Penn State’s 2018-19 Laureate Dr. John Champagne spoke on “Art and Politics: The Case of Corrado Cagli” at the Lehigh Valley campus Oct. 25. The English professor and chair of the Global Languages and Cultures program at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, offered his historical perspective on Cagli, an Italian artist who launched his career during the rise of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in 1927.

Born in 1910 in Ancona, Cagli relocated to Rome in 1915 with his family. Although he was Jewish, the talented painter, sculptor and muralist enjoyed the patronage of the Italian government in a way similar to what American artists had with the Federal Art Project (FAP) during President Roosevelt’s New Deal initiative.

According to Champagne, the Nazis embraced Cicero’s definition of rhetoric, then later applied to art as “something to delight, instruct and move.” The Nazis rejected the modernist philosophy of “art for art’s sake.”

Although Cagli rendered his artwork in modernist or primitivist styles, many of his works were designed to “delight, instruct and move,” the viewers “toward the ‘joys’ of fascism,” quipped Champagne. He referred to an example the artist’s palingenetic ultranationalist works depicting figures wearing fascist fez hats with their arms raised up in the Nazi salute. Another work celebrated soldiers marching with flags, rifles and Nazi salutes.

Champagne challenged the audience to view Cagli’s paintings from the late 1920s through the late ’30s and differentiate between which would be considered “fascist” propaganda or “not fascist” genre scenes like workers gathering grain or biblical subjects. Cagli’s “David,” was painted in 1937 with David holding a sword with one hand and Goliath’s severed head with the other.

When Mussolini accelerated the persecution of Jews in 1938, Cagli fled the country and immigrated to the United States. As an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army, he returned to Europe during the 1944 Normandy invasion. The artist was present when Buchenwald was liberated and documented the horrors he had witnessed there with a jarring series of drawings.

After the war, Cagli resettled in Rome where he continued to paint, experimenting with abstract and non-figurative techniques. He died in 1976.

Champagne, the author of five books, is currently working on one about the artistic culture of the Italian fascist years from 1922-1945. As a PSU laureate, Champagne is touring Pennsylvania through 2019 to discuss the role of the artist in times of political turmoil. For more information visit lehighvalley.psu.edu or vpfa.psu.edu/penn-state-laureate