Frederika Randall, an exceptional person, writer, and friend, died Tuesday, May 12 at her home in Rome, where she lived with her husband and loving and intellectual companion, Vittorio Jucker. Born in Western Pennsylvania, Frederika lived the last 35 years of her life in Italy. Her keen eye and judgment made her a valued public intellectual (a term she asked us not to use - you can't complain now, Frederika), publishing trenchant cultural and political commentary in The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, and elsewhere. Her bio of herself here explains her life journey and also her lifetime of significant accomplishments and awards. She was a translator of the nearly-untranslatable, bringing to life authors as diverse as the 19th-century Ippolito Nievo ("Confessions of an Italian") and 21st- century Giacomo Sartori ("I am God").
In Frederika's memory, we are re-posting several of the posts--which remain popular--she wrote for RST. We re-posted "Liberation Day: The Politics of 'Bella Ciao'" just 3 weeks ago (not knowing how precarious her life was at that point) for Italy's locked-down Liberation Day. Ten days ago we re-posted her review of a Renato Guttuso exhibit. Here we re-post her 2014 review of a show at the Complesso Vittoriano featuring the 20th-century Italian artist Mario Sironi. The review illustrates everything we've just said about Frederika - her keen eye, her trenchant criticism, her lyrical writing. She will live on in our--and all her friends' and family's--memories, and in the eclectic body of work she left to the world.
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| Sironi, Self Portrait |
For a taste of this political outlier—and yes, great painter—I recommend Sironi 1885-1961 show at the Complesso del Vittoriano in Rome until February 8, 2015. There are ninety paintings, graphic works and sketches for murals neatly organized to follow the artist’s life path: born in 1885, studies in
Things looked bad for Sironi when the Liberation came on April 25, 1945. He took the road out of
Milan toward Como and Switzerland, like many Fascists who feared partisan
reprisals, and not wrongly. On foot, his dog on a leash by his side, Sironi was
stopped at a partisan checkpoint, and only when the poet and children’s writer
(and partisan) Gianni Rodari stepped in, was he saved from being shot. After
the war, Sironi continued painting, and the vein of melancholy that colors
everything he produced seems to have deepened into something like despair.
There was no place for a man like him in a postwar Italy where all the artists
and intellectuals were anti-Fascists.
This exhibit, the
first in Italy dedicated to Sironi in twenty years, was curated by art
historian Elena Pontiggia, who provides a very useful biographical framework to
hang the artwork on, both in a short film and the good wall quotes.This doesn’t quite compensate for the fact that not many of Sironi’s greatest paintings are on
display, or that this show is much smaller than that of 1994, which had 400
artworks. But Pontiggia does bring out a crucial fact: that Sironi was a life-long depressive, a man of melancholy who it would seem should have been quite unsuited to the Fascist regime’s celebration of might and right.
Even as a young man Sironi would close himself up in his rooms, seeing
no-one, drawing obsessively. “He’ll copy a Greek head 20 or 25 times!!!” reported Boccioni (exclamation marks his). The
Futurists disapproved of antiquated art.
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| Urban Landscape, 1922 |
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| The Yellow Truck, 1918 |
The Yellow Truck, 1918, is another work from this period. Big
rough brushstrokes, in part painted on newsprint, it suggests a Futurist
enthusiasm for the vehicle itself that is utterly absent in urban scenes done even
a few years later.
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| Urban Landscape, 1920 |
In another urban landscape painted in 1920, a hard brown wall hides what seems to be a construction site. Again, the night sky is roiling overhead. Sironi is no longer celebrating the dynamism of the machine that was Futurism’s trademark. The only thing that’s dynamic is the air. When it comes to the work he did in the 1930s, Fascism’s heyday, the show tries to persuade us that although he worked for the cause, his murals and wall decorations (here, sketches for his mosaic Justice Between Law and Force in the Milan Court of Assizes) were never propaganda for Fascism. But like so many efforts to rescue Sironi from his politics, this doesn’t really ring true. Fascism was not just Blackshirts and castor oil; it was a political creed based on just the kind of myths that Sironi produced in his large allegorical murals. They embody a kind of immobilism, an image of the best of all possible worlds that need never change. Sironi was happy to accept those mural commissions because he wanted to make art for the people, not for bourgeois sitting rooms. But that, too, was a thread of Fascism.
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| Urban Landscape, 1922 |
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| My Funeral, 1960 |
After the war, Sironi
continued to paint, and there are several more gloomy cityscapes here, often
painted in a thick impasto of brown, blue and white, that are very striking. He
died in 1961, not before producing a small tempera work, My Funeral, in which a tiny hearse in one corner of the picture is
followed by a tiny handful of mourners. “Let us hope that after so many storms,
so many gales, so much bestial suffering,” he wrote, “that there will
nevertheless be a port for this miserable heart to find peace and quiet."
Fifty years later, his reputation as an artist has been largely detached
from his role as a Fascist, but you couldn’t exactly say he rests in peace.
Frederika Randall, Rome
