The title of the new show at the Palazzo Strozzi is a little confusing. Most of the artists in Italy in the 1930s weren’t beyond fascism; they were in it up to their necks. They didn’t really need much persuading by Mussolini to come up with pictures like Luciano Ricchetti’s 1939 painting ‘Listening to a Speech by the Duce’: enraptured, bare-footed Italian peasants in headscarves sit dangling babies on their knees, hanging on Il Duce’s every word.
Today lots of Italians still don’t like to admit it, but much of Florence, and Italy, were really rather keen on Mussolini, and Hitler, too. A fascinating little exhibition of official watercolours at the city archives shows what extraordinary lengths Florence went to in order to welcome the Führer in May 1938. The city was draped in 4,000 fascist and swastika flags, as Hitler made his triumphal progress from Santa Maria Novella Station, via the Pitti Palace, Piazzale Michelangelo and Palazzo Vecchio: 25 million lire — a fifth of the city’s annual budget — was spent on decking out the place for his visit. Only the churches refused to fly any flags, and Hitler avoided them on his sightseeing tour.
Like in Nazi Germany, fascist Italy was an enthusiastic sponsor of art to further the cause. The Venice Biennale, the Milan Triennale and the Rome Quadriennale were all under explicit fascist control in the Thirties.
You can see the dead hand of officially approved art in many of the pictures in this historically interesting, aesthetically disappointing show. Pippo Rizzo’s ‘The Nomad’ of 1929 — a sub-Wyndham Lewis figure stands in front of a train that presumably arrived at the station on time — is skilful enough. But it lacks originality — not because Rizzo happened to be secretary of the Sicilian Regional Fascist Fine Arts Union; just because he wasn’t very original.
There’s no foolproof link between officially sanctioned art and bad art — the Medicis commissioned some pretty good stuff half a millennium before Mussolini took over Florence, and they were no angels. It’s just that the Nazis and the Fascists happened to have a hatred for the avant-garde and, by extension, the original. Only a year after the 1937 Nazi exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ in Munich, the idea of arte degenerata entered the Italian lexicon, too.
The hatred of the new meant that it was often the good stuff that was condemned. Giorgio de Chirico was among those considered degenerate in 1938. In this show, he is sadly represented by a substandard, surrealist work of two egg-headed figures, awkwardly grouped together on an armchair while one plays a guitar. But when you look at his best works — not in this show — you see there’s no reason why art produced under an unpleasant regime should necessarily be bad.
Palazzo Strozzi just hasn’t been able to get hold of enough of the good stuff. That is really the sum of this show: not very good works by good artists, alongside not very good works by not very good artists. Still, occasionally, a decent picture breaks free of the shackles of fascist approval. In a 1929 still life of jugs and vases, Giorgio Morandi shows his pleasing gift for expressing volume with deceptively simple brushstrokes. Gigi Chessa’s 1930 ‘Figure with Hat’ — with its soft, light colours, not unlike the Scottish Colourists — comes as a welcome relief from the clashing geometric figures in many of the neighbouring late Futurist pictures.
It’s tempting to cover yourself with sanctimonious glory by praising pictures that were on the side of the goodies. But there’s no reason why the Allies should have had all the best tunes, or the best pictures. What is true is that our official war art wasn’t usually constrained by having to emphasise how glorious our political system was. Pictures by Paul and John Nash of war battlefields and Henry Moore’s drawings of Tube shelters in the second world war are hardly very cheering about the war effort; but they are extremely good.
The same goes for one of the few excellent pictures in the Strozzi show: a George Grosz drawing, ‘After the Questioning’, which shows jackbooted feet exiting a torture chamber, leaving behind them a flagstoned floor stained with blood, with no sign of the victim except for his torn trousers, a single shoe and his smashed spectacles. The drawing is free, anarchic, reminiscent of Ronald Searle; the contrarily cartoonish quality makes the horrors seem all the more vivid.
Still, it’s not the moral qualities of the drawing that make it a good one, but the artistic ones. I’m a dogged follower of the Kingsley Amis Principle of Aesthetic Preference: nice things are nicer than nasty ones. But there is a coda to it: good pictures of nasty things are better than bad pictures of nice things.
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