The construction of the New Man was another of the several key experiments conducted by the regime in order to pave the way to totalitarianism. Among these, it constituted one of the regime's most pervasive attempts at changing Italian society. For the idea of shaping a New Man was at the core of the Fascist anthropological revolution, which primarily aimed to transform the Italian citizen into a quintessentially Fascist one. As far as the existing aesthetic system was concerned, the New Man was the catalyst for the achievement of social modernization through a process of rationalization of artistic practices. We can, therefore, argue that the modern, totalitarian Man/Woman fashioned by the arts in the public sphere had the function of eroding individuality as a self-sustained system and of replacing it with a new collective sociability.
In order to achieve a fully-formed totalitarian order, the regime put in place a number of reforms: the education reform and the corporate state were two of the most important of these. At the centre of these reforms lay the attempt to construct a new idea of man/woman, or more generally to reshape the notion and understanding of subjectivity. In other words, if the new education had to build the Fascist individual and the corporative system had to transform him or her into a collective being, the arts had to create a space for visualizing and monumentalizing the entity thus created. The invention of the New Man was in essence a political, anthropological and social problem, for he or she embodied modernity. The old notion of subjectivity, driven by an independent desire for self-determination within a social and political landscape, as articulated by liberalism, was no longer sustainable. From an aesthetic point of view, this shift is visible in the sacralization of politics through the arts, in youth culture, and in the creation of national myths and the aesthetics of monumentalism.
As far as the relationship between the individual and the collective is concerned, our central hypothesis regarding the profile of the Italian totalitarian regime, as seen through the prism of the arts, is as follows: the regime planned the construction of the New Man in order to guarantee a total transformation of the personal and public spheres. If the personal sphere is that of the individual and the public sphere is that of the collective, the New Man had to unite them in such a way that the old distinction, accepted by previous political regimes such as liberalism, would be erased.
The idea of building a space for this new collective subjectivity shaped by the fascist anthropological revolution found several artistic embodiments. Mural paintings, with their striking aesthetics and the lines traced by augmented bodies in artfully arranged volumes, often in classical attire, are only one of the many cases in point (Enrico Prampolini, Fillia, Fortunato Depero, Corrado Cagli, Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Carlo Carrà). Similar examples can be found in architecture commissioned for public venues and mass gatherings, in sculptures representing Mussolini, and in mass theatre and theatre for the people (Adolfo Wildt, Arturo Martini, Leone Lodi, Lucio Fontana). Theatre often functioned as a space for the creation of myths representing the Fascist revolution, as can be seen from the Carri di Tespi or the 18BL in 1934. The main aim of these works was to create an identification between the everyday as political and the everyday as personal through simplified aesthetic compositions, amplified volumes as well as the reconceptualization of avant-garde aesthetics in an everyday landscape, such as in advertising (Alberto Bianchi Erberto Carboni, Marcello Dudovich) and in futurist paintings for public buildings (Angiolo Mazzoni's post-offices and train stations or in holiday camps, corporate cities, stadia, public palaces, and university cities).
The regime placed great emphasis on the visibility of culture and monumentalism played a key role in the transfiguration of the daily experience of Italian citizens. The more visible an artefact reflecting the ethos and ethics of the Fascist revolution was, the more effectively it could be used to create a modern Fascist society. In this respect, many artistic creations inscribed the relationship between a new subjectivity encapsulated within a modernized social landscape, such as in the Arengario in Milan, The Monumento ai caduti in Como, or the Foro Italico, in Rome. Another case in point is Mario Sironi, who abandoned easel painting in order to devote himself to the representation of the glories of the regime. His work was fairly typical in that it made this new fusion visible by emphasising the intersections between the new Man/Woman and the reality around him or her, as was also the case in paintings such as Le corporazioni, 1941, by Prampolini, Le professioni e le arti, 1942, by Fortunato Depero, or L'Italia tra le arti e le scienze, 1935, by Mario Sironi, painted for the Aula Magna of La Sapienza University in Rome. And finally the strongest of all weapons: cinema with the likes of Alessandro Blasetti, Guido Bignone, Giovacchino Forzano, Mario Camerini, Augusto Genina, Carmine Gallone and Roberto Rossellini.
The debate on the new culture could not fail to take into account the problem of the New Man.In November 1933, discussing an article in Orpheus which was itself a reply to the question posed by the Rome-based journal Il Saggiatore on the same topic, the editorial reinforced the point already made a couple of months before, by claiming that the new art they champion is ingrained in the principle that the 'realismo dinamico, […] [è] determinato dai rapporti con la vita. […]'.1 This moral and intellectual disposition could not embrace indifference if it was going to forge a more profound theoretical and critical awareness of sociability in and through the arts, which had to translate into radically different forms of individual participation in the collective. In other words, without rejecting Fascist ideology per se, these young intellectuals wanted to 'clarify' and 'explain' further their understanding of the relationship between art and the individual as a social entity. The theatre in particular was the space dedicated to the construction of myths with the potential for social resonance, with the likes of Giovacchino Forzano, Salvator Gotta, Vitaliano Brancati and Sam Benelli.
Historical materialism aspires to neither a homogeneous nor a continuous exposition of history. From the fact that the superstructure reacts upon the base, it follows that a homogeneous history, say, of economics exists as little as homogeneous history of literature or of jurisprudence. [N7a, 2] (Benjamin, 470)
The construction of the New Man was another of the several key experiments conducted by the regime in order to pave the way to totalitarianism. Among these, it constituted one of the regime’s most pervasive attempts at changing Italian society. For the idea of shaping a New Man was at the core of the Fascist anthropological revolution, which primarily aimed to transform the Italian citizen into a quintessentially Fascist one (see Hypotheses 1 and 2). As far as the existing aesthetic system was concerned, the New Man was the catalyst for the achievement of social modernization through a process of rationalization of artistic practices. We can, therefore, argue that the modern, totalitarian Man/Woman fashioned by the arts in the public sphere had the function of eroding individuality as a self-sustained system and of replacing it with a new collective sociability.
900, Ambrosiano, Le arti, Le arti plastiche, L’arte della rivoluzione fascista, Belvedere, Bollettino dell’arte, Critica fascista, Dedalo, Educazione fascista, Emporium, La fiera letteraria, Gerarchia, Occidente, Orpheus, Pegaso, Perseo, Poligono, Primato, Quadrante, Il Saggiatore, Solaria.
In order to achieve a fully-formed totalitarian order, the regime put in place a number of reforms: the education reform and the corporate State were two of the most important of these. At the centre of these reforms lay the attempt to construct a new idea of Man/Woman, or more generally to reshape the notion and understanding of subjectivity. In other words, if the new education had to build the Fascist individual and the corporative system had to transform him or her into a collective being, the arts had to create a space for visualizing and monumentalizing the entity thus created. The problem of the New Man is closely connected with the theoretical reflection on the individual vs. the collective and with the relationship between action and thought. The invention of the New Man was in essence a political, anthropological and social problem, for he or she embodied modernity. The old notion of subjectivity, driven by an independent desire for self-determination within a social and political landscape, as articulated by liberalism, was no longer sustainable. Moreover, whereas the Man of the liberal regimes understood modernity as an unlimited and self-determined journey without boundaries or constraints, the new Fascist Man’s journey was instead clearly directed towards transforming the old bourgeois subjectivity into a new collectivity with the attributes of action and of virile strength. From an aesthetic point of view, this shift is visible in the sacralization of politics through the arts, in youth culture, and in the creation of national myths and the aesthetics of monumentalism. The role of the arts in the construction of the New Man is particularly evident in the fields of advertising, mass theatre, architecture and mural painting.
As far as the relationship between the individual and the collective is concerned, our central hypothesis regarding the profile of the Italian totalitarian regime, as seen through the prism of the arts, is as follows: the regime planned the construction of the New Man in order to guarantee a total transformation of the personal and public spheres. If the personal sphere is that of the individual and the public sphere is that of the collective, the New Man had to unite them in such a way that the old distinction, accepted by previous political regimes such as liberalism, would be erased. The new modern Man was to be conceived through a fusion of both spheres. Such a conceptual step was also fundamental in the process of the social modernization of society. In this respect, youth culture played a key role in the system of the arts as an element of novelty, as an important aspect of the modernization of the aesthetic field and as a driving force in the theoretical conceptualization of the New Man. Youth culture was particularly active through journals and the Littoriali dello sport, dell’arte e della cultura e del lavoro (1933-1940). Through such channels, it encouraged both a new idea of realism and a vision of art as a social phenomenon. More specifically, it rejected the individualism of Benedetto Croce’s idealist aesthetics in favour of a socially aware aesthetics. The rappel à l’ordre of the dictatorship transformed itself into a return to the logical acceptance of art as an autonomous form of collective expression, albeit one closely embedded in the social reality of its production and circulation.
Whether stable or in a state of flux, of constant evolution and crisis, art can never be extricated from its historicity. By drawing such an unbreakable connection between text and context, youth culture moved away from Benedetto Croce’s aesthetic reflection and from Decadentism’s lack of moral standing and historical awareness to get closer to European experiments, such as German New Objectivity, transatlantic Modernism or rational and functionalist architecture. Mural painting, sculpture and public architecture were other expressions of this very same aesthetic reconfiguration insofar as they made visible the relationship between the individual, collective and political message, which they transmitted through their experimental aesthetic syntax, and which aimed to create social mythologies, fitting the ideology of the regime. In the same vein, we can also read advertising and mass theatre as instruments of the aesthetic construction of social myths.
The description given by Thoedore Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their Dialectics of the Enlighment of the old Odysseus, the bourgeois man who needs to repress his desire to obey a greater order, can be seen as the implicit antithesis of the new Fascist Man, who is stronger than any other order and hence able to fuse his or her public and personal selves. In his seminal work on Fascist culture and modernity, Emilio Gentile has pointed out the extent to which the regime initiated not merely a political, or even cultural, revolution per se, but also an anthropological one. And it follows that the outcome of this anthropological revolution could only be the New Man, who was quintessentially ‘serio, intrepido, e tenace’ and carefully shaped by the politician, acting as a form of artist/sculptor. As far as youth culture – the space in which the New Man would be born – Mario Sechi has explicitly observed how its anti-ideological stance allowed for an agreement on the idea of realism and State art, which functioned as a progressive force for innovation and experimentation (Sechi, 67).
One of the key problems to address when dealing with the aesthetic sphere during a dictatorship is how to draw the boundaries between the private and the public. Skilfully crafted by the regime, the New Man stands on the threshold between the two spheres. Taking this notion as our point of departure, together with the imperative of reformulating the relationship between subjectivity and objectivity in view of the total work of art, one of the key issues to address is how this image of the New Man was made visible through a reformulation of the aesthetic system. The Fascist revolution established the State as an ethical core at the centre of each individual’s existence, allowing the latter to be turned into collective forms of existence. The ethical State (Stato etico) had a strong educational dimension, which citizens had to understand as a moment of personal development in which to achieve a perfect overlap between the self as personal and the collective as political. In other words, the arts had to contribute to the sacralization of politics, which could thus become part of the daily life of the new Fascist Man. The Fascist revolution had not simply changed the political landscape and rescued Italy from the liberal State; it had also changed and transformed the minds of the Italian people, whose primary identity as individual subjects was now that of Fascists, and only subsequently Italians. The New Man/Woman did not rationally choose to be Fascist, for their belief was more akin to that found in religion, and thus governed by faith. The anthropological revolution, then, transformed the idea of subjectivity from a form of individual existence into an individual existence which could only come into being collectively. The arts represented this sacralization of the New Man through a wide range of artefacts, many of which embraced the aesthetics of the monumental.
The idea of building a space for this new collective subjectivity shaped by the fascist anthropological revolution found several artistic embodiments. Mural paintings, with their striking aesthetics and the lines traced by augmented bodies in artfully arranged volumes, often in classical attire, are only one of the many cases in point (Enrico Prampolini, Fillia, Fortunato Depero, Corrado Cagli, Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Carlo Carrà). Similar examples can be found in architecture commissioned for public venues and mass gatherings, in sculptures representing Mussolini, and in mass theatre and theatre for the people (Adolfo Wildt, Arturo Martini, Leone Lodi, Lucio Fontana). Theatre often functioned as a space for the creation of myths representing the Fascist revolution, as can be seen from the Carri di Tespi or the 18BL in 1934. The main aim of these works was to create an identification between the everyday as political and the everyday as personal through simplified aesthetic compositions, amplified volumes as well as the reconceptualization of avant-garde aesthetics in an everyday landscape, such as in advertising (Alberto Bianchi, Erberto Carboni, Marcello Dudovich) and in futurist paintings for public buildings (in Angiolo Mazzoni’s post-offices and train stations or in holiday camps, corporate cities, stadia, public palaces, and university cities).
The regime placed great emphasis on the visibility of culture and monumentalism played a key role in the transfiguration of the daily experience of Italian citizens. The more visible an artefact reflecting the ethos and ethics of the Fascist revolution was, the more effectively it could be used to create a modern Fascist society. In this respect, many artistic creations inscribed the relationship between a new subjectivity encapsulated within a modernized social landscape, such as in the Arengario in Milan, the Monumento ai caduti in Como, or the Foro Italico in Rome. Another case in point is Mario Sironi, who abandoned easel painting in order to devote himself to the representation of the glories of the regime. His work was fairly typical in that it made this new fusion visible by emphasising the intersections between the new Man/Woman and the reality around him or her, as was also the case in paintings such as Le corporazioni, 1941, by Prampolini, Le professioni e le arti, 1942, by Fortunato Depero, or L’Italia tra le arti e le scienze, 1935, by Mario Sironi, painted for the Aula Magna of La Sapienza University in Rome. And finally the strongest of all weapons: cinema with the likes of Alessandro Blasetti, Guido Bignone, Giovacchino Forzano, Mario Camerini, Augusto Genina, Carmine Gallone and Roberto Rossellini.
The debate on the new culture could not fail to take into account the problem of the New Man. In November 1933, discussing an article in Orpheus which was itself a reply to the question posed by the Rome-based journal Il Saggiatore on the same topic, the editorial reinforced the point already made a couple of months before, by claiming that the new art they champion is ingrained in the principle that the ‘realismo dinamico, […] [è] determinato dai rapporti con la vita. […]’.[^1] This ‘atteggiamento morale e intellettuale’ could not embrace indifference if it was going to forge a more profound theoretical and critical awareness of sociability in and through the arts, which had to translate into radically different forms of individual participation in the collective. In other words, without rejecting Fascist ideology per se, these young intellectuals wanted to ‘clarify’ and ‘explain’ further their understanding of the relationship between art and the individual as a social entity. Since its inception, in fact, the review had not hesitated to propose a collectivist understanding of aesthetics, sustained by a close dialogue between the arts in general – music, visual art, architecture, film, literature – and the public good. Specifically, in its writing on contemporary aesthetics, Orpheus maintained that the arts needed to be both a shared expression of the individual and a dynamic and historicized manifestation of the real. Thus Orpheus’ brand of international realismo storico, in line with that promoted by similar reviews such as Il Saggiatore, was a more general expression of a revolutionary humanism which sought (successfully) to bring artists and citizens back to the artistic life of their Nation and to its social context. The theatre in particular was the space dedicated to the construction of myths with the potential for social resonance, with the likes of Giovacchino Forzano, Salvator Gotta, Vitaliano Brancati and Sam Benelli.
[^1]: Orpheus (editorial). 1933. ‘I giovani e la nuova cultura.’ Orpheus 2, no.10 (December): 1-6.