From 1923 onwards, with Mussolini's famous speech at Perugia's Accademia di Belle Arti, the regime sought to define what could be considered as State art (arte di Stato) under a new political regime. The theoretical debate on this arte di Stato took place primarily in journals with various different affiliations and followed two main lines of argument: how to define modernity and how to conceptualize realism in aesthetic terms. The first of these debates played out in 1926-28 in Critica fascista, but it reached no definite conclusions, other than encouraging artists to adopt a more constructivist, modern and less decadent attitude in their work. Similarly, the 1930s battle for modern/totalitarian realism in the arts avoided all mysticism in order to champion an idea of culture which was pragmatic and constructive, and which functioned, significantly, as a mirror for modern society and its collective (anti-liberal) spirit.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the anti-liberal modernizing regimes based in Rome, Berlin, and Moscow created new totalitarian aesthetic apparatuses for the control of the individual/citizen in the social sphere, seeking total control, mass consensus, and the constitution of the 'new man/woman' as the foundation of a modern collective social identity. In their declarations, these anti-liberal regimes progressively adopted modernist aesthetics as the privileged paradigm for the modernization of the public sphere. However, this modernity was not simply totalitarian, and therefore largely political, but also sought to develop an aesthetic dimension, rooted in realism, which could document the cultural and political climate of the day. At the core of this fresh vision of an aesthetics meshed with politics was the Fascist New Man, a figure in equal measure individual and collective, morally sound and politically committed.
As we shall argue, the core issue in debates on realism in 1930s aesthetics and politics, consisted in finding a means of constructing new forms of subjectivity and objectivity within a collectivist and totalitarian understanding of the real.
During the Fascist period, the pages of literary journals were filled with animated debates on State Art.These debates were at once theoretical and, often, political, and encouraged a process of rationalization of current artistic practices both in terms of technique and thematic repertoire and in light of a shared sense of cultural modernity and a desire for social modernization. In order to represent the new Fascist Italy, the new Italian novel in particular had to be reconstructed through a process of rationalization of its content, which would henceforth be in touch with the everyday. In 1930s Italy, realism is a combination of the modernist narrative technique of the interior monologue as well as a frustrated desire of becoming real and reach a wider audience. The regime identified itself artistically with artworks which could portray modernity and tradition simultaneously: the likes of Margherita Sarfatti's Novecento movement, with Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Pippo Rizzi, Corrado Cagli; the second avant-garde, with Filippo Marinetti adding a popular and sometimes monumental dimension to futurism; Bontempelli and Pirandello's theatre; and, of course, the films of Alberto Camerini, Alessandro Balsetti and Umberto Barbaro. Such projects epitomised the idea of arte di Stato because, through the support of the publishing industry and the system of artistic patronage, they sought to reach both popular and elite circles. Moreover, they presented themselves as representative of the collective sense of the individual experience. L' arte di Stato had to be modern and international but also in touch with the national tradition and the everyday reality of citizens' lives (while also, of course, obeying its own moral imperatives).
The regime placed great emphasis on the relationship between the elite and the popular (compared to the relationship championed by liberalism, which was defined by an individualist attitude towards the real and the public domain), in such a way as to redefine the understanding of subjectivity in a rapidly changing society. Owing to the accent they established within the public sphere, the anti-bourgeois collective forms of subjectivity planned by the dictatorships in the 1930s played a fundamental part in defining and documenting a reconceptualized form of objectivity. Realism in the 1930s was 'popular-heroic/eroico-popolare', since it had to address the reality of the ordinary people living under a new form of political regime, which functioned as both a political and an aesthetic force. In aesthetic terms, such a shift resulted in simplified stylistic patterns and more articulated narrative structures, or in excessive reflection on the boundaries between the subject and its objectivity, such as in the works of the Novecento movement (Achille Funi, Mario Sironi), in the metaphysical avant-garde of Vinicio Palladini and Pippo Rizzo, in the scuola romana of Corrado Cagli or in the novels of Alberto Moravia, Umberto Barbaro, Dino Buzzati, Alba de Cespedes, Umberto Fracchia, Aldo Palazzeschi, Mario Soldati, Enrico Emanuelli, Alessandro Bonsanti, and Corrado Alvaro.
Method of this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them [N1a,8]. (Benjamin, 460)
From 1923 onwards, with Mussolini’s famous speech at Perugia’s Accademia di Belle Arti, the regime sought to define what could be considered as State art (arte di Stato) under a new political regime. The theoretical debate on this arte di Stato took place primarily in journals with various affiliations and followed two main lines of argument: how to define modernity and how to conceptualize realism in aesthetic terms. The first of these debates played out in 1926-28 in Critica fascista, but it reached no definite conclusions, other than encouraging artists to adopt a more constructivist, modern and less decadent attitude in their work. Similarly, the 1930s battle for modern/totalitarian realism in the arts avoided all mysticism in order to champion an idea of culture which was pragmatic and constructive, and which functioned, significantly, as a mirror for modern society and its collective (anti-liberal) spirit. By examining a selection of novels and paintings, we will show how, as far as the arte di Stato was concerned, Fascist debates on national realism and Modernist debates on ‘international realism’ overlapped. Our principal hypothesis is that both parties shared the common ambition of trying to formulate an alternative aesthetic system, which could speak both to the masses and to the elites. We will test our hypothesis by examining a set of novels and artefacts, which addressed the problem of a new subjectivity within a collective understanding of the real. We will also focus on the efforts of the Novecento and Futurist movements to become the official arte di Stato, and their failure to do so.
900, Ambrosiano, Le arti, Le arti plastiche, Augustea, Belvedere, Bollettino dell’arte, Cantiere, Il Convegno, Corrente, Critica fascista, Dedalo, Educazione fascista, La fiera letteraria, Occidente, Orpheus, Pegaso, Perseo, Poligono, Il Saggiatore, Lo spettatore italiano, La Ronda, Solaria.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the anti-liberal modernizing regimes based in Rome, Berlin, and Moscow created new totalitarian aesthetic apparatuses for the control of the individual/citizen in the social sphere, seeking total control, mass consensus, and the constitution of the ‘new Man’ as the foundation of a modern collective social identity. In their declarations, these anti-liberal regimes progressively adopted modernist aesthetics as the privileged paradigm for the modernization of the public sphere. However, this modernity was not simply totalitarian, and therefore largely political, but also sought to develop an aesthetic dimension, rooted in realism, which could document the cultural and political climate of the day. The aesthetic inclination towards the real as a document functioned as a political tool when it obeyed two interlocking sets of governing principles: the aesthetics of the fragment and the politics of the whole. At the core of this fresh vision of an aesthetics meshed with politics was the Fascist New Man, a figure in equal measure individual and collective, morally sound and politically committed. Both the traditional individual and the individual made affectively collective were expected to modernize and transform the national infrastructure: to do so, both would have to return to a simplified and rationalized perception and representation of reality in the arts, both as an aesthetic practice and as a social project. In short, aesthetic orientations and political grand plans in the age of totalitarianism could not be understood in isolation, or autonomously. If subjectivity (bourgeois escapism) and objectivity (realism) could no longer be separated into two fields, what then would realist consciousness (of the object) consist of in this time of totalitarian regimes?
As we shall argue through a sample of relevant artefacts, the core issue in debates on realism in 1930s aesthetics and politics, consisted in finding a means of constructing new forms of subjectivity and objectivity within a collectivist and totalitarian understanding of the real. We therefore discuss the 1930s debate on the novel in general, while focusing on the Italian case in particular, to ask the following main question: how did the act of addressing the real across a large part of European culture in the 1930s, and in Italy in particular, constitute a political as well as an aesthetic endeavour which required the scrutiny of both of these aspects? The novel will be considered both as the chief artefact employed by writers to ‘document’ the real and as a form of construction theorized across and against a series of political projects following the heyday of the avant-gardes. The dialectics between subjectivity and objectivity as represented in other media will also be scrutinised, such as those expressed in painting (Corrado Cagli, Mario Sironi, Achille Funi), sculpture (Lucio Fontana), theatre (Luigi Pirandello, Massimo Bontempelli) and cinema (Alessandro Blasetti, Umberto Barbaro, Mario Camerini).
Focusing on the works of four European high Modernists (Joseph Conrad, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Marcel Proust and James Joyce), Pericles Lewis convincingly demonstrated how one of the multi-faceted manifestations of the crisis of the liberal nation-state was expressed in a particular form of modernist writing, which sought refuge from the harshness of the real not just by experimenting with formal aesthetic strategies, but also by constructing a ‘national consciousness’. These writers materialized their consciousness of the crisis afflicting such political, ideological, and economic systems as liberalism and nationalism, by giving space in their novels to a wider factual, if not explicitly historical dimension, which ultimately provided an externalized means of decoding internal dynamics. Gabriele D’Annunzio’s over-determination of the material aspects of the fictional worlds he constructs is a case in point. Accepting nationalism as the prevailing political idea one in the pre-World War I period, Lewis, in his examination of the textual strategies employed by those key European high modernists, connected the logics of their outer worlds with those of their inner worlds, championing them not simply as aesthetic but also as tangentially political actors for ‘their engagement with the crisis of the nation-state and their explorations of the possibilities and limits of liberalism’. Lewis’ analysis demonstrated the interrelationship between the aesthetic and the political during times of perceived epochal crisis, seen as a dramatic transformation of a status quo, and he thus opened up fresh interpretative avenues. If the history of Italian Fascism has always attracted a substantial amount of academic and non-academic attention, considerably less systematic consideration has been paid to the aesthetic achievements promoted during the dictatorship. We aim to fill this gap by contextualizing the debate on the artistic world generally, and on the new Italian novel in particular, within the larger frame of l’arte di Stato. In line with Lewis’ analysis, we will do so by discussing the aesthetic problem of realism and addressing its political significance for the regime, a political system diametrically opposed to Liberalism and its idea of individual determination as the central cog in the mechanism governing the social sphere.
The modernist novel discussed by Lewis, along with the 1930s realists and the visual artists examined here, all, in parallel, pursued the same argumentative strategy. For the 1930s saw a crisis of democracy and of democratic representation in the broadest sense which echoed that before the First World War; there was still a strong drive for social modernization and industrial development, only now advocated by totalitarian regimes; there was still a preferred aesthetic form, namely realism over Decadentism, which once again marked a break with the late nineteenth century in so far as it did not put the individual produced by liberal economies at the centre of the narrative, but rather the collective body shaped, directed and orchestrated by the dictatorships. The traditional subjectivity of modernism could no longer be advocated as representative of its time. The arts under the regime were modern by virtue of their rejection of bourgeois interiority in favour of an idea of the work of art, which could reflect the modernization of society. The new political regime forced the aesthetic realm to tread a fine line between autonomy (subjectivity) and collectivity (objectivity), between antagonism and consensus.
During the Fascist period, the pages of literary journals were filled with animated debates on State Art. These debates were at once theoretical and, often, political, and encouraged a process of rationalization of current artistic practices both in terms of technique and thematic repertoire and in light of a shared sense of cultural modernity and a desire for social modernization. In order to represent the new Fascist Italy, the new Italian novel in particular had to be reconstructed through a process of rationalization of its content, which would henceforth be in touch with the everyday. In 1930s Italy, realism is a combination of the modernist narrative technique of the interior monologue as well as a frustrated desire of becoming real and reach a wider audience. The regime identified itself artistically with artworks which could portray modernity and tradition simultaneously: the likes of Margherita Sarfatti’s Novecento movement, with Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Pippo Rizzi, Corrado Cagli; the second avant-garde, with Filippo Marinetti adding a popular and sometimes monumental dimension to futurism; Massimo Bontempelli and Luigi Pirandello’s theatre; and, of course, the films of Alberto Camerini, Alessandro Balsetti and Umberto Barbaro. Such projects epitomised the idea of l’arte di Stato because, through the support of the publishing industry and the system of artistic patronage, they sought to reach both popular and elite circles. Moreover, they presented themselves as representative of the collective sense of the individual experience. As Rancière put it: ‘The “politics” of social art are to be found here: in the refusal of art’s own distinction, and thus also of the distinctions between noble and non-noble arts’ (2013, 135). L’ arte di Stato had to be modern and international but also in touch with the national tradition and the everyday reality of citizens’ lives (while also, of course, obeying its own moral imperatives). In essence, then, the Total Work of Art was an amalgamation of old and new, of popular and elite, employing a language which aimed to dismantle any form of ornament in order to arrive at the essence of the new social reality constructed by the Fascist revolution.
The regime placed great emphasis on the relationship between the elite and the popular (compared to the relationship championed by liberalism, which was defined by an individualist attitude towards the real and the public domain), in such a way as to redefine the understanding of subjectivity in a rapidly changing society. Owing to the accent they established within the public sphere, the anti-bourgeois collective forms of subjectivity planned by the dictatorships in the 1930s played a fundamental part in defining and documenting a reconceptualized form of objectivity. Realism in the 1930s was ‘popular-heroic/eroico-popolare’, since it had to address the reality of the ordinary people living under a new form of political regime, which functioned as both a political and an aesthetic force. Such a popular-heroic, or populist objectivity now had to be understood as a collective expression in dialogue with the modern political and social agents embodied by the ‘masses’ as well as with the needs of the new man/woman shaped by the fascist anthropological revolution (as for examples in the films by Mario Camerini, Alessandro Blasetti, Raffaello Matarazzo, Umberto Barbaro). In aesthetic terms, such a shift resulted in simplified stylistic patterns and more articulated narrative structures, or in excessive reflection on the boundaries between the subject and its objectivity, such as in the works of the Novecento movement (Achille Funi, Mario Sironi), in the metaphysical avant-garde of Vinicio Palladini and Pippo Rizzo, in the scuola romana of Corrado Cagli or in the novels of Alberto Moravia, Umberto Barbaro, Dino Buzzati, Alba de Cespedes, Umberto Fracchia, Aldo Palazzeschi, Mario Soldati, Enrico Emanuelli, Alessandro Bonsanti, and Corrado Alvaro.