Vittorio Zecchin: A Thousand and One Nights - More or Less

       










           THE SWALLOWS
in refreshing capes of black satin
they're typing out the new aubade
daybreak just dictated

             WHAT FUN
to see how the gasping train
climbs the ladder of frail ties
to get to the mouth of the tunnel
and be sucked in like a licorice stick

                   GIGI
I'm queasy this evening
bring me on of those 7-colored
cocktails like they drink in Paris
I wanna go somewhere over the rainbow

  --- three poems by Farfa, translated from the Italian by Fred Chappell, from The FSG Book Of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry, New York, Farrar Straus Giroux: 2012.

Stile Liberty, as Art Nouveau was called in Italy, began more or less as a movement in decorative arts that proved too delectable to be ignored by painters or poets.  The English had adopted the French term nouveau from the French, the Italians borrowed the name of  Liberty Prints from the English- each thought they had coined the better name for an all-encompassing phenomenon.  What is obvious is that the Italian style was more colorful than its northern cousins, and that color lent itself to movement more than to languor.  Not to mention smiles and a sly joke or two.

Farfa was the  nome di arte of Vittorio Ossvaldo Tommasino, a polymath from Trieste (1879-1964) Futurist who made poetry, pottery, and paintings.   These short poems, as translated by the American Fred Chappelle,   are typical of the Futurist aesthetic,  wringing irony out of compression.  He died - accounts differ - after being hit by a car or  a motorcycle, not bad for someone who was named a "national champion" of Futurist poetry in 1932.

Discouraged by  the drabness and lack of imagination he encountered at the Venetian Art Academy, Vittorio Zecchin took an eight year detour as a civil servant, before having a second try at the art life.  It took five years (1909-14) and a dozen panels to complete the commission for The Thousand And One Nights, Zecchin's interpretation of the story of Aladdin.    Intended for the lobby of the aptly named Hotel Terminus, the ensemble was split up by the upheavals of  war.  Zecchin wisely set up his own hybrid laboratory/gallery where he could pursue painting, tapestry, and glass-making all at once and without interference.  Zecchin's stylistic debt to Gustav Klimt needs no underlining at this point.
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Recently the Musee d'Orsay in Paris was fortunate to acquire one of the panels (above) however, like Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series (MoMA - NYC and The Philips Collection-Washington, DC) it remains split, some pieces in private collections and some at Ca'Pesaro in Venice,

Image
Vittorio Zecchin - The Thousand and One Nights, 1914, Musee d'Orsay, Paris.