If Guttuso’s form of social realism—victims, big backsides, spaghetti-haired women, and all—proved popular with orthodox communists and rich Italians in and out of Rome, it failed to excite much imitation—and none of any quality—among Italian painters in the postwar years, and was looking decidedly tired by the 1960s.
The new rage was for abstract painting, and in particular for the work of Alberto Burri (1915–95) and Lucio Fontana (1899–1968). But Burri’s work now seems to have been overtaken by the more subtle paintings of the Spaniard Antoni Tàpies, and Fontana’s has come to look monotonous. (There are those who, remembering Fontana’s early enthusiasm for Mussolini and Fascism, to which he was a convinced adherent, would regard this as a just punishment.) How much mileage can an artist extract, and for how long, from ripped, paint-drenched, charred burlap? The work of these “informalist” painters only reminds us, decades later, that when paintings have little or no anchorage in the world as seen, they will end up looking pretty much the same; the “freedom” of so much abstract art actually leads to monotony. Nine times out of ten, the thing that underwrites variety is a certain degree of faithfulness to things as they appear, to a world whose enormous and constantly invigorating and challenging differences cannot be surpassed by the more limited experience of a painter.
Fontana was the kind of artist whose work passed through a phase of seeming radical almost to the point of aggression and alarm, and then slumped into a semi-decorative sameness. From early Cubism onward, artists had achieved certain effects by adding material to the canvas—collaged newsprint, glued-on objects. Fontana’s rhetorical device was to take material away from the canvas, leaving holes in it—either poked or slashed in its paint-burdened surface. These were christened, rather pretentiously, Concetti Spaziali (Spatial Concepts), because they showed emptiness behind the stretched canvas. Fontana’s admirers saw in this an invigorating sign of pent-up energy, though today this seems more a figure of art-speech than a physical reality. Looking back on it, how pointless it seems! The real surface of Italy was full of holes, craters, gashes, all inflicted on it by the bombs of the raiders and the shells of the panzers. It was one huge landscape of damage. Little could have been more gratuitous than to take canvases and punch holes in them, as though this could add some meaning to what the real world had undergone, whose traces were so much more eloquent than anything an “advanced” artist could do to surfaces in his studio. Fontana’s work could not escape the fate of novelty art which outlives its novelty.
In general, Italian painting in the 1960s seemed caught in an insoluble bind: anxious to escape the heavy, elegant burden of inherited culture, plagued by memories of its own glorious past, it could not invent a convincing way of looking brutal. In Rome it entered a phase of complacent, pseudo-radical mannerism which made the frigid exercises of such painters as the Cavaliere d’Arpino, three centuries before, seem positively exuberant. The Italian art world, seemingly disoriented by the war and by the rise of American art to prominence (and then to imperial glory in the fifties), tended to treat as “major figures” artists whose talent and achievements were quite nugatory. One example among many was Mario Schifano (1934–98), an “Italian Pop” artist who briefly enjoyed the reputation of being Italy’s answer to Andy Warhol—as if an answer were needed!—before wrecking his slender talent and eventually killing himself with massive intakes of cocaine. Schifano was the next-door neighbor of the great Italian aesthete and English scholar Mario Praz, author of The Romantic Agony, The House of Life (a long, meditative essay that circled around his enormous collection), and other works. Praz loathed Schifano, who was the noisiest of neighbors and, as a friend of the Rolling Stones and a devotee of rock-and-roll, represented everything Praz found most noxious and threatening in sixties culture. Schifano, on the other hand, worshipped Praz, and bombarded him with invitations to meet. He wanted, in particular, an inscribed copy of The House of Life. Eventually, one was left outside Schifano’s door, and it was indeed inscribed by the scholar. “A Mario Schifano,” the dedication ran. “Così vicino, ma così lontano”—“To Mario Schifano, so near but so far away.”
The 1960s and ’70s were a hospitable time for conceptual art in Rome, particularly given the Italian talent for obfuscatory theory. The most “radical” of these gestures—one whose sharpness is most unlikely ever to be surpassed, and which out-Duchamps Duchamp in a small way—was Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista, which is (or possibly is not) what it says it is: the artist’s shit, a small lump or turd weighing about thirty grams, sealed in a small tin can and forever invisible.
Manzoni was born near Cremona in 1933 but lived in Rome; he had no art training, and did not need it, since his work consisted entirely of ideas about art rather than the making of aesthetic objects. One part of this field was his Achromes (No Colors), white canvases covered with white gesso that was scratched or scored with parallel lines. (They did not have to be canvases; some Achromes were made of white cotton wool, or even bread rolls—white bread, naturally, rather than the grainier brown Italian pane integrale.) The chief influence hovering behind these was that of the French artist Yves Klein, whose show of monochrome canvases, all painted the same IKB or International Klein Blue, Manzoni had seen in Paris in 1957. Another was that of Robert Rauschenberg, who had done a group of all-white canvases as far back as 1951; and one should not forget the Russian Malevich’s White on White (1918).
Manzoni did single lines, drawn on a roll of paper of a precisely given length, such as a kilometer; these scrolls were rolled up and kept in polished metal drums. He designated friends (one of whom was the writer Umberto Eco) as living works of art, issuing them with certificates of authenticity. He exhibited red and white balloons which he had blown up himself and then tethered to wooden bases, under the title Artist’s Breath; these were intended as relics or souvenirs of “creativity,” though of course they did not last long; the rubber perished. In 1961, he installed an iron block in a Danish park; its title, Base of the World, was inscribed on it upside down, so that the viewer could imagine the whole world reposing on the block, rather than vice versa. Thus, before his early death from a heart attack in 1963, Manzoni had created a small, wry, sharp body of work; how things might have developed from there is of course unknowable. Probably, one suspects, not so very far…