White Road / Black Shirt: Giorgio Morandi and Italian Fascism

An honors thesis for the Department of Art and Art History

Alex Goodhouse

Tufts University

Medford, Massachusetts

2014 Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Chapter 1: Exhibiting Politics: 16

Fascist state art exhibitions as sites of resistance and compliance

Chapter 2: Aesthetics, Rebirth, and Resistance: 48

Comparing two readings of Morandi’s art

Conclusion: Morandi in the Movies 80

Appendix A: Figures 84

Appendix B: Timeline 98

Notes 99

Bibliography 119

ii! Introduction

“Though aware of just how hard it will be to attain the distant goal I have glimpsed, I am sustained by the certainty that the path I am following is the right one.”1

– Giorgio Morandi (1928)

“He walked slowly, lyrically, tenaciously, with a long, resistant stride.” 2

– Francesco Arcangeli (1965)

Two landscapes both depict a sunny road in the Apennine hills near Bologna (figs. 1 and

2). Both works are quiet and peaceful, marked by simple, solid forms, subtle tonal shifts, precisely ordered compositions, and the absence of human figures. And yet the six years between them (1934-1941) mark one of the most turbulent periods of the Fascist regime, covering the invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935, the adoption of the anti-Semitic Racial Laws, in 1938, and the alliance with Germany and the beginning of the Second World War, in 1939. In particular, the area these landscapes depict, the town of Grizzana, was within the area of Allied bombardment and was only a few miles away from what would be the site of the largest civilian massacre in

Italy.3 Is there any trace of this political climate in these seemingly hermetic works? If not, what does this absence say about the works, and about their artist, Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964) (fig.

3)?

In the first landscape, from 1934, the viewer looks down into a valley (fig. 1). The pictoral space of the work is distinctly measured, defined by large blocks of color. In the foreground is a smooth green field, bounded by a strip of light beige, representing the road.

There are three squat farm buildings, the details of their construction barely articulated. In the upper right corner, another range of hills is visible beneath a faded blue-grey sky. However, the middle ground, a distinctly shaded group of trees that fills the left half of the canvas, dominates the composition. Although the viewer is positioned above the road, looking down, this mass of green obscures most of the scene, denying a vantage on the valley below. In this respect, the work is much like a still life, which presents objects on a ledge or in a niche for close inspection.

The group of trees provides the backdrop and also acts as an object in the composition.

Consider, for example, one of Morandi’s still lifes from two years later (fig. 4). In the

1936 still life, the color spectrum shifts to red, but the formal attention of the work is the same.

In fact, the two paintings share many of the same shapes. The box with an open lid evokes the slanted roof of the farmhouse, the curved object in the foreground has a similar effect as the beige road, and even the treetops take on the forms of bottlenecks and the lips of vases. As this brief comparison shows, the focus of the 1934 landscape is not about capturing perspective or distance, but about formal relationships in a closed space.4 This landscape compresses space and closes out the rest of the scene to enable precise study of the houses, the road, and the trees.

Morandi’s composition thus produces tension between attentive focus on formal issues and an awareness of larger context. As my thesis will argue, this is the fundamental problem in a study of Morandi. Read in a political context, this painting might suggest that Morandi was ignoring signs of a troubling future to focus on the artistic problems that were important to him in the present.

Morandi’s later work revisits the same theme as the first, a white country road with farm buildings (fig. 2). Again, the scene is essentialized and detail is reduced to a minimum. But here the vantage is entirely different. The diagonal composition is constructed to emphasize the vanishing point at the end of the road. In the landscape of 1934, Morandi offers a view of the

2! road from the side, positioning the viewer as a distant observer who looks out from a hilltop.

Here, he places the viewer squarely on the road itself, producing a greater involvement in the scene. For this reason, the landscape has a more powerful emotional effect, one that is only heightened by the saturated colors and strong contrasts in tone and value between sky and buildings, road and vegetation. The strong diagonal bisects the composition and, chromatically, is much less unified with the rest of the scene than the road in the earlier work. Rather than reinforcing the flatness of the composition, like the road in the first landscape, this road suggests depth and movement in space.

The 1941 work could be understood as a desolate and isolated scene, an empty road with no end in sight. But it could also be considered an image of creative determination and resilience, the white road read as a metaphor for the purity of Morandi’s progression through the Fascist period.5 It is not necessarily a hopeful image—the lack of a destination leaves a sense of uncertainty—but in its continued attention to the play of light and tonal relationships, this work affirms Morandi’s conviction to sustained artistic expression, especially in troubled political times. Beginning in 1913, Morandi and his family frequently vacationed in Grizzana to escape the city of Bologna during the summer. In the 1940s, he went there to escape the Allied bombardment.6 But, as period philosopher Benedetto Croce (1886-1952) wrote, “no man could escape politics, lest politics would disturb him in the very heart of his private life.”7 Even if

Morandi sought to avoid political debates and his critics tried to distance him from politics, the war ultimately came to him. In letters to Cesare Brandi (1906-1988) from 1943, Morandi prayed for “a little peace” for “our poor Italy.”8 Moreover, in 1944, he wrote to the intellectual and political figure Mario Becchis: “I am working very little and now I produce almost nothing. I miss the tranquility that is indispensible to my work. Everyday the airplanes pass overhead and

3! when they are not bombing they shoot at each other. You will understand whether one can think of painting in these conditions.”9 Yet, the hardships that occurred as a result of Fascist policy did not deter Morandi from his work. As critics like Roberto Longhi have claimed, Morandi produced some of his most beautiful paintings during the early 1940s.10

As a study of these paintings begins to suggest, Morandi’s works do not have an obvious relationship to his political context. They do not glorify the Fascist regime, nor do they decry its injustices. However, it is also apparent that there is more to these works than just masterful technique or aesthetic beauty. Morandi’s bottles and country landscapes raise questions about the limits of personal expression in a totalitarian society, about the interdependence of participation and collaboration, isolation and resistance, and about the social content and influence of art. In particular, these two images of a white country road call to mind issues of historical and artistic development, of “Morandi’s Personal Journey,” to use the title of Cesare Brandi’s 1939 essay.11

This thesis will investigate the ways in which Morandi navigated the cultural and political landscape of Fascist Italy and it will explore the constructed narrative of his “white road” of artistic purity and resistance. Specifically, I examine two aspects of Morandi’s career during the

Fascist regime: his exhibition choices and the critical interpretation of his work. Morandi had numerous associations during the interwar period that can be connected to the Fascist regime, such as Futurism in the 1910s and Metaphysics later in that decade, but I will focus my study on the 1930s. This was the period when Fascist repression was most severe and it is the decade in which Morandi first received widespread recognition, both at home and abroad. In the first chapter, I consider Morandi’s participation in state exhibitions, in particular his solo exhibit at the 1939 Quadriennale. For comparison, I discuss Morandi’s relationship to two other exhibitions, the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibit of the Fascist Revolution] in Rome

4! in 1932, and the Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Paintings, that toured the United States in

1935 and 1936. In the next chapter, I explore in depth two critical readings of Morandi’s work,

Cesare Brandi’s formalist reading, based on his 1939 essay, and Emily Braun’s contextual analysis, which focuses on Morandi’s association with the artists and critics of the Strapaese movement. Before I begin my analysis, it is important to situate my focus within the larger discourse on Morandi.

Critical Background

The critical understanding of Giorgio Morandi is fundamentally determined by the marginalization of Italian art in the modernist context. While praised in Italy, even during his own lifetime, as one of the greatest European artists, Morandi does not enjoy the international acclaim of contemporaries like Cézanne, Picasso, or Matisse. Even in the case of Italian artists, priority usually goes to Modigliani, Marinetti, or de Chirico, in part due to their relationship to

Paris and the international art scene. As a result, important aspects of Morandi’s work have not yet received comprehensive analysis. Morandi is considered primarily as a master technician, concerned with a relentless exploration of visual reality, representation, and the profound poetry of everyday things. Or, he is valued for his sobriety and restraint in a time of inflated egos and hyperbolic rhetoric.

Notable exceptions to this interpretation exist. Francesco Arcangeli, Flavio Fergonzi,

Emily Braun, Janet Abramovicz, and Mariana Aguirre have all offered historical approaches to

Morandi’s work.12 These scholars present a nuanced reading that places the artist firmly within the cultural and political dialogues of his time. Moreover, their reassessment of Morandi’s work fits within a newly complicated appreciation of Italian Fascism and its relationship to modernism and the avant-garde offered by scholars of that subject. Thus understanding the complexities of

5! Morandi’s life and career is necessarily tied to a deeper exploration of Fascist ideology and aesthetics, and to a more expansive concept of modernism.

In his own lifetime, Morandi was perceived as an isolated, disengaged, and reclusive artist, removed from partisan politics and concerned solely with aesthetics and formal harmony.

He was seen as a quiet master, a formalist or “pure” painter, a rare modernist who rejected the avant-garde. Both during and after the Fascist regime, critics like Cesare Brandi, Mino Maccari,

Lamberto Vitali, and Leo Longanesi worked to distance Morandi’s art from its historical context and to establish this formal reading.13 This is absolutely a constructed image, favored, in fact, by

Morandi himself, who used it to mask his relationships to cultural and political polemics, especially during the Fascist years.14 The artist even destroyed works that did not conform to this established narrative.15 As Emily Braun explains, the criticism of that period is characterized by statements from writers like Leo Longanesi and Mino Maccari that emphasize Morandi’s ability to “learn from the avant-garde experience without succumbing to its dangers, to extract the true essence of modernity free of easy formulas.”16 For example, Franco Solmi writes, “Morandi began to oppose the reality of memory, based on an ‘eternal’ order, to the reality of human disorder that troubled the consciousness of those times; to the history that unfolded, for better or for worse, on the Italian squares.”17

Despite his intentional avoidance of polemics, Morandi could not escape completely from his detractors. Some of the most pointed critiques were prompted by Morandi’s exhibition at the

1938 Quadriennale in Rome. Artists and theorists like Carlo Belli and Osvaldo Licini (Morandi’s childhood classmate) lamented what they saw as reactionary and out-dated conservatism, while others considered Morandi too “cerebral and anti-Italian.”18 Later in his career, Morandi was criticized by Realists for lacking social commitment and by abstractionists for clinging to a

6! monotonous investigation of visual problems.19 In both cases, he was written off as a “painter of bottles.”20 As Maria Mimita Lamberti writes in her essay for the 2008 exhibition of Morandi’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Museo d’arte Moderna di Bologna, these critics act “as if the plainness of the subjects were equivalent to a poverty of expressivity.”21

However, Morandi’s seclusion was primarily seen as a positive mark of distinction.

Among the liberal factions of the Fascist elite, Morandi represented a longed-for return to traditional, authentic Italian values. As Braun observes, to the liberal critics of Tuscany and

Emilia-Romagna, Morandi’s “art represented the simple life and respect for the individualistic temperament, as opposed to the bombastic rhetoric and mass uniformity issuing forth from

Rome.”22 Moreover, Morandi was praised for his stalwart integrity and intellectual honesty. This consideration relied in particular on the aesthetics of the liberal philosopher, Benedetto Croce, who argued for the liberating and purifying function of art.23 At the same time, Croce presented philosophical justifications for political action and intellectual critique.24 Within this Crocean framework, Morandi became a symbol of creative autonomy, offering “a lesson in the ethics of artistic activity in the face of political pressure.”25

In either case, this a-historical reading continues to determine the critical presentation of the artist. Recent considerations of Morandi’s formal language, however, have greatly expanded the discourse. As Renato Miracco summarizes in his entry in a recent exhibition catalogue,

Morandi’s work has been linked with an impressive variety of intellectual and artistic currents: existentialism and hermetic poetry, Arte Povera and the differing abstractions of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, modernist and pop art serials, explorations of memory by Aby Warburg and

Soren Kierkegaard, Albert Einstein’s relativism and even chaos theory in physics.26 No longer

7! symbols of aesthetic purity or authentic national character, Morandi’s canvases are read as

“materialist ecstasy,” explorations of the infinite and the indefinable, silent meditations on the limits of painting and the endless variability of the visible world.27 Siri Hustvedt, in particular, focuses on Morandi’s depiction of the space between objects to emphasize the spiritual and emotional power of his works.28

For current formalist critics, Morandi certainly does engage with his contemporaries.

Miracco highlights the formative influence of the Metaphysical school, while Hustvedt notes that the choice to limit formal language in order to express greater content was a unifying feature of modernism, in art and in literature.29 However, their vision of Morandi’s engagement is highly intellectualized and always preserves the image of a ruminative recluse. For example, Miracco cites seriality as a fundamental aspect of Morandi’s modernism, but clarifies that its specific character was unique: “Morandi’s modernity lies in his switching to abstraction…to the methodical search for a reality that both apparently and superficially is defined by the reiterated form, but whose pictorial essence was a methodical and obsessive abstraction.”30 This discussion, which could initiate a dialogue with pop art or with Walter Benjamin’s ideas on mechanical reproduction, instead concludes with Giulio Carlo Argan’s notion that, by replicating the same objects, Morandi “chewed and digested them until he could use them as simple ingredients or materials of study.”31 Exemplifying this line of investigation is Morandi’s statement that “nothing is more abstract, more surreal than reality.”32

These formal approaches to Morandi’s work are undeniably compelling. Moreover, they are justified in attempting to cement Morandi as one of the great artists of the twentieth century.

However the discussion of Morandi’s art cannot end here. For all their benefits, formal approaches mask the importance of historical and cultural context. In Morandi’s case, precisely

8! because a purely aesthetic appreciation is so gratifying, it is especially necessary to underscore the depth of his involvement in the politics and culture of his time. Although by no means the majority, there is a growing group of scholars who have taken up this challenge.

First among these is Francesco Arcangeli (1915-1974). One of Morandi’s close friends,

Arcangeli was commissioned to write the first comprehensive monograph on the artist in 1960.

However the work was received unfavorably by Morandi and remained unpublished until after the artist’s death, in 1964. In a letter to Morandi dated November 12, 1961, Arcangeli expressed his opposition to Croce’s idealism. Arcangeli explains that he sought in his own work to be

“empirical in the modern sense,” and to avoid the failures of other critics by not retreating “into

Arcadia” or sacrificing contextual meaning for a limited focus on Morandi’s lofty inner poetry or his essential Italian quality.33 Hoping above all to avoid any controversy in his first expansive critical treatment, Morandi was uncomfortable with Arcangeli’s relatively polemical framework.

In particular, Arcangeli credited Morandi with an “informal naturalism,” in his view the highest achievement in second half of the century, and underscored his importance to the artists of the

1950s and ‘60s. This connection reflects Arcangeli’s personal affinity for the Arte Informale movement that was happening in Italy at that time. More fundamentally, he understood Morandi as part of the reactionary side of official culture. Morandi, in Arcangeli’s view, was a leader of the Fascist left and the “culture of the minority,” who provided a refreshing alternative to the avant-garde and to self-important manifesto paintings like Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937). For his part, Morandi was not interested in being a symbol of resistance, in refuting the avant-garde, or in being the leader of a group (even a distinguished one).34 Despite its divisive history,

Arcangeli’s work laid the foundation for a historical reconsideration of Morandi. Moreover, it revealed the artist’s preoccupation with protecting his carefully crafted reputation.

9! Flavio Fergonzi also makes an important contribution to the reassessment of the “legend of Morandi.” He takes a critical historiographic approach that is a model for my own analysis. In a 2009 essay, he writes:

In celebrating Morandi, all of them [period critics like Fracnesco Arcangeli, Carlo

Ludovico Ragghianti, and Roberto Longhi] evoked an Italy that had never existed, or that

had been personified only by a tiny minority of Italians: an Italy of consistent, thoughtful,

cultivated people, standing apart from, yet aware of, the best in contemporary culture,

obsessively focused on the quality of their own work, able to look at themselves and their

age with that attitude that Longhi had magisterially defined as ‘civil sadness.’35

Moreover, he focuses on Morandi’s relationship to other artists, both his contemporaries and his predecessors. Fergonzi counters the claim of Morandi’s artistic isolation with a study of his visual sources. Although Morandi did not often view the works of other artists in person, he diligently studied black-and-white reproductions. Fergonzi claims that:

[T]he peculiar visual resolution of the black-and-white photographic illustration in books

and magazines, with its half tones, its grain, its blurred focus, and the ability to

concentrate on a tiny insignificant detail of a reproduction, in order to pick out patterns of

light and shade or graphic themes…should always be borne in mind when thinking about

how Morandi approached his sources.36

Among contemporary North-American scholars, Emily Braun leads the initiative to re- contextualize Morandi. In particular, she clarifies Morandi’s overlooked personal and professional connections with Fascism via the reactionary group Strapaese (super-country).

Inspired by the provincial activism of Tuscany, the same climate that produced Mussolini’s armed Blackshirts and lead to the march on Rome in 1921, these artists and intellectuals

10! promoted small-town life, rural tradition, and a return to the founding ideals of Fascism. Through this framework, Morandi fit comfortably into Fascist nationalism. His artwork became a

“metaphoric screen of nostalgia,” and he was able to safely cultivate the image of a modernist who was not culturally avant-garde.37 In Braun’s analysis, Morandi’s relationship reveals the complexities of Fascist culture, as well as the compromised quality of intellectual and artistic life under the regime. She writes: “The degree and kind of Morandi’s alliance with Strapaese proves that he was neither an outright anti-Fascist nor a collaborator with the regime. Similarly his paintings cannot be categorized as political manifestos; and yet they were also more than mere essays in formalist abstraction.”38 Braun sees in Morandi proof that images can be manipulated for various and contradictory causes, as well as confirmation of the “false coherency and unity” of the modernist avant-garde.39 In her analysis, formal appreciation and contextual information complement one another—abstraction does not mean indifference.

Janet Abramowicz, Morandi’s student and teaching assistant at the University of

Bologna, also made an important contribution to this vein of scholarship. Using Morandi’s personal ledger, which records sales, exhibitions, and correspondences, Abramowicz reconsiders his experience of the Fascist years and the creation of his isolated image. She reveals the depth of his personal involvement in Fascist culture, exploring how his relationships with critics and patrons influenced his reception and his actions. She concludes that, despite his purported need for solitude, Morandi lived “completely at odds with his reputation as a recluse.”40 Abramowicz provides an important historical and biographical account but her analysis does not go far enough in exploring the relationship between Morandi’s artworks and their social context.

Mariana Aguirre further expands the critical understanding of Morandi’s complicated inter-war period. In her work, Aguirre traces Morandi’s stylistic shift from metaphysics to

11! Strapaese regionalism, from Giorgio de Chirico to Ardengo Soffici (1879-1964) (through

Cézanne), from enigmatic intellectual to provincial artisan. Specifically, Aguirre notes the disappearance of the mannequin as a compositional element in Morandi’s painting, as well as important changes in his color palette and application of paint. She aligns this shift in artistic identity with the declining critical favor of metaphysics and the Fascist search for a national aesthetic. By relegating his past to the category of an “experiment,” Morandi was able to convincingly transform his own image and become a paragon of authenticity and anti-avant- garde regionalism.41 Moreover, he could enjoy the critical guarantee of an established, recognized faction of Fascism. More so than other scholars, Aguirre is sensitive to the need to connect Morandi’s work with the classicizing trends of the inter-war years and the “return to order.” Prompted by the trauma of the First World War and the failure of radical and irrational approaches to effect meaningful change, artists sought refuge in the stability of classical form and technique. By accepting and building on the past, these artists reconsidered the strategies of modernism and the avant-garde. Groups that are relevant to a study of Morandi include Purism in

France and Novecento, Valori Plastici, and Strapaese in Italy. As scholars of the period point out, the Italian groups, most notably the Novecento, expressed in some respects a forced unity for political and financial reasons, not a coherent ideology or style.42 Aguirre shows conclusively that Morandi was not an isolated individual. However, she does not interrogate fully the political implications of his connections.

In general, the current expanding focus on Morandi’s historical context coincides with a broader interest in Fascism and its relationship to the avant-garde. Increasingly, the totalitarian regime is seen as a response to the same cultural and socio-economic changes that led to the development of modernism in art.43 This scholarship thus complicates both the narrative of

12! Fascism and the framework of modernism. Understood, in part, by Walter Adamson and others as an “aestheticization of politics,” Fascism, as an ideology and a political doctrine, is necessarily linked to the politicization of art.44 Moreover, a nuanced conception of Italian

Fascism has emerged, which accounts for dissenting voices and rival factions within the regime.

To this point, Adamson declares that, “the intellectual culture of Fascism was actually a loose set of groups dispersed regionally and with important variations in the styles and ideals to which they attempted to fit an emerging notion of ‘Fascist civilization.’”45

In his critique of conventional readings of the movement, David Roberts argues for a profoundly nuanced conception of Fascist ideology and underscores the significance of the regime’s internal variations.46 He opposes both the notion that Fascism was opportunistic or chaotically reactionary and the assertion, offered most prominently by Zeev Sternhell, that Italian

Fascism was ideologically stable.47 Based on a study of figureheads like Giovanni Gentile,

Alfredo Rocco, and Sergio Pannunzio, Roberts presents Fascism as a serious political experiment that was the product of a real sense of economic, political, and ethical “possibility, even responsibility.”48 However, his understanding of Fascism foils any attempts to define a unified or

“finished” ideology and Roberts refuses to explain Fascism’s contradictions as simply the imperfect implementation of theory.49

Roberts describes a “continuing play of categories,” in which “the contest of ideas remained central to the Fascist regime, and the strands in the contest remained relatively coherent.”50 In other words, conflict and variation are fundamental, but do not imply an inherent lack of substance. Roberts argues that Italian Fascism evolved from the convergence of two distinct groups, Marxian syndicalists and Nationalists, which “remained antithetical in deeply symptomatic ways,” even as they united to form a single regime.51 In his view, “the

13! contradictions among [Fascism’s] founding impulses helped produce the impasse that in turn fed the superficiality of the regime’s later phase.” Originally grounded in Gentile’s concept of activism and the necessity of a totalitarian state, Fascism’s “centre of gravity changed as the regime evolved.”52 In the most basic sense, Roberts understands Fascism as a unique and important social experiment, distinct from other anti-Enlightenment movements and independent of French socialism and German Nazism. However, Roberts should not be understood as claiming Italian exceptionalism. Although he seeks to clarify an important point, he is generally in line with other scholars that tend to emphasize the connection of the Fascist regime to the intellectual climate of the early twentieth century in Europe.

Applying this nuanced understanding of ideology and culture in general helps to clarify

Fascist aesthetics in particular. In his summary of the scholarship on Fascism and modern art,

Mark Antliff traces the influence of Roger Griffin on subsequent authors. Specifically important in this context is Griffin’s notion of rebirth and regeneration (“pallingenesis”).53 Antliff employs this framework to explain how Fascism was able to promote a specific kind of modernism, based on the anti-enlightenment values of “activism, instinct and irrationalism” but at the same time grounded in a specifically Italian history.54 In this context, the Fascist regime employed art as an agent of social change, allowing it to claim the inheritance of a mythic past without sacrificing aesthetic variety or development. Thus the regime could equally claim aesthetics of classical stability, dynamic spectacle, and reserved regionalism (and included them in its oppressive one- way narratives).55 However, as Emily Braun points out, even as scholars explain the “pluralistic landscape” of Fascist aesthetics, classicism receives the greatest critical emphasis because of its easy association with the regime’s exaltation of Italian and “Roman” values.56 Morandi’s metaphysical paintings and spare, abstracted forms are clear examples of this.

14! The scholarship on Morandi is increasingly concerned with contextual and political approaches. No longer is the artist a hermit, a saint, or a recluse. Rather, considerations of his formal expression are paired with examinations of his personal and professional associations and with analysis of the ways in which his work relates to both Fascist and anti-Fascist narratives.

There remains, however, a need to better position Morandi in relation to the artistic systems and critical trends of the Fascist regime, in order to understand the complexities of opposition and collaboration, self-expression and propaganda, and, most basically, the state and the arts in a totalitarian society.

The Fascist era was full of contradictions and complexity. Due to the extent of the regime’s social control, resistance always entailed a degree of complicity and compliance. It is important to consider the Fascist period as a complex whole that maintains categories of Fascism and anti-Fascism, even as it acknowledges the blurring of their boundaries. As Gabriele Turi writes, the approach that “dissects Fascism ad infinitum in an attempt to discern the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ in it, [is] a method that simply annihilates Fascism as a category.”57 In this sense,

Morandi’s career cannot be separated from the history of the Fascist regime. Although he was far from the militancy of the Fascist hard-line, Morandi was a member of the Fascist Party, and

Fascist sponsorship was crucial to his career. Janet Abramowicz writes: “As the decade [1930s] progressed, much of Morandi’s enthusiasm for Fascism faded, but it was difficult to reject a system that had indisputably provided him with so many benefits.”58 Morandi was neither exempt from Fascist polemics, nor entirely caught up in the regime’s political and social project.

As my thesis will argue, this is not a problematic position. Because of his ambiguous and contradictory career and aesthetics, Morandi is a fitting embodiment of the social situation of

Fascist Italy.

15! Chapter One – Exhibiting Politics:

Fascist state art exhibitions as sites of resistance and compliance

“I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like an art of the State. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The State has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, and to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view.” (1923)

“What connection can lie between politics and art? What between the politician and the artist?

Is it possible to establish a political structure between these two manifestations of the human spirit?” (1926)

– Benito Mussolini59

These statements by Benito Mussolini (1883-1945), given at the opening of exhibitions of contemporary art in Milan three years apart, signal the intent of his artistic policy in the subsequent decade.60 Beginning in the late 1920s, the Fascist regime established a fixed presence in the production and distribution of the visual arts. Despite the seeming inclusivity of this rhetoric, Fascist policies had a restricting and stultifying effect on artistic production. Artists without a political program struggled to find a place in the totalizing system.61 Galleries and private collectors provided an important alternative, but state institutions remained the key to artistic success. However, the regime was not a monolithic entity. Rather, its cultural policies were complex, driven by a handful of officials who were often politically and personally at odds with one another.62 Because of the profound reach of the Fascist system, aesthetic choices and institutional participation were deeply problematic—even the notion of “creative freedom” became a means of state propaganda. Even so, it is necessary to discuss the subtleties of the

16! regime’s policy in order to understand how the system both enabled and denied various strategies of artistic resistance. In this chapter, I will explore Morandi’s use of the Fascist exhibition system and the political implications of his involvement with it.

As Roman art critic, Giorgio Castelfranco wrote, “By 1930 the majority of Italian intellectuals tolerated the Fascist dictatorship…they were attached to the routine of everyday life as they went ahead with their work…From a political standpoint, this was an amputated ethos, but one that could be lived with in order to make survival possible.”63 In other words, complying with Fascist policy was necessary for critical and financial success. This was as true for Morandi as for any artist. As Emily Braun writes, with specific attention to Morandi, “Indeed, it was impossible for any artist of the period not to work within the framework of the regime.”64 Fascist exhibitions were vital to Morandi’s career, but his specific relationship to the exhibition system reveals the nuance of his political participation. During the height of Fascist control of the arts, different strategies of compliance and resistance were possible. Morandi’s path, while seemingly isolated and unique, was only one response out of many.

Exhibitions and the Fascist State

Following Mussolini’s proclamations, the state created an expansive art system, whose principal parts were: provincial and regional level organizations, national prizes and state acquisitions, and large-scale public shows.65 At the end of the 1930s, the regime began to extend its influence into the private sector, offering official recognition and prizes for private galleries and individual collectors.66 Many of the important developments in the systemization of the arts were administered by Giuseppe Bottai (1895-1959) in his dual capacity as Minister of

Corporations (1929-1932) and as Minister of National Education (1936-1943).67 A complex figure, Bottai advocated a ‘liberal’ strain of Fascism and championed the freedom and autonomy

17! of artistic expression.68 The basis of the Fascist system was the Syndicate of Fascist

Professionals and Artists, established in 1929, which divided the country into a hierarchy of provincial, interprovincial, regional, and interregional organizations. Local unions held regular exhibitions and sent representatives to serve on the selection committees of shows at higher organizational levels. As Janet Abramowicz points out, membership in the Fascist Party through one of these unions became a requirement for participation in any state-sponsored exhibition.

Morandi was no exception. By 1929, he had joined the artists’ union, the Sindacato Nazionale di

Belle Arti (National Syndicate of the Fine Arts), and in 1930, he joined the related printmakers’ union, the Sindacato Nazionale di Belle Arti: Sezione Bianco e Nero (Black and White

Section).69

The new structure culminated in the Rome Quadriennale, a national exhibition held every four years, beginning in 1931.70 The international art exhibition, the Venice Biennale, and the exhibition of design, the Triennale in Milan, which predated the syndicate system, were reorganized as independent entities within the Fascist structure.71 The Venice Biennale had long been dominated by conservatives and, despite efforts to include young modernists, it remained controlled by the Fascist right.72 The Quadriennale, on the other hand, was a democratically judged exhibition, defined by artistic pluralism.73 The first two exhibitions, in 1931 and 1935, captured the stylistic diversity championed by the moderate faction of the regime. The third

Quadriennale of 1939, however, suffered from the repressive Racial Laws, enacted the previous year, and the looming threat of war. Simonetta Fraquelli notes that, apart from a large solo exhibition dedicated to Morandi, and the individualism of a handful of artists, the majority of the works could be categorized either as inflated rhetorical allegory or conformist retreatism.74

18! The syndicate system created an important framework and served a series of key functions. For the artists honored, prizes or purchases provided financial support and professional development in the form of public recognition and opportunities for exhibition.75

For the state, official patronage was a means of cultural control, but one based on sponsorship rather than censorship. As Walter Adamson explains, “regime preference was always for the carrot of officially sponsored exhibitions rather than Nazi-style bludgeons. And the regime not only permitted but even sanctioned modernist expressions within these exhibitions.”76 Thus while the Fascist exhibition structure remained constant, the content of official exhibitions varied. In other words, Fascist aesthetics were not restricted by style; any movement was open to appropriation or stigmatization by members of the Fascist hierarchy.77 Adamson poses an interesting question about this seemingly paradoxical method of cultural control: “Was

Mussolini’s aesthetic policy incoherent, then, or incoherent like a fox?”78 Although Adamson rejects any definitive answer, it is possible to conclude, as Emily Braun does, that by tolerating a wide variety of artistic expression, the regime nullified much of the reactionary potential of the avant-garde and inspired artists to comply with the regime.79 From this perspective, dynamic and chaotic Futurism was as representative of the Fascist state as works that featured classically modeled figures and conservative compositions (figs. 5-6). At the same time, the regime’s tolerance meant that artistic freedom was never fully revoked.

Even as the Fascist system permitted a diversity of expression and a variety of extreme positions both radical and conservative, it exerted a push towards cultural uniformity among the majority of artists. As Pia Vivarelli argues, the totalizing presence of the state was intended to secure the consensus of the public rather than to build a discerning art market. Acquisitions and prizes were “emblematic” gestures, rather than critical judgments of artistic quality. Often,

19! chosen works were by little-known local artists, and many works were never shown in state museums.80 Specifically, Vivarellli claims that the “constant presence of the state in the organizational structures of art provoked, at the ‘middle’ level of production and realization, a progressive homogenization of themes and collective tastes.”81 The inclusiveness and lack of aesthetic discretion in state programs prompted some critics and artists, in particular Ardengo

Soffici, Raffaello Giolli, and Alberto Savinio, to question their value. In their view, the system was broad and blunt, fostering mediocrity and stifling innovation.82 Finally, although the regime based its system around local exhibitions, its focus was predominantly on large-scale shows, like the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution], in 1932, and the

Universal Exposition, in 1942, that it could transform into media spectacles and propagandistic celebrations.83

In this sense, the corporatist system of exhibitions created an important foundation but did not satisfy the country’s need for a truly modern network of artistic distribution and exchange.84 Although limited compared to other European nations, Italy’s private market provided an alternate channel for artistic activity that responded to this need. As Vivarelli argues, it was not ideologies but individual galleries that drew artists together and “served to catalyze activity and collaboration” between them.85 Although the artistic landscape was populated by groups with shared aesthetics like the Italian Novecento, the Roman School, Italiens de Paris,

The Six of Turin, or the Milanese group, Corrente, these associations were also drawn together by finances, by the desire to secure political support, or by the practical need to exhibit or publish their works.86 Galleries like Il Milione, in Milan, or La Cometa, in Rome, existed outside of the state’s regimented division of labor and thus enabled dialogue, discussion, and exchange between critics, musicians, philosophers, and artists working in different media.87

20! Private collectors also supported artistic production in important ways. Like gallery owners, collectors could define a discerning critical taste that was “coherent and discrete at the same time” in a way that the bulky state bureaucracy could not.88 Yet these individuals, including Alberto Della Ragione, Carlo Cardazzo, and Pietro Feroldi, were not simply tastemakers. In fact, they offered a crucial countercurrent to majority opinion, safeguarding works by emerging or international artists that may otherwise have been lost or destroyed due to state conservatism.89 As Lorenza Selleri points out, whereas the Fascist system had its seat in

Rome, the heart of the private market was Milan. Because of its importance as an international financial center, Milan had a concentration of galleries, critics, and wealthy collectors who were interested in the artistic developments of Europe.90

At the end of the 1930s, Bottai began to update the Fascist system in order to capitalize on the traffic in the private market and to promote creativity and artistic autonomy within state channels. In 1939, he instituted the Office of Contemporary Art. This agency gave artists a means of financial assistance and, crucially, it awarded prizes for the best private collections and galleries, validating their efforts and connecting their success with the growth of the regime.91 In that same year, Bottai founded the Premio Bergamo, a juried prize that was held annually in the

Lombard town of Bergamo from 1939 to 1942. Bottai intended the prize as a liberal alternative to the Premio Cremona, a prize sponsored by the conservative Fascist minister, Roberto

Farinacci, which championed the influence of Nazi neoclassicism and folkloric traditionalism and was held in nearby Cremona.92

This discussion of Bottai’s Premio Bergamo and Farinacci’s Premio Cremona is not directly relevant to a study of Morandi, who never submitted work to either prize. However, the rivalry between the prizes, and their patrons, articulates an important split in state policy, one

21! that coincides directly with the debates on national and racial identity that surrounded the implementation of the Racial Laws, in 1938. These prizes articulate a contrast between nationalist, didactic, and utilitarian art, on the part of the Premio Cremona, and individual, autonomous art for art’s sake, on the part of the Premio Bergamo.93 The Premio Cremona sought to establish a model for what Fascist art should be: refined and popular, classical and traditional, and fundamentally linked to revolutionary politics and Italian identity.94 The iterations of the prize (there were three, between 1939 and 1942) had mandatory themes, all exalting the historical and political myths of the Fascist revolution: “Listening to a speech by Il Duce on the radio,” (1939), the “Battle of Grain” (1940), chosen by Mussolini himself, and “The Italian

Youths of the Lictor” (1942).95

The Premio Bergamo, on the other hand, selected the broad theme of the “Italian

Landscape” for its first exhibition, in 1939, and “Two figures” for its second, in 1940. It left the final exhibitions without defined themes. As Lorandi observes, the theme of the landscape served to avoid the monumental Neoclassicism and “statuary representation” that characterized the

Premio Cremona, in favor of Post-Impressionist plein-air painting and examples of Fascist ruralism.96 Bottai’s prize, moreover, attracted younger artists, like those of the Milan-based

Corrente group, who used figurative art to denounce the rhetorical posturing espoused by

Farinacci in favor of an expression of real, lived experience.97 In the same way, Morandi’s focus on still life and landscape can be seen as a signal of his refusal of national rhetoric.

Lorandi clarifies, however, that the Premio Bergamo and the Premio Cremona were in fact much more similar than they might seem. Despite their ideological differences, Lorandi positions the prizes as complementary manifestations of the same impulse: the desire for state control. In his view, they are the “two sides of the regime’s face.”98 He goes on to cite shared

22! styles, themes, and participants that reveal the overlap and ambiguity between the two prizes.

More fundamentally, Ruth Ben-Ghiat asserts that Bottai’s claims for creative freedom and artistic autonomy were themselves elements of Fascist propaganda. In her view, Fascism presented itself as a “third way” between the liberal individualism of democracy and the anonymous collectivism of Marxism, both of which would lead to “social and economic leveling, ‘standardization’, and the suppression of identity.”99 As the “last defense of the moral, the transcendental and the personal,” Fascism, it was believed, could protect creativity from the materialist influence of either communist or capitalist societies and “create a modern mass society on the peninsula while preserving individuality and national identity.”100 For his part,

Francesco Arcangeli criticized Bottai for an ambiguous and hypocritical involvement with the regime. In his view, “Bottai ended up being more insidious… When we began to be suspicious of the so-called Fascist left-wing, he appeared not only to be an element of moderation but one of corruption.”101

This comparison between prizes, although it focuses on Fascism’s final years, serves to illustrate one of the defining aspects of the entirety of the regime’s cultural policy, that is, its contradictions and ambiguity. The Fascist art system was totalizing and all encompassing. Even the private market was institutionalized as part of the state system, under Bottai’s Office of

Contemporary Art. By the end of the 1930s, artists could not support themselves without complying with Fascist regulations and working through Fascist structures. Through its variety, supposed tolerance, and promotion of creative freedom, the regime minimized space for resistance, transforming radical expression into a marginalized branch of its “official” policy. At the same time, outlets like the Premio Bergamo and galleries like Il Milione did provide a refuge for freethinking artists. As Carlo Bertelli explains, simply carving out a space for “good”

23! painting in “calamitous times was no small thing.”102 While these alternate channels of expression could not escape being co-opted by the Fascist regime, they offered a necessary starting place for any kind of artistic resistance. Understanding Morandi’s particular relationship with this structure helps reveal the nuance of his political participation. In order to clarify

Morandi’s position, I will contextualize his exhibition at the third Quadriennale of 1939 in terms of the Mostra della rivoluzione fascita [Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution], a celebration of the tenth anniversary of the Fascist regime that took place in Rome in 1932, and the Exhibition of

Contemporary Italian Art, a showcase of Italian modernists that toured the United States between 1935 and 1936.

III Quadrienale of 1939

Far from keeping to himself in provincial Bologna, Morandi was very much a part of the national art scene. In 1928, he published a brief autobiography in the Bologna magazine,

L’Assalto. In it, he writes:

I repudiate nothing in my past because I have no idleness to hide. Conscience has always

guided me in my work and I am comforted by the knowledge that in all my attempts,

even in the moments of greatest uncertainty, my personality has always managed to come

through… The great faith I have had in Fascism from the outset has remained intact even

in the darkest and stormiest of days. I tend to be solitary by temperament and for artistic

reasons. This in no way derives from empty pride or any lack of solidarity with all those

who share my faith.103

Admittedly, this declaration was written before the truly “dark and stormy” days of the regime, and, according to Abramowicz, Morandi only began to lose his enthusiasm for Fascism towards the end of the 1930s.104 However, this statement attests to the profound importance of the Fascist

24! system and its ideology in Morandi’s career. In particular, Morandi developed close relationships with collectors and private galleries both in Milan and in Rome. As Lorenza Selleri declares, the capital was “a necessary place and an indispensible point of reference” for him, while Milan was important as the economic heart of the country.105 Morandi benefited professionally from relationships with critics like Lamberto Vitali and Giovanni Scheiwiller, collectors Jucker, Jesi, and Mattioli, the Ghiringhelli brothers, who owned Il Milione gallery in Milan, and established artists like Carlo Carrà, Giorgio de Chirico, and Giacomo Manzù.106 In 1995, Emily Braun wrote a pioneering analysis of Morandi’s relationship with the Fascist regime through his association with the Strapaese group during the late 1920s and early 1930s, specifically through his involvement with the magazines Il Selvaggio and L’Italiano.107 However, his connections to

Fascist art do not stop there. Limited access to primary sources, as well as the scarcity of statements by Morandi, has been a challenge in my research of these ties to the regime. Further study would require an analysis of primary sources and exhibition records in greater depth, but for the purposes of this thesis, it is possible to draw some provisional conclusions based on the information available.

Morandi did not send works to the Venice Biennale between 1934 and 1948, but he was involved in four Quadriennale exhibitions during that time.108 In this preference, he was not alone. Drawn by the high attendance and large prizes of the first Quadriennale, the artists

Giorgio de Chirico, Mario Sironi, Gino Severini, and Corrado Cagli all declined invitations to the XIX Biennale of 1934 in favor of a place at the second Quadriennale of 1935.109 Moreover, the heavy-handed nationalistic themes, often proposed by Mussolini himself, and the requirements of Artist Union and Fascist Party membership of the Biennale in that period discouraged artists who were interested in modernism, free expression, and artistic autonomy. As

25! Janet Abramowicz states, Morandi “had no interest in the themes suggested at the Biennales of the 1930s.”110 In this way, the distinction between Biennale and Quadriennale parallels that of the Premio Cremona and Premio Bergamo. Abramowicz concludes that, “in the context of so much bombastic rhetoric in the visual arts, it is easy to see why Morandi’s art has been interpreted as anti-Fascist.”111 I contend, on the other hand, that it is just as easy to complicate this understanding. Morandi’s navigation of the complex climate was multifaceted and nuanced, much like the contradictions within Bottai’s cultural policy. I will argue that Morandi is working in a space between isolation and resistance that is in-line with, and indicative of, the complexity and contradictions of the Fascist regime.

In 1939, Morandi had a private installation at the third Quadriennale, at the Palace of

Expositions in Rome. Although Morandi had submitted to and served on the juries of the previous two editions, this exhibition was significant because it was the first comprehensive retrospective of Morandi’s work anywhere.112 Morandi displayed fifty-six paintings, drawings, and etchings that represented almost thirty years of his career. He was awarded the second prize in painting, of 50,000 lire, behind the younger artist, Bruno Saetti. Financially, this was a success, but critically, the result was more complicated. For the exposure and national attention it brought the artist, Francesco Arcangeli called it “the success” of Morandi’s career.113 However,

Morandi was badly criticized by members of the Fascist elite and even by some of his former friends. Morandi’s supporters, Carlo Brandi and Roberto Longhi, wrote their first essays dedicated to the artist after the event. Partly in reaction to the negative press Morandi was receiving, these publications established the hermetic, isolated viewpoint that would dominate perception of Morandi in subsequent decades.114 Certainly, as Arcangeli claims, the third

Quadriennale was significant for Morandi because it established his critical position.

26! Although he was invited to fill a private gallery by the exhibition’s secretary general,

Cipriano Efisio Oppo, Morandi was able chose the works he would send to the third

Quadriennale himself: forty-two paintings, twelve etchings, and two drawings. The earliest painting was a landscape from 1913, while three of his submissions were works from 1938.

Among his paintings was a still life from 1937 (fig. 7). The canvas is part of a series of seven related compositions, in oil and watercolor, which Morandi painted between 1936 and 1938

(figs. 8-11). In fact, all were shown at the third Quadriennale, except for the canvas owned by

Roberto Longhi, which was sent to an exhibition in San Francisco in that year (fig 8).115 The

1937 still life depicts a collection of objects arranged on a round tabletop. The composition is crowded; a row of bottles fills the width of the canvas. Overlapping and obscuring the space between them, these objects seem to be placed on top of one another, so that there is little depth in the composition itself. However, because the bottles do not cast shadows on the wall behind them, the background opens up, as if it is not a wall but a field of light. While it is clear that some objects are placed in front of others, there is a sense of uncertainty about the spatial relationships. We must carefully study the edges of each object to determine its place, and even then these boundaries seem constantly on the point of shifting as we look away. This is particularly evident in the two grey bottles at the left edge of the canvas, one with a stripe of blue. The bottle on the right seems to cast a shadow on its neighbor, as if it sits in front. However their edges also seem to touch, colors and shading shifting and blending until the distinction between the bottles is no longer clear. In the center of the composition, an upturned frying pan leans against the beige wall. Its handle marks a strong diagonal that offsets the vertical lines of the bottlenecks and energizes the composition. This pan, along with the large blue bottle decorated with a diamond shape, forms what Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti calls the “nucleus” of

27! the compositional series.116 Ragghianti continues: these pieces are “central or moved, in order to coordinate shared objects in different ways, or to introduce other objects on the sides, at the edge of the round table, or to eliminate them altogether, while maintaining a notable harmony of light and color.”117 Comparing these related canvases, the delicacy and intent with which Morandi ordered each composition becomes apparent.

In her discussion of these works, Mariana Pasquali describes a series of “object- characters that converse with each other according to internal rhythms articulated by intervals— solids and voids—that increase the vitality of the composition, almost in a celebration of life.”118

Pasquali’s idea of a conversation is a useful one. Although the arrangement is crowded, each element has its own place and its own voice that combine into a unified whole. This interpretation helps to articulate the central problem of these works in particular, and one of the primary issues of Morandi’s art as a whole: these simple bottles are at once intimate and charged with energy. Morandi finely manipulates the visual weight of his objects, constructing a delicate balance of overlapping forms and shifting boundaries. With each new painting, Morandi is re- calibrating his composition, as if in search of the resonant frequency of these objects in space.119

This formal interpretation also applies to Morandi’s career. I will argue that Morandi applied the same fine judgment to his choices in exhibitions as he did to the formal variations in his artwork. Instead of isolated and fixed, his career is charged and complex, filled with delicate decisions and political subtlety. Like his compositional series, Morandi reshaped his public image with each new exhibition. For this reason, his choices to exhibit or not are more informative if they are considered in comparison, as different parts of a political and artistic conversation. Pasquali continues her analysis, arguing that the works from the 1937 and 1938 series are the first on a “new course,” one marked by disquieting vibrations and fine

28! measurements that proved very controversial at the third Quadriennale.120 In large part, this controversy is a result of the specific political and social moment in which the exhibition took place.

The third Quadirennale differed from its predecessors in a number of important ways.

The Espozione quadriennale nazionale d’arte [the National Quadrennial Exhibition of Art], its full title, was first held in 1931. As stated above, it was instituted as an alternative to the conservative and exclusive Venice Biennale, which Sileno Salvagnini describes as undergoing a

“crisis” in those years, and as a fulfillment of Mussolini’s promises to support and encourage artists.121 To ensure artistic diversity and equal representation, participants did not need membership in the Fascist party and works were selected by two different democratic juries, one for artists who had been invited and one for those who had not.122 In 1939, the tone of the exhibition was changed by the threat of war and the recent alliance with Germany, the establishment of the Racial Laws in 1938, and a growing Nazi cultural influence, expressed, for example, through Farinacci’s Premio Cremona. Issues of national art and national character were more intensely connected than ever before. Lorenza Selleri holds that this resulted in a drop in the quality of artworks compared to the previous years.123 As articulated in Bottai’s opening remarks, this Quadriennale was intended to show that “there must be a reciprocal connection between political facts and artistic ones…artists must participate in the history of our times.”124

This new focus resulted in the exclusion of a number of prominent artists because of their Jewish heritage: Corrado Cagli, Aldo Carpi, Mario Cavaglieri, Francesco Di Cocco, Carlo Levi,

Antonietta Raphael, Paola Levi Montalcini, Arturo Nathan, Roberto Melli, and Adriana

Pincherle.125

29! Furthermore, many artists and critics expressed conservative views about the direction that Italian art was taking at the exhibition. Carlo Carrà, an artist who was associated, along with de Chirico, with Morandi’s metaphysical period, wrote: “It is a credit to the current generation to have understood how to restore Italian figurative art to the right track…In this way the new

Italian art, having abandoned the way of recent tradition, spoiled by verism and by the academy

— as Giuseppe Bottai said — returns to the antique and pure tradition.”126 While Carrà’s remarks are not especially critical of younger artists, he encourages them to continue in the style laid out by his generation instead of charting their own course. Moreover, Carrà’s praise of

Bottai is significant given the minister’s comments about the need to develop a more nationalistic and political art. The critic Raffaele De Grada took a stronger position: “It is the young artists who have an attitude towards this Quadriennale that is confused and missing. [For this reason] we once again call this new generation to the construction of a moral and esthetic ideal that can be faced with equanimity.”127

As mentioned above, this charged political atmosphere produced a polarized critical reception of Morandi’s exhibition. Even as some praised Morandi as an example of Fascist morality, other critics, like Luigi Bartolini, derided him as both “Parisian” and provincial, bourgeois and socially removed.128 Although critics and jury members felt the need to decide what “best represented the goals of the Italian art of today,” the awarding of prizes was also influenced by personal rivalry and professional bias.129 After Morandi received one of the ten lowest prizes at the first Quadriennale 1931, Osvaldo Licini wrote to him:

Dearest Morandi, do not expect my congratulations, but my condolences for the place

you occupy in the ignominious scale of prizes given at the Quadriennale! When I saw

your name among the last ten prizewinners, I felt a strange sense of anger, disdain and of

30! sorrow, but also of relief! It was to be expected: the big awards were given to the highest-

ranking clique, selected according to norms of friendship and political influence, and I

thought at once that you could not be among them, given the purity and disinterestedness

of your art and your artistic ideal. It is better that way. I do not envy the ephemeral glory

of those four or five boors, and I rejoice with you at not yet seeing you in such lofty

company… Be strong, dear Morandi, I am still stunned at the humiliation that they dealt

you in Rome, but remember that in my view the first prize in painting went to you, even

if they put you on one of the last rungs of that vile ladder…130

The kind of politicized prize giving that Licini condemns continued in the third Quadriennale. In fact, Licini himself took part in it. In a 1939 letter, Licini expresses shock at the seeming uniformity and stasis of Morandi’s work at that exhibition. While Licini had radically developed his style in the eight years between the first and third Quadriennale, Morandi seemed to have lost ground:

When I went to Rome I was still sure that I could save Morandi from the collective

general disaster, easily foreseeable. The trouble was that I had never seen so many

Morandis together. A regiment, they were. All the same, disciplined, regulated and

placed in line…How Morandi has crumbled, the champion of artistic mediocrity and

Italian bureaucracy; the creature of Oppo, Soffici, Cardarelli, Longanesi, Bartolini, of all

the nostalgic and reactionary shrimp of Strapaese…131

Evidently, Licini was not aware that Bartolini felt a similar frustration with Morandi’s inability to diversify his artistic approach and, like Licini himself, criticized Morandi’s show at the third

Quadriennale.

31! There were even harsher reactions to come. A member of the 1939 Quadriennale jury,

Romano Romanelli, wrote to Giuseppe Bottai to warn him of the danger of rewarding Morandi and the type of painting that he represented:

In certain moments of history, we must describe the essential themes of our times in a

masculine manner. It would be a terrible misfortune for Italian art if we were to allow the

opinions of those dregs…of critics such as Brandi and Longhi to prevail…if they do

prevail, our art will end up more tragically than French art did after Impressionism, when

every form of decadence was let loose in the name of feelings.132

Romanelli concluded that Morandi was an intelligent person, but “not a painter.”133

On the other hand, Morandi was also praised as an example of Italian morality and

Fascist purity. Bottai himself said that Fascist art is, “all events, all clarity of style, all frankness of language, all interiority of sentiment”:

We ask these deeds of the artist, whose moral commitment is not inferior to that which

every Fascist brings to the fulfillment of his work… We know that our reality is also his

reality and we want the artist to read it, not in the pages of the daily mail, but within his

own soul.134

Morandi’s art aptly fit this description, as other critics noted. De Grada, who had previously called for a renewed morality in Italian art, authored a review of Morandi’s exhibit that is particularly glowing: “We have to thank Oppo who demonstrated at this Quadriennale that the true modern Italian painters paint bottles, landscapes, or bare-bones compositions [scheletrici impianti compositivi]… Morandi was one of the few who assumed the work, not to renew

(because you cannot renew what does not exist) but to create modern Italian art.”135 In the jury’s official statement, they wrote that Morandi, “offers twenty-five years of diligent work, and from

32! his small, closed world he knows how to create arrangements [sa trarre accordi] that lift him to the highest poetry, as he abandons himself fully to a sweet and subdued music that entangles the viewer with its delicate tones and harmonious shades.”136 In the exhibition catalogue, he is presented as an artist whose works, “follow a healthy and positive goal upholding the Roman and

Italian tradition… One senses the fresh smell of the countryside that enlivens the works of this painter who had mastered his technique.”137 These statements, which focus on the artist’s diligent technique and his evocations of rural life, conform to a reading that began almost ten years earlier, with Morandi’s associations with the provincial activist group, Strapaese. Even so, they only indirectly connect Morandi’s artwork to political themes. The lack of explicit Fascist content likely explains why Morandi was recognized by the jury at the third Quadriennale after

Saetti.

The controversy that his work produced suggests that Morandi fits with one side of an intense, but well-established debate in the Italian art of his time. Perhaps his work was co-opted, perhaps he was using these controversial exhibitions simply a necessary way of paying bills and making a name for himself, or perhaps he really believed in the ideological program that was thrust upon his work. Undoubtedly the situation in the later days of Fascism was complex.

Morandi’s friend Roberto Longanesi described it in this way: “The absence of freedom didn’t seem to be of great importance to us, but slowly as the years went by, we became aware that our consciences began to bother us. Too often we closed our eyes to events and facts that were unpleasant, disagreeable, and we truly felt that our imagination had dried up because the impulse to rebel had disappeared.”138 Despite Longanesi’s conclusions on the subject, Morandi’s art and his exhibition choices in these years can be understood as a rebellion of sorts. Placing the

33! Quadriennale in relation to other shows sponsored by the Fascist state can help to tease out the significance of Morandi’s actions.

Mostra della rivoluzione Fascista, 1932

A comparison with the Mostra della rivoluzione Fascista [Exhibition of the Fascist

Revolution] explicitly underlines the uniquely democratic, autonomous nature of the

Quadriennale and shows Morandi’s support for personal expression over cultural propaganda.

The exhibition, abbreviated MDRF, opened at the Palace of Expositions in Rome (the same building as the Quadriennale) in 1932, in celebration of the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s

March on Rome. Morandi was not invited to participate. As a letter to Ardengo Soffici reveals,

Morandi was feeling hopeless and disillusioned with the art world after harsh criticism that he received at the first Quadriennale in 1931:

It is a world of such misery that my only desire is to be forgotten and to be able to work

in peace. What displeases me most is that some of them [his detractors] are artists and

men of genius and we would never have believed them capable of such pettiness. Artists

inherited all the worst defects of the old political climate…These conditions are certainly

not favorable for art…Those who benefit and are able to enjoy all of this are fools. With

this I do not want to pass judgment on anyone. It is my displeasure that makes me say

this. What is even more displeasing is that now one cannot hope that things will

change.139

However, there were other opportunities for exhibition open to Morandi in that year, which he did take. As Abramowicz observes, “Between 1932 and 1934, for someone who pretended that he rarely exhibited, Morandi sent etchings to exhibitions in Madrid, Prague, Vienna, Berlin, and

Munich. All were organized by [Carlo Alberto] Petrucci and the Sindacato Nazionale [the Fascist

34! printmaker’s union].”140 Importantly, these were all international shows. Although designed to celebrate Fascist art for the rest of Europe, these international exhibitions related to propaganda in a very different way than a spectacular exhibition of the history of the Fascist Party, held in the nation’s capital. This exhibition schedule suggests that Morandi turned his focus outside of

Italy to avoid what he saw as an unfavorably politicized climate in the Fascist art world of the

1930s.

Although he was not invited to exhibit at the MDRF, Morandi could not ignore an event of that importance. Thanks to his role on the selection committees of the first and second

Quadriennale, which, as stated above, were held in the same building as the MDRF, Morandi was in Rome during much of the planning and the run of the show. Furthermore, Morandi’s friends and fellow Strapaesani, Mino Maccari and Leo Longanesi were chosen to participate, and

Cipriano Efisio Oppo, concurrently the secretary general of the Quadirennale, served as one of its artistic directors.141 These men praised the project publically. Maccari called it “no longer an exhibition, but a patrimony acquired by the people…[it] speaks directly to the public…Each visit is transformed into a pilgrimage…even a casual visitor recognizes at first glance that an act of profound importance is being carried out.”142 Of all the exhibitions of the Fascist regime, the

MDRF was one of the most commercially successful, drawing almost four million visitors over a two-year period, and the most symbolically important.143 In fact, the exhibition, scheduled to last only one year, was so popular that its run was extended until October 1934.144 As Ardegno

Soffici wrote to Strapaese artist, Ottone Rosai, concerning the 1928 Novecento show, any major exhibition was a significant event for an emerging artist:

The point is to exhibit, and the way things are right now, there is no better Italian

[artistic] organization…in this way they [artists associated with the magazine, Il

35! Selvaggio] can show people how superior they are…for the Novecento is still much

better than [the] Venice [Biennale], where one still sees Tito and Bistolfi [leading

conservative artists of the official establishment], who continue to dominate the scene

there…Make sure that Morandi and Maccari understand how much good it would do

them to exhibit there…especially Morandi who should take this opportunity to prove,

once and for all, who he is.145

Like the negative space in his paintings, Morandi’s distance from this exhibition is significant.

Considering Morandi’s absence from the MDRF in the light of his high-level participation in all three Quadriennale exhibitions during the 1930s and his exhibitions outside of Italy, further complicates who he was as an artist. If, as critic Ada Negri declared, the MDRF was an “act of faith,” Morandi’s faith, despite his public statement in support of Fascism in 1928, seemed to be elsewhere.146

The MDRF sought to create a total experience, a mixture of historical spectacle and political demonstration. As mentioned above, Oppo was an artistic director of the exhibition, and

Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti was an advisor, but it was Mario Sironi who exerted the most influence on the design of the installations.147 The exhibition was set up as a chronology of the

Fascist regime, a kind of ritual procession through the past that covered over twenty rooms of artifacts, historical recreations, and memorials. Importantly, the participating artists were selected from diverse stylistic backgrounds, including Novecento artists, Futurists, and members of Strapaese, and they worked together with historians in the planning and design process. As

Emily Braun observes, this sent a message of unity and collaboration in the service of the Fascist state.148 Braun explains that, “in a politics that purveyed image as reality, the MDRF was held up as both representation and proof of the Fascisitization of Italian life.” In her view, the exhibition

36! united the regime’s “cultural and propagandistic aims” and embodied a number of its specific projects: “the sacralization of politics, the regime’s strategies of mass consensus, the style of

Fascist modernism, and a radical revision of historical consciousness.”149 For its period audience, she claims, the show reconciled “the contradiction between the movement’s revolutionary rhetoric and the conservatism of the actual regime.” Braun focuses on the imposing yet visually complex exhibition rooms designed by Sironi and others to portray the MDRF as a total work of art (fig. 12). The impact is especially strong when compared with the exhibition design of the

Quadriennale (figs. 13-14). She argues that through relief sculpture, stylized typography, photomontage, and the architecture itself, the MDRF realized the ambitions of a truly Fascist art:

[It] evinces the Fascist strategy of ensuring collective reception by devising a palimpsest

of historical and cultural references so ubiquitous and popular, broad and interconnected,

that the intended message could not but be resonant to most of the people most of the

time. This guaranteed that all avenues of interpretation would lead back to Rome—the

Third Rome of Fascism.150

Braun thus deconstructs the MDRF’s function as a totalizing spectacle, designed to immerse and overwhelm, and so eliminate any space for freethinking dialogue or historical objectivity. Like the Fascist art system more generally, and Fascist ideology as a whole, this was an intentional strategy aimed at securing consensus, not an attempt to “cover up an unstable ideological core.”151

The show’s function as a kind of visual manifesto for the Fascist regime is clearly evidenced by the façade constructed for its exhibition space (fig. 15). Adalberto Libera and

Mario De Renzi designed a new entrance for the Palace of Expositions that completely redefined the Beaux-Arts style building (fig. 16).152 The façade is composed of three imposing metallic

37! blocks, the central one in “blood-red,” as Braun notes. The three pillars of this portion are transformed into gigantic fasces, with sleek and stylized lines. In front of the geometric forms and symbolic pillars is a kind of graphic architecture, the title of the exhibition presented in large block type. Although it contains a dynamic combination of words, symbols, and pure geometric forms, this entrance only begins to suggest the visual complexity present within the exhibition

(fig. 12). As a whole, the façade presents an image of modernist monumentality and violence.

Moreover, because it preserves the structure of the triumphal arch that formed the center of the old façade, the building emphasizes the Fascist regime’s connection to the Roman glory of the past. In this way, it responds to Sironi’s hope for Fascist art and Fascism in general: “A style of life that broke with the past at the same time that it availed itself of any and all historical signifiers and signifying practices in the creation of a new totality.”153

Faced with this imposing display that sought to transform the Italian state, its history, and its present reality, Morandi’s art might seem “self-indulgent,” or not “socially useful.”154

However, some critics, for example Ugo Ojetti and Umbro Apollonio, realized that the simplicity and purity of Morandi’s work was like a breath of air amidst the suffocating rhetoric of Fascism.

Apollonio wrote of Morandi’s exhibition at the third Quadriennale: “When it is authentic, fantasy does not invent reasons, but it discovers elemental truths…with a lyrical breath that reaches things deep within.”155 At the same time, the balance of tradition and modernity in Morandi’s work can be considered in line with currents of Fascist ideology. Although its relationship to

Fascism in a larger context is more nuanced, as Marianna Aguirre argues, Morandi’s art in the early 1930s was directly opposed to the strategy of the MDRF: the show’s “diversity in terms of style and media as well as the mass appeal it sought clashed with the intimate nature of Giorgio

Morandi’s production dating to that year.”156 Aguirre points to a landscape and a still life, both

38! from 1932 (figs. 17-18). In her view, the landscape, which depicts “flat planes” of color in a series of thin washes with visible brush strokes, feels “unfinished and borders on abstraction.”157

See reads the still life as “an incomplete picture of the entire arrangement,” composed of

“fragments of other vessels [that] subvert its status as a still life.”158 Given the MDRF’s focus on large-scale works and public spectacle, Janet Abramowicz sees this small still life as a bold gesture of opposition: “One certainly admires Morandi for the courage that it must have taken the same year of the Mostra della rivoluzione Fascista to make a painting consisting primarily of a single bottle…This painting is charged with as much imagination as anything that came out of

Italy during the ventennio.”159 However, Abramowicz also points out that the work was never exhibited publicly until the 1990s. This fact succinctly captures Morandi’s relationship with the

MDRF. Even if he did oppose the national spectacle and Fascist policy that the exhibition embodied, he never made a public statement against it. Nevertheless, Morandi’s distant and guarded response is a clear sign of his uneasiness concerning the exhibition.

The Mostra della rivoluzione Fascista was an explicitly political showpiece. It literally transformed the exhibition space, at other times used by Morandi, into a propaganda tool.

Although Morandi did not protest the MDRF directly, he had no public relationship with the show, and he articulated a kind of private opposition to its principles through his artwork.

Because Morandi was disillusioned with the political climate of art in Italy as expressed by the

MDRF, he focused largely on international exhibitions during the 1930s. Yet, as the next section explores, his choice to exhibit in Fascist shows abroad supported the nationalist aims of Fascism in an important way.

Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Paintings, 1935-36

39! Janet Abramowicz observes that, “in the years between the 1930 Biennale and the 1939

Quadriennale, Morandi exhibited more frequently outside Italy than in his own country.”160 In particular, she notes the Carnegie International Exhibition of Paintings, in Pittsburg (held in

1930, ‘33, ‘36, and ‘39), and the Golden Gate International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, in

San Francisco in 1939, concurrent with Morandi’s retrospective at the Quadriennale.161 As mentioned above, Morandi sent one work from the important 1937-38 series (fig. 8) to San

Francisco instead of including it with his other works in Rome.162 Decisions like this reveal that

Morandi did not see foreign exhibitions as secondary venues. In fact, exhibitions held outside of

Italy entailed a different set of political, even diplomatic, concerns. Looking outside of Italy during a period of increased racial and national essentialism, even when performed under the auspices of a state exhibition, implied a refusal of autarchy and nationalism. To explore these issues, I will consider an exhibition of exclusively Italian art, organized with the sponsorship of the Fascist government, the Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Paintings, which toured the

United States between 1935 and 1936 and included two works by Morandi.163 Instead of private shows that focused on contemporary art in general, like the Carnegie or the Golden Gate, this exhibition served as cultural publicity for the Fascist regime.

A comparison between the third Quadriennale and this US touring show serves to highlight the important differences in Fascist political and cultural policy between 1936 and

1939, and to contextualize the significance of a statement of artistic autonomy at that time. The

Racial Laws, passed in 1938, launched the issue of “racial identity” to the forefront of the cultural debate, and empowered critics to denounce artists as “degenerate,” “Bolsehvist,”

“Jewish,” and “un-Italian.”164 By submitting to national and internationals shows, Morandi implicated himself in this debate. Specifically in the case of the 1935-1936 Exhibition of

40! Contemporary Italian Paintings, his art was used as a form of national promotion, cultural diplomacy, and even propaganda. International exhibitions can be a way to gain critical recognition, while avoiding charged polemics at home. However, allowing your work to represent your country abroad sends a message of support that is potentially stronger than an internal boycott. This seems to indicate that Morandi was not absolutely averse to using his art in the service of the national image. Rather, it was during the specific moment of 1939, three years after the end of the show in America, when the idea of nationalism and Fascism began to sour for

Morandi. Again, Morandi’s engagement with the Fascist regime was subtle and complex. In order to identify the message that Morandi actually supported by participating in the international show, it is necessary to explore the ways in which it was presented and received by its American audience.

The exhibition was conceived by Dario Sabatello, a young journalist, art-critic, and gallery owner, and William Heil, director of the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, in order to promote “the development of a better understanding between the Italian nation and the Americans…through the eternal medium of the arts.”165 Sabatello was a spirited and enterprising promoter of modern art. In fact, while serving as the director of the newly renovated

Galleria di Roma, Sabatello got into a fist-fight with conservative Fascist official Giuseppe

Pensabene, who had interrupted Sabatello’s speech at the opening of a new exhibition with derogatory and anti-Semitic comments about Amedeo Modigliani’s Red Nude (1917). Along with work by Modigliani, the exhibition featured art by Morandi, de Chirico, Carrà, and De Pisis.

This was a costly incident for Sabatello, the altercation ultimately cost him his position at the gallery. But it also serves to illustrate his passionate commitment to Italian modernism and his position against anti-Semitism.166 The 1936 show that Sabatello organized with Heil was

41! composed of ninety paintings by twenty-nine different artists. It traveled to eleven different US cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Denver, St. Paul, Memphis, New

York City, and St. Louis. Aside from San Francisco and New York, these were cities unaccustomed to large exhibitions of international modern art. For the most part, the show was housed in local museums, but in St. Paul it was located in the fine arts pavilion of the Minnesota

State Fair.167 The diversity of venues was necessary to achieve the show’s aim of widespread cultural exposure, but it posed challenges for communicating the show’s intended message.

The exhibition was fundamentally misread by its American audience. It was intended to assert the unique national identity of Italian art, and, at a political level, to convey the uniquely favorable creative climate that Fascism was creating in Italy.168 However, instead of an artistic statement, it became an ethnographic study of Italian culture. Sergio Cortesini claims that the exhibition worked against the goals of Fascist officials who were trying to emphatically assert the national and racial character of Italian art. Although it prompted renewed comparison between Italian and American art, the exhibition did not separate Italian contemporary art from the “mythic” image of the Italian Renaissance or distinguish it from European modernism in general. Furthermore, he asserts, it opened the door for later exhibitions of Italian art in America, which showed many of these same works in a depoliticized context, or in the context of

European modernism more generally.169

However, the exhibition served the Fascist cultural project in other ways, which Cortesini does not acknowledge. Most importantly, it homogenized Italian modernism, uniting diverse styles under the unified banner of Fascist Art, and it equated Italian culture with its politics, creating a cohesive national image. For instance, in the Los Angeles Times, Sabatello was presented as “Il Duce’s friend,” while at the Minnesota State Fair, young girls were recruited to

42! dress in traditional Italian costume and pose with the works, as if the paintings were prize- winning turnips or homemade loaves of bread (figs. 19-21).170 Although this presentation undermined the importance and sophistication of the artworks, it also served to reinforce the image of an inherent cultural identity, expressed just as naturally through food as through painting. The association with rural culture unintentionally helped to cement art as part of the

Italian national identity. If not entirely distinct from the rest of Europe, it was an essential cultural export. In this sense, Morandi was a perfect ambassador, even if three years later or four years earlier the idea of coming out in support of nationalistic art was not to his liking. Praised for its simplicity and purity, his art had also been described as “genuine,” as “homemade as

[Bolognese] bread with oil.”171 While Morandi could not have known that the show would be received in this way, it did not stop him from submitting to other international shows or from working with Sabatello in the future.172

Morandi’s experience with this US touring show serves to illustrate that his form of artistic resistance was conducted within certain boundaries. He was willing to work in the service of a Fascist national art in certain instances. As stated above, exhibiting within the framework provided the regime was unavoidable and did not necessarily imply agreement with its policies.173 However, Morandi’s patience with political polemics was finite. He rarely offered direct praise or support for the regime and he did not hesitate to chart his own course when possible.

Conclusion: The art of being in between

What is the image of Morandi that emerges from this discussion of exhibitions? In 1932, he was notably absent from the Mostra della rivoluzione Fascista in Rome, a powerful statement of national propaganda. However, in 1936, supporting the image of the Fascist regime

43! internationally was acceptable. By 1939, perhaps influenced by the recently passed Racial Laws and the imminent threat of war, nationalist statements were again something Morandi avoided. Is this an evolution of opinion? Is Morandi simply staying out of the way and avoiding any absolute statement, either against or in favor of the regime? Morandi’s brief autobiographical essay, published in 1928, affirmed his faith in the project of the Fascist regime. However, his complex participation in the state’s artistic project shows that, while he might have been faithful to

Fascism at the start, he was careful and deliberate in his demonstrated support. Fascist exhibitions were vital for Morandi’s career; he used them to gain prominence both at home and abroad but avoided the most nationalistic and zealous shows. In this sense, Morandi is not isolated or unique. Rather, his manufactured image of isolation and purity was simply one strategy to negotiate a troubled and often contradictory time. As Abramowicz writes, the “need for solitude that Morandi had described in L’Assalto as being essential to his art did not keep him from participating in new venues or making new connections.”174

Tommaso Baris offers a useful discussion of the social framework of Fascism, which can be applied to artists, in general, and to Morandi, in particular. Instead of consent to party tenants,

Baris focuses on participation and mobilization, a mixture of “voluntary enlistment from below” and “recruitment conducted vertically from above,” that depended primarily on the middle class.175 In this sense, Morandi’s personal beliefs, or his intentions, are less relevant than the actions he took in relation to the Fascist regime. Baris argues that a youthful core of middle-class supporters secured Fascism’s place in the early days, and in turn they saw their own social standing rise.176 Morandi certainly fits into this group. As a young, well-educated, middle class citizen, he benefitted from Fascism, receiving exhibition space, jury appointments, and even a teaching position at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Bologna.177 Although he fell out of step with

44! the “totalitarian turn” of the second half of the 1930s, with its emphasis on masculine conquest, military expansion, and anti-Semitism, Morandi remained “mobilized” in the service of the

Fascist cultural project through his participation in its institutions and exhibitions. Baris’s analysis helps to show that Morandi’s engagement with Fascist institutions is more important than his consent to its policies.

Similarly, Michel de Certeau’s notions of strategy and tactics provide a productive way to consider Morandi’s seemingly contradictory relationship with the exhibition system. De Certeau is primarily concerned with the ways that consumers make use of forms of cultural production

(commercial and literary texts, advertizing, television). Everyday consumers subvert institutional strategies of control by using the elements of the dominant order for their own ends:

Although they are composed with vocabularies of established languages…and although

they remain subordinated to the prescribed syntactical forms (temporal modes of

schedules, paradigmatic orders of spaces, etc.), the trajectories [of use] trace out the ruses

of other interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems in

which they develop.178

We can think of Morandi’s use of exhibitions in a similar framework because of the power relations at play in each example. Although Morandi was actively producing his own content, he occupied a marginal position with respect to the state, one that fits the “unrecognized” and subordinate status of de Certeau’s subjects. In particular, de Certeau conceives of the power dynamic as a difference in the ownership of the space for social action and in the dependence on time: “Strategies are able to produce, tabulate, and impose these spaces, when those operations take place, whereas tactics can only use, manipulate, and divert these spaces,” they are

45! opportunistic and isolated actions.179 Borrowing from de Certeau, we can say that Morandi used a variety of tactics to navigate the state-controlled space of the national exhibition.

Like Baris, de Certeau acknowledges the complexity of individual intention and agency—not all actions are coherent or thought-through:

Unrecognized producers…trace “indeterminate trajectories” that are apparently

meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated

space through which they move. They are sentences that remain unpredictable within the

space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems.180

However, De Certeau also explains how this variety of different, even conflicting “ways of operating,” or what he terms “making do,” is an empowering response for weak actors. He describes a North African immigrant to Paris, who “insinuates into the system imposed on him” practices of his community of origin:

He superimposes [these two sets of practices] and, by that combination, creates for

himself a space in which he can find ways of using the constraining order of the place or

of the language. Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which

lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By

an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from his situation.181

As his actions demonstrate, Morandi was well versed in this “art of being in between.” Although de Certeau does not discuss Fascist Italy directly, he does describe a mass society in which all

“consumers are transformed into immigrants. The system in which they move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining for them ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere. There is no longer an elsewhere.”182 Although this is de Certeau’s vision of a possible future capitalist society, it is also applicable to the totalizing system of

46! Fascism. Working in the context of an all-encompassing syndicate system, Morandi was able to express his own artistic vision only on the terms dictated by the state. While we cannot negate the political implications of Morandi’s participation, it is possible to consider the artist’s varied response to Fascist exhibitions as a subversion of the intentions of the regime. Rather than supporting or opposing the regime or Fascist ideology, Morandi could use the opportunity for his own ends. In this consideration, Morandi’s experience with Fascist exhibitions reveals the complex relationship between participation and resistance.

47! Chapter Two – Aesthetics, Rebirth, and Resistance:

Comparing two readings of Morandi’s art

“Fascism is a political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism.”

– Roger Griffin (2003)183

As the previous chapter argues, Morandi was involved professionally with the Fascist state. In this chapter, I will examine two readings of Morandi’s aesthetics that engage with his relationship to Fascist ideology. In particular, I will use Roger Griffin’s theorization of Fascism as a paradigm of rebirth and regeneration, what he calls “palingenesis.” In his understanding,

Fascism began as a “genuinely revolutionary form of nationalism,” which sought “to bring about a radical renewal of [the nation’s] social, political and cultural life as part of what was widely imagined to be the new era being inaugurated in Western civilization.”184 The Italian Fascist state, according to Griffin, formed in the 1920s around “the vision of the nation’s imminent rebirth from decadence.”185 Summarizing Griffin’s work, Mark Antliff notes the “Janus-faced nature of Fascism’s regenerative nationalism: to reinvigorate the body politic, Fascists looked beyond a decadent present to past eras, but they did not advocate a nostalgic return” to the past.186 Instead, he argues, they sought a “radically new society, fully integrated with twentieth- century industrialism and technology.”187 Fascism offered a vision of transformative rebirth that remained consistent with the past, in other words, a changed expression of an authentic national essence.

! 48 This chapter will engage with two prominent scholars who take different approaches to

Morandi’s work: one formalist and the other focused on political and social context. Each has origins that date to Morandi’s contemporaries. Emily Braun articulates the contextual reading.

She uses the writings of critics, notably Ardengo Soffici, Mino Maccari, and Leo Longanesi, associated with the Strapaese (super-country) movement, to connect Morandi to the politics of his time (figs. 22-24). Strapaese was a specific faction of Italian Fascism that championed rural traditions and regionalist activism. Its members remained true to the founding ideals of Fascism but reacted against the industrialization, Roman focus, and mass spectacles of the dominant factions of the regime. In Braun’s analysis, Morandi’s professional association with this group from 1927 to 1932, and his personal allegiances with its members, which extended well beyond that period, illustrates the artist’s nuanced support of Fascism.188 The formalist reading comes from Cesare Brandi, an influential critic and close friend of Morandi (fig. 25). Brandi’s first essay on Morandi was published in 1939, just a few years after the end of Morandi’s Strapaese period. That work established the focus on form that dominated critical understanding of the artist and provoked Braun’s revisionist scholarship.189 Brandi describes a pure, simple, modest, and moral art that runs counter to the bombastic rhetoric and propaganda of the Fascist regime.

Reevaluating Brandi’s framework, I argue that Morandi’s art takes part in a form of cultural resistance. This understanding is reinforced by Morandi’s associations with a circle of anti-

Fascist intellectuals, including Brandi himself, that gathered in Bologna during the later years of the 1930s.190

It is easy to think of readings by Braun and Brandi as conflicting camps in an understanding of Morandi: the artist was either politically apolitical or he was caught up in an important branch of Fascist culture. This is a misleading opposition. First of all, the

! 49 interpretations focus on different periods in Morandi’s career. Braun studies the Strapaese years

(1927-1932), while Brandi focuses on the late 1930s. Rather than showing a polarization of scholarly opinion on Morandi’s work, the contextual and formalist interpretations reveal a progression in Morandi’s attitudes and associations as the restrictions imposed by the Fascist state intensified. Second, as I will argue, the interpretations share a debt to the work of period philosopher, Benedetto Croce (1886-1952). Although Braun writes many years after Croce’s death, and her methodology and focus on social context contrast markedly with Croce’s approach, her work relates to Croce’s thought in important ways. Specifically, her premise that art making was, in itself, a political act for the members of Strapaese is distinctly Crocean.

Brandi, a contemporary of Croce, draws more heavily and more directly from the philosopher’s work, positioning Morandi’s reserved forms as statements of individual expression and moral resistance. Because of this common ground, the contradictions and gaps between readings provide fertile ground for discussion. By comparing Braun’s reading to a new analysis of

Brandi’s work, one grounded in Croce’s aesthetics, I will investigate the ways in which

Morandi’s artistic choices both supported and challenged Fascist aesthetic conventions and social dynamics.

A third scholar, Mariana Aguirre, begins to interrogate the divide between these two readings, considering Morandi’s specific formal choices in a social and political context. Her analysis of Morandi’s works in the 1910s and 1920s provides a model for my study of Morandi in the 1930s. Aguirre helps to show that the conflict between Braun and Brandi is not so extreme, after all. Just like Morandi’s selection of exhibitions, discussed in the previous chapter, the artist’s aesthetics strike a balance between extremes of resistance and compliance. In his

1964 monograph, Francesco Arcangeli described the nuanced relationship between Morandi, the

! 50 Strapaese artists, and the Fascist regime in this way: “They were Fascists, but in a way that was so strange, so personal, so independent that their struggle for certain ideas was conducted as though it were a game without rules, perhaps even a slightly dangerous game: certainly, as far as conduct goes, it was an anti-conformist struggle.”191

Using Aguirre’s work as a model, I will explore the overlap between Brandi’s formal reading and Braun’s contextual analysis. This comparison considers Morandi’s formal choices as a struggle with the notion of subjectivity and individuality in a totalitarian state, but it also acknowledges that his mix of tradition and modernity, both in style and in subject matter, mirrors dominant Fascist ideology. The dialogue between Brandi and Braun ultimately helps to clarify the ways in which Morandi’s art “performed” nationalism even as it reacted against the aesthetic and social climate of Fascist Italy. Ultimately, viewing Morandi’s formal choices in their social and political context produces an image of reinvention, repositioning, development, and change.

As Flavio Fergonzi points out, Morandi’s critical position shifted from chauvinistic Strapaesano to Crocean anti-Fascism in the space of a few short years during the 1930s.192 The transformation was so complete that Morandi was briefly arrested in 1943 for his associations with writer and political activist, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti (1910-1987) (fig. 26-27).193 In other words,

Morandi’s artistic and critical development during the 1930s conforms to Griffin’s palingenic vision of Fascism. Morandi was able to reinvent himself during and after the Fascist era while maintaining a consistent image of his artistic goals.

The Aesthetics of Benedetto Croce

The philosopher, Benedetto Croce, was a dominant force in Italian culture in the Fascist era. His work offers a vital framework for understanding the scholarship on Morandi. In particular, Croce’s work on aesthetics, published when Morandi was only twelve, was a crucial

! 51 reference for critics during Morandi’s career. I will explore Croce’s philosophy, but in a historical, not a theoretical sense. The importance of Croce for my argument is not the validity or contemporary relevance of his philosophy, but the impact that his ideas had on the culture of his time. Admittedly, it is dangerous to apply a theoretical lens after the fact. Arcangeli, for instance, warns against retroactively applying Antonio Gramsci’s writing to the activities of period artists:

“During the tragic suspension that was the war, the best artists knew how to maintain, at least, a passionate individual inquiry into the values of existence; while today they would claim that they had, in advance, read Gramsci, and that, caught up in that storm, they thought to apply the models of scientific and rational Marxism.”194 Nevertheless, Croce is particularly relevant to a discussion of Morandi. Morandi was directly exposed to Croce’s writing through the magazine

La Voce (1908-1916), which published essays by the philosopher, and Crocean thought was foundational for Morandi’s critics and colleagues, from Strapaesano Mino Maccari to formalist

Cesare Brandi.195

Croce’s activities were diverse and far-reaching. In 1902, he published his first major work on aesthetics, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General

[Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale]. The following year, he founded a philosophic and critical journal, La critica, (1903-1944) in Naples, with a younger philosopher,

Giovanni Gentile (1875-1944) (figs. 28-29). Croce was appointed Senator for life in 1910, and later Minister of Education under Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti, in 1921. However, after the

March on Rome just one year later, Mussolini selected Croce’s former colleague, Gentile, to replace him in that office.196 This was a signal of the growing conflict between the two philosophers. As David Roberts writes, “Croce and Gentile were clearly peas in a pod” on certain issues, namely the history-making potential of individual human beings, but they differed

! 52 on others, and they began to differentiate themselves publically close to the beginning of the

First World War.197 In later years, Gentile became the leading intellectual of the Fascist Party while Croce developed into its most powerful critic and a dedicated champion of neo-liberalism.

Although Croce was never explicitly censored or arrested during the Fascist ventennio, he was under strict surveillance, his work was removed from official circulation, and his name was absent from major newspapers. Through his relationship with La critica, Croce was able to maintain a public dialogue with leading Italian and international scholars. This journal, together with his literary fame abroad, ensured that Croce was too prominent a figure for Mussolini to silence without consequence. In his personal notes of 1934, Croce himself speculated on other reasons for the regime’s relative tolerance of his work. He may have been preserved as a token dissident in order to demonstrate the party’s acceptance of dialogue and free expression, in much the same way that Mussolini permitted a diversity of artists to operate. Or perhaps the traditional respect afforded to literary figures in Italy, or simply Croce’s advanced age, afforded him some protection. 198

In his Aesthetic of 1902, Croce expounds on the autonomy of art. Here the roots of his later political ideas are clearly visible. The central point of Croce’s aesthetic theory is that art is

“intuition,” which he defines variously as the “undifferentiated unity of perception of the real and the simple image of the possible,” and the “lack of distinction between reality and unreality, the image in its value as a mere image.”199 For Croce, the implications of this definition are that art is outside the realms of both morality and utility, and thus has no didactic function:

Art, considered in its proper nature, has nothing in common with utility and with pleasure

and with pain as such… But intuition, being a theoretical act, is opposed to anything

practical, and in truth, art, as in the age-old observation, is not born of an act of will: the

! 53 good will that defines an honest man does not define the artist. And since it is not born of

an act of will, it also avoids all moral discrimination… An artistic image may portray an

act morally laudable or reprehensible, but the image itself, in that it is an image, is neither

morally laudable nor reprehensible.200

In practice, however, Croce acknowledges that artists must engage with morality in their artistic production: “If art is beyond morality, the artist, who is neither on this nor that side of morality but under the domain of art, being a man, cannot avoid the responsibilities of men; and he must consider art itself – the art that is not, nor ever will be morality – as a mission, practiced as a priesthood.”201 This passage seems almost lifted from a period essay on Morandi. Indeed, Brandi writes in his 1939 essay, “And this work, gradually refining itself but never becoming exhaustedly over-refined, in its patrician reserve, can be held up as exemplary in probity and moral self-awareness: if taken as a work of art tout court, it is among the finest of our time.”202

The Strapaese critics, too, valued Morandi’s almost saintly patience and “religious spirit.”203 The similarities in all three statements attest to the relevance of Croce’s philosophy to a study of

Morandi, in particular, and to its profound influence on the critical discourse of the time.

In 1925, both Croce and Gentile began to apply their philosophies directly to Italian society. At a meeting of Fascist cultural organizations in Bologna, Giovanni Gentile wrote the

“Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals,” which was signed by the future Fascist minister, Giuseppe

Bottai, F.T. Marinetti, the leading Futurist, Margherita Sarfatti, patron of the Novecento, and

Ardengo Soffici, Morandi’s friend and mentor in Strapaese. Other signatories included playwright, Luigi Pirandello and poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti.204 In this, and subsequent works,

Gentile articulated a philosophy of totalitarianism that understood collective authority as essential to combating indifference and to promoting ethical behavior among individuals.205 As

! 54 David Roberts explains, Gentile envisioned an “ethical totalitarian state” that was a nurturing force for individual creativity: “What he offered was a philosophy of action, even a kind of activism…his novel way of bringing together individuality, freedom, responsibility, participation, power, and action led him to claim that we require a totalitarian state to exercise our human capacities in the modern world.”206 Gentile’s perspective is clearly evident in a later document, which he co-authored with Benito Mussolini in 1932, The Doctrine of Fascism:

Liberalism denied the state in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of

the State as expressing the real essence of the individual. And if liberty is to be the

attribute of living men and not of abstract dummies invented by individualistic liberalism,

then Fascism stands for liberty, and for the only liberty worth having, the liberty of the

State and of the individual within the State. The Fascist conception of the State is all

embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual values can exist, much less have

value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State—a synthesis and a

unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and potentates the whole life of a

people.207

For Gentile, the individual and the state, politics and culture, were not opposing forces; they were necessarily linked.

In direct response to Gentile, Croce authored the “Protest against the Manifesto of Fascist

Intellectuals,” also known as “The Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals” (1925), and attracted his own set of prominent supporters, notably Luigi Einaudi, the future President of the Republic

(1948-1955), and the poet, Eugenio Montale.208 Morandi did not sign either of these documents, distancing himself from explicit association with both extremes. In his statement, Croce objects to the integration of political and intellectual culture:

! 55 Truly, if intellectuals, that is lovers of science and art, as citizens, exercise their right and

fulfill their duty with membership in a political party and faithfully serve it; as

intellectuals they have only one duty, with the work of investigation and criticism and

with the creation of art, to devote themselves to elevate equally all men and all parties to

a higher spiritual sphere, so that these can fight their necessary battles with ever more

beneficial effects.209

Roberts again provides an important key to interpretation. He claims that, “the divergence between Croce and Gentile turned on the form of our collective, world-making action, and, still more fundamentally, on the scope for freedom and power in the immanent historicist world that both posited.”210 Gentile privileged collective action, while Croce maintained his faith in individual morality, tolerance, and pluralism.211

Later in 1925, Croce joined the Liberal Party, giving numerous speeches at their political councils and becoming one of their most prominent representatives in the Senate.212 Was this explicit political action a betrayal of his arguments in the counter-manifesto? Croce wanted to categorically distinguish art from politics: “To cross these limits of the office assigned to them, to contaminate politics and literature, politics and science is an error.”213 He held that the contamination of these spheres under the Fascist state was already producing “deplorable violence and insolence and the suppression of freedom of the press.”214 Although it might appear like Croce was working against his own ideals by participating in politics, the contradiction can be reconciled if we understand how Croce viewed the integration and interdependence of different forms of human action.

Roberts points out that Croce’s “insistence on the autonomy of art invited the mistaken assumption, on the part of critics and proponents alike, that his aim was to defend ‘art for art’s

! 56 sake.’”215 According to Roberts, “the espousal of ‘art for art’s sake’” was “the antithesis of what

Croce’s ‘aestheticism’ in fact involved.”216 Croce’s “wider point,” he claims, “was that ‘art’ is a moment in human activity, a moment that cannot be reduced to cognitive, moral, or utilitarian response.”217 In other words, artistic expression is distinct from other forms, but not isolated or removed from the rest of human action. In Aesthetics, as well as in his other works, Croce emphasizes the contingent nature of history, describing a kind of “radical immanence” in which we both belong to and shape our particular historical moment.218 This position articulates both the need for history-making actions, and the responsibility for how that history develops. Thus

Croce’s historical understanding takes on an ethical component.219 In Croce’s view, art is capable of influencing society and of making history. He views art as both a liberating and a purifying force: “By working on our impressions we liberate ourselves. By bringing them as objects before our minds, we detach them from ourselves and raise ourselves above them…

Activity is a liberator precisely because it drives out passivity.”220 Although artistic expression is beyond moral judgment, it is not something conducted in isolation. To this point, Croce held that, “no man could escape politics, lest politics would disturb him in the very heart of his private life.”221 In fact, Croce divides all activity into four levels, each dependent on the one preceding it: aesthetic and logical, in the theoretical sphere; economic and moral, in the practical. In

Croce’s mind, aesthetics is a kind of common denominator, a universal principle that is the foundation for all other parts of life.222

Fabio Fernando Rizi declares that, “In the struggle against Fascism, Croce’s most important contribution was his intellectual activity. In this respect he assumed a position of leadership, and his influence was unmatched.”223 Because he did not become an underground dissident or an intellectual in exile, Croce remained an integral part of the cultural discourse,

! 57 using his position within Fascist society in order to change it.224 Through his writing and his activities, he positioned intellectual action as political action. To the Fascist rhetoric of “to believe, to obey, to fight,” Croce opposed his own liberal principles. He “preached freedom, defended the dignity of man, as a free agent, and urged individual decision and personal responsibility.”225 However, Croce’s ultimate legacy is conflicted. As occurred with Morandi’s work, Croce’s theories enabled different, even opposing interpretations. His argument for the autonomy and separation between art and politics could be used by the Fascist regime to negate the reactionary potential of art. At the same time, the notion of cultural production as an essential human action, one equally capable of making history as political action, empowered artists to change their society. Croce’s influence faded slowly after the fall of Fascism, but his ideas are still relevant and important for later scholars.226 As the divergent readings of Morandi clearly illustrate, Croce offers a frame that enables art to be considered both dependent on and yet opposed to politics.

Braun’s Contextual Reading

In a 1995 essay, Emily Braun seeks to clarify Morandi’s ties to Fascism through his association with the Strapaese movement.227 Modeling their position on the provincial activism that led to Mussolini’s March on Rome and on the Florentine literary avant-garde, these artists and intellectuals promoted small-town life, rural tradition, and a return to the founding ideals of

Fascism. Artist and critic Ardengo Soffici was the spiritual leader of the group, but its main proponents were critic Mino Maccari, who was connected with the Florentine journal, Il

Selvaggio (The Wild One/The Primitive; 1924-43), and writer Leo Longanesi, who published the journal, L’Italiano (1926-42), in Bologna.228 A still life from 1930 illustrates the qualities that these critics found so exciting in Morandi’s art (fig. 30). The work features a set of nine

! 58 household objects, among them a candlestick, a pitcher, a box, a knife, and two long-necked bottles, arranged into two rows on a narrow ledge. It is hard to identify the objects exactly because of the economy of Morandi’s representation and his thick impasto technique. Moreover, one of the objects is only half visible within the frame. The work is unified by its earthy color scheme, ranging from pale yellow to deep brown through various shades of ochre. Together with the thick application of paint, which clearly shows individual brush strokes and thus highlights the artist’s process, these colors lend the objects a handmade and rustic quality. At the same time, the flattened space and geometric composition, marked by a regular alternation of positive and negative space, are distinctly modernist. A similar composition, from 1923, was published in volume nine of Longanesi’s journal, L’Italiano, in 1931 (fig. 31).

To the critics of Strapaese, everything from Morandi’s subject matter, to his color choices, his quiet compositions, and his almost religious working method, with “subtle and endless adjustments,” embodied the atmosphere of the provinces, and of Bologna in particular.229

The relationship of the artist to his hometown, with its quiet streets, numerous towers, and abundance of red brick, is particularly evident in the canvases of the Strapaese years. In fact, critics like Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti and Siri Hustvedt have explicitly related the long-necked bottles of Morandi’s still lifes to the towers and churches of Bologna’s skyline.230 Hustvedt in particular discusses depictions of the city of Bologna as a votive offering or background in altarpieces and other forms of Bolognese religious art (figs 32-35). Emily Braun writes:

For the Strapaese, Morandi’s art exemplified habit as well as tenacity, and his art

manifested the value of old and ordinary in the face of new and novel… Morandi’s

relentless focus on the commonplace, immediate, and small was a means of keeping in

! 59 touch with down-to-earth, lived experience and avoiding the false grandeur and vulgar or

romantic tastes of the bourgeois.231

Soffici, Maccari, Longanesi, and others did praise Morandi for his sophistication as a modernist, but always in a way that maintained their focus on the essential, traditional core of the medium.

While Morandi’s essentialized forms seemed “genuine” and as “homemade as bread made with oil,” they were also “architectonic,” logical, and disciplined.232 His art captured the “plastic essence of the whole,” as Soffici wrote, with what another critic and artist Achille Lega, termed a

“conscientiousness that is rare in these difficult times.”233 The balance of tradition and modernity in Morandi’s work fits in line with the values of Strapaese. As contemporary Italian scholar,

Alessandro Del Puppo, observes:

Soffici was obsessively searching for an artist: an Italian, classical, even-tempered, artist,

with the means to confront the models of figurative tradition with a well watched and

original expressivity [un’espressività sorvegliata e non epigonica], able equally to refuse

the pandering of the most superficial ‘modernity’ as to espouse a definitive balance [di

sposare una misura definitiva], modern but not rhetorical; capable of an attack [un

affondo] on the traditions of form. He found it in Morandi, and he urged the painter to

furnish Maccari’s paper with etchings and drawings.234

What Soffici found was an artist with a style that was remarkably amenable to his own.

Mariana Aguirre has explored the artistic discourse between Soffici and Morandi during the Strapaese period.235 As Aguirre observes, although Soffici was not directly involved in the creation of Strapaese, his activity within the Florentine avant-garde and his journal, Lacerba

(1913-1915), were essential models for the younger founders of the movement. In his art and his writing, Soffici espoused the rural Tuscan values (toscanità) that inspired the populist violence

! 60 upon which the Fascist movement was based.236 Soffici and Morandi respected one another professionally, and they also became close friends. They began exchanging letters in 1923, and

Soffici purchased Morandi’s paintings from the 1928 Venice Biennale and the 1931

Quadriennale.237 Aguirre argues that Soffici led Morandi towards a renewed study of Cézanne, who was an important influence on both artists. For example, in 1927, both artists produced works with compositions similar to Cézanne’s House with Cracked Walls (1894), which features a narrow farmhouse overlooking a rugged mountain landscape (figs. 36-38). Morandi’s painting, which omits the protruding rocks and positions the house at an oblique angle, is much flatter than

Cézanne’s work but, as Flavio Fergonzi observes, it keeps the “sense of solitude and silence” of the original.238 Soffici’s work changes the scene more drastically, placing the viewer alongside the house, looking down. This was not Morandi’s first exposure to Cézanne, whose work was influential in Italian artistic circles and in Florence, in particular.239 Morandi’s painting is in fact a variation on an etching he made in 1925, and which he later published in Il Selvaggio, in 1928

(fig. 39).240 This chronological detail attests to the fact that Morandi was not simply following in

Soffici’s footsteps, but was forging his own path along a similar course. Even so, Soffici was an important promoter of Cézanne in Italy, and his ideas offered the lens through which many

Tuscan intellectuals interpreted the French artist.241 Aguirre points to two still lifes from 1920 that further illustrate Morandi’s independent but related focus (figs. 40-41). In 1920, Morandi would have been familiar with Soffici’s published writings, but the two had not yet met. Both works are studies in simplified forms and chiaroscuro lighting. In this, Morandi’s work goes further than his colleague’s. It eliminates strong hues and background geometric elements altogether, and it isolates each object in space to focus entirely on the delicate play of color tones and shadows.

! 61 The Strapaese idea of renovation grounded in tradition, which so attracted Soffici to

Morandi’s work, occupies a specific place within Fascist ideology. As in Roger Griffin’s

“palingenic” framework, Fascist politicians in general sought to reinvigorate Italian society through the injection of elements of the past.242 The members of Strapaese were at the reactionary end of this process. They sought to “counter a complete eradication of the past” by maintaining strong links with tradition.243 As Braun notes, Strapaese positioned itself as a “moral corrective” within the Fascist regime, one that could advocate for authentic Italian roots against industrialization and ceremonial fanfare.244 In the complex cultural maneuvering of the Fascist state, Strapaese served as a counterpoint to the Stracittà (super-city) and Novecento movements.

Although it was often critical of the dictator and of certain cadres of the regime, the movement, as an official part of Fascist culture, was crucial in legitimizing Mussolini’s cultural platform of tradition and nationalism.245 It also mirrored the national focus and the return to classical values that was occurring in the broader European context.246

Moreover, the sexist, often racist, caricatures and satirical cartoons that Mino Maccari produced for Il Selvaggio fit with the chauvinist stereotypes of Fascist culture. For example,

Cocktail (1932), uses female figures to contrast Strapaese’s traditional purity with the

“degenerate cosmopolitanism of Stracittà” (fig. 42).247 As Braun observes, by trafficking in these female stereotypes, the cartoon confines women to roles either as “maternal peasants or wanton sexual objects.”248 Morandi’s works do not carry this kind of explicit political content, but when presented in the same pages as cartoons like this, they become a part of the reactionary cultural discourse.249 Juxtaposed with Maccari’s drawings, reproductions of Morandi’s work seem like highbrow expressions of the same chauvinistic impulses. An engraving, Still life with Kerosene lamp, printed in Il Selvaggio just a few months after Maccari’s Cocktail shares a similar aesthetic

! 62 as Maccari’s drawing (fig. 43). Both works have a hand-made quality, with visible lines and pen or knife marks, simple forms, and geometric volumes. There is even an arrangement of bottles in

Maccari’s cartoon, although it appears on the side of the work meant to convey urbane decadence. Morandi’s compositions are not caricatures of a rustic household. However, his work seems very much at home in this context, and his essentialized forms lend themselves easily to essentialized notions of Italian national identity.

Braun admits that, “Strapaese was neither Morandi’s first nor last involvement with

Fascist culture. Indeed, it was impossible for any artist of the period not to work within the framework of the regime…But it was with Strapaese that Morandi had his most explicit affiliation, and in a series of articles his critical supporters deemed him ‘Strapaesano by race.’”250

Despite the tradition of post-war scholarship that “has done its utmost not to delve into his affiliation with Strapaese,” Braun argues that Morandi was an active part of the movement.251

She claims that his “intellectual integrity, sincerity, and uncompromising character” imply that his participation could only be whole-hearted and genuine, not for reasons of career-opportunism or personal loyalty.252 This statement is also relevant to the discussion of Morandi’s participation in Fascist exhibitions in the previous chapter. Similarly, Abramowicz recounts Morandi’s sincere and lasting friendship with Maccari and Longanesi: “Twenty-five years later Morandi recalled to me the nani di Strapaese [gnomes of Strapaese]253 and, with a glint in his eye reflecting sheer joy, remembered how they would make fun of and criticize the government, il Capo, and

Mussolini, as well as how they would laugh at themselves—all of which brought out his humor as well.”254 While Francesco Arcangeli, among others, says that Morandi did not “engage in active political participation” with the group, Braun counters that the group was never interested in political activism.255 With the exception of Maccari’s political caricatures, the “ideological

! 63 content could only be implicit.”256 Braun observes that Maccari himself defined the role of the group simply as, “cultural interventionism.”257 However, in Crocean fashion, this artistic expression can be considered, and was considered at the time, a political action. Braun quotes

Maccari: “There is nothing but art”; art is the “supreme intelligence of a people,” and the “value of the revolution.”258 From these remarks, Braun draws the conclusion that, “to argue, as some critics have, that Morandi was anti-Fascist because he removed himself from actual politics is to miss the point. For Strapaese, the very making and interpretation of art were forms of ideological commitment and critique, not vehicles of retreat to the ‘ivory tower.’”259 Although Braun differs drastically from Croce in her other points, and indeed, her study of context is directly opposed to

Croce’s focus on poetic expression, Braun’s understanding of art making as a fundamentally political act is firmly grounded in the work of Croce.

Understood in this way, Morandi’s artworks take on a complex significance. They are not

“political manifestoes…yet they were also more than mere essays in formalist abstraction.”260 In

Braun’s view, Morandi’s association with Strapaese “shows how images can be manipulated to a variety of ideological ends…to interpret [Morandi’s works] solely as tributes to autonomous pictorial values is to be party to a cultural amnesia that arose in the postwar years in reaction to the insidious reach of Fascist culture.”261 Braun’s article is a necessary contribution to the scholarship on Morandi. But, following her own logic, it does not offer a complete picture of the artist. Morandi’s work is interesting and important precisely because it had such a flexible and varied ideological context. I will complement Braun’s reading with an examination of the other prominent approach to Morandi’s work, exemplified by the work of Morandi’s contemporary,

Cesare Brandi.

Brandi’s Formal Reading

! 64 Just a few years after Morandi ended his association with the magazines of Strapaese,

Cesare Brandi authored a formalist reading of Morandi’s work. Brandi’s approach is important in a historiographic sense both because of its impact on subsequent scholarship and because of

Morandi’s favorable response to it. Marilena Pasquali notes the personal and intellectual affinity between artist and critic: “Morandi was in complete agreement with Brandi’s line of analysis, and confirms this in clear and simple words both in 1939 and, 22 years later, in November 1961, when he drops into a letter: ‘I have recently reread your old essay about me to which, dear

Brandi, there is little to be added.’”262 Pasquali contends that Morandi valued Brandi’s focus on his artistic development, signaled by the title of Brandi’s first essay, “Il Cammino di Morandi”

[Morandi’s Path, or Morandi’s Personal Journey]. In contrast, the younger Francesco Arcangeli authored a monograph that Morandi rejected, in part because it crafted an image of venerated stasis.263 Furthermore, Morandi and Brandi were close friends. In a letter of 1957, Morandi wrote to Brandi about sending invitations to an award ceremony where he was to be honored: “I have sent some names, those which I care most about. Naturally your name is first on the list.”264 The two men were part of a circle of young intellectuals that gathered in Bologna in the late 1930s, attracted by the city’s great university; Pasquali describes the city as a “hothouse which nurtured some of the finest intelligences in Italy.”265 This group also included the critic Giuseppe

Raimondi, Roberto Longhi, the art historian and future chair of the department at the University of Bologna, Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti, who co-founded the leftist Partito d’Azione [Action

Party], the author Giorgio Bassani, from Ferrara, and the poet Mario Luzi, who taught in nearby

Parma. The poet and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, of a younger generation, was later influenced by this circle. Morandi was the oldest of the group, and became a kind of mentor for the younger men.266 Although they were not bound together in any official capacity, Pasquali

! 65 argues that these young intellectuals “represented the important nucleus of Italy: its critical voice and inner strength and propulsion.”267

Brandi’s essay began the process of reading Morandi’s aesthetics as silent protest, a moral stand against totalitarianism and artistic propaganda, which continues to shape scholarly discourse. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Janet Abramowicz considers Morandi’s art to be anti-Fascist in comparison to the bombastic rhetoric of the period.268 Although she seeks to expand on their views, Emily Braun also acknowledges critics who see Morandi’s art as

“apolitical, if not implicitly anti-Fascist, because it is resolutely about nothing save the beauty of the brush.”269 In Brandi’s view, Morandi’s resistance to Fascism is connected to the cultural framework established by Croce. As Flavio Fergonzi writes:

A generation of cultured Italians, accustomed to looking at painting for the most part with

tools derived from Croce’s idealism, sprinkled, in the case of the younger ones, with

existentialism, found in Morandi’s spare still lifes and uncompromising Apennine

landscapes a sort of mute protest against the rhetorical humanism professed by the Fascist

regime.270

In other words, Morandi’s focus on forms can be considered political not only because he rejects overt Fascist content, but also because he articulates a competing vision of life, one grounded in

Croce’s ideas on individual action. Morandi’s work is more than a “negative” politics, or a politics of silences and omissions. In these spare canvases, Brandi reads a clear statement about creativity and self-expression.

In his 1939 essay, Brandi writes: “Nothing is less abstract, less detached from the world, less indifferent to pain, and less deaf to joy than these paintings, which seemingly retire to the margins of life and, from the shadows, relish the dusty storerooms of corners of the kitchen.”271

! 66 This seemingly retreatist, formal reading was rebuked by subsequent critics. Notably, Francesco

Arcangeli denounced it as “idealistic and metaphysical, besides being hermetic in its formulation.”272 Arcangeli, instead, felt “the moral obligation not to rush to Arcadia, as all have so far have done with [Morandi.]”273 Similarly, Mariana Aguirre says: “While Brandi’s approach illuminates Morandi’s reconciliation of plasticity and color, it has masked his art’s relationship to

Italian cultural and political debates, especially during the Fascist regime.”274 While these objections are justified, a close reading reveals the depth of Brandi’s interpretation. The passage quoted above begins:

Probably no one, before him, had spoken so intensely through the evocation of inanimate

objects; there is a quality in these Still Lifes, beyond their superlative figurative value, the

exquisite use of color, and the bold spatial solutions, which transcends not simply the

subject, but the very fact of being painting at all, and quietly attests to a human

dimension. At the moment in which his flasks and bottles affirm themselves before our

eyes, unforgettably and incomparably, their form yields to an inspiration which

dematerializes and deconstructs them and moves towards the directly human. Nothing is

less abstract, less detached from the world, less indifferent to pain, and less deaf to joy

than these paintings, which seemingly retire to the margins of life and, from the shadows,

relish the dusty storerooms of corners of the kitchen.275

Brandi’s formalism does not retreat into a world of aesthetics. Rather, his focus on formal elements illustrates the way that these works reveal the humanity of their creator. Although this is an argument that many critics and artists raise in support of abstraction, Brandi’s understanding differs from critics like Clement Greenberg, who read abstract forms as an expression of the subconscious. For Brandi, the “superlative figurative value” of the paintings,

! 67 their boldly understated form and color and the uniqueness that Morandi is able to find through repetition and variation, attest to Morandi’s ability to remain confident and sure of himself in a difficult time. Moreover, Brandi is also attuned to Morandi’s subject matter. He praises Morandi for dignifying humble, everyday objects, the contents of “dusty storerooms” and neglected cabinets. In Brandi’s view, this is just as important to Morandi’s expression of artistic humanity as his “exquisite use of color” and his “bold spatial solutions.” As Brandi’s adoptive son Vittorio

Brandi Rubio writes, the paintings, in both form and content, reveal Morandi’s “work and life- ethic: modest and dignified yet with a highly-sustained sense of self.”276

Later in his 1939 essay, Ceare Brandi discusses a 1920 still life; the same painting that

Aguirre uses to illustrate Morandi’s relationship to Cézanne and Soffici (fig. 40). Brandi poetically evokes the chiaroscuro of the work:

In proffering the objects as fragments of the natural world, the artist now seizes on a

phenomenal equivalence of all their aspects: the shadows have no less concrete reality

that the solid bodies, and the latter no more consistency than the shadows. Beyond this

appearance they have no incontrovertible evidence…objects can exchange their corporeal

quality with the shadows, the backlighting projecting them as dense and uncooperative:

as in a Still Life of 1920…with a background the colour of olive oil, while the objects

themselves, charred survivors, resist as if on a cold hearth. Eschewing any optical clarity,

the image manages to fix itself in the sudden, imprecise flux in which it springs from

consciousness, and which transfers radiant, intimately connective properties to the colour.

It is light which has lost its naturalistic autonomy, its spatial trajectory; no longer the

means to describe the plastic quality of objects, it becomes the essential quality of the

chromatic zones…The dualism between perspectival construction and chromatic

! 68 structure is thus reconciled, and from this phase on, all Morandi’s formal solutions will

be predicated on this point of fusion.277

Within this passage about the dissolution of light and form and the trajectory of Morandi’s style,

Brandi describes the painted objects as “charred survivors, [that] resist as if on a cold hearth.”

Again, he finds human emotion, a self-confident resilience, in Morandi’s technical mastery, formal choices, and subject matter. In general, Brandi argues that Morandi’s artworks “attempt to banish any naturalistic residue in order to offer the most genuine, most fleeting moment of emotion…Morandi finds an achieved sublimation and sheds the petty self, intent on contemplation.”278 In these paintings, Brandi finds an authentic humanity that is dignified, thoughtful, and strong.

Considered in light of Croce’s ideas on aesthetics and politics, this statement is pointedly anti-Fascist. Maria Mimita Lamberti argues that Morandi’s intellectual honesty, creative freedom, and his work’s “abstraction from the context of daily life [were] bound to appear, according to the model of the aesthetics of the philosopher Benedetto Croce, as…a lesson in the ethics of artistic activity in the face of political pressure.”279 Even Morandi’s contemporaries read Brandi’s formalist essays through this anti-Fascist lens. Younger artists, like the Milanese painter Gabriele Mucchi, looked to Morandi as a symbol of stalwart resistance. To Mucchi,

Morandi was:

A great example of the profession and integrity of the artist, however, in the midst of the

widespread, slipshod rush toward hierarchical approval which infects, not only young

artists, but even the masters of the twentieth century…with regard not so much to

painting but rather to the behavior of the artist, his intimism was at that time the only

mirror reflecting us in which we could regard ourselves without shame, together

! 69 delivering our moral integrity from that which, for many years, was our contaminated

limbo of passive intellectual resistance to Fascism. There was nothing else around.280

While Mucchi focuses as much on Morandi’s behavior as on his artworks, Carlo Ludovico

Ragghianti does not hesitate to connect Morandi’s formal choices directly to politics: “In other words, Morandi was certainly not unaware that his radical reduction of the world, preserving the appearances, was a removal [traslazione] and perhaps more, a revolution as silent (with respect, for example, to Cubism) as it was powerful, irrevocable and irreversible.”281 The fact that

Morandi was arrested briefly, in 1943, for his association with Ragghianti, seems to indicate that the Fascist authorities shared, or at least acknowledged, this political interpretation of Morandi’s activities.282 Even Francesco Arcangeli, who took so much issue with Brandi’s analysis, echoes his ultimate conclusions, writing, “His art can not be reduced to a declaration of [the poet

Eugenio Montale’s] ‘not’ being [‘non’ essere]; rather it expresses with a profound pathos an exhausted but ultimately indestructible positivity.”283 Far from “hermetic isolation,” Brandi’s formalist reading finds a moral resistance in Morandi’s work that is pointedly political.

Understanding this interpretation through the lens of Croce’s aesthetics serves as a powerful counterpoint to Braun’s argument in favor of Morandi’s Fascist sympathies.

Two Readings in Dialogue: Formal Choices and Social Change

On one hand, these formal and contextual readings resist direct comparison because they pertain to different periods of Morandi’s career. In fact, Braun and Aguirre both claim that

Morandi’s move away from the members of Strapaese towards Brandi was a form of protection for his reputation.284 Because of increasingly restrictive Fascist policies, like the Racial Laws of

1938, the late 1930s were a very different time in Italy than the beginning of that decade. Braun writes that Mino Maccari, one of the key figures of Strapaese, “did not consider himself an anti-

! 70 Fascist, though he was anti-regime, and the two were not necessarily synonymous until the late

1930s.”285 However, the similarities in both the style of the artworks produced during these periods and the shared influence of Crocean thought make a comparison between the formalist and contextual approach meaningful and productive. For instance, both interpretations highlight ideas of individuality, autonomy, and the purity of artistic expression, but they come to very different conclusions concerning their social relevance.

Mariana Aguirre begins to interrogate the division between form and context in relation to Morandi. She echoes Braun’s sentiments about Morandi’s political sympathies: “Though seemingly apolitical and isolated, Morandi walked in lockstep with other Italian critics and artists, as he heeded the calls for the ‘return to order’ which led to Benito Mussolini’s regime.”286

It is important to note that the “return to order” was a broadly European phenomenon, not only an Italian one. Italian manifestations of this post-war impulse, such as Novecento and Strapaese, were linked with Mussolini’s politics, as Aguirre argues. However, there were other heavily political forms of artistic production in Italy, such as Futurism, that sought to disrupt and discard the stability of tradition. Like Brandi, Aguirre also focuses on the artwork itself. Specifically, she examines the mannequins that appear in many of Morandi’s still lifes during his metaphysical period (1917-1920). She argues that these dummies can be understood as representations of the artist.

A still life from 1918 is a key work in Aguirre’s analysis (fig. 44). The painting depicts a ledge with five objects. Most prominent is the mannequin, which faces a wine bottle situated in front of an empty frame. A small box and a slender cylinder appear nearby. Instead of the delicate chiaroscuro that Brandi describes in Morandi’s later works, this painting features the clarity of form and pronounced shadows that are characteristic of Morandi’s painting in this early

! 71 period. As Aguirre points out, the “limited palette and the smooth surfaces keep the viewer’s attention fixed on the relationship” between the objects depicted.287 Based on the placement of these objects, which suggests that the mannequin is studying the bottle within the frame, Aguirre argues that this work shows the artist “in the act of painting.”288 She calls the work an “oblique self-portrait,” which relates the artist to an object in a still life, but does not dehumanize or deny him subjectivity: “This framing allows the mannequin (and Morandi) to guide the viewer’s gaze, establishing the relationship between outside viewer and the framed bottle. Thus the painting’s spatial arrangement highlights the artist’s role in creation.”289

Connecting Morandi’s formal choices to his social context, Aguirre argues that the disappearance of the mannequin as a compositional element after 1919 represents Morandi’s disillusionment with the style of metaphysical painting, his “decision to move beyond the enigma,” a concept that defined that movement.290 Aguirre links the stylistic shift towards the rustic provincialism of Strapaese to the larger trend of the “return to order,” both in Italy and abroad:

Morandi’s abandonment of metaphysical style must be seen in light of the widespread

disdain towards Futurism and the Metaphysical School which prevailed in Italy between

World War I and the rise of Fascism…eventually, the Italian scene became more

concerned with creating art with domestic roots rather than with exploring advanced

European art.291

Although her essay focuses primarily on the late 1910s and early 1920s, Aguirre offers a model that is applicable to other phases of Morandi’s production, and to his career as a whole. This does not suggest a “cause and effect relationship between politics and art,” which Arcangeli sternly cautions against, but a necessary relationship between formal choices and their

! 72 sociopolitical context.292 A unified understanding of form and content is important for a study of any artist, however the totalizing rhetoric of the regime makes it particularly important in the

Fascist context. Mussolini said as much in his Doctrine of Fascism:

The Fascist conception of the State is all-embracing; outside of it no human or spiritual

values can exist, much less have value. Thus understood, Fascism is totalitarian, and the

Fascist State—a synthesis and a unit inclusive of all values—interprets, develops, and

potentiates the whole life of a people.293

Because the Fascist state presented itself as the unification of cultural, political, and economic life, it is imperative to consider each of these aspects in a study of the period.

In particular, Aguirre’s framework, which is built around still lifes that assert the artist’s presence metaphorically, is also relevant to Morandi’s self-portraits, where he is depicted literally. Although he only did so sparingly, Morandi created a handful of self-portraits, including one in the metaphysical style (1917), a series of four in 1924-5, and one final self- portrait in 1930 (figs. 45-50). Building on Aguirre’s analysis, I contend that Morandi’s avoidance of portraiture and representations of the body after 1930 makes a statement about the loss of individual agency and autonomy under the Fascist regime. To explore this idea, it is important to first outline some of the political and economic developments of Fascism. As discussed above, the 1920s in Italy produced a potent debate about the role of the individual in society. Croce and

Gentile provided the philosophical poles, but the debate had other manifestations. Ruth Ben-

Ghiat’s discussion of Fascism as a “third way” between capitalism and socialism, mentioned in the previous chapter, explores how Fascism was construed as a “‘moral revolution’ which catered to the ‘whole person.’”294 As Ben-Ghiat posits, the “focus on ‘morality’ distracted from

Fascist attempts to suppress individual conscience and liberty of thought.”295 In describing a

! 73 uniquely Fascist modernity, artists, writers and critics “helped sustain the fiction that Mussolini’s regime constituted a ‘humane’ and ‘moral’ alternative to the tyranny of the ‘standard man.’”296

More than simply a theoretical discourse, the notion of a “third way” was influential in the creation of a new economic system, as well. In hopes of “fusing the spheres of politics and economics”, and of eliminating the potential for economic resistance, industrial labor was reorganized into a national system of corporations.297 The cornerstone of this new system was the legge Rocco (Rocco law), named for Justice Minister Alfredo Rocco, passed on April 3,

1926. This law established a Fascist monopoly on unions and collective bargaining, prefiguring

Mussolini’s remarks in a speech before the Chamber of Deputies, in 1927: “everything in the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state.”298 Even as Fascist rhetoric claimed to empower the individual citizen, the social and economic reality did just the opposite. This is a productive contradiction in a consideration of Morandi’s art.

Other scholars have already noted a connection between Morandi’s reluctance to depict the human subject and the uncertain place of the individual in Fascist society. Focusing on the last self-portrait that Morandi painted, in 1930, Janet Abramowicz writes: “The self portrait, painted the year Morandi turned forty, depicts a sturdy man with a strong but troubled and questioning face. Produced at a time when the Fascist regime was beginning to extol Italy’s great figurative tradition, this self-portrait would be Morandi’s last painting of the figure” (fig. 50).

Laura Mattioli Rossi takes a stronger view of the work:

He is no longer the painter, but the man, now forty years old, tested but not conquered by

life, who resists, standing firm in his poverty before solitude, misunderstanding, and the

strains of daily life, even in the face of the artistic and political shadows that surround

! 74 him. Perhaps in this Self Portrait lies the clearest and strongest response that Morandi

gives to Mussolini and the Fascist rhetoric.299

Rossi’s interpretation contains echoes of Brandi’s ideas of emotional resistance, but it also resonates with Braun’s explicit focus on Fascist rhetoric. However, the fact that this guarded self-portrait is Morandi’s “clearest and strongest response” against Fascism attests to the difficulty of pursuing a political analysis of the artist.

The defiant mood of the self-portrait of 1930 is particularly apparent when the painting is compared to Morandi’s self-portraits of 1924 and 1925 (figs. 46-49). In each of the earlier works,

Morandi wears the same outfit, a white shirt with a short collar and vest. In three of the paintings, Morandi shows himself with brush and palette in hand. In one 1924 painting, he even includes the canvas, depicting himself not only in the role of painter, but in the act of painting

(fig. 48). This detail provides the most obvious contrast with the final work, in which Morandi, now clad in a jacket, holds his arms at rest. As if to emphasize Morandi’s lack of individual agency, or his refusal to create art in the service of ideology, his hands are not even visible.

Although 1930 was the year in which Morandi was appointed through the Fascist system to a professorship at the Academy of Fine Arts, in Bologna, he does not present himself as an artistic laborer in the service of the state.300 As Rossi observes, in this work he is simply a man.

However, one self-portrait from 1924 also omits these artistic signifiers (fig. 47). The differences between this work and the 1930 self-portrait are especially revealing. In both, Morandi depicts his face very sculpturally, reducing it to well-defined areas of light and shadow. The lighting in the later work, however, is much more severe. Emanating from the left of the canvas, the light source leaves Morandi’s right side entirely masked by shadow. At the same time, Morandi accentuates the lines around his nose and mouth. He appears much older than in the 1924 work.

! 75 With a furrowed brow and pursed lips, he seems to be the man that Ragghianti and Arcangeli praised: the leader of a revolution that was “powerful, irrevocable and irreversible,” a man whose positivity was “exhausted but ultimately indestructible.”301

In 1930, the worst of the Fascist regime was in many ways still to come. Moreover, as discussed previously, that year was a productive and busy one for Morandi. He produced twelve paintings and ten etchings, and he became increasingly involved professionally with the Fascist regime, joining the painter’s union and serving on the selection committee for the first

Quadriennale.302 As the repressive legislation intensified throughout the next decade, Morandi abandoned figuration completely. However, scholars have identified a continued relationship to the human form in Morandi’s work. Brandi holds that Morandi’s artworks “left behind any need for anthropomorphic representation.”303 For Brandi, the figure was irrelevant to Morandi’s message of moral resistance, which he conveyed through formal choices. Because of the relationships attached to human figures, portraiture was ultimately a distraction from this formal study. Another member of Morandi’s Bolognese circle, Giuseppe Raimondi, offers a similar idea. He questions the importance of genre in Morandi’s works altogether:

Whether painting, or rather imagining, a portrait or a vase of flowers instead of a still life

or a landscape was the same thing for Morandi is a question that does not fall to us to

answer, nor perhaps to anyone else…One can only say that abstaining from the human

figure was a way for him to hold out for a substantial content [contenuto di qualcosa]

that transcended the simple and inert reality of the object to be painted…On the other

hand, one can observe that a portrait or a vase of flowers painted by Morandi comes to

light and offers itself as a pictoral entity, in its new reality laid out on the canvas, through

a weaving and a clumping of lines and signs of forms that are the same ones that are

! 76 brought under the brush in the conception and realization of a still life or a landscape

painting…[Morandi was] not able to create “objects” that did not have a hidden

relationship with the feeling of their surrounding nature, where man lives and thinks.304

While he initially equivocates, Raimondi concludes that the content Morandi seeks is independent of his subject matter—it transcends it. Although still lifes and landscapes, free from the psychological and introspective aspects of portraiture, provide the most suitable subjects for

Morandi, genre is ultimately irrelevant because he approaches each work in the same way. Carlo

Ludovico Ragghianti again provides the most charged interpretation. While he does not read the objects in the still lifes as direct representations of human figures, he interprets them to some degree as anthropomorphic protagonists: Morandi replaced “objects and bodies traditionally endowed with prestige and beauty with objects and bodies that are in a sense proletarian, chosen from the oppressed, the disinherited, the unnoticed, the castoff, the excluded.”305 The absence of titles reinforces the anonymity of the objects and invites contemplation of the forms themselves.306 As Mark Antliff writes, these everyday objects propose a kind of proletarian resistance: “the humbleness of the depicted pitchers, bowls, and lamps underscore the primacy of their use value, as opposed to the ostentatious frivolity of bourgeois display, with its emphasis on exchange value.”307

As Aguirre begins to demonstrate, the formal and contextual readings are not mutually exclusive. Rather, putting Braun and Brandi in dialogue offers a fuller picture of Morandi’s relationship to Fascist policy and ideology. The comparison also helps show how both of these readings are constructed and motivated by the interests of their authors. Even so, the most important conclusion is that Morandi’s works enable a variety of political applications. Like the

! 77 “palingenic” aspirations of the Fascist regime, Morandi’s public image supported fundamental transformations, and underwent a series of critical “rebirths.”

Conclusion

After the Fascist period, Morandi’s political connections, on both sides, were brushed aside. In a 1958 interview with Edouard Roditi, Morandi provided a rare discussion of his artistic philosophy: “I suppose I remain, in that respect, a believer in Art for Art’s sake rather than in Art for the sake of religion, of social justice, or of national glory. Nothing is more alien to me than an art which sets out to serve other purposes than those implied in the work of art in itself.”308 When

Roditi asked, then, if Morandi disapproved of, “the sacred art of Rouault, of the socialist realism of Renato Guttuso, and of the imperial art of Sironi and of other Italian painters who once received important commissions from the State, during the Fascist Era,” the artist replied, “I have never devoted any thought to this kind of problem and have never set out to illustrate anything at all programmatic in my work… But I do not wish to be interpreted as disapproving of any other contemporary artist’s approach. With me, it is all a matter of personal conviction…”

This late-life interview, conducted in Italian and approved in the English translation by Morandi, was an opportunity for the artist to ignore or leave behind undesirable passages and to minimize past connections.309 The controversies of the Fascist era could be erased and overlooked. As the idea of “personal conviction” was separated from Croce’s notion of political action, Morandi was once again reborn in the eyes of his critics.

Gabriele Turi claims that Benedetto Croce is in large part responsible for the dominant tone of twentieth-century historiography on intellectuals during the Fascist period. Writing after the close of World War II, Croce described a binary of cultural extremes, “equating anti-Fascism with culture and Fascism with barbarity.”310 This set a precedent that “emphasized the

! 78 ‘separateness’ of the intellectuals, who, because they were intellectuals, were considered impermeable to the lure of Fascism…Thus Fascism became the prime litmus test for evaluating the careers of Italian intellectuals.”311 The critical distancing of Morandi from ties with the

Fascist regime clearly demonstrates this attitude. The two readings of Morandi that I have discussed engage his relationship with Fascism in different, complicated ways. Following

Braun’s analysis, Morandi was faithful to the founding ideals of party and he associated with active members of the Fascist cultural milieu, moreover, his style conforms to the fusion of modernity and tradition that formed one important branch of Fascist ideology. In Brandi’s view,

Morandi championed autonomy and individuality and he exalted human qualities, if not human form, as a way to counter the bombastic rhetoric of the party. Comparing these readings, and considering Morandi through Griffin’s “palingenic” lens, offers a new way to relate the artist to

Fascist ideology. Although he may have struggled to depict it, Morandi in many ways embodied the ideal Fascist man. He was modern, yet grounded in tradition, and most importantly, he was able to reinvent himself while remaining consistent with his past.

! 79 Conclusion: Morandi in the Movies

Like an analysis of one of Morandi’s paintings, a discussion of the artist should focus on shades of meaning and consider absences as much as actions. As Emily Braun states: “half-tones, like half-truths, envelope Morandi’s compositions, blurring any absolutely clear picture.”312 I have argued for an understanding of Giorgio Morandi’s artistic production that is grounded in the interdependence of pictoral form and social and political context. This approach owes a debt to scholars such as Theodor Adorno, who writes:

The imagination of the artist is not a creation ex nihilo; only dilettanti and aesthetes

believe it to be so. Works of art that react against empirical reality obey the forces of that

reality, which reject intellectual creations and throw them back on themselves. There is

no material content, no formal category of artistic creation, however mysteriously

transmitted and itself unaware of the process, which did not originate in the empirical

reality from which it breaks free.313

A combined study of aesthetics and political context is particularly important for Italian artists active in the 1920s and 30s due to the totalizing nature of the Fascist regime. By sanctioning a diversity of artistic expression and instituting an expansive system to control artistic production and exhibition, the regime colonized the space of resistance. In so doing, it defined the Fascist state as an entity based in contradiction and complexity. Through the ideology of Fascism, the regime sought strength in the unity of opposites. However, important internal divisions remained. “It will be within the breast of Fascism itself that conflicts will tend to arise,” as

Antonio Gramsci writes, “since they cannot appear in any other way.”314 Like Benedetto Croce,

! 80 who refused to exile himself or go underground, Morandi drew out the internal conflicts of

Fascism through his exhibition and aesthetic choices.

Gaining access to primary source material has been one of the major challenges of my research. A more comprehensive study of original documents would strengthen my claims. My argument would also benefit from a broader consideration of the cultural and political context of

Fascist Italy. Possible directions for further research include the decorative arts under Fascism, and the tradition of artist books and political journals and magazines. What changes did Fascism inspire in Italian design and material culture, and how does Morandi’s choice of everyday, unadorned objects relate? Considering the bottles and vases that Morandi painted as art objects in their own right would add important layers to my analysis. It is also important to compare the journals of Strapaese with other publications of the period, and to explore the ways in which the juxtaposition of disparate images in magazines gives new meaning to the individual images. In a related vein, I have largely neglected Morandi’s engravings, an important part of his oeuvre and one that relates productively to the Strapaese discourse of rural traditionalism. Finally, there is the possibility to more directly situate my discussion of Morandi within debates on the political potential of art. Morandi’s still lifes certainly lend themselves to a Marxist analysis in the model of Clement Greenberg, who read formalism as a political statement against kitsch, propaganda, and mass production. Norman Bryson offers space to expand a study of Morandi in this direction. In his discussion of the still life genre, Bryson considers the display of objects in terms of capitalist abundance, industrialization, and commercialization:

[In the modernist house] the visibility of goods becomes an embarrassment and must be

screened…those few possessions which are displayed are chosen to make the

surrounding space vibrate with its own emptiness. Modernist still life knows this space

! 81 well: the work of Morandi…is made up of such vibrations in vacancy, of ‘seeing solid in

void and void in solid,’ and of interresonating intervals eventually so fine that it takes a

lengthy viewing to analyze their discriminations.315

Recent discussions of the issue, for instance the work of Susan Buck-Morss, have problematized the distinction between art and politics, and pointed out both the power and limitations of art to effect social change.316 “The politics of art is always indirect,” Buck-Morss writes. She holds that the political potential of artwork depends both on its position in global systems of commerce and on its strategy of representation: “art is—or should be—the continuation of politics by other means…Representation is never transparent. The means of art, responsible for its opacity, is always part of the information, the most important part, the most political part. It accounts for art’s stunning power, and its impotence.”317 This issue has guided my analysis, but it certainly warrants further, and more explicit, attention.

It is also important to connect my discussion of Morandi’s activity in the Fascist era to later parts of his career. As mentioned at the close of the previous chapter, Morandi distanced himself from Fascist controversies in the post-war period and was written into a new narrative.

Will Brown, a collaborate project created by the artists Lindsey White, Jordan Stein, and David

Kasprzak, is exploring this notion of re-contextualization in a work called, Mediated Morandi

(2013-). By isolating still frames from motion pictures that feature Morandi’s works, and rearranging them for display online, the work explores “how the context of an artwork evolves through various levels of mediation at the hands of multiple authors”:

Initially, the artist [Morandi] arranged objects and rendered them on canvas. Over time,

various Morandi “stills” were inserted into moving image works. And here, on these

! 82 pages, they have been removed and refrozen as elements of a larger intentionally

arranged still life.318

Will Brown has identified Morandis in scenes from films including Federico Fellini’s La Dolce

Vita (1960), Michelangelo Antonioni’s La Notte (1961), Luca Guadagnino’s Io sono l’amore (I

Am Love) (2009), and Tommy Wiseau’s The Room (2003) (figs. 51-55). The presence of

Morandi’s canvases in these films, which both depict and contribute to a culture of decadence and aestheticism, is indicative of his transformation into a prominent symbol of the bourgeoisie.319 The artists of Will Brown write: “As the painter’s popularity grew toward the end of his career, his work became synonymous with class, wealth, and refined sensibility.”320

Morandi is a fitting choice for this work, not only because his popularity among filmmakers makes it easy to find examples of his paintings in movies.321 Rather, the shifting contexts of display that Mediated Morandi explores evoke the changing meaning of Morandi’s work, which was reframed and resituated by different critics and across different periods. Most powerfully,

Mediated Morandi serves to illustrate that the meanings associated with Morandi’s art continue to change and develop. As these still frames demonstrate, the “personal journey” that Morandi charted through his artwork, beginning before the earliest days of Fascism, still has miles to go.

! 83 Appendix A: Figures

Figure 1. Giorgio Morandi, Landscape, Figure 2. Giorgio Morandi, Landscape, 1934 (V. 189) 1941 (V. 341)

Figure 3. Giorgio Morandi Figure 4. Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1936

84 Figure 5. Giaccomo Balla, Abstract Speed Figure 6. Achille Funi, Maternity, 1921 + Sound, 1913-14

Fig. 7 Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1937 (V. 221) Fig. 8 Giorgio Morandi, Still Life (Still Life of violet objects), 1937 (V. 222)

85 Fig. 9 Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1938 (V. 225) Fig. 10 Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1938 (V. 226)

Fig. 11 Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1936 (V. Fig. 12 Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, Room O: 209), unfinished “The Year 1922.” Designed by Giuseppe Terragni. Photo, Delcampe.net

8! Fig. 13 Vittorio Emmanuele and F.T. Fig. 14 Vittorio Emmanuele, Giuseppe Marinetti in the room of Futurist Bottai, and Cipriano Efisio Oppo at the third aeropainting and aerosculpture at the third Quadriennale, 1939. Photo, Archivio Luce Quadriennale, 1939. Photo, Archivio Luce

Fig. 15 Mostra della Rivouzione Fascista, façade Fig. 16 Palace of Expositions, Rome. designed by Adalberto Libera and Mario De Photo, Wikimedia commons Renzi. Photo, Archivio Centrale dello Stato

87 Fig. 17 Giorgio Morandi, Landscape, 1932 (V. 174)

Fig. 18 Giorgio Morandi, Still Life, 1932 (V. 173)

Fig. 20 Ruth Lerud, bread baking champion of Fig. 19 Katherine Contini and Ida Minuti of Norman County, wins trip to MN State Fair, 1935. Saint Paul with Lavandaie (The Kenneth M. Wright Studios, MN Historical Laundresses), Emanuele Cavalli, at the Society, Saint Paul Minnesota State Fair, 1935. Photo, Kenneth M. Wright Studios, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul

88 Fig. 21 Boy from Anoka County holds Fig. 22 Ardengo Soffici squash entered in 1934 State Fair. Kenneth M. Wright Studios, MN Historical Society, Saint Paul

Fig. 23 Mino Maccari Fig. 24 Leo Longanesi

89 Fig. 25 Cesare Brandi Fig. 26 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti

Fig. 27 Morandi with Ragghianti and the Fig. 28 Benedetto Croce sculptor Marino Marini

90 Fig. 29 Giovanni Gentile Fig. 30 Giorgio Morandi Still Life, 1930 (V.155)

Fig. 31 Morandi, Still Life, 1923, published in L’Italiano 9, Fig. 32: Cristoforo da Bologna, Speech in the Garden. The Saints Ambrogius 1931 and Petronius, 1380-1390

91 Fig. 34 Ludovico Carracci, Fig. 33 Lorenzo Costa, St. Petronius Baregllini Altarpiece, 1588 with Sts. Dominic and Francis, 1502

Fig. 35: Morandi, Still Life, 1926 (V.114) Fig. 36: Morandi Landscape, 1927 (V.125)

92 Fig. 37 Ardengo Soffici, View Fig. 38 Paul Cézanne, The House of Poggio a Caiano, 1927 With Cracked Walls, 1894

Fig. 40 Morandi, Still Life, 1920 (V.57) Fig. 39 Morandi, Landscape, 1925. Published in L’Assalto 11 Feb. 1928, in Il Selvaggio 15 April 1928

93 Fig. 41 Ardengo Soffici, White Bottle Fig. 42 Mino Maccari, Cocktail, with Lemon, 1920 published in Il Selvaggio 15 June, 1932

Fig. 43 Morandi, Still Life with Kerosene Lamp, 1930. Published in Il Selvaggio, Nov. 1932 Fig. 44 Morandi, Still Life, 1918 (V.35)

94 Fig. 45 Morandi, Self-portrait, 1917 (V.33) Fig. 46 Morandi, Self-portrait, 1924 (V.93)

Fig. 47 Morandi, Self-portrait, 1924 Fig. 48 Morandi, Self-portrait, 1924 (V.96)

95 Fig. 49 Morandi, Self-portrait, 1925 (V.113) Fig. 50 Morandi, Self-portrait, 1930 (V.159)

Fig. 51 Still from La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini, 1960

96 Fig. 52 Still from La Notte, Michelangelo Antonioni, 1961

Fig. 53 Still from Io sono l’amore (I am Love), Luca Guadagnino, 2009

Fig. 54 Still from The Room, Tommy Wiseau, 2003 97 Appendix B: Timeline 1890-1939

1890 – Birth of Giorgio Morandi, July 20.

1907 – Enrolls in the Accademia di Belle Arti, in Bologna. Attends until 1913.

1914 – Morandi’s first exhibitions: at the Hotel Baglioni in Bologna, at the Prima Esposizione

Libera Futurista, at gallery Sprovieri in Rome, and in the Seconda Esposizione della

Secessione, in Rome.

1915 – Serves in the Second Regiment of Grenadiers, discharged for serious illness.

1918-19 – Introduced to Carlo Carrà and Giorgio de Chirico, first metaphysical paintings.

1922 – Mussolini’s March on Rome.

1926 – Exhibits in the Prima Mostra della Novecento, in Milan.

1927 – Begins professional association with members of Strapaese, lasts until 1932.

1928 – Exhibits in XVI Biennale, in Venice.

1929 – Exhibits in the Seconda Mostra della Novecento. Syndicate system established, under the

guidance of Giuseppe Bottai. Morandi joins the National Syndicate of the Fine arts.

1930 – Appointed chair of etching at the Accademia di Belle Arti. Exhibits in XVII Biennale.

Paints his final self-portrait.

1931 – Exhibits in I Quadriennale, in Rome.

1932 – Mostra della rivoluzione Fascista, Rome.

1932-1934 – Exhibits across Europe in shows organized by the Fascist Printmaker’s Union.

1935 – Exhibits in II Quadriennale. Exhibition of Contemporary Italian Paintings tours the USA.

1938 – Manifesto of Race published, July 14. Enactment of Racial Laws in September.

1939 – Exhibits in III Quadriennale. Brandi publishes his first essay on Morandi.

! 98 Notes

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Giorgio Morandi, “Autobiography, Giorgio Morandi,” in Morandi, 1890-1964 (Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.), Museo d'arte moderna di Bologna), ed. Maria Cristina Bandera and Renato Miracco (Milano: Skira, 2008), 346. Excerpt from “Autobiografie di scrittori e di artisti del tempo Fascista,” L’Assalto, February 18, 1928

2 Francesco Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi. (Milano: Edizioni del Milione, 1964), 263. My translation. Original: Ha camminato lento lirico, tenace, col lungo passo resistente.

3 At least 770 civilians were killed by Nazi forces in the Marzabotto massacre, 1944.

4 Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti provides an analysis of Morandi’s experimentation with this composition, in both landscape and still life. See Bologna cruciale 1914 e saggi su Morandi, Gorni, Saetti [Opere di Carlo L. Ragghianti, VIII] (Bologna: Calderini, 1982), 242-243. The similarities between the two genres in Morandi’s work will be discussed in chapter two.

5 “Fascism,” referring specifically to Mussolini’s political movement, is distinct from “fascism” (sometimes also capitalized), which refers to the ideology or governmental system more generally. Because this thesis deals solely with the Italian expression of Fascism, I have chosen to use the capitalized form of the term.

6 Janet Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 167, 179

7 M.E. Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature, and History (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1987), 18

8 Mariana Pasquali, “Meaning of a Dialogue,” in Cesare Brandi, Morandi, ed. Marilena Pasquali (Siena: Gli Ori, 2008), 186

9 Letter to Mario Becchis, 12 May, 1944. In Giorgio Morandi. Lettere, ed. Lorella Giudici (Milano: Abscondita, 2004), 85. My translation. Original: Io lavoro assai poco ed ora non faccio proprio nulla. Mi manca la tranquilità indispensibile al mio lavoro. Ogni giorno gli aerei passano di qui e quando non bombardano si mitragliano fra loro. Comprenderà se in questa condizione si può pensare alla pittura.

10 Maria Cristina Bandera, in Morandi: 1890-1964, 194. In an introductory essay to Morandi’s retrospective 1966 Venice Biennale, the first such exhibit after the artist’s death, Robert Longhi wrote: “Meanwhile, Morandi was on his indefatigable course and I saw him climb to the very peak, I think the highest he ever reached, in the landscapes of 1943.”

11 Cesare Brandi, “Cammino di Morandi,” Le Arti I, III, March 1939; reproduced in Brandi, Morandi

! 99 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 12 These re-evaluative works include: Janet Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); Mariana Aguirre, “Giorgio Morandi and the ‘Return to Order’: From Pittura Metafisica to Regionalism, 1917-1928.” Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas 35.102 (2013): 93-124; Francesco Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi. (Milano: Edizioni del Milione, 1964); and Emily Braun, “Speaking Volumes: Giorgio Morandi’s Still Lifes and the Cultural Politics of Strapaese.” Modernism/Modernity 2.3 (1995): 89-116.

13 The classic works on Morandi are: Cesare Brandi, Morandi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1942), and Giorgio Morandi (Rome: Editori riuniti, 1990); Cesare Gnudi, Morandi (Florence: Edizioni U., 1946); Franco Solmi, Morandi: storia e leggenda (Bologna: Grafts, 1978); and Lamberto Vitali, Morandi, Catalogo generale, 2 vols. (Milan: Electra Editirce, 1977), and Giorgio Morandi pittore (Milan: Edizione del Milione, 1965).

14 Braun. "Speaking Volumes,” 90

15 Ibid. 91, 95-96

16 Ibid. note to 96

17 Ibid. note to 97

18 Maria Mimita Lamberti. “Giorgio Morandi: The Times and Antinomies of a Legend,” in Morandi: 1890-1964, 253

19 Ibid. 255

20 Ibid. 255

21 Ibid. 253

22 Braun, “Speaking Volumes” ,95

23Jack D’Amico, Dain A. Trafton, and Massimo Verdicchio. The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views. (Toronto: Buffalo, 1999), 178; and

24 Rizi, Fabio Fernando. Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism. (Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 133-134

25 Lamberti, “The Times and Antinomies of a Legend,” 254

26 Renato Miracco, “Nothing is More Abstract than Reality”, in Morandi: 1890-1964, 290-304

27 Ibid. 302

! 100 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 28 Siri Hustvedt. Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting,!A Winterhouse ed. (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2005)

29Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle, 132; Miracco, “Nothing is More Abstract than Reality,” 301

30 Miracco, “Nothing is More Abstract than Reality,” 291

31 G.C. Argan, Morandi. Disegni. II. (Sasso Marconi: La Casa dell’Arte, 1984), quoted in Miracco, “Nothing is More Abstract than Reality,” 304

32 Giorgio Morandi, interview with Peppino Mangravite, July 13, 1955. Reproduced in Lorenza Selleri, “From Columbia University to Via Fondazza: Peppino Mangravite Interviews Giorgio Morandi,” in Morandi: 1890-1964, 349-350

33 Francesco Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi: Stesura originaria inedita (Torino: Umberto Allemandi & C., 2007), 657

34 Ibid. pp. 29-36, 652-659

35 Flavio Fergonzi, “Interpretations of Morandi at the time of his death,” in Flavio Fergnozi and Elisabetta Barisone, Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life (Washington, D.C.: The Phillips Collection, 2009), 17

36 Flavio Fergonzi, “On Some of Giorigo Morandi’s Visual Sources,” in Morandi: 1890-1964, 49-48

37 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 104

38 Ibid. 108-109

39 Ibid.108-109

40 Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence. 193

41 Aguirre, “Giorgio Morandi and the ‘Return to Order’

42Valerio Terraroli. 1920-1945: The Artistic Culture between the Wars. (New York: Rizzoli, 2006), 189

43 The literature on this subject is ample. Some examples include: Walter L. Adamson, “Avant- garde Modernism and Italian Fascism: Cultural Politics in the Era of Mussolini”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 6.2 (2001): 230-248, and “The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of II Selvaggio.” Journal of Contemporary History 30.4 (1995): 555-575; Mark Antliff, "Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity." The Art Bulletin 84.1 (2002):

! 101 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 148-69; Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics Under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Emilio Gentile, “The Conquest of Modernity: From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism”, Modernism/Modernity 1 (1994): 54-87; Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991); Ulrich Schmid, “Style versus ideology: Towards a conceptualization of Fascist aesthetics,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6.1 (2005): 127-140

44 Adamson, “The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity,” 556

45 Ibid. 558

46 David D. Roberts, “How not to think about Fascism and Ideology,” Journal of Contemporary History 35 (2000): 185-211

47 Ibid. 189-193

48 Ibid. 205-208

49 Ibid. 205-208

50 Ibid. 208

51 David D. Roberts, Fascism and Historicism in Modern Italy (Tronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 19

52 Roberts, “How not to Think about Fascism and Ideology,” 208-211

53 Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,” 149

54 Ibid. 149-154

55 Ibid. 149-154

56 Emily Braun, “Expressionism as Fascist Aesthetic”: Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (1996): 273

57 Gabriele Turi, “Giovanni Gentile: Oblivion, Remembrance, and Criticism,” The Journal of Modern History, 70.4 (1998): 917

58 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence 138

59 Mussolini’s addresses are excerpted in Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 1, and Kate Flint, “Art and the Fascist Regime in Italy,” Oxford Journal of Art 3.2 (1980): 50

! 102 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 60The exhibitions are: Sette Pittori del Novecento (Seven Painters of the Novecento [Twentieth Century]), on March 26, 1923; and La Prima Mostra del Novecento Italiano (The First Exhibition of the Novecento Italiano), in February, 1926, in which Morandi participated.

61 Carlo Bertelli, “L’arte degenerata e la buona pittura,” in Gli anni del Premio Bergamo: Arte in Italia intorno agli anni Trenta, ed. Francesco Rossi and Cinzia Solza (Electa: Milan, 1993), 19- 20

62 Adamson, “Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism,” 235-6

63 Reproduced in Abramowicz The Art of Silence, 97. Castelfranco was an early supporter of Morandi. He purchased the only painting that Morandi sold at his 1919 exhibition at the Galleria Giosi in Rome.

64 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 95-96

65 Pia Vivarelli, “La politica delle arti figurative negli anni del Premio Bergamo,” in Gli anni del Premio Bergamo: Arte in Italia intorno agli anni Trenta, ed. Francesco Rossi and Cinzia Solza (Electa: Milan, 1993), 24

66 Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 27, 33

67 Adamson, “Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism,” 235; Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 26. Bottai oversaw the creation of the corporative system for artistic production in 1929, and in 1939, he began the Premio Bergamo and established the Office for Contemporary Art, which was involved in institutionalizing the private market through prizes for collectors and galleries.

68 Adamson, “Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism,” 235; Emilio R. Papa, “Il Premio Bergamo (1939-1942) e la political culturale di Giuseppe Bottai,” in Gli anni del Premio Bergamo: Arte in Italia intorno agli anni Trenta, ed. Francesco Rossi and Cinzia Solza (Electa: Milan, 1993), 237-251

69 Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence, 114.

70 Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 24

71 Ibid. 24

72Catherine Paul and Barbara Zaczek, “Margherita Sarfatti & Italian Cultural Nationalism,” Modernism/modernity, 13.1 (2006): 891-2

73 Abramowicz, Giorgio Morandi: The Art of Silence, 151

! 103 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 74 Simonetta Fraquelli, “All Roads Lead to Rome,” in Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators 1930-45, ed. Dawn Ades et al. (London: Thames and Hudson: 1995),134

75 Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 24

76 Adamson, “Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism,” 236

77 Schmid, “Style versus ideology,” 139; Marco Lorandi, “Il Premio Bergamo (1939-1942): le estetiche neoromantiche e le metamorfosi di ‘Novecento,’” in Gli anni del Premio Bergamo: Arte in Italia intorno agli anni Trenta, ed. Francesco Rossi and Cinzia Solza (Electa: Milan, 1993), 58-60

78 Adamson, “Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism,” 234

79 Braun, Mario Sironi, 2. Braun rightly notes that Jewish artists, persecuted after the Racial Laws of 1938, are an important exception.

80 Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 24

81 Ibid. 25. My translation. Original: La costante presenza dello Stato nelle strutture organizzativa dell’arte provoca, a livello “medio” della prduczione e della fruizione, una progressiva omogeneizzazione dei temi e del gusto collettivo.

82 Ibid. 24-25.

83 Matteo Fochessati, “The Politics of Persuaion: Art and Propaganda under Fascism,” in Under Mussolini: Decorative and Propaganda Arts of the Twenties and Thirties, ed. Silvia Barisione et al. (Milan: Mazzotta, 2002), 23-26

84 Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 24

85 Ibid. 25. My translation. Original: Non l’ideologia, ma l’isolata attività di alcune gallerie favorisce il fenomeno in parte inedito per l’Italia di aggregazioni intorno a nuovi nuclei di promozione culturale, che servono da catalizzatori di attività e di collaborzioni tra sfere diverse di mestiere.

86 Terraroli, Artistic Culture between the Wars, 189

87 Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 25

88 Ibid. 27. My translation. Original: un gusto coerente e discreto nello stesso tempo.

89 Ibid. 30-31

! 104 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 90 Lorenza Selleri, “Morandi on Either Side of the Atlantic. Critics, Collectors, and Dealters in Europe and the Americas,” in Morandi: 1890-1964, 174-186

91 Vivarelli, “La political delle arti figurative,” 26-33

92 Lorandi, “Il Premio Bergamo,” 58

93 Ibid. 58

94 Chiara Tellini Perina, “Il Premio Cremona: ‘questo novecentismo Fascista: forte, vigoroso, epico, romano’ (R. Farinacci, 1940),” in Gli anni del Premio Bergamo: Arte in Italia intorno agli anni Trenta, ed. Francesco Rossi and Cinzia Solza (Electa: Milan, 1993), 51-53

95 Ibid. 51-53. The Lictor was a civil servant in ancient Rome, a kind of bodyguard that carried the ceremonial fasces. For this reason, lictors were adopted as a symbol of strength, authority, and Roman identity in Mussolini’s regime.

96 Lorandi, “Il Premio Bergamo,” 62. My translation

97 Fraquelli, “All Roads Lead to Rome,” 135

98 Lorandi, “Il Premio Bergamo,” 58. My translation

99 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the Third Way,” Journal of Contemporary History 31.2 (1996): 293

100 Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the Third Way,” 293-4

101 Abramowicz, 157, translated from Arcangeli

102 Bertelli, “L’arte degenerata e la buona pittura,” 21

103 Morandi, “Autobiography,” in Morandi: 1890-1964, 346-347

104 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 138

105 Selleri, “Morandi on either side of the Atlantic,”180

106 Marilena Pasquali, “‘Quelle sabbie portate a vibrare…’ La trasformazione dell’immagine morandiana tra il 1925 e il 1939,” Morandi e il suo tempo (Milan: Mazzotta, 1985), 62

107 Braun, “Speaking Volumes”

108 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 151-179

! 105 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 109 Sileno Salvagnini, “L’arte in azione: Fascismo e organizzazione della cultura artistica in Italia,” Studi e ricerche 173 (1988): 16

110 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 138-139

111 Ibid. 139

112 Ibid. 158

113 Arcangeli. Quoted in Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 160. Original: “Fu il successo.”

114 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 163-64

115 Bandera, Morandi: 1890-1964, 164

116 Ragghianti, Bologna cruciale, 232.

117 Ibid. 232. My translation. Original: Il nucleo è centrico o spostato in modo da coordinare diversamente oggetti comuni, o da introdurne altri laterali sul ripiano del tavolo rotondo o da espugnarne alcuni, mantendeno una notevole omogeneità cromatica e luminosa.

118 Pasquali, “‘Quelle sabbie portate a vibrare…’” 68. My translation. Original: Quei personaggi- oggetto che colloquiano fra loro secondo ritmi interni scanditi da intervalli—pieni e vuoti—che accrescono la vitalità della composizione, quasi una festa di vita?

119 Ibid. 68

120 Ibid. 68

121 Salvagnini, “L’arte in azione,” 13-16

122 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 142-143

123 Lorenza Selleri, “Echi e commenti nella stampa del tempo,” in Secondo Morandi: Roma 1939, premi dellla Quadriennale, ed. Claudio Poppi and Lorenza Selleri (Ferrara: Edisari, 2006), 12

124 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 158

125 Claudio Poppi, “Prima della guerra”, in Secondo Morandi, 7

126 Salvagnini, “L’arte in azione,” 20. My translation. Carrà’s original: È un vanto dell’attuale generazione l’aver saputo rimettere le arti figurative italiane nella giusta carreggiata…In tal modo la nuova arte italiana, abbandonata la via di una tradizone recente, guasta di verismo e di academia — come disse Giuseppe Bottai — risale a quella più antica e pura.

! 106 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 127 Ibid. 20. My translation. De Grada’s original: Sono appunto i giovani che di fronte a questa Quadriennale hanno un atteggiamento confuso e disperso. [Perciò] richiamiamo una volta di più la nuova generazione alla costruzione di un ideale morale ed estetico da affrontare con animo sereno.

128 “Spigolature critiche,” in Secondo Morandi, 32

129 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 160

130 Osvaldo Licini, quoted in Pasquali, “‘Quelle sabbie portate a vibrare’”, 65. My translation. Original: Carissimo Morandi, non aspettarti i miei rallegramenti, ma le condoglianze per il posto che occupi nella infamante scala dei premi dati alla Quadriennale! Quando ho visto il tuo nome figurare tra gli ultimi dieci premiati, uno strano senso di stizza di sdegno di dolore, e di sollievo anche, ho provato! C’era da aspettarselo: i premi grossi sono stati assegnati all’alta cricca, selezionati secondo le norme dell’amicizia e della potenza politica, ed ho subito pensato che tu non vi potevi essere, data la purezza disinteressata della tua arte e del tuo ideale artistico. Meglio. La effimera gloriola di quei quattro o cinque cafoni non la invidio, e mi rallegro con te di non vederti ancora in così alta compagnia…Forza, caro Morandi, sono ancora sbalordito per la umiliazione che ti hanno inferto a Roma, ma ricordati che per me il primo premio di pittura l’hai avuto tu, anche se ti hanno messo sugli ultimi gradini della scalaccia…

131 Licini, letter to Giuseppe Marchiori, 3 March, 1939. Quoted in Secondo Morandi, 28. My translation. Original: Come è crollato Morandi, il campione della mediocrazia artistica e burocratica italiana; la creatura degli Oppo, Soffici, Cardarelli, Longanesi, Bartolini di tutti i gamberi nostalgici reazionari di Strapaese…

132 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 160

133 Ibid. 160

134 Giuseppe Bottai, Modernità e tradizione nell’arte italiana d’oggi in “Le Arti”, Feb-March 1939, quoted in Secondo Morandi, 21. My translation. Originial: È questa l’arte Fascista: tutta fati, tutta chiareza di stile, tutta franchezza di linguaggio, tutta interiorità di sentimento. Noi chiediamo all’artista dei fatti, il cui impegno morale non sia inferiore a quello che ogni Fascista porta nell’adempiemento del suo compito… Sappiamo che la nostra realtà è anche la sua realtà e vogliamo che l’artista la legga, non nelle pagine dei quotidiani, ma nell’interno della propria anima.

135 “Spigolature critiche,” Secondo Morandi, 21-22. My translation. De Grada’s original: Dobbiamo invece ringraziare Oppo che ha dimostrato a questa Quadriennale che i veri pittori moderni dipigono bottigliette, paesaggi o scheletrici impianti compositivi… Morandi fu uno dei pochi che si assunsero il compito non di rinnovare (non si rinnova ciò che non esiste) ma di creare l’arte italiana moderna.

! 107 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 136 Ibid. 38. My translation. Original: Morandi…offer un venticinquennio di assiduo lavoro, e da un suo chiuso e piccolo mondo sa trarre accordi che lo sollevano alla più alta poesia, abbandonandosi perdutamente a una musica soave e sommessa che avvince l’osservatore coi suoi toni delicati, con le sue armoniose sfumature.

137 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 160

138 Ibid. 138

139 Letter to Ardengo Soffici, 4 April, 1931, in Giorgio Morandi. Lettere, ed. Lorella Giudici, 38- 39. My translation. Original: È un mondo di una tale miseria che unico mio desiderio è quello di essere dimenticato e di poter lavorare in pace. Quello poi che mi dispiace maggiormente è che alcuni sono degli artisti e degli uomini di ingegno e che non avremmo mai creduti capaci di simili meschinità. Tutti i peggiori difetti dei vecchi ambienti politici li hanno ereditati gli artisti…Queste condizioni non sono certo favorevoli all’arte…Chi ha vantaggio e può rallegrarsi di tutto questo sono i fessi. Con questo non voglio giudicare nessuno. È il mio dispiacere che mi fa dire questo. Quello che più dispiace è che per ora non si può sperare che le cose cambino.

140 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 149

141 Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 148

142 Jeffery T. Schnapp, Anno X: La Mostra Della Rivoluzione Fascista del 1932 (Pisa: Istituti Editoriale e Poligrafici Internazionali, 2003), 93-94. My translation. Original: Non è più una mostra, ma è già patrimonio acquisito dal popolo…La Mostra parla direttamente al pubblico…Ogni visita si trasforma in un pellegrinaggio…Un osservatore anche superficiale si accorge alle prime occhiate che un fatto di profonda importanza si compie.”

143 Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 148

144 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 148

145 Ibid. 111-112

146 Schnapp, Anno X, 41. Original: Questa non è una mostra. È un atto di fede.

147 Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 146

148 Ibid. 148-149

149 Ibid. 146

150 Ibid. 155

151 Ibid. 155

! 108 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 152 Ibid. 146-7

153 Ibid. 146-7

154 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 148-149

155 Umbro Apollonio, “Giorgio Morandi o della rinnuncia per la purezza,” in Il Popolo di Trieste, Triest, 15 March, 1939, in Secondo Morandi, 22. My translation. Original: Quand’è autentica, la fantasia non inventa motivi, ma scopre profondità elementari…col respiro lirico che raggiunge le cose ben addentro.

156 Mariana Aguirre, “Giorgio Morandi, Ardengo Soffici and Strapaese: Modern Italian landscapes between the wars,” Sincronía XVII 63 (2013): 1

157 Ibid. 1

158 Ibid. 1

159 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 149. The term “ventennio” refers to the twenty years of the Fascist regime (1922-1942).

160 Ibid. 158

161 Ibid. 158

162 Bandera, Morandi: 1890-1964, 164

163 Sergio Cortesini, “Invisible Canvases: Italian Painters and Fascist Myths across the American Scene.” American Art 25.1 (2011): 55, 72

164 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 156

165 Heil, in a letter to Amadeo Giannini, October 9, 1933. Cortesini, “Invisible Canvases”, 55

166 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 157-158. The incident occurred at the Galleria di Roma’s inaugural exhibition, on April 21, 1937. Mussolini also spoke.

167 Cortesini, Invisible Canvases, 62-65

168 Ibid. 56-59

169 Ibid. 62-69

170 Ibid. 62, 66-69

! 109 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 171 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 97. Quotation from Leo Longanesi in L’Italiano vol. 3. Original reads: “genuina, fatta in casa come il pane con l’olio.”

172 For example, he submitted to the Galleria di Roma’s inaugural show in 1937, which was directed by Sabatello.

173 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 95-96

174 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 136

175 Tommaso Baris, “Consent, Mobilization, and Participation: The Rise of the Middle Class and Its Support for the Fascist Regime,” in In the Society of Fascists, Giulia Albanese and Roberta Pergher, ed. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 71

176 Baris, “Consent, Mobilization, and Participation,” 80

177 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 130-132

178 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), xviii

179 Ibid. 30, 37-39

180 Ibid. 34

181Ibid. 30

182Ibid. 40

183 Roger Griffin, “The Palingenic Core of Fascist Ideology,” in Che cos’è il Fascismo? Interpretazioni e prospettive di richerche, ed. A. Campi (Rome: Ideazione editrice, 2003), 97- 122

184 Ibid.

185 Ibid.

186 Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,” 150

187 Ibid. 150

188 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 90-98

189 In the English volume of Brandi’s work, edited by Marilena Pasquali, translator Anita Weston highlights the figurative meaning of this title. She translates it as, Morandi’s Personal Journey.

! 110 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

190 Marilena Pasquali, “Eighteen Years After”, in Brandi, Morandi, ed. Marilena Pasquali, 19

191 Francesco Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi: Stesura originaria inedita (Torino: Umberto Allemandi & C., 2007), 322; translation by Emily Braun, in “Speaking Volumes,” note to 91

192 Flavio Fergonzi, “On Some of Giorgio Morandi’s Visual Sources,” in Morandi 1890-1964, 48

193 Ragghianti, Bologna Cruciale, 223

194 Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi, 220-221. My translation. Original: “Durante la tragica sospensione bellica, i migliori artisti seppero sostenere, almeno, un’appassionata inchiesta individua sui valori dell’esistenza; mentre ora si pretenderebbe che avessero, in anticipo, letto Gramsci, e che, coinvolti in quella tempesta, pensassero ad applicare gli schemi del marxismo scientifico e razionale.

195 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 98; Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism, 22; Fergnozi and Barisone, Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life, 15-17

196 Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered, 15

197 Roberts, Fascism and Historicism in Modern Italy, 15

198 Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered, 17; Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 208- 209

199 Benedetto Croce, The Aesthetic as the Science of Expression and of the Linguistic in General, trans. Colin Lyas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 6; Breviary of Aesthetics, trans. Hiroko Fudemoto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 15

200 Croce, Breviary of Aesthetics, 14

201 Ibid. 15

202 Brandi, Morandi, 52

203 Braun, Morandi, 106

204 Emiliana P. Noether, “Italian Intellectuals under Fascism,” The Journal of Modern History 43.4 (1971): 641

205 Roberts, Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, 16, 26

206 Ibid. 164-168, 189

! 111 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 207Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism,” in Fascism Doctrine and Institutions, (Rome: Ardita, 1932); translated on www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini

208 Noether, “Italian Intellectuals under Fascism,” 641

209 Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 87

210 Roberts, Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, 138

211 Ibid. 138

212 Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 83-4. The Liberal Party split into two factions, the National Liberal Party, which supported Mussolini, and the Italian Liberal Party, under Giolitti, which provided the opposition in parliament. Croce was named an official spokesman for the Italian Liberal Party in the Senate.

213 Ibid. 88

214 Ibid. 88

215 Roberts, Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, 15

216 Ibid. 87-88

217 Ibid. 15

218 Ibid. 10-14

219 Ibid. 10-22

220 Croce, Aesthetics, 22

221 Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered, 18

222 Croce, Aesthetics, 53-74

223 Rizi, Benedetto Croce and Italian Fascism, 196

224 Ibid. 196

225 Ibid. 196

226 For a discussion of the complex reaction against Croce in post-war Italy, see Roberts, Historicism and Fascism in Modern Italy, 68-80

! 112 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 227 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 89-116

228 Ibid. 91, 100

229 Ibid. 97, 105; Fergonzi and Barisone, Morandi: Master of Modern Still Life, 20

230 Hustvedt, Mysteries of the Rectangle, 126; Ragghianti, Bologna Cruciale

231 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 107

232 Ibid. 97, 102. Quotation from Vitali, Giorgio Morandi Pittore (Milan: Edizione del Milione, 1965)

233 Lega’s quote is from an article in Il Selvaggio, July 1927.

234 Alessando Del Puppo, Modernità e nazione: Temi di ideologia visiva nell’arte italiana del primo Novecento, (Macerata, Italy: Quodlibet, 2012), 202. My translation. Original: Soffici cercava ossessivamente un artista: il tipo d’artista italiano, classico, equilibrato, in grado di confrontare i modelli della tradizione figurative con un’esspressività sorvegliata e non epigonica, abile a ricusare tanto le lusinghe della più superficiale ‘modernità’ quanto di sposare una misura definitiva, moderna ma non retorica; capace di un affondo nella tradizione delle forme. Lo trovò in Morandi, ed esortò il pittore a fornire d’incisioni e disegni il foglio di Maccari.

235 See Aguirre, “Giorigo Morandi, Ardengo Soffici and Strapaese,” 1-29

236 Ibid. 3-5

237 Ibid. 12-13

238 Fergonzi, “On Some of Giorgio Morandi’s Visual Sources,” 53

239 Fergonzi, in particular, has explored Morandi’s longstanding interest in the Cézanne. See, “On Some of Giorgio Morandi’s Visual Sources.”

240 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” Caption to figure 13

241 Margherita D’Ayala Valva, La Collezione Sforni: Il ‘giornale pittorico’ di un mecenate fiorentino (1909-1939) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2005), 8

242 Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity,” 149-150

243 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 95 244 Ibid. 99

245 Ibid. 95

! 113 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 246 Terraroli, The Artistic Culture between the Wars, 45-47, 183

247 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 93

248 Ibid. 93

249 Popular magazines and illustrated journals in the Fascist period are an important site for future research.

250 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 95-96

251 Ibid. 90

252 Ibid. note to 91

253 A better translation of “nani” might be “fools” or “jesters.” However, at over six feet tall, Morandi towered over the shorter Maccari and Longanesi, perhaps explaining Abramowicz’s word choice.

254 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 133

255 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” note to 91; For another scholar who minimizes Morandi’s participation in Strapaese, see Alessandro Del Puppo, Modernità e nazione. Del Puppo refers specifically to Braun’s article when he writes, “With this, I do not want to ratify the excessive conclusions that have been drawn [he here cites Braun], using the participation in a journal which, in reality, was much less concerned with politics that it seems.” Original: Non voglio con questo ratificare le conclusioni eccessive che ne sono state tratte, strumentalizzando la partecipazione a una rivista che, in realtà, fu assai meno ossessionata dalla politica di quanto non sembri.

256 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” note to 91

257 Ibid. note to 91

258 Ibid. 98

259 Ibid. 98

260 Ibid. 108

261 Ibid.107-108

262 Pasquali, “The Meaning of a Dialogue,” 184

263 Pasquali, “Eighteen Years After”, 21-22

! 114 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

264 Brandi, Morandi, 329

265 Pasquali, “Eighteen Years After,” 19-20

266 Ibid. 20

267 Ibid. 20

268 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 139

269 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 90

270 Fergonzi and Barisone, Morandi: Master of the Modern Still Life, 17

271 Cesare Brandi, “Cammino di Morandi,” Le Arti I, III, March 1939; An expanded version was included in Brandi’s monograph, Morandi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1942). Reproduced and translated in 2008, Brandi, Morandi, 47

272 Arcangeli, letter to Morandi 6 Nov. 1961, quoted in Pasquali, “Eighteen Years After,” 21

273 Ibid.

274 Aguirre, “Giorigo Morandi and the ‘Return to Order’,” 94

275 Brandi, Morandi, 47

276 Vittorio Brandi Rubio, “Brandi and Morandi,” in Brandi, Morandi, 174

277 Brandi, Morandi, 39-40

278 Ibid. 43-47

279 Lamberti, “Times and Antinomies of a Legend,” 254

280 Ibid. 254

281 Ragghianti, Bologna Cruciale, 245. Original: In altre parole, Morandi non era certo inconsapevole che la sua radicale riduzione del mondo, salvando le apparenze, era una traslazione e forse più, una rivoluzione silenziosa (rispetto, poniamo, al cubismo) quanto potente, irrevocabile e irreversibile.

282 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 179

! 115 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 283 Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi, 287. Original: La sua arte non può ridursi alla dichiarazione d’un ‘non’ essere; anzi essa esprime con pathos profondo una pur stremata ma non distruttibile positività. Arcangeli references Eugenio Montale’s poem, “Non chiederci la parola” (1923), in which the poet questions art’s ability to provide definitive statements of purpose or meaning.

284 Braun, “Speaking Volumes”; Aguirre, “Giorigo Morandi and the ‘Return to Order’”

285 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 99

286 Aguirre, “Giorigo Morandi and the ‘Return to Order,’” 123

287 Ibid. 104

288 Ibid. 102

289 Ibid. 102-103

290 Ibid. 106

291 Ibid. 106

292 Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi, 287

293 Mussolini, Benito Mussolini, “The Doctrine of Fascism”

294 Ben-Ghiat, “Italian Fascism and the Aesthetics of the Third Way,” 293; quoting Mussolini’s speech of November 14, 1933

295 Ibid. 294

296 Ibid. 298

297 Matteo Pasetti, “Neither Bluff Nor Revolution,” in In the Society of Fascists (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012), 93-101

298 Mussolini, speech before the Chamber of Deputies, May 26, 1927; Pasetti, “Neither Bluff Nor Revolution,” 89

299 Laura Mattioli Rossi, “Morandi pictor optimus,” in Giorgio Morandi ed. Pier Giovanni Castagnoli, (Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino) (Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C, 2000), 63. Original: Non è più il pittore, ma l’uomo ormai quarantenne, provato ma non vinto dalla vita, che resiste stando fermo nella sua povertà davanti alla solitudine, alle incomprensioni, alla fatica quotidana e anche di fronte alle tenebre artistiche e politiche che lo circondono. Forse è in questo “Autorittrato” la risposta più chiara e forte che Morandi dà a Mussolini e alla retorica Fascista.

! 116 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

300 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 132

301 Arcangeli, Giorgio Morandi, 287; Ragghianti, Bologna Cruciale, 245

302 Abramowicz, The Art of Silence, 136

303 Brandi, Morandi, 40

304 Giuseppe Raimondi, Anni con Giorgio Morandi (Milan: Mondadori, 1970), 60. Author’s italics. Original: Se il dipingere, anzi l’immaginare un ritratto o un vaso di fiori invece di una natura morta o un paesaggio fossero la medesima cosa per Morandi, è domanda alla quale non tocca a noi di rispondere, né forse ad alcun altro…Può darsi solamente che nell’astenersi dalla scelta della figura umana fosse in lui come un maggior ritengo per un contenuto di qualcosa che trascendeva la semplice e inerte realtà dell’oggetto da raffigurare…D’altra parte si può osservare che un ritratto o un vaso di fiori dipinti da Morandi vengono alla luce e si offrono come entittà pittorica, nella loro nuova realtà imposta al quadro, attraverso un tessuto e un grumo di tratti, di segni della forma che sono i medesimi venuti sotto il pennello nella concezione e raffigurazione di un quadro di natura morta o di paessagio.

305 Ragghianti, Bologna Cruciale, 245. Original: ha proceduto alla sostituzione di oggetti e corpi tradizionalmente dotati di prestigio e imputati di venustà con oggeti e corpi per così dire proletari, scelti fra gli oppressi, i diseredati, gl’inosservati, i rifiutati, gli esculsi. 306 Ibid. 244.

307 Antliff, “Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity”, 158

308 Interview with Edouard Roditi, “Giorgio Morandi, Dialogues on Art,” in Morandi 1890-1964, 353

309 Lamberti, “Times and Antinomies of a Legend,” 250

310 Turi, “Giovanni Gentile,” 913

311 Ibid. 914

312 Braun, “Speaking Volumes,” 109

313 Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics (Verso, 1977), 190

314 Pasetti, “Neither Bluff Nor Revolution,” In the Society of Fascists, quoting Gramsci’s La costruzione del partitio comunista, 486

315 Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (Cambrdige, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 98-99

! 117 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

316 Susan Buck-Morss, “What is Political Art?” in Private Time in Public Space: InSite97, ed. Sally Yard (San Diego: Installation Gallery, 1998), 14-26

317 Ibid. 26 318 www.goodthingstaketime.com/mediated-morandi

319 Certianly Wiseau’s film is not of a kind with the work of Fellini or Antonioni. However, The Room is an important example of contemporary cult cinema, and in this respect it represents a branch of middle class taste in a way that is distinct from, but comparable to, films like La Dolce Vita. Exactly what the significance is of including Morandi’s work in this film, where it appears on the mantelpiece alongside framed pictures of plastic cutlery, warrants further consideration.

320 www.goodthingstaketime.com/mediated-morandi

321 As a sign of encouragement for the future development of this work, the artists of Will Brown write on their project site: “Due to the beloved nature of Morandi’s work, it is likely that his paintings—or reproductions of his paintings—exist quietly in numerous other films.”

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