“Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe,” at the Guggenheim, is a spectacular survey of what has long been the most neglected canonical movement in modern art—because it is also the most embarrassing. An avant-garde so clownish, in its grandiose posturing, and so sinister, in its political embrace of Italian Fascism, has been easy to shrug off, but the show makes a powerful case for second thoughts. It arrays some superb paintings and sculptures, the best of them by Umberto Boccioni, whose death in the First World War, at the age of thirty-three, deprived the movement of its one great artist. And marvels of graphic and architectural invention reward a stroll up the Guggenheim’s ramp, through an eventful installation by the curator Vivien Greene. Yet even the most original Futurist art—such as Boccioni’s gorgeous and explosive painting “The City Rises” (1910-11) and his dazzling sculpture of a body in motion—feels a bit unequal to the presumptions of the movement’s ringmaster, the poet and master propagandist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The show begins in 1909, the year of the publication of Marinetti’s first Futurist Manifesto; it ends in 1944, the year of his death, of heart failure, after service with the Axis forces on the Eastern Front. (He was at work on a poem celebrating an élite Italian Army unit.) Futurism was Marinetti’s creation. Both its glories and its miseries come home to him.
A cosmopolitan prodigy, Marinetti was born in Alexandria in 1876, and was educated at the Sorbonne and the University of Genoa, where he took a degree in law. He wrote most of his poetry in French. His father, a lawyer employed by the Ottoman administration in Egypt, staked him to a fortune. Like many a restless youth of his generation, he thrilled to new currents in the arts and philosophy, from Wagner, Nietzsche, and Bergson to the French apostle of revolutionary violence Georges Sorel. Marinetti streamlined a mélange of radical ideas into an aestheticized politics of upheaval for upheaval’s sake, with a strutting emphasis on heroic virility. He declared an intention “to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort,” and wrote, “We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gestures of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman.”
Marinetti gathered zealous adherents in Italy—where late-blooming modernization had brought an alertness to the wider world as well as an upsurge of nationalism—and organized public events calculated to scandalize. In 1910, he fluttered leaflets from the Campanile in Saint Mark’s Square in Venice, calling for the city’s canals to be filled with the rubble of its palaces and for its return to military and economic dominance of the Adriatic. It wasn’t clear, at first, whether his ideological thrust veered to the left or to the right. He idealized the proletariat, and in 1921 the Italian Communist theorist and activist Antonio Gramsci praised the Futurists as revolutionaries of culture. But reactionary tendencies emerged, not least in matters of art. Futurism hewed to traditional formats of painting and sculpture and only fitfully ventured into photography and film. It couldn’t match the aesthetic innovations of Cubism or, a few years later, the conceptual genius of Dada, or the dynamic mergers of art and design in Russian Constructivism, or the experimental discipline of the Bauhaus. It remained closest in spirit to the emotional heat, in laggard forms, of German Expressionism. But nobody could beat the Futurists for issuing manifestos.
Between 1910 and 1914, Marinetti paid calls on avant-garde circles in Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, and St. Petersburg, intending to evangelize but, instead, antagonizing almost everyone. He received the closest thing to a positive response in London, where the Vorticist movement was launched by the writer and artist Wyndham Lewis, abetted by Ezra Pound; it became Futurist, as well as proto-Fascist, in all but name. Paris was amused. Guillaume Apollinaire vacillated on Futurism but developed forms of poetry akin to Marinetti’s “words-in-freedom,” as the Italian called his typographically varied and spatially scattered aggregations of onomatopoeic sense and catchy nonsense. Parisian Cubism stunned Marinetti’s initial cadre of Italian artists—Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini—who promptly vulgarized the new syntax of fractured representation in narrative tableaux of speed and destruction: zooming cars, swooping airplanes, and siren songs of riot and war.
The guns of August, 1914, elated Marinetti. He dedicated his movement to promoting Italy’s entrance into the mayhem, on the excuse of annexing contested territory from Austria. The fatal move was made in 1915, with largely disastrous results that did not sober Marinetti. (The glamour of modern weapons, he wrote, “makes the spectacle of torn, dying human flesh almost negligible.”) When chaotic postwar conditions climaxed with Mussolini’s March on Rome, in 1922, Marinetti seems to have expected Futurism to become the official culture of the new regime—a misapprehension like that of the contemporaneous Russian avant-garde, which identified itself with the Bolshevik Revolution. Unlike Stalin, Mussolini condoned some pluralism in the arts, although pressure from Hitler, in 1938, led to a purge of Jewish artists, which Marinetti did nothing to oppose. He had long displayed a readiness to compromise his temperamental anarchism, having proclaimed, in 1915, “The word Italy must dominate over the word Liberty.”
After Futurism’s initial heyday, its visual art lost focus, becoming an eclectic mix of modernistic styles. But the movement spun off lively developments in theatre, music, dance, design, advertising, fashion, and even toys. Manifestos trumpeted each departure. The painter and composer Luigi Russolo hoisted the flag in music, promising “orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop shutters, the slamming of doors, the bustle and shuffling of crowds,” and so on through an inventory of up-to-date dins. A fascinating discovery for me, in the show, is the multimedia virtuosity of Fortunato Depero, a Futurist recruit who introduced a repertoire of robotic forms and figures. He made terrific puppets, for performances and for children’s play, and theatre sets. Among his other feats as a commercial artist, he created the classic Campari Soda bottle. From 1928 to 1930, Depero lived in New York, mounting Futurist shows and producing stylish illustrations and covers for magazines, including this one.
The show concludes with a game attempt to dilute the record of the Futurists’ misogyny, which Marinetti never tired of promulgating. In 1911, he denounced “horrible and staid Love that encumbers the march of man and prevents him from transcending his own humanity.” But he seems to have been surprised, and mellowed, by his feelings for the writer and painter Benedetta Cappa, whom he married in 1923. The couple collaborated on a style they called Tactilism, for its appeal to the sense of touch. Her warmly colored semi-abstractions and aerial-view landscapes led, in 1933-34, to a commission for murals for a post office in Palermo. The big paintings, on view at the Guggenheim, are notably sensual variants of the technology-celebrating mode that became an international staple of public art during the Depression.
An essay by the Italian scholar Claudia Salaris in the show’s substantial catalogue is titled “The Invention of the Programmatic Avant-Garde,” which neatly expresses the historical importance of Futurism while suggesting its artistic limitations. Salaris notes Futurism’s resemblance to “a political party, with a charismatic leader, a central directorate, and cells in the field—a first in the art world.” Marinetti’s gang provided a template for insurrectionary culture, especially anticipating the militant Surrealism of André Breton, whose political drive ran him into a tortured allegiance to Communism. Wanting to create art and wanting to change the world may excite the same cocktail of stimulants in the brains of the susceptibly young and disaffected. Futurism demands credit for exploiting that effect to the fullest extent ever. You can feel it at the Guggenheim, like ghost sensations in a severed limb. ♦
