In Despair

Scholars of Futurism do not exchange weird handshakes or engage in odd rituals, unlike Masons and members of other secret societies, though on rare occasions they have been known to cook up a recipe from the Futurist cookbook. Yet for the last several years they have often indulged in a ritual dialogue uniquely their own, speculating about the events and exhibitions that would mark the hundredth anniversary, in 2009, of the founding of Futurism in 1909. What would they be like? How would the general public respond? And how would “the big one” turn out, the large exhibition that would surely be mounted by a major institution? Would it rival the magnificent show organized by Pontus Hulten and held at Palazzo Grassi in Venice back in 1986? Could that one ever be surpassed? Those who have journeyed to London to view what became “the big one” will revisit those earlier flights of fantasy with some regret; the exhibition on “Futurism” that recently closed at Tate Modern was disappointing. Yet probing the reasons behind that disappointment, rather than merely grumbling about it, may also teach us something about the puzzling relationship between Futurism, modernity, and their subsequent fates in the hands of museum curators.

Like everything, the recent exhibition has a history. It was not devised by curators at Tate Modern, but concocted in Paris by curators at the Centre Pompidou (from where it travelled to the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome before finally landing in London). The original exhibition also had a very different title, Le Futurisme à Paris, a modest moniker. By the time it arrived in London, instead, the words à Paris had slipped away to leave only the blunt Futurism, seemingly announcing a more ambitious and comprehensive project while remaining essentially the same exhibition. British reviewers, perhaps misled by the new label, responded with hostility and disappointment, and it is fair to say that press coverage of it has been the harshest accorded to any major exhibition of recent years. (See the examples in the first sidebar.) At a pragmatic level, it became an object example of poor labeling and inept public relations.

Still, even the exhibition’s original title, Le Futurisme à Paris, was slightly misleading; it would have been more accurate to call it Le Futurisme à Paris, 1912. For its goal was to restage the famous Exhibition of Futurist Painting held at the Galérie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris in February, 1912, and to reconstruct the Parisian context in which it occurred. But it is precisely here that the difficulties of this later reconstruction begin. For the original exhibition went on the next month to open at the Rothschild Gallery in London, then went on to open in Berlin, and yet again in Brussels. At each stop it prompted an avalanche of press coverage. Even before the show had left Paris, Futurist paintings were being reproduced in London newspapers with extensive commentary. “Futurism—The Latest Art Sensation,” shouted the Illustrated London News. But the very conceptualization of the Pompidou’s later reconstruction, Le Futurisme à Paris, entailed treating these subsequent events not as equal parts of a larger whole, a well-orchestrated and transnational media campaign, but as minor aftershocks that merely indexed the seismic occurrence in Paris—a view that might flatter Parisians, but not one calculated to appeal to others.

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Futurism is not an easy art movement to like, or, indeed, to take seriously. With its weird mix of white-knuckle Italian progressiveness, flavoured with gloomy dollops of Milanese nostalgia, it seems constantly to be contradicting what it has just been insisting on. And in the figure of its founder, the unpleasant Filippo Marinetti, a loathsome Italian popinjay riddled with homophobic and sexist paranoias who went on to worship Mussolini, it had at its helm the most regrettable leader of any of the great rebellions of modern art. Its tone was obnoxious. Its methods were sinister and shameful. Its art achieved nothing much . . . .

For no obvious reason, we suddenly encounter a roomful of Parisian cubism dating from the years...