Whenever I come to New York, even for one day like this time, I visit Mirko Ilić in his studio in Union Square. Mirko is the biggest name in the world of design in SAD from these spaces with dozens of covers of the most fashionable American magazines, and in 2015, 38 of his works entered the permanent collection of MoMA.
...Exposure
Mirko always gives me an instructive walk through the neighborhoods around Union Square, shows details on facades or sidewalks that I would never have noticed, reveals a story that is not in the tourist guides. Last month in cooperation with United Nations we organized an exhibition in Belgrade Tolerance of which Mirko is the curator. We are talking about posters on the topic of tolerance, works of designers from all over the world. The exhibition was outdoors, in Kalemegdan, and Mirko is angry "because some of the posters were vandalized", read stained. Especially those with LGBT+ themes. I explain to him that under such circumstances in Serbia it was a great success to organize such an exhibition in general. He is surprised that in Serbia "even abnormal things have become normal".
This time he took me to Poster House, a gallery specializing in poster and poster exhibitions. There is currently (until February 22) an exhibition of posters The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy. We are talking about as many as 75 original posters from the time Mussolini's of Italy (1922–1943) which are in the possession of the famous Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli from Bologna. This foundation was founded in New York in 1984 and today owns more than 10.000 works of art, documents and artifacts that are part of Italian culture of the 20th century. They say that their goal is to promote Italian art of the 20th century from the early 1900s to the second half of the century when the internationally recognized concept of "Made in Italy" was born. Among the great artistic names whose works are in the Foundation's collection are: Giacomo Bala, Fortunato Depero, Lucio Fontana, Osvaldo Licini, Bruno Munari, Gio Ponti, Luigi Russolo and Mario Sironi.
...Black Shirt
The exhibition at Poster House shows that it is fascist Italy was very much up to date with its times and contemporary trends when it comes to graphic design. Although most of them were in the service of the propaganda of the totalitarian regime, the works that you can see in this exhibition cannot be denied high aesthetic criteria. The exhibition itself consists of three parts: "Italy as an idea", "Italy at home" and "Italy in the world".
In the thirties and forties of the 20th century, during numerous public works, many archaeological discoveries saw the light of day, which Mussolini called proof of the birth of the "Third Roman Empire". Although Italy was still a young and divided nation (unification had only taken place half a century before Mussolini came to power), fascism gained great support among artists and intellectuals of the interwar era. Personalities like Margarita Sarfatti and Gabriele D'Annunzio helped Mussolini to use Italian museums, visual artists, writers...
Benito Mussolini, formerly an average soldier in the First World War (another point of contact with Hitler), managed to establish himself as a symbol of fascist Italy by promising his compatriots the return of the power of the Roman Empire, economic independence, linguistic unification and industrial and infrastructural progress. In 1919, he founded "Fasci di Combattimento", which two years later became the National Fascist Party, a movement that used political violence as a means of reaching and staying in power, but also of imperial conquests. Fascist symbols appeared everywhere - the snoplje, the Roman eagle and most of all - Il Duce, the figure of the supreme leader on posters, in films, advertisements... Artists as well as companies in their advertisements played into the hands of the regime by using totalitarian aesthetics and interweaving Mussolini's cult of personality with national identity. Duce was ideologized in Italy, even though most of the world laughed at him as an "operatic dictator". However, the reality behind these posters was not at all "operatic" - the government organized or ordered thousands of political murders, restricted freedoms and eventually dragged Italy into the war on the side of Germany, which led to about 450.000 lost lives and ruined infrastructure and industry.
...Fiat
Probably because today he owns a factory in Serbia, my attention is particularly drawn to the "Fiat" poster, the letters of which are shaped from stone blocks on top of which are horses and horsemen, symbols of the Roman Empire. I realized that he strongly reminded me of something and soon came to the conclusion that he was the designer of the movie poster Ben Hur recorded 20 years later must have been inspired by this "Fiat" commercial.
A week later, as I write this text, I am in Rome and I am thinking about how different the attitude of post-war Italy towards the legacy of the Mussolini era in art and architecture is compared to the Germans and their view of Hitler. The fact that Mussolini, among all the horrors he shared with Hitler, did not carry out the greatest - the Holocaust (in the sense of the "final solution") - certainly contributes to this. Namely, the Italian Jews were sent to the camps only in 1943, when Mussolini's Italy fell, and German troops occupied the cities on the Apennine peninsula and in the occupied regions. Today, while walking in Rome, I saw one of the numerous inscriptions on buildings from the interwar period that say that they were built "during the reign of Mussolini" and indicate the year of construction as the XVIII year of the Fascist Era. Namely, in Fascist Italy, October 28, 1922 was taken as the new beginning of time reckoning - the day when Mussolini entered Rome and became prime minister. Although there were public debates on the subject, it was decided that these inscriptions are part of the "historical heritage of Italy" and that they should not be removed from the facades of buildings.
