Renato Guttuso's Boogie Woogie in Rome (1953): a Geopolitical Tableau

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Renato Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome (1953): A Geopolitical Tableau Romy Golan

Plaid: A ‘Bad Gestalt’ A quasi-panic underlies Renato Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome, a large painting (170 × 205.5 cm) exhibited in the Italian section of the Central pavilion at the 1954 Venice Biennale (plate 1). Painted by Italy’s foremost exponent of socialist realism who, in the eyes of many critics, was the most important painter of his generation, it depicts a group of teenagers dancing frenetically in front of Mondrian’s eponymous painting of 1942–43. The neoplasticist language of right angles and primary colours in the Mondrian painting is absorbed and morphed into the acidic colours of the kids’ plaid and striped clothes. With this impertinent placement, Guttuso demotes the syncopated beat of one of Mondrian’s best-known works, and an icon of modernism, to the status of club or disco decoration.1 The dissonant optical effect produced by the plaid shirts and the striped turtlenecks, juxtaposed with the coloured line segments of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie painting, was aimed to produce what we may call a ‘bad Gestalt’ (plate 2).2 As if in response to the jarring optical effect of the painting, a young woman (whom we might read as Guttuso’s alter ego) sits despondently and disaffectedly at a café table in the painting’s lower right, grasping an empty drink, her cigarette butt burning out in an ashtray. Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome belongs to the family of works the art historian Victor Stoichita has defined as ‘metapaintings’:

An image hangs on the wall and in some ways clearly relates to the main scene. In a sense, the interior becomes the display space of an image. […] The interior scene acts like a ‘mirror’ of the hosting space for which it was destined.3

One could also say that Guttuso restores the syncopation to its site of origin, the jazz clubs and ballrooms that Mondrian haunted after his move to New York. Guttuso reproduces only a section of Mondrian’s painting: seemingly, although not exactly, the upper left. By cutting it down and blowing it up, he undermines, indeed ridicules, Mondrian’s sacrosanct compositions. Mondrian’s painting is also enlarged: the actual Detail from Renato Guttuso, Broadway Boogie Woogie in painting measures 127 × 127 cm. If we were to see Broadway Booggie Woogie in the ‘real’ Rome, 1954 (plate 1). room, it would appear, phantasmagorically, to be mural-size. The optical effect produced by Guttuso’s mix of different patterns points, however DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.12530 disingenuously, to a truth of Mondrian’s own modus operandi. Mondrian was Art History | ISSN 0141-6790 apparently disappointed by the optical mix produced by the application of colour 43 | 5 | November 2020 | pages 1008-1037 when he first saw hisBroadway Boogie Woogie hanging at MoMA under lighting conditions

1 Renato Guttuso, Broadway different from those of his studio.4 The critic Clement Greenberg objected as well, Boogie Woogie in Rome, 1954. Oil on canvas, 170 × 205.5 cm. going so far as to see ‘impure’ colours in it, orange and purple, the two colours which, Rovereto: Museo di Arte along with chartreuse, dominate Guttuso’s nightclub scene.5 As the French artist Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto Photo: Christian Bonnefoi remarked, quite provocatively, in an article published in the journal Collezione VAF-Stiftung. Macula in the late 1970s, Mondrian’s strategy in his wartime London and New York series of the 1940s – up to his last two pictures, Broadway Boogie Woogie and Victory Boogie Woogie both of 1944 – was one of destruction.6 The oscillation, the optical mixing, and the shallow depth of Mondrian’s New York paintings produce, in the words of the art historian Yve-Alain Bois, ‘a vertigo’.7 In Guttuso’s painting, even in the checked and striped clothes, there is a doubling, a spectral, palimpsest-like spatiality, that creates a similar, vertiginous disturbance. One of the goals of the embedding in the ‘metapainting’, Stoichita writes, is to produce meaning within a system of objects and images: it sets in motion an intertextual process. In Italy, a country with the largest Communist Party outside of the Eastern bloc, the polarizing geopolitics of the Cold War locked artistic discourse into years of tenacious and acrimonious debate about the merits of abstraction versus figuration well into the 1960s. This all-absorbing debate – in Italy, mostly an affair within the political Left – generated quite animated writing in the Communist-affiliated press, which included, just in Rome, Paese Sera, L’Unità,

Il Contemporaneo, Rinascita, and Vie Nuove. A prolific writer, Guttuso was a constant protagonist in these debates during the 1950s (and in fact throughout his life) in the pages of no less than nine journals: Nuovi Argomenti, L’Unità, Società, Nostro Tempo, Realism, Vie Nuove, Il Contemporaneo, Rinascita, and Les Lettres Françaises. We will hear him numerous times in this essay.8 Cutting through the tangled cultural politics and conflicting national pressures of the Venice Biennale during the Cold War, the present account will revolve around this single painting. Panning from the scene of Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome, I will show how it pulled into its orbit much of the geopolitics of the 1950s.9 Guttuso’s 2 Piet Mondrian, Broadway depiction of gyrating youths drew its – mostly negative – energy (in the Adornian Boogie Woogie, 1942–43. Oil on canvas, 127 × 127 cm. New sense, as we shall see) from events taking place just beyond its frame. I will identify York: Museum of Modern afterimages (Guttuso’s painting elicited other paintings); medial crossovers as well Art. Photo: MoMA/Scala/Art Resource, NY. as medial denials (the centrality of film, a medium Guttuso professed to abhor);

anticipations thwarted by reversed scenarios (the fiasco of the Soviets and the success of Mondrian in the next edition of the Venice Biennale in 1956); and blind spots (nations with no pavilion). I will pick out as a leitmotif the role of plaid as a multifarious sign for youthful rebellion, nonchalant bohemianism, lumberjacks and hillbilly folk, solidarity with the working class, and modish sophistication. My approach has broader art-historical implications in showing how a single painting can summon a series of scenes, all of which involve the homology posited by Jacques Rancière in La Méthode de la scène between the space of politics and stagecraft.10 The account given here also engages with Rancière’s assertion that there is no such thing as an ‘off-stage’, in the sense of being hidden, and that all political scenarios are, in fact, manifest.

Standing Out at the Biennale Boogie Woogie in Rome was Guttuso’s only contribution to the Biennale that year, since, as he boasted in the Communist-affiliated journal Vie Nuove, most of his recent production – fifty works – were included in a retrospective that went to Prague, Warsaw and Budapest, followed by Bucharest and Sofia.11 Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie was displayed in Venice among other paintings of his co-nationals, all of them realists and all of them fellow-travellers of the USSR. In this room, however, Guttuso’s painting stood out. Next to it were paintings such as Gabriele Mucchi’s L’assetato: guerra partigiana 1943–1945 [The Thirsty One: Partisan War 1943–1945] (1954) and La difesa di Praga [The Defence of Prague] (1954), one of the last battles against the Germans on the Eastern Front. On another wall were Armando Pizzinato’s 1848: La difesa di Venezia [The Defence of Venice] (1954) and Fucilazione dei patrioti [Patriots before the Firing Squad] (1954), both depicting grass-roots Italian resistance against the powers that be, first during the revolutionary wave that swept Europe in the mid-nineteenth century and then against the Nazi occupiers. Operating within a capitalist society, Western Communist artists abandoned the affirmative Soviet model in favour of a critical stance towards the social reality of life in the West, focusing on scenes of class struggle and heroic insurgence against fascist repression. In contrast to all this, and in contrast to the political engagement of his contributions to the Biennale till then, Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome lacked a preset political script. While Mucchi’s depiction of the defence of Prague was immediately purchased (at that time artworks could be purchased directly at the Biennale) by the Czech government, and Pizzinato’s Defence of Venice was snapped up by the CGIL syndicate (the Italian General Confederation of Labour), Boogie Woogie in Rome (now in the collections of MART in Rovereto) initially failed to find a buyer, quite unusually for Guttuso. It remained for a long time invisible to the public, first in Guttuso’s studio, then in private hands.12

A Panic Painting At the outset of this article, I called Boogie Woogie in Rome a ‘panic painting’, which I will now explain. It was painted, I believe, in the spring of 1953, soon after Stalin’s death.13 As such, it belongs in company with André Fougeron’s Civilization Atlantique, also painted in that moment of doctrinal disarray and shown at the 1953 Paris Salon d’Automne (plate 3). An even larger painting than Guttoso’s (4 m × 6 m), Fougeron’s composition reads as a kaleidoscopic, all-out attack against American and French imperialism. Fierce to the point of caricature, and much more strident than Guttuso’s in its political message, the painting is dominated by the ferocious American Buick and the Nazi soldier, a reference to the American rearmament of

3 André Fougeron, Germany with the Marshall Plan. On a pedestal at the centre we find the electric Civilisation Atlantique, 1953. Oil on canvas, 380 × 559 cm, chair in which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed, having been convicted London: Tate. Photo: Tate/ of betraying atomic secrets to the USSR. Reference to French colonial wars in Art Resource, NY. Indochina is made through posters of paratroopers and the returning coffins with mourners at the right, set against the Asian mother holding a dead child. The French colonization of West and North Africa is present via the Black shoeshine boy at the bottom on the centre-right and the immigrant Algerians sheltering under corrugated roofing on the bottom left. Upon seeing it at the Salon, even the writer Louis Aragon, who had parted ways with the surrealists after a first visit to Moscow to take part at a Stalinist writers’ conference in 1930 and had since adhered to the dictates coming from the USSR, was taken aback, declaring in his review: ‘Here we have to say STOP to André Fougeron. Such painting can only pay lip service to the widespread opinion about the crudeness of Communist thought.’14 Not surprisingly, given how polarized the Cold War abstraction-versus-realism debate had become by the mid-1950s, Guttuso’s painting drew negative reviews from the partisans of abstraction. Writing in the Milanese journal of philosophy and aesthetics Aut Aut, the influential critic Gillo Dorfles declared Boogie Woogie in Rome to be one of Guttuso’s least successful paintings. Dorfles considered Guttuso’s association of the abstract painting with the debauchery of an existentialist, decadent bourgeoisie a facile jab at Mondrian.15 In ‘At the Venice Biennale Many are Looking at That Boogie-Woogie’, a short piece written for the magazine Arts, the French critic Alain Jouffroy saw the painting first as a social indictment of the fashionable young intellectuals dancing in one of the many underground nightclubs of the Left Bank in Saint-Germain des Prés, and only second as an

indictment of pictorial abstraction. In one of the most common critiques lodged against socialist realism, Jouffroy added:

While the work has attracted much attention (both favorable and not), the commentaries it has produced are foreign to painting. The talk is about politics, morals, religion […] No doubt the main problem with this anecdotal type of propaganda painting is that it is being judged based on opinions external to aesthetics the way one would look at an electoral poster. The more engagé the painter, the more distant from the true requirements of art.16

It could be expected that orthodox modernist critics would object to the picture. But when it came to Boogie Woogie in Rome even the champions of socialist realism, usually unanimous, especially about Guttuso, were divided. The painting managed to provoke dissension in the Communist-affiliated press. As Mario de Micheli, one of the anointed critical voices of the PCI (the Italian Communist Party) and the curator of the realist room at the previous Venice Biennale, in his column for L’Unità, had to acknowledge:

Guttuso’s painting representing an Existentialist den [una taverna esistenzialista] deserves a separate discussion. It is a painting that opens up new possibilities for a realist thematics, a picture of social criticism of the Americanized ways of a certain poor youth of ours. It is a rather unusual canvas for Guttuso, and it left a lot of people perplexed.17

Writing a longer piece in Il Contemporaneo, Antonello Trombadori, the other major spokesman for art in line with the directives of the PCI, sounded similarly conflicted.18 The painting, he remarked, was different from the previous output of the artist,

not so much for the course of his investigations, always directed towards social themes, as for its attempt to express, this time around, in a polemical and indirect way, contradictory feelings midway between satire and pity. Let’s say à la Daumier.

For Trombadori, the result ended up ‘tipping over towards a caricatured, folkloric insistence on gestures and customs, verging on clichés’.

More than anything [he added, in one of the best descriptions of the painting] one is struck by the rhythm of the dance and its figurations, the swivelling of the arms and bodies, the dynamic of the steps, the rotation of the skirts, the shape of the clothes. And you sense in the pattern and the colours a kind of frenetic dissatisfaction, inasmuch as the intent was to dig deeper.

Trombadori found the overall composition of the painting ultimately unconvincing. The background stairs, the gridded window, and the light coming from a hidden source, configured an exceedingly artificial set for the dancing scene. There is not a word in this detailed page-long description of Guttuso’s painting about the provocative presence of the abstract painting within the picture. Only the defenders of abstraction commented on Guttuso’s cheap shot at Mondrian. Boogie Woogie in Rome had been shown once before in the exhibition Junge Italienische Kunst at the Kunsthaus in Zurich in November 1953. On that occasion, Guttuso gave an interview to the monthly Noi Donne [We Women], another Communist-affiliated – this

time proto-feminist – Roman magazine. Prompted by a journalist who appears under the initials G.C. (probably one of the paper’s frequent contributors, Cristina Gentile), Guttuso revealed his modus operandi. The passage is worth quoting at length:

G.C.: We knew that Renato Guttuso had been recently working on two very interesting topics: an existentialist dance hall and a popular ball: two large canvases with many figures. We only found the first one to have been realized, wrapped in brown paper; of the other one we found only a handful of drawings and studies. […] Those of us who know even very little about the unhealthy atmosphere of an existentialist pub will find it perfectly reproduced in this profound, critical, satirical, rather than cruel study that is this great painting by Guttuso. […And so we asked]: Tell us where you got the idea for this painting and whether you were inspired by reality?

Guttuso: I had intended to paint two dances, one ‘boogie-woogie’, which means a dance imported from America or from France and a popular ballroom. These are after all two paintings dedicated to youth, to make evident a very simple, very obvious, contrast, but one not devoid of reality and meaning. […] I painted the first one, the ‘boogie-woogie’ here in Rome, and I wanted to reproduce this existentialist fad as it arrived in Rome where it looks even more grotesque than elsewhere, where it became a kind of travesty, a bad copy of the Parisian one.

G.C.: So then you do frequent these ballrooms?

Guttuso: I happened to go there a few times and then I came back to take notes both in Rome and in Milan. Trust me, it’s quite a human spectacle. My studio became full of these strange personages who are mostly students, young people, some of whom are fascinated by the snobbery, some existentialists by profession, the kind you find sitting on the steps of Trinità dei Monti or the Spanish Steps. They willingly posed for me and many of the faces in the painting are portraits.

G.C.: We asked Guttuso to let us know before anybody else when his second large painting will be finished so that we can immediately photograph it and publish it in our paper.19

Guttuso curiously neglected to mention in this long interview the fact that he had already painted, in 1945, another Boogie Woogie, a mural-size painting (8 m × 8 m) for the showroom of the manufacturing firm Olivetti in Rome.20 Missing from that mural’s rather humdrum depiction of dancing figures, arranged in superimposed rows, is the polemical anti-mass-culture and anti-abstraction messages of the 1953 picture.

Medial Denials But Guttuso also neglected to mention a couple of other relevant points. He omits any allusion to the quasi-documentary techniques of neorealist cinema, which he is clearly emulating. He also fails to note that he had a contributed a coloured drawing for the cover of a promotional brochure for Riso amaro [Bitter Rice], an Oscar-nominated Italian neorealist film of 1949 in which music and dance play a predominant role. The drawing depicts one of the film’s mondine, the young impoverished women who came every year from all over Italy for two weeks of backbreaking labour on the rice fields along the banks

of the Po River. In one of the film’s most erotically charged scenes, a debuting Silvana Mangano entices her girlfriend’s boyfriend to join her in a bedevilled Boogie Woogie. Soon they are joined by their young peers under the eyes of an older generation of local peasants. As Maurizio Corbella has shown in detail in his essay ‘Which People’s Music? Witnessing the Popular in the Musicscape of Giuseppe de Santis’s Riso amaro (1949, Bitter Rice),’ Boogie Woogie in the film is a marker of moral decadence and corruption, societal anxieties that are usually associated with the bourgeoisie.21 And yet, as with Guttuso’s painting, the film was critiqued by the Left. As De Santis recalled years later:

Because of Riso amaro I entered into a heated polemic with the syndicalists in the very pages of L’Unità. Morever they claimed that there was no mondina on earth who could dance the Boogie Woogie. In their view, on our threshing floors, there could only be traditional dance. Well, for some people in the party [the PCI], Italian women were not supposed to get out of the old models, there were things they couldn’t grasp.22

These omissions on Guttuso’s part might not be so surprising in light of the fact that in his essay ‘Sulla via del realismo’ [On the path of realism], published in Alfabeto in February 1952, the artist had criticized the excessive use of the term ‘neorealism’ in Italy in recent years. He had good reason to abhor the expression, he wrote, as an equivocal and quaint journalistic formula whose fortunes came from its connection to the world of cinema. ‘It is enough’, Guttuso railed,

to identify in a tangle of cubist-like forms a theme related to labour to immediately classify a painting or sculpture as belonging to the neorealist camp. We, on the other hand, have aspired, admittedly with little success, to the more ambitious and more coherent denomination of ‘realists’.

The expression ‘neorealist’ in painting, Guttuso asserted, was ‘meaningless’.23 But what Guttuso characterized as an overused reference that everyone was tired of was anything but. It had a hearty life ahead of it. His carping amounts, rather, to sour grapes and a massive disavowal on his part of the phenomenal impact of neorealism, a cinematic genre that not only came dangerously close to his own pictorial realism but was the genre that put post-war Italy on the international map. Guttuso’s objection to the term ‘neorealism’ is also indicative of a turn within a wider debate around that word. As David Forgacs has argued, the term ‘neorealism’, promoted and defended as a Left-oriented anti-fascist cultural project in the years of post-war reconstruction, gradually lost traction as the 1950s wore on.24 Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome, painted at the very moment when Italy was about to enter its decade of economic boom, could be said to signal precisely that shift.25 As if by concerted decision to obey Guttuso’s wish, the term ‘neorealism’ was either elided or used derogatively when Boogie Woogie in Rome was shown a few months after the closing of the Venice Biennale, this time on its own, at the Galleria del Vantaggio in Rome in 1955. And this despite the fact that the inclusion of the many preparatory drawings and temperas inevitably led commentators to zero in on the documentary, quasi-ethnographic dimension of his work – as did Guttuso himself in his interview with Noi donne. One critic wrote:

On a singular subject, a theme and a problem of our time, the painter conducts his investigation. Better than any written chronicle and any fieldwork, his

pencil manages to evidence the dangerous conditions of our time which, destroying the poetry of illusion in youth, is undermining the foundations of social life.26

The drawings referring to the Boogie Woogie were made from life, between 1951 and 1952, in a variety of existentialist locales in Rome, especially in one of those upper crust ones now vanished following the dramatic fate of a female employee, but made perennial by the artist’s faithful documentation followed by artistic synthesis,

wrote Giuseppe Sciortino in the weekly La Fiera Letteraria.27 Only two writers printed the word ‘neorealism’ in their reviews. One was the influential art historian Cesare Brandi, who titled his piece ‘La matita neorealista’ [The neorealist pencil].28 Another was the figurative painter and critic Franco Miele who, writing for the Christian Democrat Roman daily La Giustizia, and titling his review ‘La lezione di Guttuso si chiama propaganda’, used the adjective ‘neorealist’, always between quotation marks and negatively:

Almost two years of work on, in our view, a failed attempt to ‘report’ on canvas the ambience and the typical personages of the world of the ‘baretti’ which sprung up in Rome in the aftermath of the war. […] The ‘neorealist’ obsession with wanting to exteriorize per force reality in all its crudeness has distanced the artist, once again, from a truly pictorial investigation. The ‘neorealist’ room at the Biennale was moreover the perfect demonstration of the decadence of a group that paints according to certain dictates, and yet claims to have major artists among its rank who pretend to be at the forefront of the avant-garde.29

But cinema could not simply be wished away. Guttuso’s preparatory work on Boogie Woogie in Rome happened to coincide exactly with the release of Amore in Città on Italian movie screens in the autumn of 1953. A collectively authored work by six of Italy’s most prominent young generation of filmmakers, this was a film that most of the above-mentioned critics must have seen or at least heard of in 1955. Made in the vein of Dziga Vertov’s Kino-Pravda series in the 1920s, although with a less politically militant agenda, the project was dubbed ‘a film enquiry’ by its instigator, Cesare Zavattini. The six shorts blurred to an unprecedented degree the line between documentary re-enactment, documentary interviews, and reportage.30 One of the film’s most memorable shorts, the fourth, is by Dino Risi, the grand master of Italian comedy, showing youth from the Roman periphery dancing the boogie woogie in a popular dance hall. Entitled Paradiso per tre ore [Heaven for Three Hours], the twelve-minute film is described in the trailer as a reportage about ‘I fanatici del ballo’ [‘dance fanatics’]: ‘Every day from 5 to 8’, the voiceover tells us, ‘people dance at the Astoria. Soldiers and servants dance the tango, the mambo, boogie, and foxtrot. Three happy hours, three hours in paradise in the periphery frequented on Sundays by young people on leave.’ I suspect that it is Risi’s sequence that may have led Guttuso to drop the idea of an eventual pendant to his decadent ‘ballo esistenzialista’ depicting a ‘ballo popolare’. A confirmation that he had to have seen the film comes from the essay ‘Realism or Verism’, published in March 1954 in Cinema Nuovo by Gabriele Mucchi. Guttuso’s comrade-in-arms, Mucchi resorted to the already superannuated argument that realism in painting was always ‘transmuted’ by the artist into something beyond mere

reproduction, as opposed to the artless, overly ‘veristic’ take of the movie camera in Amore in Città.31 The parallels between Guttuso’s painting and Risi’s film are nothing if not striking, the most important being the destabilizing force of plaid when set in motion by the body. Five minutes into the dance, the sinuous lines of the plaid dress worn by the statuesque bombshell who walks across the floor, all eyes bolted on her, end up prompting a brawl among the male contenders in the room (plate 4). Missing of course from the painting is sound. Risi had been able to superimpose the heavy Roman and Southern Italian dialects on the swinging rhythm of the music. Conversely, Guttuso adds colour, absent from neorealist cinema, and so an element of vibrant dissonance. The painter and the filmmaker have, ultimately, different agendas. While Guttuso’s painting is an embittered social critique, and an attack against abstraction from within the medium of painting, Risi’s film, for all of its devastating humour, and its close-ups on the fleshy physiognomies of the young dancers verging on the grotesque, is an endearing, bittersweet depiction of Italy’s working-class youth. What they do share, however, is a jaundiced view of mass culture, one that – even though Guttuso takes a detour through Paris – is invariably coded as American. One of the many twists surrounding the production of Boogie Woogie in Rome and its reception, in the summer of 1954, is the fact that just as Guttuso was castigating a decadent Left-Bank parisianisme for an international public in Venice, the Polish government was sending Mazowsze, a collective of folk dancers and musicians, to perform in the French capital, to great acclaim. In René Jouglet’s booklet Mazowsze: Chants et danses du folklore polonais, published on the occasion of their Paris tour, and in the documentary by the Polish filmmaker Tadeusz Makarczynksi (released in 1951 but distributed internationally in 1954 as They Sing, They Dance), the troupe is presented as a source of post-war authenticity stemming, in Jouglet’s words, ‘from the heart of the nation’.32 Most bizarre, in view of the fact that Mazowsze was also an instrument of Stalinist propaganda – performing, when it toured satellite countries, in front of backdrops featuring portraits of the Soviet leader – is the similarity between the mix of acidic and saccharine colours of the outfits of the Polish dancers and those in Guttuso’s painting. As we see them in the colour photographs reproduced in Jouglet’s book, the world of difference betweenBoogie Woogie in Rome and Mazowsze resides in the pattern (plate 5). Just as in Risi’s Paradiso per tre ore, in which the adherent checked dress worn by the bombshell entering the dance hall is contrasted, in a touch of comic cruelty, with the flower motif of the ill-fitting dress worn by the homely young woman chaperoned by her mother, so too do the embroidered flowers on the bodices and the pleated stripes of the Polish dancers’ skirts stand for morality versus the urban decadence symbolized by the geometric plaid and check motifs.

A Themed Biennale The year 1954 signalled a low point for socialist realism at the Biennale in Venice. This eclipse was evident despite the return in force of the Soviet

satellites – Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and one of which, Romania, had been absent from Venice ever since 1942, and despite a large retrospective of the paintings of Gustave Courbet – the artist Guttuso liked to call ‘il padre di tutto’ [‘the father of all’] – just two rooms away from his Boogie Woogie in the Central pavilion.33 At a moment of distancing on the part of the Italian Christian Democrats (Centre-Right) from the PCI, in response to the diminished power of the centre and the success of the united front of the Left in the 1953 parliamentary election, Rodolfo Pallucchini, the director of the Biennale, made sure to ward off any automatic association of realism with Communism.34 As Pallucchini clarified in his introduction to the Biennale catalogue, while in the current political climate a Courbet exhibition could easily be read as a political gesture, his aim was rather to present Courbet as a great nineteenth-century artist tout court.35 The previous two Biennales of 1950 and 1952 had been favourable to both realism and socialist realism. There had been a significant backlash against the victory of abstraction at the 1948 Biennale. Under the aegis of the two post-war priestesses of pictorial and sculptural abstraction – the American expat collector Peggy Guggenheim, and Palma Bucarelli, the new director of Rome’s Galleria Nazionale d’Arte – the first post-war Venice Biennale and the first post-war Rome Quadriennale, were respectively both dominated by the democratizing agenda of abstract art.36 At the Biennale, whose showpiece had been the rooms dedicated to Guggenheim’s collection, it was Mondrian’s Composition of 1939 that was targeted in the press: ‘Perchè la pittura oggi è diventata incomprensibile?’ [‘Why has today’s painting become incomprehensible?’], exclaimed the reviewer for the Milanese Domenica del Corriere; ‘Chiediamo scusa ma 37 4 Dino Risi, Paradiso per tre non ambiamo riso’ [‘Sorry, but we didn’t laugh’], quipped the reviewer of Rinascita. ore, stills from Amore in Città, Guttuso, however, had almost nothing to say about Mondrian’s grid picture in his own 1954. review for the magazine, published a month earlier.38 5 René Jouglet, Mazowsze: In 1950 it was the Mexican pavilion that had attracted the critics’ attention, Chants et danses du folklore polonais, 1954, n.p. featuring realist works by the ‘Tres Grandes’ of Mexican muralism: Diego Rivera, José

Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. With works like Siqueiros’s Peasant Mother, The Sob, and Cain in the United States (The Massacre of a Black Person), politically engaged realism gained centre stage. As Rivera boasted back home in El Nacional: ‘It is an important victory over art purism in a place that had been until now the shrine of this tendency.’39 Emboldened by their success, Guttuso’s contribution to 1952 Biennale had been the huge Battle of Ponte Ammiraglio, depicting scores of red-shirted Garibaldini disembarking in Palermo in 1860 to spearhead the Italian Risorgimento. Shown in the realist room curated by Trombadori, Guttuso’s magnum opus – a true ‘Salon machine’ – was, if only for its size, the painting most talked about in the Central pavilion.40 In 1954 for the first and also last time, after years of complaint about a general lack of direction, Pallucchini conceived the Venice Biennale around a theme: surrealism or what critics called ‘Fantastic Surrealism’, with three retrospectives in consecutive rooms (numbers 45, 46, and 47) in the Central pavilion: one of Joan Mirò, one of Max Ernst (who won the Painting Prize that year), and one of Hans Arp. In response to Pallucchini’s call for national pavilions to adhere to the main theme (one that many ignored), Belgium mounted an historical exhibition of fantastic art from Hieronymus Bosch to René Magritte. The focus in the Central pavilion on three artists identified with biomorphic abstraction rankled the Italian critics on the Left. As the critic in Il Contemporaneo wrote:

One of the burning arguments is the surrealist exhibition. Many of us in Italy were alarmed by this curious initiative of the Biennale. One cannot understand why, just now, one may have wanted to give the Venetian exhibition the tone of evasion, dream, or rather nightmare. Pallucchini says it is contemporary but it is not.41

‘La mostra del mostruoso’ [the show of the monstruous], another review called it.42 For the art historian and critic Douglas Cooper, one of Guttuso’s main British admirers, writing in the Burlington Magazine, the outstanding contribution to that year’s Biennale was the Courbet retrospective:

Why Courbet, one asks, in this strange company? But then one remembers that Italy is one of the centres of modern realist painting and that the other two heroes of the movement, Goya and Picasso, have already been shown in Venice.

And yet, he went on to note:

Realism as a theme was largely suppressed in this year’s Biennale, except for Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome in the Italian pavilion. Given the presence of large contributions from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, some efforts should have been made to build up an impressive contrast between Realism and Surrealism. Here was an easy means of making the Biennale livelier still.

To which he added: ‘The Italian pavilion was the most desultory experience, because it contained the greatest number of “silly abstractionists”.’43

A Meeting of Opposites Of great interest here is one of the three plates that accompany Cooper’s review. Most likely its layout was an editorial decision taken by Burlington Magazine independently

6 Douglas Cooper, of Cooper. But note that the spread on page 319 shows Guttuso’s painting next to ‘Reflections on the Venice Biennale’, The Burlington paintings by Mirò, Ernst, and Edward Munch, who had also had a retrospective that Magazine, volume 96, number year in the Norwegian pavilion (plate 6). The juxtaposition of these four works in 619, October 1954, page 319. that illustration, all shown at the Biennale, allows us to read Boogie Woogie in Rome as a combination of the other three paintings, placing it at the intersection of the different strands of that Biennale. The listless woman sitting at the café table at the bottom right of Guttuso’s dance hall is a descendant of Munch’s zombie-like figures on a desolate beach in Evening at Asgardstrand of 1902, pointing to the artists’ shared cultural pessimism. Guttuso’s manic dancers are descendants of the monstrous figures in Ernst’s 1927 oil painting using his ‘grattage’ technique, The Horde (then in a private collection in Brussels and now at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam), which was included in the Ernst retrospective. And finally, the overall composition of Guttuso’s painting shows eerie similarity to that of the swarming biomorphic creatures in Miro’s 1940 tempera on paper, Awakening at Dawn. Most disturbing but also most significant, and surely unbeknownst to the Burlington Magazine editor, is the similarity between the illustrations’ implicit line of argument and the one developed by the Viennese art historian Hans Sedlmayr in his Strukturanalyse. The text in question is the most virulently anti-modernist text of the post-war years, Verlust der Mitte: die bildende Kunst des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts als Symptom und Symbol der Zeit, published in 1948 in Salzburg (it reached its sixth German

7 Pieter Bruegel the Elder, language edition in the span of five years) and translated into English asArt in Crisis: The Wedding Dance, c. 1566. Oil on panel, 119.4 × 157.5 cm. the Lost Center by H. Regnery Co., a Chicago press in 1958. In 1955, the sections of Detroit: Detroit Institute of Verlust der Mitte concerning modern art came out separately as a booklet entitled Die Arts. Photo: Detroit Institute of Arts. Revolution der modernen Kunst [The Revolution of Modern Art]. Its first edition, printed with a Miró painting of the 1940s on its cover, pulled a trick on the buyer, who would purchase the book unaware that the choice to reproduce that painting was in fact – just like Guttuso’s reproduction of Mondrian’s painting – defamatory. Like Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, Sedlmayr’s Strukturanalyse was predicated on good or bad Gestalt. The core thesis of Verlust der Mitte was already present in Sedlmayr’s 1934 essay ‘Bruegel’s Macchia’.44 In that essay, Seldmayr describes Bruegel’s Children’s Games (1560) and The Peasant Wedding (1587), both in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, as figures disintegrating into blobs, disconnected, unordered, until the composition of the entire picture falls apart. In a devilish switch, the inanimate becomes animated and vice versa (plate 7).45 Seldmayr’s final comparison is with the oneiric deformations and spatial alienation of the surrealists. While Bruegel for Sedlmayr remains a moralizing artist and his art both symptomatic and diagnostic of an upper-class anxiety about social order and loss of traditional values, the surrealists are the nadir. In ‘Bruegel’s Macchia’, we witness a formalist tour de force gradually morphing into a rhetoric of disapproval that anticipates that of the infamous 1937 Nazi exhibition Entartete Kunst. Some passages of Guttuso’s lengthy review on the 1954 Biennale, entitled ‘The 27th Biennale: La fiera dello

snobismo’ (which best translates as ‘Vanity Fair’) in the journal Rinascita, read as if culled directly from Sedlmayr’s prose:

Looking in sequence at Courbet, Miró, Arp, Ernst, in a single day is not only like passing through a million light years, but through different planetary systems. […] Miró encapsulates the two most typical aspects of degeneration in modern art: abstraction and surrealism, the destruction of any human vestige and the flight towards abstract mysticism, contempt for man and a recourse to dreams. […] To recapitulate, from Bosch’s infernos which terrorized the citizens of Flanders, to the ‘modern redemption of the freedom of the unconscious’, to the ‘unexpected sentiment of the sacred’ in Miró, to the escapist arcadia of Arp […], the formula seems to me perfectly clear: abstraction, distraction, escapism, destruction.46

A few paragraphs later, after having described the work of the Italian informel painters such as Giulio Turcato and Pietro Consagra a few rooms away from his own, came the death blow:

When will it be understood that genocide in art is the equivalent of genocide tout court? When will it be understood that the fact that modern art has reached such a degree of self-destruction is not something our young generations are condemned to? […] We need to analyse in depth the phenomenon of non-figurative art, identify its ideological roots, intensify our critical action, mobilizing in this struggle our best forces.47

The parallel with Sedlmayr was confirmed by Guttuso himself in 1965, in a crucial footnote in his essay on ‘Pittura Informale’, the Italian version of 1950s gestural abstraction. By then Sedlmayr’s book had been translated into Italian, also in a pocket- size edition, by Garzanti in 1958. Guttuso wrote:

I remember that it was Cesare Brandi who suggested I read the little book by Sedlmayr, Die Revolution der modernen Kunst, which I hastened to read in Italian translation. I shared, almost totally, his arguments, and so did Brandi, although I rejected the religious and metaphysical tenor of his conclusions, as well as his views about a non-overcoming of abstraction and his call for a reactionary overhaul.

For indeed, Guttuso adds, in parenthesis: ‘Sedlmayr had supported Nazi theories of art.’48 Brandi’s pamphlet La fine dell’avanguardia written in 1949 was a kindred polemic against post-war pictorial abstraction as a phony avant-garde, as well as against psychoanalysis, surrealist automatism, twelve-tone music, American jazz and mass culture, musical reproducibility, and cinema’s incapacity to break free from a ‘nagging demand for a flagrant reality’ on the part of a faithless society, all wrapped into one.49 Even closer to Guttuso’s words – and the artist might have culled the title of his review of the 1954 Biennale from it – was Brandi’s rant against the ‘sins’ of abstraction: a ‘lapse into an arbitrary and incontrollable decorativism, a mere “exercise in ‘snobbismi estetizzanti’” [aestheticizing snobbery]’.50 Brandi’s argument also sounds much like Theodor Adorno’s famous repudiation of mass culture. Here we find yet another instance of the two political extremes finding common cause during the Cold War. It may be worth recounting how Adorno and

Sedlmayr had found themselves strange bedfellows at the Darmstädter Gespräch, a major conference of artists, art historians, philosophers, and sociologists in West Germany in 1950. Sedlmayr was invited to speak on the first night, along with the Bauhaus artist and teacher Johannes Itten. In his address the following day, Adorno declared that as much as he objected to Sedlmayr’s cultural pessimism (not to mention his hatred of abstraction), he shared his views on the crucial role of disharmony and un-reconciliation in the artwork as opposed to the modernists’ investment in the reconciliatory function of art.51 The hidden homology between Guttuso’s paintings and some of the aspects of modernism that he himself condemned – a homology revealed by the illustration in the Burlington Magazine and, by proxy, by Sedlmayr – explains the popularity of Boogie Woogie in Rome beyond the Iron Curtain. As Katarzyna Muthesius has aptly shown, Guttuso had an eventful career in Eastern Europe, with a particular following in Poland.52 Coinciding with his 1954 retrospective in Warsaw, his review of the Biennale appeared in Polish in one of the country’s main art journals, Przeglad Artystyczny, accompanied by a mirroring text by the influential art historian Julius Staznsky, the curator of the Polish pavilion that year in Venice.53 The article was illustrated throughout with reproductions of paintings by Ernst, Mirò, Paul Delvaux, and Magritte, as well as the abstractionists from Ben Nicholson to Italians such as Giuseppe Capogrossi, Emilio Vedova, and Turcato, along with Boogie Woogie in Rome. While Muthesius recognizes that ‘it is hardly possible to assess today whether the wit of Guttuso’s visual argument was grasped by the readers of Przeglad Artystyczny’, she maintains that ‘its power seems to have been undermined by reproductions of the very paintings he mocked in his review’.54 Indeed, she reasons that

by the summer of 1954 orthodox socialist realism was already losing its hegemony in Poland and the reproductions of those castigated works of art were offering a chance to spy on the forbidden and much more tempting fruit of Western Modernism.55

But in view of the quantum of resistance against the socialist realist doctrine on the part of Russia’s largest satellite, compared namely to the allegiance of East Germany, it is Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome, reproduced prominently above the title of his review, that was, I propose, the truly forbidden fruit for the Poles.56

An Afterimage: Schlemmer’s Bauhauslers Let us now turn to the geopolitical resonance of Guttuso’s unique envoi to the Central pavilion at the 1954 Venice Biennale by visiting some of its surrounding national pavilions. Guttuso’s painting hung just a few steps from the American pavilion in the very year that it had been entrusted for the first time to MoMA, the proud owner of Mondrian’s painting. In a curious mirror effect, a similar jousting between realism and abstraction – one inflected by a good dose of surrealism – unfolded in the American pavilion itself, with Alfred H. Barr’s odd curatorial pairing of the social realist Ben Shahn with Willem De Kooning.57 Also exhibited at the Biennale, beyond the fictional presence of the Mondrian painting in Boogie Woogie in Rome, was another MoMA masterwork, inscribed – we now realize with time – almost like an afterimage generated by Guttuso’s painting. This was Oscar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus Stairway, included in the artist’s retrospective in the West German pavilion curated that year by the art historian Franz Roh (plate 8). Like Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, Schlemmer’s large painting ranks as one of the MoMA trophies of anti-fascism and Cold War history.58

8 Oscar Schlemmer, Bauhaus Staircase, 1932. Oil on canvas, 162.3 × 114.3 cm. New York: Museum of Modern Art. Photo: MoMA/Scala/Art Resource, NY.

Painted in 1932, three years after he had left the Bauhaus, Schlemmer’s famous vision of youth in colourful sweaters ascending towards a modernist utopia was countered by the Dantesque descent of Guttuso’s dancers into the Hades of the underground café. Although Guttuso’s painting is larger, Schlemmer’s painting (162.3 × 114.3 cm) is unusually large for the artist, and both share an imposing mode of address. Visiting Germany in spring 1933 and discovering that a Schlemmer exhibition had closed after a brutal and intimidating review in a Nazi newspaper, Barr cabled Philip Johnson, already a frequent donor to the Museum of Modern Art, to ask him to acquire Bauhaus Stairway as an eventual gift. It is a nice story if a little tainted in retrospect, in view of Johnson’s favourable views towards National Socialism. The painting, which first hung

9 The women from the Bauhaus weaving workshop on the staircase of the Bauhaus Building, Dessau, 1927. Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv. Photo: T. Lux Feininger.

in Johnson’s living room, appeared in Barr’s 1938 MoMA exhibition on the Bauhaus between 1919 and 1928, where it functioned as a wistful flashback to the more carefree years of the school during the first decade of the Weimar Republic.59 The sweaters worn by Schlemmer’s sexless Bauhauslers are solid red, blue, yellow, plus white and black; it is the same restriction as that dictated by Mondrian, who had eliminated the eventuality of ‘bad’ Gestalt from his painting by confining himself to the primaries and to the orthogonal strictures of the grid, while banishing sensuous bodily presence from his work altogether.60 In his fantasy of a perfectly organized laboratory school, Schlemmer eliminated the playful – meaning gendered and disruptive – pattern created by the colourfully striped woollen sweaters worn by the female students of the textile workshop photographed at that time, and on the same staircase by Lux Feininger – the very motif that Guttuso chose to emphasize, negatively, in the women’s outfits in his painting (plate 9).61

In Moscow’s Orbit: An Absent East Germany More intangible and all the more poignant and intriguing because it now involves, but also fills, a true absence, is a connection between Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome and West Germany’s Cold War counterpart, the GDR (German Democratic Republic), the only Soviet satellite never to earn its own pavilion in Venice.62 Here my analysis is admittedly more speculative. It was an East German publishing house, Dresden’s Verlag der Kunst, which published the second monograph on Guttuso, written by another of his British champions, the critic John Berger in 1957. In that book, Boogie Woogie in Rome appears in black and white on page twelve.63 As Jérôme Bazin has shown, East Germany was the satellite country where, in contrast to Poland and Hungary, the Soviet ideological discourse was most omnipresent, repressing all critical thinking.64 It was reported, for instance, that when, within months of Stalin’s death, strikes broke out in several East German cities in demand for better pay, and attacks were made on Party headquarters and Russian-language bookshops, Walter Ulbricht (First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party) and his puppet government holed themselves up in the safe space of the offices of the Soviet ambassador. Meanwhile, it was soldiers in Russian tanks, not the East German police, who fired at the demonstrators. Aiming to understand international socialist realisms from an East German perspective, Bazin has argued that:

Italian and French socialist realism probably seduced the East Germans because it constructed a contemporaneity, a relation to the present and the real that eluded Stalinist Realism. It showed the harshness of class struggle, as opposed to the forced optimism of the Soviet model. It also pleased Eastern official political apparatuses. Italian and French artists display their political loyalty and create an explicitly communist art, as opposed to Picasso, who while certainly a constant referent for all these artists does not sufficiently express a party-line position in the eyes of many communists.65

All the components that help us understand the Guttuso are absent in GDR painting, but not in East German cinema. It is in film and not in painting that the East Germans encountered American mass culture, and hence youth culture. Notwithstanding the artist’s negative views of the medium, it is again cinema, not painting, that structures my account of the geopolitical resonance of Boogie Woogie in Rome. In A Berlin Romance and Berlin – Ecke Schoenhauser [Berlin, Schoenhauser Corner], two East German neorealist romantic dramas of 1956 and 1957 by the filmmaker Gerhard Klein and the screenwriter Wolfgang Kohlhaase, teenagers cross into the American sector at night to dance the boogie woogie. Produced by DEFA film studios in East Berlin, they came to be known as ‘German rebel films’. True to Western (meaning mostly Italian and French) cinematic neorealism, both films were made in black and white. The protagonists, significantly, are wearing plaid. In a sequence of Berlin, Schoenhauser Corner, selected as with Amore in Città to be the film’s trailer, the hero Dieter, as he is getting ready to go out for a night on the town in the plaid shirt he wears throughout the film, confronts his politically committed room-mate:

I can’t tell you anything […]. When I stand on the street corner they call me a hooligan, when I dance the boogie woogie, I am American, when I wear my shirt tucked in, I am politically suspect. I try to explain my point of view and you don’t listen.

To which his comrade retorts: ‘You must be living on the moon. We are creating socialism’ (plate 10). Although the films duly denounced the consumerist obsession and escapism of Communist youth influenced by American culture after the war, they were nevertheless strongly criticized by East German officials, as they would have been by Guttuso.66 Jost Hermand’s essay ‘Resisting Boogie-Woogie Culture, Abstract Expressionism, and Pop Art: German Highbrow Objections to the Import of “American” Forms of Culture, 1945–1965’ makes clear that the ambivalence towards America was not confined to the Eastern part of Germany.67 But in the GDR the sole fact that the filmmakers acknowledged its youth’s wish to emulate the West sufficed to make them complicit, in the eyes of the critics, with a Western intention to destabilize East German society through the release of such films in the American sector of Berlin. This is what the East German musicologist Ernst Hermann Meyer had to say about the boogie woogie in a 1952 book on contemporary music:

Today’s Boogie-Woogie is a channel through which the barbarizing poison of Americanism invades, threatening to anaesthetize the brains of the working class. This threat is as dangerous as an attack with poison gas. By conquering the musical markets of countless countries, it helps to undermine their cultural independence with ‘Boogie-Woogie cosmopolitanism’; it propagates the degenerate ideology of American monopoly capitalism with its philistinism, its gangster and psychopath movies, its empty sensationalism, and especially its mania of war and destruction.68

In this quote, which chimes again with Adorno’s repudiations of jazz and other jazz-derived forms of popular music, we find a virulence that is close to Sedlmayr’s.69

Reversed Scenarios: A Soviet Fiasco and the Triumph of Mondrian Besides being at the crux of what was seen and, in the case of East Germany, left unseen, at the 1954 in Venice, Guttuso’s lengthy account of the Biennale that year, and his choice of Boogie Woogie in Rome as his only contribution, each prefigured a major scenario in the exhibition’s next, 1956, iteration. First was the reopening of the Soviet pavilion, which had stood empty in the middle of the Giardini since 1934 (the year that socialist realism was officially adopted), an absence made all the more glaring by the presence, for the first time, of all the Soviet satellites (except the GDR) at the Biennale in 1954.70 As Guttuso wrote in his review:

The absence of the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China is a major shortcoming in the exhibition, not only because we are talking about two large and culturally autonomous nations, but also because the social structure and cultural framework of these two nations is a new ideology. To examine the art of these countries would provide a central point

10 Stills from Gerhard Klein, for critical discussion about the positives and negatives of art, drawing its Berlin – Ecke Schoenhauser, 1957. direct inspiration from modern socialist reality and contrast it with the widely represented art of the Western world. We would be glad if such a comparison were to happen at a future Biennale, allowing us to see the display of Soviet art in its entirety, from the beginning until today, attesting to the cultural battles fought by these artists, to their mistakes and their triumphs.71

In 1956 the Soviet pavilion reopened with an ambitious retrospective of about 160 works from three generations of Soviet artists. The reopening of the Soviet pavilion occurred at a delicate historical juncture. Just a few months earlier, Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ of 25 February had denounced Stalin and his crimes in a closed-door session of the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, beginning, de facto, the process of de-Stalinization. The ensuing ‘thaw’ brought about a loosening of the strict formulas of socialist realism and an increased circulation of Soviet and Eastern European art in the West, as exemplified by the 1956 Biennale. As German Nedoshivin, the pavilion’s curator, stated in his introduction: ‘We are inclined to consider our art as an initial stage on a long road turned towards the future. Now, in many countries, art passionately seeks to return to realism. Soviet art also follows this road.’72 In fact, it was the Soviets, the curator seemed to imply, that had now become fellow travellers! Yet arguably they had arrived in Venice too late, at the end of the political system that had sustained socialist realism, and against a growing network of realist works in which artists such as Guttuso, Fougeron, or Siqueiros had become central nodes, overshadowing their absent Soviet comrades. The Soviet pavilion included many iconic works, such as Semyon Chuikov’s Daughter of Soviet Kirgizia (1948) on the left wall (plate 11). An emblem of socialist realism’s inner expansion into the various Soviet republics, as well as the imperative for ‘national character’ in art, this depiction of a Central Asian girl on her way to school was a symbol of both the global aspirations of the Soviet system and its purported respect for cultural difference, fittingly exhibited in the most international of art exhibitions. Envisioned as a method adaptable to all cultures, Soviet realism was thus presented as ‘already global’.73 What Guttuso did not predict, however, is how, in a Biennale that was already becoming increasingly contemporary in its selection of artists, after the years of ‘aggiornamento’ (the Italian word for ‘catching up’) that followed Fascism, reviewers – regardless of their political standpoint – focused instead on how desperately retrograde the Soviet pavilion looked. The reviews were merciless: ‘Russia, which has reopened a pavilion closed for a long time, has limited itself to repainting the walls and to restoring some anachronistic contrivances’, wrote the architectural historian Bruno Zevi in his column for L’Espresso.74 ‘Thirty years behind’, claimed the reviewer of Il Messaggero di Roma; ‘Pictorial questions harking back to forty years ago’, even the reviewer for the Communist Rinascita had to admit. The headline above an article by Jean-Paul Crespelle in the Parisian France-Soir read, ‘At the Venice Biennale, where the Soviets brought back the Belle Epoque’, with its author adding: ‘one might just as well be standing in their pavilion at the Salon of 1880’.75

A Tsarist relic strongly reminiscent in appearance of a stage set for a provincial presentation of Boris Godunov. Whatever changes may or may not have taken place in Russia recently, they do not seem to have trickled down to those more lowly regions where art administrators have their being,

quipped even less generously the American reviewer for The New Republic.76

The Russian pavilion leaves one with a cosy feeling of Victorian timelessness. Filled with the works of three generations of cautious academic painters and sculptors, it makes one realize what an avant-garde institution the Royal Academy of Arts in London actually is. According to plan, the satellite countries avoided all social realism, leaving the red banners and partisan pictures to their communist Italian colleagues under the leadership of Renato Guttuso,

wrote J. P. Hodin, the reviewer for another American journal, Arts Digest.77 And meanwhile, the headline of another caustic review in Milan’s Corriere della Sera written by a critic named Vero Roberti read: ‘Our communist painters are waiting in vain for a password from Moscow.’78 Both Hodin and Roberti had evidently failed to notice that the painting Guttuso had chosen to send to the Biennale that year, the mammoth La Spiaggia [‘The beach’], a depiction of bathers spread out on a crowded Mediterranean beach, was one that could hardly pass as a socialist realist painting. The only reviewer to note the changing of the guard in the Soviet pavilion was the one writing for the centrist Roman daily Momento-Sera. Titling his piece ‘The Krushchev report weighs on the Russian pavilion at the Venice Biennale’, he remarked that, though a marble bust of Lenin filled the middle of the pavilion’s central room, Stalin’s presence had been demoted to the fictive one of a painted bust in Sergei Grigoriev’s anecdotal painting Discussion of a Low Mark (1950) (now in the Tretyakov Gallery).79 The second scenario at the 1956 Biennale that Guttuso seemed to anticipate with his Boogie Woogie in Rome was a Mondrian retrospective, the first in Italy, in the Central pavilion just across from the Russian building. Curated by the director of the Stedelijk Museum, William Sandberg, the show of twenty-five works occupied the last room (number 66) of the Central pavilion. As with the Soviet pavilion that year, Guttuso’s expectations would be disappointed. Even Paolo Ricci, the critic of the Communist Rinascita, who had lamented the anachronism of the Soviet pavilion, had

11 Soviet Pavilion, Venice Biennale, 1956. Photo: ASAC, Venice.

12 Mondrian retrospective, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, 1956, designed by Carlo Scarpa. Photo: Architettura, no. 17, March 1957, page 89.

to concede: ‘The avant-garde sensation in this year’s Biennale is the Piet Mondrian retrospective.’80 Although Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie was not included in that retrospective in Venice, it was the dramatic endpoint of Sandberg’s introductory account of Mondrian’s life-long peregrinations from Amsterdam to Paris (a city in which, as the Dutch curator noted with evident bitterness, after twenty years of perseverance, nothing of his production was left), to London and, finally, fleeing the Blitz, to New York. It was in that city, where so many other European wartime exiles felt displaced, that Mondrian, Sandberg concluded, found in the jazz rhythms of its clubs the hub that he had long been seeking.81 Broadway Boogie Woogie was, even more memorably, the dramatic endpoint of Carlo Scarpa’s installation of the large Mondrian retrospective from November 1956 to February 1957 at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome. In the last room of the exhibition, it was presented by Scarpa on a solitary easel similar to the one where Mondrian perched Victory Boogie Woogie in his New York studio in 1944 at the time of his death (plate 12).82 Mondrian’s Roman retrospective was unanimously saluted by Lionello Venturi, Eugenio Battisti, Giulio Carlo Argan, and Marisa Volpi, along with all of Italy’s leading modernists. Guttuso had his say as well, this time in the Communist daily L’Unità.83 After commending Scarpa for his tasteful installation and the exhibition’s curator, Palma Bucarelli, for giving one the opportunity to comprehend the overall career of the artist, Guttuso veered into one of his seething diatribes against abstraction. ‘The era of the avant-garde is over’, he asserted. It was the ‘insane’ present-day Zeitgeist ‘that continued to promote its function beyond its

moral and historical justification, imposing its survival with the backing of a bogus and mercantile art criticism. Therefore’, Guttuso went on, ‘stylistically the formal problematic of Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie-Woogie is, in essence, a foxtrot. The “demon of the Modern” is nothing but a surface complication of a principle already established twenty years back, once and for all.’84 The foxtrot, another American ballroom dance, already mentioned in the voiceover to Risi’s sequence, is based on a three-step move that brings one back to one’s starting position. This was Guttuso’s metaphorical, and for once inspired, way of describing Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie as a repetitious game mired in its own stasis.

Boogie Woogie in Rome Goes to Moscow In the summer of 1961, Boogie Woogie in Rome finally made its way to the Eastern bloc in a retrospective of Guttuso’s work.85 Bypassing the usual stations for many exhibitions of realist art from the West in the capitals of the Soviet satellites, most of which stopped short of going all the way to the USSR, it went straight to the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, then to the Hermitage in Leningrad, and finally all the way to Novosibirsk. Guttuso’s retrospective, comprising 150 works, was the artist’s first major museum retrospective outside of Italy and, as we learn from Andrea Barbato’s review in L’Espresso, it was visited by more than 100,000 people over two months.86 The title of that Espresso review – ‘Guttuso shows us our mistakes: from every part of Russia painters have come to Moscow to discuss his paintings’ – also indicates that his works were received as a not-so-disguised polemic against what the artist himself described to Italian journalists as the stultified condition of current official Soviet art. ‘How would Guttuso have painted had he lived in a socialist country?’ one viewer had written in the museum’s visitors’ book. Photographed above the article’s title, sitting cross-legged on the floor of a studio, Guttuso is portrayed in that review as tirelessly discussing and answering questions from an eager group of painters at an art academy in Moscow late into the night. According to Barbato’s rendition of events:

13 27th Venice Biennale, 1954. Photo: ASAC, Venice.

I saw an exhibition of abstract painters and some paintings pleased me. ‘Who is right, us or them?’ asked a painter named Michail. ‘I also like many of them’, answers Guttuso. Some British and French artists make truly beautiful abstract paintings. I am not saying that non-realist paintings are not beautiful, I say that I am against these paintings. ‘Everyone laughs clapping’, the journalist reports. ‘What about your violent, discordant, use of colour?’ asked another named Andrej. ‘I try to be dramatic’, says Guttuso, ‘to tell things in the most convincing way.’

And the last question quoted in the article from a certain Ivan:

‘The most striking painting I saw in the Pushkin Museum is Boogie-Woogie. Did you just want to represent a certain society or did you want instead to critique it in this painting?’ ‘I will give you a psychological answer’, says Guttuso: ‘it’s a critical painting but not of total condemnation. These Roman kids dancing the boogie woogie are not wicked. Coming out of the war, Italian youth felt they needed to have fun in an alien way following American fashion. Theirs is a tragedy but not one without redemption.’

Confirming that the melancholy young woman surrounded by the frantic dancers was indeed his alter ego, Guttuso added: ‘I have depicted, however, the drama as such, without a programmatic aim. It is the figure in the foreground to which I have entrusted this task.’87 Evidently, five years into the thaw, unlike its Soviet counterparts, which never quite depicted the capitalist Other, Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome had not lost any of its provocative charge. Another article titled ‘Passionate opinions on the part of visitors: interest, amazement and discussions around Guttuso’s show in Moscow’, published in the Roman Paese-Sera, reported:

There are a few youngsters in tight trousers and long sideburns or trimmed beards, probably some fanatic ‘Westernizers’. They remain disconcerted in front of Boogie Woogie in Rome: such a negative blow coming from the ‘West’ – they didn’t expect that!88

Here again one may draw a comparison with cinema. As Masha Salaskina has shown in her study of the Soviet–Italian cinematic exchanges, between the 1920s and the 1950s, Italian neorealist films were, after the war, the most watched by young Soviet filmmakers. As she claims, although they were perceived at the time of their release as extensions of, and reaction to, post-war Italian cinema, several of the most iconic Soviet films of what came to be known as the ‘Cinema of the Thaw’ – intent on overcoming the familiar disconnection between state art propaganda and the people – addressed the reality of their viewers in an age of rising affluence. Because of a temporal delay with the moment of Italian neo-realism, these films made in the late 1950s coincided in fact with a declining interest on the part of young Russians filmmakers and viewers in the pauperism of the first wave of Italian neorealism.89 In July 1961, Hollywood celebrities such as Elizabeth Taylor, visiting the Soviet capital on the occasion of the Third Moscow International Film Festival, posed for photographs in Red Square as elderly women in floral dresses and kerchiefs while younger men wearing plaid shirts halted to stare.90 In 1961, Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome resonates with such a scene.

14 ‘Guttuso a Mosca’, in ABC, 18 July 1961, page 38. Photo: ASAC, Venice.

Let us end with two photographs. In both the young dancers in Boogie Woogie in Rome are being observed by their peers. The first, from the Biennale’s archives, was shot in the Central pavilion in Venice in the summer of 1954 (plate 13). The second, from the 18 July 1961 issue of a new Milanese anti-conformist and anti-clerical cultural weekly, ABC, clipped in a folder in the archive of the Venice Biennale, features a group of young Muscovites scrutinizing Guttuso’s painting in the Pushkin Museum (plate 14).91 In that photograph, a young man in the foreground is wearing the same black-rimmed glasses as one of the painted dancers, while one of the young women is wearing a paisley shirt.

Both photographs comprise a mise en abyme. A particular if more extreme occurrence of what Stoichita has named metapainting, a mise en abyme is the configuration that involves the reduplication of an image referring to the whole embedded into a larger image – be it a painting within a painting, a photograph within a photograph, architecture within architecture, a text within a text, or, more rarely, a film within a film. By explicitly doubling itself, the mise en abyme is meant to trigger a reflection on what is being doubled.92 Here again we are looking at a device that triggers a set of associations. The Moscow photograph can be read as a reprise, seven years distant, of the Venice one. But it also stands as a sad testimony to how geopolitical events can counteract more fluid cultural ones. On 13 August 1961, less than two weeks after Guttuso’s exhibition including Boogie Woogie in Rome was taken down and the works flown back from Russia to Italy, the Berlin Wall went up, cutting off the youth in plaid of East Berlin from their peers in the West.

Notes February 1954, Historical Archives of Contemporary Art (ASAC. Archivio 1 One of Mondrian’s very last works, Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43) was Storico delle Arti contemporanee. La Biennale di Venezia), Venice, Italy also one of his largest. Completed in 1943 upon Mondrian’s arrival to [hereinafter cited as ASAC]. Most of the reviews kept in the archives of New York three years earlier, it was given anonymously to the Museum the Venice Biennale, culled by the Milanese L’Eco della Stampa, are clipped. of Modern Art that year. 12 See F. Guidali, ‘Gabriele Mucchi’s Career Paths in Italy, Czechoslovakia 2 Gestalt means shape and Gestalten to arrange, to organize. Gestalt theory, and the GDR’, in Bazin et al., eds, Art Beyond Borders; and Marco Goldin, developed in the 1910s by German psychologists, posits that our brain Armando Pizzinato, Milan, 1996. For the list of exhibitions of Boogie Woogie has certain in-built properties, which, far from leaving stimuli intact, in Rome, see Enrico Crispolti, Catalogo ragionato generale dei dipinti di Renato put them into pre-arranged slots. Central for Mondrian all the way to Guttuso, Milan, 1983. the Bauhaus, it claims that there is an observable bias in our perception 13 The painting is signed ‘Guttuso 1953’. No further information is for simple configurations, straight lines, circles, and that we will tend available about its dating. to see them in terms of regularity rather than the random shapes that 14 Louis Aragon, ‘Toutes les couleurs de l’automne’, Les Lettres Françaises, we encounter in the chaos of the external world. 12 November 1953, 409. On this painting and its reception, see Sarah 3 Victor Stoichita, The Self-Aware Image: An Insight into the Early Modern Meta- Wilson, ‘From Monuments to Fast Cars: Aspects of the Cold War, Painting, New York, 1997, 189. 1946–57’, in Cold War Modern, 1945–1970, ed. David Crowley and Jane 4 Cited in Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Piet Mondrian, New York City’, Critical Inquiry, Pavitt, London, 2008, 27–33. 14: 22, Winter 1988, 268. 15 Gillo Dorfles, ‘Cronache: la XXVII Biennale e la crisi surrealista’,Aut Aut, 5 Clement Greenberg, ‘Art’, The Nation, October 1943, cited in Bois, ‘Piet July 1954, ASAC. Mondrian’, 268. 16 ‘Si on le regarde beaucoup, les commentaires (favorables ou hostiles) 6 Christian Bonnefoy, ‘A propos de la destruction de la surface’, Macula, 3: qu’il provoque sont étrangers à la peinture. On parle politique, morale, 4, 1978, 163–169. religion […].C’est sans doute l’inconvénient principal de la peinture 7 Bois, ‘Piet Mondrian’, 251. anecdotique de propagande et de polémique qu’on la juge selon des 8 Nicoletta Misler, La via italiana al realismo: La politica culturale artistica del PCI opinions et des humeurs extérieures à l’esthétique, comme on jugerait dal 1944 al 1956, Milan, 1973; Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice une affiche électorale. A mesure que le peintre s’engage, il se dégage un Biennale, 1948–64: Italy and the Idea of Europe, Manchester, 2007; and Adrian peu trop facilement des vraies exigences de son art.’ Alain Jouffroy, ‘A Duran, Painting, Politics and the New Front of Cold War Italy, Burlington, VT, Venise on regarde beaucoup ce Boogie-Woogie’, Arts, 23 June 1954, ASAC. 2014. The compendium of Guttuso’s writings is a tome 1,860 pages 17 ‘Un discorso a parte merita il quadro di Guttuso in cui è rappresentata long: Marco Carapezza, ed., Scritti di Renato Guttuso, Milan, 2013. una taverna esistenzialista. E un quadro che apre nuove possibilità 9 See Jérôme Bazin, Pascal Dubourg Glatigny, and Piotr Piotrowski, alla tematica realista, un quadro di critica sociale al costume eds, Art Beyond Borders: Artistic Exchange in Communist Europe (1945–1989), americanizzante di una certa nostra povera gioventù. Si tratta di una Budapest, 2016; and an essay that I co-authored with Nikolas Drosos, tela abbastanza inconsueta per Guttuso, che a lasciato parecchia gente ‘Realisms as International Style’, in Postwar: Art between the Pacific and the perplessa.’ Mario de Micheli, ‘Ispirati alla vita gli artisti più autentici’, Atlantic, 1945–1965, Munich, 2016, 442–447; and John J. Curley, Global L’Unità, 23 June 1954, ASAC. All the translations from Italian are my Art of the Cold War, London, 2018. own and, in view of the critical importance of some of the quotes, I 10 Jacques Rancière, La Méthode de la scène, Paris, 2018. have given some of the key passages in the original in the endnotes. 11 This was a time of increasing traffic in realist paintings across the Iron 18 Antonello Trombadori, ‘Pittori Italiani alla XXVII Biennale: I quadri e le Curtain. In a one-way pilgrimage that aimed at Moscow, yet never idee’, Il Contemporaneo, 17 July 1954, ASAC. reached it before the end of the decade, Western Communist painters 19 G. C., ‘Boogie-woogie e ballo popolare’, Noi Donne, 1 November 1953, systematically exhibited in the Soviet satellite countries of Eastern ASAC. This was the journal of the UDI (Union of Italian Women). Europe. A review of his retrospective in Bratislava praised Guttuso’s 20 The firm was run by the famously socially conscious Adriano Olivetti ‘wives of coal miners on strike in Sicilian sulphur mines, his scenes of who died in 1968. In the 1970s when the site vacated, the painting peasant occupation of land in the Italian South, all of them descendants was detached from the wall and relocated to the canteen of Olivetti’s of Garibaldi’s peasant fighters’, the subject of his largest painting, typewriter manufacturing plant in Scarmagno near Ivrea (in the the 1952 Battle of Ponte Ammiraglio included in the exhibition. See T. K, province of Turin). The costly operation is said to have provoked ‘Stretnutie s dnešnym Talianskom’ [‘Meeting the Italy of Today in the a polemic at a moment of already intense worker agitation, one in Prague Exhibition of Renato Guttuso’], Zivot, 19 March 1954. For an which Guttuso apparently intervened by telling a reporter that he had enthusiastic account, see Daniel Anselme reporting from Prague in originally asked to be paid by the hour at the same rate as a skilled blue- ‘Renato Guttuso et le nouveau réalisme’, Les Lettres Françaises, 28 January–5 collar worker. In 2002, the painting was displayed in what used to be

the Officina H of the ICO plant in Ivrea, repurposed into an exhibition 38 Renato Guttuso, ‘Osservazioni generali a proposito della XXIV space for 55 artisti del Novecento dalla raccolta Olivetti, curated by Renzo Zorzi. Biennale’, Rinascita, 6 June 1948, reprinted in Scritti, 235–238. 21 Maurizio Corbella, ‘Which People’s Music? Witnessing the Popular in 39 El Nacional, 18 June 1950, cited in Philip Stein, Siqueiros: His Life and Works, the Musicscape of Giuseppe de Santis’s Riso amaro (1949, Bitter Rice)’, in New York, 1994, 184–186. Music, Collective Memory, Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cinema after the Second 40 See John Berger, ‘A Socialist Realist Painting at the Biennale’, Burlington World War, ed. Michael Baumgartner and Ewelina Bosczkowska, New Magazine, 94: 595, October 1952, 294 and 296–297. Acquired for the York, 2020, 45–69. offices by the Milan publishing house Feltrinelli, it has recently entered 22 De Santis in 1979, cited in Enrico Giacovelli, Un secolo di cinema italiano, the Uffizi in Florence; see Antonio Natali,Guttuso agli Uffizi, Florence, 1900–1999, vol. 1, Turin, 2002, 103. 2005. Three years later the critic would wax lyrical about the fame of 23 ‘L’Espressione “neo-realista” è infatti, in pittura, priva di senso.’ Renato this painting in the opening paragraph of his preface to the catalogue Guttuso, ‘Sulla via del realismo’, Alfabeto, 3–4, February 1952, 1–4 and for Guttuso’s solo show that he had curated in London: ‘In Sicily, where 15–29, reprinted in Scritti, 1103–1121. Lara Pucci has carefully explored Guttuso was born in 1912, carts are usually painted and decorated by the shared thematics, namely that of peasant life, in the works of left- local artists. On many of these carts are now versions of another large wing realist painters, including Guttuso, and filmmakers in Italy after painting by Guttuso – the picture of Garibaldi and his Hundred taking the war, such as Giuseppe De Santis, an active communist and regular the bridge at Ammiraglio. [This is a] simple but extraordinary fact.’ visitor to the Soviet Union, especially after 1948. See Lara Pucci, ‘“Terra John Berger, Renato Guttuso, Leicester Art Galleries, London, 1955, 3. Italia”: The Peasant Subject as Site of National and Socialist Identities However adulterated the colourful checked patterns of these carts may in the Work of Renato Guttuso and Giuseppe de Santis’, Journal of the have been by the introduction of cameos of paintings sent by Guttuso Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 71, 2008, 315–334; and Pucci, ‘History, to the 1950 and 1952 Venice Biennales, they provided the folksy note Myth, and the Everyday: Luchino Visconti, Renato Guttuso, and the that Trombadori and Berger coveted. Fishing Communities of the Italian South’, Oxford Art Journal, 36: 3, 41 La galleria Veneziana, Venice, May 8, 1954, ASAC. December 2013, 413–435. What she overlooks, however, is Guttuso’s 42 Ettore Settanni, ‘La mostra del mostruoso’, Il giornale del turismo, 1954, own eventual rejection of the film medium. On the huge impact ASAC. of neorealism, see Saverio Givacchini and Robert Sklar, eds, Global 43 Douglas Cooper, ‘Reflections on the Venice Biennale’,Burlington Magazine, Neorealism: The Transnational History of a Film Style, Jackson, 2012. 96: 619, October 1954, 316–322. And see James Hyman, ‘A Pioneer 24 On the boom, see Guido Crainz, Storia del miracolo italiano: culture, identità, e Painter: Renato Guttuso and Realism in Britain’, in Guttuso, London, trasformazioni frà anni cinquanta e sessanta, Rome, 1996. 1996, 39–53; and Hyman, The Battle for Realism: Figurative Painting in Britain 25 David Forgacs, ‘The Making and Unmaking of Neorealism in Postwar during the Cold War, 1945–60, New Haven and London, 2001. Italy’, in The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought, and Film, 44 Hans Seldmayr, ‘Brueghel’s Macchia’, in The Vienna School Reader: Politics 1945–50, ed. Nicholas Hewitt, New York, 1989, 51–66. and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, ed. Christopher S. Wood, New York, 26 Elena Biaggio, ‘Pittura analitica’, Incontro, 13 February 1955, ASAC. 2000, 323–376. 27 Giuseppe Scortino, La Fiera Letteraria, 30 January 1955, ASAC. 45 Most relevant here might be Bruegel’s The Wedding Dance of 1566, 28 Cesare Brandi, ‘La matita neoralista’, Chronache, 15 February 1955, ASAC. discovered in 1930 in the collection of a London dealer by the director 29 Franco Miele, ‘La lezione di Guttuso si chiama propaganda’, La Giustizia, of the Detroit Institute of Art, and thus not included in Sedlmayr’s 27 January 1955, ASAC. essay. 30 The film consists of six shorts: Carlo Lizzani,L’amore si paga; 46 ‘Mirò riassume in sé due aspetti più tipici della degenerazione dell’arte Michelangelo Antonioni, Tentato suicidio; Dino Risi, Paradiso per tre ore; moderna: l’astrattismo e il surrealismo, la distruzione di ogni contatto Federico Fellini, Un agenzia matrimoniale; Cesare Zavattini, Storia di Caterina; umano e la fuga verso il misticismo astratto, il disprezzo dell’uomo and Alberto Lattudada, Gli Italiani si voltano. See the special issue on Amore e il ricorso al sogno. […] Riepilogando, dagli inferni di Bosch che in città in Lo Spettatore: Rivista cinematografica, 1, 1953. I want to thank Noa terrorizzavano i contadini di Fiandra, alla “redenzione moderna della Steimatsky for pointing me to this film. libertà subcosciente”, al “senso inatteso del sacro” di Mirò, alla arcadia 31 Gabriele Mucchi, ‘Realismo o verismo?’, Cinema Nuovo, March 1954. in cui ci fa evadere Arp […] mi pare che la musica sia abbastanza 32 René Jouglet, Mazowsze: Chants et danses du folklore polonais, Paris, 1954; and chiara: astrazione, distrazione, evasione, distruzione.’ Renato Guttuso, Baumgartner and Bosczkowska, eds, Music, Collective Memory. Amazingly, ‘La XXVII Biennale: una fiera dello snobismo’,Rinascita , 6 June 1954, as I was writing this article, the 1954 visit by Mazowsze to Paris was reprinted in Scritti, 336–345. filmed in Cold War, the throwback romance by Pawel Pawlikowski 47 ‘Quando si comprenderà che il genocidio in arte e il corrispettivo del which won the 2018 Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. genocidio tout court? Quando si comprenderà almeno, che il fatto che Interestingly, again, Pawlikowski shot his film in black and white to l’arte moderna ha raggiunto un così estremo confine di autodistruzione make it look like a neorealist period piece. The film includes, even non è un dato di fatalità a cui le giovani generazioni sono condannate?’ more amazingly, a scene in the Parisian Left Bank club L’Eclipse where Guttuso, ‘La XXVII Biennale’, 343. Zula, the heroine, sits drunk at a table in the exact same pose as the girl 48 ‘Ricordo che fù proprio Brandi a suggerirmi la lettura del libretto di in the right corner of Guttuso’s Boogie Woogie in Rome. Seldmayr Die Revolution der modernen Kunst, che affrettai di leggere nella 33 For celebratory coverage of this return in the Communist press, traduzione italiana. Gli argomenti di Sedlmayr erano da condividere see Mario de Micheli, ‘Un fruttuoso incontro che favorisce la quasi totalmente […] sebbene io ne respingessi la conclusione di tipo comprensione culturale dei popoli: Artisti delle Democrazie popolari religioso e metafisico e la natura di non superamento dell’arte astratta alla XXVII Biennale di Venezia’, L’Unità, 1 July 1954, ASAC. ma di restaurazione reazionaria (Sedlmayr aveva costituito d’altronde 34 While the 1948 elections saw the striking victory of the Christian un appoggio alle teorie Naziste sull’arte).’ Renato Guttuso, ‘Informale Democrats (DC) over the Popular Democratic Front (FDP) which premessa’, Paragone-Arte, September 1965, footnote 64, reprinted in united the Communists and the Socialist parties, 1953 marked a Scritti, 1847–1848. comeback for the Left which achieved a share of the vote sufficient to 49 Cesare Brandi, La fine dell’avanguardia e l’arte d’oggi, Milan, 1952. prevent the DC’s implementation of a proposal for an electoral reform 50 Brandi, La fine dell’avanguardia, 48. law. 51 See Yule Heibel, Reconstructing the Subject: Modernist Painting in Western 35 Catalogo della XVII Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 1954, 19–20. Germany, 1945–1950, Princeton, 1995, 25, 32 and 155; and Wood, The 36 See Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–64; XIV Quadriennale Vienna School Reader, 49–50. di Roma: Retrospettive 1931/1948, Milan, 2005; Patrizia Rosazza-Ferraris, 52 Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius, ‘Remapping Socialist Realism: Renato ‘La dittatura dell’arte astratta’, in Palma Bucarelli, il museo come avangardia, ed. Guttuso in Poland’, in Bazin et al., eds, Art Beyond Borders, 139–150. Mariastella Margozzi, Milan, 2009, 222–227; and Duran, Painting, Politics 53 Renato Guttuso, ‘Jarmark Snobizmu’, Przeglad Artystyczny, Warsaw, 1954, and the New Front of Cold War Italy, chapter 3. 31–42. See also Muthesius, ‘How the West Corroborated Socialist 37 L B., ‘Perché la pittura oggi è diventata incomprensibile?’, Domenica del Realism in the East: Fougeron, Taslitsky and Picasso in Warsaw’, Biuletyn Corriere, 15 August 1948; Gaetano Tumiati, ‘Chiediamo scusa ma non Historii Sztuki, 65: 2, 2003, 72–87. ambiamo riso’, Rinascita, 4 July 1948. 54 Murawska-Muthesius, ‘Remapping Socialist Realism’, 147.

55 Murawska-Muthesius, ‘Remapping Socialist Realism’, 148. 74 Bruno Zevi, ‘Fra I bunker, spunta un padiglione’, L’Espresso, 17 June 56 On that resistance, and for an account of abstract painting behind the 1956, ASAC. Paolo Ricci, ‘Rassegna della XXVIII Biennale’, Rinascita, July Iron Curtain, see Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant- 1956, 373–378, ASAC. ‘Thirty years behind’, claimed the reviewer of Il garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989, London, 2009. Messaggero di Roma; ‘Pictorial questions harking back to forty years ago’, 57 See Francis K. Pohl, ‘An American in Venice: Ben Shahn and the United the reviewer for the Communist Rinascita had to admit; Piero Scarpa, States Foreign Policy at the 1954 Venice Biennale, or Portrait of the ‘Il ritorno dei russi all’internazionale di Venezia’, Il Messaggero di Roma, 6 Artist as American Liberal’, Art History, 4: 1, March 1981, 80–113. July 1956, ASAC. 58 See Nancy Troy, The Afterlife of Piet Mondrian, Chicago, 2013. 75 Jean-Paul Crespelle, ‘A la Biennale de Venise où les Soviets ont ramené 59 See Karen Koehler, ‘The Bauhaus, 1919–1928: Gropius in Exile and the la Belle Epoque’, France-Soir, Paris, 5 June 1956, ASAC. Museum of Modern Art, NY, 1938’, in The Built Surface: Architecture and 76 Bernard Denvir, ‘The Venetian Biennial’, The New Republic, 9 July 1956, Pictures from Antiquity to the Millennium, ed. Christy Anderson and Karen ASAC. Koehler, vol. 2, Aldershot, 2002, 287–315. Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, 77 J. P. Hodin, ‘The Venice Biennale’, Art Digest, August 1956, 13–16, ASAC. the third anti-fascist Cold War trophy painting in MoMA’s collection, 78 Vero Roberti, ‘Invano i nostri pittori comunisti attendono la parola had just been shown in Milan as part of its triumphal tour of Europe d’ordine di Mosca’, Corriere della Sera, 7 August 1956, ASAC. and South America in the autumn of 1953. It was exhibited there in 79 Michele Biancale, ‘Il rapporto Kruscev grava sulla Biennale nel a dramatic display in the Sala delle Cariatidi of the Palazzo Reale still padiglone russo’, Momento Sera, 20 June 1956, ASAC. It should be noted, lying in ruins, destroyed ten years earlier by Allied bombing. however, that Grigoriev’s painting, along with another youth subject, 60 On the marginalization of the decorative in the history of Western Admission to the Kossomol (1949), were widely reproduced by artists- modernism, see Jacques Soulillou’s splendid essay, Le décoratif, Paris, copyists and as posters. They hung in thousands of schools around the 1990; see also Christopher Reed, ed., Not at Home: The Suppression of country. Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London, 1996. 80 Paolo Ricci, ‘Rassegna della XXVIII Biennale’, Rinascita, July 1956, 379, 61 On the gendered dimension of textiles at the Bauhaus, see T’ai ASAC. Lin Smith, Bauhaus Weaving Theory: From Feminine Craft to Mode of Design, 81 Catalogo della XVII Biennale di Venezia, 311–312. Minneapolis, 2014. 82 For photographs of the exhibition’s installations, see the article by its 62 This absence repeats itself in the Biennale’s archives where one curator, Palma Bucarelli, ‘Mostra di Piet Mondrian’, Architettura, 17, can find file upon file of reviews clipped from the journals of every March 1957, 86–89. As she explains, the idea was to place the pictures single European nation except for the German Democratic Republic. in isolation from one another so as to form a single, complete entity. Although the Soviets had theirs, it may not have been a priority for The now famous photographs of Mondrian’s New York studio at 15 East the young GDR to showcase its art in the midst of what they may have 59th street were shot by Harry Holtzman. considered a Western and capitalist affair. It is doubtful that West 83 Lionello Venturi, ‘Astrattismo: l’universo ordinato di Mondrian’, Germany would have been able to veto a request for an East German L’Espresso, 16 December 1957; and Eugenio Battisti, ‘Mondrian in Italia’, pavilion in Venice if it had been made. Il Verri, Winter 1957; Giulio Carlo Argan curated a De Stijl retrospective 63 A year earlier Berger had curated his solo show at the Leicester Galleries in the Greek pavilion at the 1952 Venice Biennale. to great acclaim. Hyman has noted that Berger’s promotion of Italian 84 ‘L’epoca dell’avanguardia è chiusa. E questo nostro tempo insensato che culture reflected in part a desire to shift the centre away from France; prolunga oltre le loro stesse giustificazioni morali e storiche la funzione see Hyman, The Battle for Realism in Britain. delle avanguardie, e ne impone una sopravvivenza sul terreno del 64 Jérôme Bazin, ‘Le réalisme socialiste et les modèles internationaux’, gusto, con l’appoggio di una critica artificiosa e mercantile. E perciò il Vingtième siècle: Revue d’histoire, 109, 2001, 73–87; and Bazin, Réalisme et Broadway boogie-woogie è nella sua essenza stilistica, nella sua problematica égalité: une histoire de l’art en République démocratique allemande, 1949–1990, Dijon, formale un fox-trot. Il “demone de Moderno” non complica che 2015. esteriormente un principio già affermato venti anni prima, e una volta 65 Bazin, ‘Le réalisme socialiste’, 79. per tutte’. Renato Guttuso, ‘Mondrian e l’avanguardia’, L’Unità, 5 January 66 Sabine Hake, ‘Anti-Americanism and the Cold War: On the DEFA Berlin 1957, reprinted in Scritti, 430–435. Films’, in Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter with American 85 The exhibition which went from 22 June to 1 August was prefaced by Culture after 1945, ed. Alexander Stephan, New York, 2005, 160–169. Antonello Trombadori. 67 Jost Hermand, ‘Resisting Boogie-Woogie Culture, Abstract 86 Andrea Barbato, ‘Guttuso dicci i nostri sbagli: Da ogni parte della Russia Expressionism, and Pop Art: German Highbrow Objections to the i pittori sono venuti a Mosca per discutere i suoi quadri’, L’Espresso, 27 Import of “American” Forms of Culture, 1945–1965’, in Stephan, ed., August 1961, 10–11, ASAC. As Muthesius points out, the attention to Americanization and Anti-Americanism, 67–77. Guttuso’s work in the East might well have outweighed the attention 68 Ernst Hermann Meyer, Musik im Zeit Geschehen, cited in Hermand, given to him in the West, competing with the publicity that he received ‘Resisting Boogie-Woogie Culture’, 71. This rhetoric is all the more in his native Italy; Muthesius, ‘Remapping Socialist Realism’, 142. See disturbing considering that Meyer had to emigrate from Berlin to also Guttuso e i suoi contemporanei russi: dal realismo sociale al realismo socialista, London as a Jew in 1933 before then returning to the GDR in 1948. Busto Arsizio, 1995–1996. 69 In the late 1950s, Adorno conceded that his writing on modernism 87 Barbato, ‘Guttuso dicci i nostri sbagli’, 11. ‘paradoxically runs parallel to the work of Sedlmayr’; Theodor Adorno, 88 ‘Ci sono alcuni giovani con calzoni strettissimi e basette lunghe o barbe ‘Reconciliation under Duress’ [1958–1959], in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. circolari, probabilmente alcuni maniaci dell’ “Occidente.” Rimangono Ronald Taylor, London, 1977, 167. sconcertati di fronte al “boogie-woogie a Roma”: questo attacco dall’ 70 Romania had been absent since 1942, Hungary and Czechoslovakia “Occidente” non se lo aspettavano.’ Vice, ‘Le appassionate opinioni dei since 1948; see Mario De Micheli, ‘Artisti delle democrazie pololari alla visitatori: Interesse, stupore e discussioni per la mostra di Guttuso a XXVII Biennale di Venezia’, L’Unità, 1 July 1954. See also Veronika Wolf, Mosca’, Paese Sera, 4 July 1961, ASAC. ‘Czechoslovakia at the Venice Biennale in the 1950s’, in Bazin et al., eds, 89 Masha Salazkina, ‘Soviet-Italian Cinematic Exchanges, 1920s–1950s: Art Beyond Borders, 345–356. From Early Soviet Film Theory to Neorealism’, in Givacchini and Sklar, 71 Guttuso, ‘La XXVII Biennale’, 336. Global Neorealism, 37–50. 72 German A. Nedoshivin, ‘U.R.S.S’, in XXVIII Biennale di Venezia, Venice, 90 See Elonory Gilburd, To See Paris and Die: The Soviet Lives of Western Culture, 1956, 508–509. The pavilion included none of the large Stalinist 1950s Cambridge, MA, 2018, 175. propaganda machines. The closest was Sergei Gerasimov’s Collective Farm 91 ‘Guttuso a Mosca’, A.B.C, 18 July 1961, 38, ASAC. Festival (1937) (Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow). Arkadi Plastov’s The Tractor 92 See Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text, Cambridge, 1989, 60. The Driver’s Supper (1951) (now at the museum in Irkutsk) was criticized for book was originally published as Le récit spéculaire: essais sur la mise en abyme, its unromantic view of Russian peasant life: the peasant and his family Pa r i s, 1977. are eating a meagre fare of bread and milk. 73 See Drosos and Golan, ‘Realisms as International Style’; these words are my co-author’s.