The Smithsonian Institution

Invisible Canvases
Italian Painters and Fascist Myths across the American Scene
Author(s): Sergio Cortesini
Source: American Art, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 2011), pp. 52-73
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Smithsonian American Art Museum
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Katherine Contini and Ida Minuti of Saint Paul with Lavandaie (The Laundresses), by Emanuele Cavalli at the
Minnesota State Fair, 1935. Photo, Kenneth M. Wright Studios, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul

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Invisible Canvases
Italian Painters and Fascist Myths across the American Scene

Sergio Cortesini

Terra Essay Prize

This essay is the inaugural
winner of the Terra
Foundation for American
Art International Essay
Prize, which recognizes
excellent scholarship in the
field of American art history
by a scholar who is based
outside the United States.
For more information
about this annual award,
see AmericanArt.si.edu
/research/awards/terra/.

In 1933 the futuristic Italian pavilion at

Chicagos Century of Progress worlds
fair and the concomitant triumphal
landing on Lake Michigan of an armada
of twenty-four seaplanes led over the
Atlantic by Marshall Italo Balbo (one of
the epic flights of the decade) marked the
peak of fascist Italys prestige in America.1
Americas reaction to the seizure of power
by Benito Mussolini had been far from
hostile. Mussoliniappointed prime minister in 1922had fought his way to the
political forefront as the man who would
reestablish order and stability after years
of inconclusive governments, social unrest,
and communist threat, and reinstate pride
in a country frustrated by the meager territorial gains it had obtained after World
War I. As John Diggins argues in his book
Mussolini and Fascism: The View from
America, the young Italian leaderdaring,
self-made, and charismaticbecame a
highly visible figure in American public
culture in the twenties, and fascism
enjoyed a sympathetic reception among
some American opinion makers.2
Following the invasion of Ethiopia
(October 1935June 1936), however, this
enthusiasm for fascism began to wane.
Mussolinis regime responded by strengthening its propaganda in the United States
and by promoting Italian culture as a form
of parallel diplomacy. Contemporary

art was given the task of helping to soften

the bellicose image of fascism through
exhibitions sent across the ocean. These
included a collective show that toured the
United States in 193536, which will be
the focus of this article; the activity of
the New York venue of the Rome-based
Comet gallery (which received secret funds
from the Ministry of Popular Culture) in
193738; the loan of works by both old
masters and contemporary artists to the
Golden Gate International Exposition in
1939; the Italian pavilion at the 193940
New York worlds fair, which featured a
contemporary art gallery; and the Italian
section at the International Womens
Art Exhibit at the Riverside Museum in
New York the same year. Other efforts
to promote contemporary Italian art
(such as a show of architecture proposed
to the Museum of Modern Art) proved
unsuccessful or were crippled by the war
and never went beyond the stage of preliminary discussions at the newly founded
Ufficio per lArte Contemporanea (Bureau
of Contemporary Art) within the Ministry
of National Education in Rome.
Could the regime that governed a
country of such ancient civilization
Italyand that patronized artists and
founded new cities be as brutally repressive as the antifascists painted it? Direct
contact with the work of the new artists,

53 American Art

Volume 25, Number 1 2011 Smithsonian Institution

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alongside the old masters, was supposed to

correct the limited, inaccurate, and sectarian notions Americans were thought to
have about Italian art. In 1930 philosopher
Horace M. Kallen had provided a pitiless
report on the state of Italian art, in which
he claimed that the Italians imitated the
styles current in Paris in the worlds of
both the fine arts and fashionbut were
years behind. He also stated, somewhat
maliciously and paradoxically, that
the best painter working in the Italian
peninsula was a Russian imitator named
Nicholas Lochoff, and ended with an
obituary: What I saw and heard and read
there [in Italy] left me with the feeling
that where art and thought are concerned,
Fascist Italy is . . . drugged and dead.3
Commenting ironically on the confused
results of a survey on fascist art conducted
by the journal Critica Fascista in 1926,
Kallen was unable to discern even the
shadow of a shadow of the heralded new
political ethos. He concluded with a grotesque image: In the world of art nothing
is happening: only the Futurists whipping
a dead horse and calling him Pegasus.4
Journalist George Seldes also devoted
a chapter of his critical biography of
Mussolini, Sawdust Caesar, to denouncing
the regimentation of the Italian intelligentsia and the nations school system.
Mussolini had proclaimed himself an emulator of the fifteenth-century statesman
and artistic patron Lorenzo il Magnifico,
yet, Seldes asserted, he only achieved Italys
cultural degeneration and dragged the
countrys cultural life to its grave. With
regard to the arts, however, the partial
information available to him, his own taste
for traditional art, and his personal political acrimony blurred Seldess vision and
caused him to oversimplify the situation.
Contradicting Kallen, he declared that
Mussolini had placed art in the hands of
[F. T. Marinetti] (the creator of futurism
and cofounder of the fascist movement),
signaling afor Seldes censurable
complete return to the modern art of the
past, and said that the dictator had ordered

all painters to symbolize fascism in some

manner at the 1930 Venice Biennale.
It is true that the Italian section of that
years biennial, which was organized on
a regionalist basis, presented itself as the
showcase of a new aesthetic stimulated by
fascism, which abandoned the anarchy of
experimentalism and strived for a reconciliation between art and the public. The
reintroduction of governmental prizes for
specific subjects favored artists who tended
to celebrate the regime. Nonetheless, pleasure at seeing the end of the avant-garde
movements and a return to unambiguousness, regionalism, and art that depicts
themes of daily life were not specific to
fascism but also dominant in the United
States in the 1930s. In fact, the Biennale
provided a comprehensive panorama that
ranged from academic realism to futurist
modernism. Seldess judgment that the
results were mostly propaganda and make
nice railroad posters now appears to have
been overly harsh.5
Mussolini was too pragmatic to
endorse an official artistic movement.
The art scene remained eclectic. The
post-vanguard return to craft, structural
clarity, and plastic qualities inherent in
the work of Italian old masters that had
fueled the Novecento group of artists since
1922 remained the mainstream.6 The
pervasive rhetoric of the national political
and moral regeneration of the Italians
permeated art criticism and was applied
to various and dissimilar stylistic trends.
Artistic Italianit (Italianness), schiettezza
(frankness, as opposed to avant-garde artificiality and esoterism), and truthfulness
associated with the land and its people, or
the fascist ethos, became commonplaces
in the phraseology of critics and curators.
The same discourse was adopted for both
the predominantly naturalistic paintings
shown at regional and national exhibitions
and the new dazzling aeropittura (aviation
painting, which captured the experience
of seeing as if from a spiraling airplane)
produced by a legion of second-generation
futurists. Local schools coexisted with

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those two rivaling styles: the geometric

abstractionists from Como and Milan, the
tonalist painting of young Roman artists,
late impressionists in Venice, as well as
Mario Sironis brooding primordial figures
and landscapes, Giorgio De Chiricos
postmetaphysical and neobaroque works,
or Carlo Levis Soutinesque portraits
and landscapes, to name only a few. The
same variety of styles could be found in
architecture. Through public building
commissions extending well into the late
thirties, Mussolini endorsed and patronized both the razionalisti (modernist
functionalists) and the more classicist or
middle-of-the-road practitioners.
In their selection of artists to be shown
in America, Italian cultural officials
wished to exhibit a vigorous aesthetic
strongly suggestive of their countrys
identity, but the U.S. public saw it differently. This essay examines the local
reception of the first Italian exhibitionExhibition of Contemporary Italian
Paintingwhich, in 1935, opened the
short season of artistic public relations.
Selected in Rome, the show had been
designed to prove that young Italians were
anything but aesthetically moribund: they
did not provide images of dictators on
horseback, nor scenes suitable for railway
advertisements, nor did they bow to the
dictates of Marinetti. But once in the
United States, where the artworks were
taken on a long tour of the country, they
took on new meanings in the eyes, and
literally the hands, of their American
public (frontispiece).
Working from contemporary sources,
this essay explores that elusive theme, how
a receivers cultural frame understands the
other. The imperatives implicit in the
Italian paintingswith their ideological subtexts and expectations of market
successmet, on a fluctuating intercultural terrain, the full range of expectations
of various segments of the public (with
their critical notions, political preconceptions, admiration or disapproval of
Mussolini, and identity-related community

values), thus generating an unforeseeable

friction. The significance of the art on tour
was at times reinterpreted and its propagandistic ambitions frustrated. In the end,
the aesthetic and technical qualities of the
paintings remained invisible, overshadowed
by the omnipresent critical discourses. In
fact, the exhibitions of Italian art, designed
to spread the message of a unequivocal
Italianness in style, can be viewed as
indicators of the state of American criticism of the time and illustrate how the
cultural other was translated and
doubly deformed through the twin lenses
of entrenched cultural nationalism and a
persistent interpretative model based on
French modernism.
Exhibition of Contemporary
Italian Painting
In the summer of 1933 Dario Sabatelloa
twenty-two-year-old journalist, art critic,
and enterprising art gallery ownerfound
himself in the United States on a trip to
study American journalism (fig. 1). Just
the year before he had opened a gallery
in Rome that, in only a few exhibitions
oriented toward young, up-and-coming
artists, had become a leading showcase of
the Italian national art scene. Now in San
Francisco, he met Walter Heil, director of
the Palace of the Legion of Honor, and
persuaded him to get involved in an exhibition of contemporary art of the highest
possible quality standard to be presented
in museums in the most important cities
on the West Coast.7 Sabatello persuaded
the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to
back the project. Heil organized the U.S.
museum tour and welcomed the event as
significant for the development of a better
understanding between the Italian nation
and the Americans . . . through the eternal
medium of the arts. He wrote similar
paeans on links between the two countries,
the generosity of the Italian government,
and the appreciation of the local Italian
communities.8

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1 Dario Sabatello, identified

as Il Duces Friend in Los

Angeles, Los Angeles Times,
September 5, 1933, Part II, 3

It became immediately clear to the

committee at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, which chose ninety paintings by
twenty-nine artists, that it could not limit
its selection to exponents of the latest
generation, because the Americans would
not understand our point of view and the
exhibition would be . . . considered an
event of secondary importance. Sabatello
explained that in order to reclaim several
artists for Italy that in America pass for
Frenchmen, we have included some names
that perhaps we do not consider important, but which for an exhibition abroad
are indispensable.9 The desire to assert
an Italian identity distinct from French
artan obsession in Italian art policy
abroadis revealed in these compromises,
gauged to suit the American public. In
his comment about French Italians,
Sabatello was probably alluding to painters
often resident in Paris and working in a
variety of loose, quasi-surreal and cubist
styles associated with the Parisian avantgarde. These include the metaphysical
and rebuslike scenes by De Chirico, one
of the few Italians who were well known

in America; paintings by Gino Severini,

known for his earlier futurist militancy
in Paris but then working in a personal
reinterpretation of synthetic cubist still
lifes juxtaposing heterogeneous objects
drawn from the Italian cultural heritage such as architectural fragments; and
works by Massimo Campigli, who had
developed an archaic-looking stylization
indebted to both Etruscan and Fayum
paintings and who had achieved a visibility and success in the United States
as a portraitist through the Julien Levy
Gallery in New York (which mounted
four solo exhibitions by the artist between
1931 and 1939). Also falling under the
rubric of artists associated with French
culture were the productions of impressionist Filippo De Pisis and Mario Tozzi,
who were less known. Tozzia painter
influenced both by De Chiricos metafisica
and the Novecento cult of plastic forms
(fig. 2)had played a key role in the
formation of collectives of Italians in Paris,
which influential French critic Waldemar
George referred to as a Gallo-Roman
legion guarding the bastion of magical
realism against the Judeo-romanticism
of Chaim Soutine and surrealism. George
dubbed them the Italiens de Paris in the
catalogue for an exhibition in Milan in
1930.10
In the introduction to the catalogue
for Exhibition of Contemporary Italian
Painting, Sabatello interpreted the standard discourse in Italian criticism of the
period, revolving his thinking around the
notions of Latin and Mediterranean
(as broad historical and cultural categories) and the corollaries of plasticity
and architecture within a painting (as
specific stylistic tendencies). His essay
begins with a predictable, controversial
target: the nineteenth century, when Italys
artistic prestige was eclipsed and French
realism and impressionism rose to the
fore, the twin outcomes of which were the
renunciation of plasticity in painting and
a degeneration into scenes of narrative
trivia. Furthermore, that century had been

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2 Mario Tozzi, Personaggi in cerca

di autore (Characters in Search of
an Author), 1929. Oil on canvas,
457/8 x 321/2 in. Private collection,
Trino, Italy

dominated by philosophical and moral

tendencies extraneous to the spiritual directives at the root of our culture, which
were a constant aspiration to religion, to
hierarchy, to myth. With these notions,
Sabatello refers to all that is of eternal

value and beyond the tangible reality, but,

at another level, they may also evoke the
sacralization of the state as a hierarchized
collectivity, and the mythologizing (of
history, the nation, and the leader) on
which the totalitarian regime was founded.

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3 Giorgio De Chirico, Archaeologists.

From Exhibition of Contemporary
Italian Painting under the Auspices of
the Western Art Museum Association
and the Direzione Generale Italiani
allEstero (Tivoli: Officine Grafiche
Mantero,1934), plate 14

The same dual interpretationaesthetic

and politicalis implicit in his statement that Italians had always channeled
their artistic emotions into unity and
clarity . . . measure and balance . . . right
proportion and a well defined structure.
After cubism and futurism, the existential
experience of the Great War had led to
the rediscovery of this intrinsic nature of
Italian art.11
Last, Sabatello commented briefly on
the personality of the artists, starting with
the more mature ones and moving toward
the younger generation, on whom he
focused much of his attention. Among the
former, the anthology illustrated the new,
solid, and almost magical naturalist style

of onetime futurist Carlo Carr; the expressionist temperament of Mario Sironi;

the surrealist imagination of De Chirico
(fig. 3), stating that he was too Latin and
Mediterranean to yield to abstraction; the
rediscovery of the encaustic technique and
wall painting of Ferruccio Ferrazzi (fig. 4),
who was known and collected in America
since winning the Carnegie Institute Prize
in 1926; the classically Latin love of
well-defined spaces and the architectonic
synthesis of Giorgio Morandis still lifes;
and the iconic and cold appearance of
Felice Casoratis figures (he, too, was quite
well known thanks to a Carnegie Prize),
which resembled ultra-modern beings
that had lost that muscle we call the
heart.12
The essay then came to the young
generation active in different regions: from
Friulia to Sicily, Piedmont, Lombardy and
Rome, noting: [N]o country in the world
has as . . . interesting a group of painters between the ages of twenty-five and
thirty-five years as has Italy. Implicitly, it
was the nine participating artists active in
RomeGiuseppe Capogrossi, Emanuele
Cavalli, Gisberto Ceracchini, Franco
Gentilini, Guglielmo Janni, Mario Mafai,
Adriana Pincherle, Fausto Pirandello, and
Alberto Ziveriwho best summarized the
new pictorial culture. They were above all
interested in good painting. They preferred a sophisticated relationship between
tones, convinced that violent coloration
was not required to express genius; they
aimed for plasticity and the eurythmic
arrangement of masses in painting, which
rendered their art plastic, architectonic
. . . wholly Latin and Mediterranean; they
expressed a virtual aspiration to fresco
painting; and, last, they showed they had
lost interest in deformity, which was unnecessary for the expressive enhancement
of their works.13
Sabatello concluded that Italian art
was moving toward a new, nonacademic
realism. It was a magical realism, participating in the sense of mystery of the . . .
universe. Italian painting is living through

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4 Ferruccio Ferrazzi, Ninetta melanconica (Melancholic Ninetta),

1933. Burnt fresco on clay brick,
11 x 11 in. Archivio Ferrazzi,
Rome

the dawn of a great new classic epoch . . .

toward a classicism that will be warm,
expressive, chromatically intense, antirhetorical in its solemn sincerity. Unlike
other centers of art (the Soviet Union,
Germany, France, and Spain), which were
more and more weary and outworn, Italy
was the first country in Europe to have
made the transition toward the new, he
said. Here it is not difficult to read between
the lines that the warm, expressive nature
and chromatic intensity of the new classical age were seen as a reflection of the
policies of the fascist state, as opposed to
the alleged moral and, therefore, aesthetic
exhaustion of the nations in decline.14
The last sentence of the catalogue essay
is revealing: If to these purely artistic
data we add all the other elements, moral,
social and political, bearing witness to the
rebirth of a people, it will appear that our
hope that the 20th century will renew the
preeminence of Italian art in the world
59

may be well founded. In reconsigning

Italy to the leading position in European
art, the new generation of painters was
marching in step with the universal
mission of fascism. Sabatello echoed
the notion introduced by Mussolini in
late 1932 of the coming fascistization of
Europe and Italys cultural hegemony,
saying: [T]he twentieth century will be
the century of fascism . . . during which
Italy will become the guiding light of
human civilization for the third time.15
The dividends expected from Sabatellos
investment were threefold. An intrinsic
political value was to be gained by
showing Americans that in Italyunlike
the Soviet Union and Germany, where the
governments had imposed a trite socialist
realism or neoclassicismartists enjoyed
creative freedom and the protection of the
state without having to toe the line of an
official style. At a more sophisticated level,
the political payoff was complemented
by the assumption that art reflected the
fascist ethos as an intellectual creation
imbued with the Weltanschauung of the
time. It gave an aesthetic appearance to
profound moral and political content
that could be communicated subliminally
through style. Second, a purely aesthetic
value was attained by the diffusion of an
Italian school as opposed to the cole
de Paris. And, third, promotion of the
artists among American collectors might
result in an increased market value of the
paintings. The act of assuring the Italians
a slice of the U.S. market at the expense of
the French monopoly and the dissemination of a modern Italian aesthetic at the
expense of the influence of Paris were two
sides of the same coin.
Ignoring futurism and fascist kitsch
in terms of style and anecdotal illustration and outright propaganda in terms
of content, Sabatello and the selection
committee made a moderately modernist
selection that gave visibility to the young
artists of the Roman school. Leaving
aside the critical stances taken by the
curator, what were their paintings like?

American Art

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Their common denominator was an

aesthetic of matte surfaces, diffused light,
tonally harmonized tints, and mysterious
narrative themes set in almost abstract
spaces, like visions from a dream or some

dimension of memory. Preferring to

stress the tonalism of the paintings, their
internal architecturethe relationship
of color masses and forms within the
picturesand images of archaic taste,
the Romans practiced good Italian
painting that owed nothing to German
expressionism or French impressionism.
They could, therefore, offer themselves
as the best representatives of an Italian
aesthetic spirit.
The young painter Corrado Cagli
(a Jew who would move to California
in 1940, before returning to Italy with
the U.S. army to liberate the country
from fascism) was then emerging as an
original figure, including as a critic. His
name appears in a preliminary list of
artists invited, but he was absent from the
American exhibition, probably owing to
a temporary quarrel with the curator. The
grouping was in harmony with Caglis
own leanings, howeverSabatello was
his dealerand other artists linked to
him were present, such as Capogrossi
and Cavalli. Even Sabatellos reference to
the tendency to return to fresco painting seems to allude to Cagli and his
theoretical and practical commitment to
the revival of muralism. Cagli was the
cultural activist of the generation then in
their twenties and thirties. The dawn of
a great new classic epoch, in Sabatellos
words, echoed the concept of the dawn
of primordia expressed by Cagli in an
influential article of 1933 (In a dawn
of primordia everything is again to be
redone and imagination relives all the
wonders and quivers at all the mysteries).16 And the painters discourse on the
construction of new myths in the same
text offered a good description of many
paintings in the show and was echoed in
the catalogue by repeated references to
myth and mystery.
Indeed, mythical and atmospheric
scenes suspended in time were present
not only in the works of Capogrossi,
Ziveri, Cavalli, Janni, Ceracchini, and
Gentilini but also in those of their older

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5 Giuseppe Capogrossi, Il poeta del

Tevere (The Poet of the Tiber), 1934.
Oil on canvas, 491/5 x 591/16 in.
Private collection, Rome 2011
Artist Rights Society (ARS), New
York/SIAE, Rome
6 Alberto Ziveri, Morte di un giovane
(Death of a Young Man), or Com
pianto per un giovane morto (Mourn
ing over a Dead Young Man). Oil
on board, 48 x 601/4 in. Galleria
Nazionale dArte Moderna, Rome.
Reproduced with permission of
the Archivio della Scuola Romana.
Photo, Ministero per i Beni e le
Attivit Culturali
7 Mario Mafai, Fiori (Flowers), 1932.
Oil on canvas, 311/2 x 241/5 in.
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, Gift of
Emilio and Maria Jesi. Photo, Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit Culturali

colleagues. Capogrossis The Poet of the

Tiber (fig.5) catches the oratorical pose
of a young, extempore poet, captured
like a terra-cotta statue in a swimsuit,
but the palpable quality of life on a summers day is sapped by the closely toned
palette and made enigmatic by the presence of a naked woman who lifts a cloth
over her head, reminiscent of the frescoes
in Pompeii. In Mourning over a Dead
Young Man by Ziveri, naked youths form
a circle around the body of a friend lying
on the ground, as if in a tribal rite in
some unspecified place (fig.6). In The
Laundresses by Cavalli (see frontispiece)
three women are busy folding washing
with movements that solemnize their
mundane activity, set in a papier-mch

landscape that also distances them from

everyday life like a frescoed icon. Other
painters presented modest still lifes, like
Mario Mafais Flowers (fig.7); this is a
translation of the sensory experience of
unexceptional wildflowers resting against
a wall or on a table, their stems and corollas steeped in the delicate impasto.
Was this the image of a people
dictated by a desire for action from
whom Mussolini wanted to model a
race of warriors? The indefinable settings, populated by archaizing figures,
were not only a harmless literary
fantasy, they also reflected a mythical
conception of history and rebirth. The
notions of modern myths and mysteries descended through Cagli also
appear in the work of writer Massimo
Bontempelli. He had encouraged the
creation of myths of the new epoch
in literature, observing: Is not all
Italy working today . . . in politics and
industry, in agriculture and morals, as
though engaged in writing a mythic
poem . . . on the historical stage? In
his speech at the opening of Sabatellos
gallery, Bontempelli had warned that
the greatest artists came at the beginning of each artistic phase. It was the
artists task to find the means to be at
the start of a series, of an artistic civilization, and to revive creative attitudes
typical of primitives and barbarians,
who were predisposed to feelings of
wonder (stupore) and mythos. The
initiatory and regenerative terminology
used several times by Sabatello in his
essayemerging, primordial, dawn
of a great new classic epoch, dawn of
a new artistic civilization, rebirth,
transition from the old era to the new
(with variants and combinations), which
he opposed to decadence, degeneration, outwornreiterated the rhetoric
of the myth of the new Italian, formed
by the young generations educated by
the regime and its plan for political
and anthropological regeneration of the
nation.17

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In the Eyes and Hands of Americans

The exhibition opened on January 11,
1935, at the California Palace of the
Legion of Honor in San Francisco,
and traveled until May 1936 to other
American venues: Los Angeles; Portland,
Oregon; Seattle; Denver; Saint Paul;
Hamilton (Ontario, Canada); Memphis;
Hagerstown, Maryland; Manchester,
New Hampshire; New York City; and
Saint Louis. The large number of cities
is proof of the interest the exhibition
generated. Originally only the first four
stops were planned, on a tour that was
to last just four months. Museums in
Santa Barbara, Chicago, and Omaha
also asked to host the exhibition but
ultimately were unable to do so owing to
scheduling difficulties. The event often
attracted large numbers of visitors by
local standards; the museum in Memphis
decided to extend the opening hours to
accommodate the crowds.18 Nevertheless,
the hope of making a significant impact
on the American art world was not borne
out by events.
The Italian style could not easily be
categorized, and the key to understanding modernism remained the French
paradigm. Except in New York and San
Francisco, foreign modern art exhibitions
were rare events, and, in the case of contemporary Italian art, unique. This fact
gave rise to certain naive and exaggerated claims. In Memphis the show was
described as one of the most discussed
exhibitions shown in the United States
for some time.19 Unfortunately, the
reviews revealed the difficulties that the
unknown artists posed to local critics,
who were obliged to cling to the Parisian
experience of some of the better-known
painters (like De Chirico and Severini)
as though to a safe yardstick of opinion
and thus reiterated some of the commonplaces the Italians were trying to dispel.
We can only guess at Sabatellos reaction
if he read an article in the Memphis
Commercial Appeal in which the director

of the Memphis Brooks Memorial Art

Gallery found a strong French influence
predominating among these new Italian
painters and concluded, after digressing about impressionism and cubism,
that in Italy Futurism was practiced
. . . with De Chirico . . . among the
leaders.20
In addition to the usual critical preconceptions the commentators brought
to the table, their eyes were further
veiled and directed away from the paintings by the powerful magnetic field of
Mussolinis fame. When Sabatello visited
California in 1933, he was photographed
and presented in the Los Angeles Times
(see fig. 1) as Il Duces friend (in fact
he was able to have only rare contact and
only at an institutional level). Some visitors to the exhibition were prompted by
an interest in the dictator. Consequently,
the reviews contained not only an
aesthetic judgment but also a political
angle. A number of commentators took
a sociological standpoint, calling the
artists brush wielding Fascisti and the
exhibition a collection of work from
the land of Il Duce.21 Some saw it as
a direct representation of Mussolinis
own aesthetic, as the sensationalism
and simplification of newspaper headlines indicate: Premier Mussolini Has
Shipped 90 Italian Paintings to the State
Fair Show in the Minneapolis Star, and
Mussolinis Sponsorship of Art Shows
Striking Results in the Los Angeles
Times. Others discerned psychoanalytic
implications in the perplexing paintings: [T]hese artists have received
great encouragement from Mussolini.
Their more incomprehensible works
may provide an explanation of Il Duces
foreign policy, the Hamilton Herald
asserted.22
For the seventeen months of the
exhibitions tour, Italys aggressive foreign
policy was discussed almost every day
on the front pages of American newspapers. In January 1935 the crisis that
had arisen between Ethiopia and Italy

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was a diplomatic dispute, but on May

3, 1936, when the paintings arrived in
Saint Louis, Addis Ababa was in flames.
These developments could not but influence how the exhibition was viewed: it
was inevitably associated with the Italian
government, and the reviews were affected by the politicization of the period.
Political and aesthetic partisanship
often became confused. What Sabatello
had exalted as primordial, magical
realism, and myth could be derided
by some American critics as deadly
boring. Under the title New Fascist Art
Dismal and Inert, Jerome Klein of the
New York Post, a declared pacifist and
antifascist newspaper, sarcastically observed: Tones are . . . dull grey. Figures
are always inert. . . . And these men,
many unquestionably very gifted, dont
feel it is even safe to breathe too deeply.
Its a dismal little Renaissance. This
art, we are told, is one of the elements

8 Los Angeles County Museum

assistant Virginia Stoneman poses
in front of Meriggio (Midday)
by Gisberto Ceracchini, holding
Annunciazione (Annunciation)
by Pippo Rizzo. Italys Peace
Message! Los Angeles Examiner,
March 3, 1935

bearing witness to the rebirth of a

people. Judging from it, they must have
used plenty of chloroform.23
Even the neutral TIME magazine
offered a necrologically titled Art: From
the Grave. In the New Yorker, Lewis
Mumford belittled the young Italian art
with finesse: One expected to find the
cult of dynamism and aggression. . . .
The result is . . . thirty-five harmless
nudes . . . sad, yearning, adolescent faces
that look as if they would burst into
tears if confronted with a half-grown
Ethiopian.24 Not one to use irony
when battling the dragon of fascismcapitalism, Margaret Duroc provided a
more lucid analysis in her long article on
Italian art in the Marxist publication Art
Front. Faithful to the conception of art
as political militancy, social statement,
and a tool for the creation of critical
awareness, Duroc could not help but find
something insidious in the serene and archaicizing aspect of the Italian paintings.
She argued that such an avoidance of
reality was a way to hide the control and
preservation of the social status quo and
was functionally beneficial to maintaining class hierarchy and a nonprogressive
economic system.25
Conversely, less politically aligned
or profascist newspapers offered various
shades of opinion on the show, conceding that it was surprisingly devoid of
propaganda and calling it a selection of
several masterpieces, said to be very
fine by lovers of the ultra in modernistic art. The Los Angeles Examiner,
owned by the profascist magnate
William Randolph Hearst, was explicit
in its appreciation and in underlining
the analogy between fascism and the
flowering of artconsidering the event
a message of peace among the winds of
war blowing in Europe (fig. 8).26
Rarely did the reviews shed much light
on the reactions of the public, but in Los
Angeles one mentioned that visitors had
given the thumbs down on modern
art . . . , and Italian modern art in

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particular.27 The exhibition was considered the most controversial in recent years
and provoked discussions on degenerate
art. The purchase of Carlo Carrs After the
Bath (fig.9) for the Los Angeles County
Museum, thanks to a subscription begun
by collector Preston Harrison, sparked
a storm over Italian art.28 In Seattle,
many museum visitors were apparently
unprepared to see dislocated pieces of
anatomy in space, even in an exhibition of
modern art, and were left wondering about
their encounter with Fausto Pirandellos
enigmatic and erotic Stairway (fig.10).
A scantily dressed woman descending
a wooden staircase, two fragments of
leg climbing the other way, a detached
hand grasping the banister, and a marble
foot on the landing together suggested a
coming-and-going that attracted everyones notice immediately and sent them
hurrying off to ask any artist at hand just

what the meaning of that was. Perplexed

critics debating esoteric concepts like the
fourth dimension prompted the headline
Art Critics Puzzled: Unattached Legs in
Italians Painting Cause Furor in the local
newspaper.29
During a period in which there were
few opportunities to travel to Europe,
the arrival of the exhibition was like
a cultural embassy, above all for the
Italian communities far from New
York, whose feeling of marginalization
in American society was given some
relief by the new prestige fascist Italy
bathed in. For the Italians in Seattle, the
exhibition from their mother country
was a galvanizing event, but their patriotic fervor was put to the test when
they faced Sironis disproportionate
Workers, De Chiricos mannequins, or
the sketchy, almost disfigured women
in Renato Birollis Gynaeceum (fig. 11).
Most visitors would have
appreciated views of Naples
or realist subjects. An embarrassed journalist of the local
Italian-language newspaper
turned the encounter into a
question of the publics lack of
preparation and goodwill:
Everyone will be able to go, not
lets say to visit, but to study these
paintings. Because . . . what is
referred to as modern art is com
pletely unlike classical art. . . . In
Europe theyre used to it now, but
for us aspects of it may seem so
new that it needs a lot of instruc
tion and study to be able to grasp
it. . . . Anyway, let the modern
art exhibition come. Like always,
we will welcome it as an expres
sion of our distant homeland and
will devote all the time necessary
to it to allow us to identify
ourselves with its new spirit, and
try to understand the examples of
beauty that it must undoubtedly
contain.30

9 Carlo Carr, Dopo il bagno (After

the Bath), 1931. Oil on canvas,
382/5 x 244/5 in. Private collection, Padua, Italy (Purchased by
the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art in 1935; deaccessioned
in 1977) 2011 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), New York/SIAE,
Rome

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Surprisingly, in San Francisco the

event was not covered by the profascist
publication LItalia. When it came to
intellectual missions from Italy, the anti
fascist and workers newspaper Corriere
del Popolo preferred to celebrate the visit
to the city by the former member of
the Italian parliament and socialist exile
Emanuele Modigliani, who was engaged
in a tour organized by the International
Ladies Garment Workers Union.31
In September 1935 the exhibition
arrived in Saint Paul, where it was
housed in the fine arts pavilion of the
annual Minnesota State Fair rather than
in a museum. Held at the end of the
summer, at the climax of the harvest
and the season for processing agricultural products and foods, the Minnesota
State Fair was the regular celebration of
local production and the heart and soul
of the dairy belt. Newspapers discussed
the great event daily in the days before
its opening, and captioned photographs
showcased the best specimens of horses,
cattle, and pigs who had been brushed
till they shone. In others, model brides
from various counties proudly displayed
jars of fruit or elaborate cakes for the
photographer. One and all were competing for the yearned-for blue ribbon.
Such a setting for the Italian exhibition might seem unusual if not
demeaning, but under the direction of
painter Clement Haupers in the 1930s,
an art exhibition within the fair had
become the leading cultural event in
the region, offering a combination of
traveling shows of old masters, modern
art, previews of works purchased by the
museums in Saint Paul and Minneapolis,
and exhibitions by local artists. The
point was that the Italian paintings were
seen by more than three hundred thousand visitors in one week, and despite
the fact that the public was mostly fairly
unsophisticated about fine art, the sheer
numbers must have made up for any
perceived lack of refinement.32 The Saint
Paul slot in the tour marked the high

10 Fausto Pirandello, La scala (Stair

way), 1934. Oil on board, 744/5 x
5913/16 in. Private collection. Photo,
courtesy Studio Paul Nicholls, Milan
2011 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/SIAE, Rome
11 Renato Birolli, Gineceo (Gynaceum),
1933. Oil on canvas, partially
destroyed. Original: 551/8 x 63 in;
surviving fragment: 323/10 x 273/16
in. Private collection, Milan

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12 Girls Look Over Art Works Set

Up for Exhibition at State Fair
Next Week, Minneapolis Journal,
August 27, 1935

point of the derailment of the Italian

promoters intentions. It is likely that
Sabatello had not anticipated the type
of public the fair attracted. There, in the
heart of a largely rural and Scandinavian
America, the Latin and Mediterranean
character of Italian art was in a position
to put all of its communication capabilities to the test and cause an unexpected
short-circuit.
The show was presented to the
readers of the Saint Paul Pioneer Press
as the first exhibition in the Midwest
of paintings gathered at the request
of Premier Benito Mussolini of Italy to
reveal the trends of art in his country
(a statement that falsely bestows the
role of art curator on Mussolini, while
bearing witness to the continuing
resonance of his persona in American
public culture). In his announcement
that three hundred thousand tickets to
the fair had been sold, Haupers noted
that the young Italian painters were
offering themselves for an implicit
comparison with their countrys great
art of the past, but that perhaps the
most remarkable thing was their lack
of regimentation.33 So far, this was
nothing new, but a look at the photographic coverage of the fair overall

and its art exhibition may offer a better

appreciation of how the Italian art was
received in the local community.
The Minneapolis Journal published
a photographic triptych: at left two
local Italian American women hold up
to the camera, with visible pleasure,
Emanuele Cavallis The Laundresses;
next to them, two other girls proffer
a landscape painted by a local artist
(fig.12). On the same day, the rival
Minneapolis Star showed the same
Italian Americans proudly pointing out
a large painting of a rural subject by
Gisberto Ceracchini (one of the pair
smiles at the camera while pointing to
the canvas on the easel), while in the
photograph next to that one, a local girl
holds up a painting by a New York artist
taken from a contemporary exhibition
called Our Government in Art (fig.13).
In point of fact, in another wing of the
building where the Italian show was
being held, the fine arts pavilion had
mounted a selection of paintings from
all over the United States that had been
executed as part of the Public Works
of Art Project (PWAP). This was the
first federal program set up in 1933 to
create work for more than 3,700 artists
during the depression. The building

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13 Beauties Look Over State Fair

Art, Minneapolis Star, August 27,
1935

also held a salon of local artists. The

possibility of drawing a parallel between
the aims and results of the government
art programs in both countries was
implicit in Sabatellos postscript to the
catalogue, The Italian Government
and the Artists, in which he glowingly
described the commitment made by
the fascist government to culture, the
Accademia dItalia, the intellectuals
and artists syndicate, and the public
patronage of works of artgiving the
lie to the judgments on the matter published by Kallen and Seldes.34 In the Los
Angeles Herald and Express, Alma May
Cook had taken the cue and enthusiastically acclaimed the Italian painters as
an example of how artists were being
integrated into the general plan of life
being mapped out . . . by Il Duce and,
as such, of their special significance
with regard to the PWAP.35 The theme
had been touched on by other journalists, but in Minnesota the comparison
became real.
Although not necessarily aspiring to
artistic excellence, the PWAP (and the
succeeding Federal Art Project) made
the federal government a reliable patron.
Yet because this art was being paid for
by the taxpayer, it required a figurative
language understandable to the average

man, portraying national subjectsthat

is to say, it should be an exploration of
the American Scene on a regional basis.
The peak of the regionalist movement
occurred in 1935, after TIME dedicated
the cover of its December 1934 issue to
Thomas Hart Benton and the advent
of the American school (as opposed
to outlandish French art) solidly
rooted in the Midwest and produced by
earthy Midwesterners.36 Just as Italian
art was ostentatiously reasserting the
artistic values that were intrinsic to that
countrys tradition, so too were some
American artists looking for a national
style and turning their backs on the
model of the bohemian artist and the
artificiality and intellectualism of international-Parisian modernism. Following
the example of the triumvirate Thomas
Hart Benton, Grant Wood, and John
Steuart Curry, many U.S. painters had
left the cosmopolitanism of New York to
return to the West or Midwest in search
of creative authenticity, to observe
country life, the culture of American
Indians, and to rediscover folk art. As
the American Magazine of Art noted
in a review of an exhibition held in
December of that year in Minneapolis,
artists in Minnesota were also producing
sincere and unmannered painting. . . .
Minnesota country has always been
paintable. Perhaps the renewed art
activity in and around the twin cities
is traceable to a Land Ho! School of
regionalism. . . . the recent exhibition
showed that it was possible for artists
living anywhere to paint what they
know best without self-consciousness.37
As mentioned, the pictures of the
young Italian American women who
smilingly held up one painting at a
time to the camera conformed to a
conventional manner of presenting
news stories that was used in the weeks
before and during the fair. Following
the same type of shot, photographers
recorded the faces and objects of dozens
of exhibitors from the various counties.

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14 Youth Must be Served at the

Minnesota State Fair, Saint Paul
Daily News, August 25, 1935,
first section, 8
15 Ruth Lerud, bread baking champion of Norman County, wins
trip to Minnesota State Fair,
1935. Boy from Anoka County
holds squash entered in 1934
State Fair. Photos, Kenneth
M. Wright Studios, Minnesota
Historical Society, Saint Paul

Day after day, the photographers toured

the show, capturing images of all the
activities and products that represented
the prosperity and identity of the
state, from the best tractors and giant
vegetables and fruit to the healthiest
and most productive animals and the
best cherry pies (fig.14). They also
selected and presented their fellow
countrymen: beautiful girls, the
healthiest girl and boy chosen from
the local 4-H Club members (their
photograph and caption undifferentiated from the typographic rhetoric of
the daily gallery of blue-ribbon-winning
specimens of healthy livestock), the
longest-married couple (Married and
Happy), and average members of the
honest, simple rural folkthe champion sweet-corn eater, old farmers, and
sprightly children. Together the photographs made up a mosaic of a collective
self-portrait, a taxonomy of all that is
local (fig. 15).

The Minnesota portrayed is one of

butter, cows, ideal bridesand art,
which was presented to readers and
visitors with the same emphasis as a
zootechnical product: Art, Butter,
Womens Contests Start, announced
the Saint Paul Daily News; thousands
of citizens will flock to the fair grounds
. . . [to] show their appreciation of
better hogs, better bread and better oil
painting, to mention only a few of the
State assets, as the Minneapolis Star
straightforwardly put it.38 Geographic
mapping of American painting incorporated the sense of pride of local
belonging, as did the fruit preserves,
beauty contests, and agricultural products. In the setting of the state fair, the
art of the PWAP was able to claim its
most satisfying achievement; it really
was art for the people, art capable of
describing and conveying social content
experienced by the common man or
woman.

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The Italian exhibition may seem an

interloper in this all-American celebration of native soil and the midwestern
values exalted by regionalists. But, on
closer inspection, the two young women
of Italian extractionunlike their
female American colleagues, who were

dressed in fashionable clotheswere

wearing traditional, regional costumes
(see frontispiece and figs. 12, 13). The
kerchiefs on their heads identify them
as coming from central-southern Lazio
or a neighboring region, and become a
synecdoche for all areas of Italian emigration. In this fashion they established
an analogy between the Italian and
the American works of art exhibited
at the fair, on the basis of a regionalist
paradigm. From the point of view of
the observer of the time, the presence of
the bearers of the American paintings
from the PWAP or a Minnesota
artistmust have seemed of slight
rather than meaningful relevance, little
more than graceful hostesses framing
the painting. Their individuality was
absorbed into the dominant theme of regionalism, without the need to dress up
in historical costume (perhaps as women
pioneers celebrated by the art and literature of the period), whereas the Italian
regional costumes served as intensifying
captions, characterizing a foreign art
and at the same time classifying it in a
category comparable to the American
one. Exhibited alongside the American
Scene paintings, the Italian art became
folklore, a foreign vernacular. In the
identification of modern Italian painting
as another cultural expression, though
one still comprehensible to the public
rather than the exclusive dominion of
sophisticated city-dwelling connoisseurs,
the traditional costumes reinterpreted
the exhibition art as an ethnographic
stereotype, a shift that was certainly not
authorized by the critics in Rome.
The assimilation of the Italian art
foreign but figurativeinto a regionalist
framework is yet more surprising given
the rejection of other local artists.
The paintings of Alexandre Corazzo
and LeRoy Turner, two abstractionists from Saint Paul and Minneapolis,
were described as a puzzle for the
average man, although both artists
won acclaim in Paris (where they were

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16 Alexandre Corazzo and LeRoy

Turner show their abstract paintings. Ragtime Paintings Win
Foreign Recognition for Local
Artists, Saint Paul Daily News,
August 18, 1935, first section, 8

members of the Abstraction-Cration

group) (fig.16). Only the distant and
cosmopolitan city of Paris was capable
of dealing with their mysterious
compositions of abstract forms, while
another son of Minnesota, painter Erle
Loran, who was celebrating the rebirth
of regionalism and the new local pride,
was able to say: When I returned from
Europe six years ago I found as much
excitement in rediscovering America
and American painters as I had felt
when I first saw Czannes country. . . .
To my surprise I found that a red barn
was as exciting as a Provenal mas
[traditional farmhouse], and, far more
important, I knew that I was somehow
connected with it, it really belonged to
me (fig. 17).39
Epilogue
In confronting a wide range of different types of public, the message of the
Italian spirit in art became dissipated.
In spite of the controversy, the director
of the Los Angeles County Museum
hailed the purchase of the Carr as the
first work for a gallery of contemporary
Italian art, which was never in fact
realized. At the same time, the exhibition aroused interest through a more
prolonged comparison between the two
countries. Enzo dUrbania, a painter and
contributor to the Los Angeles Examiner,
and postsurrealist Lorser Feitelson,
who held conferences on contemporary
Italian art while the paintings were
at the Los Angeles County Museum,
proposed a program of exhibition exchanges. The contemporary Italian art
movement is only partially known in
the United States . . . ; and on the other
hand, in American art circles, there is
a strong wish to show Italy the purely
ethnic trends that have recently evolved
in America, reported Dino Alfieri,
the Italian undersecretary of press and
propaganda, with regard to dUrbania

and Feitelsons idea.40 The common

denominator between the two national
art communities was a mutual willingness to recognize the others cultural
identity, freed from foreign artistic
ventriloquism (foreign influence).41
A preliminary plan was based on ten
exhibitions of Italian works from the
last decade di pura concezione e spirito
italianissimo, probably to be held at
the Hollywood Gallery of Modern
Art or the Transigram Sound Studios,
and matched in Italy by a selection of
American artists who represented the
fundamental, folkloristic and ethnic
trends that have developed over the last
decade: movements totally unknown
outside America, such as those of the
Post-Surrealists (which originated in
California), Surrealists, Neo-Classicists,
Expressionists, Purists, etc.42 Like the
reception accorded the Italian paintings in Saint Paul, however, the latest
expressions of American art, seen from
the distorting viewpoint of Rome, were
thought of as specimens of ethnographic
production. This project, too, never
came to fruition.
Italian contemporary art remained
squeezed between the myth of the
Renaissance and international modernism. In 1939 the Birth of Venus by
Sandro Botticelli and twenty-seven

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17 Erle Loran, Barge Dock, ca.

193334. Oil on canvas, 30 x
36 in. Smithsonian American Art
Museum, Transfer from the U.S.
Department of Labor

other masterpieces from between the

fifteenth and eighteenth centuries lent
by Italian museums, confirming the traditional values of Italian art, attracted
nearly three million viewers at the
Golden Gate International Exposition
in San Francisco, the Art Institute of
Chicago, and the Museum of Modern
Art (MoMA) in New York. MoMA
remained inaccessible to living Italian
artistsbut not to Botticelliuntil
1948, when the museum organized
its first exhibition on contemporary
Italian art. Throughout the thirties the
museum had been impeded by the impossibility of acting independently; its
choices had to be vetted by the fascist
government. Immediately following the
liberation, in May 1945, the cultural
attach at the American embassy in
Rome proposed to AlfredH. Barr Jr.
that an exhibition be planned, and in
April 1948 Barr and James Thrall Soby

left for Rome and Milan to meet artists

and choose works.43 Twentieth Century
Italian Art was the first exhibition in
America on Italian art from futurism
to 1949 and was accompanied by an
essay-catalogue that provided a pioneering introduction to the subject in
English. In their preface, Barr and Soby
acknowledged: The field is one that
we in America have tended to neglect,
not only because of our rightful interest in our own contemporary painting
and sculpture, but also because of two
formidable counter-attractions . . .the
Parisian present and the Italian past.44
In addition to the last generation of
artists who had emerged since the war,
Barr and Soby presented some of the
names Sabatello had included in his
exhibition fourteen years earlier (Carr,
Morandi, Casorati, Sironi, Campigli,
De Pisis, Rosai, Pirandello, and Mafai).
The new exhibition depoliticized their

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art (or politicized it differently) and

described the style of each artist by
connecting it with a broad range of
corresponding artists internationally, in
particular French, coeval or nineteenthcentury, thus reestablishing a European
dimension to Italian art that countered
Sabatellos national genealogy. The

Roman school was reinterpreted as the

painting of romanticism and private
passion, which went directly against
the cultural directives that had been
handed down by fascism. All that had
gone unnoticed when the same painters,
with similar paintings, were received in
America as the artists of Mussolini.

Notes
1 Dennis P. Doordan, Exhibiting Progress:
Italys Contribution to the Century
of Progress Exposition, in Chicago
Architecture and Design, 19231993:
Reconfiguration of an American Metropolis,
ed. John Zukowsky (Munich: PrestelVerlag, in association with the Art
Institute of Chicago, 1993), 21931.
2

John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism:

The View from America (Princeton:
Princeton Univ. Press, 1972). See also
Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy,
and American Public Culture: Envisioning
the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s1950s
(Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina
Press, 2003), esp. 1534.

3 Horace M. Kallen, Indecency and the

Seven Arts: And Other Adventures of
a Pragmatist in Aesthetics (New York:
H. Liveright, 1930), 115.
4 Critica Fascista, the cultural and political journal edited by minister Giuseppe
Bottai, in 1926 solicited an open discussion about the definition of a Fascist
art. The twenty or so replies, sent by
artists, art critics, and writers, were heterogeneous, but none proposed a specific style or content. Bottai summed up
the debate, acknowledging a tendency
toward stronger, more ample and solid
construction, in line with the great tradition of indigenous Italian art, but stating
that neither Decalogue, nor formulas,
nor maxim books, nor recipes could be
dictated to contemporary artists. Simply
put, fascist art would stem naturally from
the ethos generated by the fascist revolution; it laid potentially in the deepest
roots of consciousness of the new Italian,
the fascist Italian: Bottai, Risultanze
dellinchiesta sullarte fascista, Critica
Fascista, February 15, 1927, reprinted
in Bottai, La politica delle arti, ed.

Alessandro Masi (Rome: Editalia, 1992),

78. For the last quote, see Kallen,
Indecency and the Seven Arts, 117.
5 George Seldes, Sawdust Caesar: The
Untold History of Mussolini and Fascism
(New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1935),
333, 338, 345, 34243. The notion of
reconciling art and the people or public
(riconciliare larte e il pubblico) was a
trope in Italian criticism of the time.
6 Originally called Sette Pittori del
Novecento (Seven Painters of the
Twentieth Century), the group
(Anselmo Bucci, Leonardo Dudreville,
Achille Funi, Gian Emilio Malerba,
Piero Marussig, Ubaldo Oppi, and
Mario Sironi) gathered around critic
Margherita Sarfatti and exhibited in
1923 at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan, and
the following year at the Venice Biennale.
Sarfatti later enlarged and reshaped
the group into the Novecento Italiano,
making it a national artistic committee that sponsored exhibitions both in
Italy (the first two in Milan in 1926 and
1929) and abroad.
7 Walter Heil to Dario Sabatello, October
9, 1933, in Archivio Centrale dello Stato,
Ministero della Cultura Popolare, Dir.
Gen. Propaganda, box 218, folder Stati
Uniti 1934. I parte, sf. Esposizione darte
moderna in California.

(hereafter GNAM/AS/Maraini), cart.

41, f. Stati Uniti. Carlo Carr, Giorgio
De Chirico, and Alberto Ziveri were
represented with five paintings apiece;
Felice Casorati, Ferruccio Ferrazzi,
Ottone Rosai, Mario Sironi, and Mario
Tozzi with four; Renato Birolli, Massimo
Campigli, Giuseppe Capogrossi,
Emanuele Cavalli, Filippo De Pisis,
Leonor Fini, Guglielmo Janni, Mario
Mafai, Francesco Menzio, Enrico
Paulucci, Adriana Pincherle, Fausto
Pirandello, Gino Severini, and Carlo
Levi, with three; Alberto Bevilacqua,
Franco Gentilini, Angilotto Modotto,
Giorgio Morandi, Pippo Rizzo, and Aligi
Sassu, with two; and Gisberto Ceracchini
with just one.
10 Les Italiens de Paris: De Chirico e gli altri
a Parigi nel 1930, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo
dellArco and Claudia Gian Ferrari
(Milan: Skira, 1998), 5861.
11 Exhibition of Contemporary Italian
Painting under the Auspices of the
Western Art Museum Association and the
Direzione Generale Italiani allEstero
(Tivoli, 1934), 717.
12 Ibid., 13, 14.
13 Ibid., 5, 16.
14 Ibid., 17.

8 Walter Heil to Amedeo Giannini,

December 1, 1934, in Fine Arts
Museums of San Francisco, Exhibition
Files, Modern Italian Paintings, January
12February 11, 1935.

15 Ibid., 17. Speech by Benito Mussolini

in Milan, October 25, 1932, reported
by Renzo De Felice, in Mussolini il duce,
vol. 1, Gli anni del consenso, 19291936
(Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 308.

9 For the quotes, see Dario Sabatello to

Antonio Maraini, August 31, 1934, in
Galleria Nazionale dArte Moderna,
Archivio Storico, Archivio Maraini

16 Sabatello to Maraini. Corrado Cagli,

Anticipi sulla scuola di Roma,
Quadrante 1, no. 6 (September
1933): 36.

72 Spring 2011

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17 M[assimo] B[ontempelli], Superbia,

900, n.s., year 3, no. 1 (July 1928): 1.
Massimo Bontempelli, speech to open
the Galleria Sabatello, 1932, Special
Collection, box 27, folder 4, Getty
Reseach Institute, Los Angeles.
18 San Francisco, Palace of the Legion
of Honor (January 11February 10,
1935); Los Angeles County Museum
(February 20March 16); Portland
(Oreg.) Art Association (March 27
April 25); Seattle Art Museum (May 1
June 2); Denver, Chappell House (June
25July 27); Saint Paul, Minnesota
State Fair (August 31September 7);
Memphis, Brooks Memorial Art Gallery
(October 227); Hagerstown, Washington
County Museum of Art (November 11
December 1); Manchester, Currier Gallery
of Art (December 928); Hamilton
Art Association (February 5, 1936
?); New York, International Building,
Rockefeller Center (March 1228,
1936); Saint Louis, City Art Museum
(May 623, 1936). On extended hours
in Memphis, see, Art Exhibit to Close,
Memphis Commercial Appeal, October
27, 1935.
19 Famous Foreign Paintings to Be Shown
at Brooks, Memphis Press-Scimitar,
October 12, 1935.
20 Modern Italian Art Displayed at Brooks
Memorial Gallery, Memphis Commercial
Appeal, October 14, 1935.
21 Exponent of New Italy Visits City,
Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1933.
Herman Reuter, Contemporary
Italian Art at L.A. Museum Fails to Stir
Observer, Hollywood Citizen-News,
March 2, 1935.
22 For the quotes, see Beauties Look Over
State Fair Art, Minneapolis Star, August
27, 1935; Arthur Millier, Mussolinis
Sponsorship of Art Shows Striking
Results, Los Angeles Times, February 24,
1935; and D. M., Modern Italian Art
Is Found Perplexing, Hamilton (Ont.)
Herald, February 5, 1936.
23 Jerome Klein, New Fascist Art Dismal
and Inert, New York Post, March 21,
1936.

24 Art: From the Grave, TIME, March

23, 1936, 38. Lewis Mumford, The Art
Galleries, New Yorker, April 4, 1936, 59.
25 Margaret Duroc, Painting in Fascist
Italy, Art Front 2, no. 4 (March 1936):
46; no. 5 (April 1936): 1012.
26 Millier, Mussolinis Sponsorship; Alma
May Cook, Ultra-Modern Fascist Art
Displayed at L.A. Museum, Los Angeles
Evening Herald and Express, February 21,
1935. Enzo dUrbania, Famous Critic
Interprets Art Sent to L.A., Los Angeles
Examiner, March 3, 1935.
27 Alma May Cook, Purchase Plan
Increases Storm over Italian Art, Los
Angeles Evening Herald and Express,
March 14, 1935.
28 Ibid.
29 Last Preview Held at Art Galleries,
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, May 2, 1935.
Art Critics Puzzled: Unattached Legs
in Italians Painting Cause Furor, Seattle
Post-Intelligencer, May 19, 1935.
30 Prossima mostra di quadri Italiani a
Seattle, Seattle Gazzetta Italiana, April
12, 1935.
31 Cronaca cittadina, San Francisco Il
Corriere del Popolo, February 7, 1935.
32 Karal Ann Marling, Blue Ribbon: A Social
and Pictorial History of the Minnesota
State Fair (Saint Paul, Minn.: Historical
Society Press, 1990), esp. 22735 on
art exhibitions. Minnesota, American
Magazine of Art 28, no. 11 (November
1935): 686.
33 First Loan Exhibits for Fair Art Arrive,
Saint Paul Pioneer Press, August 24, 1935.
Minnesota.
34 Exhibition of Contemporary Italian
Painting, 1819.

38 Begin Judging Fair Exhibits, Saint

Paul Daily News, August 26, 1935;
Fair Exhibits Rushed; Will Be Ready
Saturday, Minneapolis Star, August 29,
1935.
39 Erle Loran, Artists from Minnesota,
American Magazine of Art 29, no. 1
(January 1936): 25.
40 Dino Alfieri to Antonio Maraini,
September 10, 1935, in GNAM/AS/
Maraini, cart. 36, f. 3, Mostre italiane
allestero.
41 The expression artistic ventriloquism is
from Peyton Boswell Jr., Modern American
Painting (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co,
1940), 34, where the author used it to
describe the phenomenon of American
expatriates seeking artistic recognition in
Paris.
42 Alfieris letter cites an unspecified
Hollywood gallery as the setting for
the exhibitions. It may have been the
Hollywood Gallery of Modern Art,
opened by Feitelson in July 1935, and in
which dUrbania himself exhibited in a
joint show in July 1935. In an interview
with Diane Moran, Feitelson mentioned
that in August 1935 he and Alexander
Archipenko were on the jury of the First
Annual Exhibit of Painting and Sculpture,
which was held at Transigram Sound
Studios (August 117), sponsored by a
Count dUrbania as part of a public relations job for the Italian government:
e-mail communication from Diane
Moran to the author, May 16 and 18,
2009. The description of public relations was made by Feitelson himself.
No other possible venues for the project
are known. The fundamental folkloristic quote is from Alfieri to Maraini,
September 10, 1935.

36 U.S. Scene, TIME, December 24, 1934.

43 Nelson Rockefeller to James Dunn,

April 21, 1948, Alfred H. Barr Papers,
reel 3153, frame 932, Archives of
American Art, Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, D.C.

37 Living Artists, Minneapolis and St. Paul,

American Magazine of Art 28, no. 12
(December 1935): 755.

44 James Thrall Soby and Alfred H. Barr Jr.,

Twentieth-Century Italian Art (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 1949), 5.

35 Cook, Ultra-Modern Fascist Art

Displayed at L.A. Museum.

73 American Art

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