Iconology of Mussolini. A journey between removals and rediscoveries in Italian criticism and exhibitions from the second post-war period to today

Abstract

The cultural and political choices of post-war criticism were expounded in 1944, with the exhibition Arte moderna in Italia 1915-1935 curated by Palma Bucarelli at the National Modern Gallery in Rome, where futurism, metaphysics, the return to order and abstractionism are put aside by the advantage of those artists kept away from the regime's rhetoric, or considered prematurely anti-fascist. The exhibition Arte moderna in Italia 1915-1935, organized by Ragghianti in 1967, was a turning point for the pioneering intent of bringing to attention and providing, as far as possible, the abandonment state of the works related to the period indicated. This exhibition had the merit of clearing the censorship (or self-censorship) regarding the exhibition of the Ventennio’s artworks, but the approach was accumulative, and the actual link between works and the social and political context in which they were born is deliberately omitted. In the Seventies several studies dealt with the links between art and fascism, and if in some cases important reflections are offered, in others, there is no disagreement about the poor quality of the so-called "propaganda’s art". The exhibition on Metaphysics set up in Bologna in 1980 and its catalog in two volumes, was an important time of re-evaluate art between the two wars. The initiative was particularly marked for greater openness to an interdisciplinary approach and the exhibition about the Thirties in Milano will continue on the same line. The Eighties were an important moment for the critical season of art between the two wars, although the tendency to marginalize the figurative culture associated with the regime would be a long one, as well as a certain reticence in the study of the mussolinian iconography. The provocative exhibition proposed at Seravezza in 1997, titled “L’uomo della provvidenza”. Iconografia del Duce (1923-1945), was indicative in this sense and opened for the first time the doors to an exhibition of works explicitly related to Mussolini's image. This exhibition was placed in a more general context of historical interests and reflections about confrontation between the ways of using art in the fascist, nazi and soviet dictatorships, and more generally in a historiographical renewal that has led to the emergence of various studies about fascism. In the historical-artistic sphere, it moves more slowly in this sense, and if it is true that in the last twenty years, publications and exhibitions have been increasingly frequent in re-evaluating characters and moments of the regime, it is also true that the field studies, particularly the Italian ones, remains reluctant to engage in works of propaganda, which often pass through the neutralization of any ideological connotation that the image can convey, to be inserted into a sort of reassuring certainty offered by an aesthetic dimension.