Stitching modernity: the textile work of Fortunato Depero

Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) was a Futurist artist who worked in a variety of artistic mediums, from painting and graphic design to furniture and textiles. His work in textiles, created and produced in close collaboration with his wife, Rosetta Amadori, can be considered the most important development in his artistic career, as it comprised a large portion of his creative production. Yet this work has been largely overlooked. Many reasons explain this oversight, including categorizing inconsistencies – for example, his textiles have been described as embroidery, needlework, tapestry, patchwork, and cloth mosaic – and the persistent relegation of textiles to the realm of crafts and domestic arts rather than art, which has meant that his work in textiles has not been a priority for scholars and conservators of Futurism. This paper places Depero's textiles within the context of early-twentieth-century modernist artistic activities, and demonstrates the centrality of his textile work to his artistic oeuvre.     

Multi/Interdisciplinary investigations into Italy and World War I: An introduction

This introductory article details some of the main points that characterized Italian politics and culture in the period leading up to World War I and during the war itself, and then surveys the contributions of each article in this series that further investigates the period. The authors note the febrile nature of Italian domestic politics before the war which challenged traditional liberal parliamentarism. This political challenge was accompanied by a challenge to traditional art, and no movement epitomized these twin challenges to the old order like Futurism. Yet, though the Futurists and other nationalist groups glorified war and helped push Italy into the conflict, the country was hardly united. In fact, the hope was that war would finally unify the nation and erase the shame of Italy’s lackluster military performances since unification. As such, Italy’s cultural experience of the war was somewhat unique, in that the desire to prove its martial valor did not lead to the level of denunciations that other nations’ artists and writers produced – though there were some critics. Ialongo’s article traces the Futurist contribution to this pro-war ethic. Reich shows how the popularity of the Maciste alpino film during the war built upon this desire to unify the nation behind the war. And Palanti’s analysis of the post-war film Umanità notes that there were critics in Italy willing to challenge the cult of war.     

Rethinking the Bourbon kingdom

‘But he has nothing on!’ Throughout his career, the Italian sociologist Alessandro Pizzorno's sophisticated and penetrating sociological analysis has laid bare the shortcomings of the theoretical ‘new clothes’ woven by methodological individualism out of concepts of ‘individual’, ‘interest’, ‘decision’. As well as articulating Pizzorno's critique, this article aims to draw attention to the substantial and skilfully designed suit of theoretical clothes in which he has dressed the naked emperor. Pizzorno calls on sociologists to pay particular attention to processes of mutual recognition and attribution of identity: these processes, Pizzorno argues, give standards of value to the individuals involved, who are seen as ‘jealous of their reputation’ rather than as utility maximisers.     

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: the Futurist as Fascist, 1929–37

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the leader of Futurism, is no stranger to scholarly inquiry, and the centenary of 2009 only magnified this attention. However, what is often avoided, downplayed, or misunderstood are Marinetti's politics, and specifically his connection to the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini. In this article Ialongo investigates just what this connection was, and concludes that Marinetti was exactly what Mussolini called him, a ‘fervent Fascist’, and not simply an opportunistic fellow-traveller, as many have argued. By putting the Futurist initiatives of the 1930s, such as Aeropittura, Arte sacra futurista, Cucina futurista and Naturismo into a broad political perspective, Ialongo demonstrates that each of these initiatives were all geared towards furthering Marinetti and Mussolini's twin goals of strength at home as a springboard for imperial expansion abroad, culminating in the conquest of Ethiopia in 1936. Ialongo argues that the political goals of each of these initiatives were evidence of Marinetti's ‘working towards the Duce’ in the 1930s.     

Historiographical perspectives on 1940s Futurism

The 1940s are undoubtedly the years most neglected by scholars of Futurism. This essay examines critical responses to the period over the last fifty years, considering how the failure to engage with it reflects a more general – and surprisingly persistent – belief that to all intents and purposes Futurism ended in 1915. It also notes how this phase has been considered beyond redemption, politically speaking, as a result of the movement's enduring support for Fascism in its most brutal and destructive years, and artistically substandard as a consequence of its readiness to produce works of explicit propaganda in an easily accessible, figurative vocabulary. However, the essay argues that the 1940s cannot truly be said to reveal a rupture in the ideology and art of Futurism – which had long celebrated war and violence, and which resists purely formalist interpretation. Moreover, this concluding period might even be said to have witnessed a reawakening of the movement's original visionary spirit, engendered by the fragmentation and collapse of both Mussolini's regime and the industrialized Italy celebrated by Futurist artists and poets for more than thirty years.     

‘The Futurist mountains’: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's experiences of mountain combat in the First World War

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists in the autumn of 1915, when he fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary. This article examines his experience of mountain combat and how he communicated aspects of it both to specialist, Futurist audiences and to the general public and soldiers, through newspaper articles, manifestos, ‘words-in-freedom’ drawings, speeches and essays written between 1915 and 1917. Marinetti's aim in all of these wartime writings was to gain maximum support for the Futurist movement. Thus, he adapted his views to suit his audience, at times highlighting the superiority of the Futurist volunteers over the Alpine soldiers and at others seeking to distance Futurism from middle-class intellectualism in order to appeal to the ordinary soldier. Marinetti interpreted the war's relationship with the natural environment through an exclusively Futurist lens. He sought to ‘futurise’ the Alpine landscape in an effort to reconcile the urban and technophilic philosophy of his movement with the realities of combat in the isolated, rural and primitive mountains of Trentino.     

Making waves: Giacomo Balla and Emilio Pucci

Emilio Pucci emerged as an international fashion force in the 1960s with his bold and brilliant, streamlined outfits for the active woman. Delving into Pucci's first career as a bomber pilot and Fascist aviation hero, this article demonstrates his unacknowledged debt to the fashion theories and textile designs of the Futurist Giacomo Balla. Pucci was linked to Futurist aeropittura of the 1930s by the common culture of Fascism, aviation, and the cult of speed. Though Futurism was tainted by its affiliation with Fascism, in the post-war years, the works of Balla and others were kept in the public eye through exhibitions and their influence on a younger generation of modernist artists. In the same period, Pucci began to produce his vibrant eye-popping textile designs, which elaborated the proto-psychedelic imagery of wave-like swells, spinning vortexes, and exuberant floral arabesques developed by Balla between the World Wars.     

Toward Abstraction Ranking European Painters of the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract. Paris was the unrivaled capital of modern art in the nineteenth century, but during the early twentieth century major innovations began to be made elsewhere in Europe. The author examined the careers of the artists who led such movements as Italian Futurism, German Expressionism, Holland's De Stijl, and Russia's Suprematism. Quantitative analysis revealed the implications of the conceptual basis of the art of Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio de Chirico, Kazimir Malevich, and Edvard Munch, and of the experimental origin of the innovations of Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Piet Mondrian. The finding that the invention of abstract art was made nearly simultaneously by the conceptual Malevich and the experimental Kandinsky and Mondrian particularly indicates the importance of both deductive and inductive approaches in the history of modern art.     

Novecento: Arte e storia in Italia and Italie 1880–1910: Arte alla prova della modernitÀ

The Novecento show offered viewers a sweeping summary of both the art and the historical events of twentieth-century Italy. The Italie exhibition, more tightly focused on thirty years of Italian art, presented a set of overlapping and competing themes that were important to modernism in Italy.     

Avant-garde modernism and Italian Fascism: cultural politics in the era of Mussolini

The article explores the efforts of Marinetti's futurists, Sarfatti's Novecento movement, and the Tuscan circle that propounded strapaese to shape a cultural basis for Italian Fascism. The first two movements sought to become an official art for Fascism, while the third sought to produce a culture that would remain true to Fascism's origins in 1919, but all were in different ways 'modernist' movements and they are therefore contextualized both in terms of the challenge presented by Fascism and those faced by their modernist counterparts elsewhere in Europe. It is argued that the three movements enjoyed some success in the 1920s but were effectively shut down by the rise of the intransigent Right in the 1930s. Yet it is also argued that they needed the regime because they were too weak by themselves to assert the principle of artistic autonomy in the face of an internationally ascendant commodity culture. L'articolo esplora i tentativi dei futuristi facenti capo a Marinetti, del movimento Novecento di Sarfatti, così come del circolo toscano detto di Strapaese, nel costruire e definire le basi culturali del fascismo italiano. I primi due movimenti cercarono di costituire un'arte ufficiale del fascismo, mentre la terza si protese a far nascere una cultura che rimanesse legata alle origini del movimento fascista del 1919; ma tutti erano, in maniera diversa, movimenti 'modernisti' e sono qui tra l'altro posti sia nel contesto del cambiamento, nel clima politico e culturale, rappresentato dal fascismo che in quello degli altri movimenti modernisti europei. Viene messo in evidenza che i tre movimenti ottennero un discreto successo negli anni venti, ma furono censurati da una destra intransigente che emergeva negli anni trenta. Tuttavia, è possibile affermare che tutti e tre i movimenti avevano bisogno del Regime perché troppo deboli ed incapaci di consolidare un principio di autonomia artistica nei confronti di una emergente cultura consumista nel contesto internazionale.