Yes, Fellini was iconic, legendary, by some notorious, and was perceived as both chronicler, and embodiment of a particular kind of glamour.

But, few realize that Fellini worked first as a street cartoonist and illustrator, sometimes being paid in food by the diners whom he drew in restaurants. He also made decorations for shop windows, while submitting drawings to humor publications. It's an intensely urban career, developing a strict work ethic that was virtually a training in manual labor. As such it resembles the working life of the young Andy Warhol.

It therefore is not unusual that he considers himself primarily a visual artist — "Films are pictures that move", and he considered his own films the heirs of painting more than of literature.

With this in mind, the exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum offered Fellini's drawings, caricatures, cartoons, comic strips, erotica and dream diary sketches.

This will give either a different or deeper appreciation of Fellini.

'Fellini!'
Edited by Vincenzo Mollica
Skira/Guggenheim New York: 176 pp., $45 paper

Los Angeles Times
By Michael Bracewell
June 20, 2004

As a boy growing up in Rimini, Federico Fellini idolized the prewar Italian caricaturist Nino Za, the nom de plume of Giuseppe Zanini, who was so successful that he could behave more like a film star than an illustrator.

Watching Za at work on the terrace of the town's Grand Hotel, the future director found a role model who seemed to embody the very life of glamour, luxury and romance identifiable in the movies. "The little combo played 'Follow the Fleet,' " Fellini once wrote. "The sky had become a velvety dark blue, like the jacket of the famous illustrator. I felt as if I were in Los Angeles, who knows why. Nino Za. Magnificent hotels. Success. Golden cigarette cases. English shoes. I envied him in my bones."

With the release of his seventh film, "La Dolce Vita," in 1960, Fellini himself became iconic, legendary and, in the eyes of the Vatican, notorious. More than any other director of his generation, he was perceived as both the chronicler and the embodiment of a particular kind of glamour.

Fellini's evocation of a new, Pop-age Roman decadence in "La Dolce Vita" and "Fellini's Roma" (1972) was as intoxicating as it was astute. Perhaps not since the fiction of André Gide had there been such a poised and searching portrait of the heady, sulfurous demimonde between high society and contemporary bohemianism. Crammed between the strata of urban society, this was a place where sex, sophistication, high living and excess were constantly shadowed by moral suffocation, neurasthenic passions and, ultimately, a kind of fatal boredom.

Throughout his work, Fellini's novelistic naturalism was always matched — in some films more overtly than others — by a glittering overlay of psychological symbolism and archetypal myth. Brothels and parties would become Jungian chambers of the imagination; sea monsters, glimpsed women, cabaret artistes and circus clowns became the mystical signage, playful yet perilous, of a parallel inner world that was part dream and part fairy tale but every bit as real as the world of starlets, paparazzi journalists and elegant cafes on the Via Veneto.

"Everyone lives in his own fantasy world," Fellini told his biographer, Charlotte Chandler, "but most people don't understand that. No one perceives the real world. Each person simply calls his private, personal fantasies the Truth. The difference is that I know I live in a fantasy world. I prefer it that way and resent anything that disturbs my vision."

As an artist and an icon, therefore, Fellini comes across as the omnipotent combination of Jean Cocteau and Orson Welles. He is primarily a visual artist — a fact that he stressed in his interviews with Chandler: "He told me, 'Films are pictures that move,' " she writes in her introduction to "I, Fellini" (1995), "and he considered his own films the heirs of painting more than of literature."

With this in mind, the exhibition at New York's Guggenheim Museum of Fellini's drawings — caricatures, cartoons, comic strips, erotica and dream diary sketches — last autumn and its accompanying publication, "Fellini!," offer a fascinating insight into an artist whose reputation for constantly mythologizing the facts of his own career is curiously vital to our understanding of his art. With its focus on Fellini's relationship to drawing and popular culture, "Fellini!" also achieves the rare biographical task of examining Fellini's career before he worked in cinema.

Exuberant, mysterious, witty and satirical, Fellini's drawings should be enjoyed first and foremost for the sheer style and agility of their execution. The drawings reproduced in "Fellini!' are introduced by a richly informative and perceptive essay — "Fellini From the First to the Last Drawing" — by a close friend of the director, Vincenzo Mollica. Of necessity, Mollica introduces his own essay with a lengthy quotation from Fellini's principal statement about his working methods, "Fare un Film" (1974). And of course, it is Fellini himself who gives the best description of his relationship with drawing, in a prose style so torrential and voluptuous — even in translation — that its account of his own creativity becomes utterly seductive.

"But let's go back to the drawings," he writes in "Fare un Film," "this almost subconscious, involuntary sketching of scribbles, laying out caricatural memos, creating an endless stream of puppets that stare back at me from every corner of the sheet of paper, automatically tracing obsessive super-sexy female anatomies, the faces of decrepit cardinals, the guttering flames of candles and more and more bosoms and bottoms, and countless other doodles, hieroglyphics, spangled with telephone numbers, addresses, lunatic poetry, tax bills, times for appointments. In short, this graphic grab-bag, spreading, limitless, the delight of any psychiatrist, possibly a sort of clue, a thread, at the end of which I find myself with the spotlights on, on the soundstage, on the first day of shooting."

But Fellini's "graphic grab-bag" of drawings and sketches can be seen in retrospect to track the exceptional relationship between Fellini the artisan craftsman — obsessed with the romantic, slick products of Italian and American mass media of the 1940s — and Fellini the legendary artist auteur, revealing the inner consciousness of human frailty. "In his drawings," writes Mollica, "Fellini found a way of bringing together humour and disquiet. 'Humour,' he once said, 'is a psychological conquest, a step forward in our relationship with things. It is the capacity to place ourselves outside of reality, to look at it with a certain detachment.' "

Fellini's description of himself as an outsider — skinny, ridiculous, detached, always looking on — is vital to his sense of romantic education. It would provide a semiautobiographical theme that would recur throughout his work, from his early study of provincial youth, "I Vitelloni," made in 1953, to his fantastical self-portrait "Intervista" — part interview, part documentary, part fantasy — released in 1987, when Fellini was beginning to slip out of fashion.

Tracking Fellini's early career in Rome, Mollica recounts how the future director worked first as a street cartoonist and illustrator, sometimes being paid in food by the diners whom he drew in restaurants. He also made decorations for shop windows, while submitting drawings to humor publications. It's an intensely urban career, developing a strict work ethic that was virtually a training in manual labor. As such it resembles the working life of the young Andy Warhol, whose first years in New York were spent drawing thousands and thousands of shoes. It is interesting to note that in later life, as a world-famous film director, Fellini was eager for the work of comic book artists to be seen as important contributions to contemporary art. Indeed, one imagines that he would be far more interested in the work of artisan, commercial illustrators than he would in the statements of Pop art.

Fluid, simultaneously charming and grotesque, the humor in Fellini's drawings seems drawn from the depths of his psyche. His use of bright colors to make sudden, exclamatory edges to the visual flourishes of his caricatures, or to emphasize specific details, all adds to the sense in which his drawings can seem like barely controlled explosions — their style is declamatory, aggressive in its sexuality and always balanced on a sharp edge of strangeness. The drawings show characters and scenes from his films, sketches of social types, voracious, Valkyrie-like nudes and comic-style details from Fellini's dreams.

"I think that the time has come," Mollica concludes, "to look at Fellini's drawings in total liberty, precisely as they originated, in the image and semblance of a pure creator, a talent that surprised even itself as it was making them, because they were the reflection of its subconscious, its own DNA."

In this much, "Fellini!" should be treasured as a new resource in the study and enjoyment of Fellini's work, not least because Mollica maintains a strict focus on the pictorial aspects of the director's work. It's an account that is studded with all kinds of unlikely but welcome names, too, from Picasso and Henry Moore to Felix the Cat.

There is a neat, rather touching circularity in Fellini's career-long relationship with drawing, the circuitry of which is concluded by this present volume. Toward the end of his life, in indifferent health and finding it increasingly difficult to raise the financial backing for his film projects, Fellini accepted an invitation from Mollica, then editor of the monthly comic magazine Il Grifo, and the illustrator Milo Manara to develop two of his unmade films as comic strips. Transposing all the business of making a film — sets, characters, camera angles, lighting — to the medium of comic book art, the results were eerie, tense, dream-like and erotic.

Concluding the visual pageantry of this slender but elegant volume, this last collaboration shows Fellini still in awe of the process of storytelling, mining the possibilities of fantasy and strangeness. "Nothing is known," he would say. "Everything is imagined." And these drawings are possibly the most intimate record that survives of Fellini's extraordinary imagination.

Michael Bracewell is the author of "England Is Mine: Pop Life in Albion From Wilde to Goldie" and "When Surface Was Depth."

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