Feature: Exhibition - Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator - Estorick Collection of Modern Art, N1

Published: 16 September 2010
by JOHN EVANS

POLITICAL charisma may last, but the cult of person­ality will find you out in the long run.

Against Mussolini, the upcoming show at the Estorick Collection, is subtitled Art and the Fall of a Dictator, and is concerned particularly with the years following Il Duce’s initial loss of power in 1943 and the period of resistance that saw a demi-god demonised and debased ahead of his execution at the hands of partisans in April 1945.

“The exhibition is not conceived in any way as a warning to anyone specifically. It is a warning about dictators, that dictators pretty well always finish badly,” says Professor Stephen Gundle of Warwick University, “…the more you con­centrate power in your hands the more you are going to be called a dictator. Formal consti­tutional arrangement is more democratic.” 

The show is a central element of his Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded study, The Cult of the Duce; Musso­lini and the Italians, 1918-2005, a collaboration with Professor Christopher Duggan of Reading Uni­versity and Dr Giuliana Pieri of Royal Holloway, University of London.

On show is nothing less than the decline of the cult through the art of anti-Fascist imagery which, the organisers believe, has received “surprisingly little attention in recent years”.

The exhibition will feature the satirical “Gibbo” depictions of Benito Mussolini in monstrous, bloated, form by the Paduan Tono Zancanaro (1906-1985). First produced under­ground, they eventually went “massively” public from the mid-1940s and numbered some 3,000. 

Drawings by partisans in the final months of the war depict the capture of German soldiers, battles and life in barracks. They herald a new realism and directness that was to characterise the post-war art scene. Published by the artists under pseudonyms, they were not generally seen until after the war.

The Sicilian communist Renato Guttoso (1911-1987), influenced by Pablo Picasso, also fought in the Resistance and his works here include Massacre (1943) and a study for Flight from Etna, which ironically won Italy’s major art award, the Bergamo Prize, in 1938.

There is a foreign dimension, too, notably with the work of British painter Merlyn Evans (1910-1973), The Execution, which drew on his memory of viewing the corpses of Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci while he was serving in Italy.

“The art on show is actually quite mixed,” says Professor Gundle, and depicts “the detach­ment of the artists from Fascism and from Musso­lini and their attacks on the whole thing, their satire, their barbs, their responses. The detachment from the cult of personal­ity starts as soon as the war effort starts to go badly.

“The Fascists invested heavily in the art world. They organised lots of competitions and prizes. They commissioned works from the artists, most of whom did pretty well under the regime.”

The period witnessed the destruction of many Fascist symbols and images of the leader by the people and this was often anticipated by artists. “Their works,” the organisers say, “stand testimony to that particular, tragic, phase in Italian history that preceded the rebirth of democracy.”

Professor Gundle well understands the modern parallels. Postwar, he says, party leaders of various political hues went “sombre” and “absolutely did not promote themselves”.

Yet he points to recurring instances of a tendency towards the “strong man” syndrome in Italian political life, citing figures as diverse as the Naples mayor and shipping magnate Achille Lauro, the Everyman party leader Guglielmo Giannini and even Bettino Craxi the socialist prime minister of the 1980s.

And today with Silvio Berlusconi?

Well, says Prof Gundle: “There are very striking parallels. The thing you have to recognise with Berlusconi is he’s not really a man of the people in the way that Mussolini was. He comes out of a very wealthy business background. But he does have, in mediatic terms, that sort of capacity to shape public opinion to involve the whole nation and himself and his particular concerns and ambitions which nobody else has managed to since Mussolini’s time.”

• Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator, at Estorick Collection of Modern Art, 39a Canonbury Square, N1 2AN, from September 22 to December 19. £5.