Chair: Carlotta Castellani
In the period of political instability that runs between the outbreak of the First World War and the advent of Fascism, the Italian situation leads some Modernist artists and writers to question Marinetti’s leadership and the centralizing function of the city of Milan. The essay Futurismo e Marinettismo, signed by Giovanni Papini, Ardengo Soffici and Aldo Palazzeschi in «Lacerba» (February 1915) marks the pick of this divisions. Between the so called First Phase of the Italian Futurist Movement and its Second Phase, many small avant-garde fringes carry out autonomous programs in peripheral places of the peninsula positioned as ‘counter’ Avant-garde if compared with Marinetti’s Futurism. An effective decentralized geography can be recognized above all from the development of new little magazines born in Mantua, Bologna, L'Aquila, Trieste and Rome, founded by avant-garde groups which expand their network toward international realities and find a first interlocutor in the Dadaist group of Zurich. These magazines carry on shifting programs at the crossroads between Futurism, Dadaism, Metafisica and Liberismo whose history has been overshadowed by artistic currents strongly characterized artistically and geographically. The panel intends to highlight the network of national and international contacts that has been created through these journals from a transnational perspective, thus verifying the role of little magazines as tools to create new geographies by decentralizing the avant-garde machine, to question canons and enlarge geographies. Each of these magazines combines artistic instances with literary programs, but the panel highlights aspects mostly related to the visual arts. The theoretical point of view of the panel is intended to analyze these periodicals from a transnational perspective. The focus is not so much on the contents of each issue, but rather on the positioning of them in a virtual avant-garde national and international community. In this respect, the following questions will be raised:
- In what terms the program of these magazines intends to distinguish itself from the Marinetti’s program?
- What was the network of national contacts on which the magazines relies for the development of an alternative geography within the Italian peninsula?
- Were the international contacts established by the magazines intended as the starting point for a “virtual avant-garde community” (Gábor Dobó-Merse Pál Szeredi, 2021)?
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Giuseppe Di Natale
Le Pagine (1916–1917) by Nicola Moscardelli, Giovanni Titta Rosa and Maria D’Arezzo
“Non importa raccogliere: occorre seminare” (It does not matter to reap: it is necessary to sow, Nicola Moscardelli and Giovanni Titta Rosa, 1916) – this sentence ends the programmatic presentation by Nicola Moscardelli and Giovanni Titta Rosa in the first issue of the magazine Le Pagine, published in June 1916. Founded in L’Aquila, by November 1916 it was printed in Naples under the new direction of Maria D’Arezzo (M. Cardini), for a total of sixteen issues. As Claudia Salaris points out, the magazine belongs to the “free zone” called “liberismo” which was at its peak during the war, after the closing of the magazine Lacerba (Claudia Salaris, 2013). Against the extremism of futurist manifestos, against the anti-tradition that declared the past abolished, against the imperative slogans of the futurist movement, “liberismo” affirmed an ideal freedom of action and thought that in some extent anticipates the later ’return to order’. Open to international Dadaism and French ‘esprit nouveau’, the magazine published verses by Guillaume Apollinaire and Tristan Tzara, as well as illustrations by Marcel Janco and Enrico Prampolini, showing its role as catalyst for new forces in Arts and Literature, first in L’Aquila and then in Naples. The paper discusses the first twelve issues of the magazine, published between June 1916 and November 1917. The analysis focuses on the visuality of the magazine: from its sober and traditional layout – so distant from the futurist magazines – to the works of art reproduced as illustration and the many references to art exhibitions. A particular attention will be paid to the contacts between the three editors – Moscadelli, Titta Rosa and Maria D’Arezzo – and Tristan Tzara, starting from their correspondence and with a focus on the essays by these three authors published during this same period in Dadaist magazines. Moreover, Le Pagine will be compared with other periodicals published in these same years in the Naples area such as Vela Latina (1915–1916), La Diana (1915–1917) and the Eco della cultura (1917) to verify the existence of a network of little magazine in the Campania area outside of Futurism.
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Carlotta Castellani
Enrico Prampolini and the first series of Noi (1917–1920)
The magazine Noi. Raccolta internazionale d’arte d’avanguardia, founded by Enrico Prampolini and Bino Sanminiatelli, represents a case study to verify the geographical trajectories that link the Italian avant-garde with the international context in the last years of the world conflict and in those immediately following. The magazine has been published since June 1917. This paper examines only the first four issues of the magazine, published between 1917 and 1920. This first series appears to be distant from the official nature of Marinetti’s Futurist movement and counts on the collaboration, to national level, of many ex-futurists, of “liberisti” writers and poets and of members of the nascent group of the Metafisica school, while, on an international level, the magazine published articles and illustration by Zurich Dadaists, as well as by authors coming from the French, Belgian and American avant-garde. Through this magazine, Enrico Prampolini concentrated his theoretical action on an international level, himself becoming the spokesman for the Italian avant-garde abroad. At the end of the last issue of the first series in 1920, the magazine claimed to be read in France, England, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Egypt, Argentina and China. The editorial structure counts on international collaborators appointed as foreign editors of the magazine: Blaise Cendrars (France), Arnudel del Re (England), Wallace (America) and Perez Jorba (Spain). Starting from Giovanni Lista and Roberto Cresti’s 2013 studies on this topic, the aim of this paper is to reconstruct the network of collaborators, national and international, of the four issues and, in parallel, to focus on the presence of writings and reproductions of works of art by Prampolini on other Italian and international periodicals in this same period of time. A particular attention will be given to the Casa d’Arte Italiana, an exhibition space, considered as an “extrication of collectivism”, capable of “creating anonymous and multi-personal collaboration relationships, and changing exchanges between artist and craft” (Casa d’arte italiana, 1920). The aim of this paper is to consider the first years of the magazine Noi as the gestation phase of a ‘network’ strategy based on including criteria in the name of an international and collective avant-garde artistic movement.
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Caterina Caputo
The European avant-garde through the pages of the magazines Procellaria (1917–1920) and Bleu (1920–1921)
In 1917 the two artists Gino Cantarelli and Aldo Fiozzi founded Procelleria in the city of Mantua: an avant-garde magazine with a marked literary identity. The avant-garde yearning inherent in the publishing project was declared from the very first issue, which proposed to readers “poetry-music, theater-drawings, research-advanced ideas”, as well as futurism as the matrix of its own poetics. From the very first issues, the magazine added some theoretical texts and poems made in the European avant-garde context to ‘parole in libertà’ and the figurative results deriving from Futurist research, with significant collaborations that involved Pierre Albert-Birot and Tristan Tzara. The underlying desire to develop a language that emancipated itself from Marinettian Futurism led the two publishers to gradually approach the Dadaist poetics (conveyed by both Tzara and Albert-Birot). This line led Cantarelli and Fiozzi to close Procellaria to found, in July 1920, a new newspaper with the emblematically French-speaking title: Bleu. Published in just three issues, from 1920 to 1921, the editorial line of Bleu remained faithful to the internationalism that had previously characterized Procelleria, with a widespread network of international collaborators that now included Louis Aragon, Paul Dermée, Paul Éluard, Francis Picabia and Theo van Doesburg. Through the analysis of Procellaria and Bleu, this contribution intends to highlight the prolific cultural exchanges that arose between the Italian and international avant-garde at the end of the 1910s, and to investigate the role that magazines that arose in peripheral centers of the peninsula they played in the elaboration of new poetics and unpublished visual grammars.