Legacy 18- Italian Abstracts

Abstract Italians

Jul 6, '12 6:34 AM for everyone

I was a bit in two minds over whether to write about the latest exhibition at the Estorick gallery, which focuses on Italian abstract art 1930-80.   I have to admit that I find it quite hard work engaging with very pure forms of abstraction and certainly find it rather hard to write about works in that style.  It’s by no means my favourite genre and I’m not even sure I’d have bothered going to the exhibition at all if I wasn’t a Friend of the gallery and therefore in line for invitations to private views- getting my money’s worth on my membership is a considerable incentive to turn up. 

The fact that the gallery is currently hosting a couple of Boccionis on loan from an unnamed private collection was also a considerable incentive.   They’re slightly atypical early works, both portraits; a rather humdrum mother and child and a very striking one of an old lady (probably his grandmother- they are clearly painted with great affection) which was hung alongside the Estrorick’s own portrait of the same person.  Both are rather stark studies in black and white and shades of grey which make no concessions about the aging process but also hint at a formidable personality unaffected by physical frailty.  Perhaps as a result of my own recent experiences this was a work I responded to strongly on an emotional level.

This wasn’t really the case for the main show.  I might have found it more engaging if it had focused on one artist or a small group and sought to trace their development over time rather than going for a rather synoptic overview of nearly fifty years.  It has been suggested that the British have an innate fondness for art that tells some kind of story, so perhaps I’m just displaying my Britishness for all to see.   I’m not sure it entirely works in my case but I have to admit that I struggle a bit to respond to paintings which come with titles like “Abstraction 1” or “Study” and it may be revealing that I spent quite a bit of my time looking at works like Emilio Scanavino’s very strange “Lunar Shield” (see top) which combines an unusual shape and slightly unsettling colours with what look strangely like the skeletal remains of some long-dead alien life form.   Giuseppe Capogrossi’s “Surface 209” may have a rather meaningless name but has its intriguing aspect- if only because Capogrossi appears to have anticipated Pac-man games by some thirty years in his design.

I suppose it’s no surprise that I tended to find the earlier works on show more interesting than those created from the late 1940’s onwards.  There is genuinely original abstract Italian art of that later period- the works of Lucio Fontana, for instance, which play with surfaces in a kind of three dimensional low relief or the multi-media pieces of Enrico Prampolini and Alberto Burri.  Neither gets much of a showing in the current exhibition- one Fontana, one Prampolini and no Burris (admittedly he had his moment at the Estorick a few months ago).   Instead the exhibition is long on slightly derivative works produced by second tier figures in the Italian art scene, all of them very much under the influence of 1950’s American abstraction.  

In fairness the show (inevitably) has to draw on a relatively limited base for its content- all the art comes from three galleries in the Liguria region of north west Italy (ones in Genoa, Savona and La Spezia).  On the other hand, Liguria and its galleries appear to have specialised in abstract art from a relatively early date.  La Spezia hosted its first arts festival in the mid-1930’s.   The exhibition catalogue shows an advertising poster for this event, which included the rather scary prospect of a poetry challenge issued by none other than F T Marinetti, prepared to take on all comers in improvising poetry in honour of the region (Marinetti loved La Spezia because it combined great natural beauty in its setting with the high technology and warlike preparation in the town’s massive naval arsenal- which guaranteed that it was subject to intensive bombing during the Second World War).   Somehow the festival managed to live down this distinctly embarrassing launch under very clear Fascist auspices (the state approval of the event symbolised by the reduced price rail tickets on offer to those planning to visit it) and ran as something of a shop window for Italian abstract art in the post war decades, with successful works passing into the local public collections.

Marinetti probably wouldn’t have been shocked at seeing abstract art.   It’s perfectly possible to construct a lineage into abstraction out of Futurism, which had always had a strain of geometric simplification within it (though generally coupled with an intense sense of dynamism which is not always apparent in Abstract art).  Indeed the artists associated with the Forma 1 movement in the 1940’s quite explicitly looked back to Futurism to legitimate their approach to abstraction- while also placing themselves in political terms as a kind of Alternative Left opposed to the quasi- Socialist Realism espoused by figures like Renato Guttoso.   Artists such as Bruno Munari (next up for a show at the Estorick) started out as full card carrying Futurists and ended up as luminaries of post war Italian abstract art movements.  Abstract art in the 1930’s however gravitated towards a Milanese gallery run by the Ghiringhelli brothers, who were not paid up members of the Futurist movement.   Gino, whose “Composition 5” is shown below, was particularly active as a kind of stylistic entrepreneur and intermediary, acting as an entry portal into Italy for the works of artists like Kandinsky or Mondrian.   Artists associated with his gallery like Mimo Radice and Alberto Magnelli engaged in intriguing experiments, not just with form  but with media (painting on “unorthodox” surfaces like slate or board, for instance) which anticipated the multimedia experiments of the post-war abstractionists indeed many of them would themselves go on to have successful careers after 1945.

It may come as a slight surprise to find this reception of abstraction from  elsewhere in Europe (and beyond) in Fascist Italy, especially in the later 1930’s when the regime’s initial tolerance of wide ranging stylistic diversity in art was beginning to be replaced by something approaching an “official” style with strong classicising features (the “Proclamation of Empire” after the conquest of Ethiopia massively reinforcing the Fascist tendency to present their Italy as the true heir of the Roman Empire).   One could, of course, at a stretch, make an intellectual case for the classicising roots of abstraction.  One could also find suitably Italian origins for some of the formal experiments- painting on board looked back to medieval panel painting while the tonalities and geometry of some works could be seen as echoing the intarsia wood inlay traditions found (for instance) in medieval and renaissance church furnishings.   While none of this was likely to be entirely persuasive when it came to public art, if artists were not bothered about that sort of patronage- or were happy to switch styles depending on their audience, reserving abstract works for private purchasers or their own personal experimentation- then the regime’s art bureaucracy was not greatly concerned.   Indeed there was a more or less official Abstract Art Show in Rome in 1935.  It’s hard to imagine anything similar being staged in Berlin or Moscow at the same date.  Uncovering this slightly forgotten corner of art history was itself a sufficient justification for the exhibition.