1934

Dear Ponti,

I believe whether to write you a letter is the most convenient way for the exploit that I intend to try here: recover, make relive a time, very distant, by now, in which a group of young people had some experiences, perhaps in the real context in which they lived
not ordinary, certain unusual: a case of identification of ourselves with the idea of society in which it seemed us for a certain time, losing us, to save us. I am making reference at thirties between 1931 and 1934, in Milan, at the magazines "Orpheus" and "Camminare"... to which we collaborated, at the revealing meetings with very in agreement friendships, at the curious sense of removal in which we lived, with a very active desperation. For how much I solicit the memory, I don't succeed in finding again, and I am sorry, the memory of the moment, of the precise occasion in which we met there for the first time; I remember, instead, a very well that in that years I was very desirous to discover, and not only because of syllogistic operations or abstract deductions, rather really gathering the direct and vivid experience of the movements of the do, what Ferdinand Lion will say «the secret of the art». I Frequented the studies of the painters. Different ways showed me the limits of riduttive and impositive unities. I came soon in your study; and, so, after "Il fulmine alla centrale elettrica" (1927) and "Bice" (1929) it could be possible to follow all of your tests gathering them in their arising, and borning and making themselves in a very careful job. To tell it brief, your way of working it openly came from the school of Guidi, you had taken possession of many artifices in a refined mixture of innocence and wisdom, but you took the impassive forms, floods of «allusions», and sure of themselves, and as you shook them, engraving them a strong charge of drama, among technological terrors, dark fixities of the looks and anxious ambiguous smiles. A strong impulse, but still hazy, it seemed to clearly direct you toward that particular way of seeing art and of participating it that has been «criticism of life». On the other hand, the calls, in the circumstances, they were many: there were then you alive the critical tentacles of the expressionism, there was Grosz and the «new objectivity» with Otto Dix, and there was in all the arts a disposition, a search that was said «realism». You, meanwhile, in your way you moved the forms, that you had found calms and expanses in an ancient notice of absorbed light and as without time, you moved them toward aware ways of a disturbed and violent reality, insecure of itself, convinced of one discomfort of itself. This way you took certain experienced measures and longly elaborate, and you served in the animation of the recovery of new unexpected meanings; then the new meanings acted on those studied ways with solutions of unexpected structures according to new profiles. Many among those people that could do it in that years recognized in you «the painter»; and for this, recently it has very suitably been remembered , you belonged to the most important movements of the time. Also of the «Novecento». You found yourself welcomed with liking among the others «artists»; certain, you were recognized and approved; and nevertheless, it seems me, you didn't recognize yourself in the sense that resulted implicit in that recognitions, in the sense that was intended from who that recognitions offered. A sort of anxiety, of feverish and new solicitation didn't find the formal correspondence and alive of which had need. To ironic and calms stupefations and wonder, to the wish of happy perfection of yourself, to those hidden quotations from the ancient ones you wanted give an alarmed shake, radical, show certain breakups and ruins, and somehow disclose the heart revealed of the society in which you found yourself to live. Dissatisfaction... Restlessness... Search of new meanings... And the need to invent, in the search, games of lights and of suitable colors for these dreams or critical, and compromising nightmares. Here it seems to me that is to look for the link, the point of application and contact, the native motive that brought you to approach you to Orpheus. Emilio Castellani has remembered well a great deal the first meeting of the friends in your study. And here it also seems to me that is to look for the novelty, then, of your job, its vivacious and suitable stamp in the project of a transformation that implicated of necessity certain expensive renouncements to aim to difficult results, and also risky. I have remembered Orpheus, the magazine that was made then in Milan, and here: all of a sudden of its development, in the number nine of November 1933, in it the signatures of the collaborators disappear, the job has to appear as a collective job, of group; and a sort of extreme reduction of the presence of the face of the single ones, so «a collective render» also the search of the new order «collectivist», and also that moral action that consisted of completing a work that referred to the collectivity, everything became job in which the individual had to vanish himself in an anonymous reality that overcame himt with big strength. It was a way of seeing of extreme tension, and to it we had come after a few years of common activity of intense social inspiration. The magazine was published between 1932 and 1934; and the general structures that undergo to affirmations as these have something of upsetting if you thought at the years, at the situation, at the time. They certainly bring back us to the culminating moment of an unusual experience lived in an unusual climate, in years, in them different way, difficult, in which some young people that didn't feel excluded, but that can be thought that they wanted to be excluded, they found themselves in the libraries, in the coffees, at concerts, and particularly under the wide porticos of the Faculty of letters in Corso Roma, in Milan. They realized to feel common impelled of dissatisfaction and states of discomfort toward the reality in which they were living, and vague and dark intentions of hope appeared. They were young people of different origins, and of different intentions, also of different orientations of study; and even if there is anything true, when it is said, as it is used, «that preparation is not everything», some of that young people were among those which, with an ambiguous brief expression and a too much strict, whose are said «well prepared»; and certain they didn't miss the ambitions. They read many books and magazines, and, when it was possible to have them, also that books and those magazines that were forbidden; impatient of many ties, they dreamt a distant island in which create a New Atlantide, and in a bit they felt full of the spirit of the project also in the heat of the good enlightenment climate of their city. Orpheus was a magazine of studies and musical news that was passing one moment of crisis; in the impossibility to get an authorization to go out with an appropriate heading, that young people found in it hospitality, they revived it, they widened the spaces and the affairs of it, they invented a place to say what they thought or what they believed to think. That young people were: Rémy Assayas, Emilio Castellani, Carlo Marchetti, Enzo Paci, Pino Ponti and me. Others were added little by little. Soon they met friends of other cities, of Rome, of Bologna... in which autonomous initiatives somehow convergent were born at the same time. Someone spoke of «realism», in non different meaning from that usually referred to what in more open contexts would be said... Marxism. Which were our intentions, and what is the look with which today we can look at that intentions, they had some weight on the contemporaries. In Rome, meanwhile, "Il Saggiatore" and "Il Cantiere" were published (with Giorgio Granata and Domenico Carella, this one I remember with liking), in Bologna "Il Nettuno" (with dear Sigfrido Wolfango); in Milan they were also had then Camminare (with Mondadori and Cantons). Our difficulties were full of heat: it was us, there were made old-fashioned projects. F.V., a bolognese girl with which I had a prolonged correspondence, was an example of these spontaneous shares with particular incisive accent of authenticity. Now that years are object of study; and Folin and Quaranta, in their searches, for which they have some worths, on the literary magazines among the two wars in a first study (with anthology) on the juvenile Magazines of the fascist period (pp. 450, Treviso, 1977) opportunely and with prudent hand, the theme is tangled, full of hidden meanings, and it asks for non common ability of reading among the lines, they have started a job of investigation that, it seems, it will continue in the intention to recover one chapter of the memory on facts that had their uncomfortable position in times when the second world war was growing up.