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'Echoes and Origins' and 'The Birth of Rome' are at the Wolfsonian through May 18. The Wolfsonian-FIU
Miami Beach, Fla.
An engrossing assemblage of small but related exhibitions at the Wolfsonian museum here will have you wondering how your own aesthetic leanings could be so compatible with those of Benito Mussolini.
Somehow the design, architecture and public art produced under Italian Fascism have not been tarred in the same way that Nazi style, with its red flags and black insignia, remains so utterly sinister and repellent. And while Italian design of the same period now sometimes looks to us like kitsch, much of it manages to achieve a resonant modernity.
Focusing on the years between the two world wars, the show, collectively called "Rebirth of Rome," sheds light on the staying power and indefatigable allure of Italian design produced in the 1920s, '30s and early '40s. At the same time it touches on even larger themes of identity and power, aesthetics and morality. As the director of the Wolfsonian, Cathy Leff, writes in the catalog: "The things we make are never merely things."
The exhibit opens with a perfect example of the complicated appeal of these design objects: A darkly dynamic sculpture by Renato Bertelli is a bronzed ceramic of Mussolini's profile from 1933. Hardly a routine silhouette, it shows the Roman-nosed dictator's head in solid rotation as if extruded onto a spinning turntable. "Continuous Profile of the Duce," manifests the avant-garde Futurists' love of machinery and motion even as it alludes to the myth of Janus, who could look in two directions at once. Its message of omniscient authoritarianism may be ominous, but its conceit of speed made plastic is as invigorating today as it must have been then.
Drawing on the Wolfsonian's incomparable collection of some 120,000 decorative art objects, ephemera, books and cultural artifacts associated with and produced during political movements from 1885 to 1945, curator Silvia Barisione delves first, with "Echoes and Origins: Italian Interwar Design," into the search for national identity that was fanned into an obsession when Mussolini declared his intention in 1925 to build a new, "Third" Rome, as grandiose as anything from the age of Augustus.
It was barely 50 years since the establishment of Italy as a unified country, and for Mussolini, pinning down a national identity would serve to consolidate his power and ambitions for a new Augustan empire. Ancient history proffered a deep well of symbols and myth to draw on, but the future also had to be secured. Mussolini had a voracious interest in the new; unlike Hitler, he did not equate the avant-garde with degeneracy.
And so the decorative arts abounded with motifs sourced in ancient times but treated in new ways. Old technologies like majolica were revived, and new materials such as aluminum were used to make furniture (especially after exotic woods from Africa became scarce due to League of Nations sanctions for Italy's invasion of Ethiopia). The she-wolf that fostered the founding twins of Rome, Romulus and Remus, could be seen on posters for Fiat sports cars; satyrs sold Pirelli rubber tires; ceramics were decorated with streamlined urns and lion heads in what could be called Deco Etruscan. One of the most ubiquitous motifs—rods bundled together with an ax as carried by ancient guards, and called fasces—provided the root of the word "fascist," and appeared on everything from buildings to biscotti wrappers.
In a second exhibition, "The Birth of Rome," the focus shifts to urban planning and Mussolini's grand building projects shaped by two goals: to relieve need and realize magnificence. Intriguingly, architects at the time couldn't do anything new and grandiose without first dealing with the old. Their thoughts about preservation within a dense urban setting—whether to strip them of latter-day accretions or isolate them from context—have become only more relevant today.
Two projects stand out. The Foro Mussolini, renamed Foro Italico (Italian Forum), and the fairgrounds of the Esposizione Universale di Roma (Universal Exposition of Rome), or EUR, were envisioned by Mussolini on an imperial scale—overblown but somehow more natural-looking there than the totalitarian gigantism of Albert Speer's plans for Berlin. The original intent may have been to exalt the loyal and intimidate the rest, but those parts of the forums that were built are now curiously well integrated into the city.
The first Fascist urban plan, the Foro Mussolini, was conceived in 1927 as a sports complex championing every region of the country. The central piece is a stadium for 8,000 encircled by 60 monumental male nudes in Alpine white marble and an obelisk dedicated to Mussolini. The Foro was still the largest sports facility in Rome when the stadium hosted the 1960 Summer Olympics and remains a popular venue.
If the Foro's towering male nudes now make for a freakishly eroticized urban setting, the EUR fairgrounds also feel eerie today. Following the 1939-40 New York World's Fair with its World of Tomorrow theme, Rome was to host the 1942 Olympics of Civilization, a celebration of Mussolini's "empire" fashioned according to Fascist ideology. The 420-acre site, cast as a new city about five miles south of central Rome, was never completed due to the war. But broad axial roadways, a symmetrical plan and a few signature buildings attest to its ambitious but pragmatic scope. Aiming for a fusion of modern rationalism and classical symmetry, the extant buildings look more like a de Chirico dream set or, as one commenter put it, "a marble ghost town."
The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, better known as the Square Colosseum with its stacked arcades, is the most interesting building there. Designed by Ernesto Bruno Lapadula, Giovanni Guerrini and Mario Romano, it appears here through sketches of slight variations and in a large-scale model of the site. There are also drawings, posters and models of the unbuilt parabolic arch by Adalberto Libera that is said to have inspired Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch in St. Louis. Libera's even more distinctive Palace of Congress features a flying-saucer dome and sheer glass facade layered over classical columns. EUR is a favorite source of inspiration for architects to this day.
Throughout these two exhibitions, the drive to define a national style does not feel exclusively like the blunt exercise in authoritarian control one might expect. (A third exhibition of war murals by the artist Antonio Santagata does feature straightforward propaganda.) The most compelling objects and architecture here transcend the aesthetics of dictatorship as authentic explorations into new ideas. It is probably that spirit of diversity and experiment—generally supported, not quashed, by Mussolini—that makes these Italian designs less like casualties of repressive politics and closer to living art.
Ms. Iovine writes about architecture for the Journal.