Il Futurismo di Marinetti: velocità e rottura

The twentieth of February 1909 is a date that changes the history of European art.

On that day, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto in Le Figaro.

It was not a simple literary manifesto: it was a declaration of war against tradition.

Marinetti exalted speed, the machine, war as a hygiene of the world.

The past, museums, libraries had to be destroyed to make way for the new.

Listen to this phrase: a roaring automobile is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.

It was a calculated provocation, of course, but also a symptom of an era that was changing radically.

Futurism was not only a literary movement: it involved painting, sculpture, music and architecture.

Painters like Umberto Boccioni attempted to capture movement and speed on canvas.

The technique of simultaneism sought to represent multiple instants in time within the same picture.

There is however a dark side to Futurism that cannot be ignored.

The exaltation of violence and nationalism opened the way to the fascist drifts of the following years.

Many futurists enthusiastically joined Mussolini's regime.

This enormously complicates the judgement on the movement, even when we recognise its artistic originality.

And yet without Futurism we would not have Dadaism, nor Surrealism as we know them.

Marinetti's merit was to have shattered once and for all the blind reverence toward the past.

Whether we admire or condemn it, Futurism remains one of the most radical movements of the twentieth century.

Its question is still open: where does artistic provocation end and where does ideology begin?