TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/040389/04038900.060

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 8KB | 140 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.