From the Milanese origins to the long post-war removal, a path made of audacity, visions and extraordinary lives comes to life in the new book by Giordano Bruno Guerri.
Not everyone knows, or remembers, that Italy was there cradle of the most revolutionary artistic avant-garde of the twentieth century: The futurismwhich we could write in all capital letters, or FuTuriSMo, or in upside-down letters, in homage to the fruitful typographical and orthographic disorder that the movement advocated. From now on we write it with a lowercase initial, although it wasn’t lowercase.
From Milan to the world
From Milan – born at the beginning of the 20th century on the banks of the Naviglio, where the moonlight was reflected (to be killed, according to the founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) – futurism spread throughout the world, bringing with it the name of an Italy new, driving, fast, aggressivecontrasted with the provincial laziness of post-unification Italy, a Cinderella in the roaring imperialist Europe of the period.
He was born with a Manifest published (for a fee?) on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 October 1909, but the same document saw the light in the previous weeks in various Italian newspapers, from The Gazzetta dell’Emilia at the Gazzetta di Mantuato theVerona Arenaal Small of Trieste (then an Austrian port), al Goad of Naples. The visionary Marinettia 33-year-old with strong ambitions, invented not only the movement, but the cultural marketing.
Marinetti and the machine of the future
Lover of women and enginesrich family, born in cosmopolitan Alexandria in Egypt in 1876, Marinetti always had the open wallet to support the crazy spirits that revolved around his house, in the Milanese palace in Corso Venezia 61. The young writer and poet, called Effetì, pushed them to break away from the mold of museums; it encouraged them to write, paint, sculpt, fight, plan with the roar of airplanesthe carsThe thunder of cannonsthe symphony of machine gunsthe roar of turbines and gods transatlantic.
Futurism embodied the future and expanded to all aspects of daily life. Futurists were there Kitchenthearchitecturethefurniturethe fashionThe cinemathe musicThe theaterthe dancethe sciencetheeducation. The fingerprints of futurism they are found in every expression of the current world and have marked the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, from Dadaism to surrealism up to pop art and digital art.
The crux of fascism
You will say: so what? Then there is a small problem: the removal which futurism has long been the subject of since the post-war period, due to its relations with fascism. That there were. Apart from Marinetti, a convinced fascist since the dawn of Mussolini’s movement, all had relations with the regime, but intermittent. Umberto Boccioni died in 1916, even before the fascis were formed. Everyone, however, fascists or not, early futurists or later followers, had amazing lives.
The book that reopens accounts with history
And it is to these that Giordano Bruno Guerri dedicated the book Audacity Rebellion Speed. Amazing lives of the Italian futurists (Rizzoli). «What is also amazing is that Marinetti and others really saw in the future» explains Guerri a Panorama«with words of that time they imagined the computerThe mobile phoneeven theArtificial intelligence».
Guerri continues: «For us, talking about futurism after 1945 was like bringing fascism back to life. A critical and historical nonsense. In Germany, degenerate art was prohibited. In Italy, with the futurist mob, the most modern and advanced expressions certainly could not be prohibited.”
From removal to rediscovery
The removal of the movement founded by Marinetti, a “phosphorescent idiot” according to Gabriele d’Annunzio, and the dispersion of the works lasted a long time. «Fortunately Gianni Agnelli took works for the Lingotto», recalls Guerri. «The turning point came with the great Venetian exhibition at Palazzo Grassi in 1986, curated by Pontus Hultén».
In recent decades, with difficulty, the movement born in 1909 has finally regained its position place it deserves in the history of art. Also thanks to books like this one by Guerri, full of curiosities, images and visionsone amazing Christmas presentto be placed under the tree or, by contrast, next to a traditional nativity scene, Cupiello style.
