Flavio Costantini: self portrait. Tempera, 1980
Flavio Costantini was a Italian anarchist,graphic artist and printmaker who was born in Rome on 21st September, 1926. He became a Sea Captain and worked in the navy as second lieutenant. Then, he wouldl switch to the merchant ship where he developed a passionate interest in literature. In particular, he was inspired by the writer Franz Kafka and would go on to illustrate his America and The process. 'I started to draw because I read the Kafka books… it was impossible to write like Kafka, so I began to draw'. Other writers followed, but it was the human condition as portrayed by Kafka that was to remain the dominant influence in Costantini’s world.
Once he went ashore, in 1954, he would dedicate himself to activities that let him probe his passion for creativity. He nurtured his interest in painting and literature,and in 1959, after a trip to Spain, he mades a number of paintings about Bullfighting. He was a member of the artists' group that founded the Galleria del Deposito in Boccadasse, Genoa. Other members were Eugenio Carmi, Emanuele Luzzati, Carlo Vita..
The period between the early 1960s and mid 1970s coincided with a flood tide of intense democratic hopes for large numbers of people. Costantini had been a communist until 1962, but a month long visit to Moscow when he was 36 caused him to reconsider his beliefs. In Moscow he saw “an endless stream of tourist peasantry who were strangely silent, neither sad nor happy, but were canalised in a disenchanted, unconscious pilgrimage … The revolution had ended… In the squalid vertical squares of New York or in the equally squalid horizontal squares of Moscow, reaching beyond the languid reminiscences of old Europe, this was perhaps an alternative, an isolated but insistent voice, an ancient Utopia which, however, had nothing in common with the Fabian longings of HG Wells. Since then, since 1963, I have tried, within the scope of my possibilities, to publicise this uncompromising alternative.”
He reread a book he had disliked some years previously, Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Victor Serge. Serge’s description of the heroic period of French anarchist activism that highlighted the end of the last century provided Costantini with a social theme that was to be his inspiration for the next two decades. He felt, like Serge, that although shot through with contradictions, the French anarchists were “people who demanded, before anything else, harmony between words and deeds”. They were very often lonely and isolated individuals, sensitive in their own way, whose reaction to confusion and alienation was to act, to refuse to submit.
Costantini’s work during these two decades is a documentation of this dramatic period in mankind’s odyssey towards a free society based on the principles of social justice described by Bakunin over a century ago: “It is the triumph of humanity, it is the conquest and accomplishment of the full freedom and full development, material, intellectual and moral, of every individual, by the absolute free and spontaneous organisation of economic and social solidarity as completely as possible between all human beings living on the earth.”
There is irony here, too: the faces of the policemen, for example, firing on strikers in Chicago, 1886, are those of four US presidents.
Another tempera, depicting the capture of Ravachol, has Toulouse-Lautrec as the arresting officer.
Costantini’s haunting faces, drawn directly from contemporary sources, provide an element of photographic realism that contrasts starkly with the decorative backdrop. Whether it is in the faces of the protagonists, the architectural or stylistic minutiae, there is a lovingly researched detail, harmony and structural perfection.
The ebbing of revolutionary hopes and expectations in the mid 1970s gave Costantini the sensation that he was witnessing the end of an era. He came to believe that the act of revolution, as a cathartic means of achieving the good society, was no longer possible without serious risk of sinking into a sea of anomie. His later work presented a pessimistic view of civilization. He created series of paintings exploring historical themes: Anarchy, the wreck of the Titanic, alchemy and Mozart, the French Revolution and its victims, Yekaterinburg and the murder of Nicholas II and his family. His last series offered a dark reading of Pinocchio, which he considered one of the three or four greatest Italian novel.
He would never abandon his love for literature, as witnessed by numerous portraits dedicated to writers and poets. But also ilustrations produced in volumes such as The fire horse by Vladimir Majakovskij (1969; reprinted 2006), Heart by Edmondo De Amicis (1977), The shadow line by Joseph Conrad (1989), Memories from the underground by Fëdor Dostoevskij (1997). Furthermore, portraits for national newspapers such as La Domenica del Corriere, Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, L’Europeo, Panorama e L’Espresso.
In 1980 Costantini began to immerse himself in a series of light-hearted portraits of the authors who had contributed most to his understanding of the world. Each is accompanied by rebus-like objects associated with the subject, or which provide an important theme in their work. Thus, Kafka is shown with his beetle; Poe with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey; Stevenson with a seagull, lifebelt and a killed figure; Conrad with a compass and a photograph of a steamer, and so on.
He died in Genova on the 20th of May 2013, after suffering from lung cancer, he had devoted his life to using his brushes to reproduce the pure song of the revolutionaries who rejected all compromise— and who never disappointed.. The Archive of Flavio Costantini, aims to encourage, foster, save guard and spread the knowledge of his works and research. His works have appeared in galleries across the world, and he has been prominently featured in dozens of international art magazines, and has illustrated several books including The Art of Anarchy (1974), The Shadow Line (1989) and Letters from the Underworld (1997).
A short biography by Stuart Christie can be found here. https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/t4b9k9…
And a selection of his artworks here https://libcom.org/gallery/anarchist-art-flavio-costantini…
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