One Hundred Years of Futurism: Aesthetics, Politics and Performance

By John London

More than one hundred years after Futurism exploded onto the European stage with its unique brand of art and literature, there is a need to reassess the whole movement, from its Italian roots to its international ramifications. In wide-ranging essays based on fresh research, the contributors to this collection examine both the original context and the cultural legacy of Futurism. Chapters touch on topics such as Futurism and Fascism, the geopolitics of Futurism, the Futurist woman, and translating Futurist texts. A large portion of the book is devoted to the practical aspects of performing Futurist theatrical ideas in the twenty-first century.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jan 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781783208418

Book preview

First published in the UK in 2017 by

Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK

First published in the USA in 2017 by

Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street,

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Copyright © 2017 Intellect Ltd

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Notes on the Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Futurism, Anti-Futurism, and the Forgotten Century

John London

Aesthetics and Politics

Chapter 1: Geographies of Futurism: Mapping the First Avant-garde

Andreas Kramer

Chapter 2: Intersecting Planes: Futurism, Fascism, and Gramsci

James Martin

Chapter 3: Translating Futurism: Moving Possibilities

John London

Chapter 4: Twenty-First-Century Women Drivers – Futurism’s Unlikely147 Successors: Gender Constructions, B-Movies, and Futurism

Ricarda Vidal

Performance

Forward is Forewarned: On Practitioners’ Perspectives

John London

Chapter 5: Staging Futurism: Time, Space, Place, Pace, and the Performance of Futurist sintesi

Gordon Ramsay

Chapter 6: Writing Futurist Drama in 2009: A Futurist Doll’s House

John London

Chapter 7: The Possibilities for Dance: Words, Images, and Sounds in Freedom

Rebecca Frecknall

Chapter 8: W−I−F + V−I−F = EF

Abi Weaver

Chapter 9: Depero and the Puzzle of Colours

Luke Allder

Chapter 10: Sound-singing Carlo Carrà

Lawrence Upton

Chapter 11: Recipe for a Futurist Dinner

Andrea Cusumano and Giuseppe Lomeo

Bibliography

Index

List of Illustrations

The editor and contributors have made every effort to contact the copyright holders of these illustrations.

1. Giacomo Balla, Lampada ad arco ( Street Lamp ), oil on canvas, 174.7 × 114.7 cm, 1911. Museum of Modern Art, New York. © DACS 2017.

2. Christopher R. W. Nevinson, Searchlights , oil on canvas, 76.4 × 56 cm, 1916. Manchester Art Gallery, UK / Bridgeman Images.

3. Pablo Picasso, Guernica , oil on canvas, 349 × 776 cm, 1937. Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid. © Succession Picasso / DACS, London 2017.

4. Renato Giuseppe Bertelli, Profilo continuo (Testa di Mussolini) ( Continuous Profile [ Head of Mussolini ]), terracotta, 34 × 28 × 28 cm, 1933. Imperial War Museum, London.

5. F. T. Marinetti, Irredentismo ( Irredentism ), free-word poem, ink, pastel, and collage on paper, 21.8 × 27.8 cm, 1914. Private Collection.

6. F. T. Marinetti, Après la Marne, Joffre visita le front en auto ( After the Marne, Joffre Toured the Front by Car ), 26 × 23.2 cm, 1915. From: F. T. Marinetti, Les mots en liberté futuristes (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di Poesia , 1919), p. 99.

7. K. S. Malevich, Anglichanin v Moskve ( An Englishman in Moscow ), oil on canvas, 88 × 57 cm, 1914. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

8. Herwarth Walden, Einblick in Kunst: Expressionismus Futurismus Kubismus ( Insight into Art: Expressionism Futurism Cubism ) (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm [1917]), 26.8 × 18.9 cm. Original cover, with woodcut by Jacoba van Heemskerck. With permission of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach.

9. Helen Saunders, Island of Laputa , 15.2 × 18.2 cm. From: BLAST: Review of the Great English Vortex , no. 2 (July 1915), 8.

10. Luigi Russolo, La rivolta ( The Revolt ), oil on canvas, 150.8 × 230.7 cm, 1911. Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.

11. Umberto Boccioni, Dinamismo di un ciclista ( Dynamism of a Cyclist ), oil on canvas, 70 × 95 cm, 1913. Mattioli Collection, Milan, on long-term loan to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

12. Francesco Cangiullo, Piedigrotta: parole in libertà (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia , 1916), 18.7 × 25.6 cm, facsimile repr. (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte and Libreria Salimbeni, 1978). © DACS 2017.

13. Carlo Carrà, Manifestazione interventista (Festa patriottica-dipinto parolibero) ( Interventionist Demonstration [ Patriotic Holiday-Free-Word Painting ]), tempera, pen, mica powder, paper glued on cardboard, 38.5 × 30 cm, 1914. Mattioli Collection, Milan, on long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. © DACS 2017.

14. Francesco Cangiullo, Part 1, number 4 from Caffè concerto: alfabeto a sorpresa (1916), 25.5 × 18.5 cm. Source: Francesco Cangiullo, Caffè concerto: alfabeto a sorpresa (1916) facsimile repr., ed. by Luciano Caruso (Florence: Studio per Edizioni Scelte and Libreria Salimbeni, 1979), unpaginated. © DACS 2017.

15. Francesco Cangiullo, Monache (Lettere umanizzate) ( Nuns [ Humanized Letters ]). From: Regina , 14, no. 10 (1917). © DACS 2017.

16. After the Marne, Joffre Toured the Front by Car . Source: F. T. Marinetti, Selected Poems and Related Prose , ed. by Luce Marinetti, trans. by Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 119. © 2003 by Yale University.

17. Corrado Govoni, Autoritratto ( Self-Portrait ), ink on paper, 29 × 22.5 cm, 1915. Source: Corrado Govoni, Rarefazioni e parole in libertà (Milan: Edizioni Futuriste di Poesia , 1915), p. 9.

18. ימצע ןקויד. Source: 1925–1910: םירחא םינשדחו םיטסירוּטוּפ , ed. and trans. by Ariel Rathaus (Jerusalem: Carmel and Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 1991), p. 90. © Carmel, Jerusalem.

19. Pam (Rose McGowan) posing in front of Mike (Kurt Russell) in Death Proof , dir. by Quentin Tarantino(Troublemaker Studios, 2007).

20. Advertisement for the 1969 Dodge Charger. Source: < http://www.musclecarsforever.com/1968to1970ads.asp > [accessed 24 April 2017].

21. Abernathy ( Rosario Dawson ) with the Mustang in Death Proof , dir. by Quentin Tarantino (Troublemaker Studios, 2007).

22. Zoë (Zoë Bell) on the bonnet of the Challenger, in Death Proof , dir. by Quentin Tarantino (Troublemaker Studios, 2007).

23. A close-up of Mike sitting on top of the Charger watching the girls through his binoculars, in Death Proof , dir. by Quentin Tarantino (Troublemaker Studios, 2007).

24. The victory of the women at the end of Death Proof , dir. by Quentin Tarantino (Troublemaker Studios, 2007).

25. Magnus Irvin, L’assassinio dell’artista ( The Murder of the Artist ), with Paul Fool, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009.

26. Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli, Traditionalism ( Passatismo ), performed at Loughborough University, 22 January 2009.

27. Francesco Cangiullo, Lights! ( Luce! ), performed at the University of Nottingham, 7 May 2009.

28. Angelo Rognoni, The Normal Man ( L’uomo normale ), performed at the University of Nottingham, 7 May 2009.

29. Luigi Russolo, Sintesi plastica dei movimenti di una donna ( Plastic Synthesis of a Woman’s Movements ), oil on canvas, 85 × 65 cm, 1912. Musée des Beaux Arts, Grenoble.

30. Alfredo Ambrosi, Il volo su Vienna ( Flight over Vienna ), oil on canvas, 151 × 192 cm, 1933. Palazzo del Quirinale, Rome.

31. F. T. Marinetti, Parole in libertà ( Bombardamento sola igiene ) ( Words-in-Freedom [ Bombing is the only Hygiene ]), ink and collage on paper, 31 × 42 cm, 1915. Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, Bologna.

32. Members of the audience clutch programmes, while performers stop the traffic for the Futurist Parade in the street prior to the main events of Let’s Murder the Moonshine , Lewisham, London, 19 February 2009. Photograph: Julie Weaver.

33. Giacomo Balla, La mano del violinista ( The Hand of the Violinist ), oil on canvas, 56 × 78.3 cm, 1912. Estorick Collection, London, UK / Bridgeman Images. © DACS 2017.

34. The Futurist Orchestra performs Balla’s The Hand of the Violinist , Shunt Lounge, London, 2008.

35. The Futurist Orchestra performs Synthesis of Syntheses ( Sintesi delle sintesi ), by Guglielmo Jannelli and Luciano Nicastro, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009. Photograph: Julie Weaver.

36. Disconcerted States of Mind ( Sconcertazione di stati d’animo ), by Giacomo Balla, performed by the Futurist Orchestra, The Vaults, Edinburgh, 2009. Photograph: Caoimhe Mader McGuinness.

37. Lawrence Upton sound-sings Carlo Carrà’s Ritmi plastici ( Plastic Rhythms ), Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009.

38. Mario Schifano, Futurismo rivisitato ( Futurism Revisited ), acrylic on canvas, covered by coloured Perspex, 170 × 300 cm, 1965. Private Collection. © DACS 2017.

39. Andrea Cusumano and Giuseppe Lomeo ready to serve Futurist food, Amersham Arms, London, 19 February 2009.

Notes on the Contributors

Luke Allder is a teacher and performance practitioner. His writing and visual works discuss themes of identity, language, and cultural reception. He has exhibited at a number of venues, namely Battersea Arts Centre, Warwick Arts Centre, Goldsmiths, Queen Mary (University of London), and Shunt. Luke is currently working on research into the use of performance art pedagogies within child second language acquisition. Luke lives and works in Barcelona.

Andrea Cusumano a director, scenographer, performer, painter, and installation artist. He is the artistic director of CeSDAS with which he operates between Italy and the United Kingdom. Andrea’s work has been performed and exhibited in several major institutions across Europe and overseas from New York to New Delhi. In the past he has collaborated with the Austrian Actionist Hermann Nitsch, coordinating his 6-Day-Play (a six-day long total-theatre performance that involved hundreds of actors and musicians). He is also the Conductor of the O.M. Theatre Orchestra, with which he played in several theatres and festivals across Europe. Since 2014 City Councillor of Culture in Palermo (Italy), Andrea is also a member of the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he teaches visual performance and scenography.

Rebecca Frecknall is a freelance movement and theatre director working in the United Kingdom. She trained on the Drama and Theatre Arts BA at Goldsmiths before securing a place to study directing at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA). She was one of four 2015–16 recipients of the acclaimed Regional Theatres Young Directors Scheme (RTYDS) at Northern Stage where she worked as Resident Director. Before this appointment, Rebecca worked as a freelance director at the National Theatre, Royal Shakespeare Company, and Young Vic where she was appointed Jerwood Assistant Director in 2011. She was awarded the annual National Theatre Studio Resident Director Bursary in 2012 and subsequently trained there on their inaugural directors’ course the following year.

Andreas Kramer is Reader in German and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests include early twentieth-century literature and culture, specifically literary and visual modernism in Germany (with an emphasis on Expressionism), and the European avant-garde. He is the author of monographs on Carl Einstein; on Gertrude Stein and the German literary avant-garde; and on regionalist modernism in German culture. He has edited Eugene Jolas’s autobiography Man from Babel (Yale UP) and co-edited several collections, including Carl Einstein and the European Avant-Gardes (with Nicola Creighton, 2012; de Gruyter). He is preparing for publication a book entitled Inventing Maps: Geographies of the European Avant-Garde. He recently published essays on Dada and sport in Virgin Microbe (ed. by David Hopkins and Michael White, 2014) and in the Hugo-Ball-Almanach (2016); on Dada’s heterochronia in Time and Temporality in the European Avant-Garde (ed. by Jan Baetens and Dirk de Geest, 2016); and on the aero-poetry of the European avant-garde (in Technische Beschleunigung – ästhetische Verlangsamung, ed. by Jan Röhnert, 2015).

Giuseppe Lomeo is a London-based Italian composer and musician. He is the co-founder of the experimental music collective Opera Mutica (Rome). He is the composer and chief musician of CeSDAS theatre company.

John London works in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film at Queen Mary, University of London. He has published studies such as Reception and Renewal in Modern Spanish Theatre (1997), Contextos de Joan Brossa (2010), and (as editor) Theatre under the Nazis (2000). He has also worked as an art critic and a translator from several languages. John’s premiered and published plays include You Know How These Things Are (1998), Right Couples (1999/2001), The New Europe (2000), and Nex (2005). He founded a short-lived Futurist movement in Jerusalem in 1997.

James Martin teaches rhetoric and political theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has published widely on modern Italian political thought and contemporary political theory. He is the author and editor of numerous books, including: Gramsci’s Political Analysis (1998), Third Way Discourse (2003), Piero Gobetti and the Politics of Liberal Revolution (2008), and Rhetoric and Politics (2014). He is co-editor of the Palgrave journal, Contemporary Political Theory.

Gordon Ramsay works in the School of English at the University of Nottingham, where he teaches drama, performance, and creative writing. He has had readings, workshops, and performances of a number of plays, including Pas de Deux (White Bear, London), The Woman Who Turned Into A Clock (The Gate, London), and 1X/X1 (Lion and Unicorn, London). From 2009 he worked with a director and actors from Nottingham Playhouse on developing a new play, Found (2013); and with New Perspectives Theatre Company on The Exile, a play inspired by Carlo Levi’s exile in southern Italy (2014). Other work includes articles on Italian Futurist performance (2007, 2011); on Witkiewicz (2013); and translations of Futurist sintesi (performed in 2009 and 2010). He has created a site-specific roadside installation-poem, The Talking Road (shown 2012, Tatenhill, Staffordshire), acted as curator and dramaturg for Witkiewicz Now: Theatre of the Fantastic (Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival, 2014) and performed as B.S. Johnson in But I Know This City (Excavate, Nottingham 2015). He was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2011 and is currently working on a performance poem, Out of the Woods.

Lawrence Upton is a poet, and a graphic and sound artist. Recent publications include: wrack (2012), Memory Fictions (2012), and Unframed Pictures (2011). Co-edited Word Score Utterance Choreography in Verbal and Visual Poetry (1998) with Bob Cobbing. Some commentaries on Bob Cobbing are forthcoming. Published in journals: Artist’s Book Yearbook, Book Arts Newsletter, Emerging Language Practices, Experimental Poetics and Aesthetics, Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, Readings, Sounds Rite. Solo exhibition entitled from recent projects (September 2012, St James Hatcham). Lawrence makes text-sound composition with John Levack Drever, Benedict Taylor, and Tina Krekels. AHRC Research Fellow in Music, Goldsmiths (2008–11); Visiting Research Fellow in Music, Goldsmiths (2011–15). Continuing his research as a member of Athens Institute for Education and Research (2015–).

Ricarda Vidal is a lecturer, translator, and curator. She teaches in the Department of Culture, Media & Creative Industries at King’s College London. Ricarda has published on death and culture, speed and car crashes, Futurism and Romanticism, contemporary art and architecture, gentrification, macro-engineering and alternative worlds. She is the author of Death and Desire in Car Crash Culture: A Century of Romantic Futurisms (Peter Lang, 2013) and co-editor (with Maria-José Blanco) of The Power of Death: Contemporary Reflections on Death in Western Society (Berghahn, 2014) and (with Ingo Cornils) of Alternative Worlds: Blue-Sky Thinking since 1900 (Peter Lang, 2014). Since 2013 she has been researching intersemiotic translation in the form of the collaborative project Translation Games (www.translationgames.net). Together with the artist Sam Treadaway she also runs the bookwork project Revolve:R (www.revolve-r.com), an exploration of visual communication in collaboration with 24 international artists. Web:

Abi Weaver is a producer/director working across broadcast media and film. She has produced films such as The Olympic Side of London and Walking the Wire that have been broadcast internationally and has also produced popular factual and current affairs programming for major UK terrestrial channels: BBC, ITV, and Channel 4. Abi’s interests span alternative and international film, experimental theatre, and avant-garde literature. Abi studied her BA at Goldsmiths College and MA at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She is currently producing a film in Lebanon supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council.

Acknowledgements

Because Futurism was so declaredly public in almost all its manifestations, it seemed imperative to celebrate its centenary in both a performative and critical manner. This admittedly ambitious goal of interpreting the richest avant-garde movement in the two senses of the term has been a considerable challenge. It is not easy to assess and represent a phenomenon that – over more than three decades – ranged from poetry to cooking or from painting to politics, with original contributions in dance, theatre, architecture, design, and fashion (among many fields). To try and understand Futurism in its entirety is to try and understand life in twentieth-century Europe. That is why every book on the movement is ultimately incomplete and this one is no exception. Its obvious gaps (music, for one, is sadly reduced) will, I hope, not obscure the objective of simultaneously viewing Futurism as an historical event and a living source of cultural ebullience.

My first and largest debt of gratitude in helping to maintain a perspective both analytical and ludic is to the other contributors to this volume. They have replied to my multiple requests for revised drafts of their articles with diligence and courtesy. Moreover, they have been very patient as I went through a testing series of circumstances that have delayed this project excessively. I owe them much more than these words can express. I would like to thank as well colleagues here and abroad who helped in the early stages of the endeavour: Lutz Becker, Ben Levitas, Deirdre Osborne, François Quiviger, Ariel Rathaus, and Jackie Rattray. Colin Homiski’s bibliographical expertise and his generosity have been invaluable, while Günter Berghaus has provided sage advice. Elza Adamowicz and Galin Tihanov offered fruitful insights. The book has benefited from the detailed comments of Robert Gordon. Our editor at Intellect, Matthew Floyd, has been exceptionally considerate. Various libraries in the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, and Spain have allowed me to consult their holdings.

I have worked in two colleges of the University of London during the composition of this book: Goldsmiths and Queen Mary. Students and colleagues in both have provided a constant source of stimulation. I am grateful to the Department of Theatre and Performance in Goldsmiths for facilitating a sabbatical to complete this project.

John London

Introduction

Futurism, Anti-Futurism, and the Forgotten Century

John London

1909–2009: A Mournful Anniversary

The provocative implication of the title of this book is not accidental. Whatever specialists may claim, the twentieth century is hardly considered the century of Futurism in aesthetic, political or social terms. Indeed, the largest international touring exhibition organized to celebrate the centenary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1909 founding manifesto of the movement did much to consolidate a general perception of its mediocre artistic achievements and quaint obsolescence. The reviewer for The Guardian was correspondingly downbeat: ‘None of the key figures in the movement – Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, Boccioni, Carrà and Severini – were artists of the first rank’. In Italy, several shows (especially two in Milan) gave a sense of the generic scope of Futurism by incorporating concerts, performances, and even a tram tour. There was an exhibition in Berlin with examples of sculpture, literature, music, theatre, and photography composed of material from Italy and called, significantly Languages of Futurism. But the exhibition which originated in the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2008, then travelled (in slightly different forms) to Rome, and ended its life at the Tate Modern in London, reduced Futurism to painting. Any current relevance was limited to an incongruous installation by the Detroit techno DJ Jeff Mills (the ultimate irrelevance of which was confirmed by its exclusion from the accompanying catalogue).¹

The best known precedent for the Futurist retrospectives of 2009 is probably the spectacular exhibition of 1986 at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice. Although it did not travel, the show was lavishly multi-faceted, covered the international ramifications of Futurism, and received widespread coverage outside Italy. As a British newspaper critic commented at the time: ‘The old view of the history of modern art, centred upon Paris, has finally been shattered’. On the other hand, the touring show of 2009, originally entitled Le Futurisme à Paris, brought Futurism back to an apparent dependence on the French capital: the work of Picasso and Braque stood alongside that of Boccioni, Carrà, and Severini. One commentator found this baffling (since Cubism seemed to have little to do with Futurism), but the French source of Futurist visual experimentation was nevertheless set out for all visitors to see. Whereas New York was treated to an extensive interdisciplinary exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in 2014, in the UK at least two other public factors corroborated the lack-lustre image of Futurism: a light-hearted radio documentary (in 2009) and the bleak exhibition called The Vorticists at Tate Britain (in 2011) that seemed to endorse the artistic impoverishment of the Italian movement by revealing the limitations of its English and North-American heirs.²

For any student of Futurism, the ironies of these representations are obvious. Marinetti, in his first manifesto, had declared the wish to ‘destroy museums’ which he considered ‘graveyards’.³ And one hundred years later, for many outside Italy, museums had once again buried the movement.

The Founding of Anti-Futurism

Resonances from the original context of Futurism go further than an echo of the first manifesto of the movement. For what was being played out in much of the presentation and reception of Italian Futurism one hundred years later was the same two-pronged attack that took place at its inception: those critical of Futurism either dismissed it as ridiculous or attributed any interest it had to innovations (such as Cubism) it had borrowed, rather than invented. Marinetti’s founding manifesto had been published in Italy weeks before, but it was its appearance on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909 that launched a long tradition of persistent Parisian condescension or, worse still, disdain. Marinetti’s initial eulogy of ‘the beauty of speed’ incarnated in the racing car, his urge to celebrate industrial modernity, his mockery of masterpieces, and his glorification of war were met in the press by negative reactions: the epithet ‘barbaric’ became the usual line for rejecting the Futurists. Outside the capital, the Toulouse journal Poésie published, in the summer of 1909, a compilation of writers opposing the manifesto. Among them, the Nobel-Prize-winning poet Frédéric Mistral argued that Marinetti should have called his manifesto, not Futurism, but ‘vandalism’.⁴

By the time Futurist paintings reached Paris, in 1912, the French stance turned from the dismissive to the defamatory. Doubtless provoked by an arrogant catalogue essay in which Futurist artists claimed they were ‘at the head of the European movement in painting’, and accused their French colleagues of ‘a sort of masked academism’ [sic], counter-indictments proliferated. Robert Delaunay thought the foreigners were a fraud with no originality. Most prominent in the French offensive was Guillaume Apollinaire who, in a series of articles in 1912, relocated the Futurists as firmly under the influence of and inferior to more established non-Italian names: the influence of Picasso on Boccioni was ‘undeniable’; Carrà had obviously seen many of Rouault’s paintings; Severini was heavily indebted to Renoir, Van Dongen, and Neo-Impressionists such as Signac. Hence, according to Apollinaire, Futurism was an ‘Italian imitation’ of Fauvism and Cubism, and thus seemed ‘a bit silly in Paris’. The accusations of plagiarism stuck: in R. H. Wilenski’s much-reprinted English account of modern art, Futurism made only a brief appearance as a ‘perversion’ of Cubism.⁵

It would be easy to label certain Futurist artistic techniques as derivative because of the proximity to French culture of artists such as Severini and Soffici and the visit of Futurists to Paris in 1911. In the realm of collage, for example, Futurist subservience appeared blatant. But, in their desire to infuse printed newspaper or advertisement letters with life, the Futurists were palpably distant from Cubism. Boccioni later expanded the comments of the 1912 catalogue by emphasizing the difference between the two movements: while Cubists were concerned with ‘analytical enumeration’, Futurists were interested in ‘life itself intuited in its transformations within the object’. In complete contrast to the forward-looking Italians, Boccioni argued (with some reason) that the Cubists and their critics ‘always appeal to the French tradition’.⁶

The anti-Futurist onslaught was not limited to France. Cartoons in the international press continued to mock Futurist artists. The renowned German linguist and scholar of Romance literature, Karl Vossler, was appalled by the ‘pathetic stupidity’ of the movement. Edward Gordon Craig relegated Marinetti to little more than a businessman with money to waste on futile activities. (On the subject of Marinetti’s wealth he was not far off the mark.) Futurism had, according to Craig, ‘no connection with Art’. He thought that the Futurist attempt to paint speed was misplaced because this was better suited to film or the theatre. Besides, Leonardo and the old masters were ‘true Futurists’ because they were ‘obedient to nature’ and their art would live on. Craig also published a translation of Marinetti’s manifesto The Variety Theatre, but subverted it by derogatory footnotes. The derision went several steps further in an Italian pamphlet with jokey articles and images (including a cover parodying Boccioni’s simultanist drawings) and a list of clearly parodic pseudonyms: Soffici, for instance, became ‘Boffici’ (with echoes of the words for ‘spongy’ and ‘buffoon’) and Marinetti was represented by ‘Marisudici’ (with hints of the words for ‘sweat’ and ‘filthy’). With such hostility in the air it was no revelation when André Salmon could proclaim, by 1913, ‘Futurism is dead, and that is certainly worth celebrating’.⁷

The context of Salmon’s confident words, however, managed to belie the firmness of the nail in the coffin, for they introduced the publication of Apollinaire’s L’Antitradition futuriste, a manifesto that is more ambivalent than either Salmon’s introduction or Apollinaire’s previous criticism would lead one to expect. In a distinctly Futurist rhetoric used to divide adherents from adversaries, ‘SHIT’ was granted to, among others, ‘critics’, ‘teachers’, Dante, and Shakespeare, while [a] ‘ROSE’ was extended to a long list among whom were Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, Marinetti, many Futurist artists, Salmon, and Apollinaire himself.⁸ In a sense, the indeterminate nature of Apollinaire’s text, at once parodic and dependent, provides a hint as to the unease beneath artistic and literary attitudes towards Futurism. A great many famous names expressed their excitement about the movement, whereas others – and sometimes the same ones in another context – were keen to flog a corpse supposedly long deceased.

With artists such as Duchamp and his Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) there is a genuine sense of coincidence with Futurist experiment (supported by his aesthetic admiration for machine-produced contraptions), although Duchamp would later try and praise Boccioni as an ‘important artist’ more than a Futurist. Arthur Cravan stated (in 1914) that ‘almost all painting to come’ would derive from Futurism, although the compliment became back-handed since he added that the movement had no artist of genius: he called ‘Cara’ (as he spelt ‘Carrà’) and Boccioni ‘nonentities’. Kandinsky, Klee, and several German Expressionists were certain about the importance of the movement from early on and Futurist technique is visible in paintings by August Macke and Franz Marc. The poet Gottfried Benn would later remember the publication of the first Futurist manifesto in 1909 as the ‘foundational event of modern art in Europe’, but Alfred Döblin vociferously rejected Words-in-Freedom, Marinetti’s anti-syntactical programme for literary renewal (analysed in Chapter 3 of this book).⁹

Most symptomatic was the perceived – as well as actual – relationship between Picasso and Futurism. According to Gertrude Stein, the Futurists ‘thronged around’ the Spanish artist and Stein emphasized the sense of hierarchy by remembering how ‘everybody found the futurists [sic] very dull’. (She even wrote a poem the title of which, ‘Marry Nettie’, mocked the founder.) In his defence of Cubism in 1923, Picasso denied the very terms with which Futurism functioned: he condemned ‘the spirit of research’ in art, distanced art from its subject, and argued, by appealing to ‘great painters who lived in other times’ that ‘there is no past or future in art’. Over seventy years later, John Richardson, Picasso’s biographer, continued the anti-Futurist polemic by highly deprecatory comments about the Futurists’ derivative (but inadequate) techniques, their ‘gimmicky simulation of speed’, and their undoubted debt to the master. But Boccioni had again already worked out the disparity between Picasso and Futurism in his own vituperations of 1914: Picasso was concerned with ‘scientific measurement which destroys any dynamic heat’; Picasso’s analysis of the object was made ‘always at the expense of the object itself [...] thus killing it’. Whatever may have been the initial inspiration from the Spaniard, Boccioni made it clear that the Futurists were working in a different field. Besides, in reality, the traffic was obviously not all one way: even Richardson admits that Picasso borrowed (in 1917) some of Fortunato Depero’s techniques.¹⁰

While not becoming the focus for such controversy as Picasso, other artists signalled their distance from a movement evidently important enough to merit serious consideration. In 1917, Joan Miró thought Futurism was one of the modern –isms that had helped to emancipate the artist, but decided that, as a style, it was not applicable to all subjects. Fernand Léger, in 1913, established painting in France as the source of Futurism, and then conveniently forgot its intricately developed eulogies of industrial modernity, and the influence of Futurist painting on his work, when he spoke of ‘the aesthetic of the machine’ ten years later. In 1928 Salvador Dalí subscribed to the grudging view that Futurism was ‘circumstantially indispensable’.¹¹

Of course, by then, Mussolini’s regime, initiated in 1922, had managed to taint Futurist aesthetics by what seemed to many as a natural alliance between Fascism and Futurism. In an anti-Fascist account of modern Italy, published in the 1930s, George Seldes went as far as to claim that the Duce had ‘placed the future of painting in the hands of’ Marinetti. The same book quoted the founding manifesto of Futurism as evidence of the sort of bellicose, anti-cultural ideology of its leader. So now dictatorial politics had combined with the notions that Futurism was ridiculous or unoriginal. No wonder the sculptor Jacob Epstein was explaining, in 1931, that the word ‘futurist’ ‘still persists as a term of general abuse that includes all non-academic movements both before and after Marinetti’s time’. (Epstein’s implication was that Marinetti’s time had passed, and he gave no indication that Marinetti himself was alive and very active.)¹²

In some senses a victim of the apparent coherence imposed on it from within (by its visible leader) and from without (by its hostile critics), Futurism seemed to have petered into merely pejorative rhetoric.

The Anti-Futurism of Other Futurisms

Such a version of public rejections and the occasional Futurist defence (by Boccioni and others) disregards the presence of movements parallel to or overtly stimulated by Italian Futurism. In the most famous of these cases, however, the flourishing of a new sort of artistic and literary activity came with a stance that reinforced opposition to Marinetti and his companions. The development of Futurism in different countries became (as Andreas Kramer richly demonstrates in Chapter 1) an argument about space and inevitably went hand in hand with territorial claims.

The existence of literary innovation (above all in the poetry of Khlebnikov) before Marinetti had published his experimental proposals would put Russian Futurists on a firm footing to declare their independence and attack the Italians. Many of them stayed away from Moscow when Marinetti came to give readings in the city in 1914 and there were vocal protests against his visit. But the nature of the attacks – despite genuine differences – also repeated caricatures and misunderstandings. Most significant for the evolution of a theoretical conception of Italian Futurism was the attitude of Roman Jakobson who had done some interpreting for Marinetti in 1914. Jakobson wrote an article in 1919 reasserting the debt of Italian Futurist painting to Cubism and thus arguing that it introduced ‘hardly any new pictorial technique’. Yet, in another piece (on poetry) published in 1921, he referred in detail to Marinetti’s literary ideas, showed he realized only part of their potential, and contrasted them with what he considered greater Russian achievements. Jakobson’s relegation of Italian Futurism was increased when the same essay became known more widely in translations that excised several passages referring to Marinetti.¹³

The fact that the Vorticists started activity in England years after Marinetti’s first manifesto necessitated a more urgent rejection of his grouping. So, in the first issue of BLAST (of 1914), the journal that would serve as the Vorticist organ, the editor Wyndham Lewis declared:

AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism) [sic] bores us. [...]

The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.

A collective manifesto in the same issue mocked ‘Futuristic gush over machines, aeroplanes, etc’. Lewis remembered in his autobiography how he had personally insisted to Marinetti ‘I am not a futurist’ and told the Italian that he loathed anything that moved too quickly: ‘We’ve had machines here in England for a donkey’s years. They’re no novelty to us’.¹⁴

What Wyndham Lewis chose to omit retrospectively was that London had had its fair share of Futurist activity since Marinetti came to read his first manifesto in April 1910, that Futurist paintings had been exhibited there on three occasions, that Russolo’s intonarumori (noise intoners) had been heard in concerts, and that Lewis himself had, along with other British painters, helped to organize a dinner for Marinetti in November 1913. Besides, the whole tone and, to a certain extent, the typographical design of the manifestos in the first issue of BLAST resonate with Futurist posturing, with its urge to condemn certain styles and cultural phenomena and praise others for future development. Far from dismissing modern machines, the collective Vorticist manifesto was keen to laud them in