Back To The Futurism

Vivien Greene, curator of the Guggenheim’s new exhibit on the Italian Futurists, explains how F.T. Marinetti and his compatriots violate our ideas about the avant-garde:

This is sort of a scholarly debate, but I think for many people the definition of avant-garde means it follows the idea of the scholar named Bürger, and to be avant-garde means you have to be of the left. So if you break out of that mold—it’s hard to think of an avant-garde that was on the right. And I think with Futurism you have that, because in every other way, they’re satisfying our ideas of what is avant-garde: they’re new, they’re disruptive, and as they continue to develop into the ’20s and ’30s, they are reinventing themselves. It’s not as though they’re painting the same thing over and over again. They evolve while still keeping in mind the basic tenets of what is Futurist: dynamism, simultaneity, speed, technology, the machines. They embrace new things; they’re not at all static. Innovation is very important to the ideas of the avant-garde.

The Economist suggests that the movement’s fascist associates were one reason the Futurists have never had a major retrospective in the US:

Marinetti, a showman who liked to call himself “the caffeine of Europe” for the energy he put into promoting the futurist movement, was an early fan of Benito Mussolini and took part in the founding of the fascist movement in 1919. Marinetti wanted futurism to be Italian fascism’s official art movement. But the dictator refused, preferring to bestow his favours on different art movements at different times. The two men blew hot and cold about one another. Yet when Mussolini fell from power in 1943 and Hitler named him the head of the puppet Italian republic of Salò, the founder of futurism was one of the first to offer his support. Marinetti died just five months before Mussolini was executed, their lives seemingly forever linked.

In a largely complimentary review, Peter Schjeldahl calls Italian Futurism “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 [Guggenheim] 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 33, deprived the movement of its one great artist. And marvels of graphic and architectural invention reward a stroll up the Guggenheim’s ramp.

(Boccioni’s States of Mind II: The Farewells, 1911, via Wikimedia Commons)