A large-scale polymateric sculpture, Arte e Mondanità depicts the crucifixion of a man in a morning suit,1 his jacket open and bow tie undone. The head, hands and feet are made from off-white wax; the facial features recall the primitivism of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon.2 Closing the 1985 ‘Entartete Kunst’ exhibition, the sculpture acted as a counterpoint to the small bronze Goebbels in the previous room (inv. 921), representing the avant-garde crucified by the political system and mundanity of the time. ‘The avant-garde then moves away as practice and theory, in favour of a new course not at all in conflict with social and political reality, mercantile or critical. Art falls within art. The phenomenon of its morphogenetic pain only bleeds into toasts at award ceremonies or inaugurations. The mostly dramatic, always-intense biographies of artists, suddenly inexplicable in such festivity, fall into a kind of folklore […] ridiculousness repeated, unabated. Perhaps in the dramatic score of universal history, worldliness is an eternal history. The pause of idiocy before and after every degree of value.’3

1. As Filiberto Menna wrote in a contemporary review, the coat was a luxurious garment made in 1932 by Roman tailor Caraceni: see Paese Sera, 16 June 1985, p. 18. Giancarlo Gentilucci, who installed Mauri’s work at this time, revealed that the coat had belonged to Mauri’s uncle, Valentino Bompiani.
2. L. Cherubini in Flash Art, no. 128, Milan, 1985, p. 39.
3. F. Mauri, ‘Gran serata futurista 1909–1930’, in Stilb, no. 2, 1981, p. 74.