464
PARTISAN REVIEW
it necessary to step into the debate with the declaration that socialism,
which stands for all human freedoms, must also defend the complete
freedom of the artist. At a debate recently, listening to a Communist
speaker condemn futurism, cubism, abstract art, en bloc (as
if
they all
had equal value artistically) as "ivory tower art," for a moment I could
imagine I was somewhere around Union Square in 1931 hearing about
"proletarian art." In this as in other things, Italy, after the long sleep of
Fascism , may have to go through the cultural struggles that were fought
out elsewhere ten or fifteen years ago.
Much more important than De Chirico or Fini, is the painter Gior–
gio Morandi, unfortunately almost unknown in America, though by gen–
eral testimony the greatest of living Italian painters. Morandi's work,
extremely deceptive at first glance, appearing like a limited and scarcely
original derivative from Cezanne, reveals its importance, its modest and
massive originality, only after continual looking. In a sense, having
developed relatively free from the currents of modern art-never having
gone, for example, to Faris-Morandi exhibits a kind of peasant stub–
bornness and solidity in his development. Having found a certain corner
in Cezanne, he has quarried this over and over again, always in the direc–
tion of greater simplification and abstractness, finally emerging with
something triumphantly original. What confirms the genuineness of this
development is that his painting, having developed more or less in isola–
tion, brings Italy back into the main current of modern art.
He may very well be the starting point for a new renaissance in
Italian painting. Certainly the number of young men now active, both
in their numbers and quality, look interesting enough to give one some
ground for this hope. And Italy has always had an odd and unpredictable
vitality for such revivals-and perhaps most of all now when so many
obstacles and pitfalls lie in the way.
The big thing that's happened meanwhile in Italian politics is the
Labor victory in England (we've reached the stage when there's no
longer such a thing as purely internal politics, when an election in one
state is an immediate datum within the political field of another)–
though nobody knows now what this victory will mean for Italy. The
experience of the previous Labor government in Britain doesn't reassure
us too much, and even the simplest Marxist experience would caution
us that the present Labor government, unless able to force through
fundamental social changes, will be whirled willynilly into the old orbit
of British Imperial politics. Thus did the Italian conservative press re–
ceive news of the victory, commenting drily that British interests will
remain British interests notwithstanding. Perhaps so in the long run,
but I think the elections will make an immediate difference in Italy,
where British politics have so definitely borne the stamp of Churchill's
personality and the tory temper, and where the Allied Commission has
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