this question has to be answered using the APA format and between 500 words. The text book used is “The Humanities Through the Arts” by lee Jacobs, 10th edition.

Peter Blume Nature and Metamorphosis

depending on endsheet color, set gray as with other

gray type? - SEK

Peter Blume Nature and Metamorphosis

edited by Robert Cozzolino

with contributions by

Samantha Baskind Sergio Cortesini Robert Cowley David McCarthy Sarah Vure

Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 2014

59

Sergio Cortesini

Battling over The Eternal City

When Peter Blume unveiled The Eternal City (plate 41) at the Julien Levy gallery

in New York in 1937, its reception was far from consensual. Blume’s harsh and

complex allegory against Italian fascism and its il Duce—which took nearly three

years to complete—left many lukewarm. It ignited a debate polarized between

supporters of the antifascist engagement of intellectuals—some of whom found

themselves ill at ease with Blume’s stylistic choice—and detractors of the picture

on aesthetic grounds. The debate revamped in 1939, when the jury for the 16th

Biennial at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., rejected the picture officially

on the basis of aesthetic criteria, but probably for political opportunity. The refusal

provoked a storm of polemics, articles in the cultural pages of newspapers, and

a compensatory one-picture Salon du refusé. Months later, the painting was also

rejected for an exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. Even though a handful of

Blume’s peers considered it a remarkable work, Blume would wait until the begin-

ning of World War II to see his magnum opus canonized, and the end of 1942 for

its belated consecration, when it was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art

(MoMA).

In the case of The Eternal City, the heated political climate of the late 1930s

and the formalist concerns about the effectiveness of its style must be considered

simultaneously. Blume did not provide an easy formula for his exegetes; instead

he offered a multilayered political statement crafted in a painterly tour de force

that eschewed expectations. In fact, aside from the title’s ostensible allusion to

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Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City60 61

sight are engaged in actions that will lead to the overthrow of fascism and a demo-

cratic rebirth.

The ruined scenery over which il Duce oscillates, while alluding to the historic

layers of Rome, symbolizes a moral devastation. The monuments exalted by Mus-

solini as witnesses to a glorious past that ideally would continue into the new

Impero, appear as the nest of a hideous dummy and a dangerous cultural alibi.

The fragmented marble statue of two embracing lovers, mingled with architectural

rubble on the ground, deny humanness and love in a fascist regime, despite a

policy of demographic growth and subsidies to large families. Farther left, on a

broken column, an elderly woman deformed and crippled by arthritis reaches for

alms (fig. 1). Mocking the fascist legislation on social security (one of the achieve-

ments of the welfare state of the period), as well as the new generations that were

bred by the regime to be phalanxes of regimented youth, strong-willed workers

and prolific mothers, Blume conceded a soloist role to a symbol of physical decay

and social failure.

Behind the beggar, a ruined structure in red brickwork and dark stones houses

an illuminated niche that contains a polychrome Ecce Homo encircled by ex-votos

(fig. 2). A novice friar and a woman kneel in distracted prayer at an adjacent altar,

engulfed in the half-darkness, suggesting the conventionality of church attendance

in Italian society. Christ is adorned with showy jewels, including a gem-studded Figure 1 Detail of plate 41, The Eternal City,

1934–37

Rome and fascist Italy and the painting’s commentary on the Mussolinian dic-

tatorship, its manipulation of history and religion, and its incitement of Italian

rebellion (as Cécile Whiting has suggested), on a deeper level The Eternal City

may be a warning against fascism as a global threat with American ramifications.a

Moreover, the question of whether a highly finished representational mode (even

one as antirealist as Blume’s) was appropriate for the embedded political critique,

or immediate enough, sheds light on larger modernist debates and assumptions

about style; however, those criticisms of Blume’s style were deceitful and prepos-

terous. Critics reacted politically to The Eternal City, even if officially concealing

themselves behind an aesthetic lens. In sum, the reception of the picture—origi-

nally more varied than Whiting has admitted—cannot be framed within a rigid

schema. It reflects a morphing canon, one determined both by the fluid aesthetics

and domestic political scene of the period and by changing foreign relations with

Italy. From 1937 to 1942, the appraisal of the painting mirrored the shift away

from isolationism in the United States as well as the general shift in public opinion

about the dangers of foreign fascism to the American way of life. As the United

States entered the war against the Axis powers, all disquisitions about the formal

and aesthetic probity that The Eternal City had aroused when it was first shown to

gallery cognoscenti must have seemed futile. The pugnacious quality of its almost

hallucinatory image, strident colors, and crisp forms was eventually acknowledged

and nearly enlisted as an Allied weapon in the Italian battlefield.

The Eternal City is the result of a mental recombination of cityscapes and things

seen, as well as events lived, by Blume between October 1932 and spring 1933,

when he visited Italy on a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship.b The scene is

dominated by the grotesque green head of a jack-in-the-box Mussolini loosely

inspired by a portrait included in the pivotal political exhibition Mostra della Riv-

oluzione Fascista, which opened in Rome in October 1932 to celebrate the tenth

anniversary of Mussolini’s rise to power. Blume was a witness to that landmark

propaganda event, which occurred at a time when the regime was firmly estab-

lished. The head of il Duce, with its bulging eyes and protruding crimson lips

that ridicule Mussolini’s mimic, oscillates above a scenery of ruins—partly drawn

from the archaeological digs of the Roman Fora, partly made up—and modern

buildings, framed at the horizon by mountainous peaks. The sarcastic tone of the

title alludes to the centuries-old myth of Rome as a beacon of civilization and the

antifascist polemic are blatant; however, Blume clarified the comprehension of the

interlocking secondary scenes in articles and interviews.c

Both thematically and visually the picture is divided into two sectors, in and out

of Mussolini’s visual cone, and either of them presents iconographic subgroups.

The portion falling under Mussolini’s gaze—the marble fragments, a beggar, a

niche with Christ as Ecce Homo, and the general context of ruins—exposes the

insincerity of fascist ideology and its social bankruptcy. The various personages

amid the ruined corridors and the peripheral parts outside of Mussolini’s paralyzing

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Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City62 63

maintaining the status quo. (Christ also wears an ankle bracelet with

a lictors’ fasces, the emblem of the fascist party.) The opulence of the

shrine, with its stagelike open curtain, glowing interior, jewelry, and

other bourgeois accessories (the lorgnette and military adornments),

contrasts with the poverty of the beggar. The latter is a counterpart

to Christ, to whom she is visually aligned: she echoes the seated

position, bent head, objects hanging from the hands (an inexpensive

rosary for her, jewelry for Christ), and facial contraction. Her sufferings

as an aging, deprived woman suggest an earthly, politically induced,

Passion.

In the ruined, half-buried corridors in the midsection of the paint-

ing two isolated men who epitomize the two faces of fascism—a Black

Shirt and a capitalist wearing leather gloves (hypocritically pretending

that he does not dirty his hands with the regime)—look toward the

dictator. Further away, a line of men, women, and children crawl up

from the end of the corridors to the plaza—a representation of the

Italian aspiration for freedom. In this central area—an imaginary view

of the Roman Forum, framed at the right by a building reminiscent

of the Palazzo Senatorio—a crowd confronts the mounted police,

encouraging them to desert their posts. Drawing from episodes of

Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution that describe the begin-

ning of the insurrection in Petrograd and the breakdown of military

discipline, Blume painted two women crawling past the mounted

policemen (a third one grabs a policeman’s leg) to reach a group of soldiers whose

ranks are breaking down in contradictory behaviors.e The transition from the fore-

front to the distant candy-sugared alpine landscape represents the passage from

the inferno of fascism to the paradise outside of Rome, via a progressive awaken-

ing of consciousness and popular revolt.

Despite the usual interpretation of The Eternal City as exemplary of Ameri-

can “social surrealism,” its genesis echoes the report of the first “metaphysical”

transfiguration of Florence’s piazza Santa Croce, which occurred to Giorgio de

Chirico one autumn afternoon in 1910.f The vision of The Eternal City also came

into being during a stroll amid Roman ruins: “One late afternoon… . There was a

strange light. . . . The idea of the shrine and the rocks and Mussolini and the whole

general background came together through the light over the Forum.”g Indeed,

The Eternal City is a transfiguration of a plurality of visual and cultural experiences

(travel to Italy and political opinions), tourist emotions (the archaeological and

architectural strata of Rome and the theatricality of Baroque sacred art), fantasy

details, and personal references (the artist’s dog, the willow on his property in

Gaylordsville, Connecticut, and the alpine peaks drawn from travel in Wyoming).

What differentiates Blume’s “enigma” from de Chirico’s is the political content

and narrative embedded in the American painting. Blume’s work, however, betrays

Figure 3 Jacopo Maria Foggini (1620s–1684),

Gesù Nazareno, 1654, painted wood, Church of

San Marco, Florence, Italy

cross and watches. He holds a walking cane in his hands and two swords rest

against his legs. Silver hearts, a theater lorgnette, a small coffer, and a medal lay

at his feet, while another sword and military epaulets hang above him. Here Blume

re-elaborated a side-chapel in the church of San Marco in Florence, but morphed

the expression of deeply human and dignified suffering in the original Ecce Homo

into a figure overly pathetic and verging on the grotesque (fig. 3). Like other

Americans, Blume was impressed by the theatricality of counter-reformed votive

sculptures and popular piety in Catholic churches. Similarly, Nathaniel Hawthorne,

who lived in Florence in 1858, was unimpressed with the more chastised frescoes

by Fra Angelico in San Marco and was attracted by the same statue of Christ—par-

ticularly his expression, the blood drops painted over the body, the offered jewels

and watches, the candles, and a nearby kneeling faithful.d

The epaulets and arms were possibly absent in Hawthorne’s times, as he did

not describe them in his writings. They were placed at the statue during the sub-

sequent seventy years as ex-votos of war veterans (San Marco is located in front

of the local Comando Militare). But whether they were actually there or imagined,

Blume added to their ambiguity, reworking the broken cane that serves as a mock-

scepter in the Ecce Homo into a dandyish walking cane with a knob. Such modifi-

cation underscored the complicity between the church, militarism, and fascism in Figure 2 Detail of plate 41, The Eternal City,

1934–37

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Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City64 65

Blume’s engagement in the intellectual activism of the period

further explains other details in the painting. The absence of a vis-

ible reference to the Italian occupation of Ethiopia is noteworthy

for a work whose title evokes imperial Rome and was executed

between October 1934 and July 1937,ae a period in which virtu-

ally all American newspapers were covering the Italo-Ethiopian

diplomatic crisis (from the end of 1934) and the subsequent inva-

sion of Ethiopia (October 1935–May 1936). The omission further

suggests that under the guise of an attack on Mussolini, Blume

had addressed fascism as a larger phenomenon with American

accomplices. The tiny figure of the tourist leaning from the bal-

ustrade under the palazzo and gazing through the lorgnette at

the group of rebels—defined by literary critic Kenneth Burke as

an “American tourist viewing the central drama with a collector’s

interest”—alludes to the inadequacy of American isolationism

(fig. 5).af Her inclusion is Blume’s subtle, but explicit, comment

on the Neutrality Act of 1935, which enforced an embargo on

the sale of arms, ammunition, and implements of war to both

belligerents, de facto preserving American business interests (oil

and other goods) in Italy.

However, beginning in July 1936 the major concern of radi-

cal and liberal Americans shifted from the fate of Ethiopians to

the Spanish Civil War. Once again the provisos of the Neutrality

Act hampered the defense of Loyalist Spain, whereas the insur-

gents led by Francisco Franco were backed by Italian and Nazi

military aid. Blume added the monks fleeing with the cross and

frightened by the impending insurrection at the beginning of

the Spanish war (fig. 6).ag Actually, the far-right coalition that was

backing Franco preserved the association between the Roman

Catholic Church and the state, and Franco later assumed the

Figure 5 Detail of plate 41, The Eternal City,

1934–37

Figure 6 Detail of plate 41, The Eternal City,

1934–37

a superficial understanding of Italian politics and society, despite the

specificity of its iconography. Blume admitted that “a lot of it had

nothing to do with Italy, nothing I’d ever seen in Italy.”h His sojourn,

funded for a study project on Giotto and Renaissance frescoes, was

essentially one of visual education, not of political inquiry. To be sure

he could not help but interact to some degree with Italian society

and institutions once there, yet the vision of The Eternal City falls

into the didactic. The beggar seems a picturesque topos of genre

painting or tourist-attracting folklore morphed into nightmare (fig.

4). To his own admission, Blume, initially a prejudiced visitor, was

kindly assisted by Black Shirts in several circumstances (“Black Shirts

became my friends, giving me directions in the streets, etc… and

were always helpful”),i but predictably the Black Shirt in the painting

is a thug with a depraved expression, and the capitalist is fat and

unctuous. According to canonic Marxist social theory, the church and

capitalism are allied to fascism, both serving as instruments of social

control and injustice.

However, as Whiting underscored, Blume was a moderate pro-

gressive sympathizer, rather than an opinionated party member. The

Eternal City is the only overtly political work of his career (unlike the

essentially political production of communist artists like William Grop-

per and Hugo Gellert). To his own admission, Blume “didn’t know

very much about the politics or economics of anything.”aj He was more struck

and instinctively annoyed by the cult of Mussolini and his braggadocio, than he

was inclined to analysis.aa On the other hand, through his Italian acquaintances

Blume became aware that unlike Hitler’s Nazism, Mussolini’s ambivalence toler-

ated margins of dissent. He was not persuaded that the Italian regime should be

condemned on the basis of abstract democratic values or American constitutional

liberties: “It would have been ridiculous for me to say that they don’t have this, that

or the other that we have in the U.S., because it’s obviously a different situation.”ab

In doing so he inadvertently espoused the beliefs of American isolationists, if not

pro-fascists.

Despite Blume’s candid confession, which proves at least some ideological

relativism, The Eternal City is considered his contribution to the Popular Front,

the nonsectarian coalition of Marxist and liberal parties against the spread of fas-

cism and bellicism worldwide. While he worked on the painting, Blume joined the

first meetings of the American Artists’ Congress (AAC), the association of artists

and critics that was established in 1935 as the cultural expression of the Popular

Front.ac In February 1936 he lectured on “The Artist Must Choose” at its assembly,

urging artists to abandon their ivory tower and engage in the fight for civilization

and a better social order against fascist barbarism and the “symptoms of incipient

Fascism” in the United States.ad

Figure 4 “The New Way to Keep a Travel Diary,”

advertisement for Ciné-Kodak published in Vanity

Fair, May, 1931, 97. Used with permission of

Eastman Kodak Company

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Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City66 67

the economy and a known Nazi-fascism sympathizer. Not surprisingly, a staunch

defender of The Eternal City after its rejection from the Corcoran was the New Deal

expert of labor legislation (and Loyalist Spain sympathizer), Heber Blankenhorn, a

life-long friend of Blume’s.

The Eternal City was unveiled at the Julien Levy gallery in New York on Novem-

ber 24, 1937. That Blume had been working for some time on an ambitious picture

was no secret in art circles, and Alfred H. Barr Jr. had hoped to include it in the

1936 MoMA exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism,ba but he had to settle for

the drawing Elemosina. As early as October 1935, a study of il Duce’s head had

been published in the communist publication The New Masses (fig. 10).bb Capital-

izing on expectations, Levy and Blume mounted a show centered on the single

picture that would include preparatory drawings, and they priced it 15,000 dollars,

a considerable sum at the time. The event attracted such large crowds that a queue

formed in front of the painting.bc

However, unconditional appraisals were few. A real tribute came from The

Nation, which included Blume in its “Honor Roll” for bringing “the best of the

painting tradition to the antifascist cause,” alongside a list of politicians and intel-

lectuals who had defended civil rights, or countered Nazi-fascism. The Eternal City

also had a laudatory review in the Soviet magazine International Literature, thanks

to American contributor Isidor Schneider, who cited it as an example of refined

style and symbolism espoused to antifascism and preferable to the trite workers’

imagery that usually illustrated the magazine.bd The majority of other columnists

Figure 8 Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957),

Impossible Interviews no. 4, Governor Huey Long

vs. Benito Mussolini, published in Vanity Fair,

March, 1932, 40. Harry ransom Center, The

University of Texas at Austin, Nicholas Murray

Collection, 66.2.71 © Estate of Miguel Covarrubias

Figure 9 Miguel Covarrubias (1904–1957),

Herr Adolf Hitler and Huey S. (“Hooey”) Long

versus Josef Stalin and Benito Mussolini, published

in Vanity Fair, June, 1933, private collection

© Estate of Miguel Covarrubias

title Caudillo de España, Por la Gracia de Dios (Leader of Spain, By the grace of

God). More generally, the friars reinforce the allusion to the complicity between

the church, capitalism, and fascism as a power block.

That allusion applied to American Catholics in particular, possibly even more

than to Italians. In Italy the Vatican had endorsed the dictatorship with the 1929

concordat, deceiving itself that it could Catholicize the fascist state. However the

relations proved strained (in 1931 Mussolini closed the clubs of the Azione Cat-

tolica, which he suspected of harboring political dissent), and fascist ideology

remained at its core anti-Catholic. Instead, because of their cultural background

and patriotism, Italian Americans were more easily associated with Roman Catholi-

cism and fascist leanings. Such impressions were indirectly fueled by father Charles

Coughlin, an influential CBS radio preacher, pro-fascist, anti-Semite, and propo-

nent against the New Deal (a vignette in The New Masses in 1937 depicts him with

a swastika, instead of a cross, attached to his necklace).ah

Indeed, fascism was a specter on the domestic front. Not by chance, in 1936

the AAC adopted a motion to support a film based on It Can’t Happen Here by

Sinclair Lewis (the project was aborted under pressure from Will Hays), while it

protested the production of movies with anti-labor, antidemocratic, and pro-fascist

themes. Describing the establishment of a para-fascist regime by president Berze-

lius Windrip (in whom allusions to Louisiana senator Huey Long or Kansas preacher

Gerand B. Winrod could be ascertained), It Can’t Happen Here embodied the fear

of a dictatorial drift in America. The presence of Mussolini in The Eternal City is

also in line with the long-standing artistic treatment of il Duce, one that depicted

him as the virtual godfather of all authoritarian temptations in American domestic

politics. For example, Diego Rivera included him in the historical mural cycle Por-

trait of America at the New Workers School in New York (1933), while caricaturist

Miguel Covarrubias featured Mussolini in two of his famed “impossible interviews”

with populist Huey Long in Vanity Fair (March 1932 and June 1933) in order to

lampoon—and at the same time warn against—his Napoleon complex (fig. 7).ai

Even the soldiers’ uniforms in the painting elude any Italian specificity. Their

helmets are either British (from the drawing Insurrection, or The Soldiers, 1933;

fig. 8) or German (from the actual picture), suggesting the growing concerns about

Nazism as Blume was working on the painting (Japan, the other menace, was

evoked by the dragon on the bellows that forms Mussolini’s neck). The British-

looking helmets can be explained with Blume’s words: “Fascism was a device

which had been sold to Capitalists . . . and it was absolutely the naked truth. It

happened in Italy and . . . Germany. . . . The capitalists in England and France [and

the United States, one may argue] all contributed to this great menace.”bj Conse-

quently—and coherently with the doctrine of the Popular Front—countering fascist

sympathies in the United States meant sustaining New Deal legislation against

big business laissez-faire and fighting its critics, including fascistoids such as Wil-

liam Randolph Hearst, the archenemy of union rights and federal regulation over

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City68 69

political system without attending to the procedures of the States of which we

have, at the most, but a hearsay knowledge.”bh

Blume received little support, even from those considered to be his natural pub-

lic—fellow members of the Popular Front. Marxist critic Jerome Klein of the pacifist

and antifascist New York Post—and one of the organizers of the first AAC confer-

ence—played down The Eternal City from both an ideological and an aesthetic

point of view. Klein conveyed that after three years of work Blume had attacked a

paper dictator: “It’s rebellion in miniature, . . . not in dramatic focus. . . . Only a live

monster can make one’s blood rise.” And in discussing the painterly quality of the

work, Klein did not conceal his disapproval of the “indigestible” green Mussolini:

“And if one wishes to sit coolly and paint the old stones of Rome, then it were

better to do so without spooks.”bi Writing in the communist Daily Worker, Jacob

Kainen (then on the editorial board of Art Front) approved of the antifascist theme

but underscored the inability of the painterly finito to express social indignation,

adding maliciously that Blume demonstrated “the care of a jeweler rather than

the passion of a democrat.”cj In other words—Blume would later remark—“social

commentary, it could be done in the style of Daumier or Goya . . . , not in the style

of Van Eyck.”ca

In an open letter to Blume in Partisan Review, George L. K. Morris faulted the

painting for the mismatch between technical refinement and political content.

Blume, like Dalì, had proved an expert miniaturist, working on a smooth gesso

panel and never “slip[ping] a brush-stroke across a boundary.” However, according

to Morris, Blume’s limits lay in that very technicality: He had referenced the Quat-

trocento masters—in style and even iconography (with the ruins, Christ, foliage,

and clouds)—yet superficially, had failed to achieve the “internal vitality” of those

artists’ paintings. As Morris put it, he had only “half-digested the old aesthetic

devices” and his work looked “plastically dumb.” Morris elaborated that The Eter-

nal City lacked “the very impact of artist’s touch” that could have made “your work

. . . live more freely.” Further, in struggling with a misunderstood perfectionism,

Morris believed that Blume “falls completely into the mesh [the painting] excori-

ates.” In fact, fascism did praise traditionalism in art, and it “fears the genuine

contemporary spirit.” Therefore, the critic continued, Blume’s apery of museum-

honored painting could even gain him “a fat prize at the Munich Kunstpalast” by

Hitler himself, if only the painter substituted the head of Mussolini with the spirit

of the New Reich.cb

Criticism by Young, Klein, Kainen, and Morris, among others, was nothing more

than the development of an already standing debate that was carried on in The New

Masses, Art Front, Partisan Review, and other leftist or liberal organs—a debate

that centered on the adequacy and coherence of various stylistic options and sub-

ject matter for “advanced” or “revolutionary” art. Blume seemed to contradict the

consequentiality between political progressivism and aesthetic modernism, pos-

tulated on the basis of a vague intellectual parallelism. Comments regarding The

professed amazement for Blume’s technical craftsmanship, comparing it to the

Flemish masters or Dalì and conceding that the unveiling of the picture was a

unique event. However, when assessing Blume’s manual ability with the coherence

between style and content, their compass lost orientation.

Appraised visually, the color scheme and excessive complexity of the compo-

sition made the painting look unpleasant to reviewers. The chromatic contrasts

(the red lips upon the green face attached to a yellow bellows, the red brickwork

against the dark walls, or the bright shrine within a dark recess), which evoke the

political monstrosity of fascism, were perplexing to viewers. Emily Genauer, for

example, remarked on the lack of “plastic bigness” in Blume’s earlier works, indi-

cating that the intricate composition needlessly complicated comparatively more

effective newspaper vignettes.be However, beyond those considerations, most left-

ist and liberal reviews pivoted around this crux: to forge an attack on fascism in a

fastidiously crafted image seemed an inherent contradiction. Several reviews of

the work illustrate the terms of the polemic, offering an examination of the crucial

debate about politically progressive critique and aesthetic modernism, one that

bears some relevance to the wider question of the establishment of the modernist

canon after 1945. Stark Young of The New Republic saw a failure in the meticulous

workmanship and bright colors that ultimately caused “nothing but pleasure,”

rather than Blume’s intended indignation. To him, the artist should have either

renounced the craftsman’s refinement in order to sharpen the antifascist mes-

sage—and even force his style toward some “expression, in painting terms, of his

mood”—or resolved for a merely realist and descriptive painting.bf In other words,

Blume seemed pleased with his own manual ability and let it take precedence over

the subject matter.

A perplexed Edward Alden Jewell of the New York Times objected to the ideo-

logical cogency. According to the critic, Blume had turned into a socialist propa-

gandist, but his didacticism remained nebulous. It was unclear to him if Blume’s

jack-in-the-box Mussolini suggested that the dictator was “a self-sprung megalo-

maniac” or “a figurehead manipulated” by a social bloc; however, in both cases,

for Jewell Blume’s analysis lacked sociological insight, since a dictator could hardly

rise to power without social support, and yet that issue remained unexpressed.

Jewell also found the role of Christian religion insufficiently explained in Blume’s

work. Therefore, the painting, which aspired to be a “painted essay,” looked to

Jewell like a “stage prop,” while its invective would have been better conveyed

by any of the soapbox orators at anarchic-communist rallies in Union Square.bg

More polemically, Henri McBride of the New York Sun lamented that a young

American had devoted energy to satirizing a foreign leader. Exploiting a Gug-

genheim fellowship, McBride believed that Blume had acted as a “political spy,”

returning form Italy with an attack on Mussolini: “The scriptures recommend pluck-

ing the beam out of one’s own eye before attending to the motes in the orbs of

one’s neighbors, and heaven knows we have enough things to correct in our own

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City70 71

social denunciation. When Spain was under fascist siege, even Goya appeared as

the forerunner of militant artists and the critical consciousness of his own time.ch

The atmospheric hatching of Goya’s The Disasters of the War, his loose painterly

technique, and his brooding late dark paintings became a benchmark against

which the perplexity about Blume’s “Flemish” manner becomes comprehensible.

Another reason for the praise of a looser handling of paint was the infamous

ban on all forms of modernism in Nazi Germany, the aryanization of art collections,

and the mocking exhibition of “degenerate” art combined with “good” Aryan

art at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich in 1937, just four months before

the unveiling of The Eternal City. Those events had reinforced the syllogism that

the more vibrant the painterly technique (that is the more expressionist, direct,

instinctual, and lively), the more the work qualified as progressive and antifascist,

whereas the more meticulous and controlled the style, the more the work echoed

the hyper-traditionalism that Hitler appreciated.

It is well known that Georg Lukács had a different opinion, and in 1934 he con-

tended that expressionism, too, could be an accomplice of fascism, because its

idealist and subjective theory of consciousness led to an abstract and distorting

pseudo-critique of capitalism as well as affinities with the primordialist philoso-

phy and mysticism that were at the core of Nazism. Expressionism, indeed, was

accepted, if not cultivated, in the first years of Nazism, by no less than Joseph Goe-

bbels, who wrote an expressionist novel, collected expressionist art, and declared

that expressionism represented modern feeling, because it responded to the urge

to “build a new world from the inner being.” Alternatively, in 1938 Enrst Bloch

replicated that expressionism comprised revolutionary imagery, capturing the

fragmentary nature of modern society, and by inference its dialectic materialism.

ci The latter was, implicitly, the same point of view shared by critics who objected

to The Eternal City. In other words, they held that meticulously finished, “closed”

forms either expressed permanence or solidity—with all the conservative politi-

cal associations embedded in those notions—or academic conformism of art for

art’s sake, or at worst were dangerously similar to Nazi canons (as Morris perfidi-

ously underscored in claiming that Blume could be lauded in Munich). Moreover,

expressionism, pace Lukacs, was identified with the battle for democracy and free

creative life against dictatorship, as confirmed by MoMA’s highly publicized acqui-

sition in 1939 of five expressionist masterpieces that had been deaccessioned by

the Reich’s collections and were praised for both their aesthetic (museum quality)

and political probity (they were hailed as “refugees”).dj

The description of Blume as a pseudo-Flemish recalls another major artist of the

decade, Grant Wood, whom Kirstein infamously defined in Art Front as “An Iowa

Memling,” judging him a provincial cultural nationalist.da Kirstein attacked Wood

for the mannerism of his toylike trees and artificial-looking, “over-placid” rural

scenes that eschewed a truthful representation of the working conditions of the

farmland. Wood, and fellow painters who “swallow . . . a simple formula,” “neither

Eternal City betray concerns about the capability of modern art—as well as Blume’s

relative inability—to capture, respond to, and even propel the dialectic process of

contemporary historic events and class relations. Blume’s precisionism seemed at

odds with the concept that style mirrors a given social condition determined by

the subjacent economic structure, a tenet that he himself espoused in his speech

at the AAC: “Changes in the order of society have not only affected [painters’]

style and technique,” but also “all their peculiarities, their traditions, their general

outlook, are symptoms of how social conditions have molded them.”cc More spe-

cifically, the terminology used by critics—lack of “vitality,” “passion,” “directness,”

“energy,” “blood risings,” “impact,” and so on—suggests a canon of vital, bodily,

instinctual, and emotional involvement in the artistic practice, indicating a general

propensity for an expressionist mode (understood as a broad stylistic trend and

not just the Franco-German avant-grade).

For example, in January 1935 Kainen, writing on “revolutionary art” in The Art

Front, had already argued that classicism dampened the “emotional impact” of

painting, and he had praised the expressionism of lithographer Harry Sternberg

for its “power and passion.”cd Klein had also contributed to the debate by attack-

ing surrealism, which he considered to be a bourgeois and futile product based

on the tenuous principle that discrediting reality as illusion was a sufficient revo-

lutionary act.ce Dalì’s assumption that the paranoiac-critic method could unveil

the perverse sexual drive lurking beneath bourgeois normality, and that fascism

could be interpreted as the social manifestation of a sexual perversion (as art his-

torian Robin Adèle Greeley has recently noted), was dubiously held as efficacious

for the antifascist cause.cf Leftist critics—who were wary of surrealists in the first

place and considered their enigmatic compositions to be incomprehensible to the

masses—thought Dalì, the quintessential evasive genius, politically unreliable. In

December 1936 Schneider had even suggested in The New Masses that surrealism

had fascist leanings.cg And even if in 1936 Art Front took a more nuanced attitude

with regard to surrealism, Dalì remained irrecoverable. Too solipsist, eccentric in

his social behavior, and problematic in his sexual iconography, Dalì was hardy an

example of a committed artist, and therefore the comparison between Blume and

the Catalan painter, if only on technical grounds for their similar hyper-lucid style,

was hardy beneficial to Blume’s reputation.

On the other hand, Blume’s bitter remark that he was not forgiven for painting

in the style of Van Eyck instead of Goya, hits a point. At the height of the Spanish

Civil War, leftist Americans’ sympathy for Loyalist Spain fostered a reappraisal of

the “expressionist” modes—and the media of graphic arts—of artists like Daumier,

Grosz, and Dix, who were celebrated for depicting outcasts and the oppressed.

Daumier had been the great realist of the French proletariat, and Dix and Grosz

had been the poignant anti-militarists and chastisers of a horrid bourgeoisie. In

1936 the AAC boycotted the Venice Biennale and set up a show of prints and draw-

ings against war, in which Dix and Grosz were singled out as exemplary of an art of

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City72 73

his paintings (Kirstein dismissed them as “large intestines”), but Curry, Wood, and

Benton were perceived by leftist critics as fascists for their chauvinistic regional-

ist discourse. Even more expedient is the high praise reserved for Walter Quirt,

whose work has many analogies with that of Blume (including meticulous paint-

ings on smooth gesso panel, avowed models in Italian and Northern Renaissance

masters, and scenes animated with people and objects in unexpected, quasi-

surrealist relationships; although, aside from titles that suggest social commentary,

Quirt’s work is not easier to grasp than The Eternal City). Yet Quirt was lauded as

a “Revolutionary Dalì,” possibly on account of his membership in the U.S. Com-

munist Party.dd Nor, on the other hand, could Blume be embraced, within the other

canon of advanced art—namely, the abstractionism championed by Stuart Davis

and a minority of practitioners. Abstractionism was reconciled with the notion of

revolutionary art on the assumption that the dialectic of forms and colors freed

from visible objects, and the emotional responses associated with them, resonated

with the dialectic of society by and large. In The Eternal City Blume certainly played

with color, proving that he was attentive to formal values and that he refused verisi-

militude. His representational mode is antirealist and the figures in his picture look

rubbery more than natural. However, his modernism did not go further, nor did he

venture into flattening the tridimensional forms on the picture plane. Therefore, it

is only by incorporating an examination of developments in national politics that

the valuation of The Eternal City becomes more comprehensible.

In October 1938 The Eternal City—along with two realist portraits, Colonel

Lindbergh by Robert Blackman and Country Doctor by Lauren Ford—was exhib-

ited at the 49th Annual Exhibition of American Painting and Sculpture at the Art

Institute of Chicago, where its impact on the public was reiterated. The museum

newsletter stated: “All day people stand before these paintings and express their

reactions.”de The press did not attempt to delve into the tenor of the impressions,

but The Eternal City in particular drew “throngs of visitors, because of its remark-

able technique . . . and its mystery.”df Received as an event of the season, a large

reproduction of the painting was included in the Chicago Tribune. However, all in

all the coverage for the exhibition was limited and it was chronicle-oriented rather

than critically exegetic, unlike the press that accompanied the reception of the

painting in New York. The elusive phraseology of various critics betrayed reactions

between wonder and puzzlement: “Undoubtedly . . . a subject for much discussion,

. . . often exquisite and often a little repulsive,”dg and “a dazzling work technically,

one of the great paintings of modern time, regardless of subject matter.” The

reactions were puzzling for a painting that seemed to escape a predictable canon,

especially one that had been shown next to two more conventional works.dh

The following year, The Eternal City was rejected for inclusion in the 16th Bien-

nial of American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery. The biennial was presented as

an impartial survey of national art “as it actually is”—according to then gallery

director C. Powell Minnegerodedi—and the works included in the exhibition varied

directly feel[s] nor wholly observe[s], nor completely organize[s].” Here we find the

premise of the line of reasoning applied to Blume two years later—the paradigm of

“direct feel[ing],” “strong expression,” and “intensity in seeing.” Wood’s manner-

ism was “deadening,” in that it interposed filters to reality, thus preventing direct

contact between the artist and society and entangling art in formulaic exercises

lacking “insight into the real.” While even a readable form of surrealist montage,

or photography, could qualify as a contemporary means of expression capable of

attaining “power and truth”—Kirstein conceded—indulging in a parody Flemish

style risked empty formalism: “Neither Memling nor Hugo van der Goes were pri-

marily neat; they were exact; for themselves—styleless; but they gave their age its

style. The trouble with any pre-formulated way of seeing is that . . . it is the proof

that an artist has no energy.”db (Coincidentally, Blume admitted seven years later

that he had “great admiration” for a panel by Hugo van der Goes that he had seen

at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.)dc

But if Wood was ideologically estranged from leftist intellectuals, and Dalì too

eccentric, what about Dix—one of the artists praised at the 1936 exhibition against

war and fascism—whose Neue Sachlichkeit portraits may be as painstakingly

painted as Blume’s picture, and which reference in style and themes the Northern

master (and social satirist) Lucas Cranach? Indeed the repugnance of Dix’s per-

sonages is often blatant. Even in his most refined oils, Dix verges on caricature,

and especially in his watercolors and etchings he used expressionist distortions

to unveil pitilessly and amorally abject bourgeoisie or the horrors of the trenches.

Instead the overall message of The Eternal City is to be gained through decoding

many subtle details. Blume’s work is a conundrum, and therefore its political mes-

sage risks obscurity or overcomplexity.

Take for example the sub-theme of the Spanish Civil War. Unlike fellow artists

who offered depictions of Spanish refugees and peasants being assailed by fascist

bombs, Blume alluded to the Spanish war through the fleeing friars; however, such

iconographic insert was too miniaturized and cerebral to be noticed. Therefore,

once again it is the smooth finished surface and the traceless brushstrokes (Blume

took just two months to paint the face of the beggar) that capture the attention of

the viewer. In sum, the general character of the picture was not pasionario enough

for critics of the time. (A term that equates emotion and political rectitude in art

criticism, pasionario is a reference to la Pasionaria, the nickname affectionately

given to Spanish communist leader Dolores Ibárruri, who was then well known and

quoted in American leftist circles.)

In any instance, wresting a sound criterion for the reception of The Eternal

City out of the debate on style brings no cogent solution. Some of the arguments

in that debate are interchangeable and inconsistent, and sound like preposter-

ous conceptualizations. For example, John Steuart Curry is more dramatic (there-

fore “expressionist”) than Wood, both in subject matter and brushstroke, and

Thomas Hart Benton used very personal, quasi-mannerist curvilinear schemes in

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City74 75

character.”eh Indeed in 1937 many critics, including

Klein, had been unenthusiastic, exactly for the same

aesthetic and political objections, but the aware-

ness of the unstoppable Nazi aggressiveness liq-

uidated such sophisms. The statement continued,

“We believe your refusal . . . is so dangerously akin

to the treatment of art in fascist countries as to be

fraught with grave implications disturbing not only

to American artists but to all American people.”ei

In a sign of defiance, the painting was hung a

week before the opening of the biennial at the Book

Shop, where it was introduced by an AAC-spon-

sored debate on art and censorship. Although the

venue was by no means comparable to a museum,

the Book Shop had a large following, as it hosted

regular debates and important guests from the

political and cultural world. Local artists were “all

steamed up,” and Blume’s painting was the occa-

sion to stir a (politically and culturally) progressive

front.fj At the biennial’s opening, arriving guests

were handed flyers with the word “REJECTED,”

followed by select quotations from a few favorable

reviews and an invitation to view the painting (fig.

9).

Blume found support in Blankenhorn, a former

labor journalist and publicity manager who was working for the National Labor

Relations Board (the federal agency created to administer the National Labor Rela-

tions Act, the fundamental legislation on labor union rights and collective bargain-

ing as a result of the New Deal).fa Counter to the inertia of local critics, Blume

and Blankenhorn made every effort to present the refusal of The Eternal City as

censorship by philistines, if not pro-fascists, and they sought to bring attention to

the painting and the cause of antifascism. However, they were unable to instigate

a journalistic inquiry, beyond a handful of articles.fb The Washington Daily News

published an image of the painting and defended its quality, whereas Leila Mechlin

of the Washington Star was drastically hostile, mocking a work that she believed

had “no more value than the chromos of the middle of last century” and indicating

that she was pleased by the rejection.fc Peyton Boswell, editor of The Art Digest,

expressed himself along the same lines, faulting the hypocrisy with which Blume’s

supporters affected outrage with the aim of attracting publicity.fd

The Washington Post conceded an eye-catching headline but a rather imper-

sonal report. Its owner, Eugene Meyer—although often attacked by American

Nazis as a Jew, and by Catholics for his antifascism—was reluctant to support The

Figure 9 Flyer reading “rejected,” advertising a

showing of peter Blume’s painting The Eternal City

at The Book Shop, ca. 1939, peter Blume papers,

Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution,

Washington, D.C.

in style as well as geographic distribution. In reality, the biennial was constrained

to a middle-of-the-road aesthetic and unproblematic subject matter. The reviews

underlined the character of national art—“cross-section” (New York Times), “mid-

dle-course” (Washington Post), and “impartial report” (Philadelphia Record)—and

the equal visibility given to the moderns and conservatives.ej One critic remarked a

tendency in the exhibition to overcome an American scene realism that was char-

acterized by an unspecific and inordinate painterly technique that bore witness to

the “disturbed world conditions”;ea but, in general, the reviews acknowledged the

achieved balance and “no more neuroses.”eb Vis-à-vis that rather tame context,

Blume’s work was incompatible. The Corcoran had proved that “a picture is still a

picture and not propaganda,” Art News rejoiced, maliciously adding that “a cer-

tain large and bombastic canvas whose main claim to fame was the scalding fury

of denunciation” had been excluded.ec

Minnegerode and Maurice Sterne (the president of the jury) assured that the

selection had been made exclusively on aesthetic merits; Blume, however, has

always insisted that Minnegerode intervened, telling jurors that The Eternal City

was “absolutely verboten.”ed The museum did not want to offend the Italian

ambassador, who would have been invited to the opening. The report of a tele-

phone call between George Messersmith, who was then vice-secretary of state,

and an assistant to Minnegerode confirms consultations on the issue. Unable, or

unwilling, to interfere with the jury, Messersmith suggested that Blume be asked to

submit another piece, explaining “the undesirable contention that may arise out of

showing the picture in question.”ee In the event Blume had insisted, and the Italian

embassy had protested, Minnegerode wanted to be able to officially dissociate

himself from the matter. That the Italian diplomats would not be pleased is almost

certain—in 1932 they had deprecated a Mussolini caricature by Covarrubias on the

cover of Vanity Fair, and had temporarily withdrawn Italian advertisements from

the magazine.ef In any case, the circumstance never occurred. The jurors excluded

The Eternal City after pressure from the museum’s director, or for a mixture of aes-

thetic objection and external urging. Years later, Minnegerode’s interference was

confessed to Blume by John C. Johansen, who apologized.eg

The Corcoran’s refusal mobilized various leftist organizations. The AAC, the

American Group, and the United American Artists signed collectively along with all

the artists at their helms (Stuart Davis, Rockwell Kent, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Max Weber,

and Arthur Emptage) a telegram of protest that served as a sort of unconfessed

apostasy on their own earlier positions. Also artists Hugo Gellert, Lynd Ward, Carl

Holty, and Paul Burlin, and critics Jerome Klein of the New York Post and Robert

M. Coates of The New Yorker signed on individually. How could the winner of

two Guggenheim fellowships and a Carnegie prize, whose work was collected by

major museums, be rejected for lack of aesthetic quality? The statement read: “We

have reluctantly been forced to conclude that . . . you have allowed your artistic

judgment to be prejudiced by the theme of the painting, which is anti-fascist in

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City76 77

particularly Blume’s painting. Further, the Italian consul in Chicago would most

likely cut the ribbon at the show’s opening and would eventually find himself

face to face with the terrible image of il Duce, had he wished to visit the rest of

the museum. “It was perfectly obvious. .  .  . It was a diplomatic situation. They

either had to insult the Italian government or insult me and there’s just no choice

involved.”ga

In 1939 the circulation of The Eternal City—and Blume’s freedom of expres-

sion—was barred twice by an interest in diplomatic relations with the Italian gov-

ernment. The Italian entry into World War II in June 1940 gave new credibility to

the work, as support for the Allies and an interventionist spirit increased among

Americans. In 1940 alone, the painting was hung at the American art show at

the reopened Golden Gate World’s Fair, the Whitney Annual, and in a survey of

American art from the colonial era to the present that took place at the Carnegie

Institute in lieu of the suspended international prize. Once rejected for its alleged

aesthetic deficiency, The Eternal City now featured among landmarks of national

art that included Whistlers, Remingtons, George Bellows’ Depsey and Firpo, and

Georgia O’Keeffe’s emblems of skulls and flowers in the desert.

The work received even more acclaim after the Axis powers declared war on

the United States, and the new situation encouraged a revised assessment on

aesthetic and political grounds. In 1937 Barr had discouraged Blume, comment-

ing “that it was just a shame that I [Blume] had devoted so much loving care to

a painting which no museum would buy,”gb but in December 1942 Barr himself

arranged for MoMA’s purchase, along with two related drawings, of The Eternal

City. James Thrall Soby exalted the painting in the museum’s bulletin as the most

important American acquisition of the year, avowing “Today, Blume’s courage and

conviction deserve thoughtful reappraisal.”gc The work was finally acknowledged

as “remarkably prophetic,”gd not of the fascist threat but of the imminent fall of

the Italian dictator. His head came to represent the sense of a desperate effort to

preserve the regime through terror. Obviously the painting did not change, but

the political context around it did. By then residual sympathy for Italy was extin-

guished, and earlier theoretical diatribes must have seemed sterile. It is difficult to

evaluate whether Barr’s opinion that no museum would have bought the picture

in 1937 alluded to its aesthetic quality, but probably his remark concerned what

then still seemed too controversial a subject matter.

Only weeks after the release of the MoMA bulletin, the persuasive power of

The Eternal City was being reconsidered across the ocean at the Psychological

Warfare Branch (PWB)—a combat propaganda unit that supplied General Eisen-

hower’s headquarters in Algiers. Blankenhorn—by then a major in the army who

was in charge of the leaflet section—drawing upon his experience in a propaganda

unit during World War I, and later as a publicity manager, understood the impor-

tance of the study of enemy psychology in order to undermine his morale and

soften up resistance on the ground ahead of an Allied invasion. He supervised the

Eternal City. He remarked in private that the rejection represented at the same

time an attack on fascism and the church, stating “when you put both those in one

picture . . . I wouldn’t exhibit it.”fe By April 1939 the American public was more

concerned about Hitler and Japan than they were with Mussolini, who seemed

comparatively less menacing, as he was credited with persuading Hitler to sign

the 1938 Munich Agreement that allowed for the annexation of the Sudetenland

to Germany.

A few months later Blume had another disappointment. After the successful

1938 showing, the Art Institute of Chicago requested The Eternal City for a 1939

exhibition, but, at the last minute, director Daniel Catton Rich wrote to Levy that,

regrettably, insufficient space compelled them to sacrifice the painting.ff In real-

ity, the about-face concealed the arrival in Chicago of twenty-eight Renaissance

and Baroque masterpieces that had been lent by Italian museums. The carload of

artwork, which included Masaccio’s Crucifixion, Raphael’s Madonna of the Chair,

Parmigianino’s Antea, and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, had already attracted more

than two million visitors when it was shown at the Golden Gate International Expo-

sition of San Francisco from February to October 1939. The Art Institute managed,

through tenacious negotiations, to overcome the reluctance of the Italian govern-

ment to extend the loan, eventually securing it for Chicago.

Rich wrote to the appropriate Italian ministers—Giuseppe Bottai (National Edu-

cation), Dino Alfieri (Popular Culture), and Galeazzo Ciano (Foreign Affairs): “Art

is the greatest means of universal understanding. No American in front of the

‘Madonna of the chair’ or the ‘Birth of Venus’ will fail to appreciate the greatness

of the Italian spirit and admire the generosity of the present Government that will

make the consummation of such experience possible.”fg During the diplomatic

courtship, the museum’s vice-president, Chauncey McCormick, had met with the

Italian artist and politician Cipriano Efisio Oppo in New York, written to art histo-

rian Roberto Longhi, and dined with ambassador Ascanio Colonna in Washington,

D.C.fh And the director of the Carnegie Institute, Homer Saint-Gaudens, had writ-

ten to Mussolini himself. The mayor of Chicago, Edward J. Kelly, had supported the

cause with his fellow governor of Rome,fi and Illinois senator Scott W. Lucas had

written to ambassador Colonna, saying “This extraordinary collection of Italian art

. . . undoubtedly will have a tremendous political significance in that it will inspire

greater admiration for and friendship with your country.”gj All those involved in

the negotiations stressed the following: the loan of masterpieces would be a sign

of friendship between the two nations, expectation would be generated through-

out the Midwest, special trains from Minneapolis and Pittsburgh would bring a

great number of visitors, and there would be tremendous disappointment if the

masterpieces did not stop in Chicago. Blume’s painting jeopardized those pleas.

Finally the Italian artworks were exhibited from November 18, 1939, to January

9, 1940, attracting 250,000 visitors. If art was a sign of goodwill, a Botticelli, for

example—which would attract masses of paying visitors—other art could offend,

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City78 79

between verisimilitude and uncanny rubbery

consistency. Both artists seem obsessed with tur-

gidity in human forms, and at the same time with

the violation of their integrity. Benton shows a

body being brutally dilaniated and hollowed out.

Blume objectifies and transposes that motif in the

meander of corridors and eroded walls, like the

exposed guts of the city symbolically torn by the

violence of fascism, a sentiment that is echoed by

the bandaged and broken old woman. Blume’s

subterranean corridors and Benton’s chain-filled

belly of the Japanese creature combine the

mechanical with the visceral. The fascist violence

that had turned Rome into a spiritual wasteland,

brought destruction on the battlefronts, and

threatened the United States itself, compelled

Benton to call for an equally violent response—

namely, military action as the only countermea-

sure to save the free world.

Not surprisingly, The Eternal City and The

Year of Peril shared a similar destiny. Both were

acknowledged for their combat potential and

were enlisted as tools of propaganda: the first

on enemy lines, the latter on the home front. The

federal government used The Year of Peril as agi-

tational propaganda to win over the remaining

apathists and isolationists, and it was printed on

posters and cards that were distributed by the Office of War Information in the

United States and abroad. The pharmaceutical company Abbot Laboratories also

published it in booklets, and newspapers and newsreels circulated millions of cop-

ies of the image.gg The Eternal City, as we have seen, was enlisted, but never

served. Blankenhorn made clear in his report that leaflets served as paper bullets

alongside lead, delivering an attack on the enemy’s mind. Paraphrasing one of his

vivid definitions, The Eternal City could “explode—inside enemy skulls,”gh just as

it had in the minds of peacetime gallery-goers at home.

In conclusion, the ascending curve of The Eternal City is the specular reflec-

tion of the declining appeal of Mussolini in American public culture, from neutral,

if not admired, interlocutor to national enemy (ranking third after Hitler and the

“Jap”). When Mussolini took power in 1922, American public opinion had been

ambivalent. Innovator, self-made, and pragmatic, il Duce embodied a familiar

American mold. His aggressive decision-making ability could not be divorced from

the image of a Roman tribune who almost single-handedly had brought order to

Figure 11 Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975),

The Year of Peril Series, Exterminate, 1942, Oil on

canvas, 72 × 96 in. Art Collection, The State

Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia © T. H.

Benton and r. p. Benton Testamentary Trusts/

UMB Bank Trustee/Licensed by VAGA, New York

design of airplane-dropped leaflets that were aimed at enemy troops

and civilians. From February 1943 to February 1944, more than 166

million leaflets were dropped over Tunisia and Italy. Constantly geared

toward the changing military situation on the ground, some were short

news bulletins that countered enemy propaganda, some emphasized

the futility of resistance and included amnesty for surrender, and some

were photographs of American soldiers’ food rations and cigarettes

that were promised to prisoners.ge

In May 1943, ahead of the invasion of Italy, the efficacy of the leaflets

was tested over the island of Pantelleria (midway between Tunisia and

Sicily). Four types of flyers were dropped, alternating with the bombs,

at planned intervals. The messages included those about the hope-

lessness of the Italian position, the promise of fair treatment after the

ouster of the fascist regime, the menace of redoubled bombings, and

invitations to surrender. One of the leaflets included a cartoon depict-

ing the Italy boot kicking Mussolini’s rear over one of his sayings: “l’Italia

farà da sé” (Italy will do the job herself; fig. 10). The strategy of cari-

cature, which Blume and other artists had used to lampoon Mussolini

and bemuse American readers, was repurposed as a combat device.

Intelligence reports indicated that the combination of leaflets-cum-

bomb raids over Sicily and the Italian mainland were emboldening the

antifascist underground movement and that the Allies were expected as liberators.

Meanwhile, the first bombing over the railyard in Rome was slated for July 19. Ital-

ian radio attacked the Americans as barbarian illiterates, whose one objective was

to destroy Italian culture. The Rome raid was announced with leaflets that assured

every precaution to avoid hitting monuments. However, the medieval church of

San Lorenzo was a casualty of the bombs, provoking Rome radio to rail against

the “barbarian gangsters of the air.”gf It was then that Blankenhorn thought of The

Eternal City—a sophisticated image that implicitly replied to the fascist accusa-

tions. He cabled the Office of War Information in New York requesting authoriza-

tion for the leaflet as well as one million color reproductions. A message on the

back would advise Romans that the sooner they got rid of Mussolini the sooner

there would be security for their city. The authorization from New York arrived one

week after Mussolini’s resignation (July 23, 1943); thus, the leaflet was probably

never printed.

The haunting quality of The Eternal City has a parallel in Exterminate (fig. 11),

the most terrible of Benton’s eight canvases in The Year of Peril series (1942),

which was painted as a response to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Both artists applied

their draftsmanship and a formalist approach to painting as internal dialectics of

forms and colors to endow their fascist monsters with a three-dimensional, morph-

ing physicality. Their fastidious technique awes and yet disturbs for the hallucina-

tory effect of the anatomical distortions of the figures as well as the ambiguity

Figure 10 Cartoon propaganda image of Italy

kicking Mussolini, National Archives at College

park, MD, records of the Office of Strategic

Services, Washington and Field Station Files

(rG226-055-139-B173, F2290)

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City80 81

1 Cécile Whiting, Antifascism in American Art (New Haven and London: Yale University press, 1989), 54–64.

2 The iconography of The Eternal City is clarified, on the basis of interviews and notes by the artist, in Frank Anderson Trapp, Peter Blume (New York: rizzoli, 1987); and Whiting, Antifascism in American Art. See also Sergio Cortesini, “The Eternal City di peter Blume, con qualche osservazione sull’icona di Mussolini in America,” L’Uomo Nero 5, no. 6 (December 2008): 163–89.

3 peter Blume, “Famed American Artist, Clarifies Controversy of ‘The Eternal City,’” Daily Worker, January 11, 1938; and Kenneth Burke, “Growth among the ruins,” The New Republic 93, no. 1202 (December 15, 1937): 165–66. Blume also explained the iconography in two series of notes prepared for Alfred H. Barr Jr. peter Blume, interview by Alfred H. Barr Jr., box 2/6, Interview—Blume Inter- viewed by Barr on Eternal City file, Blume papers, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, quoted in James Thrall Soby, “peter Blume’s Eternal City,” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art 10, no. 4 (April 1943): 2–6; and Trapp, Peter Blume, 56–66. Further remarks are in peter Blume, interview by robert Brown, August 1983–May 1984, transcript, AAA, 78–92, which was partially published as “Interview with peter Blume,” Archives of American Art Journal 32, no. 3 (1992): 9–12, and is quoted in Whiting, Antifascism in American Art, 57–58.

4 Hawthorne’s visit at San Marco (July 9, 1858) is recounted in Passages from the French and Italian Note-books of Nathaniel Hawthorne (London: Strahan, 1871), 2:109.

5 Blume, Brown interview, 81; and Trapp, Peter Blume, 63. Whiting clarifies that Blume condensed two episodes that happened on February 24 and 25, 1917, as reported by Trotsky. See Whiting, Antifascism in American Art, 63.

6 “One clear autumnal afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the piazza Santa Croce. . . . The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church façade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time, and the composition of my picture came to my mind’s eye.” Giorgio de Chirico, “Meditations of a painter,” in Herschel B.

Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California press, 1968), 397–98.

7 Blume, Barr interview, 1. 8 Blume, Brown interview, 81. 9 Blume, Barr interview, 1. 10 Blume, Brown interview, 89. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 90. 13 Matthew Baigell and Julia Williams, eds.,

Artists against War and Fascism, papers of the First American Artists Congress (New Brunswick: rutgers University press, 1986), 9–10, 53.

14 peter Blume, “The Artist Must Choose,” in ibid, 98–102.

15 “Eternal,” The New Yorker, December 18, 1937.

16 On the tourist woman, see Trapp, Peter Blume, 64; Soby, “peter Blume’s Eternal City,” 5; and Burke, “Growth among the ruins,”166. For conversations between Blume, Burke, and writer Malcom Cowley during the execution of The Eternal City, see “Image of Italy,” Time 30, no. 23 (December 6, 1937): 65.

17 “They [the monks] were running, and remembering that I was working this out just at the beginning of the business in Spain, and what they’d discovered in Spain of course was that the church was not impartial, never was. There was a terrific antagonism developing about the part that the church was playing in the social affairs of that kind.” Blume, Brown interview, 81. In his 1942 notes to Barr, Blume added “the priests are running away from this thing, they see signs of danger . . . in Spain they run the same way.” See Trapp, Peter Blume, 64.

18 The vignette illustrates Dale Kramer, “Can Father Coughlin Come Back?” The New Masses 22, no. 10 (March 2, 1937): 13–14, ill. 13.

19 Vanity Fair 39, no. 1 (March 1932): 40; and Vanity Fair 40, no. 4 (June 1933): 25.

20 Blume, Brown interview, 81. 21 “Is there any chance of your Italian

picture being ready?” Alfred H. Barr Jr. to peter Blume, September 28, 1936, box 2/6, M Museum of Modern Art file, Blume papers, AAA.

22 The drawing is among the illustrations in Thomas S. Willison, “revolutionary Art Today,” The New Masses 17, no. 1 (October 1, 1935): 17–32, ill. 31.

23 “Image of Italy,” Time 30, no. 23 (December 6, 1937): 65.

NotesItalian political life and restored a hint of ancient greatness. In addition, the dic-

tator’s flamboyant oratory style and poses, along with his publicized machismo

and courage, met another American cliché of Italian temperament. Admired or

despised, eulogized or satirized, Mussolini was featured in hundreds of photo-

graphs, periodical illustrations, political cartoons, posters, collectibles, sculptures,

and paintings. For two decades, his stocky features were immediately recogniz-

able in American visual culture.gi Between 1937 and 1939 he was still a potential

American partner in the European diplomatic chessboard, the head of a govern-

ment that loaned masterpieces to American museums or, at worst, “the mote” in

the Italians’ orb. By 1941 and until his death in 1945, he was a public enemy. The

magnitude of those political and cultural reversals would make any appraisal of

the impact of The Eternal City in the art world, in its first six years, based only on

aesthetic categories, inaccurate.

After the conflict was over; democracy had been restored in Europe; and the

American cultural, economic, and political hegemonic sphere had expanded, the

public meaning of The Eternal City slowly paled and lost its urgency for younger

generations. On the other hand, the affirmation of abstract expressionism, and

later Pop Art, as new inherently national aesthetic models (directed at the celebra-

tion of American individual freedom or mass consumerism), did not encourage

the appreciation of Blume’s pseudo-Flemish style and allegoric symbolism. As the

modernist canon was being rewritten, Blume was pushed aside. After being shown

in the permanent collection galleries at MoMA until 1980, The Eternal City was put

into a storeroom and, besides occasional loans to external venues, was hung again

in the museum only once in 2000, as a specimen of Modern Art Despite Modern-

ism, the title of the temporary show in which it was included.hj

Cortesini Battling Over The Eternal City82 83

56 Archivio Storico, box 231, file 1/52/79, Ministero degli Affari Esteri, Minculpop, Direzione Generale per il Servizio della Stampa Estera, rome. See also George Slocombe, “Mussolini’s Next Ten Years,” Vanity Fair 39, no. 2 (October 1932): cover, 20, and 60.

57 Blume, Brown interview, 96. Maurice Sterne, randall Davey, John C. Johansen, Jerry Farnsworth, and Carrol Tyson formed the jury.

58 The telegram sent to Minnegerode on April 2, the day after, was in the newspapers. See “Gallery rejects Anti-Fascist Art,” New York Times, April 3, 1939.

59 Ibid. 60 Heber and Ann Blankenhorn to peter

Blume, March 21, 1939, box 3/6, Eternal City file, Blume papers, AAA.

61 For a biographical profile of Blankenhorn (1884–1956), see Heber Blankenhorn papers, Walter p. reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit, accessed July 15, 2011, http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/ files/Lp000294.pdf.

62 “Corcoran rejects painting Satirizing Duce and Fascists,” The Washington Post, March 17, 1939; “Gallery rejects Anti-Fascist Art,” New York Times, April 3, 1939; E. N., “Blume’s rejection,” 30; “Artists Denounce Ban,” Providence Journal, April 3, 1939; “Artists protest painting rejection,” New York Evening Post, April 3, 1939; and peyton Boswell, “Logic Takes a Holyday,” The Art Digest 13, no. 14 (April 15, 1939): 3.

63 “This Caused All the rumpus,” The Washington Daily News, March 25, 1939; Helen Buchalter, “Artists View American Scene With a Clearer Eye, a Calmer Heart,” The Washington Daily News, April 4 1939; Leila Mechlin, “The Eternal City,” The Sunday Star, April 2, 1939; and Leila Mechlin?, “return to Sanity,” The Washington Star, April 26, 1939.

64 Boswell, “Logic Takes a Holyday,” 3. 65 This statement by Eugene Meyer was

reported by Blankenhorn to Blume, March 22, 1939, box 3/6, Eternal City file, Blume papers, AAA.

66 Daniel Catton rich to Julien Levy, October 16, 1939, box 1/6, Art Institute of Chicago file, Blume papers, AAA.

67 Daniel Catton rich to Dino Alfieri, July 15, 1939, box 229, Stati Uniti—San Francisco: 2a parte folder, Chicago—invio quadri dell’Esposizione di San Francisco

sub-folder, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Ministero della Cultura popolare, Direzione Generale per la propaganda, rome; and Daniel Catton rich to Dino Alfieri and Giuseppe Bottai, July 15, 1939, box 54, files 1 and 2, rich papers, Art Institute of Chicago Archives (AIC).

68 Chauncey McCormick to Cipriano Efisio Oppo, September 16, 1939, box 54, file 8, rich papers, AIC; Chauncey McCor- mick to roberto Longhi, May 4, and July 10, 1939, and Chauncey McCormick to Edward J. Kelly, August 19, 1939, box 54, file 6, rich papers, AIC.

69 Edward J. Kelly to pietro Colonna, October 30, 1939, box 54, file 6, rich papers, AIC.

70 Scott W. Lucas to Ascanio Colonna, July 24, 1939, box 54, file 6, rich papers, AIC.

71 Blume, Brown interview, 96. 72 Blume, quoted in Trapp, Peter Blume, 65. 73 Soby, “peter Blume’s Eternal City,” 3. 74 “Museum Here Buys Anti-Fascist painting

That Corcoran Gallery Barred in 1939,” New York Times, March 3, 1943.

75 Heber Blankenhorn, “Combat propa- ganda in Africa, Italy, United Kingdom and France, 1943–44,” typescript, 13 and 194, record group 226, box 173, file 2290, Wash-MO-prO-7-9, Washington and Field Station Files, National Archives and records Administration, College park, MD.

76 Ibid, 245. 77 Whiting, Antifascism in American Art,

115–25. 78 Heber Blankenhorn, “’Confetti’”. Combat

propaganda,” typescript, 9, box 3, file 9, Heber Blankenhorn papers, Walter p. reuther Library, Wayne State University, Detroit.

79 For American opinion on Mussolini, see John Diggnis, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (princeton: princeton University press, 1972); and Benjamin L. Alpers, Dictators, Democracy and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina press, 2003).

80 I wish to thank Carla Bianchi, curatorial assistant of the Department of painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), for providing me with the exhibition history of the painting. Modern Art despite Modernism was shown at MoMA from March 15 to August 22, 2000.

24 Isidor Schneider, “A Notable Anti-fascist painting,” International Literature, no. 1 (January 1938): 99–102.

25 Emily Genauer, “peter Blume’s Work Assails Fascism,” New York World-Tele- gram, November 27, 1937.

26 Stark Young, “Balanced in Light,” The New Republic 83, no. 1204 (December 29, 1937): 228–29.

27 Edward Alden Jewell, “Canvas on Fascism is Shown by Blume,” New York Times, November 21, 1937; and Edward Alden Jewell, “re Fascism: peter Blume paints an ‘Eternal City,’” New York Times, November 28, 1937.

28 Henry McBride, “Attractions in the Galleries,” The New York Sun, December 6, 1937.

29 Jerome Klein, “paper Mussolini K.O.’d by Blume,” New York Post, November 27, 1937.

30 Jacob Kainen, “Anti-Fascist painting on Display by Guggenheim Winner,” Daily Worker, December 11, 1937.

31 Blume, Brown interview, 100. 32 George L. K. Morris, “Art Chronicle:

Some personal Letters to American Artists recently Exhibiting in New York,” Partisan Review 4, no. 4 (March 1938): 40–41.

33 Blume, The Artist Must Choose, 98. 34 Jacob Kainen, “revolutionary Art at the

John reed Club,” Art Front 1, no. 2 (January 1935): 6.

35 Jerome Klein, “Dada for propaganda,” Art Front 1, no. 3 (February 1935): 7–8.

36 robin Adèle Greeley, “Dalì’s Fascism; Lacan’s paranoia,” Art History 24, no. 4 (September 2001): 465–92; and Eadem, Surrealism and the Spanish Civil War (New Haven and London: Yale University press, 2006), 51–89.

37 Isidor Schneider, “Shrines of Unreason,” The New Masses 21, no. 14 (December 29, 1936): 23–24.

38 russel T. Limbach, “Art Against War and Fascism,” The New Masses 19, no. 6 (May 5, 1936): 28.

39 Georg Lukács, “Expressionism: Its Significance and Decline,” in Essays on Realism (Cambridge, MA: MIT press, 1980), 76–113; and Ernst Bloch, “Discussing Expressionism,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Theodor Adrono et al. (London: NLB, 1977), 16–27.

40 Edward Alden Jewell, “The Creative Life vs Dictatorship: Works Exiled from reich Collections and Now Acquired by the Museum of Modern Art—Freedom in

Democracy,” New York Times, August 13, 1939; and “Exiled Art Finds Haven in Modern Museum,” The Art Digest 13, no. 20 (September 1 1939): 8. The works are: Blue Window by Henri Matisse, Around the fish by paul Klee, Lot Valley at Vers by André Derain, Street Scene by Ludwig Kirchner, and Kneeling Woman by Wilhelm Lehmbruck.

41 Lincoln Kirstein, “An Iowa Memling,” Art Front 1, no. 6 (July 1935): 6 and 8.

42 Ibid. 43 Blume, Barr interview; and James Thrall

Soby, “peter Blume’s Eternal City,” 4. 44 Charmion von Wiegand, “Art: Walter

Quirt,” The New Masses 18, no. 13 (March 24, 1936): 25; and C. W., “Quirt,” Art Front, no. 12 (April 1936): 13.

45 “Notes on the American Exhibition,” The Art Institute of Chicago Weekly News Letter, October 29, 1938, 1.

46 Ibid. 47 Eleanor Jewett, “Institute Opens 49th

American Exhibit Today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 20, 1938.

48 C. J. Bulliet, Chicago Daily News, November 1, 1938.

49 The Sixteenth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Oil Paintings (Washington, D.C.: Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1939), 13.

50 Edward Alden Jewell, “American Cross-Section,” The New York Times, March 26, 1939; Alice Graeme, “Corcoran Biennial Show Strikes Middle Course,” The Washington Post, April 2, 1939; and Dorothy Grafly, “A Disturbed World Disturbs Art,” Philadelphia Record, March 26, 1939.

51 Grafly, “A Disturbed World Disturbs Art.” 52 Helen Buchalter, “Artists View American

Scene With a Clearer Eye, a Calmer Heart,” The Washington Daily News, April 1, 1939.

53 rosamund Frost, “The Corcoran Looks Ahead,” The Art News 37, no. 27 (April 1, 1939): 9.

54 C. powell Minnegerode to peter Blume, March 9, 1939, peter Blume file, Minnegerode records, Corcoran Gallery Archives, Washington, D.C.; E. N., “Blume’s rejection,” New Masses 21, no. 3 (April 11, 1939): 30; and Blume, Brown, interview, 96. For a more detailed account, see Cortesini, “The Eternal City di peter Blume, 175–78.

55 The report of the telephone call is quoted in Whiting, Antifascism in American Art, 209, note 43.