The crisis of political representation in the Labour Movement
Statement issued by the Communist Party political committee - January 26, 2012
Peter De Francia Paintings
The integrity and humanism of Peter de Francia’s work stems from his socialist convictions.
Born in France in 1921 he studied art in Brussels and served in the British army during World War II after which he resumed his studies at the Slade School of Art in London where he began exhibiting in the early 1950s.
Ever since then he has questioned the purpose and validity of the liberal art Establishment’s championing of individualist formal innovation.
Disdaining vacuous content he addressed the political and philosophical issues of the times.
Renato Guttuso – with whom he worked in 1947 – and other communists Picasso, Leger, Beckmann and Grosz provided the visual languages and aesthetic outlooks from which he developed his work.
During the cold war, when the Western art world was increasingly emulating American abstraction and denigrating narrative figuration as hopelessly passe, de Francia painted three large history paintings exposing colonialist and fascist brutality.
Not surprisingly these have been shunned by mainstream histories of British art.
Indeed this is the first time that the first one The Execution of Beloyannis (1953) has been exhibited. Its subject is the Greek dictatorship’s execution of the charismatic communist along with others on the spurious charge of spying. The international campaign which tried to save him perpetuated a photograph of him holding a red carnation.
This is not an easy painting to look at. The sorrow of the tragedy is expressed by Expressionist distortions of anatomy, posture, scale and a sombre palette, without resorting to obvious descriptions of blood and guts.
The semi-naked, awkwardly twisted bodies of Beloyannis and two comrades are seen from above, so recalling contemporary filmic ways of seeing.
Beloyannis’s head is thrown back, mouth gaping uglily, not in sleep but in the sudden shock of violent death. One outstretched hand loosens its grasp of his red carnation, the other hand clutches his genitals - no more will this young man make love.
His two comrades have clasped hands in a last moment of succour and solidarity. The exaggerated scale of the hands and feet serve to heighten the painting’s emotive power.
Allusions to European art’s Christian martyrdoms and to previous depictions of political executions such as Goya’s Execution of the 3rd May give the work a universality of meaning which transgresses the specific circumstances of this event.
De Francia’s best known history painting is The Bombing of Sakiet. During the Algerian war of independence the French air force killed 58 civilians when it bombed Sakiet Sidi Yousef, a border village in Tunisia, claiming that it was used as a training camp for Algerian “terrorists.”
The current exhibition shows the little-known first version of this work in which the terror and chaos which aerial bombing brings is conveyed via the composition’s sharp diagonals, the jarringly vivid colours and the frantic gestures and postures of the victims.
The continuing relevance of these paintings is all too obvious given subsequent and current colonialist atrocities.
By the 1970s de Francia was addressing more generalised aspects of the foolishness and absurdity of human behaviour. The Disparates series of paintings and drawings which satirise mindless crassness, pomposity and cruelty is represented with Neither Rhyme Nor Reason (1970).
At a pool side a blank-faced woman grabs another chocolate with her fat fingers while all we see of her male companion lying in a hammock is the amorphous blubber of his stomach. His head – and mind? – are obliterated by the newspaper which serves him only as a sunshade.
But de Francia also creates ample celebrations of the pleasures of life in clear, joyful colours. In Figures, Evening Tunis (c. 1960) we sense the implied conviviality and camaraderie of strangers as a man carrying a sleeping child moves with the crowd in the city.
Devoid of sentimentality, Village Couple II with Dove (c. 1978) conveys the bonds of love and respect between people and the quiet dignity of domestic life.
In the cramped interior of their modest home the adults witness a child playing with a mischievous cat. That the creature leaves their pet white dove unmolested adds a message of the potential for peace.
Despite understandable restrictions of space, the gallery’s selection of paintings succeeds in showing the breadth of de Francia’s preoccupations over his working life. The inclusion of some of his incisive drawings would have been a bonus.
These works do not wring their hands in passive sorrow at injustice and cruelty, they are calls to action, to thought, to be informed. By also celebrating life and humanity at its best they remind us of the reasons to resist oppression.
In the novel A Painter of Our Time John Berger wrote that an artist “must be judged in relation to the always different and always present struggle of men to realize their potentiality more fully.” De Francia’s work answers this call.
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Peter de Francia Daily Telegraph obituary
Peter de Francia, the artist who has died aged 90, showed a concern with the everyday which aligned him with the British “Kitchen Sink” movement of the mid-1950s, but his work stood out for its overt political content.
7:11PM GMT 24 Jan 2012
De Francia became best-known for a series of highly polemical works, painted during the 1950s, that addressed Left-wing obsessions of the time. The Execution of Beloyannis (1953) took as its subject the execution in Greece in 1952 of Nikos Beloyannis, a communist hero who had fought the Nazis, on charges of spying. An international campaign to save him, supported by Sartre and Picasso, had featured a photograph of the young man holding a red carnation.
De Francia’s Expressionist tribute, in which the semi-naked, awkwardly twisted bodies of Beloyannis and two comrades are seen from above, showed his outstretched hand loosening its grasp of the carnation, while his two comrades clasp hands in a last moment of solidarity. In its emotive power, the painting drew on previous depictions of political executions such as Goya’s Execution of the 3rd May and the iconography of Christian martyrdom, giving the painting a power which transcended the specific event that it portrayed.
De Francia’s most ambitious painting, The Bombing of Sakiet (1959), recorded the killing in 1958 by the French air force of 68 Tunisians in the Algeria-Tunisia border village of Sakiet Sidi Youssef, which the French had claimed was being used as a training camp by Algerian terrorists. De Francia’s huge canvas, with its jarring colour clashes and fragmented images of bodies being torn apart, remains a polemical statement about the innocent victims of war; some found it every bit as harrowing as Picasso’s Guernica.
In later years, however, de Francia became better known as a brilliant and influential teacher at the Royal College of Art, where he was Professor of Painting, than as an artist in his own right. During the Cold War, as the Western art world fell in love with American Abstraction, de Francia’s refusal to adapt to the fashionable aesthetic meant that he suffered from critical neglect.
The growing mistrust of art which attempts to convey a message, particularly a political one, led, as de Francia himself once admitted, to his feeling “increasingly marginalised, consigned to an Index of proscribed genres”. Yet he refused to compromise his principles, and to a select band of connoisseurs he remained one of the most powerful figurative artists of the last half century.
Peter Laurent de Francia was born at Beaulieu-sur-Mer, near Nice, on January 25 1921. His father, a corporate lawyer, came from a wealthy Genoese family; his mother was English. When he was two, the family moved to Paris, where Peter was brought up, mainly by servants, in a large apartment.
In 1939, following his father’s death, de Francia moved to Brussels to study at the city’s Académie des Beaux-Arts. When the Germans invaded the following year, he and fellow students from the Academy got on their bikes and pedalled to the coast through fields, braving Stuka dive bombers and avoiding roads blocked with troops and refugees.
In Britain he volunteered for the Army, serving first in the anti-tank artillery and, in the run-up to D-Day, helping to interpret photographs of the Normandy coast. After D-Day he served in Belgium.
After the War, de Francia attended the Slade School of Art, then travelled to Italy, the United States and Canada. In 1947 he spent some time in the studio of the Italian communist artist Renato Guttuso and found himself strongly influenced by the older man’s uncompromising political engagement. Other communist artists such as Picasso, Leger, Beckmann and Grosz added their own elements to the aesthetic outlook from which de Francia developed his style.
In his early years, as well as his large-scale narrative works, de Francia produced numerous drawings of Italian subjects, mainly of working-class figures and everyday scenes, his aim being, as he explained, “to produce work which makes people intensely aware of their predicament”.
As he matured as an artist de Francia broadened his imaginative range. His works became less topical and increasingly allegorical and oblique, drawing on such influences as the satirical works of Hogarth and German artists such as Max Beckmann and George Grosz, as well as Greek mythology.
His Disparates series of paintings and drawings of the 1970s (the title derives from the group of Disparates prints by Goya) satirised the vacuity and crassness of contemporary Western culture. The poolside scene in Neither Rhyme Nor Reason (1970) for example, features a woman reaching out for another chocolate with fat fingers while a male companion is depicted as little more than a mound of blubbery flesh. De Francia continued to work in an easily accessible visual language, arguing that it was important that his work should “convey something to the untrained eye”.
De Francia began exhibiting in the early 1950s and became involved in the Left-wing Artists’ International Association which worked in confraternity with the Marxist theoretical journal New Left Review. He taught at various times at St Martin’s School of Art; at Goldsmith’s College (where he was principal of the department of Fine Art from 1969 to 1972); and was Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art from 1972 to 1986. He wrote several books (including a major study of Fernand Léger), broadcast on radio and television and worked in the 1950s as a talks producer for the BBC.
Though de Francia was indeed neglected by the contemporary art establishment for many years, he lived to witness a revival of interest, with recent exhibitions at Tate Britain, Tate Modern and at the James Hyman Gallery.
De Francia remained unrepentant in his political views. Asked recently what advice he would give to a young, politically-motivated artist, he replied: “To obtain and read carefully a certain number of texts written in the very early days of the Soviet Union, for example Lunacharsky on culture. Read them and simply question where and how things went wrong.”
De Francia’s first two marriages were dissolved. In 2004 he married Alix MacSweeney, who survives him.
Peter de Francia, born January 25 1921, died January 19 2012
The US Daily Worker writer who pushed baseball to integrate
Bill Mardo, writer who pushed baseball to integrate, dies at 88
By RICHARD GOLDSTEIN of the New York Times
Bill Mardo, a sportswriter for the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker who fought major league baseball’s color barrier in the 1940s when the mainstream American news media was largely silent on the subject, died Friday in Manhattan. He was 88. The cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease, his companion, Ruth Ost, said.
In the years before the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson as the first black player in modern organized baseball, Mr. Mardo was a leading voice in a campaign by The Daily Worker against racism in the game, a battle it had begun in 1936 when Lester Rodney became its first sports editor.
Mr. Mardo, who joined The Daily Worker in 1942, oversaw its sports coverage, together with Nat Low, during World War II, when Mr. Rodney was in the Army. Mr. Mardo had a deferment, having lost vision in one eye from a childhood virus.
The Daily Worker asked fans to write to the New York City baseball teams urging them to sign Negro league players at a time when the major leagues had lost much of their talent to military service. A milestone in baseball history and the civil rights movement arrived in October 1945 when Robinson signed a contract with the Dodgers’ organization, having reached an agreement with Branch Rickey, the Dodger general manager, two months earlier.
Mr. Mardo covered Robinson’s first spring training, with the Dodgers’ Montreal Royals farm team in 1946, and wrote of the hostility toward him in parts of segregated Florida.
As Robinson was concluding a brilliant 1946 season, Mr. Mardo wrote that racism would be smashed by the arrival of black players, which, he said, “in one fell swoop does as much to arm and educate the American people against this monstrous lie as do all the pamphlets in the world.”
After Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers in 1947, Mr. Rodney and Mr. Mardo called on the owners of the other 15 teams in the majors to sign black players.
Rickey had not acknowledged being pressured by The Daily Worker. But in recounting the campaign to shatter baseball’s color bar, Arnold Rampersad wrote in “Jackie Robinson: A Biography” (1997) that “the most vigorous efforts came from the Communist press, including picketing, petitions and unrelenting pressure for about 10 years in The Daily Worker, notably from Lester Rodney and Bill Mardo.”
Mr. Mardo was born William Bloom in Manhattan on Oct. 24, 1923. His interest in left-wing politics arose when he read a copy of The Daily Worker as a teenager, and he became a member of the Communist Party. He changed his name to Mardo as a tribute to his sisters Marion and Doris when he began his career in journalism.
Apart from reporting on baseball, Mr. Mardo wrote a boxing column for The Daily Worker, “In This Corner.” He left the newspaper to work as a Washington reporter for the Soviet news agency Tass in the early 1950s. He later worked in direct-mail advertising.
His marriage in the 1950s ended in divorce, and he had no children.
In April 1997, Mr. Mardo and Mr. Rodney (who died in 2009) spoke at a symposium at Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus marking the 50th anniversary of Robinson’s debut with the Dodgers.
Mr. Mardo noted that Rickey had not signed blacks when he ran the St. Louis Cardinals for more than two decades and suggested it was not idealism but pressure from black sportswriters, trade unions and the Communist Party that persuaded him to sign Robinson.
“Where were you looking all those years, Mr. Rickey?” Mr. Mardo said. “Istanbul? The South Seas?”
But on April 10, 1947, when the Dodgers announced they were bringing up Robinson from Montreal, Mr. Mardo, sitting in the Ebbets Field press box, could only exult.
“There’s time tomorrow to remember that the good fight goes on,” he wrote for the next day’s Daily Worker. “But, for today, let’s just sit back and feel easy and warm. As that fellow in the press box said, ‘Robinson’s a Dodger’ — and it’s a great day, isn’t it?”
Italy’s covert war against women
Women are enemy number one in a covert war in Italian workplaces. They are the hidden victims of a backward, chauvinist capitalist class, enemy number one in a covert war. Some 800,000 Italian women are forced out of their jobs every year by unscrupulous and deceitful employers, new official figures show.
It is a national scandal known forced resignations and it works like this.
At the start of their employment new recruits are asked to sign a blank or undated letter of resignation along with their contract.
They are told it’s just a formality and it’s understandable that many don’t question this when, as in most of the cases, it comes packaged with a prized permanent post.
An offer that can’t be refused, you could say.
But then you want to start a family. That’s when the pre-prepared resignation letter is pulled out of the employer’s file, dusted down and dated.
And instead of looking forward to maternity leave, the employee is sent home for good. Figures show 90 per cent of cases relate to women who become pregnant.
To make matters worse, there’s only a slim chance of obtaining justice after the event, as it has proved very difficult in the courts to show that the employee didn’t voluntarily hand in their notice.
We are not talking here of a backward country that simply hasn’t caught up with the times.
Provisions for maternity are actually pretty good by European standards.
But for many women the clock is being turned back, in particular the younger generation. Thirteen per cent of those born after 1973 lose their jobs through this route compared with 6.8 per cent of those born between 1946 and 1953.
The centre-left government of Romano Prodi that was elected in 2006 clamped down on this illegal practice by introducing an official system of numbering and a 15-day shelf-life for resignation forms.
But this had barely been put in place when the subsequent right-wing administration of Silvio Berlusconi, elected in spring 2008, effectively neutralised it, thus ensuring Italy has one of the lowest employment rates among women in the EU.
The current “technical” government of Mario Monti is now at loggerheads with unions over plans to change labour laws that will make it easier to fire workers.
This isn’t a “reform,” according to the more established definition of the word, before neoliberals began applying it to cases of social regression.
A genuine reform, instead, would be to end a practice that forces women to choose between motherhood and work.
In recent days Italy’s blogosphere and the opposition Democrats have stepped up campaigning on the issue. Will Monti, who has declared a commitment to “fairness” and “equity,” listen?
It’s misery for people in Spain these days. Well, most Spaniards, not the likes of Francisco Luzon, a senior executive at Santander bank.
Luzon, it emerged this week, has left the country’s largest bank with a pension of €56 million.
His retirement nest egg is quite a bit larger than the €860-odd a month the average Spaniard gets, or rather, will get once he or she has worked those extra two years (until 67) that form part of changes to the pension system introduced last year.
The aim of the pension “reform,” and indeed cuts to pay, welfare and public services, is to help reduce the deficit.
That’s the deficit caused by Luzon and others within the upper echelons of the world of finance, whose reckless lending and speculation led to a gigantic bubble that burst, wrecking the economy and thus the public finances.
The scary thing is that Luzon, who also earned €1.66m in “fixed” pay in 2011, isn’t top of Santander’s gold-plated pension league.
Chief executive officer Alfredo Saenz has €87m in retirement funds.
In contrast, the chairman Emilio Botin only has €25m to look forward to in his old age. My heart bleeds.
Tom Gill blogs at revolting-europe.com
