Courtesy of the author and Maretti Editore, we are publishing an exclusive essay from the book “Franco Simongini. L’atto poetico di documentare l’arte” (2019): a collection of texts, images and memoirs dedicated to the great director of art documentaries, who was also a poet, critic and writer. Curated by Gabriele and Raffaele Simongini, the volume was produced with the support of the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome.
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“A pluralistic, open, curious gaze, not as a critic but as a poet and companion of artists, also attentive to seeking the roots of an Italian tradition capable of renewing itself over time without losing its identity. Thus Franco Simongini, in his career as a director, writer, poet and art critic, unified like a diamond with many facets, could well have shared, mutatis mutandis, the aspiration declared by Giuseppe Ungaretti: “… it was the song of the Italian language that I sought in its constancy through the centuries […]; it was the beat of my heart that I wanted to hear in harmony with the beat of the hearts of my elders in a land I loved desperately” (1).
For Simongini too, tradition meant speaking through time, transmitting the vitality of certain past experiences but bringing them back to light once again, new and different. Not surprisingly, although his best-known documentaries are those dedicated to the major Italian artists of the 20th century, a focus on Italian artistic excellence, in a broad sense, over the centuries is achieved in the programme “A tu per tu con l’opera d’arte”, from the 1970s, in which Cesare Brandi chose and commented on some masterpieces of our art in a multi-century journey, from the Warrior of Capestrano to the temples of Paestum, from the Palatine Chapel to Michelangelo’s Tondo Doni, from Manzù’s Porta della Morte to Burri’s Sacchi, without forgetting the second series of the programme dedicated to the Italian regions through three major works that represent each of them and were also selected by Brandi. In a more rhapsodic vein, a similar endeavour was then undertaken in the late 1980s and early 1990s with Federico Zeri, again in “A tu per tu con l’opera d’arte”, with forays into art towns such as Amelia and Todi, with fascinating interpretations of artists such as Rosso Fiorentino, Beccafumi, Guido Reni, Sassoferrato, De Nittis and so on.
Franco Simongini. L’atto poetico di documentare l’arte, 2019, Maretti editore In essence, Simongini understood early on that the widespread nature of our artistic heritage in the osmosis between culture and nature, beyond the trivial divisions between major and minor art, is the true peculiarity of our history, without any breaks with what our artists would later do in the 20th century. In short, the films dedicated to the protagonists of 20th-century Italian art should be seen as the final destination of a happy and centuries-old creative story that has its roots in a past conceived as an integral and living part of the present. In this sense, we can better understand the absolute indifference towards fashions that characterises Simongini’s work, as well as his ability, often at the cost of isolation, not to be ensnared by ideological cages with their prevarications and dangerous sectarianism. Often going against the tide, Simongini pays due tribute, with filmic works that have now become part of history, to Giorgio de Chirico, in the early 1970s, in contrast to the reputation of a reactionary painter and folkloristic “old tool” that his homeland then reserved for him. And Simongini’s documentaries also produced a chain reaction that led to the rediscovery of de Chirico’s painting and persona through the filter of the television image by a “media” painter like Mario Schifano.
Simongini’s poetic research, in a broad sense and realised precisely in the film images, sinks into the centre of the magma that unites man and artist, in the most authentic sense possible, as if the documentary were offering a total confession through the creative gesture, the words, the expressions of the face and body, and the studio environment. Despite the artifice inherent in filmmaking, the heart of these documentaries remains existential and artistic authenticity, in an indissoluble osmosis. For example, Alberto Burri’s profound human and artistic bond with Umbria and with Città di Castello in particular is clearly visible in the images that open the documentary “L’avventura della ricerca” (1986), in which the strength of a courageous and solitary journey emerges, the formal interpretation of which is entrusted to Brandi’s incomparable words. The views and panoramas dedicated to Città di Castello and the surrounding hills and countryside provide visual evidence of a kind of genius loci that then seems to naturally transform, mutatis mutandis, into the material substance of Burri’s works. Thus, this symbiotic relationship between native environment, human story and artistic path is constantly sought, felt and visualised by Simongini both in the documentaries and in his narrative, poetic and journalistic works.
The landscape seems to be the humus that gives life to the artists’ research in a profound continuity, including visually, which becomes formal in the works, obviously not in a trivially mimetic sense. “In the flat, small expanses of land,” wrote Simongini in an article dedicated to Burri, that open out in a fan, a square, a triangle, up to the first ridges of the measured Umbrian hills, in the upper Tiber valley, from Umbertide to San Sepolcro, all that undulating sea of broad-leaved plants seems to rise to Città di Castello like a wave of various shades. In Città di Castello […] you can breathe in the smell of blond and brown tobacco, there are the large, vast drying rooms like film studios, and inhaling that soft, deep vapour of drying tobacco that spreads almost from the earth is sweet and quiet, it tastes of rest and of comfortable homes inhabited by peaceful people” (2).
Simongini, with his vocation to remain aloof, which is also evident in his documentaries, in the novel “La torre dell’orologio” (Rizzoli Editore, 1979) offers his engaging critical interpretation in a conversational manner, without any pedantic presumption, entrusting it to a key character in the story: “[…] Burri is Umbrian. There is in him, in his work, that mysterious shadow of Franciscan simplicity, arte povera, the true colours of Umbria expressed in the simplest and most immediate way, as if a monk from the Year 1000, alone on top of a mountain, wants to express his soul, his feelings, and has no paints, brushes or canvases, no experience of painting, but only his sackcloth and tree branches. So what does the good little medieval friar do? He takes his cassock, tears it up, reassembles it, and sews it back together on a frame made of oak twigs, brown on brown, variations of brown with stitching in light-coloured twine, perhaps vegetable twine, straw threads. Here is the soul of the friar laid bare, this is his prayer, the sack, the humble sack spread out in variations of colour, a simplicity made of rough canvas, in an order, in an invention, in an extraordinary decoration of his own cassock. This is Burri, a monk of today who expresses himself like a monk of a thousand years ago, yesterday as today as tomorrow, art in its wild state, in its essence, in its purest humility, the exaltation of silence and solitude.”.
To another character in the novel, however, the author entrusts, with his usual pluralism, another interpretation that is the opposite of the first, leaving the reader free to choose: “Burri is not joy, simplicity or Franciscan humility; Burri is anguish, terror, the nightmare of the end of the world, a disease that crushes and suffocates us, a collective neurosis. He heralds a world destined for madness, disintegration, suicide and nothingness. This is his value, this is his great message…” (3).
The innovative and “popular” energy, in the best sense of the term, of Simongini’s documentaries was understood better and before the critics by some artists deeply interested in the relationship between art and the media: just think, as mentioned, of Mario Schifano, who, in the context of the famous “Paesaggi TV”, loved to photograph the images of Simongini’s documentaries dedicated to de Chirico as a basis for some of his works; or, more recently, of an artist like Francesco Vezzoli, who has paid specific attention to Simongini’s documentaries – in particular “Come nasce un’opera d’arte – Giorgio de Chirico, Il sole sul cavalletto” (1975), “Come nasce un’opera d’arte – Renato Guttuso Natura morta” (1975) and “Alberto Burri. L’avventura della ricerca” (1986) – as part of the exhibition “TV70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai”, promoted and hosted in Milan by the Prada Foundation from 9 May to 24 September 2017. In particular, Vezzoli’s project acutely highlighted an important fact: in these programmes, the artists engaged with the potential of the television medium, which made them visible to the general public for the first time in Italy, transforming the creative process at the origin of their works into a “popular” narrative aimed at the heterogeneous group of viewers. And the words that Vezzoli himself dedicates in the book accompanying the exhibition on RAI in the 1970s are also very valid for Simongini’s documentary work: “From a contemporary perspective, Italian television production in the 1970s clearly reveals its anarchic and revolutionary character. As if Italian politics, which had evidently underestimated the power of the TV medium, had given it great freedom of expression. […] The television of the 1970s produced rites and, consequently, absolute and lasting myths that, even today, when presented again in this exhibition, can inspire unconventional choices” (4).
Simongini’s openness and pluralism of views, which did not allow for preconceived exclusions based on rigid ideological schemes or artistic movements, were widely acknowledged by Vezzoli in the exhibition at the Prada Foundation, especially in relation to Burri and Guttuso: in the eyes of official critics and the art world, Vezzoli wrote, “Burri represents the highest levels of intellectual research, and Guttuso is stuck in a kind of dusty vocabulary. But my goal, throughout the exhibition, is to seek reconciliation. I still live in a country that reacts vehemently to polarisation” (5). On the occasion of the exhibition, Marco Senaldi, in his essay in the catalogue, also clearly emphasised the “revolution” of Simongini’s documentaries: “In the case, for example, of “Come nasce un’opera d’arte” (1975-76), something unprecedented was actually happening: the interviews conducted by Franco Simongini with Giorgio de Chirico, Renato Guttuso and Agenore Fabbri, carried out in the artist’s own studio, capturing him in the midst of his work, allowed the flow of his thoughts to flow live, alongside the unfolding of the work that, in the meantime, materialises before our eyes on the canvas. The work of art, observed and filmed in its making, was presented no longer as an object to be contemplated, but as an event to be followed, inextricably linked to the temporal dynamics and psychology of its author. For the first time, the work was examined and presented as an event in progress, rather than as the result of an artistic mastery, thus reversing the way of looking at it: not from the end, as a point of arrival, but from the beginning, as the actualisation of one of infinite possibilities” (6)”.
Gabriele Simongini
- Ungaretti, Tre riflessioni, “Il Tevere”, 11-12 April 1929
- Simongini, “Nell’ ‘hangar’ di Burri”, “Il Tempo”, 8 November 1979
- Simongini, “La torre dell’orologio”, Rizzoli Editore, Milan, 1979, pp. 55-56
- Vezzoli, “Televisioni, rituali e miti”, in AA.VV., “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai”, exhibition catalogue, Prada Foundation, Milan, 9 May-24 September 2017, p.457
- Vezzoli and K.Biesenbach, “Lo spazio della riconciliazione”, in AA.VV., “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai”, cit., p.474
- Senaldi, “Televisione & Arte”, in AA.VV., “TV 70: Francesco Vezzoli guarda la Rai”, cit., p.548.