Abstract
The construction of the New Man was another of the several key experiments conducted by the regime in order to pave the way to totalitarianism. Among these, it constituted one of the regime's most pervasive attempts at changing Italian society. For the idea of shaping a New Man was at the core of the Fascist anthropological revolution, which primarily aimed to transform the Italian citizen into a quintessentially Fascist one. As far as the existing aesthetic system was concerned, the New Man was the catalyst for the achievement of social modernization through a process of rationalization of artistic practices. We can, therefore, argue that the modern, totalitarian Man/Woman fashioned by the arts in the public sphere had the function of eroding individuality as a self-sustained system and of replacing it with a new collective sociability.
The Relationship Between Subjectivity and Collectivity as a Social Project
In order to achieve a fully-formed totalitarian order, the regime put in place a number of reforms: the education reform and the corporate state were two of the most important of these. At the centre of these reforms lay the attempt to construct a new idea of man/woman, or more generally to reshape the notion and understanding of subjectivity. In other words, if the new education had to build the Fascist individual and the corporative system had to transform him or her into a collective being, the arts had to create a space for visualizing and monumentalizing the entity thus created. The invention of the New Man was in essence a political, anthropological and social problem, for he or she embodied modernity. The old notion of subjectivity, driven by an independent desire for self-determination within a social and political landscape, as articulated by liberalism, was no longer sustainable. From an aesthetic point of view, this shift is visible in the sacralization of politics through the arts, in youth culture, and in the creation of national myths and the aesthetics of monumentalism.
Central Hypothesis
As far as the relationship between the individual and the collective is concerned, our central hypothesis regarding the profile of the Italian totalitarian regime, as seen through the prism of the arts, is as follows: the regime planned the construction of the New Man in order to guarantee a total transformation of the personal and public spheres. If the personal sphere is that of the individual and the public sphere is that of the collective, the New Man had to unite them in such a way that the old distinction, accepted by previous political regimes such as liberalism, would be erased.
General Principles
7. The Sacralisation of the New Man's Total Politics through the Arts
The idea of building a space for this new collective subjectivity shaped by the fascist anthropological revolution found several artistic embodiments. Mural paintings, with their striking aesthetics and the lines traced by augmented bodies in artfully arranged volumes, often in classical attire, are only one of the many cases in point (Enrico Prampolini, Fillia, Fortunato Depero, Corrado Cagli, Mario Sironi, Achille Funi, Carlo Carrà). Similar examples can be found in architecture commissioned for public venues and mass gatherings, in sculptures representing Mussolini, and in mass theatre and theatre for the people (Adolfo Wildt, Arturo Martini, Leone Lodi, Lucio Fontana). Theatre often functioned as a space for the creation of myths representing the Fascist revolution, as can be seen from the Carri di Tespi or the 18BL in 1934. The main aim of these works was to create an identification between the everyday as political and the everyday as personal through simplified aesthetic compositions, amplified volumes as well as the reconceptualization of avant-garde aesthetics in an everyday landscape, such as in advertising (Alberto Bianchi Erberto Carboni, Marcello Dudovich) and in futurist paintings for public buildings (Angiolo Mazzoni's post-offices and train stations or in holiday camps, corporate cities, stadia, public palaces, and university cities).
8. Shaping the New Man's Reality by Fashioning National Myths
The regime placed great emphasis on the visibility of culture and monumentalism played a key role in the transfiguration of the daily experience of Italian citizens. The more visible an artefact reflecting the ethos and ethics of the Fascist revolution was, the more effectively it could be used to create a modern Fascist society. In this respect, many artistic creations inscribed the relationship between a new subjectivity encapsulated within a modernized social landscape, such as in the Arengario in Milan, The Monumento ai caduti in Como, or the Foro Italico, in Rome. Another case in point is Mario Sironi, who abandoned easel painting in order to devote himself to the representation of the glories of the regime. His work was fairly typical in that it made this new fusion visible by emphasising the intersections between the new Man/Woman and the reality around him or her, as was also the case in paintings such as Le corporazioni, 1941, by Prampolini, Le professioni e le arti, 1942, by Fortunato Depero, or L'Italia tra le arti e le scienze, 1935, by Mario Sironi, painted for the Aula Magna of La Sapienza University in Rome. And finally the strongest of all weapons: cinema with the likes of Alessandro Blasetti, Guido Bignone, Giovacchino Forzano, Mario Camerini, Augusto Genina, Carmine Gallone and Roberto Rossellini.
9. Monumentalism: Visualising Subjectivity and Objectivity
The debate on the new culture could not fail to take into account the problem of the New Man.In November 1933, discussing an article in Orpheus which was itself a reply to the question posed by the Rome-based journal Il Saggiatore on the same topic, the editorial reinforced the point already made a couple of months before, by claiming that the new art they champion is ingrained in the principle that the 'realismo dinamico, […] [è] determinato dai rapporti con la vita. […]'.1 This moral and intellectual disposition could not embrace indifference if it was going to forge a more profound theoretical and critical awareness of sociability in and through the arts, which had to translate into radically different forms of individual participation in the collective. In other words, without rejecting Fascist ideology per se, these young intellectuals wanted to 'clarify' and 'explain' further their understanding of the relationship between art and the individual as a social entity. The theatre in particular was the space dedicated to the construction of myths with the potential for social resonance, with the likes of Giovacchino Forzano, Salvator Gotta, Vitaliano Brancati and Sam Benelli.
References
- Orpheus (editorial). 1933. 'I giovani e la nuova cultura.' Orpheus 2, no.10 (December): 1-6.