Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism : Art and Politics under Fascism

Rating:
Summary: E. M. Legge , in "Quaderni d'italianistica" (Summer 2002)
Review: Emily Braun, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

Emily Braun's fascinating book takes on a complicated and vexing task: to address and possibly redress mainstream art historical neglect of the Fascist artist Mario Sironi. What are we to do with artists who are relegated to the art historical limbo reserved for "embarrassing cases"? Sironi's work is difficult to gauge in tone and importance, and it often evades classification within the taxonomies of modern art and of Fascist cultural projects. He is an artist who could only be redeemed if there were some way of considering him as just a modernist, whose politics don't matter. But Sironi is not easily cast as that kind of innovative, idealistic, utopian abstractionist of the kind who served the Left; he is no El Lissitsky or Rodchenko. Nor is any narrative of victimization possible: he was never punished by the regime that he supported, and he never repented of supporting it. Mussolini, who recognized that Fascism must seem to be anti-ideological and therefore could not have one official "style," was Sironi's unwavering protector. Braun plots Sironi's career within a meticulously researched intellectual history of Fascism and its permutations, always reading one through the other. Sironi is situated amongst writers and hangers-on and propagandists and events, and psychobiography is plotted against the politics.
Art historical study of Sironi is bedevilled by the diversity of his production: easel painter, muralist, sculptor, designer, graphic artist and propagandist, he idiosyncratically worked his way through four decades of dominant styles and modernist modes. He functions as a kind of ideal specimen who is at the same time unconvincing, like a composite character of a modernist artist invented for an historical novel. Beyond that, his Fascist politics were his Fascist culture: Sironi produced brutal, violent, political cartoons as well as "timeless" monumental classicising art. Braun's study is invaluable because it unflinchingly takes the whole range of Sironi's work into account.

This is an ambitious and persuasive account of an artist whose work and after-effects can only be falteringly and equivocally approached. It brilliantly sets the scene for a reconsideration of Italian Futurism and its status within the history of twentieth century art.

- From review in "Quaderni d'italianistica" (Summer 2002)