Page 43 - Studio International - April 1973

Tullio Crali Diving on the City 1938

a series of real demands made by the new epoch:
the need to be modern, and to gather the truth
of life transformed by technology, the necessity
to discover an imagery and a language
appropriate to the age of industrial
transformation. Its fundamental vice was always
the idealizing and aestheticizing concern with
the machine. In the last third of the nineteenth
century, positivism had become the panacea for
all the ills manifested in the social body of
Europe. The conquest of happiness by
technical means had appeared the most efficient
slogan within which to resolve the conflicts
that convulsed society. The philosophy of
progress lost in this way its energetic and
realistic content that Hobbes and Locke,
Helvetius and d'Holbach had given it, a content
that, though not free of illusions, was none
the less a critical force within the bourgeois
revolutionary historical movement.
Ultimately, the optimism of Marinetti,
idealistically and aesthetically, kept the
movement as a whole on a superficial plane, and,
what was worse, negative in the face of the most
burning issues of the time, mortgaged to
reaction, incapable of taking the vital step from a
rebellious state of mind to authentic
revolutionary action. The complex of
ambiguities, deceptions and self-deceptions
that characterized Futurism has not totally
celebratory restoration in the arts. Marinetti, substance. disappeared from the Italian cultural situation.
it is true, continued vociferously writing The parabola of Marinetti could not have To study the provenance and motivation of
`parole in libertà' (words in freedom) and been other than it was, right up to his final act, this complex is, then, an operation quite other
proclamations, but his actions, in reality, no adherence to the Republic of Salo (Mussolini's than untimely. q
longer achieved any serious impact. puppet regime set up after his rescue by the
The regime, supreme insult, began to regard Germans from Allied hands, participation in [Translated by Toni del Renzio]
Futurism, to which it owed so much, as a kind which sets apart the real die-hard bonehead 1F. T. Marinetti Democrazia futurista — Dinamismo
of reliquary, rendered conventional reverence fascists. Tr.) and the tenor of his last text, politico, 1919 (Futurist Democracy — Political
without any serious obligation. Quarto d'ora di poesia della X Mas9 (The X Dynamism), republished in Teoria ed invenzione
The contradictions in Futurism were too Mas's quarter of an hour of poetry. The X Mas futurista (Futurist Theory and Invention), edited by
L. De Maria, Mondadori, Milan 1968.
many for it to continue to represent fascism. was the most vicious of the Black Brigades, the 'Cf. H. Arvon L'Anarchisme, Presses universitaires de
How was it to reconcile, say, the terrorists of the last hour of fascism, commanded France, Paris 1951. George Woodcock Anarchism,
cosmopolitanism of its origins with the autarchy by Prince Borghese, now wanted for his part in a London 1962. C. Salinari Miti e coscienza del
decadentismo italiano, Feltrinelli, Milan 196o.
that even in cultural affairs was progressively plot against the Italian State. Tr.). In the Italian C. Varese Pascoli politico, Tasso e altri saggi,
becoming the general tendency of the regime ? Social Republic (Mussolini's desperate attempt Feltrinelli, Milan 1962.
Yet Marinetti made the greatest efforts to keep to force life into a branch, dry and dead since 'A letter of Boccioni from Berlin, 13 April 1912, to
Barbantini, speaks of the work with this title.
up with the new developments. He sang of the 1919), Marinetti, along with many other old G. Perocco Primi espositori di Ca' Pesaro, Venice
war in Abyssinia, of autarchy, edited, along with militants of the early days, all of them discarded 1958.
Fillia, the Manifesto of futurist sacred art (Only along the way, saw the return of the old 4The Manifesto of the futurist party was first
published in L'Italia futurista, r r February 1918, and
the futurist aeropainters can sing on canvas the phraseology, so dear to his youth, and revelled afterwards on several occasions in Roma futurista,
multiform and swift life of angels and saints), in the talk against the monarchy and the Vatican included in De Maria op. cit.
became a member of the Italian Royal Academy. and in his old theses of 'socialization'. In this 'F. T. Marinetti Futurismo e Fascismo, in De Maria
op. cit.
In such a way, while the avant-garde movements belief he died before the final collapse, 'F. T. Marinetti Al di la del comunismo, 192o, in
elsewhere developed in opposition, in Italy 2 December 1944, at Bellagio, the ultimate De Maria op. cit.
Futurism, except for those very few dissenting refuge of the fascist hierarchy on its flight to the 'Ibid.
'Dissent from or indifference to fascism was
artists8, ended a prisoner of a reactionary logic north. manifested by Vinicio Paladini who painted a work,
its own rebellious activism had helped It is obvious that Futurism cannot be Proletario della terza internazionale (Proletariat of the
to set in motion. It was now clear to a new restricted to these political actions and to Third International) in 1922; Ruggero Vasari who
was a friend of Herwart Walden, editor of Der Sturm,
generation that one cannot confound subversion `Marinettism', but it is nonetheless indispensable and wrote Flugmalerei — Moderne Kunst und Reaktion
with revolutionary action, nor plebeianism with to disentangle the skein of his equivocations and (Aeropainters — Modern art and reaction); also Ivo
Pannaggi, Libero Altomare and later Mino Rosso.
the popular spirit, nor disdain for the mediocre to show the reactionary connections of the See M. Verdone II Futurismo, Ubaldini Editore,
aesthetic tastes of the liberal bourgeoisie with an remotest suppositions, of those most apparently Rome 196o where it is related how Vasari was under
anticapitalist conviction, nor yet that it is innocent and of those merely extravagant It is police surveillance on his return to Italy from
Germany.
sufficient to adopt a series of new procedures to not to be excluded that Futurism contained in 'The poem was published by the Corriere della Sera
make, sic et simpliciter, an art that is new in its the tangle of its contradictions the expression of the day after his death. Now in De Maria op. cit.
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