The exhibition 'Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator' was held in London at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art between September and December 2010. Sponsored by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), and curated by Stephen Gundle, (University of Warwick) Giuliana Pieri (Royal Holloway, University of London) and Simona Storchi (University of Leicester), in conjunction with Roberta Cremoncini and Christopher Adams of the Estorick, it brought together a range of paintings, drawings, sculptures, cartoons, postcards and photographs produced in Italy, and in a few cases abroad, between the early 1940s and the end of the war in 1945. This period witnessed the decline of Italian Fascism following setbacks in the war and increasing hardship at home. Once widely admired and seen by many as a political genius and prototype of the new Italian, Mussolini was increasingly mocked and derided both abroad and, in private, at home. The representations of a vital, muscular and sometimes metallic leader gave way to portrayals of a flaccid and grotesque figure who, no longer as charismatic as before, was no more than Hitler's lapdog. The dictator's swift execution in the company of his lover Claretta Petacci at the hands of partisans on 28 April 1945 and the macabre public display of their bodies in Milan marked the end of a political odyssey that, forged through violence, had brought tyranny and war.
The exhibition was one of the main outputs of the AHRC research project 'The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, 1918-2005' whose investigators were Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan (University of Reading) and Giuliana Pieri. The main video presented here is a film directed and edited by Daniel Montanarini of the four gallery talks that were given in the course of the exhibition by Gundle, Duggan, Pieri, and Storchi. Short talks on specific exhibits may be viewed by clicking on the buttons above.
The painter Mario Mafai's used an expressionist aesthetic to develop a critique of Fascism. The grotesquely inflated bodies of the conquerors are the visual antithesis to the lean, hard-shelled and powerful body of the Fascist (and Futurist) ideal.
The Fantasie series by Mario Mafai chronicles the occupation of the country, the brutality of the conquerors, interrogations of prisoners, rapes, killings and massacres, and war scenes. The Troops Enjoy Themselves is a key example of Mafai's stylistic and thematic choices at the time.
In his 'Fantasie' series, Mafai reflected on the brutal realities of war, much in the manner of Goya. The soldiers in the painting described are shown as sinister and spectral black forms violating women. By the time Mafai painted this work, the atrocities perpetrated by the armed forces of various belligerent powers against civilians would have been known, at least in part.
In the summer of 1943, Mino Maccari, in the immediate aftermath of Mussolini's loss of power, worked on some thirty small paintings and several drawings. The images from his Dux series focus on the figure of the dictator, who is presented as a lascivious buffoon, and show alongside him figures from the Fascist Grand Council, Italy's diminutive king, and various figures from the Fascist intellighentia.
In this painting of 1943, belonging to his 'Dux' series, Maccari imagines Mussolini as a spectral balloon-like figure being tossed in the air in a blanket along with King Victor Emmanuel III. One of the figures holding the blanket is Uncle Sam, another is Stalin. The third ought to be Churchill, but is less clearly recognisable. Whether the work was done before Mussolini's fall from power on 25 July 1943, or after, is not clear.
Images of Mussolini were central to the construction and management of the visual cult of the Duce. However from the turn of the 1930s and in the first half of the 1940s the once celebrated body of the Duce came under attack. Zancanaro's images of Gibbo/Mussolini are a mordent satirical reflection on the rise and fall of the visual cult of the Duce.
'Il Gibbo' was a creation of the Paduan artist Tono Zancanaro. A grotesque, flabby creature, part human and part animal, it was a fruit of fantasy inspired by a variety of figures. There is no doubt that Mussolini was his main target. An anti-fascist, Zancanaro drew his invention thousands of times between 1941 and the end of the war, often incorporating Fascist slogans and scenarios that replicated real events.
Mussolini was a gift to cartoonists. With his jutting jaw, shaved head and virile swagger he was often drawn by leading British cartoonists including Low, Illingworth and Giles. Even at the height of his powers, they ridiculed him, but as his fortunes declined he was increasingly depicted as child, an old woman or in the guise of various animals.
Postcards were a hugely popular medium in interwar Italy and many thousands of cards were produced, most of them by private companies, featuring the dictator. A sample from the collection of Enrico Sturani conveys an idea of the variety of images. Anti-fascist propagandists also used postcards to depict the decline and death of Mussolini.
The cult of heroic violence had always been at the heart of fascism, with 'squadrismo' as one of the regime's foundation myths. In these drawings of c. 1943, Bazzoni satirises savagely the activities of the early Fascist squads, with their use of the manganello (truncheon) and the administration of castor oil, stripping them of any sense of nobility or heroism.
Giandante X was a painter, sculptor and architect. After graduating in architecture and philosophy, he devoted himself to art and chose his name Giandante, which meant 'traveller' and X as a symbol of the unknown. He founded an anti-fascist group in 1922 and mixed with avant-garde circles, from which he absorbed stylistic influences. Far from glorifying the Duce's metallic and militarized body, as many of his contemporaries were doing at the time, his Head of Mussolini is a distorted, caricatural figure, whose grotesque features are shown almost as collapsing, implying a strong critique of Fascism and its leader.