There is what literary critic Charles Russell called the “binary tradition” of the twentieth century: avant-garde and modernism. The former is driven by an unshakeable belief in the progressive reunification between society and the artist (he speaks of the writers); the latter, on the other hand, is made up of men shaped by an irredeemable pessimism, who “deny - all - the possibilities of distinguishing within the flow of modern history, something other than the testimony of meaningless chaos or obvious cultural decline.” What unites them is the certainty that they do not find “in modern bourgeois society any hope either for art or for humanity.” The avant-garde starts from the conviction that to create the new one must destroy the old, and in this practical nihilism any provocative experimentalism ends up affirming the visionary powers of the artist as a kind of new prophet whose religion is wholly immanent to the world; while the modernists “rarely connected aesthetic innovation with political (or even social) practice.” Therefore, not having as a first principle to deny a style or any ideology, and not feeling it necessary to take on a particular social ideology, as the avant-garde artist does, the modernist ends up expressing a stronger and more enduring language according to Russell. Indeed, this is a countercultural thesis because, where the “manifesto” has prevailed, there has also been a fragility of the movements motivated by it, while the individuality of the modernist genius expresses a strength that is realized solely in form and its relations to the past. Italy, apart from Futurism, showed in the twentieth century a decided prevalence of the modernist front, because unlike the tabula rasa, this front never rejected tradition, it only transformed and regenerated it. And this is because while in the avant-garde the message, the theory, the subversive principle prevails, in the modern artist the focal point is the form, its possibility of entering a historical course by transforming, from within, its direction.
It can be said that, apart from the debate on rationalist architecture, the most significant novelty in the discourse of Italian criticism is that introduced in 1926 by Lionello Venturi’s book on the taste of the primitive. The category of the primitive, according to Venturi, can “free us from the now forbidden antinomy of classical and romantic” and open up scenarios of inspiration “across centuries and continents.” Venturi intends, in this way, to overcome another prejudice as well, that of the pre-eminence of form over content, inherited from formalist-idealist analysis, and posits as the only condition for understanding the primitive “the recognition of ’revelation’ in the creative process of the work,” and it is in this revelation, which passes from a sort of “empirical doctrine,” as to say from an individual experimentation and not from a general law, that Giotto’s Christ, his charm all caught up in the irregularity of a flaky form and an anatomy lacking internal coherence, expresses a generative link with the Christian religion, which speaks of the “God of a humanity macerated in pain.” Benedetto Croce hastened to point out that if the “mystical moment is an eternal moment of the spirit,” thus one that unites every man of every age, quite another thing is the “religious content” that that mystical element expresses in Giotto’s fourteenth-century work, which may be missing or different in other artists of other ages and cultures.
The question of the primitive, which was a good way to overcome the shoals of the opposition between classical and romantic, was practically forgotten when, immediately after the war, the political question of art fueled the clash between realists and abstractionists. Existentialist discourse was imposing itself almost at odds with the Communist Party’s ideological need for a kind of figuration to filter into artists that would testify to the historical reasons for the class struggle. And when Togliatti, under a pseudonym, wrote a brief commentary in Rinascita calling the “First Exhibition of Contemporary Art” held in Bologna, in the headquarters of the Alliance of Culture, attended by, among others, Birolli, Corpora, Guttuso, Morlotti, Santomaso, Vedova, Afro, Cagli, “a collection of monstrous things,” inviting the protagonists and those who support them to call a spade a spade, namely to say “that a doodle is a doodle,” the same defendants responded by reminding Migliore that the Fascist twenty-year period had “theorized” the isolation of Italian artists from Europe by foreseeing “cultural autarchy”; they said they were aware that they had to get rid of the “intellectualistic positions of an art without content, of achallenged and solitary art detached from the problems of the world and reality in motion, objectively serving the ruling class,” but also that they did not want "to proceed through simplistic tabule rasae and not to throw away the wheat along with the rye.“ But they also added a sibylline phrase, which basically serves as a bad conscience for so many consequences in the following decades, and especially in the drifts of the late twentieth century: ”creating new ’consumers’ to replace the old ruling class,“ which makes one shudder when one thinks of the destructive power the word ”consumers" has had in the ethical fabric of our societies where consuming has become the forced labor of all of us, after the hours spent earning bread for a living.
In 1946 Roger Garaudy in Art en France had published a polemical attack on the new ideological vogue, taken up in the Politecnico by Elio Vittorini under the title: There is no such thing as a Communist Party aesthetic. Vittorini had been even clearer when, responding to a letter published by Togliatti in Rinascita [Oct. 10, 1946], which criticized the ideas expressed in Politecnico, particularly that of a subordination of politics to culture, and not vice versa, he replied to the leader of the PCI that “if the man of culture adheres completely to the directives of the revolutionary party, he does nothing but ’play the pipe of revolution.’” clearer could not be. The following year the Polytechnic closed, and soon Vittorini was out of the PCI. But in 1948, when the controversy over the Bologna exhibition unfolded, which had a venomous coda from Togliatti, who replied to the artists’ objections with a sly and sarcastic “your studied, cold, inexpressive and ultra-academic extravaganzas,” already the artists’ political commitment was suffering cracks on the practical level. The 1948 Biennale was a gigantic parade of big names: Picasso was, for the first time, shown. And Argan, who, in 1946, had written that "when Picasso paints Guernica he forces a human content within abstract forms..., of the action he only grasps the whole dynamic, the snap of a terrorist device. The whole of reality becomes obscured, decomposes, sinks; even color disappears from the face of the world, of things nothing remains but emptiness. “In 1948 he notes that ”even in the history of abstract art there is a phase of pessimism, which can be vaguely compared to existentialistangst: the dark intuition of an impossibility of realizing the authenticity of being, the absolute present, except in the outrage of history, in the sacrilegious or suicidal act that destroys the historicity of consciousness, like sin the grace.“ He ends by arguing that in abstractionism there is the message of a new optimism, the wish for a more authentic life (Longhi scornfully had called abstract painting ”colored rags“). For the world that becomes empty, deserted with forms and colors, is not a sign of despair and death of consciousness; precisely when nature becomes obscured and withdrawn, the life of consciousness reaches its fullness, its autonomy, its maximum strength, and can detach itself from nature in which it no longer needs to integrate or exemplify. What matters most, this abstraction from nature, is the way that also negates the creative act ”because all creation is a doing in nature (...) authentic life is achieved by destroying life in authentic or conventional (...) the artistic object will begin to exist outside the categories of space and time that define the natural and historical object."
The manifesto of realism, published in 1946 in the magazine Numero, where Testori played an important role as editor, was entitled Beyond Guernica. The risk, in fact, was to make realism a subspecies of Picassism by reducing it to a new post-Cubist formalism. But “the anathema of the Communist Party practically prevented then the birth in Italy of a new figurative painting, the development of a renewed type of figuration.”
1948, then, more than a revolutionary year was one in which the crisis of artists’ explicit ideological commitment emerged. First at the Quadriennale in Rome and then at the Venice Biennale: “Of the great political and civil themes,” writes Paolo Fossati, “of social commitment there is practically no more talk (...) The new abstractionism stutters, and the new realism is fugitive. One senses the aspiration to rediscover ”the necessity and creativity of the artistic gesture in a deep primary impulse" (thus Fossati). The Biennale gave proof of great vitality: a special exhibition onFrench impressionism proposed by Longhi, other solo shows of Kokoschka, Chagall, Klee, Picasso (Guttuso, introducing him, lamented the spread of Picassian mannerism), participation in the foreign pavilions of Rouault, Maillol, Braque, Turner, Moore, Schiele, Wotruba, German realists and expressionists, Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, and 631 Italian artists, including an anthology of metaphysics curated by Arcangeli, a room of the New Front of the Arts, and a retrospective of Arturo Martini, who had died theyear before.
The years of disassociation of many intellectuals from Soviet politics approached. In Paris, informal art, championed by Michel Tapié, is making its way. And in America, in 1952, Harold Rosenberg coined the expression Action Painting. After all, one could even see in the great Caravaggio exhibition in Milan in 1951, half a million or so visitors, the apotheosis and then the decline of modern realism itself (despite the fact that, two years later, the exhibition on the Painters of Reality also opened in Milan). The usual Vittorini is not up for the populist rhetoric and attacks the exhibition with an article published on July 17 in the “Stampa” with the sibylline title: La campana del Caravaggio. Vittorini feared the corrupting effect of Caravaggio’s “apparent and vulgar” aesthetics, but the goal is, all things considered, in favor of contemporary art and against escapes into a romantic past (today, that escape, might be the only possible one, moreover, seeing what dominates the international scenes! How perspectives change, and in spite of the moment of maximum commercial diffusion of that Caravaggesque myth that even ends up cloying because of the “consumption” effects it has on the public): “The public behaves as if it were ’oppressed’ (...), It would demand that the living artist respond to its ’current’ needs. He does not know that art can only respond to needs that are still ’potential’ (...) Therefore he accumulates resentments and as soon as he meets with an artist of the past who gives him the illusion of satisfying him he immediately explodes against those who never give it to him.”
Guttuso, however, argued in 1952 that it is not wrong “to see in the forces of our tradition the example that helps to give in the works a real image of the time we live in... ”, and again “an art, therefore, clear in its form, optimistic and uplifting in its content, an art linked to the deep motives of our tradition, but nourished by the new history ofhumanity, a spokesman for its struggles and hopes”; and two years later, in 1954, in Rinascita, he calls the Venice Biennale a fair of snobbery and salon culture, consecration of the new academy, with involutions in formalism, those of Birolli and Morlotti, and in the sterile intellectualism of Turcato and Consagra. Three years later, in 1957, Arcangeli in Paragone costatava that the "revolutions in Italy remain apparent, clamorous like futurism, but ephemeral, and such that we still do not know whether to judge them effective innovations, or only modernist jacqueries.“ Arcangeli criticized Brandi for proclaiming, in 1949, the end of the avant-garde [Brandi had seen in abstractionism the conclusion of the battle waged by Cubism, and commented: ”In order to justify Abstractionism and redeem it from the stigma of being the last rotten leftover of rotten bourgeois society (...) one must have the courage to take Abstractionism out of ’Aesthetics and place it back in the Practical, condensing everything in the very making of the artist, return to a kind of pure Gentile act, and completely disregard theaesthetic nature of the work of art.“] And speaking of Guttuso punctually, Arcangeli writes that ”social concern has abruptly reintroduced into painting a type of legibility that is bluntly foreign to the natural line of development of Western art,“ criticizing the failed claim of a national cultural unification of ”too diverse traditions."
Guttuso in the same issue of Paragone writes that he is outside the avant-garde because “we feel the real and the man who is part of it being violently pressed,” while "the avant-garde must, instead, turn its back on man. It does not admit any relationship that implies another human term“; ”it is impossible to see in the avant-garde a permanent method“ because ”permanent revolution is the opposite of revolution.“ After all, on any ”human" discourse he had literally put over a boulder that gigantic horizontal monolith that was to be the Monument to the Fosse Ardeatine, made in 1949.
In this climate of excitement, of singular tenución, and finally of rapid exhaustion of the drive that guided artists toward the definition of a “new world” to be refounded, phoenix-like, from the ashes of a difficult twenty years, it is rhetorical to ask why it happened that from maximum commitment we came, quickly, to total public silence (except for individual choices). What preceded had been a limiting experience in so many ways, in a climate of feigned politicization on the part of the queens themselves, who cultivated above all their reasons for consensus and branched them, thanks to Minculpop, through the artists themselves; but precisely because of this ambiguity underlying, to which many subjugated consciously, and not a few consented, ex post one cannot call it an asphyxiated epoch as the protagonists in part perceived it, because if one examines the debate and the body of work produced in those years (one need only go and review the exhibitions of the last thirty years onart and power in Italy, beginning with the one in Milan in 1982 on the 1930s that signaled a reversal of the historiographical climate toward the twenty-year period), one realizes that the Italian one was perhaps the richest laboratory of development regarding the relationship between art and society, and on the very reflection between autonomy and political dependence; paradoxically, it seems that the togliattian excommunication ensnared the creativity of many, who were also sincerely militant, alienating many, who soon realized that politics, when it has to enslave art to its own communicative purposes, is a burden to be escaped as soon as possible.
Italian art during the Ventennio was an art that touched some of the highest peaks of the twentieth century, even in nominally fascist artists: what else can be said about Sironi or Terragni? And this was because their freedom of expression preceded subordination to the aims of the regime, which perhaps, with their art, they hoped to lead down more humane paths.
I know that this is a difficult discourse. And that it might sound equivocal around here. But it is not, because at root it is contrary to any politicization of art (which always conceals its reverse, as Benjamin explained, the aestheticization of the political, and this was and remains, ultimately, the real danger, even when, in a Biennial such as the one currently under way, a pauperism is practiced that, when all is said and done, cannot justify itself if that same art is then placed within a market, and that even when it is not, it will have to enter it if it wants to emerge and remain more or less long on the scene).
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.
