Corrado Cagli Art Exibition

Introduction

Corrado Cagli: Nostoi. Rome New York Taormina expands on the reflection started with Transatlantic Bridges: Corrado Cagli 1938–1948, an exhibition held at CIMA in New York in 2023–2024. While the New York show focused on Cagli’s transatlantic decade—between Rome and the United States, from his exile following the Racial Laws to his return to Italy—Nostoi is broader in scope and ventures into the post-exile years, exploring especially the artist’s relationship with Taormina. Nostoi features a wide range of documents and artworks produced in Taormina and dedicated to Sicily. What emerges most strongly from the show is a strategy of memory that goes against the grain of accepted narratives, an intense relationship with places and their unique characteristics, and a growing, transnational network of relationships and collaborations. Partly a legacy of his earlier experiences and partly built on the spot, his “spider web”—to use one of Cagli’s expressions—is made up of collaborations with the most important intellectuals of the period, as well as countless exchanges, encounters, and relationships with the local communities. The reference to Homer’s Odysseus in the exhibition’s title, therefore, alludes to the post-exile nomadic condition that Cagli explored, beginning with his own personal story and extending it to the identity and intellectual landscape of his time. Rome, New York, and Taormina should therefore be understood literally as physical places linked to the artist’s biography, but also in a social sense, as communal spaces, hubs in a network of relationships and collaborations, and metaphorically as places of identity and spaces of the imagination. Nostoi weaves together international and local trajectories that are fruitful collaborations and intellectual exchanges set against stunning Mediterranean landscapes, as well as stories of conflict, oppression, and violence, as well as the working through of difficult memories. Cagli’s work bears witness and interrogates these memories in a deliberately provocative manner. It addresses memory as a construct of identity undergoing constant, arduous reworking.

Drawing on recent studies that have documented Cagli’s relations with fascism, anti-Semitic persecution, exile, WWII, and strategies of memory, Nostoi explores these themes and offers new insights, compiled in the exhibition catalog and shown at Palazzo Corvaja, with a particular focus on the artist’s Sicilian experience. John G. Champagne’s essay explores Cagli’s presence in Taormina and homoerotic iconography in his work in relation to memory, cultural heritage, and the narratives surrounding the history of the international gay community in the town. Franco Baldasso examines Cagli’s collaborations and intellectual exchanges with writers and, above all, poets. Authros such as Massimo Bontempelli, Giuseppe Ungaretti, and Carlo Levi were key interlocutors for the artist from the days of the Galleria della Cometa in 1930s Rome through his exile in the United States and his return to Italy after the war. These writers were a crucial presence, dining companions (to use Giancarlo Vigorelli’s apt image, as cited by Baldasso) who enlivened his Sicilian table. Yasmin Ryiahi, in turn, examines Cagli’s interest in and active involvement with the world of soccer. Already evident from his early days in Rome, this culminated in Sicily when the artist took over and sponsored the Robur team of Letojanni and designed the Palermo jersey: while the intersection of art and soccer is part of Cagli’s long-standing exploration of the relationship between the social role of art and the rise of mass culture, soccer is for Cagli a true artistic language and a tool for body expression, much like dance (another of his great passions). In his catalogue essay and exhibition walltexts, curator Raffaele Bedarida offers insights into each section of the exhibition and, in particular, the section dedicated to Taormina and Sicily.

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Muralism and the Primordial

In the early 1930s, Cagli was a rising star of the Italian art scene. Beginning in 1933, with the publication of the manifesto Muri ai pittori (walls to the painters) and his participation in the Milan Triennale, he was among the leading figures of Italian muralism: by reclaiming art’s public role and by working outside of the bourgeois private spaces, muralist painters presented themselves as builders of a modern Italian identity, regenerated by Fascism. In this context, Cagli theorized the “poetics of the primordium,” or the need to invent myths and formulate a novel visual vocabulary to give voice to a new society: he proposed looking to the founding moments of past civilizations as a working model, without, however, imitating their forms. Archaism and modernity thus merge in the Zodiac Fountain, created in 1935 in Terni in collaboration with the rationalist architect Mario Ridolfi. In the aggressively homophobic cultural context of Fascist Italy, Cagli exhibited strongly homoerotic works in the regime’s official exhibitions, thereby asserting homosexuality as an integral part of classical and humanistic heritage. Works dedicated to the theme of neophytes, which recurs during this period, envision rituals with an epic or biblical tone, representing an initiation that is at once spiritual, social, and sexual.

Between Official Recognition and Censorship

Cagli found himself in the paradoxical situation of receiving prestigious public commissions while at the same time facing censorship by the regime. His monumental paintings for the Italian pavilion at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair depicted the glories of Rome, according to the genealogy favored by Mussolini: the Caesars’s empire, that of the popes, and the current Fascist regime. But his visionary, almost surrealist style and the fact that he was Jewish, led the party’s more conservative faction to attack his work violently as “Jewish, Bolshevik, and degenerate.” During the same period, the Galleria Cometa in Rome opened a New York branch with the Fascist regime’s support. A form of cultural diplomacy in the United States, it was part of the regime’s attempt to project a positive image abroad and show how Fascism had modernized Italy. Cagli traveled to New York for the occasion as the show’s most prominently featured artist. Published in the New York Times, his Card Players became the exhibition’s most iconic image. But as early as 1938, Cometa was shut down by the very regime that had funded it, as it was considered an expression of an internationalist culture, corrupted by the Jewish presence. In 1939, Cagli returned to New York as an exile.

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Deconstructing the Rhetoric of Fascism

In the oppressive political climate of the late 1930s, Cagli was subjected to increasingly stringent censorship and attacks in the press. After the 1938 publication of the antisemitic Racial Laws, he left Italy: initially for Switzerland, then France, and finally the United States. In this period, through his drawings, he elaborated visual “antibodies” to the fascist rhetoric he had previously embraced; tools of deconstruction tinged with bitter irony. As anti-Semitic pressures intensified, he reflected on Jewish identity, especially through the character of King David and his paradoxical identity. David recurs obsessively in Cagli’s work as a symbol of: Renaissance humanism (in the famous versions by Donatello, Michelangelo, and Verrocchio); redemption of the oppressed; and state-sanctioned racism (the star of exclusion). With his Allegories, Cagli destabilizes the fascist notion of continuity with the classical past and heroic models of masculinity in ways that today we would call queer. In these drawings he turns virile, classical-style scenes into homoerotic, anti-heroic gestures (Allegory of the Wrong Fountain), or transforms victorious obelisks and triumphal arches into phalluses and orifices (Allegory of Triumph). Drawing has always been important to Cagli, but it becomes in this period his almost exclusive medium. Drawings are easier to carry along and, therefore, are better suited to the nomadic years of exile; they are also small, fragile, anti-monumental objects, therefore well-versed to rethink critically fascist rhetoric. 

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Exile and Disorientation

In the months following Cagli’s arrival in the United States, in October 1939, logistical difficulties dovetailed with identity-related disorientation, as documented by the correspondence and works from that period. Previously invested in the national project, now Cagli explored techniques and stylistic idioms drawn from various European avant-garde movements, such as Dada collage, Surrealist automatic drawing, and Cubist fragmentation (The Skull and the Candle). Filled with melancholia and formally awkward, his early exile work reveals an artist in search of new cultural coordinates, intellectual counterparts, and an audience. In previous years, Cagli had already encountered and engaged with the avant-garde movements during his extended stays in Paris. But whereas in the past his efforts had been directed toward finding a specifically Italian way to modernity, as an exile he embraced the avantgardes’ destabilizing approaches and fragmented identity, which he would later call “Ulyssesian.” From this point on, stylistic eclecticism became a strategic choice of Cagli’s intellectual nomadism, featuring a deliberate yet arduous loss of a stable center.

The Murals of San Luis Obispo

A notable exception, in a period mostly dedicated to drawing, is the series of murals that Cagli made for the military camp in San Luis Obispo, California. Far removed from both the magniloquence of fascist frescoes and the collective epic of Mexican School murals present in California, these are instead small, anti-monumental panels. Here too, the military insignia, the landscape, and the figures of the soldiers superimpose the present and the past, reality and art-historical references, in a way that could instill pride in his comrades-in-arms, but which also reflects the difficulty of finding shared cultural ground. Now lost, these paintings are known only through 1940s photographs. The frame of ths inscription [the Italian walltext printed on the panel] is the same size as one of the 43 lost panels, highlighting how erasure and absence are integral part of any history of exile. Together with the irreverent illustrations Cagli created for “The Caisson,” a newsletter for his training group, the decorations at San Luis Obispo are evidence of the artist’s effort to restore a sense of community through his work.

Military Training, War

During his training (1940–44) and war service (1944–45), Cagli documented desert landscapes and training grounds on the U.S. West Coast, right up to the front lines of combat in Europe. The documentary component, however, overlaps with incongruent visions that surface from memory and coexist with the events and places of the present. Biblical figures wander, disoriented, through the deserts of Arizona or the rubble of Europe bombed cities; the soldiers of Thermopylae barricade themselves behind ancient shields on the cliffs of the French coast, naked and defenseless in the face of twentieth-century technological warfare. Firsthand experiences and those absorbed through the media merge with literary images that place names or details of the conflict evoke for the artist in a manner as inevitable as it is absurd: for example, the Allied landing in Sicily in 1943 becomes an epic battle in the drawing Trinacria. Cagli’s drawings do compete with photojournalism in documenting a war already sensationalized in real time, but serves as a tool for introspection. It explores the nonlinear trajectories of memory and reveals the short-circuit between the lived and the imagined, mapping the implosion of European humanism.

Buchenwald

Cagli was among the U.S. soldiers who liberated the German concentration camp at Buchenwald in April 1945. The drawings he produced on site and in the months that followed avoided depicting the industrial scale of the camps’ horror, as the media of the time did. Instead of showing mass graves or piles of human remains, Cagli draws, with painful precision, a few bodies rendered anonymous by their suffering, revealing the methods by which they were killed. These are the same details that Cagli obsessively repeats across dozens of sheets, and which he would return to depict periodically, with slight variations, over the next thirty years that he had left to live. Rather than depicting the unrepresentable, the act of drawing seems to serve for Cagli as a laborious process working through trauma. With the almost immediate publication, between 1945 and 1946, of a portfolio reproducing these drawings in large format (Trenta disegni), Cagli embarked on a challenging strategy of remembrance, against postwar Italy’s dominant trend, which prioritized the redemptive narrative of the Resistance and the Nazi massacres in occupied Italy, and was reluctant to disseminate images of the Holocaust.  

Bacchanalia and Rebirth

Upon his return to New York, Cagli found a widespread atmosphere of euphoria and new opportunities for collaboration. He received important institutional recognitions, including a traveling exhibition of his war drawings that began at the Hugo Gallery in New York and the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for the year 1946. That same year, Cagli proposed a ballet project to Lincoln Kirstein’s newly formed Ballet Society (the future New York City Ballet): inspired by Lorenzo the Magnificent’s Canti carnascialeschi, The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne was staged in New York in 1948 in collaboration with two other exiles, composer Vittorio Rieti and choreographer George Balanchine. It was a foundational moment for both American modern dance and New York’s gay subculture. In the United States, Cagli was involved in two major exhibitions: MoMA’s Twentieth-century Italian Art (1949) and Italy at Work: Her Renaissance in Design Today (a traveling exhibition, 1951–53). Cagli interprets the recurring theme of rebirth not merely as a new beginning, but as a continuation of the times, languages, and memories (including difficult ones) that coexist in the present.

Ulysses – Polyphemus

Cagli’s first major Italian exhibition after his exile took place at Rome’s Galleria Palma in 1947. The exhibition was deliberately disorienting: while the Italian art debate was becoming polarized between supporters of abstraction and of figuration, Cagli simultaneously presented abstract works inspired by Neo-Metaphysical paintings and figurative works with an Expressionist twist (see painting La nascita and drawing Tumulto). Shortly before that, he had participated in Arte contro la barbarie (Art Against Barbarism), an exhibition organized by the Communist newspaper “l’Unità” (1944), but he also exhibited (1945) works from the Fascist era that he had recovered from beneath the rubble of his old Roman studio, which had been bombed by the Allies. In short, Cagli returned from exile presenting seemingly irreconcilable facets of his own past and the collective past. Thus, while Ulysses and his return from exile recur in the works of this period, Cagli presents his return to the homeland as anything but resolutive. Polyphemus, whom Cagli depicts from behind, slightly hunched and almost pensive, is not the image of a monstrous enemy, but rather the empathetic and introspective figure of someone with whom the viewer can identify, at least to some extent (see drawings Il ritorno di Ulisse and Polifemo). Upon his return to Italy in 1948, Cagli developed a form of “drawing-writing” inspired by Jung’s concept of the archetype: the zero degree of language from which to begin anew after destruction. 

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Collaborations and Exchanges

For Cagli, art has always been a collective, community-based endeavor. Exile disrupted the social fabric of his youth but gave rise to new collaborations. Although he joined the Surrealist and Neo-Romantic circles shortly after arriving in America, his main activities began upon his return to New York after the war. Then, ballet was the quintessential laboratory for the synthesis of the arts. In addition to Balanchine and Rieti, Cagli reestablished contact with the neo-Romantic Berman, the musician Stravinsky, the photographer Cartier-Bresson, the poet Charles Olson, and the artist and illustrator Saul Steinberg. The latter dedicated a diploma “for nothing” to Cagli, an ironic commentary on the bureaucracy of exile. Upon his return to Italy, Cagli fostered cultural exchanges between the two continents alongside Catherine Viviano in New York, Brin and Del Corso in Rome, and the Roberts couple of the American Academy, also in Rome. New York artists such as Steinberg, Cartier-Bresson, and Berman exhibited in Italy thanks to his efforts, while his Italian friends Mirko, Afro, Renato Guttuso, and Gastone Novelli launched careers in the United States. Berman moved to Rome and, in turn, fell in love with Sicily. The works on display at Palazzo Corvaja are the result of collaborations or gifts and dedications from other artists to Cagli: a testament, albeit partial, to the extensive network of exchanges woven between the United States and Italy.

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Taormina and Le Siciliane

In the 1950s, Cagli’s consistently nonconformist stance made him unpopular with institutional cultural circles. His studio in Rome, however, remained a hub for artists and critics. From the end of the decade, the critic Enrico Crispolti dedicated in-depth attention to his work, considering Cagli, alongside Fontana and Burri, as a model for moving beyond gestural abstract painting that had dominated the postwar period; in 1964 he published the first monograph on Cagli. During this phase of difficult institutionalization, Cagli established his second home in Taormina: already an international destination in previous centuries, with the economic boom it became a hub for artists and intellectuals. For him, the city embodied the simultaneity of history and myth, memory and the present. Here he produced the painting series Le Siciliane, labyrinthine compositions marked by a tension between loss of orientation and search for roots, between timeless Mediterranean imagery and emerging psychedelic culture. The colors draw simultaneously from the Sicilian landscape and the lysergic visions of the counterculture. Sicily represents an escape from the Italy of the economic miracle, but it is also a place of contemporary life, a theater of social conflicts, political tensions, and generational frictions.

The Collaboration with Danilo Dolci

Cagli addressed the issue of the Mafia as a complex phenomenon, sociologically driven and intertwined with national, as well as local, history and political responsibilities. In 1955, he designed the cover for the sociologist and activist Danilo Dolci’s Banditi a Partinico, an investigative book that examines organized crime using statistical data and attributing primary responsibility to the Italian state, dating back to Italys’ unification process in the 19^th century. Cagli’s image avoids binary simplifications: he does depict two distinct areas but within each one violence, resistance, and hope are intertwined. The collaboration with Dolci continued over time, as documented by photographs, letters, and Cagli’s donations of works in support of Dolci’s anti-Mafia activism. In 1967, Dolci wrote the introduction to La pietra di Barbato, a drawing series, published by Cagli for the anniversary of the Portella della Ginestra massacre (1947), evoking the collusion between the Mafia and national politics against peasants’ demands for a re-distribution of the land. Like his war drawings, Cagli depicts the event as both historical and epic.

Cagli’s Legacy in Taormina

The presence of Cagli’s works in Taormina’s collections and the living memory of him among locals bear witness to the complexity of his legacy. Fifty years after his death, his works can still be found in the City Hall, at the Ugo Foscolo Middle School, in Piazza Cagli in Letojanni, as well as in many other public and private locations. During the preparations for the current exhibition, many people reached out to share personal and family stories. A small selection of works and documents on display aims to convey the richness and diversity of such legacy. In 1970, following the Viale Lazio massacre, he created Piccolo processo, a drawing in homage to Judge Navarra, which is on view as part of the exhibition at Casa Cuseni. Convinced of art’s social role, he worked to establish a contemporary art museum in Taormina: he promised a gift of 300 paintings by major 20^th-century international artists, designating Palazzo Badia Vecchia as its venue; ultimately, the project stalled after Cagli’s death, but the documents on display testify to a visionary project, significantly dedicated to contemporary art in a place mostly known for its past glories. His passion for soccer was also fundamental, serving as a model for bridging the gap between art and the public: starting in 1969, Cagli supported the Robur, the soccer team of Letojanni, designing its crest and uniform; in 1973, he designed the Palermo soccer jersey.

Note on the Exhibition Design

Cagli’s presence in Taormina is deeply rooted in the place’s uniqueness and its layered history, which he merged with his own history and vision. Similarly, his network spans worlds that are very different from one another: from intellectuals like Ungaretti and activists like Dolci to the young players on the local soccer team and famous athletes like José Altafini. For this reason, the exhibition venue, Palazzo Corvaja, takes on primary significance. In addition to having hosted a Cagli exhibition in 1975 when the artist was still alive (thus preserving a memory linked to his work), the palace itself is a building rich in historical and architectural layers, in a way that naturally resonates with the artist’s exploration. The exhibition design for Nostoi, conceived by architect Pietro Airoldi, deliberately distances itself from the sterile model of the so-called white cube, preserving the building’s character and leaving the eclectic traces of its history visible. Throughout the exhibition, Cagli’s works are arranged in close dialogue with Palazzo Corvaja: from the section dedicated to the artist’s muralism and public painting, set up in the room where the large, recently restored 17th-century fresco is still visible, to the rooms dedicated to Cagli’s relationship with Sicily, displayed in the spaces that, in the 15th century, housed the first Sicilian Parliament.