Corrente di Vita

Corrente di Vita Giovanile (Stream of youthful life), later renamed Corrente di Vita or Corrente, was an Italian magazine founded on 1 January 1938 in Milan by artist Ernesto Treccani.^[1]

This magazine, created by Treccani when he was seventeen years old and almost as a juvenile adventure, quickly became an important part of collective cultural action against fascist Italy on the part of the Italian literati. Its representatives included Raffaele De Grada, Giansiro Ferrata, Luciano Anceschi, Renato Birolli, and the pure hermeticists Carlo Bo, Mario Luzi, Piero Bigongiari. Corrente stimulated its public to analyse the relationships between culture and ideology, fighting with forceful coherence against enslavement to the State.

Corrente was suppressed by the Fascist police on 10 June 1940, but its members continued their activity as an underground group, while Benito Mussolini pushed Italy into World War II. They found new ways of spreading cultural information, and in the Edizioni di Corrente (the magazine's publishing house), they published the I lirici greci by Salvatore Quasimodo, I lirici spagnoli by Carlo Bo, Frontiera by Vittorio Sereni, Occhio quadrato by Alberto Lattuada.

In 1938 some young painters within the Corrente movement, had opened in Milan the Bottega di Corrente (The Corrente Lab). Now, with Italy at war, these artists began producing innovative work, as an expression of cultural freedom and against the bombastic conformism of "Novecento Italiano" and the problematic form issues of abstract art. The Corrente painters affirmed a type of art replete with humane and moral contents, in full opposition to the fascist regime.^[2]

The Corrente painters tended decisively towards expressionist visual forms, and made actual reference to the styles of Scuola Romana, as well as to the great representatives of European fine arts culture, from Vincent Van Gogh to James Ensor and to "Fauves", from "Nabis" to "Die Brücke" to Chaim Soutine and Pablo Picasso. After two famous exhibitions held in March and December 1939, the group organised debates, meetings and "premieres" of those artists that had found their maturity within the magazine's life span. These comprised Renato Birolli, Giuseppe Migneco, Bruno Cassinari, Renato Guttuso, Ernesto Treccani, Aligi Sassu, Ennio Morlotti.^[3]

Notes

1. ^ Cf. A. Luzi, ed., Corrente di Vita Giovanile (1938-1940), foreword by Vittorio Sereni, Ateneo Roma (1975)
2. ^ Cf. M. S. Stone, The Patron State: Art and Politics in Fascist Italy, Princeton University Press (1998.
3. ^ Cf. "From Vita Giovanile to Corrente 1938-39", in R. Ben-ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, pp.168ff., University of California Press (2000).

Bibliography

• (English) R. Ben-ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945, University of California Press (2000)
• (English) M. S. Stone, The Patron State: Art and Politics in Fascist Italy, Princeton University Press (1998
• (English) Italy's Radical Return to Order, on The New York Times (26 December 1998)
• (Italian) Il movimento milanese di «CORRENTE DI VITA GIOVANILE», e l'Ermetismo, Literary debate at the Gabinetto Vieusseux in Florence dated 6 March 1968
• (Italian) F. Negri Arnoldi, Storia dell'arte, Fratelli Fabbri, Milan (1989)

See also

• Return to order
• Scuola Romana
• Novecento Italiano
• Decadent movement

External links

• (English) Note on Corrente, on Milan Arts Association. Accessed 30 May 2011
• (English) Note on Birolli, on Milan Arts Association. Accessed 30 May 2011
• (English) Tate Gallery on Corrente artists, Accessed 29 May 2011
• (English) Tate Gallery on Corrente artists, Accessed 30 May 2011
• (Italian) Il Movimento di Corrente, article on Fondazione Corrente. Accessed 30 May 2011
• (Italian) Article on Renato Birolli, by M. Maugini. Accessed 30 May 2011
• (Italian) Review on Renato Guttuso Accessed 30 May 2011
• (Italian) Review on Ernesto Treccani Accessed 30 May 2011
• (Italian) Voce Glossario, on Babelearte.it. Accessed 29 May 2011
• (Italian) Da Valori Plastici a Corrente, on Italica Rai. Accessed 29 May 2011