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Challenging cultural categories: The transformation of
the Venice Biennale under Fascism
Maria Stone
a
a
Occidental College
Available online: 25 Apr 2008
To cite this article: Maria Stone (1999): Challenging cultural categories: The transformation of the Venice Biennale under
Fascism, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 4:2, 184-208
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Challenging cultural categories: the transformation
of the Venice Biennale under Fascism
Maria Stone
OccidentalCollege
Abstract
This article analyzes the development of a national cultural event, the Venice
Biennale, under the auspices of the Fascist government. As part of a larger project of
forging responsive publics and modernizing cultural life, Fascist culture ministries and
bureaucrats used this international fine arts exhibition as a place to challenge existing
practices of cultural display and organization. In this process, which took place
between 1930 and 1938, cinema, the decorative arts and audience incentive practices
drawn from the tourist industry were mobilized to transform a previously limited
institution.
Keywords
Arts patronage, Venice Biennale, Venice Biennale Film Festival, aesthetic pluralism,
Fascist culture.
Excitement ran high on the Lido in Venice on the night of 3 August 1932. The
glamorous crowd on the terrace of the Excelsior Hotel awaited the arrival of
Greta Garbo and Lionel Barrymore. For the closing festivities of the first Venice Biennale
International Film Festival, 'the Super Colossal Grand Hotel',presided
over by 'M.CM.'s principal artists', was screened for an audience of film stars,
dignitaries, Fascist officials, European rich and summer tourists.1
The conclusion
to a Fascist cultural experiment, the Venice Biennale Film Festival was a
carefully choreographed Hollywood-style extravaganza which stressed fantasy,
spectacle and romance. The government-appointed Venice Biennale administrators
celebrated a cultural triumph and innovation. The secretary general of
the Biennale, Antonio Maraini, boasted that the Biennale was 'the first to place
cinema alongside the other major arts'.2
'The world's greatest exhibition of
contemporary art', wrote the press, 'has received and consecrated among its arts
even cinematography'. Mass culture met elite culture on the terrace of the
Excelsior Hotel, and the Fascist government and party had arranged the match.
The cultural politics of Italian Fascism opened the social and formal boundaries
of European elite culture. As part of its project to integrate Italians into
© 1999 Taylor & Francis Limited 1354-57IX
Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4(2) 1999: 184-208
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1
The Venice Biennale under Fascism
official cultural institutions and as a product of broader western socio-cultural
shifts, Fascist sponsorship transformed the presentation and cultural role of the
fine arts in Italy. The regime simultaneously appropriated and adapted elite
culture: it made use of the legitimacy and rootedness offered by elite culture,
while also expanding its content and enlarging its audiences. Fascist intervention
advanced certain preexisting trends, such as the commercialization of the fine
arts, begun in the nineteenth century, and introduced new ones, such as the
mixing and blending of cultural forms within an elite context.
This article is part of a scholarly tradition which is deciphering Italian
Fascism's complex cultural politics and its attraction for audiences and for a
significant number of interwar Italian artists.4
In contrast to postwar studies
which saw the regime's interest in culture aspurely instrumental and functional,
with Fascist intervention in cultural affairs aimed at the singular goal of
cementing an unwilling populace to the regime, much contemporary work has
abandoned the dichotomy 'collaboration' versus 'consent', 'art' versus 'propaganda'
and 'Fascism' versus 'culture', looking instead for the contestations and
accommodations between them.5
Here I investigate an instance of Fascist
cultural intervention, but with the idea that Fascist culture was imprecise and
changing — the product of a constant negotiation between the dictatorship's
goals and the cultural tastes of artists and spectators. This discussion of official
challenges to cultural hierarchies is part of the critical tradition which views the
dictatorship as shifting and contested at the ideological and functional levels.
While significant scholarly work has been done on the function of mass culture
in the Fascist dictatorship, especially on the role of film, newspapers and radio,
few investigations have considered the role ofelite culture in forging consent for
the regime.
As this article details, the seemingly inconsistent appearance of Fascist
patronage reveals an evolving cultural politics shaped by conflicting factors.
These faeton were asvaried asthe search for critical and popular acclaim and the
interest in the Fascistization and centralization of cultural production. What
emerged out of the mix was a cultural policy of 'aesthetic pluralism' — the
Mussolini dictatorship's practice of accepting, appropriating and supporting a
range of aesthetics and cultural products. This Italian Fascist form of pluralism
meant that multiple imageries and aesthetic formulations represented Fascism
and were a part of its cultural system, its imaginary and its aesthetic universe.
The Venice Biennale of International Art, then and now the most prestigious
art exhibition on Italian soil, provides a case study for the intersection of Fascist
cultural politics and the fine arts. In the late 1920s, the Fascist government
replaced local Venetian elites as the promoter of the Biennale and brought
with it a new agenda and a new relationship to inherited European elite
culture. With the dictatorship's vision of the Venice Biennale as the pinnacle
of a centralized network of national arts institutions and 'a great festival of
cultural tourism', the change of patron meant the opening up of the institution
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to larger and more diverse audiences, as well as to new cultural forms and
aesthetic languages.
Inaugurated in 1895 in commemoration of the silver wedding anniversary of
King Umberto and Queen Margherita, the Venice Biennale of International Art
was firmly located on the itinerary of the European upper classes.7
The
exhibition was conceived as a response to Venice's decline and economic woes
by its tum-of-the-century elites who hoped it would bring revenues and
international acclaim to the city. During its first thirty years, the Biennale
served primarily as a meeting place for the established European art world. The
exhibition, with its backdrop of grand balls andpalazzi,attracted the attention of
the European aristocracy and haute bourgeoisie in the years before World War I.
By 1914, it was a confirmed stop on the Grand Tours of an increasingly mobile
bourgeoisie. In its first years, the Venice Biennale stressed the isolation of the
fine arts from the pressures of mass society and politics.8
Academic painting
prevailed, with the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists generally excluded
until the yearsjust before World War I. Elevating the cult of the master and the
masterpiece, this institution, in its pre-Fascist incarnation, was based on a
restricted number of genres, styles, artists and social classes.
This article employs terminology of common but often slippery usage. For
our purposes, the categories 'high culture' and 'elite culture' refer to cultural
forms created by dominant social groups and then mobilized into a system of
social stratification. High culture, as it emerged by the nineteenth century,
required knowledge and expertise in the classical tradition. It provided European
elites with 'cultural capital' used to bolster a position of economic and
social dominance. AsPierre Bourdieu has detailed in his work on the creation of
'cultural tastes' in European societies, high culture is freighted with symbolic
capital which can be used by those with knowledge of it and access to it.9
Historians and sociologists, such as Lawrence Levine and Paul DiMaggio, have
revealed how, in the course of the nineteenth century, bourgeois elites
appropriated cultural forms such as classical music and drama from more popular
realms and reconfigured them as the exclusive terrain of high culture.10
Between 1928 and 1932, Fascist-appointed officials replaced Venetian elites
at the helm of the Biennale. Under Fascism, the biannual international art
exhibition's aristocratic and bourgeois character was repackaged to attract the
new professional and white-collar middle classes. The rise in numbers of urban
professionals and middle-class white-collar and clerical workers in the early
twentieth century represented a potential untapped audience for the Biennale
and for Fascist-sponsored cultural institutions. Between 1900 and 1925 northern
Italy had undergone rapid urbanization; by the 1920s the urban middle classes
and petitebourgeoisie — especially doctors, lawyers and small shopkeepers — had
grown significantly. In the 1920s, Italy counted three-quarters of a million
salaried personnel.
Fascist cultural bureaucrats employed several strategies for widening a
previously limited cultural institution. Changes in the boundaries of high
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' The Venice Biennale under Fascism
culture fell into two categories: broadening content and actively cultivating the
attendance of new social groups. The first strategy, that of changing accepted
notions of high culture, involved the inclusion of new cultural forms and genres,
from popular to mass culture. It also translated into welcoming a greater variety
of aesthetic schools and styles. Between 1930 and 1936, the Fascist dictatorship
moved certain manifestations of popular and mass culture —film,popular drama
and music, the decorative arts and public art — to the center of the Biennale,
displacing the dominance of easel painting and sculpture. From the Hollywood
musicals and situation comedies of the Film Festival to the glass vases of the•
decorative arts pavilion, each previously excluded form threatened the isolation
of the fine arts.
The second strategy focused on familiarizing new groups to a formerly
exclusive cultural practice. Using the techniques developed in advertising and
masstourism, the regime sought to reshape cultural habits and practices. Some of
the phenomena of consumer capitalism — advertising and the culture industry —
coincided with the dictatorship's goal of economic growth, aswell asthe interest
of Venetian elites in the same. Fascist bureaucrats targeted travel discounts and
hotel packages at members of the new urban middle classes who might have felt
excluded from the Biennale or who might have chosen to travel elsewhere.
Government-subsidized train fare discounts of up to 70 percent worked together
with hotel and restaurant promotions to turn the Venice Biennale into a
consumption and leisure experience.
Nonetheless, the Venice Biennale's reconstitution was hybrid and complex:
rather than abandon elite culture, the regime promoted an amalgamated cultural
institution. The mass and popular culture introduced at the Biennale in the
1930s retained an aristocratic patina and a flavor of cultural elitism. Fascist
defiance of the borders of elite culture was contradictory: the dictatorship at
once pursued the legitimacy and continuity it found in elite culture and the
cultural consensus possible in a successful mobilization of mass culture.
In opening high culture and adapting it to Fascism's perceived interests, the
dictatorship underwrote the transformation of the Biennale's visitors from arts
connoisseurs to cultural consumers. Thus, those attending official art exhibitions
moved from the narrow category of connoisseur, with accumulated knowledge
and expertise in European high culture, to consumer, the partaker of a commodity
based on its accessibility and divenity which carried fewer rites of
initiation. Where the connoisseur would 'judge critically because of thorough
knowledge', the consumer came to assimilate and experience.12
In addition to Fascism's goal of expanding the audiences for official culture,
the reconceptualization of the Venice Biennale was shaped by domestic political
and economic interests and international cultural and economic trends. The
blurring of the lines between high and low, elite and mass, connoisseurship and
consumption also emerged from an Italian and European avant-garde critique of
elite culture: from the Futurists to the Constructivists, cultural avant-gardes,
both before and after World War I, broke down inherited categories and
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declared the bankruptcy of established bourgeois and elite culture. The
challenges to cultural segregation came in large part from the growth of mass
culture industries such as film, radio and publishing in the 1930s. The officially
coordinated changes in the Venice Biennale thus reveal the transformation of
fine arts (re)presentation in the face of Fascism and consumer capitalism.
I The social boundaries of culture
After the Fascist consolidation of power in the yean 1925-6, the party and the
government entered into the workings of a range of preexisting cultural
institutions, from the La Scala Opera in Milan to the Uffizi Museum in
Florence. The dictatorship cited a range of motivations, from financial inefficiency
to unqualified personnel, for the overhaul of earlier administrative
systems. Overall, the legacy of Fascism's initial intervention in cultural institutions,
as the case of the Venice Biennale demonstrates, was one of cultural
change and the implanting of a national foundation, at the expense of the
preexisting local or regional one.
Fascist-sponsored cultural events and institutions, with their celebration of
the widespread participation of artists, required that the dictatorship's leading
role be seconded by audiences. And, as the Fascist regime increased its cultural
presence after 1930 and searched for a set of cultural forms and aesthetic
languages evocative of its ideology, it pursued broader segments of the population
to acknowledge its successes. Without a significant expansion of the
culture-going public, the regime could not make good its promises of a cultural
renaissance and financial support to artists, could not be a successful and visible
patron, and could not recruit high culture in its search for consent. A number of
factors, based in Fascist ideology and governing practices, coalesced in the
expansion of a government-supported fine arts culture in the 1930s. Interest in
being seen as the force behind cultural renewal, and as the enabler of the 'new'
and the revolutionary drove the move, together with the desire to mobilize the
population within conditions coordinated by the party and the government.
The early years of Fascist intervention in the arts, from 1922 to 1930, focused
on government and party involvement in preexisting institutions of high and
mass culture, on the creation of new institutions where alack was perceived, and
on the professional organization of cultural producers. Following the creation of
Fascist Syndicate of the Fine Arts between 1926 and 1930, the government
coordinated previously communal, local and regional art exhibitions into a
pyramid-shaped national hierarchy, with the Venice Biennale of International
Art at the top and the local and regional shows of the Fascist Syndicate of the
Fine Arts at the base. Between 1925 and 1932, the dictatorship legally and
financiallyreconstituted art exhibitions and created a national, centralized and
government-promoted system of artistic display. Fascist bureaucrats and artists
working in the syndicates took administrative positions in the arts bureaucracy
and at the helm of institutions. Art exhibitions, from the Venice Biennale of
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> The Venice Biennale under Fascism
International Art and the Roman Quadriennale of National Art to the regional
and provincial exhibitions, were coordinated with the Fascist Syndicate of the
Fine Arts, and the government and the party became central patrons.
In 1931, Mussolini announced:the decision to 'move toward the people'.13
He called upon the agencies of the party and the government to draw Italians
into Fascist institutions and to have Fascism touch the lives of those still not
mobilized into the organs, institutions and events of the regime. In the early
1930s, official journals debated the depth of Fascist influence upon the Italian
state and society, discussing methods for its expansion. Among the strategies
proposed to make the party more populous and populist were the expansion of
Fascist mass culture and a resurgence of populist discourse in official culture.
The party and the government created programs and policies for bringing
Fascism into asyet untouched comers of Italian society. The mass organizations
multiplied and differentiated their tasks according to social group.15
Youth and
women were targeted by the Gruppi universitari fascisti, Gioventù fascista del
littorio and the Fascifemminili. The Opera nazionale dopolavoro moved into
new workplaces.
Urban middle and upper-middle-class adults, social groups accustomed to
autonomy and, by the 1930s, possessed of an individualist, non-corporate
understanding of their social role, were harder to coordinate.17
One solution
was an officially organized sphere of high culture. As Simonetta Lux has
explained, the need 'to involve a broader public ... was often resolved by a
plan to control the major organizational and exhibiting structures of art'.18
2 The new forms
Fascism's eclectic patronage style and its use of culture in the search for
responsive publics encouraged Antonio Maraini — who served both as secretary
general of the Biennale and as director of the Fascist Syndicate of the Fine Arts —
and Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, president of the Biennale, to experiment
with the exhibition. The government-appointed Biennale administration,
in place by 1930 and presided over by Volpi, determined to build a major
national institution. Volpi personified Fascism's desire to appropriate the
Biennale and give it a Fascist and national character. Born into a lowermiddle-class
Venetian family, Volpi had built an empire and a fortune from
electrical, chemical and iron industries in the Veneto and the Emilia-Romagna.
While serving aspresident of the Biennale, Volpi also headed the Confindustria,
the association ofbusinessmen and industrialists, during the Fascist era.19
Volpi's
industrial and business background informed his attitude toward culture.20
Certainly, his managerial and business experience led him to an awareness of
the Biennale's potential as a commercially successful tourist center. Volpi and
Maraini were supported in their project by officials in the Ministry of National
Education, in particular ex-Nationalist Balbuino Giuliano.
In the early 1930s, the Fascist Biennale administration added a series of
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diverse attractions to the fine arts exhibition. The Film Festival, Music Festival,
Drama Festival, Poetry Competition and the introduction of the decorative and
public arts all represented challenges to dominant notions of high culture. The
new attractions determined perceptual shifts and brought the Biennale closer to
contemporary cultural forms such as department stores, arcades and world's fairs.
The viewer's gaze moved from the conspiratorial and knowing gaze of the
initiate to that of the modern consumer 'looking at' and consuming a range of
phenomena. These entertainment-oriented festivals pursued social groups less
trained in the language and manners of European high culture. Held in theaters,
halls and open-air auditoria, they were available to anumerically larger audience
than the traditional painting and sculpture exhibition and bestowed potentially
greater profit upon organizers.
The first innovation, while hardly revolutionary, paved the way for further
experimentation. In 1930, the Music Festival was launched with a program of
international classical music.22
Its organizers welcomed it as pathbreaking,
because 'it not only signals an important development, but opens wide horizons
for new and fertile expansions'.23
Mirroring the organization of the figurative
arts exhibition, the Music Festival offered separate 'national' and 'international'
concerts. It presented a varied fare, selected from European classical music and
including 'soloists performing recent classical music' and 'classical dance
pieces'. 5
The 1934 program emphasized well-known music by Mozart,
Richard Strauss and Verdi. That same year, in a move to blend mass and eh'te
culture, the Music Festival organized a competition for music 'suitable for radio
broadcasting'.26
Scheduled with an eye toward maintaining a steady flow of
visiton to the Biennale, the Second Music Festival in 1932 took place during the
first two weeks in September, when the summer crowds traditionally thinned
out. In contrast to the art exhibition which ran at a deficit throughout the 1930s,
the Music Festival showed a modest profit.27
The Music Festival catered to new cultural consumers who looked for more
accessible forms. With its eclectic programs and open-air theater, it mixed
musical genres and challenged notions of elite experience. Spectators consumed
the program simultaneously in large numbers and it took place at night,
when the fine arts exhibition was closed. The Music Festival redefined the
Biennale's itinerary, replacing the formal evening banquets of the Biennale's
earlier participants with reasonably priced entertainment. The physical mixing
and crowding of an amphiteater or hall confronted elite notions of the private
and isolated assimilation of culture which had previously characterized the
Biennale.
The Music Festival's popularity encouraged Maraini to launch Theater and
Poetry Festivals which fulfilled similar functions. The Theater Festival stressed a
Venetian theme with Goldoni productions and other plays written by Venetians
or set in Venice. Again, in an effort at accessibility, Goldoni's La bottega del caffè
was performed in 'modern prose'.28
This opening-up included formal experimentation,
aswhen in 1934 the Theater Festival welcomed modernist direction
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The Venice Biennale under Fascism
and staging with the exiled Weimar theater director Max Reinhardt's 77ie
Merchantof Venice.29
The addition of an array of evening activities was tied to the expanded tourist
packaging of the Biennale. After 1932, on any given evening, visitors could
partake of a variety of attractions, including fblkloric festivals and regattas on the
Venetian canals. The diversified Biennale stressed the consumption of the
'Venetian experience', in the form of a surfeit of Venetian imagery and
references, from the Goldoni productions of the Theater Festival to the
gondolas and masks of the promotional literature. Of course, these were in
symbiosis with the inexpensive and readily available souvenirs carrying the same
images.
On the heels of the Music Festival, the Biennale administration introduced
an event which quickly became its most popular new feature and which
fundamentally confronted the hegemony of the fine arts at the exhibition. In
the summer of 1932, the Biennale inaugurated the International Film Festival,
projecting forty films from nine nations and attracting 25,000 spectators.30
The
Film Festival screened two films each night for twenty nights, with the
projections held outdoors on the seaside terrace of the Excelsior Hotel. To
view the films, well-dressed spectators sat in wicker chairs on the Chez Vous
terrace of the Excelsior Hotel (see Illustration 1). Locating the spectacle in the
primary hotel on the Lido furthered the Biennale's identity as a site of
Illustration I The firstVenice Biennale Film Festival:ChezVous outdoor theater on the
terrace of the Excelsior Hotel, Lido, Venice, 1932
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consumption, tourism and leisure. The Film Festival was situated snugly among
the hotels and restaurants of the Venetian beach resort. A visitor/consumer
could dine on the terrace of the Excelsior, watch a film and sleep peacefully at
the Hotel desBains.
The second Film Festival in 1934 established it as a permanent fixture:
seventeen nations participated with fifty-eight production companies showing
films to 41,000 people.31
The success of this festival quickly led Mussolini to
decree it an annual event, thus giving it a more visible and regular cultural
presence than the fine arts exhibition itself, which took place every two yean.32
From the start, the Film Festival stressed variety and entertainment, especially
multiplicity of genre and nationality. At the 1932 debut, showings included E.
Goulding's Grand Hotel,Leni Riefenstahl's BlueLight,Dziga Vertov's Towards
Life and Rene Clair's A nous la liberti. American films predominated: the
inaugural event screened DoctorJekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Champion, Frankenstein,
The Cry of the Crowd,Forbidden,Grand Hotel and The Man I Killed,among others.
The goal of alarge and divene audience and the marketing of a ground-breaking
event gave the Film Festival a smorgasbord character and an explicit connection
to new forms of consumption and leisure. In addition to a range of melodramas,
historical dramas, musicals, situation comedies, documentaries and animated
shorts, the program 'include[d] films of unusual character: avant-garde, surrealist,
musical light symphonies'.34
Along with the stress on variety and diversity, much of the transformation of
the Biennale depended upon the promotion of prizes and awards. Each of the
separate festivals mounted competitions and awarded prizes. The Music Festival,
for example, promoted a competition for music suitable for radio broadcasting;
the Theater Festival launched one for 'four new comedies'; and the Poetry
Festival ran a competition for 'young poets'.
At the Film Festival prizes and awards played an especially determinative
function in drawing in new audiences. The spectacle surrounding the designation
of prizes at the Film Festival for production, direction and performance
tied the event to shopping and commerce. The numerous categories of prizes,
including an audience referendum with monetary awards for the winnen,
underlined the commercial rather than intellectual aspects of artistic produc-
tion.36
For example, at the 1934 Film Festival, Mussolini, the Biennale, the city
of Venice, the Istituto Luce, the Ministry of Corporations, the Fascist Theater
Association and the Ministry of National Education, among other organizations,
promoted twenty-three prizes for categories ranging from Best Foreign Film to
Best Direction to Best Animated Cartoon.37
In 1936, Walt Disney won Best
Animated Cartoon for ThreeOrphaned Cats;the honon included a medallion
depicting Mickey Mouse astride ajasao-ornamented gondola, with the Venetian
cityscape in the background.38
(See Illustration 2.) Blending the symbols of elite
culture (Venice), mass culture (Mickey Mouse) and Fascism (thefascio),the
medallion manifests the Film Festival's attempted cultural synthesis.
The vast and varied prizes of the Film Festival courted asmany types of films
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Illustration 2 Medallionawardedtothe DisneyStudiofor BestAnimated Cartoon atthe
Venice BiennaleFilm Festival in 1936
and film-makers as possible. In distinction to the competitions for thefigurative
arts, these prizes were not based on thematic categories. They were awarded for
'quality' and 'popularity' and were conferred by an international jury. The
'audience referendum', a key innovation of the Film Festival from its start,
provided the element of popular choice and selection central to consumer
culture. The questions of the audience referendum reveal a connection between
the Film Festival and the emergent discourse of Hollywood film culture. The
seven categories of the audience referendum, from Best Actress and Actor to
Best Film, very closely resembled those of the recently begun Academy
Awards. 9
In 1932, Americans won four of the audience referendum categories,
with Helen Hayes and Frederick March carrying away best performance honors.
The Fascist transformation of elite culture is striking in the Film Festival's use
of Hollywood spectacle for the presentation of the films. The Film Festival
merged a number ofspectacular elements, such asnight-time film premieres, the
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romantic ambience of Venice, dramatic appearances of'stars', and the titillating
excitement of treating cinema as a fine art. The regime eagerly cultivated the
drama and 'hype' available in the Film Festival. Prizes were awarded in tense and
staged ceremonies, openings and closings were carefully orchestrated and the
whole event was tied to the glamor and fantasy of Hollywood. The brochure for
the 1934 Film Festival summoned advertising's language of innovation. It
boasted the 'First Presentation of New Films' and that 'The Best Known Artists
of the Screen Will Be Present'.40
The promise of 'the first' and 'the best'
represented the influence of consumerism upon official culture. In July 1937,
the Minister ofPopular Culture, in amuch touted ceremony, inaugurated a new
and permanent 'Cinema Palace' on the Lido. The term 'palace' mobilizes
Hollywood language of the new aristocracy of film and of the fantasy of film: it
was not called the 'Film Pavilion', which would have been in keeping with the
Biennale's other buildings.41
With this turn to spectacle and fantasy, the Film
Festival involved the new kind of viewing implied in cinema spectatorship. The
participant in the Film Festival was a 'spectator-shopper [who] tries on different
identities', identities of fantasy, mobility and romance.42
The inclusion of popularly acclaimed and commercially successful films in
the context of the Biennale both levelled and reconfigured cultural categories.
The Venice Biennale Film Festival bestowed respectability on the relatively new
and still controversial art form of cinema. The festival allowed previously
excluded spectators to partake of mass culture experiences within the elite
context of the Biennale. The Biennale, the quintessential high culture institution,
adapted itself and produced a 'mixed1
cultural event: though film was a
mass art form, the Film Festival attracted a primarily middle- and upper-class
audience by virtue of its location on the Lido and its association with the
Biennale. The pricing of Film Festival tickets further reveals the regime's
middle-class, rather than working-class, focus: the tickets cost 5 lire, twice the
normal film ticket price. At the same time, the promotion and advertising of the
event incorporated the language of mass film culture, such as the stress upon
'stars' and 'the appearance of the most admired artists of the silver screen'.43
The Film Festival's promoters had the honor of hosting the first international
film festival in Europe. There was profit in defying convention which the
Biennale administration self-consciously celebrated: Maraini declared that his
'precise goal... in founding and organizing this Exposition' was 'to put cinema
on the level of painting, sculpture, music and drama — all arts already promoted
by the Biennale'.44
Its promoters recognized that the elevation of film to
acceptable high culture accounted for the Film Festival's attraction: 'What are
the reasons for such success? It is very simple. First, put cinema on a par with all
the pure arts — painting, sculpture, music, poetry, architecture.'45
The economy also drove cultural change. The state-sponsored Film Festival
offered practical aid to an embattled national film industry. At the time of the
firstFilm Festival, annual domestic film production in Italy had fallen to less than
a dozen films from a pre-World War I high of 500 features.46
A well-attended,
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The Venice Biennale under Fascism
critically acclaimed and highly publicized international film competition promoted
by the State suggested lucrative possibilities to Italian film-makers
squeezed by the popularity and visibility of Hollywood productions. To offer
exposure to Italian productions and to highlight official support of the film
industry, the first night of the 1933 Film Festival was 'devoted exclusively to
Italian productions' and began with 'a great propaganda film edited by LUCE
and designed to illustrate the great works of Fascism achieved in the last two
years and in the process of completion'.47
In 1934, in an effort to coordinate and
stimulate national production (aswell as to get asmuch publicity aspossible out
of a successful event), the regime declared that the Film Festival would become
annual.
The Film Festival acquired a popular following, and attendance figures rose
continually through the 1930s. In 1935, 38,500 people attended; in 1936 the
event boasted 50,000 spectators; and the 1937 version counted 56,000 view-
ers.48
By way of comparison, attendance for the 1934 and 1936 Biennales
totaled 361,917 and 194,702, respectively. Thus, by 1936, slightly more than
one-quarter ofBiennale visitors paid a separate fee to watch at least one film. By
the time of the 1935 Film Festival, Marami celebrated the profitability of the
enterprise which had 'brought in 250,000 lire, rather than the 180,000
predicted1
.49
The Music Festival, the Theatre Festival and the Film Festival together gave
the Biennale a multi-faceted character, offering a new set of itineraries and ways
of consuming culture. After 1932, visitors could make extended trips,partake of
a range of activities, select, choose and consume plays, music, film and the fine
arts. Each of these attractions mobilized the consumptive possibilities of culture
and of Venice itself by being situated in various parts of the city and requiring
that the spectator move through the city to attend them. The 1934 Biennale
brochure underlined the limitless attractions of the event: the brochure was
divided into seven promotional sections —film,finearts, decorative arts, music,
theater, 'traditional feasts and sports competitions' — and 'exceptional railway
reductions'.50
The Biennale now had an itinerary similar to shopping: the art
exhibition's pavilions themselves resembled shops and the act of moving among
a variety of attractions located throughout the city intensified Venice's transformation
into an extended arcade or theme park. The connection to broader
trends'in consumption and leisure can alsobe seen in the stress on the quantity of
new attractions, as opposed to an earlier emphasis upon the quality and
exclusivity of the Biennale. By creating the atmosphere of a supermarket of
events and exhibitions, Marami and the other Fascist-appointed administrators
had altered the context of the viewing of the fine arts. The changed context —
the shaking-up of the experience of viewing art —challenged the social
embeddedness of taste and, to a certain extent, the social boundaries of culture.
The fine arts pavilion, the core of the Venice Biennale, was not immune
from the search for expanded publics and the challenges to cultural categories.
The Biennale inaugurated in 1932 a Venezia pavilion alongside the main Italia
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building in which the painting and sculpture were housed.51
This new pavilion
housed decorative arts displays. Previously, the art of the Biennale had been
restricted to painting, sculpture and drawing — all art forms rooted in longstanding
European elite culture traditions. These art forms required knowledge
of and familiarity with high culture and were too expensive for the noncollector.
After 1932, however, new forms arrived: glassware, textiles, lacework,
gold-smelting, enamel-work and brasswork all became central to the Biennales
of 1934-42.s2
In 1934, seventy-three decorative arts exhibitors presented 422
objects. Modern glass designs by famous Venetian producers such as Venini and
Saviati shared the Venezia pavilion with traditional lacework (see Illustration 3).
The new middle classeshad been distanced from arts acquisitions by the costs,
as well asby the barriers of cultural habit and practice. Paintings and sculpture at
the Biennale had been too expensive for the non-collector or non-elite. In 1932
and 1934 painting prices ranged from 1000 to 5000 lire, while glassware and
other decorative art pieces cost between 100 and 300 lire.53
A visitor of
middling means could attend the Biennale after 1932, purchase a Venetian glass
vase for 125 lire, and consider himself a patron of the arts. Art work produced in
volume and at a lower cost allowed patrons of the arts to come, as President of
the Biennale Volpi claimed, from 'a vaster public of smaller means'.54
Blurring the lines between high and low, elite and popular took in many
forms and played many functions. In some cases, it came as patronage of
mechanical reproduction —film— and in others it took the form of defending
craft against the machine. The introduction of the decorative arts at Venice had
Illustration 3 The interior ofthe Pavilionofthe Decorative Arts-Venice Biennale,1942
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The Venice Biennale under Fascism
an economic and ideological function. On the one hand, it opened arts
consumption to new classes, as the accountant from Turin could now take
home a Venetian glass vase from the Biennale. The decorative arts confronted
the segregation of high art, which had excluded design objects because of their
'distasteful entanglement with commerce'.55
On the other hand, patronage of
the decorative arts was also redolent of the preindustrial patron-artist relationship
of the old aristocracy with the craftspeople they commissioned. So, while
the decorative arts allowed more people to purchase objets d'art, they remained
somewhat elitist, in that they embodied preindustrial social hierarchies. The
decorative arts of Venice, fine blown glass and hand-worked lace, still evoked
images of luxury associated with aristocracy. The location of the decorative arts
at the center of the Biennale simultaneously revealed a challenge to convention
and anxiety about change.56
As in case of the Film Festival, official patronage of cultural change
incorporated financial support for an embattled sector. Government and party
support of the decorative arts meant aid to an endangered crafts industry. The
Venetian lace-making and glass-blowing islands of Murano, Burano and
Torcello had suffered gready from the competition of the cheap goods of
mechanized production. The 1934 Biennale catalogue stressed the relationship
between the economic crisis and patronage of the decorative arts, claiming that
'times [have] fatally harmed the decorative arts'.57
Official interest in sustaining
die decorative arts was also tied to official anxieties over unemployment among
die skilled artisanal working class.58
3 The triumph of public art
By the middle of the 1930s, the official challenges to the formal and class
boundaries of fine arts culture intensified to confront the figurative arts
exhibition itself. The next step in Fascist cultural experimentation involved
attacks on the canon of the fine arts and a reconceptualization of what it meant
to be a patron of the arts. In a move that joined rhetoric concerning the social
role of the artist under Fascism to a critique of private, bourgeois patronage,
Fascist cultural bureaucrats made public art a central component of the production
and display of the fine arts in Fascist Italy in general and at the Venice
Biennale in particular.
Public art emerged in Italy in the early 1930s as the answer to the problem
posed by artists, officials and critics looking for a new and Fascist art dissociated
from the private, academic work of the nineteendi century. Figures inside and
outside of the Fascist hierarchy seized upon public art as the way to make art
more accessible to the masses and to reorient artistic production in the name of
Fascism. Fascist populist discourses and a depressed art market (and later
demands for cultural autarchy), togedier with artists' own experiments with
genre and explorations for more socially effective forms, led to the production
and consumption ofvast numbers offrescos,murals, mosaics and public statuary
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by the government and the party. Increasingly from 1930 on, such public forms
constituted a central element of state patronage.
Fascist Italy's embrace of public art was hardly unique. The intersection of
public art and state patronage occurred on an international level, with the crisis
of the 1930s witnessing a reconsideration of the social role of the arts and of
artists.59
The 1930s were characterized across Europe and America asa decade of
politicized culture in which artists and governments searched for responsive
forms. Public art, especially frescos, murals and monumental statuary, represented
a diffused form of international 1930s culture. Public art had a crosspolitical
cultural appeal which can be accounted for on a number oflevels. First,
governments in the years between the world wars integrated public art into the
search for a national culture and the representation of national myths and
identities. Second, mass politics and socioeconomic crisis had rendered official
support for isolated or elite culture illegitimate. Public art fit firmly within the
discourse which saw bourgeois culture as indulgent and antithetical to 'honest
production'. Third, in a time of economic crisis, public arts projects provided
employment to a potentially unruly but useful social class. Various governments
between the world wars from New Deal America to France of the Popular
Front to the Soviet Union under Stalin recruited the artist class for the
production of art with a social and public function.
Domestic and international ideological and cultural developments encouraged
Italy's turn to large-scale public art forms in the 1930s. The inconclusive
search for an aesthetic representative of Fascism drove the rise of public art.
Murals, mosaics and bas-reliefs coincided with Fascist patronage agendas in both
form and content: they were all long-standing types of public art which
combined Italian traditions dating from antiquity with Fascism's interest in
opening the social composition and rhetorical possibilities of cultural production
and reception. Patronage of murals, mosaics and bas-reliefs also represented
great statements of romanità (Romanness); such forms reinforced the regime's
connection with ancient Rome and allowed it to explicitly emulate the great
Roman imperial patrons, thereby providing an alternative model to more recent
bourgeois elites. The Roman-inspired frescos, mosaics and bas-reliefs bore a
classical aura that buttressed the message of the regime's longevity and historical
rootedness. Some Fascist bureaucrats believed that frescos, mosaics and basreliefs
strengthened the authority of the state in ways that more contemporary
forms could not.
Each major Italian artistic movement active in the interwar period promoted
its own brand of public art. The public art produced in Fascist Italy generally
shared (with the exception of that of the Futurists) an aesthetic which blended
avant-garde elements with populist, historical and monumental ones. Out of
both an internal development and in response to critics, the novecento painters
evolved a style of public art after 1934 called pittura murale (mural painting). In
addition to celebrating thè use of murals and mosaics, pitturamurale drew on
resurrected pre-Renaissance Italian pictorial traditions, such as the Etruscan and
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Romanesque. The 'Manifesto della pittura murale' ('Manifesto of mural
painting'), published by Massimo Campigli, Achille Funi, Carlo Carrà and
Mario Sironi in December 1933, declared that 'in the Fascist state art must
have a social function: an educational function'. These novecento artists
proposed the creation of a truly Fascist, Italian and modem style through mural
painting. 'Mural painting', they asserted, 'is social art, par excellence'.61
They
stressed the combined public and collective character of the mural's production
and reception. For them, mural painting 'committed the artist to a decided and
virile execution which the technique of mural painting itself requires'.
Where the pre-Fascist Biennale had been based upon private patrons buying
art to decorate private spaces, the Biennale after 1936 elevated grand-scale forms
such as bas-relief and murals to be enjoyed by the public and purchased by the
state. In 1936 public art came to the Venice Biennale in full force. That year,
prize competitions wove together a number of newly emphasized ideological
strands. The 1936 Biennale promoted competitions for frescos, bas-reliefs,
portraits, landscapes, engravings and commemorative medals. Each category
specified that the works 'will have to be inspired by events or aspects of Italian
life during the Fascist era'.6
The competition for a commemorative medal, for
instance, required that one side bear the image of a figure 'most representative of
the Fascist era' and the other an 'allegory drawn from the work of the person
depicted'.63
Government and party-sponsored competitions were to dominate
the 1936 Biennale: there was one for 'seven frescos' and one for 'eight statues...
to decorate a central hall chosen for this purpose'.64
These competitions
replaced earlier ones for easel paintings and ornamental sculpture. Two years
later in 1938, the public art focus expanded to include competitions for frescos,
bas-reliefs, portraits and commemorative medals. In an effort to open high
culture at the level of production, these competitions specified who could
participate: in 1936 restrictions of age and experience required that contributing
artists be less than 35 years of age, members of the Fascist Syndicates and from
among those not invited to the Biennale.65
In a bold challenge to the private patron and to 'the artist as celebrity', the
Biennale administration filled the main halls ofthe 1936—42 exhibitions with the
products of the public art competitions. In 1938, to emphasize a more
regimented and more public form of patronage, the works of the competition
winners occupied the first five rooms of the main exhibition hall of the Italia
pavilion. The much publicized winningfrescosand bas-reliefs met audiences in
the entrance and the 'grand central hall' (see Illustration 4).66
The location of
public art at the front of the Biennale indicated a challenge to established
patronage patterns. This was the regime's physical declaration of a new set of
priorities. It relegated the private art of the easel to the back of the display space.
Now, upon entering the pavilion, the visitor first would see the collective,
large-scale works of public destination.
The placing of works destined for public or official uses at the center of the
Venice Biennale reconfigured patronage. The spectator in the galleries of the
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Illustration4 The Fresco Competition, Venice Biennale, 1936
pavilion now viewed the art for the experience and for the message implied in
the work, not to acquire it. The 'lessons' of the frescos and the statuary — from
the glories of the war in Ethiopia to the Battle for Grain — were for consumption,
not the objects themselves. This consumption was to go on in public,
either the public space of the more open Biennale or the public space of the
work's final destination. The removal of the private market from the main halls
of the 1938-42 Biennales declared the event less intimidating and more open to
those without the means to purchase art works. Moreover, the location of
rhetorically Fascist public art at the front of the Biennale announced the
unequivocal authority of the state.
With the addition of public art to the Biennale, the dictatorship changed the
hierarchies of cultural production and reception. Most of the participants in the
public art competitions were young and non-consecrated artists, given access by
the regime, like the new audiences. The frescos, mosaics and monumental
statuary inside the Italia pavilion forced a meeting between an elite space and a
public form.
4 Tourism
Advertising and tourist incentives comprised the third strategy for opening elite
culture and integrating it into a larger burgeoning leisure and consumer
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The Venice Biennale under Fascism
economy. The European expositions of the middle and late nineteenth century
had initiated the connection between travel, commerce and the art market. By
the early twentieth century, 'a symbiotic relationship had developed between
central European tourism and the visual arts'.67
The Fascist organizers of the
Biennale wanted to extend its share of this commercial market. The broadening
of culture-going audiences at fine arts exhibitions represented economic
possibilities for the tourist industry, especially for hotels, restaurants and shops.68
In addition to the structural changes and the reconsideration of patronage
styles, Maraini and Volpi recruited promotional and publicity techniques to
attract audiences. Organized by both the Biennale press office and the government
tourist agency, the publicity initiative encouraged Italians to travel to
Venice and partake of an Italian and Fascist cultural experience. Maraini
expanded and modernized the Biennale press office with the regular publication
of information, schedules, prizes and discounts in the local, national and
international press. By 1934, Biennale news and advertisements ran in sixtytwo
national newspapers and fifteen European and American dailies.
Beginning in 1930, thousands of posten detailing available train discounts
hung in train cars throughout Italy. The posten' placing reveals the audiences
targeted by the Biennale staff: in 1930 announcements were split evenly
between first- and second-class train cars, with none for the third-class can.70
While not renouncing its commitment to long-standing elite audiences, the
Biennale now pursued middle-class audiences with equal fervor. By 1932, the
balance swung in favor of middle-class patrons, with the orden for announcements
showing twice as many allotted to second-class train can as to fint-class
can.71
The selection of locales for railway station advertisements also demonstrated
the geography of the targeted audiences. Large wall-size posten adorned
thirty-three Italian central municipal railroad stations in 1930, with 85 percent
in northern industrial cities. By 1932, the number of participating railway
stations rose to fifty-five, but the overwhelming emphasis remained in the
industrial north. Advertising went into 40,000 telephone directories.
Biennale marketing consciously targeted the urban middle classes, those who
owned telephones and took second-class train can. The Biennale also published
pamphlets in six languages for tourist offices and resort hotels. The publicity
program was coordinated with Italian and foreign tourist agencies, such as Italy's
ENIT or Britain's Bradshaw's Continental Guide.75
The Biennale administration under Maraini made travel discounts the
cornentone of the incentive program. The train fare discount policy benefited
both the regime and the consumer: the Ministry of Communications granted
each exhibition visitor the right to a certain number ofweeks of discounted train
tickets. The ticket-holder would, upon reaching the Biennale, have his or her
ticket stamped in proof of attendance. The bollo or validation cost between 5 and
15lire which was divided between the Biennale and the Ministry of Communi-
cations.76
For the 1930 Biennale, which ran from 2 May until 4 November, 50
percent discounts were available for 2—11May, 18-27July, 7—27September and
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26 October—4 November, and 30 percent discounts were offered for 12 May-
17July, 28 July-6 September and 22 September-25 October. The discounted
ticketswere valid for eight days, if issued in the Veneto, fifteen days if issued in
other Italian train stations, and twenty days for those coming from abroad.77
By 1934, the expansion of the Biennale, the birth of the collateral events, and
the attention to developing the audience all led to greater travel discounts. The
1934 Biennale, which ran from 1May until 15 October, offered 70 percent train
fare discounts for 1-20 May and 1 July-15 September, and 50 percent discounts
for 21 May—30 June and 16 September-15 October. Honeymooners were
eligible for 80 percent discounts.78
Both the train fare program and the entry
tickets were priced to attract large crowds for the Biennale's central events:
Biennale administrators further reduced train fares for inaugurations and
closings, and on the closing day of the 1934 Biennale a press release announced
that 'the entrance ticket for this final day is reduced without exceptions to one
lire'.79
While the Biennale pursued primarily the middle classes, it made growing
gestures toward working-class attendance during the course of the 1930s. Fascist
rhetoric spoke of the need to create an Italian culture open to all citizens and,
thus, the Biennale opened its doors to 'the people' — but only certain deserving
groups or on special days.80
Marami declared Sunday, 6 October 1934, 'People's
Sunday' with entrance tickets reduced to halfprice.81
At a normal price of 5lire,
the Biennale was too expensive for a working-class Italian, •who could attend a
movie for half that amount. Because the dictatorship did not want to unhinge
the Biennale from its prestigious identifications, entrance tickets at the show
remained higher, in this period, than tickets to the mass-based political exhibitions,
such as the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista which cost 2 lire.
Attendance figures attested to the success of the 'People's Day': Saturday (a
work day), 5 October, drew 1816 visitors, while the 'People's Sunday' the
following day attracted 3081 spectators.82
Organizers consciously worked to
create a context for attendance that would minimize working people's discomfort:
the long opening hours on Sunday, 'People's Days' and discounted
tickets were part of that effort. For the 1936 Biennale, Dopolavoro (the Fascist
afterwork organization) members entered the Biennale for 2.50 lire, half the
regular 5 lire entry fee, and riders on the 'popular trains' visited for 1.50 lire.
If travel and entrance discounts were designed to bring in a socially mixed
audience, the Biennale's publicity materials continued to use the elite ambience
of die event as a selling point. The institution's first clientele remained a crucial
part of its self-conception and one of its attractions under Fascism. The
pageantry and pomp of the Biennale inaugurations and ceremonies highlighted
the continued participation of the Italian and European upper classes. Fascism
wanted to appropriate the prestige of the Biennale; this required the participation
of the exhibition's original constituency. Elites had been the mainstay of
the pre-Fascist Biennale and gave it its distinctive aura; Maraini worked hard not
to lose their support as the institution moved in new directions. For all the
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TheVenice Biennale under Fascism
inaugurations of 1928 through 1942, the House of Savoy was well represented.
In 1932, 1934, 1936, 1938 and 1942, King Victor Emmanuel III opened the
Biennale, together with the current Minister of National Education. In 1934,
the Biennale press office mailed 1596 invitations for the inauguration ceremonies
and festivities which included banquets and fancy dress balls.83
This number
included 461 senators, 400 deputies, 200 Various personalities', fifteen ambassadors,
eight members of the Italian Academy, and ten directors of galleries and
museums.84
Biennale press releases always included lists of dignitaries, aristocrats
and celebrities in attendance at the Biennale. Advertising in 'the great Italian and
foreign hotels' and 'foreign luxury magazines' persisted throughout the
period.85
By 1934, the Fascist-administered Biennale had pursued and successfully
attracted large-scale and socially divene tourism. As Maraini exulted: 'The
International Biennale of Art ... [has] produced interest from all over the
world and [has] brought a tremendous boost to Venetian tourism — doubling
the number of visitors since the last exhibition.'86
The search for evidence of ever-expanding audiences led to special attention
to the compilation of attendance figures and the constant sending of tallies to
Mussolini's office and the Ministry of National Education.87
By the close of the
1932 Biennale, Maraini claimed success: in 1932 attendance reached 250,000
spectators, as compared to 193,000 in 1930 and 172,000 in 1928.88
For the 1934
event, the Biennale administration celebrated ajump in attendance to 450,000
visitors.89
These increases mirrored the success of newly established programs,
such asthe Music, Drama and Film Festivals, better publicity and increased train
discounts.
Fascist sponsorship moved Italian elite culture in numerous directions in a
search for enlarged constituencies. The canonical power of bourgeois patronage
was challenged by official support for divene forms within an elite context.
Fascism's evolving and heterodox cultural politics, with the powerful interest in
accommodation, was conditioned by the punuit of cultural consumen. By
1938, the regime had transformed the genre of the art exhibition. To attract
new audiences, it sponsored experimentation and welcomed film, popular
music, drama and the decorative and public arts. Fascism's commitment to
mass entertainment and national culture had percolated up to the Biennale,
which could no longer cater predominantly to arts connoisseun and ahautbourgeois
clientele.
Of coune, the transformation detailed here represented a single example of
the Fascist regime's larger cultural politics. From the 1920s through the collapse
of Fascism, cultural policy remained in constant flux, shaped by shifting economic,
social and rhetorical priorities.
The Venice Biennale, as transformed by its Fascist administraton, offered a
multitude of possibilities to the visitor. By 1936, a menu of cultural choices
greeted spectaton. From the Mickey Mouse cartoons of the Film Festival to the
Goldoni plays of the Theatre Festival to the Venini vases of the decorative arts
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pavilion, the Biennale had become a cornucopia of forms and entertainments.
The Fascist regime's goals of commercial development, popular success, cultural
innovation and legitimation had coincided to reconfigure the structure and
content of high culture in Italy.
Notes
1 'D programma della I. Esposizione d'Arte Cinematografica', Gazzetta di Venezia,3
August 1932.
2 L'arte nelle mostre italiane IV(1) (January 1939): 3.
3 'La prima esposizione internazionale d'arte cinematografica', Gazzetta di Venezia, 24
May 1932.
4 See: Richard J. Gokan, Fascism, Aestheticsani Culture (Hanover and London:
University Press of New England, 1992); Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); Alice Kaplan, Reproductions ofBanality:
Fascism, Literature, andFrench Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1986); Walter Adamson, Avant-GardeFlorence: From Modernism to Fascism
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
5 For the visual arts, Laura Malvano describes the multiplicity ofimageries supported or
accepted by Fascism and Fascism's changing use of those imageries: Laura Malvano,
Fascismo e lapolitica dell'immagine (Turin: Bollati Boringheri, 1988). The notion of
Fascist artistic diversity came into general acceptance with the 1982 Milan exhibition
(catalogue Anni trenta: Arte ecultura in Italia (Milan: Mazzota, 1983)).
Reassessments of the architectural legacy of Fascist Italy have been particularly
fertile. See: Giorgio Ciucci, Gliarchitetti e ilfascismo (Turin: Einaudi, 1989); Richard
Etlin, Modernism in Italian Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Diane
Ghirardo, 'Italian architects and Fascist politics: an evaluation of the rationalists' role
in regime building', Journal of theSociety ofArchitectural Historians 39(2) (May 1980):
109-27; idem, Building New Communities (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1989); Silvia Danesi and Luciano Panetta (eds) Il razionalismo e l'architettura in Italia
duranteil fascismo(Venice: Edizione 'La Biennale di Venezia', 1976); Dennis
Doordan, Building Modem Italy(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1989).
Film studies has produced a number of works detailing the varied forms the
cinematic arts took during the Fascist era. See: Gian Piero Brunetta, Cinema italiano
tra ledue guerre (Milan: Mursia, 1975);James Hay, Popular FilmCulture in Fascist Italy
(Bloomington, Ind.: University ofIndiana Press, 1987); Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Riccardo Redi (ed.) Cinema
italiano sotto ilfascismo (Venice: Marsilio, 1979); Elaine Mancini, Struggles ofthe Italian
Film Industry duringFascism, 1930-1935 (Ann Arbor University of Michigan
Research Press, 1985). On theater under Fascism see: Mabel Berezin, 'The organization
of political ideology: culture, state and theater in Fascist Italy', American
Sociological Review 56 (October 1991).
6 Paolo Rizzi and Enzo di Martini, Storiadelle Biennale,1895-1982 (Milan: Electa,
1982), p. 37.
7 Secondary sources on the Venice Biennale of International Art are limited. The most
important works are Romolo Bazzoni's memoir, 60 anni della Biennale diVenezia
(Venice: Lombroso Editore, 1962), and Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale,
1895-1968 (London: Faber & Faber, 1969). Bazzoni served as administrative
director of the Biennale from 1920 to 1948. The Biennale published a short
monograph on the exhibition's growth and development over the years: Paolo
Rizzi and Enzo di Martini, Storia della Biennale, 1895-1982 (Milan: Electa, 1982).
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The Venice Biennale under Fascism
In addition, I. Moroni has attempted to establish the Biennale as the reflection of
'officiar aesthetic tastes in Italy since 1895: I. Moroni, L'orientamento del gusto
attraverso leBiennali (Milan: Edizioni 'Le Rete', 1957).
8 Patricia Mainardi discusses the interconnected display of 'art' and 'industry' at the
French Universal Expositions: Patricia Mainardi, Art andPolitics of theSecond Empire
(New Haven, Conn., 1986). In Painters andPublic Life,Thomas Crow argues that the
salons of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were strongly shaped by
popular tastes. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life (New Haven, Conn., 1985).
9 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of theJudgement of Taste(Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
10 Lawrence Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: the Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America
(Cambridge, Mass., 1988); idem, 'William Shakespeare and the American people: a
study in cultural transformation', and Paul DiMaggio, 'Cultural entrepreneurship in
nineteenth-century Boston: the creation of an organizational base for high culture in
America', in Chandra Mukerji and Michael Schudson, RethinkingPopular Culture
(Berkeley, Calif., 1991).
11 Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1981), p. 127.
12 Funk and Wagnalls (1969) Standard Desk Dictionary, New York: Reader's Digest
Books Ine:p. 135.
13 Mussolini announced the strategy of 'decisively reaching out to the people' in a 1932
speech: 'Al popolo napoletano', Benito Mussolini, OperaOmnia, vol. XXV, ed.
Edoardo and Duilio Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1958), p. 50.
14 Jeffrey Schnapp and Barbara Spackman (eds) 'Selections from the great debate on
Fascism and Culture: Critica Fascista 1926-1927', Stanford Italian ReviewVIII (1-2)
(1990): 235-72.
15 On the massification of the party in the 1930s and attempts to mobilize various
portions of the population see:Teresa Maria Mazzatosta, Il regimefascista tra educazione
e propaganda, 1935-43 (Bologna, 1978); Giovanni Lazzari, I Littoriali della cultura e
dell'arte (Naples: Liguori Editore, 1979).
16 On youth organization and socialization see: Tracy Koon, Believe, Obey, Fight: the
Political Socialization ofYouth inFascist Italy(Chapel Hill, University ofNorth Carolina
Press, 1985); Carmen Betti, L'OperaNazionale Ballila e l'educazionefascista (Florence,
1984). On women and Fascism see: Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism RuledWomen
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
17 Victoria de Grazia discusses the targeting of Fascist culture according to social class.
Victoria de Grazia, The Culture of Consent: the Mass Organization of Leisure (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981). See, especially, 'Privileging the clerks',
pp. 127-50, and 'The formation of Fascist low culture', pp. 187-224.
18 Simonetta Lux, 'Avanguardia, traduzione, ideologia: itinerario Sironiano attraverso
un ventennio di dibattito' (unpublished essays) (Rome: Cattedra di Storia dell'Arte
Contemporanea, Università di Roma, 'La Sapienza', 1985-6), p. 4.
19 On Giuseppe Volpi Conte di Misurata, see: Roland Sarti, 'Giuseppe Volpi', in
Fernando Cordova (ed.) Uomini e voltidelfascismo (Rome: Bulzoni, 1980), pp. 523-
46, who finds Volpi exceptional for his abilities in both politics and industry; Sergio
Romano, Giuseppe Volpi: industria efinanza traGiolitti eMussolini (Milan: Bompiani,
1979), especially Chapter 18, 'Il mito di Venezia', pp. 195-202.
20 Romano, Giuseppe Volpi: industria efinanza traGiolitti eMussolini, p. 8.
21 One interpretation credits Volpi with a 'grand strategy for Venice' — to link its
industrial port, Porta Marghera, with its tourist port, Piazza San Marco. See Rizzi and
di Martini, Storia della Biennale, p. 37.
22 In a process similar to the one responsible for the reorganization of the figurative arts
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show, Maraini lobbied Mussolini, Giuliano and Giurati in March and April of 1931
for government funding and support. With official backing established in late 1931,
the Music Festival took the shape it would hold for the rest of the decade.
23 Archio Storico dell'Arte Contemporanea (ASAC), Busta 88, 'corrispondenze varie'.
24 The press welcomed the symmetrical organization of the Music and Art shows: 'there
will be certain "national pavilions", concerts dedicated to the music of a single
nation, and certain "international pavilions" which will offer the music of several
nations in the same concert' ('Il 2a Festival Intemazionale di Musica', Gazzetta di
Venezia,13January 1932).
25 ASAC, Busta 83,Press release -1934 Biennale.
26 ASAC, Busta 88, 'corrispondenze varie'.
27 ASAC, Busta 62.
28 ASAC, Busta 88, 'corrispondenze varie'.
29 ASAC, Busta 82, Press release - 1934 Theater Festival.
30 Elio Zorzi, 'Inaugurazione della III Mostra Internazionale del Cinema', L'Illustrazione
Italiana, 18 August 1935, p. 345; 'La prima Esposizione Intemazionale d'Arte
Cinematografica', Gazzetta di Venezia, 24 May 1932. The films at the first show
came from Germany, the United States, France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain,
Italy, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Holland, with the largest number of entries
coming from the United States and Germany. 'Un elenco di films', Gazzetta di
Venezia,24July 1932.
31 L'Arte nelle Mostre ItalianeIV(1) (January 1939): 7, 24.
32 Elio Zorzi, 'Inaugurazione della III Mostra Internazionale del Cinema', p. 345.
33 'Un elenco di films'; 'Referendum Pubblico - la Esposizione Intemazionale d'Arte
Cinematografica', Archivio Centraledello Stato, Presidenza Consiglio dei Minstri
(ACS, PCM) (1934-6), 14.1.4677; Gian Piero Brunetta, Cinema italiano tra ledue
guerre (Milan: Mursia, 1975), pp. 67, 71; Marcia Landy, Fascism in Film (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 15. See also: Vito Zagarrio, 'Il modello
sovietico: tra piano culturale e piano economico', in Riccardo Redi (ed.) Cinema
italiano sotto ilfascismo (Venice: Marsilio, 1979), pp. 185-200.
34 'Relazione per l'assegnazione dei premi alla Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica',
ACS, PCM (1934-6), 14.1.4677.
35 ASAC, Busta 82, 'Il convegno intemazionale di teatro — bando per il concorso d'arte
drammatica'.
36 Patricia Mainardi makes a similar point about the Second Empire's search for the
allegiance of spectators and cultural producers: Patricia Mainardi, Art andPolitics ofthe
Second Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1989), p. 17.
37 ASAC, Busta 92, 'Relazioni per il conferimento dei premi'.
38 Wolfsonian Foundation, medallion collection, 82.782.1.1.
39 'L'esito del referendum', Gazzetta di Venezia,24 August 1932.
40 ASAC, Busta 92, English language brochure, 1934.
41 Il Gazzettino, 11July 1937.
42 Anne Friedberg, WindowShopping (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993),
p. 122.
43 ASAC, Busta 83, Press release - 1934 Biennale.
44 ASAC, Busta 92, 'Stampati', 'La Biennale di Venezia — II Esposizione Internazionale
d'Arte Cinematografica — Relazioni per il conferimento dei premi'.
45 Zorzi, 'Inaugurazione della III Mostra Internazionale del Cinema', p. 345.
46 Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinemafrom Neo-Realism to thePresent (New York: Fredrick
Ungar, 1983), pp. 11-12.
47 'Appunto per S. E. il Capo del Governo', 18 December 1933,ACS, PCM (1934-6),
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14.1.4677. This propaganda film placed 'special emphasis upon the birth of the
province of Littoria'.
48 Le Mostred'Arte in Italia IV (1) January 1939): 7; 'Appunto per S.E. il Capo del
Governo', 9 September 1935,ACS, PCM (1934-6), 14.1.4677. The figure of 55,237
for 1937 was also cited by Marami in a telegram to Mussolini on 9 September 1937.
See: ACS, PCM (1937-9), 14.1.2966, sottofascicolo 5.
49 'Appunto per S. E. il Capo del Governo', 9 September 1935, ACS, PCM (1934-6),
14.1.4677.
50 ASAC, Busta 92, English Language Brochure, 1934.
51 ASAC, Busta 63, fascicolo 'Padiglione Venezia'; 'XVII Biennale d'arte - Le norme
per la sezione d'arte decorativa', Gazzetta di Venezia, 21 November 1931. The
decorative arts section was subject to the same regulations as the figurative arts
section.
52 XIX Esposizione BiennaleIntemazionaled'Arte, 1934 (Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1934),
p. 18.
53 ASAC, Registre vendite (4), 1932 and 1934.
54 Volpi, Biennale closing speech, 14 October 1934, in ASAC, Busta 80, 'Biennale
propaganda'.
55 Susan Sellers, 'Mechanical brides: the exhibition', Design Issues 10 (2) (Summer
1994): 70.
56 Debora Silverman writes of the dual function of the craft renaissance in the French
Third Republic. See: Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 43-51.
57 XIX Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, 1934, p. 213.
58 Some Fascist officials, such as Emilio Bodrero, proposed the decorative arts as an
arena for employment opportunities: 'Richiamo alle arti decorative', Il Popolo d'Italia,
14 October 1931.
59 See: Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture (Washington and London: The Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1991); Walter Kalaidjian, American Culture Between theWars
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
60 'Manifesto della pittura murale', La Colonna(December 1933), as reprinted in Lux,
'Avanguardia, traduzione, ideologia', p. 272.
61 'Manifesto della pittura murale', La Colonna(December 1933), as reprinted in Lux,
'Avanguardia, traduzione, ideologia', p. 272.
62 XXI Esposizione Biennale Intemazionale d'Arte, 1938, p. 15.
63 Le Mostre d'Arte in Italia IV (7-10) (July-October 1937): 65.
64 Le Mostre d'Arte in Italia II (6) (June 1935): 1.
65 ibid.
66 XXII Esposizione Biennale Intemazionale d'Arte, 1940, p. 10.
67 Robin Lenman, 'Painters, patronage, and the art market in Germany, 1850-1914',
PastandPresent 123: 127.
68 Diane Crane, The Transformation oftheAvant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1987), p. 7.
69 ASAC, Busta 57, fascicolo 'Pubblicità -1930'.
70 Letter, 18 April 1930, Società italiana affisioni to Zorzi, ASAC, Busta 57, fascicolo
'Pubblicità'.
71 ASAC, Busta 63, 'Pubblicità - 1932'.
72 ASAC, Busta 57, 'Pubblicità - 1930'.
73 ASAC, Busta 63, 'Pubblicità- 1932'.
74 ASAC, Busta 63, 'Pubblicità' - 1932'.
75 ASAC, Busta 63, 'Pubblicità - 1932'.
76 ASAC, Busta 57, 'Pubblicità-1930'.
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77 Il Gazzettino, 17, 19 and 22July 1930; Il Popolo d'Italia, 24-25 October 1930.
78 NotiziarioTuristico, 9 April 1934; ASAC, Busta 92, fascicolo 'Stampati - 1934'.
79 ASAC, Busta 88, fascicolo 'corrispondenze varie — 1934 — comunicati stampa'.
80 Biennale memo, 5 October 1934, ASAC, Busta 88, 'corrispondenze varie 1934'.
81 Biennale memo, 5 October 1934, ASAC, Busta 88, 'corrispondenze varie 1934'.
82 Biennale memo, 5 October 1934, ASAC, Busta 88, 'corrispondenze varie 1934'.
83 ASAC, Busta 89, 'corrispondenza'.
84 ASAC, Busta 89, 'corrispondenza'.
85 ASAC, Busta 80, 'Piano di pubblicità'.
86 Telegram, 17 October 1934, Maraini and Volpi to Mussolini, ACS, PCM 14.1.283,
sottofàscicolo 5.
87 Memo, 13 December 1932, Biennale to PCM, gabinetto, ACS, PCM (1934-6),
14.1.283, sottofàscicolo 4; letter, 7 May 1934, Maraini to Mussolini, ACS, PCM
14.1.283, sottofàscicolo 5.
88 Memo, 23 December 1932, Maraini to PCM, Capo Gabinetto, ACS, PCM (1934-
6), 14-1-283, sottofàscicolo 4; 'La chiusura della 18a Biennale Veneziana',IlPopolo
d'Italia, 2 November 1932, p. 9.
89 Minutes of meeting of the Comitato direttivo, 29January 1935, ACS, PCM (1940-
2), 14.1.730, sottofascicolo 1-D. Attendance figures for 1934 reveal a discrepancy: in
1939 Maraini quoted 361,917 visitors for 1934, as opposed to Volpi's 450,00. Le
Mostre d'Arte in Italia VI (1) (January 1939): 6.
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