Abstract
The artistic and literary worlds played an important part within the regime's strategy as far as cultural policies were concerned. This prominence derived to a large extent from their ability to exercise a degree of resistance and to some extent counteract the dictatorship's plans for totalitarian control over society and the individual, especially in the 1930s. More specifically, intellectual engagement through aesthetic and literary endeavours calls into question the boundaries between the public and private spheres, and also those between action as transformation and action as acceptance of the status quo. In other words, the intellectual élites used their modernist internationalism and cosmopolitanism as a forma mentis to react again the crisis of Western civilization and the crisis of reason orchestrated by the European totalitarianisms. Such forms of resistance through the arts found their embodiments in artworks, theatre and the debates in literary journals.
Intellectual engagement at the intersection between personal and public spheres
The relationship between the dictatorship and Italian intellectuals was necessarily a rather complex one. Its first major defining feature was the divide between elite and popular culture, which in Italy was particularly clear because of the economic structure in place to support cultural organizations. In line with its anthropological revolution, since the 1925 Manifesto of Fascist intellectuals the regime had understood culture as another facet of action. Particularly after 1932, the regime concentrated its efforts on building consensus amongst the popular classes, without visibly obstructing the intelligentsia. It operated through more or less wide-reaching structures of patronage spanning national and international exhibitions, such as the Biennali, Triennali and Quadriennali, along with prizes and the provision of financial support to publishers and stipends to authors
Central Hypothesis
In the age of totalitarianisms in Italy, this intellectual indifference translated into a multi-faceted form of engaged indifference, which sought aesthetic innovation and intellectual exchange while mostly avoiding direct political confrontation. While Futurism and Novecento were vying to become the official arte di Stato, the more radical intellectual debate occurred in the cosmopolitan circles of the cultural elites.
General Principles
10. The legitimization of the artist/intellectual participation in the civic sphere
During the Ventennio, the role of the State, and that of the arts within it, was very clearly defined in terms of totalitarian and hierarchical control over the social sphere. The institutional apparatus of the State had to join forces with the arts in order to organize forms of social life. If we look closely at the aesthetics promoted by modernist magazines, or by the elites who found their voices in those outlets, and the official debate on the arts and their place within the Fascist state, we can find some similarities (Carlo Emilio Gadda and Elio Vittorini). The official debate on State Art and the debate among the intellectual elites addressed similar concerns; namely, the universal imperative of using the arts as a platform for fostering social modernization in the civic sphere. From the point of view of the regime, art, as Giuseppe Bottai from Critica Fascista often repeated, had to be art-action – 'azione per l'arte' – and the regime had to act as an organizing force and not simply as a patron. While, with Primato (1940-43),Bottai advocated the well-known 'coraggio della concordia', the Premio Bergamo praised Guttuso and the Corrente Movement together with nationalist works (Pietro Gaudenzi). And, finally, sacred art and sculpture played an important role in consecrating, from a non-Fascist point of view, the dictatorship within the social sphere (Giacomo Manzù, Fausto Melotti).
11. The Role of Cosmopolitanism in the Modernization of the Italian Artistic Field
Literary and cultural journals encouraged intellectual exchange and debate, thereby helping Italian culture to survive the dictatorship. Through the publication of translations and articles on foreign literature, such journals played a fundamental role in fostering international dialogue, thereby preserving Italian culture from marginalization. Margherita Sarfatti herself organised several exhibitions of the Novecento movement, from Europe to Latin America until the early 1930s. Throughout the Ventennio, Marinetti and the futurists relentlessly continued to enter into dialogue with other avant-garde movements, seeking to expand their horizons and young directors were making their ways into the film industry (Alberto Lattuada, Vittorio de Sica, Luchino Visconti). Translations of foreign novels were the main literary successes of the day and sold more copies than Italian novels. And, finally, architecture was heavily indebted to foreign examples. In other words,what defined the cosmopolitan ethos was a competitive desire to compare Italy with other cultures in order to maintain a position of cultural centrality within the European sphere.
12. Citizen's Media Manipulation: Entertainment, Escapism and Consensus?
Theatre and cinema were both powerful tools for manipulating citizens. If cosmopolitanism and the participation in the debate about the arts enabled a fair number of intellectuals to be legitimised and to avoid being confined to the peripheries of the international cultural landscape, many artistic products served the purpose of providing easy forms of entertainment, thereby distracting and manipulating citizens. The cinema of the telefoni bianchi or the bourgeois theatre were for example amongst the privileged channels through which common citizens could be entertained, manipulated and/or indoctrinated (Mario Camerini, Mario Soldati, Aldo De Benedetti, Cesare Vico Lodovici, Ettore Petrolini). This form of production tended to have a set of common features: simplified story-lines, love stories and a dream-like atmosphere (occasionally set in exotic locations), or unproblematic forms of humour. These works functioned through a process of identification and alienation. The public could dream of a glamorous and adventurous lifestyle but spectators also had to accept that such a lifestyle could not be part of the everyday reality of a morally-sound Fascist citizen (Luigi Chiarini, Alessandro Blasetti, Max Neufeld).