Milan’s “Movimento Arte Nucleare” and Livorno’s Eaismo believed that a new “nuclear art” was a needed response to the fear of the bomb.
by Massimo Introvigne
Article 2 of 2. Read article 1.
In the first article of this series, we discussed a controversy on who, if anybody, held the copyright on the labels “nuclear art” and “nuclear paintings,” where some Italian artists opposed Salvador Dalí. A main character in this controversy was Milan painter Enrico Baj (1924–2003).
In 1951, Baj exhibited his own “nuclear paintings” at the Galleria San Fedele in Milan. He claimed he had already written at that time a “Manifesto of Nuclear Painting” and created with fellow painter Sergio Dangelo (1932–2022) a Nuclear Art Movement, although they were launched in Brussels in 1952.
Dangelo painted explosions, which were clearly indebted to Jackson Pollock (1912–1956), who had indeed alluded to atomic explosions. With Baj and Dangelo, the third musketeer of the Nuclear Art Movement was designer Cesare “Joe” Colombo (1930–1971), better known for his visionary “atomic era” furniture. The movement was genuinely successful in the decade of the 1950s and attracted to his exhibitions organized throughout Europe luminaries such as Piero Manzoni (1933–1863) and Yves Klein (1928–1962).
The key figure, and one crucial for creating in Italy a long-lasting culture of nuclear disarmament, was Baj. He produced dozens of paintings warning that the proliferation of nuclear weapons could only produce a planetary annihilation. “Two Children in the Nuclear Night” (1956), for example, is one of Baj’s most terrifying paintings and a good example of his anti-nuclear-weapons position.
Several pictures by Baj represent crazy generals. They have occasionally been exhibited with a soundtrack featuring the 1983 hit song by the German singer Nena “99 Luftballons”, where a crazy general mistakes balloons for spacecrafts and orders what looks like a nuclear attack. Indeed, Baj paintings were often exhibited in Germany and might have inspired the lyricist of the song, Carlo Karges (1951–2002).
But who had invented the terms “nuclear painting” and “nuclear arts”? Having sued Dalí, Baj obtained a preliminary ruling in his favor from the Justice Court of Milan in 1954, mostly because the Spanish artist had not cared to appear.
A Paris court refused to enforce the decision against Dalí, and in 1957 the Justice Court of Rome, where the case had been transferred, finally found in favor of the Spanish painter, although by that time he had already agreed that he would humor Baj and not refer to himself as “the inventor of nuclear painting” any longer.
Both parties were aware that the term “nuclear painting” had also been used in manifestos published in 1950 by Germaine Joumard (1898–1950) and Italian Futurist Fortunato Depero (1892–1960).
Baj was also hearing from the lawyers of somebody who had an even earlier priority, Livorno painter Voltolino Fontani (1920–1876), the leader of an artistic movement called Eaismo (Era-Atomica-ismo, or Atomic-Era-ism). Artists (including Angelo Siro Pellegrini, 1908–1997, and Aldo Neri, 1911–2003) and poets (Marcello Landi, 1916–1993, and Guido Favati, 1920–1973) from Livorno and nearby Cecina founded it on September 3, 1948, and organized a first exhibition in Florence in May 1949.
Although we should remember that Dalí started painting “Uranium and Atomica” immediately after the Hiroshima bombing, as a movement devoted to an “atomic art” Eaismo predates all the others. While Dalí was both terrorized by the atomic bomb and enthusiastic about the mystic potential of nuclear physics, and Baj focused almost on terror only, the artists from Livorno were somewhere in the middle. Fontani and his friends were even accused by critics in the predominantly left-wing Tuscany of their time of being in favor of nuclear weapons, while they were in fact trying to exorcize them through the arts.
Fontani’s 1948 work “Grafodinamica (Dinamica di Assestamento o Frattura e Coesione)” [Graphodynamics (Dynamics of Settlement or Fracture and Cohesion)] was a manifesto of Eaismo in itself, and a statement of its persuasion that the new science of the atom also required a new way of painting.
Fontani’s “Composizione” (1949) was painted a few months after the Eaist manifesto. According to the leading scholar of Fontani, Francesca Cagianelli, it depicts the anguish and bewilderment of post-Hiroshima humanity while the colors and technique reflects the influence of the Futurist artist Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), the wife of Futurism’s founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), whom Fontani had met.
As an organized movement, Eaismo continued until 1959, but even in his later “oneiric” production Fontani continued to allude to atomic scenarios. Just like Dalí, Fontani also turned to Catholic religious painting, most notably in the church of St. Giovanni Gualberto in Valle Benedetta, Livorno.
As American curator Michael R. Taylor noted, while they might have made the atomic art movements more well-known to the general public, ultimately the court cases were a distraction and contributed to their demise. While until a recent re-discovery, Eaismo was mostly a local Tuscan phenomenon, Baj’s anti-nuclear-weapons paintings were always popular, not to mention the Italian success of Dalí. They may have played a role in making subsequent campaigns for nuclear disarmament more immediately understandable. And, with some of its exponents such as Fontani and Dalí himself, the “nuclear art” circles also spread the idea that reflecting on the atomic energy also had something to do with religion.
In his 2015 encyclical letter on ecology “Laudato Si’” Pope Francis wrote that the cultural “settings” we are surrounded by, of which art is certainly a part, “influence the way we think, feel and act.” Both for the “nuclear” artists and for contemporary anti-nuclear-weapons movements, art can contribute to change our way of thinking, feeling, and acting, which is the only path to realistic results in the difficult field of nuclear disarmament.