In Memoriam: Frederika Randall's review of Mario Sironi exhibit at the Vittoriano

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

You have a great artist in your midst, perhaps the greatest of these times, and you don’t know it. Picasso, addressing feckless 20^th-century Italians, was talking about Mario Sironi. It was a peculiar tribute, coming from a man who belonged to the Communist party until the day he died. While Sironi, on the other hand, was a believing Fascist even before 1921, when he began working as graphic artist for Mussolini’s paper, Il Popolo d'Italia and the review Gerarchia. He even adhered to the Republic of Salò, the German-backed Italian puppet state of 1943-45, and that was much more of a minority camp than Fascism ever was.

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

engineering, a nervous breakdown, art school, meeting Boccioni and Balla, Futurism, the Novecento, bleak urban landscapes, a brief Metaphysical phase, Fascist illustration, publicity for automaker Fiat, an Expressionist turn, followed by the huge murals commissioned by Mussolini for new Fascist public buildings in Milan and Rome.

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.

Urban Landscape, 1922

Yet Sironi’s most powerful works are those that don’t celebrate Fascism, modernity, or industry. His urban landscapes, some of them painted in the early 1920s, others after World War II, are haunting, and haunted. When in 1922 he produced one of several paintings titled Urban Landscape, Sironi was staying alone in a cheap hotel in Milan, too poor to bring his new wife there to live with him. Dusty white and brick-colored industrial buildings, a great black swath of train track, a tiny tram and a tiny truck. The only thing that looks animate in the composition is the lowering green and grey sky.

The Yellow Truck, 1918

In another cityscape shown here, an ashy black truck stands immobile where two utterly empty streets of factories and warehouses intersect. There is no life or movement in the painting, just beautiful volumes. Once again, only the sky is alive, with big brushstrokes of smoke and cloud.

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.

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.

Urban Landscape, 1922

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

The Best Contemporary Art in Rome is in the....State Department!

One is greeted on the ground floor by Michelangelo Pistoletto's "L'Etrusco" (The Etruscan), 1976, with Pistoletto's
classic use of mirrors, inviting one to join the Etruscan, we we did.

"La paura" (Fear), 2004 by Mimmo Rotella.  How could
  we--film reviewers, and one of us an author of an article
on Zombie films and the Holocaust--not like this one?

The best collection of contemporary art in Rome is not in any museum--not in MAXXI, the nation's 21st-century art gallery, not in MACRO, the City's contemporary art gallery, not in the Gagosian, the city's largest private art gallery, but in the country's State Department building, colloquially known as The Farnesina. 


That's not the Palazzo Farnese, where the French Embassy resides, nor the Villa Farnesina, in the heart of Trastevere where Raphael painted rooms. The Farnesina is the enormous structure designed to be the headquarters of the Fascist party, across the Tevere (therefore, literally Trastevere) but up river adjacent to the Foro Italico, once the Foro Mussolini, the sports complex housing the city's soccer stadium, once its Olympic stadium.

Back to art.  Beginning in 2001, the government convinced artists to loan their works to the Ministero degi Affari Esteri (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, equivalent to the U.S.'s state department).  It apparently purchased some works, but most are on long-term loan, now comprising the Collezione Farnesina, and open from time to time (hey, it's Rome!).

"Battesimi Umanoi"  (Human
Baptisms) by Oliviero Rainaldi,
2006, cement.

The "di quando in quando" openings began just last year to include the last Friday of every month, except July and August, along with an early May weekend opening for Open House Roma, which is when we went.  I'd say run, don't walk, to make your appointment for one of these visits.

The work is also available on Google, but if you think you might go, save your first-time experience for the real thing.
Links are at the end of this post.

The collection is astoundingly rich and unabashedly contemporary.  The works fill the walls and halls of this building, whose construction began in 1937.  The building itself is filled with artwork from the period of its construction and decoration, which occurred mainly in the post-World War II period, with artists such as Sciajola.

From Elena Bellantoni's "The struggle for power, the fox and the wolf," 2014 video.  This video was
filmed in The Farnesina itself.

Our tour included an extensive look at the building and its hallways and rooms, which is essential to view all the artwork.

The large meeting room where Bellantoni's video was filmed.

Mosaics by Sciajola and ceiling art, part of the building decor.

Grand stairway, with original designs on sconces; classic
Fascist use of travertine marble, and use of Roman designs,
including the painting at the end, with a modernist take. 

The collection also includes some original drawings of the building by architect Enrico del Debbio (whose work we've admired in previous posts).

Del Debbio's "first solution" to the "Casa Littoria a Foro Mussolini." The building sits at the base of Monte Mario.

Today's exterior is not too different from del Debbio's "first solution" - minus the marching military, plinth and horses:

For visits, consult the Web site (it says it's in English, but it is not: http://www.collezionefarnesina.esteri.it/collezionefarnesina/it/visita/
Google's "virtual tour" is here: http://www.collezionefarnesina.esteri.it/collezionefarnesina/it/visita/google-art-visita-virtuale

Dianne

Mario Sironi's Il lavoratore  ("The worker"), 1936.

"Autobiography of the Mother": Silvia Codignola's exhibition, reviewed by Shara Wasserman

Shara Wasserman, right, with Dianne Bennett, 2013

For this review of an ongoing exhibition at the Museo Carlo Bilotti, RST is pleased to welcome as guest blogger Shara Wasserman. Wasserman is an American art historian and curator of contemporary art.  She received her BA in Art History with honors from Temple University and her MA in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University. Following a period at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, first as Hilla von Rebay fellow and later as Editorial Assistant, Wasserman relocated to Rome.  She is on the faculty of Temple University Rome, where she serves as Director of Exhibitions.  

The Museo Carlo Bilotti, an exhibition space in the heart of the Villa Borghese in Rome, is hosting a lovely display of a decade of work by Roman artist Silvia Codignola.  Curated by Lea Mattarella,  the show runs through October 22.

Silvia Codignola, in her Rome studio, 2013

Trained as an architect, Codignola moved to the visual arts early in her career, producing a varied body of work that includes drawing, sculpture, paintings and installations.  Her early architectural training is always present and results in a focus on structure and geometry.  Solid, expressionless figures inhabit empty spaces; dark colors and sharp chiaroscuro keep the spectator’s eye on the surface plane; still life objects and figures firmly positioned in their environment hold our attention, almost as if they comprise a stage set.

Mario Sironi, "Landscape with Figures," 1932

Her artistic preferences move from the Italian Early Renaissance, with artists such as Piero della Francesca and Masaccio, to Mario Sironi, the prominent Italian painter of the 1920s and 1930s, whose spare landscapes presage Codignola’s compositions.

Titled Autobiography of the Mother, the works on exhibition were culled from a decade of the artist’s production – 2006-2016 – and in particular from her almost obsessive focus on mothers and children. Two of her paintings are reproduced below.

By including many versions of the same subject, Codignola guides the spectator viewing this exhibition through a variety of aspects and stages of motherhood: from the powerful armless, headless, anonymous pregnant woman, to the lonely sleeping mother rigidly supporting the head of her child, to the absently nursing mother, to the mother reclining with her child, to the distracted mother inserted in an austere beachscape, to the final images of a small arm reaching out of the darkness towards an old man. 

Both a mother – the show is dedicated to her daughter Miranda -- and a daughter, Silvia Codignola infuses the works with a reflection, a kind of chronology, of mother and child. 

As we walk through the show, we think of Silvia the woman, but we also think of Silvia the artist as the link between life and the strong symbolism, especially in Italian art, that woman represents.  She is the life giver, the universal mater, the bearer of the seed and the symbol of fertility; she is wisdom and intellect and war and protection.  In short, she is Mother.

A long-time fan of Silvia’s art, I am always excited to see new work and the new way that she thinks of her previous work.  This exhibition fulfills both.

Shara Wasserman

Director of Exhibitions

Gallery of Art, Temple University Rome

A Night at the University: Mario Sironi's monumental Aula Magna Mural

We were attracted.

We're always eager to get official access to Rome buildings we haven't been in, and so in mid-May we headed off eagerly to the university--La Sapienza, as this one is known--to explore an evening open house.  Not much was open, actually, but the dinosaurs in front of one of the science buildings caught our attention, and we headed over.  That building is standard Fascist-era issue (most of the buildings here are of mid-1930s vintage), nothing about it of significant interest, really, even for RST, a fan of most of the era's architecture (including Gio Ponti's mathematics building on this campus).

Lots of people enjoy looking at rocks.

Still, we enjoyed puttering around in an old-fashioned museum of mineralogy, about which we know nothing.

Nude miners, mining

We were surprised to learn that Sicily was a center of sulfur mining, and that the mining was done by nude men.  Why nudity was required is not clear, though the poster's fine print might have offered an explanation.

Aula exterior

Having had enough of even very beautiful rocks, we took a chance and headed to the Aula Magna--the big hall on the campus that hosts concerts and other events (the official name is Aula Magna del Rettorato della Sapienza).  We had seen the exterior before, but had never been inside the building or its main hall, which features an important mural by Mario Sironi, a significant artist of the era (and the subject of a large retrospective a year or so ago). The outside of the Aula was suggestively lit for the evening, and--lo and behold--the doors to the auditorium were open.

Students with photos of themselves portraying very different
types of people (bride, hipster, etc.)

Inside, art students presented their work, a quartet offered music, and free wine was being served. We had talked to the students at the table (see left), and they were watching us.










And inside the hall, an orchestra was playing. And there was the Sironi mural.  We sat down, listened, and looked.

The mural is enormous--90 square meters--but even so, it can be difficult, as I'm sure readers will understand, to absorb the contents of such a work when there are distractions--an illuminated

The hall from our seats

audience, the music, the contours of an 80-year old modernist space, the thrill of being there. Here's what we later learned:

The mural is titled "L'Italia fra le Arti e le Scienze"--Italy between [probably better translated and] the Arts and Sciences.  As the story goes, the lead architect for the new university, Marcello Piacentini, approached the Duce with Sironi's name.  In 1933, Mussolini received the artist and acknowledged the great difficulty of presenting Fascism on the grand wall of the grand hall of the grand new university.

Sironi took the commission (we wonder if he had any choice) and, in two months, produced his mural.  It includes representations of astronomy, mineralogy, botany, geography, architecture, literature, painting, and history--the latter symbolized by the woman, at front/right, back turned, a book in her hands.  When it was unveiled, along with the rest of the university, in 1935 or 1936, it included a triumphal arch--the symbol of Roman conquests--a Fascist eagle, the Fascist date XIV (14th year of Fascism, or 1936), and a figure, presumably Mussolini, on horseback.  He liked to ride.
The mural was severely damaged a few years later, during World War II, and the early 1950s restoration by Carlo Siviero was freighted with guilt and embarrassment over Mussolini's regime and Fascism.  As a result, the restoration eliminated the man and the horse, re-sized the arch and the eagle (although we can't see the eagle), eliminated the Fascist-era date, and changed the "looks" of some of the figures.  Much was painted over.

Another, quite limited restoration took place in 1982.  The current restoration, which promises to restore the mural to something like its original state, began on July 1, 2015, just 6 weeks after our visit.  A reason to return.

Bill

Exiting the university through a Fascist-era arcade, its lines softened by the contemporary banners.

Pittura Metafisica: an Exploration of Metaphysical Painting

Albert Savinio, "Objects Abandoned in the Forest," 1928.  Timelessness achieved through a blending of the primeval forest with metallic-looking objects, many of modern design.   Savinio was de Chirico's brother.  

de Chirico, "Malinconia," ("Melancholy")
 1912

For the past six weeks we've been wrestling, on and off, with the idea of "Metaphysical Painting," spurred by the comprehensive Giorgio Morandi retrospective here in Rome. The term was originally Italian--Pittura Metafisica--having been invented by Giorgio de Chirico and long associated with de Chirico and the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà whom de Chirico met in Ferrara in 1917.  (De Chirico was born in Greece in 1886, lived in Italy beginning in 1909 and specifically in Rome from 1944 until his death in 1978.) The standard take on Metaphysical Painting, then, is that it was a short-lived "movement"--coinciding with the 2nd decade of the 20th century--and dominated by de Chirico and Carrà.

Some authorities include the still-life paintings of Giorgio Morandi, but only those done between 1918 and 1922, when the artist was doing self-consciously metaphysical work, including "Metaphysical Still Life" (1918, left).



Less often, some others are admitted to the metaphysical pantheon, including Felici Casorati, Massimo Campigli, George Grosz and Filippo de Pisis. The first metaphysical painting was de Chirico's "l'enigma di un pomeriggio d'autunno" ("The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon"), accomplished in Florence in 1910 after the artist experienced an epiphany at Santa Croce.

Carrà, "The Metaphysical Muse," 1917
Universal mannequin, dressed as
tennis player

A general sense of Metaphysical Painting can be gleaned from the words and phrases used to describe and characterize the paintings: "dreamlike imagery," "impossible linear perspectives," an "almost architectural sense of stillness" (said to derive from Renaissance art), "eerie mood," "strange artificiality," "haunted streets one might encounter in dreams," "featureless mannequins."  There is general agreement that there is something disquieting about the work, that it speaks of "sorrow, disorientation, [and] nostalgia," that it offers "a world estranged from man."  Art historian Mariana Aguirre adds that metaphysical painting involved a change in what we understand an artist to be.  The standard idea is that the artist is a craftsman, learned in the styles, techniques and history that go with the trade.  The metaphysical artist is, instead, a "thinker and privileged seer," a self-conscious intellectual.

That all rings true to us, and these descriptive, and sometimes analytical, phrases may be all we need, or want, to understand the phenomenon.  But in the interest of clarifying--or one might say, murkifying--Metaphysical Painting, we found ourselves wanting to know about metaphysics.  Just what is metaphysics, anyway?

Franz Marc, "The Shepherds," 1912.  The horse is every horse,
the shepherds stripped to their naked essence, outside of time.

Well, it's not physics.  Although both physics and metaphysics seek to examine and explain things, physics (and science generally) wants empirical answers--proof--while metaphysics looks for "underlying principles that give rise to the unified natural world."  Put another way, metaphysics looks beyond or beneath science to observe something more fundamental.  On the other hand, it seems obvious that there are similarities between the breadth and timing of the painterly inquiries of de Chirico and others, and the scientific efforts of Einstein to explain the nature of matter.  

The word "unified" in "unified natural world" is important, because metaphysicians believe that there are "hidden connections between things," connections our senses tell us must and do exist, but which we do not and cannot see.  (There is something new-agey in that, something close to or bound up with religion, but we'll have to abandon that line of inquiry and go on.) 

Massimo Campigli, "The Gypsies," 1928.
Gypsies, acqueducts, a game of cards.
What's happened to time?

How can "things" be connected?  The answer to that question has to do with "space" and "time" and the relationship between space and time.  Normally we privilege--that is, favor, and emphasize--the present, and so do our painters, usually, painting (for example) a picture of people on a boat having a good time [Renoir's "Luncheon of the Boating Party"]--at a particular moment in the present, or the past.  Metaphysics takes a different approach.

Perhaps, it hypothesizes, space and time don't depend on people at all.  Maybe space and time are substances that exist "independently" of their inhabitants.  If so, one can imagine--indeed, one can have--things from one "time" in the same frame, the same picture, the same space, as things from another time.  Of course, something like that happens in an antique shop, but for metaphysics there isn't really "another" time.  Indeed, time may not "pass"; past and present are one.  Stasis--or a sense of stasis--reigns.  

Mario Sironi, "Malinconia," 1927.   Modern man/woman,
trapped between the present and the aqueduct past.

Although Carrà was a Futurist and had much to do with metaphysical painting, it seems to us that the Futurists' sense of time was different.  Futurism wanted to show people engaged in a particular act at a particular time: a soccer player kicking a ball, a bicyclist riding, a plane in flight.  In contrast, metaphysical painters a) removed man b) deleted the privileged present, suggesting a unity of past and present, and c) eliminated movement, emphasizing a stasis designed to evoke the eternal, the mysterious, the ultimately unknowable core of the universe.   Stasis is central to de Chirico's work, as is the fusion of time(s), signified by his placement of Greek or Roman forms in the modern space of a 20th-century city.  

Poster for the German expressionist film,
"The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," 1921

Why the 1910s?  For one thing, plumbing the depths for the "real" truth was part of the spirit of the age--for Einstein in physics, for Freud in psychoanalysis, for de Chirico in painting.  In addition, the heyday of metaphysical painting covers, and doubtless exists as a comment on, the decade of the Great War.  That said, much work in a metaphysical vein was done after 1920, and not only by painters such as Grosz and Alberto Savinio. The "impossible linear perspectives" of de Chirico appear in German expressionist cinema throughout the 1920s.

The use of metaphysical ideas in a contemporary painting.

It is common to run across recent works of art with metaphysical content.  Indeed, the apartment we inhabited recently had two of them: one a de Chiricoesque treatment that features a variety of forms, most of them geometric, isolated and yet somehow unified, suspended against a somewhat mysterious blue/green background.  In the other (right), two children sleep in a room whose shape has been distorted, perhaps to emphasize children's fear of the dark or being in bed. In this sense--the sense that metaphysical features can be and still are being used to achieve a goal, the metaphysical is still with us.




Similarly, today's graphic artist might employ the design sensibilities of the 1960s to attract buyers to a new line of bell-bottom jeans or mini-skirts.  Or, more germane, an advertising agency could employ a certain degree of metaphysical distortion of space to create a poster for a film noir production.  But to use metaphysical artistic practices is different from engaging metaphysical concepts and questions in the way that the founders or early practitioners did.  So it could be said that metaphysical art was significant conceptually only in its early years--certainly the decade of the 1910s, with declining intensity and curiosity in the 1920s and 1930s.  Indeed, metaphysical painting in Italy was under attack as early as 1917, when the term "metafisico" began to be used negatively. In an era of strong nationalist sentiment, the movement was vulnerable because its Italian roots were suspect.  Others saw it as overly intellectual (and perhaps not masculine enough for the Fascists), and one influential critic described it as "illustration" rather than painting.  

Bill  

de Chirico, "Red Tower," 1913

The 6-legged dog: the story of Eni's famous logo

Eni's 6-legged dog, on a gas pump at a station on Rome's tangenziale, 2014

If you've motored around Italy for any length of time, you're familiar with one of the nation's most well-known logos: the 6-legged dog--part dog and dragon, actually--that breathes fire.  It's the logo for Eni--Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi--the enormous Italian oil and gas company, founded in February 1953 and headquartered in Rome.

A bit of romance while filling up

The story of the logo is well known, but too good not to tell again.  In 1952, with Eni's founding just around the corner, the company's CEO-to-be, Enrico Mattei, was convinced that the country needed to be sold on the idea that the oil fields of the Po Valley were sufficient to fuel Italy's industrial boom.  To find the right symbol for that effort, he offered 10 million lire as the prize in a competition to design logos for two products: the gasoline known as Supercortemaggiore, after the best known of the oilfields; and Agipgas, the company's gasoline outlets. The jury was composed of some of the most creative artistic minds of the generation: Gio Ponti, Mario Sironi, Mino Maccari and Antonio Baldini.  

The winner of the Supercortemaggiore contest, chosen from over 4,000 entries, was the 6-legged dog, the vision of sculptor, artist, and designer Luigi Broggoni.  Within months it was widely disseminated, appearing in magazines and newspapers, on billboards, and on the company's gas stations.  

An Agip station at Cortemaggiore, mid-1950s

Indeed, it quickly came to stand for a new type of gas station, high modernist in design and offering restaurant services as well as "powerful Italian petrol."  

Ettore Scola--soon to be directing some of Italy's best known films but then writing copy in Agipgas' advertising department--invented the slogan "il cane a sei zampe fedele amico dell'uomo a quattro ruote": the six-legged dog, loyal friend of four-wheeled man.  Eni has suggested that the 6 legs represent the sum of the automobile's 4 wheels and the driver's 2 legs.  

The dog inside the square, 1972

Broggoni's design has been modified at least twice and probably several times.  In 1972, the Unimark agency, working on turning the logo into a trademark, put the dog into a yellow square with rounded corners, a solution that required shortening the dog somewhat.  In a 1998 or later treatment, the dog came out of the box.

Bill