Curating Fascism by Sharon Hecker

Author:Sharon Hecker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

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.

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 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.

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