Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy

Book Overview

Bringing together studies by art historians, historians, and political scientists, Fascist Visions explores the themes and paradigms that pervaded protofascist and fascist aesthetic discourse, cultural policy, and artistic production in France and Italy. Whether traditionalist or innovative in idiom, art functioned as the expression of fascism's ideological polarities: nihilism and idealism, modernism and antimodernism, revolution and reaction. This volume charts the unfolding of fascist aesthetics from its genesis in nationalist and antimaterialist ideologies before World War I to its full development during the interwar period and World War II. It also highlights the shared motivations of advocates of fascist aesthetics, including artists, art critics, political activists, and government officials, outside of Germany.

The eight essays in this book investigate the intersection of fascist ideology and aesthetics through a wide range of historical examples. Topics include: theories of cultural regeneration in Italy from the Risorgimento to fascism; the impact of fascism upon the work of such artists and art critics as Ardengo Soffici, Mario Sironi, Valentine de Saint-Point, and Waldemar George; the theories of modernist urbanism developed by Georges Valois's Faisceau; and official sponsorship of painting and the decorative arts in Mussolini's Italy and in Vichy France. The contributors to this volume include Walter Adamson, Matthew Affron, Mark Antliff, Emily Braun, Mich le Cone, Emilio Gentile, Nancy Locke, and Marla Stone.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691027374
• ISBN13: 9780691027371
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 296 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.3" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

The myth of the eternal return!

In certain states of tense stress, most of people tend to find magical or alien solutions, with the candid illusion everything will change. In these days, in which certain political leaders firmly believe they are predestined by the power of the people and supported by the popular mythology - based on heroic figures of past - regarding themselves destined to redeem the hopeless people, appearing like the embodiment of Utopian theories that stranded with enough turmoil in the past century, united the regrettable fact many people has lost interest to find out historical keys or simply don't dispose of enough time to dive themselves in these frisky conceptual labyrinths, it would convene to read with special attention this thoughtful and innovative collection of essays where converge history, history of the ideas and politics with an invaluable historio-graphical achievement. And you will understand why the cult to personality, the lack of an intelligent speech, the settled and steeled conviction of finding magical solutions based on the collective comfortableness and the exacerbated adulation to the supreme authority, are the main ingredients of this mass phenomena, in which the terrene hopes can convey to misinformed people or what Jung denominated the "collective unconscious" to seek the celestial paradise here on earth, forgetting the history is plenty enough of similar and aborted projects in other latitudes with widely known results. In Latin America there' s a proverbial, caustic but wise statement in this sense: "Keep believing in pregnant birds."