An Italian Art Deco? The New York Review of Books on Guggenheim's Futurism Show

Jonathan Galassi writes for The New York Review of Books about the current exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, which runs through September. Galassi focuses in on "young poet" F.T. Marinetti, the movement's "guru and pope," whose glorification of speed and aggressive action was harnessed to aesthetics. And, of course, to the literary among them:

It’s hard to overstate the influence of early Futurism on modernist movements everywhere. The Russian literary avant-garde appropriated its name and its insolence (Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, and company called their own manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”). Apollinaire removed the punctuation from the proofs of Alcools (1913) in response to Marinetti’s attacks on traditional typography, and in Britain Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticism was partly conceived in opposition to Futurism. His collaborator Ezra Pound called Marinetti a “corpse,” though he later admitted that “the movement that I, Eliot, Joyce and others began in London would not have existed without Futurism.”

Italian Futurism, too, was largely a literary movement, in that among its most significant artifacts are the polemical magazines in which its endless battles were fought and the countless manifestos that Marinetti and his disciples produced, on everything, including literature, politics, painting, sculpture, music, noise, architecture, theater, cinema, dance, lust (“lust is the act of creation, and is Creation itself”), Trieste, Florence, Rome, and Venice (“We rush to fill its stinking little canals, with the rubble of its crumbling, pockmarked palaces. We’ll set fire to the gondolas”). Particularly delightful are the parole in libertà, or words in freedom, concrete poems of words and letters made into images, after Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés”—though these are almost always confined to onomatopoetic representation and in fact not as fully syntax-free, or as truly experimental, as Dadaist wordplay, for example, would prove to be. This, in fact, is generally true of the Futurists’ experimentalism: it goes only so far.

The unfolding politics in relation to the movement are unavoidable. How the museum reflects the "Second Futurists":

The continuation of the movement after the war was called “Second Futurism.” It represents a disheartening falling off, though the exhibition cheerily proceeds as if nothing has been lost. Ivo Pannaggi’s Speeding Train (1922) feels almost like an advertisement for the Italian railway system when compared to Balla’s and Boccioni’s and Carrà’s menacing early work. Many of the best of Marinetti’s first team abandoned him. Carrà, inspired by Giotto to return to the human figure, and the melancholy Mario Sironi were drawn to Giorgio de Chirico’s myth-haunted Metaphysical school, which eventually flowed into Surrealism.

The Second Futurists became preoccupied with a debased version of the Wagnerian “total work of art,” and with what the sculptor George Segal has referred to as “the aesthetics that has to do with living in modern cities.” Futurist living rooms, tea sets, textiles, and clothes were displayed and marketed in case d’arte, or houses of art, and the exhibition abounds in examples of these attempts to create entire environments, meant to utterly isolate their consumers from contamination by passatista influences. In essence, Second Futurism devolves into commercially digestible modernism pure and simple, a kind of Italian Art Deco.

An interesting piece on the Futurist becoming. Read all of it "Speed in Life and Death" at NYRB.