Jewish learning, while certain modernist artists (de Chirico and his circle) were inspired by Jewish mysticism. As an exhibition of cultural production and prominent personalities, it was a history of exceptional Italian Jews, of a few representing the many. Nonetheless, as John Russell remarked in The New York Times, it was no accident that the installation began with Roman coins that commemorated the capture of Jerusalem by the Emperor Titus and concluded with the antisemitic “iniquities” decreed by Mussolini.5 RB-SH: What was your role? EB: In August 1987, Mann invited me to serve as “consulting curator” for the section devoted to the Italian Jews since 1848. I had recently returned from a year and a half in Milan researching my dissertation on Mario Sironi and fascist culture. To my knowledge—and hers—I was the only art historian in North America studying the Italian interwar period. I was concurrently engaged as the catalog editor for the mammoth project Italian Art of the Twentieth Century at the Royal Academy in London (January 14 to April 9, 1989) led by Norman Rosenthal. In 1988 I had published two articles on artists of the so-called Scuola Romana, questioning the degree of their purported antifascism, given the pluralism of fascist cultural policy. Three protagonists of the Scuola Romana—Corrado Cagli, Roberto Melli, and Antonietta Raphaël Mafai—were Jewish and would be prominently featured in the exhibition.6 RB-SH: With whom did you collaborate? EB: The UCEI was an official partner. The sharing of contacts and expertise took place on multiple levels. As was typical of the Jewish Museum’s interdisciplinary methodology, Mann early on convened a Consultants’ Meeting with scholars in the fields of Judaica and Jewish history to frame the salient issues and problematize issues of continuity and Jewish identity. Several participants were being considered as catalog essayists. Mann and Rosenbaum underscored the difference between creating a show and writing a history book; “Art is the vehicle through which we tell history,” as Rosenbaum put it.7 While living in Italy I started corresponding with Philip Cannistraro, who had published the groundbreaking study of fascist cultural policy, La Fabbrica del consenso (Laterza, 1975). He had just embarked upon a biography of Margherita Sarfatti and shared generously of his research. As the exhibition

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developed, Mario Toscano of the University of Rome, La Sapienza, a historian of modern Italian Jewry (including antisemitism and Zionism) came on board as catalog contributor. Toscano was an invaluable sounding board as tensions grew over how I, as curator, would represent the relationship between the Italian Jews and fascism. The network of advisors assisting with contacts, loans, and logistics expanded as research on the checklist developed. Based on typical exhibition practice in Italy, I suggested that we form an official Advisory Committee.8 The National Endowment for the Humanities, The National Endowment for the Arts, and The New York State Council provided financial support. Funding was also forthcoming from Italian government entities, given the desire to improve relations with the Jewish community and increase the prestige of Italian art abroad. RB-SH: How would you situate the modern section of Gardens and Ghettos in the context of post-World War II exhibitions of twentieth-century Italian art in the United States? EB: To my knowledge there had not been any exhibitions devoted to the history of Italian Jewish artists—anywhere. For that reason, the Comune di Ferrara was adamant about bringing the show to Italy. In his 1967 exhibition, Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti included certain artists who happened to be Jewish. The pathbreaking, if controversial, show Gli Anni Trenta in Milan (1982), failed to examine the repercussions of the antisemitic laws and the Holocaust on Italian artists and architects. The 1949 MoMA exhibition, XX Century Italian Art, featured Cagli and Modigliani, but the catalog biographies do not mention their Jewish backgrounds. Numerous postwar exhibitions in the United States favored Modigliani, but in the framework of French modernism. Otherwise, the artists in our show were unknown here, while Corcos, Liegi, and Parin were yet to be rediscovered in Italy. By contrast, Italian Jewish writers—Carlo Levi, Primo Levi, Giorgio Bassani, Natalia Ginzburg, Alberto Moravia, Umberto Saba, and Italo Svevo had a following in the United States. In 1983, H. Stuart Hughes had published his study on the Italian Jewish literary legacy, Prisoners of Hope: The Silver Age of the Italian Jews, 1924–1974, which jump-started my research. Rosenthal’s survey had the merit of introducing certain interwar figures to the Anglo-American public, as did the English-language edition of Italian Art 1900–1945 produced by Germano Celant for the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Both projects came on the heels of several exhibitions on the ventennio in Italy, though the game-changer in validating interest in figurative art between the wars was Jean Clair’s Les réalismes 1919–1939 (Centre Georges Pompidou, 1980).9 All told, the modern section was shaped by burgeoning studies on art under fascism (which revealed the extent of modernist practices under Mussolini), histories of the Italian Jews, and antisemitism. RB-SH: How did the show relate to the mission of the Jewish Museum? EB: Under Rosenbaum’s directorship, beginning in the 1980s, the museum was a beacon for interdisciplinary projects and visually compelling installations that integrated fine art, documents, and carefully crafted didactics. It set the

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standard for a novel social art history approach with exhibitions such as Emily Bilski’s Art and Exile: Felix Nussbaum (1985), Kenneth Silver’s The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945 (1985), and Norman Kleeblatt’s The Dreyfus Affair: Art, Truth and Justice (1987). Though focused on Jewish experience, the institution aimed to mount shows relevant to other groups and the citizenry at large.10 “Teaching moments” has become a critical phrase today in cultural practice: one might argue it was already a modus operandi for the Jewish Museum four decades ago. RB-SH: Did you have any negative models from which you wanted to distance yourself? EB: No. I had a different concern relating to curatorial objectivity. It was instructive, having been raised Catholic, to observe conflicting agendas expressed during the Consultants’ Meeting on how to “shore up” the identity of Jewish viewers. What of visitors to the show who were not Jewish; what of Italo-Americans and Italians, I asked myself? How did these questions of identity relate to my own biases as an “outsider,” (though Mann and Rosenbaum never made me feel thus—to the contrary)?11 Would I have to be extra conscientious in discerning elements of Jewishness among the artists whose biographies, works, and words I would now scrutinize in depth? On the one hand, I had to avoid being reductive or essentializing; on the other, there were demonstrable markers of faith, customs, family ties—and persecution. In his review, Andre Aciman gently and justly pointed out where I likely overreached in attempting to discern “ethnic flavor,” or “tendencies” linked to Jewish origins: “Assumptions of this sort are tricky in every sense of the word. And yet one sees why they are made.”12 RB-SH: With what criteria did you form the exhibition checklist? EB: First, there was the issue of identifying Jewish artists, some obvious, others not—a testament to the degree of assimilation until the Fascists forced the issue with the 1938 Racial Laws. Once I had assembled a list of names, I wrote to institutions in Italy and Israel, and to private collectors, inquiring as to whether they owned works by these artists. In 1989 museums had not yet digitized their collections, so aside from what could be found in a publication, one did not know what they held. Then I needed to view each potential loan (a criterion for inclusion) and assess its state of conservation. My journeys often entailed tantalizing discoveries in the storeroom. Few private and public archives were organized, the nascent Carlo Levi Foundation and Archives of the Scuola Romana in Rome being exceptions. Following leads and locating objects took significant time and entailed a different kind of curatorial tenaciousness and diplomatic finesse, including relying on the proverbial kindness of strangers to get in the door. In several cases, such as the landscape artist Clemente-Pugliese Levi, I could not find appropriate examples. Loans from American collections were critical in obtaining paintings and sculpture by Modigliani, because very few were held in Italy, despite the trove “repatriated” by Turinese industrialist Riccardo Gualino and then sold under duress during the fascist period.

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The criteria for selection were historical importance, appropriateness of content, and quality, the latter referring to both aesthetics and narrative surplus. I was motivated to find objects that evidenced Jewish difference and/ or acculturation, as well as regional diversity. Equally, I looked to Jewish artists and critics who partook of—even shaped—significant art movements and present a parallel narrative of key moments in Italian modernism. Likewise, I hunted for certain works that had been commissioned or publicly exhibited. Although I received letters from individuals whose relatives had been painters, sculptors, or architects, I ultimately favored protagonists who had established significant reputations pre-1945. An exception was Adriana Pincherle, whose career had been deeply overshadowed by that of her brother, Alberto Moravia. One could have organized a different exhibition, a microhistory of late-nineteenth through early twentieth-century Italian Jewish artists, objectively important or objectively minor, for whatever reasons they had the opportunity to become “major,” such as advantages of class, gender, training, and/or talent. But that show was not the brief nor my personal interest. My essay footnotes the many artists whom I did not include.13 RB-SH: What determined the narrative of the modern section? EB: Clarity and accuracy in recounting the nuances and contractions in the entwined histories of modern Italian Jewry, the Italian nation state, and fascism. History and art history determined chronology and themes: the role of the Jews in the birth of the Italian state; the contributions of Jewish artists to modernist movements; the relationship of Jews to fascism, both supporters and resisters; the impact of fascist cultural policy on the content of their work; and the fate of Jewish artists with the Racial Laws and deportations to the camps. Beginnings and endings are powerful bookends: the modern section introduced an extraordinary story of optimism and ended with catastrophe: my task entailed accounting for, and embedding visitors into, this dramatic turn of events. The narrative unfolded over nine sections, each introduced by a text panel: “The Jews, the Risorgimento and the Macchiaioli”; “Liberal Italy, 1870– 1919”; “Trieste”; “Bourgeoisie and Bohemia”; “Jews and Fascist Culture”; “Margherita Sarfatti and the Novecento”; “The Tonal Painters of the Roman School”; “Carlo Levi and Giustizia e Libertà”; “The Racial Laws and the Holocaust.” Object labels teased out specific points, for example, the relevance of immigrants (Raphaël Mafai) and expatriates (Modigliani). The need to condense key ideas and help viewers to “see” beyond superficial appearances make the writing of these texts among the most challenging curatorial tasks. The didactics are critical interpretative tools; among other directives, they hedge against potential misreading. RB-SH: How did the exhibition come to be the first in North America to exhibit art under fascism? EB: Fascism indelibly marked the careers of all artists and critics. It was not the first postwar exhibition focused on Italian art produced in the 1920s and 1930s (the 1949 MoMA exhibition had done so), but it was the first to take

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fascist art and cultural policy as its subject including celebratory themes of Italianità; the non-classicizing, namely expressionistic, styles of fronda; and the effects of antisemitism in the cultural sphere. I aimed to make audiences aware of how and why fascism promoted modernism, unlike the totalitarian regimes in Germany and the Soviet Union, and the choices made by individuals to collaborate, passively coexist, or dissent. RB-SH: How much space did the art from the fascist ventennio have within the overall project? EB: Although the modern section of the exhibition covered but one century of the two millennia span, it unfolded on the entire second floor of the museum. Sculptures by Raphaël Mafai also occupied the outdoor entrance courtyard. Within the suite of galleries, three-quarters were pertinent to or wholly devoted to the years of the ventennio. Only the first two of the ten sections were not related to the fascist period, although “Liberal Italy (1870–1919)” featured portrait photographs by Mario Nunes Vais of figures whose careers bridged the two eras, such as Luigi Luzzatti, Claudio Treves, and Amelia Pincherle Rosselli. The section on Triestine Jewish artists included Gino Parin and Arturo Nathan, who perished in the concentration camps, as visitors learned. “Bourgeoisie and Bohemia” drew parallels between Cavaglieri’s richly layered interiors, and the falsely secure existence of the wealthy Jewish protagonists depicted in Bassani’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The presentation of Modigliani emphasized that he became known in Italy only after World War I through exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, “when his expressionist style became symbolic of creative freedom in the face of the increasingly rigid cultural policies of the regime,” to quote from the text panel. One might ask, instead, how deep a shadow did the fascist period cast back upon the exhibition? In January 1987, Mann invited Primo Levi to write the catalog preface. Before declining, he wrote to Zevi, explaining that he could not take on such a commitment because he was suffering from serious depression. He suggested, instead, that the museum reprint his text on the Jews of Turin published a few years earlier.14 This wrenching correspondence preceded his suicide by two months.15 RB-SH: How did the given gallery spaces drive choices of content, narrative, and display? EB: The Jewish Museum was the former Warburg Mansion, designed in a French-Gothic style (1908) by Charles P. H. Gilbert. The second-floor galleries contained fireplaces and wood paneling—anything but the white cube. I collaborated with the designer, Lynne Breslin, to go with the flow of structural walls, transit passages, and room sizes. I think of it as the left hand working with the right, the coordination of the narrative with the gallery sequence, including temporary, bespoke walls. Rhythm, pacing, and scale make an impact on the way information is received and retained. For example, after the gallery filled with canvases by the Macchiaioli and the black-and-white photographs of Nunes Vais, one was thrust into modernism

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Figure 11.1  Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1989. Room installation view of “Bourgeoisie and Bohemia” with works by Amedeo Modigliani and Mario Cavaglieri. Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York.

with a decisive ambient change, a dazzling, white-walled space hung with the brilliantly colored canvases of Modigliani and Cavaglieri (Figure 11.1). RB-SH: What curatorial decisions did you make in representing art of the fascist period? EB: The issue was how to frame the fascist period responsibly, to present the facts and avoid perceptions of apology. I addressed the political affiliations of artists and movements and the nuanced, political currency of styles. Fascist ideology during its first fifteen years (1919–1934) did not promote antisemitism. That Italian Jews were highly assimilated; that they included both loyal fascists and leading antifascists; that the majority of Italian Jews did not expect the Racial Laws: these were well-established facts that the exhibition underscored through visual storytelling and didactics. Alexander Stille was concurrently writing his book, Benevolence and Betrayal: Five Italian Jewish Families under Fascism (1991) about this fraught terrain, and he validated this slant of the modern section in his New York Times review of the show. Melli’s style of tonalism, tinged with magic realism, represented an ideologically equivocal modernist classicism. That same style could be seen as paying homage to fascist values, depending on the content and audience, as visitors learned. I was interested in exhibiting works of fascist art—in the case of two mural paintings by Cagli commissioned for the Italian Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale—that had never been seen in the United

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­Figure 11.2  Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1989. Room installation view of “The Tonal Painters of the Roman School” with works by Corrado Cagli (including two mural panels, far left, from his commission for the Italian Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition), Antonietta Raphaël Mafai, and Roberto Melli. Courtesy of The Jewish Museum, New York.

States (Figure 11.2). By contrast, with their expressionist and anti-nationalistic canvases, Raphaël Mafai and Levi avoided cooption by the regime. I had another, feminist agenda in presenting Raphaël Mafai, influential in Rome for her “School of Paris” style (inflected with a Jewish sensibility, as some art historians see it).16 Carlo Levi’s paintings, such as his portrait of Leone Ginzburg, told the story of the antifascism activity centered in Turin, as did Cagli’s drawing of the murdered Rosselli brothers. I chose images by Raphaël Mafai and Melli, created under duress, while in hiding (Figure 11.3). Every object had to have a precise raison d’être for inclusion. By the same token, there were few substitutions if certain loans could not be had. A vitrine displaying six issues of La Difesa della Razza represented the propaganda and treachery of antisemitism and racism, as well as the virulent anti-modernist campaign promoted in some quarters. It was critical to emphasize Italian culpability in the deportation of Jews and the Holocaust: the final display consisted of drawings, rendered in secret by Aldo Carpi, depicting the terror and depravity of the Gusen concentration camp. Carpi had been Chair of Painting at the Brera Academy before he was betrayed by a colleague. I knew his son Cioni Carpi: as with Paola Levi-Montalcini, Miriam Mafai, Daisy Nathan, Pincherle, Dario Sabatello, and others, I interviewed survivors and children of survivors, as well as those who had lived during the regime.

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Figure  11.3 Roberto Melli, Self-Portrait with a White Glove, 1944, Oil on canvas, 51 × 42 cm. Private collection.

RB-SH: The history of some Jewish figures such as Margherita Sarfatti was strongly intertwined with the history of fascism. How did you treat her role and involvement with the regime? EB: Sarfatti was a sum of contradictions. The tremendous influence that she wielded for a woman at that time also made her an exceptional figure and a problematic feminist one. That Sarfatti, the leading theorist of fascist art —and close political advisor to Mussolini —was Jewish, also meant that her inclusion was not only inevitable, but central to understanding Italian fascism. To what extent did her singular story serve as a vehicle for addressing a larger and complex history that audiences deserved to know? I interviewed Pierangela Sarfatti in Venice, the widow of Amadeo Sarfatti, Margherita’s

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son, and visited Fiammetta Sarfatti, her daughter, in Rome, more than once. Her apartment held canvases from Sarfatti’s original collection, including her portraits by Umberto Boccioni and Sironi, which we obtained for the exhibition. Her story fascinates but one had to avoid sensationalism and make plain the perils of power. RB-SH: Was any content controversial? EB: The Sarfatti section was a lightning rod. There were objections from Zevi, who claimed that many in the Italian Jewish community were alarmed and offended that Sarfatti should be present in the exhibition. The Venetian Jewish community sent a letter to Rosenbaum requesting that the Sarfatti material be excluded. In the end, the museum held firm, noting that the historical facts and current historians backed my position (the modern section “did not distort Jewish support for Fascism” as Mann wrote), but we did remove, as requested by Zevi, the editions of Dux that were to be included as part of a documentary display.17 The selection of publications thus emphasized her role as a cultural powerbroker and creator of the Novecento. Photographs underscored her family history and Jewish identity, such as images of her husband Cesare Sarfatti, active in Zionist circles, and his tomb in the Jewish section of the Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. In fact, the Sarfatti material occupied a relatively small, if distinct space (Figure 11.4), followed by the much larger attention given to the artists of the Scuola Romana and culminating with the moral weight of Carlo Levi and Giustizia e Libertà. This sequencing represented the evolving relationships between assimilated, patriotic Jews and the regime, while emphasizing the prominence of Jews, such as Leone Ginzburg (Figure 11.5) as defenders of creative freedom and early leaders of resistance. During a private preview of the exhibition, Zevi asked that the Nunes Vais portrait of Mussolini be removed, but Rosenbaum refused—art museums were still reeling from the cancellation of the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery just months earlier. In a letter related to the Sarfatti issue, Mann wrote to the Council of the Jewish Community in Venice that “to exclude her would invite severe criticisms about scholarly objectivity and possibly accusations of censorship.”18 It was a delicate situation. RB-SH: Were there any dilemmas that you had to resolve? EB: A debate centered on whether to bring the story up to the present with contemporary artists to represent the livelihood of the current Jewish community.19 Mann thought that a commissioned installation by Emanuele Luzzati might serve this purpose. My arguments against the idea of a postwar section were threefold: there was no space to include another chapter; the messaging might appear purely celebratory; and we lacked the historical distance with which to judge the importance of younger artists. Instead, the fact that Cagli, Carpi, Carlo Levi, and others in the show who survived persecution chose to remain in Italy after the Holocaust argued for continuity,

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Figure  11.4  Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy, The Jewish Museum, New York, 1989. Room installation view of “Margherita Sarfatti and the Novecento” with portraits of Sarfatti by Mario Sironi and Umberto Boccioni, publications by Sarfatti, and family photographs. Courtesy The Jewish Museum, New York.

though it did not absolve or deny trauma. I advocated for the show to remain grounded in the “past,” while leaving visitors with a sense of violation and a powerfully unsettling image that countered prevailing American perceptions of “carefree” Italy. The museum ultimately followed its policy of respecting curatorial prerogative. Aciman understood my intended effect: “Alongside the indisputable charm of color that radiates from every facet of this marvelous show, there thus lingers as well an aura of finality … and of implacable historical judgment.”20 We achieved consensus on the conclusion, an “Epilogue” in the form of a prominently placed text panel with facts about the Italian Jews who perished in the Holocaust, the postwar careers of the featured artists, and the endurance of the Italian Jews. RB-SH: If you were to curate this exhibition again what would you change? EB: My biggest regret is the omission of Cesare Lombroso (out of ignorance, not choice), a figure of towering international importance. In the end I did not have room for (or the tenacity to find) the fascist-era photographs of Ghitta Carrel, but they would have provided a bookend to the portraits of famous Italians by Nunes Vais and deepened the context for Sarfatti. Similarly, the New York venue could not accommodate works by Paola Levi-Montalcini, but she and her twin, the Nobel Laureate Rita and their brother Gino, the architect, deserved a section unto themselves. A plan to make a video on

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Figure  11.5  Carlo Levi, Portrait of Leone Ginzburg, 1933. Oil on canvas. 65 × 50 cm. Fondazione Carlo Levi, Rome.

Italian Jewish critics, patrons, and collectors, among them, Gustavo Uzielli, Gustavo Sforni, the other Primo Levi, Sabatello, Emilio Jesi, and Lamberto Vitali, did not materialize. In retrospect—and had there been an extra gallery—the exhibition would have been enriched by delving into the larger exile experience (Enrico Fermi, Mimi Pecci-Blunt, and Costantino Nivola left because they were married to Jews); this history could have been represented primarily through the figure of Cagli. And, given the subsequent publications

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by scholars such as Michele Sarfatti and Annalisa Capristo on antisemitism before the Racial Laws, information in the footnotes regarding to Italian persecution of the Jews would have been more damning, though I am not sure it would have changed the larger narrative. Perhaps as instructive is the question of the exhibition’s legacy, for example, the room dedicated to Sarfatti and Anna Kuliscioff (the Russianborn leader of the Italian Socialist Party) in the 2005 exhibition The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons, which I co-curated at the Jewish Museum. Most recently, in 2014, the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte in Rome mounted Artiste del Novecento tra visione e identità ebraica featuring over a dozen Italian Jewish women artists, some of them previously “unknown,” and fulfilling a feminist agenda that Gardens and Ghettos only hinted at. Previous scholarship is augmented and revised, errors and omissions are corrected, and new discoveries are made: that is why art historians and curators do what they do.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 ­6

Vivien Mann, ed., Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy (Berkeley, CA and New York: University of California Press and The Jewish Museum, 1989). Italian edition: I Tal Ya’: Isola della rugiada divina. Duemila anni arte e vita ebraica in Italia (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori, 1990). Andre Albert Aciman, “Gardens and Ghettos,” Commentary, January 1, 1990: 55, https://www.commentary.org/articles/andre-aciman/gardens-and-ghettos/ (accessed April 27, 2022). Alexander Stille wrote: “if the objects presented in the first three quarters of the exhibition are of more historical than artistic importance, the modern section is an art exhibition of major scope that also provides a window onto a fascinating cultural milieu.” Alexander Stille, “From Italy’s Jewry Come 2,000 Years of Treasures,” The New York Times, September 10, 1989, A 45. I am grateful to Sabina Avanesova, Coordinator of Special Projects, The Jewish Museum, for arranging access to the archives for Gardens and Ghettos in spring 2021, while the museum was closed due to COVID-19. The exhibition took place before email and all records exist in hard copy only. The archives do not contain comprehensive installation photographs. A March 1, 1987 article in The New York Times mentioned the upcoming Jewish Museum exhibition (John Tagliabue, “Italy Signs Accord with Country’s Jews”). It reported that Bettino Craxi’s government had “replaced legislation governing Jewish life in Italy that had been in force since Mussolini’s regime,” while also quoting Zevi: “We have seen in our lives how the rug can be pulled from under you. My husband’s family has been here for 2,000 years, and mine for five centuries. And all at once we were no longer Italians anymore.” John Russell, “Art: Rarities to See from Other Lands; A Visual History of Jewish Life in Italy,” The New York Times, September 15, 1989. Emily Braun “Sul Novecento e sulla Scuola Romana,” in Scuola Romana: Artisti tra le due guerre, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco (Milan: Mazzotta, 1988), 209–14; “Scuola Romana: Fact or Fiction?” Art in America, 76 (March 1988): 128–36.

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7 Typewritten minutes of the “Consultants’ Meeting, unpaginated, October 1, 1987” (Jewish Museum Archives, “Gardens and Ghettos,” Box 1, File 4). In attendance were Charles Avery, Evelyn Cohen, Shaye Cohen, Bernard Cooperman, Carole Krinsky, Libby Reid, David Ruderman, Shalom Sabar, and Menachem Schmelzer, as well as Museum staff (Mann, Rosenbaum, registrar Diane Lerner, and Deputy Director Ward Minz), and the architect Lynne Breslin. 8 Memo from Emily Braun to Vivien Mann and Joan Rosenbaum, May 17, 1988 (Jewish Museum Archives, “Gardens and Ghettos,” Box 1, File 10, “Emily Braun”). The names of the Advisory Committee are published in the front matter of the catalog. 9 For a historiography of postwar studies on the fascist period, see Emily Braun, Chapter 1, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2–8. 10 Of the “pluralism” of the Italian Jewish community, Mann stated “The accommodation with outside communities may have much to teach us as a modern society.” Typewritten minutes of the “Consultants’ Meeting” (Box 1, File 4). 11 A few years after the exhibition closed, we learned that my mother was born, on both sides, to British orthodox Jewish families: my great-grandfather, Eliezer Adler, was the founder of the Jewish community in Gateshead, England. 12 Aciman, “Gardens and Ghettos,” 58, 59. 13 In the Ferrara version of the exhibition, Franco Farina, the Director of the Palazzo dei Diamanti argued convincingly to include local artists, and thus he added Ferrara-born Giuseppe Coen, Arrigo Minerbi, and Alberto Pisa, as well as the Tuscan sculptor Dario Viterbo. Paola Levi-Montalcini was also represented. 14 Primo Levi, “Preface,” in Gardens and Ghettos, xv–xvii. Originally printed in Ebrei a Torino: ricerche per il centenario della Sinagoga, 1884–1984 (Turin: Allemandi, 1984), 13–14. ­15 See the letters from Primo Levi to Tullia Zevi (n.d., likely January 1987) and Primo Levi to Vivien Mann, February 3, 1987 (Box 1, File 11 “Primo Levi”). 16 Raphaël Mafai’s reputation still suffers outside Italy, despite her contributions to a feminist discourse. She is not included in the recent volume, 400 Great Women Artists, ed. Rebecca Morrill (London: Phaidon, 2019). 17 Letter from Vivian Mann to Tullia Zevi, July 5, 1989; Memo from Joan Rosenbaum to Ward Minz and Emily Braun. June 27, 1989; Memo from Ward Minz to Joan Rosenbaum, June 30, 1989; Letter from Tullia Zevi to Joan Rosenbaum, July 5, 1989, where she adds, “[The Sarfatti section] is causing some embarrassment also to the Ferrara Administration” (Box 1, File 8 “Tullia Zevi”). 18 Letter from Vivien Mann to the Council of the Jewish Community of Venice, July 20, 1989, and see also Letter from Joan Rosenbaum to Tullia Zevi, July 21, 1989 (Box 1, File 8 “Tullia Zevi”) 19 Memo from Emily Braun to Vivien Mann, Joan Rosenbaum, and Ward Minz, May 5, 1988, and from Ward Minz to Joan Rosenbaum and Vivien Mann, May 24, 1988 (Box 1, File 10 “Emily Braun”). The concern over how to end the show had already been expressed in the Consultants’ Meeting. 20 Aciman “Gardens and Ghettos,” 59.

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12

Exhibiting the Homoerotic Body, the Queer Afterlife of Ventennio Male Nudes John Champagne

Introduction In 1933, painter Corrado Cagli (1910–1976) completed the first of a series of images titled Il neofita (Figure  12.1).1 In a motif Cagli refashioned throughout his career, the painting depicts a nude youth kneeling before a seated companion. The way the kneeling figure leans his arms on the parted thighs of his seated co-celebrant and bows his head, gazing in the direction of his own penis, suggests an obscure erotic ritual. Even the artist’s typically circumspect archive refers to “the not too veiled erotic content of the scene.”2 Opening with a room of Cagli’s male nudes including this Il neofita, the 2019 Rome exhibition Corrado Cagli: Folgorazioni e Mutazioni, however, was nevertheless characterized by a triple silence, making no mention of the artist’s queer sexuality;3 the obvious homoeroticism of some of his fascist-era works; or his relationship with the regime. Of the latter, Cagli famously produced for the Italian Pavilion of the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne a series of images of figures from Italian history, from ancient Rome to the Risorgimento, that culminated in an equestrian portrait of Mussolini, now lost.4 Similarly, the (earlier) Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935 exhibition, which ran from February 26 to May 28, 1967, at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi, featured two of painter Filippo de Pisis’s homoerotic nudes, including his 1925 Nudino sdraiato. In this work, a slender, reclining youth looks directly at the viewer with hands tucked behind his head in a classic “pin-up” pose, one leg bent at the knee, and his pubic and underarm hair emphasizing his nudity. About de Pisis’s canvases, the commentary by art historian Michelangelo Masciotta is telling. While de Pisis’s painting is celebrated as “the most inspired, the most agile, the most excited and exciting of the forms of art appearing in Europe in the years that comprise the second quarter of our century,” when it comes to enumerating the various tropes the artist employed, the male nudes remain unmentioned, relegated to “all the elements of his extremely varied repertoire” (Figure  12.2).5 As for his relationship to fascism: while living in Paris in 1927, de

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Figure 12.1  Corrado Cagli, Il neofita (The Neophyte), 1933. Oil on canvas. 110 × 100 cm. Courtesy Archivio Corrado Cagli, Rome.

Pisis alienated the regime by saying in print that he was not a fascist, although the intervention of his friend, Italo Balbo—a member of the Grand Council of Fascism— temporarily smoothed things over.6 As we will see, this was not the last time a fascist bigwig protected de Pisis from persecution by Mussolini’s government. This, too, is unmentioned by the exhibition catalog. Despite fascism’s repression of homosexuality,7 several prominent ventennioera male artists had male lovers, and there is evidence that, even then, their queer sexuality was not a well-kept secret. Art historian Raffaele Bedarida suggests that many people knew of Cagli’s erotic relationships with men and at least one woman, Elsie Rappaport.8 In 1941, de Pisis was accused by the Prefect of Milan of being a “disruptor of morals” and, under threat of confinement, fled before another fascist friend, Grand Council member Carlo Pareschi, intervened.9 Both artists produced homoerotic representations of the male nude—images that, in their passive postures, physical

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Figure 12.2  Filippo de Pisis, Nudo disteso di spalle (Reclining Nude from Behind), 1930. Red pencil on paper. 347 × 504 mm. Courtesy Fondazione Ferrara Arte / Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea © 2021. Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

beauty, youth, iconography, and orientation to the viewer, offered up the male body to the gaze of the spectator.10 This essay considers the significance of the curatorial habit of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” arguing that, in omitting any discussion of queer artists’ homoerotic attachments and refusing to explore their relations with the regime, curators of postwar, ventennio-era exhibitions inadvertently foster the myth of homofascism: the sneaking suspicion that the fascists were homosexuals, repressed and otherwise. Faced with homoerotic images of nude men whose immediate context is an exhibition of fascist-era art, contemporary viewers might fill in the curatorial silence with the suspicion that these artists embody that myth. In this case, à la Foucault, silence is itself a form of discourse. Not simply the sign of a repression, it “produces” the suggestion that homoeroticism is intrinsic to fascism, and vice versa.11 Andrew Hewitt has written cogently on this ubiquitous “anecdotal and theoretical” tendency to conflate or associate homosexuality and fascism.12 Fostered by works as varied as Theodore Adorno’s Minima Moralia and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned, the myth takes the historical exception—Ernst Röme and Edmund Heines, homosexual members of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) hierarchy—and casts it as fascism’s most “authentic” expression. Even some recent efforts by gay and lesbian pride organizations unreflectively foster this myth.13 But while the myth is homophobic, it is more than just homophobic, for there is a historical coinciding of fascist investments in virility and interwar masculinism—the conviction that some men’s homosexuality reflected a

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heightened masculinity and not their status as a “third sex” possessing a female brain in a man’s body, as one theory of inversion suggested.14 (Re)constituting their queer sexuality, both Cagli and de Pisis rejected the pathologizing interpretations of contemporary sexology and turned to the past for inspiration, whether, in the case of Cagli, it was “primordial”—a term that, while cosmic in its overtones, embraced an expansive sense of the primitive that spanned from the prehistoric through archaic Greece to the Etruscans to Pompeii to the Quattrocentro to Picasso —or, in the case of de Pisis, classical Greece.15 That fascism also turned to the classical past for inspiration, however, risks fanning the flames of homofascism, particularly given what literary historian Paolo Valesio has termed a “purist” tendency in analyses of Italian modernism that strives to locate “the ‘stain’ or ‘taint’ of Fascism” in virtually every example of ventennio-era artistic and cultural production.16

A Queer View How might a queer approach to the exhibition of ventennio-era homoerotic works complicate both the legacy of fascism and an unreflective historiography that would turn these men into gay pioneers? Valesio’s call “to abandon excessively hygienic, or quarantine-oriented, preoccupations, and to study Italian Culture … as it develops above, under, and through Fascism”17 is in sync with the way queer theory, with its focus on negativity, shame, and failure, has similarly tempered the “excessively hygienic” and identity-affirming project of early Gay and Lesbian Studies’ efforts to claim for gay history monumental figures such as Sappho, Michelangelo, and Queen Christina—and artists like Cagli and de Pisis. Until recently, a certain Italian critical reluctance to consider the way in which an artist’s homoerotic attachments might inflect his/her/their work has prevailed.18 But while queer theory is not as institutionalized in the Italian university as in the United States, scholars are increasingly bringing it to bear on Italy. An important center for the study of gender and sexuality, for example, is CIRQUE, the Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca Queer, whose mission is “to create an inclusive, open and vital space for queer studies within Italian academia” and “to connect individual scholars and associations both in Italy and outside Italy.”19 Another is the University of Verona’s PoliTeSse, directed by Lorenzo Bernini. This work is occurring outside Italy as well. In the UK, the Queer Italia Network—organized by Charlotte Ross, S. A. Smythe, and Julia Heim—aims “to build an international network of scholars, activists, cultural practitioners, and artists who engage meaningfully with queer sexualities, cultures, scholarship, and politics in Italy, and establish dialogues and collaborations between academics and those working outside of academia.”20 The bilingual journal gender/ sexuality/italy frequently publishes queer work. Finally, in the last decade or so, the number of Italianists writing in English on queer theory and history has risen significantly.21 Rather than martial the lives of these men in the service of a triumphalist, historicist narrative of gay progress, I employ the notion of queer failure pioneered by Jack Halberstam. Writing about these men, I could not help but feel ambivalent, given their

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status as both “good” and “bad” objects, and it would be decidedly “unqueer” either to rescue or reject their work on the grounds of being a little too close for comfort to fascist propaganda. What queerness demands instead, however, is an uncomfortable and frustrating ambivalence toward these men and their artistry, an ambivalence that allows us to recognize their contributions to both the history of erotic representations of the male body and Italian modernism without ignoring, overlooking, or justifying their relationships to the regime. While the choice between resisting and embracing fascism is a false one—as nearly every artist of the period made some accommodation to the regime—we cannot turn these men into queer icons. And yet ignoring that under the noses, as it were, of a regime that saw them as a danger to the health of the race, these men gave a plastic shape to their desires, risks losing the cultural memory of their individual contributions to a cosmopolitan queer culture that, thanks to its porous borders, enriched Italian modernism.22 According to one scholar, “Disrespect for the criteria of pre-established forms of virility resulted in expulsion from society in order to protect the community from a negative example. Homosexuals upset national order, raised doubts about the basic values of fascist morality, and damaged national prestige with acts that were universally considered perverse.”23 Holding together these two images—the artist as however reluctant collaborator; the artist as queer man who risked personal and professional ruin—is extremely difficult, as it requires us to perform “an analysis that respects the full complexity of the web of interrelationships” that characterize modernism.24 Forgetting these men, we however inadvertently contribute to the myth of Italy as “underdeveloped” and “irrelevant” in terms of the history of both homosexuality in the West and Euro-American art.25 How have curators and critics filled the “triple silence” that characterized the recent Cagli show? Perhaps unsurprisingly, in place of a discussion of their queer sexuality, the homoeroticism of their work, and their relationship to the regime, exhibitions seek to secure the “Italianness” of the artists and emphasize their “artistic genius.”26 The example of de Pisis reveals how uneven this critical silence is, for several factors have resulted in an increased critical loquaciousness concerning his sexuality but a continued failure to explore his relationship to the regime.27 These factors include the withdrawal of a promised Biennale prize;28 the posthumous publication of his homoerotic writings; the sheer number of male nudes he produced; and the artist’s mental illness, which unfortunately provides critics the alibi to link his sexuality to his “neurosis” and “narcissism.”29 Concerning his “Italian” credentials, de Pisis was influenced by French postImpressionist painting, and his iconography, brush stroke, and composition are not as vociferously “Italian” as, say, Margherita Sarfatti’s Novecento painters, with their overt references to both typically Italianate themes and adoption of Renaissance portrait techniques.30 While de Pisis sometimes celebrated the Italian past—as in, for example, his 1945 lithographs illustrating I carmi di Catullo—his young male nudes adopt relaxed, vulnerable poses as they play musical instruments, or else are portrayed from the rear: both motifs also common in Cagli’s oeuvre, and both of which risk calling up images of male passivity. It is the “instability” of representations like these young male nudes, the way they both could and could not be read as heteronormative fascist

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nods to antiquity, that leaves them open to fascist, antifascist, and non-fascist readings. Such an “instability” is queer; unlike homofascism, it refuses to affix, once and for all, fascism’s relationship to male homoeroticism. Similarly, what in Cagli looks like a fascist appropriation of Italy’s artistic past may be something else. Influenced by quattrocento painting, Cagli produced homages to Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ, some completed subsequent to the regime, including a 1974 oil on paper Neofiti in which a figure whose identity, in earlier versions, is ambiguous, is now John the Baptist. These Neofiti are all homoerotic— portraying nude men, often from the rear, and in vulnerable body postures such as kneeling or undressing—and are again illustrative of a certain instability, as they suggest some obscure homoerotic ritual that may be fascist, antifascist, or non-fascist, as well as Jewish or Christian (Figure 12.3).31 In such cases, the undecidability of the images suggests a common queer survival strategy that found one of its conditions of possibility in the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann.32 I now consider two post-Stonewall exhibition catalogs from the new millennium: that of the exhibition Filippo de Pisis L’uomo e la natura, held in Modena from November 30, 2001, to February 24, 2002; and that of Corrado Cagli: Attualità per il tempo della continuità, held in Asti from October 13 to December 4, 2016. While referencing Stonewall in this context risks charges of American neo-imperialism, there is ample evidence that Italians see it as a defining moment.33 For example, in 2019 the l’Ufficio Nazionale Antidisciminazioni (UNAR), the organ of the Italian state whose goal is to combat discrimination and inequality, hoped to finance projects that would result in the “creation of an archival database of historical documentation regarding LGBT subject matter.”34 The notice begins, “50 years since the Stonewall riots.”35

De Pisis in the Post-Stonewall Years By the new millennium, some critics were eager to discuss the de Pisis male nudes in a less lugubrious and euphemistic light than previously.36 The opening of Luca Massimo Barbero’s “L’uomo e la natura,” an essay written for the catalog of a 2001–02 exhibition sponsored by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, reads as a riposte to earlier accounts of the painter’s male nudes, with their ubiquitous portrait of de Pisis as a melancholy homosexual: In de Pisis, … the elegy, the melancholy vein, the pining of love, do not sink into a desperate and inevitable “end,” but they transit, intersect, coexist with a fever excited by pleasure, the senses, the beauty, fueled by the memory of a glance, a mirage of beauty to be captured or perhaps, better, to be desired.37

Barbero then draws our attention to the de Pisis male nude as “Man born and conceived as an admirable ephebe and font of pure beauty” (Figure 12.4).38 Neither ignoring nor underplaying de Pisis’s love of men,39 Barbero links de Pisis’s nudes to classical Greek sculpture, a connection which de Pisis’s own autobiographical

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Figure 12.3  Corrado Cagli, Il Bacchino (Little Bacchus), 1938, oil on canvas, 40 × 25 cm. Courtesy Archivio Corrado Cagli, Rome.

writings encourage.40 But he also refuses a familiar critical gesture of characterizing the homoeroticism of de Pisis’s images as veiled: “Pastorale fractures any erotic hesitation.”41 Barbero’s celebratory descriptions contrast the words of de Pisis’s biographer Nico Naldini. In the same catalog, in an essay whose guiding metaphor is the artist’s “passion for dressing up,” Naldini employs the depressingly familiar image of the homosexual artist as narcissist.42 He then explains that de Pisis drew inspiration not simply from his knowledge of art history “but also from the hidden wound of an eros that aimed at immediate gratification.”43 Fostering an image of the older, lachrymose homosexual who pursues thin and haggard boys, he argues that, despite his many crises of nerves, de Pisis managed to face “the risks to which his eros exposed him.”44

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Figure  12.4 Filippo de Pisis, Nudo sulla pelle di tigre (Robert) (Nude on a Tiger Skin [Robert]), c. 1931. Red pencil on paper, 347 × 496 mm. Courtesy Fondazione Ferrara Arte / Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Born in 1929, Naldini wrote extensively on queer artists de Pisis, Giovanni Comisso, and Naldini’s cousin Pasolini, and his account of de Pisis’s homosexuality is influenced by his own sensibility.45 Born in 1963, Barbero is clearly of a different generation than Naldini and does not focus on queer artists. Naldini’s portrait of the artist as tortured homosexual ignores both the developed queer Parisian subculture of the interwar years and de Pisis’s often joyful participation in it. Whether de Pisis shared Naldini’s (and Pasolini’s) sensibility is a separate issue from how to interpret the artist’s nudes. In other words, the problem is not Naldini’s nostalgia for “rough trade,” “straight” men willing to have sex for money with gays.46 The problem is the projection of this nostalgia onto de Pisis’s nudes. Will future exhibits discuss de Pisis’s homoerotic desire? Based on the recent show at Milan’s Museo del Novecento, not always. Despite the inclusion of two of the artist’s most celebrated male portraits—his 1926 Il moro di Haarlem and 1930 Il marinaio francese—the chronologically organized exhibition withheld knowledge of the artist’s homosexuality until its account of the withdrawn Biennale prize in 1948. The sentence revealing his homosexuality is followed immediately by “also the nervous illness, which had already exposed itself for some time, was aggravated.”47 According to a press release, this exhibit provided the impetus for another, future de Pisis show, held at Rome’s Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Altemps from June 17 to September 20, 2020. In keeping with neoliberal, post-national globalization, the

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attempt to establish de Pisis’s Italian credentials has been dropped from the critical agenda, supplemented by an even more vigorous effort to cast him as the romantic genius who exists outside historical time and space. “A figure without comparison in the artistic itinerary of twentieth-century Italy,” who possesses “a decisively individual style,” de Pisis lived, according to the press release, “a personal narrative that never succumbed to artistic currents.”48 Plus ça change.

Cagli’s Recent Fortunes In the opening essay to the catalog of the 2016 Corrado Cagli: Attualità per il tempo della continuità, journalist Angelo Calabrese—not a professional art historian— begins with an attempt to discuss Cagli’s work for the regime.49 Calabrese’s essay is worth mentioning in that it is directed not toward experts but to what it imagines is a “popular” audience—an audience Calabrese has previously addressed on Cagli.50 As a result, it is suggestive of an institutionalized understanding of the “average” museum visitor and what that person needs and wants. Not being bound by the same discursive conventions as professional art historians, Calabrese could have assumed an audience that was familiar with Cagli’s sexuality via, for example, internet sites.51 By 2007 knowledge of Cagli’s (and de Pisis’s) queer sexuality was advertised in Corriere della Sera.52 In Calabrese’s essay, however, that sexuality remains undisclosed. Calabrese’s attempt to resuscitate the trope of artist as mystic is a discursive move that, particularly in light of what Rosalind Krauss has called the myth of the originality of the avant-garde, mystifies the artwork and attempts to prop up bogus assumptions about its revelation of so-called universal truths.53 The essay, however, is the fruit not only of his individual point of view but presumably reflects to some degree certain institutionalized curatorial norms. In other words, a larger institutional apparatus is responsible for that “triple silence” I described in this essay’s introduction. Determined to help Cagli procure his rightful status as one of the “geniuses” of Italian modern art—obviously, Calabrese’s repeated name-dropping of Leonardo is significant—Calabrese can only write an apologia. The catalog essay’s agenda is to secure Cagli as a fully intentional subject who knew what he was doing when he courted the regime, as well as the opposite—that he was fooled by its deceit. The trope used to promote this particularly contradictory view is that of the romantic genius, who stands outside the contingency of time to devote himself to art. Calabrese’s essay shores up the modernist conceit of the autonomy of the artwork,54 as well as that of the artist as shaman, a soothsayer with a keen interest in “universal man.”55 According to Calabrese, regrettably, Cagli was a victim who later “paid for his adhesion to that new wave which had fascinated and engaged the popular masses.”56 That new wave, however, is not actually named as fascism, and, in making this claim, Calabrese implies that one can be both a cultural maverick and a victim of populism— one of the constitutive contradictions of the figure of the artist as mystic, who speaks for us all and yet is uniquely in contact with “ancestral legends”57 and the universal “human essence.”58

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Conclusion Facing a room full of paintings of nude men in an exhibit that mentions neither the artist’s sexuality, nor his works celebrating the regime, nor the regime’s proscriptions against homosexuality, the gallery visitor may be left to assume that someone is not willing to discuss what no one can fail to see. Clearly at issue is how we understand the role of the exhibition. The assumption that the only choice curators have is to laud the artist via the figure of the romantic genius, and, in the process, ignore questions of politics, or else cast him/her/them as the dupe of history, is a false one. Similarly, claiming the artist’s homoerotic tendencies as either acts of resistance against fascism or evidence of homofascism is equally false. As queer failure insists, disciplinary transformation requires risking indecorum, bringing into our arguments alternative kinds of knowledge judged inappropriate or tendentious. Granting we have something to learn—about Italian modernist art, about fascism, about the history of sexuality—from queer failures like de Pisis and Cagli interrupts the disciplinary temptation to assume in advance what politics is and how it informs art; the relationship between art and ideology; and the role of the critic as unmasker of ideology. And, presumably, trying to think differently about art, politics, sexuality, and the connections and disconnections among the three is in part what motivates us to continue to study the art of the ventennio—particularly today, when we can only be ambivalent, and not either blindly enthusiastic or dismissive, about the queer artwork of the fascist past.

Notes On Cagli’s “neophyte” images, see John Champagne, Queer Ventennio: Italian Fascism, Homoerotic Art, and the Nonmodern in the Modern (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2019), 212–13, 252–5. Raffaele Bedarida also describes the 1933 neofita as “explicitly homoerotic”; Bedarida, Corrado Cagli: La pittura, l’esilio, l’America (1938–1947) (Rome: Donzelli, 2018), 15. 2 “Il Neofita, 1933,” Archivio Corrado Cagli, http://www.archiviocagli.com/opere/ilneofita/ (accessed April 27, 2022). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own. 3 Throughout this essay, I employ “queer” to differentiate between the competing and contradictory discourses of sexuality and gender via which these men understood their homoerotic feelings and behaviors and a post-Stonewall gay identity that assumes that homosexuality is congenital rather than situational or acquired. See Benjamin Kahan, “The Walk-in Closet: Situational Homosexuality and Homosexual Panic in Hellman’s The Children’s Hour,” Criticism 55, no. 2 (2013): 177–201. 4 On these murals, see Raffaella Cordisco, “Corrado Cagli et le pavillon italien à L’Exposition Internationale de Paris 1937. Arts et Techniques dans la vie moderne,” Storia dell’Arte 131, no. 31 (2012): 143–64. 5 Michelangelo Masciotta, “Filippo de Pisis,” in Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, ed. Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (Florence: Marchi e Bertolli, 1967), 194. 1

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6 Luca Massimo Barbero and Eduardo Bettiol, “Biografia,” in Filippo de Pisis: L’uomo e la natura, ed. Luca Massimo Barbero (Venice: Cicero, 2001), 139. 7 Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man: Homosexuality in Fascist Italy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), 2012. On the fascist confinement of homosexuals, see Gianfranco Goretti and Tommaso Giartosio, La città e l’isola: Omosessuali al confino nell’Italia Fascista (Rome: Donzelli, 2006). Other “queer” artists and writers from the period include Giovanni Comisso, Guglielmo Janni, Libero de Libero, Aldo Palazzeschi, Umberto Saba, Ottone Rosai, Henry Furst, and Sandro Penna. 8 Bedarida, Corrado Cagli, 14–18. 9 Barbero and Bettiol, “Biographia,” 140. See also Lorenzo Benadusi, “Cagli, Rosai e de Pisis: L’arte di vivere nell’Italia Fascista,” in Omosapiens, ed. Domenico Rizzo (Rome: Carocci, 2006), 148. 10 On the codes employed in male homoerotic imagery, see, for example, Richard Dyer, “Don’t Look Now,” Screen 23, no. 3–4 (September/October 1982): 61–73. Pertinent here is late nineteenth-century homosexual culture’s appropriation of classical imagery. The photographs of Wilhelm von Gloeden provide an interpretative context for both Cagli’s 1938 Bacchino (Figure 12.3) and de Pisis’s 1930 Pan. 11 This silence might be attributed to the continuing influence in Italy of Crocean aesthetics. See Benedetto Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (Milan: Remo Sandron, 1902). 12 Andrew Hewitt, Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 2. 13 See “Il gusto omoerotico del nazifascismo,” Liguria Pride, January 16, 2020, http:// www.liguriapride.it/wordpress/il-gusto-omoerotico-del-nazifascismo/ (accessed April 27, 2022). Cagli and de Pisis appear in the press release. 14 See Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). On masculinism, see Hewitt, Political Inversions; and Champagne, Queer Ventennio. 15 Primitivism was another vehicle for queer self-definition. On the co-constitution of modern homosexuality and whiteness via primitivism, see Hiram Pérez, A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire (New York: New York University Press, 2015). 16 Paolo Valesio, “Foreword: After The Conquest of the Stars,” in Italian Modernism, Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, ed. Luca Somigli and Mario Maronim (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), xviii. 17 Ibid., xix. 18 Bedarida, Corrado Cagli, 14–15. 19 CIRQUE (Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca Queer), https://cirque.unipi.it/ (accessed April 27, 2022). 20 Queer Italia Network, https://queeritaliablog.wordpress.com/ (accessed April 27, 2022). 21 See Gary P. Cestaro, ed., Queer Italia: Same Sex Desire in Italian Literature and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); Derek Duncan, Reading and Writing Homosexuality: A Case of Possible Difference (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); and Charlotte Ross, Julia Heim, and S. A. Smythe, “Queer Italian Studies: Critical Reflections from the Field,” Italian Studies 74, no. 4 (August 29, 2019): 397–412. 22 On the relationship between de Pisis’s homoerotic desire and his work, see his Le memorie del marchesino pittore, ed. Bona de Pisis and Sandro Zanotto

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(Turin: Einaudi, 1989). On homoeroticism in Cagli’s work, see Champagne, Queer Ventennio, esp. 213–56. 23 Benadusi, The Enemy, 113. 24 Valesio, “Forward,” xvii. 25 Italy remains off the radar of most Anglophone queer theorists. Concerning the alleged “underdevelopment” of Italy, see Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 26 For the former, see Alfred Hamilton Barr and James Thrall Soby, Twentieth-Century Italian Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972); both Cagli and de Pisis are discussed in these terms. On de Pisis, see Barbara Guidi, “I disegni e le litografie di De Pisis delle Gallerie d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea,” in De Pisis a Ferrara, ed. Maria Luisa Pacelli (Ferrara: Ferrara Arte, 2006), 68–9; on Cagli, see Angelo Calabrese, ed., Corrado Cagli: attualità per il tempo della continuità (Genova: Sagep, 2016). ­27 Both artists are known by amateurs of homoerotic art; see Renato Santoro, “Lo sguardo velato rivelante,” Muro Maestro (blog), February 13, 2016, https:// muromaestro.wordpress.com/2016/02/13/lo-sguardo-velato-rivelante/ (accessed April 27, 2022). 28 Most biographies repeat that the artist was to win a Grand Prize at the 1948 XXIV Venice Biennale, “but a telegram arrived from Rome prohibiting the awarding of the prize because he was homosexual.” Barbero and Bettiol, “Biografia,” 140. The prize went to Giorgio Morandi. 29 On this critical habit, see Champagne, Queer Ventennio. 30 Discussing de Pisis, critics note the influence of Manet but also the Italian Francesco Guardi; see Masciotta, “Filippo de Pisis,” 194. Although Lionello Venturi does not concur, he, too, mentions this commonplace; quoted in Luca Massimo Barbero, “Filippo de Pisis, L’uomo e la natura,” in Filippo de Pisis: L’uomo e la natura, ed. Luca Massimo Barbero (Venice: Cicero, 2001), 132. During the fascist period, the artist was accused by some of his critics of being “too French”; see Enrico Crispolti, Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (Trapani: Celebes, 1971), 726. 31 Champagne, Queer Ventennio; Bedarida, Corrado Cagli, 15–16. 32 See Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). According to Davis, “We can identify a historical process in modern culture. … namely, the constitution of aesthetic ideals, cultural norms that claim validity within an entire society, that have been based on manifestly homoerotic prototypes and significance,” 23. However much some fascists rejected “ambiguous” representations of masculinity, Italy was not immune to this historical process. 33 See Andrea Pini, Quando Eravamo Frocci: Gli omosessuali nell’Italia di una volta (Milan: Saggiatore 2011), 18; and Massimo Consoli, Stonewall: quando la rivoluzione è gay (Rome: R. Napoleone, 1990). 34 UNAR, “A 50 anni dai moti di Stonewall, l’Unar emana un avviso pubblico per tutelare, valorizzare e promuovere i documenti storici inerenti alla comunità LGBT,” https://www.unar.it/portale/-/a-50-anni-dai-moti-di-stonewall-l-unar-emanaun-avviso-pubblico-per-tutelare-valorizzare-e-promuovere-i-documenti-storiciinerenti-alla-comunit%C3%A0-lgbt (accessed April 29, 2022). 35 Ibid. 36 For a survey of this previous tendency, see Champagne, Queer Ventennio, 170–9. 37 Barbero, “Filippo de Pisis,” 15.

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38 Ibid., 20. 39 Barbero and Bettiol, “Biografia,” 140; Nico Naldini, “Il pittore ‘dalle cento meraviglie,” in Barbero, ed., Filippo de Pisis, 34–5. 40 Benadusi, “Cagli, Rosai e de Pisis.” 41 Barbero, “Filippo de Pisis,” 21. 42 Naldini, “Il pittore,” 33. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 33–4. On the tendency of some critics to attribute the artist’s death to “nerves,” see Champagne, Queer Ventennio, 125. 45 For a description of this sensibility, see Pini, “Quando eravamo,” 134. 46 Cited in ibid. 47 Exhibition materials, De Pisis, Museo del Novecento, October 4, 2019–March 1, 2020. 48 Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Altemps, “Filippo de Pisis,” press release, June 17, 2020, http://www.arte.it/calendario-arte/roma/mostra-filippo-de-pisis-66351 (accessed April 27, 2022). 49 Calabrese, ed. Corrado Cagli. While the exhibit was in the small town of Asti, it included two hundred paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramic, and tapestries. 50 Angelo Calabrese, Cagli dei Fotografi (Naples: Felice Cervino, 2010). 51 See Vincenzo Noto, “Card. Salvatore Pappalardo,” http://www.vincenzonoto.it/ PAPPALARDOCARD.SRE.htm (accessed April 27, 2022) and Sarah, “Taormina Cult … 21 Places the Muses Made Their Home,” White Almond Sicily (blog), August 16, 2015, http://whitealmond-privatesicily.blogspot.com/2015/08/taormina-cult-21places-muses-made.html (accessed April 29, 2022). ­52 Sebastiano Grasso, “Firenze: 220 lavori di 150 artisti approdano alla Palazzina Reale L’arte, l’omosessualità, e il Grande Sornione,” Corriere della Sera, November 3, 2007, https://www.pressreader.com/italy/corriere-della-sera/20071103/282694747803241 (accessed April 27, 2022). 53 Rosalina E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin, 2009). 54 Calabrese, Corrado Cagli, 44. 55 Ibid., 50. 56 Ibid., 45. 57 Ibid., 51. 58 Ibid., 44.

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“Partigiano Portami Via”: Exhibiting Antifascism and the Resistance in Post-Fascist Italy Raffaele Bedarida

Even right after I visited the exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 held at the Fondazione Prada in Milan in 2018, I had trouble locating in my memory where the antifascists were in the show and what role they played in the “art, life, and politics” of fascist Italy evoked in the show’s title.* The monumental catalog dedicates some pages to the drawings from prison of antifascist artists Carlo Levi (1934) and Aligi Sassu (1938); the censorship of an Emilio Vedova show (1943) by the fascist Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascista; and Mario Mafai’s Fantasie (1939–43), a series of paintings expressing “moral indignation” against the regime.1 These works were exhibited, but they were lost in the overwhelming spectacle of larger and far more numerous fascist-sanctioned artworks that dominated Post Zang. Even if one noticed Levi’s L’eroe cinese (The Chinese Hero), no wall texts or didactic materials helped a non-specialist viewer understand its necessarily hidden antifascist subtext or its place within the complex history of Italian antifascism. The final section of the show was more explicit, focusing on Benito Mussolini’s 1943 fall and the subsequent Italian Civil War: here, artists rejoiced the dictatorship’s end and mourned the martyrs of the Resistance and the Holocaust. This, however, came as a surprise if not a shock: the section, which looked like an afterthought given the exhibition’s 1918–1943 timeframe, appeared after dozens of rooms that felt like the galvanizing fireworks (as in the onomatopoeic title) of what was presented as a great creative season in Italian history. The show provided no indication of the factions within the Resistance, or how diversely the Resistance was interpreted and represented while it was happening and afterwards. Mino Maccari’s parodic series Dux (1943), dedicated to the fall of Mussolini, emerged out of the blue as a voice of dissent with no acknowledgment of his previous enthusiasm for fascism and virulent antisemitism.2 Corrado Cagli’s drawings of the German concentration camp of Buchenwald, too, were hard to situate in the show’s narrative, for the gallery dedicated to the year 1938 did not include any reference to the Racial Laws that had sent Cagli into exile as a Jew despite being a fascist; no wall text or audio guide told visitors that in 1945 he was fighting against fascism in the US military.

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Admittedly, fascism/antifascism is not easy to exhibit without oversimplifying or moralizing. On the one hand, a rigidly binary approach would be misleading when one considers the fragmentation within each faction, the gray zone of complacency in between, and people’s transformations through time (as Maccari and Cagli exemplify).3 On the other hand, as the 1990s debate on the legacy of the Resistance demonstrated, calls against binarism have justified a moral amnesty and legitimized neofascist revivals.4 Post Zang took place in the midst of a global wave of right-wing populism, including in Italy, which made the period under scrutiny disturbingly relevant. In that context, a thoughtful representation of dissent under fascism would have been especially important. I am interested in how a show that aimed for what curator Germano Celant declared a “real and contextual history” dealt with the reality of dissent in a period when dissent was methodically censored, repressed, or made invisible by the regime (before Mussolini’s fall) or celebrated and instrumentalized (afterwards).5 If Post Zang was for Celant “a story told with documents,”6 the main methodological question is how to exhibit dissent when the available documents and archives are the product of systematic manipulation on the part of the very authority that was being contested in the first place, and then again by the competing factions of the postwar moment. I focus on Post Zang because it is the most recent exhibition to survey art of the fascist period and, in some aspects, one of the most sophisticated curatorial endeavors on the subject. As a unique meta-curatorial attempt at “showing the showing” by reenacting or partially reconstructing exhibitions of the fascist period while making Celant’s choices the center of attention, Post Zang offers an excellent case study to reflect on how curators utilize their tools with regards to fascism. Overexposed and underexplored, antifascism is a revelatory entry point. By situating Post Zang within a curatorial tradition rooted in the shows of the ventennio and the postwar period, I argue in this essay that because of the ambivalence of the Fascist regime toward modernism and the relative intellectual autonomy it allowed for in the field of visual art, antifascism has been consistently referred to but never addressed in post-fascist exhibitions, reiterating a strategy utilized by the Fascist regime to silence and neutralize dissent. Antifascist artists were regularly included in major fascist-sanctioned exhibitions—even while they were in prison or exiled—as long as their art avoided overt antifascist content. By doing so, the regime instrumentalized their work, parading pluralism while nurturing complacency under the guise of aesthetic autonomy. In that sense, Post Zang was the culmination of a postwar curatorial tradition that inadvertently replicated this fascist method to include and absorb dissent. My second claim is that the centrality of the Resistance in the Reconstruction period to define Italian democratic identity, as reflected in exhibitions, has had long-term impact, affecting the way shows present antifascism today, though emptied of the political and cultural relevance it had in the postwar moment. If the relevance of the fascist past has become evident in recent years as far-right populism rose across the globe, what is the current relevance of Italian antifascism and the Resistance?7 In 2019 Italian President Sergio Mattarella announced the need for a national Museo della Resistenza (to be opened in Milan) “to strengthen and promote, especially amongst the younger generations, the awareness of the invaluable

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importance of democracy and freedom.”8 Considering that art shows attract more widespread attention than memorials or strictly historical exhibits, what role do exhibitions of antifascist artists play in current civic education?9 If, as some reviewers noted, a major limitation of Post Zang was the lack of critical filter through which it approached the ventennio, listening differently and more carefully to the few critical voices of the period may provide indications for new viable curatorial strategies.10 Take Carlo Levi, one of the few if not the only artist consistently engaged as an antifascist activist, making little compromises with the regime yet able to have a respectable career as a painter in Italy during the ventennio. His work appeared in two ways in Post Zang: firstly, through nine portraits of family members, fellow artists, writers, and antifascist activists, which were dispersed throughout the galleries of the Prada Foundation, among them L’eroe cinese (1931–32); secondly, through a small painting, Campo di concentramento (Concentration Camp,  1942), which appeared in the final room and received prominence in Celant’s catalog essay as one of the very few artworks to be reproduced. I will consider these as two opposite poles for understanding the ambiguous presence of antifascism in Post Zang and as points of access to the politically charged history behind these modes of exhibition: L’eroe cinese as paradigmatic of the way pre-1943 antifascism has been silenced; Campo di concentramento as typical of an overexposed, emptied-out Resistance. I will also use them as inspiration for possible counter-models to exhibit antifascism.

A Chinese Hero (Is Something to Be) L’eroe cinese was hung in a gallery dedicated to 1932 (Post Zang was organized chronologically by year), grouped with other portraits by Levi that a non-specialist, based on the information provided in the gallery, would understand as a gathering of family and friends (Figure 13.1). There was no mention that most people portrayed were political dissidents—Levi’s mother, Annetta Treves, was a socialist, and Carlo Rosselli was a leader of Giustizia e Libertà (GL) like Levi—nor that they were persecuted by the regime: writer Alberto Moravia was censored and Rosselli was imprisoned, beaten, and ultimately murdered. (Levi’s 1933 picture of Leone Ginzburg, another GL leader murdered by the fascists, was in a separate room because it did not fit chronologically.) Nor were visitors told that all of them were Jewish. Sandwiched between the catholic iconography of Adolfo Wildt’s Santa Lucia on one side and the bellicose futurist paintings of Fortunato Depero and Giacomo Balla on the other (the latter warned against unspecified “struggles pitfalls obstacles” spelled in the painting’s frame), a group of Jewish dissidents was being forced, for the thousandth time in Italian history, to stay under the radar. And, once again, nobody seemed to notice except those directly involved.11 Post Zang unintentionally reproduced the strategy of the Fascist government, whose respect for art’s aesthetic autonomy succeeded in absorbing forms of dissent during the ventennio and affected the postwar legacy of antifascist artists by initiating a depoliticized, formalist reading of their work. Before the Racial Laws, Levi was regularly invited to participate in the Rome Quadriennale, the Venice Biennale, and other regime-sponsored art shows at home and abroad, as long as he avoided explicit

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Figure 13.1  Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018. Artworks from left to right: Adolfo Wildt, Santa Lucia (Saint Lucy), 1926; Carlo Levi, Figura (Ritratto rosso della madre) (Figure [Red Portrait of Mother]), 1930; Carlo Levi, Ritratto di Alberto Moravia (Portrait of Alberto Moravia), 1932; Carlo Levi, L’eroe cinese (The Chinese Hero), 1931–32; Carlo Levi, Ritratto di Carlo Rosselli (Portrait of Carlo Rosselli), 1932; Fortunato Depero, Solidità di cavalieri erranti (Solidità di cavalieri) (Solidity of Errant Knights [Solidity of Knights]), 1927; Giacomo Balla, Le frecce della vita (The Arrows of Life), 1928. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan.

antifascist content.12 Fascist officials such as Giuseppe Bottai and Cipriano Efisio Oppo, or curators like Pier Maria Bardi and Dario Sabatello, exhibited Levi’s work on the grounds of aesthetic quality to showcase the state’s support of art, tolerance of a diversity of stylistic idioms, and a purported creative boom in Italy under Mussolini. Post Zang conveyed a similar message: the Italian press boasted titles like “How Effervescent Was Art under the Regime” (La Stampa), “How Beautiful Was Italian Art in the Darkest Hour” (La Repubblica), and “Ventennio, What a Beauty!” (Il Sole 24ore). L’eroe cinese and Levi’s exhibition strategy subtly explored this process of erasure and neutralization, exposing it in the face of fascist censorship. Today we know that the painting is a portrait of another GL activist, Aldo Garosci, a fuoriuscito (exile antifascist) in Paris in the early 1930s, like Levi. L’eroe cinese conceals the sitter’s identity through the mysterious title and by replacing Garosci’s features with an anonymized mask-like face, unlike the other portraits exhibited in Post Zang or Levi’s other known depictions of Garosci. By doing so, Levi could exhibit L’eroe cinese without raising suspicions or incurring censorship in a period when the fascist police controlled his activities and network. Unlike most of the smaller, more private portraits that he

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made in the early 1930s of GL leaders, L’eroe cinese stayed in Levi’s collection and was included in his most important shows, from solo exhibits to large surveys both during and after fascism.13 Although after the war Levi gave L’eroe cinese a prominent position in his 1948 monograph and in important shows such as the 1954 Venice Biennale and the 1967 survey Arte moderna in Italia, 1915–1935, nobody linked the painting to the name of Garosci until after Levi’s death in 1975. And although it later appeared in politically minded exhibitions such as Le ragioni della libertà (Milan, 1995), Gli anni di Parigi. Carlo Levi e i fuoriusciti (Turin, 2004), or Post Zang, L’eroe cinese was never discussed in political terms.14 As revealed in Garosci’s memoirs, written in the 1980s after Levi’s death but only published posthumously in 2019, the title L’eroe cinese came from an eighteenthcentury melodrama by Pietro Metastasio: the story, set in ancient China, was about an exiled royal dynasty, which, after being ousted by a coup, plotted to reclaim its legitimate throne. The autobiographical component as an exile in Paris and the reference to contemporary politics were obvious to anyone in the circle of GL. Levi had been using the birth name of Metastasio, P. Trapassi, as a pseudonym to sign his antifascist essays published in the magazine Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà. Garosci, who was the magazine’s editor in Paris, wrote in his memoirs that “in the title was the conspirators’ bond that connected the painter and the sitter.”15 Fascism’s relative respect for art’s autonomy, which effectively absorbed dissent, also provided a coverup for the construction of an antifascist network. And so, a fascist police report on Garosci’s encounters with another antifascist fuoriuscito in Paris, art historian Lionello Venturi, classified them as innocuous because their collaboration on the catalog raisonné of Paul Cézanne was art history and, therefore, “apolitical.”16 Levi’s intense activity as a portraitist, too, was acceptable, although his notoriously long, chatty sessions with sitters who were almost exclusively antifascist activists were also seditious meetings. In addition to providing protection, the paintings functioned as indexical references to those meetings, which could not be documented otherwise for safety concerns.17 An instrument of encounter, each portrait helped to build human relations, which, as Levi wrote in Quaderni, were the basis for a real political autonomy.18 If the title read like a riddle, the image invited a closer look (Figure  13.2). Art historians have long noticed how Levi’s work of this period was inspired by the School of Paris and, more specifically, have interpreted the stylistic resemblance to the Jewish artists of Montparnasse (Modigliani-like blank eyes; Chaim Soutine’s undulating brushstrokes, distorted anatomy, and saturated hues) as Levi’s embrace of internationalism vis-à-vis fascist chauvinism.19 L’eroe cinese, however, is more unsettling: the mask-like face, blurred relationship between figure and ground, the gloved and ungloved hands systematically undermine binary modes of epistemology— figure/ground or a pair of hands as paradigms of signification. Like the title, the image deliberately “spoke Chinese,” an expression commonly utilized in Fascist Italy to mean both a speaker’s unwillingness to communicate comprehensibly and a listener’s unwillingness to understand.20 Like a secret handshake, L’eroe cinese created a connection among “Chinese-speaking” antifascists while exposing fascist censorship

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Figure 13.2  Carlo Levi, L’eroe cinese (The Chinese Hero), 1931–32, oil on canvas, 92 × 73 cm. Courtesy Fondazione Carlo Levi, Rome.

behind apolitical aestheticism. Antifascist artist Renato Guttuso later recalled that seeing L’eroe cinese at the 1931 Rome Quadriennale was a revelatory moment in his intellectual trajectory. Describing it as “the most deeply foreign thing to [Italian] Novecento,” Guttuso recounted how, because of L’eroe cinese, he visited Levi’s show at the Galleria di Roma, initiating a lifelong admiration for and friendship with Levi.21 Levi presented the work without addressing its content or revealing the Chinese hero’s identity. But he consistently if indirectly provided a precise human context for it. Fellow GL activist and partisan Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti discussed the painting in stylistic terms in his 1948 monograph but introduced the book by describing his relationship with Levi as part of a “clandestine association of free men who found

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themselves facing, almost in a new Benedictine order, one of the most chaotic and dark crises in history.”22 Levi published his philosophical-political essay “Paura della pittura” in Ragghianti’s book, where he described artmaking as a relational endeavor for the pursuit of freedom.23 Then, Levi asked Garosci to write the catalog essay for his solo show at the 1954 Biennial, which included L’eroe cinese. Although Garosci did not reveal (yet) the “conspirators’ bond” behind the painting, he emphasized continuity with the period of exile, identifying antifascism as a shared, ongoing commitment.24 In the exhibition catalogue of the 1967 Florence show, which included L’eroe cinese, Ragghianti wrote a biographical note about Levi’s political formation in the environment of Antonio Gramsci and Piero Gobetti—his antifascism, imprisonment, confino in Basilicata, exile in France, and GL activism25—but none of this was visible in the galleries of Palazzo Strozzi (Figure 13.3), which were curated according to formalist criteria of style and “quality.” The antifascist subtext was part of the living memory and web of relationships of the people involved. Ragghianti saw the formalism and apolitical open-endedness of his curatorial approach as an antidote to fascist propaganda.26 If, already in 1967, some critics protested that Ragghianti’s formalism ultimately renounced a critical filter, risking a tout-court rehabilitation of fascist culture, things were substantially different in 2018 for Post Zang. Entering an era in which many of those who experienced the ventennio are no longer alive, this author believes it is a curator’s responsibility to make the antifascist subtext of the work speak beyond the documents produced and manipulated by the regime. It is not by chance that none of Post Zang’s numerous reviewers mentioned L’eroe cinese.

Fig. 13.3  Exhibition view of L’arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1967. Second from right, Carlo Levi, L’eroe cinese (The Chinese Hero), 1931–32. Courtesy Fondazione Ragghianti, Lucca.

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Disentangling Antifascism and the Resistance The exhibitions of the Resistance that immediately followed the Liberation affected the long-term narration of antifascism as deeply as fascist censorship: firstly, as a redemptive, well-documented, and visually recognizable chapter of antifascism, the Resistance absorbed the iconography of antifascism, largely erasing what had come before; secondly, as a foundational moment of post-fascist Italian identity, exhibitions of the Resistance were intertwined with the political needs of the Reconstruction, initiating a tradition in which the narration of the Resistance existed somewhere between a circumscribed historical event and contemporary politics. Like most shows on the Resistance, the final room of Post Zang (Figure 13.4) was influenced by early exhibitions such as Arte contro la barbarie (1944) and Mostra della Liberazione (1945), as attested by several works from those exhibits and a wallsized photograph of the latter as installed in Genoa. Unlike the previous sections, however, the last room did not reconstruct any historical exhibition. Placed outside the chronological sequence of Post Zang and dominated by a large table in the center of the room where visitors could flip through books used for research by the curatorial team, the last section fell between two temporalities: the historicism of reconstructed shows and the presentist meta-narration of Celant’s curatorial practice. The fact that Celant chose Levi’s painting Campo di concentramento to illustrate antifascist dissent in his essay is exemplary of such cross-eyed ambiguity when it comes to the Resistance. In the catalog (Figure  13.5), Celant reproduced Levi’s work, which represents a pile of naked corpses of women, with the double title, Concentration Camp or Dead Women (The Foretold Lager) and the date 1942, discussing it as the example of an artwork by a rare artist who expressed dissent against the regime and suffered the consequences of it by being “imprisoned, eliminated or forced into exile for their antiFascist beliefs.”27 The curator did not mention that in 1942 images of the Holocaust had not yet circulated; that Levi was not deported nor did he see concentration camps firsthand; that he did not exhibit this work until 1965 or include it in his 1948 catalog raisonné; or that in a 1974 show, months before his death, he changed its title from Concentration Camp (as exhibited in 1965) to Dead Women (The Foretold Lager), explaining this picture as a premonition because similar images would not be known until three years later.28 All of these could have served as entry points to explore the nonlinear process of historicization of the Resistance and the Holocaust or the collective elaboration of trauma; they could have also served as historically precise clues to address the exploitative (male) gaze in Holocaust iconography. But neither Celant nor the reviewers who discussed this work noticed those incongruities. One might argue that the mammoth exhibit left no time or energy to investigate a single painting. (A slow enquiry into individual pieces could be a valuable critical tool within a large survey.) Such silence is symptomatic of a diffuse, blurred vision when it comes to exhibiting the Resistance and the Holocaust in Italy. Concentration Camp was exhibited in Post Zang (see Figure  13.5) along with a few other artworks depicting the Holocaust (three Buchenwald drawings by Cagli) and the victims of the German occupation of Italy: on its left were Giacomo Manzù’s

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Figure 13.4  Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2018. Artworks from right to left: painting: Emilio Vedova, Incendio nel villaggio (Fire in the Village), 1945; two drawings: Emilio Vedova, Il padre morente (Father Dying) and Natura morta (Still Life), 1943; two photographs: Partisans hanged by the Nazi-Fascists in Bassano del Grappa, September 20, 1944 and Partisans entering Borgo la Croce, Florence, August 11, 1944; three drawings: Corrado Cagli, Buchenwald 1945; photograph: Buchenwald concentration camp, April 11, 1945; two drawings: Alberto Moravia, Senza titolo (Untitled) 1943; photograph: Carlo Cardazzo at Palazzo Pisani, Venice, 1950s; two paintings: Ernesto Treccani, Fucilazione (Execution), 1943 and Aligi Sassu, Civil War (The Martyrs of Piazzale Loreto, 1944); two sculptures: Marino Marini, Prigioniero (Prisoner), 1943 and Leoncillo, Madre romana (Roman Mother), 1944; Carlo Levi, Campo di concentramento (Concentration Camp), 1942; two bas reliefs: Giacomo Manzù, Crocefissione (Crucifixion), 1939 and Crocefissione con soldato (Crucifixion with soldier), 1942. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan.

Crucifixion (1939) and Crucifixion with Soldier (1942) representing a German soldier looking at a hanged partisan; on the right were Leoncillo Leonardi’s Roman Mother Murdered by the Germans (1944), Aligi Sassu’s Civil War (The Martyrs of Piazzale Loreto) (1944) showing executed partisans in Milan, and Emilio Vedova’s Fire in the Village (1945); and there were also several documentary photographs from the Museo del Risorgimento e della Resistenza of Vicenza: the Marzabotto massacre, hanged partisans, and Nazi firing squads. If the previous sections of Post Zang evoked exhibitions of the fascist period, the archetype for this section—although not a reconstruction—was the first antifascist

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Figure 13.5  Page from Germano Celant, “Towards a Real and Contextual History,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art, Life, Politics. Italia 1918–1943 (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), 43. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan.

exhibition held in Italy after the Liberation: Arte contro la barbarie, organized by the communist newspaper L’Unità after the Liberation of Rome in July 1944, and then readapted as Mostra della Liberazione after the Liberation of Milan (July 1945) and Genoa (September 1945).29 This show identified antifascism with the Resistance, representing it through artworks and documents on the partisans’ fight and the atrocities committed by the German “barbarians.” Next to artworks on the Fosse Ardeatine massacre and scenes of the Resistance by Guttuso, Mafai, Leoncillo, and other artists included in the last room of Post Zang, there were replicas of earlier artworks classifiable under three categories: revolutionary symbols (Mafai repainted Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People; Mirko Basaldella did François Rude, La

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Marseillaise); resistance against foreign invaders (Guttuso copied Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808; Giulio Turcato chose Aleksandr Deyneka, Defense of Petrograd); and the Risorgimento, the nineteenth-century Italian movement of national independence (Antonio De Mata did Gioacchino Toma, O Roma o morte). This approach proved successful in the immediate postwar moment for it shifted attention away from the Italians’ responsibilities during two decades of dictatorship and from deeply rooted domestic divisions that had culminated in years of civil war, in favor of a redemptive message and conciliatory national agenda, while presenting antifascism as an ahistorical revolutionary impulse and the Resistance as a new Risorgimento. Advocated by the leader of the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) Palmiro Togliatti after the so-called “Svolta di Salerno” of 1944,30 this rhetoric resonated with the other leading voice of the Reconstruction period, the antifascist philosopher Benedetto Croce. He deemed fascism a closed parenthesis, which was foreign to Italian society (he, too, called fascism “barbarian”), and looked to pre-fascist, liberal Italy as the foundation on which to rebuild.31 The unlikely convergence of these two factions dominated the Italian postwar discourse on antifascism, against the efforts of, among others, Levi, Garosci, and other former GL activists. Organized as Partito d’Azione, they understood fascism as endemic, deeply rooted within Italian history and still present in the current bourgeois order: they proposed a radical reconfiguration of Italian power structures in terms of both class roles and geopolitics as the only way out of fascism (Levi talked about the need for a self-mutilation)—an admittedly utopian project that Levi himself retrospectively saw as doomed to fail in that moment.32 A second influential feature of the Liberation shows was their mandate to defascistize (sfascistizzare) Italy, as requested by Togliatti. Responding to the 1932 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista as the ultimate form of fascist manipulation, Togliatti urged antifascist artists and curators to make “the true fascist exhibition,” in which they would occupy former institutional spaces of the regime and show the real face of fascism through its disastrous consequences: “our cities destroyed, our poor villages razed to the ground, where we will write the name of our martyrs and that of the heroes for the struggle for Italy’s liberation from foreign yoke.”33 Overturning Margherita Sarfatti’s famous comment that the 1932 Mostra “did not show the fascist revolution, it demonstrated it,” the organizers of Arte contro la barbarie wrote that the artworks in the show “are not just an accusation, they are a condemnation [of fascism].”34 In other words, a true antifascist show would not focus so much on the history and motives of antifascism but would educate the Italians to an unconditional rejection and moral condemnation of fascism by reminding them of the suffering it had caused: “In the direct vision of the massacres there is still the burden of the victims that weights onto the executioners. Hate is justice.”35 Such a missionary attitude would later characterize the shows periodically organized on the anniversaries of the Liberation and supported by the PCI, including the 1965 Arte e Resistenza in Europa where Levi’s Concentration Camp was first exhibited.36 If Post Zang’s representation of pre-1943 antifascism inadvertently replicated the dynamics of fascist censorship, the last section inherited the strategies of postwar missionary antifascism. The result, paradoxically, reflected today’s conundrum with regards to curating antifascism: between a need for historical specificity and the urge

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for viable models, exhibiting antifascism falls into a blurred, in-between territory. A critical exhibition history or a provenance project of individual works, as attempted here, may provide a method: in addition to existing scholarship, it could initiate productive curatorial strategies by merging Celant’s meta-curatorial achievements at Post Zang with the tradition of institutional critique (Hans Haacke to Hito Steyerl). Exhibition and provenance histories would provide not so much documentary evidence to reveal the “truer” context of the work (Post Zang had too much of that) but as an indication of the process through which meaning and memory are negotiated, manipulated, and erased. Revealing how modes of exhibition or patterns of ownership have affected our understanding of fascism and antifascism through time would be a radical exercise of curatorial transparency.

Notes

1

2 3 ­4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

I presented earlier versions of this essay at the Curating Fascism workshop including this volume’s authors (January 2021) and the “What Present for the Resistance?” panel chaired by Franco Baldasso and Daniele Biffanti at the 2021 American Association of Italian Studies conference. I thank the participants and the Fondazione Carlo Levi in Rome for their invaluable feedback. See Mario Mainetti, “Carlo Levi and Aligi Sassu: Drawings from the Prison,” 304; Mattia Patti, “Corrente Magazine and Movement,” 438; and Alberta Campitelli, “The Scuola Romana and Its Political Engagement,” 526, all in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Prada Foundation, 2018). Cornelia Mattiacci dismisses Maccari’s fascism as a juvenile mistake; “Mino Maccari: ‘Dux’ and Il Selvaggio,” in ibid., 538. See Michele Dantini, “Religioni politiche. La storia dell’arte alla prova degli studi su fascismo, antifascismo e Resistenza,” Il Capitale Culturale 18 (2018): 183–201. See David Ward, Antifascisms: Cultural Politics in Italy, 1943–46 (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). Germano Celant, “Towards a Real and Contextual History,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum, 30. Ibid., 38. On fascism’s relevance today, see Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present (New York: Norton, 2020). “Nasce a Milano il Museo della Resistenza,” La Repubblica – Milan, December 9, 2019. See Robert Gordon in this volume. This was the focus of “What Present for the Resistance?” See Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker (Chapter 4) in this volume. When Levi was arrested with other Jewish antifascists, an antisemitic journalist exulted that finally the authorities recognized that “the best of antifascism, past and present, is of the Jewish race.” Telesio Interlandi, “‘L’anno prossimo a Gerusalemme.’ Quest’anno al Tribunale Speciale,” Tevere, March 31, 1934, 1. See Laura Iamurri, “Levi, Paulucci e gli altri,” in Cultura artistica torinese e politiche nazionali, ed. Marcella Cossu and Carla Michelli (Milan: Electa, 2005), 58–9. In 1948 most of Levi’s portraits were in the sitters’ families’ collections; Carlo L. Ragghianti, Carlo Levi (Florence: Edizioni, 1948). Levi exhibited L’eroe cinese in

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the following shows: Quadriennale, Rome, 1931 (see n. 21). Levi exhibited Carlo Levi, Galerie Jeune Europe, Paris 1932; Carlo Levi, Galerie Jacques Bonjean, Paris, 1933; XXVII Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 1954; VIII Quadriennale Nazionale d’arte di Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1959; Mostra del rinnovamento dell’arte in Italia 1930–1945, Casa Romei, Ferrara, 1960; C. Levi opere dal 1929 al 1935, La Nuova Pesa, Rome, 1962; I Sei di Torino 1929–1932, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin, 1965; L’arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1967; Carlo Levi. Mostra antologica, Palazzo Te, Mantua, 1974. Antonella Lavorgna at Fondazione Carlo Levi provided this list. 14 Iamurri was the first to identify Garosci’s identity, linking the painting to the fuoriusciti environment, but she did not discuss the work’s political subtext. Laura Iamurri, “Carlo Levi e Lionello Venturi,” in Gli Anni di Parigi: Carlo Levi e i fuoriusciti, ed. Cristina Maiocchi (Turin: Archivio di Stato, 2003), 55–62. 15 Aldo Garosci, Anni di Torino, anni di Parigi (Parma: Berti, 2019), 72. 16 Iamurri, “Carlo Levi e Lionello Venturi,” 60. 17 Stanislao Pugliese, “The Eternal Tendency Toward Fascism,” in Franco Baldasso, ed., Allegoria 81 (June 2020): 134. Daniela Fonti emphasized how Levi kept portraying fellow partisans even in Nazi-occupied Florence. Daniela Fonti, “Carlo Levi, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti: Biografie allo specchio,” Lucca, June 11, 2021, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=uuHHLXBJqXk (accessed June 20, 2021). 18 Carlo Levi and Leone Ginzburg, “Il concetto di autonomia nel programma di GL,” Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà (September 1932): 6–12; republished in David Bidussa, ed., Carlo Levi: Scritti Politici (Turin: Einaudi, 2001). 19 Introduced by Venturi in the 1920s, this reading became such a cliché that André Malraux, upon visiting Levi’s Paris studio in 1932, allegedly rebutted: “I’ve never seen anything as Italian as this.” Ragghianti, Carlo Levi, 23. 20 “Parlare cinese” even indicated communication deficiencies. Archivio Italiano di Psicologia Generale (Rome: Laboratorio Sperimentale, 1935), 31. In a note, published posthumously, Levi wrote that after the war, Garosci “stopped being a Chinese but continued … to be kind of a hero.” Carlo Levi, Levi (Florence: Alinari, 1977), 46. 21 Renato Guttuso, “Per Carlo Levi,” 1967, quoted in Marina Giordano, “Guttuso e Levi,” Kalós 19, no. 14 (December 2007): 39–45. Although I could not find installation photos of Levi’s work at the Quardiennale, the three paintings by Levi listed in the exhibition catalog and recorded at the Quadriennale archives are: Daniel, Natura Morta, and Figura. Thanks to Assunta Porciani and Alessandro Sagramora of the Archivio della Quadriennale, Rome for their help. 22 Ragghianti, Carlo Levi, 13–14. 23 Carlo Levi, “Paura della pittura,” in ibid., 29–32. ­24 Aldo Garosci, “Carlo Levi,” XXVII Biennale (Venice: Alfieri, 1954), 154–7. 25 Carlo L. Ragghianti, “Carlo Levi,” in Arte moderna in Italia, 1915–1935 (Florence: Marchi e Bertoli, 1967), 383. See Sibilla Panerai, “Carlo Levi e la cultura artistica durante il fascismo,” in Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti e l’arte in Italia tra le due guerre, ed. Paolo Bolpagni and Mattia Patti (Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti, 2020), 197–205. 26 See Luca Quattrocchi in this volume. 27 Celant, “Towards a Real and Contextual History,” 43. 28 Antonio Del Guercio, ed., Carlo Levi: Mostra Antologica (Milan: Electa, 1974), 53. 29 The main difference was a stronger documentary component and the addition of north-Italian artists. See Adolfo Mignemi and Gabriella Solaro, eds., Resistenza e Ricostruzione (Milan: Skira, 2005).

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30 “Arte contro la barbarie,” Fondo Antonello Trombadori, Archivio della Quadriennale, Rome. See also Chiara Perin, “‘La vera mostra del fascismo.’ Arte contro la barbarie a Roma nel 1944,” Ricerche di S/Confine 4 (2018): 262–79. 31 Ward, Antifascisms, 68. 32 Carlo Levi, Paura della libertà (1946) and Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Turin: Einaudi, 1945). On Partito d’Azione’s political failure, see Levi, L’Orologio (Turin: Einaudi, 1950). 33 Palmiro Togliatti, speech, July 9, 1944, Rome. See Perin, “‘La vera mostra del fascismo,’” 262. 34 Velio Spano, “L’Arte contro la barbarie,” flyer, Fondo Antonello Trombadori. 35 Ibid. 36 As part of this approach, shows such as Arte e Resistenza in Europa (Bologna, 1965), Omaggio alla Resistenza (Florence, 1974), Mostra della Resistenza (Milan, 1975), and Arte della libertà (Genoa, 1995) conflated Holocaust and Resistance.

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Looking at Women and Mental Illness in Fascist Italy: An Exhibition’s Dialogical and Feminist Approach Lucia Re

The exhibition I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista (Flowers of Evil: Women in Mental Hospitals under Fascism), curated by Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino Di Sante, traveled between 2016 and 2020 to several cities across Italy and was hosted by a variety of institutions, including museums, theaters, schools, and other cultural spaces.1 Based on substantial archival research, the exhibition was  widely reviewed and well received. In most of its iterations, it was used as the basis for various forms of public interaction, including debates, roundtables, readings, teachins, workshops, and performances. Through a selection of historic photographs and excerpts from medical records, letters, diaries, and clinical studies, drawn mostly from the archives of the Sant’Antonio Abate psychiatric hospital in Teramo, as well as posters and other visual media from the fascist era pertaining to women’s roles, the exhibition provided a powerful, concise, moving, and thought-provoking account of several key aspects of the Fascist regime in Italy. These included questions of gender norms, the fascist appropriation of Lombrosian thought, ideas of racial degeneration, and the regime’s policies for the “defense of race,” including the demographic campaign, eugenics, and the new securitarian paradigm. It also revealed the extent to which the regime not only made the internment of women considered “abnormal,” “against nature,” or outside the norm key to the safety of the nation, but also presented this policy, as well as an increase in the number of asylums and inmates, as exemplary of the fascist modernization of the state.2 The exhibition paid attention to the fascist control of sexuality and eroticism; the criminalization of abortion and birth control; and the reinvention of hysteria as a psychiatric category used to legitimate women’s confinement and punishment. The catalog reproduced many of the exhibition’s images and texts and included essays by historians, archivists, and psychiatrists, most with firsthand and in-depth knowledge of the institution and its archives (Figure 14.1).3 A map by the entrance displayed the location of every asylum in Italy under the regime. The Teramo asylum emerged in this exhibition as a microcosm—one

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Figure 14.1  Catalog cover of I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016).

representative of the fascist approach to mental health and “deviancy,” as well as the process of disciplining and punishing at the heart of fascist ideology.4 It revealed the extent to which the regime, in order to function as such, was based on and relied on the control and regulation of women’s bodies, sexuality, and gender roles.5 ­I fiori del male was designed as a traveling exhibition that could be adapted to different sites, venues, and locations. Through simple, lightweight, and moveable wood and canvas panels; eye-catching graphics, colors, and captions; and a juxtaposition of photographic details and/or enlargements, it succeeded in its documentary and historical intent without being overly didactic, polemical, exploitative, voyeuristic, or sensationalist (Figure 14.2). The exhibition was divided into six sections: the first

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Figure  14.2 Some of the exhibition panels in Fano, I fiori del male. Photo courtesy Annacarla Valeriano.

four provided the historical, cultural, social, and cultural frameworks for the women and girls whose representative stories were vividly illustrated in the remaining two sections.6 Rather than rely on the shock value of the images or the spectacularization of mental illness—as was sometimes the case in previous photographic exhibitions on asylums in Italy—I fiori del male used the historical images and other documents to weave together threads of a compelling, complex, and open narrative in which the inmates’ individual stories emerge as parts of a larger tapestry drawn by the curators to reconstruct the historical and ideological context of their lives as women under the regime.7 Although the sections of the exhibition were numbered from 1 to 6, the viewer could start at any point: for example, they could start at section 6, which was devoted to the inmates’ life stories, and then return to previous sections dedicated to cultural norms enforced by the regime. The term “dialogical” in my title refers both to my method in this essay and to what I understand to be the exhibition’s approach. Over the past two years I have conducted research through a dialogue in the form of back-and-forth email conversations with Valeriano, who kindly answered my questions and discussed issues that I raised. The available material pertaining to the exhibition indicates that the curators were able to illuminate an aspect of fascism that remained unscrutinized—and of which there was little or no public awareness—while dialogically reversing the logic of the Foucaldian panopticon adopted by fascism in its attempt to control and discipline the women and girls it deemed criminally insane because they operated outside the norm.8 According

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to the regime’s logic of exclusion, abnormal, “deviant,” and mentally ill women needed to be institutionalized and hidden away, confined and invisible, yet at the same time watched—perennially pinned in place by the mental institution’s all-seeing, controlling eye. The asylum even held within its walls girls and young women who were otherwise healthy but considered in “moral danger,” either because they were too free with their erotic behavior, abandoned by their families, or exposed to environments deemed suspect or potentially criminal.9 The extensive use of photography and photographic archives by mental institutions under fascism was an important part of this exclusionary logic. Women and girls who entered the asylum were routinely photographed, and a record for each inmate was kept in the archives along with her diagnosis and case history. These records were shared with police authorities, and inmates were labeled and handled as born criminals in keeping with the Lombrosian tradition embraced and perfected by the regime.10 Deemed a danger to society, they were released only rarely, even though for some the institution was presented as a means for reeducation, reform, and recovery.11 Their continued confinement was considered necessary to ensure the security and health of the nation. The institution thus acted as a proxy for Mussolini’s famously powerful gaze—the unwavering eyes that often appear in fascist art and iconography, putatively looking over the entire nation, keeping it in order and good health and ensuring that deviants, including deviant women, could not exert their corrupting influence or be seen outside the institution’s confines. The title of the exhibition evokes poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, but, as the curators clarify in the introductory panel and catalog, it refers to a line from a 1953 work by Italian novelist and psychiatrist Mario Tobino, Le libere donne di Magliano, the moving account of the author’s experience as a young doctor working in an asylum for women in Maggiano, near Lucca: “The asylum is full of flowers but nobody can see them.”12 In making visible the inmates’ faces and painful experiences, the exhibition restores to their lives a sense of narrative coherence and thus a kind of beauty: it makes their stories bloom in the eyes of visitors, who can feel and understand how the inmates’ need for care was betrayed. While Italian Fascism was a regime based on visibility and spectacle (and a savvy, well-choreographed display of images, media, and the arts), the concealment or suppression of what Mussolini did not want to be seen was the flipside of the authoritarian spectacularization of power.13 At the same time, the inmates’ permanent surveillance in the asylum makes it structurally similar to the panopticon: inmates are aware of being constantly under the eyes and control of the agents of the power that keeps them there, even if this power remains invisible. Although the Ospedale psichiatrico provinciale Sant’Antonio Abate was architecturally not organized as a classic panopticon with a single, central observation tower, it was nevertheless like a prison. The system of centralized surveillance, inspection, registration, and written as well as photographic medical records developed there under fascism—along with experimental therapies that included inoculating patients with malaria—made it a panoptic institution in the Foucaldian sense.14 Although it was hardly a fascist invention, panopticism is a key model for modern authoritarianism. I fiori del male engaged dialogically with the panoptical logic of fascist confinement by inverting it. By designing a traveling exhibition made of flexible, lightweight panels that used clear graphics and captions to display selected,

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powerful images and texts, the curators were able to reach a wide, multigenerational, and diverse audience across Italy.15 Publicized online by the University of Teramo and by social media and online publications across Italy, I fiori del male brought to light photographs, long buried in the archives, that were originally taken as a means of control and exclusion. It encouraged open dialogue and discussions about a subject previously considered shameful and taboo, reversing the dehumanizing logic of the fascist institution by placing letters and patients’ words in dialogue with photographs and portraits of other patients. It thus fostered a positive, albeit imaginary, exchange between the exhibition’s visitors and the patients and their suffering. In its iterations, the exhibition solicited responses and opened communication with different audiences. One woman described her reaction to the exhibition in Rome as follows: The first impression I had while visiting the exhibition … was chills running down my spine. I had the feeling that, behind those eyes that looked at me from the photographs next to their medical record, instead of those little girls, adolescent girls, and women, there could be me; I could have been each one of them. Each one of us could have been one of them.16

Another wrote that she found the exhibition “very beautiful and devastating” (Figure  14.3).17 The first woman was struck by a descriptive medical typology from the asylum’s records that, she felt, could easily apply to “one of our friends” or even to

Figure 14.3  Exhibition view, I fiori del male, Ascoli. Photo courtesy Annacarla Valeriano.

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ourselves: “Loquacious, impertinent, flirtatious. Extravagant, red in the face, attractive. Impulsive, irreverent, with a naughty smirk on her face.”18 It made her feel how uncomfortably thin the border between what is considered “normal” and “deviant” could be, and how easily an individual could be flattened into a “type.” According to Valeriano, in the discussions and workshops with many groups, including large numbers of middle school and high school students across Italy, the Lombrosian categories embraced and recycled by fascism—and the “scientific” arguments about sexual difference and sexual deviancy, women’s inferiority, and women’s reproductive and domestic destiny—were the topics that generated the most interest and commentary, especially in light of the endurance of gender bias, prejudice, inequality, and violence against women and LGBTQ+ individuals in today’s Italy.19 Press reviews of the show were unanimously positive, with the exception of a review published in the then neofascist newspaper Il Giornale d’Italia.20 For Lombroso and his school, photography was not merely a technology that could be used to support Lombrosian theories of the physiognomy of the insane: it became a critical part of those theories and typologies. Photographs could be used as eloquent portraits of the insane according to typologies and thus reduce individuality to a type. Photography could record the appearance of the mentally ill for study and therapy, and it could facilitate identification and the sharing of records with police. In the early twentieth century a photograph was often attached to the patient’s record, but the use of photography became more prevalent in asylums in the fascist era. Although photography has from its inception been associated with the history of surveillance and punishment—and is arguably a structural component of the Foucaldian panopticon in the asylum—I fiori del male was able to reverse this logic dialogically.21 Along with the identification, typology, and diagnostic mugshots used for surveillance, documentation, and control, the curators found, among the images from the fascist era, celebratory group portraits sometimes taken by doctors and nurses who embraced the art of photography. These group portraits were meant as evidence of the effectiveness, order, and functioning of the institution under the regime. The inmates’ dehumanization is evident in many of these images, as are the emotions of anger and fear. Some of the patients apparently sometimes enjoyed being photographed, however, and took advantage of those rare moments to occasionally smile. The exhibition’s curators took advantage of the complex, layered, and contradictory richness of the photographic material to reframe the story told by the images, to contextualize it and highlight the humanity of the subjects as individuals. While doctors may have photographed patients in attempts to create typologies of mental illness, the captured portraits in the archive displayed in I fiori del male did the opposite: they resurrected individuals in all their particularity.22 In contrast to the totalitarian, one-way narrative intended by the regime, I fiori del male refrained from dictating any single path, order, or amount of time in which the images had to be looked at and absorbed by the viewer. Together, as arranged by the curators in dialogue with handwritten fragments of texts authored by both patients and doctors, these photographs constituted a complex, aesthetically and historically layered body of work. To highlight the humanity and individuality of the inmates, the curators chose to exhibit several group photos and close-up enlargements of the inmates’ faces and

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Figure  14.4  Page from: I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016), 50.

eyes from the same group photos, and the result is startling: the viewer finds herself sometimes looking into the eyes of a patient, as if literally face to face with her (Figure 14.4). Behind a young woman’s smiling face and the wall of wire that frames her head, one close-up reveals the desperate, intense dark eyes of another, older inmate (Figure 14.5). The curators’ tactful, moving use of photographs and documentary material, along with the exhibition’s open organization, succeeded in generating an experience for the viewer that is equally aesthetic, emotional, cognitive, and critical, exemplifying a feminist and Levinasian curatorial approach. In the introduction to the catalog, the curators write: “It seemed important to us to tell the stories of these women starting from their faces, their expressions, their gazes—gazes in which the erasures and failures of memory that relegated them into silence and oblivion seem to be almost annulled.”23 Thus the exhibition inverts the logic of the panopticon and breaks open the walls of the institution and its archive, bringing us face to face with the inmates and their stories and identities. We look into their eyes by looking at their photographic portraits and reading their words and stories. This process assumes Levinasian connotations because it is a process that dialogically counters the logic of isolation, othering, and exclusion.24 From the viewpoint of the practice of curating, and as a traveling exhibition whose purpose was not art historical but rather pedagogical (in the best sense of this term), I fiori del male exemplifies a feminist, relational approach. This approach is even more significant when dealing with the question of how to meaningfully address and present to a contemporary audience the problematic history of Italian fascism and

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Figure  14.5  Page from: I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016), 12.

its cultural and social practices. In curating the exhibition, Valeriano and Di Sante in fact performed and produced an effective feminist reading and dramatization of the fascist asylum’s archive. Sybil Fisher notes that the word “curate” comes from the Latin word cura, and as a feminist Fisher wants to reinscribe an ethical concept of care in the fabric of curatorial practice: she raises the “the question of a specifically curatorial sense of care and responsibility for the ‘other’ in a relational, ethical sense,” pointing out that “the ethical interweaves in several ways with the political and the aesthetic.”25 Although she addresses specifically the curatorial practice of temporary art exhibitions, I believe her approach may be extended to historical and pedagogical exhibitions such as I fiori del male that also include an aesthetic, emotional, and dramatic dimension. At play in this exhibition is, more specifically, what Susan Best, inspired by the research of Ulrich Bauer, calls the “reparative aesthetics” of secondary witnessing.26 Best demonstrates that in works by contemporary artists

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such as the Australian Anne Ferran—who uses archival photographs hidden from public scrutiny to document forgotten Australian women’s histories of incarceration and forced labor—contemporary viewers are moved and positioned as secondary witnesses, as well as seekers of historical understanding.27 Although not trying to be artists, the curators of I fiori del male similarly drew on the asylum’s archives to create an exhibition that was not merely documentary; its caring, carefully drawn, and contextualized narrative montage of images and texts, with its simple use of space, color, and graphics, was designed to draw the spectators in as they walked through the exhibition and invite them to see and empathize with the inmates’ humanity and suffering, thus becoming both secondary witnesses and critics of the Fascist regime that placed the women there and took their photographs. Unlike the important photographic work done in asylums in Italy under the auspices of Franco and Franca Basaglia by artists such as Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo Gardin, which contributed to the movement that led to the Basaglia Law and the closing of asylums, the original photographs used in I fiori del male were taken by photographers who worked for the asylum itself. These images therefore lack the immediate, striking shock and horror of Cerati and Berengo Gardin’s work, which was first shown, in part, in the 1968 exhibition in Parma and Florence La violenza istituzionalizzata (Institutionalized Violence) and published in Morire di Classe (To Die Because of Your Class, 1969), which documented the unspeakable suffering of the inmates’ lives.28 The photographers themselves acknowledged how powerless the camera was to capture the horror of the inmates’ condition. And as John Foot has argued, that book may perhaps be faulted—paradoxically—for treating the patients portrayed therein as mere objects, mostly as evidence for the Basaglias’ argument against asylums articulated in the introduction.29 Ironically, the images in I fiori del male emerge as less limited and objectifying. While taking care not to identify the photographed patients by name in the panel labels, the curators juxtaposed group and individual photographic portraits of women and girls with excerpts from letters and diaries, in addition to case histories and medical notes from the archive, to bring to life the reality of their plight.30 The spectator is therefore able to fill in, imagine, and grasp the humanity of the inmates—to feel how behind each portrait, pair of eyes, and smile there is a real person who deserved to be cared for yet fell victim to the dehumanizing logic of the Italian totalitarian regime. Furthermore, the exhibition was structured and organized in such a way that the spectator was not just faced with a series of numbing images or stories of suffering. Instead, the overarching logic used by the regime to justify and rationalize the internment and isolation of each representative—and yet very real—woman and girl was clarified and exposed by the exhibition in simple but never reductive terms so that the visitor was able to understand and to critique it. Balancing historical documentation with the production of an aesthetic experience, powerful emotional identification, and deep critical reflection, I fiori del male exemplifies a curatorial approach informed by a feminist ethics of care. It shows how exhibition curators can contribute to a better, wider, and more discerning understanding of the complex, troubling, and enduring legacy of fascism.

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Notes 1

Social historian Annacarla Valeriano works in the University of Teramo’s Archivio della Memoria Abruzzese, and she has published two award-winning books on the Sant’Antonio Abate Asylum featured in this exhibition: Ammalò di testa: Storie del manicomio di Teramo (1880–1931) (Rome: Donzelli, 2014) and Malacarne: Donne e manicomio nell’Italia fascista (Rome: Donzelli, 2017). The latter constitutes the exhibition’s scholarly foundation. Historian Costantino Di Sante specializes in the history of internment and deportation in modern Italy. An expert in photodocumentary sources, he has curated photo-documentary exhibitions including I campi di concentramento in Italia: Dall’internamento alla deportazione 1940–1945, exh. cat. (Rome: Franco Angeli, 2002). I fiori del male traveled to the following sites: 2016: Teramo, Biblioteca Melchiorre Delfico; Rome, Casa della Memoria e della Storia. 2017: Bolzano, Liceo Giosué Carducci; Chieti, Liceo Classico G. B. Vico; Ascoli Piceno, Palazzo dei Capitani; Pescara, Circolo Aternino; Fano, Foyer del Teatro della Fortuna; L’Aquila, Ex Ospedale Psichiatrico di Collemaggio. 2018: Rimini, Palazzo del Podestà; Pineto (Teramo), Villa Filiani; Lanciano, Polo museale; Turin, Biblioteca civica Villa Amoretti; Florence, Università degli Studi; Termoli, Arcivescovado. 2018: Rovereto, Urban Center. 2019: Bologna, Complesso del Baraccano; Brindisi, Palazzo Nervegna. 2020: Merano, Museo delle Donne/Frauen Museum. 2 Valeriano, Malacarne, 54–7. The number of women interned in asylums increased exponentially under fascism: A new asylum opened in Reggio Calabria in 1932, which was presented by the regime as a great modern achievement. By 1941 ninetyfive thousand individuals were interned, mostly women. 3 I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista. Mostra fotodocumentaria, ed. Annacarla Valeriano and Costantino di Sante, exh. cat. (Acquaviva Picena: Tipografia Fast Edit, 2016). All images are reproduced from the catalog unless otherwise indicated. 4 Dating back to the fourteenth century, Teramo’s Sant’Antonio Abate was by the late nineteenth century among the largest asylums in south-central Italy, known as Manicomio Sant’Abate and, from 1931, under the regime, as Ospedale psichiatrico provinciale Sant’Antonio Abate. The asylum’s first director, who expanded and reorganized it in the fascist era, was Marco Levi Bianchini, then considered a leader in psychiatry. The complex, almost a “city within the city” is no longer in use, although a project for its use by the University of Teramo, including museum and exhibition spaces, is being planned. For a history of the process that led to the asylum’s closure in 1998, see https://www.manicomio.unite.it/ and https://www. ospedalepsichiatrico.it/ (both accessed April 27, 2022). 5 See Lucia Re, “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender,” in Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism, and Culture, ed. Robin PickeringIazzi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 76–99. For a broader historical account of women under fascism, see Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1944 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 6 Women who did not conform to the role of exemplary wife and mother were considered “anomalous” and labeled “Insane and moral imbeciles.” The exhibition documented that these included women considered inadequate mothers; rebellious and disobedient adolescents; “hysterics”; women who had abortions; lesbians;

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women who had sexual relations outside marriage; “erotic” women; women who left their husbands; women who wandered the streets and spent nights outside the home; women who refused their domestic duties or were lazy; women who disobeyed their father or husband; women who refused to marry; and women who were victims of rape. The Asylum abolished the rights of individuals for the sake of “public order” and difesa della razza (defense of race). Eugenics was central to its ideology. Lombrosian thought and categories included, for example, both the idea that the female brain is childlike and the “natural” biological and intellectual inferiority of woman. Experimental therapies included electroshock, inoculation of malaria, and high doses of insulin to induce coma. See Valeriano, Malacarne, 83–109. On eugenics in Fascist Italy, see Francesco Cassata, Molti, sani e forti: L’eugenetica in Italia (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006). 7 Most images and documents are from the archive of the Teramo asylum held by the Dipartimento di salute mentale Asl and Teramo’s Archivio di Stato. On the relationship between psychiatry and photographic exhibitions in modern Italy, and on the genre of “asylum photography,” see Maddalena Carli, “Testimonianze oculari: L’immagine fotografica e l’abolizione dell’istituzione manicomiale in Italia,” in “Spazi manicomiali del Novecento,” ed. M. Carli e V. Fiorino, Memoria e ricerca 47 (September–December 2014): 99–113. For a wider, comparative account of questions pertaining to exhibitions of asylum photography, see Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon, eds., Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collection and Display (London: Routledge, 2011). 8 An important point of reference in Valeriano’s books is Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995). On the structure and function of the panopticon, see “Panopticism,” in ibid., 195–228. 9 Valeriano, Malacarne, 103. 10 Ibid., 51. 11 Ibid., 103. 12 Mario Tobino, Le libere donne di Magliano (Milan: Mondadori, 1963), 14. Translation by the author. 13 Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997). 14 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 203: “The Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals.” 15 In Merano, in the Alto Adige region, the exhibition at the Women’s Museum was accompanied by a bilingual program of lectures, discussions, and documentary films in Italian and German. One lecture by Costantino Di Sante addressed the theme of the deportation of mentally ill patients from asylums in Italy to German concentration camps. 16 Valeria Castrucci, “Una mostra che ci riguarda tutte,” ZapRuder: Storie in movimento 42 (2017): 148. 17 Anita Picconi, “I fiori del male: donne chiuse in manicomio e dimenticate, Roma le ricorda,” 180 gradi, November 8, 2016, https://180gradi.org/cultura/anita-picconi/ifiori-del-male-donne-chiuse-in-manicomio-e-dimenticate-roma-le-ricorda (accessed April 27, 2022). 18 Castrucci, “Una mostra,” 148.

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19 Italy ranks sixty-third in the 2021 Global Gender Gap Report; see https://www. ingenere.it/ricerche/global-gender-gap-report-2021 (accessed April 27, 2022). Italy has some of the fewest women in the workforce of any developed economy, and less than half of working-age Italian women are employed according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The burden of domestic work, childcare, and care of the elderly is still disproportionately on women. Between 2007 and 2017, the percentage of women among Italy’s total murder victims has risen from 24 to 34 percent. 20 According to Valeriano (email message to the author, September 14, 2021), the reviewer objected to the exhibition’s “one-way view of history.” I was unable to track down this review, however: the newspaper, with Franco Storace as editor, ceased publications in 2018, although a new incarnation (with a different political orientation and editor) appeared in 2020. Storace is an example of the enduring legacy of fascism in Italy. Once a member of the neofascist Alleanza Nazionale party and now close to the right-wing parties Lega and Fratelli d’Italia, he was the president of the Lazio region. He is still active in journalism as assistant editor of Il Tempo and aimed, at the time of this writing, to become the new mayor of Rome. 21 Among the first exhibitions to look critically at the relationship of photography with mental illness was Nascita della ­fotografia psichiatrica, part of the Venice Biennale at Ca’ Corner della Regina, exh. cat. (Venice: Marsilio, 1981). 22 According to some, what was recorded by the camera may indeed have the power to restore to today’s viewer the humanity of the mentally ill in ways that a written text rarely can. See Barbara Brookes, “Pictures of People, Pictures of Places. Photography and the Asylum,” in Exhibiting Madness in Museums: Remembering Psychiatry through Collection and Display, ed. Catharine Coleborne and Dolly MacKinnon (London: Routledge: 2011) 30–47. 23 Valeriano and Di Sante, I fiori del male, 5. 24 Per David-Antoine Williams, “Tête-à-tête, face-à-face: Brodsky, Lévinas, and the Ethics of Poetry” Poetics Today 30, no. 2 (2009): 207–35, the Levinasian face is not necessarily one of the empirically available, or real human faces of everyday experience, though it embodies their most important aspects: expressiveness and uniqueness. 25 Sybil Fisher, “Curare: To care, to curate. A relational ethic of care in curatorial practice” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 2013, 5, https://etheses.whiterose. ac.uk/6867/ [accessed April 27, 2022]); and “Major Global Recurring Art Shows ‘Doing Feminist Work’: A Case Study of the 18th Biennale of Sydney: All Our Relations (2012)” in Curating Differently: Feminisms, Exhibitions and Curatorial Spaces, ed. Jessica Sjöholm Skrubbe (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishers, 2016), 129–40. 26 Susan Best, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (London: Bloomsbury, 2016). 27 Hal Foster identified an upsurge of art focusing on archives and historical and ethnographic photography in pursuit of a kind of “counter-memory” and seeking to retrieve and document neglected or marginalized experiences. See Hal Foster, “An Archival Impulse,” October 110 (2004): 3–22. 28 Photographers who took photographs of patients in mental institutions in Italy from the 1950s onward and exhibited them in shows devoted to the subject of mental illness and asylums include Mario Giacomelli, Luciano D’Alessandro, Carla Cerati, Gianni Berengo Gardin, Reymond Depardon, Gian Butturini, Paola Mattioli,

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Uliano Lucas, Paolo Pini, Paolo Lucignani, and Ferdinando Scianna. Exhibitions after the historic La violenza istituzionalizzata include Inventario di una psichiatria, Rome, Palazzo Braschi, May–July 1981 (catalog Inventario di una psichiatria, Milan: Electa, 1981) with photography from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s; Trieste dei manicomi, Trieste, 1998 (catalog Trieste dei manicomi: Antologia precaria di un cambiamento epocale – Diciannove fotografi raccontano, ed. Giuseppe Dell’Acqua e Annamaria Castellan, Trieste: Cultura Viva Editrice, 1998); Il volto della follia, Reggio Emilia and Correggio, November 2005–February 2006 (catalog Il volto della follia: Cent’anni di immagini del dolore, ed. Sandro Parmiggiani, Milan: Skira, 2005). This exhibition included historic mug shots and other photographs of patients taken in the nineteenth century by Emilio Poli in Reggio Emilia’s Manicomio di San Lazzaro. A documentary, trilingual exhibition curated in 2014 by the German Association of Psychiatry, the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, and Berlin’s Foundation Topography of Terror, Berlin, entitled Registered, Persecuted, Annihilated: The Sick and the Disabled under National Socialism, with a small section devoted to Italy curated by the Società Italiana di Psichiatria called “Patients, Asylums and Psychiatrists in Italy during Fascism and World War II,” was in Rome at the Vittoriano (Monument to Victor Emmanuel II) in 2017. This wide-ranging exhibition traveled to various Italian cities and sites in 2018 and 2019, tracing the history of psychiatry and mental institutions and their practices (including forced sterilization) under Nazism. Although not focused on patients and inmates of a specific institution, it did include photographs and life stories of individual victims in several German psychiatric hospitals and camps. Unlike I fiori del male, the full names of the patients and victims of Nazi persecution were not withheld, and their identities were documented along with those of the doctors. The small Italian section, however, had no images and no documentation pertaining to specific institutions and inmates and was devoted to the documentation of Italian psychiatrists’ nearly unanimous support of fascist and racist policies (although a handful of doctors did join the Resistance), and their collusion with the deportation of Jews from Italian institutions in northeastern Italy (Trieste, Venice, and Treviso) to Nazi concentration camps. ­29 John Foot, “Photography and Radical Psychiatry in Italy in the 1960s: The Case of the Photobook ‘Morire di Classe’ (1969),” History of Psychiatry 26, no. 1 (2015): 19–35; and David Forgacs, “Asylums” in Italy’s Margins: Social Exclusion and Nation Formation since 1861 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) 197–262. 30 Although not bound to do so by Italian law, which allows archival documents to be published after seventy years have elapsed, the curators chose for ethical reasons not to identify the patients by last name so as not to expose them or their families, for the texts often contain sensitive personal information regarding individuals’ mental health, sexual life, and family histories. On the ethics of using sensitive visual documents and photographic images of psychiatric patients in exhibitions, see Elizabeth Gagen, “Facing Madness: The Ethics of Exhibiting Sensitive Historical Photographs,” Journal of Historical Geography 71 (2021): 39–50.

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Silencing the Colonial Past: The 1993 Exhibition Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 in Bologna Nicola Labanca

Italians and Colonialism In 1989, after completing his celebrated six-volume study of Italian colonialism, Angelo Del Boca reflected on how the Italians had judged the history of national colonial expansion. His article, published in the last year of the Cold War and titled “The Consequences for Italy of the Missing Debate on Colonialism,” was important in registering the state of both public opinion and scholarly studies.1 On the former, Del Boca’s mood was partly engagé, engaged, partly disconsolate. The Italians of the Republic had not wanted to hear about their national colonial past, and when they referred to it, they continued to hide behind the mask of the “good Italian” (Italiani brava gente).2 On the latter, he observed that scholars working on the history of colonialism were very few, and those from different disciplines did not always read and talk to each other. Yet Italy had lost its colonies in 1943; there should have been enough time for a decolonization of both minds and studies. Del Boca knew that colonialism, of course, was not in itself fascism, even if fascist colonialism had such a heavy weight that the two terms seemed to many (although wrongly) to be synonyms. Today, thanks to a new generation of young scholars—historians, literary historians, art historians, postcolonial scholars, and the like—something has changed, at least at the level of national and international studies.3 Since the turn of the century, Italian public opinion also seems to be changing, if we consider the generally positive reaction to the news from America about the Black Lives Matter movement. Even so, this shifting attitude has been accompanied by the spread of a new racism connected to anti-migrant sentiment. How much, then, has really changed? When did this noticeable (if still insufficient) change in attitudes begin to take place? And why? Were art or historical exhibitions on colonialism significant in this change? In September 1993 the exhibition Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 (Italian architecture overseas) was held in Bologna.4 It opened in the large spaces of

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the municipal gallery of modern art four years after the fundamental article by Del Boca. Looking back, it seems that the exhibition wanted to reflect the same two levels of discourse mentioned in the article: public opinion and academic study. But can an art exhibition change the national narrative? What effects can it have if its main objective is not to impact public opinion but rather to remain inside the narrow confines of academic debate? How much were the curators of the exhibition aware of all this? Could intellectuals remain indifferent to questions of public memory and national narratives? How much did they feel the need to establish a multidisciplinary approach (not only art history, but history à part entière) in remembering colonialism?

­The Largest Exhibition The curators of Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 were Giuliano Gresleri (1938–2020; brother of the well-known architect Glauco, 1930–2016), Stefano Zagnoni (b. 1954), and Pier Giorgio Massaretti (b. 1955). The exhibition presented more than seven hundred artworks, documents, projects, urban plans, photographs, reproductions, and architectural models, all in the blinding whiteness of the Galleria d’arte moderna (GAM), today Museo d’arte moderna di Bologna (MamBO). It was the largest exhibition of colonial art and architecture since the collapse of the empire. It remains, to date, the largest “colonial” exhibition organized during the Republican, democratic, and (in theory) postcolonial Italy. However, it is a strangely forgotten exhibition, neither remembered nor discussed. Even in postcolonial studies this show is hardly ever mentioned5 (it was referenced only briefly, for example, in the colonial section of the Post Zang Tumb Tuuum catalog in 2018). Fascism occupied a large part of the 1993 Bologna exhibition. The contribution of architects and engineers to the colonialism of liberal Italy was remembered, but fascism held the center of attention. More than the architects’ fascism, or their treatment at the hands of the regime, it was the work of the architects that was on display. Five of the ten sections housed the largest number of pieces: the capitals of Libya (Tripoli and Benghazi), the cities of Italian East Africa, Addis Ababa, the settlers’ home in Africa Orientale Italiana (AOI), and the colonization of Libya. Significant attention went to the urbanization of the colonies: to their general urban planning, to great buildings by institutions, and to private home-building. Then came some consideration of the plans for military fortifications, colonization in AOI, explorers’ cartographies, orientalist painting and—something new at that time—comprehensive urban planning for Albania, the Aegean Islands, and Rhodes. The exhibition looked at the era of fascism—and, in general, at colonialism—as a time of modernization. Attention to the ventennio as a period of modernity and the founding of cities was not infrequent in histories of art and architecture in the 1970s and 1980s. Although dedicated to particular and peripheral places such as the African colonies, the exhibition lay in the wake of the 1976 show in Venice, Il razionalismo e l’architettura in Italia durante il fascismo (curated by Vittorio Gregotti, 1927–2020), which renewed study of that period’s architecture. The Venice exhibition  was  followed  by two others with insufficiently critical reappraisals of the

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fascist period: Gli annitrenta:  Arte e cultura in Italia (Milan, 1982) and L’economia italiana tra le due guerre 1919–1939 (Rome, 1984).6 Seen from the perspective of the history of exhibitions on Italian colonial architecture, the Bologna exhibition was and remains exceptional. It would be correct to say that it inaugurated the period of source-based studies and closed the one of oblivion, silence, and apology. It had no precedent in Italy. It was not based on a critical reflection of previous colonial exhibitions but rather on extraordinary research (for that time) in the archives of the major central public institutions of colonial Italy. The exhibition was organized by a small group that had worked together intensively in the previous eight years, carrying out their research first on a voluntary basis and then with a small university grant. The group was led by fifty-five-year-old Gresleri, a researcher at Bologna University. He was joined by thirty-nine-year-old Zagnoni, who had just finished his Ph.D., and thirty-eight-year-old Massaretti, who would finish three years later. A group of rather unproven academic power, their first exhibition proposal was made to the Milan Triennale, which rejected it. In Bologna, where Gresleri taught and where he had many contacts, the group received a small grant from the university and a major one from the local banking foundation. Fabio Alberto Roversi Monaco (b. 1938), then rector of Bologna University, sat on this foundation’s committees. He was personally interested in the colonial question, as he was born in Addis Ababa, remained close to former settlers’ circles, and contributed in 1968 to the lyrically nostalgic book Africa come un mattino.7 The rich catalog of Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 was published by Marsilio, a well-known publishing house in socialist circles. The whole exhibition probably only cost around 50,000 lire (roughly 26,000 euros). But the impression it gave to visitors was of a more expensive, imposing display. The difference was due in part to the free loans of the sources, perhaps considered of secondary artistic and economic value; the few captions and accompanying panels; and the extensive use of photographic reproductions. The message that the exhibition projected was of the artistic and historical importance of an exceptional output from architects and engineers in Italian colonial Africa. In particular, and correctly, much attention was paid to the period of fascism, which—although shorter than its liberal predecessor—had produced more in terms of public and private buildings. The exhibition underlined the coexistence of styles: the first buildings in the Moorish-Gothic-Academic style of the liberal phase, then the more monumental ones under the regime, sometimes in the purest and most thorough rationalist-modernist style. Apart from this coexistence, the exhibition’s central themes were the extensive overseas production and the relevance of rational architecture in marking the fascist period. The fact that even Le Corbusier was interested in the Addis Ababa master plan (and that Gresleri was one of the leading Italian scholars of the great Swiss-French urban planner) had an influence.8 Gresleri’s interests in some ways passed to his younger collaborators. Massaretti was interested above all in the fascist colonization of Libya and AOI, with their “città di fondazione” (planned towns). Zagnoni was more attracted to the colonization of Eritrea and its traditional towns changed by the Fascist empire’s urban planning.

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Today, after almost thirty years of research on the colonial architecture and urban planning of fascism,9 it is difficult not to see the Bologna exhibition as the field’s founding act. Many findings from the extensive research conducted by its curators are published in the rich exhibition catalog. About one-third are signed by Gresleri, another third by his collaborators, and the remaining third by other authors and archivists who assisted the Bolognese group in their research and in securing the necessary loans.10 In short, as a contribution to the history of Italian architecture and urban planning, the exhibition had and maintains considerable value.

H ­ istorians’ Doubts Seen from the side of historical studies, however, the exhibition did not leave everyone satisfied.11 Its chronological framework created certain ambiguities, as 1870 and 1940 are not logical dates in the colonial history of the Italian state. Arguably, the colonial project began in 1882 (with the purchase of the Assab Bay) or in 1885 (the landing in Massawa) and ended in 1943 (the abandonment of Tunisia) or 1960 (the end of the Italian trust administration of Somalia).12 Choosing 1870 as the start date could have its own specific value (putting aside the conquest of Rome) if the aim was to stress a certain continuity of pre-colonial and colonial action in the Italian (including Italian architects’) presence in Africa. The year 1870, which was not a date of political relevance in Italian colonialism, could mean that the actual Italian colonial expansion at the political, military, and economic levels did not count much more than the pre-colonial imaginaries, fantasies, dreams, or nightmares. In short, it could have pointed to the relevance of cultures and imaginaries in colonial expansion in general, and specifically in colonial architecture, building, and urban planning. Not by chance, the first section of the exhibition as well as the catalog were dedicated to a collection of paintings from the colonial age. In short, 1870 could point to a framework of cultural history. In all respects, the end date of 1940 was much more contentious. Choosing it seemed to imply that “peaceful” fascism could be isolated from its natural outcome in war: specifically, the fascist war of 1940–43. Was Italian colonial architecture to be understood without reference to its consequences? Ultimately, we might even consider that neither of the explanations hypothesized here was thought of by the curators. The two dates could also be simply approximate, indicative, and evocative. But this was not appreciated by historians, who took from the chronology a somewhat superficial relationship between the history of architecture and the history of colonial expansion in general. The category of “overseas architecture” also seemed designed to make historians uneasy. And not only them. A short and poisonous note from Casabella, Gregotti’s magazine, called the title “not explicit” and argued that an “adjective of historical compromise [overseas] was preferred to ‘colonial.’”13 Furthermore, the use of the singular architettura and not plural architetture was questionable. Yet the exhibition, and especially the essays in the catalog, showed

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that the organizers themselves recognized the existence of several colonial or “overseas” architectures: liberal and fascist; Moorish-Arabizing and rationalist; that of colonial administrative offices and that of (great) architects; that of “local” colonial architects and that of metropolitan professionals (more or less parachuted by the regime into the colony). Above all, there was the architecture desired by the government and the architecture hoped for by the (best) architects, to which the colonial power was frequently deaf (as portrayed by Gresleri and his collaborators). It was a pity, therefore, in our opinion, to lose in the title this plurality (and these uncertainties) in favor of a single alleged Italian architecture, which the exhibition itself proved nonexistent. Was this a result of its time—the period between the late 1980s and early 1990s—when, after the collapse of Cold War ideologies, many were looking for national identities or even nationalist pride? Regardless of whether it was compromise, self-censorship, or extreme moderation, choosing “oltremare” avoided the embarrassment of putting “colonial” or “fascist” on the front page. This made it no less difficult, however, to face the crucial questions of colonial imperialism and the totalitarian regime.14 Evidently there were widespread cautions and fears—perhaps exaggerated, given that it was, at the end of the day, just an exhibition of architectural history. But not all should be attributed to the curators alone. It was not easy (in the exhibition or the catalog) to critically discuss, and take a clear position on, the point of the purely colonial character of the institutes from which Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 borrowed the works on display. One of the organizers revealed to us that, at the last moment, the publishing house for the catalog exercised a small but significant form of control. In the last phrase of the foreword to the exhibition, the authors had wanted to define the colonial as an actuality as, far from having relegated to the past any intention of imposing civilizations, it “occupies such a prominent place in the bad conscience of the West.” However, the publishing house amended the text just before going to print—leaving the authors no choice but to accept— defining colonialism as an episode “which occupies a place of such importance in the culture of the West.”15 When the exhibition opened, Italy was engaged in military operations in Somalia and in the Balkans.16 In that year, 1993, much of the “old” colonial world was far from dead. The final emancipation of South Africa from the institutional racism of apartheid (the result of colonial oppression) and the return of Hong Kong to China—two events that have been seen by many to mark the end of historical European colonialism— had not yet taken place.17 It was in this national and international context, between colonialism and postcolonialism, that the most critical historians expected and required from the Bolognese exhibition a particular attention to the themes analyzed and even to the categories, chronologies, and languages used, avoiding ambiguous or compromising choices. The absence of contributions by well-known and critical historians (for instance, Del Boca or Rochat) as well as the categories and dates chosen by the curators sowed doubt among certain scholars visiting the exhibition.

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The Exhibition’s Aims What were the scholarly aims of Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940? With its many works collected over years of research, the exhibition in Bologna aimed to impress upon an ordinary visitor the vast production by Italian colonial architects, urban planners, and the Italian presence in the African colonies in general. But compared with other European powers, Italian colonialism had had a short life. Except for the very brief period following 1936 and the proclamation of the Fascist empire, it had always suffered from a scarcity of resources and a limited availability of capital. Libya, and for a few years Ethiopia, had hosted a relatively large number of Italian settlers, but the colonial community was for the most part one of “poor whites” (“petit blancs” has no Italian equivalent). How, then, was it possible for a poor colonialism and poor communities of settlers to generate beautiful, expensive, modernist buildings? How much did the exhibition reflect and how much did it create a reality? The exhibition, moreover, aimed at communicating not only an “amazement” for the greatness and the quality of this architectural presence but also an “admiration” of it. Cautiously, in some places, the catalog seemed not to immediately rush to historical judgments. Italian colonial architecture was portrayed as an unsolved case in the history of modern architecture (not only Italian, therefore) and which for years has been waiting to be contextualized. In other places, the prevailing feeling was that of the most evident admiration, and this admiration was communicated very well by the exhibition. Then there is a question which raised other doubts for historians visiting the exhibition. Reading the catalog revealed differentiated accents between the three organizers: different ages, different academic positions, and different interests or languages were all taken into account. That said, some differentiation remains evident today, albeit—one must repeat—within a common analysis. For his part, with his six contributions in the catalog, Giuliano Gresleri practically wrote a monograph on Italian colonial architecture. In his considered reflection, moderate and with no ideological impulses, he skillfully differentiated his analysis. On the whole, his interpretation was a reevaluation of Italian architects and engineers operating overseas, both under liberal Italy and under fascism. His pages were not lacking in points of considerable harshness toward that work: for instance, he criticized the fuzzy “improbable program” of an architecture that was both Italic and Mediterranean, classical, imperial, and autarchic. Quite rightly Gresleri distinguished the Italian actions between the different colonies and periods. About liberal Italy he disapproved of a “lack of addresses.” About the fascist ventennio he denounced a “confusion of plans” and did not hide the “demolition” of native and traditional urban structures. He criticized the desire for “destruction” rather than construction in AOI, a desire aimed at “total control” of the colonized. He also mocked the “monumental celebratory tendency” of so many buildings of the time, ultimately deprecating the final “racist revision” after the enactment of anti-indigenous racial laws. Overall, Gresleri drew a transition from liberal “modesty” to the fascist “explosion” in AOI: a

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path different from those taken by other European colonial powers, culminating in a racist delirium. But besides these arguments, consonant with the results of historical research in general, there were also other accents in Gresleri. They emerged in several ways, in the catalog as well as in the exhibition. In several pages he defined the action of Italian architects as “mediatory,” and in his judgment of the liberal period (especially toward Eritrea) he emphasized the architects’ “attention to the specific indigenous,” aimed at “coexisting with indigenous peoples.” The same periodization he suggested— “two great phases”: 1870–1930 and 1930–1943—ended up underestimating the discontinuities (in program if not in realization) of the rise of fascism with respect to liberal Italy. Moreover, in the same fascism he saw at work a “mediation between local [native] culture and the twentieth century.” The most alienating fascist interventions in AOI appeared to him to have a “metaphysical, de Chirico” style, while the Manifesto of the colonial architects of 1936 seemed to pave the way for a “modern imperial” Italian approach, while the invention of Mogadishu as a colonial city is outlined as having taken place “without lacerating dichotomies.” All these stylistic appreciations were dissonant statements with respect to the results of much historical research. It was then perhaps no coincidence that, having given quick and formal applause to the studies by Del Boca, Gresleri not only never quoted Rochat but cited as his very first reference the apologetic series of the Opera dell’Italia in Africa, characterized as an objective archive.18 Furthermore, one of the underlying general themes in the catalog and exhibition was that of an Africa characterized by the absence of the modern, European city— an Africa almost as a res nullius, an empty context on which colonial architects and urban planners could operate “free from conditioning.” Combined with this theme, there was the consideration of “the modern” as rationality (in fact as universal rationality), independent and distinct from local cultures. Left uninterrogated was the fact that in the Italian overseas this modern style and modern architecture took place during fascism, particularly during its most ideological and racist moment: the second half of the 1930s. From the catalog there are signs that this coincidence is perceived by Gresleri as a contradiction, even if it is not resolved in his pages. “It is impossible,” we read, “to escape the sense of majestic and composed balance” in some of these modern overseas buildings, which still today “take your breath away.”19 All this could raise some doubts among the community of the most critical historians. Without questioning aesthetic appreciation here, a terrain that does not belong to the historian, the researcher in history cannot help but wonder what function those buildings had, what other buildings they replaced, what effect of domination they wanted to translate and impose on the colonized, how much they cost, by whom they were inhabited, how many resources they stole from the native welfare, their mise en valeur, and so on.20 However, it is not just a question of differences in disciplinary approach but of interpretation as well. Within the same common reading, the essays collected in the catalog reveal certain perceptible nuances among the curators themselves. Zagnoni,

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for instance, exposed emphases and judgments that were different from those of his collaborators. Of the three curators, he was the only one explicitly starting his articles from the work of Del Boca. Like Gresleri, his judgment was based on the results of remarkable archival research. But Zagnoni, unlike Gresleri, did not hide the “authoritarian” character of the overseas colonial gesture, be it architectural, political, or economic. He did not ignore that colonial intervention was marked by the construction of an “alien entity” often erected “without knowledge”21 of local history and context, in the liberal era and especially the fascist era. The diversity of approaches (between historians of architecture and historians) and of interpretations emerged in a more accentuated way from the pages of Massaretti, the youngest of the three organizers. On the one hand, in his pages most linked to documentary research, Massaretti clearly revealed the double morality of architects who, in the archives, left critical reports on the colonial situation but forgot their doubts when writing publicly in the magazines of the regime, flattening themselves onto Mussolini’s rhetoric. Similarly, he effectively indicated that the Italian colonial adventure, since the liberal phase, was poor in capital. On the point of agrarian colonization, he did not hide that the “modern” homes designed by Italian colonial architects for the regime even at that time actually appeared small and “immediately insufficient” (a point not raised by Zagnoni). On the other hand, however, for Massaretti the protagonist of the agrarian colonization of the fascist period was at the same time “a soldier, a missionary, a settler,” in a “heroic clot” of “cameratesca coesione,” portrayed in the national “conciliatory habits” with respect to local populations.22 It was perhaps no coincidence that Massaretti preferred quoting, at the start of his pages, Teobaldo Filesi rather than Del Boca or Rochat.23 It is true that the ordinary visitor who looked at the panels of the exhibition might not have known in detail the intentions of the organizers, which instead clearly emerged, even in their nuances, to the expert visitor who read the entire catalog. On the other hand, it is certain that—in the choice of images, the enlargement of this or that photograph, or the display of the colorful reproductions of orientalist painters and their stereotypes (in a moment, it must be recognized, when the rehabilitation of these Italian painters, generally mediocre and very attached to public or private commissions, had not yet started)—those revivalist intentions, although not always explicit, somehow emerged. The Bologna exhibition was certainly the origin of a series of subsequent studies, and in this sense, it was pioneering. The research underlying the exhibition was remarkable. It was a (big) first step. It is striking, however, that on various points the previous work of some historians was not taken into consideration: this was a sign, in terms of cultural work, of a reduced capacity for interdisciplinary listening. It is also striking how the implicit message of this exhibition was that the Italian and fascist colonialism of the 1930s contained much for reevaluation. How much could this aesthetic appreciation distinguish itself from the well-known theses, circulating in public opinion, of the “good Italian people”? Because of its ambiguity on this crucial point, the exhibition raised questions for historians.

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Comparative Conclusions A month after the opening of the Bologna exhibition, in the prestigious Parisian venue of Les Invalides, the exhibition Images et colonies (1880–1920) was inaugurated. Its curators were Nicolas Bancel, Pascal Blanchard, and Laurent Gervereau, founders of that extraordinary crucible of engaged and largely non-university historians called Achac (Association pour la connaissance de l’histoire de l’Afrique contemporaine). In France the Parisian exhibition, exceptionally documented and timely, opened, or at least strengthened, an important public and radical debate on the French national colonial past—a debate that the press covered thoroughly. Ignited by Images et colonies (1880–1920), this debate seized not only the academic but also the public discourse in France. The press reviews of Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 show that a similar debate was not ignited in Italy, even if it was desired, possible, and needed. The reaction of the Italian press to the exhibition highlighted a much more backward national public opinion than in other countries, still clinging to the many colonial stereotypes that Del Boca (and other historians) had highlighted. However, a comparison of the Bologna exhibition with Images et colonies (1880–1920) or with other “colonial” exhibitions in Europe—from The Raj: India and the British, 1600–1947 (at the National Portrait Gallery, London, October 1990–March 1991) up to Deutscher Kolonialismus: Fragmentes einer Geschichte und Gegenwart (at the Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, October 2016–May 2017)—would have been merciless. Not only had these exhibitions been presented without any ambiguity regarding the irrespective colonial pasts, but from the beginning they were conceived to meet a larger national audience and were based upon a scholarly cooperation beyond the traditional academic disciplinary fences. In Italy, however, such studies were still at an early stage—and not only on the issues of colonial architecture, which were only just beginning. In terms of multidisciplinary cooperation, much still needed to be done. Furthermore, at the level of national cultural institutions, the comparison was significant. In the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, these exhibitions were organized at the center of the country, in their capitals, by great artistic-cultural institutions: whether they were highly disputatious such as that of the Achac in Paris, moderately critical such as in London, or institutional such as in Berlin, they always took place in major national and state institutions. In Italy, Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 took place in the important but regional city of Bologna, in a municipal art gallery, thanks to the work of a small academic group, which gave the Italian exhibition an academic slant. (After 1993, both Florence and Rome attempted to organize an Italian Images et colonies-like exhibition, albeit without success for many reasons). It was not by chance that Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 failed to contribute as much as it should and could have to the decolonization of the Italian mind. Apart from political and institutional reasons, perhaps, something of the perceptive frames inspiring Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 did have an influence. The echoes of the image of the “good Italian people” circulating again, in the exhibition

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and in its catalog, had their importance. That old myth was pervasive in the reception of the exhibition, both in the daily and weekly Italian press and, therefore, at the level of public opinion. But a greater clarity at the academic level on the side of the curators and the exhibition would perhaps have made it more difficult to revive, if not prevented its return at the level of public opinion. An explicit distancing from some of the oldest myths24 would have reduced the prevalence in the press of descriptions of Italian colonial architects as Italiani brava gente. Perhaps it could have stimulated the debate on the Italian colonial past which historians, with their research, had opened. What the exhibition did not accomplish was done, in part, by politics and history. It took the controversy over the delayed return of the Axum obelisk to Adowa, and even more strongly the reactions to research on the use of gas in the Ethiopian War, to turn Italian public opinion.25 It was these events, and not Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940, that established important elements for the national debate on the Italian national past. It is a debate which in Italy has yet to take off.26 In its absence the colonial past is silenced, if no longer exalted.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9

Angelo Del Boca, “Le conseguenze per l’Italia del mancato dibattito sul colonialismo,” Studi piacentini 5 (1989): 115–28. Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1976–84); Angelo Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1986–88); Angelo Del Boca, L’Africa nella coscienza degli italiani (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1992); and Angelo Del Boca, Italiani, brava gente? (Vicenza: Neri Pozza, 2005). See Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, “The Italian Postcolonial: A Manifesto,” Italian Studies 69, no. 3 (2014): 425–33; and Kay Bea Jones and Stephanie Pilat, eds., The Routledge Companion to Italian Fascist Architecture: Reception and Legacy (New York: Routledge, 2020). Giuliano Gresleri, Pier Giorgio Massaretti, and Stefano Zagnoni, eds., Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 (Venice: Marsilio, 1993). See, for instance, Cristina Lombardi-Diop and Caterina Romeo, eds., L’Italia postcoloniale (Florence and Milan: Le Monnier-Mondadori, 2014); Caterina Romeo, Riscrivere la nazione: la letteratura italiana postcoloniale (Milan: Le Monnier università-Mondadori education, 2018); and Teresa Fiore, Spazi pre-occupati: una rimappatura delle migrazioni transnazionali e delle eredità coloniali italiane (Florence: Le Monnier Università, 2021). See Tim Mason, “Il fascismo ‘Made in Italy’: Mostra sull’economìa italiana tra le due guerre,” Italia contemporanea 158 (1985): 5–32. Fabio Roversi Monaco, ed., Africa come un mattino (Bologna: Tamari, 1969). Le Corbusier, Arte decorativa e design, preface by Giuliano Gresleri and Jose Oubrerie (Bari: Laterza, 1972); and Le Corbusier, La casa degli uomini, ed. Giuliano Gresleri (Milan: Jaca, 1985). At the very beginning, only Paolo Sica, “L’azione del fascismo nelle colonie,” in Paolo Sica, Storia dell’Urbanistica, Il Novecento (Bari: LaterzaLa, 1981), 493–519. See also Maria Adriana Giusti and Ezio Godoli, eds., L’orientalismo nell’architettura

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13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23

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italiana tra Ottocento e Novecento (Florence: M&M, 1999); Krystyna von Henneberg, “Monuments, Public Space, and the Memory of Empire In Modern Italy,” History and Memory 16, no. 1(2004): 37–85; Brian L. McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2006); Mia Fuller, Moderns Abroad: Architecture, Cities and Italian Imperialism (London: Routledge, 2007); Vittoria Capresi, L’utopia costruita: I centri rurali di fondazione in Libia (1934–1940) (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2009); and Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Modernity Is Just Over There: Colonialism and Italian National Identity,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 3 (2006): 380–93. Other contributors to Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 were Claudio Cerreti, Cristina Delvecchio, Ornella Sangiovanni, Giovanna Rosselli, Fabrizio I. Apollonio, Marida Talamona, Francesca Zanella, and Lucio Scardino. The exhibition did not attract major reviews in scientific history journals. This silence, which was not due to distraction, was more eloquent than any review. See Giorgio Rochat, Il colonialismo italiano: Documenti (Turin: Loescher, 1973); Del Boca, Gli italiani in Africa Orientale; Del Boca, Gli italiani in Libia; and Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell’espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002). “Architettura coloniale,” Casabella 606 (1996): 32. Enzo Collotti, Fascismo, fascismi (Florence: Sansoni, 1989); and Emilio Gentile, La via italiana al totalitarismo: Il partito e lo Stato nel regime fascista (Rome: La nuova Italia scientifica, 1995). Gresleri, Massaretti, and Zagnoni, foreword to Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870– 1940. I thank Massaretti and Zagnoni as well for two rich interviews. In particular I thank Zagnoni for making me read the exhibition’s exceptionally useful press reviews (rassegna stampa) and for revealing this particular fact about the catalog’s foreword. Nicola Labanca, ed., Le armi della Repubblica: dalla Liberazione ad oggi, vol. 5 of Mario Isnenghi, ed., Gli Italiani in Guerra: Conflitti, identità, memorie dal Risorgimento ai nostri giorni (Turin: Utet, 2009). Among others, see Raymond F. Betts, La decolonizzazione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003); or Dane Kennedy, Storia della decolonizzazione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2017). Comitato per la documentazione dell’opera dell’Italia in Africa, L’Italia in Africa (Rome: Ministero degli affari esteri, 1955–81). See Gresleri’s essays in the exhibition catalog: “L’architettura dell’Italia d’oltremare: realtà, finzione, immaginario”; “1936–40: programma e strategia delle ‘città imperiali’”; “La ‘Nuova Roma dello Scioa’ e l’improbabile architettura dell’impero”; and “Mogadiscio e ‘il paese dei Somali’: una identità negata.” Emilio Gentile, Fascismo di pietra (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2007). See Zagnoni’s essays in the exhibition catalog: “Abitare l’altopiano: La casa coloniale per l’Africa orientale”; “L’ attività dell’Incis: Le case degli ‘uomini bianchi’”; and “L’ Eritrea delle piccole città: 1897–1936.” See Massaretti’s essays in the exhibition catalog: “La colonizzazione agraria in Africa orientale italiana”; and “Armando Maugini in Africa: le esplorazioni fotografiche e l’‘edificazione della terra.’” See for instance Teobaldo Filesi, “L’architettura e l’urbanistica come arti del potere: le nostre città coloniali e le città di fondazione dell’agro pontino espressioni emblematiche degli anni trenta,” Africa 53, no. 3 (1998): 417–28.

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24 Emilio Distretti and Alessandro Petti, “The Afterlife of Fascist Colonial Architecture: A Critical Manifesto,” Future Anterior 16, no. 2 (2019): 46–58. See also David Harvey, “Heritage Pasts and Heritage Presents: Temporality, Meaning, and the Scope of Heritage Studies,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 319–38. See the workshop Difficult Heritages: Monuments, Memories, Conflicts, ed. Francesco Cassata, Guri Schwarz, and Paola Valenti, March 2021, with contributions by Flaminia Bartolini and Mia Fuller, among others, whose proceeding will surely be important. 25 Massimiliano Santi, La stele di Axum da bottino di guerra a patrimonio dell’umanità: Una storia italiana, foreword by Angelo Del Boca (Milan and Udine: Mimesis, 2014); Angelo Del Boca, I gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1996); and Nicola Labanca, “Il passato coloniale come storia contemporanea,” foreword to Angelo Del Boca, I gas di Mussolini: Il fascismo e la guerra d’Etiopia, 2nd edn. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2007), 7–26. 26 For a recent episode, see the Italian debate following Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?” New Yorker, October 5, 2017. See also the proceedings of the workshop Difficult Heritages: Monuments, Memories, Conflicts.

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Recharting Landscapes in the Exhibition Roma Negata: Postcolonial Routes of the City (2014) and the Digital Project Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage Shelleen Greene

In this essay, I examine Roma Negata: Postcolonial Routes of the City, a 2014 exhibition organized by photojournalist Rino Bianchi and writer and activist Igiaba Scego, and Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage, a 2018 digital project that reframes Italian colonial histories by way of the creation of digital public archives. Roma Negata is a photography series featuring Italians of African descent in locations throughout Rome. In the exhibition catalog, the photographs are contextualized within a series of essays by Scego, which describe her encounters with the submerged history of Italian colonialism by way of passages through the city, intertwined with a ranging historical survey of liberal- and fascist-era colonialism and its legacies in the present moment. As scholar Laura Sarnelli writes, “The bodies photographed in Bianchi’s pictures become foundational to their project of discovery of the city, which involves reconfiguring the metropolitan stratification of Rome against the grain of dominant historiography, thus bringing to light subaltern views and forgotten traumas, like traces in a palimpsest” (Figure 16.1).1 Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage can be considered as part of what historian Serge Noiret calls a “digital turn” in public history, providing both a new visualization and broader dissemination of and access to Italian colonial histories as embedded within urban geographies, monuments, and institutions.2 Looking at both exhibitions together, I am primarily interested in the respective interventions that incorporate the histories of people of African descent in Italy, allowing not only for greater visibility but also for revised histories of the African presence in the country. We are well aware of the historical amnesia surrounding Italian colonialism, and these projects attempt to disrupt this willful forgetting by recharting landscapes and unsettling geographies that are traced with colonial histories and are present in our most quotidian passages. I suggest that these projects—one based on photography and semi-autobiographical writing, and the other, digitally born—both

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Figure 16.1  Rome, November 25, 2013. Somali Migrant Safia Omar Mamoud photographed on the Amedeo D’Aosta Bridge. Photo: Rino Bianchi, courtesy of the photographer.

enact decolonial interventions not only by exhibiting Italian colonial histories which counter dominant narratives that obscure the ongoing legacies of Italian fascism, but also by soliciting affective and embodied engagements with history through a participatory, collaborative reengagement with archival materials, urban geographies, and the museum institution.

­A Denied Rome: Embodied Postcolonial Memory Scego and Bianchi’s collaboration emerged from the intertwining of their ongoing projects to reveal the suppressed histories of Italian colonialism. In 2013, Bianchi began a photo series entitled Paesaggi della memoria (Landscapes of Memory), a visual documentation of sites and monuments erected between 1914 and 1945, a period that corresponds with the rise and fall of the Italian Fascist regime.3 Photographs from this larger project were later incorporated into what became Paesaggi della memoria – Roma Negata: percorsi postcoloniali nella città, an exhibition and catalog that brought together Bianchi’s images and Scego’s text. The exhibition traveled to various galleries and museums throughout Italy, including the Museo dell’Agro Pontino (Pontinia, Lazio) and the Antropomorpha Fotografia (Rome), for which the photographs were installed alongside Scego’s reflections (Figure  16.2). One review speaks of the exhibition’s capacity to generate critical conversations on Italy’s colonial legacies: “The result is a narrative and visual construction of a decolonized, multicultural, inclusive Italy, where every citizen can finally be themselves.”4 Scego is a Somali-Italian novelist,

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Figure  16.2 Pontinia, July 26, 2014. Exhibition Paesaggi della memoria. Roma negata. percorsi postcoloniali nella città, Museo dell’Agro Pontino (MAP), in Pontinia, one of the cities built during the fascist ventennio.

journalist, and activist who was born in Rome after her parents fled the 1969 coup d’état in Somalia led by the then military general and later dictator Siad Barre.5 Scego has published numerous short stories, critical essays, articles, and novels, including La nomade che amava Alfred Hitchcock (2003), La mia casa e dove sono (2010), and her recent La linea del colore (2020). In her works Scego approaches the legacies of Italian colonialism in terms of migrant and second-generation Italians who navigate multiple cultural identities. As Letizia Modena argues, in her previous works and Roma Negata “[Scego’s] narrative functions as a bracing corrective to official accounts of African colonialism and offers a counter discourse that embodies the hybridities of citizenship and belonging from a distinctly female and Somalian perspective.”6 In the first essay in the catalog for Roma Negata, “I begin to walk,” Scego describes her journey to the Piazzale di Porta Capena, the location of Rome’s 9/11 monument. Although the positionality and gaze of the photographed subjects are of primary significance in this exhibition, Scego’s text conveys a kind of phenomenological journey throughout the city and provides a lived experience of the urban landscape that enhances the collection of photographs. The quotidian elements of the city—the city traffic, the commuters, the tourists—form a massive sensory system as she makes her way through the streets. She describes the sensation of pain in her feet as she walks, determined to reach her destination. At Porta Capena, Scego notes the memorial, the repurposed columns, but also “perceives an absence, a great absence.”7 Scego reminds us that Porta Capena was also the site where the Obelisk of Axum, which was stolen in 1937 after the end of the Italian-Ethiopian War (1935–1936), was erected in Rome.

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In defiance of a 1947 United Nations treaty and years of calls for its repatriation, the obelisk remained in Porta Capena for over sixty years until it was finally returned to Ethiopia in 2005.8 Scego’s description brings attention to the ironies of the present memorial, which includes a dedication, taken from Spanish-American poet and philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”9 The dispossession and violence of Italian colonialism is an obscured but embodied presence, as Scego writes: “I felt so confused. I floated among my thoughts.”10 As Sarnelli argues: “In Scego’s narratives, places and monuments play an important role, as they are considered as not simply backgrounds crystallized in silent simulacra, but rather as living entities participating in a precarious contemporaneity that hangs over in a ‘present imperfect’ temporality, a time in between a past that still lingers in the present.”11 Scego’s work can also be read as the creation of what theorist Katherine McKittrick calls the “demonic ground,” a Black feminist approach to the remapping of geographies.12 As critical geographers Camilla Hawthorne and Brittany Meché have written: “Geography, much like its cousin anthropology, was born from European colonial expansion … and was fundamental to the articulation of Enlightenment scientific racisms.”13 For McKittrick, black women have a particular relation to geography, one that “opens up a conceptual arena through which more humanly workable geographies can be and are imagined.”14 Scego’s bodily encounter with the urban environment and the history of Italian colonialism resonates with McKittrick’s argument that black women participate in “social processes that make geography a racial-sexual terrain” and further, “black women’s lives and experiences become especially visible through these concepts and moments because they clarify that blackness is integral to the production of space.”15 In this instance, African descent peoples who have been marginalized in the history of the nation can remap and reimagine space. McKittrick continues: “That black lives are necessarily geographic, but also struggle with discourses that erase and despatialized their sense of place, is where I begin to conceptualize geography.”16 Throughout Roma Negata, Scego undertakes this meaningful work of remapping the territory and thereby revealing the hidden story of Italian colonialism in order to make a more just and equitable present and future. Scego’s Rome is one of contradictions, ironies, and secrets—a city for which she holds great admiration, but one that also hides the violent history of Italy’s colonial past, a history etched upon the cityscape as well as in the most banal and ostensibly “innocent” encounters. Roma Negata maps what Sarnelli calls “relational and transformative affective routes—emotional journeys in the mystified memory of Italian colonialism.”17 At one point in the first essay, Scego meets a woman from the Marche region who raises the myth of the Italiani brava gente (“good Italian people”). Confronted, even trapped by the pervasiveness of this myth, Scego listens as the woman speaks of the “schools, bridges, hospitals and streets” that the Italians provided their colonies and after, proceeds to sing “Banane gialle” (“Yellow bananas,” 1934), a fascist-era song that along with the marching song “Faccetta nera” (“Little black face,” 1935) puts forth colonial conquest through the fetishization and possession of the black female body.18 This encounter also constitutes what critical geographer Heather

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Merrill terms “unarchived everyday violence,” or “affective experiences” of anti-Black racism that emerge in unexpected and ordinary ways.19 Scego’s response is once again visceral (“I wanted to scream”), but also returns us to the photograph—this time to the private images found in family collections that documented the colonial endeavor. The photograph within the colonial archive is presented as a complex artifact, possessed by a friend who feels shame in her family’s participation in Italian fascist colonialism. The photograph is of a fifteen-year-old girl, referred to only as “Kibra” in a handwritten note by the friend’s grandfather, who was stationed in Bengasi, as his “first conquest and passion.”20 As Giulia Barrera has written, the relationships between Italian men and indigenous women were often established under the system of madamismo, in which African women would provide household services and enter conjugal relationships with Italian men.21 The photograph documents the exploitative nature of these relationships, in which young girls were forced to serve as madame. Scego writes that she “turned F’s photo in her hand,” thus conveying what visual theorist Tina Campt has called the “haptic dimension” of the photograph.22 Scego’s encounter with the photograph, at once an item passed down from a beloved grandfather, but one that also documents colonial trauma, turns to a consideration of the subject, the young girl, whom she reads as defiant—someone who, despite the exploitative circumstances, asserts a modicum of agency in her encounter with the colonizer. Scego writes: The girl’s gaze was a mixture of shame and anger. However, at the base of her pupils was a visible flash of defiance. “I exist and I am not an inferior to anyone” she seemed to say, this little girl from Elfoihut.23

Scego’s act of reading against the violence of the photograph and locating another perspective in Kibra’s gaze can also be found in her reading against the narrative of brava gente that takes place throughout the text of Roma Negata. Refusing to remain within a narrative of denial, Scego moves between the lived experience of racism and a ranging passage through Italian colonial history. The encounter with the woman from the Marche region opens up a reflection upon how history is written, the processes of forgetting, and the necessary act of remembering. With the rise of neo-fascism in Italy and throughout Europe in recent years and the murders of African migrants and Italians of African descent, Scego’s text returns to the urgency of the present moment—a present that is a legacy of a fascist colonial past that remains submerged. Scego’s text acknowledges that this history must be recognized on multiple registers, writing: “I am a daughter of the Horn of Africa and a daughter of Italy. If I was born here, I owe it to this story of pain, passage and contamination. No, I can’t forget this history. I don’t want to forget it. Perhaps, for this reason, in my own way, I’m telling it. Perhaps, this is why I walk.”24 This embodied encounter with urban space and colonial history is reinforced by Bianchi’s photographs. In one image, Ruth Gebresus, a visual-art educator based in Rome, is standing before the Cinema Impero in Tor Pignattara, the movie palace first built in 1936 under the Fascist regime, closed in 1983, and later repurposed

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as an immigrant refuge and future site of community education and engagement (Figure  16.3).25 Gebresus is centered in the low-angle photograph, looking directly at the camera, with the stark, rationalist architecture of the cinema looming above and the words “Cinema Impero” cascading down the facade. The image captures the past of this structure, built under Mussolini’s reign, but also the transformation of space undertaken through the work of the migrant communities of the area. A similar Cinema Impero was erected in Asmara in 1937, a testament to the cinema as the “strongest arm” of the empire, but also to the “common history” shared by Italy and Eritrea.26 This complex legacy is captured in Scego’s narrative, which begins with a personal reflection on her cinematic experience watching director Ernst Marischka’s Sissi trilogy. The films, based on the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (performed by Romy Schneider), were an early influence on Scego’s life because they defied feminine gender stereotypes, offering instead a vision of freedom and independence. However, Scego notes that although she was “adorable,” Empress Sissi was also a “colonizer.”27 Scego recognizes the power of the cinema to create identification, but also, from her own position, enacts what theorist bell hooks describes as an “oppositional gaze” in which a “critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking.”28 Thus, while the experience of watching Sissi brings childhood nostalgia,

Figure  16.3 Rome, November 14, 2013. Ruth Gebresus photographed in front of the Cinema Impero. Gebresus teaches art, education, and reading, and designs and conducts workshops on the teaching of the experimental visual languages of Bruno Munari and the experimental linguistics of Gianni Rodari. Photo: Rino Bianchi, courtesy of the photographer.

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Scego is able to mitigate this affective response with her knowledge of the history of the Cinema Impero, the imperialist undertones of the costume period drama, and her own family’s experience of exile in Italy. The Cinema Impero leads Scego to a series of reflections on contemporary Italy, including the October 3, 2013 tragedy off the coast of Lampedusa in which 369 people drowned in an attempt to reach Italian shores. The tragedy brings together the Cinema Impero in Tor Pignattara, the twin edifice in Asmara, and the fascist legacy as reflected in the deaths of hundreds of Eritreans fleeing the dictatorship of Isaias Afewerki.29 Scego notes the irony of the media response to the tragedy in the midst of an ever more militarized southern border through the “Mare Nostrum” operation, which she ties to both ancient Rome and to Mussolini’s imperial ambitions. A further damning irony linked to the Cinema Impero is its use as a temporary encampment for Eritrean refugees who received little to no aid from the Italian government. Today, the work of remembering is taken up by the communities living in Tor Pignattara, once a destination for internal migrants and now home to migrant communities from Bangladesh and Eritrea. Scego comments that there may be “the possibility of returning the Empire to its inhabitants, to the citizens of the neighborhood” and for Tor Pignattara to serve as a “place for children, for coexistence, the future.”30 Through the remembrance of the October 3 tragedy, Tor Pignattara becomes the site for coalition through solidarity among various communities that look toward a more inclusive future. In one of Bianchi’s photographs, Ethiopian-Italian artist and activist Aster Carpanelli stands in front of the Stele di Dogali, confidently assuming her place before the monument dedicated to Italian soldiers who died at the 1887 Battle of Dogali in Eritrea (Figure  16.4). Carpanelli’s stance speaks to a counter-reading of the event, one which claims a victory for the Eritrean people rather than a defeat for the Italian colonizers. Once again, Bianchi foregrounds the role of black women in this rewriting of the history of Italian colonialism. As Sarnelli argues, Bianchi’s photographs “[unveil] the gender-race dynamics operating during colonialism that still linger in different ways in contemporary everyday practices.”31 As demonstrated in Scego’s interpretation of Kibra’s image, in Bianchi’s photographs black women “talk back” to the dominant narrative of Italian colonialism. Dogali was a turning point in Italy’s colonial ambitions in the late nineteenth century, with the defeat spurring the newly formed nation toward revenge through further campaigns in Eritrea and Ethiopia, and eventually leading to the devastating Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. For Scego there is a clear line from Dogali and Adwa to the fascist East African campaign, one that speaks of lost military honor and the desire to “restore” national pride. This restoration of the patriarchal order included the sexual denigration of African women in songs such as “Faccetta nera,” “Adua,” and “Africanina.”32 Carpanelli’s photograph—along with those of Zahra Omar Mohamed at Viale Somalia, Tezeta Abraham at the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, and Sofia Mohamud at the Ponte Principe Amedeo di Savoia-Aosta—offers another image of African women, one that speaks to their role in anti-colonial struggle and that counters, as Sarnelli writes, “existing stereotypical representations of black women in Italy [dating] back to Italian imperial propaganda that publicized deceptive ideological discourses aimed to legitimize the colonial enterprise.”33 In her narrative Scego describes the Dogali monument today, located in a busy and dilapidated urban area

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Figure  16.4  Rome, July 20, 2014. The Stele di Dogali, erected as a memorial to the 584 fallen soldiers in the Battle of Dogali during the First Italo-Ethiopian War of 1887–89. Photo: Rino Bianchi, courtesy of the photographer.

in which many people pass it without noting its history. She writes that despite itself, this monument has become a “postcolonial space” one that is occupied by “Somalis, Eritreans, Ethiopians and so many other migrants.”34 The intertwined histories of Italy, its former colonies, and its current multiracial society are also found in Bianchi’s photograph of a group of political refugees standing in front of the Vittoriano (Victor Emmanuel II National Monument). The refugees appear looking down at the camera with the monument casting a shadow over them. Bianchi’s photograph brings to the fore the tensions of an Italian national heritage that obscures its colonial histories and refuses to fully acknowledge its legacies. This incomplete reckoning with the past is made evident in Scego’s narrative concerning the

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2004 exhibition L’epopea degli Ascari Eritrei, Volontari Eritrei nelle forze armate italiane 1889–1941 staged at the Vittoriano. The ascari were African soldiers, many from Eritrea and Somalia, who served in the Italian military during colonial campaigns.35 While in the Italian national narrative the ascari were “the perfectly colonized figure: loyal, faithful to the point of extreme sacrifice,” in reality, the ascari were often coerced into service for the Italians and made to fight against other colonized African peoples. Scego notes that the exhibition refused to critically assess the figure of the ascaro in a period of heightened tensions between Ethiopia and Eritrea stemming from the Eritrean-Ethiopian War begun in 1998.36 While Roma Negata was installed within museums and galleries, the project demonstrates a critical awareness of the institution’s role in producing and disseminating knowledge about Italian colonialism. Unlike The Age of the Eritrean Ascari, Roma Negata foregrounds the connections between fascist Italian colonialism and the present geopolitical moment characterized by the rise of neofascism and anti-immigration sentiment. These farce memorials are the subject of Scego’s final narrative, which begins with the controversy surrounding the memorial to Rodolfo Graziani, the Minister of National Defense of the Italian Social Republic and the person responsible for war atrocities in Libya and Ethiopia, including the use of poison gas during the Ethiopian campaign in 1935–36.37 In 2012 the mayor of Affile, a town close to where Graziani was born, decided to use public funds to erect a mausoleum to the war criminal. The memorial was met with great public outcry and became a sounding moment for antifacist activism in Italy. Scego herself traveled to Affile on April 25, 2013, to take part in the celebrations of Italy’s liberation from fascism. Unlike the opening chapter, here Scego no longer walks alone but in solidarity with others protesting neofascism.38 The scene described is one of beauty and peace, but it is tainted by the presence of Graziani’s mausoleum. Although these remnants of fascism remain, Scego finds hope in activists such as Matteo Lollobrigida, who, speaking of those who lost their lives to the fascists, has “in his glance the spark of fighters for a just cause.”39 Scego ends by stating that “Affile may be saved.” In her conclusion Scego attends to the act of memorializing and the ways in which Italy’s colonial memory can be used as an instructional tool, educating the population about the nation’s colonial legacies in the present and for the future. The original concept for the concluding images of the exhibition was to photograph asylum seekers from the various former colonies on the balcony of Palazzo Venezia, where Mussolini proclaimed the Italian East African empire.40 While the photo at the Palazzo Venezia was abandoned, Bianchi creates photographs that subvert the operations of the museum institution, such as images of the actor Jonis Bascir at the former African Museum at via Ulisse Aldrovandi and Somali-Italian actor and activist Amin Nour at the Piazza dei Cinquecento at Rome’s Termini Station (Figure 16.5).41 These photographs speak once again to the intermingling of past and present, with the presence of Italians of African descent marking the transformation of these institutions from ones that perpetuated racist ideologies to the possibility of a new knowledge production that attends to the lived realities of Italy’s now multicultural society. Bianchi and Scego begin to imagine a future archive and a museum, founded through the collective efforts of not only Italians but also peoples from the former colonies, thereby allowing Rome to “finally become postcolonial Rome.”42

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Figure 16.5  Rome, October 31, 2013. Amin Nour, Somali-Italian actor, photographed at the Termini station. Photo: Rino Bianchi, courtesy of the photographer.

­Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage While Roma Negata places emphasis on the transformative potential of the photograph, Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage is a “digital public history project” that uses digital mapping technologies to explore sites that hold colonial memory in various cities throughout Italy, including Florence, Rome, Turin, Bolzano, and Venice. Begun in 2018 and led by Daphné Budasz, Ph.D., a researcher at the Department of History and Civilization of the European University Institute in Florence; Markus Wurzer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology; and a collaborative group of scholars based in Italy and the United States, Postcolonial Italy captures and documents “material traces that are visible in public space and, thus, stimulates a public debate on Italy’s silenced colonial history.”43 Budasz writes of the inauguration of the project: “It all began in late 2018, the day [my] historian colleague Markus made me notice that some places in Florence seemed to be linked to [the] Italian colonial past. … This is how the idea of marking physical locations on a digital map, which would be available online and accessible to a large audience, emerged for us.”44 As Noiret writes: “Digital public history is about organizing the relationship between Internet technologies and history via social media and Web projects. It has contributed in this way to making ‘high culture’ accessible to different publics and, in the best cases, already filtered by professional and public historians or through shared authority practices in a participatory fashion and engaging with specific communities

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or with the public at large.”45 For instance, the Postcolonial Italy site includes a “How to Contribute” section in which users can add both images and narratives (up to 2,000 characters) using parameters provided by the project coordinators. Noiret refers to these interventions as a form of crowdsourcing, where “the collective management and collection of important digital sources … constitute explicit interactive practice of digital public history in the participatory Web era.”46 Uncovering Italian Colonial Pasts: Florence, a project sponsored by Black History Month Florence, includes a walking tour of Florence, accessible via smartphone, which also includes an audio narrative of the various locations, including a plaque dedicated to Antonio Baldissera, one of the key military figures in the nineteenth-century colonial campaigns in East Africa.47 Each stop contains a spoken and written narrative, along with a Google map that provides an overview of the tour. While the digital tour does not provide the intertwining of the personal and historical narratives found in Scego’s text for Roma Negata, this kind of reflection is provided by collaborative participation and in the tour narratives themselves. In the stop for the Antonio Baldissera monument, for instance, the narrator speaks of Baldissera’s notoriety and integral role in Italian colonialism. Along with his history, the narrative explains that this plaque remains as a commemoration to Baldissera and that it is “well-maintained” and even lit at night, begging the question of why and who would maintain a memorial to a person who committed war atrocities. These provocative questions are teased out in the tour, which contrasts the city’s tourist facade, one that promotes “the prestigious historical heritage of the city [as] the cradle of the Renaissance,” with the present yet hidden colonial history etched onto the city’s geography.48 Rather than a narrated tour, Roma Imperiale includes an interactive map with sites organized by streets, statues, monuments, and institutions that speak to Italy’s colonial past, and each site on the map includes a description written by the project’s contributors. One user notes the absence of Rome’s “Quartiere Africano,” which presently appears as one of the sites on the map as “an entire area of Rome … named after the territories that Italian conquered during the colonial period.”49 The user’s comments speak to the site’s ability to become a ground for the sharing of knowledge about Italy’s colonial history, as the user directs us to the ways in which the neighborhood’s streets are all “evocative of colonialism, starting from the main street which is viale Libia, but also via Dire Daua, via Tigrè, via Giarabub, Piazza Gondar, via Cirenaica, and many others.”50 Similar to Roma Negata, Postcolonial Italy brings together various participants in the creation of the counter-history of the national narrative on Italian colonialism. These are the historians, activists, residents, authors, and artists who propose new mappings of the urban environment and alternative histories that are the product of many voices. Roma Negata and Postcolonial Italy are effectively decolonial projects, both in terms of revealing and deconstructing the colonial past and as collaborative, participatory endeavors. Both projects demonstrate the power of affective, embodied encounters with the history of Italian colonialism—encounters found in the daily, lived experiences of the city. Bianchi and Scego’s Roma Negata returns us to the power of the photograph to transform and re-envision urban spaces, now presented with subjects of African descent who speak back to empire and allow us to rewrite national narratives that once sought to discriminate and exclude. The project of Roma Negata is extended in

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the digital dissemination of history that takes place with Postcolonial Italy as a site that has the capability of not only “reaching diverse worldwide audiences” but also creating a new form of accessibility to Italy’s colonial past.51 The two projects speak to the ongoing intellectual and activist work undertaken in Italy today, a nation still marred by a mythical, incomplete, and obscured rendering of its colonial past. Both Roma Negata and Postcolonial Italy suggest that the only way to make a full reckoning with the past is through a temporal and spatial confrontation that traces complex routes that reach as far back as ancient Rome to liberal and fascist Italy to the Horn of Africa. Ultimately, Roma Negata and Postcolonial Italy speak to the momentous possibility of the present, one that will be shaped by the participation of the diverse communities who continue the ongoing project of defining the nation’s future.

Notes 1 Laura Sarnelli, “Affective Routes in Postcolonial Italy: Igiaba Scego’s Imaginary Mappings” in “Italianità,” special issue, Roots and Routes: Research on Visual Cultures 23 (December 2016), https://www.roots-routes.org/affective-routes-postcolonialitaly-igiaba-scegos-imaginary-mappings-laura-sarnelli/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 2 Serge Noiret, “Digital Public History,” in A Companion to Public History, ed. David Dean, Wiley Blackwell Companions to World History (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 111. 3 “Rino Bianchi. Paesaggi della memoria. Roma Negata: Percorsi Postcoloniali nella città,” Arte.it: The Map of Art in Italy, http://www.arte.it/calendario-arte/latina/ mostra-rino-bianchi-paesaggi-della-memoria-roma-Negata-percorsi-postcolonialinella-città-9689# (accessed April 28, 2022). 4 “Paesaggi della memoria alla galleria Antropomorpha,” The Mammoth Reflex, May 24, 2014, https://www.themammothreflex.com/mostre-fotografiche/2014/05/24/ paesaggi-della-memoria-alla-galleria-antropomorpha/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 5 Letizia Modena, “The Architectonics of Memory: Space, Power and Identity in Contemporary Rome,” Annali d’Italianistica 37 (2019): 2. 6 Ibid., 2. See also Carla Carotenuto. “Percorsi transculturali e postcoloniali in Roma Negata di Rino Bianchi e Igiaba Scego,” From the European South 1 (2016): 211–17. 7 Rino Bianchi and Igiaba Scego, Roma Negata: Percorsi postcoloniali nella città (Rome: Ediesse, 2020), 17. 8 “Obelisk Returned to Ethiopia after 68 Years,” Guardian, April 20, 2005, https://www. theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/20/italy.ethiopia (accessed April 28, 2022). See also Modena, “The Architectonics of Memory.” 9 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 16. 10 Ibid. 11 Sarnelli, “Affective Routes in Postcolonial Italy.” 12 See Katherine McKittrick. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). 13 Camilla Hawthorne and Brittany Meché, “Making Room for Black Feminist Praxis in Geography,” Society and Space, September 13, 2016, https://www.societyandspace. org/articles/making-room-for-black-feminist-praxis-in-geography (accessed April 28, 2022).

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14 McKittrick, Demonic Grounds, xii. ­15 Ibid., xiv. 16 Ibid., xiii. 17 Sarnelli, “Affective Routes in Postcolonial Italy.” 18 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 19–21. 19 Heather Merrill, Black Spaces: African Diaspora in Italy (New York: Routledge, 2018), 83–4. 20 Ibid., 20. 21 See Giulia Barrera, “Dangerous Liaisons: Colonial Concubinage in Eritrea, 1890–1941,” PAS Working Papers 1 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University, Program of African Studies, 1996). 22 Tina Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 18–19. 23 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 21. 24 Ibid., 25. 25 Sarnelli, “Affective Routes of Postcolonial Italy.” 26 Ibid. 27 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 26. 28 bell hooks. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1992), 128. 29 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 35. 30 Ibid., 46. 31 Sarnelli, “Affective Routes of Postcolonial Italy.” 32 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 62. 33 Sarnelli, “Affective Routes of Postcolonial Italy.” 34 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 68. 35 Ibid., 109. 36 Ibid., 112. 37 Ibid., 117. 38 Ibid., 119. 39 Ibid., 122. 40 Ibid., 123. 41 See also Rita Wilson’s discussion of Roma Negata in “Changing Places: Translational Narratives of Migration, Cultural Memory, and Belonging,” in Translating Worlds: Migration, Memory, and Culture, ed. Susannah Radstone and Rita Wilson (London: Routledge, 2021), 224–46. 42 Bianchi and Scego, Roma Negata, 133. 43 “The Project,” Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage, https://postcolonialitaly. com/the-project/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 44 Daphné Budasz, “Breaking the Silence: Postcolonial Italy. A Self-Guided Tour Uncovering Florence’s Colonial Past,” The Florentine, February 17, 2021, https://www. theflorentine.net/2021/02/17/breaking-silence-post-colonial-italy/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 45 Noiret, “Digital Public History,” 115. 46 Ibid., 115. 47 “Uncovering Italian Colonial Pasts: Florence,” https://izi.travel/fr/2428-uncoveringitalian-colonial-pasts-florence/en#8879bd9b-379a-490c-8906-6cc82ca21d50 (accessed April 28, 2022).

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48 Daphné Budasz, “On the Traces of Florence’s Colonial Past,” The Florentine, November 12, 2020, https://www.theflorentine.net/2020/11/12/italy-florencecolonial-past/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 49 Chiara Pacifici, February 9, 2021, comment on “Roma Imperiale,” Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage, https://postcolonialitaly.com/roma-imperiale/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 50 Ibid. 51 Noiret, “Digital Public History,” 122.

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From MRF to Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: The Responsibilities of the Rehang Vanessa Rocco

The Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, hereafter MRF) was a phantasmagoria of photography and sculpture mounted in Rome in 1932 by Benito Mussolini’s acolytes to celebrate ten years of his rule, an exhibition that was “reenacted” in 2018—albeit through monumental projections—in one of the sections at the Prada Foundation’s Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, curated by Germano Celant and designed by the design agency 2x4. The hegemonic power of the original exhibition over the Italian populace is demonstrable: people were encouraged to submit their personal pro-fascist artifacts and were therefore persuaded to feel empowered and enfranchised. On site they were beckoned to literally worship the “fact-based” photographs. The fascists also instituted mutually beneficial relationships with tourist agencies and the like to bring in massive numbers of people. The result was a two-year-long propaganda triumph with attendance figures upwards of four million and with subsequent reiterations in 1937 and 1942. The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to dissect the myriad ways that documentary photographs were used in the original installation to persuade the populace toward a certain iteration of facts and feelings, all favorable to the authoritarian regime; second, to explore how difficult it is to later rehang an exhibition with such nefarious purposes without fetishizing it or negating that crucial context. These investigations will compare and contrast the original 1932 installation shots and catalog with the later iterations. Taken together, these analyses will illuminate the challenges and responsibilities of engaging in reconstructions.

The 1932 Original Mostra A defining feature of the original installation of the MRF in 1932 was the mounting of ephemera (pamphlets, flyers, newspaper articles, draft posters) related to the rise of fascism from 1914 to 1922 directly onto the walls—oftentimes slathering every square inch, as in the first room about 1914. These three-dimensional objects were rarely

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framed, although some were placed into display cases or used as photo blow-ups, and they inevitably transmitted an experience of tactility to the spectator. Indeed, the bulk were submitted by the public and would have comprised very personal experiences of the First World War and its aftermath, including recruitment, suffering, and loss. A chapter of the exhibition catalog (technically called a “guide”) was devoted to the process of the call for memorabilia (“I Cimeli”) from the general public.1 In it, the editors Diego Alfieri and Luigi Freddi expounded in detail on the processes of gathering all the materials in a warehouse on Via Cernaia in Rome, where they were carefully cataloged for use in the exhibition. Extremely dogmatic language was used to introduce the readers to the process, including a reference to the far-flung donors who had lived “the fascist story from its origins to today” and the fact that they “struggled, fighting and suffering for year after year.”2 Approximately eighteen thousand pieces were cataloged, but the authors claimed this number was low due to under-listing items with the same subject. The guide made abundantly clear that the organizers of this exhibition were convinced that the highly personal and tactile nature of the ephemera would go a long way toward establishing a direct, emotional connection with the viewers who would be coming through the exhibition at the Palazzo dei Esposizioni. Not only would those raw ingredients facilitate this goal, but the installation design, using flamboyant architectural elements, was intended to turbo-charge those emotions. We know from what the organizers wrote about Sala A (the first room) that “the documentary material … was to be implanted architectonically with unchallenged domination over every other element,” and that the documents would therefore work a “suggestive, vital and emotional acting on the visitor’s mind and soul.”3 In other words, they presented this as factual material precisely because it was “documentary,” but they put their heightened fascist spin on it through the design. The public was to therefore believe the “facts” that the organizers wanted them to believe, and, moreover, believe them in a visceral way that would seep in more deeply because they were emotionally attached to the objects on display. These tactics illustrate the crux of Marxist scholar Antonio Gramsci’s theory of how cultural hegemony leads to consent: the hegemonic power convinces the subjugated that they are actually enfranchised.4 Gramsci was imprisoned by the fascists from 1926 to 1935, so he missed the totality of the original MRF, and he died in 1937—the same year as the first rehang. Nevertheless, what he understood about fascist methodology is directly applicable to the exhibition. Namely, the state achieves consent of the people, but it “educates this consent.”5 The state’s logic, therefore, would posit that the artifacts in the MRF are the people’s artifacts, so how could this show not belong to them? That the exhibition was flagrantly about the glorification of a single individual did not seem to negate this feeling of belonging, and the numbers of people encompassed into this spectacle should not be underestimated: at least four million visitors over two years, which was 10 percent of the Italian population. This sense of perceived co-ownership along with the exhibition’s haptic experiences are the primary components that create such problems when attempting to reenact the MRF in any way, shape, or form in a contemporary space.

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Reconstructions, Restagings, Reenactments As museum studies specialist Isobel Whitelegg queried in her abstract “Restaging Exhibitions: Reconsidering Art History and Exhibition Making” for the 2017 London conference Reconstructions, Restagings, Re-enactments: Revisiting Seminal Art Exhibitions in the Twenty-First Century: “can this work (of re-making) ever hope to recoup the exhibition’s history as a situated and social phenomenon?”6 Given the facts above about how the original Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista came together with mass-donated objects, as well as its stated goals of working on the minds of the audience, I would propose the answer in the case of MRF vs. Post Zang Tumb Tuuum is decidedly “no.” Giant two-dimensional projections of partial views of the numerous rooms that flatten the experience cannot possibly hope to “recoup” the fraught social situation of 1932. The projections could certainly be viewed as helpful guides to the historical, but Celant specifically states in Prada marketing materials that the reconstructions will “reinsert them [the artworks] into their original historical communication space.”7 The second part of Whitelegg’s quote therefore comes into play: “this question gains particular relevance when an exhibition’s purpose was contingent on sociopolitical demands of its time.”8 MRF’s purpose certainly was that. Now, any argument against rehanging—and here I should note that I am differentiating from projections, which are more like reenactments—is complicated because the show was rehung in its own time in the 1937 and 1942 iterations. Those retained the tactility and personal connections of the original Italian audience, but even those immediate rehangs shifted emphasis due to rapidly changing facts on the ground.

1937 and 1942 Iterations of MRF The original MRF in 1932 was considered such a public-relations coup that it was reformulated twice after its closure in 1934. In 1937 it was reinstalled at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Valle Giulia in Rome to celebrate the bimillennium of the birth of Augustus Caesar, with some of the same organizers, such as Alfieri, but different architects. It had additional rooms that trumpeted the recent conquest of Ethiopia and the successes of Franco in the Spanish Civil War, as well as large-scale redrawn maps that showed what things would look like if there were a fascist empire.9 Indeed, the autumn of 1936 was considered as successful for the Italian fascists as it was for the Germans: it marked Mussolini’s high point of domestic popularity due to the Ethiopian invasion and the Rome-Berlin pact, and the later MRF exhibition’s contents reflected these new world realities. Despite these developments, however, most of the same artifacts from 1932 were shown. This is not only evident from comparative installation shots but also from the astonishing fact that nearly every artifact displayed in 1937 was documented at the Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS) in Rome. However, the design elements in 1937 were so scaled down that scholars today have the opportunity to assess just how essential the exhibition design was to

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creating visually coercive moments in 1932. In these images, photography alone does not contain the “sheer force of presence”10 of the earlier iteration: it needed to be fitted into a compelling design, and one can see this acutely by revisiting several of the rooms. The descriptive denotations of the 1937 show were no longer designated with the letters A–P, but rather they had numerals. Therefore, what was Sala A (1914) now became Sala no. 4, “Intervento.” Installation shots demonstrate an absence of the design flourishes of the 1932 iteration, and one could argue that a primary reason the space is less compelling—if you place it side-by-side with the original—is because the lesser presence of dense photographic material inarguably compromises the imagistic power. At this point the “documentary material” that was to be “implanted architectonically,” as stated in the original catalog, was reliant solely on pieces of paper. These pieces of paper were mounted in the same perpendicular vitrines, yes, but without the backdrop of grandiose, overlapping callouts for the military draft, and aggressive statuary. It is also lacking in dynamic typography, with a much drier presentation of didactic texts above the vitrines. For Sala G, the later iteration had parquet floors, staid white walls, messy flags hung up, and none of the strong design assertion of the original, such as the dark contrasts behind the minions following the leader and the dynamic anthropomorphic figures filled with photo-references to Il Duce. Finally, vis-à-vis Sala O, the room of master Rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni: in 1937 it is as if the entire room had been placed in a shrinking machine (Figures 17.1 and 17.2). There is none of the monumentality, none of the ability to wrap the visitors up physically into the spaces and therefore enrapture them. Indeed, some of the areas, such as the turbines or the “iron man”—which appeared so effective in the 1932 version—take on the look of a grade school science fair in comparison with the theatrical phantasmagoria of the earlier iteration, partly because the limitations of scale work to make everything appear 2D rather than 3D. The later Sala P also reminds one of the need for stark contrasts in the coloration of spaces, as the lack thereof detracts mightily from the original’s striking effects. There were reasons for this, as architectural historian Diane Ghirardo has explored: the 1937 version was intended to become a permanent historical display, and the “goals were more narrowly documentary.”11 But a comparison of design effectiveness is still warranted. This version of the exhibition would be installed yet again in 1942, with similar design but the addition of wartime emphases: “a room dedicated to doctrine, another to artifacts recovered during the campaigns in Africa, and yet another against Jews and Communists, who were blamed for the war.”12 What’s clear is that, tragically, the earlier superior design elements coincided with the period when extreme persuasion was needed. The best talent unleashed the conditions that were most ripe for looking away from fascist transgressions in 1932 and for instead celebrating the ideology. Enough of the public went along, and hegemony grew into domination by the time the regime began curdling.13 A grand reformulation of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista in 1942 was intended for installation at the Esposizione Universale di Roma, but circumstances of war dictated a more sober reinstallation in the same Valle Giulia. Here one is able to see how the show changed over time—from 1932 to 1937 to 1942—and became more overtly antisemitic as Mussolini tried to show that he was as tough as Hitler, especially

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Figure 17.1  Sala O of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), 1932. Copyright ACS; MRF, fasciolo 1 (1932), Scatola 203, neg. #172.

after 1938. The third MRF iteration in 1942 morphed to keep apace with the new Teutonic world order, including new large-scale murals. In one of them, the darkened top half contained a menorah, a caricature of a male in a bourgeois top hat, and a spider caught in a web, all spot-lit cinematically (Figure 17.3). A group of coins spill out to the left of the spider web, and the quote raking across the lower half of this mural is: “l’ebraismo mondiale è stato durante sedici anni nostra politica un nemico irreconciliabile del Fascismo” (Judaism in the world has been during sixteen years of our policy an irreconcilable enemy of fascism). Like the spider web in Sala O participating against the communists, this metaphor implied that the enemies will catch “us” in their web if “we” are not careful. The wall vitrine installed below the mural contained charts and graphs, one of which looks related to eugenics. These were reproduced alongside

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Figure 17.2  Sala 17 (“Anno 1922”) of the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (MRF), 1937. Copyright ACS; MRF, fasciolo 2 (1937), Album 7, neg. #92.

documentary photographic blow-ups of European Jews in a single-file line, and another reproduction of a menorah. Antisemitic spectacles easily slid into the template already developed for pro-fascist spectacles. This exchange of ideas in the realm of exhibition culture had continued throughout the 1930s despite Germany’s rising dominance. Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s viewing of the original MRF and affirmative statements about it echoed in a 1936 Messe article by Albert Wischeck.14 As art historian Michael Tymkiw has explored, the design team of the Munich exhibition Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew, 1937–38) had, a year earlier, borrowed material from the MRF for their 1936 exhibition Der Bolschewismus (Bolshevism). Der ewige Jude utilized many of the same jutting photographic designs as the MRF and took particular inspiration from Sala E.15

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Figure 17.3  Sala Ebraismo e massoneria of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution, 1942. Copyright ACS; MRF, fasciolo 15 (Mostra 1942), Album 113, neg. #551.

Through their newly retrofitted propagandistic displays such as the 1942 version of the MRF, the Italians had fulfilled Mussolini’s wishes and indeed become more “odious.”16 The anxiety of “Nazified” racism seen in such displays is in many ways a transference of desperation from the Italian regime into modes of display. And the anxiety of the Italian fascists in 1942 was well founded: the following year would see Mussolini stripped of his authority by July of 1943, when Il Duce was arrested by order of the king, and, in April 1945, he was executed by Italian partisans.17

Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 and the MRF The examples above demonstrate the difficulty of rehanging even the same show (at least in name) as the cultural priorities of the organizers shifted within ten years, to say nothing of nearly one hundred years later. And, to my knowledge, none of the highly problematic developments of the 1937 and 1942 iterations were substantively analyzed in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum or the catalog. Prada’s press release makes it very clear how the mission of the exhibition’s “reconstructions” was viewed by the organizers: ­ ased on documentary and photographic evidence of the time, [Post Zang Tumb B Tuuum] reconstructs the spatial, temporal, social and political contexts in which

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the works of art were created and exhibited, and the way in which they were interpreted and received by the public of the time.18

And added to this, in the subsequent paragraph is a quote by Celant about why he wanted to show the works of art alongside original documents, letters, and clippings: [To] question, as explained by Germano Celant, “the idealism in exhibitions, where works of art, either in museums or other institutions, are displayed in an anonymous, monochromatic environment, generally on a white surface; to connect them to period photographic testimony and reinsert them in their original historical communication space”19

Later in the press release it is also specified that some of the historical exhibitions will be viewed through “spectacular projections.”20 Credit is undoubtedly due, in this exhibition, to the work of recreating other exhibition spaces in a holistic 3D physical experience, and the work required to insert pages with installation shots into the catalog at the last minute so that a broader audience could see what the show looked like.21 However, taking into consideration the above discussion of what actually comprised the methodology of the 1932 MRF, large-scale 2D projections simply cannot hope to “reconstruct” the spatial, temporal, social, and political contexts of the original, nor the manner in which they were received by the public. First of all, floor-to-ceiling high-resolution projections did not exist in 1930s exhibitions as the “original historical communication space.” Second, to return to Gramsci’s theory of consent, the fascists at this time attempted to meet the public where they were, and clearly this cannot be simulated for a public in 2018. Indeed, it is probably a misnomer to describe projections of a historical show as a “reconstruction.” In this case, it is better to posit it as a reenactment. The art critics and scholars Martha Buskirk, Amelia Jones, and Caroline E. Jones explored the challenges of this nomenclature in a 2013 Artforum essay that they emphatically called a “reckoning”—“The Year in ‘Re-,’” noting the burgeoning obsession in the art world with “returns, revisits, and repetitions, of all kinds”22—and proceeded to provide a glossary of sorts that helps sift through what can be both confusing and overlapping. In said glossary/list, “Reconstruct” comes in at #6. The authors define this as something “rebuilt,” which “implies that some aspect of the original work has been lost; guesswork may be involved. Or, as the object is rebuilt, changes may be authorized by the artist with the result thus deemed authentic.”23 The reconstruction of László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator at the Harvard Art Museums is their first example, followed by others including Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, on which Harold Szeemann advised in 1983, and the Mondrian Studio at the Tate, which had not then been built. Portions of an exhibition with 3D physical elements turned into projections could not hope to fall under these scholars’ definition of a reconstruction. I think that more accurate, at least for Buskirk et al., would be a “re-enactment,” which is #8. Those authors mostly align this with performance, and in a way, the

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Prada floor-to-ceiling projections are performative, which is what also makes them potentially fetishistic (Figure  17.4).24 How does anyone, even one armed with abundant information about the 1932 MRF, not become mesmerized by the nature of these spectacular screens? It’s a big ask. At one point the Artforum authors discuss “unfettered access to an original score or script and a close relation to the original artist.”25 They present it as a close relative to “re-staging” and redoing something done before. This alignment would force acceptance of the exhibition space itself as a work of art, but exhibition-as-medium has become established in the field of late, including this author’s own work.26 Although still problematic, contemplating Celant and 2x4’s MRF projections as something other than “reconstructions” would liberate them somewhat from how the Prada press release defines that term: again, that the show “reconstructs the spatial, temporal, social and political contexts in which the works of art were created and exhibited, and the way in which they were interpreted and received by the public of the time.”27 This is simply not possible to do with projections of the MRF, precisely because the original 1930s organizers stated that they were dependent upon allencompassing, “architectonic” physical experiences in order to convince the public of fascist ideologies. For example, Freddi was the co-designer of Sala A in 1914, the room in which the catalog first outlines this “architectonic” logic. One of the

Figure 17.4  Exhibition view of Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943. Photo Attilio Maranzano, 2018, Fondazione Prada, Milano. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan.

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projections from the Prada loop has a slice of the room that presents the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, clearly a cataclysmic moment that set off the Great War. But the 1932 MRF catalog reproductions make it clear that there were 3D architectural elements jutting outward into the viewer’s space in the show. This envelopment of visitors with photographs and dynamic typography cannot be reformulated in a projection. This was true of many other moments in other rooms throughout the original show. In addition to more monumental architectural gestures, various niches created their own tour de force of architectonic photography, achieving the goals laid out for Sala A in the guidebook to act on the viewer’s mind. One niche presented a massive “metal man” surrounded by sloganeering against the paralyzing strikes that were blamed on the socialist trade unions. Coming out of the niche, the towering letters spelling out the Italian wording for legal strikes formed a huge web above, which was described as wrapping “itself around the nation,” suffocating the economy (see Figure 17.1).28 This area again included Il Duce’s favorite visual idiom: massive crowd scenes montaged upon one another to evoke the sense of an oceanic mass. In another case, montages of crowds hovered above cartoon-like constructed metal flames licking up toward them along with headlines about the burning of the socialist newspaper Avanti!’s headquarters, a cause célèbre of the fascists.29 The headlines in this niche were repeated over and over again, with the prominent Avanti! masthead and the byline about the fire. Those flowery mastheads were wedged under an aggressive, sans-serif slogan jutting in a perpendicular manner into the viewer’s space, screaming out “The Conquest of Palazzo Marino and the Fall of the Socialist Municipalities.” All of these spaces demonstrate the extent to which the photographic “document” can be used to promote almost any message if constructed in certain ways within dynamic and physically imposing elements, including sculptures, architecture, and architectonic-like captions. It further shows how the medium’s presence was thought by organizers to increase the conviction with which the crowd might receive that message. It is clear from these descriptions that the organizers of the 1932 MRF considered the physical interaction with the artifacts essential to their goal of riling up the audience, enhancing the buy-in to the fascist ideology. This is not to say, however, that filmic evidence of historical exhibitions serves no purpose in current exhibition spaces—indeed, I have been involved in organizing photographic evidence for them in past projects.30 They do serve a purpose, but it is an archival one: i.e., as a repository of information, and one that should avoid the exaggerated monumentalizing of those images lest they become overly pleasurable to the viewer.31 They impart knowledge to a contemporary audience about portions of what was seen, but they cannot hope to achieve the “spatial, temporal, social and political contexts in which the works of art were created and exhibited, and the way in which they were interpreted and received by the public of the time.”32 It is the responsibility of the rehang to acknowledge this, and explain why—particularly when the stakes are as high as understanding how exhibitions contributed to the dangerous consent to fascism by the public.

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Conclusions In sum, “Re-s” of any type are enormously challenging and vexing. Even the immediate reformulations of the MRF in 1937 and 1942 could not hope to replicate the theatricality of the original due to changed venues, altered priorities, and the non-involvement of original designers. Nor did the organizers fully attempt this, as the content itself also changed given increased emphases on colonialism and antisemitism. As curators and academics, we are somewhat desperate for the audience to comprehend these display spaces, because in the interwar period they were an essential modality through which people experienced visual culture. But the only way to hope for a level of reinsertion, in my estimation, is through as exact, straightforward, and dry a 3D reinstallation of the objects as possible, a tactic Celant used in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum, but not vis-à-vis the MRF, which would have been unrealistic as I mentioned above.33 This opinion is controversial, and recent scholarship on the subject of reconstructions has rightly focused much energy on the fetishization of “dead objects.”34 But on a practical level—if we can agree that, granted, these reinstalls do not have the “magical powers” to conjure up what the experience was for past audiences—if a scholar goes through the rigorous exercise of tracking down every image that was in what is now considered a touchstone exhibition, images that I have not been privy to in historical installation shots, and it actually can be reconstituted, unlike MRF, then I want that knowledge rather than my half-knowledge of what was seen. A powerful case in point: in the exhibition Universal Archive, installed in 2008 at MACBA Barcelona, a team of curators, scholars, and architects took on the challenge of researching the entire installation of El Lissitzky’s Soviet Pavilion at Film und Foto.35 The museum then reconstructed it, and I had the opportunity to walk through it and observe all the nooks and crannies. This 1929 pavilion was proclaimed in primary sources as the one that most attracted audiences in the larger show due to the intersection of innovative design techniques and experimental photography and filmic material along with viewing stations.36 The same few installation shots of it have been used endlessly in secondary literature. MACBA’s team has now inarguably filled in gaps in our received knowledge of a watershed moment in Soviet modernism. Similarly, media professor Patrick Roessler recently collaborated with the Fachhochschule Erfurt on an AI experience of the oftenoverlooked but design-groundbreaking 1931 Berlin exhibition about labor unions, a pivotal collaboration among Bauhaus alumni.37 Viewers can simulate the experience using as many archival installation photographs as possible, including those rarely seen. Can one convincingly state that this is not productive on a scholarly level? And is it not possible to use that knowledge, while concurrently acknowledging in didactics that we are not bringing the same modes of reception that the original audiences possessed? Perhaps it is the (former) curator more than the scholar speaking here, but I believe museums are up to that task, if they decide to meet it.

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Notes 1 Dino Alfieri and Luigi Freddi, Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista: Guida Storica (Bergamo: Italian Institute of Graphic Arts, 1933; reprinted in Milan), 59–63. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid., 72; my italics. 4 Gramsci describes how the state does have consent but it also “educates this consent.” Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quentin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 259. 5 Ibid. 6 Isobel Whitelegg, “Restaging Exhibitions: Reconsidering Art History and Exhibition Making” (abstract for the workshop Reconstructions, Restagings, Re-enactments: Revisiting Seminal Art Exhibitions in the Twenty-First Century, Futuro House, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, March 31, 2017). ­7 Fondazione Prada, “Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943,” press release, https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/post-zang-tumb-tuuumart-life-politics-italia-1918-1943/?lang=en (accessed April 28, 2022). There is little distinction made here between the room reconstructions and the projections. 8 Whitelegg, “Restaging Exhibitions.” 9 Diane Ghirardo also explores the emphasis on a much more “straight” documentary style in this incarnation: less avant-gardism, more historical and “factual” indoctrination. Ghirardo, “Architects, Exhibitions, and the Politics of Culture in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Architectural Education 42, no. 2 (February 1992): 70. 10 Ghirardo, “Architects,” 70. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 72. 13 I should state here that innovative exhibition design did not end in Italy in 1937. Notably, at the very same Palazzo delle Esposizioni where the 1932 MRF was installed, the state held an exhibition in 1937 entitled Mostra Augustea della Romanità. This exhibition, celebrating the birthday of Augustus, contained far more “engaging” use of photographic enlargements, scaffolded architectural structures, and three-dimensional objects than the reinstall of the MRF. See installation shots in Marla Stone, “Exhibitions and the Cult of Display in Fascist Italy,” in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Prada Foundation, 2018), 190. 14 Albert Wischeck was then the director of the Berlin Nonprofit Exhibition, Trade Fair, and Tourism Corporation. 15 Michael Tymkiw, Nazi Exhibition Design and Modernism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 181. 16 This is despite arguments by intellectuals like Giovanni Ansaldo that Italians did well to distinguish themselves from the radical antisemitism of the Nazis. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascists and National Socialists: The Dynamics of an Uneasy Relationship,” in Arts, Culture, and Media under the Third Reich, ed. Richard Etlin (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 262. ­17 Portions of the preceding section were based on excerpts from my book: Vanessa Rocco, Photofascism: Photography, Film, and Exhibition Culture in 1930s Germany and Italy (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020). 18 Fondazione Prada, “Post Zang.” 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid.

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21 It is highly unusual for a catalog to include current installation shots. I thank Romy Golan for pointing this out. 22 “. . . only to induce a renewed fantasy of presence and objecthood.” Martha Buskirk, Amelia Jones, and Caroline E. Jones, “The Year in ‘Re-,’” Artforum (December 2013), https://artforum.com/inprint/issue=201310&id=44068 (accessed April 28, 2022). I am grateful to Vivien Greene for pointing me to this article. 23 Ibid. 24 To avoid this fetishizing, as underwhelming as it sounds, perhaps better to just have original documentation of MRF in a vitrine, as the fragile nature of most of the ephemera means it cannot be reinstalled. 25 Buskirk, Jones, and Jones, “The Year in ‘Re-.’” 26 Vanessa Rocco, “Exhibiting Exhibitions,” in Made in Italy: Rethinking a Century of Italian Design, ed. Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 180. 27 Fondazione Prada, “Post Zang.” 28 Alfieri and Freddi, Mostra, 185. 29 On April 15, 1919, two subsets of the fascists burned down Avanti!’s headquarters in Milan, which Mussolini claimed was “spontaneous.” Three years later, after the March on Rome, it happened again. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 34, n. 141. 30 The exhibition to which I allude is Universal Archive: The Condition of the Document and the Modern Photographic Utopia, MACBA, Barcelona, October 23, 2008–January 6, 2009, curated by Jorge Ribalta. 31 Again, Celant uses the phrase “spectacular projections” to describe them in the press release. Fondazione Prada, “Post Zang.” 32 Ibid. 33 Celant also engaged in a well-known reconstruction (as he called it) of Szeemann’s exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the 2013 Biennale, so he has done this before. However, it is essential to note that the reconstruction was purposely realized with the historical architecture of an eighteenth-century palazzo visible underneath, so this undertaking remained performative—i.e., this is self-consciously “new” on top of “old.” In the words of art critic Pablo Larios, “cracks are visible.” Larios, “When Attitudes Become Form,” Frieze 157 (September 2013), https://www.frieze.com/ article/when-attitudes-become-form (accessed April 28, 2022). 34 “Dead objects” is from a quotation of Michael Ann Holly that Walter Benjamin used as an epigraph to The Melancholy Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1. Helen Molesworth has pointed out Allan Kaprow’s disdain for the “re-install” and his preference for “reinventions”; see David Sokol, “Stomp the Yard,” NYC The Official Guide, September 21, 2009, https://www.nycgo.com/articles/stompthe-yard/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 35 This team included curator Jorge Ribalta, scholar Margarita Tupitsyn, and architect Isabel Bachs. 36 Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky: Life Letters Texts (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 85, which reproduces numerous reviews from 1929 including from Nouvelles littéraires. Paris-Midi also stated that the Soviet Pavilion “wields the strongest power of attraction for the public,” and according to the Yorkshire Evening News, “Pride of place must go to the outstanding Russian exhibit.” 37 For a video version of this experience see https://www.fh-erfurt.de/arc/ar/forschung/ bauhaus-trifft-vr/) (accessed August 2021).

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The Final Ramp: Addressing Fascism in Italian Futurism at the Guggenheim Museum Vivien Greene and Susan Thompson

Italy’s mistake was believing that once Mussolini was dead fascism would die with him. But fascism, actually fascists, continued to exist even after that. I am not only speaking about vague ideas inspired by fascism, but flesh and blood people who recouped a political and social virginity in postwar Italy. It was them, more than others, who silenced that too-uncomfortable part of history. Why dig up the past? They said merrily. Instead let us bury it. Let’s look ahead. Igiaba Scego1 When visitors to the Guggenheim Museum’s Italian Futurism exhibition ascended the ramps of the building’s iconic rotunda, they experienced a shift in the tenor of the show (Figure 18.1). Though the presentation addressed the political undercurrents of futurist2 ideologies from the outset, upon arriving at the sixth and final ramp, viewers encountered a confluence of aesthetics and official regime politics that was complex, even disturbing. Curating Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe was a quasi-Sisyphean undertaking. One of the greatest challenges was dealing with this last section, which focused on futurism in the 1930s and early 1940s, the era when fascism most haunted the movement.3 Tackling this material demanded a nuanced and multipronged methodology. As curators we knew we could not go it alone, so we established an international advisory committee of expert scholars.4 Some were not sure we should include works from Secondo Futurismo at all, advising that we focus exclusively on the earlier “Heroic” futurist output that culminated with the First World War. But others were supportive. Indeed, shirking this last episode of the epic would have been irresponsible. However, the subject matter had to be parsed for the public to interrogate both the art and its troubling historical circumstances. Among other elements, this entailed meticulous didactics that endeavored to explain the tangled relations between futurism and fascism; an audio guide which bolstered this explication; and a documentary film on the fascist-era expositions. This film, commissioned for the exhibition, introduced the ramp, and its soundtrack could be heard throughout the space, intentionally setting a tone of uneasiness and foreboding.

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Figure  18.1 Installation view, overall view of rotunda, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. February 21– September 1, 2014. Photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

Futurism was not merely an aesthetic movement. Practitioners were united under leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and via shared ideologies. Futurism’s ethos, articulated clearly in the 1909 founding manifesto, was a bombastic one that called for ousting the past and tradition (termed passatismo) through destructive means, celebrating accelerated change, innovation, and regeneration. It was masculinist and nationalist. It was also pro-war, initially spurred by irredentist goals. Fascism then appropriated the aggressive rhetoric and disruptive tactics from futurism. In analyzing this pioneering, yet discomfiting, modernist artistic movement and including its later history entwined with a Fascist regime, we had to carefully assess the value of this endeavor and anticipate potential pitfalls. Why present cultural material that was linked to fascism? Does showcasing inflammatory works in a major museum risk amplifying their message—or worse, inadvertently and tacitly endorsing it? The public asked such questions of our institution in certain cases. Our response was that we cannot ignore history. We learn from it and, hopefully, comprehend that there are moments we should never repeat, a sentiment that is imperative to recognize in the contemporary political climate.5 Italian Futurism covered the entire span of the futurist movement in Italy, starting in 1909, when Marinetti’s “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” was published on February 11, 1909, in Le Figaro in French as “Le Futurisme,” and ending in 1944 when Marinetti died and Italy had all but capitulated in the Second World War. The exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York was the first large-scale presentation ever

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to be held in the United States and stayed on view for six months in 2014. Central futurist thematics shaped the exhibition conceptually, visually, and physically. It was multidisciplinary in nature, encompassing painting, sculpture, work on paper, architecture, publications (manifestos, books, and journals), photography, textiles, fashion, design, ceramics, theater, performance, and more. This multimedia strategy deliberately emphasized a lodestone intrinsic to futurism, the opera d’arte totale (total work of art). The museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed rotunda—made up of six ramps, spiraling upward—lent itself to this and other futurist motifs. These included simultaneity and dynamism, since the public could look up and down the ramps or across the museum’s space and see multiple bays of three or four ramps concurrently, the circular forms of the building further activating the installation. The architecture allowed for another principal tenet: placing the viewer at the center of the artwork, as visitors were literally surrounded by the exhibition. Perhaps the show’s most pressing goal, however, was to investigate the paradox of a right-wing avant-garde. This premise remains controversial, as many still correlate leftist politics with modernist cultural expressions. Planning Italian Futurism took five years. The movement’s thirty-five-year scope and many mediums required the museum’s full rotunda as well as two large side galleries to trace its full history.6 It comprised over 360 works by eighty artists from more than one hundred lenders in Europe and the United States. A minimum of twenty-five trips to Italy and elsewhere in the United States and Europe was necessary to conduct research at archives and libraries (some in private hands and rarely opened to anyone); view and assess the quality and condition of artworks in museums and private collections; meet with scholars, artists’ heirs, and estates; and request and obtain the loan of objects. Funding this project, which had a very high budget, was a titanic task in itself. Most crucial of all was negotiating the loans. Loans are the foundation of any noncollection-based exhibition. Securing loans can be a convoluted endeavor for any exhibition, and the additional question of futurism’s relationship to fascism posed a particularly touchy hurdle. Select institutions and private collectors, albeit wonderfully generous and accommodating, were hesitant to concede that “their” artists could have been, however distantly, connected to or complicit with fascism or, worst of all, were in fact fascist themselves. If we defined these artists in any such way, it could have jeopardized loans. Because later futurist production received little international attention, and since the movement’s associations with fascism had tarnished the status of its subsequent phases within Italy, the emotional stakes for our exhibition were high for some of those lenders who hoped that it might function as a vehicle to redeem their beloved artists or rehabilitate their marred reputations. While much of the pressure we faced to temper allusions to fascism was not explicit, we had to diplomatically sway lenders, arguing for the significance and worth of the project notwithstanding this uncomfortable dilemma. At myriad stages during this prolonged process, after having obtained approval for the loan of an artwork, confirmed it with a countersigned loan document, and published it in the catalog, a few loans were imperiled. Even after works were crated and transported to New York, installed in the museum, and the exhibition opened to the public, the occasional owner threatened to pull them from the show because didactics or a review noted that the artist was fascist or had fascist leanings.7

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Loans led to further difficulties as well. Italy has a colossal cultural patrimony, which is both a gift and a burden. The state cannot steward the entirety of the peninsula’s immeasurable heritage, and a casualty has been less investment in modern Italian art, especially Secondo Futurismo. Consequently, vital artworks were in a fragile state and required conservation. Works were occasionally overvalued for commercial interest, but also out of understandable pride. Dating art was another delicate area—the longdead artists had sometimes assigned an earlier date to a work to seem more prescient. There were also fakes to avoid. Finally, works that had not been registered with the state could not legally be temporarily exported outside Italy. The dynamic within the exhibition’s robust advisory committee mirrored some of the above issues. In assembling the almost thirty participants, we sought to be inclusive to allow for an array of purviews. We invited an exceptionally broad multigenerational group of accomplished scholars from manifold disciplines who were primarily a mix of Anglo-Americans and Italians. They fell into three general camps of thought: those who did not study futurism after around 1916 and the death of painter, sculptor, and theorist Umberto Boccioni, or, at the latest, the end of the First World War, which meant fascism was sidestepped; those who worked on Secondo Futurismo and welcomed its aesthetic transformations, but did not discuss fascism or chose to circumvent these overtones; and those who accepted the full sweep of the movement and thus wrestled with the quandaries that ensued when modernism and the right-wing joined hands. Prompted by a series of questions sent to them in advance, this collegial and motivated committee had a lively bilingual dialogue in written form via a wiki platform, which permitted multifarious opinions to be shared and debated to aid us in formulating the exhibition.8 Many of the advisory committee members, augmented by additional voices, contributed to the ambitious catalog.9 With thirty essays and over three hundred color plates, the book permitted us to cover a range of fields and viewpoints, some more critical of futurism than others, and to probe the various intersections, collaborations, and divergences between fascism and futurism in more depth. Of the three longerformat introductory essays, historian Adrian Lyttelton’s text treated fascist ideologies head on. Shorter texts such as those by Emily Braun, Romy Golan, and Susan Thompson further inspected the comminglings of futurism and fascism. Within the space of the museum, the elaborate exhibition design enunciated futurist precepts with swooping walls that appeared to bend in space; curving platforms; scrims behind vitrines containing publications that were silkscreened with excerpts of parole in libertà (words in freedom);10 and the vitrines’ glass windows edged in reflective metal to echo the futurists’ litolatta (lithographed tin) books (Figure  18.2). These and other stylized architectural structures also hinged on the necessity to properly stage, accommodate, and safely show and protect the large number of objects in the exhibition. Moreover, a degree of spectacle and visual appeal in displays is essential to engage audiences. Didactic vehicles were extensive: long and short wall texts; extended object labels; a map; an app with multi-voice narratives on specified themes as well as translations of manifestos; touchscreens to digitally “leaf ” through books on view; and three commissioned films by Jen Sachs, an experimental animated documentary filmmaker.

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Figure  18.2 Installation view, “Futurist Publications” bay, Ramp 4, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. February 21–September 1, 2014. Photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

The futurist-fascist nexus was invoked from the onset of the exhibition and highlighted as one of the inconsistencies plaguing the movement in the introductory text, but it became more apparent as the show progressed. Once visitors reached the Guggenheim’s top ramp and last gallery, the exhibition demonstrated several futurists’ embrace of fascism in the 1930s and early 1940s, becoming more text-heavy to scrutinize the formidable intersection of history and art. Determining who was a hardline fascist, who colluded, who was less culpable, who was opportunistic, and who was simply attempting to survive was not consistently feasible—this obstacle could not always be successfully surmounted without speculation, which we avoided, as that tack would have wreaked its own havoc. Ramp 6, which is architecturally anomalous from the preceding ramps, with bigger bays and soaring ceilings, exposed the slippery slope down which much futurism later slid to become a vehicle for political propaganda and fascist iconography. An arcing wall was constructed across the front of the first bay on the ramp, obligating the public to peer into and then enter a dark space (Figure 18.3). There they could view the five-minute film on the fascist expositions, which offered a montage of cultural and historical imagery from the era, often split into a vertical tripartite format and tinted with the colors of the Italian flag. It integrated period visuals and sound (historical photographs, newsreels, musical compositions, etc.) documenting the futurists’ participation in the many regime-sanctioned expositions of the decade. Visitors were met with exhibition installation views, individual artworks and architecture, and depictions of the artists themselves, particularly Marinetti. Interspersed in the film was

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Figure  18.3  Installation view, Entrance to “Expositions” bay, Ramp 6, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. February 21–September 1, 2014. Photograph by David Heald © Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York.

documentation of expositions on health, hygiene, and other fascist initiatives as well as events of the era stressing fascist force: marching soldiers, tanks, saluting, roaring crowds, jubilant chants of “Il Duce,” and the colonial empire. A crucial element, this cinematic moment defined the sinister mood that pervaded the entire ramp. When divorced from the visuals, its sound metamorphosed into a disturbing sonic collage and dominated the space.11 The objects on Ramp 6 frequently reprised themes from the film—images of military strength, aerial power, the visage of Mussolini, and so on. We pointedly showed occasional examples of art that was propagandistic, and not always of the utmost artistic

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quality, critiquing vivid moments when futurism was deployed fully in the service of fascist politics. Aerial-themed works—in which artists patriotically advertised Italy’s preeminence in aviation while exploring new modes of perceiving space in modernist art as seen from overhead—abounded on this final ramp: aeropittura, aeroscultura, aeroceramica, aerofotografia, aerodanza. Each bay was organized around a distinct subject: the aforementioned film on fascist expositions; design, including an early 1930s dining room set by Gerardo Dottori; painting and ceramics exulting fascism; polimaterismo; arte sacra; architecture; journals; futurism’s final publications and parole in libertà; and photography. The journals accentuated striking futurist graphic design and writings of the 1930s, but also documented the fascist oratory of multiple futurists in print. The paradoxes and complexities of futurism were laid bare in the conception of these bays, which problematized nationalism, the regime, patriotism, and underscored the role of art (futurist and otherwise) in advancing political agendas. The exhibition concluded in the museum’s top gallery, Tower Level 7, with Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti)’s five “murals,” Sintesi delle comunicazioni (Syntheses of Communications, 1933–34), realized for the conference room of Palermo’s Palazzo delle Poste (post office), a pinnacle of the futurist opera d’arte totale. Comprised of large canvases embedded into the room’s walls and secured in place by frames, this loan was complicated due to the quasi-permanent installation of the multipart oeuvre. It also marked the first occasion that the paintings had been removed from their home since being created, and we remain indebted to the many incredibly munificent individuals from within and outside the state Poste Italiane who helped us borrow this rarely seen ensemble. A deviation from the linear chronological progression of the exhibition, this gallery stepped back to the mid-1930s when the regime was at its height. The murals extoll fascist technological advances and efficiency in communications. Closing the show with these works gave us the possibility to reveal more contradictions within futurism and between the movement and fascism as well. Painted by a woman artist (although futurism commenced as uber-masculinist), they also embodied one of the few examples of a futurist decorative commission among the many fascist public buildings erected—a phenomenon resulting from Mussolini’s personal dislike of futurism.

Hindsight Surveying this project from the vantage of 2021, we cannot help but ponder whether we should have done anything differently to explicate the relationship between futurism and fascism. The answer, of course, oscillates depending on context. If we could go back in time, are there aspects of the exhibition as it was staged in 2014 that we would choose to change? Perhaps. If we were to mount Italian Futurism again in 2021, would we make alternate decisions? Absolutely. Would we even elect to realize this show today? Maybe, but it is hard to predict. With the benefit of hindsight, we welcome this opportunity to ask ourselves difficult questions and reevaluate some of our choices. As we grapple with these retrospective reflections, it is important and revelatory to situate the planning of the exhibition in its own temporal moment, between 2009

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and 2014, which were vastly unlike previous and more recent years in the United States (much as we write this text in yet another specific moment). Conceived and executed during the Obama presidency—a chapter of political and social optimism for progressives—Italian Futurism’s address of Italian fascism firmly situated that history in the past, hoping that mainstream espousal of such thinking could be a relic of an erstwhile epoch. We saw the exhibition as an opportunity to tell a cautionary tale. That a liberal democracy such as Italy could have begat fascism gave the story resonance. Admittedly, an amount of naiveté was operative on our part in these assumptions. Despite the lessons of the past, mistakes are repeated. In the United States alone, the Tea Party congressional victories in 2010 and the rise of the alt-right were already indicators of the ascendant nationalism, populism, and racial discord that would lead to the 2016 election of Donald Trump. Ultimately, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, authoritarian tendencies, and cult following culminated in the anti-democratic insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021—a disconcerting echo of Mussolini’s strident supporters. We expected audiences to know that any references to fascism held negative connotations. It unsettles us now that works visitors encountered in our exhibition—and especially on Ramp 6, which idolized Mussolini, celebrated the Fascist regime’s military might, and mythologized the Blackshirts’ violence—might have inspired or affirmed biases. Our electrifying and highly wrought exhibition design also may have veered to an over-aestheticization of the material. These design interventions were indispensable tools to cogently organize, present, and frame such an enormous quantity of works, but with our current self-awareness, how might we have otherwise balanced the explanatory but also visually “seductive” prerequisites of a museum’s display of artworks with “ugly” content? As curators, where do we draw the line between showing this type of art and running the risk of its glorification? How could we have better gauged and potentially guided the public’s reaction to the art, the design, and the politics? While our didactics attended to futurist affiliations with or admiration of the Fascist party, the timbre of the language used to convey historical accounts was neutral—what one might call “newscaster voice.” This was very much in keeping with prevailing museum standards for historical exhibitions at the time, which discouraged editorializing. Today we can more directly acknowledge the fallacy of the museum as an objective and dispassionate arbiter of history.12 Indeed, museums are not neutral, but are rather potent mechanisms for shaping public understanding and appreciation of art, culture, and history. Decisions regarding what a museum promotes, emphasizes, or exhibits inherently and unavoidably carry value judgments that reflect the tastes, priorities, and perspectives of the decision makers. It is therefore not inappropriate or unprofessional to inflect didactics with similarly subjective appraisals. Given the chance now, we would choose to recast these materials in both content and tone, employing more qualitative statements equating fascism with oppression and underlining that the praise of fascist outlooks through the arts fostered a fertile cultural landscape for the rise of dictatorial power. Due to the copious text included in the exhibition, we eventually had to put the detailed timeline that historian Ernest Ialongo authored on the online microsite only.13 This resource tracked key moments in world and Italian politics and history

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as well as international artistic and futurist milestones from 1909 to 1945, including references to the most sinister aspects of Mussolini’s regime: from the establishment of the OVRA (secret police), to the war with Ethiopia to expand the colonies in East Africa, to the implementation of racial laws that codified discrimination against Italy’s Jewish populations. Incorporating this timeline into the space of the exhibition proper would have more effectively indicted the violence of the Fascist regime. Some public programs also raised the enigmas innate in later futurism. Yet, no sum of didactics or other educational vehicles could truly express the atrocities of the era. And heavy didactics can tax viewers so that they absorb little, if any, information. But was this “distanced” approach misleading? Or lacking in clarity? Finally, we look back with ambivalence on featuring Benedetta’s murals from the Palermo post office in the final gallery at the apex of the exhibition. Though these large and impressive paintings represent one of the only successful futurist public commissions under the Fascist regime—and by a woman, no less—thanks to the friendship between the architect Angelo Mazzoni and the futurists, they ended the exhibition on an emotional and aesthetic “high” note with a grandeur and spectacular effect that could be read as lionizing. Their position clearly made an impact: a New York Times article devoted solely to the murals noted that they were “given pride of place” in the museum.14 Although their inclusion was apposite from a strictly visual curatorial stance, it was problematic as a finish to a period overshadowed by fascism. In retrospect, it might have been better to install the murals in the lower Tower Level 5 gallery and shift the artworks in there to a ramp. In this scenario, the last work in Italian Futurism’s long itinerary would have been Tullio Crali’s Prima che si apra il paracadute (Before the Parachute Opens, 1939), an equally arresting work but with bellicose hints and vertiginous perspective as a parachuter floats down toward a landscape. This decidedly more ominous image would have been an effective conclusion to the show, leaving visitors with a different and graduated final impression regarding the ambiguities surrounding the futurist movement. Nevertheless, the coincidental selection of this painting for the cover of the catalog (as well as its use as the marquee advertising image) cemented its lasting affiliation with the exhibition.15 Futurism does not equate fascism, but the movement became increasing imbricated with reactionary right-wing ideals after the First World War. While the exhibition’s purpose was to examine Italian futurism, not Italian fascism, controversial artwork and material culture of the former had to be confronted and framed in the context of the latter. History cannot be swept under the rug. But to achieve this responsibly and in a productive manner is fraught. We must continue to ask ourselves the question: How do we move forward from our present time and place when engaging with this kind of work?

Notes 1

“L’errore dell’Italia è stato credere che, morto Mussolini, il fascismo sarebbe morto con lui. Ma il fascismo, anzi i fascisti, hanno continuato ad esistere anche dopo di lui. Non parlo solo di vaghe idee di ispirazione fascista, ma proprio di persone in carne

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2

3

4

5 6 7 8 9 10

11

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ed ossa che si sono rifatte una verginità politica e sociale nell’Italia del dopoguerra. Sono stati loro, più di altri, a far tacere quella parte di storia troppo scomoda. Perché rivangare il passato? Dicevano baldanzosi. Seppelliamolo piuttosto. Guardiamo avanti.” Igiaba Scego, Roma negata. Percorsi postcoloniali nella città (Rome: Ediesse, 2020), 129. English translation by Vivien Greene. Throughout the exhibition and in all related materials, the Guggenheim capitalized “futurism” and “futurist(s)” when referring to the artistic movement and its practitioners. This usage accords with historical precedents and also served to disambiguate the terms from more generic denotations. In accordance with Bloomsbury’s editorial style, these designations are, however, lowercased throughout this essay. While Benito Mussolini became Prime Minister in 1922 and established his dictatorship in 1925, fascism did not rule futurism in the 1920s to the extremes of the following decade, when assorted affiliations existed between many futurist artists and the Partito Nazionale Fascista (Italian National Fascist Party). We are especially indebted to preeminent futurist scholar Claudia Salaris for her brilliant, patient, and unstinting guidance throughout the planning of the exhibition, and to the great Enrico Crispolti, who sadly is no longer with us, for his generosity and support. The long lineage and surging re-emergence of populist leaders and dictatorial regimes is mapped in Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present (New York: Norton, 2020). Because of the Guggenheim’s idiosyncratic architecture, the continuous spaces of the rotunda’s High Gallery and six ramps are almost always dedicated to a single exhibition. Moreover, some lenders held the copyright to the images. Here, too, a careful dance was performed to be granted permission to reproduce artworks in print or virtually. Maintaining amicable and collaborative rapports with all these scholars was also fundamental because some had influence over access to archives and/or private loans. Vivien Greene, ed., Italian Futurism: Reconstructing the Universe (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2014). Parole in libertà refers to a free-form mode of poetry invented by the Italian futurists that has an aural and visual emphasis and is sometimes meant to be performed. Produced as single artworks and as publications, such works are composed in nonlinear arrangements utilizing text rendered in various fonts and sizes, and often incorporate drawing, collage, ciphers, emphatic punctuation, and onomatopoeia, among other literary devices. The use of audio as a disruptive component was a key curatorial strategy and employed throughout the show, beginning with the declamation of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism on Ramp 1, which reverberated across the rotunda floor as visitors entered the museum. At later moments in the exhibition, these aural interjections would periodically cause viewers to stop their ascent up the ramps and refocus their attention. On the question of museums and neutrality, see, most recently, Laura Raicovich, Culture Strike: Art and Museums in an Age of Protest (New York: Verso, 2021).

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­13 “Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe: Time Line,” Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, http://exhibitions.guggenheim.org/futurism/ timeline/ (accessed April 28, 2022). 14 Rachel Donadio, “Guggenheim Is to Show Rare Murals by a Futurist,” The New York Times, January 21, 2014, C1 and C6. 15 The choice of this work for the catalog cover was unrelated to its placement in the installation. Instead, the book’s graphic designer, Eileen Boxer, proposed it as a lesserknown and, thus, fresher lead image, long before the painting’s location was decided.

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The Making of MART and the Archivio del Novecento: Interview with Gabriella Belli Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida

Founded in 1987 in the northeastern region of Trentino, the Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART) has established itself as a prominent institution for the exhibition and study of twentieth-century Italian art, despite its decentered location. Its growing art collection comprises, among many other artists of the ventennio, the largest body of work of futurist artist Fortunato Depero and his studio-museum, Casa d’arte futurista Depero. MART’s archive, Archivio del ‘900, hosts the papers of numerous leading artists, critics, and dealers of the fascist period, including those of fascist art critic and cultural policy maker Margherita Sarfatti. Since 2002, with the opening of its new building designed by architect Mario Botta, MART’s prolific exhibition activity has devoted special attention to the art of the ventennio, produced shows on sculpture in fascist Italy (2003), Thayaht (2005), Luigi Russolo (2006), Tullio Crali (2010), Gino Severini (2011), Mario Radice (2014), Mario Sironi (2017), Italian Magic Realism in the 1920s and 30s (2018), and Margherita Sarfatti (2018), in addition to countless exhibitions on Depero and futurism. We interviewed via email Gabriella Belli who was the mastermind behind the foundation of MART and served as its founding director until 2011. In April 2021, after Belli accepted our invitation, we sent her a long series of questions regarding the origins of MART and her curatorial choices with regards to art of the fascist period, leaving her freedom to respond to what she felt to be most relevant. Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida (SH-RB): How did MART start and what was the original idea behind its creation and its collections? Gabriella Belli (GB): Breaking cultural isolation, rewriting the artistic history of the twentieth century in an area like Trentino that had lost its traces, rediscovering the identity value of the community, founding an institutional tradition of contemporary art: this is the propellant that inspired the MART project. The idea is the result of a long gestation, matured approximately between 1981 and 1987. These were the precursor years to the actual project, marked by the opening of Palazzo delle Albere (1981) as an exhibition venue

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for contemporary art and by an exhibition dedicated to Giovanni Segantini in 1987—a success that for the first time brought 110,000 visitors to Trentino. Things started to happen in November of the same year, 1987, with the approval of the provincial law establishing the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. From that date, the multidisciplinary and intercultural project at the origin of MART would begin to take shape: a place where arts coexist, designed for the active conservation of works, for promotion, debate, research, knowledge of the plurality of means of expression and experiences of our time, with a very broad horizon, reflecting the multiform centers of the contemporary art scene. Its mission is to promote knowledge processes that are fundamental for the growth of the civil and cultural values of society. Its tools are study and research, archives, and a library; permanent and temporary exhibition activities, art collections, exhibitions, and conservation of assets; educational activity, making to learn, interactive workshops for all ages; communication, a means to dialogue and explore the world. Italian art in the twentieth century and in particular futurism and the Novecento movement primarily guided the definition and characterization of the museum, of its permanent collections, as well as its study and research activities. A line that we never betrayed, which, however, has always required updates in a process of continuous expansion and growth of the topics and tools necessary to conduct research. This process also led to an important exploration of contemporary art as an appendix and consequence of the artistic investigations that originated precisely in the years of the historical avant-garde and of the return to order. To summarize, it was a question of creating a circularity of information, leading from the artwork to the archive and library and vice versa, in a vertical as well as horizontal combination, thus open to continuous contamination. SH-RB: Can you describe the criteria you followed during the formation of the collection? GB: On the one hand the spirit of the 1915 manifesto by Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero, Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe, on the other the poetics of Novecento, which we found in the works of some authors from Trentino as well as in the first great gamble made by the museum as it was being set up: at the end of the 1990s, we secured as a long-term loan of the private collections, Collezione Giovanardi and VAF-Stiftung, two pillars of Italian art of that period, including work by Carlo Carrà, Filippo De Pisis, Massimo Campigli, Mario Sironi, Giorgio Morandi, Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico, and many futurist masterpieces. Dialogues and comparisons, alignments, and discontinuities, these were the words used to formulate the project for the new display of the permanent collection, a collection of masterpieces born thanks to a relationship of trust with many private collectors. Finally, the educational services within the exhibition, explaining the value of art in our lives, as Balla and Depero already said in 1915: “art at the service of everyday life”—the point of arrival of the Museum’s mission. SH-RB: Did you make specific curatorial choices for the art of the fascist period?

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GB: No critical review, but a careful and documented presentation of the facts. Most MART collections speak directly or indirectly of fascism. My commitment was in one direction only: to show and document, exhibit and explain. The purchase of Margherita Sarfatti’s archive intended to give full meaning to that extraordinary patrimony of works of “her” Novecento italiano hanging on the walls of the museum, which find explanations and comments in the theoretical treatment of her letters, writings, catalogs collected in her archive, even in the various j’accuse that make it up. So it was for the futurist archives of Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, Tullio Crali, Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles), Giannina Censi, Mino Somenzi, and many others, which give voice to the beautiful works in the collection and explain a fundamental chapter of Italian art. These documents reveal a history full of surprises and flashes of inspiration behind every work. As for the exhibition, the curatorial criteria are: narrative clarity, thematic grouping, or chronology; more importantly we have aimed to put the artworks in dialogue and to emphasize elective affinities between artists. By doing so, scholars, critics, and the general public alike can find pleasure in the discovery of new areas of knowledge.

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Now You See It, Now You Don’t: Reconstructing Artists’ Studios in Exhibitions on Fascist-era Art Sharon Hecker

Art is first of all an ethical fact before an esthetic one.

Mario Mafai1

Introduction Despite decades of scholarly research on the dangers of fascism, the “implicit code of silence” (implicita omertà)2 described by journalist Andrea Damiano in 1945 still persists in the way exhibitions of the art of the period are curated. This is evident in the fact that postwar exhibitions dedicated to fascist-era art continue to have a difficult time conveying the paradox that the aesthetic brilliance of the artworks sits uncomfortably with the horrors and tragedy of the period.3 To date, three kinds of approaches have been used to exhibit fascist-era art. One is the monographic exhibition, which highlights the production of a single artist and concentrates on biography, often heroizing or sanitizing the artists’ life stories and glossing over their relationships with the regime. Another is the survey exhibition, which tends to minimize each artist’s personal and professional complexities in favor of focusing on their artworks or broader artistic themes of the time. A third type highlights just one group’s relationship to fascism—an approach that, by definition, cannot show the multiplicity of experiences of artists living under the regime. After nearly a century of postwar exhibitions on fascist-era Italian art, the question still remains: Is there a way to show the art of this epoch in a manner that effectively intertwines aesthetic intensity with the realities of human tragedy? Could a curator find a different mode to exhibit the art produced during this period that does not end up replicating the spectacular aspect used and manipulated by the regime, while, at the same time, presenting the inexorably dark side of fascism?

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Today it is crucial for exhibitions to add to the glittering visual dynamics of the artworks the personal and collective circumstances of each artist’s trajectory within the historical moment. In this essay I suggest that one strategy could be to create a show that takes the viewer into the artists’ studios via photographs and the artists’ own pictorial representations of their studios. Such an approach could lead viewers to look behind the visual power of the art in order to glimpse the makers in their real or imagined spaces of work. To continue to admire only the beauty of the objects in exhibitions without grasping the troubled circumstances surrounding their creation seems complicit with fascism and the very strategies it used for gaining public consensus. There are several advantages and challenges to this strategy. One advantage is that the viewer can begin to move beyond the idea of the artist’s studio as a transparent, unproblematic, and ideologically neutral working environment, one that was equal and the same for all artists under fascism. Some studio images, for example, show artists who were committed to faithfully adhering to the publicly proclaimed role assigned to artists “to be faithful militants of the fascist cause.”4 In other images there may be a disconnect between what is happening in the artists’ lives and the images they present of their studios. Some show veiled signs of resistance while presenting a veneer of acceptability. Certain studios disappear as the ventennio unfolds, when dissenters, antifascists, and Jews either escaped from Italy, went into hiding, exile, or to death in concentration camps. Their studios can continue to exist as pregnant absences. Images of studios abandoned, reconstructed, or reinhabited after the war should also be included to provide a way to understand how the experience of fascism continued to be integrated or denied by artists. A challenge to showing images of artists’ studios is the fact that their highly performative nature can make it difficult for viewers to fully comprehend the insidiousness of fascism. In order to provide a more comprehensive context, additional textual support may be necessary. Rather than presenting historical or biographical data as wall text, using subtle lighting or ominous music, and flooding the show with documents, the goal can be accomplished by displaying directly on the exhibition walls subjective personal quotes from relevant voices of the period. What will become evident in this combination of texts and images is the contradictions, dissonances, complexities, and tragedies of the context in which artists moved and artworks were produced. This would mitigate the risk of lionizing, fetishizing, or romanticizing the artists or their workplaces.5

The Artist’s Studio under Fascism From the seventeenth century onwards the studio has typically been conceived as the generative place of artistic activity—a space for creative play, where ideas are worked out and the imagination is liberated “to reflect, critique, and innovate.”6 The studio has not only been considered a physical space but can also be a virtual or mental one wherein artists traditionally “realize their own artistic agency and self.”7 It is normally considered the protected site of autonomy, but it can also be a hub for instruction, social

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exchange, and collective work. In the case of fascism and other repressive regimes, the artist’s studio became far more ideologically charged, performative, and coded. Artists had to present to the public, collectors, critics, photographers, politicians, unexpected visitors, inspectors, and selection committees a façade of acceptability, although some studios secretly doubled as sites of antifascist meetings and illicit sexual encounters.8 It is beyond the scope of this essay to fully examine the ways in which artists were not free during fascism—the material is too vast to analyze here. Rather, the following paragraphs will give a flavor of how pervasive such surveillance was. Fascism shrewdly controlled and censored every intellectual and cultural realm of Italy. This has been documented through research on Italian writers, actors, editors, architects, photographers, and translators, as well as those involved in production of cinema, theater, music, and cartoons.9 Artists were no exception. Although single case studies of artists have been conducted, there has been no systematic archival analysis of how the regime manipulated the art system: how early and how far surveillance of artists reached, which artists or their families had files opened on them, whose studios were searched, and which of their artworks were forcibly repainted or were excluded from exhibitions. Given that there were official lists of undesirable authors, it is difficult to imagine that such lists did not exist for artists. For example, the 1939 Quadriennale publicly listed excluded Jewish artists after the 1938 Racial Laws were enacted. More subtly, influential fascist critics, art historians, and journalists patrolled artists and their output;10 cautious editors and dealers deemed certain artworks unpublishable or unmarketable; and commissioners and collectors prudently avoided others. We can only surmise through glimpses of single cases and artworks that the pressure on artists was ever present. There is no doubt that the messages from on high were explicit from early on. As historian Alessandra Tarquini notes, on February 15, 1926, in a speech at the Prima Mostra del Novecento exhibition in Milan, Mussolini established a clear hierarchy between politics and art, in which Italian artists had to consider themselves employees in the service of the state. And on October 5, 1926, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia, he went further, exhorting artists to produce art that was the highest glory of fascist Italy.11 This fact challenges the commonplace belief that the regime’s direct interference was only palpable from the mid-1930s.12 In order to make evident this dictatorial cultural context, a curator might consider adding to the exhibition walls quotes from the widely read journal Critica fascista defining the relationship between art and fascism. The anonymous editor of the journal, directed by the important proponent of fascist culture Giuseppe Bottai, listed subjects that were unacceptable for artists to depict, including anything “fragmentary, syncopated, psychoanalytical, intimist, crepuscular.”13 Art that reflected an interest in internationalism or foreign cultures was also considered objectionable. It has become commonplace in today’s scholarly literature and exhibitions to reiterate that even if Mussolini did impose fascist subject matter on artists, he never imposed a unified national style, as did Russia and Germany. Although a pluralism of styles was tolerated, this tolerance has given rise to the general misperception that artists were somehow free or at least autonomous under fascism.14 In actuality there was not an acceptance of all styles. A little-known 1940 text published in the United States by the self-exiled art historian Lionello Venturi makes this clear:

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The Italian Fascists … have sought to circumscribe art more underhandedly, by pretending to serve it, and have conceded it, nominally, every possible liberty. But when the Assistant Director of an exposition chooses the paintings and sculpture, he turns down those works which, because of their intrinsic quality, might attract unfavorable comment from the hierarchy and excuses himself by saying, “This is not in keeping with Mussolini’s taste.”15

­The Artist’s Studio, the Domestic Space, and the Family As exhibition viewers begin to understand that artists were not free, they can come to see the different ways in which artists adapted, conformed, and at times participated in defining fascist dicta. Some studio photographs—such as those of painter Mario Sironi and sculptor Adolfo Wildt—show artists whose commitment to fascism was clear and unwavering.16 Their early devotion to fascism led to acclaim from the regime, although such esteem did not necessarily assure lack of surveillance. The studio photographs show the artists presiding over artworks that conform to fascist prescriptions. Since the nineteenth century, artists’ studios were mostly perceived as virile places of escape from the family and above the daily toils of domesticity. However, Wildt’s studio photos admit the presence of his granddaughter raised on a sculpture pedestal, admitting the presence of the family into the virile professional space (Figure 20.1). Another example of the blending of an artist’s life, work, and family under fascism may be glimpsed from the descriptions of Carlo Carrà’s studio located in a living room filled with family and friends. These images of Carrà at work—with his wife engaging in household tasks, his son Massimo doing homework by his side, or visitors seated on the sofa—give a strong sense of the artist’s workspace as a site of pleasure and productivity as well as safety and control for artists and their families.17 There can be no doubt that artists saw their adherence to fascism as a form of protection for their families. There was a real and present fear, based on experience, that a refusal to adhere to fascism could be harmful to family members. As early as 1924 the poet Renato Mucci, a figure who would become involved in regime censorship of literature, wrote in an exhibition review, “I won’t state my political opinion, since I am a family man, I care about my life, and I don’t want, at times like these, to compromise myself.”18 This chilling quote shows just how close to home the threat of fascism extended.19 Fortunato Depero’s photos of his Casa del mago (Magician’s House, 1920) further articulate the image of productive family involvement in the artist’s space. They make publicly visible the studio as workshop and business enterprise as Depero’s wife Rosetta labors with others to make fascist-approved tapestries and paintings. These photographs have been regarded as promoting the studio as a magical world of creativity and productive collaboration between art, design, and daily life.20 Yet between the lines of the image of the industrious fascist family, one might glimpse a protective maneuver that attempts to seal the artist off from suspicion, leaving nothing that is dear to him exposed.

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Figure  20.1 Photograph of Adolfo Wildt in his studio on Corso Garibaldi with his granddaughter Mia, 1919, published in Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics Italia 1918– 1943 (Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2018), 95. No photographer’s name is listed. Photograph is in the public domain.

Encasement in the Studio Another example of how artists excised their studios from the outside world is Felice Casorati’s enormous painting Lo studio (The Studio), 1922–23 (Figure 20.2), which he considered his masterpiece—his intellectual and spiritual touchstone. This painting was so precious to him that he exhibited and published photos of it frequently and even remade it after its destruction in a fire in 1931. In the painting, originally called Gli allievi (The Pupils), Casorati depicts his studio as a serene, ordered space of instruction

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Figure  20.2 Felice Casorati, Lo studio (The Studio), 1922–23, oil on canvas, exact dimensions unknown, destroyed. Published in Raffaello Giolli, Felice Casorati (Milan: Hoepli, 1925), n.p. Photograph is in the public domain.

in which artistic labor takes place via learning.21 This process is alluded to by the seated woman on the left, who is facing the viewer and absorbed in the task of sketching a nude model seen by the viewer only from behind. In the background, a headless white plaster torso of a female body can be seen on a raised pedestal, and to the right is a boy dressed in a painter’s smock, looking away from his easel as if lost in meditation, paintbrush drooping from his hand. The tranquil mood of the painting, noted by critics from Casorati’s time, must be juxtaposed with the turbulent events in his life at this moment, which are not mentioned in exhibition catalogs or most art-historical essays on Casorati.22 On October 19,

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1922—exactly during the period of work on this painting, and nine days before Mussolini’s March on Rome—Casorati, together with his close friend Piero Gobetti and the typographer Arnaldo Pittavino, founded the antifascist journal La Rivoluzione Liberale. Casorati did the graphic design and created the journal’s logo. On February 6, 1923, under Mussolini’s orders, Casorati was arrested along with Gobetti; Gobetti’s publishing house was raided; and a ceramic head made by Casorati was destroyed.23 Although these intimidating experiences occurred only two months before Lo studio was exhibited, no trace of upset can be discerned in Casorati’s imagined studio. Nor did the regime see any cause for concern in the work. He showed it to great acclaim in fascist-approved exhibitions such as the Turin Quadriennale in spring 1923. Still, the link between the antifascist Gobetti and his friend Casorati continued to be made in newspapers during this period, and Gobetti published a lavish monograph on Casorati in late July 1923.24 This connection may have appeared politically problematic in the eyes of the regime, however: in at least one review of Gobetti’s monograph, both Casorati and Gobetti were criticized as “notoriously communists and paid by the foreigner.”25 Lo studio loomed large over Casorati’s personal room at the Venice Biennale in April 1924, introduced by a long essay in the September 1924 issue of the journal Dedalo by Venturi, a critic whose political position was by that time becoming compromised in the eyes of the regime.26 This was followed by a 1925 book on Casorati by the critic Raffaello Giolli, who in the same year was expelled from teaching for publicly refusing to adhere to the regime. The fact that Casorati quickly distanced himself from Gobetti suggests that these connections may have become worrisome to him. On July 25, 1925, Gobetti’s wife Ada mentioned in her diary a chance meeting she and her husband had with Casorati at the Louvre after not having seen him in Turin for a long time. She remarked that Casorati “never speaks seriously,”27 suggesting he avoided discussing their past antifascist engagements. By February 1926 Gobetti would die after beatings by fascists. By 1939 Venturi would be in self-exile in the United States. And Giolli, due to his political views, was eventually tortured and deported to a concentration camp, where he died in 1944. The split between Casorati’s studio image and the tumultuous events of his life was not unusual among cultural figures of the ventennio. It was part of a phenomenon termed by historians of fascism as the “the gray zone,”28 wherein occupants oscillated between political poles or chose to remain outside and above the historical tragedy of the moment, whether because they were afraid, had become disillusioned, or used dissimulation as a survival strategy. In Casorati’s case he imagined his real studio as a peaceful “inner room”29 of his mind. It should be noted that throughout his life, Casorati maintained a sense of tragedy that did not originate with fascism. He had served in the First World War and suffered personal losses, leading Venturi to write that “the tragedy of the [Great] war … took away from him in those years every serenity.”30 There may have been an inner price to pay for Casorati’s excision of the world from his art. While most critics praised his studio painting as harmonious, a few remarked on its “excessive symmetry” and “almost caricatural order,”31 as well as the fact that it appeared “supremely intellectualistic.”32 Some noted “an icy wind” had dried up his paintings and that “everything is immobilized, as if suspended.”33 Only in 1958 did

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critic Luigi Carluccio speak openly of the “frigidity” and “mechanicalness” of Casorati’s painted world, “closed in its encasement”34 and populated by figures who are “unable or unsuitable to communicate.”35 Perhaps this can be gleaned from the close-ups of the boy in Lo studio that Casorati provided to publishers. He is framed by the only shadow in the painting, which has been cast on the wall from the plaster torso. The light falls on the front of his face, while the entire left side is shadowed, making it resemble a porcelain mask or as if covered with a theatrical facade of powder. With his large smock, the child resembles the commedia dell’arte’s Pierrot, the figure who is known to cry on the inside, an allusion that makes a tiny breach in the painting’s otherwise impeccable serenity.

The Studio as Ethical Crisis Mario Mafai’s Modelli nello studio (Models in the Studio, 1940; Figure 20.3) is a rare example of a studio image that is more conflicted and resistant. As with Casorati’s painting, Mafai’s imaginary depiction of his studio contains elements from reality but leaves less room for doubt about his political feelings in the dramatically degenerating political climate. At first glance there seems to be nothing that would have raised the regime’s concern in Mafai’s depiction of his studio in Genoa: two nude male models, one standing and seen from the front, wearing a top hat and about to put on a black outfit (perhaps suggesting armor or a centurion’s breastplate, with a barely visible male face on it), while the other, seen from behind, is seated on a black blanket. On the right is a male plaster torso, turned away from the viewer and placed next to a vase with dried flowers. On the back of the studio wall is a blurry image and an empty red chair facing it. Some elements are difficult to decipher and may lead to conjecture, from the model’s blank or worried stare to the black sack he is about to enter and the dried flowers in the vase. The elegant top hat on this model appears in self-portraits of this year, and unpublished primary documentation indicates that a member of the awards jury of the fascist “Premio Bergamo” at the Mostra Nazionale di Pittura in 1940 had told Mafai to remove the hat from the painting if he wanted to win the prize.36 It is not easy to understand the signification of this gesture. Perhaps atop a nude male body it was considered a provocation, uncomfortably juxtaposing diplomatic formality with nakedness—as we shall see, Mafai would repeat the gesture of the naked figure with the top hat more violently in other works of the same year, which he kept hidden. More readily discerned is the uneasy perspective. The figures seem to be pushed back into a tight corner of the studio as if under surveillance from above. Most disturbing is the image on the back wall, which, according to my interview with Mafai’s daughter Giulia, was an etching her father owned of the Massacre of the Innocents, depicting King Herod’s killing of Jewish children. The reference to the regime’s Racial Laws is at once veiled and explicit. Despite all these allusions (and the hat), the painting won the first prize, and it is often still discussed in terms of the prize but not the political context.37

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­ igure 20.3  Mario Mafai, Modelli nello studio (Models in the Studio), 1940. Oil on canvas, F 164 × 125.5 cm. Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan. Courtesy Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan.

The year of Modelli nello studio’s creation was a moment of ethical crisis for Mafai and a turning point in his career. Mussolini’s Racial Laws of 1938 led to an anonymous tip to authorities about the fact that Mafai’s wife, the artist Antonietta Raphaël, was Jewish. She and their daughters were forced to flee from Rome into hiding in Genoa, where he installed a makeshift studio, the locus of this painting. Mafai expressed in his diary his self-doubt about the artist’s position in this historical moment: “Here I am who thinks, judges with my reasoning, with the tentacles of my sensitivity. And nobody is with me. I am responsible and alone in my little dressing room like a sad actor.”38 During this time Mafai also began to draw and paint his Fantasie (Fantasies), works that visualized the tragedy of the period in graphic terms resonating symbolically with

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the Massacre of the Innocents on his studio wall and recapturing the naked men in top hats—here depicted openly as perpetrators of violence with their black fascist military boots. The artist hid these chilling works throughout the war, showing them only sporadically. Today Giulia Mafai describes them as: streams of tears and blood. … They are paintings that … at that time were … very dangerous to keep: they were against the war at a time when its mysticism was being exalted instead. That’s why we always kept them hidden and when we were forced to move houses as clandestines, these “Fantasies” always followed us. The task of us three sisters … was to bind up these wooden tablets and carry them from house to house. They are a piece of my life and of the country.39

­“Now You See it, Now You Don’t”: Showing the Absences By 1938, when the Racial Laws were issued, it became evident that the studios of Jewish artists no longer existed or had been abandoned. Jewish artists or those close to them could not be seen after 1938 and should be included in exhibitions as weighty absences. Beyond the tranquil image of studio work represented by Nella Marchesini, what happened when she and her husband, Ugo Malvano, who was Jewish, had to escape due to the Racial Laws? And what happened to the studio of the artist Raphaël, shown happily painting in her Roman garden, when she had to relocate to a clandestine life in Genoa with her daughters? The studio of the Trieste painter Gino Parin, who was deported and died in Bergen-Belsen, could stand empty for exhibition viewers, along with the date of his deportation. One might also think of Ghitta Carrel (Klein), the Jewish Hungarian photographer who, by strongly retouching her photos, gave glamour and star status to the regime’s most powerful figures and families in her studio. When Carrel requested protection from the regime in 1939, her subjects turned on her and kept her under surveillance, so much so that she was constrained to flee Rome.40 Other kinds of absences would be important to include in a show. Studios of queer artists, women artists, and figures close to artists should be represented. Carrà’s studio furniture, for instance, was designed by architect Giuseppe Pagano. Photos of this would allow the viewer to reflect on Pagano’s sudden antifascist turn in 1943 and his tragic deportation to death in Mauthausen.

Artists’ Studios after the War What might be most startling for viewers would be not stopping at 1945 but instead seeing the aftermath, when the bubble of fascism burst. Photos of Lucio Fontana on the ruins of his crumbled studio, both emblematizing the collective historical reality and denying it by transforming it into a photo-op, could represent one artist’s response.41 Carrà’s bitter recollections could be another: the Nazis occupied his studio in Forte dei Marmi, stole drawings, and used his easels as firewood. According to his grandson Luca and surviving photos, Carrà found this so upsetting that he refused to use easels

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Figure 20.4  Photograph of Carlo Carrà painting in his studio/home in Forte dei Marmi after his easels were burned by the Nazis, c. 1945. Courtesy Archivio Carrà, Milan.

from then on when painting in Forte dei Marmi (Figure 20.4).42 After the war, Ghitta Carrel’s role in shaping the regime’s public images may have become intolerable to her. She abandoned her studio in Italy, immigrated to Israel, and her career disintegrated. A final postwar studio image could be that of Mafai. In April 1944 he moved into the Roman studio of regime sculptor Domenico Rambelli, who had to escape when Italy was liberated but returned soon afterwards (Figure 20.5). As a journalist noted in 1946, the studio was filled with Rambelli’s “enormous, hideous plaster statues covered in dust … depict[ing] Vittorio Emanuele III and Mussolini, very severe, awkwardly cloaked. They are the official statues of the ancient regime as they appeared in the exhibition of the [fascist] revolution. Behind a partition are hidden little Kings and little Mussolinis with dirty rags on their shoulders and faces.”43 Mafai kept Rambelli’s statues of il Duce on display in his studio, continuing to make art, but left visible the signs of the tragedy of the past, providing an example of an artist who never forgot.

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Figure 20.5  Photograph of Mario Mafai in his studio between April 1944 and 1946. The studio was previously the studio of fascist sculptor Domenic Rambelli. Visible in the background is Rambelli’s enormous sculpture of Benito Mussolini. Photographer unknown. Courtesy Giulia Mafai, Rome.

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Notes 1 L. D., “Mario Mafai: Paesaggista romano,” Quadrivio (Rome), January 24, 1937. All translations in this essay are by the author. 2 Andrea Damiano, Rosso e grigio (Milan: Muggiani, 1947), 183. See also Anna Ferrando, “L’itinerario di Andrea Damiano e le lettere inedite a Piero Gobetti,” Nuova Antologia (January–March 2012): 13–24. 3 See this volume’s essays, as well as Carmen Belmonte, “La Sapienza, il fascismo, una mostra: Snodi critici nella ricezione dell’arte del Ventennio negli anni Ottanta,” Studi di Memofonte 24 (2020): 208–44. 4 Giuseppe Bottai, “Risultanze dell’inchiesta sull’arte fascista,” Critica fascista 5, no. 5 (February 15, 1927): 61–4. 5 On studio fetishization, see Jon Wood, “The Studio in the Gallery?” in Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, ed. Suzanne MacLeod (London: Routledge, 2005), 158–69. For a different approach to artists’ studios, see Ada Masoero, Beatrice Marconi, Flavia Matitti, L’officina del mago: l’artista nel suo atelier, 1900–1950 (Milan: Skira, 2003). 6 Lisa Wainwright, Foreword to The Studio Reader: On the Space of Artists, ed. Mary Jane Jacob and Michelle Grabner (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2010), ix. The literature on this subject is vast. 7 Ibid. 8 See Ebe Cagli Seidenberg, Il tempo dei Dioscuri (Bologna: Bora, 1996), 16–21. Thanks to Raffaele Bedarida for this ­reference. 9 The literature on fascist censorship is enormous. See the overview by Guido Bonsaver, ed., in Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth Century Italy (Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2005). 10 For example, in 1930, art critic, politician, and fascist exhibition director Cipriano Efisio Oppo wrote in the fascist-leaning newspaper La Tribuna, regarding a show of Mario Mafai and Scipione financed by Mussolini at the Galleria di Roma and controlled by the fascist Syndicate: “it also bothers us to feel hovering around this painting, the ism of that ‘surrealism’ that reminds us of Berlin and Paris also through Israel.” Cipriano Efisio Oppo, “Mafai e Scipione alla Galleria di Roma,” La Tribuna (Rome), November 13, 1930. 11 Alessandra Tarquini, Storia della cultura fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 93. 12 The cutoff date Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti chose for his 1967 exhibition Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935 exemplifies this commonplace belief. 13 Bottai, “Resultanze dell’inchiesta,” 61–4. 14 Luca Quattrocchi’s essay in this volume examines this misperception’s origin. 15 Lionello Venturi, “Art under Fascism,” in Neither Liberty Nor Bread: The Meaning and Tragedy of Fascism, ed. Frances Keene (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940; repr. 1969), 148–50. I thank Elena Dellapiana for sharing this. 16 It is beyond the scope of this essay to discuss the photographers and uses of studio photographs. 17 According to his son, Massimo, Carrà’s studio was always in his living room, from the studio in via Vivaio to that in via Pascoli from 1928 to 1939 and his studio after the war. See Massimo Carrà, Il piacere della memoria: ricordi d’arte e di artisti (Turin: Fògola, 1999), 10–15, 21–31.

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18 Roberto Mucci, “La luna nel pozzo: mostra di Donghi,” Il Nuovo Paese, December 11, 1924; cited in Antonio Donghi: Sessanta dipinti dal 1922 al 1961, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (Rome: De Luca, 1985), 105. On Mucci, see Adolfo Scotto di Luzio, “‘Gli editori sono figliuoli di famiglia,’ Fascismo e circolazione del libro negli anni Trenta,” Studi Storici 36, no. 3 (July–September 1995): 761–810. 19 This quote could be placed on an exhibition wall next to photos of artists’ studios with family members. 20 See, for example, Gabriella Belli, ed., La casa del Mago: le arti applicate nell’opera di Fortunato Depero, 1920–1942, exh. cat., Archivio del ‘900 Rovereto (Milan and Florence: Charta, 1992). 21 Piero Gobetti, letter to Ada Gobetti, n. 248, August 6, 1922, in Piero and Ada Gobetti, Nella tua breve esistenza: Lettere 1918–1926, ed. Ersilia Alessandrone Perona (Turin: Einaudi, 1991), 495. 22 An exception is Romy Golan, who describes how fascism prompted artists and critics “to fashion refined techniques of undecidability” and notes the political leanings and fates of antifascist writers on Casorati. See Romy Golan, “Is Fascist Realism a Magic Realism?” RES 73/74 (2020): 221–37. 23 The bust, titled Ada, portrayed Gobetti’s wife. Rosanna Maggio Serra, ed., Piero Gobetti e Felice Casorati, 1918–1926 (Milan: Electa, 2001), 80. 24 Piero Gobetti, Felice Casorati Pittore (Turin: Piero Gobetti Editore, 1923). 25 “Index,” (Rome), November 10, 1923, cited in Laura Malvano, “Il pittore e il critico: note sulla ricezione della prima monografia casoratiana,” in Serra, Piero Gobetti e Felice Casorati, 27 and n. 53. 26 Lionello Venturi, “Il pittore Felice Casorati,” Dedalo 4 (1923–24): 238–61. 27 Ada Gobetti, in Nella tua breve esistenza, 320. 28 Claudio Pavone, “La Resistenza oggi: problemi storiografici e problema civile,” Rivista di Storia Contemporanea 21, no. 2–3 (1992): 476. 29 F. Bernardelli, “Artisti al lavoro: Casorati,” interview in La Stampa (Turin), March 13, 1923; cited in Felice Casorati, Scritti, interviste, lettere, ed. Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Abscondita, 2004), 15–16. 30 Venturi, Felice Casorati, 256. 31 Anonymous commentator in Gazzetta di Venezia, April 24, 1924; cited in Giorgina Bertolino, Francesco Poli, and Felice Casorati, Felice Casorati, catalogo generale: i dipinti (1904–1963) (Turin: Allemandi, 1995), 255. 32 C. Giardini, “Le affermazioni alla XIV Biennale di Venezia. Felice Casorati,” Arte pura e decorativa, September 1924, 19; cited in Bertolino et al., Felice Casorati, 255. 33 Ibid. 34 Luigi Carluccio, Felice Casorati, exh. cat. Centro culturale Olivetti, 1958, in Bertolino et al., Felice Casorati, 256. 35 Luigi Carluccio, preface to Felice Casorati (Turin: Teca, 1964), n.p.; see https://www. luigicarluccio.it/images/carluccio/libri/pdf/casorati.pdf (accessed April 29, 2022). 36 This letter was brought to my attention by Mafai’s daughter Giulia. 37 An exception is Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Valerio Rivosecchi, Mafai (Rome: De Luca, 1986), 17. The scope of this essay does not allow me to open the question of revisionist postwar readings. 38 Claudia Terenzi, “Mario Mafai: gli anni difficili,” in ibid., 27. 39 Giulia Mafai, interview with the author, May 1, 2021. She is quoted in Marica Guccini, “Le fantasie” di Mario Mafai: un pensiero antifascista,” Arte e arti, February

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Curating Fascism 23, 2021, http://www.artearti.net/magazine/articolo/le-fantasie-di-mario-mafai-unpensiero-antifascista/ (accessed April 29, 2022). Roberto Dulio, Un ritratto mondano: Fotografie di Ghitta Carell (Milan: Johan & Levi, 2013). See Sharon Hecker, “‘Servant of Two Masters’: Lucio Fontana’s 1948 Sculptures in Milan’s Cinema Arlecchino,” Oxford Art Journal 35, no. 3 (December 2012): 337–61. Luca Carrà, conversation with the author, January 1, 2021. G. Visentini, “Visita a Mario Mafai,” in La Fiera Letteraria (Rome), April 11, 1946, 7.

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Interview with Maaza Mengiste on Project3541: A Photographic Archive of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War Raffaele Bedarida and Sharon Hecker

After reading Maaza Mengiste’s 2019 novel, The Shadow King, on the resistance of Ethiopian women against the Italian fascist army in the mid-1930s, we learned about her Project3541, which is “an artistic and educational endeavor that uses written, visual, and oral histories to provide an intimate perspective on the global and personal consequences of the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War.”1 We contacted her, asking her to participate in our volume, and giving her the option to either write an essay or conduct an interview with us. After a preliminary correspondence and based on Mengiste’s preference, on February 12, 2021, we had an hour-long Zoom conversation, followed by an exchange of emails. What follows is the interview as transcribed by Cooper Union student Fern Greene. Sharon Hecker (SH): Raffaele and I are both art historians, and we both work on modern and contemporary Italian art, and we both went to see the Prada exhibition about art during the fascist period, and each of us had this terrible reaction to it, because it was this beautiful show, incredibly beautiful, it was at the Prada Foundation, wonderfully curated, just gorgeous artworks, and documents that for a scholar would have been a dream. At the same time, we started feeling that it was very unsettling; because the exhibition was so beautiful that it kind of mesmerized you out of thinking that there was something not okay about this period. And the whole desirability of fascist art was actually what contributed to fascism’s success in the first place. So we just started talking about it, chatting about it, WhatsApp-ing about it, and then we started thinking about what this show was revealing about that period, and what it was concealing; and how that actually fits into a much bigger history of exhibitions of fascist art in Italy after the war, and how that is shaping memory, and that is shaping history in some way. So we decided to put [something] together—we gave a few talks about it, and people were very

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vocal, and there was a lot of dialogue, and so we thought, “Oh, we’ve, we’ve hit on something,” and so we decided to create a volume out of it, and we decided to invite many, many people to talk about how all the exhibitions that have been organized from the fall of Mussolini all the way to today—I mean, that was only two years ago—are really shaping collective memory and historical narratives and even political discourses around the Italian ventennio, so the idea of the volume was really what are the curatorial strategies, and what are the political responsibilities also when you do an exhibition on that period, focusing on such a delicate moment; and we asked art historians, architectural historians, design historians even, to talk about the design, cultural historians, curators just to talk about different parts of that exhibition that also maybe were hidden or ignored. And of course, one of them was the fact that there was nothing in the room of 1938 about the Racial Laws, so it was like, life went on as normal in 1938, and that was certainly not the experience of Jews during fascism. And that led us to think that also there was really nothing about the experience of imperialism, and what if you were an Ethiopian walking through that exhibition, how would you have felt about that presentation of Italian history? And so that’s when we hit on your book and your writing, and we thought that it was really important to bring that into the volume as well, because it sort of opened up different voices and different attitudes and approaches about it—I don’t know, Raffaele … do you want to add to that? Raffaele Bedarida (RB): Yeah, so we were both very interested in the way you approach the history and legacy of fascist colonialism in your writing, but also the role that specifically images have in your work. Because, of course, the focus of the book is on exhibitions, right, so of course you have talked about the book [elsewhere], and the book speaks for itself too, but we were particularly interested in two aspects, and this is how we want to structure today’s conversation. One is your Project3541, which is on your website, and so we would like to learn more about how it works, how it started, and then also the role of images (in particular photography, but not only photography) in your writing. So does that sound good? Maaza Mengiste (MM): Yeah, that does, that’s great. RB: So yeah, the first question would be, if you could talk a little bit about Project3541, how it started, and its scope. MM: Project3541 is an artistic and educational endeavor. It’s both a gathering of photographs, from my collection—which I’ll talk about a little bit later— and also from other people who are the descendants of those who were involved in any way in this war [the 1935–41 Italo-Ethiopian War]: whether they are Italian, or British, or Ethiopian, Eritrean, Somalian, Libyan, Indian; those who were part of the British forces. This is a site where people can share their family photographs, but we also understand that not everyone had the ability to make photographs at that time. We’re also looking for family stories, family memories, things that can help develop a better understanding of this history from an intimate perspective. The memories

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the families have and the memories that photographs can reveal, but also complicate for us. The site really … began as a way for me to share my own photography collection. My fascination with these photographs began before I was even a writer—by now, it has been more than twenty years ago. And I was interested in these images that were taken of Ethiopia in the 1930s since before I started writing my first book [Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, 2010]. Whenever I would see a photo in an antique store or anywhere like that, I would get it … I didn’t know why. I just knew I was interested, and slowly this collection started to grow into an idea that this maybe was something I could write about because I had my own family memories from this war with Italy. And as I was writing my first book, I started researching this history a bit more and continued to collect these photographs. I moved to Rome, I was there on a fellowship for almost one year, to do research on this fascist period. I was looking in archives throughout Rome and realizing that the information I was getting in those archives was not the history that I knew. I would look at my photographs and realize that they were hinting at a different kind of story. Soon after that, I went to Calabria, and I was on a book tour for my first book (which is set in 1974). I was there talking in this small town in a small bookstore and at the end of my presentation, a man stood up and he said, “I want to talk about 1935.” And the entire room froze. They got tense. And you know, most of the soldiers that were fighting on the ground, not the generals, not the officers, came from the South. And I wondered when I was on my way there from Rome, I was thinking in the back of my head, “I wonder if there is something I can research here, or if, you know, these are descendants of those men from the South.” So when this man stood up, in some ways I was prepared. But um, I didn’t expect what he said next, which was, “My father was a pilot during this war.” He said, “He dropped poison on your people. How do I ask for your forgiveness?” And he started crying. People were turning around and telling him to sit down, and he said, “Please don’t leave until I come back.” He left, and a little bit later he came back, and he had a self-published book of his father’s photographs, his father’s diary entries, his father’s letters. And he gave it to me, and he said, “Do what you want with this.” When I got back to my apartment in Rome, I looked at those photographs and I realized: number one, these soldiers took their cameras to war. These were a different kind of photograph than I had been seeing in my own rough collection. These were quotidian photographs—the others were photojournalist images, you know, that were very available in antique stores. These were very intimate, personal photographs, things that men—the soldiers—would take. They didn’t expect censors would ever see them, they could take anything they wanted, they maybe didn’t develop them until they got back to Italy. They weren’t always developing them at Asmara or Addis Ababa. So this is where everything really began for Project3541. I said, “Let me leave the archives, let me get out of here because the real story is with the descendants and the real story is in these photographs. The letters were censored, but the photographs, maybe,

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were not.” So I started going by foot into every small store in Rome; every place that had photographs, old photographs. I started going to flea markets across Italy. Abruzzo, Trieste, every small place I could find, Palermo—and really collecting these. And so that collection is what is helping to develop Project3541. RB: And people are participating too, people are submitting photographs? MM: Some, yes. It was really interesting—initially when I put this call out, somebody emailed and he said, “Would you accept photographs from an Italian?” And in the beginning I was just thinking this would reach Ethiopians, East Africans. I wasn’t thinking of the Italian side. And then I thought, “Yes, of course. Yes.” So from the Italian side is sometimes a question like this: “My grandfather was in Ethiopia, he had a child with an Ethiopian woman. My family’s refusing to give me information about that. Would you help me find him?” I’m getting that, I’m getting other questions. For example, from a woman who showed me some photographs and said, “My family was Jewish in Eritrea and they were put in the camp and I think I have the name [of the camp], could you help me locate records?” So in addition to photographs, I was getting questions. Another person, an Ethiopian, said, “My grandfather, or my great uncle, we think he was taken to this prison and we never saw him again. Could you help me find information about a prison in Italy?” I think it was a place like Isola di Ponza or similar, one of those isolated prisons Mussolini would put people in. And I’m getting these questions and I’m realizing there is an entire history that is completely a mystery to families in ways I didn’t understand. These are just a few examples. And I’m hoping that this website becomes a way also for people to communicate information or communicate questions. People are submitting photographs. We haven’t put them up yet; we’re developing this slowly, but they’re also asking questions. I think that this site is now going to also be a place for those questions, so people can explore the complications of this shared history. And maybe there is a way for communication, for someone to say, “I know this area because my father is from there and we did have a prison camp there,” you know, and we can do that together. SH: It’s so interesting, I mean, because it just—right away you touched at some of the questions about how sensitive the topic of imperialism is in Italy even today, and any negative image of Italy, both here in Italy and in the world, can meet with such resistanceMM: Yes. SH: And that’s similar to how fascism in Italy’s involvement with the Nazis is told, you know, it’s very hard to bring out not-so-nice sides. I wondered: did you have any responses from Italy, the other kind of responses, like “this is not our story,” from the website or the project? MM: I get that. It’s often been, “Well, we built the roads.” You know there’s always that, “We built the roads, we built this.” You know, that’s the … friendlier reaction to it. I was in Rome just before the pandemic hit in December 2019, and I was there to collect an award for this book, and the judges were

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discussing why they selected the book. It was interesting because all of them said that they recognized the character of Colonel Carlo Fucelli from The Shadow King, a really cruel officer. They, all of them, said they recognized a brother, a brother-in-law: “That is someone in our family.” Which was interesting to me. That it still, of course, exists. But as they were speaking, one man stood up at the back and began to say, “This history is completely, you know, exaggerated . . .” And somebody else stood up, and then there started an argument [Laughs]. The book is coming out in March [2021] in Rome—in Italy, so we’ll see what happens there. I’m bracing myself; I think the response from journalists, the reviews, will reflect partly the book but partly the response to that history. SH: [nods] RB: Absolutely. And one of the things that struck me is how, in the book, in the Shadow King, and when you discuss the book you describe the fascist use of photography as an aggressive gesture, and the camera as a weapon, right? And then in your website and also today when you were describing Project3541 you were saying this is an intimate perspective on the Italian-Ethiopian War, and as an act of reclamation. I was wondering if there was an interconnection between these two and if you could expand on these notions? MM: I think that these photographs that were taken by Italians in East Africa and in Libya (I have some of those photographs as well), were not necessarily revealing; they were not intended to reveal something about the East African. They were really being used to develop a narrative about Italians. To develop and curate memory so that when these Italians took these photographs back with them, they could look at things they wanted to remember and leave out the rest. And so in that way, the camera is a weapon. I mean, these narratives were about power, about dominion, about domination; but when I look at those images as an Ethiopian, I’m looking for the things that the camera reveals that the photographer never knew were being revealed. And this is where that intimate perspective comes in. The way that I can look at this, the way that I try to understand this history— I’m not looking at it in a straightforward way. I come at this at an angle, because I know that this is not just an image of two people. It’s not just a photo of an Italian man with an arm over an East African man. Clearly the East African is feeling very uncomfortable, but the Italian is smiling and he is letting you know that he is in control. But when I’m looking at it, I understand there is another way for me to consider this. I can look at it and begin to take apart why that image was even necessary, you know. What was happening that made that show of strength necessary? What was threatening these Italians? I can also look and think about what it is that this man is saying… Does his dress reveal an area of the country, is there some identifying detail here that can help me connect this to a moment in history, or to a region, and then develop a larger narrative about it? So it becomes more than just about this Italian. It becomes an intimate conversation I begin to have with an invisible story that is there, but I just have to figure out how to look.

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RB: In one of your talks, you were saying that the title itself of the Shadow King—the shadow could be interpreted as a photographic shadow. MM: Absolutely. I don’t know if you’ve seen the photograph I’m talking about just now, but, there [Figure 21.1] you see the shadow of that photographer on the ground, with these two men. And The Shadow King comes from that place that a photographer rules, which is a place of shadows, both morally and physically. That world in between light and dark. RB: Yeah, it would be great if we could include the image in the publication! MM: Absolutely, I can send that to you. RB: Thank you.

­Figure  21.1 Two men standing in the shadow of a photographer c. 1935, Ethiopia. Photo from the private collection of Maaza Mengiste.

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MM: And if I forget, if you just remind me, I can send it. RB: Okay. Fantastic. So on the one hand, you were talking about looking closely at images and finding something that was not necessarily intentional on the part of the photographer. I was also wondering if, then, there are images that you decided to leave out? For example, as you received images for your project, or when you collect images—is there something that you think would be better to not be exhibited? And, in general, let’s say a curator asks you, you know, to exhibit those photographs—what would be the main concerns regarding the use or misuse of these images? MM: There are certain images, of course—we’ve seen some, some are readily available online—images that show extreme violence, of Italians holding up the heads that they have cut off of Ethiopians. I don’t have that in my collection, but if you just Google you can find it online. [Pauses] I would hesitate, I think the question for me is … I don’t want to exploit the people any more than they were already exploited in the 1930s. And so the images that these Italians would take that were sexually exploitative, where it was clear that these were assaults, there were sexual assaults likely happening … I don’t want to show that because I feel like those people I see in the photographs, those East Africans, they feel like family to me. So I’m being careful and respectful because they went back home and they tried to live their lives in as normal a way as possible after everything, maybe never spoke about what they really experienced, especially the women and the girls, and I don’t want to exploit them again by revealing some of this. I don’t put those up on the website. [Pauses] Yeah. And I think because my book addresses some of the violence that occurred against women, it’s not being silenced. But I don’t want to put it up on the website. There is an allegiance and respect I feel for those women and girls. SH: You’ve already talked a bit about it: in respect to Italy, you’ve talked about how storytelling can work to fill in gaps or untold stories in history, but you also have a culture that in many senses doesn’t want to see or discuss this, and maybe is there an element of shame? I mean, what you were describing—that man—enters into this discussion, and how do you address that carefully when you are trying to bring out something that is so, so, so sensitive in a cultureMM: Mmm [nods] SH: that had been buried underneath in a really um, conscious way almost. MM: Well, yeah, I think that art and literature provide a way to look that becomes easier. It’s maybe easier to talk about it through fiction first before moving into actual family stories. It might be easier to look at it as a film or an artistic project and then begin to turn that conversation closer to home. I hope that when my book is released in Italy that it becomes a way for families to say, “Wait, was there anyone in our family that went to Ethiopia?” Because there are a lot of people, that didn’t—I have friends that did not know until they met me that they had a grandfather or an uncle who was in that war; and it was only through our conversations that they thought to ask a grandparent and then the stories came out. No one talked about it before and didn’t want

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to talk about it over the years. And so sometimes it’s just a matter of having a way to ask. And hopefully, this is one way that makes it a little bit easier to begin to think about all the complicated questions that need to still be asked. They’re just beneath the surface. SH: Mmm. Yeah. [nods] RB: You described the way you conducted research in Italy; I’m curious how the research process happened in Ethiopia? MM: The Ethiopian process was talking to people. It was really just talking to family members, to other people, it was really looking at history through oral storytelling. Documentation tended to be in Italy. Some of the Ethiopian stories of what happened … I would go to the sites of certain battles, certain villages and go look at the terrain and talk to the people that were born there, that lived there, that might have had a family memory to share, who might say, “Oh yeah there was an Italian camp over here, let me show you,” you know that kind of thing. That’s the work I did in Ethiopia. The documents: those things I did in Italy. RB: And, as we were saying before, our book focuses on exhibitions, so we were wondering if you visited any exhibition, and if that was helpful or you responded to any shows? MM: I didn’t visit any exhibitions when I was in Rome then but I did go to EUR [laughs]. Oh my god! I would like to visit again but I don’t know if I have ever been in a more … I don’t know what the word is … it was so uncomfortable and so garish, and so bizarre, but in some ways it was fascinating to be there. I felt like I was in an exhibition myself, walking through it. That place felt to me like a monument to fascism, quite literally. I’m currently working on a project now, with the Goethe Institute and the Onassis LA Centre about EUR, about monuments and memory. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, of what remains when buildings are up—even if one of the buildings is now a headquarters for Fendi [laughs]. I’m thinking about what memory is contained there and what’s happening with collective dialogue regarding this monument. I’ve been thinking about that a lot and I do think that that is still an exhibit. Any time I would walk through Piazza Venezia, I would look up, just turn and look and imagine Mussolini up on the veranda giving his speech—that feels still like an exhibit. It just feels like that to me. I don’t remember seeing an exhibit while I was in Italy about this moment. I don’t— maybe I did but I don’t remember. RB: Thank you. ­SH: Could you tell us a little more about your research in Italy? Like, how did you approach it, and with the fascist archives in Rome I think they were only opened in the 90s, were they easily accessible, did people ask you why you needed this information— MM: [laughs] Yeah. SH: —do you think it was cleaned up before you got there, did you look in other places, I mean, did somebody give you . . .?

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MM: Well, when I was there, ISIAO was still open, l’Istituto Italiano per l’Africa e l’Oriente. And I would go there and look at the documents, read the newspaper accounts, those things, and that was helpful to me. I had an interesting experience in Rome at the Discoteca di Stato. I went there and they asked me to fill out a form with what I wanted. And I said, I’d like the speeches of Mussolini, I would like anything related to Africa Orientale, the 1935 [war]. I gave them my sheet and this elderly man, he looked at the request and he looked at my face, and then he looked at the request and looked at my name and looked at my face … and he said, “un attimo,” “Hold on just a moment, hold on just a moment.” He went in the back of the office, I heard some talking and then I saw three faces peek out the door [laughs]; a woman came out and she said, “Okay. Okay. Okay.” [smiles] Like this. And she put me in the room where I had the equipment and all of this and I just was sitting there for the longest time. And the door was open and I happened to look and someone was walking by and there was this other man with an armload of records and different papers and tapes, and he walks by, looks at me, and then he walks back again and comes in. It’s my stuff, and he pulls up a chair and sits down [laughs] next to me, and he puts the things down and he says, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry what we did to your people. I’m so sorry.” And he kept apologizing. And he says, “There are three things I’m ashamed of in this country,” he says, “mafia, Berlusconi, and Mussolini.” [laughs] And he sat with me, and as I watched—he didn’t do anything, he just felt … he didn’t know what to do, you know, so he sat there and eventually someone came by and told him to leave me alone [laughs] so I could do my work. [laughs again] I’ll never forget it. And there’s that response, there’s that. That is often what I would get, especially going to these flea markets, to these small, small towns where there’s often a table, a fascist table, paraphernalia. That’s the table where I would go. And the other side of this response, which was also what I would sometimes get from librarians in the archives would be, “Why do you want this?” At these flea market tables I would literally have people push me away or take the things out of my hands and put them down and say, “This is not for you,” and take the box and put it away, on the ground. And usually I would go with an Italian friend. And I’d just leave, then I’d tell my friend, “Go back and look for me.” So I still got my things. Two different reactions but very common. But in general though these vendors, especially those in small towns, they’re really kind, they will look with me, they will start handing me things, “Here, you might want this.” “Here, you might want this one too.” And a few of them would eventually have my phone number and would text me when something would come in. There’s still someone in Abruzzo … a friend of mine was looking for something after I came back here and that man from Abruzzo said “Ah! There’s a woman who’s also here, you know, comes and looks for things, are you her friend?” There was that kind of a relationship that would eventually develop. SH: And did you have someone guiding your research in Italy as well or was it you on your own?

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MM: I had a mentor, Sandro Triulzi, who was very helpful. If I had questions about how to look for certain information, he would help me. But otherwise, I was pretty much on my own. I work alone anyway. I think that’s the easiest way. SH: Did you talk to people you met in Italy about the research you were working on and how did they respond to it? MM: Well, you know, almost everyone I met that I got to know knew why I was there. But generally if they were strangers and they would ask me, “Oh why are you in Italy?” I learned very quickly that when I said that I was there to do research on the fascist period, people got tense. And so if it was a casual conversation, I would say “I’m just here doing research on World War II.” You know. Basta. Especially at a dinner table [laughs]. That’s what I would say so that the conversation doesn’t stop. But people I would get to know a little bit, friends of mine, eventually I would tell them. But again and again I saw that this was not comfortable for people. SH: Yeah. And this was your first time in Italy? MM: The first time I was there. Yeah. I’ve gone back. SH: Did you have an image of Italy and Italians before you arrived, or while living there and then did it become more conflicted with the events that you researched? MM: Before I really began the research on this, I think I had a general sense of Italy as, you know, la brava gente. There was some talk of the atrocities in Ethiopia, but not even really a full sense of what happened. We didn’t have that dialogue, we didn’t have a truth and reconciliation commission, we didn’t have a war crimes trial, we didn’t have any of these things that would’ve kept the atrocities in memory. So what Ethiopians tend to remember are, “Well, the Italians really love us because some of them stayed and married our women and they have children who are Ethiopian and everything is fine, they are really kind people, they built a lot of roads.” That is mostly the general narrative. I had that, in many ways, until I started research. And when I started researching before I went to Italy, I became angrier and angrier and angrier at all the information I was finding out. By the time I got to Rome, I would walk down the street and if an Italian was going to look at me wrong, they were going to get it on the street. [laughs] I was going to shout at them or I was ready, I was ready to fight. And then I was talking to an Italian friend of mine soon after I got there, whose father was a fascist officer, she’s quite old, and we were talking about this history and she must have seen my expression because at some point she’s telling me about her father and then she stops and she says, “Maaza, he was a good man. I loved him. I loved him.” And when, when she said that, it struck me. I realized I’m dealing with human beings, I’m dealing with people who loved and were capable of love and were loved by their families. These were men who were kind to their children. And there is that dichotomy that I had to address in my writing. The cruelty and the love. There was an elderly man I encountered in Florence, he came to one of my readings. He came, and sat way in the back. He was at least eighty-something

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years old. He waited until everyone had finished talking to me, and as I got up to leave, he came up. And he was so old that his hands were shaking and he said, “I want to show you something, my name is—” I think his name was Domenico, and he said, “I want to show you something.” I said, “Okay.” And he pulled out from his pocket this little folded newspaper clipping. The paper was so old, faded. And he unfolded it carefully and it was from 1936. And it was a funeral announcement. And he said, “This is my father. He’s buried in your country.” And he said, “This is his name.” And that’s all he wanted to tell me. That was it. He just wanted somebody to acknowledge that his father had died in Ethiopia and he wanted to tell this Ethiopian woman, and he saw that connection, he imagined that his love for his father would connect me to him. And that was another lesson for me. I needed to get over … you can’t write in anger, you can’t write in anger for ten years. But I needed to address these complications also, that these men were loved and missed, and died there also. And that changed the way that I wrote the book. RB: Um, So it sounds like—it’s clear that the images, objects, photographs, have an important role in the research part, for The Shadow King; but also in the book there are detailed descriptions of images, specifically of photographs. And so did you consider reproducing photographs in the book? And I guess my question is: in what way does describing images in writing serve your purpose more effectively or differently than having the image right there? MM: [nods] I thought about putting the images there but one thing I wanted to do was move beyond the frame of a photograph. And I wanted to give the subjects in those images an opportunity to speak back, in a sense. I wanted to move something from a two-dimensional, or flat, surface and make it a moment that was alive. Make it the way that it could have been before and during the making of that photograph. And the only way for me to do that was through words. I wanted to work within the territory of the imagination as opposed to an established, frozen visual landscape. I wanted my images to be layered. Photographs can tend to flatten things, especially these particular photographs. RB: Thank you. And in other parts also I noticed there are long and very detailed lists of objects, like, you know, in the box, what’s in the box? Or what is the main character hiding or burying and what is being discovered? And then you have those lists of objects—which to me were almost like exhibitions on the page—so I was wondering, what is the role of material possessions in your relationship with history? Preserving them, for example, carrying them from one place to the other, which is something that happens in the book, hiding them, or finding someone else’s objects, so that kind of relationship. MM: I don’t want to give too much away so I’ll speak in very general terms. When Hirut is burying these objects, she’s looking at objects as a way to balance what’s missing in her world now, as a way to correct the scales of justice. She’s hoping that in some way they will equal eventually what has been taken from her. One of the objects that she gets really in trouble for holds memory, and also contains history. And when she takes that one thing that

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she should not have taken, this is when part of Aster and Kidane’s history begins to unfold. I was looking at those objects almost like photographs, too, as carriers of memory. I wanted to consider what they could reveal about the person and the moment that made that object valuable. Because objects mean nothing, really, without the value that we place on them. SH: The necklace is also very beautiful. MM: Yes. SH: I think being connected, you know, I think in another story you talked about“tutte le parole sono connesse” [all things are connected]. MM: Sì [yes]. SH: Yeah, a very beautiful image of holding people together. MM: Thank you [smiles]. RB: In other parts, also, you acknowledge the absence of images, which is also very interesting to us; like at one point, you write: “The photo of this moment does not exist”— MM: Yeah. RB: —“there is only the memory of that moment.” And so, um, it would be great if you could talk a little bit about the role, or um your strategies to deal with absence, with censorship, or lack of information dealing with— MM: Yeah RB: —dealing with historical paths. MM: Those moments where I would mention that were really an acknowledgment of history, this history, from the Ethiopian side, from maybe the East African side, the side of most people who were subjected to colonialism. They were not the owners of those cameras, they did not have that. So certain memorable moments, you know, where the Italians might have made a photograph and thus, had “proof ” [does air quotes] of something happening, what the Ethiopians had was really just their ability to talk about it. For them, a photograph didn’t exist. There was no tangible proof that it happened. But what we have are the stories, or the songs. Those songs have been passed down from generation to generation even now. And we have some of the family stories, but that’s often the only thing that exists. There is a gap in this historical recollection. What’s interesting to me in thinking about this is that after the war, after photographic studios started to flourish across Addis Ababa, once people returned from the war and society was moving along again, in the forties—I think through the fifties, sixties—people would put on their uniforms from that 1935 war, bring the gun that they had, or the spear, or any memento, and create a photograph; almost as a way to replace what was missing from the 1930s—they would make a photograph of themselves as proof of what happened in the past. And I find those also really interesting. SH: Hmm. So one of the things our volume is about, is about how we can curate exhibitions sensitively and ethically, and how we can bear the weight of responsibility of this history for Italy but also tell this aspect of the Italian story, both in Italy and abroad, and we were sort of just wondering, in your

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imagination, what kind of an exhibition would that be? You know, is there a sensitive way that this could be done, um, to tell this story as well? MM: I think yes. I think this can be done by, obviously, involving East Africans, involving Libyans, creating a conversation with people who were a part of this, beyond Italians. I think that there’s an interesting history still to be explored from the perspective of the British colonial forces that were in Italy, the Sikhs, the Kenyans, all those who were there. Someone recently shared with me that her grandfather, Kenyan, was there in Ethiopia. So now we have this other history to discuss that can help broaden and develop this conversation because this was really a global war. There were prison camps for Italians in South Africa. Who were those South Africans who were part of this? There are homes in Kenya built by Italian POWs in the thirties and the forties under the British. I met someone not long ago who said, “Yeah, we lived in a house that was built by an Italian, these Italian prisoners.” There are conversations to develop that go beyond the borders of East Africa and Libya and Italy and I think that dialogue is also part of this war. For Italian POWs the war, the consequences, continued, you know, for a decade after, in some sense. How do we account for that? And how do we get these other voices involved too? I think the voices of women become very important here. And I still feel uncomfortable with showing photographs of women who were exploited by the Italians in front of the camera, but I’m currently working with an artist, a visual artist on the response back to those images. Her name is Helina Metaferia and we’re in the midst of developing an art project surrounding my photographs and my writing and her work. Handling photographs, this history ethically and sensitively is important to both of us and we are continually talking about this. We don’t want to exploit people again. SH: So that would be a way to begin to open the conversations through also— MM: —through art, yes. SH: Yeah, these were exactly what was lacking in the exhibition that we had responded to so strongly in that it was just a show of the winners. And it’s a story of history that really didn’t have to do with, nothing really about the women, nothing, nothing about any story that was outside that main story that’s being told over and over again. So it seems like it’s the right moment also for something to happen. MM: I have to say that obviously there’s that other school of thought that says you have to show and reveal what was really done. You have to show the Addis Ababa massacre or the concentration camps, these sites of execution. You can’t shy away from that. But it really is about the framing of it and who is part of the conversation when that’s done. SH: Yeah. I think also what you said about how you can’t write from anger, that’s a dangerous position to move from anger even to curate an exhibition— MM: Absolutely. SH: You could end up being judgmental, very harsh, and you really have to understand that these were people doing some—they were caught up in

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something very big, and you know, that these people had very contradictory personal lives as well. So the human aspect, what you talked about has to be, has to somehow be taken into account, but it’s not easy. MM: I think it has to be done like—I curated an exhibition of some of my photographs last year in New York City. And I did include a couple of photographs of massacres, a couple of them in the midst of everything else that provided an idea of the history so that it was taken in context. I have a photograph of a young girl, and clearly she’s being sexually exploited in front of the camera, but her hands are crossed over her chest so you don’t see anything. That I could include, because it hints at something greater. So I think there has to be a balancing, but also revealing act. Which can get into tricky territory. I have friends of mine who are curators and photography historians who have told me again and again “You can’t hide this [those exploitative photos], you have to show it, you have to put them up there exactly the way they took these photographs, you have to do it.” And every time, I resist and we’re still in this ongoing conversation. So I know that there are different schools of thought here. I personally have a hard time doing that. SH: Mm. It’s the same problem also with using a lot of text and explanations as sometimes it just goes through the mind, and it doesn’t touch people and it risks overwhelming. So I like the idea also that art and fiction can be a nondirect way to um—because I think that’s why people were coming to you and handing you things that they wouldn’t have dared otherwise— MM: Absolutely. SH: —They didn’t feel you as a threatening presence, you weren’t going to judge them. That’s quite beautiful. That’s an interesting point. MM: Thank you. RB: Thank you.

Note 1

https://www.project3541.com/ (accessed June 23, 2021).

Index Note: page numbers in italics refer to figures 2×4 (design firm) 50 Aciman, André 146, 153 Adorno, Theodore 161 Aghina, Guido 46 Agnelli, Gianni 2 Albini, Franco 83, 140 Alemanni, Gianni 70 Alfieri, Dino 228–9, 238 Altara, Edina 133 Amaral, Aracy 103 Anderson Art Gallery, University at Buffalo (SUNY) 7 Andrade, Mário de 107 ANED (Associazione nazionale degli ex-deportati politici nei campi nazisti, National Association of Ex-Political Deportees to the Nazi Camps) 65, 68, 71 Anglo-Americans 243 Annitrenta (Milan, 1982) 5–6, 21–7, 30–9, 41, 45–8, 138, 145 Antifascism 8, 172–85 Antisemitism 36, 145–6, 148–50, 155, 172, 237 Apollo 54, 61 Architectural documentation 117 forms 125 models 124 photographer 122 reconstruction 116, 124 subject 126 Architettura italiana d’oltremare 1870–1940 (Bologna, 1993) 9 Arengario, Milan 46, 53 Armellini, Guido 21 Art Deco 33 Art Institute of Chicago 131 Arte contro la barbarie (Rome, 1944) 8, 179, 181–2, 185

Arte e Resistenza in Europa (Bologna, 1965) 182, 185 Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935 (Florence, 1967) 15–21, 30, 51, 53, 55–6, 61, 145, 159, 176, 178, 184 ­Arte Povera 56, 62 Artist as romantic genius 163, 167–8 Artist’s studios after the Second World War 263 and domestic space 257 and the family 257 under fascism 10, 254–68 Artistas italianos na coleção do MAC (San Paulo, 1985) 104 Artiste del Novecento tra visione e identità ebraica (Rome, 2014) Arts Council, London 95–7 Aspesi, Natalia 39, 55, 62 Auschwitz 6, 65, 66, 68–72 Block 21 68–72 Memoriale in onore degli italiani caduti nei campi di sterminio nazisti 68–71 Bacon, Francis 51 Balbo, Italo 160 Baldessari, Luciano 22–3, 25, 41, 140 Balla, Giacomo 1–3, 18, 69, 93, 98, 174 Le frecce della vita 175 Marcia su Roma 1–3, 3 Velocità Astratta 1–3, 2 Banfi, Gian Luigi 66 Barbaroux, Vittorio 108 Barbero, Luca Massima 164–6 Bardi, Pier (Pietro) Maria 81, 82, 105–8, 111, 175 Barilli, Renato 5–6, 21–2, 25–6, 30–1, 33, 35, 38, 41, 45–8, 135 Barrera, Giulia 215 Bartali, Gino 71 Basaldella, Mirko 181 Bassani, Giorgio 145, 148

284 Baudelaire, Charles 189 Baudrillard, Jean 37 Bauer, Ulrich 193 reparative aesthetics 193–4 BBPR architecture studio 66 Bedarida, Raffaele 6, 8, 160 Belgiojoso, Lodovico Barbiano di 66, 68 Belle Époque 75, 82, 85 Belli, Gabriella 10 Bellonzi, Fortunato 17 Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti) 246, 248 Bennett, Tony 40 Berengo Gardin, Gianni 194 Berger, John 122 Berlinguer, Enrico 38–9 Bernini, Lorenzo 162 Bertelli, Patrizio 124 Bertolucci, Bernardo Il conformista 38 ­Bianchi, Rino 5, 9, 211–12, 216–221 Paesaggi della memoria 212 Biennale di Venezia (Venice Biennale, institution) 174 Biennale del dissenso (1977) 39 XXIII Biennale di Venezia (1942) 56 XXVII Biennale di Venezia (1954) 51, 163, 166, 176, 184 Binario 21, Milan 74 Birolli, Renato 94–5, 108, 112 Blackshirts 247 Bobbio, Norberto 40 Boccioni, Umberto 95, 152, 153, 243 Bonito Oliva, Achille 77 Borelli, Caterina 119—23 Borgese, Leonardo 19 Borsi, Franco 22 Bossaglia, Rossana 21 Bottai, Giuseppe 35, 175 Bottoni, Piero 140 Braun, Emily 8, 98, 243 Brera Academy (Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera), Milan 71 Breslin, Lynne 148 Briganti, Giuliano 19–20 British Fascisti, aka British Fascists 93 British Union of Fascists 93–4 Bruck, Edith 66 Bucarelli, Palma 110

Index Budasz, Daphné 220 Buzzi, Tomaso 134 Cagli, Corrado 8, 67, 94, 111, 144, 145, 150, 152, 154, 159, 162–4, 172–3 Bacchino, Il 165 Buchenwald 59, 172, 179, 180 Neofita, Il 159–60, 160, 164 Calabrese, Angelo 167 Caleffi, Piero 66 Pensaci, uomo! 66 Calvesi, Maurizio 1–2 Campigli, Massimo 18, 95–8, 103 Campt, Tina 215 Cannistraro, Philip 98, 144 Capristo, Annalisa 155 Cardazzo, Carlo 108 Caroli, Flavio 35, 46 Carpi 64–7, 69, 71–2 Carpi, Aldo 150, 152 Carpi, Cioni 150 Carrà, Carlo 95, 98, 102–3, 153, 257, 263–4, 264 Carrel (Klein), Ghitta 263, 264 Casa Balla 2 Casorati, Felice 93, 95, 97 ­Lo studio (1923) 258–61, 259 Cassinari, Bruno 108 Castello dei Pio (Carpi) 64, 65 Cavaglieri, Mario 148, 149 Cavaglion, Alberto 70 Cecchi Pieraccini, Leonetta 80 Celant, Germano 5, 6, 10, 45, 47, 49–62, 124, 145, 172–4, 179–85, 227, 229, 234–5, 237–9 “critica acritica” 56, 62 Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris 35 Centro Interuniversitario di Ricerca Queer 162 Ceramics 135–9 Cerati, Carla 194 Champagne, John 8 Chicano Art 40–1 Christina, Queen 162 Clair, Jean 35, 145 Classicismo, realismo, vanguarda: pintura italiana no entreguerras (Sao Paulo, 2013) 103–4 Clerici, Fabrizio 131

Index Coen, Ester 54–5, 62 Comisso, Giovanni 166 Contemporary Italian Art (London, 1954) 97 Contemporary Italian Painting (London, 1946) 94 Cooper, Douglas 94–5 Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC 152 Corcos, Vittorio 145 Corrado Cagli: Attualità per il tempo della continuità (Asti, 2013) 164, 167 Corrado Cagli: Folgorazioni e Mutazioni (Rome, 2019) 159 Crainz, Guido 36, 39 Crali, Tullio 248 Craxi, Bettino 24, 36, 38–40, 47 Crispolti, Enrico 20–21, 77 Croce, Benedetto 17, 56, 78, 182 Da Vinci, Leonardo 167 Dagospia 54, 62 Danesi, Silvia 21 Dardi, Costantino 75, 83, 84, 85 de Chirico, Giorgio 92, 95, 102–3, 139–40, 144 de Felice, Renzo 35, 36, 38, 41 Intervista sul fascismo 38 De Grada, Raffaele 17 De Luna, Giovanni 70 De Mata, Antonio 182 De Micheli, Mario 19 de Pinedo, Francesco 33 de Pisis, Filippo 8, 95, 159–63, 167 Il marinaio francese 166 Il moro di Haarlem 166 Nudino sdraiato 159 ­Nudo disteso di spalle 161 Nudo sulla pelle di tigre (Robert) 166 L’uomo e la natura 164 De Seta, Cesare 21 Del Guercio, Antonio 18–20 Delacroix, Eugène 181 della Ragione, Alberto 108–10 Dellapiana, Elena 8 Democrazia Cristiana (DC) 36, 38, 40, 46 Depero, Fortunato 33, 93, 174 Casa d’arte futurista 251 Casa del mago 257 Solidità di cavalieri erranti (Solidità di cavalieri) 175

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Design 129–40 Deyneka, Aleksandr 182 Di Sante, Costantino 186–98 Diehl, Johanna 118–23 Difesa della Razza 150 Diulgheroff, Nikolay 140 Domus 138 Dorfles, Gillo 22 Dottori, Gerardo 246 East Africa 248 Eisen, Markus 123 Esposizione commemorativa del cinquantenario dell’immigrazione ufficiale São Paulo Del Brasile. Mostra d’arte del padiglione Italia 113 Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art 91, 97–9 Estorick, Eric 7, 96–8 Ethiopia 5, 10, 111, 117, 204, 208, 213–4, 217–9, 229, 248, 269–82 EUR (see Universal Exposition Rome 1942) Ex3 Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea, Florence 71 Exhibition of Modern Italian Art (Brighton, 1926) 92–3 Exhibitions as palimpsest 75, 83 rehang 227–9, 233, 236 Exposição de pintura italiana moderna (Rio de Janeiro, 1947) 106 Exposition Internationale des Arts et des Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (Paris, 1937) 159 Fabris, Annateresa 103–4 Fabro, Luciano 76 Fagone, Vittorio 25, 35, 46 Farago, Jason 50, 61–2 fascist art artists’ lack of freedom and censorship of 57, 91, 152, 172, 175–6, 179, 182, 256–7 fascist manipulation of art 256–7 formalist history and revision of 4 myth of freedom of 256 Fellini, Federico Amarcord 38

286 Feltrinelli publisher 66 feminist curating 186, 192–4 ­Fermi, Enrico 154 Ferran, Anne 194 Fiedler, Konrad 17 Financial Times 54, 62 First World War 134, 139, 228, 240, 243, 248, 260 Focardi, Filippo 72 Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah (Paris) 72 Fondazione Prada, Milan 49–62, 129, 140 Fontana, Lucio 98 Förg, Günther 119–20, 122–3 Fosse Ardeatine massacre 181 Fossoli 64–7 Fossoli Foundation 69 Foucault, Michel 161 panopticon 188–9, 191–2 Francesca, Piero della 164 Francesco I de’ Medici 134 Franco-Italian Exhibition (Wertheim Gallery, London, 1935) 94 Funi, Achille 92, 95, 105–7 Fuoriusciti 175–6, 184 futurism 1–3, 9, 10, 91–2, 95, 97–8, 240–50, 252 Parole in libertà 243, 246, 249 Secondo Futurismo 240, 243 Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, Milan 47 Garberi, Mercedes 46 Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy (New York and Ferrara, 1989–90) 8, 143–57 and Advisory Committee 145 censorship 152 checklist 146–7 choice of artists 146–7 didactics 147, 153 fascist culture 147–8 installation 147–50 planning 144–5 reviews 144, 146, 149, 153 and Sarfatti, Margherita 151–3 Garosci, Aldo 175–6, 177, 182, 184 gender/sexuality/Italy 162 Gilbert, Charles P. H. 148 Ginzburg, Leone 150, 152, 154, 174, 184

Index Ginzburg, Natalia 145 Giolli, Raffaello 134, 260 Giustizia e Libertà (GL) 147, 152, 174–8, 182, 184 Gli anni di Parigi. Carlo Levi e i fuoriusciti (Turin, 2004) 176, 184 Gnudi, Cesare 17 Gobetti, Ada 260 Gobetti, Piero 178, 260 Goebbels, Joseph 56 ­Golan, Romy 6–7, 243 Gonçalves, Lisbeth Rebollo 104 González, Felipe 40 Gordon, Robert 6 Goya, Francisco 182 Gramsci, Antonio 178 Grassi, Alfonso 21 Greco, Emilio 84 Greene, Shelleen 9 Greene, Vivien 9–10 Gruppo 63 (Group 63) 47 Gualino, Riccardo 146 Guerri, Giordano Bruno 35, 36, 38 Guerrini, Mino 79 Guggenheim Museum (Solomon R. Guggenheim) 139, 240–1, 244–8 Gusen 88, 150 Gusen-Mauthausen 66, 150 Guttuso, Renato 50, 67, 82, 94–96, 98, 108–9, 111–12, 177, 182, 184 Gott mit uns 110, 115 Guzzi, Virgilio 17–18 Haacke, Hans 183 Halberstam, Jack 162 Hassler, Uta 124 Hawthorne, Camilla 214 Hecker, Sharon 6, 10 Heim, Julia 162 Heines, Edmund 161 Henry Allen Moe Prize 143 Hewitt, Andrew 161 Historic Compromise 38, 40 Historical Revisionism 35, 41 Holocaust (Shoah) 6, 8, 148, 151, 152, 153, 172, 179–83, 185 Holocaust art and memory 63–74 Holocaust memorials in Italy (Fossoli) 6

Index Homenagem a Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho 103 Homosexuality (see also Queer Italia Network; Queer Theory; PoliTeSse) 160, 164–6, 168 absence in exhibitions 8 fascism and 160–1, 163–4 history and 162, 168 homofascism 161–2, 168 masculinism 161–2 narcissism and 165 sexology and 162 Stonewall 16 third sex 162 hooks, bell 216 Hughes, H. Stuart 145 Ialongo, Ernest 269 I fiori del male: donne in manicomio nel regime fascista (Teramo, 2016–19) 8–9, 186–98 Il Popolo d’Italia 57, 58 ­International Auschwitz Committee (IAC) 68 Italian Art 1900–1945 (Venice, 1985) 145 Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900–1988 (London, 1989) 98 Italian Civil War (1943–45) 172, 180, 182 Italian colonialism, exhibitions on 9 Italian Futurism (1909–1944): Reconstructing the Universe (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2014) 9, 240–50 Italian Jews 143–54, 172–83 and antifascism 150, 174–6 antisemitism 145, 147, 149, 150, 173 and fascism 149, 151 under fascism, exhibitions about 8, 63–74, 143–57 Italian Museums and fascism, mission 251–253 “Italiani brava gente”, myth of 9, 31, 199, 208, 214–15, 278 Italianità (Italianness) 108, 113, 159, 163, 167 Italo–Ethiopian War (1935–1936) 10, 208, 213, 219, 229, 269–82

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Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (Brooklyn, NY, 1950–3) 131–3 Jameson, Fredric 36–7 nostalgia films 36 pastness 37 Jesi, Emilio 154 Jewish Museum, New York 143, 144 John Paul II, Pope 68 Jones, Jonathan 91, 98–9 Jüdisches Museum, Berlin 72 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 41 Kleeblatt, Norman 146 Koolhaas, Rem 50 Krauss, Rosalind 167 Kuh, Katharine 20 Kuliscioff, Anna 155 La Metafisica: gli anni venti (Bologna, 1980) 33 La Repubblica 55, 62 Labanca, Nicola 9 Lambretta 131 Le Figaro 241 Le ragioni della libertà (Milan, 1995) 176 Léger, Fernand 67 Leninism 40 Leoncillo (Leonardi) 180–1 Madre romana 180 Les réalismes 1919–1939 (Paris, 1980) 35, 145 Levi, Carlo 8, 145, 146, 147, 150, 152, 172–85 Campo di concentramento 174, 179–81, 180, 181 Figura (Ritratto rosso della madre) 175 L’eroe cinese 172–8, 175, 177, 178 Ritratto di Alberto Moravia 175 Ritratto di Carlo Rosselli 175 ­Levi, Clemente Pugliese 146 Levi, Primo 65, 68, 69,145, 148 suicide 148 Levi-Montalcini, Gino 153 Levi-Montalcini, Paola 150, 153 Levi-Montalcini, Rita 153 Lévinas, Emmanuel 192 face (face to face, close-up) 189, 191–2 Libeskind, Daniel 72

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Index

Liegi, Ulvi 145 Lissitzky, El 23 Lombroso, Cesare 153, 186, 189, 191 Longoni, Alberto 67 Losi, Bruno 65 L’Unità 181 Luppi, Marzia 64 Luzzati, Emanuele 152 Luzzatti, Luigi 148 Lyttelton, Adrian 243 Maccari, Mino 172–3, 183 Macchiaioli 147, 148 Made in Italy 8, 140 Mafai, Antonietta Raphaël 144, 147, 148, 150 Mafai, Mario 111–2, 172, 181, 254, 261–3, 264–5 Fantasie 172, 262 Modello nello studio 261–3, 262 Mafai, Miriam 150 Magalhães, Ana Gonçalves 7 Malfano, Ugo 263 Maltese, Corrado 20 Mancini, Antonio 92 Mann, Vivien 143, 144, 146, 148, 152 Manzù, Giacomo 96–8, 179 Mapplethorpe, Robert 152 Marcelli, Emanuele 19 Marchesini, Nella 263 Marchiori, Giuseppe 17 Marcoussis, Louis 139 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 50, 58, 241, 244 “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” 241 Maris, Gianfranco 68 MART (Museo di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto) 10, 251–3 Archivio del ‘900 251 Martelli, Claudio 38 Martini, Arturo 51, 56, 83–4, 95–8 L’aviatore 51, 52 Donna che nuota sott’acqua 56 Marussig, Piero 92–3 Marx, Karl 19, 40 Marzabotto massacre 180 ­Mascherini, Marcello 84 Masciotta, Michelangelo 159 Matarazzo Sobrinho, Francisco (aka Ciccillo Matarazzo) 7, 102–11

Mattarella, Sergio 173 Mauri, Fabio 76, 84 Mauthausen 66, 68, 263 Mazzoni, Angelo 248 McKever, Rosalind 7, 54, 61–2 McKittrick, Katherine 214 Meche, Brittany 214 MEIS (Museo dell’ebraismo italiano e della Shoah, National Museum of Italian Judaism and the Shoah) 74 Mekinda, Jonathan 8 Melli, Roberto 144, 149, 150, 151 Melotti, Fausto 133 Mengiste, Maaza 10 Menna, Filiberto 19, 76, 77 Merrill, Heather 214–15 Merz, Mario 76 Metastasio, Pietro 176 Michelangelo (Buonarroti) 162 Milliet, Sérgio 107 Mitterrand, François 39–40 Modena, Letitia 213 Modern Italian Art (London, 1925) 91–2 Modern Italian Art (London, 1950) 95–6 Modern Italian Art from the Estorick Collection (London, 1956) 97 Modigliani, Amedeo 102–3, 105, 109, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 176 Moholy-Nagy, Lazlo 123 Mondoperaio 39 Monti, Raffaele 20 Monza Biennale: 134–35 Morandi, Giorgio 94–8, 102–3 Moravia, Alberto 145, 147 Morello, Augusto 46 Mostra Augustea della Romanità (Rome, 1937) 81 Mostra della deportazione nei campi nazisti (Rome, 1959) 78 Mostra della Liberazione (Milan and Genoa, 1945) 179, 181 Mostra della Ricostruzione Nazionale (Rome, 1950) 82 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Rome, 1932) 1, 9, 50–1, 54, 57, 58, 77, 81, 83, 124–5, 182, 227–8 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Rome, 1937) 229–30 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (Rome, 1942) 230–3

Index Mostra nazionale dei Lager nazisti (Carpi, 1955) 64–5 Musée d’Orsay, Paris 140 Museo della Resistenza, Milan 175, 183 Museo del Risorgimento e della Resistenza, Vicenza 180 Museo monumento al deportato politico e razziale, Carpi 65–7 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York 45–6, 95–7, 145, 147 ­Muzio, Giovanni 134 Nabokov, Vladimir 75 Naldino, Nico 165–6 Nardella, Dario 71 Nathan, Arturo 148 Nathan, Daisy 150 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) 36, 38–9 Nazism 17, 35–6, 56, 64–6, 68, 76, 98, 117, 161, 180, 198, 233, 263, 272 Nerdinger, Winfried 123–4 Nervi, Pier Luigi 23 Nivola, Costantino 154 Nizzoli, Marcello 22, 32, 41 Noiret, Serge 211, 220–1 Nono, Luigi Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto ad Auschwitz 68 Novecento, Arte e storia in Italia (Rome, 2000) 1 Novecento Italiano 92–5, 102–6, 108, 111–12, 163, 252 Nude, male 159–61, 163–4, 166, 168 Nunes Vais, Mario 148, 152, 153 Obama, Barack 247 Ojetti, Ugo 134, 39 Olivetti Company 133 Opera Vigilanza Repressione Antifascista (OVRA) 172, 248 Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence 71 Oppo, Cipriano Efisio 80, 82, 94, 175 Paeslack, Miriam 7 Pagano, Giuseppe 263 Palazzo dei Diamanti, Ferrara 143 Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome 7 Palazzo della Poste, Palermo 246, 248 Palazzo Reale, Milan 45–8, 53

289

Pareschi, Carlo 160 Parin, Gino 145, 148 Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI) 36, 38–40, 46, 65, 182 Partito d’Azione (PdA) 182, 185 Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) 36, 38–40, 46 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 166 Patetta, Luciano 21 Pecci-Blunt, Anna Laetitia (aka Mimì) 111, 154 Pedrosa, Mário 106–7 Pentapartito, coalition 36, 40–1 Peressutti, Enrico 66 Persico, Edoardo 22, 32, 41 Petacci, Clara 140 Photographic Recall: Rationalist Italian Architecture in Contemporary German Art (Buffalo, NY, 2019) 7, 116–21, 118, 120, 121, 123, 126 Piacentini, Marcello 25–6, 81 Piacentini, Pio 79, 81, 84 Piano, Renzo 2 ­Pica, Agnoldomenico 17–8 Picasso, Pablo 67, 162 Pinacoteca Agnelli, Turin 2 Pincherle, Adriana 147, 150 Pinelli, Antonio 22 PoliTeSse 162 Ponente, Nello 19 Ponti, Gio 8, 131–40 Porta, Antonio 22 Post Zang Tumb Tuuum: Art Life Politics 1918–1943 (Milan, 2018) 5, 6, 10, 40, 45, 49–62, 116, 123–6, 131–33, 172–6, 175, 179–83, 180, 181, 233–7 Postcolonial Italy: Mapping Colonial Heritage (online exhibition) 211, 220–2 Postmodernism 35, 40, 47–8, 55, 57–9, 107 Prada, Miuccia 124 Prampolini, Enrico 140 Prima mostra dell’animale nell’arte (Rome, 1930) 110 Project 3541 (online archive) 10, 269–82 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 40 Pugliese-Levi, Clemente 146 Purovisibilità 56

290

Index

Quaderni di Giustizia e Libertà 176, 184 Quadriennale, Rome 50, 75–87, 94, 174, 177 I Quadriennale (1931) 75, 79–81, 177, 184 II Quadriennale (1935) 83 III Quadriennale (1939) 256 V Quadriennale (1948) 81 VI Quadriennale (1951) 78, 83–4 VII Quadriennale (1955) 79, 82, 80, 84 VIII Quadriennale (1959) 184 X Quadriennale (1973) 75–7, 76, 83–4 Quadriennale (Turin, 1923) 260 Quattrocchi, Luca 5, 45 Quattrocento 162, 164 Queer Italia Network 162 Queer Theory 159–64, 167–8 failure and 162–3, 168 Racial Laws (Leggi Razziali) 56, 58,143, 146, 147, 149, 172, 174 Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico 4, 6, 15–22, 26–7, 30, 39–40, 46, 51, 53, 55–6, 61, 135, 145, 177–8, 184 Rambelli, Domenico 264 Raphaël, Antonietta 262, 263 Rappaport, Elsie 160 Rationalism 41, 116, 119, 126 Re, Lucia 8–9 Reconstruction (of Italy) 227, 229, 233–5, 237 Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse) 77 Renaissance 102, 106–8 Resistance 179–85 Richard-Ginori Company 133–5, 8 ­Ripa di Meana, Carlo 39 Risi, Nelo 66, 68 Rocco, Vanessa 9 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan 66, 83 Rogers, Meyric 131 Roma negata: percorsi postcoloniali nella città (Rome, 2014) 5, 9, 211–15, 219–22 Röme, Ernst 160 Rosci, Marco 20 Rosenbaum, Joan 143, 144, 145, 146, 152 Rosenthal, Norman 144, 145 Ross, Charlotte 162 Rosselli, Amelia Pincherle 148

Rosselli, Carlo 174, 175 Rousseff, Dilma 104 Royal Academy of Arts, London 91–2, 95, 98 Rude François 181 Ruffini, Elisabetta 64 Russell, John 144 Rutter, Frank 92–3 Saba, Umberto 145 Sabatello, Dario 150, 154, 175 Sachs, Jen 243 Salvini, Matteo 53 Samonà, Mario (‘Pupino’) 68–9 Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo (MAC USP) 7, 102–15 Sappho 162 Sarfatti, Amedeo 151 Sarfatti, Cesare 152 Sarfatti, Fiammetta 152 Sarfatti, Margherita (né Grassini) 7, 10, 51, 61, 102–8, 111, 134,144, 147, 151, 152, 153, 155, 163, 182, 251, 253 art collection 152 Dux 57, 152 in Gardens and Ghettos (see above) 151–2 Storia della pittura moderna 108, 112 Sarfatti, Michele 155 Sarfatti, Pierangela 151 Sarnelli, Laura 211, 214, 217 Sartogo, Piero 77, 78 Sartoris, Alberto 17 Sassu, Aligi 108, 112, 172, 180, 183 Guerra Civile (Civil War) 180 Scarpa, Carlo 83, 140 Scego, Igiaba 5, 9, 211–217, 219, 240 Scipione (Gino Bonichi) 109–12 Scultura Lingua Morta: Sculpture from Fascist Italy (Leeds, 2003) 98 Scuola Romana 144, 146, 152 Second World War 3, 64, 98, 102, 104, 106, 117, 131, 135, 140–1, 241 Severini, Gino 18, 95, 102–3 ­Sforni, Gustavo 154 Shoah (see Holocaust) Shulman, Julius 122

Index Silver, Kenneth 139, 146 Simulacrum 36–7 Sironi, Mario 18, 26, 50, 93, 95–8, 103, 139,144, 152, 153 Smythe, S. A. 162 Soffici, Ardengo 109 Soutine, Chaim 176 Spadini, Armando 18 Spielberg, Steven Schindler’s List 56, 62 Stalin, Iosif 17 Steiner, Albe 66 Steiner, Lica 66 Stella, Guido Balsamo 139 Steyerl, Hito 183 Stille, Alexander 149 Strobel, Hilde 123 Svevo, Italo 145 Szeemann, Harald 58, 62 Museum of Obsessions 58 Tassi, Roberto 18, 22 Tate, London 95–7 Tea Party 247 Tempesti, Fernando 21 Tendenzen der Zwanziger Jahre (Berlin, 1977) 35 Terragni, Giuseppe 25 Testori, Giovanni 23 The Circle of Montparnasse: Jewish Artists in Paris, 1905–1945 (New York, 1985) 146 The History of Reconstruction – The Construction of History (Munich, 2010) 116, 123–6, 125 The New York Times 50, 61, 248 The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and their Salons (New York, 2005) 155 Thirties: British Art and Design Before the War (London, 1974) 33 Thompson, Susan 9–10 Tobino, Mario 189 Togliatti, Palmiro 182, 185 Tognoli, Carlo 6, 24, 26, 36, 38, 46 Toma, Gioacchino 182 Toscano, Mario 145 Tosi, Arturo 92, 94–5, 107

291

Totalitarianism 35, 39–40, 79, 111, 148, 191, 203 Trapassi, Pietro (aka Pietro Metastasio) 176 Treves, Claudio 148 Trombadori, Antonello 17 Trucchi, Lorenza 19 Trump, Donald 53, 247 Turcato, Giulio 82 ­Twentieth-Century Italian Art (New York, 1949) 45–6, 145 UCII (Unione delle comunità israelitiche italiane, Union of Italian Jewish Communities, aka UCEI) 65, 143, 144 UNESCO 68 Ufficio Nazionale Antidiscriminazioni 164 Umbertinian style 75, 78, 82, 85 Umberto I 85 United States (USA) 40, 242, 247 US Capitol 247 Universal Exposition Rome 1942 (EUR) 50, 117, 126, 139, 276 USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republic) 36, 38–9 Uzielli, Gustavo 154 Valdameri, Rino 108 Valeriano, Annacarla 186–98 Valesio, Paolo 162 Venini, Paolo 140 Venturi, Lionello 94, 256, 260 Venturoli, Marcello 82 Vergine, Lea 23, 39 Victor Emmanuel III 79 Visconti, Luchino 161–2 Vitali, Lamberto 95, 154 Vitalità del Negativo nell’arte Italiana 1960/70 (Rome, 1970–71) 77, 78 Viva, Denis 6, 45 Warburg Mansion 148 Weiss, Peter Der Ermittlung 68 Wildt, Adolfo 57, 257–258 Cesare Sarfatti 59 Il Duce 57, 59 in his studio 258

292 Santa Lucia 174, 175 La Vittoria 59 Williams, Gisella 2 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 164 Wright, Frank Lloyd 242 Wullschläger, Jackie 54, 62 Wurzer, Markus 220

Index Yad Vashem, Jerusalem 74 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas 40 Years of Lead (Anni di piombo) 85 Zanini, Walter 10 Zevi, Bruno 23–4, 26, 84 Zevi, Tullia 143–4, 148, 15­

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