Futurism Redux

This volume comes to us in the form of a triptych, the perfect format for a movement with as much zeal as Futurism. Published on the occasion of the centennial of the movement, this is the first six-hundred-page anthology to give us a truly panoramic view of the Futurist adventure from 1909 to 1944. It offers us no less than forty-four poems, sixty-two manifestoes, and a full scope of its visual repertoire ranging from the printed page to murals.

Horrified by the prospect of empty, unproductive time and the specter of boredom, the residual side-effects of modernization, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was an indefatigable producer who encouraged his cohorts to do likewise. The fanatic over-production of manifestoes, poems, paintings, and theatrical experimentation served as an apotropaic device to ward off the obsolescence so vividly feared by the Futurists. The span of this volume gives us a sense of the longevity of a movement that, for all of its desire to burn the past into the present and the present into the future, turned out to be a very long avant-garde.

By venturing deep into Secondo Futurismo, the new infusion of blood that was to give the movement its second wind during the Fascist ventennio (the regime's two decades in power), the editors take us all the way into the Second World War. In that sense this book functions as a corrective to the previous English-language Futurist anthologies which, focusing on the more canonical texts, stopped much earlier. Marinetti: Selected Writings, edited by R.W. Flint (1972) ends in 1920 (with the exception of a glowing cameo portrait of Mussolini by Marinetti published in 1929)¹; and Futurist Manifestos, edited by Umbro Apollonio (1970), ends in 1918².

A good third of the present volume is devoted to what Futurism is best known for and arguably did best, the manifestoes. Here we see Marinetti retaining steadfast control as the main source of inspiration over a movement that witnessed, quite remarkably, almost no defections among its members while managing a successful recruit of faithful younger adherents in the 1920s. These manifestoes were propagated in charismatic typographic form in Lacerba, La Voce, L'Italia futurista, and Stile futurista reminding us that Italy, to this day, relies heavily on journals and magazines as cultural platforms. This is what allowed Futurism to seep so readily into the bloodstream of Italy's politics.

Fig. 1.

The first page of Le Figaro, 20 February 1909, featuring the Manifesto of Futurism by F. T. Marinetti. Private collection. Image source: Futurism, Didier Ottinger, ed. (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2009), 77.

Futurism remains, as Lawrence Rainey posits from the outset in his introduction, a litmus test of the relationship between art and power, aesthetics and politics. He gives us a detailed, riveting, and responsible account of how these relationships were established. Italian public figures have rarely been tested for what Anglo-Saxons like to call "accountability." Futurism for some decades had been read apolitically, its seductive and wild poetic rhetoric exempting it from realpolitik. This is how Futurism was "rediscovered" after a few years of post-war, post-fascism quarantine by the British critic Reyner Banham, when he chanced on a volume of Marinetti's writings on a bookstall outside the Brera in Milan on day in 1951. The manifestoes, which Banham compared to Beat poetry were, he wrote, "an orgy of wild and irresponsible automobilism" that read like nothing else in Western literature except for parts of Kerouac's On the Road, and Marinetti himself was "an anticipation of hipsterism."³ But, as Rainey shows us in his introduction, not only can the movement not be thought of separately from Fascism, but the two thrived in parallel. He also reminds us how, perhaps because of the irrepressibility of its public discourse, Italy also produced an antidote: intellectuals endowed with both prescient and unforgiving lucidity. The critic and painter Ardengo Soffici...