Italian Painting Today
by John O’Neil
October 1953
I am here to talk about painting and Italy, or more exactly, painting in Italy today, both subjects easy to like and easy to misunderstand, capable of being experienced in almost any way, I mean, you can be offended by the smell of refuse in a Venetian canal and complain about the absence of American-style coffee in the restaurants, or you may abandon your senses to the enjoyment of the theatrical splendor of this city in which a “view” is always apparitional. It is a matter of focus of interest. Similarly, the Italians are what you choose to recognize in them, remembering that Dante, Rudolph Valentino, Mussolini, Michelangelo, the bandit-hero Giuliano, Leonardo da Vinci, and Garibaldi were all members of the same racial family. But to avoid the sociological or artistic cliche, Italy and its painting remain individualistic, stimulating and reliably resurgent.
In this ancient peninsula, one learns to expect to find the old and the new in uneasy cohabitation: it is no pleasure, but no surprise either, to discover in the Gothic stone fancy of the figures atop Milan’s cathedral one coca-cola stand: Italian taste can sometimes be a survival of the durable. The painters are not likely to bend their knee always in the direction of tradition; even though the temptation to dream in the airy splendor of the Renaissance past has an hypnotic attraction, many artists have tried either to break with the past or work comfortably away from it. If they occasionally plant a soft drink amid ancient splendor, it is from an excess of energy, and eventually unimportant.
Curiously, only two major movements in painting originated in modern Italy: one was Futurism, and the other the Metaphysical school. The first eventually became internationally influential, the second less so; both, contrasting in idea, are yet typical of the extremes and range of Italian creativity. Futurism, a kind of motorized cubism, was a state of infatuation with the machine, not for what the machine could do to permit man to do less, but simply because it was found to be beautiful in its movement, in its very machine-ness. “We shall sing the love of danger, energy and boldness,” Marinetti had written in 1909 as Italian correspondent for the Paris newspaper, Figaro, “we declare that the world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing motor car, its hood adorned with great pipes like snakes with explosive breath…a roaring motor car, which runs like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” It was the opening manifesto of Futurism, attracting immediately a group of young and enthusiastic artists such as Bocciono, Russolo,and Carra. Interest in the machine movement quickly progressed to interest in any movement. In 1910 futurists said “everything is moving, everything is running, everything is whirling…painters have always shown us figures and objects arranged in front of us. We are going to put the spectator in the center of the picture.” If Futurism produced few masterpieces with the possible exception of Balla’s Leash in Motion of 1912, and Boccioni’s bronze sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, (which by the way, owes a debt to the Winged Victory), it had a subtle influence on many arts thereafter: the mobile in sculpture was a logical extension of it, and Rome’s new railway station, which seems to soar and flutter in the air, would have amazed and delighted the enthusiasts of 1910. It would have pleased them, too, that the building both houses and enhances those roaring machines which they worshipped.
The Metaphysical School, founded by Giorgio de Chirico, is the other thought extreme: contemplative, visionary painting in which enigmatic forms, mannequins, boxes, and unmoving figures appear in a vast and quiet space, in deserted piazzas, in a light that never seems to change, casting shadows that absorb and conceal. De Chirico’s metaphysical painting, created mostly in isolation in Paris from 1912 to 1915, was also unmistakably national: the arcaded streets, the glowing color, the powerful sense of form, these together are like the best qualities of all Italian towns but resembling none in particular. It is the introspective side of the peninsular genius, the dream of the present in the evocation of the past. The de Chirico paintings of this period are remarkably ageless, they do not carry the marks of a battle begun and won as cubist works do. They are not “modern” in this sense, although de Chirico’s odd juxtaposition of objects was to suggest to Max Ernst and others the properties of sur-realism, leading finally to the banalities of Dali. Metaphysical painting itself, never an organized school, never published by manifesto, was to have few followers except Giorgio Morandi and Carlo Carra for a short while. De Chirico himself has long since abandoned it, in fact condemned it, in a sterile return to technical bravura and the emulation of Raphael.
Twentieth century Italian painting has developed spottily, having been for long intervals isolated from the brilliant innovations in France and Germany. A comprehensive exhibition of work by the Impressionists was not seen until 1948 at the Venice Biennale. The Americans, with the exception of Alexander Calder, are known sparsely, by hearsay or reproduction. Rufino Tamayo’s work was introduced only in 1950, a meeting that was electrifying to the younger talent.
The Venice Biennale has been the most influential force in painting in Italy today, staged in the spacious and elegant way which makes it a spectacle as well as the most complete exhibition of its kind in the world. On a verdant island between San Marco and the Lido the buildings are spaced out in a garden, each country having a permanent pavilion of its own, the Italian galleries and the retrospective exhibits occupying the central building. It is an art park, in which color and form have been, at least last year, over-stimulating. Generally, Italian painting seen here since the war’s end has been enthusiastically free, self-conscious of its release from Fascist-controlled subject and style, and eager to join the international “retreat from likeness”. Seen in seemingly unending corridors, the non-objectivists’ over-sized canvases, stinging colors, forms made with compass and ruler, textures that dazzle, are often brave and breathless efforts to catch up, so that they may go beyond a point already passed by others. French cubism has been a dominant force, assimilated with success by Santomaso, a Venetian painter, and used more personally by Afro in Rome, but with both there is yet some feeling of the dryness of a school discipline, with a structure too obvious, substituting force for subtlety. Overstatement is a common fault with many of the Italian cubists.
Some have used cubist wedded to a propagandist theme; the best known of these painters is Renato Guttuso. Sicilian born, Roman in residence and sympathy, he was bitterly anti-German during the war, and in 1947 became a member of the Fronte Nuovo delle Arti, a group of mainly abstract artists. At his best Guttuso uses color with great power, a kind of angrily cut structure, and majestic human figures drawn from his Sicilian memory with sympathy and grandness. Recently his concern with politics and economics has brought him away from a thoughtful picture organization and toward illustration, with its dangerous appeal of the immediate. In contrast to Picasso, who never lets the theme, even a personally sensitive one, such as in the Guernica, overcome his sense of the pictorial structure, Guttuso is becoming more polemicist than painter, while yet remaining a leading figure.
City states bred and developed great painters of the past in Italy, and it was not uncommon for an artist to produce his best works in the place of his birth; Michelangelo in Rome and Leonardo in Milan were exceptions, having obtained a widespread audience wanting their genius. Now, even with the modern overtones of fast luxury trains, frequent and crowded buses, and the feeling that everyone is on the move, there are still cities such as Siena and Lucca, Assisi and Ravenna, that seem to have changed not at all since they reached the peak of their importance. Love of one’s own earth can be strong, and not all artists feel a need to prove themselves in Rome, Milan, or Venice, or even exhibit in these centers. The work of the Venetians and Florentines is seen infrequently in the capital. Rome and Venice are hardly comparable to Paris and New York as art centers, at least in the commercial evidence of dealers’ galleries. If art is a business in these places, it is a gentle business. The Via Margutta in Rome, generally acknowledged to be the artists’ quarter, does have a number of studios, but there is not the tendency for artists to gather together as there was in Montmartre, Montparnasse or in Greenwich Village; the Italian painter is often also a writer, a critic, or a dramatist, and he is never considered a social oddity. If he sits at a sidewalk cafe to talk about politics, the politician might also be sitting at a sidewalk cafe talking about art. In a country in which art exists, its right to being is unquestioned.
Then too, the difference we make between “commercial” art and “fine” art is not so marked. Books by Italian authors are commonly printed with reproductions of contemporary paintings on the cover as the sole decoration; in some cases, as with Carlo Levi, a painting by the writer. Sculpture, architecture, painting, hand crafts, and industrial design have all exchanged ideas freely. There is now an identifiable emergence of a new Italian style, nationalistic in its tendency toward warm, rich surfaces, superior craftsmanship, and freedom of form and line, international in it attack on the problem of use of new materials and unique social or esthetic functions.
If I were to select one word which would describe a characteristic of this emerging style, it would probably be “lyric”. It is curious that it should be this, when the opportunities for the development of the tragic theme have been so great. Painting since the war has almost entirely avoided the subject of war: even the bombed ruins which remain in sections of some cities have been absent as material for painting. The glance is forward, not back; buildings rise where once was rubble, and the artist, when not absorbed in purely formal problems of pictorial assembly, has used people, the everyday objects they use in living, the cities they build, and the earth they cultivate as subject. The recurrent transitory tragedy of war he leaves to the reporters and the newspapers. It was hardly accidental that Giuseppe Verzocchi, a manufacturer of brick in Milan, wishing to commission a group of Italian artists in 1950 to paint on a given theme, chose “work” as the subject, about which each would have something personal to comment. An imposed theme, even such a universal one, is often difficult to convert into art. Pompeo Borra, writing of his own approach said: “When I set out to make a picture representing something that would express and exalt the idea of work, I thought that the best way to meet this problem would be first, to produce a good piece of painting. For this reason I at once abandoned all those solutions which would have involved a merely realistic or illustrative picture. Thus it was that I began to consider the shape of the painting and how I could work the forms and colors into it. The man and the horse in my picture are before everything the outcome of a special limitation and the colors are only the expression of an equivalence of tones.”
John O’Neil