Mario Sironi
Fascism is a style of life: it is life itself for Italians. No formula will ever succeed in completely expressing it, let alone defining it. Similarly, no formula will ever succeed in expressing, let alone defining, what is understood as Fascist art, that is to say, an art which is the plastic expression of the Fascist spirit.
Fascist art will be created little by little and will be the result of the slow labour of the best people. That which can and must be done straight away is to free artists from the numerous doubts which linger on.
In the Fascist state art acquires a social function: an educative function. It must translate the ethic of our times. It must give a unity of style and grandeur of contour to common life. Thus art will once again become what it was in the greatest of times and at the heart of the greatest of civilizations: a perfect instrument of spiritual direction.
The individualist conception of ‘art for art’s sake’ is dead. As a result of this there is a deep incompatibility between the goals that Fascist art assigns itself and all the forms of art born of the arbitrary, of individualization, of the particular aesthetic of a group, of a coterie, an academy. The great disquiet which troubles all European art is the product of a time of spiritual decomposition. Modern painting, for years and years technical exercises and minute analyses of natural phenomena of Nordic origin, today feels the need for a superior spiritual synthesis.
Fascist art rejects experiments or investigations, the endeavours which the current century has indulged in. It rejects above all the ‘consequences’ of these investigations, which have unfortunately been prolonged into the present. Although seeming varied and often diverse, these investigations all derive from the vulgar materialist view of life which was characteristic of the past century and which is not only alien to us, but eventually became intolerable.
Mural painting is social painting par excellence. It acts on the popular imagination more directly than any other form of painting, and inspires lesser arts more directly.
The renaissance of mural painting, above all of the fresco, allows the formulation of the problem of Fascist art. The answer is the practical purpose of mural painting (public buildings, public places with a civic function). They are governed by laws; it is the supremacy of the stylistic element over the emotional, it is its intimate association with architecture which forbids the artist from giving way to improvisation and simple virtuosity. On the contrary, they oblige the artist to control himself by a decisive and virile technical execution of his task. The technique of mural painting obliges the artist to develop his own imagination and to organize it completely. There is no form of painting in which order and rigour of composition predominate, no form of ‘genre’ painting, which stands up to these tests set by the technical demands and large dimensions of the mural painting technique.
From mural painting will arise the ‘Fascist style’ with which the new civilization will be able to identify. The educative function of painting is above all a question of style. The artist will succeed in making an impression on popular consciousness by the style, by the suggestion of climate, rather than by the subject-matter (as the Communists think).
Questions of subject are too simplistic to be essential to the solution. Mere political orthodoxy of ‘subject’ does not suffice: it is a convenient expedient, erroneously used by the ‘advocates of content’. To be in harmony with the spirit of revolution, the style of Fascist painting will have to be antique as well as very new: it will have to resolutely dispense with the hitherto predominant trend of a narrow and monotonous art, based on an alleged, fundamentally false, ‘good sense’ which reflects neither a ‘modern’ nor a ‘traditional’ attitude. It will have to combat all the false returns which bolster an elementary aestheticism and constitute an obvious outrage to any true sense of tradition.
A moral question arises for every artist. The artist must renounce this egocentricity which from now on can only sterilize his spirit, and become a ‘militant’ artist who serves a moral ideal, subordinating his own individuality to collective work.
We do not intend to advocate practical anonymity, which is repugnant to the Italian temperament, but rather an intimate sense of devotion to collective work. We firmly believe that the artist will become a man amongst men as was the case in the most prestigious eras of our civilization.
We do not want to advocate hypothetical agreement on a single artistic formula – which would be practically impossible – but a precise and express artistic will to free art from subjective and arbitrary elements, such as that specious originality, which is desired and sustained only by our vanity.
We believe that the voluntary establishment of a work-discipline is necessary to create true and authentic talent. Our great traditions, principally decorative in character, mural and stylistic, strongly favour the birth of a Fascist style. No elective affinities with the great epochs of our past can be understood without a profound understanding of our time. The spirituality of the beginnings of the Renaissance is closer to us than the splendour of the great Venetians. The art of pagan and Christian Rome is closer to us than Greek art. We have recently come to mural painting by virtue of aesthetic principles which have developed in the Italian spirit since the war. It is not by chance, but by insight into our times that the most audacious experiments of Italian painters have already focused, for years, on mural techniques and stylistic problems. The way forward is indicated by these endeavours, until the necessary unity can be achieved.
Mario Sironi (1933)
