Earlier this month, hundreds thronged to Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art for the highly anticipated opening of a major exhibition on Futurism, arguably Italy’s most notable contribution to 20th-century art. Coming on the heels of cubism, Futurist art broke with the past to capture the movement and dynamism of the modern age. Yet with its nationalistic and warmongering rhetoric, Futurism is also intertwined, in part, with Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
Conspicuously absent at the inauguration were some of the Futurism scholars and critics who had spent the better part of the past year preparing the show. They were dismissed by culture ministry officials this summer and replaced with an organizing committee including an architect, an archaeologist and an expert in Medieval art.
“I was told, ‘arrivederci’ — you never existed” said Massimo Duranti, one of the ousted experts. “The exhibition became about exalting Futurism during the period of the regime.”
Massimo Osanna, the director of Italy’s state museums, denied that the changes to the committee were ideologically motivated. Duranti and others had never been formally appointed, he said, and the new panel had worked to present “an extraordinary era from many points of view.”
A show about Futurism had been high on the wish list of Gennaro Sangiuliano, whose turn as Italy’s culture minister was cut short last August after it emerged that he’d had an affair with a consultant in his department. Sangiuliano, a right-wing journalist and politician, had been handpicked for the ministerial post by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader of a party descended from post-Fascist roots.
Since Meloni came to power more than two years ago, there has been debate in Italy over whether her government is meddling in the cultural sphere. Some observers say that Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party is elbowing for cultural space to make up for decades on the outskirts of political power.
The Futurism exhibition “is not put together, planned and executed by experts,” said Günter Berghaus, one of the scholars who was dismissed, “but by a government who seeks to promote, first of all, their cultural agenda.”
Most of all, Berghaus objected to the government’s imposition of a “grand narrative of a right-wing culture” in which Futurism played an important part. The reality is that the Futurists were not politically homogenous, he said. “There was quite a range of attitudes toward Fascism,” he added.
In the exhibition, a celebrated sculpture by Renato Bertelli of Mussolini’s face is the only direct reference to the dictator who controlled Italy for two decades. Instead, it celebrates the dynamism and energy of the era — when, as the old Fascist propaganda touted, trains ran on time — through everyday objects like cars, motorcycles, planes and Olivetti typewriters, which are displayed alongside paintings.
Giancarlo Carpi, another of the ousted experts, described it as a sort of calling card for pre-World War II “Made in Italy.” He said that after the committee was substituted, the number of artworks was drastically cut and the design objects were introduced.
“There is the glorification of technology instead of art,” he said, made to appeal to a general audience and avoiding the more problematic aspects to those decades. Carpi is suing the culture ministry for breach of contract over his dismissal.
For over a year now, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art has been singled out by critics as a venue of government propaganda.
A year ago, it hosted a major retrospective dedicated to the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien, the British author of “The Lord of the Rings.” Touted as a right-wing counteroffensive in the country’s culture wars, the exhibition raised eyebrows, not least because Tolkien’s books are a touchstone for Meloni, who used to dress up as a Hobbit in her youth and has credited Tolkien’s fantasy world with shaping her political outlook.
Earlier this year, 40 members of the museum staff signed a letter protesting the presentation at the museum of the book “Why Italy is Right-Wing. Against the Lies of the Left,” written by Italo Bocchino, the editor of Secolo d’Italia, a daily newspaper close to Meloni’s party. Renata Cristina Mazzantini, the institution’s director, responded with her own letter informing the 40 signees that having perceived both “discontent and a will to contest” the book presentation, their identities would be reported to the culture ministry and to “competent authorities,” steps that union officials perceived as threatening.
Three members of the museum’s scientific committee, a consultative board, immediately resigned, complaining that they had also been shut out of decision making. Augusto Roca De Amicis, one of the resigning committee members, said that the museum was being used like “a branch of the party,” and that meddling on the part of right-wing politicians had gone “beyond the normal limits.”
As culture minister, Sangiuliano envisaged creating a museum to commemorate the victims of a massacre that took place in northeastern Italy at the end of World War II, when thousands of people believed to be Mussolini supporters were killed. He also supported a private initiative in the central Emilia Romagna region, for a museum to celebrate Italian culture and the country’s contributions to civilization. Critics questioned the need for such a venue, warning it opened the door to identitarian rhetoric.
But even the right’s detractors acknowledge that political interference in culture has gone both ways.
“The gun with which the right is shooting was put there by the left,” said Tomaso Montanari, the rector of the University for Foreigners in Siena and one of Italy’s most polemical left-wing intellectuals. A 2014 culture ministry reform under Dario Franceschini, a left-wing minister, had opened the door to non-Italian candidates for key jobs in top museums, but it also allowed the minister to pick them, transforming a mostly bureaucratic process into one that could be politically charged. “This had never happened before,” Montanari said.
A later crop of museum directors chosen by the Meloni government favored Italian candidates. And a reform of Italy’s opera houses, which critics accused of trying to flush out foreign talent, led to a lawsuit. When Fortunato Ortombina, a respected opera administrator, was appointed at La Scala last year, the culture minister enthused that after three foreign general directors, “an Italian returns to La Scala.”
When the government appointed Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, a contrarian journalist, as the president of the organization that stages the Venice Biennale, some observers anticipated that he would shift the event in a more nationalist direction. But he has confounded those expectations. Last week, Buttafuoco named Koyo Kouoh, one of Africa’s pre-eminent curators, to oversee the Art Biennale’s 61st edition. She will be the first African woman to curate the exhibition.
Lorenzo Castellani, a history professor at Luiss Guido Carli in Rome, said the right did not have enough qualified sympathizers to fill positions of power in Italy’s cultural institutions. Nor did most right-wing lawmakers care, he added, given that high culture was not a priority for its electorate.
“There’s only a small group of right-leaning academic intellectuals who aspire to overthrow the predominance of the left in the world of high culture,” he said, adding that their chance of success was small. “Simply put,” he said, “there’s a disproportion of means, of resources, of people.”
Speaking to reporters at the Foreign Press Club in Rome on Monday, Federico Mollicone, a lawmaker from Meloni’s party who chairs the culture commission of Italy’s Parliament, said the right had no interest in building a “new cultural hegemony,” but was trying to ensure “a national vision” that looked to the present. The Futurism exhibition marked the return of a tradition of great national exhibitions that spoke to the people, he said, rather than intellectuals or experts.
Yet experts were the guarantors of intellectual autonomy, said Montanari, the university rector, and the government crossed a red line when it dismissed them.
“The minister of health can’t go into the operating room with a scalpel and start operating,” he said. Exhibitions must be overseen by scholars, he added — “otherwise it’s not culture, it’s propaganda.”
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