That principle that Roberto Longhi brings to bear to distinguish Caravaggio from the great men of the fifteenth-fifteenth century, whom he least liked because they often represented the power of the Italian centers over the mistreated periphery, and to prevent critics from ending up considering the painter the last of that host of supermen (“the night porter of the Renaissance”), especially since it was not at all clear that he could become the first of the new Baroque course albeit well in advance; lo and behold, that principle defines Caravaggio, his way of being, “human but not humanistic,” or clearer still “popular.” And he writes this in the preface to the 1951 exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, an essay that, while not the decisive one among the many he wrote on the painter, is nevertheless a fundamental text for the historian to the point that in the second edition of the catalog, published a month after the first (because sold out precisely in a few weeks, just to say the influx of the public to the exhibition and the importance that was attributed to that volume), came out with some corrections made by Longhi in his introductory text. Stylistic “touches,” one would say, that do not change the substance, but in fact they do change it, because criticism is that thing there, the style with which one writes or creates, and those corrections, a dozen in all, say just how much Longhi cared about the exhibition and the catalog and how much space questions of expressive form had in his writing. Rémy de Gourmont, a giant of French literature who lived at the turn of the nineteenth-nineteenth century, said that style is like eye color, fingerprints or tone of voice: everyone has his own and no one else can replace them.
To Longhi one could impute certain nonchalance dictated by the search for pungent, histrionic expression at times, but when he tackled a crucial issue, his brains became so strong and clear that he gave birth to “the verbal equivalent” (in this case, not only of a work, but of the artist who was its creator, but even more so of a certain idea of criticism). Human and not humanist, that is, close to the man in the street and not abstract and cerebral producer of new ideas, is in fact a “way of being critical” that Longhi declares already when he publishes in the first issue of “Paragone” (1950) the Proposte per una critica d’art, where he valorizes the analogy born of the elaboration of a poet, a writer, a thinker and, why not, the artist himself as the apex of landing to art prose that is distinguished precisely in the “verbal equivalence” that Longhi juxtaposes with the Greek term ekphrasis. To say in evocative words the substance of a work of art without technicalities or abstractions, that is, without resorting to abstract desinences fought by the critic to free Caravaggio from any suspicion of Mannerist anti-Classicism, and above all being clear that visual art and writing are two different languages that cannot be superimposed in imitation. And poetry is where the verb succeeds most in embodying itself, in becoming an analogon of the work of art while remaining distinct from it.
If you are reading a critical text, the word must lead you to “see” the work, not only what it is, but also to feel the emotion it provides. Testori, a disciple of Longhi, in Gran Teatro Montano, the book where he collected essays on Varallo and Gaudenzio Ferrari in 1965, states precisely that he exercises “emotional” criticism. The academic universe always looks at emotion as a pathetic expression of critical language, as something unanalytical and based on too subjective means. We might even say, in fact, that this poetic-specific criticism probes distances that scientific criticism does not know. And it is this, in essence, that inspired Simone Soldini, for many years director of the Mendrisio Museum and now a free-lance critic, to orchestrate an exhibition that is anything but easy, presenting the critical work of eight writers starting with their artists of choice. Soldini, who knows full well that he has chosen an “enormous” subject, that is, one of “boundless breadth,” puts his hands out by making it clear right away that he does not claim to have the last word on the matter and merely presents the work of the magnificent eight in order to highlight, piece by piece, a way of doing criticism that actually seems to have fallen into disuse in recent decades. Today the curator, the museum manager, the director of periodically fixed reviews, the consultant to auction houses or major collectors dominates. The critic that Soldini wants to celebrate, on the other hand, is a writer who without his own style would fall back into theoretical verbiage. The master of this tendency is always him, Roberto Longhi, but the disciple who has at certain moments surpassed him with “total” writing is Giovanni Testori, one of the eight chosen by Soldini: but to tell the truth, if his name had not been present, the whole exhibition would have been an irremediable flop, despite another leading name like Francesco Arcangeli. We will see in a moment why this “team” works in unison in defining the critical style that we might call “of poetry,” but, as in any soccer team, everyone has his own function, and only at the moment of penalties does everyone shoot at the goal. Different styles for each, for the same critical model though. Uniting the “magnificent eight” are a few essential points: first of all, the generational one, emphasized by some of them even through the “friendship relationship” that becomes maieutic in search of the deep core that guides the form. The postwar period and the 1950s and 1960s are the golden age where this “passion” developed, which opens the gaze to several critical themes: first and foremost, that of the province, inherited by the stone guest who presides over the exhibition scene, Roberto Longhi, who not only formed the critical experience of Francesco Arcangeli and Giovanni Testori, his disciples and collaborators in exhibitions and “Paragone,” but also nonetheless left his imprint on the other six protagonists: Attilio Bertolucci, Roberto Tassi, Francesco Biamonti, Vittorio Sereni, Dante Isella and Giorgio Orelli. I did not write “protagonists” at random, not because I needed a word that encompassed them all, but rather to connote discourse on the main subject: criticism-for once art remains only handmaiden to the other-and consequently the questions that are necessary today to understand the importance of an exhibition like this, which foreshadows work yet to be done on the importance of this way of doing criticism as opposed to academic or scientific criticism.
We live in an age where some of Italy’s major newspapers have taken a dislike to art exhibitions and, before that, to militant criticism; not that they don’t have their reasons: the culture industry, with its economic logic and manipulation of the public, has made disasters in recent decades. Some production companies offer ersatz critical operations that they take around Italy each time in two or three stages; a mere commercial product, even when the subject matter is very serious, where criticism is absent and the telltale becomes the logorrhoea of many catalogs that are published today: the macroscopic example in recent years are some of those being produced by the Museums of San Domenico in Forlì, the latest on the still ongoing exhibition devoted to the Self-Portrait, six hundred pages to document an exhibition that exhibits more than anything else muscular strength but no analogous critical genius, where works are juxtaposed without a relevant and illuminating project (a drift aggravated after the passing of Antonio Paolucci, who chaired the organizing committee). I have already had a chance to write about this exhibition, so I refer back to those observations. But the problem is not only critical perspicacity, because these catalogs, and one could also point to other exhibitions being produced in Italy, at the Palazzo Reale in Milan (a notable exception is the exhibition on Max Ernst set up in 2022 with a catalog that becomes a tool for study) or in Rome, are a demonstration of endless verbiage: hundreds of pages written by multiple authors, as if the exhibition were just a pretext for producing a book on the subject. Catalogs that have a necessary function, and accompany exhibitions that are themselves the result of years of study, are quite rare today. Moreover, this logorrheic criticism rarely sums up in itself expressive qualities that, on the other hand, are typical of militant criticism exercised by writers such as those who for a lifetime have stood by artists, their contemporaries (but also those of the past), or faithful to historical paths proving capable of auscultating their secret souls. A criticism in its own way visionary, not because it was the result of interpretative excesses, but because it was capable of entering with the eye and the mind inside the work of art. One of the masters of this idea of criticism was Henri Focillon, the great French art historian who left us, in particular, a treatise where he outlines the context in which criticism is also the work of visionaries: for almost a century Life of Forms has been helping to think in an unconventional way. But already in a 1926 essay, Aesthetics of Visionaries, Focillon wrote that visionaries “do not see objects, they vision them. One would say that between sensation and perception there is interposed a special virtue which, without altering nature, gives it a vividness, an intensity, an astonishing depth.” These artists, Focillon had premised, with their imaginations are not only “capable of creating and concatenating images” but demonstrate “an exceptional aptitude for receiving them and translating them as hallucinations.” Visionaries create worlds, they feel them because they see them from the inside: an endoscopy conducted with hand and eye. They feel deep inside the essence of things. And it is on this road that critic-writers also walk, who, endowed with introspective power, in turn see artists from within. They turn over in negative what “appears” from the artist’s hands and return criticism as an x-ray of their “humanity.”
Writers’ criticism has a different intuitive value from “scientific” criticism because through the analogy of style it reaches depths that the rationality of the interpretive scheme almost never knows. It makes me think, to paraphrase the discourse, of sculpture made by painters: it would be interesting, and not even that difficult, to trace a path between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showing that the real revolutionaries who changed sculpture were some painters. But about this I will say on another occasion.
In newspapers, then, there remains very little militant criticism, which is closest to that of writers; today they pass off as criticism sponsored assignments that event production companies pay for as “editorial” pages signed often by the same names who will later also write pieces considered to be critical. At that point, considering that one struggles to find unconventional ideas in these advertising products, one has to wonder whether criticism in a world ruled by communication centers has become superfluous: the Mendrisio exhibition puts before our eyes a model where the figure of the critic, all the more so if endowed with style and strength of writing, exerted a weight on the destinies of art, which today not only does not have, but is reduced to the status of “Perugina kisses”: a sweetened and decorative thought. Can there, then, still be art criticism that is not the swamped university genre research or conformist study functional to Grand Tour exhibitions, which serves the critics themselves to carve out spaces of power in the system? This is not an apocalyptic announcement: criticism exists and will still exist for a long time if there will be critics and places where it is practiced outside the advertising logic, the “compliment industry,” as Giuseppe Bonura called it, in analogy with the marketing vision of the culture industry, thus also restoring the well-deserved institution of “critique,” which does not claim absolute judgment, but to reveal the bad conscience of the system. But it is necessary to say that critical judgment also has a relative value: it can change after time, even overturn itself, but this does not mean it was wrong the first time: the critic is a man and lives in time, registering changes in the context with his own tools - this can push him to modify his judgment in light of what has happened in the meantime in the context.
Unlike the “curation” that so many now practice believing themselves to be critics and not mere organizers trained in the master’s degrees of academies and universities, the critic should claimexception and otherness with respect to what Bonito Oliva forty years ago certified as the “art system” of which everyone is a part, even when they would not want to be; the centers of power are now incapable of considering the function of criticism in the right way, which is not to be the notary of novelty or of initiatives designed at the table by private and public institutions to impose fashions and trends, but should be understood as the prosecutor who accuses the bad conscience that dominates the system in an almost hegemonic way, thanks to the logics supported by capital, without there being-as the advocates of democracy recite-someone to judge their actions.
Soldini’s exhibition thus has the great merit of re-proposing the question: which art criticism do we want? Because the areas where the proposal of an exhibition, an artist, a historical retrospective, a new movement still passes, no longer depend on an effective criticism, mentally free, insensitive to fashions, opposed to the conformism of the politically correct; an act capable of demolishing what in itself does not even have the consistency to withstand the news because it is often manufactured at the table by those same economic forces that condition institutions such as the Venice Biennale now reduced to a media circus; to be critical today also means knowing how to use writing and its metaphors to unmask the conformism that conforms to ecologist, queer, pauperist ideologies, where almost always very little has to do with art and much falls into mere sociology. What I am arguing is not meant to be discriminatory, but to solicit a reflection where when we talk about art we are not naturally driven to make it an issue governed by the clichés of the communicative world. The social dimension of art cannot ignore that the first degree of critical judgment remains aesthetic and expressive.
The critic that Soldini outlines with his choice of eight writers is a figure who must not be primarily objective, if anything like Baudelaire claims his own positive (or negative) bias; he is also a moral “guide,” as Arcangeli and Testori were in the 1950s when their essays on “Paragone” animated a discussion on reality, nature and abstraction that yielded outcomes in the historical debate that were quite unique and pregnant, if only because they accelerated the overcoming of that phony opposition between realists and abstractionists. Testori, for example, debated intensely with Guttuso on the question of reality; but as a militant critic he elected Morlotti as a champion of the dialectic between reality and nature (Arcangeli placed him at the top of the “last naturalists”). For Testori, writing goes far beyond the aesthetic register by assuming in toto the existential fact. Still in 1992, a year before his death, he confesses, “The perception of beauty has something lacerating for me. It is a wound, something that incises the boil from which a beauty compromised with the human will arise. And if in his time he had openly said that a critical path ”is something that touches you, dirties you, compromises you," it is to this line that Testori has remained faithful by pursuing the heroes of the Lombard and not only Lombard periphery (thelast artist he promoted in 1990 was the Romagnolo Ilario Fioravanti, architect, sculptor and multifaceted creative, and the essay he wrote for the Milan solo show at the Compagnia del Disegno remains a masterful text for irony, militancy and writing, which Vittorio Sgarbi took as a model of criticism when presenting essays on Testori’s sculpture). Thus both his writings on Gaudenzio Ferrari and those on Ceruti and the Brescian dialect exemplify criticism beyond strictly historical registers, and I wondered whether-for him more than anyone else, including Arcangeli- it was not essential to juxtapose in the exhibition some examples from the past (Caravaggio himself, to whom Testori had attributed a child’s head drawing, perhaps plausible) alongside the Varlin, Bacon, Giacometti, Sutherland, the wild Disler, Fetting, Hödicke, Rainer, but also the Guttuso and Morlotti. The unique quality that Testori still embodies for those who want to see him would emerge: total writer, four-leaf clover writer I called him on the occasion of the centenary of his birth, because he was able to express from a single fulcrum an aesthetic quality as much in narrative writing as in dramaturgical writing (one of the greatest of the second Italian twentieth century), in critical (and not only artistic, but also elzeviristic) writing as in poetry (with I Trionfi he gave us one of the greatest Italian poems of the second twentieth century). This is why I do not much understand Soldini’s effort to make Testori’s critical work the specifics of his writing, reiterated in the catalog on at least two occasions, when probably the most pertinent position is the one summarized by Francesco Frangi when he writes that “Testori’s field of work is a unique field within which the usual fences of sectors have fallen, or rather, have been uprooted.” After all, it is well demonstrable, when following Testori’s writing, that he continually moves, even within the same text, from fiction to theater, from poetry to j’accuse, from militant criticism to writing-self-portrait.
Considering the merits of each of the authors chosen by Soldini in addition to reaffirming the gaze of almost all of them in favor of the province-periphery, Arcangeli’s “universal province,” it must be admitted that the only one who could spearhead this project was Testori himself. From him we can start again by rediscovering a criticism where writing is not a form of embellishment or histrionics, but the substance, the style, of a way of being and also of thinking. In any case, the exhibition, in itself, is an opportunity to revisit some names that for some time, despite having a solid collecting base, have somewhat ended up in the shadows with respect to the art system: Francese, Dobrzanski, Mandelli, Ruggeri, Ossola, Sandra Tenconi, Ferroni, Negri, Paganin.
Warning: the translation into English of the original Italian article was created using automatic tools. We undertake to review all articles, but we do not guarantee the total absence of inaccuracies in the translation due to the program. You can find the original by clicking on the ITA button. If you find any mistake,please contact us.
