In Luchino Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960), boxing has got a key role: Simone sees in the sport the possibility of becoming rich; his brother Rocco (Alain Delon) is instead obliged to embark in a boxing career, even though he hates it, to provide for his family and repair the harm done by Simone.
Boxing became rather popular in Italian culture in the 1940s and 1950s, also thanks to other Hollywood and Italian films featuring boxing characters and scenes set in gyms: for example, Visconti shot the boxing scenes for Rocco e i suoi fratelli drawing inspiration from "Il ponte della Ghisolfa", a collection of short tales by Giovanni Testori, and in particular a story divided in two parts and focusing on the friendship between Cornelio Binda, a poor yet passionate boxing fan, and the powerful Duilio Morini, a local championship.
Visconti's neorealist film was shot in a famous Milanese gym known as "La Lombarda", later dubbed Palestra Visconti and currently part of the ARCI Bellezza Club, a famous old workmen's meeting place in Milan. The space is turning 50th this year, but 2018 also marks the 100th anniversary of the death of the artist-boxer Arthur Cravan.
Born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in 1887 in Switzerland, the writer, poet, artist and boxer changed his name to Cravan in 1912 to honour his fiancée Renée Bouchet, who was born in the small village of Cravans, western France.
In the early 1900s, Cravan displayed an interest in poetry and art events in which he was often at the centre of the action. His poetry was provocative and anarchist and Cravan, deemed a public nuisance, delighted in shocking the others with his brutality and explosive temperament.
Idolised by Dada artists and Surrealists, among them Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia (both admired his rather violent literary lectures...) and André Breton, he published and edited a literary magazine between 1911 and 1915 - "Maintenant!" (Now!). In 1915 Cravan held an exhibition of his paintings at the gallery Bernheim Jeune in Paris under the pseudonym Èdouard Archinard.
After the First World War began, Cravan left Paris to avoid being drafted into military service. On a stopover in the Canary Islands a boxing match was arranged in Barcelona between Cravan and the former world champion Jack Johnson to raise money for Cravan's passage to the United States. Posters for the match advertised Cravan as "European champion", but Johnson knocked him out cold after six rounds. The artist remained the first (and last...) modernist poet to enter the ring to fight a former world heavyweight champion.
Though he was the nephew of Oscar Wilde (his aunt Constance Mary Lloyd, was married to Wilde), Cravan never met him. The poet and writer probably drowned in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Mexico in November 1918.
The Visconti gym and Cravan will be celebrated in an evening of entertainment tonight at the Palestra Visconti (c/o Circolo Arci Bellezza, via Giovanni Bellezza, 16/A, Milan), with a boxing event combined with a theatrical performance, a conversation about Arthur Cravan, a piano concert and a screening of Rocco e i suoi fratelli.
The event will be followed by an exhibition, "VS. CRAVAN", opening tomorrow (until 6th December 2018) about boxing and art that will feature a group of Italian and international artists.
Among the highlights there are pictures of Palestra Visconti by Mimmo Capurso, vintage posters of fights from the 1970s by Luigi Castiglioni (a tribute to Primo Carnera - Italy's only world heavyweight boxing in history - by his Gianluigi Colin), paintings about boxing by Nino Crociani and Giovanni Testori, Elena Kovylina's video "Boxing", focusing on gender differences and Antonio Marras's nostalgic collages.
"VS. CRAVAN" tries to highlight the connections between boxing, art and life and it can be read as an inspiring theme for fashion collections as well (don't underestimate the physicality of Cravan's performances as opposed to that of a boxer's fighting on the ring...). Last but not least, the exhibition is a metaphor inviting visitors to stand up and keeping on fighting, it is indeed dedicated to Stefano Cucchi, a Rome-based draughtsman who loved to boxe and died in 2009 after an alleged Carabinieri beating.
Image credits for this post
1. Alain Delon in Luchino Vosconti's Rocco e i suoi fratelli, 1960
2. Palestra Visconti, ex Pugilistica Lombarda, Arci Bellezza Milan
3. Arthur Cravan
4 and 5. Mimmo Capurso, Pugilistica Lombarda, Milan, 1972
6. Omar Hassan, Michelangelo's Punch, 2016
7. Andrea Contin, Versus, performance, 2003-2018, Berlin, January 21, 2012, Ph. Nikki Brendson
8. Antonio Marras, Guardami (Loot at me), 2003
9. Nino Crociani, Giovane pugile (Young Boxer), 1998
10. Giovanni Testori, K.O. (Boxe I), 1970
11. Elena Kovilina, Boxing / Бокс, performance, 2005
Comments