AND WHEN I SAY IT LACKS CONTEXT, I MEAN MY POLITICAL SLANT:

Birds of prey: Are Italy's 'aeropaintings' thrilling celebrations of flight - or just barbaric fascist propaganda? (Jonathan Jones, January 5, 2005, The Guardian)

[W]ith Futurist Skies: Italian Aeropainting, the Estorick has achieved a brilliant parody of art collectors, art historians, and the Italian government, all of whom, we are supposed to believe, have lent their support to an exhibition of fascist paintings of bombers.

Like many readers probably, I received for Christmas Philip Roth's novel The Plot Against America, his fantasy of a 1940s America, where the aviator and Hitler sympathiser Charles Lindbergh became president. But Roth's fiction pales beside what the Estorick has achieved. It is a stupendous assault on good taste that begins with a wall text about "aeropainting" - a subgenre of late futurism that flourished in Mussolini's Italy - without mentioning Mussolini, or fascism, or the invasion of Ethiopia, or any of the less-than-cosy connections that anyone with even the slightest awareness of modern history might make between flight, war and art in the 1930s.

To grasp the enormity of this silence, let's look at a painting of an aeroplane by Guglielmo Sansoni, who called himself Tato. The plane propels itself out of the stormy clouds, dark as a bird of prey. Such images in 1930s Italian art represent, according to the curators of Futurist Skies, a passion for the new perspectives and vertiginous excitements of aviation - an innocent wonder we have lost in our age of routine civilian flight. But Tato's painting does not simply depict a plane. It is a picture of a bomber. You can see the machine-gun nest in the nose, as it banks up after delivering its payload. The painting is called Aerial Mission, making its military character plain.

Tato painted this piece of fascist crap in 1937. Does the date ring a bell? It was on April 26 1937 that the Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe, in support of General Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, bombed the Basque capital Guernica, on a market day, killing 1,654 people out of a population of 7,000. Pablo Picasso began Guernica after he read about this new chapter in the story of human cruelty. It seems plausible that Tato's painting Aerial Mission refers to the same events. For more than half a century Picasso's Guernica has preserved the memory of a town torn to pieces by aerial bombing. Now, at last, Futurist Skies gives us the other point of view: that of the murderer in the cockpit.

Almost as if trying to parody Paul Hollander's point, finds no corresponding room to discuss the fact that Picasso's painting is Stalinist crap, nor to discuss the terrors in which it is thereby implicated, but which Franco thankfully prevented from being visited upon Spain, even if with help from Mussolini.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2005 5:22 PM