The Brooklyn Rail

Renato Miracco is an Italian scholar, curator, and art critic. He has served as the Cultural Attaché for the Italian Embassy in Washington and has curated exhibitions around the world at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the National Gallery of Art, and Tate Modern among many others. He is widely published: two of his recent works include Italian and American Art: An Interaction, 1930s-1980s (5 Continents, 2024) and Oscar Wilde’s Italian Dream: 1875-1900 (Damiani, 2020). He also recently published “An Italian Impressionist in Paris: Giuseppe De Nittis,” the catalogue of a 2023 exhibition at the Phillips Collection that won a Washington Post award as one of the ten best exhibitions in the world.

We began our conversation by talking about the uses and abuses of Italian Futurism and the exhibition at the Mart Rovereto on Arte e Fascismo.

Renato Miracco: There is nothing wrong with having an exhibition but after the exhibition at the Mart curated by the former undersecretary of this government on Fascism and Art and the Tolkien exhibition, and now the Futurist exhibition… there is something wrong.

What I would like to underline is now the tendency, the Italian contemporary tendency, to confuse Futurism with the fascist movement, to claim futurism as their art movement. [Giorgia] Meloni recognizes the importance of cultural hegemony (the superstructure that enriches the domination of a political class, of a group over others); the importance that Meloni attributes to it probably arises from a feeling of intellectual inferiority, certainly not personal, but of the political class she represents, due to the limited role of culture and the arts in society that Italy has suffered for a long time. And the ignorance generates confusion and false understanding. The claim of Futurism as inherently fascist is something totally inappropriate and totally wrong. We should divide Futurism into first (1909-1917), second (1917-1926), and third movements (1926-1944). The first movement was totally a left movement. [Giacomo] Balla and [Antonio] Sant’Elia were reading Marx. [Carlo] Carrà was an anarchist. The early futurists produced three political manifestos, the first in relation to the elections of 1909, the second in favor of the Libyan war (1911) and the third in 1917, in favor of the First World War.

Futurism at that time wanted to represent a new reality—new reality about speed, new reality about women, new reality about the new society. They were in favor of World War I because, according to them, the war would wash away everything that was old and recreate a new reality. A lot of them died in that war.

In the post-war period, the Futurists organized themselves into a political party with [Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti as their leader. Early in 1919, the Futurists aligned themselves with Mussolini because he represented a new political force, but by 1920, Marinetti decided he didn’t want to deal with the political side of things. The Futurists, who were against marriage, against the church, for gender parity, as they expressed in their paper “Roma futurista,” no longer could align themselves with the fascists.

Natalie Prizel: Do you think Mussolini in his moment and Italian thinkers on the right, do you think in Italy at least there is a real need to use art as a kind of political justification?

Miracco: Yes, but the new class is ignorant; they don’t care about culture. The term of culture is something vague for them. They don’t understand the three moments—totally different from each other, totally with different backgrounds, totally with different missions, totally with different goals.

Prizel: And do you think that this history is unknown to contemporary politicians, or they just choose not to know anything? It’s interesting because I think, here in the US it doesn’t seem that there is a significant need for politicians to use art (at least so-called “high art”) to support their political ideology. But it seems it’s different in Italy.

Miracco: Italy is a cultural place. And the cultural aspect means power.

I asked Miracco about the Tolkien exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome from 2023-2024.

Miracco: They spent a million dollars to promote Tolkien because Meloni and her establishment were in love. They think Tolkien means they are the new elves against the Bad Guys of the left. They hook onto rhetorical values, particularly those surrounding children and the family ​​such as we saw in the Meloni/Musk meeting recently. Many of these values ​​ are also shared by the left but inserted in the context of the twenty-first century, such as the idea of family extended to married people of the same sex, to transgender people, just to give a few examples.

What I am really worried about is the young generation and what will be our legacy. The tendency, with sadness, is to wash their memories out. Terrible.

Prizel: The [absence of] precise historical knowledge is a real problem.

Miracco: When people don’t have any sense of a background or history, they are easily manipulated by nefarious political forces.

I then asked about the relationship between (mostly post-war) American modernism and Italian modernism.

Miracco: We were witnessing an exchange, a mutual search for what the other party was missing. On the American side: Robert Rauschenberg gave a box to Alberto Burri in 1953. Cy Twombly married the Italian artist Tatiana Franchetti. De Kooning shared a studio in Rome with Afro Basaldella. American people were looking for some roots. In the meantime, the Italians wanted to have some representation in America where their work sold and had better recognition. Think about Viviano Gallery. Or Leo Castelli, just to give some examples.

Miracco spoke of the tendency in America to read religious meaning and ideas of Italian purity into Italian modern art. Our conversation shifted to the question of Italian influence on American art along those lines.

Prizel: I was thinking about the de Kooning in Italy exhibition at the Biennale of this year, and I’m not an expert on de Kooning, but I have worked on Titian. De Kooning writes about oil painting being invented to paint flesh, and for me, this is exactly what Titian does. So it’s not about a fantasy of Italy as a place, but it’s about looking at specific works and art and materials that draw artists together.

Miracco:…color, shape, how shapes roll into space. Not about an angel. He was producing, re-producing, Titian with his eyes. So, I don’t want any angels.

Prizel: So do you think the part of American or other fantasies about Italy are very much about religious art or an authenticity of religious feeling?

Miracco: Yeah, yeah. American artists are looking for roots...history. For this particular example [de Kooning], you want to understand what he is looking for in that particular model of an artist. Was he looking for space, or color, how the figure was moving?

I then ask Miracco about his book, Oscar Wilde’s Italian Dream: 1875-1900

Prizel: You also write about Oscar Wilde. I've written a bit about Oscar Wilde, and I've read about his time in Italy and various interpretations of it. But I'm curious as to what you think Oscar Wilde’s fantasies about Italy were.

Miracco: After he left prison, in his meeting with André Gide, Wilde said, I know what I am now. When he got out from the prison he said: I cannot use my old world. I have to find a new world to express a new life.

Miracco explains about Wilde settling in Palermo, in Sicily rather than in northern or central Italy.

Prizel: So, in the south, nobody’s really paying attention to illegal acts, immoral acts?

Miracco: It’s totally different.

Prizel: Did he learn Italian?

Miracco: Yes, a young boy from Naples was teaching him Italian, and he was talking in a strange language, somewhere between Italian and Napoletano.

We then spoke about regionalism and regional languages in Italy.

Miracco: Everybody says that every language is a world. So you are in a different kind of world, with a different kind of point of view.

Prizel: How do you think regional language and regionalism have affected art in Italy?

Miracco: Italy is only one during soccer games. Otherwise, Italy has many different regions, different kinds of artists, different relationships with America.

Prizel: The idea of one Italy is also part of the American fantasy about Italy.

Miracco: It’s a challenge to be real—to be real means you are not living in a dream. It takes so much energy to be real every second of your life. Sometimes you want to live in a dream.