Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

Fascism was something Steinberg experienced firsthand, as a Romanian Jew living in Milan (1933–41) under Mussolini. His experience of Italian Fascism, however, did not enter his art until thirty years later, when he produced a series of politically charged drawings such as this one—perhaps inspired by a 1974 interview with close friend Aldo Buzzi, in which he looked back on his early life. The drawing depicts a goose-stepping man raising his arm in a Fascist salute. The building at left is an imagined Bauhaus structure—Bauhaus being the architectural style promoted during Steinberg’s years at the Politecnico—while the building at right is the Palazzo di Giustizia (Palace of Justice), designed by the Fascist architect Marcello Piacentini in the 1930s.