The Paradox of Venice’s Art : From the old masters to the modernists, Italian works glitter in several exhibitions

The fabled jewel of the Adriatic is a tangled Byzantine paradox. Its murky yellow-green canals are as enchanted as a Joseph Cornell box, its imperious hotel concierges as parsimonious as dirt farmers. The ambiance is at once as cheery as a carnival and as devious as the narrow streets that meander catlike through crumbling monuments.

Between the Bellinis in the Academia and the Tintorettos in the School of San Rocco, there is enough old art to sate a battalion of starving scholars, but Venice also perversely insists on being a center for modern art. It seems to want to do everything imaginable to attract yet another million tourists and then complain that the multitudes are literally wearing out the cobbled sidewalks.

There is no “Biennale” this summer, but the town is still punctuated with special exhibitions--Goya at the modern museum, Impressionist paintings from the National Gallery at the city museum, a show of modern Italian photography. Needless to say, it all seems wonderfully redundant in a place where every real view has served as grist for some famous artist’s palette.

The big-ticket item among art exhibitions is “Italian Art 1900-1945” at the Palazzo Grassi until Nov. 5. The museum is directed by Pontus Hulten, who was the original head man at Paris’ Pompidou Center and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art. Small world, the art world. The show is a truncated version of “Italian Art of the 20th Century” organized by London’s Royal Academy and seen there last winter. The Academy did a real service in organizing this textbook show and two others on German and English modernism. The Venetian version is an impressively indigestible affair stuffed into the Palazzo’s 37 galleries and includes painting, sculpture, architecture, books, documents and memorabilia.

A three-story plaster copy of Umberto Boccioni’s “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” is barely contained by the central courtyard and is almost as ghastly as it is large. The exhibition dips into art made during the Fascist period of the 1930s, but you could look at the show without ever thinking about Il Duce or any of that. If there was an official Italian Fascist art paralleling that of the Third Reich, it is not here. Even the work of Mario Sironi--the artist most closely linked to the politics of the era--looks more like a depressed version of Giorgio de Chirico’s deserted piazzas than Socialist Realism.

A sprinkling of precursors like Medardo Rosso and Pellizza da Volpedo in introductory galleries gives way to examples of the best-known Italian modernist movements, Futurism and Metaphysical art, and marches righteously on through postwar masters Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri. It is all so well selected and instructive that one wishes the ensemble could somehow be the Palazzo Grassi’s permanent collection. As far as I know, there is no such stable resource for the period and that’s really too bad.

Written encyclopedias have a lot of information, but you can never synthesize it and that’s annoying. Visual encyclopedias are different. Shows like this one crystallize in the mind and you come away with epic insights about the collective aesthetic that fueled the art. It’s like having a crystal ball with a model of the Italian spirit inside like a ship in a bottle. It lists a trifle to port.

At its best, Italian modernism was wonderfully stylish, theatrical and dynamic. It seems to have inherited those qualities from its Baroque past. In Venice, you can verify the notion just by crossing the Grand Canal to look at the Cinemascope Old Masters like Veronese’s “Supper at Emmaus.” At the Palazzo Grassi there is one room with five Futurist masterpieces--Gino Severini’s Cubist syncopated “Dancing at the Pan-Pan,” Boccioni’s exuberant “The City Rises,” Carlo Carra’s “ Funeral of the Anarchist Galli,” Antonio Russolo’s “The Revolt” and Giacomo Balla’s “Abstract Speed.”

They are the absolute nut of Italian modernism, as inventive as Einstein and as solid as Titan. The damn things just make you grin with admiration. When you add in Amedeo Modigliani’s sculpture in a nearby room, you’re ready to forgive all his potboiler paintings, very glad the Italians got into the 20th, albeit barely.

Panache soaks the best of this art, but it’s not the dominant quality. What saturates this work, good, bad and middling, is memory. It’s like that orchestra in front of the cafe Florian, forever whining out the love theme from “Dr. Zhivago.” Some day my love. . . .

As an aesthetic carburetor, memory has produced great works of modern art from Proust to Kienholz, but it’s a tricky source of inspiration because one wrong move and you’re covered with the goop of sentimental nostalgia, the slime of stylish perversity or the paralytic lime of historical academicism.

There is a soft penumbra around memory that contradicts modernism’s insistence on progress. It’s almost funny how the tough Futurists with their radical manifestos calling for the literal destruction of the past were always sneaking off doing portraits of their mothers. Lovable, but not exactly the image of your avant-garde radical.

Naturally, De Chirico and Giorgio Morandi are heavily represented. They were both smart to incorporate their different versions of memory up front so you have to accept it as a given. The sense of time is almost palpable in Italy. It’s not just all the old buildings, it’s something in the air that sometimes makes you feel the world is moving in slow motion in a sweet, clear syrup of hours, years and centuries.

Morandi used the quality to make himself into the prototype of the modern hermit-monk artist humbly absorbing millions of seconds into his little still lifes of dusty bottles. De Chirico’s days seemed to consist of twilights a hundred hours long and allowed him to create the parallel space that made Surrealism possible.

With exceptions, most of the rest of the exhibition serves as a cautionary catalogue of how many ways one can go wrong in the use of memory.

In the 1920s, modernism underwent a general conservative backlash. Severini and Carra went in for religious archaism, Ardengo Soffici, Felice Casorati and quite a few others went in for Balthus-like Neo-Classical eroticism. Fortunato Depero made ice cream parlor Dadaist fantasy art that is mildly amusing.

We don’t miss the more recent Italian transavantgardia that was lopped out of this show because such artists as Clemente, Chia and Cucchi based their styles largely on the bad end of this show.

With the exception of a few figures like Fontana and Burri, Italian art failed to recover its energy after World War II. Once fashionable postwar figurative figures such as Renato Guttuso, Giacomo Manzu and Marino Marini look flaccid and tired here. It is nonetheless a wonderful, straightforward show.

There is something tirelessly interesting about getting other people’s versions of the modernist orthodoxy. Other nations always give large play to local heroes who are elsewhere considered minor figures, and sometimes the home team is right. In Germany, Joseph Beuys started as an indigenous cult figure. The Venice show helps us understand why Fontana is revered. We tend to remember him for late abstractions of solid-color canvases with a single elegant razor slash. Here the artist, who died in 1968, is revealed in a long career of Picasso-like variety, which ranged from stylized figurative sculpture to constructivist works and roiling ceramics--always energetic and pristine.

Museum shows, of course, have high purpose. These days, however, everybody is exquisitely and unfortunately conscious of the commercial side of art on account of multimillion-dollar auction bids that make headlines and convince people with too much money that art is not only a good investment but a glamorous way to gain social status.

At the time I visited the Venetian exhibition, an International Contemporary Art Expo held forth in Milan. It seemed worth checking out since it came wrapped in a bunting of impressive publicity--more than 90 galleries participating, more than 18,000 visitors during its last run in 1987.

Milan is chic and cosmopolitan, and the Internazionale D’Arte Contemporanea was impressive even though Italian galleries far outnumbered those of other countries. It was held in the Fiera Milano, which sounds more poetic than convention center even though it comes to the same thing.

The Fiera is a vast hall with a grand escalator running up the middle. Commercial expos are always a bit of a jumble since their purpose is monetary rather than aesthetic, so this one had the usual mix of amateurism, illustration and decor posing as art, then shading off into real art through talents who have fallen out of fashion. Part of the mordant fun of these affairs is rediscovering artists who have been erased from one’s memory bank by time. Good grief, there is a Bernard Buffet. It’s hard to believe he was once taken seriously. And Karel Appel. Everybody thought of him as a monster Expressionist and now he looks pretty.

Expos are sad too. Their frank commercialism makes the works look like aging courtesans lolling about nervously hoping for a rich sugar daddy to rescue them from all this.

So much said, the expo was still a quality affair complete with catalogue and a kind of theme that emerged from the murk. It really looked like an attempt to exploit the prestige of the Palazzo Grassi exhibition.

Morandi and Carlo Carra were significantly represented, and every third booth seemed to have a version of De Chirico’s haunted piazzas. The artist was reputedly shameless in making copies of his own early works and backdating them. Present evidence suggests that’s what he did. His late Neo-Classical paintings of rearing horses reigned in by strapping male nudes have always been considered potboilers, but their presence in force here and in Venice suggests a move to save them from history’s ash heap. Might work too. Their thin theatrical panache and kitsch heroism suit the Post-Modernist sensibility.

A noticeable presence of later watered-down Italian modernists like Massimo Campigli, Alberto Savino (De Chirico’s brother), Manzu and others suggest a final sugaring of the Italian sensibility that contributes to the whiff of a trend one has sensed elsewhere recently. We are seeing the re-emergence of that timeless refuge of mined-out art universally known as--Cute.