Rethinking Futurism
How Fascism and Feminism sat under the banner of a single art movement.
Futurist thought is varied, complex and frequently ambiguous. Poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded the movement in 1909 with the “Manifesto of Futurism.” Marinetti praised modernity, celebrated war and professed scorn for women.
Just a year later, artists Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini responded with a “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters 1910”, shortly thereafter the same group produced the “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto.” The movement would thus become one of the twentieth century’s most significant art movements.
The “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” followed Marinetti’s founding manifesto in that it denounced the “antiquated traditions” “pedantry and formalism” of Italian art. It vows to “glorify today’s life, incessantly and tumultuously transformed by victorious science”[9]. However, it does not refer to either women or warfare.
Many artists who grappled with Marinetti’s theoretical ideals frequently undermined the core principles of Futurism in their work while others produced additions, rebuttals and alternatives to the movement’s original manifesto.
Futurist thought thus became highly contested; as such, it was repeatedly revised by those who opposed Marinetti’s rather extreme ideas or had such ideas of their own. Unlike many of its avant-garde counterparts, the Futurist movement was not driven by a perceived need for an aesthetic revolution, but by a set of socio-political beliefs.
Throughout the early twentieth century, Futurism would become increasingly influenced by Fascism on the one hand and Feminism on the other.
Futurism was not a homogenous movement which sought to popularise Marinetti’s vision. Instead, it was composed of artists and intellectuals who each immortalised specific aspects of Marinetti’s original manifesto in their work, while rejecting others.
Futurism spanned a period of unprecedented social upheaval in Italy. The First World War proved devastating to Italy and its people, who experienced a “complete upending” of Italian society [1]. Through the first half of the twentieth century, Italy struggled between modernity and its illustrious but conservative past. The country endured war, poverty and finally fortune.
As a consequence of the ever-changing socio-political and economic climate, the Futurist movement underwent regular examination, and re-examination, invention and reinvention. There is then, not one Futurist manifesto but many.
So, while a great deal of art was created under the banner of Futurism, it is not always entirely clear which Futurism.
Marinetti’s “Founding Manifesto” was written five years before the outbreak of the First World War. Thirty years later, and well into the Second World War, Marinetti and his followers continued to espouse Futurist ideals, which, over three decades were subject to constant scrutiny by artists and intellectuals who took Marinetti’s ideas with varying degrees of literalness.
By 1941 Marinetti had abandoned his “anarchic vision of society”[2] and instead professed his willingness to fight for “the great Italy of Mussolini”[3]. Few artists accepted Marinetti’s manifesto without question. The author himself was frequently contradictory, and his ideals developed dramatically throughout his career. Even the work of Umberto Boccioni, co-author of the “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters” at times seems to undermine the founding manifesto’s oath to “scorn for women”.
Marinetti’s manifesto, was by his admission, “violently upsetting [and] incendiary.” Indeed, Christine Poggi has argued that the most extreme declarations of the manifesto can be understood to be deliberately provocative[4]. According to Poggi, in publishing the manifesto on the front page of the French newspaper, Le Figaro Marinetti announced his desire to catch the attention of a broad and diverse audience [5].
The artistic community responded accordingly, although by no means consistently. The manifesto commands the destruction of “museums, libraries, academies of every kind” claiming that doing so would free Italy “from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians”[6].
Marinetti fetishises the machine, commanding the Futurists “affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed.” He also degrades women, claiming Futurism will “fight … feminism”[7]. Finally, the manifesto decrees the Futurists will “glorify war — the world’s only hygiene,” and imbues each proclamation with violence and aggression [8].
But how did Futurist ideology translate to Futurist art?
Boccioni’s “Technical Manifesto” concerns the aesthetic development of the Futurist movement. It declares “all is conventional in art, and what was truth for the painters of yesterday is only a falsehood for us today”[10]. Like those before it, the manifesto rejects formalism, traditional subjects, and marries abstraction with modernity and technology. Each manifesto makes violent and grandiose proclamations imbued with disdain for tradition.
Following the devastation of the First World War, the art world effectively took a collective U-turn on the road between figurative and abstract art in what became known as the “call to order.” It is therefore worth considering artists working during this time in terms of their pre-war and post-war aesthetic.
The work of artist, Fortunato Depero offers an interesting example of this. Depero arrived in Rome in 1913, several years after Futurism had exploded into the art world. In his first years in Rome, Depero found fascination with the philosophy of Marinetti. In the Spring of 1915, by which time his aesthetic had assimilated to the visual dynamism and use of abstract form affiliated with Futurism, he signed (yet another futurist manifesto) “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe.”
Between 1917 and 1919 Depero and his wife, Rosetta Amdori began experimenting with textiles, in what Virginia Gardener Troy has described as the most significant development of his artistic career[11]. In the years immediately preceding the war, Depero worked designing sets and costumes for various ballets in Rome, he used pieces of fabric and paper and stuck them to cardboard to create mock-up designs and in the process realised the potential of these collage-come-tapestries [12].
In 1919, following a brief stint on the Eastern Front, Depero and his wife returned to the provincial town of Roverto to establish a workshop and showroom for their new enterprise [13].
The tapestries Depero and Amdori produced during the early 1920s often depict landscapes constructed with vibrant geometric shapes. Despite having co-authored a Futurist manifesto, the artist’s use of the ancient medium of tapestry seems to juxtapose Futurism’s rejection of “antiquity.” Rural landscapes such as Serrada,1920 undermine Boccioni’s scorn for landscape painting directly, as well as the avant-garde’s broader move toward cosmopolitanism.
In the tapestry, the town of Serrada, which is situated just eight kilometres from Depero’s home in Roverto, is depicted as what first appears to be a small, idyllic township untouched by war, modernity or industrialisation. However, Depero’s flat landscapes, and geometric, even mechanical figures reference cubism and earlier Futurist artworks.[14]
Depero expertly weaves references to the mechanisation of warfare and the body within the peaceful rural landscape of Serrada [15]. There are three separate depictions of people within this artwork, the central figure of a woman balancing a pot atop her head, a man who appears to be puffing a pipe on his doorsteps, and a border of grey and orange mechanised figures. Indeed, in reaction to the many soldiers who returned from war with prosthetic limbs in place of their arms and legs, avant-garde artists such as Depero depicted “human-machine hybrids” such as those bordering this tapestry of a provincial Italian town [16].
These figures represent an uncanny disruption of an artwork that could otherwise belong to the “call to order”. Perhaps the most disturbing element of the tapestry is the geometric shapes that sit in the place of facial features, implying emotion. On one, a semi-circle in place of a mouth implies joy, while on another an oval suggests horror. As a twenty-first-century viewer for whom the idea of robotics has normalised the notion of human-like machines, it is not the mechanisation of these figures that is uncanny, rather their apparent emotion.
Other works such as Guerra = Festa, meaning, “war = party” represent a decidedly less ambiguous attitude towards warfare than Serrada. Depero’s work can be analysed according to two fundamental principles of Futurism, firstly, warfare and secondly technology. Although the works he produced in light of First World War do not “glorify” warfare, and are more ambiguous than later works, Serrada represents a fusing of man and machine similar to that seen in the work of Boccioni.
However, notably, he worked alongside his wife who played an integral role in his artistic process. While he may have depicted Futurist ideas in his art, his relationship with women and, as we will find that of many of his counterparts, were not guided by Futurist ideals.
Boccioni is arguably the most notable of the Futurist painters; indeed, his style has become the strongest example of the movement’s aesthetic. However, his depictions of women reject the gender roles which underpin the violent affirmation of a patriarchal nationalistic order in Marinetti’s Futurist writings.[17] According to Poggi, throughout his manifestos, Marinetti “emphasises the fusion of man and machine, flesh and metal” he describes “mankind’s domination over nature,” and renders the earth with distinctly feminine characteristics.[18]
During the pre-war period, Boccioni was closely associated with Marinetti. Like Marinetti, Boccioni was obsessed with the idea of expressing the “life” of machine and technology in his art [19]. However, his mother and figures of motherhood consistently preoccupied his work. Marinetti’s Futurist discourse represents “women as lack” however, Boccioni depicts women in the role of motherhood, showing they are more than the “passive, mindless, lump of matter” that Marinetti’s writings reduced women to.[20]
Despite his public allegiance with Marinetti’s Futurist principles, his paintings seem to suggest that unlike Marinetti, Boccioni felt that to replace women with machines was too great of a sacrifice. Here, the personal relationships of each man become significant. Boccioni had three women in his life for whom he held love and adoration, his mother, his sister and his lover. Similarly, Marinetti was a devoted husband and father.
According to Virginia Spate, while Marinetti’s writing appears to be inflexible and sealed off from his personal life, Boccioni’s art is “saved from rhetorical bluster by some sort of confrontation between ideology and his lived relationships with particular women”.[21] So, like Depero, Boccioni’s lived experience does not assimilate to his ideology. Whereas, Marinetti’s writing does not give any indication that there was a woman in his personal life. Indeed, Poggi implies that Marinetti’s repeated condemnation of women and eroticised relation of man to machine indicates his own suppressed sexuality.[22]
This “scorn” for women and the insistence that traditional gender roles must underpin Futurism reveals a significant paradox in the ideologies’ core principles. As Spate puts it, “far from transcending tradition, the Futurists followed the centuries-old identification of woman with nature”[23] Of course, to assume that the assertion of patriarchal values was a contradiction, one must also believe that Feminism is an element of modernity.
To contextualise the publication of the “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” it is worth remembering that while Marinetti was demeaning tradition, praising modernity, and decreeing the Futurists will “destroy … Feminism” the Suffragette movement had spread across England and women were less than a decade from winning the right to vote democratically.
Despite not subscribing fully to Marinetti’s misogyny, Boccioni maintained the dichotomy between male and female in his art; consistently representing the body of the male “Futurist Hero” dissolving into radiant waves of colour or ripples of light, while the female body remains tactile [24].
The relationships between Depero, Boccioni, Marinetti and the respective women in their lives, therefore, do not reflect the dehumanisation of women described in Futurist writings. However, these Futurists dedicated themselves to the glorification of war and violence, hence the movements’ association with Fascism. Boccioni took part in the demonstrations for Italian participation in the war, while Marinetti’s later writing express ardent admiration for Mussolini [25].
The Futurist empathy for Fascism saw the movement increasingly isolated from those who adopted the more progressive elements of its ideology. Rosa Rosà became known for her Feminist interventions in the wartime journal L’Italia Futurista [26]. She is among a small group of women who contributed to Futurism and attempted to assert a Feminist agenda within what was arguably the most patriarchal ideology of the twentieth century.
Even among Feminists, Futurism was contested. In 1912, for example, Valentine De Saint-Point wrote a response to Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto: the “Manifesto of the Futurist Women.” Like the original manifesto, it vilifies Feminism and asserts women’s place in the home. However, it also argues, “humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are equal. Both merit the same disdain”[27]. Paradoxically, while asserting traditional gender roles, the “Manifesto of the Futurist Women” also declares equality.
Rosa Rosà took a considerably more radical approach and one that sits more comfortably with twenty-first-century ideals. While her drawings are “devoid of the aggressive and machine obsessed imagery characteristic of many Futurist works” they celebrate modernity, cosmopolitanism and notably, women. For example, Rosa Rosà wrote a letter in response to Marinetti’s wartime bestseller “How to Seduce Woman.” Rosà argued that even if women were, as Marinetti had it “stupid enough to be seduced,” then “Futurist men [could not be] superior to women and endowed with higher intelligence, [because] they suffered from the same weaknesses as the so-called weaker sex.”
Rosa Rosà’s writing garnered attention across Italy, and her letter, which she initially authored under the male pseudonym Jean Jacques, started a discourse about female sexual empowerment. Rosa Rosà declared “both men and women are equal and equally capable of seduction and susceptible to desire.” For Rosa Rosà, this sexual equality represented the most radical stand Futurism had taken on gender issues” [28]. Futurism and modernity, in this sense went beyond the technological to increasingly popular ideological notions of equality. Rosa Rosà’s involvement with Futurism ended as the movement edged closer to the fascist regime [29].
Rosa Rośa’s stance begs the question, what is a Futurist? Can we identify a clear set of ideas within an artwork and label it Futurist, or do the competing principles of the movement render an inevitable contradiction?
The Futurists profess a shared admiration for modernity, technology and machinery. In this sense, there are aspects of the movement that are progressive. There are those Futurists who have taken on board the modern ideals and revered machinery as decreed by Marinetti, yet also rejected the original manifestos less egalitarian elements.
Contrary to the likes of Cubism, Fauvism, Dada, Minimalism and the like, Futurist art was not defined in aesthetic terms. Although Boccioni’s “Technical Manifesto” attempts to address the issue of aesthetics, its focus is more on decrying traditional art forms than establishing a set Futurist aesthetics. In this sense, Futurism indistinguishable from any other avant-garde movement.
The movement is entirely underpinned by a political rather than an aesthetic position. These politics were often deliberately provocative and consistently contested throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Even the most radical of Futurists, even Marinetti, abandoned particular views as the continually changing political atmosphere rocked Italy.
If anything can be taken from the fact that Fascism and Feminism co-existed within different versions of a single ideology, it is that there is rarely, if ever, absolute harmony in ideological movements. It was true then, and it is true today.
Notes:
[1] Anthony White, “Futurism, Territory and War in the Work of Fortunato Depero,” Journal of War & Culture Studies, 8, 2, 2015, pp. 125–142.
[2] Virginia Spate, “Mother and Son: Boccioni’s Painting and Sculpture 1906–16”, in Terry Smith, ed. In Visible Touch, Power Publications, Sydney and Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1997, pp. 107–138.
[3] FT Marinetti FT, M Puma, P Masnatana, “Qualitative Imaginative Futurist mathematics 1941” in Futurism; An Anthology, eds Christina Poggi et al, Yale Univeristy Press 2009.
[4] Christine Poggi, “Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd,” Critical Inquiry, 28, 3, 2002, pp. 709–748.
[5] Poggi, 2002, pp. 709–748.
[6] FT Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) in Umbro Apollonio (ed.) Futurist Manifestos New Your, The Viking Press 1970, pp. 19 -24.
[7] Marinetti, 1909
[8] Marinetti, 1909
[9] Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, “Manifesto of Futurist painters” and “Futurist Paiters Technical Manifesto” in Umbro Apollonio (ed.) Futurist Manifestos New Your, The Viking Press 1970, pp. 24–26.
[10] Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Balla, Severini, 1910
[11] Virginia Gardner Troy, “Stitching modernity: the textile work of FortunatoDepero”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 20, 1, 2015, pp. 24–33.
[12] Troy, 2015, 24–33
[13] Troy, 2015, 24- 33
[14] White, 2015, 125–142
[15] White, 2015, 125–142
[16] White, 2015, 125–142
[17] Spate, 1997, 107–138.
[18] Poggi, 1997 19–39
[19] Poggi, 1997 19–39
[20] Spate, 1997, 107–138.
[21] Spate, 1997, 107–138.
[22] Poggi, 1997 19–39.
[23] Spate, 1997, 107–138.
[24] Spate, 1997, 107–138.
[25] Spate, 1997, 107–138.
[26] Lucia Re, “Rosa Rosà and the Question of Gender in Wartime Futurism” in Vivien Greene, ed., Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014, pp. 184–190.
[27] Valentine De Saint-Point “Manifesto of the Futurist Women” Futurist Manifesto of Lust,” in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman, eds. Futurism: An Anthology, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 49–53; 109–112.
[28] De Saint-Point, 1912
[29] De Saint-Point, 1912
