Abstract

Ardengo Soffici’s engagement with African art was mediated by French modernism and led him to articulate a painterly aesthetic at once ‘primitive’ and classical. Soffici moved to Paris in 1900, and after his return to Florence in 1907 devoted himself to updating Italian art by promoting French modernism. Specifically, the artist created a modern style that incorporated these advances as well as elements from the early Italian Renaissance. This paper analyzes his fresco cycle, The Room of the Mannequins, which demonstrates his temporary adoption of the Parisian scene’s primitivism while recalling the decoration of ancient Roman and Renaissance villas. While Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon shattered academic conventions by relying on primitive art’s ‘savage’ nature, in Soffici’s murals, the female figures are playful and non-threatening, bringing to mind the pastoral landscapes that informed both Henri Rousseau and Henri Matisse’s works. Though the Italian artist substituted African references in his later work with alusions to Tuscan folk paintings, his brief use of the former demonstrates the ways in which non-Western references interacted with Italian art even in the absence of direct colonial links to their places of origin. Finally, this consideration of Soffici’s frescoes and writings on primitivism serves as a pre-history of the ways in which art and visual culture under Fascism appropriated African sources to legitimize its colonial project by presenting them as inferior to classical culture.