Giorgio Morandi and Italian Fascism an Honors Thesis
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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.