Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (1876–1944). Italian writer and artistic entrepreneur, the founder of Futurism and the movement's chief theorist and promoter. He was born in Alexandria, the son of a wealthy lawyer, and family money later allowed him the freedom to pursue his artistic interests. In 1893 he moved to Paris, then studied law in Genoa, graduating in 1899. At this point he settled in Milan, but he kept close links with Paris (his early poetry—up to 1912—was written in French) and it was in Paris that he launched Futurism in 1909 with his famous manifesto published on the front page of Le Figaro. Over the next few years, up to the beginning of the First World War, he was extremely vigorous in promoting Futurist ideas, travelling widely around Europe, organizing exhibitions, giving lectures, holding press conferences, and so on. Wherever he went, he attracted attention because of his outspoken and provocative behaviour. In London in 1911, for example, he challenged a journalist to a duel for making slighting remarks about the Italian army, and in Italy ‘Marinetti gained enormous publicity from the three trials for obscenity that followed the publication in 1910 of his novel Mafarka futurista, the offending item being Mafarka's eleven-metre-long penis which he wrapped round himself when he slept. Marinetti was acquitted at the first trial, given a two-and-a-half-month suspended sentence at the second, and had the same suspended sentence confirmed at the third’ ( Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla, Futurism, 1977).

Marinetti agitated for Italy to enter the First World War, and when the country did so in 1915, he volunteered for the army; during his service he was wounded and decorated for bravery. The war had a disastrous effect on the Futurist movement, but Marinetti continued promoting it afterwards. In 1918 he founded the Futurist Political Party, which supported Mussolini (a friend of Marinetti's) in his rise to power. He moved to Rome in 1925, and in 1929 launched Aeropittura as an offshoot of Futurism. In 1935—ever-aggressive in his nationalism—he served as a volunteer in the army when Italy invaded Abyssinia, and in 1942 (in spite of his advanced age) he once again enrolled in the army and fought in Russia. He was soon repatriated because of illness, and he spent the last months of his life at Bellagio di Como, where he was archivist of the Accademia d'Italia (of which he had been made a member in 1929).

Throughout his life Marinetti kept up a stream of writing, often in an experimental vein; in his poetry, for example, he sometimes used typography that had expressive qualities of its own, anticipating Concrete poetry. He also occasionally tried his hand in the visual arts, making collages, for example, and also producing a Self-Portrait (Dynamic Collection of Objects) (private collection, 1914), made up of odds and ends including matchboxes, brushes, and a handerchief—an anticipation of the Surrealist object. Although he is not regarded as a major writer or artist himself, he had an enormous influence as a provocateur—so much so that he is described by Robert Hughes as ‘one of the key figures of twentieth-century culture. He was the prototype of avant-garde promoters. For how do you create interest in something as utterly marginal to the public as new art? By turning it into fresh copy. The Futurists … realized that the newspapers wanted to run sensational stories about weirdos, not virtuously tolerant reviews of the avant-garde. Marinetti brilliantly used this appetite by trumpeting an art movement as a broad “revolution” in living that aims to change life itself, embracing everything from architecture to athletics, politics and sex.’