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

In Memoriam: Frederika Randall's review of Renato Guttuso 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 for Italy's locked-down Liberation Day. Here we re-post her 2013 review of a major 20th-century Italian artist, little known in the US, Renato Guttuso. The review illustrates everything we've just said about Frederika - her keen eye, her trenchant criticism, her lyrical writing; a review that ends with the words "memento mori." 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.


RST has admired the work of Renato Guttuso since we first came across it, perhaps a decade ago.  So we were disappointed when we learned that a major exhibition of the artist's work was to take place in Rome when we weren't present.  Our solution was to commission a review of the show from Frederika Randall, translator extraordinaire, writer for The Nation and the Italian weekly Internazionale, and former arts reporter for the Wall Street Journal.  Frederika has also written for RST on the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli and on the partisan anthem Bella Ciao.   The Guttuso exhibition closes February 10. 

Self-Portrait, 1936

The painter Renato Guttuso was famous  in the 1970s, when he served as something like the Italian Communist Party’s  (PCI’s) official artist. He won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1972 and, beginning in 1976, held office as a Senator with the PCI. He was a figurist, unlike most of his contemporaries who were devoted to abstraction. Not everyone in the art world admired him; the Party’s imprimatur was a double-edged blessing. His “realist” style looked suspiciously like socialist realism to those who adhered to the abstract creed. But Guttuso, who died in 1987, and the PCI, whose demise came in 1991, now belong to history, and the time is right to take a fresh look.

I recently spent a fascinating hour and a half doing just that at “Guttuso”,  one hundred paintings, drawings and theatrical sketches on show until February 10 at Rome’s Complesso del Vittoriano--the big white monument in Piazza Venezia, the one the Romans used to liken to a set of dentures, before there were implants. The earliest work in the show is an accomplished water-color of a Sicilian garden that young Renato, born to free-thinking middle-class parents in Bagheria near Palermo in 1911, made when he was twelve.  One of the last ones, painted two years before his death, is an indifferent sketch of a reclining nude, in the slightly smutty rear haunch view with garter belt that the artist favored when his powers  were declining.

Crucifixion, 1941

With perhaps those two exceptions,  there is little realism on display at “Guttuso.” One of his gods, instead, was Picasso, whom Guttuso first studied in reproductions during  the  Fascist 1930s and who later became the Italian painter’s great friend when he spent time in Paris after the war. Early works like La fuga dall’Etna (Flight from Etna, 1938) or the harsh, doleful Crucifixion of 1941, with their tangle of limbs and loins, human and animal, although they resemble no particular works by Picasso, share Cubism’s restlessness, and have all the human and political urgency of a Guernica. His Crucifixion, steeped in the cruelty and suffering of war and of late Fascist Italy, brought Guttuso some attention, not all favorable: the Church abhorred the picture and actually ordered Catholics not to look at it.

Blue Window, 1940

But politically engaged paintings were only part of his production.  A convinced anti-Fascist, Guttuso would take part in the Roman resistance in 1943, yet through the 40s and 50s he also continued to paint portraits, landscapes and still lifes, often deploying the fruits and vegetables of his native south, sometimes with jarring elements thrown in, such as the pair of sharp scissors that accompany a bevy of lemons. Color became a powerful element in his compositions:  La finestra blu (Blue Window, 1940) [right] being a particularly successful example. Guttuso  designed stage sets and costumes and even illustrated books. The moody artichokes and raffia-covered flask of wine he drew for the cover of English cookbook writer Elizabeth David’s 1954 classic Italian Food, and the ink-drawn illustrations of its opulent ingredients, so exotic to early post-war Britons, were the first glimpse many outside Italy had of his art, albeit only as book illustration. My own copy, bought in 1970, was in many ways my introduction to Italy, which I’ve never stopped seeing though Guttuso’s sharp, expressionist optic.

Blackbird, 1940

His small, early paintings, some of them, like the marvelous Il Merlo (Blackbird) of 1940 [left] veering toward abstraction, are the surprise of the exhibit, but they did not represent Guttuso’s highest aspirations. “I’ve always believed a painter’s honor depends on painting large pictures,” he said. And indeed he is best known for his large narrative paintings: “history paintings” as the genre was once aptly named.  Large pictures, but not murals, he specified. Works of art in their own right, not works of illustration, pedagogy or exhortation.

Togliatti's Funeral, 1972

Togliatti’s Funeral, 1972, a battlefield of red flags and black and white figures representing the great pantheon of Communism assembled in honor of the departed PCI secretary, is perhaps the best-known of these, its style a cross between history painting and graphic art. Caffè Greco features De Chirico and Buffalo Bill in the crush of a Roman bar;  Beach, set at the people’s beach of Ostia, is a tumble of brown Roman bodies with a trim, spry Picasso drying himself on a green towel. 

These most ambitious of his paintings don’t always manage to transcend  muralistic description. One, however, is truly outstanding:  his great portrait of the Palermo street market, La Vucciria, of 1974. Three meters by three, a challenging square canvas. Into those nine square meters Guttuso has spilled a great cornucopia of cardoons and fennel, tomatoes and eggs, octopus and squid, swordfish and tuna, lemons and melons, cheese and sausages, a side of beef showing all its ribs and a butcher carving away at it. Nature’s merchandise is so exuberant and so vital it saturates every inch of the space, except for a narrow corridor down the middle, where a small huddle of shoppers move through the scene on a vertical axis. The figures, none of which engage the viewer or each other, are cryptic, slightly ghostly. As a proper still life should, this one makes us think of mortality.

The Vucciria market, Guttuso said, was one of his first discoveries when he moved to Palermo as a student in the early 1930s. “When I began to paint, among my first subjects were those colors, those planes of light.” But his great painting of the market was not done until 1974, when he was living in Varese, Lombardy, “under the pallid light of the north.” He said the picture was “a great still life” imbued with all the noise, the energy and the violence of “the markets of poor countries.”

La Vucciria, 1974

          In order to paint from life, Guttuso had an agent ship him the eggs, the cardoons, the tuna, by air from Palermo to Milan. He then persuaded a local butcher to loan him a side of beef “for no more than two hours” so he could sketch it into the composition. The minutes ticked by, and then the hours. The butcher was counting how long his beef would survive without refrigeration.  Guttuso, meanwhile, was molding those ribs and haunches into his most powerful memento mori.

Frederika Randall

The 1943 Rome epidemic, that wasn't

Isola Tiburina, location of the Fatebenefratelli hospital

The "partisan card" for Giacomo Cesaro,
father, Giuseppe, who shared this story.
Issued by the "Ministry of Occupied Italy,"
it shows the older Cesaro was a
member of the "Justice Freedom" brigade.

The story that follows appears in Pietro Borromeo's book, Il giusto che invento' il morbo di k. (Fermento Editori, 2007). Pietro is the son of Giovanni Borromeo, a protagonist in the events described. Giuseppe Cesaro, chief of the press office of ACI (the Italian AAA), and a writer, shared the story with family on April 25, a day celebrating the 1945 liberation of Italy from the German occupation.  It is reprinted here--in English translation, followed by the Italian version--with permission.

[Update 4 May 2021 - this invented disease also is known as "Syndrome K" in English, and is the subject of a new documentary of the same name, with a release date of 1 June 2021 in the US.]

During the Second World War in [occupied] Rome, there was a terrible epidemic of an unknown and dangerous illness.

Isola Tiberina with its Fatebenefratelli Hospital.

It was known as "disease of K," it had very serious symptoms, and was extremely contagious, but thanks to the intuition of three exceptional doctors (Giovanni Borromeo, Adriano Ossicini and Vittorio Sacerdoti), there was not a single fatality. All those who were sick, put in isolation in a pavilion of the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, were miraculously saved, as were the doctors and nurses, notwithstanding that the "disease of K" was extraordinarily contagious.

It all began on the 16th of October, 1943, the "black Saturday" of the Roman ghetto, when the [Nazi] SS conducted a horrendous roundup, forcing 1024 people, among them hundreds of children, to board the trains of horror headed for the death camps at Auschwitz.

Dott. Giovanni Borromeo

However, some succeeded in avoiding the Nazis and saving themselves [from the trains], seeking refuge on Tiberina Island, where the courageous doctor Borromeo, head of the hospital, decided to shelter them all--almost one hundred. It was obviously necessary to compile medical records for these special patients.  And so the three physicians, in particular Vittorio Sacerdoti (who, because he was a Jew, had already been victimized by the [1938] racial laws and was working at the hospital under a false name, protected by his supervisor, Borromeo), imagined a horrendous illness, devastating and highly contagious, the "disease of K," with the "K" referring to Kesselring, the ruthless Nazi official--or, according to other sources, Kappler, the inhuman Rome persecutor.

Those taken in--the fake sick--were put in a special ward, in isolation.

On the evening of October 16, 1943, when the Nazis arrived to search the hospital, they found the three doctors--Borromeo, Ossicini and Sacerdoti--with masks covering their faces, extremely worried about the scope of this unexpected and dangerous epidemic.  The Nazis--there was a doctor among them--demanded to see all medical records, but, when asked by Doctor Borromeo to visit the sick in person, were fearful of this terrible "disease of K" and preferred, instead, to leave. 

And so all the sheltered, pretend patients were saved from the Nazi horror.

But the story does not end there.

Borromeo, Ossicini and Sacerdoti continued to help Jews  and partisans on a daily basis. They installed a hidden radio transmitter in the basement of the hospital in order to stay in contact with other partisans and with Radio London. They declared the pretend patients deceased from the "disease of K" and procured false documents to allow them to flee, exposing themselves to great risk in a sad historical moment in which denouncements to the Germans were the order of the day and the hospital was swarming with spies.  

These three courageous physicians did not retreat before the horror and the fear, because, as Adriano Ossicini continued to assert in interviews after the war,  "One must seek to be on the side of what is right, always."  

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Durante la seconda Guerra Mondiale a Roma ci fu una terribile epidemia di una malattia sconosciuta e pericolosa. 

Si chiamava morbo di K., aveva sintomi molto gravi ed era estremamente contagiosa, ma grazie all’intuizione di tre medici eccezionali (Giovanni Borromeo, Adriano Ossicini e Vittorio Sacerdoti) non ci fu nessuna vittima. Tutti i malati, messi in isolamento in un padiglione dell’Ospedale Fatebenefratelli, si salvarono miracolosamente e così anche i medici e infermieri, nonostante il morbo di K. fosse molto contagioso.

Iniziò tutto il 16 ottobre 1943, il “sabato nero” del ghetto di Roma, quando le SS fecero un orrendo rastrellamento costringendo 1024 persone, tra cui centinaia di bambini, a salire sui treni dell’orrore per andare a morire ad Auschwitz. 

Qualcuno però riuscì a evitare i nazisti e a salvarsi, cercando rifugio proprio sull’isola Tiberina dove il coraggioso dottor Borromeo, primario dell’ospedale, decise di ricoverarli tutti, quasi un centinaio. 

Ovviamente bisognava compilare una cartella clinica per questi pazienti speciali. E così i tre medici, in particolare Vittorio Sacerdoti (che in quanto ebreo era già stato vittima delle leggi razziali e lavorava sotto falso nome all’ospedale, protetto dal primario Borromeo), immaginarono una malattia orrenda, devastante e contagiosa, il Morbo di K., dove la K. indicava in realtà Kesselring, lo spietato ufficiale nazista, o secondo altre fonti, Kappler, il disumano persecutore di Roma. 

I finti ricoverati furono messi tutti in un reparto speciale, in isolamento.

La sera del 16 ottobre 1943, quando i nazisti arrivarono a perlustrare l’ospedale, trovarono i tre medici, Borromeo, Ossicini e Sacerdoti con delle mascherine sul volto, preoccupatissimi per lo scoppio di questa improvvisa e pericolosa epidemia. I nazisti allora pretesero di vedere tutte le cartelle cliniche, dato che c’era anche un medico tra loro, ma alla richiesta del dott. Borromeo di andare a visitare personalmente i malati, ebbero paura di questo terribile morbo di K. e preferirono andarsene. 

E così tutti i finti malati ricoverati in isolamento si salvarono dall’orrore nazista.

Ma la storia non finisce qui. 

Borromeo, Ossicini e Sacerdoti continuarono quotidianamente ad aiutare ebrei e partigiani. Installarono una radio ricetrasmittente clandestina negli scantinati dell’ospedale per restare in contatto con gli altri partigiani e con Radio Londra, dichiararono morti proprio per il morbo di K. i finti pazienti e procurarono loro documenti falsi per farli fuggire, esponendosi così a grandi rischi, in un triste momento storico in cui le delazioni ai tedeschi erano all’ordine del giorno e l’ospedale pullulava di spie.

Questi tre medici coraggiosi non arretrarono davanti all’orrore e alla paura perché, come non smetteva di raccontare nelle interviste dopo la guerra Adriano Ossicini: “Bisogna cercare di essere dalla parte giusta, sempre”.

(Pietro Borromeo, figlio di Giovanni Borromeo ha raccontato questa storia nel libro: Il giusto che inventò il morbo di k. Fermento Editori, 2007)

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 During the Second World War in [occupied] Rome, there was a terrible epidemic of an unknown and dangerous illness.

It was known as "disease of K," it had very serious symptoms, and was extremely contagious, but thanks to the intuition of three exceptional doctors (Giovanni Borromeo, Adriano Ossicini and Vittorio Sacerdoti), there was not a single fatality.  All those who were sick, put in isolation in a pavilion  of the Fatebenefratelli Hospital, were miraculously saved, as were the doctors and nurses, notwithstanding that the "disease of K" was extraordinarily contagious.

It all began on the 16th of October, 1943, the "black Saturday" of the Roman ghetto, when the [Nazi] SS conducted a horrendous roundup, forcing 1024 people, among them hundreds of children, to board the trains of horror headed for the death camps at Auschwitz.

However, some succeeded in avoiding the Nazis and saving themselves, seeking refuge on Tiberina Island, where the courageous doctor Borromeo, head of the hospital, decided to shelter them all--almost one hundred.  It was obviously necessary to compile a medical record for these special patients.  And so the three physicians, in partuclar Vittorio Sacerdoti (who, because he was a Jew, had already been victimized by the [1938] racial laws and was working at the hospital under a false name, protected by his supervisor, Borromeo), imagined a horrendous illness, devastating and highly contagious, the "disease of K," with the "K" referring to Kesselring, the ruthless Nazi official--or, according to other sources, Kappler, the inhuman Rome persecutor.  

Those taken in--the fake sick--were put in a special war, in isolation. 

On the evening of October 16, 1943, when the Nazis arrived to search the hospital, they found the three doctors--Borromeo, Ossicini and Sacerdoti--with masks covering their faces, preoccupied by the scope of this unexpected and dangerous epidemic.  The Nazis--there was a doctor among demanded to see all medical records, but, when asked by Doctor Borromeo to visit the sick in person, were fearful of this terrible "disease of K" and preferred, instead, to leave. 

And so all the sheltered, fake patients were saved from the Nazi horror.

But the story does not end there.

Borromeo, Ossicini and Sacerdoti continued to help Jews  and partisans on a daily basis.  They installed a hidden radio transmitter in the basement of the hospital in order to stay in contact with other partisans and with Radio London.  They declared the pretend patients deceased from the "disease of K" and procured false documents to allow them to flee, exposing themselves to great risk in a sad historical moment in which the accusations of the Germans were the order of the day and the hospital swarming with spies.  

These three courageous physicians did not retreat before the horror and the fear because, as Adriano Ossicini reccalled in an interview after the war,  "One must seek to be on the side of what is right, always."