BY ROBERT MELVILLE

THE exhibition of 20th-century Italian art which has just started on a tour of eight public galleries in the north of England is the most ambitious exhibition of its kind that has ever gone out to the provinces. It opened at Wakefield City Art Gallery in April, and will be seen at Liverpool, Salford, Scarborough, Hull, Huddersfield, Newcastle and York. In all probability it will also be seen at Nottingham, Bristol, Bedford and Brighton, and towns in the southern region before it finally returns to London sometime in 1955.

It surveys an aspect of the development of modern art which defers only to the school of Paris in creative richness, and it performs its task with an authority which might suggest that it has been assembled in Italy, under official patronage, but the surprising fact is that, although there are no less than one hundred and fifty items in the exhibition, they have been selected from the collection of Mr Eric Estorick, who has made his home in this country. The exhibition includes not only oils, drawings and prints, but a number of sculptures. (A dozen works in the show belong to Mr Donald M. Blinken, who also shares Mr Estorick's enthusiasm for contemporary Italian painting). Most of the work of organizing the tour has been carried out by Mr Estorick and by Miss Helen Kapp of Wakefield, one of the most vigorous of young museum directors who have been quietly revolutionizing our provincial galleries since the war. The Arts Council has accepted responsibility for transportation between towns. All this is, I think, a clear indication of the value to the community of the public-spirited private collector.

Eric Estorick is an American writer, forty-one years old, married to an Englishwoman, and with two children. He is the editor of a series of volumes on the British Commonwealth published in America, and has written a biography of Sir Stafford Cripps, and a study of political changes in the British Empire.

As far as the two great Italian schools of the second decade of the 29th-century are concerned-Futurism and the Scuola Metafisica—most of the key works were already publicly owned and out of circulation before Estorick began to collect, yet he has been able to acquire enough works of this period to convey a sense of the immense influence of these two movements on almost all subsequent Italian art. The only modern Italian painter with an international reputation who was not influenced by them was Modigliani. Even so, his work is unmistakably Italian as the masterpiece of drawing called Caryatid in the Estorick collection eloquently confirms.

Futurism is represented in the exhibition by Severini, Soffici, and the greatest of the Futurists, Boccioni. The Severini group includes the brilliant Boulevard exhibited in the first Futurist Exhibition held in Paris in 1912, and a Dancer painted a year later a fandango of tubular forms and feathers, dedicated to Marinetti, the theatrically violent leader of the Futurist movement. The Soffici is a 1912 landscape with the greens and browns and brick reds of early cubism, and the heaving and furrowed forms of Futurism. The spirit of the fine, explosive drawing of horses made by Boccioni in 1912 emerges again in all its strength and assurance in Marini's recent bronze of a horse with head wildly turning.

If the Futurists were discovering formal equivalents for actions and sensations, the aim of the members of the Scuolo Metafisica was to create an imagery intensified by philosophical reverie and filled with spiritual preoccupaations. The three artists represented in the exhibition who were actually members (it was very short-lived as a group manifestation) arc Chirico, Carrà and Morandi. Carrà had been a Futurist, and the delightful picture by him called La Stella painted in 1916, a year before the Scuolo Metafisica was formed, is a happy fusion of his cool, simplified forms and his earlier desire to create lines of force and emblems of energy. The show also contains a lithograph of the most famous of Carrà's metaphysical paintings, The Engineer's Mistress dated 1921, the last year in which the group functioned. It owes much to early paintings by Chirico, but is a rationalization of their imagery and does
not allow room for the atmosphere of presentiment which distinguishes Chirico's best work.

Morandi is the most consistent of loth-century Italian artists, and is generally considered by the Italians to be their greatest living painter. In some ways he is the most enigmatic painter of our time : throughout his life he has been content to paint a line of simple objects in space—bottles and jars and boxes-and yet has never repeated himself. His adherence to the Scuolo Metafisica hardened his forms for a year or two but they returned to their muted light and their silent communing almost of their own accord. One thinks of these paintings as a series of little wedding-groups of objects, but they do not disclose their subtlety to a casual glance, and it is to be feared that their qualities may be overlooked in the burly-burly of contrasted styles and vigorous personalities. It would be a pity if this were to be the fate of the lovely examples in the Estorick collection. It is the largest group of his works that has so far been seen in England, and includes rare examples of his drawing and engraving.
Ironically enough, the greatest works of the Scuolo Metafisica were painted by its founder, Giorgio de Chirico, before the group carne into being. The pictures he painted between 1910 and 1917 remain the most inspired and mysterious series of pictures created in our time. They have been as influential as the paintings of Picasso, and may yet exert even greater influence on human ways of perceiving reality as the secrets of this visual poetry are unfolded to future generations. Metaphysical Family illustrated here is a good example of a later period of his work, when he was dramatising his metaphysical preoccupations and painting figures `drunk with thoughts' as the critic San Lazzaro puts it.

Fortunately, some splendid examples of Chirico's early period are on view, and one of them, a painting of a biscuit watched over by a large drawing of an eye, is a masterpiece, and a superlative example of his genius for turning anxiety, that most insidious of human maladies, into a means of converting common objects into mysterious symbols.

The painter Filippo de Pisis used to claim that he was a member of the Scuolo Metafisica, and he certainly wrote about its aims while it was an active group, but he is an Impressionist painter, and something of the spirit of Guardi hovers over his best work. He too is well represented in the Estorick collection, as are Mafai, Tosi and Rosai, all distinguished painters who have remained outside the modern movement.

Girl with a Locket, one of the colour plates illustrating this article, is amongst the noblest of Massimo Campigli's paintings. On the formal side, Campigli's work is Parisbred, but the single `thought' that has sustained his entire oeuvre came to him in the atmosphere of the Scuolo Metafisica. He has taken the notion of man as `clay' quite literally, and has had a vision of the human form being baked very gently and lovingly by the sun into the consistency of a terracotta. Estorick has many of his works, including entrancing crowd scenes which turn theatres and pleasure steamers into gay mausoleums of mummified women. His art is a modern reflection of that smiling art of the Etruscan tombs that D. H. Lawrence loved so much.

Another artist who sometimes conveys this quite unmorbid sense of the tomb is Sironi. He paints some of his figures as if they were petrified and had been installed in niches in the sides of caves. He was briefly influenced by both the Futurists and the Metaphysicals. His studies of industrial slums have a sombre, oppressive grandeur imbued with the Scuolo Metafisica's intense feeling for significant stillness.

There is much else in this exhibition: the work of the fantasists, headed by the delicate art of Music; the strong romantic draughtsmanship of Vespignani and Muccini; the flowing brushwork and brilliant characterization in the paintings of Fausto Pirandello, son of the dramatist; the realism of Cassinari and Birolli; the controlled sentiment of the American girl Beverley Pepper, who has made her home in Italy ; and, above all, the sculpture of Martini, Marini, Manzù, Greco, and Scalini (brilliant young wife of Campigli, which has given back to Italy her old preeminence in bronze sculpture.

When I asked Mr Estorick why he collected the work of so many Italians he said, `I believe that Italy has produced a number of really good artists in this century, who have not lost touch with humanity and human ideas. They have never retreated completely into psychoanalysis or mere decoration. Their work has kept contact with the living world and is therefore in the great tradition of art.'


Illustrations


GINO SEVERINI. Boulevard. 1911

GIORGIO DE CHIRICO. Metaphysical family. 1926

GIORGIO MORANDI. Still life. 1921

MASSIMO CAMPIGLI. Girl with a Locket. 1930

FAUSTO PIRANDELLO. Man with Striped Pyjama jacket. 1952

MARIO SIRONI. Urban Landscape. 1924

ANTONIO MUSIC. Horses and Landscape. 1952

AMEDEO MODIGLIANI. Caryatid. Crayon and pencil

UMBERTO BOCCIONI (1882-1916). Dinamismo plastico. Cavallo e case. 1911. India ink