Raw Talk, but Cooked Painting

By ROBERT HUGHES

The Royal Academy of Arts in London, long since shaken from its ancestral mustiness by its energetic exhibitions secretary Norman Rosenthal, has made a speciality of packaging national surveys. It did German art in 1985, British art in 1987; now Italy's turn has come. "Italian Art in the 20th Century," curated by Rosenthal and the Italian art critic and historian Germano Celant, tells its narrative in some 230 paintings and sculptures, and will fill Burlington House, the site of the academy's galleries, through April 9.

It is hard to imagine a useful century-wide show of French or American art. The subject, in either case, is too big, various, richly inflected and unwieldy to be stuffed into one trunk -- at least, without the kind of editing that amounts to severe mutilation. But 20th century Italy, like Germany and Britain, is somewhat more compressible. Italian modernism can be summarized because its achievement was small next to the School of Paris', and smaller yet beside the glories of Italy's own past. From the emergence of Giotto in the 13th century to the death of Bernini in the 17th, Italian painters and sculptors ruled the European roost, setting the standards of achievement by which Western culture judged itself. By the 19th century this primacy was lost, and throughout the modernist era Italy produced no equivalents to Picasso, Matisse or Mondrian, and, of course, nothing even faintly comparable to Titian or Michelangelo.

It is the very presence of its past that seems to determine the shape of Italian modernism: a systole and diastole between innovation and tradition. Particularly in the 1950s and '60s, Italian artists had a way of talking raw but painting cooked. In the early '50s, when Alberto Burri began to exhibit his paintings assembled from torn sacks and burnt strips of wood, they looked as leprous as Dubuffets. Today they seem tender, full of regard for discarded things, and about as threatening as sunlight on an old wall; one realizes this was always part of their intent. Even the Italian artists dealing with popular imagery in the early '60s, like Mimmo Rotella, lack the bluntness of their American counterparts. Rotella's Marilyn, 1962, a torn poster "found" and peeled from the wall, is partly about abstract expressionist gesture, partly about the ruin of images by time, and not in the least concerned with the shiny newness Pop art liked.

The Italian avant-garde before World War I, where this show begins, found itself in a fix under the immense shadow of its own cultural history. Either it made a diverting Oedipal commotion about the loathsome oppressiveness of the past, like the futurists, or immersed itself in poignant reveries about its authoritarian and alienating beauty, like Giorgio de Chirico and his associates in metaphysical painting.

Futurism made the most noise at the start. The futurist painters' manifestos of 1910, written by that inspired poet and arch-hypester Filippo T. Marinetti and signed by a clutch of brilliantly gifted artists (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini), declared war on cultural history -- "the enthusiasm for everything worm-eaten, rotting with filth, eaten away by time."

The futurists promised a bright churning world of dynamism, machine worship, speed and conflict. As the machines dated, so did some of the paintings. A work like Severini's Plastic Synthesis of the Idea "War," 1915 -- his response to the general mobilization of the French army, painted in Paris -- seems, with its antique gun limber and biplane wings, almost as nostalgic an image as a battle piece by Paolo Uccello. But others have not dated. In particular, the spiking and whorling of translucent mechanical forms in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, can be seen as one of the great pictorial images of our century, as fresh in impact as the day it was painted.

If Balla was the best painter associated with Futurism, the idea of metaphysical painting is all but synonymous with De Chirico. Just as futurist cells sprang up all over the world, and futurism was for most people synonymous with modern art up to at least 1925, so De Chirico's dreaming, spatially deceitful piazzas and arcades, with their phallic locomotives and long-shadowed statues, had an immense resonance both inside and outside Italy. Their influence on surrealism was crucial, but their reveries about past and present, nature and culture, memory and desire also hover behind much Italian art from the '60s to the '80s, such as the richly metaphoric sculptures of Giovanni Anselmo or even (more distantly) the structures of Mario Merz.

The Royal Academy show includes quite a lot of De Chirico's more debatable pseudoclassical work from the '20s -- this is now de rigueur, thanks to its popularity among postmodernists, who see it as a daring and prophetic form of backwardness -- as well as the paintings of his hardly less talented brother, the painter-composer-dram atist who worked under the name of Alberto Savinio and turned the late scheme of metaphysical painting into an even wilder pastiche than it had already become.

On the whole, the rooms devoted to 1910-35 are the best. The show does a particular service by exhuming the impressive work of Mario Sironi (1885-1961) and, at long last, intelligently describing the relations between Italian modernists and Fascism in the 1920s and '30s. The pieties of art politics, up to the present, have tended to discourage this, since the arrival of Mussolini was greeted with rapture by so many leading artists and intellectuals. The Fascist rhetoric of dynamism and machine efficiency meshed with (and was partly inspired by) that of futurism; while the Duce's promise of a renewed empire, a "third Rome" that would replay the Augustan past, had immediate appeal to nostalgists like De Chirico, Carra and even Giorgio Morandi.

By far the best of the "classicists" was Sironi, whose reputation as an artist has badly suffered from his devotion to Fascism: he stayed loyal to Mussolini right through to 1943. The figure on horseback in The White Horse and the Pier, 1920-22, draws on Italy's long history of equestrian hero images and may refer to the Duce. Nevertheless, as painting, Sironi's dark, emphatically delineated compositions, with their massive figures and Brunelleschian weight of architecture, are often quite superb, a reminder that you cannot necessarily judge an artist by his or her political ideology.

The show contains a few further surprises, such as the gritty and beautifully painted domestic dramas of Fausto Pirandello (1889-1975) and the best of all younger Duchampians, Piero Manzoni (1933-63), whose balloon full of artist's breath and cans full of artist's feces are wonderfully prophetic satires on a market mania whose present inflation he could scarcely have imagined.

The show has a dying fall into the rhetoric of the '80s, represented here for the umpteenth time by Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente and Mimmo Paladino. These figures have become quasi-official artists, like the stars of the Paris salons a century ago. Yet when the '80s have receded, it will seem odd that the feeble draftsmanship in Clemente's washed-out frescoes should once have been applauded, or that the lurid bombast of even the better works of Cucchi, such as the droopy head that lies like a huge Dalinian watch along the cemetery roof in Stupid Picture, 1982, could have been thought heroic in scale. In fact, there is less scale in such work than brute size. To see what the scale of an image can mean in terms of real address to the eye, one must go a few rooms back and look, once more, at early De Chirico and Sironi.