When pilots were gods

PLANESPOTTING

Estorick Collection, N1

WHAT with economy-class syndrome and kamikaze hijackers, it is harder than ever to imagine a time when pilots were gods, and to be a passenger was heaven. The timely and illuminating exhibition at the Estorick Collection, Italian Aviation Posters 1910-1943, takes us back to an age when flying captured everyone's imagination, inspiring writers, artists and designers.

The industrial revolution came late to Italy, but early in the last century the Futurist movement, founded in Milan by the writer FT Marinetti, tried to make up for lost time with a hysterical enthusiasm for modernity. Marinetti' s high-octane literary works included The Conquest of the Stars and The Pope's Aeroplane. The Futurist ethos also inspired the legendary writer Gabrielle d'Annunzio. He undertook flying missions during the First World War, when in his fifties. Aviators were regarded as Nietzschean supermen: a dramatically asymmetrical poster from 1915 entitled Aerial Combat shows awe-struck ground soldiers looking up as a plane explodes and the doomed pilot falls from the sky.

Many posters juxtapose Renaissance monuments and Roman ruins with aeroplanes, automobiles and speedboats - the idea being that the engineering skills of modern Italians were more than a match for their illustrious ancestors. These parallels were assiduously exploited by Mussolini's Fascist regime, which came to power in 1922. In Fascist propaganda, Roman-style eagles often stand in for aeroplanes, while a preposterous advertisement for a film, The Conquest of the Air, merges a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci with a flock of seagulls and a crash-landed Icarus.

Increasingly, however, it is the squadron, rather than the individual aviator, that is celebrated. In several

posters, closely packed groups of planes seem to peel off from a vast portrait bust of Mussolini, carved in the style of the presidential portraits on Mount Rushmore. The Fascist Dictator is the equivalent of a queen bee; the innumerable planes are like devoted but anonymous worker bees. These images imply that relentless carpet- bombing, rather than the individual dogfight, was now the main priority. The golden age of aviation was already over.

Until 28 April. Tel: 020 7704 9522.

Copyright 2002
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