Virgilio Retrosi, Neutralità...armata Armed Neutrality, 1915. Courtesy Imperial War Museum, London
The worlds of early twentieth century Italian politics, art, satire and wartime propaganda are currently being explored in a new exhibition at the Estorick Collection of Modern Art in London .
Barbed Wit: Italian Satire of the Great War, showing at the Gallery until Sunday March 18 2007, features a collection of rarely seen original artworks for postcards produced in Italy during the First World War.
The 36 highly coloured original designs by little-known artists have been loaned from the vast archives of the Imperial War Museum, London and reveal the sophisticated and often shrewd attitudes that fermented within Italian politics at the time.
Virgilio Retrosi, Il volto della guerra, The Face of War, c.1915-18. Courtesy Imperial War Museum, London
Original large-scale drawings are exhibited next to a selection of the resulting monochromatic postcards - allowing visitors to see the mass-produced results of the original designs.
Postcards first appeared in Austria from around 1869 and became increasingly popular across Europe and America before eventually reaching a golden age in the first decade of the 20th century. By the end of the Great War they had developed into an important part of social and political commentary and today they are valuable sources of wartime ephemera.
Virgilio Retrosi, Il cittadino che protesta, The Complaining Citizen, 1914. Courtesy Imperial War Museum, London
In Italy in the early twentieth century they quickly became the preferred medium for using art to convey wartime propaganda. The Italian Futurists, since their foundation in 1909, had glorified and advocated participation in war, defining it in their foundation manifesto as the ‘sole hygiene of the world’, whilst others were diametrically opposed.
At the war’s outbreak in 1914 the country was effectively divided into neutralists and interventionists. The Italian government meanwhile had signed up to a triple Alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany, but argued that an aggressive war did not uphold the terms of the Alliance.
Following the secret Treaty of London in April 1915 the Italians eventually joined the Triple Entente of the Allies and declared war against Austria-Hungary.
Virgilio Retrosi, Il Guerra fondaio, The Warmonger, 1915. Courtesy Imperial War Museum, London
It’s this schism and tumult in Italian national politics that the propaganda postcards address. Artists turned to postcards in order to criticise the action or inaction of various sectors of Italian people during the war.
The prosperous bourgeoisie are attacked as materialistic profiteers, whilst complaining citizens are shown as plump and overfed ‘Boulevadiers.’ Elsewhere the horrors of war are depicted through horrific Medusa figures, (representing the German Kaiser Wilhelm II) whilst the country’s early inaction is symbolised through a giant in armour - shackled with heavy chains.
Throughout the exhibition there is much evidence of cutting satire mixed with a healthy dose of theatrical good humour – the kind of which would become a mainstay of the European seaside postcard later in the twentieth century.
Virgilio Retrosi, L’alba, Sunrise, c.1914-18. Courtesy Imperial War Museum, London
The designs use a variety of different satirical devices including personification, caricature and bestialisation to create a fascinating commentary on Italy’s often complex involvement in the Great War.
