Solidarity and Socially Engaged Art in 1970s Italy

In 1978, twenty-eight Italian artists donated works to the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) on the occasion of the International Art Exhibition for Palestine held in Beirut in the spring of the same year. As was the case with other artworks donated to the PLO by artists from countries around the world, many were said to have been destroyed during the bombing of the city during the Israeli invasion of 1982. Only pictures of the works, printed in the exhibition catalog, remain to testify to this act of international solidarity. Leafing through the pages dedicated to the Italian participants, one encounters oil paintings and drawings, etchings and graphics – some figurative, others displaying abstract forms. Most of the works were donated by artists who were less well-known internationally, and even to the Italian public of the time. Nevertheless, there are some recognizable names, such as those of realist painters Renato Guttuso and Ernesto Treccani, abstract artist Carla Accardi, and sculptor Giò Pomodoro – artists who came to the fore in the 1950s and 1960s, and were acknowledged as masters in the 1970s. Other, younger and lesser-known participants belonged to a network of artists who used to gather in Rome at the gallery Il Gabbiano – a promoter of neo-figurative, socially committed trends – or at the office and exhibition space of the collective L’Alzaia. This essay partly retraces the story and creative practice of this network of artists; however, a stylistic comparison or art-historical comment upon the works they produced and donated to the PLO in 1978 does not constitute its primary scope. Rather, it will try to unfold the rationale at the core of this gesture of international solidarity, and will expand on the concept of “solidarity” itself, as it was differently understood and put into practice by a number of Italian artists and collectives, but also by cultural institutions such as the Venice Biennale.