La Difesa Della Razza (1938–1943): Primitivism and Classicism in Fascist Italyстатья из журнала
Аннотация: AbstractWhile recent studies on Italian Fascism have considered the regime's colonial project in Libya and Ethiopia, it is also necessary to analyze racism and its construction in the peninsula. The official magazine La difesa della razza (1938–1943) sought to provide scientific and cultural bases for Italian racism and anti-Semitism by citing anthropological studies as well as ancient sources. My paper examines its use of images, specifically the juxtaposition of classical, African, and modernist references. Thus, I focus on the ways in which classical art was represented alongside African individuals and/or sculptures in order to construct a racist ideology rooted on the civilized-primitive dichotomy. Despite the fact that La difesa della razza extolled the greatness of classical art while denigrating modern art, many of its covers recall Giorgio de Chirico's metaphysical paintings, Man Ray's photographs, and Hannah Höch's photomontages. Though the aforementioned artists utilized classical and/or African elements to question European culture, this fascist publication adopted a similar aesthetic to support its claims regarding the superiority of Italian race and culture across time. Hence, La difesa della razza demonstrates the heterogeneous and often contradictory ways in which fascist intellectuals justified the regime's racial policies, as they utilized the modernist sources they claimed endangered Italian civilization and its alleged racial purity. In any case, as with many other aspects of fascist official (and unofficial culture), modern art was at once disavowed and relied upon, thus constituting a peculiar case of modernist primitivism. Given the current existence of neo-Fascist parties within Italy, migration from Africa and the need for a more thorough reconsideration of fascist colonialism, my essay traces this nation's visual discourse on race as it emerged during the years leading up to World War II. Notes on ContributorMariana Aguirre is a researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas-UNAM and has a PhD in art history from Brown University. She has received fellowships from the Fulbright and Mellon foundations and has published on Italian modern art and magazines, focusing on the fascist period and its ruralist ideology. She is currently pursuing research on primitivism, namely, on African sources' influence on the development of art and visual culture in Italy in light of fascist colonialism.Notes1Unfortunately there are very few studies on Telesio Interlandi and his magazine other than Francesco Cassata, 'La Difesa della razza' Politica, ideologia e immagine del razzismo fascista (Turin: Einaudi, 2008), which also considers his other publications, Il Tevere (1924–1943) and Il Quadrivio (1933–1941) and their role precursors to this magazine's racism and anti–Semitism; see also Valentina Pisanty's anthology: Pisanty (ed.) Educare all'odio: La difesa della razza, 1938–1943 (Milan: Bompiani, 2006). The following articles consider specific aspects of the magazine: P. Foro, 'Racisme fasciste et antiquité. L'exemple de la revue La Difesa della Razza (1938–1943)', Vingtième Siècle: Revue d'histoire, 2:78 (2003), pp. 121–131; G. Rigano, 'Romanità cattolicità e razzismo: La Santa Sede e La Difesa della razza', Cristianesimo Nella Storia 33:1 (January 2012), pp. 45–88; S. Servi, 'Building a Racial State: Images of the Jew in the Illustrated Fascist Magazine, La Difesa della Razza, 1938–1943' in Joshua D. Zimmerman (ed.) Jews In Italy Under Fascist & Nazi Rule, 1922–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 114–157.2Cassata, op. cit., p. ix. Cassata also identified Man Ray and Vinicio Paladini as potential sources for the magazine's photomontages.3See V. Fagone, L'arte all'ordine del giornio: figure e idee in Italia da Carrà a Birolli (Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 2001), p. 23.4Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944 (New York: Berghahn Books, 1996), pp. 250, 251.5See C.E. Oppo, 'La Terza Quadriennale', Le Arti, 1:3 (1939), pp. 235–238.6G. Bottai, 'Modernità e tradizione nell'arte italiana d'oggi', Le Arti, 1:3 (1939), p. 230. The original text reads: 'Nel concetto di 'razza' è riflesso e riassunto, in sintesi, il percorso della conscienza civile Italiana, a tutt'oggi. '7See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).8Ibid., p. 219.9Ibid., p. 204.10For Interlandi's role as a propagator of Mussolini's more radical opinions, see M. Michaelis, 'Mussolini's Unofficial Mouthpiece: Telesio Interlandi, Il Tevere, and the Evolution of Mussolini's Anti–Semitism', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 3:3 (1998), pp. 217–240.11Griffin, op. cit., p. 228. An example would be Pensabene's opposition to the project for the Florentine train station in 1933: see Cassatta, op. cit., pp. 253–254.12Ibid., pp. 242–243.13Ibid., p. 241.14Michaelis, op. cit.15S.G. Pugliese, Fascism, Anti–fascism, and the Resistance in Italy: 1919 to the Present (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), p. 13. The MinCulPop was a descendant of Mussolini's Press Office and of the Undersecretariat for Press and Propaganda.16Though it fancied itself a scientific magazine and had several academics that wrote for it, La difesa della razza was anything but.17The manifesto first appeared in Anonymous, 'Il Fascismo e i problemi della razza', Giornale d'Italia, 15 July 1938, cited in Cassata, op. cit., p. 40. The following scientists signed the manifesto: Sabato Visco, Franco Savorgnan, Arturo Donaggio, Edoardo Zavattari, Lidio Cipriani, Guido Landra, Lino Businco, Leone Pranzi, and Marcello Ricci. Mussolini's role regarding the creation of the manifesto is discussed in Cassata, op. cit., p. 38. See also F. Cuomo, I dieci. Chi erano gli scienziati italiani che firmarono il 'Manifesto della razza ' (Milan: Baldini Castoldi Dalai Editore, 2005).18After World War I, photomontage and other avant–garde strategies reached Italy through the works and activities of Giacomo Balla, the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia, and Vinicio Paladini, among others. See Giovanni Lista, Vinicio Paladini. Dal Futurismo all'Immaginismo (Bologna: Edizioni del Cavaliere Azzurro, 1988). This is not to say that other artists or venues did not welcome the avant–garde, but for the purposes of this essay, these are the most relevant ones to the development of photomontage in Italy in relation to Interlandi's publications. Dada in Italy: see Crispolti, Schwarz and Paoletti,19I have contacted both Valentina Pisanty and Francesco Cassata, specialists on this magazine, neither of whom confirmed whether or not Paladini authored any images. Indeed, other than the cover image and some of the drawings, no authorship can be established for the images that appeared in the magazine. Unfortunately, as Cassata informed me, it has been impossible to locate archives holding the magazine and/or Interlandi's papers. Casatta, op. cit., p. 344.20G. Pensabene, 'Spontaneità e livellamento nella storia d'Italia', La difesa della razza, 5:17 (July 1939), pp. 16–19. See also Pensabene, 'La razza dell'arte', La difesa della razza, 2:11 (5 April 1939), p. 21; F. Scardaoni, 'L'ombra giudaica sulla Francia', La Difesa della razza, 1:3 (5 September 1938), p. 33–34.21For more on the exhibition that reconstructed Entartete Kunst, see Stephanie Barron (ed.) Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1991).22B. Buchloh, 'The Dialectics of Design and Destruction: The Degenerate Art Exhibition (1937) and the Exhibition Internationale du Surréalisme (1938)', October, 150 (2014), p. 49.23Though the literature on primitivism continues to grow, the following texts are among the most important ones in terms of their influence, controversial nature or as collections of primary sources. See Petrine Archer, Negrophilia: Avant–Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s (New York: Thames & Hudson, 2000); Frances S. Connelly, The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725–1907 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Jack D. Flam and Miriam Deutch (eds) Primitivism and Twentieth–century Art: A Documentary History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Robert John Goldwater, Primitivism in Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986); William Rubin, 'Primitivism' in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984); Mariana Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).24W.A. Grossman, 'From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image', Visual Resources: An International Journal of Documentation, 23:4 (2007), pp. 291–336.25Carl Einstein, Negerplastik (Leipzig: Verlag der weißen Bücher, 1915). Einstein followed this book with a more historical appraoch in Afrikanische Plastik (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1921).26See E. Greco, 'L'arte negra alla Biennale di Venezia del 1922. Ricostruzione del dibattito critico sulle riviste italiane', Annali. Dipartimento di Storia del Storia delle Arti e dello Spettacolo. Università degli Studi di Firenze, 11 (2010), pp. 356–374; E. Bassani, 'Scultura africana alla XIII "Biennale" di Venezia, 1922', Critica d'arte, 62:4 (1999), pp. 69–79; M. Aguirre, 'Carl Einstein in Italy: Art History, Ethnography, Aesthetics and African Sculpture', forthcoming in 2016.27For an overview of futurist primitivism, see L. Re, '"Barbari civilizzatissimi": Marinetti and the Futurist Myth of Barbarism', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 17:3 (2012), pp. 350–368. Though the literature on futurist primitivism has centered on Boccioni and Marinetti, it appears that it also developed in the works of Fortunato Depero and Enrico Prampolini, who did not focus on early French modernist primitivism, but rather on the negrophilia craze that arose after World War I, which was also linked to jazz and figures such as Josephine Baker: see P. Strozek, 'Futurist Responses to African American Culture', in Fionnghuala Sweeney and Kate Marsh (eds) Afromodernisms: Paris, Harlem, Haiti and the Avant–garde (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), pp. 43–61; M. D'Ambrosio, 'Écriture manifestaire de Marinetti (1936–39). Pour une littérature corporatiste coloniale autarcique et synthétique', Cahiers de Narratologie, 24 (2013), pp. 2–15.28Karen Pinkus, Bodily Regimes: Italian Advertising Under Fascism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 82.29Cassata (op. cit., p. 346–348) describes La difesa della razza's readers' confusion regarding several of its images.30Conor Joyce, Carl Einstein in Documents and his collaboration with Georges Bataille (Philadelphia: ExLibris, 2003). See also Franz Boas, The Mind of Primitive Man: A Course of Lectures Delivered Before the Lowell Inst., Boston, and the Nat. Univ. of Mexico, 1910–1911 (New York: Macmillan, 1911).31An example of this would be Wilhelm Brasse's photographs of prisoners at Auschwitz.32Idalgo Palazzetti was a member of the Gioventù Universitaria Fascista (GUF) chapter of Perugia. See Cassata, op. cit., p. 343.33Ibid., p. 343, n10. For an overview and analysis of fascist racial theories, see Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (London: Routledge, 2002).34See: the catalog for the exhibit, Roberto Vighi, Catalogo: Bimillenario della nascità di Augusto. Mostra augustea della Romanità (Rome: Colombo, 1938); Cristian Olariu, 'Archaeology, Archictecture and the Use of Romanità in Fascist Italy', Studia Antiqua Et Archeologica, 18 (2012), pp. 351–375; F. Marcello, 'Mussolini and the idealisation of Empire: The Augustan Exhibition of Romanità', Modern Italy, 16:3 (2011), pp. 223–247.35Cassata, op. cit., pp. 56–57.36Giorgio Almirante eventually became a key leader of Italian neo-Fascism through his leadership at the Movimento Sociale Italiano. See G. Almirante, 'L'editto di Caracalla: un semibarbaro spiana la via ai barbari', La difesa della razza, 1:1 (5 August 1938).37The magazine often illustrated its articles with images that recall anthropological photography, especially profile and frontal shots. Its depiction of racial difference also employed tavole razziali, namely, compendia of pictures of individuals belonging to different races, as these had been commonly reproduced in many official publications even before the advent of Fascism in order to exemplify racial differences between individuals. For a general analysis of anthropological photography and the rise of the modern state, see John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1988); transl. Antonio Fernández Lera, El peso de la representación: ensayos sobre fotografías e historias (Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, SA, 2005). See also G. Gabrielli, 'Cataloghi visivi della pedagogia dell'alterità: le tavole delle "razze" nella scuola italiana tra otto e novecento' in Valeria Deplano and Alessandro Pes (eds) Quel che resta dell'impero. La cultura coloniale degli italiani (Milan: Mimesis, 2014), pp. 85, 97.38G. Landra, 'Concetti del razzismo italiano', La difesa della razza, 1:2 (20 August 1938), pp. 9–11.39Ibid. The works included were by Titian, Sandro Botticelli, a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, the Medici Venus and Donatello's Saint George. The images related to non-Italians were of Jewish men and women, Egyptian princesses, and a drawing of the Winged Bulls at the Nergal Gate of Nineveh.40For a description of the Apollo Belvedere, see J.J. Winckelmann, 'Die Statue des Apollo' in Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Weimar: H. Böhlaus, 1964), pp. 309–310; 'V.B.e.hh, Beschreibung des Apollo im Belvedere' in Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, II (Vienna: Akademischen Verlag, 1776), pp. 814–817.41Michaud, 'Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History', October, 139 (Winter 2012), pp. 68–69.42Several recent anthologies have investigated the rise of art history in relation to this disciplines: see Donald Preziosi (ed.) The History of Art History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. section 4, 'Anthropology and/or Art History'. See also Elizabeth Mansfield (ed.) Art History and Its Institutions: Foundations of a Discipline (London: Routledge, 2002); Mansfield (ed.) Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and Its Institutions (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2014). The relationship between art and anthropology is explored in Morgan Perkins and Howard Morphy (eds) The Anthropology of Art: A Reader (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005).43See Joshua Arthurs, Excavating Modernity : The Roman Past in Fascist Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).44Futurism maintained a primitive vein throughout the ventennio: see D'Ambrosio, op. cit.45For an account of modern primitivist sculpture that clearly divides the avant-garde from mainstream primitivism or negrophilia, see A. Del Puppo, 'Primitivismo mondano, orientalismo da museo' in Gabriella Belli, Flavio Fergonzi and Alessandro Del Puppo (eds) Modigliani scultore, catalogo della mostra (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2010), pp. 19–31; see also Archer, op. cit.46Though this movement was not well received by leading Italian critics, it influenced a wide variety of works of art and mass culture between the wars, including the practice of photomontage, since Max Ernst's early collages, for example were influenced by Giorgio de Chirico. See M. Aguirre, 'Giorgio Morandi and the "Return to Order": From Pittura Metafisica to Regionalism, 1917–1928', Anales del Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 35:102 (2013), pp. 93–124; Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico: The Metaphysical Period, 1888–1919 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1997), pp. 382–414; see also Baldacci, Giorgio De Chirico. Betraying the Muse: De Chirico and the Surrealists: April 21 to May 28 (New York: Paolo Baldacci Gallery, 1994). This negative reception had in fact occurred within Interlandi's other publications, since Corrado Pavolini attacked de Chirico in Il Tevere in 1928, for instance. See C. Pavolini, 'La XVI Biennale Veneziana', Il Tevere, 3–4 May 1928, p. 3, cited in Cassata, op. cit., p. 303, n28.47An exception to this is W. Grossman, 'From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon: Photographs of African and Oceanic Sculpture and the Rhetoric of the Image,' Visual Resources 23:4 (Winter 2007), pp. 309–10.48Before he moved to Europe in 1921, Man Ray saw Marius de Zayas' seminal exhibition of African art at Alfred Stieglitz' 291 Gallery in 1914. For the United States' reception of African art, see Tribal Art Magazine, Special Issue 3 (2012), which accompanied the exhibit at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "African Art, New York, and the Avant–Garde," November 27, 2012–September 2, 2013. Once in Paris, the photographer became part of André Breton's surrealist circle, and came into contact with de Chirico and his oeuvre.49See 391, 18 (July 1924). The cover includes the following phrases, "Oh ! do shit again ! … / Oh ! douche it again ! … /RROSE SÉLAVY"; "Ce numéro ne se vend pas; on le donne"; "Parmi les ventes publiques :/ Collection Caca : œuvres de L. Rosemberg [sic] (et sa suite); Roybet ;/Didier–Pouget ; etc … .. etc … .."; " ?/ Aux chiottes !/ E. P."; "Du dos de la cuillère au cul de la douairière!/ ROSE SÉLAVY"; "Les poètes portent leur cerveau dans/ une gourde."; "/ / ALBERT GLEIZES"; and "De la MERDE !". In this cover, several cultural and humorous references are employed: Roybet and Didier–Pouget were painters, chiottes is a chamberpot or outhouse, douairière means dowager, gourde refers to Haitian currency.50Grossman, 'From Ethnographic Object to Modernist Icon'.51A number of books and guides to the exhibit were published; the official guide is André Demaison, Exposition coloniale international a Paris en 1931: Guide official (Paris: Mayeux, 1931). See Sophie Leclercq, 'The Surrealist Appropriation of the "Indigenous" Arts', Arts & Societies, Letter of Seminar 13, Primitivisms, 2006, http://www.artsetsocietes.org/a/a--leclercq.html. See also David Bate, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (New York: IB Tauris, 2004); James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).52Bate, op. cit., pp. 214–224.53See Linda Nochlin, The body in pieces: the fragment as a metaphor of modernity (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), p. 8.54Ibid.55Sigmund Freud, trans. David McLintock, The Uncanny (London: Penguin Books, 2003).56Cassata, op. cit., p. 350. I saw the facemask myself, or a replica at the very least, as part of a display on multiculturalism at Florence's ethnographic museum in 2015. The rest of the museum's displays are likely from before World War II.57The Hottentot Venus was part of the anti-miscegenation campaign conducted in the magazine's first issue, see G. Landra, 'I bastardi', La difesa della razza, 1:1 (5 August 1938), pp. 16–17. Here, Landra included a drawing of the woman and claimed that she had mixed Bushmen and Dutch origins, while the consensus at the time was that she had mixed African origins. On the difference between Landra and Cipriani's approach to photography, see Cassata, op. cit., p. 363.58Maud Lavin, Cut With the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 160; Lavin, 'Hannah Höch's From an Ethnographic Museum', in Naomi Sawelson-Gorse (ed.) Women in Dada: Essays on Gender, Gender and Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 330–359.59Brett M. Van Hoesen, 'Re-Visioning Germany's Colonial Past: Tactics of Weimar Photomontage and Documentary Photography' in Völker M. Langbehn (ed.) German Colonialism, Visual Culture, and Modern Memory (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 197–219.60Ibid.61Patricia Fortini Brown, Venice & Antiquity: The Venetian Sense of the Past (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).62Paladini published similar images in Quadrivio. See note 2.63Lavin, 'Hannah Höch's From an Ethnographic Museum', p. 343.64On the Hottentot Venus' appropriation by La difesa della razza, see B. Sòrgoni, '"Defending the Race": The Italian Reinvention of the Hottentot Venus during Fascism', Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 8:3 (2003), pp. 411–425.65Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife, p. 107.66Interlandi became involved in Salò's propaganda, as he worked in the Ministry of Popular Culture and was part of the Comitato consultivo per la propaganda headed by Giorgio Almirante. He also directed radio and print propaganda aimed at southern Italy. See W.M. Adams, 'Mussolini and Intellectuals in the Republic of Salò, 1943–1945'(PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 2007), p. 174.67For instance, in the film La ciociara (1960, dir. Vittorio de Sica), the main character, played by Sofia Loren, and her daughter, are gang-raped by Moroccan soldiers that were part of the French army during World War II.68After Napoleon's invasion of Egypt, French artists approached this encounter with the Other by relying on classical models in order to emphasize racial and cultural difference; a similar process can be seen in the years prior to World War I and in the following decades. See Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Extremities: Painting Empire in Post-Revolutionary France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002).69See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Prin-ceton: Princeton University Press, 1989), which focuses on this return to classicism as a response to World War I; Christopher Green, Art in France, 1900–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). Green does not link right-wing politics and the return to order as much. Rosalind Krauss considers instead how Picasso's turn towards a Neo-Classicist idiom was in fact a strand of the experimentation he had started with his collages: see The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1998). See Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, 'Figures of Authority, Cyphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting', October, 16 Art World Follies (Spring, 1981), pp. 39–68. Buchloh obliquely refers to colonialism by mentioning atavism and primitivism.
Год издания: 2015
Авторы: Mariana Aguirre
Издательство: Taylor & Francis
Источник: Politics Religion & Ideology
Ключевые слова: Italian Fascism and Post-war Society, European history and politics
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 16
Выпуск: 4
Страницы: 370–390