The exhibition, Italian Arts & Design: The 20^th Century, at the ROM has a title that is very much in keeping with the Italian way of "fare bella figura," a phrase of great importance in that society. Literally, it means 'making a good figure', an expression that is mostly wrongly translated as meaning 'cutting a good figure'. Its real meaning comes more closely to the British expression of 'having good form' and includes a bit of 'keeping a stiff upper lip'. It is about having good manners and good appearance. One distinction between the British phrase and the Italian is that having 'good form' also implies having substance.

Having substance is, however, not implied in 'fare bella figura'. The Italians appear to value appearance more than substance, something often freely admitted. Being well dressed, wearing elegant shoes and carrying expensive leather handbags, having good positions, titles (oh, those dottores everywhere), never drinking cappuccino after 10:30 a.m., wearing sunglasses — even on dreary days — and being very formal in the office, where first names between bosses and underlings are never exchanged, are part of 'fare bella figura'. It is all about impression, impression, impression.

Bonbon Dish

The exhibit at the ROM, which was produced by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in co-operation with the ROM, has a title that implies much more than it offers despite its content of about 300 items. Yes, when one enters the gallery space in the newly renovated third floor Centre Block of the museum, the displays are very much in keeping with the texture and tone of what 'fare bella figura' implies. The displays are well laid out, the cases — as all of the new display cases in the museum — are works of art in themselves. The audio guide offers fine insight into what is being shown.

What is lacking — and what Italians generally really don' t care much about — is substance beneath this 'fare bella figura' in general and in this exhibit. You must keep up form on the surface, but underneath it is alright to cheat on your taxes, skim funds off your company's income, be well dressed but have an empty fridge. Driving through red lights, and backing up on one-way streets at a high speed, telling your neighbors you are going on vacation, but instead hide away in your home underneath a sunlamp to get the required tan, are all okay. To admit you can't go on vacation would be like, well, "una bruta figura," i.e. really 'bad form'. One explains this because at the ROM, despite the richness of number of display items, the total effect is meager. Somehow substance seems to be missing.

Cobra Chair	Delphos Dress	Continuity in Space
Gold Necklace with diamonds	Tube Chair

The exhibit is divided into four sections representing distinct eras, with a fifth, the Introduction area, preceding them all and containing some representative objects of each era. After the Introduction, there is 'Boundless Optimism', which is an examination of Italy's artistic climate at the start of the 20^th Century. The next section is headed 'Monumentality and Rationalism'. It explores the era just before and between the two World Wars and looks at the relationship between Fascism and the arts it fostered. The third section examines Italy at the end of World War II right up to the end of the 1950s. It is called 'Reconstruction and the Economic Miracle'. Strangely, from a historic point of view, I don't think we ever associated the term 'economic miracle' with Italy. That was strictly a German phenomenon, or at least that is the general understanding. Finally one reaches the fourth section, 'Postmodern Testing Ground'.

This latter is a most hideous title. It borrows the term, postmodern, from the late 1970s invention of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard and the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard. It is an empty word that makes very little sense etymologically. Its most famous Canadian exponent is John Ralston Saul. I realize that by pointing out to the curatorial staff that it has succumbed to fashionable empty rhetoric is, of course "una bruta figura," but it has to be said.

When we think of Italian design, we think of elegant fashions, of men dashingly throwing their overcoats over their shoulders like capes of a bygone period, of kitchen utensils with a flair, of graceful coffee makers, coffee pots and creamers with quirky yet formal lines, and the very best of cook pots. We imagine elegant jewelry, and quixotically designed items for transportation. Most of these items are, indeed, in this exhibit, but none really catch one's imagination as one expects they should. Something in this exhibit hasn't gelled.

In part this disconnection may lie with the image we have in our minds of Italy, based on films from the Fellini era and his film, La Dolce Vita, and on the country's more distant past of artistic achievements. We have expectations that the real Italy cannot fulfill because it doesn't exist, except in our imagination. Anyone who has visited Italy soon finds that out.

The lack of fashion from the present is one of the images one misses. Milan and Paris are forever fighting over which of the two cities is the fashion capital of Europe. Yes, one is enchanted by the Delphos dress and jacket, designed by Mariano Fortuny. It would look good on any woman of slender figure. But this pleated green silk tabby dress with Venetian glass beads was designed sometime between 1910-20. That hardly speaks to us about Milan as a modern fashion centre, and Italy as a fashion-conscious country, which it is. Two items from the 1960s, a dress by Bruna Bini, Divertissement, and the Armor Outfit by Germana Marucelli and Getulio Alviani, certainly are not outfits that emphasize our impression of fine Italian couture. Instead they underline a playful nature, looks without substance. These may be of Italian design, but one doubts that any well dressed Milanese or any Italian woman would have worn either outfit. As for having an impact on world fashion, one doubts this very much.

There is some jewelry on display, much of it from the ROM's own collection. The Italians, of course, think little of costume jewelry. It has to be the real thing, even when you go to the grocery store. Remember: "fare bella figura." One can hardly imply that with throwaway jewelry. So one expects to see some great pieces. But, the gold and diamond pieces in this exhibit tend to be expensive but gaudy rather than elegant. Nothing one cares to take home, let alone wear.

The displayed furniture is quirky, often heavy and crude. While the Italians appear to place so much emphasis on elegance and grace, much of the furniture is very much the opposite, whether it hails from the early 1900s, such as the Cobra Chair designed in 1902 by Carlo Bugatti, and his Armchair from around 1895, or the Tube Chair made of PVC and other synthetic fabric from around 1969-70,  designed by Joe (Cesare) Colombo. Nor can one relate to the 1981 Carlton Room Divider by Ettore Sottass or to Alessandro Mendini's 1993 Nigritella Nigra Chest of Drawers, the clumsy-looking, bright red La Mamma Armchair and Footrest made of polyurethane, which can be squashed down to a flat package for moving. They are playful, but as furniture they are neither practical nor pleasing to look at. They are items of the moment, but not of permanence.

Disappointing, too, is the radio-gramophone Stereo System from 1966. One presumes that the two speakers can be folded in front of the console, but the design is crude. More successful are some unusual lamps made of thick transparent acrylic material that serve both as sculptures and as utilitarian object.

One does like Mendini' s 1988 Peyrona Bonbon Dish and his Tea and Coffee Service from 1983. That is the kind of flair one expects from Italy. But then, when one takes a look at the prototypes for a hair dryer and a fan from 1979, created by Michele De Lucchi, one hopes that they were never realized.

There is some lovely glassware, for which the Italians are rightly famous. But, in the whole collection, there are only a couple of items that one really wants to take out of the display case to take home. One is an elegant, thin-stemmed green glass dish, which comes from the ROM's own collection of Art Deco glassware, and was featured in its 2003 Art Deco exhibit, and there is one of Carlo Scarpa's Tessuto Vases from 1939.

As one can expect, art in the period in which Mussolini held sway in Italy, often takes on a heavy, monumental stature. Many of the paintings and drawings featured from this period have nothing in common with Italy's fine painterly past, but everything with the socialist realism of not just right-wing Italy and Germany, but the now defunct communist Soviet Union. It must be said, however, that unlike its German and Soviet counterparts, Italy allowed a struggle to ensue between modernity and overbearing realism with its idealization of the past and the worker.

Strangely enough, two works from the early part of the 20^th century seem to speak more to the future, the monumental images of the Fascist period, then their own. The 1913 bronze sculpture, 'Unique forms of Continuity in Space' by Umberto Boccioni, and the 1909 bronze in the Art Nouveau style, 'Le grand foumilier' by Rembrandt Bugatti, are powerful in some ways, but they are also stressing power for the sake of power, as Fascist and Nazi art would later. The Art Nouveau piece lacks the elegance of the organic shapes associated with this period. It is far too brooding.

Italian artists and designers of the Mussolini period in Italian history were given a chance to experiment in ways that were not allowed in Hitler's Germany. It is interesting, however, to note that the closer the items are to the beginning of the war with Abyssinia and then World War II, the more the monumental realism took hold. A typical example from this latter period is the design for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Rome, from 1939. Also, very typical of this period is Tullio Crali's 1939 painting 'Incuneandosi nell' abitato', which features a pilot in a cockpit heading straight into a centre of a futuristic city of skyscrapers (hardly an Italian scene). It reeks with aggression and a desire for power.

It is interesting to see the modernity and slender elegance of the Olivetti typewriters on display that hail from the mid-1930s. They are really portables, a format rare for this period in Europe. This typewriter compares very favorably with the well-known German version, the Adler, which had none of the Italian grace and sleekness at that time.

Lastly, there are the Vespa and the Fiat Nuovo, two items of transportation closely related in our minds with Italy, the Mediterranean, and the easy life. But, they never really caught on here. The Fiat, in various versions, fizzled out here because of poor performance. A joke going around among mechanics is that Fiat stands for 'Fix it again Tony'. There is now an attempt being made to bring the Vespa back to this continent because of high gas prices. These little polluters might do in light city traffic, but they will not do on our highways, I am sure. So, the future does not look too bright for this vehicle here in North America except among people determined to be stylishly, though misguidedly, eco-friendly.

There is some artwork from the current century included in the exhibit. Among these are works by Vanessa Beecroft, a performance artist born in Genoa and who now lives in New York. She is represented by two works featuring two young women on black and white striped couches in front of black and white striped walls. The implied symbolism in the works fails to make an impact and leaves the viewer with a sense of looking at style rather than substance. Fabio Novembre's Org Table from 2001, although meant as a utilitarian piece of furniture, is really more of a piece of playful conceptual sculpture.

As one walks through this exhibition, one very prevalent feeling persists. For the past century and a bit, Italian art and design have continually hovered between the charming and the ridiculous, between the elegant and the crude. There is no distinct Italian style as there is the Scandinavian (Danish) design that had such a strong influence on our own. Italian design has had some influence on a few utensils in our daily life, but not on the serious pieces of furniture that we like to live with for a long time. It is in the kitchen, in the food—la cusina—that the Italians have influenced us the most. There "fare bella figura" is not just appearance, but full of substance.