I brought my mom up to New York City for a visit in the
middle of June and because it’d been so long since we took in a real art
exhibit, we decided to go up to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth
Avenue at 89th Street to catch Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing
the Universe, running there
from 21 February to 1 September 2014. Having
bought our tickets on line the day before (advance tix are only available on
line at least 24 hours before the visit), we went uptown on Monday, 23 June,
where I got Mother a wheechair to negotiate the spiral ramp at the Goog, and we
took the elevator to the 6th floor to work our way down. (I wasn’t about to push Mom up the ramp—I’m not all that spry my own
self these days!) I hadn’t been to the
Guggenheim for several years (the last time may have been for Aztec Empire in 2004), but I thought I recalled
that the shows started at the top of the helix and ended at the ground level,
but either I remember wrong, the museum’s changed its practice, or this show is
arranged backwards, so we actually ended up seeing the display from back to
front, that is, from the ’forties down to the ’teens. It was a little disorienting, trying to
rearrange the development and history into ascending chronological order in my
mind as we went along—adding new information to the start of every developmental
step at each level rather than the normal process of accumulating new
information sequentially. It was
counterintuitive, and not a few times I had one of those “so that’s where that
came from” or “that’s what that was referring to” revelations.
Italian Futurism reminded me a lot of Dada, the show I saw at the National Gallery in Washington and MoMA
in New York in 2006 and ’07 (my report on which I posted on ROT on 20 February 2010), not only
because the movements overlapped—Futurism, arguably one of the lesser known developments in
the arts, lasted from 1909 till
the end of World War II, as the exhibit’s title suggests; Dada went from 1916
to about 1924, essentially the post-World War I period—but like Dada, I knew
little about Futurism and found I had to read most of the explanatory panels
for each section of the show as well as for each work of art at which we
paused. (Also like Dada, Italian Futurism
turned out to be a delightful, enjoyable, and eye-opening art experience. But I’ll be getting to that shortly.)
Unlike most art and
cultural movements, we can date the origin of Futurism with specificity
(another parallel to Dadaism, by the way).
On 5 February 1909, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published “Manifesto del futurismo” in a Bologna newspaper (and later, as “Manifeste
du futurisme” on the front page
of the
Paris daily Le Figaro on 20 February
1909). It was an aggressive and even belligerent
statement of principals—the Futurists apparently didn’t have the sense of humor
that the Dadaists had, even though the Dada movement was a direct response to
the horrors of mechanized global warfare as the artists experienced it during
the Great War. The Futurists celebrated
rather than decried modernism and the society-shaking developments of machines
and electrification, speed (locomotives, automobiles, and eventually airplanes),
long-distance communication (telegraph, telephone, and radio), and even space
travel (which was still a fantasy in the 1920s and ’30s when it figured in
Futurist art). Intensely patriotic and enamored
of violence from their inception, the Futurists were largely supportive of,
first, Italy’s entrance into World War l, and then Benito Mussolini and his
National Fascist Party. (Mussolini, elected
to head Italy’s government in 1922, is featured prominently in several Futurist
art works on display in the Guggenheim exhibit, such as 1935’s Fascist Synthesis by Alessandro
Bruschetti. The movement came to an end with
the death of Marinetti in 1944, one year after the Fascists were ousted from
Italy’s leadership in 1943.) The New York Times’s Roberta Smith called
the movement “noisily contradictory,” noting that it was simultaneously “aesthetically
revolutionary and politically reactionary.”
Among the movement’s stated principals were these declarations:
We will glorify war—the world’s
only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of
freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
We will destroy the museums,
libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every
opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
Note not only the insurrectionary sentiment, but the strident language Marinetti used. Indeed, the poet (Futurism was originally a
literary movement before taking in the visual and performing arts, as well as architecture,
fashion, home decor, advertising, and politics), promised: “It is from Italy
that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto
of ours.” The Futurists denied the past
and meant to create an entirely new culture.
They expected their movement to lead to an actual revolution intended to
influence social thinking as well as the arts.
The Futurists were also adamantly nationalist (note Fortunato Depero’s
1935 mural-sized sketch for the mosaic Proclamation
and Triumph of the National Flag), unlike the Dadaists who were staunchly
internationalistic. While Dadaism had
many centers—Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New
York—Futurism was almost exclusively an Italian movement. (There was a small echo of Futurism in
Moscow, mostly a literary force, but like Constructivism, a contemporaneous
modernist movement centered in Russia around the time of the Bolshevik
Revolution, it was smothered in its infancy when Stalin took over the reins of
the Soviet state after Lenin’s death.) As
Mussolini and the Fascists drew a line directly connecting modern Italy with
its Roman past (the fasces, the emblem
and namesake of Mussolini’s party, was a Roman symbol of state authority), the
Futurists celebrated technical advancements with which the country was
prominently associated, particularly radio (pioneered by Guglielmo Marconi, 1874-1937)
and aviation (long after Leonardo da Vinci’s fanciful flying machine designs ,
there were, among others, Enrico Forlanini, 1848-1930, who built an unmanned helicopter
in 1877; Giuseppe Cei,
1889-1911, who flew around the Eiffel tower in 1911; Enea Bossi, Sr., 1888-1963, who was the first
to cross the Andes Mountains in a balloon in 1916; Giuseppe
Mario Bellanca, 1886-1960, designer of the first enclosed monoplane cabin in 1917; Gaetano Arturo
Crocco, 1877-1968, an early flight pioneer, contemporaneous with the Wrights, who
built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in 1929).
Declaring that “we want no
part of it, the past,” and celebrating change, originality, and innovation,
Futurism focused on the emerging urban world and those who lived and worked in
the city, including factories, eschewing the farmer, the peasant, the country
folk who’d been a frequent subject of the 19th-century art of Romanticism,
Realism, and Impressionism. Emphasizing
the speed, energy, dynamism, and power of machines and the vitality, change,
and restlessness of modern life, the Futurists discarded all that was old and
traditional, and glorified technology, machines, industry, gadgets, noise, commotion,
movement, violence, and youth. While the
Dada artists were aghast at the brutality and mechanized death of World War I,
the Futurists welcomed the war’s outbreak as a chance to destroy the old, to
cleanse the static and decaying society of its outmoded ways, reactionary
thinking, and old-fashioned art. (Many
Futurists enlisted in the Italian military when the war broke out. Some of the movement’s leaders died in the
conflict, including architect Antonio Sant’Elia, 1888-1916, whose drawings La CittÃ
Nuova [“New City”] and Station
for Trains and Airplanes, both 1914, are in the exhibit, and Umberto Boccioni,
1882-1916, who was drafted into the cavalry and had been the principal author
of “The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters,” 1910, and “Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” 1912; Marinetti, a volunteer
in the Lombard cyclists battalion, was seriously wounded in the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo River, Slovenia, in 1917 and decorated for
bravery.)
Futurist art never differentiated between abstract and representational,
combining a symbolic imagery with impressionistic but literal depictions of figures
and objects. (Realism could even make
significant appearances, such as the portraits of Il Duce and others that
figure in some of the works.) The art is
powerful, muscular, masculine (conspicuously misogynistic,
Futurism had only a few female adherents, among them Benedetta Cappa, known
simply as Benedetta, who married Marinetti in 1923, and also Valentine de Saint-Point, who composed
the 1913 “Manifesto of Futurist Woman”), and extremely colorful, with bright blues, oranges,
yellows, and reds featured liberally in the canvases. The most frequent motifs are machines, cars,
and planes, but there are human and animal figures and other objects in the
works, as well as geometric shapes and expressionistic swirls, washes, and
splashes of color or black and gray.
(It’s odd, and I can’t explain the technique the artists used to
accomplish it, but despite the bright and vibrant colors in most of the
paintings, many are still dark and shadowy, giving them an ominous or
threatening aspect, as if dense clouds had just closed in on a previously
sun-lit landscape or brightly lit room and the painter had caught the instant
of lowering darkness. Morris Louis, an
Abstract Expressionist and Colorist of the mid-20th century, painted canvases
with rainbow-bright pigments which he then covered with black or brown, but
that’s not what the Futurists have done.
It will take another painter to explain how they did this, I
imagine.)
The Futurists were vague about their unifying style and themes, declaring
in the 1910 “Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Painting” that their aim was a “universal dynamism” which they’d represent in
their art. The brilliant colors the
painters used were initially broken into dots and stripes instead of blended (a
technique known as Divisionism), forcing the spectator to integrate them
subconsciously. After 1911 (when Futurist
artists Boccioni and Carlo Carrà visited Gino Severini, who lived in Paris),
they encountered Cubism and adopted that movement’s methods, giving the
Futurists a way to portray the dynamism they admired in the modern world in
their paintings, drawings, and sculptures, characterized by vigorous motion and
fractured forms. (Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Nude
Descending a Staircase is a perfect example of this kind of imagery. It’s not in the Goog exhibit, but ironically
was rejected by the Cubists as too Futurist.
Several works in Italian Futurism bear a superficial resemblance
to Duchamp’s iconic painting.) In the
1920s, the Futurists introduced arte meccanica, works expressing the
aesthetics of the machine; the 1930s brought aeropittura, with its abstract
aerial imagery.
Perspectives are often from the ground looking up at vertiginous
heights (Mario Chiattone’s Buildings for a Modern
Metropolis, 1914) or, more innovatively still, from an aerial point of view, as if the
painter were in a plane looking down—even at a parachutist in mid-drop (Tullio
Crali’s Before the Parachute Opens, 1939). Along with the machines, automobiles, and
trains (and later planes and even spaceships— depictions of moving vehicles),
urban scenes, frequently showing construction and manual labor, typified
Futurist art. They saw the world as in
constant motion and their art aspired to express the “interior essence” of the
objects depicted. (The “Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” lays out the principals of dynamism for the
three-dimensional art that’s aimed at the realization
of the relationship between an object and its environment.)
The exhibit at the Goog, organized by the museum’s Senior Curator of
19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Vivien Greene, includes over 360 works by
more than 80 artists, architects, designers, photographers, and writers. Among the paintings, drawings, sculptures,
photos, and other art works are many of the Futurists’ manifestos. (They published dozens; as David Freedlander observes
on the Daily Beast: “[P]erhaps no collection of artists could manifest
quite like the Futurists.” These
documents were usually distributed free on the streets or sometimes dropped from
planes.) According to the Guggenheim, Italian
Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe is the first comprehensive
retrospective of the movement to be shown in the United States. (Maika Pollack on Gallerist
posits that “Futurism’s link with fascism may be why museums have shied away
from the subject in the past.”) Some of
the works on display have seldom been seen by the public and others have never
traveled outside Italy. The works are arranged
in essentially chronological order, generally separated into decades from the
1910s at the base of the ramp up through the ’20s, the ’30s, to the ’40s,
taking up almost the entire museum (with the exception of a couple of side
galleries devoted to non-Futurist exhibits).
The displays mix paintings and drawings with architectural sketches,
advertising posters and objects, sculptures, toys, furniture, clothes, ceramics,
photographs, and printed matter.
Along some walls are also videos of Futuristic film works and one
gallery contains items, including videos, related to Futurist theater and
performance (programs, posters, set and costume designs, and so on). Marinetti had published “The Variety Theatre”
in 1913 in which he’d claimed that traditional theater merely “vacillates
stupidly between historical reconstruction (pastiche or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction of our daily life,” but the “Variety Theatre
. . . proposes to distract and amuse the public with comic effects, erotic
stimulation, or imaginative astonishment,” “seeking the audience’s
collaboration” so that it “forcibly drags the slowest souls out of their torpor
and forces them to run and jump.” Futurist
painter and scenographer Enrico Prampolini published “Futurist Stage Design” (1915)
in which he called for a break with the contemporary “static stage” that’s “a
photographic enlargement of a rectangle of reality” to replace it with a “dynamic
stage” in order to “live out the dramatic action” and “become an integral part
of it.” Prampolini proposed banning
painted scenery, replacing it with “a colorless electromechanical architectural
structure, enlivened by chromatic waves from a source of light.”
Like Dada, Italian Futurism is a big show, with many
works by many different artists. That
can make it hard for me to sort out and develop any kind of unified experience
from it aside from awe. While there were
many Dadaists of whom I’d never heard, I knew a lot of the names and the work
of a number of the artists in that exhibit before I went in, which helped me a
little make a coherent experience out of it.
But with the Futurists, there was only one whose name I’d encountered
before (Fortunato Depero, and my connection to him was pretty tangential to
this show—though I may get around to explaining it later if it comes up)—so the
art and the artists, not to mention the philosophy and ideas they expressed,
were all new to me. (I’d heard of Futurism
in the vaguest sense, of course, and one of my NYU profs, Michael Kirby, was
the author of Futurist Performance, so I had some general familiarity
with what Futurism was about.) Mother
and I decided to go up to the Guggenheim partly because Italian Futurism
promised to be an interesting art experience, but also partly because we hadn’t
been to anything in a long time and we just wanted to find an art show of
almost any acceptable type. (We’d gone
to movies from the same impetus, though not always with the same pleasant result. An alternative choice was a Mark Rothko show
at one of New York‘s commercial galleries, but it was closed on both Sunday and
Monday, so we committed to the Goog and Futurism.)
Even though we saw the exhibit from the end to the start, I’m going to
try to describe it and assess my experience in the chronological order Italian
Futurism was meant to be seen.
The first gallery is a small selection of Futurist sculptures, notably Development of a Bottle in Space (1912) and Unique Forms of
Continuity in Space (1913) by Boccioni.
The latter is a striking and powerful evocation in gleaming bronze of a
muscular human form, almost as if clad in armor, striding along, evoking flames, speed,
strength, and energy. Also on display here
is Boccioni’s grotesque Antigraceful
(1913), characterized by Lance Esplund in the Wall Street Journal as “an overwrought, misunderstood version of
Picasso's first sculpted Cubist head” which “breaks free from a surrounding
frame, which slices through the head like a guillotine.” As its title implies, it’s the opposite of
grace and beauty (it’s supposed to be the sculptor’s mother), a thumbed nose at
the traditions of conventional art. As Ariella Budick asserts in the Financial Times, the artist “dismantled
old pieties and rebuilt awkwardness into dynamic elegance.”
As a number of reviewers point out, the Guggenheim’s unique
space, with its white walls and sloping, spiral walkway, sets off Italian Futurism extraordinarily. It was almost as if Frank Lloyd Wright had
expressly designed his iconic museum for a display of the aggressively
modernist, iconoclastic works of Futurism.
(Marinetti explicitly eschewed museums for the art of his movement, but
I wonder if they’d have made an exception for the Goog since it, too, broke the
mold of art-exhibition space.) The
Boccioni sculptures are an example: standing alone in the small High Gallery,
surrounded by white walls, even the hideous Antigraceful
creates a striking impression that drew me in from the walking path. (I parked Mother in her wheelchair
momentarily so I could go up and see what this piece and the surrounding
display were about.) Needless to add,
the manner of the exhibition was a large part of what made this visit such a
special experience—the opposite of, say, the old Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania (before it moved to
new digs in Philadelphia), which was such a
hodge-podge of paintings, crowded haphazardly on dark-paneled walls, that it
became tiring to peer at them to find those of particular interest. In Italian
Futurism, even works or items that might otherwise have raised little
curiosity in me became objects of fascination.
Boccioni’s figures were part of the period known as “heroic”
Futurism, which stretched from the initiation of the movement until the middle
of the Great War, about 1916 (the year two of the movement’s leaders died on
the battlefield). This was the period of
fascination with industry, machinery, speed, and urban environments. It was more utopian and exploratory than the
later period, the so-called Second Futurism that followed the war. (The following year, the United States
declared war on Germany and the Bolshevik revolution toppled the Russian tsar
and eventually replaced the Russian Empire with the Soviet Union. In 1919, fearing a similar upheaval in Italy,
Marinetti and the major Futurists allied with Mussolini and his Fascist
Party.) Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist
(1913), for example, is an expression of pure, wild energy in vibrant yellow, blue,
green, and red swirls of paint, overlapping and rearranging themselves into an
abstraction of speed and vitality. Giacomo
Balla’s The Hand of the Violinist (1912), initially influenced by photography, shows a moving violinist’s hand on the
instrument’s neck in repeated sequence (like a multiple exposure photo), and Automobile in corsa (“Speed of
the car,” 1913), a study of
speed, are other examples.
Following World
War I, Futurism expanded rapidly into other areas of art and culture, including
performance. Marinetti had included serate, Futurist performance evenings
(which some historians consider the origin of performance art), in his original
concept for the movement. In a side gallery, Fortunato Depero’s designs and
marionettes for his Balli Plastici (1918) and Balla’s detailed diagrams
for the lighting design of Igor Stravinsky’s Fireworks (1916; staged in
1917) are on exhibit. Depero and Balla coined the Futurist
phrase opera d’arte totale (“total
work of art”), clearly a take on the concept of the
Gesamtkunstwerk Richard Wagner wrote
about in 1900. The idea was that
the spectator would be enveloped in an entirely Futurist environment,
designed to be of one single aesthetic. (This
notion, carried to its logical extreme, was also the foundation for Depero and
Balla’s 1915 manifesto, “Futurist
Reconstruction of the Universe,” which gives the Goog’s exhibit its title.)
Depero’s Balli Plastici (“plastic ballets” or
“plastic dances”) was a Futurist performance conceived for machine-inspired
puppets which would replace human actors and dancers, set to compositions by
various Futurist and experimental musical artists. Designed in 1917, the dances, casting
technology in the lead role with the mechanical meeting the fantastical, were
presented at the Teatro dei Piccoli
(Children’s Theater) in Rome the next year. (Depero was one of the
rare Futurists who had a sense of humor, or at least whimsy. He also designed Futurist toys, a set of
colorful fabric-collage men’s vests, and advertisements for Campari and Vanity Fair, examples of all of which
are on display at the Goog.) On exhibit in Italian Futurism are some of his whimsical marionettes and scenic
sketches, as well as posters for performances.
(Balli Plastici was performed eleven times; considered novel, its
reception was unenthusiastic—though Marinetti reportedly loved the work.) Balla conceived
of his Fireworks, produced by
Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Teatro
Costanzi in Rome (only in a single dress rehearsal—the full production was
scuttled by labor disputes),
as an evocation of “the moods of fireworks” set to Stravinsky’s music rather
than a recreation of pyrotechnical images.
With a fascination for artificial light, the artist designed a set of solid geometric
wood pyramids and prisms covered in colored fabric and paper, inside which
he placed electric lights which pulsed rhythmically and created startling
movement and other effects. (It wasn’t
really a ballet in the conventional sense—there were no dancers—but a light
show which is recreated at the Guggenheim.)
(I alluded
to my brief contact with Depero above, and this is where it fits. In my research into Tennessee Williams’s
concept of “plastic theater,” I came across an essay called “Gilberto
Clavel: Depero’s Plastic Theater,” about the artist’s “Plastic Dances,” which
appeared to define plasticity in the same terms that Williams did, but the
original essay was published in Italian in a Milan newspaper in 1919 and wasn’t
published in English until 1968, so I decided it would have been unlikely that
Williams had read it and wrote the similarity off as an amazing coincidence. In 1919, Williams was only 8 and by 1968,
he’d already formulated and published his ideas about plastic theater 23 years
earlier. I published an article about this concept, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s
Plastic Theater,” on ROT on 9 May 2012.)
For most of the
1920s and ’30s, the Futurists tried to reconcile their drive for newness with
their nationalism and militarism (these are the decades of their fervent
alliance with Fascism), to marry their program of perpetual upheaval to the
increasingly conservative tastes of Il Duce’s regime. The Times’s
Smith contends that “the art itself turned more benign, consistent and
decorative” in the Second Futurism, and Speeding Train (Treno in corsa, 1922) by Ivo Pannaggi, constitutes a symbol of
modernity and speed, the founding themes of Futurism, and depicts the sensory
perception of a powerful locomotive rushing
toward the viewer on a diagonal, illustrating the great speed in the blur of
the cars and evoking the screech of the wheels, the scream of the whistle, and
the roar of the engine. Pannaggi’s
painting is a prime example of the Futurist post-war sub-genre arte meccanica (“machine aesthetics”), articulated in Pannaggi
and Vinicio Paladini’s 1922 “Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical
Art.” The next stage of Futurist art,
prevalent in the years leading up to and into World War II, was aeropittura
(“airplane painting”), works inspired by flight, and the automobile and
locomotive, the symbols of speed, strength, and modernity that dominated
Futurist art between World War I and the ’30s, were replaced by images of
planes (and later spacecraft) and the bird’s-eye perspectives of views from
flying machines (Virgilio Marchi’s Building Seen from a Veering Airplane, 1919-20, and Fantastic City, ca. 1919, are early prototypes). Flying over the Coliseum in a Spiral (Spiraling) (1930) by Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) presents an
airplane soaring over the iconic Roman ruin, the circular path of the plane
echoing the Coliseum’s shape.
Giovanni
Acquaviva’s 1939 design for a ceramic dinner service, The Life of
Marinetti, however, makes the
marriage of the two philosophies, one artistic, the other political, perfectly
clear. The dinner plate, Fascismo/Futurismo, has a multicolored
abstract and geometric design surrounding a large letter F in the center with an ax blade extending from it, creating a
stylized fasces. Around the perimeter of the design, are the
words FASCISMO at the top and FUTURISMO at the bottom, unambiguously
expressing the painter’s leanings. In Bruschetti’s Fascist Synthesis, a triptych painted in oil on plywood depicting
movement and speed through repeated patterns of soldiers holding flags,
soldiers with upraised swords, and the word DUX
inscribed on an obelisk at the center of the left-hand panel, the artist
included a host of Fascist symbols, from the obelisk to daggers to sheaves of
wheat, and so on, placing a double portrait of Il Duce prominently in the
center of the middle panel, all in a style that implies movement and dynamism,
the central themes of Futurism. (Dux is Latin for leader, commander, or
ruler—the source of the Italian word duce,
which Mussolini took as his sobriquet—and was the term in classical Rome for a
high-ranking army commander.)
Italian Futurism ends at the top of the helix with
a gallery devoted to five monumental canvases (each about 10 by 6½ feet) by
Benedetta. Syntheses of Communications (1933-34), in tempera and
encaustic (they were intended to evoke the ancient frescoes of Pompeii),
depicts various means of communication, including air, radio, sea, land, and
telegraph and telephone. Though
Marinetti (Benedetta’s husband) had wanted Mussolini to name Futurism the
official art of his regime, Syntheses,
from the conference room of the Palermo, Sicily, post office, was among the
very few public commissions awarded to a Futurist during the Fascist period;
this exhibit marks the first time the paintings have been shown outside of
their original location.
The Guggenheim’s
Italian Futurism, 1909–1944:
Reconstructing the Universe is a beautiful show, both in terms of
the art on exhibit and the aesthetic experience it yields—not to mention the
curiosity it engenders about a little-known (at least to me) period in Western
art. It’s impossible to get around the
Futurists’ reprehensible politics in the Fascist era, as well as their
boosterism during World War I. In fact,
much of the movement’s philosophical basis is anathema to us today (and, I
would hope, to most people even in the ’teens, ’20s, and ’30s). But ironically, the art that came out of this
movement, however justified and explained by the creators and apologists, is
unquestionably stunning. Can you
separate artists and their work from the rationale used to conceive it? I don’t know—maybe not. But it’s also hard to dismiss both the beauty
of the Futurist art—as blogger Molly Hashimoto put it bluntly, “Some of it, 100
years old, still looks very new”—or the influence the art had on those who
followed even decades later, irrespective of its political and philosophical
underpinnings. I hope we can look at an
exhibit like Italian Futurism,
experience the work on display, and appreciate what is good and moving while
also acknowledging what is awful and shameful—and I’m not trying to invoke the
old bromide about Mussolini making the trains run on time—and not throw the
artistic baby out with the political bathwater.
(On the other hand, maybe I feel that way because I was born after World
War II and my only sense of the consequences of Italian Fascism is that my late
father was a World War II vet. I wonder
if I’d feel the same way about Nazi art if any of it were good. Maybe it’s too easy for me to shrug it off;
maybe the beautiful and startling art work is Dorian Gray and the Fascism
behind it is his portrait in the closet.)
