Black Shirts

The print shows four of Mussolini's Black Shirts. Presumably this is an image incorporated in, or related to, Sandri's illustrations to "Fanciulli d'Italia" by A.V. Gentile, published in 1921. Two toughs, their cruel faces in profile, stand menacingly in front of two less hardened men, one young, one old, seen full-face. The artist's brilliant combination of pose and attitude, together with the vigorous patterning of the blocked-in black shirts and sketchy rendering of the rest of the forms, creates a singularly sophisticated image, which rises above caricature. This is a parallel to the far more famous tusche lithographs of Nolde and especially Grosz, which document parallel developments among the Germans to the north.