Mediterranizing Gauguin. Giuseppe Biasi’s North Africa and Sardinia

Looking at the works by the Italian artist Giuseppe Biasi (1885-1945) made during his four years’ stay in North Africa and after his return to Italy in 1927, the paper deals with a brand of Mediterraneism deeply marked by issues of national and regional identity. A leading figure of the regionalist movement which in the 1910s strived to construct a new identity for his native Sardinia, Biasi had devoted his early years to represent the peasant world of the island as a primitive Eden, in secessionist, decorative paintings. Determined to achieve what he called a “Mediterranized Gauguin”, he saw in North Africa the basin where the great cultures of the world merge, discovering a wealth of motives which prompted his move to a more modern (if not modernist) style. He also encountered a kind of alterity different from anything he had experienced in Sardinia: one which wasn’t just class-based, but also racial and sexual. On the one hand, he used the image of the African “Other” as a means to strengthen his own Western identity; on the other hand, he sympathized with the quest for national identity initiated in Egypt by painters such as Mukhtar and Said, with whom he was in contact. Back in Italy, Biasi’s North African experience was in turn to reshape his vision of Sardinia. In his new paintings, the two worlds collapsed into one, implicitly confirming the theories of anthropologists such as Giuseppe Sergi about the Italians as Mediterranean race and contributing to spread the fascist notion of a mediterraneism aimed at justifying colonialism.