Surrealism in Italy? Sexuality and Urban Space in the Work of Scipione (1904–1933)

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Acknowledgements

Research for this article was carried out in Rome during a trip funded by the University of Melbourne's Special Studies Program (Long) in 2009. The text began as a paper given in 2012 at the ‘Dispersed Identities: Sexuality, Surrealism and the Global Avant-Gardes’ conference at The University of Melbourne, which was supported by the University of Manchester. It was subsequently developed into a lecture delivered in 2013 at the Department of Italian Studies, Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, New York University, while I was a Visiting Scholar in that department. I would like to thank my colleagues Ara Merjian, Romy Golan and David Lomas for their generous support and feedback, and to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers whose comments were of great assistance in preparing the final version of the text.

Notes

1. See Roger Cardinal, ‘Giorgio de Chirico and Surrealist Mythology’, Papers of Surrealism 2 (2004): 1–6. The term ‘modern mythology’ is a quote from André Breton's early essay ‘Giorgio de Chirico’, Littérature (1920), reprinted in André Breton Les Pas Perdus (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 89. André Breton would also later (in 1936) describe the work of Alberto Savinio and Giorgio de Chirico as being at the origin of ‘all modern myth that is still evolving’. See André Breton, Anthologie de l'humour noir (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1972), 341–43.

2. See, for example, Max Ernst, Aquis Submersus (1919); Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant (Paris: Gallimard, 1926).

3. André Breton, ‘Surrealism and Painting’, La Révolution Surréaliste 2, no. 7 (1926): 4.

4. Mario Puccini, ‘Un'arte fascista’, Critica fascista 4, no. 23 (1926): 435–36. Reprinted in Jeffrey Schnapp, ed., A Primer of Italian Fascism (Lincoln: University of Nebraksa Press, 2000), 229; Cipriano Efisio Oppo, La Tribuna (Rome), 13 November 1930. One source for the connection made between surrealism and pederasty may be a 1925 interview with Paul Claudel in the Milan newspaper Il Secolo. See José Pierre, Tracts Surréalistes et Déclarations Collectives 1922–1969 (Paris: Le Terrain vague, 1980), 392.

5. This poor reception prompted de Chirico to write directly to Mussolini to complain about his treatment. See Garibaldo Alessandrini, ‘Il Duce alla ‘vernice’ della seconda Quadriennale nazionale d'arte’, Telegrafo (Livorno), 5 February, 1935; and Giorgio de Chirico, Letter to Benito Mussolini, 18 February 1935, both quoted in Elena Pontiggia, ‘La grande quadriennale’, in La Grande Quadriennale. 1935, La Nuova Arte Italiana, ed. Elena Pontiggia and Carlo F. Carli (Milan: Electa, 2006), 74–76.

6. A good, brief account of the diversity of artistic practice under fascism can be found in Marla Susan Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 43–54. One literary figure interested in surrealism in this period was Umberto Barbaro. See Ruth Ben-Ghiat, ‘Fascism, Writing, and Memory: The Realist Aesthetic in Italy, 1930–1950’, Journal of Modern History 67, no. 3 (1995): 627–665. See also Silvana Cirillo, Nei Dintorni del Surrealismo – da Alvaro a Zavattini: Umoristi, Balordi e Sognatori Nella Letteratura Italiana del Novecento (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2006).

7. Roberto Longhi, ‘Clima e opere degli irrealisti’, L’Italia Letteraria, 14 April 1929, 4.

8. Corrado Pavolini, ‘La prima Mostra nazionale dell’Animale nell’Arte’, Rassegna dell’Istruzione Artistica 1, no. 3 (May–June 1930): 174.

9. Giorgio de Chirico, L’Italia Letteraria, 28 December 1930. Quoted in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco and Valerio Rivosecchi, Scipione: Vita e Opere (Turin: Umberto Allemandi, 1988), 109.

10. The full list of individuals named in the drawing is Utrillo, Paulhan, Alain, Mallarmé, Thibaudet, Cocteau, Radiguet, Larbaud, Valery, Gide, Lautréamont, Salmon, Rimbaud, Matisse, Breton, Proust and Picasso.

11. See the interesting discussion of Scipione's conception of the double and the hermaphrodite in Giuseppe Appella, Scipione: 306 Disegni (Rome: Edizioni della Cometa, 1984), XIV, and XXXIV, n. 34.

12. See Grace Tiffany, Erotic Beasts and Social Monsters: Shakespeare, Jonson, and Comic Androgyny (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 30–31.

13. Another possible source of the hermaphrodite's pose is to be found in a 1906 work by Pablo Picasso titled The Teenagers. I would like to thank David Lomas for suggesting this connection.

14. Comte de Lautréamont, Les Chants de Maldoror (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1965), 71.

15. Amy Lyford, Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 24.

16. See Ferdinando Amigoni, ‘Putting Ghosts to Good Use: Savinio, Bontempelli, Landolfi’, Italica 77, no. 1 (2000): 69–80, 73.

17. Keala Jewell, The Art of Enigma (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2004), 115, 21.

18. Scipio Sighele, Eva Moderna (Milan: Treves, 1910), 45, quoted in Jewell, The Art of Enigma, 24 and 205, n. 58.

19. Whitney Davis, Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 6–7.

20. Silvia Loreti, ‘Modern Narcissus: The Lingering Reflections of Ancient Myth in Modern Art’, Papers of Surrealism 9 (2011): 18.

21. Jean Cocteau, ‘Le Numéro Barbette’, La Nouvelle Revue Française 13, no. 154 (1926): 257–63. For Scipione and La Nouvelle Revue Francaise see Scipione: Lettere a Falqui 1930–1933 (Rome: Edizioni della Cometa, 1988), 51, n. 21. In making the arguments here regarding Cocteau, I have benefited from reading Raymond Spiteri's excellent article ‘The Blood of a Poet: Cocteau, Surrealism and the Politics of the Vulgar’ in Regarding the Popular: Modernism, the Avant-Garde and High and Low Culture, ed. Sascha Bru et. al. (Berlin: De Gruyer, 2012), 227–239.

22. See Lydia Crowson, ‘Cocteau and Le Numéro Barbette’, Modern Drama 19, no. 1 (1976): 83.

23. See Amy Lyford ‘“Le numéro Barbette”, Photography and the Politics of Embodiment in Interwar Paris’, The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, Whitney Chadwick, ed., (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 225.

24. See the discussion of this image in Lara Pucci, ‘Remapping the Rural: The Ideological Geographies of Strapaese’, in Film, Art, New Media: Museum Without Walls?, ed. Angela Dalle Vacche (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2012), 180.

25. Scipione, letter to Enrico Falqui, 24 November 1931, published in Scipione: Lettere a Falqui 1930–1933 (Rome: Edizioni della Cometa, 1988), 39.

26. Luisa Passerini and Ara H. Merjian (interview), ‘Gender Historiography and the Interpretation of Fascism’, Qui Parle 13, no. 1 (2001): 157–163, 160.

27. See Luisa Passerini, Mussolini Immaginario, Storia di una Biografia 1915–39 (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1991), 49. See also the discussion in Luisa Passerini, ‘Costruzione del Femminile e del Maschile. Dicotomia Sociale e Androginia Simbolica’, in Il Regime Fascista. Storia e Storiografia, ed. Angelo Del Boca, Massimo Legnani, Mario G. Rossi (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1995), 498–506, esp. p. 505. See also Mussolini's statement from 1923: ‘The workers must love the fatherland. Just as they love their mother, they must with the same purity of feeling, love the communal mother: our fatherland’, in Scritti e Discorsi di Benito Mussolini, vol. 3 (Milan: Ulricho Hoepli Editore, 1934), 50.

28. Carlo Emilio Gadda, Eros e Priapo (Milan: Garzanti 1967), 73. Quoted in Barbara Spackman, ‘The Fascist Rhetoric of Virility’, Stanford Italian Review 8, nos. 1–2 (1990): 81–101; 81.

29. There was also a literary tradition in Italy during the 1920s of narrating statues coming to life in the work of Giorgio Vigolo, as Giuseppe Lupo pointed out in Poesia Come Pittura: De Libero e la Cultura Romana 1930–1940 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2002), 15, n. 20.

30. See, for example, Alfredo Mezio, ‘Il pittore dagli occhi cerulei’, Quadrivio, 30 June 1935.

31. Leonardo Sinisgalli explained that ‘I myself recall having given him Hebdomeros by De Chirico which had just been published and Nadja by Breton and Potomak [by Cocteau] in exchange for a drawing titled “The prophet in sight of Gerusalem”.’ See Leonardo Sinisgalli, ‘Ricordo di Scipione’, L’Italia letteraria, 16 February 1935.

32. See Briony Fer, ‘Surrealism, Myth and Psychoanalysis’ in Realism, Rationalism, Surrealism: Art between the Wars, ed. Briony Fer, David Batchelor and Paul Wood, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 183.

33. André Breton, Nadja (London: Penguin, 1999), 23, 24, 32 and 86.

34. For Scipione's interest in de Chirico, see Leonardo Sinisgalli, ‘Scipione’, Aretusa 2, no. 13 (1945): 8.

35. Alfredo Mezio, ‘Il Pittore Dagli Occhi Cerulei’, Quadrivio, 30 June 1935.

36. Breton, Nadja, 24. See the discussion of the surrealists’ attitude to public sculptures in Sergiusz Michalski, Public Monuments: Art in Political Bondage, 1870–1997 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 45–55, and Simon Baker, Surrealism, History and Revolution, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), 147–230.

37. Mario Tinti, 'Scipione, l'ultimo dei romantici’, Giornale di Genova, 16 April, 1935.

38. Scipione's vision of Rome also accords with that perceived by Margaret Brose in the poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti. ‘A walk through Rome on a summer's day: vertigo, a Sartrean nausea, a roller coaster of floating fragments; a montage of walls, capitals, arches, domes. The Western world is dismembered here, as we dis-remember the past by means of the layers of centuries, periods, styles and modes’. See Margaret Brose, ‘Giuseppe Ungaretti's Sentimento del Tempo: Baroque Rome and the Experience of Time’, Pacific Coast Philology 21, no. 1/2 (1986): 65–77; 65.

39. Benito Mussolini, mandate to the office of the Governatore of Rome, 31 December 1925, in Scritti e discorsi di Benito Mussolini, vol. 5, Dal 1925 al 1926 (Milan: Hoepli, 1934), 243–45. Quoted in Terry Kirk, ‘Framing St. Peter's: Urban Planning in Fascist Rome’, Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 756–776; 763.

40. See David Atkinson, ‘Totalitarianism and the Street in Fascist Rome’, in Images of the Street: Planning, Identity and Control in Public Spaces, ed. Nicholas Fyfe (London: Routledge, 1998), 13–30; see esp. 18–20.

41. Various proposals for major demolitions of the urban landscape throughout Rome were made public as early as 1928, and the commission for the Master Plan, which was created in April 1930, reported its findings in October 1930. See Paul Baxa, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 56–57. See also Aristotle Kallis, ‘“In miglior tempo…”: What Fascism did not Build in Rome’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 16, no. 1 (2011): 59–83, esp. pp. 64–71. It is important to note in this regard that the works by Scipione discussed here, in particular Piazza Navona and The Roman Courtesan, were first shown in an exhibition at the Galleria di Roma, which opened on 8 November 1930. See Fagiolo dell’Arco and Rivosecchi, Scipione: Vita e Opere, 117.

42. Cipriano Efisio Oppo, ‘Sala XVI: Mostra Postuma di Gion Bonichi (Scipione)’, Seconda Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale (Rome: Tumminelli & C. Editori Stampatori, 1935), 75.

43. Kallis, ‘“In Miglior Tempo…”‘, 63.

44. Baxa, Roads and Ruins, 64.

45. An ink and watercolour on paper work by Scipione in the Giuseppe Bertolami collection in Rome, dated to 1930, shows the demolitions around the Trajan's Forum already in progress. See Scipione 1904–1933, exh. cat. (Rome: Palombi Editori, 2007), catalogue no. 14, 72. Another drawing reproduced in Scipione: Lettere a Falqui, 180, shows workmen demolishing a building. The location corresponds precisely to the spot where the figure in The Roman Courtesan, 1930, discussed below, is shown to be standing.

46. See Mario Barosso (1879–1960), Demolitions on the West Side of the Trajan's Forum Square, 20 September 1929, pencil and watercolour, 39 × 28 cm, Museo di Roma, Rome, http://foto.ilsole24ore.com/SoleOnLine4/Tempo%20libero%20e%20Cultura/2008/fori-imperiali/fori-imperiali.php?id=10 (Accessed 20 September, 2014).

47. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), xvii.

48. In support of this reading it may be observed that some of the artist's still-lifes indulged in a rather explicit sexual symbolism. See, for example, Scipione's Still Life with Feathers, 1929.

49. For example, André Breton, Man Ray, Max Morise, Yves Tanguy, Exquisite Corpse, 1926. Thanks to Romy Golan for this comparison.

50. For ‘pictorial dysentery’ see Neppi, Il Lavoro Fascista, 15 November 1930, quoted in Scipione 1904–1933, exh. cat. (Rome: De Luca Editore), 69; for ‘anti-hygienic and anti-digestive’ see Mario Tinti, Giornale di Genova, 16 April 1935.

51. Antonio Muñoz, Il Museo di Roma (Rome: Governatorato di Roma, 1930), 46, quoted in Joshua Arthurs, ‘Roma Sparita: Local Identity and Fascist Modernity at the Museo di Roma’, Città e Storia 3, nos. 1–2 (2008): 199.

52. In a related image, The Road that Leads to Saint Peter's, 1930, Scipione depicts a series of buildings that once blocked the view to St Peter's and were subsequently demolished by Mussolini. Although Scipione could not have been aware of the demolition activity that would take place after his death, by hiding the massive dome of St Peter's behind the buildings still existing at the time, the work created by Scipione put forward his own alternative version of urban planning to that proposed by the fascist dictator. The virtual absence of the church is somewhat made up for by the seated figure of Saint Peter, who flies in over the top of the buildings like a spirit invading the soon-to-be-destroyed spaces surrounding the Vatican. As Terry Kirk argues in ‘Framing St. Peter's: Urban Planning in Fascist Rome’, Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (2006): 756–76, plans to clear the urban space between the basilica and the rest of Rome had been proposed for centuries. Therefore, it is not unthinkable that Scipione was imagining that, once the 1929 Lateran Treaty was signed, giving the go-ahead for urban planning around the church, the buildings that feature in the foreground of his painting would soon be no more.

53. See, for example, Scipione's The Apocalypse: The Sixth Seal, 1930.