104
PARTISAN REVIEW
appar~ntly fanc~es
himself to be,. without having a quiet art-weekly suddenly
burs.t
~nto
react10nary
h~wls
agamst artistic progress which are unnervingly
reffilmscent of that Antt-"Kultur-Bolschewismus" movement which similar–
ly born in 1932 Berlin, grew like a rank weed till, with Hitler's
ac~ession
to
power, it finally succeeded in entirely strangling German culture.
And, just as in pre-Nazi Berlin, the practical manifestations of this
reactio.n disp!ay that puritanism which seems an inevitable parallel of racism
(also
~ncr.easmglf ramp~nt
in pre-Fascist France). The
Vingtieme Siecle
re–
ports
tn
tts Chnstmas Issue that "a well-bred person (such as Huysmans
would have called a 'disconcerting stinker')" made such a scandalous scene
in
f~ont
.of a
Mon~arnasse
bookshop window in which the magazine's
prev10us Issue was displayed open at a page showing a detail of a Maillol
nude, th.at a mob formed, requiring the police to disperse it.
It
is not many
weeks since some budding fascist covered Rodin's "Age d'Arain" with a
shirt; and the latest report from Pere Lachaise Cemetery is that, sure enough,
some racial puritan has repeated the castration of the figure on the Epstein
tomb of Oscar Wilde.
If
it is not fascist laymen but fascist artists who are behind these
juvenilely preposterous yet dangerously symptomatic manifestations, they
might do well to consult the painter Corrado Cagii, who has recently ar–
rived in Paris, a refugee from Italy. Cagli, who chose fascism, and was from
1933 .to 1937 its white-haired boy (he was the official painter of the Italian
pavillion at the 1937 Paris Exposition), found that his espousal of the
gangster cause did not protect him from the consequences of having a non–
Aryan grandmother. Or they might consult a recent number of
Beaux-Arts
itself, wherein, side-by-side with articles defending French art from every–
thing that has made it world-famous in the last three decades, is an item
reporting the complete ousting of the quite Aryan Futurist Marinetti from
all his Italian sinecures because Mussolini demands that Italy "return to her
classic heritage." DeChirico, already pretty well
rate
as an artist, will pre–
sumably soon receive a similar blow.
Yet though the cultural world here is haunted by the jittery feeling that
somebody or
so~pething
called war or fascism is constantly looking over its
shoulder when it works, it has not yet to any considerable extent drawn tne
correct conclusions from the bankruptcy of the Stalino-Litvinov policy ex–
emplified internationally by Anschluss, Munich, and the coming Ukrainian
blackmail; and more particularly in France by Bonnet's December 14th
statement before the Parliamentary Commission on Foreign Affairs that the
Franco-Soviet Pact was fully operative
except
in the event of an autonomy
movement in the Russian Ukraine; by the bringing to open trial of the
General deMiller kidnapping case-after years of letting the G.P.U. have
carte blanche in France (e.g., the theft of Trotsky's archives, the assassina–
tions of Reiss and Klement, and the mysterious death of Leon Sedov)–
which last week resulted in the inevitable jury-verdict that it was a G.P.U.
job; and, three days ago, by the suppression of the
Journal de Moscou.
Romain Rolland, for example, whose war-crisis. break with Stalini.s'?
roused long-range hopes in this correspondent, ba;ksltd,
~n~e
the v:ar CriSIS
was past,
faute de mieux,
into the columns of
L Hu_mamte,.
v.:herem•. how–
ever much distrusted now by the internally quarrelmg Stahmst Pohtburo,
he yet continues to write an occasional vague and puzzled appeal for human-
