On
February 20, 1909, the first page of Paris magazine “Le Figaro” reported
a curious manifesto, Le futurisme, that its editors defined as very audacious.
It was the official birth certificate of a great both Italian and European
avant-garde movement that involved all the fields of human expression,
from literature to figurative arts, from cinema to fashion, from music
to cuisine and even eroticism. Its author was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti,
the Italian writer and poet who had been looking for a new bold and rebel
literary formula that could suit that period. In the first place, with
an extremely symbolist and biographical way of writing, he illustrated
the mythical foundation of the movement: one rowdy night a group of poets
raced madly off with a car. The race ended with Marinetti's plunge into
the muddy water of a workshop. That bath was strengthening and purifying
and the car became a symbol of vitality. The second part of the manifesto,
on the other hand, included the programmatic lines of the movement inspired
by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bergson's philosophy: love for danger, boldness,
fearlessness and rebellion in poetry, aggressiveness in literature against
the drowsiness of the past, speed and fight as the new ideals of beauty.
Exaltation against the traditionalism of the present, of the future, and
of modern cities with factories and workers, arsenals and building sites,
stations and workshops, locomotives and planes. Scorn of women and destruction
of museums, libraries, and academies of all kinds. Glorification of patriotism
and of war, the “world's sole hygiene”.
We have briefly summed up
Marinetti's manifesto because Futurism's long history (whose “leading themes”
are currently being hosted in an exhibition in the halls of Genoa's Palazzo
Ducale and that will move to Milan's Fondazione Mazzotta in the next few
months) actually resides in Marinetti's emphatic and combative provocation,
in his fight “to the last” against the old schemes which represented an
explosive and overwhelming novelty that could deeply shake a still extremely
provincial artistic and cultural environment for Giolitti's Italy in the
early twentieth century.
Painting, in particular,
still lingering on floral and symbolist stylistic features or on social
and political themes of verist inspiration, was subjected to a real jolt,
a surge of modernity that immediately adjusted it to Europe's most vital
currents. The “universal dynamism” was a key concept for the Futurist painting:
in a world where everything was moving and running fast, it was necessary
to render the movement of the figures “that multiply, distort and follow
one another in space. So a running horse does not have four legs, but twenty”.
It was not just a question of imitating movement, but to transfigure it
in an interpenetration system that demolished the traditional idea of space.
Another key point was the idea of colour that had to set free from all
the prejudices of the past. “The human face, - maintained the Futurists,
- is yellow, is red, is green, is blue, is violet”. In the great themes
that make up the exhibition - such as the metropolis, speed, simultaneity,
the individual, mood, war, spirituality, home - the Futurist poetics, that
several publications and exhibitions held in the past few years allowed
us to know, now emerges with an almost new character, confirming that great
art, both sincere and inspired, has always something topical to tell us. |
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