Page 24 - Studio International - September 1973

contemplates itself, the autonomy of the sphere
of art from other activities of the mind,
distinctions of an intellectual origin, are
Crocean concepts leading to the detachment, as
well, of the author from his work and to the
overtaking of art as confession, as gesture, along
the road followed by Belli. This is so even
though Croce's thought influenced the type of
criticism that praised the fragment, sensibility,
melancholy, and even though Croce was
opposed to it, and every new avant garde. 'Art is
not an expression of mood', Belli continues,
`it is not an interpretation of visual reality, not a
translation, not an illustration, not reporting.
Still less can it be the impression of impressions
. . . . The elements of painting are form and
colour. Let us, then, make forms and colours .
Artistic emotion cannot be of a psychological
order. There is first of all artistic material
equal for everyone. It is a question of working it
with the appropriate means. This is style. Style
is the work, the particular work. Free the
forms from the object. Make painting.'
Though it found a parallel in the arguments
for a rational architecture of Terragni, Lingeri,
Pagano, Nizzoli1 and the few others opposed
to the rhetoric of the monumental, this rigorous
purism of Belli with its anti-romanticism was
offset by the unrestrained fantasy of Licini's
declarations. This latter had no intention of
leaving out fancy, surprise, the irrational, but
of containing them within the discipline of his
rhythmic composition. This meant the
demonstration that geometry could become
feeling. In fact, Licini had always felt the value
of the absurd beneath the appearance of
absolute lucidity.
`Up to four years ago', he wrote in the
foreword to the exhibition at the Galleria
Million, in May 1935, of his first abstract
pictures, 'I did everything I could to do good
paintings from life. Then I began to have
doubts. To doubt is not a weakness, but hard
work like smithing, as Cartesius said. I am
convinced I was doing, as so many still are,
painting out of its time, superannuated, belated,
contrary to its true nature which is not to
imitate. Painting is the art of colours and forms,
freely conceived, and it is also an act of will and
of creation, and it is, unlike architecture, an
irrational art where fantasy and imagination
predominate, as in poetry. So I took the two
(Top left)
Page from Campo Grafico 1934 hundred good canvases I had painted from life
designed by Dradi and Rossi and put them in the attic. And over these four
(Top right) years I have begun to invent my pictures. The
Cover of first number of high-priests say that I am now doing cerebral
Bollettino del Million, September 15 painting. What are we supposed to do then,
to November i t, 1932
designed by Edoardo Persico intestinal painting ? Even their sensation is a
phenomenon of the central cerebral activity.
(Above left)
Advertisement for Olivetti 1940 And then ? They even say (in good faith) that
designed by G. Pintori our painting is decorative. If this is so, then
(Above right) theirs is scene-painting, photographic and
Nizzoli and Persico grotesque. And so we are quits.
tubular steel exhibition structure in the Galleria, `What is the purpose of a painting if not to
Milan, 1934
"super-decorate" a wall, to cheer up an interior.
This is its function, its sole justification. I agree,
it can also be poetry. And this is what we

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