By Alice Rainis
It is at the small but interesting space of the Estorick Collection that took place, from 10th January until 18th March, a temporary exhibition called Barbed Wit: Italian Satire of the Great War. 36 original drawings have been displayed, from the archives of the Imperial War Museum, from which propagandistic postcards, very popular in the first decade of the XX century, were created.
The theme upon which these satirical depictions develop is exactly the Great War and the way Italy related itself to such a crucial historical period. Irony rotates around the indecision that characterised the Bel Paese when, politically weak and divided into two parts, struggled to come to a decision about whether to join the war.
The grater part of the cartoons is an explicit jeering at this neutrality – like the personification of Italy in a woman who, tearing off the petals of a daisy, asks herself “I shall go… I shall not…” – but are present, still as desecrating drawings, images of the war and the monstrosities that it involves, among which The Face of War stands out.
The big dimension of the drawings and their live colours give even more strength to the short but sharp sentences, so that it is possible to fully appreciate the biting sarcasm.
Among the artists showcased were Virgilio Retrosi, Paolo Ferro and Giulio Gigli; by the latter one the curator of the exhibition, Chris Adams, shows us what, in his opinion, is one of the most representative works. There is a reference to a previous work by Severini – who as a futurist backed the entry of Italy to war, hoping for the modernisation of the country and raising to values the concepts of dynamism, velocity, mechanisation and so on – called Dynamic Vision of Befana with the intention of underlining the epiphany in those countries already actively involved in the conflict.
Beyond the specialist visitor who, for sure, found the exhibition a chance to observe closely some works very difficult to find otherwise, even a simply curious audience could discover the existence of these sarcastic postcards that, exactly by means of a “bitter laugh”, outline an important historical period and reveal to be still very topical.
The videointerview with the curator and the photographs of the exhibition are available on our website www.giorgiostudio.co.uk.
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