TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/040389/04038900.060

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.9 KB | 154 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 77

Raw Talk, but Cooked Painting


A show surveys innovation and tradition in 20th century Italy

By Robert Hughes


    The Royal Academy of Arts in London, long since shaken from
its ancestral mustiness by its energetic exhibitions secretary
Norman Rosenthal, has made a speciality of packaging national
surveys. It did German art in 1985, British art in 1987; now
Italy's turn has come. "Italian Art in the 20th Century,"
curated by Rosenthal and the Italian art critic and historian
Germano Celant, tells its narrative in some 230 paintings and
sculptures, and will fill Burlington House, the site of the
academy's galleries, through April 9.

    It is hard to imagine a useful century-wide show of French
or American art. The subject, in either case, is too big,
various, richly inflected and unwieldy to be stuffed into one
trunk -- at least, without the kind of editing that amounts to
severe mutilation. But 20th century Italy, like Germany and
Britain, is somewhat more compressible. Italian modernism can
be summarized because its achievement was small next to the
School of Paris', and smaller yet beside the glories of Italy's
own past. From the emergence of Giotto in the 13th century to
the death of Bernini in the 17th, Italian painters and
sculptors ruled the European roost, setting the standards of
achievement by which Western culture judged itself. By the 19th
century this primacy was lost, and throughout the modernist era
Italy produced no equivalents to Picasso, Matisse or Mondrian,
and, of course, nothing even faintly comparable to Titian or
Michelangelo.

    It is the very presence of its past that seems to determine
the shape of Italian modernism: a systole and diastole between
innovation and tradition. Particularly in the 1950s and '60s,
Italian artists had a way of talking raw but painting cooked.
In the early '50s, when Alberto Burri began to exhibit his
paintings assembled from torn sacks and burnt strips of wood,
they looked as leprous as Dubuffets. Today they seem tender,
full of regard for discarded things, and about as threatening
as sunlight on an old wall; one realizes this was always part
of their intent. Even the Italian artists dealing with popular
imagery in the early '60s, like Mimmo Rotella, lack the
bluntness of their American counterparts. Rotella's Marilyn,
1962, a torn poster "found" and peeled from the wall, is partly
about abstract expressionist gesture, partly about the ruin of
images by time, and not in the least concerned with the shiny
newness Pop art liked.

    The Italian avant-garde before World War I, where this show
begins, found itself in a fix under the immense shadow of its
own cultural history. Either it made a diverting Oedipal
commotion about the loathsome oppressiveness of the past, like
the futurists, or immersed itself in poignant reveries about its
authoritarian and alienating beauty, like Giorgio de Chirico and
his associates in metaphysical painting.

    Futurism made the most noise at the start. The futurist
painters' manifestos of 1910, written by that inspired poet and
arch-hypester Filippo T. Marinetti and signed by a clutch of
brilliantly gifted artists (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni,
Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini), declared war on
cultural history -- "the enthusiasm for everything worm-eaten,
rotting with filth, eaten away by time."

    The futurists promised a bright churning world of dynamism,
machine worship, speed and conflict. As the machines dated, so
did some of the paintings. A work like Severini's Plastic
Synthesis of the Idea "War," 1915 -- his response to the general
mobilization of the French army, painted in Paris -- seems, with
its antique gun limber and biplane wings, almost as nostalgic
an image as a battle piece by Paolo Uccello. But others have not
dated. In particular, the spiking and whorling of translucent
mechanical forms in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, can be seen
as one of the great pictorial images of our century, as fresh
in impact as the day it was painted.

    If Balla was the best painter associated with Futurism, the
idea of metaphysical painting is all but synonymous with De
Chirico. Just as futurist cells sprang up all over the world,
and futurism was for most people synonymous with modern art up
to at least 1925, so De Chirico's dreaming, spatially deceitful
piazzas and arcades, with their phallic locomotives and
long-shadowed statues, had an immense resonance both inside and
outside Italy. Their influence on surrealism was crucial, but
their reveries about past and present, nature and culture,
memory and desire also hover behind much Italian art from the
'60s to the '80s, such as the richly metaphoric sculptures of
Giovanni Anselmo or even (more distantly) the structures of
Mario Merz.

    The Royal Academy show includes quite a lot of De Chirico's
more debatable pseudoclassical work from the '20s -- this is
now de rigueur, thanks to its popularity among postmodernists,
who see it as a daring and prophetic form of backwardness -- as
well as the paintings of his hardly less talented brother, the
painter-composer-dramatist who worked under the name of Alberto
Savinio and turned the late scheme of metaphysical painting
into an even wilder pastiche than it had already become.

    On the whole, the rooms devoted to 1910-35 are the best.
The show does a particular service by exhuming the impressive
work of Mario Sironi (1885-1961) and, at long last,
intelligently describing the relations between Italian
modernists and Fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The pieties of art
politics, up to the present, have tended to discourage this,
since the arrival of Mussolini was greeted with rapture by so
many leading artists and intellectuals. The Fascist rhetoric of
dynamism and machine efficiency meshed with (and was partly
inspired by) that of futurism; while the Duce's promise of a
renewed empire, a "third Rome" that would replay the Augustan
past, had immediate appeal to nostalgists like De Chirico, Carra
and even Giorgio Morandi.

    By far the best of the "classicists" was Sironi, whose
reputation as an artist has badly suffered from his devotion to
Fascism: he stayed loyal to Mussolini right through to 1943.
The figure on horseback in The White Horse and the Pier,
1920-22, draws on Italy's long history of equestrian hero images
and may refer to the Duce. Nevertheless, as painting, Sironi's
dark, emphatically delineated compositions, with their massive
figures and Brunelleschian weight of architecture, are often
quite superb, a reminder that you cannot necessarily judge an
artist by his or her political ideology.

    The show contains a few further surprises, such as the
gritty and beautifully painted domestic dramas of Fausto
Pirandello (1889-1975) and the best of all younger Duchampians,
Piero Manzoni (1933-63), whose balloon full of artist's breath
and cans full of artist's feces are wonderfully prophetic
satires on a market mania whose present inflation he could
scarcely have imagined.

    The show has a dying fall into the rhetoric of the '80s,
represented here for the umpteenth time by Sandro Chia, Enzo
Cucchi, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino. These figures
have become quasi-official artists, like the stars of the Paris
salons a century ago. Yet when the '80s have receded, it will
seem odd that the feeble draftsmanship in Clemente's washed-out
frescoes should once have been applauded, or that the lurid
bombast of even the better works of Cucchi, such as the droopy
head that lies like a huge Dalinian watch along the cemetery
roof in Stupid Picture, 1982, could have been thought heroic in
scale. In fact, there is less scale in such work than brute
size. To see what the scale of an image can mean in terms of
real address to the eye, one must go a few rooms back and look,
once more, at early De Chirico and Sironi.