Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism

Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism is an important book that helps resituate art historical studies of the Fascist period. As the title indicates, the author, Anthony White does not shy away from using the ‘F’ word that still today tends to be elided when discussing art from the 1920s and 1930s in Italy. Even Germano Celant’s highly praised exhibition Post Zang Tumb Tuuum. Art Life Politics: Italia 1918–1943 at the Prada Foundation in Milan in 2018 avoided criticising the censorship, violence and bloodshed of the period in order to exploit it as a purely productive and creative period. In his book, White invites the reader to reconsider three artists from the time in greater depth: the research he conducted in archives in Italy sheds new light on the work of Fortunato Depero, Scipione (Gino Bonichi) and Mario Radice. The author dedicates a chapter to each artist—these chapters, he explains, began their lives as separate peer-reviewed articles. In each chapter, he analyses specific aspects that intrigue him about the artist under examination: war and machinery in the work of Depero, spirituality in that of Scipione, and abstraction and architecture in Radice. By entering into their specificities, White conversely reveals the vastness of their production. The interdisciplinarity of the three artists reaches from architecture to abstraction, spirituality, choreography, tapestries, performance, poetry and painting. Although marketed exclusively at an academic audience, the book—unlike many art history academic books that tend to forego image quality over scholarship—is richly illustrated and includes eight colour plates. White is also careful to reference contemporary issues that concern the field. Depero’s work, he observes, and its connections to military combat and destruction was appropriated by the extreme right-wing group CasaPound for a conference on the artist in 2013. White, instead, aims to understand Depero more holistically by uncovering the lesserknown aspects of his production. In his first chapter, ‘The Folk Machine: Fortunato Depero’s Cloth Pictures, 1919–1927’, the author examines Depero’s early forays into set design, first working for the Ballets Russes, then developing futurist toys like Giacomo Balla for his Plastic Ballets in 1918 and eventually creating his ‘fabric mosaics’. In his detailed visual analysis of the tapestry Serrada from 1920, we learn of the effects of the destruction of men and cities during the First World War on the artist’s creativity: