Arturo Schwarz:
Outline for a Projected Text
Forty to sixty pages
(1970)
1. The Formal Background:
a) Social Realists of the Thirties (Ben Shahn etc.)
b) Surrealists of the Fourties (Gorky etc.)
c) The March Gallery in the Sixties (Lurie, Goodman, Fisher, etc.)2. The Theoretical Background:
a) The Social Function of Art
b) Art and Revolution
c) A Marxist-Leninist Approach
d) Recent Contributions (Trotsky, Lukacs, Marcuse, Guevara)
e) Socialist Realism or the Degeneration of a Progressive Concept.3. The Tasks of the Radical Artist today:
a) His Responsibility towards Art
b) His Responsibility towards the Society he lives in
c) His Responsibility towards the People of the Third World.Source: Lurie, Boris; Krim, Seymour: NO!art, Cologne 1988
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ABOUT ARTURO SCHWARZ: He was born in 1924 in Alexandria, Egypt, to Jewish parents: a German father and an Italian mother. In his youth, he was very active in clandestine political circles. At first he was affiliated with the Zionist movement and spent several months on a kibbutz in Palestine; later he became involved in a Trotskyist group in Alexandria. At the same time Schwarz made the acquaintance of the Egyptian Surrealists and from 1945 to 1948 ran a publishing company and a bookstore. Arrested several times for his political activities, he was expelled from the country in 1949. He settled in Milan, where he founded another publishing house and, at the beginning of the 1950s, opened a bookstore which later developed into Galleria Schwarz, which closed in 1975. The gallery held exhibitions of the best Dada and Surrealist artists and of contemporary artists throughout the world. Simultaneously, Schwarz wrote poetry, published scholarly books such as a catalogue raisonné of the works of Marcel Duchamp, gave lectures and organized international Dada and Surrealist exhibitions. His intense involvement in the Surrealist movement and his personal acquaintance with many of its members made him a leading authority on its history. ►more
