European fascisms (Re: Tanks for the memories...

[jbor]

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>From: Mark David Tristan Brenchley <mdtb at st-andrews.ac.uk>


> Also, there is a possible
> comparison between the Futurists (yea, fascism"!and The Surrealists (yea,
> communism!), both have strong aesthetics but given the Surrealists
> strongly anit-aesthetic approach to art (through their links to Dadaism)
> it is perhaps not surprising that they sided with the Communists. I'm not
> quite sure that this idea holds up

It doesn't. As well as being fervent patriots the Futurists glorified
"dynamism": motion, speed, light, the machine, war etc. F.T. Marinetti was
their guiding light ideologically, and I'd say that most of the actual
painters and sculptors were just along for the ride. (Unhappily, several of
the better artists met an untimely end in WWI practising what they
preached.) Andre Bréton, editor of the Surrealist magazine of the late 20s,
joined the Communists in 1930. Not many of the major painters shared his
politics, or, not for long (eg. Dali). The aspiration to "sheer psychic
automatism" in the quasi-experimental paintings and collages of people like
Max Ernst, Paul Klee or Joan Miró I guess might be described as
anti-aesthetic, but it certainly wasn't "anti-art" as the Dada ready-mades
and audience-abuse sessions were. The Surrealists were more interested in
tapping into dream-states. Paintings by de Chirico, Dali, Magritte, Delvaux
were largely figurative, realistic, and it's this type of apolitical
Surrealism with which Pynchon seems to have more in common (cf. the couple
of references to de Chirico in _V._, and Pynchon's early idea to use one of
his paintings for the novel's cover).

It might be interesting to note that Mussolini was an influential member of
the Italian Socialist Party from 1904-1915, before signing up to serve in
the war against Austria. He formed the Italian Fascist Party in 1919, and
strongly supported d'Annunzio's gesture in seizing Fiume. In 1922 Mussolini
was appointed Prime Minister of a Fascist/nationalist coalition govt., but
it was pretty much a sham parliament. Much of the political ritual of
Mussolini's Fascism (the title Il Duce, for example) derived from
d'Annunzio.

best