178 DE CHIRICO’S DISREGARDED E42 INVITATION PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS Elisabetta Cristallini It was 1 August 1940 when Oppo, vice-chairman of the Rome World’s Fair Agency, sent de Chirico a letter inviting him to take part in a competition “limited to only ten artists” for “a mosaic decoration for Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e Congressi”1. Oppo, chief organiser of all the decorations to be created for E42 quarter (a project he’d been working on since 1936), also headed the commission for the decoration of Palazzo dei Congressi, with Piacentini, Severini, Amato, Carena, Ferrazzi, Vagnetti and Adalberto Libera.2 The 1940 competition for the decoration of the great central hall was actually the second one taking place, as the first, announced through the interprovincial headquarters to all artists enrolled in the fascist Union, had turned out null and void. As Oppo specified in his letter to de Chirico, “this attempt failed to obtain results in line with the Agency’s expectations”. In effect, although around 50 sketches were submitted for the first competition, publicised on 10 December 1939, it was at once clear to Oppo that no real artists had taken part, in spite of the fact that he had sent personal invitations to the biggest names. This lack of participation had seemed even more seri- ous because it regarded the decoration of the building that was symbol of the entire E42 project for the World’s Fair to be held in Rome in the new quarter near Three Fountains Abbey to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the March on Rome as a new secular jubilee. Moreover, it dealt with the very heart of the building, which, with its square-plan layout, intended to function as a grand central reception hall. In Libera’s view, the mosaic (3,200 sq. m.) would strengthen the solidity of the “quadrangular ring” and supply it “with material and psychological reality, a value of absolute and unsurpassable limit”3. As if suspended in the void (there were no walls up to a height of 9 metres but only a com- plex of pillars, loggias and stairways), the mosaic was to appear like a gilded diaphragm, illuminated by the large windows at the base of the intersecting vault dome, with evocative effects of spatial expansion. Hence the centrality of the decoration and Oppo’s absolute need for true artists to com- 1 The letter is held in Rome’s Central State Archives, Esposizione Universale di Roma 1942, b. 924, file 8346; like the other archive documents repro- duced in this essay, it is published by permission of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, authorisation ACS, N° 1151/2013. Previously unpublished, the letter was discovered by E. Cristallini and S. Lux during research on Palazzo dei Ricevimenti and Congressi and is cited in: S. Lux, Il concorso per “la decorazione in mosaico nel Salone del Palazzo dei Ricevimenti e Congressi”, in M. Calvesi, E. Guidoni, S. Lux , E42 Utopia e scenario del regime, Marsilio, Venice 1987; E. Cristallini, Il concorso per il mosaico, in G. Muratore, S. Lux, Palazzo dei Congressi, Editalia, Rome 1990; L. Montevecchi, Fonti documentarie inedite, relative a Giorgio de Chirico, conservate presso l’Archivio Centrale dello Stato, in C. Crescentini, G. de Chirico Nulla sine tragoedia gloria, Atti del convegno europeo di studi, Artout-Maschietto, Florence 2002. 2 Piacentini, head of E42 architecture, Severini, representative of the Ministry of National Education, Amato, representative of the fascist National Fine Arts Union, Carena and Ferrazzi, representatives of the Italian Royal Academy, Vagnetti as painter, and Libera as architect-designer of the palazzo. 3 A. Libera, I mosaici del Palazzo dei Ricevimenti all’Esposizione Universale, in “Civiltà”, n. 5, April 1941, p.11. METAPHYSICAL ART 2013|N° 11/13 ELISABETTA CRISTALLINI: DE CHIRICO’S DISREGARDED E42 INVITATION – PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS 179 pete, countering the populist pressure of the union and its national commissioner, the powerful and authoritarian Antonio Maraini who was also general secretary of the Venice Biennale. For the second competition, this time by invitation only, Oppo made direct contact with de Chirico, Alberto Salietti, Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, Felice Casorati, Aldo Salvadori and Fausto Pirandello, the only “Roman”.4 The presence of de Chirico and Campigli would certainly guarantee the international scope of the competition. More than ten years earlier both had been part of the “Italiens de Paris” group, open to avant-garde research and far from any autarchic sentiment whatever, notwithstanding the group’s art critic Waldemar George, who instead wanted to distinguish Italian art from French art in the name of a vaguely defined Mediterranean character, quite close to what Sarfatti claimed for her Novecento artists.5 De Chirico’s involvement would not only give the E42 a transatlantic touch as at that time he was the best known Italian artist in America, where he had held numerous exhibitions in and lived for 16 months from August 1936 on.6 Although American critics had subscribed to Breton’s censure of his post-metaphysical production at the time7, de Chirico had found two excel- lent patrons: millionaire Albert C. Barnes and Julien Levy, who had a gallery on Madison Avenue (and was also Campigli’s dealer). In December of that year de Chirico exhibited in the collective show of Italian art held in Countess Mimì Pecci Blunt’s Cometa Art Gallery, enthusiastically support- ed by Oppo as it put forward an exhibition line to his liking, with quality works free from all condi- tioning, especially that of the unions.8 Prior to the fateful 10 June 1940, when Italy declared war on France and Great Britain (a “stab in the back” from a neighbour as Roosevelt put it), de Chirico’s works had also been selected for other exhibitions of Italian art in America, such as the itinerant show curated by Dario Sabatello (and a committee headed by Galeazzo Ciano), Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Paintings9, an initiative that came under a broader project to promote Italian culture abroad with the purpose of pragmatic political-cultural propaganda. By backing exhibitions without rhetorical connotations the intention was to arouse a positive idea of fascist Italy among the American public.10 Meanwhile Oppo had set 4 The invitation to take part in the second competition was also extended to five artists or groups of artists who had “distinguished themselves” in the first competition: Capizzano-Gentilini-Guerrini-Quaroni, Fioresi, Predonzani, Fornasetti-Maiocchi-Ponti and Cascella. The commission for the mosaic went to the first group but the onslaught of historical events meant that it was never created. 5 See Les Italiens de Paris. De Chirico e gli altri a Parigi nel 1930, catalogue of the exhibition curated by M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Skira, Milan 1998. From 1927 de Chirico appeared in Italian Novecento exhibitions, especially abroad (Leipzig, Geneva, Zurich, Hamburg, Amsterdam, The Hague, Berlin etc.). 6 On the 16 months spent in New York, see M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Giorgio de Chirico: gli anni Trenta, Skira, Milan 1995, pp. 247-267; E. Braun, Giorgio de Chirico and America, Allemandi, Milan 1996; K. Robinson, Giorgio de Chirico – Julien Levy. Artist and Art Dealer: Shared Experience, in “Metafisica. Quaderni della Fondazione Giorgio e Isa de Chirico” n. 7/8, 2008, pp. 326-356; and de Chirico’s poetic and visionary texts: J’ai été à New York, “XXe Siècle”, 1 March 1938, and Metafisica dell’America, in “Omnibus”, 8 October 1938, both now in Giorgio de Chirico, Scritti/1 (1911-1945), Romanzi e Scritti critici e teorici, edited by A. Cortellessa, Bompiani, Milan 2008, pp. 853-855 and pp. 858-868. 7 In 1936 de Chirico showed works dating earlier than 1919 in the exhibitions Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MoMA, curated by Alfred H. Barr Jr. who, in an evolutionistic vision of art history, placed de Chirico as an artist who went beyond cubism and abstractionism to open the way to surrealism. Other exhibitions curated by Barr Jr. took the same critical stance: A Brief Survey of Modern Painting (MoMA, 1932) and Art in Our Time (MoMA, 1939), as well as the solo show Pierre Matisse held in 1935 and James T. Soby’s texts, After Picasso (Dodd, Mead & Co, New York, 1935) and The Early Chirico (1941), the first monograph on de Chirico to be published in America. 8 Oppo frequented Mimì Pecci Blunt’s salon in Rome, together with Bottai and influential members of the political hierarchy such as Dino Alfieri and Galeazzo Ciano. On the occasion of the inauguration of Cometa’s New York branch Cagli, who was co-director of the Rome gallery with Libero de Libero, came from Italy, bringing de Chirico the proofs of the Italian translation of Hebdomeros which was to be published by Cometa. 9 The exhibition, with recent works by de Chirico, opened in January 1935 in San Francisco, continuing to Los Angeles and then to Oregon, Seattle and Washington before reaching New York in March 1936. 10 See. S. Cortesini, Arte contemporanea italiana e propaganda fascista negli Stati Uniti di Franklin D. Roosevelt, Pioda Imaging, Rome 2012. METAPHYSICAL ART 2013|N° 11/13 180 ELISABETTA CRISTALLINI: DE CHIRICO’S DISREGARDED E42 INVITATION – PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENTS in motion a strategy for bringing home the Paris “exiles” (including de Chirico who before and after his stay in America continued to divide his time between Italy and France), in particular through the Rome Quadrennial, the great show which, with Mussolini’s approval, he devised and directed as general secretary and which cast a shadow on the Venice Biennale.