Miart 2025
We proclaim ourselves FORMALISTS and MARXISTS, convinced that the terms Marxism and Formalism are not INCOMPATIBLE, especially today when the progressive elements of our society must maintain a revolutionary and AVANT-GARDE position and not fall into the misunderstanding of a dead and conformist realism, which, in its most recent experiences in painting and sculpture, has demonstrated what a limited and narrow path it is.
On March 15, 1946, in Rome, a group of artists – Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, and Giulio Turcato – met to define and sign a manifesto that, in April 1947, would find space in the first and only issue of the magazine Forma 1, Mensile di Arti Figurative. With this act, the artists of the group place form as both the instrument and the goal of the artwork, proposing an aesthetic that breaks free from any link to figurative painting in favor of a universal dimension that can engage in dialogue with contemporary European avant-gardes and experimental movements. In the context of a heated debate contrasting the social realism of Guttuso – openly aligned with the Italian Communist Party – with the emerging abstractionism in Italy, the Forma 1 group put forward a proposal that attempted to reconcile formalism with Marxism. “We proclaim ourselves formalists and Marxists, convinced that Marxism and formalism are not incompatible”: this is one of the manifesto’s emblematic statements, which represents the synthesis of a critical stance toward figurative art and an attempt to express a progressive and political vision of society through abstraction. Think of the extraordinary series of Comizi (Meetings) by Giulio Turcato, which, starting from 1946, is characterized by the strong abstraction of flags in the public square, never renouncing any political-social assertion, as well as the emancipatory struggles of the period.
The group will publicly exhibit for the first time in 1947 at the Art Club gallery in Rome, but it will be the heterogeneity of their political and stylistic positions that will soon lead to an internal split: Dorazio, Perilli, and Guerrini will prefer to maintain a certain autonomy, distant from the pressure of the Communist Party, and will establish the L’Age d’Or gallery in 1950, a center for the promotion of abstract art. The brief life of Forma 1, in addition to its lack of formalization, does not diminish its indelible impact on the history of post-war Italian art, as it anticipates, in many ways and despite the different context, the phenomenon of the MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta).
Pietro Consagra, who had already navigated the conflict between abstraction and political commitment, will maintain a central role in the redefinition of sculpture, not only due to the paradigmatic revolution that undermines the traditional three-dimensionality of sculpture in favor of frontalism but also by orienting himself toward participation, and sometimes criticism, of the society in which he lived and worked. Through the negation of volume, Consagra seeks the formulation of a sculptural object never separate from the urgency of the historical and political context, and which, in fact, becomes the means to activate a critical discourse inherent in the human condition. Word and sign have always been inseparably intertwined in Consagra’s artistic research, as evidenced by his writings, starting with the extraordinary autobiography Vita mia published by Feltrinelli in 1980. Observing his practice in detail, the connection becomes even more evident through his direct use of language and the fact that many of his works, in their very titles, explicitly refer to language. An emblematic example of this intertwining is the series Colloqui (Conversations), where sculpture becomes word and vice versa, in a continuous dialogue between visual forms and verbal meanings that allude to a particular, yet universal, communication between art and society.
The connection between the Forma 1 group and the subsequent generation of artists who gathered around the Piazza del Popolo school in the 1950s and 1960s is more than a mere passing of the baton: it represents a continuous reworking of the theoretical and aesthetic premises introduced by the formalists, where the political dimension remains a constant. On the one hand, Forma 1, whose manifesto appeared in the first and only issue of the eponymous magazine, had placed art as a universal language and, above all, form as the instrument and end of the artwork. On the other hand, the Piazza del Popolo School, with artists such as Franco Angeli and Mario Schifano, would develop these issues in a way that was linked to the social and aesthetic tensions of the time.
It was precisely Angeli and Schifano who put an end to the long disputes between supporters of abstraction and realism that had marked the immediate post-war period, determining the ideological direction of the 1950s and the difficult attempt to redefine the relationship between art and society. From Forma 1, in particular, the idea of painting as the language of the contemporary world persists: Mario Schifano, with his ability to rework the visual languages of contemporary media, responded to the proposal of the Forma 1 group for an art without “continuity with the last twenty years of Italian painting”. His new “televisual” narrative can be read as a description of the emotions, reasons, struggles, and animated participation in the years of protest.
Of equivalent intensity, but perhaps filtered through his relationship with the Italian neo-avant-garde literary scene, is the work of Franco Angeli. That very relationship with some of the most experimental figures of Italian poetry, such as Nanni Balestrini, Elio Pagliarani, Cesare Vivaldi, and Mario Diacono, as identified by Maurizio Fagiolo d’Arco, coincides with the increasingly frequent appearance in his works of inscriptions and epigraphs, which overlap with Angeli’s typical “symbolic index”: the sickle, the hammer, the star. Emblematic shapes that are representative of the struggle that fired the period, to be read as a warning of the political commitment that, at the time, pervaded the Roman art scene.
We proclaim ourselves FORMALISTS and MARXISTS, convinced that the terms Marxism and Formalism are not INCOMPATIBLE, especially today when the progressive elements of our society must maintain a revolutionary and AVANT-GARDE position and not fall into the misunderstanding of a dead and conformist realism, which, in its most recent experiences in painting and sculpture, has demonstrated what a limited and narrow path it is.
On March 15, 1946, in Rome, a group of artists – Carla Accardi, Ugo Attardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo, and Giulio Turcato – met to define and sign a manifesto that, in April 1947, would find space in the first and only issue of the magazine Forma 1, Mensile di Arti Figurative. With this act, the artists of the group place form as both the instrument and the goal of the artwork, proposing an aesthetic that breaks free from any link to figurative painting in favor of a universal dimension that can engage in dialogue with contemporary European avant-gardes and experimental movements. In the context of a heated debate contrasting the social realism of Guttuso – openly aligned with the Italian Communist Party – with the emerging abstractionism in Italy, the Forma 1 group put forward a proposal that attempted to reconcile formalism with Marxism. “We proclaim ourselves formalists and Marxists, convinced that Marxism and formalism are not incompatible”: this is one of the manifesto’s emblematic statements, which represents the synthesis of a critical stance toward figurative art and an attempt to express a progressive and political vision of society through abstraction. Think of the extraordinary series of Comizi (Meetings) by Giulio Turcato, which, starting from 1946, is characterized by the strong abstraction of flags in the public square, never renouncing any political-social assertion, as well as the emancipatory struggles of the period.
The group will publicly exhibit for the first time in 1947 at the Art Club gallery in Rome, but it will be the heterogeneity of their political and stylistic positions that will soon lead to an internal split: Dorazio, Perilli, and Guerrini will prefer to maintain a certain autonomy, distant from the pressure of the Communist Party, and will establish the L’Age d’Or gallery in 1950, a center for the promotion of abstract art. The brief life of Forma 1, in addition to its lack of formalization, does not diminish its indelible impact on the history of post-war Italian art, as it anticipates, in many ways and despite the different context, the phenomenon of the MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta).
Pietro Consagra, who had already navigated the conflict between abstraction and political commitment, will maintain a central role in the redefinition of sculpture, not only due to the paradigmatic revolution that undermines the traditional three-dimensionality of sculpture in favor of frontalism but also by orienting himself toward participation, and sometimes criticism, of the society in which he lived and worked. Through the negation of volume, Consagra seeks the formulation of a sculptural object never separate from the urgency of the historical and political context, and which, in fact, becomes the means to activate a critical discourse inherent in the human condition. Word and sign have always been inseparably intertwined in Consagra’s artistic research, as evidenced by his writings, starting with the extraordinary autobiography Vita mia published by Feltrinelli in 1980. Observing his practice in detail, the connection becomes even more evident through his direct use of language and the fact that many of his works, in their very titles, explicitly refer to language. An emblematic example of this intertwining is the series Colloqui (Conversations), where sculpture becomes word and vice versa, in a continuous dialogue between visual forms and verbal meanings that allude to a particular, yet universal, communication between art and society.
The connection between the Forma 1 group and the subsequent generation of artists who gathered around the Piazza del Popolo school in the 1950s and 1960s is more than a mere passing of the baton: it represents a continuous reworking of the theoretical and aesthetic premises introduced by the formalists, where the political dimension remains a constant. On the one hand, Forma 1, whose manifesto appeared in the first and only issue of the eponymous magazine, had placed art as a universal language and, above all, form as the instrument and end of the artwork. On the other hand, the Piazza del Popolo School, with artists such as Franco Angeli and Mario Schifano, would develop these issues in a way that was linked to the social and aesthetic tensions of the time.
It was precisely Angeli and Schifano who put an end to the long disputes between supporters of abstraction and realism that had marked the immediate post-war period, determining the ideological direction of the 1950s and the difficult attempt to redefine the relationship between art and society. From Forma 1, in particular, the idea of painting as the language of the contemporary world persists: Mario Schifano, with his ability to rework the visual languages of contemporary media, responded to the proposal of the Forma 1 group for an art without “continuity with the last twenty years of Italian painting”. His new “televisual” narrative can be read as a description of the emotions, reasons, struggles, and animated participation in the years of protest.
Of equivalent intensity, but perhaps filtered through his relationship with the Italian neo-avant-garde literary scene, is the work of Franco Angeli. That very relationship with some of the most experimental figures of Italian poetry, such as Nanni Balestrini, Elio Pagliarani, Cesare Vivaldi, and Mario Diacono, as identified by Maurizio Fagiolo d’Arco, coincides with the increasingly frequent appearance in his works of inscriptions and epigraphs, which overlap with Angeli’s typical “symbolic index”: the sickle, the hammer, the star. Emblematic shapes that are representative of the struggle that fired the period, to be read as a warning of the political commitment that, at the time, pervaded the Roman art scene.
- Omar Mismar
- Kevin Francis Gray
