Abstract
Storchi looks at how the experience of the First World War was inscribed in the artistic theorization of Ardengo Soffici and Carlo Carrà, who had been part of the Italian Avant-garde during the pre-war years and had been active as interventionist when the war broke out. Through the analysis of the artists’ writings between 1918 and 1921, this chapter demonstrates how, despite having different experiences of the war, these artists claimed the same principles: the interconnection between aesthetics and politics and the idea of the nation as key to the renewal of Italian art. Storchi shows how Soffici’s and Carrà’s personal, artistic and political identities were shaped by the war, and how they, in turn, had a key role in shaping the cultural milieu of post-war Italy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
On the futurists’ interventionism, see Daly (2016).
- 2.
Published respectively in the March, April and June 1918 issues of La raccolta. The biblical theme of Tobias, who, while travelling with the archangel Raphael, caught a fish whose heart and liver could drive off evil spirits and whose gall healed his father Tobit’s blindness on his return home, already belonged to the pictorial tradition and had been recently treated by Giorgio de Chirico in his highly symbolic 1917 painting Il sogno di Tobia, which, according to Maurizio Fagiolo Dell’Arco, had already inspired Carrà’s paintings L’ovale delle apparizioni (1918) and Composizione TA (1916–1918). See Fagiolo Dell’Arco (1984, p. 100) and also Baldacci (1997, p. 362).
References
Adamson, Walter L. 1993. Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism. Cambridge (MA) and London: Harvard University Press.
———. 2007. Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism’s Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe. Berkeley (CA) and London: University of California Press.
Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso.
Baldacci, Paolo. 1997. De Chirico 1888–1919: la metafisica. Milan: Electa.
Bellini, Davide. 2015. Kobilek di Soffici: dalla guerra-gioco alla narrazione di una comunità. Annali d’Italianistica 33: 151–167.
Benjamin, Walter. 1999. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. In Illuminations (Hannah Arendt, Ed. and Harry Zohn, Trans.). London: Pimlico.
Braun, Emily. 2008. L’arte dell’Italia fascista: il totalitarismo fra teoria e pratica. In Modernità totalitaria: il fascismo italiano, ed. Emilio Gentile, 85–99. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
Bürger, Peter. 1996. Theory of the Avant-Garde (Michael Shaw, Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Carden-Coyne, Ana. 2009. Deconstructing the Body: Classicism, Modernism, and the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Carrà, Carlo. 1918a. Il ritorno di Tobia. La raccolta 1: 1–3.
———. 1918b. Tobia futurista. La raccolta 2: 24–27.
———. 1918c. Tobia futurista. La raccolta 4: 60–62.
———. 1919. Il rinnovamento della pittura in Italia. Valori plastici I XI–XII: 1–3.
———. 1920a. Canova e il neoclassicismo. Valori plastici II IX–XII: 93–95.
———. 1920b. Il rinnovamento della pittura in Italia (parte II). Valori plastici II I–II: 8–10.
———. 1920c. Il rinnovamento della pittura in Italia (parte III). Valori plastici II III–IV: 33–35.
———. 1920d. Il rinnovamento della pittura in Italia (parte IV). Valori plastici II V–VI: 53–55.
———. 1921a. Canova e il neoclassicismo (Parte II). Valori plastici III 1: 1–5.
———. 1921b. Canova e il neoclassicismo (III). Valori plastici III 2: 30–35.
———. 1978. In Tutti gli scritti, ed. Massimo Carrà. Milan: Feltrinelli.
Carrà, Massimo, Ester Coen, and Gérard-Georges Lemaire. 1987. Carlo Carrà. Milan: Giunti.
Cowling, Elizabeth, and Jennifer Mundy. 1990. Introduction. In On Classic Ground: Picasso, Léger, de Chirico and New Classicism 1910–1930, ed. Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, 11–30. London: Tate Gallery.
Daly, Selena. 2016. Italian Futurism and the First World War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Fagiolo Dell’Arco, Maurizio. 1984. L’opera completa di Giorgio De Chirico 1908–1924. Milan: Rizzoli.
Ferris, David. 2000. Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Gentile, Emilio. 1996. Le origini dell’ideologia fascista. Bologna: Il Mulino.
Griffin, Roger. 2007. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Isnenghi, Mario. 1970. Il mito della grande guerra. Rome-Bari: Laterza.
Mosse, George L. 1999. The Fascist Revolution. New York: Fertig.
Pontiggia, Elena. 1992. Classicismo, tradizionalismo, moderna classicità. In L’idea del classico 1916–1932: temi classici nell’arte italiana degli anni Venti, ed. Elena Pontiggia and Marco Quemada, 9–43. Milan: Fabbri.
———. 2008. Modernità e classicità: il ritorno all’ordine in Europa dal primo dopoguerra agli anni trenta. Milan: Bruno Mondadori.
Sartwell, Crispin. 2010. Political Aesthetics. Ithaca (NY): Cornell University Press.
Soffici, Ardengo. 1919. Kobilek. Giornale di battaglia. Florence: Vallecchi.
———. 1920a. Apologia del futurismo. Rete mediterranea 3: 197–207.
———. 1920b. Dichiarazione preliminare. Rete mediterranea 1: 3–20.
———. 1920c. Bilancio dell’arte francese contemporanea. Rete mediterranea 3: 261–272.
———. 1920d. Errore di coincidenza. Rete mediterranea 1: 51–62.
———. 1920e. Errore di coincidenza. Rete mediterranea 3: 238–251.
———. 1920f. Errore di coincidenza. Rete mediterranea 4: 320–354.
———. 1920g. Politica. Rete mediterranea 1: 80–88.
———. 1920h. Politica. Rete mediterranea 2: 172–181.
———. 1920i. Politica. Rete mediterranea 3: 275–279.
———. 1920j. Preraffaellismo. Rete mediterranea 1: 71–76.
———. 1955. Fine di un mondo. Florence: Vallecchi.
Somigli, Luca. 2003. Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2013. Past-loving Florence and the Temptations of Futurism. Lacerba (1913–15); Quartiere Latino (1913–14); L’Italia futurista (1916–18); and La Vraie Italie (1919–20). In The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazine, ed. Peter Brooker, Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop, vol. 3, 469–490. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Somigli, Luca, and Mario Moroni, eds. 2004. Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Somigli, Luca, and Simona Storchi, eds. 2015. Introduction. The Great War and the Modernist Imagination in Italy. Annali d’Italianistica 33: 17–30.
Storchi, Simona. 2013. Margherita Sarfatti and Il popolo d’Italia: National Classicism Between Tradition and Modernity. Modern Language Review 108 (4): 1135–1155.
———. 2015. Ardengo Soffici’s Rete mediterranea: The Aesthetics and Politics of Post-war Modernism. Annali d’Italianistica 33: 321–340.
Wittman, Laura. 2011. The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Modern Mourning and the Reinvention of the Mystical Body. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Storchi, S. (2020). Artists at War: Artistic Identities and the Politics of Culture in Post-World War I Italy. In: Pedriali, F., Savettieri, C. (eds) Mobilizing Cultural Identities in the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42791-7_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42791-7_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-42790-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-42791-7
eBook Packages: HistoryHistory (R0)