| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 104.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, editors. Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1997. Pp. ix, 283. Cloth $59.50, paper $19.95.

This book gathers together a number of well-researched essays on art and ideology in France and Italy. Editors Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff provide a concise and informative introduction, setting out the historical and historiographical terms of the collection. Questions about ideology and politics in the "age of extremes" are linked with ideas about fascism as "secular religion." Successive chapters explore art and art theory in specific political contexts while demonstrating how certain currents of anxiety, obsession, and ecstatic belief recurred: thus the deepest degenerationist gloom was intertwined over and again with dreams of regeneration. The material ranges from public speeches to obscure texts, from utopian architectural designs to public art commissioned by the state, and the setting moves from Rome to Milan, from Paris to Vichy. Often microcosmic in form, the book focuses on individuals (artists, decorators, art critics, and political theorists) and their relation to wider attitudes and movements (the avant-garde, heroic art, architecture and the city, gender debates, state patronage, public competitions, and political parties). There is also interesting discussion of the effect of the Great War in both accentuating and challenging prevailing beliefs, not least amongst the Italian futurists, about the possibility of collective redemption through violent historical destruction: blood-letting as "purge." Several authors stress the significance of Georges Sorel as a precursor of such bellicose idealizations. . . .

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