Fabio Mauri. The Great Forerunner

Sebastiano Mauri with an interview with Achille Mauri

Recent generations of the Mauris are custodians of family stories shrouded in an aura both glorious and tragic – stories alternating adventure and misadventure at a rapid pace. Fabio Mauri outlined some of these stories in his text Preistoria come Storia (Prehistory as History) ¹ . Representing our collective family mythology, they were as much a part of my childhood as they were of his.

As is true of us all, Fabio’s family and historical background played an important role in shaping his character. But given that Fabio was born into a rather particular family, in a place and at a historical time ripe with contradictions, I believe these elements had a more disorienting influence on him than average. He was born in Rome in 1926. His mother’s family, the Bompianis, were academics, painters and military men. Fabio’s maternal grandfather, Giorgio Bompiani, was a General and the King of Italy’s Minister of Culture. In 1905, before extras existed as a concept, Giorgio brought the First Regiment of the Bersaglieri to take part in the first film shot in Italy and then publicly projected: La presa di Roma, directed by Filoteo Alberini and co-produced by Cavaliere Achille Mauri.

Fabio’s paternal grandfather, Achille Mauri, managed the Argentina and Apollo theatres in Rome and the Mediolanum and Trianon theatres in Milan – the latter, the first and only theatre dedicated to Futurism. Achille arranged Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull’s Italian tour.He also brought the Balletto Schwarz to Rome, on a tour that spelled the end of the company: most of the ballerinas never returned home, marrying Roman intellectuals and princes instead. When Achille invited French pilot Léon Delagrange to demonstrate to the Italian public for the very first time an airplane flying over the fields of Rebibbia, on Rome’s north-eastern outskirts, the airplane failed to take off. To be precise, it did take off, but only several days later, by which time the protective fences had been broken down by members of the public demanding their money back.

When Achille Mauri died at forty-three, he left his theatrical empire to his young son Umberto Mauri, who by then was already married and a father. Umberto carried on working with Gabriele D’Annunzio, Luigi Pirandello and Ettore Petrolini, as well as forging a new working relationship with Josephine Baker. Umberto soon lost everything after the Apollo Theatre went up in smoke. He moved the family to Milan and went to work for publisher Arnoldo Mondadori; his brother-in-law, Valentino Bompiani, already worked there. Continuing their theatrical and publishing work, the Mauri household became a haven for artists, a gathering place for writers, actors, poets, directors and musicians. Not only did the Mauris welcome diversity, but their home embodied the essence of family life while embracing Futurism, the Blues, Guido Piovene, Alberto Savinio, Luigi Pirandello’s theatre and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s writings. This backdrop shielded the children of this affluent bourgeois family from the military and political disasters that loomed large during those years.

Fabio described this situation very eloquently in his performance Che cosa è la filosofia. Heidegger e la questione tedesca (What is Philosophy. Heidegger and the German Question) (1989) in which, atop a table used as a stage, members of the German intelligentsia delighted in philosophical discussions, hermetic readings and dodecaphonic music while, seated around them, the spectators drank beer and ate bratwurst, oblivious to the dark omens of war.

Growing up, Fabio had always thought he would become an artist. Given his family background, no one was surprised or displeased when he did.

The Mauris moved to Bologna in 1938. Fabio’s father, Umberto, became CEO of the Messaggerie Italiane book distribution company. It was in Bologna that Fabio met Pier Paolo Pasolini. In 1942, when still teenagers, Fabio, Pier Paolo and young friends of theirs founded a literary revue, Il Setaccio (The Sieve), expressing their nascent anti-fascist views, not necessarily shared by the bourgeois world around them. Fabio and Pier Paolo both enrolled at Liceo Galvani. In 1938, they had taken part in the Ludi Juveniles games in Florence during Hitler’s visit: Fabio’s 1971 performance Che cosa è il fascismo. Festa in onore del generale Von Hussel di passaggio per Roma (What is Fascism. Party in honour of General Von Hussel passing through Rome)was based on that experience. I remember Fabio telling me when I was a child that he wanted the performance to show that evil does not arrive in a T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Amico del Diavolo’ (Friend of the Devil) as fair warning. Evil is seductive, young, strong… even sexy.

Fabio’s many passions for modernity, radio, flight, music and the cinema were not just childhood pastimes, they were the very ingredients of Futurism. When he discovered Futurist painting in Bologna, the movement’s powerful, essential nature chimed with him. However, owing to the movement’s close association with the Fascist cause, enthusiasm for Futurism waned after the war. Fast forward to 1980, when Fabio created Gran Serata Futurista 1909–1930 (Futurist Grand Soirée 1909–1930), a four-hour extravaganza of paintings, poetry, literature, graphics, sculpture, and theatre, a multimedia homage to the avant-garde, dedicated throughout to subverting all kinds of clichés.

World War II broke out when the Mauri family was on holiday in Rimini, on Italy’s Adriatic coast. They decided to shelter in place. My father, Achille, Fabio’s fourth sibling, was born during their prolonged stay in the Romagna region. The first two years of the war were fought in distant lands. The war caught up with them first in Bologna, then Rimini, where they were bombed. Friends disappeared; cold, hunger, and mourning became part of everyday life for the survivors. Fabio fell ill.

The first images of concentration camps began to circulate in Italy at the end of the war, along with the certainty that the family’s Jewish friends would never return. Day by day, bombings were supplanted by shocking news of what had happened: unimaginable horror. Fabio’s condition worsened. He stopped painting, writing, seeing his friends. Eventually, he stopped speaking. He contemplated suicide, and then found refuge in religion. He was never the same again. It became his mission to try and work out how this could have happened in modern Europe, in plain sight. He felt guilty for having missed the signs; he was not at all sure there was any guarantee that, in one form or another, it would not happen again. He could not find peace.

For the next eight years, Fabio lived some of the time in monasteries, some of the time as a patient in psychiatric hospitals. In hospital, he often became an informal spiritual guide for the other patients, dispensing advice and support. One day, his psychiatrist claimed that if he had just two more patients like Fabio, he could run the hospital without lifting a finger. When the doctors realised that Fabio was a man of God rather than a sick person, they suggested he return to the monastery. Back with the friars, Fabio ate breadonly, prayed and studied excessively and slept on wet sheets to suffer the cold. He fell ill with pneumonia, ended up back in hospital, and from there was again put in psychiatric care, enduring thirty-three rounds of electroshock treatment.

Fabio hated the war, its justifying ideologies, and the people who had made it happen. The exhibition ‘Pic-nic o il buon soldato’ (Picnic or the Good Soldier) (1998) gave him a chance to reflect on this theme. The young soldier is as fragile as he is trusting in the mechanisms that brought him to where he is. But power exploits the young. Power nourishes, orders, clothes and arms the young, only to send them off to die. This is how ‘good soldiers’ are made. Thus it has been for thousands of years; thus it is to this day. Power has the ability to radically simplify reality, conjuring up a lie that eschews all complexity, leaving behind a reality devoid of nuance, grey areas or paradoxes. Fabio saw only those paradoxes, in all their lethal complexity.

After years of malaise and psychiatric care, Fabio moved to a kind of halfway house, the Villaggio del Fanciullo in Civitavecchia, which was home to more than 3,000 war orphans. There he found a modicum of balance, teaching drawing and ceramics to the younger residents. Evidently still prohibiting himself creative pleasures, he did not make his own works. Orphans are victims of the randomness of war: a bomb is a game of Russian roulette. Fabio’s awareness went beyond the bombs to focus not on the random nature of suffering during the war but on human beings’ deliberate malice. But he never spoke to his students about his anguish and sense of responsibility for recent events.

Fabio began his professional artistic career in 1954. By 1959, he was featuring comic-strip cutouts and supermarket articles in his compositions: works like Braccio di Ferro (1959) and Cassetto (1960) are surprising for precociously adopting a language linked to mass media and consumerism, which, only a few years later, US artists and the US market spread around the word as Pop art.

At the same time, in 1957–58 Fabio created his first Schermi (Screens), not merely seeking the art degree zero pursued by artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but also intuiting that screens were becoming the filter through which we perceive reality. Since the invention of smartphones, this work has taken on a prophetic quality, his insight undeniably true.

In 1971, Fabio began using art to deal with the horrors and enabling ideologies of World War II. From screens to projections, prototypes and performances, his entire body of work is a kind of complex autobiography, an exploration of the relationship between individual destiny and universal history. As he writes in his 1999 text Quadreria (Picture Gallery): ‘The destiny of Europe has shaped my character far more than being blond or having typhoid fever as a child. Insisting on art allows me to be what I am not: a scholar, a warrior, a man, a woman, a Christian, a Jew.’

Fabio was not Jewish, but for him, religion was a constant state of diversity – a quality he believed applied especially to Judaism. Although he did not see art as a religion, he sometimes equated Jews with artists, perceiving a parallel destiny for them both, and he believed that art’s prime mission was to become what it is not yet, what it has not yet achieved.

Fabio’s neuroses prompted him to analyze his surroundings deeply, critically reviewing the very concept of society. He eschewed the easy way out of denial, an approach that can make life more bearable by curbing one’s awareness. His healing process was an obsessive dissection of history, its ideologies, symbols and narrative techniques. In his 1971 performance-installation Ebrea (Jew), Fabio imagined the historical reality of Nazism had not ended and, more importantly, that it had never been fully condemned. He envisioned it still alive, still evolving. The installation claimed to feature bars of soap made from Jewish adipose tissue, horse reins covered in Jewish skin, and the chilling Pelli da sci eseguite con Oswald e Mirta Rohn catturati a Davos. Brzezinka-Ospedale Maggiore (Ski Skins made from Oswald and Mirta Rohn, Captured in Davos. Brzezinka – Main Hospital) along with domestic items emblazoned with the names of the people from whom they had been made.

These works were a stark warning to those who believe such horrors only exist in the past; that modern progress somehow shields us from the possibility of history repeating itself; that the seeds of evil have, until now, only germinated in the past. Uncle Fabio’s concern, or rather premonition, seems more relevant than ever today. No longer does the threat appear to be a dark and distant cloud on the horizon, as it apparently was just a decade ago; today, it looks like a storm rumbling ominously overhead.

We now move on to a conversation I had with my father, Achille Mauri, the youngest of the Mauri siblings, before he passed away in January 2023.

Sebastiano Mauri: What teachers and friends most influenced Fabio at the start of his artistic journey?

Achille Mauri: I believed in my brother Fabio from a young age. He had everything he needed for his art to achieve great success. By the age of fourteen, he was talking regularly with Pier Paolo Pasolini, Gillo Pontecorvo and poet Francesco Leonetti. Like Pasolini, he was already writing and drawing. Not long after that, revolutionary art critic Roberto Longhi became an educational mentor to them. Longhi was propagating his opinion that Caravaggio was the first true filmmaker, willing to challenge the ferocity of society. This nascent view greatly influenced Pasolini’s approach to cinematography. Caravaggio’s clear-cut iconography and cutting use of light are evident in Pasolini’s early films Accattone, Mamma Roma and La ricotta. Fabio was also profoundly influenced by Longhi’s ideas: this is evident from his drawings from the period. I distinctly remember pilfering one of his sketches on butcher’s paper of a worker with a saintly halo on a bicycle.

During the war, the Mauri family was displaced to Rimini, where they lived in the gatehouse at Villa Saffi. Keeping dogs was prohibited at the time: on their rounds, Italian and German soldiers would kill any dogs they found. To get round this, a neighbouring farmer gave us a piglet, which we named Pippo. With five siblings, our mother, and the nanny all looking after it, Pippo grew very quickly. We played blind man’s buff with him: blindfolded, he could find us using his sense of smell alone. The piglet even learned to hide when we played hide and seek. Smart, affectionate and always in a good mood, Pippo made the ideal playmate.

One day after the war ended and celebrations were still continuing, a group of armed men trudged through our garden, walking home to avoid handing in their weapons at a railway station as required. As soon as they caught sight of Pippo, they grabbed the pig, slit his throat, and put a basin underneath him to collect his blood. All five of us siblings sat on the garden wall, terrified. Only Fabio dared move. He went over to Pippo and draped his painter’s smock, stained with oil paint, over the pig’s body. Irritated, one of the men pulled the smock off Pippo and threw it over Fabio.

Our nanny appeared wielding a small toy rifle that shot corks tied to a string. The men burst out laughing and, taking Pippo with them, continued on their way. Fabio was enraged. Our mother tried to calm him down. Holding tight to Pippo’s ‘Turin Shroud’, Fabio showed no signs of piping down. He shouted at her: ‘You have no idea who I am!’My mother called all the siblings together: ‘Come here, everyone. Fabio wants to tell us who he is.’ Fabio said, ‘I am an artist and I cannot ignore the pain of this world.’He certainly convinced me, and from that moment on, I purloined many more of his drawings.

SM: One of the legacies your paternal grandfather, theatre entrepreneur Achille Mauri, left was his trusting relationship with Luigi Pirandello. This helped finally end the long and troubled period when Fabio lived in monasteries and psychiatric clinics. Can you tell us how that unfolded?

AM: Fabio’s despair continued after the war ended. For years, he struggled to find any meaning in life. He simply couldn’t comprehend the war or the ferocity of wartime events. Our father persuaded him to go on a journey to Argentina and Brazil, accompanying an exhibition of books that dad had published, alongside a performance of Pirandello’s play, Six Characters in Search of an Author. Fabio returned home from the trip in love with Adriana Asti, the lead actress in the play and his soon-to-be wife. At last, his mystical fervour abated.

The family’s relationship with Luigi Pirandello had begun two generations earlier. Grandfather Achille Mauri was his producer. Passionate about modernity and entertainment in all forms, Achille developed a strong understanding with many artists, actors, directors and writers from all over Italy. He pioneered a variety of fields, in what today we refer to as the entertainment industry. Back then, though, pre-television, with cinema in its infancy and radio a rarity, theatre and its stars were the only route for political voices in society to satirise power; arguably, it was the only public sphere in which expressing dissent was tolerated.

Achille Mauri died of a heart attack one night outside his Trianon Theatre in Milan. He left his wife Giulia Maria Andreoli and son Umberto to handle the strong political backlash to their work. When still very young, our dad, Umberto, married his friend Valentino Bompiani’s sister, Maria Luisa. He put on a huge ball for Maria Luisa’s birthday. Disastrously, the theatre caught fire, killing two dancers and putting the Mauri family in serious jeopardy. Fortunately, Umberto’s relationships with a great many artists like Ettore Petrolini, Gabriele D’Annunzio and Luigi Pirandello helped him get back onto his feet. He followed Pirandello on his theatre tours, staged D’Annunzio’s plays, and produced shows by Ettore Petrolini.

Achille Mauri’s son Umberto and grandson Fabio inherited his voracious curiosity for the latest trends. Both Umberto and Fabio constantly sought out the newest forms of literary, theatrical and pictorial expression.

SM: Your grandfather Achille Mauri’s involvement in theatre, cinema, music, sports and technology made him a perfect fellow-traveller for early Futurist experiments. Achille Mauri staged Futurist evenings at the Trianon Theatre in Milan. This trailblazing new development pre-dated similar evenings at Rome’s Argentina and Lirico theatres. Boccioni, Russolo, Sant’Elia, and De Angelis all featured on the playbill. Il Nuovo Teatro Futurista (New Futurist Theatre) made its debut at the Trianon.

AM: Decades later, my brother Fabio and students from the Academy of Fine Arts in L’Aquila, where Fabio taught aesthetics for many years, staged a monumental anthological performance, reviving many Futurist actions and performative and poetic interventions. Gran Serata Futurista was Fabio’s tribute to that movement and his way of reinterpreting and re-evaluating it: a creative and philological reconstruction, if you will. The Futurists were still regarded as embarrassing and taboo back then, partly because they reminded people of the Fascist regime’s phallic ideology. However, as Gran Serata Futurista showed, the linguistic, figurative and conceptual innovations they ushered in were not so easily dismissed. After the second performance at the Teatro Olimpico in 1982, I remember spending time with a very calm bear, hanging out in the parking lot after putting in an appearance onstage.

SM: Tell us about the trip to the United States your father Umberto Mauri and Uncle Valentino Bompiani took right after the end of World War II to scout for new publishing ideas.

AM: After the end of Fascist period – nothing could be imported from the United States under Fascism – Valentino and Nini Bompiani set sail for New York in search of new publishing product, with Umberto and Maria Luisa Mauri. My mother told me that when she joined my father in Walt Disney’s office and saw the two men from behind, bent over some papers, she couldn’t tell which one was her husband: they had the same build, the same haircut, even the same grey suit.

They met Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s widow, Consuelo, and were the first Europeans to get the rights to publish The Little Prince. Valentino’s wife, Nini Bompiani, translated the book on the return trip home. Valentino’s sister, Letizia, translated Pamela Lyndon Travers’ Mary Poppins. One summer, I remember being told that Travers was coming to visit us at our home in Lerici. I wasn’t waiting for the author of the book, but for Mary Poppins herself. My child’s mind drew no distinction between the two. I was so excited about her arrival that I kept glancing up at the sky, expecting the graceful, rose-scented nanny to land gently in our garden, clutching her sturdy umbrella. I remember the deep sense of disappointment when Travers walked in, small, stout, dragging a heavy suitcase, her hair dishevelled and dress crumpled. That day, I learned the hard way to differentiate between a novel’s author and lead character.

Amongst the loot that they brought back from that trip as a potential publishing project was the board game Monopoly, which had taken America by storm. My mother, Maria Luisa, translated the ‘Chance’ and ‘Community Chest’ cards into Italian and back in Milan Valentino Bompiani, Umberto Mauri, Arnoldo Mondadori and their friend, financier Mario Gasbarri, played the game. They argued a lot during the game about its educational value and other qualities: it was soon clear who would win, thanks to a couple of early strokes of luck, and that the rest of them would have to watch the sad and inevitable spectacle of humiliating defeat unfold for hours. During the fierce after-game debate, the three losers argued that the game only taught people how to become accustomed to losing rather than fighting to win. Unfortunately, they decided to pass on it.

They did, however, return from the trip with the works of authors like T.S. Eliot and John Steinbeck transformed into Italian by exceptional translators Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini and Eugenio Montale. They obtained publishing rights to comic strips Mandrake the Magician, pioneering astronaut Flash Gordon, tough cop Dick Tracy, boy scouts who befriend a tiger in Tim Tyler’s Luck, and Li’l Abner, the first comic strip to feature a sexy blonde, causing quite a scandal at the time. Arnoldo Mondadori purchased Walt Disney’s products and published them to great success. Mickey Mouse was an immediate huge hit in Italy, ultimately becoming a kind of ethical and political guide for the country. This small, honest, generous, shorts-wearing mouse became part of the educational landscape for generations of Italians. Well aware of Mickey’s iconic status, Fabio featured the rodent in a number of his works.

SM: Fabio was so often a forerunner. For example, he used supermarket products in his visual works, comic strips in paintings, protruding monochrome canvases, he revived Futurist artists’ work, and so on.

AM: Fabio was always ahead of his time. His screens are reminiscent of the smartphones we all now carry everywhere. On trains, I’m often amazed to see how rarely people look out of the window, read a book, or talk to one another. Mostly, they’re bent over their phone. Fabio’s prophecy came true: we experience reality through screens rather than directly. He was also prescient about mass consumerism, which has now become the essential fabric of our society on all five continents. Fabio often argued that politics exploits beauty. If anti-Semitism characterised Fabio’s time and place in history (not to mention most of his work), you may rest assured that works like Ebrea set out to destabilise any form of discrimination, regardless of ethnic, gender, religious or sexual orientation basis.

NOTE

Fabio Mauri, ‘Preistoria come storia’, in Fabio Mauri. Opere e azioni 1954–1994, catalogue of the exhibition (Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rome), ed. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Marcella Cossu (Milan / Rome: Editoriale Giorgio Mondadori and Carte Segrete,1994), 47–51.