Fascist Art
Oct. 11th, 2010 09:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purejuiceEmail to the genocide heads:
For those of you interested in hate speech or fascist rhetoric, the Guggenheim has just opened a show of fascist art, and art produced during the rise of fascism, the first in the U.S. It is reviewed by the NYT here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/arts/design/11chaos.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=hitler&st=cse
Interestingly, it is called "Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936". Here is the Guggenheim link:
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/chaos-and-classicism
The art historian Kenneth E. Silver (Esprit de Corps: the Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925) has curated the show. The catalog looks to be a very exciting document (WITH PICTURES!), with contributions from Emily Braun, among others, the biographer of the amazingly talented and totally unrepentent Mario Sironi, Mussolini's right hand art guy. If you only have time to read one book on fascist art, read Braun on Sironi. People are inclined to think of fascist art only as Hitler kitsch, but the Italians....well, there are certain things they do better. Fascist art among them. Here is the link for the catalog:
http://www.guggenheimstore.org/chandclartin.html
The Times piece makes the point, which I am interested in but totally unqualified to discuss, that post-modernism is responsible for "disabus[ing] us of the notion that art is, by definition, an expression of any culture's better nature".
There are lots of interesting connections and threads here, among them Hitler's own sublimated aesthetic life, and the whole fascist ideal of connoisseurship, which is represented in the exhibit by a neo-realist triptych of slightly pornographic young ladies by Adolf Ziegler representing earth, air, wind, fire which Hitler lept above his mantelpiece. It's quite creepy.
Enjoy!
For those of you interested in hate speech or fascist rhetoric, the Guggenheim has just opened a show of fascist art, and art produced during the rise of fascism, the first in the U.S. It is reviewed by the NYT here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/arts/design/11chaos.html?_r=1&scp=3&sq=hitler&st=cse
Interestingly, it is called "Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936". Here is the Guggenheim link:
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/chaos-and-classicism
The art historian Kenneth E. Silver (Esprit de Corps: the Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925) has curated the show. The catalog looks to be a very exciting document (WITH PICTURES!), with contributions from Emily Braun, among others, the biographer of the amazingly talented and totally unrepentent Mario Sironi, Mussolini's right hand art guy. If you only have time to read one book on fascist art, read Braun on Sironi. People are inclined to think of fascist art only as Hitler kitsch, but the Italians....well, there are certain things they do better. Fascist art among them. Here is the link for the catalog:
http://www.guggenheimstore.org/chandclartin.html
The Times piece makes the point, which I am interested in but totally unqualified to discuss, that post-modernism is responsible for "disabus[ing] us of the notion that art is, by definition, an expression of any culture's better nature".
There are lots of interesting connections and threads here, among them Hitler's own sublimated aesthetic life, and the whole fascist ideal of connoisseurship, which is represented in the exhibit by a neo-realist triptych of slightly pornographic young ladies by Adolf Ziegler representing earth, air, wind, fire which Hitler lept above his mantelpiece. It's quite creepy.
Enjoy!
