Gianni Dova

Klaus Wolbert - Gianni Dova and nuclear art

Premiss. The Russell-­Einstein Manifesto

Aesthetic research cannot be at the service of slow destruction (consumption), just as scientific research cannot be at the service of violent destruction (war): at least not without ceasing to be what it always has been, the search for value, Art. (GIULIO CARLO ARGAN)1

In 1932 Albert Einstein wrote to Sigmund Freud.
World War I had ended fourteen years before, but the image it had left in a young Europe that had made such progress towards well-being was of fear that arrogance and ignorance could again prevail over knowledge and progress.
That which had fuelled a state of positivist, future-possible euphoria, the blind faith in the discoveries of science and mechanics, the awareness of being able to overcome every obstacle and barrier, had instead shown man’s limit and his total inability to manage the power deriving from all this.
Numerous bodies devoted to safeguarding the cultural heritage and the events it could nurture were founded, and it was precisely as a member of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation2 that Einstein posed Freud the question the community was beginning to ask:
How could science and knowledge have been able to free men from the spectre of war?
Freud, on his part, having published the essay Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920, declared that he had had the same thought, and offered his contribution by theorising the “death-instinct” as equivalent to and opposite the “life-instinct”, in the Metapsychology of 1915, in an attempt to raise public awareness of the risks that man’s lack of scruples and atavistic desire to predominate could entail.
Collective acceptance of the dualism between the antithetic relationships of good and evil (Eros and Thanatos),3 which, although apparently surpassed thanks to a modern and conscious state of values, actually sounded like the defeat of the very modernity that had generated it, and, despite the efforts made to start containing the madness that was nourished by this uncontrollable power, the warning did not pertain to the future to come, but was only a forewarning of the rise of he who made the death-instinct his life purpose: Adolf Hitler.

The fundamental problem of the fate of the human race seems to me to be this: to what extent will civil evolution manage to control the upheavals of collective life caused by the aggressive and destructive impulse of men […] who have so extended their power over natural forces […] that in making use of them it would be easy for us to exterminate one another […]. (SIGMUND FREUD)4

When Hitler came to power in Germany (1933), a large part of the educated class had already fled to America, including Einstein himself.

My pacifism is an instinctive feeling, a feeling that dominates me, because the killing of man fills me with disgust. My stance is not derived from some intellectual theory, but is based on my profound aversion to all kinds of cruelty and hatred.5

Ironically he, man of science, prophet of peace and sworn enemy of war, was the passive cause of the explosion of the atomic bomb. In convincing the then president, Roosevelt, of the need to build a nuclear weapon for defensive purposes, he razed to the ground, along with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the unquestioned faith in human reasoning, decreeing the failure of the modern age and marking the start of an era of transition from which our contemporary society was to arise.

The artistic expressions of the second half of the twentieth century are testimony of this turning point. No longer having any valid pretext for reflecting reality through those figurative or abstract forms that in any case synthesised its presence and role, artists had no choice but to follow the context, asserting through the disintegration of visible and objectifiable contents the representative function of a life that had been shown to be incoherent and illogical in drawing strength from the attrition of its own failures.
Was it right to submit to a society accustomed to commercialisation and the idolatry of consumption, to the point of approving and celebrating the production of death on a vast scale?

I paint to formulate a judgement on my time, society and the various customs of today. The more ruthless the judgement, the more implicitly each person will feel responsible for it. (GIANNI DOVA)6

The Russell­-Einstein Manifesto was presented in London in 1955. It was the first document denouncing the threat of nuclear weapons, and was to sanction the universality of twenty years of studies and reflections.
We are not talking, on this occasion, as members of this or that occasion, continent or religious faith, but as human beings, members of the human race, whose survival has now been put at risk […] We must start thinking in a new way.7 The wise and level-headed civilisation shown by this new ethics gave voice to the hope generated only by acknowledging it; it was slowly assimilated like rain falling in the desert, and germinated those seeds that the earth safeguarded beneath the arid expanse of anxiety and fear.
It defined the legitimacy of an objective and practical, targeted and vigilant style, and was proposed as a temporal bridge towards the age of change and awareness, of new binary experimentation and reconstruction.
This premiss, which seems so far removed from the sphere of artistic culture, also reconnected to the historical, social and political context of his time, considering that the communicative empathy art is able to offer its own time is often an impulsive reaction to what life offers.
Towards the end of the war and immediately after, artists were a “class” outside society, they did not want to be part of it because they rejected a society that had given space and support to fascism and had compromised itself in suffocation, abuse and racial and cultural persecution… We felt like the vanguard of new ideas, new values, respect, aware that our work had to change the world… In our Western world today there is no longer anything to change, one could only improve it rather than worsening it… But how? (Gianni Dova)8

Edmund Husserl and the anticipation of change. Is art dead?

The universe is dark: we hope, though, that infinity will be blue, be this sky of clean light without clouds, without boundaries. (GIANNI DOVA)9

The flight from Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century took an aesthetic philosophy marked by revolt and rejection to America.
In 1936 Edmund Husserl focused the problem of the general loss of logical meaning caused by “blind” modern development, whose shortcoming was precisely that it was now too far from what he called the “world of life”.

European civilisation is essentially a culture of freedom and cannot be stiffened into any fixed conceptual historical scenario […] it can only correspond to its original impulse, that of looking directly and in complete freedom at the world.10

So from this point of view the failure of the values that had sustained the European avant-gardes marked the end of a cultural system based on the mathematical illusion that everything could be obtained at the expense of the irrational sphere in which man nourishes his fantasies.

Jean-Paul Sarte had also published numerous essays reflecting on the tragic nature of the human condition and on the conflictual coexistence of “consciousness” and “physical world”: an opposition that, in his opinion, would never find a balance and would make existence absurd and paradoxical.

The separation of theory and practice had the result of turning one into an unprincipled empiricism and the other into pure, crystallised knowledge.11

Absurdity and paradox were also preached by another great writer, whose interest in philosophy always alternated with that in literature and art: Günther Stern, better known as Günther Anders, known for having categorised his ideas by coining the term Diskrepanzphilosophie (philosophy of discrepancy).
Strenuously fighting the Nazi theorist Heidegger’s mechanical principle, which he clearly saw as being “blind to the Apocalypse”, Anders fought with all his strength to expose the collective ineptitude and the problem of a growing divergence between the technically possible (intellectual capacity) and the possibly technical, or that which the human mind is able to imagine (fantasy of emotivity).
He was one of the first writers involved in the anti-nuclear movement and one of the thinkers who rigorously and tenaciously alerted mankind to the dangers of madness born from power.
In 1933 he fled Germany and found refuge in New York, where he continued his work as a writer and philosopher. He was the co-founder, with Robert Jungk, of the anti-nuclear movement of 1954.

Your first thought upon awakening be: atom. For you should not begin your day with the illusion that what surrounds you is a stable world […] the possibility of the Apocalypse is our work. But we know not what we are doing.12

The symbiotic relationship between artists, writers and philosophers is well-known, and we acknowledge it, noting the influences they have always had on each other.
“Death is reconciled by living”, wrote Giuseppe Ungaretti in 1916.
In making history and emotions visible it is easy to guess how the most influential disruptive movements of the early twentieth century (Surrealism, Futurism, Abstractionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, analytical Cubism) were artistic currents intellectualised in a particular historical context and thus indicative of the current social situation.
In accordance with industrial development and its progression in wars, these movements broke the relationship with the formality of the image and imposed a clear rejection of the creative representation of existence, undermined by the assumptions of mass aesthetic production (cinema) and fear of the loss of value of the object itself, taken in its unrepeatable uniqueness (industrial production).
The negation of aesthetic formalism speaks for itself and becomes the very image of the generational failure in which it was reflected, and whose perplexities now blocked the move to the future. In order to lay the foundations of a bridging rebirth a response was needed to the question, is art dead?

[…] when I was young, I thought that art was only possible if it was an expression of man’s history, to help free himself from taboos, violence, coercion, including consumerism and advertising. (Gianni Dova)13

The first “International Exhibition of Modern Art”, known as the Armory Show (69th Regiment Armory) opened in New York in 1913, presenting European contemporary art to the American public.
During the opening, the incredulous visitors went in search of the work by a “certain” Duchamp titled Nude Descend­ing a Staircase and, not managing to find it, expressed their disappointment so vehemently that “Art News” magazine offered a prize of 10,000 dollars for the person who found it.
On the wave of the enormous success of the Armory Show exhibitions, the first mixed American collections were assembled (John Quinn and Arthur Jerome Eddy) and the first joint project of interactive thinking took place, between Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Katherine Dreier, giving rise to the “Société Anonyme.”14

The subjective experience of European thinking continued to merge with the objective curiosity of American instinct through to the full maturity of events (mid-1940s), giving rise to a developing continuity that was able to overcome the imploded absolute rationalism in its extreme consequence and awakened an unconditioned, individual cognitive awareness.
The “death” of the European avant-gardes was unwittingly generating a dynamic and objectifying “art practice”, which took the name of Abstract Expressionism.15
Surrealism and Dadaism (the first “anti-art” movement conceived in 1915 by Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp), are the closest relations of Abstract Expressionism, visible in the spontaneous, automatic, subconscious action that typified its style (Jackson Pollock’s “dripping” took its cue precisely from the work of Max Ernst). And it still shows the emotional intensity of the German Expressionists, the anti-figurative aesthetic and the anarchic and rebellious approach of Futurism and the Bauhaus.
Quickly asserted as a new, dynamic and socially active current, Abstract Expressionism also marked the start of an aesthetic rebirth that, returning to Europe, spread like wildfire and ignited all the progressive art movements with its innovative language, close to and coinciding with the philanthropic philosophies of the immediate postwar period. Although it was to lead to Action Painting in America, in Europe its direct consequence was Arte Informale, in which the difference between making art and making art objects was by then only an opinion. The Informal artist rejected any objective function of the work of art, abhorred old painting and intended defining his own style through experimental research. This led to a slow disintegration of content, undermining the propositional intention of conversing through a gestural poetics with a high ethical impact.
So art is dead?
If we too read Arte Informale not as a fashion or movement, but as a coherent situation, which Husserl described as loss of the “telos that has been innate in European humanity since the birth of Greek philosophy and consists in the desire to be a humanity based on philosophical reasoning,”16 then we could give an affirmative response.

Masses of condensed paint that surreally implode on the canvas, acting in a genuine, epic, science fiction pantomime, whose deepest meaning is criticism, joy and fear, pushed to the point of parodying the substantial irrationality of the mechanical and lyrical fabric of time and space, in which the artist, on behalf of history, expresses mixed and negative impulses of a collective unconscious (comment on Gianni Dova’s work Nuclear Composition, 1952, VAF 1487).

Art is dead.
Long live art.

The nuclear movement and Gianni Dova

One afternoon, at the Giamaica bar, I met Peverelli and Dova who swore only by Pollock and Wols.
I don’t remember the date, but I think it must have been the first week in October 1950.
Dova said he wanted to buy some tins of enamel paint and, intrigued, we followed him first to the stationer Crespi and then, tins in his pocket, to the room he occupied in Via Solferino that also served as his studio. Here, with much enthusiasm, Dova spilt the paint onto the canvases, and a fury of never before seen colour knocked us down with excitement.
Later Peverelli (with whom I sometimes worked) showed me some paintings of a rare beauty, with big signs that I define as “alla Peverelli” against the stupidity of the opinions of the time, that wanted them to be “alla Hartung”.
One afternoon, having gone back to Baj, I discovered he had resumed painting using enamels: his new paintings were laid out on the floor.
As often happens in these cases, several artists, unaware of the others’ research, had detected “something new” and were translating it in similar ways.
I was actually still devoted to my lines and rectangles, but at the same time I was ready to throw everything out the window if experimentalism called for it.
Something remains to be said of the term “nuclear”.
The term was Enrico Baj’s. One day when I was painting in Via Teuliè, Baj came in and, looking at the paintings on the floor and walls, said to me: “We’ll do an exhibition with these things that will really be an exhibition of today. And I’ll tell you what we’ll call these paintings: they’ll be called “nuclear”.
SERGIO DANGELO17

The terms “nuclear” and “atomic,”18 in common use at the time, had already been associated with other artistic events in the past, among which we recall Salvador Dali’s Mystical Manifesto (1951); the Eiaismo (era atomica-ismo, 1948) by the painter Voltolino Fontani and Fortunato Depero’s Manifesto of nuclear painting and plastic (1951).19
These were isolated attempts with no further developments, but were significant of that collective fervour that always precedes big changes.
Changes that took place rather in the caves20 of Brera, among Gianni Dova, Enrico Baj, Joe Colombo and Sergio Dangelo, and the many artists who joined in as things developed, united by the intention of wanting to reconstruct the Italian cultural fabric, through the universal and unlimited vision of modern, independent and creative spirits.

It was in these caves that the Nuclear Manifestos were drawn up and launched, and here that the first exhibitions were soon held. They were basically the natural meeting place for painters who had spent the day trying out new painting solutions. And it is interesting to note that the Nuclear Movement, like Dada, was born in a cellar: the first Dadaists met at the Cabaret Voltaire and the nuclears, fifty years later, in the updated version of the cabaret: the cave.21

From a historical point of view, the main strength of the Nuclear Movement was the elasticity of its contents. Lacking any systematic poetics, it opened up to the differential aspects of the various people who took part in it, attracted more by the need for revolt against and breakage of the art conventions of the time, rather than by a set programme of cultural renewal.
The Movement’s highly polemic approach may be ascribed to the particular situation in which Milan was emerging in the 1950s, held between the suffocating grip of concrete abstractionism on one hand and social realism on the other.

Nuclear painting is intended as an intuitive view of a world in which matter becomes energy that is indefinitely reproduced. The artist proposes taking part in this cosmic thrust of liberation. So his view does not remain simple contemplation but becomes an active and dynamic stance […] contemporary physics was an unforeseeable revelation even for the most expert, attentive and far-sighted scientists […] and then again perhaps only the artist can extend the powers of action that science offers us into visions. (GIORGIO KAISSERLIAN)22

The informal question was much more than mere technique. It was a wish to reason on space and time and on the coexisting relationship between the two elements/subjects that made up the logo of the first Nuclearism: the atomic mushroom/embryonic foetus as “epistemological metaphor”23 to be reflected on.
The value of the infinite was no longer an evocative philosophical concept, but an exceedingly tangible reality. And detecting its internal generating tension was the aim of the gestural action proposed by the nuclearists; an indispensable action for testing the metamorphosis between form and chance at a level of profound intuition and awareness of the real. In October 1951 Gianni Dova exhibited a series of works at the Galleria del Milione in Milan that broke with all past experiences and presented something genuinely innovative: the representation of a strange cosmic space, compressed and full of energy, indefinite, with unusual, incandescent colours that came very close to echoing the atomic era.
A genuine explosion of matter, it was produced with the techniques that came from the lesson of abstract Expressionism: tachisme, frottage and dripping, which Dova constantly experimented with and in which he was an undisputed master.
The astonishment aroused by this exhibition attracted all the intellectually active of Milan, and the paintings were defined as “nuclear art”, before the Movement had even been founded.
Considered Lucio Fontana’s closest follower, Dova was a genuine spatialist talent. His personal imagination, full of astral depths and technically advanced, was the pivot on which the bridges with the past were burnt and he began to emerge from that much suffered and much sought bubble of fear and parochialism.

I did not start painting because I had a vital charge of knowledge that I wanted to transfer to art; painting was not an end for saying other things, but a means of understanding life and reality or even the magic and the unreal that nests in things. (GIANNI DOVA)24

Dova’s natural affinity with surreal automatism, along with his restless search for images to assign to the innate spirits of the substance of reality and fantasy, offer us an aesthetic reading of the very forms of emotion, narrated from the ephemeral sensation to the dense and coloured matter that reveals them in all their calm bliss.
As a free thinker, he always kept his distance from the formalist and naturalist movements of that period, enthusiastically adhering rather to those that allowed him to experiment and refine the painting techniques and the logics of perception that so excited him.
He signed the Manifesto of Realism (Beyond Guernica) in 1946 and the second Manifesto of Spatialism in 1948. He also took part, by association of aims, in groups that referred to abstract art, arte povera and concretism; he long frequented and worked with the group formed around the magazine Azimuth25 and supported the avant-garde magazines “Segno”, “Phases” and “Gesto”.
Often associated with Ernst’s surreal realism, with Dubuffet’s automatic action, with the Cobra group and with the lesson of Klee, Lam, Brauner and the Matta/Gorky relationship, Gianni Dova was always faithful to his ingenuity and his ability to “disclose that which is truly real beneath outward appearances, beneath the common disguises of reality,”26 in this way managing to rush through time without ever losing the essential purpose of his creative intention. This is what made him the great artist we know and appreciate today.
The tool Dova gave to Nuclearism at this point speaks for itself: who, better than him, could have given rise to that powerful emotion that is the very expression of fear and fascination? Who better than him could have given voice and figure to the dark side of existence with the same rationale with which he condemned its persistence?
This is why the mushroom/foetus, the subject of all his paintings on the theme, became the very symbol of the movement, symbol of the end of a blind and colourless universe.
I duly cite the paintings belonging to the collection of the VAF foundation,27 chosen for their quality and beauty, to which I often turned the questions that from time to time my “thinking” posed, trusting in them, and in the work of art’s natural capacity to converse, for the ideas used in drafting this piece.
I will not dwell on specific descriptions, but democratically direct a wonderful thought to the nuclear artists and to Dova in particular, intended to be

[…] dedicated to the lunatics, the non-conformists, the rebels, the trouble-makers, all those who see things in a different way. They do not like directions, especially regulations, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can cite them, disagree with them, glorify them or denigrate them; but the one thing you can never do is ignore them; because they are able to change things, because they advance mankind. And while some could define them as lunatics, we see their genius. Because only those who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, really do change it.28

    1. Giulio Carlo Argan, L’arte moderna 1770­-1970, Sansoni, Florence 1970.
    2. The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation met for the first time in Geneva in 1922. It was a special commission set up by the League of Nations with the principle aim of organising and safeguarding manifestations of intellectual work, especially in its international relations.
    3. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920. Takes up the themes of Eros and Thanatos from Empedocles’ thinking: a cosmic conflict always arises between the philía (love/friendship) principle and the neikos (hate/discord) principle.
    4. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 1929-1930.
    5. Albert Einstein to Paul Hutchinson, editor of the magazine “Christian Century”, July 1929; quoted in Einstein on peace, edited by Otto Nathan and Heinz Norden, Simon and Shuster, New York 1960, p. 98.
    6. Quotation of Gianni Dova taken from an “Art Weekly Report” column, January 2012, Area Research, Intelligence e Investor Relations, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena.
    7. The Russell-­Einstein Manifesto is the declaration presented in London at the height of the Cold War, on 9 July 1955, on the occasion of a campaign for nuclear disarmament, promoted by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein. The document, countersigned by eleven other leading scientists and intellectuals, invited learned people all over the world to meet to discuss the risks represented by nuclear arms.
    8. “Le arti news”, December 1985, interview with Gianni Dova by Salvatore Bartolomeo.
    9. Quotation of Gianni Dova taken from an “Art Weekly Report” column, January 2012, Area Research, Intelligence e Investor Relations, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena.
    10. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenol­ogy, 1936.
    11. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme, Nagel, Paris 1946 (English edition, Existentialism Is a Humanism, translation and introduction by Philip Mairet, Methuen, London 1948).
    12. Günther Anders, Commandments in the Atomic Age, text included in the correspondence between Anders and Claude Eatherly, the Hiroshima pilot, as attached to letter n. 4 of 2 July 1959; it appeared for the first time in the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” of 13 July 1957; in Italy it was published in La coscienza al bando, Einaudi, Turin 1962, and then in L’ultima vittima di Hiroshima, Nemesis, Milan 2016.
    13. Dova, edited by Flavio Vangeli, “La memoria del tempo” series, Società Editoriale Punto e Linea, Milan 1986.
    14. The “Société Anonyme Inc., New Jersey” was an art organisation founded in 1920 by Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. It sponsored talks, publications and modern art exhibitions, including the “International Exhibition of Modern Art” at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926. Between 1920 and 1940 it held eight exhibitions of Abstract and Cubist art. It was officially closed in 1928 but its art collection continued to be expanded until 1941, when it was donated to the Yale University Art Gallery.
    15. The term “Abstract Expressionism” was coined by Alfred H. Barr jr. in 1929 commenting on a painting by Wassily Kandinsky. It was subsequently taken up by the critic Robert Coates and applied to American art of the 1940s (1946).
    16. Edmund Husserl, Sulla fallita realizzazione nello sviluppo della cultura e della scienza moderna del telos dell’Umanità europea, five essays, in L’Idea di Europa, edited by Corrado Sinigallia, Cortina, Milan 1999.
    17. Taken from an excerpt in the book by Tristan Sauvage, Art nucléaire, Éditions Vilo, Paris 1962.
    18. The “atomic era” expression arrived from the US, where it had been coined by the journalist William L. Lawrence and subsequently used by the economist Virgil Jordan (Manifesto for Atomic Age, Rugter University Press, 1946) and by the writer Wilbur M. Smith in his book This atomic age and the word of God (1948).
    19. Essay written by Fortunato Depero and published in the catalogue for the “88ma Mostra Depero” titled Pittura e arte applicata 1915-­1951. Prima presentazione di Arte Nucleare, Manfrini, Rovereto, 1951.
    20. The caves were the wine cellars in Brera where the festive gatherings of artists and intellectuals took place in the early 1950s. Decorated and painted in Surrealist style, they were the venue for “those evenings, when the fun, entertainment, dancing and arguments did not end until dawn and where the Milan artists congregated for the fist time in a place that they themselves had created”. Tristan Sauvage, Art nucléaire, Éditions Vilo, Paris 1962.
    21. Ibid.
    22. Giorgio Kaisserlian, art critic and theorist of the Spatialist and Nuclear movements, in the essay La materia ha più immaginazione di noi, in Le arti figurative nell’architettura (Cascella A. e P., Baj, Peverelli, Dova, Crippa, Burri, Colombo, Preda, Fontana, Donati, Cagli, Santomaso, Vedova, Matta, Lusignoli, Dorazio, Prampolini, Mon­ nini, Milani, Sanfilippo, Joppolo, Tullier), edited by Beniamino Joppolo and Giorgio Kaisserlian, exhibition catalogue (May), Amici della Francia, Milan 1952.
    23. Umberto Eco, L’Informale come opera aperta, in “Il Verri”, n. 3, June 1961, pp. 98-127.
    24. In Gianni Dova, edited by Claudio Spadoni et al., catalogue of the anthological exhibition (Viareggio-Cesena-Mantua), Wafra Litografia, Cesena 1991.
    25. “Azimuth” was a contemporary art magazine founded in 1959 by Piero Manzoni and Enrico Castellani, of which only two issues were published. The two artists also opened the Galleria Azimut in Milan along the same lines, which was open for just eight months and presented a good thirteen exhibitions involving the leading figures of the new generation of intelletuals.
    26. Self-criticism by Gianni Dova, taken from the introduction by Claudio Spadoni, in Gianni Dova, edited by Claudio Spadoni et al., catalogue of the anthological exhibition (Viareggio-Cesena-Mantua), Wafra Litografia, Cesena 1991.
    27. VAF Stiftung. La Collezione, general catalogue of the works of the VAF Foundation of Frankfurt, edited by Daniela Ferrari, Silvana Editoriale, Cinisello Balsamo 2012.
    28. Think different advertising campaign, Apple, 1997.

© 2022 giannidova.it – All Rights Reserved | Design: walterferrario.it