Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism by Anthony White;

Author:Anthony White;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Furthermore, in the same letter he argues that the eternal part of humanity that God has breathed into each individual is completely different to that which “falls and ceases with our body, our senses, our days”; that is to say, not only our material self but also our temporal one. Although such ideas may appear similar to the arguments of a neoclassicist who would seek to restore an age-old state of affairs and revitalize a modern world fallen into decadence, Scipione’s texts do not coincide with the idea of bringing back something which existed before in history: rather they assert the significance of something altogether outside the historical.

As we have seen from his writing on El Greco, Scipione’s condemnation of history was extremely wide ranging, encompassing neoclassicism, the paganism of the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation, and the period at the beginning of the 20th century. He was also bitterly disappointed with the state of the world that he saw around him. His letters were scathing about the art of his time, including those conservative Roman painters who relied on preexisting historical skills and formulas as well as those who reduced their paintings to a focus on superficial elements of the picture plane.150 Against both of these tendencies, in the opinion of Mafai at the time of their first exhibitions in 1929, for both he and Scipione it was important that “painting had to say something, to speak, to express ideas.”151 In this sense, Fernando Tempesti is correct to argue that it was not only the “formal freedom” of Scipione’s work that “opened a crack in the structure of a normality—in formal terms—which was agreeable to the regime,” but also “certain intrusions of an emphasis on content rather than form.”152 Scipione’s critique of the present led him to engage through his art with problems that, in his view, ran deep in contemporary society.

As the artist complained in a letter to Enrico Falqui, “nowadays men no longer have confidence in friendship, not because they doubt it, but because friendship requires a moral climate higher and of course different from that suspicious, arid and therefore sterile climate of today.”153 The artist concluded in the same letter that the period he was living through was one in which the most beautiful human feelings had disappeared. Against this dire assessment Scipione writes that the only way out is “another war in the world” or, failing that, “men are condemned to fall lower and lower in abandonment and frigidity until they are frozen in a concrete mold.”154 Such statements show the artist’s rejection of contemporary society as a whole, the very same society that Fascism had been busily transforming for almost ten years, and his anticipation of a world-historical calamity in the future. In subsequent letters he satirized the pseudo-religiosity of official public spectacles like the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution held in Rome’s Palazzo delle Esposizioni—the same venue that had hosted some of the artist’s most significant public exhibitions—the purpose of which was to demonstrate that society had been completely changed for the better by Mussolini and his policies.

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