Gino Nibbi (1896–1969) was an Italian-born naturalised Australian author, art critic, gallerist, intellectual, and bookseller in Australia and Italy, who helped educate and connect Melbourne modernist artists and their public.
Early life Nibbi was born on 29 April 1896 in Fermo, Italy, to Anna (née Spinelli) and Pasquale Nibbi, a cooper. They moved to nearby Porto San Giorgio, also in Fermo province on the Adriatic Sea. There, Gino completed studies in accountancy at the Technical Institute of Ascoli Piceno on 2 September 1915. Serving in artillery as a lieutenant in World War I he was decorated for bravery, but the experience convinced him to become a pacifist. Post-war he kept accounts for an agricultural cooperative in Fermo then for a pasta factory Società Molini e Pastifici, in Porto San Giorgio, where on 3 April 1922 he married schoolteacher Elvira Petrelli whose father was a painter, a copyist of old masters. Nibbi's own interest in contemporary art developed through his friendship, from 1920, with the painter and Fermo art teacher Osvaldo Licini who in Paris had met Picasso, Cocteau, Modigliani and Cendrars and exhibited with Kandinsky, and who drew Nibbi to the French avant-garde, an interest shared by another friend Acruto Vitali.
Palmer associates Nibbi with other expatriates Yosl Bergner, Danila Vassilieff, Peter Herbst, Gerd Buchdahl, Franz Philipp and Ursula Hoff, whose ‘ordeals in Fascist and Nazi Europe…manifested in their relocation to Australia.’ Palmer, Sheridan. "Maladies of the soul: Sheridan Palmer considers the impact or some European emigre intellectuals on the art of Arthur Boyd." Meanjin, vol. 64, no. 1-2, Mar.-June 2005, pp. 55+. Haese is more specific: '[Nibbi's] reasons for migrating were to do with both politics and art. Mussolini's accession to power was a factor in prompting the move, since Nibbi had been a fervent supporter of the Italian Republican Party, with its strong liberal tradition of anti-clericalism, anti-monarchism and anti-fascism.' Nibbi's friend Licini was jailed for his protests against the fascists, and Nibbi obtained authorisation to emigrate only through the intervention of journalist Margherita Sarfatti. Artieri confuses Gino Nibbi with Gino Bibbi, an 'individualist anarchist' implicated in assisting Gino Lucetti's attempted assassination of Mussolini in 1926. As a pacifist, Nibbi was, in September 1939, a signatory on an open letter of thanks to Mussolini for declaring Italy neutral, though 9 months later Il Duce joined the Axis in WW2 and declared war on the Allies.
Before leaving Italy Nibbi edited the anti-Marinettian Futurist and Dadaist Le Pagine during its short life 1916–1917, and was a regular contributor in the 1920s to La Fiera Letteraria, the Italian magazine of letters, sciences and arts (later titled, in Rome, l'Italia Letteraria).
Australia and the Pacific In 1926 Nibbi emigrated to Melbourne, followed by his family in 1927. From thence during 1931-2 he undertook a pilgrimage to Tahiti and the Society Islands pursuing his interest in Paul Gauguin's life in the South Pacific, seeking 'memories [of Gauguin] surviving among the people,’ and writing about his discoveries for a number of Italian newspapers, as well as for the Herald, and about Ra'latea in the Leeward Islands (Polynesia), and Tasmania's picturesque delights for L'Illustrazione Italiana.
With Italian publishers the results appeared in The Islands of Happiness (Milan, 1934). Il Giornale Italiano of Sydney quoted the reception of his book by Quadrivio, the literary weekly of Rome of 8 July 1934; 'his observations do not stop at the surface, and also because the journey is very rich in details. With a style rich in different tones, the author now describes the wonderful landscapes of those islands not wrongly called "of happiness"; now instead, even if briefly, or almost in passing, gives news of a historical or geographical and economic nature (without being cloying), now he tries to penetrate the soul of the natives of those strange countries, perfectly managing to give us an exact sensation of their linear psychology; Il Giornale cites also comments in the Roman fortnightly magazine Augustea of 15 July 1934: 'He is a "personal" narrator, who, while observing minutely, gives a certain fairy-tale feel to his page, which one might say is a little hallucinatory, even when it is seasoned with a skeptical realism. This is not the classic "travel book", it is a kind of confession that the author makes of himself after his experiences there.' Milan's L'Ambrosiano rated the volume among the three best of the month.
Leonardo Art Shop
Returning to Melbourne in 1928 he established, as Sendy notes, at 166 Little Collins Street, near the corner of Exhibition Street, close to the famous Victoria Coffee Palace and a few doors from F. W. Cheshire's, an avant-garde literary and art shop, his Leonardo Art Shop. O'Grady places it 'at 170 Little Collins Street, behind George's department store.' Meanwhile, Elvira taught Italian at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music and the Berlitz School of Languages.
The shop was advertised in 1931 as:...a veritable bit of Paris—a book-salon, intimate, colourful, and satisfying. You’ll find at the Leonardo Art Shop, as well as the more important English and American publications, books and periodicals in almost every European tongue French, German, Russian, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Yiddish—Adequate reproductions of the New Masters—Cezanne, Van Gogh, Renoir, Manet—Art-albums for architects and interior decorators—and modern music, too. Here, in brief, is a sophistication, an atmosphere of modernism, suggestive of some friendly little book-store in the Rue de I’Odeon.
Rees declares that:the Leonardo Art Shop...inspired a generation of young artists to create a homegrown avant-garde...' in the inter-war decades which 'were the heyday of the White Australia policy...with little diversity and few outside influences, Melbourne was a staid and conservative city, suspicious of new ideas that might challenge the status quo. [Its] conservatism manifested as a fierce antagonism towards the modernist aesthetics revolutionising art in Europe. Picasso, Matisse, Cezanne, Gauguin – artists we now revere as visionaries – were dismissed by Australian critics as degenerates whose abstracted and expressionist forms threatened the principles of academic painting.Nibbi was a vehement supporter of modern art and was close to Giorgio de Chirico and Amedeo Modigliani. He imported and sold postcards; magazines including in 1931 the radical magazine Stream, the publishing address of which was his shop, and for which he wrote on modern art; plays and poetry by Melbourne authors; and books in various languages, on European modernism; as well as the quality poster prints of Post-Impressionist works published by Piper in Munich; all being superior to the reproductions previously seen by his customers who included Clarice Beckett, Len Crawford, Russell Drysdale, Albert Tucker, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Ian Fairweather, Eric Thake, and Donald Friend. Writer Alister Kershaw declared it 'the most enchanting bookshop in the world', while Len Crawford valued Nibbi's advice and opinions on his early painting efforts. Many who were struggling financially and could not purchase his glossy art books appreciated Nibbi allowing, and encouraging, them to browse the shelves.
These young Australian artists, despite their geographical isolation from Europe, were thereby exposed to innovators of modernism, and in the bookshop they would encounter each other. Fairweather had left Bali for Melbourne early in 1934 and was quickly oriented to the Antipodean scene when Nibbi, who recognised his unique talent, introduced him to George Bell, 'Jock' Frater, Arnold Shore and others. Tucker noted that "he went out of his way to import a whole lot of the postcard prints, cheap reproductions and better quality reproductions and books covering the contemporary movement …" Harding notes that it was Nibbi in the early 1940s who introduced Tucker to the expressionism of Edvard Munch, which led him to the Germans Max Beckmann, Otto Dix and George Grosz.
Vic O’Connor recalled to Barbara Blackman his dawning teenage interest in art when in about 1932 he would ‘spend a couple of hours in Gino Nibbi's bookshop, [to] read books [and] look at pictures or talk to Gino Nibbi,’ ‘there was no other bookshop in Melbourne like it,’ and that next door was Riddell furniture shop and gallery with exhibitions of Arnold Shore and Danila Vassilieff. O’Connor describes Nibbi's friendliness and his: 'inquiring mind, he was an interesting man and he…was a great talker, …stoutish and great wavy Italian brown hair and huge milky brown eyes, and wonderful operatic gestures. He could've been singing any of the Puccini operas when he talked to you….he was very conservative politically but he had this wonderful love of culture and he lived it. I remember him telling me…what he was reading.
Nibbi would invite O’Connor to his home, a modest weatherboard terrace-house at 4 Kooyong-Koot Road, Hawthorn where he had original artworks; ‘a nice Chirico [his late Horses on the Beach, a gift of the artist] some paintings by Gino Severini, the Italian cubist, a Carlo Carrà, and he had a Kisling, Moïse Kisling…’ De Chirico's intrigue with distant, melancholic Melbourne, mentioned early in his 1929 Hebdomeros, was piqued when his friend Nibbi sent him a postcard of the city's Italianate Treasury Building.
An enthusiastic promoter of Italian culture, for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Nibbi occasionally presented ‘The Art of Italy’ on radio from September 1933, then from January 1934 until February 1936 spoke on ‘The Italian Language’ in weekly programs from which he generated Gino’s Newest Italian-English Reader (Melbourne, 1936). He also lectured on Italian literature, giving at one Societa Dante Alighieri event a commemorative lecture (with an English synopsis for Australian attendees) on Italian poet and writer, Gabriel d'Annunzio, and at another, lectured on the early Italian novel, Alessandro Manzoni's I promessi sposi ('The Betrothed') and its contemporary setting of the plague epidemic of 1629-31.
The couple traveled to Italy on the SS Pierre Loti for the launch of Nibbi's short stories Il Volto degli Emigranti (Florence, 1937), thirteen accounts by Italian migrants gathered in Melbourne and further afield amongst cane cutters in Queensland. Generously, he had advertised that he would be leaving for Italy on December 15, 1936, to ‘visit the principal cities of Italy for business reasons, and ... is in a position to take an interest in business of various kinds, especially those which may concern Italian customers.’ En route, in early 1937, they stopped at Gauguin's grave in Hiva Oa in the Marquesas, from whence he wrote an article on the artist's last days. The couple toured Madeira, on which Nibbi wrote a travelogue for the Melbourne Herald, and visited Berlin, then Paris, where he interviewed De Chirico, Brancusi, Zadkine and Kisling for his biography of Modigliani which he announced on his return would be his next book. O'Grady, whose information comes from his interview with Nibbi who was then 70, indicates that it was on that trip that he acquired the paintings by De Chirico, Kisling and Severini mentioned by O'Connor. In October that year he loaned to the New South Wales National Gallery for an exhibition of contemporary European art his Kisling, which Basil Burdett singled out as 'the most representative modern work in the show. It represents the "Back to Ingres" movement of French modernism...a very exquisite small work indeed.'
Censorship