Abstract
Reviewed by: Mauro Pasqualini, CONICET, Argentina
The relationship between Italian fascism and modernist art has motivated plenty of academic research in the last decades. More recently, different authors started to approach the issue from a gender perspective, which led to a growing number of works focusing on masculinity and the different roles that virility, homoerotism, homophobia and misogyny played in fascist ideology. In Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy John Champagne seeks to contribute to this field of research through a very ambitious interdisciplinary outlook. By combining art history, historical materialism, psychoanalysis and queer theory, he seeks to stress the role of the fine, performing and literary arts in ‘producing, provoking, and possibly even resisting’ the model of new man that the fascist regime tried to impose upon the Italian population (4). The book therefore focuses on important playwrights, painters, music composers and novelists in order to account for the ways in which artists shaped different representations of masculinity.
Champagne defines his approach as a ‘materialist, queer semiotics that refuses to abandon the project of understanding capitalism as a totality that structures modern social relations’ (4). In Chapter 1, indeed, Champagne argues that capitalism’s increasing commodification of life led to new modes of experiencing gender. While nineteenth-century capitalism endorsed conceptions of manhood linked to the attributes of the skilled worker such as morality, independence and self-mastery, by the 1920s and 1930s Taylorist and Fordist capitalism endorsed changes in masculinity connected to consumption. Men began to perform gender based on strategies that included them as objects of desire. Drawing from other authors’ reflections on the issue, Champagne contends that the impact of these changes in the specific Italian context was crucial to understanding why senses of masculinity could not be reduced to the virile type, and that even the hyper-virile fascist new man was part of the phenomenon of ‘feminization’ of men by which the regime used the male body as an ‘object of erotic contemplation’ (36, 32–40).
The following chapters describe different artists’ representations of masculinity during the regime. Chapter 2 studies some of Pirandello’s plays. Through a detailed description of plot and argument, Champagne underlines Pirandello’s criticism of Positivism, his notion of divided self, and his conception of identity and ‘wounded’ masculinity, thus concluding, not surprisingly, that Pirandello’s notion of masculinity has none of the emphasis on the will, energy and self-mastery that characterizes fascist virility. Chapter 3 deepens the debate, with an emphasis on homoerotic visual representations of the male body, especially through the paintings of Filippo de Pisis, Carlo Carrà, and other artists connected to the School of via Cavour (Mario Mafai) or the Roman School (Alberto Ziveri, Giuseppe Capogrossi and Guglielmo Janni). Champagne uses some of their paintings to show how, in the fascist years, homoerotic paintings of the male body as delicate, sensual and feminine were not uncommon. The thread of homoerotism continues in Chapter 4, where Champagne reconstructs how music composer Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco set for voice nine poems selected from Walt Whitman’s ‘Calamus’ cluster of his 1860s’ edition of Leaves of Grass – a significant act since, according to Champagne, they are ‘some of Whitman’s most homoerotic poems’ (119). Chapter 5 goes beyond the fascist years to explore Giorgio Bassani’s novels The Gold-Rimmed Spectacles (1958) and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1962). Reading these pieces through a highly psychoanalytic version of queer theory, Champagne underscores how Bassani was able to put together homosexuality and Jewishness in order to contest essentialist conceptions of identity and denounce heteronormativity’s murderous consequences.
The book has two merits: it reads important works from innovative theoretical frames, and it highlights the diversity of representations of masculinity during the fascist years. Unfortunately, there are significant problems, springing from the author’s ambitious claims. First, there is an important disengagement between the theories invoked and the kind of analysis that Champagne privileges. The result is that his specific reference to the relationship between consumption and gender is very abstract and not supported by actual research. Second, the book abuses the terms ‘complex’, ‘contradictory’ and ‘complicated’ to describe the relationship between modernism, masculinity and fascism (for instance 4, 43, 67–68, 70, 72, 73, 93, 97, 109, 119, 123, 137, 173). This does not help to frame his specific readings into a valuable original thesis, and fails to recognize that previous authors (which Champagne mentions throughout the book) have already described the relationship between virility, modernism and the fascist regime in very nuanced, inner-tensioned and multi-determined modes. The book’s actual contribution could have been better appreciated if the author had departed from a more basic starting point: that some expressions of Italian culture were open to representing non-conventional masculinity and male homoerotic desire even under the fascist regime.