In 1936, Antonio Sciortino created his sculpture Lindbergh on Eagle, which is now in the National Museum of Fine Arts in Malta. This article aims to put this work of art into a historical and art historical context and I am grateful to Dr Marjorie Trusted for her comments on the subject and editorial suggestions.
The sculpture forms a parallel with the Futurist world in which Sciortino was embedded, although paradoxically he did not form part of that same movement. I believe that his Lindbergh on Eagle is an effective forerunner to his masterpiece Speed (1937), which can be seen as a magnificent reply to Jacob Epstein’s Tomb of Oscar Wilde (1909-12). Sciortino’s Speed is a forceful Futurist work within the paradigm of dynamic Futurist philosophy. Only the works of Umberto Boccioni and Marcel Duchamp’s Nu descendant un escalier n.2 (1912) can be said to compete with it. Many subsequent artists tried to emulate Sciortino’s Speed, without success.
The strength of the sculptor’s Lindbergh can be gauged by comparing it with some of the works of the Italian Futurists, for example Fedele Azari’s Perspectives de vol (1926), Gerardo Dottori’s En survol sur le village (1930), Marisa Mori’s Le Vol d’Italie (1936), Mino delle Site’s Altitude (1935), Alessandro Bruschetti’s En vrille (1932), the more famous Tullio Crali’s En piqué sur la ville (1939) and Tato’s En spirale sur le Colisé (1931). But it would be a grave mistake to define Sciortino simply as a Futurist, in spite of the fact that he exploited the language of Futurism. Conversely, Sciortino, like the Futurists, was profoundly interested in the victory, rather than the demise, of Icarus, whom the Futurists saw as a god, not a failure. As in Kasimir Malevich’s and Giuseppe Cominetti’s variants, which depict man’s ultimate victory over the sun, Sciortino became infatuated with the technological-industrial revolution which gave the impression that man could triumph over nature. Sciortino’s interest in technological inventions can be seen in, for example, his less well known ‘scientific experiments’, devices which would notionally prevent submarine tragedies, an invention that he successfully demonstrated to the Italian dictator Mussolini in 1928 (The Pittsburg Press, United Press, 26 February 1928).
The Maltese sculptor described his work as “Lindbergh on eagle, arriving in Europe and giving the first salute”. (D. Vella, Antonio Sciortino, 2007). I recall a heated debate I had a few years ago with the late Dennis Vella, who denied that Lindbergh’s gesture with which Sciortino decided to embellish the monument is, in fact, clearly a Nazi salute. I remember Vella in his characteristically cynical but nonetheless good-humoured way criticising those who see politics in everything. Unfortunately I believe I was right.
Bertolt Brecht tackled the same subject. The German dramatist wrote an experimental play, originally entitled The Flight of the Lindberghs. This title was later changed by the author to Der Ozeanflug (The Flight across the Ocean), because of Lindbergh’s Nazi affiliations. The work was premiered first on the radio, and later at a concert performance at the Baden-Baden Music Festival of 1929, two years after Lindbergh’s historic flight. The music was composed by Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith, directed by Hermann Scherchen and later by Otto Klemperer. According to Owen Hatherley: “Here the most impressive new technological achievement of the time, the transatlantic flight, is made a collaboration between collective producers building the plane, each one of whom is Lindbergh”.
Brecht’s play was produced as the fruit of a collective of collaborators, composers and artists working within a certain mediaeval complexity using a projection of multimedia. Brecht was here experimenting with his Lehrstück (learning-play) principles. Instead of the idea of mimesis in art, we are witnessing a novel and critical challenge to reality. The audience have to participate by involving themselves politically. Brecht’s ideas and his philosophy of the art of theatre overflowed into other spheres of creativity, especially during the Modernist evolution of the visual arts.
Sciortino, although a contemporary of Brecht, does not seem to have been affected by these radical Modernist beginnings. He gives us a Futurist-Fascist rendition of the same event. Bearing in mind the date of the sculpture, and Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi sympathies, we can understand Sciortino’s perplexed affiliations during this dangerous period, and his apparent empathy with Lindbergh’s heroism. In the literature on Sciortino’s work this has not been sufficiently taken into account to date.
In the 1920s Lindbergh was considered to be a hero epitomising the new man of the 20th century. This changed in the next decade because of his actions and statements, which clearly reflected his Nazi sympathies. His racism, anti-Semitism, and a quasi-religious belief in Nordicism, as well as his allegiance with the ideas of eugenics, central to Nazi genetic engineering, were all too evident by the mid-1930s. According to Scott Berg, because of his problematic and enigmatic personality, “Lindbergh changed in the popular imagination from young god to tragic hero to demon”.
In May 1936 Fascist Italy occupied Ethiopia, a fellow-member of the League of Nations. The same year saw the tragic events of the Spanish Civil War in which the German Nazis and the Italian Fascists assisted General Franco in his insurgence against the democratically elected government of the Spanish Republic: 300,000 people were massacred; none were beatified. It was precisely at that moment that Sciortino created his Lindbergh. 1936 was also the year when the British Academy of Arts in Rome, headed by Sciortino, was closed. Sir Eric Drummond, the British Ambassador in Rome, believed that the Academy was “no longer serving its original purpose... and [it was] to an increasing extent being kept alive for the benefit of Italians”.
Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974) was awarded the Service Cross of the German Eagle in 1938. He was the second American citizen to receive this award from the Nazis. The first was Henry Ford, founder of the Ford Motor Company, who had been awarded this ‘honour’ for his contribution to the industrial militarisation of Germany. Another important figure to receive the Nazi award “for distinguished service to the Reich” was James Mooney, the senior executive of General Motors.
Lindbergh was fascinated by Nazi technology and ideology. He and his family were, in fact, invited to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin by none other than Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe. He and his family were so enthralled by Nazi Germany that they even planned to move to Berlin permanently in 1938. The infamous 1936 Olympics were legitimised by the participation of the United States, Great Britain, France and 45 other nations, including Malta.
Sciortino’s Eagle assumes a more precise meaning when these factors are taken into consideration, and when we acknowledge the fact that the Weimar eagle was transformed by Hitler’s regime into the belligerent black eagle of the Nazis. It is true that the eagle was also chosen as the national emblem of the USA – against the advice of Benjamin Franklin, who advocated a turkey instead – symbolising the spirit of freedom and “the boundless space of the future (Maude M. Grant). Sciortino’s work seems to be depicting both the American and the Nazi eagles.
Lindbergh vehemently favoured an alliance between Nazi Germany and the West against Russia and energetically promoted a strategy to try to persuade Hitler to attack the Soviet Union. He wanted the West to force Hitler to “turn his ambitions against Asiatic Communism”, an idea that led to not only the anti-Comintern alliance of 1936, but the infamous 1938 Munich Peace Agreement.
As the Second World War loomed, Lindbergh’s pro-Nazi ideas provoked bitter tensions within the Roosevelt administration. “The rise of Hitler’s National Socialist Party and the resulting persecution of Jews and political dissidents brought about another break in German-American relations. However, an isolationist Congress and American public did not allow the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to do much to resist Hitler’s rise to power. The Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934 was severed. After the Reichskristallnacht in 1938, the American ambassador was recalled but diplomatic relations were not severed” (US Diplomatic Mission to Germany).
In spite of this, in 1941 Lindbergh tried his best to persuade the United States House Foreign Affairs Committee on the Lend-Lease policy to change gear and to withdraw their assistance to the Allies. In default of an alliance with Germany, he pressed for a neutrality agreement. President Roosevelt was to denounce him, and Lindbergh resigned from the Air Corps Reserve. However, following the attack on Pearl Harbour in 1941, he joined the US Armed Forces against the Axis Powers.
Such Fascist beliefs from a man who had been an idealised cult individual were to transform Lindbergh from a hero to an isolated Lear-like figure.
Woody Guthrie wrote a haunting song about Lindbergh that became popular, sung in his unforgettable manner:
Mister Charlie Lindbergh, he flew to old Berlin,
Got ‘im a big Iron Cross, and he flew right back again
To Washington, Washington.
Missus Charlie Lindbergh, she come dressed in red,
Said: “I’d like to sleep in that pretty White House bed
In Washington, Washington”.
Lindy said to Annie: “We’ll get there by and by,
But we’ll have to split the bed up with Wheeler, Clark, and Nye
In Washington, Washington”.
Hitler wrote to Lindy, said: “Do your very worst”,
Lindy started an outfit that he called America First
In Washington, Washington.
All around the country, Lindbergh he did fly,
Gasoline was paid for by Hoover, Clark, and Nye
In Washington, Washington.
Lindy said to Hoover: “We’ll do the same as France:
Make a deal with Hitler, and then we’ll get our chance
In Washington, Washington.
Then they had a meetin’, and all the Firsters come,
Come on a-walkin’, they come on a-runnin’,
In Washington, Washington.
Yonder comes Father Coughlin, wearin’ the silver chain,
Cash on his stomach and Hitler on the brain.
In Washington, Washington.
Mister John L. Lewis would sit and straddle a fence,
His daughter signed with Lindbergh, and we ain’t seen her since
In Washington, Washington.
Photo at right: The Nazi medal Lindbergh received from Hitler
Hitler said to Lindy: “Stall ‘em all you can
Gonna bomb Pearl Harbour with the help of old Japan.’
In Washington, Washington.
Then on a December mornin’, the bombs come from Japan,
Wake Island and Pearl Harbour, kill fifteen hundred men.
Washington, Washington.
Now Lindy tried to join the army, but they wouldn’t let ‘im in,
‘Fraid he’d sell to Hitler a few more million men.
In Washington, Washington.
So I’m a gonna tell you people: If Hitler’s gonna be beat,
The common workin’ people has got to take the seat
In Washington, Washington.
And I’m gonna tell you workers, ‘fore you cash in your checks:
They say “America First,” but they mean “America Next!”
In Washington, Washington.
Such is the historical and artistic context of Sciortino’s Lindbergh on Eagle.
Dr Schembri Bonaci is a
lecturer in the Department
of History of Art at the University of Malta.
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