Futurism

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FUTURISM.

DEFINING A MOVEMENT
THE WAR AND EARLY POSTWAR YEARS
WITHIN THE FASCIST REGIME
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Proclaimed in a manifesto by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti that appeared in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, futurism was the first twentieth-century avant-garde movement to aim at a total reconstruction of modern culture and society. In the prewar years, Marinetti relentlessly promoted the movement throughout Europe, developed a futurist version of nearly every art form (including poetry, literature, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, theater, photography, and dance), and sparked an international debate about his vision of modernity.

DEFINING A MOVEMENT

Futurism was at once a cultural vision devoted to the ideals of speed, machinery, anti-passéism, the love of danger, the glorification of war, the destruction of museums, and scorn for the traditional ideal of woman and a new sort of intellectual association: a close-knit group of stalwarts who publicly displayed themselves in performances called serate futuriste (futurist evenings) and used Marinetti's manifestos as the basis for a total rethinking of art and life.

Until February 1912, when the first exhibition of futurist painting opened in Paris, Marinetti promoted his movement by recruiting artists such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Aldo Palazzeschi, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini; holding serate; and publishing more and more manifestos. In general, the manifestos preceded the reform of artistic practice. Thus, although the "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters" appeared in February 1910, only in late 1911 did the painters settle on a way to depict motion dynamically in painting, as their manifesto required. Similarly, the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" (1912) appeared well before efforts (such as Marinetti's "Zang Tumb Tuuum" in 1914) to deploy its declared preference for "words-in-freedom." In music, Marinetti recruited the composer Francesco Balilla Pratella in 1910 and Pratella promptly wrote a manifesto, but his participation in futurism was erratic, and the task of creating a "futurist art of noises" ultimately fell to the painter Russolo. The exception was the manifesto on cinema, which Marinetti published a month after the first futurist film, Vita futurista, (1916; Futurist life), by Arnaldo Ginna. Oddly, futurism did little to further develop futurist film, despite film's obvious compatibility with futurism's celebration of the machine.

Marinetti wrote two early political manifestos, the second and more detailed one when Italy went to war in Libya in October 1911. A still fuller discussion appeared as the "political program" of futurism in the 15 October 1913 edition of the Florentine review Lacerba. These texts linked libertarian, nationalist, irredentist, antisocialist, and anticlerical themes to the futurist cultural vision.

The futurists engaged in many other forms of public spectacle, such as hurling futurist leaflets from the top of the campanile overlooking Venice's Piazza San Marco. Marinetti also reported from war scenes such as Tripoli and the Bulgarian trenches of Adrianopolis. No expense was too great if publicity resulted from it, for Marinetti was a man of substantial inherited wealth who probably understood as well as anyone of the day the power of visual spectacle, sloganeering, and vivid typography in a world that moved too fast for long books and long-winded speeches.

While Marinetti was in Tripoli, Boccioni, Carrà, and Russolo were in Paris assessing the cubist scene under Severini's guidance. French poet Guillaume Apollinaire would soon charge that they had stolen cubist ideas, and many issues of the early Lacerba were devoted to the question of who owed what to whom. One result of their Paris sojourn was an important new recruit, Valentine de Saint-Point, a dancer who wrote manifestos on the futurist woman and, even more scandalously, on lust. Although women were noticeably absent from the early futurist movement, many women writers joined in during World War I, especially in connection with the second journal of Florentine futurism, L'Italia futurista (1916–1918).

In 1913 Marinetti wrote a manifesto on variety theater, which addressed the urban working classes and sought to destroy "art with a capital A." By 1914 some striking images of the futurist city had emerged in the manifesto on architecture by Antonio Sant'Elia, which appeared in Lacerba on the day World War I broke out. Sant'Elia, like Boccioni, would die in the coming conflagration.

THE WAR AND EARLY POSTWAR YEARS

In 1915 Balla and Fortunato Depero published a design manifesto on the "futurist reconstruction of the universe." It anticipated the futurism of the interwar years, which became associated with a certain style of design for fascist and capitalist culture to appropriate rather than with an avant-garde movement aiming to put the futurists themselves in charge of reconstructing modern cultural life.

The war took the futurists to the front and largely ended the frenetic theorizing and theatrical self-display of their first years. When Marinetti stepped back into the public realm in 1918, he aimed to found a futurist political party that would take power and direct the effort at postwar reconstruction. This grand illusion lasted until May 1920, when at the Second Fascist Congress Benito Mussolini split with the futurists, moved to the right, and began an ascent to power that culminated two and half years later in his Marchon Rome. Once fascism had consolidated its power, futurism was reduced to competing to become fascism's official art rather than being a comprehensive movement in its own right. This later aesthetic futurism is often called second futurism, but there are really three futurisms, corresponding to the prewar, immediate postwar, and fascist periods.

The political futurism of 1918 through 1920 was anticipated by Marinetti's jocular pamphlet, Come si seducono le donne (1917; How to seduce women), which, noting the transformations that had occurred in women's lives during the war years, argued that society was moving in the direction of universal free love and, toward that end, that divorce should be made easy and women given the right to vote. Then, in Al di là del comunismo (Beyond communism), written in the wake of the November 1919 elections in which the futurist-fascist ticket had suffered a crushing defeat, Marinetti fantasized about a coming counter-bourgeois political order in which futurists would rule, parliamentarism would be abolished along with prisons and police, and a new, free artistic sphere would flourish.

Post–World War I political futurism was a curious blend of leftist and rightist attitudes, and an independent left-futurism persisted well into the 1920s. Its main manifestation was in Turin, where the communist Antonio Gramsci led a section of Proletkult, a Comintern-sponsored cultural organization that included a number of futurists, including Arturo Cappa (the brother of Benedetta Cappa, who married Marinetti in 1923), and Luigi Colombo, known as Fillia, who would become close to Marinetti later in the decade.

Turin Proletkult was part of a general fragmentation of 1920s futurism. Some of the greatest futurist talents had died in the war. Others who survived it, like Carlo Carrà, had grown conservative and joined earlier defectors from futurism, such as Ardengo Soffici in calling for a "return to order." Still others, such as Mario Carli, Emilio Settimelli, and Giovanni Bottai, split with Marinetti over political questions, the first two launching an independent futurism of an apparently monarchist (but covertly fascist) stripe, and Bottai abandoning futurism altogether for a straightforward embrace of fascism. Finally, some futurists, such as Enrico Prampolini, launched independent futurist journals of a purely aesthetic sort. His early Noi (1917–1920; We) showed dadaist sympathies, and his second series (1923–1925) pursued machine aesthetics in relation to theater and design, with some influence from Russian constructivism. The only prewar futurist who remained loyal to Marinetti in this period was Balla.

WITHIN THE FASCIST REGIME

Beginning in 1923, Marinetti openly embraced Mussolini, seeking in vain to make futurism into the regime's state art. He moved to Rome in 1925, was among the inaugural members of the Reale Accademia in 1929, and then used his hitherto anticlerical avant-garde theory to advocate "sacred art." A manifesto on this topic, coauthored with Fillia, appeared in 1931 and undergirded futurist efforts in "aeropainting," "aeromusic," and "aeropoetry"—art forms inspired by transatlantic aviation—that had begun with a 1929 manifesto. These forms of "sacred art" lent themselves especially well to regime propaganda, for example in the celebration of Italo Balbo's 1933 spectacular flight from Orbetello to Chicago and back. In 1935 a futurist "war aeropainting" helped to promote the war in Abyssinia.

Despite Marinetti's obsequious efforts, the futurists were marginalized by the regime. They were not invited to participate in the 1924 Venice Biennale, which featured a number of works by Russian futurists. They were also denied any role in the Italian pavilion at the 1925 Paris Exposition, although they were allowed to display their work in a separate pavilion—a fitting symbol of their relationship with the fascist regime. They were consigned to two rooms on the upper level of regime's Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista (1932), the most lavish and popular artistic spectacle it ever staged. Meanwhile, a group of right-intransigent fascists led by Roberto Farinacci conducted a feverish campaign in the early 1930s against all forms of avant-garde modernism, including futurism. Parroting Adolf Hitler's argument that modernism was "degenerate art," they succeeded by 1937 in having futurism officially declared decadent in Italy. In 1939 the suppression of Mino Somenzi's futurist journal Artecrazia (Artistocracy) meant that an independent futurism had been stamped out in Italy. During the 1940s, futurism survived only as fascist war propaganda.

See alsoFascism; Marinetti, F. T.