Handbook of International Futurism

Handbook of
International
Futurism
Edited by
Günter Berghaus
ISBN 978-3-11-027347-2
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-027356-4
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-039099-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018953241

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
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Contents
Preface XI

Part I: General Aspects of Futurism

Günter Berghaus
1 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 3

Aleš Erjavec
2 The Politics of Futurism 28

3 Women Futurists 47
Lucia Re
Italian Women Artists and Writers 48
Charlotte Douglas
Russian Women Futurists 60

Part II: Futurism in Different Artistic Media

Michelangelo Sabatino
4 Architecture 69

Matteo Fochessati
5 Ceramics 88

Wanda Strauven
6 Cinema 101

Cecilia Novero
7 Cuisine 116

Patrizia Veroli
8 Dance 129

9 Fashion Design 143

Franca Zoccoli
Italian Fashion Design 144
Ekaterina Lazareva
Russian Fashion Design 154
VI Contents

Stephen Bury
10 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books 162

Anna Maria Ruta

11 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 175

Daniele Lombardi
12 Music 193

Marta Braun
13 Photography 215

Margaret Fisher
14 Radio and Sound Art 231

15 Theatre 246
Domenico Pietropaolo
Italian Theatre 247
Edward Braun
Russian Theatre 262

Jed Rasula
16 Visual Poetry 282

Part III: Futurist Traditions in Different Countries

Rosa Sarabia
17 Argentina 299

Krikor Beledian
18 Armenia 314

Bart Van den Bossche

19 Belgium 325

João Cezar de Castro Rocha

20 Brazil 336

Giuseppe Dell’ Agata

21 Bulgaria 352
 Contents VII

Greg Dawes
22 Chile 365

Man Hu
23 China 373

Alena Pomajzlová
24 The Czech Lands 380

Torben Jelsbak, Per Stounbjerg

25 Denmark 396

26 Egypt 408
Maria Elena Paniconi
Literature and Drama 408
Nadia Radwan
The Fine Arts 415

Tiit Hennoste
27 Estonia 423

Hannu K. Riikonen
28 Finland 437

Willard Bohn
29 France 449

Bela Tsipuria
30 Georgia 469

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach
31 Germany 484

Jonathan Black
32 Great Britain 506

Chris Michaelides
33 Greece 527

András Kappanyos
34 Hungary 538
VIII Contents

Selena Daly
35 Ireland 555

Benedikt Hjartarson
36 Iceland 565

37 Italy 576
Luca Somigli
Futurist Literature in Italy 578
Giorgio Di Genova
Italian Futurism in the Fine Arts 599

Pierantonio Zanotti
38 Japan 628

Kyoo Yun Cho

39 Korea 648

Aija Brasliņa
40 Latvia 656

Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė
41 Lithuania 669

Sergio Delgado Moya

42 Mexico 684

Ton van Kalmthout

43 The Netherlands 698

Carlos García
44 Peru 708

Przemysław Strożek
45 Poland 721

Nuno Júdice
46 Portugal 736

Irina Cărăbaş
47 Romania 753
 Contents IX

48 Russia 764
Henryk Baran
Futurist Literature in Russia 766
Christina Lodder
Russian Futurist Art 798

Andrew A. Anderson
49 Spain 824

Jesper Olsson
50 Sweden 842

Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj
51 Ukraine 853

Pablo Rocca
52 Uruguay 871

Ara H. Merjian and Nicola Lucchi

53 United States of America 883

Giovanna Montenegro
54 Venezuela 894

55 The Former Yugoslavia and Its Republics Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia 905

Irina Subotić
Introduction 905

Janez Vrečko
Slovenia 906

Sanja Roić
Croatia 911

Bojan Jović
Serbia: Literature 917

Jasmina Čubrilo
Serbia: Fine and visual arts 920

Notes on Contributors 925

Name Index 933

Global spread of Futurism
Countries with a Futurist presence
covered in this volume.

Copyright © Andrea Ballatore (2018). Boundaries from Natural Earth (2017).

Preface

International Futurism

Between 1909 and 1925, Futurism became a catchphrase for a broadly felt desire for
cultural renewal. Although originating in Italy and proclaimed to the wider world in
France (on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909), its ethos and rebellious
drive could be found in many other countries, too. Its foundational manifesto had been
composed in autumn 1908 by the Italian poet, critic and editor Filippo Tommaso Mari-
netti (1876–1944) and was widely distributed on flysheets or in magazines and newspa-
pers, first in Italy and soon after in many other European countries. Within months, it
also reached Asia and the Americas. The author received so many critical responses and
letters from writers of international standing that, in August 1909, he filled 50 pages
of his magazine Poesia with them. In 1910, he even intended to publish a two-volume
press review to document the national and international impact of his new school.
The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism was supplemented soon after, in
anticipation of the March 1909 general elections in Italy, by the first Futurist Political
Manifesto. Thus, from the very beginning, Marinetti signalled that Futurism was to be
a force not only in the cultural but also in the social domain. Although Marinetti was,
in the first instance, a poet, he had graduated in law with with a thesis on The Crown in
Parliamentary Government. Throughout his early career, he entertained close contacts
with anarchist circles, observed the political trends and events of his time and never
restricted his interests to literature alone. He was a consummate musician and pub-
lished many reviews of opera performances; he was friends with painters and sculptors
and possessed a sound knowledge of the latest trends in the fine arts. It therefore does
not come as a surprise that in early 1910 he received in his house a group of painters
with whom he discussed how Futurism could be expanded from the literary domain
into adjacent fields. Thus, in quick succession, the Futurist aesthetic was outlined in
manifestos concerned with painting, sculpture, music, theatre and architecture.
The stream of manifestos published by F. T. Marinetti was not only geared towards
an Italian public but also addressed to audiences in other countries. In June 1910,
the poet issued a Futurist Proclamation to the Spaniards, followed in August 1911 by
an Address to the English on Futurism (originally given as a lecture on 2 April 1910 in
London at the Lyceum Club). However, Marinetti knew well that the European hub
for new artistic developments was undoubtedly Paris and, thus, his prime focus was
always directed towards France.
Marinetti was well prepared for launching Futurism’s international career
in France, as he had gone to a French school and had received a thoroughly
French-oriented education. After his studies, he commuted regularly between
France and Italy, ran the Milanese office of L’ Anthologie Revue and collaborated
with a number of literary journals in France. His early poems and plays were all

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-201
XII Preface

written in French and show that he was intimately familiar with the latest trends
on the French literary scene. A fellow anarchist, Félix Fénéon, served as a direc-
tor at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and was sympathetic to Marinetti’s iconoclastic
programme. He agreed to exhibit some 27 paintings in a show that ran from 5–24
February 1912 and turned out to be a major success, garnering reviews all over
Europe. It became the first leg of an international tour, which, in combination with
other paintings, travelled to London, Berlin, Brussels, Hamburg, Copenhagen, The
Hague, Amsterdam, Cologne, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Karlsruhe, Lviv, Dresden,
Prague, Leipzig, Halle and Hanover.
In Russia, reports on Futurism and translations of its first manifestos coincided
with a radical turn in painting and literature that bore many similarities to Italian
Futurism. Being conversant with the publicity methods employed by the Italian
Futurists, the writers and artists in Russia began to organize public debates and
other provocative actions that attracted a great deal of public attention. The critics
and journalists attached the name Futurizm to these activities, and by 1913 the term
‘Cubo-Futurism’ came to be employed as a designation for the works produced by
these groups. Marinetti was keen to meet these artists and visited, from 26 January
to 17 February 1914, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. His lectures were enthusiastically
received by the public and given a very favourable response in the press. However,
some local representatives of avant-garde proclivity disapproved of Marinetti’s
assumption that they formed a local branch of Italian Futurism. To them, the Italian
poet seemed to adopt the pose of a general who had come to inspect one of his remote
garrisons. Rather than submitting to a commander-in-chief from a foreign country,
they insisted on the inherently Russian character of their revolution and asserted
their independence from parallel developments in Western Europe.
This feature of Russian Futurism – being inspired and influenced by Italian Futur-
ism yet insisting on the original and sovereign status of their own works – can also
be observed in other countries where Marinetti’s manifestos were widely circulating.
When surveying the international responses to Futurism in the 1910s, one can detect
three principal tendencies. There was one camp that viewed Marinetti’s movement
in a positive light because it suggested novel ways of depicting the technical and
industrial achievements of the modern age (machinery, factories, transportation,
electricity, skyscrapers, etc.) as well as the new lifestyles shaped by an industrial-
ized civilization. Then there were the artists who criticized Marinetti not because
they disapproved of his ideas but because they had already developed similar ideas
themselves and wished to be seen as an independent force in the intellectual market-
place. There also existed a third camp that deemed Marinetti to be a notoriety-seeking
businessman who was primarily interested in scandal-mongering for the sake of gen-
erating publicity for his movement. They satirized the Futurists’ media hype, their
aggressive, ‘American-style’ public-relations campaigns and their hyperbolic press
releases. They saw in Marinetti’s merger of art and business an example of cultural
merchandising that was displacing authentic art.
 Preface XIII

Newspapers and magazines across Europe and other continents offered scattered
information about Futurist activities in Italy and attracted the attention of artists
and critics alike. Commentators picked up, in a rather superficial fashion, certain
elements of Futurism and ignored others, thereby distorting its aesthetic agenda.
Stripped of its theoretical basis, Futurism began a ‘second life’ that often bore little
relation to the aims and visions pursued by the movement’s founding fathers. None-
theless, Futurism acted as a stimulant and exerted a fertilizing influence in many
countries, especially when an artist or writer had gained access to manifestos, either
in the original or in translation. Thus, significant aspects of the Futurist aesthetic
filtered through and influenced artists and writers who did not always acknowledge
that they were adopting some of the movement’s tenets.
The first, ‘heroic’ phase of Italian Futurism came to an end with the First World
War. By that time, a number of original members had left the movement and others
lost their lives on and off the battlefields. After the war, Marinetti re-launched Futur-
ism as a political movement and forged an alliance with the Fasci di combattimento.
However, when the former Socialist Benito Mussolini verged towards the Right,
Marinetti reoriented his troops towards the newly founded Communist Party. In 1920,
he came to realize that neither political direction was on the same wavelength with
him, and he outlined a new artistic programme that is usually characterized by the
epithet secondo futurismo (second-wave Futurism).
Marinetti’s political disillusionment became even more acute after the March
on Rome (28–29 October 1922) and Mussolini’s appointment as prime minister
(30 October 1922). Marinetti, who had resigned from the Fasci di combattimento on
29 May 1920, had good reason to be worried when Mussolini started obliterating the
traces of his former alliance with the Futurists. A new brand of Fascism, which had
only the name in common with the movement Marinetti had supported in 1919, estab-
lished law and order in the political and artistic spheres. The National Institute of
Fascist Culture, created in 1925, was full of exactly those traditionalist forces against
which Futurism had rebelled since 1909. The new cultural apparatus was in large
part negatively disposed towards Futurism and made sure that in the battle for State
sponsorship the Futurists were given only limited support. Nonetheless, the Futurists
managed to exploit niches in the literary and art market.
In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, Marinetti adopted a highly contradictory
attitude towards the régime and could often be found to criticize in private what in
his public announcements he endorsed. He was experienced enough to know that
the survival of his movement depended on tacit concessions granted by Fascist
bureaucrats. He had to mince his words and conceal his opposition to the new
cultural establishment. Attentive observers could witness a ‘smooth operator’ acting
in accordance with what was expected of him in higher quarters. This allowed him
to attract more than one thousand artists to his movement, organized in local cells
strewn across the peninsula and often operating only in loose connection with the
headquarters in Rome. During this period, ‘Futurism’ acted as a broad term for a
XIV Preface

rather diverse collective, whose avant-garde leanings stood in marked contrast to the
retrograde culture that was fostered by the Fascist régime, and whose works offered a
rare breath of fresh air in an increasingly stifling climate. Marinetti, who had always
sought to link art and politics, decided now to draw a clear dividing line between the
two domains. Mussolini acknowledged Marinetti’s new strategy, but gave his backing
to a rival organization, Novecento, that advocated a modern classicism and embraced
the figurative art of the past.
Italian Futurism of the years 1923 to 1930 was characterized by a desire to gain
recognition from the new régime. But Marinetti’s attempt to present himself as a
major figure in the Italian cultural landscape and to portray Futurism as a movement
of international significance bore only limited fruit. Nonetheless, Futurism continued
to attract a lively following and could act as an umbrella for a large number of artists
from a wide range of media. Already in its first phase, Futurism had had a strongly
multidisciplinary orientation, but it was in its second phase, in the 1920s and early
1930s, that it translated its key aesthetic principles into fields as diverse as ceramics,
cuisine, dance, fashion, furniture, graphic design, interior design, mural décor, pho-
tography, radio and so on. This creative activity was given a theoretical foundation in
more than five hundred manifestos.

The concept of ‘Worldwide Futurism’

In Italy, as in many other countries, Futurist ideas were merged with doctrines taken
from other Modernist movements. Dynamic cross-influences occurred between
various -isms, and this reception process bore close resemblance to what in chemistry
is called ‘elective affinities’. In its aesthetic test tubes bubbled a seething mixture
of ingredients – Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dada, Constructivism and/
or Surrealism. When these came into contact with a given artist’s personal predis-
position, they interacted in an unpredictable manner and produced a diverse and
highly original range of works of art. Futurists never followed a monolithic set of pre-
scriptions but incorporated ideas and devices from many sources. When Futurism
became fused with indigenous traditions in other countries, a multifaceted and often
erratic assimilation occurred. This explains why, in the course of its thirty-five years
of existence, Futurism developed so many forms and facets in dozens of countries and
artistic disciplines.
Marinetti observed with great interest how critics and avant-garde artists
responded to the ideas emanating from Italy and devised a diagram that presented
Futurism as the fount and mother of most movements of the historical avant-garde.
This served as the basis for Le Futurisme mondial: Manifeste à Paris (Worldwide
Futurism: Manifesto Launched in Paris, 1924), in which he placed Futurism at the
centre of a genealogy of avant-garde art and co-opted a large number of artists under
 Preface XV

the rubrics “futuristi senza saperlo o futuristi dichiarati” (Futurists without knowing
or Futurists of conviction). In the 1920s, futurismo mondiale became a code word for
inter-avant-garde alliances and contacts. The new stationery of the Futurist head-
quarters summarized the key principles of what Marinetti considered to be the Ideo-
logia del futurismo e dei movimenti che ne derivano (Ideology of Futurism and of the
movements that derive from it) and listed in a diagram such “derivative movements”
as Orphism, Cubism, Dadaism, Simultaneism, Creationism, Purism, Zenitism, Surre-
alism, Rayism, Cubofuturism, Vorticism, Expressionism, Constructivism, Suprema-
tism, Imaginism and Ultraism. The same list can be found in Marinetti’s Quadro sin-
tetico del futurismo italiano e delle avanguardie (A Concise Picture of Italian Futurism
and the Avant-garde), published repeatedly in the years 1927 to 1934, and in modified
form until 1939. It is therefore not astonishing that the Futurist periodical La città
futurista (The Futurist City, 1928–29) carried as its subtitle Sintesi del futurismo mondi-
ale e di tutte le avanguardie (Synthesis of Worldwide Futurism and of All Avant-garde
Movements). More extended versions of this interpretative model circulated in the
form of essays, where the title was clearly signalling the programme behind it: L’in-
fluenza mondiale di Marinetti e del futurismo (Emilio Settimelli: The Global Influence
of Marinetti and Futurism, 1924), Il trionfo mondiale del futurismo italiano (Mino
Somenzi: The Worldwide Triumph of Italian Futurism, 1933), Les Influences du futur-
isme (Giuseppe Lo Duca: The Influences of Futurism, 1937) or F. T. Marinetti e l’influ-
enza mondiale del futurismo (Angelo Rognoni: F. T. Marinetti and the Global Influence
of Futurism, 1942).
The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University preserves a
manuscript that shows that Marinetti planned to set up a creative hub to be called Cen-
trale futurista italiana di creazione e di espansione allacciata ai centri culturali d’avan-
guardia di tutto il mondo (Italian Futurist centre of creation and expansion connected
to the cutting-edge cultural centres of the avant-garde around the world). There is no
doubt that the artists who marched under the banners of zenitismo, creazionismo,
simultaneismo, vorticismo, ultraismo, etc. were well informed about Futurism and
that their concepts at one point or another were boosted by a tributary influx of ideas
stemming from Italy. But this, of course, did not turn them into “Futurists without
knowing”, as Marinetti called them in his manifesto Le Futurisme mondal (Worldwide
Futurism, 1924). Despite the existence of mutual influences, it would be misleading
to speak about one artist imitating another. When we examine the multifaceted art
scene of the 1910s and 1920s, we have to question our common, linear concept of
‘influence’. The Futurist impulse coming from Marinetti and his Italian followers was
simultaneously repealed and preserved in the receiving cultural environments. The
imported conceptions were creatively transformed into a new aesthetic that operated
on a different level and was recognizable as something dissimilar to Marinetti’s brand
of Futurism, yet also intimately connected to it. It would be much better to consider
these developments as a dialectic process, for which Hegel employed the term ‘Aufhe-
bung’. In German, this word entails three meanings, all of which can be encountered
XVI Preface

in the reception processes we are concerned with in the countries covered in this
handbook: to cancel out, to preserve and to raise to a higher level.
Especially when examining Futurist influences outside Europe, it becomes
obvious that Marinetti’s heuristic model of centre/periphery, which is still widely
adhered to even nowadays, is rather misleading as it ignores the originality and
inventiveness of art and literature in other cultures and on other continents. Futurist
tendencies in Asia or Latin America may have been, in part, ‘influenced’ by Italian
and Russian Futurism, but they certainly did not simply ‘derive’ from them. The com-
plexity of this reception process was further complicated by the fact that reports on
Futurism were not always coming directly from Italy and Russia. The information that
was circulating around the globe was mediated (or filtered) by the art scenes in Paris,
Berlin, Madrid, Barcelona or Lisbon. All of these intermediate pathways strongly
shaped the attitudes towards Futurism that prevailed in European and non-Western
countries. Thus, it was not always Marinetti’s or Mayakovsky’s provocative pro-
nouncements that determined the cultural discourses on Futurism outside Italy and
Russia, but also the (often prejudiced) viewpoints of critics and journalists in other
European countries. Especially French and Spanish, but also German, assessments of
the Futurist revolt circulated widely in Eastern Europe, Asia and Latin America, where
they could produce reactions that were as forceful as the passions provoked by the
Futurist publications and exhibitions themselves.
Futurism formed part of a widespread revolt against academic art and classi-
cal models of literature. The call for renewal found much sympathy amongst Latin
American and Asian artists, as they were engaged in a similar battle against the canon-
ical discourses of colonial rule. One can therefore detect many parallels between
the European avant-garde and the innovative movements in non-Western countries.
Attempts to find alternatives to traditionalist art meant that artists adopted aspects
of Futurism and combined them with other, often indigenous, sources of inspiration.
The result was a hybrid form of art and literature that was indebted to Futurism and
other movements, yet also distinctly different from them. It was therefore only natural
that many heterogeneous forms of Futurism emerged in other European countries and
in far-away continents.

International Futurism in recent scholarship

This handbook documents the impact of Futurism on the international avant-garde.
In the course of the past decades, numerous scholars have directed their attention
to the ebb and flow of aesthetic concepts in the European and worldwide network of
the avant-garde. A handful of books are dedicated to the comparative study of Futur-
ism, but otherwise publications have tended to focus either on individual artists or
groups of artists, or on a small geographical unit. By bringing together in this volume
 Preface XVII

55 essays on 38 countries and 14 media, we are providing an overview of the mani-

fold configurations of Futurism and thus inviting more comparative studies of these
formations.
The major cities of Europe have long been considered birthplaces and homes
of twentieth-century avant-garde movements. In recent years, the drive within
Avant-garde Studies (and its sister field, Modernism Studies) to look beyond narrowly
defined (Western) European borders has been gathering pace, and transnational
approaches have increasingly been adopted. One need only think of such landmark
volumes as Laura Doyle and Laura Winkiel’s Geomodernisms: Race, Modernism,
Modernity (2005), James Harding and John Rouse’s Not the Other Avant-Garde: The
Transnational Foundations of Avant-Garde Performance (2006), Mark Wollaeger and
Matt Eatough’s Oxford Handbook of Global Modernisms (2012), Elaine O’Brien’s Modern
Art in Africa, Asia and Latin America: An Introduction to Global Modernisms (2012) or
Per Bäckström and Benedikt Hjartarson’s Decentring the Avant-Garde (2014). These
volumes, and many others, have focussed on aspects of avant-garde cultural produc-
tion in Africa, Latin and Central America, as well as parts of South Asia. Modernism
and the avant-garde have now been clearly established as global phenomena, slowly
pushing back the Eurocentrist attitudes that have long been a defining feature of the
discipline and are still dominating a great many books published in this field.
In the domain of the fine arts, the most significant demonstration that Futurism
was not an Italian or Russian preserve came in 1986, when Pontus Hultén mounted
the monumental and path-breaking exhibition Futurismo – Futurismi at the Palazzo
Grassi in Venice. Leading museums from many countries sent some two hundred
and fifty paintings and sculptures that documented the international linkages and
differences between many brands of Futurism across the world. The sweeping vista
was accompanied by a symposium, Futurismo, cultura e politica, later issued as a
book, which consolidated many of the insights that could be gained in the exhibi-
tion. The landmark venture in Venice was followed up by many projects focussing
on a smaller number of countries in Western or Eastern Europe, or on the rapports
between Europe and Asia, or Europe and Latin America. Thus, we are now much
better informed about the influence of Russian Futurism in Japan, Korea and China,
or in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Lithuania, and on the reception of Italian Futurism
in Brazil, Argentina and the USA. Artists who have long been seen primarily within
the traditions of their own country are nowadays understood to have operated in a
global network, in which Futurism played a particularly significant rôle.

Format and genesis of this handbook

This Handbook of International Futurism is situated within the above-mentioned
‘transnational turn’ in Avant-garde Studies and ties in with the International Yearbook
XVIII Preface

of Futurism Studies, which has published many essays on responses to Futurism

outside the Western hemisphere. The thirty-eight regionally focussed chapters in
this volume are not neglecting the familiar and well-established locations in Western
Europe where Futurism made its mark (such as Great Britain, France and Germany),
but they also draw attention to countries and regions that have long resided at the
margins of the topics pursued in avant-garde scholarship. This handbook highlights
processes of cultural exchange across political, geographic and linguistic borders.
One key area is Central and Eastern Europe. For a long time, the countries in this
region have been considered under the umbrella of ‘Russian Futurism’. However, in
this publication the peculiarities and singular features of Futurism in nations such as
Bulgaria, Georgia and Ukraine are explored on their own merits. In total, the Hand-
book of International Futurism features twelve non-European countries, and particu-
lar attention is given to Latin America, perhaps unsurprisingly, due to Marinetti’s own
trips to Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in 1926 and 1936 and the continent’s cultural
proximity to Italy, caused by the large numbers of Italian immigrants it received in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Asia is represented by entries on Japan, China
and Korea. An entry on Egypt documents the repercussions Futurism elicited in the
Middle East.
The idea of organizing a handbook on international Futurism goes back to a con-
ference on “Futurism in an International and Interdisciplinary Perspective”, held
in May 1995 at the Institute of Romance Studies in London. Out of this symposium
evolved a volume of twenty-five essays, International Futurism in Arts and Literature,
published by De Gruyter in 2000. Some ten years later, following the Centenary of
Futurism in 2009, the same publishing house agreed to institute a forum of discus-
sion for a worldwide community of Futurism scholars in the form of an International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies. This periodical investigates the relations between
Italian Futurism and other Futurisms worldwide, the artistic movements inspired by
Futurism and a broad range of artists operating in the international sphere with close
contacts to Italian or Russian Futurism. So far, it has fulfilled its function of fostering
intellectual cooperation between Futurism scholars across countries and academic
disciplines. The eight volumes that have been issued since 2011 offer 4,500 pages of
detailed examinations of the impact of Futurism in some thirty countries and on three
continents. By using English as its medium of communication, the yearbook offers an
international readership access to current research published in over fifty languages
in disciplines as diverse as literary studies, fine arts, design and architecture, Italian
Studies, Hispanic Studies, Slavonic Studies, theatre history, music history, and so on.
More than one hundred contributions to the International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies have demonstrated that Futurism was never a coherent national style but an
artistic impulse that radiated from one culture to another and, in the process, gave
rise to extraordinarily complex and often contradictory forms of cross-fertilization.
The essays in the Yearbook identify these elements and discuss the multifaceted influ-
ences of Futurism; they have thus contributed to a better understanding of Futurism
 Preface XIX

in its manifold guises. However, these publications serve the primary purpose of pre-
senting original research and do not have the aim of summarizing the state of schol-
arship in a given country or artistic medium. Even thematic volumes, like the ones on
East-Central Europe (2011), the Iberian Peninsula (2013) or Latin America (2017), were
primarily designed to inform on current debates and to stimulate further investiga-
tions. It therefore became obvious at an early stage that a general and comprehensive
guide might be required for a wider academic audience, which would offer an over-
view of the main developments in the countries and disciplines in which Futurism
had a marked influence.
In 2011, the Editorial Director for Language, Literature and Culture at De Gruyter
suggested at a meeting in Berlin that we should contemplate a handbook that would
summarize and complement the information communicated via the International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies and the earlier volume, International Futurism in Arts
and Literature. Some two years later, more than fifty authors had agreed to contribute
to the handbook. But as is so often the case with extraordinarily complex projects
operating with contributors from many countries and cultures, the editing process
was far from easy and smooth. It was therefore a great relief when the last essays were
finally received and by spring 2017, all fifty-five entries had undergone final edits.

Aims and scope of this handbook

This reference work is geared towards Futurism scholars with varying levels of
experience and interests and is designed to offer a synthesis of the state of schol-
arship regarding the international radiation of Futurism in some fourteen artistic
disciplines and thirty-eight countries. It acknowledges the great achievements in
the visual and literary arts of Italy and Russia, yet at the same time treats Futurism
as an international, multidisciplinary phenomenon that left a lasting mark on the
twentieth-century avant-garde. It offers guidance to readers relatively unfamiliar with
the reactions to Futurism in a given country or discipline and unlikely to speak many
languages beside English. The fifty-five entries discuss the œuvre of artists who were
actively involved in the movement and others who absorbed Futurist ideas and stylis-
tic devices during a brief, yet important phase in their career. They are presented here
in the context of their national traditions, international connections and the media
in which they were predominantly active. However, this handbook is not a biograph-
ical dictionary; rather, it offers an encyclopaedic overview of countries and media in
which the movement exercised a particularly noteworthy influence.
Individual entries vary in length and are syntheses, not textbook chapters. The
limited length of each contribution means that authors can only highlight the salient
points of the ways in which Futurism was responded to, absorbed and transformed
in a given country or medium. Information is presented in a concise manner and only
XX Preface

highlights the Futurist features in the works of significant artists and writers. Every
contributor was encouraged to assemble factual evidence and to communicate the
material in a manner that can be understood by a diverse readership from many coun-
tries and disciplines. All entries, of course, reflect the authors’ scholarly viewpoints
and professional judgment, but they avoid bias and subjective opinion. Controver-
sial topics that have a significant corpus of scholarly literature attached to them are
marked as such and are presented in a manner that balances important arguments
put forward on both sides of the fence.
Entries include quotes from primary or secondary literature, with references
to the sources given in parentheses. Long quotations have been avoided, and well-
known facts are not necessarily supported by a detailed citation. As a handbook, this
volume attempts to lay out facts and widely accepted views on the topic under discus-
sion and does not seek to intervene in topical scholarly debates. Although the Table of
Contents suggests a clear division between countries and media, no attempt has been
made to eliminate overlap altogether. Thus, for example, Russian Futurist theatre is
covered in both the entries on Russia and on theatre. While the first has more of a his-
toriographical orientation, the second focusses on the medium and the ways in which
it was employed by various artists. Cross-references are inserted when other entries
in the volume offer complementary information. Each essay is followed by a bibliog-
raphy, which not only lists all quoted sources but also provides a guide to other and
more detailed studies. As Futurism was highly influential in some cultures and media
and less important in others, and since research into Futurism tends to be vigorous
in some countries and disciplines and rather neglected in others, it is inevitable that
these reading lists vary in length and scope.
The list of countries and artistic media featured in this volume is far from exhaus-
tive. It is to be hoped that the entries in this handbook, and future contributions to
the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, will encourage scholars to direct their
attention to regions not covered in this publication and to investigate new links and
lines of interaction that will further enrich our knowledge of Futurism’s global, inter-
disciplinary reach.
Günter Berghaus and Selena Daly
Part I: General Aspects of Futurism
Günter Berghaus
1 The Historiography of Italian Futurism
Introduction: The Futurist revival
The rebirth of research into Italian Futurism1 set in at a time when Western countries
emerged from the post-war reconstruction period. Both in the arts and in society at
large, a rather sterile and stifling atmosphere had gained ground, causing a number of
counter-cultural movements, such as Beat music, Pop Art, Happening and Fluxus, to
appear on the scene. The situation in the late 1950s and early 1960s was propitious for
a rediscovery of the youthful energy and radical drive that had characterized Futur-
ism in its first, ‘heroic’ phase. In Italy, of course, a large number of former Futurists
still producing works based on the aesthetics of prewar Italy and were thus in a posi-
tion to impel younger artists and scholars to take an interest in Marinetti’s movement.
But also abroad – in the USA, Germany, France and Switzerland – a revived interest in
prewar Futurism could be observed. Allen Ginsberg and his fellow poets declared that
in the Beat Generation, “the prophecies of Marinetti are coming true; some of them,
the wilder, more poetic ones” (interview in a documentary film of 1967 by Antonello
Branca, What’s Happening?). Although the Happening and Fluxus movement took
inspiration primarily from Dada, their attempt to overcome the artistic stagnation of
the previous decade was also based on the Futurist conception of fusing art and life.
In the immediate post-war years, when the artistic decline in Mussolini’s Italy was
still firmly fixed in everybody’s mind, there was a tendency to equate Futurism with
Fascism. However, amongst the critics, writers and painters who had experienced the
first phase of the movement, there was little doubt that Marinetti had played a nec-
essary and useful rôle in the process of lifting Italy from the past into the twentieth
century. Eugenio Montale judged in a retrospective essay in the Corriere della sera of
11 April 1961 that Futurism may have been a passing phenomenon but one that left
traces in the works of Italy’s best authors, most of which would not have been written
if Marinetti’s movement had not existed (Montale: “Buzzi-Cangiullo-Onofri”).
The first studies of Futurism published after the Second World War emphasized
the movement’s ‘heroic’ phase, which also featured prominently in the first exhibi-
tions of Futurist art after 1945. A great many visitors of such shows and readers of such
studies possessed a living memory of the artistically mediocre tail end of Futurism in
the 1930s and 1940s. It therefore came as a surprise to them to see the exuberant
quality of first-phase Futurism, either as a rediscovery and reminder, or as a first con-
frontation with an avant-garde movement, which after 1945 startled audiences just as

1 The substantial critical literature on Futurism published in the period from 1909 to 1944 remains
outside the scope of this entry.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-001
4 Günter Berghaus

much as it had done in the early 1910s. Piero Girace spoke for many when he wrote in
1948: “Amongst the most interesting aspects of this Quadriennale is the retrospective
of the Futurist painters. It has a tremendous importance and will serve as a yardstick
to assess the recent experiments in the fine arts” (quoted in Agnese and Sagramora:
I futuristi e le Quadriennali, 105). Piero Scarpa judged that much of contemporary art
could hardly stand comparison with the “first phase of Futurism, which many people
don’t know”, and Walter Guidi wrote with genuine excitement: “These dead artists
are more alive than living artists” (quoted in Agnese and Sagramora: I futuristi e le
Quadriennali, 105–106).
My research into the critical reception of Futurism in the post-war period identi-
fied some 650 publications from the period 1945–1959 (Berghaus: International Futur-
ism, 1945–2015: A Bibliographic Handbook), yet for reasons that I shall explain below,
to this day the myth of a post-war repression of Futurism has been kept alive. It was
even accepted by scholars who should have known better. Jean-Pierre Andréoli-de
Villers, for example, stated in an essay from 1974:

Until 1959, Futurism was virtually forgotten by art critics. The political reputation that Marinetti
had earned by joining Mussolini’s movement could not be quickly abolished by Italian critics.
Hence the very small number of articles that tried to do justice to the movement before 1959,
when a very important exhibition took place in Rome. This exhibition marks the turning point in
the critical history of the movement and in the revelation of his accomplishments to the public.
(Andréoli-de Villers: “Futurisme et futuristes à New-York”, 50)

It was therefore logical that in a book published the following year, Futurism
and the Arts: A Bibliography, 1959–73, Andréoli-de Villers included only mate-
rial printed after 1959. I do not wish to question his statement on the historical
significance of the 1959 exhibition Il futurismo at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome
(6 June – 6 September 1959), which had been set up to honour the cinquante-
nario of Futurism (it subsequently travelled to the Kunstverein Winterthur and
the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich; see Drudi Gambillo: Il futur-
ismo). However, anybody casting a glance at the two volumes of the Archivi del
futurismo, published for this occasion, will see that between 1945 and 1959 a sig-
nificant number of books and essays had indeed seen the light of day. This is also
confirmed by another important publication in 1959, Enrico Falqui’s Bibliografia
e iconografia del futurismo.
In the 1950s, attempts to overcome the tainted image of Futurism as Fascist
propaganda art made scholars and curators focus on the years 1909–1916 because
there was a widely felt consensus that Futurism had come to an end with the death of
Boccioni and Sant’Elia. Developments took a new turn when Maria Drudi Gambillo,
together with her husband Enrico Crispolti, edited the collection Documenti per la
poetica della seconda generazione futurista (1960) and organized, at the Studio d’Arte
Contemporanea “La Medusa” in Rome, the path-breaking exhibition, Dopo Boccioni:
Dipinti e documenti futuristi dal 1915 al 1919 (1961). In the same year, Palma Bucarelli
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 5

curated the retrospective, Enrico Prampolini, at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna
and offered visitors a glimpse into the ‘machine phase’ of Futurism (arte meccanica
futurista, c. 1922–early 1930s). Even more impressive was the Giacomo Balla exhibi-
tion held in 1963 at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin, jointly curated by
Enrico Crispolti and Maria Drudi Gambillo. This show underscored that it was not
only Balla’s abstract works – which formed a significant counterweight to Boccioni’s
dynamic canvasses – but also his collaboration with Fortunato Depero – resulting
in the manifesto Futurist Refashioning of the Universe (1915) – that opened up a new
perspective on the second phase of Futurism with its diverse aesthetic directions and
novel emphases. From now on, the second phase of Futurism came to be seen as a
truly new chapter in the history of the movement.
The Gambillo-Crispolti couple pursued their mission of elucidating the continu-
ity of Futurist aesthetics from the 1910s well into the 1930s in a large number of pub-
lications and exhibitions and thus prepared the way for a fundamental re-evaluation
of the Futurist trajectory covering the whole period from its inception in 1909 to its
founder’s death in 1944. Once the time frame of Italian Futurism had been extended
beyond 1916, the 1930s also became a focus of attention. A number of exhibitions
presented the aesthetics of aerovita (both in its cosmic and aeropainting varieties),
Futurist arte sacra, and the multifaceted activities within a broad spectrum of media,
such as theatre, radio, architecture, interior design, graphic arts, muralism and so on.
The field of investigation now covered a time span of thirty years, extended to over
fifty geographical centres and included hundreds of artists. A swell of exhibitions of
Futurist art went hand in hand with a rising number of reprints of Futurist publica-
tions. Scholars, both in Italy and abroad, recognized the international dimension of
the Futurist movement and investigated the links to other avant-garde movements,
both in terms of their indebtedness to Futurism and with regard to their influence
on Futurist artists. And in the 1990s, research into para-Futurist movements in other
countries set in. Thus, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, Futurism Studies
had become a vast field of investigation. My bibliographic research establishes
that between 1945 and 2009 more than 25,000 books and essays were published on
Futurism.

Biases and distorting coverage in Futurism Studies

Given the wealth of books now easily available on Futurism, it is difficult to imagine
how frustratating it must have been for a person in the 1950s who, for whatever
reason, developed an interest in Futurism and sought to gain access to a representative
sample of Futurist writings. Few of the books published by the Edizioni di “Poesia”,
Edizioni de “L’ Italia futurista”, etc. had been collected by public libraries. Manifestos
in their broadsheet or pamphlet format, as well as the numerous Futurist periodicals
6 Günter Berghaus

and magazines, could only be found in private collections. One cannot underestimate
the historical significance of the editorial activities undertaken by scholars such as
Mario Verdone, Luciano De Maria, Ruggero Jacobbi, Giovanni Calendoli, Luigi Scrivo,
Glauco Viazzi, Maria Drudi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori. It was only when their text
editions appeared on the market that a serious and systematic evaluation of Futurist
aesthetics could begin.
In the 1950s, there was no lack of initiatives to revive public interest in Futurism.
But these came predominantly from former Futurists, remained individual endeav-
ours and were rarely followed up by scholars in a comprehensive and systematic
manner. Given the loss of reputation Futurism had experienced due to Marinetti’s
pandering to the Fascist régime, several former members of his movement recog-
nized that their biographies and works were in danger of being eliminated from the
chronicles of early twentieth-century Italian art. For this reason, they undertook a
number of attempts, individually or collectively, to recoup the memory of Futurism as
an avant-garde movement rather than a servant to Fascism.
These initiatives of former Futurists had the great merit of preserving and making
public a large number of documents, which otherwise would have been lost or would
have disappeared for an unknown length of time in private collections. However, as
these artists and writers pursued a politics of memory that sought to elevate their own
position and that of the group they were closely associated with, there was always a
danger that public and scholarly perception was going to be manipulated and that
the history of Futurism was going to be presented in a biased fashion. There can be
little doubt that, up to the present day, those members of the Futurist movement who
excelled in the art of self-aggrandizement managed to assume a position of promi-
nence in the public mind, whilst others – often much better artists – faded into obliv-
ion. Astute and wily managers such as Fortunato Depero, Enzo Benedetto, Alberto
Viviani or Luigi Scrivo backed a certain number of friends and colleagues while ignor-
ing or pushing to the sidelines all those they had fallen out with. For this reason, one
tends to encounter the same names in the periodicals Arte viva (1958–1959), Futur-
ismo = Artecrazia (1969–1976), Futurismo-oggi (1969–1993) and Cultura e costume
(1972–1975). The same bias can be found in the first group shows, such as Mostra
nazionale della pittura e della scultura futuriste (Bologna: Palazzo del Podestà, 1951),
Mostra antologica del futurismo (Rome: Centro Studi Futuristi, 1957), Quaranta futur-
isti (Milan: Toninelli Arte Moderna, 1962) or Documenti del futurismo (Milan: Isti-
tuto Europeo di Storia d’Arte, 1966). Similarly, the book projects promoted by these
artist-publisher-managers tended to give representation only to the limited number of
Futurists with whom they entertained amicable relationships.
In the 1980s, when Futurism became widely recognized as an important avant-
garde movement, a further factor contributed to a skewing of the overall picture:
local politics. With more than fifty luoghi del futurismo vying with each other for
prominence in the heritage industry, a local council or municipality that donated
a public building or supplied money and personnel to a centro futurista could raise
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 7

awareness of Futurist activities in the city in a manner that did not truthfully rep-
resent the local group’s significance within the Futurist movement. Poor towns or
cities investing their money in other projects were likely to see their Futurist heritage
dwindle in terms of public awareness and reputation.
Another significant influence in the historiography of Futurism came from
scholars and curators who pursued a strongly personal interest in the avant-garde
traditions of their local environments. In the last third of the twentieth century,
a large number of local historians began to unravel the microhistory of Futurism
in their city, sometimes jointly, sometimes in competition with each other. Naples
proved to be a particularly fertile environment. Despite the fact that the city had
only produced rather minor figures in the wider family of Futurist artists and had
never been represented in the inner circle of the Futurist leadership, Ugo Piscopo,
Sergio Lambiase, Gian Battista Nazzaro, Luciano Caruso, Stelio Maria Martini,
Matteo D’Ambrosio and Domenico Cammarota – to name but a few – investigated in
great detail the Futurist activitites in their home town without necessarily unearth-
ing works of national or international significance. Such vagaries and coincidences
could be further exacerbated when local galleries or publishing houses joined the
bandwagon. Suddenly, the prices paid for works by certain artists shot through the
roof, which prompted another unsavoury feature of the Futurism market: the prolif-
eration of fakes.

Post-war exhibitions of Futurism

Several of the first exhibitions of Futurist works in the post-war period were dedicated
to former members of the movement who had distanced themselves from Marinetti
at an early stage of their careers. Already in 1945, Gino Severini, who had spent most
of his creative life in Paris and was thus above suspicion as far as Fascist sympathies
were concerned, was regularly exhibited and written about. Carlo Carrà, who had
pursued a rather apolitical style of painting from 1917 onwards, occupied an elevated
position in the cultural establishment of liberated Italy. In January 1947, the two paint-
ers were reunited for the first time with one of their former Futurist colleagues in the
exhibition Boccioni Carrà Severini (1910–1914) at the Galleria La Margherita in Rome.
Giacomo Balla and Luigi Russolo also re-appeared on the scene and were given the
opportunity to show their past and present works.
Of course, it is one thing for a living artist to promote his work and to organize
retrospective exhibitions that support his claim for a prominent position in the chron-
icles of twentieth-century art. But it is an altogether different matter to have a public
institution opening its doors to former members of the Futurist movement. This took
place for the first time in 1948 when the Quadriennale di Roma organized an exhibi-
tion entitled Rassegna nazionale di arti figurative (National Exhibition of Visual Arts).
8 Günter Berghaus

The show in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna included twenty-six works by ten Futurist
artists. For understandable reasons, the emphasis was placed on the first phase of
Futurism. The Fascist heritage of Futurism was sidelined, and works from the secondo
futurismo period were relegated to a small side room.
The critical response to this first post-war edition of the Quadriennale in 1948 (see
above, pp. 3–4) indicated that, on the whole, the curators’ strategy was successful.
The public still possessed a living memory of Fascist propaganda art dressed up in
Futurist attire and was therefore more than pleasantly surprised to see the dynamic
and vibrant works of the movement’s founding fathers. Another institution that con-
sidered it opportune to offer the public a fresh chance to judge and review the histor-
ical significance of Futurism was the Venice Biennale. To test the waters, the organiz-
ers put together a show that presented forty years of Italian art from Futurism to the
present day and presented it in Lausanne and Lucerne (Quarante ans d’art italien du
futurisme à nos jours, 1947). Encouraged by the response to this exhibition, the Bien-
nale charged Umbro Apollonio, a young lecturer in contemporary arts at the Univer-
sity of Padova, with presenting thirty-nine works by Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo
and Severini at the Biennale’s 25th edition in 1950 (Apollonio: “I firmatari del 1°
manifesto futurista”). From 1950 onwards, Apollonio acted as director of the Archivio
Storico della Biennale and was the mastermind behind a plethora of activities that
fostered and stimulated the early phase of revisitations and revaluations of Futurism.
Apollonio’s engaged re-assessment of Futurism found a loyal collaborator in Carlo
Cardazzo, who ran the Galleria del Cavallino in Venice and the Galleria del Naviglio in
Milan. In 1950, he issued a first series of reprints of Futurist manifestos, accompanied
by studies on Boccioni and on the ‘heroic phase’ of the Futurist movement (Valsecchi:
Umberto Boccioni; Giani: Il futurismo, 1910–1916). Outside Italy, the interest in Futur-
ism also took off in the late 1940s. In 1949, the Museum of Modern Art in New York
mounted a seminal Futurism exhibition as part of a show on twentieth-century Italian
art (Soby and Barr: Twentieth-century Italian Art), which was followed in 1950 by
similar events in Brussels, Zurich, London and Paris, in Palm Beach in 1951 and in New
York in 1954. These exhibitions prompted, both in the popular press and in scholarly
journals, a large number of reviews and critical re-assessments of Futurist aesthetics.
Publishing houses observed this trend and engaged some prominent art historians to
investigate the history of Futurism and to portray its most significant representatives.
From the more than one hundred publications of those years, some stand out, such
as Raffaele Carrieri’s history of avant-garde art that went through several editions
and formed the basis of three splendid tomes that accorded Futurism a prominent
place: Futurismo e avanguardia in Italia (Pitture e scultura); Pittura e scultura d’avan-
guardia in Italia, 1890–1955; Il futurismo. Equally impressive was a magnificent issue
of Cahiers d’art edited by Christian Zervos in January 1950, and some well-informed
Futurism numbers of art magazines from France (Art d’aujourd’hui, July-August 1949,
March 1950, January 1951, January 1952), Switzerland (Werk / Œuvre, Supplement 3–4,
Januar 1951) and Germany (Das Kunstwerk 53, 1951).
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 9

The reception of Futurism in the 1950s

After this encouraging start in the immediate post-war period, the significance of
Futurism for experimental art and literature came to be presented in a number of
books,2 such as:

Libero De Libero, ed: Antologia futurista. Torino: “Civiltà delle Macchine”, 1954.
Libero Altomare: Incontri con Marinetti e il futurismo. Roma: Corso, 1954.
René Berger, ed.: Le Mouvement dans l’art contemporain. Lausanne: Association
Pour l’ Art, 1955.
Guy Weelen: Le Problème du mouvement dans l’art contemporain. Paris: Synthè-
ses, 1955.
Guido Ballo: Pittori italiani dal futurismo a oggi. Roma: Edizioni Mediterranee,
1956. Translated into German and English (both 1958).
Alberto Frattini: Marinetti e il futurismo. Milano: Marzorati, 1958.
Umbro Apollonio: Antonio Sant’Elia: Documenti, note storiche e critiche. Milano:
Il Balcone, 1958.
Enrico Falqui: Bibliografia e iconografia del futurismo. Firenze: Sansoni, 1959.
Walter Vaccari: Vita e tumulti di F. T. Marinetti. Milano: Omnia, 1959.
Mario De Micheli: Le avanguardie artistiche del Novecento. Milano: Feltrinelli,
1959. Translated into Hungarian (1963), Czech (1964), Spanish (1967), Por-
tuguese (1987) and Serbo-Croatian (1990).

The effect of these critical studies and of the exhibitions that were held in the early
1950s was that Futurism came to be seen as more than just Fascist or para-Fascist
art. This shift of opinion was largely brought about by a number of influential critics,
historians and curators, some of them old enough to have experienced the scintil-
lating force of Futurism when it first burst onto the scene in the 1910s. They were
now able to place Futurism in a wider international context and to demonstrate that
Marinetti and his followers had been a driving force behind the renewal of the visual
and literary arts in the early twentieth century. And it is largely the books of these
critics that to this day condition our understanding of the historical rôle of Futurism.
However, one should not forget that in the 1950s many members of the Futur-
ist movement were still alive. They began to organize themselves and attempted
to demonstrate the artistic achievements of the group they had belonged to. On 26
February 1950, a number of former Futurists, including Cesare Andreoni, Giovanni
Acquaviva, Benedetta, Paolo Buzzi, Tullio Crali, Luciano Folgore, Armando Mazza,
Bruno Munari, Ignazio Scurto, Tato and others, met in the house of Pino Masnata

2 Books and journal issues listed with full bibliographic details are not registered again in the biblio-
graphy at the end of this entry.
10 Günter Berghaus

in Milan to set up a Centro Futurista, which was given the mission “to preserve the
memory of the movement” (Cesare Andreoni: Artista, artigiano, protodesigner, 143 and
158). In 1951, at the Palazzo del Podestà in Bologna, they mounted a first Mostra nazi-
onale della pittura e della scultura futuriste, followed in 1957 in the Centro Studi Futur-
isti in Roma by a Mostra antologica del futurismo. In a letter from 1954, Palazzeschi
described to his publisher Attilio Vallecchi a serious re-awakening of interest in Futur-
ism and suggested that his novel Perelà should be re-issued with the label “Futur-
ist” on its cover (see the letter of 30 July 1954 in Palazzeschi: Tutti i romanzi, 1511).
Similarly, Fortunato Depero availed himself of the changing climate to publicize and
rally support for his plan of a “Pinacoteca privata Depero” in Rovereto (which finally
opened on 11 August 1959 under the names Casa Depero / Museo Depero / Galleria
Museo Fortunato Depero). It received a thorough overhaul in 2009 and now functions
as the Casa d’Arte Futurista Fortunato Depero and as a third branch of MART (Museo
d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto).
With the fifty-year anniversary looming on the horizon, the former Futurists
increased their efforts to institutionalize Futurism as a national treasure. In Sep-
tember 1958, Enzo Benedetto published the first issue of his journal Arte-viva,
which dedicated a special issue to Il cinquantenario del futurismo in June of the
following year. In parallel, he set up an Istituto Internazionale di Studi sul Futur-
ismo in Rome, which Carlo Belloli, also in 1959, complemented with a Centro
Futurista in Milan, later re-baptized ‘Isisuf ’ (Istituto Internazionale di Studi sul
Futurismo).
In preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of Futurism in 1909,
the Quadriennale charged Drudi Gambillo with the editing of the two-volume Archivi
del futurismo and the mounting of a major retrospective dedicated to Futurist paint-
ing, which subsequently transferred to Switzerland and Germany. The Galleria Nazi-
onale d’Arte Moderna instituted a series of lectures, which included Angelo Maria
Ripellino speaking on Russian Futurism, Nello Ponente on Futurist Theatre and Mau-
rizio Calvesi on Cubist influences in early Futurism.
In Venice, the Biennale showed even more initiative in presenting Futurism as
the great Italian contribution to the renewal of the arts in the twentieth century. They
organized a special section on Futurism at the II Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna
de São Paulo (8 December 1953 – 8 February 1954), and at its Venice edition of 1954
a room was set aside for twenty-one works by Enrico Prampolini. A few years later,
Umbro Apollonio curated another show of contemporary Italian art (Diez años de
pintura italiana, 1957) that toured to great acclaim in various Latin American coun-
tries and showed to the world that

it was due to Futurism that the country freed herself, absorbed European artistic trends and
opened her doors to modern art. Thus occurred the profound transformation of language that
would relegate simple technical skills to a secondary position. It set in motion a process that
was to characterize modern figurative art. (Vergara Grez: “Exposición ‘Diez años de pintura ita-
liana’ ”, 376)
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 11

Futurism also featured prominently in two government-sponsored travelling

exhibitions, Italian Artists of To-day (Gothenburg: Konsthallen, February 1951; Helsinki:
Konsthallen, March 1951; Oslo: Kunstnernes Hus, April 1951; Copenhagen: Frie udstill-
ing, May 1951) and Italian Art of the 20th Century (Perth: Art Gallery of Western Aus-
tralia, March–April 1956, Adelaide: National Gallery of South Australia, May-June,
1956; Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, July 1956; Hobart: Tasmanian Museum,
August-September 1956; Brisbane: Queensland Museum, November-December 1956).
Both were curated by Enrico Prampolini, and the catalogue, edited by his brother
Vittorio Orazi, was furnished with informative notes on Balla, Boccioni, Prampolini,
Severini and Mario Sironi. Back in Italy, the Galleria Blu in Milan began to stage a series
of Futurism shows that was of historical significance as it heralded a re-evaluation of
the period of secondo futurismo. At this point, of course, the name of Enrico Crispolti
needs to be mentioned, who, more than anyone else, widened the spectrum of Futurism
scholarship and became one of the protagonists of Futurism Studies for the next fifty
years. And with him, a new generation of critics and curators appeared on the scene,
producing hundreds of exhibitions as well as dozens of major studies and anthologies.
One of these was Mario Verdone (1917–2009), a film and theatre historian who in
his youth had been a close friend of many Futurists. In the 1960s, he started a cam-
paign against the pervasive state of misinformation and prejudice that still prevailed
in Italy with regard to Futurism. Subsequently, with several hundred publications to
his name, he became a major player in Italian Futurism Studies. Another man from
that generation was Maurizio Calvesi, who in 1953 had presented a first selection of
writings by Umberto Boccioni (Scelta degli scritti, regesti, bibliografia e catalogo delle
opere) and subsequently published more than twenty books and catalogues on Boc-
cioni, Balla and other leading Futurist artists.

Futurism in the 1960s: Theatre and music

In the 1960s, Futurism scholarship in Italy began to expand beyond the domains of the
fine arts and literature. To revive Italian audiences’ interest in Futurism as an active force
in the theatre, Giovanni Calendoli issued a three-volume edition of Marinetti’s plays (1960)
and Francesco Cangiullo published in 1961 a fresh edition of his Le serate futuriste, origi-
nally printed in 1930. To complement this book of theatrical memoirs, Cangiullo began a
long series of newspaper articles and published, towards the end of his life, an anthology
of texts, Teatro della sorpresa (1968). The already mentioned Mario Verdone issued two
anthologies of texts and documents, Ginna e Corra: Cinema e letteratura del futurismo
(1967; reprinted 1968) and Teatro italiano d’avanguardia: Drammi e sintesi futuriste (1970).
Throughout the 1960s, essays on Futurist theatre appeared in journals such as
Sipario, Marcatré, Fenarete, Il caffè, Il dramma, Il verri and Palatino. At the University
of Padova, Giovanni Calendoli, Umberto Artioli and Flores D’Arcais set up a Centro
12 Günter Berghaus

di Studi del Teatro e dello Spettacolo and published a new journal, Studi teatrali,
which dedicated its first issue of March 1966 to the subject of Futurist theatre. A
year later, Sipario: Rassegna mensile dello spettacolo followed suit (#260 of Decem-
ber 1967). Mario Verdone, who since 1965 was teaching at the Centro Sperimentale di
Cinematografia in Rome, published a voluminous study, Il teatro del tempo futurista
(1969), which remained influential for years to come and inspired a young generation
of theatre historians to uncover the full range of Futurist activities in the fields of
theatre, dance and other performing arts.
Around the same time, Italian scholars rediscovered Russian Futurism. The peri-
odical Rassegna sovietica published a large number of texts and critical essays, which
were complemented by editions such as Maiakovski: Opere (1958ff.) and Angelo Maria
Ripellino’s influential book Majakovskij e il teatro russo d’avanguardia (1959; 2nd edn
1968; translated into French, German, Portuguese, Greek and Spanish).
Needless to say, the professional theatre made productive use of the material that
became newly available. In Italy, the practical recuperation of the Futurist heritage
was initiated by Franco Marenga, director of the Compagnia del Teatro Universitario
di Villa Flaminia in Rome. In 1967, he untertook a serata futurista with a group of stu-
dents at the Casa Internazionale dello Studente in Rome. On 27 January 1967, a second
Serata presented a number of sintesi by Marinetti, Cangiullo, Ginna, Corra, Buzzi,
Folgore and others (see Quaderni di Futurismo oggi. Due, p. 19).
This salvage of a lost tradition continued when, on 1 March 1970, they performed
plays by Buzzi, Cangiullo, Corra, Ginna, Marinetti, Pratella and Yambo (Enrico
Novelli) at the Teatro Comunale “Metastasio” in Prato (see Benedetto and Lotti:
Almanacco futurista 1978, 39). Another instigator of Futurist-themed theatrical events
was the Jesuit priest Valentino Davanzati at the Centro Culturale “Il Grattacielo” in
Livorno. He had struck up a friendship with Francesco Cangiullo and on 19 December
1968 presented his play La cura delle rose, to coincide with the edition of Cangiullo
and Marinetti’s Teatro della sorpresa by the Libreria Belforte in Livorno (Di Sacco:
“Francesco Cangiullo futurista e non solo”). Around the same time, Paolo Belforte
and Luciano Caruso organized at the Libreria Belforte a scenic recitation of various
short plays from the Teatro sintetico repertoire.
In Turin, the Teatro delle Dieci, a group of young actors from the Teatro Stabile
under the directorship of Massimo Scaglione, had taken over a cinema, the Ridotto
del Romano, on Piazza Castello. In 1967, the company was joined by Gian Renzo
Morteo, who was undertaking research into the theatre of the historical avant-garde
in order to create with them an evening of Futurist sintesi (April 1967). In Rome, at the
Teatro Arlecchino, Luigi Pascutti premièred on 20 January 1968 a Futurist collage,
Nessuno in casa di Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In the same year, the Teatro Stabile
di Torino undertook a professional production of Marinetti’s Il suggeritore nudo,
directed by Paolo Poli (premièred on 22 March 1968 at the Sala Gobetti). Subse-
quently, it travelled to the Festival di Spoleto and became incorporated into the rep-
ertoire of the 1968–1969 season at the Teatro delle Muse in Rome. The performances
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 13

in Turin were accompanied by a collage of Futurist scenes (including a reconstruction

of Balla’s Fuochi d’artificio), called Futur/Realtà, directed by Gabriele Oriani (son of
the Turinese Futurist, Pippo Oriani) and performed at the Festival Teatrale Venezia
(10–11 October 1968), at the Sala Gobetti (13–18 October 1968), at the Experimenta
3 festival at the Deutsche Akademie der Darstellenden Künste, Frankfurt (3–6 June
1969), the open-air theatre of the Scuola Clotilde di Savoia in Turin (14 July 1969) and
the Tecnoteatro in Turin (26 July 1969). And in Milan, in April 1969, the theatre group
Gli Improvvisati dedicated an evening to the Teatro sintetico futurista at the Istituto
Leone XIII, performing, amongst other pieces, Marinetti’s Bambole elettriche (also
known as Poupées électriques).
These early attempts to recuperate the Futurist heritage in the field of theatre were
framed by various other initiatives, from which three Biennale exhibitions stand out:
Il futurismo ed il suo tempo at the 30th Biennale di Venezia (18 June–16 October 1960),
the Retrospettiva di Umberto Boccioni at the 33rd Biennale di Venezia (18 June–16
October 1966) and Quattro maestri del primo futurismo italiano at the 34th Biennale di
Venezia (22 June–20 October 1968). Alongside these exhibitions, Luigi Scrivo’s anthol-
ogy Sintesi del futurismo: Storia e documenti (1968), and Luciano De Maria’s collection
of Marinetti’s theoretical and creative writings, Teoria e invenzione futurista (1968),
were published. These exhibitions and books did not only cause extensive discussion
in Italian newspapers and magazines but also fostered public debates between critics
and former Futurists in cultural centres as well as evenings with recitations of Futurist
poems and manifestos. Such semi-theatrical performances were repeatedly organized
by Francesco Cangiullo and Tullio Crali, who had learned the art of declamation from
Marinetti and could therefore provide an important link between historical Futurism
and the younger generation’s rediscovery of the movement.
It was not only Futurist plays that began to inspire young theatre artists. New
developments in stage design and staging techniques fostered an interest in their
Futurist predecessors and led to exhibitions such as the Mostra delle scenografie di
Enrico Prampolini in the Salone Napoleonico of the Brera Academy (1969) and Avan-
guardia a teatro dal 1915 al 1955 nell’opera scenografica di Depero, Baldessari, Prampo-
lini, mounted at the Museo Teatrale alla Scala (1969–70).
In the musical sphere, the rediscovery of Futurist composers was rung in with
Francesco Balilla Pratella’s memoirs, “Marinetti e il suo futurismo in Romagna”
(1951) and Giovanni Seganti’s chronicle of the first Futurist meetings in Lugo, “Futur-
ismo lughese: I simpatici pazzi” (1956). Luigi Russolo, who after the Second World
War had continued his career as a painter, saw a first translation of his seminal mani-
festo, L’ arte dei rumori into English (1950) and then into French (1954). Following the
short brochure, Russolo, by Giuseppe Cartella Gelardi (1949), the artist’s wife, Maria
Zanovello Russolo, published in 1958 Russolo: L’uomo, l’artista. That the musical
avantgarde of the post-war period took notice of these publications is confirmed by
the great exponent of musique concrète, Pierre Schaeffer, in the essay “La galleria
sotto i suoni, ovvero il futuro anteriore” (1959), and by the Dutch composer Ignace
14 Günter Berghaus

Lilien in “Soniek anno 1914” (1963). The musicologist Claudio Marabini dedicated
an essay to Balilla Pratella, “Per una storia del futurismo”, in the widely read Nuova
antologia: Rivista di lettere, scienze ed arti (September–December 1963). Fred K. Prie-
berg’s essay “Der musikalische Futurismus” (1958) was followed by his influential
study Musica ex machina: Über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik (1960), trans-
lated twice into Spanish in 1961 and 1964, and into Italian in 1963. The Fluxus artist
Robert Filliou underlined the continuity between prewar and post-war avant-garde
music when he translated Russolo’s L’ arte dei rumori for the Something Else Press
in New York (1967). Armando Gentilucci published a long paper, “Il futurismo e lo
sperimentalismo musicale d’oggi” in 1964, and re-issued this piece the following
year as a stand-alone brochure. J. C. G. Waterhouse, a young musicologist at Oxford
University, communicated his findings on Russolo and Pratella in his doctoral thesis
The Emergence of Modern Italian Music (1968), and expanded on this in two essays
entitled “A Futurist Mystery” (1967) and “Futurist Music in Perspective” (1972). In
addition, in 1969, Giovanni Lugaresi published his authoritative edition of Pratella’s
correspondence, which first appeared in the Osservatore politico letterario and then
as a volume, and which remained a treasure-chest of information to many research-
ers on all aspects of Futurism for decades.

Futurism in the 1960s: The Fine Arts

I mentioned above Maria Drudi Gambillo’s work for the Quadriennale, which
included the magisterial two-volume edition of the Archivi del futurismo (1958–62)
and the Cinquantenario exhibition, Il futurismo, held at the Palazzo Barberini, the
Kunstverein Winterthur and the Städtische Galerie München. Her undertakings were
given practical support by the young art historian Enrico Crispolti, who also helped
with mounting the first Balla exhibition after the artist’s death in 1958 (Futurballa,
1871–1958. Milano: Galleria Blu, 1959). Four years later, the Gambillo-Crispolti couple
continued their collaboration (see above, p. 5) and engaged in a major re-assessment
of Futurist art of the 1920s and 30s, i. e. the ‘post-heroic’ phase that was supposedly so
tainted by Fascism that it deserved little more than a footnote in history books. Cris-
polti’s fresh appraisal of the works of Fillìa, Prampolini, Rosso, Diulgheroff, Oriani
and others brought to light some extraordinary works, which he analysed in Notizie,
a journal he was editing at the time with Luciano Pistoi. His collaboration with Drudi
Gambillo led to a series of path-breaking exhibitions: Secondo futurismo at the Gal-
leria Blu (1960), Aspetti del secondo futurismo torinese at the Galleria Civica d’Arte
Moderna in Turin (1962) and Mostra a quattro protagonisti del “secondo futurismo” at
the Galleria “Il Canale” in Venice (1964).
Due to the research carried out by Crispolti and Drudi Gambillo, resistance
towards Futurism began to subside. It became more and more accepted that Futurism
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 15

under Mussolini had produced more than Fascist art and that there had been some
significant artistic developments after Futurism’s foundational phase in 1909–1915.
Popular interest in Futurism grew year by year and was suitably fuelled by museums,
galleries and publishing houses. All major painters and sculptors of the Futurist
movement received retrospective exhibitions in prominent museums, and galleries
were busily trading in Futurist paintings, which in ever-rising numbers flooded the
market. Of these exhibition spaces, a few stand out because of their sustained interest
in and support of Futurist art: the Galleria “Il Canale” in Venice, run by Aldo Della
Vedova; the Galleria Blu in Milano, owned by Luca and Daniele Palazzoli; the Gal-
leria Schwarz in Milan, directed by the Dada-specialist Arturo Schwarz; the Galleria
Mosaico in Chiasso, managed by Gino Macconi, and the Galleria Narciso in Turin,
owned by Elio Pinottini. Over fifty exhibitions were mounted in these galleries alone,
mainly of former Futurists with whom the proprietors entertained amicable personal
relations. From the group shows held in public institutions, a few stand out because
of their popular and critical success:

Les Sources du XXème siècle: Les arts en Europe en 1884 a 1914. VIe Exposition
europèenne. Paris: Musée National d’Art Moderne, 4 November 1960 – 23
January 1961.
Futurism. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 31 May – 5 September 1961;
Detroit: Institute of Arts, 18 October – 19 December 1961; Los Angeles:
County Museum, 14 January – 19 February 1962.
Italien 1905–1925: Futurismus und Pittura metafisica. Hamburg: Kunstverein,
28. September – 3. November 1963. Frankfurter am Main: Steinernes Haus
Römerberg, 16 November 1963 – 5 January 1964.
Arte moderna in Italia 1915–1935. Firenze: Palazzo Strozzi, 26 February – 28 May
1967.
Quattro maestri del primo futurismo italiano: Linee della ricerca – dall’informale
alle nuove strutture. XXXIV. Biennale di Venezia, 22 June – 20 October 1968.
Cento opere d’arte italiana dal futurismo ad oggi. Roma: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte
Moderna, 20 December 1968 – 20 January 1969. German edn Italienische
Kunst des XX. Jahrhunderts. Bochum: Städtische Kunstgalerie, 5–30 May
1968. Berlin: Kunstamt Berlin-Charlottenburg, 8–29 June 1968. Köln: Kunst-
halle am Neumarkt, May–September 1968.

Visitors to these shows needed to be fed easily digestible and inexpensive publica-
tions. Thus, several portfolios dedicated to individual Futurist painters, as well as
albums such as Il futurismo by Renzo Modesti (1960), emerged in museum bookshops.
More upmarket were Maurizio Calvesi’s illustrated volumes, Dinamismo e simulta-
neità nella poetica futurista, a series on modern art published in nine instalments and
reissued in several editions.
16 Günter Berghaus

A different type of mass-circulation publication was José Pierre’s book, Il futur-

ismo e il dadaismo (three editions between 1965 and 1968). The French version of 1966
received five reprints and was soon translated in German, Dutch, Spanish, English
and Swedish. Another attempt to place Futurism into a wider spectrum of avant-garde
art was Maurizio Calvesi’s Le due avanguardie dal futurismo alla pop art (three edi-
tions in 1966, 1971, 1981 and reprinted six times subsequently).
The scholarly book market was also offering several full-length historical surveys
such as:

Rosa Trillo Clough: Futurism: The Story of a Modern Art Movement. A New Apprai-
sal. New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
Pär Bergmann: “Modernolatria” et “Simultaneità”: Recherches sur deux tendan-
ces dans l’avant-garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la première
guerre mondiale. Uppsala: Svenska Bokförlaget, 1962.
Christa Baumgarth: Geschichte des Futurismus. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1966.
René Jullian: Le Futurisme et la peinture italienne. Paris: Société d’Édition d’En-
seignement Supérieur, 1966.
Gabriele Mandel: La Peinture italienne du futurisme à nos jours. Milan: Institut
Européen d’Histoire de l’ Art, 1967.
Marianne W. Martin: Futurist Art and Theory 1909–1915. Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1968.
Enrico Crispolti: Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo. Trapani: Celebes, 1969.

Moreover, at this time, a number of periodicals published special issues on Futur-

ism that were targeting a readership somewhere in-between a popular and a schol-
arly audience. Examples of these include La fiera letteraria (14 February 1954 and
21 March 1965), Il Tevere (30 June 1956), L’ osservatore politico letterario (September
1958), Notizie (January 1960), Civiltà delle macchine (January–February 1961), Il caffè
politico e letterario (June 1962), Bianco e nero (October–December 1967), Il castoro
(October 1969), Il caffè (June–July 1969), Quaderni del osservatore (December 1969),
Le arti: Mensile di cultura e di attualità (July–August 1970) and Il Verri (October 1970).
Commercial galleries also began to mount group shows of Futurism (rather than
exhibitions of individual Futurist artists), no doubt sensing lucrative business oppor-
tunities. Of particular significance were Le Futurisme: Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo,
Severini, Zatkova, Soffici, Sironi, Rosso at the Galerie Krugier in Geneva (1968); Aspects
du futurisme at the Galerie d’Art Moderne Marie-Suzanne Feigel in Basel (1968) and
The Futurism: Balla, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Severini, Soffici, Sironi, Rosso at the
Albert Loeb & Krugier Gallery in New York (1968).
In the late 1960s, Marinetti’s publisher Mondadori decided that the time was ripe
for issuing a multi-volume edition of critical and creative writings by the founder of
Futurism. Conscious of the fact that the 1940s edition of Marinetti’s Opera omnia never
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 17

progressed beyond the preparatory phase, they limited their new undertaking to a
handful of volumes and gave it the more modest title, Opere di F. T. Marinetti. As it hap-
pened, this project never progressed beyond the fourth volume, with the effect that
to this day only a very small number of Marinetti’s essays, manifestos and books are
actually available. Mondadori and Vallecchi regularly reprinted titles from their back
catalogue, but a scholarly, historical-critical edition is nowhere in sight. The person
who was in charge of the most widely sold volume, Teoria e invenzione futurista (1968;
2nd edn 1983, with many reprints), was Luciano De Maria (1928–1993), who also edited
various cheap paperback anthologies, such as Marinetti e il futurismo (1973), Marinetti
e i futuristi (1994) and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e il futurismo (2000).
In view of this revived interest in Futurism, the surviving veterans also made their
voices heard, partly to stimulate research into Marinetti’s movement, partly to boost their
own reputation. In June 1967, Enzo Benedetto’s publishing house Arte-viva issued a dec-
laration signed by twelve surviving Futurists (Acquaviva et al.: “Manifesto di futurismo
oggi”), which became the starting point for Futurismo-oggi: Periodico mensile per i giovani
futuristi italiani. It ran for 24 years (1969–1993), at the best of times as a bi-monthly, and
acted as a mouthpiece for the Centro Iniziative Culturali Futurismo Oggi. It also pub-
lished a book series, Quaderni di Futurismo-oggi, of which a total of thirty-eight volumes
appeared in print (plus four “fuori numerazione”). Apart from promoting their own
works, the circle around Enzo Benedetto mounted a number of collective Neo-Futurism
shows and memorial exhibitions, in which they sought to convince the public that “Futur-
ism should not be perceived as a corpse, but as a living organism” (Benedetto: Futurismo
cento x 100, 10). However, as the world of the fine arts was moving into an entirely dif-
ferent direction, the old guard increasingly lost touch with contemporary realities and
viewed the recent developments in Italian and international art in a rather warped and
deluded fashion: “We must avoid looking like ruins of the Futurist past […] Our motto,
Marching not Rotting, is always topical, especially nowadays when everything is rotting
and nothing is moving ahead” (Silvio Marnano in a letter to Enzo Benedetto, dated 7
October 1975, in Stagnitti: “Si va sempre / verso il tempo / che verrà”, 50).
The various former Futurists scattered across the Italian peninsula interpreted their
side-lining by the critics as a double ostracism: not only was the heritage of Marinetti’s
movement held in low esteem, but their attempts to revive and continue Futurist aes-
thetics were also largely ignored. As their concepts of ‘Futurism’ were primarily focussed
on Marinetti’s manifestos and on their own writings from the days gone by, they failed
to take in the rise of the Nuovo Futurismo movement that was only vaguely related to
the historical avant-garde. Enterprising young artists such as Antonio Fiore, Giananto-
nio Abate, Innocente, Marco Lodola, Plumcake or Umberto Postal came to be promoted
by Luciano Inga-Pin, Renato Barilli and Giorgio Di Genova, rather than by the Futurist
veterans, who saw in them little more than “banalità goliardica” (Silvio Marnano in a
letter to Enzo Benedetto, in Stagnitti: “Si va sempre / verso il tempo / che verrà”, 50).
The members of the Nuovo Futurismo group were afforded scarce attention in
Futurismo = Artecrazia, a weekly information bulletin set up by Luigi Scrivo, who had
18 Günter Berghaus

been Marinetti’s secretary in charge of the Futurist bulletins issued by the Agenzia
Letteraria Artistica (A.L.A.). He was supported in his undertaking, which ran from 18
October 1969 until 31 May 1976, by Luigi Tallarico and Antonio Marasco. The periodical
included reviews of exhibitions granted to former Futurists, reports on books, essays
and articles on Futurism, neo-Futurist manifestos written in the old Marinettian style,
diatribes against colleagues considered heretics (e. g. Francesco Cangiullo), polemics
against newspapers who printed negative comments on Futurism, and proclamations
whose bombastic style betrayed the age of their authors (see, for example, Scrivo: “Il
futurismo sempre vivente e vigoroso non è mai morto”).
Death, however, was around the corner for many of these veterans. Therefore, under-
standably, they were greatly concerned about how they would be remembered in future
times. Just like Depero had done in the 1950s (see above, p. 10), several surviving Futur-
ists set up archives and museums, in which their lives’ work, and to some degree also
that of other Futurists, was to be preserved and exhibited. Gerardo Dottori and Tancredi
Loreti created such a centre in Perugia in the late 1960s (since 1977 it has been adminis-
tered by Massimo Duranti); in 1970, a Centro d’Azione Futurista was set up in Palermo,
and in 1971, the family of Alberto Viviani, editor of a periodical with a strong focus on
Futurism, Cultura e costume, set up a Museo del Futurismo “A. Viviani-Burali”. In Milan,
Tullio Crali created in his studio a Centro di Documentazione Futurista (1977), but – as far
as I have observed – it has been rarely used by scholars, in distinct contrast to the Fon-
dazione Primo Conti in Fiesole, which, apart from a magnificent museum, also houses a
Centro di Documentazione e Ricerche sulle Avanguardie Storiche, administered by fully
trained archivists and librarians (see Manghetti: “The Fondazione Primo Conti”). The
greatest repository of Futurist memorabilia and storehouse of dozens of Futurist estates
emerged in 1987, when the Depero Museum was restructured and fused with the Art
Museum of the Province of Trento, forming the new Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contempo-
ranea di Trento e Rovereto (MART). The institution’s document repository and research
centre, now called ‘L’ Archivio del ‘900’, contains the estates of more than sixty artists.

Statistical analysis and summary

It needs to be stressed here that the list of publications presented in this chapter is
anything but complete. What I have selected for discussion only highlights some sig-
nificant exhibitions and books that may possibly have had an influence on people’s
perception of Italian Futurism. However, if we want to assess the question of whether
Futurism vanished from public memory in the post-war period due to political ostra-
cism, we must look at more than just the tip of the iceberg. For this reason, I have
undertaken a statistical analysis that is shown in the graph on p. 19.
As one can see, by the end of the 1950s, some 650 publications on Italian Futurism
had appeared, which in the next ten years increased to over 1,600. This hardly squares
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 19

Table 1: Preliminary count of publications on Italian Futurism, 1945–1969

Publica-
tions
180 1945–49: 101
170 1950–54: 207
160
1955 –59: 348
150
140 1960–64: 383
130 1965–69: 581
120 Total : 1,620
110
100
90
80
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
Year 1945–46–47–48–49–50–51–52–53–54–55–56–57–58–59–60–61–62–63–64–65–66–67–68–69

Note: These statistics cover books, catalogues and essays in scholarly journals, but exclude
book and exhibition reviews. The census date is November 2009, i. e. before the completion of
International Futurism, 1945–2015: A Bibliographic Handbook.

with what one prominent scholar recently wrote about that period: “There was a deaf-
ening silence about futurism in Italy. Only after important critical and popular edi-
tions appeared a decade later did the scholarship take off” (Adamson: “Fascinating
Futurism”, 71). This may be what Calvesi, Verdone, Crispolti, etc. want us to believe
because it positions them as the ‘Founding Fathers of Futurism Studies’. But my
bibliographical investigations show that this view, in fact, is historically incorrect.
Further to the already impressive figures mentioned above, one needs to add an
equally increasing number of publications concerned with Futurism in the fields of
music, theatre, cinema, architecture and so on. By the late 1960s, a growing number
of studies demonstrated that the Italian movement had had an influence in all artistic
media and had made an impact in countries as far apart as Japan, Brazil and the USA.
From that moment onwards, a new phase in the reception of Italian Futurism set in.
The old equation ‘Futurism = Fascism’ lost ground, politics came to be sidelined and
the full spectrum of Futurist activities became the subject of more than 9,000 pub-
lications in the years from 1970 to 2009. And I am consciously leaving out here the
more than 5,000 publications dealing with Futurism in Russia and 11,000 studies on
Futurism in other countries.
More difficult to quantify are the exhibitions of Futurist works in the period 1945–
1969. My statistics can only record exibitions for which catalogues were printed. I have
no way of establishing how many more exhibitions of Futurist works were actually
held but only documented in the contemporary press. The figures shown in Table 2
indicate that in the first ten years after the Second World War only a small number of
20 Günter Berghaus

Table 2: Preliminary count of exhibitions on Italian Futurism, 1945–1969

Exhibi-
tions 1945–49: 26
40 1950–54: 31
1955 –59: 66
35 1960–64: 110
1965–69: 159
30
Total : 392
25

20

15

10

Year 1945–46–47–48–49–50–51–52–53–54–55–56–57–58–59–60–61–62–63–64–65–66–67–68–69

exhibitions was mounted, 57 altogether, but rising from 3–4 to 9–10 a year. Numbers
doubled over the next five years, and doubled again until 1964, rising from 13 a year
to an average of 22. By the end of the decade, this number had increased to 40 per
annum. During the whole period 1945–1959, 392 exhibitions, documented through
catalogues, were held.
In view of these figures, the popular belief that Futurism remained a terra incog-
nita until the late 1960s becomes untenable. It is without question that, during the
post-war period, Futurism was widely looked upon with suspicion or even disappro-
bation. It is also indisputable that the surviving veterans of the Futurist movement
were not given the exhibition opportunities they thought they should have been
granted. However, this lack of interest needs to be seen in the context of the Euro-
pean art scene of the post-war period, when neo-avant-garde trends such as Abstract
Expressionism, Concrete Art, Tachism, Kineticism, Pop-Art, etc. were in the forefront
of public debates, and young artists searching for inspiration and models to emulate
were turning their attention towards the contemporary USA rather than to prewar
Italy. To this new generation, it was of little concern whether the Futurists had been
Fascists or not; to them, Futurism was simply a matter of the past, and they did not
want to be seen in the company of rearguard artists. Therefore, the mantra of com-
plaints that rang from the pages of Futurismo-oggi and Futurismo = Artecrazia needs
to be treated with caution. When compared to other historical avant-garde movments,
the recuperation of Futurism suffered a fate that was similar to that of Expression-
ism, Dada and Surrealism. The critical appraisal and public appreciation of the early
twentieth-century foundations of modern art were a slow process, both in Italy and in
other parts of the world (Berghaus: “The Postwar Reception of Futurism”, 394–396).
My study of the reception of Futurism in the post-war period suggests that the
important rôle of Futurism within the matrix of Modernist art was recognized early
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 21

on. However, due to the movement’s tainted history in the 1930s and 1940s, ideologi-
cal barriers had to be removed before the full spectrum of Futurist creativity could be
appreciated. This happened slowly but steadily in the years 1950 to 1970. From then
on, the historical avant-garde in its many manifestations, including the manifold
facets of Futurist art, came to be recognized as an auspicious market proposition,
both in the publishing and in the gallery worlds. Futurism Studies profited from that
situation and experienced rapid growth rates in the years 1970 to 2009. Looking back
at these last forty years, we can now discern that it was in the period after 1970 that
some 85 per cent of the existing literature on Futurism came to be published.

Works cited
II Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo: Catálogo geral. São Paulo: EDIAM Edições
Americanas de Arte e Arquitetura, 1953.
II Bienal do Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo. Sala especial: Futurismo. A cargo de Umbro
Apollonio. São Paulo: Bienal, 1954.
Acquaviva, Benedetto, Bruschetti, Caviglioni, Crali, D’Abisola, Dal Monte, Delle Site, Dottori,
Marasco, Pettoruti and Sartoris: “Manifesto di futurismo oggi.” Futurismo-oggi. A cura di
Arte-viva. Exhibition catalogue. Formia: Salone della Biblioteca Comunale, 5–20 August 1967.
Roma: Arte-viva, 1967. s.p. Reprinted in Futurismo-oggi 1:1 (December 1969): 6.
Adamson, Walter L.: “Fascinating Futurism: The Historiographical Politics of an Historical
Avant-garde.” Modern Italy 13:1 (February 2008): 69–85.
Agnese, Gino and Alessandro Sagramora, eds.: I futuristi e le Quadriennali. Milano: Electa, 2008.
Andréoli-de Villers, Jean-Pierre: “Futurisme et futuristes à New-York: La Collection Winston-Malbin.”
Vie des arts 18:74 (Spring 1974): 50–53.
Andréoli-de Villers, Jean-Pierre: Futurism and the Arts: A Bibliography, 1959–73 = Le Futurisme et les
arts: Bibliographie, 1959–73 = Il futurisme e le arti: Bibliografia, 1959–73. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1975.
Apollonio, Umbro: “I firmatari del 1° manifesto futurista.” XXV Biennale di Venezia: Catalogo.
Venezia: Alfieri, 1950. 57–62.
Arte-viva. A. 1, no. 1 (September 1958) – A. 2, no. 8–9 (June 1959). Roma: Tip. A.T.E.L, 1958–1959.
Benedetto, Enzo: Futurismo cento x 100. Roma: Arte-Viva, 1975. Reprint Roma: Futurismo-oggi, 1991.
Benedetto, Enzo, and Stefania Lotti, eds.: Almanacco futurista 1978. Roma: Arte-Viva, 1977.
Berghaus, Günter: International Futurism, 1945–2015: A Bibliographic Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter,
forthcoming.
Berghaus, Günter: “The Post-war Reception of Futurism: Repression or Recuperation?” Geert
Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, eds.: The History of Futurism: The Precursors,
Protagonists, and Legacies. Lanham/MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 377–403.
Branca, Antonello: What’s Happening? (DVD video). Roma: Kiwido, 2010.
Bucarelli, Palma, ed.: Enrico Prampolini. Exhibition catalogue. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in
Rome, dal 6 giugno 1961.
Calvesi, Maurizio: Dinamismo e simultaneità nella poetica futurista. Vol. 1. Il manifesto del futurismo e i
pittori futuristi. Vol. 2. Boccioni e il futurismo milanese. Vol. 3. I futuristi e la simultaneità: Boccioni,
Carrà, Russolo e Severini. Vol. 4. Penetrazione e magia nella pittura di Balla. Vol. 5. Il futurismo
romano. Vol. 6. Futurismo e arte meccanica: il comico, l’automatico, il casuale. Vol. 7. Futurismo e
orfismo. Vol. 8. Il futurismo russo. Vol. 9. Antologia critica, bibliografia e indici. Milano: Fabbri, 1967.
22 Günter Berghaus

Calvesi, Maurizio: Le due avanguardie dal futurismo alla pop art. Milano: Lerici, 1966.
Calvesi, Maurizio, ed.: Umberto Boccioni: Scelta degli scritti, regesti, bibliografia e catalogo delle
opere. Roma: De Luca, 1953.
Cangiullo, Francesco: Le serate futuriste: Romanzo storico vissuto. Pozzuoli: Tirena, [1930]. Revised
edn Milano: Ceschina, 1961.
Cangiullo, Francesco, and F. T. Marinetti: Teatro della sorpresa. Livorno: Belforte, 1968.
Carrieri, Raffaele: Futurismo e avanguardia in Italia (Pitture e scultura) = Avant-garde Painting and
Sculpture (1890–1955) in Italy. Edizione speciale bilingue. Milano: Istituto Editoriale Domus, 1955.
Carrieri, Raffaele: Il futurismo. Milano: Il Milione, 1961. English translation Futurism. Milano:
Il Milione, 1963. German translation Futurismus. Milano: Edizioni del Milione, 1963.
Carrieri, Raffaele: Pittura e scultura d’avanguardia in Italia, 1890–1955. Milano: Edizioni della
Conchiglia, 1950. English translation Avant-garde Painting and Sculpture in Italy (1890–1955).
Milano: Istituto Editoriale Domus, 1955.
Cartella Gelardi, Giuseppe: Russolo. Portogruaro: Tipografia Biasutti, 1949.
Cesare Andreoni: Artista, artigiano, protodesigner. A cura dell’ Archivio Cesare Andreoni. Bergamo:
Bolis, 1992.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Aspetti del secondo futurismo torinese. Exhibition catalogue. Torino: Galleria
Civica d’Arte Moderna, 27 marzo–30 aprile 1962.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Il secondo futurismo: Torino, 1923–1938. Torino: Pozzo, 1962.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Mostra a quattro protagonisti del “secondo futurismo”: Fillia, Farfa,
Diulgheroff, Oriani. Exhibition catalogue. Venezia: Galleria “Il Canale”, 6–20 ottobre 1964.
Crispolti, Enrico, and Maria Drudi Gambillo, eds.: Giacomo Balla. Exhibition catalogue. Torino:
Galleria Civica d’ Arte Moderna, dal 4 aprile 1963.
Cultura e costume: Rivista di critica d’arte, letteraria, cinematografica e del costume A 1, no. 1 (dicembre
1972) – A. 4, no. 3–6 (December 1975). Milano: Centro d’ Arte “Cultura e Costume”, 1972–1975.
De Maria, Luciano, ed.: Marinetti e il futurismo. Milano: Mondadori, 1973. 1977. 4th rev. edn 1981.
1994. Revised edn under the title Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e il futurismo. Milano: Mondadori,
2000. Part 1 (Manifesti) reprinted in Luciano de Maria, Giampiero Posani, and Guido Neri, eds.:
I manifesti delle avanguardie: Futurismo, dadaismo, surrealismo. Trezzano sul Naviglio (MI):
Euroclub, 1998. 1–220.
De Maria, Luciano, and Laura Dondi, eds.: Per conoscere Marinetti e il futurismo: Un’antologia.
Milano: Mondadori, 1973. 3rd edn 1977. 4th edn 1981. Revised edn under title Marinetti e i
futuristi. Milano: Garzanti, 1994.
Di Sacco, Elda: “Francesco Cangiullo futurista e non solo.” CN – Comune notizie (Livorno) 24 (April
1998): 83–88.
Diez años de pintura italiana: Exposición circulante en Sur América. Organizada por la Bienal de
Venecia, por encargo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y del Ministerio de Educación.
Exhibition catalogue. Caracas: Museo de Bellas Artes, 27 de enero - 17 de febrero; Bogotà:
Museo Nazionale, 7 - 21 de marzo; Lima: Museo de Arte Italiano, a partir del 15 de abril;
Santiago de Chile: Museo de Arte Contemporáneo; Rio de Janeiro: Museu de Arte Moderna,
Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 18 de junio - 19 de julio 1957. Venezia: Arti
Grafiche Sorteni, 1957. Portuguese edn Dez anos de pintura italiana, 1945–1955: Exposição
itinerante na América do Sul e na Península Ibérica. Organizada pela Bienal de Veneza, por
iniciativa do Ministério dos Negócios Estrangeiros e do Ministério da Educação Nacional da
Itália. Lisboa: Palácio Foz, 5 - 25 abril 1958. Lisboa: Secretariado Nacional da Informação, 1958.
Drudi Gambillo, Maria, ed.: Dopo Boccioni: Dipinti e documenti futuristi dal 1915 al 1919. Exhibition
catalogue. Roma: Studio d’Arte Contemporanea “La Medusa”, dal 7 ottobre 1961.
Drudi Gambillo, Maria, ed.: Il futurismo. Presentazione di Aldo Palazzeschi. Saggi critici di Giorgio
Castelfranco, e Jacopo Recupero. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Ente Premi, Palazzo Barberini,
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 23

6 giugno–6 settembre 1959. Roma: De Luca, 1959. Swiss edn Il futurismo. Winterthur:
Kunstverein Winterthur, 4. Oktober–15. November 1959. German edn Futuristen: Ausstellung in
der Städtischen Galerie München. München: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 5. Dezember
1959–14. Februar 1960.
Drudi Gambillo, Maria, and Enrico Crispolti: “Documenti per la poetica della seconda generazione
futurista.” Notizie: Arti figurative (Torino) 3:10 (January 1960): 18–36.
Drudi Gambillo, Maria, and Teresa Fiori, eds.: Archivi del futurismo. Vols. 1–2. Roma: De Luca,
1958–62.
Falqui, Enrico: Bibliografia e iconografia del futurismo. Firenze: Sansoni, 1959.
Francastel, Pierre, ed.: Il futurismo ed il suo tempo: XXX Biennale di Venezia. Mostra storica del
futurismo. Venezia: La Biennale di Venezia, Stamperia di Venezia, 1960.
Futurballa, 1871–1958. Testo di Maria Drudi Gambillo. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Galleria Blu,
dicembre 1959–gennaio 1960.
Futurismo = Artecrazia: Centro Informazioni Arti e Lettere Contemporanee. A. 1, no. 1 (18 ottobre
1969) – A. 8, no. 23 (31 maggio 1976). Direttore Luigi Scrivo, direttore responsabile Luigi
Tallarico, condirettore Antonio Marasco. Roma: s. n., 1969–1976.
Futurismo-oggi: Periodico mensile per i giovani futuristi italiani. A. 1, no. 1 (1 dicembre 1969) – A. 25,
no. 2 (febbraio 1993). Roma: Edizioni Arte-Viva, 1969–1993.
Futuristas e artistas italianos de hoje na segunda Bienal de São Paulo, Brasil. Exposição organizada
pela Bienal de Veneza, a cargo do Ministerio de relac̃ões Exteriores e do Ministério da
Educação, 8 de dezembro de 1953 - 8 de fevereiro de 1954. Venezia: Ferrari, 1953.
Gentilucci, Armando: “Il futurismo e lo sperimentalismo musicale d’oggi.” Convegno musicale 1:3–4
(July–December 1964): 275–303. Re-issued as Il futurismo e lo sperimentalismo musicale
d’oggi. Torino: Edizioni del Convegno, 1965.
Giani, Giampiero: Il futurismo, 1910–1916. Venezia: Edizioni del Cavallino, 1950.
Ignace, Lilien: “Soniek anno 1914: ‘L’arte dei rumori’ van Luigi Russolo.” Mens en melodie 18 (1963):
203–206.
Italian Art of the 20th Century. Introduction Enrico Prampolini. Biographical notes by Vittorio
Orazi. Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia, March–April 1956, Adelaide: National Gallery of
South Australia, May–June, 1956; Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, July 1956; Hobart:
Tasmanian Museum, August–September 1956; Brisbane: Queensland Museum,
November–December 1956. Melbourne: McLaren, 1956.
Italian Artists of To-day: Exhibition of Italian Contemporary Art. Göteborg: Konsthallen, February
1951; Helsinki: Konsthallen, March 1951; Oslo: Kunstnernes Hus, April 1951; Copenhagen: Frie
udstilling, May 1951. Rome: Bestetti, 1951.
Lugaresi, Giovanni, ed.: “Lettere a F. Balilla Pratella di Severini, Russolo, De Pisis.” A cura di
Giovanni Lugaresi. Osservatore politico letterario 15:10 (October 1969): 80–95.
Lugaresi, Giovanni, ed.: “Lettere di Marinetti a F. Balilla Pratella.” A cura di Giovanni Lugaresi.
Osservatore politico letterario 15:7 (July 1969): 53–82; 15:8 (August 1969): 63–91; 15:9
(September 1969): 81–94.
Lugaresi, Giovanni, ed.: Lettere ruggenti a F. Balilla Pratella. A cura di Giovanni Lugaresi con un
“chiarimento” di Giuseppe Prezzolini. Milano: Quaderni dell’Osservatore, 1969.
Manghetti, Gloria: “The Fondazione Primo Conti: A Centre for Documenting and Researching the
Historical Avant-garde.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 8 (2018): 327–339.
Marabini, Claudio: “Per una storia del futurismo.” Nuova antologia: Rivista di lettere, scienze ed arti
98: 489 (#1953) (September 1963): 67–86.
Majakovskij, Vladimir: Opere. A cura di Ignazio Ambrogio. Vol. 1–8. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1958–1972.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Teatro. Vol. 1–3. A cura di Giovanni Calendoli. Roma: Bianco, 1960.
24 Günter Berghaus

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano:
Mondadori, 1968; 2nd edn 1983.
Modesti, Renzo: Il futurismo. Casatenovo Brianza: Vister, 1960.
Montale, Eugenio: “Buzzi-Cangiullo-Onofri.” Corriere della sera, 11 April 1961. Reprinted in E.
Montale: Sulla poesia. Milano: Mondadori, 1976. 316–318. E. Montale: Il secondo mestiere:
Arte, musica, società. Milano: Mondadori, 1996. 2376–2379.
Monteverdi, Mario, ed.: Avanguardia a teatro dal 1915 al 1955 nell’opera scenografica di Depero,
Baldessari, Prampolini. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Museo Teatrale alla Scala, 29 novembre
1969–10 gennaio 1970. Calliano (TN): Manfrini, 1970.
Mostra antologica del futurismo. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Centro Studi Futuristi, 1957.
Mostra delle scenografie di Enrico Prampolini nel Salone Napoleonico dell’ Academia di Brera.
Presentazione Guido Ballo. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Accademia di Brera, dal 14 maggio
1969. Milano: Maestri, 1969.
Mostra nazionale della pittura e della scultura futuriste. Exhibition catalogue. Bologna: Palazzo del
Podestà, 11–25 novembre 1951. Bologna: Movimento Futurista Italiano, 1951.
Palazzeschi, Aldo: Tutti i romanzi. Vol. 1. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
Pierre, José: Il futurismo e il dadaismo. Losanna: Rencontre; Ginevra: Edito-Service, 1965.
French translation Le Futurisme et le dadaisme. Lausanne: Rencontre, 1966. German
translation Futurismus und Dadaismus. Lausanne: Rencontre, 1967. Dutch translation
De schilderkunst van het futurisme en dadaïsme. Utrecht: Het Spectrum, 1968. Spanish
translation El futurismo y el dadaismo. Madrid: Aguilar, 1968. English translation
Futurism and Dadaism. Genève: Edito Service, 1969. Swedish translation Futurismen och
dadaismen. Hälsingborg: Concert Hall, 1969. Finnish translation Futurismi ja dadaismi.
Helsinki: Ex Libris, 1980.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: “Marinetti e il suo futurismo in Romagna.” La piê: Rassegna di
illustrazione romagnola 20:1–2 (January–February 1951): 5–8; 20:7–8 (July–August 1951): 153.
Prieberg, Fred K.: “Der musikalische Futurismus.” Melos 25 (1958): 124–127.
Prieberg, Fred K.: Musica ex machina: Über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik. Berlin: Ullstein,
1960. Italian translation Musica ex machina. Torino: Einaudi, 1963. Spanish translation
Música de la era técnica. Buenos Aires: Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires, 1961. Música y
máquina: Música concreta, electrónica y futurista, nuevos instrumentos, robots, discrografía.
Barcelona: Zeus, 1964.
Quaderni di Futurismo oggi. Due. Roma: Arte-Viva, [1967].
Quaranta futuristi. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Toninelli Arte Moderna, 16 gennaio–9 febbraio
1962.
Quarante ans d’art italien du futurisme à nos jours. Exhibition catalogue. Lausanne: Musée Cantonal
des Beaux Arts, 15 février–15 mars 1947. Lausanne: Imprimerie Centrale, 1947. German edn
40 Jahre italienischer Kunst: Die Erneuerungsbewegungen vom Futurismus bis heute. Luzern:
Kunstmuseum, 29. März–1. Juni 1947.
Rassegna nazionale di arti figurative, promossa dall’ente autonomo Esposizione Nazionale
Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma: Catalogo generale. Roma: Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Valle Giulia,
marzo–maggio 1948. Roma: Istituto Grafico Tiberino, 1948.
Ripellino, Angelo Maria: Majakovskij e il teatro russo d’avanguardia. Torino: Einaudi, 1959.
1968. 1978. 1982. 2002. German translation Majakowskij und das russische Theater der
Avantgarde. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1959. 2nd edn 1964. French translation Maïakovski
et le théâtre russe d’avant-garde. Paris: L’ Arche, 1965. Brazilian translation Maiakóvski e o
teatro de vanguarda. São Paulo: Editôra Perspectiva, 1971. 2nd edn 1986. Greek translation
Ho Magiakovskē kai to Rōsiko prōtoporiako theatro. Athēna: Kedros, 1977. Spanish translation
Mayakovsky y el teatro ruso de vanguardia. Sevilla: Editorial Doble J, 2005. 2nd edn 2014.
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 25

Russolo, Luigi: L‘ Art des bruits: Manifeste futuriste 1913. Introduction de Maurice Lemaître. Paris:
Richard-Masse, 1954.
Russolo, Luigi: L’arte dei rumori: Manifesto futurista. Milano: Direzione del movimento futurista,
1913. English translation “The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto.” Oliver Strunk, ed.: Source
Readings in Music History. New York: Norton, 1950. 643–648.
Russolo, Luigi: The Art of Noise: Futurist Manifesto, 1913. Translated by Robert Filliou. New York:
Something Else Press, 1967.
Schaeffer, Pierre: “La galleria sotto i suoni, ovvero il futuro anteriore.” La Biennale di Venezia: Arte,
cinema, musica, teatro 9:36–37 (July–December 1959): 65–71.
Scrivo, Luigi: “Il futurismo sempre vivente e vigoroso non è mai morto.” Futurismo = Artecrazia 2:10
(26 March 1970): 1.
Scrivo, Luigi, ed.: Sintesi del futurismo: Storia e documenti (Roma: Bulzoni, 1968).
Seganti, Giovanni: “Futurismo lughese: I simpatici pazzi.” Lugo nostra: Culturale – Artistica –
Letteraria. Special issue for Christmas 1956. Lugo: Randi, 1956. 5–7.
Sipario: Rassegna mensile dello spettacolo 22:260 (December 1967). Special issue on Teatro
futurista italiano.
Soby, James Thrall, and Alfred Hamilton Barr, eds.: Twentieth-century Italian Art. Exhibition
catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 28 June–18 September 1949.
Stagnitti, Barbara: “Enzo Bendetto e la continuità del futurismo.” B. Stagnitti, ed.: “Si va sempre /
verso il tempo / che verrà”: Enzo Benedetto e Futurismo-oggi. Corrispondenza 1969–1992.
Padova: Il Poligrafo, 2009. 2nd edn 2010. 9–52.
Studi teatrali 1:1 (March 1966). Special issue on Futurismo.
Valsecchi, Marco: Umberto Boccioni. Venezia: Edizioni del Cavallino, 1950.
Verdone, Mario: Il teatro del tempo futurista. Roma: Lerici, 1969. 2nd edn Roma: Bulzoni, 1988.
Verdone, Mario, ed.: Ginna e Corra: Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Special issue of Bianco e
nero 28:10–12 (October–December 1967). Re-issued as Cinema e letteratura del futurismo.
Roma: Edizioni di Bianco e Nero, 1968. 2nd edn Calliano: Manfrini, 1990.
Verdone, Mario, ed.: Teatro italiano d’avanguardia: Drammi e sintesi futuriste. Roma: Officina, 1970.
Vergara Grez, Ramón: “Exposición ‘Diez años de pintura italiana’. Museo de Bellas Artes, del 18 de
junio al 19 de julio.” Anales de la Universidad de Chile 115:106 (April–June 1957): 374–380.
Waterhouse, John Charles Graham: “A Futurist Mystery.” Music and Musicians 15:8 (April 1967):
26–30.
Waterhouse, John Charles Graham: “Futurist Music in Perspective.” Futurism 1909–19. Newcastle:
Hatton Gallery, 1972. 93–104.
Waterhouse, John Charles Graham: The Emergence of Modern Italian Music (up to 1940). Ph.D.
Dissertation. Oxford: University of Oxford, 1968.
Zanovello Russolo, Maria: Russolo: L’uomo, l’artista. Milano: Corticelli. 1958.
Zervos, Christian, ed.: Un demi-siècle d’art italien. Special issue of Cahiers d’art 25:1 (January 1950).

Further reading
Antonucci, Giovanni: “Continua la riscoperta critica del nostro futurismo.” Studium: Rivista univer-
sitaria 68:3 (March 1972): 248–252.
Antonucci, Giovanni: “La riscoperta critica del futurismo italiano.” Studium: Rivista universitaria
76:6 (November–December 1980): 783–807.
Barilli, Renato: “Le due eredità del futurismo.” Eugenio Gazzola, ed.: Le conseguenze del futurismo.
Piacenza: Scritture, 2009. 106–121.
26 Günter Berghaus

Barilli, Renato, ed.: I Nuovi Futuristi: Gianantonio Abate, Clara Bonfiglio, Dario Brevi, Gianni Cella,
Andrea Crosa, Innocente, Marco Lodola, Battista Luraschi, Luciano Palmieri, Plumcake, Umberto
Postal. Exhibition catalogue. Rovereto: Casa d’Arte Futurista Depero, 19 novembre 2011–26
febbraio 2012. Cinisello Balsamo (MI): Silvana, 2011.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Il Nuovo Futurismo a Tortona. Tortona: Palazzo Guidobono, 21 novembre 2010–9
gennaio 2011. Exhibition catalogue. Busto Arsizio (VA): Fondazione Bandera per l’ Arte, 2010.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Il Nuovo Futurismo: Gianantonio Abate, Clara Bonfiglio, Dario Brevi, Gianni Cella,
Andrea Crosa, Innocente, Marco Lodola, Battista Luraschi, Luciano Palmieri, Plumcake, Umberto
Postal. Exhibition catalogue. Busto Arsizio: Fondazione Bandera, 24 aprile–30 maggio 2010.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Nuovo Futurismo: Gianantonio Abate, Clara Bonfiglio, Innocente, Marco Lodola,
Luciano Palm ieri, Plumcake (Cella, Pallotta, Ragni), Umberto Postal. Exhibition catalogue.
Groningen: Groninger Museum, 23 februari–31 maart 1985.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Nuovo Futurismo. Exhibition catalogue. Madrid: Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 17
maggio–18 giugno 1989. Milano: Fabbri, 1989.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Nuovo Futurismo. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Rotonda di via Besana, marzo–
aprile 1986. Milano: Comune di Milano; Electa, 1986.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Nuovo Futurismo: Abate, Innocente, Lodola, Plumcake, Postal. Exhibition
catalogue. Rovereto: Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Archivio del ’900, 7 luglio–2
ottobre 1994. San Marino: Galleria Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Logge dei Balestrieri, 9
luglio–4 settembre 1994. Milano: Electa, 1994.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Nuovo Futurismo: Gianni Cella, Luciano Palmieri. Exhibition catalogue. Chur:
Galleria Arrivada, 7 Oktober 2011–7 Dezember 2011.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Nuovo Futurismo: Plumcake, Dario Brevi. Exhibition catalogue. Chur: Galleria
Arrivada, 28. Januar–26. März 2011.
Barilli, Renato, ed.: Nuovo Futurismo: Ridisegnare la città. Dedicato a Luciano Inga-Pin e Umberto
Postal. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Spazio Oberdan, 20 giugno–9 settembre 2012. Cologno
Monzese: Silvia, 2012.
Bartolucci, Giuseppe, ed.: Il “gesto” futurista: Materiali drammaturgici. Roma: Bulzoni, 1969.
Bartolucci, Giuseppe, ed.: Il suggeritore nudo: Introduzione al futurismo. Torino: Teatro Stabile, [1968].
Benedetto, Enzo: “Storia di ‘Futurismo-oggi’.” Futurismo-oggi 19:7–12 (July–December 1987): 3–4.
Benet, Rafael: El futurismo comparado el movimiento Dada. Barcelona: Omega, 1949.
Canal, Luca: Un ponte di nome Carlo Cardazzo: L’attività del gallerista tra Venezia, Milano, Roma e
Parigi. Tesi di laurea. Relatore Relatore Nico Stringa. Venezia: Università di Venezia Ca’ Foscari,
2014.
Catalogo della Galleria e Museo Depero – Rovereto: Il primo museo futurista d’Italia. Trento: T.E.M.I.
[Tipografia Editrice Mutilati Invalidi], 1959.
Crispolti, Enrico: “Appunti sul problema del secondo futurismo nella cultura italiana fra le due
guerre.” Notizie: Arti figurative 2:5 (April 1958): 34–51.
Crispolti, Enrico: “Il secondo futurismo.” Le arti 11:1–2 (January–February 1960): 22–23.
Crispolti, Enrico: “Indicazioni per una cronologia del secondo futurismo.” Notizie: Arti figurative 3:10
(January 1960): 12–16
Falqui, Enrico: “Nel cinquantenario del primo ‘Manifesto’: Il futurismo in appello.” Annali della
pubblica istruzione 6:2 (March–April 1960): 161–184.
Futurismo. Special issue of La Biennale di Venezia: Arte, cinema, musica, teatro 9:36–37 (July–
December 1959).
Menna, Filiberto: Enrico Prampolini. Roma: De Luca, 1967.
Peintres et sculpteurs italiens du futurisme à nos jours. Catalogue de l’exposition organisée par la
Biennale de Venise. Préface Gian Alberto Dell’ Acqua. St. Etienne: Musée d’Art et de l’Industrie,
May 1959; Dijon: Musée des Beaux-Arts, July 1959; Blois: Château de Blois, September 1959;
 The Historiography of Italian Futurism 27

St. Pierre: Musée St. Pierre, October 1959; Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 23 October 1959–6
December 1959; Charleroi: Palais des Beaux-Arts, December 1959. Lyon: Francia, 1959.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: Testamento. A cura di Rosetta Berardi e Francesca Serra. Ravenna:
Edizioni del Girasole, 2012.
Sega, Ierma: La Galleria Museo Fortunato Depero di Rovereto: Un esempio di museo monografico.
Genova: Masnata, 1995.
Aleš Erjavec
2 The Politics of Futurism
The ideology and politics of Futurism
Through most of its history, Futurism’s essential socially mediated activities – besides
art – seemed to be politics and ideology. Yet, it has been argued that “on the whole,
Futurism had no ideology nor did it want one” (De Felice: “Ideology”, 488). Such a
claim could hardly be made about Futurist politics. Already in its first year, the Futur-
ist movement published a manifesto for the general elections, Elettori futuristi! (First
Futurist Political Manifesto, 1909), thereby demonstrating that it held not only artis-
tic but also political ambitions. Afterwards, Marinetti and numerous other Futurists
carried out coordinated political campaigns, even if sometimes their views and politi-
cal positions varied or even became mutually exclusive. The first rift occurred in 1914,
when a number of first-hour Futurists, such as Ardengo Soffici and Giovanni Papini,
left the movement. A certain number of them decided to become ‘independent Futur-
ists’ (Emilio Settimelli in 1922, Antonio Marasco in 1932, Carlo Frassinelli and Rampa
Rossi in Turin, Pietro Illari in Pavia, etc.). Some became ‘Futurists of the Right’ (Bruno
Corra in March 1933), while others became adherents of a ‘Futurism of the extreme
Left’ (e. g. Paolo Buzzi in March 1933; see Berghaus: Futurism and Politics, 239–245).
Until the early 1920s, Futurism was the dominant cultural movement in Italy. Futur-
ism’s fundamental ideology was vague and poetic. However, this meant that Futurist
politics remained undefined, as such serving as a signifier that could be invested with
a plethora of meanings. Futurism was – artistically and politically – a movement and
not a school or an orthodox Party. It was also a part of what was later called ‘the Futur-
ist moment’, or what Perloff referred to as “that short-lived period when the possibili-
ties for an avant-garde – an avant-garde that would transform not only art but society
itself – seemed all but limitless” (Perloff: The Futurist Moment, xxxi).
Futurism was politically most active between 1918 and 1920. Over this period,
the Fasci politici futuristi were formed, articles such as “Concezione futurista della
democrazia” (The Futurist Concept of Democracy, April 1919) and “La democrazia
futurista” (Futurist Democracy, May 1919) were published, and a programme for an
‘Italian Revolution’ was elaborated. During that time, a situation developed in Italy
that allowed for unprecedented and unexpected historical developments. In such a
situation – representing the political ‘Futurist moment’ – a broad array of possibilities
was on the table, with the actual outcome of these political conflicts and struggles for
power in Italy being Mussolini’s takeover of the State in 1923–1924 and Marinetti’s loss
of all political positions.
In 1920, Marinetti had broken with Mussolini and had left the Fasci di combatti-
mento. After 1920, he retreated from politics, while Futurism, despite remaining the
most international and foremost avant-garde art movement in Italy, found itself on
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-002
 The Politics of Futurism 29

the cultural margins, and its activities became limited to the domain of art. After 1925,
when Fascism took control of Italy, some Futurists searched – out of opportunism or
conviction – for support in and cooperation with the Fascist régime.
In 1914 and 1915, Futurists carried out a series of interventionist actions. Among
them was one based on the manifesto Anti-Neutralist Clothes published on 11 Septem-
ber 1914. The action consisted of Francesco Cangiullo causing a scandal by wearing
such clothes at La Sapienza University. These were to be ephemeral, of vivid colours
and phosphorescent, forming a kaleidoscopic image in permanent movement.
Although the clothes could also have an independent aesthetic function, their intent
was primarily political. This example illustrates the versatile nature of Futurism as
well as its ingenious ways of artistically politicizing quotidian life and events.
Marinetti was a great master in permanently stage-managing unprecedented
public unrest mixed with avant-garde provocations. Generating extraordinary pub-
licity was his life-long trademark. Futurists knew how to make the best use of their
publications, performances, public riots and audience provocations – in brief, how
to carry out artistic acts and political propaganda that assured public attention. One
such method were the serate futuriste (Futurist evenings), the first of them taking
place in Trieste on 12 January 1910. Among their more conventional methods of dis-
semination were periodicals such as Lacerba and L’ Italia futurista. After 1912, the
number of Futurist magazines grew exponentially (more than 110 are listed in Salaris:
Riviste futuriste). The collaborators of these periodicals were not strictly Futurists or
necessarily adherents or supporters of Marinetti.
Futurist political views were presented in a series of manifestos such as Discorso
ai Triestini (Speech to the People of Trieste, 1910), La Guerre, seule hygiène du monde
(War, the Sole Cleanser of the World, 1911), Programma politico futurista (The Futurist
Political Programme, 1913), and books such as Democrazia futurista (Futurist Democ-
racy, 1919), Al di là del comunismo (Beyond Communism, 1920) and Futurismo e fas-
cismo (Futurism and Fascism, 1924). Since 1909, the starting point of Futurist politics
was the opposition to everything that disrupted Futurism’s libertarian spirit (cleri-
calism, democracy, bourgeoisie, the monarchy, Socialism, moralism and pacifism),
along with the defence and support of Anarchism, Irredentism, militant nationalism,
interventionism and patriotism.
While from 1909 into the 1920s Futurists incessantly produced ideas that were
an ever-changing but nonetheless continuous articulation, and re-articulation, of
national demands, grievances and expectations, they only rarely entered the institu-
tions of State politics. Futurists held only a few influential posts under Mussolini after
he became premier in 1923; on the contrary, they regularly witnessed Fascist reluc-
tance to share power with the Futurists. Around this time, Fascism as well as Futur-
ism, both artistically and politically, ceased being the revolutionary movements that
previously, and on many occasions, had acted in tandem. Once Fascism had assumed
the reins of power and promoted a ‘return to order’, Futurist anarchist behaviour
became increasingly redundant.
30 Aleš Erjavec

Anarchism and other influences

A potent influence among Futurists was Anarchism. This is obvious already from early
Futurist paintings, such as Carlo Carrà’s I funerali dell’anarchico Galli (The Funeral of
the Anarchist Galli, 1910–11) and Umberto Boccioni’s Rissa in Galleria (Riot in the Gal-
leria, 1910). On these canvases, we perceive ‘force-lines’, yet another Futurist artistic
invention. We also see how – with Words-in-Freedom and force-lines – the Futurists
fused expressive artistic innovations with political messages.
The majority of the early avant-gardes, Italian Futurism included, were strongly
influenced by Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism. Anarchist aesthetics promoted
ephemeral art: a “theorist of Anarchism understands art as an experience. […] He
struggles for a spontaneous ‘art en situation’ that depends on the moment and place”
(Proudhon, quoted in Reszler: L’ Esthétique anarchiste, 6). Syndicalist ideology was
also an easily recognizable influence in Futurism. Its most important author was
Georges Sorel, a Marxist who promoted the idea of a general strike that would enable
the formation of a proletarian State to be run by trade unions:

From political theorists Arturo Labriola and Georges Sorel Marinetti borrows the Marxist concep-
tion of the transformation of the world; in Anarchist thinkers such as Max Stirner, Bakunin and
Peter Kropotkin he imitates especially the position of protest toward art and cultural institutions
of the past. (Blumenkranz: “Une poétique de l’héroisme”, 51)

In the view of Anarchist thinkers, for art to be useful it should be connected to life
and the social sphere. For this reason, all creative works destined for collections and
museums were moribund. This recalls a statement from the Foundation and Mani-
festo of Futurism: “We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort”
(Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 22).
Other important influences were Nietzsche (who was also an object of criticism),
Ernest Renan and the philosophy of élan vital developed by another popular and
widely read philosopher, Henri Bergson. According to Bergson, only art allows for
the comprehension of reality because reason is not capable of intuitively grasp-
ing the world. Bergson exerted a strong influence on both Sorel and Marinetti. His
philosophy thus played an important rôle in Futurist art: his ideas were influen-
tial especially in Futurist painting and sculpture, for he highlighted the power of
intuition and the rôle of movement. The link between Bergson and Futurism was so
strong that, in July 1912, Auguste Joly wrote in the magazine La Belgique artistique
that Bergsonism and Futurism “have thus far revealed themselves as similar, for
they both make use of symbolic continuities of emotions” (Joly: “Le Futurisme et la
philosophie”, 418.)
Marinetti was also critical of Sorel. In fact, he put him in the same basket as Kant
and Hegel, whom he reproached for aprioristic and blind professorialism (“profes-
soralismo aprioristico e cieco quello di Sorel”; Marinetti: “Crollo di filosofi e storici,
 The Politics of Futurism 31

sibille a rovescio”, 315). He furthermore criticized Sorel for his lack of intuition and
his erroneous views of art, religion and philosophy: “For us Futurists, philosophy
and religion are two kinds of police, created from fear of this – war and revolution –
and from fear of that over there – hell. For us art is inseparable from life. If it becomes
art-action it is thus the only one capable of prophetic and divine power” (Marinetti:
“Crollo di filosofi e storici, sibille a rovescio”, 315). For his part, Sorel had a low
opinion of avant-garde art, which he regarded as the moment when painting fell
into the absurd, into the unconnectedness of foolish forms. Sorel’s views resembled
Proudhon’s, who privileged aesthetic experience and an art that does not become a
prisoner of museums, galleries and concert halls.
If Anarchism represented the international moment of Futurism, then Italian
nationalism was its local complement. Futurism was nationalistic from its begin-
ning: on the one hand, the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism already contained
criticism of Italy, while on the other it offered an artistic as well as political pro-
gramme for its rejuvenation. It was therefore not uncommon to hear Marinetti speak
of “Italian pride” (Critical Writings, 119, 156, 170, 226–231, 281, 300, 357, 394) and the
“extraordinary number of geniuses” (“The Proletariat of Talented People”, 304) pro-
duced by the Italian race or of the Italian homeland as the maximum extension of
the individual.
Italian nationalism was a phenomenon widely shared by a great majority of
Italian intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth and the first decades of the
twentieth century. In this respect, Italian Futurism differed strongly from other Euro-
pean avant-gardes, for whom nationalism was largely irrelevant at that time. Futur-
ism wanted to make patriots of Italians and to turn Italy into a ‘strong’ nation, equal to
other ‘big’ nations, following the famous statement attributed to Massimo D’Azeglio:
“We have made Italy: now we have to make Italians”.

Futurists and war

In a 1913 manifesto devoted to the Futurist political movement, Boccioni, Carrà and
Luigi Russolo wrote that “the word ITALY must take absolute precedence over the word
LIBERTY” (Marinetti: “Second Futurist Political Manifesto”, 74). To the Futurists, war
represented an aesthetic act and was “the sole cleanser of the world” (Marinetti: “La
Guerre, seule hygiène du monde”, 14). Such opinions resembled those of other Euro-
pean artists (for instance, Fernand Léger praised the rôle of canons, weapons and the
city). War was perceived as not only an aesthetic but also a peculiar cleansing act,
while its aestheticization was usually mixed with patriotism. This held true for Mari-
netti as well, except that in his case it remained valid well into the Second World War:
after he travelled as a war correspondent to the Italo-Turkish front in Libya (1911–12),
he volunteered for the army in 1915 for the duration of the war, during which time he
32 Aleš Erjavec

was also wounded; later, he departed as a volunteer to fight the war in Ethiopia (1935)
and, aged sixty-six, went to the Russian front (1942).
In early Futurism, technology and orientation towards the future carried impor-
tant ideological significations. At issue were not actual scientific discoveries but rather
enthusiasm over the visible attributes of the nascent technological world. It was no
longer the smokestack that served as an example of new technology, but rather the
aeroplane, the automobile and the steamship. The Futurist fascination with speed
found its Russian equivalent in Vladimir Tatlin’s Pamiatnik Tret’emu Internatsionalu
(Monument to the Third International, 1917) and in the fascinating movement of its
constitutive geometric bodies.
Futurists denigrated the past, which was often synonymous with old age,
while admiring a future in a way that implied the admiration of youth. Such a bio-
political designation found its parallel in society, where the past was something to be
destroyed and replaced with the new:

The Futurists […] have destroyed, destroyed, destroyed, without worrying if the new creations
produced by their activity were on the whole superior to those destroyed. […] They have grasped
sharply and clearly that our age […] was in need of new forms of art, philosophy, behaviour and
language. (Gramsci: “Marinetti the Revolutionary”, 51)

Futurism and Bolshevism

Before and after the Great War, the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI) was a strong polit-
ical force in Italy. Due to their post-war political inefficiency and indecisiveness, the
Socialists did not stop the political chaos and turmoil but seemed to contribute to it.
Futurism was closer to the Bolsheviks and the October Revolution, which was simul-
taneously a political, social and cultural revolution. The October Revolution and a
new revolutionary political system were unprecedented historic events not only from
the Russian perspective but also globally and were comparable only to the French
Revolution. The October Revolution was often seen as the blueprint for the Futurist
and Fascist ‘revolutions’ in Italy. The basic difference between them was that their ide-
ology and political concerns had different addressees, namely ‘the nation’ in Italy and
‘the workers and peasants’ in Russia. While Marinetti exhorted a Futurist ideology
consisting of anarchic individualism, inequality, libertarianism and violence, Lenin’s
Bolsheviks (in Marinetti’s opinion) privileged Utopian levelling, uncreative collectiv-
ism and the negation of the individual. Marinetti’s conclusion was – as explained in
various publications, the most important among them being his brochure, Al di là del
comunismo (Beyond Communism, written in December 1919) – that Italy could not
follow the of Bolshevik Revolution’s model but instead had to find its own solutions
built on its own values.
 The Politics of Futurism 33

Futurism and Fascism

In Italy and Russia, Futurism was not only an artistic but equally a cultural move-
ment. Since ‘culture’ was primarily understood as national culture in both of these
countries, it carried important political connotations. Historians have always con-
sidered Fascismo and German Nationalsozialismus as the basic models of generic
Fascism, which was a political and social phenomenon also in Spain, Romania and
Hungary, and elsewhere (see Griffin: The Nature of Fascism; Fascism; International
Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus; Fascism, Totalitarianism and Politi-
cal Religion; Modernism and Fascism; A Fascist Century). In all cases, its main charac-
teristics were extreme nationalism, militarism and totalitarianism, or at least extreme
authoritarianism.
Futurism and Fascism ascribed priority to the nation at the expense of the class:
“the identity as the people plays a much more important rôle than the identity as
class” (Laclau: Politics and Ideology, 114). This sentiment is very obvious from two of
Marinetti’s statements in Beyond Communism, which expressed ideology and polit-
ical positions that Mussolini soon appropriated for Fascism: “The concept of the
nation is as indestructible as that of a political party”; “The nation is nothing other
than a vast political party” (Marinetti: Beyond Communism, 340–341). Marinetti here
posited the primacy of the nation when compared to class. A nation is typically inter-
nally divided according to class, religion, tradition, region, dialect, etc. Yet Marinet-
ti’s phrasing homogenized the nation and interpreted it as a political Party, which
implied conscious and active belonging – something that in fact cannot be the case
with the nation: I choose my political Party but am born into my nation. A question
remained: if the Party is represented by its representatives, then who represents the
nation? Under Fascism, the answer was: the Fascist State.
Beyond Communism also reveals Marinetti’s proximity to Fascist demagoguery.
He proclaimed Marx’s well-known statement (originally ascribed to Socrates and
Diogenes the Cynic) that he is a “citizen of the world” to have “the same meaning
as ‘I don’t give a damn about Italy, Europe or Humanity. All I care about is myself’ ”
(Marinetti: Beyond Communism, 340). Needless to say, the meaning of the statement
about being a citizen of the world is clear and is completely different from the inter-
pretation proffered by Marinetti.
The ideas of Marinetti and Futurism about the nation and Italy were extensively
appropriated by the Fascists. Their common denominators were populism and the
privilege assigned to the nation, which was to serve as cement to the national commu-
nity. Hence, during the second Fascist Congress in May 1920 when Marinetti left the
Fascist movement, Fascists stated that they supported any initiative by those minority
groups of the proletariat that were able to assimilate class interest to the nationalist
one. Fascism set up a corporative system and attempted to put the State in the position
of the only locus of power to which political parties would be subordinated. In reality,
“Fascism survived partly because of the Duce’s accomplishments on a national level,
34 Aleš Erjavec

and partly because, after the dissolution of the opposition, there was simply nothing
else” (Hamilton: The Appeal of Fascism, 62).

Fascism: Roots, sources and developments vis-à-vis

Futurism
The theoretical and ideological roots of Fascism are well known: they are Georges
Sorel, with his revolutionary syndicalism; the economist and sociologist Vilfredo
Pareto, with his theory of social changes and the rise of new élites; and Enrico Corrad-
ini and Giovanni Pascoli, with their thesis about the opposition between ‘proletarian’
(poor) nations and ‘bourgeois’ (rich) nations and their attacks on ‘European plutocra-
cies’ such as Britain and France. Poor nations could only accept nationalism, just as
the poor classes found hope in the acceptance of Communism as their ideology. The
majority of Italians, intellectuals included, believed that Italy had been discriminated
against, that it should possess colonies in order to populate them with its own people
and that the Italian-speaking territories occupied by Austria should be redeemed.
This negative sentiment against Austria and everything ‘German’ is very much visible
in Carlo Carrà’s chart, Sintesi futurista della guerra (Marinetti et al.: “Sintesi futurista
della Guerra”, 280–281). In the early (or ‘heroic’) period of Futurism, ideas and actions
that eventually were going to lead to Fascism were only implicitly present: in inter-
ventionism, in nationalism, in criticism of Communism, in militarism and violence.
In the prewar period, such attitudes did not have the same consequences as after the
Great War. Thus, for example, in June 1911, the Milanese Futurists came to Florence in
a punitive expedition to settle accounts with Ardengo Soffici for having published a
very unfavourable article about a Milanese Futurist exhibition. A fight ensued, but at
the end Soffici joined the Futurists (Soffici: Fine di un mondo, 594–600).
Mussolini’s early career developed within the Socialist Party. In December 1911,
he became the editor of Avanti! and initially distanced himself from the Futurists.
However, during the interventionist period (1914–15), he changed his mind and joined
forces with Marinetti. Mussolini’s rhetoric owed much to Marinetti, in whom he saw
“an innovative poet who gave me the sense for oceans and the machine” (Mussolini:
Corrispondenza inedita, 55).
Fascism as a political ideology and historical phenomenon developed through
different stages: in its nascent phase, it shared numerous ideas and activities with the
Futurist political programme; a second phase followed with the formation of the Fasci
di combattimento on 23 March 1919 in piazza San Sepolcro and a third in 1924, when it
assumed the reins of power in the Italian State. Fascism started off as a revolutionary
movement, and a left-wing faction continued to exist well into the 1920s. However, after
Mussolini made his truce with the Vatican and the Monarchy, the movement as a whole
changed direction and became a conservative and reactionary force in the country.
 The Politics of Futurism 35

Marinetti, who was a key representative of the Fascist left, like the majority of
those Futurists who accepted Fascism, was initially publicly full of praise for Mus-
solini, who purportedly demonstrated “a Futurist consciousness” (Marinetti in an
interview with the newspaper L’ avvenire; see GIRAV: “Il valore futurista della Guerra”;
in Critical Writings, 242). Marinetti confided his real feelings about Mussolini in his
diary. In the entry dated 4 December 1918, we read: “I sense the reactionary in the
making in this violent, agitated temperament, so full of Napoleonic authoritarian-
ism and a nascent, aristocratic scorn for the masses” (Marinetti: “A Meeting with the
Duce”, 285).
Mussolini and Marinetti were closest between 1915 and 1919. Interventionist ideas
at that time were supported by the great majority of Italian intellectuals and artists.
Gabriele D’Annunzio, who was one of the earliest voices defending interventionism,
thus said in a speech in Genoa in May 1915, at the time of Italy’s entry into war: “What
do you want, Italians, to make the nation smaller or bigger? Wish for an Italy which
will be bigger not with the aid of acquisition but with the aid of conquest, not with
the force of shame but for the price of blood and glory!” (D’Annunzio: “Parole dette al
popolo di Genova nella sera del ritorno, IV maggio MDCCCLX”, 12). The Futurists were
the loudest interventionists, but the war was also championed by Luigi Pirandello
and Giuseppe Ungaretti. The great majority of Italian intellectuals supported the war.
In September 1918, Marinetti, Mario Carli and Emilio Settimelli founded the news-
paper Roma futurista, which carried the subtitle “Newspaper of the Futurist Political
Party”. The programme of this Party had been published as a manifesto in February
of the same year. Its founding is dated 11 to 17 August, i.e during Marinetti’s stay in
Rome. Following the FPP’s founding meeting sometime between 11 and 17 August
1918 and the formulation of its political programme, the Party slowly began to take
shape. On 6 December 1918, the first fascio (Party branch) was formed in Florence.
The group held its first official meeting at the Gambrinus Hall in Florence, under the
chairmanship of Enrico Rocca (see Berghaus: “The Futurist Political Party”).
Still in December 1918, the Fasci politici futuristi were founded, a political Party
with a name related to the interventionist groups of 1914 and 1915. They were then
called Fasci di azione rivoluzionaria, with the term fascio meaning a group or an
association, generally used by the Italian Left. These now became action leagues of
former soldiers and included veterans of the shock troops (arditi) dressed in black
shirts, with a headquarters in Marinetti’s house: “Futurist Mario Carli founded the
first association of arditi in Rome. The second, the one in Milan, was founded in 1919
by Ferrucio Vecchi in my house, Corso Venezia 61, in Milan” (Marinetti: Teoria e inven-
zione futurista, 495–496). Mussolini continued with this initiative and formed his
own group, the Fasci di combattimento. Among the co-founders were also Marinetti
and Ungaretti.
From the programme of the Fasci politici futuristi, or Futurist Political Party, it
is obvious that the Futurists wished not only to expand their activity explicitly into
the political domain but also to focus on political action for some time to come by
36 Aleš Erjavec

separating the Party from the Futurist art movement. The programme included an
eight-hour working day, collective working contracts, social aid, the right to strike,
the right of assembly, etc. It also announced the expropriation of Church lands and
promised to allot former soldiers land free of charge. Futurists opposed the monarchy
of the liberal State; they accentuated the rôle of youth and the passion for technology;
the proletariat was to receive a patriotic education with accents on sports and military
exercise. Their reasoning was that if people devoted more time to sports instead of
learning Greek and Latin, everyone would be able to defend themselves from crim-
inals, thereby making the police and prisons redundant in a Futurist city. Futurists
furthermore pronounced marriage to be like lawful prostitution and supported free
love and the abolishment of the family. Not surprisingly, the programme was firmly
anti-clerical: the Futurists wanted to liberate Italy “of its churches, its priests, its
friars, its nuns, its madonnas, its candles, and its bells” (Marinetti: “Manifesto of the
Futurist Political Party”, 272). The aim of the programme was also the overcoming
of class antagonism between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Parliament was to
be transformed, with industrialists, farmers, engineers and businessmen playing an
active rôle in the government of the country. In a second stage, government was to be
replaced by a group of twenty technocrats elected by universal suffrage; the Senate
was to be replaced by a Supervisory Assembly made up of twenty young men under
the age of thirty, elected by universal suffrage; there was to be an equal vote for men
and women in a broadly based election system using proportional representation.
Similarities between Fascism and Futurism did not end with their respective polit-
ical programmes. The Fascists, who discovered the efficiency of Futurist street man-
ifestations in interventionist fights, also employed violence as a new form of politi-
cal engagement. When Mussolini founded his Party, the Futurists welcomed it. The
Futurists were initially supportive of the Fasci di combattimento, founded in 1919, but
not of the Partito Nazionale Fascista; PNF, founded in 1922. It was only after 1924 that
some leading members of the Futurist movement aligned themselves with the PNF,
but few of them ever joined the Party. At this time, Fascism supported the elimination
of the monarchy and the denationalization of Church property. But political support
for Fascists and Futurists remained weak: when, in November 1919, Mussolini, Mari-
netti and Arturo Toscanini ran for parliament, they received fewer than 5,000 votes,
while the Socialists received 170,000 and the Catholics 74,000.
At the second congress of the Fasci di combattimento, a conflict with the Futurists
occurred, for the Fascists no longer criticized the Church and the Monarchy, turned to
the Right and increasingly institutionalized themselves. After 1919, the Futurist phase
of Fascism ended, and in 1920, Marinetti and some other Futurists left the Fascist
movement. Mussolini described Marinetti as an “extravagant clown”, while the Futur-
ists reproached the Fascists for distancing themselves from the masses and advocated
support of proletarian demands. Marinetti and Ferruccio Vecchi opposed the mon-
archy and clerical tendencies of some of the speakers. In the same year, but already
after leaving the Fasci di combattimento, Marinetti, Carli and Settimelli published the
 The Politics of Futurism 37

essay, Che cos’è il futurismo (What is Futurism?, published in several versions between
1910 and 1919), in which they affirmed that Futurism in life was the same as Futurism
in politics and art. Nonetheless they saw it was necessary that political and artistic
Futurisms be kept separate, although autonomous artistic activity should infuse polit-
ical action with innovative energy. Similar to how Mussolini saw Futurism, Giuseppe
Bottai, a former Futurist and a founding member of the Fasci di combattimento, and
Fascist cultural ideologue, lamented in a speech from 1 January 1921 that Futurism
had run its course and that “only those who speak of order, rhythm and law that need
to be restored to our life” have a meaningful rôle to play in the post-war situation
(Bottai: “Un libro su F. T. Marinetti”).

Futurism during the period of the Fascist régime

On 29 May 1920, Marinetti handed in his resignation from the Central Committee and
quit the Fasci di combattimento. This was more than a symbolic gesture showing his
disappointment with the course of political events in the country; in fact it signalled
Marinetti’s decision to return to an artistic agenda. During the years 1920 to 1924,
Marinetti successfully re-launched Futurism. To accommodate Futurism to changed
political circumstances, he proposed in I diritti artistici propugnati dai futuristi italiani:
Manifesto al governo fascista (Artistic Rights Championed by the Italian Futurists:
A Manifesto for the Fascist Government, 1923) to limit Futurist activities to the realm of
art. This departure from the political arena was supplemented by personal changes,
namely his “decision to marry in 1923, […] his acceptance of the regime and move
to Rome in 1925, and finally his decision to join the Italian Academy in 1929 and to
convert to Catholicism in the 1930s” (Adamson: Embattled Avant-Gardes, 248; see also
Berghaus: “Marinetti’s Volte-Face of 1920”).
The longer Futurism existed, the more diversified and ramified it became. Differ-
ent groups, revues and individuals parted ways with Marinetti or uneasily coexisted
with him. Marinetti succeeded in keeping Futurism relatively autonomous, and in
the above-mentioned Manifesto to the Fascist Government he spelled out his view of
the future separation between Fascism and Futurism: Futurism would operate in the
unlimited domain of pure fantasy and only intervene in the political battle in hours of
great danger for the Nation.
In spite of the innumerable compromises he had to make with Fascism and his
fellow-Futurists, Marinetti succeeded in keeping the movement alive. As recently dis-
covered documents bear witness, Marinetti was only marginally supported by the
Fascist State and was furthermore under police surveillance (see Berghaus: Futur-
ism and Politics, 281–290). Since leaving politics behind, he saw himself once again
primarily as an artist rather than a politician. On various occasions he also made
an effort to help artists who came into conflict with the régime. Such was the case
38 Aleš Erjavec

of the Slovenian writer France Bevk, who was an Italian citizen, but critical of the
Fascist régime. As the President of the PEN club in Rome, Marinetti attempted to help
Bevk participate in the congress of PEN centres in Dubrovnik on 25–27 May 1933. On
10 May 1933, Bevk wrote to France Stele, the secretary of the Ljubljana PEN club, that
he would write a letter to Marinetti the following day “in which I implore him to inter-
vene with the Ministry of Interior, for only this can help” (see Archival sources: Bevk
et al.: Letters, s.p.). In spite of Marinetti’s intervention, however, Bevk’s travel docu-
ments were not issued. Nonetheless, after receiving yet another letter from Dr. Stele,
Marinetti attempted once more to intervene in 1935, this time successfully. Hence Bevk
was able to attend the PEN Congresses in Barcelona (1935), Paris (1937) and Prague
(1938), where he reported on the Fascist violence and terror perpetrated against the
Slovenian population in Italy.
Italian art was frequently exhibited in Germany. Thus in February–March 1934,
an exhibition of Futurist painting was held in Hamburg and moved to Berlin as Aus-
stellung Italienische Futuristische Luft- und Flugmalerei (Exhibition of Italian Futurist
Aeropainting, 25 March – 27 April 1934). But Futurism also provided conflict in the
relations between Italy and Hitler’s Germany. In that same year, Futurists strongly
criticized racist and conservative conceptions of art, and in 1934 the Futurist Enrico
Prampolini publicly attacked Hitler for censuring modern art, thereby almost causing
a diplomatic scandal. The Fascist radical with Nazi sympathies, Roberto Farinacci,
argued that modern art was, just like entartete Kunst in Germany, degenerate – only
to be immediately reprimanded by the Futurist Mino Somenzi, who recalled his own
political pedigree as a soldier, legionnaire and Fascist. In autumn 1938, Giuseppe
Bottai, who in the meantime had become minister of education, founded a semi-official
newspaper, Critica fascista (1923–1943), that was tolerant of all styles. Such events
demonstrate the relatively ‘soft’ totalitarianism in Italy of the 1930s. Among the well-
known Italian intellectuals and scientists, only Enrico Fermi emigrated – a picture
vastly different from that of Hitler’s Germany. Italian Fascism only occasionally acted
in a truly totalitarian manner; more often than not it was simply authoritarian. None-
theless, in the newly gained territories it carried out a ruthless nationalistic policy
against local non-Italian populations.

Artistic alternatives to Futurism

It has been argued that Futurist art was simply Fascist art in the same way that the art
of Arno Breker, Josef Thorak or Richard Klein was the art of German National Social-
ism. Although some Futurists changed their aesthetic and artistic preferences and
started to support other, non-Futurist styles, they can hardly be considered ‘Fascist
artists’. Well-known cases include Carlo Carrà, who left Futurism in 1915 and turned to
metaphysical painting, or Mario Sironi or Ottone Rosai, who moved closer to Fascism.
 The Politics of Futurism 39

Starting in 1929, Aeropittura (aeropainting) and Aeropoesia (aeropoetry) – art forms

that could be either militant or spiritual and mystical – began to replace the name of
‘Futurism’, thereby attempting to assimilate it into Fascist culture.
In the 1920s and 1930s, artistic groups (especially in literature) existed in Italy
that to some degree produced work that resembled Nazi art. One was the literary
and cultural Strapaese (Super-Countryside) movement, which emerged in 1926. It
was strongly opposed to the prewar modernism pioneered by Futurism and was both
traditional and provincial. The Novecentismo movement, launched in Milan in 1922,
included the more pro-European, urban and ‘cosmopolitan’ Stracittà (Super-City).
The Novecento artists, with the support and advice of Margherita Sarfatti, became
rivals of Futurism and succeeded in gaining the support of Mussolini. Nonetheless,
the Duce did not want to involve art in ideological combat or make it subservient to
the State and therefore stated in 1923: “I declare that it is far from my mind to encour-
age anything resembling an art of the State. Art belongs to the domain of the indi-
vidual” (Mussolini: “Alla mostra del Novecento”). Mussolini’s policies in this respect
remained unchanged throughout his reign of Italy. Sarfatti attempted to turn what
since 1925 had been called Novecento Italiano into an organized and perhaps official
art of Fascist Italy. The movement held its first official exhibition in 1926, which was
addressed by Mussolini. Sarfatti wanted to turn Novecento Italiano into an umbrella
organization that would bring together all the national avant-gardes, but such a policy
met with criticism and finally failure, partly because with the founding of the Confed-
eration of Professionals and Artists in 1928, autonomous art institutions outside State
control became prohibited.
At least until the middle of the 1920s, Futurism continued to be an avant-garde art:
well into the 1930s, it remained open-minded and interacted with other progressive
and cosmopolitan circles, with its more recent areas of artistic intervention (although
their beginnings go to 1915) being tactilism, ceramics, interior design and cuisine.
Futurism continued to behave aggressively towards traditionalist aesthetics and
strove not only to represent the world, but to transform it. In this respect, Italian Futur-
ism resembled Russian Futurism and especially Constructivism. In both instances, a
fusion of artistic and political avant-gardes occurred, causing the artistic avant-garde to
intervene in the political space. This was more characteristic of Italian Futurism, which
was organically connected to the emergent Fascism, than of the Russian avant-garde.

Russian Futurism: From bohemia towards artistic

exclusivism
The influences of Italian and sometimes of Russian Futurism have been documented
in numerous countries. This influence was generally artistic and at times cultural. In
most instances, however, it involved individuals and not movements. Italian Futurism
40 Aleš Erjavec

was influential mostly in Western Europe, and Russian Futurism in Slavic countries.
The Italian movement had historical precedence over its Russian counterpart, and
the differences between the two were so significant that the term ‘Futurism’ does not
really signify a shared concern.
Futurism appeared in Russia in 1910 and was called ‘budetlianstvo’ at that time
(see p. 764 in the entry on Russia in this volume). Only in 1911 did the name ‘Futurism’
appear in the subtitle of a collection of poems by Igor Severyanin. Before the First
World War, ‘Futurism’ in Russia was synonymous “with post-symbolist literary inno-
vation, urban modernity, and public provocation” (Ram: “Futurist Geographies”, 322).
After the Revolution, the term designated modern art in general and often included
experimental and avant-garde art. Futurism was an active force in literature as well
as in the visual arts.
The first Futurist poems, by Velimir Khlebnikov and David and Nikolai Burliuk,
were published in the almanac Studiia impressionistov (Impressionist Studio) in
February 1910. The real beginning of Futurism in Russia, however, was the almanac
Sadok sudei (A Trap for Judges), published in April 1910. In the beginning, Russian
Futurism was represented mostly by lyric poetry. It offered no political message, but
was notorious for its avant-garde provocations and decadent individualism. In 1911,
the literary group Hylaea presented a manifesto entitled Poshchechina obshchestven-
nomu vkusu (A Slap in the Face of the Public Taste, 1912), signed by David Burliuk,
Velimir Khlebnikov, Aleksei Kruchenykh and Vladimir Mayakovsky. In 1914, Russian
Futurism bifurcated into a ‘national’ wing (Khlebnikov, Livshits) and a ‘cosmopolitan’
wing (Mayakovsky, some Ego-Futurists). Cubo-Futurism was adopted in 1913, and its
adherents called themselves ‘budetliane’ (budet = will be) and developed a theory
of equivalence between words and material things. The foremost Cubo-Futurist painter
was Malevich. Other Futurist groups in Russia included the Ego-Futurists, led by
Severyanin.
Mayakovsky was one of the rare Futurists whose poetry also focussed on broader
political issues such as war and revolution. He was well known and appreciated by
the public, a fame that put him in a special position after the Revolution when he and
other avant-garde artists and theorists strove to hegemonize Bolshevik cultural policy.
Russian Futurism and its successors in Lef magazine were, besides Italian Futur-
ism, the only avant-garde movement in the early twentieth century that became polit-
ically influential due to its ties with a political avant-garde. They were also the only
Russian movement from before the October Revolution that organizationally per-
sisted in the new Soviet State.
Post-revolutionary Russian Futurism underwent a number of transformations,
most of them carried out due to organizational and conceptual reasons. In 1918,
Futurists attained practical control of the newspaper Iskusstvo kommuny (Art of the
Commune), which they used for their propaganda. Their next important publications
were the magazines Lef: Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv (Lef: Journal of the Left Front
of the Arts, 1923–1925) and Novyi Lef (New Lef, 1927–1928). All of these undertakings
 The Politics of Futurism 41

were directed by Osip Brik and Boris Kushner, with Mayakovsky acting as a person
nominally in charge of some of them, although he probably left most of the editorial
work to Brik.
We may speak of a political relevance of Russian Futurism only after the October
Revolution, although even then it remained limited in influence and its numbers
constantly decreased. Accordingly, while the first number of Lef in April 1923 was
published in 5,000 copies, by its seventh issue in January 1925 its print run had
been reduced to only 1,500 copies. This was far from what the former Futurists had
expected. They believed that their ideas and deeds would be the starting point of a
global radical avant-garde that would resemble a world revolution, while their maga-
zine Lef was expected to gather together experimental Russian art. By the time Novyi
Lef appeared in 1925, the group had stopped calling itself ‘Futurist’.
One of supporters of Futurism and the avant-garde was Anatoly Lunacharsky, who
became the People’s Commissar of Education and the representative of the Soviet cul-
tural administration. “The vacuum in Russian cultural life brought by the Revolution
had allowed the left artists, as they came to call themselves, to become highly visible
despite their lack of popularity” (Stephan: “Lef” and the Left Front of the Arts, 2).
Futurism and the movements into which it developed were strongly dependent
upon Lunacharsky’s support and that of the Soviet administration, which frequently
found Futurist aesthetic values and political tactics extremist. The history of Russian
Futurism from the October Revolution onward was thus a long series of attempts by
the avant-garde to secure positions in Soviet organizations, sideline competitors and
promote its own activities as the only ones suitable for the new social and political order.
When the Bolsheviks took control of Russia, Mayakovsky and his fellow
avant-gardists sought to take control of Soviet institutions of art and literature. It thus
soon became clear that Mayakovsky’s group was far more radical than the Bolshe-
viks, thus forcing Lunacharsky on a number of occasions either to distance himself
from Lef artists or to criticize them in public. One such reprimand from Lunacharsky
came in 1925: “Lef is already an almost obsolete thing. […] Comrade Mayakovsky and
his friends came out of an aesthetic culture, a culture of the satiated bourgeois, who
sought new graces, new caprices, and unusual eccentricities. They have retained
this position” (Stephan: “Lef” and the Left Front of the Arts, 53). In June 1925, the
Central Committee published its directive, O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi
literatury (The Party’s Policy in the Field of Literature), proclaiming that no group
could lay claim to artistic legitimacy and that the Party would not endorse any par-
ticular style. Lev Trotsky also took part in these events, attempting to explain to the
Lef members that the Party would not canonize the work or orientation of any par-
ticular group as authentically ‘Communist’. In 1925, the Lef group began to promote
Faktography, i. e. an art based on facts and not fiction, which turned out to be more
successful than other Lef projects. New Lef continued until 1928, when Mayakovsky’s
group dropped the idea of an independent path for Soviet literature. In February 1930,
the majority of Lef members joined the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.
42 Aleš Erjavec

A parallel historical path was that of Constructivism, first introduced in 1913 by

Vladimir Tatlin, although the name only began to be widely used after 1920. Alexei
Gan, Alexander Rodchenko, Liubov Popova, Tatlin, El Lissitzky and many others
in the 1920s experimented with industrial and utilitarian objects and new aesthetic
forms, attempting to create art that would authentically respond to what they consid-
ered to be the need of the new political system for a new art and a New Man. Some
also completely rejected the very category of the ‘work of art’, claiming that it was
a remnant of the bourgeois epoch. Nonetheless, they continued with their artistic
activities (especially in stage design and the design of everyday objects), working
together with avant-garde artists from cinema and theatre. They also started educa-
tional programmes intended to form “artist-constructors” and “artist-engineers”. For
this purpose, the VKhuTeMas (Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops) were founded.
All such endeavours ended in the early 1930s. Aleksandr Rodchenko and El Lis-
sitzky continued their artistic experiments with photography and design (especially
in the magazine SSSR na stroike [Soviet Union in Construction]) but became increas-
ingly isolated because, beginning in the early 1930s, Soviet art had moved to Socialist
Realism.

Archival sources
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Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica (National and University Library), Ljubljana. Ms. 1832. PEN
Club. V. Correspondence, V. 2. “The Bevk Matter”.

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Further reading
Adamson, Walter L.: Avant-garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism. The Politics of Culture in
Italy, 1903–1922. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press 1993.
Affron, Matthew, and Mark Antliff: “Art and Fascist Ideology in France and Italy: An Introduction.”
Matthew Affron, and Mark Antliff, eds.: Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy.
Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. 3–24.
Albini, Carla: Les Arts plastiques en Italie de 1860 à 1943. Paris: Editions Entente, 1985.
Anděl, Jaroslav, ed.: Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914–1932. Exhibition catalogue. Seattle/
WA: Henry Art Gallery, 4 July–2 September 1990. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.
Antliff, Mark: Avant-garde Fascism. Durham/NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Antliff, Mark: Fascism, Modernism, and Modernity. Durham /NC: Duke University Press, 2007.
Bajt, Drago: Literarni leksikon 27: Ruski literarni avantgardizem. Ljubljana: DZS, 1985.
Blumenkranz-Onimus, Noëmi: “Quand les artistes manifestent.” Liliane Brion-Guerry, ed.: L’ Année
1913. Vol. 1. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971. 351–369.
Blumenkranz-Onimus, Noëmi: La poésie futuriste italienne. Paris: Klincksieck, 1984.
Braun, Emily: Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Brion-Guerry, Liliane, ed.: L’ Année 1913: Les formes esthétiques de l’œuvre d’art à la veille de la
première guerre mondiale. Vol. 1–3. Paris: Klincksieck, 1971–1973.
Bru, Sascha: “The Phantom League. The Centennial Debate on the Avant-Garde and Politics.”
Sascha Bru, and Gunther Martens, eds.: The Invention of Politics in the European Avant-Garde
(1906–1940). Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi, 2006. 9–31.
Cachin-Nora, Françoise, ed.: Le Futurisme, 1909–1916. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Musée National
d’Art Moderne, 19 septembre–19 novembre 1973. Paris: Éditions des Musées Nationaux, 1973.
Carpi, Umberto: Bolscevico immaginista: Communismo e avanguardie artistiche nell’ Italia degli
anni venti. Naples: Liguori, 1981.
Carpi, Umberto: L’estrema avanguardia del novecento. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1985.
Crispolti, Enrico: “Appunti sui materiali riguardanti i rapporti fra futurismo e fascismo.” E. Crispolti,
Berthold Hinz, and Zeno Birolli, eds.: Arte e fascismo in Italia e in Germania. Milano: Feltrinelli,
1974. 7–67. Reprinted as “Appunti su futurismo e fascismo: Dal diciannovismo alla difesa contro
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De Felice, Renzo: Mussolini il rivoluzionario (1883–1920). Torino: Einaudi, 1965.
Flaker, Aleksandar: Ruska avangarda. Zagreb: SNL/Globus, 1984.
46 Aleš Erjavec

Gherarducci, Isabella: Il futurismo italiano. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1984.

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Lucia Re, Charlotte Douglas
3 Women Futurists
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, feminist activism focussed not only
on women’s right of suffrage but also on sexual, social and economic rights, helping
to establish a new cultural and intellectual legitimacy for women. With new percep-
tions of women’s rôles across the domestic and public spheres, more opportunities
became available for female artists and writers. The expanding possibilities for women
in society at large and the right to attend higher education enabled some to obtain
limited access to professional training and to enter traditionally male-dominated
cultural venues and art markets. The new generations of female artists and writers
became increasingly confident in creating and promoting their works, and they gained
a modicum of visibility that had previously been denied to them.
Many of these women worked as commercial writers and artists. Others with
higher ambitions became active in the various modernist and avant-garde schools that
emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century. Modernist and avant-garde move-
ments were not just opposed to the prescriptive and traditional notions dominating
academic art and culture. They also sought to be innovative in social domains and
embraced issues of class, ethnicity, sexuality and gender. The new art and literary
scene in Europe was of crucial importance for female artists or writers who challenged
traditional social structures and the notion of what women could do, were permitted
to do, and should do. It opened new horizons for creative women and enabled them to
take part in the comprehensive project of transforming both art and society.
In the nineteenth century, Russian cities also underwent a process of moderniza-
tion that affected women’s lives socially and legally and led to more female participation
in society. However, the degree of emancipation they experienced depended largely on
their social status. While middle-class women gained access to higher education, trav-
elled to the West and were responsive to European notions of equality, the educational
opportunities for the lower classes in the provinces continued to be highly restricted.
Nonetheless, by the 1910s, Russia boasted a substantial number of female professionals
trained in higher institutions of learning. In March 1917, all Russian women were granted
the right to vote and hold political office, and during the Soviet period they became a
vital part of the workforce and greatly improved their educational opportunities.
During this transition period, women became an established part of the cultural
fabric of Russia and were active as writers, craftswomen and artists. Women of intellec-
tual and cultural sophistication played a vital rôle in the birth of artistic and literary Mod-
ernism. They often came from solid, well-to-do families, were socially respectable and
possessed money and connections. Despite the fact that their access to vocational train-
ing was limited, they constituted a powerhouse within the Russian avant-garde. Many of
them profited from supportive partnerships, but their creative energy was also boosted
by contemporary intellectual frameworks and new platforms for the presentation and
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-003
48 Lucia Re

exhibition of their work. Especially after the Revolution of 1917, the number of renowned
women artists increased and greatly affected the cultural life of the country.
Starting around 1912, Marinetti’s and Italian Futurism’s boisterous critique of
traditional female rôles (and of the sexual normativity of bourgeois life) attracted a
number of cosmopolitan, trans-European as well as Italian intellectual women to the
movement – including writers, visual artists and performers – especially during the
First World War and its tempestuous aftermath before the rise of Fascism. During and
immediately after the war, gender rôles and traditional morality were increasingly
subverted while women found new occupations and obtained jobs that had previ-
ously been monopolized by men. Florence and then Rome became important centres
of Futurist initiatives involving women, although female contributors to Futurist jour-
nals submitted works from a wide variety of locations across Italy.
With the rise of Fascism and the demise of emancipationist feminism in Italy
(where women did not gain the right to vote until 1946), the first generation of female
Futurists and sympathizers of the movement disintegrated. Individuals withdrew
from the Futurist scene and each went her own separate way. In the Fascist era, few
Modernist women received real recognition or encouragement. Various kinds of cen-
sorship were applied to their work, for the régime sought to promote a vision of women
as essentially wives and mothers, while at the same time channelling women’s cre-
ative energy towards the decorative and applied arts related to the domestic sphere
(see pp. 186–187 in the section on Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design in
this volume).
However, a new generation of creative women Futurists from different social
classes and backgrounds did emerge in Italy in the 1920s and 1930s, with many of them
endorsing the misogynist gender ideology of the régime or seeking an improbable
accommodation with Fascist policies. After 1946, the aesthetic hegemony of Neoreal-
ism and the disrepute to which Futurism had fallen due to its alliance (with few excep-
tions) with Mussolini made it seem a hopelessly obsolete avant-garde. Yet recently
scholars have started to trace elements of continuity and connections between the
work of Futurist women in the first half of the twentieth century and the female and
feminist neo-avant-garde that came to life over the course of the 1960s and 1970s.
The important rôles that women played in the Futurist movement have increas-
ingly come to be recognized in scholarship. The present chapter discusses the work
of some of the most significant female Futurists from Italy and Russia and shows how
Futurism was able to inspire women to be creative in many fields of the arts.

Italian Women Artists and Writers

Futurism has always been identified as a masculinist and misogynist movement (with
Surrealism probably not lagging far behind). Misogyny – a staple in the work of major
 Women Futurists 49

and minor thinkers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Möbius to Weininger, not to

mention Cesare Lombroso and his school – was based on the belief in the mental,
moral and intellectual inferiority of women and constituted a deeply ingrained sub-
stratum of the conservative ideologies in all of Europe. The prominence of female
types (hyper-spiritual virgins, angels of the hearth or their femme fatale opposites),
sensual/erotic obsessions and androgynous tropes in Symbolist and Decadent lit-
erature, particularly in the work of Gustave Flaubert and Gabriele D’Annunzio (the
latter writer’s influence was a fundamental source of anxiety for Marinetti), helped
shape and justify Futurism’s rhetorical rejection of everything female, feminine or
effeminate. As such, it is not astonishing that the otherwise revolutionary Futurist
programme also included deeply entrenched reactionary components.

Marinetti’s “disdain of women”

The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) proclaimed as one of the central
points of the Futurist agenda the “mépris de la femme” or disdain of woman, and
the replacement of love for woman with love of the machine. The theme of ‘woman’
and ‘the feminine’ were important in the work of the Futurist leader, F. T. Marinetti,
but may in fact be traced back to the pre-Futurist period. For example, in the 1905
satirical tragedy Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle), woman and the feminine appear as
haunting, detestable, yet central images. The heroic early Futurist identity – virile and
homosocial – was shaped from the very beginning in opposition to its construction of
the feminine and its putatively negative traits, connotations and potentials: softness,
weakness, passivity, pacifism, affinity with the natural rather than the mechanical
world, and debilitating influence on men.
From the early Futurist perspective, the decadent androgyne represented an unde-
sirable contamination of the male by the female. On the other hand, as advertised for
example in Come si seducono le donne (How to Seduce Women, 1917), Marinetti was
personally very passionate and indeed excited about women and had his own rather
comical and irreverent approach to seduction. In the preface to the novel Mafarka
le futuriste / Mafarka il futurista (Mafarka the Futurist, 1909/10), for which he was
brought to court and censored in Italy, Marinetti sarcastically declared that the Futur-
ist injunction to despise women, which had attracted so much outraged criticism, in
fact referred only to women’s sentimental value in trite pseudo-romantic literature,
not to the “animal worth of women” (Marinetti: “Preface to Mafarka the Futurist”, 32).
Yet, the novel articulates in symbolic terms a sense of aversion for and even fear of
female sexuality as well as an implicit envy and resentment for woman’s reproductive
power. In the exalted conclusion, the protagonist of the novel imagines giving birth to
a mechanical son, a superior being created by him alone with no female contribution,
not even sexual intercourse.
50 Lucia Re

Although Futurist artists declared war on the trite academic convention and aes-
thetics of the nude – traditionally based on the harmonious, purified and beautiful
female body seen from a male perspective – and opened up radically new ways of
looking at and thinking about nature, culture and the human body and mind, they
also developed their own repertoire of irreverent, ‘anti-aesthetic’ female images
and bodies. This may be seen, for example, in Umberto Boccioni’s Idolo moderno (A
Modern Idol, 1911) and Rissa in galleria (Riot in the Galleria, 1910) (the former is a
colourful portrait of a prostitute, while the latter represents a riot that develops in
Milan’s fashionable shopping arcade around two prostitutes grabbing each other’s
hair in a fight) or Visioni simultanee (Simultaneous Visions, 1911), which portrays a
red-headed woman looking out from a balcony onto the swirling city below. La strada
entra nella casa (The Street Enters the House, 1911), Antigrazioso (The Antigraceful,
1912–13) and the series Materia (Matter, 1912–13) are based on the artist’s mother. The
female nude reappeared in some later Futurist works, but post-war painters such as
Fillìa (pseud. of Luigi Enrico Colombo) and Fortunato Depero tended towards more
de-gendered, abstract or fantastic figures.
In the 1911 volume, Le Futurisme, revised and translated into Italian under the
title Guerra sola igiene del mondo (War, the Sole Cleanser of the World, 1915), Marinetti
addressed the woman question in the two central chapters, “Le Mépris de la femme”
(Disdain for Women; in the abbreviated Italian version, the title became “Contro l’amore
e il parlamentarismo” [Against Sentimentalized Love and Parliamentarianism]) and
“L’ Homme multiplié et le règne de la machine” (Extended Man and the Kingdom of the
Machine). In addition to reiterating the need to abolish sentimental love and its burden-
some social and political baggage (including the stifling rôles of bride, mother or mis-
tress prescribed by bourgeois society for women), he argued (in a less utopian vein than
he had done in the 1910 novel) that the procreative sexual union of man and woman was
still necessary at least for the survival and propagation of the species. Otherwise, the
erotic relationship between men and women would be best if reduced to free love. Real
love, however, and aesthetic appreciation were to be transferred onto the machine. In
“L’ Homme multiplié et le règne de la machine”, Marinetti describes the voluptuousness
of an engine and the way a mechanic caresses it as if it were an erotic object (Marinetti:
“Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine”, 85–86). This leads him in turn to
imagine the future evolution of man himself into a superior machine (“man extended”
or “multiplied”), which would occur through the pure strength of human volition, so
that even the need for reproductive copulation would be entirely eliminated.
While Marinetti downplayed the importance of heterosexual desire and deni-
grated the emotional attachment between men and women, his post-human vision of
the “reign of the machine” relates to women in that it addresses, albeit in a utopian
vein, the question of reproduction. Reproduction was at the core of the subjection
of women because it was widely seen at the time as the essential and defining func-
tion of woman and her only reason for existing at the side of man. In every capacity
other than gestation and mothering, woman was deemed irremediably and naturally
 Women Futurists 51

inferior to man. To argue, as some critics have done, that Marinetti’s post-human vision
of reproduction is a way to kill off woman altogether effectively subscribes to the very
same patriarchal reproductive logic because it implies that reproduction is woman’s
essential activity. Marinetti, however, disputed the natural inferiority of woman and
blamed prejudice, unfair discrimination and lack of education for woman’s relegation
to the status of second-class citizen in patriarchal societies. Once they had been lib-
erated from their traditional rôles and their function as mere procreative machines,
what would Futurist women be or do? Marinetti was still unclear in this regard, but
he nonetheless saw feminists and even suffragists as potential allies in the explosion
and destruction of the bourgeois family and the entire existing order.

Valentine de Saint-Point

Marinetti began to overcome his gender prejudices and accept the notion that even
women could be Futurists after he was vehemently criticized and challenged in 1912
by the writer and performer Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953). In her own highly
controversial Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman,
1912), Saint-Point argued against Futurist stereotypes and, ironically, Marinetti’s
old-fashioned and still essentially misogynist view of woman and the feminine. Fore-
shadowing aspects of contemporary radical feminism, Saint-Point saw masculinity
and femininity as shifting cultural categories not necessarily rooted in an exclusive,
biological sexual difference, and virility as a quality that a woman may embody as
much as or more than a man. All humans are a mix of feminine and masculine traits,
according to Saint-Point, and these categories are themselves fluid and changing. The
androgyne initially dreaded by Futurism was thus reintroduced to the avant-garde
context by Saint-Point as a radical figure for gender instability. Women as such are not
mediocre beings inferior to men, she affirmed, because mediocrity is in fact typical
of the majority of humanity, which generally merits equal and undivided disdain.
Through a paradoxical feminist expropriation of Nietzsche’s ideas (which were also
fundamental for the early Marinetti) and in an unrepentant, militant celebration of
the revolutionary potential of violence and war, Saint-Point argued that superior
women might indeed be more valiant and virile (in other words brave, strong and
capable) than most men. The superior women she envisioned may be not only writers,
artists and performers, but also heroic mothers and brides of warriors inspired by
classical models of female virility, or indeed warriors and amazons themselves.
Marinetti immediately sought, and briefly succeeded, to enlist her as a Futur-
ist, helping her publicize this manifesto and the subsequent Manifeste futuriste de
la luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust, 1913), both of which had wide international
resonance. In contrast to the prevalent Lombrosian stereotypes, Saint-Point, whose
virulence retains the power to shock and outrage even today, argued that female
52 Lucia Re

libido was not necessarily weaker than men’s, and asserted (in anti-sentimental
and effectively proto-Freudian terms) the centrality of the sexual drive, its power
and its aggressive as well as liberating potential. Like some post-1968 Italian radical
feminists, such as Carla Lonzi and the Milan Women’s Bookshop Collective, Saint-
Point thought that liberal, equal-rights feminism was deluded and found its egal-
itarian and moderate agenda to be anti-revolutionary. However, the experience of
the First World War, during which she worked in France as a volunteer for the Red
Cross, entirely reversed her initially positive vision of war, and she soon left Futur-
ism, although she never abandoned her combativeness and her radical feminist
ideals.

The circle of L’ Italia futurista and Roma futurista

Deeply influenced by individual women throughout his life and, unlike most male
intellectuals of the first half of the twentieth century, genuinely interested in their
work, Marinetti continued to decry the traditional rôles and symbolic functions of
women in bourgeois society and culture until the early 1920s. In Le Futurisme and
“Against Sentimentalized Love and Parliamentarianism”, he inveighed against patri-
archal marriage along with the parliamentary political system because he saw both as
forms of repression and social control in liberal Italy. Futurism’s critique of traditional
female rôles and especially of the sexual repressiveness of bourgeois society attracted
a number of intellectual women to the movement on an international scale, espe-
cially during the First World War and its extended, turbulent aftermath. British poet
and artist Mina Loy (Mina Gertrude Löwy, 1882–1966), Austrian-born writer, painter
and illustrator Rosa Rosà (Edith von Haynau, 1884–1978), the Czech painter Růžena
Zátková (1885–1923) and the Lithuanian writer Eva Kiun (Kühn Amendola, 1880–1961)
were among them. Futurism was the first literary or aesthetic movement in Europe to
actively encourage the participation of women, who had been historically excluded
from the realm of cultural production traditionally reserved for men.
While Marinetti became eager to enlist women to his cohort and revolutionary
project, some male Futurists were sceptical. As the wartime journal L’Italia futurista
and Marinetti’s own Come si seducono le donne exhibit, homosocial male misogyny
remained a popular trope. On the one hand, the seductive, captivating strategies of
Marinetti the man and leader contrasted with the violent, misogynistic language of
his texts, in which women were nonetheless always ready, it seems, to be seduced
by Marinetti in spite of everything. On the other hand, Marinetti did not hesitate to
support feminist causes such as women’s suffrage and divorce when he felt it was con-
venient for the movement’s revolutionary agenda. The recurrent misogyny and virility
of Marinetti’s movement therefore constituted a profoundly ambivalent, opportunis-
tic ideology that paradoxically, yet effectively allowed Marinetti to continue to attract
 Women Futurists 53

men to Futurism and, from 1912, when Valentine de Saint-Point briefly joined the
movement, women as well.
In 1918, Marinetti met the writer and artist Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), who
signed her work simply Benedetta. They became lovers and she exerted an impor-
tant influence on him as well as on the younger generation of Futurist women who
came on the scene in the Fascist era. She became a lifelong collaborator, who in the
1920s and 1930s helped to shape new developments in the Futurist sensibility and
its aesthetics, especially tactilism, oneiric prose narrative and the more abstract,
spiritual and celestial vein of aeropittura. Traces of Marinetti’s original misogyny may
still be found in the allegorical novel Gli indomabili (The Untameables, 1922), written
during the period conventionally described as Marinetti’s ‘return to order’, which also
marked the beginning of his eventual submission to the institution of marriage in 1923
and, shortly thereafter, to Mussolini’s Fascism.
A substantial contingent of other female Futurists became active through L’Italia
futurista (1916–1918), Roma futurista (1918–1920) and a few other avant-garde jour-
nals. Among them was the poet and prose writer Maria Crisi Ginanni (1891–1953), who
also acted as co-editor-in-chief of L’Italia futurista and directed the journal’s avant-
garde book series, Libri di valore, an unprecedented rôle for a woman in Italy. The
series presented texts by both men and women, including Ginanni’s own Montagne
trasparenti (Transparent Mountains, 1917), which used abstract and surreal images to
express sensations and evoke unconscious mental associations, projecting them into
the phenomenal world, observed in slow motion and in the most minute and exact
detail, as if through a kind of hyper-expansion of the sensorial apparatus.
Around Ginanni gathered a diverse circle of fiction writers, poets, playwrights,
stage actresses and visual artists, such as Irma Valeria (Irma Zorzi Gelmetti, 1897–
1988), Francesca (Fanny) Dini (1895 –?), Mina della Pergola (dates unknown), Fulvia
Giuliani (1900 –?) and Enif Robert (1886–1976). Edith von Haynau and Eva Kühn
Amendola also published in the journal, under the pseudonyms Rosa Rosà and
Magamal, respectively. Although some shared an interest in the kinds of spiritualism
then fashionable in avant-garde circles and all identified themselves with Futurism,
each had her own distinct style. Inspired by Futurist iconoclasm, they shared a desire
to experiment with language, visual expression and genres. Irma Valeria’s article
“Occultismo e arte nuova” (The Occult and New Art, 1917), encapsulated the group’s
interest in a poetic language capable of penetrating occult mysteries beyond the
reach of traditional science. Her 1917 volume of poetic prose, Morbidezze in agguato
(Softnesses Lie in Ambush, 1917), is an example of the original mix of parodic irony
and theosophic concerns prevalent among most women in the group, although dis-
liked for instance by Enif Robert, who instead advocated a raw kind of corporeal and
experiential realism that she practiced in her own Words-in-Freedom. Rosa Rosà’s
synthetic novel Una donna con tre anime (A Woman with Three Souls, 1918), following
on the tail of her feminist interventions published in the journal, narrated in an ironic
science fiction-like mode the metamorphosis of a petty bourgeois housewife into a
54 Lucia Re

liberated new woman of the future. These women’s originality and independence from
the Marinettian model was sometimes criticized by fellow Futurists and made Mari-
netti himself rather uneasy. For example, Emilio Settimelli reproached Ginanni for
venturing into a highly personal direction that had little to do with Futurism proper.
Marinetti himself, on the other hand, had no hesitation in calling Ginanni a genius.
On the pages of L’Italia futurista, considerable attention was devoted to the woman
question in relation to the war effort. The new, more modern rôles for women that the
war helped create were discussed and openly debated by men and women. Robert
and Rosà both vigorously rebuked Futurist misogyny and highlighted the pitfalls of
Marinetti’s ideas on seduction as well as the obsolescence of traditional images of
women. The enormous contribution of women to the war and their invaluable efforts
outside the home in factories, transportation, public administration and other tradi-
tionally male bastions helped shape a new consciousness of female identity and rôles
for some Futurist women. It also contributed to male paranoia and – as is evident
from some of the male interventions in the journal – fostered the fear of being emas-
culated and rendered useless, accentuating in some respects male misogyny. In 1919,
the atmosphere amongst Futurist women was still optimistic. Enif Robert published
the outstanding experimental collage novel, Un ventre di donna (A Woman’s Womb),
co-signed with Marinetti as a symbol of the new parity between men and women. As
the Futurist feminist Futurluce (Elda Simeoni Norchi, dates unknown) wrote in Roma
futurista, the recent war had led to a “hundredfold multiplication of forces” and “the
recognition of new energies” (Futurluce: “Il voto alla donna”, 3). The full recognition
of the rights of women seemed imminent, along with the availability of new and more
modern rôles for women in post-war Italy.

Second Wave Futurism

Most of the early female recruits left the Futurist movement after the First World War
and sought other outlets for their creativity. The rise of Fascism and the establishment
of Mussolini’s régime in 1925 made some of them opt for silence or, as in the case of
Eva Kühn Amendola, they were silenced (Di Leo: “Eva Amendola Kühn”; Re: “Women
at War”). Yet in the 1920s, and even more so in the 1930s, a new generation of Futurist
women emerged. The works of the visual poet Alzira Braga (1900–1930), whose colour-
ful Free-Word Tables were a cross between poetry and painting, remained unpublished
and unexhibited, although they were praised by Marinetti himself, who collected them.
Maria Ricotti (1886–1974), a pantomime artist, choreographer and dancer, collabo-
rated with Enrico Prampolini in her hometown Paris on the Théâtre de la pantomime
futuriste (see pp. 136–137 in the entry on Dance in this volume). Some women negoti-
ated a space for their female creativity by coming to terms, more or less explicitly, with
Fascism, either by accepting it, as Marinetti did, or by altogether embracing it.
 Women Futurists 55

Early Fascism was not inimical to women and even briefly advocated female suf-
frage. However, by 1926, the Fascist backlash against the new woman and the Party’s
anti-female discriminatory policies determined the outlines of a regressive agenda for
women, who from that point onwards were required to be patriotic wives and prolific
mothers who devote themselves exclusively to family life, nursing or child-related
work, thus sacrificing any other need, tendency or desire they may have had. The
impulses to fashion an individual female identity, to explore the realms of the body,
desire and the unconscious through artistic creation and experimentation, and to
forge new and more modern rôles for women were effectively stifled by Fascism with
its new mass politics, personality cult and religion of the State.
Nonetheless, Benedetta sought and was able to strike a compromise between the
exigencies of the régime, which she supported (along with Marinetti), all the way to
the days of Mussolini’s Republic of Salò, and her work as a writer and as an artist. She
created a successful persona for herself as an exemplary Fascist wife and mother (the
couple had three daughters, and Benedetta addressed women in uniform in 1935 and
1936 on behalf of the régime to promote female sacrifice for the campaign in Ethio-
pia) and, simultaneously, as an artistic creator. In her three highly original novels, Le
forze umane (The Human Forces, 1924), Viaggio di Gararà: Romanzo cosmico per teatro
(Gararà’s Journey: Cosmic Novel for the Theatre, 1931) and Astra e il sottomarino (Astra
and the Submarine, 1935), none of which were works of propaganda, she experimented
with abstraction, the interplay of different narrative, graphic and theatrical modes,
and oneiric surrealism. Her prolific work as a painter, including aeropittura and large-
scale murals such as the ones painted for the post office in Palermo (1933–34) was
lyrical and inspired and constitutes a major contribution to twentieth-century art.
A number of the later women Futurists like the painter, stage designer and pho-
tographer Marisa Mori (1900–1985), the painter, aviator and performer Barbara
(Olga Biglieri Scurto, 1915–2002) or the dancer and choreographer Giannina Censi
(1913–1995) attempted to integrate Futurism and what seemed to them the least
unpalatable traits of Fascism through an art inspired by aviation and technology (both
highly promoted as emblems of modernity by Mussolini). At the same time, they sought
to express in original aesthetic terms their desire for a liberated feminine space, body
and identity. Others – like the sculptor Regina (Regina Prassede Bracchi, 1894–1974),
who experimented with lightweight metals and other materials (and was recruited
as a Futurist by Marinetti himself), or the Sicilian poet, painter, photographer and
collagist Adele Gloria (1910–1985), whose work was imbued with a Dada-like playful
irony – succeeded in remaining politically independent. Marinetti remained active in
the recruitment of young female Futurists, and a number of them were ardent Fascists,
for example Annaviva (Anna Traverso Acquaviva, dates unknown), Dina Cucini (1905–
1980), Immacolata Corona (dates unknown) and Laura Serra (1895–1959). Some of the
most brilliant work done by Futurist women was in the practice of applied and deco-
rative arts and in the manufacture of objects of everyday use, one of the few activities
encouraged by the régime because they were originally connected to traditional female
56 Lucia Re

tasks in the home. The embroideries, fabrics, fans, carpets, tapestries, pillows, screens
and other objects designed and made by Alma Fidora (1894–1980), Rosetta Amadori
Depero (1893–1976), Luce Balla (1904–1994) and Elica Balla (1914–1993) – the latter
three were largely overshadowed by Futurist men in their still largely patriarchal-style
households – are among the most aesthetically accomplished works of second-wave
Futurism (see pp. 186–187 in the contribution on Decorative Arts in this volume).
The acknowledgement and public display of patriotic women and their bodies –
often in uniform – as essential to the collective life and future of the nation and Italian
‘race’ brought a modicum of socialization outside the home for women and even a
spiritual, almost religious fulfilment, as was the case for the Futurist-Fascist intel-
lectual, philosophy graduate, poet and teacher Maria Goretti (1907–2001), author of
La donna e il futurismo (Women and Futurism, 1941). Goretti wrote eloquently and
sincerely about her long-meditated path to Fascism, support for Fascist imperial con-
quest, and the Futurist beauty of the war machinery that was carrying Italy forward –
a beauty that was fully disclosed to her only through her encounter with Marinetti. For
many women, however, this Futurist-Fascist aesthetic and patriotic cult could hardly
compensate for what was effectively a return to a pre-war condition of subjection and
moral censorship. While in practice the range of women’s rôles, behaviours and activ-
ities was much more diversified than the régime would have liked, it discouraged cre-
ativity outside the home and artistic practices not associated with traditional home
crafts, with very few exceptions.

The rediscovery of female Futurism

The weight of Fascism long prevented even-handed scholarly scrutiny of the work
of female Futurists, as to some it appeared contaminated by Fascism even avant la
lettre. Futurist women were only rediscovered in the early 1980s by feminist art and
literary historians, initially through Lea Vergine’s pioneering exhibition, L’ altra
metà dell’avanguardia (The Other Half of the Avant-garde; Milan: Palazzo Reale, 16
February – 30 April 1980; Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 3 July – 8 August 1980;
Stockholm: Kulturhuset, 14 February – 3 May 1981) and Claudia Salaris’ anthology, Le
futuriste: Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia (The Women Futurists: Women
and Avant-garde Literature in Italy, 1982). In the 1990s, scholars began to study in
more depth both the image and the rôle of women and gender in Futurism. There was a
tendency, especially among neo-feminist scholars, to criticize Futurist women, whose
work was, and largely remains, difficult to find and on whom information is often still
scarce and unreliable. Perhaps rather unfairly and certainly with a lack of historical
perspective, female Futurists were censured for having failed to elaborate ‘authen-
tic’ feminist models or images of femininity or of feminism. Historical, archival and
editorial work since the 1980s has allowed the picture to become increasingly clear
 Women Futurists 57

and less ideologically over-determined. While the links between women of the histor-
ical avant-garde and those of the neo-avant-garde are yet to be explored, it is not coin-
cidental that one of the most important studies of female Futurists, Women Artists of
Italian Futurism: Almost Lost to History (1997) was co-authored by Franca Zoccoli and
Mirella Bentivoglio, herself one of the great contemporary female avant-garde artists.

Works cited
Benedetta [pseud. of Benedetta Cappa Marinetti]: Le forze umane. Viaggio di Gararà. Astra e il
sottomarino. A cura di Simona Cigliana. Roma: Edizioni dell’ Altana, 1998.
Bentivoglio, Mirella, and Franca Zoccoli: Women Artists of Italian Futurism. New York: Midmarch Art
Press, 1997.
Di Leo, Donatella: “Eva Amendola Kühn (Magamal): A Futurist of Lithuanian Extraction.” International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 297–326.
Futurluce (pseud. of Elda Simeoni Norchi): “Il voto alla donna.” Roma futurista 2:13 (30 March 1919):
3. Reprinted in Claudia Salaris: Le futuriste. Milano: Edizioni delle Donne, 1982. 139. English
translation “The Vote for Women.” Laurence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.:
Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 251–252.
Ginanni, Maria: Montagne trasparenti. Firenze: Edizioni de “L’Italia futurista,” 1917.
Goretti, Maria: La donna e il futurismo. Verona: La Scaligera, 1941.
L’Italia futurista A. 1, n. 1 (1 giugno 1916) – A. 2, n. 39 (11 febbraio 1918). Firenze: Stabilimenti grafici
M. Martini, 1916–17; Stabilimento Tipografico Aldino, 1917. Stabilimenti Tipografici Vallecchi,
1917–18. Facsimile reprint Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1992.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “L’ Homme multiplié et le règne de la machine.” F. T. Marinetti: Le
Futurisme. Paris: Sansot, 1911. 70–81. English translation “Extended Man and the Kingdom of
the Machine.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. 85–88.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Preface to ‘Mafarka the Futurist’.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed.
by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 32–42.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Come si seducono le donne. Firenze: Centomila Copie, 1917.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Guerra sola igiene del mondo. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1915.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Le Futurisme. Paris: Sansot, 1911.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Le Roi Bombance: Tragédie satirique en quatre actes. Paris: Société du
Mercure de France, 1905.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Mafarka il futurista: Romanzo. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1910.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Mafarka le futuriste: Roman africain. Paris: Sansot, 1909.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Enif Robert: Un ventre di donna: Romanzo chirurgico. Milano:
Facchi, 1919.
Re, Lucia: “Women at War: Eva Kühn Amendola (Magamal) – Interventionist, Futurist, Fascist.”
Annali d’Italianistica 33 (2015): 275–306.
Roma futurista: Giornale del Partito Politico Futurista. A. 1, n. 1 (20 settembre 1918)–A. 3, n. 84–85
(16–30 maggio 1920). Roma: Cooperativa Tipografica Luzzatti, 1918–20.
Rosà, Rosa (pseud. of Edith von Haynau): Una donna con tre anime: Romanzo. A cura di Claudia
Salaris. Milano: Edizioni delle Donne, 1982.
58 Lucia Re

Rosà, Rosa: “A Woman with Three Souls. English translation by Lucia Re and Dominic Siracusa.
Introduction by Lucia Re.” California Italian Studies 2:1 (2011): 1–39.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste de la femme futuriste: Réponse à F. T. Marinetti.” Valentine de
Saint-Point: Manifeste de la femme futuriste. Ed. by Jean-Paul Morel. Paris: Mille et une Nuits,
2005. 7–15. English translation “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman: Response to F. T. Marinetti”
(1912). Laurence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New
Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 109–113.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste futuriste de la luxure.” Valentine de Saint-Point: Manifeste
de la femme futuriste. Ed. by Jean-Paul Morel. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2005. 17–23. English
translation “The Manifesto of Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti).” Lawrence S.
Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale
University Press, 2009. 130–133.
Salaris, Claudia: Le futuriste: Donne e letteratura d’avanguardia in Italia. Milano: Edizioni delle
Donne, 1982.
Valeria, Irma (pseud. of Irma Zorzi Gelmetti): Morbidezze in agguato. Firenze: Edizioni de “L’ Italia
futurista”, 1917.
Valeria, Irma “Occultismo e arte nuova.” L’ Italia futurista 2:17 (10 June 1917): 2.
Vergine, Lea: L’altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940: Pittrici e scultrici nei movimenti delle
avanguardie storiche. Milano: Mazzotta, 1980. 2nd edn Milano: Il Saggiatore, 2005.

Further reading
Ambrosi, Barbara: “Una protagonista del secondo futurismo fiorentino: Maria Ginanni. La
trasparenza e la veggenza come cifre di stile.” Avanguardia: Rivista di letteratura contem-
poranea 9:26 (2004): 97–115.
Ballardin, Barbara: Valentine de Saint-Point. Milano: Selene, 2007.
Ballardin, Barbara, and Adrien Sina: Enif Angiolini Robert: Futurista, amica di Marinetti, attrice,
fedelissima della Duse. Milano: Selene, 2010.
Bello Minciacchi, Cecilia: Scrittrici della prima avanguardia: Concezioni, caratteri e testimonianze
del femminile nel futurismo. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2012.
Bello Minciacchi, Cecilia, ed.: Spirale di dolcezza+serpe di fascino: Scrittrici futuriste. Antologia.
Napoli: Bibliopolis, 2007.
Berghaus, Günter: “Danza futurista: Giannina Censi and the Futurist Thirties.” Dance Theatre Journal
8:1 (Summer 1990): 4–7, 34–37.
Berghaus, Günter: “Fulvia Giuliani: Portrait of a Futurist Actress.” New Theatre Quarterly 10:38 (May
1994): 117–121.
Berghaus, Günter, ed.: Women Artists and Futurism. Special Issue of International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 5 (2015). Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2015.
Brezzi, Francesca: Quando il futurismo è donna: Barbara dei colori. Milano: Mimesis, 2009. French
edn Quand le futurisme est femme. Milan: Mimesis, 2010.
Carpi, Giancarlo, ed.: Futuriste: Letteratura. Arte. Vita. Roma: Castelvecchi, 2009.
Contarini, Silvia: “How to Become a Woman of the Future: ‘Una donna con tre anime’ – ‘Un ventre di
donna’.” Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, eds.: The History of Futurism: The
Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies. Lanham/MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 199–212.
Contarini, Silvia: La Femme futuriste: Mythe, modèles et répresentations de la femme dans la théorie
e la littérature futuristes. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris X, 2006.
Katz, M. Barry: “The Women of Futurism.” Woman’s Art Journal 2 (Fall 1986 – Winter 1987): 3–13.
 Women Futurists 59

Margaillan, Cathy: “La Révolution du langage chez deux futuristes: Valentine de Saint-Point
(1875–1953) et Benedetta Cappa Marinetti (1897–1977).” Franca Bruera, and Barbara Meazzi,
eds.: Plurilinguisme et avant-gardes. Bruxelles: Lang, 2011. 205–226.
Margaillan, Cathy: “Les Femmes futuristes ou une reconnaissance occultée.” Barbara Meazzi, and
Jean-Pol Madou, eds.: Les Oubliés des avant-gardes. Chambéry: Université de Savoie, 2005.
121–136.
Meazzi, Barbara: “Enif Robert e Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: ‛Un ventre di donna’ e l’autobiografia
futurista.” Bart Van den Bossche, Michael Bastiaensen, and Corinna Salvadori Lonergan, eds.:
Tempo e memoria nella lingua e nella letteratura italiana. Atti del convegno dell’ Associazione
Internazionale dei Professori d’Italiano (AIPI), Ascoli Piceno, 23–26 agosto 2006. Vol. 3.
Bruxelles: A.I.P.I. (Associazione Internazionale Professori d’Italiano), 2009. 23–41. Revised and
updated version “Enif Robert e Marinetti: L’autobiografia futurista a due voci.” Franca Bruera,
and Barbara Meazzi, eds.: Plurilinguisme et avant-gardes. Bruxelles: Lang, 2011. 345–359.
Meazzi, Barbara: “Flora Bonheur et l’amour futuriste.” Barbara Meazzi, Jean-Pol Madou, and
Jean-Paul Gavard-Perret, eds.: Une traversée du XXe siècle: Arts, littérature, philosophie:
Hommage à Jean Burgos. Chambéry: Éditions de l’Université de Savoie, 2008. 191–206.
Meazzi, Barbara: “Women Futurists in Italy: A Research Report.” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 5 (2015): 450–464.
Mondello, Elisabetta: La nuova italiana: La donna nella stampa e nella cultura del ventennio. Roma:
Editori Riuniti, 1987.
Mosco, Valentina, and Sandro Rogari, eds.: Le amazzoni del futurismo: Femmine, massaie, pecore o
donne? Firenze: Academia Universa Press, 2009.
Panzera, Lisa, ed.: La futurista: Benedetta Cappa Marinetti. Exhibition catalogue. Philadelphia/PA:
Goldie Paley Gallery, Moore College of Art and Design, 1998.
Parati, Graziella: “Speaking Through Her Body: The Futurist Seduction of a Woman’s Voice.” G.
Parati: Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography. Minneapolis/MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 44–71.
Parati, Graziella: “The Transparent Woman: Reading Femininity within a Futurist Context.” Giovanna
Miceli Jeffries, ed.: Feminine Feminists: Cultural Practices in Italy. Minneapolis/MN: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994. 43–61.
Poggi, Christine: “Futurist Love, Luxury, and Lust.” C. Poggi: Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics
of Artificial Optimism. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2008. 181–231.
Re, Lucia: “Futurism and Feminism.” Annali d’Italianistica 7 (1989): 253–272.
Re, Lucia: “Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy.” Annali d’Itali-
anistica 27 (2009): 103–124.
Re, Lucia: “Scrittura della metamorfosi e metamorfosi della scrittura: Rosa Rosà e il futurismo.”
Emmanuelle Genevois, ed.: Les Femmes-écrivains en Italie (1870–1920): Ordres et libertés.
Colloque international 26–27 mai 1994 Centre de Recherches sur l’Italie Moderne et Contem-
poraine (Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III). Special issue of Chroniques italiennes
39–40 (1994). Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1994. 311–327.
Re, Lucia: “Valentine de Saint-Point, Ricciotto Canudo, F. T. Marinetti: Eroticism, Violence and
Feminism from Prewar Paris to Colonial Cairo.” Quaderni d’Italianistica 24:2 (Fall 2003): 37–69.
Richard de la Fuente, Véronique: Valentine de Saint Point: Une poétesse dans l’avant-garde futuriste
et méditerranéiste. Céret: Édition des Albères, 2003.
Ruta, Anna Maria: “ ‘Non solo mano…’: Il lavoro femminile nelle Case d’Arte futuriste e oltre.” Anty
Pansera and Tiziana Occleppo, eds.: Dal merletto alla motocicletta: Artigiane/artiste e designer
nell’Italia del Novecento. Milano: Silvana, 2002. 29–37.
Ruta, Anna Maria: Fughe e ritorni: Presenze futuriste in Sicilia. Vol. 2. Benedetta. Exhibition catalogue.
Palermo: Palazzo delle Poste 27 novembre 1998 – 24 gennaio 1999. Napoli: Electa, 1998.
60 Charlotte Douglas

Sica, Paola: “Maria Ginanni: Futurist Woman and Visual Writer.” Italica: Journal on the Study of
Italian Literature and Language 79:3 (Autumn 2002): 337–352.
Sica, Paola: “Regenerating Life and Art: Futurism, Florentine Women, Irma Valeria.” Annali d’italia-
nistica 27 (2009): 175–185.
Sica, Paola: Futurist Women: Florence, Feminism and the New Sciences. Houndmills: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015.
Sina, Adrien, ed.: Feminine Futures: Valentine de Saint-Point. Performance, War, Politics and
Eroticism = Tragédies charnelles: Valentine de Saint-Point. Performance, guerre, politique et
érotisme. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2011
Tesho, Artemida: “Italian Futurist Women.” Forum on Public Policy: A Journal of the Oxford Round
Table 6:2 (2010): 1–18.
Zoccoli, Franca: Benedetta Cappa Marinetti: L’ incantesimo della luce. Milano: Selene, 2000.

Russian Women Futurists

In Russia, women were some of the strongest of the avant-garde artists. Although they
were always more concerned with being artists than feminists, or even specifically
Futurist artists, they were friends and supported one another in their work. Alexandra
Exter (1882–1949), Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Olga
Rozanova (1886–1918) and Nadezhda Udaltsova (1886–1961) were early leaders, and
before the summer of 1914, they each had links with their foreign colleagues, including
Italian Futurists, and had the opportunity to see Futurist works of art. Each of them went
through a Futurist phase around the years 1912–1916, when they were inclined to produce
dynamic images of electric light, modes of transportation, machines and mechanical
devices. Rozanova also made consistent use of images drawn from urban life.
Alexandra (Grigorovich) Exter was the most notable of the five for disseminating
visual and theoretical information about Italian Futurism throughout Russia. She was
born in the city of Bialystok and grew up in and around Kiev, but before the First
World War spent much time in Western Europe, where she became acquainted with a
panoply of French progressive artists, including Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Fernand
Léger and the Puteaux Cubists. She presented her work in Western Europe in exhi-
bitions such as the Salon de la Section d’Or at the Galerie La Boëtie (10–30 October
1912) and the Salon des Indépendants (20 March – 16 May 1912 and 1 March – 30 April
1914). From Paris, Exter returned regularly to Saint- Petersburg and Kiev, bringing
with her photos and other reproductions of current art work (see Tobin: “Alexandra
Exter 1908–14”). Most likely, it was she who introduced the term ‘Cubo-Futurism’,
newly coined in Paris, into Russia, where for decades it became a primary designation
among the avant-garde (Boulenger: “Causons de ces cubo-futuristes”; Lista: “Futur-
isme et Cubo-Futurisme”; Cavallo: “Ardegno Soffici et le cubo-futurisme”).
Exter was responsible for the publication (in Russian) of two major Futurist texts:
La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting,
1910) and the introduction to the Bernheim-Jeune catalogue, Les Exposants au public
 Women Futurists 61

(Exhibitors to the Public, 1912). Both manifestos appeared in the June 1912 issue of
the Saint-Petersburg journal, Soiuz molodezhi (Union of Youth). From 1912 to 1914,
Exter shared a studio on the Boulevard Berthier with Ardengo Soffici and developed
a romantic relationship with him. Through Soffici, Exter came to know many of the
Italians – including Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini.
She and Soffici travelled together in Italy, and in Paris they made Sunday visits to
Severini’s home.
Liubov Popova and Nadezhda Udaltsova arrived in Paris in November 1912 to
study Cubism. There they found Exter already actively involved with the local art
scene, and they took up residence in the same pension, well known for its Russian
cooking. Naturally, during that winter 1912/13, they would have heard about, and
become acquainted with, some of Exter’s local friends and associates. Both women
returned to Moscow in spring 1913, but by the middle of March 1914, Popova was again
back in Paris.1 In the middle of April 1914, she and the Moscow sculptors Iza Bur-
meister and Vera Mukhina left Paris for a tour of France and Italy. Along the way, they
visited Nice, Menton, Genoa, Naples, Paestum, Florence and Venice, among other
places, and spent two weeks in Rome. It is reasonable to suppose that, while in Rome,
they visited the Esposizione libera futurista internazionale (Free Exhibition of Inter-
national Futurists), held from 13 April to 25 May 1914 at the Galleria Sprovieri. There,
they would have met Exter, who had contributed three paintings to the exhibition,
Ritmy kafe (Café Rhythms, c.1914), Fonari italianskogo bulvara (Lights on an Italian
Boulevard, c.1914), and Kompozitsiia s vazoi i tsvetami (Composition with Vase and
Flowers, c.1914), and who during the exhibition took on the responsibility of introduc-
ing visiting Russians to Marinetti and other Futurists.
At Marinetti’s invitation, Olga Rozanova contributed six items to the exhibition:
two illustrated books – Te li le (Te li le, 1914) and Utinoe gnezdyshko … durnykh slov (A
Duck’s Nest of … Bad Words, 1913) – and four paintings: Port (Port, 1913), Fabrika i most
(Factory and Bridge, 1913), Dissonans (Dissonance, 1913), and Chelovek na ulitse (Man
on a Street, 1913). Of all the Russian work exhibited at the Sprovieri Gallery, Rozano-
va’s paintings – energetic city views, gestural and expressive – were perhaps the most
reflective of Italian Futurism. They constituted Rozanova’s first showing in Western
Europe and remained for a while in Marinetti’s collection after the show ended.
Although Rozanova did not travel abroad, she had had ample opportunity to become
acquainted with Futurist works. Not only did she see some of the reproductions Exter
passed on to Saint-Petersburg artists, in late 1912, she also attended David Burliuk’s
lecture on “The Futurists, the French and the Russians – Old and New”, where forty
to fifty lantern slides, taken between April and June 1912 on a trip to Western Europe,
were projected. In 1913, Rozanova produced a spectacular Futurist-inspired poster to

1 For the sake of comparison, all dates are given here according to the Gregorian calendar, although
it was implemented in Russia only on 14 February 1918.
62 Charlotte Douglas

advertise the Futurist ‘opera’ Pobeda nad solntsem (Victory over the Sun). Between
1913 and 1916, Rozanova, along with her companion Alexei Kruchenykh, composed
zaum’ (beyond the mind) sound poetry, which she understood as the literary equiv-
alent of abstraction in visual art. When Marinetti visited Russia (26 January–17
February 1914), he received an ambivalent reception from Moscow artists, but in Saint
Petersburg, Rozanova and her friends were clearly intrigued. She was among the local
artists who greeted his arrival and celebrated his presentation at the artists’ café Bro-
diachaia sobaka (Stray Dog).
When Natalia Goncharova left Moscow for Rome on 12 May 1914, shortly after her
solo retrospective closed in Saint-Petersburg, she was already well acquainted with
Italian Futurism. At a March 1912 exhibition in Moscow, Goncharova had shown paint-
ings that made conscious use of a variety of sources, including Futurism. In addition
to works labelled ‘Futurist Style’, there were paintings executed in ‘Chinese style’,
‘Byzantine style’ and ‘Signboard style’. In the following months, she produced a
magnificent series of paintings focussing on electric and mechanical themes, such as
Elektricheskaia lampa (Electric Lamp, 1913), Tkatskii stanok (Loom + Woman, 1912–13)
and Aeroplan nad poezdom (Airplane over a Train, 1913). The Moscow Mishen’ (Target)
exhibition that opened on 24 March 1913 featured, among her Rayist works, also her
Futurist paintings Fabrika (Factory) and Koshki (Cats).
Goncharova travelled to Paris via Rome for Sergei Diaghilev’s rehearsals of the
opera-ballet Le Coq d’Or (The Golden Cockerel), for which she had designed the sets
and costumes; she too arrived in the city in time to see the Free Futurist International
Exhibition. Exter participated in two Futurist exhibitions: Kol’tso (The Ring), which
she organized in Kiev at the Kalfa Department Store in February 1914 (it opened on
8 March), while Larionov and Goncharova organized in Moscow Nomer 4. Vystavka
kartin. Futuristy, luchisty, primitiv (Number 4: Futurists, Rayists, Primatives) that
opened on 5 April 1914 and included Goncharova’s Pustota (Emptiness, 1913) and
Electricheskii ornament (Electric Ornament, 1914).
Moscow and Saint Petersburg were not the only Russian venues for Modernist
and Futurist exhibitions. From 1909 on, the excitement also spread to large and small
towns off the beaten track. Shows opened in Kherson, Vilno, Riga, Perm, Ekaterino-
slav and Baku, among others. For a while, Exter and Goncharova seemed to be exhib-
iting everywhere.
After the Rome exhibition, Marinetti began preparations for an exhibition of
Italian Futurist paintings in Russia, but the beginning of the Great War put an end
to that and many other such plans. Germany declared war on Russia on 1 August
1914; Austro-Hungary followed suit five days later. Consequently, most of the Russian
artists abroad hastily made their way home.
Although effectively cut off from Western Europe, the women were still very active
in Futurist exhibitions at home. Organized primarily by Kazimir Malevich, Pervaia
futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin: ‘Tramvai V’ (The First Futurist Exhibition: ‘Streetcar
V’) opened in the Small Hall of the Imperial Society for the Advancement of the Arts
 Women Futurists 63

in Petrograd on 16 March 1915. For the first time, Exter, Popova, Udaltsova, Rozanova
and Kseniya Boguslavskaya exhibited together under the rubric ‘Futurist’. According
to the catalogue, a total of ten artists exhibited 92 paintings. As was common from
the beginning of the war, and especially during the disastrous Russian military cam-
paigns of 1915 and 1916, when casualties began flooding into Petrograd and Moscow,
all ticket proceeds from the exhibition went to benefit a soldiers’ hospital. Since the
show took place in an exhibition space that had in an adjoining hall a simultane-
ous exhibition of the popular artist Ilia Repin, the Futurists had an unusually large
audience. The reviews were numerous, however all of them were viciously derogatory.
Goncharova’s first trip to Paris had been to attend the opening of Sergei Diaghi-
lev’s Golden Cockerel at the Paris Opéra on 24 May 1914. Her spectacular costume and
set designs were vigorous and free renditions of the Russian peasant style. She imme-
diately became the talk of Paris and was catapulted into fame. A year later, in July
1915, Diaghilev again summoned her to work on his “Russian seasons”, this time per-
manently. With great difficulty she made her way once more to Western Europe, and
from then on, until Diaghilev’s death in 1929, she worked almost exclusively for him.
In Russia, extreme shortages of canvas and oil paint, the practical need to raise
money to live on – felt in cities and rural villages alike – as well as charitable causes
were incentives for an intense concentration on smaller works of art, especially modern
textile designs. Virtually every avant-garde artist, male and female, created fabric
designs at this time, and they were shown in dozens of exhibitions (see pp. 154–160 in
this volume). In Moscow in 1915 and again in 1917, Exter and Natalia Davydova organ-
ized major shows of Futurist-, Orphist- and Suprematist-inflected decorative domestic
items, such as pillowcases, belts, scarves, screens and handbags. For these exhibi-
tions, skilled peasant stitchers from Verbovka, Natalia Davydova’s Ukrainian estate,
created colourful embroideries and appliqués, following patterns created by contem-
porary avant-garde artists. At a time when circumstances made major works of art diffi-
cult or impossible to produce, these small-scale projects provided an outlet for creative
work for Exter, Udaltsova, Rozanova, Popova and many others. The exhibitions were
popular, reviews were laudatory, and sales were strong. Today, these small remnants
of fabric are some of the most sought-after pieces of modern art.
The “last Futurist exhibition” opened in Saint-Petersburg on 1 January 1916.
The complete title was Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin ‘0.10’ (The Last
Futurist Exhibition ‘0.10’). It was intended to be the complementary event with which
to frame The First Futurist Exhibition: ‘Streetcar V’ that had taken place the previ-
ous March, with many of the same artists. 0.10 is now famous for its first showing
of Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist paintings and Vladimir Tatlin’s wall-mounted
“counter reliefs”, but the women Futurists also played a large rôle in it, after having
fought vigorously against Malevich’s desire to jettison the word ‘Futurist’ from the
show’s title. Of the fourteen artists participating in the show, seven were women –
Kseniya Boguslavskaya, Anna Kirillova, Vera Pestel, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova,
Nadezhda Udaltsova and Maria Vasileeva.
64 Charlotte Douglas

The last boom of Russian Futurism took place in the theatre, where women
artists were responsible for some of the most innovative and exciting stage designs
anywhere. Although the titles of the theatrical works often had historical allusions,
the Futurists borrowed for the stagings the fast action and complicated rhythms and
antics of the circus, vaudeville acts, popular reviews and silent films. Instead of
painted flats and realistic stage sets and costumes they introduced unconventional,
sometimes painted-on costumes, and three-dimensional, freestanding and movable
elements that could themselves become characters in the play – at times even making
comments on the action – as well as functioning as physical supports and providing
contextual information (see pp. 274–275 in this volume).
Exter became almost exclusively a theatre artist; amongst many other theatrical
productions, she designed costumes and stage sets for Famira Kifared (Thamira the
Kitharist, 1916), Oscar Wilde’s Salomeia (Salomé, 1917), Romeo i Dzhul’ etta (Romeo
and Juliet, 1921), all produced by Alexander Tairov for his Kamerny (Chamber) Theatre.
Exter also designed costumes for the futuristic science-fiction film Aelita, which takes
place on the planet Mars, where a Russian engineer-astronaut foments a revolution
among Martian slaves, who are urged to “Follow our examples, Comrades! Unite into
a family of workers in a Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics!” Exter designed
about a dozen costumes for the inhabitants of Mars. Constructed of metal, metallic
cloth, plastic and fabric, in their suggestion of both biological difference (some of
the women had three breasts) and advanced technology, the costumes were unlike
anything she had done before. The actual filming took place between February 1923
and August 1924, partly on the streets of Moscow. Hundreds of extras participated in
the crowd scenes, and the resulting film was widely debated in Russia. It was also
screened in 1924 at the Venice Biennale, and in Paris in 1925.
For Meierkhold’s 1922 production of Fernand Crommelynck’s farce, Le Cocu
magnifique (The Magnanimous Cuckold, 1921), Liubov Popova invented a wooden
self-contained ‘machine’ for the actors, with platforms, steps, a bridge, slides, large
rotating wheels and revolving doors. The actors’ movements were energetically ‘bio-
mechanical’, and the wheels reacted expressively to events as they occurred on stage.
Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), several years younger than the others, came into
prominence about the time of the Revolution. An artist proficient in textile design,
book illustration, photomontage and clothing design, she also wrote sound poetry
which, although related to zaum’, at times came close to Dada verse. Stepanova was
also attracted to the theatre. Her creation of simplified ‘uniforms’ and collapsing
‘stage furniture’ for the acclaimed comedy Smert’ Tarel’kina (Tarelkin’s Death, 1922)
was directed by Sergei Eisenstein for Vsevolod Meierkhold’s theatre in Moscow.
Although the First World War ended in Russia with the October Revolution in
1917, the years of Civil War after the Revolution were even more physically difficult.
Disease, lack of food, heat and transportation took its toll on people of all classes.
Olga Rozanova, perhaps the most innate Russian Futurist of all, died of diphtheria on
7 November 1918 at the age of 32, and Liubov Popova died of scarlet fever on 25 May
 Women Futurists 65

1924, aged 35. Five months earlier (December 1923), even before the filming of Aelita
was completed, Exter left Russia, ostensibly to help with the Russian entry in the
Venice Biennale. Her costume designs for Aelita, along with her designs for Famira
Kifared and Romeo and Juliet, and for an unrealized production of Calderon’s La dama
duende (The Phantom Lady, 1629), were exhibited at the Russian pavilion in Venice
in June.

Works cited
Boulenger, Marcel: “Causons de ces cubo-futuristes.” Gil Blas 54:13019 (8 October 1912): 1.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: “Dossier ‘Le Futurisme et le cubo-futurisme’: L’exposition de 1912. Les années
20. Les années 30.” Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 5 (September 1980): 456–495.
Cavallo, Luigi: “Ardengo Soffici et le cubo-futurisme:” Ligeia: Dossiers sur l’art 21–24 (October 1997 –
June 1998): 68–83.
Tobin, Jordan: “Alexandra Exter 1908–14: Futurist Influences from Russia and the West.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 252–265.

Further reading
Bowlt, John Ellis, and Matthew Drutt, eds.: Amazons of the Avant Garde: Alexandra Exter,
Natalia Goncharova, Liubov Popova, Olga Rozanova, Varvara Stepanova, and Nadezhda
Udaltsova. Exhibition catalogue. London: Royal Academy of Arts, 10 November 1999 – 6
February 2000; Venice: Peggy Guggenheim Collection, 29 February – 28 May 2000; New
York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 21 June – 1 October 2000. New York: Guggenheim
Museum, 2000.
Budanova, Natalia: “Penetrating Men’s Territory: Russian Avant-garde Women, Futurism and the First
World War.“ International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 168–198.
Douglas, Charlotte: “Suprematist Embroidered Ornament.” Art Journal (Spring, 1995). 42–45.
Reprinted in Licht und Farbe in der Russischen Avantgarde. Berlin: Dumont, 2005. 282–286,
494–496.
Douglas, Charlotte: “The Art of Pure Design: The Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and
Textiles.” Susan E. Reid, and Rosalind P. Blakesley, eds.: Russian Art and the West. Dekalb/IL:
Northern Illinois Press, 2006. 86–111.
Drutt, Matthew, ed.: In Search of 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting. Exhibition catalogue.
Riehen (Basel): Fondation Beyeler, 4 October 2015 – 10 January 2016. Stuttgart: Hatje/Cantz,
2015.
Gur’ianova, Nina Al’bertovna: Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-garde
1910–1918. Amsterdam: G + B International, 2000.
Iablonskaia, Miuda Naumovna: Women Artists of Russia’s New Age, 1910–1935. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.
Iovleva, Lidia, ed.: Goncharova: Between East and West. Exhibition catalogue. Moskva: State
Tretyakov Gallery, 16 October 2013 – 16 February 2014.
Lavrentiev, Alexander: Stepanova: The Complete Work. Cambridge/MA: The MIT Press, 1988.
Lodder, Christina: “Olga Rozanova: A True Futurist.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5
(2015): 199–225.
66 Charlotte Douglas

Marcadé, Jean-Claude, and Valentine Marcadé, eds.: L’ Avant-garde au féminin: Moscou-Saint-

Petersbourg-Paris, 1907–1930. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Artcurial, 17 Mai – 31 Juillet 1983.
Rubinger-Gmurzynska, Krystyna, ed.: Künstlerinnen der russischen Avantgarde, 1910–1930.
Exhibition catalogue. Köln: Galerie Gmurzynska, 10. Dezember 1979 – 31. März 1980. 2nd edn
Köln: Wienand, 1979.
Sarabianov, Dmitri, and Natalia L. Adaskina: Liubov Popova. New York: Abrams, 1989.
Terekhina, Vera: Olga Rozanova: “Lefanta chiol…”. Moskva & Sankt Peterburg: RA; Palace Editions,
2002.
Wünsche Isabel: “Elena Guro: On the Crossroads between Symbolism, Organicism and
Cubo-Futurism.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 266–291.
Part II: Futurism in Different Artistic Media
Michelangelo Sabatino
4 Architecture
Futurism radically transformed the image of industrialization, the city and the rôle
of the machine (and mechanization) in the arts during the first half of the twentieth
century and beyond. The impact of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Foundation and Man-
ifesto of Futurism, first published in 1909, was felt for decades in a number of coun-
tries, as the contributions to this handbook demonstrate. Science and technology had
a major impact on Futurist artistic and cultural production. Architects, artists, graphic
designers, musicians, photographers and writers who identified with the Futurist
movement embraced new technologies born out of industrialization and its corollary,
urbanization, as a source of acoustic, poetic, spatial and visual innovation. Mobility,
speed and change were celebrated as part of a new zeitgeist that was radically upending
societal norms and, as a consequence, the fundamental qualities that were associated
with arts and culture. The year 1909 was the beginning of what we are now wont to call
‘the historical avant-garde’.
In most narratives of twentieth-century Modernism, Futurism is credited with
typifying the Italian avant-garde and with spurring the rise of a modern architecture
and city planning. Characterized by Utopian ideals, the movement reconsidered the
city as a physical and cultural space in order to accommodate new modes of trans-
portation (rail, automobile or air). Although Sant’Elia’s Città nuova (New City, c.1914)
is considered by some critics to derive from Stile Liberty and the great masters of
Viennese Jugendstil (Otto Wagner, in particular), most narratives of Futurism have
continued to stress the movement’s anti-historicist stance, its dedication to verticality
and its exhortation of the machine.
The visibility and prominence of Futurism in Italy during the 1920s and 1930s
was partly due to the fact that shortly after Sant’Elia completed the drawings for
his Città nuova, they were featured in avant-garde publications along with draw-
ings by Giacomo Mattè Trucco (1869–1934) for his rooftop track for the Fiat Lingotto
factory in Turin (1915–1939). Le Corbusier reproduced three photographs of the
Lingotto to illustrate his Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture, 1923). In
an essay on contemporary Italian architecture published in 1931, Sigfried Giedion
(1888–1968) identified Futurism with the origins of Italian Modernism and drew
a visual analogy between Guarino Guarini’s seventeenth-century San Lorenzo
cupola in Turin and an Alfa Romeo radial aircraft engine of 1930. Giedion used
collage to suggest, as Le Corbusier had done with the Parthenon in 1923, that the
ingenuity of the past was being replaced by a more evolved modern-day engineer-
ing. Reyner Banham (1922–1988) continued where Giedion left off and brought
Sant’Elia to the forefront of discussions after a public lecture given at the Royal
Institute of British Architects on 8 January 1957 (Banham: “Futurism and Modern
Architecture”). In recent years, scholars in Italy and elsewhere have continued to
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-004
70 Michelangelo Sabatino

dedicate attention to Futurist architecture especially in terms of its problematic

affiliation with Fascist ideology.
It was not a coincidence that the manifesto – a brief yet incisive call to arms – was
adapted as the primary medium of communication. Just as the printed press generated
opportunities for engaging with a much broader public, Futurist actionism broke down
barriers between ‘high art’ and the art of everyday life. The focus on ‘newness’ and ‘the
future’ (hence ‘Futurism’) had as its corollary an emphasis on youth and a vilification
of anything and everything that was perceived as belonging to the past. In an aggres-
sive embrace of the creative force of destruction, Marinetti advocated the liberation of
“our country from the stinking canker of its professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and
antiquarians” (Marinetti: “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14). In this regard,
Futurism shared much with other movements, such as Cubism and Expressionism, that
stressed abstraction and favoured new approaches over existing ones. Yet, with hind-
sight, it is possible to see how the development of Futurism was the result of a number
of changes that the arts witnessed during the late nineteenth century in response to the
surge of social, economic and cultural changes prompted by new urban lifestyles and
the impact of science and technology. New forms of transportation such as railroads,
automobiles and aeroplanes offered rapid means of connectivity and thus became the
new preferred subject matter of artistic and architectural inquiry. Yet, the complex rela-
tionship between the city and the countryside generated some important tensions that
expressed themselves in the work of Futurist protagonists in Italy and beyond.

Italy
In Italy’s major cities, and especially in its capital, Rome, the country’s architectural
heritage was widely celebrated and had given rise to the classicist architecture of
Italian unification. Futurism was vehemently opposed to nineteenth-century histor-
icism, and it is not a coincidence that its architectural branch was born in Milan,
Italy’s most industrialized city in the North, where vestiges of the Renaissance and
Antiquity were not nearly as ubiquitous as in Rome, Florence or Venice.
In the spring of 1914, while Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) penned a manifesto
of Futurist architecture (Boccioni: “Architettura futurista”), Marinetti urged his other
supporters to recruit some real architects to the Futurist cause. One of them was
Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916), a Brera-trained architect and member of the Nuove
Tendenze group, which had been founded in Milan in the summer of 1913. The Futur-
ists and the members of Nuove Tendenze shared a number of similar concerns, but the
latter were more conciliatory in tone and welcomed artists disapproving of Marinetti’s
scandalous and provocative antics. The first Nuove Tendenze exhibition at the Fami-
glia Artistica Gallery (20 May – 10 June 1914) included works by two architects: Mario
Chiattone exhibited three drawings, including an impressive image of the metropolis
 Architecture 71

of the future; Sant’Elia showed sixteen perspective drawings, including sketches for
La città nuova.
Aeroplanes and trains occupied a key rôle in shaping the tumultuous pace of
Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città nuova. His one-point perspective drawing puts the viewer in
the air, squarely in front of an aeroplane and railroad station of some unnamed city of
the future (see Caramel and Longatti: Antonio Sant’Elia, 288, and Di Giacomo: Antonio
Sant’Elia: L’ architettura disegnata, 240). Although commercial air travel was still in its
infancy when Sant’Elia executed his drawings, trains had already begun to reduce the
contrast between countryside and city by creating transportation networks that facil-
itated the exchange of ideas, people and products. Automobiles, too, were replacing
horse-drawn carriages and tramways. Thus, speed and movement became essential to
Futurist painters and formed a background to Sant’Elia’s vision of the world to come.
Sant’Elia first presented his ideas on Futurist architecture in a Messaggio
(Message), published as the preface to the catalogue of the Nuove Tendenze exhibition
in Milan (Sant’Elia: “Messaggio”). Subsequently, a longer and more trenchant version
appeared in Lacerba on 1 August 1914, substantially modified by Marinetti. In this
Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, Sant’Elia stated: “We must invent and rebuild the
Futurist city like an immense and tumultuous shipyard, agile, mobile and dynamic
in every detail; and the Futurist house must be like a gigantic machine” (Sant’Elia:
“Manifesto of Futurist Architecture”, 170).
The exhilarated and combative tone of the manifesto owed as much to the new
style of ‘telegraphic’ communication promoted by Marinetti as it did to the context in
which Sant’Elia was writing. During the first decades of the twentieth century, Italy
was primarily an agrarian nation that had only begun to awaken to the stimuli of
the Industrial Revolution. Italian towns and cities had been shaped over centuries by
layers of historical architectures that were a cumulative presence to be reckoned with.
Sant’Elia was well aware of this challenge, and his bold schemes paralleled Marinet-
ti’s desire to free Italy from the influence of archaeologists and antiquarians.
It is not a coincidence that the drawing Stazione d’aeroplani e treni ferroviari
(Aeroplane and Railroad Station) and the rest of the Città nuova portfolio, for that
matter, provided little or no indication of the location in which these monumental
transportation nodes and housing towers were to be realized. Buildings adjacent to
the aeroplane and railroad station were mere outlines, ‘projections’ of a city in fieri.
The fact that Sant’Elia provided only perspective drawings and no plans of the New
City is an indication of the Utopian quality of his endeavour. Whether or not Sant’Elia
was thinking of his Aeroplane and Railroad Station as a transformative addition to
a real city or as a catalyst for the founding of a new city is of little importance (see
Whyte: “The Architecture of Futurism”, Godoli: Il futurismo and Crispolti: Architettura
futurista). It is precisely this speculative quality of Sant’Elia’s drawings that excited
the imagination of different generations of architects and city planners from the 1920s
well into the 1960s, from Le Corbusier’s Ville contemporaine (Contemporary City, 1922)
and Norman Bel Geddes Futurama (1939) to Yona Friedman’s Ville spatiale (Spatial
72 Michelangelo Sabatino

City, c.1962) and Archigram’s Plug-in-City (c.1963). All of these concepts of cities owe
some debt to Sant’Elia’s urban visions in which he conflated art, engineering, archi-
tecture and urbanism. Even today, his drawings continue to be at the centre of discus-
sions on the future of the city (see De Michelis: La città nuova oltre Sant’Elia).
Mario Chiattone (1891–1957) was Sant’Elia’s fellow architect in the Nuove Ten-
denze group. They met as students at the Brera Academy and worked for a while in a
joint studio. Chiattone’s father put Sant’Elia into contact with Boccioni and thus the
Futurist movement, with whom he shared the belief that architecture should reflect
the technological advances of modern times. However, he disapproved of the Futur-
ists iconoclastic fervour and never formally joined Marinetti’s group, although in
1928 he participated in the Prima mostra di architettura futurista. Chiattone’s Futurist
works belong to the period 1914–19, after which he returned to his native Ticino and
converted to a conventional architectural profession, designing buildings in the tra-
ditional style. His early schemes bear much resemblance to Sant’Elia’s Utopian urban
scenographies, without, however, reaching the same level of originality and complex-
ity. Chiattone was certainly influenced by Sant’Elia, but the common view of him as
a ‘disciple’ or ‘epigone’ has been questioned in recent times. After 1914, he favoured a
sober simplicity that predated Rationalism and Purism.

Capri as epicentre of ‘slow’ Futurism

Most scholarly accounts on aspects of Futurism have focussed upon the rôle that
industrialization and mechanization played in the Futurists’ break with the past.
Yet, right from the beginnings of the movement, a concern over Italianità occupied a
key position in its manifestos and opened up possibilities that point to a less mono-
lithic Futurism. As the early 1910s obsession with mechanization began to wane, the
rediscovery of Italy’s Meridione or South, and in particular the island of Capri, caused
Futurists to rethink their attitudes toward the past. For second-generation Futurists
and Rationalists focussing their attention on Italianità, the ‘primitive’ character of
vernacular forms infused the mechanistic aesthetic with an expressive, sculptural
quality that went beyond flimsy transparency.
Although the island of Capri’s natural and built landscape shared little with the
soaring verticality of Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città nuova, or the dynamic curvilinearity of
Virgilio Marchi’s Città fantastica (c.1919–20), its remoteness from the industrialized
cities paradoxically fuelled the creative impulses of a generation of ‘slow’ Futurism
(see Sabatino: Pride in Modesty, and Lejeune and Sabatino: Modern Architecture and
the Mediterranean). To be sure, it was a Futurism at odds with the idea of a ‘fast’
Futurism as seen in one of the closing images of Le Corbusier’s Vers une architec-
ture, in which automobiles were seen driving (‘flying’) on the rooftop of the Fiat Lin-
gotto Factory. By the early 1920s, Capri and southern Italy, where industrialization
 Architecture 73

had been least felt, became an epicentre and pilgrimage site for Italian Futurists (see
Piscopo: Capri futurista, and Caruso: “Breve storia del futurismo a Capri”). They were
strongly attracted to the spontaneous vernacular structures typical of this part of the
country, as well as the dramatic qualities of the rugged landscape. Capri’s insular-
ity, far removed as it was from the metropolis celebrated by first-generation Futurists
coupled with the conspicuous absence of any trace of modernity’s fascination with
speed (the automobile, the train, the aeroplane), appealed to Futurists as much as the
pleasure-seeking bourgeoisie who frequented the island.
After the First World War, due to the efforts of Capri’s charismatic mayor of many
years, Edwin Cerio (1875–1960), an engineer-turned-politician, the island evolved into
a haven for international artists, architects, intellectuals and preservationists (see
Vergine: Capri 1905–1940). In an address delivered to the 1922 Convegno del paes-
aggio (Symposium on Landscape) convened in Capri, Marinetti praised the island’s
vernacular buildings because of their rational and anti-picturesque qualities:

I believe that this is a Futurist island; I feel that it is full of infinite originality as if it had been
sculpted by Futurist architects such as Sant’Elia, Virgilio Marchi, painted by Balla, Depero,
Russolo, Prampolini, and sung and made musical by Francesco Cangiullo and Casella! (Marinetti:
“Il discorso di Marinetti”)

More than a decade after Marinetti’s attack on Italy’s cult of the past, espoused in
The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), he exonerated vernacular build-
ings, sparing them his anti-historicist wrath and proclaiming them exempt from the
flux of academic styles. Marinetti saw beauty and freedom in the dramatic and varied
landscape of Capri because it rejected, as he put it, “any kind of order reminiscent
of Classicism” (Marinetti: “Elogio di Capri”). Although the interest in primitivism,
which surfaced in the 1920s among Futurists, shared something with the pursuit of
the archaic that was typical of the milieu of the journal Valori plastici (1919–1922), it
remained a fundamentally anti-classical impulse. The rediscovery and appropriation
of the vernacular did not imply an end to the avant-garde, but rather a reframing of its
objectives in the context of Fascist Italy, in which artists and architects engaged with
issues of national identity and Modernism.
In 1922, the year that Benito Mussolini seized political power, Virgilio Marchi
(1895–1960), Futurist architect and set designer, praised the vernacular buildings of
Capri and the Amalfi coast as a source of formal inspiration for contemporary design-
ers. He published a short illustrated essay on the primitivism of Capri architecture in
Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s avant-garde journal, Cronache d’attualità (Marchi: “Primi-
tivismi capresi”). Two years later, in his book, Architettura futurista (1924), Marchi
elaborated on the “innate virtue of primitive builders” in his discussion of the rela-
tionship between the vernacular tradition and contemporary design (see Torelli
Landini: Virgilio Marchi architetto e scenografo; D’Amico and Danesi Squarzina: Vir-
gilio Marchi, architetto, scenografo, futurista). On the book’s cover, he reproduced one
74 Michelangelo Sabatino

of his drawings for a hydroelectric plant, one of the most modern of twentieth-century
architectural types. This project by Marchi echoes the sculptural, stereotomic quali-
ties of the vernacular buildings of Capri and the Amalfi coast, which he had recorded
a few years earlier. With Architettura futurista and Italia nuova architettura nuova (The
New Italy, the New Architecture, 1931), Marchi tried to position himself as the heir
to Sant’Elia and as the champion of Futurist architecture after the latter’s death in
1916. Yet, Marchi’s drawings for Città fantastica (c.1919–1920) rejected the linearity
of Sant’Elia’s Città nuova in favour of an Expressionist quality akin to Bruno Taut’s
visionary drawings for Alpine Architektur (Alpine Architecture, 1919). Most of all,
Marchi’s spiralling fantasy city of the future recalls the dramatic topography of Capri.
Several of the Futurist artists regularly convening in Capri assimilated their
impressions in a variety of paintings (e. g. Fortunato Depero in Portatrice caprese
[Female Water Carrier, 1917], Tarantella [1918–20] and Paese di tarantelle [Land of
Tarantella Dances, 1918], or Enrico Prampolini in Architettura cromatica di Capri
[Chromatic Architecture of Capri, 1921]) and also engaged in architectural projects,
both theoretically and practically. The case of Capri reveals an important dialogue
between architects and artists: while this dialogue produced a fertile exchange
between two-dimensional painting, three-dimensional sculpture and architecture, it
is important not to overlook differences in intention.
The pre-industrial and remote character of Capri, both associated with the
pre-industrial world of southern Italy, posed a challenge to Futurist artists and archi-
tects such as Depero, Marchi and Prampolini, who were in thrall of an identity politics
tainted by Fascist nationalism. Insofar as it was devoid of the mechanized symbols
of progress (the car, the train, the aeroplane), the island forced artists and architects
to think in terms of a modernity of the spirit. Prampolini wrote architectural man-
ifestos, painted and produced architecture; when in Capri, he used the landscape,
the light and the sea as sources of artistic inspiration, and in 1935 he went so far as
to design a villa (never built) for Marinetti. His multi-storey, multi-faceted Padiglione
futurista (Futurist Pavilion, 1928) for the Turin International World’s Fair (Parco del
Valentino, 1 May – 4 November 1928) drew on the sculptural and labyrinthine land-
scape of Capri, echoing the paintings and prints produced during those years by the
Danish artist Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898–1972), who also drew attention to sites in
the Campania region on the Amalfi coast.
Fortunato Depero’s depictions of the alpine mountain towns in the Trentino region
east of Rovereto, including Serrada (1920) and Lizzana (1923), show his interest in the
organic relationship between vernacular architecture and the natural landscape. This
dialectical relationship is manifested in his faceted one-storey Bestetti-Treves-Tum-
inelli book pavilion, built for the third Monza Biennale (1927) (see Doordan: “The
Advertising Architecture of Fortunato Depero”). In many ways, its stereotomic mass
recalls the sculptural qualities of the layered, interlocking stone masonry of the
southern Italian vernacular buildings anchored to the earth from which they rise. Like
Marchi’s visionary drawings for the Città fantastica, this building evokes solid masses
 Architecture 75

in contradistinction to the pursuit of transparency and dematerialization that had

come to characterize much of the avant-garde glass architecture of the same period in
Germany and Holland.

Futurism versus Rationalism

From the late 1920s onwards, architects in Italy used the term ‘Rationalism’ to describe a
movement within modern architecture that prioritized function but not at the expense of
the poetics of site and ‘tradition’. Although the Rationalists identified with the Utopian
impulse sustaining Sant’Elia’s Città nuova, they all agreed on the need to move beyond
the contestation or tabula rasa phase of Futurism. Although Futurists and Rationalists
adopted different positions toward the rôle of tradition, they shared a common inter-
est in the stark yet expressive qualities of simplified geometries. If Futurism aspired to
heightened expressivity by introducing the allusion of movement, Rationalism sought
a more ‘static’ lyricism by drawing upon abstraction and classicism.
During the 1930s, Rationalism emerged as a central strand of Italian Modern-
ism. The first exhibition of Rationalist architecture was organized by the Movimento
Italiano per l’ Architettura Razionale (MIAR) in 1928, but at the second and final
exhibition of MIAR in 1931, Pier Maria Bardi (1900–1999) showcased his Tavolo degli
orrori (Panel of Horrors), a highly polemical montage of historicist buildings. This
denouncement of eclectic and historicist architecture prompted debates over the
agenda and validity of the movement with respect to the Fascist political agenda
and eventually caused Rationalism’s demise as a State-endorsed movement. After
repeated attempts to enter into a dialogue with the Fascist leadership, more progres-
sive Rationalists such as Adalberto Libera (1903–1963) found themselves at odds with
the régime’s growing insistence on prescriptive attitudes that banalized Classicism
in State-sponsored buildings. Libera and other architects such as Giuseppe Terragni
(1904–1943), whose Casa del Fascio in Como (1933) had absorbed the lessons of Clas-
sicism without succumbing to banal mimesis, felt betrayed by a régime that grad-
ually abandoned both Futurism and Rationalism. À propos the overlap of Futurist
and Rationalist tendencies, it is worth noting that Terragni also executed in Como a
Monumento ai caduti (Monument to the Fallen), based on a sketch by Sant’Elia. The
site was inaugurated on 4 November 1933.
The overlap between the formal and material qualities of Futurist and Rational-
ist architecture is most apparent in the work of Alberto Sartoris, Angiolo Mazzoni,
Ottorino Aloisio and Pier Luigi Nervi. Sartoris, who grew up in Switzerland, enter-
tained amicable relations with various avant-garde groups. His interest in Futurism
was counterbalanced by an equally strong rationalist propensity, indicated by his
attachment to Le Corbusier, Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. His pavilion
at the aforementioned 1928 International Exhibition of Turin was one of the first
76 Michelangelo Sabatino

examples of Rationalist architecture, yet he was also an editor of the Futurist period-
ical La città futurista, and he showed his designs at the Prima mostra di architettura
futurista (First Exhibition of Futurist Architecture, 19 October – 4 November 1928),
curated by his friend Fillìa. His book, Gli elementi dell’architettura funzionale (The Ele-
ments of a Functional Architecture, 1932) had a dedication by Marinetti and a preface
by Le Corbusier; its architectural ideas were leaning towards the latter, but his asser-
tive and uncompromising modernity and his emphatic commitment to a modernist
art in line with technological progress had clearly Futurist undertones. Sartoris was
a convinced internationalist who participated in CIAM (Congrès internationaux d’ar-
chitecture moderne [International Congresses of Modern Architecture]), documented
the works of his contemporaries and published widely in many countries, but he was
also fully involved with the Turin circle of Futurists. Shortly after his first encounter
with Futurism in 1920–21, he designed a Futurist bar, later changed into a Capella/
Bar (Chapel/Bar, 1927). His buildings, in a pronounced axonometric style and inven-
tive use of colour, were praised by Fillìa as a “triumph of steel and crystal, a play of
volumes that define an absolutely original rhythm and achieve a result of constructive
severity” (Fillìa: “L’ architettura sacra futurista”, 4).
Quite different in style were the works of Angiolo Mazzoni (1894–1979). He joined
the Futurist circle in Rome and exhibited in their group shows at the Teatro Costanzi
(February – March 1913) and Galleria Sprovieri (December 1913 – June 1914). As an
architect he worked for a while in Marcello Piacentini’s studio (1920–1921) before
taking a diploma at the Academy of Bologna (1923) and joining the railway depart-
ment of the Ministry of Public Works. In 1933, he formally re-joined the Futurist move-
ment and was severely criticized for this by Giuseppe Pagano in Casabella (“Un nuovo
architetto futurista”, 47). He became co-editor of the Futurist newspaper Sant’Elia
(1934–1935), signed with F. T. Marinetti and Mino Somenzi the Manifesto futurista
dell’architettura aerea (Manifesto of Aerial Architecture, 1934) and was often praised
by Marinetti for being the most representative Futurist architect of the 1930s. Mazzo-
ni’s many buildings were conceived as Total Works of Art in which he designed not
only the edifice but also its décor and fixtures. Mazzoni’s elevated position within
the power structure of the Fascist State allowed him to invite many Futurists (Bene-
detta, Depero, Fillìa, Prampolini, Tato and others) to collaborate with him on public
commissions. His most famous project was that for the main train station of Florence,
Santa Maria Novella (1931), but also highly original were his post offices in Agrigento
(1931–1934), Littoria (1932) and Ostia (1934), his contributions to the città di fondazi-
one (a vast building programme of more than a dozen techno-cities built on reclaimed
marshland in the Latium region) and the train stations in Siena and Trento (1933–1935,
1934–1936). The style of Mazzoni’s buildings was often eclectic and contradictory, like
his position as a State official who was simultaneously a member of an unruly avant-
garde movement. Mazzoni believed that the bareness of reinforced concrete had to be
hidden under a modern decoration that was complementary to the structural ideas
expressed in the architecture. He differentiated between load-bearing and decorative
 Architecture 77

features and favoured an interplay of beauty and functionality, hence his interest in
the collaboration of architect and artisan, in the polymaterial quality of buildings and
in architecture as a Total Work of Art.
Ottorino Aloisio (1902–1986) was a member of the MIAR group and took part
in the Prima Esposizione italiana di architettura razionale (First Italian Exhibition
of Rational Architecture in Rome, 28 March – 30 April 1928). During the years he
lived in Udine (1926–29), he made a name for himself with his designs for the Terme
littorie in Rome (1927), re-designed a year later as a Università dello sport for the
Olympics in Amsterdam (1928). In 1929 he settled in Turin to teach at the Politecnico
and established contacts with the group of Futurists headed by Fillìa. In 1934, he
won a competition with his Casa del Fascio in Asti, followed by a project for the
re-building of the burned-out Teatro Regio in Turin (1937) and a commission to build
the Cinema Ideal a Torino (1939). Other prominent projects were the Stazione Marit-
tima in Naples (1933) and the Palazzo del Littorio in Rome (1934). Aloisio was never
a fully fledged Futurist and rather attempted to create a bridge between traditional
and modern architecture. He favoured an expressionist rather than functionalist
style and operated with a pronounced lyricism that bore more than a passing resem-
blance with the ideas of Virgilio Marchi.
Cesare Augusto Poggi (1903–1971) belonged to an independent Futurist circle in
Florence and was thus sidelined by Marinetti. He campaigned for a kind of machine
à habiter (which he called ‘case macchina’), but not with the excessive verticality of
American skyscrapers. He published in 1933 a Manifesto dell’architettura futurista
Poggi (Manifesto of Futurist Architecture “Poggi”), in which he argued against Ration-
alism and favoured a type of Futurist architecture not characterized by a specific style
but by “continuous evolution, fast progress” (Poggi: “Manifesto dell’architettura
futurista Poggi”, 193). In concrete terms, this “moving ahead with science” meant for
him steel construction rather than building with reinforced concrete. His Padiglione
al mare per polisportivi (Seaside Sport Facility Pavilion, 1933) and Arcone radiofaro per
G. Marconi all’ E-42 (Radio-lighthouse Arch for G. Marconi at the 1942 Universal Exhi-
bition, 1940) were technological fantasies that operated with highly aerodynamic and
symbolic forms, whereas his Teatro per visioni novissimi dinamiche di massa (Mass
Theatre for Ultra-modern Dynamic Visions, 1934) was inspired by the organic struc-
ture of a tortoise shell.
The leading figure in the Turin Futurist circle was Fillìa (pseud. Luigi Colombo,
1904–1936). Together with Alberto Sartoris, he founded the journals La città futurista
(1928–1929), La città nuova (1932–1934), as well as Stile futurista (1934–1935), which
offered ample space to architecture. Fillìa’s significance for architecture lay in his
tireless editorial activities, such as the influential monographs, La nuova architet-
tura (1931) and Gli ambienti della nuova architettura (1935), and a long list of essays
concerned with modern architecture, muralism and what he called ‘ambientazione’
(i. e. the spiritual and technical fashioning of living environments, interior design, the
rôle of advertising in modern cities, etc.). In 1930, Fillìa spent time in Paris, where he
78 Michelangelo Sabatino

joined the Cercle et Carré group, contributed to their periodical a response to Michel
Seuphor’s essay, “Pour la défense d’une architecture” (A Defence of Architecture,
1930) and exhibited an Architecture dans l’ interieur (Interior Architecture) in their
group show at the Galerie 23 (17 April – 1 May 1930). Fillìa was a veritable force in the
polemical debates of 1930–1931 when Rationalism claimed the official status of being
the ‘architecture of the Fascist State’. To counterbalance the influence of his rivals,
Fillìa assumed charge of the First Exhibition of Futurist Architecture, held in the Parco
Valentino in Turin (see above, p. 74), which showed not only architectural designs,
but also real pavilions created by Enrico Prampolini and Alberto Sartoris. Jointly with
Marinetti, he was a assiduous propagator of Sant’Elia’s ideas and heritage, as can be
seen in the Mostra delle opere dell’architetto futurista comasco Sant’Elia e Onoranze
nazionale dell’architetto futurista Sant’Elia (Exhibition of Works by the Futurist Archi-
tect Sant’Elia from Como and National Celebration in Honour of the Futurist Architect
Sant’Elia [Como: Broletto, 14 September – 3 October 1930]), subsequently shown as
Mostra futurista dell’architetto Sant’Elia e 22 pittori futuristi (Futurist Exhibition of the
Architect Sant’Elia and 22 Futurist Painters; Milan: Galleria Pesaro, 16 October – [?]
November 1930) and Mostra delle opere dell’architetto futurista Sant’Elia (Exhibition
of Works by the Futurist Architect Sant’Elia; Rome: Circolo di Coltura, 6–16 December
1930). He also was the key organizer behind the Prima mostra nazionale di plastica
murale per l’ edilizia fascista (First National Exhibition of of Mural Décor for Fascist
Buildings; Genova: Palazzo Ducale, 14 November 1934 – 11 January 1935), in which
he presented nine of his designs for public buildings. Fillìa’s architectural œuvre was
small and focussed more on interior design than on the buildings themselves, as can
be seen in the first permanent Futurist theatre, the Novatore (1927), and the Futurist
restaurant Santopalato (1931), both in Turin.
Pier Luigi Nervi (1891–1979) was an ingegnere edile (building engineer), known
for his innovative use of reinforced concrete and the dramatic sense of design in
his large-span structures. Nervi graduated from the University of Bologna in 1913
and worked in Bologna and Florence, where he participated in the third Mostra
nazionale di architettura razionale (Palazzo Ferroni, 20 March – [?] April 1932) with
the spectacular Albergo galleggiante (Floating Hotel). Also in Florence, he built
the innovative Giovanni Berta football stadium (1933). Thayaht interviewed Nervi
in the periodical Futurismo, in which the architect expressed his great admiration
for Sant’Elia and wondered how he would have realized his grandiose ideas if he
had had at his disposal the technical possibilities of today (Thayaht: “Consider-
azioni sullo stadio Berta”, 4). A third project with distinct Futurist features was
the Palazzo dell’acqua e della luce (Palace of Water and Light, 1939) for the World’s
Fair of 1942 in Rome.
Quirino De Giorgio (1907–1997) trained at the Industrial art school in Padua and
the Royal School of Architecture in Rome. He entered the Futurist movement in 1931
at the exhibition Sette futuristi padovani (Seven Futurists of Padua; Sala del Sindacato
Artisti, January 1931), where he exhibited in the architecture section. He was again
 Architecture 79

present with architectural drawings in Pittura aeropittura futurista, arazzi architettura

giocattoli (Painting Futurist Airpainting, Tapestries Architecture Toys; Trieste: Art
Club, 6–20 March 1931), the Prima mostra triveneta d’arte futurista (First Exhibition
of Futurist Art in the Three-Veneto Region; Padua: Sala Hesperia, February 1932), the
exhibition, Omaggio futurista a Umberto Boccioni (A Futurist Homage to Boccioni;
Milan: Galleria Pesaro, 1–20 June 1933) and Prima mostra nazionale d’arte futurista
(First National Exhibition of Futurist Art; Rome: Palazzo dei Sindacato Ingegneri,
28 October – 4 November 1933). De Giorgio, who was also a military officer in the
province of Padua, entertained close relations with the Fascist authorities. When
they decided in 1937 to construct within a short span of time 335 new Party buildings
(case di fascio) and in 1939 a further 343, the time had come for régime-friendly archi-
tects to place their skills at the service of the State. De Giorgio was one of them, and
due to his more than one dozen PNF buildings he very quickly rose to prominence
in Mussolini’s apparatus. De Giorgio’s architectural designs borrowed extensively
from Sant’Elia and the conservative and semi-classical Novecento movement. When
some of them were published by Depero in Dinamo futurista, they were praised for
their “ascending lines, shining nudity, masses, volumes, adherence to a heroic spirit”
([Anon.]: “Quirino De Giorgio”). Indeed, they had a heavy ‘machinist’ appearance
and operated with a monumentalism that was typical of a fusion between Fascist
rhetoric and Futurist exaggeration. The theatrical quality of his architectural vision
may explain why Marinetti chose him to design a spectacular metropolis for Ruggero
Vasari’s drama Raun (1931–1932).
Attilio Calzavara (1901–1952) also studied graphic and decorative arts in Padua
(1915–1920) and architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice (1922–1926). But
his work as an architect was greatly hampered by the fact that he refused to enrol
in the Fascist Party. His architectural creations were therefore largely restricted to
designs on paper, or when they were built he went uncredited. His large personal
archive, which was published in 1994 and 2010, contains designs and photographs
of three pavilions made for the Fiera del Levante in Bari (1933, 1934 and 1938). In
1935, he designed the Pavilion of the Ministry of Public Works at the Universal Exhi-
bition of Brussels in a dynamic and daring Futurist style. In the Padiglione dell’ Avi-
azione Civile e della Marina Mercantile (Pavilion of Civil Aviation and Sea Trade) for
the Society “Ala Littoria” at the Padua Trade Fair of 1939, he created a curvilinear
space supporting printed images in an exceptionally large format, written slogans
and mechanical objects. His six pavilions for the Prima Mostra Triennale delle Terre
Italiane d’Oltremare in Naples (1940) worked with similar principles of juxtaposing
words and images in a manner that looked like three-dimensional Words-in-Freedom.
Calzavara achieved an exhibition design with an individual voice that moved at ease
between Futurism, Constructivism, Novecento and Rationalism and demonstrated
that Futurist works were not an exclusive patrimony of the faithful followers of Mari-
netti’s organization. Thus, he showed that Futurism had spread, albeit in a diffused
manner, into various professional quarters.
80 Michelangelo Sabatino

Futurism in the world

Although Futurism was born in Italy, it soon became an international phenome-
non, whose impact was felt throughout the world. Russian Futurism in particular
reflected an intense relationship between art and architecture by way of Construc-
tivism. In 1921, the VKhuTeMas (Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskie Mas-
terskie; Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops), set up an architectural wing and
became affiliated with the ASNOVA (Assotsiatsiia novykh arkhitektorov, Associ-
ation of New Architects) and the OSA (Obedinenie sovremennykh arkhitektorov;
Organization of Contemporary Architects) groups. Protagonists of this exchange
were Yakov Chernikhov (1889–1951), Konstantin Melnikov (1890–1974), the Broth-
ers Leonid Vesnin (1880–1933), Victor Vesnin (1882–1950) and Alexander Vesnin
(1883–1959). Although rationalists at heart, they were also interested in the psy-
chological aspects of architecture. Aesthetically they were linked to both Construc-
tivism and Futurism. However, as the latter experienced a distinct decline in the
1920s and was eventually banned, the Futurist heritage exercised more of an indi-
rect influence on their works. The most impressive example of Melnikov’s ‘Futurist’
principles was his Rusakov Club (1927–1929) and the cylindrical house he designed
for himself in Moscow (1927–1929).
Chernikov was greatly interested in the Futurist movement, Malevich’s Suprema-
tism and Constructivism. He published several books with elaborately designed archi-
tectural fantasies, but the Bolsheviks mistrusted his unusual ideas. Consequently, his
influence was more profound as a teacher than a builder of houses. The Vesnin broth-
ers worked collaboratively on a number of projects, which also included stage designs
and painting. Following an early period of designing private and industrial build-
ings in the 1920s, they began to embrace avant-garde concepts, including Futurism.
Their architecture emphasized functionality and modern construction technologies,
as can be seen in their Palace of Labour in Moscow, also known as Likhachev Palace
(1930–1934).
The Spanish architect Casto Fernández-Shaw (1896–1978) had an opportunity to
see Konstantin Melnikov’s Russian Pavilion at the Paris Exposition Internationale des
Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Indus-
trial and Decorative Arts, 28 April – 25 October 1925), which reinforced his interest
in Constructivism. Although most of his built architecture was in a Rationalist style,
his visionary drawings were strongly Futurist in orientation. One that was actually
realized was the petrol station in Calle de Alberto Aguilera in Madrid, also known as
Gasolinera Gesa, or Gasolinera de Porto Pí (1927). Similarly, in his Railway Station on
Plaza de Colón in Madrid (1933–1936) he was able to link his Rationalist affinities with
a Futurist understanding of urbanism and architecture.
Gregori Warchavchik (1896–1972) was an architect who had familiarized himself
with Futurism during his youth in Ukraine and during his studies in Rome (1918–20).
He worked for a while with Marcello Piacentini (1881–1960) and emigrated to Brazil
 Architecture 81

in 1923, where he became the first major Modernist architect. In 1925, Warchavchik
wrote a manifesto entitled “Futurismo?”, published in Italian in Il piccolo (São Paulo,
15 June 1925) and then in Portuguese (“Acerca da architectura moderna” – On Modern
Architecture) in the Correio da manhã (Rio de Janeiro, 1 November 1925). In 1930, he
set up a studio in Rio de Janeiro, where between 1932 and 1936 Oscar Niemeyer began
his career. Warchavchik was very critical towards the architectural aesthetic that was
flourishing at the time. He was vehemently opposed to useless and absurd ornamen-
tation and any blind imitation of classical architecture. He felt that just as machines
had conditioned technological progress, so also did buildings need to modernize, for
they were true “machines for living”.

The legacy of Futurism

With the destruction and human loss of the Second World War, the celebration of the
machine by Futurist artists and architects receded, only to surface during the 1960s
with the work of the British avant-garde architectural group, Archigram (Peter Cook,
Warren Chalk, Ron Herron, Dennis Crompton, Michael Webb and David Greene) and
in Japan with the spectacular megastructual cities of the Metabolist Movement (Kenzo
Tange, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa and Fumihiko Maki). Gone were all the
political associations of Futurism that it had developed in Italy during the 1920s, and
in their place moved a populist agenda aimed at re-vitalizing post-war architecture and
urbanism. Peter Cook, author of several of the most provocative Neo-Futurist draw-
ings of the new city, would have to wait several decades to realize his first ‘Futurist’
building (with Colin Fournier): Kunsthaus Graz (2003). The Metabolists’ resurrection
of Futurist ideals meant that a considerable number of essays on Futurism appeared
in Japanese periodicals and gave a fresh impetus to the notion that a metropolis was
a living apparatus whose components should be changeable in accordance with the
demands of modern life. In Italy, the Archizoom group (Andrea Branzi, Gilberto Cor-
retti, Paolo Deganello, Massimo Morozzi, Dario Bartolini, Lucia Bartolini) invented
“Superarchitecture” and a “No-Stop-City”, radical visions of the city of the future,
which were all-embracing creations closely linked to design and environmental plan-
ning. The trend of anti-traditionalism and anti-historicism in late twentieth-century
architecture meant that numerous architects in the East and West re-thought some
of the propositions made by the historical avant-garde, and by Futurism in particu-
lar. Amongst the Neo-Futurist architects can be counted the French architect Denis
Laming, the Finnish-American Eero Saarinen and the Spaniard Santiago Calatrava;
but also the Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid took Futurist (and Constructivist) cues
to create buildings that sought to emulate movement and visually defy age-old laws
of gravity in her early works, such as the Vitra Fire Station (1994) and the Bergisel Ski
Jump (2002).
82 Michelangelo Sabatino

Works cited
[Anon.]: “Quirino De Giorgio.” Dinamo futurista 2 (March 1933): 8.
Banham, Reyner: “Futurism and Modern Architecture: Mr. Reyner Banham’s Talk at RIBA.” The Builder
192:5937 (11 January 1957): 89–90. Reprinted in Architects’ Journal 125 (17 January 1957):
119–126. The Architect: Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects 64:4 (February 1957):
129–139.
Boccioni, Umberto: “Architettura futurista: Manifesto.” U. Boccioni: Altri inediti e apparati critici.
A cura di Zeno Birolli. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1972. 36–40. English translation “Manifesto
1914.” Jacqueline Gargus, ed.: From Futurism to Rationalism: The Origins of Modern Italian
Architecture. London: Architectural Design, 1981. 17–18.
Caramel, Luciano, and Alberto Longatti, Antonio Sant’Elia: L’ opera completa. Milano: Mondadori,
1987.
Caruso, Luciano: “Breve storia del futurismo a Capri: Ovvero il paradiso (mancato) dei futuristi.”
Nord e sud 33:3 (July–September 1986): 107–117.
D’Amico, Alessandro, and Silvia Danesi Squarzina: Virgilio Marchi, architetto, scenografo, futurista.
Milano: Electa, 1977.
De Michelis, Marco, ed.: La città nuova oltre Sant’Elia: Cento anni di visioni urbane, 1913–2013.
Exhibition catalogue. Como: Pinacoteca Civica, 24 marzo – 14 luglio 2013. Cinisello Balsamo
(MI): Silvana, 2013.
Di Giacomo, Francesca, ed.: Antonio Sant’Elia: L’ architettura disegnata. Exhibition catalogue.
Venezia: Museo d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro, 7 settembre – 17 novembre 1991. Venezia:
Marsilio, 1991.
Doordan, Dennis P.: “The Advertising Architecture of Fortunato Depero.” The Journal of Decorative
and Propaganda Arts 12 (Spring 1989): 46–55.
Fillìa [pseud. of Luigi Colombo]: “L’ architettura sacra futurista.” Futurismo 1:4 (2 October 1932): 4.
Fillìa: [s.t.] Cercle et Carré 1:1 (15 March 1930): [7].
Fillìa: Gli ambienti della nuova architettura. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1935.
Fillìa: La nuova architettura. Torino: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1931.
Godoli, Ezio: Il futurismo: Guida all’architettura moderna. Rome: Laterza, 1983.
Le Corbusier [Charles-Édouard Jeanneret]: Vers une architecture. Paris: Crès, 1923.
Lejeune, Jean-François, and Michelangelo Sabatino, Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean:
Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities. London: Routledge, 2010.
Marchi, Virgilio: “Primitivismi capresi.” Cronache d’attualità 6–10 (1922): 49–51.
Marchi, Virgilio: Architettura futurista. Foligno: Campitelli, 1924.
Marchi, Virgilio: Italia nuova, architettura nuova: Seguito di Architettura futurista. Foligno:
Campitelli, 1931.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Elogio di Capri.” Natura 1:1 (January 1928): 41–48.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il discorso di Marinetti.” Edwin Cerio, ed.: Il convegno del paesaggio.
Naples: Gaspare Casella, 1923. 38.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Angiolo Mazzoni, and Mino Somenzi: “Manifesto futurista dell’archi-
tettura aerea.” Sant’Elia 2:3 (1 February 1934): 2bis. Reprinted in Ezio Godoli: Il futurismo:
Guida all’architettura moderna. Roma: Laterza, 1983. 195–196. English translation “Futurist
Manifesto of Aerial Architecture.” Bruno Mantura, Patrizia Rosazza-Ferraris, and Livia Velani,
eds.: Futurism in Flight. Exhibition catalogue. London: Accademia Italiana, 4 September – 13
October 1990. Roma: De Luca, 1990. 205–206.
Pagano, Giuseppe: “Un nuovo architetto futurista.” Casabella 6:8–9 (August–September 1933): 47.
 Architecture 83

Piscopo, Ugo: Capri futurista. Napoli: Guida, 2001.

Poggi, Cesare Augusto: Architettura futurista Poggi. Firenze: Gruppi Futuristi d’Iniziative, 1933. Reprinted
in Ezio Godoli: Il futurismo: Guida all’architettura moderna. Roma: Laterza, 1983. 192–194.
Sabatino, Michelangelo: Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in
Italy. Toronto-Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Sant’Elia, Antonio: “L’ architettura futurista: Manifesto.” Lacerba 2:15 (1 August 1914): 228–231.
English translation “Manifesto of Futurist Architecture.” Umbro Apollonio, ed.: Futurist
Manifestos. New York: The Viking Press, 1970. 160–172.
Sant’Elia, Antonio: “[Messaggio].” Prima Esposizione d’Arte del Gruppo Nuove Tendenze, aperta
alla “Famiglia Artistica” di Milano dal 20 maggio al 10 giugno 1914. Milano: s. n., 1914. 13–19.
Reprinted in Ezio Godoli: Il futurismo: Guida all’architettura moderna. Roma: Laterza, 1983.
182–183. English translation “The New City, 1914.” Tim Benton, Charlotte Benton, and Dennis
Sharp, eds.: Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design
1890–1939. London: Crosby Lockwood Staples, 1975. 71–72.
Taut, Bruno: Alpine Architektur. Hagen i.W.: Folkwang-Verlag, 1919.
Thayaht [pseud. of Ernesto Michahelles]: “Considerazioni sullo stadio Berta.” Futurismo 2:20 (22
January 1933): 4; 2:31 (9 April 1933): 4. Reprinted in Thayaht: Vita, scritti, carteggi. A cura di
Alessandra Scappini. Milano: Skira 2005. 438–444.
Torelli Landini, Enrica, ed.: Virgilio Marchi: Architetto e scenografo. Exhibition catalogue. Roma:
Galleria André; Livorno: Galleria Peccolo, 6 novembre – 5 dicembre 2009.
Vergine, Lea, ed.: Capri 1905–1940: Frammenti postumi. Milano: Skira, 2000.
Warchavchik, Gregori: “Note d’arte: Futurismo.” Il piccolo (São Paulo) 14 June 1925. Portuguese
translation “Futurismo, ou, Acerca da arquitetura moderna.” O correio da manhã (Rio de
Janeiro), 1 November 1925. Reprinted in G. Warchavchik: Arquitetura do século XX e outros
escritos. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2006. 33–38.
Whyte, Iain Boyd: “The Architecture of Futurism.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in
Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000. 353–372.

Further reading
[Anon.]: “Tra futurismo ed espressionismo: Visioni architettoniche di Ottorino Aloisio (1926–28).”
Architettura: Cronache e storia 6:8 (December 1960): 564–567.
Aceti, Enrico, and Tiziano Dalpozzo: Archetipi dell’architettura e futurismo: Conversazioni. Con un
intervento di Francesco Giardinazzo. Faenza: Carta Bianca; Amici dell’ Arte, 2012.
Alba, Ángel Fernández, and Soledad del Pino, eds.: Casa estudio en Moscú: La casa del arquitecto
Konstantin Melnikov. Madrid: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos de Madrid, 2001.
Alomar Esteve, Gabriel: “Don Casto Fernández Shaw, o El futurismo y los castillos: Homenaje de la
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Matteo Fochessati
5 Ceramics
Introduction
On 7 September 1938, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published in La gazzetta del
popolo the manifesto Ceramica e aeroceramica (Ceramics and Aeroceramics), in
which he summed up twenty years of Futurist activities in the field of ceramics:
“In this modern art, characterized by the aesthetics of the machine, by geometry
and velocity generated by Italian Futurism, any hope of a return to hybridisms and
statics in the classical style seems imbecile and anti-patriotic” (Marinetti: “Ceramica
e aeroceramica”, s.p.).
The first experiments in the medium date back to the mid-1910s (see below,
p. 90), but a full-scale exploration of an innovative style of Futurist ceramics on a
professional level only emerged in the second half of the 1920s, largely thanks to
Tullio Mazzotti (1899–1971), later known as Tullio d’Albisola. He was the leader of a
group of Futurist potters in the small town of Albisola in Liguria, which pioneered the
new style and brought it to national and international renown (see Buzio Negri and
Zelatore: Albisola futurista). His efforts were flanked by Giuseppe Fabbri (1901–1995),
Riccardo Gatti (1886–1972), Anselmo Bucci (1887–1959), Mario Ortolani (1901–1955)
and Mario Guido Dal Monte (1906–1990), who operated Futurist workshops in Faenza
(see Nicolini: “La ceramica futurista a Faenza”), and a similarly innovative approach
was taken by the artistic glass manufacturers of Altare, Enrico Bordoni (1904–1969),
Albino Grosso (1902–1934), Angelo Saroldi (1890–1963) and Costantino Bormioli
(1876–1934) (see Michelotti et al.: Futuraltare).
The early stages of the Futurist experimentation in the field of ceramics were
often characterized by the recovery of traditional models, on which forms and décors
based on Futurist imagery were transposed. However, the aesthetic turn in the activ-
ity of potters in Albisola was not only a question of motifs and decorative patterns; it
also was the result of a new and innovative operative approach. A process of renewal
was instigated by consolidating organizational and technological systems within the
already existing production plants. The interventional strategies that had been devel-
oped by the Futurist movement were applied to the collaborative working processes
in ceramic workshops, eventually merging artisanal production and industrial serial-
ity in a new artistic synthesis.
The adaptation of modern aesthetic principles to traditional production methods
could also be found in the avant-garde ceramics of other countries. Tullio d’Albisola, for
example, compared Futurist work in Italy with Soviet pottery, but then contrasted the
“colourful Deperian arabesques with the cold decorations of the State schools of Russian
Suprematists” (D’Albisola: “Sintesi storica della ceramica futurista italiana”, s.p.). The
Imperial Porcelain Factory, established in Saint Petersburg in the middle of the eighteenth
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-005
 Ceramics 89

century under the name ‘Imperatorskii farforovyi zavod’, was renamed ‘Gosudarstvennyi
farforovii zavod’ (State Porcelain Factory), and after 1918 it was managed by the Narodnyi
Kommisariat Prosveshcheniia (People’s Commissariat for Enlightenment). It represented
a similar case of renewing an existing production plant by members of the avant-garde.
Mikhail Adamovich, Alexandra Shchekotikhina-Pototskaya, Maria Lebedeva, Varvara
Petrovna Freze, Elizaveta Berngardovna Rozendorf, Nathan Altman and Wassily Kan-
dinsky, amongst others, collaborated with the State Porcelain Factory and embraced the
motto, Ot mol’berta k mashine (From the easel to the machine).
Under Sergei Chekhonin’s supervision (1918–1923 and 1925–1927), the State
Porcelain Factory was characterized by a production that translated propagandist
themes and patterns, as can be seen from the series of dishes with political slogans
designed by Chekhonin himself or from the pottery celebrating the October Revolu-
tion and the International Workers’ Day (see Lobanov-Rostov: “Soviet Propaganda
Porcelain”, 126–141). The great innovations of Suprematism, which won great acclaim
when exhibited in Konstantin Melnikov’s Russian Pavillion at the 1925 Paris Interna-
tional Exhibition, were introduced into the factory production of ceramics with the
appointment of Nikolai Suetin as art director. The style he promoted was marked by
an application of avant-garde patterns and artworks to porcelain, creating abstract
decorations that contrasted chromatically vivid geometrical figures with a white
background, on which these forms seemed to be floating.
This rigorous and stylized decorative approach also characterized the production
of other members of the Russian avant-garde, for example, Ilya Chashnik, who did
not follow the formal renewal to be found in Futurist pottery in Italy and had much
more in common with the pottery workshop at the Bauhaus, located in Dornburg,
a town some 30 kilometres outside Weimar. It boasted a long-standing tradition in
ceramics production and was close to Bürgel, the most important centre of crockery
production in Thuringia. The master ceramicists Theodor Bogler and Otto Lindig had
studied with the sculptor Gerhard Marcks, whose pottery was marked by strong plas-
ticity and subtle colours. When, in 1923, Lindig and Bogler took over the direction of
the Bauhaus pottery workshop, they began to collaborate with some industrial enter-
prises, such as the Steingutfabrik Velten-Vordam, the Älteste Volkstedter Porzellan-
fabrik AG and the Staatliche Porzellanmanufaktur in Berlin. Their serial production
was based on a rationalistic reinterpretation of popular forms of pottery (see Weber:
Keramik und Bauhaus).
Tullio d’Albisola took a similar approach in his early Futurist production, although
with different modalities, as can be seen in his presepe (nativity scenes), exhibited at
the Mostra d’arte del presepio in Savona (December 1928), or in adaptations of the
archaic technique of the bucchero (a distinctive black pottery of the Etruscans). In
the 1920s, Tullio D’Albisola’s research evolved into a peculiar primitivist and anti-
decorative style, which culminated in hyper-decorated polycentric pitchers, enriched
by metalinguistic inscriptions.
90 Matteo Fochessati

Early Futurist ceramics

Although Albisola pottery production played a leading rôle in Futurist ceramics of the
1930s, there were already precedents in the 1910s and 20s. The first Futurist experi-
ments took place in Rome, in the early 1910s, when the art dealer Giuseppe Sprovieri
commissioned Roberto Rosati (1889–1949), who supervised a furnace at Treia in Lazio,
to produce a ceramic version of two paintings by Gino Severini and one by Franz Marc.
Again in Rome, between 1914 and 1915, Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) designed some
Futurist flower vases, characterized by an anti-imitative style and by an iconography
connected to a mechanistic aesthetic. His interest in pottery increased in the follow-
ing two years, when he widened the range of his projects and applied this technique
both to everyday objects and to wall decoration (wall tiles). This production was pre-
sented at the Mostra del pittore futurista Balla, a solo exhibition that opened on 4
October 1918 at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in Rome. On the back cover of the exhibition
catalogue, the gallery announced among its future activities the opening of an exhi-
bition of modern pottery, with numbered artworks by different artists, amongst them
Balla and Fortunato Depero (1892–1960). Between 1926 and 1928, Balla also decorated
dishes and floor tiles (used for his house in Via Oslavia), and in 1929 he collaborated
with the majolica factory Galvani in Pordenone in the design of a dinner set.
From 1918, Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956) and Ugo Giannattasio (1888–1958)
designed Futurist pottery in their respective case d’arte in Rome. Such Futurist work-
shops for the creation of furnishings, textiles, toys and household goods sprang up
all over Italy (see the entry on Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design in this
volume). Between 1924 and 1925, Depero designed dish decorations for his casa d’arte
in Rovereto, while in the mid-1920s Pippo Rizzo (1897–1964) designed pottery for his
Casa d’Arte Pippo Rizzo – Arti Decorative Futuriste in Palermo (Fonti: “Dalle botteghe
d’arte”, 47–72). The production included a wide range of decorative objects (vases,
velvet and felt pillows, embroidered rugs and carpets, decorative panels, furniture,
etc.) and was exhibited at the Mostra di arti decorative di Taormina in 1928, in which
the Futurists Vittorio Corona (1901–1966) and Giovanni Varvaro (1888–1973) also took
part (Barbera: “Una Monza piccola piccola”, 53–59). In the second Mostra d’arte del
sindacato siciliano fascista degli artisti in Palermo (1929), Pippo Rizzo exhibited some
pottery based on his design and produced by Giuseppe Fabbri’s factory in Faenza.
Regarding Futurist activity in Sicily, mention must also be made of Balla and Depero’s
ceramics for Casa Jannelli, in Castroreale Bagni, near Messina.

Futurist ceramics in Faenza

Following these pioneering experiences in the manufacturing and decoration of
pottery, the introduction of Futurist aesthetics into consolidated artisanal practices
 Ceramics 91

in traditional production facilities marked a crucial turn in Futurist decorative art and
design. Futurist pottery in Faenza showed, as Enrico Crispolti underlined in his crit-
ical examination, an effective pragmatism in imposing modern visual patterns onto
conventional Faenza forms (Crispolti: La ceramica futurista da Balla a Tullio d’Albi-
sola, 15). The beginning of this experience dates back to 1928, when Giuseppe Fabbri,
a writer from Pieve di Cento in the Province of Bologna, designed the advertising for
the Futurist pottery workshops of Riccardo Gatti, Anselmo Bucci and Mario Ortolani.
The latter had created a dinner set inspired by Benedetta Cappa Marinetti’s painting
Velocità di motoscafo (Speeding Motorboat, 1926–1927), also reproduced on ceramic
tiles by Gatti. This procedure of transposing Futurist paintings onto ceramics is also
documented in a dish by Ortolani, on which one of Gerardo Dottori’s paintings was
reproduced (1929). Ortolani also designed ceramic artworks based on sketches by
Pippo Rizzo and Mario Guido Dal Monte.
Dal Monte became the most important figure in Faenza Futurist pottery produc-
tion. This is testified to by his rôle in the Grande mostra d’arte futurista, organized at
the Ridotto del Teatro Comunale in Imola (January–February 1928), which included,
among others, works by Fillìa (pseud. of Luigi Colombo, 1904–1936), Prampolini,
Balla, Benedetta, Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni, 1896–1974), Farfa (pseud. of
Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini, 1881–1964) and Enzo Benedetto (1905–1993). Dal Monte
pursued an intense exhibiting activity at that time, as his solo shows at the Casa d’Arte
Bragaglia in Rome (December 1928) and at the Cenacolo Imolese (March 1929) testi-
fied. In the first show, he exhibited four ceramic tiles, produced by Gatti but carrying
the attribution “Ceramiche Futuriste G. Fabbri Faenza”. In the second exhibition, he
presented, in addition to paintings, a number of theatre costumes, fashion designs
and some pottery based on his designs and manufactured by Gatti and Ortolani.
Finally, the Prima mostra della ceramica futurista in Faenza, organized by the
Musical Association “Giuseppe Sarti” (October – November 1928), exhibited some
pottery by Riccardo Gatti, based on Balla’s designs, and dinner sets, dishes, bowls,
vases and tiles designed by Dal Monte for Giuseppe Fabbri. The exhibition was a
great commercial success, confirming Fabbri’s entrepreneurial status at a national
level. In addition to producing pottery decorated by Balla and Dal Monte for ashtrays,
vases and liquor sets, Fabbri expanded his connections with Futurism during that
period, thanks to his collaborations with Dottori and Benedetta and his personal con-
nections with Fillìa, Depero, Nicolay Diulgheroff, Angelo Caviglioni and Aldo Fiozzi.
Furthermore, the Ceramiche Futuriste G. Fabbri manufacture took part in the Mostra
d’arte futurista, novecentista, strapaesana at the Teatro Scientifico in Mantova (23
December – 15 January 1929), with objects based on designs by Balla and Dal Monte,
and works by Mario Ortolani based on Remo Fabbri’s sketches. In spring 1929, works
by Ortolani and Gatti’s workshops, based on designs by Balla, Dal Monte, Benedetta,
Remo Fabbri and Pippo Rizzo, were exhibited at the Pavillion of the Ente Nazionale
Piccole Industrie at the Universal Exhibition in Barcelona (20 May 1929 – 15 January
1930). However, the definitive affirmation of Faenza Futurist pottery took place when
92 Matteo Fochessati

Riccardo Gatti held a solo exhibition within the Mostra di trentatré artisti futuristi at
the Galleria Pesaro in Milan (5–15 October 1929).

Tullio d’Albisola and Futurist ceramics at Albisola

This same exhibition marked Tullio D’Albisola’s recognition within the Futurist
artistic scene. He had first shown his talents when in 1925, together with his brother
Torido, he took part in the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels
modernes in Paris (28 April – 25 October 1925), exhibiting in the Ligurian room at the
Grand Palais. His pottery had an Art Déco flair, but it was innovative compared to the
traditional production of his manufacture. At the Grand Palais, he had occasion to see
the works of the Futurists Prampolini, Depero and Balla, which made him realize that
he had to adopt a more anti-imitative approach. This led to his first Futurist pottery,
in which he sought to “forget and to overcome and overturn the ideas and techniques
of any ceramic secret with the Hyper-New the Hyper-Original and the Never-Seen”
(Marinetti: “Ceramica e aeroceramica”). Tullio himself declared:

My first anti-imitative pottery dates back to 1925. Very colourful, with Futurist arabesques,
covered with hyper-shiny glass, they were produced in a manner to make them look horribly
woody, bumpy, uneven and useless. They were totally anti-ceramic. I had to free myself abruptly
from the craft, eradicate our workmanship – weighed down by centuries of tradition – escape
the rickety, humiliating, nauseating and sterile reproduction of forms and decorations inherited
from the 14th to 19th centuries. (D’Albisola: “Le ceramiche futuriste”, 3)

In 1927–1928, Tullio began his collaboration with the Milanese Futurists Nino Strada
(1904–1968), a pupil of Leonardo Dudreville, and Bruno Munari (1907–1998), a
craftsman-turned-graphic designer. On 4 October 1930, the leader of the Futurist
movement visited the Albisola furnaces and, in the same month, opened the Mostra
futurista dell’ architetto Sant’Elia e 22 pittori futuristi at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan
(16 October – November 1930). Amongst the many exhibits were examples from Tullio
d’Albisola’s workshop, based on sketches by the best Futurist painters, and a special
section of pottery by Farfa.
Tullio d’Albisola became the promoter of the ‘ceramic capital of ITALY’, as Marinetti
defined Albisola in Ceramica e aeroceramica (1938). Supported by his father Giuseppe
Mazzotti (1907–1981) and his brother Torido Mazzotti (1895–1988), as well as two impor-
tant Futurist magazines of the time, La città nuova and La terra dei vivi, the Edizioni
Ceramiche Futuriste began a collaboration with the most advanced groups of the Futur-
ist avant-garde. Tullio’s close relationship with Fillìa was of paramount importance in
this, as the latter was, according to Marinetti, the creator of “aeroceramics in which, for
the first time in the art of pottery, spherical and cubical forms at the top were supported
by slender and dynamic bases, combining plastic construction with forms pulled up
 Ceramics 93

from the revolving wheel” (Marinetti: “Ceramica e aeroceramica”). Tullio’s collabora-

tion with Nicolay Diulgheroff (1901–1982) was also of major significance. In 1932, the
Bulgarian artist designed for the Mazzotti plant “the first example of a rationalist house
to which the pure and novel concepts of Antonio Sant’Elia’s Futurist architecture were
applied” (D’Albisola: “Le ceramiche futuriste di Tullio d’Albisola”, 3). The close rela-
tionship between Tullio and the Turinese Futurist group is also demonstrated by his
participation – with his sculptures and pottery – in some important Futurist exhibitions
organized in Piedmont: Arte futurista: Pittura, scultura, architettura, ceramica, arreda-
mento, Alessandria: Sottogruppo Universitario Fascista, 1930; XXXI Esposizione, Società
degli Amici dell’ Arte, Torino: Palazzo della Promotrice delle Belle Arti, 1930; Futuristi di
Torino, Torino: Galleria Codebò, 1930; Futuristi di Torino, Torino: Galleria Codebò, 1932.
Among his other collaborations with Futurist artists, we can mention those with
Depero, whom Tullio encouraged in 1932 to produce pottery for interior decoration
and advertisement, and with Tato, whose ceramics reproduced two of his most famous
paintings, Assalto (Assault, 1924–1925) and La marcia su Roma (The March on Rome,
1922). Tullio’s partnership with Lucio Fontana (1899–1968) was intense and lasted
into the post-war period. His artistic connections with the Ligurian artistic scene were
tightened through the Genoese group, Sintesi, founded in October 1930. Tullio d’Albi-
sola, indeed, took part in the I Mostra del gruppo avanguardista e futurista “Sintesi”,
organized by Alf Gaudenzi (1908–1980) at the Galleria Vitelli in Genoa (15–26 January
1931). Gaudenzi’s first contacts with Mazzotti date back to 1929 (Presotto: Lettere di
Tullio Crali…, 11) and led to a series of “decorative Futur-fascist dishes”, with sub-
jects connected to the episodes of the Fascist rise to power and themes typical of the
régime’s propaganda efforts (Presotto: Lettere di Tullio Crali…, 21).
In a solo exhibition in Catania, Mostra delle ceramiche futuriste di Tullio d’Albisola
(October 1932), Tullio exhibited a wide range of artworks from his recent production.
Although a sensuous iconography inspired by Secessionist and Art Déco motifs was
still present in these pieces, shortly afterward, thanks to his connections with the
Turinese Futurist group and the young Milanese Futurists, he fully adopted a mature
Futurist aesthetic. Tullio’s contribution to the development of Albisola pottery in a
Futurist direction is confirmed by the career of Ivo Pacetti (1901–1970). After creating
his first Cubo-Futurist toys for ILSA (Industria Ligure Stoviglie e Affini; Crockery and
Related Dishware Industry of Liguria), Pacetti gave birth to an independent Futurist
activity in his La Fiamma pottery. Together with Tullio d’Albisola, he exhibited a
ceramic head in the Galleria delle arti decorative e industriali at the VI Triennale in
Milan (1936), where pottery of the most important manufactures active in Albisola
were exhibited, in a special section called Priorità italiche in arte (Italic Priority in
the Arts).
To understand Tullio d’Albisola’s great versatility as an artist, we must consider
his parallel literary activity, which placed him in close contact with the expressive
field of Futurist poetry. He published six volumes of poetry: L’ anguria lirica: lungo
poema passionale (Roma: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1934); Incidente (Milano:
94 Matteo Fochessati

Chiattone, 1935); 500.000 urgonmi: Poema d’amore. L’ incidente: Lirica. Il vicolo

del pozzo: Liriche (Milano: Morreale, 1937) and Racconto (Milano: All’ Insegna del
Pesce d’Oro, 1943). These books echo the spirit of ironic psychological introspec-
tion that can be found in his ceramic works and the Dadaist calembours that
characterized the pottery of his circle. These artists included Farfa, who often
adopted provocative titles for his original creations: Tamburale (Drum-Dish), Bev-
ibullone (Drink-Bolt), Jazz vaso (Jazz-vase), Vaso formichiere (Anteater-vase) and
Tango vaso (Tango-vase); as well as Munari, author of a maiolica fairytale series,
Animali immaginari (Imaginary Animals, 1929) and of works inspired by ironic
wordplay, such as La tassa delle imposte (Tax-cup, c.1934).
Munari, moreover, produced ten illustrations for Tullio’s poetry collection,
L’ anguria lirica. They appeared in the second edition of 1934, printed on tin-plated
sheets. Together with Marinetti’s volume, Parole in libertà futuriste tattili-termiche-ol-
fattive (Words-in-Freedom: Futurist, Olfactory, Tactile and Thermic, 1932), produced in
the same manner by the Lito-Latta factory in Savona, this work represents one of the
most outstanding examples of the Futurist typographical and editorial revolution (see
the essay on Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books in this volume). The spe-
cific innovative quality of the tinplate books contributed to an expansion of the product
portfolio, just as Diulgheroff had highlighted in a letter to Tullio on 2 January 1933:

I can see the future reader of your aluminum book sitting relaxed on a chromium-plated steel
chair and being absolutely engrossed in it. He turns over the pages of coloured aluminum on a
polished, unbreakable and axiometrically designed crystal table top that reflects the lozenges
of the linoleum floor covering the rationally designed 50 cubic meters of a room saturated with
lyricism and bright light. Your aluminum book will carry a revolutionarily battle cry into the
“rococo-style salon” and, shining mockingly with its 15 pages, will ridicule its dusty furniture
made of an amalgamation of so-called “pure” and pseudo-Baroque. (Presotto: Lettere di Edoardo
Alfieri…, 18)

Tullio d’Albisola’s collaboration with Vincenzo Nosenzo’s tin-plate factory in Savona can
be set against the background of his innovative and experimental research on materials
and techniques, both in the field of pottery – vitrified clay mixtures, airbrushed enamel,
‘orange peel’ surfaces – and sculpture, where he produced a set of aluminium-chrome
pieces at the Mantegazza foundry in Varazze in 1930. Tullio’s experimentation with new
expressive forms and materials did not prevent him from pursuing a decidedly com-
mercial approach in his ceramics. His production of everyday objects corresponded, on
the one hand, to the theories of the so-called ‘Futurist refashioning of the universe’ (see
p. 609 in this volume) and connected, on the other, to an equally important aspect of
Futurist poetics: advertisement.
The Futurists believed that it was important to promote their artistic practice and
that the art of the future should coincide, aesthetically, with the operative processes
of advertising (Depero: “Manifesto: Arte pubblicitaria futurista”, 4). Therefore, they
presented themselves as the most suitable avant-garde movement to interprete the
 Ceramics 95

linguistic codes of advertisement and to develop an aesthetics that would be open to

the new and the expanding forms of mass communication. Consequently, the Mazzotti
plant in Albisola started the production of ashtrays and bottles for important national
brands (Campari, Cora and Martini), as well as advertising boards, for example, the
1932 Bitter Campari campaign that transposed Depero’s painting Squisito al seltz (The
Exquisite Flavour of Soda Water, 1926) onto six tiles.
In the 1930s, following the publication of the Manifesto dell’ aeropittura (Man-
ifesto of Aeropainting, 1929/1931), a new trend in Futurist aesthetics set in, often
referred to as Aero-Futurism (see pp. 614–615 in this volume). The ceramicists in Albi-
sola and Faenza also contributed to this third-wave Futurism by transpositing panel
painting to ceramic products. Tullio himself wrote: “F. T. Marinetti’s aeropainting
originated a series of decorative dishes representing great aerial enterprises” (D’Al-
bisola: “Le ceramiche futuriste di Tullio d’Albisola”, 3). This broadened the appeal of
Futurist aesthetics and played a key rôle in the field of Futurist propaganda (Foches-
sati: “Il futurismo e la propaganda tra strategie promozionali e strutture tematiche di
un’arte ufficiale”, 18–27). It was therefore logical that the Futurist potters participated
in the most important aeropainting exhibitions during the decade, also influencing
those companies that were not properly placed within the Futurist movement, such
as the exemplary case of FACI (Fabbrica Artistica Ceramiche Italiane; Manufacturer of
Artistic Italian Ceramics) in Civita Castellana. This happened through the spreading
of illustrative motifs connected to the themes of flight and velocity.

Ceramics and Futurist muralism

Futurist ceramicists who had experimented with ceramic display boards for advertis-
ing purposes contributed to the use of ceramics in Futurist wall panels (Fochessati:
“La plastica murale”, 71–82). This must be seen within the perspective of a shift away
from the design of objects for private dwellings to a wider environmental dimension,
conceived for social and public spaces (see pp. 178–187 in this volume). As Tullio wrote:
“The new self-sufficient discipline of Italian ceramics has experienced an awakening,
a dominance and an organization within the self-sufficient Fascist Corporations that
make Futurist potters undertake wonderful, large-size ceramics, which they hope
to exhibit under the sun of Rome at the Universal Exhibition of 1942” (D’Albisola:
“Sintesi storica della ceramica futurista italiana”, s.p.). Due to the advent of the war,
the Roman E42 exhibition never took place. The planned Futurist contribution was
limited to works by Prampolini and Depero, whose mosaics were strongly influenced
by régime propaganda and possessed an altogether illustrative and didactic character.
The public decorations actually realized by the Futurists included Prampolini
and Fillìa’s ceramic mosaics, Le comunicazioni telegrafiche, telefoniche e aeree (The
Telegraphic, Telephonic and Aerial Communications Systems) and Le comunicazioni
96 Matteo Fochessati

terrestri e aeree (The Terrestrial and Aerial Communications Systems), for Angiolo
Mazzoni’s post-office building in La Spezia (1933). They were based on models exe-
cuted by Renato Righetti (1916–1982) and Cesare Andreoni (1903–1961) in the Società
Ceramica Ligure (Ligurian Ceramic Society). The same manufacturing plant also real-
ized the ceramic decorations for the Stadio del Nuoto di Albaro in Genoa, projected by
Paride Contri (1897–?) between 1930 and 1935. The highest artistic expression in the
whole complex was Fillìa’s panel, Il nuotatore (The Swimmer), whose stylized chro-
matic pattern strongly resembled the mosaics in the post office building in La Spezia.
The I Mostra nazionale di plastica murale per l’ edilizia fascista (First National
Exhibition of Mural Décor for Fascist Buildings), which took place at the Palazzo
Ducale in Genoa (14 November 1934 – 11 January 1935), offered the Futurists a show-
case for their ideas on public decoration. Several works exhibited on this occasion
had ceramic inserts, for example those presented by Tullio d’Albisola, who also repre-
sented those Albisola ceramicists who had been excluded from the show due to their
lack of “Futurist capacity to bring a project to completion” (Presotto: Lettere di Fillìa a
Tullio D’Albisola, 90). Sketches for Futurist wall décor with ceramic inserts were later
exhibited in the 2a Mostra nazionale di plastica murale per l’ edilizia fascista in Italia e
in Africa at the Mercati Traianei in Rome (October – November 1936). The catalogue of
the show contained the manifesto La plastica murale futurista (Futurist Wall Decora-
tion). Tullio realized a frieze with fire-resistant tiles, Le forze fasciste (Fascist Forces),
for the Pavilion of Architecture at the VI Triennale in Milan (1936) and another in
coloured ceramics, entitled 22 corporazioni (The 22 Corporations), for the Main Hall
at the Italian Pavilion at the 1937 Exposition Internationale in Paris. Amongst the last
interventions in this field were a ceramic panel with marine motifs, realized in 1938
from a sketch by Tato, for a seaside holiday camp called ‘Burgo’ in Moneglia (Presotto:
Lettere di Tullio Crali…, 138), and the ceramic panel, Ritmi negri (Negro Rhythms),
which was realized for the Triennale d’Oltremare in Naples in 1940 from a sketch by
Prampolini.

The historical significance of Futurist ceramics

The Manifesto d’aeropittura futurista maringuerra (Manifesto of Futurist Aeropaint-
ing and Naval Warfare), published by Marinetti in February 1941 amid a climate of
war, elaborated on the “great sculptural dream” of Giovanni Acquaviva (1900–1971),
inspired by “the ascending elastic eccentricity of the navigating smokes of the sooty
harbour of Savona” and evoking the aesthetic innovation of “paintings made of sculp-
tural complexes with an internal polymaterial and ceramic structure” (Marinetti:
“Manifesto d’aeropittura futurista maringuerra”, 225–226). It ended with a celebration
of the artistic achievements of “the great mind and inventor of Futurist ceramic and
aero-poet Tullio Mazzotti d’Albisola” (Marinetti: “Manifesto d’aeropittura futurista
 Ceramics 97

maringuerra”, 227). He made reference to twelve octagonal dishes, Vita di Marinetti

(Marinetti’s Life, 1932), which offered a sort of synthesis of the history of the Futurist
movement in the form of a dinner set and confirmed the importance ceramics had
gained in the 1930s for the Futurist movement (see Barisione: “Futurist Ceramics”,
which includes a reproduction of the dinner set).
Marinetti himself had already announced – in the above-mentioned Ceramica
e aeroceramica manifesto – his intention of imprinting all the formal and thematic
options of aeropainting onto ceramics. By the time of the Aeropittura futurista
maringuerra manifesto, ceramic production had become associated with Futurist wall
decoration (plastica murale) and the gradual passage from the production of everyday
objects to a reshaping of the environmental dimension of human life.
The search for an applied form of ceramics within a culture of polimaterismo (a com-
bination of various materials) was also determined by a will to avoid the debasement
of ceramics to mere ornamental objects. Fillìa confirmed this operative programme
in a letter to the Genoese gallery owner Alessandro Vitelli: “For a certain amount of
time, except in unusual circumstances, we shall not organize any longer exhibitions
that combine works of Futurist fine art with decorative art. This is to prevent the stupid
fight against us, in which ‘decorative’ and ‘ornamental’ are always confused” (Pre-
sotto: Lettere di Fillìa a Tullio D’Albisola, 20). Futurist experimentation in the field of
ceramics developed into a global conception of artistic environments and was in line
with the integration of the arts and a project of a modernist Gesamtkunstwerk.
In 1930, Fillìa wrote to Tullio d’Albisola that ceramics “have great importance
today in the interior design of houses and bring to completion the new style envi-
sioned by Sant’Elia” (Presotto: Lettere di Fillìa a Tullio D’Albisola, 19). Tullio’s artis-
tic and entrepreneurial activity was deeply influenced by the aesthetic trends of the
Centrale Futurista di Architettura Arredamenti Arte Decorativa (Futurist Centre for
Architecture, Interior Design and Decorative Art) in Turin. He contextualized, as early
as 1932, the expressive development of ceramics within the field of interior and fur-
niture design: “By using movement and the interplay of geometric forms arranged
according to a horizontal pattern, and by using enamel, chromium and silver-plating,
both polished and opaque, we obtained ceramic compositions which truly fit in with
the rationalist furniture of the new dwellings” (D’Albisola: “Le ceramiche futuriste di
Tullio d’Albisola”, 3).

Works cited
Barbera, Gioacchino: “Una Monza piccola piccola: Considerazioni sulla prima mostra di arti
decorative siciliane di Taormina del 1928.” Maria Flora Giubilei, and Valerio Terraroli, eds.: La
forza della modernità: Arti in Italia 1920–1950. Lucca: Fondazione Ragghianti, 2013. 53–59.
Barisione, Silvia: “Futurist Ceramics.” Vivien Greene, ed.: Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing
the Universe. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2014. 287–293.
98 Matteo Fochessati

Buzio Negri, Fabrizia, and Riccardo Zelatore, eds.: Albisola futurista: La grande stagione degli
anni Venti e Trenta, dagli anni Cinquanta alle rivisitazioni ceramiche di oggi. Laveri, Lodola,
Marsiglia, Nespolo. Exhibition catalogue. Gallarate: Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna, 23 marzo –
4 maggio 2003.
Crispolti, Enrico: La ceramica futurista da Balla a Tullio d’Albisola. Firenze: Centro Di, 1982.
D’Albisola, Tullio [Tullio Mazzotti]: “Le ceramiche futuriste di Tullio d’Albisola.” Futurismo 1:7 (23
October 1932): 3.
D’Albisola, Tullio “Sintesi storica della ceramica futurista italiana.” Tullio d’Albisola, ed.: La
manifattura Giuseppe Mazzotti: Ceramiche e maioliche d’arte. Albisola: Mazzotti, 1938. s.p.
Depero, Fortunato: “Manifesto: Arte pubblicitaria futurista.” Futurismo 1:2 (June 1932): 4.
Reprinted in F. Depero: Ricostruire e meccanizzare l’ universo. A cura di Giovanni Lista. Milano:
Abscondita, 2012. 135–138.
Fochessati, Matteo: “Il futurismo e la propaganda tra strategie promozionali e strutture tematiche
di un’arte ufficiale.” Silvia Barisione, et al, eds.: Pubblicità e propaganda ceramica e grafica
futuriste. Cinisello Balsamo (MI): Silvana, 2009. 18–27.
Fochessati, Matteo: “La plastica murale: Teorie ed esperienze.” Vittorio Fagone, et al., eds.: Muri ai
pittori: Pittura murale e decorazione in Italia 1930–1950. Milano: Mazzotta, 2000. 71–82.
Fonti, Daniela: “Dalle botteghe d’arte alle case d’arte: Il rilancio dell’ oggetto d’artista.” Gabriella
Belli, ed.: La Casa del Mago: Le arti applicate nell’ opera di Fortunato Depero 1920–1942.
Rovereto: Archivio del ‘900; Milano: Charta, 1992. 47–72.
Lobanov-Rostovsky, Nina: “Soviet Propaganda Porcelain.” The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda
Arts 11 (Winter 1989): 126–141.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Ceramica e aeroceramica.” La gazzetta del popolo, 7 September 1938.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Manifesto d’aeropittura futurista maringuerra.” Giovanni Acquaviva:
L’ essenza del futurismo nel suo poetico dinamismo italiano fra le filosofie. Roma: Edizioni
futuriste di “Poesia”, 1941. s.p. Reprinted in F. T. Marinetti: Collaudi futuristi. A cura di Glauco
Viazzi. Napoli: Guida, 1977. 225–227.
Michelotti, Fulvio Matteo, Giulia Musso, and Luca Maragliano, eds.: Futuraltare: L’ avventura degli
altarini futuristi. Exhibition catalogue. Altare: Museo dell’ Arte Vetraria Altarese, 4 aprile-31
agosto 2009.
Nicolini, Simonetta: “La ceramica futurista a Faenza.” Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Il futurismo in Romagna.
Rimini: Maggioli, 1986. 79–81.
Presotto, Danilo, ed.: Lettere di Edoardo Alfieri, Lino Berzoini, Nicolay Diulgheroff, Escodamè, Italo
Lorio, Tina Mennyey, Bruno Munari, Pippo Oriani, Ugo Pozzo, Mino Rosso, Paolo Alcide Saladin,
Nino Strada, Felice Vellan e G. Giambattistelli (1928–1939). Savona: Liguria, 1981.
Presotto, Danilo, ed.: Lettere di Fillìa a Tullio D’Albisola (1929–1935). Savona: Liguria, 1981.
Presotto, Danilo, ed.: Lettere di Tullio Crali, Valentino Danieli, Fortunato Depero, Dino Gambetti, Alf
Gaudenzi, Antonio Marasco, Benedetta Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Pino Masnata,
Marisa Mori, Vittorio Orazi, Giacomo Picollo, Enrico Prampolini, Bruno Sanzin, Mino Somenzi,
Tato, Ernesto Thayaht, Ruggero Vasari, 1929–1939. Savona: Liguria, 1981.
Weber, Klaus, ed.: Keramik und Bauhaus. Berlin: Kupfergraben, 1989.

Further reading
2a Mostra nazionale di plastica murale per l’ edilizia fascista in Italia e in Africa. Exhibition catalogue.
Roma: Mercati Traianei, October – November 1936. Roma: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1936.
 Ceramics 99

Bottaro, Silvia, ed.: Albisola e Savona: Maestri di ieri e di oggi nella ceramica d’arte. Exhibition
catalogue. Sesto Fiorentino (FI): Rifugio Gualdo, 27 ottobre – 17 novembre 1996. Sesto
Fiorentino: Fiorepubblicità, 1966.
Cameirana, Arrigo, and Massimo Trogu, eds.: Albisola 1925: Ceramica degli anni ‘20. Convegno di
studi, sabato 7 luglio 1979; esposizione Villa Gavotti-Della Rovere, Villa Trucco dal 6 al 22 luglio
1979. Savona: Sabatelli, 1979.
Casali, Claudia: “La ceramica futurista in Romagna.” Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri, ed.: Romagna
futurista. Exhibition catalogue. San Marino, Musei San Francesco, 2006. Cinisello Balsamo
(MI): Silvana Editoriale, 2006. 30–35.
Cassini, Giorgia¸ and Simona Poggi, eds.: Omaggio a Farfa: Ceramistaerofuturista, cartopittore,
poeta. Exhibition catalogue. Savona: Pinacoteca civica, 18 aprile – 31 agosto 2009. Savona:
Sabatelli, 2009.
Chilosi, Cecilia, and Liliana Ughetto, eds.: La ceramica del Novecento in Liguria. Genova: Istituto
Grafico Silvio Basile, 1995. 2nd edn Genova: SAGEP, 1997.
Clark, Garth: “Ceramics and Modernism: Europe 1910–1940.” Garth Clark: Ceramic Millennium:
Critical Writings on Ceramic History, Theory and Art. Halifax/NS: Press of the Nova Scotia
College of Art and Design, 2006. 92–114.
Crispolti, Enrico, and Cecilia Chilosi, eds.: La ceramica futurista da Balla a Tullio D’Albisola: Opere
e documenti. Exhibition catalogue. Albisola Superiore: Museo Manlio Trucco, 18 aprile – 31
agosto 2009.
D’Albisola, Tullio, ed.: La manifattura Giuseppe Mazzotti – ceramiche e maioliche d’arte – presenta
in edizione completa la Ceramica futurista. Albisola Mare: Mazzotti, 1938.
Dalpozzo, Tiziano: Gatti: Bottega d’arte ceramica, maiolicari in faenza dal 1928. Faenza: Tipografia
Romagna, 2000.
Dirani, Stefano: La vita, la cultura, l’ arte di Mario Ortolani a Faenza. Faenza: Monte di Credito su
Pegno, 1985.
Futurismo coi baffi: La ceramica di Riccardo Gatti a Faenza e il futurismo faentino. Testo di Jadranka
Bentini. Exhibition catalogue. Faenza: Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, 13 novembre
2009 – 14 febbraio 2010.
La ceramica futurista. Manifesto dell’ aeroceramica. Opera e sintesi storica. Savona: Stamperia
Officina d’Arte, 1939.
Lobanov-Rostovsky, Nina: Revolutionary Ceramics: Soviet Porcelain, 1917–1927. London: Studio
Vista; Cassell; New York: Rizzoli, 1990.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso [... et al.]: “Futurist Mural Plastic Art.” Bruno Mantura, Patrizia Rosazza-
Ferraris, and Livia Velani, eds.: Futurism in Flight. Roma: De Luca, 1990. 206.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, et al.: “La plastica murale.” La gazzetta del popolo, 1 December 1934.
Reprinted in 2a mostra nazionale di plastica murale per l’ edilizia fascista in Italia e in Africa
organizzata dal Movimento Futurista. Roma: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1936. Enrico
Crispolti, ed.: Ricostruzione futurista dell’ universo. Torino: Musei Civici Mole Antonelliana,
1980. 536–538.
Mostra personale di pittura e ceramica dello scrittore-pittore Giuseppe Fabbri. Exhibition catalogue.
Cento (FE): Galleria Graphis, Novembre 1972.
Natalini Setti, Anna Maria: “Le fabbriche della ceramica: Castellani a Cesena, Gatti e Ortolani
a Faenza.” Anna Maria Nalini, ed.: Futurismo in Emilia Romagna. Milano: Mazzotta, 1990.
109–110.
Presotto, Danilo, ed.: Lettere di Lucio Fontana a Tullio D’Albisola (1936–1962). Savona: Liguria, 1987.
Trogu, Massimo: “Art Déco e futurismo.” Cecilia Chilosi: Ceramiche della tradizione ligure: Thesaurus
di opere dal Medioevo al primo Novecento. Cinisello Balsamo (MI): Silvana, 2011. 262–277.
100 Matteo Fochessati

Ughetto, Liliana: “Ceramica e aeroceramica futurista.” Cecilia Chilosi, and Liliana Ughetto, eds.: La
ceramica del Novecento in Liguria. Genova: Banca Carige, 1995. 101–132.
Yaremich, Svetlana: “Die russische Avantgarde – eine neue Weltkunst: Das fragile Porzellan der
‘futuristischen Revolution’.” Klaus Klemp, ed.: Fragile: Die Tafel der Zaren und das Porzellan
der Revolutionäre. Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2008. 306–357.
Zelatore, Riccardo: “La ceramica albisolese e il secondo futurismo.” Beatrice Buscaroli Fabbri,
Roberto Floreani, and Anna Possamai Vita, eds.: Scultura futurista, 1909–1944: Omaggio a
Mino Rosso. Cinisello Balsamo (MI): Silvana Editoriale, 2009. 138–141.
Zelatore, Riccardo, and Renata Bianconi, eds.: Ivos Pacetti: La rinascita della ceramica albisolese del
‘900. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Galleria Bianconi, 22 settembre – 16 ottobre 2005.
Wanda Strauven
6 Cinema
Rediscovering and reconstructing Futurist cinema
It was the Italian film critic Mario Verdone who in the mid-1960s rediscovered Futurist
cinema (see Verdone: “Cinema e futurismo”, Strauven: “L’ inventore”). He brought to
light the pioneering work in the field of abstract cinema undertaken in the early 1910s
by the aristocratic brothers Arnaldo and Bruno Ginanni Corradini, better known as
Arnaldo Ginna (1890–1982) and Bruno Corra (1892–1976). Verdone published their
early writings on the medium and documented their involvement in the production
of the only ‘official’ film of Italian Futurism, Vita futurista (Futurist Life, 1916) (see
Verdone: Ginna e Corra). Verdone spent much of his career rehabilitating the two
brothers and underlining the primacy of Italian Futurism in the context of interna-
tional avant-garde filmmaking. At the end of the 1980s, however, Verdone asked
himself if a Futurist cinema had ever really existed (Verdone: “Futurismo: Film e let-
teratura”, 78). This is a crucial question that points towards the ambivalent position
that cinema occupied within the overall programme of the Futurist movement, espe-
cially in Italy, but, to a similar degree, also in Russia and other countries. What looked
like the perfect medium to embody Futurism’s main features – movement, velocity
and machine-art – failed to become an important chapter in its history. A true Futurist
cinema with a solid film production and a more or less organized exhibition or screen-
ing circuit never got off the ground during the heyday of its first phase (1909–1920) or
in its second phase (the 1920s and 1930s).
Nevertheless, over the last fifty years, the Futurist filmography has been growing
steadily, mainly thanks to the research efforts of Mario Verdone and of the other major
historian of Futurist cinema, Giovanni Lista. In 2010, Lista compiled a list of one
hundred (mostly) Italian titles, of which about a third is considered lost, plus an addi-
tional list of even more international titles, including thirteen Russian prints (Lista: Il
cinema futurista, 236–255). Most valuable for the reconstruction of Italian Futurism’s
filmography is the discovery, in the mid-1990s, of an existing (albeit reduced) print
of Velocità (Speed), a film made in 1930–1931 by Turin Futurists Pippo [Giuseppe]
Oriani (1909–1972), Tina [Calistina, also known as Celestina] Cordero (1899–1951) and
Guido Martina (1906–1991) with the help of documentary filmmaker Eugène Deslaw
(pseud. of Ievhen Antonovych Slabchenko, 1898–1966). Containing various scenes of
object animation and a long sequence of cine-aeropittura (aeropainting), the film paid
tribute to many international avant-garde films and ended with a ‘mechanical ballet’
of a mannequin. Whereas the print of Velocità was found and is now conserved at the
BFI National Archive, formerly the National Film and Television Archive, in London,
the Cinémathèque Française in Paris holds the only surviving copy of another film
related to Italian Futurism: Thaïs, made in 1916 by Futurist photographer Anton
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-006
102 Wanda Strauven

Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960) with the collaboration of Futurist set designer Enrico
Prampolini (1894–1956). Imbued in Dannunzian decadentism and Baudelairian sym-
bolism, Bragaglia’s film has very little to do with Futurism, except for the final scene
where the Futurist set becomes an integral and determinative part of the story leading
to the suicide of the heroine (played by Thaïs Galitzky).

Marinetti’s rôle in the production of Vita futurista

Stricto sensu, Futurist cinema consists of only one film, that is, Vita futurista, which
was officially recognized and fully supported by the leader of Italian Futurism, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti. Considered lost for a long time, with legendary stories about the
only surviving copy going up in flames during a private projection, Giovanni Lista
had the opportunity, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, to view six surviv-
ing photographic sequences, corresponding to approximately five minutes of projec-
tion (Lista: Il cinema futurista, 52–53). It remains, however, unclear whether or not
these sequences were part of the final editing of the film. Shot during the summer of
1916, Vita futurista was conceived of as an episodic, poly-expressive, self-promotional
and whimsical film. Its various scenes illustrated the life of the Futurists, with titles
such as “How the Futurist sleeps”, “How the Futurist walks”, etc. The film was a pro-
duction of the newly founded journal L’ Italia futurista, which was the mouthpiece
of the so-called second Florentine Futurist movement (following the first Florentine
Futurist movement that had been represented by the journal Lacerba until its editors’
rupture with Marinetti’s doctrine in 1914). To this second Florentine Futurist move-
ment adhered also the Ginanni Corradini brothers, who had in the meantime been
renamed by painter Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) as Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra.
Given their previous experience in filmmaking, they played an important rôle in
the production of Vita futurista and in the formulation of the manifesto of Futurist
cinema, Cinematografia futurista, that was written in parallel. It was Arnaldo Ginna
who, as (technical) director, invited Marinetti to join the film set and to participate as
one of its main actors. Marinetti appeared in several episodes, such as “Morning gym-
nastics” (fencing and boxing) and “Futurist breakfast” (in which Marinetti and Balla
publicly insult some other Futurists disguised as old men, provoking much agitation
among the clients of the restaurant who were unaware of the setup).
Besides Ginanni Corradini’s conception of abstract cinema as “chromatic music”
(or colour music), the manifesto of Futurist cinema, which Marinetti co-signed, con-
tains many typical motifs or inventions of his literary and theatrical programme, such
as the poetry of analogies, the drama of objects, words-in-freedom, simultaneity and
compenetration. For this reason, the manifesto, together with the film production
of Vita futurista, can be considered as truly, or ‘orthodoxically’, Futurist, that is, as
concrete products of Marinetti’s art-action movement. In the period that followed his
 Cinema 103

experience on the film set, Marinetti also wrote a film script, entitled Velocità (Speed).
The founder of Futurism, however, kept this film project secret until the end of his life;
only in the mid-1990s was it disclosed, thanks to Giovanni Lista’s archival searches at
the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where the hand-
written screenplay is conserved. Consisting of eleven tableaux revolving around the
binary opposition of Futurist speed and passéist slowness, Marinetti’s Velocità pre-
sents no direct connection with the homonymous film made in 1930–1931 by the Turin
Futurists. Besides, it is unlikely that Marinetti ever considered producing or direct-
ing his own script, as he also refrained from recruiting young filmmakers to put into
practice the fourteen propositions set out in the manifesto of the Futurist cinema. In
this sense, Marinetti, as the main ‘director’ of Italian Futurism, can be considered to
have been responsible for the failure to develop a mature form of Futurist cinema.
Yet, within the large context of (international) Futurism, many film projects were ini-
tiated, although most of these projects were occasional experiments, undertaken in
the margins of other artistic activities.

Pre- and pseudo-Futurist cinema during the first

phase of Futurism
The most obvious example of accidental experimental filmmaking was the practice
of ‘cine-painting’ undertaken by the Ginanni Corradini brothers. Their principal aim
was to visualize music in colour, for which they used a very simple technique that con-
sisted of painting directly on the filmstrip after having removed its gelatin emulsion.
They also constructed a chromatic piano that projected (by means of light beams) a
different colour for each tone. Although truly pioneering in the history of cinema,
these colour experiments were not intended as cinematic artworks but only served
as a research instrument. For the Ginanni Corradini brothers, cinema was a means to
arrive at a deeper understanding of the correspondences between the arts and of the
essence of music as the purest art form. Between 1910 and 1912, they made six short
abstract films: Accordo di colore (Colour Chord, 1911), inspired by an Impressionist (or
Divisionist) painting by Giovanni Segantini; Studio di effetti tra quattro colori (Study
of Effects Between Four Colours, 1911), centred around the colour dyads red/green
and blue/yellow; Canto di primavera (Spring Song, 1911), a visual translation of Men-
delssohn’s Frühlingslied mixed with a Chopin waltz; Les Fleurs (The Flowers, 1911), an
adaptation of Stéphane Mallarmé’s homonymous poem by means of abstract colour
equivalences; L’ arcobaleno (The Rainbow, 1912), a visual symphony based on the con-
trast between a grey background and the various colours of the rainbow; and, lastly,
La danza (The Dance, 1912), which displayed the twirling of three colours: carmine,
purple and yellow. Apparently these films were never shown to an audience, not even
to close associates, which strengthens the hypothesis that the Ginanni Corradini
104 Wanda Strauven

brothers did not conceive of them as cinema or autonomous works of art. Moreover,
their (modest and vanished) filmography cannot be defined as fully Futurist, since it
predates their enrolment in the Futurist movement; it is, at most, ‘pre-Futurist’.
In the first phase of Futurism, two other trends of pseudo-Futurist cinema can be
identified: on the one hand, the avant-garde cinema of Anton Giulio Bragaglia and,
on the other, the commercial cinema that exploited, in one way or another, the label
‘Futurism’. Inventor of the Futurist technique of fotodinamismo (photodynamism), Bra-
gaglia had previously rejected the cinema as being too mechanical or too analytical to
be considered an artistic tool. Despite such a negative appraisal, he founded his own
film production company, La Novissima, in September 1916 in Rome. As the son of
one of the pioneers of the Italian film industry, Anton Giulio had already worked, at
a very early age, in the professional film world. His father was general manager at the
film studio Cines, where Anton Giulio made his début in 1906 as an assistant director,
working with major directors such as Mario Caserini (1874–1920) and Enrico Guazzoni
(1876–1949). With the foundation of La Novissima, Bragaglia clearly intended to give
life to an avant-garde cinema of highly professional quality, involving professional
actors and set designers. Besides the above-mentioned Thaïs, Bragaglia made two other
feature films, Il perfido incanto (The Evil Spell, 1917) and Il mio cadavere (My Corpse,
1917), as well as a short comedy Dramma nell’Olimpo (Drama on Mount Olympus, 1916).
Thaïs is the only La Novissima production of which a copy is preserved. Of Il
perfido incanto some frames survived, as well as the poster announcing the film’s
subtitle: “Drama of modern magic”. The plot descriptions of Bragaglia’s lost films tell
us that they had little to do with Futurism; like Thaïs, they were just “very modern
versions of old-fashioned types of movies” (Verdone and Berghaus: “Vita futurista”,
398). Because of his work and reputation as pioneering Futurist photographer, Bra-
gaglia’s film productions were, and still are, directly associated with Futurism. It
should however not be forgotten that Bragaglia’s photodynamism was never fully
acknowledged as an art form by the Futurist painters, who publicly denounced it as
having had nothing to do with their invention of plastic dynamism (Boccioni et al. :
“Avviso”, 211; on this conflict see also below, pp. 218–219).
Besides Bragaglia’s artistic film productions, commercial cinema also responded
to Futurism’s programme, either as a parody or as a form of self-advertisement. For
instance, Milano-Films released in 1914 a comedy with the title Dick futurista (Futur-
ist Dick), with actor Caesar Quest. Similarly, Cines produced in 1916 Kri Kri modern-
ista (Modernist Kri Kri). The most outstanding case, however, was Mondo baldoria
(A World of Merriment, 1914), made by Aldo Molinari (1885–1959) for his own newly
founded film studio, Vera Film, in Rome and which he promoted as “the first Futurist
film”. Freely inspired by Aldo Palazzeschi’s manifesto Il controdolore (An Antidote to
Pain, 1914), the film included some Pathé news footage featuring the Futurists. For
this illegitimate appropriation of Futurist ideas and imagery, Marinetti disavowed and
boycotted the film by means of a pamphlet, entitled Gli sfruttatori del futurismo (The
Exploiters of Futurism, 1914). When, in 1919, Olympus Film released L’ odissea di Don
 Cinema 105

Giovanni (The Odyssey of Don Juan), which opened with a sequence entitled “The
Futurists”, such a misappropriation did not elicit any reaction from Marinetti. By
then, the chapter of Futurist cinema was clearly concluded for the leader of Futurism.

Second-phase Futurism’s experimental cinema

In the 1920s and 1930s, a revitalization of Futurist cinema could be observed. Numer-
ous film projects were undertaken, but only a few were actually completed. In terms of
Futurist legitimacy, these sporadic achievements of the second phase of Futurism are
to be considered ‘heterodox’, although probably tolerated (that is, not openly repudi-
ated) by Marinetti. During these years, the Futurist movement decentralized more and
more, and many activities were undertaken in small circles across the peninsula, which
meant that the membership was no longer controllable by the Futurist headquarters in
Rome. Many Futurist projects, also outside the realm of cinema, were initiated on an
individual basis, without official support by the leader of Futurism. As for the Futurist
film productions, there is one exception to the rule: the documentaries made by Eugène
Deslaw, especially the 1930 reportage about the Futurist musician and composer Luigi
Russolo (1885–1947). According to Deslaw’s recollections, Marinetti actively partici-
pated in this film, presumably entitled Futuristi a Parigi (Futurists in Paris). In 1929,
Deslaw had already made another documentary, Montparnasse (alternatively titled
as Parnasse, Quatre cafés, Quatre crèmes or Un Café Crème), in which various Mont-
parnassian painters figured, as well as the Futurists Russolo, Prampolini and possibly
Marinetti. These two film reportages seem to be lost. Deslaw’s 1928 experimental film,
La Marche des machines (The March of the Machines), made with the collaboration of
Russolo and his rumorarmonio, did survive – albeit without its Futurist soundtrack. In
this “March of the Machines”, no Futurists could be seen, only mechanical puppets.
Other films that saw the light during the period of secondo futurismo were pro-
duced within the context of some Futurist circles that had emerged in three cities in
particular: Turin, Padua and Macerata. Turin is the city where Oriani, Cordero and
Martina shot Velocità (1930–1931), the only Futurist film that had a certain resonance
abroad thanks to international projections and the collaboration of Deslaw. Then, in
1934, Antonio Leone Viola (aka Leonviola, 1913–1995) made, together with the Futur-
ist Carlo Maria Dormal (1909–1938), founder and main activist of the Futurist circle in
Padua, the slapstick-style film Fiera di tipi (Model Fair). Allegedly this one-hour film
won a golden medal at the so-called “Piccola Biennale” of the Venice Festival, which
ran parallel to the Mostra Internazionale for three years – from 1934 to 1936 – and was
dedicated to international experimental cinema. Also in 1934, Leonviola made, with
the collaboration of Fernando De Marzi (1916–1993), the erotic short Eva e la macchina
(Eve and the Machine), which was based on Marinetti’s principle of analogy: “By
means of editing effects and analogies of sexual overtone (the movement of the lever
106 Wanda Strauven

at a railway crossing, the oil splashing from a radiator), the film shows the eroticism of
a young motorcyclist torn between woman and machine” (Lista: “La ricerca”, 36–37).
Finally, at the end of the 1930s, a film unit called “Futurcine” was founded in Mac-
erata, where the last films of Italian Futurism were made: Incontro (Encounter, 1938)
by Sante Monachesi (1910–1991) and La strada (The Road, 1938) by Fulvio Benedetti
(dates unknown). These Macerata films have no longer any direct connection with
Marinetti’s poetics, but are rather to be inscribed into the extension of the European
avant-garde cinema of the 1920s (see below).
In 1938, the same year as the Macerata film productions, Marinetti launched a
new manifesto of Futurist cinema, entitled Cinematografia. Co-signed by Arnaldo
Ginna, this manifesto listed twenty-four propositions of which more than half were
taken from the 1916 manifesto. Among the new proposals, the most significant con-
cerns were the asynchronism between sound and image for sound films, independ-
ent colour effects for colour films, deforming relief effects for stereoscopic films and
the effects of chiaroscuro for black and white films. Yet, in the late 1930s, such ideas
were not revolutionary any longer, but had already been theorized or put into prac-
tice by others; see, for instance, the manifesto Budushchee zvukovoi fil’my: Zaiavka (A
Statement on the Sound-Film of the Future, 1928) by Soviet directors Sergei Eisenstein
(1898–1948), Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) and Grigori Aleksandrov (1903–1983),
or the distorting effects of the Expressionist film by Robert Wiene (1873–1938), Das
Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1920). Within the context of Italian
Futurism, these late 1938 propositions remained without consequence.
Besides the Turin, Padua and Macerata films, other titles can be added to complete
the filmography of second-phase Futurism: Circolare esterna (External Circular, 1931)
and Il ventre della città (The Belly of the City, 1932), two film reportages shot by Futurist
painter Fernando Di Cocco (dates unknown); O la borsa o la vita (Your Money or Your
Life, 1933), a film with a Surrealist flavour made by Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s brother,
Carlo Ludovico (1894–1998), with the collaboration of Gastone Medin (1905–1975);
and La gazza ladra (The Thieving Magpie, 1934), a filmic study of Rossini’s musical
theme by Corrado D’Errico (1902–1941). Likewise, the abstract cinema of Luigi Veronesi
(1908–1998) was a continuation of the pre-Futurist experiments of cine-painting by the
Ginanni Corradini brothers. Between 1939 and 1942, Veronesi made a number of hand-
coloured films, with very varied musical accompaniments, from Stravinsky’s Histoire
du Soldat in Film no. 4 (1940) to Mood Indigo in Film no. 6 (1941).

From Russian Futurism to the Soviet avant-garde

The film production that came about in the context of Russian Futurism (1910s) and
the Soviet avant-garde (1920s) is a separate subject. It is important to note that the
birth of Russian Futurist cinema anticipated Vita futurista by three years. Already
 Cinema 107

in 1914, the Russian Futurists made their filmic début in Drama v Kabare futuristov
no. 13 (Drama in the Futurist Cabaret, no. 13), a short film by Vladimir Kasyanov
(1883–1960), involving the painters Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) and Natalia Gon-
charova (1881–1962), two major members of so-called Cubo-Futurism. The film was
shot in one of the cabarets of Moscow at the end of 1913, one year after the launch of
the first Russian Futurist manifesto, Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap
in the Face of Public Taste, 1912), signed by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), David
Burliuk (1882–1967), Viktor (Velimir) Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Aleksei Kruchenykh
(1886–1968). Allegedly, both Mayakovsky and Burliuk figured in this avant-garde film
production, alongside the two Cubo-Futurist painters Larionov and Goncharova.
Generally described as a parody of cine-guignol, the film was centred on the attrac-
tion of the “Futurdance of Death”, during which one of the partners has to kill the
other. In the same year, 1914, another movie tied to Russian Futurism was released:
Ja khochu byt’ futuristom (I Want to Be a Futurist), with the interpretation of clown
Lazarneko Vitali (1890–1939), who was a friend of Mayakovsky’s. These two Russian
productions shared with the Italian film Vita futurista a self-promoting objective and
a certain self-referentiality, indicated in their titles: Futurist films are about Futurism.
In 1918, the private film studio Neptun in Saint Petersburg produced three films
written and performed by Mayakovsky: Ne dlia deneg rodivshiisia (Not Born for
Money), based on the novel Martin Eden by Jack London, with Mayakovsky in the part
of an aspiring Futurist poet; Barishnia i khuligan (The Young Lady and the Hooligan),
inspired by the tale La maestrina degli operai (The Workers’ Young Schoolmistress)
by Edmondo De Amicis; and Zakovannaia fil’moi (Captivated by Film), a film with a
double mise-en-abyme about a painter falling in love with a dancer seen on screen
during the projection of a film, entitled Serdtse ekrana (The Heart of the Screen),
which also talks about cinema. After his experience as a scriptwriter at Neptun
Studio, Mayakovsky developed in the 1920s a series of experimental film scripts,
which all remained projects on paper. The most interesting of these, from a Futurist
point of view, was Kak pozhivaete? (How Are You?), which chronicled a day in the five
“cine-details”, with effects of filmic Words-in-Freedom.
As for the Soviet production of the 1920s, there are a number of films that can be
classified as Futurist or post-Futurist. First of all, David Abelevich Kaufman, better
known under his Futurist pseudonym Dziga Vertov (1896–1954), celebrated in his
experimental documentaries – from Kinoglaz (Kino-Eye, 1924) to Chelovek s kinoap-
paratom (The Man with the Movie Camera, 1929) – typical Futurist motifs, such as
movement, city life and the new vision of the machine. Likewise, the first feature
film by Sergei Eisenstein, Stachka (Strike, 1924), was entirely based on the interaction
between man and machine, the exaltation of the machine as a metaphor for revolu-
tion and the Futurist principle of analogy. Other films to be cited here are those pro-
duced by the Fabrika ekstsentricheskogo aktera (Factory of the Eccentric Actor [FEKS]
see below pp. 272-274), founded in 1921 by Grigori Kozintsev (1905–1973) and Leonid
Trauberg (1902–1990), two young actors who were directly inspired by Marinetti’s
108 Wanda Strauven

Teatro di Varietà (The Variety Theatre, 1913). Among the FEKS films, those using
explicit Futurist themes or techniques were: Pokhozhdeniia Oktiabriny (The Adven-
tures of an Octoberite, 1924), a filmic application of the principle of estrangement by
means of various dramas of objects; Chertovo koleso (The Devil’s Wheel, 1926), a love
story on the roller coaster in an amusement park; and Bratishka (The Little Brother,
1927), a film about the lyricism of an old truck on a car cemetery. A most striking
encounter between Soviet cinema and avant-garde set design can be observed in the
science-fiction film, Aelita (1924 see above p. 64), by Yakov Protazanov (1881–1945).
Accused of commercialism by the Party critics at the time, the film contained a spec-
tacular Martian episode with Constructivist sets and costumes designed by Alexandra
Exter (1882–1949).

Futurist cinema outside Futurism during the 1920s

In addition to the film production of (Italian and/or Russian) Futurism, other films have
been qualified as ‘Futurist’, even though they were not made by representatives of the
movement. The most remarkable case is Faits divers (Miscellaneous, 1923) by Claude
Autant-Lara (1901–2000), as it was explicitly defined by Marinetti as “Futurist film” in
a letter to the Autant-Lara family during the production process of the film (see Lista:
Marinetti et le futurisme, p. 67). Loosely inspired by Marinetti’s theatrical mini-drama,
Le mani (The Hands, 1915), the film narrates the encounter between three characters
by means of close-ups of their hands and other metonymic images. Another interesting
example is L’ Inhumaine (The Inhuman Woman, 1924) by Marcel L’ Herbier (1888–1979),
in which were involved, among others, avant-garde painter Fernand Léger (1881–1955)
and Modernist architect Robert Mallet-Stevens (1886–1945). Probably because of the
Futurist laboratory designed by Léger and the theme of futurological technologies
(such as the wireless audio-vision), this Art Déco film was distributed at the time in
Italy under the title Futurismo.
Other films associated with Futurism range from (Italian) short comedies from the
1910s to European avant-garde films of the 1920s focussed on the aesthetics of speed
and the modern city. Among the short comedies, the most quoted films are Cretinetti e le
donne (Cretinetti and the Ladies, 1909) by André Deed (pseud. of Henri André Chapai,
1884–1931), in which the main character’s body is broken up into pieces as if it were
a mechanical man according to Marinetti’s Futurist concept of the uomo moltiplicato,
and Amor pedestre (Pedestrian Love, 1914) by Marcel Fabre (pseud. of Marcel Fernán-
dez Peréz, 1884–1929), which tells an adulterous love story through the images of feet
only, similar to Marinetti’s mini-drama, Le basi (The Bases, 1915). Classic examples of
European avant-garde films imbued in Futurism are, for instance, Jeux des reflets et
de la vitesse (Play with Reflections and Speed, 1925) by Henri Chomette (1896–1941)
and Berlin – Die Symphonie einer Großstadt (Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis,
 Cinema 109

1927) by Walter Ruttmann (1887–1941). Another important component of European

avant-garde cinema is the genre of visual music – from the colour studies of Léopold
Survage (1879–1968) to the abstract film Symphonie diagonale (1924) by Viking Egge-
ling (1880–1925), the Rhythmus series (1921–1925) by Hans Richter (1888–1976) and the
Opus series (1919–1927) by Walter Ruttmann. All of these can be inscribed in the same
tradition of the Ginanni Corradini brothers’ cine-painting experiments.
Furthermore, several films made within the context of the Parisian avant-garde,
in particular Dada and Surrealism, put into practice the original ideas proposed in the
manifesto of Futurist cinema and have, therefore, been associated with Futurism by
cinema scholars. For instance, Fernand Léger’s Ballet mécanique (Mechanical Ballet,
1924), a so-called ‘Cubist’ film, offers a catalogue of Futurist applications, respond-
ing as it were to various of the fourteen programmatic points of the 1916 manifesto:
analogy between human body parts and inanimate objects (mainly kitchen tools)
(no. 1), drama of these same objects through the notion of ‘mechanical ballet’ and the
cross-cutting discussion between a hat and a shoe (no. 7), facial “flirtations” by means
of close-ups of the eyes and lips of Kiki de Montparnasse (no. 9), unreal reconstruc-
tions of the human body by means of editing (Kiki) or animation (figure of Charlot at
the end of the film) (no. 10) and the Words-in-Freedom of a headline that transforms
into a montage of numbers with a rotating zero (no. 14). Also the Dada film Entr’acte
(1924) by René Clair (1898–1981) is read in Futurist terms for putting on screen a whole
series of “daily exercises aimed at freeing one self from logic” (no. 6): from jumping in
slow motion around a cannon located on a roof to boxing and chess, to a roller coaster
ride and a funeral chase. Conceived as an entr’acte of the Ballets Suédois production
Relâche (Performance Suspended, 1924) by Francis Picabia (1879–1953), Clair’s film
was an avant-garde production par excellence, featuring many leading artists of the
time (Picabia himself, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Erik Satie and others).
Anémic Cinéma (1926), the only film experiment by Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968),
is a Surrealist application of cinematic Words-in-Freedom, offering the viewer the
hypnotizing alternation of spinning rotoreliefs and absurd, erotically tinted phrases.
Other films mentioned frequently as Surrealist applications of the Futurist programme
are those by Man Ray (pseud. of Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890–1976) – from the dramatic
sequence with thumbtacks and pins in Retour à la raison (Return to Reason, 1923) to
the cinematic poems Emak Bakia (Emak-Bakia, 1926), L’ Etoile de Mer (The Starfish,
1928) and Les Mystères du Château de Dé (The Mysteries of the Chateau de Dé, 1929) –
as well as Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), the first joint film experiment
by Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) and Salvador Dalì (1904–1989), with its famous and cruel
analogy between a long-shaped cloud obscuring the moon and a knife cutting an
eye in close-up. Whether these avant-garde artists were directly inspired by the 1916
manifesto of Futurist cinema is difficult to say, but they certainly were influenced or
affected – albeit involuntarily, à contrecœur, given the controversy of Futurist political
programme and adherence to Fascism in those same years – by some general ideas of
Futurism as an anti-academic, anti-narrative and anti-rational art movement.
110 Wanda Strauven

The same can be said of the avant-garde film productions by the Belgian film-
maker Charles Dekeukeleire (1905–1971), who embraced Futurist poetics with Combat
de box (Boxing Match, 1927), where close-ups of hands (with and without boxing
gloves) prevail, and Impatience (Restlessness, 1928), where the mechanical body of
a motorbike fuses, by means of cross-cutting, with the human body of a woman. Or
the German Dada film, Vormittagsspuk (Ghosts Before Breakfast, 1927–1928) by Hans
Richter, which contains many ‘dramas of objects’: bowler hats flying away from heads
to perform a dance in the air, a necktie that refuses to stay around the neck of its
owner, guns that multiply and arrange themselves in geometric figures, a garden hose
that rewinds itself, coffee cups that recompose their own broken pieces, etc. Each
object becomes a character, revolting against the human authority. This type of ani-
mated object films existed already in the early days of cinema, especially in the genre
of the haunted hotel, from L’ Auberge ensorcelée (The Bewitched Inn, 1897) by Georges
Méliès (1861–1938) to The Haunted Hotel (1907) by Jack Stuart Blackton (1875–1941).
In other words, Futurist cinema existed before Futurism; or rather, as also stated in
the 1916 manifesto: “the cinema, which came into being not many years ago, might
seem Futurist already, by which we mean having no past and being free from all tra-
dition” (Marinetti et al.: “The Futurist Cinema”, 261). Indeed, at its origins, cinema
was truly Futurist, but it became, very quickly, contaminated by dominant forms of
‘bourgeois culture’ (such as literature and theatre). Therefore, this new (Futurist) art
form needed to be freed by the Futurists. One could say, however, that the (re)birth
of Futurist cinema only truly happened outside Futurism, within the context of other
avant-garde circles.

The future of Futurist cinema

The Futurist legacy persisted throughout the twentieth century in various avant-garde
film experiments – from the colour music studies, such as A Colour Box (1935) by Len
Lye (1901–1980) and Allegretto (1936) by Oskar Fischinger (1900–1967), to the provo-
cations by the American avant-garde filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, on both
the east and the west coasts. Within the context of the San Francisco-based Canyon
Cinema, Robert Nelson (1930–2012) attacked American racism with his sardonic (and
burlesque) ‘drama of objects’, Oh dem Watermelons (1965), while from the New York-
based Chambers Street Group one can mention Zorns Lemma (1970) by Hollis Frampton
(1936–1984), a structural film that consists of a montage of words-in-freedom. Their
connection with the propositions of the original 1916 manifesto is, without doubt,
merely accidental; it shows, however, that the Futurist film formulas are timeless.
Lastly, there have also been some attempts to remake Vita futurista. Within the
context of Futurism’s centenary, at least two noteworthy film projects came off the
ground: Vita futurista 2008 (2008) and Futurist Life Redux (2009). The former is a
 Cinema 111

low budget, student-produced film that was exhibited in November 2008 during an
international conference on Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance at the University
of Toronto, whereas the latter was commissioned by the Performa Biennial of Per-
formance art, SFMOMA and Portland Green Cultural Projects, to be screened during
Performa 09 that took place in New York City from 1–22 November 2009 and that was
largely dedicated to Futurism.
Justin A. Blum, Gabrielle Houle and Mark David Turner, all PhD students at the
Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies of the University of Toronto, con-
sidered their production of Vita futurista 2008 mainly as “an act of research”, under-
taken in order to better understand the questions at stake when studying a mythical
film like Vita futurista (1916). Although they allowed themselves some (poetical and
critical) freedom, their “re-imagining” of six selected episodes remains rather faith-
ful to the original insofar as it aimed at illustrating the life of the Futurists in their
battle against passéism. With its sepia-toned photography, its theatrical staging, its
cabaret setting and music, the film has an overall vintage look, which is playfully
undermined by many (deliberate) anachronisms.
Futurist Life Redux, on the contrary, is an omnibus film, consisting of eleven epi-
sodes (mainly digital videos) shot by eleven acclaimed artists, each freely inspired by
a written description of a particular scene of the original Futurist Life. The most mem-
orable episodes are, on the one hand, “The Sentimental Futurist” by Californian video
and performance artist Shana Moulton, who opted for some painterly special effects,
such as the deforming cut-out head of the Futurist and a continuously – through art
history – morphing female portrait; and, on the other hand, “Conversation with Boxing
Gloves” by New York-based Brazilian dance performers Rosane Chamecki and Andrea
Lerner, known as the chameckilerner duo, who very wittily reinterpret the original
episode where Marinetti ‘converses’ with Ungari. The male script is transformed into a
powerful female choreography, which conflates two perspectives by superposing the
frontal images of two boxing women, whose violent gestures slowly evolve into fluid
dance movements – a subtle, yet unequivocal critique of Futurism’s arrogant virility.
This short revival of Futurist cinema at the beginning of the twenty-first century
proves that Futurist cinema not only existed, but also still exists. Alas, Mario Verdone,
who asked this fundamental question about Futurist cinema’s existence, did not outlive
the ‘last’ Futurist film, entitled Futurist Life Redux. He passed away in June 2009.

Works cited

Archival sources
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Velocità, film. New Haven/CT: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers, Box 37, no. 1664.
112 Wanda Strauven

Printed sources
Boccioni, Umberto, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo, and Ardengo Soffici:
“Avviso.” Lacerba 1:19 (1 October 1913): 211.
Eizenshtein, Sergei, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigori Aleksandrov: “Budushchee zvukovoi fil’my:
Zaiavka.” Zhizn’ iskusstva 32 (5 August 1928). Reprinted in S. Eizenshtein: Izbrannye
proizvedeniia v shesti tomakh. Vol. 2. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1964. 315–316. English translation
“A Statement on the Sound-Film.” S. Eisenstein: Film Form: Essays in Film Theory. New York:
Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977. 257–260.
Lista, Giovanni: “La ricerca cinematografica futurista.” Gian Piero Brunetta, and Antonio Costa, eds.:
La città che sale: Cinema, avanguardie, immaginario urbano. Rovereto: Manfrini, 1990. 30–38.
Lista, Giovanni: Il cinema futurista. Recco: Le Mani, 2010.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: Marinetti et le futurisme. Lausanne: L‘ Age d‘Homme, 1977.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Gli sfruttatori del futurismo.” Lacerba 2:7 (1 April 1914): 106‒107. Reprinted
as a leaflet Gli sfruttatori del futurismo. Milano: Direzione del Movimento futurista, [1914].
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Velocità.” Fotogenia: Storie e teorie del cinema 2:2 (December 1996 –
January 1997): 15–25, 143–147.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Arnaldo Ginna: “La cinematografia: Manifesto futurista.” Bianco e
nero 2:4 (April 1938): 138–140.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Bruno Corra, Emilio Settimelli, Arnaldo Ginna, Giacomo Balla, and
Remo Chiti: “Cinematografia futurista: Manifesto.” L’ Italia futurista 1:10 (15 November 1916):
1. English translation “The Futurist Cinema.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter
Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 260–265.
Verdone, Mario: “Cinema e futurismo.” La Biennale di Venezia 14:54 (September 1964): 15–25.
Verdone, Mario: “Futurismo: Film e letteratura.” Annali d’Italianistica 8 (1988): 68–79.
Verdone, Mario: Ginna e Corra: Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Special issue of Bianco e nero
28:10–11–12 (October–December 1967). Reprinted as Cinema e letteratura del futurismo. Roma:
Edizione di Bianco e Nero, 1968. 2nd edn Rovereto: Manfrini, 1990.
Verdone, Mario, and Günter Berghaus: “ ‘Vita futurista’ and Early Futurist Cinema.” Günter Berghaus,
ed.: International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter, 2000. 398–421.
Strauven, Wanda: “L’ inventore del cinema futurista = The Inventor of Futurist Cinema.” Bianco e nero
588–589 (May-December 2017): 52–61.

Further reading
Aristarco, Guido: “Teoria futurista e film d’avanguardia.” La Biennale di Venezia: Arte, cinema,
musica, teatro 9:36–37 (July–December 1959): 77–85.
Belloli, Carlo: “Lo spettacolo futurista: Teatro, danza, cinema, radio. Regesto essenziale.” Fenarete:
Letture d’Italia 15:1 (January–February 1963): 42–52.
Bernardi, Sandro: “Cinema come arte sovversiva: Il futurismo italiano e la rivoluzione russa.”
S. Bernardi: L’ avventura del cinematografo: Storia di un’arte e di un linguaggio. Venezia:
Marsilio, 2007. 76–94.
Bertetto, Paolo, and Germano Celaut, eds.: Velocittà: Cinema e futurismo. Milano: Bompiani, 1986.
Bittoto, Enrico, ed.: Convegno internazionale nei cento anni del Manifesto della cinematografia
futurista. Bologna: Pendragon, 2015 [2018].
Blum, Justin A., Gabrielle Houle, and Mark David Turner: “Research for Production and Production
as Research in Re-Living the ‘Vita futurista’.” Paul J. Stoesser, ed.: Futurist Dramaturgy and
Performance. Ottawa: Legas, 2011. 133–150.
 Cinema 113

Blumenkranz-Onimus, Noëmie: “Bruno Corradini: Cinéma abstrait, musique chromatique (1912).”

Dominique Noguez, ed.: Cinéma: Théorie, Lectures. Paris: Klincksieck, 1978. 267–274.
Bonatti, Maria: “El movimiento futurista y el cine.” Los cuadernos del Norte 7:39 (November 1986):
46–51.
Brunetta, Gian Piero: “Deconstructing and Reconstructing the Cinematic Universe: The Futurist
Word.” G. P. Brunetta: The History of Italian Cinema: A Guide to Italian Film from its Origins to
the Twenty-first Century. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. 54–57.
Brunetta, Gian Piero: “Il cinema futurista.” G. P. Brunetta: Storia del cinema italiano, vol. 1: Il cinema
muto 1895–1929. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1993. 213–219.
Burke, Marina: “Mayakovsky: Film: Futurism.” Alexander Graf, and Dietrich Scheunemann, eds.:
Avant-Garde Film. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 133–151.
Carbone, Ester: “Futurismo e cinema.” Serena Dell’ Aira, ed.: Serate futuriste. Roma: Associazione
Culturale Micro, 2006. 101–107. Reprinted in Meiling Li, ed.: Race into the Future: Futurism
Centennial Exhibition. Taipei: Media Sphere Communication, 2009. 106–109.
Catanese, Rossella: “Prospettive ed esperimenti nel cinema futurista: ‘Vita futurista’ e il manifesto.”
Avanguardia: Rivista di letteratura contemporanea 14:42 (2009): 99–117.
Catanese, Rossella, ed.: Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-Garde Film. Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2018.
Catania, Corrado, and Mila Cappello, eds.: Cinema e futurismo. Atti di un convegno svoltosi
a Roma nel Settembre 1987 ad iniziativa dell’ Associazione Italiana per la Ricerca
Storico-Critico-Letteraria. Agrigento: Centro di Ricerca per la Narrativa e il Cinema, 1987.
Christie, Ian, and John Gillett, eds.: Futurism/Formalism/FEKS: ‘Eccentrism’ and Soviet Cinema,
1918–36. London: British Film Institute, 1978. 2nd edn 1987.
Comin, Jacopo: “Appunti sul cinema d’avanguardia.” Bianco e nero 1:1 (January 1937): 6–33.
Corra, Bruno (Bruno Corradini): “Les trois étapes de la cinématographie futuriste: La ciné-peinture,
le théâtre filmé, le cinéma.” Giovanni Lista, ed.: Les Futuristes. Paris: Veyrier, 1988. 63–70.
Crispolti, Enrico: “Il ‘secondo’ futurismo e il cinema.” E. Crispolti: Il mito della macchina e altri temi
del futurismo. Trapani: Celebes, 1969. Second edition 1971. 501–509.
Cuenca, Carlos Fernández: “Marinetti y los primeros pasos del cine de vanguardia.” Cine
experimental: Revista mensual (Madrid) 2 (January 1945): 67–74.
Delgado Leyva, Rosa Maria: La pantalla futurista: Del “Viaje a la luna” de Georges Méliès a “El hotel
eléctrico” de Segundo de Chomón. Madrid: Cátedra, 2012.
Della Ragione, Antonella: “Cinema e futurismo.” Vincenzo De Rosa, ed.: Sulle orme del futurismo.
Casolla (Caserta): Vozza, 2009. 22–26.
Durgnat, Raymond: “Futurism and the Movies.” Art and Artists (February 1969): 10–15.
Favuzzi, Pellegrino: “Cinema cinematografico e percezione del mondo: Per un’ipotesi di lettura dei
manifesti del futurismo.” Gian Piero Brunetta, and Pellegrino Favuzzi, eds.: La via mélièsiana:
Viaggio nella storia del cinema in quattordici tappe. Padova: Esedra, 2010. 33–52.
Fernández Castrillo, Carolina: “Futurismo e attrazioni del precinema.” Elio Girlanda, ed.: Il
precinema oltre il cinema. Roma: Audino, 2010. 59–69.
Fernández Castrillo, Carolina: “Hacia un nuevo modelo narrativo: El manifiesto cinematográfico
futurista.” Francisco García García, and Mario Rajas, eds.: Narrativas audiovisuales: Los
discursos. Madrid: Editorial Icono14. 103–123.
Fernández Castrillo, Carolina: “Rethinking Interdisciplinarity: Futurist Cinema as Metamedium.”
Simona Storchi, and Elza Adamowicz, eds.: Back to the Futurists: Avant-gardes 1909–2009.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 272–283.
García Brusco, Carlos: “El futurismo y las vanguardias cinematográficas.” Historia y vida (Barcelona)
21:241 (1988): 40–51
Gaviria, Victor Manuel: “Formalismo y futurismo: La imagen poetica.” Universidad de Medellin 51
(December 1987): 73–83.
114 Wanda Strauven

Ginna, Arnaldo: “Note sul film d’avanguardia ‘Vita futurista’.” Bianco e nero (May–June 1965):
156–158.
Heil, Jerry: “Russian Futurism and the Cinema: Majakovskij’s Film Work of 1913.” Russian Literature
19 (1986): 175–192.
Herlinghaus, Hermann: “Vertov – Mayakowski – Futurismus.” Filmwissenschaftliche Beiträge 14:73
(1971): 154–171.
Jutz, Gabriele: “Handpainted Films: Bruno Corra und Arnaldo Ginna (1911).” G. Jutz: Cinéma brut:
Eine alternative Genealogie der Filmavantgarde. Wien: Springer, 2010. 185–196.
Innamorati, Isabella: “Nuovi documenti d’archivio su ‘Vita futurista’: Peripezie di una pellicola
d’avanguardia.” Quaderni di teatro: Rivista del teatro regionale toscano 9:36 (May 1987):
47–64.
Kirby, Michael: Futurist Performance. New York: PAJ, 1971.
Lista, Giovanni: “Futurisme et cinéma.” Germain Viatte, ed.: Peinture – Cinéma – Peinture. Paris:
Hazan, 1989. 59–65.
Lista, Giovanni: “Futurismo cinematografico: Il film ‘Velocità’ di Cordero, Martina, Oriani.” Fotogenia
4:4-5 (September 1997 – March 1998): 73–103.
Lista, Giovanni: “Ginna e il cinema futurista.” Il lettore di provincia 18:69 (September 1987): 17–25.
Lista, Giovanni: “La ricerca cinematografica futurista.” Gian Piero Brunetta, and Antonio Costa, eds.:
La città che sale: Cinema, avanguardie, immaginario urbano. Rovereto: Manfrini, 1990. 30–38.
Lista, Giovanni: “Les Trois Étapes de la cinématographie futuriste: La ciné-peinture, le théâtre filmé,
le cinéma.” G. Lista: Les Futuristes. Paris: Veyrier, 1988. 63–70.
Lista, Giovanni: “Un inedito marinettiano: ‘Velocità’, film futurista.” Fotogenia 2 (1996): 6–11.
Lista, Giovanni: Cinema e fotografia futurista. Ginevra & Milano: Skira, 2001.
Lista, Giovanni: Le Cinéma futuriste. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou-Les Cahiers de Paris
Expérimental, 2008.
Maiakovskii, Vladimir: “Teatr, kinematograf, futurizm.” Kine-zhurnal 14 (27 July 1913): 3. Reprinted
in V. Maiakovskii: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1. Moskva: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo
Khudozhestvennoi Literatury, 1955. 275–277. English translation “Theatre, Cinema, Futurism.”
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Maiakovskii, Vladimir: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v trinadtsati tomakh. Vol. 11. Kinoscenarii i pesy,
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Maiakovskii, Vladimir: Teatr i kino. Vol. 2. P’esy, kinostsenarii, stat’i, prilozeniia. Moskva: Iskusstvo,
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Marcus, Millicent: “Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s ‘Thaïs’; or, The Death of the Diva + the Rise of the
Scenoplastica = The Birth of Futurist Cinema.” South Central Review 13:2–3 (1996): 63–81.
Mitchell, Stanley: “Marinetti and Mayakovsky: Futurism, Fascism and Consumerism.” Screen 12:4
(Winter 1971): 152–161.
Noguez, Dominique: “Du futurisme à l’ ‘underground’.” Dominique Noguez, ed.: Cinéma: Théorie,
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Sergio Toffetti, eds.: Cinema d’avanguardia in Europa dalle origini al 1945. Milano: Il Castoro,
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 Cinema 115

Rapisarda, Giusi: “La FEKS e la tradizione dell’avanguardia.” Giusi Rapisarda, ed.: Cinema e
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Cecilia Novero
7 Cuisine
Introduction
When Futurism burst onto the European scene in 1909, it aimed to make art inter-
disciplinary and to radically modernize all aspects of existence. Around the time of
the First World War, the Futurists had set about to radically change the arts, from
literature via painting and sculpture to architecture, music, theatre, photography and
cinema. Most importantly, in 1915, Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Fortunato Depero
(1892–1960) published a manifesto, Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Futurist
Reconstruction of the Universe), which called for a total art that would encompass
all media, including everyday objects, furnishings, fashion and advertising. After
the death of Umberto Boccioni, in 1916, the theme of ‘refashioning’ the universe
continued to inform the praxis of Futurism and inspired its members to explore art
and life with all five senses. It reached its climax in the period of secondo futurismo
(second-wave Futurism) and included the domain of cooking.
The desire for a total revolution in all fields of art and human life meant that
the Futurists included among their targets the entirety of the sensate human body.
Futurism considered the body to be the source of a vast array of new sensations that
could and should be attuned to the increasingly fast pace of modern life. In Michel
Onfray’s words, the new rhythms required “another human, another body … for
another history, another destiny where art and life are reconciled” (Onfray: “L’ Empire
des signes culinaries”, 223). Faithful to the movement’s wider goal of rejuvenating the
spirit of the Italians, the Futurist artist-cooks set out to invent a diet that was deemed
“both mad and dangerous” (Marinetti and Fillìa: The Futurist Cookbook, 21). However,
the processes and means to re-programme the mind and enliven the body’s sensa-
tions did not always elicit pleasure, as can be seen in the violent aesthetics conveyed,
for example, in the ‘formulas’ or recipes they conceived for their Futurist banquets.
Indeed, the Futurists were acutely aware of the etymological links between revolution
and revolt-ing, or the ‘disgusting’ and the rebellious.
The Futurists’ plans for a new diet were outlined first in the Manifesto della
cucina futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Cooking), published in the Turin newspaper,
La gazzetta del popolo, on 28 December 1930, after having been announced via radio
at a banquet in the Restaurant Penna D’Oca in Milan. The Futurist diet was then pre-
sented at a series of banquets staged by Marinetti and Fillìa (pseud. of Luigi Colombo,
1904–1936) in the Futurist Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate), which
opened in Turin on 8 March 1931, and afterwards recorded in the Futurist cookbook,
La cucina futurista (Futurist Cooking, 1932).
In the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking of 1930, Marinetti and Fillìa banished pasta,
the Italian national staple, in order to introduce a light, electrifying and scientifically
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-007
 Cuisine 117

(i. e. chemically) conceived fare that would not fill the stomach but, rather, serve as a
means of shaping individual desires, at least once the State had taken care of assuag-
ing hunger through pills and various substitute foods. As is made even clearer in The
Futurist Cookbook, the new diet aimed at arousing passions and the imagination,
rather than satisfying the stomach. According to Marinetti, the move away from pasta
would help to re-shape the body and the spirit by replacing the comfort provided
by familiar pleasures and ‘conformist’ tastes with an exciting erotic gastronomy that
would exude the cacophony and dynamism of the modern world. The banquets, for
example, focussed on actively stimulating the tactile sensation of eating at the table
by banning forks and knives and by encouraging diners to simultaneously touch their
food and various other materials, such as silk, velvet or sandpaper. Other proposals
in The Futurist Cookbook included, for instance, a recipe that featured ball bearings,
serving to rediscover the mouth as a tactile organ. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
aptly terms these dining strategies “gustatory foreplay” and jokingly describes the
Futurist technique of passing food around to be smelled and seen, but not eaten, as
“gastronomus interruptus” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: “Appetizers”, 21).
The Futurists had always championed artificial devices and eulogized the syn-
thetic and synoptic forms that were arising from mechanical speed, electric light and
steel, i. e. Nature modified by science and modern technology and remade by modern
humans in their image. Through their culinary pursuits, the second-wave Futurists
also began to address questions of taste from the bottom up, as it were, by going deep
into the body and rethinking Nature in technological terms. Just as in the heroic early
phase of the movement the machine was embraced as the source of a new aesthet-
ics, so chemistry, in the second phase, would provide the means for developing new
gustatory experiences, as well as revolutionizing individual habits and national tradi-
tions. During the movement’s second phase, when the reactionary politics of Fascism
were being consolidated, the Futurists focussed on cuisine as an essential component
of their programme of civilizational renewal.
The Futurist Cookbook of 1932 reads as the summa and apex of a programme of
renewal that had constituted the Futurist agenda from its very beginning. Indeed, it
comprised the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (1930), 172 ‘formulas’ by various chefs
and artists and descriptions of banquets that had been staged in various European
and Italian cities (1931–1932) or could be staged in the future. It also included news-
paper reviews of these events, some of them held at the Tavern of the Holy Palate. In
this second phase of the movement, when the Futurists concentrated their efforts on
developing a full-blown culinary discourse, The Futurist Cookbook acquired a historio-
graphical function in that it served as a vehicle through which the Futurists playfully
took stock of the fundamental aporia of the avant-garde, namely that revolutionary
movements had oxymoronically already become historical and, hence, in their view,
were passé. Therefore, the culinary programme summarized and regrouped all of the
Futurists’ preceding aesthetic innovations, e. g. their theories of synthetism, simulta-
neity and universal dynamism. Yet, the new cuisine also meant that these principles
118 Cecilia Novero

were destined to be demolished, or consumed, when the Futurists re-produced them

as ‘meals’ for the body to physically ingest. In other words, cooking exposed the
Futurists’ previous accomplishments to the very concrete, yet ephemeral biological
and cultural materiality of both the body and culinary enterprise.
The culinary programme in The Futurist Cookbook also fulfilled a subtler ideolog-
ical task in that it surreptitiously distanced second-wave Futurism from the culturally
and socially reactionary politics of the Fascist régime. For example, Marinetti’s attack
on pasta was ambiguous in that it could be read both as opposing Mussolini’s 1925
campagna del grano (wheat campaign), which promoted the production of ‘Italian’
grains, and later as supporting it when wheat became scarce in Italy. Nonetheless,
the banquets displayed the playful and theatrical irony that had marked the Futurists’
early culinary enterprises, which included devouring passéist meals. This return of
the revolutionary and insurrectional legacy of early Futurism in the 1930s Futurist
Cookbook disturbed the cultural conservatism of institutionalized Fascism, a Fascism
that glorified itself and its historical mission with little irony.
During the early stages of Futurism, the culinary domain had presented an addi-
tional area of innovation that occasionally had supplemented other more centre-stage
activities. Nonetheless, even though it is somewhat sparse and rudimental, this culi-
nary prehistory of Futurist cooking is important because it re-confirms the move-
ment’s drive to abolish the purview of the high arts and to expand classical aesthetics
to cover the material and lower ends of taste. Ultimately, the Futurist gastrosophy
rediscovered taste as a material and synaesthetic sense that is simultaneously man-
ifest in all the other senses (Weiss: Feast and Folly, 37). Thereby, taste enabled the
Futurists to displace vision as the privileged site of aesthetics and facilitated Futur-
ism’s intention to re-root the art world in the life-world, treating both art and life as
inextricably integrated fields of experience.
Moreover, the early Futurists’ attention to food also offers fertile ground for the
critical analysis of the more complex gastronomic agenda that characterized Futurist
cooking in the 1930s, which, in addition to having ideological objectives, involved
increasingly sophisticated theatrical experiments. Importantly, and in turn, the per-
formative and ‘impractical’ qualities of the Futurist culinary discourse that developed
in the 1930s also ran counter to that same ideological agenda, with its immediate
practical ends (Novero: “Futurist Banquets”, 21).

The prehistory of Futurist cuisine

On 12 January 1910, one of the earliest Futurist banquets took place after a serata
futurista at the Politeama Rossetti in Trieste. It was quite common for these loosely
structured soirées to conclude with a meal, even though these feasts were not an inte-
gral part of the events and hence were not usually recorded (Berghaus: “The Futurist
 Cuisine 119

Banquet”, 4). However, the menu for the above-mentioned banquet is known, as is
the fact that the courses were served in reverse order.
The dinner began with coffee, continued with ice cream, and ended with an
entrée and an aperitif. This subversion of the sequence of courses undermined the
temporal continuity and dramatic narrative of a traditional dinner, culminating in
a plat-fort and concluding with dessert. More to the point, by serving the meal in
reverse, the Futurists questioned the historical convention of using names that glorify
icons of history or culture (think of ‘Tournedos Rossini’, Mozartkugeln, or the ‘Napo-
leon’ pastry). Instead, this early Futurist menu presented the first edible versions of
passéism, “Archaeological salad, […] Explosive peas served with the sauce of history,
Dead Sea fish, […] Clotted-blood soup […]” before calling for their definitive inges-
tion or destruction through being devoured or, in the menu’s words, “demolished”
(Salaris: Marinetti, 83). Tellingly, the last course, “Entrée of demolition”, marked the
concluding act of a meal, which, as its name suggests, served to inaugurate Futurist
cooking.
The Futurists were involved in a number of other brief gastronomic enterprises
during the early years of the movement, most notoriously at the tavern ‘Le Venete’
in Rome on 9 March 1913, where the food served was named after the not-yet canon-
ical artists Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Ardengo Soffici and Umberto Boccioni, who
had earlier been inciting the audience to engage in political struggle and conflict at
the nearby Costanzi theatre (Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 111–118). However,
the first programmatic declaration of Futurist cooking came from France, not Italy,
when the chef Jules Maincave (1890–1918) published La Cuisine futuriste in the
Parisian magazine Fantasio on 1 September 1913. Maincave, whose restaurant in the
Latin Quarter was known to Marinetti, attacked traditional mixtures, seasonings and
aromas, called for new combinations of ingredients and essences and asked why, for
example, oil and vinegar were considered an acceptable condiment whereas the com-
bination of rum and pork juice was deemed a profanation. Maincave also called for a
“cuisine that is suited to the comforts of modern life and the latest concepts in science
[...] Futurist cuisine aims at uniting elements of food and drink that nowadays, owing
to a strange overcautiousness, are strictly separated. It seeks to provoke, by means of
these encounters, unknown gustative sensations” (Portnoy: “A Note on Jules Main-
cave”, 8). Some fourteen years later, Marinetti introduced a translation of this text in
La fiera letteraria (22 May 1927). In the meantime, however, Maincave’s destiny was
allegedly sealed when a shell hit him while cooking for the 90th battalion during the
Battle of the Somme in 1916 ([Anon.]: “Latin Quarter Chef among War Heroes”, 4).
For a brief time, the French writer and critic Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918)
joined the ranks of the Futurists and indeed claimed to have launched in 1912 (hence
before Maincave) a radically new cuisine that he called “Gastro-astronomisme”
(Apollinaire: “Gastro-Astronomisme ou la Cuisine Nouvelle”, 378–404). Apollinaire
was such a fervent gourmet that his friend and collaborator, André Billy (1882–1971),
wondered whether his culinary competence was superior to his skills in the plastic
120 Cecilia Novero

arts (Billy: “Apollinaire vivant”, 18). Nonetheless, while Apollinaire was an expert
on culinary traditions around the world and the first member of the avant-garde
to explicitly incorporate cuisine into modern art, the dinners that he celebrated in
Paris-Journal in 1912 were less inspired by Futurism and a modern life-style than by
Trimalchio’s banquet in Petronio’s Satyricon (Berghaus: “The Futurist Banquet”, 17).
Indeed, the extent to which the Futurist banquets included in the 1932 cookbook also
returned to and updated the culinary feasts of antiquity and early modernity is an
open question. As Onfray amply illustrates (“L’ Empire des signes culinaries”, 208),
the theatrical feasts used to stage the Weltanschauung of the hosts and chefs did not
escape Marinetti, whose first satirical play, Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle, 1905),
satirized the exponents of Socialism as ‘cooks of happiness’. The Futurist Cook-
book’s definitive dinners also convey primitive substantialist beliefs according to
which the qualities of cooked matter are transferred to the living body via ingestion
(Onfray: “L’ Empire des signes culinaries”, 220). Marinetti, however, believed that the
‘magical’ power of food could shape the modern mind through chemistry and linked
this to the political need to rewrite modern Italian history from the Risorgimento to
Fascism, from the body up (Novero: “Futurist Banquets”, 7–8, 10, 13).
Günter Berghaus convincingly argues that Futurism was only able to regard
cooking holistically, that is, as a total multi-mediatic experience, once it had reformed
the theatre, namely after the publication of Il teatro di varietà (The Variety Theatre
Manifesto, 1913) and Il teatro futurista sintetico (A Futurist Theatre of Essential
Brevity, 1915). Although it was only in the second phase of Futurism that the sensate
body became both a source and final target of the attempt to ‘re-fashion the universe’,
initially it was the spectacle of eating, or the theatricality of the staged dinners, that
attracted the Futurists. In this case, the Futurist meals can be seen to merge with the
new mini-dramas (sintesi) that were composed for the Futurist stage.
The drama Il pranzo di Sempronio (Sempronio’s Lunch, 1915), written by
Marinetti’s collaborators Emilio Settimelli (1891–1954) and Bruno Corra (pseud. of
Bruno Ginanni Corradini, 1892–1976), followed the Futurist theory of simultaneity
and illustrated the itinerary of Sempronio’s life through a series of quick, interlock-
ing yet discontinuous moments, each representing a course in a single meal of the
central character (Berghaus: “The Futurist Banquet”, 5). The entire life of the char-
acter is thereby condensed in the space of a few courses, each of which in turn con-
denses a different set of emotions, affects, desires and needs in one stage of the pro-
tagonist’s life. In this way, the courses function as a succession of micro-containers
of concentrated sensory and intellectual experiences, without intimating any cau-
sality. A few years later, simultaneity and synthetism returned as the gastronomic
principles animating the Futurist foods to be served in the first Futurist restaurant,
the Tavern of the Holy Palate. Here, Marinetti and Fillìa concocted menus of “simul-
taneous mouthfuls” or canapés “which contain ten, twenty flavours to be tasted in
a few seconds […] and can sum up an entire area of life” (Marinetti and Fillìa: The
Futurist Cookbook, 40).
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Before the Turin restaurant opened, the Variety Theatre Manifesto had inspired the
formation of three Futurist nightclubs in Rome. Food was served at these venues as an
additional cultural event to enrich the already lively programme. For the most part, it was
the interior décor rather than the menu that caught the eye of the Roman crowds once
again eager to enjoy life after the Great War. As Berghaus states, in these Futurist clubs,
“a careful balance of heterogeneous parts contributed to a vibrant and dynamic whole
[…] from the taste of the cocktails and food to the olfactory sensations of the smells per-
vading the room, the spectators were immersed in multiple synaesthetic sensations and
exposed to a bombardment of sensuous stimuli” (Berghaus: “The Futurist Banquet”, 6).
The first club to open was the Bal Tic Tac, designed by Giacomo Balla in 1921.
Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960) followed suit and created in 1922 a multi-media
centre, the Teatro degli Indipendenti. It was designed by the Futurist Virgilio Marchi
(1895–1960) and comprised a gallery, a dance studio, a meeting room and a bar with
a buffet (Berghaus: “The Futurist Banquet”, 6). A third site, the Cabaret Diavolo,
founded by Fortunato Depero, functioned as a fully-developed restaurant. Moreover,
unlike the other two, which counted poets, artists and writers among their visitors,
Depero’s cabaret catered especially to the Roman élite, with the pricey menu includ-
ing champagne and French wines, in addition to the dishes Depero had invented,
such as ‘Railway Disaster’, ‘Critique of Pure Reason’, and ‘Concentrated Solitude’
(Berghaus: “The Futurist Banquet”, 7).
Depero’s cabaret was architecturally designed as a modern Dantesque tripartite
space, with the core representing the Inferno or Hell, as is suggested by the club’s name
and the magazine it published, Il cabaret del diavolo: Gazzetta ufficiale delle persone
di spirito e della Brigata degli Indiavolati (Cabaret of the Devil: Official Gazette of Witty
People and of the Brigade of the Bedevilled, May 1922). The press especially praised
Depero’s innovative interior decoration, which featured tables with modern built-in
lights (Solari: “Roma notturna”; Giovannetti: “Un nuovo paradiso artificiale”). As
reported in the newspaper L’ impero, “the atmosphere was heated by a conflagration
of lights which hung over us poor damned souls like a blazing purple cloak” (cited in
Berghaus: “Futurist Banquet”, 7). As these initial ventures suggest, rather than pre-
senting a fully developed Futurist cuisine, the dinners disrupted the social rituals
associated with bourgeois customs and table manners.
Similar principles were expressed in what could be described as the first Italian
manifesto of Futurist dining, entitled Culinaria futurista, which was written by the
Futurist poet Irba Futurista (pseud. of Irma Bazzi, life dates unknown) and published
in Roma futurista on 9 May 1920. Here, Irba Futurista paid particular attention to table-
ware, calling for plates in new shapes and bright colours to account for each diner’s
individual tastes, to create a Futurist table that was able to “laugh with the diversity
of reds-greens-yellows-blues of big-small-oval-square-round plates” (Irba Futurista:
“Culinaria futurista”, 325–326). Similarly, Irba Futurista proposed that the sequence
of courses should follow the whims of the diner, using the example of a three-soup
meal, and that the dishes should be firmly sculpted.
122 Cecilia Novero

While Irba Futurista proposed a mosaic of individual preferences, which subse-

quently turned up again in Marinetti and Fillìa’s gastrosophy, Culinaria futurista still
foregrounded the effects of the décor, rather than the diet. In this way, Irba Futuris-
ta’s manifesto echoed the Futurists’ general interests in the decorative arts, especially
ceramics, which they started to produce in specialized workshops in Albisola. This
interest in crafts ran parallel with that in interior design for private homes on the one
hand, and the above-mentioned cabarets, restaurants and theatres, on the other (see the
entries on Ceramics and Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design in this volume).

The Tavern of the Holy Palate and the ‘Definitive

Dinners’
The Tavern of the Holy Palate opened in Turin, in 1931, following the national and
international controversy created by Marinetti’s campaign against pasta. Run by
Angelo Giachino (life dates unknown), the Tavern featured the culinary creations of
Futurist chefs, artists and critics. On opening night, for example, the Futurist critic
Paolo Alcide Saladin (1900–1965) accepted a challenge from chefs Ernesto Piccinelli
and Cesare Burdese to cook and serve fourteen dishes that, inspired by the Futur-
ist desire for an accelerated and exhilarating aero-life, would instil Futurist states of
mind in the diners. The guests also included non-Futurists, such as the painters Felice
Casorati (1883–1963), Eso Peluzzi (1893–1963) and Felice Vellan (1889–1976) (Pinottini:
“La cucina futurista”, s.p.). The formulas, which were recorded a year later in The
Futurist Cookbook, were designed to turn the diners themselves into Futurist works of
art while being immersed in a total Futurist environment where all the senses were
stimulated at once. In addition to listening to recitals of Futurist poetry and music, in
which the names of the dishes were announced via loudspeakers, the diners would
also eat foods designed to evoke visual, tactile, olfactory and auditory sensations
(aerovivanda) which, in turn, were augmented by sophisticated technological equip-
ment. While ‘ozonizers’ spread special fragrances with each course to excite the olfac-
tory sense, the diners were provided with small fans that would quickly dissolve the
lingering smell of each meal to prepare the air (and the nose) for subsequent courses.
As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett notes, “the whirring blades added a desired kinetic element
[…] Reminiscent of propellers, fans were a metonym for their favorite machine, the
aeroplane” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett: “Appetizers”, 21). Street noises were also mixed in
with the music and made the tavern resonate with the sonic rhythms of everyday life,
thus precluding any state of introspection and contemplation. Every detail of every
dish and meal was carefully planned and executed so that it would perfectly fit with
the Futurist concept of the Holy Palate.
Nicolay Diulgheroff (1901–1982) designed the Tavern of the Holy Palate follow-
ing the principles that Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916) had elucidated in Architettura
 Cuisine 123

futurista: Manifesto (Manifesto of Futurist Architecture, 1914). Several menus were

inscribed on metal plates, matching the aluminum interior of the restaurant, while
others featured illustrations of special dishes by Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), Ugo
Pozzo (1900–1981), Fortunato Depero and Fillìa. These dishes included ingredients
selected according to what the Futurists hoped would be their calculable effect of
stirring up Futurist states of mind, such as artificial optimism and virility, something
that the Futurists had explored through aeropainting and that now, in 1931, became
part and parcel of Futurist aerovita (life-style of the age of aviation).
The banquets described in The Futurist Cookbook were choreographed to evoke
particular affective states. For example, the ‘Heroic Winter Dinner’ was designed to
inspire courage in soldiers about to go to war and to help them overcome melancholy
and fear of death. Devouring food was expected to anticipate, and present as pleasura-
ble, the destruction about to take place on the battlefield. In this way, the gastronomic
pleasure served as a stimulant and non-sentimental experience able to reconcile the
fear of death with a view of life as process of consumption. The courses that made
up this dinner also connected eating and war via analogy, as for example in ‘Drum
Roll of Colonial Fish’ and ‘Raw Meat Torn by Trumpet Blasts’ (Marinetti and Fillìa:
The Futurist Cookbook, 102). The latter dish aimed at evoking the experience of the
trenches, with raw meat being first electrocuted and then torn apart by trumpet blasts
that marked the possible future of the soldiers, who were also referred to as carne da
macello (cannon fodder; literally, ‘meat to be butchered’). Snow, spotted with black
and red peppers, was used to form a Futurist birds-eye-view (or the view from the
beloved airplane) of a winter landscape of black trenches, black corpses and spilled
blood. Bugle calls interrupting the succession of bites evoked the sudden assaults on
a soldier’s life and, by blowing the trumpet, the soldier became the master of death
(his or his enemy’s). As the assonance tromba – bomba (trumpet and bomb) suggests,
the trumpet served as an instrument to announce his ‘voluntary’ heroic death, while
turning him into the weapon – the bomb – that he ‘blasts’ to kill the enemy.
The foods included in the ‘Heroic Winter Dinner’ could all be associated with
either the soldier’s identity or some instrument of death. The dessert included per-
simmon (cachi in Italian, written just like the Italian transliteration of khaki), a fruit
that stood in for a military uniform. Similarly, the assonance between pomegranates,
also an ingredient in the dessert, and grenades (or in Italian melograni and granate)
changed this fruit into a weapon. In conjunction with painting war and its effects, the
meal also intended to overcome a life of tenderness and affection through the use of
volatile perfumes. These olfactory means were specifically chosen to provoke nausea
and compel the soldiers to leave the nostalgic scene in order to embark on the path
to their death in a state of elation. By the end of the meal, the soldiers were supposed
to have reached the ‘definitive’ and conclusive state of mind necessary for combat.
As the ‘Heroic Winter Dinner’ suggests, life and death were to be experienced
simultaneously through the act of devouring a meal. The soldier was to face death
as a gastronomic, i. e., sensual, will for life and overcome his fear through a culinary
124 Cecilia Novero

act that put him in control. However, although this textual reading of the meal paints
the gruesome aspects of war, the dish’s corresponding ‘optimistic’ state of mind was
intended to glorify death in a Fascist manner. The Futurist banquet’s theatrical pres-
entation of war appears to be less concerned with disavowing conflict than, perhaps,
fetishizing the production of conflict in the aesthetic realm.
For the opening night at the Tavern of the Holy Palate, Fillìa composed a dish
named ‘Chickenfiat’. According to a diner whose testimony is included in The Futurist
Cookbook, its ingredients were raw, roasted and cooked meat, and ball bearings
(Marinetti and Fillìa: The Futurist Cookbook, 78). This formula condensed the sym-
bolic evolution of humankind, from nature to culture and, finally, to pure artifice, into
one simultaneous mouthful. The ball bearings also referred to game dishes that retain
the bullets that killed the prey. However, while in the traditional dish reference is
made to the world of hunters, the use of ball bearings in ‘Chickenfiat’ transformed the
natural prey into a medium that transfers the speed of the machine (the automobile)
onto the Futurist diner. Moreover, as the diner was seated inside the steel alcove of
the Futurist restaurant, steel served both as the container and the contained, forming
the outside (the spirit and mind) and the inside (the skeleton) of the Futurist diner.
Indeed, in Fillìa’s words, the entire architecture of the Holy Palate was to resem-
ble the body of a Futurist man who, in turn, was supported by the structural elements
of the restaurant’s architecture, steel and light, “the supple bone structure of a new
body, completed by the rhythms of indirect lighting. […] Within the aluminum body,
then, light served as an arterial system, indispensable to the surrounding organism in
a state of activity” (Marinetti and Fillìa: The Futurist Cookbook, 71). Consequently, the
meals served in the restaurant, as the Futurist formulas reveal, attempted to elicit the
qualities of steel and light to shape the skeleton of the Futurist diner, just like alumi-
num sustained the restaurant’s interior, and light infused it with energy and desire.
While some recipes, such as ‘Chickenfiat’, incorporated actual metallic or artificial
materials, more often the formulas referred to such ingredients symbolically.
A recipe by the painter Marisa Mori (1900–1985), the patriotic ‘Italian Breasts in
the Sunshine’ (a variation of which, named ‘Strawberry Breasts’, is also included in
The Futurist Cookbook), invoked sunlight as an agent of manly “violence against a
woman’s body, an act of rape” (Parati: “Speaking through Her Body”, 66–67). Parati
goes on to show how violence and war shape Nature, in the form of landscape and
woman. The sun embodies the creative power of the demiurge, whose work – the
sculpted edible breasts – guarantees both the survival of his desire and the satisfac-
tion of gastronomic pleasure by allowing him to imprison the eternal feminine in his
stomach. Yet, according to a different interpretation of the same formula, Jennifer Grif-
fiths considers Mori’s recipe as part of the paradoxes and contradictions of the Futurist
Cookbook in that the breasts first prop up the female body’s otherness, by appropriat-
ing the misogynist Futurist language of desire, then give themselves up to a devouring
that is so radical that it leaves Futurism without the material ‘other’ it would need to
make its own virile claims (Griffiths: “Marisa Mori’s Edible Futurist Breasts”, 25).
 Cuisine 125

On one level, the ‘definitive’ banquets held at the Tavern of the Holy Palate and
elsewhere (Novara, Paris, Chiavari, Bologna, Genoa, Milan, Altare and Tunis) sought
to foster ‘Italianism’, misogyny and colonial racism as Futurist states of mind. These
chauvinistic tendencies are most evident in the descriptions of the ‘Geographic Dinner’,
‘Dinner White Desire’ and ‘Colonial Instinct’. On another, more implicit level, however,
the only ‘definitive state of mind’ that appears to have been evoked was the Futurists’
scepticism towards the feasibility (i. e. the practicality) of such a straightforward political
agenda, or even its desirability. An indication of the Futurists’ subtle critique of Fascism’s
pompous campaigns lies in the fact that the movement’s political agenda unfolded in a
‘crazy’ cookbook and took the shape of an ‘impractical’ diet. Accordingly, when staged,
the theatrical banquets would have accomplished what The Futurist Cookbook suggested
to its reader, namely that Fascism had not yet achieved its goals. The performative, the-
atrical qualities of the Futurist Cookbook’s open-ended texts did not, however, amount
to an act of subversion or anti-Fascism. Although being well planned and scripted, these
banquets operated with elements of chance, incredulity, incompleteness, even failure,
thus guaranteeing that the Futurist (culinary) revolution would never be fulfilled or con-
cluded and, thereby, that Futurism would never be consumed once and for all.

Conclusion
As the story goes, the new Futurist cuisine did not find any followers at the time.
Echoes of the movement’s artistic and technological culinary innovations are mostly
to be found in recent ventures, such as nouvelle cuisine and molecular gastronomy. In
recent years, the technological spirit of Futurist cooking has, also furtively and some-
what facetiously, returned with the numerous websites promoting electronic gadgets
and tools supposedly meant to alleviate the labour of both cooking and eating.
Futurist banquets were also revived at the 1986 exhibition Futurismo e futurismi at
the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, the 2004 exhibition Depero futurista at the Palazzo
Bricherasio in Turin and in various cities during the 2009 centennial celebrations of
the movement. In Milan, a Futurist restaurant called ‘Lacerba’ opened in 2002 with
a Futurist banquet designed by the artist Carmine Caputo di Roccanova, author of
Il nuovo manifesto di cucina futurista (The New Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine, 1996).
As the initiator of a post-aesthetic avant-garde, Futurism is credited for having
introduced the culinary as the necessary passageway to making art relevant in the
shaping of individual and collective bodies in their time (Onfray: “L’ Empire des signes
culinaries”, 206–238; Beil: Künstlerküche). Food has literally become a staple ingredi-
ent of art performances and installations since the 1960s. However, the contribution
made by Futurism to the arts and gastronomy – the critical reassessment of which
must include the consideration of its totalitarian elements – may ultimately lie less in
whether it accurately forecast the future or not. Rather, the legacy of Futurist cooking
126 Cecilia Novero

may best be explained by Walter Benjamin’s theory of art, which contradicts his own
rendition of Futurism. In keeping with Benjamin, reading art and other cultural phe-
nomena requires performing a symptomatic analysis of the history of the objects at
stake. For Benjamin, art history only unfolds as a history of prophecies to be deci-
phered anew because specific possibilities arise during each epoch that allow us to
see the prophecies of the art of the past, and its limitations (Didi-Huberman: “L’ His-
toire de l’ art à rebrousse-poile”, 98). Accordingly, reading The Futurist Cookbook may
illuminate our present modalities of cooking, eating and making art and in turn help
us to reconsider the value and pitfalls of Futurist cooking.

Works cited
[Anon.]: “Latin Quarter Chef among War Heroes: Visitors Returning to Paris Have Just Learned of the
Fate of Jules Maincave.” New York Times, 12 February 1921. 4.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Gastro-Astronomisme, ou La cuisine nouvelle.” G. Apollinaire: Œuvres en
prose. Vol 1. Paris: Gallimard, 1977. 378–404.
Balla, Giacomo, and Fortunato Depero: “Ricostruzione futurista del universo.” Maria Drudi Gambillo,
and Teresa Fiori, eds.: Archivi del futurismo. Vol. 1. Roma: De Luca, 1958. 48–51. English
translation “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura
Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 209–215.
Beil, Ralf: Künstlerküche: Lebensmittel als Kunstmaterial von Schiele bis Jason Rhoades. Köln:
DuMont, 2002.
Berghaus, Günter: “The Futurist Banquet: Nouvelle Cuisine or Performance Art?” New Theatre
Quarterly 17:1 (2001): 3–17.
Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Billy, André: “Apollinaire vivant (1923).” André Billy, et al.: Apollinaire chez lui. Paris: Paris Tête
d’Affiche, 1991. 18.
Caputo di Roccanova, Carmine: “Il nuovo manifesto di cucina futurista.” Broletto: Rivista lombarda di
varia umanità 54 (Summer 1998): 76–77.
Didi-Huberman, Georges: “L’ Histoire de l’ art à rebrousse-poile.” Les Cahiers du Musée National
d’Art Moderne 72 (Summer 2000): 98.
Giovannetti, Eugenio: “Un nuovo paradiso artificiale.” Il tempo, 20 April 1922.
Griffiths, Jennifer: “Marisa Mori’s Edible Futurist Breasts.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and
Culture 12:4 (Winter 2012): 20–26.
Irba Futurista [pseud. of Irene Bazzi]: “Culinaria futurista: Manifesto.” Roma futurista 3:83 (9 May
1920): 1. Reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo. Exhibition
catalogue. Torino: Musei Civici Mole Antonelliana, 1980. 325–326.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara: “Appetizers.” Artforum International 28:3 (November 1989): 20–23.
Maincave, Jules: “Manifeste de la cuisine futuriste.” Fantasio 8:171 (1 September 1913): 84–85.
Italian translation “Manifesto della cucina futurista.” La fiera letteraria 3:21 (22 May 1927): 3.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il teatro di Varietà.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura
di Luciano De Maria. 2nd edn Milano: Mondadori, 1983. 80–91.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “La cucina futurista.” La fiera letteraria 3:21 (22 May 1927): 3.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Manifesto della cucina futurista.” La gazzetta del popolo (Torino), 28
December 1930.
 Cuisine 127

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Le Roi Bombance: Tragédie satirique en quatre actes. Paris: Société du
Mercure de France, 1905.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Fillìa [pseud. of Luigi Colombo]: La cucina futurista. Milano:
Sonzogno: 1932. Reprint Milano: Longanesi, 1986. English Translation: The Futurist Cookbook.
Ed. by Lesley Chamberlain. London: Trefoil, 1989. San Francisco/CA: Bedford Arts, 1989.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra: “Il teatro futurista sintetico.”
F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. 2nd edn Milano:
Mondadori, 1983. 113–121.
Novero, Cecilia: “Futurist Banquets.” C. Novero: Antidiets of the Avant-Garde: From Futurist Cooking
to Eat Art. Minneapolis/MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. 1–52.
Onfray, Michel: “L’ Empire des signes culinaries.” M. Onfray: La Raison gourmande. Paris: Grasset,
1995. 206–238.
Parati, Graziella: “Speaking Through Her Body: The Futurist Seduction of a Woman‘s Voice.”
G. Parati: Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women‘s Autobiography. Minneapolis/MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996. 44–71.
Pinottini, Marzio: “La cucina futurista, ovvero L’ ottimismo a tavola.” Giorgio Origlia, ed.: Progetto
mangiare = Eating as Design. Milano: Electa, 1981. 194–201.
Portnoy, Ethel: “A Note on Jules Maincave, le cuisinier futuriste.” Maatstaf (Amsterdam) 33:6 (June
1985): 8–10.
Salaris, Claudia: Marinetti: Arte e vita futurista. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1997.
Settimelli, Emilio, and Bruno Corra: “Il pranzo di Sempronio.” Teatro futurista sintetico. Vol. 2. Milano:
Studi Editoriale Italiano, 1915. 29–30. Reprinted as “Il pranzo di Sempronio: Scelta e combinazione
di attimi.” Mario Verdone, ed.: Emilio Settimelli e il suo teatro. Roma: Bulzoni, 1992. 152–153.
Solari, Pietro: “Roma notturna: I nuovi cabarets. Giuochi di luce e futurismo. Nel sotterraneo di un
palazzo.” Il Resto del Carlino (Bologna), 22 April 1922.
Weiss, Allen S.: “L’ Espace ivre de l’ esthétique.” Les Cahiers du Musée national d’art moderne 74 (Winter
2000–2001): 58–75. English translation “Drunken Space.” A.S. Weiss: Feast and Folly: Cuisine,
Intoxication and the Poetics of the Sublime. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.
17–37.

Further reading
Benedetta [Benedetta Marinetti-Cappa], et al.: I futuristi a tavola: 7 ricette culinarie. Napoli:
Colonnese, 1969.
Berghaus, Günter: “A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea of a Total
Work of Art.” Maske und Kothurn 32 (1986): 7–28.
Berghaus, Günter: “Futurist Cabarets, Artists’ Festivals, and Banquets.” G. Berghaus: Italian Futurist
Theatre. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. 384–395.
Berghaus, Günter: “I banchetti futuristi come performance art.” Trasparenze: Supplemento a
Quaderni di poesia 31–32 (2007): 10–24.
Birnbaum, Charlotte: “Alimentary School: On Ferran Adriá and Futurist Cooking.” Artforum (October
2009): 111–112.
Bisiaux, Marcel: “Le Futurisme à table.” Alfabeta/La Quinzaine Littéraire. 8:84 (May 1986): 104–106.
Borghese, Alessandra, and Sergio Illuminato: “Cucina futurista.” A. Borghese, and S. Illuminato,
eds.: Intorno al futurismo. Roma: Leonardo; De Luca, 1991. 104–111.
Callegari, Danielle: “The Politics of Pasta: La cucina futurista and the Italian Cookbook in History.”
California Italian Studies 4:2 (2013): 1–15.
128 Cecilia Novero

Cesaretti, Enrico: “Recipes for the Future: Traces of Past Utopias in the ‘Futurist Cookbook’.” The
European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 14:7 (2009): 841–856.
Cigliana, Simona: “Kostprobe total: Ästhetik, Gastronomie und Küche bei den Futuristen.”
Irene Schütze, ed.: Über Geschmack lässt sich doch streiten: Zutaten aus Küche, Kunst und
Wissenschaft. Berlin: Kulturverlag Kadmos, 2011. 47–60.
Depero, Fortunato: “Cucina futurista natalizia (1932).” F. Depero: Scritti e documenti editi e inediti. A
cura di Maurizio Scudiero. Trento: Il Castello, 1992. 145.
Farfa [Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini]: Tuberie e sette ricette di cucina futurista. Milano: All’Insegna del
Pesce d’Oro, 1964.
Gatta, Massimo: “La Taverna del Santopalato: Primo, unico, vero covo gastronomico futurista.”
M. Gatta: Bibliofilia del gusto: Dieci itinerari tra libri, letteratura e cibo. Macerata: Biblohaus,
2008. 29–46.
Golan, Romy: “Anti-pasta.” Cabinet Magazine 10 (2003): 12–15.
Helstosky, Carol: “Recipes for the Nation: Reading Italian History through ‘La Scienza in cucina’ and
‘La cucina futurista’.” Food and Foodways 11 (2003): 113–140.
Helstosky, Carol: “Time Changes Everything: Futurist/Modernist Cooking.” Silvia Bottinelli,
and Margherita D’Ayala Valva, eds.: The Taste of Art: Cooking, Food and Counterculture in
Contemporary Practices. Fayetteville/AR: University of Arkansas Press. 2017. 45-59.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara: “Playing to the Senses: Food as a Performance Medium.”
Performance Research 4:1 (1999): 1–30.
Lemke, Harald: “Futuristische Revolution der Kochkunst: ‘Santopalato’ – Taverne zum Heiligen
Gaumen. ‘Schöne’ Erfindungen der futuristischen Koch-Kunst.” H. Lemke: Die Kunst des
Essens: Eine Ästhetik des kulinarischen Geschmacks. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2007. 17–27.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Verso una imperiale arte cucinaria.” La scena illustrata 53:5 (May
1938): 9–10.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: La cucina futurista: Un pranzo che evitò un suicidio. Milano: Marinotti, 1998.
Onfray, Michel: “Marinetti ou le porexcité.” M. Onfray: Le Ventre des philosophes: Critique de la
raison diététique. Paris: Grasset, 1989. 151–177.
Pautasso, Giulio Andrea, ed.: Cucina futurista: Manifesti teorici, menu e documenti. Milano:
Abscondita, 2015.
Possiedi, Paolo: “La cucina futurista.” Italian Quarterly 32: 125–126 (Summer–Fall 1995): 39–46.
Presotto, Danilo: “Sperimentazioni in cucina futurista.” Liguria 58: 11 – 12 (November–December
1991): 17–18.
Salaris, Claudia: “Cucina.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Il dizionario del futurismo. Firenze: Vallecchi, 2001.
335–338.
Salaris, Claudia: “F. T. Marinetti: Father of the ‘Nouvelle Cuisine’.” La gola: Mensile del cibo e delle
tecniche di vita materiale 4:36 (October 1985): 13–19.
Salaris, Claudia: “La cucina futurista.” La gola: Mensile del cibo e delle tecniche di vita materiale 2:3
(December 1982 – January 1983): 15–18.
Salaris, Claudia: “Nuvole saporite: Il banchetto futurista a Parigi del 1931.” La gola: Mensile del cibo
e delle tecniche di vita materiale 3:25 (November 1984): 17.
Salaris, Claudia: “Pranzo futurista: Ricette inedite di casa Depero.” Alfabeta / La Quinzaine littéraire
8: 84 (May 1986): 150–151.
Salaris, Claudia: Cibo futurista: Dalla cucina nell’ arte all’arte in cucina. Roma: Stampa Alternativa, 2000.
Salemi, Maria: La cucina futurista. La cucina Liberty. Firenze: Libri Liberi, 2003.
Weiss, Allen S.: “L’ Espace ivre de l’ esthétique.” Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne 74
(Winter 2000–2001): 58–75. English translation “Drunken Space.” A.S. Weiss: Feast and Folly:
Cuisine, Intoxication and the Poetics of the Sublime. Albany/NY: State University of New York
Press, 2002. 17–37.
Patrizia Veroli
8 Dance
The rediscovery of Futurist dance
in the 1960s and 1970s
The Italian Futurists were the authors of theoretical enunciations concerned with
theatre and dance, extending from the Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights (1911)
through The Variety Theatre (1913) and the Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity (1915)
to the Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1917). The international impact of these manifestos
cannot be underestimated, as the Dadaist soirées in Switzerland and France (1916–
1921), as well as some performances at the Bauhaus and in Russia (1922–1929), testify
(see also the entry on Italian Theatre in this volume).
As a field of academic enquiry, Futurist dance has raised a number of problems
for scholars: Futurist dance has left very few traces, and no school of dance was born
from it. Given that reviewers in the early decades of the twentieth century lacked a
specialization in dance and that their metaphorical language rarely captured the
details and quality of the movements they saw, it is very difficult nowadays to find
clear and informative descriptions of Futurist dance performances. The semantic
extension Marinetti and his followers applied to the word ‘dance’ meant that they
realized on stage non-balletic types of movement with which the general public were
not familiar and that were not perceived as ‘dance’.
At around the end of the nineteenth century, an epistemological change took
place in the Western world: new theories, interests and problems came to the fore,
and a new way of envisioning and understanding the world came about and exerted
its influence on what was considered to be ‘dance’. The hegemony of ballet came to an
end. Futurist dance was an early episode in this story, one that had an enduring influ-
ence on twentieth-century avant-garde performance. Long neglected, it became the
object of artistic curiosity in the 1960s, prompted also by the rise of American Post-
modern Dance, which contested existing dance codes, classical as well as modern,
together with the need for a formal dance training. Searching for antecedents and
legitimacy, the supporters of the new forms of dance looked back to the Futurists,
who had also imagined a new kind of movement vocabulary far removed from the
accepted canons. They re-activated not so much the Futurist attempts at renewing
dramatic canons through performances in theatres or art galleries, but the provoca-
tive modes of presentation in the serate, the lack of trained performers and the active
involvement of the audience.
The redefinition of dance as an art whose practical status can include any kind of
movement, including stillness, and the current focus on multimedia performance and
technological prostheses, provides new reasons for exploring the Futurists’ theories of

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-008
130 Patrizia Veroli

theatre and dance, and to reflect upon their relationship to the cultural and intellec-
tual landscape of their time. The years from the early 1910s until the early 1930s were
dotted with experiments, some of them fairly well known – such as the Théâtre de la
Pantomime Futuriste (Futurist Pantomime Theatre, 1927–1928), organized by Enrico
Prampolini (1894–1956) in Paris, Milan and Turin, or the dances of Giannina Censi
(1913–1995) and Zdenka Podhajská (1901–1991) – but still in need of serious schol-
arly attention. New theoretical tools, a new approach to the sources and possibly the
uncovering of new documentation in archives outside the major European capitals,
may lead to a better understanding of the ways in which Marinetti and other Futurists
envisioned dance.

The Futurist body on stage

“Modernism is a form of testing – of modernity, and its modes”, wrote Timothy J. Clark
(“Origins of the Present Crisis”, 91). Futurism was the first Modernist movement that
aimed at reforming all of the arts, in a process involving the ‘refashioning’ of life in all
its forms, in line with the great economic, social, cultural and technological expan-
sion associated with the Industrial Revolution. The growth of capitalism and the tech-
nical innovations in the mass production and distribution of goods brought about
new technologies of transportation and communication, whose speed made intellec-
tuals imagine a new era of continual technological progress. Futurism praised in its
manifestos the metropolitan lifestyles, the hustle and bustle of crowds, speeding cars
and a multiplicity of electric stimuli attracting the attention of passers-by. If any trope
can define the modern experience, it is movement. For the Futurists, stasis could only
be apparent, or episodic: everything moves, and everybody has to move. Marinetti
often referred in his manifestos to a body constantly alert, always ready to attack,
aggravate, run, move on. Could all of this be translated into a new kind of dance, as
unprecedented in its imaginative strength as the Futurists wanted their art to be?
In the early twentieth century, before the rise of Modern Dance, ballet reigned
supreme. Its technical, dramaturgical and aesthetic standpoints were still unchal-
lenged. Ballet was executed according to a code of rules dating back to the Baroque
era, updated in French and Italian treatises and coupled with mime. The portrayal
of male rôles by female dancers (travesty dance) was the norm in most European
countries. The most popular and widely circulating ballets complied with the formula
of ballo grande invented in the 1880s by the Italian choreographer Luigi Manzotti
(1835–1905), who used hundreds of performers, and even live animals, in order to
stage stories overloaded with positivistic, mythological and patriotic implications
(Pappacena: Excelsior).
How could a radical change be envisioned and what strategies did the Futurists –
none of whom was a dancer – conceive in order to fulfil their aims? Lack of knowledge
 Dance 131

of the kinetic laws of the body prevented the Futurists from getting involved in any
actual dance practice and changing it. In addition, the Futurist concept of the body
changed dramatically after the First World War, especially with its shift towards a
mechanized body and the use of rigid encasements that hindered the movements of
the dancer.

Valentine de Saint-Point’s métachorie

Valentine de Saint-Point (pseud. of Anna Jeanne Valentine Marianne Desglans de
Cessiat-Vercell, 1875–1953) was a poet and writer, and the creator of an innovative
dance language which she displayed in solo performances starting from 1912. In 1906,
1907 and 1910, some of her poems were published in Marinetti’s journal Poesia and,
for a while, Futurists were among the many artists who convened for literary soirées
at her salon. After the publication of the Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto
of the Futurist Woman, 1912) and Manifeste futuriste de la luxure (Futurist Manifesto
of Lust, 1913), both bearing her signature, Saint-Point was included by Marinetti
in the directorate of the Futurist movement (Berghaus: “Dance and the Futurist
Woman”, 29). This is presumably the reason why her dances were seen to form part
of the Futurist renewals in the arts, even though Saint-Point and Marinetti never
called them ‘Futurist dances’. As a matter of fact, in a letter to the Journal des débats
of 7 January 1914, Saint-Point denied ever having been a Futurist. Nancy Gaye Moore
has gone as far as to question the very authorship of the two Futurist manifestos
signed by Saint-Point, who in her opinion was following esoteric and spiritualistic
trends, Arabian arts and Eastern religions, rather than Futurism (Moore: Valentine
de St.-Point).
Saint-Point’s first theoretical statement on dance used the term métachorie
(beyond the chorus), which referred to the Greek choros and signified a type of move-
ment that went beyond the classical format of dancing. It was characterized by the
same feminist stance which Saint-Point took in her Futurist manifestos. She pre-
sented her métachorie in a lecture at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris on 29
December 1913, and later, in 1917, at the Metropolitan Theatre in New York; however,
the concept had already been alluded to in her “Discours sur la tragédie et le vers
tragique” (A Discourse on Tragedy and Tragic Verse) that served as a preface to her
drama L’ Agonie de Messaline, written in 1907 and published many years later with a
slightly different title, L’ Âme impériale, ou L’ Agonie de Messaline (The Imperial Soul,
or Messalina’s Agony; see Moore: Valentine de St.-Point).
In Saint-Point’s view, dance should parallel a new feminine posture far removed
from Romantic attitudes. She believed that dance should be cool, intellectual, free from
any determination by music and relate to the new cultural context that characterized
France at the time. In her opinion, a poetic idea should provide the theme upon which
132 Patrizia Veroli

a dance would be based, and the execution would follow geometrical shapes and strict
lines established beforehand by the dancer. Within that framework, the dancer’s body
would obey an inner rhythmic instinct (Saint-Point: “La Métachorie: Conférence”). Saint-
Point danced barefoot, just like Isadora Duncan (1877–1927), who in those very years
made herself known in Paris with her dances liberated from the ballet canon. However,
Saint-Point distanced herself explicitly from Duncan’s postures, which were derived from
Greek vase paintings. Her aim was to submit dance to ‘spiritual’ control and to intellec-
tual concepts, and to charge the geometrical figures executed by the body with esoteric
and symbolic meanings. This may have been linked to the intellectual undercurrents
permeating Modern Dance as it was theorized and practiced in Germany at the time. The
few photos remaining of Saint-Point’s dances show her dressed in costumes that were
either soft and fluid, or stiff like armour, her face covered with veils. Her body formed
geometrical patterns, just as she had indicated in her manifesto. How her choreogra-
phies developed in time and space has not been ascertained so far, as the surviving pho-
tographs do not indicate clearly how she dealt with the body’s weight and dynamism.
At a time when dancers in Europe were searching for a new artistic status, Saint-Point’s
proposals were undoubtedly original, even though she herself dismissed her work after
the First World War.

Marinetti’s Manifesto of Dance (1917)

Marinetti focussed his attention on the medium of dance in 1917, when all other
major arts had already been given consideration in a variety of manifestos. French
Symbolism, which had played an important rôle in Marinetti’s early education, no
doubt made the monumental choreographies inspired by Manzotti, and still well
received by audiences, unacceptable to him. He also rejected the aesthetic renewal
instigated by the Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929) and his Ballets
Russes, which had conquered the Paris cultural establishment with performances
in which dance, music and décor tended to form an organic ensemble. Yet, at least
one such work was amongst the most transgressive ballets of the period before the
First Word War: Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913), with choreography
by Vaslav Nijinsky (Vatslav Nizhinskii, 1890–1950) and music by Igor Stravinsky
(1882–1971). In the same year as the first performance of Le Sacre du printemps,
Marinetti published Il teatro di varietà (The Variety Theatre, 1913), where for the first
time he showed some interest in dance:

The Variety Theater offers the healthiest of all the kinds of entertainment, by virtue of the dyna-
mism of its form and color (simultaneous movement of jugglers, ballerinas, gymnasts, multicolo-
red riding troupes, dancers sur les pointes, whirling around like spinning tops). With the rhythm
of its quick, exhilarating dances, the Variety Theater inevitably drags the most sluggish souls out
of their torpor and forces them to run and to leap. (Marinetti: “The Variety Theater”, 187)
 Dance 133

The music-hall appealed to Marinetti first of all because of its structure: short acts,
independent from one another, broke the dramatic unity of the spectacle. Perfor-
mance genres were mixed, and the audience was directly involved in the performers’
actions, with unexpected outcomes. Psychologically motivated plots and mysterious
atmospheres were often replaced by gags, and jugglers and gymnasts engaged in
‘body madness’ (fisicofollia), while sentimental scenes were substituted with violent
attacks on the audience’s nerves. Above it all, a brand new discovery was employed:
electric light.
It was possibly the American dancer Loie Fuller (1862–1928) to whom Marinetti
referred when he praised the “dancers sur les pointes, whirling around like spinning
tops” (Marinetti: “The Variety Theatre”, 187). A pioneer of the new dance, Fuller
became famous for her solos staged in dark spaces, her body lit by magic lanterns
and covered by an extremely large and light costume which she controlled by means
of rods attached to her arms. Did Marinetti see Fuller on stage? The dancer stopped
performing in 1908, but he may have seen her before this at the Folies-Bergère, or
watched an early film recording of her groundbreaking Danse serpentine (Serpentine
Dance, 1892; see Veroli: “Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism”).
Fuller’s technological imagination was bound to strike Marinetti, who mentioned
her in his Manifesto della danza futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Dance, 1917): “We
Futurists prefer Loïe Fuller and the Negroes’ cakewalk (making use of electric light
and mechanical devices)” (Marinetti: “Futurist Dance”, 210; emphasis in the origi-
nal). The manifesto was dedicated to Marchioness Luisa Casati (Luisa Stampa Casati
di Soncino, Marchesa di Roma, 1881–1957), one of the most celebrated femmes fatales
of the time, and conjured up the dramatic atmosphere of war rather than the colourful
and smoky ambience of Paris music-halls. Marinetti theorized about a Futurist dance
that was “tuneless – rudely – ungracious – asymmetrical – synthetic – dynamic –
Words-in-Freedom” (Marinetti: “Futurist Dance”, 211) and set it against some of the
leading stars of the time. These included not only Isadora Duncan, whose dances, in
his view, conveyed “the most convoluted emotions of a desperate nostalgia, of an ago-
nized sensuousness, or of a childishly feminine gaiety”, but also Saint-Point, whose
creations he decried as “static, arid, cold, and devoid of emotion” (Marinetti: “Futur-
ist Dance”, 210). With the “glorious Italian ballet dead and buried”, he found reason
to praise Diaghilev’s company, and especially the dancer Nijinsky, who for him re-
presented “the divinity of muscle in action” (ibid.). Marinetti saw him as a paradigm
of a well-oiled machine, which Marinetti wanted the new dance to emulate: “With
our actions, we should imitate the movements of machines; we should pay very close
attention to the steering wheel, to wheels, to pistons, and thus prepare the way for
the fusion of men and machines, arriving at the metallic character of Futurist dance”
(Marinetti: “Futurist Dance”, 210).
How was this concept to be realized? The 1917 manifesto can be divided into
two parts: the first is theoretical, while the second describes three war dances. Even
though the third dance was entitled Danza dell’aviatore (The Aviator’s Dance) and
134 Patrizia Veroli

referred to a male aviator, the wording made it clear that the performer was intended
to be a woman. Marinetti was clearly indebted here to the Italian ballet tradition, in
which male performers did not occupy a significant place. The movements described
in Dance of the Shrapnel and Dance of the Machine Gun were quite elementary: the
dancer walks, stamps the ground, opens her arms wide to describe the bullet’s tra-
jectory, hops around in an ecstatic mood and makes swimming gestures. This is a
mime, a mimicry of objects and natural elements. Dance of the Aviator was more
complex, but the action was again imitative. The dancer would have a celluloid pro-
peller pinned to her breast and wear a monoplane-shaped hat. She would simulate a
plane taking off, then stand up and create the impression of flying. The whole dance
was to be depersonalized. Once again, Marinetti was describing a mime, in which
movements had no semantic ambiguity. Their reference to reality was entirely literal.
In the 1910s, mime enjoyed great popularity in Europe, so Marinetti’s approach was
not surprising. However, his ambition to create a Futurist dance was left unfulfilled.

The machine dances of the 1920s

As is well known, at the turn of the century, Europe witnessed a heightened interest
in mannequins, marionettes and puppets. This also extended to the theatre and to
the Futurists, who wanted to refashion human relations to their surrounding world.
They made use of marionettes because they were closely linked to the theme of the
machine and added to the technological imagery which characterized the movement
throughout its existence.
An example of Marinetti’s rejection of traditional theatrics can be seen in his first
plays, Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle, 1905) and Poupées électriques (Electric Dolls,
1909). An important step forward towards the use of animated objects was made by
Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) in their manifesto Rico-
struzione futurista dell’universo (The Futurist Refashioning of the Universe, 1915).
Here, they described the invention of complessi plastici (three-dimensional assem-
blages), which were abstract constructions lit from within, able to move, metamor-
phose, make noise and even smell. For such artificial beings, an equally artificial
landscape was envisaged, geometrical and inhabited by metallic animals.
Always sensitive to new trends in the arts, Sergei Diaghilev met Marinetti in 1915
in his Milan home. Diaghilev was in the process of modernizing his ballet produc-
tions in every respect, not only with regard to dance but also to music and décor. The
Russian impresario was not convinced by the intonarumori (noise intoners) invented
by Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), and nothing further came out of this visit. One year
later, Giacomo Balla showed Diaghilev some sketches for a ‘mimic action’ (possibly
a ballet) called Tipografia (The Printing Workshop). Against a backdrop painted with
the letters of the alphabet, twelve marionette characters designed by Balla, wearing
 Dance 135

tailcoats and top hats, would move and utter sounds. This project did not appeal to
Diaghilev either, but he commissioned from Balla abstract scenery for a new ballet,
Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), with music by Igor Stravinsky (composed between 1908
and 1916). He was also attracted to Depero’s Vestito ad apparizione (Apparition-like
Outfits, 1915–1916) and his costume designs for Mimismagia (Magic Mimes, 1916), a
work that was never seen on stage (Veroli: “Quello ‘strafottentissimo’ Depero”). In
contrast to Balla, Depero envisaged real bodies on stage, albeit costumed in a way
that made it very difficult for the dancers to move.
In 1916, Diaghilev signed a contract with Depero for a ballet, Le Chant du rossignol
(The Song of the Nightingale), based on Stravinsky’s opera Le Rossignol (The Night-
ingale, 1914). Depero constructed a bizarre garden of wooden flowers and cardboard
costumes which would have hindered the dancers’ movements. This gave Diaghilev
a reason to reject Depero’s work. Balla’s décor, by contrast, was used for Fireworks,
which premièred at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 12 April 1917. For the first and
only time in the history of the Ballets Russes, Diaghilev produced a ‘ballet’ with no
dancers on stage. Balla’s geometrical shapes were rhythmically lit from within in dif-
ferent colours (see Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 254–259).
The great fame enjoyed by the Russian impresario as a collector of modern art
caused several Futurists to invite him to their studios, where they presented ideas for
further ballets to him. Francesco Cangiullo (1884–1977) had written a libretto named
Il giardino zoologico (The Zoological Garden), which contained characters that were
partly human and partly animal. It was accepted by Diaghilev, who commissioned
the accompanying music from Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) and scenery, again, from
Giacomo Balla. However, for a variety of reasons, nothing came of it (Veroli: “Djagilev
e ‘L’ oro di Napoli’ ”). Other proposals submitted by Cangiullo were also turned down
by Diaghilev, which meant that, in the end, the striking scenery for Fireworks remained
the only collaboration between the Futurists and the Ballets Russes. The reason for the
impresario’s rejection of Depero’s Le Chant du rossignol is far from clear, but on 18 May
1917, one could see three characters encased in cardboard costumes in Paris in the
ballet Parade. They had been designed by Picasso in Rome at a time when he had daily
contact with Depero and saw the scenery he had constructed for Rossignol (Depero’s
influence on Picasso’s costumes has been discussed in Berghaus: “The Futurist Body
on Stage”, 341–342).
Depero’s theatrical talent found a more fruitful outlet in his Balli plastici (Plastic
Ballets), which prémiered in Rome on 14 April 1918. Anthropomorphic and brightly
coloured wooden marionettes personifying animals, clowns, ballerinas and so on were
operated by one of the most famous marionette companies of the time, the Teatro dei
Piccoli of Vittorio Podrecca (1883–1959; see Campanini: “Il ‘mondo meccano’ di Fortu-
nato Depero”; Veroli and Volpicelli: La fabbrica dei sogni). The small characters moved
in lines, like chorus girls, but of course the range of their movements was very limited.
After the First World War, the theme of the metallic body emerged again when
the painters Vinicio Paladini (1902–1971) and Ivo Pannaggi (1901–1981) staged a Ballo
136 Patrizia Veroli

meccanico futurista (Futurist Mechanical Ballet) in the hall of the Casa d’Arte Bra-
gaglia in Rome on 2 June 1922. Two Russian actors or mimes called Ikar and Ivanoff
(whose identities have never been ascertained), performed largely improvised move-
ments in rigid costumes to the roaring sounds of motorcycles. Pannaggi and Paladini
seemed to have paid little attention to the dances themselves, as their creative focus
was very much directed at the visual impression their work would make on stage.
Depero worked again with rigid armour in Aniccham del 2000 (Machine of the
Year 2000), also called Aniccham del 3000 at the time, which premièred on 11 January
1924 in Milan. The actors or mimes represented two trains and a stationmaster and
found it very difficult to move in their stiff, mechanical costumes. The piece was per-
formed together with Psicologia delle macchine (The Psychology of Machines), con-
ceived by the Futurist painter Enrico Prampolini, whose manifestos, Un’arte nuova?
Costruzione assoluta di moto-rumore (A New Art? Absolute Constructions of Sound
in Motion, 1915) and Scenografia e coreografia futurista (Futurist Stage Design and
Choreography, 1915) envisioned artificial human beings similar to those created by
Balla and Depero.
It seems characteristic that the theoretical and practical experiments of all the
Futurists discussed above paid little attention to the dancers’ bodily movements,
in contrast to the artists who were working at the same time at the Bauhaus (Oskar
Schlemmer, Kurt Schmidt, Xanti Schawinsky, Andor Weininger) or in Russia (FEKS or
Mastfor). At any event, towards the end of the 1920s, a shift towards mime could be
observed, not only in Futurist circles.

Enrico Prampolini and the pantomime futuriste

Fin-de-siècle Europe witnessed a renewed interest in a form of theatre that told
stories without words – by means of bodily movements, gestures and facial expres-
sions – variously referred to as ‘pantomime’ or ‘mime’. A widely felt crisis concerning
the canons of all art forms, a new urgency to communicate anxieties related to indi-
vidual, social and national life, as well as the challenge to artistic languages posed by
the rise of cinema, were among the circumstances that pushed artists, the Futurists
amongst them, towards a mimed and danced drama that had an esteemed antecedent
in the commedia dell’arte. In Italy, the genre was deliberately exhumed by the writer
and theatre director Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960) and the Futurist painter
Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956). In an unperformed libretto, Il polline abbandonato
(The Abandoned Pollen, 1919), Prampolini experimented with robots and tried to
implement a new bodily language, free from the conventions of contemporary acting
(Prampolini: “Il polline abbandonato”). In 1918, he invited a Ukrainian dancer, Ileana
Leonidoff (pseud. of Elena Sergeevna Pisarevskaya, 1893[?]–1965), to give a so-called
‘mimoplastic’ performance at the Galleria d’arte “L’ Epoca” in Rome on the occasion
 Dance 137

of an exhibition of his paintings. Three years before, Leonidoff had been the protag-
onist of Thaïs, a film directed by Bragaglia, for which Prampolini had created the set
and costume designs. Her barefoot dance performance of 1918 was seemingly impro-
vised and took inspiration from the free and rhythmic movements championed by
Isadora Duncan and other modern dancers in Germany.
In 1927, at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris, Prampolini launched a company
called Théâtre de la Pantomime Futuriste, whose star was the Italian actress-dancer
Maria Ricotti (1886‒1974). The composers included Franco Casavola (1891–1955),
Silvio Mix (Silvius Aloysius Micks, pseud. of Silvio De Re, 1900–1927), Francesco
Balilla Pratella (1880–1955) and Luigi Russolo; the librettists included Luciano
Folgore (1888–1966), Enrico Prampolini and F. T. Marinetti. Prampolini was the set
and costume designer for all items on the programme. They were inspired by a range
of themes and traditions, including commedia dell’arte, folklore and Diaghilev’s
Ballets Russes, also because Prampolini himself did not possess any dance training
and consequently was not able to conceive and teach a new dance form. Although he
featured in the programme as choreographer, his true rôle was that of designer and
stage director.
With one of his dancers, Zdenka Podhájska (1901–1999), Prampolini created some
sport-inspired performances, Tennis (with music by Silvio Mix) and Football (with
music by František Hradil), at a Futurist festival staged in front of the Futurist Pavilion
at the Parco del Valentino during the Esposizione del Decennale della Vittoria in Turin
in 1928. Although, as several manifestos testify, Prampolini took a strong interest in
dance, he was unable to shape a Futurist choreographic style.

Giannina Censi’s ‘aerodances’

Giannina Censi was an Italian dancer trained in Milan and elsewhere in the classi-
cal ballet tradition and possibly in other dance techniques (Belloli: “Giannina Censi
negli anni Trenta danzava la poesia futurista”). In 1931, she improvised ‘aerodances’
at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan to the sound of ‘aeropoems’ recited by Marinetti in the
wings. The few extant photos show her in a shining costume and a cap designed by
Prampolini, to which the painter pinned metal tubes and copper wires just before she
entered the stage. As she would remember in an interview of 1989, she could hardly
move in such an outfit (Censi: “Raccontandomi”). Marinetti would later engage her
as a dancer for the minor rôle of Piff in his Simultanina, a “Futurist divertissement in
16 short scenes” (1931), which toured Italy in the early 1930s. Censi was not a Futurist
and never became one, although she was happy to collaborate with Marinetti and put
her eclectic talent at his disposal. Still alive in the 1970s, when Futurism was rediscov-
ered as an object of scholarly study, she began to recall her experiences and enjoyed
sudden celebrity status (Berghaus: “Giannina Censi and the Futurist Thirties”).
138 Patrizia Veroli

How did Censi move at the time? The photographs show a body well schooled
by classical training, possibly able to create geometrical shapes on stage. But how
did her dance develop in space and time? How did she deal with crucial elements of
dancing, such as the body’s weight and energy? Who taught her a Futurist language, if
indeed she had any? Was her dance improvised? Can she be considered a person who
created, albeit at a late date, a Futurist form of dance? It is hard to give answers to such
questions. Censi certainly did not create a Futurist repertoire, and her ‘aerodances’ did
not leave any traces in the dance world. However, they were appreciated by one of the
most important Italian physiologists of the time, Giuseppe Poggi-Longostrevi (1936–
2000). Aiming to establish a canon of female movements that balanced eugenics with
aesthetic purposes, he used photographic portraits of Censi as examples of the kind of
gymnastics women should practise in order to acquire the strength Fascism required
from them as mothers (Poggi-Longostrevi: Cultura fisica della donna ed estetica femmi-
nile, plates 187–192). The Fascist régime set up a political strategy aimed at tightening
its control over women’s bodies in the early 1930s. It is significant that it was thanks
to Fascist ideology that Censi’s Futurist poses were portrayed as an example to follow,
whilst at the time she found no disciples at all in the domain of dance.

Works cited
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30:1–2 (January–February 1976): 3–18.
Berghaus, Günter: “Dance and the Futurist Woman: The Work of Valentine de Saint-Point,
1875–1953.” Dance Research 11:2 (Autumn 1993): 27–42.
Berghaus, Günter: “Giannina Censi and the Futurist Thirties.” Dance Theatre Journal 8:1 (Summer
1990): 4–7, 34–37.
Berghaus, Günter: “The Futurist Body on Stage.” Nathalie Roelens, and Wanda Strauven, eds.: Homo
orthopedicus: Le corps et ses prothèses à l’ époque (post)moderniste. Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2001.
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Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Campanini, Paola: “Il ‘mondo meccano’ di Fortunato Depero: Storia e utopia dei Balli plastici.” Ariel:
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translation “The Variety Theater.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus.
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144–152. English translation “Futurist Dance: Dance of the Shrapnel – Dance of the Machine
Gun – Dance of the Aviator.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 208–217.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Simultanina: Divertissement futurista in 16 sintesi.” F. T. Marinetti:
Teatro. A cura di Giovanni Calendoli. Vol. 3. Roma: Bianchi, 1960. 381–451.
Moore, Nancy Gaye: Valentine de St.-Point: “La femme intégrale” and Her Quest for a Modern Tragic
Theatre in “L’ Agonie de Messaline” (1907) and “La Métachorie” (1913). Ph.D. Dissertation.
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17–21. Reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, and Rosella Siligato, eds.: Prampolini: Dal futurismo
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Prampolini, Enrico: “Un’arte nuova? Costruzione assoluta di moto-rumore.” L’ artista moderno 14:9
(19 May 1915): 149–151. Reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, and Rosella Siligato, eds.: Prampolini: Dal
futurismo all’informale. Roma: Carte Segrete, 1992. 159–160.
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1914): 3.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste de la femme futuriste: Réponse à F. T. Marinetti.”
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Nuits, 2005. 7–15. English translation V. de Saint-Point: “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman:
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eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 109–113.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste futuriste de la luxure.” V. de Saint-Point: Manifeste de la
femme futuriste. Éd. Jean-Paul Morel. Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2005. 17–23. English translation
V. de Saint-Point: “Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913).” Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi,
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Saint-Point, Valentine de: L’ Âme impériale, ou L’ Agonie de Messaline: Tragédie en 3 moments avec
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140 Patrizia Veroli

Veroli, Patrizia: “Djagilev e ‘L’ oro di Napoli’: Il mezzo fiasco del San Carlo tra Cangiullo e ‘Pulcinella’
(1915–1917).” Pier Paolo De Martino, and Daniela Margoni Tortora, eds.: Musica e musicisti a
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Napoli: Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici, 2012. 51–66.
Veroli, Patrizia: “Loie Fuller’s Serpentine Dance and Futurism: Electricity, Technological Imagination
and the Myth of Machine.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: Futurism and the Technological Imagination.
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Veroli, Patrizia: “Quello ‘strafottentissimo’ Depero: Giocondità ballerina futurista.” Terzo occhio:
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Piccoli di Podrecca 1914–1959. Marionette e materiali scenici della Collezione Signorelli.
Bologna: Bora, 2005.

Further reading
Anz, Craig, and Jennifer Halfacre: “Futurist Movement Theory: A Choreographic Oscillation Between
Futurist Dance and Architectural Design.” George E. Lasker, Jane Lily, and James Rhodes, eds.:
Systems Research in the Arts. Vol. 8. Music, Environmental Design, and the Choreography of
Space. Tecumseh/ON: International Institute for Advanced Studies in Systems Research and
Cybernetics, 2006. 133–136.
Ballardin, Barbara: Valentine de Saint-Point. Milano: Selene, 2007.
Barbarini, Silvana: “Passi di aerodanza: Omaggio a Giannina Censi.” Oltre: Bimestrale di cultura,
ambiente e turismo 5:28 (July–August 1994): 32–35.
Barros, Né: “Futurismos do gesto e da criatura na dança.” Margarida Acciaiuoli, Joana Cunha Leal,
and Maria Helena Maia, eds.: Arte e poder. Lisboa: Instituto de História da Arte – Estudos da
Arte Contemporânea, 2008. 281–290.
Bentivoglio, Leonetta: “Danza e futurismo in Italia, 1913–1933.” La danza italiana 1:1 (Autumn 1984):
61–82. Reprinted in Elisa Vaccarino, ed.: Giannina Censi: Danzare il futurismo. Milano: Electa,
1997. 43–54. Gabriella Belli, and Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino, eds.: La danza delle avanguardie.
Milano: Skira, 2005. 139–145.
Blumenkranz-Onimus, Noëmi: “A bas le tango et Parsifal!: La danse futuriste.” Revue d’esthétique 22
(1992): 53–65.
Bonfanti, Elvira: “Appunti per un’estetica della danza futurista.” Elisa Vaccarino, ed.: Giannina
Censi: Danzare il futurismo. Milano: Electa, 1997. 55–62.
Bonfanti, Elvira: Il corpo intelligente: Giannina Censi. Turin: Il Segnalibro, 1995.
Bono, Virginio Giacomo: “Aerodanza: Giannina Censi musa futurista.” Oltre: Bimestrale di cultura,
ambiente e turismo 3:13 (December 1992): 42–47.
Bragaglia, Anton Giulio: “Parentesi sull’aerodanza futurista.” Roberto Leydi, ed.: La Piazza:
Spettacoli popolari italiani descritti e illustrati. Milano: Avanti!, 1959. 183–192.
Brandstetter, Gabriele: “Flugtanz: Futuristischer Tanz und Aviatik.” G. Brandstetter: Tanz-Lektüren:
Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde. Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1995. 386–421. English
translation “Aerodance: Futurist Dance and Aviation.” G. Brandstetter: Poetics of Dance: Body,
Image, and Space in the Historical Avant-Gardes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 314–344.
Cerbe-Farajian, Claudia Maria: “Beziehung zwischen Tanz und bildender Kunst: Der Futurismus.”
C.M. Cerbe-Farajian: Bewegung, Rhythmik und Ausdruck in Tanz und bildender Kunst im
späten 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert und ihr Reflex in den Schriften Aby Warburgs. Ph.D.
Dissertation. Kassel: Universität Kassel, 2001. 32–35.
 Dance 141

Fiorani, Pierangela: “Giannina Censi in tuta rosa a danzare il futurismo.” La provincia di Pavia 7
(December 1991): 39–42.
Klöck, Anja: “Of Cyborg Technologies and Fascistized Mermaids: Giannina Censi’s Aerodanze in
1930s Italy.” Theatre Journal 51:4 (December 1999): 395–415.
Lustrac, Philippe de: “Cubisme … futurisme … ésotérisme: De ‘L’ aprés-midi d’un faune’ (1912)
à ‘Parade’ (1917) et au ‘Manifeste de la danse futuriste’ (1917).” Ligeia: Dossiers sur l’ art
19:69–72 (2006): 62–115.
MacCarren, Felicia: “Isadora Dances for Marinetti/Ballets Without Bodies: The Futurist Dancer
versus the Dancer of the Future. The Dancer Becomes a War Machine.” F. MacCarren: Dancing
Machines: Choreographies of the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Stanford/CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003. 96–108.
Majocchi, Antonella: “Giannina Censi in ‘Simultanina’.” Futurismo-oggi 20:11–12 (November–
December 1988): 29–31.
Majocchi, Antonella: “La danza futurista.” Futurismo-oggi 20:5–7 (May–July 1988): 17–22.
Martin, Marianne W.: “The Futurist Gesture: Futurism and the Dance.” Kunst Musik Schauspiel: Akten
des XXV. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte, Wien 4.–9. September 1983. Vol. 2.
Wien: Böhlau, 1985. 95–113.
Mendonça, António Cadima: “O futurismo e a dança.” Cristina Azevedo Tavares, and Fernando Paulo
Rosa Dias, eds.: As artes visuais e as outras artes: As primeiras vanguardas. Lisboa: Faculdade
de Belas Artes da Universidade de Lisboa, 2007. 125–134.
Merwin, Ted: “Loie Fuller’s Influence on F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Dance.” Dance Chronicle 21:1 (1998):
73–92.
Moore, Nancy Gaye: “The Convergence of Orientalism and Parisian Occultism in the Dances of
Valentine de St.-Point (1875–1953).” Janice LaPointe-Crump, ed.: CORD 2001: Transmigratory
Moves. Dance in Global Circulation. Supplement to the Proceedings of the 34th Congress
on Research in Dance Held at New York University, October 26–28, 2001. Vol. 2. New York:
Congress on Research in Dance, 2001. 320–326.
Moore, Nancy Gaye: “The Hermetic Dances of Valentine de St.-Point (1875–1953).” Juliette Willis,
ed.: Proceedings of the Society of Dance History Scholars: Twenty-second Annual Conference,
Albuquerque. University of New Mexico, 10–13 June 1999. Riverside: Society of Dance History
Scholars, 1999. 167–175.
Ogliari, Francesco, and Roberto Bagnera: “Giannina Censi.” F. Ogliari, and R. Bagnera: Milano
futurista: Quando l’ imperativo è rompere con il passato. Pavia: Selecta, 2009. 13–16.
Palli, Cecilia: “Una musa nel panorama dell’arte totale del movimento futurista: Giannina Censi.
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Franca Zoccoli, Ekaterina Lazareva
9 Fashion Design
Dress codes for the citizen of the modern world became established at the beginning
of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, people had displayed their wealth and power
by wearing clothes made from expensive fabrics adorned with sumptuous accoutre-
ments. With the rise of capitalism, the figure of the bourgeois industrialist became a
social model. To signal that he was wholeheartedly dedicated to a ‘religion of work’,
an austere, puritanical dress code came into being. The Futurists were amongst the
first to challenge these conventions and created provocative clothes that showed that
a rethinking of the relationship between art and fashion was underway.
Items of clothing can communicate, and their language has attracted the attention
of sociologists and semiologists. In his analysis of fashion as a system of signifiers,
Roland Barthes revealed its ideological bias. The great theorist of modernity, Charles
Baudelaire, demonstrated in his writings that fashion and beauty were not absolute
values but the fruit of one’s own time and place, and were thus ever-changeable. The
very fact that fashion was so transitory, ephemeral and fugitive made it a hallmark
of modernity. Walter Benjamin spun this thought further and demonstrated that
because fashion was an eternal recurrence of the New, it shared a key characteris-
tic with Modernism: the break with the past and the quest for novelty. As the avant-
garde wanted to integrate art and life, fashion became a particularly attractive field
for artists seeking to expand the boundaries of ‘pure’ art.
The Futurists advocated a re-fashioning of the universe according to artistic
principles and discovered in clothing a valuable domain of artistic expression. But
contrary to Baudelaire and Benjamin, they were not attracted by the eternal cycle of
fashions. For them, the fashions of the day were terribly ‘old-fashioned’, i. e. passéist;
they were a frivolous luxury following the dictates of a mercantile industry and had to
be replaced with clothes that were works of art. But their sartorial masterpieces were
not created for museums; they were worn in daily life and were thus short-lived. This
related them to two other Futurist principles: art being rooted in the ‘here and now’
and contributing to a process of rejuvenation and progress.
The first Futurist in Italy to develop a novel conception of fashion was undoubt-
edly Giacomo Balla (1871–1958). He was both a great theorist and a multi-talented
artist. His manifestos on clothing and his extensive collection of artistically designed
clothes stem from the years before the First World War, whereas in Russia the Futurists
only began to focus on clothing in a serious manner after the October Revolution. As
in Italy, it was not the bourgeois fixation on seasonably changing styles and fabrics
that interested them, but utilitarian dress in the private sphere and work environment.
The Productivist concept of art in a Communist society was geared towards a form of
creativity that contributed to the construction of Soviet modernism. This involved a
radical re-interpretation of everyday objects, including clothes. What distinguished the
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-009
144 Franca Zoccoli

Russians from their Italian colleagues was their ideology of a future society. In Com-
munism, all men are equal. Conventional dress signalled social standing and thus had
to be replaced with functional, egalitarian clothing. The Italian Futurists, by contrast,
operated in a capitalist environment. Yet in one respect they resembled their Eastern
colleagues: they also produced anti-fashion. Both Italian and Russian designers
created revolutionary clothes and left a major legacy to future generations of designers.

Italian Fashion Design

The first manifestos of Futurist clothing

In 1912, Giacomo Balla wrote to his wife from Düsseldorf that “the black suit with the
white stripe caused a sensation.” (Balla: Con Balla. Vol. 1, 279–280). In other letters
from that town, he described the success of the extravagant suits he had created for
himself, together with an equally original hat, shoes and gloves. This was the first
time that items of clothing found a mention within Italian Futurism. From then on,
Balla never stopped applying his fantasy to clothes and accessories. In the same year,
he designed his first brightly coloured tie (he would create a whole series of them in
the following years), using a pattern of Futurist ‘lines of force’, which paralleled his
early experiments with abstract painting.
It was two years later, in 1914, that Balla complemented his creation of fashion
items for his personal use with a theoretical statement, Il manifesto futurista del vestito
da uomo (The Futurist Manifesto of Men’s Clothing), later renamed – undoubtedly
on Marinetti’s insistence – Il vestito antineutrale: Manifesto futurista (The Antineu-
tral Suit: Futurist Manifesto). This violent attack on the seriousness and conservative
nature of men’s clothing at the time was accompanied by various illustrations, the
most audacious being a red, one-piece suit for the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà. In the
design reproduced in the manifesto we see two intersecting triangles, from which
head, hands and feet emerge; where the two triangles meet we see the genitals, rep-
resented as two balls and an upward-pointing arrow. In his provocative stand, Balla
went as far as to write: “The Futurist hat shall be asymmetrical and in aggressive,
festive colours. Futurist shoes shall be dynamic, each of a different shape and colour.”
(Balla: “Il vestito antineutrale”, 32).
One could speculate that if Balla had not ventured into the field, Futurist fashion
design would not have come into existence. However, it was not by chance that Balla
did what he did. He had long been thinking about the necessity for the Futurist move-
ment to extend beyond the conventional realms of literature, painting, sculpture,
music and theatre. He had heeded Marinetti’s call for a fusion of art and life and had
developed his own programme of re-fashioning all aspects of human life (see Balla
and Depero: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo).
 Fashion Design 145

In 1914, Balla announced that a manifesto on women’s clothing would be forth-

coming, but he never wrote one. Only six years later, in 1920, an atypical Futurist, the
journalist and diplomat Vincenzo Fani (1888–1927), who called himself ‘Volt’, would
issue a Manifesto della moda femminile futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Women’s
Fashion). This is not surprising. Futurism was a revolution against the bourgeoisie
(although the Futurists were middle-class people themselves), and therefore one can
expect that criticism, as far as clothes were concerned, was particularly directed at
male attire – conventional, monotonous, sombre and synonymous with conservatism.
Instead, “women’s fashion has always been more or less Futurist”, as Volt asserts in
his manifesto (Volt: “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion”, 160), referring to the
variety of colour tones, to the vast array of materials and to the continually evolving
imagination regarding the appearance of women.
If Balla was the first, and also the most prolific and imaginative Futurist
fashion designer, he was soon followed by many others. Initially, it was Fortunato
Depero (1892–1960), co-author of Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo, followed by
Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956), Tullio Crali (1910–2000), Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo
Sansoni, 1896–1974), Gerardo Dottori (1884–1977), Thayaht (pseud. of Ernesto
Michahelles, 1893–1959) and Mino Delle Site, (1914–1996), to name but a few, who
created dresses and hats, shoes and gloves, shawls, buckles and buttons, bags and
umbrellas, necklaces and bracelets. This did not, however, cause a shift in fashion
trends that could be seen on the street – nor was it meant to. The Futurists never
really aimed at placing their products on the market and making them part of a
process of mass production; the objects that they created were handcrafted and
were generally one-offs.

Futurist waistcoats, ties and headgear

Among the items of clothing created by the Futurists, the favourite was the waistcoat
which, duly transformed, became almost a symbol of the movement. Always eccentric
and often brightly coloured, waistcoats were to be worn even under an ordinary suit
and were particularly adept at undermining the austerity of male clothing. However,
the idea of overturning the significance of this traditional item of clothing was not
completely new; there was already a precedent in Sonia Delaunay’s ‘simultaneous’
waistcoats of 1913. The Futurists, however, gave their creations a markedly subversive
bias and a highly ideological function.
Waistcoats were made in the case d’arte, artists’ sales and exhibition galler-
ies which were flourishing from the beginning of the 1920s, including the famous
workshop of Fortunato Depero in Rovereto (see the entry on Decorative Arts in this
volume). Futurist waistcoats were made from a patchwork of materials in bright,
but never gaudy, colours, showing vaguely heraldic figures with floral and animal
146 Franca Zoccoli

designs that evoke a fairytale atmosphere of flaming crowns, sinuous leaves and
stylized benevolent dragons of great vitality. Other waistcoats were produced in
Palermo in the workshop of Pippo Rizzo (1897–1964), who was extremely produc-
tive in the 1930s and early 40s, often producing highly original pieces (Gueci: Pippo
Rizzo e le arti applicate; Ruta: Fughe e ritorni). Balla’s creations were at the fore-
front of originality with their abstract patterns embroidered onto canvas. He used
letters that make up the word ‘BALLA’ and worked them into the geometric design,
but in a manner that would be indecipherable to anyone who had not been alerted
to them.
From the very beginning, Futurist fashion designers chose as their chief target
the tie, a bourgeois fetish that had become a symbol of male identity and was highly
resistant to change. The Futurists did not aim at abolishing ties altogether, they rather
wanted to transform them into something imaginative and surprising. Balla created a
vast number of ties with highly imaginative shapes and patterns, ranging from irides-
cent interpenetrations to dynamic speed lines. Others that deserve special mention
were a noise-making tie, a tie made of celluloid quivering like jelly, and one that was
shaped like a transparent box with a coloured light bulb inside. Anton Giulio Bra-
gaglia remembered: “At electrifying points of his speech, he pressed a button and
the tie lit up; these were the high points of the evening.” (Fagiolo dell’ Arco: Balla:
Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo, 96).
In 1932, Mino Delle Site designed ties that were asymmetrical and metallic;
others were minuscule or came in the form of a bandage, without a knot. The follow-
ing year, a metal ‘anti-tie’ was invented by the painter and sculptor Renato Di Bosso
(1905–1982) and by the writer and poet Ignazio Scurto (1912–1954), who organized
tumultuous soirées to launch their tin accessories. These were the years in which aer-
opittura (aeropainting) triumphed throughout Italy, theorized upon in the Manifesto
dell’aeropittura, of which two different versions appeared in 1929 and 1931 (see Mari-
netti et al.: Manifesto dell’ aeropittura, 1929–31). In the 1930s, every creative sphere
took on the prefix ‘aero’, from aeropoesia (aeropoetry) to aerodanza (aerodance) (see
pp. 137–138, 594 and 613–616 in this volume). Aviation also became a leitmotiv in
fashion manifestos. Recurrent references to aeroplanes, the sun, the blue sky and
to light can be found in Di Bosso and Scurto’s manifesto, Manifesto futurista sulla
cravatta italiana (1933): “It is better to be decorated by an airplane in the sun rather
than by a ridiculous neutral and pacifist rag.” (Di Bosso, and Scurto: “The Futurist
Manifesto of the Italian Tie”, 171).
From the earliest times, in every place and in every culture, headgear has been an
attire with greater symbolic importance than any other, and it represents the seman-
tic value of clothing to the highest degree. In 1933, Marinetti published Il manifesto
futurista del cappello italiano (The Futurist Manifesto of the Italian Hat). Indeed, some
members of the movement had been interested in hats long before and had started
to invent pieces a few years after the publication of The Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism (1909). Marinetti satisfied this need with his manifesto, which, after
 Fashion Design 147

emphasizing the importance of the fight against the bourgeois suit, condemned “the
Nordic use of black and neutral hues” for the “various passéist headgear that does not
match the speed and the practicality of our great mechanical civilization.” (Marinetti
et al.: “The Futurist Manifesto of the Italian Hat”, 162). After stating, “Color! We need
color to compete with the Italian sun” (Marinetti et al.: “The Futurist Manifesto of the
Italian Hat”, 162), Marinetti suggested twenty types of hats among which at least three
show that he certainly had his eye on the future. He predicted a number of things that
only several decades later became a reality: the gramophone hat (a type of walkman),
the radio-telephone hat (a kind of mobile phone) and the therapeutic hat with a band
designed to reduce cosmic waves (like a device to protect against electromagnetic
radiation). Reading the manifesto, it is noticeable that, as with the necktie, the Futur-
ists did not argue for the disappearance of the hat, but for its transformation into a
modern, dynamic accessory. Indeed, it was the Second World War that was eventually
responsible for its demise, just as the First World War had been responsible for the
raising of women’s hemlines.

Women Futurists as designers

The range of accessories devised by the Futurists was very wide: they ranged
from belts, buckles and buttons to jewellery, scarves and handkerchiefs. Women
also made a considerable contribution in this field, although several of them have
remained in the shadows to this day (an important attempt to resurrect them from
oblivion was Pansera and Occleppo: Dal merletto alla motocicletta). This is the
case with some Futurists’ wives who were in fact the driving forces behind the case
d’arte, like Rosetta Amadori Depero (1893–1976), who was an artist herself and cer-
tainly helped to create some of the “rainbow-like beverages for the eyes”, as the
objects produced in the ‘magician’s house’ were called (Grazioli: Arte e pubblicità,
43). Among the women artists who came to the fore in the field of design, the first
was Alma Fidora (1894–1980) (see Zoccoli, “The First Women Futurists in the Visual
Arts”, and Zoccoli: “Alma Fidora: Ago e pennello”). She had joined the group Nuove
Tendenze upon its foundation in 1914 and contributed to the exhibition of the same
year four pieces of embroidered fabric. In those works, the tactile qualities of the
material and the carefully selected threads were as important as patterns and colors.
The style of these fabrics was mainly abstract with suggestions from Art Nouveau
and the newly born Orphism, a French movement which contributed to the ascent
of Sonja Delaunay (1885–1979) as a design star. This perhaps encouraged Fidora to
intensify her activity in this field and to venture into the world of fashion, also cre-
ating clothes.
Sicily is an area that has been investigated more thoroughly from the viewpoint
of fashion. There we find, among others, Brunas (pseud. of Bruna Pestagalli Somenzi,
148 Franca Zoccoli

life dates unknown. See Ruta: “Farfalle d’acciaio”) and Gigia Corona (1903–2013) (see
Ruta: Arredi futuristi and Fughe e ritorni), who created several types of artefacts, as
well as Rosita Lo Jacono (or Lojacono, 1897–2001) (see Ruta: Fughe e ritorni, and Carpi:
Rosita Lo Jacono), notable, above all, for her jewels, fabrics and scarves (one with
road-signs employed for decorative purposes).
It must be noted that there was an underlying discrepancy in the relationship
of women to the applied arts (see also pp. 186–187 in this volume). On the one
hand, they were strongly attracted to them because they offered a natural outlet to
their talents, to their visual-tactile insight that had developed over the centuries,
women having always been involved in sewing, embroidery, weaving and pottery
(see Pancotto: Artiste a Roma). On the other hand, and for the very same reasons,
the applied arts could appear to be over-identified with women and therefore
represent the danger of reinforcing the stereotype of women as refined, decora-
tive and diligent housewives. Perhaps for this reason, the most important women
artists, from Růžena Zátková (1885–1923) and Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977) to Rosa
Rosà (pseud. of Edith von Haynau, 1884–1978), and almost all the aeropainters,
did not get involved in the production of objects.

Festive and everyday wear

In 1916, Bruno Corra (1892–1976) had encouraged everyone “to dress […] with a certain
lively, dynamic look, wearing an eccentric hat, an imaginative tie, a pair of unusual
shoes. It is necessary. It is urgent.” (Corra: “È bene dipingere subito il mondo”). At this
point, we may wonder whether the Futurists really wore such controversial clothes.
It is obvious that none of the artists chose such clothes as everyday gear. Generally,
the waistcoats and the ties were worn – for ideological demonstration purposes – at
their uproarious serate and on other official occasions. Even this, however, was not
always the case. Marinetti was well known for his elegance and preferred to wear a
bowler hat (or a straw hat in summer). Although on several occasions he wore items
created by his Futurist designer friends, he usually presented himself in public with a
quintessentially bourgeois dark suit or, in the evening and on ceremonial occasions,
in tails, a dinner jacket or a frock coat. Various documents and photographs of the
period bear witness to this (for a rich photographic documentation, see Pampaloni,
and Verdone: I futuristi italiani). However, such apparently stiff conformity can be
viewed as another, more subtle form of transgression; it was going against the cliché
of the slightly unkempt bohemian artist with a floppy hat and a colourful cravat tied
around his neck. In a similar way, many other Futurists, from Boccioni and Balla to
Carrà and Severini, made a point of being elegant. In this way, it seems that they
wanted to assert the status the movement had acquired: it was an experimental move-
ment of revolt, but with an extremely serious ideological basis, ambitious plans and a
 Fashion Design 149

vocation to spread the word. Far from being a tramp, the follower of Futurism looked
every inch the gentleman.
Among the artists who expressed their avant-garde credentials by often dressing
in a fancy fashion, there were Giacomo Balla and Tullio Crali. A case apart was that of
the sculptor Thayaht, who liked to make a splash by going around dressed in a tuta
(overall), which he had created in 1918 as a revolutionary suit for every occasion (see
Fonti: Thayaht, Scappini: Thayaht, and Caputo: Thayaht). He can therefore be consid-
ered the originator of a trend that became established only much later, “casual sports
clothing, once strictly limited to purely informal occasions” (Volli: Block Modes, 83).
Cool, hygienic, comfortable and economical, the one-piece tuta enjoyed an extraor-
dinary long-term success; even George Bernard Shaw wore one while on a cruise,
finding it very practical. Still today the word tuta is commonly employed in Italy, even
though almost nobody knows its origin.

The Futurist women’s dress

Thayaht did not forget women. His Studio di tuta da donna (Study of Female Over-
alls, 1919) was accompanied by a leaflet, Avvertimenti alle ‘tutiste’ (Advice to Female
Wearers of Overalls), in which Thayaht states that this new item of clothing must
be worn without a hat, and stresses that “the woman who has the courage to get
rid of high heels, will be a true pioneer in the world of hygiene and art.” (Thayaht:
“Avvertimenti alle ‘tutiste’”, 373) in the sketches produced by Thayaht’s workshop,
the woman wears loose trousers or a simple, baggy dress, has her head uncovered and
walks in comfortable, flat-heeled shoes. More than ten years later, in the Manifesto
per la trasformazione dell’abbigliamento maschile (Manifesto for the Transformation
of Male Attire, 1932), written in co-operation with his brother Ruggero Alfredo Micha-
helles (1898–1976), also known as Ram, Thayaht confirmed his commitment to the
practicality and hygiene of footwear. Among the shoes which are here proposed, one
deserves special mention: the aeroscarpa, “a kind of very light and elastic shoe, built
to air the foot” (Manifesto for the Transformation of Male Clothing”, 168), which pre-
dates today’s ‘breathing’ Geox line.
As concerns practicality, we find Volt at the opposite end. In the aforemen-
tioned Manifesto della moda femminile futurista, he goes so far as to suggest “shoes
of different forms, colors, and heights” (Volt: “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s
Fashion”, 160). What, above all, interested him was the eccentric and fanciful
potential of fashion, which had to be “flying over the [dizzy heights] of the Absurd”
(Volt: “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion”, 160). This was of course an abstract
proposal.
Even though the Futurists were mainly interested in men’s clothes, several
of them – Giacomo Balla, Tullio Crali, Marcello Nizzoli (1887–1969), to name but a
150 Franca Zoccoli

few – also created women’s dresses that could actually be worn in a normal social
setting. Only in some isolated cases did the artists have links with haute couture
houses. Entering the fashion market was not one of the Futurists’ aims. They created
their articles by hand and therefore only in very limited numbers. The home-based
workshop was considered more suitable than the factory with its mass production,
extended time scale and pressure for compromise (see also p. 175 in this volume). The
Futurists entertained a relationship with fashion that was different from that of artists
from other avant-garde movements (Crispolti: “Balla oltre la pittura”, 23). The rigid
uniformity of mass-produced articles clashed with the Futurist idea of a transitory
and ephemeral art of the future. In 1911, when the movement had just been founded,
Georg Simmel wrote that fashion supplements people’s “lack of importance, their
inability to individualize their existence purely by their own unaided efforts, by ena-
bling them to join a group characterized and singled out in the public consciousness
by fashion alone” (Simmel: “The Philosophy of Fashion”, 197–198).

Conclusion
Futurist fashion did not aim at influencing what was being worn in the streets, nor
did it search for practicality and healthy comfort (apart from exceptional cases, such
as Thayaht’s tuta). The Futurists did not campaign for the abolition of tie and hat,
but rather sought to transform bourgeois garb into modern, dynamic fashion. The
most striking re-invention of a fashion accessory in the Futurist wardrobe was that
of the fan. It may surprise us that such a passéist ornament could become so popular
amongst Futurists. Alma Fidora was the first to create one with abstract patterns of
dazzling colours (1914), followed by Mino delle Site, Giuseppina Pelonzi-Bragaglia
(1901–1965) and Giacomo Balla himself, whose fan with an outline broken up
into curves and aggressive points (1918) inspired the Russian Suprematist Sergei
Chekhonin (1878–1936) to publish a similar a sketch in the magazine Atelier in 1923.
Probably both of them were attracted by the dynamic function of the object: a fan,
when still and closed, looks like a sort of stick.
After the Second World War, male and females increasingly left their houses
without headdress; the tie still survives, although worn on fewer and fewer occa-
sions. Today, in the streets, we can see people, attractive and unattractive, young and
elderly, wearing the most extravagant outfits. Thus, the Futurists’ message would be
anachronistic in our time. However, in the early twentieth century, their cry of rebel-
lion was beneficial and salutary to a conformist society.
Futurist fashion was a stroke of genius, injecting a dose of fantasy into everyday
life and touching the wearer’s very body. The brightly coloured suits, the gaudy waist-
coats, the peculiar asymmetrical hats and the noise-making ties were meant to be a
strike of lightning that stimulated the imagination.
 Fashion Design 151

Works cited
Balla, Elica: Con Balla. Vol. 1–3. Milano: Multipla, 1986.
Balla, Giacomo: Il vestito antineutrale: Manifesto futurista. Milano: Direzione del Movimento
Futurista, 1914. Reprinted in G. Balla: Scritti futuristi. Milano: Abscondita, 2010. 28–32.English
translation “The Antineutral Dress: A Futurist Manifesto.” Radu Stern, ed.: Against Fashion:
Clothing as Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT, 2004. 157–158.
Balla, Giacomo: Le Vètement masculin futuriste: Manifeste. Milan: Direction du Mouvement futuriste,
1914. Reprinted in G. Balla: Scritti futuristi. Milano: Abscondita, 2010. 24–28.
English translation “Male Futurist Dress: A Manifesto.” Radu Stern, ed.: Against Fashion: Clothing as
Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT, 2004. 155–156.
Balla, Giacomo, and Fortunato Depero: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo. Milano: Direzione
del Movimento Futurista, 1914. Reprinted in G. Balla: Scritti futuristi. Milano: Abscondita,
2010. 32–39. English translation “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe.” Lawrence Rainey,
Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale
University Press, 2009. 209–215.
Barthes, Roland: The Fashion System. New York: Hill and Wang, 1983.
Baudelaire, Charles: “The Painter of Modern Life.” C. Baudelaire: The Painter of Modern Life and
Other Essays. London: Phaidon, 1964. 1–40.
Benjamin, Walter: “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” W. Benjamin: Illuminations. London: Cape,
1970. 253–265.
Caputo, Annarita, ed.: Thayaht: Un artista alle origini del made in Italy. Exhibition catalogue. Prato:
Museo del Tessuto, 15 dicembre 2007 – 14 aprile 2008.
Carpi, Giancarlo, ed.: Rosita Lo Jacono: Stile futurismo. Mostra di disegni e bozzetti su stoffa.
Exhibition catalogue. Monte Porzio Catone: Villa Mondragone, 4 dicembre 2009 – 31 gennaio
2010. Roma: GSE, 2010.
Corra, Bruno: “È bene dipingere subito il mondo.” L’ Italia futurista 1:1 (1 June 1916): 2.
Crispolti, Enrico: “Balla Beyond Painting: The ‘Futurist Reconstruction’ of Fashion = Balla oltre la
pittura: la ‘ricostruzione futurista’ della moda.” Fabio Benzi, ed.: La Collezione Biagiotti Cigna:
Dipinti, moda futurista, arti applicati = Balla: The Biagiotti Cigna Collection, Paintings, Futurist
Fashions, Applied Arts. Milano: Leonardo Arte, 1996. 17–28.
Di Bosso, Renato, and Ignazio Scurto: Manifesto futurista sulla cravatta italiana. Verona: Movimento
futurista Verona, 1933. Facismile reprint in Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Il futurismo e la moda. Venezia:
Marsilio, 1988. 146–147. English translation “The Futurist Manifesto of the Italian Tie.” Radu
Stern, ed.: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT, 2004. 170–171.
Fagiolo dell’ Arco, Maurizio: Balla: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo: Scultura, teatro, cinema,
arredamento, abbigliamento, poesia visiva. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Casa d’Arte Bragaglia,
1968. Roma: Bulzoni, 1968.
Fonti, Daniela, ed.: Thayaht: Futurista irregolare. Exhibition catalogue. Rovereto: Museo di Arte
Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, 11 giugno – 11 settembre 2005. Milano: Skira,
2005.
Grazioli, Elio: Arte e pubblicità. Milano: Mondadori, 2001.
Gueci, Giulia: Pippo Rizzo e le arti applicate. Corleone (PA): Vivi Corleone, 2006.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, et al.: “Il manifesto futurista del cappello italiano.” Gazzetta del popolo,
26 February 1933. Reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Il futurismo e la moda. Venezia: Marsilio,
1988. 143. English translation “The Futurist Manifesto of the Italian Hat.” Radu Stern, ed.:
Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT, 2004. 162–163.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, et al.: “Manifesto dell’aeropittura.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione
futurista. A cura di Luciano de Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 169–171. 2nd edn 1983. 197–201.
152 Franca Zoccoli

Pampaloni, Geno, and Mario Verdone: I futuristi italiani. Firenze: Le Lettere, 1977.
Pancotto, Pier Paolo: Artiste a Roma nella prima metà del ‘900. Roma: Palombi, 2006.
Pansera, Anty, and Tiziana Occleppo, eds.: Dal merletto alla motocicletta: Artigiane/artiste e
designer nell’ Italia del Novecento. Milano: Silvana, 2002.
Ruta, Anna Maria: Arredi futuristi: Episodi delle case d’arte futuriste italiane. Palermo: Novecento, 1985.
Ruta, Anna Maria, ed.: Fughe e ritorni: Presenze futuriste in Sicilia. Exhibition catalogue. Palermo:
Palazzo delle Poste, 27 novembre 1998 – 24 gennaio 1999. Napoli: Electa, 1998.
Scappini, Alessandra, ed.: Thayaht: Tra futurismo e art deco. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Derbylius
Libreria Galleria Archivio Internazionale d’Arte, 12 aprile – 31 maggio 2006.
Simmel, Georg: “The Philosophy of Fashion.” Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings. Ed. by David
Frisby, and Mike Featherstone. London & Thousand Oaks/CA: Sage, 1997. 187–206.
Thayaht [pseud. of Ernesto Michahelles]: “Avvertimenti alle tutiste.” La nazione (Firenze), 2 July
1920. Reprinted in Thayaht: Vita, scritti, carteggi. A cura di Alessandra Scappini. Milano: Skira
2005. 372–373.
Thayaht, and Ruggero Michahelles: “Manifesto per la trasformazione dell’abbigliamento maschile.”
Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Il futurismo e la moda. Venezia: Marsilio, 1988. 137. Thayaht: Vita, scritti,
carteggi. A cura di Alessandra Scappini. Milano: Skira, 2005. 404–407. English translation
“Manifesto for the Transformation of Male Clothing.” Radu Stern, ed.: Against Fashion: Clothing
as Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT, 2004. 167–169.
Volli, Ugo: Block Modes: Il linguaggio del corpo e della moda. Milano: Lupetti; Editori di
Comunicazione, 1998.
Volt [pseud. of Vincenzo Fani Ciotti]: “Manifesto della moda femminile futurista.” Roma futurista
72 (29 February 1920): 1. Reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Il futurismo e la moda. Venezia:
Marsilio, 1986. 115. English translation “Futurist Manifesto of Women’s Fashion.” Radu Stern,
ed.: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT, 2004. 160–161.
Zoccoli, Franca: “Alma Fidora: Ago e pennello.” Mirella Bentivoglio, and Franca Zoccoli: Le futuriste
italiane nelle arti visive. Roma: De Luca, 2008. 137–142.
Zoccoli, Franca: “The First Women Futurists in the Visual Arts.” Mirella Bentivoglio, and Franca
Zoccoli: Women Artists of Italian Futurism. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997. 93–95.

Further reading
Bensi, Fabio, ed.: Balla: Futurismo tra arte e moda. Opere della Fondazione Biagiotti Cigna.
Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Chiostro del Bramante, 30 ottobre 1998 – 31 gennaio 1999. Milano:
Leonardo Arte, 1998.
Bensi, Fabio, ed.: La Collezione Biagiotti Cigna: Dipinti, moda futurista, arti applicati = Balla: The
Biagiotti Cigna Collection, Paintings, Futurist Fashions, Applied Arts. Exhibition catalogue.
Moskva: Gosudarstvennyi muzei izobrazitel’nykh iskusstv imeni A. S. Pushkina, 22 iiulia – 15
sentiabria 1996. Milano: Leonardo; Roma: Biagiotti Export, 1996.
Braun, Emily: “Futurist Fashion: Three Manifestoes.” Art Journal 54:1 (Spring 1995): 34–41.
Cerutti, Carla, and Raffaella Sgubin, eds.: Futurismo – Moda – Design: La ricostruzione dell’universo
quotidiano. Exhibition catalogue. Gorizia: Musei Provinciali, 19 dicembre 2009 – 1 maggio
2010.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Il futurismo e la moda. Exhibition catalogue. Ferrara: Padiglione d’Arte
Contemporanea; Milano. Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, 25 febbraio – 9 maggio 1988.
Venezia: Marsilio, 1988.
 Fashion Design 153

Duci, Mirella: Fondo Thayaht: Inventario. Rovereto (TR): MART, Museo di Arte Moderna e
Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto; Rovereto: Nicolodi, 2006.
Duranti, Massimo, and Francesca Duranti, eds.: Futurismo e suggestioni di fashion design
contemporaneo 100 anni dopo. Exhibition catalogue. Latina: Galleria Lydia Palumbo Scalzi, 30
maggio – 30 luglio 2009. Roma: Gangemi 2009.
Framke, Gisela, ed.: Künstler ziehen an: Avantgarde-Mode in Europa. Heidelberg: Braus, 1998.
Garavaglia, Luca Federico: Il futurismo e la moda. Milano: Excelsior 1881, 2009.
Guillaume, Valérie, and Isabelle Néto, eds.: Europe 1910–1939: Quand l’ art habillait le vetement:
Europe, 1910–1939. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Musée de la Mode et du Costume, 1997. Paris:
Paris-Musées, 1997.
Lapini, Lia, Carlo V. Menichi, and Silvia Porto, eds.: Abiti e costumi futuristi. Exhibition catalogue.
Pistoia: Palazzo Comunale, 25 maggio – 30 giugno 1985. Pistoia: Comune di Pistoia, 1985.
Pancotto, Pier Paolo: “Roma nella prima metà del ‘900: Un luogo d’incontro con l’ arte russa = Rome
in the First Half of the 20th Century: A Meeting Place with Russian Art.” Renato Miracco, ed.:
Avanguardie femminili in Italia e Russia, 1910–1940. Milano: Mazzotta, 2007. 43–49. 141–144.
Panzetta, Alfonso: Opere di Thayaht e Ram nel Massimo & Sonia Cirulli Archive di New York.
Bologna: XX Secolo, 2006.
Paulicelli, Eugenia: “Fashion and Futurism: Performing Dress.” Annali d’Italianistica 27 (2009):
187–208.
Pautasso, Guido Andrea, ed.: Moda futurista. Milano: Abscondita, 2016.
Ruta, Anna Maria: “Farfalle d’acciaio = Steel Butterflies.” Renato Miracco, ed.: Avanguardie
femminili in Italia e Russia, 1910–1940. Milano: Mazzotta, 2007. 31–41. 133–139.
Ruta, Anna Maria: “ ‘Non solo mano…’: Il lavoro femminile nelle Case d’Arte futuriste e oltre.” Anty
Pansera, and Tiziana Occleppo, eds.: Dal merletto alla motocicletta: Artigiane/artiste e designer
nell’Italia del Novecento. Milano: Silvana, 2002. 29–37.
Ruta, Anna Maria: “Rosita Lo Jacono: Artigiana-artista tra futurismo e Déco.” Salvatore Di Marco, ed.:
Figure femminili del Novecento a Palermo. Vol. 3. Palermo: Auser-Ulite, 2006. 119–123.
Ruta, Anna Maria: “Rosita Lo Jacono: Artista déco.” Palermo: Rivista mensile della Provincia di
Palermo 12:5 (1990): 38–45.
Ruta, Anna Maria: “Rosita Lojacono: Artigiana e artista nella Palermo degli anni Trenta.” Anna Maria
Ruta, ed.: Artedonna: Cento anni di arte femminile in Sicilia 1850 –1950. Palermo: Edizioni di
Passaggio, 2012. 103–114.
Scudiero, Maurizio: “Depero e la moda: Un percorso attraverso i suoi lavori in stoffa.” Carla Cerutti,
and Raffaella Sgubin, eds.: Futurismo – Moda – Design: La ricostruzione dell’universo quotidiano.
Exhibition catalogue. Gorizia: Musei Provinciali, 19 dicembre 2009 – 1 maggio 2010. 55–60.
Scudiero, Maurizio, ed.: Casa d’arte futurista Depero. Exhibition catalogue. Bozen: Galerie Les
Chances de l’ Art, marzo–aprile 1992; Trento: Galleria d’Arte Il Castello, marzo–aprile 1992;
Rovereto: Galleria Spazio Arte, marzo–aprile 1992.
Thayaht, Ernesto: “Liberazione della moda.” E. Thayaht: Vita, scritti, carteggi. Milano: Skira 2005.
399–404.
Verdirame, Margherita: “Abiti ‘agilizzanti’ e geometrie futuriste.” Pietro Frassica, ed.: Shades of
Futurism. Atti del convegno internazionale, Princeton University, 8–9 ottobre 2009. Novara:
Interlinea, 2011. 247–263.
Zoccoli, Franca: “Futurist Accessories.” Cristina Giorcelli, Paula Rabinowitz, and Manuela Fraire,
eds.: Accessorizing the Body: Habits of Being. Minneapolis/MN: University of Minnesota Press,
2011. 54–81.
Zoccoli, Franca: “Gli accessori futuristi.” Cristina Giorcelli, ed.: Abito e identità: Ricerche di storia
letteraria e culturale. Vol. 4. Palermo: I.L.A. Palma, 2001. 91–127.
154 Ekaterina Lazareva

Russian Fashion Design

Fashion between between art and life

Russian Futurism, born as “a slap in the face of public taste”, aspired to épater le
bourgeois by means of extravagant events that caused public scandals and prompted
sensationalist newspaper reports. In 1913 and 1914, the Russian poets and artists
presented to the public a rebellious and anarchist image of budetliane (men of the
future), dressed up in bright clothes and with their faces painted in unusual make-up.
Marinetti remembered Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) as “a clown in a red cloak
with gold cheekbones and a blue forehead” (Marinetti: La grande Milano, 301). The
Russian Futurists’ attempt to escape the dictates of bourgeois fashion led to distur-
bances of public peace, in Russia even more so than in Italy. The best-known exam-
ples of this are the yellow blouses Mayakovsky used to wear, the face paint of David
Burliuk (1882–1967) and the wooden spoons that Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) and
Aleksei Morgunov (1884–1935) inserted into their buttonholes during their prome-
nades on Kuznetsky Most in Moscow.
The aspiration to erase the borders between art and life became a driving force
behind the Russian Futurists’ first experiments in the field of fashion. As Ekaterina
Bobrinskaya observes, “fashion became for them first of all the instrument for an
invasion of art into social reality, for an introduction of a new aesthetics to the
masses” (Bobrinskaia: “Futuristicheskii ‘grim’ ”, 157). Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964)
and Ilya Zdanevich (1894–1975) proclaimed in their manifesto, Pochemu my ras-
krashivaemsia (Why We Paint Ourselves, 1913): “We have joined art to life. After
the long isolation of artists, we have loudly summoned life and life has invaded
art, it is time for art to invade life. The painting of our faces is the beginning of
the invasion” (Larionov and Zdanevich: “Why We Paint Ourselves”, 81). According
to Bobrinskaya, the primitive drawings on David Burliuk’s cheeks (a horse, a dog,
etc.), did not go beyond a carnival effect, whereas the Rayists questioned the nature
of the image in their abstract face colourings and suggested that “Rayism erases
the borders between the picture plane and Nature” (Bobrinskaia: “Futuristicheskii
‘grim’ ”, 157).
On 15 September 1913, the Moscow newspaper Stolichnaia molva announced
the publication of two manifestos by Larionov, Manifest k muzhchine (The Mani-
festo Addressed to Men) and Manifest k zhenshchine (The Manifesto Addressed to
Women). Unfortunately, the texts were never published, but the journalists inform us
that Larionov suggested a theatrical and paradoxical concept of fashion that encour-
aged men to wear gold and silk threads in their hair and to shave off half of their
beards, while women were to paint their breasts. An example of Rayist design for
a woman’s bust, together with photographs of Larionov, Zdanevich, Natalia Gon-
charova (1881–1962) and Mikhail Le Dantiu (1891–1917), accompanied the manifesto
 Fashion Design 155

(Larionov and Zdanevich: “Why We Paint Ourselves”, 118). Goncharova was the first
artist from the Cubo-Futurism circle to exhibit designs for embroideries and sketches
for female dress in her solo exhibition at the Klavdiia Mikhailova Art Salon in Moscow
(30 September – 5 November 1913).

Fashion between art and industry

The first Cubo-Futurist and Suprematist attempts at manufacturing modern cloth-

ing took place in 1916–1917 in the Verbovka village in Kiev province, an artisan
cooperative founded by Natalia Davydova (1875–1933) in the Ukrainian province
of Kiev. Kseniya Boguslavskaya (1892–1972), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949), Kazimir
Malevich, Lyubov Popova (1889–1924), Ivan Puni (1892–1956), Olga Rozanova
(1886–1918) and Nadezhda Udaltsova (1886–1961) made sketches commissioned
by Davydova for the production of embroideries that represented abstract orna-
mental compositions, wholly unrelated to the article’s structure. More than 400
items (dresses, handbags, etc.) were presented at two Verbovka exhibitions in
Moscow in 1917.
The idea of a ‘Re-fashioning of the Universe’, proposed by the Italian Futurists
in 1915 (Balla, and Depero: “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, 197–200), was
not known in Russia, when shortly after the October Revolution Vladimir Mayak-
ovsky, Vasily Kamensky (1884–1961) and David Burliuk proclaimed in the Dekret №
1: O demokratizatsii iskusstv: Zabornaia literatura i ploshchadnaia zhivopis’ (Decree
No. 1 on the Democratization of Art: Fence Literature and Square Painting, 1918): “In
the name of the great march of equality for all, as far as culture is concerned, let the
Free Word of creative personality be written on the corners of walls, fences, roofs,
the streets of our cities and villages, on the backs of automobiles, carriages, street-
cars, and on the clothes of all citizens” (Maiakovskii, Kamenskii and Burliuk: “Decree
no.1 on the Democratization of Art”, 107). This poetic appeal anticipated the bloom of
mass agitation art of the first post-revolutionary years and was subsequently turned
into a programme of transforming everyday life. The Futurist concept of an invasion
of art into life became one of the main tenets of the Russian avant-garde and found a
practical application in craft production and fashion design.
If in the decade before the First World War the Futurist Utopia was centred on a
renewal of the spirit, in the years after the Revolution this was replaced by a utopia
focussed on the education of a new humanity within a new material environment.
Consequently, the scandalous behaviour that had characterized early Futurism and
the provocative way in which its members dressed in public gave way to serious work
with new models of clothes and pattern drawings. And not only this; the new aesthet-
ics was complemented by new political, class and gender issues elaborated in the
spheres of clothing and textiles.
156 Ekaterina Lazareva

From prewar Cubo-Futurism to post-revolutionary Productionism

The development from the prewar to the post-revolutionary avant-garde in Russia

demonstrates both continuity and disruption. The spontaneous gestures of early
Futurism did find a continuation in the 1920s, but they were increasingly replaced
by a programme of an all-embracing reorganization of life, strongly influenced by
Suprematism and Constructivism. ‘Futurism’ gradually ceased to be a designation of
a specific art movement and became a generic term for left-wing, revolutionary avant-
garde art. One of its leaders, Vladimir Mayakovsky, participated in the organization
of an Association of Communists-Futurists (KOMFUT) in 1921 and of the Moscow
Association of Futurists (MAF) in 1922 before becoming a founding member of Lef
(Levyi front iskusstv; Left Front of the Arts) in 1923. The periodicals Lef (1923–1925)
and Novyi Lef (1927–1928) became platforms for Productivist art, whose key support-
ers emphasized the continuity of prewar to post-revolutionary Futurism by retaining
the term ‘Futurist’ and showing loyalty to some of Marinetti’s slogans and ideas (see
Brik: “My – futuristy”).
At the same time, some of the key artists from prewar Cubo-Futurism, such as
Exter, Malevich, Popova, Udaltsova and Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), assumed major
rôles in the art scene of Soviet Russia and taught at the new technical art schools,
UNovIs (Utverditeli novogo iskusstva – Champions of the New Art) and VKhuTeMas
(Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskie Masterskie – Higher Artistic-Technical
Workshops), where they designed ceramics, furniture and clothing. However, the
experiments in the field of applied arts were now dominated by Suprematist and Con-
structivist aesthetics and aspired to produce mass consumer clothing and to intro-
duce new patterns and new models into the textile industry.
In 1919, Malevich presented his first sketches for textile ornamentations and
demonstrated his orientation towards industrial production. His progression from
self-contained compositions made for the Verbovka community to regularly repeated
motifs reveals his understanding of textiles existing as a roll of fabric “aspiring to infin-
ity” (Malevich: K voprosu izobrazitelnogo iskusstva, quoted in Shatskikh: “UNOVIS:
Epicenter of a New World”, 57) rather than a small and narrow piece of fabric. The first
textile sample with a regularly repeating compact composition combining a triangle,
a circle, a rectangle and a square was made under Malevich’s direction in Vitebsk in
1920. According to Selim Khan-Magomedov, “Suprematism was the germinating force
of a new geometrical ornamentation of textiles that was then developed and brought
to a stage of industrial production by the Constructivists” (Khan-Magomedov: Pionery
sovetskogo dizaina, 281). In 1919, Malevich, together with Udaltsova, developed ele-
ments of the new decorative style in the Moscow SvoMas (Svobodnye Masterskie;
Free Workshops) and shortly afterwards in the Vitebsk UNovIs, where they sought
to introduce “the utilitarian world of things” (Shatskikh: Vitebsk: The Life of Art, 80)
into Suprematism. However, at this stage, the Suprematist attempts to create a style
for everyday environments was still more important than the creation of utilitarian
 Fashion Design 157

things. The very philosophy of Suprematism defined the character of ‘utilitarian

organisms’ in a uniform system of world architecture (Shatskikh: “UNOVIS: Epicenter
of a New World”).
For Malevich, the ‘casual thing’ was just a particular element of a much wider,
‘total’ reorganization of reality under a new aesthetic law. His sketch of a dress with
contrasting white, black, red and green details, made in 1923, was signed by the artist:
“Foreseeing that the movement of architecture will carry a predominantly suprema-
tist harmony of functional forms I have made a dress design in accordance with the
mural painting based on color contrast” (Beeren: Kazimir Malevich, 27).
Such an approach was not supported by the Constructivist group and was openly
opposed at an INKhUK meeting in December 1921, after which both parties assumed a
consistently negative attitude towards each other. The Constructivists insisted on the
necessity of proceeding from function towards form. They even rejected the notion of
‘style’ (not to mention ‘fashion’ – perceived as a ‘bourgeois’ vestige of a former social
order). The Constructivists sought to democratize clothing and advocated a mass pro-
duction of clothes for the new revolutionary class. In Prikaz № 2 po armii iskusstv (Order
No. 2: To the Army of Arts!, 1921), Mayakovsky demanded: “Give us new forms, we’re
waiting!” (Mayakovsky: “Order No.2”, 46). His colleague Osip Brik (1888–1945) wrote:
“The conviction is gaining ground that the picture is dying, that it is indissolubly linked
with the forms of the capitalist regime, with its cultural ideology, that the textile print is
now becoming the center of creative attention, and that the textile print and work on it
are the apex of artistic labor” (Brik: “From Pictures to Textile Prints”, 244–245).
The romantic impulse of the Constructivists to leave the artist’s studio in order to
work in factories carried in its wake a “politicization of aesthetics” (Benjamin: “Das
Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, 469) and a categor-
ical request for art to be ‘useful’, leaving no place for conventional art forms. Elena
Sidorina remarks: “The question of ‘art and industry’ was part of a more general
question of ‘art and production’, which in turn replaced the problem of ‘art and life’
because, according to Marxism, life ‘as a whole’ was conceived as a ‘system of social
production’ ” (Sidorina: Russkii Konstruktivizm, 29). The artist-constructor trans-
formed himself into a specialist, a kind of engineer who rejected palette and brushes
and started working with ruler and compass. Constructivist things were characterized
by the dominance of straight and circular lines, and by the use of simple contrasting
colours without nuances and shades. However, owing to such austerity, aesthetics
often came into conflict with conveniences and ergonomics.
Since 1924, one of the founders of Constructivism, Vladimir Tatlin, was engaged
in the Petrograd GInKhuK (Gosudarstvennyi Institut Khudozhestvennoi Kul’tury –
State Institute of Artistic Culture), where he designed so-called ‘normal-clothes’.
His sketches of a female dress and a male coat made in 1923–1924 represented this
concept of convenient and durable casual clothes with a loose cut, independent of
the whims of fashion. To enhance the rationalization of production, he simplified the
cuts as much as possible, tested the models and samples’ utility on himself; and to
158 Ekaterina Lazareva

increase the clothes’ economic value, he invented zip-in lining for different seasons.
As Paul Wood noticed, Tatlin’s experiments focussed on the creation of clothes for the
‘working person’ and resisted the mechanisms of fashion market dictates at the time
of the New Economic Policy (NEP) (Wood: “The Politics of the Avant-Garde”, 10–11).
The Cubo-Futurist artist Aleksandra Exter, who in the early 1920s engaged in the
design of rational clothes, shared the same position when she wrote: “We have to
oppose the changing of modern ‘fashion’ according to the whims of merchants, and
invent clothes that are expedient and beautiful in their simplicity. The suit designed
for mass consumption has to be made of elementary geometrical shapes, such as the
rectangle, square, triangle, with their colours offering rhythmic variation to their
form” (Exter: “Prostota i praktichnost v odezhde”, 31). In this and some other pub-
lications, Exter offered sketches of male, female and children’s wear made of sets of
separate garments that could be combined according to a given situation (within one
set, options ranged from daily work to festive occasion). Such changeability meant
that the clothes were never boring and enhanced creativity in the user, similar to the
combination of multi-layered clothes in today’s fashion.
If Tatlin and Exter were engaged in the design of modern and democratic casual
clothes, the Productivists – Lyubov Popova, Alexander Rodchenko (1891–1956) and
Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958) – addressed the design of work wear called ‘Prozo-
dezhda’ (from the Russian proizvodstvennaia odezhda, meaning ‘production wear’).
Thus, they sought to emphasize the direct participation of artists in the heart of the
work sphere. Varvara Stepanova published in the second number of Lef an article,
Kostium segodniashnego dnia – prozodezhda (Today’s Fashion is the Worker’s Overall),
in which she wrote:

In establishing contemporary clothing, one needs to follow it through from the design stage to
the material production, where, taking into account the specific nature of the work for which it
is intended, one stipulates a particular way of cutting. It is even necessary to substitute aesthetic
elements with the production process for sewing the same thing. I’ll explain more clearly: one
must not sew decorations on the garment, but the same stitching, necessary after the cutting,
gives it shape. The stitching of the garment, its buttoning, etc, needs to be laid bare. Nowadays
there are no longer unrefined artisanal stitches: the seaming of the sewing machine industriali-
zes tailoring and deprives it of its secrets, if not of the fascination of the individual-manual work
of the tailor. (Stepanova: “Today’s Fashion is the Worker’s Overall”, 173)

Lef artists sought to reconcile form with function and thus turned to clothes with spe-
cific qualitities. In 1922, Rodchenko designed prozodezhda for Productivist artists – a
woollen overall with patch pockets and leather finishing, similar to Ernesto Thayaht’s
functional overall (Tuta) of 1919 (see above, p. 149). Inspired by the biomechanics
of Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1940), Lyubov Popova designed prozodezhda for actors
and employed them in Meyerhold’s production of Fernand Crommelynck’s Le Cocu
magnifique (Magnanimous Cuckold) in 1922 (see p. 274). In Meyerhold’s production
of Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin’s Smert’ Tarelkina (Tarelkin’s Death, 1922), Popova’s
 Fashion Design 159

colleague Varvara Stepanova dressed the actors in sportswear (see p. 275). The scien-
tific biomechanics developed by Alexey Gastev (1882–1939) at TsIT (Tsentral’nyi Insti-
tut Truda – The Central Institute of Labour) led the Russian Constructivists to a better
understanding of the human body’s mechanical functions.
The considerable success of Productivist art was connected with the printed
fabrics designed by Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova and produced at the First
Cotton-printing Factory in Moscow, where the two artists worked in 1923–1924 and
succeeded in launching around twenty fabric ornaments on each of their production
lines. They introduced complex textile production methods ranging from weaving and
colouring to cutting of fabrics. For example, Popova accompanied her sketches for
fabric ornaments with drawings of garments that could be sewn from these materials.
Popova and Stepanova’s cotton prints, with repeated abstract geometrical composi-
tions created by straight and circular lines, produced an illusion of depth, movement
and three-dimensional space (anticipating some Op-Art effects of the 1960s). However,
in the late 1920s, Soviet textile ornamentation was largely characterized by figurative
motifs rather than geometrical abstraction. As Charlotte Douglas remarks:

But whereas the old avant-garde, under the influence of Lenin’s early internationalist aspira-
tions, had argued in favour of abstraction because of its classlessness, its lack of a specifically
bourgeois history, the new designers, adopting the contemporary political viewpoint that looked
to “revolution in one country,” argued for a precisely proletarian art, an art that would strengt-
hen the grip of the “dictatorships of the proletariat.” (Douglas: “Russian Fabric Design, 1928–
1932”, 640)

By the end of the 1920s, the abstract style of Suprematist and Constructivist fabric
ornamentation was replaced by emblematic propaganda images of tractors, engines,
light bulbs, steamships and factory stacks, much to the displeasure of consumers.

Italian Futurism and Russian Cubo-Futurism

The Russian Futurists’ style of behaviour, Rayist theory of fashion and Cubo-Futurist
applied arts experiments had much in common with the concept of fashion in Italian
Futurism; however, the subsequent history of the Russian avant-garde demonstrated
a considerably divergent development and a distinctive production model that was
unknown in Italy at the time. The Italian Futurists were mainly guided by the principle
of a ‘wireless imagination’ (free and untrammelled creativity), whereas the Russian
artists, in particular those belonging to the Constructivist circle, were anxious to
respond positively to the challenges of a revolutionary time and a new social order.
While their Italian colleagues engaged in the tailoring of exclusive suits, the Russian
avant-garde sought to design standard clothes for a mass market. Furthermore, Italian
Futurism avoided a serious engagement with the crisis of representation, whereas in
160 Ekaterina Lazareva

Russia any mimetic imitation of reality was declared obsolete. The evolution of the
Russian avant-garde, described by Boris Groys as “the demand that art move from
representing to transforming the world” (Groys: The Total Art of Stalinism, 14), was
the result of the transformation of Russian society. And the following politicization of
aesthetics defined the specifics of Russian experiments in the domain of clothes and
textiles and led to the formation of the profession of the fashion designer.

Works cited
Balla, Giacomo, and Fortunato Depero: “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe.” Umbro Apollonio,
ed.: Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. 197–200.
Beeren, Wim, ed.: Kazimir Malevich, 1878–1935: Works from State Russian Museum, Leningrad.
Exhibition catalogue. Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 5 March 1989 – 29 May 1989.
Benjamin, Walter: “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.” W.
Benjamin: Gesammelte Schriften. Vol. II.2. Herausgegeben von Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann
Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980. 431–508,
Bobrinskaia, Ekaterina: “Futuristicheskii grim.” E.A. Bobrinskaia: Russkii avangard: Granitsy
iskusstva. Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006. 146–165.
Brik, Osip: “My – futuristy.” Novy Lef 1:8–9 (1927): 49–52. English translation “We Are the Futurists.”
Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928.
Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 251–255.
Brik, Osip: “Ot kartiny k sitsu.” Lef: Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv 2:6 (1924): 27–34. English
translation “From Pictures to Textile Prints.” John E. Bowlt, ed.: Russian Art of the Avant-garde:
Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934. New York: Viking Press, 1976. 248–249.
Douglas, Charlotte: “Russian Fabric Design, 1928–1932.” Anthony Calnek, ed.: The Great Utopia: The
Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915–1932. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992.
634–648.
Exter, Alexandra: “Prostota i praktichnost v odezhde.” Krasnaia Niva 21 (1923): 31
Groys, Boris: The Total Art of Stalinism. Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Khan-Magomedov, Selim Ottovich: Pionery sovetskogo dizaina. Moskva: Galart, 1995.
Larionov, Mikhail, and Ilya Zdanevich: “Pochemu my raskrashivaemsia: Manifest futuristov.”
Argus 12 (December 1913): 114–118. English translation “Why We Paint Ourselves: A Futurist
Manifesto, 1913.” John E. Bowlt, ed.: Russian Art of the Avant-garde: Theory and Criticism,
1902–1934. New York: Viking Press, 1976. 2nd edn 1988. 79–83.
Maiakovskii, Vladimir: “Prikaz № 2 po armii iskusstv.” Stanislav B. Dzhimbinov, ed.: Literaturnye
manifesty ot simvolizma do nashikh dnei. Moskva: Soglasie-XXI vek, 2000. 208–211. English
translation “Order No. 2: To the Army of Arts.” V. Mayakovsky: Poems. Moscow: Progress, 1972.
44–46.
Maiakovskii, Vladimir, Vasilii Kamenskii, and David Burliuk: “Dekret № 1: O demokratizatsii
iskusstva: Zabornaia literatura i ploshchadnaia zhivopis.” Gazeta futuristov 1 (March 1918).
English translation “Decree No. 1 on the Democratization of Art: The Hoarding of Literature and
Painting of Streets.” Rex A. Wade, and Alex G. Cummins, eds.: Documents of Soviet History. Vol.
1. Gulf Breeze/FL: Academic International Press, 1991. 107.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista. Una sensibilità italiana nata
in Egitto. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1969.
 Fashion Design 161

Shatskikh, Alexandra: “UNOVIS: Epicenter of a New World.” Anthony Calnek, ed.: The Great Utopia:
The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915–1932. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
1992. 52–63.
Shatskikh, Alexandra: Vitebsk: The Life of Art. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2007
Sidorina, Elena: Russkii Konstruktivizm: Istoki, idei, praktika. Moskva: VINITI [i. e. Galart], 1995.
Stepanova, Varvara Fedorovna: “Kostium segodniashnego dnia – prozodezhda.” Lef: Zhurnal
levogo fronta iskusstv 1:2 (April–May 1923): 65–68. English translation “Today’s Fashion is
the Worker’s Overall.” Lydia Zaletova, Fabio Ciofi degli Atti, and Franco Panzini, eds.: Costume
Revolution: Textiles, Clothing and Costume. London: Trefoil, 1989. 173–174. “Present-Day
Dress-Production Clothing.” Radu Stern: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930.
Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2004. 172–173.
Wood, Paul: “The Politics of the Avant-Garde.” Anthony Calnek, ed.: The Great Utopia: The Russian
and Soviet Avant-Garde 1915–1932. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1992. 1–24.

Further reading
Art in Revolution: Soviet Art and Design since 1917. London: Hayward Gallery, 1971.
Art into Life: Russian Constructivism 1914–1932. New York: Rizzoli, 1990.
Art into Production: Soviet Textiles, Fashion and Ceramics 1917–1935. Oxford: Museum of Modern
Art; London: Crafts Council, 1984.
Barron, Stephanie, and Maurice Tuchman, eds.: The Avant-garde in Russia, 1910–1930: New
Perspectives. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 1980.
Exter, Alexandra: “V konstruktivnoi odezhde.” Atelier 1 (1923): 4–5.
Lodder, Christina: Russian Constructivism. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 1983.
Misler, Nicoletta: “Dressing Up and Dressing Down: The Body of the Avant-Garde.” John E. Bowlt,
and Matthew Drutt, eds.: Amazons of the Avant Garde. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1999. 95–108.
Rodchenko, Aleksandr, and Varvara Stepanova: Buduschee – edinstvennaia nasha tsel … München:
Prestel, 1991.
Shadowa, Larissa: Suche und Experiment: Aus der Geschichte der russischen und sowjetischen
Kunst zwischen 1910 und 1930. Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1978.
Stern, Radu: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850–1930. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005.
Strizhenova, Tat’iana Konstantinovna: Iz istorii sovetskogo kostiuma. Moskva: Sovetskii
khudozhnik, 1972. English edn From the History of Soviet Costume. Liverpool: Collet’s;
Liverpool Polytechnic, 1977.
Strizhenova, Tat’iana Konstantinovna: La Mode en Union soviétique, 1917–1945. Paris: Flammarion,
1991. English edn Soviet Costume and Textiles, 1917–1945. Paris: Flammarion, 1991.
Stephen Bury
10 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’
Books
In his book, The New Typography (1928), Jan Tschichold (1902–1974) formulated the
principles of a modernist, constructivist graphic design, which were to have a pro-
found influence on twentieth-century design. He credited F. T. Marinetti with having
been the precursor of the change from “ornamental to functional typography.” (Tschi-
chold: The New Typography, 53). Referencing Marinetti’s poem, Lettre d’une jolie
femme à un monsieur passéiste (Letter of a Pretty Woman to a Traditionalist Man, 1919),
Tschichold insisted that “the types have not been chosen for formal-aesthetic, decora-
tive reasons; […] For the first time typography here becomes a functional expression of
its content. For the first time also an attempt was made […] to create ‘visible-poetry’,
instead of the old ‘audible-poetry’ ” (Tschichold: The New Typography, 56).
Tschichold also included in this section the last two sections “Typographic rev-
olution” and “Free Expression Orthography” from Marinetti’s manifesto, Destruc-
tion of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom, dated “Milan 11
May 1913” (11 was Marinetti’s ‘lucky number’ used for most manifestos). It had been
read / performed in French by Marinetti on 22 June 1913 at an exhibition of work by
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) held at the Galerie La Boëtie in Paris. An Italian trans-
lation appeared in the widely distributed Florentine magazine, Lacerba, edited by
Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964), Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) and Giuseppe Prezzolini
(1882–1982) and printed and published by Attilio Vallecchi. An English translation by
Harold Monro (1879–1932), poet and founder of The Poetry Bookshop (with connec-
tions to Imagism and thus to Vorticism via Ezra Pound) appeared in the Futurist issue
of Poetry and Drama (September 1913). Interestingly, Tschichold used the form of the
manifesto and a black-and-white version of the poem as they appeared in Marinetti’s
anthology, Les Mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist Words-in-Freedom, 1919) with the
poem, now in red type, printed sideways on the front-cover.

The context of Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled

Imagination – Words-in-Freedom
What was Marinetti reacting against? In Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled
Imagination – Words-in-Freedom, he railed against the “handmade paper of the sev-
enteenth century decorated with galleys, Minervas, and Apollos, with initial letters in
red with fancy squiggles, vegetables, mythic missal ribbons, epigraphs, and Roman
numerals” (Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax”, 128). He singled out Stéphane Mal-
larmé (1842–1898) as a representative of Symbolist poetics and wrote:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-010
 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books 163

I am at war with the precious, ornamental aesthetics of Mallarmé and his quest for the rare word, for
the unique, irreplaceable, elegant, evocative, and exquisite adjective […] Moreover, with this typo-
graphic revolution, I am at war with Mallarmé’s static ideal, for it lets me impose on words (already
free, dynamic and torpedo-like) every type of speed – that of the stars, clouds, airplanes, trains,
waves, explosives, flecks of sea spray, molecules and atoms. (Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax”, 128)

Marinetti had been an admirer of Mallarmé and had added verses of his own to his Italian
translation of Mallarmé’s Verses et prose (1899), published as Versi e prose in 1916. And
it is difficult to imagine that Marinetti, a poet after all, was not aware of Mallarmé’s
transformative work, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Throw of the Dice Will
Never Abolish Chance, 1897/1914). This was edited by Armand Colin and first published
in Cosmopolis of 4 May 1897. With its mainly neo-classical Roman typeface interspersed
with calligraphic fonts, this edition came closer to the later Dada experiments than the
version – published posthumously, but under Mallarmé’s stringent instructions – by
Gallimard in July 1914 (see also pp. 282–283 in the section on Visual Poetry). Instead of
the Roman serif typefaces, such as the Elzevir, inspired by sixteenth-century typefaces,
used by many Parnassian poets and by Mallarmé himself in L’ après-midi d’un faune
(1876), Mallarmé for his preferred final setting of the publication preferred to use Didot,
based on mathematical ratios. Since its creation in 1784, it had been associated with
officialdom, such as Le Journal officiel or the Napoleonic Code. With its strong contrast
in the thickness of strokes, the Didot typeface further exploited the white space that
Mallarmé’s layout already emphasized. Although Mallarmé and the Futurists were both
interested in and profoundly influenced by posters and newspapers, white space was
something that Futurist graphic design did not really exploit. A second characteristic
of Un coup de dés was its articulation of the page spread – with the text running over
the central gutter from verso to recto. Futurist publications rarely did this, and in one
notorious case, Marinetti and Tullio d’Albisola’s tin-book Parole in libertà futuriste tattili
termiche olfattive (Words-in-Freedom: Futurist, Olfactory, Tactile and Thermic, 1932),
Marinetti’s poem was on the recto of the tin sheet with Tullio’s visualization on the verso.
Like Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) was part
of the late-Symbolist poetry scene in France. His magnificent artist’s book, Prose du
Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France (The Prose-poem of the Trans-Siberian
Railway and of the Little Jean of France) was published in June 1913 in a notional
edition of 150 copies by Cendrars’ own press, Editions des Hommes Nouveaux. Con-
sisting of four sheets glued together and extending some 199 cm, it was claimed that if
the entire edition was laid end to end it would replicate the height of the Eiffel Tower
itself. It was illustrated on the left by Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979), who extended her
pochoir stencilling into the the text on the right. Clearly, the subject matter – trains,
war, the Eiffel Tower, etc. – fitted Marinetti’s programme of modern themes as laid
out in The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. Indeed, public readings of the poem
evoked Marinetti’s performances. Typographically, also, there were parallels: twelve
different fonts were used and in different sizes and colours. Marinetti’s Destruction of
Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom would assert the need for a
164 Stephen Bury

revolutionary typography to include the use of three or four colours of ink and twenty
different typefaces: “italic for a series of like or swift sensations, bold Roman charac-
ters for violent onomatopoeias.” (Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax”, 128).
Apollinaire is generally associated with Cubism, but his connections and
involvement with Futurism were extensive (see the section on France in this
volume). He corresponded at length with Marinetti. At one point in 1914, Carlo Carrà
and the editor of Lacerba, Giovanni Papini, lodged in the offices of Apollinaire’s
review, Les Soirées de Paris, which published Apollinaire’s first visual poem/cal-
ligram, Lettre-Océan on 15 June 1914 (it was probably composed around 29 May 1914,
the date of the postmark shown in the calligram). There is a close resemblance with
Carrà’s collage painting of July that year, which was reproduced in Lacerba on 1
August 1914 as Dipinto parolibero (Festa patriottica) (Free-word Painting: Patriotic
Holiday). Apollinaire had already signed himself or allowed himself to be signed
as “Apollinaire Futuriste” in the manifesto, L’ Antitradition futuriste, first published
in Gil Blas on 3 August 1913, and then in Lacerba on 15 September, in-between the
first part of Marinetti’s Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza fili – Parole
in libertà (15 June 1913) and its supplement, Dopo il verso libero le parole in libertà
(After Free Verse: The Words-in-Freedom; 15 November 1913). L’ antitradition futur-
iste pioneered the distinction and division between things to condemn and things
to praise (“merde aux” and “rose aux”), which Wyndham Lewis would take up in
the first issue of Blast, published on 2 July 1914, with his ‘Bless and Blast’ sections:
“BLESS cold / magnanimous / delicate / gauche / fanciful / stupid / Englishmen”,
vs. “BLAST FRANCE […] APERITIFS (Pernots, Amers picon) / Bad change”, etc. (Blast
1 [1914], 13 and 24). Of course, the Rose section was set in boldface, but overall the
typography was comparatively restrained: there were occasional mixtures of lower
and upper case within words (paragonnage), vertical lines and aligned text, single
and double underlinings, a line of music and very little punctuation. The manifesto
version extended over three (as opposed to two) pages and had bolder type.
Lettre-Océan was influenced by Cubism and its use of posters and newspapers.
There is a collage of phrases and postmarks, and it was even signed like a painting
on the bottom right. The Eiffel Tower was laid out as a visual poem on the right-hand
page, whilst a smaller similar visual poem was on the left-hand side, but this time in
the shape of a key ring. The calligram form, where an image adds to or even illustrates
a text, was not a preferred medium of expression for the Futurists, except maybe
Soffici, Francesco Cangiullo (1884–1977) and Carrà, who explored it repeatedly. But
Marinetti’s aesthetic concepts were still reflected in Lettre-Océan: T.S.F. (Télégra-
phie sans fils) references the immaginazione senza fili (wireless imagination). A more
literal calligram is Il pleut, composed in July 1914 but first published in December
1916 in Pierre Albert-Birot’s magazine Sic, where the text falls down the page as if
running down a windowpane or just falling from the clouds. This proved to be influ-
ential on future graphic designers, such as Milton Glaser (1929–). Apollinaire’s choice
of rain may refer to Gustave Kahn’s volume of free verse, La Pluie et le beau temps
 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books 165

(Rain and Sunshine, 1896) and reflect Kahn’s suggestion that poetry should not be
pictorial (Kahn: “Préface”, 31), and that paintings should not include words (Kahn:
“La Section d’Or (Galerie la Boétie)”, 181–182).

Russian Futurism
The relationship between Italian and Russian Futurism was complex. Marinetti
visited Russia in January–February 1914 at the invitation of Genrikh Tasteven, who
published Futurizm: Na puti k novomu simvolizmu (Futurism: On the Way to a New
Symbolism, 1914), which included Russian translations of some of Marinetti’s manifes-
tos, including Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza fili – Parole in libertà.
The Russian Futurists, except for Vadim Shershenevich (1893–1942), were opposed to
Marinetti, although his influence can be seen in the use of a multiplicity of typefaces,
for example in the work of David Burliuk (1882–1967) and Ivan Ignatyev (1892–1914),
who also used musical notation and mathematical symbols. Vasily Kamensky (1884–
1961) in particular disliked Marinetti and deplored the onomatopaeic character of
his poetry. As an alternative he proposed what he termed ‘zhelezobetonnye poemy’
(ferro-concrete poetry), modelled after reinforced concrete: the rods in the concrete
are replaced in the poems by lines dividing up the space. The words are mainly nouns
and adjectives, which allow free association, constrained by metonymy and visuality:
the reader is free to begin reading the poem from any point on the page.
David Burliuk and Vasily Kamensky produced one of the most innovative artists’
books of the twentieth-century with Tango s korovami (Tango with Cows, 1914), printed
in an edition of 300 copies. The book, a 19.7 cm square, was printed in letterpress on
the reverse side of brightly coloured wallpaper, thus presenting a wallpaper illustra-
tion to the poem on the right-hand side of the spread. The use of wallpaper parodied
the bourgeois tastes that both Italian and Russian Futurism abhorred. The title con-
nected Russian ruralism (the cow) with the latest erotic dance from Argentina, the
Tango, which had arrived in Russia in 1913. The front cover had a green, collaged
label containing the title. The top right corner was cut off, leaving a pentagram shape.
Poems like Bosikom po krapive: Destvo (Barefoot in the Nettles: Childhood), which
contained the name of the author, place and date of its composition, was written by
Kamensky aged eleven in Perm, or Telefon No. 2b (Telephone No. 2b), including the
onomatopoeic ringing, numbers and one-side of a conversation, were typographi-
cally similar to Italian Futurist poetry. Polet Vasiliia Kamenskogo na aeroplane v Var-
shave (Vasily Kamensky’s Aeroplane Flight over Warsaw) was to be read from bottom
to top, and the lines decreased in length as the reader’s eyes (and the plane) ascend,
leaving just the dot of an ‘i’ at the summit. In this sense it was a combination of Apol-
linaire’s calligram and the Italian Futurists’ exploration of different type sizes. But the
six remaining visual-verbal compositions were ferro-concrete poems with a five-sided
166 Stephen Bury

grid divided by lines into geometric spaces. The poem Constantinople had the “stanti”
of the city’s name in large type, which then formed a word column, in which a letter
was omitted on each line below, a sort of lipogram. The bottom-left irregular rectangle
contained only italics in a column: it was a translation of a song Kamensky heard on
his visit to the Middle East, but did not understand properly, assuming that it referred
to fishermen and sea gulls. The column was headed by the Russian soft sign: with the
italics this may mean that it was sung quietly. A bold 0 shape suggested the night-
time temperature fell to zero. Kabare Zon (The Cabaret Zone) consisted primarily of
single words – in different typefaces and type sizes – such as almonds, champagne,
tango and entrance charges. Dvorets S.I. Shchukina (The S.I. Shchukin Palace) was
arranged like a tour of the museum, even indicating its stairs: one segment had Mat-
isse’s name with word associations, Monet had the word ‘No’ in his segment. There is
no prescribed route through this poem and the reader is left to his or her own devices
as to how to proceed and what to make of the text. Some of Kamensky’s ferro-concrete
poems were exhibited as art-works in No. 4: Vystavka kartin Futuristy, Luchisty, Prim-
itiv (Exhibition No. 4: Futurists, Rayonists, Primitive), organized by Mikhail Larionov
in 1914 (for more on Russian Futurist artists’ books see pp. 812–816 in the entry on
Russian Futurist Art in this volume).

Italian Futurist graphic design in practice

The first poem written in the Words-in-Freedom style was Battle: Weight + Smell (Mari-
netti: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, 117–119). It deployed some of the
innovative tactics of the manifestos – no adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions and very
little punctuation, but it largely preserved the traditional format of the typographic
page and still required left-to-right reading. Just as the Futurist painters were influenced
by Marey’s photographs of motion (and Marinetti did describe Futurism as a “move-
ment”), it is likely that Marinetti’s literary manifestos were influenced by the work of
the French ophthalmologist Émile Javal (1839–1907). His Physiologie de la lecture et
de l’ écriture (Physiology of Reading and Writing, 1905) described eyes moving rapidly
(saccades) mixed with stops (fixations). Only with Zang Tumb Tumb (or as the title
page says, Zang Tumb Tuuum), published in February 1914 (although individual poems
were published earlier in journals from 1912–1914 and some later in the Dada maga-
zine, Cabaret Voltaire (1916), do we have the first significant work of Futurist Words-in-
Freedom poetry. Marinetti acknowledged the assistance of the letterpress printer Cesare
Cavenna, who had premises below him in Milan. The book had 228 pages, measured
20.4 x 13.5 cm and cost three lira. Its orange paper cover had all of its text at an oblique
angle save for its subtitle “Adrianopoli ottobre 1912”. The second and third letters of the
title were in bold and probably inspired the cover of Blast and (directly or indirectly)
Dada 3. All the type was sans serif except for the publisher’s name and address at
 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books 167

the bottom left. The work still depended heavily on narrative and had a linear quality,
which meant that Marinetti could still do readings and performances from this book.
But it had Words-in-Freedom that ranged from the pseudo-scientific “Synchronic
Chart” of the pilot Y.M. bombing Adrianople, with its long central arrow simulating
the bombing dive, algebraic symbols and phonetic spelling; the more calligrammatic
“Pallone frenato turco”, where the captive Turkish balloon and its ropes were made out
of words and letters, the wirelesses (TSF) emitting onomatopoeic signals, to the more
phonetic Words-in-Freedom of Bombardamento di Adrianopoli (The Bombardment of
Adrianople), where Zang tumb tuuum enacted exploding guns. In Apollinaire’s edito-
rial for Les Soirées de Paris of 15 April 1914 he remarked on the novelty in technique of
Zang tumb tuuum: “C’est un livre d’expression métallique qui mérite qu’on s’y arrête”
(This is a book of metallic expression that deserves attention; Apollinaire: “Lectures”,
191). What he meant by “metallic expression” is unknown.
Les Mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist Words-in-Freedom, 1919) consisted of
poems written in and about the First World War, some of which had appeared pre-
viously in Futurist periodicals, such as L’ Italia futurista. The folding plates that
amounted to abstract paintings were made out of collaged metal and wood type and
symbols, which were then printed from photographically engraved plates, as if the
poetic ambition, perhaps rising to the challenge of Dadaism and the experimental
typography of Raoul Hausmann and Tristan Tzara, had outstripped the technical pos-
sibilities of typesetting. Une assemblée tumultueuse (A Tumultuous Assembly), for
example, is actually unreadable as a text (Marinetti: Les Mots en liberté futuristes,
plate 3). Forcing the reader to open out the folded plates could also be a strategy of
Marinetti’s to attack the traditional book format.
Lacerba (1 January 1913 – 22 May 1915) and L’ Italia futurista (1 June 1916 – 11
February 1918) were two Futurist magazines in which many of the Futurist poems
written in the Words-in-Freedom style made their first appearances. Lacerba had a
supposed print-run of around 20,000 copies, of which 3,000 were given to Marinetti
for distribution (Papini: Letter of 18 March 1913 to Marinetti, quoted in Salaris: Mari-
netti editore, 144). Aldo Palazzeschi later reduced the number to 10,000 copies (Pala-
zzeschi: Letter of 16 May 1913 to Attilio Vallecchi, in Ferrone: Aldo Palazzeschi, 19).
Whatever the exact figure, Giovanni Papini certainly felt that the periodical was a
great success: “Lacerba is selling like hotcakes. […] Everyone liked the issue and only
few of the 8,000 copies are still left.” (Papini: Letter of 24 March 1913 to Aldo Palazz-
eschi, quoted in Palazzeschi and Marinetti: Carteggio, 129). The Marxist political theo-
rist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) reported that eighty percent were bought by working
men (Gramsci: “A Letter to Trotsky on Futurism”, 53). Its first masthead was brick red,
designed by Soffici in imitation of supposed Etruscan characters found by the archae-
ologist, Gaston Maspero, and may have influenced the bold red sans serif masthead
of the cover design of Dada 3. Lacerba was in two columns and L’ Italia futurista took
a four-page newspaper format (cut from 58 x 42 cm to 50 x 38 cm when Vallecchi took
over the publication in April 1917). Its central two pages were used for ‘creative’ works,
168 Stephen Bury

its text being arranged in six, and later in five, columns. It was printed by the Stabil-
menti grafici M. Martini, Prato. Bartram has speculated that as each magazine only
used two typefaces each, several poems appeared on the same spread and many of
them were sent in from the war front, it was left up to the printer to devise their final
appearance (Bartram: Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text, 132). This theory is
backed up by the evidence of Stefan Themerson (1910–1988), the novelist and director
of the Gaberbocchus Press, London, who interviewed Pierre Albert-Birot (1876–1967),
founder of the review SIC, which had printed Albert-Birot’s own calligrams as well as
Apollinaire’s Il pleut, on the subject of calage (setting) done by Frédéric Levé (Them-
erson: Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms, 23).
Ardengo Soffici’s BIF§ZF+18 (1915) – apart from its nonsensical title, which itself
interrogates the book apparatus – is best known for its brightly coloured collaged
cover, imitative of a poster, about which Soffici had theorized in Primi principî di una
estetica futurista (First Principles of a Futurist Aesthetics, 1920). The whole volume
in itself demonstrates that typography could be considered a work of art. One of his
poems anthologized here was Tipografia, which incorporated letters borrowed from
La voce (1908–1916). Like Marinetti’s Tumultuous Assembly, this existed primarily as a
visual composition. Some of the poems combined letterpress in various sizes, wooden
and poster type and existing photo-engravings, and sometimes they incorporated ele-
ments of advertising blocks.
Fortunato Depero’s ‘Bolted Book’, in reality entitled Depero futurista, 1913–1927,
was published by Fedele Azari in 1927 and sits well with the Futurists’ promotion
of the mechanical and of tactilism. It consisted of 119 sheets, mostly on ivory-white
paper with some green, grey, orange and violet pages, documenting Depero’s pro-
jects, posters, photographs and writings over the years 1913–1927. The bolts serving as
the binding are referenced by many twentieth-century artists’ books, such as Kevin
Osborn’s Real Lush (1981) or Tim Staples’s Under Pressure (1994).

The legacy of Futurist graphic design, typography

and artists’ books
We have seen a large range of overlapping developments in graphic design in the
period 1913–1930. One can consider Cendrars and Delaunay’s pochoir La Prose du
Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, Apollinaire’s calligrams, Kamenksy and
Burliuk’s Tango with Cows and Wyndham Lewis’s Blast as part of a general Futurist
wave. Even Dadaist innovation can be seen as part of this evolution, and the Dadaists
could be considered Futurists who disliked Futurism. The works of Paul van Ostai-
jen and Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich) span some of these different influences. The Flemish
nationalist Van Ostaijen (1896–1928) published Bezette stad (Open City) in 1920 with
woodcuts by Oskar Jespers. The use of space between words and lines revealed the
 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books 169

influence of Mallarmé, although the predominant typeface was Caslon rather than
Didot. But there were parallels with Dada, Expressionism and Futurism – not least in
its theme of war. Likewise Iliazd’s lidantIU fAram (Le-Dantiu as a Beacon, 1923) com-
bined Georgian, Russian and Italian Futurism (although it preferred printers’ symbols
over their use of mathematical symbols) and Dada (with which Iliazd became closely
associated). It is a typographic tour de force, so much so that the visuality of the per-
formance can detract from its reading – the designs of the sixty-one page numbers
are all unique.
Likewise, a wide range of influences can be seen in the work of individual Futur-
ists. Fortunato Depero’s work easily deliquesced into Art Deco, as is evident in his
work for Vanity Fair and Vogue: the Futurist obsession with ocean liners and trains
collapsing back into the travel poster. Bruno Munari (1907–1998) adopted the Russian
photo-collage to promote Fascism in L’ ala d’Italia (1933–1936). Munari’s graphics for
Campari (1965) with its coloured paragonnage were more Dada than Futurist, and in
fact he made a book, ABC Dadà di Munari (1944), unpublished at the time. Although
some artists and designers, such as Tullio Crali (1910–2000) kept a Futurist practice
going until the 1950s, the Futurist experimental design failed in the face of the success
of international Modernism – El Lissitsky’s Dlya golosa (For the Voice) was published
in Berlin in 1923, the same year as Iliazd’s Le-Dantiu as a Beacon. The Milan-based
magazine Campo grafico: Rivista di estetica e di technica grafica (1933–1939), edited
by the campisti, printers, typographers and designers under the direction of Attilio
Rossi (1909–1939), displayed the typical graphic design effects of the European
avant-garde – grids, white space, asymmetrical typography and photomontage: its
last special issue was devoted to Italian Futurism as if it were an afterthought.
In the 1960s, there was a renewed interest in the historical avant-garde, espe-
cially in the art school education based on the Bauhaus Vorkurs (Foundation Course).
At Chelsea School of Art, London, the curriculum for the graphic design department
run by Edward Wright (1912–1988) included Italian Futurism. Wright’s design of the
catalogue for the exhibition This Is Tomorrow, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London
(1956), demonstrated an interest in large condensed poster type (now printed in silk-
screen), the use of typewriter type and use of spiral binding. Wright’s other interest
was in concrete poetry, where Marinetti’s legacy was long lasting. The Brazilian-born
Swedish poet and artist Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) published in 1953 Hipy Papy
Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy, a manifesto for concrete poetry, which referenced Mari-
netti’s “lyrical obsession of matter” from The Technical Manifesto of Literature (1912)
(Fahlström: Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy, 108–120). The concrete poetry
of Eugen Gomringer (1925–), Augusto de Campos (1931–), Ernst Jandl (1925–2000) or
Ian Hamilton Finlay (1925–2006) show how the influence of Marinetti’s theories and
Words-in-Freedom has persisted.
As much as Tschichold praised Marinetti as a predecessor for using typography
as a functional expression of content and for his creation of ‘visual poetry’, it was
the Futurists’ exploitation of the book format – whether that was tin covers, bolted
170 Stephen Bury

bindings, changes of orientation of the text that required the reader to interact differ-
ently with the book or nonsense titles – that was influential over time. Even Munari,
whose graphic style had lost most of its Futurist character by the late 1930s, could
still produce innovative artist’s books, such as An Unreadable Quadrat Print (1953)
and I Prelibri = Prebooks = Prelivres = Vorbücher (1980). In the latter, book and page
are interchangeable and the two plastic leaves contain twelve miniature books made
from various materials such as felt and wood and bound with various bindings from
spiral to string. This interrogation of the book format comprises Futurism’s enduring
influence on graphic design and the artist’s book into the twenty-first century.

Works cited
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “L’ Antitradition futuriste.” Gil Blas 35:13, 313 (3 August 1913): 3. Lacerba
1:18 (15 September 1913): 202–203. Reprinted in G. Apollinaire: Œuvres en prose complètes.
Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. 937–939. 1675–1682.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Lectures” Les Soirées de Paris 3:23 (15 April 1914): 191.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Lettre-Océan.” Les Soirées de Paris 3:25 (15 June 1914): 340–341.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Il pleut.” Sic 1:12 (December 1916): [4].
Bartram, Alan: Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text. London: The British Library, 2005.
Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex 1 (June 1914).
Cendrars, Blaise: La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France. Texte de Blaise
Cendrars; couleurs simultanées de Madame Delaunay-Terk. Paris: Éditions des Hommes
Nouveaux, 1913.
Depero, Fortunato: Depero futurista, 1913–1927. Milano: Edizione della “Dinamo”, 1927.
Fahlström: Öyvind: “Hipy Papy Bthuthdth Thuthda Bthuthdy: Manifesto for Concrete Poetry.” Ö.
Fahlström: The Art of Writing. Evanston/IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008. 135–143.
Ferrone, Siro, ed.: Aldo Palazzeschi: Mostra bio-bibliografica. Firenze: Palazzo Strozzi, 1976.
Gramsci, Antonio: “A Letter to Trotsky on Futurism.” A. Gramsci: Selection from Cultural Writings. Ed.
by David Forgacs, and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1985. 52–54.
Javal, Émile: Physiologie de la lecture et de l’ écriture. Paris: Alcan, 1905.
Kahn, Gustave: “La Section d’Or (Galerie la Boétie).” Mercure de France 100:369 (1 November 1912):
181–182.
Kahn, Gustave: La Pluie et le beau temps. Paris: Vanier, 1896.
Kahn, Gustave: “Préface.”Premiers poèmes. Avec une Préface sur le vers libres. Paris: Société du
Mercure de France, 1897. 3–38.
Kamenskii, Vasilii Vasil’evich: Tango s korovami: Zhelezobetonnye poemy. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo
D.D. Burliuka, izdatel’ia 1-go zhurnala russkikh futuristov, 1914.
Mallarmé, Stéphane: “Un coup de dés jamais n’aboliras le hasard.” Cosmopolis: Revue interna-
tionale 6:17 (May 1897): 417–426. 2nd rev edn Un coup de dés jamais n’aboliras le hasard:
Paris: Gallimard, 1914.
Mallarmé, Stéphane: Versi e prose. Prima traduzione italiana di F. T. Marinetti. Milano: Istituto
Editoriale Italiano, 1916.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
Freedom.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006. 120–131.
 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books 171

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical

Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 107–119.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Les Mots en liberté futuristes. Milano: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”,
1919.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Parole in libertà futuriste tattili termiche olfattive. Rome: Edizioni
Futuriste di “Poesia.” 1932.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Zang Tumb Tuuum: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912. Milano: Poesia, 1914.
Reprinted in F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano:
Mondadori, 1983. 638–779.
Munari, Bruno: ABC Dadà di Munari. Milano: Lady Esther, 1944.
Munari, Bruno: I prelibri = Prebooks = Vorbücher = Prelivres. Mantova: Corraini, 2003.
Ostaijen, Paul van: Bezette stad. Originaalhoutsneden en tekeningen van Oskar Jespers. Antwerpen:
Het Sienjaal, 1921.
Palazzeschi, Aldo, and F. T. Marinetti: Carteggio con un appendice di altre lettere a Palazzeschi.
A cura di Paolo Prestigiacomo. Milano: Mondadori, 1978.
Salaris, Claudia: Marinetti editore. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990.
Soffici, Ardengo: BIF§ZF+18: Simultaneità e chimismi lirici. Firenze: Edizioni della “Voce”, 1915. 2nd
edn Firenze: Vallecchi, 1919.
Soffici, Ardengo: Primi principî di una estetica futurista. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1920.
Tasteven, Genrikh, ed.: Futurizm: Na puti k novomu simvolizmu. S prilozheniem perevoda glavnykh
futuristskikh manifestov Marinetti. Moskva: Iris, 1914.
Themerson, Stefan: Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms. London: Gaberbocchus Press, 1968.
This Is Tomorrow. Introductions by Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, and David Lewis. Exhibition
catalogue. London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 9 August – 9 September 1956.
Tschichold, Jan: The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers. Berkeley/CA: University of
California Press, 1995.
Zdanevich, Il’ia Mikhailovich: lidantIU fAram. Paris: 41°, 1923.

Further reading
Andel, Jaroslav: Avant-Garde Page Design 1900–1950. New York: Delano Greenidge, 2002.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: Lettere a F. T. Marinetti. Con il manoscritto del manifesto “Antitradizione
futurista”. A cura di Paquale Aniel Jannini. Milano: All’Insena del Pesce d’Oro, 1978.
Arnar, Anna Sigridur: The Book as Instrument: Stéphane Mallarmé, the Artist’s Book, and the
Transformation of Print Culture. Chicago/IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Bentivoglio, Mirella: “Innovative Artist’s Books of Italian Futurism.” Günter Berghaus, ed.:
International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000. 473–486.
Bohn, Willard: The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry 1914–1928. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Bonito Oliva, Achille: La parola totale: Una tradizione futurista, 1909–1986. Modena: Galleria Fonte
d’Abisso, 1986.
Bove, Giovanni: Scrivere futurista: La rivoluzione tipografica fra scrittura e immagine. Roma: Edizioni
Nuova Cultura, 2009.
Bury, Stephen: Artists’ Books: The Book as a Work of Art, 1963–1995. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995.
Cammarota, Domenico: “La rivoluzione tipografica futurista.” Melania Gazzotti, and Julia Trolp, eds.:
La parola nell’arte: Ricerche d’avanguardia nel 900, dal futurismo a oggi attraverso le collezioni
del MART. Milano: Skira: 2007. 55–59.
172 Stephen Bury

Caproni, Attilio Mauro: “Il libro e la nuova tipografia da Stéphane Mallarmé al futurismo.”
Mauro Guerrini, ed.: Il linguaggio della biblioteca: Scritti in onore di Diego Maltese. Vol. 1.
Firenze: Giunta Regionale, 1994. 213–228. Reprinted Milano: Editrice Bibliografica, 1996.
585–600.
Caproni, Attilio Mauro: “Il libro nell’avanguardia futurista.” Accademie e biblioteche d’Italia 55
[N.S. 38]:1 (January–March 1987): 40–47. Reprinted in A. M. Caproni: Fogli di taccuino: Appunti
e spunti vari di biblioteconomia (1971–1988). Roma: Vecchiarelli, 1988. 195–202.
Caproni, Attilio Mauro: “Futurismo e irrisione tipografica.” Andrea Gatti, ed.: Quaecumque recepit
Apollo: Scritti in onore di Angelo Ciavarella. Parma: Biblioteca Palatina; Museo Bodoniano,
1993. 53–64.
Caruso, Luciano: Il libromacchina (imbullonato) di Fortunato Depero. Con lettere inedite di Fedele
Azari e interventi critici di Guido Almansi. Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1987.
Caruso, Luciano, ed.: Parole in libertà futuriste. Exhibition catalogue. Pistoia: Palazzo Comunale,
18–29 maggio 1977. Pistoia: Tipolitografia Tris, 1977.
Caruso, Luciano, and Stelio Maria Martini, eds.: Scrittura visuale e poesia sonora futurista. Mostra
bibliografica. Exhibition catalogue. Firenze: Palazzo Medici Riccardi, 4 novembre – 15 dicembre
1977.
Caruso, Luciano, and Stelio Maria Martini, eds.: Tavole parolibere e tipografia futurista. Exhibition
catalogue. Venezia: Ca’ Corner della Regina, 15 ottobre – 20 novembre 1977. Venezia: La
Biennale di Venezia, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, 1977.
Caruso, Luciano, and Stelio Maria Martini, eds.: Tavole parolibere futuriste, 1912–1944: Antologia.
Vol. 1–2. Napoli: Liguori, 1975.
Castleman, Riva: A Century of Artists Books. New York: Abrams, 1994.
Compton, Susan: The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books 1912–16. London: British Library, 1978.
Corazza, Simonetta, ed.: Edizioni elettriche: La rivoluzione editoriale e tipografica del futurismo.
Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Biblioteca Nazionale, 19 dicembre 1995 – 27 gennaio 1996. Roma:
De Luca, 1995.
Cundy, David: “Marinetti and Italian Futurist Typography.” Art Journal 41:4 (Winter 1981): 349–352.
De Puineuf, Sonia: “Quicksands of Typography: The Futurist Experience in Central Europe during
the 1920s.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin: New York:
DeGruyter, 2011. (International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Vol. 1). 61–84
Drucker, Johanna: The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923, Chicago;
London: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Eskilson, Stephen J.: Graphic Design: A New History. 2nd edn New Haven/CT: Yale University Press,
2012.
Fanelli, Giovanni, and Ezio Godoli: Il futurismo e la grafica. Milano: Comunità, 1988.
Greve, Charlotte: “Writing the Image: The Early Russian Avant-Garde Book.” C. Greve: Writing and
the ‘Subject’: Image-text Relations in the Early Russian Avant-garde and Contemporary Russian
Visual Poetry. Amsterdam: Pegasus, 2004. 37–83.
Gurianova [Gourianova], Nina Al’bertovna, ed.: Livres futuristes russes = The Russian Futurists and
Their Books. Paris: La Hune, 1993.
Hajek, Miroslava: Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past. Cinisello Balsamo (MI): Silvana, 2012.
Hollis, Richard: Graphic Design: A Concise History. Rev. edn London: Thames & Hudson, 2001.
Janecek, Gerald: The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930,
Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Janecek, Gerald: Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego: San Diego
University Press, 1996.
Krichevskii, Vladimir: “Tipografika futuristov na vzgliad tipografa.” Sergei Kudriavtsev, ed.:
Terent’evskii sbornik. Vol. 2. Moskva: Gileia, 1998. 43–74.
 Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books 173

Lista, Giovanni: Le Livre futuriste: De la liberation du mot au poème tactile. Modena: Panini, 1964.
Magarotto, Luigi: “Il libro del cubofuturismo russo e dintorni.” Giovanna Pagani Cesa, ed.: Il libro
dell’avanguardia russa: Opere della collezione Marzaduri a Ca’ Foscari. Exhibition catalogue.
Venezia: Fondazione Querini Stampalia, 12 giugno – 22 agosto 2004. Milano: Biblion, 2004.
15–39.
Magarotto, Luigi: “La rivoluzione tipografica del futurismo italiano e l’ attività artistica di
V. Kamenskij e I. Zdanevič.” Europa Orientalis 15:1 (1996): 103–111. Russian translation
“ ‘Tipografskaia revoliutsiia’ ital’ianskogo futurizma i khudozhestvennaia deiatel’nost’:
V. Kamenskogo i I. Zdanevicha.” Mikhail B. Meilakh, and Dmitrii V. Sarabianov, eds.: Poeziia
i zhivopis’: Sbornik trudov pamiati N.I. Chardzhieva. Moskva: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury, 2000.
480–489.
Magarotto, Luigi: “Pietroburgo, Mosca, Tiflis, capitali del libro futurista.” Antonella D’Amelia, ed.:
Pietroburgo capitale della cultura russa. Salerno: Europa Orientalis, 2004. 323–332.
Markov, Vladimir: Russian Futurism: A History. Washington/DC: New Academia Publishing, 2006.
Orban, Clara: The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1997.
Parish, Nina: “From Radio to the Internet: Italian Futurism, New Technologies and the Persistence of
the Book.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012): 378–396.
Perloff, Marjorie: The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture.
Chicago/IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Perloff, Marjorie: “Mirskontsa (Worldbackwards): Collaborative Book Art and Transrational Sounds.”
The Getty Research Journal 5 (2013): 101–118.
Perloff, Marjorie: Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago/IL:
University of Chicago Press, 2010.
Perloff, Nancy: Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art. Los Angeles/LA:
Getty Publications, 2016.
Poggi, Christine: In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage, New
Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 1992.
Prati, Sandro, ed.: Grafica futurista minima, 1909–1944. Gavardo (BS): Liberedizioni, 2001.
Rowell, Margit, and Deborah Wye: The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934. New York: Museum of
Modern Art, 2002.
Salaris, Claudia: “Le Futurisme et la publicité.” Jean-Hubert Martin, ed.: Art & Publicité 1890–1990.
Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 31 octobre 1990 – 25 février 1991.
180–197. Reprinted in Art & Publicité. Exhibition catalogue. Tokyo: Sezon Museum of Art,
12 septembre – 4 novembre 1991; Kobe: Musée d’Art Moderne de Hyogo, 16 novembre – 23
décembre 1991. Tokyo-Kobe: Ashai Shimbun, 1991. 148–158.
Salaris, Claudia: “Libri futuristi.” Vittorio Di Giuro, ed.: Manuale enciclopedico della bibliofilia.
Milano: Bonnard, 1997. Reprint 2005. 287–293. Reprinted as “Futurismo italiano, libri del.”
Daniele Baroni, et al.: La rivoluzione tipografica. Milano: Bonnard, 2001. 61–70.
Salaris, Claudia: Il futurismo e la pubblicità: Dalla publicità dell’arte all’arte della pubblicità.
Milano: Lupetti, 1986.
Scott, David: Pictorialist Poetics: Poetry & the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Scudiero, Maurizio, ed.: Il libro futurista e le avanguardie. Venezia: Arsenale, 2009.
Silk, Gerald D.: “The Photo Collages of Bruno Munari.” Sally Metzler, and Elizabeth Lovett Colledge,
eds.: Cultural and Artistic Upheavals in Modern Europe 1848 to 1945, Jacksonville, FL: Cummer
Museum of Art, 1996. 41–76.
Somigli, Luca: “Past-loving Florence and the Temptations of Futurism: ‘Lacerba’ (1913–15), ‘Quartiere
latino’ (1913–14), ‘L’ Italia futurista’ (1916–18), ‘La Vraie Italie’ (1919–20).” Peter Brooker,
174 Stephen Bury

Sascha Bru, Andrew Thacker, and Christian Weikop, eds.: The Oxford Critical and Cultural
History of Modernist Magazines. Vol. 3. Europe 1880–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009. 469–490.
White, John J.: “The Argument for a Semiotic Approach to Shaped Writing: The Case of Italian Futurist
Typography.” Visible Language 11 (Winter 1976): 53–86.
Anna Maria Ruta
11 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior
Design
The new relationships between art, crafts
and industry
The rapid rise of industry in the second half of the nineteenth century and the
increasing opportunities for trade and commerce had a major impact on artistic
creativity, the technical-industrial realization of aesthetic ideas and the market-
ing of art and design products. In England, John Ruskin (1819–1900) and William
Morris (1834–1896) consolidated the principle of design and instigated a reform of
the applied arts in order to escape the rigid production methods of the manufac-
turing industry. Their vision of linking art to industry meant that humans would
not work for machines any longer, but the machine would work for humans. Art
Nouveau and its national variants (Jugendstil in Germany, Stile Liberty in Italy)
fostered the development of a crafts industry at the highest artistic level, without
however abrogating the use of machines. The Deutscher Werkbund (German Associ-
ation of Craftsmen), inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement in England, sought to
strike a balance between protecting the creative work of craftsman on the one hand
and incorporating methods of industrial mass production on the other. This aim
of combining applied arts, industry and business led to the simple forms and pure
functionality that became key features of the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. Here,
the integration of art and industry was not directed against the crafts, but aimed at
a synthesis of the various branches of the arts and crafts. The artists’ attempts to
resolve the antinomies of craft and industry gave rise to three operational directions
that can be summed up as follows: (1) a persistence of mass-produced furniture to
which neo-baroque forms of decoration are applied; (2) an ever-increasing predom-
inance of rationalism, functionalism and geometric shapes; (3) experimentation
with new forms of creativity, where one-off originality outweigh mass-produced
objects.

The Futurist refashioning of the universe

On 11 March 1915, Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) pub-
lished the manifesto Futurist Refashioning of the Universe. The text’s focus on the
process of synthesis made it a point of reference for all subsequent Futurist endeav-
ours to integrate the creative process in all fields of art and life. The two artists opened

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-011
176 Anna Maria Ruta

up a complex and structured reflection on how to alter everyday life in a fundamental

and decisive way. However, refashioning the environment according to aesthetic prin-
ciples unveiled a number of contradictions. The Futurist world of the arts was unable
to enter into a constructive relationship with industry. In their production of everyday
objects, the Futurists occupied a middle ground between functionalist innovation
and adherence to traditions. Their compromise showed that they were aware of the
need to advertise their products in accordance with the laws of the consumer market.
But in the end, they failed to identify a type of consumer ready to buy their products
and to become followers of avant-garde design.
After an initial phase of developing and defining their theories and programmes,
Futurist artists began a varied and multifaceted production cycle, but output always
remained small. The concept of refashioning the environment in a Futurist manner
meant that life should be given an artistic quality. The Futurists developed a funda-
mental strategy on how to overturn and aestheticize, in its widest sense, the culture of
living. They intervened creatively and according to an explicitly artistic notion in the
fields of architecture, decorative arts, fashion design, advertising, cuisine, etc. Within
these domains, one of the most significant was that of interior design, as it creates
“structures that mediate between human beings and their environment” (Fundarò:
Rubrica di arredamento, 3).

The house according to Futurists

Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916) in his Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914) con-
fronted the task of creating the Futurist house ex-novo and of “establishing new
forms, new lines, new harmonies for profiles and volumes, an architecture that
finds its raison d’être solely in the special conditions of modern living and its cor-
responding aesthetic values in our sensibility” (Sant’Elia: “Futurist Architecture”,
199). The architect not only intervenes in the design of a city but also leaves a mark
on the different functions of the interiors, e. g. shops, offices, schools, museums,
cabarets, bars, exhibition halls. He considers the house as a place in which human
sensibility and sensory faculties are enhanced and social and cultural features are
emphasized.
Henry van de Velde (1863–1957) claimed that furnishings influence the state of
mind of each person who inhabits an abode, due to the emotional communication
that is inevitably established between a human being and his or her surroundings
(Van de Velde: “Déblaiement d’art”, 21). Giacomo Balla was of the view that the
aesthetics of the environment mould the human being (Santamaria: “Conversando
con Balla”, 202). And Pippo Rizzo (1897–1964) felt that the modern house needs to
have “furniture, tapestry and all furnishings with such an inventive decoration that
they can offer a stronger sensation than an isolated painting on the wall” (Rizzo:
 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 177

“La pittura dell’avvenire”, 124). The Futurist battle cry therefore became: “Renew
the interiors, so that we can renew the human mind!” (Rizzo: “La pittura dell’av-
venire”, 124).
Futurist architecture was designed to arouse new emotions by means of a decora-
tive lexicon that would eliminate repetition and the monotonous rhythm of daily life.
New forces should radiate from the house, propelling human beings out of a state
of drowsy cosiness and somnolent leisure towards a dynamic and modern existence
(see Cangiullo: “Il mobilio futurista”). The categorical imperative imposed by the
new social reality of modernity was ‘Move and act quickly!’ Thus, the house would
be filled with an internal dynamism, and the furnishings should also contribute to a
more dynamic way of life enriched through a sensorial synaesthesia of colours, imag-
inative shapes and materials best suited to the new rhythms of modern life.
The designer-artist was encouraged to organize the space in relation to its func-
tion and achieve an aesthetic balance between minor and major arts. It was impor-
tant to replace luxury products with a continuous supply of light, economic and
interchangeable materials. The Futurist designer directed a particular focus on those
pieces of furniture suitable for a brisk and inventive life, in which all the arts were
fused. In an efficient and inventive living space, the furniture would be like sculpture
and painting. Tapestries and cushions would be in tune with Futurist aesthetics and
be made from different materials, such as cloth, silk and wools (Guttry, Maino and
Tarquini: Tessuti, arazzi, 32). The house would imbue the inhabitant with an energetic
force and provide a joyful existence. However, the Futurists never lost sight of inti-
macy and of domestic comfort. They saw the house as a protective environment and
preferred to call their workshops ‘houses of art’ rather than studios or ateliers. Their
creations were available only in limited numbers and were predominantly bought by
friends, collectors and art lovers. And as their non-traditional production methods
attracted little support from the mainstream Italian craft industry, the Futurist case
d’arte were rarely commercially viable and tended to have a short life span.

Interior design in the industrial North

In the industrial triangle of the North, and above all in Milan and Turin, the Futurist
designers distinguished themselves through their creativity and flexibility. In Milan,
an emblem of industrial progress, Ugo Nebbia (1880–1965), Leonardo Dudreville
(1885–1975) and Marcello Nizzoli (1887–1969) produced cloths, shawls, cushions and
artistic tapestries in silk and in wool. Alma Fidora (1894–1980) created beautiful fans
modelled on those by Balla and glassware that she had manufactured by the Vetreria
Cappellin Venini in Venice and Altare. Fedele Azari (1895–1930) opened an officina
d’arte (art workshop) and became an agent and art director for Fortunato Depero,
creating with him in 1927 Depero futurista, 1913–1927, an outstanding artists’ book
178 Anna Maria Ruta

known as the libro imbullonato (bolted book; see Depero: Depero futurista 1913–1927
and p. 168 in this volume). The graphic design, advertising, poster and postcard pro-
duction of these artists had a decisive effect on the future developments of the sector.
Also active in the production of art objects in Milan were Cesare Andreoni and his wife
Angela Lombardini (1899–1989) (who called herself ‘Chiffon’ or ‘Chiff’). They pre-
ferred a pictorial-decorative style in their interior design of bars, tobacco shops, golf
clubs and industrial fairs. The painters Oswaldo Bot (1895–1958; pseud. of Osvaldo
Barbieri), Regina (artist name of Regina Bracchi, née Prassede Cassolo, 1894–1974),
and Bruno Munari (1907–1998) were also designers of objects and furniture. The Inter-
national Biennial of Decorative Art in nearby Monza provided these artists with an
opportunity to promote their ideas and products, and Como, home of the internation-
ally recognized Movimento italiano architettura razionale (MIAR; Italian Movement of
Rationalist Architecture), assumed an equally positive rôle.
Functionalist design also made inroads in Turin, a city at the hub of Italian indus-
trialization. Its Futurist circle included Pippo Oriani (1909–1972), Nicolay Diulgheroff
(Nicolai Diulgerov, 1901–1982), Mino Rosso (1904–1963), Enrico Alimandi (pseud. of
Enrico Allemandi) (1906–1984) and Alberto Sartoris (1901–1998), all of whom not only
produced home furnishings but also engaged in exhibition design. At the Esposizione
internazionale (International Exhibition) of Turin (Parco del Valentino, April–October
1928), Fillìa (pseud. of Luigi Enrico Colombo, 1904–1936) decorated the Futurist Pavil-
ion and designed the Prima mostra di architettura futurista (First Exhibition of Futurist
Architecture), where Diulgheroff showed his projects for interior design and applied
art, graphics and industrial design, as well as ceramics made in the Savona work-
shops of the Futurist Tullio d’Albisola (pseud. of Tullio Mazzotti, 1899–1971). Together
with Fillìa he furnished the first Futurist restaurant, the Taverna Santopalato (Tavern
of the Holy Palate) in Turin (1930–31), with walls entirely covered in sandblasted alu-
minium and metal eyes resembling portholes on ships. Fillìa and Ludovico De Amicis
(1899–1935) renovated the rooms of an ancient coffee house in Turin and turned it into
the Ambiente Novatore (Innovative Environment). Each room of this bar cum dance
hall cum theatre was given a décor that reflected its particular function.

Depero’s Casa del Mago, the Cabaret del Diavolo

and other projects
In 1919 in his hometown of Rovereto, Depero founded La Casa del Mago (The Magi-
cian’s House), a self-managed art workshop. It was the first of its kind and “the most
productive and continuous” (Scudiero: Depero: Casa d’arte futurista, 7) of all of them.
It made good trade with inlaid furniture, tapestries and cushions, vases and ceramic
dishes, stained-glass windows, but also toys, marionettes and various other objects,
all of which were characterized by a ludic inclination and a decorative sense imbued
 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 179

with strongly folkloric components. The intention was “to reconstruct the universe
[by] cheering it up” (Balla and Depero: “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”,
209). Depero wanted to produce saleable craftwork, either as unique specimens or
in small numbers that were useful and pleasing to the eye and could find a niche in
the market. However, he also produced interior designs that catered to the tastes of
the affluent classes, as in the smoking room of Villa Notari in Monza (1924–25), the
Camera da letto del saltimbanco (Bedroom of the acrobat) in the house of the Futur-
ist gallerist Giuseppe Sprovieri in Rome (1921), and the three rooms of the Cabaret
del Diavolo (The Devil’s Cabaret; 1921–22), later renamed ‘Bottega del Diavolo’ (The
Devil’s Workshop).
This cabaret, which offered a sort of round trip to the underworld, opened on
19 April 1922 in the basement of the Hotel Élite et des Étrangers in Rome. Depero’s
devil-exorcizing components in the décor and furniture put a stamp on this highly
usual nightclub, whose synaesthetic interventions and kinetic elements offered an
alternative to the usual nightspots of the capital. The dynamic space turned the specta-
tor into a real actor in the show and provided him with plenty of surprises and startling
emotions (Berghaus: “Futurist Cabarets, Artists’ Festivals and Banquets”, 388–391).
Depero’s club was not the only Futurist departure in this domain. In 1921, Balla
had designed the Bal Tic Tac (see below, p. 181), and in 1923 followed the Cabaret della
gallina a tre zampe (Cabaret of the Hen with Three Legs) that was attached to the Teatro
Sperimentale degli Indipendenti (Experimental Theatre of the Independents Group)
run by Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960). Because of its unusual interiors (see below,
pp. 180–181), it constituted, in the words of one of its visitors, “the most amazing and
bizarre nightclub in Europe” ([anon]: “Inaugurazione alla casa d’arte Bragaglia”).
Depero communicated a profusion of details for the three rooms (Heaven, Pur-
gatory and Hell) of his cabaret in the bolted book, Depero futurista, 1913–1927. The
furniture, the big and small lampshades, the hat stands and the chairs can be defined
as real sculptures or micro-architectures. The chairs became especially favourite ele-
ments in Depero’s design schemes as they gave him unlimited possibilities for practis-
ing his creativity, so much so that he put them at the centre of his 1927 tapestry, Festa
della sedia (Chair Festival), similar to what Balla did in his 1929 painting, La seggiola
dell’uomo strano (The Odd Man’s Chair). Depero designed many fanciful, asymmetri-
cal and light-hearted chairs that contained all the marks of his personality, not only
in their design but also in their colours. The Futurist chair was reduced in its function
and stripped of its leather, tapestry or velvet coverings and was thus freed from the
associations with stability and well-being. As wooden structures with painted sur-
faces, chairs became generic pieces of furniture, no longer confined to the enclosed
space of a bedroom, dining room or living room. From now on, they were movable
items that could change any environment and modify its character.
At the First International Exhibition of Decorative Arts in Monza (1923), Depero
showed an interior design called Sala trentina (Trento Room), and in 1924 he designed
the furniture of the Futurist Bar of the Grand Hotel Bristol in Merano. When he moved
180 Anna Maria Ruta

to New York, he decorated two rooms and the winter garden of the Zucca Restau-
rant (1929–1930), and four wall panels in the Enrico & Paglieri Restaurant in New
York (1930). The projects undertaken in New York did not provide Depero with the
economic outcome he had hoped for. However, the furniture created in a material
called ‘buxus’ (made from paper pulp that had been pressed and hardened, then var-
nished and polished) developed into a proto-industrial direction, in which Futurism,
Art Déco and functionality all merged into one (see Thea: “Depero and the Industrial
Art of Buxus”).
Beyond these interior settings, Depero devoted himself to ephemeral architec-
ture, stands and advertising pavilions in trade fairs. Some of these, like the Book
Pavilion for the publishers Bestetti, Tumminelli and Treves at the Monza Biennial
Exhibition of Decorative Arts in 1927, looked like a piece of typographic architecture
created from gigantic letters of the alphabet and were the result of great imagination
and technical finesse. Depero, the magician, applied his creativity also to the design
of party sceneries: the Veglia futurista (Futurist Ball, January 1923) was an extraordi-
nary event that included the collaboration of Luciano Baldessari (1896–1982), Carlo
Belli (1909–1983), Fausto Melotti (1901–1986) and Gino Pollini (1903–1991). Somewhat
related to this type of decoration was his festival float, Monopoli (1936), which had a
precursor in similar processional carts designed in 1922 by Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo
Sansoni, 1896–1974) and in 1928 by Pippo Rizzo.

The Roman case d’arte of Bragaglia and Balla

The case d’arte (houses of art), active between 1918 and 1935 across all of Italy, from
its North to its South, constituted “an authentic bridgehead” (Scudiero: “Un’avan-
guardia lunga trent’anni”, 17) between art and society. They functioned as artists’
salerooms and exhibition galleries attached to workshops and pursued a variety
of artistic directions, from the almost serial-style production of Depero and Enrico
Prampolini (1894–1956) to the pure craftsmanship of Balla, Tato and Rizzo. All of the
artists-craftsmen gave free rein to their artistic creative imaginations and produced a
large number of objects for the furnishing of the house of the future.
In 1925, when Marinetti transferred his residence from Milan to Rome, the capital
became a major centre for Futurism. A popular meeting ground was the casa d’arte
set up by Anton Giulio and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia (1894–1998) in via degli Avi-
gnonesi (1918). It functioned as an independent art gallery with social rooms attached
for meetings, lectures and performances. In 1921, it transferred to the basement of
Palazzo Tittoni in via Rasella, which incorporated the remains of the ancient thermal
bath of Septimius Severus. It was rebuilt in 1922 as the ‘Teatro Sperimentale degli
Indipendenti’. The art centre was furnished by Virgilio Marchi (1895–1960), Balla,
Depero and Prampolini. One of its main attractions was the Bar Room, the bright
 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 181

ceiling of which was decorated by Balla, whereas the walls were shaped with curved
and helical lines in an Expressionist manner that Marchi was fond of the furniture by
Depero had again a joyful and light character and included lampshades, cabinets,
tables and chairs. Giuseppina Bragaglia ([?]–1953), wife of Anton Giulio, decorated
the Gallery with drapes on the ceiling that were illuminated from the inside, cushions
and various objects scattered about the room.
Whereas the Bragalia brothers operated on the margins of the Futurist move-
ment, one of its propelling forces and central figures was Giacomo Balla, who can
also be considered the most extraordinary inventor of Futurist interior design, fur-
niture and fashion items. Some of his ideas were influenced by manifestos such as Il
primo mobilio italiano futurista (The First Italian Futurist Furniture, 1916), written by
Arnaldo Ginna (pseud. of Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini, 1890–1982), and Il mobilio futur-
ista (Futurist Furniture, written in 1916, published in 1920), by Francesco Cangiullo
(1884–1977). Balla’s first major design project was the Löwenstein house in Düsseldorf
(1912), characterized by a ludic, quasi child-like imagination, rigorous research into
dynamism and light refraction (iridescent compenetrations of colour) that energized
everything, and a treatment of the house as a mythological place where objects have
totemic value. Balla designed the house as a minimalist but well-proportioned unity.
The domestic space was completely reinvented in order to facilitate an imaginative
dialogue with those who would use it on a daily basis. Studying all the chromatic
and optical fluctuations of the design objects, Balla intended that the furniture both
reveal and hide its daily functions.
Between 1918 and 1921, Balla created various room furnishings, such as the futur-
camera (future-room) realized on the estate of Count Lovatelli in Argiano (c.1920).
In 1921, he designed the Bal Tic Tac, housed in the basement of a large apartment
block in Rome’s busy city centre. The French magazine, Les Tablettes praised it as
“a triumph of skilful imagination [...]. The very walls seem to dance: great architec-
tural lines appear to interpenetrate each other with their clear tonalities of light and
dark blue. They create a luminosity comparable to a carnival in the sky” (quoted in
Berghaus: “Futurist Cabarets, Artists’ Festivals and Banquets”, 385–386). For the Bal
Tic Tac, Balla created a luminous outdoor sign with thin small letters performing
a syncopated dance, a streetlamp, ceiling lights and vellum lampshades depicting
charming figures. The furniture possessed extraordinary surprise effects: foldable
and convertible, humanized meta-furniture, speaking furniture, etc. The bar counter,
the box office, the wall cabinets, panels for the bandstand and some windows were
all decorated with musical notes.
Balla’s furniture with its kinetic component and ludic surprise effects were a step
ahead of those by the Russian Constructivists and Suprematists, the kinetic sculp-
tures of the Ukrainian artist Olexandr Arkhipenko (1887–1964) and the creations of
the Romanian Constantin Brâncuşi (1876–1957). Balla’s phantasmagorical house was
a triumph of colour and surprise. Nothing was to stand in the way of his brilliant
ideas, no wall, furniture or decorative object, not even in the kitchen. For him, as
182 Anna Maria Ruta

for Depero, chairs were fundamental pieces of furniture; he gave them a deliciously
chromatic character, liberated them from their functionality and offered with them
dynamic alternatives facilitating a fast Futurist life, thus overcoming a culture of
sleepiness and laziness that was seen as curbing the wings of creative imagination.
Balla’s own house in via Oslavia in the Prati district of Rome was a real ‘house of
art’ to be lived in. Helped by his wife Luisa and daughters Luce and Elica, the master
created a broad range of furniture, executed in a playful-ironic vein. These pieces
transposed Futurist dynamism from the figurative to the decorative arts. They encom-
passed anything from objects for daily use to lampshades and ceramics, from tapes-
tries, cushions and carpets to magnificent flowers made from wood (see Masoero: Nel
giardino di Balla: Futurismo 1912–1928). His friend Guglielmo Jannelli (1895–1950) felt
that “Balla achieves a true renewal of taste” (Jannelli: “Futurballa” , 1933) and judged
that, for him, Balla was “of particular interest because of the fusion of life and art,
dream and reality, of Balla-the-man and Balla-the-artist he has achieved in himself”
(quoted in Balla: Con Balla, III, 92).

The case d’arte of Prampolini, Giannattasio, Melli,

Dal Monte and Tato
In the immediate post-war period, Rome offered other sales galleries for Futurist craft-
work. Between 1918 and 1921, Enrico Prampolini and the critic Mario Recchi (1891–
1938) ran a casa d’arte italiana (House of Italian Art), first in via S. Nicola da Tolentino
and then in via Francesco Crispi. Although it pursued a commercial, trade-oriented
approach, its permanent gallery, reading rooms and library, where concerts, lectures
and performances were organized, became a veritable club for an international intel-
lectual élite. Prampolini, who had been excluded from the Futurist group in Rome
and had thus not signed the manifesto, Futurist Refashioning of the Universe, devel-
oped his contacts with other avant-garde movements abroad (Dada, Suprematism,
Constructivism, De Stijl). Through his casa d’arte and the periodical Noi (We, 1920–
25), he fostered Futurism’s European connections and eventually became one of the
leading members of the movement, active also in the field of interior design.
He produced extremely elegant screens, curtains, painted cloths, tapestries, cush-
ions, carpets (among the most beautiful in the history of Futurist design), ceramics
and many lampshades, all in all trying to satisfy a public with not particularly discern-
ing tastes. Unlike Balla, who predominantly focussed on colour and light, Prampolini
interpreted the materials, chiefly those of a more modern character, with more than
a cursory glance at the style of the Bauhaus and various other foreign artists, whose
interior designs he often featured in the pages of Noi. Prampolini’s tables and benches
were not conceived as isolated elements in a room, but as organically integrated into
the surrounding environment, offering a unique and animating fusion of painting,
 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 183

sculpture and architecture. Examples of this approach can be found in the wall reliefs
of Marinetti’s new apartment in piazza Adriana (1925), the residence of German banker
Dr. Fritz Mannheimer in Paris (1928) and the boudoir in the house of the journalist and
lawyer Henri de Jouvenel and his wife Sarah Boas, also in Paris (1929).
Prampolini was also involved in the design of public environments, exhibition
spaces and trade fairs, often complying with the political-propagandist demands of the
Fascist era. His rather spectacular decorative interventions sought to overcome the fun-
damental antinomy between the ephemeral and the permanent. He used spaces to great
effect by allowing an interaction of lights, linguistic elements, polymaterial composi-
tions, industrial materials and modern reproduction technologies. Some of his creations
have a lasting place in the history of architectural-environmental design, for example
the Post Office buildings in Trento (1933) and La Spezia (1933) or the Futurist Pavilion at
the Fifth Triennial in Milan (1933) (see Pirani: “Prampolini e gli allestimenti”).
Between 1920 and 1923, another casa d’arte in the Eternal City was run by Ugo
Giannattasio (1888–1958), who produced Futurist furniture and applied arts. Few
traces remain of this activity aside from some sketches, which reveal a wide variety
of approaches, possibly owing to the personal tastes of his customers (see Crispolti
and Scudiero: Balla-Depero, 322). Brief mention should also be made of the short-lived
house of art founded by Roberto Melli (1885–1958) in via dei Coronari (1918), following
an announcement of its wide-ranging plans in Valori plastici (Melli: “Casa d’arte”).
In Imola, Mario Guido Dal Monte (1906–1990) set up in 1928 a casa d’arte called
‘Studio Magudarte’. Everything could be ordered from his catalogue, from furniture
to ceramics and from tapestries to design objects, but realized products were few in
numbers. In Bologna, a veritable anti-Futurist city, Tato founded a casa d’arte futur-
ista, which in 1923–1924 became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals. Tato
offered wall decorations and furnishings that were strongly marked by a cheerful
emphasis on colour and dynamic plasticism (Ruta: Arredi futuristi, 40). Tato’s designs
oscillated between traditionalism and Futurism. His chairs were made from plain and
inexpensive wood, designed to be quickly replaced. An ironic or even clownish vein
can be found in his amusing lampshades or in the Futurmensolmascher (a Futurist
masked wall-shelf). Its components could be assembled in a variety of manners so
that they resembled the sculptures or marionettes produced by Depero and Gerardo
Dottori (1884–1977) (see Galassi: “Il pittore Tato”) and had the same sarcastic Dada
touch as his ‘photo-camouflages’ (see Barbato: “L’ obbiettivo futurista”). In 1924, Tato
moved his house of art to Rome, where he catered to a middle-class taste with furni-
ture ranging from late-Liberty to an eclectic Moorish style.
As all of Tato’s furniture is lost, we can only judge it from period photos. The same
must be said about the interiors he executed in the house of Nello Quilici, director of
Il resto del Carlino; the salon of Castello Vigoleno, where Maria Ruspoli, Duchess of
Gramont, regularly assembled an international artistic circle; and the new headquar-
ters of the Corriere padano in Ferrara, all of which seem to have been characterized by
colourful narrative schemes.
184 Anna Maria Ruta

Pippo Rizzo and the houses of art in Sicily

Southern Italy saw low productivity in the sector of the applied arts. As already
mentioned, in 1916 Francesco Cangiullo had penned the Manifesto del mobilio futur-
ista (Manifesto of Futurist Furniture) in Naples. Carlo Cocchia (1903–1993), interior
designer and decorator, established in 1928 a bottega di decorazione (decoration
workshop, with the term ‘bottega’ underlining its handicraft character) and ran
it together with the photographer Giulio Parisio (1891–1967), who introduced the
concept of ‘decorative photography’ (see Artieri: “La mostra Parisio e Cocchia alla
‘Bottega di decorazione’ ”).
A far more lively scene developed in Sicily, especially in Pippo Rizzo’s casa d’arte
in Palermo, run with modern managerial briskness, which in the Futurist movement
was otherwise only associated with Marinetti. Having lived for a while in Rome and
having improved his skills in the studio of Giacomo Balla, Rizzo returned to Sicily
with the intention of following the example set in the Roman houses of art. With the
support of his wife Maria Carramusa, he founded the Casa d’Arte Pippo Rizzo – Arti
Decorative Futuriste (House of Art Pippo Rizzo – Futurist Decorative Arts), also known
as ‘La Bottega’. It was a real art centre, in which unforgettable performances were held,
together with debates and lectures that enlivened the cultural life of Palermo. The work-
shop produced furniture, decorative objects, tapestries, carpets, cushions, chandeliers
and lampshades, silverware and ceramics (manufactured by the Coniglione pottery in
Catania or by the Futurists Giuseppe Fabbri [1901–1995] and Mario Ortolani [1901–1955]
in Faenza). Pippo Rizzo exhibited his works with great success, also outside the island,
and was instrumental in giving modern applied art a legitimate place in Palermo.
At the Mostra internazionale delle arti decorative (International Exhibition of Deco-
rative Arts) in Taormina in 1928, Rizzo showed a complete interior designed in a rigid
geometrical style, livened up by the serrated struts of the small tables and chairs. Furni-
ture decorated with triangular and step-like motives in grey-red lacquer and red leather
coverings suited a snobbish public but otherwise did not naturally find many buyers. The
shirt shop Camiceria Di Fresco, completely furnished in Futurist style, caused a scandal
amongst the sober inhabitants of Palermo. An equally extraordinary décor could be
found in the Angolo di casa (House Corner, 1925), which featured embroideries by Rizzo’s
wife, Maria Carramusa. Rizzo designed a wonderful Bal Masqué, entitled Azzurro stel-
lata (Starry Blue, 1927) and a spirited float for a carnival procession, Fioritura futurista
(Futurist Flowering, 1928), made of zigzag-shaped paper flowers, triangles and cuneiform
elements. Rizzo also encouraged his friend Vittorio Corona (1901–1966) and his wife Gigia
(1909–2013) to open an art workshop. Gigia had moved from Udine to Palermo, where
her friends Corona, Rizzo, Giovanni Varvaro (1888–1973) and Ladislao Kondor (dates
unkown) designed a Futurist bedroom for her, of which a charming cabinet decorated in
strong colours has survived. The activity of the Corona workshop was characterized by the
absence of furniture and the systematic and coherent realization of cushions, tapestries
and decorative panels made from rough wool and coloured cloths of lively imagination.
 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 185

Guglielmo Jannelli designed the Villino Mamertino in Terme Vigliatore near

Messina (1924–1926), which became the best-known example of Futurist interior
design on the island of Sicily. Jannelli created the winding inner staircase, stained-
glass windows, tiled floors and cushions, while Balla planned the charming coloured
wooden parlour, and Pippo Rizzo the furniture. To these outstanding works of crafts-
manship one needs to add two known pieces of furniture by Giulio D’Anna, a chest
decorated with a radiant and intensely chromatic aeropainting and a charming hat
stretcher of 1928, realized in Messina, probably under the impression of what he had
seen in the Taormina Exhibition of Decorative Arts.

The interiors of Ivo Pannaggi and Gerardo Dottori

and the furniture of Thayaht and Acquaviva
In the Marches region, Vinicio Paladini (1902–1971) and his fried Ivo Pannaggi
(1901–1981) gave birth to some extraordinary interior designs inspired by Russian
Constructivism, Czech Cubism and De Stijl. The house Pannaggi designed for the
industrialist Erso Zampini in Esanatoglia (Macerata) was created in 1925–1926
and had four rooms (anteroom, dining room, parlour for radio transmissions, and
bedroom). It was an example of a total intervention into what Pannaggi called
“interior architecture” (Pannaggi: “Casa futurista Zampini”, 10). From the furni-
ture to the bedspreads and tablecloths and from the lampshades and chandeliers
with indirect or semi-direct light to the stained-glass windows, everything was sup-
ported by a rational structure. The house was characterized by soft chromatism,
pure shapes and surfaces; it had only minimal furnishings, two paintings and two
bas-reliefs.
In Perugia (Umbria), Gerardo Dottori worked in 1923–1924 on the planning and
realization of public and private interiors. For the restaurant Altro mondo (The Other
World), he designed furniture, lamps and various ornaments of a highly theatrical
nature, thus following in the steps of Depero’s Cabaret del Diavolo. Dottori’s Hell
and Heaven were characterized by curvilinear interlacements in the banisters of the
entrance staircase, reminiscent of Art Nouveau. More Futurist in character were the
flaming wall decorations, at least according to the impression one can gain from
the few surviving photographs. Furthermore, Dottori designed the Bar Ricci in
Perugia (1923), the house of the Futurist Mario Carli (1889–1935) in Rome (1924), his
own house (1925), animated with painted furniture in Futurist style, and in 1930 the
house of the lawyer Guido Cimino (1883–1978‎), which featured an interesting side-
board in a colourful dining room and rather heavy desks characterized by geometric
shapes, but streamlined by decorative painting (Duranti: “La sala da pranzo di casa
Cimino”). Such furniture was rare among the Futurists, as study rooms, libraries and
desks were related to academic culture and hence deprecated.
186 Anna Maria Ruta

In the evolution of Futurist design, the work of Thayaht (pseud. of Ernesto Micha-
helles, 1893–1959) played a minor rôle as he did not stray too far away from conven-
tional structures and directed his elegant creativity predominantly towards fashion
design, except in some exquisite pieces such as a blue lacquered secretaire of 1923.
Giovanni Acquaviva (1900–1971) from Leghorn was, above all, active in the fine
arts, but occasionally designed furniture, wallpaper, lampshades and, together with
Farfa (pseud. of Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini, 1881–1964) and Fillìa, some ceramics.
A surviving sketch shows a dining room with six chairs furnished with crenellated
backrests, a dressing table and some coffee tables that have a pronounced geometric
quality, as if they had been inspired by the works of Prampolini, Pannaggi, Dottori or
the Deutscher Werkbund and the Bauhaus. In Acquaviva’s furniture, ornaments and
decorations disappeared in favour of elementary geometric figures (squares, circles,
triangles, etc.), sometimes enlivened by colours that aimed to enhance, through the
encounter of vertical and horizontal lines, that dynamic simultaneity that was central
to Futurist aesthetics. But Acquaviva also loved the tactile quality of wood and exalted
its materiality (Bottaro: L’ arredamento d’interno, 67–71).

The rôle of women in Futurist applied arts

In all the case d’arte mentioned above, women had an important function. There were
more of them than it may appear, as they were frequently active behind shop fronts
that carried their husbands’ names, but they were often crucial collaborators, espe-
cially in the daily running of the workshops and in translating the creative process
from intellectual ideation to manual realization of designs. Quite a number of these
women made a strong contribution to the renewal of the arts, some as craftswomen,
others as craftswomen-artists, others also as designers and entrepreneurs. They often
preferred working with fabrics and produced carpets, tapestries and cushions, as
well as jewels, ceramics, lampshades and other objects. More often than not, they
did not sign their works, and often they did not stray from the traditional perimeter of
their houses. However, when the applied arts gained a significant market place in the
1920s, the floodgates opened and female creativity became visible. They exhibited,
next to their husbands and male friends, in important exhibitions and left an indeli-
ble mark on the development of interior design.
In Russia, Cubo-Futurist aesthetics were introduced to the applied arts by Natalia
Goncharova (1881–1962), Liubov Popova (1889–1924), Olga Rozanova (1886–1918),
Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958), Alexandra Exter (1882–1949) and others. In France,
Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) made a name for herself with her furniture and décor for
the bookshop Au sans pareil in Neuilly-sur-Seine (1922). In Italy, there were several
centres of female creativity. In Milan, we find the already mentioned Alma Fidora,
Chiff, Regina, as well as Rosa Menni Giolli (1889–1975) and Bice Lazzari (1900–1981),
 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 187

whose creations in plain materials (bags, belts, rope scarves, string necklaces, wooden
jewels, tapestries, cushions and hand-knotted carpets) quickly won over critics and
the public. When Bice Lazzari moved to Rome, she opened her own studio and col-
laborated with architects on the wall decorations of public buildings, exhibitions and
private houses.
In Rome, apart from the already mentioned Giuseppina Bragaglia and Luce (1904–
1994) and Elica Balla (1914–1993), it is necessary to remember Brunas (artist name of
Bruna Pestagalli Somenzi, dates unknown), who distinguished herself through the
delicacy and imagination of her ceramics, tapestries, intarsia and curtains with bold
embroideries, as could also be admired in the Palazzo delle Poste in Palermo (1934),
with Futurist curtains executed in vibrant colours and different materials to comple-
ment the dynamism of architectural forms by Angiolo Mazzoni (1894–1979), murals by
Benedetta (artist name of Benedetta Cappa-Marinetti) and paintings by Tato. Leandra
Angelucci Cominazzini (1890–1981) directed her attention above all to ceramics and
drew inspiration from her Umbrian heritage. Marinetti’s versatile wife, Benedetta
Cappa, also devoted herself to ceramics – working in Faenza with Riccardo Gatti and
Mario Ortolani and in Albisola with Giuseppe Mazzotti (see p. 91 in this volume) –
and designed some stained glass windows. International acclaim was won by Fides
Stagni Testi (1904–2002), who worked with her husband for Maria Monaci Gallenga
(1880–1944), owner of a furniture company on via Veneto, with an important branch
in Paris (in 1928 renamed ‘Boutique Italienne’). Stagni created highly regarded fabrics
with airbrushed motifs and amusing Futurist patterns.
In Palermo, Maria Carramusa (1900–1978), Gigia Corona (1903–2013) and Rosita
Lojacono (1897–2001) worked as a female group that was entirely autonomous, not
tied to a specific workshop, but greatly stimulated by Futurist aesthetics. Lojacono’s
designs were manufactured by established firms and easily found clients, especially
her printed silk scarves, cushions made from silk or canvas or patchwork-fabric, cur-
tains made of batik, rugs, wallpaper or fabrics in modern geometries and refined
embellishments. She exhibited her work in all the important national exhibitions and
received much acclaim from both critics and customers.

Conclusion
The influence exercised by Futurism on the development of the applied arts was
revolutionary because it drew artists’ attention towards fields of activity that had
previously been the exclusive domain of craftsmen. Subsequently, the applied arts
became a serious and programmatic pursuit for many artists who aimed at produc-
ing objects destined to be of benefit to their users and that asserted specific aes-
thetic values and qualities. In the 1950s and 60s, the industrial design of Pierre Sala
(1948–1989), Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007), the Memphis group of Alessandro Mendini
188 Anna Maria Ruta

(born 1931) and the Studio Alchimia repeatedly revealed that they had their roots
in Futurism. Some avant-garde firms or individuals, such as the architect Giuseppe
Albanese (born 1965), created Futurist furniture (Albanese: Il mobile futurista; Zang!
Il primo mobile futurista) that offers inspiration to new generations of artists, design-
ers and engineers. Thus, we can observe interior designs and decorative schemes
created by Archigram, ArchiGO, Santiago Calatrava, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves,
Zaha Hadid, etc. during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century that are in
tune with the style of a postmodern, neo-Futurist type of architecture (see p. 81 in
this volume).

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Further reading
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decorative siciliane di Taormina del 1928.” Maria Flora Giubilei, and Valerio Terraroli, eds.: La
forza della modernità: Arti in Italia 1920–1950. Lucca: Edizioni Fondazione Centro Studi sull’ Arte
“Licia e Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti”, 2013. 59–54.
Belli, Carlo, and Menna Filiberto: Prampolini: Verso la sintesi. Roma: Galleria Editalia, 1980.
Belli, Gabriella: “Arredo, oggettistica, moda: L’ avventura della ‘Ricostruzione futurista
dell’universo’.” Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Futurismo, 1909–1944: Arte, architettura, spettacolo,
grafica, letteratura. Milano: Mazzotta, 2001. 147–162.
Belli, Gabriella: “Fortunato Depero: Ricostruire l’ ambiente: Mobili, arazzi, giocattoli, progetti di
architettura e arredamento, testimoniano il nuovo rapporto dinamico tra oggetti e spazio nel
lavoro dell’artista futurista.” Ottagono (Milano) 27:105 (December 1992): 54–60.
Belli, Gabriella: “Una casa per il mago.” Art e dossier 8:75 (January 1993): 14–15.
Belli, Gabriella, ed.: Depero: Dal futurismo alla Casa d’Arte. Milano: Charta, 1994.
Belli, Gabriella, ed.: La casa del mago: Le arti applicate nell’opera di Fortunato Depero, 1920–1942.
Milano: Charta, 1992.
Bentivoglio, Mirella, and Franca Zoccoli: Women Artists of Italian Futurism. New York: Midmarch Arts
Press, 1997. Italian edn. Le futuriste italiane nelle arti visive. Roma: De Luca, 2009.
190 Anna Maria Ruta

Bottari, Stefano: “La Mostra di Arti Decorative Siciliane.” La gazzetta di Messina, 19 May 1928.
Bottaro, Silvia: “Ambientazione.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Il dizionario del futurismo. Firenze: Vallecchi,
2001. 17–20.
Cangiullo, Francesco: “Il mobilio futurista, i mobili a sorpresa parlanti e paroliberi.” Roma futurista,
3:71 (22 February 1920): 1.
Cavallucci, Giulio: Le “case d‘arte” futuriste: Laboratori di arti applicate nell’Italia tra le due guerre.
Pescara: Ianieri, 2016.
Celant, Germano: “Futurismo.” G. Celant, ed.: Ambiente/arte: Dal futurismo alla Body Art. Venezia:
Edizioni “La Biennale di Venezia”, 1977. 8–15.
Cerutti, Carla, and Raffaella Sgubin, eds.: Futurismo – Moda – Design: La ricostruzione
dell’universo quotidiano. Exhibition catalogue. Gorizia: Musei Provinciali, 19 dicembre 2009–1
maggio 2010.
Crispolti, Enrico: “Un arredamento futurista di Pannaggi.” Arte illustrata 2:22–24 (October–
December 1969): 72–81. Reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Pannaggi e l’ arte meccanica
futurista. Milano: Mazzotta, 1995. 293–297.
Crispolti, Enrico: Giacomo Balla: Due aspetti della ricostruzione futurista dell’universo: Mobili e
arazzi. Pescara: Coen & Pieroni, 1975.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Casa Balla e il futurismo a Roma. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Accademia di
Francia, Villa Medici, 28 settembre–3 dicembre 1989. Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello
Stato, 1989.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Fillia: Fra immaginario meccanico e primordio cosmico. Exhibition catalogue.
Cuneo: San Francesco, 14 maggio–30 luglio 1988. Milano: Mazzotta, 1988.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo. Exhibition catalogue. Torino: Musei Civici
Mole Antonelliana, giugno–ottobre 1980.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Vittorio Corona attraverso il futurismo. Trapani: Celebes, 1978.
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opere su carta, 1916–1966. Roma: De Luca, 2014.
De Guttry, Irene, Paola Maino, and Mario Quesada: Le arti minori d’autore in Italia dal 1900 al 1930.
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D’Elia, Anna: L’ universo futurista: Una mappa, dal quadro alla cravatta. Bari: Dedalo, 1988.
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dell’architettura e restauro (Firenze) 17 (January–June 1997): 73–84.
 Decorative Arts, Furniture and Interior Design 191

Ginna, Arnaldo: “Il primo mobilio futurista.” L’ Italia futurista 1:12 (15 December 1916).
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Pollenza-Macerata: La Nuova Foglio, 1976.
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Universo, Mario, ed.: Fortunato Depero e il mobile futurista = Fortunato Depero and Futurist
Furniture. Exhibition catalogue. Padova: 16° Salone del mobile triveneto, Fiera di Padova, 1990.
Venezia: Marsilio, 1990.
Verdone, Mario, ed.: Acquaviva. Savona: Comune di Savona, Assessorato alla Pubblica Istruzione e
Cultura, 1987.
Verdone, Mario, Francesca Pagnotta, and Marina Bidetti: La Casa d’arte Bragaglia, 1918–1930.
Roma: Bulzoni, 1992.
Watts, Paola, and Claudio Strinati, eds.: Bice Lazzari 1900–1981: Opere dal 1921 al 1981 = Werke von
1921 bis 1981. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Palazzo Venezia, 1987. Frankfurt am Main: Westend
Galerie, Februar–März 1987. Roma: Multigrafica, 1987.
Daniele Lombardi
12 Music
Pratella and the foundation of musical Futurism
More than a century after its appearance on the European artistic scene, Futurism has
become firmly established in the chronicles of twentieth-century avant-garde move-
ments, the first of many -isms that followed (Dadaism, Surrealism, Constructivism,
etc.). However, the term ‘Futurism’ is often used inappropriately to refer to all Modern-
ist trends, however strange and exotic they might be. A historical account of Futurism
needs to recognize that Marinetti was the first to use the genre of the manifesto as a
form of artistic communication in order to outline his aesthetic programme. In The
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), he proposed an outline for the future
development in the arts, thereby providing a mission statement that all adherents of
the movement could subscribe to.
The Futurist adventure in the field of music began a year later with a meeting
between Marinetti and the young composer Francesco Balilla Pratella (1880–1955). In
1903, Pratella had taken part in a competition organized by the publisher Sonzogno
and was one of twenty winners (out of 237 participants) with his opera Lilia, which
was subsequently performed in Lugo. His fame increased with the dialect opera,
La Sina d’Vargön: Scene della Romagna bassa per la musica (Rosellina dei Vergoni:
Scenes from the Romagnolo Countryside Put to Music), a rare example of the use of
popular traditions in music at the time. It was during a performance of this opera
at the municipal theatre of Imola on 20 August 1910 that Pratella met Marinetti and
immediately joined his Futurist movement.
As the official musician of the group, Pratella made several theoretical contribu-
tions that adopted Marinetti’s radical viewpoints and applied them to music. Between
1910 and 1912, he wrote three manifestos that outlined a theoretical framework for a
new conception of music. The first was Manifesto dei musicisti futuristi (Manifesto
of Futurist Musicians, 1910), which reaffirmed Marinetti’s position through a series
of judgments and claims intended to give a moral dimension to the musical life of
the age and to explore new ways of overcoming the limitations of Italian musical
sensibilities at the time, especially the reactionary cultural context in the Italian prov-
inces, from which others, such as Alfredo Casella (1883–1947) and Alberto Savinio
(1891–1952), had fled abroad. The second manifesto, La musica futurista: Manifesto
tecnico (Futurist Music: Technical Manifesto, 1911), speculated on the possible devel-
opments of musical composition within the context of European musical life, while
the third, La distruzione della quadratura (The Destruction of Quadrature, 1912),
investigated theoretical aspects through a study of rhythm. All three manifestos
demonstrated that musical theory and experimentation were further advanced in the
rest of Europe than in Italy. Paris and Vienna, in particular, were attracting all kinds
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-012
194 Daniele Lombardi

of revolutionary practitioners who developed concepts of polytonality, atonality and

twelve-tone serialism, as, for example, Arnold Schönberg in Pierrot Lunaire (Moon-
struck Pierrot, 1912) and Die glückliche Hand (The Hand of Fate, 1910–1913), Ferruccio
Busoni in Sonatina seconda (1912), Alban Berg in Altenberg Lieder (1913), Igor Stravin-
sky in Le Sacre du printemps (The Rite of Spring, 1913), Debussy in his second book
of Préludes (1913) and Anton Webern in Fünf Orchesterstück (Five Orchestral Pieces,
1913) and Bagatelles for string quartet (1913). It was within this context that Pratella
presented Inno alla vita: Sinfonia futurista op. 30 (Hymn to Life: A Futurist Symphony,
1912) in Rome. It contained compositional features that were to become a constant in
Pratella’s work: a Futur-Expressionism marked by a torpid sensuality alternating with
popularist roots and ‘Futurist’ motifs, at times carefully dissonant, with a reiterated
use of the hexatonic scale reminiscent of Claude Debussy (1862–1918).
The Futurists’ attack on a country that was profoundly linked to a traditionalist
culture sparked a fierce reaction from the musical world. In 1911, Ildebrando Pizzetti
(1880–1968) condemned Pratella’s theories and the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians,
while Giannotto Bastianelli (1883–1927), who himself drew up a manifesto in 1914,
and other critics were more positive (see Lombardi: Il suono veloce, 32–33). One of the
most critical articles was written in 1914 by Gennaro Napoli:

This is music that is really ingenious, free and modern, that sounds as if “the soul is embracing
the future”; music that reflects “all those new impulses of nature, tamed by man by virtue of his
ceaseless ‘scientific’ discoveries”, that renders “the soul of the masses, of the great industrial
complexes, of trains, ocean liners, battleships, automobiles and aeroplanes…” It makes me feel
nostalgic for a “nauseating” Neapolitan lovesong. (Napoli: “Futurismo musicale”, 5)

The debate on the Futurist aesthetic agenda, and the compositions that resulted from
it, continued in many newspapers over the next few years. Alfredo Casella, one of the
few who attempted to stay in touch with what was happening in the rest of Europe,
never wanted to be considered a ‘Futurist’, as he wrote in a lively article from 1919
(Casella: “Diffida”), although in this period his harsh and highly experimental style
had much in common with Marinetti’s artistic vision. Even the boldest Italian com-
posers – Alfredo Casella, Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973), Ildebrando Pizzetti,
Franco Alfano (1876–1954) and Ottorino Respighi (1879–1936) – who had emerged as
the protagonists of Italian musical life, kept their distance as they did not dream of
forsaking the heritage of the past or of indulging in subversive experimentation that
would lead to a crisis of musical form and genre (see Lombardi: “La sfida alle stelle!”).
In this way a querelle between Futurists and conservatives began, which was often
portrayed as a dispute between dilettantes and academics.
Pratella’s compositions remained anchored to those forms that he saw as the
fullest expression of Futurist music: the orchestral and choral symphonic poem and
the musical drama. Urged on by the tireless Marinetti, Pratella began work on an
opera that, for the first time, tackled the heroism of aviation. Initially, it was to be
called L’ eroe (The Hero), but the title was eventually changed to L’ aviatore Dro (The
 Music 195

Aviator Dro). It had three acts and was first performed at the Teatro Rossini in Lugo
on 4 October 1920, and after decades of oblivion it was restaged in 1996. In this work,
Pratella attempted to achieve a synthesis of sound and colour. The scene of the dreams
(sogni) involved a rare instance of Wagnerian influence and contained analogies with
Luigi Dallapiccola’s one-act opera, Volo di notte (Night Flight, 1940). Pratella’s opera
predated other musical works inspired by the theme of aviation, such as Kurt Weill’s
Der Lindberghflug (Lindbergh’s Flight, 1929), Casella’s Il deserto tentato (The Attempt
on the Desert, 1936–37), and Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero (The Prisoner, 1949). Pratella
was a firm believer in the relationship between intervals as a means of expressivity, a
relationship that he never ceased to exploit. “For man, absolute truth consists in what
he feels as a human being”, he wrote (Pratella: “Futurist Music: Technical Manifesto”,
82). Therefore, his poetics of modality, which he called “generative emotional motif”
(motivo passionale generatore; Pratella: “Futurist Music: Technical Manifesto”, 82),
bordered on Expressionism.

Russolo and the ‘Art of Noise’

Marinetti, who placed his trust in Pratella as a musician, urged him to go a step fur-
ther and take a more active part in European musical life. Meanwhile, the leader of
Futurism was contacted by the artist Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), who came from a
family of well-established musicians. His brother had a brilliant career as a pianist,
organist and conductor, collaborating with Toscanini’s orchestra. Luigi Russolo had
studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and had worked as a graphic designer be-
fore joining the Futurist circle in Milan (Tagliapietra: Luigi Russolo: Vita e opere di un
futurista, Collovini: Luigi Russolo incisore, Cavadini: Luigi Russolo: Grafiche, disegni,
dipinti, and Folini, Gasparotto, and Tagliapietra: Luigi Russolo: Al di là della materia).
He participated as a painter in their first group exhibitions, but around 1913 focussed
his attention more and more on music, which at the outset was for him primarily a
matter of theory. However, he became responsible for what today is considered to be
the most important development in the history of Futurist music. In 1913, he pub-
lished the manifesto, L’ arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), addressed to Pratella, in
which he theorized on the possibility of making music with audio sources that imitate
the noises of life. He described an imaginary world of sounds that represented the
sounds of everyday reality, the world of work, factories and life in a metropolis (Ches-
sa: Luigi Russolo, Futurist, Brown: “The Noise Instruments of Luigi Russolo”, Hegarty:
Noise-Music: A History, Morgan: “ ‘A New Musical Reality’ ”, and Poggi: “The Futurist
Noise Machine”).
There had been some precursors, for example Symphonie des forces mécaniques
by Carol-Bérard (pseud. of Bernard Ollivier), said to have been written in 1908 or
1910 (Prieberg: Musica ex machina, 72, and Dumesnil: La Musique contemporaine en
196 Daniele Lombardi

France, 215–216). Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), in his Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der
Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, 1907), had already outlined a similar
theory and was one of the first to come to grips with a conception of microtonal
music, referring to the first electric generator produced in Washington by Taddeus
Cahill, later known as the Telharmonium (Prieberg: Musica ex machina, 25). After a
life spent listening to the clarinet, the traditional orchestra, the piano and the harp-
sichord, Busoni believed that music had to move beyond traditional sounds and that
the moment had come to construct new instruments for this purpose.
Russolo’s ideas flew in the face of traditional academic thinking. To conceive
of noise as the arrival point of an aesthetic process meant consigning harmony and
melody to the rubbish heap and transforming sounds into events. With the help of the
technician Ugo Piatti (1888–1953), he constructed new instruments that were able to
produce these sounds: he called them intonarumori, instruments for ‘tuning’ sounds
at various pitches. It was an ingenious revival of an instrument from previous centu-
ries, the Ghironda (wheel fiddle). The intonarumori were actually boxes that housed
a wooden disc. A handle on the outside of the box was connected to a rotor inside;
when the handle was turned, the rotor rubbed against a string, the vibration of which
was amplified through a membrane. An external megaphone gave the sound a further
boost. Moving the handle up and down, the operator tightened or loosened the string,
thereby raising or lowering the pitch and making a glissando, which could be held at
any position. This was a totally new concept, even though in 1903 the eccentric Dutch
scientist Henri Adrien Naber (1867–1944) had invented an orchestra of sirens (Koning:
“Dr. H.A. Naber”).
The characteristic timbre of the intonarumori was provided by the wooden disc:
smooth for the Ululatore (Howler), indented for the Crepitatore (Crackler), with a
metal spring for the Gorgogliatore (Gurgler) and so on. The first prototypes were pro-
duced between 1913 and 1914, the first of which, a Scoppiatore (Rubber), was pre-
sented at the Storchi Theatre in Modena on 2 June 1913 (Berghaus: Italian Futurist
Theatre, 118–122). Subsequently, Russolo worked on further Noise-Intoners, ending
up with 29 in the three concerts held at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées in Paris (17, 27
and 28 June 1921). He subsequently combined his family of apparatuses in a single
instrument, which he baptized Rumorarmonio or Russolofono.
With his noise instruments, Russolo had overturned the traditional musical
parameters of pitch, intensity, timbre and rhythm and pushed sound into a totally
new dimension, opening up new grammatical and syntactical possibilities. The
bundle structure created by continuous sounds gave the impression of a linear flow,
or what Russolo called “acoustic voluptuousness” (Russolo: L’ arte dei rumori, 92).
It was based on the analysis of the real sounds heard in everyday life, in which all
acoustic phenomena were catalogued. Russolo then attempted to reproduce each
of these phenomena with an instrument. To oppose the abstraction of grammatical
formalism in tempered music with the material nature of the sound source, which
could be realized in unexpected fusions, was nothing short of revolutionary. In this
 Music 197

process, sound was indeed abstracted but only to be rendered material once again,
and Russolo was fully aware that this would be far more Futurist than any novelty
emerging from music written according to traditional parameters. His 1913 manifesto,
The Art of Noises, and the book with the same title that followed three years later,
constitute the first fundamental technical treatise on suono-rumore (noise-sound; see
“The Art of Noises: A Futurist Manifesto”, 134); a century later, Russolo’s conceptions
and practical experiments can be considered the most significant legacy of Futur-
ism to music. However, using the instruments made by his brother Antonio Russolo
did not do him great service when the latter played Corale and Serenata, two rather
uninteresting pieces composed by his brother, in a concert given at the Théâtre des
Champs-Élysées (17, 27 and 28 June 1924; see also p. 459 in the entry on France), in
which he used the intonarumori in conjunction with a small orchestra (the two com-
positions were also released as a 78 rpm record in 1924).
Marinetti was an intellectual and occasional music critic (see Lista: La Scène
futuriste, 26–30) who understood the importance of the international context of Futur-
ist music and did everything he could to promote a Futurist music of noises. The scep-
tical reactions of some, and the platonic enthusiasm of others (including well-known
composers such as Maurice Ravel and Edgar Varèse, who heard the intonarumori at
Marinetti’s home in Milan in 1914), identified Russolo as being more of an artist than
a musician. The experience of the arte dei rumori has not found a place in the history
of music as almost no original recordings, scores and musical instruments remains.
Russolo shares a fate similar to that of the architect Antonio Sant’Elia, whose
extraordinarily designs were never realized. Their intuitions occupied an important
place in twentieth-century history, alongside contemporary masterpieces, but their
value was only understood after the Second World War, when the Utopias they envis-
aged were taken up in musical and architectural thought. The 1950s saw the advent
of Musique concrète, invented by Pierre Schaeffer (1910–1995). The use of ready-made
noises recorded and assembled in a musical collage mark the first clear derivation
from the Spirale di rumori (spiral of noises; see Chessa: Luigi Russolo, 151–168). A few
years previously, John Cage (1912–1992) had invented his ‘prepared piano’, a percus-
sion instrument that modified sound by adding objects such as screws, insulation
material, rubber, pieces of wood, etc. between the strings, the distances between them
calculated to produce an interplay of harmonic resonances. In the electronic music of
the 1950s, the concept of horizontal structure can be found, too. Here, bundles of
sound were meant to encourage the listener to contemplate, analyse and appreciate
the secondary timbres and the complex spectral features of the rhythms. They were
technically more advanced than Russolo’s, due to the use of magnetic wire systems
and tape recording.
Russolo also invented the arco enarmonico for the violin, with the intention of cre-
ating new sonorities (see Russolo: “L’ arco enarmonico”). It was a kind of long screw
that vibrated the string when pulled across it. The vibration was produced at the point
where the bow was drawn, dividing the string into two parts, and two sounds that
198 Daniele Lombardi

corresponded to the proportions of these two parts. The bow could be drawn over
the string at any point to produce any fraction of a tone. Thanks to Russolo, all tonal
systems, including polytonality, atonality and twelve-tone serialism, were given up
in favour of what both Pratella and Russolo called ‘enarmonia’ (enharmonic modu-
lation; see Pratella “Futurist Music: Technical Manifesto”, 81; Russolo: “Conquista
totale dell’enarmonismo”), which for them meant the possibility of moving from a
high frequency sound to a low one without passing through intermediate stages,
but by using glissando. This changed everything because at this point music was no
longer to be codified in a system of 88 levels, but could have an infinite number.
Today, only Russolo’s theoretical works survive. There are no prototypes of
instruments, and not any musical manuscript except for a fragment of Risveglio di
una città (Awakening of a City, 1913), reproduced in the review Lacerba. His Futur-
ist manifesto, The Art of Noises, began with the reflection that in ancient times the
world was immersed in silence. He then focussed attention on the metropolis, the
machine and everything that burst onto the scene in the new century, bringing with
it new sounds. He believed in a Utopia in which everyday noise would substitute a
musical tradition that was linked to the past and had to give way to modernity. His
Ululatori, Gorgogliatori, Scoppiatori, Sibilatori, Ronzatori, Stropicciatori and all the
rest of them can be considered today in much the same way as Marcel Duchamp’s
Fontaine (Fountain, 1917), an invention that was meant to initiate a new way of con-
ceiving ‘art’.

Futurist music after the First World War

It was obvious that the myth of speed and everything that had been discussed in
Futurist manifestos before the First World War had irreversibly transformed the con-
cept of form in relation to the passing of time. The linear, narrative nature of sound
had been destroyed or irreversibly fragmented in a collage. Increasingly removed
from narration or representation, art had given rise to deformations of classical no-
tions of form.
One interesting aspect that stemmed from the early Futurist serate (see pp. 247–
248 in the entry on Italian theatre in the present volume) was the practice of improvi-
sation. In 1921, two Roman musicians, Mario Bartoccini (1898–1964) and Aldo Mantia
(1903–1982), published the manifesto, L’ improvvisazione musicale (Improvisation
in Music), which, for the first time, theorized on free improvisation both by soloists
and by entire orchestras. Several Futurist theatre productions in the post-war period
required the cooperation of musicians. Fortunato Depero’s Balli plastici (Plastic
Ballets) was presented on 14 April 1918 by the puppet company of Gorno dell’ Acqua
at the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome. The four plays included music by Alfredo Casella,
Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson (Lord Berners; 1883–1950), Gian Francesco Malipiero
 Music 199

and Béla Bartók (1881–1945). The musical director was Alfredo Casella (see Berghaus:
Italian Futurist Theatre, 309–315). Mention should also be made of the Teatro del
colore, which had been invented by Achille Ricciardi (1884–1923) in an attempt to
dramatize moods and emotions through colour, in an abstract approach to theatre,
which made use of forms moving on stage and the projection of coloured light
(Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 347–357). In 1919, Ricciardi published Il teatro
del colore: Estetica del dopo-guerra (Theatre of Colours: A Post-war Aesthetics) and,
together with Enrico Prampolini (1894–1956), put on four programmes with three to
four plays each at the Teatro Argentina in Roma (21–31 March 1920). Prampolini’s pro-
duction had the collaboration of a number of musicians who played music by Frédéric
Chopin, Pratella, Isaac Albéniz, Adelmo Damerini, Gian Francesco Malipiero and
Vittorio Gui. Prampolini sought to transform set design into an art that interpreted
the drama in a non-mimetic manner and whose dimensions consisted of time and
movements through space, rather than static space.
Any attempt to shed light on music from this second period of Futurism, under
Fascism, faces the difficulty that musicians working during the time tended to remove
this tragic period from their memory. However, two musicians are worthy of attention:
Franco Casavola (1891–1955) and Silvio Mix (Silvius Aloysius Micks, pseud. of Silvio
De Re, 1900–1927). Franco Casavola was a pupil of Ottorino Respighi. In 1924, he pub-
lished several theoretical manifestos on music and its relationship with the stage
and the visual arts: La musica dell’avvenire (Music of the Future, 1924) and La musica
futurista (Futurist Music, 1924), which included Le sintesi visive (Visual Syntheses,
1924, written with Sebastiano Arturo Luciani [1884–1950] and Anton Giulio Bragaglia
[1890–1960]), Le atmosfere cromatiche della musica (The Chromatic Atmosphere of
Music, 1924) and Le versioni scenico plastiche della musica (Scenic-volumetric Ver-
sions of Music, 1924). He courageously adopted an outspoken and risky standpoint
with regard to the cultural despotism that the Fascist régime was imposing, most
notably in his bold defence of jazz, not only in his theoretical writings, but also in the
language of his compositions, in which he made use of rhythms and stylistic elements
connected to jazz.
Casavola collaborated with Vinicio Paladini (1902–1971) and Ivo Pannaggi (1901–
1981) on the Ballo meccanico futurista (Futurist Mechanical Ballet), performed at the
Casa d’Arte Bragaglia, on 2 June 1922. From a musical point of view, the significance
of the event consisted in the polyphony created by the noises made by motorcycles.
By varying the intensity of the noises and accelerating or slowing down the timing,
it was possible to produce prolonged insistent fugues, syncopated outbursts, glissan-
dos and backfiring, stops and starts ending in angry crescendos (Berghaus: Italian
Futurist Theatre, 422–426).
Two years later, with Silvio Mix, Casavola provided music for the Nuovo teatro
futurista tour through various Italian towns and also contributed music for Pram-
polini’s Théâtre de la Pantomine at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris (12 May–
June 1927). Only recently have the scores that Casavola wrote in the 1920s come to
200 Daniele Lombardi

light. They include Fantasia meccanica (Mechanical Fantasy), the ballets Anihccam
del 3000 (The Machine of the Year 3000), Hop Frog (The Jester) and Operazioni aritme-
tiche (Arithmetic Operations) as well as the pieces Il castello nel bosco (The Castle in
the Woods), L’ alba di Don Giovanni (Don Juan’s Dawn) and Il mercante di cuori (The
Merchant of Hearts). It has finally become possible to assess Casavola’s considerable
skill as an orchestrator and as a composer of film music.
Casavola’s interest in synaesthesia, which he expressed in his manifestos,
referred to the possibility of listening to paintings and seeing music. The prime mover
behind all of this was Marinetti, who, with his Tavole parolibere (Free-Word Tables),
had created an important precedent for symbolic notations of poetic actions that used
visual codes or ideograms to guide performers. Casavola also wrote lyrics for Futurist
songs such as La canzone di Uriele (Uriel’s Song), the text of which is entirely made up
of meaningless phonemes. Others were musical transcriptions of a tavola parolibera
used for advertising purposes, Campari, one of the first ever jingles, or to cabaret-style
songs such as Fox Trot zoologico, Tankas and Quatrain. All written in the 1920s, they
displayed considerable refinement in their use of timbre and a French allure. In 1927,
having decided that Futurism no longer corresponded to the way his music was devel-
oping, Casavola left the movement. Two years later, his short opera Il gobbo del califfo
(The Caliph’s Hunchback) had a successful première at the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome
(4 May 1929) and won the “Governatorato di Roma” prize.
The other musician who stands out in the panorama of those years is Silvio
Mix, a brilliant and precocious self-taught composer who was already conducting
his own work at the Pergola Theatre in Florence at the age of 19 and used to impro-
vise with Felice Boghen (1869–1945), a well-known concert pianist and composer.
Born in Trieste, Mix’s family moved to Florence just before the outbreak of the First
World War. In Florence, he began to take part in Futurist soirées held at the Mate-
razzi rooms in via Martelli, at the Galleria d’Arte Cavalensi & Botti and in the gallery
that had been opened by the publisher Ferrante Gonnelli. Many of the pieces that
were named in the records of the Futurist soirées for which he played the piano actu-
ally referred to improvisations. However, when Mix died, he left behind a number of
compositions, some of which have never been performed, such as the string quartet
in three movements, Preludio, Notturno and Scherzo. More like written-out improv-
isations are the pages for piano, Due preludi (from Stati d’animo), Profilo sintetico
musicale di F. T. Marinetti (Condensed Musical Profile of F. T. Marinetti) and Omaggio
a Stravinsky.
Mix wrote and conducted the symphonic introduction to the opera Sardanapalo,
which was performed in April 1919 at the Teatro della Pergola, and in December of the
same year he was again at the Pergola with his Intermezzo sinfonico del metàdramma
“Astrale” (Symphonic Intermissions for the Meta-Drama “The Stars”). A few years
later, he gave a presentation at the Futurist Congress, held at the Birreria Spatenbrau in
Milan (23–24 November 1924), and wrote a series of articles for the newspaper L’ impero
(Bianchi: La musica futurista, 103–123).
 Music 201

In 1921, together with Franco Casavola, he wrote some music for performances
of the Teatro della sorpresa (The Theatre of Surprise), organized by Francesco
Cangiullo (1884–1977) with the De Angelis Company, as well as for its second tour
in 1924, now baptized ‘Nuovo teatro futurista’ (New Futurist Theatre). Mix contrib-
uted the ballet Psicologia delle macchine and the symphony Bianco e rosso (White
and Red), originally written for Marinetti’s play of the same name, produced at
the Teatro degli Indipendenti in Rome in 1923. This was followed in 1926 by music
for L’ angoscia delle macchine (Anguish of the Machines) by Ruggero Vasari (1898–
1968), which should have been performed in Berlin with designs by Vera Idelson,
and for Marinetti’s Cocktail, performed as part of the Théâtre de la Pantomime
Futuriste (Futurist Pantomime Theatre) at the Théâtre de la Madeleine in Paris
(May–June 1927).
Within the context of second-phase Futurism, mention could be made of addi-
tional musicians, although their involvement with the movement was short lived.
These include Aldo Giuntini (1896–1969), Virgilio Mortari (1902–1993) and Carmine
Guarino (1893–1965). Giuntini adopted the idea of sintesi (essential brevity) from
the early years of Futurism and after 1928 wrote many piano pieces bearing the
title Sintesi musicali futuriste. The most interesting of these are Allegria (Gaiety), Il
mare (The Sea), Infinito (Infinity), Linee aerodinamiche a 3000 metri (Aero-dynamic
Lines at 3,000 Metres Altitude), Festa dei motori (Feast of Engines) and Le macchine
(Machines), published in the magazine Stile futurista (Turin, 1934–1935), together
with the Manifesto dell’aeromusica sintetica geometrica e curativa (Manifesto of Aero-
Music: Dense, Geometric and Curative, 1934). A few of these and others (Le macchine,
L’infinito, Il mare, La festa dei motori, Amanti in volo and Battaglia simultanea di terra,
mare e cielo) can be heard in a rare 78 rpm recording made by Giuntini in 1931. Mari-
netti, who organized Futurist evenings of poetry and music with Giuntini, cited other
compositions in Futurismo – Aerovita (1934), but these have not survived (Marinetti:
“L’ aeromusica futurista”).
Giuntini contributed to the Canzoniere futurista amoroso guerriero (Futurist Song-
book for Love and War, 1943) with compositions for voice and piano. The score of Fuor
dai dotti orizzonti (Leave the Learned Horizons Behind) was designed by Giovanni
Acquaviva (1900–1971), with notes represented as triangular little flags. In the mid-
1930s, he also attempted to construct an instrument that could produce microtonal
music. This iperfonio (Hyperphone) was a kind of piano, with two keyboards tuned
at an interval of a quartertone and amplified; its volume could be controlled with a
pedal (Compagno: Aldo Giuntini futurista, and Puglisi: “Le immagini sonore di Aldo
Giuntini”).
Virgilio Mortari was a pupil of Ildebrando Pizzetti, with whom he shared a similar
Neo-classical vision (Ragni: “L’ avventura futurista ed altro”). His encounter with Mari-
netti towards the end of the 1910s led to a momentary interest in Futurism. During this
period, he composed Fox-Trot futurista per il Teatro della sorpresa (Fox-Trot for the
Futurist Theatre of Surprise, 1921), which was published with humorous cartoons and
202 Daniele Lombardi

staves undulating freely across the page, drawn by an unknown artist. He also wrote
compositions for voice and piano, such as La mia anima è puerile (My Childish Soul),
using lines taken from Marinetti’s Destruction: Poèmes lyriques / Distruzione: Poema
futurista (Destruction, 1904/1911). A rare musical-theatrical synthesis was Dramma-
Sinfonia, in which a pianist played a piece for a few seconds while a man dressed in a
tailcoat ran across the stage before the curtain closed.
Carmine Guarino was also connected with Futurism. A violinist and composer,
he was the first to compose the music for a ‘symphonic radio opera’ entitled Tum
Tum ninna nanna (Il cuore di Wanda) (Tum Tum: A Lullaby, Or Wanda’s Heart, 1931),
written by Pino Masnata (1901–1968; see p. 232 in the entry on Radio in this volume).
He composed many other works, including music for Marinetti’s Simultanina:
Divertimento futurista in 16 sintesi (Simultanina: A Futurist Diversion in 16 Short Acts,
1931), of which survives a Canzone for voice and piano to words by Escodamé (pseud.
of Michele Leskovich, 1909–1979). Furthermore, in the 1930s he wrote a Concerto
for Pianoforte and Orchestra and other works for piano, such as Canzone Barbara,
Capriccio and two curious waltzes entitled La Rinascente, evidently to publicize the
department store of the same name. In 1937, Guarino composed a series of piano
pieces with the title Musica per bimbi (Music for Children), issued with a Futurist
cover design by Giovanni Acquaviva. Late in life, in the 1960s, he revived his interests
in Futurism and wrote a Partita su temi futuristi (Musical Suite on Futurist Themes).
Another short-lived Futurist was Giacinto Scelsi (1905–1988) who, as a young
man, had been very interested in Russolo’s ideas (Freeman: “Tanmatras: The Life
and Work of Giacinto Scelsi”). In 1929, he composed a work entitled Rotativa (Rotary
Press), with the subtitle “Coitus mechanicus”, a rare example of music inspired by
the myth of machines, similar to Le macchine by Aldo Giuntini (Verzina: “Alcune
categorie del futurismo in ‘Rotativa’ ”), cited above. A theme favoured by late-
Futurist musicians, and which went hand in hand with their taste for rhythmical
and mechanical movement, was that of aviation. Ermete Buldorini (1914–1988) and
Mario Monachesi (aka Chesimò, 1908–1992) were both composers of aeromusica. The
former wrote Respirare il mare volando: Sintesi per pianoforte e voce parlata-urlata
(Inhaling the Sea While Flying: Synthesis for Piano and Spoken/Shouted Voice,
1938), performed at the Gran Ballo dell’Ala held at Falconara Marittima airport at the
opening of the touring exhibition of Aeropittura futurista (7 August 1938). In the same
year, Monachesi composed Contraerei (Anti-aircraft), Ala spaziale (Wing in Space) as
well as a piece for four hands, Eliche (Propellers: Aeromusic for two pianos). Luigi
Grandi (1902–1973) was also fascinated by machinery, as is evident from the titles
of his compositions Aeroduello: Dinamosintesi (Duel in the Air: Dynamic Synthesis)
and Cavalli + Acciaio: Meccanocavalcata (Horses + Steel: A Mechanical Ride). Of
other composers we have only the names: Renzo Massarani, Armando Muti, Franco
Sartori. All of these examples cited show that, by the end of the 1930s, Futurist music
had become a popular art form that interpreted an anti-formalist spirit within Fascist
culture.
 Music 203

Futurist music in Russia

Futurism was not just an Italian movement, and the theories of The Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism (1909) had an international appeal. When Marinetti went to
Russia to present Futurism (26 January – 17 February 1914), he confronted strong
resistance from Russian artists and writers who claimed that they were the origina-
tors of this avant-garde movement and that it was part of their own artistic tradition.
Among them was the musician Naum Izrailevich Lur’e (1891–1966), who later called
himself Artur Sergeevich or Artur Vintsent Lure and is best known as Arthur Vincent
Lourié (see Gojowy: “Sinestesia futuristica e melodismo magico in Arthur Lourié”,
Gojowy: Arthur Lourié und der russische Futurismus, and Levidou: “Arthur Lourié and
His Conception of Revolution”). He was one of the most interesting composers of the
period, whose compositions for piano illustrate his interests in dodecaphony and
innovative forms of notation. Lourié steered a highly personal course between Prim-
itivism and Futurism, the essential nature of which eventually came to be identified
as ‘fragmentation’, with its isolated patterns juxtaposed between silences intended as
sound vacuums, taking to extreme limits the dilation of resonance that can be found
in the last works of Franz Liszt (1811–1886).
After beginning with an expressive, late-Romantic style in his Cinq Préludes, op. 1
(Five Preludes, 1908–1910), the fruit of a restless and brilliant adolescence, he soon
succumbed with his opus 2, two Estampes (Prints, 1910), to the appeal of the hexa-
tonic world of Claude Débussy. However, this turned out to be a brief transition as he
began to explore the harmonic possibilities of superimposed fourths reminiscent of
the contemporary works of Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915). The Quatre Poèmes op. 10
(Four Poems, 1912), together with Deux Poèmes op. 8 (Two Poems, 1912), paved the
way to the most significant moment in Lourié’s pianistic output, which comprised
Masques (Tentations) op. 13 (Masks: Temptations, 1913) and Synthèses (Délires) op. 16
(Syntheses: Hallucinations, 1914). In these latter two works, the emancipation of dis-
sonance is achieved through a progressive process of deformation: octaves become
chords in which the fundamental is no longer doubled, but united to the seventh
and minor ninth, intervals of a fifth become augmented fourths, in such a way that
the chord structure creates a highly complex sound spectrum. From a tonal point of
view, the sound fabric is expanded – with continual contrasts between low and high
pitches and with oblique excursions into fields that anticipate certain passages in
Pierre Boulez’s First Piano Sonata (1946) – while the contrast in rapid dynamics is
heavily accented. Masques especially features the dilution of a syntactic development
into isolated fragments, while Synthèses, completely divorced from any kind of tonal-
ity, harnesses proto-dodecaphonic material.
In Formes en l’air – à Pablo Picasso (Forms in the Air, Dedicated to Pablo Picasso,
1915), the process of sublimation is complete, made possible by an increasing frag-
mentation of isolated episodes immersed in an empty silence. Written with an
innovative notation system, on numerous separate staves, its performance requires
204 Daniele Lombardi

improvised choices to be made about the length of the silences between fragments.
This work can be considered an example of Cubist composition predating Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s first Klavierstücke (Piano Pieces, 1952). Lourié’s extraordinary research
into the language of music came to a close with the October Revolution in 1917. Lourié
abandoned Modernism for a mysticism that led him back to more traditional forms
of expression. His Troisième Sonatine (Third Sonatine, 1917), even though it is asym-
metrical and maintains a sense of deformation with powerful dissonances in a style
that recalls Robert Schumann (1810–1856), reclaims a tonal dimension that concludes
resolutely in the key of d-minor.
Today, Lourié’s work is not very well known; many compositions got lost when
he fled Russia at the beginning of the 1920s during an official visit to Paris on behalf
of the Soviet authorities. As a result, his pre-1917 work has largely vanished from
memory. Lourié was in contact with Igor Stravinsky, Ferruccio Busoni and others,
and when the Nazi troops arrived in Paris (14 June 1940), he emigrated to the United
States, where he spent the rest of his life more or less in obscurity, writing film music
and occasionally giving performances of his earlier works.
Certain aspects of Futurism found favour in the Soviet Union, such as the Mod-
ernist approach to urban design and the rhythms of modern life, but not the formal
experimentation that jarred with the aesthetics of Social Realism. This can be seen
in the works of another suppressed composer, Alexander Mosolov (1900–1973), who
until a few years ago was known chiefly for Zavod (Iron Foundry, 1927), a rare example
of a Futurist work for orchestra (Savenko: “Muzyka mashin i ee avtory”, Sprengel:
“The Futurist Movement in Russia”, and Vorob’ev: Russkii avangard i tvorchestvo Alek-
sandra Mosolova 1920–1930-kh godov). In a letter dated 21 September 1928, Prokofiev
wrote to Diaghilev: “I already told you about Shostakovich, Mosolov and Gavriil Popov,
whose talents clearly stand out above the crowd” (Prokofiev: Selected Letters, 68).
The critic Viktor Belyaev wrote: “His music is characterized greatly by a psychological
dimension, by which I mean a penetration of the psyche, often into its most painful
moods […] and the ability to enter into a nocturnal dimension, into the music of the
night. It is the ‘nocturne’ of the city and its modern life tragedy, the tragedy of soli-
tude in people and the tragedy of fantasy and reality” (Beliaev: “A. V. Mosolov”, 84).
A few years after the Revolution, the Soviet Union was a country animated by strong
collective tension, and Mosolov’s ‘tragedy of solitude’ signified an incapacity to face
up to the new political reality and to fulfil his rôle in the Socialist collective. His lack
of confidence, contempt for Marxist values and streaks of pessimism were considered
harmful to the ‘proletarian culture’ of the Soviet Union. In 1932, as a result of the
harsh criticism he received and the climate of hostility that surrounded him, Mosolov
sent a letter to Stalin, in which he asked to be given further work opportunities. The
real troubles began in 1936, when he was expelled from the Composers’ Union under
the pretext of causing public scandal in a state of drunkenness. After a visit to Ash-
gabad in Turkmenistan to investigate the nature of its popular music – causing him to
write Turkmen Song to Stalin, which has since disappeared – he was arrested in 1937
 Music 205

and sentenced to eight years in a labour camp, later reduced to five years’ banishment
from the cities of Moscow, Leningrad and Kiev.
While Zavod achieved international notoriety (it was performed in Rome under
Bernardino Molinari in 1932 and a few years later by the Orchestra Sinfonica dell’
EIAR under Victor De Sabata), Mosolov’s sonatas for piano (the third of which was
destroyed as a punishment by the Soviet authorities) are much less known. They con-
stitute a fundamental link between the piano music of Scriabin and Prokofiev and,
together with the Second Sonata op. 5 by Sergei Protopopov (1893–1954), are among
the most important Russian compositions for the piano of the interwar period. Also
worth remembering are his Gazetnye obiavleniia (Newspaper Advertisements, 1926),
four short compositions for soprano and piano taken from advertisements in Isvestiia,
and his two concertos for piano and orchestra (Lombardi: “La musica pianistica di
Aleksandr Mossolov”).

Futurist music in the USA

The impact of Futurism in the United States was minimal (see the entry on the USA
in this volume), and there were no contacts between Italian Futurist composers and
musicians on the other side of the Atlantic. However, some American artists who
had lived in Europe were influenced by it. One of them was George Antheil (1900–
1959), an eccentric musician, inventor and endocrinologist, who was born in Tren-
ton/NJ to Polish parents and died in Los Angeles (Whitesitt: The Life and Music of
George Antheil 1900–1959). He gave numerous concerts in Europe and had the label
‘Futurist-pianist’ printed on posters that advertised them. Strongly attracted by the
myth of the machine, he wrote Ballet mécanique (The Mechanical Ballet, 1923–1924)
for the film of the same name by Fernand Léger (Albright: “Antheil’s ‘Ballet Mécan-
ique’ ”, Freedman: “George Antheil: Ballet Mécanique”, and Oja: “ ‘Ballet Mécanique’
and International Modernist Networks”). The score provides indications for a rhythm
that makes sound and image coincide. The composition grew out of a desire to put
together mechanical instruments in a synchronized performance, something that for
many years remained a utopian idea. Antheil’s score was written for a bizarre group
of instruments that could be adapted in accordance with their availability: sixteen
pianolas, eight xylophones, four bass drums, an aeroplane engine, electric doorbells
and so on. It immediately proved problematic to tune the pianolas to the other in-
struments. After being premièred in Paris in 1926 and the following year in New York
(Aaron Copland was one of the pianists), the first version for sixteen pianolas turned
out to be unfeasible, and Antheil drastically diminished their number, producing a
revised version for eight pianos to be played live. This was later reduced to four, and
today the ballet is performed with groups that vary in their faithfulness to the original
specifications, but which in any case sound equally effective.
206 Daniele Lombardi

At the beginning of the 1920s, Antheil composed numerous ‘Futurist’ piano

pieces that were reminiscent of Stravinsky, but with an ‘esprit nouveau’ intended to
scandalize bourgeois concert-goers (Lombardi: “George Antheil: Pianista-futurista
tra primitivismo e mito della macchina”). The most important from this period were
Mécanismes (Mechanisms, c.1923), and Sonata sauvage (Wild Sonata, 1922–23). His
autobiography, The Bad Boy of Music (1945), is an interesting and amusing descrip-
tion of the climate in Paris during those years. Charles Amirkhanian, the cataloguer
of Antheil’s compositions, has recounted the curious and multi-faceted aspects of the
creativity of this eccentric artist (Amirkhanian: “An Introduction to George Antheil”).
In 1942, he became friends with the actress Hedy Lamarr (1914–2000), and together
the two of them patented an ingenious information coding system, similar to the per-
forated paper rolls used in pianolas. The idea was presented to the National Inventors
Council in Washington and patented on 11 August 1942 as a ‘System for Secret Com-
munication no. 2 292 387’.
Perhaps the composer most closely identified with the art of noise was Henry
Cowell (1897–1965). Cowell conceived of a piano that could be used as a whole, not
just played by using a keyboard and three pedals. He wanted the whole body to reso-
nate by plucking the strings directly. For this kind of interaction, he coined the term
‘string piano’. It is unknown whether he was ever in contact with Russolo or Marinetti,
but his music operated with a new language of noise effects called ‘black and white
noise’ (Sachs: Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music).
Cowell was a protagonist – along with Charles Ives (1874–1954), Charles Sprague
“Carl” Ruggles (1876–1971), Leo Ornstein (Lev Ornshteyn, 1893–2002), George Antheil
and three or four others – of the American musical renaissance, which took place in
the first quarter of the twentieth century. His works were revolutionary in character
when compared to previous compositions for the piano. Cowell already made sys-
tematic use of sound clusters in his very first composition, The Tides of Manaunaun
(1912), one of three Irish Legends written at the age of fifteen. Although they may seem
the spontaneous and ingenuous fruit of an adolescent creativity, they already pointed
the way to how sonorities would be organized according to precise criteria of dimen-
sionality. This is also true for Dynamic Motion and Antinomy, parts of his Five Encores
to Dynamic Motion (1917). In Tiger (1928), Cowell achieved a synthesis in which lines
of repeated chords change and are developed, accumulating or diminishing, moving
closer to or further away from the cluster, which remains implicitly suspended in a
relation of movement and stasis.
Cowell’s chaotic sound cluster can be grouped into three categories, which sound
quite different and are recognizable: white key clusters, black key clusters and chro-
matic clusters using all the keys. In all three types, the pitch is perceptible in the highest
or lowest note of the range. In this way, melodies similar to those in Schönberg’s Klang-
farbenmelodie (sound-colour-melody) are created. In this way, too, the piano is exalted
for its percussive qualities, but is also defined exactly by its 88 notes. From this point
of view, Cowell needs to be remembered as a major influence on his contemporaries.
 Music 207

Russolo was not interested in researching the sound possibilities of the piano, but
his concerts held at the London Coliseum (15–21 June 1914) aroused the interest of the
twenty-year-old Leo Ornstein. This successful pianist was so intrigued by the event
that he wrote compositions inspired by Futurism and defined his recitals as “Con-
cert[s] of Futurist Music” on the posters that advertised them. He wrote piano pieces
such as Suicide in an Airplane (1913) and Anger from Three Moods (1914), but espe-
cially Danse sauvage (Wild Dance, 1915), the noise of which borders on violence and
overcomes the distinctions between order and chaos. Tonal and rhythmic clusters are
mixed with extremely complex chords and then superimposed on a polyrhythmic pro-
gression that accentuates the pieces’ percussive density.
Considered at the beginning of the twentieth century to be an ‘enfant terrible of
the piano’, Ornstein was born in Kremenchug in Southwest Russia and died in Green
Bay Wisconsin. He made his début at the Steinway Hall in London in 1914, and the
Daily Mail of 27 March wrote:

WILD OUTBREAK AT STEINWAY HALL

A pale Russian youth dressed in velvet, crouched over the instrument in an attitude all his own,
and for all the apparent frailty of his form, dealt it the most ferocious punishment. Nothing as
horrible as Mr. Ornstein’s music has been heard so far – save Stravinsky’s ‘Sacrifice to Spring’.
Sufferers from complete deafness should attend the next recital.

Ornstein’s reputation as a ‘Futurist’ accompanied his career as a performer and

composer for many years. As a rule, he improvised almost everything, making use
of other musicians to write ‘under dictation’, a practice he had in common with Gia-
cinto Scelsi. This explained the unreasonable scepticism of many critics. In reality,
his compositions were extremely original in style and reveal a highly creative
personality.

Innovative aspects of musical Futurism

The historical avant-garde at the start of the twentieth century directly affected
national and nationalistic cultures and initiated a process of creative and inter-
cultural osmosis. Various strands can be distinguished in so-called ‘Futurist music’,
and they are often found together. Pratella’s ‘Futurist Expressionism’ evokes his no-
tion of “generative emotional and inspirational motifs” (Pratella: “Futurist Music:
Technical Manifesto”, 83), referring to a succession of sound emotions that are so
strong that they create a kind of patchwork, a plot in the form of a collage. This antic-
ipated what years later was to become a Surrealist procedure. In the case of Pratella,
however, it was dictated not so much by irrational or unconscious factors, but by a
need for form that controlled the internal relations of the sound narration.
‘Noise’, as conceived by Russolo, has influenced several generations of musi-
cians, who attach more importance to the event than to its form, and to the dynamism
208 Daniele Lombardi

of Becoming within sound structures. Perceived as a material entity, music has always
been considered as an art form existing in time rather than in space. The Futurist
myths of speed and simultaneity have been represented very differently in music
and fine arts, since the flow of time requires the synthesis of different moments to
be approached in different manners. The issue is that the visual arts and music have
often switched codes (i. e. music has taken recourse to visuality and the visual arts
to musicality), in ways that can be defined as a clash, encounter or contamination,
depending on the experiences made by different composers and visual artists in the
creation of their works.
In the early twentieth century, the idea that time represents a fourth dimension
in space had become particularly attractive. This idea made it possible for musicians
to conceive of visible sounds, and for visual artists to listen to the sounds evoked by
images. This exchange led composers to the world of theatre. Likewise, musical scores
transformed into something that could be seen on stage, images could be listened to
and texts that were not intended for performance (e. g. Words-in-Freedom) still offered
visual traces of events. In short, these comprised a utopia of pre-audio-visual commu-
nication, which has characterized our age since the middle of the last century.
The idea of mixing genres, media and languages was a significant aspect of
Futurism in its musical manifestation. Marinetti reflected on the suspension of value
judgements and the fusion of different musical genres in the manifestos Teatro di
varietà (Variety Theatre, 1913), Il teatro della sorpresa (Theatre of Surprise, 1921) and
La radia: Manifesto futurista (Manifesto of Radia, 1933). He offered a practical appli-
cation in Cinque sintesi per il teatro radiofonico (Five Short Scenes for Radiophonic
Theatre, written 1933, published 1938), in which he linked diverse sound sources in a
collage (see p. 238 in the chapter on Radio in this volume). These Futurist acoustical
landscapes made use of all possible sound sources to construct a ‘patchwork’: not a
synthesis intended for light entertainment, but a sophisticated choice linking heter-
ogeneous elements, both banal and sublime. In this sense, Marinetti’s Cinque sintesi
were ahead of their time and can be related to performances by John Cage and Fluxus
artists, in whose works verbal descriptions of actions replace traditional scores (Aus-
lander: “Fluxus Art-Amusement: The Music of the Future?”).
The Futurists identified in the machine the most important instrument of moder-
nity, and their idolizing attitude towards possible futures created a sort of ‘romantic
cult of the machine’, an idealistic way of thinking that could be expressed through the
mimesis of isochrony (rhythmic division of time into equal portions by a language).
However, it also went in the direction of a utopian scenario, or a ‘science fiction’, in
art. Marinetti appealed to a new sensitivity, a new possibility of perception, which
was also aspired to by the other avant-garde movements that constituted the premise
for a new way of relating to audiovisual messages, a to-ing and fro-ing between the
visual and the auditory, which today has become the norm. In the 1950s and 1960s,
when informal music made use of representational systems in which images, texts
and moveable structures all had a part to play, the actual physical presence of a
 Music 209

performer was no longer a necessity, and non-specialist members of the audience

could be called upon to provide their own solution to the composer’s utopia.
One of the most interesting results of synaesthesia was achieved by Pratella in
Giallo pallido (Pale Yellow, 1926), which developed a fabric of tonal and dynamic
microvariations and evoked a relationship between sound and colour that had also
interested other Futurist artists and musicians, as the programmatic text, L’ arte
dell’ avvenire (Art of the Future, 1911), by the brothers Ginanni Corradini (better known
as Arnaldo Ginna [1890–1982] and Bruno Corra [1892–1976]), showed. Futurism,
Cubism and other -isms, including musical ones, pitched Modernism against tradition
in a manner that irreversibly transformed the notion of what constituted a work of art.
The tonal system had become over-complex and was bordering on entropy. Informal
music was born at the moment when sound (to which any noise belonged) became a
matter of being closely investigated, returning to Luigi Russolo’s notion of the tabula
rasa with the aim of conquering the infinite variety of noise-sounds. Thus his new aes-
thetics connected to features of everyday life, even though Edgar Varèse erroneously
believed that it was just a slavish imitation and not an innovative form of sound.
Today, we should reconsider the theoretical implications of Russolo’s work,
especially in the light of what has happened since the days of the historical avant-
garde. Futurist writings contain premonitions of musique concrète, electronic music,
industrial noise music, environmental music etc. and had repercussions in musical
domains that were far afield, both temporally and geographically. It is therefore
important to give new life to their compositions through performance so that they
can be reassessed for their sound impact. In this sense, Futurist composers can be
rediscovered and given the place in history they surely deserve.
Futurist music may not have given the world a composer of the stature of Schön-
berg or Stravinsky, but in the context of the historical avant-garde movements of the
early twentieth century, the ferment created by musicians who joined Marinetti’s
movement should certainly be studied and re-evaluated. This was made clear from
the moment when the Futurist poet and musician, Francesco Cangiullo, claimed
that the most important Futurist composer was Stravinsky, who had called Pratella
and Russolo “a pack of very nice, noisy Vespas” (Craft: Conversations with Igor
Stravinsky, 105).

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Lista, Giovanni: La Scène futuriste. Paris: C.N.R.S., 1989.
Lombardi, Daniele: “George Antheil: Pianista-futurista tra primitivismo e mito della macchina.”
Musica / Realtà 6:17 (August 1985): 125–137. Reprinted in D. Lombardi: Il suono veloce:
Futurismo e futurismi in musica. Milano: Ricordi, and Lucca: LIM, 1996. 215–228.
Lombardi, Daniele: “La musica pianistica di Aleksandr Mossolov.” Musica / Realtà 11:31 (April 1991):
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Lombardi, Daniele: “La sfida alle stelle!” Musica / Realtà 2:5 (August 1981): 51–70. Reprinted in
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 Music 211

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Cinque sintesi per il teatro radiofonico.” F. T. Marinetti: Teatro. Vol.
1. A cura di Giovanni Calendoli. Roma: Bianco, 1960. 221–225. English translation “Radio
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invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 7–14. English
translation “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by
Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “L’aeromusica futurista.” Futurismo – Aerovita [Supplement to
Sant’Elia] 3:66 (1 May 1934): 1.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Teatro di Varietà.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A
cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 80–91. English translation “The Variety
Theater.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2006. 185–192.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Aldo Giuntini: “Manifesto dell’aeromusica sintetica geometrica e
curativa.” Stile futurista 1:2 (August 1934): 14–15.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Francesco Cangiullo: “Il teatro della sorpresa.” F. T. Marinetti:
Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 166–169.
English translation “The Theater of Surprises.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter
Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 383–385.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Pino Masnata: “La radia: Manifesto futurista dell’ottobre 1933,
pubblicato nella ‘Gazzetta del Popolo’.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di
Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 205–210. English translation “The Radio.” F. T.
Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
410–414.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Farfa, Giovanni Acquaviva, and Aldo Giuntini: Canzoniere futurista
amoroso guerriero. Savona: Istituto Grafico Brizio, 1943.
Morgan, Robert P.: “ ‘A New Musical Reality’: Futurism, Modernism, and ‘The Art of Noises’.”
Modernism / Modernity 1:3 (September 1994): 129–151. Reprinted in Thomas J. Schoenberg,
ed.: Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Vol. 166. Detroit/MI: Gale, 2005. 232–246.
Mortari, Virgilio: Fox-Trot futurista per il Teatro della sorpresa. Napoli: Bixio, 1921.
Napoli, Gennaro: “Futurismo musicale.” L’arte pianistica 1:7 (1 April 1914): 4–5. Reprinted in Daniele
Lombardi, ed.: Nuova enciclopedia del futurismo musicale. Milano: Mudima, 2010. 212–214.
Oja, Carol Jean: “ ‘Ballet mécanique’ and International Modernist Networks.” C. J. Oja: Making Music
Modern: New York in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 71–96.
Pizzetti, Ildebrando: “Musicisti futuristi?” La nuova musica 16:206 (5–20 January 1911): 3–4.
Poggi, Christine: “The Futurist Noise Machine.” The European Legacy: The Official Journal of the
International Society for the Study of European Ideas 14:7 (December 2009): 821–840.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: “Futurist Music: Technical Manifesto.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi,
and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
80–84.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: “La distruzione della quadratura.” F.B. Pratella: Musica futurista per
orchestra, op. 30. Bologna: Bongiovanni, 1912. XVII -XXVI. Reprinted in Stefano Bianchi: La
musica futurista: Ricerche e documenti. Lucca : Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1995. 204–213.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: “Manifesto of Futurist Musicians.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi,
and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
75–80.
Prieberg, Fred K.: Musica ex machina: Über das Verhältnis von Musik und Technik. Berlin: Ullstein,
1960. Italian translation Musica ex machina. Torino: Einaudi, 1963.
212 Daniele Lombardi

Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeevich: Selected Letters. Ed. by Harlow Robinson. Boston/MA: Northeastern
University Press, 1998.
Puglisi, Pierluigi: “Le immagini sonore di Aldo Giuntini.” Atti e memorie della Accademia Aruntica di
Carrara 4 (1998): 151–164.
Ragni, Stefano: “L’avventura futurista ed altro: Intervista a Virgilio Mortari.” Piano Time: Mensile di
pianoforte e musica 6:66 (Ottobre 1988). 28. Reprinted in MUSIC@: Bimestrale di musica 4:11
(January–February 2009): 40–43.
Ricciardi, Achille: Il teatro del colore: Estetica del dopo-guerra. Milano: Facchi, 1919.
Russolo, Luigi: “Conquista totale dell’enarmonismo mediante gl’intonarumori futuristi.” Lacerba
1:21 (1 November 1913): 242–245.
Russolo, Luigi: “L’arco enarmonico.” Fiamma 2:1 (1926): 9–19.
Russolo, Luigi: “The Art of Noises: A Futurist Manifesto.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and
Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
133–139.
Russolo, Luigi: L’arte dei rumori. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1916. English translation The
Art of Noises. Translated by Barclay Brown. New York: Pendragon Press, 1986.
Sachs, Joel: Henry Cowell: A Man Made of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Savenko, Svetlana Il’inichna: “Muzyka mashin i ee avtory.” Grigorii Lyzhov, and Daniil Petrov, eds.:
Orkestr: Sbornik statei i materialov v chest’ Inny Alekseevny Barsovoi. Moskva: Gosudarst-
vennaia Konservatoriia imeni P.I. Chaikovskogo, 2002. 318–323.
Sprengel, Tia L.: “The Futurist Movement in Russia: Futurism’s Role in the Work of Composer
Alexander Mosolov.” Constructing the Past 14:1 (2013): 35–39.
Tagliapietra, Franco, and Anna Gasparotto, eds.: Luigi Russolo: Vita e opere di un futurista. Milano:
Skira, 2006.
Verzina, Nicola: “Alcune categorie del futurismo in ‘Rotativa’.” Daniela M. Tortora, ed.: Giacinto
Scelsi nel centenario della nascita. Atti dei convegni internazionali, Roma, 9–10 dicembro
2005, Palermo, 16 gennaio 2006. Roma: Aracne, 2008. 37–54.
Vorob’ev, Igor’ Stanislavovich: Russkii avangard i tvorchestvo Aleksandra Mosolova 1920–1930-kh
godov. Sankt-Peterburg: Kompozitor, 2006.
Whitesitt, Linda: The Life and Music of George Antheil 1900–1959. Ann Arbor/MI: UMI Research
Press, 1983.

Further reading
Alaleona, Domenico: “I moderni orizzonti della tecnica musicale: Teoria della divisione dell’ottava in
parti uguali.” Rivista musicale italiana 18 (1911): 382–420.
Alaleona, Domenico: “L’armonia modernissima: Le tonalità neutre e l’arte di stupire.” Rivista
musicale italiana 18 (1911): 789–838.
Bastianelli, Giannotto: La crisi musicale europea. Pistoia: Pagnini, 1912.
Bellorini, Giuliano, Franco Tagliapietra, and Anna Gasparotto: Luigi Russolo: La musica, la pittura, il
pensiero. Nuove ricerche sugli scritti. Firenze: Olschki, 2011.
Cangiullo, Francesco: Le serate futuriste. Milano: Ceschina, 1961.
Carol-Bérard (pseud. of Bernard Ollivier): “Recorded Noises: Tomorrow’s Instrumentation.” Modern
Music 6 (January–February 1929): 26–29. Reprinted in Timothy Dean Taylor, Mark Katz,
and Tony Grajeda, eds.: Music, Sound, and Technology in America: A Documentary History
of Early Phonograph, Cinema, and Radio. Durham/NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
110–113.
 Music 213

Casavola, Franco: “I manifesti della musica futurista.” Pierfranco Moliterni: Franco Casavola: Il
futurismo e lo spettacolo della musica. Bari: Adda, 2001. 161–168.
Casavola, Franco: “Manifesti e scritti critici.” Stefano Bianchi: La musica futurista: Ricerche e
documenti. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1995. 234–240.
Casavola, Franco: 21 + 26. Roma & Milano: Augustea, 1931.
Casavola, Franco: Avviamento alla pazzia. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1924.
D’Antoni, Claudio A.: “Il futurismo musicale secondo Francesco Balilla Pratella.” Otto / Novecento:
Rivista bimestrale di critica e storia letteraria 31:1 (January-April 2007): 27–40.
Donadoni Omodeo, Miriam: Giannotto Bastianelli: Un uomo orale. Firenze: Olschki, 1979.
Fellerer, Karl Gustav: Der Futurismus in der italienischen Musik. Brussel: Koninklijke Academie voor
Wetenschappen, 1977.
Gentilucci, Armando: Il futurismo e lo sperimentalismo musicale d’oggi. Torino: Edizione del
Convegno, 1965.
Gojowy, Detlef: “Arthur Lourié der Futurist.” Hindemith Jahrbuch 8 (1979): 147–185; 12 (1983):
116–157.
Gojowy, Detlef: “Russische Avantgarde um 1920: Arthur Lourié and Russian Futurism.” Detlef
Gojowy, ed.: Studien zur Musik des XX. Jahrhunderts in Ost- und Ostmitteleuropa. Berlin: Spitz,
1990. 126–128.
Gojowy, Detlef: Neue Sowjetische Musik der 20er Jahre. Laaber: Laaber, 1980.
Graham, Irina: “Arthur Sergevič Lourié: Biographische Notizen.” Hindemith Jahrbuch 8 (1979):
186–207.
Hofman, Mira Veselinović, ed.: On the Occasion of 100th Anniversary of Futurist Manifesto. Special
issue of New Sound: International Magazine for Music 34 (2009). Beograd: Department for
Musicology, Faculty of Music, 2009.
Kämper, Dietrich, ed.: Der musikalische Futurismus. Laaber: Laaber, 1998.
Kern, Stephen: The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press,
1983.
Kirby, Michael: Futurist Performances. New York: Dutton, 1971.
Kolleritsch, Otto, ed.: Der musikalische Futurismus: Ästhetisches Konzept und Auswirkungen auf die
Moderne. Graz: Universal Edition, 1976.
Levi, Erik: “Futurist Influences Upon Early Twentieth-Century Music.” Günter Berghaus, ed.:
International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000.
322–352.
Lista, Giovanni: Luigi Russolo e la musica futurista. Milano: Mudima, 2009.
Lombardi, Daniele: “Futurism and Musical Notes.” Artforum 19:5 (January 1981): 43–49.
Lombardi, Daniele: Nuova enciclopedia del futurismo musicale. Milano: Mudima, 2009.
Lombardi, Daniele, and Carlo Piccardi, eds.: Rumori futuri: Studi e immagini sulla musica futurista.
Firenze: Vallecchi, 2004.
Maffina, Gian Franco, ed.: Caro Pratella: Lettere a Francesco Balilla Pratella. Ravenna: Edizioni del
Girasole, 1980.
Maffina, Gian Franco, ed.: Russolo: L’arte dei rumori 1913–1931. Venezia: Biennale di Venezia, 1977.
Mende, Wolfgang: “Der russische Futurismus.” W. Mende: Musik und Kunst in der sowjetischen
Revolutionskultur. Köln: Böhlau. 2009. 35–60.
Moliterni, Pierfranco: Franco Casavola: Il futurismo e lo “spettacolo” della musica. Bari: Adda, 2000.
Nicolodi, Fiamma: Musica e musicisti nel ventennio fascista. Fiesole: Cadmo, 1984.
Pestalozza, Luigi: “Futurismo e nazionalismo musicali.” Il filo rosso 2:9 (May–July 1964): 39–51.
Reprinted in Discoteca − Alta fedeltà 11:107 (January – February 1971): 12–17.
Pestalozza, Luigi: “Introduzione.” Luigi Pestalozza, ed.: La rassegna musicale: Antologia. Milano:
Feltrinelli, 1966. IX–CLXXVIII.
214 Daniele Lombardi

Piccardi, Carlo: “Flussi e riflessi del futurismo a Parigi.” Carlo de Incontrera, ed.: Contaminazioni: La
musica e le sue metamorfosi. Monfalcone: Teatro Comunale, 1997.
Piccardi, Carlo: “Futurismo.” Alberto Basso, ed.: Dizionario enciclopedico universale della musica e
dei musicisti. Torino: UTET, 1983. 307–317.
Pinamonti, Paolo: “Su alcuni contatti tangenziali di Casella al futurismo via Parigi.” Giovanni Morelli,
ed.: Alfredo Casella negli anni di apprendistato a Parigi. Atti del convegno internazionale di
studi, Venezia, 13–15 maggio 1992. Firenze: Olschki, 1994. 277–296.
Pound, Ezra: Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: Autobiografia. Milano: Pan, 1971.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: Scritti vari di pensiero, di arte e di storia musicale. Bologna: Bongiovanni,
1933.
Pratella, Francesco Balilla: Testamento. A cura di Rosetta Berardi e Francesca Serra. Ravenna:
Edizioni del Girasole, 2012.
Radice, Mark A.: “Futurismo: Its Origins, Context, Repertory, and Influence.” Musical Quarterly 73:1
(January 1989): 1–17.
Redfield, Seth: “George Antheil’s ‘Second Sonata The Airplane’.” Sonus: A Journal of Investigations
into Global Musical Possibilities 22:2 (Spring 2002): 97.
Rostagno, Antonio, and Marco Stacca, eds.: Futurismo e musica: Una relazione non facile. Atti
della giornata di studi, Roma: Biblioteca Casanatense, 23 giugno 2009. Roma: Edizioni Nuova
Cultura, 2010.
Sebastiani, Grazia: Franco Casavola e la sua musica tra futurismo e tradizione. Bari: Edizioni dal
Sud, 1996.
Solomos, Makis: “Bruits et sons musicaux: À propos de Russolo et Schaeffer.” Filigrane: Musique,
esthétique, sciences, société 7 (2008): 133–157.
Tampieri, Domenico, ed.: Francesco Balilla Pratella: Edizioni, scritti, manoscritti musicali e futuristi.
Ravenna: Longo, 1995.
Waterhouse, John Charles Graham: “A Futurist Mystery.” Music and Musicians 15:8 (April 1967):
26–30.
Waterhouse, John Charles Graham: “Futurism.” Stanley Sadie, ed.: The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians. Vol. 7. London: Macmillan, 1980. 41–43.
Waterhouse, John Charles Graham: “Futurist Music in Perspective.” Futurism 1909–19. Newcastle:
Hatton Gallery, 1972. 93–104.
Marta Braun
13 Photography
In La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico (Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto,
1910), the signatories, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo
and Gino Severini, outlined their programme for a revolution in painting. The mani-
festo pointed to potential subjects and themes including bodies that were permeable,
occult phenomena produced by mediums, the persistence of images upon the retina,
X-rays, horses with twenty legs and universal dynamism. Such subject matter revealed
the eclectic nature of the painters’ passions: for scientific discovery, the ideas of the
French philosopher Henri Bergson, who conceived of reality as dynamic movement
grasped only by intuition, and the then popular domain of the occult. However, these
topics found no pictorial expression in Futurism until late 1911. In October of that year,
Boccioni, Russolo and Carrà visited Paris, where Severini already resided. On their
return to Italy, the Futurist painters began to adapt freely the chronophotography of
French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904). Marey’s images, re-interpreted
and transposed in the photodydamics of Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960) and his
brother Arturo Bragaglia (1893–1962), accorded photography a brief and vexed rôle in
the development of Futurist aesthetics.

Chronophotography
Marey was what we would today call a biophysicist. He had begun to work with
photography in 1882 as a way of extending his méthode graphique (graphic method),
tracings made with the instruments he had devised for graphing bodily functions
and dynamics without the intervention of hand or eye. These ingenious devices, the
mechanical ancestors of today’s electronic oscilloscopes and cardiograms, enabled
him to make the first accurate analyses of human and animal locomotion. He took up
photography following the example of the Anglo-American photographer Eadweard
Muybridge (1830–1904), who in 1878 had used a battery of cameras to produce a
sequence of twelve images capturing the gait of a horse. Marey, in contrast, fabri-
cated a single-camera technique that produced a theoretically infinite number of
overlapping images on a single glass plate. Chronophotography, as Marey called his
method, severed knowledge from natural vision in the most fundamental way; it was
a product of an artifice that rendered what the unaided eye could never grasp.
For the Futurists, Marey’s linear, calligraphic and two-dimensional images offered
a seductive vocabulary for everything they had proclaimed essential in their mani-
festo, including the force lines that joined together objects in space, gestures that were

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-013
216 Marta Braun

“the dynamic sensation itself” (Balla et al.: “La pittura futurista”, 64), the moving
object that constantly multiplies and universal vibration.
The repetitive, overlapping forms of Marey’s chronophotography resurfaced in
a number of Futurist paintings produced between late 1911 and 1913, for example,
Carrà’s Il funerale dell’anarchico Galli (The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910–1911),
Russolo’s Solidità della nebbia (Solidity of Fog, 1912), Boccioni’s Elasticità (Elasticity,
1912) and most clearly in three works by Balla, all executed in 1912: Dinamismo di un
cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash), Bambina che corre sul balcone
(Girl Running on a Balcony) and La mano del violinista (I ritmi dell’archetto) (Hand of
the Violinist: The Rhythms of the Bow). Balla had encountered Marey’s work at the
1900 World’s Fair in Paris, and again in Rome in 1911 at an exhibition of scientific
photography. But it was a new adherent to the Futurist cause, Anton Giulio Bragaglia,
who focussed Balla’s attention on chronophotography.

The Bragaglia brothers and the birth of Futurist

photodynamism
In July 1911, Anton Giulio Bragaglia mailed postcards of the first photographs he had
taken with his younger brother Arturo. The images, which he named fotodinamiche
(photodynamics) to follow the Futurist lexicon, rendered ordinary gestures such as
bowing, typing or smoking as fluid, blurred trajectories. They were made with an ordi-
nary camera – probably with a hand-operated leaf or blade shutter – and slow film
that required long exposures. By adding a flash effect (produced with one, two or three
lamps) and placing a revolving shutter in front of the lens, Anton Giulio and Arturo tight-
ened up the edges of the blur to create a fusion of staccato images and blurred undu-
lations. In 1912, they expanded their repertoire to include ‘polyphysiognomic’ portraits
(ritratti polifisionomici) of Boccioni and of the Futurist poet Luciano Folgore (pseud. of
Omero Vecchi, 1888–1966) created by multiple exposures. By 1913, Anton Giulio had
also begun to write about them in the declamatory manner of Marinetti’s manifestos.
Bragaglia’s desire to take up photography seems to have been stimulated by at least
three events in 1911. In Turin, he had visited an exhibition that celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of Italian Unity. It included a photography section that showed, amongst
other things, examples of Pictorialism (as the high art of photography was called at the
time), X-ray photography, Marey’s chronophotography and prints that featured photo-
graphs of ‘spirits’. In April 1911, Bragaglia saw an international photographic exhibition
held in Rome where chronophotography was again on view. That same month, the phi-
losopher Henri Bergson gave a lecture in Bologna on his philosophy of intuition, and
Giovanni Papini, an editor of the Florentine journal La voce, published his translation
of Bergson’s book Introduction à la métaphysique (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1903).
On 29 May 1911, at the Circolo artistico internazionale in Rome, Umberto Boccioni gave
 Photography 217

a lecture, Futurismo e pittura futurista (Futurism and Futurist Painting; printed as “La
pittura futurista: Note per la Conferenza tenuta a Roma 1911”), which turned out to be
a galvanizing moment for Bragaglia. The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting had
been published a little more than a year earlier, and Boccioni’s lecture expanded on its
programme, highlighting the importance of the invisible, the sole subject he considered
suitable for the “true modern artist” (Boccioni: “Futurist Painting”, 237).
Boccioni insisted on a renewed spiritual status of painting that sought “to render
[…] the psychic and synthetic impression of a thing” (Boccioni: “Futurist Painting”,
237) and made the Futurists “the primitives of a new, completely transformed sen-
sibility” (Boccioni: “Futurist Painting”, 232). No longer would the artist produce an
analytic or optic impression of matter. Since both science and the occult had shown
that matter was only the outer edges of the invisible, the rôle of the artist must be to
unveil and transcribe the invisible, teeming with unseen forces. The modern artist
needed a new transformative sensibility and a clairvoyant psychic force that allowed
him to penetrate the hidden layers of reality: “We painters [...] feel that we divine
in this a psychic force that empowers the senses to perceive what has never been
perceived before. [...] Sensation is the material covering of the spirit, and it is now
appearing to our prophetic eyes” (Boccioni: “Futurist Painting”, 232, 239). For Boc-
cioni, then, the Futurist artist was like a highly sensitive recording machine – almost,
one could say, like an ultra-sensitive photographic plate.
Bragaglia created his photodynamics to realize just such ideas. In his manifesto,
Fotodinamismo futurista (Futurist Photodynamism), published in April and again in
June and September 1913, he wrote that his images would be the means of “carry[ing]
out a revolution […] in photography, purifying ennobling and truly elevat[ing] it to
art” (Bragaglia: Fotodinamismo futurista [1980 edn], 13). He claimed that his photo-
dynamics superseded Marey’s images. Chronophotography, he wrote, is “like a clock
that marks the quarter hours, cinematography one that marks also the minutes, and
photodynamism is like a third that indicates to us not only the seconds but also the
intermovemental fractions existing in the passages between seconds. This becomes
an almost infinitesimal calculation of movement” (Bragaglia: Fotodinamismo futurista
[1980 edn], 28). Indeed, Bragaglia claimed he and his brother were not photographers
at all, but artists using a camera to free photography from “that ridiculous and brutal
negative element, the snapshot” (Bragaglia: Fotodinamismo futurista [1980 edn], 35;
see also below, p. 222). Bragaglia repeatedly condemned instantaneity and insisted on
the innovative nature of his camera’s products. His photodynamics not only proved
many of the “facts foreseen by the Futurist painters”, including the technical manifes-
to’s statement that movement, in effect, destroys bodies, but also showed other effects:
“The skeleton of the fingers, devoid of flesh and wrapped only in a singular diaph-
anousness very similar to that of x-rays” (Bragaglia: Fotodinamismo futurista [1980
edn], 48) and the “magnificent dynamic emotion with which the universe ceaselessly
vibrates” (Bragaglia: Fotodinamismo futurista [1980 edn], 36). Invoking Bergson,
Bragaglia envisioned his photodynamics to be a starting point of the Futurist painters’
218 Marta Braun

exploration of the philosopher’s notions of simultaneity and the fourth dimension. To

Bragaglia, photodynamism did not compete with painting, but surpassed it because
“the technical means of photographic science are faster, more powerful and more
forward looking and more in tune with the needs of modern life than the older methods
of representation” (Bragaglia: Fotodinamismo futurista [1980 edn], 36).

Giacomo Balla’s tribute to chronophotography

Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) was perhaps the most photo-literate of the Futurist paint-
ers, and his friendship with Bragaglia presented an opportunity to move beyond his
earlier Divisionist style (see Benzi: “Balla and Photography”, and Poggi: “Photogenic
Abstraction”). From summer 1912 onwards, he produced a series of drawings and col-
ourful paintings that amalgamated chronophotography’s analytic decompositions and
photodynamism’s blurred trajectories. In Dynamism of a Dog on Leash, Girl Running on
a Balcony and Rhythm of a Violinist, Balla conveyed the sensation of dynamic move-
ment through transparent, overlapping forms repeated across the picture plane.
In 1913, Balla paid a final tribute to chronophotography, Linee andamentali +
successioni dinamiche (Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences), which
shows birds in flight seen simultaneously from above and from the side, their over-
lapping wings and bodies forming a sweeping rhythm that is echoed by blurred
interstitial shapes. From this point onwards, any reference to chronophotography or
photodynamism in his work espoused a more decorative style of abstraction.
Balla’s abandonment of chronophotography and photodynamism was prompted
in part by Boccioni’s response to Bragaglia and his work. Since the publication of
Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto, Boccioni had established himself as the most
outspoken proponent and foremost theorist of Futurist painting and sculpture.
Frustrated in his attempts to demonstrate Futurism’s superiority over Cubism (see
Boccioni: “I futuristi plagiati in Francia” and “Il dinamismo futurista e la pittura
francese”), angered by critics who mocked the dependence of Futurist painting on
photography and cinema and unhappy with Balla’s evident debt to photography, Boc-
cioni publicly disavowed photography, cinema and Bragaglia.
On 31 October 1912, La voce had printed an essay by the French critic Henri des
Pruraux that characterized Futurist painting as photographic:

It is from photography that we find these eccentric coagulated movements no one has ever seen,
since the essence of movement is continuity in duration, of which photography immobilizes an
instant. One starts by consulting it and ends up copying it. It is from instantaneous photography
that grotesque affirmations such as this one derive: instantaneous photography and its aggra-
vator, the cinema, which disrupts life, which jumps in a precipitous and monotonous rhythm.
[…] Would these, perhaps, be the two new classics in favour of which the Futurists proscribe the
masters of the museums? (Pruraux: “Il soggetto nella pittura”, 13)
 Photography 219

In March 1913, Boccioni responded in Lacerba: “Any accusations that we are merely
being ‘cinematographic’ makes us laugh – they are just vulgar idiocies” (Boccioni:
“The Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting”, 89). But the publica-
tion of the second edition of Futurist Photodynamism that summer and Bragaglia’s
insistence that he was pursuing a Futurist agenda were seen as grounds for further
provocation. Lacerba’s announcement of the book’s appearance on 1 July prompted
Boccioni to write an outraged letter to Ardegno Soffici, one of the journal’s editors: “A
mishmash of arbitrary and unspeakable idiocy […] We have decided to repudiate the
text and its author at all times” (See Archival sources: Boccioni: Letter to Soffici, fol.
18 c verso). On 1 August, Boccioni repeated his attack once more in Lacerba: “We have
always rejected with disgust and scorn even a distant relationship with photography,
because it is outside art” (Boccioni: “Il dinamismo futurista e la pittura francese”,
171). On 4 September, he admonished the Futurist gallerist Giuseppe Sprovieri to dis-
tance himself clearly from Bragaglia’s book:

It is an arrogant uselessness that harms our aspiration to liberate ourselves from the schematic
or successive reproduction of stasis or of motion. […] Can you imagine a need for the graphoma-
nia of a positivist photographer of dynamism? […] His pamphlet seemed to me, and also to our
friends, simply monstrous. His affectation and infatuation with the nonexistent are grotesque –
(keep what I’m telling you about Bragaglia to yourself, because personally I find him likeable).
(Bragaglia: Letter to Giuseppe Sprovieri, 288)

And, finally, on 1 October, came the official excommunication in Lacerba, signed by

Balla, Boccioni, Carrá, Russolo, Severini and Soffici:

Given the general ignorance in matters pertaining to art, and to avoid equivocation, we Futurist
painters declare that everything referring to photodynamism concerns innovations in the field of
photography exclusively. These purely photographic researches have absolutely nothing to do
with the plastic dynamism invented by us, or with any dynamic research in the dominion of
painting, sculpture and architecture. (Balla et al.: “Avviso”, 211)

The Futurist repudiation of photodynamism was symptomatic of the threat that pho-
tography posed to painting. The Futurists extolled a mechanized universe and the
fusion of man and machine, but they were not ready for a world rendered dynamic
by a photographic machine. Although the Futurists ostensibly embraced the masses
and wished to transcend the separation of high and low art, they actually supported
the traditional hierarchy of artistic media, with painting at the top and photography
beneath consideration.
Notwithstanding his exclusion from the Futurist movement, Anton Giulio Bra-
gaglia did not abandon his Futurist activities. Together with Luciano Folgore, he
organized a series of lectures across Italy. While Arturo turned almost exclusively to
portraiture, Anton Giulio began photographic studies of spirits and other occult phe-
nomena.
220 Marta Braun

Ironically, this investigation was again inspired by Boccioni. In the article for
Lacerba of March 1913, in which he had abjured all Futurist associations with the
photographic and cinematographic, Boccioni had also emphatically aligned his idea
of a physical transcendentalism with, as he put it, “the perception of analogous phe-
nomena, which have hitherto remained hidden from our obtuse sensibilities. These
phenomena include the perception of the luminous emanations of our bodies, of the
kind I spoke of in my first lecture in Rome, and which has already been found to
appear on the photographic plate” (Boccioni: “The Plastic Foundations of Futurist
Sculpture and Painting”, 89). It was Boccioni then who, while rejecting Bragaglia’s
rendering of the invisible with a camera, inadvertently pinpointed the path that
photo-dynamism would now take: the investigation of ghosts, spirits, X-rays and the
fourth dimension.
In November 1913, Bragaglia made the spiritist aspects of his Futurist Photody-
namism overt by describing his experiments with supernatural manifestations in the
essay “I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti” (The Spectres of the Living and the Dead). It
was illustrated by examples of what were held to be authentic photographs of mediu-
mistic séances, including nine of his own, admittedly contrived, pictures of spirits
and doubling – again taken with his brother Arturo and their friend, the Roman pho-
tographer Gustavo Bonaventura (1882–1966). In December 1913, he published “La
fotografia dell’invisibile” (Photography of the Invisible), an essay in which he consid-
ered once more the problems inherent in rendering with a camera mediumistic phe-
nomena and ghosts. In 1916, Bragaglia abandoned photography for cinema, and in
1918 opened his casa d’arte, a gallery and meeting place that would become a centre
of Futurist activities (see also pp. 180–181 in this volume).

New directions: Depero, Paladini, Pannaggi

By the beginning of the First World War, Futurism was internationally recognized
as Italy’s most significant contribution to the avant-garde. However, the Futurists’
rejection of photography as an independent art meant that no photographer dared
to follow Bragaglia’s example. Yet the Futurists could not ignore the power of pho-
tography, and in a variety of ways it became their medium of expression, although not
under the heading ‘Futurist photography’.
In December 1913, the young painter Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) arrived in
Rome and made the acquaintance of Giacomo Balla, who soon became his mentor
and friend. In March 1915, they jointly published, Ricostruzione futurista dell’uni-
verso (The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe), a manifesto illustrated with
photographic reproductions of six sculptures. Depero did more than use photogra-
phy as a means to document these assemblages; that same year he produced a
series of self-portraits that extended photography into the field of performance.
 Photography 221

The images captured the fugitive features traced by extreme emotions on his face.
They show him squinting, holding his clenched fist over his face contorted in anger,
gazing contemplatively out of the picture, making grimaces and laughing cynically.
Like Bragaglia’s photodynamics, these close-ups seem to have been mailed as post-
cards, and at least two of them were embellished with writing and paint, inviting
the viewer to scrutinize the face and to engage with a unique sense of physical and
emotional proximity. Thus, they followed a tradition set up in nineteenth-century
scientific photography, for example in the research of Guillaume-Amant Duchenne
de Boulogne (1806–1875) in Paris or Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) in Rome, who
investigated the universal meaning of facial expression beyond any cultural
conventions.
Depero’s portraits present emotions in their most transitory and bizarre forms,
turning them into sources of curiosity, wonder or amusement. They recall Boccio-
ni’s painting La risata (Laugh, 1911), which, according to the artist, was indebted to
the principle of X-rays and to Bergson’s Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique
(Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, 1900). In Pantomime (1916), Depero
moved from photographing his face to representing his body, posing with Swiss writer
and artist Gilbert Clavel, with whom he was working on a series of dances for a mar-
ionette theatre, I balli plastici (Plastic Ballets; see pp. 254–255 in this volume). The
image shows the two men in frozen, mechanical postures, feet, hands and joints awk-
wardly angled. Depero sports a sawhorse on his shoulder, and Clavel wears a metal
funnel on his head. They seem to declare that the human body could function just
like any other artistic material – wood, stone or metal. In three other photographs,
Depero is depicted sitting in a café and enacting scenes from his childhood: playing
hide-and-seek and climbing up a tree.
Of course, Marinetti, who oversaw the public face of Futurism, exploited what
seems to have been an innate talent for publicity and an understanding of the com-
modification of the image. He presented himself to the camera in postures that
conveyed heroism and aggression, and he controlled the dissemination of the photo-
graphs in newspapers and magazines. The other Futurists also regularly posed or had
their work photographed for posterity. They clearly understood photography to be the
modern medium of communication, self-promotion and publicity, although none of
them dedicated themselves exclusively to the task of developing a modernist artistic
practice for this medium.
Depero, too, undertook such promotional portraits – for example, for the Futurist
waistcoats he designed; yet, his performative self-portraits were of a different order
than those favoured by Marinetti. Like so much of his artistic production, they pro-
moted the importance of childhood. They were both confrontational and comical,
and their physical directness was unique within Futurist photography.
The interwar years saw photomontage – disparate images usually from the
mass media, juxtaposed without overt connection or explanation – become a key
avant-garde artistic strategy. The photogram, a unique image made from materials
222 Marta Braun

and light-sensitive paper exposed to light without the involvement of a camera, also
became popular with the Dadaist, Constructivist, Surrealist and Bauhaus artists.
The Futurists’ openness to and exchange with these international movements – in
Rome primarily through exhibitions at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia – ensured the rel-
atively quick, although ultimately short-lived, adoption of photomontage and the
photogram.
Two new adherents to the Futurist cause, Ivo Pannaggi (1901–1981) and Vinicio
Paladini (1902–1971), had met at Bragaglia’s casa d’arte and had begun to incorporate
photomontage into their work by the mid-1920s. Both of them had strong Communist
leanings and conceived of photomontage as a political tool, with Pannaggi looking to
the Bauhaus and Paladini to Dada and Constructivism for inspiration. With the rise
of Mussolini and Marinetti’s alignment with Fascism at the First Futurist Congress
of 1924, Pannaggi and Paladini’s belief in photomontage as a vehicle that could link
Futurism to proletarian culture became untenable. Pannaggi extricated himself from
the group and moved to the Bauhaus and the circles of photomonteur John Heartfield
in Berlin. Paladini founded his own movement, called ‘Immaginismo’, and graced the
cover of La ruota dentata (The Cogwheel, 1927) with a photomontage that combined
elements taken from both Dada and Surrealism. He wrote an article on photomontage
in November 1929 for La fiera letteraria (The Literary Fair) and continued to provide
photomontage illustrations for the periodicals Quadrivio (Crossroads) and Occidente
(The West) throughout the 1930s. But the images that would become known as Futur-
ist photography constituted a different form of visual analogy, one that became a
strategy for constructing iconic images of Fascism.

The Manifesto of Futurist Photography (1930)

From May 1929 to July 1930, an international touring exhibition, Film und Foto (Stutt-
gart, Zurich, Berlin, Danzig, Vienna, Zagreb, Tokyo, Osaka), celebrated the power of
photomontage and the photogram, amongst other expressions of photographic moder-
nity, including the snapshot and the straight photograph that Bragaglia had so vocif-
erously condemned in Fotodinamismo futurista (see above p. 217). Not a single Italian
photographer was included in the exhibition. Perhaps not to be outdone, in Septem-
ber 1930 Marinetti and Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni, 1896–1974) launched, on
the occasion of the 1° Concorso fotografico nazionale (see below, pp. 223–224), a leaflet
entitled Manifesto. It was reprinted and expanded on throughout the autumn and
given a final gloss in January 1931 (“La fotografia futurista: Manifesto”) in the journal
Il futurismo: Rivista sintetica illustrata (Futurism: Compact Illustrated Magazine), this
time illustrated by six photographs by Tato, accompanied by snippets of laudatory
descriptions of Futurism written by national and international critics (Marinetti:
“Il futurismo giudicato in Italia e all’estero”).
 Photography 223

The manifesto is a curious document. Rather than promoting photography as an

avant-garde strategy or as a superior manner of perception, the two authors looked
back with nationalistic pride to what the Futurists had rejected twenty years earlier:
Bragaglia’s photodynamism, “imitated thereafter by all the avant-garde photogra-
phers in the world” (Marinetti and Tato: “Futurist Photography”, 392). They called for
photographers to achieve sixteen new photographic possibilities, including photo-
graphs of the “shadows of contrasting objects” (§ 2), “diffracted images of some parts
of human or animal bodies, either in isolation or joined together again in the wrong
order” (§ 4), “transparent and semitransparent images of people and concrete objects
with their semiabstract phantoms superimposed on them with the simultaneous
effect of dream memories” (§ 11), landscapes that are “totally extraterrestrial, astral,
or mediumistic” (§ 14) and “camouflaged objects intended to elude aerial observa-
tion” (§ 16). The manifesto concluded with an appeal that aimed at “extending the
possibilities of the science of photography to become more of a pure art and assist-
ing its development in the fields of physics, chemistry, and war” (Marinetti and Tato:
“Futurist Photography”, 393).
Tato, Marinetti’s co-signatory, was a painter and designer who had moved to
Rome in 1925 to take over his brother’s photographic studio. He had been drawn into
the Balla/Bragaglia circle and had exhibited his first photographic experiments in the
Casa d’Arte Bragaglia. Three of the six photographs used to illustrate “La fotografia
futurista: Manifesto” in Marinetti’s journal were “transparent and semi-transparent
images of people”, i. e. portraits that had been produced by superimposing negatives
to dynamically render the essential characteristics of the sitters: Marinetti, theatre
critic Remo Chiti and poet and novelist Mario Carli.
The other three photographs were examples of Tato’s original method of “cam-
ouflaged objects”. These were intended, as he wrote in his autobiography, to be
commercially useful or to support aerial reconnaissance in wartime (Tato: TATO rac-
conTATO da TATO, 132). Unlike ordinary camouflage, these photographed fabrications
would trick the eye and the camera lens of the enemy into assuming the presence of
things that were not really there. Tato proffered three examples: (1) “The Shepherd
and The Donkey”, made out of a small wooden hammer and metal bobbin, (2) the
Surrealist-inflected “The Perfect Bourgeois”, combining real hands that emerge from
a boutonnière-festooned jacket with the human body replaced by a coat hanger and
(3) “The Ballerina”, portraying a marionette in a stage setting made of paper, but illu-
minated and photographed from below so that she fills the frame and casts a very
human shadow.
The publication of the manifesto officially heralded the advent of Futurist pho-
tography. It unfolded in stages over three exhibitions. The first was Primo concorso
fotografico nazionale (First National Photographic Competition, Rome: Aranciera di
Villa Umberto, 9–30 November 1930), where Marinetti and Tato organized a Futurist
section of forty-six prints by, among others, Tato, Bragaglia, Mario Bellusi (1893–1955)
and the Neapolitan Pictorialist photographer Giulio Parisio (1891–1967). The Mostra
224 Marta Braun

sperimentale di fotografia futurista (Experimental Exhibition of Futurist Photography,

Turin: Padiglione delle Comunità Artigiane, 15 March – 6 April 1931), which travelled
to the Fiera di Milano (12–27 April 1931), exhibited 115 works. The Mostra fotografica
futurista (Exhibition of Futurist Photography, Trieste: Padiglione Municipale del
Giardino Pubblico, 1–17 April 1932) showed 107 prints.
The Turinese portrait photographer Giuseppe Enrie (1886–1961), best known
today for his photographs of the shroud of Turin, wrote a short introductory essay for
the Turin catalogue, crediting Futurist photography with having overcome the ‘iron
fetters’ of the documentary image. Marinetti published a leaflet version of the mani-
festo to accompany the exhibition. Entitled Il grande manifesto della fotografia futur-
ista, it appeared under his name alone and without § 16 on ‘camouflaged objects’.
In Trieste, the manifesto re-appeared in the catalogue in its dual-author form and
with the sixteenth point restored, following an introductory essay by the Futurist poet
Bruno Sanzin (1906–1994).
The exhibiting photographers were all Italian; they were mostly studio profession-
als, technically proficient masters of the then-dominant style of Pictorialism and of
classic portraiture, rather than members of any avant-garde. We do not know how nor
why they were chosen. The photomontages of Paladini and Pannaggi, for example,
were not included, and the predominant technique was a blending of photomontage
and photogram, a kind of sandwich of multiple negatives, often superimposing text,
signs and objects over scenes or faces. There were also examples of ‘camouflage’ as
well as plain photograms and images that depicted movement along the lines of Bra-
gaglia’s photodynamics. Many of these were portraits, although musical motifs were
also common.
Tato, Parisio and ‘Bragaglia’ (the attribution would become ‘Arturo Bragaglia’ in
the Trieste show) exhibited in all three venues. Tato’s work comprised three portraits,
including one of Mario Carli entitled Il fantasma del romanzo (The Ghost of the Novel),
and camouflaged objects. Parisio’s Aria di caffè: La tazza di caffè (Frothed Espresso:
The Cup of Coffee) showed a distorted image of a man reflected in the chrome surface
of an espresso machine, but his two images of Anno X a Napoli (Year X [of the Fascist
Era, 1931–1932] in Naples) exhibited in Trieste were images of light effects on paper
figures, a subject he would develop for the rest of his career. Tato added to the Trieste
show two images called Spettralizzazione (Spectralization). The ‘Bragaglia’ photo-
graphs included reprints of those made in 1911–1913: Lo schiaffo (The Slap), Il saluto
(The Greeting) and Polifisionomico (Poly-physiognomy). New works included Il violon-
cellista (The Cellist) and the humorous Il miope (The Short-sighted Man): four over-
lapping profiles in photodynamic fashion of a spectacled man bringing his face ever
closer to a beautiful woman. The Turin exhibition offered an opportunity to add local
photographers. They came from the studios of Giovanni Giuseppe Guarnieri (1892–
1976) and Oreste Bertieri 1870–1908) – Balla had been an apprentice there in 1891 – as
well as Giuseppe Enrie, Piero Luigi Boccardi (1890–1971) and Maggiorino Gramaglia
(1895–1971), whose Spettralizzazione dell’io (Spectralization of the Self) was later
 Photography 225

turned into his studio logo. The Milanese portraitist Mario Castagneri (1892–1940),
who became a Futurist after Marinetti charged him with photographing the First
Futurist Congress in 1924, presented two superimpositions of the poet offering the
Fascist salute, entitled L’ eroica (The Heroic One), and five pictures of stage sets at the
La Scala theatre, where he was the official photographer. As in Turin, the Trieste show
included native professionals, such as Ferruccio Demanins (1903–1944) and Wanda
Wulz (1903–1984), both of whom took up Tato’s technique of superimposition. Dema-
nins’ Sintesi aerea di Trieste (Aerial View of Trieste) superimposed a lighthouse and
the bell tower of the Cathedral over a view of the port. His portrait Radiosintesi (Radio
Synthesis) overlaid Marinetti’s head with a microphone, the hanging frame of which
encircling his face from eyes to chin. Wulz, who together with her sister ran their
father Carlo’s photographic studio, was more playful, superimposing her own face
with that of a cat, Io + Gatto (Me + Cat), to picture the fluidity of identity, or a drum set
on her body, Jazz Band, to convey the modern rhythms of a jazz band.
In his introductory essay for the Trieste catalogue, Bruno Sanzin claimed that
the “problem of photographic art” was resolved with Futurist photography because
Futurist photography – Sanzin defined it as “dynamic sensations and the multiple sit-
uations that the manifesto describes” – oriented the medium’s propensity for objec-
tive documentation towards an emotive function (Sanzin: “Preface”, 2–3). But the
kinds of photographic experiments promoted by Sanzin, prescribed by the Manifesto
of Futurist Photography and executed by the exhibitors were long out of date by the
1930s. Photomontage, photograms, solarizations and multiple exposures were strate-
gies that had been part of the German, Russian and French avant-gardes since the end
of the First World War. As for images of spectralizations and psychic manifestations
of will, Fascism had sounded the death knell for such investigations, once Mussolini
had subordinated the will of the individual to the will of the collective.
The Futurist exhibitions of 1930–1932 with their out-of-date aesthetics saw pho-
tography shift from a modernist strategy to a major element in the aesthetic arsenal of
Fascist propaganda. In Turin, portraits of Mussolini created by superimposition dom-
inated, for example, Ritratto politico del Duce (A Political Portrait of the Duce) and
L’ Italia nell’anno IX (Italy in the Year IX [of the Fascist Era, 1930–1931]), both by Studio
Bertieri. They featured the eyes of a disembodied Mussolini and a mass of arms lifted
in the Roman Salute, respectively. Over both images are superimposed aeroplanes,
the fasces (lictorian bundle) and the numeral IX, referring to the ninth year after the
March on Rome (1922). In Trieste, Mussolini also featured in Boccardi’s Il Duce and
Tato’s Ritratto dinamico del Duce (Dynamic Portrait of the Duce).
At the Mostra della rivoluzione fascista (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution,
Rome: Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 28 October 1932–28 October 1934), the architect
Giuseppe Terragni presented the final emanation of the Futurist dream of the fusion
of man and machine in its photographic embodiment. But whereas Futurist photogra-
phers had rejected the subjugation of the medium to an objective reality, the Fascists
embraced its claim to ‘truth’ in order to further their political ends. In the immense
226 Marta Braun

photo-mosaic in Room O of the exhibition, a montage of thousands of faces and

bodies blankets the surface of three turbines to evoke the power of the masses, while
above them a forest of disembodied hands is raised in the Fascist salute. The size of
the photo-mosaic – a gargantuan photomontage spread over a whole wall – makes
visible the importance of the new spiritualist school of Fascist mysticism. Its adher-
ents – the thousands melded into an oceanic crowd – worship the spirit of Mussolini,
whose metallic profile guides them from across the room.

Conclusion
Although still relatively unknown, Bragaglia’s photodynamics were the first truly
avant-garde photographs: both the images and the accompanying manifesto preceded
by many years all other attempts in Europe to use the camera or the photograph as a
means of Modernist artistic expression. Experiments in the 1930s under the aegis of
‘Futurist photography’ paid homage to Bragaglia’s work but were themselves short-
lived in the face of the Fascist régime’s embrace of a seemingly unmediated documen-
tary photography that would serve its political ends. Today, Photoshop and motion
capture technologies have supplanted combination-printing and ‘movemented’ pho-
tography. And while Bragaglia’s work awaits the attention it deserves, in examples
such as Bill Viola’s video work and the still photography of artists from Jeff Wall to
Cindy Sherman, the gestures and theatrics that are at the heart of photodynamism
have become a hallmark of postmodern visual production.

Archival sources
Boccioni, Umberto: Letter to Soffici, undated. Archivio di Stato, Florence, Fondo Soffici 4/2, letter 18.

Works cited
Balla, Giacomo, et al.: “Avviso.” Lacerba 1:19 (1 October 1913): 211.
Balla, Giacomo, et al.: “La pittura futurista. Manifesto tecnico.” Maria Drudi Gambillo, and Teresa
Fiori, eds.: Archivi del futurismo. Vol. 1. Roma: De Luca, 1958. 65–67. English translation
“Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (11 April 1910).” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and
Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
64–67.
Benzi, Fabio: “Balla e la fotografia: Lo sguardo della modernità = Balla and Photography: The
Modern Gaze.” Fabio Benzi, ed.: La Collezione Biagiotti Cigna: Dipinti, moda futurista, arti
applicati = Balla: The Biagiotti Cigna Collection, Paintings, Futurist Fashions, Applied Arts.
Milano: Leonardo Arte, 1996. 29–49.
 Photography 227

Bergson, Henri: Introduction à la métaphysique. Paris: Payen, 1903. Italian translation La filosofia
dell’intuizione: Introduzione alla metafisica ed estratti di altre opere a cura di Giovanni Papini.
Lanciano: Carabba, 1909.
Bergson, Henri: Le Rire: Essai sur la signification du comique. Paris: Alcan, 1900.
Boccioni, Umberto: “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste.” Lacerba 1:6 (15
March 1913): 51–52. English translation “The Plastic Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and
Painting.” Umbro Apollonio, ed.: Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.
88–90.
Boccioni, Umberto: “I futuristi plagiati in Francia.” Lacerba 1:7 (1 April 1913): 66–68. Reprinted in
Maria Drudi Gambillo, and Teresa Fiori, eds.: Archivi del futurismo. Vol. 1. Roma: De Luca, 1958.
147–151.
Boccioni, Umberto: “Il dinamismo futurista e la pittura francese.” Lacerba 1:15 (1 August 1913):
169–171. Reprinted in U. Boccioni: Gli scritti editi e inediti. A cura di Zeno Birolli. Milano:
Feltrinelli, 1971. 53–56.
Boccioni, Umberto: “La pittura futurista: Note per la Conferenza tenuta a Roma 1911.” Zeno Birolli,
ed.: Altri inediti e apparati teorici. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1972. 11–29. English translation “Futurist
Painting: Lecture Delivered at the Circolo Artistico, Rome, May 29, 1911.” Ester Coen, ed.:
Umberto Boccioni. New York: Abrams, 1988. 231–239.
Boccioni, Umberto: “Lettera di U. Boccioni a G. Sprovieri, 4 September 1913.” Maria Drudi Gambillo,
and Teresa Fiori, eds.: Archivi del futurismo. Vol. 1. Roma: De Luca, 1958. 287–288.
Bragaglia, Anton Giulio: “I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti.” La cultura moderna: Natura ed arte 22:23
(November 1913): 756–764.
Bragaglia, Anton Giulio: “La fotografia dell’invisibile”. Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia, ed.:
Fotodinamismo futurista. Torino: Einaudi, 1980. 247–255.
Bragaglia, Anton Giulio: Fotodinamismo futurista. Ed. by Antonella Vigliani Bragaglia. Torino:
Einaudi, 1980. Partial English translation by Lawrence S. Rainey in Modernism/Modernity 15:2
(April 2008): 363–379.
Film und Foto: Internationale Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbunds. Exhibition catalogue.
Stuttgart: Ausstellungshallen am Interimtheaterplatz, 8 May – 7 July 1929. Stuttgart: Werkbund,
1929.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “La fotografia dell’avvenire.” Gazzetta del popolo (Turin), 9 November
1930. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista: Futurismo e fotografia. Milano: Multhipla, 1979. 318–320.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed.: “Il futurismo giudicato in Italia e all’estero.” Il futurismo: Rivista
sintetica illustrata 22 (11 January 1931): 2–4.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Tato [pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni]: “La fotografia futurista:
Manifesto.” Il futurismo: Rivista sintetica illustrata 22 (11 January 1931); and [with Marinetti’s
signature alone] Il grande manifesto della fotografia futurista. Torino: Roncati, [1931]. English
translation “Futurist Photography.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 392–393.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Tato [pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni]: Manifesto. Roma: Direzione del
Movimento Futurista, 1930. Reprinted in Mostra fotografica futurista (ceramiche): Esposizione
permanente del Sindacato Belle Arti, 1–17 aprile 1932-X. Trieste: Tip. P. N. F., 1932. [6]. Oggi
e domani 2:3 (10 novembre 1930): 5. Tato racconTato da Tato: 20 anni di futurismo. Milano:
Oberdan Zucchi, 1941. 127-128. Luigi Scrivo, ed.: Sintesi del futurismo: Storia e documenti.
Roma: Bulzoni, 1968. 191. Italo Zannier, ed.: Cultura fotografica in Italia: Antologia di testi sulla
fotografia, 1839–1949. Milano: Angeli, 1985. 290-291. Giovanni Lista: Futurismo e fotografia.
Milano: Multhipla, 1979. 317-318.
Paladini, Vinicio: “Fotomontage.” La fiera letteraria 5:45 (10 November 1929): 4. Reprinted in
Giovanni Lista: Futurismo e fotografia. Milano: Multhipla, 1979. 314–315.
228 Marta Braun

Poggi, Christine: “Photogenic Abstraction: Giacomo Balla’s ‘Iridescent Interpenetrations’.”

C. Poggi: Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton/NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2009. 109–149.
Pruraux, Henri de: “Il soggetto nella pittura.” La voce 4:44 (31 October 1912): 920–922.
Sanzin, Bruno: [Preface.] Mostra fotografica futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Trieste: Sindacato Belle
Arti, 1–17 April 1932. [1]–[3].
Tato [pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni]: “La fotografia futurista nell’avvenire.” Oggi e domani 2:11
(8 December 1930): 5. Reprinted with some modifications as “La fotografia futurista e la
trasparenza dei corpi opachi.” Il giornale d’Italia, 12 December 1930. Reprinted in Giovanni
Lista: Futurismo e fotografia. Milano: Multhipla, 1979. 323–325.
Tato [pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni]: TATO racconTATO da TATO: 20 anni di futurismo. Milano: Zucchi,
1941.

Further reading
Apraxine, Pierre, and Sophie Schmit: “La Photographie et l’ occulte.” Clément Chéroux, ed.: Le
Troisième Œil: La photographie et l’ occulte. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. 12–17. English translation
“Photography and the Occult.” The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult. New Haven/
CT: Yale University Press, 2005. 12–17.
Bertolotti, Costanza: “Les Invisibles des futuristes.” Images re-vues: Histoire, anthropologie et
théorie de l’ art 8 (April 2011): 1–24.
Bragaglia, Anton Giulio: “La fotografia di movimento: La fotografia futurista.” Noi e il mondo 3:4
(April 1913): 358–364.
Braun, Marta: “Anton Giulio Bragaglia: Photodynamism and Photospiritism = Anton Giulio
Bragaglia: Photospiritisme et photodinamisme.” Vincent Lavoie, and France Choinière, eds.:
Shock Wave: Photography Rocks Representation = Ondes de choc: La représentation secouée
par la photographie. Montréal: Dazibao, 2003. 85–97; 89–103.
Braun, Marta: “Giacomo Balla, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, and Etienne-Jules Marey.” Vivien Greene,
ed.: Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe. New York: Guggenheim Museum,
2014. 95–103.
Braun, Marta: Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey 1830–1904. Chicago/IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1992
Briani, Giulio: “I futuristi e la fotodinamica.” Atti della Accademia roveretana degli agiati. A. Classe
di scienze umane, lettere ed arti, serie VII, vol. 5, A 245 (1995): 253–287.
Carey, Sarah: “From ‘fotodinamismo’ to ‘fotomontaggio’: The Legacy of Futurism’s Photography.”
Carte italiane: A Journal of Italian Studies 6:2 (2010): 221–237.
Cigliana, Simona: Futurismo esoterico: Contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra Otto
e Novecento. 2nd edn Napoli: Liguori, 2002.
Crispolti, Enrico: “I futuristi e la fotografia.” Qui arte contemporanea 8 (June 1972): 15–21.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Nuovi archivi del futurismo. Vol. 1. Cataloghi di esposizioni. Roma: De Luca;
CNR - Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 2010.
De Berti, Raffaele, and Irene Piazzoni, eds.: Forme e modelli del rotocalco italiano tra fascismo e
guerra. Milano: Cisalpino, Istituto Editoriale Universitario – Monduzzi Editoriale, 2009.
Fernández Castrillo, Carolina: “Depero y la fotoperformance.” Depero futurista (1913–1950). Madrid:
Fundación Juan March, 2014. 286–291. English translation “Depero and Photo-Performance.”
Depero futurista (1913–1950). Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 2014. 286–291.
 Photography 229

Ginex, Giovanna: “Boccioni e la fotografia.” Laura Mattioli Rossi, ed.: Umberto Boccioni: Pittore
scultore futurista. Milano: Skira, 2006. 137–165.
Lista, Giovanni: Futurismo e fotografia. Milano: Multhipla, 1979.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: Cinema e fotografia futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Rovereto (Trento): Museo
d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto, Archivio del ‘900, 18 maggio – 15 luglio
2001. Milano: Skira, 2001. French translation Cinéma et photographie futuriste. Milan: Skira,
2008.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: Futurism and Photography. Exhibition catalogue. London: Estorick Collection of
Modern Italian Art, 24 January – 22 April 2001. London: Merrell, 2001.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: Il futurismo nella fotografia. Exhibition catalogue. Firenze: Museo Nazionale
Alinari della Fotografia, 17 settembre – 15 novembre 2009. Pordenone: Palazzo della Provincia,
5 dicembre 2009 – 7 febbraio 2010. Firenze: Fratelli Alinari, 2009.
Marey, Etienne-Jules: “La cronofotografia: Nuovo metodo per analisi del movimento nelle scienze
fisiche e naturali.” Il dilettante di fotografia 23 (1892): 355–356; 24 (1892): 376–377; 25 (1892):
390–394; 26 (1892): 405–411; 27 (1892): 423–427; 28 (1892): 441–443; 29 (1892): 453–457; 30
(1892): 471–475; 31 (1892): 488–490.
Marra, Claudio: “In zona futurismo.” C. Marra: Fotografia e pittura nel Novecento (e oltre). Milano:
Mondadori, 2012. 1–33.
McCauley, Anne: “Francis Bruguière and Lance Sieveking’s ‘Beyond this Point’ (1929): An Experiment
in Abstract Photography, Synaesthesia, and the Cinematic Book.” Record of the Princeton
University Art Museum 67 (June 2008): 46–65.
Minghelli, Giuliana: “Eternal Speed/Omnipresent Immobility: Futurism and Photography.” Sarah
Patricia Hill, and Giuliana Minghelli, eds.: Stillness in Motion: Italy, Photography, and the
Meanings of Modernity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. 97–130.
Müller-Helle, Katja: “The Past Future of Futurist Movement Photography.” Getty Research Journal 7
(January 2015): 109–123.
Ortenzi, Alessandro, ed.: Fotografia futurista: + Demanins. Trieste: Sala Mostre della Provincia di
Trieste, Palazzo Galatti, 18 dicembre 2000 – 29 gennaio 2001. Vicenza: Edisai, 2000.
Pacini, Piero: “Cronofotografia, fotodinamica e futurismo: Visioni in movimento.” Art e dossier
18:190 (June 2003): 14–19.
Pelizzari, Maria Antonella: “Futurist Photography: Tato and the 1930s.” Vivien Greene, ed.:
Italian Futurism 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe. New York: Guggenheim Museum
Publications, 2014. 295–309.
Pelizzari, Maria Antonella: Photography and Italy. London: Reaktion Press, 2011.
Racanicchi, Piero: “Fotodinamismo futurista.” Siprauno 3 (May–June 1965): 80–86.
Ragaglia, Maria Letizia: “Fotografia futurista: Le logiche extra-quadro di Fortunato Depero.” Il
cristallo (Bolzano) 43:2 (August 2001): 53–58.
Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico: “Fotodinamica futurista: Una postilla a ‘fotografica ed arte’.” Sele arte
7:39 (January–February 1959): 2–10. Reprinted with appendix in C. L. Ragghianti: Arti della
visione. Vol. 2. Spettacolo. Torino: Einaudi, 1976. 169–183.
Regnani, Gerardo: “Futurism and Photography: Between Scientific Inquiry and Aesthetic
Imagination.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Amsterdam/
New York: Rodopi, 2009. 177–199.
Rosso, Vanessa: “Room O of the Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution.” Jorge Ribalta, ed.: Public
Photographic Spaces: Exhibitions of Propaganda, from Pressa to The Family of Man, 1928–55.
Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, 2008. 220–256.
Ruggiero, Elisa: “L’ aerofotografia e il futurismo tra le due guerre.” E. Ruggiero: Fotografare volando:
Storia, arte, impresa. Roma: Aracne, 2010. 93–102.
230 Marta Braun

Schiaffini, Ilaria: “I fotomontaggi immaginisti di Vinicio Paladini tra pittura, teatro e cinema.”
Ricerche di storia dell’arte 109 (2013): 54–65.
Schwarz, Angelo: “Fascist Italy.” Jean-Claude Lemagny, and André Rouillé, eds.: The History of
Photography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 136–140.
Tisdall, Caroline, and Angelo Bozzolla: “Bragaglia’s Futurist Photodynamism.” Studio International
90:190 (July–August 1975): 12–16.
Trizzino, Lucio: Refoli di fotografia futurista. Firenze: Polistampa, 2010.
Uroskie, Andrew V.: “Chronophotography and Cinematography to Photodynamism and Chromatic
Music: Bergson’s Critique of Photography and the Birth of the Futurist Motion Picture,
1910–1912.” Giuseppe Gazzola, ed.: Futurismo: Impact and Legacy. Proceedings of a
Conference Held in Florence: Center for Contemporary Italian Studies, 15 October 2009. Stony
Brook/NY: Forum Italicum Publishing, 2011. 147–157.
Vittori, Massimiliano, ed.: L’ obbiettivo futurista: Fotodinamismo & fotografia. Exhibition catalogue.
Cagliari: Centro Comunale d’Arte e Cultura Exmà, 20 marzo 2009 – 21 giugno 2009. Roma:
l’ Ex GIL in Largo Ascianghi, 15 – 30 maggio 2009. Brescia: Palazzo Martinengo, 4 luglio – 27
settembre 2009. Reggio Calabria: Villa Genoese Zerbi, 7 novembre 2009 – 3 gennaio 2010.
Latina: Novecento, 2009.
[Wulz, Wanda]: I Wulz: Tre generazioni di fotografi a Trieste dal 1868 al 1981. Exhibition catalogue.
Trieste: Civico Museo Revoltella; Sala comunale d’arte di Palazzo Costanzi, 21 novembre – 15
dicembre 1981. Trieste: Comune; Wanda e Marion Wulz, 1981.
Margaret Fisher
14 Radio and Sound Art
From its inception, the Futurist movement used science and technology as a canvas
for an art that would push society toward a new and thoroughly modernized human-
ity. Daily life was occasion for art, provided that it glorified a swift pace of change
and broke with tradition on everything from literature to painting, from applied arts
to politics and everyday life. Before the advent of Italian broadcast programmes, F. T.
Marinetti equated radio-telegraphic stations with hallowed places – post-Christian
sanctuaries endowed with a Futurist Divinity that dwelled in all places and things
embodying speed – and described them as “the synthesis of every kind of courage
in action. It is aggressive and warlike … Speed = scorn for all obstacles, desire for the
new and the unexplored. It represents modernity and moral health” (Marinetti: “The
New Ethical Religion of Speed”, 254–255).
Broadcast radio, introduced in Italy in 1924, complemented a range of previous
attempts by the Futurists to reach into daily life. Programme content, before the
State brought in strict control of content in the 1930s, ranged across the arts and pro-
moted Esperanto, physical exercise, hygiene, Montessori education and international
exchange. Radio popularized do-it-yourself technology as a new paradigm. The aux-
iliary print media of Italian State radio, RadioOrario (RadioHour) and RadioCorriere
(RadioCourier), featured Marinetti as a symbol of their commitment to revolutionize
their broadcast programmes, but granted very little microphone time to actual Futur-
ist content. Giuseppe (Pino) Masnata (1901–1968), poet-surgeon and dramatist, and
Marinetti published a Manifesto futurista della radio (Futurist Manifesto of Radio), in
Turin’s Gazzetta del popolo (22 September 1933). It was reprinted several times and
circulated also under the name La Radia and Il teatro futurista radiofonico. Together,
they imagined a future radio art with and without broadcast radio, in which the art-
ist’s ‘palette’ consisted of essential vibrations given off by living beings and by mate-
rial objects, a cosmic art of vibration carried by the medium of ethereal silence, an art
that would abolish time and the confinements of space, an art requiring new powers
of perception, an art that would ultimately push aside death by revealing the means
to perpetuate the human spirit into timeless space.
The manifesto immediately captured the world’s attention when it was translated
into French and then also in Esperanto. After the Second World War followed versions
in various other languages. Thus, it continues to exert ‘iconic force’ over the imagina-
tion of artists and writers committed to rethinking art through electronic media in our
own time (Grundmann: “The Geometry of Silence”, 1).
The Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature, 1912) introduced parole in libertà (Words-in-Freedom), a new type of lit-
erary composition devoid of syntax, infused with energy and delivered with speed.
Futurist literature enjoyed a second wind as aeropoesia – words and expressions no
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-014
232 Margaret Fisher

longer symbolically linked to real objects, but abstracted to reflect an aerial perspec-
tive of time and space – the optimal form for radio content (see p. 594 in the entry on
Italy in this volume). “Wireless imagination”, proposed in the Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Literature, was suggestive of an art of wave forms, an art reduced to the
minimum accoutrements, “an art that is even more essential” (Marinetti: “Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, 414). Radia was to be that “more essential” art.
The concept of a Futurist radio built upon the verb ‘to radiate’ (radiare) and followed
two trajectories. The first concerned the expansion of Futurism’s sphere of influence and
relied on publicity and a public presence. Marjorie Perloff dates the first Futurist broad-
cast to 8 July 1910, when the Futurists dropped hundreds of thousands of copies of the
manifesto Contro Venezia passatista / Discours futuriste aux Vénitiens (Against Passéist
Venice / A Futurist Speech to the Venetians) from the clock tower in Piazza San Marco
in Venice (Perloff: The Futurist Moment, 103). A second example of a Futurist broadcast
before the advent of broadcast stations occurred during Marinetti’s visit to London in
May 1914 to oversee a Futurist exhibition and concert. Using the telephone, he was able
to simultaneously participate in a Futurist spectacle at the Sprovieri Gallery in Naples,
Italy (Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 239). The association of Futurism with broad-
cast radio was secured in February 1925, when composer Francesco Balilla Pratella
(1880–1955) first transmitted his music on Italian radio. Ugo Donarelli (1890–1950),
Artistic Director of Italian Radio (U.R.I. or Unione Radiofonica Italiana), followed with
readings of two pre-Futurist, rather sentimental poems by Marinetti, originally written
in French: Invocation à la mer toute-pouissante (Invocation to the Omnipotent Sea) and
La Chanson du mendicant d’amour (Song of the Mendicant of Love), both taken from
Destruction (1904). On 23 April 1925, Marinetti himself came to the microphone and gave
radio audiences their first exposure to parole in libertà by declaiming his poem, Il bom-
bardamento di Adrianopoli (The Bombardment of Adrianople, 1912). It was followed by
the lecture, La nuova poesia (The New Poetry), repeated on 13 May. Approximate airtime
for Futurist-related content in the whole of 1925 was about 40 minutes, possibly less
than the duration of the Futurist event in Venice, if we discount the non-Futurist broad-
casts of Futurist Luciano Folgore (1888–1966). He hosted a ten-minute entertainment
programme that borrowed heavily from humorous magazines of the turn of the century
(See Archival sources: Folgore: Autograph Texts and Assorted Clippings, 1930s. See also
Ceri and Malantrucco: “Marinetti alla radio”, 539–562).
The Futurist radio presence in Italy waned in 1926, although Marinetti made
numerous broadcasts in South America to promote Futurism as the crucible of
Fascism (see pp. 342–343 in this volume). After 1927, Futurist radio activity increased
incrementally until 1931, after which it saw an unaccountable drop in activity, not-
withstanding the milestone radio event on 20 December, when Pino Masnata and
Carmine Guarino (1893–1965) premièred their Futurist opera, Il cuore di Wanda
(Wanda’s Heart), conducted by Arrigo Pedrollo. Wanda was the second opera specif-
ically written for broadcast radio (the first was Walter Goehr’s 66-minute Malpopita,
which aired on 29 April 1931 in Berlin).
 Radio and Sound Art 233

By the end of the 1920s, the language of radio infused the Futurist lexicon and
vice versa. Fedele Azari (1895–1930) and Marinetti published a Primo dizionario aereo
(First Aerial Dictionary, 1929) to introduce and decode the radio-jargon of aviators.
Ham radio operator Gian Franco Merli (dates unknown) – painter, sculptor, ceram-
icist, theorist and author of the first volume of the Edizioni radiofuturiste “Electron”
(Radio-Futurist Publishing House “Electron”), Radioaviazione (Radio-Aviation,
1929) – joined forces with painter-sculptor Bruno Munari (1907–1998) in 1927 to start
the Gruppo Radiofuturista Lombardo (Lombard Group of Radio-Futurists) to further
Azari’s aerial art. Under Munari’s presidency, the group produced the first examples
of radiopittura (radio-painting). The transformation of pictorial works into the radio
genre was justified by the ubiquity of radio waves, which now shared the atmosphere
with light: “Because radio in our time fills the atmosphere of the room and of the
world […] modern life, with its antennae and radio apparatus, is always the source of
the newest sensibilities” (Buzzi: “Pittori nuovi”, 138). Priority was given to concept
over execution of the work of art; the more audacious, violent, abstract, divorced
from any sense of the grand masters, the better. Two examples are Munari’s sculp-
ture, Radioscopia dell’uomo moderno (Radioscopy of Modern Man, 1933), described
as “a skeleton made of wood and metal, with a globe suspended between its ribs.
Man carries the world inside himself” (Manzoni: “Munari: Palombaro della fanta-
sia”), and Marisa Mori’s canvas La radio (1934) with lines radiating out from an oval
(an artist’s palette?) intersected by five horizontal lines (a musical stave?), them-
selves intersected by a disc (a phonograph record?) (see Futuristi di Torino: Pittura,
scultura, [5]).
The slim Futurist presence on Italian radio was compensated for by an increased
activity in the field of aerial theatre. In April 1931, Marinetti updated the 1919 mani-
festo, Teatro aereo futurista (Futurist Aerial Theatre) by Fedele Azari, pilot, recipient
of medals of valour for aerial combat and director of aerial spectacles (Marinetti: “Il
teatro aereo radiotelevisivo”). Azari died in 1930, but his ambitious script for an air
spectacle with ‘painted aeroplanes’, ‘flight dialogues’, ‘aerial parole in libertà’ and a
set design created by the planes’ own smoke, was given an experimental rehearsal by
Marinetti and Stanislao (Mino) Somenzi (1899–1948) in January 1932 outside Milan at
the Taliedo airfield (Kirby: Futurist Performance, 220–221, and Berghaus: “F. T. Mari-
netti’s Concept of a Theatre Enhanced by Audio-Visual Media”, 112–113). Marinetti’s
posthumous contribution to Azari’s script was to add powerful loudspeakers, which
broadcast music and speeches from the fuselage to the crowd below (Berghaus:
Italian Futurist Theatre, 485–494).
In 1932, the Futurists were given several opportunities to act as symbolic mascots
of Italian radio art. In January, Marinetti delivered a monologue; in September he
premièred Violetta e gli aeroplani (Violetta and the Aeroplanes). This radio drama in
three short scenes was commissioned by the recently restructured State radio station
E.I.A.R. (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche; Italian Authority for Radio
Broadcasts), which boasted Arnaldo Mussolini as vice-president. The Duce’s brother
234 Margaret Fisher

wove the Futurist rhetoric of ‘love of risk-taking’, ‘audacious consciousness’ and ‘a

suggestive poetics of danger’ into his speeches about the future of radio (Mussolini:
“Il saluto inaugurale”, 1, and Mussolini: “Gli eroi della volontà”, 1). Marinetti partici-
pated in radio celebrations of the tenth anniversary of Mussolini’s March on Rome,
joining Guglielmo Marconi and Pietro Mascagni for broadcasts heard beyond Italy on
sixty European stations and one-hundred in the United States (Fisher: Radia, 7).
A pivotal year for Futurist radio was 1933. Corrado Govoni (1884–1965) and For-
tunato Depero (1892–1960) joined the roster of Futurists permitted access to the
microphone, and Marinetti’s Violetta e gli aeroplani enjoyed a repeat-broadcast. On
12 August 1933, Marinetti acted as a radio commentator at the arrival of Italo Balbo’s
fleet of hydroplanes setting down in Rome after their record-breaking transatlantic
crossing to Chicago. He peppered the extemporaneous eye-witness account with pre-
scripted prose:

Hail the robust twenty-four voices of the new chorus of machines substituting everywhere for the
gentle songs of mandolins and guitars that once made the name of Italy wave across the skies
like a flower shedding its petals or a wafting perfume. In their place, the extremely hard aggres-
sive polyphony of power born of optimism. Steel voices, flesh, resilient skin of birch plywood,
and sleek Italian vigour recalls the fantastic displays of Sicilian steel foils and swords of combat.
(Marinetti: ‟Triumph of the Atlantic Fleet”, 164)

Continuous coverage brought the flight details to every radio listener in Italy, a break-
through in the public’s ability to experience and participate in world events. The
homecoming, during which Marinetti shared the aural stage with King Vittorio Ema-
nuele III, Mussolini and Balbo, marked Fascism as a product of Italian technological
genius and Futurist aesthetics. Both the 1932 and 1933 radio celebrations showcased
Italy’s engineering prowess within some of the world’s most competitive industries;
these were important and timely distinctions to be made on radio in Europe.
Marinetti secured a programme slot from 1934 to 1943 for ten- to fifteen-minute
radio ‘conversations’, called Futurismo mondiale (World-wide Futurism) and broad-
cast once or twice a month with varying frequency. They promoted Futurist art and
artists as integral elements of Italy’s military ambitions. Additionally, several pro-
grammes were devoted to the research of Georges Lakhovsky (1869–1942) concern-
ing cellular vibration. These scripts, held by the Getty Research Institute, have yet to
be incorporated into Futurism Studies (see Archival sources: Marinetti: Autograph
texts in blue crayon, untitled, undated [but 1930s]). Marinetti was temporarily pre-
vented from broadcasting because he regularly deviated from his submitted scripts
(see Berghaus: Futurism and Politics, 284–285). When Marinetti went as a volunteer
to Ethiopia in the Italian war of conquest (1935–1936), his wife Benedetta hosted the
programme. Ignazio Scurto (1912–1954), Depero and Govoni occasionally aired their
poetry independently of Futurismo mondiale. Aldo Palazzeschi (1885–1974) adapted
his 1909 sound montage, La fontana malata (The Sick Fountain) for radio. Bruno
Corra (pseud. of Bruno Corradini, 1892–1976) and Giuseppe Achille (1902–1959) broad-
 Radio and Sound Art 235

cast several radio dramas. These activities relied on the material world of Radio – the
microphones and loudspeakers, the personnel and radio transmitters – all controlled
by Mussolini’s government, which, like most State-controlled radio in Europe, vetted
the speakers, required inspection of the scripts and offered limited access to studios.
For most of the Futurist radio activities, there are no extant sound recordings. The
Archive of Recorded Sound in Rome, Discoteca dello Stato, holds a tape of Marinetti’s
broadcast to Italian-Americans on Balbo’s return, but not of the actual eye-witness
broadcast. One can also hear several seconds from the 1941 broadcast of Violetta e gli
aeroplani, montaged for the fifty-year anniversary of Italian radio.
Numerous tangential activities helped extend the Futurist sphere of influence
in the field of radio and its related technology. The most important outlets were the
weekly printed programme magazines, RadioOrario and RadioCorriere. They hosted
articles by Marinetti as well as by painter and noise artist Luigi Russolo (1885–1947),
painter Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), as well as the composers Virgilio Mortari (1902–1993),
Franco Casavola (1891–1955), Franco Alfano (1875–1954) and Pratella. The surreal
photographs of Italo Bertoglio (1871–1963) appeared on RadioCorriere’s cover and
internal pages. Guido Sommi-Picenardi (1839–1914) wrote a weekly column, “Sussuri
dell’etere” (Whispers of the Ether), for RadioCorriere. There were frequent contribu-
tions by Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960), whom the Futurists adopted as their own,
despite his affiliation with the Novecento movement. Outside of State radio, Arnaldo
Ginna (1890–1982) wrote a radio column from 1930 to 1931 for the Rome daily L’ impero
d’Italia (The Italian Empire). Paolo Buzzi (1874–1956), employed as a provincial civil
servant in Milan, broadcast in an official capacity, but outside of work he was a radio-
futurista, publishing Poema di radio-onde (The Poem of Radio Waves, 1940). Somenzi
held a license to sell radio equipment (see Archival sources: Sarti and Boni: Lettera
a Mino Somenzi, 1928 luglio 25, da Roma). As editor of Futurismo, the weekly organ of
the Futurist movement, he reported on the radio avant-garde. The January 1933 issue
carried a protest note about the fact that Futurism was being sidelined in Italian radio
and was thus unable to participate, much less contribute, to a new radio aesthetic
(Somenzi: “Spettacoli radiofonici futuristi”, 1).

The Futurist art of Radia

Futurist radio output followed a second trajectory toward an art of vibration, an art
of the unseen and the unknown, an art of varied scale ranging from an intimate art
to reverberations throughout the infinite cosmos, an art directly related to the origi-
nal wireless imagination. The 1933 Futurist Manifesto of Radio surveyed the material
world of radio and concluded that a new art was required. Radia, written with the
feminine rather than a masculine ending (Italian nouns are gendered), aligned Futur-
ist radio with the fine arts, la musica, la poesia, la pittura, la danza, l’ architettura, la
236 Margaret Fisher

cinematografia. It distinguished radia from the temporal jurisdictions of commerce,

politics and the military. La radia was not to be a reflection of cinema, books, theatre
or broadcast radio. In 1935 Masnata wrote a gloss of the radio manifesto, Il nome radia
(The Name ‘Radia’; see Archival sources: Masnata: Il nome radia), according to which
broadcast radio concerned the circulation of a performance rather than the creation
of one. Radia would by necessity require the material world of radio until scientists
could conquer the immaterial world of brain waves, the ether and the electromag-
netic spectrum. The manifesto suggested that, until then, Radia would be poised to
enact the nine evolutionary advancements mandated by the 1933 Second National
Futurist Congress: to advance beyond love, beyond patriotism, beyond the machine,
beyond modern architecture, painting, war, chemistry, beyond the Earth, beyond
death (Marinetti and Masnata: “The Radio”, 410–411).
Whereas Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna! (Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight, 1909) advocated
“wholehearted recklessness” and a “plunge into the darkness of death” (Marinetti:
“Second Futurist Proclamation”, 23), the Futurist Manifesto of Radio called for the con-
quest of death with the “metallization of the human body and seizing hold of the spirit
of life as a driving force” (Marinetti: “Futurist Manifesto of Radio”, 411). Darkness and
death were no longer considered voids, but a canvas for art, thanks to radio technol-
ogy. At the Second Futurist Congress, Ignazio Scurto described the process: Record
the voice before death; after death place the body in a crucible; add molten metals;
pour the mixture into moulds; let harden. The result is a metal container for the spirit.
Scurto imagined his own life after death as tooled parts for machine guns to be fired by
the next generation of soldiers (Scurto: “Meccanizzazione dei morti”, 112–113).
Yet when the 1933 Futurist Manifesto of Radio enumerated what Radia must be
(La radia sarà …), machines played no part. Marinetti and Masnata guided the mani-
festo’s theoretical reach, taking the art of Radia beyond the nine mandates of the
Second Futurist Congress towards an essential medium of vibration. Masnata, trained
in the natural sciences, deferred to the physical laws behind radio technology as the
more productive avenue: energy, electromagnetic waves and electron ‘demographics’
mapped in the Periodic Table of Elements. The language of the manifesto reads like
poetry and thereby masks Masnata’s professional roots in science. Masnata’s gloss,
written two years later (see Fisher: Radia), was filed away among Marinetti’s papers
and was only published in 2012. Without having access to this important document,
scholars have until recently conflated the Futurist art of Radia with the Futurist pres-
ence in all activity falling under the purview of radio.
Masnata took Radia beyond paroliberismo, the Futurist Free-Word style. His
account of parola in libertà in the context of a discussion about non-continuous ‘bits’
of information recognizes the natural affinity between Futurist sound poetry and
radiophysics. The use of discontinuous fragments was key to avant-garde movements
of the late nineteenth / early twentieth century, mirroring the wave / particle debates
unleashed by radio science. Masnata embedded his update on parole in libertà within
the larger discussion of packets of dynamic ‘bits’, or packets of energy. Such packets
 Radio and Sound Art 237

represented the smallest, irreducible unit of measurement established by the field of

quantum physics; they became the essential measurement of Futurist sound (Fisher:
Radia, 75). Packets of isolated sounds charged with the maximum of energy, “verbs ad
infinitum” (Marinetti, and Masnata: “The Radio”, 413) would radiate forever through-
out the universe.
Masnata peppered his argument for a new electronic art with unbridled enthu-
siasm and speculation. He (inaccurately) imagined not just parole in libertà but all
spoken words as perpetually radiating waves that maintain their original waveform.
Poetic license led him to speculate that words spoken by Julius Caesar might still
radiate in attenuated form throughout our atmosphere, although we do not yet know
how to harness the latent capacity inside of us to tap into them. Should we deploy
that capacity, Radia would be “a pure organism of radiophonic sensations” (Marinetti
and Masnata: “The Radio”, 413). The sixth demand of the Futurist Manifesto of Radio
points to our evolution as human radio receivers and to sound waves as one means
of destroying chronological time. Masnata conveniently ignored the fact that wave-
forms combine, change shape or size, are subsumed or rendered unrecognizable; and
that vibrations may escalate, diminish or be cancelled in the combining. The mani-
festo’s seventeenth bullet point, however, allows for such combinations: “utilization
of interferences between stations and of the intensification and fading of sounds”
(Marinetti and Masnata: “The Radio”, 414).
The evolution of the New Man envisaged in 1910 in L’ uomo moltiplicato e il
regno della macchina (Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine, 1910/1915)
was absorbed in the 1920s into the poetics of radiophysics: “Simultaneity, therefore,
plastic dynamism, aerial perspective, ultraviolet chromaticism; and underneath it all,
the exaggerated pleasure of re-inventing oneself, remaking oneself with every pen
stroke; re-characterizing oneself between the crackling of electric sparks and the auras
of the giant feverish underground and the cosmopolitan city, according to propeller
mechanics” (Buzzi: “Pittori nuovi”, 138–139). Masnata placed ‘mind’ at the centre
of the known world, assigning to the Futurist artist the rôle of giving shape to wave
forms: “There are those who hold that the ultimate conclusion of modern physics is
this: The universe is only a thought … What is the world? A universe of trapped waves
and of constantly shifting waves” (Fisher: Radia, 103, 108). Masnata wrote of a future
in which humans would communicate directly by brain waves without the participa-
tion of mouth, tongue, eyes, hand, gestures or machines.

Essentialist art of radio: Marinetti’s sintesi

and Pound’s radio operas
In his June 1931 manifesto, La radio come forza creative (Radio as a Creative Force),
Enzo Ferrieri (1890–1969), artistic director at E.I.A.R., published the seminal idea
238 Margaret Fisher

that the source of radio’s true, paradoxical power derived from silence (Ferrieri: La
radio, 32, 39). The theory had long been in the making, with many RadioOrario and
RadioCorriere articles focussed on radio’s ability to extract ‘music’ from the myste-
rious ether. Accepting Ferrieri’s premise, the Futurists proposed that silence should
be moved from background to foreground, from shapeless void to geometric planes,
from archetype to variable types of silence. Riccardo Ricas (pseud. of Riccardo Cast-
agnedi, 1912–1999) reported that he had broadcast “concerts of silence” on the radio
with Bruno Munari in May 1935 (Bassi: “Riccardo Ricas”, 963).
The Futurist work that most closely aspires to an art of Radia is Cinque sintesi
radiofoniche (Five Short Pieces of Essential Radio), written by Marinetti in 1933, pub-
lished in 1941 and first broadcast in 1980. The instructions for each piece consist of a
list of sounds and silences with timings. Minimal comments describe the fourth piece;
there are no additional guidelines for the artist/interpreter. Cinque sintesi adheres
closely to the last five bullet points of the Futurist Manifesto of Radio: its sounds and
silences proceed “with different gradations of harshness, of loudness and softness […
striving to give] the broadcasts cubic, round, or spherical – essentially, geometrical –
shape” (Marinetti and Masnata: “The Radio”, 413–414). Cinque sintesi recalls the Euro-
pean station identification signals heard daily on the radio: “Geneva: four musical
notes; Leipzig: Clock that beats tic-tac every second; Dresden: Morse signal long short
long short, … three bird calls in succession, the trill of a nightingale, the small bells of
a music box” (Chiodelli: “L’ identificazione delle stazioni”, 6). The first sintesi, Un paes-
aggio udito (A Landscape Heard), calls for “10 seconds of splashing, 1 second of crack-
ling, […] 6 seconds of a blackbird’s call.” The second, Dramma di distanze (“Drama of
Distances”) also might recall the experience of turning the radio dial: eleven seconds
for each of seven soundscapes from diverse locations. But whether they played in suc-
cession or simultaneously, Marinetti does not say. The third piece, I silenzi parlano
tra di loro (The Silences Speak Among Themselves) builds slowly to long periods of
silence, toying with the listener’s expectations regarding deliberate and random struc-
tures and challenging our acceptance of silence as a part of aural literacy. Battaglia di
ritmi (Battle of Rhythms) calls for three minutes of silence that all but eliminates the
centrality of the listener, placing the focus instead on ambient sounds. The receiver’s
crackling noise and atmospheric radio signal itself, although not identified, must enter
the work. The fifth piece, La costruzione di un silenzio (The Construction of a Silence),
uses sounds with distinctly different resonances to indicate two walls, a ceiling and
floor – drum roll, trumpet, shouts, squealing auto tram; gurgling water in pipes; songs
of sparrows and swallows. Despite the title, there is no silence indicated in the score.
Masnata had hoped to publish nine examples of Futurist Radia as an appendix
to his unpublished gloss: Marinetti’s Violetta e gli aeroplani and eight of Masnata’s
short works: Il bambino (The Child), Fox trot, Rosa rossa (Red Rose), L’ aviatrice Gaby
Angelini (The Aviatrix Gaby Angelini), Uno schiaffo (A Slap), Ricerca sentimentale
(Sentimental Research), Beethoven, and Il fischio (The Whistle) (Masnata: “Sei sintesi
radiofoniche”).
 Radio and Sound Art 239

Federico Luisetti attributes the “centrality assigned to intervals and interrup-

tions” in Cinque sintesi to Marinetti’s interest in the work of Henri Bergson. This is
then related to diverse approaches by other artists who grappled with the function of
the interval in art: Leoš Janáček, Bertolt Brecht, Anton Giulio Bragaglia and Marcel
Duchamp (Luisetti: “A Vitalist Art: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s ‘sintesi radiofoniche’ ”,
285–286). To this list should be added the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972),
who visited Marinetti in spring 1932 to consult on radio matters and electronic music
(see Archival sources: Pound: Undated letter to Marinetti). Pound had recently broad-
cast his own experimental radio opera Le Testament on the BBC. The two men had
radio and much else in common, leading Pound to revise his earlier impression of
Futurism as no more than a fleeting fad. Pound, engaged in writing a poem contain-
ing history, had dispensed with chronological time, likening his technique to that of
the radio. The discontinuous fragments of Pound’s Cantos interrupt, pause, fade in or
out, surprise and otherwise violate the Aristotelian unities of time and space (Fisher:
Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas, 40). Pound mastered the art of the interval by learning to
compose music; he matched or ‘rhymed’ durations of the syllables, words, phrases
and verse lines, imbuing his writing with hidden time structures.
Masnata cited Pound as his authority when he claimed Futurism had triggered
all experimentation in twentieth-century European literature (Fisher: Radia, 109;
Marinetti: “Art and the State. VI: Italy”). Although Pound’s literary techniques were
not, in fact, Futurist, he abided by an original theory that would serve well any poet or
musician or radio artist. His radical, and, to use a Futurist word, ‘essentialist’ theory
of harmony, is equally applicable to Dadaist sounds and Futurist parole in libertà as
well as to music: “A sound of any pitch, or any combination of such sounds, may be
followed by a sound of any other pitch, or any combination of such sounds, providing
the time interval between them is properly gauged” (Pound: Antheil and the Theory on
Harmony, 10).

The Radio Divide: La Radia and Radiophonic

Expression
In November 1933, Fortunato Depero previewed several poems from his upcoming
book Liriche radiofoniche (Radio Operas, 1934). The book was published the following
year with a list of qualities characteristic of Futurist radiophonic expression:

Brevity or concision
Concise variety of images
Contemporary subject matter
Simultaneous and cheerful style
Poetic lyricism fused to a phonic lyricism; sonorous and using sound effects
240 Margaret Fisher

Imitative and interpretative onomatopoeia

Inventive language
Joyful songs and voices
Surprises for the spirit
Colourful, synthetic expressions snatched from life, throbbing with a daily rhythm, fickle; with
aspects, dramas, materials and machinisms that are impossible to resist and do not admit:
Descriptive analysis
Maudlin and gloomy content
Scholastic cautiousness, cultural exhumations of limited fantasy (Depero: Liriche radiofoniche,
7–8)

It is difficult to understand why Masnata rejected Depero’s poems such as Radia

(Fisher: Radia, 111). Was it that these poems were written for print media? Or did
Depero’s aesthetics signal a radio divide within Futurist ranks? Marinetti could have
chosen Folgore, Munari, Sommi-Picenardi, Pratella or Russolo as his co-authors
for a radio manifesto. Arnaldo Ginna defined the Futurist radio artist as a person
who would distinguish between radio that upholds the tenets of Futurism and
Fascism from radio that applies the principles of Symbolist art and sensory aesthet-
ics (Ginna: “Scienzarte”, 3). Yet he, too, was overlooked by Marinetti in favour of
Masnata. With hindsight, we might say that the Futurist radio artist needed to be an
alchemist of silence rather than an alchemist of noise, music and colour, someone
who could give shape to the ether with silence and thought waves as well as with
sound. Marinetti placed Futurist radio in the hands of Masnata who, like himself,
had produced numerous theatrical sintesi and had successfully broadcast a work
written specifically for radio. As a surgeon, Masnata stayed up-do-date on the latest
research in cell biology, chemistry and, as his gloss makes evident, sub-atomic
physics. As poets, the co-authors produced a provocative statement regarding the
art of waves, one that continues many generations later to influence artists working
in new media.
Perpetuating the legacy of la Radia today is the 1st Mile Institute in New Mexico,
directed by Richard Lowenberg (1946–). The Institute identifies the radio frequency
spectrum as an ecological resource subject to conservation and preservation and as
an artistic resource requiring liberation from the politics of access. We have yet to
locate within the frequency spectrum the vibrations emitted by living beings and
material objects. And we have yet to identify the relationship between thought and
the spectrum. When we do, the art of Radia will flourish.

Archival sources
Folgore, Luciano: Autograph Texts and Assorted Clippings, 1930s. Los Angeles/CA: Getty Research
Institute. Luciano Folgore Papers, 1890–1960. Accession no. 910141, Series VI, Boxes 42–43
passim, and Oversize 5.
 Radio and Sound Art 241

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Autograph texts in blue crayon, untitled, undated [but 1930s]. Los
Angeles/CA: Getty Research Institute. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Correspondence and Papers,
1886-1974. Accession no. 850702. Box 9, f.21.
Masnata, Giuseppe: Il nome radia. New Haven/CT: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. F. T. Marinetti, General Collection 130. Box 34. Folder 1561.
Pound, Ezra: Letter to F. T. Marinetti, undated (1930s). Milan: Private collection.
Sarti, Guglielmo, and Manlio Leone Boni: Lettera a Mino Somenzi, 1928 luglio 25, da Roma. Museo
d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto. Mino Somenzi Papers. Som. III.9.1.

Works cited
[Anon.]: “Violetta e gli aeroplani: Trisintesi radiofonica.” RadioCorriere 8:37 (10–17 September 1932):
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Evening Art, 2012. 162.
Azari, Fedele: “Teatro aereo futurista.” Luigi Scrivo, ed.: Sintesi del futurismo: Storia e documenti.
Roma: Bulzoni, 1968. 161–162.
Azari, Fedele, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Primo dizionario aereo italiano. Milano: Morreale,
1929. Reprint Primo dizionario aereo italiano (futurista). Saggio introduttivo di Stefania
Stefanelli. Sesto Fiorentino (FI): Apice, 2015.
Bassi, Alberto: “Riccardo Ricas.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Il dizionario del futurismo. Firenze: Vallecchi,
2001. 963–964.
Berghaus, Günter: “F. T. Marinetti’s Concept of a Theatre Enhanced by Audio-Visual Media.” Forum
modernes Theatre 22:2 (2007): 105–116.
Berghaus, Günter: Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction,
1909–1944. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1996.
Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Buzzi, Paolo: “Pittori nuovi.” Giornale di Genova, 2 July 1929. Reprinted in P. Buzzi: Futurismo: Scritti
carteggi testimonianze. A cura di Mario Morini e Giampaolo Pignatari. Vol. 2. Milano: Quaderni
di Palazzo Sormani, 1983. 135–141.
Buzzi, Paolo: Poema di radio-onde (1933–1938). Firenze: Vallecchi, 1940.
Ceri, Luciano, and Elisabetta Malantrucco: “Marinetti alla radio.” Walter Pedullà, ed.: Il futurismo
nelle avanguardie: Atti del Convegno Internazionale di Milano. Roma: Ponte Sisto, 2010.
539–562.
Chiodelli, Raoul: “L’ identificazione delle stazioni.” RadioCorriere 4:5 (29 January 1928): 6.
Depero, Fortunato: Liriche radiofoniche. Milano: Morreale, 1934.
Ferrieri, Enzo: La radio! La radio? La radio! Milano: Greco & Greco, 2002.
Fisher, Margaret: Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas: The BBC Experiments 1931–1933. Cambridge/MA: MIT
Press, 2002.
Fisher, Margaret: Radia: A Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto. Emeryville/CA: Second Evening
Art Publishing, 2012.
Futuristi di Torino: Pittura, scultura. Exhibition catalogue. Torino: Galleria Codebò, 12–21 aprile 1932.
Ginna, Arnaldo: “Scienzarte.” Futurismo 2:1 (1 January 1933): 3.
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Banff: Walter, 1994. 129–139.
Kirby, Michael Stanley, and Victoria Nes Kirby: Futurist Performance. New York: Dutton, 1971. 2nd
edn New York: PAJ, 1986.
242 Margaret Fisher

Luisetti, Federico: “A Vitalist Art: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s sintesi radiofoniche.” Geert Buelens,
Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, eds.: The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists,
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Manzoni, Carlo: “Munari: Palombaro della fantasia.” Natura 7:1 (31 January 1934): 4.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Art and the State. VI: Italy.” The Listener 16:405 (14 October 1936):
730–732.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Cinque sintesi per il Teatro Radiofonico: Un paesaggio udito – Dramma
di distanze – I silenzi parlano tra loro – Battaglia di ritmi – La costruzione di un silenzio.” Autori
e scrittori: Mensile del sindacato nazionale 6:8 (August 1941): 7. Reprinted in F. T. Marinetti:
Teatro. Vol. 1. A cura di Giovanni Calendoli. Roma: Bianco, 1960. 221–225. Teatro. A cura di
Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Vol. 2. Milano: Oscar Mondadori, 2004. 629–638. English translation “Radio
Syntheses: An Acoustical Landscape; Drama of Distances; Silences Speak Among Themselves;
Battle of Rhythms; Building a Silence.” Modernism / Modernity 16:2 (April 2009): 415–420.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Second Futurist Proclamation: Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight.”
F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2006. 22–31.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il teatro aereo radiotelevisivo.” Gazzetta del popolo (Torino), 15 January
1932. Reprinted as “Il teatro futurista aeroradiotelevisivo.” Il teatro futurista sintetico. Naples:
CLET, 1941. 52–54. Reprinted in F. T. Marinetti: Teatro. A cura di Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Vol. 2.
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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il trionfo degli atlantici.” RadioCorriere 9:34 (12 August 1933):
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8:10 (October 1952): 1412. Reprinted as “Radiocronaca, agosto 1933.” Giuliano Manacorda:
Letteratura e cultura del periodo fascista. Milano: Principato, 1974. 233. Claudia Salaris:
Marinetti: Arte e vita futurista. Roma: Riuniti, 1997. 265–266. English translation “Triumph of
the Atlantic Fleet.” Margaret Fisher, ed.: Radia: Pino Masnata’s Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio
Manifesto. Emeryville / CA: Second Evening Art, 2012. 163–168.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “L’ uomo moltiplicato e il regno della macchina.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria
e invenzione futurista. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 255–258. 2nd edn 1983, 297–301. English
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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 107–119.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The New Ethical Religion of Speed.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings.
Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 253–259.
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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Pino Masnata: “La radia: Manifesto futurista dell’ottobre 1933,
pubblicato nella ‘Gazzetta del popolo’.” Autori e scrittori 6:8 (August 1941): 5–6. Reprinted in Il
teatro futurista. Napoli: CLET, 1941. 55–57. F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. Milano:
Mondadori, 1968. 176–180; 2nd edn 1983. 205–210.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Pino Masnata: “Manifeste de la Radia futuriste.” Comœdia, 15
December 1933; Stile futurista 1:5 (December 1934): 33. Reprinted as “Manifeste de la Radiaart
futuriste.” Giovanni Lista, ed.: Le Futurisme: Textes et manifestes, 1909–1944. Ceyzérieu:
Champ Vallon, 2015. 1853–1856.
 Radio and Sound Art 243

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Pino Masnata: “Manifesto futurista della radio.” Gazzetta del
popolo (Torino), 22 September 1933. Reprinted as “Manifesto della radio.” Futurismo (Roma)
2:55 (1 October 1933): 1.
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Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven / CT: Yale
University Press, 2009. 292–295.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Pino Masnata: “The Radio.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by
Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 410–414.
Masnata, Giuseppe (Pino): “Radia, not Radio.” Margaret Fisher: Radia: A Gloss of the 1933 Futurist
Radio Manifesto. Emeryville / CA: Second Evening Art Publishing, 2012. 71–120.
Masnata, Giuseppe (Pino): “Sei sintesi radiofoniche.” Autori e scrittori 6:8 (August 1941). English
translation “Eight Radio Sintesi.” Margaret Fisher, ed.: Radia: Pino Masnata’s Gloss of the 1933
Futurist Radio Manifesto. Emeryville/CA: Second Evening Art, 2012. 149–155.
Masnata, Giuseppe (Pino): Tum-Tum Ninna-Nanna: Il cuore di Wanda. Radio opera
sinfonica. Partitura di Carmine Guarino. Milano: Select; Bologna: Bongiovanni, 1931.
English translation “Wanda’s Heart (Il cuore di Wanda).” Margaret Fisher, ed.: Radia: Pino
Masnata’s Gloss of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto. Emeryville / CA: Second Evening Art,
2012. 146–148.
Merli, Gian Franco: Radioaviazione. Milano: Edizioni radiofuturiste “Electron”, 1929.
Mussolini, Arnaldo: “Gli eroi della volontà.” RadioCorriere 6:2 (12–18 January 1930): 1.
Mussolini, Arnaldo: “Il saluto inaugurale.” RadioCorriere 6:1 (5–11 January 1930): 1.
Palazzeschi, Aldo: “La fontana malata.” A. Palazzeschi: Poemi. Firenze: [Blanc], 1909. Reprinted in
A. Palazzeschi: Opere giovanili. Milano: Mondadori, 1958. 35.
Perloff, Marjorie: The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre and the Language of Rupture.
Chicago/IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Pound, Ezra: Antheil and the Theory of Harmony. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1925.
Scurto, Ignazio: “La meccanizzazione dei morti.” Claudia Salaris, ed.: Pentagramma elettrico: Suoni,
rumori e parole in libertà. Roma: Fondazione Musica per Roma, 2009. 112–113.
Somenzi, Mino: “Spettacoli radiofonici futuristi.” Futurismo (Roma) 2:1 (January 1933): 1.

Further reading
Bardiot, Clarisse: “L’ acteur, le spectateur et la téléprésence: Le ‘drame des distances’ chez
Marinetti.” Ligeia 69–72 (July–December 2006): 197–204.
Barsotti, Anna: “Il mondo ‘visionico’ di Masnata: Drammaturgia dell’ ‘io’ nel secondo futurismo.”
A. Barsotti: Futurismo e avanguardie nel teatro italiano fra le due guerre. Roma: Bulzoni,
1990.
Belsito, Elda: “Ignazio Scurto: Poeta e radioartista.” Marco Condotti, and Mina Gregori, eds.:
Futurismi: Aeropittura aeropoesia architettura nel Golfo della Spezia. La Spezia: Fondazione
Cassa di Risparmio della Spezia, 2007. 204–212.
Berghaus, Günter, ed.: Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Amsterdam and New York:
Rodopi, 2009.
Bonini, Tiziano: “Dalla radia futurista alla riconfigurazione di spazio e tempo.” T. Bonini: La radio
nella rete: Storia, estetica, usi sociali. Milano: Costa & Nolan, 2006. 155–161.
Bravi, Francesca: “Fortunato Depero’s Radio-Lyrics.” Geert Buelens, Harald Hendrix, and Monica
Jansen, eds.: The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists, and Legacies. Lanham /
MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 271–282.
244 Margaret Fisher

Calvesi, Maurizio: “Cinque sintesi di F. T. Marinetti e il teatro radiofonico.” Collage: Annuario di

nuova musica e arti visive contemporanee 5 (September 1965). Reprinted in M. Calvesi: Le due
avanguardie. Vol. 1. Studi sul futurismo. Bari: Laterza, 1975. 177–189.
Campbell, Timothy, and Gloria Canestrini, eds.: Radio Depero. Milano: Area Studio, 1990.
Cannistraro, Philip V.: “The Radio in Fascist Italy.” Journal of European Studies 2 (June 1972):
127–154.
Ferrieri, Enzo: “La radio come forza creative.” II convegno 12:6 (June 1931): 297–320.
Fisher, Margaret: “Futurism and Radio.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: Futurism and the Technological
Imagination. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2009. 229–262.
Fisher, Margaret: The Echo of Villon: Duration Rhyme in the Music and Poetry of Ezra Pound.
Emeryville/CA: Second Evening Art e-book, 2013.
Fisher, Margaret: The Transparency of Ezra Pound’s Great Bass. Emeryville/CA: Second Evening Art
e-book, 2013.
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100–109. Reprinted in A. L. Giannone: Le scritture del testo : Salentini e non. Lecce : Milella,
2003 [2004]. 151–170.
Isola, Gianni: L’ ha scritto la radio: Storia e testi della radio durante il fascismo (1924–1944). Milano:
Mondadori, 1998.
Lakhovsky, Georges: L’ Origine de la vie: La radiation et les êtres vivants. Paris: Gauthier-Villars,
1925.
Lakhovsky, Georges: Secret de la vie: Les ondes cosmiques et la radiation vitale. Paris: Gauthier-
Villars, 1925.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “ ‘Canti fascisti della metropoli verde’ di Pino Masnata (1935).” Glauco
Viazzi, ed.: Collaudi futuristi. Napoli: Guida, 1977. 131–134.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Il teatro futurista sintetico (dinamico – alogico – autonomo –
simultaneovisionico). A sorpresa. Aeroradiotelevisivo. Caffe concerto. Radiofonico. Napoli:
CLET, 1941.
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2012): 162–175.
Masnata, Pino: “La bambina ammalata.” Oggi e domani (Roma), 31 August 1931.
Masnata, Pino: “Manifesto del teatro visionico.” La testa di ferro, 14 November 1920.
Masnata, Pino: Anime sceneggiate. Roma: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1930.
Masnata, Pino: Tavole parolibere. Roma: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1932.
Monteleone, Franco: La radio italiana nel periodo fascista: Studi e documenti (1922–1945). Venezia:
Marsilio, 1976.
Monteleone, Franco: La storia della radio e della televisione in Italia. Venezia: Marsilio,
1992.
Monticone, Alberto: Il fascismo al microfono: Radio e politica in Italia (1924–1945). Roma: Edizioni
Studium, 1978.
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(2009): 333–348.
Ottieri, Alessandra: “Appunti su futurismo e mass-media.” Sinestesie: Rivista di studi sulle
letterature e le arti europee 2:1 (2004): 60–71.
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letterature e arti europee 2:1 (2004): 68–71.
Panzera, Emanuele Federico: “Ignazio Scurto: ‘L’ ardente poeta della radio’.” Giorgio Cortenova,
and Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, eds.: Futurismi a Verona: Il gruppo futurista veronese U. Boccioni.
Milano: Skira, 2002. 81–87.
 Radio and Sound Art 245

Parola, Luigi, ed.: E poi venne la radio, Radio Orario 1925–1929. Roma: Radiotelevisione Italiana,
1999.
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Ungaretti, Marinetti e altri . Napoli: Liguori, 2008. 139 –154. French translation: “Le Futurisme
et le language radiophonique.” François Livi, and Silvia Contarini eds.: Futurisme et
surréalisme. Lausanne: L’ Age d’Homme, 2008. 183–196.
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Verdone, Mario: “Mezzo secolo di radiofonia del futur-passat-ismo: Radia fonica visionica. Inediti
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105–132.
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Domenico Pietropaolo, Edward Braun
15 Theatre
From the very beginning of the movement, the Futurists treated the performing arts as
one of their favourite modes of expression. Throughout the movement’s existence, the
hallmarks of Futurist performances remained principally the same: Futurist theatre
was provocative, stimulating, dynamic. It tried to break down stultifying conventions
in dramatic literature and theatrical institutions. It sought to activate the audience
and to fuse the spheres of art and life. The Futurists questioned the traditional rôle
of theatre as an institution in society, the function of performances in the lives of
spectators and the structures of communication employed by actors and playwrights.
The Futurists objected to the commercialism of itinerant troupes of players and the
intellectual mediocrity of the impresarios. They abhorred the audiences who went to
the playhouses merely to parade their intellectual vanities and pretensions, to show
off their elegant clothing or simply to digest a lavish evening meal in the company of
stars and starlets.
Of course, the Futurists were not the first to demand a radical overhaul of theat-
rical traditions and conventions. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, one can
observe how several of the founding fathers of the modern stage sought to demol-
ish the narrow confines of Realist aesthetics. Frank Wedekind, August Strindberg,
Maurice Maeterlinck and many other playwrights directed their attention to the sub-
jective experience or spiritual dimension of the world. Edward Gordon Craig, Adolphe
Appia, Georg Fuchs, Paul Fort, Aurélien-Marie Lugné-Poë and others stripped down
the Naturalistic paraphernalia that cluttered the stage and instituted a new aesthetic
based on stylized, symbolic or abstract décor. Dramatists and directors discovered the
scenic spectacle and the physical craft of the actor and introduced the principles of
Modernism into the domain of theatre.
The years 1890 to 1914 were a transitional period in which the historical avant-
garde emerged out of a cultural climate of renewal and experimentation. The artistic
programme of the first generation of theatrical reformers was certainly modern, in
some ways also ahead of its time, but it still treated theatre as a handmaiden of dra-
matic literature. The leading representatives of the modern stage retained the concept
of theatre as a fixed and repeatable spectacle and never questioned the unspoken
assumptions about a theatrical production. It fell to the Futurists, both in Italy and
in Russia, to challenge the criteria for a scenic work of art should be and to create
performances that were not just interpretations of dramatic texts but also autono-
mous, transient events that derived their energy and impact from their temporal and
physical immediacy.
Futurism demanded that theatre, like the other arts, should offer a synthesis and
reflection of the modern world. The traditional language of the stage no longer pro-
vided adequate means for expressing the ways in which a citizen in a technologically
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-015
 Theatre 247

advanced society experienced his or her surroundings. Therefore, the Futurists

sought to condense the diversity of life into new forms of theatrical performance that
Marinetti described as “dynamic, fragmented symphonies of gesture, word, sound,
and light” (Marinetti: “A Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity”, 203). Futurist theatre
was a violent assault on the nerves of the spectators. By eliminating the barrier of
the proscenium arch, the stage action invaded the auditorium and united actors and
spectators in a common experience. The emphasis on the physical, sensory quali-
ties of performance enhanced the non-representational character of theatre. Futurist
performances were anti-psychological, anti-Naturalistic, ‘real’ rather than ‘Realist’.
There was an emphasis on scenic processes rather than on literary texts. In this way,
the Futurists rediscovered the ‘theatrical’ nature of theatre and cleared the way for a
whole phalanx of radical artists who, in the course of the twentieth century, changed
the physical and intellectual premises of the performing arts.

Work cited
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “A Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings.
Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 200–207.

Italian Theatre
Introduction
When Futurism made its first appearance, Italian theatre was highly vulnerable to
critical attack: it was an entertainment market dominated by unscrupulous impresa-
rios producing plays written or adapted to keep the spotlight on a star whose display
of vocal skill and gestural elegance determined the success of a performance. The
audiences that flocked to see their favourite stars on stage, on sets that had only
limited relevance to the dramatic action being enacted, dwelled in so shallow a state
of aesthetic consciousness and self-awareness that they neither questioned the the-
atre’s claim to artistic status nor expressed desire for radical change. They did not,
furthermore, display any inclination to establish links between the stage and the
ebullience of the new nation.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, himself a playwright, found the contemporary
theatre scene deplorable, and together with fellow artists began to organize a series
of boisterous and highly provocative performance events, known as serate futuriste,
in major theatres all over the peninsula. Thus began the project of the Futurist reform
of Italian theatre, conducted simultaneously on stage, in print and in society. The
248 Domenico Pietropaolo

serate dominated the scene from 1910 to 1914, by which time they had become some-
what tiresome for both the audiences and performers. They then gave way to more
sedate performances in small art galleries and other spaces, which soon morphed
into cabaret shows of various types, at times with considerable success. By the early
1920s, many Futurists, no longer hostile to the mainstream, started to seek the artistic
legitimacy of tradition, partly because they knew that in ten years or so of intense
creative activity Futurism had managed to alter mainstream conventions significantly
by means of both confrontation and osmosis.
In all arguments for radical reform, and in the activities of movements founded
on the idea of reform, it is useful to distinguish the pars destruens, in which estab-
lished art forms are subject to attack and criticism, from the pars construens, in which
the ideals of the reform are given in positive terms as goals within reach of both the
intellect and the imagination. In a historical assessment of Futurism, and especially
the assessment of its contribution to theatre, this distinction is crucial. Unfortunately,
in the case of Italian Futurist theatre it has not always been made to full effect, with
the result that the constructive content of the Futurist reform programme for the stage
remains somewhat obscured. In fact, the seminal premise of Italian Futurist theatre
might well be considered its demotion of the art of playwriting from a position of vir-
tually exclusive centrality and dominance to that of one among several arts, each of
which made a unique contribution to the collaborative creation of the single aesthetic
object that we call a theatrical performance. The purpose of this handbook entry is to
disentangle and analyse the major issues in the Futurists’ theatre project, grouping
them into broad areas of creative dramaturgy – including scripts, design and perfor-
mance style – and making reference to major productions and collaborations with
established theatre companies in Italy. The emphasis throughout will be on the idea
of the total performance text, independent of literary value judgments, a concept that
can be seen as a theatrical embodiment of the Futurist movement.

A Futurist concept of theatre

The essential features of Futurist theatre were outlined by Marinetti in a series of mani-
festos, the most significant of which are the following: Manifesto dei drammaturghi
futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights), also known as La voluttà d’esser fischiati
(The Pleasure of Being Booed, 1910); Il teatro di Varietà (Variety Theatre Manifesto,
1913); Il teatro futurista sintetico (A Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity, 1915); and La
declamazione dinamica e sinottica (Dynamic, Multichannelled Recitation, 1916). In
the destructive part of the arguments presented in these manifestos, Marinetti spelled
out, with his customary indulgence in extravagance, what Italian Futurism despised
most in the Italian playwriting and performance traditions. Essentially, the Futurists
were contemptuous of the dramaturgical principles that had governed the art of
 Theatre 249

writing plays since Aristotle, namely the logical development of the action and the
coherent construction of characters as its dramatic agents. Moreover, they derided the
production values that underpinned nineteenth-century stage Realism with its naïve
convention of a painterly reproduction of reality in generic scenes separated from
the audience by an invisible wall. The principle itself of such a text and such a stage
décor was inconsistent with the acting style of the grand mattatore (star actor), whose
very appearance on stage denied the illusionism presupposed by the set and whose
celebrity status entitled him to use the script as a pretext for bravura performances.
In the constructive part of his argument, Marinetti specified Futurist theatre’s claim
to superior artistic status with reference to tradition. For Futurism, theatre “can have
no other purpose than that of snatching the soul of the audience from its base, day-
to-day reality and exalting it in an atmosphere of dazzling intellectual intoxication”
(Marinetti: “Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights”, 182). This is the fundamental premise
of all Futurist theatre manifestos. Unlike the fiery rhetoric of Marinetti’s attacks on
artists and poets that monumentalized the past, the language of this statement is calm
and relatively free of hyperbole. It points to serious reflection on the aesthetic and ide-
ological mandate of the Futurist stage, and lays down the central assumptions of the
Futurist discourse on theatre. Marinetti’s conception of Futurist theatre in terms of the
noble task that it has embraced, which is to deliver the audience from the contemptible
shabbiness of life, is conceptually precise and constructively programmatic. Theatre
needs to be transformed in this way because life needs to be liberated from the grip of
ordinariness, and the audience’s soul has to be “snatched” from its “base […] reality”.
The verb strappare, ‘to snatch’, carries a denotation of urgency and abruptness, and
the connotation of a quick rescue. The intended impact of this dramatic gesture on
the audience is meant to be long-lasting, but the liberating action – that is, the the-
atrical event itself – is necessarily envisioned as very brief. The compositional princi-
ple implied by such an operation undermines the dramaturgical form of conventional
theatre, which necessarily includes a logical development of the dramatic action and
normally has a three-hour duration. By contrast, the Futurist theatrical event must
be brief, have no regard for verisimilitude and retain an improvisatory quality, or else
it will fall prey to the illusion that it can change society and overcome conventions
without stepping out of their domain. Futurist performances must be generated by the
urgent need to shock the audience out of its political and aesthetic torpor.
Marinetti’s concept of audience dramaturgy – that is, of the control that the pro-
duction can exercise over the audience’s mode of reception – has a direct relation-
ship to the fundamental principle of all dramatic form: dialogue, either verbal or
physical. Futurist drama is designed to prevent spectators from settling into passive
internalization or narrative decipherment, which are conventional stances presumed
by lyric poetry and fiction. The communicative intent of Futurist drama is instead to
cause the audience to react to what occurs on stage hic et nunc. In Marinetti’s view,
the plays of passéist theatre present themselves as objects to be appreciated by con-
templation, as if they were works written primarily in the self-expressive manner
250 Domenico Pietropaolo

of lyric or in the referential one of narrative discourse. In his opinion, contempla-

tion induces passivity in the audience. Of the three basic functions of language – to
express, to provoke and to describe – Marinetti chose the second as the primary one
for his Futurist concept of spectatorship. Provocation is a variety of the stimulus-
response model of communication on which the dialogical form of drama is nec-
essarily based. By making this choice, Marinetti effectively turned the audience
into actors, the venue into an extension of the stage and audience reaction into a
component of stage action.

The Futurist theatrical genres

The first and most provocative challenges on the Italian theatrical scene were the
boisterous performances known as serate futuriste, a new type of performance event
invented by Marinetti and the early supporters of the Futurist movement. A serata
futurista was a theatrical soirée, loud and disorderly, based on a disjointed perfor-
mance text that included manifesto readings and poetry recitations, with occasional
additions in the form of musical performances and presentations of Futurist paint-
ings. These theatrical events were openly used as vehicles for the proclamation of ide-
ology and for the impromptu provocation of the audience to aggressive belligerence,
potentially leading to a riotous exchange of insults and blows with the performers.
The genre was inaugurated by Marinetti on 12 January 1910 at the Politeama Rossetti
in Trieste, the heart of the borderland in which Italians were under Austrian rule. If
the Italian theatre was truly to be awakened from its servitude to shallowness, the jolt
had to be politically sharp, structurally jerky and aesthetically outrageous. Such was
generally the intent of the serate futuriste, which, within a month of the inauguration
of the genre, cascaded in quick succession on audiences in the main theatrical cities
of Italy, including Milan (Teatro Lirico, 15 February 1910), Turin (Politeama Chiarella,
8 March 1910), Naples (Teatro Mercadante, 20 April 1910), Venice (Teatro Fenice, 1
August 1910) and so on. Among the most memorable serate was the one that took place
on 12 December 1913 at the Teatro Verdi of Florence, summed up a few days later (15
December 1913) in Lacerba, soon to become an official organ of the movement. Along-
side Marinetti, the Futurists on stage included such eminent figures as Francesco Can-
giullo (1884–1977), Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), Ardengo
Soffici (1879–1964) and Giovanni Papini (1881–1956). The audience that flocked to the
theatres– to be cajoled by performers in black tie into embracing militarism and com-
bativeness, and to be lectured on the aesthetics of war – numbered in the thousands,
exceeding by far the capacity of the venues. Never had Italian audiences known such
an experience. Futurism had taken the Italian theatre scene by storm.
Soon, however, the storm of the serate began to blow itself out by becoming pre-
dictable. The improvised confrontation with the audience began to appear rhetorical
 Theatre 251

and formulaic – evidence that the genre had perhaps outlived much of its usefulness.
That is when the declamazione dinamica e sinottica (dynamic and multichannelled
recitation), the second theatrical genre of Futurism, made its appearance, displac-
ing from centre stage the serata from which it was ultimately derived. Generally per-
formed in galleries in connection with an exhibition, which enabled art to serve as a
staging element, the Futurist declamazione sinottica presupposed intimate collabora-
tion between the arts of performance, the art of painting and the rhetoric of recitation.
It aimed to offer the audience a multichannelled aesthetic and cognitive experience of
Futurist themes in a manner that was intellectually provocative without being phys-
ically confrontational or socially disruptive. Its performance texts appear disjointed,
like those of Variety theatre where the combination of numbers is not determined by
narrative logic and always retains an improvisational flavour. The most famous of
these performances was also the first major example of the genre: Piedigrotta, an evo-
cation of the eponymous Neapolitan carnival, which was presented at the Sprovieri
Gallery in Rome and involved F. T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Cangiullo,
who was the author of the poem that served as the script. A second declamazione, this
time by Marinetti alone, took place on 28 April 1914 at the Doré Gallery in London,
followed on 12 June 1914 by a joint one with C.R.W. Nevinson (1889–1946), where Mari-
netti used his poem Il bombardamento di Adrianopoli (The Bombardment of Adriano-
ple, 1912) as the supporting script (see p. 513 in the chapter on Great Britain).
From the perspective of dramatic writing, the most important Futurist innova-
tion was the genre known as the sintesi, a class of “essentially brief” scripts that
purport to synthesize into a few lines of text the essence of dramatic material for
which conventional theatre would require a full-length play or even entire collec-
tions of plays. In the years that followed the early manifestos of the movement, the
Futurists produced a large number of sintesi, thereby creating the basis for what is
collectively known as the Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity. The anthology Teatro
futurista sintetico (Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity, 1915–1916), edited by Mari-
netti, included seventy-nine sintesi by twenty-six authors, frequently working in
collaboration. From the most memorable early sintesi, Marinetti’s Simultaneità (Sim-
ultaneity, 1915) and Dissonanza (Dissonance, 1915) by Bruno Corra (pseud. of Bruno
Ginanni Corradini, 1892–1976) and Emilio Settimelli (1891–1954) stand out, even in
their titles, as early examples of a commitment to a fundamental aesthetic principle
of Futurism, also illustrated by various other sintesi: forging a reciprocal relation-
ship between discrete artistic forms which, in conventional aesthetics, represent
divergent experiences of the world. Here, by contrast, these forms were conjoined
in the same art object in order to generate a complex experience of reality that was
beyond the reach of the precepts of conventional logic. In Simultaneità, this idea is
translated into the interpenetration of several sets on stage, where the living room
of a middle-class family intersects with that of a prostitute while their stories move
forward separately in time but as one event in the audience’s field of consciousness.
In Dissonanza, two stories intersect in the same place across great distances of time
252 Domenico Pietropaolo

and culture, as a man from the present walks onto the scene of a medieval dalliance,
revealing the artificiality of dramatic forms grounded in the convention of verisimil-
itude of Naturalist theatre.

The art of Futurist set design

Such developments in the notions of dramatic form and action were accompanied
by a reconceptualization of the stage itself. The aesthetic and ideological premises
of Futurism caused all the theatrical arts to confront the conventions of Naturalism.
The greatest challenge came from the art of set and lighting design, whose prod-
ucts are what the audience notices first in the theatre. The most significant rôles in
the advancement of the Futurist project in this area of production dramaturgy were
variously played by Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) and Enrico Pram-
polini (1894–1956). The key theoretical texts are Prampolini’s Un’arte nuova? Costruz-
ione assoluta di moto-rumore (A New Art? Absolute Constructions of Noise in Motion,
1915), Scenografia e coreografia futurista (Futurist Scenography and Choreography,
1915) and L’ atmosfera scenica futurista (The Futurist Staging Atmosphere, 1924), as
well as Depero’s Appunti sul teatro (Notes on the Theatre, 1916) and Il teatro plas-
tico Depero: Principi ed applicazioni (Depero’s Plastic Theatre: Principles and Appli-
cations, 1919), to which one could also add Balla’s Le Vêtement masculin futuriste
(Futurist Men’s Clothing, 1914) because of its great impact on costume design. These
documents laid the groundwork for Futurist theatre aesthetics from the perspective
of the set designer.
For the art of stage design, Marinetti’s call to arms against the artistic conventions
of Naturalism meant finding ways of overcoming the conceptual and material limi-
tations of the art of painting and of dismantling its static, two-dimensional surfaces
dependent on external sources of light. Using conventional techniques, the figura-
tive arts had attempted to give iconic representation to selected aspects of reality,
subjecting them in the process to the falsifying power of the other artistic conven-
tions of the stage (such as the celebrity actor occasionally interrupting the action to
take a bow). Futurist art, on the other hand, was meant to offer not a figurative rep-
resentation of the world but a reconstruction of it, using elementary abstract shapes
as the building blocks of an aesthetic vision focussed on the inner essence of modern
life. The new goal of Futurist stage design was that the set should be non-mimetic,
three-dimensional, dynamic, self-illuminating as well as illuminated and, when the
dramatic action was so conceived, inhabited by automata rather than living actors,
or else by no characters at all. The various practitioners emphasized one or more of
these components, but in general all accepted the premise that, in a Futurist produc-
tion, painting, sculpture, architecture, mechanical movement and lighting technol-
ogy were to come together in a bold new conception of performance events.
 Theatre 253

Depero and Balla sought to replace reality with its abstract equivalents, derived
by the designer from his contemplation of modern reality sub specie machinae: sets
consisting of multilayered dynamic planes, populated by mechanical beings moving
and gyrating in cheerful integration with the space in which they existed. Under-
lying such a vision of design was the idea that mechanical dynamism formed the
essence of modern reality. The corresponding aesthetic task for the theatre artist was
to create automatically moving structures that could embody that principle three-
dimensionally in a seemingly capricious way. Balla, primarily a painter who was less
attracted by the mystique of technology, was chiefly interested in expanding painting
into the arts of the stage rather than reconceptualizing theatrical space. This, however,
resulted in a new notion of what constituted the theatrical event, at once painterly,
sculptural and dynamic. Balla envisaged a dramatic action consisting of colourful,
sound-producing and mobile constructs called complessi plastici (three-dimensional
aggregations; see p. 609 in this volume). Balla’s ultimate aim was to bring the figura-
tive and performative arts into such an intimate collaboration that they could alter the
fundamental parameters of perception.
Depero was fascinated by the technological world view of the new age almost from
the start and grasped, with total clarity, the aesthetic possibility of using the idea of a
machine as an analogue with which to model the Futurist refashioning of the world.
Indeed, for Depero the activity of the universe could be conceived as the operation of a
cosmic machine. The theatrical reconstruction of the world on stage could be figured
as a machine with automatically moving and self-illuminating parts, giving dynamic
shape to scenic space and displaying the latter as both the agent and the object of the
performance rather than as the locus for the performance of a separate dramatic action.
Prampolini sought to eliminate altogether the painterly aspect of the set by trans-
forming the stage into a sophisticated construction of three-dimensional kinetic
pieces designed to give scenic space an abstract sculptural texture and to infuse its
shapes with dynamic energy and electrochemical luminosity. For him, the stage was
not a static object of contemplation but a Constructivist assemblage of components
that endowed the set with the power of complex motion. The stage did not consist of
a flat surface, iconic of an ordinary floor and walls, but of a multilevelled area with
moving platforms, sinking and rising elevators and flowing neon lights. Prampolini’s
sets were the product of an architectural vision bold enough to overcome the con-
straints of static forms and to bring to fruition the premise of automatically moving
three-dimensional structures. The set, in his view, should not just receive light from
an external source but should itself be a source of lighting, its construction incorpo-
rating electrochemical incandescence capable of generating multichromatic kinetic
shapes. The aesthetic pleasure implicit in Prampolini’s vision of a totally realized
Futurist theatre is crystal-clear. We shall witness, he says, incandescences “climb-
ing tragically or showing themselves voluptuously” for the purpose of creating new
emotional experiences in the audience (Prampolini: “Futurist Scenography”, 206).
In 1925, Prampolini received the Grand Prix d’Art Théâtrale for the design of a Teatro
254 Domenico Pietropaolo

magnetico (Magnetic Theatre), a model of the Futurist stage in which the essence of
theatre was entrusted entirely to mechanical and electrochemical technology capable
of displaying itself in virtuosic action. Having eliminated all aesthetic residues of
fourth-wall and scenic-arch dramaturgy, and having dissolved the need for actors,
whom he regarded as absurd materialistic intrusions into the world of abstract the-
atrical forms, Prampolini envisaged a show in which the drama was an orchestrated
arrangement of self-referential mechanical and luminous dynamism.
In the terms of visual stage design, Balla, Depero and Prampolini decidedly
endorsed the ambition that Marinetti had set for all Futurist art, namely that it should
be a reflection of the times. For the designer, the contemporary world was a magical
one of machines, coloured neon lights and self-propelled dynamism, made possible
by modern science and electricity. Technology liberated the set designer from the
material limitations of conventional structures and enabled him or her to venture
into a region of thought in which theatre, science and aesthetics melded into a single
creative force, alluring in its display of creativity and suggestive of content both lofty
and lubricious.

Scenic productions
Balla, Depero and Prampolini offered not only manifestos and theoretical essays but
also productions in which they sought to give aesthetic materiality to their ideas.
Balla’s major contribution towards the achievement of the Futurist aesthetic goal
in theatre practice was his design for Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks) for the
Ballets Russes at the Costanzi Theatre in Rome on 12 April 1917. The set consisted of
geometric structures of various shapes and sizes, some made of canvas and others of
translucent fabric stretched on wooden frames, capable of being lit from the inside
and projecting incandescence across the stage and into the auditorium. The sources
of light were ingeniously connected to a series of switches arranged as a keyboard
in the prompt box, where they could be controlled to complement the music. Balla
himself worked the switches, following a lighting plot of fifty different cues, some of
which were repeated, that enabled him to effect a lighting change every few seconds.
Balla thereby translated Stravinsky’s music into a choreography of coloured lights
and dancing geometric figures.
Equally dedicated to the Futurist goal of integrating the arts in production, Depero
focussed his perspective on stage movement. In his “Notes on the Theatre”, he spoke
of metamorphoses and spectacular displays of mobility by buildings and mountains,
but in his Balli plastici (Plastic Dances) which he choreographed in collaboration
with Gilbert Clavel (1883–1927) at the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome on 15 April 1918, the
movements on stage came from colourful wooden marionettes. The show consisted of
four ballets, produced under the musical direction of Alfredo Casella (1883–1947) and
 Theatre 255

performed by the colourful wooden marionettes of the Gorno Dell’ Acqua Company: I
pagliacci (The Clowns, with music by Casella), L’ uomo dai baffi (The Man with the Mous-
tache, with music by Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, known under the alias of Lord Berners,
1883–1950), L’ orso azzurro (The Blue Bear, with music by Béla Bartók, 1881–1945) and I
selvaggi (The Savages, with music by Gian Francesco Malipiero, 1882–1973). As might
be guessed from the venue and these titles, the tone of Depero’s plastic dances was
generally light and the settings had a fairy-tale-like appearance – but the aesthetic
lesson that they imparted was very serious. The whimsical mechanical characters
were not stylized representations of reality but the elemental components of an artis-
tic reconstruction of the world. In a performance event intended to offer such a recon-
struction, design was not subservient to the other arts but functioned as the chief par-
adigm through which the other arts came to cohere together.
Prampolini made a major contribution to the progress of theatrical art by letting
his non-human characters interact with abstract sets. A highly sophisticated type of
dramatic character was designed to offer itself totally and uninhibitedly to the pene-
trating vision of the audience: a puppet whose materiality had been abstracted away
to reveal its interior vacuity. Prampolini demonstrated his conception for the first
time in a production of Motoum and Trevibar by Pierre Albert-Birot (1876–1967) at the
Teatro dei Piccoli in 1919. Prampolini’s Motoum was a puppet with a transparent head
with a source of light mounted in it, so that he was illuminated and illuminating at the
same time. In Santa velocità (Holy Speed), Prampolini intended to eliminate the actor
completely from the stage (see Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944, 460).
The set design consisted of luminous dynamic shapes created against a neutral back-
ground by means of powerful beams of coloured light. The result was to be a panto-
mime of chromatic figurations changing to the rhythm of noise music composed by
Luigi Russolo (1885–1947).
These examples of Futurist scenographic performance demonstrate that, each in
their own way, the scenic artists of the movement sought to replace the iconic aspect of
reality with the abstractions to which, in the Futurist understanding of the world, the
essence of modern reality directs the artist’s mind. The scenographers’ abstractions
were, as Prampolini said with great precision, “interpretive equivalents” (Prampolini:
“Futurist Scenography”, 205) of reality. Their function, however, was not to refer the
audience back to reality, but to enable the audience to experience in an exclusively
cerebral manner an artificial world analogous to reality. In the aesthetic domains of
Balla, Depero and Prampolini, the performance of such abstractions took the form of
dynamic displays of colours and geometric shapes that signified only themselves as the
abstract elements of a constructed world. The ultimate aim of the Futurist designers
was to incorporate these aesthetic ideas into a multimedial conception of theatre in
which various arts were brought into collaboration. In the same way that geometric
forms are abstractions of natural and man-made objects, the self-illuminated mario-
nettes and dancing luminous figurations of Futurist designers were abstractions of dra-
matic agents, aesthetic equivalents of the cerebral forces that propel the modern world.
256 Domenico Pietropaolo

Futurist collaboration with the world

of professional theatre
In order to pursue their goal more effectively, the Futurists looked to eminent stars of
the stage such as Emma Grammatica (1874–1965), Ermete Zacconi (1857–1948), Ruggero
Ruggeri (1871–1953), Tina Di Lorenzo (1872–1930) and Armando Falconi (1871–1954),
and sought to cast them in their productions, hoping that their skill and their prestige
in the artistic world would have a positive effect on the Futurist project of revolution-
izing Italian theatre. More importantly, however, they sought the assistance of theatre
companies amenable to the cultural precepts of Futurism.
Among the most important collaborations with established companies was the
one that Marinetti secured with the Compagnia dei Grandi Spettacoli led by Gualtiero
Tumiati (1876–1971), an ensemble whose repertory had hitherto been entirely conven-
tional and literary. The company reoriented itself towards Futurism when Corra and
Settimelli assumed the rôle of artistic managers. With Elisa Berti-Masi (1868–1947)
and Giulio Tempesti (1875–1958) in leading rôles, the troupe produced Marinetti’s
Elettricità (Electricity) at the Politeama Garibaldi in Palermo on 13 September 1913,
using a script derived from the second act of his early play Poupées électriques (Elec-
tric Dolls), with an additional recitation of poetry and manifestos. After the première
in Palermo, the company toured most of Italy, with a memorable performance at the
Teatro dal Verme in Milan on 16 January 1914. From a structural point of view, the
script for Elettricità may give the impression of a concession to pre-Futurist drama,
but the content of the performance text was entirely and thoroughly Futurist. The dra-
matic action consists of androids leading the life of middle-class Italians. The story
that it tells eroticizes electricity and aestheticizes machines while showing the dehu-
manizing impact of conventional culture on society.
With respect to the Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity, the collaborations with
the Berti-Masi and the Zoncada-Masi-Capodaglio companies in 1915 and 1916 were
highly significant. Early in 1915, Ettore Berti (1870–1940), Giuseppe Masi (dates
unknown) and Emilia Varini (1867–1949), all of the Berti-Masi company, agreed to
take the teatro sintetico on an itinerary through the main cities of Italy, staging fifteen
sintesi in various cities in the northern regions of Italy. With this tour, which premièred
in Ancona on 1 February 1915, the directors of the two companies became the Futurists’
primary collaborators from professional theatre. Following the initial success of the
productions, the outbreak of the First World War prompted an increasing display of
ideology and a limitation of financial expenditure. The production of the Zoncada-Ma-
si-Capodaglio company in 1916 did not secure Marinetti the success that he had hoped
for, but it considerably enlarged the Futurists’ circle of acceptance in the professional
world, which they sorely needed in order to be taken seriously. Marinetti himself occa-
sionally took part in the performances with declamations of political poems – as he
did, for example, at the Politeama Duca di Genova in La Spezia in April 1916.
 Theatre 257

Among the acclaimed professional actors who were willing to lend their support
with occasional collaborations were Odoardo Spadaro (1893–1965), Luciano Moli-
nari (1880–1940) and Ettore Petrolini (1884–1936). To develop the theatrical arts as
planned, though, Futurism needed new companies to emerge from within the move-
ment itself, inspired by the collaborating stars but imbibed from the start with Futur-
ist culture and committed to its goals. The success that Futurism garnered with the
help of touring companies and sympathetic stars was never large enough for it to rise
above the level of experimental performance, always less than commercially viable.

The Futurist art of acting

In the context of the Futurists’ early collaboration with great actors, Corra vigorously
asserted the aesthetic dignity of acting. In the Florentine periodical L’ Italia futurista
of 15 December 1916, he argued that acting should be vindicated as a great art on a par
with the other arts of the theatre whose status had never been the object of scepticism
(Corra: “Creare il teatro italiano”, 118). He rejected wholesale the acting style of com-
mercial theatre, but there was no question in his mind that acting as such was itself
a creative activity of fundamental importance to theatre. The question was instead:
on the basis of what principles should a Futurist aesthetic of acting be envisioned?
The general practice in Futurist thought was to begin with a pars destruens, with
an adversarial gesture of alienation, before coming to focus on a pars construens. In
Futurist acting, the principle of verisimilitude and the aesthetics of mimesis that it
always presupposes were fundamentally rejected. These two principles were seen
as the aesthetic foundation of all passéist theatre, even in the highly conventional-
ized form of the early twentieth-century celebrity actors. For Futurists like Corra, the
gestural and phonic rhetoric of verisimilitude could more easily give rise to feelings
of sympathy and admiration in the audience – neither of which was of any interest
to Futurism – than it could provoke the audience to energetic reaction, vehement or
riotous though that might be. The Futurist ideal of acting envisaged by Corra and
Settimelli presupposed a culture of movement expressive of the new ideology and its
attendant aesthetic ideals, a culture of highly stylized geometric gestures or move-
ments to which the widespread use of machines, in the workplace and everyday life,
was quickly habituating the collective imagination. In light of this ideal, the vacuous-
ness and irrelevance of the movement culture presupposed by conventional perfor-
mance styles was exposed. Futurism sought to place the audience in a state of mind in
which traditional performance styles appeared empty and sterile because they were
grounded in a rhetoric of movement that was now virtually without referents.
One approach to gestural and vocal expression appropriate to the Futurist rep-
resentation of character was embodied in the performance style of Ettore Petrolini.
This great comic actor derided the aesthetic principle of mimesis, saying that it would
258 Domenico Pietropaolo

lead to the conclusion that monkeys are excellent artists because they are good at
imitation. However, Futurist acting had to be brought into harmony with the move-
ment’s aesthetic concerns and did not necessarily require a jarring, disruptive and
arrhythmic mode of representation. All in all, Futurist acting parodied inherited stage
conventions and was mordaciously deformative with respect to the social referents
that those conventions sought to embody. Much of this bold thinking found its way
into the main theatrical traditions of European Modernism.
The reverse, however, was also true: the main theatrical traditions of Europe
exercised a notable influence on the Futurists, who not infrequently developed par-
ticular aspects of their ideas or productions in response to innovations proposed
and realized by the great Modernist reformers of the stage. The most ambitious and
daring Futurist response of this kind came from Marinetti himself in the form of a
concrete proposal: Il teatro totale futurista (Total Futurist Theatre). Published first in
an abridged version in the review Futurismo on 15 January 1933, and posthumously
in its entirety in Teatro contemporaneo by Mario Verdone and Luce Marinetti in 1985,
this was Marinetti’s response to the Modernist call for grand synaesthetic works tran-
scending the limiting aesthetic conventions of monosensory perception. The project
included plans for the erection of a building in which the main floor was a water-
filled moat enclosing a large stage under an electric sun and moon moving in their
orbits. On this stage there would be five other stages, capable of being separated but
also equipped for simultaneous operation in full view of the audience, which could
watch, for example, the enactment of war dramas in different countries simultane-
ously on separate stages. The members of the audience would occupy revolving seats
that enabled them to focus their attention on one or more stages while palpating with
their fingers the textured surface of conveyor belts for tactile sensations correlated
with their visual and aural perceptions of the performances on stage. Equipped with
radio speakers, projectors, a cyclorama, television screens and tactile belts, Marinet-
ti’s total theatre would generate multisensory aesthetic experiences and an instan-
taneous grasp of the principle of speed, simultaneity and synthesis at the highest
level possible in the contemporary world: the speed of international communication
technology, the simultaneous perception of distant events and a grand multisensorial
synthesis of the entire world in a single building and in a single work of art.

Conclusion
It is convenient to distinguish between two periods in the history of Futurist theatre:
an early one, in which the emphasis was on shocking the artistic and intellectual
mainstream with a new vision of the world and a new understanding of the task of
theatre, and a later one, in which the Futurists joined the mainstream, sacrificing some
of their distinctive features as Futurists. The early phase was the period in which they
 Theatre 259

dominated the Italian theatrical scene with a quick succession of manifestos, vitriolic
rhetoric and bold experiments. It was also the period in which they reflected seriously
on the aesthetics of the stage and on the pragmatics of production. In the second decade
of the twentieth century, the Italian Futurists entered a new phase of activity in which
they retained their poetics and refined their methods, but chiefly sought to achieve
success within conventional theatrical institutions. By the late 1920s, Futurism could
no longer claim any right to centre stage, having been absorbed into the mainstream
However, there was no doubt that Futurism would continue to operate within the main-
stream, influencing its aesthetic orientation and conditioning the formal development
of its dramaturgy.

Works cited
Balla, Giacomo: Le Vêtement masculin futuriste: Manifeste. Milan: Direction du Mouvement futuriste,
1914. Reprinted in G. Balla: Scritti futuristi. A cura di Giovanni Lista. Milano: Abscondita, 2010.
24–28.
Corra, Bruno: Battaglie. Milano: Facchi, 1920.
Corra, Bruno, and Emilio Settimelli: “Dissonanza.” F. T. Marinetti, ed.: Il teatro futurista sintetico
creato da Marinetti, Settimelli, Bruno Corra. Piacenza: Ghelfi, 1921. 39–40.
Depero, Fortunato: “Appunti sul teatro.” Fortunato Depero: Opere 1911–1930. Torino: Galleria d’Arte
Martano, 1969. 58–61. English transation “Notes on the Theatre.” Michael Kirby: Futurist
Performance. New York: Dutton, 1971. 207–210.
Depero, Fortunato: “Il teatro plastico Depero: Principi ed applicazioni.” Il mondo 5:17 (27 April 1919):
9–12. Reprinted in Bruno Passamani, ed.: Fortunato Depero, 1892–1960. Bassano del Grappa:
Museo Civico, 1970. 147–151.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il teatro di varietà.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura
di Luciano De Maria. 2nd edn Milano: Mondadori, 1983. 80–90. English translation “The Variety
Theatre Manifesto.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006. 185–192.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il teatro futurista sintetico.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione
futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. 2nd edn Milano: Mondadori, 1983. 113–121. English
translation “A Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by
Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 200–207.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il teatro totale futurista.” Futurismo 2:19 (15 January 1933): 1. Reprinted
in Almanacco letterario per l’ anno 1933. Milano: Bompiani, 1933. 306–309. First published
in full in Teatro contemporaneo: Rivista di studi sul teatro contemporaneo 5:9 (February–May
1985): 373–384. English translation of the original manuscript “Total Theatre: Its Architecture
and Technology.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2006. 400–407.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “La declamazione dinamica e sinottica.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e
invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. 2nd edn Milano: Mondadori, 1983. 122–129.
English transation “Dynamic and Multichanneled Recitation.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings.
Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 193–196.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Simultaneità.” F. T. Marinetti, ed.: Il teatro futurista sintetico creato da
Marinetti, Settimelli, Bruno Corra. 2nd edn Piacenza: Ghelfi, 1921. 21–23.
260 Domenico Pietropaolo

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Elettricità sessuale: Sintesi futurista. Milano: Facchi, 1920. Reprinted in
F. T. Marinetti: Teatro. Vol. 1. Roma: Bianco, 1960. 417–454.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi. Milano: Redazione di “Poesia”,
1911. Reprinted as “La voluttà d’esser fischiati.” F. T. Marinetti: Guerra sola igiene del mondo.
Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1915. 113–118. F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione
futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. 2nd edn Milano: Mondadori, 1983. 310–313. English
transation “Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter
Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 181–184.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Poupées électriques: Drame en trois actes, avec une préface sur le
futurisme. Paris: Sansot, 1909.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed.: Teatro futurista sintetico. Vol. 1. Supplemento 114 al n° 11 de “Gli
avvenimenti: Periodico illustrato della vita italiana”. (Milano) 28 November – 5 December 1915;
Vol. 2. Supplemento al n° 15 de “Gli avvenimenti”. 2–9 April 1916. 2nd edn Il teatro futurista
sintetico creato da Marinetti, Settimelli, Bruno Corra. Vol. 1-2: Milano: Istituto Editoriale Italiano,
[1915–1916]. (Biblioteca Teatrale, 10-11). 3rd edn Vols. 1-2. Piacenza: Ghelfi, 1921. Prampolini,
Enrico: “L’ atmosfera scenica futurista.” L’ impero, 6–7 November 1924. Reprinted in Palma
Bucarelli, ed.: Enrico Prampolini. Roma: De Luca, 1961. 53–57. English transation “The Futurist
Staging Atmosphere.” Michael Kirby: Futurist Performance. New York: Dutton, 1971. 224–231.
Prampolini, Enrico: “Scenografia e coreografia futurista.” La balza futurista 3 (12 May 1915): 17–21.
Reprinted in Palma Bucarelli, ed.: Enrico Prampolini. Roma: De Luca, 1961. 41–44. English
transation “Futurist Scenography and Choreography.” Michael Kirby: Futurist Performance. New
York: Dutton, 1971. 203–206.
Prampolini, Enrico: “Un’arte nuova? Costruzione assoluta di moto-rumore.” L’ artista moderno 14:9
(19 May 1915): 149–151. Reprinted in Palma Bucarelli, ed.: Enrico Prampolini. Roma: De Luca,
1961. 37–39.

Further reading
Antonucci, Giovanni: Lo spettacolo futurista in Italia. Roma: Studium, 1974.
Apollonio, Umbro, ed.: Futurismo. Milano: Mazzotta, 1970. English translation Futurist Manifestos.
London: Thames and Hudson, 1973.
Balla, Giacomo, and Fortunato Depero: “Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo.” Umbro Apollonio:
Futurismo. Milano: Mazzotta, 1970. 254–258. English transation “Futurist Reconstruction of the
Universe.” Umbro Apollonio, ed.: Futurist Manifestos. London: Thames and Hudson, 1973. 197–200.
Belli, Gabriella, Nicoletta Boschiero, and Bruno Passamani, eds.: Depero: Magic Theatre. Milano:
Electa, 1989.
Berghaus, Günter: “A Theatre of Image, Sound and Motion: On Synaesthesia and the Idea of Total
Work of Art.” Maske und Kothurn 32:2 (1986): 7–28.
Berghaus, Günter: “Futurist Performance, 1910–16.” Simona Storchi, and Elza Adamowicz, eds.:
Back to the Futurists: Avant-Gardes 1909–2009. Manchester: University of Manchester Press,
2013. 176–194.
Berghaus, Günter: “The Futurist Body on Stage.” Nathalie Roelens, and Wanda Strauven, eds.: Homo
Orthopedicus: Le corps et ses prothèses à l’ époque (post)moderniste. Paris: L’ Harmattan, 2001.
333–348.
Berghaus, Günter: “Prampolini and the Theatre of the 1920s: Exhibitions of Stage Design,
Mechanical Theatre, and Dance.” Przemysław Strożek, ed.: Enrico Prampolini: Futurism, Stage
Design and the Polish Avant-garde Theatre. Łodz: Muzeum Sztuki, 2017. 49–58.
 Theatre 261

Berghaus, Günter: Futurism and Politics: Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction. Oxford:
Berghahn 1996.
Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Berghaus, Günter: Theatre Performance and the Historical Avant-Garde. New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005.
Brook, Federico, and Vittorio Minardi, eds.: Prampolini scenografo. Exhibition catalogue. Roma:
Istituto Italo-Latino Americano, gennaio–febbraio 1974.
Cangiullo, Francesco: Le serate futuriste: Romanzo vissuto. Napoli: Tirrena, [1930]. Revised edn
Milano: Ceschina, 1961.
Causey, Matthew: Theatre and Performance in Digital Culture. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.
Corra, Bruno: “Creare il teatro italiano.” L’ Italia futurista 1:12 (15 December 1916).
Dashwood, Julie R.: “The Italian Futurist Theatre.” James Redmond, ed.: Drama and Society.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. 129–145.
Davico Bonino, Guido, ed.: Teatro futurista sintetico. Genova: Il Melangolo, 1993. 2nd edn Teatro
futurista sintetico, seguito da manifesti teatrali del futurismo. Nugae (GE): Il Nuovo Melangolo,
2009.
Dixon, Steve: “The Genealogy of Digital Performance: Futurism and the Early-Twentieth-Century
Avant-Garde.” S. Dixon: Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance,
Performance Art, and Installation. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2007. 37–72.
Fonti, Daniela, and Claudia Terenzi, eds.: Depero e il teatro musicale. Roma: Auditorium Parco della
Musica, 11 dicembre 2007 – 31 gennaio 2008. Milano: Skira, 2007.
Fossati, Paolo: La realtà attrezzata: Scena e spettacolo dei futuristi. Torino: Einaudi, 1977.
Gaborik, Patricia: “Lo spettacolo del futurismo.” Domenico Scarpa, ed.: Atlante della letteratura
italiana. Vol. 3. Dal romanticismo ad oggi. Torino: Einaudi, 2012. 408–422, 589–613.
Glitzouris, Antonis: “On the Emergence of European Avant-Garde Theatre.” Theatre History Studies
28 (2008): 131–146.
Goldberg, RoseLee: Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.
Gómez, Llanos: La dramaturgia futurista de Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: El discurso artístico de la
modernidad. Vigo: Academia del Hispanismo, 2008.
Gordon, Robert S.: “The Italian Futurist Theatre: A Reappraisal.” Modern Language Revue 85:2
(1990): 349–361.
Kirby, Michael: Futurist Performance. New York: Dutton, 1971.
Lapini, Lia: Il teatro futurista italiano. Milano: Mursia, 1977.
Lista, Giovanni: La Scène futuriste. Paris: C.N.R.S., 1989.
Lista, Giovanni: Lo spettacolo futurista. Firenze: Cantini, 1988.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: Théâtre futuriste italien: Anthologie critique. Vol. 1–2. Lausanne: L’ Âge
d’Homme, 1976.
Lucchino, Gianfranco: “Futurist Stage Design.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in Art
and Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001. 449–472.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano:
Mondadori, 1968. 2nd edn 1983.
Maramai, Fernando: F. T. Marinetti: Teatro e azione futurista. Pasian di Prato (UD): Campanotto, 2009.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Il teatro futurista sintetico. Napoli: CLET, 1941.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Teatro. Vols. 1–2. Ed. by Jeffrey T. Schnapp. Milano: Mondadori, 2004.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Teatro. Vols. 1–3. Ed. by Giovanni Calendoli. Roma: Bianco, 1960.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Francesco Cangiullo, eds.: Teatro della sorpresa. Livorno: Belforte,
1968.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2006.
262 Edward Braun

Mezzetta, Enrica: Il teatro futurista in teoria. Pisa: Giardini, 2006.

Monteverdi, Mario, ed.: Avanguardia a teatro dal 1915 al 1955 nell’opera scenografica di Depero,
Baldessari, Prampolini. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Museo Teatrale alla Scala, 29 novembre
1969 – 10 gennaio 1971. Calliano (TN): Manfrini, 1970.
Nuzzaci, Antonella: Il teatro futurista: Genesi, linguaggi, tecniche. Roma: Edizioni Nuova Cultura, 1997.
Orban, Clara: The Culture of Fragments: Words and Images in Futurism and Surrealism. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 1997.
Ovadija, Mladen: Dramaturgy of Sound in the Avant-Garde and Postdramatic Theatre. Montreal:
McGill Queen’s University Press, 2013.
Plassard, Didier: “Le Théâtre synthétique futuriste.” D. Plassard: L’ Acteur en effigie: Figures de
l’ homme artificiel dans le théâtre des avant-gardes historiques: Allemagne, France, Italie.
Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1992. 64–103.
Ramsay, Gordon: Murdering the Moonshine: Sintesi of the Italian Futurists. Brighton: Sussex
Academic Press, 2006.
Ripellino, Angelo Maria: “Futurismo.” Enciclopedia dello spettacolo. Vol. 5. Roma: Le Maschere,
1958. 783–790.
Salter, Chris: Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge/MA:
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2010.
Segel, Harold B.: “Italian Futurism, Teatro Grottesco, and the World of Artificial Man.” H.B. Segel:
Pinocchio’s Progeny: Puppets, Marionettes, Automatons, and Robots in Modernist and
Avant-Garde Drama. Baltimore/ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 260–296.
Settimelli, Emilio: Settimelli e il suo teatro. A cura di Mario Verdone. Roma: Bulzoni, 1992.
Sinisi, Silvana, ed.: “Varieté”: Prampolini e la scena. Torino: Martano, 1974.
Stefanelli, Stefania: “Futurismo sulla scena.” S. Stefanelli: Va in scena l’ italiano: La lingua del teatro
tra Ottocento e Novecento. Firenze: Cesati, 2006. 95–124.
Stoesser, Paul, ed.: Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance. Ottawa: Legas, 2011.
Teatro futurista. Special issue of Sipario: Rassegna mensile dello spettacolo 22:260 (December 1967).
Valoroso, Antonella: “Futurist Theater: Theories, Experiments, Legacy.” Giuseppe Gazzola, ed.:
Futurismo: Impact and Legacy. Proceedings of a Conference Held in Florence: Center for
Contemporary Italian Studies, 15 October 2009. Stony Brook/NY: Forum Italicum Publishing,
2011. 158–175.
Verdone, Mario: “Lo spettacolo futurista.” Teatro contemporaneo 1:1 (1982): 1–18.
Verdone, Mario: Il teatro del tempo futurista. Roma: Lerici, 1969. 2nd edn Roma: Bulzoni, 1988.
Verdone, Mario, ed.: Manifesti futuristi e scritti teorici di Arnaldo Ginna e Bruno Corra. Ravenna:
Longo, 1984.

Russian Theatre
Introduction
The influence of Italian Futurism on Russian poetry and painting in the early years
of the twentieth century has been the subject of much debate (see Markov: Russian
Futurism: A History; Lawton and Eagle: Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes).
The Cubo-Futurists, as the dominant group of Russian poets came to be called in
1913, took every opportunity to assert their independence from their Western coun-
 Theatre 263

terparts (see the entry on Russian Literature in this volume). When Marinetti went
to Moscow in January 1914, they all contrived to be elsewhere, and his lectures
there and later in Saint Petersburg provoked none of the public scandals that he
so ardently desired. No lasting contacts were established, and Marinetti’s hopes of
extending his dominion were frustrated as Russian Futurism continued to develop in
its own distinct direction.
One encounter, however, is worthy of note. During his stay in Saint Petersburg,
Marinetti was invited by Vsevolod Meyerhold (1874–1942), the leading avant-garde
director, to visit his recently opened theatre studio. At Marinetti’s request, students of
the Grotesque Group gave a three-minute improvised performance of Othello, thereby
anticipating to the letter the principle of the sintesi that Marinetti, Settimelli and
Corra were to formulate a year later: “We are creating a Futurist Theater that will be
COMPRESSED, that is, very short, squeezing into a few minutes, a few words and
a few gestures, innumerable situations, sensibilities, ideas, sensations, facts, and
symbols” (Marinetti: “A Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity”, 201). This, however,
should not be taken to suggest a deep affinity at this point between Meyerhold and
Futurism: having long since rejected the static drama of the Symbolists, he used his
studio classes in 1914 to explore the contemporary application of traditional perfor-
mance skills and conventions taken from the commedia dell’ arte, kabuki theatre and
other popular forms, including the circus.

“The First Futurist Theatre Performances

in the World”: Vladimir Mayakovsky and
Victory over the Sun
Meyerhold is known to have attended the theatre debut of the twenty-year-old Vladimir
Mayakovsky (1893–1930), but it would hardly have encouraged him to embrace Futur-
ism. The play Vladimir Maiakovskii: Tragediia (Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, 1914)
was performed under the auspices of the Union of Youth at the Luna Park Theatre,
Saint Petersburg, on 2–5 December 1913, on alternate nights with Pobeda nad solntsem
(Victory over the Sun, 1913), jointly written by Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and
Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968); Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934) composed the music
for Victory over the Sun. The performances were presented grandly as “The First Futur-
ist Theatre Performances in the World” (see the poster in Petrova: Russian Futurism
and David Burliuk, “The Father of Russian Futurism”, 2, translated in Kruchenykh: Our
Arrival, 60–62). The first indication of this event had appeared three months earlier in
the newspaper Rech’ (Speech), which published a small notice announcing auditions
at the author’s first public reading of Vladimir Mayakovsky at the Troyitsky Theatre
and concluded: “Actors do not bother to come, please” (quoted in Tomashevsky and
264 Edward Braun

Matyushin: “Futurism in St. Petersburg”, 94). On the appointed day the aspiring per-
formers, most of them students attracted by the prospect of paid employment, were
surprised to discover that they were to be considered for both productions. With
numerous parts to be cast, the level of competence was extremely variable, but May-
akovsky’s central rôle dominated his tragedy, and Victory over the Sun required only a
few of the principals to sing. Preparations were predictably chaotic. There were only
two rehearsals, the chorus was hired two days before the performance, and only three
of its seven members could sing. For Victory over the Sun, Kazimir Malevich (1878–
1935) had to create twenty large pieces of scenery in four days, and a piano ordered to
replace the intended orchestra arrived just two hours before the curtain rose on the
first night; it turned out to be out-of-tune. However, the Futurists were consummate
self-publicists, and their regular public events had already generated a notoriety that
guaranteed the sale of all the exorbitantly priced tickets.
Vladimir Mayakovsky opens with a prologue in which the protagonist who “may
well be the last poet there is” (Mayakovsky: Plays, 21; Maiakovskii: Teatr i kino, 117),
arrives like a messiah in a city of tears, promising to reveal “new souls humming like
the arcs of street lights” through the power of “words as simple as bellowing” (Plays,
22; Teatr i kino, 118). The first act is a beggars’ holiday in “a spider’s web of streets”
(Plays, 23; Teatr i kino, 119) where the poet’s resolve is tested in a series of encoun-
ters with disfigured human abstractions: an old man with scrawny black cats (several
thousand years old), a man with one ear, a man with no head, a man with a gaunt
face, a man with one arm. In a mounting frenzy of revolt, the mob – exhorted by
Mayakovsky – agrees to sacrifice an enormous woman, the embodiment of his love.
He is restrained, however, first by an ordinary young man and then by a man with
one eye and one leg proclaiming the apocalyptic overthrow of the old world. In Act
Two, Mayakovsky, now clad in a toga and crowned with laurel, finds ever more tears
pouring out by the townspeople. Reluctantly, he accepts the burden of their misery,
packs it into his suitcase and sets off for the northern sea to cast it “to the dark god of
storms at the source of bestial faiths” (Plays, 37; Teatr i kino, 135). As though embar-
rassed by this portentous rhetoric, Mayakovsky returns in a brief throw-away epilogue
and makes one last attempt to provoke his audience by reminding them that “I wrote
all this about you, poor drudges” (Plays, 38; Teatr i kino, 136). The text owes nothing
to Italian Futurism; instead, it is a monodrama in which all the characters are, in the
words of Benedikt Livshits, the poet’s “cardboard partners, the impersonal progeny of
his own imagination” (Livshits: The One and a Half-eyed Archer, 160). Thematically,
there is a clear affinity with Nikolai Yevreinov’s earlier monodramas and with Alexan-
der Blok’s Balaganchik (The Little Showbooth, 1905), which Meyerhold had staged in
the same theatre seven years earlier (see Braun: Meyerhold, 61–68).
The set design for the production was the work of two artists and consisted of
simple panels placed in front of a cloth backdrop. The one used for the prologue
and epilogue, designed by Pavel Filonov (1883–1941), was “painted brightly with
various objects: little boats, houses and wooden horses, as if someone had strewn
 Theatre 265

a pile of toys around and children had drawn them” (Rudnitsky: Russian and Soviet
Theatre, 13). For the play itself, Iosif Shkolnik depicted two Cubist cityscapes with
tumbling roofs, streets, telegraph poles and street lamps collapsing onto one another.
Filonov’s interpretation of Mayakovsky’s parade of disfigured monsters was inert and
two-dimensional.
By contrast, Mayakovsky’s ‘love-interest’ was a five-metre-tall peasant woman
made from papier mâché and dressed in rags. Before donning the toga and laurel
leaves for Act Two, Mayakovsky wore his usual attire of black and yellow striped shirt,
coat, top hat and walking stick. Smoking a cigarette, he addressed his lines to the
audience, paying little heed to the other characters until they forced their tears on
him in Act Two. It was his powerful, sonorous delivery and commanding presence
that saved the day, calmly overriding the incessant laughter, whistles and catcalls.
In literary circles, the performance confirmed Mayakovsky’s reputation, but to the
public it was largely incomprehensible.
Victory over the Sun opens with an oracular, prophetic prologue by the Futur-
ist poet Velimir Khlebnikov, replete with original archaisms and neologisms, after
which Kruchenykh’s text tells of the capture and imprisonment of the sun, the source
of passion and the symbol of Apollonian rationality, by the Budetliane (Futuremen).
In Act Two, set in the “Tenth Country” of the future (Kruchenykh et al.: “Victory
over the Sun”, 118), the past has been conquered and those with enough strength
remaining celebrate their liberation from memory and conventional logic in a world
freed from the laws of gravity. An aeroplane crashes, leaving the pilot unhurt but
crushing a woman and a bridge. Then, finally, the Futuremen return and proclaim
that “the world will die but for us there is no end” (Kruchenykh et al.: “Victory over
the Sun”, 124). Matyushin and Malevich declared in an interview for Den’ (Day) on 1
December 1913:

Its meaning is the overthrow of one of the great artistic values – the sun, in the present instance …
There also exist in people’s minds, certain specific links between them, established by the mind
of man. Futurists want to break free of this regulated world, these ties, which are conceivable in
it. They want to transform the world into chaos, to smash established values into fragments and
create new values out of those fragments, making new generalisations, discovering new, unex-
pected and unseen links. (Quoted in Kruchenykh: Our Arrival, 67)

Unfortunately, the barely comprehensible text falls short of these lofty ambitions; it
has none of Mayakovsky’s audacious imagery and relies instead on “uncommonly
feeble, pretentious and loud” musical interjections composed by Mikhail Matyushin
(Livshits: The One and a Half-eyed Archer, 160; for more detail, see Allende-Blin:
“ ‘Sieg über die Sonne’: Kritische Anmerkungen zur Musik Matjušins” and Dempsey:
“A Musical Assessment of ‘Victory Over the Sun’ ”). The actors inserted lengthy pauses
between each word and spasmodic bursts of zaum’, that is, ‘transrational’ language
composed mainly of nonsense vowel or consonant clusters, and existing Russian
words with their inflectional endings removed.
266 Edward Braun

The reaction of the first-night audience is difficult to establish. Matyushin

claimed that “the bite of the critics was toothless, but they could not conceal our
success among young people” (quoted in Rudnitsky: Russian and Soviet Theatre, 13).
However, twenty-five years later, Kolya Tomashevsky, who had played two parts in the
production, recalled that

the public was not angry; they shouted happy remarks at the actors, who swallowed them
silently, without answering back. […] Kruchenykh received feeble hisses and sarcastic applause,
and when this unmitigated abstruseness was over, everyone left satisfied and happy. They had
had the opportunity to witness Futurist nonsense. (Tomashevsky and Matyushin: “Futurism in
St. Petersburg”, 100)

There was no such divergence of opinion over the impact of the set designs for
Malevich’s production, which signalled his progression from Cubism to the pure
geometrical abstraction of Suprematism. At the start of the opening scene, two
Strongmen ripped apart a Cubist front curtain made of paper to reveal the first of three
square backdrops framing smaller squares. One of them was divided into a black and
a white triangle; the other two were made up of geometrical Cubist elements which
approximated Kruchenykh’s vague stage directions. Against this background, robotic
figures moved slowly in brightly painted geometrical cardboard costumes which
both reshaped human figures and dictated their movements. A crucial element in
Malevich’s conception was his use of kinetic lighting, which is described by Livshits:

Out of the primal night the tentacles of the projectors snatched part of first one and then another
object and, saturating it with colour, brought it to life. […] The innovation and originality of
Malevich’s device consisted first of all in the use of light as a principle which creates form, which
legitimises the existence of a thing in space […]. Within the limits of the stage box a painted solid
geometry came into being for the first time, a strict system of volumes. […] The [human figures]
were sliced by the blades of the beams; alternately, hands, feet, head, were eliminated, since for
Malevich they were only geometrical bodies subject not only to decomposition into component
parts, but also to complete dissolution in pictorial space. (Livshits: The One and a Half-eyed
Archer, 163–164)

Nancy Van Norman Baer calls Victory over the Sun “a pivotal work in the early
avant-garde’s struggle to forge a new theatrical aesthetic” (Baer: “Design and Move-
ment in the Theatre of the Russian Avant-Garde”, 38). However, crucial as the work
was for Malevich’s development as a painter, it was an isolated event in theatre, which
displayed no discernible interest in Futurism until after 1917.

The first Soviet play

Following the October Revolution, Meyerhold and Mayakovsky were among the first
artists to declare their support for the Bolsheviks. In 1918, Meyerhold accepted a
 Theatre 267

commission from the Narkompros (Commissariat for Enlightenment) to stage Mayak-

ovsky’s newly completed Misteriia-Buff (Mystery-Bouffe, 1918; revised 1921), the first
play to be written by a Soviet dramatist, to mark the first anniversary of the Revolu-
tion. Malevich was recruited to design the sets and costumes. With most professional
actors keeping their distance from the new régime, Mayakovsky again found himself
working with a largely student company and playing three parts himself when the
production was presented at the Petrograd Conservatoire on 7, 8 and 9 November 1918.
The play, written in a style that Lenin was later to characterize as “hooligan
communism” (Zolotnitskii: Sergei Radlov, 76), parodies the biblical story of Noah’s
Ark, with the flood representing world revolution. The seven pairs of “Clean” human
beings survive the rulers and exploiters, and the seven “Unclean” pairs represent the
international working class. Having overthrown the Clean, the Unclean are led by
“Simply a Man” through an innocuous hell and a tedious paradise to the promised
land, which is revealed as the perfect mechanized state of Socialism where the only
servants are “Things” (tools, machines, etc.) – a complete reversal of the dystopian
vision of the Big City in Vladimir Mayakovsky. Whilst the “Unclean” speak in the
uniform heroic manner of political oratory, the “Clean” are lampooned in the broad
knockabout style of fairground theatre. Meyerhold added to the lazzi of the commedia
dell’arte other tricks that his troupe had explored in their workshops: elements of
circus clowning and acrobatics, plus an American who made his entrance through the
auditorium on a motorcycle. Mayakovsky himself played “Simply a Man” and pulled
off an equally spectacular effect with his first entrance:

Hidden from the audience’s view, he climbed four or five metres up an iron fire-escape behind
the left-hand side of the proscenium arch. Then a broad leather strap was fixed to his belt, and at
the appropriate moment he seemed to hurtle into view, soaring over the Unclean crowded on the
deck of the ark. (Fevral’skii: Pervaia sovetskaia p’esa, 73)

Malevich’s set designs for Mystery-Bouffe have not survived, but in an interview of
1932 he recalled:

I did not subscribe to the objective use of imagery in Mayakovsky’s verse; I was closer to the
non-objectivity of Kruchenykh. My approach to the production was Cubist. I saw the box-stage as
the frame of a picture and the actors as contrasting elements […]. Planning the action on three or
four levels, I tried to deploy the actors in space, predominantly in vertical compositions in accor-
dance with the current principles of painting; the actors’ movements were intended to accord
rhythmically with the elements of the setting. I depicted a number of planes on a single canvas; I
treated space not as illusionary but as Cubist. (Quoted in Fevral’skii: Pervaia sovetskaia p’esa, 73)

As Malevich’s reference to Kruchenykh suggests, his approach to Mystery-Bouffe was

similar to his treatment of Victory over the Sun five years earlier, and it is not surprising
that it blended uneasily with the carnivalesque buffoonery unleashed by Mayakovsky
and Meyerhold. In any case, the play was put on so hastily that confusion and friction
268 Edward Braun

were inevitable: the company, mainly amateur but containing a few of Meyerhold’s
ex-students, seemed to vary in size between seventy and eighty; the Conservatoire
refused to sell copies of the play text at its bookstall and, according to Mayakovsky,
even nailed the doors of the auditorium shut to prevent rehearsals; and the posters
had to be finished by Mayakovsky himself on the day of the performance.
Nevertheless, Meyerhold and Mayakovsky saw the production as both a revolu-
tionary celebration and a declaration of war against the routine and escapism of estab-
lished theatre. Having declaimed the prologue, the “Unclean” ripped crude replicas
of current theatre posters from the velvet front curtain. How the public responded
is hard to establish, since few critics deemed the event worth reporting. In the peri-
odical Zhizn’ iskusstva (Life of Art), Andrei Levinson vilified the Futurists for their
opportunism, yet marvelled at the play’s “noisy success” (Levinson: “Misteriia-Buff
Maiakovskogo”, 2). Some years later, however, Meyerhold’s assistant director,
Vladimir Solovyov, recalled: “The production had a rather cool reception; to be frank,
it didn’t get across to the audience” (quoted in Zolotnitskii: Sergei Radlov, 75). Even
so, the unassailable fact remains that by obliterating the division between stage and
audience, by invoking the spirit of carnival and by harnessing the unruly energy of
popular theatre and circus, Meyerhold and Mayakovsky had committed Futurism to
the Bolshevik cause, and thereby issued a challenge that was soon to galvanize the
new Soviet avant-garde.

‘Circusization’ and ‘music-hallization’

Having severed all links with the former Imperial theatres, Meyerhold was involved
in various attempts to introduce popular theatre to a wide audience, before being
forced by illness to leave Petrograd in May 1919 for convalescence in the Crimea. In his
absence, the newly formed Hermitage Theatre, of which he was the nominal director,
found a temporary home in the small Armorial Hall of the Winter Palace, where it
performed from June to November 1919. The one notable production was Lev Tolstoy’s
Pervy vinokur (The First Distiller, 1886), which opened on 13 September and had four
performances, two of them to audiences of soldiers and sailors. It was a production
that bore the unmistakable imprint of Marinetti’s Futurist aesthetics, and specifically
of his Variety Theatre Manifesto, which had been published in Russian translation in
1914 (Marinetti: “Miuzik-kholl”).
For his début as a director, the young artist and cabaret designer Yury Annen-
kov (1889–1974) reinforced the cast with a number of well-known variety and circus
performers, including the red-haired clown Georges Delvari, who played a peasant
woman, the ‘India-rubber man’ Alexander Karloni and Konstantin Gibshman, a cel-
ebrated Variety compère. Tolstoy’s dramatic fable tells of a simple peasant who is
led into temptation by a little demon to distil his surplus grain, thereby reducing his
 Theatre 269

entire village to riotous drunkenness, greatly to the satisfaction of Satan himself.

Annenkov dismantled Tolstoy’s text and compressed it into a series of Variety turns
(analogous to the Futurist sintesi). Hell was represented by Annenkov as a circus ring
with poles, ropes, trapezes and suspended platforms, with the Four Devils from the
Ciniselli Circus performing death-defying feats as the resident demons.
Unsurprisingly, Annenkov’s disregard for political relevance and his iconoclas-
tic treatment of the venerated Tolstoy did not endear him to the Petrograd Theatre
Department of the Commissariat for Enlightenment, and in November 1919 the Her-
mitage Theatre was summarily wound up. The brief run of The First Distiller must
have been seen by fewer than a thousand people, but it gave new focus to the ongoing
debate on the hybridization of the dramatic stage – its tsirkizatsiia (circusization) and
miuzik-khollizatsia (music-hallization), to use the terms then current. It also marked
the advent of a new type of performance that would soon be called ekstsentrizm
(Eccentrism).
In January 1920, a similar but more sustained attempt to synthesize the skills of
the actor, the circus performer and the cabaret artiste was initiated by Sergei Radlov
(1892–1958) with the opening of the Theatre of Popular Comedy in the People’s House,
located in a working-class suburb north of the River Neva. The company consisted
mainly of variety and circus performers, including Gibshman, Delvari, Karloni, the Jap-
anese juggler Tatsunosuki Takoshimo, the celebrated aerialist clown Serge (pseud. of
Alexander Alexandrov) and the satirical-ballad singer Stepan Nefedov. Profiting from
his four years of training at Meyerhold’s studio before the Revolution, Radlov took the
commedia dell’ arte as the basis for a new anti-literary, anti-intellectual improvised
‘barbarous’ theatre in which the traditional masks were replaced by figures such as
international financiers, factory owners, Red Fleet sailors and revolutionary agents.
The bleak, cavernous Iron Hall of the People’s House had a permanent multilevel
construction, with no front curtain and a low projecting forestage. With only the
most rudimentary of sets, maximum attention was focussed on the performer “tire-
lessly demonstrating to an enthusiastic public his leaps, somersaults, salto mortale,
flame-juggling, transformations, verbal dexterity, eccentric musical numbers and all
the other marvels long since banished from the serious stage” (Radlov: Desiat’ let v
teatre, 179). Radlov’s intention, however, was the opposite of revivalism; inspired by
the exploits of Nick Carter and Fantômas, by Pearl White and the Hollywood serial
adventures, he aimed for the destruction of “logic” and “a cinematographic rapidity
of impressions […] an interweaving of different rhythms and a synthesis of speeds”
(Gvozdev and Piotrovskii: “Petrogradskie teatry i prazdnestva v epokhu voennogo
kommunizma”, 198).
The audiences that flocked to the Theatre of Popular Comedy (over 1,600 each night,
free of charge in its first season) were soon won over by the performers’ brilliant rep-
artees and their physical daring and virtuosity. In the finale of Obez’iana-Donoschitsa
(The Monkey Informer, 1920), Serge, as the Monkey, clambered up the metal frame-
work of the Iron Hall all the way to the roof over the centre of the auditorium, where
270 Edward Braun

he remained hanging by one hand and scratching himself. In Priemysh (The Adopted
Son, 1920) he played the renegade adopted son of a wealthy capitalist who fled from
the police with vital revolutionary papers, walking up a tightrope to the roof, then
swooping back down over the audience and finally being rescued by climbing a rope
lowered from a passing aeroplane and disappearing into the skies. Meanwhile, his
two luckless pursuers, played by the acrobats Alexander Karloni and Ivan Taureg,
delighted the audience by dropping through trapdoors and falling into barrels of
water.
What Radlov had created was a new genre, Circus Comedy, in which the main
element was circus and the political content was no more than token agitprop. In an
attempt to give his work more political bite, he turned to Maxim Gorky, who wrote a
topical scenario lambasting work-shy officials, called Rabotiaga Slovotekov (The Hard-
working Slovotyokov), which was presented in June 1920. The slapstick vulgarity of Del-
vari’s verbose Soviet bureaucrat, Slovotyokov, who mouthed incessant slogans about
‘collective action’, delighted the audience, but Gorky was outraged at the reduction of
his political satire to crude farce, and the production survived only three nights before
the Petrograd Theatre Section (headed by Gorky’s common-law wife) ordered its closure.
There were no further attempts at political satire, and in its second season
the Theatre of Popular Comedy began to stage comedies by Shakespeare, Molière,
Calderón and others. Gradually, its star performers drifted back to the circus and
audiences declined until, in January 1922, the company was finally dissolved. Suc-
cessful as Radlov had been in attracting a new audience to the theatre, none of his
productions managed to solve the fundamental problem inherent in the syncretism
of ‘circus theatre’.
The Civil War ended in November 1920, and the following March saw the harsh
measures of War Communism replaced by Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP), which
was designed to restore the shattered Soviet economy by a partial reversion to private
enterprise and the encouragement of foreign investment. For theatre, this meant the
withdrawal of subsidies from all but a few state-approved ‘academic theatres’, and far
more stringent economic controls were applied overall. It also led to a flood of foreign
films, a proliferation of operetta, cabaret and variety theatres, and the re-emergence
of a fast-living café society, which mimicked everything Western, from the fox-trot and
the jazz band to cocktails and short skirts. These manifestations of capitalist ‘dec-
adence’ inspired numerous parodies on stage and screen, although the distinction
between moralistic denunciation and admiring plagiarism was often far from clear.

Foregger’s mechanized theatre

Foremost amongst the new wave of small theatres in Moscow was Mastfor (Masterskaia
Foreggera), the Foregger Theatre Workshop, set up by Nikolai Foregger (1892–1939) in
 Theatre 271

January 1921. In collaboration with the young dramatist Vladimir Mass (1896–1979),
he presented a programme of parodies, topical sketches, satirical playlets and eccen-
tric dance numbers. Mastfor opened its doors to the public on 28 March 1921 with a
programme of witty parodies directed against such varied targets as the Meyerhold
Theatre, the Moscow Art Theatre and the Bolshoi Theatre. These were soon joined
in Foregger’s repertoire by a series of topical ‘parades’, programmes of fast-moving
Variety sketches featuring a range of stock characters. These included a female com-
missar with briefcase and leather jacket who spoke in agitprop slogans and propa-
gated Alexandra Kollontai’s doctrine of free love, an intellectual mystic reminiscent
of the poet Andrei Bely and a composite figure that was half the peasant poet Sergei
Yesenin and half the Futurist dandy Vadim Shershenevich. There was also the tra-
ditional ginger-haired clown Auguste, who disrupted the show by getting in every-
one’s way. These characters shared a distant kinship with the masks of the commedia
dell’arte, but Foregger – like Radlov – was truly Futurist in his admiration for the
dynamism, the hyperbole, the physical skills, the verbal dexterity and the infectious
high spirits of the modern music-hall and, to a lesser degree, the circus. Music was
a vital component of the shows, in particular the syncopated rhythms of jazz, which
Mastfor introduced to Russia in 1921.
Foregger was also the first to grasp the significance of Charlie Chaplin’s films for
the new mechanized theatre, and Chaplin’s economy of gesture and precisely cho-
reographed movements were adopted as a model for the company. In 1922, Foreg-
ger said of Chaplin: “His playing is concrete, he reacts precisely to things. The whole
experience is inconceivably stark, and, because his whole body is at work as a com-
plete mechanism, one doesn’t remember his ‘eyes’ or his ‘profile’ ” (Foregger: “Charli
Chaplin”, 2–3).
Having found a home in the two-hundred-seat theatre of the Press House, Mastfor
attracted an enthusiastic following that included the leftist avant-garde as well as the
newly affluent public produced by the NEP, although orthodox critics were uneasy
about its cheerful apoliticism and its taste for the erotic. Khoroshee otnoshenie k
loshadiam (Kindness to Horses), previewed on New Year’s Eve 1921, did nothing to
placate them. The show opened with a street scene taken from Mayakovsky’s poem of
the same title, in which a horse collapses from exhaustion in the centre of Moscow and
lies surrounded by a crowd of amused onlookers until the poet arrives, notices tears
rolling down the horse’s muzzle and comforts him, whereupon he regains his strength
and trots cheerfully back to his stable. Foregger and Mass used this scene as a pretext
for their now familiar Moscow types to burlesque the topics of the day. The set designs
were executed by two future masters of Soviet cinema. The seventeen-year-old Sergei
Yutkevich (1904–1985) devised a placard-style big-city set, with moving parts oper-
ated by the designer using a handle backstage. The costumes were the work of Sergei
Eisenstein (1898–1948), six years his senior and already experienced as a designer
with Proletkult, a proletarian cultural and educational organization founded in 1917.
For the number “Mucki iz Kentukki” (Mucky from Kentucky), he devised
272 Edward Braun

a sensational woman’s costume consisting of a broad-brimmed hat, a skimpy camisole and a

lampshade skirt – a huge wire framework suspended from varicoloured ribbons. The ribbons
were arranged at wide intervals, designed to reveal the actress’s shapely legs to the astonished
gaze of the strait-laced Muscovite of the time. (Iutkevich: Kontrapunkt rezhissera, 232)

Highly disciplined dance routines were a regular feature, including all the latest
American imports such as the fox-trot, the charleston, the shimmy, the cakewalk and
the two-step. In this context, the distinction between parody and imitation was of
little concern to Mastfor’s enthusiastic patrons. However, when Foregger presented
his Tantsy mashin (Machine Dances) on 13 February 1923, he was quite specific about
their purpose. Describing them as “a plastic exercise in Constructivism”, he claimed
that he was creating a form of choreography that would assist the masses in master-
ing “the rhythm that is so essential in all labour processes” (quoted in Uvarova: Russ-
kaia sovetskaia estrada, 1907–1929, 267). At the blast of a whistle, the young actors,
male and female, dressed in uniform overalls, rapidly formed a human pyramid
resembling some huge machine, and at a second signal began to move like gears,
pistons and connecting rods, all in precise coordination and accompanied by a noise
orchestra rattling broken glass, bits of metal and other assorted objects. Far from
demonstrating the dehumanizing effects of the machine age, Machine Dances was
intended to celebrate the harnessing of technology by the Soviet State. Like the theory
that underpinned Meyerhold’s actor-training system of biomechanics, it owed much
to the experiments in the scientific organization of labour conducted by the Ameri-
can Frederick Winslow Taylor and his Russian follower Alexei Gastev (see Law and
Gordon: Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics, 34–41).
In January 1924, Mastfor’s premises were destroyed by fire and the company
disbanded. Foregger became a conventional choreographer, but the influence of his
work with Mastfor was profound, not only on modern dance in the Soviet Union but
also on the agitprop work of the Siniaia bluza (Blue Blouse) collective – as it acknowl-
edged in its own journal in 1925:

Foregger’s theatre, which as far as ideology is concerned, limped on all four feet, left behind
many purely formal achievements. The chief ones are: the physical training of the actor and the
truly American rhythm of his technique. [The Blue Blouse] took from the followers of Foregger
the dynamism, the precisely mechanised gestures, which often had no subject, and were not
illustrative, as well as their ‘industrial’ movements, imitations of mechanical work by a group of
human bodies. (Quoted in Stourac and McCreery: Theatre as a Weapon, 56)

Petrograd becomes Eccentropolis

Whereas the programme of Mastfor pandered increasingly to the tastes of its NEP clien-
tele, the Factory of the Eccentric Actor (FEKS) in Petrograd did everything possible to
outrage public taste. Its teenage progenitors, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg,
 Theatre 273

and their respected partner, Georgy Kryzhitsky (aged thirty), announced their inten-
tions on 5 December 1921 in true Futurist manner with the launching of their Manifest
ekstsentricheskogo teatra (Eccentric Theatre Manifesto) at a riotous public meeting in
Petrograd (or Eccentropolis, as they renamed it). Announcing the “Americanization of
the Theatre”, the authors proclaimed:

WE ARE ECCENTRISM IN ACTION

1. The performance is a rhythmical beating on the nerves.
2. The high point is a trick.
3. The author is an inventor-improviser.
4. The actor is mechanised movement: he avoids tragic parts and doesn’t play his
role like a mask, but like a clown’s blinking nose. Acting is not movement but
contortion, it’s not mime but grimace, not words but screaming.

We revere Charlie Chaplin’s arse

More than Eleonora Duse’s hands!
(Kozintsev et al.: “Eccentrism”, 97)

Joined by Sergei Yutkevich from Moscow, FEKS announced a programme of train-

ing that promised contributions from Yuri Annenkov, the writer and director Nikolai
Yevreinov, the Constructivists Vladimir Tatlin and Nikolai Punin, the music-hall star
Nina Tamara, the juggler Takoshimo and the clown Serge. Only the last two of these
luminaries joined FEKS when it opened on 9 July 1922. Its inaugural production,
Nikolai Gogol’s comedy Zhenit’ba (The Marriage, 1841), would, it was announced,
be performed “not according to Gogol” (Leach: Revolutionary Theatre, 132). The first
night was on 25 September 1922 at the Petrograd Central Arena of Proletkult:

The play opened with the bringing on of a chamber pot. Gogol solemnly sat down upon it,
whereupon it was wired up and electric shocks were sent through him via his backside! Next
moment […] a sequence from a Charlie Chaplin film was shown, and in front of it the action
continued. Podkolyosin, the hero, was renamed Musichall Cinematographovich Pinkertonov,
and Miss Agatha’s other suitors were the Steam Bridegroom, the Electric Bridegroom and the
Radio Bridegroom, each on roller skates. Taurek the Clown appeared as Albert, and Serge was
Einstein. The audience booed, cheered and whistled, as a fantastic kaleidoscope of theatrical tri-
ckery was shaken out before it – melodrama, clowning, dance, acrobatics, film. Multi-coloured
lights flashed, the pianist played a two-step, hooters hooted, bells rang, rattles rattled, and the
performers cracked topical jokes and recited rude rhymes. There was even a can-can, and in the
end – perhaps unsurprisingly – Gogol expired pitifully and in despair. (Leach: Revolutionary
Theatre, 132–133)

Kryzhitsky and Yutkevich left after this production, but Kozintsev and Trauberg
continued to teach courses that included mime, acrobatics, gymnastics, clowning,
boxing, fencing and screen-acting. Like Mastfor, they took Chaplin as their model. On
4 June 1923, they presented Vneshtorg na Eifelevoi Bashne (Foreign Trade on the Eiffel
Tower), in which the American inventor Hugely, who has devised a means of making
274 Edward Braun

‘blue coal’ from thin air, is pursued by agents of the World Fuel Corporation, desper-
ate to destroy him and his formula in order to protect their monopoly. After a frantic
chase through the Paris sewers and up the Eiffel Tower, the plot is foiled thanks to
a seven-year-old Russian girl played by Serge and a clown named Pepo (short for
Petrogradskoe Edinoe Potrebitel’skoe Obshchestvo, the Petrograd Consumer Society).
Again, film was incorporated into the production, this time specially shot, and the
stage action was broken down into ninety-eight brief sequences. Not surprisingly,
after this production FEKS turned its attention to cinema. Kozintsev and Trauberg’s
first film, Pokhozhdeniia Oktiabriny (The Adventures of Oktyabrina), was released in
December 1924, thus marking the end of their brief theatrical careers.

Biomechanics and Constructivism

In October 1921, two months before the Eccentrism debate in Petrograd and the
première of Kindness to Horses at Mastfor, Meyerhold was appointed director of the
newly opened Gosudarstvennye vysshie rezhisserskie masterskie (GVYTM; State Higher
Director’s Workshops) in Moscow. Whilst there were courses in all the conventional
theatre skills plus boxing, acrobatics and gymnastics, all students were required to
devote one hour a day to Meyerhold’s newly formulated training system of biome-
khanika (biomechanics). He presented this as the theatrical equivalent of industrial
time-and-motion study derived, on the one hand, from Taylorism (see above) and, on
the other, from the theories of reflexology, developed by the ‘objective psychologist’
William James and the Russians Vladimir Bekhterev and Ivan Pavlov. Meyerhold’s ter-
minology was aggressively iconoclastic and Futurist in tone, but there is no doubt that
biomechanics owed just as much to his pre-revolutionary exploration of the comme-
dia dell’arte, kabuki theatre and the skills of the circus ring.
The efficacy of this training method was demonstrated to spectacular effect
on 25 April 1922 in Meyerhold’s production of Le Cocu magnifique (The Magnani-
mous Cuckold, 1920). Fernand Crommelynck’s dubious tragi-farce about a village
Othello and his innocent young wife forced into adultery by his paranoia was trans-
formed by the irresistible innocence and comic virtuosity of the student company.
Everything was arranged to focus the spectator’s attention on the actors’ skills,
from the blue, loose-fitting uniform overalls to the functional multilevel scaffold,
both designed by the Constructivist Lyubov Popova (1889–1924). Their tricks were
performed with all the casual dexterity of the circus clown. What The Magnanimous
Cuckold emphatically demonstrated was the necessity of an integrated training
system for the ‘eccentric’ actor. It was a lesson that FEKS tried briefly to emulate
and one that Foregger partially implemented in his system of tefiztrenazh (physical
training of the body), which was analogous to biomechanics except for the fact that
it was dance-based.
 Theatre 275

On 24 November 1922, The Magnanimous Cuckold was joined in the repertoire by

Smert’ Tarelkina (Tarelkin’s Death, 1869), a comedy by Alexander Sukhovo-Kobylin
(1817–1903) that satirized bureaucratic corruption and tsarist police methods. In a
prefatory note, Sukhovo-Kobylin had written: “In keeping with the play’s humorous
nature, it must be played briskly, merrily, loudly – avec entrain” (Sukhovo-Kobyilin:
Trilogiia, 348). Meyerhold took this as a cue for unbridled theatricality. Popova’s
fellow Constructivist Varvara Stepanova (1894–1958) designed a series of prozodezhda
(production wear – drab, baggy overalls decorated with stripes, patches and chevrons
which resembled convicts’ uniforms; see the entry on Russian Fashion Design in this
volume). On the bare stage there was an assortment of white-painted ‘acting instru-
ments’ ready to be shifted and used by the actors as required. Each one concealed a
trap: the table’s legs gave way, the seat deposited its occupant onto the floor, the stool
detonated a blank cartridge. Most spectacular of all was the cage used to simulate a
prison cell into which the prisoner was propelled head-first through something resem-
bling a giant meat-mincer. As a further test of the spectators’ nerves and the actors’
courage, an assistant director (called ‘laboratory assistant’) announced the intervals
from the front row by firing a pistol at the audience and shouting “Entrrr-acte!” There
were helter-skelter chases with the pursuers brandishing inflated bladders on sticks;
at the end, Tarelkin escaped by swinging across the stage on a trapeze. Illusion was
never given a chance to take hold: Ludmilla Brandakhlystova, “a colossal washer-
woman of about forty” (Sukhovo-Kobyilin: Trilogiia, 272), was played by the slender,
youthful Mikhail Zharov (1899–1981) with no make-up and enormous padding under
his skirts; Tarelkin, bound hand and foot in prison and mad with thirst, tried in vain
to reach a cup of water held by a warder − and then suddenly winked broadly at the
audience and took a long draught from a bottle of wine he had concealed in his pocket.
Inventive and provocative as it was, Tarelkin’s Death was one of Meyerhold’s less
successful productions, partly because it was performed in a draughty, unheated
auditorium during the harsh Moscow winter and partly because Stepanova’s ingen-
ious ‘acting instruments’ functioned so capriciously that they completely destroyed
the young actors’ confidence. However, one of the ‘laboratory assistants’ was Sergei
Eisenstein, and Tarelkin’s Death proved to be the springboard that launched his career
as a director.

Back to Ostrovsky?
As well as attending Meyerhold’s workshops and working with Foregger, Eisenstein
had been Head of Design at the Moscow Proletkult since October 1920, and before
Tarelkin’s Death opened he had decided to leave Meyerhold to work as a director with
the Proletkult organization. For some time he had been preparing an adaptation of
Alexander Ostrovsky’s Na vsiakogo dovol’no prostoty (Enough Stupidity in Every Wise
276 Edward Braun

Man, 1868), together with the poet Sergei Tretyakov, a founder member of LEF (the
Left Front of the Arts), who had little faith in theatre and was committed to

the principle of production art, whereby the former entertainer/joker/clown/conjurer/hanger-on

of society’s entertainment world switched categorically to the ranks of the workers, exchan-
ging aesthetic fantasy for the creation of things that were useful and needful for the proletariat.
(Tretyakov: “We Raise the Alarm”, 300)

The choice of Ostrovsky’s much-loved comedy in the centenary year of his birth
was a calculated provocation. A fortnight before the opening of The Wise Man, as
it was retitled, Izvestiia had published an article by Anatoly Lunacharsky calling
on theatres to “go back to Ostrovsky” (Lunacharskii: “Ob Aleksandre Nikolaeviche
Ostrovskom i po povodu ego”, 241) in order to learn from his achievements in the
depiction of social reality. In response to this plea for orthodox Realism accessible to
a mass audience, Boris Arvatov, a member of LEF and Proletkult’s leading theorist,
declared:

Ostrovsky has been chosen as a bourgeois writer who depicts everyday life, as a fetish of bour-
geois art who has always been staged traditionally. And this Ostrovsky has been turned inside
out. Bourgeois art has been dealt a crushing blow, bourgeois aesthetics have been given a slap in
the face. (Quoted in Trabskii: Ruskii sovetskii teatr, 271).

Tretyakov’s ‘free composition’ left little of the original text intact. He discarded most
of the dialogue, shifted the location to contemporary émigré Paris, and portrayed the
characters on different levels by finding for them equivalents in popular culture and
in the political sphere.

Thus Glumov, played by Ivan Yazykanov, was the White Clown, and a subversive NEP man; Goro-
dulin was a juggler, but also the recently empowered Mussolini, apt to exclaim “Mama mia!”
when surprised; Mamaeva was a circus equilibrist and a vamp; Mashenka an ingenue as well as
Mac-Lac the dealer in stocks and shares; Kurchaev, a lion tamer in fleshings and leopard skins,
but also simultaneously three “extra-polished hussars”; Mamaev, an acrobat and Milyukov (at
least in Tretyakov’s script though Eisenstein seems to have made him a Lord Curzon equivalent);
and Golutvin, the “mysterious” person, was Harry Piel, the film detective, and also a double-
dealing NEP man; with Krutitsky becoming General Joffre and Manefa the matchmaker […] Ras-
putin. (Leach: Revolutionary Theatre, 144–146).

The whole farrago reached a climax when Mamaev/Milyukov dragged another char-
acter backwards onto the stage by his coat-tails, shouting “Back, back to Ostrovsky!”
The Proletkult First Workers’ Theatre was housed in the banqueting hall of the
mansion that once belonged to the industrialist and art patron Savva Morozov. For
The Wise Man it was transformed by Eisenstein into a circus arena with a raised plat-
form stage at one end and seating for 250 spectators stretching round the acting area
and rising to the gallery. On the green-carpeted circus arena there were rings, paral-
lel bars, a vaulting horse, a slack wire connected to the gallery, a trapeze and other
 Theatre 277

assorted pieces of apparatus that were brought on and removed by stagehands as

required. There was also a cinema screen above the stage.
Much of the text was incomprehensible to the audience, partly due to the poor
diction of the performers, partly because it was constantly disrupted with improvised
asides, but mainly because Eisenstein attempted to mobilize every available shock
effect, visual and aural, to maintain his audience in a state of alertness and excite-
ment. In their Eccentric Theatre Manifesto, Kozintsev and his FEKS colleagues had
referred to “a chain of tricks”, and now, immediately after the première of The Wise
Man, Eisenstein published his “Montage of Attractions” in the journal Lef, defin-
ing the basic unit of stimulation as an “aggressive moment in theatre” (Eisenstein:
Selected Works, 34–36).
As in Eisenstein’s later films, the individual units in The Wise Man were organ-
ized into a rapid, alogical sequence, termed ‘montage’, which depended for its
impact on the speed, the comic invention and the physical daring of the performers.
The tricks that had The Wise Man’s audiences on the edge of their seats for over
sixty performances were achieved after barely six months of training that the inex-
perienced young company received from Eisenstein, the biomechanics specialist
Valery Inkizhinov and the circus artiste Georges (Pyotr Rudenko). In his production,
Eisenstein took the principle of the literal metaphor, employed first by Meyerhold
in The Magnanimous Cuckold, and pursued it to its absolute physical limits. As he
recalled in 1934:

A gesture expands into gymnastics, rage is expressed through a somersault, exaltation through
a salto-mortale, lyricism on ‘the mast of death’. The grotesque of this style permitted leaps from
one type of expression to another, as well as unexpected intertwinings of the two expressions.
(Eisenstein: Film Form, 7–8).

Thus, Eisenstein recalls the scene when Golutvin steals Glumov’s diary, played by
Grigory Alexandrov as a slack-wire act:

Up the wire, keeping his balance with an orange parasol, wearing a top hat and tails, as the
music plays, walks Grisha Alexandrov, without a safety net. And on one occasion the wire had
become [accidentally] smeared with machine oil near the top. Grisha is sweating, puffing and
panting. Although he is wearing light deerskin shoes with separate big toes to help him grip the
wire, he is slipping inexorably backwards. Our pianist, Zyama Kitaev, starts to repeat the music.
His feet are slipping. Grisha won’t make it. Eventually somebody in the balcony realises what’s
wrong and holds out a walking stick to help him. This time Grisha manages to reach the safety of
the balcony. (Eisenstein: Izbrannye proizvedeniia. Vol. 1, 269)

The finale featured a brief film montage specially shot by Eisenstein, entitled Dnevnik
Glumova (Glumov’s Diary), in which first Glumov undergoes a series of miraculous
transformations into a machine gun, a donkey and a babe in arms. Then, Golutvin
is seen clambering over the roof of the theatre, leaping down into a passing car and
driving up to theatre entrance − at which point Alexandrov himself bursts into the
278 Edward Braun

auditorium brandishing a spool of film. Just before this final twist, Eisenstein himself
appears in the film and doffs his cap to the audience.
With The Wise Man, Eisenstein had pursued Eccentrism further, and certainly
more systematically, than even Kozintsev and Trauberg had done at FEKS. Like them,
he could see nothing more to be done with theatre; or, as he put it, “the cart dropped
to pieces, and its driver dropped into cinema” (quoted in Bordwell: The Cinema of
Eisenstein, 7). His proposal for the film Stachka (Strike) was accepted by the State
company Goskino in April 1924, and shooting began that summer with the cast of The
Wise Man in the principal rôles. With the release in 1924 of Kuleshov’s Neobychainye
prikliuchenia Mistera Vesta v strane bolshevikov (The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr
West in the Land of the Bolsheviks) and FEKS’s The Adventures of Oktyabrina, fol-
lowed in April 1925 by Strike, the impact of Futurism on the emerging Soviet cinema
was confirmed.
Seen from today’s perspective, the slapstick clowning, the lampooning of social
types, the breakneck speed and the trick montage of these films provide a graphic
indication of what the Russian theatrical avant-garde was doing in the years follow-
ing the Civil War. What they cannot convey are the elements of danger and confronta-
tion that were vital to the performances: physical danger, political risk-taking, moral
offence, calculated bad taste, violation of the classics, the overturning of conventions
and the indiscriminate mixing of genres. In the hectic period from 1920 to 1923, the
Russian Futurists kept orthodox opinion in Russia in a state of upheaval with a series
of theatrical events that were as defiantly iconoclastic and as contentious as any in
Europe.

Works cited
Allende-Blin, Juan: “ ‘Sieg über die Sonne’: Kritische Anmerkungen zur Musik Matjušins.”
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Text + Kritik, 1984. 168–182.
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Bordwell, David: The Cinema of Eisenstein. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Braun, Edward: Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre. London: Methuen, 1995.
Dempsey, Christopher: “A Musical Assessment of ‘Victory Over the Sun’.” Patricia Railing, ed.:
Essays on Victory over the Sun. Vol. 2. Forest Row: Artists Bookworks, 2009. 101–115.
Eisenstein, Sergei: Film Form. London: Dobson, 1951.
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Eisenstein, Sergei: Selected Works. Vol. 1. London: British Film Institute, 1988.
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1971.
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Iutkevich, Sergei: Kontrapunkt rezhissera [The Director’s Counterpoint]. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1980.
Kozintsev, Grigorii, Georgii Kryzhitskii, Leonid Trauberg, and Sergei Iutkevich: “Eccentrism.” The
Drama Review 19:4 (December 1975): 95–109.
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Kruchenykh, Alexei, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Mikhail Matiushin: “Victory over the Sun.” Translated
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Law, Alma, and Mel Gordon: Meyerhold, Eisenstein and Biomechanics. Jefferson/NC: McFarland,
1996.
Lawton, Anna, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism Through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928.
Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Leach, Robert: Revolutionary Theatre. London: Routledge, 1994.
Levinson, Andrei: “Misteriia-Buff Maiakovskogo.” [Mystery-Buff by Mayakovsky] Zhizn’ iskusstva
[Life of Art], 11 November 1918. 2.
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Research Partners, 1977.
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Reprinted in A.V. Lunacharskii: O teatre i dramaturgii: Izbrannye stat’i [About Theater and
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Mayakovsky, Vladimir: Plays. Translated by Guy Daniels. Evanston/IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1995.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “A Futurist Theater of Essential Brevity.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings.
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Shershenin]. Moskva: Tipografiia Russkogo tovarishchestva, 1914. 76–77.
Markov, Vladimir: Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press, 1968.
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Breisig: Palace Editions, 2000.
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1986.
Sukhovo-Kobylin, Aleksandr: Trilogiia [Trilogy]. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1966.
Tomashevsky, Kolia, and Mikhail Matyushin: “Futurism in St. Petersburg.” The Drama Review 15:4
(Fall 1971): 92–105.
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280 Edward Braun

Tretyakov, Sergei: “We Raise the Alarm.” John Ellis, ed.: Screen Reader. Vol. 1. Cinema, Ideology,
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Theatre, 1907–1929]. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1976.
Zolotnitskii, David: Sergei Radlov: The Shakespearian Fate of a Soviet Director. Amsterdam:
Harwood, 1996.

Further reading
Bowlt, John Ellis, ed.: Russian Avant-Garde Theatre: War, Revolution and Design 1913–1933. London:
Victoria and Albert Museum, 18 October 2014 – 25 January 2015. London: Herns, 2014.
Bowlt, John Ellis, Nikita D. Lobanov-Rostovsky, Nina Lobanov-Rostovsky, and Olga Shaumyan,
eds.: Russian Stage Design, 1880–1930. Vol. 1. Masterpieces of Russian Stage Design. Vol. 2.
Encyclopedia of Russian Stage Design 1880–1930: The Catalogue Raisonné of the Collection of
Nina and Nikita D. Lobanov-Rostovsky. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2012.
Douglas, Charlotte: “Victory over the Sun.” John E. Bowlt, ed. Twentieth-Century Russian
and Ukrainian Stage Design. Special issue of Russian History / Histoire Russe 8:1–2 (1981):
69–89.
Douglas, Charlotte: Swans of Other Worlds: Kazimir Malevich and the Origins of Abstraction in
Russia. Ann Arbor/MI: UMI, 1980.
Firtich, Nikolai, and Dan Ungurianu, eds.: Ot Gogolia k “Pobede nad solntsem”: Traektorii Russkogo
avangarda = From Gogol to “Victory over the Sun”: Trajectories of Russian Avant-Garde. Special
issue of Zapiski Russkoi Akademicheskoi Gruppy v S.Sh.A. / Transactions of the Association of
Russian-American Scholars in the U.S.A. 35 (2008–2009).
Gray, Camilla: The Great Experiment: Russian Art 1863–1922. London: Thames and Hudson, 1962.
Jadova, Larissa [Larisa Alekseevna Zhadova]: “Sur le théâtre futuriste russe: ‘Des Commencements
sans fins’.” Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle 53:552 (April 1975): 124–135.
Kovalenko, Georgii Fedorovich, ed.: Avangard i teatr 1910–1920-kh godov [Avant-garde and Theatre,
1910–1920s]. Moskva: Nauka, 2008.
Kovalenko, Georgii Fedorovich, ed.: Russkii avangard 1910-kh–1920-kh godov i teatr [Russian
Avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s in the Theatre]. Sankt-Peterburg: Gosudarstvennyi institut
iskusstvoznaniia; Bulanin, 2000.
Lövgren, Håken: “Sergej Radlov’s Electric Baton: The Futurization of Russian Theater.” Lars Kleberg,
and Nils Åke Nilsson, eds.: Theater and Literature in Russia 1900–1930. Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1984. 101–113.
Railing, Patricia, ed.: Victory over the Sun. Vol. 1. A. Kruchenykh, K. Malevich, M. Matiushin: A Victory
over the Sun Album. Photographs, The Three, Posters, Libretto, Backdrops and Costumes,
Score, Reviews, Memoirs. Album compiled by Patricia Railing. Translation of Victory Over The
Sun by Evgeny Steiner with his programme notes, “Throwing Pushkin Overboard”. Vol. 2.
Essays on “Victory over the Sun”. Forest Row: Artists Bookworks, 2009.
Ripellino, Angelo Maria: Majakovskij e il teatro russo d’avanguardia. Torino: Einaudi, 1959. German
translation Majakowskij und das russische Theater der Avantgarde. Köln: Kiepenheuer &
Witsch, 1959. 2nd edn 1964. French translation Maïakovski et le théâtre russe d’avant-garde.
Paris: L’ Arche, 1965.
Rudnitskii, Konstantin: “Teatr futuristov.” [Futurist Theatre] K. Rudnitskii: Russkoe rezhisserskoe
iskusstvo, 1908–1917 [Russian Directorial Art, 1908–1917]. Moskva: Nauka, 1990.
239–263.
 Theatre 281

Schmidt, Paul: “Some Notes on Russian Futurist Performance.” Canadian American Slavic Studies
19:4 (Winter 1985): 492–596.
Sergeev, Anton Vladimirovich: Tsirkizatsiia teatra: Ot traditsionalizma k futurizmu [The Circusization
of the Theater: From Traditionalism to Futurism]. Sankt-Peterburg: Chistyi list, 2008.
Terekhina, Vera: “Teatr ‘Budetlianin’: Dva puti russkogo futurizma.” [Theater of the “Futurians”: The
Two Paths of Russian Futurism] Jean-Philippe Jaccard, and Annik Morard, eds.: 1913: “Slovo
kak takovoe”. K iubileinomu godu russkogo futurizma [“The Word Itself”: On the Anniversary of
Russian Futurism]. Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo Evropeiskogo universiteta v Sankt-Peterburge,
2015. 339–354.
Jed Rasula
16 Visual Poetry
Introduction
Poetry has been rendered in striking visual form worldwide since the earliest traces of
written culture. Amulets, talismans and prayers from antiquity offer a vivid record of
visual poetry. Hebrew Masoretic text-images, Greek magical papyri and the Christian
carmina figurata were among the practices incorporating visual figurations. This foun-
dation was augmented by calligrams, emblems, hieroglyphics and pattern poems.
But apart from notable exceptions such as the great English poet George Herbert
(1593–1633), prominent poets were not traditionally involved in the visual and typo-
graphic aspects of their compositions. At the end of the eighteenth century, William
Blake’s illuminated poems appeared on the historical horizon like a meteor cross-
ing the sky from an unfathomable origin. His comprehensive interpenetration of text
and illustration, filling the printed page on all four sides, conveyed the apocalyptic
fervour of the poems themselves. Yet Blake’s unprecedented work, largely unknown
and overlooked, had little or no impact on the development of visual poetry.
The phenomenon of visual poetry in the Modernist period is well documented
and has a canonical foundation in Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice) by the French
Symbolist poet Stéphane (Étienne) Mallarmé (1842–1898). Arranged in a striking
dispersal of words and lines, with several fonts and variable type sizes, the poem
appeared in the periodical Cosmopolitan in 1897, although it is most familiar from
the eponymous book published posthumously in 1914, in which the text is given a
more expansive treatment, with the composed page spanning two facing pages of
print (see also p. 163 in the chapter on Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Book
in this volume). With this poem, the page itself was activated as an element of the
composition. In addition, the blank space emerged as a compositional prerogative.
The poem was no longer strictly made of words. Spatiality recast the page as a tem-
plate commensurate with the visual arts. Now, seamlessly continuous, the platform
for artistic work encompassed the page, the canvas, the stage, and potentially even
the mental act of attention. Mallarmé’s initiative convened a space in which poetic
composition could avail itself of a gestural repertoire.
Although F. T. Marinetti churlishly characterized Un coup de dés as “static”
(Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom”,
128), most poets regarded it as an inaugural proclamation and incentive to continue
the adventure. As the tangible aperture through which words passed on their way
to freedom, Mallarmé’s poem prompted the Futurist pursuit of words liberated from
the rectilinear measure of the type area and recomposed by analogy with telegraphic
expedience. Poems could instead be organized around pictorial vectors of energy and

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-016
 Visual Poetry 283

intensity. Words were encased in a wordless armature of lines, frames, grids, punctu-
ation and accent marks.
Mallarmé was an enthusiast of the typographic ingenuity on display in the
public sphere. But with the growing industrialization of print culture in the nine-
teenth century, literature subsided to its subordinate logocentric rôle, with display
type reserved for commercial usage. Mallarmé restored to poetry a prerogative
readily available to the humblest compositor of playbills. William Carlos Williams
(1883–1963) reprised the emancipatory theme in Spring and All (1923), sounding as
if he was explicitly addressing the phenomenon of Futurist ‘Words-in-Freedom’: “To
understand the words as so liberated is to understand poetry. That they move inde-
pendently when set free is the mark of their value” (Williams: Spring and All, 91).
Spring and All was ostensibly Williams’s salute to Dada, but the ground had been
thoroughly prepared by Futurism – both Italian and Russian. In any case, words need
no longer be consigned to parade duty. “You have seen the letters in their words –
lined up in a row, humiliated, with cropped hair, and all equally colorless, gray”,
complained the Russian poets Viktor (Velimir) Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Aleksei
Kruchenykh (1886–1968) in 1913, as they set about emancipating the letters (Kruche-
nykh and Khlebnikov: “The Letter as Such”, 63). To activate the alphabet was not an
impromptu and improper treatment, but a return to the etymological and archaeolog-
ical substrate from which human societies emerge.
The atavistic fantasy of accessing a primal stratum of original speech served as
a baseline for the Russian Futurists. The group eventually known as Cubo-Futurists
originally adopted the name Hylaea, hearkening back to the Scythian roots of the
region where the founders were on vacation (see p. 768 in the entry on Russia in
this volume). The preoccupation with zaum’, or ‘transrational language’, on the
part of poets like Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexei Kruchenykh and Vasily Kamensky
(1884–1961) reflects their determination to purify poetry of all but the most primal
Slavic elements (see p. 776 in this volume). There was nothing in this quest that
was intrinsically visual (zaum’ was decidedly oral in orientation). But, thanks to the
collaborative alliance between poets and painters in the Russian Futurist milieu,
there emerged a cornucopia of visual poetry. So close was the partnership in the
production of books such as Pomada (Pomade, 1913) and Vzorval’ (Explodity, 1913) –
the latter authored by Kruchenykh in cooperation with five artists – that any attempt
at distinguishing between ‘poem’ and ‘illustration’ seemed fruitless. At times, the
line fittingly wavered in an indeterminate location between a line of poetry and a
drawn line. The handiwork involved in these modestly scaled productions – pam-
phlets, really, not books, with print runs in the low hundreds – meant that copies
often bore individual touches by the artists, consigning them to the category of the
artists’ book, a domain that might well be considered on the far side of what we
mean by visual poetry (see the entry on Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’
Books in this volume).
284 Jed Rasula

The types of modern visual poetry are considerably varied, reflecting the
typographic revolution of the early twentieth century. There would continue to be
poems for reading; but now there were also poems for looking, and poems for sound-
ing. The Italian Futurists provided the first label: parole in libertà (mots en liberté;
Words-in-Freedom). As this liberation developed across Europe, there emerged
such practices as letter poems, typographic compositions, poster or placard poems,
collage and literary photomontage, sound poems and a series of local practices
including poetism in Prague, pictopoezie in Bucharest, Bildarchitektur in Budapest,
the ferro-concrete poems of Vasily Kamensky in Moscow (cf. Tango s korovami [Tango
with Cows], 1914), the Merzbilder and Plakatgedichte of Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948)
in Hannover, the Letterklangbeelden of Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931) in Holland
(the letter poem was as much a pictorial art as a species of writing, influencing the
development of concrete poetry) and the poème-objet of the Surrealists in Paris.
Although collage was specifically associated with the visual arts, it served as an
inter-media zone inasmuch as the use of print material often gave collages a smatter-
ing of language, sometimes (as in Berlin Dada) immersing the viewer in alphabetic
profusion.

The French connection

Among the most recognized visual poems of the twentieth century is La Prose du
Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and
of Little Jeanne of France, 1913), a two-metre long text descending through a radiant
colour field by the writer Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) and the artist Sonia Delaunay
(1885–1979). Its eminent status as an artwork is reflected in the fact that copies have
often been displayed in art exhibitions. However, when presented as a stand-alone
object, outside the context of visual poetry, its true character is not fully appreciated.
Cendrars, like Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918), was an avid participant in the col-
laborative aesthetics emerging in Paris at the time. Cendrars and Apollinaire’s resus-
citation of the ancient art of the calligram, along with Cendrar’s La Prose du Trans-
sibérien, served as an incentive for a generation of poets receptive to the prospect of
dramatizing the ‘look’ of poetry.
Apollinaire made a dramatic gesture when, shortly before the publication of his
collection Alcools in 1913, he removed all the punctuation from the poems – a “mas-
sacre of commas”, as it has been described (Carrieri: Futurism, 86). This was not strik-
ingly visible, but it was a step in the direction Apollinaire pursued with increasing
tenacity in subsequent years as he affirmed the emerging spirit in which poets were
“creating new entities which have a plastic value” (Apollinaire: “The New Spirit and
the Poets”, 229). Accordingly, “typographical artifices worked out with great audacity
have the advantage of bringing to life a visual lyricism which was almost unknown
 Visual Poetry 285

before our age.” He went so far as to “predict the day when, the photograph and
the cinema having become the only form of publication in use, the poet will have
a freedom heretofore unknown” (Apollinaire: “The New Spirit and the Poets”, 228).
Apollinaire’s own experiments charted a different course than the typographic lib-
eration of Futurism, as he was inclined to resurrect the ancient practice of the cal-
ligram, “a visual slang of the super-intellect” in the estimation of László Moholy-Nagy
(Moholy-Nagy: Vision in Motion, 301).
As some observed at the time, Apollinaire’s calligrams could be rather ham-
fisted, their shapes tautologically replicating the pocket watch, starfish and cravat
that were their subjects. In 1916, one of these critics, the Futurist poet Francesco
Meriano (1896–1934), urged his compatriots to seek another model and to “represent
the flight rather than the aeroplane” (Meriano: “Dall’ideogramma al simbolo e più
in là”, 29). The temptation of mimetic literalism would continue to influence visual
poetry – and aeroplane flight would be ingeniously, if mimetically, rendered again
and again by Italian Futurists.
Apollinaire’s tentative alliance with the Italian Futurists, as well as the appear-
ance of his calligrams in the magazine Les Soirées de Paris, inspired the poet Pierre
Albert-Birot (1876–1967) to issue a periodical of his own, SIC (an acronym for Sons
Idées Couleurs), in which he regularly deployed a variety of techniques for visual
poetry. There were placard poems, letter poems, calligrams and sound poems,
lending a signature look to its pages. Albert-Birot was frequently disposed to print
even regular Free Verse in an oversized font, filling the page as if they, too, bore the
mission of visual poems.
Apollinaire also inspired artists in other countries such as Spain and prompted
a concentrated burst of visual poetry in Catalonia by Josep-Maria Junoy (1887–1955),
Joan Salvat Papasseit (1894–1924), Joaquim Folguera (1893–1919) and Carles Sindreu i
Pons (1900–1974), among others (see Epps: “The Avant-Garde Visual Poetry of Junoy
and Salvat-Papasseit”, Armangué i Herrero: “Joaquim Folguero i el futurisme italià”
and Gavagnin: “Mites i objectes futuristes en la poesia de Salvat-Papasseit”). Resist-
ing the hegemonic rôle played by Castile in Spanish politics and culture, these poets
from Barcelona looked to France and Italy for cultural guidance. “Who amongst
us, as youngsters, did not swear in 1919 by the sacred name of Apollinaire”, wrote
Augustí Esclasans, “just as a few years earlier we had sworn by the sacred name
of Marinetti?” (Esclasans: “L’ obra d’en Joan Salvat-Papasseit”, 106). The temporal
sequence suggested by Esclasans indicates why the Catalan poets’ visual works seem
less beholden to Futurism than to Apollinaire, with pictorial treatment predominating
over the alphabetic. Yet, they were certainly aware of Futurism: the September 1917
issue of Troços (a periodical conspicuously dedicated to visual poems) reported the
death of Umberto Boccioni and took the opportunity to remind readers of the “camió
d’artilleria” (hand grenades) of electrified free-word compositions pouring out of the
Italian scene ([Anon]: “Italia! Italia”, [6]).
286 Jed Rasula

Marinetti’s Words-in-Freedom
Characterizing Free-Word compositions by way of military weaponry had been a
rhetorical ploy since Marinetti’s depiction of the Balkan War in late 1912. He subse-
quently developed the typographic explosions of Zang tumb tuuum (1914), building
on an inspiration to destroy syntax, abolish qualifiers and eliminate punctuation,
which he claimed to have received from an aeroplane propeller (Marinetti: “Techni-
cal Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, 104). Other recommendations would yield what
he called immaginazione senza fili (wireless imagination), and the sort of imagina-
tion that would have the velocity of a torpedo (Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax –
Untrammelled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom”, 128).
The profusion of visual poetry by Italian Futurists prompted Marinetti to claim,
in his introduction to Les Mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist Words-in-Freedom,
1919), that there were over a hundred “mots-libristes” in Italy (Marinetti: “Les Mots
en liberté futurists”, 11). Lacerba, based in Florence, printed a few of Marinetti’s
early visual experiments in 1913, although the first full-blown typographic compo-
sition to appear in its pages was Apollinaire’s L’ Antitradition futuriste (September
1913). Subsequent issues contained poems by Marinetti, Boccioni and Francesco
Cangiullo. Then, as if to inaugurate a new year, beginning with the first January
issue in 1914, parole in libertà became prominent in Lacerba until August 1914, after
which the journal turned its attention to politics and the First World War. In early
1915, two final pictorial compositions appeared by Corrado Govoni (1884–1965),
including his dynamic Autoritratto (Self Portrait), in which a pumpkin head radiates
lines of text in all directions (Govoni: Rarefazioni, 9). By the time L’ Italia futurista
was launched in Florence (producing fifty-one issues from June 1916 to February
1918), a constant supply of visual poetry was appearing during its two-year run –
enough, even, to spill over into the pages of Vela latina (Napoli, 1913–1918) and other
Futurist journals.
The wave of Italian Futurist visual poems was strikingly realized in individually
authored books. Marinetti’s Zang tumb tuuum (1914) established the gold standard
(see pp. 166–167 in this volume), followed up after the Great War with Les Mots en
liberté futuristes and 8 anime in una bomba: Romanzo esplosivo (8 Souls within
One Bomb: An Explosive Romance, both 1919). Marinetti’s publishing operation,
Edizioni di “Poesia”, issued a steady series of titles, many of them exquisite com-
pendia of Words-in-Freedom. Among them were Ponti sull’ oceano (Bridges across
the Ocean, 1914) by Luciano Folgore (pseud. of Omero Vecchi, 1888–1966), L’ elisse
e la spirale (The Helix and the Spiral, 1915) by Paolo Buzzi (1874–1956), Corrado
Govoni’s Rarefazioni e parole in libertà (Rarefactions and Words-in-Freedom, 1915),
Guerrapittura (Warpainting, 1915) by Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), Baionette (Bayonets,
1915) by Auro D’Alba (pseud. of Umberto Bottone, 1888–1965), Francesco Meriano’s
Equatore notturno (The Equator at Night, 1916), Archi voltaici (Voltaic Arc, 1916) by
 Visual Poetry 287

Volt (pseud. of Vincenzo Fani Ciotti, 1888–1927), Caffeconcerto (Music-hall, 1916)

and Piedigrotta (1916) by Francesco Cangiullo (1884–1977). The publication dates
suggest that books rather than single poems dispersed in periodicals filled the gap
between Lacerba’s turn away from Futurism and the advent of L’ Italia futurista.
Firmamento (Firmament, 1920) by Armando Mazza (1884–1964), Il fuoco delle pira-
midi (Pyramids on Fire, 1923) by Nelson Morpurgo (1899–1978), Stati d’animo diseg-
nati (Drawings of States of Mind, 1923) by Giuseppe Steiner (1898–1964) and Tavole
parolibere (Free-Word Tables, 1932) by Pino (Giuseppe) Masnata (1901–1968) were
among the few later titles. Published elsewhere were Bïf § zf + 18 (1919) by Ardengo
Soffici (1879–1964), Cangiullo’s Poesia pentagrammata (Poetry on the Staff, 1923),
Depero futurista (1927) and Liriche radiofoniche (Radio Poems, 1934) by Fortunato
Depero (1892–1960).
Surprisingly, despite his advocacy of the medium and his own achievements,
Marinetti did not play the curatorial rôle that might have been expected from so
ardent a theoretician-practitioner. His anthology I poeti futuristi (The Futurist Poets,
1912) was published before the typographic explosion got underway; but in I nuovi
poeti futuristi (The New Futurist Poets, 1925) one gets the impression that the free-
word revolution never happened. Out of 350 pages, a handful of poems deploy slightly
larger letters for occasional effect, with only five substantive free-word compositions
(two foldouts by Marinetti, one by Cesare Simonetti [dates unknown] resembling a
bayonet, and single-page works by Bruno Sanzin [1906–1994] and Fillìa [pseud. of
Luigi Colombo, 1904–1936]). Marinetti’s “Bombardment d’Adrinople”, as it appeared
in I nuovi poeti futuristi, was a 1923 version completely stripped of the distinctive typo-
graphic and spatial components of its 1912 original. Marinetti cast a final backward
glance over the phenomenon when he assembled Aeroporto della rivoluzione futurista
delle parole in libertà, poesia pubblicitaria, italianità, velocità, simultaneità (Airport of
the Futurist Free-Words Revolution, Advertising Poetry, Italianness, Speed, Simulta-
neity) in a very elegant, multi-coloured portfolio for the design journal Campo grafico
(March–May 1939).
Despite his own canonical examples, Marinetti was not a strict devotee of the
visual poem. He imagined Words-in-Freedom as a categorical gesture emancipat-
ing poetry from traditional constraints of precedence and decorum: “My revolution
is directed against the so-called typographic harmony of the page”, he declared. “I
want to seize [words] roughly and hurl them straight in the reader’s face.” (Mari-
netti: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom”, 128)
Claiming affinity with molecular mobility and mechanical force, Marinetti extolled
a typographical revolution capable of assimilating the velocity of “the stars, the
clouds, the airplanes, the trains, the waves, the explosives, the flecks of sea spray,
the molecules, and the atoms” (Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled
Imagination – Words-in-Freedom”, 128). The Dadaist Tristan Tzara repeated Mari-
netti’s insistent refrain with a simple command: “Each page must explode” (Tzara:
“Dada Manifesto 1918”, 126).
288 Jed Rasula

The Futurist impact abroad

The prevailing characteristic of Italian parole in libertà is buoyancy. It is as if the letters
and other forms are bubbling up from some felicitous magma. The visual ravishment
can be misleading, of course. On close reading, some of these works chronicle
despondency, ennui, metropolitan malaise and even sordid crimes. Yet the mere ani-
mation of letters, it seems, can prevail over the actual semantic contents of a text.
There could also be a precisely calculated fit between image and text, particularly in
some of the early celebrations of aerial flight. The actual means involved in producing
Free-Word compositions could be quite varied. Hand lettering and drawn components
mingled with a medley of type fonts. Another widespread practice was to experiment
with multiple colours, bringing the overall look of the page closer to art. Despite Mari-
netti’s expectation that published poetry would be printed in different colours, that
particular option rarely made its way into print. Adopting a more pragmatic approach,
Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) executed large multi-coloured renderings
of his poems, presented by Lucien and Gaston Manuel in an art exhibition in Paris
(Une exposition de poèmes de Vincent Huidobro, 16 May – 2 June 1922).
After the war, a proliferation of vanguard periodicals thrived throughout Europe,
most of them indebted to the typographic flourishes pioneered by the Futurists and
Dadaists. These ‘Little Magazines’ characteristically served as both meeting ground
and forum for interaction among the arts. In this milieu, a typographic composition
might have as conceptual equivalent on a facing page a photographic ‘rayogram’
by Man Ray (pseud. of Emmanuel Radnitzky, 1890–1976), a ‘proun’ by El Lissitzky
(pseud. of Eleazar’ Markovich Lisitski, 1890–1941) or a collage by Hannah Höch
(1889–1978). At the same time, the stylistic features formerly concentrated in visual
poetry were increasingly disseminated into the overall design of a journal. Francis
Picabia (1879–1953) paid attention to every aspect of 391 (Barcelona, New York,
Zürich, Paris, 1917–1924) and gave its pages a jolt of constant typographic ingenu-
ity, regardless of whether the contents were ostensibly poems or prose. Others with
a notably aggressive design aesthetic include Blast (London, 1914–1915), 291 (New
York, 1915–1916), Troços (Barcelona, 1916–1918), Noi (Rome, 1917–1925), Ma (Budapest
1916–1920; Vienna 1920–1925), Dada (Zurich and Paris, 1917–1920), Ultra (Madrid,
1921–1922), Zenit (Zagreb, 1921–1923, Belgrade, 1923–1926), Het Overzicht (Antwerp,
1921–1925), Mécano (Leiden, 1922–1923), Contimporanul (Bucharest, 1922–1932), Zwrot-
nica (Kraków, 1922–1923), G: Material zur Elementaren Gestaltung (Berlin, 1923–1924),
Merz (Hanover, 1923–1932), 75 HP (Bucharest, 1924) and Blok (Warsaw, 1924–1926) (on
all of these magazines see Brooker et al.: The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of
Modernist Magazines. Vol. 3. Europe 1880–1940). It was part of the scope of these
magazines that visual poems might appear – often in a context that makes it difficult
to distinguish between a poem and an advertisement – but after the heyday of L’ Italia
futurista (and, more modestly, Troços), such works were never found in abundance,
even in these contexts.
 Visual Poetry 289

A baseline for visual poetry is the unadorned alphabetic composition. A classic

example is “Typography” by Ardengo Soffici in Bïf § zf + 18 (1919), in which a large
capital A in the upper left would seem to inaugurate a conventional text, but the jumble
of letter and number forms filling out the rest of the page defies reading, evoking
nothing so much as a box of alphabetic effluvia shaken into a momentary kaleidoscopic
configuration. The Hungarian poet-artist Lajos Kassák (1887–1967) also specialized in
such letter formations, called Bildarchitektur (Picture architecture), some of which
anticipate the development of concrete poetry. One can find other influences of Futur-
ist typography in Theo van Doesburg, editor of the influential design journal De Stijl,
where he published numerous alphabetic compositions called ‘letterklangbeelden’
(alphabetic sound pictures) under his Dadaist pseudonym I. K. Bonset. His immediate
model came courtesy of Kurt Schwitters, with whom he undertook a performance tour
in Holland (the so-called ‘Dada Campaign’ of 10 January to 14 February 1923). Another
distinctive alphabetic composition was by Prague poet Vítězslav Nezval (1900–1958),
whose Abeceda (1926) was illustrated with photographs of dancer Milča Mayerová
(1901–1977) posing in the form of letters. Although not strictly a form of visual poetry,
iconic status has accrued to a work by Louis Aragon (pseud. of Louis-Marie Andrieux,
1897–1982), which simply prints the letters of the alphabet from a to z, a poem in which
the title does all the talking (Aragon: “Suicide”, 5).
The letter poem endowed poetry with performative characteristics commensurate
with extra-textual practices. Visual poetry effortlessly merged with a broader stream
of modern design, in which almost any alphabetic component resonated with tactile
and sonic potentiality. Dutch graphic designer Piet Zwaart (1885–1977) produced com-
mercial page-compositions that are routinely juxtaposed with poems in compendia
of modern typography. Poster designs for the newly emerging film medium provided
Constructivist artists in particular with an available template for creative visualiza-
tion, in which letter-forms expressed somatic exuberance first and foremost. Print
advertising began to take on the tilted, mobilized look of avant-garde graphic design.
Jan Tschichold (Johannes Tzschichhold, 1902–1974), the pioneering author of Die
neue Typographie (The New Typography, 1928), insisted that the pace of modern life
impinged directly on the printed page. Modern people look first and then read. The
page arrests the gaze at a glance; reading may or may not be the consequence. Grasp-
ing the total compositional field in its alphabetic amplitude was all too often lost in
the compulsion to read. Therefore, a persistent virtue, or strategy, of visual poems
was to arrest the gaze, inhibit or delay reading momentarily so that the semantic
experience of the poem could unfold gradually from a visual field established in situ.
Visual poetry was part of a broad typographic domain encompassing newspapers,
advertisements, posters, public notices – any printed material whatsoever – reinforcing
Louis Aragon’s view in his 1918 article “Du Décor” (On Film Sets) that “letters advertis-
ing a make of soap are the equivalent of characters on an obelisk or the inscription in
a book of spells” (Aragon: “Du Décor”, 24). In this milieu, poems were in effect adver-
tisements for themselves as they jostled in an urban environment increasingly suffused
290 Jed Rasula

with animated visual language. Walter Benjamin reflected on this in his book Einbahn-
straße (One-Way Street, 1928) and showed that “Writing, having found shelter in the
printed book, where it was leading an independent existence, is ruthlessly dragged out
into the street by advertisements and subjected to the brutal heteronomies of economic
chaos” (Benjamin: One Way Street, 66).
The blending of wordscape with cityscape is striking in “Manicure”, a long poem
by Mário Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916) published in the Portuguese journal Orpheu in 1915
(see Júdice: “Futurism in Portugal”). The innocuous opening in a manicurist’s chair
gradually gives way to a vision of “The wonderful wares of futurism!” (Rasula, and
Conley: Burning City, 169). The port of Lisbon provides a bevy of display font trade
names ranging from “CRÉDIT LYONNAIS” to “le bouillon KUB” with its evocation
of Cubism. Celebrating Marinetti and Picasso by name – ringmasters of “Numbers
and letters, brands and billboards” and “Free Words, sounds unleashed” – the poet
concludes by dashing out into the street in a shower of enlarged letter forms, as if the
parole in libertà of Italian Futurism had been ingested like a hallucinogenic mush-
room (Rasula and Conley: Burning City, 175, 176).
The conjunction of cityscape and visual poetry found its apogee in Bezette stad
(Occupied City, 1921) by the Flemish poet Paul van Ostaijen (1896–1928). Nearly each
of its 130 pages is a unique composition in itself. Its multilingualism is jubilantly dis-
played in a portrait of the poet’s native Antwerp during the German occupation of
the city during the First World War. It is at once the largest and the most inventive of
all modernist poems partaking of the free-word spirit. In addition, the typographic
variety is consistently subordinated to the overall thrust of the poetic vision. Music-
hall, bars, nightlife, cinema and the commerce of the city port naturally extend them-
selves in typographical vivacity (Hadermann: “Paul van Ostaijen en het futurisme”).
Ostaijen was hardly alone, as visual poetry had a natural affinity with the
popular and commercial culture of the day. Presumptions about modernist élitism
have obscured such affinities, as in Francesco Cangiullo’s Piedigrotta (1916), com-
memorating his native Neapolitan festival of the same name. Cangiullo’s anthropo-
morphic alphabet-puppets in Caffeconcerto (also 1916), gave a puckish twist to this
social scenario, in that all the performing figures are literally composed of letters of
the alphabet.
The book-length playscript lidantIU fAram / Ledentu le phare (Le-Dantiu as a
Beacon, 1923) by Iliazd (pseud. of Ilya Mikhailovich Zdanevich, 1894–1975) marks a
certain limit where the avant-garde meets unbridled decorum, as the preponderance
of printer’s ornaments throughout has equal weight with the Cyrillic text, in which
the speeches of characters called “Likeness” and “Unlikeness” (among others) are
rendered. Furthermore, the whole is swept up in a visual and oral performance far
exceeding its service rôle as prompt for a performance. Here the pages themselves are
a performance commensurate with any that might unfold on a stage. Through a land-
scape of typographic beguilements, a liberated language threads its way. In Ledentu,
the profusion of ornamentation coupled with typographic ingenuity creates a force
 Visual Poetry 291

field impeding the transitive function of written language (Isselbacher: Iliazd and the
Illustrated Book; Drucker, “The Futurist Work of Ilia Zdanevich” and “Iliazd and the
Book as a Form of Art”).
At the time when Iliazd’s book was published, people around the world were
beginning to confront another challenge to the dissemination of language, this time
in the non-alphabetic medium of radio broadcasting. T. S. F., a prevalent European
acronym for radio transmission (via télégraphie sans fil in French and telegrafia senza
fili in Italian), had a dramatic impact on poets, suggesting a variant of the ancient
model of the Muse. Radiophonic voices emerged out of the atmosphere. Like the expe-
rience of the telephone a generation earlier, radio detached voice from body. Words
streamed in from an ambiguous realm. The Futurist emphasis on telegraphic speech
was reinforced by this new phenomenon, and for a time the acronym flashed through
the printed facade of poems like a cattle brand, as poets affirmed the newness of Mod-
ernism in its latest technology. For a time, poems brandished the alphabetic slogan
“T. S. F.”, but the radiophonic source eventually prevailed, as the look of poetry
returned to its modest rôle as logocentric transcript. By 1930, poems everywhere con-
verged on uniformity, making no distinct appeal to the eye.

Conclusion
Despite its rapid global spread and a wealth of vivid examples, the phenomenon
of dynamic typography in poetry lasted scarcely more than a generation. Even the
captivating typographic variety of early publications tended to be effaced in late
career collections of poets who had ascended to national prominence. The Italian
Futurist contribution was so conspicuous that, in some sense, typographic ingenu-
ity would henceforth be associated with a movement tainted by its later association
with Fascism. After the Second World War, any urge to accentuate the printed word
finally became concentrated in another international tendency, concrete poetry. But
that is another story, a different direction, which has itself long since passed. Only in
recent years, with lavishly produced retrospective publications, has the phenomenon
of visual poetry been fitfully resurrected, mingling with poster designs and advertise-
ments in the broader historical profile of twentieth-century graphic design.

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Kamenskii, Vasilii Vasil’evich: Tango s korovami: Zhelezobetonnye poemy. Moskva: Izdatel’stvo
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Kruchenykh, Alexei, and Velimir Khlebnikov: “The Letter as Such.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle,
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Kruchenykh, Alexei: Pomada Moskva: Kuz’min i Dolinskii, 1913.
Kruchenykh, Alexei: Vzorval’: Stikhi. Sankt-Peterburg: “Svet”, 1913.
Mallarmé, Stéphane: “Un coup de dés jamais n’aboliras le hasard.” Cosmopolis: Revue interna-
tionale 6:17 (May 1897): 417–426. 2nd rev edn Un coup de dés jamais n’aboliras le hasard:
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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
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and Giroux, 2006. 120–131.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: 8 anime in una bomba: Romanzo esplosivo. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di
“Poesia”, 1919.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Les Mots en liberté futurists. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”,
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Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1914.
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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed.: I nuovi poeti futuristi. Roma: Edizioni futuriste de “Poesia“,
1925.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed.: I poeti futuristi. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1912. Reprint
Lavis (Trento): La Finestra, 2004.
Masnata, Pino: Tavole parolibere. Roma: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1932.
Mazza, Armando: Firmamento. Con una spiegazione di F. T. Marinetti sulle parole in libertà. Milano:
Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1920. Reprint Palermo: Istituto Siciliano Studi Politici ed
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Meriano, Francesco: “Dall’ideogramma al simbolo e più in là.” La brigata 1:2 (July 1916): 25–48.
Meriano, Francesco: Equatore notturno, ovest-est: Parole in libertà. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di
“Poesia”, 1916. Reprint Milano: Scheiwiller, [1983]. Roma: Biblioteca d’Orfeo, 2009.
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294 Jed Rasula

Nezval, Vítězslav: Abeceda: Tanečni komposice Milči Mayerové. Praha: Otto, 1926. Reprint Praha:
TORST, 1993.
Ostaijen, Paul van: Bezette Stad: Nagelaten Gedichten. Antwerpen: Casie, 1921. Reprint Amsterdam:
Athenaeum-Polak and Van Gennep, 2010.
Rasula, Jed, and Timothy Conley, eds.: Burning City: Poems of Metropolitan Modernity. Notre Dame/
IN: Action Books, 2012.
Sá-Carneiro, Mário: “Manucure.” Orpheu 2 (April–June 1915): 98–107.
Soffici, Ardengo: BIF§ZF+18: Simultaneità e chimismi lirici. Firenze: Edizioni della “Voce”, 1915.
Reprinted in original folio format. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1981. Reprinted in reduced 16° format.
Roma: Stampa Alternativa, 1986.
Soffici, Ardengo: BIF§ZF+18: Simultaneità e chimismi lirici. 2nd rev. edn in 16° format. Firenze:
Vallecchi, 1919. Reprint Firenze: Vallecchi, 2002.
Steiner, Giuseppe: Stati d’animo disegnati. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1923. Reprint
Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1990. Livorno: Belforte, 1991.
Tschichold, Jan: Die neue Typographie: Ein Handbuch für zeitgemäß Schaffende. Berlin: Verlag des
Bildungsverbandes der deutschen Buchdrucker, 1928. Reprint Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1987.
Tzara, Tristan: “Dada Manifesto 1918.” Richard Huelsenbeck, ed.: Dada Almanac. London: Atlas,
1993. 121–132.
Une exposition de poèmes de Vincent Huidobro. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Théâtre Edouard VII
[Galerie G. L. Manuel Frères], 16 mai – 2 juin 1922.
Volt [pseud. of Vincenzo Fani]: Archi voltaici: Parole in liberta e sintesi teatrali. Milano: Edizioni
futuriste di “Poesia”, 1916. Reprint Viterbo: Stampa Alternativa / Nuovi Equilibri, 1986. Firenze:
Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1991.
Williams, William Carlos: Spring and All. Paris: Contact, 1923. Reprint New York: New Directions, 2011.

Further reading
Andel, Jaroslav: Avant-Garde Page Design 1900–1950. New York: Delano Greenidge, 2002.
Ballerini, Luigi, ed.: Italian Visual Poetry, 1912–1972. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Finch College
Museum, in Conjunction with the 8th Triennial Congress of the Associazione Internazionale per
gli Studi di Lingua e Letteratura Italiana, New York, 25–28 April 1973. New York: Istituto Italiano
di Cultura. Distributed by Wittenborn, 1973. Italian edn Scrittura visuale in Italia, 1912–1972.
Torino: Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, 27 settembre – 28 ottobre 1973.
Bartram, Alan: Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2005.
Belloli, Carlo: “La componente visuale-tipografica nella poesia d’avanguardia. 1. I pionieri: Dal
simbolismo agli anni venti.” Pagina: Rivista internazionale della grafica contemporanea 2:3
(October 1963): 5–47.
Blistène, Bernard, ed.: Poésure et peintrie: D’un art, l’autre. Exhibition catalogue. Musées de
Marseille: Centre de la Vieille Charité, 12 février 1993 – 23 mai 1993. Paris: Reunion des Musées
Nationaux, 1993.
Bohn, Willard: Modern Visual Poetry. Newark/DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001.
Bohn, Willard: The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry 1914–1928. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986.
Burke, Christopher: Active Literature: Jan Tschichold and New Typography. London: Hyphen Press,
2007.
Bury, Stephen, ed. Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde, 1900–1937.
London: The British Library, 2007.
 Visual Poetry 295

Campo grafico: Rivista di estetica e tecnica grafica mensile A. 1, n. 1 (gennaio 1933) – A. 7 n. 3–5
(marzo – maggio 1939). Reprint Milano: Electa, 1983.
Caruso, Luciano: “Futurism.” Ralph Jentsch, ed.: The Artist and the Book in Twentieth Century Italy.
Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 14 October 1992 – 16 February 1993.
309–328.
Caruso, Luciano, ed.: Parole in libertà futuriste. Exhibition catalogue. Pistoia: Palazzo Comunale,
18–29 maggio 1977. Pistoia: Tipolitografia Tris, 1977.
Caruso, Luciano, and Stelio Maria Martini, eds.: Tavole parolibere e tipografia futurista. Exhibition
catalogue. Venezia: Ca’ Corner della Regina, 15 ottobre – 20 novembre 1977. Venezia: La
Biennale di Venezia, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, 1977.
Caruso, Luciano, and Stelio Maria Martini, eds.: Tavole parolibere futuriste (1912–1944). Vol. 1–2.
Napoli: Liguori, 1974–1977.
Chevrier, Jean-François: L’ Action restreinte: L’art moderne selon Mallarmé. Paris: Hazan, 2005.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: “Visualizzazione poetica, poesia e prosa.” E. Crispolti, ed.: Futurismo
1909–1944: Arte, architettura, spettacolo, grafica, letteratura. Milano: Mazzotta, 2001. 493–511.
Dachy, Marc: Avant-gardes et nouvelle typographie au début du siècle. Paris: Centre National de
Documentation Pédagogique, 1985.
Damase, Jacques: Révolution typographique depuis Stéphane Mallarmé. Genève: Galerie Motte,
1966.
Drucker, Johanna: The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923.
Chicago/IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Greve, Charlotte: Writing and the ‘Subject’: Image-text Relations in the Early Russian Avant-garde
and Contemporary Russian Visual Poetry. Amsterdam: Pegasus, 2004.
Hanson, Anne Coffin, ed.: The Futurist Imagination: Word + Image in Italian Futurist Painting,
Drawing, Collage and Free-Word Poetry. New Haven/CT: Yale University Art Gallery, 1983.
Heller, Steven. Merz to Emigre and Beyond: Avant-Garde Magazine Design of the Twentieth Century.
London: Phaidon, 2003.
Lacerba 1:1 (1 January 1913) – 3:22 (22 March 1915). Firenze: Vallecchi, 1913–15. Reprint Milano:
Mazzotta, 1970. Firenze: Vallecchi, 2000.
L’ Italia futurista 1:1 (1 June 1916) – 2:39 (11 February 1918). Firenze: Martini, 1916–1917; Aldino, 1917.
Vallecchi, 1917–1918. Reprint Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1992.
Lista, Giovanni: Le Livre futuriste: De la libération du mot au poème tactile. Modena: Editions Panini,
1984.
Mascelloni, Enrico, and Sarenco [pseud. of Isaia Mabellini], eds.: Poesia totale, 1897–1997: Dal colpo
di dadi alla poesia visuale. Exhibition catalogue. Mantova: Palazzo della Ragione, 13 giugno –
30 agosto 1998. Colognola ai Colli: Parise, 1998.
Miccini, Eugenio: Archivio della poesia visiva italiana. Firenze: Tèchne, 1970.
Papini, Maria Carla, ed.: L’ Italia futurista (1916–1918). Roma: Edizioni dell’ Ateneo and Bizzarri, 1977.
Perloff, Nancy: Explodity: Sound, Image, and Word in Russian Futurist Book Art. Los Angeles/LA:
Getty Publications, 2016.
Perloff, Marjorie: Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media. Chicago/IL: University of
Chicago Press, 1991.
Rasula, Jed, and Steve McCaffery, eds.: Imagining Language: An Anthology. Cambridge/MA: The MIT
Press, 1998.
Rowell, Margit, and Deborah Wye: The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934. New York: The Museum
of Modern Art, 2002.
Sarenco [pseud. of Isaia Mabellini]: La poesia visiva in Italia. Brescia: Amodulo, 1971.
Scheiwiller, Vanni: “La tipografia futurista.” Claudio Leonardi, Marcello Morelli, and Francesco
Santi, eds.: Album: I luoghi dove si accumulano i segni: Dal manoscritto alle reti telematiche.
296 Jed Rasula

Atti del convegno di studio della Fondazione Ezio Franceschini e della Fondazione IBM Italia,
Certosa del Galluzzo, 20–21 ottobre 1995. Spoleto: Centro Studi sull’ Alto Medioevo, 1996.
177–187.
Sigei, Sergei (Serge Segay) [pseud. of Sergei Vsevolodovich Sigov], and John M. Bennett: Zaum:
Russia Visual Poetry. Kiel: Russian Kieler Edition, 2006.
Spignoli, Teresa: “No Man’s Land: From Free-Word Tables to Verbal-Visual Poetry.” Geert Buelens,
Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, eds.: The History of Futurism: The Precursors, Protagonists,
and Legacies. Lanham/MD: Lexington Books, 2012. 353–376.
Troços 1 (1916). Barcelona: Galeries Dalmau, [1916]. 2a sèrie 1–5 (September 1917 – April 1918 [nos.
4–5 titled Trossos]). Barcelona: Galeries Laietanes, 1917–18. Reprint Barcelona: Leteradura,
1977.
Vela latina: Pagine futuriste dirette dal poeta futurista Francesco Cangiullo. 3:41 (14–20 October
1915) – 4:8 (4 March 1916). Reprint Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1978.
Webster, Michael Paul: Reading Visual Poetry after Futurism: Marinetti, Apollinaire, Schwitters,
Cummings. New York: Lang, 1993.
White, John J.: Literary Futurism: Aspects of the First Avant-Garde. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
Part III: Futurist Traditions in Different Countries
Rosa Sarabia
17 Argentina
The first Futurist manifesto and its reception
in Argentina
The appearance of Futurism in Argentina was rather erratic in the full sense of the
word: inconstant, mutable, changing, irregular, fitful. The first, and partial, trans-
lation into Spanish of the Futurist manifesto appeared in Montevideo on 20 March
1909 in the newspaper El día and, a day later, on 21 March 1909, in Buenos Aires in El
diario español, barely a month after the publication of the Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism in Le Figaro on 20 February of the same year. The translation was under-
taken by the Catalan Juan Más y Pi (1878–1916), a literary critic, writer and journalist of
anarchist tendencies who spent the major part of his life in Brazil and Argentina. From
1907 he was editor-in-chief of El diario español, a newspaper run by Justo López de
Gomara. Más y Pi’s translation of the ninth point of the manifesto is notable because
he suppressed Marinetti’s phrase “contempt for women”, altered the order of items
exalted and closed the paragraph with the glorification of the destructive gesture of
the anarchist. As this example suggests, he did not undertake a literal translation of
the manifesto but rather glossed the eleven points of the Futurist programme. Under
the title, “Futurism as a Tendency of Life”, Más y Pi praised the ideas of Marinetti
for offering a “vast programme for renovating life” and hoped that all the Americas
would share this new ideal (Más y Pi: “Una tendencia de vida: El futurismo”, 7).
A few weeks later, on 5 April 1909, the same eleven points appeared in a translation,
accompanied by a brief summary entitled “Marinetti y el futurismo”, by the Nicaraguan
poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) in the Argentine newspaper La nación. Darío was a foreign
correspondent of the paper, as well as the principal exponent of modernismo, a Sym-
bolist-inclined literary movement born in the Americas, whose aim was to revolution-
ize poetic language. Unlike Más y Pi, Darío was ironic and saw Marinetti’s manifesto as
vain and fruitless, suitable only for inspiring imitators lacking the talents of its author. In
addition, he claimed that the term ‘Futurist’ had been used some years previously by the
“great Majorcan” (Darío: La nación, 4) Gabriel Alomar in El futurisme (Futurism, 1904),
although the doctrines of the two writers differed substantially (see pp. 827–828 in the
entry on Spain in this volume). It is significant that these articles appeared in the daily
press rather than in literary or cultural journals, for the newspaper was a medium that
the avant-garde had a taste for exploiting for its propagandistic aims. It should be pointed
out that Marinetti included in the Poesia issue of April–July 1909 the articles by Más y Pi
and Darío, as well as many other reactions to his manifesto, both positive and negative.
Between 1912 and 1913, the first Spanish translation of several of Marinetti’s texts
appeared under the title El futurismo, published jointly by Sempere in Valencia and

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-017
300 Rosa Sarabia

Ponzinibbio in Buenos Aires. Following the precedent of Darío, the almost unknown
poet Rómulo Romero published El futurismo literario in 1913, a tirade against Marinet-
ti’s programme. It should come as no surprise that the first defences of Futurism were
mounted by anarchist intellectuals. The explosive, violent, anti-institutional and
anti-bourgeois content of the Futurist programme echoed the anarcho-syndicalism
of Georges Sorel, Ottavio Dinale and others. The opening of the twentieth century in
Argentina was characterized by economic progress, increasing literacy and the con-
tinuation of an open immigration policy. That said, there were social conflicts and
labour strikes throughout the country. In the first decade of the new century, two
laws were passed that authorized the deportation of any immigrant who disrupted
the social order. The Residency Law of 1902 and the Law in Defence of Social Order
of 1910 were targeted particularly at anarchists, the majority of whom were Spaniards
and Italians. It is worth noting that, according to the census of 1914, Italians made up
eleven per cent of the population. Marinetti, who himself had excellent connections
to anarchist circles in Lombardy, propagated his ideas beyond the aesthetic realm and
was warmly received by the libertarian movement. A leading defender of Futurism
was the anarchist Alberto Ghiraldo, director of the journal Ideas y figuras (Ideas and
Figures), whose editorial “F. T. Marinetti” of 2 March 1910 was extremely positive,
although he acknowledged that the resonance of Futurism would be confined to “a
small group of artists” and of limited significance to the general public (quoted in
Artundo: “El futurismo de Juan Más y Pi”, 56). Like Más y Pi, Ghiraldo emphasized the
social movement over the artistic doctrine. This tendency to fuse art and life would set
a precedent which, in the 1920s, was taken up by Surrealism.
Más y Pi wrote a second and more extensive article in 1909, “Una tendencia de
arte y vida: Notas sobre el futurismo” (A Trend in Art and Life: Notes on Futurism).
Patricia Artundo has highlighted the fact that Más y Pi’s use of the first-person plural
conveyed a sense of partnership with the Futurists (Artundo: “El futurismo de Juan
Más y Pi”, 54). For Más y Pi, the ideal space for the Futurists’ vitality and audacity
was not Spain but the Americas, since “the art of the Americas [was] an art without
tradition” (Artundo: “El futurismo de Juan Más y Pi”, 55). It is worth pointing out that
the writer and diplomat Alberto Candioti explained the limited impact of Marinetti’s
manifesto precisely because of the lack of a tradition in the new continent. What was
required, according to Candioti, was the creation of artistic institutions in Argentina.
Furthermore, he added, aversion to the belligerent clamour of Marinetti stemmed
from the fact that “the Americas were a continent of peace” (quoted in Alcalá: La
esquiva huella, 41–42).
In addition to these conjectures, it can be said that the hiatus between the imme-
diate reception of Futurism and the eruption of the avant-garde in Argentina over a
decade later was primarily the result of literary and cultural factors. Modernismo,
spanning the years 1888 to 1916, contained within itself the paradox of attempting
both to Latin-Americanize poetic language as a cultural commodity and to insert
itself within a sophisticated cosmopolitanism. This pairing of Americanism and
 Argentina 301

cosmopolitanism was the foundational matrix of the Latin American avant-gardes.

However, even more important was that modernismo was able to renew itself, par-
ticularly during its second phase, which was characterized by ruptures in form and
content. One example of this was Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938), the leading expo-
nent of modernismo in Argentina, whose innovative Lunario sentimental (Sentimen-
tal Lunar Calendar) was published in 1909. In his prologue, Lugones defended Free
Verse, a technique that was championed in the first phase of Futurist poetry as liber-
ating syntax, but was superseded in 1912 by what Marinetti called ‘parole in libertà’
(Words-in-Freedom). Despite the somewhat sarcastic tone of his dispute with Mod-
ernist poetry, Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) accepted that Lugones’s Lunario, as much
because of its metaphors as because of its use of Free Verse, did prefigure several
avant-garde ideas (Borges: “Las ‘nuevas generaciones’ literarias”, 262–263). We can
also see in this process of renewal internal to modernismo a curb on the gestation and
consolidation of avant-garde ideas. The death of Darío in 1916 put an end to modern-
ismo. This was also the same year that saw Umberto Boccioni pass away, and there
is a general consensus that it marked the end of Futurism’s first period of social and
creative innovation (although there are also those who argue that it ended in 1915, the
year Italy entered the First World War; see Adamson: “How Avant-Gardes End – and
Begin”, 856).
By the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century, a new cosmopolitan
sensibility had evolved in Argentina, in which the sense of simultaneity was more
than a Futurist slogan and had become a law imposing itself on the modern city. By
1913, Buenos Aires had become the twelfth city in the world to offer a metro service.
In 1923, the Milanese architect Mario Palanti had built the first skyscraper in South
America, the Palacio Barolo in Buenos Aires. Before and during the second decade of
the century, the city welcomed distinguished figures such as Eugene O’Neill, Marcel
Duchamp, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, the Prince of Wales, Albert
Einstein, Paul Langevin, Count Hermann Keyserling, Jules Supervielle, Ernest Anser-
met, Waldo Frank and Le Corbusier, as well as the Spaniards José Ortega y Gasset,
Jacinto Benavente and others. This wave of visitors was paralleled by its inverse:
those Argentines who went to Europe to further their education and upon their return
integrated themselves into the avant-garde: Xul Solar, Oliverio Girondo, Emilio Petto-
ruti, Jorge Luis and Norah Borges and Alfredo Brandán Caraffa, among others.
The almost immediate arrival of Futurism in the southern cone of America corre-
sponded with a transatlantic exchange of new technologies and inventions, to which
the avant-gardes attached themselves with fervour. Argentina occupied a peripheral
status with respect to the hegemonic culture of Europe and, since the Spanish con-
quest, had been accustomed to importing cultural goods. South American intellectuals
demonstrated early on an interest in the iconoclastic gestures of Futurism; however, it
took more than a decade to transform theory into avant-garde artistic practice, to eclec-
tically harvest the Futurist seeds that had been dispersed throughout this period and
that had taken root in other movements, such as Cubism, Creationism and Dadaism.
302 Rosa Sarabia

The -isms of the Latin American avant-garde found their true beginnings in the
1920s. The first and only edition of Los raros: Revista de orientación futurista (The
Misfits: A Magazine of Futurist Orientation), edited by Bartolomé Galíndez (1897–?)
was published, precisely and peculiarly, in January 1920. The journal’s title was an
allusion to Darío, who had dedicated a book to writers whose exceptional nature he had
characterized as ‘rare’, while its subtitle was a clear reference to Marinetti (Ehrlicher:
“Bartolomé Galíndez’s Magazine, ‘Los raros’ ”, 360–361). As Hanno Ehrlicher has
pointed out, Galíndez established a line of continuity between “the distinctive ‘rarity’
of modernismo and the more recent innovations of Futurism” (Ehrlicher: La revista
“Los Raros”, 4). This single number of Los raros was a sort of “ultra-modernist” (Ehr-
licher: La revista “Los Raros”, 101) project without any offspring (Ehrlicher: La revista
“Los Raros”, 3, 101).

The arrival of ultraísmo, the formation of the Florida

Group and the founding of the journal Martín Fierro
The avant-garde in Argentina was the result of transatlantic return-trip traffic. The
Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948), referencing Darío, distanced himself from
Futurism in 1914, but at the same time proclaimed a hatred for the relics of museums
and the old-fashioned literary fossils, and claimed to love “those who dream of the
future and only have faith in the future” (Huidobro: “Yo”, 30). In 1916, when he
travelled to Buenos Aires to give a lecture, his ideas were baptized with the name
of creacionismo (Creationism). At the end of this same year, en route to Paris, Huido-
bro passed through Madrid, where he came into contact with a group of writers with
whom he would return to interact in 1918. That year witnessed the birth of ultraísmo
(Ultraism), whose debt to creacionismo was recognized by the Spanish (Comet: “Una
época de arte puro”; see also pp. 370 and 830–831 in this volume).
After a three-year stay in Madrid, Borges returned to Argentina in 1921 and
brought with him Spanish ultraísmo, which in short order he fused with native ele-
ments. According to Beatriz Sarlo, the Argentine avant-garde took shape within a
“culture of mixing”: residual elements coexisted with innovatory programmes, and
cultural characteristics of creole origin merged with discourses and symbolic prac-
tices imported from abroad (Sarlo: Una modernidad periférica, 28). As examples of
this hybrid process, mention should be made of the Florida Group and the periodical
Martín Fierro. The former was a group of avant-garde artists and writers, habitués
of Calle Florida, a pedestrian street in central Buenos Aires, whose neighbourhood
cafés were the site of social and intellectual gatherings and related events. The Florida
Group stood in opposition to the Boedo Group, named after a working-class neigh-
bourhood, whose members championed Social Realism. The Florida Group came
together around a number of journals whose formats proposed a new concept of active
 Argentina 303

reader’s response. Among these, notable were the folding sheets of Proa: Revista de
literatura (The Prow: A Literary Review, 1922) and Proa: Revista de renovación literaria
(The Prow: A Review of Literary Renewal, 1922–1923), which later became the journal
Proa (The Prow, 1924–1926); Prisma: Revista mural (Prism: A Mural Review, 1921–1922),
which enacted a dialogue between the walls of the streets and their passers-by; and
Revista oral (Oral Magazine, 1926), which was realized in the basement of the Royal
Keller restaurant, and whose sixteen issues remained uniquely recorded in the memo-
ries of those involved. Within the Florida Group, ultraísmo gave expression to a poetic
tendency, but it also included among its adherents artists and architects such as Xul
Solar, Emilio Pettoruti, Norah Borges, Alberto Prebisch and Ernesto E. Vautier.
Other avant-garde publications of note included Inicial (The Starting Point,
1923–1927) and Martín Fierro (1924–1927). The latter took its name from the epic
gaucho poem written in 1872 by José Hernández (1834–1886); with forty-five issues,
it was the most popular Argentine avant-garde journal of the period. In the vision of
its editor, Evar Méndez (1885–1955), Martín Fierro was the result of a group endeavour
to represent a new sensibility. Its corrosive humour was directed in equal measure at
its enemies and its supporters. The manifesto it published in issue 4 of 15 May 1924
unmistakably alluded to Futurism both in terms of its aggressive language and its
content. Something of this flavour is given by the opening lines:

Faced with the elephantine impermeability of the ‘honourable public’. Faced with the funereal
solemnity of historians and academics who mummify everything they touch. […] Martín Fierro
is, therefore, more at home in a modern transatlantic liner than a Renaissance palace and belie-
ves that a nice Hispano-Suiza is a much more perfect WORK OF ART than a Louis XV chair.
([Girondo]: “Manifiesto de ‘Martín Fierro’ ”, 1)

The manifesto was unsigned, reflecting the editorial line of the journal. Neverthe-
less, it is known that it was written by Oliverio Girondo (1891–1967), who, in one of
his Membretes (a sort of humorous, metaphorical aphorism) published in this same
issue, included another direct reference to Futurism: “There is no ‘landing’ more
moving than the ‘landing’ of the Victory of Samothrace” (Girondo: “Membretes”, 3).
The image fuses the wings of the Greek sculpture with those of the aeroplane, whose
speed surpassed that of the automobile, the machine celebrated by Marinetti in the
fourth point of his Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.
Unlike Girondo, Borges quickly dissociated himself from Futurism. In “Anatomía
de mi ‘Ultra’ ” (Anatomy of My “Ultra”, 1921), Borges highlighted two aesthetics: the
active aesthetic of prisms and the passive aesthetic of mirrors. According to Borges,
the two could exist side-by-side. Using Futurism as his example, he claimed that “with
its exaltation of the cinematic objectivity of our century, it represents the passive ten-
dency of tame submission to the medium” (Borges: Textos recobrados, 95). In this
same year, Borges published “Ultraísmo”, in which he declared he would neither use
a rhetoric of “resounding antagonism between the old and the new”, nor holler “in
the manner of the Futurist manifestos” (Borges: Textos recobrados, 108). By contrast,
304 Rosa Sarabia

he summarized Ultraist poetry as being rooted in the image, as an art “of refinement,
sober and simplified […] that tends to enunciate, clearly and easily, lyrical intuitions”
(Textos recobrados, 110). Borges was responsible for purifying Spanish ultraísmo and
introduced, among other things, an orthography that reproduced the phonetics of
Buenos Aires speech, both in his poems and his manifestos. In addition, he made a
decisive turn towards the apolitical, abandoning his first, revolutionary and pacifist
project, Salmos rojos (Red Psalms). Poems such as Rusia (Russia) and Insomnio
(Insomnia), published in the Spanish journal Grecia in 1920 (Borges: Textos recob-
rados, 57–59), had somehow answered the Futurist summons of Marinetti’s eleventh
point: “We shall sing of the great multitudes who are roused up by work, by pleasure,
or by rebellion; of the many-hued, many-voiced tides of revolution in our modern
capitals” (Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14). Despite this
apolitical posture, shared by the direction of Martín Fierro, in 1927 Borges organized
and presided over a committee of young intellectuals in support of the radical and
popular presidential candidate Hipólito Yrigoyen. The majority of the writers and
artists affiliated with Martín Fierro supported the committee, which resulted in a
rupture with Evar Méndez and the closure of the journal.
In general, ultraísmo had a poetic programme that attacked the tradition of mod-
ernismo and championed the abolition of anecdotes, sentimentalism, connectives,
mediating phrases and useless adjectives (see pp. 830–832 in this volume). By con-
trast, the primordial poetic element of metaphor was given maximum independence.
One can recognize in these propositions a debt to the Technical Manifesto of Futur-
ist Literature of 1912, in which Marinetti advocated the abolition of punctuation, the
adjective and psychology, and any ‘lyric intoxication’. Despite this obvious Futurist
heritage, Borges insisted that “the exasperated rhetoric and botched dynamite of the
Milanese poets is very remote to us” (Borges: Textos recobrados, 130).

Argentine poets inspired by Futurism

Marinetti’s manifesto Le Futurisme mondial (Worldwide Futurism, 1924) included
among its long list of adherents the Argentines Borges, Roberto Ortelli (1900–?) and
Alfredo Brandán Caraffa (1898–1978), as well as other Hispanics. It is not known what
any of them made of being mentioned. One figure not on Marinetti’s list was Alberto
Hidalgo (1897–1967), a Peruvian poet with Futurist tendencies who had settled in
Buenos Aires in 1919 (see pp. 709–714 the Peru chapter in this volume). As a sort of
distillation of creacionismo and ultraísmo, Hidalgo created simplismo (Simplism), the
movement of which he was the sole member. He was also the founder of the afore-
mentioned Revista oral. Hidalgo opened his soirées of poetry readings, held under
the same name (which in Spanish can refer to both a literary review and a theatrical
revue), with a brief gramophone recording, which was followed by live acts by artists
 Argentina 305

and writers, who read editorials, poems, diatribes, epitaphs, and pronounced literary
judgements on specific authors. His poems eulogized the automobile, war, elevators
and trains, in vertical and caligrammatic verses marked by onomatopoeia and heter-
ogeneous typographies. In his La nueva poesía (Manifiesto) (New Poetry: Manifesto,
1916), Hidalgo summoned poets to “Let go of the old outdated motifs / and sing to us
of Muscle, of Strength, of Vigour” (Hidalgo: “La nueva poesía: Manifiesto”, 48).
Although one can find traces of Futurism in Argentine ultraísmo, they are dis-
persed and/or diluted versions of Marinetti’s raucous uproar. Prismas, the first
collection of the Ultraist Eduardo González Lanuza (1900–1984), displays Futur-
ist characteristics both in form and content. The poems Apocalipsis (Apocalypse),
Instantánea (Snapshot), Taller (Workshop), Poema de la ciudad (Poem of the City)
and Poema de las fábricas (Poem of the Factories), lacking connectives and arranged
in a fractured interrupted syntax, convey the sounds of automobile horns and the
noise and iron of machines that are “the virile glory of movement” (González Lanuza:
Prismas, 24). Alfredo Brandán Caraffa, one of the founders of Proa, sang of the great
vital energies linking the animal and the machine in his Nubes en el silencio (Silent
Clouds, 1927). Océano Atlántico (Atlantic Ocean), Apocalíptica (Apocalypse), Rotativas
en marcha (Rotary Press in Motion), Trenes que parten (Departing Trains) and Expreso
(Express Train) all contain small typographic variations as well as quasi-Futurist
images. Another collaborator of Martín Fierro was Leopoldo Marechal (1900–1970),
who, prior to publishing his well-known novel Adán Buenosayres (Adam of Buenos
Aires, 1948), devoted poems and short essays to an idolatry of modern urbanity and
to the rhythm of transportation. Thus, in his “Breve ensayo sobre el ómnibus” (Short
Essay about the Bus, 1925) in Martín Fierro, he asserted quasi-Futuristically that “the
omnibus has created modern-day heroism. Next to its affairs, the cantos of Homer are
but common kitchen recipes” (Marechal: “Breve ensayo”, 139).
By contrast, Bernardo Canal Feijóo (1897–1982) and Marcos Fingerit (1904–1979),
marginal poets in the avant-garde, displayed a greater affinity with Futurism. In his
Penúltimo poema del fut-bol (Penultimate Football Poem, 1924), which he also illus-
trated, Canal Feijóo mixed poetry with prose and aphorisms into a single long poem
in a grandiloquent Futurist style. Images of sport are joined with a sense of festivity,
different typographies are used in an expressive manner together with an unusual
arrangement of the verses, onomatopoeia reproduces the cries of the fans and the
robust bodies of the players are highlighted.
Sport as an essential element of art, and the aggressive optimism resulting from
the cult of muscle, were ideas elaborated by Marinetti in Destruction of Syntax –
Untrammelled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom (1913), in Futurism and English Art
(co-authored with Christopher Nevinson, 1914) and in Geometrical and Mechanical
Splendour and Sensitivity Towards Numbers (1914). In 1925, Ortega y Gasset elaborated
on the sporting and festive senses of life in La deshumanización del arte (The Dehu-
manization of Art, 1925), an essay whose impact on the Hispanic avant-gardes was
immense.
306 Rosa Sarabia

For his part, Fingerit published the anthology Antena (Antenna) in 1929; its
Futurist inheritance is made explicit in the title, as well as in some of the poems:
Automóvil (Motorcar), Altoparlante (Loudspeaker), Jaz-Band [sic], Josefine Baker and
others. In Profecía (Prophecy) we read: “A rumour of motors / – future humanity – /
ripens / the dreams / of the womb of the world” (Fingerit: “Profecia”, 42), while the
antenna tower is an “Up-to-date / accusing finger / mankind’s rebellion against God”
(Fingerit: “Antena”, 38). Particularly interesting about this book are the six illustra-
tions by Adolfo Travascio (1894–1932) executed in a Cubo-Futurist style. An avant-
garde contributor to Martín Fierro, Travascio distinguished himself in furniture and
graphic design, as well as in painting.
Another artist working in interior and graphic design was Piero Illari (1900–1977),
a young Italian militant of the second Futurist generation, who during his long resi-
dence in Argentina also contributed to Martín Fierro (see Briganti and Lorenzo Alcalà:
Piero Illari; Lorenzo Alcalá: “Piero Illari: Un futurista italiano en Argentina”). In 1923
he founded and edited the journal Rovente (Burning Hot), in Parma, Italy. The journal
published one bilingual Spanish–Italian issue, Rovente futurista, in Buenos Aires in
November 1924. Pedro Juan Vignale, poet and member of the Martín Fierro circle, pub-
lished a letter to Illari, “El futurismo y la república literaria argentina” (Futurism and
the Argentine World of Letters), in the bilingual issue, taking an ambiguous position
with respect to the reception of the “rabid Futurism” that Illari desired for his new
home. Vignale argued that in Argentine culture there was more to construct than to
destroy. On the other hand, Vignale sarcastically described the Argentines as Futur-
ists in politics and in life, including in the latter women, sport and alcohol (Vignale:
“El futurismo y la república literaria argentina”, s.p.).

Futurism and the visual arts in Argentina

The Realist and Symbolist traditions of the nineteenth century were a difficult legacy
to shake off in the twentieth century. Futurism, like Cubism, did not bear fruit until
the 1920s, although Artundo points out that El monitor de la educación común (Bulle-
tin of Public Education), official organ of the National Board of Education, published
an anonymous editorial in November 1910, “El manifiesto de los pintores futuris-
tas”, which made reference to the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910) signed by
Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. The
editorial highlighted the Futurist exaggerations, yet admitted that the text was a beau-
tiful gesture (Artundo: “Futurismo en Buenos Aires”, s.p.). Less condescending was
a review of the same manifesto published in February 1911 in the journal Athinae and
signed by a certain “G”. This review attacked the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters as “a
shallow and vain document” (G.: “Sobre el manifiesto de los pintores del futurismo”,
100), attempted a character assassination of Marinetti and characterized Futurism as
 Argentina 307

a “psychological imbalance” (G.: “Sobre el manifiesto de los pintores del futurismo”,

102) On the other hand, in 1912, La semana universal reproduced, under the title “Las
extravagancias en el arte” (Extravagances in Art), Duchamp’s Nu descendant un esca-
lier (Nude Descending a Staircase, 1912) and a still life by Jean Metzinger. And in 1918,
the journals Augusta and Plus Ultra published articles on and reproductions of works
by Rafael Barradas (1890–1929) and Joaquín Torres-García (1874–1949).
It is important at this point to highlight the promotion and support provided by
the State for the creation of spaces for the new kind of art. Just as El monitor took it
upon itself to give space to Futurism, funds were granted for the creation of an Asoci-
ación Amigos del Arte in 1924 in order to mount exhibitions and international confer-
ences, including the one Marinetti attended in 1926. There is a wide consensus in art
criticism that the avant-garde tradition in the Argentine visual arts commenced with
the return to Argentina of Xul Solar and Emilio Pettoruti in 1924, and to a lesser extent
that of Norah Borges in 1921. The three were part of the Florida Group and contributed
to the avant-garde journals of the epoch.
Pettoruti (1892–1971) had direct contact with Italian Futurism after taking
up residence in Florence in 1913, where he saw the Esposizione di pittura futurista
di “Lacerba” (Exhibition of Futurist Paintings Organized by Lacerba, November
1913 – January 1914). He declared that the exhibition had given him “an enormous
shock” and that he had left the hall with “an awful headache and a spiritual upheaval
impossible to translate into words” (Pettoruti: Un pintor ante el espejo, 45). However,
he returned to the show for each of the forty-seven days of its duration. There he met
Marinetti, with whom he established a friendship despite having refused several of
his invitations to join the ranks of the movement. Pettoruti preferred to call himself
an abstractionist, although he recognized the importance of Futurism in having given
the art establishment a salutary and necessary shake-up. Pettoruti was an admirer
of Boccioni and took an interest in how Balla had captured and expressed move-
ment and dynamism. Armonía – Movimiento – Spazio (Harmony, Movement, Space,
1914), Composición futurista (Futurist Composition, 1914), Luci nel paesaggio (Light in
a Landscape, 1915), Vallombrosa (Vallombrosa Abbey, 1916) and Los bailarines (The
Dancers, 1918) are some of his first experiments with Futurist and Cubist aesthetics.
Upon his return to Argentina, the press identified him as a Futurist painter, a label he
frowned upon, for, according to Pettoruti, “to say ‘Futurist’ in Argentina in 1924 […]
was the same as saying mad, prankster, outlandish, impostor, charlatan or mounte-
bank” (Pettoruti: Un pintor ante el espejo, 175). That same year, his first exhibition at
the Witcomb Gallery caused a tremendous scandal. Pettoruti complained that new
currents in art were always given a poor and hostile reception by the public, and
that he had been compelled to cover his paintings with glass after visitors had spat,
vandalized and written insults upon them (Pettoruti: Un pintor ante el espejo, 202).
Despite his resistance to employing Futurist aesthetics, a month later Pettoruti partici-
pated in the Primer Salón Ultrafuturista (First Ultrafuturist Salon), held at the Van Riel
Gallery, and some forty years later in the neo-Futurist group exhibition in the Salone
308 Rosa Sarabia

della Biblioteca Comunale in Formia (5–20 August 1967) and endorsed the Manifesto
di “Futurismo-oggi” (“Futurism Today” Manifesto), which was published for the occa-
sion (see p. 619 in this volume).
A figure on the fringes of these developments was the tango musician and visual
artist Juan Cruz Mateo (1904–1951) who, although his works came later, practiced a
Futurism more related to the “initial chemistry of the movement” (Cippolini: Man-
ifiestos argentinos, 35). It is to be noted that Martín Fierro, Inicial, Proa and other
publications regularly collaborated with notable Italian Futurists, including Fortu-
nato Depero, Umberto Boccioni, Enrico Prampolini, Antonio Sant’Elia, Carlo Carrà
and F. T. Marinetti himself. In 1926, José Salas Subirat published Marinetti: Un ensayo
para los fósiles del futurismo (Marinetti: An Essay for the Fossils of Futurism), a study
that both admired the founder of Futurism and rejected his personality and politi-
cal orientation: “Marinetti, Mussolini and D’Annunzio […] are not ignorant. They are
degenerates” (quoted in Alcalá: La esquiva huella, 27).

Marinetti’s two visits to Argentina: 1926 and 1936

On the occasion of Marinetti’s first visit to Argentina (7–28 June 1926), the rhetoric of
the press, together with the reputation of the leader as a ‘franc-tireur’, transformed
the avant-garde strategy of shocking the public into a commodity. Between 15 May
and 1 July, eighty-seven newspaper articles were written about his visit, thirty-eight
of which appeared in Crítica, a sensationalist evening newspaper that printed three
hundred thousand copies a day. Crítica had sent a correspondent to Brazil to cover
the first stop on Marinetti’s South American journey, which was accompanied by both
scandals and an out-and-out rejection of the Milanese visitor’s defence of Fascism (see
pp. 342–345 the entry on Brazil in this handbook). None of this happened in Argen-
tina, since Marinetti quickly learned his lesson and limited himself to giving lectures
(more than a dozen, in various cities) on literature, art, theatre, fashion, music, sports
and his new interest, tactilism. Thus, the high expectations generated by his visit
resulted in a fiasco of a different kind: disappointment. It could be said that the ambi-
guity with which Argentina received the ideas of Futurism in its initial phase was
repeated again in the actual presence of its founder. Although Martín Fierro, the issue
of which dedicated to Marinetti coincided with his arrival, announced that it received
the “efficient sterilizer of a putrid aesthetic” with open arms, it also made it clear that
it distanced itself from his politics (Homenaje a Marinetti, s.p.).
In the context of the exhibition of works by Norah Borges, Emilio Pettoruti, Xul
Solar, Ernesto Vautier, Alberto Prebisch and Piero Illari, organized by the Asociación
Amigos del Arte at its own building (June 1926), Marinetti gave various lectures which
were reviewed by Prebisch himself in the subsequent issue of Martín Fierro. In it, he
observed that, by now, Futurism had been entirely superseded and that its ideology
 Argentina 309

smacked of wine gone bad. For his part, Alberto Hidalgo, the most Futurist of the
avant-gardists, begged his colleagues in “Marinetti no creó el futurismo” (Marinetti
Did not Create Futurism), an interview in Crítica (9 June 1926), not to encourage the
Italian by getting worked up or expressing shock, because that was precisely what he
was looking for. In his view, Futurism was a deceased movement by now. Leopoldo
Marechal rejected Marinetti and argued that “Nothing will remain of his works: Mari-
netti is the gesture, an arrogant attitude, a screaming poster in a corner of time” (Mare-
chal: “Saludo a Marinetti”, 210). In general, he was reproached for his improvisations,
his superficiality, his lack of rigour and for betraying his own ideals by reviving certain
traditions in his lectures. In his travel diary, Marinetti insisted that crowds came to
hear him offering endless ovations (Marinetti: “Tournée nell’ America”, 535–537). All
the same, Martín Fierro was the only publication to treat Marinetti with generosity. It
organized a banquet in his honour and gave space in its pages to some of his works,
such as the eleven points of his first manifesto and an essay on Boccioni and the future
of painting. As Silvia Saítta has pointed out, Martín Fierro took the major newspapers
to task for not having paid the least attention to the Argentine avant-garde movement.
While Martín Fierro had had no access to the large-circulation media, the popular press
recognized in Marinetti not an avant-garde writer but the effective propagandist of the
new art among the general public (Saítta: “Futurism, Fascism and Mass-Media”, 44).
Marinetti’s second visit to Buenos Aires, between 5 and 15 September 1936, took
place on the occasion of the Fourteenth Congress of the PEN Club. Marinetti, along
with Enzo Ferrieri, Giuseppe Ungaretti and Mario Puccini, was an official delegate
of the Italian Writers’ Union. This was a historical period in which both Europe and
Argentina were experiencing tumultuous times. For the Argentines, the so-called
‘belle époque’ had ended in 1930 with the first coup d’état and the beginning of what
came to be known as the ‘infamous decade’, to which was added social instability and
a clampdown on immigration.
The day following the arrival of Marinetti, La nación published a feature on the
present state of Futurism, but the founder of the movement appeared to be more pre-
occupied with defending the prestige of Italian Fascism by highlighting its differences
from Nazism, than with disseminating aesthetic propaganda (Alcalá: La esquiva
huella, 177). All the same, Marinetti did debate with Victoria Ocampo (1890–1979),
founder of the journal Sur, in which the function of the common reader and the limi-
tations of revolutionary experimental literature were addressed for a minority reader-
ship. Another unpleasant aftertaste of Marinetti’s visit was a nationalistic and racist
text he published in the journal Azione imperiale that same year. In his intervention at
the Congress of the PEN Club, Jules Romains read excerpts of Marinetti’s “Programma
per ‘Azione Imperiale’ ” (Programme for Azione imperiale) which once again glorified
war as the “sole cleanser of the world” (Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism”, 14; on the whole affair see Rabossi: “Marinetti en Sudamérica”, 49).
However, Marinetti also gave speeches on Futurist poetry and politics, and art in the
new Italy, and recited Futurist poems to large audiences.
310 Rosa Sarabia

Cecilia Rabossi has concluded that Marinetti’s South American visits contributed
nothing new to the local avant-gardes and that Marinetti, the Futurist poet, turned
out in the end to be a tireless advocate of the Italian Fascist régime (Rabossi: “Mari-
netti en Sudamérica”, 52). It has been said that the 1920s were the years of plenty
for Argentinians. Many years later, the Ultraist poet Carlos Mastronardi recalled that
the avant-gardes were “the last happy men” (quoted in Pinto: Breviario de literatura
argentina, 23).

Translation: Colman Hogan

Works cited
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in Futurismo-oggi 1:1 (December 1969): 6.
Bonilla, Juan, ed.: Aviones plateados: 15 poetas futuristas latinoamericanos. Málaga: Centro de
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Borges, Jorge Luis: “Las ‘nuevas generaciones’ literarias.” J.L. Borges: Obras completas. Barcelona:
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Brandán Caraffa, Alfredo: Nubes en el silencio. Buenos Aires: Porter, 1927.
Briganti, Andrea, and May Lorenzo Alcalà, eds.: Piero Illari: Un futurista tra due mondi. Parma:
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Comet, César A: “Una época de arte puro.” Cervantes: Revista hispano-americana 4:4 (April 1919):
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Ehrlicher, Hanno, ed.: La revista “Los raros” de Bartolomé Galíndez (1920). La Plata: Universidad
Nacional de La Plata, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, 2012.
Fingerit, Marcos: “Antena.” Antena: 22 poemas contemporáneos. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1929. 38.
Reprinted in Juan Bonilla, ed.: Aviones plateados: 15 poetas futuristas latinoamericanos.
Málaga: Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 2009. 80.
Fingerit, Marcos: “Profecía.” Antena: 22 poemas contemporáneos. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1929. 41–42
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Málaga: Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 2009. 82–83.
G.: “Sobre el manifiesto de los pintores del futurismo.” Cippolini, Rafael, ed.: Manifiestos
argentinos políticas de lo visual 1900–2000. Buenos Aires: Hidalgo, 2003. 100–103.
Ghiraldo, Alberto: “F. T. Marinetti.” Ideas y figuras 2:27 (2 March 1910): s.p.
[Girondo, Oliverio]: “Manifiesto de ‘Martín Fierro’.” Martín Fierro 1:4 (15 May 1924): s.p. Reprinted
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Ayacucho, 1988. 134–135. English translation “Manifesto of ‘Martín Fierro’.” Patrick Frank,
ed.: Readings in Latin American Modern Art. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2004. 12–13.
Girondo, Oliverio: “Membretes.” Martín Fierro 1:4 (15 May 1924): s.p. Reprinted in Revista Martín
Fierro 1924–1927: Edición facsimilar. Estudio preliminar de Horacio Salas. Buenos Aires: Fondo
Nacional de las Artes, 1995. 27
González Lanuza, Eduardo: Prismas. Buenos Aires: Samet, 1924.
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93–99. Reprinted in Nelson Osorio Tejeda, ed.: Manifiestos, proclamas y polémicas de la
vanguardia literaria hispanoamericana. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1988. 48–49.
Hidalgo, Alberto: “Marinetti no creó el futurismo. Así nos dice Alberto Hidalgo. A su criterio fue
el poeta Walt Whitmann el iniciador.” Crítica, 9 June 1926. Reprinted in Stanford Humanities
Review 7:1 (Summer 1999): 44.
Homenaje a Marinetti. Special issue of Martín Fierro 3:29–30 (8 June 1926): s.p. Reprinted in Revista
Martín Fierro 1924–1927: Edición facsimilar. Estudio preliminar de Horacio Salas. Buenos Aires:
Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995. 209–211.
Huidobro, Vicente: “Yo.” V. Huidobro: Pasando y pasando. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta y
Encuadernación Chile, 1914. 11–35. Reprinted in V. Huidobro: Obra selecta. Caracas: Biblioteca
Ayacucho, 1989. 270–281.
Lorenzo Alcalá, May: “Piero Illari: Un futurista italiano en Argentina.” M. Lorenzo Alcalá: La esquiva
huella del futurismo en el Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires: Rizzo, 2009. 49–77.
Lorenzo Alcalá, May: La esquiva huella del futurismo en el Río de la Plata: A cien años del primer
manifiesto de Marinetti. Buenos Aires: Rizzo, 2009.
Lugones, Leopoldo: Lunario sentimental. Buenos Aires: Moen, 1909.
Marechal, Leopoldo: “Breve ensayo sobre el ómnibus.” Martín Fierro 2:20 (5 August 1925):
s.p. Reprinted in Revista Martín Fierro 1924–1927: Edición facsimilar. Estudio preliminar de
Horacio Salas. Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995. 139.
Marechal, Leopoldo: “Saludo a Marinetti.” Martín Fierro 3:29–30 (8 June 1926): s.p. Reprinted
in Revista Martín Fierro 1924–1927: Edición facsimilar. Estudio preliminar de Horacio Salas.
312 Rosa Sarabia

Buenos Aires: Fondo Nacional de las Artes, 1995. 210. L: Marechal: Obras completas. Vol. 5. Los
cuentos y otros escritos. Buenos Aires: Perfil Libros, 1998. 231–232.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
Freedom.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. 120–131.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Programma per ‘Azione Imperiale’.” Azione imperiale: Rassegna della
creazione fascista 1:1 (August 1936): 1.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: El futurismo.Valencia: Sempere y Cia. & Buenos Aires: Viuda de
S. Ponzinibbio, [1912?].
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Tournée nell’ America del Sud (maggio–giugno 1926).” F. T. Marinetti:
Taccuini 1915–1921. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1987. 515–541.
Más y Pi, Juan: “Una tendencia de arte y vida: Notas sobre el futurismo.” Renacimiento (Buenos
Aires) 1:3 (August 1909): 381–400.
Más y Pi, Juan: “Una tendencia de vida: El futurismo.” El diario español (Buenos Aires) 4:1279
(21 March 1909): 7. Reprinted in Poesia 5:7–9 (August–October 1909): 30–32. Hispamérica
35:104 (August 2006): 58–62.
Ortega y Gasset, José: La deshumanización del arte. Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1925. Reprinted
in J. Ortega y Gasset: La deshumanización del arte y otros ensayos de estética. Madrid: Espasa
Calpe, 1987. 47–92.
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson, ed.: Manifiestos, proclamas y polémicas de la vanguardia literaria
hispanoamericana. Caracas: Ayacucho, 1988.
Pettoruti, Emilio: Un pintor ante el espejo. Buenos Aires: Solar, 1968.
Pinto, Juan: Breviario de literatura argentina contemporánea. Buenos Aires: La Mandragora, 1958.
Rabossi, Cecilia: “Marinetti en Sudamérica: Crónica de sus viajes.” Gabriela Belli, ed.: El universo
futurista 1909–1936. Buenos Aires: Fundación Proa, 2010. 39–52.
Romero, Rómulo: El futurismo literario. Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1913.
Saítta, Sylvia: “Futurism, Fascism and Mass-media: The Case of Marinetti’s 1926 Trip to Buenos
Aires.” Stanford Humanities Review 7:1 (Summer 1999): 31–47.
Salas Subirat, José: Marinetti: Un ensayo para los fósiles del futurismo. Buenos Aires: Tor, 1926.
Sarlo, Beatriz: Una modernidad periférica: Buenos Aires 1920 y 1930. Buenos Aires: Nueva Visión, 1988.
Vignale, Pedro Juan: “El futurismo y la república literaria argentina.” Rovente futurista (Buenos
Aires), ser. 3, 2:1 (November 1924): s.p.

Further reading
Arestizabal, Irma, ed.: Due pittori tra Argentina e Italia: Emilio Pettoruti ed Enzo Benedetto.
Un’amicizia futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Istituto Italo-Latino Americano, 27
novembre – 30 dicembre 2009.
Artundo, Patricia M., ed.: Artistas modernos rioplatenses en Europa. 1911/1924: La experiencia de
la vanguardia = Modern Artists of the River Plate in Europe, 1911/1924: The Experience of the
Avant-Garde. Exhibition catalogue. Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte Latinoamericano, 17 d’octubre
de 2002 – 27 de enero de 2003. Buenos Aires: Costantini, 2002.
Barnitz, Jacqueline: “The Vanguard of the Twenties in Buenos Aires: Fact or Fiction?” Maria Amélia
Bulhões, and Maria Lúcia Bastos Kern, eds.: Artes plásticas na América Latina contemporânea.
Porto Alegre: Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, 1994. 37–52.
 Argentina 313

Baur, Sergio, ed.: El periódico Martín Fierro en las artes y las letras 1924–1927. Exhibition catalogue.
Buenos Aires: Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, 14 de abril – 27 de junio 2010.
Boccanera, Jorge: “La poesía en pelotas: Un libro insólito y fundamental de Bernardo Canal Feijóo.”
Lezama (Buenos Aires) 5 (August 2004): s.p.
Candioti, Alberto María: Pettoruti: Futurismo, cubismo, expresionismo, sintetismo, dadaísmo. Berlin:
Editora Internacional, 1923.
Ciccone, Lucio: “L’ Argentina futurista e il ‘Martin Fierro’.” Il cerchio: Rivista di cultura e politica 9:1–2
(#47) (March–May 2003): 29–32.
Córdova Iturburu, Cayetano: La revolución martinfierrista. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Culturales
Argentinas, 1962.
Cruz, Jorge: “Marinetti en Buenos Aires: A cien años del primer manifiesto futurista.” Boletín de la
Academia Argentina de Letras 74: 303–304 (May–August 2009): 551–571.
Emilio Pettoruti. Special issue of Futurismo-oggi 25:1 (January 1993).
Farris, Giovanni, ed.: Marinetti a Cordova (1926). Savona: Sabatelli, 2013.
Hidalgo, Alberto: Panoplia lírica. Lima: Fajardo, 1917.
Ledesma, Jerónimo: “Rupturas de vanguardia en la década del 20: Ultraísmo, martinfierrismo.”
Celina Manzoni, and Noé Jitrik, eds.: Historia crítica de la literatura argentina. Vol. 7. Rupturas.
Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2009. 167–200.
López Anaya, Jorge: Ritos de fin de siglo: Arte argentino y vanguardia internacional. Buenos Aires:
Emecé, 2003.
Martínez Pérsico, Marisa: “Recepción ambivalente del futurismo en Argentina.” Lingue e linguaggi
8 (2012): 89–98.
Montgomery, Harper: “Futurist Confrontations and Other Modes of Registering Modernity: Buenos
Aires, 1924–1926.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 7 (2017): 60–85.
Montilla, Patricia: “Parodic Musings on Futurism and ‘Amore’ in Oliverio Girondo’s ‘Espantapájaros
(al alcance de todos)’.” Studies in Twentieth and Twenty First Century Literature 29:2 (Summer
2005): 302–321.
Patat, Alejandro: “ ‘Martín Fierro’ e l’irruzione del nuovo.” A. Patat: Un destino sudamericano:
La letteratura italiana in Argentina (1910–1970). Perugia: Guerra, 2005. 73–108.
Rocha, João Cezar de Castro: “Marinetti Goes to South America”: Confrontos e diálogos do futurismo
na America do Sul. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford/CA: Stanford University, 2002.
Saítta, Sylvia: “El caso Marinetti.” S. Saítta: Regueros de Tinta: El diario “Crítica” en la década de
1920. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1998. 164–173.
Saítta, Sylvia: “Filippo Marinetti en la Argentina.” Paula Bruno, ed.: Visitas culturales en la
Argentina, 1898–1936. Buenos Aires: Biblos, 2014. 215–229.
Salvador, Nélida: Revistas argentinas de vanguardia, 1920–1930. Buenos Aires: Universidad de
Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1962.
Sarlo, Beatriz: La imaginación técnica: Sueños modernos de la cultura argentina. Buenos Aires:
Nueva Visión, 1992. English translation The Technical Imagination: Argentine Culture’s Modern
Dreams. Stanford/CA: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Scarano, Tommaso: “Imporre la modernità: Le riviste dell’ultraismo argentino.” Stefania Stefanelli, ed.:
Avanguardie e lingue iberiche nel primo Novecento. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007. 71–82.
Sullivan, Edward J., and Nelly Perazzo, eds.: Emilio Pettoruti (1892–1971). Exhibition
catalogue. Buenos Aires: Fundación Pettoruti; Asociación Amigos del Museo Nacional
de Bellas Artes, 28 de octubre de 2004 – 28 de enero de 2005. New York: La Marca, 2004.
Volpe, Rino: “Il ‘Martin Fierro’ e il futurismo.” Il cerchio: Rivista di cultura e politica 8:3–4 (#45–46)
(December 2002 – February 2003). 60–61.
Krikor Beledian
18 Armenia
Futurism reached Armenia relatively quickly by way of two routes: present-day Turkey
and Georgia. Constantinople (Istanbul) and Tbilisi were two cultural centres with
large Armenian populations in the early twentieth century. The geographical and cul-
tural environment of each mediating country influenced the respective receptions of
the Futurist movement in very different ways.
In Constantinople, the Italian manifestos and poems found an immediate trans-
lator in Hrand Nazariantz (1886–1962). In Tbilisi and later in Yerevan, Marinetti’s
movement arrived through the Russian channel and became enriched with elements
of Russian Futurism. A gap of four years occurred between these two processes, with
the first beginning in July 1910, and the second in 1914. The fate of Futurism in Con-
stantinople was sealed with the outbreak of the First World War, which was also the
beginning of the genocide of Western Armenians, at the very time when the emblem-
atic figure of Armenian Futurism, Kara-Darvish (Black Dervish, pseud. of Hagop
Genjian, 1872–1930) published his book Inch’ e futurizmy (What is Futurism?, 1914).
Armenian Futurism in the Caucasus had a longer life, was part of a longer-term
history, became a social phenomenon, was rooted in an Armenian-Georgian environ-
ment, and radicalized itself around 1919 with the first attempts to create a transmen-
tal language (zaum’). In a second phase, Kara-Darvish adopted the Communist ideol-
ogy of the new Soviet régime and joined the Group of Three, led by Yeghishe Charents
(1897–1937). Their brand of Futurism formed an important part of Armenian literary
history and achieved great public visibility before it was suppressed in 1923 by Soviet
critics (see below). Like many avant-garde movements in the USSR, the Armenian
vanguard that produced very innovative, yet highly criticized works, it was repressed.
Political and cultural functionaries in the Armenian SSR judged Futurism to be politi-
cally ‘reactionary’ and aesthetically ‘leftist’. Consequently, it ended up in the ‘dustbin
of history’, only to re-appear as a recovered memory and object of study in independ-
ent Armenia after 1991.

Hrand Nazariantz
As a young Symbolist poet, Nazariantz played a pioneering rôle in Constantinople.
His book F. T. Marinetti yew apagayapashtut’iuny (F. T. Marinetti and Futurism, 1910)
contained a study of the life and works of the founder of Futurism, photographs and
a translation of Le Futurisme, the manifesto published by Le Figaro on 20 Febru-
ary 1909, without its “Foundation” section. A French version of the Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism appeared in Constantinople on 7 August 1910 in the weekly

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-018
 Armenia 315

newspaper, La Patrie, preceded by a note by Hrand Nazariantz. The ‘Apostle of Futur-

ism’ was presented again by La Patrie in February 1911, when it published the essay,
“Un procès contre le futurisme” (A Trial against Futurism), reporting on the condem-
nation of Marinetti’s novel Mafarka le Futuriste (Mafarka, the Futurist, 1910) and the
two-month prison sentence issued against its author by a Milanese court. Nazariantz
took up arms with the young writer Kostan Zarian to protest against this measure
(Beledian: “Kara-Darvish and Armenian Futurism”, 298). Following this campaign,
La Patrie also published in February 1913 the Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi
(Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights 1911) and Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifeste
futuriste de la luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust, 1913).
During the years 1911–1912, Nazariantz was in contact with Futurist poets, trans-
lated their poems for the magazine Bagine (Temple) and presented the poetry of Gian
Pietro Lucini to readers in the Ottoman empire and abroad. He also translated the Man-
ifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910), accompanied by a
self-portrait of Umberto Boccioni. In April 1913, Nazariantz left Constantinople and
settled for good in Bari. He became friends with Lucini, who shared his reservations
against militarism and Marinetti’s increasingly radical aesthetics, particularly regard-
ing the destruction of syntax and the invention of parole in libertà (Word-in-Freedom).
He wrote an eloquent article entitled Apagayapashtut’iuny merrel myn e (Futurism Is
a Corpse) for Azatamart (April 1914). This accelerated shift from enthusiasm to hos-
tility was significant because Nazariantz was not a theorist. He merely wanted “to
inform the reader what this school is and what it intends to achieve” (Marinetti yew
apagayapashtut’iuny, 8). Subsequently, he moved towards esotericism, publishing Il
grande canto della cosmica tragedia (The Great Song of Cosmic Tragedy, 1946) and
Manifesto graalico (The Graal Manifesto, 1951).
Meanwhile, Nazariantz’s translations were paying off. Futurist poetry as well
as painting became the subject of debates and ridicule. In 1912, the review Shant’
(Lightning) published in Constantinople an article on Apagayapasht nkarichnery ew
banasteghtsnery (The Futurist Painters and Poets), illustrated with Gino Severini’s
painting La Modiste (The Milliner, 1910–1911), Umberto Boccioni’s Stati d’animo:
Gli addii (States of Mind: The Farewells, 1911), Carlo Carrà’s I funerali dell’anar-
chico Galli (The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1911) and Luigi Russolo’s La rivolta
(Rebellion, 1911).

Kostan Zarian
It was not until the publication of the magazine Mehean (Temple, 1914) that a true
debate on Futurism set in. Five writers signed the manifesto Mer hanganaky (Our
Creed, January 1914): Kostan Zarian (1885–1969), Hagop Oshagan (1883–1948),
Kegham Parseghian (1883–1915), Aharon Dadourian (1888–1965) and Daniel Varoujan
316 Krikor Beledian

(1884–1915). Varoujan knew Marinetti’s aesthetic doctrines and estimated in his

lecture Grakan dprots’ner (Literary Schools, 1912) that Futurism made more noise than
it produced works. He described it as a mixture of Symbolism and Realism, with an
emphasis on the advancement of science, but also as a political movement. Marinetti’s
anti-passéism did not find much enthusiasm in a poet whose ‘poetic paganism’ was
the opposite of a Modernist aesthetic. Although Marinetti’s patriotism could please the
group of Armenians just named, his pronounced warmongering and political aggres-
siveness met with a strong reserve, as in Kostan Zarian’s Het’anosut’iwn? (Paganism?,
1914), although Zarian himself was an ‘agitator’ who issued aggressive and provocative
statements that attacked the rule of ‘values’. Zarian grew close to Nazariantz during
his first visit to Constantinople in 1911–1912 and therefore joined him in a protest letter
against the Mafarka court case, published in La Patrie on 12 March 1911, and demanded
the immediate release of the poet (Nazariantz and Zarian: “Proclamation Concern-
ing the Mafarka Court Case”). Relations between the two poets soured in 1914 when
Zarian’s review Mehean published an article by Hagob Oshakan (1883–1948) that was
critical of Nazariantz and questioned “the splendour of his Futurist crown” (Oshakan:
“Hart’enk: Hrand Nazariantz”, 10).
After 1915, Zarian settled in Italy without reconnecting with Nazariantz. In 1918–19,
Zarian made the acquaintance of Kara-Darvish in Tbilisi and came into contact with
poets belonging to the group 41°, founded in 1919 by Ilya and Kirill Zdanevich, Igor
Terentyev and Aleksei Kruchenykh (see pp. 471–474 and 790–791). On his return to
Europe, Zarian sang the praises of Kara-Darvish in Chambordy yew ir chamban (The
Traveller and His Road, 1927). Meanwhile, Armenian Futurism disappeared as the
entire Armenian intelligentsia was arrested and deported, and the Armenian popu-
lation was largely exterminated. It was only in other countries that Armenian liter-
ature flourished. Zarian acted here as a bridge between the two Futurist currents. In
his writings of the years 1927–1930, he referred to meetings with Marinetti in Milan
and the Futurist group of Florence without, however, mentioning any details. Zarian
remained very attentive to the European avant-gardes, and in his creative works he
practiced the kind of simultaneity and ‘interpenetration’ of time and space that was
typical of Futurist painting and literature (Zarian: Mijnergortsum, 224–225).

Kara-Darvish
Before Kara-Darvish began his Futurist activity in Tbilisi, the local press had been
very attentive to Russian Futurism and had published a number of articles on this
new art. However, it is unclear to what degree the authors of these reports actually
had access to Futurist writings. Kara’s book Inch’ e futurizmy (What is Futurism? 1914)
offered an almost systematic introduction to Italian Futurism, far more comprehen-
sive than Nazariantz’s pamphlet, which Kara did not know of. Kara’s treatise exceeded
 Armenia 317

the journalistic treatment Futurism had received by then in the Armenian press and
informed the reader of Marinetti’s theses and their political and aesthetic significance.
Even more important is that the book appeared as Futurism was unleashing a pro-
tracted controversy. Without naming any specific examples, Kara was certainly famil-
iar with the attacks unleashed against Marinetti by Harut’iun Surkhatian (1882–1938),
Inch’ e futurizmy (What is Futurism?), and Inch’ e rrusakan futurizmy (What is Russian
Futurism?), published in Mshak (The Toiler) on 7 and 15 March 1914.
Before fully subscribing to Futurism, Kara-Darvish had published the novel
Erwand Gosh (Erwand Gosh, 1911). As a teacher and native of Stavropol, he knew
Russian well enough to translate works by Leonid Andreyev and Fyodor Sologub. The
year 1914 was a turning point in his career. On 20 January, following the acquaint-
ance he had made with the Russian Futurists David Burliuk, Vasily Kamensky and
Vladimir Mayakovsky, he gave his first public lecture on Futurism at the Artistic
Society Theatre in Tbilisi. His theoretical activity was accompanied by a poetic pro-
duction in a truly Futurist style. His first ‘Cubo-Futurist’ poems include Shresh Blur
kam Tervishneri pary (Hill of Daffodils, or The Dance of the Dervishes), published in
Horizon (Horizon) on 10 May 1914. These quasi-phonetic poems ran through several
editions in more or less identical forms and had been handwritten and issued on
postcard before being printed in the trilingual anthology, Sofii Georgievne Melnikovoi
(Sofia Melnikova Miscellany, 1919).
In 1915, Kara gave himself the title hay gusan futurist (Armenian Futurist bard).
He performed at a series of poetry evenings while touring the Caucasus. It was for
one of those occasions that he wrote a proclamation entitled Arewelky vorpes aghbiwr
nor arwesti yew steghtsagortsut’ean: Geank’i nor goynery (The Orient as a Source of
Art and New Creation: The New Colours of Life, 1916), where for the first time the
theme of an ‘Oriental Futurism’ emerged. This 1916 proclamation extended the book
What is Futurism? from 1914. Futurism was now dressed in the “new colours” of the
East. For Kara-Darvish it was no longer necessary to go to Europe for a renewal of the
arts and literature. The indigenous traditions of the Orient such as folk art, operetta
and local poetry were able to give inspiration to an Oriental Futurism. This, in fact,
went in the same direction as the Orientalism advocated by Georg Yakulov (Gevorg
Bogdani Yakulyan), Benedikt Livshits and Arthur Lourié (Artur Sergeevich Lur’e)
in My i Zapad’ (We and the West, 1914), which was directed against Marinetti and
Western art. Kara-Darvish, as the head of Oriental Futurism, cultivated the paradox
of fighting the West with its own weapons in order to found an ‘Armenian art’ (which
he called ‘hayavari’ [national art]) that encompassed whole swathes of the Armenian
historical and social reality, such as the 1915 genocide.
Kara-Darvish illustrates the case of a writer who worked in two different linguistic
and cultural spheres. In his tours and articles, he addressed the Armenian public and
continued to cause scandals, not least because of his startling attire and provocative
behaviour. During Vasily Kamensky’s stay in Tbilisi (1918), Kara entertained a close
relationship with the Russian poet and became fully engaged with the organization of
318 Krikor Beledian

the cabaret venue, Fantastiuri Duqani / Fantasticheskii Kabachok (Fantastic Tavern),

together with the Zdanevitch brothers, the poet Aleksei Kruchenykh, the actress Sofia
Melnikova and others. Transformed into “University 41°”, this structure organized
soirées of ‘transmental poetry’ (zaum’), in which Kara presented one of his poems,
probably Ov em yes (Who I Am, 1918), in a Russian translation.
The year 1918, during which Georgia and Armenia declared their independence,
was a turning point in the poetic production of Kara-Darvish. Under the general title,
Depi nor bardzunkner (Towards New Summits, 1918), he composed several poems,
published in Tbilisi in both their original Armenian and Russian versions. Although he
possessed a perfect command of Russian, Kara-Darvish seems rarely to have written
in that language. His only Russian collection, Pesni buntuiushchego tela (Songs of a
Rebellious Body, 1919), includes texts translated by his friends from original Arme-
nian versions. In the luxurious album dedicated to Sophie Melnikova, the four poems
entitled Hurutk’ Ulunk’ (Magic Pearls, 1919) represent Kara’s extreme phonetic poetry.
Like his Russian Futurist friends, he embraced the events of the October Revolution
and began to contribute articles to the newspaper Karmir astgh (Red Star). In Dazhan
t’atron (The Theatre of Cruelty, 1921), he advocated the destruction of the “old forms”
and the adherence to psychology, proposed to overcome the separation between stage
and auditorium, etc. All this, however, did not please the new, Communist régime. He
was very quickly ejected from his post and refused permission when he requested to
travel to Moscow. But he continued to give lectures at the Armenian House of the Arts
(Hayartun) in Tbilisi, which for a few years became an important place of passage for
almost all Armenian writers.

Yeghishe Charents and the Group of Three

The already mentioned Group of Three, led by Yeghishe Charents, published on 14
June 1922 the important Deklarats’ia yerek’i (Declaration of the Three) in the news-
paper Khorhrdayin Hayastan (Soviet Armenia). Despite its proletarian accents, this
statement was an authentic Futurist proclamation and was well received as such
(Beledian: “Kara-Darvish and Armenian Futurism”, 298–299). It was followed by
three public events and three ‘bulletins’. But the group soon disintegrated when
Vshtuni accused Charents of writing ‘bourgeois’ poetry and Charents questioned the
‘proletarian’ character of Vshtuni’s poems.
For the Armenian intelligentsia, which was imbued with Symbolism and ‘lit-
erature of the soil’, the Futurist rejection of the past and of established literary tra-
ditions was unacceptable. The Marxist trailblazers Harut’iun Surkhatian, Artashes
Karinian (pseud. of Artashes Balasievich Gabrielian, 1886–1982), Tigran Hakhumian
(1894–1978), Poghos Makintsian (1884–1937) and Suren Erznkian (1879–1963) criti-
cized the group for concealing their blend of Futurism and Imagism under the mask
 Armenia 319

of proletarian art. The titles of their polemic articles speak volumes for themselves:
“Futurizmy vorpes grakan reakts’ia” (Futurism as Literary Reaction, 1923), or “Hayka-
kan Bualon yev nra arbanyaknery” (The Armenian Boileau and his Satellites, 1922).
In December 1922, Vshtuni launched the magazine Murch (Hammer) and the
Association of Proletarian Writers. Abov sharply criticized the new works of Charents,
especially his agit-prop play Kapkaz (Caucasus, 1923). At the centre of this controversy
was Charents’ series of articles that included the theoretical-critical Inch’ petk e lini
ardi hay banasteghtsut’iuny? (What Should Modern Armenian Poetry Look Like?, June
1922), Apadasakargayin inteligenty yew deklarats’ian (The Downgraded Intellectual
and the Declaration, July 1922), Pro domo sua (Defending One’s Own Case, January
1923), Ardi Rrusakan poezian (Modern Russian Poetry, April 1923), Futurizmi shurjy
(On Futurism; June 1923). All of them failed to disarm his critics. He responded:

We think that contemporary poetry must adopt aesthetic forms that correspond to the psy-
chology and temperament of our working class; it has to produce songs and images that can
organize and channel the disposition and artistic interests of the workers and peasants, who
are today trying to achieve class consciousness. (Charents: “Inch‘ petk e lini ardi hay banas-
teghtsut’iuny?”, 22)

Such reflections on poetry were accompanied by an abundant production of crea-

tive works: Rromans anser (Romance without Love, 1922), Poezozurrna (Zurna Poetry,
1922), Snokhdoni amousinner (The Snowdon Couple, 1923), Komalmanakh (Commu-
nist Almanac, 1923).
Charents had become familiar with Futurism by 1917, thanks to Kara-Darvish.
Already Ambokhnery khelagarvats (Frenzied Crowds, 1918) contained some Futurist
features. From Amenapoem (Omnipoems and Radio Poems, 1920) onwards, his poetry
expanded in all directions, synthesizing and integrating everything. His lyrics wanted
to be revolutionary and employ for this purpose syncopated rhythms, ‘step-ladder’
forms and declamatory tones. Romance without Love pushed the provocative tone
even further by addressing the traditional subject of woman with a pronounced
anti-lyricism. Instead of the usual erotic discourse, he stigmatized the public taste for
the ideal woman. Public outrage followed suit and the critics savagely slammed him
for his ‘errors’.
The poetry collections of Gevorg Abov and Azat Vshtuni were no longer welcome.
Danaky bkin (The Knife at the Gorge, 1923) by Abov implemented a more bellicose
than revolutionary discourse. Abov liked word games and alliteration similar to those
of Igor Severyanin, whom he repeatedly cited. In his first collection, Miayn kiny (The
Only Woman, 1919), he tried to go beyond Symbolism by adopting a pronounced ‘pro-
letarian’ tone. In Huzank’ u zang (Emotion and Bell, 1923), Azat Vshtuni celebrated
modern technology combined with proletarian art. Neo Orientalia (The New East,
1923) initiated a poetic Orientalism that found a pinnacle in Salamname (1924) and
Arewelky hur e hima (The Orient on Fire, 1927). For Vshtuni, the Orient was not only an
inspiration for something new (à la Kara-Darvish), but the place of a future revolution.
320 Krikor Beledian

Alexandr Miasnikian (1886–1925), secretary of the Armenian Communist Party, per-

sonally judged this poetry to be “characterless” (Miasnikian: Murchi masin, 1922).
In addition to the Group of Three, ‘proletarian Futurism’ attracted the poet-
worker Vahram Alazan (1905–1966), whose Hrabkhapoesia (Volcanic Poetry, 1923)
had all the characteristics of agit-prop. Almost all of his works suffer from a revolu-
tionary romanticism and a declamatory tendency that seems like a caricature of the
desire to make poetry a force on the street, set out in the Declaration of the Three. In
this highly politicized, leftist context, the name of Kara-Darvish became synonymous
with individualism and bourgeois aesthetics. Vshtuni treated him as an “old and
spent Futurist” (Mi grakhosakani arrt’iw, 1923), and in May 1924, Charents mocked
Kara’s “phonetic games” (Charents: Standart). The latter’s reaction to the Declaration
of the Three was expressed in the article, “Tsptvats futuristner” (The Fake Futurists,
1923), where Kara assumed paternity to these “neo-Futurists” when he declared them
his “spiritual sons”, who may be “admirable lyric poets”, but not really “proletarian
bards”. On display here was a tug of war between Charents and some of his former
companions. Abov and Vshtuni had become fervent followers of proletarian art, and
Futurism had to be treated as an aesthetic manifestation of a dying class, just as
Symbolism was.
The year 1923 was a decisive one for attacks by proletarian writers on Armenian
Futurism. The Marxist critique became increasingly violent, as can be seen in Futur-
izmy vorpes grakan reakts’ia (Futurism as a Literary Reaction) by Suren Erznkian, who
pushed the alignment of the art and policy farther than anybody else. The author
did not only repeat the arguments that critics in the Soviet Union commonly directed
against Futurism, but added: “Futurism had and has no place in Soviet Armenia”
(Erznkian: “Futurizmy vorpes grakan reakts’ia”).
Erznkian’s statement was literally adopted in the tribunal held at the Armenian
House of Art (Hayartun) in Tbilisi on 15 November 1923 and found its way into the
text of the condemnation of Armenian Futurism: Futurizmy yew nra andradardzumy
Kara Darvishi steghtsagortsut’iunneri mej (Futurism and Its Echos in the Works of Kara
Darvish), published in Martakoch’ (Tbilisi) on 19 November 1923. During the literary
trial, the main critics of Armenian Futurism voiced their charge and the jury, solely
made up of workers, produced the expected verdict. To a packed hall, Kara-Darvish
defended Futurism as a revolutionary art. Subsequently, he lobbied for the right to
publish a monthly magazine in the Armenian language, Dzakh (Left), following the
example of Lef: Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv (Lef: Magazine of the Left Front of the
Arts, 1923–1925). His request for a printing permission went unanswered. However,
on 2 January 1924, the House of the Arts in Tbilisi organized an event called ‘Decade
of Armenian Futurism’ and Kara took the opportunity to respond to the indictment of
the 15 November trial. The press continued its smear campaign and saw in the organ-
ization of the ‘Decade’ a clear sign that Kara belonged to ‘the past’. The outcome was
that the Soviet authorities turned against him and his rôle as the architect of Arme-
nian Futurism came to an end.
 Armenia 321

Despite the increasing stranglehold of the Communist Party, Kara-Darvish and

Charents each tried to resist in his own way. In his lecture Intwits’ia yew tekhnolokia
(On Intuition and Technology, April 1926), Kara upheld the importance of emotion
and individual sensibility. He denounced the schematism of Armenian Soviet liter-
ature. Finally, when the constraints became more and more intolerable for writers
and artists, he claimed “a bit of freedom” (Letter to Martakoch’ [1923], unpublished,
Yerevan Archives 547/161). Between 1923 and 1928, we find no literary text by Kara
published in any journal or collective volume. Therefore, the appearance of the novel
Orerits’ arraj (Before the Days, 1928) after nearly five years of silence must have come
as a surprise to his contemporaries. This text had no Futurist traits, but was still
viciously attacked.
As for Charents, he tried to launch the magazine Standart in Moscow, supported
by the architect Mikhail Davidovich Mazmanian (1899–1971) and the theatre director
Garo Halabian (1897–1959). Standart followed a Constructivist trend, similar to that
adopted by Lef. It banished all psychologism and formalism, advocated the aesthet-
ics of advertising and ‘popular’ literature and described the work of art as a product
where all individual sensitivity and lyricism were eliminated. Although the magazine
was printed, for reasons that were never unveiled it could not be distributed and Alek-
sandr Miasnikian was forced to pulp all copies (only a single, private copy survives in
the Museum of Literature and Art in Yerevan). Following this renunciation, Charents
obtained permission to travel to Western Europe (1924–1925). On his return, he wrote
the poems of Epikakan lousabats (Epic Dawn, 1930) and claimed to have “changed”
and to have “dropped the drum of Lef” (“Epikakan fragmentner”, in Charents: Yerkeri
zhoghovatsu. Vol. 4, 57). Thus, his avant-garde poetry and the history of Futurism in
Armenia came to an end.

Works cited

Archival sources
Kara-Darvish [pseud. of Hagop Genjian]: Intwits’ia yew tekhnolokia. [On Intuition and Technology]
(April 1926). Yerevan: Museum of Art and Literature, Kara Darvish Archives 547/570.
Kara-Darvish: Letter to Martakoch’ [1923]. Yerevan: Museum of Art and Literature, Kara Darvish
Archives 547/161.

Printed sources
Abov, Gevorg: Danaky bkin [The Knife at the Gorge]. Moskva: s.n., 1923.
Abov, Gevorg: Miayn kiny [The Only Woman]. Tiflis: Hratarakut’iwn Hay ashakertakan Miut’ean, 1919.
Alazan, Vahram: Hrabkhapoesia [Volcanic Poetry]. Yerevan: Petakan hratarakch’ut’iun, 1923.
322 Krikor Beledian

[Anon.]: “Futurizmy yew nra andradardzumy Kara Darvishi steghtsagortsut’iunneri mej.” [Futurism
and Its Echos in the Works of Kara Darvish] Martakoch’ [Battle Cry], 19 November 1923. English
translation “Condemnation of Armenian Futurism in Tbilisi, 15 November 1923.” International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies 4 (2014): 299–300.
Beledian, Krikor: “Kara-Darvish and Armenian Futurism.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies
4 (2014): 263–297.
Charents, Yeghishe: “Amenapoem.” [Omnipoem and Radio Poems] Y. Charents: Yerkeri Zhoghovatsu
[Collected Works]. Vol. 2. Moskva: Petakan hratakch’ut’iun, 1922.
Charents, Yeghishe: “Apadasakargayin inteligenty yew deklarats’ian.” [The Downgraded Intellectual
and the Declaration] Khorhrdayin Hayastan [Soviet Armenia] 158 (18 July 1922): 2.
Charents, Yeghishe: “Ardi rrusakan poezian.” [Modern Russian Poetry] Payk’ar [Fight] 5 (1923):
90–96.
Charents, Yeghishe: “Futurizmi shurjy.” [On Futurism] Martakoch’ [Battle Cry], 103 (June 1923).
Charents, Yeghishe: “Inch’petk e lini ardi hay banasteghtsut’iuny?” [What Should Modern Armenian
Poetry Look Like?] Khorhrdayin Hayastan [Soviet Armenia] 132 (16 June 1922): 2-3; 133 (17 June
1922): 2; 134 (18 June 1922): 2; 134 (19 June 1922): 2; 135 (20 June 1922): 3; 136 (21 June 1922):
2. Reprinted in Y. Charents: Yerkeri Zhoghovatsu [Collected Works]. Vol. 6. Yerevan: Haykakan
SSH GA hratakch’ut’iun, 1967. 22–48.
Charents, Yeghishe: “Pro domo sua.” [Defending One’s Own Case] Payk’ar [Fight] 3 (7 February
1923): 43–45.
Charents, Yeghishe: “Snokhdoni amousinner.” [The Snowdon Couple] Martakoch’ [Battle Cry], 174
(1923).
Charents, Yeghishe: Ambokhnery khelagarvats [Frenzied Crowds]. Tiflis: s.n. 1919.
Charents, Yeghishe: Ardi rrusakan poezian [Modern Russian Poetry]. Payk’ar 5 (1923): 90–96.
Charents, Yeghishe: Epikakan lousabats’ [Epic Dawn]. Yerevan: Haykakan Sovetakan Sots’ialistakan
Hanrapetut’iun Gitut’iunneri Akademiayi hratakch’ut’iun, 1968. (= Yerkeri Zhoghovatsu
[Collected Works]. Vol. 4.)
Charents, Yeghishe: Kapkaz [Caucasus]. Tiflis: Zh. T.G. Kh. Polygrafiakan Bazhin 4 Tparan, 1923.
Charents, Yeghishe: Komalmanakh [Communist Almanc]. Yerevan: s.n., 1924.
Charents, Yeghishe: Poezozurrna [Zurna Poetry]. Moskva: s.n., 1922.
Charents, Yeghishe: Rromans anser [Romance without Love]. Moskva: s.n., 1922.
Charents, Yeghishe, ed.: Standard: Zhurnal grakanut’yan yew arvesti [Standard: Journal of Literature
and Art] 1 (May 1924).
Charents, Yeghishe, Azat Vshtuni, and Gevorg Abov: “Deklarats’ia yerek’i.” [Declaration of the Three]
Khorhrdayin Hayastan [Soviet Armenia] 130 (14 June 1922): 3. English translation “Declaration
of the Three.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 4 (2014): 298–299.
Erznkian, Suren: “Futurizmy vorpes grakan reakts’ia.” [Futurism as a Literary Reaction] Martakoch’
[Battle Cry], 101 (26 June 1923): 2–3.
Kara-Darvish [pseud. of Hagop Genjian]: “Dazhan t’atron.” [The Theatre of Cruelty] Karmir astgh
[Red Star] 40 (27 April 1921).
Kara-Darvish: “The East as a Source of New Fine Art and Creativity: Old Colors with a New Shine.”
Journal of Armenian Studies 10 (2015): 25–30.
Kara-Darvish: “Tsptvats futuristner.” [The Fake Futurists] Martakoch’ [Battle Cry], 14 January
1923.
Kara-Darvish: Inch’ e futurizmy? [What is Futurism?] Tiflis: Epokha, 1914. English translation “What Is
Futurism?” Journal of Armenian Studies 10 (2015): 30–56.
Kara-Darvish: Orerits’ arraj. [Before the Days] Tiflis: Zh. T.G. Kh. Polygrafiakan Bazhin. 4 Tparan,
1928.
Kara-Darvish: buntuiushchego tela [Songs of a Rebellious Body]. Tiflis: [Shresh?], 1919.
 Armenia 323

Kara-Darvish: Yerwand Gosh. Tiflis: Shapson, 1911.

Makints’ian, Poghos: “Haykakan Bualon yew nra arbanyaknery.” [The Armenian Boileau and his
Satellites] Khorhrdayin Hayastan [Soviet Armenia] 157 (16 July 1922): 2–3.
Miasnikian, Alexandr: “Murchi masin.” [About Murdj] Martakoch’ [Battle Cry], 107 (1 December 1922).
Nazariantz, Hrand: F. T. Marinetti yew apagayapashtut’iuny [Marinetti and Futurism]. K. Polis
[Constantinople]: Barseghian, 1910.
Nazariantz, Hrand, and Kostan Zarian: “Proclamation Concerning the Mafarka Court Case.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 4 (2014): 298.
Oshakan, Hagob: “Hart’enk’: Hrand Nazariants’.” [Criticism: H. Nazariantz] Mehean [Temple]
1 (1914): 9–11.
Sofii Giorgevne Melnikovoi [Sofia Melnikova Miscellany]. Tiflis: Fantastichesky Kabachok, 1919.
Surkhatian, Harut’iun: “Inch’ e futurizmy?” [What is Futurism?] Mshak [The Toiler], 7 March 1914.
Surkhatian, Harut’iun: “Inch’ e rrusakan futurizmy?” [What is Russian Futurism?] Mshak [The Toiler],
15 March 1914.
Vshtuni, Azat: “Mi grakhosakani arrt’iw.” [Concerning a Book Review] Khorhrdayin Hayastan [Soviet
Armenia] 104 (18 May 1923): 2
Vshtuni, Azat: Arewelky hur e hima [The Orient on Fire]. Rostov-na-Donu: s.n., 1927.
Vshtuni, Azat: Huzank’ u zang [Emotion and Bell]. Alek’santrapol: s.n., 1923.
Vshtuni, Azat: Neo Orientalia [The New East]. Tiflis: s.n., 1924.
Vshtuni, Azat: Salamname. Tiflis: s.n., 1924.
Makints’ian, Poghos: “Haykakan Bualon yew nra arbanyaknery.” [The Armenian Boileau and his
Satellites] Khorhrdayin Hayastan [Soviet Armenia] 157 (16 July 1922).
Zarian, Kostan: “Het’anosut’iwn?” [Paganism?] Mehean [Temple], March 1914.
Zarian, Kostan: “Mijnergortsum.” [Interpenetrability] K. Zarian: Chambordy yew ir Chamban
(1926–27) [The Traveller and His Road]. Ant’ilias: Tparan Kat’oghikosut’ean Hayots’ Metsi Tann
Kilikioy, 1973. 224–225.
Zarian, Kostan: Chambordy yew ir Chamban (1926–27) [The Traveller and His Road]. Ant’ilias: Tparan
Kat’oghikosut’ean Hayots’ Metsi Tann Kilikioy, 1973.

Further reading
Aghababian, Suren: Sovetahay grakanut’yan patmut’yun [History of Armenian-Soviet Literature].
Vol. 1. Yerevan: Haykakan Sovetakan Sots’ialistakan Hanrapetut’iun Gitut’iunneri Akademiayi
hratakch’ut’iun, 1986.
Beledian, Krikor: “Arewelky ibrew aghbiwr gegharwesti yew steghtsakortsut’ean” [The Orient as a
Source of Art and Creation] Gayk (Paris) 3 (1993): 113–119.
Beledian, Krikor: “H. Nazariantz dans la littérature arménienne.” Hrand Nazariantz fra Oriente e
Occidente. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi. Conversano, 28–29 novembre 1987.
Fasano (BR): Schena, 1991. 39–61.
Beledian, Krikor: “Kara-Darvish: A Forgotten Futurist.” Raft: A Journal of Armenian Poetry and
Criticism 6 (1992): 39–53.
Beledian, Krikor: “ ‘Le Futurisme arménien’ et Hrant Nazariantz.” Bazmavep: Hayagitakan-
Banasirakan-Grakan Handes = Revue d’Études Armeniennes 148 (1990): 379–412.
Beledian, Krikor: Haykakan futurizm [Armenian Futurism]. Yerevan: Khachents-Printinfo, 2009.
Charents, Yeghishe: “Due agitka dell’armeno Egische Ciarenz.” Teatro contemporaneo 3:5 (October
1983 – January 1984): 210–256. Reprinted in Mario Verdone, ed.: Teatro contemporaneo. Vol. 5.
Appendice 2. Rome: Lucarini, 1985. 209–225.
324 Krikor Beledian

Charents, Yeghishe: Girk’ mnats’ortats’: Antip zharangut’iun [The Book of Chronicles: A Unique
Heritage]. Yerevan: Nairi hratarakch’ut’iun, 2012.
Charents, Yeghishe: Odi armene a coloro che verranno nell’interpretazione di Mario Verdone e un
saggio sul futurismo armeno. Empoli: Ibiscos-Ulivieri, 2007.
Charents, Yeghishe: Verjin Khosk’ [Last Word]. Yerevan: Hayagitak, 2007.
Charents, Yeghishe: Yerkeri Zhoghovatsu [Collected Works]. Vol. 4. Yerevan: Haykakan SSH GA
hratakch’ut’iun, 1968.
Charents, Yeghishe: Yerkeri Zhoghovatsu [Collected Works]. Vol. 6. Yerevan: Haykakan SSH GA
hratakch’ut’iun, 1967.
Der Melkonian-Minassian, Chaké: Politiques littéraires en U.R.S.S depuis les débuts à nos jours.
Montréal: Presses de l’ Université du Québec, 1978.
Gasparian, Davit’: Haykakan apagayapashtut’iun [Armenian Futurism]. Yerevan: Zangak-97, 2009.
Hrand Nazariantz fra Oriente e Occidente. Atti del Convegno internazionale di studi, Conversano,
28–29 novembre 1987. Fasano (BR): Schena, 1991.
Kara-Darvish [pseud. of Hagop Genjian]: Keank’i jut’ake [The Violin of the Life]. Tiflis: Slovo, 1917.
Kara-Darvish: Shresh Blur kam Tervishneri pary [Shresh blur: Postcard Poem]. Tiflis: Shresh, 1915
(multiple print runs).
Kara-Darvish: Tepi nor bardzunk’ner [Towards New Summits], Ov em yes [Who I am], Siruhis e
im grkis [My Darling in My Arms], Kyank’i bazhaky [The Cross-section of Life], Goghgot’a
[Golghotha]. Series of postcards. Tiflis: Shresh, 1918–1923.
Kara-Darvish: Yerker [Selected Works]. Yerevan: Khachents-Printinfo, 2015.
Filipozzi, Mara: Nazariantz: Poeta armeno esule in Puglia. Galatina (LE): Congedo, 1987.
Magarotto, Luigi, Marzio Marzaduri, and Giovanna Pagani Cesa, eds.: L’ avanguardia a Tiflis: Studi,
ricerche, cronache, testimonianze, documenti. Venezia: Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1982.
Nazariantz, Hrand: Asteghahew menut’yun [Constellation of Solitude]. Yerevan: Sargis Khatchents-
Printinfo, 2008.
Nichanian, Marc, ed.: Yeghishe Charents, Poet of the Revolution. Costa Mesa: Mazda, 2003.
Tsipuria, Bela: “H2SO4: The Futurist Experience in Georgia.” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 1 (2011): 299–322.
Verdone, Mario: “Autocomunisti di mezzo secolo fa in Armenia: Note sul futurismo armeno. Testi
di Elise Ciarenz, Gevorg Abov, Azat Vshtuni, Micael Mazmanian, Karo Halabian, Marietta
Shaginyan.” Carte segrete 6:20 (October–December 1972): 76–107.
Verdone, Mario: “Il futurismo armeno.” Elise Ciarenz: Odi armene a coloro che verranno
nell’interpretazione di Mario Verdone e un saggio sul futurismo armeno. Empoli: Ibiscos-
Ulivieri, 2007.
Zakarian, Anushavan: Rrus groghener Andrkovkasum yev hay grakan kapery (1914–1920) [Russian
Writers in Transcaucasian and Armenian Literary Life (1914–1920)]. Yerevan: Sovetakan grogh,
1984.
Bart Van den Bossche
19 Belgium
Belgium never experienced a truly Futurist movement, as only a handful of Belgian
artists at a certain stage of their career called themselves (or accepted being called)
Futurists. Yet the ideas and practices of Italian Futurism remained far from being
unknown in Belgian artistic circles. What makes the Belgian case particularly inter-
esting is not so much the degree or type of involvement with Futurism, but the way
in which reactions to Futurism were entangled with the constantly evolving cultural,
artistic and political situation of the country. Because of its geographic position and
its multilingual and multicultural nature, Belgium was (and is) particularly receptive
to foreign cultural impulses and at the same time eager to transform and rearticu-
late those impulses within local artistic and cultural dynamics, in particular in the
constant questioning and renegotiating of its own composite identity (Hadermann:
“Echos du futurisme”; Gobbers: “Résonances futuristes”; Puttemans: “Belgio”;
Gennaro: “Il futurismo italiano”; Terzetti: “La ricezione del futurismo in Belgio”).

Initial reactions to the Foundation and Manifesto

of Futurism
The publication of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism in Le Figaro certainly did
not go unnoticed in Belgium, because in October 1909 Marinetti decided to directly
target Belgian art circles with the publication of a short summary in the magazine La
Fédération artistique. The text, preceded by a short note by Edmond-Louis de Taeye
(1860–1915), the chief editor of the magazine, captured the cornerstones of the Futur-
ist programme (De Taeye: “Marinetti: Le Futurisme”). One of the few artists and critics
who reacted positively to Marinetti’s ideas was Henry Maassen (1891–1911), then aged
eighteen, who in his Appel aux futuristes belges (Appeal to the Belgian Futurists,
1909) urged his fellow artists to be truly Futurist (Martin-Schmets: Henry Maassen.
Vol. 1, 101–104; vol. 2, 681). Towards the end of 1909, he echoed some of Marinetti’s
statements in a short article in the journal La Revue mosane (Maassen: “Pan et le
futurisme”). Later on, Maassen left Belgium for Paris and adhered to paroxysme, an
avant-garde movement founded by Nicolas Beauduin (1881–1960), which shared with
Futurism a fascination with technology, speed and other notable aspects of modern
urban life (Lista: Futurisme, 18–19; Martin-Schmets: Henry Maassen. Vol. 1, 101–124;
vol. 2, 431–471).
Most reactions to Futurism in Belgium were, however, quite sceptical, if not
openly hostile. The critic Arnold Goffin (1863–1934), in an article entitled “A Propos
du futurisme et de l’ art” (Concerning Futurism and Art, 1909), was particularly weary
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-019
326 Bart Van den Bossche

of the aggressive tones of Futurist manifestos and of their glorification of war and
violence. In 1911, the magazine L’ Art moderne published something akin to a psycho-
logical profile of Futurism penned by Francis de Miomandre (1880–1959). The author
interpreted the aggressive tones of Futurism as a reaction to the cultural situation
of Italy, and in particular to the dominant image of Italy as “the cradle of the art of
the past” (De Miomandre: “Futurisme” 371). In general, the opinions of critics such
as Goffin and De Miomandre were in tune with the way most French art magazines
portrayed Futurism: in spite of a certain (yet often limited) degree of sympathy for the
Futurist embrace of radical innovation, the dominant attitude was one of caution and
scepticism, sometimes paired with disdain and derision, if not outright dismissal, in
particular with regard to the tone of the Futurist proclamations and to some of their
statements (see the entry on France, p. 449).

1912: The Exhibition of Futurist Painters in Brussels

In 1912, Brussels was the fourth stage of a touring exhibition that had opened in Paris
as Les Peintres futuristes italiens and then moved to London and Berlin. This exhibi-
tion marked a turning point in the international reception of Futurism. On the occa-
sion of its inauguration at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, the Belgian magazine
L’ Art moderne had published “Les Peintres futuristes”, a slightly modified version of
the preface to the catalogue, signed by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo,
Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini.
The Galerie Giroux, located in the centre of Brussels, had hosted an exhibition
of Cubist painting in 1911 (Lewijse: “G.G.G.”). The Futurist presentation had been
planned to run from 20 May to 4 June 1912, but the delayed arrival of the paintings
from the previous showing at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin (see p. 484 in the entry on
Germany in this volume) meant that Georges Giroux could stage his event only after 30
May. To stir the attention of Belgian art circles, he organized a supporting programme
of lectures: at the opening, Boccioni read the Manifeste des peintres futuristes, on 2
June Marinetti gave a talk, and on 4 June an audience of about two hundred attended
a roundtable discussion between Marinetti and Boccioni (Nyst: “Les Peintres futuris-
tes italiens”, 98). The exhibition catalogue contained, in addition to The Exhibitors to
the Public (the foreword of the Parisian catalogue), the Manifesto of Futurist Painters
(1910) and reproductions of five paintings.
On the whole, reactions to the exhibition were in tune with the dominant view of
Futurism up until then: despite a certain degree of sympathy for the Futurist project,
the provocative and aggressive stance of the artists was deemed unwarranted. Yet the
exhibition at the Galerie Giroux prompted lively discussions and encouraged several
critics to dedicate more in-depth commentaries to Futurist aesthetics. The novelist
Franz Hellens (1881–1972) acknowledged that the Futurist passion for energy and
 Belgium 327

speed was indeed a relevant modern artistic programme, but in his view the paintings
on display presented only another version of Neo-impressionism. He was also highly
critical of the Futurists’ aggressive stance and desire to destroy the achievements of
the past (Hellens: “A la Galerie Georges Giroux”). For the music critic Gaston Knosp
(1874–1942), who quoted Francesco Balilla Pratella’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Music, Futurism’s rejection of the contemporary musical establishment (in particu-
lar the commercialization of opera) was more than justified, yet the indiscriminate
rejection of the music of the past as well as the excessive tendency towards theoret-
ical reflection were deemed to jeopardize the birth of a truly creative Futurist music
(Knosp: “La Musique et le futurisme”).
The journal La Belgique artistique et littéraire published two essays which were
more enthusiastic in tone. The critic Raymond Nyst (1864–1943) stressed the innova-
tive power of Futurist painting and of concepts such as dinamismo plastico (plastic
dynamism). In his view, a truly modern style of painting (such as that the Futurists
were aiming for) could only be achieved by showing not so much the visible part
of reality but rather what remains invisible to the eye, in particular the emotions
that accompany the process of perception (Nyst: “Les Peintres futuristes italiens”).
Auguste Joly (1861–1932), in his short contribution entitled “Sur le futurisme” (On
Futurism), saw Futurist art as a literary and artistic expression of contemporary preoc-
cupations. Marinetti did not hesitate to take advantage of the positive reaction coming
from Brussels, and turned the articles by Joly and Nyst into a large-scale, bilingual
broadsheet, La Peinture futuriste en Belgique / La pittura futurista nel Belgio: Dalla
rivista “La Belgique artistique et littéraire”, luglio 1912 (Lista: Futurisme, 415–422; De
Maria: Marinetti e i futuristi, 265–270).
The 1912 exhibition in Brussels managed to give Futurism some notoriety in
Belgium, as can be seen from the Great-Zwans exhibition in Brussels (11 May – 14 June
1914). Zwans in Brussels dialect means ‘farce’ or ‘ nonsense’, and here the Futurists
were mocked as “Macaronetti”, “Marie Netti” and “Boccioni dit Marino-Marinelli”
(Great-Zwans Exhibition, passim). Yet in the years between the 1912 exhibition and
the end of the First World War, the reception of Futurism continued to be a matter of
mainly individual, isolated and at times confused or inconsistent interactions with
Futurist ideas and techniques. Belgium became a major battlefield, and the German
occupation of almost the entire territory hampered the wider dissemination of Futur-
ist ideas.
The only Belgian artist who actually joined Futurism was the Antwerp painter Jules
Schmalzigaug (1882–1917), and it was symptomatic that even his artistic connection
with Futurism was interrupted by the outbreak of war (Mertens: Jules Schmalzigaug;
Terzetti: “La ricezione del futurismo in Belgio”). Schmalzigaug had studied at the
Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, and after a first period of artistic activity in Belgium
had moved to Paris, where he had visited the Futurist exhibition at the Galerie Bern-
heim-Jeune. Ever since his début as a painter, he had been fascinated by new ways
of painting light. Therefore, Boccioni’s plastic dynamism struck him as a new way of
328 Bart Van den Bossche

combining light and movement. In April 1912, he moved to Venice, and in his paintings
of 1912 and 1913 he gradually explored various applications of Futurist techniques and
ideas, in particular Gino Severini’s representation of movement, Boccioni’s ideas on
simultaneity and dynamism and Giacomo Balla’s abstract stylization (Versari: “Sur la
correspondance”; Terzetti: “La ricezione del futurismo in Belgio”; Seuphor: Un renou-
veau de la peinture en Belgique flamande, 171).
In the spring of 1914, six of Schmalzigaug’s paintings were selected for the
Esposizione libera futurista internazionale (International Futurist Exhibition), held
from 13 April to 25 May at the Galleria Giuseppe Sprovieri in Rome (Mertens: Jules
Schmalzigaug, 322). In the autumn of 1914, several months after the outbreak of war,
Schmalzigaug returned to Belgium. Shortly afterwards, after being declared unfit for
military service, he left for the Netherlands, where he remained fairly active as an
artist. However, he felt increasingly isolated, developed depression and, in 1917, com-
mitted suicide.

After the First World War: Towards a global

interpretation of Futurism
In the years after the First World War, Belgian cultural and artistic life was pervaded by
a strong interest in avant-garde and experimental art. Ideas and practices of various
international Modernist movements were presented and discussed in numerous mag-
azines, published in French and in Dutch, for example Lumière (Light, 1919–1923),
Vlaamsche Arbeid (Flemish Labour, 1919–1930), Ruimte (Space, 1920–1921), Ça ira!
(Allright!, 1920–1923), Sélection (1920–1927), Het Overzicht (The Survey, 1921–1925),
Anthologie (1921–1940), Le Disque vert (The Green Disc, 1922–1925) and 7 arts (1922–
1928). These magazines, although different in size, scope and audience, shared a
common emphasis on the connections between artistic innovation and the ethical
and political mission of the artist. The latter was often associated with instances of
radical pacifism, communism (seen as an eminently humanitarian ideology) and – in
the Flemish magazines in particular – a mixture of nationalism and international-
ism. Common artistic points of reference in these discussions were Expressionism,
Constructivism and, from the mid-1920s onwards, Surrealism (although by then, the
attitude towards the relationship between art and politics had profoundly changed).
Within this context, Futurism was regularly referred to, with many critical commen-
taries on Futurism’s rôle in the development of the pre-war avant-garde as well as the
Futurists’ new actions, ideas and practices launched in the 1920s.
Most assessments of Futurism in the post-war years acknowledged the move-
ment’s historical rôle within the pre-war avant-garde, especially in promoting inno-
vative artistic practices and a radical rethinking of the position of art within cultural
institutions. Futurism was also seen as a valuable source of inspiration for many new
 Belgium 329

artistic initiatives directed against sterile bourgeois individualism and the still largely
Symbolist-inspired art that dominated Belgium until 1914. Yet, as most artists were
pacifists, they could not agree with Futurism’s glorification of violence and war. In an
article in Ruimte, a short-lived magazine linked to humanitarian Expressionism, the
critic Eugène (Eugeen) De Bock (1889–1981) warned against the risk of a disappear-
ance of the subject and a dehumanization of art in Futurist aesthetics (De Bock: “Het
jonge Vlaanderen”). It is significant that another collaborator of Ruimte, the painter
Prosper de Troyer (1880–1961), in a long letter to Marinetti written at the beginning of
1920, hailed Futurism for its “ardent love / truth / courage / joy of life / energy, labour /
pride / faith in a future / that is more powerful and more beautiful”, highlighting those
elements of Futurism that were compatible with his own humanitarian Expressionism,
and blatantly avoiding any allusions to Marinetti’s bellicose nationalism (De Poortere:
Prosper de Troyer, 15–16; Archival sources: Marinetti’s letters to Prosper de Troyer).
Boccioni’s emphasis on plastic dynamism was generally acknowledged as a
historically significant concept, yet, for various artists and critics, Futurist paint-
ing was still too heavily indebted to the physical appearance of reality. Georges
Marlier (1898–1968) declared in the first issue of Ça ira!, a French-language mag-
azine published in Antwerp, that Futurism had remained “fundamentally Realist
and, despite everything, attached to the external appearance of things” (Marlier: “La
Vraie Renaissance”, 5). A similar criticism had already been formulated during the
war by the young poet and art critic Paul Van Ostaijen (1896–1928) in his critical
assessment of the historical avant-garde (Van Ostaijen: “Ekspressionisme in Vlaan-
deren”). According to Van Ostaijen, Futurism had made a vital contribution to the
evolution of modern art and had been instrumental in introducing dynamism to the
language of art. However, he believed, the figurative and Naturalist residues that
could be spotted in many Futurist works, as well as Futurism’s analytical leanings,
prevented it from achieving the spiritual synthesis that was indispensable in a truly
modern work of art. Jozef Peeters (1895–1960), chief editor of Het Overzicht, another
magazine from Antwerp, stressed in an editorial the inherent conflict between Futur-
ism’s pursuit of a dynamic art and the static nature of the image or statue, a flaw
that Cubism, according to Peeters, had been able to avoid (Peeters: “Inleiding tot de
moderne plastiek”, 95).
Many of the post-war avant-garde artists articulated their programmes of artistic
innovation and ethical orientation in interaction with other artistic movements. The
young Expressionists, Constructivists and Surrealists of the 1920s looked to Futur-
ism for ideas. They discovered many shared interests in the work of Enrico Prampo-
lini and other Roman Futurists. It was not a coincidence that magazines particularly
sympathetic towards Constructivist tendencies, such as Het Overzicht and 7 arts, paid
attention to Futurist artists developing new concepts of a machine aesthetics (in par-
ticular Prampolini and Ivo Pannaggi).
In 1922, Het Overzicht devoted a special issue to Futurism and printed reproduc-
tions of paintings by Russolo, Fortunato Depero and Vinicio Paladini, two theatrical
330 Bart Van den Bossche

mini-dramas by Marinetti and Francesco Cangiullo, and sections from the manifesto
Theatre of Surprise (1921). In his introduction, Jozef Peeters recognized the historical
rôle of pre-war Futurism and stressed that post-war Futurists were open to all kinds
of suggestions in tune with the spirit of the times. In 1924, the magazine published a
Dutch translation of Prampolini’s L’ estetica della macchina e l’ introspezione meccan-
ica nell’arte (The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art, 1922),
which had been published two years earlier in De Stijl.
This illustrates once more how Het Overzicht looked for common interests
between second-phase Futurism and the ethically inspired Constructivism it propa-
gated. In their correspondence, which stretched over several years, Jozef Peeters and
Marinetti discussed the organization of exhibitions, lectures and publications (Lista:
Marinetti et le futurisme, 70–71). Peeters and his co-editor Fernand Berckelaers (1901–
1999, better known under the pseudonym of Michel Seuphor) were in contact with
various Futurist artists (Sauwen: “D’un monde à l’ autre: Michel Seuphor et Paul Joos-
tens”, 132–138). Pannaggi, for instance, was involved in the organization of a Futurist
exhibition on the occasion of the second Conference on Modern Art in Antwerp at the
beginning of 1922 (2e Kongres, 15–18). In issue 20 of January 1924, Het Overzicht pub-
lished a short list of European and American magazines it was closely cooperating
with, mentioning under the heading “Rome” Noi (Prampolini) and Cronache d’attual-
ità (Anton Giulio Bragaglia).
7 arts, published in Brussels from 1922 to 1928, pursued Constructivist aesthetics
with a strong ethical and political stance similar to that of Het Overzicht. The maga-
zine – as is indicated by its name – displayed a lively interest in different artistic dis-
ciplines and heterogeneous aspects of modern life, from advertising and performance
to functional design and architecture (Verhesen: “ ‘7 arts’ et l’ avant-garde poétique”,
335–347; Goyens de Heusch: 7 arts). It regularly hosted contributions that highlighted
Futurism’s achievements in the applied arts. Alberto Sartoris was a regular contributor
to 7 arts and, in 1926, Prampolini published an article in it on the fundamental rôle of
architecture in Modernist art (Prampolini: “L’ Architecture futuriste”). Several editors
of 7 arts were in contact with Marinetti and Prampolini; between 1922 and 1924, for
instance, Marinetti proposed to Victor Servranckx (1897–1965) the idea of dedicating
an exhibition to the latter’s work at the Galleria Bragaglia (Lista: Marinetti et le futur-
isme, 71; Archival sources: F. T. Marinetti: Four letters to Victor Servranckx). 7 arts also
developed contacts with the magazine Noi and reported on Prampolini’s activities
([Anon.]: “7 arts et le modernisme international”), but it distanced itself from certain
aspects of Futurism, in particular Marinetti’s rapprochement with Fascism and the
bourgeois leanings of the movement (Werrie: “Autonomie”).
Anthologie, published in Liège between 1921 and 1940, was the organ of the
Groupe moderne d’art, led by Georges Linze (1900–1993). The eclectically Modernist
orientation of the magazine, already signalled by its name, was similar to that of
the periodicals mentioned above, yet what distinguished Anthologie from the others
was the close attention it paid to Futurism (and to Italian literature in general, one
 Belgium 331

should add). In 1925, the magazine published an Italian issue, in large part dedi-
cated to Futurism, and between the mid-1920s and 1935, the Italian writer Antonietta
Drago (pseud. of Nenè Centonze, 1901–1992) regularly contributed reviews of Futur-
ist publications, exhibitions or other initiatives. Anthologie hosted manifestos and
reproduced artwork by Futurists such as Armando Mazza, Alberto Sartoris and Pino
Masnata. As the magazine continued to appear until 1940, it was virtually the only
periodical in Belgium to pay constant attention to Futurism. In fact, one of the last
issues of the magazine, published in 1939, assessed thirty years of Futurism in liter-
ature and the arts by stressing the undeniable contribution the movement had made
to the spread of new ideas and artistic practices (Horion: “Le Trentième Anniversaire
du futurisme”, 4).
The importance of the contacts and exchanges that linked Belgian artistic circles
to Expressionism and Constructivism on the one hand and Italian Futurism on the
other can be illustrated by the fact that Marinetti’s Le Futurisme mondial: Manifeste à
Paris (World-Wide Futurism: A Manifesto from Paris, 1924) included a dozen Belgian
names, all of whom were editors of the aforementioned magazines. Yet this conver-
gence of interests turned out to be relatively short-lived. In the second half of the
1920s, references to Futurism began to thin out, and in some cases disappeared alto-
gether. The artistic and cultural agendas of these magazines were often as ambitious
as they were generic (not to say naïvely generous). The eclectic nature of the mate-
rial published led to confusion, misunderstandings and conflicts – between various
groups, and not infrequently between editors of the same journal. Some artists were
disappointed by the general lack of interest in social issues and artistic matters. After
a short phase of enthusiasm and openness to new trends, by the mid-1920s bourgeois
normality had returned to Belgium. In Flanders, a figurative form of Expressionism
with some Constructivist elements prevailed; in French-speaking Wallonia, Surreal-
ism was dominant. Futurism had definitely become a thing of the past.

Archival sources
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Four letters to Prosper de Troyer. Antwerp, Letterenhuis. Accession no.
73.446/1-4.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Four letters to Victor Servranckx, 1922–1924. Universiteitsarchief
Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven, fonds Victor Servranckx. Accession no. 4.

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[Anon.]: “ ‘7 arts’ et le modernisme international.” 7 arts 4:20 (1926): 2.
332 Bart Van den Bossche

Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini: “Les Peintres
futuristes.” L’ Art moderne 32:6 (1912): 41–43.
De Bock, Eugène: “Het jonge Vlaanderen en de letterkunde.” [Young Flanders and Literature] Ruimte
[Space] 10–12 (1920): 127–133.
De Maria, Luciano, ed.: Marinetti e i futuristi. Milano: Garzanti, 1994.
De Miomandre, Francis: “Futurisme.” L’ Art moderne 31 (1911): 371–372.
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De Taeye, Edmond-Louis: “Marinetti: Le Futurisme.” La Fédération artistique 28:1 (1909): 3.
Esposizione libera futurista internazionale: Pittori e scultori italiani, russi, inglesi, belgi,
nordamericani. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Galleria Futurista G. Sprovieri, aprile–maggio 1914.
Gennaro, Rosario: “Il futurismo italiano tra la Francia e il Belgio: Il ruolo delle riviste.” Bart Van den
Bossche, Giuseppe Manica, and Carmen Van den Bergh, eds.: Azione/Reazione: Il futurismo in
Belgio e in Europa. Firenze: Cesati, 2012. 27–42.
Gobbers, Walter: “Résonances futuristes.” Jean Weisgerber, ed.: Les Avant-gardes littéraires en
Belgique: Au confluent des arts et des langues 1880–1950. Bruxelles: Labor, 1991. 173–204.
Goffin, Arnold: “A Propos du futurisme et de l’ art.” La Belgique artistique et littéraire 16 (1909):
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1914. 2nd rev. edn Bruxelles: Association de la Presse Belge, Section Bruxelloise, 1914.
Hadermann, Paul: “Echos du futurisme en Belgique.” Jean-Claude Marcadé, ed.: Présence de Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1982. 287–302.
Hellens, Franz: “A la Galerie Georges Giroux, Les Peintres Futuristes italiens.” L’ Art moderne 32:24
(1912): 187–188.
Sauwen, Rik: “D’un monde à l’ autre: Michel Seuphor et Paul Joostens.” Herbert Henkels, ed.:
Seuphor. Antwerpen: Mercator Fonds, 1976. 109–154.
Horion, Constant de: “Le Trentième Anniversaire du futurisme.” Anthologie 20: 1 (1939): 1–4.
Joly, Auguste: “Sur le futurisme.” La Belgique artistique et littéraire 28 (1912): 68–74. Reprinted as
Le Futurisme et la philosophie = Il futurismo e la filosofia. Milano: Direzione del Movimento
Futurista, 1912. Reprinted in Luciano De Maria, ed.: Marinetti e i futuristi. Milano: Garzanti,
1994. 265–270.
Knosp, Gaston: “La Musique et le futurisme.” La Belgique artistique et littéraire 28 (1912): 176–182.
Lewijse, Vera: “G.G.G.: La Galerie Georges Giroux, monument de l’ histoire de l’ art belge.”
Arts-mémoires: Lettre mensuelle, June 2005. s.p.
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1973.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: Marinetti et le futurisme: Études, documents, iconographie. Lausanne: L’ Âge
d’Homme, 1977.
Maassen, Henry: “Pan et le futurisme.” La Revue mosane 2:2–3 (November – December 1909): 51.
Marlier, Georges: “La Vraie Renaissance flamande.” ça ira! 1:1 (1920): 4–6.
Martin-Schmets, Victor: Henry Maassen. Vol. 1–2. Thèse de Doctorat. Toulouse: Université de
Toulouse, 1969.
Mertens, Phil: Jules Schmalzigaug, 1882–1917. Antwerpen: Van de Velde; Brussel: Internationaal
Centrum voor Structuuranalyse en Constructivisme, 1984.
Nyst, Raymond: “Les Peintres futuristes italiens: Salle Giroux.” La Belgique artistique et littéraire 28
(1912): 98–104. Reprinted as La Peinture futuriste en Belgique = La pittura futurista nel Belgio.
Milano: Direzione del Movimento Futurista, 1912. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme:
Manifestes, proclamations, documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 419–422.
 Belgium 333

Peeters, Jozef: “Inleiding tot de moderne plastiek.” [Introduction to Modern Sculpture] Het Overzicht
[The Survey] 2:11–12 (September 1922): 91–96.
Prampolini, Enrico: “L’ estetica della macchina e l’ introspezione meccanica nell‘arte.” De Stijl 5:7
(July 1922): 102–105. Dutch translation “Het esthetische der machien en het ingrijpen der
mekanika in de kunst.” [The Aesthetics of the Machine and the Intervention of Mechanics in
Art] Het Overzicht [The Survey] 4:21 (April 1924): 145–146.
Prampolini, Enrico: “L’ Architecture futuriste: Documents pour l’ histoire du mouvement moderne.”
7 arts 4:22 (1926): 3.
Puttemans, Pierre: “Belgio.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Dizionario del futurismo. Firenze: Vallecchi, 2007.
121–127.
Seuphor, Michel: Un renouveau de la peinture en Belgique flamande. Paris: Tendances Nouvelles,
1932.
Terzetti, Caterina: “La ricezione del futurismo in Belgio: Le riviste, le personalità.” Bart Van den
Bossche, Giuseppe Manica, and Carmen Van den Bergh, eds.: Azione/Reazione: Il futurismo in
Belgio e in Europa. Firenze: Cesati, 2012. 43–64.
Van Ostaijen, Paul: “Ekspressionisme in Vlaanderen.” [Expressionism in Flanders] De Stroom
[The Current] 1:2 (1918): 103–117, 1:3: 152–171, 1:4: 208–224. Reprinted in P. Van Ostaijen:
Verzameld werk. Vol. 4. Proza: Besprekingen en beschouwingen. [Collected Works 4:
Discussions and Considerations] Amsterdam: Bakker, 1979. 53–99.
Verhesen, Fernand: “ ‘7 arts’ et l’ avant-garde poétique.” Michel Otten, ed.: Études de littérature
française de Belgique offertes à Joseph Hanse pour son 75e anniversaire. Bruxelles: Antoine,
1978. 335–347.
Versari, Maria Elena: “Sur la correspondance inédite de Jules Schmalzigaug à Umberto Boccioni.”
ça ira! 40–41 (2010): 7–37.
Werrie, Paul: “Autonomie, de droit et de fait, pour la révolte lyrique.” 7 arts 5:13 (1927): 2.

Further reading
Agnese, Gino: “I futuristi a Bruxelles nel 1912: Quegl’indimenticabili incontri e scontri.” Bart Van den
Bossche, Giuseppe Manica, and Carmen Van den Bergh, eds.: Azione/Reazione: Il futurismo in
Belgio e in Europa. Firenze: Cesati, 2012. 21–25.
Baudart, Christiane: Fernand Stéven: Un peintre futuriste. Mémoire de licence en histoire de l’ art,
archéologie et musicologie. Liège: Université de Liège, 1992.
Castiglione, Vera: “A Futurist Before Futurism: Emile Verhaeren and the Technological Epic.” Günter
Berghaus, ed.: Futurism and the Technological Imagination. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009.
101–124.
Crispolti, Enrico, and Caterina Terzetti, eds.: La fortuna del futurismo in Belgio. Exhibition
catalogue. Bruxelles: Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 19 November 2009 – 1 December 2009;
Leuven: Katholieke Universiteit, Faculteit Letteren, 4–18 December 2009; Ferrara:
Salone dei Passi Perduti, 1–23 marzo 2010. Roma: Archivio Crispolti Arte Contemporanea,
2009.
Décaudin, Michel: “Sur la pénetration du futurisme en Belgique.” Si & no: Rivista quadrimestrale di
letteratura moderna e contemporanea, 2nd series, 3:1 (#7) (1978): 3–6.
Fayt, Joëlle: Sur les traces du futurisme en Belgique. Mémoire. Bruxelles: Université Libre, 1987.
Gennaro, Rosario: “Il futurismo italiano tra la Francia e il Belgio: Il ruolo delle riviste.” Bart Van den
Bossche, Giuseppe Manica, and Carmen Van den Bergh, eds.: Azione/Reazione: Il futurismo in
Belgio e in Europa. Firenze: Cesati, 2012. 27–41.
334 Bart Van den Bossche

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 Belgium 335

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ottobre 2009. Novara: Interlinea, 2011. 131–152.
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João Cezar de Castro Rocha
20 Brazil
First reactions to Futurism
The first Brazilian response to Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
was published in the north-eastern region of Brazil. On 5 June 1909, A república in
Natal printed an incomplete translation of Marinetti’s manifesto by Manuel Dantas
(1867–1924). A few months later, on 30 December 1909, Almáquio Diniz (1880–1937)
introduced and translated the full text on the first page of the Jornal de notícias in Sal-
vador de Bahia under the title “Uma nova escola literária” (A New Literary School; see
Rocha: “ ‘Futures Past’: On the Reception and Impact of Futurism in Brazil”; Peterle
and Fogaça: “The Reception of Italian Futurism in Brazilian Periodicals”). Diniz’s
presentation, however, was relatively insignificant in comparison with another doc-
ument, Rubén Darío’s “Marinetti y el futurismo” (Marinetti and Futurism, 1909), an
essay that was published in Buenos Aires on 5 April 1910 (see p. 299 in this volume)
but circulated in Brazil as well. It discussed Marinetti’s career and aesthetic ideas and
insisted that precedence should be given to the Catalan Gabriel Alomar as the founder
of Futurism (see Schwartz: Vanguardas latino-americanas, 351–355; Bird: “Futurist
Social Critique in Gabriel Alomar i Villalonga”). The editor of the Jornal de notícias
nonetheless proudly announced in December 1909: “We are the first Brazilian news-
paper to report on this subject” (quoted in Schwartz: Vanguardas latino-americanas,
355). The importance of “this subject” led him to believe that the manifesto would
“really attract the interest of our intellectual milieu” (quoted in Schwartz: Vanguardas
latino-americanas, 356). A few months after the translation, the journalist from
Salvador de Bahia published another article on Futurism, “O romance de Marinetti”
(Marinetti’s Novel), in which he discussed Mafarka il futurista (Mafarka the Futurist,
1910). The periodical has not been identified, but the text can be found in Diniz’s
F. T. Marinetti: Sua escola, sua vida, sua obra em literatura comparada (F. T. Marinetti,
His School, his Life, his Work in Comparative Literature, 1926).
Marinetti’s manifesto appears not to have had great circulation in Brazil, and it was
only in 1912, when Oswald de Andrade returned from Europe, that Futurism began to
have serious repercussions on the Brazilian cultural scene (see Bosi: História concisa
da literatura brasileira, 374). From then on, the debate about Futurism increased each
year, although many contributions were clouded in misinformation and were highly
polemical in nature. For instance, in 1913, a critic as important as José Veríssimo (1857–
1916) published an appraisal of Futurism and, more particularly, of the Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912). The title of the essay synthesizes its content –
“Mais uma extravagância literária” (Another Literary Extravaganza) – and contains a
variety of mistakes, suggesting that the quality of information then available in Brazil
was not very high. The essay symptomatically closes with the following question,
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-020
 Brazil 337

“Are we facing a phenomenon of that degeneracy already studied by Nordau, or a

formidable fallacy?” (Veríssimo: “Mais uma extravagância literária”, 38). In 1914, an
Italian Professor, Ernesto Bertarelli (1873–1957), wrote an article in O estado de São
Paulo, entitled “As lições do futurismo” (The Lessons of Futurism), mainly referring
to Giovanni Papini and concluding in a conciliatory tone: “We believe that someday
it will be said that Futurism – in spite of its explosive expressions and the brutality of
its forms, often conveyed in a paradoxical fashion – was a logical and positive move-
ment” (Bertarelli: “As lições do futurismo”, 36).
In the 1920s, the debate about Futurism proved to be decisive for the definition
of a Brazilian avant-garde culture. Marinetti’s controversial ideas were discussed
by Brazilian intellectuals as diverse as Graça Aranha (1868–1931), Guilherme de
Almeida (1890–1969), Ronald de Carvalho (1893–1935), Sérgio Buarque de Holanda
(1902–1982), Menotti del Picchia (1892–1988), Monteiro Lobato (1882–1948), Cassiano
Ricardo (1895–1974) and Paulo Setubal (1893–1937). Thus, if “in São Paulo, in 1920,
the use of the word Futurism [was] already widespread” (Brito: História do modern-
ismo brasileiro, 161), it was in 1921 that its polemical resonance achieved an unprec-
edented intensity. This was initiated by Oswald de Andrade’s article “O meu poeta
futurista” (My Futurist Poet), in which he commented on the forthcoming publication
of one of the most important Modernist books, Mário de Andrade’s Paulicéia desvai-
rada (Hallucinated City, 1922). After quoting “the miraculous Govoni”, Oswald con-
cluded his article on a heroic note: “Blessed be this Paulista Futurism” (Andrade: “O
meu poeta futurista”, 25). From this point on, ‘Futurism’ acquired a fresh meaning:
it no longer signified an all-encompassing rejection of the past, but an emergence
of a new literary school whose aim was to praise “the unrepressed metropolis [...]
lively people who think up new ideas [...] search for new rhythms, scrutinize and
demand horizons and futures” (Andrade: “O divisor das águas modernistas”, 23).
The reaction was such that until the end of 1922, ‘Futurism’ and ‘Futurist’ became
ubiquitous catchphrases in newspapers. Even “politics [we]re invaded by them. For
instance, the polemical attitudes of the opposition [we]re called ‘political Futurism’ ”
(Brito: História do modernismo brasileiro, 246–247). This conflation of the concept
of Futurism and its iconoclastic programme determined the rejection of Marinetti’s
movement, especially when Modernism transformed itself into an elevated form of
nationalism.
Mário de Andrade was probably the first Modernist to understand the ambiguity
surrounding the concept of ‘Futurism’. Thus, a week after Oswald’s eulogy, Mário pub-
lished his response, “Futurist?!”, in which he declared: “The poet of Hallucinated City
is not a Futurist and, above all, was never interested in ‘making Futurism’ ” (Andrade:
“Futurista?!”, 238). Oswald’s article was received with sarcasm, and the verses quoted
by Oswald were mockingly read as an example of Futurist ‘poetry’. Mário promptly
reacted, enlightening the Modernists’ strategy: “Why Futurist? Is it only because
[Oswald] admires certain luminaries of Futurism and acknowledges, amidst their
misconceptions, the benefits brought to us by them?” (Andrade: “Futurista?!”, 235).
338 João Cezar de Castro Rocha

As Annateresa Fabris has keenly observed, “after 1921, the Modernists embraced
Futurism as a weapon because of its negative connotations” (Fabris: “A questão
futurista no Brasil”, 71). Using the concept of Futurism, therefore, did not necessar-
ily imply a profound knowledge of Marinetti’s manifestos, or a solid appreciation of
Futurist works. How superficial the Modernists’ understanding of Futurism could be
became obvious when Ettore Petrolini toured Brazil in October 1921. His performance
of Luciano Folgore’s Zero meno zero (Zero minus Zero, 1915), Francesco Cangiullo’s
Radioscopia di un duetto (Radiography of a Duet, 1918) and a sketch from the Futur-
ist Theatre of Essential Brevity “did not engage Modernists in any debate” (Fabris:
O futurismo paulista, 131). The simple reason for this was that the novelty of Petro-
lini’s performance style was not appreciated, most likely because, at the time, local
audiences did not have a suitable frame of references to fully appreciate Petrolini’s
breakthrough artistic expression.

Futurism enters the popular imagination

In any case, it is relevant to remark on the strong presence of Marinetti in the Brazil-
ian popular imagination during the 1920s and 1930s. The leader of the Italian move-
ment spawned the new word ‘marinete’, which became a synonym for vehicles of high
speed. The Houaiss Dictionary clarifies the etymology of the word: “anthr. Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944, Italian writer); because a bus company in Salvador
was given the name of the author of ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’ ” (See
the entry “marinete” in Houaiss et al.: Dicionário Houaiss da língua portuguesa, 1855).
In this context, Futurism became equated with velocity, understood as an acceleration
of historical time, and, as a consequence, a carrier of novelties. In this sense, Brazilian
popular culture reproduced a general feeling regarding Marinetti’s movement: “For an
intense period the term ‘Futurism’ was used synonymously in place of ‘modernism’ and
‘avant-gardism’; anything new was seen as Futurist” (Todolí: “Director’s Forword”, 15).
The creation of a neologism in Brazilian Portuguese offers remarkable evidence
of the resonance of the Italian movement in the country, but this was not a unique
and solitary case. In 1924, Paulo Silveira published a volume of reviews and chron-
icles, Asas e patas (Wings and Paws). The first chapter started with an epigraph
boldly taken from Marinetti’s Futurismo e fascismo (Futurism and Fascism, 1924)
and then clarified the viewpoint adopted by the Brazilian author by remarking
that Asas would represent Futurism, whose ‘wings’ would foster “a violent reform
of national literature, all of it concocted, with few exceptions, with the debris of
French literature” (Silveira: Asas e patas, 11). In this predictable equation, patas
would stand for the literature of the past, still in search of the dernier cris.
Noel Rosa (1910–1937), one of the most important composers of Brazilian popular
music, wrote one of his hits based on the view that Futurism was a primordially
 Brazil 339

nonsensical art movement. The lyrics of A.B. Surdo (ABSurd), presented in the Carni-
val of 1931, run thus:

It is Futurism, girl, it is Futurism, girl

For this is not a Carnival song, not here nor in China
It is Futurism, girl, it is Futurism, girl
For this is not a Carnival song, not here nor in China. (Rosa: “A.B. Surdo”, 27)

The song’s title encapsulates how Futurism was understood in Brazilian popular
culture: any irreverent and nonsensical gesture was readily interpreted as a mani-
festation of Marinetti’s artistic programme. The pun of A.B. Surdo reads even better
in Portuguese, because ‘surdo’ means ‘deaf’, so what could be more absurdo than
writing a song for someone who is surdo? This height of absurdity was seen to be
a perfect portrait of Futurism (see Rosa: “A.B. Surdo”, 27–29). Therefore, it does not
come as a surprise that, on 3 December 1921, Marinetti received a note from Ettore
Petrolini, then touring in Brazil: “You should know that here in Brazil you are very
very popular. The press talks about you often and very nicely” (see Archival sources:
Petrolini, Letter to Marinetti, 3 December 1921).

The Week of Modern Art

The Week of Modern Art was held in São Paulo as a three-day festival in February 1922
(see Martins: O modernismo, 67–70, and Sevcenko: Orfeu extático na metrópole, 269–273).
It is generally considered to have been a pivotal event in twentieth-century Brazilian
cultural history because it initiated a complete renewal of the arts. It was inaugurated
on 13 February with a lecture delivered by Graça Aranha (Aranha: “A emoção estética
na arte moderna”), followed by a musical recital and a poetry reading. The first day
also included a lecture by Ronald de Carvalho on the modern trends in Brazilian paint-
ing − represented by the works of Anita Malfatti (1889–1964), Zina Anita (1900–1967)
and Emiliano Di Cavalcanti (1897–1976) − and sculpture − featuring the works of Victor
Brecheret (1894–1955). On 15 February, Menotti del Picchia delivered a lecture on “Arte
moderna” (Modern Art), followed by a poetry reading. Mário de Andrade was received
with catcalls so loud that his recitation was hardly audible. Since this booing was in
perfect agreement with Marinetti’s theory of “la voluttà d’esser fischiati” (the pleasure
of being booed”) and of theatre performances as an equivalent to the battlefront, the
Modernists should not have been troubled by the jeering they received, since it only con-
firmed their revolutionary status. Oswald de Andrade recalled the event: “The heroic
evening of the Week was the presentation of new literature. [Poets] lined up on stage and
faced a tremendous catcall” (Andrade: “O divisor das águas modernistas”, 53). However,
instead of being torn to pieces, they secured themselves a place in history. Finally, on 17
February, several of Heitor Villa-Lobos’s musical compositions were performed.
340 João Cezar de Castro Rocha

Annateresa Fabris has stressed the similarities between “the very structure of the
Week of Modern Art [and] the futurist serata” (Fabris: “A questão futurista no Brasil”,
75; on the Futurist serata see pp. 250–251 in this volume). However, this likeness applies
only to the performative level because as organized movements the Italian Futurists and
Brazilian Modernists were rather different in character. While Futurism was master-
minded by a cultural entrepreneur and achieved international fame through strategies
that were typical of advertising agencies, Brazilian Modernism was a fleeting associa-
tion of artists who were circumstantially assembled against what they regarded as tradi-
tionalism. Therefore, the effect of the Week of Modern Art on the intellectual scene was
only moderate (Camargos: Semana de 22, and Gonçalves: 1922).
Finally, it is important to distinguish between the Week of Modern Art and Mod-
ernism, that is, between the polemical presentation of a movement and its further
developments, which involved the co-option of most Modernists by the State (on that
distinction, see Sodré: História da literatura brasileira, 528). This co-option directly
influenced the reception of Futurism, a fact that was often repeated in discussions
concerning the concept of ‘Futurism’.

The concept of ‘Futurism’

‘Futurism’ as a term came to be widely used in the Brazilian cultural establishment.
However, it could be applied to all sorts of phenomena deemed to be radical. Paulo
Menotti del Picchia (1892–1988) highlighted this fact when he wrote in the Correio
paulistano, on 6 December 1920.

Once the eruption had calmed down, a gap opened up and Futurism came to be defined as an
innovative trend, beautiful and strong, topical and audacious, unfurling a flag that flutters in the
breeze of a libertarian ideal in art, lightly touched by the respect for the past which at first it
repelled. […] All that which is rebellion, all that which is independence, all that which is sincerity,
all that which fights literary hypocrisy, imitation, obscurantism, all that which is beautiful and
new, strong and audacious, fits into the good and broad conception of Futurism. (Picchia: “O
futurismo”, 167)

Similarly Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, in an article on “O futurismo paulista” (Futurism

in São Paulo, 1921), expressed the view that it is not “an objectionable error when some
people call all innovative tendencies ‘Futurist’. Nowadays this is the meaning by which
the term ‘Futurism’ is almost universally known” (Holanda: “O futurismo paulista”, 19).
Mário de Andrade gave it an even wider meaning in an essay for the São Paulo news-
paper A gazeta: “We are absolutely not tied to Marinetti’s contradictory, albeit at times
admirable, Futurism. We simply wish to be up-to-date” (Andrade: “Arte moderna I: Terno
idílio”).
Menotti del Picchia, in his lecture at the Week of Modern Art, remarked on this
terminological confusion:
 Brazil 341

Ours is an aesthetics of reaction. As such, it is belligerent. The word ‘Futurist’, with which it
was mistakenly identified, is the term we accepted because it conveyed the entirety of our chal-
lenge. […] We are not, never were ‘Futurists’. Personally, I abhor the dogmatism and the liturgy
of Marinetti’s school. [...] In Brazil, however, there is no logical or social reason for an orthodox
Futurism, since Brazil’s tradition is not such that it would inhibit the freedom of its future forms.
(Telles: Vanguarda européia e modernismo brasileiro, 288)

The usage of the term ‘Futurism’ was instrumental in establishing Modernism as a

new school in Brazil, but it became problematic when at a later stage modernismo
evolved into nationalism. In the first phase, the rejection of traditional values was
stressed by the words ‘Futurism’ and ‘Futurist’; in the second phase, the Modern-
ists’ engagement with the construction of a modern State demanded detachment
from the iconoclastic concepts they had previously adopted. Otto Maria Carpeaux
has identified the paradox underlying this strategy: “Brazilian Modernists faced two
equally important and hardly compatible tasks: to create new, genuinely national
poetry and art and, in order to do so, employ resources of European avant-gardes,
from France and Italy” (Carpeaux: As revoltas modernistas na literatura, 195). This
paradox explains the Modernists’ use of European avant-garde aesthetics. In addi-
tion, it gives a relevant function to an otherwise trivial remark, according to which
Oswald was enchanted by Marinetti’s Words-in-Freedom technique, because he
“needed to transform an inaptitude into a virtue: Oswald’s incapacity of compos-
ing metrical poetry” (Brito: História do modernismo brasileiro, 30). In other words,
Futurism was a source of inspiration as long as it fit into the Modernist project of
renewal. Or as Jorge Schwartz remarked: “Brazilian Modernism certainly was the
Latin-American avant-garde movement that most profited from, underwent and
questioned the influence of Futurism” (Schwartz: Vanguardas latino-americanas,
347–348).
It is important at this point to stress that the subtlety of this question was not
perceived by Marinetti. A clear indication of this can be found in his diary notes
made during his visit to Brazil in May to June 1926 (Marinetti: “Tournée nell’ America
del Sud”). There are not only misspellings of names and an erroneous chronology
of events, but also a symptomatic lack of understanding regarding the divergent
aesthetic and political choices made by the Modernists in 1926. In 1922, the Week
of Modern Art was initially going to be called ‘Futurist Week of Art’ (see Schwartz:
Vanguardas latino-americanas, 348), and the organizers were regularly referred to as
‘Futurists’: “In 1921, the Modernist group − or Futurist, as it was then called, and
as they sometimes called themselves” (Brito: História do modernismo brasileiro, 179).
However, by 1926, ‘Futurism’ had become synonymous with a superficial detachment
from the past, whilst ‘Modernism’ referred to a search for national roots. This shift
reflects an endeavour to overcome the iconoclasm promoted by the Modernists during
the 1922 Week of Modern Art in favour of a vision of the poet-engineer contributing to
the construction of a Brazilian nation. This semantic split was highly significant and
determined the reception of Marinetti’s speeches during his 1926 lecture tour.
342 João Cezar de Castro Rocha

Marinetti’s visit to Brazil (1926)

On 13 May 1926, Marinetti and his wife Benedetta arrived in South America to give
some 35 lectures-cum-recitations in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Buenos Aires and Mon-
tevideo before returning to Europe on 11 July 1926 (see Fabris: O futurismo paulista,
217–259; Barros: O pai do futurismo no país do futuro). Marinetti depicted his expe-
riences in Brazil in a Words-in-Freedom poem called Velocitá brasiliane (Brazilian
Velocities). After a poetical evocation of the beauty of Guanabara Bay, his attention
was captured by another sort of attraction:

Cries of Long live Futurism! Long live Marinetti. [...] Amidst the poets Carvalho, Olanda, Almeida,
Moras [Prudente de Moraes Neto], Bandeira, Pongetti, Silveira, Agripino Grieco, appears Graça
Aranha, the sturdy forty-year old with the square deliberate upbeat face who smiles and greets
me with the brightest most welcoming of eyes. (Marinetti: “Brazilian Velocities”, 140)

Marinetti lists an impressive group of men of letters. Ronald de Carvalho, proclaimed the
“Prince of Brazilian Prose” in a competition organized by Simões Pinto in 1931, was an
author who was both popular and critically acclaimed. Sérgio Buarque de Holanda and
Prudente de Moraes Neto (1904–1977) were well established in Rio de Janeiro’s intellec-
tual milieu and had solid links with the print media. Manuel Bandeira has been regarded
as one of the most important Brazilian poets of the twentieth century, alongside Carlos
Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto. Graça Aranha, who played the rôle
of the official host, was not forty, but fifty-eight years old, and exercised a circumstantial
leadership of the Modernist movement during the Week of Modern Art. This impressive
welcoming scene perfectly captures Marinetti’s stay in Rio de Janeiro. His first lecture
was scheduled for 15 May. Performed at the Lírico Theatre, Marinetti spoke in French to
an audience of 596 spectators. After the lecture, a news cable was sent to Europe:

lírico theatre completely filled huge audience mainly composed men of letters students ladies
etc. marinetti obtained extraordinary triumph being deliriously applauded welcoming in name
of Rio São Paulo futurists member of Brazilian academy graçaranha spoke delivered remarka-
ble speech answering marinetti expressed gratitude delivered lecture on Futurism. (see Archival
sources, Marinetti: Telegram of 15 May 1926)

Marinetti’s statistics did not exactly comply with reality, but rather reflected the prop-
aganda strategies typical of the Futurist leader. Only one third of the theatre capacity
was actually sold, but nonetheless, Graça Aranha did welcome Marinetti with a highly
complementary speech, “Marinetti e o futurismo”, published as a preface to Futurismo:
Manifestos de Marinetti e seus companheiros (Futurism: Manifestos by Marinetti and
his Companions, 1926). A second lecture was scheduled for 18 May, promoted by a
Futurist concert broadcast on Rádio Mayrink Veiga that same day. The press coverage
of the first lecture together with the radio promotion had a predictable effect. Accord-
ing to a press report, 957 spectators attended the second lecture and “roared, whis-
tled, kicked about, and could not be more lively” (C. A.: “O Sr. Marinetti e nós”). Some
 Brazil 343

men of letters mistakenly interpreted the audience’s reactions as an unpleasant inci-

dent, and they are still interpreted as such by some modern critics solely concerned
with the content of Marinetti’s speech (see Fabris: Futurismo: Uma poética da modern-
idade, 69). However, according to the distinction proposed by Paul Zumthor, a Futurist
lecture is less a text − a reservoir of meaning always claiming an interpretation − than
a work − an aggregate of several layers of presentation not altogether translatable into
a ‘meaningful’ message (see Zumthor: “Body and Performance”, 219).
In the following days, Marinetti continued to perform on two other radio shows.
On 22 May, Rádio Sociedade granted him the unprecedented honour of an intro-
duction by Ronald de Carvalho in front of 300 illustrious spectators, among them
several politicians such as Estácio Coimbra, vice-president of Brazil, and writers such
as Graça Aranha and Manuel Bandeira (see Fabris: O futurismo paulista, 224–225).
Although unwilling to accept Marinetti’s success, Mário de Andrade admitted: “In Rio,
he was embraced by the Modernists and was honoured − undeservedly in my view.
[...] I cannot fathom their enthusiasm for him, especially that coming from Manuel
Bandeira” (Andrade: Cartas de Mário de Andrade a Luís da Câmara Cascudo, 63).
Before leaving for São Paulo, Marinetti sent another news cable:

marinetti delivered effective interesting broadcast all brazil after brilliant inaugural talk by poet
ronald carvalho about great artistic political impact of Futurism [...] extremely warm uncontes-
ted success marinetti departed for spaulo for another lecture cycle. (see Archival sources, Mari-
netti: Telegram of 23 May 1926)

Marinetti had some reason to believe that Mário de Andrade was a possible ally. In
1922, the poet had sent his Hallucinated City to Corso Venezia 61, Milano, with the fol-
lowing dedication: “To / F. T. Marinetti / with warm affection and admiration” (quoted in
Fabris: O futurismo paulista, 218; for additional information, see Schwartz: “A biblio-
grafia latino-americana na coleção Marinetti”). Always eager to reciprocate, Marinetti
included Mário de Andrade and Yan de Almeida Prado in his manifesto Le Futurisme
mondial (World-wide Futurism, 1924), along with an eclectic list of other literary lumi-
naries, who had never declared any allegiance to the Futurist movement. If Mário de
Andrade and Yan de Almeida Prado did not know in 1924 that they were Futurists, they
were soon to find out. As the latter ironically recalled, shortly after Marinetti’s arrival,
“out of the blue, I received a note from another impresario announcing that Marinetti
was going to undertake a South American tour and that, naturally, he was counting
on my support” (Prado: O Brasil e o colonialismo europeu, 392). Mário de Andrade,
who might have received a similar note, fully understood Marinetti’s methods of
self-promotion and did not attend any of Marinetti’s performances. He wrote innumer-
able letters recounting his own version of the events, often contradicting newspaper
reports, and generally trying to break the spell that Marinetti exercised on some of his
friends and allies in Rio de Janeiro.
Marinetti presented his first lecture in São Paulo on 24 May 1926. He attracted the
largest crowd of the entire South American tour: 1,108 spectators in a theatre with a
344 João Cezar de Castro Rocha

capacity of 1,328 seats. Nonetheless, according to traditional scholarship, this lecture

represented the biggest failure of the tour, since Marinetti was virtually unable to deliver
his speech. As he himself recalled, this evening was “the noisiest and most violent
Futurist soirée of my entire existence!” (Marinetti: “Per la inaugurazione della espo-
sizione futurista”, 4). The Jornal do commercio wrote on 26 May 1926 in an unsigned
note: “Mr. Marinetti could simply not deliver his speech.” ([Anon.]: “Futurismo em Pan-
tanaes.”) Although this judgement is often repeated by historians and critics, it does
not consider the Futurist’s theory and practice of provoking audiences towards noisy
reactions. For the second lecture, delivered on 27 May, the ticket prices were raised in
order to limit audience numbers and avoid further incidents. A total of 835 spectators
paid to see Marinetti. On 1 June, the audience filled half of the Parque Balneário Theatre
in Santos. However, his last lecture in São Paulo, held two days later in the Cassino
Antártica, only sold 164 out of 1,328 seats. Therefore, after Rio de Janeiro’s uncontested
success, São Paulo’s violent reaction and an even more emphatic indifference seem to
have confirmed Mário de Andrade’s version. This account, however, cannot deny the
success that Marinetti met with in Rio de Janeiro. Thus, one could judge Marinetti’s
journey to Brazil a failure based exclusively on his stay in São Paulo, which constitutes
a methodological problem. It tautologically reinforces Mário de Andrade’s interpreta-
tion of events and produces an incomplete, and hence misleading, picture of historical
truth.
In this context, it is important to be fully aware of the local circumstances of the
conflicting accounts of Marinetti’s reception in Brazil. At the time of Marinetti’s visit,
Mário de Andrade and Graça Aranha were disputing the leadership of the Brazilian
Modernist movement. In 1925, Aranha published O espírito moderno, portraying
himself as the key architect of Modernism. In the same year, Mário de Andrade issued
A escrava que não é Isaura (The Slave Who Is not Isaura, 1924), a declaration of opposi-
tion to Aranha’s essays’ principles, to be read as ‘authentically’ modern. On 12 January
1926, in A manhã, Mário published an open letter to Graça Aranha, the tone of which
was acrimonious and uncompromising: “I must insist that you are wrong when claim-
ing that the Modernists of São Paulo are moving away from you. It is not just those from
São Paulo, but rather nearly all Brazilian Modernists” (Andrade: Cartas de Mário de
Andrade a Prudente de Moraes Neto, 186). As a response, Graça Aranha’s welcoming
speech to Marinetti was a message to Mário de Andrade. Aranha’s argument begins by
asserting that in 1909 Marinetti initiated the renewal of artistic expression and then
states: “Confronted by this contribution, it is ludicrous to debate whether Marinet-
ti’s Futurism is now passéist” (Aranha: “Marinetti e o futurismo”, 864). Futurism had
become as meta-historical as Aranha’s claim for leadership when he inaugurated the
1922 Week with his lecture. Mário de Andrade was keen to understand Aranha’s strat-
egy, and promptly revealed the paradox of his formulation. Indeed, it is a paradox
that accompanied the avant-garde gesture itself: in Aranha’s contention, Marinetti –
given his services to Futurism in the past – surfaced as the undisputed architect of the
avant-garde. In this context, Marinetti’s rôle was that of a pawn − just as had already
 Brazil 345

happened with the concept of ‘Futurism’. Thus, both Aranha’s support and Mário de
Andrade’s rejection were instrumental and directly related to internal fights within
Brazilian Modernism. Finally, Mário de Andrade was the winner in this complex chess
game, for he became the mastermind of the future by imposing his own version of
Marinetti’s trip.
A different interpretation of the same story emerges from the contract by Mari-
netti and the theatre impresario Niccolino Viggiani, signed on 16 December 1925:

The poet F. T. Marinetti commits himself to undertake a lecture tour (minimum eight lectures)
including Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires [...] Mr. Viggiani commits
himself to organizing the lectures in question in the best theatres of the above-mentioned cities,
[...] it being understood that seven days will be the minimum period spent in each city (so as to
ensure the success of the lectures by means of interviews, etc. etc.). Mr. Viggiani commits himself
to paying F. T. Marinetti [...] twenty percent of the net after-tax box-office receipts. (See Archival
sources, Marinetti: Contract with the theatre impresario Niccolino Viggiani, dated 16 December 1925)

The commercial side of Marinetti’s tour proves that it was successful. The two lec-
tures in Rio de Janeiro were attended by over 1,850 spectators, assuring Marinetti a
net income of $250 in 1926 American currency. In São Paulo, Marinetti’s share was
considerably larger. In the first lecture, he profited $226, almost the same amount
as for the two prior lectures in Rio de Janeiro. Let us remember that, according to
Mários’s version, this lecture proved to be the failure of the tour! In the second
lecture, although the audience had been limited due to the higher ticket price, the
box-office result − precisely because of the raise − was the best of his entire South
American tour: Marinetti earned $265. The six public lectures Marinetti gave in
Brazil netted him $850 in 1926 U.S. dollars − a sum that today would amount to
$22,950 in U.S. dollars. In other words, such a lecture tour cannot but be recognized
as a success.
This is the appraisal of one of the latest books on Futurism published in Brazil:
“Concerning the 1926 lectures, only the first one, which took place in Rio de Janeiro,
was well-received, albeit with clamorous interference by the audience. This was the
only one that, more or less, corresponded to the announced intentions, the Futurist
aesthetic, its art of poetry, the recitation of poems by Marinetti and other authors”
(Barros: O pai do futurismo no país do futuro, 10). Indeed, the author here repeats
the errors already highlighted above, namely that he disregards the Futurist voluttà
d’esser fischiati (pleasure of being booed), which formed part of Marinetti’s perfor-
mance strategy (see the entry on Theatre in this volume).

Conclusion
A full account of Marinetti’s tour of 1926 in the context of the cultural situation of the
country he visited reveals that Futurist influences never turned into a constitutive
346 João Cezar de Castro Rocha

element in Brazilian literature. ‘Brazilian Futurism’ has to be seen as a generic

disposition against the forces of tradition and a welcoming attitude towards modernity.
The ‘Futurist moment’ was a relevant component, but not the ideas of Futurism per se.
Renato Poggioli has suggested that “the futurist moment belongs to all the avant-gardes
and not only to the one named after it [...] Italian Futurism had the great merit of fixing
and expressing it, coining that most fortunate term as its own label” (Poggioli: The
Theory of the Avant-Garde, 68–69). Annateresa Fabris has stressed the importance of
this distinction and suggests that it is necessary “to replace an emphasis on ‘Futurism’
to one on the ‘Futurist moment’ ” (Fabris: “A questão futurista no Brasil”, 68). Even after
the organization of the Week of Modern Art, the word ‘Futurism’ continued to designate
a generic rejection of the past instead of an engagement with a clearly defined body of
ideas. For instance, on 30 October 1922, Joaquim Inojosa (1901–1987), author of A arte
moderna (The Modern Art, 1924) − an important document attesting the expansion of
Modernism in Brazil’s Northeast − published in A tarde the article “Que é futurismo?”
(What is Futurism?). Although its title promised to introduce Marinetti’s movement,
it instead defined the ‘Futurist moment’: “The word creates enemies: the reality has
always existed in reactions against tradition, old things, the past. Aesthetic renova-
tion, updating of art, that is what it is. The younger spirits are not obliged to follow the
elderly” (Inojosa: “Que é futurismo?”, 18). Thus, the proper way of legitimizing Futur-
ism’s present − as well as assuring its future − is to locate its omnipresence in the past.
Finally, the predominance of the ‘Futurist moment’ has also contributed to the
strategic usage of the concepts of ‘Futurism’ and ‘Futurist’, as well as to the subse-
quent rejection of Futurism. After all, the ‘Futurist moment’ only signalled a gesture
of adherence, not a consistent commitment to an ideology or aesthetic programme
(see Rocca: “Un poeta a toda máquina”, 1–3).
Wilson Martins has proposed that “Futurism existed in Brazil [...] from 1917 [...] to
1922” (Martins: O modernismo, 72). The Week of Modern Art became a decisive turning
point as it declared “Death to Futurism! This was the war cry of all Modernist groups
from 1924 onwards” (Martins: O modernismo, 76). In his view, Oswald de Andrade’s
collection of poems, Pau-Brasil (Brazil-Wood, 1925) and Mário de Andrade’s essay
on modernist aesthetics, A escrava que não é Isaura, signified the final detachment
from Futurism. Annamaria Fabris contradicted this interpretation of history and sug-
gested that the turmoil provoked by Marinetti’s 1926 tour could only happen because
the discussions around Futurism were still relevant, “otherwise, the quantity of arti-
cles and polemics originated by Marinetti’s arrival is not understandable” (Fabris:
“A questão futurista no Brasil”, 77). Fabris located the decisive rupture in 1928, when
Mário de Andrade published Macunaíma: O herói sem nenhum caráter (Macunaíma:
The Hero without Any Character), for it is “from the viewpoint of a radical critique
of the civilization of the machine [...] that the dialogue with Futurism was consid-
ered closed” (Fabris: O futurismo paulista, 279). It was a closure inextricably related to
the path chosen by the Modernists, namely, to rescue Brazilian traditions in order to
provide the newly modernized nation with a solid cultural foundation.
 Brazil 347

Thus, in the span of some twenty years, Futurism underwent a full circle – from
the first translations of The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism to a blooming
period immediately before and after the Week of Modern Art – and declined at the
end of the 1920s. Marinetti was indeed prophetic in his exclamation: “My Dear
Arãnha, Rio de Janeiro is a tropical fruit whose delicious juice is the speed of its
automobiles” (Marinetti: “Brazilian Velocities”, 138). Caught between complex and
multifaceted periods of transition in Brazilian cultural history, Futurism came either
right after or long before the time was ripe for its iconoclastic message. However,
this uncanny and always misplaced relationship with historical time could also be
regarded as a perfect self-portrait of Futurism itself and its innumerable promises
and impasses.

Works cited

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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Telegram of 15 May 1926. Yale University, Beinecke Library, New Haven/
CT, Marinetti Papers, Series III, Box 7, Folder 76.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Telegram of 23 May 1926. Yale University, Beinecke Library, New Haven/
CT, Marinetti Papers, Series III, Box 7, Folder 76.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Velocitá brasiliane, Yale University, Beinecke Library, New Haven/CT,
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Petrolini, Ettore: Letter to Marinetti, 3 December 1921. Yale University, Beinecke Library, New Haven/
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350 João Cezar de Castro Rocha

Zumthor, Paul: “Body and Performance.” Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Karl Pfeifer, eds.: Materialities
of Communication. Stanford/CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. 217–226.

Further reading
Bagno, Sandra: “Almachio Diniz e o futurismo italiano.” Actas do Terceiro Congresso da Associação
Internacional de Lusitanistas, Universidade de Coimbra (18 a 22 de Junho de 1990). Coimbra:
Associação Internacional de Lusitanistas, 1992. 593–600.
Bagno, Sandra: “Il futurismo in Brasile nella divulgazione di Almachio Diniz.” Il confronto letterario:
Quaderni del Dipartimento di Lingue e Letterature Straniere Moderne dell’Università di Pavia
e del Dipartimento di Linguistica e Letterature Comparate dell’Università di Bergamo 7:14
(November 1990): 479–484.
Berghaus, Günter: “A Cultural Icon of Ill-Repute: Marinetti and Brazilian Antifascism.” International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies 7 (2017): 250–259.
Berriel, Carlos Eduardo: “Mário de Andrade entre dois (ou três) futurismos.” Lúcia Wataghin,
ed.: Brasil-Itália: Vanguardas. Atas do Seminário Internacional Brasil-Itália: Vanguardas;
Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências, Universidade de São Paulo, 3 de abril de 2001. Granja
Viana/Cotia, SP: Ateliê, 2003. 43–53.
Besse, Maria Graciete, ed.: Le Futurisme et les avant-gardes au Portugal et au Brésil. Argenteuil:
Convivium Lusophone, 2011.
Bonet, Juan Manuel: “Futurismo: Ecos hispánicos (y brasileños).” Revista de occidente 340 (2009): 53–63.
Bopp, Raul: Movimentos modernistas no Brasil 1922–1928. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, 1966.
Bortolucce, Vanessa: “Futurist Manifestos and Programmatic Texts of Brazilian Modernism.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 7 (2017): 232–249.
Brito, Mário da Silva: Poetas paulistas da Semana de Arte Moderna. São Paulo: Martins, 1972.
Broca, Brito: Futuristas, passadistas, modernistas: Vida literária e anos 20 no Brasil. São Paulo:
Polis, 1979.
Calbucci, Eduardo: “Marinetti e Mário: (Des)conexões entre o ‘Manifesto técnico da literatura futurista’
e o ‘Prefácio Interessantíssimo’.” Revista USP 79 (September–November 2008): 205–214.
Castro, Sílvio: “Futurismo e modernismo brasileiro: Afinidades e discordâncias significativas entre
as duas vanguardas históricas. O modernismo como antifuturismo.” Sandra Bagno, Andréia
Guerini, and Patrica Peterle, eds.: Cem anos de futurismo: Do italiano ao português. Rio de
Janeiro: 7Lettras, 2010. 271–283.
Coelho Florent, Adriana: “ ‘C’est du futurisme, ma chère!’: L’ impact du modernisme sur la
société brésilienne au début du XXe siècle.” Maria Graciete Besse, ed.: Le Futurisme et les
avant-gardes au Portugal et au Brésil. Argenteuil: Convivium Lusophone, 2011. 225–241.
Fabris, Annateresa: “Il ‘futurismo paulista’: Una proposta di analisi.” Campi immaginabili: Rivista
quadrimestrale di cultura (Cosenza) 1–2 (1991): 135–143.
Fabris, Annateresa: “Marinetti e il suo primo ‘sbarco’ in Brasile.” Campi immaginabili: Rivista
quadrimestrale di cultura (Cosenza) 4:11–12 (1994): 105–120.
Fabris, Annateresa: “Modernidade e vanguarda: O caso brasileiro.” A. Fabris, ed.: Modernidade e
modernismo no Brasil. São Paulo: Mercado de Letras. 1994. 9–27.
Fabris, Annateresa, and Mariarosa Fabris: “ ‘C’est trop beau! C’est plus beau que le Bosphore! Pauvre
Stanbul!’: Marinetti e il Brasile visitato ed evocato.” Comunicações e artes: Revista especi-
alizada da Escola de Comunicações e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo 42 (June–August
1999): 142–151.
 Brazil 351

Faria, Maria Alice de Oliveira: “Os modernistas e o futurismo.” Revista de letras (São Paulo) 24
(1984): 25–35.
Ferrua, Pietro: “Futurism in Brazil.” Neohelicon: Acta comparationis litterarum universarum 5:2
(1977): 185–94.
Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de: “Marinetti novamente no Rio.” O jornal (Rio de Janeiro), 11 July 1926.
Reprinted in S. Buarque de Holanda: As raízes de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Rio de Janeiro:
Rocco, 1989. 79–80.
Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de: “Marinetti, homem político.” O jornal (Rio de Janeiro), 13 May 1926.
Reprinted in S. Buarque de Holanda: As raízes de Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Rio de Janeiro:
Rocco, 1989. 75–78.
Mendes de Abreu, Mirhiane: “Between Letters and Memoirs: Behind the Scenes of Futurism in
Brazil.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 7 (2017): 267–287.
Nist, John: The Modernist Movement in Brazil. Austin/TX: University of Texas Press, 1967.
Olea, Héctor: “Ver com olhos livres palavras em liberdade: O futurismo português nos manifestos
oswaldianos.” Kenneth David Jackson, ed.: One Hundred Years of Invention: Oswald de
Andrade and the Modern Tradition in Latin American Literature. Centenary of Oswald de
Andrade. Austin/TX: University of Texas at Austin, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese; Abaporu
Press, 1990. 83–94.
Pasquet, Martine: “Marinetti et la littérature d’avant-garde hispano-américaine.” Jean-Claude Marcadé,
ed.: Présence de F. T. Marinetti. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1982. 353–363.
Peterle, Patricia, and Fernanda Moro Cechinel: “Manifesto futurista no Brasil: Traduções e
polêmicas.” In-Traduções: Revista do Programa de Pós-graduação em Estudos da Tradução da
UFSC 4 (2011): 10–18.
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totalitaires.” Jean-Claude Marcadé, ed.: Présence de F. T. Marinetti. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme,
1982. 346–352.
Rocha, João Cezar de Castro: “O Brasil mítico de Marinetti.” Folha de S. Paulo – Caderno Mais!
12 May 2002. 4–11.
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7 (2003–2004): 56–77.
Rocha, João Cezar de Castro: “Marinetti Goes to South America”: Confrontos e diálogos do futurismo
na América do Sul. Ph.D. Dissertation. Stanford/CA: Stanford University, 2002.
Rocha, João Cezar de Castro, and Jeffrey Schnapp: “As velocidades brasileiras de uma inimizade
desvairada: O (des)encontro de Marinetti e Mário de Andrade em 1926.” Revista brasileira de
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Departamento de Letras da Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa 29 (December 2007): 77–91.
Giuseppe Dell’ Agata
21 Bulgaria
The Futurist circle of Yambol
Bulgaria usually occupies a negligible place in discussions of Italian Futurism and
its spread to other European and non-European countries. Generally, it is limited to
the circumstances that led to the conception of – and the outlining of the main topics
for – one of Marinetti’s major works, Zang tumb tuuum: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912 (Zang
tumb tuuum: Adrianople, October 1912; 1914), which is set in the Bulgarian-Turkish
war of 1912–1913 and is almost unanimously considered to be a masterpiece. The cre-
ativity of its ideas and the configuration of the text reflect the theories concerning
‘Words-in-Freedom’, ‘imagination without strings’ and the ‘destruction of syntax’ that
the author fervently advocated in his struggle against passéism.
In 1922, the city of Yambol became the centre of Marinetti’s profound and direct
attention. Barely eighteen years old, Kiril Krăstev (1904–1991), who was to become a
well-known essayist and art critic, published a translation of a passage from Zang tumb
tuuum and of the manifesto Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numer-
ica (Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility, 1914). At this
time, Yambol was a breeding ground for revolutionary ideas, and young people were
involved in various political parties, from the Social Democrats to the Anarchists and
Communists. For all of them, modernity was embodied by Expressionism and Futur-
ism. Krăstev and the circle of Yambol’s young Modernists invited Geo Milev (pseud. of
Georgi Milev Kasabov, 1895–1925) to hold two lectures on avant-garde tendencies in
literature and in the arts. Captivating a wide audience, Milev spoke on 21 and 22 May
1922 about Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism. Yambol’s young people sent him a
greeting card for his name day, on which the name of the sender was written in Italian:
“Movimento futurista di Yambolì” (Futurist Movement of Yambol). The card was signed
by the circle’s president, Kiril Krăstev, and by its secretary, Vasil Petkov. The latter – a
particularly lively member of the local youth – had visited Italy and had brought back
a “volume of F. T. Marinetti’s book Zang Toumb Toumb” (Krăstev: Spomeni, 39). The
volume contained a photograph of Marinetti in a martial pose with an upturned mous-
tache, which stirred the enthusiasm of the city’s Modernists. The young people began
to meet at night in the city’s park and to reproduce the onomatopoeia of Marinetti’s
text, thus horrifying and frightening the bourgeois residents who lived nearby. The
bullets whizzed, “bam, bam, bam”, the machine guns blasted out their “zang-zang”,
the grenades fell with a thunderous “tumb-tumb” and the cannon’s roar was imitated.
In the spring of 1922, Nikola Mavrodinov (1904–1958) invited Krăstev to edit a
third volume of the journal Lebed (The Swan), published in Gorna Orjahovica. A
large number of the texts sent to Mavrodinov were rejected, but when Lebed came
out on 27 September 1922, it included a revived graphic layout that drew inspiration
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-021
 Bulgaria 353

from Milev’s review Vezni (Scales, 1919–1922), even though a large proportion of the
texts followed, as if by inertia, the sentimental-romantic vein of the preceding issues.
Nevertheless, the issue also contained writing by some of the Yambol Modernists,
Teodor Chakărmov’s lithographs and, above all, the first Bulgarian Dadaist mani-
festo, written by the editor-in-chief, Kiril Krăstev. The text, entitled Neblagodarnost
(Ingratitude), audaciously announced Dada’s vitality and joyous glee and ended with
Blaise Cendrars’s statement, “Poetry is play” (“poésie est en jeu”, in Cendrars: “Au 5
coins”, 270; Krăstev: “Neblagodarnost: Manifest”, 7).
The transformation of Lebed into a trenchant, albeit ephemeral Futurist journal
began with the publication of the 15 November 1922 issue. The journal had changed
its name to the Italian title Crescendo and had a frontispiece that was clearly Futurist
in character. Produced by Krăstev’s cousin Milcho Krachulev (dates unknown), the
frontispiece used Latin letters that increased in size from left to right, drawing on a
graphic technique used in Zang tumb tuuum. The issue, twenty pages in total, con-
tained writing by authors from Sofia and opened with an essay by the most radical
Bulgarian avant-garde artist, Chavdar Mutafov (1889–1954) – architect, prose writer
and founder of the structural analysis of the work of art – entitled “Nevăzmozhnosti”
(Impossibilities) and dedicated to the most famous meeting point of Sofia’s intelli-
gentsia, the restaurant and coffee house Tsar Osvoboditel (The Tsar Liberator). Boian
Danovski (1899–1976), who had studied in Milan and had become Marinetti’s friend,
presented a page with a bilingual title – “Oskverneno svetilishte” (Desecrated Sanc-
tuary) and, in Italian, “Profanazione” (Profanation) – on which some cowboys dese-
crated a monastery and tore the nuns’ clothing off. In addition, the journal contained
a poem by the local Modernist Teodor Draganov (1902–1978), “Vakkhanalna pesen”
(Drinking Song), a translation of Richard Dehmel’s “Mein Trinklied” (My Drinking
Song, 1895), which Geo Milev dedicated to his Yambol friends, and an expressly
Futurist manifesto by Krăstev entitled “Vitrinite” (Shop Windows).
The next and last issue of Crescendo was a double one, number 3–4 of November–
December 1922, consisting of sixteen pages of a considerably larger size. The journal
contained two poems by August Stramm, translated by Milev, Kurt Schwitters’s An
Anna Blume (To Anna Blume, 1919), translated by Petăr Spasov, articles on architecture
by Le Corbusier and Ehrenburg and a brief text by Tristan Tzara on the concept of the
simultaneous poem. Particularly important, from a theoretical point of view, was a long
manifesto essay by Krăstev, entitled Nachaloto na poslednoto (The Beginning of the
End) in which the accurate presentation of various artistic and literary movements such
as Futurism, Simultaneism, Noise Art, Cubism, Imagism and Constructivism was fol-
lowed by a concluding philosophical and visionary passage on the ultimate aim of art:
Krăstev claimed that the ultimate goal of art is the “humanization of formal art” and the
“humanization of the human being itself” (Krăstev: “Nachaloto na poslednoto”, 16).
The central section of the final Crescendo issue (pp. 8–10), entirely devoted to
Marinetti, contained a page which was styled after Zang tumb tuuum and showed the
calligram Indifferenza di due rotondità sospese sole + pallone frenati (Indifference of
354 Giuseppe Dell’ Agata

Two Suspended Rotundities Sun + Balloon Restrained). It is followed by the text of

a manifesto which was thrown from a Bulgarian monoplane on 30 October 1912 to
demand the surrender of the Turkish army, so as to prevent further bloodshed, and a
more accurate translation of Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico than Krăstev’s. As
demonstrated by the use of the French form “courir” and by the fact that Boccioni is
defined as a “molibrist” (for the Italian parolibero, or ‘Free-Word poet’), the text had
clearly been translated from the French (Marinetti: “Geometrichno i mekhanichno
velikolepie”, 8–10). As is well known, Marinetti’s literary manifesto prescribed that
all verbs be in the infinitive, which he defined as “the actual driving force of the new
lyricism” (Marinetti: “Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and Sensitivity Toward
Numbers”, 137). Since the Bulgarian language does not have an infinitive form, the
translator added a playful note, bordering on the pathetic, that stated: “Unfortu-
nately, as is obvious, this cannot be realized in the Bulgarian language” (Crescendo
3–4, p. 9). Furthermore, the Marinettian section contains a portrait of the poet in
profile by the Russian writer, physician and patron of the Futurists, Nikolai Kulbin
(1868–1917). Yambol’s Futurists then sent the two issues (2 and 3–4) of Crescendo to
Milan. Marinetti, who was very flattered, replied with a letter written on the headed
notepaper of Il futurismo: Rivista sintetica (Futurism: A Digest), which was adorned
with the image Pugno di Boccioni (Boccioni’s Fist), designed by Giacomo Balla. In
expressing his gratitude to Yambol’s young people, Marinetti wrote:

My dear Futurist friends,

I was pleased to receive a copy of your beautiful journal Crescendo, with the translation of my
Aéroplane Bulgare and Splendeur géométrique. Thank you with all my heart. I am delighted to
see that you are genuinely Futurist supporters of our movement. Please let me know if Yambol
– Bulgaria is sufficient to write as an address. In any case, I am sending you at this address
some Futurist works and manifestos. I hope to come to Bulgaria in the autumn. I look forward
to meeting you in person and warmly greet you, F. T. Marinetti. (Quoted in Krăstev: Spomeni, 47)

The letter was accompanied by a set of Futurist manifestos, including the Manifesto
of Futurist Painters and Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto by Boccioni, Carrà,
Russolo, Balla and Severini, and by a copy of Les Mots en liberté futuristes (Futurist
Words-in-Freedom, 1919), with the dedication “To Cyrile Kresteff, with Futurist affec-
tion” (Krăstev: Spomeni, 45).

Geo Milev and Futurism

The brief publication history of Lebed / Crescendo and the relationship between
the Yambol Futurists Krăstev and Milev reveal the existence of a specific Bulgarian
interest in Marinetti’s movement. Geo Milev’s famous poem September arguably pre-
sents, alongside its Expressionist structure, numerous features of Futurist poetics.
 Bulgaria 355

The poem was published in September 1924 and was immediately confiscated by the
police. The poet was sentenced to one year in prison and to a fine of twenty thousand
leva. On the following day, using a pretext, a police officer led him to the headquar-
ters of the police force, where the poet was strangled by the Tsankov government’s
torturers.
In the field of twentieth-century Bulgarian poetry, September stands out as an
exceptional and innovative text. It is devoted to the insurrection of the peasants
and working classes, depicted as a blind and desperate revolt of the masses who
are driven by an anarchic and chaotic spontaneity. The poem utilizes montage
and consists of twelve sections of differing lengths: some are more than eighty
lines – mostly brief and made up of just one word – whereas others are shorter.
The various parts of the poem are pieced together as in a collage, showing no
evident continuity of content and following a disjointed and fragmented narra-
tive thread.
The poet Lamar (pseud. of Lalio Marinov Ponchev) recalled that, at the end of
1921, Milev had received from Berlin Mayakovsky’s poem 150 000 000 (1921), which
had inspired him so much that he recited it in Russian, standing with his right arm
raised (Lamar: “[Memoir]”, 311). Milev translated and published several passages of
150 000 000 and also all of Mayakovsky’s poem Pervoe maia! (The First of May!,
1923). Some of the characteristic features of September were clearly taken from it. In
Pervoe maia! Mayakovsky puts eight words into a column, one per line, after the word
“substantives”, and places six adjectives after the word “adjectives”:

Сущесвительные: Мечты. Substantives: Hopes.

Грëзы. Storms.
Народы. Peoples.
Пламя. Flame.
Цветы. Flowers.
Розы. Roses.
Свободы. Freedoms.
Знамя. Flag.
[…] […]
Прилагательные: Красное. Adjectives: Red.
Ясное. Clear.
Вешний. Springlike.
Нездешний. Foreign.
Безбрежныи. Boundless.
Мятежный. Mutinous.

(Maiakovskii: “1a maia!” 42).

An analogous poetic technique – which clearly shows the close relationship between
the two texts – can be observed in the lines of September:
356 Giuseppe Dell’ Agata

с пръти with poles

с копрали with goads
с търнокопи with picks
с вили with pitchforks
с брадви with axes
с топори with hatchets
с коси with scythes
и слънчогледи […] and sunflowers […]

уродливи deformed
сакати crippled
космати long-haired
черни blackened
боси barefooted
изподрани haggard
прости uneducated
диви untamed
гневни enraged
бесни […] frenzied […]

(Milev: Septemvri: Poema, 50).

Although the technique of arranging the lines in the form of a ‘ladder’ – which is
typical of Mayakovsky – is used only twice in September, both cases are nevertheless
very significant:

скот като скот: a rabble of brutes:

хиляди thousands
маса a mass
народ multitudes

изтракаха пушки the rifles rattled

Ку Ku
Клъкс Klux
Клян Klan

(Milev: Septemvri: Poema, 65).

In “Marsileza” (The Marseillaise), a section of Milev’s “Grozni prozi” (Ugly Prose,

1924), the narration of an attack upon the editorial office of Die rote Fahne (The Red
Flag) is suddenly fractured into an onomatopoeic ‘ladder’ as well:
 Bulgaria 357

Хряс- Rat-at
ссссссссс -- Ratatatat --
рррррр […] Rrrrrr […]

(Milev: “Marsileza”, 84).

In this case, the onomatopoeia is composed of six horizontal r letters that reproduce
the crackling of the machine guns used by the militant Communists in Berlin to
defend the building. In Zang tumb tuuum, Marinetti used the same technique and
repeated the letter forty-two times:

1000 m. biplano bulgaro molle velluto del 1000 m. Bulgarian biplane drenched velvet
suo russare russarrrrr of its snore snorrrrre
rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

(Marinetti: “Zang tumb tuuum”, 585).

Therefore, as shown by these references to Mayakovsky (Russian Futurism) and Mari-

netti (Italian Futurism), it is possible to ascertain that the poem September exhib-
ited some of the most established Futurist and, obviously, Expressionist traits. In
November 1912, Milev enrolled at the Faculty of Philosophy in Leipzig and became
interested in Herwarth Walden’s avant-garde journal Der Sturm (The Storm, 1910–
1932), in which Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism and the Manifesto
of Futurist Painting had been published in March of the same year. Milev’s library
still contains a copy of Les Mots en liberté futuristes, which bears his handwritten
signature on the cover. Todor Genov (1903–1988) recalls that Geo was known to be an
“unrestrained Futurist, intolerant of the opinion of others” (Genov: “[Memoir]”, 377),
and the poet Dora Gabe (1886–1983), when remembering the visit she paid in 1919 to
Geo Milev in Sofia, wrote that she was impressed by the cushions with Futurist deco-
rations in his apartment. Mila apparently told her: “This is Futurism, the most fash-
ionable style in Germany and, in general, all over the Western world! We have brought
them from there” (Gabe: “[Memoir]”, 303). In issue 11 (1920) of his journal Vezni, Milev
had also published a photograph of Luigi Russolo’s Futurist painting Dinamismo di un
treno (Dynamism of a Train, 1912).
While it is certainly true that many of the Futuristic stylistic features in Septem-
ber were drawn from Russian Futurism and that, as Marinetti argued, “Futurism was
introduced to Bulgaria through the translations of Mayakovsky’s poems” (Marinetti:
La grande Milano, 333), it is also true that Milev was familiar at an early date with
Marinetti’s writings and that some features of his poem are reminiscent of Marinettian
techniques.
358 Giuseppe Dell’ Agata

Other Bulgarian poets: Lamar and Danovski

Lamar (pseud. of Laliu Marinov Ponchev, 1898–1974) was a poet particularly akin to
the later Milev. The brief collections of poems entitled Arena (1922) and Zhelezni ikoni
(Iron Icons, 1927) clearly showed both Marinettian and Russian stylistic features. On
the formal level, the poems were characterized by a lack of punctuation and by lines
composed of just one word, whereas the content was marked by a passionately anar-
chic, deliberately anti-aesthetic spirit, by the overturning of traditional poetic values
and by an overall compliance with the ‘barbarization’ of Bulgarian poetry that Milev
advocated (see Milev: “Poeziiata na mladite”).
Another remarkable poet, writer, translator (mainly from Italian), literary critic
and theatre director was Boian Ivanov Danovski (1899–1976). From 1919 to 1921, while
studying engineering and music in Milan, he became acquainted and started associ-
ating with Marinetti. He attended Marinetti’s public readings of the poem Zang tumb
tuuum and became passionate about Futurist poetics. Upon his return to Sofia, he
assiduously collaborated with Geo Milev’s journal Vezni and, afterwards, with Khi-
perion (Hyperion). In 1922 he published in the latter journal an article entitled “Futur-
izăm” (Futurism), in which he argued that it was born out of the contradiction between
traditional sentimental literature and the irruption of modernity brought about by the
machine and the increased speed of life. He acknowledged the influence of Futurism
on his work and argued that, in spite of the fact that the movement had been brought
to an end by the Great War, the various revolutionary aspects it contained were still
convincing (Danovski: “Futurizăm”, 433–435). His brief “Oskvărneno svetilishte –
Profanazione” (Desecrated Sanctuary – Profanation), undeniably Futurist in tone,
was published in the second issue of Crescendo. The following year, while Danovski
was abroad, Milev published, with an Italian title, his Quasi una fantasia (Almost a
Fantasy), which contained an interesting “Sinfoniia na vinnite pari” (Symphony of
the Vine Vapours).
From 1925, Danovski worked in Rome and had close relations with the Futurist
sympathizer Anton Giulio Bragaglia, who invited him to give a lecture on Bulgarian
contemporary poetry in his Teatro degli Indipendenti. When Danovski started speak-
ing about how Geo Milev had been murdered by the police of the Tsankov govern-
ment, a few dissenting and provocative voices, obviously political in tone, rose from
the audience. Bragaglia was enraged and managed to silence the provocateurs.
Danovski also recalled attending a performance of Marinetti’s Vulcano at the Teatro
Valle, premièred by Pirandello’s company on 31 March 1926, and described, many
years later, the repeated clashes which had taken place between Marinetti and the
youths in the upper gallery and had led to the suspension of the performance. During
his stay in Rome, he was engaged in clandestine activities. He travelled frequently to
Albania and was involved in the preparations for guerrilla warfare planned by the
irredentist Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. When the Bulgarian
Secretary General of the World Committee Against War and Fascism, Georgi Dimitrov
 Bulgaria 359

(1882–1949), was put on trial in Leipzig (20 September – 23 December 1933) for an
alleged plot to set the German Reichstag on fire, Danovski accompanied and inter-
preted for Dimitrov’s mother and sister. He became one of the most important Bul-
garian theatre directors and promoted the methods of Bertolt Brecht (whom he met
in Germany) and those very different ones of Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vsevolod
Meyerhold. After the Second World War, he became the cornerstone of Bulgarian
drama, directed several theatres and was a lecturer at VITIZ (Vissh Institut za teatral-
noto izkustvo, the Higher Institute of Theatre Arts). Many of his students still remem-
ber him with veneration.

Marinetti in Sofia (1932) and its repercussions

in Bulgarian painting
Marinetti’s visit to Bulgaria occurred ten years after the Crescendo episode when, in
1932, he was invited by the Bulgarian section of the PEN Club to hold two lectures
in Sofia. He arrived in January and was met at the station by, among others, Alek-
sandăr Balabanov (1879–1955), Chavdar Mutafov and Vladimir Polianov (pseud.
of Vladimir-Georgii Ivanov, 1899–1988). He immediately asked whether he could
meet Krăstev. The latter attended the lectures, which were held in French at the
Royal Theatre, and was fascinated by Marinetti’s extraordinary mimicry and vocal
performance techniques. After Marinetti’s recitation of a passage from Zang tumb
tuuum, the audience cheered and applauded so much that the theatre was shaking.
Surrounded by a crowd of enthusiastic admirers, Balabanov introduced Krăstev to
Marinetti as one of his Futurist followers in Sofia. The journal Zlatorog (The Golden
Horn) published an anonymous note, which can be attributed to the painter and
co-editor-in-chief, Sirak Skitnik (pseud. of Panaiot Todorov Khristov, 1883–1943). It
emphasized the way Marinetti had charmed and mesmerized a chiefly conservative
and traditionalist audience which was unfamiliar with the allures of Futurism. The
note underlined the historical importance of the break with tradition put forth by
Italian Futurism and argued that, even though the artistic outcomes of the Words-
in-Freedom turned out to be, to a large extent, rather modest, some of the basic
theses, such as the idea of life’s new dynamism, the mechanization of art and the
destruction of the ‘I’, were still convincing.
During Marinetti’s stay in Sofia, the Italiansko-bălgarsko spisanie (Italo-Bulgarian
Journal), directed by Enrico Damiani (1892–1953), published an informative and
well-balanced article on Marinetti, written by the Italianist Petăr Dragoev, followed
by Dragoev’s translation of Bombardamento di Adrianopoli (The Bombardment of
Adrianople, 1912). Although correct in substance, the translation almost entirely
avoided graphic effects such as the use of different characters and the non-linear
arrangement of the words of the original text. After the lectures, Marinetti was invited
360 Giuseppe Dell’ Agata

to several literary gatherings, among which was one in the home of the writer Anna
Kamenova (1894–1982). Ten years later, Marinetti would recall his encounters in Sofia
with the following words:

the poetess [Elisaveta] Bagriana depicts with sparkling and lively comments the original traits of
her country’s poetry in Mrs [Anna] Kamenova’s home a most noteworthy literary salon
I am introduced to [Vladimir] Vassilev the director of the most important journal The Golden
Horn [Zlatorog] where the first very accurate translation of the Bombardment of Adrianople made
by the young Bulgarian poet [Petăr] Uvaliev was published
I am also introduced to the brilliant Bulgarian Futurists
Nikolai Marangozov author of “Ode to my simultaneous lover” [Oda na moiata mnogo-
lika liubovnitsa] and [Nikolai] Rainov author of Conversations with Verlaine Marinetti Mayak-
ovsky Yesenin.
(Marinetti: La grande Milano, 334)

Marinetti included Marangozov (Nikolai Tsanev Neikov, 1900–1967) among the group
of Futurist writers following a principle already employed in Le Futurisme mondial
(World-Wide Futurism, 1924), which sought to emphasize the primogeniture of Futur-
ism within the historical avant-gardes. The word ‘mnogolika’ in the title of the poem
in question, Oda na moiata mnogolika liubovnitsa (Ode to My Protean Lover), however,
does not mean ‘simultaneous’ but ‘manifold’: all the women that Marangozov had
loved merged into one ideal virtual lover. The simultaneity perceived by Marinetti
was instrumental for the definition of Marangozov as one of the “brilliant Bulgarian
Futurists”. Yet even as early as 1923, in his collection of poems entitled Nula: Khuli-
ganski elegii (Zero: Hooligan Elegies), Marangozov had already expressed a disruptive
avant-garde violence which, in a way, combined Expressionism with Futurism. Milev
edited the volume and praised its harsh and anti-aesthetic lines as a “barbarism” that
“injects life into dead poetry” (Milev: “Poeziiata na mladite”, p. 70).
In Marinetti’s recollections, considerable attention is paid to the painter, writer
and literary critic Sirak Skitnik:

Italian theorizations involuntarily generate what can be termed the primo-passismo [‘taking the
first step’, or ‘trailblazing’] of the Bulgarian painter poet and literary critic Sirak Skitnik who
anxiously reveals general ideas
The latter is fascinated by the innovative boldness of other countries and immediately
praises them depicts with geniality and polemic vigour and propagandistic passion […]
The primo-passista [‘trailblazer’] Sirak Skitnik has also expressed his admiration for the
Futurist costumes realized in Paris by Prampolini and worn by a beautiful Bulgarian dancer who
proves the triumph of the Words-in-Freedom and of Parisian Futurist stage design. (Marinetti: La
grande Milano, 333–334)

In an insightful review, written from a Modernist-Expressionist perspective, Geo

Milev had argued in 1921 that Sirak Skitnik was “almost the only exponent of the new
tendencies in painting” (Milev: “Iubileina izlozhba”, 266). According to Milev, this
painter was already on the way to Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism, even though
 Bulgaria 361

his work still showed Neo-Impressionist traits, a modernized Primitivism and an illus-
trative-decorative tendency of Russian origin. Sirak Skitnik had studied painting in
Russia (1908–1912) under Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, had close relationships with Soiuz
molodezhi (Union of Youth), the Modernist group from Saint Petersburg, with the
Russian avant-garde painters who were acquainted with the Italian Futurists and with
Boccioni in particular. He was also a member of the Mir iskusstva (World of Art) circle
in Saint Petersburg. After Marinetti’s lectures in Sofia, Sirak Skitnik executed a cycle
of paintings in openly Futurist colours, some of which he later revised and re-painted
in oil, a fact that is rightly interpreted by Emiliia Georgieva as a resurgence of his
Russian experience (Georgieva: “Marineti”, 216). Thus, by interrelating Milev’s view
and Marinetti’s words, we can attempt to interpret the neologism “primo-passista”
and to see Sirak as the painter who had made the ‘first steps’ towards leaving tradi-
tional painting behind, particularly, in Milev’s opinion, Neo-Symbolism.
Zhorzh (Georgi) Papazov (1894–1972) was another noteworthy painter of distinc-
tive originality and remarkable expressive power. Publicly acknowledged by Marinetti
as “Papazoff: avanguardisti e futuristi bulgari” (Papazoff, belonging to the Bulgarian
avant-gardists and Futurists), he spent a large part of his life in France (Krăstev: Zhorzh
Papazov, 31). In February 1934, Papazov presented sixty oil paintings and fifty etch-
ings in the Il Milione art gallery in Milan. Marinetti arrived by aircraft and held a bril-
liant lecture on this painter, whom he characterized, due to his peculiar and dynamic
sensibility, as a Futurist. However, the critic Andrei Nakov defined him as a “Surrealist
maverick” (Nakov: Papazoff: Franc-tireur du surréalisme), while others considered him
a “Surrealist painter before Surrealism” (Crespelle: Montparnasse vivant, 193).

A Bulgarian Futurist in Italy: Diulgheroff

The multifaceted artistic activities of Nikolay Diulgheroff (born as Nikolai Diulgerov,
1901–1982), who spent a large part of his life in Turin, were, on the contrary, fully
and proudly Futurist. After having studied in Vienna, Dresden and at the Weimar
Bauhaus, and thus receiving a substantial Constructivist education, he exhibited
his paintings in Sofia in 1924 and moved to Turin in 1926. He graduated in architec-
ture from the Accademia Albertina and developed a close relationship with Fillìa
(pseud. of Luigi Enrico Colombo, 1904–1936) and with the Turin Futurist group. He
enjoyed the patronage of Fillìa and Marinetti, and exhibited his paintings in many
Italian cities, in France, Russia, Germany and Turkey and, in the 1930s, actively
took part in developing the new aeropittura aesthetics of the Futurist movement.
From the 1930s he devoted himself to architectural planning, interior design,
collages and publicity posters. His aluminium cartelli lanciatori (advertising bill-
boards) became very famous and substantially contributed to changing the features
of urban design.
362 Giuseppe Dell’ Agata

Works cited
Cendrars, Blaise: “Aux 5 coins.” B. Cendrars: Complete Poems. Berkeley/CA: University of California
Press, 1993. 270.
Crespelle, Jean-Paul: Montparnasse vivant. Paris: Hachette, 1962.
Danovski, Boian: “Futurizăm.” Hyperion 1:6-7 (1922): 433–435.
Danovski, Boian: “Oskvărneno svetilishte – Profanazione.” [Desecrated Sanctuary – Profanation]
Crescendo 1:2 (October 1922): 6.
Danovski, Boian: Q uasi una fantasia. Sofiia: Vezni, 1920.
Draganov, Teodor: “Vakkhanalna pesen.” [Drinking Song] Crescendo 1:2 (October 1922): 13.
Gabe, Dora: “[Memoir].” Georgi Janev, Leda Mileva, and Ivan Granitski, eds.: Geo Milev v spomenite
na săvremennitsite si. Sofiia: Zacharii Stoianov, 2009. 303–305.
Genov, Todor: “[Memoir].” Georgi Janev, Leda Mileva, and Ivan Granitski, eds.: Geo Milev v
spomenite na săvremennitsite si. Sofiia: Zacharii Stoianov, 2009. 373–380.
Georgieva, Emiliia: “Marinetti i bălgarskie pisateli.” [Marinetti and Bulgarian Writers] Panteleĭ
Zarev, Donka Petkanova, and Vladimir Grăncharov, eds.: Vtori mezhdunaroden kongres
po Bălgaristika, Sofiia, 23 maĭ – 3 iuni 1986 g. Vol. 13. Prevod i retseptsiia na bălgarskata
literatura v chuzhbina i na chuzdestrannata literatura v Bălgariia. [Second International
Congress of Bulgarian Studies, Sofia, 23 May –3 June 1986. Vol. 13. The Translation and
Reception of Bulgarian Literature Abroad and Foreign Literature in Bulgaria] Sofiia: Bălgarska
akademiia na naukite, 1989. 205–221.
Krăstev, Kiril: “Nachaloto na poslednoto.” [The Beginning of the End] Crescendo 1:3–4
(November–December 1922): 12–16.
Krăstev, Kiril: “Neblagodarnost: Manifest.” [Ingratitude: A Manifesto] Lebed [The Swan] 3:1
(September 1922): 5–7.
Krăstev, Kiril: Spomeni za kulturniia zhivot mezhdu dvete svetovni voini. [Memories of Cultural Life
between the Two World Wars] Sofiia: Bălgarski pisatel, 1988.
Krăstev, Kiril: Zhorzh Papazov. Sofiia: Bălgarski khudozhnik, 1987.
Lamar [pseud. of Lalio Marinov]: “[Memoir].” Georgi Janev, Leda Mileva, and Ivan Granitski,
eds.: Geo Milev v spomenite na săvremennitsite si. Sofiia: Zacharii Stoianov, 2009.
309–322.
Maiakovskii, Vladimir: “1-e Maia.” [First of May] V. Maiakovskii: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii.
[Complete Works] Vol. 5. Moskva: Goslitizdat, 1957. 42–44.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Geometrichno i mekhanichno velikolepie.” Crescendo 1:3–4
(November–December 1922): 8–10. English translation “Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor
and Sensitivity Toward Numbers.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 135–142.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Zang tumb tuuum. Milano: Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”, 1914.
Reprinted in F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano:
Mondadori, 1968. 559–710.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista: Una sensibilità italiana nata
in Egitto. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1969.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Zang tumb tuuum. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1914.
Milev, Geo: “Grozni prozi.” [Ugly Prose] Plamăk [The Flame] 1:3 (March 1924): 81–86.
Milev, Geo: “Iubileina izlozhba.” G. Milev: Pătiat na svobodata [The Path to Freedom]. Sofiia:
Stoianov, 2002. 263–269.
Milev, Geo: “Marsileza.” [The Marseillaise] Plamăk [The Flame] 1:3 (March 1924): 83–84.
Milev, Geo: “Poeziiata na mladite.” Plamăk [The Flame] 1:2 (February 1924): 67–70.
Milev, Geo: Pătiat na svobodata [The Path to Freedom]. Sofiia: Stoianov, 2002.
 Bulgaria 363

Milev, Geo: Septemvri: Poema [September: Poem]. Sofiia: Bălgarski pisatel, 1965.
Nakov, Andrei B.: Papazoff: Franc-tireur du surréalisme. Bruxelles: La Connaissance, 1973.

Further reading
Crescendo 1:1 (September 1922) – 1:3–4 (November–December 1922).
Crispolti, Enrico: “Nicolai Djulgheroff.” E. Crispolti: Il secondo futurismo: Torino 1923–1938. Torino:
Pozzo, 1961. 189–213.
Danovski, Boian: Krăstopătishta [Crossroads]. Sofiia: Nauka i Izkustvo, 1988.
Danovski, Boian: Ot dvete strani na zavesata: Teatralni spomeni [On Either Side of the Curtain:
Theatrical Memoirs]. Sofiia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1969.
Dell’ Agata, Giuseppe: “Bojan Danovski e la cultura italiana.” Études balkaniques 50:2 (2014): 101–111.
Dell’ Agata, Giuseppe: “Marineti, bălgarskiiat ‘Futurizăm’ i poemata ‘Septemvri’ na Geo Milev.”
[Marinetti, Bulgarian “Futurism” and the Poem “September” by Geo Milev] Literaturen vestnik
[Literary Journal] 14 (2010): 9–11.
Dell’ Agata, Giuseppe: “Marinetti, il ‘futurismo’ bulgaro e il poema ‘Settembre’ di Geo Milev.”
Giovanna Tomassucci, and Massimo Tria, eds.: Gli altri futurismi: Futurismi e movimenti
d’avanguardia in Russia, Polonia, Cecoslovacchia, Bulgaria e Romania. Pisa: Plus 2010. 23–36.
Dimitrova, Tatiana, and Irina Genova, eds.: Nepoznatiiat Sirak Skitnik [Unknown Sirak Skitnik].
Sofiia: Bălgarski khudozhnik; Kultura, 1993.
Diulgheroff, Nicolay [Nicola Diulgerov]: “Il mio primo incontro con F. T. Marinetti.” Simultaneità:
Periodico trimestrale 2:2–3 (1998): 73–77.
Dragoev, Petăr: “Marinetti i negoviia futurizăm.” [Marinetti and His Futurism] Italo-bălgarsko
spisanie [Italo-Bulgarian Magazine] 1–2 (1932): 55–63.
Fillía [pseud. of Luigi Enrico Colombo]: Diulgheroff, pittore futurista: Studio critico. Torino: Edizioni
d’Arte “La città futurista”, 1929. Reprint Firenze: Studio per Edizioni Scelte, 1989.
Genova, Irina: “The Hybrid Artistic Identity: Nicolay Diulgheroff and the Second Phase of the Italian
Futurist Movement.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 1 (2011): 323–342.
Genova, Irina, ed.: Nikolai Diulgerov = Nikolay Diulgheroff = Nikolay Diulgheroff. Exhibition
catalogue. Roma: Accademia Santa Cecilia, Auditorium Parco della Musica, 7 novembre – 7
dicembre 2008; Torino: Politecnico di Torino, 27 maggio – 12 giugno 2009; Sofiia: Gradskata
gradina / City Garden, 23 iuni – 23 avgust 2009; Sofiia: Letishte Sofiia, Terminal 2, 25 noemvri
2009 – 28 mart 2010. Sofiia: Ministerstvo na kulturata & Ministerstvo na vãnshnite raboti;
Roma: Ministero della Cultura & Ministero degli Affari Esteri, 2008.
Georgieva, Emiliia: “Un dialogo Sirak Skitnik – Marinetti.” Terzo occhio: Trimestrale d’arte contem-
poranea 25:1 (#90) (March 1999): 14–15.
Georgieva, Emiliia: Futurizmite v izkustvoto na Nikolai Diulgerov [Futurisms in the Art of Nikolai
Diulgerov]. Sofiia: Bălgarski khudozhnik, 2005.
Gospodinov, Georgi: “Minaloto e pălno s futurizăm.” [The Past Is Full of Futurism] L’ Europeo:
Dvumesechno izdanie [The European: Two-month Edition] 27 (August–September 2012): 144–152.
Iliev, Klasimir, and Plamen V. Petrov, eds.: Sirak Skitnik: 130 godini ot rozhdenieto na Sirak Skitnik
[130 Years since the Birth of Sirak Skitnik]. Exhibition catalogue. Sofiia: Sofiiska Gradska
Khudozhestvena Galeriia, dekembri 2013 – mart 2014. Sofiia: Multiprint, 2014.
Krăstev, Kiril: Sirak Skitnik, 1883–1943: 10 izbrani zhivopisni tvorbi. Papkata e posvetena na
100-godishninata ot rozhdenieto na khudozhnika [Sirak Skitnik, 1883–1943: 10 Selected
Paintings Dedicated to the 100th Anniversary of the Artist’s Birth]. Sofiia: Bălgarski
khudozhnik, 1983.
364 Giuseppe Dell’ Agata

Krăstev, Kiril: Sirak Skitnik: Chovekăt, poetăt, khudozhnikăt, kririkăt, teatralăt [Sirak Skitnik: The
Man, the Poet, the Artist, the Critic, the Theater]. Sofiia: Bălgarski khudozhnik, 1974.
2nd edn 1983.
Lebed: Literaturno-khudozhestveno spisanie [The Swan: A Literary-Artistic Magazine] 1:1–3
(Mai – November 1921) – 3:1 (September 1922).
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il pittore bulgaro Papazoff.”] Stile futurista 2:11–12
(September 1935): 18.
Nacheva, Gergana: “Varvarin-razrushitel v poeziiata na Lamar: ‘Arena’ i ‘zhelezni ikoni’.” [The
Barbarian Destroyer in Lamar’s Poetry: “Arena” and “Iron Icons”] Nauchni trudove na
Rusenskiia Universitet [Scientific Papers of Ruse University] 49 (2010): 78–82.
Pinottini, Marzio, ed.: Diulgheroff futurista: Collages e polimaterici, 1927–1977. Milano: All’Insegna
del Pesce d’Oro, 1977.
Greg Dawes
22 Chile
While it is true that the historical avant-garde per se had a significant and lasting
impact in Chile, affecting artists, poets and novelists alike, such was not the case
of Futurism. Roberto Matta (1911–2002), Pablo Neruda (1904–1973), Vicente Huidobro
(1893–1948), Juan Emar (1893–1964), Pablo de Rokha (1894–1968), María Luisa Bombal
(1910–1980), Juan Marín (1900–1963) and even writers who were less overtly avant-
gardist, such as Pedro Prado (1886–1952) and Juan Guzmán Cruchaga (1895–1979),
were influenced by the avant-garde movements. However, in surveying the literary
field, it becomes apparent that Futurism’s impact in Chile was almost entirely nega-
tive or, as Roberto Schwarz has put it in regard to the Brazilian context, amounted to
a “misplaced idea” (Schwarz: Misplaced Ideas, 19–32). Huidobro, the only fervent and
eloquent advocate of Futurism and a consummate champion of the aesthetic revolu-
tion in Chile in the early part of the twentieth century, announced in 1914, in typical
avant-gardist fashion, that Italian Futurism was passé, and even claimed that it had
Latin American roots (Costa: Vicente Huidobro: Poesía y política, 37–39).
Futurism’s impact on the Chilean literary scene, then, was ambivalent from
the beginning. As we shall see, although several writers were clearly affected in
one way or another by the avant-garde and were, at least tangentially, influenced
by Futurism (for example, in their use of technological imagery and adherence to
an ethos of modernity), they never fully embraced its methods or its promise. Even
a cursory reading of their works makes it clear that in the midst of the Industrial
Revolution, Chile’s rural scenery, people and customs continued to hold sway over
these writers (Concha: “Función histórica”). In the wake of the First World War,
despite the revolutionary uprisings in 1918–1919, the hyperinflation period of 1923
and the great depression in 1929, Europe could still boast a standard of living and
an accompanying economic development that would be hard to discern in Santiago.
The same could be said about American prosperity relative to Chilean development
in those early decades of the twentieth century. Comparatively speaking, Chile had
important advantages over other Latin American countries in terms of raw materials
and resources in general, but the fact remained that this southern cone nation was
still heavily shaped by rural life in the 1930s.
Nonetheless, avant-garde writers in Chile were unquestionably familiar with
and exposed to modernization and its effects in the cities – Santiago, Concepción,
Valparaíso and Iquique. Many of them were in touch with anarchist organizations
whose ideas about art dovetailed with those of the avant-garde, whose search for the
unknown in culture went hand in hand with destroying the old and creating the new
(Poggioli: Theory of the Avant-Garde, 26–37). Neo-Romantic at heart, left-libertarian
thought provided artists and writers alike with a prophetic rôle, aesthetic freedom and
ideas about a future egalitarian society. These aesthetic and political ideas circulated
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-022
366 Greg Dawes

not only in urban areas, but also made forays into the rural and semi-urban environ-
ments. It therefore comes as no surprise that they took hold among Chilean writers,
who denounced the excesses of capitalist modernization, without however abandon-
ing their support for progress and technological innovation. More importantly, they
did not relinquish their ties to rural Chile because they could place their faith in an
anarchist-inspired agrarian communalism. This was true of avant-gardists in general
and those most influenced by Futurism in particular.

Pablo de Rokha
Perhaps no other literary figure represents this contradictory situation and the second
phase of Futurism better than the poet Pablo de Rokha (pseud. for Carlos Díaz Loyola,
1894–1968). As Fidel Sepúlveda Llanos notes, “his tenderness and violence, his indi-
vidualism and socialism, his Futurist and nostalgic views, his temporality and eternal
charm, his atheism and scatologicalism, his happiness and bitterness, his solidarity
and solitude” were a contradictory and yet essential part of who he was (Sepúlveda
Llanos: “Pablo de Rokha, una forma poética”, 695). And so, too, was his relationship
with Futurism, as a reading of his magnum opus, Los gemidos (Howls, 1922) readily
confirms. This book of poetry also affirms the tensions between the countryside
(where Rokha was born and grew up) and the city (Santiago), idealizing the former
somewhat nostalgically while condemning the latter for increasing social problems.
Yet it was in the Chilean capital that he conceived and wrote Los gemidos under the
clear influence of anarchist and avant-gardist ideas (Nómez: “Prólogo: Invitación al
lector”, 6). Its publication date coincides with the dystopian element in the second
phase of the Futurist movement and the waning years of Expressionism, and these
movements had an impact on Los gemidos, along with anti-poetry and Surrealism.
Intended to be an all-encompassing lyrical hymn with a first-person subject who is
simultaneously poet and prophet, this work deals with the United States as bastion
and bane due to its technological development, the human struggle with God and
Satan, the overpowering influence of death on all creatures, the nature of utopias in
general and the sea in particular, and the poet’s life.
Indeed, as the section dedicated to the United States (“Yanquilandia”, or Yan-
keeland) indicates, this North American country represents the epitome of the
excesses of technology in modern societies. Thomas Edison, for instance, is associ-
ated with “the customary, the specific, the vulgar” and “mechanical and methodical
reason”, and he is finally considered an “admirable and infallible machine” himself
(Rokha: Los gemidos, 33). According to the speaker, Edison resembles the common
citizen in the United States who lives “mechanically” (Rokha: Los gemidos, 34) in as
much as machines suffuse everyday life there, creating a deadening existence com-
pensated for by volumes of money (Rokha: Los gemidos, 34). As such, the speaker por-
 Chile 367

trays the United States as the “thermometer, chronometer, barometer of the twentieth
century” (Rokha: Los gemidos, 38) and, consequently, as emblematic of modernity
per se. This hyper-modernity contrasts with the organic Nature that Walt Whitman
extolled. Paradoxically, then, Whitman serves as an antidote in the book to the mad
rush to industrialize and seems to offer a solution to the societal quagmire the U.S.
faced in the early part of the twentieth century.
And yet, Rokha was not so quick to dismiss modern society in one fell swoop.
He described himself as the “mechanical singer of the future” whose duty it was to
denounce the upper classes who exploit the working masses (Rokha: Los gemidos, 41).
In that sense, although Americans are reduced to the status of commodities with
their “funereal souls”, there still seems to be a ray of hope (Rokha: Los gemidos, 42).
Although more acerbic criticism of corporate and individual greed follows as well as
the condemnation of its alienating results, the poet seems to suggest they should at
least provide Chile with a social alternative (by way of negation).
As the next (untitled) section of the book makes clear, Chile appears to be imi-
tating the U.S. in myriad ways. Here, too, the speaker points to the contrast between
benign rural life and the onslaught of modernity (the multitudes, the urbanization,
crime, the exploitation and the wealthy beneficiaries; Rokha: Los gemidos, 71). Over-
seeing this “cynical horror”, notes the bard, are the financiers, the utilitarian way of
life and the tragic exaltation of the present (Rokha: Los gemidos, 76). However, amidst
the “horror” he witnesses, the speaker points to possible agents of social change (who
he calls “heroes”) whose actions and words could possibly provide some optimism
(Rokha: Los gemidos, 76). Nonetheless, this sliver of hope does not lead to anything
but the speaker’s own misery (Rokha: Los gemidos, 104).
If anarchists, socialists and communists cannot act as agents of change and
alter the current state of affairs, then perhaps God could provide salvation to suffer-
ing souls. A section dedicated to this topic reveals the speaker’s struggles with his
faith. Although he affirms the Creator’s existence by naming Him, he also questions
whether He exists and whether His purpose is beneficial to humankind (Rokha: Los
gemidos, 148). In line with the second generation of Italian Futurists, then, Rokha
searches for meaning in life all the while highlighting angst and scepticism during
the machine age.
This leads the speaker to renew his critique of modernity in the following section.
In his despair he states that only by planting bombs here and there in modernity’s
epicentres could one hope to get rid of industrialization’s nefarious effects (Rokha:
Los gemidos, 152). Yet that is no more a solution than yearning to return to the coun-
tryside, as he notes sarcastically (Rokha: Los gemidos, 165). All that is left is a tragic
(and thus unsolvable) juxtaposition of the “humble agrarian voice” and the “Satanic
vinegar of the city” (Rokha: Los gemidos, 165). And this leads inexorably to the decline
of Pablo de Rokha (the speaker) in the modernizing and yet decaying city (Rokha: Los
gemidos, 168). This paradox is captured in these salient lines: “Great machines, oh!
great machines, oh! great Futurist machines, events born of the subterranean womb
368 Greg Dawes

of that other great SAD machine: man” (Rokha: Los gemidos, 209). Human beings
are capable of creating technological marvels, but only at the cost of destruction,
exploitation and melancholy.
Rokha’s Los gemidos ends with an eclogue to the Chilean countryside, where a
less modern technology coexists with nature’s splendour. However, as he observed
before, rural life has now been eclipsed by modernity, and all that is left is this “sin-
ister” and “macabre” world (Rokha: Los gemidos, 345). And yet the speaker views life
somewhat positively because he is a product of this industrial age and possesses “the
great madness of beauty” (Rokha: Los gemidos, 346). And so concludes this major
avant-gardist work, with its occasional references to modernity’s positive contribu-
tions and many, biting critiques of its extremes.

Juan Emar
A similar case, at least with regard to the inflections rather than to the fully-fledged
presence of Futurism, is Juan Emar (pseud. of Alvaro Yáñez Bianchi, 1893–1964). A
writer and painter, Emar used technological imagery as a vehicle for exploration while
also condemning modernity’s homogeneity and monotony. As a self-proclaimed out-
sider, he was able to level critiques at the traditional political powers via allegory
and iconoclastic formal devices. Emar’s short stories and novels show, both in form
and content, life as fragmented yet loosely tied together, irrational, absurd and
dependent on chance. Using rhetorical weapons such as humour, irony, sarcasm and
disdain, Emar poked fun at literary and political traditions in Chile in the 1930s, a
period shaped by the dictatorship of Carlos Ibáñez (1927–1931). In that regard, Emar’s
denunciation of tradition dovetailed with his critique of the dictatorship. The military
government stifled modernity and literary representation, so the outsider’s appropri-
ate aesthetic response was to undermine reigning political and literary discourse via
avant-garde themes and techniques.
Two of Emar’s most salient books, Un año (A Year, 1934) and Miltín (Miltin, 1934),
show a strong avant-gardist sway and Futurist inspiration. In the first of these novels,
the protagonist views his friend’s funeral procession from inside a colonial house
with its barred windows and cloistered quarters. In essence, according to Patricio
Lizama’s incisive study, Emar describes the state of the artist, art and modernity in
allegorical terms. Trapped in a pre-modern setting and restricted by the social con-
straints in 1930s Chile, the narrator-protagonist can only watch modernity march
by (Lizama: “Un año de Juan Emar”, 97–98). He observes the “great, large, imposing
Cossacks” who ride “gigantic black horses”, yet he is incapable of describing or par-
ticipating in the event due to semi-colonial, pre-modern circumstances in which he
and Chile find themselves (Emar: Un año, 32). Symbolized by the Cossacks – that is
anti-revolutionary forces – and by the black horses, the Ibañez dictatorship comes to
 Chile 369

represent the quintessence of Tradition. As Lizama notes, Emar seems to suggest that,
under these circumstances, art is confined to mimicking pre-modern social condi-
tions, which restrict the artist’s freedom and his ability to see beyond the limits of the
closed and authoritarian national situation (Lizama: “Un año Juan Emar”, 98). The
funeral procession, then, turns out to be a rendering of the fall of traditional society
and of the Ibáñez government.
The novel’s plot and references reinforce this point. On the one hand, the pro-
tagonist seems to be obsessed with precise dates and numbers (and multiples of
numbers), which are cited hyperbolically and whimsically and appear to be tied to
the rigidity of the society under the dictatorship. At the beginning of the novel, for
instance, the narrator notes an absurd scene in which his reading of Don Quixote is
interrupted fourteen times in a row by another gentleman (Emar: Un año, 15). By the
end of this entry (1 February), the protagonist states in a playful and ironic tone that
he “repeated the experience. It didn’t work out. I repeated it fourteen times in a row.
Now you know what the number fourteen means to me. I didn’t try it a fifteenth time,
which doesn’t mean that today wasn’t worthy of being lived” (Emar: Un año, 22). The
playful tone and absurd example lead the reader to question and make fun of the
quantification of life and thus the weight of Tradition, thereby questioning the polit-
ical forces behind it.
His humorous trip on a boat to different ports along the Chilean coast and then
on to Peru and Ecuador achieves a similar goal. The protagonist abandons Santiago
due to the people’s ignorance, the absurdity of life and because the Chilean capital
is the focal point of the dictatorship. As he travels, the main character finds that the
nine ports he visits are remarkably similar, reflecting their distance from modernity.
The only way to destabilize the pre-modern rigidity imposed by the dictatorship
was to question language and use irony, humour and mocking to undermine the dom-
inant discourses put in place by the authoritarian government. Emar accomplishes
this in Miltín (1935) by describing the various ports and their semi-rural and semi-
urban realities and then depicting the Peruvian Surrealist poet César Miró as a charac-
ter in search of an aesthetic. Lizama underscores the fact that, in Dadaist fashion, the
words on the newspaper fly off the page, as do their meanings, so the poet’s duty is
to create new meaning based on these linguistic fragments (Lizama: “Un año de Juan
Emar”, 104). Questioning language allows him to interrogate society at large.

Vicente Huidobro
And that is precisely the theme that Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948) takes up in his
classic book of poetry, Altazor (1931). Divided into seven cantos, the first and most
significant of these sets up the drama facing Huidobro’s alter ego, Altazor, who has
lost his “first serenity”, is full of “anguish” and of “a fear of being” and suffers from
370 Greg Dawes

pain and solitude. Moreover, the speaker finds himself in a world where “there is no
good, no bad, truth, order or beauty” (Huidobro: Altazor, 61). The prospect of death
in a meaningless world haunts him. Writing in the aftermath of the torrid advent of
the industrial revolution, the First World War and the Great Depression, a period in
which “Christianity is dying”, Huidobro clearly feels a tremendous void (Huidobro:
Altazor, 64). While technology offers a possible glimpse of forthcoming social pro-
gress for humankind (“A thousand airplanes salute the new era / They are the oracles
and the flags”; Huidobro: Altazor, 65), it also signals the immensely destructive ways
in which technology can be employed. Indeed, as he states later on in this first canto,
the misuse of technology can lead to extreme social alienation and an amoral indif-
ference to other human beings (Huidobro: Altazor, 76). A brief interlude consisting
of thirteen verses suggests fleetingly that the 1917 October Revolution might provide
human beings with a ‘last hope’, but the poet never returns to this apparent solution
to the crises he is confronting. Rather, the speaker sees no other solution than the
prospect of parachuting slowly down to earth – an allegory for the passage of life
itself. And as Altazor does so, he can at least record the fragmentation and destruc-
tion these crises have wrought on him and other human beings. Towards the end of
Canto I, it becomes apparent that only poetry can step into the void and attempt to fill
the souls of human beings.
However, this must be a new poetry that can keep pace with rapid and profound
developments in science and technology, and it must be inspired, in neo-Romantic
fashion, by a muse (which is the topic of Canto II). In his manifesto El creacionismo,
written in 1916 and published in 1925, he notes that “all that was accomplished in
mechanics has also been done in poetry” (Huidobro: Obra selecta, 307).
Declaring himself an anti-poet who has symbolically buried his old self, in the rest
of the cantos the speaker searches for his poetic voice as he carries out the alternation
of and then the breaking down of lyrical language. By playing somewhat mechanically
with – to name a few techniques – prefixes, suffixes, surprising juxtapositions, repe-
tition and variation of words, audacious metaphors and visual images, he provides
multiple points of view and challenges the limits of traditional poetry. The speaker
proceeds, in Canto VII, to break down words into sonorous syllables or letters. Echoing
Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), Huidobro reduces poetic
discourse to its most basic constituent elements and thus begins anew with a “differ-
ent language” brought to him by the “airplane” (as he puts it at the beginning of Canto
III, 93; Marinetti: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, 107).
Although technology cannot be heralded as a panacea – à la Marinetti – it is
nonetheless the source for the development of ‘new worlds’ in poetry. In this context
at least, poetry and modernity go hand in hand.
While Futurism did not leave a major imprint on Chilean cultural life in the early
part of the twentieth century, it did influence some of the major writers both posi-
tively and negatively. In most cases, modernity and its after-effects seemed sharply
at odds with the rural life that still dominated Chile under the Ibañez dictatorship
 Chile 371

and thus highlighted the uneven socioeconomic development in the countryside.

Several poets, like Rokha, faced with the assault of modernity and its incarnation in
the United States’ unbridled capitalism, depicted rural life as a paradise lost. For a
few writers, like Emar and Huidobro, a compensatory modernity could at least point
in the direction of social and cultural progress. And for others still, rural life and its
literary sustenance were a refuge from the rapid advance of industrialization.

Works cited
Concha, Jaime: “ ‘Altazor’ de Vicente Huidobro.” René de Costa, ed.: Vicente Huidobro y el
creacionismo. Madrid: Taurus, 1975.
Concha, Jaime: “Función histórica de la vanguardia: El caso chileno.” Revista de crítica literaria
latinoamericana 24:48 (1998): 11–23.
Costa, René de, ed.: Vicente Huidobro: Poesía y política (1911–1948). Madrid: Alianza, 1996.
Emar, Juan: Miltín 1934. Santiago de Chile: Mago, (1934) 2011.
Emar, Juan: Un año. Barcelona: Barataria, 2009.
Huidobro, Vicente: Altazor / Temblor de cielo. Edición de René de Costa. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000.
Huidobro, Vicente: Obra selecta. Edición de Luis Navarrete Orta. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1989.
Lizama, Patricio: “Un año de Juan Emar: El artista de vanguardia en una modernidad periférica.”
Revista chilena de literatura 77 (July–December 2010): 95–108.
Nómez, Naín: “Prólogo: Invitación al lector.” Pablo de Rokha: Los gemidos. Santiago de Chile: LOM,
1994. 5–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus; trans. Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2008. 107–119.
Poggioli, Renato: The Theory of the Avant-Garde. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
Rokha, Pablo de: Los gemidos. Prólogo Naín Nómez. Santiago de Chile: LOM, 1994.
Schwarz, Roberto: Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture. London: Verso, 1992.
Sepúlveda Llanos, Fidel: “Pablo de Rokha, una forma poética.” Revista iberoamericana 60:168–169
(1994): 695–714.

Further reading
Bary, David: Nuevos estudios sobre Huidobro y Larrea. Valencia: Pre-Textos, 1984.
Brodsky, Pablo: “Prólogo.” Juan Emar: Antología esencial. Santiago de Chile: Dohmen, 1994. 7–41.
Caracciolo-Trejo, Enrique: “Huidobro y el futurismo.” Revista iberoamericana 45:106–107 (January–
June 1979): 159–164. Reprinted in E. Caracciolo-Trejo: Travesias: Ensayos literarios. Barcelona:
Ediciones 29, 1987. 127–134.
Concha, Jaime: “Función histórica de la vanguardia: El caso chileno.” Revista de crítica literaria
latinoamericana 24:48 (1998): 11–23.
Dawes, Greg: “ ‘Altazor’ and Huidobro’s ‘Aesthetic Individualism’.” Luis Correa-Díaz, and Scott
Weintraub, eds.: Huidobro’s Futurity: Twenty-First Century Approaches. Special issue of
Hispanic Issues On Line 6 (2010): 53–71.
Emar, Juan: Diez: Cuatro animales, tres mujeres, dos sitios, un vicio. Santiago de Chile: Ercilla, 1937.
372 Greg Dawes

Goic, Cedomil: “Vicente Huidobro: Datos biográficos.” Anales de la Universidad de Chile 100
(October-December 1955): 21–61. Reprinted in René de Costa, ed.: Vicente Huidobro y el
creacionismo. Madrid: Taurus, 1975. 27–59.
Lizama, Patricio: “Jean Emar/Juan Emar: La vanguardia en Chile.” Revista iberoamericana
60:168–169 (1994): 945–959.
Lizama, Patricio: “La máquina en la vanguardia chilena.” Anales de literatura hispanoamericana 40
(2011): 243–261.
Lihn, Enrique: “El lugar de Huidobro.” René de Costa, ed.: Vicente Huidobro y el creacionismo.
Madrid: Taurus, 1975.
Nómez, Naín: “Pablo de Rokha y José Angel Cuevas: De la nostalgia del mundo rural al sujeto de la
ciudad marginal.” Alpha 31 (December 2010): 175–194.
Ortega, Norma Angélica: “Rasgos futuristas en ‘Altazor’.” N. A. Ortega: Vicente Huidobro: “Altazor”
y las vanguardias. México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2000. 93–159.
Piña Riquelme, Carlos: “Ser y tiempo en Juan Emar.” Patricio Lizama, and María Inés Zaldívar, eds.:
Bibliografía y antología crítica de las vanguardias literarias. Chile. Madrid: Iberoamericana;
Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2009. 419–437.
Rojas, Gonzalo: “Testimonio sobre Pablo de Rokha.” Revista iberoamericana 45:106–107 (1979):
101–107.
Rutter, Frank P.: “Vicente Huidobro and Futurism: Convergences and Divergences (1917–1918).”
Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 58:1 (January 1981): 55–72.
Salaris, Claudia: “Cile = Chile.” C. Salaris, ed.: Futurismi nel mondo = Futurisms in the World.
Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2015. 222–239.
Man Hu
23 China
Futurism in China developed in three stages: 1. News about Futurism circulated in
China and influenced writers and some painters during the 1920s, 30s and 40s. 2.
Futurism, like most foreign literature, was rejected and ignored during the years 1949–
1978 because of political circumstances. 3. Interest in Futurism revived after 1978 due
to political reform and an opening up to Western culture (see Li Xin: “Weilai zhuyi
wenxue zai zhongguo”, 286). This entry focusses on the diffusion and influence of
Futurism on Chinese literature from 1920 to the early 1940s, examines its experimen-
tal and revolutionary quality, and some of the reasons why it stopped at the beginning
of the 1940s. The historical avant-garde (including Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism and
Surrealism) arrived in China along with the advanced technology and culture intro-
duced by Western colonialists in the early twentieth century. Most of it was shocking
yet also inspiring to Chinese artists, but Chinese theorists (see below) were unsure as
to whether they should appreciate Futurism as a meaningful expression of modernity
or reject it as irrelevant to contemporary Chinese realities.
Futurism was born in Italy, where the domestic economy lagged far behind that
of other capitalist countries. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was fully aware of the deep
gap that separated Italy from her neighbours and wished to change this backward-
ness by propagating the advantages of modern technology. At the beginning of the
twentieth century, China was even more behind other nations than Italy was, due to
its weak national bourgeoisie and economic exploitation by Western colonial powers.
Therefore, Chinese intellectuals tended to offer Futurism a qualified welcome,
because its social, economic and cultural reference points were quite similar to those
prevailing in Asia at the time.

Early reports on Futurism in China

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Chinese artists and critics learned about
Western modern art mainly through magazines and journals (Sullivan: Art and Artists
of Twentieth-century China, 36). Reports on Futurism arrived mainly in three ways: via
Japan, Russia and Western Europe. As very few Modernist works of art became known
through reproductions, the great variety of artistic trends, styles and movements was
bewildering even to highly educated people in China. Due to the First World War,
first-hand experience of European avant-garde art was impossible. In the following
pages, I shall focus largely on literature where Futurist traces can be observed, but
also present some examples from the fields of theatre and fine arts.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-023
374 Man Hu

After the Meiji Restoration (1868), Japanese critics had brought in and translated
numerous writings by Western intellectuals and subsequently – much earlier than
their colleagues in other Asian States – began to connect with Western modern arts
(see Clark: Japanese Exchanges in Art, and Menzies: Modern Boy, Modern Girl). The
successful import of Western technologies motivated China to study her neighbours
and to follow Japan in a concerted effort to bring about national revitalization. As the
entry on Japan in this volume shows, Futurism was introduced to Japan shortly after
Marinetti had published his Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism in 1909. In quick
succession, specimens of poetry and drama followed the manifestos, as well as repro-
ductions of Futurist paintings in magazines. Thus, Futurism also reached China with
rapid speed and was given the label weilai zhuyi (未来主义), derived from the Japanese
term mirai-ha (未来派). On 1 August 1914, an article entitled “Fengmi shijie zhi weilai
zhuyi” (Futurism, Popular in the World) was translated from a Japanese source in the
journal Dongfang zazhi (The Eastern Miscellany) by Xichen Zhang (1889–1969),1 who,
in so doing, introduced the first report of Futurism in a Chinese periodical. In 1917,
Qinzhong Lü (no life dates available) discussed in the pages of The Eastern Miscellany
various Modernist theories, including Futurism. In 1921, Futurist poems from Russia
and Italy appeared in the journal Xiaoshuo yuebao (The Novel Monthly) under the
heading “Bu guize de shipai” (Irregular Poems), together with an essay by the literary
theorist Ryuko Kawaji (1888–1959).
Comparatively speaking, Futurist aesthetics were more influential in Western
Europe than in Japan. Chinese scholars studying in France and Britain translated
materials by Futurists and on Futurism into Chinese. For example, the lecture “Weilai
pai de shiyue ji qi piping” (Poetic Theories of Futurism and Its Criticism, 1923) by
Moruo Guo (1892–1978) was based on information derived from A New Study of English
Poetry by Henry John Newbolt (1862–1938). Dun Mao (pseud. of Shen Dehong, 1896–
1981), a well-known theorist and writer in China, criticized Futurist poetry in “Lun
wuchan jieji yishu” (On Proletariat Arts, 1925), which was influenced by the article
“The Revolution in Russian Literature” by Victor Francis Calverton (1900–1940).
Chunfang Song (1892–1938) was the first person to translate Futurist plays into
Chinese. In 1921, he published “Weilai pai xiju si zhong” (Four Futurist Plays), which
included F. T. Marinetti’s Un chiaro di luna (Moonlight, 1915), Mario Dessy’s Vostro
marito non va?... Cambiatelo (Can’t Stand Your Husband? Get a New One, 1919),
Arnaldo Corradini and Bruno Corra’s Alternazione di carattere (Change of Character,
1915) and Francesco Cangiullo’s Non c’è un cane (No Soul to Be Seen Here, 1920).
Together with some other European plays from the period, they were meant to act
as models for an artistic renewal of contemporary Chinese theatre (Brezzi: “Quattro
folli pièces”). Another article, “Weilai pai de shi” (Futurist Poems, 1936) by Ming Gao

1 Contrary to Chinese practice, given names are placed ahead of surnames in this entry, in order to
make it compatible with other entries.
 China 375

(1908–1992) was the most authoritative discussion of Futurist literature because of the
broad range of materials it referred to.
After the October Revolution, leftist intellectuals from China began to translate
Russian literature into Chinese, including Futurist books, and to comment on them in
the press. Mayakovsky’s poetry was discussed in several articles and essays, including
“Lun eguo de weilai zhuyi” (On Russian Futurism, 1932) by Xizhen Sun (1906–1984);
“Weilai zhuyi wenxue zhi xianshi” (The Trend of Futurist Literature, 1922) by Dun
Mao, “Shiyue geming yu eluosi wenxue” (October Revolution and Russian Literature,
1927) by Guangci Jiang (1901–1931) and Waiguo wenxue shi lüe (A Brief History of
Russian Literature, 1924) by Zhenduo Zheng (1898–1958). As Italian Futurism aligned
itself politically with Fascism, its literary production became largely unacceptable in
China. Discussions of Futurism in the 1920s focussed instead on Russian magazines
and periodicals such as Lef: Zhurnal levogo fronta iskusstv (Lef: Journal of the Left
Front of the Arts), which offered a great deal of inspiration to Chinese intellectuals
and artists with a leftist orientation. The Dawn Blossoms Society, founded in 1928 by
Xun Lu (1881–1936), published in 1930 five albums of paintings and woodcuts, the
last volume of which introduced the graphic arts of Vladimir Krinsky, Yuri Annenkov,
Pavel Pavlinov, Vladimir Favorsky, Nikolai Kupreianov and Elizaveta Kruglikova.

Creative works written under the

influence of Futurism
In comparison with Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, Futurism was underestimated
in China. Although different opinions about Futurism prevailed amongst artists and
intellectuals, most tended to be negative or critical. Dun Mao, for example, who had
initially been favourably disposed towards Futurism, changed his mind when his
interest in Marxism was aroused. He then considered Futurism to be “the art of a
society and class in decline” (Mao: “Lun wuchan jieji yishu”, 573), and judged that
“Futurism belonged to pastism rather than modernism” (quoted in Guo: “Weilai pai
de shiyue ji qi piping”, 250). Although Moruo Guo and Xun Lu were both influential
critics in China, not all writers followed their viewpoints but rather created works that
followed in the steps of Futurism.
The playwright Xu Xu (1908–1980) publicly declared that his dramas were
written under the influence of Futurism. For example, in Huang chang (Wasteland,
1931), two nameless men meet repeatedly, at the ages of ten, thirty and fifty years.
After their deaths they tell each other about their boring and wasted lives. Nv xing
shi (Female History, 1933) revolves around three conversations between a man and
a woman and thematizes female dependence on male strength, power and money.
Ren lei shi (The History of Mankind, 1935) condenses the history of mankind into one
activity: eating. Futurism stressed the exploration of an unknown future, of speed
376 Man Hu

and dynamism and forcefulness. Seen from this point of few, the plays by Xu Xu do
not seem to be typically Futurist, but their nihilistic, antirational and absurd themes
had a provocative quality, just like Futurist theatre in Italy had. The plays contra-
dicted the divine account of history and made audiences rethink their own lives.
The bizarre plot of Wasteland was meant to inspire revolution and change, whereas
A Female History showed social alienation and human enslavement caused by the
worship of money.
Futurist poetry was more popular in China than Futurist drama. It broke up
the rules and forms of traditional poetry and gave expression to the social contra-
dictions in Chinese society. This kind of poetry was quite emotional and induced a
spirit of rebellion in its readers. Some Futurist poems in China were written under
the influence of Mayakovsky, who was well known in 1930s China. The poet Qing Ai
(1910–1996) spent three years in Paris, poorly but freely (Ai: “Preface”, 2). During this
time, he read much about avant-garde and Futurist art in Russia and Italy. Three of his
poems, “Bali” (Paris, 1933), “Masai” (Marseille, 1933) and “Ludi” (Mirliton: In Memory
of G. Apollinaire, 1933), have a strongly avant-garde quality and resemble Futurism in
their depiction of metropolitan street scenes, speedy traffic, department stores and
the amenities of modern technology.
The most representative Futurist work of Qifang He (1912–1977) is the collection
Ye ge II (Night Songs II, 1940), which stood in opposition to the conventions of tradi-
tional poetry:

I have lost the simplicity of the nineteenth century

We are modern
I want to talk about wars
Because the wars are under way
On the French border
Two million soldiers are hitting, are devouring each other
You all get in, get in!
Nobody can stop you
Nobody can stop the engine
Which will take all of you to the end
I know they are awake
They will change this nature of war into another death
There will be a new Europe and a new world. (He: He Qifang zuopin xinbian, 35)

Qifang He’s poems were littered with English phrases and foreign words because the
English language represented modernity to Chinese readers. War was not eulogized
per se, but was regarded as a necessary means to create a new and better world.
Some graphic artists published their woodcuts in in Mu ke jicheng (Diary of
Woodcuts, 1934), which included Futurist works such as Baba hai zai gongchang
(Father Is Still in the Factory) by Qingzhen Luo (1905–1942), La (Pull) by Wucheng
Li (pseud. of Yanqiao Chen, 1911–1970) and Yan (Smoke) by Bitao He (1913–1939).
Woodcuts were considered to be the most revolutionary and modern form of art from
 China 377

the 1920s to the 1940s in China, as painters sought ways of combining Western aes-
thetics with traditional Chinese techniques. But even the three artists mentioned here
produced only few experimental works of this kind.

Conclusion
Futurist plays, poems and woodcuts in China were all meant to be revolutionary and
to promote an industrial civilization that would revolutionize traditional lifestyles.
The authors were experimenting with new forms of expression, but compared to the
bold nature of Russian or Italian Futurism, these works were lacking in confidence
and were only tentatively and hesitatingly pursuing an avant-garde direction.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of artists tried to imitate
some of the themes and formal devices of Futurism, but they did not find the popular
support that was granted to those working in Critical Realism and Revolutionary
Romanticism. One of the reasons surely was that China was still a semi-feudal and
semi-colonized country that had not experienced the industrial civilization Futurism
was promoting. Furthermore, during the process of translating and interpreting
Futurist works, a great deal of misunderstanding slipped in. Finally, the tentative
adoption of some Futurist themes and ideas was cut short in 1937 by the Second Sino-
Japanese War and never re-surfaced. Therefore, all in all, the Futurist impact in China
was very limited.

Works cited
Ai, Qing: “Bali.” [Paris] Q. Ai: Xuan ji [Anthology]. Vol. 1. Chengdu: Sichuan wen yi chu ban she,
1986. 26.
Ai, Qing: “Ludi.” [Mirliton: In memory of G. Apollinaire] Q. Ai: Xuan Ji. [Anthology]. Vol 1. Chengdu:
Sichuan wen yi chu ban she, 1986. 23.
Ai, Qing: “Masai.” [Marseille] Q. Ai: Xuan ji [Anthology]. Vol 1. Chengdu: Sichuan wen yi chu ban she,
1986. 35.
Ai, Qing: “Preface.” Q. Ai: Xuan ji [Anthology]. Vol. 1. Chengdu: Sichuan wen yi chu ban she, 1986. 2.
Ai, Qing: Shi xuan [Selected Poems]. Beijing: Ren min wen xue chu ban she, 1979.
Brezzi, Alessandra: “Quattro folli pièces: Le prime traduzioni dell’avanguardia futurista italiana.”
Paola Paderni, ed.: Atti del XIV Convegno A.I.S.C., Procida 19–21 settembre 2013. Napoli: Il
Torcoliere, 2014. 89–109.
Calverton, Victor Francis: “The Revolution in Russian Literature.” The Modern Quarterly 4:2
(June–September, 1927): 89–101.
Clark, John: Japanese Exchanges in Art, 1850s–1930s. Sydney, NSW: Power Publications, 2001.
Gao, Ming: “Wei lai pai de shi.” [Futurist Poems] Xian dai [Modern Magazine] 5:3 (1934): 473–483.
Guo, Moruo: “Weilai pai de shiyue ji qi piping.” [Poetic Theories of Futurism and Its Criticism] M.
Guo: Quan ji [The Complete Works of Moruo Guo]. Vol. 15. Ed. by Yang Zhou. Beijing: Ren min
wen xue chu ban she, 1982. 242–251.
378 Man Hu

He, Qifang: “Ye ge II.” [Night Songs II] Q. He: He Qifang zuo pin xin bian [New Collected Works of
Qifang He]. Beijing: Ren min wen xue chu ban she, 2010. 33–37.
Jiang, Guangci: “Shiyue geming yu eluosi wenxue.” [October Revolution and Russian Literature]
G. Jiang: Wen ji [Collected Works]. Vol. IV: Shanghai: Shang hai wen yi chu ban she, 1982.
57–134.
Kawaji, Ryuko: “Bu guize de shipai.” [Irregular Poems]. Xiaoshuo yuebao [The Novel Monthly] 13:9
(1922): 100–105.
Li Xin, Song Defa: “Weilai zhuyi wenxue zai zhongguo.” [Futurist Literature in China] Shijie wenxue
pinglun [World Literature Review] 2 (2006): 286–289.
Lü, Qinzhong: “Xin hua pai lue shuo.” [A Brief Introduction on New Paintings] Dongfang zazhi [The
Eastern Miscellany] 14:7 (1917): 99–101.
Mao, Dun: “Lun wuchan jieji yi shu.” [On Proletariat Arts] D. Mao: Quan ji [The Complete Works of
Dun Mao]. Vol. 18. Ed. by Guisong Zhong. Hefei: Huang shan shu she, 2014. 558–580.
Mao, Dun: “Weilai zhuyi wenxue zhi xianshi.” [The Trend of Futurist Literature] D. Mao: Quan ji [The
Complete Works of Dun Mao]. Vol. 32. Ed. by Guisong Zhong. Hefei: Huang shan shu she, 2014.
663–671.
Menzies, Jackie, ed.: Modern Boy, Modern Girl: Modernity in Japanese Art, 1910–1935. Exhibition
catalogue. Sydney, NSW: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 18 July–30 August 1998.
Mu ke jicheng [Diary of Woodcuts]. Vol. 1. Shanghai: Tie mu yi shu she yin xing, 1934.
Newbolt, Henry John: A New Study of English Poetry. London: Constable, 1917.
Song, Chunfang: “Weilai pai xiju sizhong.” [Four Futurist Plays] Dongfang zazhi [The Eastern
Miscellany] 13 (1921): 97–107.
Sullivan, Michael: Art and Artists of Twentieth–century China. Berkeley/CA: University of California
Press, 1996.
Sun, Xizhen: “Lun eguo de weilai zhuyi.” [On Russian Futurism] X. Sun: Waiguo wenxue
shilüe [Foreign Literature Review Collection]. Fu Jian: Fujian Ren Min Chu Ban She, 1984.
202–216.
Xu, Xu: “Huang chang.” [Wasteland] X. Xu: Wen Ji [Collected Works of Xu Xu]. Vol. 16. Shanghai san
lian shu dian, 2008. 339–344.
Xu, Xu: “Nv xing shi.” [Female History] X. Xu: Wen Ji [Collected Works of Xu Xu]. Vol. 16. Shanghai san
lian shu dian, 2008. 354–356.
Xu, Xu: “Ren lei shi.” [The History of Mankind] X. Xu: Wen ji [Collected Works of Xu Xu]. Vol. 16.
Shanghai san lian shu dian, 2008. 375–376.
Xu, Xu: Da quan ji [Large Corpus of Lu Xun]. Vol. 31. Wuhan Shi: Hubei ren min chu ban she, 2011.
Zhang, Xichen: “Fengmi shijie zhi weilai zhuyi.” [Futurism, Popular in the World] Dong fang za zhi
[The Eastern Miscellany] 11:2 (1914): 66–68.
Zheng, Zhenduo: Waiguo wenxue shilüe [A Brief History of Russian Literature]. Shanghai: Shang wu
yin shu guan, 1924. Reprint Changsha Shi: Yuelu shu she, 2010.

Further reading
Chen, Sihe: “The Avant-garde Elements in the May Fourth New Literature Movement.” Frontiers of
Literary Studies in China 1:2 (January 2007): 163–196.
Clark, John: Modernity in Asian Art. Broadway, NSW: Wild Peony, 1993.
Marcotulli, Francesca Romana: “Guo Moruo e il futurismo.” Mondo cinese 70 (June 1990): 45–59.
Sullivan, Michael, and Weihe Chen: 20 Shi Ji Zhong Guo Yi Shu Yu Yi Shu Jia [Art and Artists of
Twentieth-century China]. Shanghai: Shanghai ren min chu ban she, 2013.
 China 379

Sullivan, Michael: The Meeting of Eastern and Western Art. Berkeley/CA: University of California
Press, 1989.
Tipton, Elise, and John Clark, eds.: Being Modern in Japan: Culture and Society from the 1910s to the
1930s. Sydney, NSW: Australian Humanities Research Foundation, and Honolulu/HI: University
of Hawaii Press, 2000.
Zheng, Yi, and Stephanie Hemelryk Donald: “Modernisms in China.” Peter Nicholls, Andrzej
Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, eds.: Oxford Handbook of Modernisms.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. 976–995.
Alena Pomajzlová
24 The Czech Lands
Until 1918, the Czech lands formed part of the Habsburg Empire and the Austro-
Hungarian Monarchy. After 1918, the Czechs and Slovaks created the Republic of
Czechoslovakia. As the Slovaks were culturally closer to Hungary, they pursued artistic
developments substantially different from those in the Czech lands and are therefore dis-
regarded in this entry. Investigating manifestations of Futurism among Czech artists is a
complicated affair, because the stylistic devices of both its Italian and Russian variants
made an appearance in a different guise often hidden behind a predominating façade
of Cubism, Expressionism or Constructivism. Although Italian Futurism found some
immediate responses in the Czech lands – as can be seen in the manifesto Otevřená okna
(Open Windows, 1913) by the poet Stanislav Kostka Neumann (1875–1947), or the theat-
rical presentations of the well-known Prague cabaret comedian Ferenc Futurista (pseud.
of František Fiala, 1891–1947) – for the most part, influences from Futurism penetrated
Czech art only indirectly, in a roundabout way, vicariously and with shifting emphases.
Unlike Picasso’s Cubism, which was familiar to the Czechs from direct knowledge
of his works – either as originals or from reproductions – Futurist aesthetics largely
became known through its manifestos. Hence, Futurist theories of art often had more
influence than actual works of art. Although Czech art had traditionally been close
to Austrian, German and Russian art, in the early twentieth century French art also
exercised a great attraction. As Futurist aesthetics also had an important influence in
France – dynamism and simultaneity, for example, played a significant rôle amongst
French Cubists – French interpretations of Futurist principles affected the Czech scene.
Such indirect influences were stronger than immediate contacts with Futurist art, and
were also tolerated better because they were perceived within the context of Cubism.
It was only after the First World War that a new situation arose and Futurist projects,
especially in the applied arts, impacted on Czech Modernist culture – as evidenced by
the connections between art and technology, kineticism and intermedial works.
Czech art has always stood at the crossroads of various trends and movements
coming from western and the eastern Europe. The second decade of the twentieth
century was especially characteristic in this respect. Multifaceted stimuli of varying
origins gave rise to hybrid mixtures which Hans Arp and El Lissitzky described as a
“hotchpotch” and “metaphysical meatloaf” (Arp and El Lissitzky: Die Kunstismen,
VIII; see also Wiese: “Metaphysisches Beefsteak?”, 38). Nevertheless, at that time,
Czech Cubists were endeavouring to achieve a certain stylistic purity. The art historian
Vincenc Kramář, and some artists such as Emil Filla proclaimed Picasso’s variant of
Cubism to be the only proper approach to rendering reality, but it never became a
generally accepted view point. On the contrary, a blend of influences and inspira-
tions could be observed in every field of the arts. Such hybridization has often been
regarded negatively, as a kind of inconsistency, deviation or misconception. But more
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-024
 The Czech Lands 381

recently, these fusions, combinations or heterogeneous approaches have come to

be considered as an artistic pluralism that was more beneficial to Czech art than an
uncritical espousal or a mere adoption of external stimuli would have been.
Czech art historians, to this day, interpret the Picassoesque version of Cubism
as a generic form of Modernism rather than a stylistically distinctive phenomenon,
that is to say, an intentional narrowing of the spectrum of modern art in Europe. In
contrast, Czech scholarship interpreted Futurism in a very restrictive manner and
reduced it to a novel way of depicting the modern world as a product of technolo-
gies and machines. The Futurist concept of intuitive cognition, largely based on Henri
Bergson, was not given due consideration. For this reason, it was only in recent years
that the search for Futurist traces in Czech art started in earnest. The first attempt
at a comprehensive survey of the interrelationship between Czech art and Futurism
was undertaken in 1988 by František Šmejkal (“Futurismus a české umění”). He saw
Futurism as arriving in the Czech lands in two waves, the first taking place in the
period from 1912 to 1915 and related to the Futurist principles of dynamism, simul-
taneity and psychic conflicts; a second wave emerging at the beginning of the 1920s
and representing a more comprehensive impact of Futurism, above all, on the con-
ceptions of art advanced by Karel Teige (1900–1951). However, as mentioned above,
Futurism was always combined with stimuli coming from other provenances: in the
1910s, Cubism; in the 1920s, Dadaism, Purism and Constructivism.
In the following three sections, I shall outline how and where Futurism entered
Czech art. From the first period I shall give three examples: Bohumil Kubišta (1884–
1918), who employed Futurist ideas in both theory and practice; Antonín Procházka
(1882–1945), who merged elements of Futurism with those of Orphism; and, lastly,
Otto Gutfreund (1889–1927), who also took inspiration from the ideas of Bergson. All
three artists made use of Futurist dynamism and simultaneity within the context of
Cubist forms. I shall then discuss the work of two Czech artists working abroad: Růžena
Zátková (1885–1923) in Italy, and František Kupka (1871–1957) in France. Both encoun-
tered Futurism and its variants directly, but in spite of this personal contact with Futurist
art and artists, they only partially incorporated Futurist aesthetics into their works. The
same applies to the 1920s, when direct contact between the Czech avant-garde and the
Futurists played a major rôle and when Futurist art expanded in various directions, as
can be seen in the examples of Karel Teige and Zdeněk Pešánek (1896–1965).

The inconspicuousness of Czech Futurism

in the 1910s
The painter Bohumil Kubišta was well acquainted with the Italian movement since
he had read the manifestos published in the magazine Der Sturm and had seen the
Futurist touring exhibition when it was in Berlin (12 April – 31 May 1912; see p. 484
382 Alena Pomajzlová

in this volume). He was also in contact with Josef Čapek (1890–1938), who brought
Futurist literature from Paris and took part in the Futurist and Expressionist exhibi-
tion at the Nemzeti Szalon in Budapest (25 January – 28 February 1913), repeated in
June 1913 as the Exhibition of Futurists, Cubists, etc. at the Muzeum Przemysłowe in
Lviv. It is possible to identify Futurist ideas in Kubišta’s paintings Pobřežní děla v boji
s loďstvem (Coastal Cannons in a Battle with the Fleet, 1913), a simultaneous record of
wartime action, Vodopád v Alpách (Waterfall in the Alps, 1912) and Vlak v horách (Train
in the Mountains, 1913), in which dynamism and the modern world of technology, as
well as the energy of nature and the mechanical strength of the machine are combined.
However, this manifest dynamism and simultaneity cannot be found in other
paintings by the same artist; this does not mean that they disappeared altogether
from Kubišta’s work but rather they reappeared in different guises elsewhere. The
reason for this shift may have been that Kubišta elaborated his conception of a paint-
ing’s structure by taking into account both Futurist manifestos and Cubist theories.
In his theoretical writings, he spoke of a universal vital force that was the prime
mover of all phenomena and controlled all motions and changes. He compared
dynamism to a hyperbolic curve “where all the proportions of focal points and cir-
cumferential points change endlessly” (Kubišta: “O duchovním podkladu”, 90).
He therefore opposed any neutral and static descriptiveness, which for him was sym-
bolized by a circle with a fixed distance between the centre and the circumference.
The Futurists spoke of a similar universal dynamism and elevated it to a general and
permanent principle of being: “The gesture that we want to reproduce will no longer
be a moment in the universal dynamism which has been stopped, but the dynamic
sensation itself, perpetuated as such” (Boccioni et al.: “Futurist Painting: Technical
Manifesto”, 64). For them, the technique of capturing everything in motion was
simultaneity, or “the simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the disloca-
tion and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from
accepted logic, and independent from one another” (Boccioni et al.: “The Exhibitors
to the Public”, 106).
What the Futurists called compenetrazione (interpenetration) found an equiva-
lent in Kubišta’s concept of Penetrism, a fusion of space, time and thought that would
extend to the “intangible, invisible, subtle core of everything modern” (Kubišta:
“O duchovní podstatě”, 124). He focussed above all on the dramatic and conflicting
moments played out in the human psyche, for example in Nervózní dáma (Nervous
Lady, 1912), Hypnotizér (Hypnotist, 1912) or Překážka (Obstacle, 1913). The Futurists,
too, concerned themselves with psychological states and declared: “The simultane-
ousness of states of mind in the work of art: that is the intoxicating aim of our art”
(Boccioni et al.: “The Exhibitors to the Public”, 105), which may have been a very
stimulating thought for Kubišta. In the context of the rejection of the art of the past,
the Futurists renounced allegorical and symbolic means of expression and replaced
them with abstract forms. Boccioni’s 1911 triptych Stati d’animo (States of Mind) con-
cealed a stylized rendering of a specific scene; it combined the ‘world as seen’ with
 The Czech Lands 383

the ‘world as experienced’, not only with regard to shifts of forms, but also with the
arrangement of layers of two different painterly languages, using a reduced figuration
for the seen and an abstract morphology for emotions and feelings.
A similar simultaneity or interpenetration of the material and psychological
worlds can be discerned in Kubišta. He advocated the use of two different kinds of
form: empirical (i. e. that which can be represented) and transcendental, or sensuous
and spiritual (i. e. that which remains abstract). However, the geometric abstracting
form – which for him was always the most important – was never used in isolation but
always combined, in a simultaneous fashion, with empirical, sensually perceptible
forms. He used them as a starting point to “guide our attention to the abstract and
geometric infrastructure of his paintings, which he regarded as the actual substance
of his artistic message” (Nešlehová: Bohumil Kubišta, 123). Although Kubišta never
formulated a distinct theory of simultaneity as the Futurists did, he nevertheless
used the device in his paintings. Opposing the criticized system of phased motion, he
intentionally chose a combination of the figurative and abstract mode that was very
similar to Boccioni’s method.
Futurism also influenced the work of the painter Antonín Procházka in the indi-
rect manner alluded to above, namely through a mediating circle of Cubist painters
from France. From 1910, Procházka worked far removed from the Czech cultural
centres and was in touch only with Emil Filla (1882–1953) and Vincenc Kramář
(1877–1960). In his work, he combined Cubist forms with a conspicuous range of
colours close to those to be found in Orphism, which he might have encountered at
the First German Autumn Salon at the gallery of Der Sturm in Berlin (20 September –
1 December 1913; see p. 489 in this volume). He himself participated in this exhi-
bition with a still life, as did Robert Delaunay, who exhibited a large collection of
paintings using the motif of coloured discs in spectral colours. They were supposed
to evoke a rotating movement with a dynamic overlapping of the colour layers.
Procházka’s second direct opportunity to encounter Cubist works of a non-Picas-
soesque kind was at a modern art exhibition held in Prague (Moderní umění: 45.
výstava SVU Mánes v Praze, February–March 1914), which centred on varieties of
creative dynamism and simultaneity, with French contributions by Jean Metzinger,
Albert Gleizes and, again, Robert Delaunay.
Procházka might also have found inspiration in the translated texts of French
Cubists (Metzinger, Gleizes and Le Fauconnier) published in the Czech art magazines
Volné směry (Free Directions) and Umělecký měsíčník (Art Monthly) which also partly
dealt with dynamic colour composition in painting. He often made use of radiant
colour schemes, which can indicate plasticity but also layers of time, or shifts in
time. Apart from a non-Picassoesque spectral colour range, what arouses attention
in Procházka’s paintings and drawings is the subjects’ spiral penetration into space
and the changes of shape produced by light, as well as the partial abstraction. This
seems to be an echo of Boccioni’s concept of dynamism and the dematerializing rôle
of light, but an exact genesis of these dynamic elements in Procházka’s unique work
384 Alena Pomajzlová

can be deduced only hypothetically; it may have been brought about by his contacts
with the French Cubists.
Otto Gutfreund’s dynamic conception of modern sculpture had a different
genesis. He sought to express abstract ideas by non-Naturalistic means and took
inspiration from early medieval reliefs. He applied the principle of projection of forms
or figures from a flat ground to a freestanding sculpture that could taken in from a
single vantage point. However, although Gutfreund’s statues are directed towards a
spectator, their full impact requires in the viewer’s mind a rotation around a motion-
less centre. The works thus created bear resemblance to Boccioni’s Sviluppo di una
bottiglia nello spazio (Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912; see Krauss: Passages in
Modern Sculpture, 41–46).
In other respects, however, we find few parallels between Boccioni and Gutfreund.
Gutfreund was an advocate of a clear sculptural order and of Cubist formal devices.
He created geometrized sculptures without any manifest elements of movement. His
Milenci / Objímající se postavy (Lovers / Figures Embracing, 1913–1914) worked with
the idea of movement and dynamics, but differently from Boccioni’s Forme uniche
della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913), which
was a sculpture moving in all directions, capturing internal dynamics, energy and
force-lines; it represented the translation of the kinetic continuum into a sculptural
work, an imaginary aggressive penetration of a sculpture into space. In contrast,
Gutfreund’s dynamism emerged from ideas that he explained in his essay “Plocha a
prostor” (Surface and Space, 1913), a long, well-considered statement on the essence
of modern sculpture, in which he expressed the view that “sculpture is no longer a
fossilized fragment of time, but a continuous undulation of surfaces, an illusion of
volumes”, and that it was to become, “an expression of continuous movement, whose
rhythm is identical with that of the creative mental process before the crystallization
of thoughts into ideas” (Gutfreund: “Plocha”, 242).
Gutfreund’s concepts bear a certain resemblance to Boccioni’s writings about
sculpture, but it is not known whether Gutfreund was familiar with them. The tradi-
tionalist magazine Dílo published Boccioni’s Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista
(Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, 1912), although only as a curiosity, and it
is quite unlikely that Gutfreund, as a Modernist, would have read such a tradition-
alist periodical. It is more likely that he arrived at conclusions similar to Boccioni’s
because both had congruent points of theoretical departure, for example the philo-
sophy of Bergson. Boccioni, according to notes preserved in the Getty Research
Insitute in Los Angeles (see Archival sources) had read Matière et mémoire (Matter
and Memory, 1896), L’ Évolution créatrice (Creative Evolution, 1907) and L’ Intuition
philosophique (Philosophical Intuition, 1911), while Gutfreund was familiar at least
with L’ Évolution créatrice. He also may have acquainted himself with Bergson’s ideas
from articles published in the magazines Volné směry and Umělecký měsíčník.
Both artists were impressed by the idea that movement and change are not attrib-
utes of reality, but realities in their own right. Time exists as duration, is indivisible,
 The Czech Lands 385

merges present and past, so that present and memory form an unbroken sequence.
Both Gutfreund and Boccioni developed from Bergson’s concepts a method of grasp-
ing time that was based on intuition and not on rational analysis. Gutfreund wanted
to dematerialize sculpture and eliminate its static and immobile character, but at the
same time he objected to the distinction of individual moving phases as the Futurists
did in their early paintings. He felt that these segments of time were stopping move-
ment, while he wanted to conceive of moving, immaterial, abstract surfaces capable
of creating an illusionary volume, non-existent as tangible object. In his sculptures,
movement was not depicted in a ‘real’, material form, but imagined as a projection
of volumes and surfaces onto the viewer’s perception. The sculpture’s dynamism
results from the time in which the work’s perception is formed in our mind, and is
not connected to superficial kineticism. These moving surfaces were able to create
newly composed volumes and an interior space, thus providing modern sculpture
with an important and new conceptual element, comparable with the revolutionary
idea of the surface in Cubist painting. Gutfreund not only found an original solution
for modern, dynamic sculpture but also overcame the Modernist concept of the auton-
omous work of art through his emphasis on the active perception of a viewer.

Kupka in Paris and Zatkova in Rome

Czech artists working abroad were much more closely connected with Futurism, since
they had the opportunity to observe Futurist creativity in the fields of arts and lit-
erature directly at first hand. They formed part of the multicultural atmosphere in
European capitals, and their contribution to the interpretation of Futurist aesthetics
was very distinctive, as can be see in the case of František Kupka in Paris and Růžena
Zátková in Rome. As it happened, they had next to no influence on art in their home-
land, where their work remained neglected or unrecognized for a long time.
František Kupka never formed part of the Futurist movement, even though he
was familiar with its programme and was preoccupied with very similar aesthetic
and creative problems. He formulated his ideas, which bore close resemblance to
many Futurist concepts, in his treatise Tvoření v umění výtvarném (Creativity in the
Visual Arts), written in the period from 1907 to 1913 and published in Czech in 1923,
but not translated into French until 1989. Kupka conceived movement and rhythm
as the vital force stimulating the whole universe, and he explored movement as a
manifestation of life, a physical quantity as well as a philosophical issue. Unlike
the Futurists, however, he left dynamic aspects of modern civilization to one side,
perhaps with the exception of the period of machine culture at the beginning of the
1920s. He was well informed about Futurism due to the movement’s activities and pro-
nounced media presence in Paris. According to the remarks of 1912 by the writer and
journalist Richard Weiner, Kupka had the Futurist ‘ten commandments’ fixed to the
386 Alena Pomajzlová

door of his studio – apparently the manifesto Les Exposants au public (The Exhibitors
to the Public) in the catalogue of the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition of 1912 (see Weiner:
“Návštěvou”, 368). Later, in the 1920s, when he had become a professor at Prague’s
Academy of Fine Arts, he gave lectures on, among others, Bergson and F. T. Marinetti.
In his paintings, he synthesized a broad spectrum of stimuli, including Futurist
ones. Parallel to the Futurist “simultaneity of sequences” he addressed the “problem
of shift” (Weiner: “Návštěvou”, 368), that is to say, the problem of how to represent
movement taking place in time. Initially, he started to investigate phased motion, as
the Futurists had done and as, somewhat later, his neighbours, the Duchamp brothers
Raymond, Jacques and Marcel, did. Examples of this approach were Jezdci (Riders,
c.1908) and Klávesy piana (Piano Keys, 1909). Eventually, he expanded his investiga-
tions to include “the relationship between successive moments and their location in
space” (Kupka: Tvoření, 44). He was not only concerned with representing movement,
but above all its spatio-temporal relations. He rendered them not only with shifts of
form, but also with a changing colour range and intensity of luminosity: “The con-
tours of shapes – moving – are kinematically developed, multiplied, growing degree
by degree, level by level, from the most vivid to the palest, blending into each other”
(Kupka: Tvoření, 155).
Kupka put this idea into practice in a series of pastels executed between 1909 and
1911: Žena trhající květiny (Woman Picking Flowers, 1909), Portrét hudebníka Follota
(Portrait of the Musician Follot, 1910) and Plochy podle barev (Planes by Colours, after
1909). The movement phases in them are interconnected with colour-graded vertical
bands and blurred outlines of figures. For the Futurists, “movement and light destroy
the materiality of bodies” (Boccioni et al.: “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto”,
66), whereas Kupka was inspired, besides by movement, by scientific discoveries as
well, for example X-rays. It is also possible that he received inspiration from experi-
menting with photography. Étienne-Jules Marey’s ‘time-pictures’ were well known in
Paris, Milan and Rome, and Kupka himself evidently took photographs, too (Rowell:
Frank Kupka, 62). Kupka’s conception of art went beyond traditional ideas about a
work of art and attempted to bring about an “energizing movement in itself, a move-
ment that destroys existing boundaries and breaks through all boundaries of space”
(Kupka: Tvoření, 155). His call “anything goes!” (ibid.) came close to Futurist radical-
ism and went beyond the possibilities of what could be achieved at the time.
The idea of producing a “synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees”
(Boccioni et al.: “The Exhibitors to the Public”, 106) also brought Kupka closer to
Futurism. Kupka described this notion as “a conglomeration of previous, remembered
impressions, now joined together forming aggregates which are amassed ad infini-
tum” (Kupka: Tvoření, 54). He placed the painterly depiction of this synthesis higher
than the mere development of a film or the layering of photographic negatives, since
it was dependent on the selection and organic unity of the final work, that is to say,
on the rôle of the artist. And that is precisely why Kupka subsequently abandoned the
graphic phasing of visible movement and adopted an abstract and intuitive approach
 The Czech Lands 387

to time, movement, development and change, for example in the series of studies
and paintings called Lokalizace grafických hybných sil (The Localization of Graphic
Motive Forces, 1912–1913). Later, in Abstraktní malba (Abstract Painting, 1930), move-
ment was no longer evoked by dynamic shapes and lines, but incorporated into the
movement of the viewer’s eye when roaming along three straight black lines of an
otherwise static and minimalist painting. The image stimulates the viewer’s percep-
tion: movement is not ‘enclosed’ in the work, but is transferred to the process of per-
ception. This “de-allegorization of movement”, or “impression of movement through
means which themselves are not in motion” (Wittlich: “Kupka”, 168), represented
a new conceptual approach, which now, however, went beyond Futurism’s stylistic
framework.
The painter Růžena Zátková moved to Italy in 1910 and worked among the
Futurists in Rome, where slowly but steadily she shed the painterly style she had
learnt in Prague. Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla made the greatest impres-
sion on her. Her dynamic and abstract compositions reflected Boccioni’s subject
matter of stati d’animo (mental states), and the spiritualist séances in which Balla
also participated. Zátková was the only Czech artist to adopt Boccioni’s concept of
dynamic sculpture created from diverse materials, which completely overturned the
appearance and meaning of sculpture. For her magnum opus of 1916 (now destroyed),
Sensibilità, rumori e forze ritmiche della macchina pianta-palafitte (Sensibility, Noises
and Rhythmic Forces of a Piledriver), she used leather, metal, wood, glass, cellulose
and evidently paint too. Although the work was not kinetic, it evoked movement and
rhythmic pounding with the dynamic disfigured leather belts, sharp edges cutting
into space, bowl-shaped forms unwinding in spirals and concentric circles suggest-
ing the diffusion of sound waves. Not by chance did Enrico Prampolini reproduce it
in 1923 in his review Noi, together with Boccioni’s material sculpture Dinamismo di
un cavallo in corsa + case (Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses, 1915). Futurist
provocative actionism, however, was alien to her, and in her works of art she balanced
movement, speed and dynamism with the timelessness of Russian Primitivism, with
which she had become familiar through Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov.
This polarity of modernity and archaism was typical of her work in the 1920s, when
the Futurist element of her work found the support of F. T. Marinetti. He prepared two
solo exhibitions for her in Rome (at the Galleria G. Giosi, April–May 1921, and the Casa
d’Arte Bragaglia, November 1922); the introduction to the catalogue of the second exhi-
bition was written by Enrico Prampolini. At that time, Zátková was continuing with
her polymaterial works, assemblages and sculptures, into which she had also recently
incorporated a kinetic element. The emphasis she was now placing on the surface
structure came to be acknowledged by Marinetti in Il tattilismo: Manifesto futurista
(Tactilism: Futurist Manifesto, 1921), which he sent to her at the beginning of 1921. In
honour of Marinetti, Zátková painted three large portraits of him (1921–1922). Work on
other Futurist projects – poetry, plays and other paintings – was regrettably cut short by
her untimely death, and so her remarkable talent never fully realized its true potential.
388 Alena Pomajzlová

Czech Poetism and Kineticism: From museum

art to street art
In the 1920s, Futurism made a more pronounced inroad into Czech art, and the reason
for this was not only Marinetti’s visit to Prague (December 1921) and the clamour
aroused by his lectures, but the Futurist disdain for the past and traditional kinds of
art. What in the preceding decade had been merely an unusual provocation was now
becoming a frequently discussed problem of the avant-garde. This followed on from
the earlier rejection of ‘retinal’ painting by Marcel Duchamp, who was associated
with Dadaist anti-aestheticism and the slogan ‘Down with Art!’ (Nieder die Kunst!),
announced on posters of the Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920. In addition, there was the
condemnation of the art of the past by the Russian Constructivists, and lastly, the shift
towards a modern civilization amongst the Purist group associated with the French
magazine L’ Esprit nouveau. New technological developments now made it possible to
realize some former Futurist projects of movement, dynamism and speed.
These problems were fundamental for Karel Teige, a leading figure of the Czech inter-
war avant-garde and theoretician of the art association Devětsil. The name of the circle
refers to a plant from the sunflower family and also means ‘nine forces’, referring to the
nine members of the group at the time of its foundation in Prague in 1920. After 1923 there
existed also a branch in Brno. Teige observed the European avant-garde and was conver-
sant with Futurist texts, as well as with the manifestos of the second decade of the century,
but was not in direct contact with the Futurists until after Marinetti’s visit to Prague. After
that, he wrote three essays focussing on the Futurist group and evaluated their pro-
grammatic statements concerning the visual arts rather than their actual. He took note
of Boccioni’s modernolatry, acknowledging that “Futurism has come up, in particular,
with an anti-traditionalist appeal and resolute negation of historicism, academism and
passéism” (Teige: “Futurismus”, 5). He underlined the Futurists’ passion for the present
and praised their favourite forms of expression: the circus with clowns and acrobats,
noisy advertising, acting, the rhythm of factory work and machines. In the conclusion of
his last article, “F. T. Marinetti + italská moderna + světový futurismus” (F. T. Marinetti +
Italian Modernism + International Futurism, 1929), he summarized the movement’s great-
est achievement, which in his view lay in initiating kinetic forms of art, new typography,
the idea of free association (which Surrealism was to develop into automatism), revitaliz-
ing the theatre and giving due consideration to the senses of touch and smell.
In his early writings, Teige mingled Futurist rebelliousness with attempts at finding
a different, modern conception of art. He promoted creative work directed against
exclusiveness, aloofness, l’ art pour l’ art and the snobbery of the viewer. He wanted
art to be released from the institutional framework of museums and galleries and
allowed to develop more true-to-life forms of expression, such as those to be found in
the cinema, the music-hall and cabaret. The Futurist pedigree is obvious in phrases
such as “Classical beauty in museums turns out to be uninspiring, boring, dreary and
 The Czech Lands 389

unsatisfactory” (Teige: “Umění dnes a zítra”, 189), and “a wall covered with posters is
often a sight more invigorating than some late-Renaissance rooms in the Louvre” (Teige:
“F. T. Marinetti a futurismus”, 77). In this spirit, Teige’s imagination was caught by the
shift to a modern life full of excitement, action and dynamics. Indeed, he considered
it necessary for art to start from point zero, without consideration of past civilizations.
Around the middle of the 1920s, echoes of Futurism could be found in Teige’s
search for new connections between art and life, marked by spontaneity, improvi-
sation, performance and humour. Teige called the new approach ‘Poetism’. It went
beyond the normal categorization of art and attempted to connect and fuse its com-
ponents in a new synthesis, which could also include non-artistic media. Later, this
concept was broadened to include ‘poetry for all five senses’, a comprehensive ars
una, replacing the set of separate artistic and non-artistic areas, and directed chiefly
at new discoveries from the world of technology, similar to Boccioni’s idea that

there is neither painting nor sculpture, neither music nor poetry: there is only creation! […] Reject
the idea that one material must be used exclusively in the construction of a sculptural whole.
Insist that even twenty different types of material can be used in a single work of art in order to
achieve its plastic feeling. To mention a few examples: glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement,
hair, leather, cloth, mirrors, electric lights, and so on. (Boccioni: “Futurist Sculpture”, 118)

Teige’s experimental projects for new creative work in the fields of cinematography,
photogenic poetry, mechanical ballet, radiophonic poetry, optophonetics, the sym-
phony of fragrances, the poetry of flavours, tactilism, free dance, aviation and so on
received some inspiration from the Futurist manifestos of the 1920s; for the most part,
however, they remained on the drawing board. Teige’s aims (all-encompassing emo-
tions, a synthesis of physics and psychology, a union of “sensuality, intelligence and
activity”; Teige: “Manifest poetismu”, 336) went beyond the possibilities of the time
and, like the pioneering projects of the Futurists, were utopian ideas without a chance
of realization.
Teige took a strong interest in technology-based arts and particularly applied
himself to photography and film. He still regarded photography as a static means of
expression, but also acknowledged that it exceeded the traditional nature of painting,
that it could be reproduced in a variety of manners and that it could act as a model
for dynamic films unfolding in a temporal dimension. The Futurists initially had a
contradictory relationship to photography, not least because Boccioni dismissed it as
a mechanical picture and rejected Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s experiments with photo-
dynamism (see p. 219 in the entry on Photography in this volume), which meant that
a Futurist manifesto on photography would only be published in 1930 (F. T. Marinetti
and Tato: “La fotografia futurista: Manifesto”). Teige’s deliberations on photography
therefore drew on different sources: he turned in the first instance to the symbol of the
modern technological world: America. He rejected artistic photography, that is, pho-
tography contaminated by traditional painting. On the contrary, he was attracted by
the “rhythm, poetry, continuous drama of events around the globe” (Teige: “Foto”, 157)
390 Alena Pomajzlová

in common news photography. He further developed the scope of photography by

making use of modern photomontage; he was also aware of the experimental pos-
sibilities of photochemical technology and the use of the dynamics of light. For this
reason, he brought the photographer Jaroslav Rössler (1902–1990) to Devětsil, whose
main photographic subject matter was light, its pervading and intersecting paths and
dynamics. Another avant-garde photographer, Jaromír Funke (1896–1945), photo-
graphed illuminated forms and their shadows, which produced abstract compositions
that looked like successive simultaneous visions captured in time.
Teige’s interest regularly returned to film as a “coloured, moving, rhythmic, spa-
tio-temporal picture” (Teige: Film, 83). He viewed Devětsil’s innovative collages, pho-
tomontages and picture poems as either material for mass reproduction, or as sce-
narios for art films or what he called ‘enlivened photomontages’. For him, film was
genuine dynamic painting that made it possible to bring colours, lights, forms and
sounds together into ‘photogenic poems’ that combined, in collage fashion, abstract
forms with fragments of reality, thereby developing the viewer’s sensibility. These cre-
ations were to replace paintings statically hanging on walls and go beyond the bound-
aries of traditional art by harnessing modern technologies in support of the creative
process. Although Teige’s screenplays were published in avant-garde magazines at the
time (e. g. Disk or Pásmo), none of them was actually filmed. In his book Film (1925),
Teige’s interests shifted more towards abstraction and “pure film” as a “complex of
lights and lines, organized in rhythmic movement” which was no longer an image but
a spectacle in which Bergson’s factor of ‘duration’ played a major rôle (Teige: Film, 95).
In the Czech lands, only Zdeněk Pešánek produced sculptures that involved real
movement. This time-based art was tied to the development of new technologies and
resulted from the idea of new, modern art as developed by the Futurists. Pešánek tried
to cut himself off from the past and to direct his creative path towards the future. He
is cited as having said:

In theory, I come close to Futurism, and I maintain that Cubism, and everything that came after it,
must inevitably advance towards, and has today indeed already arrived at, a dead end, because
the possibilities offered by the brush or palette knife are primitive and negligible compared to the
means of modern technology. (Felix: “Uměnív pohybu”, 5)

Pešánek rejected traditional art and also the spiritual path that had dynamized art
before the First World War. Instead, he sought to introduce the most modern form of
energy, electricity, which became the driving force behind his work, as is evidenced
by his book Kinetismus, written in the second half of the 1920s but not published until
1940. Pešánek was preoccupied for the most part with the technical aspects of the new
art, into which he incorporated film, fireworks, a light fountain, kinetic light sculp-
ture, and neon billboards that illuminated urban spaces with their light displays.
Pešánek’s book shows that the fundamental building-block of his work was
coloured light in dynamic changes taking place in time. His idea of a “dyed atmosphere
 The Czech Lands 391

[…] enveloping the observer with a certain colour” (Pešánek: Kinetismus, 44) there-
fore used only pure and coloured light, liberated from any other objects or props and
psycho-physiological effects, as if it followed on from the idea of coloured fumes
or clouds in a vacant space advocated in Boccioni’s lecture at the Roman Circolo
Artistico Internazionale in via Margutta (29 May 1911). Incidentally, Pešánek frequently
made reference to Boccioni, and his concept of light sculpture took inspiration from
Boccioni’s book Pittura scultura futuriste (Dinamismo plastico) (Futurist Painting and
Sculpture: Dynamism in Space, 1914), in which, besides pointing out how the energy of
an object can be captured with the aid of force-lines, Boccioni emphasized the need to
substitute description with abstraction because this corresponded much better to the
indefinite nature of movement (see Felix, “Umění”, 3). The last chapter in particular,
“Trascendentalismo fisico e stati d’animo plastici” (Physical Transcendentalism and
Pictorial States of Mind), with its references to new scientific discoveries and technical
invention innovations, must have been very inspiring for Pešánek.
Another important source for Pešánek was the theatre, as demonstrated in his
many designs for the Pomník letcům (Aviation Monument, 1925–1926), which not only
included changing lights, a fountain and drum sounds, engines and a siren, but was
also placed on a revolving circular plinth. Rather than being a monument, this was
more like a multimedia performance conceived by a theatre director. The connec-
tion with modern stage design, which also used movement and dynamic lighting, is
obvious. In the 1920s, the Futurists published several theatre manifestos, which were
not without influence on the architect, painter and set designer Jiří Kroha (1893–1974)
and his dynamic scenery projects, for example, the (unrealized) scenery for Christian
Dietrich Grabbe’s Scherz, Satire, Ironie und tiefere Bedeutung (Joke, Satire, Irony
and Deeper Meaning, 1827). He incorporated into his scenography the movement of
coloured geometric shapes, projected light shows and completely omitted live actors.
A prototype of such an actor-less stage was Giacomo Balla’s production of Stravinsky’s
Feu d’artifice (Fireworks, 1908) in Rome in 1917, in which the arrangement of radiantly
coloured abstract shapes was dynamized with the rhythm of lighting contrasts (see
Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 253–259).
Pešánek created something similar with his kinetic light sculpture for the Edison
transformer station in Prague (1930). It was a four-metre high object built from geomet-
ric forms in which coloured electric lights had been installed. Every day, between
seven and eight in the evening, with the aid of a perforated paper or pasteboard band
and a hydraulic switching system, a dynamic light show took place. It brought together
engineering, non-sculptural materials, modern technology and electrical energy. This
was a new conception of art, since the sculpture demolished the Romantic idea of a
noble and majestic sculpture. It was not destined for a museum, but was an object
that was part of a public space. Pešánek also applied himself to illuminated adver-
tising boards and to electric street lighting, with the intention of eliminating the dis-
tance that customarily separated the viewer from a work of art. However, as it turned
392 Alena Pomajzlová

out, non-Futurist concepts of art prevailed in the Czech lands, and so Pešánek’s revo-
lutionary ideas were doomed.
All the above-mentioned works – be they abstractions, fusions of artistic lan-
guages, dynamic perceptions or incorporations of kinetic elements into sculpture –
had one thing in common: their ultimate source, to a greater or lesser extent, was
Futurism. However, it was not Futurism as it is commonly understood. Rather, the
Czech artists discussed here elaborated the Futurist stimuli in an independent
manner and created works of art that reflected their own preoccupations and made
those works all the more valuable because of it.

Archival sources
Boccioni, Umberto: Libri da consultare – Bergson. Los Angeles: The Getty Research Institute.
Umberto Boccioni Papers, Series II B. Notes and clippings, 1911, undated; Accession no
880380, box 3, f. 29.

Works cited
Arp, Jean, and El Lissitzky: Die Kunstismen, 1914–1924. Erlenbach-Zürich: Rentsch, 1925.
Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Boccioni, Umberto: “Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista.” U. Boccioni: Gli scritti editi e inediti.
A cura di Zeno Birolli. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1971. 23–30. English translation “Futurist Sculpture.”
Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New
Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 113–119. Czech translation “Umělecký manifest
futuristického sochařství.” Dílo [Work] 11 (1913): 47–48, 67–68, 108–109.
Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini: “Futurist Painting:
Technical Manifesto, 11 April 1910.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.:
Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 64–67.
Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla: “The Exhibitors
to the Public, February 1912.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.:
Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 105–109.
Felix, Adolf: “Umění v pohybu.” [Art in Motion] Světlo a výtvarné umění v díle Zdenka a Jöny
Pešánkových [Light and Fine Art in the Work of Zdeněk Pešánek and Jöna Pešánková]. Praha:
Elektrické podniky hlavního města Prahy, 1930. 5–6.
Gutfreund, Otto: “Plocha a prostor.” [Surface and Space] Umělecký měsíčník [Art Monthly] 2:7
(Spring 1913): 240–243.
Krauss, Rosalind E.: Passages in Modern Sculpture. New York: Viking Press, 1977.
Kubišta, Bohumil: “O duchovní podstatě moderní doby.” [The Spiritual Essence of Modern Times]
Česká kultura [Czech Culture] 2:14–15 (9 April 1914): 217–221. Reprinted in Bohumil Kubišta:
Předpoklady slohu: Úvahy, kritiky, polemiky. [Assumptions of Style: Reflections, Criticism,
Polemics]. Sestavil a k tisku připravil František Kubišta. Praha: Girgal, 1947. 117–126.
Kubišta, Bohumil: “O duchovním podkladu moderní doby.” [The Spiritual Background of Modern
Times] Česká kultura [Czech Culture] 1:2 (18 October 1912): 52–56. Reprinted in Bohumil
Kubišta: Předpoklady slohu: Úvahy, kritiky, polemiky. [Assumptions of Style: Reflections,
Criticism, Polemics]. Sestavil a k tisku připravil František Kubišta. Praha: Girgal, 1947. 86–92.
 The Czech Lands 393

Kupka, František: Tvoření v umění výtvarném [Creation in the Visual Arts]. Praha: SVU Mánes, 1923.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Tato [Guglielmo Sansoni]: “La fotografia futurista: Manifesto.”
Luigi Scrivo, ed.: Sintesi del futurismo: Storia e documenti. Roma: Bulzoni, 1968. 191. English
translation “Futurist Photography.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus.
New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 392–393.
Nešlehová, Mahulena: Bohumil Kubišta. Praha: Odeon, 1984.
Pešánek, Zdeněk: Kinetismus: Kinetika ve výtvarnictví – barevná hudba [Kineticism: Kinetics in Art –
Colour Music]. Praha: Česká grafická unie, 1941.
Rowell, Margit, ed.: František Kupka, 1871 – 1957: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue. New York:
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 10 October – 7 December 1975; Zürich: Kunsthaus
Zürich, 17. Januar – 14. März 1976. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1975.
Šmejkal, František: “Futurismus a české umění.” [Futurism in Czech Art] Umění [Art] 36:1 (1988):
20–53.
Teige, Karel: “Foto, kino, film.” [Photo, Cinema, Film] Život: Sborník nové krásy [Life: An Anthology of
New Beauty] 2 (1922): 153–167.
Teige, Karel: “F. T. Marinetti + italská moderna + světový futurismus.” [F. T. Marinetti, Italian
Modernism and World-wide Futurism] ReD [Revue Devětsil] 2:6 (February 1929): 185–204.
Italian translation “F. T. Marinetti + modernismo italiano + futurismo mondiale.” K. Teige: Arte e
ideologia 1922–1933. Torino: Einaudi, 1982. 97–135.
Teige, Karel: “F. T. Marinetti a futurismus.” [F. T. Marinetti and Futurism] Aktuality a kuriozity 1:8–10
(15 January 1922): 77–79.
Teige, Karel: “Futurismus a italská moderna.” [Futurism and Italian Modernism] Pásmo [Zone] 1:10
(March 1925): 4–6. Italian translation “Il futurismo e l’ arte italiana moderna.” Il verri 25:33–34
(October 1970): 32–44.
Teige, Karel: “Umění dnes a zítra.” [Art of Today and Tomorrow] Jaroslav Seifert, ed.: Revoluční
sborník Devětsil [The Devětsil Revolutionary Miscellany]. Praha: Večernice, 1922. 187–202.
Teige, Karel: Film. Praha: Petr, 1925.
Teige, Karel: “Manifest poetismu.” ReD [Revue Devětsil] 1:9 (June 1928): 317–336. Reprinted in K.
Teige: Výbor z díla. Vol. 1. Svět stavby a básně: Studie z dvacátých let. Praha: Československý
spisovatel, 1966. 487–500.
Weiner, Richard: “Návštěvou u nového Františka Kupky.” [Visiting the New František Kupka]
Samostatnost [Independence] 16 (8 August 1912): s.p.. Reprinted in Výtvarné umění [Fine Arts]
15:8 (1965): 367–371.
Wiese, Stephan von: “Metaphysisches Beefsteak? Zum Kubismus-Rezeption des Expressionismus.”
Jiří Švestka, and Tomáš Vlček, eds.: 1909–1925 Kubismus in Prag. Stuttgart: Hatje, 1991. 38–43.
Wittlich, Petr: “Kupka a dealegorizace pohybu: Na okraj výstav děl Františka Kupky v Praze r. 1968.”
[Kupka and the De-allegorization of Movement: On the Fringe of Works by František Kupka in
Prague in 1968] Umění [Art] 17:2 (1969): 168–172.

Further reading
Ambros, Veronika: “The Amazing Fortunes of Futurism in Prague: ‘Parole in libertà’ and the Liberated
Theatre.” Paul J. Stoesser, ed.: Futurist Dramaturgy and Performance. New York: Legas, 2011.
57–66.
Boccioni, Umberto: Pittura scultura futuriste (Dinamismo plastico). Milano: Edizioni futuriste di
“Poesia”, 1914. Reprint Pittura e scultura futuriste. Milano: SE, 1997. English translation Futurist
Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism). Los Angeles/CA: Getty Publications, 2016.
394 Alena Pomajzlová

Čapek, Josef: “Postavení futuristů v dnešním umění.” [Futurist Positions in Contemporary Art]
Umělecký měsíčník [Art Monthly] 1:6 (March 1912): 174–178.
Ciccotti, Eusebio: “Teatro futurista italiano a Praga.” Mario Verdone, ed.: Teatro contemporaneo.
Vol. 8. Appendice 5. Roma: Lucarini, 1988. 69–74.
Dierna, Giuseppe: “Karel Teige a italský futurismus: Odmítnutí a dluhy.” [Karel Teige and Italian
Futurism: Rejection and Debts] Umĕní [Art] 43:1–2 (1995): 56–62. Italian translation “K. Teige
e il futurismo italiano: Negazioni e debiti.” G. Dierna: Maghi meravigliosi: Cinque capitoli
sull’avanguardia in Boemia. Roma: CATIGI, 1999. 5–18.
Dierna, Giuseppe: “ ‘Spero di trovarla domani nel pomeriggio’: Sulle tracce di Federico De Pistoris
e dei futuristi italiani a Praga sullo scorcio del 1921.” Gianna A. Mina, ed.: Federico Pfister/De
Pistoris (1898–1975): Futurista e intellettuale tra Svizzera e Italia. Bern: Ufficio Federale della
Cultura, 2010. 57–66.
Dierna, Giuseppe: Per una storia del futurismo italiano in Boemia (1909–1929). Roma: Voland, 1999.
Drews, Peter: “Futurismus in Böhmen.” P. Drews: Die slawische Avantgarde und der Westen: Die
Programme der russischen, polnischen und tschechischen literarischen Avantgarde und ihr
europäischer Kontext. München: Fink, 1983. 184–187.
Folejewski, Zbigniew: “Futurism in Czech and Slovak Poetry.” Z. Folejewski: Futurism and Its Place in
the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology. Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press, 1980. 97–102, 248–255.
Gwóźdź-Szewczenko, Ilona: “Futurism: The Hidden Face of the Czech Avant-Garde.” Günter
Berghaus, ed.: Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 154–174.
Gwóźdź-Szewczenko, Ilona: “Futurystyczne inspiracje literatury czeskiej: Mały przyczynek do dużej
sprawy.” [Futurist Inspirations in Czech Literature: A Small Contribution to a Big Issue] Miłosz
Bukwalt, et al., eds.: Wielkie tematy kultury w literaturach słowiańskich [Great Cultural Topics
in Slavic Literatures]. Vol. 7.2. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2007.
191–198.
Gwóźdź-Szewczenko, Ilona: “Refleksje nad włoskim futuryzmem w czeskich międzywojennych
polemikach literackich jako (nie)uświadomiony dyskurs tożsamościowy.” [Reflections on
Italian Futurism in Czech Interwar Polemics as an (Un)conscious Discourse on Identity] Joanna
Goszczyńska, ed.: Procesy autoidentyfikacji na obszarze kultur środkowoeuropejskich po roku
1918 [Self-identification Processes in the Area of Central European Cultures after 1918]. Warszawa:
Uniwersytet Warszawski, Instytut Slawistyki Zachodniej i Południowej, 2008. 157–175.
Gwóźdź-Szewczenko, Ilona: Futuryzm w czeskim pejzażu literackim [Futurism in the Czech Literary
Landscape]. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2009.
Hajný, Josef: “Panoráma italského futurismu.” [Panorama of Italian Futurism] Svĕtová literatura
[World Literature] 14:5–6 (1969): 150–158.
Holý, Jiří: “Kubismus, futurismus, civilismus.” Jan Lehár, et al., eds.: Česká literatura od počátků
k dnešku [Czech Literature from the Beginnings to Today]. Praha: Nakladatelství Lidové noviny,
1998. 509–513.
Kupka, František: La Création dans les arts plastiques. Paris: Éditions Cercle d’Art, 1989.
Liška, Pavel: “Tschechischer Kubismus und der Futurismus.” Jiří Švestka, and Tomáš Vlček, eds:
Kubismus in Prag 1909–1925: Malerei, Skulptur, Kunstgewerbe, Architektur. Stuttgart: Hatje
1991. 154–157.
Lista, Giovanni: Le Futurisme: Création et avant-garde. Paris: Les Éditions de l’ Amateur, 2001.
Neumann, Stanislav Kostka: Ať žije život! [Long Live Life!] Praha: Borový, 1920.
Nešlehová, Mahulena: “Impulses of Futurism in Czech Art.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: International
Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000. 122–143.
Niedziela, Zdzisław: “Futurystyczny epizod w twórczości S.K. Neumanna.” [The Futurist Episode in
the Work of S.K. Neumann] Z. Niedziela, ed.: Literatury słowiańskie w okresie awangardowego
 The Czech Lands 395

przełomu [Slavic Literatures in the Time of the Avant-Garde Breakthrough]. Wrocław: Zakład
Narodowy imienia Ossolińskich, 1979. 133–141.
Ottinger, Didier, ed.: Le Futurisme a Paris: Une avant-garde explosive. Exhibition catalogue. Paris:
Centre Pompidou, 15 octobre 2008 – 26 janvier 2009. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2009.
Pomajzlová, Alena, ed.: Rytmy + pohyb + světlo: Impulsy futurismu v českém umění [Rhythms +
Motion + Light: Futurist Impulses in Czech Art]. Exhibition catalogue. Plzeň: Západočeská
galerie v Plzni, 10. října 2012 – 13. ledna 2013; Brno: Moravská galerie v Brně, 14. února – 19.
května 2013. Praha: Arbor Vitae Societas a Porte, 2013.
Richterová, Sylvie: “Kolářův experiment s uměním: Příklad futurismu.” [Jiří Kolář’s Experiments with
Art: The Example of Futurism] Česká literatura 54:2–3 (2006): 289–303.
Savický, Nikolaj: “O kubismu, futurismu a klasickém umění aneb Problém Bohumila Kubišty.”
[Cubism, Futurism and Classical Art, or The Bohumila Kubišty Problem] Prostor [Space] 6:24
(1993): 154–157.
Srp, Karel, ed.: Karel Teige, 1900–1951. Exhibition catalogue. Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy,
15. února – 1. května 1994.
Stefański, Michał: “Almanach na rok 1914: Czyli kłopoty z czeskim futuryzmem.” [The Almanac for
1914, or The Trouble with Czech Futurism] Bohemistyka [Czech Studies] 2 (2010): 93–107.
Šetlík, Jiří, ed.: Otto Gutfreund: Zázemí tvorby [Otto Gutfreund: The Background of Creation]. Praha:
Odeon, 1989.
Šmejkal, František: “Il futurismo nell’opera di Jiří Kroha.” Mario Verdone, ed.: Teatro
contemporaneo. Vol. 8. Appendice 5. Roma: Lucarini, 1988. 163–168.
Šmejkal, František, Rostislav Švácha, and Jan Rous, eds.: Devětsil: Česká výtvarná avantgarda dvacátých
let [Devětsil: Czech Avant-Garde Art of the 1920s]. Exhibition catalogue. Brno: Dům umění, 22.
duben – 25. květen 1986; Praha: Galerie hlavního města Prahy, 3. června – 6. červenec 1986.
Švácha, Rostislav: “K futuristickým motivům v české architektuře.” [Futurist Themes in Czech
Architecture] Umění [Art] 45:3–4 (1997): 330–340.
Tria, Massimo: “Marinetti e Prampolini a Praga: Contatti futuristi con l’ avanguardia cecoslovacca
fra le due guerre.” Giovanna Tomassucci, and T. Massimo, eds.: Gli altri futurismi: Futurismi
e movimenti d’avanguardia in Russia, Polonia, Cecoslovacchia, Bulgaria e Romania. Pisa:
Edizioni Plus, 2010. 37–54.
Uffelmann, Dirk: “ ‘Nie spolszczono ich’: Łagodzenie rygorów w kulturze polskiej XX wieku (futuryzm
na tle literatury rosyjskiej, czeskiej, i słowackiej).” [‘Not Polandized’: Mitigating Rigours in
Polish Culture of the Twentieth Century: Futurism against the Background of Russian, Czech and
Slovak Literature] Mieczysław Dąbrowski, and Tomasz Wójcik, eds.: Dwudziestowieczność.
[The Twentieth Century] Warszawa: Wydział Polonistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2004.
401–421.
Versari, Maria Elena: “The Central European Avant-Garde of the 1920s: The Battleground for Futurist
Identity?” Vojtěch Lahoda, ed.: Local Strategies, International Ambitions: Modern Art and
Central Europe, 1918–1968. Papers from the International Conference, Prague, 11–14 June 2003.
Praha: Artefactum, 2006. 103–110.
Zemánek, Jiří, ed.: Zdeněk Pešánek 1896–1965. Exhibition catalogue. Praha: Národní galerie, 21.
listopadu 1996 – 16. února 1997. Praha: Národní galerie; Gema Art, 1996.
Torben Jelsbak, Per Stounbjerg
25 Denmark
At the outbreak of the First World War, Futurism was an established concept in
Danish public discourse. Introduced by art exhibitions and by several articles in the
press, it pointed to an artistic radicalism and experimentation that was felt to border
on madness. But the term was also used in commercial and political discourse: in
the summer of 1913, a Copenhagen department store could present the latest style
in female dresses “in the strangest Futurist designs” (Esther: “Udstilling”), and in
September 1914 an article in the daily newspaper Politiken spoke about “Political
Futurism” with regard to the instability of the triple alliance between Germany,
Austria-Hungary and Italy (H.B.-z: “Politisk Futurisme”).
Until this point in time, the impact of Marinetti’s Futurism on Danish art and
literature had been close to non-existent. Yet the Great War served as a catalyst
for Modernist activity. Between 1914 and 1918, cultural life in the Danish capital of
Copenhagen went through a period of paradoxical prosperity. Due to the country’s
neutrality, Danish merchants could trade with both England and Germany, and
the wartime economy created vast fortunes, some of which were invested in art.
Exhibitions and large private collections made the latest currents in European art
accessible to a Danish public (see Aagesen: “Art Metropolis”). This peculiar situation
served as the background for a short-lived Modernist breakthrough which culminated
in the emergence of the avant-garde magazine Klingen (The Blade, 1917–1920), which
came to serve as the focal point for a generation of young, experimental artists and
poets, and the 1918 Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling, or KE (Artists’ Autumn Exhibition).
This Modernist breakthrough incorporated elements and impulses from French
Fauvism and Cubism, German Expressionism and Italian Futurism.

Critical responses to Futurism: Georg Brandes

The first Dane to react to the ideas of Italian Futurism was the literary critic Georg
Brandes (1842–1927). Brandes was no newcomer to European Modernist discourse;
he had a prehistory as leading critic and ideological spokesman of early phase of
Scandinavian Modernism during the 1880s and 1890s, represented by figures such
as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg and others. Between 1888 and 1890, he had made
the discovery of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and communicated his
importance to a European public. There is no doubt that Brandes had the intellectual
capacity to acknowledge the revolutionary endeavour and activist agenda of Marinetti’s
Futurism. Yet, as a liberal intellectual he took a very sceptical stance towards the politi-
cal implications of the new art movement. Brandes’s first mention of Futurism goes back

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 Denmark 397

to 11 August 1909, when, in a short news column in the Copenhagen daily Politiken, he
commented on the recent special issue of Marinetti’s magazine Poésia that was devoted
to Futurism. In a laconic tone, Brandes noted the youthful and somewhat immature
proclamations of Marinetti’s publicity and its “odd” combination of patriotism and
anarchism (Brandes: “Futurisme”). These preliminary remarks by a leading European
critic anticipated some of the recurrent issues in the Danish reception of Futurism.
In the winter of 1911–1912, Brandes had a three months’ stay in Paris and attended
several Futurist events, including the exhibition of the Futurist painters at the
Bernheim-Jeune Gallery (5–24 February 1912). Brandes collected his reflections on the
new art movement in two feature articles published in Politiken (25 April and 31 May
1912). The two articles were part of a comprehensive coverage of Futurism which also
included an extensive review of the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition (7 March 1912). When,
in July 1912, the Futurist touring exhibition reached Copenhagen, Politiken printed
reports about the event on an almost daily basis.
The first of Brandes’s two articles contained a critical evaluation of Marinetti’s
Futurism. Commenting on the effective publicity and commotion surrounding the
movement, Brandes described Marinetti as a “howler monkey” whose primary goal
was to attract attention (Brandes: “Futurismen”). Brandes appreciated the energy and
the anarchist elements of Marinetti’s programme and expressed his sympathy with
the urge to revolt against the Italian fixation on the country’s great cultural past, but
he found the juvenile pathos of Marinetti’s proclamations hysterical, frivolous and
potentially dangerous. He warned against the political implications of Marinetti’s
agenda: its heroic militarism and nationalist patriotism he saw as a potential threat to
the political stability of Europe. Brandes did not comment on the aesthetic and artis-
tic practices of the Italian Futurists. Only a short statement at the end of the article
revealed his view of the painters presented at the recent exhibition in Paris: “We have
rarely seen anything more insane than their exhibition in Paris at Bernheim Jeune &
Co.” (Brandes: “Futurismen”).
The other article was devoted to Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifeste de la femme
futuriste (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, 1912). It contained a detailed examina-
tion of Saint-Point’s literary work, scrutinizing the impulses she had received from
Nietzsche’s philosophy and his idea of the superhuman. In this article, Brandes also
emphasized the heroic philosophy of life and the fever of war inherent in Futurist
rhetoric, but this time without drawing any political conclusions from it (Brandes:
“Den futuristiske Kvindes Manifest”).

Futurist impulses in Danish visual art

The pivotal event in the proliferation of Futurism in Denmark was the appearance
of the Italian Futurist painters at Den frie Udstillingsbygning (The Independent
398 Torben Jelsbak, Per Stounbjerg

Exhibition Building) in July 1912. This exhibition was a reduced version of the one
held at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery four months earlier. It featured twenty-four of the
thirty-five works displayed in Paris, including such major (and today canonical) works
as Umberto Boccioni’s La strada entra nella casa (The Street Enters the House, 1911)
and Gino Severini’s La Danse du “Pan Pan” á Monico (The Dance of the Pan-Pan at
the “Monico”, 1909–1911). The organizer of the exhibition was the German art impre-
sario and owner of the gallery of Der Sturm in Berlin, Herwarth Walden, who person-
ally attended the opening of the exhibition and supported the marketing of the event
by giving a public lecture on the Futurist painters’ technique of simultaneity. As had
been the case with the original in Paris, the exhibition in Copenhagen was a success
de scandal, attracting a large number of visitors and receiving extensive coverage in
the press.
Whereas Georg Brandes’s articles about Futurism had focussed on the concep-
tual or ideological basis of the new movement, the Futurist exhibition in Copenhagen
was mainly discussed in aesthetic terms. In line with the dominant French taste
amongst Danish art critics, the stylistic devices of the works on display were deemed
almost acceptable in the case of Severini, but the other artists were generally consid-
ered to have produced hysterical and incoherent paintings. The tone of most of the
reviews was deprecating and rather ironic, and the Futurist works were subjected to
numerous caricatures in the press. The most prominent example of this reaction to
the Futurist aesthetic in cartoons was a drawing that appeared in the tabloid daily
Ekstra-Bladet of 12 July 1912. It was signed by the artist and cartoonist Robert Storm
Petersen (1882–1949), and depicted a dynamic vision of an urban landscape with a
distorted, seemingly screaming figure in the centre, surrounded by isolated body
parts, a roaring taxi car and other iconic elements without any obvious connection
to one another. The drawing was presumably meant to be a visual parody of the
simultaneous technique of the Futurist painters, and it was accompanied by a piece
of abstruse prose which contributed to the general public’s perception of the new
movement as ‘insane’.
It is generally maintained by scholars of early Danish Modernism that the Futurist
exhibition (as well as Futurism in general) did not have any substantial impact on
contemporary Danish art. Despite the curator Herwarth Walden’s eager efforts to
promote Futurism and to gain supporters for the new aesthetics in the Danish artistic
milieu, leading Danish Modernist painters had reservations about Futurist aesthetics.
Nonetheless, it is possible to observe a series of elements and stylistic features that
entered contemporary Danish painting and can be considered Futurist.
This Futurist impulse consisted, first of all, of the introduction of new motifs in
painting: modern city life, dance, sports, variety theatre and other popular entertain-
ments, technology, transport. This tendency was articulated in the circle of artists
gathered around the magazine Klingen. In a programmatic article entitled “Om at
male” (On Painting, 1918), the painter Albert Naur (1889–1973) expressed this new
preoccupation with modern themes:
 Denmark 399

Engines and rails and wires […], from which nothing but technology and new forms of beauty
emanate […]. Our time itself is Cubism – and its symbols are wheels and bullets. Art is infected
with rationality and precision, which is a necessity when you work with engines and pistons.
(Naur: “Om at male”, s.p.)

Naur employed the term ‘Cubism’, but the artistic attitude he described may be seen
as a proto-Futurist embrace of technological modernity. However, such statements
often had a marked rhetorical character. In his own artistic practice, Naur dedicated
himself to landscape and figure painting in a relatively traditionalist and representa-
tional manner – far removed from any kind of Futurism.
The Danish artist who most clearly adopted formal features of Futurist painting
was the painter Jais Nielsen (1885–1961). His work from the period contained a number
of self-portraits and modern, urban genre paintings made in an eclectic avant-garde
style that combined Cubist and Futurist techniques of simultaneity with more clas-
sical devices of pictorial composition. Perhaps the most Futurist among Nielsen’s
works is the painting Afgang! (Departure!, 1918), exhibited at the Artists’ Autumn
Exhibition of 1918. The picture depicts a dynamic urban setting with three figures
running through a street in the direction of a railway station. The hectic impression
of the scene is created by the visual arrangement of the tableau and by the recurrent
use of the motif of the clock as a symbol of time and pressure. To support this feeling,
the picture plane is broken up into a dynamic series of fragmentary forms that evoke
the multiple sensations of a person running through a street. In this way, the painting
can be said to represent “an unorthodox use of the principle of simultaneity”, reflect-
ing a Futurist conception of time and modernity (Aagesen: The Avant-Garde, 20).
Nielsen’s works were torn apart by the critics and ridiculed by the public, and in
the 1920s he was to abandon his avant-garde experiments with painting and instead
pursued a career as a ceramicist. But ever since Afgang! was included in Pontus
Hultén’s international exhibition Futurismo & Futurismi in 1986, Nielsen’s early exper-
imental paintings have been recognized as pivotal works in the canon of early
twentieth-century Danish Modernism. Yet Nielsen’s status as a pioneer painter is still
an issue of debate among art historians (see Gottlieb: “Avant-gardism”).
Another controversial work of the 1918 exhibition, which has been interpreted as
being Futurist, is the large-scale, kaleidoscopic painting of a tramcar, Komposition:
Sporvogne (Composition: Tramcars), by William Scharff (1886–1959). This painting
evokes the dynamic vision of an urban landscape as seen from a tramcar in motion.
In this case, the motif is split up into a dynamic mosaic of forms and colours tending
towards abstraction. Once again, the painting can be seen as a Futurist rendering of
motion and speed. Yet Scharff’s organic brushstrokes and the overall harmonic com-
position also point towards an influence originating in Wassily Kandinsky’s theory
and practice of abstraction.
As a general rule where the adoption and appropriation of Futurism in Danish
painting are concerned, we find that the Futurist impulses were rarely appropriated
400 Torben Jelsbak, Per Stounbjerg

in a direct and exclusive manner, but only partially adopted and then combined with
other styles of modern art.

Futurist impulses in Danish literature:

Emil Bønnelycke
In Danish literature, Emil Bønnelycke, Fredrik Nygaard and Tom Kristensen were
the main representatives of the new avant-garde tendencies. They were labelled
‘Expressionists’, but, like their colleagues within the visual arts, they gathered inspi-
ration and impulses from several Modernist sources, including Futurism.
The Futurist connections are most explicit in the case of Emil Bønnelycke (1893–
1953). Following the publication of a series of experimental novels and collections of
poetry between 1917 and 1920, Bønnelycke became a rising star in the Danish literary
Parnassus. Like Marinetti, he was a master of publicity and self-promotion, and his
rapid fame made him the symbol and spokesman of a new generation of poets. At the
same time, he was an active member of several avant-garde networks, a co-editor of
the magazine Klingen (from 1919) and a travelling reporter with international contacts.
The novel Joschja Ogoll of 1920 depicts a poet fashioned in Bønnelycke’s self-image:
a cosmopolitan, multilingual composer of Free-Verse poems inspired by “Marienetti’s
[sic] wonderful, ground-breaking work, ‘The Technical Manifesto of Modern Art’”
(Bønnelycke: Joschja Ogoll, 53–54).
In his poetic œuvre, Bønnelycke adopted the catchwords and proclamations of
Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism to promote new literary subject
matters – city life, technology, industrial production, cars, aeroplanes and film – along
with a provocative celebration of speed, revolution, war, complexity and chaos. The
manifesto-like prose poem Aarhundredet (The Century, 1918) praises advertisements,
telephones and all sorts of machines, including “the power and explosive noise” of the
1918 Gnome aero engine, as up-to-date lyric subjects (Bønnelycke: Asfaltens Sange,
10). Most of the poem in fact consists of thinly veiled allusions to Marinetti’s first
manifesto. The opening passage, for instance, advocates “chaos, the beauty of con-
fusion, the splendour of speed” and “war, whose […] drums and machine guns pro-
claim the world revolution” (Bønnelycke: Asfaltens Sange, 8). Bønnelycke’s Futurist
proclamations reflect an untroubled and rather naïve fascination with modernity in a
European country unaffected by war and revolution.
Bønnelycke also wrote poems in which he praised the austere world of steel,
concrete and stone, as opposed to weakness, decay and impurity in modern life.
But such uncompromising extremes remain few and far between in his lyric works.
Likewise, Bønnelycke’s most radical avant-garde gestures coincided with and were
on an equal footing with a poetic œuvre of an idyllic orientation. As a self-proclaimed
avant-gardist, Bønnelycke declared that poetry should not be written to the sound
 Denmark 401

of the lyre (which gave the lyric genre its name), but should praise the beauty of
speed accompanied by the electrical horn of the motorcar. In most cases, however,
Bønnelycke did not draw from the new Futurist aesthetics any profound conclusions
for his own poetry.
Nonetheless, during his artistic heydays around 1920 Bønnelycke undertook a
series of experiments that challenged the integrity of the poetic genre and the status
of the literary work of art. Asfaltens Sange signalled modernity by its use of prose
fragments instead of lyric poems. The anti-Romantic gesture of its title, Songs of the
Asphalt, contested the Danish lyric tradition with its inclination towards pastoral
motifs. Most radical was the above-mentioned Aarhundredet with its manifesto-like
rhetoric full of exaggerated, unreasonable and provocative statements that were
directed against the traditions and canons of High Art in literature. Modern engineer-
ing products – tramways, bridges, tunnels etc. – are praised as poetic creations sur-
passing the works of Shakespeare and Michelangelo. “I adore”, Bønnelycke declares,
“an advertising pillar, a cigarette, a matchstick more than a poem by Christian
Winther”, a Danish Golden-Age poet who in the poem is derided as “awful” (Asfaltens
Sange, 9).
Bønnelycke’s Futurism, however, was not just rhetorical. It also entailed an
innovative and experimental engagement with the materiality of the book medium
and the visual features of the literary text such as typography and layout (see
Jelsbak: “Avantgarde og boghistorie”). In 1918, Bønnelycke was planning a collec-
tion of visual poems in the fashion of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes (1918).
Even though this project never materialized, a number of visual poems were pub-
lished in the magazine Klingen. The most radical among these, “Berlin”, appeared
in Klingen 9–10 (1918). This ‘poem’ was in fact a drawing: a series of parallel and
criss-crossing lines evoking the vision of modern traffic infrastructure or commu-
nication networks (the lines may be seen as a depiction of power cables or railway
systems of the city). Apart from its title, the poem did not contain any words. By
renouncing linguistic material altogether, “Berlin” challenged the integrity of the
poem as a literary genre.
Bønnelycke’s most elaborate literary experiment was the war novel Spartanerne
(The Spartans), published in 1919. Here, he adopted the crosscutting and montage
aesthetic of contemporary film art, with D.W. Griffith’s silent epic Tolerance (1916)
serving as a model. In order to create a simultaneous narration, three parallel sto-
rylines are separated in time and space. One of the narratives takes place in Ancient
Greece, whereas the other two are set in wartime Europe (one in a Danish garrison,
the other on the western front). This plot construction allowed Bønnelycke to create
a counterfactual scenario in which he made Denmark participate in the First World
War. As part of the novel’s ambition to render the sensorial experiences of war,
Spartanerne drew on visual devices of literary composition introduced by Marinetti
in his Zang tumb tuuum: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912. Parole in libertà (Zang Tumb Tumb:
Adrianople, October 1912. Words-in-Freedom, 1914). Some pages of Bønnelycke’s book
402 Torben Jelsbak, Per Stounbjerg

were transformed into a sort of concrete visual poetry, as for example in a passage
depicting a churchyard with several lines repeating in geometric patterns the words
‘crosses’ and ‘graves’, thus evoking the mass graves of the Great War.
Bønnelycke’s single most sensational Futurist manifestation, however, was
his performance of the poem Rosa Luxemburg: Prosalyrisk Symphoni Pathétique in
Memoriam during a series of so-called ‘Expressionist Evenings’ held at the premises
of the Copenhagen daily Politiken in February 1919. The Copenhagen Expressionist
soirées were organized as a response to the heated public debate following the 1918
Artists’ Autumn Exhibition and included a variety of artistic acts, ranging from paint-
ing and music to literary recitations and Modern Dance performances. Bønnelycke
chose for his contribution a subject of the greatest topicality and political con-
troversy: the tragic fate of the Polish Marxist theorist and revolutionary Socialist
Rosa Luxemburg, who had been killed by right-wing Prussian officers three weeks
earlier. The climax of the poem was powerfully emphasized when Bønnelycke ended
his reading by firing a series of gunshots over the heads of the audience. With this
gesture, the recitation was turned into a performative act that provoked a variety of
reactions in the public, like in a Futurist serata.

Fredrik Nygaard and Tom Kristensen

The organizer of the ‘Expressionist Evenings’ was the young poet Fredrik Nygaard
(1897–1958) who also contributed to the events with a series of texts in the Futurist
or Dadaist genre of the simultaneous poem (i. e. texts conceived explicitly for dra-
matic or musical performance on stage). The most stunning example of this was the
poem Avind (Envy) which was given at the last of the four soirées on 27 February 1919.
Later the same year the poem was included in Nygaard’s collection of poems, Opbrud
(Rupture), alongside a detailed dramatic score for its performance. According to the
stage direction, the poem was to be performed by an “ugly and deformed man” with
a green spotlight illuminating his face and by a group of four gymnasts dressed in
white, accompanied by “monotonous” piano music. The four gymnasts moved in a
mechanical manner to offer a contrast to the speaker’s presentation of himself as a
“clumsy oaf” (Nygaard: Opbrud, 113–116). The performance ended with Futurist noise
music, produced by the pianist who let his hands slide furiously across all keys of the
piano, before the spotlight was switched off.
Nygaards inclinations towards Futurist poetics are reflected in his two collec-
tions of prose poems from 1919, the already mentioned Opbrud and Evropaskitser
(Sketches of Europe). Like Bønnelycke’s prose fragments, Nygaard’s poems focussed
on modern, urban themes, coupled with a touch of multilingual cosmopolititanism.
The poems were full of exclamations and interruptions and polyphonic effects. Due
to a multi-voiced montage technique, scraps of everyday life and street language were
 Denmark 403

integrated into texts such as “London” (from Evropaskitser) that hovered between
the idyllic and the cacophonic (see Larsen: Drømme og dialoger, 243–247; Jelsbak:
Ekspressionisme, 131–138).
Tom Kristensen (1893–1974) is today considered the most canonical poet of the
First World War generation in Danish literary history. He made his literary début
with the poetry collection Fribytterdrømme (Buccaneer Dreams, 1920). Like his friend
and colleague Bønnelycke, Kristensen was well acquainted with Marinetti’s literary
works, but in contrast to Bønnelycke he was a more intellectual or academic writer
and reacted cautiously with regard to the new ideas presented by Futurism. Yet,
Kristensen’s début work reflects a subtle dialogue with Futurist aesthetics and their
integration into a more classical lyric set-up (see Jelsbak: “ ‘Lifeless glaciers’ ”, 15–16).
The central poem of the collection, Landet Atlantis (The Land called Atlantis), with
the generic subtitle “A Revolutionary Fantasy”, depicts a utopian vision of war and
revolution. Futurist metaphors of violence and destruction are used to create a shock
effect. The poem celebrates the Futurist myth of youth, energy, violence and destruc-
tion: “Superb like a devasted railway station are / our youth and our strength and our
wild ideas” (Kristensen: Fribytterdrømme, 48). The conclusion of the poem took the
shape of a Futurist proclamation: “In chaos I raise my gun / towards beauty’s bright
star and take aim” (Kristensen: Fribytterdrømme, 49). This echoes the Nietzschean
coda of Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism of 1909: “Standing tall on
the roof of the world, yet once again, we hurl our defiance at the stars!” (Marinetti:
“The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 16).
It is one of the paradoxes in the Danish literary reception and appropriation of
Futurism that Kristensen could write such proclamations without himself breaking
the rules, traditions and canons of lyric poetry. As a classicist he retained all the
formal conventions of conventional poetry such as metre, rhythm and rhyme. We are
very far removed here from Free Verse and Futurist Words-in-Freedom, or the destruc-
tion of syntax, as advocated by Marinetti.

The Futurist poetics of Rud Broby and

Harald Landt Momberg
The Futurist reform of poetry, outlined in Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature and Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom
(1912), was put into action in Denmark by the two young poets Harald Landt Momberg
(1896–1975) and Rud Broby (Rudolf Broby-Johansen, 1900–1987). In 1922, two of their
collections of poetry were published by the Copenhagen New Student Society (Det Ny
Studentersamfund, or D.N.S.S.). This final chapter in the history of Danish Futurism
took place in the context of this Communist organization which, between 1921 and
1924, was the centre of a series of activities, including political demonstrations,
404 Torben Jelsbak, Per Stounbjerg

street activism, art exhibitions and the publication of a weekly pamphlet, Pressen
(The Press, 1923–24, see Jelsbak: “Avant-Garde Activism”). Parallel to its political
activities, the DNSS was part of a European network of avant-garde artists and fos-
tered close connections to Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm. To underline this affinity,
Momberg’s Parole (Words) and Broby’s BLOD (BLOOD) both used variants of the
term ‘Expressionism’ as generic subtitles to emphasize their allegiance. Both works
reflected strong influences coming from the literary aesthetics propagated by the
Berlin magazine: the ‘telegram-style’ poetry of August Stramm (1874–1915) and the
principles of Expressionist ‘word art’ outlined by Lothar Schreyer (1886–1966) in his
essay Expressionistische Dichtung (Expressionist Poetry, 1918–19). And behind all this
lay Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, which had appeared in a
German translation by Jean-Jacques (pseud. of Hans Jakob, 1896–1961) in Der Sturm
in 1912.
Broby’s BLOD is perhaps the most anti-aesthetic collection of poetry ever pub-
lished in Denmark. Its iconoclastic break with liberal and humanist ideals, and its
rebellion against artistic harmony and beauty, clashed with the taboos of literary
convention and public morality. The poems of the collection present an apocalyptic
vision of post-war Europe as a grotesque universe of capitalist exploitation, male vio-
lence and female prostitution, reminiscent of George Grosz’s contemporary cartoons
of mutilated war veterans and bourgeois decadence.
The formal design of the anthology was no less radical: in accordance with the doc-
trines of Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, Broby’s poems renounced
traditional lyric metre, rhythm and rhyme and were on the verge of being incomprehen-
sible. The first lines of the poem “TRIBADER” (Tribades) read: “MY ROOM SLEEPS /
MOONASPHALT / SEA / BLOCKS: BOSOMS” (Broby: BLOD, 21). The only punctuation
consists of slashes, colons, question marks and exclamation marks. Articles and con-
junctions are abolished, syntax is compressed and new images are created by mere jux-
taposition – either by the use of the colon or by the creation of new composite words.
Broby’s focus was on the visual and sonic materiality of the words. He set the entire col-
lection in capital letters and with headings mimicking the typographical layout of Der
Sturm. Some pages integrated texts and drawings, while others opened the possibility of
reading vertically as well as horizontally, letting the reader’s eye wander over the page.
Broby’s BLOD became a public scandal, and the publisher’s stock of the first
edition was immediately confiscated by the Police. The book was subsequently
banned and its author was charged by the Copenhagen City Court with distributing
pornography. Broby was later acquitted of the charges, yet the seizure of the first
edition and public ban on the book were maintained, and BLOD was out of circulation
for almost fifty years until its first reissue in 1968.
The other collection of poetry published by the publishing house of the DNSS,
Harald Landt Momberg’s Parole, represented an aesthetic position that was equally
far removed from Broby’s harsh Social Realism and Marinetti’s industrial land-
scapes. Momberg’s poems constituted a strange blend of Abstract Expressionism
 Denmark 405

and Metaphysical poetry, drawing on a variety of literary and spiritual tradi-

tions ranging from dark Romanticism and Symbolism to esoteric occultism and
theosophy. On a formal level, however, his poetic style was strongly indebted to
Futurist devices: reduced syntax, elliptical language without punctuation and par-
ticles. While renouncing any mimetic references to an external social reality, the
poems explored a sensibility for the materiality of language. In poems inspired
by music and the visual arts with titles such as Etude (Étude) and Komposition
(Composition), he isolated the acoustic qualities of words. Another typical poem,
Abstrakt komposition (Abstract Composition), consisted of seventeen lines, each
containing one noun. Other works included experiments with montage and con-
crete poetry. The response to Momberg’s anthology was either silence or vilifica-
tion. As a consequence he was to give up poetry in favour of a career as a political
journalist. His pioneering work was quickly forgotten until he was rediscovered in
the late 1960s.
The fate of Momberg and Broby marked the culmination and the end of the
Futurist moment in Denmark. In the early 1920s, the cultural and intellectual climate
was characterized by a retour à l’ ordre and a general move away from avant-garde
positions, even amongst artists who had formerly advocated an ultra-modern aes-
thetics. Hence, by the mid-1920s, the most prominent figure of the generation, Emil
Bønnelycke, turned into a conservative and religious moralist. In an essay on the
future of European literature, Georg Brandes saw the “disintegration of form” as a
hallmark of Futurist art. He concluded that the attempts to “blow up artistic forms,
grammar and linguistic logic” were wrong and would have no future in European
literature (Brandes: “Spørgsmaalet”, 8). Similarly, Tom Kristensen, in an essay on
the crisis of new poetry, wrote something resembling an epitaph that honoured the
“crazy experiments” of the avant-gardes and exalted “the mad Futurist” Marinetti
(Kristensen: “Den unge Lyrik”, 13). From then on, no Danish artist would declare
himself a Futurist. The term ‘Futurism’ was still used with regard to radical modernity
but, in light of Marinetti’s ideological and political trajectory in the 1920s, it assumed
an ironic tone or expressed a negative assessment of his association with national-
ism, patriotism and Fascism.

Works cited
Aagesen, Dorthe: “Art Metropolis for a Day: Copenhagen during World War I.” Hubert van den
Berg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 299–324.
Aagesen, Dorthe ed.: The Avant-Garde in Danish and European Art, 1909–1919. Exhibition catalogue,
Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst [Danish National Gallery], 2002.
Bønnelycke, Emil: “Berlin.” Klingen [The Blade] 1:9–10 (June–July 1918): s.p.
Bønnelycke, Emil: “Hr. Thuborg.” Politiken (Copenhagen), 5 August 1920.
406 Torben Jelsbak, Per Stounbjerg

Bønnelycke, Emil: Asfaltens Sange [The Songs of the Asphalt] Copenhagen: Nordiske Forfatteres
Forlag, 1918.
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Christensen, 1919.
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(Copenhagen), 31 May 1912.
Brandes, Georg: “Futurisme.” Politiken (Copenhagen), 11 August 1909.
Brandes, Georg: “Futurismen.” Politiken (Copenhagen), 25 April 1912.
Brandes, Georg: “Spørgsmaalet om den evropæiske Literaturs Fremtid.” [The Question of the Future
of European Literature] Politiken (Copenhagen), 30 January 1921.
Broby, Rud: Blod: Expressionære digte [Expressionary Poems]. Copenhagen: DNSS, 1922. Reprint
Copenhagen: Politisk Revy, 1988.
Esther: “Udstilling af Sommertoiletter og Hatte.” [Exhibition of Summer dresses and Hats]
Nationaltidende (Copenhagen), 20 May 1913.
Gottlieb, Lennart: “Avant-gardism Danish Style: Jais Nielsen as a Modern Genre Painter 1916–18.”
Hubert van den Berg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries
1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 481–490.
H.B.-z: “Politisk Futurisme.” Politiken (Copenhagen), 7 September 1914.
Jelsbak, Torben: “Avantgarde og boghistorie: Emil Bønnelyckes bibliografiske aktivisme.”
[Avant-Garde and Book History: The Bibliographical Activism of Emil Bønnelycke] Lychnos:
Årsbok för idé och lärdomshistoria. Uppsala: Lärdomshistoriska samfundet, 2010. 239–259.
Jelsbak, Torben: “ ‘Lifeless glaciers’: The History of Futurism in Denmark.” International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 6 (2016): 147–168.
Jelsbak, Torben: Ekspressionisme. Hellerup: Spring, 2005.
Kristensen, Tom: “Den unge Lyrik og dens Krise.” [The Young Poetry and its Crisis] T. Kristensen:
Mellem Krigene: Artikler og kroniker [Between the Wars. Essays and Cronical Articles].
København: Gyldendal, 1946. 11–24.
Kristensen, Tom: Fribytterdrømme [Buccaneer Dreams]. Copenhagen: Hagerup, 1920.
Larsen, Peter Stein: Drømme og dialoger: To poetiske traditioner omkring 2000 [Dreams and
Dialogues: To Poetic Traditions around 2000]. Odense: Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 2009.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Momberg, Harald Landt: Parole: 33 expressionistiske digte [33 Expressionist Poems]. København:
DNSS, 1922.
Naur, Albert: “Om at male.” [On Painting] Klingen 1:4 (January 1918): s.p.
Nygaard, Fredrik: Evropaskitser [Sketches of Europe]. Copenhagen: Pio, 1919.
Nygaard, Fredrik: Opbrud [Rupture]. Copenhagen: Pio, 1919.

Further reading
Aagesen, Dorthe: “The Avant-Garde Takes Copenhagen.” D. Aagesen, ed.: The Avant-Garde in
Danish and European Art 1909–19. Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst [Danish National
Gallery], 2002. 152–171.
 Denmark 407

Harsløf, Olaf, ed.: Rudolf Broby-Johansen: En central outsider i det 20. århundrede [Rudolf
Broby-Johansen: A Pivotal Outsider in the 20th Century]. København: Museum Tusculanums
Forlag, 2000.
Jelsbak, Torben: “Avant-Garde Activism: The Case of the New Student Society in Copenhagen
(1922–24).” Hubert van den Berg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the
Nordic Countries 1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 541–555.
Stounbjerg, Per, and Torben Jelsbak: “Danish Expressionism.” Hubert van den Berg, et al., eds.:
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2012. 463–478.
Maria Elena Paniconi, Nadia Radwan
26 Egypt
The Mediterranean Basin has been a space of cross-cultural exchange since Antiquity.
Trade routes connected Egypt with the world at large and fostered the circulation of
products and ideas. These commercial and cultural interactions took a new turn after
Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798 and intensified when the Suez Canal was com-
pleted in 1869 and the country became a British Protectorate in 1882. Many European
intellectuals chose Egypt as a place of residence, and, conversely, many Egyptian
writers and artists studied and received their training north of the Mediterranean.
The transnational exchanges between Europe and the Middle East had a profound
effect on literature and the arts in Egypt. There was a stimulating circulation of ideas
between European expatriate communities and the local intellectual élite, and this
gave rise to a process of transculturation, in which a variety of Modernist trends
played an important rôle.
In contrast to the situation in western Europe, where Modernism was a response
to rapid technological development, Modernist culture was embraced in Egypt as a
force that could induce cultural and political change. European aesthetics stood in
marked contrast to indigenous folk culture and the traditions of Islamic art. By adopt-
ing some of the artistic tendencies of Europe, the cultural vanguard could develop a
programme of modernization which pulled the country out of a pre-modern state of
existence and into the twentieth century.
This entry focusses on contacts between Egypt and Italy and maps out some of
the cross-cultural exchanges that took place in the fields of literature, theatre and the
fine arts. It identifies key actors and intermediaries who introduced Futurism to – and
propagated it in – the land on the Nile and outlines how this process of cultural trans-
fer affected the birth of a Modernist culture in the country.

Literature and Drama

Egypt and international Futurism

The region south of the Mediterranean is not traditionally understood as one of

Futurism’s spheres of influence. However, Egypt played a significant rôle in the move-
ment, for F. T. Marinetti was born there and lived in Alexandria until he was fifteen. In
several of Marinetti’s works we can find memories drawn from his native country, for
example in Mafarka le futuriste: Roman africain (Mafarka the Futurist: African Novel,
printed 1909, but dated 1910 on cover) and in his Free-Word composition Dune (1914),
or in the setting of the novel Gli indomabili (The Untameables, 1922).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-026
 Egypt 409

He returned to Egypt in 1929 and 1938 and wrote some travel notes about his expe-
riences there. They were included in Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto (An Italian
Sensibility Born in Egypt, published posthumously in 1969), and Il fascino dell’Egitto
(The Charm of Egypt, 1933), and show how the mythical dimension of Egypt served
as a profound source of inspiration for him. From these books, especially the latter
one, we can deduce that the founder of Futurism knew how to behave in Egyptian
society and that he could understand a few words in the spoken Arabic typical of this
country, as he had been exposed to it in childhood.
Besides Marinetti, a number of other Futurists travelled to Egypt and visited its
cosmopolitan cities. Valentine de Saint-Point (1875–1953), for example, the author of
the Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, 1912) and the
Manifeste futuriste de la luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust, 1913), moved to Egypt and
eventually died there in 1953. Likewise, Bruno Corra (1892–1976) travelled to the Nile
in 1925 when he was seeking inspiration for his novel Sanya, la moglie egiziana: il
romanzo dell’oriente moderno (Sanya, the Egyptian Wife: The Novel of the Modern
Orient, 1927). The painter Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni, 1896–1974) also visited
Cairo repeatedly to seek inspiration for his work. Yet, despite this traffic between Italy
and Egypt, neither Egyptian critics nor artists of Arabian descent took a great deal of
interest in Futurism. The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) was not trans-
lated into Arabic at the time, and scholars investigating Arab responses to the Italian
avant-garde or to European Modernism have not found any signs of a ‘local’ reac-
tion to Futurism in Egypt, which contrasts with the positive reception that Surrealism
received in the Essayistes group, active in Cairo between 1924 and 1934 (see Khalil:
The Arab Avant-Garde).
The ‘spores’ of Futurism settled in Egypt only due to a group of expatriate Italians
and remained an isolated phenomenon in the land of the Pyramids. The presence of
a Futurist offshoot in Egypt was in large part the result of the activities of one person:
the lawyer Nelson Morpurgo (1899–1978), who lived there from 1920 to the late 1940s.
Morpurgo’s family came from Istria on the Adriatic coast, and they migrated to Egypt
at the end of the nineteenth century. Carlo Morpurgo, Nelson’s father, established a
law firm in Cairo, which had an Italian community of about forty thousand in 1917 and
sixty thousand in 1939. At that time, foreigners were very welcome in Egypt, and the
tax-free régime of the Ottoman Capitulations, which conferred rights and privileges
on foreign subjects resident or trading in the Ottoman dominions, ended only in 1949.
Due to these arrangements, European communities, in particular from Italy, France
and Britain, set up flourishing trading links and commercial enterprises in Egypt in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Petricioli: Oltre il mito).
Although Morpurgo’s father was agnostic and Nelson converted to Catholicism
in 1918, the Morpurgo family always had links to the transnational and multicultural
Jewish community, whose presence in Egypt was historically intertwined with that of
the Italians. Egyptian Jews also made a major contribution to the Francophone press
in the country – from La Semaine égyptienne (The Egyptian Week) to L’ Égypte nouvelle
410 Maria Elena Paniconi

(The New Egypt) and La Revue du Caire (The Cairo Review) and took part in the lit-
erary life of cities such as Cairo and Alexandria. They played an important rôle in
trans-communal intellectual exchange between Jews, Muslims, Italians, Greeks and
others. Morpurgo’s attitude, as we shall see below, perfectly reflected this cosmopol-
itan milieu, and the multiple affiliations of intellectuals from the Jewish community
helped to spread the ideas of Futurism in Egypt.

Morpurgo and the Futurist movement in Egypt

Morpurgo was born in Cairo in 1899, but educated in Athens and Padua and later at
the Liceo Manzoni in Milan. Completely bilingual in Italian and French, he earned two
degrees in jurisprudence: one in Paris in 1924 and a second one in Rome in 1933. While
still a schoolboy, he read Lacerba (1913–1915), the literary and artistic review founded
by Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici in Florence. Feeling drawn to Futurism, he
met Marinetti at a student demonstration in support of Italian intervention in the First
World War. He completed his ‘apprenticeship’ at the Futurist headquarters in Milan,
where he spent a great deal of time arranging press reports on Futurism from L’ eco
della stampa (The Echo of the Press) and reading the volumes published by Marinetti’s
Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia” (Morpurgo: “Primo incontro con Marinetti a Milano”).
In 1916, Morpurgo became involved in the preparation of the first posthumous
exhibition of Umberto Boccioni’s works at the Galleria Centrale d’Arte in Milan.
Following Marinetti’s example, Morpurgo enlisted as a volunteer in the First World
War and in 1919 joined the Italian Expeditionary Corps in Palestine. Subsequently,
he established himself in Cairo and took over his father’s law office. In 1920, he
founded the Mouvement futuriste: Direction pour l’ Egypte (Futurist Movement:
Directorate for Egypt) and, for more than two decades, organized theatre perfor-
mances, soirées, lectures, recitations of Words-in-Freedom poetry, debates and con-
ferences. He contributed to various French- and Italian-language publications and
wrote a series of articles on Futurism for Roma: Eco dell’Oriente Italiano (Roma:
The Echo of the Italian Orient), a periodical widely distributed within the Italian
community in Egypt.
Morpurgo’s first collection of poetry was Il fuoco delle piramidi (Pyramids on Fire,
1923), published by the Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia” and quickly acknowledged as
one of the most successful examples of Words-in-Freedom in the secondo futurismo
period (Viazzi: “Marinetti collaudatore”, 200–201). Morpurgo’s second book, Pour
mes femmes (For the Women in My Life, 1933) was published by the Cairo weekly La
Semaine égyptienne. The book was bilingual, with a French translation undertaken by
Jean Moscatelli, a friend of Morpurgo’s and a leading poet of a Surrealist group based
in Cairo, named ‘Art et Liberté’ (Art and Liberty). A particularly favourable review
by the aforementioned Valentine de Saint-Point launched the book, which was well
 Egypt 411

distributed within the cultural and artistic circles of Egypt, especially in the French-
speaking milieu. The poems were much less influenced by Marinetti’s ‘freewordism’
than those in Il fuoco delle piramidi, and only a few of them still employed the aesthet-
ics of visual poetry. The abstraction, the universalism and the syncretism which had
characterized the first collection gave way to a poetic language that was derived from
the crepuscolari (‘twilight poets’, a late-Symbolist group in Italy; see p. 583 in this
volume) and was closely linked to the Egyptian context and landscape.
The Mouvement futuriste: Direction pour l’ Egypte attracted a small group of sup-
porters among the Italian population of Egypt and several members from the French-
speaking community. The former group included the painter and decorator Vasco
Luri, the poet Renato Servi and the élite Royal Italian Army storm troopers Rodolfo
Piha and Rambaldo di Collalto. Morpurgo stated that he was alone in his activities
and collaborations during the second phase of the Mouvement futuriste in Egypt. The
fact that the group’s activities were exclusively based on his initiative is confirmed
by the fact that 25 Rue Cheikh Abou el-Sebaah was the official address of both the
Movement and of Morpurgo’s law office.
Morpurgo’s publications in both French- and Italian-language magazines and
journals in Egypt suggest that the poet attempted to spread Futurism amongst a wide
community of people and thus contribute to a worldwide literary and artistic revolu-
tion. He directed, for this purpose, a literary column entitled “Arti e lettere” (Arts and
Literature) in the broadsheet Roma. He also organized free Sunday-morning lectures
in film theatres and Futurist soirées in Cairo and Alessandria. These included stagings
of plays by Umberto Boccioni, Paolo Buzzi, Francesco Cangiullo, Mario Dessy and
Cesare Cerati, as well as theatrical adaptations of Words-in-Freedom by Marinetti and
Mario Carli.
In June 1920, the group organized a performance of twenty-four Futurist plays at
the Printania Theatre in Cairo. On 24 August 1920, a soirée at the Olympia Theatre in
Alexandria followed, featuring poetry readings, a lecture on Futurism by Morpurgo
and songs by Lydia Fosca and Signor Fugà. On 16 October 1921, the Ezbekiyyeh theatre
(known among the Italians in Cairo as Teatro del Giardino) presented Morfina!, a show
that was reminiscent of the comic theatre of the Italian actor Ettore Petrolini (1884–
1936). In 1921, the weekly satirical magazine Bar printed some excerpts of Colonierie
(Colonial Knick-knackery), a “comical-satirical-musical review” by Morpurgo and
Carlo Bocca, which was successfully staged by the Vannutelli company at the Kursaal
Theatre in Cairo on 1 November 1922.
Around the same time, Morpurgo created a regular radio broadcast in Cairo
that ran until the nationalization of Egyptian radio in 1934. He also worked on
various magazines and French- and Italian-language newspapers, such as Roma, Le
Journal d’Égypte (Egyptian Newspaper), La Bourse égyptienne (The Egyptian Stock
Exchange), Le Progrès égyptien (Egyptian Progress), Il giornale d’Oriente (Newspaper
of the East), Calligrammes: Art, science, littérature (Calligram: Art, Science, Literature)
and Actualités (Current News). His writings show that Morpurgo was an important
412 Maria Elena Paniconi

mediator on the Cairene cultural scene as a dramatist, performer, radio speaker and
cultural manager, as well as having an interest in the fine arts, during the 1920s and
thereafter.

Marinetti’s visits to Cairo

Morpurgo’s efforts were directed towards a propagation of the aesthetic principles

of Futurism, which he defined as “a marvellous edifice built with our own hands”
(Morpurgo: “Cosa è il futurismo”). He was keen to contribute to the intellectual
renewal of the Italian population in Egypt, and in this he had Marinetti’s full support.
Although personal encounters between the two men were rare, the mere fact that both
of them were born in Egypt fostered a deep mutual esteem and respect. This friend-
ship was reinforced during the visits Marinetti paid to the Italian colony in Egypt in
1929 and 1938.
During this period of second-wave Futurism, Marinetti sought to establish the
movement as the font of all avant-garde movements in Europe. Starting with Le
Futurisme mondial (Worldwide Futurism, 1924), he issued a series of writings in which
he outlined the historical development of various art movements that had all sprung
forth from Futurism (see D’Ambrosio: “Il futurismo nel mondo”). In the context of
liberal Egypt and the international community that resided there, many European
trends in the arts and literature were represented in the cultural life of the country.
It was therefore essential for Marinetti to defend the position that Futurism occupied
with regard to other art movements. During his visit in 1929, Marinetti gave lectures at
the Circolo Italiano, at the Teatro Alhambra, at the Kursaal Theatre and at the Diafa
(Hospitality) club. His lectures were held both in French and Italian, and attracted a
multinational audience (see Strożek: “Marinetti’s Visit to Cairo in December 1929”,
Bardaouil: Surrealism in Egypt, 60–87 and Paniconi: “Italian Futurism in Cairo”).
His visit in 1938 had a great resonance in the Egyptian press because he was offi-
cially greeted as Accademico d’Italia and was invited by the local Fascist representatives
to speak to both Italians and other foreigners in Egypt. On 23 March 1938, Marinetti gave
a talk entitled “La Poésie motorisée” (Motorized Poetry) at the Scuole Littorie (repeated
at the Club des Essayistes in Cairo on 24 March 1938, and the Ewan Memorial Hall
on 25 March 1938). After repositioning Futurism in the context of the other European
avant-garde movements as such as Dadaism and Surrealism, he recited several poems
that evoked the roaring sound of a motor at high speed (Tamer: “Futurisme et poésie
motorisée”). The meetings also contained a contribution from Morpurgo, who read to
a bewildered audience from his poem Thermomètre égyptien (Egyptian Thermometer).
On the occasion of Marinetti’s lecture at the Club des Essayistes a dispute with the local
Surrealist group took place. The leader of the association, Georges Henein (1914–1973),
publicly attacked Marinetti for his allegiance to Fascism (see Bardaouil: Surrealism in
Egypt, 60–87 and Paniconi: “Italian Futurism in Cairo”).
 Egypt 413

Marinetti also attended Egyptian theatres as a spectator and familiarized himself

with the contemporary Egyptian cultural scene, largely thanks to Morpurgo, who was
perfectly integrated into local Francophone and Arabic-speaking cultural circles.
From the documents that Morpurgo left behind after his death (see the “Morpurgo
Collection” at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, General Collection
and the “Archivio Morpurgo – Fondo Cherini” at MART, Museum of Modern and
Contemporary Art in Trento and Rovereto, Archivio del Novecento), we learn about
the success of Marinetti’s visits and about the events that Morpurgo organized
around them – such as the Futurist evening held at the villa owned by the influ-
ential businessman Carlo Grassi, an event on which Marinetti also reported in his
memoirs (Marinetti: Una sensibilità italiana nata in, p. 322). According to Morpurgo,
the intellectual and artistic élite of Cairo was invited to this gala dinner in honour of
Marinetti, including prominent literary figures, writers, painters, sculptors, musi-
cians, poets, actors and journalists of all nationalities: Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese,
French, English, Italian, Greek and Armenian (Morpurgo: “Marinetti in Egitto”,
54). The poet also mentions intellectuals and well-known Egyptian poets such as
Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), who had studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome
and had been trained by Ferruccio Ferrazzi; Taha Hussein (1889–1973), who was a
figurehead of the Egyptian Nahda, or cultural Renaissance, and one of the found-
ing fathers of the Modernist movement in Arabian literature; the poet Salih Jawdat
(1912–1976), then the youngest member of the Apollo Group (Jamā‘at Apollo, a lit-
erary movement active 1932–1934); and the sculptor Mustafa Naguib (1913–1990),
who had been educated in Italy, and his wife Saiza Nabarawi (pseud. of Zaynab
Muhammad Murād, 1897–1985), a pioneer of the Egyptian feminist movement.
Interestingly, there were people of all religions: Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Copts,
Jews, Muslims; also present were representatives of the Arabic-speaking press from
both Cairo and Alexandria: al-Ahrām, al-Akhbār, al-Moqattam, Rose al-Yusef, the
Armenian Houssaper, the Greek Kairon, the Italian Il giornale dell’Oriente and the
French La Bourse égyptienne, Le Journal d’Égypte, Le Progrès égyptien, La Reforme,
Images, Dimanche and Actualités.
Clearly, Morpurgo moved at ease within the French- and Arabic-speaking cultural
circles of the time; he had many contacts with the figures who were prominent in the
cultural and theatrical life of Cairo and, over time, he wove trustworthy relationships
with traditionalist poets such as Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) as well as with poets
of the avant-garde, such as the Surrealist Georges Henein. Morpurgo availed himself
of this network of acquaintances when organizing Marinetti’s visits to Cairo and the
lectures held on that occasion (Morpurgo: “Marinetti in Egitto”, 54).
Morpurgo’s journalistic writings show that he had considerable standing as a
member of the Italian community in Cairo and as a representative of Egyptian cos-
mopolitanism. He played a mediating rôle between the Arabic-speaking scene and
the multilingual foreign community in Egypt. He mediated between Marinetti and
the local, largely Surrealist avant-garde (Paniconi: “Italian Futurism in Cairo”). Thus,
414 Maria Elena Paniconi

Futurism did play some rôle in the cultural life of the country, although it did not
attract a numerous following.

Archival sources
Morpurgo, Nelson: Incontro con Marinetti. New Haven/CT: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book and
Manuscript Library. General Collection, “Nelson Morpurgo Collection”. [Box no. 11]
Morpurgo, Nelson: Marinetti in Egitto (1938). New Haven/CT: Yale University, Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library. General Collection, “Nelson Morpurgo Collection”. [Box no. 15]

Works cited
Bardaouil, Sam: Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group. London: Tauris, 2017.
D’Ambrosio, Matteo: “Il futurismo nel mondo.” I cent’anni del futurismo. Roma: Edizione della
Camera dei Deputati, 2010. 83–109.
Khalil, Andrea Flores: The Arab Avant-Garde: Experiments in Art and Literature. Westport/CN: Praeger,
2003.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Il fascino dell’Egitto. Milano: Mondadori, 1933. Reprint 1981.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista. Una sensibilità italiana nata
in Egitto. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1969.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Cosa è il futurismo” Roma: Eco dell’Oriente italiano, 19–20 January 1920.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Marinetti in Egitto (1938).” Europa letteraria e artistica 1:7–9 (September–
December 1975): 51–54.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Primo incontro con Marinetti a Milano (1914): Testimonianza di un poeta
futurista.” La martinella di Milano 30:1–2 (January–February 1976): 29–32.
Morpurgo, Nelson: Il fuoco delle piramidi. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1923.
Morpurgo, Nelson: Pour mes femmes. Cairo: Édition de “La Semaine égyptienne”, 1923.
Paniconi, Maria Elena: “Italian Futurism in Cairo: The Language(s) of Nelson Morpurgo Across the
Mediterranean.” Michael Allan, and Elisabetta Benigni, eds.: Lingua franca: Toward a Philology of
the Sea. Special issue of Philological Encounters 2:1–2 (January 2017). Leiden: Brill, 2017. 159–179.
Petricioli, Marta: Oltre il mito: L’ Egitto degli Italiani (1917–1947). Milano: Mondadori, 2007.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste de la femme futuriste: Réponse à F. T. Marinetti.” Édition
établie et présente par Jean-Paul Morel. Paris: Mille et une Nuits, 2005. 7–15. English
translation “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman: Response to F. T. Marinetti (1912).” Laurence
Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale
University Press, 2009. 109–113.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste futuriste de la luxure.” V. de Saint-Point: Manifeste de la
femme futuriste. Édition établie et présentée par Jean-Paul Morel. Paris: Mille et une Nuits,
2005. 17–23. English translation: “Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913).” Lawrence S. Rainey,
Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale
University Press, 2009. 130–133.
Strożek, Przemysław: “Marinetti’s Visit to Cairo in December 1929: Kimon Evan Marengo’s
Caricatures in ‘Maalesh’.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 4 (2014): 111–113.
Tamer, A.: “Futurisme et poésie motorisée.” La réforme, 26 March 1938.
 Egypt 415

Viazzi, Glauco: “Marinetti collaudatore.” Sergio Lambiase, and Gian Battista Nazzaro, eds.: F. T. Marinetti
futurista: Inediti, pagine disperse, documenti e antologia critica. Napoli: Guida, 1977. 195–207.

Further reading
Camera D’Afflitto, Isabella: “Poesia araba e movimento futurista.” Il Veltro: Rivista della civiltà
italiana 53:3–4 (May–August 2009): 107–111.
Farghal, Hassan: “L’ influsso del futurismo sulla musica egiziana.” Il Veltro: Rivista della civiltà
italiana 53:3–4 (May–August 2009): 115–120.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il parolibero Nelson Morpurgo.” Nelson Morpurgo: Il fuoco delle
Piramidi. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1923. 5–6.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Autocronologia.” ES: Rivista quadrimestrale 2 (1974–1975): 54–60.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Cairo 1942.” L’ osservatore politico letterario 23:1 (April 1977): 94–99.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “I miei amici futuristi.” Prospetti 12:46–47 (June–September 1977): 21–24.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Incontri con Marinetti.” Sergio Lambiase, and Gian Battista Nazzaro, eds.: F. T.
Marinetti futurista: Inediti, pagine disperse, documenti e antologia critica. Napoli: Guida, 1977.
365–374.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Le molteplici vite di Marinetti.” Il giornale d’Oriente, 3 June 1938.
Morpurgo, Nelson: “Un’avventura ‘by night’.” Prospetti 40 (1975): 19–25.
Paniconi, Maria Elena: “Nelson Morpurgo and the Futurist Movement in Egypt.” International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies 6 (2016): 22–42.
Paniconi, Maria Elena: “Nelson Morpurgo e il movimento del futurismo egiziano, tra
internazionalismo cosmopolita e appartenenza colonial.” Diego Poli, and Laura Melosi, eds.:
I linguaggi del futurismo. Atti del convegno internazionale di Studi (Macerata 15–17 dicembre
2010). Macerata: EUM, 2013. 209–235.
Ruberti, Roberto: “Nelson Morpurgo, poeta e futurista in Egitto.” Il Veltro: Rivista della civiltà italiana
53:3–4 (2009): 95–99.
Salaris, Claudia: “Futuristi d’Egitto.” Corto maltese 4:2 (#29) (February 1986): 14–15.
Starr, Deborah: Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture and Empire. New York:
Routledge, 2009.
Strożek, Przemysław: “Futurism in Egypt: Nelson Morpurgo and the Cairo Group.” http://
performa-arts.org/magazine/entry/futurism-in-egypt-nelson-morpurgo-and-the-cairo-group
(consulted 14 April 2013).
Zouari, Fawzia: “En débattant du futurisme.” Marc Kober, ed.: Entre Nil et sable: Écrivains d’Égypte
d’expression française, 1920–1960. Paris: Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique,
1999. 79–84.

The Fine Arts

Introduction

Cross-cultural interactions between Egypt and Italy had a significant impact on

Egyptian modern art. By the end of the nineteenth century, many Italian painters
416 Nadia Radwan

had established their studios in Cairo and Alexandria and worked as professors in
art schools. Additionally, a number of young Egyptians belonging to the generation
of the so-called ‘pioneers’ received grants to study art in Italy, in particular in Rome
and Florence. The presence of Italian professors and their commitment to improv-
ing art education and cultural institutions, combined with the mobility of young
Egyptian artists, generated a substantial circulation of artistic ideas and practices
between Egypt and Italy.
Perhaps one of the most tangible legacies of this migratory flow lies in the archi-
tectural design and urban planning of Cairo and Alexandria (see Godoli and Milva:
Architetti e ingegneri italiani in Egitto; Volait: “La Communauté italienne et ses
édiles”). But these transnational exchanges between Europe and the Middle East had
also a major impact on the development of the visual arts in the region and greatly
affected the development of Egyptian modern art (see Radwan: “Dal Cairo a Roma”).
Although the present discussion focusses on Egypt’s multiple connections with Italy,
one has to bear in mind that, during this period, similar processes took place involv-
ing other European countries, such as France or Great Britain, where Futurism had a
notable presence.
King Fuad I (1868–1936) was a convinced Italophile, as was his son and successor
to the throne, Farouk I (1920–1965), who acquired a number of Italian paintings to
decorate his residences. Attracted by the European-oriented artistic taste of the ruling
class in Egypt, a large number of Italians moved to Cairo and Alexandria, and some
of them played a significant rôle in training a generation of young Egyptian artists.
Equally significant was the establishment of an Egyptian Academy in Rome, as well
as the representation of Egypt on the international art scene with its first participa-
tion in the Venice Biennale in 1938. These transnational exchanges and networks ulti-
mately meant that Italian modern art, and Futurism in particular, left a mark on the
formation of Egyptian art in the early twentieth century.

Teaching the fine arts in Cairo

In 1908, the patron and art collector, Prince Youssef Kamal (1882–1967), together with
the French sculptor Guillaume Laplagne (1870–1927), established a School of Fine Arts
(Madrasat al-funun al-jamila) in Cairo (see Naef: A la recherche d’une modernité arabe;
Shabout: Modern Arab Art). Their goal was to train young Egyptians in the traditions
of European art. Accordingly, the administration of the new institution was entrusted
to the hands of French and Italian artists until 1937, when the Alexandrian painter and
diplomat Mohamed Naghi (1888–1956) was the first Egyptian to be appointed head of
the school, succeeding the Italian painter Camillo Innocenti (1871–1961).
Italian artists not only played an important part in establishing the aesthetic
canons of the institutions of art education, but were also active as artists. They found
 Egypt 417

a clientele among a privileged social class increasingly eager to acquire canvases with
which to decorate their mansions and palaces. The appreciation and possession of
European paintings served to reflect social status and functioned as a sign of belong-
ing to a modern and cultured society. However, much of the art that enjoyed fame and
status in Egypt either belonged to the Orientalist tradition and resembled European
salon art, or pursued a Naturalist style of conventional still lifes, landscape paint-
ing, portraiture and street scenes. The young generation that had studied with Italian
professors and had the opportunity to travel to Italy successively introduced novel
painting styles championed by the Macchiaioli, Post-Impressionism and Divisionism.
Mohamed Naghi had many connections with Alexandria’s Italian commu-
nity. During his secondary studies at the Swiss School of Alexandria he befriended
his fellow pupil Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888–1970), who was then drawn towards
Parnassianism and Symbolist poetry but later had amicable relations with Futurists
such as Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, F. T. Marinetti, Aldo Palazzeschi, Giovanni
Papini and Ardengo Soffici (see D’Ambrosio: “Ungaretti e il futurismo”; Saccone:
“Ungaretti, Reader of Futurism”; Viola: “Ungaretti, Marinetti e gli anni Trenta”;
Zingone: “Kavafìs – Ungaretti – Naghi – Marinetti”). Naghi was initially trained by
the Italian painter Alberto Piattoli (dates unknown), but left for Italy in 1910 to com-
plete his artistic studies at the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Academy of Florence. Yet
in Italy he received only a classical training; he also maintained relations with the
Futurists, who played a significant rôle in his intellectual development.

The ‘pioneers’ in Rome and Venice

Once a talented painter obtained a diploma from the School of Fine Arts in Cairo, he was
sent to Europe with a government grant to complete his artistic training. As might be
expected, the French professors in Egypt sent their best pupils to Paris, while the Italians
directed them to Rome or Florence. In 1925, the first director of the drawing and painting
section of the School, Paolo Forcella (dates unknown), arranged for three of his most
gifted students, Ragheb Ayad (1892–1982), Youssef Kamel (1891–1971) and Mohamed
Hassan (1892–1961) to be trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. Ayad and Kamel
had already visited Italy in 1921 and 1922 to study works of art and monuments they had
previously known only from black-and-white reproductions. These exchange arrange-
ments with France and Italy show that an extended stay in Rome or Florence came to
be seen as a passage obligé in the career of many Egyptian artists. Their studies abroad
had major implications for their careers, because, on their return, many of them were
appointed to influential positions in schools, museums or other cultural institutions.
The state-funded travel grants provided Egyptian artists with an opportunity to
broaden the scope of their artistic practice and to develop networks in an interna-
tional environment. When Ayad, Kamel and Hassan arrived in Rome, they had to
418 Nadia Radwan

learn Italian before entering the Academy of Fine Arts. They shared the same studio
and were supervised by the Roman painter Umberto Coromaldi (1870–1948), but they
also encountered Italian Futurists such as the painter Ferruccio Ferrazzi (1891–1978),
who had a significant influence on Ragheb Ayad’s work (see Bardaouil and Fellrath:
ItaliaArabia; Corgnati and Barakat: Italy).
Ferrazzi had joined the Futurist movement in his early career before turning towards
a Neoclassical style that brought him closer to the Novecento movement (see Mantura
and Quesada: Ferruccio Ferrazzi; D’Amico and Vespignani: Ferruccio Ferrazzi; Tallarico:
Futurismo di Ferrazzi). His Scuola di decorazione at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome
had a considerable impact on Italian mural art, which became one of the favoured
media of expression for Futurists such as Gerardo Dottori, Fillìa, Enrico Prampolini,
Giuseppe Preziosi, Pippo Rizzo and ex-Futurists such as Mario Sironi and Gino Severini.
This new trend culminated in the Manifesto della pittura murale (Manifesto of Mural
Painting, 1933) and La plastica murale (Wall Decoration, 1934), and the two occasions of
the Mostra nazionale di plastica murale per l’edilizia fascista (National Exhibition of Wall
Decoration for Fascist Buildings), held in Genoa (Palazzo Ducale, 14 November 1934 –
11 January 1935) and Rome (Mercati Traianei, October–November 1936) (see Godoli: “Il
futurismo e la plastica murale”; Golan: “Slow Time: Futurist Murals”; Grueff: “Plastica
murale”). Ayad shared with Ferrazzi an interest in decorative painting, especially
Ferrazzi’s encausto technique. Although Ayad’s activity as a decorator is not very well
documented, it was an important aspect of his career, as he was commissioned in Egypt
to paint several decorative projects in churches and other public buildings.
In April 1926, Mohamed Hassan, together with his colleague Ragheb Ayad, visited
the fifteenth edition of the Biennale, which was marked by the participation of the
Italian Futurists (see I futuristi italiani alla 15. Biennale veneziana; Fabbri: “La scena di
tutte le scoperte “; Migliore: “Macchina di visione”). The Mostra del futurismo italiano,
curated by F. T. Marinetti, was presented in the pavilion of the USSR and included sixty
works by leading figures of Futurism, such as Fedele Azari, Giacomo Balla, Umberto
Boccioni, Fortunato Depero, Fillìa, Enrico Prampolini, Pippo Rizzo, Luigi Russolo
and Tato (see XVa Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia: Catalogo,
228–231). In his unpublished travel report, Ragheb Ayad expressed his admiration for
the Futurists, whose influence is perceptible in the dynamic lines and vibrant touch
that characterized his work from this period (see Archival sources, ‘Ayyad: Taqrir min
rihlati fi mudun Flurinsa, Siyana wa-l-Bunduqiya).
When Ragheb Ayad returned to Cairo after having spent four years in Italy, he sug-
gested to the government the creation of an Egyptian Academy in Rome. The sight of
the many foreign academies established in the Italian capital had led him to imagine
a similar institution for his country, which would function as an artists’ residency and
facilitate cultural exchange. This proposal came at a time when King Fuad I was inten-
sifying diplomatic relationships with Italy. When, in 1936, an agreement was signed
to found the Egyptian Academy in Rome, Fuad I appointed the artist and diplomat
Sahab Rifaat Almaz (dates unknown) as director of the Academy. The first years of the
 Egypt 419

institution coincided with the accession to the throne of Fuad’s son, King Farouk I,
and the official independence of Egypt. Farouk I was keen to cultivate the diplomatic
ties with Italy that had been initiated by his father in order to maintain stability in the
region, particularly with regard to the strategic implications of Mussolini’s occupa-
tion of Ethiopia (1935).
Mohamed Naghi, who headed the Egyptian Academy in Rome between 1947 and
1950, affirmed his admiration for the Italian Futurists. As a fervent nationalist, he
found affinity with the patriotic ideals of the Italian movement and promoted the
social and political virtues of a national art that could serve and reflect the progress
of a nation (see Naghi: “Art et Dictature”). As mentioned earlier, Naghi maintained a
close friendship with Giuseppe Ungaretti, and it appears that he also had great respect
for Marinetti, who, just like him and Ungaretti, was born and raised in Alexandria.
Naghi paid tribute to Marinetti in one of his major works, entitled L’ École d’Al-
exandrie (The School of Alexandria), which he had begun to paint after the Venice
Biennale of 1939. This large allegorical painting was one his most ambitious works
and occupied him for more than ten years. The title and subject of the work echo
Raphael’s fresco Scuola di Atene (The School of Athens, 1509–1511) in the Apostolic
Palace of the Vatican, which depicts the triumph of Reason and Faith by synthesizing
the philosophical and theological thought of Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy.
Naghi’s ambition was to transpose this idea of depicting several branches of knowl-
edge, ancient and modern, to the other side of the Mediterranean. The master of the
cinquecento gave classical philosophers the countenance of contemporary thinkers
and artists (Raphael himself, Francesco Maria della Rovere, Giuliano da Sangallo,
Bramante, Baldassare Castiglione, Il Sodoma, Perugino). Naghi’s School of Alexandria
similarly blended figures of ancient and modern times. Behind the mathematician
Archimedes, we can see Marinetti and Ungaretti. Among the crowd of intellectuals
who form part of the philosophical legacy of the city founded by Alexander the Great,
whose equestrian portrait figures in the centre of the composition, we can discern the
writer Taha Hussein, the politician Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid and the feminist intellec-
tual Huda Shaarawi. Thus, by portraying Marinetti in his School of Alexandria, Naghi
included Futurism as part of the narrative of Egyptian intellectual history.
Although other Egyptian art movements, such as Surrealism with the establish-
ment of the Art and Liberty Group (see Bardaouil: Surrealism in Egypt), flourished
in Egypt in the 1930s, the dialogue with Italian Futurism, both from an aesthetic
and from an ideological perspective, continued. Egyptian Surrealism was founded
as a counter-movement by the writer and poet Georges Henein (1914–1973) in reac-
tion to the lecture, “La Poésie motorisée”, which Marinetti held in 1938 at the Club
des Essayistes in Cairo. Despite the tensions created by the ideological differences
between the leading figures of these movements, their coexistence in Egypt generated
an intellectual space where lively intellectual debate could thrive. Thus, Futurism
helped to stimulate the emergence of an Egyptian avant-garde, as well as the develop-
ment of a cosmopolitan art scene.
420 Nadia Radwan

Conclusion

An examination of the migratory flows and transnational circulation of persons,

ideas and images between Egypt and Italy demonstrates that Italian artists played
an important rôle in defining certain criteria of art education and artistic develop-
ments in Egypt. Starting in the early twentieth century, with artists who belonged
to the Macchiaioli and Divisionist movements and were active as administrators of
the School of Fine Arts in Cairo or as educators in their Alexandrian studios, these
interactions were consolidated by the encounter of young Egyptian artists with Italian
Futurism in Italy. Moreover, the ideas of personalities such as Marinetti and Ungaretti,
whose writings and lectures were published in the local press, had a major impact on
Egyptian intellectuals. Futurism was therefore, for the ‘pioneers’ mentioned here, not
simply an aesthetic, but also a social and political rôle model.

Archival sources
‘Ayyad, Raghib [Ragheb Ayad]: Taqrir min rihlati fi mudun Flurinsa, Siyana wa-l-Bunduqiya [Report
on My Visit to Florence, Siena and Venice]. Dated 10 November 1926. PPP: Dar al-Watha’iq
[Egytian National Archives, Cairo]; Ba‘that [Grants], 4031-005943.
Hasan, Muhammad: Taqrir min ziyarati li-l madinat al-Bunduqiya wa ma‘radiha al-khamis ‘ashara
[Report of My Visit to Venice and Its Fifteenth Biennale]. Dated Rome, 21 October 1926. PPP: Dar
al-Watha’iq [Egytian National Archives, Cairo]; Ba‘that [Grants], 4031-005944, 4031-046414.

Works cited
XVa Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia. Exhibition catalogue. Venezia: Ferrari, 1926.
Bardaouil, Sam: Surrealism in Egypt: Modernism and the Art and Liberty Group. London: Tauris,
2017.
Bardaouil, Sam, and Till Fellrath: ItaliaArabia: Artistic Convergences between Italy and Egypt,
Lebanon, Syria and Iran. New York: Chelsea Art Museum, 2008.
Corgnati, Martina, and Salih Barakat: Italy: Arab Artists between Italy and the Mediterranean. Milan:
Skira, 2008.
D’Ambrosio, Matteo: “Ungaretti e il futurismo.” Carlo Bo, et al., eds.: Atti del convegno internazionale
su Giuseppe Ungaretti: Urbino, 3–6 ottobre 1979. Urbino: 4 Venti, 1981. 899–906.
D’Amico, Fabrizio, and Netta Vespignani, eds.: Ferruccio Ferrazzi: Visione, simbolo, magia. Opere
1915–1947. Milano: 5 Continents, 2004.
Fabbri, Paolo: “La scena di tutte le scoperte: Esperienza Biennale e aspettative futuriste.” Tiziana
Migliore, and Beatrice Buscaroli, eds.: Macchina di vision: Futuristi in Biennale. Venezia:
Marsilio, 2009. 9–16.
Godoli, Ezio: “Il futurismo e la plastica murale.” Loretta Mozzoni, and Stefano Santini, eds.:
Architettura dell’eclettismo: Il rapporto con le arti nel XX secolo. Napoli: Liguori, 2008. 55–75.
 Egypt 421

Godoli, Ezio, and Milva Giacomelli, eds.: Architetti e ingegneri italiani in Egitto dal diciannovesimo
al ventunesimo secolo. Firenze: Maschietto, 2008.
Golan, Romy: “Slow Time: Futurist Murals.” Vivien Greene, ed.: Italian Futurism 1909–1944:
Reconstructing the Universe. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 2014. 317–320.
Grueff, Liliana: “Plastica murale.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Il dizionario del futurismo. Firenze: Vallecchi,
2001. 888–892
I futuristi italiani alla 15. Biennale veneziana. Testi di Enrico Prampolini e Renzo Bertozzi. Venezia:
Scarabellin, 1926.
Mantura, Bruno, and Mario Quesada, eds.: Ferruccio Ferrazzi: Dal 1916 al 1946. Roma: De Luca, 1989.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed.: Prima mostra nazionale di plastica murale per l’ edilizia fascista.
Genova: Palazzo Ducale, 14 novembre 1934 – 11 gennaio 1935. Torino: Stile Futurista, 1934.
Reprint Latina: Associazione Novecento, 2008.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed.: Seconda mostra nazionale di plastica murale per l’ edilizia fascista
in Italia e in Africa. Roma: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia”, 1936.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Ambrosi, Andreoni, Benedetta, Depero, Dottori, Fillia, Oriani, Munari,
Prampolini, Rosso, Tato: “La plastica murale.” La gazzetta del popolo, 1 December 1934.
Reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, ed.: Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo. Torino: Musei Civici
Mole Antonelliana, 1980. 536–538.
Migliore, Tiziana: “Macchina di visione: Futuristi in Biennale.” T. Migliore, and Beatrice Buscaroli,
eds.: Macchina di vision: Futuristi in Biennale. Venezia: Marsilio, 2009. 25–115.
Naef, Silvia: A la recherche d’une modernité arabe: L’ évolution des arts plastiques en Egypte, au
Liban et en Irak. Genève: Slatkine, 1996.
Naghi, Mohamed: “Art et Dictature.” La Revue du Caire 25 (1940): 163–167.
Radwan, Nadia: “Dal Cairo a Roma: Visual Arts and Transcultural Interactions between Egypt and
Italy.” Asiatische Studien / Études asiatiques 70:4 (2016): 1093–1114.
Saccone, Antonio: “Ungaretti, Reader of Futurism.” Luca Somigli, and M. Moroni, eds.: Italian
Modernism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. 267–293.
Shabout, Nada M.: Modern Arab Art: Formation of Arab Aesthetics. Gainesville/FL: University Press
of Florida, 2007.
Sironi, Mario, Carlo Carrà, Massimo Campigli, and Achille Funi:: “Manifesto della pittura murale.”
Colonna: Periodico di civiltà italiana 1:1 (December 1933): 11–12. Reprinted in M. Sironi: Scritti
editi e inediti. A cura di Ettore Camesasca. Milano. Feltrinelli, 1980. 155–157.
Tallarico, Luigi: Futurismo di Ferrazzi. Roma: Arte-Viva, [1973].
Viola, Gianni Eugenio: “Ungaretti, Marinetti e gli anni Trenta.” G.E. Viola: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti:
Lo spettacolo dell’arte. Palermo: Epos, 2004. 127–139.
Volait, Mercedes: “La Communauté italienne et ses édiles.” Revue de l’ Occident musulman et de la
Méditerranée 46:1 (1987): 137–156.
Zingone, Alexandra: “Kavafìs – Ungaretti – Naghi – Marinetti.” A. Zingone: Affricana: Altri studi per
Ungaretti. Caltanissetta: Sciascia, 2012. 40–42.

Further reading
Abaza, Mona: Twentieth-century Egyptian Art: The Private Collection of Sherwet Shafei. Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2011.
Abu Ghazi, Badr al-Din: Raghib ‘Ayyad [Ragheb Ayad]. Cairo: General Information Organization,
1984.
422 Nadia Radwan

Abu Ghazi, Badr al-Din: Yusuf Kamil [Youssef Kamel]. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization,
1982.
Azar, Aimé: La peinture moderne en Egypte. Le Caire: Les Editions Nouvelles, 1961.
Corgnati, Martina: “Dall’Italian Manner alla Modernità liquida: Relazioni artistiche fra alcuni
paesi arabo-mediterranei e l’Italia.” California Italian Studies Journal 1:1 (2010): 1–11.
http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8hs4w9t8 (consulted 18 January 2016).
Giudice, Giovanni, and Maria Rigel Langella, eds.: I pittori italiani in Egitto (1920–1960). Roma: AIDE
(Associazione Italiani d’Egitto), 2004.
Iskandar, Rushdi, Kamal al-Mallakh, and Subhi al-Sharuni: 80 sana min al-fann, 1908–1988 = 80
Years of Art: 1908–1988. Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1991.
Kane, Patrick: The Politics of Art and Culture in Modern Egypt: Aesthetics, Ideology and Nation
Building. London, Tauris, 2012.
Karnouk, Liliane: Modern Egyptian Art, 1910–2003. Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2005.
Karnouk, Liliane: Modern Egyptian Art: The Emergence of a National Style. Cairo: American
University in Cairo Press, 1988.
Naghi, Effat, et al.: Mohamed Naghi (1888–1956), un impressionniste égyptien. Le Caire: Cahiers de
Chabramant, 1988.
Radwan, Nadia: “Between Diana and Isis: Egypt’s ‘Renaissance’ and the neo-Pharaonic Style.”
Mercedes Volait, and Emmanuelle Perrin, eds.: Dialogues artistiques avec les passés de
l’Égypte. Paris: CNRS-INHA; InVisu, 2017. 1–18.
Zorzi, Elio: “La partecipazione straniera.” XXIa Biennale Internazionale d’Arte. Venezia: Zanetti, 1938.
216–239.
Tiit Hennoste
27 Estonia
Introduction
Estonia never had a formally constituted Futurist movement, but there existed a
number of writers and artists who absorbed Futurist ideas and technical devices.
Between 1910 and 1927, this could be observed in the works of the poets and essay-
ists Johannes Semper (1892–1970) and Henrik Visnapuu (1890–1951), the poet Erni
Hiir (1900–1989), and the prose writer and essayist Albert Kivikas (1898–1978). More
indirect connections to Futurism can be found in the works of the poets Johannes
Barbarus (pseud. of Johannes Vares, 1890–1946), Henrik Allari (pseud. of Heinrich
Richard Seppik, 1905–1990) and Ralf Rond (pseud. of Jaan Kurn, 1893–1981).
Estonian literature in the early twentieth century was characterized by the Young
Estonia movement (1905–1915), which introduced Aestheticism and Symbolism to
Estonian literature. In the years preceding the First World War, these schools dom-
inated the field of poetry, whereas a mixture of Realism and Aestheticism character-
ized Estonian prose works. The First World War stopped almost all literary life in the
country. A revival set in after the Russian Revolution (1917), and the first signs of this
could be observed in the Siuru group (active 1917–1919), whose members still adhered
to Aestheticism, although some of them showed an awareness of Futurism in their
writings. In the spring of 1919, a strong opposition to Aestheticism began to emerge.
Several manifestos and articles advocated a change of direction with slogans such
as “Back to life” and “Ethics over aesthetics”. Consequently, an avant-garde era in
Estonian literature began, in which both Expressionism and Futurism set a new tone.

Early responses to Russian and Italian Futurism

The first Estonians who were interested in Futurism were five or six young men in the
small town of Pärnu around 1910. They corresponded with F. T. Marinetti and received
Futurist publications from him. It is unclear whether they formally assembled as a
group, as the only source is a short passage in the memoirs of one of those men,
Johannes Semper (Semper: “Mälestused”, 169–171). In 1914, Semper attended some of
the performances Marinetti gave during his visit to Russia (26 January–17 February)
and then, on 18 February, gave a lecture on Futurism in the university town Tartu,
which was published in the most important newspaper of the era, Postimees (Semper:
“Futurismus”). After this, several articles on Futurism were published in the Estonian
press (see Kruus: “Futurismi kajastusi eesti trükisõnas”). The articles introduced
Russian Cubo-Futurism, described a Futurist evening in Moscow on 13 February 1914

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-027
424 Tiit Hennoste

involving Russian Futurists and Marinetti, quoted the Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature, and described an art exhibition of Russian Futurists at the Tramway B
(Tram V) in Saint Petersburg (3 March – 2 April 1915), which had a great influence on
young Estonian artists (Barbarus: “Esteetiline käärimine”, Nemo: “Tuleviku teenäita-
jad”, Rumor: “Tramway B”, and Vahtra: “Valitud tööd”, 181–184).
The first Estonian writers whose works were connected to Futurism were members
of the ‘Moment’ group (active in 1913–1914). At the end of March 1914, two of them,
Henrik Visnapuu and Richard Roht (1891–1950), published a short collection printed
on green paper and called it Roheline Moment (The Green Moment) ([Roht, Visnapuu,
Varik]: Roheline Moment).1 The most important work in the collection was the manifesto
Momentistide päewakäsk (literally “The Momentists’ Order of the Day”). It contained
ten commandments (in Estonian käsk, ‘order’, ‘commandment’) and ten prohibitions.
The manifesto primarily attacked Aestheticism and declared all important Estonian
cultural figures (naturally, followers of Aestheticism) to be outdated. Momentistide
päewakäsk was the first Estonian literary manifesto written in the style and language
of the twentieth-century avant-garde. The term päewakäsk was borrowed from the
lexicon of the army and shows that the young men had assumed the rôle of officers
(see also Maiakovskii: “Prikaz po armii iskusstva”, Marinetti’s commandmends to
“the great army of madmen” in Marinetti: “Second Futurist Proclamation”, or the
orders of the “supreme commander” Mafarka in Marinetti: Mafarka the Futurist).
The collection also included the first Futurist poems in Estonia: Visnapuu’s cal-
ligram Varaoni tütar (A Daughter of Pharaoh), Oktoobri õhtu suurlinnas (October Night
in a City), which described modern city life (electricity, cars, tramway), and Kevade
külas (A Spring in a Village), which amounted to little more than a catalogue of words.
All of these poems were full of onomatopoeia and devoid of any punctuation marks
(see Hennoste: “Break, arise and bloom!”).

The peak of Futurism in 1919–1920

Visnapuu’s poetry was characterized by neologisms, word play, onomatopoeia, glos-
solalia, musical verse and complex rhythms and rhymes. In 1917, he published his
début collection, Amores, followed in 1920 by his most experimental and Futurist
book, Hõbedased kuljused (Silver Bells). Visnapuu was influenced by Russian Ego-
Futurist Igor Severyanin (1887–1941), and others often accused him of epigonism.
In spring 1921, a student of Estonian philology, Albert Kivikas, analysed the influ-
ences of Severyanin on Visnapuu in a literary workshop at the university of Tartu

1 The third author, Alfred Varik, was a fabrication. His poems were written by Visnapuu on the basis
of some prose works by Roht.
 Estonia 425

and published his findings in the daily newspaper Päevaleht. Visnapuu confirmed
these influences, but added that the idea of wordplay and onomatopoeia had been
borrowed from Estonian folk poetry, which is very rich in such devices (Kivikas: “Vene
mõju”, Visnapuu: “Henrik Visnapuu vaidluskiri”, and Kivikas: “Mõned read”; see
also Salu: “Esimene harjutustöö”).
Around 1918–1920, Visnapuu established personal contact with Severyanin, who
lived in Estonia at the time. He translated Severyanin’s poems into Estonian, organ-
ized recitations of his poetry and, in turn, Severyanin helped Visnapuu to translate
Amores into Russian. In 1919, Visnapuu published an essay on Igor Severyanin, in
which he emphasized that the most important idea of Futurism was its desire to
go “back to life”, to sing about the new rhythm of modern life and the beauty of
speed. He also advocated the use of neologisms, colloquial language and complex
new rhymes (Visnapuu: “Igor Severjäänin”, 130–132). The same ideas were repeated
in his manifestos and essays, starting in December 1919 with Lohe liigutab (Dragon
is Moving), directed against the philistine public and everyone “who pounces on a
living person and seeks to tear him apart”: capitalists, nouveaux riches, marauders,
profiteers, thieves, as well as (petit)-bourgeois and ordinary people who lack culture
(Visnapuu: “Lohe liigutab”). In 1920, Visnapuu published his most important mani-
festo, Vastne moment (A Brand New Moment). It starts with the Ego-Futurist slogan,
“Long live all that is alive!”, borrowed from Severyanin’s poem Ego-Polonaise (1914).
Visnapuu declared that the world was in chaos, a revolution was needed and that
it was time for the old world to die. He announced that he wanted to be a traveller
aboard a modern high-speed train, not a stationmaster on a small, sleepy railway
line. He proclaimed the end of Aestheticism and called for a return to life: “Down
with garden roses, lilacs and thyme! Long live fresh dung!” (Visnapuu: “Vastne
moment”, 9–12).
Johannes Semper also published his début collection Pierrot in 1917 and intro-
duced in it new imprecise rhymes derived from Russian Cubo-Futurists, mainly from
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). In his next collection, Jäljed liival (Traces on the
Sand, 1919) we can find Futurist poems in the cycle Metamorfoosid (Metamorphoses),
in which he assumed a variety of rôles (that of fifteen ducks, a cello, etc.). A good
example of this approach is Ma olen ürgmets (I Am Jungle), which ends with a set of
onomapoeia imitating birdsong (“logloblüüdi gii gii...”).
Semper’s most important contribution to Estonian Futurism was the long essay,
“Futurism” (1920). The text contained a report on Marinetti’s life and career, with
excerpts from the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Literature (1912), Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-
in-Freedom (1913), The Variety Theatre (1913) and a translation of Battaglia = peso +
odore (Battle = Weight + Stench, 1912). He also translated and popularized two precur-
sors of Futurism, Émile Verhaeren (1855–1916) and Walt Whitman (1819–1892).
In 1919, the two budding writers Erni Hiir and Albert Kivikas emerged under
the label of Futurism (see Kruus: “Erni Hiire kirjanikutee”, and Hennoste: “Eesti
426 Tiit Hennoste

kirjanduslik avangard 20. sajandi algul”, 283–286, 325–333). Their first public action
consisted of hanging up nine handwritten or typewritten Orders of the Day on the walls
of several schools in Tartu. The first of them announced, “We declare ourselves to be
dictators of the poets. [...] On this occasion, we curse: 1/ eternal renewal and rebirth
through destruction for art, life and the world. [...] BREAK, ARISE, AND BLOOM!” (see
Archival sources: Hiir and Kivikas: Päevakäsk). The main idea behind their manifesto
was to battle against Aestheticism and its followers in Estonia. The title of the mani-
festo, Order of the Day, was borrowed from the Momentists’ Ninth order: “We order:
To let the life of the nation be guided by beauty, emotions and play.” (see Hennoste:
“Language of Violence”, 210–213). Following this performance, several Futurist books
followed. Hiir produced Tantse maailmastik. Täielik teoste kogu. Raa… 4, nr 1 and nr 2
(World of Dances. Complete Works. Bo... 4, Number 1 and 2). The two books consisted
only of covers and two poems inside: Masurka I and Masurka II. Both poems were
garnered with slogans “Art only in Struggle!” and “Down [with]!” The first motto was
taken from paragraph seven in Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
(“There is no longer any beauty except the struggle”; see Marinetti: “The Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism “, 14). ‘Down with …’ was an important exhortation in
Futurist manifestos and also a political slogan of the era. The next publication was
the collective volume, Ohverdet konn (Sacrificed Frog, 1919), which contains some of
the most remarkable examples of Estonian Futurism: Hiir’s poems Esimene uri (First
Sacrifice), Armluul (Poem of Love/Delusion) and Jälelkaja (Follow-up), and Kivikas’
prose pieces Kantselei (Office), Sinfoonia (Symphony) and Rattasõit (Cycling). The
best known Estonian Futurist poem is Armluul, which begins with the meaningless
“Kii.....kii.....kiii! / Kippee ri-rindari kippe” and used a technique similar to Aleksei
Kruchenykh’s sdvigologiia (shiftology; see Hennoste: “Break, arise and bloom!”).
Hiir’s favourite topics were war, destruction, death, killing, cabarets, prostitutes,
drinking and dance. His lexicon was full of onomatopoeia, glossolalias, repetitions,
neologisms, Words-in-Freedom and word fragments like “oh it is pring pring-pring
S S S” in Jälelkaja. His sentences often consisted of nothing but strings of words con-
nected by hyphens (word catalogues) and unusual metaphors such as “tuli limane”
(fire slimy) in Esimene uri.
In 1919, Kivikas published a collection of short prose, Lendavad sead (Flying
Pigs), which was printed on the reverse sides of tsarist-era beer and lemonade labels.
The texts in the book were replete with emblems of modern technology (cars, trains,
motorboats, etc.), metamorphoses of creatures reminiscent of circus and silent film
tricks, and involved Futurist analogies and absurd metaphors (“clarinet-frogs”, “pitch-
milk”, etc.). For Estonian opponents of the avant-garde, the book and its title became
a much-hated symbol of degenerate literature. There is also a manuscript extant of
Flying Pigs, which was typewritten partly on the backs of manifestos and posters used
as publicity material for left-wing parties in the elections to the Constituent Assembly
in 1919 (Ms. in Estonian Cultural History Archive at the Estonian Literary Museum).
Both the printed and manuscript version resembled books by Russian Futurists, for
 Estonia 427

example Tango s korovami: Zhelezobetonnye poemy (Tango with Cows: Ferro-concrete

Poems, 1914) by Vasily Kamensky (1884–1961), with illustrations by the Burliuk broth-
ers (see pp. 165–166 and 778 in the entry on Russia in this volume).
In 1920, Kivikas proceeded with three more publications in the style of Flying
Pigs. Marineerit siluetid (Pickled Silhouettes) was issued in the magazine Ilo and
echoed works by the Dadaists (Kivivaas: “Marineerit siluetid” in T[uglas]: “Toimetuse
laualt I”, 47). The short book Mina (Me, 1920) was printed by means of different fonts
and font sizes and contained, by way of an introduction, a manifesto, in which he
declared: “O dragon, I will throw this book in your face” (Kivikas: Mina, 5). The fol-
lowing pages were largely made up of word lists in the style of “My X is Y”, borrowed
from science, natural history and the modern world. A visual poem showed the head
of the author made from mathematical signs, whilst in others his soul was terrorized
by the forces of Nature.
Kivikas’ Maha lüüriline shokolaad (Down with Lyrical Chocolate, 1920) was
again a manifesto against Aestheticism. However, Kivikas no longer advocated a
Futurist position, but rather promoted Naturalism and Estonian themes. The author
himself interpreted his manifesto not as a literary programme but as “art in action”
(Kivikas: “Manifesti puhul”). In 1919, Kivikas had participated in the Estonian War of
Independence and the following year published a collection of war stories, Verimust
(Black-as-Blood). It offered a cinematic picture of war, killing and death, laid out in
simple and metaphor-free language. Although he admitted that in this work he was
inspired by Marinetti’s La Bataille de Tripoli (The Battle of Tripoli, 1912), his personal
experiences in the war made him argue against Marinetti’s concept of war as “the sole
cleanser of the world” and assume a pacifist position (see Salu: “Albert Kivikas”, 37).

The last signs of Futurist literature in the 1920s

In 1924, Semper wrote an essay on Italian literature in which he declared that Futurism
as a literary movement was dead (Semper: “Itaalia uuemast kirjandusest”, 416). He
continued his experiments with rhymes in the collection Viis meelt (The Five Senses,
1926). One cycle in the collection is headed Suurlinnad (Metropols) and ends with a
poem Veduri enesetapp (Suicide of the Locomotive). Here, a locomotive goes mad from
boredom, destroys the world and then commits suicide (Semper: Viis meelt, 109–112).
Erni Hiir also published several new collections in 1924–1926, the most important of
which was Meeri-Maria-Mari: Armastuslaulud (Meeri-Maria-Mari: Love Songs, 1926).
It contained garish stories about city life in the manner of George Grosz and employed
Futurist techniques such as neologisms, onomatopoeia and telegraphic style.
In the first half of the 1920s, the only newcomers on the scene, who to a certain
extent were related to Futurism, were Ralf Rond and Henrik Allari. Rond was a minor
poet who wrote some works influenced by Mayakovsky, as can be see in Rond’s first
428 Tiit Hennoste

collection 27 (1923). Allari published a collection of miniatures, Koidang (Dawn, 1925),

which connected Expressionist ideas with Futurist devices. Allari wrote partly in
Esperanto, and one of his works was the first Expressionist text translated into Icelandic
(Hjartarson: “Anationalism and the Search for a Universal Language”, 269–276).
Another significant poet of the group was Johannes Barbarus. He mixed
Futurism with Constructivism and Simultaneism in his two collections of poetry,
Geomeetriline inimene (Geometric Man 1924) and Multiplitseerit inimene (Multiplied
Man, 1927). Both captured aspects of modern city life, travel in aeroplanes, adver-
tisements, cinema and so on and sought to reflect an avant-garde aesthetic. In his
Constructivist poems, Barbarus created a world from geometric figures, whilst others
employed technical devices inspired by French Simultaneism (Henri-Martin Barzun,
Nicolas Beauduin, Fernand Divoire; see Barbarus: “Pilk prantsuse moderni lüüri-
kasse”, 720–724, 810–811). Barbarus wrote poems with different voices arranged in
parallel columns that functioned like an orchestral score (see Andresen: “Johannes
Barbaruse ‘Geomeetriline inimene’ ”, Lapin: “Avangard”, 96–102, Laak: “Johannes
Barbaruse aeg”, and Hennoste: “Break, arise and bloom!”). Barbarus also published
a manifesto, Meie kirjandusloomingulik staatus quo (Our Literary Status Quo, 1924),
in which he proclaimed the poet to be a creator of new life and the instigator of a
revolution: “New poetry is written with an electric finger on the wall of a big city; it
is created in the smoke of factory chimneys, in the burning flames of smelting fur-
naces.” (Barbarus: “Meie kirjandusloomingulik staatus quo”, 3–5). The poet identi-
fied himself here with the proletariat and, similar to Mayakovsky, assumed the rôle
of a Communist Futurist. This change of perspective was marked with a new type of
language. In contrast to the texts of early Estonian Futurism, which were full of meta-
phors borrowed from Nature and agriculture, Barbarus’s focus was directed towards
urban environments and modern industry.

Traces of Futurism in Estonian art

Although young Estonian artists had contacts with the European avant-garde before
the First World War, when many of them studied in Saint Petersburg, Paris and
Munich, the peak of Estonian avant-garde art only occurred in the years 1919 to 1925.
Most of it was labelled ‘Cubism’, ‘Constructivism’ or ‘Expressionism’, as there was
no organized Futurist movement in Estonia and no artist identified him- or herself
unequivocally as being ‘Futurist’. However, some works created at that time were
undoubtedly connected to Russian Cubo-Futurism, characterized by fragmentation,
abstraction, geometrization, simultaneity and dynamism, and presenting aerial views
of landscapes and modern cityscapes with trains, automobiles, etc.
Ado Vabbe (1892–1961) was the first Estonian avant-garde artist and the most impor-
tant innovator in Estonian art, whose works around 1914–1924 were clearly connected
 Estonia 429

to Futurism (Komissarov: “Avant-garde Narrative in Ado Vabbe’s Work from 1913 to

1925”). He studied in Munich, where he came under the spell of Wassily Kandinsky.
In 1914, he travelled to Italy and established contact with Italian Futurism; in 1915–
1916, he worked in Moscow, encountered Russian Cubo-Futurism and developed an
interest in Mikhail Larionov’s Primitivism. Vabbe’s most important Futurist painting
is the watercolour Seine’i jõgi (Seine River, 1924) showing a speeding boat viewed
from an aeroplane. His Cubo-Futurist works are abstract, geometric and dynamic,
with bending lines and colour patches, which he used in a number of drawings, for
example Figuur (Figure, 1915) and Kompositsioon nelja figuuriga (Composition with
Four Figures, 1916). He employed the same style in his book design and illustrations
for Visnapuu’s Amores (1917) and Semper’s Näokatted I (Masks I, 1919). Some scholars
regard his watercolours Autoportree (Self-Portrait, 1919) and Muusika (Music, 1919) to
be on the border between Expressionism and Futurism.
Märt Laarmann (1896–1979) is another artist who showed Cubo-Futurist traces
in his simultaneous urban views and dynamic portrayals of modern technology. The
woodcut of a speeding motorbike, Mototsiklett, and other images in the portfolio
7 puulõiget (7 Woodcuts, 1923) represent the modern industrial world. In addition,
the painting Sadam (Port 1924) with a crane and ships and the ink drawing Poks
(Boxing, 1924), among others, can be related to Futurism. More indirectly linked to
Cubo-Futurism were some works by Jaan Vahtra (1882–1947), mainly in his portfolio
of woodcuts, Blanc et noir (Black and White, 1919–1921), characterized by simulta-
neism, contrasts and dynamics. Laarmann and Vahtra were members of the Estonian
avant-garde art group Eesti Kunstnikkude Ryhm (Estonian Artists’ Group), which was
founded in 1923, active until 1928, and officially dissolved in 1940. They were also affil-
iated with the Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten, Futuristen, Kubisten
und Konstruktivisten (Union of Expressionists, Futurists, Cubists and Constructivists),
founded in 1919 by William Wauer in Berlin (see p. 495 in this volume). In addition,
there were a number of artists who identified works as ‘Futurist’ in their titles, e. g.
Futurism (Indian ink, 1921–1923) by Ardo Sivadi (pseud. of Anatol Sivard, 1890–1966)
and Futuristlik kompositsioon (Futurist Composition, coloured chalk and Indian ink,
1920) by Alexander Mülber (1897–1931).

Ethno-Futurism: The Futurist revival

in the 1980s and 90s
In 1986, art and life in the Soviet Union began to change due to perestroika, Mikhail
Gorbachev’s programme of economic, political and social ‘restructuring’. In August
1991, Estonia declared itself independent. The five years between those dates were full
of cultural battles and rapid changes in Estonian literature. Young writers created new
paradigms, partly derived from the historical avant-garde and partly from post-war
430 Tiit Hennoste

Modernism. The most significant trend in this cultural revolution was etnofuturism
(Ethno-Futurism or Ethnofuturism), born in Tartu in 1988/89 (Hennoste: “Ethno-
Futurism in Estonia”, and Viires: “The Phenomenon of Ethofuturism in Contemporary
Estonian Literature”). Ethno-Futurism was a meeting of two extremes in Estonian
culture and society. The ‘Ethno’ pole was indigenous, archaic and pre-historical, and
the ‘Futurist’ pole was cosmopolitan, urban, contemporary and included computers
and the Internet as new technologies of the era. Together, these poles created a new
outlook for Estonian artists and intellectuals.
The origins of Ethno-Futurism can be dated back to 1987–1988, when a literary
group, Ida-Piirisaare Dalinistlik Kõõl (Dalinist Subtense of Ida-Piirisaare Island),
was active in Tartu. The association consisted of the young poet Sven Kivisildnik
(pseud. of Sven Sildnik, born 1964) and the prose writer Jüri Ehlvest (1967–2006).
Their absurdist actions were full of provocations and mystifications. In the autumn
of 1988, Kivisildnik, Ehlvest, Karl Martin Sinijärv (born 1971), Kauksi Ülle (pseud.
of Ülle Kahusk, born 1962) and Valeria Ränik (born 1964) established the group
Hirohall (1988–1991), which subsequently became the true founder and propagator
of Ethno-Futurism.
In 1989, the group established the Estonian Kostabi-Society (Eesti Kostabi Selts,
EKS), named after the American, Postmodern painter of Estonian extraction, Mark
Kalev Kostabi (born 1960) who, in his work and life, fused the rôles of artist and busi-
nessman. EKS was primarily a publishing company. The leaders and main ideologues
of the group were Kivisildnik and Sinijärv, who gathered a large company of young
people around Hirohall and the newspaper Kostabi. Two of them became very impor-
tant for Ethno-Futurism: Kaido Torop (1963–2000), an author of manifestos and per-
former in many public actions of Hirohall, and Lauris Kaplinski (born 1971), son of the
poet and essayist Jaan Kaplinski and one of the ideologues of the indigenous Estonian
religion of maausk.
Behind the Ethno-Futurist actions were manifestos full of ludic parody and
absurdity mixed with rude provocations. An important idea behind them was the
destruction of the border between life and literature (exemplified in the concept of
boozing as a new form of art), destruction of literature as an independent sphere of
human activity and poetry as an inimitable creative act of a unique poet.
Estonians first heard about Ethno-Futurism in June 1989, when the newspaper
Edasi printed the manifesto Kirjanduse kirstu kõrval (By the Coffin of the Literature),
signed by an organization called Ylemaailmse Etnofuturistide Poolkonna Luule
Keskavantyyr Hirohall (Central Adventure of Poetry of Worldwide Half-kind of Ethno-
Futurists Hirohall). The most notorious manifesto of the era was Hüübinud vere
manifest (Manifesto of Clotted Blood, 1990), signed in the name of the non-existing
organization Estonian Islamic Revolution by fifteen persons, Kivisildnik, Sinijärv and
Torop, among others, and published in the short-lived cultural newspaper Vagabund.
In May 1990, the cultural journal Vikerkaar published a special issue on
Ethno-Futurism. It contained three manifestos: Etnofuturismi ideaalid (Ideals of
 Estonia 431

Ethno-Futurism) and Metodoloogilisi marginaale (Methodological Notes) by Kivisild-

nik and Armastuse ja vabaduse manifest ehk Tartu vaimu hetkeseis (The Manifesto of
Love and Freedom, or the Present State of the Spirit of Tartu) by J. P. Teineke (Kaido
Torop). In the autumn of 1991, the Ethno-Futurists started the cultural newspaper
Kostabi (45 issues appeared between 1991 and 1993), which printed radical statements
and sought to introduce the Estonian public to different European avant-garde trends.
In 1993, they printed excerpts from Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism
and Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, accompanied by a brief commentary.
Another aspect of Ethno-Futurism was the systematic destruction of the canon-
ical models of Estonian literature. The group employed in their poetic experiments
devices freely taken from historical Futurism, such as Words-in-Freedom, glossolalia,
destruction of syntax, new verse-forms and spelling, simultaneity, new typography,
pictograms, mathematical signs, etc. Those elements were particularly prominent in
the works of Kivisildnik and Sinijärv.
Karl Martin Sinijärv created poetry by means of neologism, nonexistent lan-
guage, word-play, unusual syntactic constructions and texts printed in differ-
ent directions on the page. His third collection SürWay (1992) contained mostly
Futurist poetry. The main poetic idea behind Sven Kivisildnik’s poetry was to kill
literature by depersonalization. He wanted poetry to be a machine product and the
poet to work like a machine. His second idea was to construct a new poetic reality
by mixing ancient Estonian literature with the avant-garde. His first collection
of verse, Märg Viktor (Wet Viktor, 1990), consisted of semantically unconnected
sentences and phrases taken from various sources. In 1991 followed Dawa vita, a
collection of absurd poems, commissioned by the Estonian followers of the indige-
nous Taara cult. In 1990, Kivisildnik had written a contribution for a special issue
on Ethno-Futurism to be published by Vikerkaar. It was called Eesti Nõukogude
Kirjanike Liit – 1981: Aasta seisuga, olulist (The Union of Estonian Soviet Writers
– in 1981: Something Important), but the magazine refused to publish it. When
it was finally released on the Internet in 1996, it caused a tremendous scandal.
Kivisildnik was sued by two older writers and his computer was confiscated. The
author himself called the piece a ‘poem’, but it was actually a list of the members of
the Estonian Writers’ Union around the year 1990, with extremely rude and some-
times absurd comments attached to each name.
The next peak of Ethno-Futurism occurred around 1995–1997. In December 1995,
Vikerkaar published a second special issue on Ethno-Futurism. It contained the last
important manifesto by Kivisildnik, Etnofuturism on jõudnud teooriast praktikasse
(Ethno-Futurism Has Come from Theory to Practice). The zenith of Kivisildnik’s career
as a poet came in 1996 when he published the collection Nagu härjale punane kärbse-
seen (Like a Red Fly Amanita to a Bull), a voluminous, 841-page anthology of modern
poetry. It was followed by Sinijärv’s Neli sada keelt (Four Hundred Languages, 1997),
partly written in English and printed on the reverse sides of beer bottle labels, as
an homage to Kivikas’ collection from 1919, Lendavad sead (see above p. 426).
432 Tiit Hennoste

Subsequently, only Kivisildik continued his battle against tradition, canons, authori-
ties, etc., signing his work with the new name ‘(:)kivisildnik’.

Conclusion
Futurism in Estonia went through two distinct phases, one belonging to the histori-
cal avant-garde, and one to postmodern times. The historical Futurist movement in
Estonia lasted from around 1914 to 1920, while Ethno-Futurism had two peaks in 1987–
1988 and 1994–1997. The Ethno-Futurists’ actions, manifestos and poetic texts were
clearly inspired by their historical forebears, but also mixed in archaic and pre-historic
elements while offering a cosmopolitan, urban perspective and operating with the
new technologies of computers and the World-Wide-Web. While the ideas and devices
of Ethno-Futurism had strong parallels with historical Futurism, they also introduced
innovative concepts that were rooted in contemporary Estonian society and culture.
Ethno-Futurism can be characterized as Neofuturism for a terrorist, postmodernist
and post-avant-garde era, and as such was a symptom of the state of mind in the late
1980s and 1990s, which demanded its own brand of Futurism.

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Arhiiv, f 245, m. 233:16.

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Kivisildnik, Sven: Dawa vita. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1991.
Kivisildnik, Sven: Märg Viktor [Wet Viktor]. Tartu: Eesti Kostabi Selts, 1989 [recte 1990].
Kivisildnik, Sven: Nagu härjale punane kärbseseen [Like a Red Fly Amanita to a Bull]. Tartu: EKS,
1996.
Kivisildnik, Sven, et al.: “Hüübinud vere manifest.” [Manifesto of Clotted Blood] Vagabund 1 (1990): s.p.
Kivivaas, Alfons [pseud. of Albert Kivikas]: “Marineerit siluetid.” [Pickled Silhouettes] Ilo 5 (1920): 47.
434 Tiit Hennoste

Komissarov, Eha: “Avant-garde Narrative in Ado Vabbe’s Work from 1913 to 1925.” Eesti kunsti
ajalugu. Vol. 5. 1900–1940 = History of Estonian Art. Vol. 5. 1900–1940. Tallinn: Eesti
Kunstiakadeemia, 2010. 661–662.
Kruus, Rein: “Erni Hiire kirjanikutee alguse taustast.” [On the Background of Erni Hiir’s Literary Path]
Looming 60:3 (March 1985): 403–413.
Kruus, Rein: “Futurismi kajastusi eesti trükisõnas enne 1917. aastat.” [Reactions to Futurism in the
Estonian Press before 1917] Keel ja Kirjandus 24:6 (June 1981): 337–347; 24:7 (July 1981): 397–406.
Laak, Marin: “Johannes Barbaruse aeg.” [The Times of Johannes Barbarus] Rein Veidemann, ed.: Aeg
ja kirjandus: Studia litteraria Estonica. Vol. 4. Tartu: Tartu Ülikool, 2002. 97–116.
Lapin, Leonard: Avangard [Avant-garde]. Tartu: Tartu Ülikooli Kirjastus, 2003.
Maiakovskii, Vladimir V.: “Prikaz po armii iskusstva.” Iskusstvo kommuny 1 (7 December 1918):
1. Reprinted in V. V. Maiakovskii: Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 2. Stikhotvorenia (1917–1921).
Moskva: Goslitizdat, 1956. 14–15.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Mafarka the Futurist: An African Novel. Translated by Carol Diethe and
Steve Cox. London: Middlesex University Press, 1998.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Second Futurist Proclamation: Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight.” F. T. Marinetti:
Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2006. 22–31.
Nemo [pseud. of Otto Münther]: “Tuleviku teenäitajad.” [Pioneers of the Future] Töö Hääl, 27 March,
29 March, 1 April 1914.
[Roht, Richard, Henrik Visnapuu, and Alfred Varik]: Roheline Moment: Pühendatud kõigile
kirjanduslistele paganatele ja variseeridele [The Green Moment: Dedicated to All Literary
Pagans and Pharisees]. Tartu: Moment, 1914.
Rond, Ralf: 27. Narva: Vironia, 1923.
Rumor, Karl: “ ‘Tramway B.’: Mõnda futurismusest.” [“Tram V.”: Some Words on Futurism] Tallinna
Kaja 14 (1915): 209–211.
Salu, Herbert: “Esimene harjutustöö Tartu ülikooli kirjanduse seminaris.” [First Exercise in the
Workshop of Literary Studies at the University of Tartu] H. Salu: Posthobustel Jõhvist Rooma.
Lund: [s. n.], 1974. 79–119.
Salu, Herbert: Albert Kivikas. Lund: Eesti Kirjanike Kooperatiiv, 1971.
Semper, Johannes: “Futurism.” J. Semper: Näokatted I.: Esseede kogu [Masks I: A Collection of
Essays] Tartu: Odamees, 1919 [recte: 1920]. 43–66.
Semper, Johannes: “Futurismus: Uuem vool kirjanduses ja kunstis.” [Futurism: A New Trend in
Literature and Art] Postimees, Lisaleht, 21 February 1914.
Semper, Johannes: “Itaalia uuemast kirjandusest.” [On New Italian Literature] Looming 3:5 (1925):
407–421.
Semper, Johannes: Jäljed liival [Traces on the Sand]. Tartu: Odamees, 1919.
Semper, Johannes: Mälestused [Memoirs]. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1978.
Semper, Johannes: Näokatted I.: Esseede kogu [Masks I: A Collection of Essays]. Tartu: Odamees,
1919 [recte: 1920].
Semper, Johannes: Pierrot. Tallinn: Siuru, 1917.
Semper, Johannes: Viis meelt [Five Senses]. Tartu: s.n., 1926.
Sinijärv, Karl Martin: Neli sada keelt. Strong Estonian Lager [Four Hundred Languages]. Tartu: Eesti
Kostabi Segadus, 1997.
Sinijärv, Karl Martin: SürWay. Tartu: St ödessa [Eesti Kostabi-Selts], 1992.
T[uglas], Fr[iedebert]: “Toimetuse laualt I.” Ilo 5 (1920): 44–47.
Teineke, J. P. [pseud. of Kaido Torop]: “Armastuse ja vabaduse manifest ehk Tartu vaimu hetkeseis.” [The
Manifesto of Love and Freedom or Present State of the Spirit of Tartu] Vikerkaar 5:5 (May 1990): 42–44.
 Estonia 435

Vahtra, Jaan: Valitud tööd [Selected Works]. Tallinn: Eesti Riiklik Kirjastus, 1961.
Viires, Piret: “The Phenomenon of Ethofuturism in Contemporary Estonian Literature.” Heikki
Leskinen, ed.: Symposiumi Itämerensuomalainen kulttuurialue: Congressus Octavus
Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum, Jyväskylä, 12.8. 1995. Vol. 7. Litteratura, archaeologia &
anthropologia. Jyväskylä, 10–15 August 1995. Jyväskylä: Moderatores, 1996. 235–238.
Visnapuu, Henrik: “Henrik Visnapuu vaidluskiri.” [The Argument of Henrik Visnapuu] Päevaleht,
23 May 1921.
Visnapuu, Henrik: “Igor Severjäänin.” [Igor Severyanin] H. Visnapuu: Vanad ja vastsed poeedid [The
Old and New Poets]. Tallinn: Noor-Eesti, 1921. 127–139.
Visnapuu, Henrik: “Lohe liigutab.” [Dragon is Moving] Vaba Maa, 8 December 1919.
Visnapuu, Henrik: “Vastne moment.” [A Brand New Moment] Looming I. Tartu: Odamees, 1920. 9–12.
Visnapuu, Henrik: Amores. Tallinn: Siuru, 1917.
Visnapuu, Henrik: Hõbedased kuljused [Silver Bells]. Tallinn: Varrak, 1920.

Further reading
Ado Vabbe. Exhibition catalogue. Tallinn: Eesti NSV Riiklik Kunstimuuseum, 1976.
Ado Vabbe. Tallinn: Kunst, 1993.
Barbarus, Johannes: “Luule ja taie.” [Poetry and Art] Taie 1:1 (1928): 43–44.
Hanson, Raimu: “Hirohalli loomingu tuline oja.” [Fiery Stream of the Creation of Hirohall] Edasi,
4 June 1989.
Hennoste, Tiit: “Becoming European: Estonian’s Literary Avant-garde in 1914–1927.” Liis Pählapuu,
ed.: Geomeetriline inimene: Eesti Kunstnikkude Rühm ja 1920.–1930. aastate kunstiuuendus =
Geometrical Man: The Group of Estonian Artists and Art Innovation in the 1920s and 1930s.
Tallinn: Kumu Art Museum / Eesti Kunstimuuseum, 2013. 70–83.
Hennoste, Tiit: “Elu ja ilo: Eesti kirjandusmanifestide kuldaeg.” [Life and Beauty: The Golden Era of
Estonian Literary Manifestos] Looming 80:9 (September 2005): 1353–1373.
Hennoste, Tiit: “Noor-Eesti manifest muude manifestide taustal.” [Manifesto of the Young-Estonian
Movement on the Background of Other Manifestos] Looming 80:5 (May 2005): 746–749.
Hiir, Erni: Mässulaulud: Valik võitlusluulet (1918–1930) [Songs of Rebellion: Selected Fighting Poetry
(1918–1930)]. Tallinn: Eesti Raamat, 1975.
Januson, Ainu: “Erni Hiire nooruriaastate luulest.” [On the Poetry of Young Erni Hiir] Looming 50:3
(March 1975): 495–500.
Kivikas, Albert: Nimed marmortahvlil II [Names in Marble II]. Tallinn: Olion, 2000.
Kivisildnik, Sven: “Aaviku meetod minimalismi tingimustes.” [The Method of Aavik in Conditions of
Minimalism] Kostabi, 16–23 October 1992.
Kivisildnik, Sven: Kutse [Invitation]. s.l.: s.n., 1997.
Kivisildnik, Sven: Loomade peal katsetatud inimene [Animal-tested Human]. Tallinn: Brain
Publishing, 1997.
Kivisildnik, Sven: Valitud teosed I.: Jutustused ja romaanid 1984–2004 [Selected Works. Vol. 1.
Stories and Novels, 1984–2004]. Tallinn: Argo, 2004.
Kivisildnik, Sven, Karl Martin Sinijärv, and Kaido Torop: “Avalik kiri edumeelsele inimkonnale.”
[Open Letter to Progressive Mankind] Kostabi, 20 November 1991.
Mäger, Mart: “Luuleteksti foneetilise struktuuri ja semantika vahekorrast.” [On the Relations of
Phonetic Structure and Semantics in a Poetic Text] M. Mäger: Luule ja lugeja. Tallinn: Eesti
Raamat, 1979. 50–68.
436 Tiit Hennoste

Pruul, Kajar: “Etnosümbolism ja etnofuturism.” [Ethno-Symbolism and Ethno-Futurism] Vikerkaar

10:12 (December 1995): 58–62.
Rand, Eha, ed.: Hingede ränd: Ado Vabbe ja Friedebert Tuglas. Exhibition catalogue. Tallinn: Vabaduse
galerii, 15. september – 4. oktoober 2011. Tallinn: Underi ja Tuglase Kirjanduskeskus, 2011.
Salu, Herbert: “Boheemlane ja lohe.” [Bohemian and Dragon] H. Salu: Kihutav troika. Stockholm:
Välis-Eesti & EMP, 1984. 154–174.
Sarapik, Virve: “Noor-Eesti antifuturismist.” [On the Anti-Futurism of the Young-Estonia Movement]
Methis ½ (2008): 242–261.
Särg, Indrek: “Intervjuu Kostabi Seltsi esimehe Sven Kivisildnikuga.” [Interview with Sven
Kivisildnik, Chair of Kostabi Society] Kostabi, 18–23 September 1992.
Sinijärv, Karl Martin, et al.: “Visnapuudulik – luule ime!” [Visnapuudulik – A Miracle of Poetry]
Vikerkaar 4:7 (July 1989): 26–31.
Hannu K. Riikonen
28 Finland
Introduction
In any discussion of Futurism in Finland, it should be noted that Finnish artists,
composers and writers did not have many direct contacts with Italian or Russian
Futurists. Those who wrote about Futurism usually had to rely on secondary sources
and second-hand information, which often led to various kinds of misunderstandings
and inaccuracies. Moreover, the labels ‘Futurist’ and ‘Futurism’ were often attached to
almost anything that was regarded as either modern or extreme. Although an article
about Futurism was published in 1912 (Laurila: “Futuristit”), more extensive presenta-
tions arrived rather late on the scene in Finland, the crucial time being the latter part of
the 1920s, when the Tulenkantajat group sought to “open the windows to Europe” – a
slogan which itself dates from 1922 and stems from an article by Elmer Diktonius (1900–
1961) in the magazine Ultra (Vainio: Diktonius, 121). It is also obvious that the new trends
in literature, arts and theatre came to Finland mainly from Germany and were often
linked to Expressionism.
In Helsinki, there were good opportunities for becoming acquainted with Russian
Futurism, as the library of the University of Helsinki (at that time, the Imperial
Alexander University) had a right to receive copies of everything published in Russia;
the collection contains many rarities, including a collection of over 5,700 pages of
Russian Futurist texts. This, however, appears to have been of no particular signifi-
cance to Finnish writers and artists at the time, as most of them possessed insufficient
knowledge of the Russian language.

Views of Finnish literary historians

In his book Johdatus uudenajan kirjallisuuden valtavirtauksiin (Introduction to the
Main Streams of Modern Literature, 1926), the literary historian Aarne Anttila (1892–
1952) discussed developments in European literature after Symbolism and registered
several new literary movements, most of which were short-lived, like Floralism,
Druidism or Vivanticism. The only one on Anttila’s list that is not forgotten today is
Futurism. Referring to Marinetti’s theory of poetry, Anttila maintained that the new
language and the poetic innovations of Futurism could only be fully appreciated by
an élite, and then, if ever, in a distant future (Anttila: Johdatus, 261–263).
Anttila was not the only Finnish literary historian who failed to muster any enthu-
siasm for Futurism. Eino Railo (1884–1948) gave a neutral description of Marinetti
in the last part of his literary history in six volumes (1937), but emphasized that

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438 Hannu K. Riikonen

Marinetti’s anarchist views did not find much acclaim except in ‘Bolshevikia’ (i. e. the
Soviet Union), where the Futurists were supportive of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution
(Railo: Yleinen kirjallisuuden historia. Vol. 6, 335–336).
Such negative evaluations by conservative literary historians, written when
Futurism had already had its heyday, fit in well with Finnish attitudes towards
Futurism in the 1910s. Kaarle Sanfrid Laurila (1876–1947), who was an aesthetician
and a specialist in art theory and later a professor of the philosophy of art at the
University of Helsinki, wrote an article in the form of a travel report to the Helsingin
Sanomat (Helsinki Newspaper) from Berlin in 1912. It was published under the heading
“Futuristit: Uusi mullistava taidesuunta” (The Futurists: A New Revolutionary Art
Movement). In this article, he reported on a flyer containing the Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and how he responded to this unusual document:

In the middle of everyday life, and especially in the middle of orderly and sensible Prussian life,
this ‘manifesto’ made a very refreshing impression on me. When the eternal pursuit of reason
and order reigns in the arrangement of both everyday life and science, it is very good to occa-
sionally read or hear something that has no trace of that tedious striving, but which instead
moves bravely in the completely opposite direction. – For that reason, I was thankful from the
bottom of my heart to Mr. Marinetti for preparing this refreshment. (Laurila: “The Futurists: A
New Revolutionary Art Movement”, 374)

The flysheet that Laurila referred to also contained an invitation to the Futurist art
exhibition held at the gallery of Der Sturm in Berlin. Laurila emphasized the newness
of the works displayed there and the fact that they were completely different from any-
thing that had ever existed before. In his view, they would not have lost any meaning
had they been turned upside down. In the exhibition hall, Laurila had also an oppor-
tunity to listen to a lecture by F. T. Marinetti, which he found both “amusing” and
“outrageous” (Laurila: “The Futurists: A New Revolutionary Art Movement”, 376).
After leaving the exhibition, he passed a memorial statue of Richard Wagner, which
seemed to comment on what he had just experienced:

It looked as if the great composer, proudly raising his energetic chin, was throwing disdainful
glances towards the Futurist exhibition in order to say: half-foolish whippersnappers there babble
about supposedly new things that echo the thoughts of my former friend Friedrich Nietzsche,
which they have only absorbed through convoluted pathways and have not understood at
all, or at most have understood incorrectly! (Laurila: “The Futurists: A New Revolutionary Art
Movement”, 377)

Laurila is an important figure here, because he was one of the few Finnish scholars
or artists who ever came into personal contact with Marinetti. Another such person
was the Finnish-Swedish aesthetician Hans Ruin (1891–1980), who in 1936 partic-
ipated in the sixteenth congress of the PEN Club in Buenos Aires. Ruin described
his impressions in his travel book Väl mött, Europa! (Well Met, Europe!, 1938) and
gave a short but vivid account of Marinetti’s speech “Fonction possible des écrivains
dans la société” (Possible function of writers in society). Because of the protests and
 Finland 439

commotion in the audience, it was difficult for Ruin to understand what Marinetti
said, except the word “outrageous”, which was repeated several times. The French
writer Georges Duhamel then offered a response to the speech (Ruin: Väl mött,
Europa!, 52–56).
In 1923, eleven years after Laurila’s newspaper article, Jean-Louis Perret (1895–
1968), a Swiss-born lecturer in French at the University of Helsinki, presented
Futurism in the article “Marinetti och futurismen” (Marinetti and Futurism). Perret
had met Marinetti on a train from Naples to Syracuse and likened their journey to
Marinetti’s voyage from his native Egypt to Paris, which had been evoked in the tactile
panel Sudan-Paris (1920). Marinetti’s lecture on tactilism had caused a great stir at
the Théâtre de L’ Œuvre on 15 January 1921 (see Marinetti: “Il tattilismo”; Marinetti:
“Le Tactilisme”; Berghaus: “Futurist Tactile Theatre”); and as Perret mentioned that
Marinetti was returning from Prague, where he had given a lecture at the Švanda
Theatre in Prague on 14 December 1921, their meeting in a train carriage is likely to have
taken place at the end of 1921. Perret also referred to Papini’s Esperienza futurista (My
Futurist Experience, 1919) and quoted an opinion on Futurism voiced by D’Annunzio.
Perret’s article was one of the sources for Hans Ruin when he described Futurism in
his 1949 book I konstens brännspegel (In the Burning Glass of Art, 228–235). The only
Futurist contribution in Tyyni Tuulio’s anthology Italian kirjallisuuden kultainen kirja
(The Golden Book of Italian Literature, 1945) was a chapter from Giovanni Papini’s Un
uomo finito (A Failed Man, 1912).

Olavi Paavolainen on Futurism

After Laurila’s newspaper article of June 1912, no further extensive presentation of
Futurism appeared in Finland until Olavi Paavolainen (1903–1964) published his
book Nykyaikaa etsimässä (In Search of Modern Times) in 1929. Paavolainen was
a member of the Tulenkantajat (Torch-bearers) group, which wanted to ‘open the
windows to Europe’ and present to a Finnish audience everything that was new on
the Continent. Although written and published as a collection of essays and minor
articles, Nykyaikaa etsimässä also functioned as a literary and cultural manifesto,
a call to get engaged with what was happening in Europe. As pointed out by Päivi
Huuhtanen (Tunteesta henkeen, 193), we can find several exhortations and slogans
in Paavolainen’s book that were taken from Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism (1909).
Olavi Paavolainen had visited Paris in 1927 and had seen a performance there of
the Théâtre de la pantomime futuriste (Futurist Pantomime Theatre) at the Théâtre
de la Madeleine, where it ran from 12 May to June 1927, directed by Maria Ricotti and
Enrico Prampolini, with music by the Futurist composers Franco Casavola, Silvio Mix
and Francesco Balilla Pratella (see pp. 136–137 in this volume). Paavolainen was of
440 Hannu K. Riikonen

the view that the heyday of Futurism had passed and that it had turned into a rather
conventional artistic movement. It should be noted, however, that Paavolainen’s
level of information was somewhat limited, for he did not have any contact with the
Futurists themselves or with critics who were well informed about their works.
Paavolainen’s book consisted of essays which were lavishly decorated with
photos, paintings and caricatures. One of them, “Säikähtyneet muusat” (The
Frightened Muses), discussed Futurism and was illustrated with photographs of four
Futurists: F. T. Marinetti, Luigi Russolo, Luciano Folgore and Enrico Prampolini. Each
artist was briefly presented in the captions. Marinetti, for example, was portrayed as
“the founder and leader of Futurism, and the ‘electrifier of all fields of life’ ”; Russolo
was characterized as “a painter and the inventor of Futurist music and ‘the harmony
of noise’ ”. At the end of the chapter on Futurism, there was a photo of Maria Ricotti,
presented as the “prima donna” of the Futurist Pantomime Theatre. The caption
declared: “The Muses have got a pension from Mussolini!” (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa
etsimässä, 85) – a rather amusing statement considering that Ricotti was a very minor
dancer. When Nykyaikaa etsimässä was published in the first volume of Paavolainen’s
Valitut teokset (Selected Works) in 1961, the photo of Maria Ricotti was omitted.
Paavolainen’s essay “Säikähtyneet muusat” began with quotations from Futurist
texts, which were followed by an account of the development of the Futurist move-
ment. He compared the Futurists to a group of crusaders who, singing the Te Deum, left
Italy “in order to conquer the Jerusalem of the New Spirit” (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa
etsimässä, 56). Paavolainen tried to explain why Futurism was born in Italy, a country
known for its artistic traditions and idyllic lifestyles, and repeated the views of the
German critic Paul Fechter (1880–1958; see also p. 491 in this volume), who felt that
Italy was a country where the past was not a stimulus any longer but a nightmare that
stifled everything young and vigorous.
Paavolainen outlined in his book some general aesthetic principles and doctrines
of Futurism, emphasizing the rôle of movement, speed and simultaneity. He also high-
lighted the group’s political activism by referring to the slogan “War is the most beau-
tiful Futurist poem”, which Marinetti had used in the leaflet In quest’anno futurista
(Marinetti: “In this Futurist Year”, 234–235) and in “Il valore futurista della guerra”,
an interview with the newspaper L’ avvenire (Messina) of 23 February 1915 (Marinetti:
“The Meaning of War for Futurism”, 241). Paavolainen discussed Futurist activities
in various arts, paying particular attention to the visual arts. He seems to have had a
special interest in Giorgio de Chirico, whom, despite his allegiance to Pittura metafi-
sica, he discussed as if he were a Futurist. Exact differences and boundaries between
new movements and trends were not very important for Paavolainen.
According to Paavolainen, the achievements of Futurism in literature, drama
and music were only modest in comparison to those in the visual arts, but he paid
notable attention to literature by reprinting Cesare Simonetti’s poem Treno in corsa
(Speeding Train), which had been published in I nuovi poeti futuristi (The New Futurist
Poets), an anthology edited by Marinetti in 1925. For Paavolainen, Simonetti’s poem
 Finland 441

was “the most grotesque example of Futurist poetry”. However, he discovered “real
lyrical power” in Marinetti’s works, remarking that, especially when he wrote about
“mechanical people” or “human machines”, his verses displayed “imagination and
dark pathos” (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa etsimässä, 76). Paavolainen’s presentation of
Marinetti also included two short examples of poetry in Finnish translation, without
giving their titles (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa etsimässä, 74–75). One of them consists of
the first lines from Marinetti’s Poema preciso (An Accurate Poem, 1932), the other one
is part of Escodamè’s La bicicletta (The Bicycle, 1925).
At the end of his essay, Paavolainen gave a general characterization of Futurism
and emphasized that, as a spiritual movement, it possessed an enduring significance.
The movement’s manifestos praising the new rhythm of life, the values of technical
innovation and the aesthetics of the machine, as well as the combination of a new
world view and a new way of feeling and seeing, had revolutionized the arts. Its battle
for the New and its opposition to traditionalist concepts, values and authorities had
had a long-term effect on modern art.
One chapter in Paavolainen’s book was devoted to Aleksandr Blok (1880–1921),
Sergei Yesenin (1895–1925) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), the three ‘revo-
lutionary poets’, as he calls them. He also paid attention to Russian Futurism and
Marinetti’s visit to Russia in January and February 1914 (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa
etsimässä, 209, where he mistakenly records the year as 1913). Paavolainen’s descrip-
tion of the cultural situation in Russia during the time of the Revolution is colourful
and almost grotesque; he emphasized the shift from a patriarchal and undeveloped
country to a society in which avant-garde poets sang the praises of modern technology:

The poets whose fathers couldn’t even read properly and whose brothers-in law flogged their
wives with the belts of their muzhik trousers, sang hymns to typewriting machines and running
water in the bathroom; the painters whose brothers drove troikas adored in their paintings loco-
motives and luxury express trains; the descendants of the sellers of watermelons shouted with
the voice typical of their trade which they had inherited from their forefathers: “Blow up the
Hermitage!” (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa etsimässä, 209–210)

Paavolainen maintained that Futurism had paved the way for the Revolution and
the Bolsheviks’ dream of the industrialization of Russia (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa
etsimässä, 210). He discussed and partly translated into Finnish Mayakovsky’s poem
150 000 000 (1919–1920), but also referred to Lenin’s sceptical attitude towards
Futurism and the condemnation of Futurism by the Bolsheviks (Paavolainen:
Nykyaikaa etsimässä, 212–217). From the three revolutionary poets discussed by
Paavolainen, only Blok’s poetry was translated into Finnish before the Second
World War.
Olavi Paavolainen returned to Futurism in his pamphlet Suursiivous eli Kirjallisessa
lastenkamarissa (The Great Housecleaning, or In the Literary Kindergarten) in 1932.
In something resembling a parallel to the Futurist desire to demolish museums,
Paavolainen attempted to demolish the Finnish literature of his time. He turned against
442 Hannu K. Riikonen

his former colleagues in the Tulenkantajat group, accusing them of lacking a sense
of style, and, in the case of the novelist Viljo Saraja (1900–1970), of plagiarism. As
part of this “housecleaning”, Futurism was also to be discarded. In a chapter entitled
“Only for Readers with Strong Nerves”, Paavolainen quoted an article about Futurism
from a leftist newspaper, wondering why the editors had allowed the printing of such
“manic-depressive irrationalism” (Paavolainen: Suursiivous, 153). In the epilogue to
the chapter he called himself “the broken author of Nykyaikaa etsimässä” saying that,
at the time, he had believed that his presentation of the modern world was a presenta-
tion of Futurism, but he now regretted that it had only inspired second-rate epigones.

Futurism in Finnish literature

There are some, albeit very late, works in Finnish literature that can be defined as
Futurist, for example Jääpeili (Ice Mirror, 1928) by Aaro Hellaakoski (1893–1952).
This collection of poems included some typographic experiments, especially in the
poem Dolce far niente (Sweet Doing Nothing), but it was also replete with references
to machine culture, for example in Keväinen junamatka (A Train Journey in Spring),
where the train, a product of the technical age, appeared amidst an unspoilt land-
scape. Paavolainen, for his part, was not very fond of Jääpeili, probably because the
Futurism in the collection was confined to form and did not meet any ideological
demands. Paavolainen wrote in Nykyaikaa etsimässä: “Aaro Hellaakoski’s ‘modernis-
tic’ form experiments in Jääpeili reveal a lacking sense of style; there is no connection
between content and form” (Paavolainen: Nykyaikaa etsimässä, 48; see also Lassila:
“Tahtomme: Eteenpäin!”, 59).
On the other hand, Hellaakoski exclaimed in his Carmen saeculare (Song of the
Ages) in the collection Maininki ja vaahtopää (Swell and White Cap, 1924): “Rautahepo
ja automobiili! / – Voimansa antoi / sähkö ja hiili!” (Iron horse and automobile! / –
Electricity and coal / gave their power!) (Hellaakoski: Maininki ja vaahtopää, 135).
Finnish poetry of the 1920s contained several evocations of cars, trains and speed.
The poet and critic Lauri Viljanen (1900–1984), who later became professor of
Finnish literature at the University of Helsinki, wrote the poems Autolaulu (A Car
Song, 1927) and Hymni nopeudelle (Hymn to Speed, 1927) as a homage to the auto-
mobile and engineering firm Hispano-Suiza. Viljanen was not greatly interested in or
impressed by Futurism, which is why he refused to review Mika Waltari’s collection
Valtatiet (see below).
Waltari (1908–1979) who later became a popular author of historical novels,
wrote a poem called 23.30 Pikajuna Viipuriin (Express Train to Vyborg at 11.30 p.m.)
in 1929. Arvi Kivimaa (1904–1984), later director of the Finnish National Theatre,
was the author of Arthur Honegger in which he evoked the composer’s symphonic
poem Pacific 231, which had been performed in 1926 by the Helsinki Philharmonic
 Finland 443

Orchestra, conducted by Robert Kajanus. According to the music critic Heikki

Klemetti, Pacific 231 could be compared to the “din of the engine factory in Vyborg”
(see Marvia and Vainio: Helsingin kaupunginorkesteri, 378). Typical Futurist features
can also be found in Valtatiet (Main Roads, 1928), a poetry collection by Waltari and
Olavi Lauri (pseud. of Olavi Paavolainen). The collection is largely concerned with
movement, speed and modern vehicles such as trains, trams and cars. Waltari con-
tributed, for example, the poem Juna (Train) while Paavolainen was the author of
Terässinfonia (Steel Symphony) and Punainen Fiat (The Red Fiat), two of the most
impressive Futurist poems in Finnish literature (Mikkonen: “Olavi Paavolaisen
‘Punainen Fiat’ ”).
In the 1920s, P. Mustapää (pseud. of Martti Haavio, 1899–1973) became acquainted
with Futurism. Among his early experiments with poetry, there is a poem entitled
Reumatismi eli futuristinen runo, joka saattaisi olla kaunis, elleivät sangen erilaatuiset
asiat olisi niin mielivaltaisesti kytketty yhteen (Rheumatism, or, A Futurist Poem that
Might Be Beautiful, Unless Quite Different Things Were Arbitrarily Tied Together).
According to Maija Larmola, who published the poem in her study of Mustapää’s
poetry, the poet saw in Futurism an art movement that assembled material from a
variety of sources and rejected the old aesthetics (Larmola: Opera secreta, 278–279).
Mustapää was also aware of the works of the Estonian writer Albert Kivikas (1898–
1978), who at that time was going through a brief Futurist phase (see pp. 425–427 in
the entry on Estonia in this volume). Kivikas was a member of the Tarapita group
(active between 1921 and 1922), which published a manifesto in 1921 that is usually
labelled ‘Expressionist’ (Mägi: Estonian Literature, 48–49). When Mustapää inter-
viewed Kivikas, he found out that he had read Marinetti’s works in Russian transla-
tions. Mustapää also said that his La Cuccagna (Cockaigne), which in itself cannot be
regarded a Futurist poem, was based on the topos of the ‘world turned upside down’,
similar to Kivikas’s Verimust (Black as Blood) (Haavikko: Kirjailijat puhuvat, 185–186;
Larmola: Opera secreta, 286–287).
Elmer Diktonius (1900–1961) was a Finnish-Swedish poet who had some inter-
est in Futurism. In his collection of aphorisms, Brödet och elden (Bread and Fire,
1923), he distanced himself from all current -isms (Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism,
Dadaism), except Expressionism and ‘Revolutionism’ (Palmgren: Kapinalliset kynät,
153). Despite his critical views on the new -isms, his novel Janne Kubik: Ett träsnitt
i ord (1932), which he himself translated into Finnish under the title Janne Kuutio:
Puupiirros sanoin (Janne Kuutio: A Woodcut in Words) in 1946, has sometimes been
regarded as a Futurist text, although the surname Kubik (Cube) refers to Cubism. In
his youth, Diktonius also had an interesting correspondence on aesthetic matters
with the Finnish Communist Otto Ville Kuusinen (1881–1964) who, under Stalin and
Khrushchev, occupied high positions in the Soviet hierarchy and was buried in the
Kremlin wall. In his letters to Diktonius, Kuusinen emphasized the power of words
and the aesthetics of revolutionary poetry. He did not, however, recommend Futurism
to Diktonius (Henrikson: Romantik och Marxism, 254–257). Nonetheless, Kuusinen
444 Hannu K. Riikonen

produced some Futurist poems himself, as can be seen in Torpeedo (Torpedo), pub-
lished in the collection Vallankumousrunoja (Poems of Revolution, 1926).
Olavi Paavolainen dedicated his collection of essays Nykyaikaa etsimässä to “Dear
Hagar”, that is, the Finnish-Swedish writer Hagar Olsson (1893–1978), who is also an
interesting figure in the reception of Futurism in Finland. Unlike most of the writers
discussed above, Olsson had Futurist magazines at her disposal. In her plays, for
example S.O.S. (1929), and novels, such as Mr Jeremias söker en illusion (Mr Jeremias Is
Looking for an Illusion, 1926), she addressed the topics of urban life, machines, radio,
telephones, telegrams, factories and aeroplanes. One telegram in Mr Jeremias söker
en illusion tells about an aeroplane crash in which the pilot and eight passengers died.
The cover of the novel presented a man’s head in Cubist fashion, designed by Wäinö
Aaltonen (see below).
Machines were, of course, often referred to in working-class poetry, where
they were portrayed as inventions that were enslaving human beings. According to
Raoul Palmgren, a historian of working-class literature in Finland, the most effec-
tive description of this slavery is the poem Koneorjan laulu (The Song of the Slave of
Machines, 1929) by Aku Rautala (1896–1931) (Palmgren: Kaupunki ja tekniikka, 96).
In Finnish theatre of the 1920s, there were many kinds of experiments with
Modernist idioms, but they were mainly made in the spirit, and under the influence,
of German Expressionism rather than Futurism (see Orsmaa: Teatterimme käänne,
54–72).

Futurism in the visual arts

In Finnish publications at the beginning of the twentieth century concerned with
modern trends in art, Cubism and Futurism were often bracketed together, the empha-
sis being on Cubism. On the other hand, when Kalle Kuutola (1886–1974), Bruno
Tuukkanen (1891–1979), Urho Lehtinen (1887–1982) and Yrjö Ramstedt (1880–1931)
exhibited their works in the twenty-third Taiteilijain näyttely (Artists’ Exhibition) in
Helsinki in November 1913, the critics characterized them as Futurists. Most of these
works were, however, more Cubist than Futurist (see Sadik-Ogli, “Finnish Futurist
Visual Art”, 35). A rare exception was Marcus Collin (1882–1966), whose Karuselli
(Carousel, 1910) can be considered a Finnish painting that displays an awareness of
Futurist theories, probably acquired during Collin’s trips to Paris in 1909–1910 and
1912 (Wennervirta: Marcus Collin, 25). Some of Ilmari Aalto’s (1891–1934) paintings,
which Olavi Paavolainen praised as Cubist (Nykyaikaa etsimässä, 20), also contained
a number of Futurist features (see Sadik-Ogli: “Finnish Futurist Visual Art”, 36).
As pointed out by Ben Hellman, in the 1917 exhibition of Finnish art in Saint
Petersburg (at that time Petrograd), Finnish artists had an opportunity to meet
Russian Futurists and members of the cultural élite (see Hellman, “ ‘Mnogo! Mnogoo!
 Finland 445

Mnogoo!’ ”). The most interesting artist in this context is the sculptor Wäinö Aaltonen
(1894–1966), as he had personal contact with Futurists in Italy, corresponded with
Marinetti and received Futurist manifestos from him. His Musica (1926) has been
interpreted as “an ideological futurist synthesis of different sensual experiences
and various arts into a single whole” (Sadik-Ogli: “Finnish Futurist Visual Art”, 36).
Aaltonen’s Futuri presents the head of the Finnish writer Aleksis Kivi like the Greek
singer Orpheus with a lyre in his hand (Lindgren: Monumentum, 83). A similar mixture
of stylistic features can be found in the statue of Aleksis Kivi in front of the Finnish
National Theatre in Helsinki. Later in life, Aaltonen turned to Classicism, acquired
the status of an almost ‘official’ sculptor and was elected to the Finnish Academy
(Lindgren: Monumentum, 87–96).
Futurism was also parodied. In the first chapter of Olavi Paavolainen’s Nykyaikaa
etsimässä there appeared a photograph (p. 28) of a painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela
(1865–1931), Piika ja härkä eli katastrofi eli idioottimaalauksen triumfi (Servant Girl and
Ox, or The Catastrophe, or The Triumph of Idiotic Painting). The caption text attached
to the photo referred to the experiments of some Finnish painters who had parodied
Modernist excesses, and expressed disappointment with the fact that Finnish artists
had largely remained aloof from developments that had changed culture and public
life in the rest of Europe.

Futurism in music
Futurist music was represented in Finland by Elmer Diktonius, who was not only a poet
but also a composer. Even more interesting is Ernest Pingoud (1887–1942), one of the
most cosmopolitan composers in the history of Finnish music. In November 1918, he
organized a concert that included his own Le Dernier Aventure de Pierrot and Dance
macabre. The critics characterized these compositions as ‘ultramodern’, ‘extreme’,
‘Cubistic’ and ‘Futurist’ (Salmenhaara: “Ernest Pingoud”, 253). The composer himself
denied the applicability of such terms, and insisted that he was neither an experimen-
talist nor a Futurist and that his works did not express “the spirit of the times” (see
Pingoud: “Intet angrepp – intet försvar”). However, it is obvious that Pingoud’s com-
positions featured urban themes that can be linked to Futurism, especially in his sym-
phonic poem La Face d’une grande ville (The Face of a Big City, 1936). One of its parts was
entitled “Réclames lumineuses” (Neon Signs) and used highly repetitive rhythmic ele-
ments played “sempre automaticamente” (Salmenhaara: “Ernest Pingoud”, 272–273).
It is also worth mentioning that Pingoud was interested in locomotives, inspired,
no doubt, by Zola’s railway novel, La Béte humaine (The Human Beast, 1890). It is one
of the ironies of history that trains were fatal for Pingoud: he committed suicide in
Helsinki in 1942 by jumping in front of one (Salmenhaara: Suomen musiikin historia.
Vol. 3, 202).
446 Hannu K. Riikonen

Conclusion
Futurism reached Finland mainly in the 1920s. The most extensive presentations of it,
the essays “Säikähtyneet muusat” (The Frightened Muses) and “Venäläisiä vallanku-
mousrunoilijoita” (Russian Revolutionary Poets) in Olavi Paavolainen’s collection of
essays Nykyaikaa etsimässä, were published in 1929. There were also some Futurist
experiments in Finnish art, literature and music which expressed an admiration for
machines and modern vehicles. It was also typical of the reception of Futurism in
Finland that many movements of the historical avant-garde, such as Cubism, Dadaism,
Expressionism and Futurism, were often bracketed together and portrayed as different
facets of Modernism, without any clear borders being drawn between them. It is also
noticeable that many of the authors and artists influenced by Futurism or producing
works with Futurist features were Swedish-speaking Finns (e. g. Diktonius, Pingoud,
Parland). The only exceptions were Olavi Paavolainen and the Tulenkantajat group.
In the Finnish reception of Futurism, few artists played a major rôle; the voices of the
critics predominated, and their attitudes tended to be negatively inclined.

Works cited
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Emotion to Spirit: Antipositivism and Finnish Aesthetics, 1900–1939]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen
Kirjallisuuden Seura [The Finnish Literature Society], 1973: 58–69.
Larmola, Maija: Opera secreta. P. Mustapään runokuvien kehitystä (Opera secreta. P. Mustapää’s
Use of Images). Helsinki: Werner Söderström, 1990.
Lassila, Pertti: “Tahtomme: Eteenpäin! Suomalaisen futurismin taustaa.” [Our Will: Forward! On
the Background of Finnish Futurism] Kirjallisuudentutkijain Seuran vuosikirja [Yearbook of the
Literary Research Society]. Vol. 27. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura [The Finnish
Literature Society], 1973. 58–69.
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Laurila, Kaarle Sanfrid: “Futuristit: Uusi mullistava taidesuunta (kirje Berliinistä Helsingin
Sanomille).” Helsingin Sanomat [Helsinki Newspaper], 11 June 1912. English translation “The
Futurists: A New Revolutionary Art Movement. A Letter from Berlin to the ‘Helsingin Sanomat’.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012): 373–377.
Lindgren, Liisa: Monumentum: Muistomerkkien aatteita ja aikaa [Monumentum: Ideas and Times of
Monuments]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura [The Finnish Literature Society], 2000.
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Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il tattilismo: Letto al Théâtre de l’ Œuvre (Parigi), all’Esposizione
mondiale d’Arte Moderna (Ginevra), e pubblicato da ‘Comoedia’ in gennaio 1921.” F. T. Marinetti:
Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 135–142.
2nd edn 1983, 159–166. English translation “Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto.” F. T. Marinetti:
Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 370–376.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il valore futurista della guerra.” L’ avvenire (Messina), 23 February
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Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 231–237.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Le Tactilisme: Un art nouveau inventé par le futurisme.” Comœdia
15:2953 (16 January 1921): 1.
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Philharmonic Orchestra, 1882–1982]. Helsinki: Werner Söderström, 1993.
Mikkonen, Kai: “Olavi Paavolaisen ‘Punainen Fiat’ ja paluu futurismiin.” [‘The Red Fiat’ by Olavi
Paavolainen and the Return to Futurism] Johanna Pentikäinen, and Sakari Katajamäki,
eds.: Runosta runoon: Suomalaisen runon yhteyksiä länsimaiseen kirjallisuuteen Antiikista
nykyaikaan [From Poem to Poem: The Connections of Finnish Poetry to Western Literature, from
Antiquity to the Present Age]. Helsinki: Werner Söderström, 2004: 246–266, 362–364.
Orsmaa, Taisto-Bertil: Teatterimme käänne: Ekspressionismi suomalaisessa teatterissa [The Turn of
Our Theatre: Expressionism in the Finnish Theatre]. Helsinki: Gaudeamus, 1976.
Paavolainen, Olavi: Nykyaikaa etsimässä: Esseitä ja pakinoita [In Search of Modern Times: Essays
and Causeries]. Helsinki: Otava, 1929.
Paavolainen, Olavi: Suursiivous eli kirjallisessa lastenkamarissa [The Great Housecleaning, or In the
Literary Kindergarten]. Jyväskylä: Gummerus, 1932.
Palmgren, Raoul: Kapinalliset kynät: Itsenäisyyden ajan työväenliikkeen kaunokirjallisuus
[Rebellious Pens: The Literature of the Workers’ Movement in the Age of Independence]. Vol 1.
Kaksi puoluekirjallisuutta ja muotovallankumous (1918–30) [Two Party Literatures and the
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Palmgren, Raoul: Kaupunki ja tekniikka Suomen kirjallisuudessa: Kuvauslinjoja ennen ja jälkeen
tulenkantajien [City and Technology in Finnish Literature: Presentations Before and After the
Torch-bearers]. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura [The Finnish Literature Society], 1989.
Perret, Jean-Louis: “Marinetti och futurismen.” [Marinetti and Futurism] Konstnärsgillets julalbum
[The Christmas Album of the Artists’ Guild]. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Konstnärsgillet [The Artists’
Guild], 1923. 46–57.
Pingoud, Ernest: “Intet angrepp – intet försvar.” [No Attack – No Defence] Svenska Tidningen
[The Swedish Newspaper], 26 November 1918.
Railo, Eino: Yleinen kirjallisuuden historia [General Literary History]. Vol 6. Realismi ja naturalismi,
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448 Hannu K. Riikonen

Ruin, Hans: Väl mött, Europa! [Well Met, Europe!] Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Schildts, 1938.
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Mirror of Art: From the Art of Impressionism to Dictatorships]. Helsingfors: Schildts, 1949.
Sadik-Ogli, Nikolai: “Finnish Futurist Visual Art.” Journal of Finnish Studies 4:2 (December 2000):
34–48.
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Salmenhaara, Erkki: Suomen musiikin historia [The History of Finnish Music]. Vol. 3. Uuden musiikin
kynnyksellä 1907–1958 [On the Threshold of Modern Music, 1907–1958]. Helsinki: Werner
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Tuulio, Tyyni, ed.: Italian kirjallisuuden kultainen kirja [The Golden Book of Italian Literature].
Helsinki: Werner Söderström, 1945.
Vainio, Matti: Diktonius: Modernisti ja säveltäjä [Diktonius: Modernist and Composer]. Helsinki:
Suomen musiikkitieteellinen seura [The Finnish Musicological Society], 1976.
Viljanen, Lauri: “Autolaulu.” [A Car Song] Aitta [Magazine] 5 (1927): 18–19.
Viljanen, Lauri: “Hymni nopeudelle.” [Hymn to Speed] Seura [Company] 3 (1927): 21.
Wennervirta, Ludvig: Marcus Collin: Katsaus maalaustaiteemme vaiheisiin vuosina 1900–1920
[Marcus Collin: An Overview of Finnish Art, 1900–1920]. Helsinki: Otava.

Further Reading
Ruutu, Hanna: “Diktens uppror: Om Henry Parland och den ryska futurismen.” [The Rebellion of the
Poem: Henry Parland and Russian Futurism] Clas Zilliacus, ed.: Erhållit Europa: Vilket härmed
erkännes. Henry Parland-studier [Europe Received: Which Is Hereby Acknowledged. Studies
on Henry Parland]. Helsingfors [Helsinki]: Svenska litteratursällskapet i Finland [The Swedish
Literature Society in Finland]; Stockholm: Atlantis, 2014.
Saarenheimo, Kerttu: Tulenkantajat: Ryhmän vaiheita ja kirjallisia teemoja 1920-luvulla
[Torch-bearers: The Phases and Literary Themes of a Group in the 1920s]. Helsinki: Werner
Söderström, 1966.
Sadik-Ogli, Nikolai: Don’t Shoot Väinämöinen! Dada and Futurism in Finland, 1912–1932. M.A.
Thesis. Bloomington/IN: Indiana University, 1999.
Sadik-Ogli, Nikolai: “Finland and Futurism.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012):
335–377.
Sarajas-Korte, Salme, ed.: Kubismi – Futurismi = Kubismen – Futurismen: Finlands Konstakademis
ambulerande utställning [Kubism – Futurism: The Circulating Exhibition of the Finnish Art Academy].
Exhibition catalogue. Tampere: Tampereen Nykytaiteen museo [Tampere Museum of Modern Art];
Turku: Wäinö Aaltosen museo [Wäinö Aaltonen Museum]; Helsinki: Ateneumin taidemuseo [Art
Museum Atheneum]; Jyväskylä: Keski-Suomen Museo [The Museum of Middle Finland], 17 lokakuu
1968 – 10 toukokuu 1970. Helsinki: Suomen taideakatemia [Finnish Art Academy], 1968.
Trast, Viktor Kustaa, ed.: Slaavilaisten kirjallisuuksien kultainen kirja [The Golden Book of Slavic
Literatures]. Helsinki: Werner Söderström, 1936.
Tuhkanen, Totti: “Futurismi ja vastahakoiset suomalaiset.” [Futurism and the Reluctant Finns]
Settentrione: Rivista di studi italo-finlandesi 1 (1989): 80–96.
Valkonen, Markku: “Futurismin suomalaisia kaikuja = Echoes of Futurism in Finland.” M. Valkonen,
ed.: Uusi taide: Nopeus, vaara, uhma, Italian futurismi 1909–1944 = A New Art: Speed, Danger,
Defiance, Italian Futurism 1909–1944. Espoo: EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, 2012. 40–43.
Willard Bohn
29 France
Born and raised in Egypt, F. T. Marinetti possessed as many connections to France as
he did to Italy. Before gaining a law degree from the University of Pavia, he obtained
his baccalaureate from the Sorbonne. By 1905, Marinetti had not only become a famil-
iar figure in Paris but had also acquired a reputation as an homme de lettres. He had
already published La Conquête des étoiles (The Conquest of the Stars, 1902), Gabriele
D’Annunzio intime (Intimate Portrait of Gabriele D’Annunzio, 1903), La Momie sang-
lante (The Bleeding Mummy, 1904) and Destruction (Destruction, 1904), and in 1905
he published a play entitled Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle), which was performed
at the Théâtre de l’ Œuvre on 3 April 1909 and twice more thereafter. Annoyed at the
boos and whistles coming from the audience, Marinetti climbed on stage and verbally
assaulted the hecklers (Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 35–39).

From the Foundation and Manifesto of

Futurism (1909) to the group exhibition at the
Bernheim-Jeune Gallery (1912)
On 20 February 1909, Marinetti published his first manifesto on the front page of Le
Figaro, which received considerable attention. Conceived as a “ceremonial intro-
duction to a new sensibility” (Roche-Pézard: L’ Aventure futuriste 1909–1916, 102),
the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism exhorted readers to reject the past and to
adopt a revolutionary new aesthetics that more faithfully reflected modern existence.
Reviewing the manifesto three months later, Jean Ferval took exception to some of its
hyperbolic statements (Charbonnel: “A Propos du ‘Futurisme’ ”). Despite Marinetti’s
best efforts to convince him, Ferval declared that he was unable to believe that war
had any hygienic or aesthetic value. In addition, he deplored the violent imagery
permeating the manifesto, such as the exhortation to burn museums and libraries,
and stressed the obvious importance of literary and artistic traditions. The same year
witnessed the publication of two more works by Marinetti in France: Les Poupées
électriques (Electric Dolls), which contained a preface on Futurism, and Mafarka le
futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist, printed in 1909, but sold with the year 1910 on the
cover). Subsequent manifestos and several of his books would appear in both French
and Italian editions.
Eager to publicize Futurist literature and art, Marinetti seized every opportunity to
attract new converts to his cause. Among other things, he delivered a lecture at the Maison
des Étudiants on 9 March 1911, and granted an interview to Le Temps five days later.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-029
450 Willard Bohn

Writing in October of that same year, Camille Mauclair (1872–1935) published a sym-
pathetic article about Futurism, which a delighted Marinetti sent to numerous cor-
respondents (Mauclair: “Le Futurisme et le jeune Italie”). The reason the Futurists
detested the past, Mauclair explained, was because their country had been trans-
formed into a historical cemetery. People only came to Italy to visit the museums
and view the ruins. Futurist creations were often shocking, he added, because the
Futurists sought to instil a new vitality into Italian literature, art and music.
Although Giacomo Balla exhibited several paintings at the Salon d’Automne
in October 1909, the Futurist artists had generally avoided Paris. All that changed
in November 1911, when Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà arrived in the French
capital to prepare for a Futurist exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. Thanks to
their Futurist colleague Gino Severini (1883–1966), who lived in Paris, they became
acquainted with French art, the Cubist painters and Guillaume Apollinaire. The latter
introduced Boccioni and Severini to Picasso and took them to see that artist’s studio
(Apollinaire: “Le Futurisme”). On 16 November 1911, Apollinaire (1880–1918) informed
the readers of the Mercure de France that the Futurists liked to depict a variety of
moods as forcefully as possible (Apollinaire: “Peintres futuristes”). Following a recent
dispute with Marinetti, he added, the talented painter and art critic Ardengo Soffici
(1879–1964) had made up his disagreement with the Milan group and had joined the
Futurist movement.
The first Futurist exhibition in Paris featured works by Carrà, Boccioni, Severini
and Luigi Russolo and ran from 5 to 24 February 1912. It caused a great deal of commo-
tion. For those viewers who came not just to gawk, the catalogue included a detailed
explanation of the principles governing Futurist art. Attempting to stir up some addi-
tional interest, Marinetti lectured again at the Maison des Étudiants (on 9 February
1912) and at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery six days later. The second talk elicited a
hostile reaction from members of the audience, who were outraged by Marinetti’s
remarks. Unexpectedly, besides Severini, two French painters leaped to his defence:
Albert Gleizes (1881–1953) and Jean Metzinger (1883–1956). Although they were Cubist
painters rather than Futurists, they had previously encountered a similar response
to their own works. Reviewing the Futurist exhibition, Apollinaire detected a great
deal of French influence and was far from enthusiastic (Apollinaire: “Les Peintres
futuristes italiens”). While the Futurists were the equals of several French avant-garde
artists, he concluded, they were only feeble imitators of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and
André Derain (1880–1954).
Returning to the exhibition again two days later, Apollinaire criticized the
Futurists’ obsession with specific subjects and ephemeral moods, both of which,
in his opinion, were hopelessly old-fashioned (Apollinaire: “Chroniques d’Art: Les
Futuristes”). By contrast, he argued, the most advanced French artists liked to dissect
nature into its various components, which resembled notes in a musical composi-
tion. In Apollinaire’s estimation, Boccioni and Severini had the most to say. The lat-
ter’s Danse du “Pan-pan” à Monico (The Pan-Pan Dance at the Monico, 1909–1911)
 France 451

impressed him as the most important Futurist work so far. Reviewing the exhibition in
the Mercure de France, Gustave Kahn (1859–1936) also detected a good deal of French
influence, but his critical remarks were assuaged by words of esteem for the “the work
of excellent artists who deserve serious attention” (Kahn: “Art”, 868). Impressed by
so much novelty and vitality, he arranged an elaborate banquet in the artists’ honour.
Apollinaire returned to the question of Cubist influence once again towards the
end of the year. Convinced that the Futurists were merely imitating French artists,
he nonetheless identified a number of differences between them (Apollinaire: “Le
Futurisme”).

From the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition to the

First World War
The following year, Gino Severini discovered a young artist in Paris named Félix
Del Marle (1889–1952, also known as Félix Delmarle and Aimé Félix Mac Del Marle),
with whom he shared a studio for a while. Impressed by his talent and eager to
make a convert, Severini persuaded him to join the Futurist movement. Before long,
Del Marle was writing Futurist manifestos and painting brilliant Futurist pictures.
On 15 April 1913, he published a manifesto entitled La Peinture futuriste (Futurist
Painting), which described Futurism as a violently revolutionary art form (Del Marle:
“La Peinture futuriste”). Displaying an impressive knowledge of Futurist theory, Del
Marle announced that he and his colleagues sought to participate in the dazzling life
of steel, fever and speed that surrounded them. Two months later, Boccioni exhib-
ited a number of Futurist sculptures at the Galerie La Boëtie in Paris. When Marinetti
lectured there on 21 June, Del Marle finally managed to meet him, and probably also
Boccioni, who gave a talk on 27 June.
In July 1913, Del Marle issued a second manifesto that attracted considerable
attention (Del Marle: “Manifeste futuriste à Montmartre”). Modelling it on Marinetti’s
Futurist Discourse to the Venetians (1910), he called for Montmartre to be demolished
with the blows of Futurist pickaxes and blasts of dynamite. This hilly quarter of Paris
had become associated with a bygone era, he proclaimed, and had degenerated into
a vulgar tourist attraction – like Venice itself. Unfortunately, Del Marle did not submit
the manifesto to Marinetti beforehand, as all the Futurists were required to do. Perhaps
for this reason, Severini found the document offensive and sent a letter of protest to
several newspapers, accusing the author of plagiarism and self-promotion. A fierce
polemic ensued, which ended only when Marinetti decided to intervene (Severini
and Delmarle: “Polémique Severini – Delmarle”, 390–396). Delighted to have added
a French artist to his ranks, he sided with Del Marle and reprinted his manifesto in
Lacerba, the semi-official Futurist journal. Despite these annoying events started by
his studio-mate Severini, Del Marle remained loyal to the Futurist cause until after the
452 Willard Bohn

Great War. On 13 March 1914, he published an article in Poème et drame in which he

reaffirmed his allegiance to Futurism (Del Marle: “Quelques notes sur la simultanéité
en peinture”).
The grand-niece of the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, Valentine de
Saint-Point (1875–1953), was an accomplished painter and writer who passionately
embraced modern life. Attracted to forward-looking causes, she was fascinated by the
creative vitality of the Futurist exhibition in 1912. Wishing to meet Marinetti and his
colleagues, Saint-Point hosted an elaborate soirée in their honour on 11 February and
decided to become a Futurist. Although she approved of most of the programme out-
lined in the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, she found one of its tenets disturb-
ing: “We wish to glorify war […] and scorn for women” (Marinetti: “The Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14; Saint-Point: “The Manifesto of Futurist Woman”,
109). Annoyed by Marinetti’s apparent misogyny, she published a counter-manifesto
on 25 March 1912, using this phrase as an epigraph. Those who cultivate masculine or
feminine qualities exclusively, the Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto of the
Futurist Woman) proclaimed, will either become brutes or cows (“femelles”); regard-
less of his or her sex, every hero, every genius, every gifted individual manages to
combine masculinity and femininity in some way. The same distinction applies to his-
torical periods as well: Futurism, Saint-Point explained, enables an audience living at
the end of a feminine era to put some virility back into its lives – men need to lead a
life of audacity and conquest, and women need to be tough and banish sentimentality
from their lives.
Following the manifesto’s appearance in print, Marinetti made Saint-Point
the director of a Futurist section devoted to “Action Féminine”, which seems to
have been created especially for her. On 12 June 1912, she read her work aloud at
the Galerie Giroux in Brussels, where the Futurists were exhibiting a collection of
paintings. On 27 June, she gave another reading at the Salle Gaveau in Paris, fol-
lowed by a discussion that was moderated by Marinetti. The Manifeste futuriste de la
luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust), a second, more provocative manifesto, appeared
on 11 January 1913. Celebrating the fundamental importance of luxure (usually
translated as ‘lust’),1 it portrayed the latter neither as a vice nor as a sin but as an
important source of energy. An essential element in life’s dynamic dance, Lust, for
Saint-Point, was the force that powered both creativity and physical activity, and it
deserved to be recognized as such, not concealed behind awkward euphemisms and

1 The semantics of this term vary considerably in French and English. Luxuria, ‘debauchery’, is one
of the seven deadly sins and as such it has a very negative connotation in the Anglo-Saxon world.
In France, it has acquired a range of different meanings beside lechery: passion, desire, hedonism,
indulgence, etc., and still carries associations with the older Latin meaning (extravagance, wealth,
splendour). In English, luxury has lost the sexual connotations it once had, whereas French luxure can
refer to an extravagance in both a physical and economic sense.
 France 453

sentimental veils. For this reason, she advised her readers to transform Lust into
a work of art. Echoing Nietzsche’s distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian
impulses, she argued that the importance of Lust was equal to the importance of
the mind. In her opinion, a successful person should exhaust all the possibilities
available in both areas.
Towards the end of the year, Saint-Point invented a new kind of performance
art which, because it was wholly abstract, she decided to call métachorie (beyond
dance). The first performance took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 20
December 1913 (see also pp. 131–132 in the entry on Dance in this volume). Following
a theoretical introduction, she performed solo, “almost naked, her body partly veiled
by transparent silk strips” (Sina and Wilson: “Valentine de Saint-Point”, 44–47). Not
wishing to distract from the dance’s abstract and geometrical aspects, Saint-Point
covered her face with veils as well. As she danced, excerpts of her poetry, glimpses
of mathematical equations and various perfumes appeared and disappeared in a
random fashion. Like the musical accompaniment, they were unrelated to her ges-
tures or to each other. Verbal, visual and olfactory cues mingled in a ballet of the
senses. Saint-Point wrote a long address that was read out by Georges Saillard on 29
December 1913 before a performance at the Comédie des Champs-Elysées and, on 11
January 1914, published a manifesto-like statement which explained what she was
trying to do (Saint-Point: “La Métachorie”). Whereas dance was often considered to
be inferior to the other arts, she wanted to create a special version that would be
their equal. The dance she envisioned would be a synthesis of the other arts. The
theme for the music would come from one of her poems, which in turn would suggest
a geometrical figure. Inspired by the latter, the dance would illustrate this figure
while adhering to its conceptual limits. Since the performance would be driven by an
abstract idea, it would constitute a danse idéiste (dance of ideas). Ironically, although
the manifesto was written in the conditional mood, she had already performed this
dance two weeks before at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées.
The period 1913–1914 was replete with avant-garde polemics as dozens of artists
and writers founded new movements and many more experimented with new con-
cepts and new techniques. Before long, not surprisingly, the question of precedence
raised its ugly head. Everyone wanted to receive credit for things they had invented –
or thought they had invented – and was in no mood to listen to rival claims. Angered
by an article Apollinaire had published two weeks before, Boccioni issued a rebuttal
on 1 April 1913, provocatively entitled “I futuristi plagiati in Francia” (The Futurists
Plagiarized in France). Whereas Apollinaire claimed that the Italians had stolen
all their ideas from French sources, Boccioni argued that precisely the reverse was
true: the French had plagiarized the Italians. Centred on concepts such as simulta-
neity, Simultaneism and Orphism, a convoluted polemical exchange ensued that
lasted nearly a year. Besides Boccioni and Apollinaire, it involved Fernand Léger
(1881–1955), Robert Delaunay (1885–1941), Giovanni Papini, Carlo Carrà and Ardengo
Soffici, among others.
454 Willard Bohn

Although Apollinaire corresponded with most of the Futurists at one time or

another – he spoke fluent Italian – his most important correspondent was Marinetti.
While the two men had exchanged letters previously, they only began to correspond
seriously in 1913. As the frequency of their letters increased, so did the frequency of
their face-to-face meetings. Since Marinetti was the chief of the Futurist movement,
he constantly passed through Paris on his way to speaking engagements elsewhere.
And whenever he came to town, the correspondence reveals, he and Apollinaire
would get together over a drink or a meal. The head of the Italian avant-garde would
sit down with the head of the French avant-garde and discuss the latest develop-
ments. Such a close relationship between the leaders of two different avant-gardes
was virtually unprecedented. Before long, Marinetti and Apollinaire became very
good friends.
During the period immediately before the war, the French and Italian avant-gardes
were also drawing closer to each other. As if to symbolize this new relationship, Severini
married the daughter of the French poet Paul Fort in August 1913 (with Apollinaire as
his best man). Offering a toast to the newly-weds after the ceremony, the bride’s father
exclaimed: “This is the marriage of France to Italy!” Another sign of the increasing
rapprochement between the two countries was provided by Apollinaire himself, who,
to everyone’s surprise, authored a Futurist manifesto entitled L’ Antitradition futuriste:
Manifeste synthèse (Futurist Anti-Tradition: Manifesto Synthesis). It was dated 29 June
1913, but was actually completed one month later. Although the document was signed
by only one person, it was very much a joint project. Conferring in person and by post,
Apollinaire and Marinetti decided which items should be included and which left out.
The former drafted the initial manuscript, and the latter gave it its final manifesto
shape. Continually varying the fonts and typefaces, he listed everything they hated
on the first, verso page and everything they loved on the facing recto. The former cat-
egory included such things as punctuation, adjectives, traditional verse and gloomy
poetry. The latter included analogies, visual effects, onomatopoeia and machinism.
Although literary concerns tended to predominate, art, dance, theatre and music also
received some attention. The third page was divided into two halves, labelled, respec-
tively, “Merde aux …” (Shit to the…) and “Rose aux …” (A Rose to the…). The first
heading was reserved for things the authors disliked (e. g. philologists and Venice)
and the second for people they approved of (e. g. Alexander Archipenko and Wassily
Kandinsky). While Apollinaire was certainly not a Futurist, he and Marinetti shared
many of the same opinions about art and literature.
Early in 1914, several Futurists, including Carrà, Papini, Soffici, Palazzeschi and
Magnelli, visited Paris and stayed there for a good month or even longer. Thanks to
Apollinaire, who co-edited Les Soirées de Paris (Paris Evenings, 1912–1914), some of
them were able to stay in the journal’s offices instead of paying for a hotel. In addition
to renewing some of the acquaintances they had made previously, they were eager to
learn more about modern French art. Besides visiting the Salon des Indepéndants,
 France 455

where thousands of paintings were on display, they went to see the collections of
Auguste Pellerin (1852–1929) and Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947). Pellerin was one of
the most important collectors of Manet and Cézanne at the time. Uhde was a dealer
whose collection of modern art was open to the public twice a week. Travelling in
Apollinaire’s company, the Futurists also met a number of artists and writers and,
more importantly, several art dealers. Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1884–1979), who rep-
resented Picasso and Braque, amongst others, offered Carrà a contract after seeing
some of his paintings. Ironically, although Severini lived in Paris, he was absent at
the time and thus unable to accompany his colleagues. Shortly after the Futurist con-
tingent left for Italy, at the beginning of April 1914, Boccioni arrived in Paris. With
memories of the recent polemic still fresh in his mind, he made no attempt to see
Apollinaire.
Despite Boccioni’s lingering resentment, the Futurist painters’ visit to Paris in
spring 1914 turned out to be a great success. For the first time, the French and Italians
began to collaborate on a variety of projects. Before returning to Italy, Papini pub-
lished an article on Henri Bergson and Benedetto Croce in Les Soirées de Paris (Papini:
“Deux Philosophes”). He also promised to contribute an article on Rolland Romain’s
lengthy novel Jean-Christophe (1904–1912), but this project never materialized. Eager
to publish some of Apollinaire’s poetry in Lacerba, which he co-edited with Papini,
Soffici obtained twenty-two short texts from him while he was in Paris. Seven of these
were published almost immediately, on 15 April 1914, grouped together under the title
Banalités (Banalities). Two weeks later, when Soffici was about to publish the remain-
ing poems, Apollinaire asked him to change the title to Quelconqueries (Whatnots)
because he thought it would be more amusing. He also promised to send him a text
entitled “Onicrocritique”, which apparently never arrived.
Soffici himself returned to Paris at the beginning of May 1914, where he remained
until mid-June, dividing his time between Apollinaire and his lover, Alexandra Exter.
On 15 June, Apollinaire published his first visual poem in Les Soirées de Paris, which,
combining painting and poetry, received considerable attention. Representing a letter
to his brother Albert in Mexico, Lettre-Océan (Ocean-Letter) featured two wheel-and-
spoke patterns composed of phrases and snatches of phrases. In addition, it contained
numerous Futurist touches, such as the use of numerals, onomatopoeia, mathemat-
ical symbols and different fonts and typefaces. When Carrà received his copy of Les
Soirées de Paris and saw what Apollinaire had achieved, he resolved to do something
similar. Instead of a poem that was also a painting, he would create a painting that
was also a poem. He planned to create a circular collage containing numerous verbal
elements, which would follow the same wheel-and-spoke pattern. On 1 August 1914,
a photograph of his creation appeared in Lacerba with the title Dipinto parolibero
(Festa patriottica) (Free-Word Painting: Patriotic Celebration). Made of tempera and
pasted paper on cardboard, it consisted largely of phrases cut out of newspapers or
added in white paint (Bohn: The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928, 88–102).
456 Willard Bohn

The First World War

When war broke out in August 1914, cultural life in France came to a halt. All of a
sudden, the exciting experiments that had galvanized the French avant-garde lost
their significance, like the avant-garde itself. Journals ceased publication, concerts
were cancelled and art galleries closed their doors. Three million men up to the age of
forty-five were suddenly mobilized. Thousands of others, like Apollinaire, joined the
military voluntarily. By contrast, the situation was totally different in Italy, which had
decided to remain neutral. For most Italians, at least for the time being, life went on
as usual. While many people, including Marinetti and his colleagues, were incensed
at the government’s refusal to get involved in the conflict, they were in the minority.
Hoping to persuade the government to intervene on the side of the Allies, the Futurists
organized the first of several demonstrations in Milan on 15 September 1914. When,
eight months later, Italy finally entered the war, Marinetti immediately registered as a
volunteer, together with Boccioni, Soffici and Russolo.
Since so many of the Futurists were fighting at the front, their creative activi-
ties dwindled to a mere trickle. Similarly, the French avant-garde did not begin to
recover until 1916. By that time, Paris had regained some of its former vitality, and
two individuals reminded the French public that Futurism still existed: Gino Severini
and Pierre Albert-Birot (1876–1967). Despite his expatriate status, Severini had been
a major Futurist figure from the very beginning. One of the original signatories of
the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910), he signed
every collective manifesto that followed and participated in all subsequent principal
exhibitions. When war was declared, the fact that he was married and his wife was
pregnant exempted him from being drafted. Since Marinetti urged the Futurist artists
to focus their attention on the hostilities, Severini began to paint military subjects,
which he depicted in his usual dynamic style.
By January 1916, Severini had produced enough paintings to hold an exhibition
at the Galerie Boutet de Monvel, where he also delivered a lecture, “Symbolisme
plastique et symbolisme littéraire” (Symbolism in the Arts and Literary Symbolism).
Severini’s exhibition attracted the interest of an energetic young firebrand named
Pierre Albert-Birot, editor of an avant-garde journal called SIC. He published a review
of the exhibition in the February issue, accompanied by a photograph of one of
Severini’s pictures, Train arrivant à Paris (Suburban Train Arriving in Paris, 1915).
This was not the only time this Futurist painter appeared in the journal’s pages. An
artist himself, Birot admired Severini’s intellectual approach to painting and the bril-
liant manner in which he acquitted himself. These qualities were especially evident in
a drawing that graced the April issue, Dans le Nord–Sud: Compenetration simultaneite
d’idées-images (On the North–South Train: Simultaneous Interpenetration of Ideas
and Images). Evoking the sounds, sights and smells of the north–south line of the
Paris metro, it depicted a dynamic slice of life. As Severini was friendly with artists
still living in Paris, he found himself drawn more and more to Cubism. His portrait
 France 457

of a milliner in the August–October 1916 issue of SIC could have been the work of
André Lhote (1885–1962), Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) or Amédée Ozenfant (1886–
1966). While it was technically proficient, not a trace of life remained. In homage to
Boccioni, who had died at the front, Severini also contributed a Realist portrait to the
same issue, as well as a moving obituary.
Prior to the war, Les Soirées de Paris had been the leading avant-garde journal in
France. As normal life gradually resumed, two publications sprang up in its wake:
SIC (1916–1919) and Nord–Sud (1917–1918). In contrast to the latter journal, which
ignored Futurism completely, the former provided it with a valuable forum in France.
Although Pierre Albert-Birot was not a Futurist himself, he found the movement
extremely interesting. In addition to Severini’s contributions, he published a number
of works by Francesco Balilla Pratella, Fortunato Depero, Enrico Prampolini, Luciano
Folgore, Giacomo Balla and Gino Cantarelli. Published in May 1917, one of the more
interesting issues was concerned with recent collaborations between the Futurists
and Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet in Rome (see pp. 134–135 in the entry on Dance
in this volume). After an introduction by Folgore, who defined Futurism as “the inex-
haustible love of the New” (Folgore: “Le Futurisme”), Pierre Lerat praised the abstract
scenery designed by Balla for Feu d’artifice (Fireworks, 1916). In addition, he contin-
ued, Depero was to be congratulated for the scenery and costumes he created for Le
Chant du rossignol (The Song of the Nightingale, 1916; unperformed). Serving as illus-
trations, drawings by each of the two artists accompanied Lerat’s remarks. Another
highlight was provided by Matoum et Tévibar, a play for marionettes written by Albert-
Birot, which Enrico Prampolini directed and designed in Rome (see Berghaus: Italian
Futurist Theatre, 280–284). A letter from Prampolini describing the performance at
the Teatro Odescalchi appeared in SIC on 15 June 1919, together with drawings of the
scenery and of two costume designs for the play’s characters.
Not surprisingly, Albert-Birot experimented with Futurist techniques in some of
his own works. One of his most successful efforts, possibly inspired by conversations
with Severini, resulted in a dynamic drawing published in May 1916. Entitled Guerre
(War), it depicted two interpenetrating groups of dagger-like shapes, a large round
object and what looks like a trail of smoke winding across them. However, his initial
attempts at writing Futurist poetry were less ambitious and, perhaps for that reason,
less successful. By 1916, the Futurists had accumulated an enormous arsenal of poetic
devices which they had successfully tested over the previous four years. During the
first twenty-two months that Albert-Birot edited SIC, he experimented with pre-
cisely three of them. He abolished punctuation, introduced multiple voices and ran
the words together in each line. A phrase like “Un tramway tourne au coin” became
“Untramwaytourneaucoin” (Astreetcarturnsthecorner) (Albert-Birot: “Derrière la
fenêtre”, 21). In contrast to the first two procedures, which were in general circulation
by that time, the third was the unmistakable hallmark of the Futurists.
As of November 1917, Albert-Birot began to experiment with a popular Futurist
genre: sound poetry. The first of his “poèmes à crier et à danser” (poems to shout
458 Willard Bohn

and dance), as he called them, imitated the noise made by an aeroplane (Albert-
Birot: “Poèmes à crier et à danser: L’ avion”, 4). Other sound poems were conceived
as abstract compositions. The following month, inspired by Apollinaire’s calligrams,
Albert-Birot published the first of several visual poems (Bohn: Reading Visual Poetry,
88–102). Prior to this development, his experiments with expressive typography had
been limited to signs and announcements. Now, for the first time, he began to vary the
fonts and typefaces in some of his poems. Once again, however, he made no attempt
to exploit the huge treasure-trove of visual devices accumulated by the Futurists. By
their standards, Albert-Birot’s poems look relatively conservative. Despite his tempo-
rary flirtation with Futurism, he was essentially an eclectic poet. Instead of joining
the Futurists, the Cubists or the Dadaists, he borrowed what he could from them while
retaining his basic independence. What interested him was modern poetry in general.
Marinetti and Apollinaire were both wounded in the war; the former was able to
return to the front line, while the latter was not. Eventually, as his health improved,
Apollinaire resumed his journalistic activities in Paris, where he wrote a weekly column
for L’ Europe nouvelle. Since he and the Futurist leader continued to correspond, some
of the news he received found its way into his column. Although Marinetti was fight-
ing on the Austrian border in 1917–1918, thanks to Apollinaire and the Société Art et
Liberté he managed to maintain a certain presence in Paris. Not only was his name
repeatedly in the news, but some of his short plays (sintesi) were being performed
on the French stage. Composed of artists and intellectuals, the Société Art et Liberté
was dedicated to defending French artists accused of spreading German influence.
Under its patriotic auspices, five examples of the teatro sintetico (Futurist Theatre of
Essential Brevity) were performed on 17 February 1918 in the Œuvre du Soldat dans la
Tranchée, a hall situated on the Champs-Elysées (see Corvin: Le Théâtre de recherche
entre les deux guerres, 81–87). The programme was introduced in a lecture by the artist
and writer Fernand Divoire (1883–1951). Two weeks later, a scathing review appeared
in SIC, authored by none other than Pierre Albert-Birot. For reasons that remain diffi-
cult to fathom, he insisted that the plays were totally worthless.
On 13 April 1918, Apollinaire announced that the Théâtre Idéaliste would
produce a short play by Marinetti at the end of spring, directed by Carlos Larronde
(Apollinaire: “Echos et on-dit des lettres et des arts” [13 April 1918], 1422). On 6 July,
however, he reported that on 23 June the Société Art et Liberté had gathered in the
garden of the Maison Balzac to listen to scenes read by four authors, one of whom was
Marinetti. According to the Société, he added on 27 July, Larronde’s troupe was plan-
ning to perform Marinetti’s Simultanéité (Simultaneity, 1915) the following season. On
14 September 1918, Apollinaire informed his readers that the Futurist leader was now
a lieutenant assigned to a motorized squadron of armoured vehicles. Recalling that
the Futurists believed in the benefits of war, he praised “that masculine eloquence, so
modern, that characterizes his manifestos, which contain his best work” (Apollinaire:
“Echos et on-dit des lettres et des arts” [14 September 1918], 1476). Instead of waiting
for the next season, the Théâtre Idéaliste performed Simultanéité on 9 October, at a
 France 459

literary soirée held in Natalie Clifford Barney’s studio. Its title was changed for the
occasion to Compénétration (Interpenetration).

After the war

Since Apollinaire succumbed to the Spanish flu in November 1918, Futurism’s post-war
presence in France is more difficult to trace. Without Apollinaire’s regular newspaper
columns, all that remains is a catalogue of the more significant events. On 15 April 1920,
a writer named Dominique Braga (1892–1975) published an article in Le Crapouillot (The
Trench Mortar) praising Marinetti as the father of the modern avant-garde. Futurism’s
greatest contribution, he insisted, was to give subsequent movements the freedom to
do whatever they wanted (Braga: “Le Futurisme”). On 14 January 1921, Marinetti read
his latest manifesto, Le Tactilisme (Tactilism), to a curious audience at the Théâtre de
l’Œuvre in Paris. Published two days later on the front page of Comœdia, the manifesto
proposed to transform the sense of touch into an art form. Different kinds of surfaces
were classified according to six variables. Readers and listeners were encouraged to
undertake tactile voyages, either singly or paired with someone of the opposite sex.
Anxious to draw attention to their own movement, the Paris Dadaists held a noisy
demonstration outside the theatre and disrupted the reading with boos and whistles.
Following an exhibition of Futurist paintings at the Galerie Reinhardt in May 1921,
a group of Russolo’s intonarumori / bruiteurs (noise-makers) was presented in the
French capital. Writing in Comœdia on 10 June, Gabriel Brun announced that three
concerts would take place at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées on 17, 27 and 28 June.
Each of them would consist of six pieces composed by Russolo’s brother Antonio.
In order to produce a whole new range of enjoyable sounds, Brun continued, the
orchestra would include “three ululaters, three grumblers, three stridulaters, three
cracklers, three gluggluggers, three buzzers, four croakers, four swishers and one
whistler” (Brun: “Les Bruiteurs futuristes à Paris”, 426). Discussing the concert of
17 June two days later, the reviewer for Comœdia reported that musicians and critics
alike found the music to be highly enjoyable. Following the concert, he added,
Maurice Ravel examined each instrument and confided that he hoped to use some
of them in his own compositions (Montboron: “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: Les
bruiteurs futurists”, 2). On 25 June, the reviewer for L’ Opinion criticised the term brui-
teur, since what the orchestra produced was clearly music, but admitted that he had
greatly enjoyed the concert. He was particularly taken with the swishers (froufrou-
teurs), which produced a soft, barely audible tone (Bidou: “Les Bruiteurs futuristes
italiens de Luigi Russolo”, 427).
Other Futurist highlights in the 1920s included a lecture on “Le Futurisme
mondial” (World-Wide Futurism), given by Marinetti at the Sorbonne on 10 May 1924.
Invited to discuss worldwide Futurism by René Allendy (1889–1942), the chair of a
group formed to study new ideas, Marinetti spoke about Futurism in general. Calling
460 Willard Bohn

Leonardo da Vinci the greatest Futurist of all time, he recounted the movement’s
history and emphasized its optimistic philosophy. Defining Futurism as “la grande
religion du nouveau” (the religion of the New), he warned his listeners to beware of
pessimism, which was its greatest enemy (Marinetti: “Le Futurisme mondial”, 94).
When the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs opened its doors in April 1925,
few people suspected it would mark the end of one era and the beginning of another.
Before the year was out, however, Art Nouveau had been supplanted by a brand
new style – known henceforth as Art Déco. Cognizant of the contributions made to
modern design by Futurist artists, the organizing committee of the Italian section
asked Prampolini to coordinate a section devoted to Futurism. Accordingly, works
by Depero, Balla and Prampolini himself were housed in three rooms of the Grand
Palais. The judges were especially impressed by Depero’s entries and awarded him
two gold medals, one silver medal and one bronze medal for artistic excellence and
innovation. In addition, Prampolini had entered a model of his Magnetic Theatre in
another competition at the Exposition, which won the Grand Prix d’Art Théâtrale.
A large, complicated machine with moving elements, it was designed to take the
place of actors on the stage (Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 444–446). All in all,
Prampolini found his experience in Paris so invigorating that he remained there for
another two years.
The second half of the 1920s was filled with similar activities by Futurist artists,
poets, actors, playwrights, directors, scenographers, composers and musicians, who
regularly passed through Paris. Although no single figure emerged as their champion
in France, Futurism remained alive and well. Among other things, several theatrical
troupes visited Paris at one time or another. Sponsored by the Art et Action group, a
series of plays from the Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity genre were presented at
the Grenier Jaune on 4 November 1922. The latter was a small experimental theatre
situated on the seventh floor of an apartment building. On 27 April 1927, another
company performed L’ Angoisse des machines /Angoscia delle machine (Anguish of
the Machines, 1925) by the Sicilian playwright Ruggero Vasari (1898–1968). Billed as
a “synthèse tragique en trois mouvements/sintesi tragico in tre movimenti” (tragic
synthesis in three movements; see Vasari: “L’ angoscia delle machine: Sintesi tragica
in tre tempi”), it portrayed a kingdom inhabited exclusively by emotionless machines.
When a woman manages to seduce one of the machines, thereby restoring its human-
ity, the others hasten to take revenge. Two weeks later, on 12 May 1927, Prampolini
premièred his Théâtre de la pantomime futuriste (Theatre of Futurist Pantomime),
a programme consisting of ten plays, dances and pantomimes, at the Théâtre de la
Madeleine.
Although the Futurist movement endured until 1944, French interest in Futurism
began to wane as the 1920s drew to a close. Since Surrealism had come into its own,
figures such as Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), Joan Miró (1893–1983) and Max Ernst (1891–
1976) were receiving much more attention. In addition, some people found the Futurists’
public adulation for Mussolini increasingly hard to take – like Mussolini himself.
 France 461

Many Futurists did not care for him either, of course, but they did not voice their
views in public. Surrounded by countries that were, or would soon become, Fascist
dictatorships, France felt increasingly vulnerable. One of the last Futurist exhibitions
in Paris opened at Galerie 23 on 27 December 1929 and ran for two weeks. The opening
evening began with a brief talk by the composer Edgar Varèse (1883–1965), who intro-
duced two unusual musical instruments patented by Luigi Russolo: a Rumorarmonio /
Rumorharmonium (noise harmonium) and an Arco enarmonico / Archet enharmonique
(enharmonic bow). Taking them in hand, Luigi Russolo gave a brief recital that demon-
strated what they could do. Ready as always to support his colleagues, Marinetti gave
a lecture on Futurism, Cubism and Surrealism at the gallery on 4 and 8 January 1930.
Changes were already underway that would have a profound effect on Futurist
art. In an article entitled “Prospettive del volo e aeropittura” (Perspectives of Flight
and Aeropainting, 1929), Marinetti had exhorted the Futurist painters to celebrate the
tremendous visual and experiential drama of flight. The artists responded enthusias-
tically and began to portray aeroplanes and aerial views in their works. On 2 March
1932, Prampolini and several other Futurist artists mounted an exhibition of their
latest aeropaintings at the Galerie de la Renaissance. Eager to inform the public about
the latest Futurist art form, Marinetti gave several lectures at the gallery. Destined to
dominate the rest of the decade, aeropainting continued well into the 1940s. By that
time, however, France and Italy were at war.

The Futurist legacy

Although Futurism attracted considerable attention in France, for the most part only
marginal figures were influenced by it. This seems to have been as true of the Futurist
painters as it was of the Futurist writers. By the time the Italians held their first group
exhibition in France (1912), Cubism was so firmly entrenched and Cubist artists so res-
olutely committed to the cause, that there was little room for another movement there.
Among other things, this explains why Futurism appealed to newcomers such as Del
Marle and outsiders like Valentine de Saint-Point, who had not yet decided what they
wanted to do. Casting around for a specific school to join, they settled on Futurism but,
after an initial flurry of activity, dropped out of sight a few years later. Whether the First
World War was responsible for their change of heart or whether they lacked confidence
in the movement’s artistic direction is difficult to say. Except for Del Marle, the 1912
touring exhibition of Futurist paintings seems to have had little immediate influence on
French painters. By contrast, two Belgians were profoundly affected by the exhibition –
Jules Schmalzigaug (1882–1917) in Paris and Ray Nyst (1864–1943) in Brussels – and
hastened to embrace Futurism immediately (Verhack: Jules Schmalzigaug; Nyst: “Les
Salons”; see pp. 327–328 in the entry on Belgium in this volume).
Another factor that partially accounts for the limited Futurist influence in 1912
was the rivalry that already existed between Futurism and Cubism. Whereas the
462 Willard Bohn

former movement originated in Italy, the latter was a uniquely French creation, albeit
with contributions from artists of other nationalities. This sentiment of pride was
so pronounced that Apollinaire insisted repeatedly that Futurist art was inspired by
modern French artists. At the same time, ironically, he believed that Futurist artists
were exerting a certain amount of influence on French art. Citing Robert Delaunay
as an example, Apollinaire declared in 1912 that Futurist manifestos published in
French had influenced the terminology employed by French artists (Apollinaire: “Le
Futurisme n’est pas sans importance”). More importantly, he continued, Futurist and
Orphist painters, like Delaunay and his disciples, influenced one another. Ultimately,
reviewing the Salon des Indépendants two years later, he ventured to speak of the
“futurisme tournoyant” (whirling Futurism) evident in Delaunay’s Disques solaires
(Solar Discs; see Apollinaire: “Au Salon des indépendants”). Unfortunately, this was
just the kind of confusing statement that had engendered the bitter polemic over
Simultaneism, which continued to rage (see Bergman: “Guillaume Apollinaire et les
discussions sur la simultanéité de 1912 à 1914”; Bière-Chauvel: “The Dispute over
Simultaneity”). Stung by the implication that he had borrowed his technique from
the Futurists, Delaunay was greatly offended by Apollinaire’s words.
While the Futurists never managed to influence a major French artist, the situation
was slightly different where French writers were concerned. When Apollinaire agreed
to write a Futurist manifesto, Marinetti and his colleagues were ecstatic (Meazzi: “Le
Manifeste de l’ anti-tradition futuriste”). Here, at last, was a prominent French figure
whose adherence to the Futurist movement would greatly increase its prestige and might
prompt other artists and writers to follow suit. He agreed to write L’ Anti-tradition futur-
iste partly as an avant-garde exercise and partly as a lark. On the one hand, the idea of
suddenly appearing to embrace Futurism greatly amused him, as did the opportunity to
engage in verbal pyrotechnics. On the other hand, he was concerned about the seem-
ingly endless proliferation of European avant-garde movements. Without an overarching
principle, without a unifying name, there was a danger that modern art would lose its
cohesiveness and coherence. Apollinaire considered whether the meaning of ‘Futurism’
could perhaps be expanded to cover all the different movements – not unlike ‘Modernism’
today. One thing all the schools shared was a hatred of the past, which explains the man-
ifesto’s opening line: “DOWN WITH REVERENCE FOR THE PAST”. Broadly conceived,
the document continues, “Futurism” could be “the motor that drives all the different
tendencies: Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Pathetism, Dramatism,
Orphism and Paroxysm” (Apollinaire: “L’ Anti-tradition futuriste”, 937).
Although L’ Anti-tradition futuriste was based on Futurist models, it does
not really signal a Futurist influence in France. Indeed, as noted previously, the
manifesto was actually designed by Marinetti. The search for Futurist influences
becomes more interesting when we examine Apollinaire’s visual poems. To be sure,
the latter look nothing like the Futurist experiments with visual poetry. Unlike
the parole in libertà, which are constructed around visual analogies, the poems
are basically Realist (Bohn: Modern Visual Poetry, 38–99). However, the earliest
 France 463

Futurist compositions date from the beginning of 1914, while Apollinaire published
his first visual poem (Lettre-Océan) in June of the same year. This already sug-
gests that he borrowed the idea of visual poetry, if not the actual model, from the
Futurists. The fact that Lettre-Océan employs numerals, onomatopoeia, mathe-
matical signs and expressive typography confirms this initial impression. Inspired
by the Futurists’ earlier experiments, Apollinaire briefly adopted some of their
graphic conventions. Bridging the gap between the parole in libertà and the cal-
ligrams, Lettre-Océan was basically a transitional poem. By the following month,
when four more of his poems appeared in print, Apollinaire had invented a new
kind of visual poetry altogether.
The French writer on whom Futurism had the greatest influence was Pierre Albert-
Birot. Although he was also indebted by other movements, he both composed Futurist
poetry and, as the editor of SIC, helped to popularize the movement in France. An
important avant-garde catalyst, he also excelled at organizing and coordinating events
such as the first performance of Apollinaire’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias (The Breasts of
Tiresias, 1917). Unfortunately, despite his love of poetry and painting, his own efforts
were largely unremarkable. Continually involved in avant-garde activities, he was a
gifted facilitator but not a gifted poet. While his career resembles that of Del Marle
and Saint-Point in several respects, it differs from them in several others. Like them,
Albert-Birot experimented with Futurism for a while before moving on. Unlike them,
he was a minor figure rather than a marginal one. Unfortunately, he was not the kind
of representative the Futurists were hoping to attract. The reason they failed to find a
persuasive spokesman in France, one surmises, was because Futurism was essentially
a foreign movement. Whereas Cubism reflected the French love of reason, order and
discipline, Futurism corresponded to the popular image of Italian passion, exuberance
and freedom. Each movement basically appealed to a different sensibility.

Works cited
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Apollinaire: Œuvres en prose complètes. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. 650.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Echos et on-dit des lettres et des arts.” L’ Europe nouvelle 1:14 (13 April 1918): 676.
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Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Echos et on-dit des lettres et des arts.” L’ Europe nouvelle 1:36 (14
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Gallimard, 1991. 1474–1476.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “L’ Anti-tradition futuriste: Manifeste-synthèse.” Lacerba 1:18 (15 September
1913): 202–203. Reprinted in G. Apollinaire: Œuvres en prose complètes. Vol. 2. Paris:
Gallimard, 1991. 937–939, 1675–1682.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Le Futurisme.” L’ intermédiaire des chercheurs et des curieux 66:1342 (10
October 1913): 477–478. Reprinted in G. Apollinaire: Œuvres en prose complètes. Vol. 1. Paris:
Gallimard, 1977. 487–488.
464 Willard Bohn

Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Le Futurisme n’est pas sans importance.” G. Apollinaire: Œuvres en prose
complètes. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. 488–489.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Les Peintres futuristes italiens.” L’ Intransigeant 32:11529 (7 February 1912).
Reprinted in G. Apollinaire: Œuvres en prose complètes. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. 406–407.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Chroniques d’Art: Les Futuristes.” Le Petit Bleu, 9 February 1912. Reprinted
in G. Apollinaire: Œuvres en prose complètes. Vol. 2. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. 407–412.
Apollinaire, Guillaume: “Peintres futuristes.” Mercure de France 12:94 (#346) (16 November 1911):
436–437. Reprinted in Œuvres en prose complètes. Vol. 3. Paris: Gallimard, 1993. 88–89.
Albert-Birot, Pierre: “Derrière la fenêtre.” Sic 3 (March 1916): 21. Reprinted in P. Albert-Birot: Poésie,
1916–1924. Mortemart: Rougerie, 1992. 99.
Albert-Birot, Pierre: “Poèmes à crier et à danser: L’ avion.” Sic 23 (November 1917): 4.
Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Bergman, Pär: “Guillaume Apollinaire et les discussions sur la simultanéité de 1912 à 1914.”
P. Bergman: “Modernolatria” et “Simultaneità”: Recherches sur deux tendances dans
l’ avant-garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la première guerre mondiale.
Uppsala: Svenska Bokförlaget, 1962. 337–411.
Bidou, Henry: “Les Bruiteurs futuristes italiens de Luigi Russolo.” L’ Opinion, 25 June 1921. Reprinted
in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations, documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge
d’Homme, 1973. 427.
Bière-Chauvel, Delphine: “The Dispute over Simultaneity: Boccioni–Delaunay, Interpretational Error
or Bergsonian Practice?” Simona Storchi, and Elza Adamowicz, eds.: Back to the Futurists:
Avant-Gardes 1909–2009. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2013. 113–132.
Boccioni, Umberto: “I futuristi plagiati in Francia.” Lacerba 1:7 (1 April 1913): 66–68. French
translation “Les Futuristes plagiés en France.” Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes,
proclamations, documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 387–389.
Bohn, Willard: Modern Visual Poetry. Newark/DE: University of Delaware Press, 2001.
Bohn, Willard: Reading Visual Poetry. Madison/NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011. 88–102.
Bohn, Willard: The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914–1928. Chicago/IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993.
Braga, Dominique: “Le Futurisme.” Le Crapouillot, 15 April 1920. 2–3. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista,
ed.: Le Futurisme: Textes et manifestes, 1909–1944. Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon, 2015. 1200–1204.
Italian translation Il futurismo giudicato da una grande rivista francese. Milan: Direction du
Mouvement Futuriste, 1920.
Brun, Gabriel: “Les Bruiteurs futuristes à Paris.” Comœdia 15:3098 (10 June 1921): 2. Reprinted
in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations, documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge
d’Homme, 1973. 425–426.
Charbonnel, Jean-Roger [pseud. of Jean Ferval]: “A propos du ‘Futurisme’.” Akademos 1:5 (15 May
1909): 722–727. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations,
documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 409–413.
Corvin, Michel: Le Théâtre de recherche entre les deux guerres: Le laboratoire Art et Action.
Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1976.
Del Marle, Félix: “La Peinture futuriste.” Le Nord illustré 5 (15 April 1913). Reprinted in Giovanni Lista,
ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations, documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 178–179.
Del Marle, Félix: “Manifeste futuriste à Montmartre.” Paris-Journal, 13 July 1913 and Comœdia, 15 July
1913. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations, documents.
Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 119–121.
Del Marle, Félix: “Quelques notes sur la simultanéité en peinture.” Poème et Drame, 13 March 1914.
Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations, documents. Lausanne:
L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 197–198.
Folgore, Luciano: “Le Futurisme.” SIC 2:17 (May 1917): 2.
 France 465

Kahn, Gustave: “Art.” Mercure de France 95:352 (16 February 1912): 863–868.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Il futurismo mondiale: Conferenza di Marinetti alla Sorbonna.”
L’ impero, 20 May 1924. Reprinted as “Una conferenza di F. T. Marinetti.” Il Verri: Rivista di
letteratura 15:33–34 (October 1970): 26–31. Excerpts translated into French as “Le Futurisme
mondial: Conférence à la Sorbonne.” Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations,
documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 97–98.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “La prima affermazione nel mondo di una nuova arte italiana:
L’aeropittura. Un manifesto di Marinetti.” Il giornale della domenica, 1–2 February 1931.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Le Futurisme mondial: Manifeste à Paris.” Le Futurisme: Revue
synthétique illustré 9 (January 11, 1924): 1–3. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme:
Manifestes – Proclamations – Documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’homme, 1973. 94–97.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Prospettive del volo e aeropittura.” La gazzetta del popolo, 22
September 1929.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” Critical Writings. Ed. by
Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Mauclair, Camille: “Le Futurisme et la jeune Italie.” La Dépêche de Toulouse, 20 October 1911.
Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations, documents. Lausanne:
L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 413–415.
Meazzi, Barbara: “Le Manifeste de l’ anti-tradition futuriste: Apollinaire et le futurisme.” Quaderni
del Novecento francese 17 (1997): 139–166.
Montboron [pseud.]: “Au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées: Les bruiteurs futurists.” Comœdia 15:3107
(19 June 1921): 2.
Nyst, Raymond: “Les Salons: Les peintres futuristes italiens.” La Belgique artistique et littéraire 82
(July 1912): 98–104. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes, proclamations,
documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 419–422.
Papini, Giovanni: “Deux Philosophes.” Les Soirées de Paris 22 (22 March 1914): 133–135.
Roche-Pézard, Fanette: L’ Aventure futuriste 1909–1916. Rome: École Française, 1983.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “La Métachorie.” Montjoie! 2:1–2 (January–February 1914): 5–7. Reprinted
in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Le Futurisme: Textes et manifestes, 1909–1944. Ceyzérieu: Champ Vallon,
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Saint-Point, Valentine de: “La Métachorie: Mme Valentine de Saint-Point entend révolutionner l’art
charmant de la dance et le rendre ‘Géométrique’.” Le Miroir NS 7 (11 January 1914): [23]-[24].
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L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 255–256.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste de la femme futuriste.” V. de Saint-Point: Manifeste de
la femme futuriste, suivi de Manifeste futuriste de la luxure, Le Théâtre de la femme, La
Métachorie. Paris: Séguier, 1996. 13–21. English translation “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman:
Response to F. T. Marinetti (1912).” Laurence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.:
Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 109–113.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifeste futuriste de la luxure.” V. de Saint-Point: Manifeste de
la femme futuriste, suivi de Manifeste futuriste de la luxure, Le Théâtre de la femme, La
Métachorie. Paris: Séguier, 1996. 22–30. English translation “Futurist Manifesto of Lust
(1913).”).” Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An
Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 130–133.
Severini, Gino: “Symbolisme plastique et symbolisme littérataire.” Mercure de France 113:423
(1 February 1916): 466–476. Reprinted in Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme: Manifestes,
proclamations, documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 210–215.
Severini, Gino, and Félix Del Marle: “Polémique Severini – Delmarle.” Giovanni Lista, ed.: Futurisme:
Manifestes, proclamations, documents. Lausanne: L’ Âge d’Homme, 1973. 390–396.
Sina, Adrien, and Sarah Wilson: “Valentine de Saint-Point.” Tate etc. 16 (Summer 2009): 44–47.
466 Willard Bohn

Vasari, Ruggero: “L’ angoscia delle macchine: Sintesi tragica in tre tempi.” Teatro: Periodico di nuove
commedie 3:8 (August 1925): 5–22. Reprinted in R. Vasari: L’ angoscia delle macchine e altre
sintesi futuriste. A cura di Maria Elena Versari. Palermo: Duepunti, 2009. 7–36.
Verhack, Valérie, ed.: Jules Schmalzigaug: Un futuriste belge. Exhibition catalogue. Bruxelles:
Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, 29 octobre 2010 – 23 janvier 2011. Gand: Snoeck,
2010.

Further reading
Albert-Birot, Arlette: “Pierre Albert-Birot, ‘Sic’ et le futurisme.” Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle
53:551 (March 1975): 98–112.
Andréoli-de-Villers, Jean-Pierre: “F. T. Marinetti et le futurisme à Paris = F. T. Marinetti and Futurism
in Paris.” J.-P. Andréoli-de-Villers, ed.: Debout sur la cime du monde: Manifestes futuristes,
1909–1924 = Futurist Manifestoes 1909–1924. Paris: Dilecta, 2008. 6–31.
Berghaus, Günter: “Dance and the Futurist Woman: The Work of Valentine de Saint-Point,
1875–1953.” Dance Research 11:2 (1993): 27–42.
Berghaus, Günter: “Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism: Some Cross-fertilizations Among the Historical
Avant-Garde.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2000. 271–304.
Bergman, Pär: “Modernolatria” et “Simultaneità”: Recherches sur deux tendances dans
l’ avant-garde littéraire en Italie et en France à la veille de la première guerre mondiale.
Uppsala: Svenska Bokförlaget, 1962.
Bertozzi, Gabriele-Aldo: “Influenza del futurismo su Dada e surrealismo: Invenzione
dell’avanguardia.” G.-A. Bertozzi: Viaggio nell’alchimia letteraria: Avanguardie e altri percorsi.
Lanciano (CH): Carabba, 2014. 225–238.
Cachin-Nora, Françoise: “Futurism in Paris 1909–1913.” Art in America 52:2 (March–April 1974): 38–44.
Calvesi, Maurizio: “Futurismo e orfismo.” M. Calvesi: Dinamismo e simultaneità nella poetica
futurista. Milano: Fabbri, 1967. 241–280. Reprinted in M. Calvesi: Il futurismo: La fusione della
vita nell’arte. Milano: Fabbri, 1975. 193–224.
Carmody, Francis J.: “Cubist and Futurist Aesthetics to May 1913.” F.J. Carmody: The Evolution of
Apollinaire’s Poetics, 1901–1914. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press, 1963. 94–103.
Cary, Joseph: “Futurism and the French Théâtre d’Avant-garde.” Modern Philology 57 (1959–1960):
113–121.
Cescutti, Tatiana: “French Responses to Futurism, 1909–1912.” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 4 (2014): 117–133.
Coen, Ester: “Parigi. Verso Parigi. Marinetti e il mondo letterario. Futurismo a Parigi.” E. Coen, ed.:
Illuminazioni: Avanguardie a confronto. Italia, Germania, Russia. Milano: Electa, 2009. 21–109,
454–460.
Contarini, Silvia: “Valentine de Saint-Point: A Futurist Woman?” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 5 (2015): 87–110.
Cortiana, Rino: “Cendrars et le futurisme.” Maria Teresa de Freitas, Claude Leroy, and Edmond
Nogacki, eds.: Blaise Cendrars et les arts. Actes du colloque organisé à l’ université de
Valenciennes. Valenciennes: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2002. 49–64.
De Paulis-Dalembert, Maria Pia: “Les Manifestes futuristes de F. T. Marinetti entre français et
italien.” Cécile Berger, Antonella Capra, and Jean Nimis, eds.: Les Enjeux du plurilinguisme
dans la litterature italienne. Actes du colloque organisé à Toulouse: Universite Toulouse, 11–13
mai 2006. Toulouse: Collection de l’ ECRIT; Université Toulouse, 2007. 341–358.
 France 467

Décaudin, Michel: “Futurisme italien, modernité française: Pour une approche nouvelle.” Ligeia:
Dossiers sur l’ art 21–24 (October 1997 – June 1998): 84–90.
Di Ambra, Raffaella: “Marinetti e la Francia.” Enzo Benedetto, ed.: Marinetti domani: Convegno di
studi nel 1. centenario della nascita di F. T. M. Roma: Arte-Viva, 1977. 131–137.
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italiana: Presenze 1900–1945. Milano: Bompiani, 1989. 95–102.
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Bela Tsipuria
30 Georgia
Introduction
Georgia, a small country situated between the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains,
emerged in the early twentieth century as a culturally active locus aspiring to be
part of the European cultural and political atmosphere of renewal, generally termed
‘Modernism’. Futurism was a significant factor in giving the country a lively avant-
garde culture, lasting until the end of the 1920s.
The first two decades of the twentieth century saw Georgia aspiring to become a
free democratic State, fully embedded in the European cultural context. However, the
global political situation in Europe, Russia and, consequently, in the South Caucasus
region was pitted against these aspirations. Georgia had spent a century as part of
the Russian Empire and was eager to restore its independent statehood. The goal of
building a new society based on the ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity formed
the modern Georgian consciousness and was most clearly verbalized by the Georgian
writer and national leader, Ilia Chavchavadze (1837–1907), and a group of intellectu-
als spearheading the Georgian national revival movement, called the ‘Generation of
the 1860s’. Thus, by the time of the fall of the Russian Empire in 1917, global politi-
cal circumstances and local societal and cultural conditions were favourable for the
establishment of the free Georgian Democratic Republic in 1918.

The Blue Horns, Symbolism and Futurism

Some Futurist manifestos and books as well as reports about Futurist artistic activi-
ties had already reached Tbilisi in early 1911 thanks to the painter Boris Lopatinsky
(1881–1946), who, upon his return from Paris, introduced young Ilya Zdanevich
(1894–1975) to these novelties. A good fifteen years later, in a letter to Ardengo Soffici,
Zdanevich recalled that at a time when he was still an “imitator of the Symbolists”,
this introduction caused in him a conversion and inspired him to develop his own
Futurist ideas (Iliazd : “Lettre d’Iliazd à Soffici”, 189). In the cause of the next years,
he became a supporter of Marinetti’s programme in Georgia (Gayraud: “Quand Iliazd
écrit à Soffici”, 183) and a passionate popularizer of Futurism (Magarotto: “Il’ia
Zdanevich”, 41).
The Georgian public had a first opportunity to listen to a recitation of Futurist
poetry when the Hylaens’ lecture tour to Crimea, Volga and the Urals (see the entry on
Russia in this volume) was extended to Transcaucasia. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vasily
Kamensky and David Burliuk held a Futurist soirée in the Tbilisi Public Theatre (now

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-030
470 Bela Tsipuria

the State Opera House of Georgia) on 27 March 1914. Vladimir Markov remarked on
the event: “The Georgians in Tiflis were particularly (and traditionally) hospitable,
and they were so charmed by Mayakovsky’s saying a few introductory words in their
own language that they were ready to accept all the tenets of Futurism” (Markov:
Russian Futurism, 137). Mayakovsky used the opportunity of this stay in Georgia
to visit Kutaisi, the town of his childhood, where young admiring students of the
local Grammar School offered him an enthusiastic welcome (see Tukhareli et al.:
Vozvrashchenie, 22–26).
A couple of years later, the term and the concept of Futurism was introduced into
Georgian culture through a literary group called the Blue Horns (Tsisperi Kantsebi).
However, this circle, which became a dominant actor in Georgian culture in the 1910s,
was first of all committed to Symbolism, and not to Futurism. One of the group’s leaders,
Titsian Tabidze (1895–1937), was of the view that in Europe, as well as in Russia, the
most recent cultural innovations were associated with Futurism; nonetheless, he
claimed that “Futurism can never ignore the cultural and aesthetic achievements of
Symbolism” (Tabidze: Tsisperi Qantsebit 2, 20). In 1913–1915, Tabidze studied at the
University of Moscow and moved in cultural circles still enthralled by Symbolism. Yet,
he was an acute observer of how Moscow was opening its doors to Futurism: Marinetti
was visiting the city, and Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov and other Russian Futurists were
appearing on the scene (Tabidze: “Iz avtobiografii”, 230). Titsian Tabidze and his fellow
Georgian poets were still convinced that the modernization of Georgian literature
should be achieved by taking recourse to Symbolist aesthetics. Harsha Ram defined
this approach as an attempt to provide “Georgian literary culture with an abbreviated
history of Modernism as a whole” (Ram: “Modernism on the Periphery”, 378). In the
opening manifesto of the group, Pavlo Iashvili exhibited ambitions that were remi-
niscent of Futurism (Iashvili: “Pirveltkma”, 3). Luigi Magarotto believes that Iashvili’s
manifesto Pirveltkma (The First Word) “clearly lies in the great tradition of the ‘tradi-
tional’ European avant-garde” with is eccentricity, dandyism, non-conformity, antago-
nism, rejection of tradition, scandal, demagoguery, self-advertisement, violence, etc.
(Magarotto: “Storia e teoria dell’avanguardia georgiana”, 56).
The Blue Horns undertook great efforts to modernize Georgian literature by
accessing the roots of Modernism and implementing Symbolist principles in their
works. Thanks to a very strong group spirit, they published numerous literary
works and played an active rôle in changing the cultural atmosphere in Georgia.
For a decade, their poetry, prose works, essays and translations remained loyal
to Symbolist aesthetics. Although they never developed a truly avant-garde liter-
ature, this never posed a barrier to their cooperation with the artistic vanguard in
Georgia.
The Blue Horns were highly committed to their cultural and social mission and
created an atmosphere of aesthetic dialogue and understanding between the various
strands of high-Modernist discourse that were circulating in Georgia at the time. This
open-minded and effervescent cultural environment created in Tbilisi (then called
 Georgia 471

Tiflis1) contrasted with the dramatic historical processes that were unfolding in Russia
at the time. The city, which for centuries had been a cultural and political centre in
the Caucasus region, became a hub for artists fleeing Russian cities rocked by the
Bolshevik Revolution (October 1917) and the subsequent civil war (1917–1922). Tbilisi,
traditionally a cosmopolitan city, attracted young poets and artists of different ethnic
backgrounds, including some Georgian natives who had studied at Russian universi-
ties: the brothers Ilya Zdanevich (1894–1975) and Kirill Zdanevich (1892–1969), Yuri
Degen (1896–1923), Tatiana Vechorka (1892–1965) and Rurik Ivnev (1891–1991). The
Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) described Georgia at that time as

this small, ‘independent’ State, having emerged out of the bloodshed in other countries [i. e.
the Russian Revolution and the First World War], tried to be bloodless. Hemmed in by mena-
cing forces, it aspired to enter history as a clean and thriving State, to become something like
a new Switzerland, a neutral piece of land ‘innocent’ from birth. (Mandel’shtam: “Men’sheviki
v Gruzii”, 318)

In spring 1918, the first multicultural literary journals appeared, in which the Blue
Horns and various writers in exile emphasized the ideas of diversity and a ‘gathering
of nations’ (see Redaktsia: [Editorial] in ARS, 4).

The Zdanevich brothers and the Futurist group 41°

The version of Futurism maintained during Tbilisi’s multicultural avant-garde period
was strongly influenced by Russian zaum’ poetry (see pp. 776–777 the entry on Russia
in this volume), but went a stage further and left rationality, logic, intellectuality and
comprehensibility even further behind. Ilya Zdanevich recalled the creation of zaum’
poetry back in Saint Petersburg: “Kruchenykh created phonemes – as in the famous
Dyr bul shchyl – rooted in a secular language, as Antonin Artaud did in France, while
I created a phonetic language operating on the emotions by means of sound and
associations with common parlance, much further removed from meaning than
Khlebnikov’s words” (Il’iazd : “Lettre d’Iliazd à Soffici”, 192). In Tbilisi, the concept of
zaum’ was shared by poets and artists forming the group 41˚ (Georgian: Ormotsdaerti
gradusi; Russian: Sorok odin gradus; French: Le Degré Quarante-et-Un; the name is
related to the geographic location of Tbilisi, as well as to the body temperature in
Celsius at which humans would start getting delirious). The group included Aleksei
Kruchenykh, Ilya and Kirill Zdanevich, Igor Terentyev and Kolau Cherniavsky. A few
years later, zaum’ also influenced the Georgian Futurist group H2SO4 (see below,
pp. 476–479). Although Kruchenykh had been developing the zaum’ concept since

1 Tiflis (ტფილისი) was the Russian name for Tbilisi (თბილისი) during the years 1921–1936.
472 Bela Tsipuria

1913, after his arrival in Tbilisi, the Georgian language environment provided him
with new acoustical impulses to expand his radical experiments. As Gerald Janecek
(“Zaum in Tiflis, 1917–1921”), Tatiana Nikolskaya (“Fantasticheskii gorod”) and
Giuseppe Marzaduri (“Futurismo menscevico”) pointed out, many meaningless new
words appearing in his texts during the Tbilisi period recall the sound of Georgian
words seemingly exotic and incomprehensible to a Russian ear.
Ilya and Kirill Zdanevich were born and raised in Georgia to a Polish father (a
French teacher) and a Georgian mother (a music teacher). Kirill Zdanevich (1892–1969)
spent two years, from 1911 to 1913, in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, and six months
during 1913 in Paris. He served for three years in the First World War before return-
ing to Tbilisi, where he worked as a graphic artist, book, stage and costume designer.
Ilya Zdanevich (1894–1975), poet, artist and book designer, emigrated to Paris in 1921,
adopted the name ‘Iliazd’ and continued his avant-garde activities, also on behalf of
the group 41˚. In Paris, he conducted collaborative projects with Tristan Tzara, Pablo
Picasso, Juan Miró and Max Ernst. He kept his Georgian passport and adopted the
status of an émigré.
Ilya and/or Kirill Zdanevich contributed to almost every avant-garde book pub-
lished during the avant-garde period in Tbilisi and indeed pushed book design to a
new level of achievement. Mzia Chikhradze considers the experimental playing with
words and artistic forms as the main characteristic of these works:

To overcome the ‘boring straightforwardness’ of monotonous lines of printed words, members of

41˚ were using various fonts, different-sized letters and handwritten texts, where the words and
illustrations often are interlaced, creating united artistic-and-poetic pictures. Sometimes they
used wallpaper instead of writing paper. The appearance of the books was characterized by an
emphasized primitivism; the covers were made of cardboard, the drawings were hand-made, and
the whole book was characterized by simplicity in which one could find a kind of effortless and
artistic-poetic entity. (Chikhradze: “Tbilisi Avant-garde and Ilya Zdanevich”, 67)

Between 1917 and 1920, Ilya and Kirill Zdanevich and their Russian friends pub-
lished a number of avant-garde book projects in Tbilisi. Kirill Zdanevich developed
the book design and contributed fifteen graphics to Kruchenykh’s book of poetry,
Uchites’, Khudogi! (Learn Artists!, 1917). Slightly smaller in number were his contribu-
tions to Kruchenych’s Ozhirenie roz (Obesity of Roses, 1918), and Malokholia v kapote
(Malokholia in a Dressing Gown, 1919). Vasily Kamensky joined the duo in 1917 to
publish his ferroconcrete poems in a joint book, 1918. The cover of Ilya Zdanevich’s
book, Ostraf pAskhi (Easter Island, 1919), lists twenty books by the four group
members as having been published by the 41˚ publishing company,2 although some

2 Although some publications of the Tbilisi avant-garde must be considered lost, most of them are pre-
served in the Georgian Parliament National Library and Ioseb Grishashvili Library-Museum in Tbilisi.
 Georgia 473

of them were reprints of books that had previously been published in Saint Petersburg
and Moscow in 1912–1913.
The brothers Zdanevich and others set up the Futurist group 41˚ in 1919
and experimented with radical aesthetic principles. Cooperation amongst some
group members had already started in Saint Petersburg before the Revolution
and continued after 1917 in Tbilisi under the name ‘Futurist Syndicate’. Besides
the brothers Zdanevich, the group included the Tbilisi-born Russian poet Yuri
Degen, the Moldovan Kolau (Nikolai) Cherniavsky (1892–1947), the Armenian
poet Kara-Darvish (pseud. of Hagop Genjian, 1872–1930), the Georgian painter
Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1980), the Pole Ziga (Sigizmund) Valishevsky (1897–
1936), as well as the Russian poets Igor Terentyev (1892–1937) and Aleksei
Kruchenykh (1886–1968). Yuri Degen praised Kirill Zdanevich for inventing
Orchestral Painting, where all methods of creativity are combined by the artist
on one canvas, since the artist arrives at the understanding that any method or
style equally contains the truth, and a method should not be limited to certain
narrow tasks. Thus, Kirill Zdanevich was acknowledged by Degen as a mentor
of the movement, and fate had it that the leader of this new movement, Aleksei
Kruchenych, came to Tbilisi to meet him (Degen: “Kirill Zdanevich”, 3 and 6).
Ilya Zdanevich recalled that he “wrote orchestral poetry for several simultane-
ous voices, intended for stage performance, and choreographic poetry where the
accompanying movements are determined not by music but by the syllables.”
(Il’iazd : “Lettre d’Iliazd à Soffici”, 189).
Scholars often consider the group 41˚ and their zaum’ poetry as a synthesis of
Futurism and Dadaism. However, Régis Gayraud rightly points out that Ilya Zdanevich
learned of Dada only in 1920 (Gayraud: “Quand Iliazd écrit à Soffici”, 179). There
were, nevertheless, many common concerns between Dada, born in 1916 in Zurich in
the midst of the First World War, and 41˚, emerging completely independently in 1918
in a peaceful and vibrant Tbilisi. Furthermore, Kirill Zdanevich’s Cubo-Futurist œuvre
also contained clear signs of Cubism (see Kipiani, and Tsipuria: “Cubist Influence
in Georgia”, 172–185). It is virtually impossible to establish clear distinctions in this
confluence of styles and aesthetics, and Iliazd emphasized that all of this “new art”
was “subsumed under the label of Futurism” (Iliazd : “Lettre d’Iliazd à Soffici”, 190).
Synthetism was a natural product of an intense collaboration between artists and
writers, actors and designers, which characterized the whole Georgian avant-garde
(Lomidze: “Tfilisuri Avangardi”, 313). As Gerald Janecek observed in “Zaum’ in Tiflis”,
much of the verbal experimentation in zaum’ poetry crossed the boundaries into
visual art. The same can also be observed a few years later when the Futurist group
H2SO4 emerged in Tbilisi.
Ilya Zdanevich’s literary activities were an important input into the Tbilisi avant-
garde. Although his most innovative typography and book design was actually
undertaken a few years later in Paris, it was certainly influenced by the collabora-
tive experiences he gained in Tbilisi. His main contribution to the history of zaum’
474 Bela Tsipuria

was a series of five one-act plays, called ‘dras’ (see Janecek: “Zaum’ in Tiflis”, 273).
These playtexts were not so much based on a synthesis of poetry and graphics as on
poetry and music. The visual component did not play an important rôle in the printed
editions of the ‘dras’, which were performed in an avant-garde marionette theatre in
Tbilisi.
The ‘dras’ were printed using Cyrillic letters, but not many words can be rec-
ognized as Russian. Luigi Magarotto emphasizes the rôle of zaum’ in this dramatic
pentalogy, where “the meaning is emptied and phrases are reduced to the simple
syntactic sequence of letters” (Magarotto: “Il’ia Zdanevich”, 47). The underlying
concept of Ilya Zdanevich’s five plays was called, using a strange and idiosyncratic
capitalization, aslaablIchia. Janecek translated this as ‘Dunkeeness’, in reference
to the play’s main figure, a Donkey (Janecek: “Zaum’ in Tiflis”, 273). Three of the
five plays were published as separate books in Tbilisi: Ianko krUl albAnskai (Ianko,
King of Albania; Tiflis: Sindikat, 1918); Ostraf pAskhi (Easter Island; Tiflis: 41˚,
1919); and zgA IAkaby (As Though Zga; Tiflis: 41˚, 1920). One, asEl naprakAt (Donkey
for Hire, written in 1918) was included in an album compiled by Ilya Zdanevich:
Sofii Georgievne Melnikovoi: Fantasticheskii kabachok, Tiflis 1917–1918–1919 (To
Sofia Georgievna Melnikova: The Fantastic Tavern in Tiflis, 1917–19, 1919). The last
drama, lidantIU fAram (Le-Dantiu as a Beacon), was announced in zgA IAkaby as
to be published soon in Tbilisi, but it only appeared in Paris in 1923 under the
author’s pen name ‘Iliazd’, still on behalf of the 41˚ Publishing Company, since
Ilya Zdanevich was now trying to propagate zaum’ and the 41˚ group in France. It
is notable that only in this last book from the series did he apply himself to sophis-
ticated cover and book design, strongly reminiscent of his Tbilisi experience in the
late 1910s.

Artists’ cafés in Tbilisi

Lado Gudiashvili (1896–1989), one of the Blue Horn poets, was cooperating with the
multicultural avant-garde groups active in Tbilisi and was frequently identified as a
Futurist. In the years of the Georgian avant-garde, Gudiashvili’s graphics appeared in
journals such as ARS, Feniks and Kuranti. Before leaving for Paris in 1919 to continue
his studies and artistic activities, he painted, together with others, the décor of the
artists’ cafés Qimerioni and Fantastic Tavern.
The wall paintings of the Qimerioni café – still preserved in the base-
ment of the Rustaveli Theatre, Tbilisi – were undertaken together with David
Kakabadze (1889–1952) and the Russian artist and set-designer, Sergei Sudeikin
(1882–1946), who had previously decorated the literary and artistic Stray Dog
cabaret (Brodiachaia Sobaka) in Saint Petersburg. Nino Tabidze, Titsian Tabidze’s
wife, describes in her memoirs how the walls of the café were given new décor
 Georgia 475

by Georgians and exiles, who joined forces in an outstandingly creative life

(Tabidze: Tsisartkela Gantiadisas, 74–76). As the art critic Tea Tabatadze suggested
(Tabatadze: “For the Definition of Certain Features of Modernist Artistic Cafes”,
304), the number of artistic cafés in Tbilisi and their socio-cultural activities were
indicative of the fact that, by the 1910s, Tbilisi’s cultural spaces were given a fresh
appearance to reflect the spiritual, aesthetic and ethical ambitions of a society in
the throes of modernization. The circumstances of their creation and utilization
suggest that this phenomenon formed an essential part of the discourses of early
Modernism in Georgia.
The Fantastic Tavern (Georgian: Fantastiuri Dukani; Russian: Fantasticheskii
Kabachek) was founded on 25 November 1917 on the initiative of Yuri Degen and
other poets and artists. At its first anniversary, the journal Feniks characterized it
as a “haven of the Tbilisi poetic family”, praising it for hosting meetings of various
artistic and poetic groups (e. g. Kolchuga, Tsekh Poetov), lectures on various issues,
recitation of poetry and prose texts and for being the first “motley daubed” place
in Tbilisi (В. К.: “Godovshchina so dnia osnovaniia Fantasticheskogo kabachka”,
14). The walls and ceilings of the tavern were painted by Lado Gudiashvili, Ilya
Zdanevich and Iakob Nikoladze (a Georgian sculptor and student of Auguste
Rodin).
One result of that creative multicultural interaction was the publication of a mul-
tilingual avant-garde book that was a unique example of artistic cooperation between
Futurists and Symbolists, poets and artists, and between Georgians, Russians, Poles,
Armenians, as well as Tbilisi natives and exiles. The book contained both poetry and
graphics and was dedicated to Sofia Melnikova (1890–1980), a Russian actress living
in exile, who was a regular performer at the Miniature Theatre in Tbilisi and who
was famous for her recitations of zaum’ poetry (Kipiani: “The Book – Palimpsest”,
418–423).
In February 1921, this immensely vibrant and innovative phase in Georgia’s
history was cut short by the invading Bolshevik Army and the country’s annexation
by Russia. As a consequence, most Russian avant-garde authors left Georgia. For a
while, the Georgian Modernists continued with their activities and published many
avant-garde poems and novels. The Blue Horns were still active, and some new groups
were also established at this time. Galaktion Tabidze (1892–1959), the great Georgian
poet associated with Symbolism, began publishing his own periodical, the Galaktion
Tabidze Journal (1922–1923), designed by Lado Gudiashvili and Kirill Zdanevich.
Konstantine Gamsakhurdia (1893–1975) introduced Expressionism from Germany,
where he had studied from 1912 to 1918. New and influential journals published by
a group called the Academic Association were Khomaldi (The Ship, 1921–1922, edited
by Alexander Abasheli) and Ilioni (1922–1923, edited by Konstantin Gamsakhurdia).
Increasingly, the Soviet authorities intervened in cultural matters by supporting a
new brand of artist belonging to the Proletarian Writers’ Association. By the end of
the 1920s, the Soviet State exercised complete control over Georgian culture; in the
476 Bela Tsipuria

early 1930s, Socialist Realism was imposed as part of Stalin’s cultural policy, and all
traces of Futurism and Modernism vanished.

The Futurist group H2SO4 and the journals H2SO4,

Literatura da Skhva and Memartskheneoba
In the 1920s, a short-lived Futurist group, H2SO4 (the name refers to the formula for
sulphuric acid) was active in Tbilisi. In May 1924 they issued the first and only issue
of the magazine H2SO4 and filled its 100 pages with works by Beno Gordeziani,
Nikoloz (Niogol) Chachava, Irakli Gamrekeli, Pavlo Nozadze, Zhango Gogoberidze,
Akaki Beliashvili, Bidzina Abuladze, Simon Chikovani, Nikoloz Shengelaia and
Shalva Alkhazishvili. This was the first tangible product of the group, followed by
several public actions, including a recital of their scandalous, but not particularly
innovative manifesto, Sakartvelo – Fenixi (Georgia – the Phoenix), in May 1922 at
a literary evening organized by Georgian Symbolists (Avaliani: Kartuli Futurizmi,
327–328).
The journal H2SO4 can be seen as a lucid artistic statement and an indication of
the group’s public success. It possessed an accomplished design and was based on
well-established conceptual foundations. It recalled the cultural experience of the
past decade in Georgia and the changed political realities after 1921. The graphic
design of the journal and the poetic works it published were a reflection of both
Georgian and European avant-garde culture. Although Tbilisi had seen books
and journals of dazzling visual quality (for example, the works by Ilya and Kirill
Zdanevich), the design concept of H2SO4 was nonetheless a step ahead in Georgian
literary production. Tatiana Nikolskaya sees “the journal’s virtuosic manipulation
of various fonts as reminiscent of 41˚ publications; however, its composition was
extraordinary even for the Futurist production of the times” (Nikol’skaia: Avangard
i okrestnositi, 128). Two graphic designers, Irakli Gamrekeli (1894–1943) and Beno
Gordeziani (1894–1975), developed the look of the journal and published some of
their best works in it. The practice of combining, integrating or fusing words and
images was already known from Russian avant-garde books and journals, but some
of the Georgian works, especially the visual poems by Nikoloz (Niogol) Chachava
(1901–1974), possessed an even more sophisticated visual quality. The graphics and
contents of Chachava’s ten poems published in H2SO4 were inspired by Futurist
and Dadaist works; at the same time, they responded to issues that were topical in
Georgian culture (e. g. the polemics with the Blue Horns; debates about Georgia’s
geopolitical position; rejection of ‘old-fashioned’, ‘sentimental’ Modernist move-
ments such as Symbolism, Impressionism, Acmeism, Imaginism on the one hand,
and traditionalist Realism and popular culture in Georgia on the other). Although
most of Chachava’s poems contain meaningless words and syllables, which were
 Georgia 477

influenced by the zaum’ poetry of the 41˚ group, their meaning can still be grasped
from the fragmented, but graphically sophisticated sentences.
In the same issue of the journal, a number of essays theorized on and analysed
aspects of urbanism, technology, word engineering, cinematographic creations and so
on. Some of the contributions were anonymous and were presented on behalf of the
whole group. From those that have the names of authors attached, the following are
worthy of mention: Pavlo Nozadze: “Tractate Written for Poetry”; Zhango Gogoberidze:
“Preparation, Which, Reversed, Equals to the Measure and, in Returned Action to V, and
Is Spelled Like”; Simon Chikovani: “Project of New Battle Cruiser. Focus of Reversed
Art”; Nikoloz Shengelaia: “Georgian Circus”; Shalva Alkhazishvili: “Cinema Apologia
and Theatre of the Absurd”. The essays demonstrate that the group had, by that time,
developed shared aesthetic values, a common vision of the world and a mission to posi-
tion Georgia within its geopolitical context. References to local culture displayed a typi-
cally avant-garde temperament: Georgian art was considered to be far behind European
concepts of modernity and H2SO4 was the only organization able to catch up with the
developments elsewhere. Traditionalist schools of art would be substituted by H2SO4,
which would “cinematographically reorganize modernity” (Redaktsia [Editorial Staff]:
[Editorial] in H2SO4, 2). Sentimentalist topics, romantic moods and spiritual dilemmas
were denounced as antiquated; the power of the object would be restored, and a new
world would be constructed using new forms of representation and ‘word engineering’;
theatre would have to be substituted by the circus and cinema. The accomplishments
and innovations of the European and Russian avant-garde, especially Futurism and
Dada, would act as models for Georgian art and literature of the future.
Simon Chikovani (1902–1966) explained the coexistence of Futurism and Dada
on the pages of H2SO4 with the fact that “Russian Futurism, if not Italian, stands in
close relation to Dada”. He drew on examples from the artistic practices of both move-
ments, and characterized “Futurism as the first phase of a revolution in poetry, and
Dada as a part of Futurism” (Chikovani: “Proekti Akhali Kreiseris”, 37). Chikovani
emphasized the revolutionary mission of Futurist poetry by associating it with the
Russian Cruiser “Aurora”, from where, on 25 October 1917 (O.S.), a shot was fired to
signal the assault on the Winter Palace, i. e. the beginning of the October Revolution.
Other links between Dada and Futurism were highlighted in Pavlo Nozadze’s poem
Dada da Kindzistavi (Dada and Pin), Zhango Gogoberirdze’s poem, Zhango Dada
da Fabrikantebis Koalitsia (Zhango Dada and the Coalition of Fabricators) and Beno
Gordeziani’s poetic œuvre. For the Georgia Futurists, it seemed natural to mix Dada
elements into their works, a practice not unknown in the Western avant-garde during
the years 1916–1922, when Futurism and Dada were “cross-fertilizing” each other, as
Günter Berghaus has demonstrated (see Berghaus: “Futurism, Dada and Surrealism”,
271–305). The interests in Dada did not change the fact that the Georgian group iden-
tified more strongly with Futurism. It is significant that H2SO4 members, maybe under
Soviet influence, sometimes refrained from affiliating themselves unequivocally with
either the Italian or Russian Futurist movements. In the mid-1920s, they blamed the
478 Bela Tsipuria

Italians for being followers of ‘bourgeois ideology’ (see Shengelaia: Taktilizmi) – a

definition which, of course, came from Soviet sources. On the other hand, they also
tried to avoid identifying with the Russian school as their national perspective was
oriented towards the West rather than the Soviet Union (see Chikovani: “Sastsrafo
Ganmarteba Jurnal H2SO4 Gamosvlis”, 48).
In order to present a modern picture of the world, and to put forward an argument
for similar developments to take place in Georgia, H2SO4 presented various avant-
garde authors and their creations, starting, of course, with Marinetti (Chikovani com-
pared him to Christopher Columbus), many Russian leaders, but also figures such as
Jean Cocteau and Charlie Chaplin. Although the first issue of the journal, published
in 1924, announced that the second would appear in August of the same year, and
that the new periodical I0 would be available on 9 July, this never happened. Instead,
Nikoloz Chachava, on behalf of the group H2SO4, edited in 1924/25 a 106-page new
magazine, Literatura da Skhva (Literature and the Rest). The cover design, this time,
was not by Irakli Gamrekeli but by Kirill Zdanevich. Some members of the group pre-
sented recent essays and examples of their latest poetry, and this was complemented
by fragments from a novel by Demna Shengelaia (1896–1980), Khvito (Wishing Gem),
a theoretical essay, some poems by Besarion Zhgenti (1903–1976) and two graphic
works by Mikheil Gotsiridze (1901–1975).
The themes and topics discussed in Literatura da Skhva were quite similar to
those in H2SO4. Chachava and Zhgenti’s contributions were again graphically
structured, although the visual design of the poems was not particularly sophisti-
cated. Georgian Futurist poetry now mostly followed the style developed by Simon
Chikovani, which was less visually oriented and instead stressed its acoustic qual-
ities: alliteration, accumulation of harsh consonants, meaningless syllables and
words, etc. Morphological homonymy and specific phonation was often applied
in order to rarify the process of perceiving the meaning of words. A high degree
of expressiveness and emotional effects was achieved by adapting avant-garde
approaches to fit the phonetic characteristics of the Georgian language. Another
characteristic of Georgian Futurist poetry introduced by Literatura da Skhva was
the usage of folk poetry. Georgian Futurists developed new techniques of extracting
unusual sounds from folk verses, using alliteration, reverberation of words and syl-
lables that might have had semantic significance but were meaningless to modern
ears. This method was in some way related to the concept of zaum’, but the praxis of
the Russian avant-gardists was considerably modified to fit the Georgian linguistic
and cultural context.
In 1928, in another journal of the H2SO4 group, Memartskheneoba (Leftness),
this method was analysed by Levan Asatiani in an essay on zaum’ and avant-garde
philosophy and linked to Viktor Shklovsky’s linguistic theories (Asatiani: “Poezia da
‘zaumi’ ”, 21–28). Nikoloz Chachava suggests that the choice of vocabulary and sound
had to be dealt with as a group activity in order to reinstate a “national line” and an
“organic whole of Georgian art” (Chachava: “Mimartva”). Similarly, Besarion Zhgenti
 Georgia 479

has grounded the interest in folk poetry in the group’s desire to avoid external influ-
ences and to “restore the national spirit” (Zhgenti: “Oratori Laparakobs”).
In the 1920s, the Georgian Modernists received inspiration from mythological
images and texts and applied them to literature, thus responding to a spiritual
crisis in the Modernist era. Western aestheticism and philosophy were adopted
in order to rethink and redefine Georgian identity as a synthesis of pre-Christian
and Christian traditions of West and East. This dimension explains the H2SO4 pro-
duction of folk-inspired poetry by Simon Chikovani and Nikoloz Chachava and
the mythology-inspired prose works by Demna Shengelaia. Simon Chikovani also
offered a method of intertextual parody of poetical texts that already belonged to
the Georgian literary canon. Chikovani’s poem Mkinvari, for example, referred to
texts by Georgian Romantics and Realists from the nineteenth century (Grigol
Orbeliani, Nikoloz Baratashvili, Ilia Chavchavadze, etc.). These canonical texts and
figures were, of course, parodied by the Futurist poet, yet, intertextual references
make it clear that underneath his ironic approach the author acknowledged that the
canon was just as important as the aesthetic position of the avant-garde for Georgian
culture. The same method was used by Simon Chikovani in his epic poem, Fikrebi
Mtkvris Piras (Thoughts on the Bank of the River Mtkvari, 1925), with a cover by
Irakli Gamrekeli. The title refers to a canonical poem by Nikoloz Baratashvili, which
describes a Romantic poet’s meditations on the vainness of material life. Chikovani
was now suggesting a Futurist meditation on the material world in the form of a
seventeen-page text, using Free Verse, Futurist images and ironic paraphrases of
authoritative texts, as well as of canonical or traditional wisdom.
Although in 1924 it was announced that Literatura da Skhva would publish six
issues annually, in the end only one appeared in print. However, between December
1925 and January 1926, three issues of the paper Drouli (Timely) were published on
behalf of the Left Front of the Arts; and in 1927, a new literary journal, Memartskheneoba
(Leftness) emerged. It announced the founding of a Georgian Left Front, similar to
the Left Front of the Arts in Russia, led by the former Russian Futurists Osip Brik,
Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergey Tretyakov. The process was actively supported by
the Georgian-born Futurist, Vladimir Mayakovsky, who had visited Tbilisi in 1924 and
supported H2SO4. Besarion Zhgenti, Demna Shengelaia and Nikoloz Chachava were
the editors of the first issue, and Simon Chikovani of the second. H2SO4 members were
the main authors of the periodical but were joined by a few others. Memartskheneoba
was intended to unite all ‘leftist’ authors and artistic schools, thus establishing the
new movement in Georgia.
Memartskheneoba brought together poets, prose writers, painters and cinematog-
raphers. The design of the second issue was based on images taken from Georgian
cinema, which by that time was quite advanced and influenced by avant-garde aes-
thetics (see Zhgenti: Georgian Avant-garde Cinema of the Stormy Twenties). The H2SO4
member Nikoloz Shengelaia had switched to making films, and Memarskheneoba
presented his movies and essays about cinematography, as well as articles by Mikheil
480 Bela Tsipuria

Kalatozishvili (1903–1973) and Leo Esakia (1890–1969) and stills from their films.
Furthermore, the journal printed reproductions of paintings made by David Kakabadze
during his Paris sojourn in 1924–1925, and stage designs by Irakli Gamrekeli, who had
begun work with the renowned theatre directors Konstantine (‘Kote’) Mardzhanishvili
(1872–1933) and Sandro Akhmeteli (1886–1937) at the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi. The
popularity of these performances said much about the tastes of the Georgian public,
who were demonstrating that they were familiar with and appreciative of Modernist
and avant-garde aesthetics (Shavgulidze: “Setting Principles in Georgian Set Design
in the 1920s”, and Urushadze: “Constructivism Peculiarity in Georgian Theatrical
Scenery Art”).
From the late 1920s onwards, Soviet totalitarianism affected the cultural situa-
tion in Georgia. Modernist culture was denounced as being hostile to Soviet interests,
and avant-garde authors, including all H2SO4 members, were forced to renounce their
cultural identity. Consequently, Futurism disappeared from the scene in Georgia and
only came to be rediscovered after the country regained independence in 1991 follow-
ing the dissolution of the USSR.

Works cited
Asatiani, Levan: “Poezia da ‘zaumi’.” [Poetry and zaum’] Memartskheneoba [Leftness] 2 (1928): 21–28.
Avaliani, Lali: “Kartuli Futurizmi.” [Georgian Futurism] Gaga Lomidze, and Irma Ratiani, eds.: Kartuli
Modernizmis Tipologia [The Typology of Georgian Modernism]. Tbilisi: Shota Rustavelis Kartuli
Literaturis Instituti, 2016. 327–338.
В. К.: “Godovshchina so dnia osnovaniia Fantasticheskogo kabachka.” Feniks [Phoenix] 1 (1919): 14.
Berghaus, Günter: “Futurism, Dada and Surrealism: Some Cross-Fertilisations Among the Historical
Avant-garde.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin & New
York: DeGruyter, 2000. 271–305.
Chachava, Nikoloz: “Mimartva.” [Address] Drouli [Timely] (Tbilisi), 17 December 1925.
Chikhradze, Mzia: “Tbilisi Avant-garde and Ilya Zdanevich.” Kornelia Ichin, ed.: Dada po-russki
[Russian Dada]. Beograd: Izdatel’stvo Filologicheskogo fakul’teta v Belgrade, 2013. 62–75.
Chikovani, Simon: “Mkinvari.” [Mount Mkinvari] Literatura da Skhva [Literature and the Rest] 1
(1924–1925): 45–48.
Chikovani, Simon: “Proekti Akhali Kreiseris.” [The Project of the New Cruiser] H2SO4. 1 (1924): 37–39.
Chikovani, Simon: “Sastsrafo Ganmarteba Jurnal H2SO4 Gamosvlis.” [An Urgent Clarification
Regarding the Publication of the Journal H2SO4] Mnatobi [Luminary] 4 (1924): 212–221.
Chikovani, Simon: Fikrebi Mtkvris Piras [Thoughts on the Bank of the River Mtkvari]. Tbilisi: [s.n.],
1925.
Degen, Iurii: “Kirill Zdanevich.” Feniks 2–3 (February–March 1919): 1–8.
Gayraud, Régis: “Quand Iliazd écrit à Soffici: Une histoire dans l’ histoire.” Cahiers de la
Méditerranée 90 (2015): 179–198.
Iashvili, Pavlo: “Pirveltkma.” [The First Word] Tsisperi Qantsebi [The Blue Horns]. 1 (1916): 3–5.
Iliazd [pseud. of Il’ia Zdanevich]: “Lettre d’Iliazd à Soffici: 50 ans de futurisme russe.” Appendix
to Régis Gayraud: “Quand Iliazd écrit à Soffici: Une histoire dans l’ histoire.” Cahiers de la
Méditerranée 90 (2015): 187–196.
 Georgia 481

Janecek, Gerald: “Zaum in Tiflis, 1917–1921.” Gerald Janecek: Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of
Russian Futurism. San Diego/CA: San Diego University Press, 1996. 223–289.
Kipiani, Nana: “The Book – Palimpsest.” Yearbook of Comparative Literature. Vol. 1. Tbilisi: Ilia State
University Press, 2013. 418–423.
Kipiani, Nana, and Bela Tsipuria: “Cubist Influence in Georgia: Cubo–Futurism, Kirill Zdanevich,
David Kakabadze.” Ars 47:2 (2014): 172–185.
Kruchenych, Aleksei, and Kirill Zdanevich: Malokholia v kapote [Malokholia in a Dressing Gown].
Tiflis: 41°, 1918.
Kruchenych, Aleksei, and Kirill Zdanevich: Ozhirenie roz [Obesity of Roses]. Tiflis: 41°, 1918.
Kruchenych, Aleksei, and Kirill Zdanevich: Uchites’, Khudogi! [Learn Artists!]. Tiflis: 41°, 1917.
Kruchenych, Aleksei, Kirill Zdanevich, and Vasilii Kamenskii: 1918. Tiflis: 41°, [1918?].
Lomidze, Gaga: “Tfilisuri Avangardi.” [Tiflis Avant-garde] Gaga Lomidze, and Irma Ratiani, eds.:
Kartuli Modernizmis Tipologia [The Typology of Georgian Modernism]. Tbilisi: Shota Rustavelis
Kartuli Literaturis Instituti, 2016. 308–326.
Magarotto, Luigi: “Il’ia Zdanevich: Ot italianskogo futurizma do dramaticheskoi pentalogii.” [Ilya
Zdanevich: From Italian Futurism to Dramatic Pentalogy] Kornelia Ichin, ed.: Dada po-russki
[Russian Dada]. Beograd: Izdatelʹstvo Filologicheskogo fakulʹteta v Belgrade, 2013. 39–48.
Magarotto, Luigi: “Storia e teoria dell’avanguardia georgiana (1915–1924).” Luigi Magarotto,
Marzio Marzaduri, and Giovanna Pagani Cesa, eds.: L’ avanguardia a Tiflis: Studi, ricerche,
cronache, testimonianze, documenti. Venezia: Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1982.
45–99.
Mandel’shtam, Osip Emilevich: “Men’sheviki v Gruzii: Ocherk.” [The Mensheviks in Georgia: An
Essay] Ogonek [Asterix] 20 (12 August 1923): 3–7. Reprinted in O. E. Mandel’ shtam: Sobranie
sochinenii v 4-kh tomakh. Vol. 2. Moskva: Art-Biznes-Tsentr, 1993. 316–321.
Markov, Vladimir: Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press, 1968.
Marzaduri, Marzio: “Futurismo menscevico.” Luigi Magarotto, Marzio Marzaduri, and Giovanna
Pagani Cesa, eds.: L’ avanguardia a Tiflis: Studi, ricerche, cronache, testimonianze, documenti.
Venezia: Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1982. 99–180.
Nikol’skaia, Tat’iana L’ vovna: Avangard i okrestnosti [The Avant-Garde and Its Environs].
Sankt-Peterburg: Limbakh, 2002.
Nikol’skaia, Tat’iana L’ vovna: “Fantasticheskii gorod”: Russkaia kul´turnaia zhizn´ v Tbilisi (1917–1921)
[“Fantastic City”: Russian Cultural Life in Tbilisi, 1917–21]. Moskva: Piataia strana, 2000.
Redaktsia [Editorial Staff]: [Editorial.] ARS. 1 (1918): 3–4.
Redaktsia [Editorial Staff]: [Editorial.] H2SO4. 1 (1924): 2–3.
Ram, Harsha: “Modernism on the Periphery: Literary Life in Postrevolutionary Tbilisi.” Kritika:
Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5:2 (Spring 2004): 367–382.
Shavgulidze, Ketevan: “Setting Principles in Georgian Set Design in the 1920s.” Peter Skinner,
Dimitri Tumanishvili, and Anna Shanshiashvili, eds.: Georgian Art in the Context of European and
Asian Cultures. Proceedings of the Vakhtand Beridze First International Symposium of Georgian
Culture, Tbilisi, 21–29 June, 2008. Tbilisi: Georgian Arts and Culture Center, 2009. 321–325.
Shengelaia, Demna: “Taktilizmi.” [Tactilism] Drouli [Timely], 17 January 1926.
Sofii Giorgevne Melnikovoi. Tiflis: Fantasticheskii Kabachok, 1919.
Tabatadze, Tea: “For the Definition of Certain Features of Modernist Artistic Cafes: On Ideological
Conceptual Language of ‘Qimerioni’ Paintings.” Peter Skinner, Dimitri Tumanishvili, and Anna
Shanshiashvili, eds.: Georgian Art in the Context of European and Asian Cultures. Proceedings
of the Vakhtand Beridze First International Symposium of Georgian Culture, Tbilisi, 21–29 June
2008. Tbilisi: Georgian Arts and Culture Center, 2009. 302–309.
Tabidze, Nino: Tsisartkela Gantiadisas: Titsiani da misi Megobrebi [The Rainbow at Dawn: Titsian
and His Friends]. Tbilisi: Artanuji, 2016.
482 Bela Tsipuria

Tabidze, Titsian: “Iz avtobiografii. 1936.” [From the Autobiography. 1936] T. Tabidze: Proza,
Mimotsera [Prose, Personal Letters]. Tbilisi: Literaturis Muzeumi, 2015. 226–236.
Tabidze, Titsian: “Tsisperi Qantsebit.” [With the Blue Horn Horns] Tsisperi Qantsebi [The Blue Horns]
1 (1916): 21–26; 2 (1916): 20–26.
Tukhareli, Dimitri, Nana Zardalishvili, and Maia Tukhareli: Vozvrashchenie: Vladimir Maiakovskii v
Gruzii [The Return: Vladimir Mayakovsky in Georgia]. Tbilisi: Russkii Klub, 2008.
Urushadze, Tea: “Constructivism Peculiarity in Georgian Theatrical Scenery Art.” Peter Skinner,
Dimitri Tumanishvili, and Anna Shanshiashvili, eds.: Georgian Art in the Context of European
and Asian Cultures. Proceedings of the Vakhtand Beridze First International Symposium of
Georgian Culture, Tbilisi, 21–29 June, 2008. Tbilisi: Georgian Arts and Culture Center, 2009.
326–329.
Zdanevich, Il’ia: “asEl naprakAt.” Sofii Giorgevne Melnikovoi. Tiflis: Fantasticheskii Kabachok, 1919.
41–68.
Zdanevich, Il’ia: Ianko krUl albAnskai. Tiflis: 41˚, 1918.
Zdanevich, Il’ia: lidantIU fAram. Paris: 41˚, 1923.
Zdanevich, Il’ia: Ostraf pAskhi. Tiflis: 41˚, 1919.
Zdanevich, Il’ia: zgA IAkaby. Tiflis: 41˚, 1920.
Zhgenti, Besarion: “Oratori Laparakobs.” [The Orator Speaks] Drouli [Timely], 17 January 1926.
Zhgenti, Olga: Georgian Avant-garde Cinema of the Stormy Twenties: From Anarchy to
Totalitarianism. Paper presented at the conference Modernism in Georgia, Redrawing the
Boundaries. Harriman Institute, Columbia University, April 2010. harriman.columbia.edu/files/
harriman/01773.pdf (consulted 19 September 2016).

Further reading
Bakradze, Akaki: Mtserlobis Motviniereba [The Tempting of Literature]. Tbilisi: Sarangi, 1990.
Boynik, Sezgin: Still Stealing Steel: Historical-Materialist Study of Zaum’. Tbilisi: Rab-Rab, 2014.
Beridze, Vakhtang: Kultura da Khelovneba Damoukidebel Sakartveloshi, 1918–1921 Tslebi
[Culture and Arts in Independent Georgia, 1918–1921]. Tbilisi: Metsniereba, 1992.
Chikhradze, Mzia: “The Futurist Book, Tbilisi 1917–1919.” Peter Skinner, Dimitri Tumanishvili,
and Anna Shanshiashvili, eds.: Georgian Art in the Context of European and Asian Cultures.
Proceedings of the International Symposium of Georgian Art, Dedicated to Vakhtang Beridze.
Tbilisi, 21–29 June, 2008. Tbilisi: Georgian Arts and Culture Center, 2009. 310–316.
Chilaia, Sergi: Otscleuli, 1921–1940: Tslebi da Problemebi [Twenty Years, 1921–1940: Years and
Problems]. Tbilisi: Tbilisskogo Universiteta, 1986.
Kipiani, Nana: “The Tbilisi Avant-garde.” Spike: Art Quarterly 24 (Summer 2010): 115–120.
Kverenchkhiladze, Revaz: XX Saukunis Sakartvelos Literaturuli Tskhovreba [Literary Life of Twentieth-
Century Georgia]. Tbilisi: Universali, 2005.
Kverenchkhiladze, Revaz: Tsamebis Gza [Road of Torture]. Vol. 2. Tbilisi: Erovnuli Mtserloba, 2005.
Lomidze, Gaga: “Simbolizmi da Avangardizmi Saqartveloshi.” [Symbolism and Avantgardism in
Georgia]. Irma Ratiani, ed.: Kartuli Literatura: Istoria Saertashoriso Literaturuli Protsesebis
Prizmiashi (Shuasaukuneebidan Postsabchota Epoqamde) [Georgian Literature: History
through the Prism of International Literary Processes. From Medieval Centuries to the
Post-Soviet Period]. Tbilisi: Shota Rustavelis Kartuli Literaturis Instituti, 2016. 111–148.
 Georgia 483

Magarotto, Luigi: “Literary and Cultural Life in Tiflis (1914–1921).” Maia Tsitsishvili, and Nino
Tchogoshvili, eds.: Kartuli Modernizmi, 1910–1930 = Georgian Modernism, 1910–1930. Tbilisi:
Sezani, 2006. 73– 91.
Maglaperidze, Teimuraz: Maradi Atsmko [Eternal Present]. Tbilisi: Universali, 2005.
Makharadze, Fillip: “Mokhseneba.” [Plenary Speech] Sruliad Sakartvelos Mtseralta Pirveli Kriloba,
Tbilisi, Tebervali, 1926. Stenograma [All-Georgian Writers First Convention, Tbilisi, February,
1926. Stenographic Record]. Tbilisi: Sakhalkho Ganatlebis Komisarta da Khelovenbis Sakmeta
Mtavari Sabcho, 1926. 6–26.
Nikol’skaia, Tat’iana L’ vovna: “Gruzinskie realii v proze Il’ii Zdanevicha.” [Georgian Actuals in Ilya
Zdanevich’s Prose] Kornelia Ichin, ed.: Dada po-russki [Russian Dada]. Beograd: Izdatel’stvo
Filologicheskogo fakul’teta v Belgrade, 2013. 76–80.
Postanovlenie Politbiuro TSK VKP(b): “O perestroike literaturno-khudozhestvennykh organizatsii.
23 aprelia 1932 g.” [Decree of the Central Committee of the All-Soviet Communist Party of 23
April 1932: On the Reconstruction of Literary and Art Organizations] Partiinoe stroitel’stvo [Party
Construction] 9 (1932): 62.
Robakidze, Grigol: Gvelis Peraingi: Phalestra [Novels: Snake’s Shirt. Phalestra]. Tbilisi: Merani,
1988.
Shavgulidze, Ketevan: “Avant-garde of Georgian Theatre.” Paper Presented at the Conference
Modernism in Georgia: Redrawing the Boundaries. Harriman Institute, Columbia University,
April 2010. http://www.harrimaninstitute.org/MEDIA/01768.pdf (consulted 19 September 2016)
Sigua, Soso: Avangardizmi Kartul Literaturashi [Avant-gardism in Georgian Literature]. Tbilisi:
Didostati, 1994.
Tsipuria, Bela: “H2SO4: The Futurist Experience in Georgia.” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 1 (2011): 299–322.
Tsipuria, Bela: “Polish and Georgian Cultural Experiences: The Avant-garde against Socialist
Realism.” Herito: Dziedzictwo, kultura, współczesność [Herito: Heritage, Culture, Present Day]
4 (2011): 116–129.
Tsipuria, Bela: “Transferring Avant-garde to Georgia / Transferring Georgia to Avant-garde.” Harri
Veivo, ed.: Transferts, appropriations et fonctions de l’avant-garde dans l’Europe intermédiaire
et du Nord. Paris: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2012. 171–184.
Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach
31 Germany
The reception of Italian Futurism in Germany,
1909–1914
The reception of Italian Futurism in Germany can be traced back to its very beginnings
in 1909. A few months after Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had published The Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of Le Figaro, he presented the first inter-
national reactions to it in a section of his journal Poesia, entitled “Le Futurisme et
la presse internationale”. This press review included the comments of three German
newspapers: the Kölnische Zeitung, the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Berlin Vossische
Zeitung. They all showed a certain interest in the Futurist programme but were agreed
in their reservations towards this new literary school.
As an artistic movement, Futurism came to be known to the German public in
a review concerning the 1910 summer exhibition at Palazzo Pesaro in Venice (Wolf:
“Permanente Ausstellung im Palazzo Pesaro”). Much more substantial was the
response to the first exhibition of Futurist paintings at the gallery Bernheim-Jeune
in Paris, running from 5 to 24 February 1912 (Schmidt: “Zukunftsmalerei”, Grautoff:
“Austellungen: Die Ausstellung der Pariser Futuristen und Anderes” and Grautoff:
“Kunstausstellungen: Paris”) and subsequently shown at the Sackville Gallery in
London (March 1912).
The journalist and cultural impresario Herwarth Walden (1878–1941) presented
these paintings from 12 April to the second half of May 1912 in the rented premises of
Tiergartenstr. 34a in Berlin (Walden: Der Sturm: Zweite Ausstellung. Futuristen).1 Although
the correspondence of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc suggests that even before
1912 these two artists were familiar with at least one of the Futurist manifestos, probably
Francesco Balilla Pratella’s Technical Manifesto on Futurist Music (see Kandinsky: “Letter
to Franz Marc, 1. September 1911”), most German Modernist painters could not quite
fathom what Futurist painting was about. They only came to learn more about it from
the Berlin exhibition and the promotional campaign in favour of the Italian movement,
which Walden launched in his periodical Der Sturm in parallel with the exhibition.
The immediate reactions to the Futurist exhibition in Berlin were extremely varied.
The German art critics and the daily press concurred in their rejection of the Futurist

1 The dates vary in the first and second edition of the catalogue. As the next leg of the Futurist
touring show in Brussels opened on 30 May (see p. 326 in the entry on Belgium in this volume), the
planned extention from 15 to 31 May 1912 and shift of venue from Tiergartenstrasse 34a to Königin
Augusta-Strasse 51 did not take place. Walden decided to inaugurate the new Sturm Gallery on 18 May
1912 with a show of graphic art by Picasso and others.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-031
 Germany 485

movement in general, and of Futurist painting in particular. As a consequence, the

exhibition aroused the curiosity of the public and turned out to be a succès de scan-
dale. As Walden’s second wife, Nell Walden, stated in her memoirs, it had up to 1,000
visitors a day (Walden and Schreyer: Der Sturm, 11–12). Umberto Boccioni came to
Berlin for the opening, while Marinetti arrived two days later, on 14 April 1912. Both
remained in the German capital for nearly ten days and met many artists and writers
of the Sturm circle and beyond. It is most likely that they encountered Rudolf Blümner
(1873–1945), Rudolf Kurtz (1884–1960) and Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) at the editorial
office of Der Sturm; there were further meetings with, for example, Wenzel Hablik
(1881–1934) and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884–1976), and probably also with the pub-
lisher Alfred Richard Meyer and the translator Else Hadwiger (1877–c.1935), who were
responsible for the first German anthology of Marinetti’s poetry, a small booklet enti-
tled Futuristische Dichtungen (Futurist Poetry, 1912).
Walden’s promotional campaign made Futurism the object of heated debates
in Germany and beyond. He provided the readers of Der Sturm with extensive infor-
mation on the movement by publishing German translations of important Futurist
manifestos and poems and reproducing works of art. These included, in chronologi-
cal order:
– Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista (“Manifest der Futuristen”), Der Sturm
2:103 (March 1912): 822–824.
– Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo (“Manifest des Futurismus”), Der Sturm
2:104 (March 1912): 828–829.
– Les Exposants au public (“Futuristen: Die Aussteller an das Publikum”), Der Sturm
3:105 (April 1912): 3–4.
– Umberto Boccioni: “La Peinture des états d’âme (I, II, III)”, Der Sturm 3:107
(April 1912): 21, 3:108 (May 1912): 29 and 3:109 (May 1912): 35.
– Valentine de Saint-Point: Manifeste de la femme futuriste (“Manifest der futuris-
tischen Frau”), Der Sturm 3:108 (May 1912): 26–27.
– F. T. Marinetti: A l’ automobile de course, Der Sturm 3:109 (May 1912): 36.
– Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna! (“Tod dem Mondschein!”), Der Sturm 3:111 (May 1912):
50–51 and 3:112 (June 1912): 57–58.
– F. T. Marinetti: Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (“Die futuristische
Literatur”), Der Sturm 3:133 (October 1912): 194–195.
– F. T. Marinetti: Risposte alle obiezioni (“Supplement zum technischen Manifest
der futuristischen Literatur”), Der Sturm 3:150–151 (March 1913): 279–280.
– Umberto Boccioni: Simultanéité futuriste, Der Sturm 4:190–191 (December 1913): 151.
– Gino Severini: Tango argentine (“Tango argentino”), Der Sturm 4:192–193 (January 1914):
front page.

Walden’s extensive publicity campaign in conjunction with Marinetti’s repeated visits

and public appearances in Berlin offered a number of opportunities for writers, artists
and the interested public to find out more about the Futurist movement and its artistic
486 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

and literary programme. On 22 April 1912, the Futurist leader gave his first talk on
Futurism at the exhibition venue, a second lecture took place on 16 February 1913 at
the Berlin Choralionsaal, and two further appointments followed on 12 and 15 October
1913 on the occasion of the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon).
In the meantime, in summer/autumn 1912, twenty-four of the thirty-five Futurist
paintings exhibited in Berlin were purchased by the German banker Dr Borchardt,
an acquisition that enabled Walden to extend his operating range as a promoter of
Futurism (and Modernist art in general) by launching an exhibition that travelled
through several German cities and neighbouring countries. Accompanied by a trilin-
gual catalogue in German, English and Danish, Die Futuristen: Umberto Boccioni /
Carlo D. Carra (sic) / Luigi Russolo / Gino Severini, it was shown between 1912 and
1914 in various guises in nearly a dozen cities and proved fundamental for the diffu-
sion and reception of Futurism in Germany and beyond. And yet, the calendar of this
travelling exhibition and the exact details of its composition is still a desideratum of
research; so far, I have been able to confirm the following dates and venues for the
German legs of the show:
– 28 June – 6 July 1912: Hamburg, Jungfernstieg 14 (the former studio of the master
tailor Iwan M. Schlichter). Scheduled to open on 25 June, the vernissage took place
three days later because the arrival of the paintings from Brussels was delayed;
– 11 October – 25 October 1912: Cologne, Der Rheinische Kunstsalon (Gallery of Otto
Feldmann);
– 30 October – 15 November 1912: Munich, Moderne Galerie Heinrich Thannhauser;
– 14 December 1912 – 7 January 1913: Vienna, Wallnerstr. 2 (Realgymnasium
Schwarzwaldschule), organized by the Akademischer Verband für Literatur und
Musik;
– 24 May – c.14 June 1913: Karlsruhe, Badischer Kunstverein;
– c.24 October – November 1913: Dresden, Kunstsalon Emil Richter;
– 4 January – 15 February 1914: Leipzig, Galerie Del Vecchio.

German artists and writers responding to the

Futurist impulse
The memoirs, letters and writings of several German Expressionist and Modernist
artists and writers demonstrate that the travelling exhibition of paintings by the Italian
Futurists and the artistic programme that supported them by means of the accompa-
nying catalogue and the manifesto translations in Walden’s Der Sturm magazine, had
an immediate effect in German artistic circles. This is particularly true for the paint-
ers Franz Marc (1880–1916) and August Macke (1887–1914), who in October 1912 were
involved in hanging the Futurist paintings in Otto Feldmann’s art gallery in Cologne.
Macke went more than once to the exhibition to study the paintings on display and
 Germany 487

described, presumably in a letter to his wife’s uncle, Bernhard Koehler Snr., how
impressed he was with the Futurists (Frese and Güse: August Macke, 292–293). Franz
Marc received the Berlin exhibition catalogue from Herwarth Walden, but initially was
not convinced by the Futurist ideas. When he finally saw the paintings in Feldmann’s
gallery, he changed his mind. He expressed enthusiasm about them in letters to Paul
Klee and Wassily Kandinsky (Marc: “Letter to Paul Klee, 11 October 1912”, and “Letter
to Wassily Kandinsky, 23 October 1912”) and defended the Italian artists in Der Sturm
(Marc: “Die Futuristen”, 187).
The Futurist exhibition in Cologne was seen by the painters Heinrich
Campendonk (1889–1957), Max Ernst (1891–1976), Franz Seraph Henseler (1883–
1918), Carlo Mense (1886–1965) and Paul Adolf Seehaus (1891–1919), who all
belonged to the circle of the Rheinische Expressionisten. Shortly after the show,
Paul Klee (1879–1940) also penned a record of his views on the Futurist paintings
that he had seen at the Thannhauser gallery in Munich in late October 1912 (Klee:
Tagebücher, 282). However, in comparison to Franz Marc, his Munich friends and
companions of Der Blaue Reiter were not particularly enthusiastic. Paul Klee appre-
ciated the paintings but was unconvinced by the theory behind them, while Wassily
Kandinsky was markedly critical towards the Italian innovators (Kandinsky: “Letter
to Herwarth Walden, 15 November 1913”).
Similarly varied was the impact of Italian Futurism on Modernist artists in Berlin.
Those connected to Walden’s journal and art gallery reacted in most cases positively
and sought inspiration from Futurist ideas. This becomes evident in the dynamic city
visions (“apocalyptic landscapes”) by Ludwig Meidner (1884–1966) or, more subtly,
in the kinetic compositions (“Bewegungsbilder”) painted by Lyonel Feininger (1871–
1956) at the time.
The members of the Brücke group did not remain unaffected either, as can be
seen in the street scenes of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938), realized between
1912 and 1915. The reaction of the later Dadaist Hugo Ball (1886–1927) was also
extremely positive. He saw the Futurist exhibition for the first time in late 1913 at
Emil Richter’s Art Salon in Dresden and wrote an enthusiastic review of it in the
short-lived magazine Revolution (Ball: “Die Reise nach Dresden”). At the same venue
in Dresden, a young Otto Dix (1891–1969) came into contact with the Futurist paint-
ings, and traces of this can be detected in some of his drawings from immediately
before and during the Great War. In contrast, negative responses are documented
by the artist, visionary architect and craftsman Wenzel Hablik, who met Walden
and Boccioni in May 1912 and considered the Futurists “immature subjects without
universal sensitivity” (see Archival sources: Hablik: Tagebuch, 23 May 1912), and
by the writer and art historian Carl Einstein (1885–1940), who rejected Futurism
in favour of French Cubism (Schmidt-Bergmann: Die Anfänge der literarischen
Avantgarde in Deutschland, 245–247). Yet, as Dorothea Eimert has emphasized, it
was “characteristic of the Futurist influence in Germany and the development of
German art that young painters in search of new forms of expression [...] engaged
488 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

with Futurism, and that also the older, more mature artists experimented with the
new Futurist techniques.” However, in the latter case “only a few paintings with
a distinctly Futurist tendency resulted from this encounter.” (Eimert: Der Einfluss
des Futurismus auf die deutsche Malerei, 118).
In most cases, the exhibition of Futurist paintings encountered incompre-
hension and disapproval from art critics and the popular press, who accused the
Futurists and Walden of dishonesty, triviality and mere sensationalism. This was
counterbalanced by the judgement of the writer Alfred Döblin, who initially sided
with the Futurist movement (Döblin: “Die Bilder der Futuristen”). Yet, when he
read Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature and its Supplement in
Der Sturm (which included an early example of Futurist parole in libertà from La
battaglia di Tripoli), Döblin changed his mind and distanced himself from Futurism
(Döblin: “Futuristische Worttechnik: Offener Brief an Marinetti”). Nonetheless, the
impact of Futurism on Döblin’s literary œuvre was significant, just as it was on other
German writers and poets such as August Stramm (1874–1915), Hugo Ball, Richard
Huelsenbeck (1892–1974), Johannes R. Becher (1891–1958) and Kurt Schwitters
(1887–1948) (see Schmidt-Bergmann: Die Anfänge der literarischen Avantgarde in
Deutschland and Demetz: Worte in Freiheit).

The years 1913–1914 and the outbreak of the

First World War
Marinetti’s second appearance in Berlin in February 1913 coincided with a show
of twenty-five paintings and drawings by Ardengo Soffici, presented together with
works by Robert Delaunay and Julie Baum, which opened at the Sturm Gallery on
30 January. The Tuscan painter and art critic had only recently joined the Florentine
group of Futurists and many of the works exhibited in Berlin dated back to the years
1908–1912 when he was still affiliated with French Cubism. The only Futurist painter
who was ever granted a solo exhibition at the Sturm Gallery was Gino Severini. Living
in Paris, Severini had first encountered Walden in March 1913, when the latter was
preparing the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon and had come to the French capital to
inform himself about the latest trends in French painting. Forced by economic con-
straints, Severini overturned the decision of the Futurist painters to show their works
only as a group. He asked Walden to take over an exhibition of his works shown at
the Marlborough Gallery in London (April–May 1913) and to present it in his Sturm
Gallery in Berlin and in other German cities. Walden did not miss the opportunity
and opened on 1 June 1913 his Sechzehnte Ausstellung. Gemälde und Zeichnungen des
Futuristen Gino Severini (Sixteenth Exhibition: Paintings and Drawings by the Futurist
Gino Severini). Initially scheduled to run until 30 June, the paintings remained at
Walden’s gallery until at least August 1913. Announcements in Der Sturm give reason
 Germany 489

to presume that further showings were planned in Halle (February 1914) and Hanover
(March–April 1914).
In the meantime, preparations were underway for the Erster Deutscher
Herbstsalon, a jury-free exhibition of the newest currents in Modernist art. The salon
ran from 20 September to 1 December 1913 and showed more than 350 works from
almost 100 international artists. The contribution of the Futurist painters was rela-
tively modest: three works each by Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo, two each by Balla,
Severini and Ugo Giannattasio, and three works by Soffici. Yet, their presence made
a considerable impact. As already mentioned, Marinetti seized the opportunity of
the Herbstsalon and delivered two lectures on Futurism, while Severini’s latest work,
the Ritratto di F. Tommaso Marinetti (Portrait of F. Tommaso Marinetti, 1913) with its
stuck-on moustache became the talk of the town and thus compensated for the rela-
tively small number of works exhibited.
In November 1913, and contemporaneous with the Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon,
Walden exhibited two paintings of the young Futurist Ugo Giannattasio in his Sturm
Gallery as part of a collective show entitled Expressionisten / Kubisten / Futuristen.
It took until July–August 1916 before another omnibus show could be mounted.
One reason for the reduced presence of Futurist paintings in Berlin were the freshly
emerging possibilities for presenting Futurist works in Italy (Florence, Rome, Naples,
Bologna, Milan) and other European cities (Stockholm, London, Rotterdam, Lviv,
Paris, Prague). A further reason was Walden’s touring exhibition of the works pur-
chased by Dr Borchardt, which he had organized without the Italians’ prior agreement.
The changing character of the exhibition and the fact that their works were presented
in conjunction with other avant-garde artists (e. g. Cubists and Expressionists), with
whom they did not want to be mixed-up, caused ire and disgruntlement amongst the
painters. Nevertheless, they maintained their relationship with Walden and continued
their cooperation after the Herbstsalon. Marinetti’s letters written to Walden between
September and November 1913 reveal that they were planning an exhibition of sculp-
tures by Umberto Boccioni and a German translation of Marinetti’s novel, Mafarka il
futurista (Mafarka the Futurist, 1910; see Coen: Illuminazioni, 145–148). According to
a review of Marinetti’s lecture at the Herbstsalon, he also had a concert of Russolo’s
intonarumori (noise machines) in mind (Th. P.: “Marinettismus”). It is difficult to say
why these plans did not come to fruition, but it seems that, in spring/summer 1914,
both the Futurists and Herwarth Walden were too busy with other projects, and that
finally the Great War put an end to their joint activities.
As far as we know at the moment, the last presentation of the Futurist touring
exhibition was at the gallery Del Vecchio in Leipzig (January – February 1914). From
here, the pictures returned to Berlin, where Walden showed them probably once
more in his 28th exhibition, Die Futuristen (between mid-August and October 1914).
Afterwards, to the great annoyance of the Futurist painters, several of the works
remained in Germany. A note belonging to the Marinetti correspondence held in
the archive of the magazine Der Sturm at the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin (see Archival
490 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

sources: “Untitled note, dated 20 March 1914”) suggests that Walden, during a Paris
meeting with the Futurists in spring 1914, agreed on taking charge of the outstand-
ing payment for the works by transferring 100 Marks each month. However, these
disbursals stopped after the initial instalments and the 3,000 Marks owed for the
twenty-four paintings purchased by Dr Borchardt were never fully paid.

Futurism in Germany and Switzerland during the

First World War
Although the First World War interrupted the Italian Futurists’ personal contacts with
Herwarth Walden and the artists of the Sturm circle, Futurism continued to have a
presence in German art, literature and everyday life. This was partly due to Walden’s
journal Der Sturm, which advertised Boccioni’s book Pittura e scultura futuriste (Futurist
Painting and Sculpture, 1914) and, from April 1914 to May 1915, the Florentine Futurist
journal Lacerba. Furthermore, between 1914 and 1919 Walden repeatedly included
paintings by Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Severini in collective shows entitled Ständige
Kunstausstellung: Expressionisten / Kubisten / Futuristen (Permanent Art Exhibition:
Expressionists, Cubists, Futurists). Some of these works had been part of the Borchardt
collection and had remained, together with Futurist drawings, in Germany. After
Boccioni’s death in 1916, Walden republished in Der Sturm of September 1916 a drawing
from Boccioni’s triptych, La Peinture des états d’âme (“Die Abfahrenden”), followed by
an obituary (Walden: “Nachruf”). From December 1917 onwards, he sold high-quality
reproductions of Boccioni’s triptych in his gallery, where since 1912 two series of artists’
postcards showing the most important Futurist paintings had been available. These com-
plemented a series of photo-postcards of artists from the Sturm circle, which included a
portrait of Umberto Boccioni. Reproductions of Futurist works also appeared in Walden’s
books, Einblick in Kunst: Expressionismus / Futurismus / Kubismus (Insight into Art:
Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, 1917) and Die neue Malerei (The New Painting, 1919).
However, Walden was not the only promoter of Italian Futurism in Germany. The
Berlin cultural-political journal, Die Aktion (The Action, 1910–1932), founded and
edited by Franz Pfemfert (1879–1954), was a rival and competitor of Walden’s Der Sturm
and initially highly critical of Futurism. Die Aktion changed its outlook in September
1913, when Pfemfert published a special issue on modern French poetry, compiled
by the translator Hermann Hendrich. It included two poems by F. T. Marinetti, “An
meinen Pegasus” (A Mon Pégase / Ode to a Racing Car, 1908) and “Der Abend und
die Stadt” (Le Soir et la ville / Evening and Town, 1898), as well as Valentine de Saint-
Point’s “Die Klugen” (Aux sages / To the Wise, 1912). On 27 September 1913 followed a
further poem by Marinetti, “Die heiligen Eidechsen” (Les Lézards sacrés / The Sacred
Lizards, 1908), and in January, March, April and November 1916 poetic texts by Aldo
Palazzeschi. In addition, in February 1916, Pfemfert’s Aktion dedicated an entire issue
 Germany 491

to Italian Modernist poetry, compiled by the Triestine poet Theodor Däubler (1876–
1934) who was closely connected to the Florentine Futurists (see Bressan: “Theodor
Däubler: A Mediator between Florentine Futurism and German Modernism”).
It is beyond question that the Futurist movement’s artistic ideas found widespread
dissemination in Germany between 1912 and 1914 and that the term ‘Futurism’ itself
entered everyday language to denote the latest trends – not only in Modernist art, but
in modern life as a whole (for an example of this, see Chytraeus-Auerbach: “Marinetti in
Berlin”, 119). Although largely used in a negative and defamatory way to denigrate ‘avant-
garde art’ in general, over the years Futurism as an artistic and literary movement gained
ground in the more progressive German literary, artistic and intellectual circles. But there
were also detractors, as can be seen in the publication of the defamatory pamphlet,
Futuristengefahr (The Futurist Danger, 1917). Here, the German composer Hans Pfitzner
(1869–1949) transferred the anti-Futurist and anti-Modernist attitude amongst German
art critics to the field of music and sharply attacked the Italian pianist and composer,
Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), whose treatise Entwurf einer neuen Ästhetik der Tonkunst
(Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music, 1907) had recently been re-published in an expanded
version in Leipzig in 1916 (Kindermann: “Zur Kontroverse Busoni – Pfitzner”). Between
Pfitzner’s anti-Modernist campaign on the one hand and Walden’s pro-Modernist stance
on the other, Pfemfert’s belated turn towards Futurism exemplified how the Futurist
movement and its ideas pervaded German society, literature and art. The same applies to
the discussion of Futurism by Paul Fechter (1880–1958) in his book Der Expressionismus
(Expressionism, 1914). It signalled that the more the German art public grew accustomed
to Futurism, the more it was taken seriously and its scandalous reputation began to wane.
Gradually, Futurism met with increasing acceptance, and new currents showing
a clear Futurist influence appeared on the scene. The most significant of these was
Dada, founded in Zurich by Hugo Ball who, as I mentioned above, had seen the
Futurist travelling exhibition in Dresden and had written an enthusiastic review of it.
It appeared in Revolution, an avant-garde journal published in Munich by Ball and
Hans Leybold (1892–1914) and inspired by Futurism. Around that time, Ball intended
to hold an exhibition of Cubist, Futurist and Expressionist paintings and contacted
Herwarth Walden for this (Berghaus: “Futurism and the Genesis of Dada”, 141). In June
1914, he moved to Berlin, where he established close relations with Die Aktion and Der
Sturm, as well as with Else Hadwiger, the translator of the first German anthology
of Marinetti’s poetry, Futuristische Dichtungen. Together with Richard Huelsenbeck,
Ball penned a proto-Dadaist and semi-Futurist manifesto and organized a series of
‘artistic-literary-political’ evenings with a clear provocative-aggressive character that
bore close resemblance to the Futurist serate. As Günter Berghaus has pointed out,
two of these can be characterized as “para-Futurist soirées”: the Gedächtnisfeier für
gefallene Dichter (Commemorative Celebration for Poets Fallen in the War, 12 February
1915) and the Expressionisten-Abend (Expressionist Soirée, 12 May 1915), in which
Futurism merged with a pre-Dada position (Berghaus: “Futurism and the Genesis
of Dada”, 148–151). In June 1915, he planned a literary anthology that was going to
492 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

include a number of Futurist works. On 9 July 1915, he received a parcel of parole

in libertà (Words in Freedom) from Marinetti, but the publication had to be shelved
because at the end of July he left Berlin and moved to Zurich.
There he founded, in February 1916, the Cabaret Voltaire, which was soon to
become the nucleus of the Dada movement. In May 1916, Ball revived the plans for
his literary anthology, which was now named, after the nightclub, Cabaret Voltaire.
It included material that had been sent by F. T. Marinetti, and some of these parole in
libertà were also used to decorate the walls of the cabaret, where Futurist poetry was
regularly recited as part of the nightly entertainment.
In 1916, the young Romanian poet Samuel Rosenstock (alias Tristan Tzara,
1896–1963), who had been in contact with Marinetti since summer 1915, joined the
Cabaret Voltaire group, which transformed itself under his, Hans Arp’s and Marcel
Janco’s guidance into the Dada movement. Tzara edited the first issue of the journal
DADA (July 1917) and thereby established a new platform of cooperation between Italian
Futurists and Zurich Dadaists. It lasted until May 1919 and relied heavily on the help of
the young Futurist Enrico Prampolini, who brokered the collaboration of a young gen-
eration of Futurist-inspired writers and artists (Francesco Meriano, Nicola Moscardelli,
Maria d’Arezzo [pseud. of Maria Cardini], Gino Cantarelli, Bino Sanminiatelli, Alberto
Savinio and Giorgio de Chirico). After the Great War, the Dadaists shifted their direc-
tion and, in most cases, regarded Futurism as a thing of the past.

Futurism in Berlin after the Great War

The end of the First World War and the dislocation of the Zurich Dadaists to Berlin
and Paris did not bring an end to Futurist influences in the German-speaking lands.
Certainly the most active representative of Italian Futurism after the Great War and
during the 1920s was Enrico Prampolini, a young painter who had been excluded
from the Futurist group due to Boccioni’s enmity. This hostility caused him to seek
other alliances in Italy and beyond. In 1917, he founded the journal Noi: Raccolta
internazionale d’arte d’avanguardia (We: International Collection of Avant-garde
Art, 1917–1920, 1923–1925), and in 1919 the Casa d’Arte italiana (House of Italian
Art), which became a meeting-point for avant-garde artists in Rome and served as a
venue for exhibitions and cultural events. It was here that the artists’ group Das Neue
Leben (The New Life) from Basel first presented their works to the Italian public.
Prampolini’s cooperation with the Novembergruppe was particularly close: he was
an active member of the group, participated in its exhibitions and showed their
work in the Mostra espressionisti tedeschi (Exhibition of German Expressionists,
June–July 1920) and the Esposizione espressionisti Novembergruppe (Exhibition of
Expressionists from the Novembergruppe, October – November 1920), both held in
his casa d’arte. According to contemporary sources, the latter was a great success.
 Germany 493

Prampolini’s commitment to Modernism and his internationally oriented

activities – including participation in the Exposition internationale d’art moderne
(International Exhibition of Modern Art, Geneva: Bâtiment Électoral, 26 December
1920 – 25 January 1921) – led to his reconciliation with the Futurist movement. At the
beginning of the 1920s, Marinetti assigned him important organizational responsibil-
ities, for example the Esposizione italiana d’arte d’avanguardia (Italian Exhibition of
Avant-Garde Art), first shown in Prague at the Rudolfinum (8 October – 6 November
1921) and then in Berlin at Israel Ber Neumann’s Graphisches Kabinett, where it
presented 163 works as Große futuristische Ausstellung (Great Futurist Exhibition,
February – March 1922).
A second important mediating figure between the Futurist movement and
German Modernist currents was the writer and poet Ruggero Vasari (1898–1968). Born
in Messina, the young poet became a member of a Sicilian Futurist group in 1915 and
moved to Berlin in 1922. By publishing the monthly magazine Der Futurismus (May–
December 1922) and establishing a private Futurist gallery, he formed an international
artist group linked directly to Italian Futurism. The gallery and editorial office served
as the Berlin ‘headquarters’ for the Italian Futurists and showed “the most important
Futurist artists […]: Italians: Boccioni – Depero – Dottori – Governato – Marasco –
Pannaggi – Prampolini / Germans: Belling – Mohr / Japanese: Murayama – Nagano /
Russians: Vera Steiner – Xenia Boguslawskaja – Puni / Latvians: Zalit – Dzirkal.”
(Der Futurismus 1:5–6 [October 1922], [s.p.]).
Vasari was responsible for the German branch. Whether he was employed or
financed by Marinetti is not entirely clear. However, with his manifold activities,
Vasari flanked and complemented Enrico Prampolini, who had re-established rela-
tions with Herwarth Walden in late October 1921 during a visit to Berlin. A second
journey, this time together with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, took place in December
1922, as their signatures in the Der Sturm visitors’ book show. Concerted efforts
were undertaken to extend the operational range of Italian Futurism to Central and
Eastern Europe (see Versari: “Enlisting and Updating”). Just as before the Great War,
the close cooperation between Walden and the Italian Futurists had many cross-ferti-
lizing effects between Walden’s Der Sturm, Vasari’s Der Futurismus and Prampolini’s
Noi. Thus, the February 1922 issue of Der Sturm presented Vasari’s short play Weiber
(Women) and the April issue Marinetti’s Der Mietvertrag (The Tenancy Agreement)
and Jetzt kommen sie (They Are Coming). In July–August 1922, Walden published a
special issue of Der Sturm on “Das junge Italien” (The Young Italy), dedicated mainly
to Futurism. On the cover it featured Prampolini’s Costruzione spaziale / Paesaggio
(Spatial Construction / Landscape), while the next pages were dedicated to Umberto
Boccioni, with a reprint of Walden’s obituary for the artist, in German and Italian,
and a reproduction of Quelli che restano (Those Who Stay), a drawing from the trip-
tych La Peinture des états d’âme. This was followed by works of Marinetti, Vasari,
Emilio Settimelli, Luciano Folgore, Primo Conti, Pitigrilli, Guglielmo Jannelli,
Paolo Buzzi, Aldo Palazzeschi, Mario Carli, Francesco Carrozza, Luciano Nicastro,
494 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

Bruno Corra, Corrado Govoni – all in Italian – complemented by a photograph of

Prampolini’s sculpture Architettura dinamica / Busto del poeta futurista Vasari
(Dynamic Architecture / Bust of the Futurist Poet Vasari) and Fortunato Depero’s
linocut Pappagalli / Motivo ornamentale (Parrot / Ornamental Motif).
In turn, in October 1922, Ruggero Vasari re-published in nos. 5–6 of Der Futurismus
Walden’s obituary for Umberto Boccioni and advertised – in Italian – the special issue
of Der Sturm, “Das junge Italien”, while nos. 7–8 (November–December 1922) included
Marinetti’s Vengono (“Jetzt kommen sie”, in a German translation by Rudolf Blümner)
and an advertisement for Prampolini’s journal Noi, the second series of which, start-
ing in April 1923, carried the subtitle “Rivista d’arte futurista” (Futurist Art Review).
Furthermore, Vasari’s Der Futurismus presented in issue 2–3 (June–July 1922) German
translations of the manifestos “Der Taktilismus” (Manifesto of Tactilism) by Marinetti
and “Das Theater der Überraschung” (The Theatre of Surprise) by Marinetti and
Francesco Cangiullo. Additionally, the journal presented a series of short written por-
traits called “Charakterköpfe”, which included Marinetti, Vasari, Jannelli, Carrozza,
Folgore, Nicastro, Ivo Pannaggi, Paolo Buzzi, Rudolf Belling, Alexander Mohr, Ivan
Puni and Karl Zalit (Kārlis Zāle).
As for Enrico Prampolini, he showed in the second series of Noi the international
network he was linked to and highlighted the importance of Berlin as a crossroads for
different international avant-garde movements. The contemporary reader could find in
Noi information on Vasari’s Futurist headquarters in Berlin, his gallery and the journal
Der Futurismus, Walden’s Der Sturm and other international avant-garde groupings oper-
ating in Berlin. These included, amongst others, the Russian and German Constructivists
and Suprematists gathered around the short-lived journal Veshch’ = Objet = Gegenstand
(The Object, 1922), directed by El Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg, or the directors of the art
magazine Laikmets (The Era, 1923), Kārlis Zāle and Arnolds Dzirkals (see also pp. 660–661
in the entry on Latvia in this volume). Enrico Prampolini also remained in close contact
with the Novembergruppe and maintained links to the Internationale Vereinigung der
Expressionisten, Futuristen und Kubisten (International Association of Expressionists,
Futurists and Cubists), the Bauhaus in Weimar and the Dutch avant-garde group De Stijl.
In 1922, he travelled to Düsseldorf to represent Futurism at the Erster interna-
tionaler Kongreß fortschrittlicher Künstler (First International Congress of Progressive
Artists, 29–31 May 1922), while in the concomitant I. Internationale Kunstausstellung
(First International Art Exhibition, Kaufhaus Tietz, 28 May – 3 July 1922) Futurist works
by Boccioni, Depero, Pannaggi, Prampolini, Trilluci (pseud. of Umberto Maganzini)
and Antonio Marasco went on display, mostly coming from the Große futuristische
Ausstellung in Berlin. The congress turned out to be an important forum for Modernist
and avant-garde artists and offered an opportunity for the Italians to meet up again
with Herwarth Walden, who represented Der Sturm and the Internationale Vereinigung
der Expressionisten, Futuristen und Kubisten, as well as with other international artists’
groups. Prampolini’s speech at the Düsseldorf congress was subsequently printed in
De Stijl (Prampolini: “Relazione del pittore Enrico Prampolini”).
 Germany 495

In the meantime, Prampolini’s contacts with the Bauhaus, which he had initiated
in autumn 1921, expanded into a collaborative album of graphics in the Bauhaus-
Drucke series. It was called Neue Europäische Graphik. 4te Mappe. Italienische u.
Russische Künstler (New European Graphics. Fourth Portfolio: Italian and Russian
Artists, 1924) and included five Italian artists (Boccioni, Carrà, De Chirico, Severini
and Prampolini himself). A sixth work by Soffici did not arrive on time and was there-
fore omitted. Together with Ruggero Vasari, who after May 1923 formed part of the
editorial committee of Noi, Prampolini was in those years also involved in transform-
ing Vasari’s gallery in Berlin into a Casa internazionale degli artisti (International
House of Artists). Its exhibition practice followed the model of Prampolini’s Casa
d’arte italiana, Antonio Giulio Bragaglia’s Casa d’ arte Bragaglia (see pp. 180–183
in this volume) or, as Maria Elena Versari presumes, of the Russian Dom Iskusstv
(House of Art) in Berlin (Versari: Ruggero Vasari, 152). The general direction of the
International House of Artists was assigned to Vasari, while the technical direction
lay in the hands of the sculptor Rudolf Belling (1886–1972), another prominent figure
of the artistic community in post-war Berlin. This founder and board member of
the Novembergruppe was strongly influenced by Boccioni and Futurist aesthetics.
Information on the Casa internazionale degli artisti is still scarce, but an undated
letter from Marinetti to Vasari gives reason to suggest that Walden was also involved
in this venture (see Tomasello: Oltre il futurismo, 191).
We are better informed about the Internationale Vereinigung der Expressionisten,
Futuristen und Kubisten, a further attempt of the German and international artistic
community in Berlin to organize a coordinated network of avant-garde artists in the
immediate post-war period. Founded in Berlin in 1919 by the sculptor and director
William Wauer (1866–1962), the association took a new direction in their general
assembly of 9 May 1922, when it linked its activities closer to Walden and his Sturm
Gallery. Vasari was elected the Italian representative, and in 1926 Marinetti became
an honorary member. Although Vasari moved to Paris in December 1923, his coopera-
tion with Walden continued. On 3 August 1924, the Italian journal L’ impero, edited by
the Futurists Mario Carli und Emilio Settimelli, published Vasari’s article, “Herwarth
Walden e Der Sturm”, while in the January 1925 issue, Der Sturm presented large parts
of Vasari’s tragedy L’ angoscia delle macchine (The Anguish of the Machines, 1925) in
a German translation by ‘Lilly Nevinny’ (alias Yvan Goll and Else Hadwiger), together
with reproductions of some stage and costume designs by Vera Idelson (née Vera
Steiner, 1893–1977). German radio broadcasted the text a few months later as a radio
drama. Subsequently, it was revised for the German stage by Yvan Goll (see Versari:
Ruggero Vasari, 163–164). On 14 January 1925, Vasari participated in one of the famous
Sturm soirées and recited Futurist poetry.
During the 1920s, Walden continued to sporadically publish Futurist works in
Der Sturm, for example, Pannaggi’s painting Zug in Bewegung (“Speeding Train”,
December 1923, 185); Rodolfo Alcaro’s poem Il palo telegrafico (“The Telegraph Pole”,
March 1924, 39); Bruno G. Sanzin’s poem Una disgrazia (“A Misfortune”, February
496 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

1925, 29–30); a photograph of Prampolini’s stage set for Romeo and Juliet performed
in Prague (July–August 1925, 105); a reproduction of Pannaggi’s Mechanisches Ballett
(“Mechanical Ballet”, July–August 1925, 113); Vasari’s prose Unter den Linden –
Kurfürstendamm (August 1926, 71–75) and reproductions of paintings by Arturo
Ciacelli (August 1928, 257 and 261). The cooperation and friendship between Vasari
and Walden lasted until 1932, when Der Sturm ceased its activities and Walden moved
for personal and professional reasons to Moscow.
In the 1920s, a second generation of Futurists came to the fore and engaged in
the international dissemination of Futurism. This development found a reflection
in German publications, such as Arthur Sakheim’s Expressionismus / Futurismus /
Aktivismus: Drei Vorträge (Expressionism, Futurism, Activism: Three Lectures, 1919),
Max Deri’s lecture on “Futurismus und absolute Malerei” (Futurism and Absolute
Painting), published in Die Neue Malerei: Sechs Vorträge (New Painting: Six Lectures,
1921), or Paul Westheim’s Künstlerbekenntnisse (Artists’ Confessions, 1925), which
included Marinetti’s “Manifest des Futurismus” (The Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism, 1909).
The second generation of Futurists showed a considerable presence in Germany,
but as the selection of artists for the Bauhaus portfolios of New European Graphics
shows, they were rivalled now by new art movements emerging from Italy. Pittura
metafisica and Novecento represented a ‘return to order’ and thus contested the
Futurist dynamic and mechanistic vision of the modern world. An interesting example
of how both artistic tendencies coexisted and at the same time competed with each
other was given in the December 1925 issue of Paul Westheim’s art magazine, Das
Kunstblatt, in a section dedicated to “Das junge Italien” (Young Italy). After an intro-
ductory essay by Italo Tavolato, “Chronik der futuristischen Instauration” (The Birth
of Futurism: A Chronicle), which celebrated prewar Futurism but declared it to be
part of history now (and thus obsolete), it featured non-Futurist artworks and texts
by Giorgio de Chirico, Carlo Carrà, R. [sic, possibly Virgilio?] Guidi, Giovanni Papini,
Sergio Corazzini, Ardengo Soffici, Giuseppe Ungaretti – together with Marinetti’s “En
volant sur le cœur de l’ Italie”, taken from his book Le Monoplan du pape (The Pope’s
Monoplane, 1912).

Futurism in the 1930s

With the end of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, the polit-
ical and cultural climate in Germany and the already unstable working conditions
for modern artists in general and for the avant-gardes in particular changed drasti-
cally. Many artists were either forced to emigrate or to submit to the new rules of the
National Socialist régime. As a consequence, Berlin lost its pivotal rôle for the inter-
national artistic and literary community.
 Germany 497

Herwarth Walden’s close friend and collaborator, Rudolf Blümner, tried to con-
tinue the twenty-year-old cooperation with Futurism and thereby maintain a certain
presence of modern art in National Socialist Germany. In 1933, on the eve of the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of Italian Futurism, Rudolf Blümner inter-
vened in the debate on the movement’s history and its current rôle in Fascist Italy with
an article on “Faschismus und Futurismus” (Fascism and Futurism) in the Berliner
Börsen-Courier (2 July 1933). Meanwhile, Vasari and Marinetti began, in collaboration
with Blümner, to organize an exhibition of over 100 ‘Air-Paintings’ (aeropitture) by 36
Futurist artists at the Hamburger Kunstverein (24 February – 18 March 1934). Although
the show turned out to be difficult to put in place, it was subsequently transferred to
the Galerie am Lützowufer in Berlin (25 March – 27 April 1934). A year later, it was
sent, in a reduced size (fifty-eight paintings and sculptures by twenty-eight artists),
to Vienna (Neue Galerie, 21 February – [?] March 1935). A fourth leg of the show in
Salzburg did not materialize.
At the opening in Hamburg, the curator, Vasari, held an inaugural address
on “Flugmalerei – Moderne Kunst und Reaktion” (Air-Painting: Modern Art and
Reaction), concurrently published by the Max Möhring publishing house in Leipzig.
Rudolf Blümner wrote the introductory text for the Berlin catalogue, while Marinetti
joined Vasari and Blümner for the opening event in Berlin. According to the Hamburg
press reviews, the show aroused vivid debates and predominantly negative responses.
Vasari’s speech against the reactionary tendencies in German culture was sharply
attacked by the conservative forces who were seeking to establish a hegemonic posi-
tion in National Socialist cultural politics. Correspondingly, the official response to the
second leg of the show in the German capital was restrained. The Deutsch-Italienische
Gesellschaft (German-Italian Society) in Berlin was not allowed to organize a social
welcoming event for Marinetti; hence, the Union Nationaler Schriftsteller (National
Writers Union), with its vice-president Gottfried Benn (1886–1956), organized the offi-
cial reception, which Peter Demetz characterized as “a weird party” (Demetz: Worte in
Freiheit, 149). Sibyl Moholy-Nagy recalled in her memoirs that, short of Hitler, all Nazi
luminaries were present. They were sitting at a huge, horseshoe-shaped high table,
while the Party underlings and the artists whom Marinetti had invited were relegated
to smaller tables strewn across the hall. Marinetti recited from Il bombardamento di
Adrianopoli (The Bombardment of Adrianople, 1912) and Kurt Schwitters from his
Dada poem, Anna Blume (1919), much to the dislike of the Nazi officials (Moholy-
Nagy: Moholy-Nagy: Experiment in Totality, 99–100.)
It is not documented whether the painter Rudolf Bauer (1889–1953) was present at
the reception, but photographs confirm that Marinetti visited Bauer’s private museum,
Das Geistreich (The Realm of the Spirit), during his 1934 trip to Berlin. Bauer, who
belonged to the Sturm circle and was a founding member of the Novembergruppe,
expressed his view on Futurism in a small brochure entitled Das Geistreich: Die Kunst
im neuen Jahrtausend (The Realm of the Spirit: Art in the New Millennium, 1930). His
relation with Marinetti and the Futurists lasted presumably until 1937, when he was
498 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

forced to close his museum. He left Germany in August 1939 and emigrated to the
United States of America.
Although the Aeropittura exhibition did not have the success desired by Blümner
and Vasari, the latter continued his campaign in favour of modern Italian, and especially
Futurist, art and literature in Germany. In 1934, he published the brochure, Flugmalerei –
Moderne Kunst und Reaktion, illustrated with eleven figures of works by Thayaht (pseud.
of Ernesto Michahelles), Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi, Roberto Marcello Baldessari, Benedetta
[Cappa Marinetti], Alessandro Bruschetti, Gerardo Dottori, Fillìa (pseud. of Luigi Enrico
Colombo), Pippo Oriani, Prampolini, Mino Rosso and Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni),
followed by the collection Junges Italien: Eine Anthologie der zeitgenössischen italienis-
chen Dichtung (The Young Italy: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Poetry, 1934).
The anti-Modernist drive in National Socialist cultural politics and especially Hitler’s
campaign against ‘degenerate art’ led to a number of reactions on the Futurist side. A
first article in defence of German Expressionism and Italian Futurism was published by
Enrico Prampolini after Hitler’s programmatic speech in Nuremberg in September 1934:
“Il futurismo, Hitler e le nuove tendenze” (Futurism, Hitler and the New Tendencies,
1934), followed by Marinetti’s protest note, “S.E. Marinetti difende il futurismo dalle
critiche di Hitler” (H.Exc. Marinetti Defends Futurism against Hitler’s Criticisms, 1937).
But these remonstrations could not really relieve the tense situation that had emerged
in the German-Italian cultural relations; on the contrary, it seems that they only rein-
forced them. Only five works by Dottori, Prampolini, Ivano Gambini and Tullio Crali were
included in the Olympische Kunstausstellung (Olympic Art Exhibition; Ausstellungs-
Gelände am Kaiserdamm, 15 July – 16 August 1936). A year later, when the Italian govern-
ment arranged a major Ausstellung italienischer Kunst von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart (Italian
Art from 1800 to the Present) at the Preußische Akademie der Künste (1 November – 12
December 1937), Futurism was again represented only by a handful of paintings. The
exhibition was intended to demonstrate the amicable relations between the two régimes
and to affirm the cultural cooperation within the Rome-Berlin axis, but the inclusion of
the Futurists caused quite a stir behind the wings. The paintings chosen by Marinetti
were only moderately modern in character, but they did not find the approval of the
National Socialist authorities and an envisaged transfer to Munich was refused.
Marinetti’s movement had enjoyed a nearly continuous presence in Germany for
over twenty-five years. But in the end, as the exhibitions in 1936–1937 showed, Futurism
met the same fate as all Modernist and avant-garde art during the Nazi period.

Archival Sources
“Untitled note, dated 20 March 1914.” Marinetti, Emilio Filippo Tommaso: Letters to Herwarth
Walden, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Handschriftenabteilung,
Sturm-Archiv I, Bl. 28.
Hablik, Wenzel: Tagebuch, 23 May 1912. Wenzel-Hablik-Stiftung, Itzehoe. 23 V 1912, WH TG 10.
 Germany 499

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500 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

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Vasari, Ruggero, ed.: Flugmalerei: Moderne Kunst und Reaktion. Leipzig: Möhring, 1934.
Vasari, Ruggero, ed.: Junges Italien: Eine Anthologie der zeitgenössischen italienischen Dichtung.
Leipzig: Möhring, 1934.
Versari, Maria Elena: “Enlisting and Updating: Ruggero Vasari and the Shifting Coordinates of
Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 1 (2011):
277–298.
Versari, Maria Elena, ed.: Ruggero Vasari: L’ angoscia delle macchine e altre sintesi futuriste.
Palermo: Duepunti, 2009.
Walden, Herwarth: “Nachruf.” Der Sturm 7:6 (September 1916): 70–71.
Walden, Herwarth: Die neue Malerei. Berlin: Der Sturm, 1919.
Walden, Herwarth: Einblick in Kunst: Expressionismus, Futurismus, Kubismus. Berlin: Der Sturm, 1917.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Das junge Italien. Special issue of Der Sturm 13:7–8 (July–August 1922).
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Der Sturm: Zweite Ausstellung. Futuristen. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Der
Sturm, 12. April – 15. Mai 1912. 2nd edn Zweite Ausstellung: Die Futuristen Umberto Boccioni,
Carlo D. Carra, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini. Berlin, Tiergartenstrasse 34a vom 12. April bis 31.
Mai 1912. 3rd edn Zweite Ausstellung: Die Futuristen Umberto Boccioni, Carlo D. Carra, Luigi
Russolo, Gino Severini. Berlin, Königin Augusta-Strasse 51 vom 12. April bis 31. Mai 1912.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Die Futuristen. Exhibition catalogue. Leipzig: Galerie Del Vecchio, Januar –
Februar 1914.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Die Futuristen: Umberto Boccioni / Carlo D. Carra / Luigi Russolo / Gino
Severini. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Gesellschaft zur Förderung Moderner Kunst, 1912.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Dreiundvierzigste Ausstellung: Expressionisten, Futuristen, Kubisten.
Gemälde und Zeichnungen. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Der Sturm, Juli – August 1916.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Der Sturm, 20.
September – 1. November 1913.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Neunzehnte Ausstellung: Expressionisten, Kubisten, Futuristen. Exhibition
catalogue. Berlin: Der Sturm, November 1913.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Sechzehnte Ausstellung: Gemälde und Zeichnungen des Futuristen Gino
Severini. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Der Sturm, Juni – August 1913.
Walden, Herwarth, ed.: Ständige Kunstausstellung: Expressionisten, Kubisten, Futuristen. Exhibition
catalogue. Berlin: Der Sturm, 1916.
Walden, Nell, and Lothar Schreyer, eds: Der Sturm: Ein Erinnerungsbuch an Herwarth Walden und
die Künstler aus dem Sturmkreis. Baden Baden: Klein, 1954.
Westheim, Paul, ed.: “Das junge Italien.” Das Kunstblatt 9:12 (December 1925): 354–365.
Westheim, Paul, ed.: Künstlerbekenntnisse. Berlin: Propyläen, 1925.
Wolf, August: “Permanente Ausstellung im Palazzo Pesaro.” Kunstchronik: Wochenschrift für Kunst
und Kunstgewerbe N.S. 21:36–37 (26 August 1910): 594–595.

Further reading
Allegri, Mario: “ ‘Der Futurismus’ di Ruggero Vasari: Osservazioni su di un possibile
futur-espressionismo.” Primo quaderno veronese di filologia, lingua e letteratura italiana.
Verona: Università, 1979. 167–184.
502 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

Allegri, Mario: “Hypothèques françaises sur les rapports entre expressionisme allemand et
futurisme italien.” Sandro Briosi, and Henk Hillenaar, eds.: Vitalité et contradictions de
l’ avant-garde. Mayenne: Corti, 1988. 264–272.
Arnold, Armin: “Walden, Stramm und die Futuristen.” A. Arnold: Die Literatur des Expressionismus:
Sprachliche und thematische Quellen. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966. 28–31.
Becker, Sabina: “Döblinismus contra Futurismus.” S. Becker: Urbanität und Moderne: Studien zur
Großstadtwahrnehmung in der deutschen Literatur 1900 – 1930. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1993.
295–316.
Belli, Gabriella, ed.: Sprachen des Futurismus: Literatur – Malerei – Skulptur – Musik – Theater –
Fotografie. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Martin-Gropius-Bau, 2. Oktober 2009 – 11. Januar
2010. Berlin: Jovis, 2009.
Bergius, Hanne: “Frühexpressionistische Radikalität, futuristischer Einfluß und prädadaistische
Aktivitäten in Berlin.” H. Bergius: Das Lachen Dadas: Die Berliner Dadaisten und ihre Aktionen.
Gießen: Anabas, 1989. 41–62.
Brasliņa, Aija: “Latvian Modernists in Berlin and Rome in the 1920s: Encounters with ‘secondo
futurismo’.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe. Special issue of
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Vol. 1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011, 231–261.
Brenner, Hildegard: “Die Kunst im politischen Machtkampf der Jahre 1933/34.” Vierteljahreshefte
für Zeitgeschichte 10:1 (January 1962): 17–42.
Bressan, Marina: “La seconda generazione di futuristi a Berlino: La mediazione di Ruggero Vasari.”
Marino de Grassi, ed.: Futurismo: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, l’ avanguardia giuliana e i
rapporti internazionali. Mariano del Friuli (GO): Edizioni della Laguna, 2009. 158–168.
Bressan, Marina, ed.: Der Sturm e il futurismo. Mariano del Friuli: Edizioni della Laguna, 2010.
Buono, Franco: “Futurismo in Germania: Pro et contra.” Giuseppe Barletta, ed.: Futurismi. Atti del
convegno, Bari: Palazzo Ateneo, Salone degli Affreschi, 4 – 6 November 2009. Bari: Graphis,
2012. 91–102.
Chiellino, Carmine: Die Futurismusdebatte: Zur Bestimmung des futuristischen Einflusses in
Deutschland. Frankfurt/Main: Lang, 1978.
Cioli, Monica: “Il ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’ nell’arte italiana: Qualche riflessione sul futurismo, la
metafisica e il muralismo nel regime fascista”. Stephanie Klauk, Luca Aversano, and Rainer
Kleinertz, eds.: Musik und Musikwissenschaft im Umfeld des Faschismus: Deutsch-italienische
Perspektiven = Musica e musicologia all’epoca del fascismo: Prospettive italo-tedesche. Sinzig:
Studio Verlag, 2015. 235–253.
Chytraeus-Auerbach, Irene: “Der Sturm und der italienische Futurismus.” Andrea von Huelsen-Esch,
and Gerhard Finckh, eds.: Der Sturm. Zentrum der Avantgarde. Vol. 2. Wuppertal: Von der
Heydt-Museum, 2012. 285–304.
Chytraeus-Auerbach, Irene, and Elke Uhl, eds.: Der Aufbruch in die Moderne: Herwarth Walden und
die europäische Avantgarde. Berlin: LIT, 2013.
Cortiana, Rino: “Visages du futurisme entre Paris et Berlin.” Wolfgang Asholt, and Claude Leroy,
eds.: Paris – Berlin – Moscou: Regards croisés (1918 – 1939). Actes su colloque, Centre Culturel
International de Cerisy-La-Salle, 2–9 septembre 2004. Special issue of RITM [Recherches
Interdisciplinaires sur les Textes Modernes] 35 (2006). Nanterre: Université Paris X, Centre des
Sciences de la Littérature Française, 2006. 85–94.
Dada: Recueil littéraire et artistique. Zürich: Heuberger, 1917–19; Paris: Au Sans Pareil, 1920–21.
Reprint Nice: Centre du XXè Siècle, 1976.
Dautel, Ernst: “Gottfried Benn, l’ expressionnisme allemand et le futurisme.” Karine Cardini, and
Silvia Contarini, eds: Le Futurisme et les avant-gardes littéraires et artistiques au début du XXe
siècle. Nantes: Centre de Recherche sur les Identités Nationales et l’ Interculturalité, 2002.
267–285.
 Germany 503

De Pasquale, Matilde: “August Stramm tra espressionismo e futurismo.” Antonio Gasbarrini, and
Novella Novelli, eds.: Luci e ombre del futurismo. Atti del convegno internazionale, Roma: Libera
Università degli Studi “S. Pio V”, 27 – 28 ottobre 2009. L‘ Aquila: Angelus Novus, 2010. 125–143.
Demetz, Peter: “The Futurist Johannes R. Becher.” Modernism/modernity 1:3 (September 1994):
179–193.
Der Futurismus: Monatliche Zeitschrift. Berlin: Leitung der futuristischen Bewegung, 1922.
Der Sturm: Wochenschrift für Kultur und die Künste. Berlin: Der Sturm, 1910–1932. Reprint Nendeln:
Kraus, 1970.
Dering, Peter: Avanti! Avanti!; Futurismus im deutschen Expressionismus. Exhibition catalogue.
Bonn: August Macke Haus, 14 June – 23 August 1998.
Die Aktion: Wochenschrift für freiheitliche Politik und Literatur. Berlin: Verlag der Wochenschrift Die
Aktion, 1911–1932. Reprint Hildesheim: Olms, 1974.
Eltz, Johanna: Der italienische Futurismus in Deutschland, 1912–1922. Bamberg: Lehrstuhl für
Kunstgeschichte und Aufbaustudium Denkmalpflege an der Universität Bamberg, 1986.
Fancelli, Maria: “Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e Gottfried Benn.” Studi in onore di Leone Traverse.
Special issue of Studi urbinati di storia, filosofia e letteratura 2:1–2 (#45) (1971): 672–681.
Farese Sperken, Christine: “Appunti sull’ influenza del futurismo sugli espressionisti tedeschi.”
Giuseppe Barletta, ed.: Futurismi. Atti del convegno, Bari: Palazzo Ateneo, Salone degli
Affreschi, 4–6 November 2009. Bari: Graphis, 2012. 531–548.
Feierabend, Volker W.: “II futurismo in Germania = Der Futurismus in Deutschland.” Giovanni Lista,
ed.: Futurismo: La rivolta dell’avanguardia / Die Revolte der Avantgarde. Cinisello Balsamo
(MI): Silvana, 2008. 8–33.
Finkeldey, Bernd, ed.: Konstruktivistische Internationale Schöpferische Arbeitsgemeinschaft.
1922–1927. Utopien für eine europäische Kultur. Exhibition catalogue. Düsseldorf:
Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 30 May – 23 August 1992, Halle: Staatliche Galerie
Moritzburg, 3 September – 15 November 1992. Ostfildern: Hatje-Cantz 1992.
Flaim, Carmen: “Per una bibliografia del futurismo in Germania e dei suoi rapporti con
l’ espressionismo.” Primo quaderno veronese di filologia, lingua, e letteratura italiana. Verona:
Università, 1979. 185–232.
Franz, Sigrid: “Keimzellen der Merzkunst: Futurismus und ‘Sturm’.” S. Franz: Kurt Schwitters’
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Frontisi, Claude: “Paul Klee ‘futuriste’.” Mady Ménier, ed.: De la métaphysique au physique: Pour
une histoire contemporaine de l’ art. Hommage à Fanette Roche. Paris: Publications de la
Sorbonne, 1995. 61–69.
Gabelmann, Andreas: “Wege ins Neue: Schmidt-Rottluff und seine Auseinandersetzung mit
Futurismus, Kubismus, Primitivismus.” Magdalena M. Moeller, and Tayfun Belgin, eds.: Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff: Ein Maler des 20. Jahrhunderts. München: Hirmer, 2001. 212–239.
Garzarelli, Benedetta: “Parleremo al mondo intero”: La propaganda del fascismo all’estero.
Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2004.
Godé, Maurice: “Un malentendu fécond: La réception du futurisme en Allemagne.” Isabelle
Krzywkowski, and Cécile Millot, eds.: Expressionisme(s) et avant-gardes. Actes du colloque de
Reims, 23–25 janvier 2003. Paris: Improviste, 2007. 227–250.
Heiderich, Ursula: “Im Spannungsfeld von Kubismus, Futurismus und Delaunay.” U. Heiderich, ed.:
August Macke – Aquarelle: Werkverzeichnis. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje, 1997. 30–35.
Hodonyi, Robert: “Der italienische Futurismus.” R. Hodonyi: Herwarth Waldens “Sturm” und die
Architektur: Eine Analyse zur Konvergenz der Künste in der Berliner Moderne. Bielefeld:
Aisthesis, 2010. 242–249.
Horn, Ursula: “Zum Einfluss des Futurismus auf die deutsche Kunst.” Bildende Kunst 27:5
Supplement “Kunstwissenschaftliche Beiträge” (May 1979): 2–9.
504 Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach

Kliemann, Helga: Die Novembergruppe. Ed. by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Bildende Kunst
(Kunstverein Berlin), Bildende Kunst in Berlin, Vol. 3. Berlin: Mann, 1969.
Kolberg, Gerhard: “Der Blaue Reiter und die italienischen Futuristen.” Magdalena M. Moeller, ed.:
Der Blaue Reiter und seine Künstler. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Brücke Museum, 3. Oktober
1998 – 3. Januar 1999. München: Hirmer, 1999. 175–187.
Kühn, Joachim: “Ein deutscher Futurist: Die Futurismusrezeption Hugo Balls.” Hugo Ball Almanach
15 (1979): 86–103.
Kühnel, Anita, Michael Lailach, and Jutta Weber, eds.: Avantgarde! Die Welt von Gestern.
Deutschland und die Moderne 1890–1914. Worte in Freiheit. Rebellion der Avantgarde
1909–1918. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Kulturforum, 6. Juni – 12. Oktober 2014. Dortmund:
Kettler, 2014.
Loquai, Franz: “Geschwindigkeitsphantasien im Futurismus und im Expressionismus.” Thomas Anz,
and Michael Stark, eds: Die Modernität des Expressionismus. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1994. 76–94.
Masini, Ferruccio: “Futurismo e rivoluzione conservatrice in Germania.” Renzo de Felice, ed.:
Futurismo, cultura e politica. Torino: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988. 303–317.
Meier-Lenz, Dieter Paul: “Der Futurismus und sein Einfluß auf Alfred Döblin und August Stramm.”
Die Horen 94 (1974): 13–30.
Meißner, Günter, ed.: Franz Marc: Briefe, Schriften und Aufzeichnungen. Leipzig & Weimar:
Kiepenheuer, 1989.
Moeller, Magdalena M.: “Futuristen im Rheinischen Kunstsalon.” Köln: Vierteljahresschrift für die
Freunde der Stadt 1 (1986): 38–41.
Möser, Kurt: “Der Futurismus und seine Rezeption.” K. Möser: Literatur und die ‘Große Abstraktion’.
Kunsttheorien, Poetik und ‘abstrakte Dichtung’ im “Sturm” 1910 – 1930. Erlangen: Palm & Enke,
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Musarra, Franco: “ ‘Der Sturm’: Incontri e scontri tra l’ espressionismo tedesco e il futurismo
italiano.” Rivista di letteratura italiana 23:1–2 (2005). 455–465.
Musarra, Franco: “Ruggero Vasari e Herwarth Walden.” Lia Fava Guzzetta, et al.: Tra simbolismo e
futurismo, verso Sud. Pesaro: Metauro, 2009. 79–110.
Musarra, Franco: “Sulla presenza del futurismo italiano nella rivista ‘Der Sturm’.” Bianca Maria Da
Rif, ed.: Civiltà italiana e geografie d’Europa. Relazioni del XIX Congresso A.I.S.L.L.I., Trieste,
Capodistria, Padova, Pola, 19–24 settembre 2006. Trieste: EUT, 2009. 234–244.
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Jonathan Black
32 Great Britain
Futurism arrives in the United Kingdom
Parts of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism were first published in English
in the unlikely context of a magazine entitled The Tramp: A Journal of Healthy
Outdoor Life for the Adventurous Gentleman in August 1910 (Wees: Vorticism and
the English Avant-garde, 96). It seems fitting that the movement, often regarded in
the United Kingdom as outré and problematically unconventional, should appear
in a publication aimed at a select, minority readership, whose interest focussed
not only on camping outdoors and mountaineering but also on vegetarianism,
nudism and other ‘experimental forms’ of modern life. It also must be admitted
that the credibility of Futurism within Great Britain, especially in England, suf-
fered severely from the fact that its creator, F. T. Marinetti, and its leading artistic
proponents were Italian. In Georgian Britain, the very words ‘Italy’ and ‘Italians’
invariably generated a host of unfortunate instinctive stereotypes and prejudices.
Italy was perceived as a picturesque yet governmentally ramshackle and techno-
logically backward country, whose people – especially its males – were regarded
as noisy, unstable, illogical, over-emotional, treacherous and cowardly (Black:
“Taking Heaven by Violence”, 29–30). To promote Italian Futurism in the United
Kingdom was always going to be a very hard sell indeed. British artists were part of
one of Western Europe’s most advanced industrial powers and invariably proud of
belonging to the world’s largest Empire. So, why should they embrace and adopt a
movement headquartered in Milan?

Marinetti’s first London visit, 1910

Marinetti first spoke about Futurism in London on 2 April 1910 to an audience of
suffragettes at the Lyceum Club, Piccadilly. The secretary of the Club was Margaret
Nevinson (1858–1932), mother of Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889–1946),
who would later be the lone formal English member of the Futurist movement.
Margaret Nevinson later recalled that Marinetti began his lecture by praising the
‘English’ (he did not refer to the British at any point) for having retained “an unbri-
dled passion for struggle in all its forms, from boxing […] to the roaring monstrous
mouths of your cannon, crouched in their rotating steel turrets on the bridges of your
dreadnoughts.” (Nevinson: “Futurism and Women”, 112; see Marinetti: “Lecture to
the English on Futurism”, 89) He was, however, dismissive of John Ruskin, whom he
referred to as

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-032
 Great Britain 507

that deplorable man, who – I should like to convince you, once and for all – is utterly ridiculous.
With his morbid dream of the primitive, agrarian life, with his nostalgia for Homeric cheeses and
age-old “whirling spindles”, and his hatred of machines, of steam and electricity, with his mania
for ancient simplicity, he resembles a man who, after attaining complete physical maturity, still
wants to sleep in a cradle and be suckled at his decrepit old nurse’s breast, so as to regain the
mindlessness of his infancy. (Marinetti: “Lecture to the English on Futurism”, 93)

Perhaps aware of the low reputation of the Italian male in the United Kingdom,
Marinetti then attacked the vitality of contemporary young Englishmen, boldly
asserting that

nearly all of them, at some time or other, are homosexual. This perfectly respectable preference
of theirs stems from some sort of intensification of camaraderie and friendship, in the realm of
athletic sports, before they reach the age of thirty – that age of work and order in which they
suddenly return from Sodom to become engaged to some impudent young hussy. (Marinetti:
“Lecture to the English on Futurism”, 91)

Marinetti concluded his fiery peroration by informing his audience: “So there, I’ve told
you very briefly what we think of England and the English. And now must I listen to the
polite reply that I guess is already taking shape on your lips? Without doubt, you wish
to put a stop to my impoliteness by telling me all the good things you believe about Italy
and the Italians... Well, no thanks. I don’t want to listen to you.” (Nevinson: “Futurism
and Women”, 112) Reflecting on Marinetti’s lecture, Margaret Nevinson conceded that he
had been a most invigorating speaker; however, as a feminist, suffragette and mother of
two, she could not approve of Marinetti’s vision of “a machine-governed and womanless
world in which even the human race may be generated by mechanism, and where every-
body will be of masculine gender” (Nevinson: “Futurism and Women”, 112).

The first Futurist exhibition in London, 1912

The first exhibition of Futurist art in the United Kingdom, some thirty-five paintings in
total, was held in March 1912 at the Sackville Gallery in central London (see Pezzini:
“The 1912 Futurist Exhibition at the Sackville Gallery, London”). It generated enor-
mous press coverage and made Marinetti immensely impressed with the extensive
power of the British popular press. Much of this coverage of Futurism was mocking
and puzzled; one newspaper condemned these “crazy exploding pictures by ‘Art
Anarchists’ ” (Hind: “Daily Chronicle”, 5). Severini’s The Dance of the Pan-Pan at the
Monico was likened to “an artistic bomb. Who throws bombs? Why, anarchists of
course …” (Harrison: “The New Terror”, 2). In that pillar of the establishment opinion,
The Times, an editorial (probably by Arthur Clutton-Brock) airily concluded: “The
anarchical extravagance of the Futurists must deprive the movement of the sympathy
of all reasonable men.” ([Anon.]: “The Aims of Futurism”, 2)
508 Jonathan Black

Some influential voices were prepared to detect something valuable in the exhib-
its, for example, Walter Richard Sickert, veteran painter and a founding member of
the Camden Town Group (Wees: Vorticism and the English Avant-garde, 94). Marinetti
gave the impression he was entranced by London’s bustling energy. At the Bechstein
Hall, on 19 March 1912, he both praised and damned the English, just as he had done
two years earlier at the Lyceum Club. On one hand he was impressed by England’s
“brutality and arrogance” ([Anon.]: “ ‘Futurist’ Leader in London”, 1) and yet was also
repelled by “this nation of sycophants and snobs, enslaved by old, worm-eaten tradi-
tions, social conventions and Romanticism” (Wees: Vorticism and the English Avant-
garde, 96).
Boccioni also looked on the English with a rather jaundiced eye. On 15 March
1912, he wrote to a friend in Milan, Vico Baer, that “London is beautiful, monstrous,
elegant, well-fed, well dressed but has brains as heavy as steaks. The home interiors
are magnificent; there’s cleanliness, honesty, calm, order, but at the bottom of the
matter the people are idiots or semi-idiots. [...] What does it matter if one day you
will dig up from under the rubble of London intact raincoats and ledgers without
inkblots?” (Boccioni: Lettere futuriste, 37–38)
Marinetti, with his habitual acuity, was quick to grasp that New York rather
than London was the true city of the future. Indeed, some of those commenting
on the lectures that Marinetti gave in London in March–April 1912 wrote that
his vision of Futurism seemed more applicable to an American conception of
modernity and technological progress. After hearing Marinetti’s talk, given in
French, at the Bechstein Hall on 19 March 1912, a correspondent wrote in The
Times two days later that Marinetti’s “ideal world of the future showed a place
so stripped of all tenderness and beauty that […] it would be like New York at its
worst.” ([Anon.]: “The Aims of Futurism”, 2) Often though, Futurism was criti-
cized precisely for not being ‘Anglo-Saxon’ and for being a tempestuous, unre-
liable race with a propensity for trying to assassinate their King (see [Anon.]:
“Attempted Assassination of King Victor.”], in reference to the murder of King
Umberto I in 1900, and for making a mess of defeating the sick man of Europe,
the Ottoman Empire (Wheatcroft: Infidels, 33, in reference to the Italo-Turkish
War of 1911–1912).
Some eight months after the Futurist exhibition had closed at the Sackville
Gallery, Nevinson’s father, the journalist and war correspondent Henry Nevinson
(1856–1941), encountered Marinetti while covering the early stages of the First Balkan
War in Stara Zagota on Turkish territory, recently occupied by the Bulgarians (John:
War, Journalism and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century, 130). To an audience of
stranded and startled journalists, Marinetti gave an impromptu performance of an
early version of his poem The Battle of Adrianople, and Henry Nevinson was greatly
impressed. Two years later he was to write that Marinetti had “burst like a shell in my
life” (Henry W. Nevinson in the Newark Evening News, 17 January 1914, quoted in Cork:
Vorticism and Abstract Art, 226).
 Great Britain 509

Severini in London, 1913

In April 1913 it would be Henry Nevinson who, on encountering Gino Severini – who
was in London to promote his solo exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery – would invite
the painter home for dinner (Walsh: Hanging A Rebel, 66). It was at the Nevinsons’
house on Downside Crescent, Belsize Park, that Severini met C.R.W. Nevinson –
known to his family as ‘Richard’ (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 54). Richard Nevinson and
Severini seem to have immediately hit it off. Within a few days of Severini’s dining at
the Nevinson family home, Richard was taking the Italian for motorcycle rides into
the centre of the city (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 55).
Severini, exhibiting some twenty works at the Marlborough Gallery (7 April –
7 May 1913), did his best to court the London popular press. To the Daily Express, he
professed himself entranced by London: “We seek for subjects in landscapes that are
thick with black factory chimneys, in streets that are thick with moving throngs, in
cafes that are thick with the cosmopolitan crowd [...] we understand the lyricism of
electric light, of motor-cars, of locomotives, and of aeroplanes.” He also made a point
of praising “the essentially masculine strength of the English people which ought to
understand our [the Futurist] exaltation of strength and energy [while] the architec-
ture of London expresses the individualism and aristocratic spirit of the Englishman”
(Wees: Vorticism and the English Avant Garde, 97). Severini concluded that he could
only agree with Marinetti’s declaration, made the previous year, that London was
“the Futurist city par excellence” (Wees: Vorticism and the English Avant Garde, 103).
Later in 1913, writing from Paris, Severini informed Marinetti that in London he
had met a number of English artists who seemed intrigued by Futurism. They were
led by Richard Nevinson, who had introduced him to other painters such as Percy
Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957), Frederick Etchells (1886–1973) and Edward Wadsworth
(1889–1949). Severini had also encountered the art critic and curator Frank Rutter
(1876–1937) and encouraged the Englishman to plan an exhibition that would contain
not only works by Italian Futurists but also examples of Futurist imagery by British
artists. Rutter’s exhibition, The Post-Impressionists and Futurists, duly opened at the
Doré Galleries on New Bond Street early in October 1913 (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 56).
It contained works by Picasso, Severini, Soffici, Balla, Delaunay and Kandinsky as
well as paintings executed in a Futurist manner by Nevinson and Wadsworth. Among
Nevinson’s six exhibits were The Departure of the Train de Luxe from the Gare St.
Lazare (now lost), which owed a debt to the example of Boccioni’s Farewells series,
and Waiting for the Robert E. Lee (now lost), apparently inspired by an American
ragtime tune then popular but whose execution – incorporating Futurist lines of force
and the jumbled fragments of intelligible reality associated with the concept of ‘sim-
ultaneity’ – was clearly informed by the artist’s knowledge of Severini’s Futurist cel-
ebrations of riotous Parisian night life such as Geroglifico dinamico del Bal Tabarin
(Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin, 1912) and La Danse du “Pan Pan” á Monico
(The Dance of the Pan-Pan at the “Monico”, 1909–1911). Wadsworth submitted a now
510 Jonathan Black

lost Omnibus (1913) which appears to have been informed by an appreciation of Carrà
and Soffici, whose woodcuts Wadsworth much admired (Black: Form, Feeling and
Calculation, 16).

Scottish Futurism
As a consequence of the May 1913 exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery and the
October 1913 show at the Doré Galleries, Severini’s Futurism spread beyond London
to other parts of the United Kingdom. In Edinburgh, it electrified the young Orcadian-
Scottish painter Stanley Cursiter (1887–1976) and prompted him to celebrate parts
of his adopted city in a dynamic Futurist manner. Inspired by press photographs of
Severini’s paintings, he created works such as The Sensation of Crossing the Street
(1913, oil on canvas, Aberdeen Art Gallery), set at the busy junction of Shandwick
Place, Lothian Road and Queensferry Street in Edinburgh, and Rain on Princes Street
(1913, oil on canvas, Dundee Art Gallery and Museums), also focussing on a vibrant
part of commercial Edinburgh.
Cursiter was short of money at the time and so poor that he could not afford to
travel to London to see the Futurist exhibition at the Doré Galleries in April 1914. In the
spring of 1914, the management of the Doré Galleries did consider sending a portion of
the Futurist exhibition to a sister gallery in Edinburgh, but nothing came of the plan
owing to a distinct lack of enthusiasm from the gallery in Edinburgh. Indeed, there
were fears that the exhibits would so outrage the locals that they might be physically
attacked (see Archival sources: Nevinson: Letter to Wyndham Lewis, 5 November 1913).

Marinetti in London, 1913

In November 1913, urged on by Severini and having received invitations to visit London
from Richard Nevinson and Wyndham Lewis, Marinneti arrived in the city to further
promote the cause of Futurism. On 16 November, he lectured and performed excerpts
from Zang Tumb Tuuum as well as other ‘dynamic poems’ at the Cave of the Golden
Calf, an avant-garde night club established just off Regent Street in June 1912 by Frida
Strindberg (1872–1943). On 18 November, he could be seen at the Poetry Bookshop in
Holborn and on 20 November in the Doré Galleries. After having experienced Marinetti
performing at the Cave of the Golden Calf, Wyndham Lewis wrote to a friend: “It’s a
pity you didn’t come along last night [to the Cave …] Marinetti declaimed some pecu-
liarly blood-thirsty concoctions with great dramatic force [...] He will be lecturing
there again soon and [...] will no doubt be well worth hearing.” (Wees: Vorticism and
the English Avant-garde, 98) A few days later, Edward Marsh, a well-known patron of
the arts who had helped organize Marinetti’s appearance at the Poetry Club, wrote to
 Great Britain 511

his friend Rupert Brooke that Marinetti was “beyond doubt an extraordinary man, full
of force and fire, with a surprising gift of turgid lucidity [...] and full of [...] a foaming
flood of indubitable half-truths [...] his readings were about on the level of a very good
farm-yard imitation – a supreme music hall turn.” (Wees: Vorticism and the English
Avant-garde, 99) Referring to the English musichall, Marsh was perhaps aware that
portions of Marinetti’s Il teatro di varietà (The Variety Theatre Manifesto, 1913) had
been published on 21 November 1913 under the heading “The Meaning of the Music-
Hall. By the Only Intelligible Futurist”, in the mass circulation newspaper, The Daily
Mail. During the same week, the Imagist poet Richard Aldington noted in the pages
of The New Freewoman that Marinetti had been about in London reading his latest
poems: “London is vaguely alarmed and wondering whether it ought to laugh, or not
[...] It is amazing and amusing to a glum Anglo-Saxon to watch Mr. Marinetti’s prodi-
gious gestures [he is] a much better man than the bourgeois [...] who grin at him when
he reads.” (Wees: Vorticism and the English Avant-garde, 99)
Wyndham Lewis and Richard Nevinson invited Marinetti to attend, as guest of
honour, at a celebratory dinner. This was held at the fashionable Florence Restaurant,
Rupert Street, Soho, on 18 November 1913 (Walsh: Hanging a Rebel, 71). Nevinson
later recalled the occasion, attended by some twenty-six people, as an

extraordinary affair [...] Marinetti recited a poem about the siege of Adrianople, with various
kinds of onomatopoeic noises and crashes in free verse [...] while all the time a band downstairs
played ‘You made me love you, I didn’t want to do it.’ It was grand, if incoherent [...] It certainly
was a funny meal. Most people had come to laugh, but there were few who were not overwhel-
med by the dynamic personality and declamatory gifts of the Italian propagandist. (Nevinson:
Paint and Prejudice, 77)

There can be no doubt that Nevinson had been greatly impressed by Marinetti, as in
the following year he produced a striking portrait of the Italian, in gouache and ink,
his domed forehead and trademark bow-tie fused with the dynamism and drama of
a great metropolis with its imposing industrial buildings and tall factory chimneys.

Possibilities for English Futurism, 1913–1914

According to Nevinson, Marinetti unveiled at the dinner in Florence Restaurant his
plans to launch an English chapter of the Futurist movement. Indeed, the day after
the event, Nevinson wrote to Lewis, half in jest, that “I had quite a great deal of diffi-
culty in preventing Marinetti from yet again expounding [...] his philanthropic desire
to present us to Europe and be our continental guide.” (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 63)
Marinetti’s wish to form those artists in London who had displayed an interest in
Futurism into a band of English Futurists under his general direction thereby inad-
vertently laid the seed for the future repudiation of the movement by a majority among
512 Jonathan Black

that same small group of self-consciously avant-garde British artists. At the time,
Wadsworth (from West Yorkshire) and the half-American but older and well-travelled
Lewis rather bridled at the prospect of being seen to ‘take orders’ from and ‘follow
the direction’ of Marinetti, an Italian, as undoubted ‘chief’ of the European Futurist
movement. Then there was the factor that neither Lewis nor Wadsworth found it easy
to take Marinetti as a person all that seriously (see Edward Wadsworth’s letter to
Wyndham Lewis, 25 February 1914, in Wadsworth: Edward Wadsworth, 49).
Still, when Lewis, Wadsworth, Nevinson and others established the Rebel Art
Centre on Great Ormond Street in March 1914, Marinetti was invited to speak there
about Futurism (Walsh: Hanging a Rebel, 71). Nevinson indicated his continued
adherence to Futurism in a quarter of the works exhibited in the inaugural exhibi-
tion of the London Group, early in March 1914. It included the now lost oil paintings
The Non-Stop (inspired by a trip on the northern line of the London underground
railway via Severini’s painting of the French Metro Nord-Sud): The Arrival (1913–1914,
oil on canvas, Tate, London); another image of a harbour, Le Vieux Port (1913, oil on
canvas, Government Art Collection), and a charcoal drawing, The Strand (1914, Private
Collection), celebrating the London thoroughfare thronged with motorbuses and
taxis (see Fry: “The London Group”). In the same exhibition, Wadsworth exhibited a
now lost oil painting, Radiation (1914, oil on canvas, whereabouts unknown), which
suggests his continuing awareness of Severini and Boccioni (Black: Form, Feeling and
Calculation, 162). However, Wadsworth’s other works, as well as those submitted by
Lewis, indicate a growing interest in exploring geometrical abstraction and left no
room for the intelligible fragments of reality that were still retained in most Futurist
paintings.
Although formally moving away from Futurism, up until the end of May 1914 Lewis
often wrote very positively about Futurism and Marinetti, whom Lewis, in an article
for the New Weekly in May 1914, dubbed admiringly “the intellectual Cromwell of our
time” (Lewis: “A Man of the Week”, 328). Lewis frankly acknowledged in the article
that “England has need of these foreign auxiliaries [the Futurists] to put her energies
to right and restore order” (Lewis: “A Man of the Week”, 328). He was, however, at
pains to remind his readers that “Futurism is largely the produce of Anglo-Saxon civ-
ilisation. As modern life is the invention of the English, they should have something
profounder to say on it than anyone else.” (Lewis: “A Man of the Week”, 329)

Second Futurist Exhibition in London, 1914

By the time this article had been published, a second Futurist Group exhibition had
opened in London, this time at the invitation of Frank Rutter, at the Doré Galleries
(13–30 April 1914). The exhibition, which alongside Boccioni, Severini, Luigi Russolo
and Carlo Carrà, included for the first time in the United Kingdom works by Ardengo
 Great Britain 513

Soffici and Giacomo Balla, caused even more furore than the first, and reviews were
considerably more hostile than they had been two years previously. The Daily Express
dismissed the exhibits as “lunacy masquerading as art” ([Anon.]: “Futurist Stunts”, 4).
Particular exception was taken to the sculpture by Boccioni and Marinetti’s Self-Portrait
made from a clothes brush, matches and cigarette case and postcards hanging from
the ceiling of the Doré Galleries ([Anon.]: “The Futurist Exhibition”, 6 ). Near abstract
canvases by Balla were seen in London for the first time, for example, Disgregamento
d’auto in corsa (Dynamic Decomposition of a Motor in Rapid Movement, 1914),
Successioni luminose x spostamenti (Luminous Successions x Displacements, 1913),
Linee andamentali + successioni dinamiche (Walking Lines + Dynamic Successions,
1913) and Studio per materialità di luci x velocità (Dynamism of Light, 1913; see the
catalogue Exhibition of the Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors, 30 and
[Anon.]: “Futurism at the Doré Galleries”). They left a very favourable impression on
Lewis and Wadsworth (see Black: Form, Feeling and Calculation, 23), and Nevinson,
inspired by Boccioni’s Fusione di una testa e di una finestra (Fusion of a Head and
Casement Window, 1912), produced his own ‘dynamic head’, which he entitled The
Automobilist when exhibited at the Friday Club in February 1915.
On the evening of the opening of the Futurist exhibition, Marinetti recited in a
‘Dynamic and Synoptic’ manner his poem, Il bombardamento di Adrianopoli (The
Bombardment of Adrianople, 1912), aided by Nevinson who later recalled: “I was
given a drum to bang in order the enhance the dynamic qualities of his verse and,
under his direction, I made a great deal of noise and enjoyed myself.” (Nevinson: Paint
and Prejudice, 82) Marinetti, with a large wooden mallet in each hand, struck a desk
to simulate the staccato rattle of machine gun fire. Henry Nevinson wrote at the time
that Marinetti’s performance was “superb [...] No Englishman could have touched it.
It overwhelmed me. It was [...] terrific.” (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 73) Edward Marsh,
another observer of the performance, was less impressed by Marinetti’s dexterity with
mallets than with the novelty of his “moving through the hall with dynamic gestures
[...] Three blackboards had been placed at various intervals in the room and he alter-
nately walked and ran to them [...] drawing diagrams, theorems, equations and [...]
‘Words in Freedom’ he was reciting, so that the audience had to keep swinging around
to follow the rhythm of his words.” (Edward Marsh’s letter to Rupert Brooke, of April
1914, quoted in Ross: The Georgian Revolt, 37 and Wees: Vorticism and the English
Avant Garde, 99)
For a while, Futurism became such a ‘craze’ in London that one could buy Futurist
style socks, pyjamas, pillowcases, wall paper and painted pottery cat figures. Some
of the more populist newspapers, which would be called tabloids today, anxiously
asked their readers: “Would you allow your daughter to marry a Futurist?”, the Daily
Express asked on 13 June 1914 ([Anon.]: “Futurism in London”). Once again, critics
aired a myriad of offensive stereotypes at the Futurists who were frequently denied
any possible legitimacy on account of their Italian origin. Lewis and Wadsworth may
have been having growing doubts about the wisdom of their continued association
514 Jonathan Black

with Futurism, but Nevinson at least seemed more committed to the Futurist cause
than ever. Early in June 1914, at the Allied Artists Association Annual Exhibition,
Nevinson exhibited (with the support of the association’s founder, Frank Rutter) a
self-proclaimed ‘Futurist Masterpiece’, catchily entitled Zang Tum Tum, Tum-Tiddly-
Um-Tum-Pom-Pom (now lost) in homage to Marinetti’s recently published book, Zang
tumb tuuum: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912. Parole in libertà (Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianople,
October 1912. Words-in-Freedom, 1914). The vast canvas, painted in oils with the addi-
tion of confetti, sequins and sand, had been inspired by the raucous uninhibited work-
ing-class crowds that packed Hampstead Heath, situated not far from the Nevinson
family home, every Spring and August Bank Holiday (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 73).
Among the swirling mass emerge recognizable faces, arms, bodies and in particular
a huge, gross laughing female face, crowned by a feathered hat, which surely ref-
erenced Boccioni’s Idolo moderno (Modern Idol, 1911) – a controversial image when
exhibited at the Sackville Gallery show in March 1912.
The manifesto Vital English Art named both Marinetti and C.R.W. Nevinson as
authors; however, Marinetti claimed that he had conceived it entirely and Nevinson
had only co-signed the document (see Marinetti’s letter to Mario Carli of 20 July 1914,
in Marinetti and Carli: Lettere futuriste tra arte e politica, 42). When the manifesto was
printed on the arts page of the Observer newspaper on 7 June 1914, it attracted the pre-
dictable ire not only of conservative critics, but also from Lewis and some of his allies,
such as the French-born sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who dismissed it as “tummy
rot” and frivolous Futurist tomfoolery (quoted in O’Keeffe: Gaudier-Brzeska, 225). This
“Manifesto of English Futurism” (Walsh: Hanging a Rebel, 86) poured scorn on what
was portrayed as England’s hopelessly backward and reactionary culture, enmeshed
in debilitating Victorian hypocrisy and sickening sentimentality (Nevinson: Paint and
Prejudice, 79). Drawing upon the language of Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism, the manifesto damned the “mania for immortality. A masterpiece must dis-
appear with its author” and refers to “the ancestors of our Italian Art” who have “built
for us a prison of timidity, of imitation and of plagiarism” (Marinetti and Nevinson:
“Vital English Art”, 80). They warn: “Take care children. Mind the motors. Don’t go
too quick. Wrap yourselves well up. Mind the draughts. Be careful of the lightning.”
(Marinetti and Nevinson: “Vital English Art”, 80) To which the Futurists respond:
“Forward! Hurrah for motors! Hurrah for speed! Hurrah for draughts! Hurrah for light-
ning!” The manifesto also urged the creation of

an English Art that is strong, virile and anti-sentimental. 2.- English artists strengthen their
Art by a recuperative optimism, a fearless desire of adventure, a heroic instinct of discovery, a
worship of strength and a physical and moral courage, all sturdy virtues of the English race [...]
4.- To create a powerful advance guard, which alone can save English art, now threatened by the
traditional conservatism of Academies and the habitual indifference of the public [...] 5.- A rich
and powerful country like England ought without question to support, defend and glorify its
advance guard of artists, no matter how advanced or extreme, if it intends to deliver its Art from
inevitable death. (Marinetti and Nevinson: “Vital English Art”, 80)
 Great Britain 515

Futurism and the emergence of Vorticism

Probably inadvertently, the manifesto Vital English Art, as printed, gave the impression
that it was endorsed by members of the Rebel Art Centre. Lewis and its fellow artists
could not agree to this and quickly despatched letters of repudiation to the Observer
and The New Weekly (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 77). Meanwhile, on 11 June 1914, the
Daily Express ran a story about Blast, a forthcoming arts magazine and platform for a
new and specifically English avant-garde movement to be called ‘Vorticism’, serving
as an English parallel to Cubism, Expressionism and Imagism and intending to deliver
a death blow to Impressionism and Futurism.
When Marinetti and Nevinson attempted to lecture about Futurism at the Doré
Galleries, on the evening of 12 June 1914, they were shouted down by a group within
the audience who were shortly to emerge as the core Vorticists: Lewis, Wadsworth,
Ezra Pound (1885–1972), Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891–1915) and the critic Thomas
Ernest Hulme (1883–1917). What Lewis particularly objected to in Nevinson’s talk was
his claim that Britain could only avoid being overtaken as a great industrial power
by Imperial Germany and the United States if its people were to embrace the dyna-
mism of Futurism ([Anon.]: “A Lecture on Futurism”, 12). A fortnight earlier, Lewis
wondered in the New Weekly what a nation that had produced H.G. Wells – author of
The Time Machine (1895) and The War in the Air (1908) – could possibly learn from
such a neophyte industrial power as Italy? (Lewis: “A Man of the Week: Marinetti”,
328) Lewis further asserted that “Futurism is largely Anglo-Saxon civilisation … As
modern life is the invention of the English, they should have something profounder to
say on it that anyone else” (Lewis: “A Man of the Week: Marinetti”, 329). He conceded
that Marinetti may indeed be “the intellectual Cromwell of our time”, but still, the
Italian betrayed a risible “Latin childishness towards machinery” (Lewis: “A Man of
the Week: Marinetti”, 329).
Within a month, Lewis had launched Vorticism, his own experimental art move-
ment committed to all that was English, dynamic and technologically modern. In the
first issue of Blast, he airily dismissed Futurism: “AUTOMOBILISM (Marinetteism)
bores us. […] The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of
1890 and the realist of 1870.” (Lewis: “Long Live the Vortex!”, 8) By contrast, England
was presented as an “Industrial island machine” (Lewis: “Bless England”, 11), exem-
plar of “the modern world,” which was due “almost entirely to Anglo-Saxon genius
[...] Machinery, trains, steam-ships, all that distinguishes externally our time, came
far more from here than [from] anywhere else.” (Lewis: “Manifesto VI”, 39) Lewis
proceeded to haughtily define Futurism as “a picturesque, superficial and romantic
rebellion of young Milanese painters against Academism.” (Lewis: “Melodrama of
Modernity”, 143)
Lewis’s dislike for Marinetti and Futurism further intensified when Vorticism was
launched in the British press, early in July 1914, and was commonly interpreted as an
English offshoot and by-product of Futurism. Reviewing Blast on 5 July 1914, the critic P.G.
516 Jonathan Black

Konody further outraged Lewis by stating, quite accurately, that the magazine would not
have been possible without the example set by Futurist publications: “Without Marinetti
‘Blast’ would have been inconceivable.” (Konody: “Art and Artists: ‘BLAST’”, 12)

C.R.W. Nevinson, the English Futurist

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson seems to have been genuinely surprised that
Vital English Art had so upset Lewis and his allies, although he did rather bask in
being labelled “the eminent English Futurist” by G. K. Chesterton in the mass circula-
tion magazine, The Illustrated London News (Chesterton: “Our Note Book”, 44). Two
days later, he was at pains to write to Lewis, more in apparent sorrow than in anger,
that there was much more to Futurism than crass ‘automobilism’; the movement was
capable of change and promised a visually stimulating development. In his view,
Futurist aesthetics had developed significantly from the 1912 show at the Sackville
Gallery, as could be witnessed in Balla’s paintings exhibited at the Doré Galleries in
April 1914 (see Archival sources: Nevinson: Letter to Wyndham Lewis, 13 July 1914).
Indeed, Lewis conceded in the first issue of Blast that he was rather impressed by
Balla, whom he defined as “not a Futurist in the Automobilist sense. He is a rather
violent and geometric sort of Expressionist” (Lewis: “Melodrama of Modernity”, 144).
Given that Nevinson was widely identified as the sole English Futurist, adher-
ent of a movement that had proclaimed in its Foundation and Manifesto that war
was “the sole cleanser of the world” (Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism”, 14). Richard Nevinson felt that it was incumbent upon him to be seen
to be ‘doing his bit’ and volunteer for service in the nation’s military effort in the
First World War. However, due to a bout of rheumatic fever and recurrent illness as
a schoolboy, Nevinson’s health was not robust and he was twice turned down as a
volunteer (Nevinson: Paint and Prejudice, 94). He was certainly interested in painting
the novel sights of wartime London in a Futurist manner, for example the stimulating
oil painting, The First Searchlights at Charing Cross (1914–1915, oil on canvas, Leeds
City Art Gallery), which greatly impressed P.G. Konody when he saw it at the Friday
Club in February 1915 (Konody: “Art and Artists: Futurism at the Friday Club”). In
September 1914, Nevinson took heart from the assertion in Colour magazine that “the
explosive style of the Futurists is eminently suited to the character of modern warfare
and battle subjects are the very things that would appeal to their anarchic views of
life. The Futurists should give us the true expression of War in Art.” (Quoted in Walsh:
Hanging a Rebel, 95) However, by late October 1914 he was despondent; his career
seemed to be going nowhere and his faith in Futurism had begun to seriously waver –
Italy was as yet still neutral and did not look as if it was going to join the fray anytime
soon. He even told his father that he was prepared to renounce Futurism and start his
own art movement to be called ‘Mentalitism’ (see Henry W. Nevinson Diary Entry for
 Great Britain 517

25 October 1914, quoted in Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 94). With the help of his father,
Nevinson was able to volunteer for service with an ambulance unit established by the
Quakers, called ‘The Friends Ambulance Unit’. He served with them in Belgium and
France from mid-November 1914 to the end of January 1915 (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson,
95–97). Initially, he tended French and German wounded found abandoned in a series
of railway carriages at Dunkirk train station. This was a rude awakening to the horror
of what modern weaponry could inflict on the vulnerable human body. He drove a
motor ambulance picking up French and Belgian military and civilian wounded from
the much shelled southern Belgian city of Ypres. In all he spent about ten days driving
his motor ambulance before the back of it was demolished by a shell. In December
1914, he sent Marinetti a photograph-postcard of himself standing by his yet intact
ambulance and indicated with dramatic strokes of the pen which portions had been
completely destroyed by the shell and which riddled with needle sharp fragments
any one of which could have killed him had it reached him in the driving seat (Walsh:
C.R.W. Nevinson, 95–96).

C.R.W. Nevinson and English Futurism at war,

1914–1915
Nevinson later wrote that an attack of rheumatism in his hands had prevented him
from driving his ambulance any more. At the end of January 1915, he returned to
London, where he painted, in a Futurist manner, the dramatic oil painting, Taube
Pursued by Commander Samson (Royal Air Force Museum, Hendon). This along with
the superb Returning to the Trenches (National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) and the
grim Ypres After the Second Bombardment (Graves Art Gallery, Sheffield) would be
hailed as masterpieces by many critics when included in the second exhibition of
the London Group, held in the Goupil Gallery in March 1915 (see the review [Anon.]:
“Futurists and War”, 7).
Even those who had taken Nevinson to task for his prewar Futurism now praised
him as the young British artist who had devised the formula for accurately depict-
ing the reality of modern total war, not only the new military technology in Taube
Pursued by Commander Samson, but also the mass mobilization in Returning to the
Trenches as well the damage caused by modern artillery in Ypres after the Second
Bombardment (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 113–114). His work struck many observers as
so much more intelligible and relevant to the wartime atmosphere than the baffling
geometrical abstractions of Vorticist images included in the London Group exhibi-
tion by Lewis, Wadsworth and Etchells (see Clutton-Brock: “Junkerism in Art”, 5). By
comparison, even Nevinson’s Futurism looked the epitome of intellectual sanity and
clarity, or “a clever compromise between dynamic art [...] and realism” ([Anon.]: “The
Art of Coloured Stripes”, 11).
518 Jonathan Black

Nevinson took this opportunity to promote Futurism to a wider British public

through a variety of publications. He asserted to the Daily Express that although he
could not agree with the Futurist worship of war, “our Futurist technique is the only pos-
sible medium to express the crudeness, violence and brutality of the emotions seen and
felt on the present battlefields of Europe.” (Nevinson: “The Unconscious Humorists”)
In May 1915, Henry Nevinson observed his son painting the exuberant Bursting
Shell (Henry W. Nevinson Diary entry for 20 May 1915 in Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson,
128). When the work was exhibited in November 1915 at the New English Art Club,
Charles Lewis Hind likened it to a “Neapolitan ice cream tormented by radium” (Hind:
“Futurist Painters”, 4). However, to Hind, Nevinson’s experiments with Futurism
and Cubism had lost something of the sting of their novelty and were well on their
way to becoming yet another convention (Hind: “The London Group”). Later, in May
1915, Nevinson tried to return to his ambulance unit but was rejected for over-stay-
ing his leave. At the beginning of June 1915, he volunteered as a private in the Royal
Army Medical Corps at the Third London General Hospital in the London borough of
Wandsworth (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 120). A few days later, his sombrely coloured
Cubo-Futurist Searchlights (Manchester City Art Gallery) was one of six works he
exhibited as a ‘Futurist Independent’ in the one and only Vorticist exhibition held
at the Doré Galleries in June 1915. The following month, his pen and ink drawing of
Returning to the Trenches was reproduced in the second and what transpired to be
the last issue of Blast. Even Lewis paid reluctant tribute to the power of Nevinson’s
wartime Futurism, perhaps ironically saluting him in the magazine as “Marinetti’s
solitary English disciple” (Lewis: “The Six Hundred, Verestchagin and Uccello”, 25).
In November 1915, Nevinson secured ten days precious leave to get married. He
later claimed that during the last two days of his honeymoon, perhaps to the irrita-
tion of his new wife, he painted two war scenes that still define the Great War to this
day: La Mitrailleuse (Tate Britain, London) and Deserted Trench on the Yser (Private
Collection). Neither were executed in his accustomed Futurist style; the former work
suggested that he was now pursuing a form of simplified Cubo-Futurist manner, and
the latter represented a variant of nineteenth-century Japanese wood block prints
à la Hiroshige and Hokusai. To a degree, the manner in which the French machine
gunners are depicted mirrors the way in which Severini presented French soldiers in
action in canvases such as Train Blindé (Armoured Train in Action, 1915), shown at the
Galerie Boutet de Monvel in Paris (1re exposition futuriste d’art plastique de la guerre et
d’autres œuvres antérieures, 15 January – 1 February 1916).

Nevinson moves away from Futurism, 1916–1917

Nevinson exhibited La Mitrailleuse in March 1916 at the Allied Artists Association
along with two oil paintings, Night + Light + Crowd and Violence: An Abstraction,
 Great Britain 519

which contemporary newspaper descriptions suggest were executed in a more overtly

Futurist style but are now lost (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 135). La Mitrailleuse impressed
many observers: the painter Walter Sickert, who had been prepared to give Futurism
the benefit of the doubt before the war but now felt that as a style it no longer had a
future, described the canvas as “the most authoritative and concentrated utterance
on the war in the history of painting” (Sickert: “O Matre Pulchra”, 35).
It was suggested in the British press with increasing frequency that Nevinson was
now attempting to place some distance between himself and Futurism ([Anon.]: “War
Pictures”). The artist, normally never slow to defend himself in print, remained quiet
on the question, although he was still, albeit only intermittently, in touch with Severini.
Indeed, he was hoping to invite the Italian to an exhibition of recent Modernist art
from Paris he was planning to hold in central London. Unfortunately, this exhibi-
tion, which was to include Futurist works, never took place (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson,
153). In his own first solo exhibition, held at the Leicester Galleries from September
to November 1916, no new Futurist work was included. In the catalogue to the show,
Nevinson wrote a “Note by the Artist” in which he declared that he now reserved the
right to paint in the style that seemed fitting for the subject matter (Nevinson: “Note
by the Artist”, 7). However, as yet, he did not renounce his attachment to Futurism.
Indeed, in work that followed this exhibition, flashes of Futurism still appeared in his
output, for example in the drawing, Temperature 102.4, reproduced in the Gazette of
the Third London General in March 1917, which depicted what it had felt like for the
artist to be in a hospital ward at Wandsworth suffering from a hallucination-induc-
ing high fever. The following month, he painted Swooping Down on a Hostile Plane
with some diluted Futurist touches in the treatment of the British biplane diving to
attack a German Taube monoplane. The painting was quickly purchased by Sir Alfred
Mond, recently appointed first chairman of the new Imperial War Museum, who then
donated it as one of the first works to enter the Museum’s art collection (see Archival
sources: Nevinson: Letter to Sir Alfred Mond, 30 April 1917; quoted in Harries: The
War Artists, 39 and Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 156). Shortly thereafter, Nevinson was
appointed an official war artist working for the Department of Information and spent
July 1917 in France.
When he was given his new charge, his employers had been hoping that Nevinson
would paint “things full of violence and terror” (see Archival sources: Masterman:
Letter to John Buchan, 18 May 1917; quoted in Harries: The War Artists, 40). Even a
few thrilling Futurist images would, perhaps, be permissible (Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson,
157). However, they were rather disappointed with what he did eventually produce
back in London during the autumn of 1917. He returned in the main to a form of gritty,
pared-down Realism that harked back to the look of the prewar Camden Town Group.
He painted only one work in his former Futurist style of 1914–1915, an image of a British
soldier throwing a grenade that seems to detonate in the air above him, entitled The
Bomber (Private collection; lithograph from 1918, British Museum, London). While
Nevinson seemed very pleased with this image, Thomas Derrick, a Department of
520 Jonathan Black

Information official, was left cold by it and thought that it would be best for Nevinson
not to undertake any further Futurist experiments (see Archival sources: Derrick:
Letter to C.F.G. Masterman, 16 October 1917; quoted in Harries: The War Artists, 40–41
and Walsh: C.R.W. Nevinson, 161).
Futurism was almost completely absent from the works Nevinson exhibited as
an official war artist at the Leicester Galleries, London in March 1918. In his preface
to the catalogue, he declared: “Since my last exhibition I have experimented with
various styles of painting: I wished to create a distinct method in harmony with each
new picture. I do not believe the same technique can be used to express a quiet static
moonlight night, the dynamic force of a bomber and the restless rhythm of mechani-
cal transport” (Nevinson: “Preface”, 6).
Critics, who in the past never cared much for Nevinson’s Futurism, noted with
considerable relish that he seemed to have abandoned the movement (Walsh: C.R.W.
Nevinson, 166). The artist himself remained silent on the matter, but during the year he
occasionally created works that were executed in his old Futurist manner, such as the
impressive mezzotints Wind (1918) and Limehouse (also known as Southwark, 1918),
as well as a series of four panels in oils entitled The Seasons, exhibited in London at
the London Group in November 1918. Two months later, in January 1919, Nevinson did
formally announce that he had parted company with Futurism, although he took the
opportunity to defend it against the accusation from a Danish Professor that to be a
Futurist automatically indicated that one was mentally ill (Nevinson: “Are Futurists
Mad? Mr. Nevinson Thinks Not”).

Post-war Futurism in the United Kingdom

Futurist elements, from time to time, could be sighted in Nevinson’s compositions, for
example in The Roof Garden (mezzotint, 1919), a lively image of the shadows formed
by a dancer’s legs, or in the lithograph The Great White Way, depicting the stylized
rays of light blazing down on night-time Broadway in a manner that recalls pre-war
Balla. For much of the 1920s, Nevinson eschewed Futurism, although towards the
end of the decade Futurist fragments began to reappear in some images with a lively
contemporary urban setting, such as Amongst The Nerves of the World (1928–1929;
collection: Museum of London), exhibited in October 1930 as his tribute to the
dynamism of Fleet Street, then the heart of the British newspaper industry (Ross:
Twenties London, 10–11) and Any Wintry Afternoon in England (1929–1930; collection:
Manchester City Art Gallery), which was exhibited to considerable acclaim in the
National Society in February 1932 (Knowles and Jeffrey: C.R.W. Nevinson, 50–51).
During this period, he also praised the use of Futurist elements in contemporary
poster design, such as the superimposition and interpenetration of forms, particu-
larly in the designs of artists working for London Underground such as Edward
 Great Britain 521

McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) and Clive Gardiner (1891–1960) (see Black: “Pictures
with a Sting”, 149–153).
By the early 1930s, Nevinson made occasional references to his past adherence to
Futurism, perhaps further damaging its reputation among many of his British readers
by highlighting Marinetti’s involvement in the creation of Fascism in 1919 as well as
the movement’s continued rôle in vividly celebrating the rule of the Duce. However,
he never entirely disowned his past as a Futurist. In May 1931, he described Marinetti
in the Daily Express admiringly as “one of the men who taught me how to live”, along
with Wyndham Lewis, Van Gogh and Sigmund Freud (Nevinson: “These Men Taught
Me How to Live”). Six months later, he justified his joining the Futurist movement in
1914 as an attempt to inject “some much-needed vigour into English Art” and “con-
front the sloppy jabber of Socialists and Victorian sentimentalities” (Nevinson: “From
Paint to White Wash”).
In his autobiography, published in November 1937, Nevinson rather nostalgi-
cally recalled his prewar contacts with Marinetti, for whom he evidently still retained
a degree of admiration and affection. More in sorrow than in condemnation, he
lamented that Marinetti had been “the John the Baptist of the [Fascist] movement”,
while “Futurism was but the candlelight for Fascism” (Nevinson: Paint and Prejudice,
90). He mused: “It is a black thought for me to look back and see that I was associated
with Italian Futurism much as Christianity was quenched by the Spanish Inquisition
[...] Mussolini seized on it and worked his thug will. What a fate for an intellectual
idea!” (Nevinson: Paint and Prejudice, 89)
C.R.W. Nevinson, the last English Futurist, died in October 1946. In his obituaries
there was much discussion of the undoubted merits of his First World War art but
little recognition that some of his most impressive examples of that art had been pro-
duced when he was a committed Futurist ([Anon.]: “Mr. C.R.W. Nevinson: A Versatile
Artist”, 12).

Archival sources
Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney: Letter to John Buchan, 18 May 1917, Department of Art,
Imperial War Museum, London. C.R.W. Nevinson WWI File, 226-A6
Nevinson, C.R.W.: Letter to Sir Alfred Mond, 30 April 1917. Department of Art, Imperial War Museum,
London. C.R.W. Nevinson WWI File, 226-A6.
Nevinson, C.R.W.: Letter to Wyndham Lewis, 5 November 1913. Rare Books and Manuscripts
Collection, Carl A. Kroh Library, Cornell University, Ithaca/NY. Lewis Papers, Folder 134, Box 128,
4612.
Nevinson, C.R.W.: Letter to Wyndham Lewis, 13 July 1914. Rare Books and Manuscripts
Collection, Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University, Ithaca/NY. Lewis Papers, Folder 132,
Box 128, 4612.
Derrick, Thomas: Letter to C.F.G. Masterman, 16 October 1917. Department of Art, Imperial War
Museum, London. C.R.W. Nevinson WWI File, 226-A6.
522 Jonathan Black

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 Great Britain 523

Lewis, Wyndham: “Manifesto VI.” Blast 1 (June 1914): 39–40.

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Wheatcroft, Andrew: Infidels: The Conflict Between Christendom and Islam, 638–2002. London:
Viking, 2003.
524 Jonathan Black

Further reading
Aliaga, Juan Vicente: “La vanguardia beligerante: Demarcaciones de género en el futurismo y el
vorticismo.” J. V. Aliaga: Orden falico: Androcentrismo y violencia de genero en las praticas
artisticas del siglo XX. Madrid: Akal, 2010. 29–66.
Andréoli-de Villers, Jean-Pierre: “Wyndham Lewis e F. T. Marinetti.” Futurismo-oggi 23:9–10
(September–October 1991): 11–17.
Antliff, Mark, and Vivien Greene, eds.: The Vorticists: Rebel Artists in London and New York,
1914–1918. London: Tate Publishing, 2010.
Antliff, Mark, and Scott W. Klein, eds.: Vorticism: New Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013.
Araujo, Anderson: “Blast, Futurism, and the Cultural Mobility of Modernist (Inter)Text.” Massimo
Bacigalupo, and Gregory Dowling, eds.: Ambassadors: American Studies in a Changing World.
Genoa: AISNA-Associazione Italiana di Studi, 2006. 427–437.
Ardizzone, Patrizia: “Futurismo in Inghilterra: Echi sulla stampa inglese, 1910–15.” Rassegna
siciliana di storia e cultura 3:6 (1999): 89–101.
Ardizzone, Patrizia: “II futurismo in Inghilterra: Bibliografia (1910–1915).” Quaderno (Istituto di
Lingue e Lettere Straniere, Facoltà di Lettere, Università di Palermo) 9 (1979): 91–115.
Bacigalupo, Massimo: “Vorticismo e futurismo, 1914–1915.” Leo Lecci, and Manuela Manfredini,
eds.: Prima e dopo il 1909: Riflessioni sul futurismo. Roma: Aracne, 2014. 49–70.
Barassi, Sebastiano, ed.: We the Moderns: Gaudier-Brzeska and the Birth of Modern Sculpture.
Cambridge: Kettle’s Yard, 2007.
Baronti Marchiò, Roberto: “The Vortex in the Machine: Futurism in England.” Günter Berghaus, ed.:
International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000. 100–121.
Baronti Marchiò, Roberto: Il futurismo in Inghilterra: Tra avanguardia e classicismo. Roma: Bulzoni,
1990.
Black, Jonathan: “ ‘A hysterical hulla-bulloo about motor cars’: The Vorticist Critique of Futurism,
1914–1919.” Elza Adamowicz, and Simona Storchi, eds.: Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde
and Its Legacy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 159–175.
Black, Jonathan: C.R.W. Nevinson: The Complete Prints. Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2014.
Brooker, Peter: Bohemia in London: The Social Scene of Early Modernism. London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007.
Buchowska, Dominika, and Steven L. Wright: “The Futurist Invasion of Great Britain, 1910–1914.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012): 201–252.
Buckle, Richard: “Futurism and its Impact on Vorticism.” I.C.S.A.C Cahier (Brussel: Internationaal
Centrum voor Structuuranalyse en Constructivisme) 8–9 (1988): 83–106.
Caruso, Rossella: “La mostra dei futuristi a Londra nel 1912: Recensioni e commenti.” Ricerche di
storia dell’arte 45 (1991): 57–63.
Cianci, Giovanni: “Futurism and Its Impact on Vorticism.” I.C.S.A.C Cahier (Brussel: Internationaal
Centrum voor Structuuranalyse en Constructivisme) (8–9 December 1998): 83–101.
Cianci, Giovanni: “La catalizzazione futurista: La poetica del vorticismo.” G. Cianci, ed.: Modernismo /
modernismi: Dall’avanguardia storica agli anni Trenta e oltre. Milano: Principato, 1991.
156–174.
Cianci, Giovanni: “Un futurismo in panni neoclassici: Sul primo Wyndham Lewis vorticista.” Giovanni
Cianci, ed.: Wyndham Lewis: Letteratura / Pittura. Palermo: Sellerio, 1982. 25–66.
Cianci, Giovanni: “Wyndham Lewis vortico-futurista (1909–1915).” G. Cianci, ed.: Modernismo/
Modernismi: Dall’avanguardia storica agli anni Trenta e oltre. Milano: Principato, 1991.
175–193.
Cianci, Giovanni, ed.: Futurismo / Vorticismo. Palermo: Università di Palermo, 1979.
 Great Britain 525

Cipolla, Pietro: “Futurist Art and Theory in Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist Manifesto ‘Our Vortex’.”
Quaderno (Istituto di Lingue e Lettere Straniere, Facoltà di Lettere, Università di Palermo)
9 (1979): 69–89.
Cohen, Milton A.: “The Futurist Exhibition of 1912: A Model of Prewar Modernism.” The European
Studies Journal 12:2 (1995): 1–31.
Cohen, Milton A.: “The Futurist Traveling Exhibition of 1912.” M. A. Cohen: Movement, Manifesto,
Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910–1914. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004. 15–28.
Corbett, David Peters, ed.: Wyndham Lewis and the Art of Modern War. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998.
Cork, Richard: A Bitter Truth: Avant-garde Art and the Great War. New Haven/CT: Yale University
Press, 1994.
Cork, Richard: Vorticism and Abstract Art in the First Machine Age. Vol. 1–2. London: Fraser, 1976.
Edwards, Paul: “Futurism, Literature and the Market.” Laura Marcus, and Peter Nicholls, eds.: The
Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005. 132–151.
Edwards, Paul: Wyndham Lewis: Art and War. London: Lund Humphries, 1992.
Edwards, Paul: Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2000.
Ferrall, Charles: “ ‘Melodramas of Modernity’: The Interaction of Vorticism and Futurism before the
Great War.” University of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal of the Humanities 63:2 (Winter
1993): 347–368.
Gale, Matthew: “Du futurisme au vorticisme: Un vol de courte durée.” Didier Ottinger, ed.:
Futurisme: Une avant-garde explosive. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2009. 66–75.
Italian edn “Un breve volo: tra futurismo e vorticismo.” Futurismo: Avanguardiavanguardie.
Milano: 5 Continents, 2009. 66–75. English edn “A Short Flight: Between Futurism and
Vorticism.” Didier Ottinger, ed.: Futurism. London: Tate Publishing, 2009. 66–75.
Gąsiorek, Andrzej, Alice Reeve-Tucker, and Nathan Waddell, eds.: Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures
of Modernity. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.
Gioè, Valerio: “Futurism in England: A Bibliography (1910–1915).” Bulletin of Bibliography 44:3
(September 1987): 172–188.
Gioè, Valerio: “Il futurismo in Inghilterra: Bibliografia (1910–15). Supplemento.” Quaderno (Istituto
di Lingue e Lettere Straniere, Facoltà di Lettere, Università di Palermo) 16 (1982): 76–83.
Gough, Paul: A Terrible Beauty: British Artists in the First World War. Bristol: Sansom, 2010.
Gruetzner Robins, Anna: “The Futurist Exhibition.” A. Gruetzner Robins, ed.: Modern Art in Britain
1910–1914. London: Merrell Holberton, 1997. 56–58.
Harrison, Charles: “Cubism, Futurism, Vorticism.” C. Harrison: English Art and Modernism,
1900–1939. London: Lane, 1981. 2nd edn New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 1994. 75–114.
Jaffe, Aaron: Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Jameson, Frederic: “Wyndham Lewis as Futurist.” Hudson Review 26:2 (Summer 1973): 295–330.
Konody, Paul George: Modern War Paintings by C.R.W. Nevinson. London: Richards, 1916.
Lang, Frederick K.: “II ruolo di Marinetti nella creazione del modernismo inglese.” Luigi Sansone, ed.:
F. T. Marinetti = Futurismo. Milano: Motta, 2009. 133–145.
Lawton, Anna Maltese: “Marinetti in Inghilterra: Scritti inediti.” Il Verri, series 5, 10 (June 1975):
138–149.
Lemaire, Gérard Georges: “L’ Invasion futuriste de la Grande-Bretagne.” Erik Pesenti, ed.: Futurisme:
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526 Jonathan Black

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Chris Michaelides
33 Greece
Introductory remarks
Futurism, like most other avant-garde movements of the first half of the twentieth
century, was not influential in Greece, where its presence was only intermittently felt
and mostly limited to literature rather than the visual arts. Surrealism alone had an
impact in Greece, both literary and artistic, as can be seen, for example, in the work
of the poet and painter Nikos Engonopoulos (1907–1985). Whatever interest there
was in Futurism in Greece, it came to be associated exclusively with Marinetti and
can be roughly delineated by the first reactions to the Futurist manifesto of 1909 and
Marinetti’s visit to Greece in 1933.

Translations of the 1909 Futurist manifesto

There were six different Greek translations of the Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism or of its eleven-point programme, all published between 1909 and 1912. The
first of these was in “Hē prokēryxis tou Mellontismou” (The Proclamation of Futurism),
an article in the daily newspaper Empros (Forward) on Wednesday, 11 February 1909
(i. e. 24 February in the Gregorian calendar – the Julian calendar was used in Greece
until 1923), just four days after the manifesto’s publication in Le Figaro. It was the
work of Iōannēs Kondylakēs (1861–1920), a writer best known for the popular novel Ho
Patouchas (Patouchas: The Big-footed Greek, 1892), but also a prolific newspaper col-
umnist who usually wrote under the pseudonym of Diavatēs. It announced the foun-
dation of mellontismos (as Futurism was initially called in Greece, from the adjective
mellontikós, pertaining to the future) “by the young Italian and French poet Marinetti,
and his numerous supporters. The theories of this school, as our readers can judge
from the present proclamation, surpass in daring any present or past theory”. This
short introduction was followed by a translation of the eleven programmatic points
of Futurism.
Kondylakēs was an experienced translator of French texts; he had already trans-
lated into Greek Émile Zola’s La Débâcle (1892) and Théophile Gautier’s Le Capitaine
Fracasse (1894). He returned to the subject of the mellontistes in an article of 21
February, in which he described the new ideals of strength and violence among the
younger generation of Italian poets, ideals that older poets found perplexing and
astonishing. He also reminded his readers of Marinetti’s recent manifesto and likened
its violent and revolutionary tone to the proclamation of a conqueror as opposed to
the melancholy poetic statements of faith of the Decadent and Symbolist schools.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-033
528 Chris Michaelides

Evidently familiar with another French work by Marinetti, La Conquête des Étoiles
(The Conquest of the Stars, 1902), he ended his article with an ironic flourish,
saying that only poets can conquer the stars as they usually live in garrets. In “Hoi
Oneireuomenoi” (The Dreamers), published the following day, Kondylakēs reported
information from an anonymous source that there were four or five mellontistes (i. e.
Futurists) in Greece; Kondylakēs, unfortunately, did not mention their names. He also
referred to a recent article in the Kölnische Zeitung, part of which was later reprinted
in the Futurism issue of Marinetti’s magazine Poesia (no. 3–6 [April–July 1909],
32–33), which claimed that the Germans were the inventors of Futurism because
Marinetti’s ideas were derived from Friedrich Nietzsche and Richard Wagner. Finally,
in “Dyo Xenoi” (Two Foreigners), published on 25 February, Kondylakēs discussed
D’Annunzio’s and Marinetti’s cult of youth.
In April 1908, Dēmētrēs Kalogeropoulos (1868–1954), a friend of Marinetti’s, had
published a prose poem in Poesia. In Athens, he edited Pinakothēkē (The Gallery),
a monthly magazine (March 1901 – November 1926) with a wide-ranging coverage
of Greek and European art and literature, and in 1909 he translated extracts from
Marinetti’s article on Carducci and D’Annunzio, as well as three short stories by Phōtos
Giophyllēs (1887–1981), later a spokesman for Futurism in Greece. The March 1909 issue
announced the foundation of mellontismos in an article signed “Daphnis” (a pseudo-
nym of Kalogeropoulos). It included a translation of the eleven programmatic points but
expressed doubts about the anarchic nature of the manifesto, lamenting its advocacy of
the destruction of museums and libraries and pointing out that the demolished “statues,
paintings, and the works of Homer and Shakespeare” were unlikely to be replaced by
Futurist works of equal quality. The negative conclusion was: “It is sad that these exag-
gerations are written by an intelligent man and, moreover, a poet, Mr Marinetti, who
honours me with his sincere friendship, but who has saddened me enormously with
this unexpected and unpredictable manifesto.” (Daphnis: “Mellontismos”, 18)
In issue 110 (April 1910), Pinakothēkē also published a translation of the Manifesto
of the Futurist Painters, the text of which was followed by the concluding remark:
“This artistic manifesto exhibiting the paroxysms of a degenerate generation will
certainly have the fate of the poetic manifesto of mellontismos”. Further reactions in
Greece to the publication of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism were docu-
mented in Poesia (no. 3–6 [April–July 1909], 24–26), which included a French transla-
tion of an article by Pol Arcas (pseud. of the prolific playwright and journalist Polyvios
Dēmētrakopoulos, 1864–1922), originally published in Athēnai, and an article by Jean
Dargos (dates unknown), originally published in Le Monde hellénique.
Four more translations of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism were pub-
lished outside mainland Greece in cosmopolitan centres with strong Greek com-
munities: Constantinople, Alexandria (Marinetti’s birthplace) and Smyrna. Initial
reactions were mixed: some were sceptical, others responded favourably to its call
for artistic and moral renewal. The first of these translations appeared in an article by
Achilleus Kaleuras (1882–1960), “Hē apotheosis tou ekkentrismou” (The Apotheosis
 Greece 529

of Eccentricity), published in the Constantinople newspaper Neon Pneuma (New

Spirit) on 18 March 1909. Like Kondylakēs’s translation, it merely reproduced the
eleven-point programme of Futurism. In September 1909, the complete text of
the manifesto appeared in a new translation (this time in demotic Greek) in the
Alexandrian monthly magazine Serapion. Its title, “Sto perithōrio tēs Poesia” (In the
Margin of Poesia), shows that its author, Dēmētrēs G. Chrysanthēs (dates unknown),
was also familiar with Marinetti’s magazine. The tone of the article was both
ironic and critical. Two new translations were published in Smyrna, the first, “Ho
Mellontismos” (Futurism) by Stilpōn Pittakēs, in Kosmos (15 May 1910), the second,
“Ho Phoutourismos eis tēn Hellada kai to A’ Manipheston tou Marinetti” (Futurism in
Greece and Marinetti’s First Manifesto) by Theodōros Exarchos (dates unknown), in
Neotēs (December 1912). Both of these articles gave a more favourable impression of
Futurism than the one in Serapion. Neotēs had earlier, in its August issue, greeted the
publication of Marinetti’s novel Le Monoplan du Pape (The Pope’s Aeroplane, 1912),
and published a translation of its eighth chapter, “Côte à côte avec la lune”, as “Plaϊ
plaϊ me to phengari” (Side by Side with the Moon) in the subsequent issue. Chapter 9
of Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist) followed in January 1913.

Early reactions in Greece: Palamas, Giophyllēs,

Theotokas
As the reports in the above-mentioned periodicals demonstrate, news about Futurism
was circulating in Greece from an early stage. Nonetheless, the movement’s aes-
thetics of the machine did not have a significant effect in a country where indus-
try was still in its infancy and where there were few motorcars. The radicalism and
ideologically extreme character of Futurism was generally treated with reservation
by Greek intellectuals (Tsolkas: “The Greek ‘Passatismo’ and Marinetti’s Futurism”,
156). Moreover, in the popular press and in theatrical revues, Futurism became syn-
onymous with all avant-garde movements and, as such, the butt of relentless satire.
Thus, the announcement (Technē kai theatron, 9 July 1916, 103) of a forthcoming
translation of Marinetti’s play Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle, 1909), came with the
suggestion that critics should be armed with insecticide (Hē Athēnaikē epitheorēsē,
402). Discussion about Futurism in Athens was most intense in 1916. There were three
articles under the title “Ho Mellontismos” (Futurism) by Stephanos Daphnēs (1882–
1947) in the newspaper Athēnai, and the literary magazine Harmonia (25 March 1916,
1 April 1916, 8 April 1916) published three poems inspired by the First World War by
a certain Amphion, a pseudonym of Dēmētrios Karachalios (1871–1942); his identity
was later confirmed by Phōtos Giophyllēs, who also published two poems, S.A.P. and
Ta Chauteia (Homonoia Square District), in a later issue of the magazine. Theodōros
Exarchos’s translation of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism and that of “Côte
530 Chris Michaelides

à côte avec la lune” were reprinted in the Athens newspaper Ta Phylla (The Sheets) in
April 1916, whipping up even more interest; Xiphir phaler (the title is nonsensical), a
lavish and enormously popular theatrical satire of contemporary politics and society
which opened in June 1916, thus included a ‘Futurist’, called Mr Bellantonos, among
its dramatis personae (Pop, Laskarēs and Lidōrikēs: Xiphir phaler).
In the course of the 1910s and 1920s, three writers played an important rôle in
the reception of Futurism in Greece: Kōstēs Palamas (1859–1943), Phōtos Giophyllēs
(1887–1981) and Giōrgos Theotokas (1905–1966). The poet Kōstēs Palamas was a
central figure in Greek intellectual life and a formative moral and aesthetic influence
on the younger generation of writers. Like Kalogeropoulos, he formed a friendship
with Marinetti. “Mellontismos”, his open letter to Marinetti, was published in the
magazine Ho Noumas, on 30 January 1911, although, as he states in the opening lines,
it had been written and sent earlier (Palamas: “Mellontismos”). As a poet, Palamas
was fascinated by the vigour and youthful energy of the 1909 manifesto. He compared
Futurism to a handsome young man who no longer takes part in a chariot race in
Olympia but who drives an imposing car, whistling a tune at once scary and mocking.
He also admitted that he was dazzled by the anarchic energy and “satanic pride” of
Futurism. On the other hand, he distanced himself from certain tenets of Futurism
(e. g. its attitude towards the emancipation of women and socialism, and its rejection
of the cult of the past). He confessed that, being a native of the land where the idols
of classical Antiquity were venerated and where archaeology was the only discipline
respected by all, he was somewhat intimidated by the daring of the manifesto’s rec-
ommendation of a wholesale break with the past. Palamas also wrote about Futurism
on 16 March 1922 in Empros, praising Marinetti as a poet of great ingenuity and daring
inspiration, but also expressing scepticism about the methods the Futurists employed
in achieving their ideals (Orsina: “Palamàs e il futurismo”).
Giōrgos Theotokas later became one of the major representatives of the Genia
tou ‘30 (Generation of 1930), whose representatives included, in literature, Giōrrgos
Sepherēs and Odysseas Elytēs, and, in the visual arts, Giannēs Tsarouchēs and Nikos
Chatzēkyriakos-Gkikas (Ghika). Theotokas wrote Eleuthero pneuma (Free Spirit)
during a stay in London. Published in 1929, it became the ideological manifesto of
the Generation of 1930. The work, which shows the influence of Futurist thought
on a younger generation of writers, surveyed and rejected current literary trends in
Greece; it called for an urgent renewal of artistic and literary language that would
embody the national characteristics of Greece and take the country out of its state of
spiritual decline and relative intellectual insignificance in Europe, just as the various
avant-garde movements had done in other European countries before the First World
War. Theotokas admired the Futurist ideals of youth and speed but implicitly rejected,
like Palamas, the movement’s attitude towards the past. The chapter “Peripatos stēn
Eurōpē” (A Stroll in Europe) contains striking imagery redolent of aeropainting. It
evoked the different characteristics of European countries, and within each country
the contrasts between east and west, north and south. Theotokas suggested that a
 Greece 531

flight over the “garden of Europe” would remedy the lack of an overall vision of these
differences: the splendour of Europe and the harmony of the whole can only, he pro-
posed, be appreciated if seen from above.
Perhaps the most authentic Futurist voice in Greece was that of Phōtos Giophyllēs
(pseud. of Spyros Mousourēs), a prolific writer of poetry, prose works, plays, transla-
tions and articles in magazines and newspapers. Between 1929 and 1931, he published
the monthly literary and art magazine Prōtoporia (Avant-Garde). Giophyllēs had a
long involvement with Futurism, both as a poet and theorist, and his poetry contains
many Futurist themes, such as contemporary life, the machine and the city. In his “Ho
Phoutourismos stēn Hellada” (Futurism in Greece, 1960), he also became the – some-
what unreliable – historian of the movement in Greece. The article provides an over-
view of the creation and development of the movement and, more specifically, its impact
in Greece. He stressed the importance of Iōn Dragoumēs (1878–1920), especially his
Hellēnikos politismos (Greek Civilization) and his call for renewal without rejecting Greek
popular traditions. Giophyllēs considered himself the first Greek poet to write a poem
about the cult of technological progress, He hēdonē tēs mēchanēs (The Pleasure of the
Machine, 1910), the “first hymn to a Futurist machine in Greece”, which he composed in
a printer’s workshop to the sound of a printing press. Giophyllēs’s retrospective account
also mentions Palamas (especially the collections Ta Dekatetrasticha [The 14 Lines,
1919] and Hoi Pentasyllavoi [The Five Syllables, 1925]) and highlights Futurist, or rather
Modernist elements, in the work of various other writers, especially Kōstas Karyōtakēs,
who in 1920, together with Charilaos Sakellariadēs, wrote a satirical, anti-Futurist sonnet
Ho Phoutourismos (Karyōtakēs: Karyōtakē Hapanta ta heuriskomena. Vol. 2, 286–287).
Giophyllēs’ examination of the visual arts suggested that Futurism had replaced the
influence of the Munich School and that of Paris, which were predominant in Greece
in the nineteenth century, ushering in all the avant-garde movements of the twentieth
century. He concluded that Futurism should not be belittled because it did not create an
exclusively Futurist writer or artist in Greece; rather, it should be viewed as a springboard
for innovation, in literature even more than in the visual arts.

Alk Gian and Nikos Kalamarēs

Alkiviadēs Giannopoulos (1896–1981) who, in his Futurist works, abbreviated his
name to Alk Gian, has the distinction of being the only Greek promoter of Futurism
in Italy. His family settled in Milan in 1906 and he lived there (apart from a period
he spent in Greece doing his military service) until he returned to Greece for good in
1924. He was part of the second Milanese Futurist group, formed in 1915 during the
Interventionist demonstrations in Milan. His Futurist output is confined to the years
1916 to 1921, notably 1916 and 1917, when he corresponded with Marinetti (Kechagia-
Lypourlē: “Grammata tou Marinetti ston Alk. Giannopoulo, 1916–1920”).
532 Chris Michaelides

After contributing eight brief texts (poetry, Words-in-Freedom, prose) to the Milanese
La nuova gazzetta letteraria (The New Literary Gazette; no. 20, 1916), he founded the
short-lived magazine (two issues) La freccia futurista: 15nale d’antitutto (Futurist Arrow:
A Fortnightly against Everything, 1917). Piero Negri and Silvestro Lega were also on the
editorial team, and Mario Dessy joined them for the second issue. The magazine had a
striking masthead which, like its general typographical layout, was inspired by that of
Lacerba (Salaris: Riviste futuriste, 263). It had close links with the Florentine newspaper
L’ Italia futurista, with which it shared various contributors: Mario Carli, Arnaldo Ginna,
Maria Ginanni and Irma Valeria. Other authors included Francesco and Pasqualino
Cangiullo, Silvestro Lega, Armando Mazza and Nelson Morpurgo. Alk Gian coined the
word antitutto, which appeared in the subtitle of the magazine and was also the title of
his editorial in the first issue. The second issue included more poems, a short theatrical
text and a review of the latest numbers of L’ Italia futurista. In 1917, Alk Gian also con-
tributed texts to Procellaria (Seabird), a Mantuan monthly magazine marked by Futurist
and Dadaist tendencies. Like L’ Italia futurista, it had several collaborators in common
with, and similar advertisements to, La freccia futurista.
In December 1918, Alk Gian was recalled to Greece for military service. He returned
to Italy in 1920 and published, with Franco Bernini, a second magazine, Zibaldone
(Notebook; seven issues, 1921–1922) in the following year. His contributions to this
magazine show, however, that he was already beginning to detach himself from
Futurism. In 1924, he returned permanently to Greece, where his subsequent output
was not Futurist. Between 1934 and 1972, he translated into Greek texts by Giovanni
Papini, Alberto Savinio, Luigi Pirandello and other Italian writers. He remained,
however, silent about his Futurist past and output. He only came out of the cold in
December 1976 on the occasion of a conference on Futurism organized in Athens by
the Italian Cultural Institute, where for the first time he publicly confirmed his early
involvement with the Futurist movement (Verdone: “Il futurismo in Grecia”).
Nikos Kalamarēs (1907–1988), who also wrote as M. Spieros, Nikētas Rados or Nikolas
Kalas, combined Marxism with the artistic avant-garde and was attacked for this by both
the Left and the Right in Greece. The resulting tensions led to his self-imposed exile,
first in Paris (1937–1939), where he joined André Breton’s Surrealist group, then Lisbon
(1939–1940), where he founded his own Surrealist group, and then New York. Although
he is usually classified as a Surrealist, it has been suggested that his early poetry and
essays on cinema have affinities with Futurism, in particular with the Florentine group of
L’ Italia futurista (Menelaou Trabalza: “The Reception of Futurism in Greece”, 436–439).

Marinetti in Greece, 1933

Marinetti made his first and only visit to Greece in 1933. He arrived in Athens on
29 January for a series of lectures, organized by the Italian Institute of Higher Studies in
 Greece 533

Athens in conjunction with an exhibition of seventy aeropaintings by artists including

Benedetta, Enrico Prampolini, Nicolai Diulgheroff, Alberto Vincenzi, Elia Vottero and
Mario Zucco (see Ekthesis tōn Italōn Phoutouristōn). Marinetti’s visit, as a member of the
Royal Academy of Italy and official representative of the Italian State, received wide-
spread coverage in the press. According to Giophyllēs, for a few days in 1933, Futurism
almost became a fashion in Athens (Giophyllēs: “Ho Phoutourismos sten Hellada”).
On 15 February, Nea Hestia (New Home) published articles by Paulos Nirvanas (1866–
1937) and Dionysios A. Kokkinos (1884–1967). Nirvanas reported that Marinetti had
delivered lectures, given interviews and “explained the mysteries of aeropainting” at
the opening of the exhibition of Futurist painters. However, despite Marinetti’s numer-
ous manifestos and other proclamations, the movement had not made any inroads in
Greece. In fact, it was its inability to produce a great artist (a composer, painter or archi-
tect) that had prevented Futurism from conquering the local artistic scene (Nirvanas:
“Phoutourismos”). Kokkinos suggested that Marinetti had come to Greece too late,
nearly twenty-five years after his explosive founding manifesto of 1909. He underlined
the links between Marinetti and Mussolini (who greeted Marinetti as the apostle of
italianità), and unfavourably compared the Futurists with other avant-garde artists
such as Henri Matisse, André Derain and Pablo Picasso (Kokkinos: “Hē zōgraphikē”).
The most ferocious attack on Futurism, however, came from Antreas Zevgas (pseud.
of Aimilios Chourmouzios, 1904–1973) in his essay “Ho Phoutourismos sto phōs tou
Marxismou (Hoi Phoutouristes hypēretes tou Phasismou)” (Futurism in the Light of
Marxism: The Futurists as Servants of Fascism).
Geōrgios Pratsikas (1897–1974), a fellow Alexandrian, was the official translator
and reporter of Marinetti’s lectures in a series of articles published in the newspaper
Prōia on 1, 3, 5 and 7 February (see Menelaou-Trabalza: “The Reception of Futurism in
Greece”, 429–430). They described how Marinetti offered in his lectures an appraisal
of the history of the Futurist movement and its contribution to European art, contrast-
ing its instinctive passion with the more cerebral processes of Cubism. Marinetti also
pointed out that the dynamism and vitality of the Fascist revolution were essentially
Futurist elements. He also talked about synthetic and mechanical theatre, the aes-
thetic of the machine and aeropainting as typical expressions of contemporary life.
Marinetti carefully praised Greek artists and men of letters (especially Kōnstantinos
Parthenēs and Constantine Cavafy) and stressed his friendship with them, and con-
cluded with a warm salutation to Greek students.
On 10 February, after Marinetti’s departure from Athens, the newspaper Eleutheron
Vēma (Free Tribune) published his manifesto dedicated to the youth of Greece. It was
called Hypsōsate tē sēmaia sas: Maniphesto pros tēn neolaia tēs Hellados (Hoist your Flag!
Manifesto to the Youth of Greece). It was originally written in French, which was also the
language of his lectures (and a language his Greek audiences were more familiar with),
even though the visit had been organized by the Italian Institute. The manifesto offers a
kaleidoscopic juxtaposition of classical and modern images of Greece. The Parthenon,
“once majestic but now fallen on hard times”, will furthermore “lose its grandeur to the
534 Chris Michaelides

eyes of a poet who is flying at an altitude of three thousand metres” (Marinetti: “Hoist
Your Flag”, 448). Marinetti urges the students of Greece to turn their back on the Acropolis
and forge a new art inspired by the sounds and landscapes of modern Greece, making
use of contemporary imagery such as “the pearly reflection of an aeroplane that flies over
the ripples of the sea” (Marinetti: “Hoist Your Flag”, 449). To help them overcome their
awe of the art of the past, he mentions the examples of Palamas, “the standard bearer of
the regenerated Greek language” and “the great forward-looking geniuses” (Ibid.) of the
sculptor Tompros and the painter Parthenēs (the latter, a fellow Alexandrian, was, in fact,
an artist whose work was more indebted to Puvis de Chavannes than Futurism).
An Italian translation of the manifesto, Messaggio agli studenti greci, was pub-
lished on the first page of Futurismo on 19 February 1933. The same issue of Futurismo
included extracts from two articles in praise of aeropainting by Zacharias Papantoniou
(1877–1940), the director of the Ethnikē Pinakothēkē (National Gallery) originally pub-
lished in Eleuthero Vēma on 2 and 3 February 1933, and an article by Nikolas Aiginitēs
(dates unknown), president of the Lega per l’ avvicinamento intellettuale italo-greco
(Association for Greek-Italian Intellectual Cooperation), that pointed out the links
between Futurism and Fascism. Aiginitēs would later publish a short study of Futurist
theatre (Aiginites: To Phoutouristiko theatro).

Marinetti and Cavafy

Three years before his visit to Greece, Marinetti returned to Egypt to give a series of lec-
tures on Futurism to the Italian community in Alexandria. While there, he paid a visit
to Constantine Cavafy (Kōnstantinos Petrou Kavaphēs, 1863–1933), one of the most
important figures in Greek poetry. An account of the meeting, “Il poeta greco-egiziano
Cavafy” (The Greek-Egyptian Poet Cavafy), was included in Il fascino dell’Egitto (The
Lure of Egypt, 1933), a collection of Marinetti’s impressions of his return to his native
country. This short and poignant article (it had originally appeared in La gazzetta del
popolo) has Cavafy asking about Free Verse and Marinetti replying that Futurist poetry
had left this technique behind in favour of the simultaneism of Words-in-Freedom, in
order to give expression to “our great mechanical civilization of speed” (Marinetti: “Il
poeta greco-egiziano Cavafy”, 1080). In the ensuing wide-ranging discussion about
modern Greek literature, Palamas was judged by Marinetti to be as verbose as Victor
Hugo and as sentimental as Alphonse de Lamartine. By contrast, he offered high praise
for Spyros Melas and his theatrical company, Eleuthērē Skēnē (Free Stage), headed by
Marika Kotopoulē, ‘the Greek Eleonora Duse’, and their performances of avant-garde
plays. At the end of their conversation and exchange of views, Marinetti pronounced
Cavafy to be a ‘Futurist’, a title which the elderly poet politely declined. This encounter
between two very different personalities whose views somehow never quite coincided
perhaps encapsulates the somewhat reserved reception of Futurism in Greece.
 Greece 535

Works cited
Aiginitēs, Nikolas: To Phoutouristiko theatro [Futurist Theatre]. Athēna: Ekdoseis Gkovostē, 1940.
Chrysanthēs, Dēmētrēs: “Sto perithōrio tēs ‘Poesia’.” [In the Margin of Poesia] Serapion 1:9
(September 1909): 289–290.
Daphnēs, Stephanos: “Ho Mellontismos.” [Futurism] Athēnai, 27, 28, 29 March 1916.
Daphnis [pseud. of Dēmētrēs Kalogeropoulos]: “Mellontismos.” Pinakothēkē [The Gallery] 9:97
(1909): 17–18.
Ekthesis tōn Italōn Phoutouristōn (aerozōgraphikē) [The Exhibition of the Italian Futurists:
Aeropainting]. Athēna: Italikon Institouton Anōterōn Spoudōn en Athēnais, 1933.
Exarchos, Theodōros: “Ho Phoutourismos eis tēn Hellada kai to A Maniphesto tou Marinetti.”
[Futurism in Greece and Marinetti’s First Manifesto] Ta Phylla [The Sheets] 2 (April 1916): 94–96.
Giophyllēs, Phōtos: “Ho Phoutourismos stēn Hellada, 1910–1960.” [Futurism in Greece, 1910–1060]
Nea Hestia [New Home] 68 (1960): 846–853.
Kaleuras, Achilleus: “Hē apotheōsis tou ekkentrismou.” [The Apotheosis of Eccentricity] Νeon
Pneuma [New Spirit] 1:20 (8 March 1909): 322.
Karyōtakēs, Kōstas: Karyōtakē Hapanta ta heuriskomena [The Complete Extant Works of
Karyōtakēs]. Philologikē epimeleia Geōrgios Panu Savvidēs. Vol. 2. Athēna, Hermēs, 1979.
Kechagia-Lipourlē, Aglaia: “Grammata tou Marinetti ston Alkiviadē Giannopoulo (1916–1920).”
[Marinetti’s Letters to Alkiviadēs Giannopoulos, 1916–1920] Epistēmonikē Epetērida tēs
Philosophikēs Scholēs [Scientific Yearbook of the Faculty of Philosophy]. Thessalonikē:
Philosophikē Scholē tou Aristoteleiou Panepistēmiou, 1979. 125–161.
Kokkinos, Dionysios: “Hē zōgraphikē: Hē ekthesis tōn Italōn Phoutouristōn.” [Painting: The
Exhibition of the Italian Futurists] Nea Hestia [New Home] 13 (15 February 1933): 227–228.
Kondylakēs, Iōannēs: “Dyo Xenoi.” [Two Foreigners] Empros [Forward], 25 February 1909. 1.
Kondylakēs, Iōannēs: “Hē prokēryxis tou Mellontismou.” [The Proclamation of Futurism] Empros
[Forward], 11 February 1909. 1.
Kondylakēs, Iōannēs: “Hoi Oneireuomenoi.” [The Dreamers] Empros [Forward], 22 February 1909. 1.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Hypsōsate tēn semaia sas: Manipheston pros tēn neolaian tēs
Hellados.” Elephteron Vēma, 10 February 1933. Italian translation “Messaggio agli studenti
greci.” Futurismo 2:24 (19 February 1933): 1. Reprint “Innalzate la vostra bandiera: Manifesto
per la gioventù della Grecia.” Sincronie: Rivista semestrale di letterature, teatro e sistemi di
pensiero 13:25–26 (January–December 2009): 63–54. English translation “Hoist Your Flag!
Manifesto to the Youth of Greece.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 4 (2014):
448–449.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “II poeta greco-egiziano Cavafy.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione
futurista. A cura di Luciano de Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1983. 1080–1083.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Il fascino dell’Egitto. Milano: Mondadori, 1933. Reprint 1981.
Menelaou-Trabalza, Elissavet: “The Reception of Futurism in Greece.” International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 4 (2014): 421–449.
Nirvanas, Paulos: “Phoutourismos.” [Futurism] Nea Hestia [New Home] 13 (15 February 1933):
181–182.
Orsina, Vincenzo: “Palamas e il futurismo.” Hellēnika [Greek] 43:2 (1993): 411–415.
Palamas, Kōstēs: “Mellontismos.” [Futurism] Ho Noumas [The Numa] 9:421 (30 January 1911): 71.
Pittakēs, Stilpōn: “Ho Mellontismos.” [Futurism] Kosmos [The World] 2 (15 May 1910): 1.
Pop, Geōrgios, Nikolaos Laskarēs, and Miltiadēs Lidōrikēs: “Xiphir Phaler.” Thodōros
Chatzēpantazēs, and Lila Maraka, eds.: Hē Athēnaikē Epitheorēsē [The Athenian Revue]. Vol. 2.
Athēna: Hermēs, 1977. 343–447.
Salaris, Claudia: Riviste futuriste: Collezione Echaurren Salaris. Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2012.
536 Chris Michaelides

Theotokas, Giōrgos: Eleuthero pneuma [Free Spirit]. Epimeleia K. Th. Dēmaras. Athēna: Hermēs,
1973.
Tsolkas, Ioannēs: “The Greek ‘Passatismo’ and Marinetti’s Futurism.” Pietro Frassica, ed.: Shades
of Futurism. Atti del convegno internazionale, Princeton University, 8–9 ottobre 2009. Novara:
Interlinea, 2011. 153–166.
Verdone, Mario: “Il futurismo in Grecia.” M. Verdone: Diario parafuturista. Roma: Lucarini, 1990:
108–111.
Zevgas, Antreas [pseud. of Aimilios Chourmouzios]: Ho Phoutourismos sto phōs tou Marxismou
(Hoi Phoutouristes hypēretes tou Phasismou) [Futurism in the Light of Marxism: The Futurist
Servants of Fascism]. Athēna: Ekdoseis Gkovostē, 1933.

Further reading
Boumpoulidēs, Phaidōn Kōn: “Apēchēseis tou Phoutourismou stēn Neoellēnikē Grammateia.”
[The Influence of Futurism on Modern Greek Literature] Epetēris Hidrymatos Neoellēnikōn
Spoudōn [Yearbook of the Foundation for Modern Greek Studies] 1 (1979–1980): 7–48.
Kalamaras, Vasilēs K.: “Epilogē Hellēnikēs vivliographias gia to kinēma tou Phoutourismou.”
[A Select Greek Bibliography on the the Futurist Movement] Diavazō [I Read] 141 (1986):
54–55.
Kalas, Nikolas [Nikos Kalamarēs]: “Kinēmatographos.” [Cinema]. Nikolas Kalas: Keimena poiētikēs
kai aisthētikēs [Texts on Poetry and Aesthetics]. Theōrēsē-epimeleia Alexandros Argyriu.
Athēna: Plethron, 1982: 185–210.
Kalas, Nikolas “Poiēmata.” [Poems] N. Kalas: Graphē kai phōs [Painting and Light]. Athēna: Ikaros,
1983: 9–92.
Katsigiannē, Anna: “Hellēnikos Phoutourismos.” [Greek Futurism] Kathēmerinē [Daily News], 17 June
1982.
Katsigiannē, Anna: “Hellēnikos Phoutourismos B.” [Greek Futurism II] Kathēmerinē [Daily News], 24
June 1982.
Kechagia-Lipourlē, Aglaia: Alkiviadēs Giannopoulos: Vivliographikē kai viographikē meletē
[Alkiviades Giannopoulos: A Bibliographical and Biographical Study]. Ph.D. Dissertation.
Thessalonikē: Aristoteleio Panepistēmio Thessalonikēs, 2003.
Kondylakēs, Iōannēs: “Mellontikoi.” [The Futurists] Empros [Forward], 21 February 1909. 1.
Kyprianou, Phlōrēntia: Ho Phoutourismos hos kinēma prōtoporias kai hōs systēma stēn kritikē tou
hellēnikou mesopolemou (1909–1933): Hē eikona tēs mēchanēs sto Phoutourismo kai stēn
ideologikē skepsē Trotski-Chourmouziou [Futurism as Avant-Garde Movement and as System
in Critical Writings of the Inter-war Years (1909–1933): The Image of the Machine in Futurism
and in the Ideological Thinking of Trotsky-Chourmouzios]. Ph.D. Dissertation. Thessalonikē:
Aristoteleio Panepistēmio Thessalonikēs, 2008.
Menelaou-Trabalza, Elissavet: “Ho Marinetti ston Ph. S. Parnasso kai to manifesto tou pros tēn neolaia
tēs Hellados.” [Marinetti at the Parnassos Philological Club and his Manifesto to the Youth of
Greece] Philologikos Syllogos Parnassos [The Parnassos Literary Society] 50 (2008): 333–340.
Menelaou-Trabalza, Elissavet: “Phoutourismos: He hypodochē tou stēn Hellada.” [Futurism: Its
Reception in Greece] Historia eikonographēmenē [Illustrated History] 491 (May 2009): 94–111.
Orsina, Vincenzo: “Traduzione e ripercussioni in Grecia del manifesto di fondazione del futurismo.”
Mario Vitti, ed.: Testi letterari italiani tradotti in greco dal ‘500 ad oggi. Soveria Mannelli (CZ):
Rubbettino, 1994. 291–301.
 Greece 537

Palamas, Kōstēs: “Prosōpa kai zētēmata: Phoutourismos.” [People and Issues: Futurism] Empros
[Forward], 16 March 1922. 1–2.
Perlorentzou, Maria: “Alkiviadis Ghiannòpulos, traduttore di teatro e di avanguardie.” Mario Vitti,
ed.: Testi letterari italiani tradotti in greco dal ‘500 ad oggi. Soveria Mannelli (CZ): Rubbettino,
1994. 303–325.
Perlorentzou, Maria: “Alk(iviadēs) Gian(nopoulos): Italikes phoutouristikes martyries.” [Alk(iviadēs)
Gian(nopoulos): Italian Futurist Testimonies] Asterios Argyriou, Kōnstantinos A. Dēmadēs, and
Anastasia Danaē Lazaridou, eds.: Ho Hellēnikos kosmos anamesa stēn Anatolē kai tē Dysē,
1453–1981 [The Greek World between East and West, 1453–1981]. Vol 1. Eurōpaikou Synedriou
Neoellēnikōn Spoudōn, Verolino, 2–4 Oktōvriou 1998 [European Conference of Modern Greek
Studies, Berlin, 2–4 October 1998]. Athēna: Hellēnika Grammata, 1999. 405–414.
Perlorentzou, Maria, ed.: Alk Gian, futurista. Bari: Graphis, 1999.
Plakas, Dēmētrēs: “Ho Phoutourismos stēn Hellada.” [Futurism in Greece] Diavazō [I Read] 141
(1986): 14–20.
Vitti, Mario: He Genia tou Trianta: Ideologia kai morphē [The Generation of 1930: Ideology and
Form]. Athēna: Ekdotikē Hermēs, 1979.
Zōgrafidou, Zozē: “Futurismo letterario in Grecia.” Rivista di letteratura italiana 24:2 (2006):
255–262. Reprinted in Z. Zografidou: Voci italiane in Grecia = Italikes phōnes stēn Hellada.
Roma: Aracne, 2013. 177–192.
Zōras, Gerasimos: “Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1876–1944.” G. Zōras: Italoi logotechnes sto ergo
tou Palama [Italian Men of Letters in the Work of Palamas]. Athēna: Domos, 2004. 109–113.
András Kappanyos
34 Hungary
The cultural context
The most striking feature of early twentieth-century Hungarian culture was its
severely divided nature. On one side stood the forces of traditionalist patriotism, on
the other, those of international Modernism. All the traditional institutions of the
establishment, such as the ministries, the Academy, the universities and the literary
societies, were in the hands of conservative groups who followed official doctrine. The
Modernists, however moderate, had no option but to create their own institutional
establishment: the press. Most of the important writers of the era went to university
(as their families wanted a ‘proper’ career for them), but only a couple actually grad-
uated. Most of them left to pursue journalism, or, more precisely, freelance writing
backed up by journalism, which could also be interpreted as a symbolic desertion to
the ‘other side’.
Even more importantly, the leading literary journals became alternative institu-
tional centres of modern culture. The name of the most important periodical of mod-
erate Modernism, Nyugat (West, 1908–1941), became synonymous with the whole
period, serving as a meeting place and a collective label for several literary genera-
tions. Similarly, the premier cultural review of the Hungarian avant-garde, Ma (Today,
1916–1925), as well as its short-lived predecessor, A Tett (The Action, 1915–1916), were
synonymous with the Modernist renewal movement to such a degree that its members
were often referred to as ‘Maists’. It is also worth noting that Ma is unusual among the
European avant-garde periodicals because of its ten-year lifespan. The greater part of
Hungarian cultural history of this period could be written as the history of these journals.
The once-revolutionary ideas of Hungarian Romanticism (especially those of János
Arany and Sándor Petőfi) were considered highpoints of national culture and were
thus followed slavishly. In effect, the cultural establishment rewarded didacticism
and unoriginality, if not downright plagiarism. Literary innovation was regarded with
suspicion, as reflecting either immorality or cosmopolitanism. In this context, even
the title of the new literary journal of 1908, Nyugat, was a provocation. The periodical
embraced the New, the central idea of Modernism, and for at least a decade became
the unchallenged leader of literary renewal. One would expect its editors to have con-
sidered Futurism a natural ally, a comrade-in-arms against the obsolete views of offi-
cial obscurantism, but this was not the case. Nyugat’s attitude towards Futurism was
mostly patronizing and sometimes even downright hostile, but not just because of aes-
thetic conservatism. The mission that Nyugat set itself, and that it successfully accom-
plished in terms of literary history, was the modernization of mainstream Hungarian
culture. The review had to introduce the ideas of Symbolism and Naturalism before
turning to more radical streams, and it had to employ ideas that could flourish within
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-034
 Hungary 539

the framework of a modern mainstream culture. Futurism was definitely modern, but
it was not mainstream, and (at least in the beginning) it was not intended to be so.
The Futurists’ constant provocations resulted in a constant challenge to mainstream
culture, and the leading minds of Nyugat reacted to that challenge from the point of
view of their projected, ideal mainstream. They also saw in Futurism a potential rival
in the contest for a leading position in the process of modernizing Hungarian culture.
The Hungarian avant-garde, as a movement, started only in 1915, with A Tett,
edited by Lajos Kassák (1887–1967). Its relationship with Nyugat can be character-
ized as one of friendly rivalry. Their common enemy (which we can call ‘academism’)
meant that the two periodicals and their circles were comrades-in-arms. The main dif-
ference in their attitude towards academism was that Nyugat permanently sought to
be accepted as a legitimate rival to it, while A Tett and its direct successor, Ma, follow-
ing revolutionary principles, did not see the conservative establishment as an equal
rival but, rather, as a fundamental enemy. Kassák was a regular contributor to Nyugat
even after he started his own literary reviews, and he held its legendary editor, Ernő
Osvát (1877–1929), in high esteem. After 1915, Kassák and Osvát sometimes recom-
mended prospective contributors to each other from their respective circles, but apart
from Kassák himself, hardly anyone contributed to both reviews at the same time.
Notwithstanding their alliance, Kassák’s main ambition was to divert the flow
of the mainstream towards his more progressive artistic ideas. This can best be seen
in the initial editorial of his new periodical of 1926, Dokumentum (Kassák et al.:
“A Nyugat húsz éves”). It is also safe to assume that, in the Nyugat circle, there was a
silent majority who believed that the avant-garde was a series of obscure groups and
-isms with a limited impact, both temporally and geographically, and that Kassák and
his fellow activists were immature, infantile, self-appointed Titans.

The first reactions to Futurism

It is a distinctive feature of any emerging avant-garde movement that it challenges
the cultural establishment, and that the response of that environment is a predict-
ably one of resistance. Although Nyugat had not yet become fully established as a
mainstream magazine, its opposition to Futurism was pronounced and considerably
stronger than its opposition to other artistic movements, as they did not contain the
essential element of the avant-garde: the radical break with tradition. Several ele-
ments of Futurist aesthetics, such as the cult of speed and technological innovation,
were vaguely acceptable to Nyugat, as Mihály Babits (1883–1941), one of the finest
Hungarian poets of the century and editor-in-chief of Nyugat from 1929, admitted in
his first evaluation of the movement (Babits: “Futurizmus”). The Nyugat circle appre-
ciated the Futurist response to the growth of modern civilization, but rejected other
ideas that extended far beyond aesthetics, for example, its militarism and misogyny
540 András Kappanyos

(see § 9 in Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism). It was exactly because of

those extremist tenets, and not because of its works of art, that Futurism became syn-
onymous with eccentricity and fanaticism. However, as this verdict was pronounced
long before anyone had actually seen a Futurist work of art in Hungary, and as it was
present long before Babits’s essay appeared in print, we may duly call this attitude
a premature judgement. It was an involuntary, widely shared belief in Hungary that
Futurism was not merely a destructive movement but also an infantile prank that
lacked seriousness and gravity.
When the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (20 February 1909) was first men-
tioned in Nyugat (on 1 May 1909), it was referred to as an already well-known text. The
relevant article was written by a somewhat atypical contributor, the Communist jour-
nalist Ernő Bresztovszky (1882–1922), who talked about how the proletariat was grad-
ually becoming responsive to art and how a change was needed in the ways that art
was produced. “And as the mother of this new taste is technology, the intention of the
Futurists to create a poetic theme out of the automobile and aeroplane won’t be such a
folly” (Bresztovszky: “Új hedonizmus”, 486). Three issues later, Frigyes Karinthy (1887–
1938) published a poetic essay on the metaphysics of the moving picture that mentioned
Marinetti as if he had already become a household name:

But what then happens to art, and to the mysticism that nourishes it? There’s no use struggling.
Art is quiet and unarmed, my dear Mr Marinetti, against reality. When a wheezing locomotive
arrives, snorting, in this infinite realm, art recoils into the hideouts of woods and groves, and
cannot but gaze into a flower’s chalice as the lord of the air, an aeroplane, sweeps by above its
head. Art does not fight, my dear Mr Marinetti; it calms down and embraces reality like morning
glory – yes, like morning glory. (Karinthy: “A mozgófénykép metafizikája”, 645)

In early 1910, the editorial office of Nyugat received a Futurist publication for the first
time, Paolo Buzzi’s Aeroplani: Canti alati (Aeroplanes: Winged Songs, 1909), and
Marinetti’s manifesto, Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight (1909). Subsequently, the journal
published both a review (by Mihály Babits) and a sample of specimen poems (trans-
lated by Dezső Kosztolányi, 1885–1936). Both authors were leading figures of the
Nyugat circle at that time, and had a national reputation, which indicates that the
phenomenon of Futurism was taken seriously by the journal. Babits, in accordance
with the spirit of Nyugat, tried to distance himself from the prejudices surround-
ing the movement, yet began his essay in a harsh tone, referring to Aeroplani as an
“Italian book in late-Symbolist style, rather tasteless, as wide as it is tall” (Babits:
“Futurizmus”, 487). Attributing the whole phenomenon to ‘Secessionism’, a Germanic
equivalent to Symbolism, he contended that the book’s style was outdated and lacked
the most important Modernist feature: newness. Furthermore, he also questioned its
serious intentions: “What the Italian is attempting, with his peculiar childish enthusi-
asm, is for us just a worn-out idea; we see in these things not modernity, but a parody
of modernity” (Babits: “Futurizmus”, 487). He then cited some examples that were
 Hungary 541

meant to prove that the thematic range of Futurist poetry had already been present
in Hungarian poetry, for example in his own allegorical poem, A halál automobilon
(Death Sits in an Automobile, 1905).
Kosztolányi’s approach seemed more sympathetic, and although he never became
a Futurist and never adopted any of their ideas, he managed to reveal to his con-
temporaries some of the potential of Futurist poetry. In 1911, Endre Ady (1877–1919)
also voiced his views on Futurism. The pretext was the première of Giacomo Puccini’s
La fanciulla del West, and he referred to a Futurist manifesto on music, most likely
Francesco Balilla Pratella’s Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, that attacked “the rickety
and vulgar operas of Giacomo Puccini and Umberto Giordano”. Ady’s judgements on
Puccini and on his adversaries were equally harsh: “Well, I detest the Futurists, nat-
urally only because and predominantly because they have little talent and are all too
heavy on theory” (Ady: “La Fanciulla del West”, 247). He also complained about the
fact that the Futurists kept on sending him their latest publications.
Ady’s remark shows that there was a general feeling of annoyance about the
Futurist movement. The following year, Béla Balázs (1884–1949), poet and future
founding father of film theory, made a more profound and more honest attempt at
understanding the phenomenon of Futurism. In his report on the Futurist exhibition
at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris (see pp. 450–451 in this volume), he admitted
that he could perceive in the artists unmistakable signs of talent and that “what they
do is really new”. His final verdict came close to an actual acceptance of the works
on display: “This is not art. But even so, the [Futurists] cannot be simply dismissed as
fools and madcaps” (Balázs: “Futuristák”, 647).
The most important account of Hungarian Futurism (unsurpassed for several
decades) was written by Dezső Szabó (1879–1945), one of the most original authors
of the Nyugat circle. He developed his very own Expressionist style of writing that
made a great impression even on Kassák. Strangely, his first remarks on Futurism
were rather sarcastic. He reports that he bought a book by Marinetti from a street
vendor in Paris. It only cost him a few sous and turned out to be a dedication copy
(Szabó: “F. T. Marinetti: Le Futurisme”, 156). In the following years, Marinetti sent
several books to Szabó, who in turn reviewed them in a serious manner. His general
opinion is summed up in the sentence: “Youth, bravery and power are sympathetic,
even in their excesses and mistakes” (Szabó: “F. T. Marinetti: Le Monoplan du Pape;
Luciano Folgore, Futurista: Il Canto dei Motori”, 300). Szabó undoubtedly developed
a certain sympathy towards Futurism and in 1913 wrote an important essay that not
only reviewed the movement as a whole but also made an attempt to attribute to it a
place in the history of European culture:

There may be much folly and sickness in Futurism because the world heals itself with folly and
sickness. But its general message is cunningly clever: enough of the romantic snivel of the last
150 years, there has been too much analysis, criticism, denial, whimpering. We have to look for
the positive building blocks of the future. (Szabó: “Futurizmus: Az élet és művészet új lehetősé-
gei”, 23)
542 András Kappanyos

These words had a lasting effect on Kassák who, in 1915, asked Szabó to write the
inaugural column of his first periodical, A Tett (Szabó: “Keresztelőre”).

Nyugat and Futurism after 1915

From 1915 onwards, two new factors influenced Hungarian opinions of Futurism. The
first was the emergence of a native avant-garde; the other was Italy’s entry into the First
World War on the side of the entente cordiale. When Babits commented on this latter
event, he also mentioned the Futurists: “Italy today is an entirely Futurist State”, he
declared with a good dose of sarcasm that foresaw (unknowingly) the future of Futurism
in Mussolini’s Italy (Babits: “Itália”, 643). Almost at the same time, Kosztolányi wrote
his review of Kassák’s first volume of poetry, Eposz Wagner maszkjában (The Epic in
the Mask of Wagner, 1915), and he made a point of dissociating the young poet from
the Futurists: “Marinetti defines war this way: Battle = Weight + Stench. The definition
of our gentle poet would probably go like this: Battle = Tears + Tears … ad infinitum”
(Kosztolányi: “Eposz Wagner maszkjában”, 626; the poem referred to, Bataille: Poids +
Odeur, formed part of Marinetti: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, 117–119).
In 1915, it was still impossible to deploy the term ‘Futurism’ in an objective,
descriptive manner. In a book review from that year, we see the pejorative meaning
surface again: “If I had been thinking like this a year ago, they would have said ‘he
is just as mad as Marinetti, the Futurist’ ” (Erdély: “Néhány háborús könyvről”, 804).
Similarly negative was the handling of the term by Frigyes Karinthy, this time in a
war scene in a fantastic short story: “What happened afterwards, he remembers like
a bizarre nightmare, like an illustration of Dante’s Inferno by one of those mania-
cal Futurist painters” (Karinthy: “Legenda az ezerarcú lélekről”, 651). Remarks and
gestures like these mirror the public opinion that prevailed in Hungary in the 1910s.
Kassák reported in his autobiography that, when he was arrested in 1919 for his
involvement with the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic, his lawyer demanded
that he should include the following statement at the end of his testimony: “I would
like to remark that I am a Futurist writer.” Kassák objected, but the lawyer tried to
persuade him that this was the only way to get him out of prison: being a Futurist was
synonymous with being a harmless fool, meaning that he would not be held respon-
sible for his actions (Kassák: Egy ember élete. Vol. 2, 661).
In the meantime, some people, connected both to Nyugat and the Kassák
circle, managed to adopt a historical perspective on Futurism and sought to remove
the prejudices that were attached to the movement. Iván Hevesy (1893–1966) pub-
lished a book on new trends in painting and mentioned Futurism together with two
rather more acceptable movements: Expressionism and Cubism (Hevesy: Futurista,
expresszionista és kubista festészet). Vilmos Rozványi (1892–1954) wrote a review of
Szabadulás (Getting Free), an anthology of poems by four former Ma poets, in which
 Hungary 543

he tried to use the term ‘Futurist’ in a non-judgmental manner. However, to avoid

any offensive associations, it was placed in quotation marks, possibly at the editor’s
demand (Rozványi: “Új költők”). Eight years later, when Kassák returned from his
exile, he wrote a report on Walter Ruttmann’s masterpiece Berlin – Die Symphonie
einer Großstadt (Berlin – Symphony of a Metropolis, 1927) and complained about
the hostile and discriminatory introductory speech before the screening: “They [the
audience] haven’t seen anything yet but they had already learned that some Futurist
idiocy was about to start” (Kassák: “Az abszolút film”). It seems that negative over-
tones had become indelibly attached to the word ‘Futurism’.

Futurism in Kassák’s periodicals

It is astonishing that Kassák’s periodicals showed considerably less interest in
Futurism than Nyugat did. When reading the pages of A Tett and Ma, there is no indi-
cation that Kassák was in any way a serious adherent of Futurism. Throughout its
history (seventeen issues in 1915 and 1916), his first journal, A Tett, published only
one Futurist poem, Le case parlano (The Houses Speak), by Libero Altomare. Kassák
also wrote a prose piece based on Carlo Carrà’s painting Funeral of the Anarchist Galli
(Kassák: “Carlo D. Carrà ‘Anarchista temetés’ című képe alá”). The December 1918
issue of Ma contained a small section with three poems by Altomare and Buzzi, and in
November 1921 a Words-in-Freedom composition by Luciano Folgore was published.
A Tett also published the above-mentioned parole in libertà, Battle: Weight + Stench (1
June 1916), and the manifesto Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto appeared in Ma (1 June
1921). In 1924, to coincide with the International Exhibition of New Theatre Technology
in Vienna (24 September – 15 October 1924), Ma published a special issue on Music
and Theatre, which contained two important Futurist writings in their original (respec-
tively Italian and French): Marinetti’s Abstract Anti-psychological Theatre of Pure
Elements and the Tactile Theatre (1924) and Enrico Prampolini’s The Futurist Scenic
Atmosphere (1924). As far as the visual arts were concerned, there were reproductions
of two works by Boccioni, as well as one by Aldo Fiozzi and one by Prampolini (Ma
3:5 [1 May 1918]: 53, 4:5 [15 May 1919]: 91, 8:4 [1 February 1923]: 35, 9:8–9 [15 September
1924]: 174). And in 1925, Kassák published a short essay on Marinetti, which (accord-
ing to Kassák) Marinetti had objected to being published in the Futurist periodical Noi
(Kassák: “F. T. Marinetti”).
The material reported on here does not amount to much over a ten-year period,
especially when considering how well Ma covered other phenomena, such as Kurt
Schwitters’s Merz aesthetics. This may not have been caused by ideological factors,
but also technical ones, one of them being language. While Nyugat was dominated
by highly qualified, professional men of letters, the writers of the Kassák circle
were mainly self-taught men of lower-middle-class extraction (Kassák’s own formal
544 András Kappanyos

qualifications were those of a locksmith’s apprentice). While knowledge of German

was generally expected from anyone with a secondary education (it was still the time
of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy), and some French was required for more edu-
cated conversations, translators familiar with Italian were rather hard to find. Kassák
had very little money to pay royalties and largely relied on his contributors’ enthusi-
asm. Thus, the Italian language was a hurdle that was easier to overcome for Nyugat
than for Kassák’s periodicals.
The other detrimental factor was timing. Futurism began more or less at the same
time as Nyugat; when A Tett was founded, Futurism was already six years old. This
may not be long for an artistic movement, but when it is entirely geared towards the
values of novelty and originality, six years can mean a lot. Consequently, Kassák
opted for the German Expressionists as potential collaborators and used one of their
key periodicals, Franz Pfemfert’s Die Aktion, as inspiration for his own review, A Tett
(which also means ‘The Action’). Although Kassák never actually agreed with the
Futurists’ goals, his attitudes nonetheless showed traces of Futurist influence in that
his ambitions went beyond the territory of Modernism in the cultural field and were
marked out in terms of radical political and social change. In fact, it was on these
grounds that he called his movement ‘Activism’, signifying not a style but a moral
obligation towards the oppressed of the world.
A third technical factor can be detected in Kassák’s preferred methods of com-
munication. The early Futurist movement was characterized by its actionism, as in
the infamous serate and street performances, which relied on immediate and per-
sonal presence, improvised response, provocation and pandemonium. Performance,
as handled by Marinetti, developed into an autonomous art form, independent of
the representational traditions of theatre, and was later taken to an extreme by the
Dadaists. But Kassák and his circle were not very interested in this kind of activity
and instead preferred the established, institutionalized forms of artistic communica-
tion like literary journals. It is no coincidence that Ma was one of the longest-lasting
avant-garde periodicals internationally, whereas its soirées and matinees were only
occasional and infrequent events. Kassák avoided scandals and improvised actions,
and preferred to make his points as level-headedly and cogently as possible through
other means.

Ideological disagreements
The above-mentioned technicalities account for the rather low profile of Futurism in
A Tett and Ma. But, as also indicated above, Kassák’s attitude towards Futurism was
not simply one of indifference; in fact, one can detect a distinct and rather consistent
dislike that can be traced back to several causes, the four most important of which I
shall discuss below.
 Hungary 545

The foremost cause of disagreement between Kassák and the Futurists was related
to the question of war. Futurism started off in the spell of an imagined, idealized and
still hypothetical future war, while the organization of the Hungarian avant-garde was
in great part due to the everyday experience of a real war. Kassák and his associ-
ates had witnessed the deaths, forced drafting, food shortages and lies of nationalist
propaganda during the Great War. For this reason, they were unable to see any pos-
itive aspects in war, and as early as 1916 Kassák referred to it as “eighteen months of
world-monstrosity”. In this programmatic statement he condemned not only war but
also the Futurists’ attitude towards it:

The new literature must not swear loyalty to the flags of any -ism. As it cannot accept the new
possibilities of Christianism, it must confront Futurism head-on as well. Because, while on the
one hand there are ascetics gazing at their navels for thousands of years, on the other there
are haughty prima donnas singing the apotheosis of war … Every artistic school is an indica-
tor of either decadent aestheticism or superficial virtuosity or sanctified mediocrity. (Kassák:
“Programm”, 154)

By “Christianism”, which is a neologism in the original too, Kassák is probably refer-

ring to the neo-Catholic writers of the time such as Paul Claudel or François Mauriac.
The second controversial question was linked to historical circumstances: nation-
alism. While Marinetti again and again declared his patriotism, Kassák hardly ever
mentioned the idea of the nation. In fact, it was due to his internationalist sympathies
that he came into conflict with the authorities. In August 1916, he published an ‘inter-
national issue’ of A Tett, which contained translated poems and prose pieces by Émile
Verhaeren, Georges Duhamel, Paul Fort, Ludwig Rubiner, Libero Altomare, Mikhail
Petrovich Artsybashev and Wassily Kandinsky – that is, authors from several ‘enemy
nations’. At that time, such an action was deemed high treason and could lead to the
banning of a periodical, as indeed happened with A Tett in November of the same year
(Kassák: Egy ember élete. Vol. 2, 304–305). Kassák’s international pool of artists had a
symbolic significance, just like the gathering of a multinational group of Dadaists in
Zurich earlier that year.
When, in 1920, Kassák emigrated to Vienna, he became a member of an interna-
tional community. In Ma, he regularly published works by artists from many nations,
corresponded with them and advertised their periodicals just as they advertised his.
This internationalist tendency was a welcome development for the Kassák circle in
exile. For the Futurists, on the other hand, having promoted such ideas as ‘fervent
patriotism’ it was less easy to accept. Marinetti nevertheless made his own attempt at
internationalism with his Le Futurisme mondiale (Global Futurism) manifesto of 1924,
predominantly a publicity stunt without much foundation, and with a “ridiculously
inflated list of adherents” (Berghaus: Futurism and Politics, 263). Although Marinetti
used the international scene cleverly by participating in conferences and exhibitions,
giving lectures, functioning as national secretary of PEN and so on, his concept of
internationalism was one of conquest rather than fraternity.
546 András Kappanyos

The third cause of disagreement was also political. It related to Marinetti’s argu-
ment that collectivism degraded the achievements of talented individuals and was
thus inferior to individualism. As far as we know, Kassák, a born democrat, held
substantially different views and expressed them when he met Marinetti in Vienna.
The accounts of this encounter in 1925 are rather insubstantial and somewhat biased.
József Nádass (1897–1975), an associate of Kassák, was present and recalled the event
at the time of Kassák’s death:

Marinetti, the pope of Futurism, visited Kassák in Vienna and provoked a debate with him. It
is characteristic of the purity of Kassák’s ideology that the debate led to the throwing of chairs,
banging of tables and almost to actual fighting, because Marinetti was already flirting with
Fascism and wanted to convince Kassák of the genius of Mussolini and the truth of his ideas.
Kassák in turn called Marinetti’s hero a traitor, and he called Fascism a reactionary, anti-human
adventure. (Nádass: “Kassák Lajossal az emigrációban”, 1629)

Kassák’s own recollection provides even less detail, but he adds one characteristic
element to the account: “At the end of the meeting, Marinetti shook my hand at great
length, hugged me and said that the world needs artists of this kind who can stand up
for their ideas” (Kassák: Az izmusok története, 275).
Marinetti regarded Futurism as his own absolutely original and unprecedented
creation, which had been plagiarized by other art movements and had, some-
times, even been distorted and perverted, as in the case of the Russian Futurists
who had joined the Bolshevik cause. Kassák saw Futurism as one of several pos-
sible systems within which enlightened creative artists could fulfil their sublime
vocation: the elevation of the suppressed masses to the heights of the creative
Spirit.
The fourth and final cause of Kassák’s dislike for Futurism was purely aesthetic.
Long after Marinetti’s death and the termination of their political differences, the aging
Kassák voiced his doubts concerning Futurist aesthetics in Az izmusok története (The
History of -Isms, 1972), where he related his account of Futurism to Maurice Raynal’s
criticism (Raynal: Modern French Painters, 82-83) and drew on the decades-old debate
between abstraction and figuration:

What is essentially new in painting twelve legs of a running dog instead of four? Is it enough to
conceive of movement in a Naturalist manner and to demonstrate it by using quantitative redun-
dancy? Does it go beyond superficial illustration? Can we induce the feeling of reality by showing
appearances? (Kassák: Az izmusok története, 74)

At the end of the chapter on Futurism, he declared the essence of his views: “The
real creative artist always aims at changing the world, and a real work of art always
advances the changing of the world. The work is not a mirror image of the world but it
is the world: a drop in the ocean.” The Futurists, he wrote, denied their audience this
experience, which is why their legacy was the least positive among the movements
 Hungary 547

of the historical avant-garde: “They only demanded and promised the New. This
attracted much attention, of course, but their success in exciting world opinion
brought real artistic results in other, more substantial domains” (Kassák: Az izmusok
története, 75).

Aesthetic convergences
There was very little chance of reconciliation between Kassák and the Futurists. In the
first (and, as we see it today, most productive) period of Kassák’s career, his funda-
mental aim was to find an artistic form that could help people to understand, absorb
and heal the historical trauma of the First World War. This precluded any ideologi-
cal agreement with Marinetti. On the other hand, when he depicted the monstrosi-
ties of war in his poetry, he was quite content to use the techniques he had learned
from Marinetti. Some of the verses in Eposz Wagner maszkjában show the impact that
Futurist inventions had on Kassák and without which not only his œuvre but also
the whole of Hungarian culture after the First World War would look significantly
different:

Fölöttünk vad acélmadarak dalolnak a halálról,
pre-pre-pre, pre… pre… rererere… re-re-e-e-e…
és vér, vér, vér és tűz, tűz, tűz,
vér és tűz és fölötte, mint repülő sakál vonít a
srapnel,
Above us wild steel birds singing about death
pre-pre-pre, pre… pre… rererere… re-re-e-e-e…
and blood, blood, blood and fire, fire, fire,
blood and fire, and above, like a flying jackal, a
yowling shrapnel

Zizegő golyóraj… Égő acélüstökösök… Szürke,
zömök gránát…
s valahol a tarajos sörényű óperenciákon,
mint vérmes bronzbikák bogárzanak az U 9 és
XII-ők.
Buzzing swarm of bullets… Burning steel
comets… Grey, stocky grenades and somewhere
on the crested mane of the oceans,
like sanguine bronze bulls, U9s and XIIs prepare
to mate

Fu-u-ujjjiii… bum… bururu-u… bumm… bumm…
siü-cupp, paka-paka-paka-paka-brura-rü-ü-ü-ü…
fru-urrru-u-u-u… pikk… frrrrrrrru-u-u-u-u-u,
a porban égő rózsabokrot forgat a szél.
(Kassák: Összes versei. Vol. 1, 15)
Fu-u-ujjjiii… bum… bururu-u… bumm… bumm…
shiü-cupp, paka-paka-paka-paka-brura-rü-ü-
ü-ü…
fru-urrru-u-u-u… pikk… frrrrrrrru-u-u-u-u-u,
the wind whirls a burning rose-bush around in
the dust.

However, when Kassák created his first typographical experiments, he had already
embarked on his voyage towards his mature, Constructivist art. Nevertheless, some
of his most original works closely resemble parole in libertà as well as Dadaist
word-collages by Kurt Schwitters and others. His best-known typography, which
occupied a full page in the 15 October 1922 issue of Ma and is widely considered to be
548 András Kappanyos

his motto, reads: “Destroy so that you can build and build so that you can win”. This
slogan might not be directly inspired by Futurism, but it is definitely rooted in a spirit
that had been deeply influenced by it.
As for the visual arts, it seems that, in the first decades of the twentieth century,
the Hungarian experts distinguished three radical trends: Futurism, Expressionism
and Cubism. When in 1919 Iván Hevesy wrote his short monograph on these three
-isms, and when he published a extended version in 1922 (A futurizmus, expresszioniz-
mus és kubizmus művészete művészet [Futurist, Expressionist and Cubist Art]), he did
not include one single Hungarian artist in the section on Futurism.
The Hungarian public’s first opportunity to see actual Futurist paintings came in
1913, with a representative exhibition at the National Salon, Budapest (25 January –
28 February). The dynamism of the works by Boccioni, Severini and Carrà had a
great effect on several Hungarian artists (see Szabó: A Magyar aktivizmus művészete
1915–27, 46). Their impact can be most easily observed in thematic novelties: in the
following years, the themes of machines, elevated depictions of human work and
man-made environments became relatively frequent, for example in the paintings
of locomotives by Sándor Bortnyik (1893–1976), in whose œuvre this period seems
an important step toward his later Constructivism. (On the other hand, the appear-
ance of war-related themes can be attributed to the experience of the war itself.)
A deeper correlation can be detected if we consider Lajos Gulácsy (1882–1932), an
instinctive Expressionist, whose later paintings show a close resemblance to the
dense structures and psychological symbolism of Boccioni’s work (Szabó: A Magyar
aktivizmus művészete 1915–27, 48). The presence of the two methods or features of
Futurism, distinguished by Hevesy as dynamism and simultaneism (see his A futuriz-
mus, expresszionizmus, 5) is undeniable in several paintings and drawings by diverse
artists of the Ma circle such as the master of László Moholy-Nagy, Róbert Berény
(1887–1953), Lajos Tihanyi (1885–1938) or János Schadl (1892–1944), as well as in the
works of painters who belonged to an older generation and became attracted to the
avant-garde in a later period of their career, for example Béla Kádár (1877–1956) or
Hugo Scheiber (1873–1950).
The 1913 exhibition also had a great effect on Kassák (who wrote a prose piece
based on a Carrà painting, as mentioned above p. 543), and his close collaborator
(also his brother-in-law), the painter and graphic artist Béla Uitz (1887–1972). In the
following years, Uitz created several paintings on the subject of war, with both unmis-
takable Futurist dynamism and pacifist intentions – similarly to Kassák’s poem above
on p. 547. In 1919, Uitz, together with Kassák and the majority of the Modernist intel-
lectuals, became a resolute supporter of the Hungarian Soviet Republic (1919). Uitz,
Berény and a few others prepared some outstanding political posters, most notably
on the theme of military mobilization. The imagery of these posters was later incorpo-
rated into the Socialist-Realist iconography of the 1950s, and some of their character-
istics even found their way into public art of the Communist era – quite an ironic fate
for Futurist ideas.
 Hungary 549

An ironic aftermath
In 1931, Marinetti, as a member of the Italian Academy, was invited by the Hungarian
Academy to visit Budapest (Dobó: “A közönség nevet, az elnök komor arccal néz maga
elé”). He gave a lecture to an audience of academics and aristocrats and was introduced
by the Academy’s president, who stated: “There is no established common opinion
on Futurism as of yet, but we have to consider the fact that conservative Fascism sup-
ports it, and that cannot mean anything else but that it sees a creative, rather than
destructive force in Futurism” (Bálint: “Futurizmus a Tudományos Akadémián”). We
do not have an exact record of the event, but according to the newspaper reports,
Marinetti spoke about his latest inventions (tactilism, aeropainting, possibly Futurist
cuisine), recited Il bombardamento di Adrianopoli (The Bombardment of Adrianople,
1912), Paesaggio d’odori del mio cane-lupo (My Wolf-Dog’s Landscape of Smells, 1925)
and other poems. He also argued about individualism and referred directly to Kassák:

He suddenly stops and utters a name that has never before had been heard between these walls.
He says “Kassák”. Then he says “Ma”. There is silence for a moment, the president raises his
head and watches Marinetti expectantly, with rapt attention. Marinetti argues against Kassák. He
claims that Futurism cannot be connected to communism, because Futurism is equal to nationa-
lism, individualism. In some places [Russia] the Futurists became communists because the ruling
classes and circles failed to support them. (Bálint: “Futurizmus a Tudományos Akadémián”, 7)

It was a strange situation: the conservative press praised Marinetti’s artistic original-
ity while the left-wing press sneered at his opportunism. Marinetti was, for both sides,
above all a high-ranking representative of the Fascist State. Kassák (who was not
present) saw the moral advantage afforded to him by the situation and wrote a sharp
and uncharacteristically witty article in Nyugat (Kassák: “Marinetti az Akadémián”).
Among other things, he warned Marinetti that publicly calling someone a communist
could be deemed slanderous (and Kassák, in fact, was a Social Democrat). However,
the main thrust of his sarcasm was aimed at the conservative reporters, especially an
anonymous one from the Budapesti Hírlap (Budapest Gazette), who tried to explain
the artistic value of the canine performance to his readers in bombastic terms:

And it is also art, although without the sublime and sometimes on the brink of the grotesque,
when he presents the monologue of the dog, thinking through its olfactory organs. […] Anyone
who is able to create a man, animal, tree, flower, stone or even decay, so that we stand before it
deeply moved and feel “yes, that’s right” – is a God-blessed artist, whatever form he uses to that
effect. Because it’s not the form that is important, it’s the essence. (‘M’: “Futurizmus”, 7)

Kassák’s retort to this was almost cruel:

Of course, form is nothing. We know very well that during the Great War, the battles were only a
form, a mere formality even, the essence being the massacre, the all-engulfing decay, to which
Marinetti contributed by using his God-given ability of thinking through the olfactory organs of
a dog. (Kassák: “Marinetti az Akadémián”, 57)
550 András Kappanyos

In the article, he quoted his own words of 1916 (“haughty prima donnas singing the
apotheosis of war”), and at the end reiterated the closing remarks of his 1925 essay:
“Marinetti is the man who cleverly runs away from darkness but instinctively recoils
from light.” (Kassák: “F. T. Marinetti”). Kassák made his point and demonstrated his
uncompromising moral stance that stood in marked contrast to Marinetti’s oppor-
tunism. It was not a debate between them any more: in his own frame of refer-
ence, Marinetti might have been consistent and faithful to his principles, but in the
Hungarian context and in Kassák’s view he had clearly deserted and gone over to the
enemy side.
After the late 1920s, avant-garde activity in Hungary became virtually non-existent,
but the images and ideas of the avant-garde, including those incorporated from
Futurism, remained very much present. As the most popular Hungarian literary his-
torian, Antal Szerb, wrote:

Everyone who read Ma at that time, and leafs through it again today, will be faced with two
surprises. First, it turns out that the poems and prose which were once considered entertaining
nonsense, have now become perfectly comprehensible. […] Second, one will be amazed to notice
just how much of Ma’s agenda was realized, and how much has sunk into our literary conscious-
ness and today counts as self-evident. (Szerb: Magyar irodalomtörténet. Vol. 2, 230)

After 1948, Communist cultural policy condemned the avant-garde altogether as a

by-product of the decay of Western bourgeois society. In this context, Italian Futurism
was particularly easy to denounce as downright Fascist. However, it is worth quoting
a sentence from a 1960 letter of György Aczél, deputy minister and de facto head of
cultural politics at the time: “We don’t like and don’t understand the ‘art’ of Lajos
Kassák” (quoted in Sasvári: “A mi kultúránk nem lehet más itthon, mint külföldön”,
103). But only two years later, when the Gondolat publishing house started an educa-
tional book series on the -isms, the two initial volumes were ironically on the Baroque
and on Futurism, the latter one being fairly substantial. Futurism, at last, had begun
to find its place in the cultural memory of Hungary and in the minds of its people.

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 Hungary 551

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Wagner: A Book of Poetry by Lajos Kassák] Nyugat [West] 8:11 (1 June 1915): 625–626.
“M”: “Futurizmus.” [Futurism] Budapesti Hírlap [Budapest Gazette], 17 June 1931. 7.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Csata. Súly+szag” [Battle: Weight + Stench] A Tett [The Action] 2:15
(1 June 1916): 251–253.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “A taktilizmus: Futurista kiáltvány” [Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto]
Ma [Today] 6:7 (1 June 1921): 91–92.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Le futurisme mondial: Manifeste à Paris.” Le Futurisme: Revue
synthétique illustrée 9 (11 January 1924): 1–3.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti:
Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
107–119.
552 András Kappanyos

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Nádass, József: “Kassák Lajossal az emigrációban.” [With Lajos Kassák in Exile] Kortárs [Contemporary]
10 (1968): 1626–1632.
Raynal, Maurice: Modern French Painters. Geneva: Skira, 1950.
Rozványi, Vilmos: “Új költők.” [New Poets] Nyugat [West] 12:1 (1 January 1919): 71–72.
Sasvári, Edit: “ ‘A mi kultúránk nem lehet más itthon, mint külföldön’ – Kassák 1960-as párizsi
kiállítása.” [“Our Culture Cannot Be Different at Home and Abroad”: The Kassák Exhibition in
Paris in 1960] Gábor Andrási, ed.: Kassák Lajos az író, képzőművész, szerkesztő és közszereplő
[Kassák: Author, Visual Artist, Editor and Public Persona]. Budapest: Petőfi Irodalmi Múzeum –
Kassák Alapítvány, 2010. 89–108.
Szabó, Dezső: “F. T. Marinetti: Le Futurisme.” Nyugat [West] 5:14 (16 July 1912): 156.
Szabó, Dezső: “F. T. Marinetti: Le Monoplan du Pape; Luciano Folgore, Futurista: Il Canto dei Motori.”
Nyugat [West] 5:16 (16 August 1912): 298–300.
Szabó, Dezső: “Futurizmus: Az élet és művészet új lehetőségei.” Nyugat [West] 6:1 (1 January 1913):
16–23. Reprinted in Zoltán Kenyeres, ed.: Esszépanoráma, 1900–1944 [Essay Panorama,
1900–1944]. Budapest: Szépirodalmi Kiadó, 1978. 701–714. English translation “Futurism:
New Possibilities in Art and Life.” Timothy O. Benson, and Éva Forgács, eds.: Between Worlds:
A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2002.
152–157.
Szabó, Dezső: “Keresztelőre.” [On a Christening] A Tett [The Action] 1 (1 November 1915): 1–2.
Szabó, Júlia: A Magyar aktivizmus művészete 1915–27 [The Art of Hungarian Activism, 1915–27].
Budapest: Corvina, 1981.
Szerb, Antal: Magyar irodalomtörténet [Hungarian Literary History]. Vols. 1–2. Kolozsvár: Erdélyi
Szépmíves Céh, 1934–1935.

Further reading
Babits, Mihály: “Ma, holnap és irodalom.” [Today, Tomorrow and Literature] Nyugat [West] 9:17
(1 September 1916): 328–340.
Bittera, Jenő: “А futurista festők mozgalma.” [The Movement of the Futurist Painters] Művészet [Art] 7
(1912): 264–268.
Bori, Imre, ed.: A szecessziótól a dadáig: A magyar futurizmus, expressionizmus és dadaizmus
irodalma [From Art Nouveau to Dada: The Literature of Hungarian Futurism, Expressionism and
Dadaism]. Újvidék [Novi Sad]: Forum, 1969.
Cavaglia, Gianpiero: “Il futurismo italiano e l’ avanguardia ungherese.” Renzo de Felice, ed.:
Futurismo, cultura e politica. Torino: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988.
319–349.
Deréky, Pál: “Az olasz futurizmus fogadtatásának kezdetei a magyar irodalomban és
irodalomkritikában.” [The Early Reception of Italian Futurism in Hungarian Literature and
Literary Criticism] Literatura 14:3 (1987): 224–244. Reprinted in P. Deréky: Latabagomár ó
talatta latabagomár és finfi [a nonsensical line from a Kassák poem]. Debrecen: Kossuth
Egyetemi Kiadó, 1998. 7–33, 105–122.
Deréky, Pál: A vasbetontorony költői: Magyar avantgárd költészet a 20. század második és
harmadik évtizedében [The Poets of the Ferro-concrete Tower: Hungarian Avant-Garde
Poetry in the Second and Third Decades of the Twentieth Century]. Budapest: Argumentum,
1992.
 Hungary 553

Dobó, Gábor, and Merse Pál Szeredi, eds.: Local Contexts – International Networks: Avant-Garde
Journals in East-Central Europe. Budapest: Petőfi Literary Museum; Kassák Múzeum, 2018.
Dobó, Gábor, and Merse Pál Szeredi, eds.: Signal to the World: War – Avant-garde –
Kassák. Budapest: Kassák Foundation, 2016.
Feleky, Géza: “A futurista festő.” [The Futurist Painter] Nyugat [West] 3:19 (1 October 1910):
1342–1348.
Fried, Ilona: “A futurista színház, a látvány színháza.” [Futurist Theatre, Theatre of Vision]
I. Fried: Modern olasz irodalom: Problémák, művek, dokumentumok [Modern Italian
Literature: Problems, Works, Documents]. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem
Bölcsészettudományi Kar, 2006. 17–25.
Fried, Ilona: “Marinetti’s Visits to Budapest, 1931, 1932 and 1933: Archival Documents and the
Memoirs of Margit Gáspár.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 1 (2011): 343–362.
Gergely, Mariann: “ ‘Elég volt a jóból, szépből!’: A futurizmus hatása a magyar avantgárd
művészetben” = “ ‘Basta di “bello e buono”!’: L’ influenza del futurismo sull’arte d’avanguardia
ungherese” = “ ‘Enough of the good and the beautiful!’: The Impact of Futurism on Hungarian
Avant-Garde Art.” Depero a futurista = Depero futurista = Depero the Futurist. Budapest:
Magyar Nemezeti Galéria, 2010. 87–98, 102–112, 116–124.
Gismondi, Gianni: “Il futurismo italiano e l’ Ungheria.” Nuova Corvina 9 (2001): 152–158.
Hevesy, Iván: ”A futurizmus.” [Futurism] I. Hevesy: Az új művészetért: Válogatott írások [For a New
Art: Selected Writings]. Budapest: Gondolat, 1978. 32–36
Illés, Ilona: A Tett (1915–16), Ma (1916–25), 2x2 (1922): Repertórium [Repertory]. Budapest: Petőfi
Irodalmi Múzeum, 1975.
Kappanyos, András: “The Reception of Futurism in ‘Nyugat’ and in the Kassák Circle of Activists.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 1 (2011). 110–131.
Kardos, László: “Magyar futurizmus.” [Hungarian Futurism] Alkotás [Creation] 3–4 (1947): 40–42.
Karinthy, Frigyes: “Futurizmus.” [Futurism] Pesti Napló [Pest Journal], 29 March 1917. 7.
Karinthy, Frigyes: “L’ Homme qui vole.” Nyugat [West] 2:15 (1 August 1909): 114–116.
Kassák, Lajos: “Képarchitektúra.” [Image Architecture] Ma [Today] 7:4 (15 March 1922): 52–54.
Kosztolányi, Dezső: “A futurizmus.” [Futurism] A Hét [The Week] 2 (11 July 1909): 467–468. Reprinted
in D. Kosztolányi: Szabadkikötő: Esszék a világirodalomról [Free Port: Essays on World
Literature]. Budapest: Osiris, 2006. 412–413.
Molnos, Péter: Scheiber Hugó: Painting in the Rhythm of Jazz. Budapest: Kieselbach, 2014.
Nagy, Zoltán, ed.: ”Tóth Árpád leveleiből.” [From the Letters of Árpád Tóth] Nyugat [West] 31:6–8
(June–August 1938): 23–33, 86–96, 410–423.
Passuth, Krisztina: Avantgarde kapcsolatok Prágától Bukarestig, 1907–1930 [Avant-Garde
Connections from Prague to Bucharest 1907–1930]. Budapest: Balassi, 1998. French translation
Les Avant-gardes de l’ Europe centrale 1907–1927. Paris: Flammarion, 1988. German translation
Treffpunkte der Avantgarden: Ostmitteleuropa, 1907–1930. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó; Dresden:
Verlag der Kunst, 2003.
Sánta, Pál: “Privire de ansamblu (de la futurism la dadaism).” [An Overview from Futurism to
Dadaism] Vatra: Revista literară 10 (2003): 41–63.
Szabó, György: ”A futurizmus történeti szerepe.” [The Historical Rôle of Futurism] Az Eötvös Loránd
Tudományegyetem Bölcsészettudományi Karának Évkönyve az 1952–53 évre. [The Yearbook of
the Philology Faculty of Eötvös Loránd University of Science] Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó Vállalat,
1953. 430–452.
Szabó, György: “Il rinnovamento del linguaggio poetico: Due proposte per un dinamismo
espressivo. L’ attivismo di L. Kassák ed il futurismo di T. Marinetti.” Zsuzsa Kovács, and Péter
Sárközy, eds.: Venezia, Italia e Ungheria tra decadentismo e avanguardia. Atti del VI Convegno
554 András Kappanyos

di Studi Italo-Ungheresi. Budapest, 10–13 giugno 1986. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990.
373–383.
Szabó, György, ed.: A futurizmus [Futurism]. Budapest: Gondolat, 1962.
Szabó, Júlia: “Some Influences of Italian Futurism on Hungarian Painters.” Acta historiae artium
academiae scientiarum hungaricae 24:1–2 (1978): 425–435.
Takács, József: “Futurismo italiano e attivismo ungherese.” Zsuzsa Kovács, ed.: Venezia, Italia e
Ungheria tra decadentismo e avanguardia: Rapporti italo-ungheresi dalla presa di Buda alla
Rivoluzione Francese. Atti del VI Convegno di Studi Italo-Ungheresi, Budapest, 10–13 giugno
1986. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1990. 369–372.
Takács, József: “Kassák és az olasz futurizmus.” [Kassák and Italian Futurism] Filológiai Közlöny 26:2
(April–June 1980): 236–240.
Verdone, Mario: “Futurismo ed altro: Parlando con Lajos Kassák, un padre delle avanguardie.” Idea:
Rivista mensile di cultura e di politica 53:1–2 (January–February 1997): 43–51.
Selena Daly
35 Ireland
Futurism and Irish literature
Marinetti never visited Ireland and there was never an exhibition of Futurist painting
in Ireland during Marinetti’s lifetime (nor indeed, since). Nonetheless, a number of
Irish-born artists and writers did come into contact with Futurism, and the influences
of Marinetti’s movement can be felt in their work, although any direct contact they
had occurred either in Great Britain or in mainland Europe.
The Irish Nationalist poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939) was the first Irish
writer who crossed Marinetti’s path, during the latter’s pre-Futurist, Symbolist phase.
French translations of some of Yeats’s early poems appeared in French magazines
in the early years of the twentienth century, including Vers et prose and Mercure
de France (see Vinall: “English Contributors to Poesia”, 550–551), which Marinetti
would have read. The future leader of Futurism then invited Yeats to contribute some
work to Poesia, Marinetti’s international poetry revue, and in 1907 he published an
extract from Yeats’s forthcoming play Deirdre, based on a figure of Celtic mythology
(Yeats: “A Dirge over Dierdre e Naise [sic]”, 12). Marinetti and Yeats met on at least
two occasions between March 1912 and June 1914, when Marinetti visited London
(Vinall: “English Contributors to ‘Poesia’ ”, 558). Deirdre O’Grady has argued that the
influence of Marinetti “as both symbolist and futurist proved instrumental” to the
development of Yeats’s aesthetic (O’Grady: “Futurism in Exile”, 35) and pointed to
the echoes of the hero of Mafarka il futurista, Gazurmah, in Yeats’s exploration of the
mechanical human being and puppet in the plays The King of the Great Clock Tower
(1934) and The Herne’s Egg (1938).
It is Ireland’s most famous writer, James Joyce (1882–1941), though, who is most
readily associated with a Futurist influence. Joyce encountered Futurism while he was
living in Trieste in the 1910s and was exposed there to the ideas of Marinetti and his
followers. It has often been speculated that Joyce was present at the Futurist serata
held at the Politeama Rossetti on 12 January 1910, and if he had not been present, he
would certainly have been aware of the event and its raucous unfolding in the city.
Joyce was also in possession of a number of Futurist books, including Palazzeschi’s
Il codice di Perelà (1911), Marinetti’s Enquête internationale sur le vers libre (1909)
and Boccioni’s Pittura e scultura futuriste (1914) (Budgen: James Joyce, 194; Lobner:
“James Joyce and Italian Futurism”, 79).
In 1918, Joyce reportedly asked his friend and fellow writer, Frank Budgen, about the
‘Cyclops’ episode in Ulysses, enquiring “Does this episode strike you as being futuris-
tic?” (Budgen: James Joyce, 153). This suggests that Joyce felt some echoes of Marinetti’s
doctrine in his work. Futurist influences in Ulysses, both in terms of style and content,
have been traced by a number of scholars (McCourt: “James Joyce: Triestine Futurist?”
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-035
556 Selena Daly

and Lobner: “James Joyce and Italian Futurism”, 79). The onomatopoeia of the opening
of ‘Sirens’ and the lack of punctuation in Molly Bloom’s monologue ‘Penelope’ both
recall Marinetti’s declarations regarding parole in libertà and Futurist literature.
The abundance of modern technology in ‘Aeolus’, the violence and praise of war in
‘Cyclops’, and the nighttime setting of ‘Circe’ (recalling Futurist ‘insomnia’) have all
been presented as ideas inspired, at least in part, by Futurism. Lobner went so far as to
propose that the figure of the semi-paralysed Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone in
‘Cyclops’ “suggests a satire of Marinetti” who was wounded during the First World War
(Lobner: “James Joyce and Italian Futurism”, 86). These parallels notwithstanding, it is
important to note that a utilization of certain Futurist themes and stylistic devices by
Joyce in Ulysses by no means indicates a wholesale approval of Marinetti’s pronouce-
ments and actions. This did not, however, stop Marinetti from claiming in 1934 that,
despite “Joyce’s original genius”, the Irish writer owed his parole in libertà experiments
to the Futurists (Marinetti: “Joyce e le parole in libertà”, 2).
In fields other than literature, the influence of Futurism on Ireland is more diffi-
cult to trace. While no official Futurist serata or exhibition ever took place in Ireland,
it appears that a performance of Futurist music was planned for Dublin. From 15–21
June 1914, Luigi Russolo conducted with his Intonarumori (instruments for ‘tuning
sounds’ at various pitches) a Grand Futurist Concert of Noises at the Coliseum Theatre
in London. In his 1916 book, L’ arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises), Russolo described
how he planned a tour around Europe with these musical instruments, writing that
“from London we should have gone on to Liverpool, to Dublin, to Glasgow, Edinburgh
and Vienna, and then start another long tour that would have included Moscow, Berlin
and Paris. The war caused it all to be postponed” (Russolo: L’ arte dei rumori, 26).

A Futurist woman painter: Mary Swanzy

In the visual arts, Cubism received far more attention in Ireland than Futurism,
although there was a limited appetite for avant-garde art in pre-war Dublin. The wari-
ness in Ireland towards modern art was rooted in the country’s particular political and
cultural history. The partition of Ireland and the founding of the Irish Free State in the
early 1920s “created a political climate that was suspicious, inward-looking and xen-
ophobic” (Kissane: “Analysing Cubism”, 15). The Gaelic Revival had begun in the late
nineteenth century as a literary phenomenon but soon spread to other artistic fields.
The nationalist aims of this movement appeared at odds with the international and
forward-looking spirit of Modernism. Art critic Robert O’Bryne has commented that

within Ireland, opposition to the introduction of non-national influences habitually sprang from
an understandable fear that the consequence of this cultural invasion would be the engulfing of
indigenous traditions. Modernism was thus regularly contested on the basis that it was not Irish.
(O’Byrne: “Irish Modernism”, 13)
 Ireland 557

Terry Eagleton has also noted that there was “little or no avant-garde” in Ireland,
continuing that “there could be no exhilarating encounter between art and tech-
nology in such an industrially backward nation” (Eagleton: Heathcliff and the Great
Hunger, 299).
In spite of these challenging conditions for modern artists in Ireland, the avant-
garde did succeed in penetrating the Irish cultural landscape in the 1910s. In 1911,
Ellen Duncan (later curator of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin) organized
an exhibition in Dublin, entitled Works by Post-Impressionist Painters, featuring paint-
ings by André Derain, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Henri Matisse
and Pablo Picasso. The following year, she held an exhibition of Cubist paintings at
the United Artists Club in Dublin, showing works by Picasso and Juan Gris. This exhi-
bition, Modern French Painters, was the first to show Cubist paintings in Ireland.
Ireland is unusual in its relationship to avant-garde art because its most famous
proponents were in fact women, primarily Mainie Jellett (1897–1944), Evie Hone
(1894–1955) and Mary Swanzy (1882–1978) (Marshall: “Women and the Visual Arts
in Ireland”, 28). All three women were influenced by Cubism, but it was only Swanzy
who also displayed echoes of Futurist expression in her artworks. Thus, she can be
identified as Ireland’s first and only Futurist painter (see Daly: “Mary Swanzy”). Born
in Dublin to a professional Protestant family, Swanzy began attending classes at the
Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1897 and was primarily a portrait painter.
Before the First World War, she spent time in both France and Italy, where it is likely
that she came into contact with Futurism. Based in Florence in 1913, she could not
have been unaware of Lacerba and the exhibition of Futurist artworks at the Libreria
Gonnelli (13 November 1913 – 18 January 1914). Swanzy rarely dated her paintings, so
a chronology of Futurist influence on her work is difficult to ascertain. Yet it appears
that she experimented with Futurist styles in the period 1913–1920 and again, briefly,
in the 1940s.
In 1923, Swanzy identified herself as a landscape painter, and several of her land-
scapes indicate a familiarity with the tenets of Futurist painting, in particular the com-
positional style of many of Giacomo Balla’s landscapes and natural subjects (Cullinane:
Mary Swanzy, 33). White Tower is Swanzy’s most overtly Futurist-style painting.
According to Swanzy herself, it was actually painted while she was in Italy. However,
like most of her work, the work is undated, and she only recalled to Patrick Murphy
(the painting’s current owner) in a conversation in 1971 that it had been painted “many
years before” (Murphy: A Passion for Collecting, 78). The influence of Futurist ideas
on this painting is unmistakable. Indeed, in his memoir, Patrick Murphy recalled an
anecdote where Beth Straus, then Vice-President of the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, mistook the painting for a Futurist masterpiece (Murphy: A Passion for Collecting,
267). The tower of the title is one of the many structures in the Tuscan town of San
Gimignano, and yet in Swanzy’s painting it resembles not so much a medieval tower
as an urban skyscraper. The smooth façade and grey colour of the building suggest a
concrete construction, and the low vantage point of the viewer makes it appear even
558 Selena Daly

taller. It rises up out of the earth with an energy and dynamism similar to that evoked
in many Futurist paintings. In addition, the clean lines and bulk of the tower also bring
to mind the architectural sketches of Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916).
Although best known for her Cubo-Futurist and Samoan landscapes, Swanzy
did not neglect other subjects in her work. Two quite similar paintings, Propellors
(1942) and Futuristic Study with Skyscrapers and Propellors (undated), show evidence
of the influence of Futurist ideas in both their composition and their subject matter.
The composition of both paintings is almost identical. Propellors on long poles shoot
out from the bottom-right-hand corner of the canvas, creating an energetic sense
of forward motion. The paintings are more abstract than many of Swanzy’s works
but demonstrate a clear interest in objects associated with modernity and speed.
Although not concerned with the depiction of movement itself, as the Futurists were,
these paintings do seem to have drawn inspiration “from the tangible miracles of con-
temporary life, from the iron network of speed which winds around the earth, from
the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, the marvelous flights that plow the skies,
the shadowy audaciousness of submarine navigators” (Boccioni et al.: “Manifesto of
Futurist Painters”, 62). Swanzy’s portrait Woman with White Bonnet (undated, but
c. 1920) has been likened to Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein (1905–1906)
(Kennedy: “Squaring up to Mary Swanzy”, n.p.), which Swanzy saw in Stein’s house,
although there seems to me to be, at best, a very tenuous link between the two works.
A more convincing influence on Swanzy’s portrait is Umberto Boccioni’s Costruzione
orizzontale (1912). In accordance with the tenets of Futurist painting, there are multi-
ple intersecting planes in Boccioni’s portrait. Swanzy employed a similar technique
in her painting. Pushing up past the figure’s right shoulder and almost plunging into
her eye is a thick pillar, which could be a tower or a chimneystack. Plants sprout from
the woman’s left shoulder and right hip, revealing no separation between the subject
and the background. The woman’s body appears transparent at times, as the brown
wood of her chair and easel can be seen overlapping with and penetrating her body,
recalling the Futurist statement: “Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit,
and the sofas penetrate our bodies” (Boccioni et al: “Futurist Painting: Technical
Manifesto”, 65). While Boccioni’s Costruzione orizzontale represents a more sophis-
ticated application of Futurist principles, Swanzy’s portrait is nonetheless a striking
interpretation of these proclamations.

Reports on Futurism in the Irish press

Although artists and writers in Ireland needed to travel abroad in order to come into
direct contact with Marinetti’s movement, Futurism was not entirely unknown in
Ireland. Once the movement had been launched in 1909, Marinetti included Ireland
in his projected sphere of influence. As is well known, the impresario was famous for
 Ireland 559

sending out announcements and copies of his publications to critics and newspapers
all over the world in order to promote Futurism. Luca Somigli has observed that “even
in countries where there was not an active futurist artistic practice, the publication
of manifestoes in the popular press became a way to establish a presence, to get the
public interested and involved in the futurist project” (Somigli: Legitimizing the Artist,
165). This was the case in Ireland, where Futurism received a moderate amount of
coverage.
For the most part, Futurism in Ireland received a similar treatment in the press as
it had in Great Britain. The Futurist exhibitions and concerts in London between 1912
and 1914 were greeted with responses ranging from disdain to dismissive bemuse-
ment. Two typical headlines were “Picture Gallery of a Madhouse: Crazy Dreams Put
on Canvas” (Daily Express, 1 March 1912) and “Lunacy Masquerading as Art” (Daily
Express, 30 April 1914) (quoted in Black: “The Vorticist Critique of Futurism”, 163).
The Irish Independent commented sarcastically on Futurist literature in an article
of 22 August 1912, writing that “this new literature would at any rate appeal to the
schoolboy, for with the abolition of verbs, adverbs, and adjectives, there would pass
away most of the rules of grammar” ([Anon.]: “Futurist Literature”). A review in the
Sunday Independent of Marinetti’s performance of the Bombardment of Adrianople
in London’s Doré Gallery in June 1914 was harsh in its judgement of the spectacle
([Anon.]: “Futurist Poetry to Hammer-Beats and Drum Rolls”). The critic wondered
whether it was intentional that a desk collapsed when Marinetti beat a hammer
onto it to signify the sounds of the bombardment. When Marinetti began marching
through the audience declaiming his Words-in-Freedom, a Futurist in the audience
whispered to the critic that this was meant to represent the besiegers entering the
city, at which the anonymous critic caustically commented: “So the picture must
have been as clear to the audience as daylight” ([Anon.]: “Futurist Poetry to Hammer-
Beats and Drum Rolls”).
Futurist innovations in painting did not escape comment in the Irish press either.
In a light-hearted piece, advice was offered to young men about how to become
Futurist painters, with the following rationale:

I cannot explain what Futurist drawing is, and I am afraid the Futurists could not tell you them-
selves. But I do know that under the Futurist spell you can take a large canvas, rub it all over with
a very juicy fruit pie, and label it “Paddington Station in a Rush” and everyone will believe you.
Always label Futurist drawings on the back. All the Futurists do this because they wouldn’t know
what it was themselves if they did not. (Jay: “In Lighter Vein”)

One point that does set the reaction of the Irish press apart from its British coun-
terparts is the relative attention paid in Ireland to Marinetti’s political activities,
hyper-nationalist outlook and revolutionary goals. By contrast, Luca Somigli has
noted that “the political dimension of futurism was almost completely erased from
the reports in the British press” (Somigli: Legitimizing the Artist, 173). The reason for
the different response in Ireland may be that aspects of the Futurist programme were
560 Selena Daly

deemed to have particular resonance and relevance for the country’s political cir-
cumstances. In the first Irish Times article dedicated to Futurism, dated 5 May 1909,
the commentary concluded by relating the content of the first manifesto to the Irish
context, stating:

If the ‘Futurists’ do in the next ten years a tenth part of what they propose to do, they will have
warmed their hands to some purpose. […] The younger generation in Ireland will follow with
interest, and possibly with some sympathy, the developments of this fiery Italian movement
against the cramping tendencies of a socialistic age. These young men may not be destined to go
far, but they manifestly intend to go fast. ([Anon.]: [s.t.])

While Somigli noted that only one British newspaper journalist mentioned Marinetti’s
involvement in Italy’s campaign in Libya in 1912, the same was not true in Ireland. In
fact, in an Irish Times editorial of August 1912 about Futurist literature, the writer was
confident of a familiarity with Marinetti among the newspaper’s readership precisely
because of his links to the Tripoli campaign, writing: “Signor Marinetti’s name is, no
doubt, known to many of our readers; his championship of the Italian attack upon
Tripoli gave him a wider notoriety than he could ever have won with his philosophy of
art” ([Anon.]: “Editorial”). Much of this familiarity can be attributed to the war report-
age of Francis McCullagh, a Catholic journalist born in County Tyrone in present-day
Northern Ireland. Variously describing himself as Irish and British, he was an inter-
nationally renowned war reporter (Horgan: “Journalism, Catholicism”, 172). His book
on his experiences in Tripoli, Italy’s War for a Desert, was published in 1912 and fea-
tured heavy criticism not only of Italy’s actions in Libya but also of Marinetti, who
travelled as a war reporter for L’ Intransigéant to Tripoli. In an appendix entitled “ ‘The
Cult of the Cannon’: An Examination of Signor Marinetti’s Philosophy of Blood and
Iron”, McCullagh was highly critical of Marinetti’s jingoism, stating that “this ado-
ration of slaughter is almost as great a sign of degeneracy as the Futurist movement
itself” (McCullagh: Italy’s War for a Desert, 397). McCullagh’s book and his criticism of
Marinetti received coverage in numerous Irish newspapers. The Ulster Herald in April
1912 recounted an amusing encounter between McCullagh and Marinetti ([Anon.]:
“Frank McCullagh Challenged Again”). The latter, in London on one of his Futurist
propaganda trips, read the dispatches by McCullagh in The Nation criticizing Italy’s
campaign in Tripoli. Thus, accompanied by an Italian journalist and “a well-known
Futurist painter”, he set off to McCullagh’s isolated house in the Surrey Downs to con-
front him. When he did not receive a denial or apology from McCullagh, Marinetti
challenged him to a duel. McCullagh refused to engage because proper protocol for
a duel had not been followed. Marinetti left his card and reluctantly departed. When
McCullagh rang Marinetti’s hotel the following day to organize the duel, he was
informed that the Futurist leader had already departed.
Not all commentary on Futurism in Ireland was negative and dismissive in its
tone. The Irish Times devoted the most considered and balanced judgement of
Futurism from an Irish source to be found on public record. The newspaper received
 Ireland 561

copies of all of Marinetti’s manifestos directly from the Futurist headquarters in

Milan. The first mention of Futurism appeared on 5 May 1909, just over two months
after the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism was published on the front page of Le
Figaro in Paris. It is in fact surprising that this article did not feature in Marinetti’s
own round-up of international reactions to his first Futurist manifesto, which he pub-
lished in Poesia in July 1909. According to this forty-eight-page documentary section,
only two other English-language newspapers remarked on the birth of Marinetti’s
movement, the British Daily Telegraph and the Sun in New York.
The report in The Irish Times commented on the “newest literary cult” from Italy,
of which Marinetti asked the newspaper’s “sincere opinion”. At first, the anonymous
journalist appears merely amused by the excesses of Futurism, writing: “New schools
of literature are always welcome. They disturb with a pleasant flutter of excitement
the routine of intellectual life. The greater their futility or extravagance, the better
entertainment they furnish for the archaeological instincts of posterity.” However,
the overall judgement was in fact positive and the writer declared himself “very
impressed” with the Futurists who have “raised the standard of revolt with a venge-
ance. They swoop down upon literature as a racing motor car might plunge into the
crowded traffic of a city street” ([Anon.]: [s.t.]).
The previously mentioned editorial from August 1912 opens by stating that “we
are constantly flattered by receiving communications under the address of Milan from
Signor F. T. Marinetti” ([Anon.]: “Editorial”), although the judgement of Marinetti’s
Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature was rather scathing. For the most part,
however, the reports were free from the hostility evident in many British publications,
with the Irish reactions mainly confined to curiosity, bemusement and light-hearted
mocking. Marinetti’s visit to London in 1913 was covered in some depth by The Irish
Times, which observed that the visit “has done something to inform men’s minds in
these countries as to the real objects of the Futurists” ([Anon.]: “Revolution in Art”).
The presentation of Futurism was considered and nuanced, rather than merely dis-
missive. The report continued:

As a rule, we are inclined to regard this literary and artistic sect as merely a suitable subject
for jokes. The red grass and the green faces of the Futurist pictures have brought the whole
movement into disrepute. It certainly is in some aspects very ridiculous. We should be sorry to
see the day when it was no longer the impulse of the ordinary man to laugh at such a cult. But
when the laughter is over, we sometimes think that there must be more in all this than we see at
a glance. Unless Futurists are all lunatics, there must be some comparatively reasonable theory
at the back of the weird pictures and literature. ([Anon.]: “Revolution in Art”)

The journalist made a concerted effort to judge Futurism on its merits, an attitude
not often to be found in the media of the time. He apparently saw some truth in
Marinetti’s doctrine, suggesting that the abolition of adjectives, adverbs and metre
may not be such a bad idea. He observed that for some less able poets, metre can
be “a hindrance and a nuisance”, while others fancy themselves as accomplished
562 Selena Daly

poets merely because they are adept at the use of poetic prosody. While his ultimate
verdict of Futurism was negative, he was far-sighted enough to intuit its potential
legacy: “They [the Futurists] will not succeed, but they will probably make their mark.
Perhaps, when the present generation is dead, some saner man will take what is good
in their theories and introduce it to the world. That is the way in which reforms are
brought about” (Anon: “Revolution in Art”).
Coverage of Futurism in The Irish Times diminished during the First World War,
with one arts reviewer noting that “in the midst of graver matters, echoes of the
hysterical shrieks of Marinetti and the noisy sans culottes of the new revolution in
art and literature have a hollow ring” ([Anon.]: “Futurism”, 1915). A few months
later, the paper reported on the birth of the Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity
(teatro sintetico futurista) and its latest tour in Italy (see p. 256 in the chapter on
Italian Theatre), certainly inspired by a missive sent from Futurism’s headquarters
in Milan. While the Futurists’ theatrical pursuits were treated as somewhat of an
oddity, the report is evidence of a sustained interest in Futurism in certain circles
in Ireland. The article also confirmed that Futurism was still alive and active in
spite of the war, under the leadership of “its chief apostle, Signor Marinetti, the
inspirer of Futurist art, poetry, and music, [who] still leads the noisy brotherhood
of artistic revolutionaries in Milan” ([Anon.]: “Futurism”, 1916).
Although a certain amount of knowledge of Futurism and of Marinetti circulated
in Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century, direct encounters with the move-
ment were only possible for those with the means to travel beyond the island’s shores.
Thus, while Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus were imbued with certain Futurist
traits as they rambled around Dublin, the same could not be said of the average Irish
intellectual in the nation’s capital.

Works cited
[Anon.]: “Editorial.” The Irish Times, 24 August 1912.
[Anon.]: “Frank McCullagh Challenged Again.” The Ulster Herald, 13 April 1912.
[Anon.]: “Futurism.” The Irish Times, 25 March 1916.
[Anon.]: “Futurism.” The Irish Times, 3 December 1915.
[Anon.]: “Futurist Literature.” The Irish Independent, 22 August 1912.
[Anon.]: “Futurist Poetry to Hammer-Beats and Drum Rolls.” The Sunday Independent, 7 June 1914.
[Anon.]: “Revolution in Art.” The Irish Times, 24 November 1913.
[Anon.]: [s.t.] The Irish Times, 5 May 1909.
Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini: “Manifesto of Futurist Painters,
11 February 1910.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An
Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 62–64.
Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla: “Futurist Painting:
Technical Manifesto, 11 April 1910.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.:
Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 64–67.
 Ireland 563

Budgen, Frank: James Joyce and the Making of Ulysses. Bloomingon/IN: University of Indiana
Press, 1960.
Cullinane, Liz: Mary Swanzy 1882–1978: An Evaluation of her Career. ‘This is our Gift, Our Portion
Apart’. MA Thesis. Cork: Crawford College of Art & Design, 2010.
Daly, Selena: “Mary Swanzy (1882–1978): A Futurist Painter from Ireland.” International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 70–86.
Eagleton, Terry: Heathcliff and the Great Hunger: Studies in Irish Culture. London: Verso, 1995.
Horgan, John: “Journalism, Catholicism and Anti-Communism in an Era of Revolution: Francis
McCullagh War Correspondent 1874–1956.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 98:390 (Summer
2009): 169–184.
Jay, Thomas: “In Lighter Vein.” The Leitrim Observer, 15 August 1914.
Kennedy, Christina: “Squaring up to Mary Swanzy.” World of Hibernia 3:3 (September 1997): s.p.
Kissane, Seán: “Analysing Cubism.” S. Kissane, ed.: Analysing Cubism. Cork: Crawford Art Gallery,
2013. 12–16.
Lobner, Corinna del Greco: “James Joyce and Italian Futurism.” Irish University Review 15:1
(1985): 73–92.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “James Joyce e le parole in libertà.” Sant’Elia 2:4 [Futurismo 3:61] (15
February 1934): 1.
Marshall, Catherine: “ ‘The liveliest of the living painters’: Women and the Visual Arts in Ireland.”
Éimear O’Connor, ed.: Irish Women Artists, 1800–2009: Familiar but Unknown. Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2010. 28–36.
McCourt, John: “James Joyce: Triestine Futurist?” James Joyce Quarterly 36:2 (Winter 1999): 85–105.
McCullagh, Francis: Italy’s War for a Desert: Being Some Experiences of a War-Correspondent with the
Italians in Tripoli. London: Herbert & Daniel, 1912.
Murphy, Patrick J.: A Passion for Collecting: A Memoir. Dublin: Hinds, 2012.
O’Byrne, Robert: “Irish Modernism: The Early Decades.” Enrique Juncosa, and Christina Kennedy, eds.:
The Moderns: The Arts in Ireland from the 1900s to the 1970s. Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern
Art, 2011. 10–22.
O’Grady, Deirdre: “Futurism in Exile: From Milan to Dublin via Paris. William Butler Yeats.” Pietro
Frassica, ed.: Shades of Futurism = Futurismo in ombra. Novara: Interlinea, 2011. 35–48.
Russolo, Luigi: L’ arte dei rumori. Milano: Edizioni futuriste di ‘Poesia’, 1916.
Somigli, Luca: Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915.
Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2003.
Vinall, Shirley W.: “Marinetti and the English Contributors to ‘Poesia’.” The Modern Languages Review
75:3 (July 1980): 547–560.
Yeats, William Butler: “A Dirge over Dierdre e Naise.” Poesia 2:9–12 (October 1906 – January 1907): 12.

Further Reading
Black, Jonathan: “ ‘A hysterical hullo-balloo about motor-cars’: The Vorticist Critique of Futurism,
1914–1919.” Elza Adamowicz, and Simona Storchi, eds.: Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde
and its Legacy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013. 159–175.
Cianci, Giovanni: “Joyce futurista.” Il Verri, series 8, 1-2 (March-June 1987): 57–80.
Cianci, Giovanni: “L’ anima e la città: Joyce futurista.” Il piccolo Hans 64 (Winter 1989-90): 52–75.
Guzzetta, Giorgio: “Joyce’s Exile and Futurism.” G. Guzzetta: Nation and Narration: British Modernism
in Italy in the First Half of the Twentieth Century. Ravenna: Longo, 2004. 75–84.
564 Selena Daly

Marengo Vaglio, Carla: “Joyce e il futurismo: Il corpo, la voce, l’ improvvisazione.” Giuliana Ferreccio,
and Davide Racca, eds.: L’ improvvisazione in musica e in letteratura. Torino: L‘Harmattan Italia,
2007. 56–76.
Marengo Vaglio, Carla: “Le avanguardie: Joyce e il futurismo.” Franca Bruera, and Barbara Meazzi,
eds.: Plurilinguisme et avant-gardes. Bruxelles: Lang, 2011. 279–297.
Marengo Vaglio, Carla: “Noisetuning: Joyce and Futurism.” Franca Ruggieri, ed.: Joyce’s Victorians.
Roma: Bulzoni, 2006. 331–354.
McCourt, John: “Among the Futurists and the Vociani.” J. McCourt: The Years of Bloom: James Joyce
in Trieste, 1904–1920. Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2000. 154-171. Italian translation “Tra futuristi e
vociani.” J. McCourt: James Joyce: Gli anni di Bloom. Milano: Mondadori, 2004. 219–238.
Benedikt Hjartarson
36 Iceland
Introduction
The first decades of the twentieth century saw a vivid discussion of the new European
-isms in Iceland, although no avant-garde activities in the narrow sense of that term
emerged. On the whole, the avant-garde was viewed with scepticism, but modestly
embraced because it supported the modernization of Icelandic culture. Futurism
played an important rôle in this process and shaped the cultural visions of a limited
number of artists, authors and intellectuals in the formative years of the Icelandic
nation state. The years 1918–1920 were a key period in the history of Iceland, which
gained sovereignty from Denmark only in 1918. At that time, the total population of
the country was around ninety-two thousand, and the capital had just over fifteen
thousand inhabitants. Art exhibitions were rare (in fact, the first solo exhibition in
Reykjavik was held only in 1900), and the literary market was extremely small: in the
period 1918–1928, despite a considerable increase in published works, only thirty-six
authors of belles-lettres published books, and only two of them were born in Reykjavik
(see Guðmundsson: “Loksins, loksins”, 39).
To understand the Icelandic cultural field in the early twentieth century, one
needs to bear in mind that artistic activities in the country during the 1910s and 1920s
cannot be fitted into a narrow definition of the ‘historical avant-garde’. However,
Futurism was well known to the educated public in Iceland due to the ongoing dis-
cussions in Denmark. In the early twentieth century, Copenhagen served as Iceland’s
cultural capital; the usual path for young aspiring artists led in the first instance to
Copenhagen, often after some initial training at home. They cannot have failed to take
notice of the controversy that surrounded the travelling exhibition of works by the
Italian Futurists, organized by Der Sturm, that reached Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in
Copenhagen on 11 July 1912 (see pp. 397–398 in the entry on Denmark in this volume).
The key publications related to the debate on Futurism and the other -isms in the
period 1917–1942 begin with a poem that mentions Futurism in its title and end with
articles that appeared on the occasion of an exhibition of ‘degenerate art’ in the par-
liament building in Reykjavik:
– 1917: Þórbergur Þórðarson: Futuriskar kveldstemningar (Futurist Evening Moods),
– 1918–1919: Sigurður Nordal: Einlyndi og marglyndi (Unity and Diversity),
– 1919: Jón Björnsson: “Futurismi” (Futurism),
– 1919?: Jóhannes S. Kjarval: Futurismi (Futurism; unpublished notes),
– 1920: Alexander Jóhannesson: “Nýjar listastefnur” (The New Art Movements),
– 1922: Þórbergur Þórðarson: Hvítir hrafnar (White Ravens),
– 1935: Björn Franzson: “Listin og þjóðfélagið” (Art and Society),

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-036
566 Benedikt Hjartarson

– 1936: Halldór Laxness: “Rithöfundaþíng í Buenos Aires” (A Writers’ Congress in

Buenos Aires),
– 1941: Jónas Jónsson: “Hvíldartími í listum og bókmenntum” (Repose in Arts and
Literature).

The sudden interest in Futurism and other avant-garde movements in the years
1917–1920 was a reaction to debates that had arisen in Denmark after Carl Julius
Salomonsen (1847–1924), a professor of bacteriology at the University of Copenhagen,
had given a lecture on the pathological symptoms of the avant-garde and published it in
January 1919 (see Abildgaard: “The Nordic Paris”, 185; Jelsbak: “Dada Copenhagen”, 403).
In a similar vein, the poet and scholar Sigurður Nordal (1886–1974) presented a
series of lectures in Reykjavik, Einlyndi og marglyndi (Unity and Diversity, 1918–19),
that can be seen as a symptomatic expression of an anti-avant-garde discourse. His
remarks were not only important because they offered some of the first references to
Futurism in Iceland, but also because they demonstrated that the avant-garde was
seen in Iceland as a cultural trend that could be not taken seriously. Although Nordal
gave a fairly positive appraisal of Impressionism, Symbolism and Decadentism, he
considered Futurism and Cubism to be ‘idiotic’, eccentric and scandalous, and treated
them as warning signs of cultural corrosion.
Icelandic debates on the avant-garde reached full force with the publication
of “Nýjar listastefnur” (The New Art Movements, 1920) by Alexander Jóhannesson
(1888–1965). This essay offered a detailed discussion of the European avant-gardes and
sought to reveal their pathological character. Jóhannesson’s article contained an intro-
duction to the writings of Salomonsen and largely followed the latter’s general line of
argumentation. Referring to Salomonsen’s notion of “dysmorphism”, Jóhannesson
described the avant-garde as a “deformity” or “monstrosity” (Jóhannesson: “Nýjar
listastefnur”, 41). His reference to a “return to barbarism and demolition of the burden
of culture” clearly alludes to the writings of the “leader of the Futurists, Marinetti”,
who “proposed that we destroy all the museums and all the libraries” (42). In a second
article, “Um málaralist nútímans” (On Modern Painting, 1922), Jóhannesson discussed
the avant-garde along similar lines and portrayed Futurism as the most radical manifes-
tation of the ‘new art’. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, he presented Futurism and other
avant-garde currents to Icelandic readers in order to prevent them from taking root in the
country. The tone in Jóhannesson’s article was certainly more virulent than the one used
in Nordal’s lectures; more important, however, was the consensus between these two
authors that Futurism constituted a threat to the civilizing project in Icelandic culture.

“Artificial Futurists” and “Futurists by nature”

Four authors and artists were instrumental in introducing Futurism to Iceland between
1917 and 1942: Þórbergur Þórðarson (1888–1974), Jóhannes S. Kjarval (1885–1972), Jón
 Iceland 567

Björnsson (1878–1949) and Halldór Laxness (1902–1998). They either wrote introductory
articles on the movement, appropriated stylistic and formal elements of Futurist aesthet-
ics or defined their own works as ‘Futurist’. Their embrace of Futurism was ambivalent
and involved a rather sceptical position; they picked up slogans and ideas and appropri-
ated certain artistic techniques or stylistic elements, yet at the same time they explicitly
distanced themselves from the cultural and political implications of the Futurist project.
Þórbergur Þórðarson was the first author to refer to ‘Futurism’ in print when
he published, under the nom de plume of Styr Stofuglamm, the poem Futuriskar
kveldstemningar in the volume Spaks manns spjarir (Tatters of a Wise Man, 1917). The
poem was characterized by highly humorous imagery and showed few traces of the
stylistic devices to be found in Italian or Russian Futurism. Þórðarson’s ‘Futurism’ pre-
sented the author’s explicit revolt against the dominant tradition of lyrical poetry and
revealed a playful search for a new poetic language, which the author later traced back
to the year 1914, when he had been visited by the “demon of Futurism” and liberated
from the yoke of Neo-Romanticism (see Þórðarson: “Endurfæðingarkróníkan”, 8). In
1922, the poem was republished in a slightly extended version in Hvítir hrafnar (White
Ravens). That book also contained an introduction in which Þórðarson reflected
on Futuriskar kveldstemingar, as well as on a poem called Til hypothetista (To the
Hypothesists), originally published in the volume Hálfir skósólar (Half-soles of a Shoe,
1915), which Þórðarson also referred to as ‘Futurist’ (Stofuglamm: Hálfir skósólar, 7–9).
The author declares that at the time when he wrote these two ‘Futurist’ poems he
had “no idea about the concept of ‘Futurism’ in the arts” (Þórðarson: Hvítir hrafnar, 8),
thus implying that he had indeed invented the term. He further explains that the
poems were “not an imitation of a foreign artistic taste” but rather the result of a poetic
initiative meant to “reduce to absurdity, by means of an instinctive ‘inner nature’, the
sentimental gruel of thoughts that had been dominant amongst young men a couple
of years ago” (Þórðarson: Hvítir hrafnar, 8–9). Two decades later, Þórðarson claimed
that he had been “the first and possibly only self-conscious Futurist in Icelandic lit-
erature”, further declaring that in 1917 ‘Futurism’ had been for him only “the name
of a new movement in poetry and art in foreign countries”. Finally, he admitted that
he had only a vague concept of “the way Futurism must look like”. In the following
remarks, however, he referred to his poems as being in fact instances of “pseudo-
Futurism” (Þórbergur: Edda Þórbergs Þórðarsonar, 104).
Þórðarson’s ‘Futurism’ was clearly not the result of an intense engagement with
Futurist aesthetics; rather, he used ‘Futurism’ as a provocative label to describe
his own artistic revolt. In other texts from the 1920s he would employ other -isms
to describe his work, sometimes with a touch of irony, as a text of 1928 shows: “I
was a totally modern poet. A Futurist, an Expressionist, a Surrealist and also a bit
classical – I was all of this” (Þórðarson: “Þrjú þúsund, þrjú hundruð og sjötíu og níu
dagar úr lífi mínu”, 132–133). From Þórðarson’s perspective, the different -isms were
interchangeable, and it seems to have been more or less a coincidence that he chose
the label ‘Futurism’ rather than, for instance, ‘Expressionism’.
568 Benedikt Hjartarson

Yet the fact remains that the term ‘Futurism’ appears in a number of Þórðarson’s
writings from the late 1910 and early 1920s. The question is how he picked up with
the movement’s name. A letter of 1923 suggests that the most likely source may have
been the painter Jóhannes S. Kjarval, who probably provided an illustration for Hvítir
hrafnar in 1922. In this letter, Þórðarson recounts a conversation he had with Kjarval
and sheds an interesting light on his loose appropriation of Futurism: “Kjarval spoke
of two kinds of Futurists. On the one hand Futurists by nature and by God’s grace,
and on the other hand artificial Futurists, men who try to be different from others. The
first ones are artists. […] I liked this, because I’m a born Futurist” (Þórðarson: “Þessi
bæjarómynd”, 116).
Jóhannes S. Kjarval had become acquainted with Futurism as early as 1911. The
most important documents testifying to his engagement with the Italian movement
are unpublished notes with the heading “Futurismi”, probably written in 1919. Here,
Kjarval declares that he first became aware of Futurism through reproductions of
artworks in journals and articles during his years studying in London in 1911 and
1912, and that he experienced Futurist paintings at first hand “half a year or one
year later” at an exhibition in Copenhagen (Archival sources: Kjarval: Futurismi;
Guðnadóttir: “The Artist and His Life”, 104). This encounter most likely took place at
the travelling exhibition of Futurism that opened at Den Frie Udstillingsbygning in
July 1912 (see Guðnadóttir: “Jóhannes Kjarval’s Appropriation of Progressive Attitudes
in Painting”, 491). Links to Futurist aesthetics can be found in a few works from
Kjarval’s early career, among others in the paintings Hvítasunnumorgunn (Whitsun
Morning, c.1918) and Herfylking (Batallion, c.1918). As Kristín G. Guðnadóttir has
argued, the painting Himnaför (Rising to Heaven, 1919–1920) has structural and com-
positional affinities with Severini’s La Danse du “Pan Pan” á Monico (Dancing the
“Pan-Pan” at the Monico, 1909–1911), which Kjarval probably saw at the exhibition
in Copenhagen in 1912. In an interview, Kjarval described his Copenhagen years and
identified himself with the new aesthetic current as follows:

I encountered new movements that travelled the backstreets around the reigning schools. These
people thought in colours, lines and tones, strong and rich in accordance with each person’s
talents and originality. The currents came up from the south and were instantly on the tip of
everyone’s tongue. The leaders were undaunted by criticism because they knew that the highest
judgment is the last one, the one a human being cannot control. They used death as a backdrop,
but looked into the light, which was full of wondrous forms and disparate colours. And they
fashioned pictures and objects which they considered to belong to the future. […] One of those
men was me. ([Anon.]: “Viðtal við Jóhannes Kjarval”, 1)

Although Kjarval never mentions the movement by name, the references to new “cur-
rents” that “came up from the south” and to works that the artists “considered to
belong to the future” clearly refer to Futurism. The reason for not being more explicit
may have been that he remained sceptical of the cultural and political implications
of Marinetti’s movement. In the unpublished notes from 1919, he stressed: “I do not
intend to introduce [Futurism], or let it into my country unhindered, like a contagious
 Iceland 569

ship that may carry a cargo full of misery” (emphasis in the original; see Archival
sources: Kjarval: Futurismi). He also explicitly mentioned Futurism’s “contempt for
women” and the movement’s call for the destruction of “all museums”. This dismissal
is hardly surprising, given that his country had only recently put the construction of a
national tradition on its cultural agenda and that, at the time, there were no museums
in existence that could have been razed to the ground (the first steps towards the
foundation of a National Art Collection were taken in 1885, but the Icelandic National
Gallery only opened in 1961).
Kjarval’s works bear witness to an Icelandic artist’s engagement with Futurist aes-
thetics in the 1910s and early 1920s, but his conception of Futurism remained rather
hazy. Futurism was seen less in terms of a movement with a specific aesthetic pro-
gramme than as a mode of thinking to be picked up and appropriated, or as a trans-
historic artistic principle that appeared in the works of true artists at different times.

The half-hearted Futurism of Jón Björnsson

Kjarval opened his notes from 1919 with the declaration that Futurism “is nothing new
in this country” (Archival sources: Kjarval: Futurismi), which indicates that they were
probably written in response to an article by the journalist and author Jón Björnsson
in the widely read newspaper Morgunblaðið on 5 August 1919. That article, “Futurismi
(Yngsta listastefnan)” (Futurism: The Youngest Art Movement), contained not only a
short introduction to the movement and its aims, but also paraphrased key passages
from Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909). The text, in fact, incor-
porated nine of the eleven programmatic statements presented in Marinetti’s text (only
points five and six of the manifesto are left out) and can thus be considered a partial
translation. Although the programmatic points are not numbered, the presentation of
Futurism in Björnsson’s article was not substantially different from the partial trans-
lations of Marinetti’s manifesto that had appeared in other languages, often limited
to the eleven programmatic statements. With the article in Morgunblaðið, the news
of Futurism can be said to have finally reached the geographic periphery of northern
Europe.
The publication date suggests that the article was a response to debates in
Copenhagen at the time and that it was most probably translated or adapted from one
that had appeared in the Danish press. Yet a closer look at Björnsson’s other writings
from the late 1910s and the 1920s sheds an interesting light on his article from 1919.
References to Futurism cannot be found in his literary works, but he was among the
authors reflecting on new social developments amongst young people in Reykjavik,
and his works have been linked with “the renewal of narrative form during the tur-
bulent 1920s” (Jóhannsson: “Realism and Revolt”, 374). Futurism’s cult of technology
and urban life obviously appealed to the young Björnsson as a radical manifestation
570 Benedikt Hjartarson

of the experience of cultural modernity with which a new generation of Icelanders

was being confronted. However, his aesthetic preferences were different from the
Futurist agenda he introduced to Icelandic readers in 1919. Futurism was one of the
currents the new generation needed to be aware of and respond to, but it was not to
be embraced unconditionally. This may explain Björnsson’s conclusion, which seems
curiously misplaced in an introductory article on a new art movement:

It has been predicted that this art movement will conquer the world in a short time. Each new
movement descends on the countries like a shower of rain, watering the human spirit and
bringing it new evolutionary views, lives for a short time and then falls into ruins. From this,
a new movement arises, because the whole world consists of decomposition and construction.
(Björnsson: “Futurismi”, 2)

Futurism thus appeared to Björnsson as a fleeting phenomenon and “child of its time”.
He introduced Futurism to Icelandic readers primarily as a curiosity, as “probably the
most peculiar art movement that has ever emerged” (Björnsson: “Futurismi”, 2).

Halldór Laxness’s encounter with Marinetti in

Buenos Aires
References to Futurism became less frequent toward the end of the 1920s. Around
1930, the avant-garde movements no longer offered suitably controversial ideas to
key figures in the Icelandic cultural field, not even experimental devices that could
be appropriated to counter the traditional aesthetic framework. There were several
reasons for this. Firstly, a substantial shift in avant-garde aesthetics took place in an
international context in the mid-1920s, with the call for a ‘return to order’ and a ‘new
objectivity’. Secondly, a process of institutionalization of art gave Icelandic artists
the possibility of receiving public funding for their work and selling their products
to the State. In 1928, the Icelandic Arts Council was founded, comprised of politi-
cians and public intellectuals who had played an important rôle in the project of
reforming Icelandic culture, amongst them Guðmundur Finnbogason (1873–1944)
and Sigurður Nordal. The founding of the Arts Council was not only an important
step towards professionalization and the establishment of an autonomous cultural
field, but also a clear indication that creating works in an avant-garde spirit was no
longer a viable option for Icelandic artists (see Rastrick and Hjartarson: “Cleansing
the Domestic Evil”). Thirdly, Icelandic artists and writers who had defined their
works in terms of the -isms or looked towards them as points of reference now turned
to more traditional modes of aesthetic expression. This was partly due to their adap-
tation to the Icelandic art market, especially in the visual arts (see Van den Berg:
“Jón Stefánsson og Finnur Jónsson”), and partly due to a turn towards revolutionary
 Iceland 571

politics, Socialist Realism and a denunciation of the avant-garde as ‘bourgeois’, ‘for-

malist’ and ‘degenerate’.
This shift in discourse can be seen most clearly in the first issue of Rauðir
pennar (Red Pens), the organ of Félag byltingarsinnaðra rithöfunda (The Society of
Revolutionary Authors), which contained an article by Björn Franzson (1906–1974),
“Listin og þjóðfélagið” (Art and Society, 1935). The author described “Futurism in lit-
erature, Cubism in painting and Atonalism in music” as “a sign of the spiritual impo-
tence of the bourgeoisie” and as symptomatic of the avant-garde’s “flight into a realm
of religion and mysticism” (Franzson: “Listin og þjóðfélagið”, 291). Franzson discussed
Futurism in considerable detail, describing it as “Italian Blackshirts’ art” (Franzson:
“Listin og þjóðfélagið”, 292) and quoting a lengthy passage from the Futurist Political
Programme published in Lacerba on 11 October 1913. Although the avant-garde had dis-
appeared from the intellectual horizon as a possible source of cultural renewal, critical
remarks on Futurism and the other -isms were still on the Icelandic cultural agenda.
The most interesting critique of Futurism from a Marxist perspective can be found
in an article by Halldór Laxness from 1936, in which he discussed Marinetti’s behav-
iour at the PEN Club congress in Buenos Aires that year. Laxness describes Marinetti
as an “incredible circus beast” who “for many years has been a threat and a night-
mare at all international writers’ congresses”:

According to his own reports, Marinetti is the initiator of Futurism, but no one knows anything
any longer about this movement, except possibly those who can think back twenty-five years
or more into the past and may recall a few asphalt philosophers drinking absinthe at night,
arriving at home in a state of intoxication and writing in one blow a whole pamphlet in pidgin
French, without cases, conjugation or punctuation marks. Nobody hears of this movement any
longer, except the few who have the experience of visiting a writer’s congress every second year
with Marinetti being present. […] His books are little known, except for occasional propaganda
writings that appear in Fascist journals, incomprehensible to the minds of sane men. (Laxness:
“Rithöfundaþíng í Buenos Aires”, 218–219)

Such a denunciation was clearly in line with Laxness’s views on Futurism and other
progressive currents of modern art and literature in these years. The remarks on the
Italian author, whom Laxness had previously encountered at a writer’s congress in
Paris (1931), and on his long-forgotten movement are somewhat surprising as they
come from an author who, in the 1920s, had continuously presented himself as the
representative of the latest aesthetic trends and who has indeed been called, along
with Þórbergur Þórðarson, one of “the representatives of Futurism in Iceland” (Lista:
Le Futurisme, 232). Yet, Laxness’s remarks on the different -isms show that his interest
in the avant-garde was limited and his understanding of the avant-garde was, from
the beginning, peculiarly unorthodox.
Sporadic references to Futurism can be found in some of Laxness’s essays written
during his stay in Italy, for example in a “Letter from Sicily” (1925), in which he com-
pares the hills of Taormina to “a Futurist painting of Nordic tress” (Laxness: “Bréf
572 Benedikt Hjartarson

frá Sikiley”, 3). Yet the movement is not one of the -isms he continually referred to
in his writings. Laxness’s encounter with the “circus beast” in Buenos Aires was cer-
tainly not forgotten. Marinetti’s critical view of “xenophilia” as “one of the most hor-
rible crimes that any Italian can be guilty of” and his declarations about “war as the
world’s only hygiene” shocked the Icelandic author. From Laxness’s perspective, the
views of the Italian “warmonger” (Laxness: “Rithöfundaþíng í Buenos Aires”, 219)
were clearly in contrast to the pacifist and internationalist views dominant in PEN.

Futurism and a display of ‘degenerate’

art in Reykjavik in 1942
Italian Futurism remained a well-known point of reference in discussions about
modern art in Iceland well into the 1940s. In December 1941, the head of the Icelandic
Arts Council, the controversial politician Jónas Jónsson (1885–1968), published a
series of articles on the ‘new art’, which launched a debate on ‘degenerate’ art and
culminated in an exhibition of eight works of “modern-style Icelandic art” (Jónsson:
“Skáld og hagyrðingar”, 106). The exhibition opened in a side room of the parliament
building in Reykjavik on 28 March 1942 and was later put on display in the city’s main
street, where it attracted large crowds (see Friðriksson and Þór: Ljónið öskrar. Vol.
3, 204). The exhibition was explicitly presented as a measure against “the absolute
social danger of communist subversive activities in literature and in matters of art in
this country” (Jónsson: “Það er Sigurður Nordal sem samdi skjalið”, 142).
Jónsson’s writings never mention Futurism, Expressionism, Dadaism or Cubism
explicitly, but rather subsume them under labels such as ‘decadence’ and ‘degener-
ation’. This seems to suggest that he had doubts as to whether the Icelandic public
would be familiar with any of these -isms. Yet, in a clear allusion to Marinetti, Jónsson
mentions “a prophet of painting who affiliated his art movement with the future”.
Furthermore, he refers to Giacomo Balla as an artist who “once showed a fine lady
with a lapdog on a leash” and explains:

He imagines that the leash will oscillate in a broad circle, between the lady’s hand and the dog’s
head. The new art of the future manifested itself as it represented the trembling of the leash with
many curves in that dimension of the atmosphere in which the dog leash had played its rôle.
(Jónsson: “Hvíldartími í listum og bókmenntum”, 500–501)

This reference to Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,

1912) is unambiguous and served as an emblem of the ‘degenerate’ art that was seen
as a threat to the international or Icelandic art scene. Futurism thus found its place
in the controversy surrounding the exhibition of 1942. The exhibition was, however,
curiously misplaced, because it came at the close of a rather quiet decade in the
 Iceland 573

history of Icelandic culture, when the avant-garde had no longer shown a public pres-
ence. Thus, it marked the definite end of the first period in the reception of Futurism
and the other avant-garde movements in Iceland.

Archival sources
Kjarval, Jóhannes: Futurismi. Reykjavik: Listasafn Reykjavíkur [Reykjavik Art Museum]; Kjarval
Collection, box 9.

Works cited
Abildgaard, Hanne: “The Nordic Paris.” Dorthe Aagesen, ed.: The Avant-Garde in Danish and
European Art 1909–19. København: Statens Museum for Kunst, 2002. 172–187.
[Anon.]: “Viðtal við Jóhannes Kjarval.” [Interview with Jóhannes Kjarval] Morgunblaðið [The Morning
Paper] (Reykjavik), 23 April 1922. 1.
Björnsson, Jón: “Futurismi (Yngsta listastefnan).” [Futurism: The Youngest Art Movement]
Morgunblaðið (Reykjavik), 5 August 1919. 2.
Franzson, Björn: “Listin og þjóðfélagið: Nokkrar hugleiðingar frá sjónarmiði marxismans.” [Art and
Society: A Few Reflections from a Marxist Perspective] Rauðir pennar [Red Pens] 1:1 (1935):
278–297.
Friðriksson, Guðjón, and Jón Þ. Þór: Ljónið öskrar [The Lion Roars]. Vol. 3. Saga Jónasar Jónssonar
frá Hriflu [The Story of Jónas Jónsson from Hrifla]. Reykjavík: Iðunn, 1993.
Guðmundsson, Halldór: “Loksins, loksins”: Vefarinn mikli og upphaf íslenskra nútímabókmennta
[“Finally, finally”: The Great Weaver and the Emergence of Modern Icelandic Literature].
Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1987.
Guðnadóttir, Kristín G.: “Jóhannes Kjarval’s Appropriation of Progressive Attitudes in Painting
Between 1917 and 1920.” Hubert van den Berg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the
Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 491–498.
Guðnadóttir, Kristín G.: “The Artist and His Life.” Einar Matthíasson, et al., eds.: Kjarval. Reykjavík:
Nesútgáfan, 2005. 10–496.
Jelsbak, Torben: “Dada Copenhagen.” Hubert van den Berg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the
Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 401–413.
Jóhannesson, Alexander: “Nýjar listastefnur: Alþýðufræðsla Stúdentafjelagsins 9. maí 1920.” [The
New Art Movements: Popular Education Series of the Student Society, 9 May 1920] Óðinn [Odin]
16:1–6 (January–June 1920): 41–46.
Jóhannesson, Alexander: “Um málaralist nútímans.” [On Modern Painting] Eimreiðin [The
Locomotive] 28:1 (1922): 14–24.
Jóhannsson, Jón Yngvi: “Realism and Revolt: Between the World Wars.” Daisy Neijmann, ed.: A
History of Icelandic Literature. Lincoln/NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 357–403.
Jónsson, Jónas: “Hvíldartími í listum og bókmenntum [Parts I–III].” [Repose in Arts and Literature]
Tíminn [The Time] (Reykjavik), 6, 13, 18 December 1941. 500–501, 512–514, 520–522.
Jónsson, Jónas: “Skáld og hagyrðingar.” [Poets and Versifiers] Tíminn [The Time] (Reykjavik). 9 April
1942: 106–108
Jónsson, Jónas: “Það er Sigurður Nordal sem samdi skjalið.” [It Was Sigurður Nordal Who Wrote the
Document] Tíminn [The Time] (Reykjavik), 26 April 1942. 142–143.
574 Benedikt Hjartarson

Laxness, Halldór: “Bréf frá Sikiley.” [Letter from Sicily] Morgunblaðið [The Morning Paper]
(Reykjavik), 29 July 1925. 3.
Laxness, Halldór: “Rithöfundaþíng í Buenos Aires.” [A Writers’ Congress in Buenos Aires] H. Laxness:
Dagleið á fjöllum: Greinar [A Day’s Journey in the Mountains: Articles]. Reykjavík: Helgafell,
1962. 216–228.
Lista, Giovanni: Le Futurisme: Création et avant-garde. Paris: Éditions de l’ Amateur, 2001.
Nordal, Sigurður: “Einlyndi og marglyndi.” [Unity and Diversity] S. Nordal: List og lífsskoðun [Art and
Philosophy]. Vol. 2. Reykjavík: Almenna bókafélagið, 1987. 13–290.
Rastrick, Ólafur, and Benedikt Hjartarson: “Cleansing the Domestic Evil: On the Degenerate Art
Display in Reykjavik 1942.” Per Stounbjerg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in
the Nordic Countries 1925–1950. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.
Stofuglamm, Styr [pseud. of Þórbergur Þórðarson]: Hálfir skósólar: Söngvar og kvæði um mannlega
náttúru [Half-soles of a Shoe: Songs and Poems on Human Nature]. Reykjavík: Prentsmiðjan
Gutenberg, 1915.
Stofuglamm, Styr: Spaks manns spjarir: Lyrisk lofnar-kvæði og heimspekilegar hugraunir [Tatters
of a Wise Man: Lyrical Love Poems and Philosophical Sorrows]. Reykjavík: Prentsmiðjan
Gutenberg, 1917.
Þórðarson, Þórbergur: “Endurfæðingarkróníkan.” [The Rebirth Chronicle] Stefán Einarsson:
Þórbergur Þórðarson: Fræðimaður – spámaður – skáld fimmtugur [Þórbergur Þórðarson:
Scholar – Prophet – Poet Turns Fifty]. Reykjavík: Heimskringla, 1939. 7–11.
Þórðarson, Þórbergur: Edda Þórbergs Þórðarsonar [The Edda of Þórbergur Þórðarson]. Reykjavík:
Heimskringla, 1941.
Þórðarson, Þórbergur: Hvítir hrafnar [White Ravens]. Reykjavík: Gutenberg, 1922.
Þórðarson, Þórbergur: “Þessi bæjarómynd.” [This Inept Town]. Þórbergur Þórðarson: Mitt
rómantíska æði: Úr dagbókum, bréfum og öðrum óprentuðum ritsmíðum frá árunum 1918–1929
[My Romantic Delusion: From Diaries, Letters and Other Unpublished Writings from 1918–1929].
Reykjavík: Mál og menning, 1987. 110–123.
Þórðarson, Þórbergur: “Þrjú þúsund, þrjú hundruð og sjötíu og níu dagar úr lífi mínu.”
[Three-thousand, Three-hundred-and-seventy Days of My Life] Iðunn [Idun] 12:2 (1928):
130–142.
Van den Berg, Hubert: “Jón Stefánsson og Finnur Jónsson: Frá Íslandi til evrópsku framúrstefnunnar
og aftur til baka. Framlag til kortlagningar á evrópsku framúrstefnunni á fyrri helmingi
tuttugustu aldar.” [Jón Stefánsson and Finnur Jónson: From Iceland to the European
Avant-Garde and Back. A Contribution to the Mapping of the European Avant-Garde in the First
Half of the Twentieth Century] Ritið [The Journal] 6:1 (2006): 51–77.

Further reading
Birgisdóttir, Soffía Auður: Ég skapa – þess vegna er ég: Um skrif Þórbergs Þórðarsonar. [I Write –
Therefore I Am: On the Writings of Þórbergur Þórðarson] Reykjavik: Opna, 2015.
Elísson, Guðni: “From Realism to Neo-Romanticism.” Daisy Neijmann, ed.: A History of Icelandic
Literature. Lincoln/NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006. 308–356.
Guðmundsson, Halldór: The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness. London: McLehose, 2008.
Hjartarson, Benedikt: “ ‘A new movement in poetry and art in the artistic countries abroad’: The
Reception of Futurism in Iceland.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 6 (2016): 220–247.
Hjartarson, Benedikt: “Anationalism and the Search for a Universal Language: Esperantism and
the European Avant-Garde.” Per Bäckström, and Benedikt Hjartarson, eds.: Decentring the
Avant-Garde. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. 267–303.
 Iceland 575

Hjartarson, Benedikt: “Dragging Nordic Horses Past the Sludge of Extremes: The Beginnings of the
Icelandic Avant-Garde.” Sascha Bru, and Gunther Martens, eds.: The Invention of Politics in the
European Avant-Garde (1906–1940). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006. 235–263.
Hjartarson, Benedikt: “International Nationalism: Reflections on the Emergence of Anti-avant-
gardism in Iceland.” Hubert F. van den Berg, and Lidia Głuchowska, eds.: Transnationality,
Internationalism and Nationhood: European Avant-Garde in the First Half of the Twentieth
Century. Leuven: Peeters, 2013. 75–99.
Hjartarson, Benedikt: “The Early Avant-Garde in Iceland.” Hubert van den Berg, et al., eds.:
A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2012. 615–627.
Potter, Rachel: “Modernist Rights: International PEN 1921–1936.” Critical Quarterly 55:2 (2013):
66–80.
Rastrick, Ólafur: Háborgin: Menning, fagurfræði og pólitík í upphafi tuttugustu aldar [The Acropolis:
Culture, Aesthetics and Politics at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century]. Reykjavík:
Háskólaútgáfan, 2013.
Salomonsen, Carl Julius: De nyeste kunstretninger og smitsomme sindslidelser [The Newest Art
Movements and Contagious Mental Diseases]. København: Levin & Munskgaards, 1919.
Sigurjónsson, Árni: Laxness og þjóðlífið: Bókmenntir og bókmenntakenningar á árunum milli stríða
[Laxness and Social Life: Literature and Literary Theories in the Interwar Years]. Reykjavík:
Vaka-Helgafell, 1986.
Þorsteinsson, Þorsteinn: Fjögur skáld: Upphaf nútímaljóðlistar á Íslandi [Four Poets: The Emergence
of Modern Poetry in Iceland]. Reykjavík: JPV, 2014.
Þorvaldsson, Eysteinn: “Ljóðagerð sagnaskálds.” [Poetry of an Epic Writer] Ljóðaþing: Um íslenska
ljóðagerð á 20. öld [Writings on Poetry: On Icelandic Poetry in the Twentieth Century].
Reykjavík: Ormstunga, 2002. 49–67.
Van den Berg, Hubert, and Benedikt Hjartarson: “Icelandic Artists in the Network of the European
Avant-Garde: The Cases of Jón Stefánsson and Finnur Jónsson.” Hubert van den Berg, et al.,
eds.: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925. Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2012. 229–247.
Vilhjálmsson, Björn Þór: “Modernity and the Moving Image: Halldór Laxness and the Writing of ‘The
American Film in 1928’.” Journal of Scandinavian Cinema 1:2 (2011): 135–144.
Luca Somigli, Giorgio Di Genova
37 Italy
During the nineteenth century, European society underwent a profound transforma-
tion. In the course of a few generations, the face of the continent changed, both
mentally and physically, beyond recognition. New technologies and inventions had
a profound impact on the everyday life of the citizens of the industrialized world.
Revolutionized means of transportation and new modes of communication shook up
people’s conception of a linear continuum of time and space and altered their cogni-
tive mapping of the world. Whereas in previous centuries renewal had been experi-
enced as a gradual process, occurring over a long period of time, towards the end of
the nineteenth century the feeling of a great and far-reaching cataclysmic upheaval
gained ground.
The changing conditions of contemporary life imposed new forms of expression
on the artistic production of the period. At the turn of the century, Europe was rife with
new schools and movements that wanted to reflect these new urban environments,
the hustle and bustle of the metropolis, the myriad of sensory impressions that inces-
santly showered the city-dweller’s mind. The effort of finding new artistic languages
for capturing these experiences caused the Moderns to be highly self-conscious
about their media of expression. Whereas nineteenth-century art was based on a
positivist-materialist understanding of the world, the Moderns had to grapple with
the fact that scientific discoveries had destroyed the classical understanding of the
physical universe. A world that could no longer be explained by means of traditional
science and philosophy had to be represented in a new manner that went beyond the
traditional ‘mirror’ concept of representational and Realist art.
In the period 1880 to 1910, Italy also experienced the advent of industrial capital-
ism. The young nation was eager to catch up with the major European States in the
northern hemisphere. Milan, Genoa and Turin became modern urban centres, where
advanced transport systems of buses, trams, bicycles and automobiles replaced
horse-drawn carts and coaches; thoroughfares were illuminated with powerful street-
lamps; and houses were fitted with sanitary services unknown anywhere else in the
peninsula. In short, a progressive urban lifestyle began to emerge in Italy, too.
However, despite this ‘arrival of the future’, Italy’s cultural identity remained
firmly rooted in the past. The great achievements of the Renaissance weighed heavily
on the modern generation. Instead of reflecting a country transformed by steam
engines, electricity, locomotives, motor cars and aeroplanes, artists remained in their
ivory-towers and stood aloof from the unfolding technological and social revolutions.
They ignored the systemic transitions in the age of modernity and sought to create an
art that was detached from everyday existence. They created cultural sanctuaries that
were isolated from the social sphere and offered escape from the quotidian routines
of bourgeois life.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-037
 Italy 577

Futurism, launched in 1909 by the Italian poet and publicist Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, was not the first, but certainly the most radical attempt to resuscitate Italy’s
dormant cultural life. The Futurists declared war on the establishment and assumed
the rôle of a violent jolt that set ablaze the somnolent and stultified cultural scene in
Italy. They proclaimed the bankruptcy of a country that clung to the past and ignored
the great advances in the modern world. They ridiculed the ossified cultural and
political institutions and the servile respect paid to Italy’s glorious past. Instead, they
sought nothing less than to revolutionize life and society in all their diverse aspects:
moral, artistic, cultural, social, economic and political.
Futurist art and literature took as its subject matter “the many-hued, many-voiced
tides of revolution in our modern capitals” (Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism”, 14). To render these experiences in a novel and up-to-date fashion, the
Futurists studied the latest scientific discoveries and incorporated them into their
artistic programme. Science not only provided mind-expanding knowledge but also
suggested new creative processes that were to become vital for twentieth-century art.
Marinetti and his fellow Futurists gleaned from the sciences an experimental method-
ology and applied it to the fields of art, where it served to dismantle the dogmatic tra-
ditions of academism. Instead of following the rules and principles inherited from the
venerated Great Masters of the past, Futurist artists stepped into unfamiliar terrain
and produced original, innovative works that were genuinely breaking new ground.
Futurist experimentalism defied traditions, canons and doctrines and operated with
unprecedented creative approaches. Thus, Futurism bequeathed to other avant-garde
movements the fundamental principle of ‘experimentalism’.
The Futurists absorbed Henri Bergson’s writings on the human experience of time
and space and reflected on how the artist’s subjective experience of reality affects
his or her state of mind. Futurist art and literature was to offer a sum total of the
artist’s impressions and sensations, both past and present. Thus, they shook off the
remnants of mimetic Realism and developed a new aesthetic, which they summed
up in their manifestos under the headings simultaneity, interpenetration, synthesis,
multiple viewpoints and universal dynamism.
It was a key characteristic of Futurism that it did not only unleash a revolution in
the artistic domain, but also that it fused art and politics, cultural and social concerns
in a manner that has few parallels in European history. From the very inception of the
Futurist movement, Marinetti proclaimed a far-reaching programme of transforma-
tion and regeneration. Only a month after pubishing his foundational manifesto in Le
Figaro, he issued the movement’s first political manifesto. Thus, an unprecedented
aesthetization of politics and a politicization of arts took place in the years 1910–1915;
this was followed by a focus on war and revolution in the years 1915–1919. Then, sud-
denly, came a volte-face in early 1920. Marinetti’s alliance with the Arditi, the Fasci
di combattimento and Communists of a Gramscian conviction was short-lived and
ended in the bitter disillusion that the two domains of Aisthetika and Politika could
not easily be conjoined.
578 Luca Somigli

A new brand of Futurism resulted from this U-turn, usually referred to as secondo
futurismo. It was meant to operate in the “unlimited domains of pure fantasy”
(Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista, 496–497) and to become involved in politics
“only in time of grave peril for the Nation” (Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista,
562). Although all attempts to have Futurism recognized as ‘Art of the State’ failed,
the movement made inroads into the artistic institutions of the country. By the 1920s,
the initial rejection by the public had been overcome. Galleries, theatres and concert
halls opened their doors to the Futurist incendiaries, unperturbed by their battle cries
against the academies and museums. Futurism was still frowned upon in the Fascist
cultural establishment and often complained about in the corridors of power, but
Marinetti’s ideological meandering and political twists and turns were ultimately suc-
cessful, albeit at a cost. The Futurist leadership was obliged to make one compromise
after the other in order to be allowed, from time to time, to exhibit or publish in an
‘official’ framework. This meant paying lip service to a conservative establishment and
towing the line with politics that were not necessarily shared. Some Futurists openly
embraced the Fascist system but only benefitted from this if they tuned down their rev-
olutionary rhetorics. All in all, Italian Fascism was an imperfect and inefficient system,
and the Futurists’ survival tactics allowed them to remain active, and occasionally to
be innovative, well into the 1930s.
Critics and historians are divided in their opinion of Futurism’s lasting achieve-
ments. Some rate their theories higher than their creative works, but there is little
doubt that their radical engagement with and enthusiastic commitment to change
left a lasting impression on subsequent generations. Futurism’s rôle in Italian culture
was profound and pervasive. It freed the country’s art and literature from their deeply
rooted attachment to the legacy of past glories, and it was a vital stimulus that pro-
pelled Italian culture into the twentieth century, first in the field of literature and soon
after also in the other arts.

Futurist Literature in Italy

Marinetti and the foundation of Futurism

In an essay dedicated to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s poetry, Paolo Valesio lamented

that Marinetti the writer has become the victim of his success as a cultural impresa-
rio. The very fact that he acted as a successful manager of the Futurist movement,
which he founded in 1909 and single-handedly ran in Italy until his death in 1944, has
proved to be an obstacle to the recognition of his “artistic and intellectual achieve-
ment” (Valesio: “ ‘The Most Enduring and Most Honored Name’,” 149). Valesio’s
point is well taken, and yet it is nearly impossible to disentangle the history of Italian
Futurism from the biography of its creator, especially when it comes to literature. As
 Italy 579

the main ideologue and theoretician of Futurism, Marinetti cast his shadow over all
activities of the movement, but as a poet, playwright and prose-writer he also had a
specific professional interest in literary production and often offered his own works as
quintessential examples of Futurist poetics. Indeed, while we can identify a number
of major contributors in the figurative arts, in architecture, or in music, in literature
Marinetti rises above a crowd of minor writers, with the rare exception of a handful
of figures such as Aldo Palazzeschi (pseud. of Aldo Giurlani; 1885–1974) or Corrado
Govoni (1884–1965) whose collaboration with the movement were limited to a short
phase of their careers.
Marinetti was born on 22 December 1876 in Alexandria (Egypt), where his father
ran a flourishing law practice. While his mother introduced him to the classics of
Italian literature, he was educated in French at the Jesuit college Saint François
Xavier, where he discovered his vocation for literature, writing poetry in French,
and cultural promotion, producing almost single-handedly the magazine Le Papyrus
(1894–96). Upon his family’s return to Milan in 1894, he completed his baccalauréat
at the Sorbonne in Paris, then went on to study law in Pavia and Genoa, graduating
in 1899 but never actually practicing. Rather, he devoted himself primarily to poetry
and spent long periods in the French capital, where he came into contact with many
of the leading figures of its literary milieu. He was particularly influenced by Gustave
Kahn’s vers libre (Free Verse), which he adopted for his own compositions and cham-
pioned as a means of liberating Italian prosody, which he saw as hopelessly bound
to a Parnassian cult of form. Before the foundation of the Futurist movement, he
published three volumes of poetry – La Cônquete des étoiles (The Conquest of the
Stars, 1902), Destruction (1904) and La Ville charnelle (The Carnal City, 1908) – which
contain a number of features recurrent in his later works and images and themes that
anticipate Futurism (Berghaus: The Genesis of Futurism). If in the earliest work the
agonistic impulse at the core of Marinetti’s poetics was expressed through the anthro-
pomorphization of natural forces and phenomena – the sea, the sun, the desert, the
stars – in La Ville charnelle we see the rise of proto-Futurist topoi such as the modern
metropolis and the automobile, which, however, still appear ambiguously as symbols
of a disquieting new world for which poetry does not yet seem to have found an ade-
quate language.
Meanwhile, through his frequent contributions to literary magazines and his
activity as a declaimer of poetry, Marinetti also attempted to cast himself as a medi-
ator between the literary avant-gardes of France and Italy (Somigli: “The Mirror of
Modernity”). An important rôle in this respect was played by the journal Poesia, an
elegant (semi-)monthly anthology of modern poetry that Marinetti co-founded in
1905, and of which he soon became the sole director as well as financial backer. Open
to all tendencies of international modern poetry, it eventually became the cradle of
the Futurist movement. Not by chance, three of the five writers who – according to
the famous roll call that opens the first version of the manifesto Uccidiamo il chiaro di
luna! (Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight!, 1909) – formed the first wave of Futurism, Paolo
580 Luca Somigli

Buzzi (1874–1956), Enrico Cavacchioli (1885–1954) and Libero Altomare (pseud. of

Remo Mannoni; 1883–1966), either won one of the literary competitions sponsored by
Poesia or published some of their earliest works on its pages. Furthermore, Poesia also
became a crucial instrument in Marinetti’s campaign to promote Futurism, and even
after the journal closed at the end of 1909, ‘Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia” ’ remained
the name of the publishing arm of the movement throughout its later history (Salaris:
Marinetti editore, 337–363).
The birth of Futurism, however, can be traced back to a specific event: the publi-
cation, on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, of a
text then simply titled “Le Futurisme”, and best known, in a somewhat longer form,
as Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo (The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism).1
Marinetti had in fact been at work on the project of a literary movement for a good part
of 1908, but he had to postpone its launch, which had been planned for the beginning
of the new year, when a catastrophic earthquake struck Messina and Reggio Calabria
on 28 December, killing over 120,000 people, and monopolizing public attention.
Divided into three sections – an allegorical account of the birth of the movement, the
eleven points of the manifesto proper, and an appeal to the reader to join the Futurist
revolution – the manifesto called for a radical rethinking of the rôle of art in moder-
nity in two complementary ways: On the one hand, artists were to reject the social and
aesthetic values inherited from tradition and refuse to let their works be confined into
institutional sites such as libraries and museums, the destruction of which the man-
ifesto famously demanded. On the other hand, artists were to engage in a dialogue
with modernity and develop a language appropriate to giving shape to its energy and
dynamism, of which the city and the machine are the most representative emblems.
Some of the manifesto’s more controversial points, such as the notorious principles of
war as “the sole cleanser of the world” and of the “scorn for women” (Marinetti: “The
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14), derive from Marinetti’s emphatic denun-
ciation of the social and moral values associated with bourgeois society, to which he
opposed a series of positive values centred around the notions of speed, rebellion and
struggle. From the beginning, one of the characteristics of Futurism was the intention
to heal the breach between art and life that had characterized late nineteenth-century
aestheticism. Its diverse political and philosophical sources included anarchism,
Sorelian syndicalism, Nietzschean and Bergsonian thought, and Italian nationalism.

1 Several of Marinetti’s early Futurist works were first published in French or simultaneously in
French and Italian. I give the Italian titles only, unless I refer specifically to the French version. It is
worth noting that Marinetti circulated the programmatic section of the first manifesto among friends,
contributors to Poesia, artists and politicians as early as January 1909 and that it was published, parti-
ally or in full, by a handful of Italian newspapers before 20 February without receiving any particular
notice (see Salaris: Marinetti editore, 60–62). Marinetti always referred to the publication in Le Figaro
as the birth of Futurism.
 Italy 581

Manifestos and Mafarka: Marinetti’s early Futurist works

Aside from its content, The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism is a fundamental
document because it is the first in a vast production of manifestos to characterize not
only the Italian movement, but also the historical avant-garde tout court. Published
in newspapers and periodicals and circulated in the form of leaflets and handbills,
manifestos became the centrepiece in Futurism’s publicity campaign. Marinetti very
carefully controlled their production, especially in the early years of the movement,
and even those that he did not personally author or co-author often bore the unmis-
takable signs of his editorial intervention. Marinetti’s strategy was twofold: On the
one hand, he used Futurist principles to ‘colonize’ and re-invent not only every pos-
sible form of artistic production but every corner of everyday life, from painting to
music, from cookery to clothing. On the other hand, he turned the manifesto into
more than a programmatic statement, making it a new literary genre that not only
called for literary innovation but also performed that very task of renewal. For all their
differences, texts such as Marinetti’s Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna!, Aldo Palazzeschi’s
Il controdolore (An Antidote to Pain, 1914) or Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero’s
Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (The Futurist Refashioning of the Universe, 1915)
articulate in narrative terms the Utopian aims of the movement and its members.
What is noticeably missing from The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism is any
specific suggestion as to how literary renewal might be achieved. In fact, in the early
years of the movement, literature seemed to lag behind the figurative arts in terms of
its experimental thrust. The earliest instances of Futurist literature remained heavily
indebted to the late Symbolist and Decadentist milieu in which their authors were
formed. An important example of this transitional production is Marinetti’s novel
Mafarka le futuriste / Mafarka il futurista (Mafarka the Futurist), published in French
in 19102 and translated into Italian by Marinetti’s secretary Decio Cinti the same year.
Set in an exotic Africa typical of fin-de-siècle Orientalist fantasies and popular adven-
ture novels (see Rinaldi: Miracoli della stupidità), the account of the trials and tri-
umphs of the Arab warlord Mafarka is a tangle of Marinetti’s cultural influences, from
Dante to Nietzsche, and personal obsessions, from the traumas over the loss of his
brother and mother (Baldissone: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 115–119) to the Utopia of
what Cinzia Sartini Blum has called the “rejection and transcendence of the natural
order” (Sartini Blum: The Other Modernism, 75). Indeed, the most Futurist element of
the novel is the creation, in the last chapter, of a mechanical superman in the form
of Mafarka’s ‘son’ Gazurmah, a flying machine whose birth signals the advent of a
new order, symbolically represented by the death of Mafarka, in a scene that seems to

2 In the critical literature, Mafarka is variously dated 1909 or 1910. The first edition says “1909” on
the title page, but “1910” on the cover. It appears that the book was printed in December 1909, but
issued in January 1910, with the fake indication “deuxième édition”.
582 Luca Somigli

translate in narrative terms the principle of the necessary overcoming of one (artistic)
generation by the next expressed in the closing paragraph of The Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism. The Italian translation of the novel was tried for obscenity
(Marinetti was found guilty on appeal), and the trial provided much fodder for the
publicity machine of the movement.

The first generation of Futurist poets

The relative belatedness of Futurist literature is even more evident in the anthology
I poeti futuristi, published in 1912 – significantly, the same year when the international
sensation caused by the itinerant exhibition of Futurist art that touched most European
capitals made the movement synonymous with artistic innovation. While the painters
in fact demonstrated a unity of purpose and vision, expressed theoretically in co-signed
manifestos and aesthetically in the relative thematic and formal coherence of their
works, the thirteen poets included in the anthology seemed to have little in common
beyond an interest in Free Verse and, more importantly, the intention of displaying “a
firm group solidarity” (Saccone: Futurismo, 36). The volume’s copious prefatory mate-
rial captures quite sharply the presence of two contradictory visions of poetry within
the movement. One text, “Il verso libero”, reprinted Paolo Buzzi’s 1908 response to
the enquête on Free Verse launched by Poesia in 1905 and aimed conservatively at
renewing poetry from within, through the introduction of new formal structures such
as the French vers libre. Another was Marinetti’s Manifesto tecnico della letteratura
futurista (Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, 1912) and its companion piece,
the “Supplemento” also known as Risposta alle obiezioni (Answers to Objections), both
already issued as leaflets and dated 11 May and 11 August 1912 respectively. They advo-
cated a radically transformation of the art of poetry through a revolution that under-
mines and unhinges the structures of its material, language itself. Indeed, while Buzzi,
writing before the launch of Futurism, can still speak of Poetry (rigorously capitalized)
as “an eminently aristocratic and difficult art” (“Il verso libero”, 48), Marinetti, taking
stock of the present state of Futurist poetry and attempting to chart a new direction for
it, can reject art altogether, famously inviting his followers to abandon their “priestly
airs” and “spit everyday on the High Altar of Art!” (Marinetti: “Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Writing,” 113). The poems collected in I poeti futuristi, starting with Marinetti’s
own, drawn mostly from his pre-Futurist production in French, are the outcome of the
early verslibriste conception of Futurist poetry, with the curious result that the anthol-
ogy appears to conclude a phase in the development of Futurist literature rather than
provide examples of the poetry of the future.
In addition to a few minor figures such as Armando Mazza (1884–1964), as well
known for his imposing physique and stage presence put to good use in numerous
serate futuriste as for his poetic skill, the anthology includes all the major writers
 Italy 583

in the early phase of the movement. The only significant exception is that of Gian
Pietro Lucini (1867–1914), an important Symbolist poet and theorist of Free Verse
who, though never an official member of the group, had been close to Marinetti and
had published one of his major collections of poetry, Revolverate (Gun Shots, 1909)
under the imprint of the Edizioni Futuriste di “Poesia”. Among the Futurists of the
first hour, the most influential, if not the best known, is without a doubt Buzzi, a
prolific writer at home in all genres, but especially dedicated to poetry, who had
entered Marinetti’s orbit in 1901. His first Futurist work is the Free-Verse poetry col-
lection Aeroplani (Aeroplanes, 1909), very much a transitional work in which poems
in the Decadent vein such as “Notturno veneziano” (Venetian Nocturne) co-exist
with poems that engage with Futurist themes such as regenerating violence and the
rejection of bourgeois values, best exemplified by “Inno alla guerra” (Hymn to War),
programmatically placed at the beginning of the book. Buzzi’s most experimental
phase coincided with the war period and includes L’ ellisse e la spirale (The Ellipse
and the Spiral, 1915), a novel that merges elements of adventure fiction (it has been
described as an example of early science-fiction) with Futurist themes and proce-
dures, in particular the inclusion, for the first time in a narrative work, of Free-Word
tables directly into the text.
Luciano Folgore (pseud. of Omero Vecchi; 1888–1966) represents the side of
the poetic movement engaged in the celebration of modernity and its technological
wonders, as suggested by the titles of the poems selected in I poeti futuristi from his
1912 volume Canto dei motori (Engine Song) – “Torpediniera” (Torpedo Boat), “Al
carbone” (To Coal) and “L’ elettricità” (Electricity), to name a few. His line of research
was still bound here to a fundamentally traditional prosody, but in his later volumes
such as Ponti sull’oceano (Bridges over the Ocean, 1914) and Città veloce (Fast City,
1919) it continues in a more experimental vein. More interesting is the production of
Corrado Govoni, who, when he joined Marinetti’s movement, was already established
as an important figure of crepuscolarismo, a poetic school whose works described, in
a muted and melancholic tone that provided a sort of counterpoint to the dominant
model of Gabriele D’Annunzio’s sonorous and well-wrought verse, humble every-
day experiences and the increased marginality of art in bourgeois society. Although
Govoni’s 1903 volumes Le fiale (The Vials) and Armonia in grigio et in silenzio
(Harmony in Grey and Silence) are credited as foundational texts of crepuscolarismo,
by the second half of the decade the poet was already moving in a new direction that
anticipated some Futurist themes, such as the description of the modern metropolis
and its contradictions in “Le capitali” (The Capitals), first published in Gli aborti (The
Miscarriages, 1907) and selected by Marinetti for I poeti futuristi. This theme returns
in the Free-Verse collections of his Futurist period, Poesie elettriche (Electrical Poems,
1911) and L’ inaugurazione della primavera (The Inauguration of Spring, 1915), while
in Rarefazioni e parole in libertà (Rarefactions and Words in Freedom, 1915) he pub-
lished his most accomplished and original experimental works. In particular, the
rarefazioni – hand-drawn and hand-written visual poems – creatively interpreted
584 Luca Somigli

Marinetti’s Words-in-Freedom and playfully broke down the boundaries between

word and image with their apparent stylistic naïveté.
The vagaries of alphabetical order placed Aldo Palazzeschi at the end of the
anthology. This author is considered by critics to be the most important and origi-
nal member of the first generation of Futurist writers, even though his militancy in
the movement was effectively over by the spring of 1914. What sets Palazzeschi apart
from most of his fellow Futurists is the fact that his ‘conversion’ to the movement con-
sisted not so much in the adoption of its typical themes and keywords, but rather in
the re-articulation, through Futurist strategies, of his peculiar and personal poetics.
This is nowhere more evident than in the manifesto Il controdolore, which uses the
quintessential Marinettian genre of propaganda to re-affirm Palazzeschi’s own theory
of the liberating power of laughter. The recurrent theme of Palazzeschi’s pre-Futurist
and Futurist production is the critique of the mores and conventions of bourgeois
society through the humorous perspective of an eccentric and marginal character
who, by virtue of his candour, is able to expose the pretensions of the social institu-
tions with which he comes in contact. The most accomplished interpretation of this
theme is the Futurist novel Il codice di Perelà (The Man of Smoke, 1911), which tells the
allegorical fable of Perelà, a fantastic character born out of the smoke of a chimney
who is first greeted by the rulers and the beau monde of an unnamed kingdom as an
envoy of a superior power sent to bring a new code of laws, and is then rejected and
imprisoned when he falls victim to vicious rumours and gossips (the obvious parallel
with the story of Christ has been frequently remarked upon). A version of the candid
demolisher of bourgeois norms is the artist himself, who in the poem “E lasciatemi
divertire!” (And Let Me Have My Fun), from the volume L’ incendiario (The Arsonist,
1910), declared the superfluity of his rôle but simultaneously, as an ultimate gesture
of defiance, also proclaimed his right to indulge in his uselessness in a society in
which efficiency is the rule: “The times have changed quite a bit – / men no longer
expect / anything from poets, / so let me have my fun!” (Palazzeschi: “E lasciatemi
divertire!”, 129). Unlike Marinetti, Palazzeschi remained unconvinced of the power of
art to change the world, as suggested by the poem “L’ incendiario”, in which the poet
both hails as a new divinity the eponymous arsonist – a character very much inspired
by the Futurist leader – but also admits his own impotence as “wretched would-be
arsonist / an arsonist of poems” (“L’ incendiario”, 25).

The theory of Words-in-Freedom

In a curious way, then, the most experimental work published in I poeti futuristi
is not to be found in the anthology proper, but rather in one of Marinetti’s intro-
ductory manifestos. Coming at the end of Risposta alle obiezioni, “Battaglia Peso +
Odore” (Battle: Weight + Stench) is the first instance – presented as an example of
 Italy 585

the theoretical apparatus that precedes it – of a Free-Word composition. With Words-

in-Freedom, Marinetti aimed at introducing into the arts the principles of speed and
dynamism that governed the visual arts by dispensing with the two structuring prin-
ciples of traditional discourse: syntax and the subject. Stripping language down to its
essential and material components, nouns and verbs in the infinitive, Marinetti called
for the abolition not only of syntax but also of all those categories such as verb tenses
that serve to arrange the sentence hierarchically, as well as of all the verbal elements
such as adjectives and adverbs that slow down discourse as they imply “a pause, a
moment of contemplation” (Marinetti: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Writing”, 107).
These are replaced by procedures such as analogy, and, in later manifestos, condensed
metaphors or different forms of onomatopoeia, all of which serve to render the life and
dynamism of matter. The destruction of the ‘I’ also theorized in the Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Writing, is a consequence of this radical shift. The ‘I’ is abolished in two
senses: In the first instance, as an organizing principle, as the authority that gives
shape and order to perceptions through structured language. In the second, as the
central concern of the literary work, in which the “psychology of man, by now played
out” will be replaced by “the lyrical obsession for matter” (Marinetti: “Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Writing”, 111). While the abolition of the subject has been crit-
icized as a crude attempt to repress historical and psychological depth in favour of
a poetics that focusses in an almost hyper-mimetic fashion on the surface of things
and events (Curi: Tra mimesi e metafora, 96–108), it is worth pointing out that here
Marinetti also anticipates – at least on a theoretical level – the critique of the subject
and of anthropocentrism that has characterized post-human studies in the late twenti-
eth and early twentyfirst century.
Marinetti’s theorization of Words-in-Freedom continued over the following two
years with the manifestos Distruzione della sintassi – Immaginazione senza fili – Parole
in libertà (Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom,
1913) and Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico e la sensibilità numerica (Geometrical
and Mechanical Splendour and Sensitivity Toward Numbers, 1914). In the first,
Marinetti introduces the concept of “simultaneity”, thus fully aligning the research of
Futurist writers with that of the movement’s painters, who had first used the term in
the preface to the 1912 travelling exhibition. This move entails “the shift from absolute
objectivism to a relative subjectivism in the theory of Words-in-Freedom” (De Maria:
“Marinetti”, LXXIV), with the re-introduction of the ‘I’ summarily dismissed in the
Technical Manifesto, but now understood not as psychological depth, but rather, as
“an I reduced to an urgent flow of visual, auditory, olfactory sensation (both lived and
recalled)” (De Maria: “Marinetti”, LXXIII). Distruzione della sintassi also announces
the “typographical revolution” that would constitute one of the most original con-
tributions of Words-in-Freedom. Rejecting the “so-called typographical harmony of
the page” (Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax”, 128), Marinetti proposed a number of
techniques such as the use of inks of different colours or different fonts on the same
page for expressive purposes.
586 Luca Somigli

This attention to the visual dimension of the text was further developed and codi-
fied in Lo splendore geometrico e meccanico, where the page becomes the autonomous
unit of composition, and the relative dimension and position of the typographic ele-
ments have specific expressive functions. Indeed, one might even describe the page
as a kind of synaesthetic space in which words communicate not only through their
arbitrary meaning as elements in a system of signs (an aspect of the word that is in fact
attenuated by the constant torsions and manipulations of the signifier), but also as a
visual and auditory element, as shape and sound. Not by chance, a complex taxon-
omy of different types of onomatopoeia follows Marinetti’s description of the “natural”
transformation of words into pictures. Better known as “tavola parolibera” (Free-
Word table), this type of “auto-illustration” (Marinetti: “Geometrical and Mechanical
Splendor and Sensitivity Toward Numbers”, 139), as Marinetti calls it in 1914, also
marks an essential shift in the Futurist leader’s conception of the literary work.
In the Manifesto tecnico and the Risposta, Words-in-Freedom may well repudi-
ate the “antique syntax […] inherited from Homer” (Marinetti: “Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Literature”, 107), but they nevertheless still presuppose a traditional
reading practice, in which words are read as they appear on the page one after the
other, from left to right, from top to bottom. Moreover, Marinetti remained faithful
to his conception of poetry as fundamentally a performable art – it may be worth
recalling not only his pre-Futurist fame as a declaimer of poetry, but also the fact
that, before the presence of the Futurist painters turned them into multimedia spec-
tacles, the earliest serate futuriste were advertised as “soirées of Futurist poetry”
(Bertini: Marinetti e le “eroiche serate”, 17). Therefore, initially the Futurist leader
envisioned Words-in-Freedom compositions in relation to their oral presenta-
tion, as “performable scores” of sorts (Del Puppo: “Tavole parolibere”, 1036), in
the enactment of which the suppressed grammatical and syntactical connections
were in fact re-introduced through the voice, tones and gestures of the declaimer.
In Distruzione della sintassi, Marinetti even discussed the need for “a special sort of
recitation” (Marinetti: “Destruction of Syntax”, 131) as a means of making the texts
understandable, and, true to form, shortly thereafter provided a theory of Futurist
recitation in the manifesto La declamazione dinamica e sinottica (Dynamic, Multi-
channelled Recitation, 19163). On the contrary, by emphasizing the visual dimension
of the text, the later manifestos also begin to articulate an entirely new, non-linear
mode of reading that relies on the visual apprehension of the entire page and that
is driven by visual cues such as the relative position and size of letters and words or
the manipulation of the textual space by means of various devices. For instance, in
Francesco Cangiullo’s “Fumatori. II” (Second-Class Smokers Carriage, 1914), one of
the earliest Free-Word tables in print (it appeared in Lacerba on 1 January 1914, still

3 As Günter Berghaus notes, the text was already completed by 1914 but only published in 1916
(Marinetti: Critical Writings, 199).
 Italy 587

under the label of ‘parole in libertà’), the eye of the reader is not drawn to the top left-
hand corner of the page, as normal, but to its very centre, where the word “NOTTE”
(night) deliberately stands out and from which depart four diagonal lines that divide
the page into sectors.

The practice of Words-in-Freedom: The case of Zang Tumb Tuuum

The unquestioned masterpiece of Words-in-Freedom is Marinetti’s Zang Tumb Tuuum

(1914), an account of the siege of the Turkish city of Adrianople (Edirne) by Bulgarian
troops during the First Balkan war (1912–1913), which Marinetti claimed to have wit-
nessed first-hand. In one of the most insightful readings of this work, Jeffrey Schnapp
has suggested that it represents Marinetti’s most extreme attempt to overcome the
Symbolist retreat of the poetic word from life. Overturning the logic of Mallarmé’s
Un coup de dés (A Throw of the Dice, 1897), often cited as a precedent for Words-in-
Freedom, and of the French poet’s famous dictum that the world exists to give rise to a
book, Marinetti sees the book as instead existing to give rise to the world. To this aim, he
develops a series of formal procedures, here deployed to their fullest extent, that stretch
the aural, visual and gestural dimensions of the signifier and create “a sort of ‘absolute
mimesis’ ”, the ultimate aim of which is “the erasure of all literary and linguistic medi-
ation” (Schnapp: “Politics and Poetics”, 206). Replacing the Cartesian “memory-bound
cogito” (I think) with the Futurist “infinitely mobile ago” (I act) (Schnapp: “Politics and
Poetics”, 212), Marinetti thus presents his own solution to the problem of overcoming
the dissociation of art and life that had found in aestheticism its most extreme expres-
sion. Formally, the still mostly linear arrangement of the text is strategically broken
by pages that subvert it, such as the “Carta sincrona dei suoni rumori colori immagini
odori speranze voleri energie nostalgie tracciata dall’aviatore Y. M.” (Synchronic Map
of the Sounds Noises Colours Images Smells Hopes Wills Energies Nostalgias Traced by
the Airman Y. M.), an attempt at rendering simultaneously both the physical sensations
and the psychological state of a warplane pilot, or “Pallone frenato turco” (Captured
Turkish Balloon), an early example of “typographically designed image” (Marinetti:
“Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and Sensitivity Toward Numbers”, 138), that is,
a graphic poem in which words are shaped into the object they represent.
De Maria has best described the ‘hybrid’ character of this text, balanced between
Marinetti’s literary past and the future of experimental poetry: Zang Tumb Tuuum
represents “on the one hand, the incunabulum of visual and concrete poetry, on
the other, the final and hypertrophic offshoot of a declaimable poetry” (De Maria:
“Marinetti poeta e ideologo”, LXXIX). But there is another way in which the hybrid-
ity of Zang Tumb Tuuum should be understood, as it is a text that subverts the tra-
ditional boundaries of literary genres, sharing with poetry a focus on the material
dimension of the sign, with prose fiction a narrative thrust, and with theatre the
588 Luca Somigli

performability of the text. Indeed, given the “journalistic context” in which the work
was born (Suter: “Mallarmé and His Futurist ‘Heir’ Marinetti”, 150), it also crosses
the borderline between fiction and non-fiction, and Marinetti would have probably
not disagreed with Roman Jakobson’s description of Words-in-Freedom as a reform
of reportage (Jakobson: “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia”, 302), although he certainly
would not have seen that as incompatible with a simultaneous reform in poetic lan-
guage. In 1919, finally, Marinetti recapitulated the experience of Words-in-Freedom
with Les Mots en liberté futuristes, a volume that collects, in French translation and for
an international audience, the various technical manifestos and selections of Words-
in-Freedom culminating in four folded sheets that rank among his most experimental
works, such as “Le Soir, couchée dans son lit, elle rélisait la lettre de son artilleur au
front” (At Night, Laying on Her Bed, She Re-read the Letters of Her Artilleryman at
the Front), a “triumph of the (auditory and above all visual) perceptible” (Caruso and
Martini: “Le tavole parolibere ovvero la ‘rivoluzione culturale’ dei futuristi”, 56) in its
reduction of linguistic signs to blocks of light and darkness and the incorporation into
the text of a drawing of the female character mentioned in the title.

Lacerba and its legacy

One of the peculiar characteristics of the Futurist movement was its pervasive spread
throughout the Italian peninsula, from major cities to provincial towns, with the for-
mation of many local groups and the foundation of a myriad of often short-lived and
poorly distributed little magazines. Domenico Cammarota has rightly described the
public activities of Marinetti and his affiliates in “the complex province of the Italian
territory” as a form of “predication” that constantly spawned new adepts entrusted with
the task of spreading the Futurist word in their local reality (Cammarota: Futurismo,
31). That translated into a staggering volume of editorial initiatives: Cammarota has
identified no less than 500 authors and some 150 journals and magazines (many of
them one-shots) that were affiliated, in some way, with Futurism between 1909 and
1944. Milan and, after 1925, Rome played a central rôle in the geography of Futurism
as Marinetti’s city of residence and the de facto headquarters of the movement, but
in the 1910s Florence emerged as the main centre of Futurist literature, thanks in par-
ticular to two journals: Lacerba (1913–1915) and L’ Italia futurista (1916–1918).
A rich magazine culture had flourished in the Tuscan city since the beginning
of the century, including Marzocco (1896–1932), Il regno (1903–1906), Hermes (1904),
and La voce (1908–1914). In 1913, the writer Giovanni Papini (1881–1956) and the
painter Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) founded the literary and artistic journal Lacerba,
summarizing their aims in the opening editorial as the vindication of artistic genius
against bourgeois philistinism and as the opposition to contemporary culture and
its “idealisms, reformisms, humanitarianisms, christianisms and moralisms” (Papini
 Italy 589

and Soffici: “Introibo” 1). Papini and Soffici had generally been critical of what they
saw as the superficiality of Futurism and, according to a famous anecdote, in 1911
had even been the targets of a ‘punitive expedition’ on the part of Marinetti and his
associates, who had travelled from Milan to Florence for the purpose of beating up
Soffici, guilty of having written a negative review of the Futurist works exhibited at
the Mostra d’arte libera in Milan that year. After two bouts of fisticuffs, the two groups
realized that they in fact shared a common enemy in traditional social, literary and
artistic values (see Carrà: La mia vita, 149–151). Over the next several months, thanks
also to the mediation of Aldo Palazzeschi, they formed an alliance of sorts, formalized
in issue 6 of 1913 of Lacerba.
Although short-lived – it officially ended in December 1914, but the first signs
of tension had already been visible by March of that same year – this collaboration
proved extremely fruitful, and Lacerba became, without a doubt, the most impor-
tant periodical in the history of the Futurist movement. International in scope with a
special attention to the French avant-garde – it published reproductions of works by
the likes of Renoir, Picasso and Archipenko, as well as translations of works by writers
such as Remy de Gourmont, Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, including the
latter’s statement of Futurist faith, L’ Anti-tradition futuriste (Futurist Anti-tradition,
1913) – the journal also provided a forum for the new Futurist literature, featuring
Marinetti’s Distruzione della sintassi and Lo splendore geometrico, early excerpts of
Zang Tumb Tuuum, and Free-Word poems and tables from practically every member
of the group who tried his hand at this new expressive mode.
The introduction of Words-in-Freedom in fact marked a new wave of experimen-
tation not only among the writers of the movement, many of whom adopted the new
technique as we saw above, but also among the figurative artists who brought to
them their visual sensibility and produced some of the most interesting results in
the form. Among the regular contributors to Lacerba, Carlo Carrà (1881–1966) demon-
strated the porosity of the boundary between word and image by bringing together,
in Guerrapittura (Warpainting, 1915), a series of Words-in-Freedom of great visual
impact, and a group of disegni guerreschi (war drawings) in which the images are
complemented by written texts that – unlike similar contemporary Cubist experi-
ments – fully retain their signifying function. Significantly, when his painting Festa
patriottica (Patriotic Festival, 1914), also known as Manifestazione interventista
(Interventionist Demonstration), was reproduced in Lacerba on 1 August 1914, it was
defined as a “Free-Word painting” (dipinto parolibero). Another author of such visual
forms of poetry was Ardengo Soffici, who also produced one of the most innovative
volumes, BIF & ZF + 18 Simultaneità e Chimismi lirici (BIF & ZF + 18 Simultaneities
and Lyric Chemistries, 1915), especially notable for its use of collage. Francesco
Cangiullo (1884–1977), a versatile artist, writer and musician, provided an original
interpretation of Words-in-Freedom that mixed together the three arts in a sort of
total work that drew its inspiration from popular spectacle and from the folklore and
street art of Cangiullo’s native Naples. His Piedigrotta (1916) has been described as a
590 Luca Somigli

“polyphonic-noise-onomatopoeic interpretation” of the Neapolitan festival (Salaris:

Storia del futurismo, 101), while Caffeconcerto: Alfabeto a sorpresa (Caffeconcert:
Surprise Alphabet, 1919) stages on the page a cabaret or variety theatre show, the pro-
tagonists of which are a series of figures composed of animated letters of the alphabet.
With his volume of recollections of his Futurist militancy, Le serate futuriste (Futurist
Evenings, 1930), Cangiullo also began the conspicuous trend of Futurist memoirs that
would culminate with Marinetti’s final works, La grande Milano tradizionale e futur-
ista and Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto.
Finally, one important consequence of the typographic revolution fostered by
Words-in-Freedom is the fact that the book itself, as an object, appeared too limited
to contain the creativity of the artists, and new solutions were sought to accommo-
date their novelties (see also the section on Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’
Books, as well as Visual Poetry in this volume). Examples include the use of paper of
different colours, as in Caffeconcerto, and of folded pages, either bound into the text
as in Les Mots en liberté futuristes, mentioned above, or simply included as loose leaf-
lets, as in Archi voltaici (Electric Arcs, 1916) by Volt (pseud. of Vincenzo Fani Ciotti;
1888–1927). From being the support of the author’s words, the book thus became
what Cammarota has described as a “book-object, with its own tactile and material,
chromatic and sonorous, visual and olfactory values” (Cammarota: Futurismo, 21). In
its most extreme forms, it was bound with nuts and bolts, as in Fortunato Depero’s
Depero futurista (1927), printed on sheets of different types of papers and materials,
as in the collective volume Programma Almanacco Italia veloce (Programme Almanac
Fast Italy, 1930), or printed on metal sheets, as in Marinetti’s Parole in libertà olfattive
tattili-termiche (Olfactory Tactile-thermal Words-in-Freedom, 1932). Indeed, the earli-
est example of book art, Arturo Martini’s Contemplazioni (Contemplations, 1918), even
renounced alphabet signs, which were replaced by “a sort of non-semantic writing”
(Bentivoglio: “Innovative Artist’s Books of Italian Futurism”, 475) that alludes to lan-
guage while at the same time obliterating the line between the practice of reading
associated with texts and that of contemplation associated with the figurative arts.

The Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity (teatro sintetico)

In 1914, Emilio Settimelli (1891–1954) and Bruno Corra (pseud. of Bruno Ginanni
Corradini; 1892–1976), two young writers formed in the lively intellectual climate of
the Florentine avant-garde, joined the Futurist movement with the manifesto Pesi,
misure e prezzi del genio artistico (Weights, Measurements and Prices of Artistic
Genius), in which they illustrated their unique critical methodology to determine the
value of a work of art. The following year, they collaborated with Marinetti in drafting
the manifesto Il teatro futurista sintetico (The Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity),
which proposed the creation of an entirely new form of drama. While Marinetti had
 Italy 591

written two plays before the launch of Futurism – Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle,
1905) and Poupées électriques (Electric Dolls, 1909), the latter performed in Italian in
Turin a little over a month before the movement’s foundation – his later interventions
in the field had tended to censure the traditional theatrical repertoire or focus on per-
formance rather than articulate a properly Futurist form of playwriting.
This gap was filled with Il teatro futurista sintetico, which theorized a form of the-
atrical spectacle offering “a condensed, compressed version of the diversity of human
experience in rapid and concise scenes, called sintesi” (Berghaus: Italian Futurist
Theatre, 176; see also pp. 251–252 in the section on Theatre in this volume). While
the production of such mini-dramas between the second half of the 1910s and the
early 1920s involved practically every member of the movement, the results tended
to revolve somewhat repetitively around a series of set themes, foremost among them
the flouting of bourgeois conventions (including those governing mainstream theatre)
and the exaltation of the Futurist values of speed and dynamism.
Played often for a comic or grotesque effect, the syntheses are interesting for
their almost inexhaustible repertory of theatrical inventions: For instance, Marinetti’s
Simultaneità (Simultaneity, 1915) illustrates the recurrent Futurist buzzword by staging
the compenetration of different diegetic planes. Le basi (The Bases, 1915), also by
Marinetti, flouts theatrical conventions by leaving the curtain at the actor’s waist level
throughout the performance. Cangiullo’s Non c’è un cane (There Isn’t Even a Dog, 1915),
celebrates the displacement of the human subject from the centre of the representa-
tion by reducing the performance to a dog crossing the stage (significantly, the list of
characters is made up of only one entry: “the man who isn’t there”). Its most original
results are perhaps those that completely dispense with narrative. The gibberish of
Balla’s proto-Dada Per comprendere il pianto (In Order to Understand Weeping, 1916)
or the sequence of sounds and lights that makes up Guglielmo Jannelli and Luciano
Nicastro’s Sintesi delle sintesi (Synthesis of Syntheses, 1920) gesture towards an almost
purely abstract and non-representational theatre that parallels other contemporary
experiments in scenography and choreography such as those of Balla himself for the
ballet Feu d’artifice (Fireworks, 1917; see also pp. 135 and 254 in this volume).

New directions: L’ Italia futurista and the First World War

In 1916, Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli founded L’ Italia futurista. The journal marked
a generational shift of sorts within Futurism and introduced a new group of artists and
writers, who would play a crucial rôle in the history of the movement over the next two
decades. In addition to the two directors, the group included Corra’s brother Arnaldo
Ginna (pseud. of Arnaldo Ginanni Corradini; 1890–1982), Ginna’s partner Maria (Crisi)
Ginanni (1891–1953), who also directed the book series “Edizioni dell’Italia futurista”,
Remo Chiti (1891–1971), and Mario Carli (1889–1935). While L’ Italia futurista dedicated
592 Luca Somigli

ample space to Marinetti and other established members of the movement and to Free-
Word compositions, its Florentine contributors also brought to the movement their own
interests and concerns. In their literary production, formal experimentation gave way to
the exploration of new themes, with a particular interest in spiritualism and the occult,
in oneiric and irrational experiences, and in states of unconsciousness or of automatism,
in which some critics have seen an anticipation of Surrealism (Papini: “Introduzione”,
35–36). The manifesto La scienza futurista (Futurist Science, 1916), signed by Corra, Ginna
and other members of the group, provided a theoretical formulation of a new vision
of science (and art), whose task was no longer the discovery of objective truths about
the material world, but rather the identification of “new openings into the unknown”
(Corra et al.: La scienza futurista, 1) and the study of “that less investigated area of our
reality that includes the phenomena of clairvoyance, psychism, rhabdomancy, divina-
tion, telepathy …” (Corra et al.: La scienza futurista, 2). This poetics underlies most of
the works published by the “Edizioni dell’Italia futurista” – Maria Ginanni’s Montagne
trasparenti (Transparent Mountains, 1917), Primo Conti’s Imbottigliature (Filling Bottles,
1917), Settimelli’s Mascherate futuriste (Futurist Masquerades, 1917), Carli’s Notti filtrate
(Filtered Nights, 1918), to mention only the best known – or by affiliates of the group,
such as Ginna’s Le locomotive con le calze (The Locomotives in Stockings, 1919). Its most
representative example is perhaps Corra’s novella, Sam Dunn è morto (Sam Dunn Is
Dead, 1915), in which Paris is pushed into a state of collective madness by the powers
emanating from the psyche of the eponymous protagonist.
Another distinctive element of L’ Italia futurista is that it included many women
among its contributors (see pp. 52–54 in this volume), and in response to the publi-
cation of Marinetti’s Come si seducono le donne (How to Seduce Women, 1917) it even
fostered a lively debate on the inability of male Futurists to free themselves from tra-
ditional stereotypes of female rôles. This critique also underlies the narrative works
of two participants to the debate. With Una donna con tre anime (A Woman with Three
Souls, 1918), Rosa Rosà (pseud. of Edyth von Haynau; 1884–1978) imagined the sexual,
intellectual and psychological evolution of a shabby housewife into the ideal Futurist
woman, brought about by a scientific experiment gone awry. In Un ventre di donna
(A Woman’s Womb, 1919), subtitled “A Surgical Novel”, Enif Robert (née Angelini;
1886–1974) established a dialogue with Marinetti (who co-signed the book), juxtapos-
ing the autobiographical account of her struggle with illness to Marinetti’s descrip-
tion of his experiences as a soldier on the Austrian front through a series of letters.
Interventionists of the first hour, most able-bodied Futurists in fact volunteered
for service when Italy entered the First World War in 1915, and the conflict provided
the inspiration for many of their works of the period. Marinetti in particular turned
repeatedly to it in works such as the amusing 8 anime in una bomba (8 Souls in a
Bomb, 1919), a Free-Word “explosive novel” that illustrates the eight different aspects
composing Marinetti’s personality, with each section printed in a different font, and
L’ alcova d’acciaio (The Steel Alcove, 1921), a more traditional autobiographical work
in which he re-evoked his erotic and military adventures. The Great War, however, did
 Italy 593

not obstruct the dialogue between Futurism and other avant-garde groups. Marinetti
was in epistolary contact with Tristan Tzara from at least 1915, and Futurist prop-
aganda tactics and experiments with Words-in-Freedom had a direct influence on
Zurich Dada, as confirmed by the Dadaist artist Hans Richter (Sheppard: “Dada and
Futurism”, 210). In their turn, affiliates of Futurism showed great interest in the Swiss
movement. The journal Noi, founded in 1917 by the painter Enrico Prampolini (1894–
1956), closely followed its activities, publishing works by Tzara and Marcel Janco as
well as by Italian Dadaist Julius Evola (1898–1974), who had begun his artistic activity
within Balla’s Futurist circle in Rome.

Return to order: Futurism after the Great War

The 1920s were a period of retrenchment and increasing integration into the cul-
tural establishment for the Futurist movement, culminating with the appointment
of Marinetti, the erstwhile would-be destroyer of academies and museums, to the
newly-founded Reale Accademia d’Italia in 1929. In the immediate post-war period,
Marinetti and other members of the movement had been actively engaged in the polit-
ical arena, first with the foundation of a Futurist political party that had as its organ
the journal Roma futurista, directed by Marinetti, Carli and Settimelli, then by partic-
ipating in the activities of Mussolini’s Fasci di combattimento. By 1920, however, the
increasing distance with Mussolini regarding central aspects of the Futurist political
programme such as anti-clericalism and republicanism led Marinetti to resign his
membership of the Fasci di combattimento and to retreat from active politics. In fact,
his next major work, the novel Gli indomabili (The Untameables, 1922), is a thinly
veiled allegory of the “cathartic, comforting, consolatory function” of art in light of
the perceived failure of political action (De Maria: “Marinetti poeta e ideologo”, XC),
as well as a critique of the masculinist and aggressive forces at work in early Futurism,
which in the novel need to be integrated with their feminine opposite (Berghaus:
“Marinetti’s Volte-Face of 1920”, 64–68). What is more, Gli indomabili is also char-
acterized by the return to a substantially traditional prose – in spite of Marinetti’s
definition of the novel as a “Free-Word book” (Gli indomabili, 3) – and thus marks the
closing of the more experimental phase of the literary side of the movement.
Two years later, Marinetti implicitly confirmed the end of the grand project of a
Futurist reinvention of life through art by retracing the boundary between art and
politics that the movement had earlier called into question. In Futurismo e fascismo
(Futurism and Fascism, 1924), the work that also marks his rapprochement with the
régime, he declared: “Futurism is unequivocally an artistic and ideological movement.
It becomes involved in politics only in time of grave peril for the Nation” (“Futurism and
Fascism”, 357). This renewed distinction between the domain of politics and that of art
is perhaps best illustrated by the newspaper L’ impero (1923–1933), founded by Carli and
594 Luca Somigli

Settimelli, which politically positioned itself within the more extremist and intransigent
wing of the Fascist Party, but culturally opened its pages to Futurists of all political con-
victions, including the members of the Neapolitan Unione Distruttivisti Attivisti (Union
of Activist Destructivists), who demanded a socially committed and revolutionary form
of literary production (see Bernari et al.: Manifesto di fondazione dell’U.D.A.).
The retreat from direct political engagement had its counterpart in a renewed
effort to gain national and international recognition for Futurism. Internally, Marinetti
sought unsuccessfully to establish his movement as the official art of the régime, while
externally he asserted the primacy of Futurism over all other forms of avant-gardism. In
the 1924 manifesto Le Futurisme mondial (World Futurism), he called upon a veritable
who’s-who of the avant-garde (Picasso, Picabia, Chagall, Eliot, Gropius, Mayakovsky,
Man Ray, etc.), “unwitting or declared futurists” all (Marinetti: Le Futurisme mondial,
91), to unite in a common struggle for modern art. In the 1920s and ‘30s, Marinetti also
travelled extensively to promote Futurism and Italian culture abroad and was actively
involved in the activities of the PEN Club, of which he also became the Italian secretary,
although his support for the imperial politics of Fascism led to his marginalization
within the writers’ association after the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
The gradual return to a traditional conception of literature, which aligns Futurism
with the more general rappel à l’ ordre in European culture in the aftermath of the
Great War, follows some parallel paths in the various genres. In poetry, the produc-
tion of Words-in-Freedom continued into the early 1940s. However, as the anthol-
ogy I nuovi poeti futuristi (The New Futurist Poets, 1925) makes evident, already by
the mid-1920s this mode of writing had been substantially emptied of its subversive
potential and had been turned into a literary convention. The formal experimentalism
of some of the protagonists of the new generation of Futurist poets here anthologized,
such as Fillìa (pseud. of Luigi Colombo; 1904–1936) or Bruno Sanzin (1906–1994),
could not compensate for a certain repetitiveness of themes and the inability to go
beyond the expression of immediate sensations or situations. Marinetti’s theoriza-
tion of “aeropoetry” in the manifesto L’ aeropoesia (1932) – the literary counterpart
of the more successful aeropainting, launched the previous year – formalized the
return to a more traditional prosody. Its demand for a poetry that could express the
simultaneous visions and perspectives fostered by flight was translated into a style
that has been well described as “attenuated Free-Word poetry that partially reacti-
vates syntactical connections, makes renewed use of verb tenses, and standardizes
typographical fonts” (Saccone: Futurismo, 85). The results range from the somewhat
tedious descriptivism of L’ aeropoema del Golfo di La Spezia (The Aeropoem of the Gulf
of La Spezia, 1935) to the mystical élan of the more inspired pages of L’ aeropoema
di Gesù (Jesus’s Aeropoem, 1943–1944, published posthumously in 1991), the best
literary example of Futurist sacred art. In the late 1930s, Marinetti’s poetry became
more openly celebratory of the Fascist régime and its wars in works such as Il poema
africano della Divisione “28 ottobre” (The African Poem of the “28 October” Division,
1937), based on the poet’s own experiences as a volunteer in the war in Ethiopia,
 Italy 595

and Canto eroi e macchine della guerra mussoliniana (I Sing the Heroes and Machines
of Mussolini’s War, 1942). Fascism’s technological advances and its policy of autar-
chy provided the inspiration for the “poetry of technicisms”, a new genre of poetry
intended to extract “new splendour and new music” (Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione
futurista, 1143) from technical inventions, such as the synthetic fibers rayon and
lanital, praised by Marinetti as the fabrics of modern times (see Schnapp: “The Fabric
of Modern Times”). It was exemplified by works such as Il poema del vestito di latte
(The Poem on the Dress Made of Milk, 1937) and Il poema non umano dei tecnicismi
(The Non-Human Poem of Technicisms, 1940).
In prose fiction, the most important new figure to emerge in this second phase
of the movement was Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), who married Marinetti in 1923.
Benedetta, who signed her works with her first name only, continued the lineage of
the spiritualist and proto-Surrealist prose of the Italia Futurista group in three novels,
Le forze umane (The Human Forces, 1924), an ‘abstract’ novel in which the text was
completed by a series of ‘graphic syntheses’ by the author, Viaggio di Gararà (Gararà’s
Journey, 1931), simultaneously a novel and a theatrical work, and Astra e il sottomarino
(Astra and the Submarine, 1935), considered her best work. Much of the production
by members of the movement, however, shows a pronounced drift towards the main-
stream and often flirts with schemes and situations of popular literature. Marinetti
and Corra continued to mine the vein of erotic-sentimental fiction inaugurated in the
co-authored L’ isola dei baci (The Island of Kisses, 1918). Marinetti’s light-hearted short
stories published over the next decade included Gli amori futuristi (Futurist Loves, 1922)
and Novelle con le labbra tinte (Stories with Painted Lips, 1930), while Corra entered
into a copious production of novels that squarely belong to the genre of entertainment
fiction. The most Futurist elements of this production, which includes works by other
members of the movement such as Carli’s Marvana (1927), was a by now somewhat
conventional critique of bourgeois social institutions, the family in particular. The
more visionary strand of Futurism was represented by novels that, like Volt’s La fine
del mondo (The End of the World, 1921) or Enzo Benedetto’s Viaggio al pianeta Marte
(Journey to Mars, 1930), share elements with bourgeoning science fiction.
The theatre continued to be a space of experimentation in the post-war period,
although many of the innovations proposed in various manifestos – Fedele Azari’s
Il teatro aereo futurista (Futurist Aerial Theatre, 1919), Vinicio Paladini and Ivo
Pannaggi’s Manifesto dell’ arte meccanica futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Machine Art,
1922) and Marinetti’s Il teatro totale (Total Theatre, 1932), to name a few – belong more
properly to the history of performance than of literature as they concern technical
issues from acting to staging and lighting (see the chapter on Theatre in this volume).
Futurist playwrights tended to return to full-length dramatic works, with Marinetti
as usual leading the way with the African drama Il tamburo di fuoco (The Fire Drum,
1923), which marks a return to the exoticism of Mafarka il futurista, and with plays
described as ‘assemblages of syntheses’ (sintesi incatenate or ‘interlinked synthe-
ses’), such as Prigionieri (Prisoners, 1927) or Simultanina (1931). In the 1920s, Ruggero
596 Luca Somigli

Vasari (1898–1968) investigated the dark side of the Futurist cult of the machine with
L’ angoscia delle macchine (The Anguish of Machines, 1925) and Raun (1932), among
the most original contributions to the later phase of the movement precisely because
of their critical perspective on one of its fundamental principles, technophilia.
Marinetti welcomed the outbreak of the Second World War with his customary
“self-induced optimism” (Marinetti: “We Renounce Our Symbolist Masters, the Last
of All Lovers of the Moonlight”, 46) and even volunteered for service on the Russian
front, an experience recalled in Originalità russa di masse distanze radiocuori (Russian
Originality of Masses Distances Radiohearts, published posthumously in 1996).
Literarily, however, the movement had substantially run its course, and its leader, who
followed Mussolini into the German-controlled Italian Social Republic after the fall of
Fascism, dedicated his final years to memoirism, producing a number of works that
would appear posthumously, including La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista (1969),
Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto (1969), and Firenze biondazzurra sposerebbe futur-
ista morigerato (Blonde-Azure Florence Seeks Marriage with Moderate Futurist, 1992),
written with Alberto Viviani. Marinetti’s death on 2 December 1944 marked also the
conclusion of the first historical avant-garde, at least as an organized movement.
The question of Futurism’s lingering influence is more complicated. Unlike
Surrealism, the only other movement to which it can be compared in terms of duration
and impact, Futurism – and literary Futurism in particular – did not survive the Second
World War, in part because its close association with Fascism made it ideologically
suspect, in part because, as we have seen, it had substantially lost its innovative and
subversive potential and was in any case out of tune with the concerns of the culture of
the reconstruction, which found its most influential expression in Neorealism. However,
an afterlife of sorts can be found in the works of post-war authors such as Carlo Belloli
(1922–2003), author of Testi-poemi murali (Mural Texts-Poems, 1944), whose poems in
plexiglass, Corpi di poesia (Bodies of Poetry, 1951), anticipate visual and concrete poetry
(Salaris: Storia del futurismo, 256). These exceptions, however, were few and far between,
and even the Neoavanguardia of the 1960s, which shared with Futurism several theoret-
ical concerns, preferred to look at more marginal (and less ideologically problematic)
figures of the movement such as Palazzeschi or Lucini, rather than its more central pro-
tagonists. It was only in the late 1960s that a proper historicizing of the movement would
begin, fittingly with an anthology of Marinetti’s writings, Teoria e invenzione futurista
(Futurist Theory and Invention), edited by Luciano De Maria in 1968.

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Bentivoglio, Mirella. “Innovative Artist’s Books of Italian Futurism.” Günter Berghaus, ed.:
International Futurism in the Arts and Literature. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter, 2000.
473–486.
 Italy 597

Berghaus, Günter: “Marinetti’s Volte-Face of 1920: Occultism, Tactilism and ‘Gli indomabili’.” Gino Tellini,
and Paolo Valesio, eds.: Beyond Futurism: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Writer. For the Centennial
Anniversary of the Italian Avant-Garde = Al di là del futurismo: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, scrittore.
Per il centenario dell’avanguardia italiana. Firenze: Società Editrice Fiorentina, 2011. 47–76.
Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1998.
Berghaus, Günter: The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti’s Early Career and Writings, 1899–1909. Leeds:
Society for Italian Studies, 1995.
Bertini, Simona. Marinetti e le “eroiche serate”. Novara: Interlinea, 2002.
Buzzi, Paolo: “Il verso libero.” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ed.: I poeti futuristi. Milano: Edizioni
futuriste di “Poesia”, 1912. 43–48.
Cammarota, Domenico: Futurismo: Bibliografia di 500 scrittori italiani. Milano: Skira, 2006.
Caruso, Luciano, and Stelio M. Martini: “Le tavole parolibere ovvero la ‘rivoluzione culturale’ dei
futuristi.” Luciano Carso, and Stelio M. Martini, eds. Tavole parolibere futuriste (1912–1944).
Vol. 2. Napoli: Liguori, 1977. 13–64.
Carrà, Carlo: La mia vita. Roma: Longanesi, 1943.
Corra, Bruno, et al.: “La scienza futurista (antitedesca – avventurosa – capricciosa – sicurezzofoba –
ebbra d’ignoto).” L’ Italia futurista 1:2 (15 June 1916): 1–2.
Curi, Fausto: Tra mimesi e metafora: Studi su Marinetti e il futurismo. Bologna: Pendragon, 1995.
De Maria, Luciano: “Marinetti poeta e ideologo.” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione
futurista. Milano: Mondadori, 1983. XXIX–C.
Del Puppo, Alessandro: “Tavole parolibere.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Il dizionario del futurismo. Firenze:
Vallecchi, 2001. 1136–1141.
Jakobson, Roman: “Noveishaia russkaia poeziia.” R. Jakobson: Selected Writings. Vol. 5. On Verse,
Its Masters and Explorers. The Hague: Mouton, 1979. 299–354.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
Freedom.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. 120–131.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor and Sensitivity Toward
Numbers.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. 135–142.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Le Futurisme mondial: Manifeste à Paris.” Le Futurisme: Revue
synthetique illustré 9 (11 January 1924): 1–3. Reprinted in Paolo Tonino, ed.: I manifesti del
futurismo italiano: Catalogo dei manifesti, proclami e lanci pubblicitari stampati su volantini,
opuscoli e riviste (1909–1944). Gussago: Edizioni dell’ Arengario, 2011. 90–91.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 107–119.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” Critical Writings. Ed. by
Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “We Renounce Our Symbolist Masters, the Last of All Lovers of the
Moonlight.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. 43–46.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Futurismo e fascismo Foligno: Campitelli, 1924. Reprinted in F. T. Marinetti:
Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 435–498.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Gli indomabili. Piacenza: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia” della Società
Tipografica Editoriale Porta, 1922. Reprint Milano: Mondadori, 2000.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano De Maria. Milano:
Mondadori, 1968. 2nd edn Milano: Mondadori, 1983.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Enif Robert: Un ventre di donna: Romanzo chirurgico. Milano:
Facchi, 1919.
598 Luca Somigli

Palazzeschi, Aldo: “E lasciatemi divertire!” A. Palazzeschi: The Arsonist = L’ incendiario. Trans.

Nicholas Benson. Los Angeles/CA: Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2013: 124–129.
Palazzeschi, Aldo: “L’ incendiario.” A. Palazzeschi: The Arsonist = L’incendiario. Trans. Nicholas
Benson. Los Angeles/CA: Otis Books / Seismicity Editions, 2013. 12–29.
[Papini, Giovanni, and Ardengo Soffici]: “Introibo.” Lacerba 1:1 (January 1913): 1.
Papini, Maria Carla: “Introduzione.” L’ Italia futurista (1916–1918). Roma: Ateneo & Bizzarri, 1999. 29–55.
Rinaldi, Rinaldo: Miracoli della stupidità: Discorso su Marinetti. Torino: Tirrenia, 1986.
Saccone, Antonio: Futurismo. Roma: Marzorati – Editalia, 2000.
Salaris, Claudia: Marinetti editore. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990.
Salaris, Claudia: Storia del futurismo. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1985.
Sartini Blum, Cinzia: The Other Modernism: F. T. Marinetti’s Fiction of Power. Berkeley/CA: University
of California Press, 1996.
Schnapp, Jeffrey T.: “Politics and Poetics in Marinetti’s ‘Zang Tumb Tuuum’.” J. T. Schnapp:
Modernitalia. Bern: Lang, 2012. 203–223.
Schnapp, Jeffrey T.: “The Fabric of Modern Times.” Critical Inquiry 24:1 (Autumn 1997): 191–245.
Sheppard, Richard: “Dada and Futurism.” R. Sheppard: Modernism – Dada – Postmodernism.
Evanston/IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. 207–236; 423–430.
Somigli, Luca: “The Mirror of Modernity: Marinetti’s Early Criticism between Decadence and
‘Renaissance Latine’.” Romanic Review 97:3–4 (2006): 331–352.
Suter, Patrick: “Mallarmé and His Futurist ‘Heir’ Marinetti.” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 4 (2014): 134–164.
Valesio, Paolo: “‘The Most Enduring and Most Honored Name’: Marinetti as Poet.” Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti: Selected Poems and Related Prose. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2002. 149–165.

Further reading
Adamowicz, Elsa, and Simona Storchi, eds.: Back to the Futurists: The Avant-Garde and Its Legacy.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.
Bergman, Pär: “Futurismo letterario.” Enciclopedia del Novecento. Vol. 3. Roma: Istituto della
Enciclopedia Italiana, 1978. 118–131.
Blumenkranz-Onimus, Noëmi: La Poésie futuriste italienne. Paris: Klincksieck, 1984.
Buelens, Geert, Harald Hendrix, and Monica Jansen, eds.: The History of Futurism: The Precursors,
Protagonists, and Legacies. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012.
Cigliana, Simona: Futurismo esoterico: Contributi per una storia dell’irrazionalismo italiano tra Otto
e Novecento. Napoli: Liguori, 2002.
Contarini, Silvia: La Femme futuriste: Mythes, modèles et représentations de la femme dans la
théorie et la littérature futuristes. Nanterre: Publidix; Presses Universitaires de Paris X, 2006.
Cordié, Carlo: “Futurismo letterario italiano.” Critica letteraria 7:24 (1971): 573–612.
D’Ambrosio, Matteo: “Strategie, procedimenti e modelli testuali della poesia futurista.” M.
D’Ambrosio: Futurismo e altre avanguardie. Napoli: Liguori, 1999. 1–38.
De Vincenti, Gloria: Il genio del secondo futurismo fiorentino tra macchina e spirito. Ravenna: Longo,
2013.
Falqui, Enrico: “La poesia futurista.” E. Falqui: Novecento letterario. Serie Nona. Firenze: Vallecchi,
1968. 7–43.
Jacobbi, Ruggero, ed.: Poesia futurista italiana. Parma: Guanda, 1968
 Italy 599

Luisetti, Federico, and Luca Somigli, eds.: A Century of Futurism, 1909–2009. Special issue of Annali
d’Italianistica 27 (2009).
Meazzi, Barbara: Le futurisme entre l’ Italie et la France. Chambery: Université de Savoie, 2010.
Rocca, Marzia: L’ oasi della memoria: Estetica e poetica del secondo Marinetti. Napoli: Tempi
Moderni, 1989.
Saccone, Antonio: “La trincea avanzata” e “la città dei conquistatori”: Futurismo e modernità.
Napoli: Liguori, 2000.
Salaris, Claudia: Artecrazia: L’ avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo. Firenze: La Nuova Italia,
1992.
Salaris, Claudia: Marinetti: Arte e vita futurista. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1997.
Salaris, Claudia: Riviste futuriste: Collezione Echaurren Salaris. Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2012.
Somigli, Luca: Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003.
Tellini, Gino, and Paolo Valesio, eds.: Beyond Futurism: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Writer. For the
Centennial Anniversary of the Italian Avant-Garde = Al di là del futurismo: Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti, scrittore. Per il centenario dell’avanguardia italiana. Firenze: Società Editrice
Fiorentina, 2011.
Tomasello, Dario: Il futurismo letterario: Storia e geografia dell’avanguardia italiana. Avellino:
Associazione Culturale Internazionale Edizioni Sinestesie, 2016.
Tomasello, Dario, and Francesca Polacci: Bisogno furioso di liberare le parole: Tra verbale e visivo.
Percorsi analitici delle tavole parolibere futuriste. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2012.
Tondelli, Leonardo: Futurista senza futuro: Marinetti ultimo mitografo. Firenze: Le Lettere, 2009.
Verdone, Mario, ed.: Prosa e critica futurista: Antologia. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1973.
Viazzi, Glauco, ed.: I poeti del futurismo, 1909–1944. Milano: Longanesi, 1978.
Viazzi, Glauco, and Vanni Scheiwiller, eds.: Poeti del secondo futurismo italiano. Milano: All’Insegna
del Pesce d’Oro, 1973.
Weber, Luigi: Romanzi del movimento, romanzi in movimento: La narrativa del futurismo e dintorni.
Massa: Transeuropa, 2010.

Italian Futurism in the Fine Arts

The manifestos of Futurist painting

Futurism was the first outstanding Italian contribution to the artistic avant-garde
of the twentieth century. It was born on 20 February 1909, when Le Futurisme,
written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, appeared in the Paris daily, Le Figaro. Its
author was already well known in Paris for his tragédie satirique (satirical tragedy)
Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle, 1905). Depite Marinetti’s claims originality, the term
‘Futurism’ had first been used by the Spanish intellectual Gabriel Alomar (1873–1941),
whose lecture, El futurisme, was given at the Ateneu Barcelonès on 18 June 1904 (for
more on Alomar, see pp. 827–828 in the entry on Spain in this volume).
As a man in love with cars, Marinetti wrote in Le Futurisme a hymn to “the man
behind the steering wheel” of “a roaring motorcar, which seems to race on like
machine-gun fire, [and] is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace”
600 Giorgio Di Genova

(Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 13). He glorified war as

“the sole cleanser of the world”, advocated the destruction of “museums, libraries,
academies of any sort” and a “revolution in our modern capitals”; he extolled “the
great multitudes who are roused up by work, by pleasure, or by rebellion” (Marinetti:
“The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 13–14), the dockyards lit by the elec-
tric light, the modern capitals, steamboats, trains and aeroplanes. In other words:
progress. Upon the death of his father in 1907, a lawyer who had worked in Egypt,
Marinetti inherited a considerable fortune, and this allowed him to distribute many
thousands of copies of his first manifesto, in many translations, around the world,
thus turning it into a fundamental statement that defined the aims and aesthetics of
Futurism.
In the first decade of the twentieth century, Italy was still an agricultural country
in the early stages of modernization. Thanks to its wide circulation in Italy, Marinetti’s
first manifesto enthused the country’s youth and especially those who were fight-
ing for a new creative dimension in the arts. Umberto Boccioni was amongst them.
A painter living in Milan, he obtained from Libero Altomare (pseud. of the Futurist
poet Remo Mannoni, 1883–1966) the promise to be introduced to Marinetti. Later on,
in early February 1910, they went to his home, together with Carlo Carrà (1881–1966),
Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) and possibly Romolo Romani (1884–1916), with the purpose
of proposing to him that Futurism should be extended to painting. After a discussion
of several hours, Marinetti agreed to the idea, and that same evening he informed
the writer Aldo Palazzeschi: “Futurism is born in painting, too” (Palazzeschi:
“Prefazione”, XIX).
It was Boccioni who convinced the founder of Futurism to extend the movement
also to other arts. Thus, Futurism as a total art movement spread into the fields of
music, theatre, sculpture, architecture, fashion, cinema, radio, dance, graphic
design, gastronomy, science, toy production, interior design, photography, stage
design, religious art, politics, and much more. All of these sectors would be codified
according to rules and principles set out in countless manifestos, sometimes launch-
ing new and revolutionary creative paths and always deprecating old traditions and
outlooks.
Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo penned the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, later
completed with the help of Marinetti and his secretary, Decio Cinti. It was dated 11
February 1910 and first presented to the public on 8 March during a Futurist serata
at the Chiarella Theatre in Turin. Romolo Romani and Aroldo Bonzagni (1887–1918)
added their signatures, too, but soon withdrew their support, owing to the violent
reaction the manifesto provoked. The text stigmatized art competitions, art critics,
academies, illustrators and “hack decorators”, all dubbed ‘passatisti’ (venerators
of the past), and called for the disempowering of people specialized in the produc-
tion of art but devoid of any artistic talent: “Throw out the Portraitists, the Genre
Painters, the Lake Painters, the Mountain Painters” (Boccioni et al.: “Manifesto of the
Futurist Painters”, 63). Instead, they paid homage to the Divisionist painters Giovanni
 Italy 601

Segantini (1858–1899) and Gaetano Previati (1852–1920) as well as to the sculptor

Medardo Rosso (1858–1928).
After the withdrawal of Romani and Bonzagni, the manifesto was signed by
Giacomo Balla (1871–1958) and Gino Severini (1883–1966), a friend of Boccioni’s
since the earliest years of the new century when they had studied the principles of
Divisionism under Giacomo Balla. Severini had been living in Paris since 1906 and
was well connected there; he was thus able to assist Marinetti in launching Futurist
painting on the international scene. Having the Rome-based Balla on his side helped
promote Futurism from the Italian capital. Boccioni and his colleagues quickly real-
ized that the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters was insufficiently focussed, and a little
later they wrote the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, dated 11 April 1910, which
was signed by the original group (Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo) as well as Severini
and Balla.
The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting stressed the rôle of science in the
renewal of the visual conception of painting. It emphasized the Divisionist ideas of
Previati, whom Boccioni had met twice in Milan in 1908, and complemented them
with the concept of élan vital, drawn from the French philosopher Henry Bergson, but
also with devices such as universal dynamism, simultaneity, elasticity of space, force
lines and compenetration, which were underpinned by a substantial body of theory
and partly rooted in Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity of 1905. Towards the end of
the Manifesto they declared: “We are the Primitives of a new sensibility” (Boccioni
et al.: “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto”, 67).
In 1910, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Balla were still painting in a Divisionist style.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Severini had absorbed the Cubist decomposition of the subject
and was using colour to achieve Neo-Impressionist results. Boccioni was aiming in
his paintings at fulfilling the demands made in the manifesto, but his work was char-
acterized by restless, post-Impressionist urge and a leaning toward Symbolism, as
can be seen in the first series of his Stati d’animo (States of Mind, 1911): the almost
flaming serpentines in Gli addii (The Farewells), the tight linear brushes running from
right to left in Quelli che vanno (Those Who Go), or the monochromatic green rain in
whose folds submerge bending figures in Quelli che restano (Those Who Stay).
All in all, it must be acknowledged that Futurist painting had been theorized upon
but was yet to come into practice. A first group exhibition took place at the Mostra
d’Arte Libera in Milan (April – May 1911) and had to face an overwhelmingly negative
reaction from the public. One exasperated visitor slashed Boccioni’s La risata (The
Laughter, 1911) with a razor blade. The painter Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) aggres-
sively criticized the works on view as “stupid and repugnant blusterings by unscru-
pulous persons with no poetic feelings” (Soffici: “Arte libera e pittura futurista”).
Marinetti, Boccioni and Carrà decided to go to Florence and attack Soffici. They found
him at the Caffè delle Giubbe Rosse. Boccioni slapped him, and a riot broke out. They
were all taken to the Police Station, where they started to exchange their ideas on art.
Thus, the way was prepared for Soffici to join the Futurist movement in 1913.
602 Giorgio Di Genova

In the meantime, Severini was working on a Futurist exhibition that Marinetti had
arranged at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris. It should have opened in the autumn
of 1911, but Marinetti decided to postpone it, due to Italy’s war in Libya. Severini’s
financial situation was precarious, and Boccioni suggested that he go to Marinetti and
ask for help. Severini looked at the paintings Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo had recently
created and judged them outdated in comparison with the Parisian avant-garde. He
acknowledged Boccioni’s and Carrà’s talent, but was doubtful with regard to Russolo.
He persuaded Marinetti to finance a visit of his painter friends to Paris, where they
could study Cubism and meet its leader, Pablo Picasso. This journey became a turning
point for Boccioni who, although critical of the static quality of the Cubist works he
saw, finally managed to overcome his Divisionist style. He embarked on a reworking of
his Stati d’animo series, and the new version made after his return from Paris shows a
decomposition of forms and dynamic plasticity, with certain Expressionist inflexions.
The Futurist exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune finally opened in February
1912 under the title, Les Peintres futuristes italiens (The Futurist Italian Painters). It
showed thirty-four works by four signatories of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Painting. The catalogue also listed Balla’s Lumière électrique (the Italian title was
Lampada ad arco [The Arc Lamp], 1911), which was not actually displayed, as Boccioni
had refused it on the ground that its style was still Divisionist. Owing to this rejection,
Balla began studying the visual effects of the movement of cars and discovered spiral-
ling and radiating rhythms that were repeating and overlapping with each other. On
the basis of these insights, a year later he began to paint his first Futurist works. Thus,
1912 marks the beginning of Balla’s Futurist style.

1912 and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture

For entirely different reasons, the year 1912 was also extremely important for Boccioni.
During this year, he managed to represent an innovative vision of space in his oil
painting Elasticità (Elasticity, 1912) and to deepen his sculptural understanding of
space in paintings such as Antigrazioso (Antigraceful, 1912) with a figure character-
ized by a grotesque face (possibly influenced by Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon
[The Young Ladies of Avignon, 1907]), Volumi orizzontali (Horizontal Volumes, 1912),
and Materia (Matter, 1912–1913). The subject of all three paintings was Boccioni’s
mother: in Volumi orizzontali and Materia, the sitter is shown in frontal view with
intertwining fingers. In the former, constructive and volumetric elements amalgamate
and penetrate each other with mathematic precision. In the latter, a stronger dyna-
mism is attained through prismatic lights on the figure’s bust and a very articulated
compenetration of elements in the lower part of the painting. Unsurprisingly then, in
the same year, 1912, Boccioni felt the need to write his Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Sculpture, in which he dealt with the idea of a polymaterial, environmental sculpture:
 Italy 603

Systematizing lights’ vibrations and the interpenetrations of planes will produce a Futurist
sculpture, whose basis will be architectural, and not just as a construction of masses but in
the way that the sculptural block itself will contain the architectonic elements of the sculptural
environment in which the object exists. (Boccioni: “Futurist Sculpture”, 116)

The new type of sculpture was to be made from plaster, bronze, glass, wood, cardboard,
iron, cement, horsehair, leather, cloth, mirrors, electric lights and other materials. It sup-
pressed all attempts at realistic, narrative structures, abolished finite lines and opened
the figure up to “let it enclose the environment” (Boccioni: “Futurist Sculpture”, 117).
A large number of innovative developments in twentieth-century art cannot be
understood without keeping Boccioni in mind: from Alexander Archipenko to Naum
Gabo, Antoine Pevsner and Vladimir Tatlin, up to the assemblages of Dadaists such
as Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Kurt Schwitters, to some of Picasso’s sculp-
tures. But also works made by other Futurists, such as Prampolini’s polymaterism,
and works conceived outside Futurism, such as Lucio Fontana’s Struttura al Neon
(Spatial Light: Structure in Neon, 1951) were indebted to Boccioni’s manifesto of 1912,
a true turning point in twentieth century art.
After the small Testa in legno (Wooden Head, 1912), and Sviluppo di una bottiglia
nello spazio (Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912) – both based on a decomposition
of planes –Boccioni proceeded in 1913 to make sculptures where bodies and objects
compenetrated and attained almost baroque effects: Espansione spiralica di muscoli
in movimento (Spiral Expansion of Muscles in Motion), Muscoli in velocità (Muscles
in Quick Motion), Sintesi del dinamismo umano (Synthesis of the Human Dynamism),
unfortunately all lost and known only through photographs. The latter represented
a walking male body that was studded with a great number of additional elements.
From this developed an absolute masterpiece of dynamic optics, Forme uniche della
continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913), a compenetration
of body parts realized in space and attaining successful results in terms of elastic
‘forma-forza’ (form-force), a concept introduced by the artist in his preface to the
catalogue of Esposizione di scultura futurista del pittore e scultore futurista Boccioni:
“form-force that derives from the real form” (Boccioni: Gli scritti editi e inediti, 423).
Such effects were obtained through breaking the figure’s closed lines so that move-
ment was represented in space through the expansion of bending excrescences, a
kind of ‘spatial heel’ acting as a perfect counter-point to the curves of the muscles.

The literary journal Lacerba and Florentine Futurism

Thanks to Severini, who in 1912 went to Florence to act as a mediator with Ardengo
Soffici, a reconciliation between the Florentine artists and Futurists took place in 1913.
Together with the writer Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), Soffici stopped contributing to
604 Giorgio Di Genova

the journal La voce (The Voice, 1908–1916) and set up a new journal. On 1 January
1913, the fortnightly Lacerba was born: it would act as the mouthpiece of Futurism
from March 1913 until May 1915, when Italy entered the Great War.
Soffici, whose artistic past was linked to the tradition of Tuscan painting, began
in 1913 to participate in Futurist exhibitions, although first only as a guest, since his
style was still excessively affected by Cubist decomposition, as could be seen in the
works displayed at the Prima esposizione pittura futurista (First Exhibition of Futurist
Painting), held in the foyer of the Costanzi Theatre in Rome (11 February – March
1913). Later in the year, the show was moved to the bookshop of Ferrante Gonnelli in
Florence, under the new title Esposizione di pittura futurista di “Lacerba” (Exhibition
of Futurist Painting by “Lacerba”, 13 November 1913 – 18 January 1914). Soffici pre-
sented himself now as a member of the movement. To the paintings shown in Rome,
he added nine more, amongst which were Compenetrazione di piani plastici (Tarantella
dei pederasti) (Interpenetration of Volumetric Planes: Tarantella of the Pederasts,
1913), Complementarismo pittorico (Fruttiera) (Pictorial Complementarism: Fruit Dish,
1913), Compenetrazione di piani plastici (Fruttiera bottiglia tazza) (Compenetrazione
of Volumetric Planes: Fruit Dish, Bottle, Cup, 1913), and Sintesi pittorica di un paes-
aggio d’autunno (Painterly Synthesis of a Landscape in Autumn). The influence of
Severini’s works can be perceived here, albeit not those depicting dancers but street
scenes taken from the tram or bus. However, Soffici cut off the signs of stations and
shops that emerged from the decomposed shapes in Severini’s paintings.
Not only Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo, but also Balla took part in the two exhibi-
tions of 1913. As indicated in the exhibition catalogue, in Rome he showed Lampada
ad arco (The Arc Lamp, 1911), Guinzaglio in moto (Leash in Motion, later known as
Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio [Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash], 1912), Bambina
moltiplicato balcone (Girl Multiplied by Balcony, later renamed Bambina che corre
sul balcone [Girl Running on a Balcony], 1912) and La mano del violinista: I ritmi
dell’archetto (The Hand of the Violinist: The Rhythms of the Bow, 1912). Although
the latter work was still indebted to Divisionism, Balla took advantage of Boccioni’s
suggestions related to the multiplication of moving parts (Boccioni et al.: “Futurist
Painting: Technical Manifesto”, 64) and of the principles of photodynamism he had
learned from his friends, the brothers Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890–1960), Arturo
Bragaglia (1893–1962) and Carlo Ludovico Bragaglia (1894–1998). On the other hand,
he worked on the concept of transparency, as shown in the best of his geometrical iri-
descent compenetrations. Balla took part in the exhibition organized by Lacerba with
Plasticità luci + velocità (Plasticity. Lights + Speed, c.1913), Disgregamento d’auto in
corsa (Decomposition of a Motor Car in Motion, 1913), Profondità dinamiche (Dynamic
Depths, 1912) and Successioni luminose + spostamenti (Luminous Successions +
Displacements, 1913). In all of them, one can observe diagonals that create com-
penetrations of geometrical elements and chiaroscuro slants, quite different from
the bending and rhythmically repeated lines in his contemporary sequences of Voli
di rondine (Flight of Swallows, 1913–1914). The whole of Balla’s Futurist production
 Italy 605

developed in these two directions, displaying a preponderance of curvilinear shapes

without, however, giving up rectilinear, geometrical solutions.
As for Russolo, certainly the least talented of the five signatories of the 1910
manifestos, he expressed Futurist dynamism through iterating curvilinear ele-
ments, obtaining remarkable concentric shapes, as for example in Solidità della
nebbia (Nebbia a Milano) (Solidity of Fog: Fog in Milan, 1912), and angular motifs,
as in Dinamismo di un’automobile (Dynamism of a Motor Car, 1912–1913). His inter-
est in music, however, led him to devote increasingly less time to painting. He
took part in the 1913 Florence exhibition with only two works: Automobile in corsa
(Motor Car in Motion, 1912) and Volumi dinamici (Dynamic Volumes, 1913).
The Florentine exhibition of 1913 was a seed whose fruits would soon become
visible in a painter then only thirteen years old, Primo Conti (1900–1988), who would
pay several visits to the Gonnelli bookshop. It was there that he met for the first time
Soffici, Boccioni, Carrà, Marinetti and Papini, who described him as “the youngest
and the most intelligent visitor of the Futurist exhibition” (Conti: La gola del merlo,
30). Under the influence of the works he saw, Conti started to alternate works in a
Realist or Secessionist style with Futurist ink drawings: Uomo a cavallo (Man on a
Horse, 1913–1914), Seminatore (Sower, 1914) and Nudino (Small Nude, 1914), clearly
showing Boccioni’s influence.
From 6 December 1913 to 15 January 1914, twelve “three-dimensional aggre-
gations” in chalk and thirty-six drawings by Boccioni were shown at the Galleria
Sprovieri in Rome. The bookseller Gonnelli in Florence asked Conti and his friend
Ugo Tommei (1894–1918), both devotees of Boccioni, to help him set up a second exhi-
bition, which ran from March to April 1914. When Boccioni saw his works there, he
not only approved of the way they had been set up in the space, he also reassured
the young Primo Conti, who was worried about the fragile sculpture getting damaged
during transportation: “A work of art must be alive, have the same destiny as man,
and endure, like him, illness and death.” (Conti: La gola del merlo, 43)
The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture of 1912 inspired Georges Braque
to integrate a papier collé into a painting and Picasso to do the same with a collage.
Such additions of non-pictorial elements also proliferated amongst the Lacerba
circle of Futurists. In 1913–1914, Boccioni, Carrà, Soffici and Severini used collage in
their paintings, the latter going as far as to glue actual whiskers onto his Ritratto di F.
Tommaso Marinetti (Portrait of F. Tommaso Marinetti, 1913). Polymaterialism spread
from sculpture, as in Boccioni’s Cavallo + Cavaliere + Caseggiato (Horse + Rider +
Houses, 1914), made of wood, cardboard and metal and currently displayed at the
Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, to the so-called “dynamic combinations of
objects”, such as Testa di filosofo passatista + schiaffi futuristi (Head of a Traditionalist
Philosopher + Futurist Fisticuffs, 1914) by Francesco Cangiullo, Autoritratto (Self-
Portrait, 1914) by Marinetti and La Signorina Flicflic Chiapchiap (Miss Flicflic
Chiapchiap, 1914), a work signed by both Cangiullo and Marinetti, which would open
the way to paintings that incorporated objects, such as those made by Dadaists like
606 Giorgio Di Genova

Picabia. Such works by Cangiullo and Marinetti were included in the Esposizione
libera futurista internazionale. Pittori e scultori italiani – russi – inglesi – belgi – nor-
damericani (Free International Futurist Exhibition of Painters and Sculptors from
Italy – Russia – England – Belgium – North America), held at Galleria Sprovieri in
Rome (13 April – 25 May 1914). The exhibition was opened with Cangiullo, Balla and
Marinetti’s performance of Cangiullo’s Funerali di un filosofo passatista (Funeral of a
Traditionalist Philosopher) and demonstrated to a certain extent how far the circula-
tion of Futurist ideas in the international sphere had gone. Many artists contributing
to the Lacerba show at the Gonnelli Bookshop were not there, but new names could
be seen, some of them from outside the Futurist movement, others from within, such
as Arnaldo Corradini (later called Arnaldo Ginna, 1890–1982), Fortunato Depero
(1892–1960), Ottone Rosai (1895–1957) and Ugo Giannattasio (1888–1958), as well as
a large number of works by Balla’s pupils Gino Galli (1893–1954), Enrico Prampolini
(1894–1956) and Mario Sironi (1885–1961).

Futurism in Rome

As a Divisionist, Balla had been the teacher of Severini and Boccioni and was later
taught Futurism by Boccioni himself. By 1913 he was a reference point for Futurist
newcomers, such as Gino Galli and Fortunato Depero. Sironi, on the contrary, lived in
isolation, was inspired by Boccioni’s ‘sculptorial’ style, as his two self-portraits, both
named Autoritratto (Self-Portrait, 1913–1914), show, and by Cubism, which led him to
make use of the collage technique in L’ arlecchino (The Harlequin, 1914–1915).
Another Futurist newcomer was Enrico Prampolini, possibly introduced to Balla
by the artist Duilio Cambellotti after they both took part in the Mostra dell’ Agro
Romano (Exhibition of the Ager Romanus) of 1911. Balla immediately recognized
Prampolini’s talent and invited him to show fourteen works at the Esposizione libera
futurista internazionale: some of them staged three-dimensional shapes in space and
water, some others referred to Guglielmo Marconi’s recent scientific discoveries, for
example Energie cromatiche del marconigramma (Colour Energies of the Marconigram,
1912), or shaped lyrical abstractions indebted to Balla’s urge toward abstractionism,
as could be seen in Prampolini’s series Velocità astratta (Abstract Speed, 1913).
Arnaldo Ginna’s abstract works were entirely different, and he was harshly criti-
cized by some Futurists for this. A few of them referred to music, e. g. Paganini: Sintesi
fantastica espressiva (Paganini: Fantastic-expressive Synthesis, 1912) and Musica della
danza: Tema di una sinfonia di colori (Music of the Dance: Theme for a Symphony of
Colours, 1912). When they still worked under their true names as Arnaldo and Bruno
Ginanni Corradini (1892–1976), the two brothers (later respectively called Ginna and
Corra) published the treatise L’ arte dell’ avvenire (The Art of the Future, 1910), where
their intention to set painting in unison with music was made clear (Corra would
 Italy 607

develop it further in his 1912 essay, Musica cromatica [Colour Music]). Although not
always effective in practice, the theories of the Ginanni Corradini brothers found some
echoes in Carlo Carrà’s manifesto, La pittura dei suoni, rumori, odori (The Painting of
Sounds, Noises and Smells, 1913), and a little later in Prampolini’s La cromofonia: Il
colore dei suoni (Chromophony: The Colour of Sounds, 1913). The possible influence
of Russolo’s Arte dei rumori (The Art of Noises, 1913) and of Cangiullo’s works cannot
be disregarded. Francesco Cangiullo (1884–1977) was well known as a composer and
lyricist of Neapolitan songs, whose cheerful spirit he transfused into Futurist exhibi-
tions. More than in painting, his innovative talent would find its best expression in
the so-called ‘alfabeto a sorpresa’ (surprise alphabet), that is, in drawing humanized
numbers and alphabetical letters. Noteworthy examples are numbers with a head and
legs, such as in I quattro carabinieri (The Four Policemen, 1913), and others with a
wide-open mouth, filled with parolibere, for example Bello (Beautiful, 1914). These
works acted as a model for his adolescent brother, Pasquale, dubbed “Pasqualino
Tredicianni” (13-Year Old Pasqualino, 1900–1975) by Marinetti, who was always in
search of young talents.
In 1913, Fortunato Depero arrived in Rome from his native Rovereto, a small town
belonging at the time to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Intending to meet the Futurists
in person, Depero had undertaken an arduous journey on foot and on carts. Cangiullo
and Balla caught sight of him sitting on the steps of the Galleria Sprovieri, emaciated
and covered in mud. He had with him a briefcase full of mostly grotesque drawings
(Cangiullo: Le serate futuriste, 118–121). Balla liked them very much, took the young
painter to his home and became his “first true supporter” (Depero: “Giacomo Balla,
un mio maestro”, 5).
Depero showed seven of his works at the Esposizione libera futurista internazio-
nale of 1914. Balla’s inspiring influence can be clearly detected in Scomposizione di
bambina in corsa (Deconstruction of a Little Girl Running, 1914); Ritmi di ballerina +
clown (Rhythms of a Ballerina + Clown, 1914) showed his interest in the circus, which,
together with a tendency towards an Expressionist style, would always characterize
his works. His unmistakable style was commercially successful from the very begin-
ning of his career. With the exception of Autoritratto, all the works Depero exhibited
on that first occasion were sold.
Depero’s Futurism was indeed set apart from that of the other artists, even though
he was not the only one to shape a unique style. Boccioni’s opposition notwithstand-
ing, Marinetti’s strategy to enlarge the Futurist group was far from strict: he kept
encouraging his associates to contact other artists and convince them to join, even if
their stylistic lexicon was far from being Futurist.
As a consequence, a few associations would not last, as was the case of Giannetto
Malmerendi (1893–1968) from Faenza, who in 1914–1915 painted a few outstand-
ing Futurist works (some of which were indebted to Boccioni’s suggestions). Other
temporary contacts were even more important: Achille Funi (1890–1972), Leonardo
Dudreville (1885–1975), Carlo Erba (1884–1917) and the architect Antonio Sant’Elia
608 Giorgio Di Genova

(1888–1916) should be mentioned here. They all belonged to Gruppo Nuove Tendenze,
whose first exhibition was held at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan (May–June 1914).
The exhibition catalogue included texts from all the artists. Erba and Dudreville
voiced their orientation towards what they called ‘abstraction’ (Erba: Prima espo-
sizione d’arte del Gruppo Nuove Tendenze, 26; Dudreville: Prima esposizione d’arte
del Gruppo Nuove Tendenze, 8), and an interest in the relationship between music
and painting, possibly indebted to the Corradini brothers’ Arte dell’avvenire. Of all
those artists whose style oscillated between Secessionism and Futurism, Boccioni
appreciated Funi the most because his instinct for three-dimensional solutions felt
rather close to his own. Sant’Elia’s call for a new architecture (see p. 71 in this volume)
contained echoes of some Futurist manifestos. Pushed by Carrà to officially endorse
Futurism, Sant’Elia revised his text and, supplemented by some additional sentences
by Marinetti, published it as a Futurist manifesto under the title L’ architettura futur-
ista (Futurist Architecture, 1914).

Futurists and the Great War

On 28 July 1914, Austria declared war on Serbia. Although Italy was a member of the
Triple Alliance with Austria and Germany, the country declared its neutrality and
was soon divided into champions of participation in the war and defenders of peace.
Being ardent nationalists, the Futurists took side with the interventionist camp, as
did the Socialist Benito Mussolini. Initially a defender of peace, he suddenly changed
his mind, resigned from the directorship of the Socialist daily Avanti! and soon after
founded a new newspaper, Il popolo d’Italia.
Political contingencies also affected the Futurists’ production during the Great
War. Carrà made a few collages and temperas proclaiming his support of the war,
for example Manifestazione interventista (Interventionist Demonstration, 1915) and
Festa patriottica (Patriotic Celebration, 1919). In mid-September, Marinetti, Boccioni,
Carrà, Mazza, Russolo and Ugo Piatti (1880–1953) organized an interventionist action
in Milan at the Teatro Dal Verme and at the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, where they
distributed leaflets of Sintesi futurista della guerra (The Futurist Synthesis of War) and
burned eight Austrian flags (Berghaus: Futurism and Politics, 74). As a result, they
were arrested and kept in prison for six days. Balla was one of the most pugnacious.
He was the author of a manifesto entitled Le Vêtement masculin futuriste (Futurist
Men’s Clothing, May 1914), published after the outbreak of war under the title Il
vestito antineutrale: Manifesto futurista (The Antineutral Suit: Futurist Manifesto,
11 September 1914), whose epigraph contained a quote from Marinetti’s first mani-
festo from 20 February 1909: “We wish to glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world”
(Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14). The ‘antineutral suit’
was to have the colours of the Italian flag, that is: white, red and green, as shown in
 Italy 609

the drawing on the first page of the manifesto. This led the way to the multicoloured
waistcoat, ties and jackets realized by Balla and Depero, sometimes worn during
political and artistic manifestations by some of the most important members of the
movement during the 1920s. The Futurist movement printed and distributed freely for
billposting three-hundred thousand copies of The Futurist Synthesis of War, a leaflet
written in the Words-in-Freedom style and signed by Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà,
Russolo and Piatti. Allegedly, this action took place on 20 September, but the date was
more likely November 1914, backdated in order to respond to the German destruction
of Reims Cathedral on that day (see Daly: Italian Futurism and the First World War,
22–24). The uncertain political situation was an inspiring source for Balla, who in 1915
began a series of pro-intervention paintings, in which three-dimensional forms with
red, white and green spikes were bending and slotting into one another: Forme grido
Viva l’Italia (Shout Forms Hurray for Italy), Dimostrazione interventista in piazza del
Quirinale (Interventionist Demonstration in Piazza del Quirinale), Sbandieramento +
folla (Flag Waving + Crowd) and Bandiere all’altare della Patria (Flags at the Altar of
the Fatherland).
Together with Depero, Balla wrote the manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’uni-
verso (The Futurist Refashioning of the Universe, 11 March 1915). The two authors
aimed at resuming and recasting their earlier Futurist experiences in order to remodel
the universe, cheering it up by “recreating it entirely” and creating an “artificial land-
scape” with the help of solid geometry. Depero advocated a renewal of toys, which
should not only be more joyful but also accustom children to “physical courage,
struggle and WAR” (Balla and Depero: “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”,
212). The most outstanding innovation consisted however in the invention of abstract
complessi plastici (three-dimensional aggregations), whirling at various speeds. They
“decompose, speak, make noises, sound simultaneously”, and also “appear and dis-
appear […] in repeated fits and starts” (Balla and Depero: “Futurist Reconstruction
of the Universe”, 210–211). On the last two pages, following the two artists’ signa-
tures, the manifesto included six images of complessi plastici, three by Balla and
three by Depero. Their captions showed the two painters’ debt to Boccioni’s Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. This particularly applies to Balla’s Complesso pla-
stico colorato di frastuono + danza + allegria (Three-dimensional Aggregation of
Colour + Noise + Dance + Gaiety), made of mirrors, aluminium foil, talc, cardboard
and iron threads, and to Depero’s Complesso plastico colorato motorumorista di equi-
valenti in moto (Coloured, Moving, Sound-emitting Three-dimensional Aggregation
of Equivalents in Motion), where coloured veils, cardboard, aluminum foil as well as
metal threads coexisted with wood, pipes and sheaves. Depero and Balla, who signed
themselves “Futurist abstractionists”, did indeed work up Boccioni’s ideas through
the addition of sound and movement. Their complessi plastici anticipated kinetic art,
which would emerge a few decades later.
In December 1914, Papini and Soffici voiced in Lacerba their dissatisfac-
tion with what they judged a weak alignment of Futurism with the champions of
610 Giorgio Di Genova

Italy’s entry into war. On 14 February 1915, they published the article, “Futurismo
e marinettismo” in which they distinguished between Futurism (counting only
eight members, including Carrà, Severini and Francesco Balilla Pratella [1880–
1955]) and Marinettism (with 28 members, including Boccioni, Balla, Giannattasio,
Malmerendi, Russolo, Sant’Elia and Bruno Corradini). This marked the end of the
first phase of the Florentine Futurist movement. In that same year, Carrà detached
himself from Futurism and dedicated himself to new projects. The same happened
to Severini one year later: he opted for a return to classicism after having painted
a few important Futurist works inspired by war, for example Synthèse plastique de
l’idée: “Guerre” (Three-dimensional Synthesis of the Idea of ‘War’) and Train blindé
en action (Armoured Train in Action, both of 1915).
On 24 May 1915, Italy entered into the war and, soon after, Marinetti, Boccioni,
Russolo, Sironi, Sant’Elia, Erba, Funi and Mino Somenzi (1899–1948) joined the
Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists. After falling from his horse,
Boccioni died at Sorte (Verona) on 17 August 1916. Sant’Elia was killed in action on 19
October 1916, and the same happened to Erba on 20 June 1917. Boccioni’s last works
included two versions of Ritratto della signora Busoni (Portrait of Mrs Busoni) as well
as Il ritratto del Maestro Ferruccio Busoni (Portrait of the Musician Ferruccio Busoni,
both 1916), whose debt to Cézanne’s style made some critics wrongly suppose that he
had disavowed Futurism (Di Genova: Storia dell’arte italiana del ‘900: Generazione
maestri storici. Vol. 1, 352–354). Not only was he deeply engaged in Futurism until
the end of his life, the works themselves contradict such a hypothesis and clearly
show Boccioni’s will to translate the Futurist dynamism into the colour layerings in
his paintings.
As an homage to his late pupil’s socialist ideas, Balla made the extremely stylized
and dynamic Il pugno di Boccioni (Boccioni’s Fist, 1916–1917), a sculpture in cardboard
and wood painted in red and representing a hammer and sickle. Balla was not drafted
into the war, due to his age (he was forty-four in 1915) and could thus engage in a
multifaceted cycle of artistic production characterized by the idea of refashioning the
universe through a blending of the arts. Besides producing some paintings inspired
by war casualties (e. g. Paesaggio + velo di vedova: Guerra [Landscape + Widow’s Veil:
War, 1916]), he performed in the film, Vita futurista (Futurist Life, 1916), made the décor
for Feu d’artifice (Fireworks, 1917), produced by the impresario of the Ballets Russes,
Sergei Diaghilev (1872–1929), and began to create furniture and decorative works for his
home, which were subsequently exhibited at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in October 1918.
Owing to bad health, Depero was discharged from the army. In 1917, under another
assignment from Diaghilev, he constructed a stage set of sculpted flowers and some
cardboard costumes for the ballet Le Chant du Rossignol (Song of the Nightingale,
1917), which the impresario however rejected. Depero made positive use of that expe-
rience and developed his own ‘ballets’ of marionettes, I balli plastici, which was per-
formed at the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome in April 1918 (see also the entries on Dance and
Theatre in this volume).
 Italy 611

In the same period, Prampolini worked on stage décor and published a large
number of drawings in Italian and foreign journals. In 1917, he founded with Bino
Sanminiatelli (1896–1984) the journal Noi and established a wide network of connec-
tions, Dadaists included, in Italy, in other parts of Europe and in the USA. Different in
format and nature was the bimonthly L’ Italia futurista, founded in Florence by Ginna,
Corra and Emilio Settimelli (1891–1954) in 1916. It took on a rôle previously played by
Lacerba and had a group of young artists, called the ‘Pattuglia azzurra’ (blue patrol),
supporting it. They called into existence a second wave of Florentine Futurism, which
included the painters Primo Conti, Achille Lega (1899–1934), Lucio Venna (1897–
1974), Roberto Iras Baldessari (1894–1965), Ottone Rosai and the Viennese aristocrat
Edith von Haynau (who called herself Rosa Rosà, 1884–1978). L’ Italia futurista ceased
publication on 11 February 1918. One year later, Conti was the founding editor, with
Corrado Pavolini (1898–1980), of the four issues of the journal Il centone, to which
also Lega and Rosai contributed.
In Rome, Virgilio Marchi (1895–1960) and Francesco Di Cocco (1900–1989) joined
the Futurist group as new members, the former in 1916, the latter in 1917/18. Neither of
them cherished war subjects, in contrast to Osvaldo Licini (1894 –1958), who painted
Soldati italiani (Italian Soldiers, 1917) during his short association with Futurism.

Futurism after the Great War

The first issue of Roma futurista, subtitled “Newspaper of the Futurist Political Party”,
was published on 20 September 1918. Marinetti himself had written the Manifesto
del Partito Futurista Italiano (Manifesto of the Italian Futurist Party, first published
in February 1918), which included a number of demands that were later adopted by
Mussolini. The founder of Futurism, dubbed at the time “the caffeine of Europe” for
his formidable organizational and propagandistic talents, and the future dictator
joined forces in several political actions for which they both went to jail.
After the war, when the northern region of Trentino withdrew from Austrian
control and became integrated into the Italian State (1919), Depero returned home
from Rome to his native Rovereto, now incorporated within Italy’s borders. Assisted
by his wife, Rosetta Amadori Depero (1893–1976), he started the Casa d’Arte Futurista
Depero, a workshop where he could create handmade cushions, tapestries, cloth
marquetry (inaccurately defined ‘tapestries’), toys and much more. This activity was
documented in paintings such as Io e mia moglie (Me and My Wife, 1919) and the
large-sized La casa del mago (The Magician’s House, 1920). Depero developed a style
in which painting and decoration were perfectly fused and that was perfectly suitable
to his grotesque character-marionettes, made variously of rubber (Diavoli di caucciù
a scatto [Flip-Up Rubber Devils], 1919), of wood (Anacapri, 1920) or metal (Fumatore
di ferro [Iron Smoker, 1921]). They were all inspired by his manifesto, Ricostruzione
612 Giorgio Di Genova

futurista dell’universo (especially its section describing a “metallic animal”) as well as

by the myth of the machine that characterized the second wave of Futurism.
In the meantime, Futurism was becoming more and more popular among the
artists discharged from the military. Guglielmo Sansoni, called Tato (1896–1974), was
making himself known in Bologna, while in Rome Virgilio Marchi was carrying on
Sant’Elia’s ideas with a visionary production, exemplified by temperas such as Città
fantastica (Fantastic City, 1919) and Teatro (Theatre, 1920), as well as in his Manifesto
dell’architettura futurista: Dinamica, stato d’animo, drammatica (Manifesto of Futurist
Architecture: Dynamic and Dramatic States of Mind, 1920). It received the endorse-
ment, amongst others, of Mirko Vucetich (1898 –1975), who founded the Gruppo
Futurista Goriziano, together with Sofronio Pocarini (1898–1934), in October 1920.
Gerardo Dottori (1884–1977) acquired for himself a good reputation in his birth-
place Perugia by publishing the militant Futurist periodical Griffa!, in which he
attacked the ‘return to order’ of some ex-Futurists, such as Carlo Carrà and Ardengo
Soffici. In his oil painting Il lago (The Lake, 1920), and even more so in the aerial view
Primavera umbra (Springtime in Umbria, 1923), Dottori was disclosing the first seeds
of an optical conception which would later give Marinetti reason to acknowledge him
as a forerunner of ‘aeropainting’.
Futurist forms of expression were particularly popular in Rome, where Balla
decorated the ceiling of the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia (1921–1922) and the halls of the
night club Bal Tik Tak (1921). In a similar vein, Depero opened and embellished a
Cabaret del Diavolo in 1922. Two students in architecture, the Moscow-born Vinicio
Paladini (1902–1971) and Ivo Pannaggi (1901–1981) from Macerata, published in Rome
a Manifesto dell’arte meccanica futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art, June
1922), which was later re-written and co-signed by Prampolini. Paladini conceived a
Ballo meccanico futurista (Futurist Mechanical Ballet), which was performed at the
Casa d’Arte Bragaglia on 2 June 1922 with robotic costumes designed by Pannaggi,
which were reminiscent of Depero’s Balli plastici, and noise music indebted to Russolo
that was produced by two motorcycles. Both Paladini and Pannaggi decorated a
wall of the Casa d’Arte, entitled Jazz Band, and designed shows for the Teatro degli
Indipendenti, for example Pierrot fumiste (Jules Laforgue: Pierrot the Charlatan) and
Fantocci elettrici (F. T. Marinetti: Electric Dolls, both of 1925). In 1926, Pannaggi also
engaged in the renovation of Casa Zampini in the small Marche town Esanatoglia, a
perfect ‘living machine’ mixing architecture, pictorial chromatism, structural plas-
ticity and stage construction (see p. 185 in the section on “Decorative Arts, Furniture
and Interior Design” in this volume).
The concept of a mechanical art was developed further in Turin, from a psycho-
logical and symbolical standpoint, by Luigi Enrico Colombo (pseud. Fillìa, 1904–
1936). He was the leader of the left-wing Movimento Futurista Torinese, which was
strongly involved in social projects and aroused the interest of the politician and the-
oretician Antonio Gramsci. One of its members was the artist Ugo Pozzo (1900–1981).
In 1923, together with Tullio Alpino Bracci (1891–1952) and Angelo Maino (1883–1944),
 Italy 613

Fillìa founded the Sindacati artistici futuristi (Futurist Artistic Unions) and published
one year later an Alfabeto spirituale (Spiritual Alphabet) and La pittura spirituale
(Spiritual Painting). Fillìa’s painting Idolo meccanico (Mechanical Idol, 1925) took the
new aesthetics of the machine to an extreme.
The Sicilian Pippo Rizzo (1897–1964) was also inspired by the myth of the
machine. During his stay in Rome (1919–1922), he met Balla, Prampolini, Marinetti
and Pannaggi. Once back in Palermo, he painted Treno in corsa nella notte (Speeding
Night Train, 1926), where suggestions from Pannaggi’s Treno in corsa (Speeding Train,
1922) can be detected.

Futurism in the Fascist era

At the time of Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, Marinetti did not fully share the
future dictator’s views and detached himself from him. Once Mussolini had become
Prime Minister, their disagreement increased, not least because Mussolini gave his
support to the backward-looking Novecento Italiano group rather than to Futurism.
Mussolini and Marinetti reconciled at the first Futurist Congress, held in Milan on
23 November 1924. During the event, the ideologically opposed factions within
Marinetti’s movement clashed violently, and subsequently those Futurists who were
not willing to support Fascism were ousted. This was the first step towards an inte-
gration of Futurism into the cultural fabric of Fascism. Many Futurist artists partici-
pated in the cult of the Duce and extolled the régime’s war ventures. Yet, despite the
ingratiating gestures of Futurist artists and owing to the strong opposition of Fascist
functionaries to their work, Futurism never managed to become a privileged art of the
Fascist State.
After 1925, many Futurists portrayed Mussolini in various poses and guises. Enrico
Prampolini produced a painting called Mussolini: Sintesi plastica (Three-dimensional
Synthesis of Mussolini, 1925); Enzo Benedetto (1905–1993) focussed on the Duce’s
radiant eyes in Mussolini, sintesi dinamica (Dynamic Synthesis of Mussolini, 1926);
Osvaldo Peruzzi (1907–2004) painted his profile while haranguing the masses in Il
Duce parla (The Duce Speaks, 1933); and Corrado Forlin (1912–1943) portrayed him
several times on horseback. Mussolini was celebrated in the new genre of aeropaint-
ing, amongst others by Alfredo Gauro Ambrosi (1901–1945) in Aerosintesi simultanea
del Duce aviatore (Simultaneous Aero-Synthesis of the Duce as Aviator, 1938), Verossì
(pseud. of Siviero Albino, 1904–1945) in Non disturbate il pilota (Don’t Disturb the Pilot,
1940), and by Barbara (pseud. of Olga Biglieri Scurto, 1915–2002) in Sintesi aereopit-
torica del Duce (Aeropainterly Synthesis of the Duce, 1940). Sculpted portraits were
numerous, the most successful being the helmet-shaped metal heads in thayahtite
and marble by Thayaht (pseud. of Ernesto Michahelles, 1893–1959) called Dux, 1929.
Also worth mentioning are the polymateric Architettura di una testa (Architecture
614 Giorgio Di Genova

of a Head, 1934) by Mino Rosso and the multiple copies made through the years by
Renato Bertelli (1900–1974), called Profilo continuo di Mussolini (Continuous Profile of
Mussolini, 1933–1936; see Di Genova: “L’ uomo della Provvidenza”).
Prampolini’s Mussolini: Sintesi plastica was exhibited in 1926 at the XV Biennial
of Venice, in a special Mostra del futurismo italiano, curated by Marinetti. Since the
imposition of the dictatorship in 1925, this was the first time that Marinetti had been
given such an official appointment. The Futurist section included sixty works, many
of them celebrating war. Marinetti’s wife Benedetta (1897–1977), a pupil of Balla’s,
exhibited Velocità di motoscafo (Speed of a Motorboat, 1919–1924) and Luci e rumori
di un treno notturno (Lights and Sounds of a Night Train, 1924), two works represent-
ing the myth of the machine and speed. The artist-aviator Fedele Azari (1895–1930)
presented his Prospettive di volo (Flight Perspectives, 1926), later considered to have
been the first aeropainting. During his short life (he died in 1930 at the age of 34),
Azari made an outstanding contribution to Futurism. Not only did he write the mani-
festo, Per una Società di protezione delle macchine (For a Society for the Protection
of Machines, 1927; Collarile: Fedele Azari: Vita simultanea futurista, 95–99), he also
published the famous libro imbullonato (bolted book), Depero futurista, 1913–1927
(Depero, the Futurist, 1927), and a glossary of Futurist neologisms, Primo dizionario
aereo (First Aero-Dictionary, 1929).
In 1928, Mino Somenzi, a journalist and great enthusiast of flying, wrote Aeropittura e
aeroscultura: Manifesto tecnico futurista (Aeropainting and Aerosculpture: A Technical
Futurist Manifesto), which in 1931 Marinetti would develop into a text entitled “LA
PRIMA AFFERMAZIONE NEL MONDO di una nuova arte italiana: L’ AEROPITTURA”
(The First Statement in the World Concerning a New Italian Art: Aeropainting).
Written to celebrate Italo Balbo’s successful flight over the Atlantic, it was published
on 1–2 February in Il giornale della domenica. It would be reprinted several times as
Manifesto dell’aeropittura and was signed by around thirty Futurists (see Balla et al.:
“Manifesto of Aeropainting”). Marinetti mentioned as forerunners of the new genre
the works by Azari, the wall paintings made by Dottori at the airport of Ostia (1929)
as well as his own article, “Prospettive del volo e aeropittura” (Flight Perspectives
and Aeropainting), which had appeared on 22 September 1929 in Turin’s Gazzetta del
popolo. In it, Marinetti ascribed the genesis of a precise conception of aeropittura to
Somenzi, who had developed it as a consequence of “the time spent in the cockpit
together with the painter Dottori” (Balla et al.: “Manifesto of Aeropainting”, 283).
On 1 February 1931, the first exhibition of aeropainting opened, organized by Tato
in Rome at the Camerata degli Artisti on Piazza del Popolo and including works by
Balla, Benedetta, Dottori, Fillìa, Pippo Oriani (1909–1972), Tato, Ballelica (pseud. of
Balla’s daughter Elica, 1914–1993), Diulgheroff, Prampolini, Brunas (pseud. of Bruna
Pestagalli Somenzi, the writer’s wife, life dates unknown). The first seven of them also
showed their paintings at the first Quadriennale, opened in Rome on 6 January 1931.
Balla did not miss the celebration of Balbo’s aviatory endeavour of 1931 and painted
the large canvas Balbo e i trasvolatori italiani (Balbo and the Italian Transatlantic
 Italy 615

Pilots), whose decorative rhythms were the result of a succession of lictor’s bundles
(the ubiquitous Fascist emblem) and seaplanes.
Starting in 1931, aeropainting came to be characterized by an exaltation of war,
especially after Italy entered the Ethiopian War (1935–1936) and the Spanish Civil
War (1936–1939). They were exhibited in shows such as Futuristi aeropittori d’ Africa
e Spagna, which Marinetti curated in three halls of the Venice Biennial of 1938. The
celebration of Fascist aviation and war went hand in hand with a glorification of
the Duce. The third Quadriennale of 1939 included a Futurist section, Mostra futu-
rista di aeropittori e aeroscultori, with a subdivision devoted to Prampolini. The 1943
Quadriennale, in turn, had several rooms dedicated to Aeropittori di guerra. Aeropittori
cosmici e astrattisti. Futuristi, which again contained many works celebrating war by
Giovanni Acquaviva (1900–1971), Ambrosi, Leandra Angelucci Cominazzini (1890–
1981), Giovanni Chetoffi (Ivan Ketoff, 1916–[?]), Tullio Crali (1910–2000), Renato Di
Bosso (pseud. of Renato Righetti, 1905–1982), Dottori, Fasullo (pseud. of Italo Fasolo,
1912–1943), Forlin, Peruzzi and Tato.
All of these events demonstrate the extent to which Futurism became involved in
Fascism in the 1930s. The political consent expressed by Marinetti and many of his
followers was rewarded by the Ministry for Popular Culture with secret, but often very
substantial emoluments (for a complete list see Sedita: Gli intellettuali di Mussolini).

Thematic and regional variations of Italian Futurism

In the course of the 1920s, Futurism spread out and developed branches in many
cities and towns all over Italy. It continued to be an important artistic force well into
the 1930s.
Milan: The city where, with short interruptions, Marinetti resided from 1894 to
1924, was obviously the first to host Futurist activities. Even after he moved to Rome,
a group of artists continued to be active there: Cesare Andreoni (1903–1961), Riccardo
Ricas (pseud. of Riccardo Castagnedi, 1912–1999), Carlo Manzoni (1909–1975), Gelindo
Furlan (1907–1994), Franco Grignani (1908–1999), Bruno Munari (1907–1998), Ivano
(Ivanhoe) Gambini (1904–1992) and others. Undoubtedly, Bruno Munari, with his pro-
clivity for playfulness, was the most creative talent of them. Aiming at overcoming
both painting and sculpture, he constructed in the 1930s a series of Macchine inutili
(Useless machines), which would hang on the ceiling like chandeliers or, decades
later, like Calder’s mobiles. This was Munari’s personal way of implicitly poking fun
at the Futurist myth of the machine.
Andreoni, on the contrary, had endorsed aeropainting, as his murals and mosaics
displayed at the fifth Trienniale show in Milan. Ricas signed in 1934, together with
Furlan, Manzoni, Munari and later Regina (artist name of Regina Cassolo Bracchi,
1894–1974), the Manifesto tecnico dell’aeroplastica futurista (Technical Manifesto
616 Giorgio Di Genova

of Futurist Aerosculpture), and was active not only as a painter and graphic artist,
but also as a musician. He gave ‘concerts of silence’ on the radio, and together with
Munari experimented with an ‘olfactory cinema’. Grignani was more inclined than
others to structure his paintings spatially. His Sintesi architettonica: L’ uomo-macchina
(Architectural Synthesis: The Man-machine, 1931) was the origin of his later, geomet-
rical and perceptual post-Futurist works. Regina (Bracchi) stood out for small
dynamic sculptures made of layers of tin, aluminum, metal or celluloid sheets (such
as Ballerina, 1923–1924; Danzatrice, 1930): her indented ‘bas-reliefs’, e. g. L’ amante
dell’aviatore (The Pilot’s Lover, 1935), and her iron works were also remarkable.
Gorizia: In 1919, Mirko Vucetich, Sofronio Pocarini and Giorgio Carmelich
(1907–1929) founded the Movimento Futurista Giuliano. Ivan Čargo (1898 –1958) was
another member, as was the younger Tullio Crali, the latter of whom was undoubtedly
the most important artist in the group, both as an organizer and as a painter. Initially,
he focussed on sport subjects and later became a leading aeropainter.
Rome: In 1924, Marinetti settled with his wife Benedetta in the capital, which
subsequently became the organizational centre of Futurism. Balla, Prampolini,
De Pistoris (Federico Pfister, 1898–1975), Paladini and Pannaggi lived there until
1930. Domenico Belli (1909–1983), the author of the painting Il trasvolatore (The
Transatlantic Pilot, 1934), also resided there. Tato settled in Rome in 1924, and Dottori
remained there until 1939. Augusto Favalli (1912–1969) was also in Rome and founded
the Gruppo Futursimultaneisti in 1931, together with Belli, Bruno Tano (1913–1942)
from Macerata and the sculptors Alfredo Innocenzi (1909–1974) and Gianni Tomassetti
(dates unknown). Enzo Benedetto settled in Rome in 1931.
Turin: In the meantime, Fillìa founded a Futurist group in the capital of the
Piedmont region and was joined in 1926 by the Bulgarian Nicolay Diulgheroff (1901–
1982), following his studies at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Pippo Oriani, Franco Costa
(1906–1980) and the sculptor Mino Rosso adhered to the circle in 1927, and Enrico
Alimandi (1906–1984) two years later. Art historian Enrico Crispolti has described their
activity as ‘second-wave Futurism’ (Crispolti: Il secondo futurismo). In May 1931, Fillìa
authored the Manifesto dell’arte sacra futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Religious Art),
in which he voiced the Futurist opposition to the Lateran Treaty, signed by Mussolini
and Pope Pio XI in 1929, and confirmed the Futurists’ anticlericalism, stating that
religious art could be renewed only through a Futurist “synthesis” and “transfigura-
tion” (Marinetti and Fillìa: “Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art”, 286). Fillìa created reli-
gious art himself, for example, La sacra famiglia (The Holy Family, 1931) and La città
di Dio (The City of God, 1931–1932). He also organized a Mostra nazionale d’arte futu-
rista: Aeropittura arte sacra pittura scultura futuriste (National Exhibition of Futurist
Art: Aeropainting, Religious Art, Futurist Painting and Sculpture), which gathered
182 works at the Bottega d’Arte in Livorno (16–31 December 1933). Oriani showed
Natività (Nativity), La salita al Calvario (The Ascent to Calvary), La crocifissione (The
Crucifixion) and L’ ascensione (Ascension), Mino Rosso the sculptures San Francesco
(St. Francis) and Natività (The Nativity), Pozzo San Antonio da Padova (St. Anthony of
 Italy 617

Padua), Paolo Alcide Saladin (1900 1952) his Arte sacra futurista (Futurist Sacred Art)
and Mario Zucco (1902–[?]) Arte sacra futurista (Futurist Sacred Art).
Diulgheroff stood out as a designer of advertising placards and as an architect
of the restaurant Taverna del Santopalato, of 1930–1931, with an interior design all
done in aluminium. In his paintings, he pursued a geometrical and rational concep-
tion, to which he added a pronounced plasticity and dialectic spatial structure (e. g. Il
marinaio [Sailor], 1939), or intricately juxtaposed collages (e. g. Architettura con la A
maiuscola [Architecture with a Capital A], 1935).
Liguria: Farfa (pseud. of Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini, 1881–1964) was the author
of outstanding cartopitture (paper paintings) and entered the Turin group in 1923
before moving on to Savona six years later. From there it was easy for him to reach
Albissola Marina, which Tullio Mazzotti (called Tullio d’Albisola, 1899–1971) and his
brothers had managed to transform into an important production centre of Futurist
pottery (see pp. 92-95 in this volume). A large number of Futurist artists worked at
Albissola. Alfredo Gaudenzi (1908–1980) and Dino Gambetti (1907–1988), both from
Liguria, were also ceramicists, and in the autumn of 1930 they formed the Gruppo
Artisti Genovesi Sintesi, which was associated with Tullio d’Albisola and other artists.
Sicily: In 1922, Rodolfo Castellana (1896–1962) was appraised in Palermo for his
chalk bas-reliefs, which Marinetti called plasticaricature (three-dimensional carica-
tures). In the same period, Pippo Rizzo was often there and was housed by Giovanni
Varvaro (1888–1973), with whom he started a circle of young Futurists, which included
Vittorio Corona (1901–1966). Giulio D’Anna (1908–1978) entered Futurism in Messina
towards the end of the 1920s.
Calabria: The most outstanding Futurist of this Southern region was Enzo
Benedetto (called Benedetto Record by Marinetti). He founded in 1924 the Futurist
journal Originalità (it had only two issues), but in 1931 moved to Rome. The painter
and potter Michele Berardelli (1912–1995) should also not be overlooked.
Emilia Romagna: This very active Futurist region in central Italy counted
amongst its members Mario Molinari (1903–1966), who was active in Modena, while
Tato, the less talented Angelo Caviglioni (1887–1977) and Giovanni Korompay (1904–
1988) worked in Bologna. Mario Guido Dal Monte (1906–1990) ran a casa d’arte futur-
ista in Imola. Faenza became another important hub for ceramics. Riccardo Gatti
(1886–1972) had a workshop there, as did Remo Fabbri (1890–1977), who liked to
present himself as ‘the first Futurist potter’.
Naples: Carlo Cocchia (1903–1993), Antonio Deambrosio (1901–1965) and
Guglielmo Peirce (1909–1958) signed in May 1928 the Manifesto dei pittori circumvi-
sionisti (Manifesto of the Circumvisionist Painters), which was followed by the found-
ing manifesto of the Unione Distruttivisti Attivisti (Union of Destructivist Activists,
dated July–September 1929), authored by Carlo Bernard (pseud. of Carlo Bernari,
1909–1992), Paolo Ricci (1908–1986) as well as by Peirce himself. These artists orig-
inally inflected the myth of the machine: “We consider the sea and the moon as
machines: the sea is a connecting machine, and the moon is a mechanism useful to
618 Giorgio Di Genova

cosmic balance” (Caruso: Francesco Cangiullo e il futurismo a Napoli, 82). The painter
Mario Lepore (1908–1972), the painter and sculptor Luigi Pepe Diaz (1909–1970) and
later Emilio Buccafusca (1913–1990) were members of this group.
Florence: This Tuscan city became in the 1920s and 1930s the centre of an inde-
pendent Futurist movement, founded by Antonio Marasco (1896–1975). A native from
Calabria, he moved to the Tuscan town at age 10. From his youth, he was active in
Marinetti’s movement and even accompanied him to Russia in 1914. Marasco’s style was
abstract, hence far from the Futurist mainstream. In the early 1930s, he voiced his oppo-
sition to Marinetti, whom he deemed as having sold out artistically and politically to the
régime. He founded the Gruppi Futuristi di Iniziative, and in March 1933 he launched
the Manifesto dei gruppi futuristi indipendenti (Manifesto of the Independent Futurist
Groups), of which Marisa Mori (1900–1985) was a member. Marasco was the founding
editor of the only issue of the journal Supremazia futurista (March 1933) and a supporter
of the more successful anti-Marinetti periodical, Nuovo futurismo (1934–1935).
Umbria: Gerardo Dottori was the most important Futurist painter in this region.
He worked in Perugia from 1912 until 1926, when he moved to Rome. By the end of the
1920s, Leandra Angelucci Cominazzini entered the movement and was joined in 1935
by Alessandro Bruschetti (1910–1980), who had become a Futurist in Rome under
Dottori’s influence. In 1939, Dottori returned to his native Perugia and continued his
activity as a Futurist there.
Veneto: This region became, in 1931, a beehive of activities of a Gruppo Futurista
Veronese “Boccioni”, which had among its associates the aeropainters Ambrosi;
Verossì; the sculptor Di Bosso, whose works were inspired by sport; the writer Ignazio
Scurto (1912–1954), who published in 1933 the Manifesto futurista sulla cravatta ital-
iana (Futurist Manifesto of the Italian Necktie); the painter and stage designer Ernesto
Amos Tomba (1898–1973), inventor of the so-called ‘pneumatic stage’; the versatile
Bruno Aschieri (1906–1991), who entered Futurism at the age of 17 with his brother
Tullio (1908–[?]), an architect; as well as the painter and poet, Quirino Sacchetti
(1909–1979). In Padova, meanwhile, Carlo Maria Dormal (1909–1938), Quirino De
Giorgio (1907–1997), Giorgio Perissinotto (who called himself Peri, 1904–1993) and
Crali founded a new Futurist group, from which the Gruppo Savarè of Monselice
stemmed in 1936, with Italo Fasullo (Fasolo) and Corrado Forlin, the author of
Manifesto dell’ardentismo in pittura (Manifesto of Ardentism in Painting, 1940).
Apulia: This Southern region became a centre of Futurist activity, mostly literary,
but in the 1930s also in the field of painting with Oronzo Abbatecola (1912–2007) and
Mino Delle Site (1914–1996).
Tuscany: When, in 1932, Osvaldo Peruzzi moved to Livorno, where his family
owned a glass factory, Futurism penetrated also into this important Tuscan town.
Some of the smaller cities such as Leghorn, Lucca, Pisa, Siena and Viareggio also
saw a lively Futurist activity in the forms of exhibitions, serate futuriste and designing
local popular festivals (see Belluomini Pucci and Mazzoni: Il futurismo a Viareggio e
in Versilia; Crispolti Il futurismo attraverso la Toscana; Pautasso: Versilia futurista).
 Italy 619

The Marche: Macerata was a flourishing Futurist centre, where Bruno Tano
(1913–1942) and Sante Monachesi (1910–1991) created polymaterial panels together
and founded with other artists the Gruppo “Umberto Boccioni” in December 1932.
Amongst its members were, from 1936, the sculptor Umberto Peschi (1912–1992),
Virgì (pseud. of Virgilio Bonifazi, 1918–1997), Arbell (pseud. of Arnaldo Bellabarba,
1913–2002), Rolando Bravi (dates unknown), and from 1940 the eighteen-year-
old Wladimiro Tulli (1922–2003). (See Di Genova: Storia dell’arte italiana del '900.
Generazione anni Venti, 12–13).

Futurism after 1944

Marinetti died on 2 December 1944 at Bellagio, where he had moved to live close to
Mussolini, who one year before had founded the Repubblica Sociale Italiana in nearby
Salò. Historians usually consider Futurism to have come to a close with its founder’s
passing away. But this, in fact, is not correct. In 1944, the Futurist movement folded as an
organization, but the Futurist style was kept alive by many artists, such as Crali, Marasco,
Delle Site and Peruzzi. Other artists, such as Severini, Pippo Oriani and Monachesi, who
had worked for a while in a different idiom, returned to Futurism. In 1964, Monachesi felt
the need to reaffirm his Futurist past and published in Macerata the first Manifesto Agrà
(“Agrà” [Antigravitational] Manifesto), to be followed by three more in 1969. In the late
1970s, Antonio Fiore (1938–), whom Monachesi baptized Ufagrà, developed an extremely
colourful and dynamic Futurist style, which can be defined as ‘cosmic’.
Benedetto ran, from 1958, a magazine and publishing house, Edizioni Arte-
Viva, which in 1967 organized the exhibition Futurismo-oggi (Futurism-Today) in the
Municipal Library of Formia and in the catalogue published a Manifesto di Futurismo-
oggi. It was signed by Acquaviva, Bruschetti, Dal Monte, Caviglioni, Tullio d’Albisola,
Delle Site, Dottori, Marasco, Emilio Pettoruti (1892–1971) and Alberto Sartoris (1901–
1998). It stated that Futurism was still alive, a conviction and a programme these artists
tried to propagate by means of a new journal, Futurismo-oggi, published between 1969
and 1992. In addition, Benedetto organized in several towns a series of “exhibitions of
Futurismo-oggi”, which showed work not only of the signatories of the manifesto, but
also of Angelucci, Domenico Belli, Di Bosso, Stefania Lotti (1927–2008), Tina Aprea
(dates unknown), Krimer (pseud. of Cristoforo Mercati, 1908–1977), Roberto Rosati
(1889–1949), Carlo Monti (1931–), Gino Piergentili (dates unknown), Roberto Patalano
(1942–), Luigi Versace (1927–1991) and Serafino Babini (1933–). New Futurist associ-
ations followed. In 1971, Babini founded in Lugo a Futurist group, amongst whose
members were Roberto Patalano and Davide Servadei (dates unknown). In 1986, at
Castelnuovo di Farfa, Baldo Savonari (1942–) defined his style as ‘Terzo Futurismo’ and
organized in October 1987 an art festival in which Benedetto, Lotti, Delle Site, Peruzzi,
Fiore, Babini and Billero (pseud. of Guido Borrelli, 1943–) exhibited their works.
620 Giorgio Di Genova

In 2005, Antonio Saccoccio (1974–) founded Net.Futurismo, an Internet-based

organization with an anarchical orientation, which is the heir to several artistic
movements ranging from Futurism to Situationism. Collateral to Net.Futurismo is
the ‘trans-humanist’ movement, which has as key members Riccardo Campa (1967–)
and Stefano Vaj (pseud. of Stefano Sutti, 1960–), the writer Roberto Guerra (1960–),
the composer Stefano Balice (1988–) and many others. All of this demonstrates that,
although far removed from the lexicon of historical Futurism, the seeds sown by
Marinetti are still bearing fruit.

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Prampolini, Mino Somenzi, and Tato: “Manifesto of Aeropainting.” Lawrence S. Rainey,
Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale
University Press, 2009. 283–286.
Belluomini Pucci, Alessandra, and Riccardo Mazzoni, eds.: Il futurismo a Viareggio e in Versilia:
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futurista della guerra.” F. T. Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista. A cura di Luciano de Maria.
Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 280-281; 2nd edn 1983. 326–327.
Palazzeschi, Aldo: “Prefazione: Marinetti e il futurismo.” F. T. Marinetti. Teoria e invenzione futurista.
A cura di Luciano de Maria. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. VII-XVII; 2nd edn 1983. XV-XXVI.
Pautasso, Guido Andrea, ed.: Versilia futurista: Dalla Repubblica di Apua alle scorribande di
Marinetti e dei futuristi in Versilia. Exhibition catalogue. Forte dei Marmi (LU): Villa Bertelli, 18
dicembre 2015 – 31 gennaio 2016. Pietrasanta: Franche Tirature, 2015.
Sedita, Giovanni: Gli intellettuali di Mussolini: La cultura finanziata dal fascismo. Firenze: Le Lettere,
2010.
Soffici, Ardengo: “Arte libera e pittura futurista.” La voce 3:25 (22 June 1911): 597.
Somenzi, Mino (Stanislao): “Aeropittura e aeroscultura: Manifesto tecnico futurista.” Enrico
Crispolti, ed.: Futurismo 1909–1944: Arte, architettura, spettacolo, grafica, letteratura. Milano:
Mazzotta, 2001. 220–221.

Further reading
Acordon, Angela, ed.: Futuristi alla Spezia. La Spezia: Edizioni del Tridente, 1991.
Andreoli, Anna Maria, Giovanni Caprara, and Elena Fontanella, eds.: Volare! Futurismo, aviomania,
tecnica e cultura italiana del volo 1903–1940. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Palazzo Reale, 12
settembre – 16 novembre 2003. Roma: De Luca, 2003.
[Andreoni, Cesare]: Cesare Andreoni e il futurismo a Milano tra le due guerre. A cura dell’ Archivio
Cesare Andreoni. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Palazzo Reale, 29 gennaio – 28 marzo 1993.
Bergamo: Bolis, 1993.
622 Giorgio Di Genova

Appella, Giuseppe, ed.: Verso le avanguardie: Gli anni del futurismo in Puglia 1900–1944. Exhibition
catalogue. Bari: Castello Svevo, 20 giugno – 30 agosto 1998; Taranto: Castello Aragonese, 5
settembre – 1 novembre 1998. Bari: Adda, 1998.
Bagatti, Fabrizio, Gloria Manghetti, and Silvia Porto, eds.: Futurismo a Firenze, 1910–1920.
Exhibition catalogue. Firenze: Palazzo Medici Riccardi, 18 febbraio – 8 aprile 1984. Firenze:
Sansoni, 1984.
Baldacci, Paolo: Thayaht: Sculture, pitture, disegni dal 1913 al 1940 provenienti dall’eredità
Michahelles. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Galleria Philippe Daverio, 4 – 20 febbraio 1976.
Balla, Elica: Con Balla. Vols. 1–3. Milano: Multhipla, 1984–86.
Ballo, Guido: Boccioni. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1964.
Ballo, Guido: Dottori: Aeropittore futurista. A cura di Tancredi Loreti. Roma: Editalia, 1970.
Ballo, Guido, et al., eds.: Boccioni a Milano. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Palazzo Reale, dicembre
1982 – marzo 1983. Milano: Mazzotta, 1983.
Barillari, Diana, et al., eds.: Futuristi in Polesine. Exhibition catalogue. Rovigo: Palazzo Roncale,
6 novembre – 8 dicembre 1992. Padova: Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e
Rovigo, 1992.
Bartolini, Sigfrido: Achille Lega, maestro del Novecento. Firenze: Banca Mercantile Italiana, 1987.
Belli, Gabriella, ed.: La Casa del Mago: Le Arti applicate nell’opera di Fortunato Depero.
Exhibition catalogue. Rovereto: Archivio del '900, 12 dicembre 1992 – 30 maggio 1993.
Milano: Charta, 1992.
Bellonzi, Fortunato: Sironi. Milano: Electa, 1985.
Benedetto, Enzo: Futurismo cento x 100. Roma: Arte Viva, 1975.
Benedetto, Enzo: Sodalizio con Marinetti. Roma: Arte Viva, [1989].
Benzi, Fabio, ed.: Mario Sironi. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, 9
dicembre 1993 – 27 febbraio 1994. Milano, Electa, 1993.
Bigongiari, Piero, ed.: L’ opera completa di Carrà, dal futurismo alla metafisica e al realismo mitico,
1910–1930. Milano: Rizzoli, 1970.
Bossaglia, Rossana, and Giorgio Di Genova, eds.: Antonio Fiore: Un futurista d’oggi. Bologna: Bora, 1999.
Calvesi, Maurizio, ed.: Mostra antologica di Tullio Crali. Exhibition catalogue. Trieste: Sala Comunale
d’Arte, 10 luglio – 15 agosto 1976. Trieste: La Editoriale Libraria, 1976.
Cannistraro, Philip V., and Brian R. Sullivan: Il Duce’s Other Woman. New York: Morrow, 1993.
Cappelli, Vittorio, and Luciano Caruso, eds.: Calabria futurista: Documenti, immagini, opere. Soveria
Mannelli: Rubettino, 1997.
Caramel, Luciano, and Alberto Longatti: Antonio Sant’Elia: L’ opera completa. Milano: Mondadori /
Ideacomo, 1987.
Caramel, Luciano, ed.: Regina. Exhibition catalogue. Sartirana Lomellina: Castello, primavera –
estate 1991. Milano: Electa, 1991.
Carluccio, Luigi: Primo Conti. Torino: Pozzo, 1967.
Carrà, Carlo, and Ardengo Soffici: Lettere 1913/1929. A cura di Vittorio Fagone e Massimo Carrà.
Milano: Feltrinelli, 1983.
Carrà, Massimo: Carrà: Tutta l’ opera pittorica. Vol. 1. (1900–1930). Milano: Edizioni dell’ Annunciata;
Edizioni della Conchiglia, 1967.
Cavallo, Luigi, ed.: Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964): Mostra antologica. Exhibition catalogue. Macerata:
Pinacoteca Comunale, aprile–maggio 1988.
Cervellati, Alessandro: Bologna futurista. Bologna: Istituto Tecnico Industriale Aldini-Valeriani, 1973.
Coen, Ester, ed.: Boccioni: A Retrospective. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Metropolitan Museum of
Art, 15 September 1988 – 8 January 1989. New York: Abrams, 1988.
Conti, Primo: Fanfara del costruttore 1917–1919. Milano: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1974.
Conti, Primo: Imbottigliature. Firenze: Edizioni de “L’ Italia futurista”, 1917. Reprint Roma: Carucci, 1975.
 Italy 623

Cortenova, Giorgio, and Cesare Biasini Selvaggi, eds.: Futurismi a Verona: Il gruppo futurista
veronese “U. Boccioni”. Exhibition catalogue. Verona: Officina d’Arte, 22 novembre 2002 – 30
marzo 2003. Milano: Skira, 2002.
Crali, Tullio: Parole nello spazio: Crali futurista. Milano: Edizioni Futuriste, 1983.
[Crali, Tullio]: Sassintesi futuriste di Crali: Note alla 1a mostra di Milano di Crali. Milano: Galleria
Minima, 1961.
Crali, [Tullio]: Sassintesi: Poesia plastica futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Galleria d’Arte “Il
Dialogo”, marzo – aprile 1980.
Crispolti, Enrico: Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo. Trapani: Celebes, 1969.
Crispolti, Enrico: Vittorio Corona attraverso il futurismo. Palermo: Celebes, 1978.
Crispolti, Enrico: Vittorio Corona: Attraverso il futurismo. Catalogo ragionato dei dipinti e delle opere
su carta, 1919–1966. Roma: De Luca, 2014.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Aeropittura futurista aeropittori. Exhibition catalogue. Modena: Galleria Fonte
d’Abisso, maggio – giugno 1985. Modena: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1985.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Casa Balla e il futurismo a Roma. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Villa Medici, 28
settembre – 3 dicembre 1989. Roma: Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato, 1989.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Cataloghi di esposizioni. Vol. 1. Nuovi Archivi del Futurismo. Roma: De Luca;
Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 2010.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Di Cocco: Nomade, solitario, contemplativo, dal futurismo alle strutture di
puro colore. Exhibition catalogue. Macerata: Pinacoteca e Musei Comunali, novembre 1983.
Macerata: Coopedit, 1983.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Dottori: Aeropittore futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Modena: Galleria Fonte
d’Abisso, 1 ottobre – 23 dicembre 1983.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Futurismo e Meridione. Exhibition catalogue. Napoli: Palazzo Reale, 18 luglio –
31 ottobre 1996. Napoli: Electa, 1996.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Il futurismo in Romagna. Exhibition catalogue. Rimini: Sala delle Colonne, 18
luglio – 28 settembre 1986. Rimini: Maggioli, 1986.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: L’ aeropittore futurista Tato e le vere origini del manifesto dell’aeropittura.
Roma: Rivista Militare, 1990.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: M. G. Dal Monte. Exhibition catalogue. Rimini: Chiesa di Santa Maria ad Nives,
18 luglio – 28 settembre 1986. Rimini: Maggioli, 1986.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Mino Delle Site aeropittore futurista: Anni Trenta. Exhibition catalogue.
Modena: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 30 ottobre – 22 dicembre 1984.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Mino delle Site: Aeropittura e oltre, dal 1930. Exhibition catalogue. Lecce:
Museo Provinciale Sigismondo Castromediano, 15 ottobre – 3 dicembre 1989. Milano: Electa,
1989.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Monachesi futurista: Anni Trenta. Exhibition catalogue. Macerata: Pinacoteca,
luglio 1983. Macerata: Coopedit, 1983.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Pannaggi e l’ arte meccanica futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Macerata: Palazzo
Ricci, 22 luglio – 15 ottobre 1995. Milano: Mazzotta, 1995.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Prampolini dal futurismo all’Informale. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Palazzo
delle Esposizioni, 25 marzo – 25 maggio 1992. Roma: Carte Segrete, 1992.
Crispolti, Enrico, and Albino Galvano, eds.: Aspetti del Secondo futurismo torinese. Exhibition
catalogue. Torino, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, 27 marzo – 30 aprile 1962. Torino:
Pozzo-Salvati-Gros Monti, 1962.
Crispolti, Enrico, and Tonino Sicoli, eds.: Marasco: Anni Dieci – Settanta. Dal futurismo al
concretismo. Exhibition catalogue. Rende: Museo Civico, 30 marzo – 30 aprile 1995. Milano:
Mazzotta, 1995.
Dalla Chiesa, Giovanna: Il Museo Primo Conti. Milano: Electa, 1987.
624 Giorgio Di Genova

D’Ambrosio, Matteo: Emilio Buccafusca e il futurismo a Napoli negli anni Trenta. Napoli: Liguori, 1991.
D’Ambrosio, Matteo: I circumvisionisti: Un’avanguardia napoletana negli anni del fascismo. Napoli:
CUEN, 1996.
D’Ambrosio, Matteo: Marinetti e il futurismo a Napoli. Roma: De Luca, 1996.
De Benedetti, Carlo: Il futurismo in Liguria. Savona: Sabatelli, 1976.
De Felice, Renzo, ed.: Futurismo, cultura e politica. Torino: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1986.
De Marchis, Giorgio: Balla. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, 23
dicembre 1971 – 27 febbraio 1972. Roma: De Luca, 1971.
Della Valle, Anna, ed.: Nuove Tendenze: Milano e l’ altro futurismo. Exhibition catalogue. Milano:
Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea di Milano, 31 gennaio – 31 marzo
1980. Milano: Electa, 1980.
De Polo, Paolo, ed.: Dinamismo sportivo. Introduzione di Paolo Mosca. Exhibition catalogue. 20
marzo – 2 maggio 1981. Milano: Galleria “Il Dialogo”, 1981.
Di Genova, Giorgio, ed.: Antonio Fiore: Ufagrà. “1909–2009: Il futurismo ha cento anni”. Exhibition
catalogue. Roma: Galleria Vittoria, 7 – 24 febbraio 2009. Roma: Eurosia, 2009.
Di Genova, Giorgio, ed.: Giannetto Malmerendi (1893–1968): Pitture, disegni, xilografie, ceramiche
e arte applicata. Exhibition catalogue. Cesena: Galleria Comunale d’Arte, Pinacoteca Comunale,
27 novembre 1993 – 2 gennaio 1994. Cesena: Wafra, 1993.
Di Genova, Giorgio, ed.: Pippo Oriani: Prima mostra antologica: Opere dal 1928 al 1963.
Presentazione di Filiberto Menna. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Galleria La Medusa, marzo 1964.
Roma: Studio d’Arte La Medusa, 1964.
Di Stefano, Eva, ed.: Vittorio Corona. Exhibition catalogue. Gibellina: Museo Civico, maggio – giugno
1985. Palermo: Sellerio, 1985.
Dudreville, Leonardo: Il romanzo di una vita. Milano: Charta, 1994.
[Dudreville, Leonardo] Leonardo Dudreville. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Galleria Dedalo, aprile
1936. Milano: Rizzoli, 1936.
Duranti, Massimo, ed.: Dottori e l’ aeropittura: Aeropittori e aeroscultori futuristi. Prefazione di
Giorgio Di Genova. Exhibition catalogue. Seravezza: Palazzo Mediceo, 16 giugno – 26 agosto
1996. Siena: Maschietto & Musolino, 1996.
Duranti, Massimo, ed.: Gerardo Dottori: Catalogo generale ragionato. Vol. 1–2. Perugia: Fabbri, 2006.
Duranti, Massimo, ed.: Gerardo Dottori: Opere 1898–1977. Exhibition catalogue. Perugia: Rocca
Paolina-CERP, 7 dicembre 1997 – 7 febbraio 1998. Perugia: Fabbri, 1997.
Duranti, Massimo, ed.: Osvaldo Peruzzi: L’ ultimo futurista. Con una testimonianza di Danilo Sensi.
Milano: Fabbri, 2005.
Esposizione di pittura futurista di “Lacerba”. Exhibition catalogue. Firenze: Galleria Gonnelli,
novembre 1913 – gennaio 1914. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1913.
Evangelisti, Silvia, ed.: Fillia e l’ avanguardia futurista negli anni del fascismo. Exhibition catalogue.
Milano: Galleria Philippe Daverio, giugno 1986. Milano: Mondadori; Edizioni Philippe Daverio,
1986.
Fillia [pseud. of Luigi Colombo]: Diulgheroff pittore futurista. Torino: Edizione d’Arte “La Città
Futurista”, 1929.
Fillia [pseud. of Luigi Colombo], ed.: Arte fascista. Torino: Sindacati Artistici, [1928].
Fonti, Daniela, ed.: Gino Severini: Catalogo ragionato. Milano: Mondadori; Edizioni Philippe Daverio, 1988.
Galvano, Albino, ed.: Mino Rosso. Exhibition catalogue. Torino: Galleria Narciso, 16 ottobre – 16
novembre 1976.
Genova, Irina, ed.: Nikolai Diulgerov / Nikolay Diulgheroff / Nikolay Diulgheroff. Testi di Giorgio Di
Genova e Irina Genova. Exhibition catalogue. Roma: Accademia Santa Cecilia, 7 novembre – 7
dicembre 2008; Torino: Castello del Valentino, 27 maggio 2009 – 12 giugno 2009. Sofiia:
Ministerstvo na kulturata Ministerstvo na vănshnite raboti, 2008.
 Italy 625

Gentile, Emilio: La nostra sfida alle stelle: Futuristi in politica. Bari: Laterza, 2009.
Gnisci, Roberto, ed.: Francesco Cangiullo, 3 mondi: Belle Epoque, futurismo, il dopo. Exhibition
catalogue. Roma: Galleria Chimera, 8 novembre – 10 dicembre 1991; 1 febbraio – 3 aprile 1992.
Greene, Vivien, ed.: Italian Futurism 1909–1914: Reconstructing the Universe. Exhibition catalogue.
New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim, 21 February – 1 September 2014.
Hájek, Miroslava, and Luca Zaffarano, eds.: Bruno Munari: My Futurist Past. Exhibition catalogue.
London: Estorick Collection, 19 September – 23 December 2012.
Lista, Giovanni: Balla. Modena: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1982.
Lista, Giovanni: Dal futurismo all’immaginismo: Vinicio Paladini. Salerno: Il Cavaliere Azzurro, 1988.
Lista, Giovanni, ed.: Enrico Prampolini. Carteggio futurista. Roma: Carte Segrete, 1992.
Longhi, Roberto: Scultura futurista: Boccioni. Firenze: Libreria della Voce, 1914.
Maffina, Gianfranco, ed.: Luigi Russolo e l’ arte dei rumori. Torino: Martano, 1978.
Manghetti, Gloria, ed.: Firenze futurista 1909–1920: Atti del Convegno di studi. Firenze: Palazzo dei
Medici, 15 – 16 maggio 2009. Firenze: Polistampa, 2011.
Mantura, Bruno, ed.: Dottori. Exhibition catalogue. Spoleto: Palazzo Ancaiani, 27 giugno – 15 luglio
1979. Roma: De Luca, 1979.
Mantura, Bruno, ed.: Volo e pittura: Dipinti inediti poco e mal noti raffiguranti il volo. Roma: De Luca,
1994.
Mantura, Bruno, et al., eds.: Aeropittura: Mostra dell’aria e della sua conquista. Exhibition catalogue.
Napoli: Castel Sant’Elmo, 16 dicembre 1989 – 28 gennaio 1990. Roma: De Luca, 1989.
Maraini, Antonio, and F. T. Marinetti: Ernesto Thayaht: Scultore, pittore, orafo. Firenze: Giannini,
1932.
Marchiori, Giuseppe: Sculture in evelpiuma di Sante Monachesi. Campobasso: Nocera, 1967.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: A. G. Ambrosi, aeropittore futurista nelle opere della Raccolta Caproni.
Verona: Arti Grafiche S.A. Albarelli Marchesetti, [1941].
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Fillìa, pittore futurista. Torino: A.R.S., [1931].
Massari, Stefania, ed.: Carlo Erba: Una memoria nel futurismo 1884–1917. Exhibition catalogue.
Roma: Istituto Nazionale per la Stampa Calcografica, 10 aprile – 10 maggio 1981. Roma: De
Luca, 1981.
Maurizi, Elverio, ed.: Futuristi nelle Marche. Exhibition catalogue. Ancona: Chiesa del Gesù;
Macerata, Chiesa di San Paolo e Pinacoteca Comunale, 10 luglio – 31 ottobre 1982. Macerata:
Coopedit, 1982.
Maurizi, Elverio, ed.: Umberto Peschi: Scultura come poesia. Exhibition catalogue. Macerata: Chiesa
di San Paolo, marzo – aprile 1979. Macerata: Tipolito Sangiuseppe, 1979.
Meneguzzo, Marco, ed.: Bruno Munari: Opere 1930–1986. Exhibition catalogue. Milano: Palazzo
Reale, 11 dicembre 1986 – 1 marzo 1987. Milano: Electa, 1986.
Menna, Filiberto: Prampolini. Roma: De Luca, 1967.
Mosetti, Giovanna: Monachesi: Futur-agrà. Pollenza di Macerata: Edizioni del Tagliamento, 1972.
Mostra d’arte futurista: Arte sacra futurista, aeropittura, pittura, scultura. Exhibition catalogue.
Firenze: Palazzo Ferroni, 16 – 31 dicembre 1933. Reprint: Livorno: Belforte, 1984.
Munari, Bruno: Artista e designer. Bari: Laterza, 1976.
[Munari, Bruno] Mostra di Munari inventore, artista, scrittore, designer, architetto, grafico, gioca con
i bambini. Testi di Luciano Caramel, Giovanni Anzani e Marco Meneguzzo. Cantù: Palazzo delle
Esposizioni, 1995. Mantova: Corraini, 1995.
Nalini, Anna Maria, et al., eds.: Futurismo in Emilia Romagna. Modena: Artioli, 1990.
Nazzaro, Gian Battista: Futurismo e politica. Napoli: JN, 1987.
[Oriani, Pippo] Un esponente del secondo futurismo torinese: Pippo Oriani (1909–1972). Con un
testo di Albino Galvano. Exhibition catalogue. Torino: Rosaria Arte Gallery, 13 novembre – 6
dicembre 1975.
626 Giorgio Di Genova

Pacini, Piero: Severini. Firenze: Sadea/Sansoni, 1966.

Palazzeschi, Aldo: L’ opera completa di Boccioni. Milano: Rizzoli, 1969.
Parrilla, Salvatore: Monachesi. Con una testimonianza di Aldo Palazzeschi. Roma: Edizioni Canova,
1971.
Parronchi, Alessandro: Soffici. Roma: Editalia, 1976.
Passamani, Bruno: Depero. Rovereto: Comune di Rovereto, 1981.
Passamani, Bruno: Di Bosso futurista. Milano: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro, 1976.
Passamani, Bruno, and Umberto Carpi, eds.: Frontiere d’avanguardia: Gli anni del futurismo nella
Venezia Giulia. Exhibition catalogue. Gorizia: Musei Provinciali, 16 febbraio – 30 aprile 1985.
Passoni, Franco, Massimo Duranti, and Antonio Carlo Ponti, eds.: Alessandro Bruschetti: Dal
futurismo alla pittura purilumetrica. San Mariano (PG): Umbria, 1981.
Penelope, Mario, ed.: Sironi: Opere 1902–1960. Exhibition catalogue. Sassari: Padiglione
dell’ Artigianato Sardo, 26 ottobre – 24 novembre 1985. Roma: De Luca; Milano: Mondadori,
1985.
[Peruzzi, Osvaldo] O. Peruzzi. Testo di Giorgio Di Genova. Exhibition catalogue. Ferrara: Palazzo dei
Diamanti, Sala d’Arte Benvenuto Tisi, 18 gennaio – 1 marzo 1987. Ferrara: Tosi, 1987.
Pfister, Federico: Enrico Prampolini. Milano: Hoepli, 1940.
Pignatti Morano, Monica, and Nadia Di Santo, eds.: Enzo Benedetto: Mostra antologica. Exhibition
catalogue. Roma: Complesso Monumentale del San Michele, 4 – 24 febbraio 1991. Roma:
Museo Laboratorio di Arte Contemporanea, La Sapienza; Gaeta Grafiche, 1991.
Pinottini, Marzio: Diulgheroff futurista: Collages e polimaterici 1927/1977. Milano: All’Insegna del
Pesce d’Oro, 1977.
Pinottini, Marzio: Farfa dal futurismo alla Patafisica. Exhibition catalogue. Torino: Galleria Narciso,
12 marzo – 16 aprile 1988.
Pinottini, Marzio: Peruzzi futurista: Oli e collages 1932–1981. Milano: All’Insegna del Pesce d’Oro,
1981.
Pinottini, Marzio, ed.: Ugo Pozzo 1900–1981: Pittore futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Torino: Galleria
Piemonte Artistico e Culturale, 17 novembre – 2 dicembre 1984. Torino: La Nuova Grafica, 1984.
Prampolini, Enrico: Arte polimaterica: verso un’arte collettiva? Roma: Edizioni del Secolo, 1944.
Prima esposizione pittura futurista. Roma: Ridotto del Teatro Costanzi, 11 febbraio – marzo 1913.
Roma: Stab. Tip. “Giosué Carducci”, 1913.
Ragghianti, Carlo Ludovico: Primo Conti. Taccuini e serie di disegni tra il 1912 e il 1921. Firenze:
Giunti Martello, 1978.
Rebeschini, Claudio: Crali futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Rovereto: Museo di Arte Moderna e
Contemporanea, 16 dicembre 1994 – 26 marzo 1995. Milano: Electa, 1994.
Ruta, Anna Maria: Il futurismo in Sicilia. Marina di Patti: Pungitopo, 1991.
Ruta, Anna Maria, and Salvatore Ventura, eds.: Futuristi e aeropittori a Catania. Exhibition catalogue.
Catania: Centro Fieristico, 29 marzo – 1 maggio 1996. Catania: Publinews, 1996.
Saccoccio, Antonio, and Roberto Guerra, eds.: Marinetti 70: Sintesi della critica futurista. Roma:
Armando, 2014.
Saladin, Paolo Alcide: Fillìa, pittore futurista. Torino: Edizioni d’Arte “La Città Futurista”, 1929.
Salaris, Claudia: Storia del futurismo: Libri giornali manifesti. Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1992.
Salaris, Claudia, ed.: Antonio Sant’Elia – Carlo Erba tra futurismo e Nuove Tendenze. Exhibition
catalogue. Roma: Galleria Il Campo, 15 maggio – 30 giugno 1990. Roma: Edizioni Il Campo,
1990.
Santini, Pier Carlo: Rosai. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1977.
Schiavo, Alberto, ed.: Futurismo e fascismo. Roma: Volpe, 1981.
Scudiero, Maurizio: Depero: Casa d’arte futurista. Firenze: Cantini, s.d. [1988].
Scudiero, Maurizio: Fortunato Depero: Opere. Gardolo di Trento: Luigi Reverdito, 1987.
 Italy 627

Scudiero, Maurizio, ed.: Di Bosso futurista. Modena: Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, 1988.
Scudiero, Maurizio, and Marzio Pinottini, eds.: Verossì: Aeropittore futurista. Exhibition catalogue.
Torino: Galleria d’Arte Narciso, 29 febbraio – 31 marzo 1992. Torino: Galleria d’Arte Narciso,
1992.
Scudiero, Maurizio, and Claudio Rebeschini, eds.: Futurismo veneto. Exhibition catalogue. Padova:
Palazzo del Monte, 24 novembre – 31 dicembre 1990. Padova: Cassa di Risparmio di Padova e
Rovigo, 1990.
Severini, Gino: Dal cubismo al classicismo e altri saggi sulla divina proporzione e sul numero d’oro.
Firenze: Marchi Bertolli, 1972.
Severini, Gino: La vita di un pittore. Milano: Edizioni di Comunità, 1965 (new edn 1983). English
edition The Life of a Painter: The Autobiography of Gino Severini. Princeton/NJ: Princeton
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Sicoli, Tonino, ed.: Antonio Marasco futurista. Special issue of La provincia di Catanzaro 8:1
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Tato [pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni]: TATO racconTATO da TATO: 20 anni di futurismo. Con scritti
poetici di F. T. Marinetti. Milano: Oberdan Zucchi, 1941.
Taylor, Joshua C., ed.: Futurism. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 31 May
– 5 September 1961; Detroit/MI: Institute of Arts, 18 October – 19 December 1961; Los Angeles/
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Toni, Anna Caterina: Futurismo nelle Marche. Roma: De Luca, 1982.
Toni, Anna Caterina: L’ attività artistica di Ivo Pannaggi nel periodo giovanile (1921–1926).
Pollenza-Macerata: La Nuova Foglio Editrice, 1976.
Toni, Anna Caterina, ed.: I luoghi del futurismo, 1909–1944: Atti del Convegno nazionale di studio,
Macerata 30 ottobre 1982. Roma: Multigrafica, 1986.
Troisi, Sergio, ed.: Pippo Rizzo. Exhibition catalogue. Palermo: Villa Zito, 21 marzo – 21 aprile 1989.
Palermo: Sellerio, 1989.
Vannucci, Marcello: Firenze futurista. Firenze: Bonechi, 1976.
Ventura, Salvatore, ed.: Tato: Sessanta opere del Maestro dell’ Aeropittura. Con la consulenza
e la collaborazione di Maria Fede Caproni. Roma: Galleria Russo, 5 – 28 febbraio 2015. Roma:
Palombi, 2015.
Verdone, Mario, ed.: Ginna: Arnaldo Ginna tra astrazione e futurismo. Ravenna: Essegi, 1985.
Verdone, Mario, et al.: La Casa d’Arte Bragaglia 1918–1930. Roma: Bulzoni, 1992.
Pierantonio Zanotti
38 Japan
Numerous histories of Futurism in Japan have been written, both within larger recon-
structions of the history of the so-called ‘historical avant-gardes’ in the country and
as separate surveys. The Japanese bibliography on the subject is extensive, as are the
results of research conducted on primary sources. A number of presentations are also
available in European languages (see the references at the end of this entry). What
follows is indebted to such sources (and in particular to the research undertaken by
Toshiharu Omuka),1 which are frequently rich in detail on single episodes or authors.
The reader is therefore invited to refer to them for further information.
Another introductory remark is appropriate: many of these histories, as will be
mine, are primarily focussed on the vicissitudes of the avant-garde movements active
in Tokyo, the capital. From a historical perspective, this is partially justified by the
centralism of the Japanese cultural world. In a manner that has frequently been seen
as running in parallel to the rôle played by Paris in the French context, some of the
most influential and prestigious cultural institutions of the country (museums, art
schools, publishing companies, newspapers and magazines, universities, art galleries,
etc.) are concentrated in Tokyo. Nonetheless, it should be remembered that one of the
most recent trends in scholarship on Japanese avant-gardes is concerned with the art
scenes of other cultural centres, such as Osaka, Kobe and Kyoto, as well as with minor
centres and the cultural scenes of the territories which, until the Second World War,
were subject to Japanese colonial rule. In this respect, one of the most promising per-
spectives for research is the study of avant-garde networks within East Asian countries.

Early reports on Futurism (1909)

Ōgai Mori (1862–1922), one of the most prominent figures in the Japanese cultural
world, is generally credited with having initiated the reception of Futurism in Japan.
His column “Mukudori tsūshin” (Correspondence from the Grey Starling) in the
May 1909 issue of the literary monthly Subaru (Pleiades) (reprinted in Omuka and
Hidaka: Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, shinbun zasshi hen. Vol. 1, 3–8) included
a translation of the eleven points of the Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo
(Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, 1909). Research conducted on Ōgai’s trans-
lation (e. g., Nishino: “Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e il Giappone futurista”, 326)

1 Japanese practice is to present surnames before given names, but this is inverted here in order to
follow the norm in the rest of the handbook.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-038
 Japan 629

has convincingly demonstrated that his text was based on German sources; spe-
cifically, there are striking textual correspondences between his translation and an
article communicating the eleven points of the foundational manifesto, reportedly
published in the Vossische Zeitung and reproduced by Marinetti in his magazine
Poesia (Marinetti: “Le Futurisme et la presse internationale”, 33–34). Among the
few original additions by Ōgai was a final statement that jokingly compared the
boldness of the Italian Futurists with the tame attitude of contemporary Japanese
intellectuals: “Subaru contributors are rather timid. Ha! Ha! Ha!” (trans. by Nishino:
“Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e il Giappone futurista”, 326). Modern scholars have
generally pointed out that, despite its rapid appearance, Ōgai’s translation had a
small, if not negligible, influence on the Japanese cultural world. Indeed, a vacuum
of nearly three years followed before the Japanese discourse on Futurism resumed
in an appreciable manner.
In the following years, Ōgai continued to cursorily report on the vicissitudes of
European Futurism in “Mukudori tsūshin” (until 1913) and in a similar column called
“Mizu no anata yori” (From Across the Waters) in the magazine Warera (We, 1914).

1912: The reception of Futurism in the

Post-Impressionist movement
In 1912, the Futurist exhibitions in Paris and London increased the international vis-
ibility of the Italian movement. In Japan, this offered the occasion for a fresh start
and a ‘second introduction’ of Futurism to the artistic community and wider public.
Indeed, many authoritative Japanese scholars judged it more appropriate to celebrate
the hundredth anniversary of Futurism in Japan in 2012 instead of 2009 (Omuka:
100th Anniversary of Futurism in Japan). The catalogues of the Bernheim-Jeune and
Sackville exhibitions circulated in the Japanese artistic and intellectual milieus: the
photographs and writings they contained – the latter either translated or paraphrased
in the Japanese media – represented some of the most frequently cited material in the
discussion of Futurism throughout the 1910s.
During 1912, a number of articles covering the exhibitions were published both
in art magazines and national newspapers (see Ōtani: “Itaria miraiha no shōkai to
Nihon kindai yōga”). Among them, “Shōraiha no kaiga tenrankai” (The Exhibition
of Futurist Painting), featured in Bunshō sekai (The World of Texts) in June 1912 and
was the most structured and original. Its author, the literary critic Tenkei Hasegawa
(1876–1940), had visited the London exhibition, and his article also contained the
second Japanese translation (after Ōgai’s) of the eleven points of the Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism.
The young painters involved in the Japanese transition from Impressionism to
Post-Impressionism began to develop an interest in Futurism as a topic within the
630 Pierantonio Zanotti

local debate on ‘Western-style painting’ (yōga). In this context, the most iconic
and best-studied case is that of the Fusain group (Fyūzankai, Hyūzankai or Société
du Fusain, 1912–1913), a group of young Post-Impressionist artists whose members
included Shōhachi Kimura (1893–1958; in many respects the group’s most repre-
sentative art critic), Yori Saitō (1885–1959), Ryūsei Kishida (1891–1929) and Kōtarō
Takamura (1883–1956). In October 1912, they edited a special issue of Gendai no yōga
(Contemporary Western-style Painting) entirely devoted to Futurism. It featured ten
reproductions of Futurist paintings, a translation of Camille Mauclair’s “Le Futurisme
et la jeune Italie” (Futurism and Young Italy, 1911) and contributions by Kimura, Saitō
and Kishida, all rather unsympathetic towards Futurism. The issue was largely based
on material which Kimura and the young Fusain member Yōjirō Uryū (dates unkown)
had obtained by writing to the Bernheim-Jeune and to Marinetti himself some months
before. In his “Postscript” (“Kotowarigaki”) at the end of the issue, Kimura presented
Marinetti’s response and provided information on the materials sent by Marinetti,
revealing that they included articles from The Sketch, Illustrated London News and
Je sais tout.
Kimura collected and enlarged his contributions on Futurism (among them a
complete translation of the Sackville catalogue) in two books: Geijutsu no kakumei
(Revolution in Art, 1914) and Miraiha oyobi rittaiha no geijutsu (The Art of Futurism
and Cubism, 1915). Notwithstanding Kimura’s unfavourable attitude, the chapters
devoted to Futurism in these volumes represented some of the most complete reposi-
tories of information on the Italian movement available in Japan in the 1910s.

Futurism in the Japanese press, 1912–1919

In addition to the phonetic renderings of the words ‘Futurism’, ‘futurisme’ or ‘futur-
ismo’ (e. g., fyūchurizumu), two semantic equivalents rapidly took root in Japan:
miraiha and miraishugi. In both cases, mirai means ‘future’, while -ha and -shugi
are suffixes indicating ‘school/current’ and ‘-ism’ respectively. The two terms were
frequently used interchangeably (for instance, by Ōgai himself in his writings). In
Japanese journalistic discourse, comparably to what can be observed in other coun-
tries during these years, the words miraiha and miraishugi quickly began to show
a tendency to be used in vague or confusing ways. A narrow and ‘technical’ usage
that designated works, ideas or exponents related to the movement founded by
Marinetti was soon paralleled by a generic usage that referred to all ‘new’ or ‘modern’
art (and was applied, for instance, to Wassily Kandinsky, Arnold Schönberg, Walter
Hasenclever or Leo Ornstein), as well as to attitudes and works perceived by any given
writer as outrageously new, provocative or even bizarre.
This process was probably amplified by the mediation of the English-language
press, on which a significant part of Japanese cultural journalism relied. In this
 Japan 631

respect, when one examines the articles collected in the first two volumes of the doc-
umentary series edited by Omuka and Shōji Hidaka, Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho,
shinbun zasshi hen (Collection of Works on the New Foreign Art: Newspapers and
Magazines Series, 2005), covering the years 1909–1915 and 1916–1921 respectively, it
is evident that much of the information on Futurism was conveyed by paraphrasing
or translating (either credited or uncredited) material previously published in British
and US newspapers and magazines (Kimura also relied on English-language material
and had to resort to the help of a friend who studied French in order to accomplish his
translation of Mauclair’s “Le Futurisme et la jeune Italie”). For example, “Shigunōru
Marinetti: Miraiha no geijutsukan” (Signor Marinetti: The Art View of Futurism), by
Shigetsune Ashiya (1886–1946), one of the first articles to display excerpts from Zang
Tumb Tuuum (1914) in the original language, was published in the July 1914 issue
of Sōsaku (Creation) and resembled “The Intoxication of Life” (The Times [London],
5 May 1914) rather closely. This article was also one of the first to present the con-
tents of the manifestos Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-
in-Freedom (1913) and Geometrical and Mechanical Splendour and Sensitivity towards
Numbers (1914) in Japan.
The translation of Futurist manifestos, which was relatively assiduous, albeit
unsystematic, often relied on English versions, for example those contained in the
catalogue of the 1912 exhibition in the Sackville Gallery (Initial Manifesto of Futurism,
Manifesto of the Futurist Painters and The Exhibitors to the Public). After Kimura’s
books, Kichiji Watanabe (1894–1930) provided a complete translation of this cata-
logue in the June 1916 issue of Teikoku bungaku (Imperial Literature).
Toshirō Takase translated Roger Le Brun’s booklet F. T. Marinetti et le Futurisme
(1911) in the January 1913 issue of a minor cultural magazine from Tokyo, Mozaiku
(Mosaic). Incidentally, the text included the first Japanese translation of a number
of lines from Marinetti’s poem A mon pégase (Ode to a Racing Car, 1905–08) and of
passages from Mafarka il futurista = Mafarka le futuriste (Mafarka the Futurist, 1909/
10). The hero of Marinetti’s “African Novel” was also discussed as an example of the
Nietzschean ‘superman’ by Rinsen Nakazawa (1878–1920) in the essay “Shin dōtoku
ron” (On New Ethics) in Waseda bungaku (Waseda Literature, November 1913). Yūzō
Yamamoto (1887–1974) presented a translation of the Futurist manifesto The Variety
Theatre (1913) in Shinshichō (New Currents of Thought, July 1914), probably relying on
the English version by Dorothy Nevile Lees in the journal The Mask.
“Inshōha tai miraiha” (Impressionism vs. Futurism), printed in the influential art
magazine Bijutsu shinpō (Art News) in April 1915, stands out for many reasons. It is a
translation of “Perché non siamo impressionisti” (Why We Are Not Impressionists),
the sixth chapter of Umberto Boccioni’s Pittura scultura futuriste: Dinamismo plastico
(Futurist Painting and Sculpture: Dynamism in Space, 1914). Ikuma Arishima (1882–
1974), a respected Post-Impressionist painter and critic who, about twenty years later,
in September 1936, interacted with Marinetti at the International Congress of the PEN
Clubs in Buenos Aires, managed to translate it directly from the Italian (a feat quite
632 Pierantonio Zanotti

uncommon at that time), and it had a certain impact on younger painters such as Tai
Kanbara (1898–1997) and Seiji Tōgō (1897–1978).
The first reproductions of Futurist works (often mere black-and-white figures or
plates) reached Japan via exhibition catalogues, books and magazines imported from
Europe. Popular books in the Post-Impressionist coteries, such as Arthur J. Eddy’s
Cubists and Post-Impressionism (1914), Gustave Coquiot’s Cubistes, Futuristes,
Passéistes (1914) and W.H. Wright’s Modern Painting (1915), were frequently used
as sources of reproductions and other critical material. The first Futurist work to be
exhibited in Japan is reported (see Ōtani: “Itaria miraiha no shōkai to Nihon kindai
yōga”, 120) to have been a reproduction (perhaps a woodblock print) of an unspec-
ified part of Boccioni’s triptych Stati d’animo (States of Mind, 1911), which went on
display at the exhibition Der Sturm mokuhanga tenrankai (Der Sturm: Exhibition of
Woodblock Prints; Tokyo, 14–28 March 1914).
Judging from the pieces collected in Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, shinbun
zasshi hen, or surveyed by Omuka (“Futurism in Japan”), Thomas Hackner (Dada und
Futurismus in Japan, 30–50) and Yoshiaki Nishino (“Taishō zenki bungei shoshi no
miraiha”), the presentation of Futurism in the Japanese press was relatively uninter-
rupted throughout the 1910s. The discussion of pictorial aspects was prominent, even
if frequently accompanied by unsympathetic or indifferent reactions. Less regularly,
the press featured articles on Futurist music, theatre, literature, fashion, architec-
ture and even ‘life-art’, as in “Seikatsu taido toshite no miraishugi” (Futurism as an
Attitude Towards Life), published with a sympathetic tone by Katsunosuke Nakada
(1886–1945) in Seikatsu to geijutsu (Life and Art) in April 1914, and “Men’s Dress”, a
version of Giacomo Balla’s Il vestito antineutrale (The Anti-neutral Suit, 1914), pub-
lished in the same magazine in August 1914. Caricatures or parodies of Futurist paint-
ing, often taken from the British press, can be found as well (see Zanotti: “A Popular
Japanese Cartoonist”).
The years 1914–1915 were characterized by remarkable press coverage of Futurism.
Among other things, a translation of Massimo Dell’Isola’s article “Poche parole intorno
al futurismo” (A Few Words about Futurism; originally printed in the February 1913
issue of Rivista d’Italia) by Kanae Sakuma (1888–1970) appeared in Teikoku bungaku
(January 1914). The impressions in Bijutsu shinpō (August 1914) of the visit to the 1912
Bernheim-Jeune exhibition by the painter Mango Kobayashi (1870–1947) are often
quoted by scholars for the dismissive tones with which he commented on the works on
display. “Miraiha kikaku no shinkenchiku” (The New Architecture of Futurist Plans;
Bunshō sekai, May 1915) by the critic Shiran Wakatsuki (1879–1962) was probably based
on “The Amusing Audacities of Futuristic Architecture” (Current Opinion, February
1915), and featured excerpts from Antonio Sant’Elia’s Manifesto of Futurist Architecture
(1914) and Sintesi futurista della guerra (A Futurist Synthesis of War, 1914) by Marinetti,
Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Piatti.
It appears that the first Japanese eye-witness who wrote first-hand on a concert
of Futurist music was the art critic Tōru Iwamura (1870–1917), who, in June 1914, had
 Japan 633

attended one of Luigi Russolo’s noisemaker concerts at the London Coliseum; he

reported his experience in “Ryochū shōkan” (Travel Impressions) in Bijutsu shinpō
(October 1915). Prominent figures in Japanese academia discussed Futurism in their
works, often providing penetrating remarks; examples include the literary scholar
Hajime Matsuura (1881–1966) in Bungaku no honshitsu (The Essence of Literature,
1915), and the aestheticians Juzō Ueda (1886–1973) and Shūjitsu Ogasawara (1885–
1958) in, respectively, “Miraiha no shuchō” (Principles of Futurism) in Geibun (Arts
and Letters, December 1914) and “Miraiha no geijutsukan to watashi no hyōka” (My
Judgement on the Art View of Futurism) in Mokushō (Mute Bell, June 1915). Press cov-
erage of Italian Futurism lost momentum as the First World War progressed, not least
because many Japanese cultural correspondents and students returned to Japan from
Europe. Nevertheless, it is clear that by the end of the 1910s, the name of Marinetti
and some notions related to Italian Futurism were generally known among Japanese
intellectuals, although often superficially or on the basis of hearsay.
Before the 1920s, information on Russian Futurism similarly began to be pre-
sented and popularized by specialists in Russian literature such as Shomu Nobori
(1878–1958) and Keishi (Aika) Ose (1889–1952), and by artists such as Kanae Yamamoto
(1882–1946); nonetheless, when compared to Italian Futurism, the amount of infor-
mation available on Russian Futurism remained quantitatively inferior.
On 3 December 1916, the Yomiuri shinbun (Yomiuri Newspaper) briefly reported
on Boccioni’s death (17 August 1916), also featuring a photo-portrait of him and a
reproduction of the painting L’ antigrazioso (Anti-graceful, 1912). In 1916, Masao Kume
(1891–1952) released an incomplete, yet still sizeable translation of Arthur J. Eddy’s
Cubists and Post-Impressionism, which included a substantial chapter on Futurism
with many quotations and excerpts from Futurist writings such as Marinetti’s Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) and Boccioni’s Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture
(1914). Kume’s book was reprinted in 1922, 1926 and 1930. Eddy’s book had already
been mined repeatedly by Japanese writers such as Kamenosuke Morita (1883–1966)
in his series of articles “Taisei gakai shin undō no keika oyobi kyubizumu” (Trends
of the New Movements in the Western Art World, and Cubism) in Bijutsu shinpō
(January–September 1915).
In the field of art criticism, mention should be made of an adversarial report
by the painter Shinpu Takamura (1876–1954) on the Exhibition of the Works of the
Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors (London: Doré Gallery, 13–30 April 1914), which
appeared rather belatedly as “Miraiha no tenrankai” (The Futurist Exhibition) in Chūō
bijutsu (Central Art) in October 1916, and of an essay by the art historian Kozue Sawaki
(1886–1930), also unsympathetic and entitled “Inshōha yori rittaiha miraiha ni
tassuru made” (From Impressionism to Cubism and Futurism), in Mita bungaku (Mita
Literature) in January 1917. Like many other commentators of the late 1910s, Asatori
Katō (1886–1938) also discussed pre-war material (in this case, Horace B. Samuel’s
“The Future of Futurism” from Modernities [1913]) in his essay, “Miraiha no hossoku”
(The Launch of Futurism), in Waseda bungaku in August 1917.
634 Pierantonio Zanotti

Impact on Japanese literature, 1909–1916

The poet Hiroshi Yosano (1873–1935), also known by the pen name of Tekkan, began
to develop an interest in Futurism during his stay in Paris in 1911–1912. He visited the
Bernheim-Jeune exhibition and reported his positive impressions of Futurism in the
newspaper Tōkyō Asahi shinbun (Tokyo Morning Sun Newspaper), later collected and
edited in the book Pari yori (From Paris, 1914). Yosano published some of the earli-
est Japanese translations of Futurist poetry. In an article in the Tōkyō Asahi shinbun
(29 November 1912), he presented, in translation, some lines of Marinetti’s Words-in-
Freedom poem Bataille: Poids + Odeur (Battle: Weight + Stench, 1912) and demon-
strated his knowledge of the precepts contained in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature. In 1914, he published Rira no hana (Lilac Flowers), an immense collection of
contemporary French poetry, which contained translations of Marinetti’s A l’ automo-
bile de course (Ode to a Racing Car, 1908), Aldo Palazzeschi’s La fontana malata (The
Sick Fountain, 1909; almost certainly translated directly from the Italian), Valentine
de Saint-Point’s Les Pavots de sang (The Poppies of Blood, 1912) and Blaise Cendrars’s
Ma danse (My Dance, 1914). The four authors were presented as “Futurist poets”.
Considering the information assembled in Pari yori and Rira no hana, it is likely that
Yosano was familiar with the anthology I poeti futuristi (The Futurist Poets, 1912). In
July 1914, he published in the magazine Mita bungaku a translation of Valentine de
Saint-Point’s lecture “La Métachorie” (Beyond the Chorus, 1913), probably relying on
the text published in Montjoie! (January–February 1914). It appears that Yosano con-
tinued to be sporadically interested in Futurism in the following years as well.
Like many other exponents of the Japanese anti- or post-Naturalist movement,
Yosano found some elements in Futurism that squared with his own search for
a vital, innovative and sincere art. A similar case in point is that of Gyofū Sōma
(1883–1950), one of the most influential literary critics of the early 1910s. In his
essay “Gendai geijutsu no chūshin seimei” (The Central Life in Contemporary
Art), published in Waseda bungaku (March 1913), Sōma acknowledged a similar-
ity between his own search for an art that was capable of expressing the power of
modern life, and the creative attitude of the Futurists: “[independently from their
actual works] what I praise is just their […] ardent revolutionary mood […] their
active and virile stance towards modern life” (Sōma: “Gendai geijutsu”, 15).
Kōtarō Takamura was a prominent sculptor, poet and art critic. His interest in
Futurism was sparked very early, possibly during the last part of a study tour to
Europe which ended in 1909. Back in Japan, he became a leading figure in the Post-
Impressionist and anti-Naturalist movement. He was also a member of the Fusain
group, and a number of sources confirm that he played a rôle in the circulation of
the 1912 Futurist catalogues among its painters. In 1912, amidst the sensation pro-
voked by the Futurist touring exhibition, he expressed his interest in Futurism in the
article “Miraiha no zekkyō” (The Scream of the Futurists), published on 5 March in
the Yomiuri shinbun, in which he displayed some knowledge of the Futurist material
 Japan 635

available in French, in particular some passages of Le Futurisme, the volume released

by Marinetti in 1911. In February and March 1914, Takamura published translations of
the two Futurist manifestos by Valentine de Saint-Point in Warera. Futurist influences
may also have affected his activity as a progressive art critic (until around 1915) and
some experimental poems in his maiden collection, Dōtei (Itinerary, 1914).
The article “Nihon ni okeru miraiha no shi to sono kaisetsu” (Futurist Poetry in
Japan and Its Explanation) by the poet Sakutarō Hagiwara (1886–1942), published
in the magazine Kanjō (Sentiment) in November 1916, presents one of the earliest
known uses of the label ‘Futurist’ to describe a Japanese writer. This was the poet
Bochō Yamamura (1884–1924), who, in 1915, had published Seisanryōhari (The Holy
Prism), a collection marked by innovative formal experiments. However, it is unlikely
that Italian Futurism, a movement that he must have known about only in a general
way, directly inspired Yamamura’s poems. Today, Hagiwara’s use of the term miraiha
to characterize Yamamura is generally considered incorrect. Nevertheless, his article
stands as an effective example of the semantic complexities (and confusions) that
surrounded the word miraiha in those years.

Burliuk and the Futurist Art Association

The reception of Italian Futurism in the field of the fine arts in Japan is a complex issue.
Although no Japanese painter was an ‘official’ member of Marinetti’s movement, there
are some cases of artists who (a) implemented some aesthetic devices into their own
work that contemporary or post-war experts, not always unanimously, have consid-
ered Futurist; (b) defined their activities, which may or may not display Futurist influ-
ences, by turning to the ambiguous term miraiha; or (c) established contacts and/or
collaborated with Marinetti or other Italian Futurists and, under these circumstances,
produced works influenced by Futurism. These three groups can and do overlap.
Among the first group, frequent mention is made of Tetsugorō Yorozu (1885–1927),
who painted such works as Akai me no jigazō (Self-portrait with Red Eyes, 1912–1913)
and Ko no ma kara mioroshita machi (Town Below Viewed Through Trees, 1918); the
printmaker Kōshirō Onchi (1891–1955) is sometimes cited as well. The second group
includes artists such as Gyō Fumon (1896–1972), Shūichirō Kinoshita (1896–1991),
Kamenosuke Ogata (1900–1942), Masamu Yanase (1900–1945) and others who were
associated with the Miraiha Bijutsu Kyōkai (Futurist Art Association, 1920–1923). The
third group includes Tai Kanbara, Seiji Tōgō and two members of the Japanese avant-
garde, Tomoyoshi Murayama (1901–1977) and Yoshimitsu Nagano (1902–1968), who
were active in Germany in the early 1920s.
In 1920, the visibility of Futurist activities was increased by the foundation of the
Miraiha Bijutsu Kyōkai (Futurist Art Association) by Gyō Fumon, and, shortly thereaf-
ter, by the arrival of David Burliuk (1882–1967), the Ukrainian painter and self-styled
636 Pierantonio Zanotti

‘father of Russian Futurism’, in Japan. This event is often regarded as marking the
beginning of a new phase in the history of Japanese avant-garde movements.
Burliuk arrived with Victor Palmov (1888–1929) on 1 October 1920 and stayed until
August 1922. Touring the main cities of Japan and holding exhibitions and giving lec-
tures, often with the assistance and collaboration of local artists, he devoted himself
to fundraising for his subsequent journey to the United States of America. He organ-
ized the Nihon ni okeru saisho no Roshia-ga tenrankai (First Exhibition of Russian
Painting in Japan), which toured Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto from October to December
1920, displaying for the first time in Japan a significant amount of works by the
Russian avant-garde. Burliuk made the acquaintance of a number of Japanese artists,
including Yumeji Takehisa (1884–1934) and Chikuha Otake (1878–1936), an innovator
in the field of nihonga (Japanese-style painting), and collaborated with the members
of the Nikakai (Second Division Society), among them Tōgō, and the Miraiha Bijutsu
Kyōkai, at whose 1921 annual exhibitions he also displayed some of his own works.
The Miraiha Bijutsu Kyōkai was founded without any clear links to the aesthetics
of European Futurism. As Shūichirō Kinoshita (who by 1922 had become its leader)
candidly recollected in 1977: “In the beginning, even though we would say ‘Futurism’,
nobody knew what Futurism was about” (quoted in Iseki: Miraiha, 415). The collabo-
ration with Burliuk made the group’s name somewhat more indicative of the adoption
of ideas from Futurism. Nonetheless, it is difficult to consider Miraiha Bijutsu Kyōkai
as having been an exclusively Futurist group. In February 1923, Kinoshita published
the book Miraiha to wa? Kotaeru (What is Futurism? An Answer), and showed how
much he had profited from the study and research conducted with Burliuk.
Reviving the interest in Russian avant-garde movements, Burliuk’s presence in
Japan had an important influence on the Japanese avant-garde. Moreover, it also had
a significant symbolic value as an instance of actual interaction between Asian and
European avant-gardists on Japanese soil. Shortly before Burliuk’s departure for the
United States, the Russian painter Varvara Bubnova (1886–1983), who had translated
Futurist group manifestos in 1912 (see p. 657 in this volume), arrived in Japan. She
played an important rôle in the dissemination of the latest trends in Russian art, and
of Constructivism in particular. The Miraiha Bijutsu Kyōkai was disbanded in 1923,
and most of its associates later converged in the Sanka (Third Division) group, a fed-
eration that gathered together the main Japanese avant-garde groups.

1921–1926: Futurism enters the debate on art and

politics and becomes visible in other artistic media
In the latter part of the Taishō period (1912–1926), the presentation of various aspects
of Futurism continued and was led by the intense publishing activity of Tai Kanbara
(see below, pp. 642–645). In November 1921, the poet and critic Banri Hirano (1885–1947)
 Japan 637

presented a translation of Marinetti’s manifesto La danza futurista (Futurist Dance, 1917)

in the magazine Myōjō (Morning Star). However, he expunged the “Dance of Shrapnel”
and “Dance of the Machine Gun” because he judged them to be “ridiculous” (reprinted
in Omuka and Hidaka: Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, shinbun zasshi hen. Vol. 2, 323).
An exponent of the literary world, Ryūkō Kawaji (1888–1959) discussed Futurist
poetry in comparison with other “eccentric” schools in two articles of 1922: “Miraiha
oyobi rittaiha to sono shiika: Marinettī to Aporinēru ni tsuite” (Futurism, Cubism and
Their Poetry: Marinetti and Apollinaire), featured in the April issue of Nihon shijin
(The Japanese Poet), and “Toppi-naru shiha ni tsuite: Miraiha, rittaiha, dadaha,
shashōha no shi” (On the Eccentric Poetic Schools: The Poetry of Futurism, Cubism,
Dada, Imagism), in the July number of Waseda bungaku. In both articles, he quoted
some lines from Palazzeschi’s La fontana malata. In May 1922, Shinchō (New Tide)
published Yōichi Nakayama’s “Miraishugi to wa nanizo” (What is Futurism?), which
contained a new translation of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism and of
Marinetti’s Noi rinneghiamo i nostri maestri simbolisti, ultimi amanti della luna (We
Renounce our Symbolist Masters, the Last of All Lovers of the Moonlight, 1911).
In 1922, during their stay in Germany, the painters Tomoyoshi Murayama and
Yoshimitsu Nagano established contacts with European Futurists such as Marinetti and
Ruggero Vasari. They took part in Die große futuristische Ausstellung (The Great Futurist
Exhibition, Berlin: Graphisches Kabinett I. B. Neumann, January–February 1922), and
some of their works were reproduced in Futurist magazines such as Noi and Der Futurismus.
Back in Japan, Murayama published in May 1923 a translation (from the German) of Il
tattilismo: Manifesto futurista (Tactilism: Futurist Manifesto, 1921) and Il teatro della sor-
presa (The Theatre of Surprise, 1921) as Shokkakushugi to kyōi no gekijō (Tactilism and
the Theatre of Surprise) in the art magazine Chūō bijutsu. In his introduction, Murayama
reported that Marinetti had personally given the two texts to him in Berlin. He also pointed
out that he was not a Futurist, but a “conscious Constructivist” (reprinted in Omuka and
Hidaka: Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, shinbun zasshi hen. Vol. 4, 217).
Two months before Murayama’s publication of Il teatro della sorpresa, the text
had been translated by Tai Kanbara in the March issue of Shinchō, under the title
Miraihageki: Atarashiki jidai no seishin ni okuru (Futurist Theatre: Dedicated to the
New Spirit of Our Age). Kanbara’s piece, which was probably based on the French
version published in the first issue of Le Futurisme (11 January 1922), also included
translations of eight short plays: Marinetti’s Simultaneità (Simultaneity, 1915), Il con-
tratto (The Contract, 1921), Vengono: Dramma d’oggetti (They Are Coming: Drama of
Objects, 1915), Declamazione di lirica guerresca con tango (Recitation of War Poetry
with Tango, 1920), Marinetti and Giani Calderone’s Musica da toilette (Dressing Room
Music, 1922), Marinetti and Francesco Cangiullo’s Giardini pubblici (Public Park, 1922),
Cangiullo’s Detonazione (Detonation, 1916) and Consiglio di leva (Draft Board, 1916).
Kanbara also published a translation of Marinetti’s Antineutralità (Anti-neutrality,
1915) in “Miraihageki ni tsuite” (Futurist Theatre), in the Tōkyō Asahi shinbun (30–31
March, 1 and 3 April 1923). In “Kikaiteki yōso no geijutsu e no dōnyū” (Introduction of
638 Pierantonio Zanotti

Mechanical Elements into Art), in the art magazine Mizue (Watercolour, January 1924),
Murayama relied largely on an essay by Enrico Prampolini featured in the October
1922 issue of Broom (“The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in
Art”) to discuss the latest trends in European mechanical art.
In the field of art criticism, Tari Moriguchi (1892–1984), who as early as 1914 had
discussed Futurism in his articles, devoted important chapters to it in Kindai bijutsu
jūnikō (Twelve Lessons on Modern Art, 1922, 2nd edn 1924) and in the commercially
successful Itan no gaka (Heretical Painters, 1920). Yoshinaga Ichiuji (1888–1952)
released a popular and influential monograph, Rittaiha, Miraiha, Hyōgenha (Cubism,
Futurism, Expressionism, 1924), where the new movements were analysed from a
left-wing perspective. Resorting also to material published in Valori plastici (Plastic
Values), the painter Jūtarō Kuroda (1887–1970) provided a detailed presentation of
pre-war Futurist painting in “Fyuchurizumu, orufizumu oyobi sankuromizumu”
(Futurism, Orphism and Synchromism, August 1924), published in Chūō bijutsu.
Works such as Ichiuji’s Cubism, Futurism, Expressionism showed that, in the
1920s, Japan witnessed a rapid rise of the so-called ‘proletarian’ art movements,
which amalgamated a wide range of anti-bourgeois, revolutionary, socialist, Marxist
and (later) Soviet tendencies. This ignited an interest in Russian Futurism and Russian
Constructivism, which became a major influence on the Japanese avant-garde, as in the
case of the Mavo group (1923–1925), led by Murayama. Some Japanese avant-gardists
attempted to synthesize or adapt ‘proletarian’ themes to the contemporary discourses
on Futurism. Similar efforts were undertaken in the leftist literary journal Tanemaku
hito (The Sower, 1921–1923), for example by Renkichi Hirato (1893 or 1894–1922) and
Masatoshi Muramatsu (1895–1981), or the anonymous author of “Musan kaikyū no
geijutsu toshite no miraishugi no igi” (The Meaning of Futurism as Proletarian Art),
published in the March 1922 issue. Torao Ueno (1894–?) was one of those who criti-
cized Italian Futurism from a Marxist perspective and accused it of being a bourgeois
and nationalist movement. Ueno was a partisan of left-wing literary movements, and
his article “Miraiha igo no geijutsu keikō” (Art Tendencies since Futurism), published
in Shinchō in November 1922, triggered a short-lived exchange with Tai Kanbara, who
at the time was building for himself a reputation as an expert on Marinetti’s move-
ment and tended to affect a scholarly and apolitical attitude towards it.
In May 1925, the Sanka group, born from the fusion of the main avant-garde
denominations in Tokyo, organized a series of performances, known as Gekijō no
Sanka (Sanka in the Theatre), at the Tsukiji Little Theatre (Tsukiji Shōgekijō) in Tokyo.
Some of these stage actions shared elements with Futurist theatre. Among many
others, Murayama, Kinoshita and Kanbara took part in this event.
On 26 September 1925, as confirmed by Kanbara’s article “Miraiha no Puraterra”
(Pratella the Futurist) in the Tōkyō Asahi shinbun of 24 September, a piano arrange-
ment of Francesco Balilla Pratella’s op. 30, Musica futurista per orchestra (1912) was
performed by Giichi Ishikawa (1887–1962) at the Aoyama Kaikan in Tokyo. The event
was presented as the first performance of this kind in Japan. Ishikawa later elaborated
 Japan 639

on the topic of Futurist music in the article “Miraiha ongaku” (Futurist Music) in the
November 1925 issue of Gakusei (Music Star), which also featured some musical scores.
With the exception of Renkichi Hirato (see below), there are no known represent-
atives of literary Futurism in Japan. Even Tai Kanbara, in his individual activity as a
painter and poet, is considered more generically as a Modernist author. His experi-
mental verse, which started with a number of kōki rittaishi (post-Cubist poems, 1917),
fused different elements and themes from a wide range of avant-garde trends, both
international and local. If the question of whether there were ‘Futurist writers’ can
be settled in a relatively easy way, it is more difficult to isolate or detect ‘Futurist ele-
ments’ or ‘Futurist influences’ in the work of other authors who currently form part
of the canon of Japanese modanizumu. Riichi Yokomitsu (1898–1947), in an essay
entitled “Kankaku katsudō” (Sensory Activity) and published in Bungei jidai (Literary
Age) in February 1925, showed an attitude that was representative of many writers
of the early Shōwa period (1926–1989). Alongside the future Nobel Prize laureate
Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972), Yokomitsu is considered one of the major writers of
the Modernist literary current known as Shinkankaku-ha (commonly rendered as ‘New
Sensation School’). The following passage from “Kankaku katsudō” is probably the
single attestation of the word ‘Futurism’ (miraiha) with which historians of Japanese
literature are best acquainted: “I recognize Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism,
Dadaism, Symbolism, Constructivism and some of the realists as all belonging to [the]
Shinkankaku school” (trans. in Gerow: Visions of Japanese Modernity, 37).
Yokomitsu’s syncretic attitude was less eclectic and superficial than that of other
Modernist writers of this period. Many of them probably possessed some knowledge
of Marinetti’s writings, at least of some of his manifestos, yet due to the overwhelm-
ing influence of French, German and Anglophone poetics, few of them treated Italian
Futurism as a main reference point for their creative activity. After all, by the mid-
1920s, themes such as simultaneity, the embracement of modern and urban life and
interest in the technological and mechanical world had become common tropes in
Modernist and avant-garde discourses, and the same can be said about technical
and rhetorical devices such as the deconstruction of syntax, analogy, visual poetry,
typographical experiments, montage, anti-lyricism and multiple perspectives. In the
pool of Japanese Modernist writers, one stands out as an exception: Taruho Inagaki
(1900–1977), a collaborator of the Miraiha Bijutsu Kyōkai and Shinkankaku-ha whose
fiction expresses a personal fascination with the themes of flight and celestial objects
and thus documents an explicit interest in Italian Futurism.

Renkichi Hirato
Renkichi Hirato was the only figure in the Japanese literary world who explicitly pro-
claimed himself a Futurist. Hirato wrote a manifesto entitled Nihon miraiha sengen
640 Pierantonio Zanotti

undō = Mouvement Futuriste Japonais (Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement)

and, according to several sources (see Hatori: “Hirato Renkichi to Nihon miraiha”), at
some point in the final months of 1921, he distributed leaflets containing this mani-
festo and one of his experimental poems on the streets of Hibiya, a central Tokyo
neighbourhood. This event represents one of the first ‘Happenings’ on the Japanese
avant-garde literary scene. Among other things, Hirato’s manifesto proclaimed that
“libraries, art museums and academies are not worth the noise of one car gliding
down the street”, quoted verbatim from the French version of the Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Literature and explicitly acknowledged Marinetti’s authority: “We, who
like to be instantaneous and quick on our feet, are much indebted to Marinetti,
who loved the bewitching changes of the cinematograph” (Hirato: “Manifesto of
the Japanese Futurist Movement”, 228). Although Hirato took part in the activities
of the Miraiha Bijutsu Kyōkai, he remained, as a Japanese representative of literary
Futurism, in many ways an isolated figure. Moreover, his poetic œuvre betrayed a
strong tendency towards eclecticism. His poems showed not only a familiarity with
the Words-in-Freedom and other technical devices and themes of Italian Futurism, but
also with variegated motifs of Cubist, Dada and Expressionist origin, not to mention
Romantic and late-Symbolist elements.
In fact, in the last months of his short life, Hirato began to transcend his own brand
of Futurism, developing a new poetic theory that he called ‘analogism’ and presenting
it in the article “Anarojisumu ni tsuite” (On Analogism) in Nihon shijin in May 1922. The
starting point for Hirato’s reflection on analogy appears to be the Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Literature, which is abundantly quoted in the text. The fact that Marinetti’s
theories share the stage with a digression on Paul Claudel’s L’ Annonce faite à Marie (The
Tidings Brought to Mary, 1910) as an example of Expressionism confirms the impression
that Hirato was open to different aesthetic trends. We can only speculate on how his
research might have developed further had it not been abruptly interrupted by tuber-
culosis in July 1922. In 1931, his friends and companions, among them Tai Kanbara and
Hirato’s mentor Ryūkō Kawaji, managed to publish Hirato Renkichi shishū (Collected
Poems of Renkichi Hirato), a book-length edition of nearly all of his poetry and his most
important essays. However, the ideological and literary climate had already changed
in the early 1930s: Hirato’s poetry failed to provoke a significant impact and remained
little known even afterwards. In addition to poetry, Hirato also published some pieces
of avant-garde prose, such as the Futurism-tinged “Sport jidai” (The Age of Sports,
January 1922) and the short story Mujitsu (Nothing Day, March 1922), a text that features
montage techniques and urban and technological motifs.
A copy of his manifesto is preserved in Marinetti’s libroni (the paste-up albums
in which Marinetti kept press reports and documents), and his name appears on the
list of Japanese Futurists appended to Le Futurisme mondial (Worldwide Futurism,
1924). This may have been due to a suggestion from Kanbara, as Hirato apparently
never had any direct contact with exponents of Italian Futurism. He probably made
the acquaintance of Burliuk during the latter’s stay in Japan, but it is not known how
 Japan 641

close their acquaintance was. In “Watashi no miraishugi to jikkō” (My Futurism and
Its Realization), published in Nihon shijin in January 1922, Hirato reported that Burliuk
had jokingly called him the ‘Marinetti of Japan’, but according to other accounts the
visitor from Russia also applied this description to Shūichirō Kinoshita. “Watashi no
miraishugi to jikkō” is of additional interest because Hirato expresses in it his feelings
of proximity to Italian Futurism but, simultaneously, also his will to distance himself
from it in order to preserve his own brand of Futurism: “Even though I receive stimuli
from the Futurist school of Marinetti and others, I am in no way subordinate to it”
(reprinted in Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, shinbun zasshi hen. Vol. 3, 3). It should
be remembered that, being a product of the pacifist and internationalist cultural
climate of Taishō-era Japan, and having many left-leaning companions, Hirato must
have felt considerable unease about certain ideological traits in Marinetti’s thought.

Seiji Tōgō
Seiji Tōgō is regarded as a major twentieth-century Japanese painter. Today, he is
remembered primarily for his female portraits, which are marked by a dreamy and
surreal vein. However, at the beginning of his career, Tōgō showed a lively interest in
Italian Futurism. This was partially due to the influence of his colleague Tai Kanbara
and of one of his mentors, the critic and painter Ikuma Arishima, who introduced
Tōgō, while he was still a teenager, to Futurist painting. Some of the judgments
expressed by critics on his début personal exhibition, held in Tokyo in September
1915, evoked the categories of Futurism and Cubism. Of his works from this early
phase, one of the most famous is Parasoru saseru onna (Woman with a Parasol, 1916),
which was awarded a prize at the third Nikakai exhibition. However, in this, as in
other works of the early Japanese painterly avant-garde, it is difficult to single out
specifically Futurist or Cubist elements.
Tōgō lived in France from 1921 to 1928. Especially during the first years of his
stay, he interacted with exponents of the European avant-garde. His relationship with
the Futurists is still not entirely clear; in part, it is complicated by Tōgō’s post-war
autobiographical writings, which tend to downplay his involvement with the move-
ment. The rapport with Marinetti is documented in nine letters from Tōgō (published
in Omuka: Taishōki shinkō bijutsu undō no kenkyū, 123–128), which are part of the
Marinetti papers at the Beinecke Library, and in a number of articles from Europe,
which were published in 1921–1922 in the Yomiuri shinbun and in Myōjō. According to
these sources, Tōgō met Marinetti and Russolo in Paris in June 1921, on the occasion of
the concerts of noise music held at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. Later, in October
1921, he reportedly visited Marinetti in Milan, and again in January 1922. On the
latter occasion, he took part in the Esposizione d’arte italiana futurista at the Teatro
Modernissimo in Bologna (21 January – 21 February 1922), inaugurated with a lecture
642 Pierantonio Zanotti

by Marinetti, during which Tōgō greeted the audience and was publicly praised by
Marinetti. Tōgō vividly evoked this episode, which is attested in the Italian press,
in one of his articles in Myōjō. Tōgō planned to display his works at other Futurist
exhibitions. His fervour for Futurism is also proved by two “Futurist Poems” (mirai-
hashi) which were published in the August 1922 issue of Myōjō. It is not entirely clear
how and why Tōgō distanced himself subsequently from Futurism. It seems that the
process had already begun before the end of 1922. Modern scholarship has considered
some possible Futurist influences in some of his paintings from this period, such as
Bōshi wo kamutta otoko (Man Wearing a Hat, also known as Donna che cammina [The
Walking Woman], 1922).

Tai Kanbara and the Shōwa period

Tai Kanbara (sometimes spelled ‘Kambara’ in Western sources) was the main sym-
pathizer and scholar of Italian Futurism in pre-war Japan. However, in the national
cultural debates of the period, he did not present himself as a Futurist. As he rec-
ollected in his many post-war autobiographical writings, he discovered Futurism
around 1915 through the translation of a chapter of Boccioni’s Pittura scultura futur-
iste by Ikuma Arishima, and started collecting material by ordering books through
Japanese bookstores and later writing directly to the Edizioni di “Poesia”. Important
information on his relationship with the Italian movement can be gleaned from his
library and archive, preserved at the Ōhara Museum of Art in Kurashiki. The collection
also includes a number of postcards, inscriptions on books, photographs and other
ephemera that attest to the contacts between Kanbara and Italian Futurists such as
Marinetti and Vasari. The publication in Noi (August 1923) of the Japanese text (tran-
scribed into Roman characters) of Mahiru no gaidȏ (Poème musical) (Street in Broad
Daylight [Musical Poem]), a revised version of one of Kanbara’s ‘post-Cubist poems’
of 1917, offers clear evidence of their interaction. Under unclear circumstances, which
perhaps involved Marinetti’s mediation, between 1924 and 1925 he contributed eleven
articles on current affairs in Japan to the Milanese newspaper L’ Ambrosiano.
Presumably, Kanbara began corresponding with Marinetti at some point in the
early 1920s. His first translation of a Futurist work, and the first to appear as a book
in Japan, was Marinetti’s Poupées électriques (as Denki ningyō). It was published
in the magazine Ningen (Humanity) in March 1921 and as a book in 1922, 1924 and
1930. This was the beginning of Kanbara’s career as an expert on Futurism, during
which he gave lectures and published articles, translations and monographs. He
was also an accomplished painter and organizer of cultural events. Where his
paintings are concerned, it is difficult to detect unambiguous Futurist elements;
he was one of the first in Japan to experiment in the field of abstract painting and
held his first personal exhibition in November 1920. On that occasion, he printed
 Japan 643

a substantial manifesto, Dai ikkai Kanbara Tai sengensho (First Manifesto of Tai
Kanbara), in which he explicitly paid homage to Marinetti and discussed the
principles of Futurist painting in order to better assert his own originality. In the
following years, he positioned himself in the moderate range of the spectrum of
Japanese avant-garde movements and was a founding member of Akushon (Action,
1922–1924). Although he associated himself with the Modernist trends represented
by the pivotal magazine Shi to shiron (Poetry and Poetics, 1928–1933), as a poet he
also tried to develop Realist and proletarian themes by founding the magazine Shi,
genjitsu (Poetry, Reality, 1930–1931).
Between 1921 and 1926, the same years in which his involvement with the
avant-garde scene reached its peak, Kanbara wrote extensively on Futurism. One
of his earliest and most accomplished contributions was “Miraiha no shōri” (The
Triumph of Futurism), a comprehensive presentation of the Italian movement up to
the First World War (also featuring many translated excerpts and a long commen-
tary on Marinetti’s Le Monoplan du Pape [The Pope’s Aeroplane, 1912]), which was
serialized in four instalments in Shisō (Thought), starting in April 1922. Kanbara’s
books Atarashiki jidai no seishin ni okuru (Dedicated to the New Spirit of Our Age,
1923), Geijutsu no rikai (Understanding Art, 1924), Shinkō geijutsu no noroshi (New
Art’s Flare, 1926) and especially Miraiha kenkyū (Futurism Studies, 1925) all dealt
to varying degrees with Futurism. In these volumes, he collected most of his pre-
viously published contributions on the latest art trends. He also published new
translations, including the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism and Fedele
Azari’s manifesto Il teatro aereo futurista (A Futurist Theatre of the Skies, 1919) in
Geijutsu no rikai. In Miraiha kenkyū he published excerpts of Words-in-Freedom
from Marinetti’s Dune (Dunes, 1914), Zang Tumb Tuuum (1914) and Carlo Carrà’s
Guerrapittura (Warpainting, 1915), as well as theatrical pieces such as Passatismo
(Traditionalism, 1915) by Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli, Un chiaro di luna
(Moonlight, 1916) by Marinetti and Non c’è un cane (Nobody’s There, 1920) by
Cangiullo. In Omuka’s words, Miraiha kenkyū is “still one of the most reliable and
comprehensive works on Italian Futurism in the Japanese language” (“Futurism in
Japan”, 264). At approximately three hundred and fifty pages, this major work of
scholarship contains a fastidiously detailed history of the Italian movement and
its publishing output. It also features a number of reproductions of artworks and
several translations and samples of Futurist writing, including three post-war mani-
festos, such as Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura (Against All Returns in Painting, 1920)
by Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Luigi Russolo and Mario Sironi, and L’ arte
meccanica (Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art, 1923) by Enrico Prampolini, Ivo
Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini. Kanbara drew on numerous Futurist materials
which Marinetti sent directly to him (a practice that apparently continued until the
late 1930s), including Marinetti’s post-war efforts such as Les Mots en liberté futur-
istes (Futurist Words in Freedom, 1919), 8 anime in una bomba (8 Souls Within One
Bomb, 1919) and Futurismo e fascismo (Futurism and Fascism, 1924).
644 Pierantonio Zanotti

The presentation and discussion of Futurism continued in the Shōwa period,

which began in December 1926 with Hirohito’s accession to the throne. However, the
Japanese coverage of Futurism in this period is both less studied and less well known
in comparison to the material produced in the previous two decades. The established
narrative of the Shōwa years indicates that the movements that had galvanized the
Japanese avant-garde in its first phase progressively lost momentum. More moderate
versions of Modernism, frequently inspired by Surrealism, contended for prominence
with those of leftist and Socialist Realist inspiration, at least until the latter were pro-
gressively repressed or silenced. With the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and
the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, the official cultural policies
pushed for a return to a national and traditional culture, and a marginalization (if not
open persecution) of the most advanced trends coming from the West.
Nonetheless, Futurism was dealt with extensively in critical, historical and even
didactic compendia, especially in the field of the fine arts, as can be seen in the
twelve-volume anthology of reprinted books and essays originally published between
1914 and 1943, Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, kanpon hen (Collection of Works on the
New Foreign Art: Books Series, 2003). Even though his visibility as an artist had dimin-
ished, Kanbara remained the main Japanese expert on Italian Futurism in this period.
For instance, in the Yomiuri shinbun of 5 April 1926, he reported briefly on the “Itaria
miraiha no atarashii shijintachi” (New Futurist Poets of Italy), who were included in
the eponymous anthology edited by Marinetti in 1925. A copy of this article is also pre-
served in Marinetti’s libroni. In September 1928, Kanbara began publishing, in Shi to
shiron, “Miraiha no jiyūgo wo ronzu” (On Futurist Words-in-Freedom), a series of arti-
cles on the origins of Futurist poetry which relied heavily on writings by Marinetti and
on Mario Dessy’s article “L’ opera di F. T. Marinetti” (Marinetti’s Œuvre), published
in Poesia NS 1:9 (October 1920). The series was interrupted in June 1929. Kanbara
reported on Virgilio Marchi’s book Architettura futurista (Futurist Architecture, 1924)
and Tato’s activities in “Miraiha no kenchiku” (Futurist Architecture), published in
Jūtaku (Housing, May 1929), which also featured reproductions of two drawings by
Antonio Sant’Elia and two photographs of the Casa d’Arte Tato.
A translation from the Italian of Marinetti’s Le Roi Bombance (King Guzzle, 1905),
by Yukio Satō, was published in 1929. Building on his rapport with Lionello Fiumi,
Kuninosuke Matsuo (1899–1975), corresponding from Paris for the Yomiuri shinbun,
reported on the developments in literary Futurism during the 1930s in “Fasshisumu
bungaku no hassei made: Itari bungō Rionero Fiumi to kataru” (Until the Birth of
Fascist Literature: A Talk with the Italian Master Lionello Fiumi, 3–5 September 1931)
and “Itari shidan wa doko e iku: Rionero Fiumi ni kiku” (Where Is the Italian Poetry
Scene Going? An Interview with Lionello Fiumi, 18 April 1935).
Perhaps the last remarkable study on Futurism to appear before the Second World
War was Kanbara’s Fyūchurizumu, Ekusupuresshonizumu, Dadaizumu (Futurism,
Expressionism, Dadaism, 1937). Its contents were not particularly original, but the
volume is noteworthy for Kanbara’s remarks on how the Futurists accommodated
 Japan 645

to the Fascist régime. It contained reproductions of works that expanded the usual
Futurist canon from the movement’s first phase, including paintings by Fortunato
Depero, Prampolini, Pannaggi, Tato and Fillìa. Judging by the clippings preserved
in the libroni, Marinetti probably also received a copy of this book and managed to
publicize it in the Italian press.
At present, the reception in Japan of aeropoesia and aeropittura, as well as other
aspects of secondo and terzo futurismo, appear to need further investigation.

Archival sources
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, and Seiji Tōgō: Correspondence. New Haven/CT: Yale University,
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. F. T. Marinetti, General Collection Series III. Box 17.
Folder 1065.

Works cited
Gerow, Aaron: Visions of Japanese Modernity: Articulations of Cinema, Nation, and Spectatorship,
1895–1925. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press, 2010.
Hackner, Thomas: Dada und Futurismus in Japan: Die Rezeption der historischen Avantgarden.
München: Iudicium-Verlag, 2001.
Hatori, Tetsuya: “Hirato Renkichi to Nihon miraiha.” [Hirato Renkichi and Japanese Futurism] Seikei
Daigaku Bungakubu kiyō = Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities, Seikei University 31 (1996):
1–21.
Hirato, Renkichi: “Manifesto of the Japanese Futurist Movement.” Daniel Rosenberg, and Susan
Harding, eds.: Histories of the Future. Durham/NC: Duke University Press, 2005. 226–230.
Iseki, Masaaki: Miraiha: Itaria, Roshia, Nihon [Futurism: Italy, Russia, Japan]. Tachikawa: Keibunsha,
2003.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ed.: “Le Futurisme et la presse internationale.” Poesia 5:3–6 (April–July
1909): 12–34.
Nishino, Yoshiaki: “Avangyarudo shi shi kō (11): Taishō zenki bungei shoshi no miraiha.” [A/Z
on Avant-Garde Magazines (11): Futurism in Early Taishō Literary Magazines] AC2 (Aomori
Contemporary Art Centre) 10 (2009): 102–127.
Nishino, Yoshiaki: “Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e il Giappone futurista = F. T. Marinetti and Japan
the Futurist.” Luigi Sansone, ed: F. T. Marinetti = Futurismo. Milano: Motta, 2009. 147–159,
326–331.
Omuka, Toshiharu: “Futurism in Japan, 1909–1920.” Günter Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in
Arts and Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000. 244–270.
Omuka, Toshiharu: Taishōki shinkō bijutsu undō no kenkyū [A Study on the Modern Art Movement of
the Taishō Era]. Tōkyō: Sukaidoa, 1995. 2nd edn 1998.
Omuka, Toshiharu, ed.: Hōkokusho: Nihon ni okeru miraiha hyakunen kinen shinpojiumu =
Proceedings: 100th Anniversary of Futurism in Japan: International Symposium. Tsukuba:
Daigaku Geijutsukei = Faculty of Art & Design, University of Tsukuba, 2013.
Omuka, Toshiharu, and Shōji Hidaka, eds.: Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, kanpon hen [Collection
of Works on the New Foreign Art: Books Series]. Vol. 1–12. Tōkyō: Yumani Shobō, 2003.
646 Pierantonio Zanotti

Omuka, Toshiharu, and Shōji Hidaka, eds.: Kaigai shinkō geijutsuron sōsho, shinbun zasshi hen
[Collection of Works on the New Foreign Art: Newspapers and Magazines Series]. Vol. 1–10.
Tōkyō: Yumani Shobō, 2005.
Ōtani, Shōgo: “Itaria miraiha no shōkai to Nihon kindai yōga: 1912nen zengo no dōkō.” [The
Presentation of Italian Futurism and Japanese Modern Painting: Trends Around 1912] Geisō:
Bulletin of the Study on Philosophy and History of Art in University of Tsukuba 9 (1992): 105–126.
Sōma, Gyofū: “Gendai geijutsu no chūshin seimei.” [The Central Life in Contemporary Art] Waseda
bungaku [Waseda Literature] 88 (March 1913): 2–16.
Zanotti, Pierantonio: “A Popular Japanese Cartoonist Tries His Hand at the ‘Italian Futurists’ Painting
Style’ (1913).” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 6 (2016): 471–474.

Further reading
Asano, Tōru: “Rittaiha miraiha to Taishōki no kaiga.” [Cubism, Futurism and Taishō Era Painting]
Shōwa 51 nendo Tōkyō Kokuritsu Kindai Bijutsukan nenpō [Annual Report of the National
Museum of Modern Art, Tōkyō, for the Year 1976] (1978): 85–107.
Barillari, Diana: “Giappone.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Il dizionario del futurismo. Firenze: Vallecchi, 2002.
530–532.
Bertozzi, Barbara: “Un incontro con l’ artista ultranovantenne: Il futurista Tai Kanbara.” Art e dossier
4:41 (December 1989): 17–19.
Bonnefoy, Françoise, ed.: Japon des avant-gardes 1910–1970. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Centre
National d’Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou, 11 décembre 1986 – 2 mars 1987. Paris: Editions
du Centre Pompidou, 1986.
Chiba, Sen’ichi: Gendai bungaku no hikaku bungakuteki kenkyū [Comparative Literary Studies on
Contemporary Literature]. Tōkyō: Yagi Shoten, 1978.
Gardner, William O.: Advertising Tower: Japanese Modernism and Modernity in the 1920s.
Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2006.
Granieri, Lucia: “L’ aura futurista in Giappone.” Adolfo Tamburello, ed.: Italia-Giappone 450 anni.
Vol. 1. Roma: Istituto Italiano per l’ Africa e l’ Oriente; Napoli: Università degli Studi di Napoli
“L’ Orientale”, 2003. 133–139.
Hirato, Renkichi. Spiral Staircase: Collected Poems of Hirato Renkichi. Edited and translated by Sho
Sugita. Brooklyn/NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017.
Iseki, Masaaki: “Una storia del futurismo in Giappone.” Ester Carla De Miro d’Ajeta, ed.: Giappone
avanguardia del futuro. Milano: Electa, 1985. 88–98.
Kikuchi, Yasuo: Aoi kaidan wo noboru shijintachi: Gendaishi no taidōki [Poets Who Climb the Green
Staircase: The Beginnings of Japanese Contemporary Poetry]. Tōkyō: Seidōsha, 1965. Rev. and
enlarged edn Tōkyō: Genbunsha, 1967.
Komata, Yūsuke: Zen’ei shi no jidai: Nihon no 1920nendai [The Era of Avant-Garde Poetry: The
Japanese 1920s]. Tōkyō: Sōseisha, 1992.
Kōuchi, Nobuko: ‘Miraiha’ to Nihon no shijintachi [‘Futurism’ and Japanese Poets]. Tōkyō: Gusukō
Shuppan, 2007.
Lanne, Mitsuko, and Jean-Claude Lanne: “Le Futurisme russe et l’ art d’avant-garde japonais.”
Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 25:4 (October–December 1984): 375–402.
Omuka, Toshiharu: “David Burliuk and the Japanese Avant-Garde.” Canadian–American Slavic
Studies 20:1–2 (Spring–Summer 1986): 111–133.
Poncini, Giovanni: “Il futurismo in Giappone: Estremismi dell’Estremo Oriente.” Art e dossier 4:41
(December 1989): 12–17.
 Japan 647

Shigeta, Mariko: Taruho/Miraiha [Taruho/Futurism]. Tōkyō: Kawade Shobō Shinsha, 1997.

Verdone, Mario: “Futurismo made in Japan.” Terzo occhio: Trimestrale d’arte e critica contemporanea
2 (June 1990): 16–20. Rev. edn in M. Verdone: Arti senza frontiere. Bologna: Bora, 1993. 22–31.
Weisenfeld, Gennifer S.: Mavo: Japanese Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1905–1931. Berkeley/CA:
University of California Press, 2002.
Zanotti, Pierantonio: “Beyond Naturalism: Sōma Gyofū, Italian Futurism, and the Search for a New
‘Art of Force’.” Archiv orientální 85:2 (2017). 283‒303.
Zanotti, Pierantonio: “La collaborazione di Kanbara Tai con il quotidiano ‘L’ Ambrosiano’
(1924‒1925): Prospettive di ricerca.” Maria Chiara Migliore, Antonio Manieri, and Stefano
Romagnoli, eds.: Riflessioni sul Giappone antico e moderno. Vol. 2. Canterano: Aracne editrice,
2016. 211‒231.
Zanotti, Pierantonio: “What is Miraiha? Academic Discourses on Japanese Futurism.” International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012): 35–65.
Zanotti, Pierantonio: L’ avanguardia letteraria in Giappone: Il caso della poesia di Yamamura Bochō
(1884–1924). Ph.D. Dissertation. Venezia: Università Ca’ Foscari, 2009.
Kyoo Yun Cho
39 Korea
Introduction
Futurism came to be known in Korea via the colonial ruler, Japan, but it neither led
to the formation of a Futurist group nor to any theoretical declaration in support of
Marinetti’s programme. Yet it influenced the formation of a Korean form of modern
literature in the 1930s, when writers such as Gi-rim Kim (1908–?)1and Sang Yi (1910–
1937) adopted aspects of Futurist poetics and engaged with themes and issues such as
urbanism, the dissolution of reality, supersaturated self-consciousness, neologisms,
the deconstruction of orthography and syntax structure and visual poetry.
Futurism, fundamentally, was an aesthetic reflection of the process of modern-
ization in Europe. In countries such as Italy and Russia, where old structures and
conditions prevailed long into the twentieth century, self-conscious intellectuals
worried about falling behind other, more advanced countries. Korea, as a colonized
country, fell into a similar pattern, and this explains why Futurism was discussed
in Korea, came to be accepted in some Korean literary circles and, in a transformed
guise, gained access to this Asian cultural environment.
The history of Korea in the twentieth century can be divided into three distinct
periods: Japanese colonial rule (1905–1945); the separation of South and North Korea
and the Korean War (1945–1953); Republican government (1953–1961) and military
dictatorship (1961–1988) in the South, and Communist rule (1953–present) in the
North. During the period of Japanese annexation, the Korean economy was underde-
veloped, the use of the native language was suppressed and Korean culture did not
receive any official support. As a result, there was no cultural modernization or free
pursuit of novelty and experimentation in the arts and literature. Only a limited and
uncoordinated influence of Japanese and Western Modernism can be found in the
works of individual poets. Korea did not have any organized Futurist groups until the
beginning of the twenty-first century and no artists or writers published any theoreti-
cal declarations that can be deemed Futurist.
During the Japanese occupation, both the publication of Korean literature and the
importing of foreign books were restricted. F. T. Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism (1909) and several more manifestos were translated into Japanese and
became very influential in the world of Japanese literature and fine arts (see the entry
on Japan in this volume). However, they came to be introduced into Korea only fifteen
years after the publication of Marinetti’s initial manifesto, in 1924.

1 The Korean practice to present surnames before given names is inverted here in order to follow the
norm in the rest of the handbook.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-039
 Korea 649

The reception of Futurism in Korea in the early

twentieth century
The first person to introduce Futurism to the Korean Peninsula under Japanese rule
was Young-hee Park (1901–1950), a poet, critic and exponent of a proletarian form
of literature. In 1924, he wrote about Futurism in Kaepyŏk (Dawn), a typical anti-
Japanese literary journal at the time. His essay, “Chungyosulŏsajŏn” (A Dictionary
of Primary Predicates), praised Marinetti’s radical rebellious attitude and rejec-
tion of the established arts. In contrast to Park’s somewhat abstract definition of
Futurism, the literary critic and scholar Ju-dong Yang (1903–1977) described the basic
concepts of Futurism as well as giving a subjective interpretation of it. In an essay
entitled “Kuju hyŏndae munyesasang kaegwan” (An Overview of Modern European
Literature, 1929), published in the newspaper Dong-A Ilbo (East Asia Daily), he wrote
that Futurism expressed a “hope for the future” and could be regarded as a school
of thought that “rebels against the pressures of the past and completely severs the
civilization of the past from that of the present, in order to create an art that is full of
fresh, new life” (Yang: “ Kuju hyŏndae munyesasang kaegwan”, 5). Additionally, Yang
portrayed the Futurists as followers of a dynamic modern civilization who adopted
a machine propelled by a motor or the noise of a battleship as material for their lit-
erary works. The author saw Futurism as an artistic trend born from extreme mate-
rialism, as an “abnormal phenomenon in literature and at the same time a sign of
extreme decadence” (Ibid.). Nonetheless, he admitted that it had potential for further
development.
Ju-dong Yang’s definitions and evaluations of Futurism were probably based on
studies published in Japan in the early 1920s, such as David Burliuk and Shūichirō
Kinoshita’s Miraiha to wa? Kotaeru (What is Futurism? An Answer, 1923), Kyūzō
Fukui’s Nihon shinshishi (A History of New Japanese Poetry, 1924) and Tai Kanbara’s
Miraiha kenkyū (Futurism Studies, 1925). Both Park and Yang had studied in Japan
in the 1920s. Although, at the time, Marinetti’s manifesto had yet to be translated
into Korean, we can surmise that Korean intellectuals who opposed colonization were
inspired by Futurism through Japanese publications.
It was only in the 1930s that stylistic devices typical of Futurism could be detected
in Korean writings. The most representative poet of this new trend was Gi-rim Kim
who had visited Japan several times between 1910 and 1940. In 1933, he set up Guinhoe
(the Circle of Nine), a group that aspired to pure arts, opposed tendency literature and
contributed to the development of Korea’s national literature. Gi-rim Kim described
Modernism as a manifestation of the twentieth-century that could reflect advanced
urban civilization:

The implication of words has changed, and the discovery and creation of a new ‘rhythm’ that cor-
responds to the speed of civilization has been attempted […]. Unlike the ‘rhythm’ of the previous
650 Kyoo Yun Cho

generations, the ‘rhythm’ intrinsic to modern painting reflects the noises of planes and factories
and the outcry of the masses. (Gi-rim Kim: Kimgirim chŏnjip. Vol. 2, 56)

Kim defined Modernism in a way that was quite similar to Futurism. The “ ‘rhythm’
intrinsic to modern painting” was the essence of his Futurist poetry and can also
be found in the works of Italian Futurist painters such as Umberto Boccioni and
Carlo Carrà, who regularly created moving objects on their canvases. In 1931, Kim
began writing poetry in earnest and expressed his enigmatic position on Futurism in
“Sangat’apŭi pikŭk: Sap’oesŏ ch’ohyŏnsilp’akkachi” (The Tragedy of the Ivory Tower:
From Sappho to Surrealism, 1931). While seeing in Futurism an “explosion that fright-
ened the world” that was “writhing in its death throes”, he also saw the creative
purpose of his Futurist poetry in the “beauty of speed” (Gi-rim Kim: Kimgirim chŏnjip.
Vol. 2, 314–315). Gi-rim Kim’s poems, such as Yŏhaeng (Journey, 1934) and Sangkong
untonghoe (Sky Sports Day, 1934), express the changes in life and art brought about by
modern speed. His portrayal of skyscrapers, planes or cars made him one of the most
significant early Modernists in Korea.
Another poet from the period with a similar attitude was Sang Yi (1910–1937), a
member of the Circle of Nine. He wrote in a vivid Futurist style, experimenting not
only with modern themes but also modern formal devices. Typical of his approach
was Okamto (A Crow’s-Eye View, 1934), containing fifteen sections headed Shi
jeilho (Poem 1), Shi jeiho (Poem 2) and so on. The abolition of conventional titles for
poems provides readers with new possibilities for poetic imagination and reveals
an orientation towards visual poetry. The format of the poems in A Crow’s-Eye View
was extraordinary and shocking for Sang Yi’s contemporaries. Poem 1 stands out
in terms of its rejection of orthographic norms and word-spacing rules, and with
its repeated syntactic structures. In this poem, form becomes content. Through the
poetic structure of irony, some opposing attributes become identical. The theme of
the poem turns out to be the contradiction of human existence, a likely reference
to the unsuccessful struggle to escape from Japanese Imperialism, to nihilism and
to the frustration of colonized intellectuals. In this poem, reality is dismantled by
means of self-conscious and supersaturated sensations of speed, tension, anxiety,
battle and death.
A Crow’s-eye View was originally planned to appear in a series of thirty parts in
the daily newspaper Chosunjoongang Ilbo (Korean Central Daily), but the serial pub-
lication was suspended due to a flood of protests from readers. As Marinetti wrote
in the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism: “Any work of art that lacks a sense of
aggression can never be a masterpiece” (Marinetti: “Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism”, 14). Similarly, the poems of Sang Yi in the 1930s were a practical example
of a Futurist “slap in the face of public taste” (Burliuk et al.: “Poshchechina obsh-
chestvennomu vkusu”, 3-4) or what Marinetti called “a violent assault upon the forces
of the unknown with the intention of making them prostrate themselves at the feet of
mankind” (Marinetti: “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14).
 Korea 651

Futurism in South Korea after the Korean War

The Korean War (1950–1953) was a historical factor that determined the divergence
of Korean literature into two different directions. The first was a continuation of
Modernist tendencies from the 1930s; the other was the so-called ch’amyŏshi (Poetry
of Participation), which took a critical view of reality and used literature to cam-
paign for social reform. These two dissimilar trends influenced each other and char-
acterized the development of Korean literature up to the late twentieth century.
The Korean War had exposed South Korea to Western culture, and when the south-
ern part of the Peninsula recovered from the years of devastation, people became
aware of how much the country lagged behind artistically. The full scale of Modernism,
which had swept through Europe in the early twentieth century, now entered aesthetic
debates in Korea. However, it was only absorbed in a piecemeal fashion. Rather than
accepting Western trends in an unconditional manner, poets developed an indigenous
form of Modernism that was Western-oriented, but not a copy of Western art and lit-
erature (see Lee: “Paginhwan p’yŏngjŏn”, 39–40). Korean Modernism reflected home-
grown concerns and expressed ideas rooted in Asian traditions.
A leading representative of this development was Soo-young Kim (1921–1968),
who opposed the traditional lyricism of the 1950s and confronted social concerns in
a language that was novel and experimental. For him, Western Modernism offered a
model to be emulated in the transition from an underdeveloped to a sophisticated
country, from a desolate reality to an ideal future, from traditional to new art and
poetry. However, for Kim, who viewed the Korean reality from a Western perspective,
the chasm between these opposing extremes became too large to be bridged, forcing
him to experience endless frustration and self-contradiction.
Soo-young Kim was a leading Modernist poet who exposed the negative attributes
of modern civilization and urban life, the mentality of the petit bourgeoisie and the
taboos and insincerity that dominated Korean society in the early twentieth century.
Having grown up amidst violent upheavals and experienced extreme intellectual
anguish, Kim became the leader of the 1960s Poetry of Participation movement. This
trend sought to fuse art and life and make literature a dynamic force in society. The
political background to this was the Revolution of 19 April 1960 (Sailku hyŏkmyŏng),
an uprising of students and workers against the corrupt government and the exces-
sive abuse of power by the ruling Liberal Party.
In P’urŭn hanŭlŭl (Blue Sky, 1960), Soo-young Kim artfully intertwines a lyrical
and a political theme. Here, freedom is creative freedom and at the same time practi-
cal freedom. The ‘revolution’ in this poem is not just a social, but also an artistic one.
Kim’s poem is a good example of the transition from a Modernistic to a revolutionary
conception of art and literature. It signals a demand for a revolution in real life at a
time of social and political upheaval.
This revolutionary vision was greatly influenced by Russian Futurism, espe-
cially its poetic representative, Vladimir Mayakovsky. Soo-young Kim investigated
652 Kyoo Yun Cho

Mayakovsky’s Futurism and Pasternak’s creative process of overcoming Futurism.

Just as Mayakovsky emphasized the political relevance of art and, after the Russian
Revolution, made a transition towards agitation and propaganda, Kim, too, focussed
on a socially engaged form of poetry. However, Mayakovsky often found himself in
opposition to the functionaries of the Soviet State and to the doctrine of Socialist
Realism, venting his anger in satirical works. Similarly, after the 16 May Coup (Oilryuk
gunsa jeongbyeon), Kim shifted towards satire to express his despairing thoughts.
Parallels between the fates and creative paths of Mayakovsky and Kim can be seen in
other fields, too. Mayakovsky’s life and works reflected the coexistence of art and pol-
itics. However, his leftist ideas met with official prohibition in Korean society, which
became conservative in terms of politics, culture and ideology after the division into a
northern and southern State. Mayakovsky’s poetry became known to the public only
through unofficial channels and provided radical slogans against the oppressive mil-
itary régime of Chung-hee Park.
Although Soo-young Kim was less radical than Mayakovsky, he certainly aimed to
be a revolutionary poet and a poet of revolution. Soo-young Kim pursued a new form
of poetry rooted in social reality. The ideal of overcoming a depressing political reality
caused by war and military dictatorship was expressed through a poetic revolution
which involved a critical adaptation of Western artistic models. The organic combina-
tion of Western-oriented and reality-oriented thinking, artistic experimentation and
political reflection was the basis on which Soo-young Kim developed his avant-garde
aesthetics.

Korean Futurism in the early twenty-first century

A new group of poets whom the poet and critic Hyuk-woong Kwon (1967–) called
Miraep’a (Futurists) emerged after the year 2000. Kwon provided a simple definition
of their Futurist characteristics:

The recent young poets use a variety of poetic methods to create repetition. The message of their
poems is too rich to be stuffed into a monolithic frame. They do not sacrifice their message for
the purpose of musicality. There is an abundance of images; they send several narrators onto
the stage; ontological definitions are given up in favour of insights into society and history.
Distastefulness and dissonance were part of their aesthetics from the very beginning. (Kwon:
Miraep’a: Saeroun shiwa shiinŭl wihayŏ, 149)

Most of the poets that Kwon classifies as Futurists were born in the early 1970s. They
broke with traditional lyricism, deconstructed established traditions, proclaimed an anti-
aesthetics and dismantled the concept of a poetic narrator. They did not all adopt the
same themes, and never joined forces as a literary movement or school, but each poet on
his or her own pursued a unique and individual path. Since Hyuk-woong Kwon released
 Korea 653

his book, Miraep’a: Saeroun siwa siinŭl wihayŏ (Futurism: For New Poetry and Poets,
2005), the label has gradually expanded to represent all forms of new-wave lyricism and
unusual aesthetics. The poetic orientation of these poets can be captured with the word
‘de-lyricism’, in the sense that the poet does not seek to express an emotional experi-
ence in a subjective and appealing manner. He or she rejects all poetic forms that cannot
capture the wide spectrum of experiences in a modern age. Some of the stylistic devices
of the new poetics are repetition, fragmented rhythm, polyphony and the use of the gro-
tesque. The poems have a vague, fanciful, detached, disparate, even cruel character and
are devoid of any clearly defined poetic ‘I’. In other words, they express the fear and anx-
ieties of the modern human being through the deconstruction of the poetic narrator and
thus provide the reader with an unfamiliar yet fascinating poetic experience.
In stark contrast to traditionalist lyricism, the poetry of the Futurist poet Jang-
wook Lee (1968–) works with a dispersed rather than a single lyric ego. Marinetti
defined the characteristics of the new Futurist lyricism, in which “our literary ‘I’
is burnt up and destroys itself in the superior vibrancy of the cosmos” (Marinetti:
“Dynamic, Multichanneled Recitation”, 193). This is similar to Mayakovsky’s “My ‘I’
is much too small for me. Stubbornly a body pushes out of me” (Maiakovskii: “Oblako
v shtanakh”, 179). To Mayakovsky, such a dissociation from his poetic ‘I’ is a maxi-
mization of lyricism. Eventually, the enlarged and Futurist ‘I’ is alone, having been
deprived of a true dialogue with others. Moreover, the dissociation of the poetic nar-
rator was the manifestation of a fundamentally and inherently tragic psychological
state caused by Mayakovsky’s alienation from the masses. Although in Jang-wook
Lee’s poems, the poetic ‘I’ does not experience such a tragedy, there is a similarity
to Mayakovsky’s Futurist poetics because the dissociation of the poetic narrator and
the deconstruction of the poetic ‘I’ becomes an opportunity to escape from traditional
lyricism and to embark on a journey to find the true ego.
Tragic lyricism, as defined by Kwon, is a poetic tendency also to be found in
Futurist experiments such as discord between the poetic subject and object. Tragic
lyricism separates the poetic subject from the object; it creates instability and disor-
der, and is thus inevitably perplexing and strange. Kwon points out that such char-
acteristics are the signs of a new transformation of Korean poetry in the 2000s. He
views a series of Futurist poems in terms of the logic of similitude and describes the
character of the poems as follows:

It is free from the pressures of previous generations in terms of language and aesthetic consci-
ousness. This alien language will eventually be translated into our language, thus positioning
itself as a dialect of similar groups. Until then, this strange language will produce new signifier
and signifieds. Aesthetics was developed through such heterogeneity and hybridism. (Kwon:
Miraep’a: Saeroun shiwa shiinŭl wihayŏ, 146–147)

Russian Futurist poets had a similar idea in mind when they threw the world into
chaos by dismantling the values of previous generations. They sought to create a new
social ethics and approached this task first through language. The alogical zaum’ was
654 Kyoo Yun Cho

presented as a future language that escapes segmentation, root-word assembly and

phonation, in addition to dismantling the relationship between signifier and signified.
The pun, the unfamiliar metaphor and so on became fundamental forms in their poetry.
As mentioned above, Korean Futurism was not an independent school of thought
or literature, and never published a manifesto like those issued in Italy and Russia.
Essentially, the first ‘Futurist manifesto’ in Korea was created by a critic, Hyuk-woong
Kwon, who in 2006 explained his use of the term ‘Futurist’ thus: “Futurism is an
empty name and a type of blank space. This term may be used or may not be used,
but if the positions of all that exists is revealed even slightly through this blank space,
then I believe that there is sufficient reason to use this term” (Kwon: “Miraep’a shiŭi
arŭmdaumŭl saenggak’am”, 128). ‘Emptiness’ offers the possibility of newness and
an opportunity to face a new literary reality. Interestingly enough, the poets who were
called ‘Futurists’ did not agree with this label. This was due to the fact that the young
poets recognized that the act of manifesto-like declarations had degenerated into a
mere gesture that has no substantial effect or meaning of its own.
The manifestos of Italian and Russian Futurism proclaimed a need to free art
and literature from traditional aesthetic conceptions. When Korean poets pursued
a similar goal, they caused intense debates among critics and readers. The critical
arguments against the Futurists in Korea can be grouped into three types: (1) Poetic
communication is not possible because their poetic world is excessively playful and
self-referential; (2) Futurist poets have an obsession with ‘newness’; (3) Futurist poets
are institutionalized and function like a coercive norm that cannot be opposed any
longer by young poets, thus becoming – at odds with the underlying intentions of
Futurists – an impediment to the development of Korean literature.

Conclusion
The development of Korean literature since the 1930s was strongly affected by
Futurism, first in its Italian variant and then in its highly politicized Russian alter-
native. This led to the rise of the Poetry of Participation and the debates of the early
2000s, when Eun-young Jin and Hyung-chul Shin, along with Hyuk-woong Kwon and
Jang-wook Lee, were classified as a Futurist group of poets (Miraep’a) whose politi-
cal poetry contributed to the development and progress of Korean society. Almost a
hundred years after the emergence of Futurism in early twentieth-century Europe, a
debate on Futurism as a literary tendency in the Korean literary world led to a very
interesting and productive discussion which, unlike the ideological debates in the
1980s and 1990s, was primarily concerned with poetic aesthetics. Only after the
emergence of the young Korean poets contentiously defined as Futurists did their
compatriots really begin to understand how to view and evaluate avant-garde experi-
mentation and new forms of literary language.
 Korea 655

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Kim, Gi-rim: Kimgirim chŏnjip [Collected Works]. Vol. 2. Seoul: Shimseoldang, 1988.
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Seoul: Moonji, 2005.
Kwon, Hyuk-woong: “Miraep’a shiŭi arŭmdaumŭl saenggak’am” [Thingking of the Beauty of Futurist
Poetry] Shilch’ŏnmunhak [Practical Literature]. Vol. 84. Winter 2006. 128–135.
Lee, Dong-ha: “Paginhwan p’yŏngjŏn.” [A Critical Biography of In-hwan Park] D. Lee: Pakinhwan
[In-hwan Park]. Seoul: Munhaksekyesa, 1993. 13–87.
Maiakovskii, Vladimir: “Oblako v shtanakh.” [Cloud in Trousers] V. Maiakovskii: Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii [Complete Works]. Vol. 1. Moskva: Goslitizdat, 1955. 173–196.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Dynamic, Multichanneled Recitation.” Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter
Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 193–199.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter
Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Park, Young-hee: “Chungyosulŏsajŏn.” [A Dictionary of Primary Predicates] Kaepyŏk [Dawn] 49
(8 July 1924): 20–21.
Yang, Ju-dong: “Kuju hyŏndae munyesasang kaegwan.” [An Overview of Modern European
Literature] Donga Ilbo [East Asia Daily], 3 January 1929. 5.

Further reading
Cho, Kiu Iun [Kyoo Yun Cho]: “Vospriiatie Maiakovskogo v Koree.” [The Perception of Mayakovsky in
Korea] Russkii iazyk za rubezhom [Russian Language Abroad] 5 (2009): 79–85.
Cho, Kyoo Yun: “Futurism in Korea: From the Historical to the Postmodern Avant-Garde.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 6 (2016): 3–21.
Ha, Sang-il: Sŏchŏngŭi miraewa pip’yŏngŭi yunli [The Future of Lyricism and Ethics of Criticism].
Seoul: Shilch’ŏnmunhaksa, 2007.
Han, Sŏngch’ŏl: “Italia Miraejuŭiŭi Han’guk munhak yŏnghyang yŏn’gu – 1920nyŏndae Han’guk
munhakgwa Kim Tonginŭl chungsimŭro.” [The Impact of Italian Futurism on Korean Literature in
the 1920s, with a Focus on Korean Literature and Dong-In Kim] Italliaŏmunhak / Lettere Italiane
17 (2005): 189–210.
Kim, Hyosin: “Miraejuŭi sŏn’ŏngwa Han’guk munhak – 1930nyŏndae shirŭl chungsimŭro.”
[The Futurist Manifesto and Korean Literature, with a Focus on Poems of the 1930s]
Oegungmunhakyŏn’gu [Studies in Foreign Literature] 40 (November 2010): 77–104.
Kwon, Hyuk-woong: “Haengpokhan sŏjŏngsi, pulhaenghan sŏjŏngsi.” [Happy Lyric Poetry, Tragic
Lyric Poetry] Munyejungang [Literary Centre], Summer 2005. 45–52.
Lee, Jang-wook: Naŭi uulhan modŏn boi [My Melancholy Modern Boy]. Seoul: Changbi, 2005.
Aija Brasliņa
40 Latvia
In the early twentieth century, Latvia experienced a modernization of art and liter-
ature. In breaking with traditional aesthetics, Latvian Modernists – both in art and
literature – combined, transformed and synthesized fragmentary impressions of
Futurism with impulses from other modern movements, creating derivations, indi-
vidual modifications and hybrid styles. In articles written by their contemporaries,
the term ‘Futurism’ was often used with reference to phenomena of the so-called ‘new
art’ and applied to various forms of early and classical Modernism in Latvia. Futurism
played a certain rôle in the modernization of Latvian art and literature, but did not
develop into a national movement in its own right; rather, it was assimilated in a
restrained manner, as was the case with other avant-garde tendencies. The local cul-
tural environment was essentially conservative and characterized by an absence of
industrialization and modern city culture. Following the declaration of an independ-
ent Latvian State in 1918, the small community of Latvian Modernists, coming largely
from the lower strata of society, called for a reinforcement of national culture, not an
aggressive eradication of, or war against, tradition.

Early responses to Futurism

The literary journals Domas (Thoughts, 1912–1915) and Druva (Field, 1912–1914) were
the main outlets for reports on Italian avant-garde art during the period before the
First World War, but this was not followed by any practical engagement with the ideas
and aesthetics of Futurism. In the few articles and essays published between 1912 and
1914, one can observe attitudes of irony and critical detachment towards the Futurist
movement. In November 1912, the magazine Domas cited the main points of Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and translated
them into Latvian ([Anon.]: “Futūrisms”). The same article also contained an analysis
of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) and mentioned the manifes-
tos of the Futurist painters. However, the full texts of these proclamations were not
published at the time. In November 1912, the writer Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš presented
Futurist painting in Druva (J.J.: “Futūristi”) by summarizing a review that had been
published a few months earlier in the German magazine Der Kunstwart on the Sturm
Gallery exhibition in Berlin (see Avenarius: “Futuristen”).
Before the First World War, direct encounters with Italian Futurism were very
rare. The critic Ernests Puriņš (pen name Sillarts, 1886–1943), then living in Paris,
described the principles of the new movement in his review of Umberto Boccioni’s
sculpture exhibition, held at the Galerie La Boëtie (20 June – 16 July 1913) (Sillarts:

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-040
 Latvia 657

“Futūrisms”). When Puriņš obtained a copy of Marinetti’s novel Mafarka le futuriste

(Mafarka the Futurist, printed in December 1909, but saying 1910 on the cover), he
gave it to Jāzeps Grosvalds (1891–1920), one of the initiators of Latvian Modernism,
who found it “bad, but exciting” (quoted in Kļaviņš: Džo: Jāzepa Grosvalda dzīve un
māksla, 125). More reports regarding Futurism appeared in local magazines, and the
daily press printed articles about Futurist exhibitions and public events in Russia, as
well as on Marinetti’s visit to Moscow and Saint Petersburg in January/February 1914.
The prevailing opinion in Latvian art history is that local representatives of
Modernism were well informed about Italian Futurism. However, a detailed investi-
gation shows that knowledge of Futurism was largely indirect, acquired through mag-
azines and art books printed in Russia, Germany and France, and therefore did not
have a decisive impact on artistic developments in the 1910s. Some Latvian artists
came into contact with Cubo-Futurism, and later, during the years of the First World
War and the October Revolution, they witnessed the amalgamation of socio-political
Utopias, Proletkult doctrine and formal experimentation. A few others encountered
Italian Futurism on their travels abroad.
Voldemārs Matvejs (1877–1914), the founding figure of Latvian Modernism, had an
important influence on the early Russian avant-garde, since he was one of the leading
figures of the artists’ group Soiuz molodezhi (Union of Youth) in Saint Petersburg. His
theoretical articles Printsipy novogo iskusstva (Principles of the New Art, 1912) and
Printsipy tvorchestva v plasticheskikh iskusstvakh: Faktura (Creative Principles in the
Plastic Arts: Faktura, 1914), published under the pseudonym Vladimir Markov, as well
as his innovative approach to the study of ‘primitive’ cultures, Iskusstvo negrov (Negro
Art, 1919), inspired Russian Futurists and Neo-Primitivists. Matvejs also corrected an
important text by his partner Varvara Bubnova, a Russian translation of two Futurist
group manifestos published in the catalogue of the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition in
Paris (5–24 February 1912), for the second issue of Soiuz molodezhi (June 1912; see
Boccioni et al.: “Manifest futuristov” and “Eksponenty k publike”).
During the propaganda tour of the Moscow Futurists to the Crimea, Volga and
Caucasia districts (January–February 1914), Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burliuk
and Vasily Kamensky gave a public performance in Kazan (20 February 1914). It was
attended by the Latvian sculptor Kārlis Zāle (1888–1942) and the painter Ludolfs
Liberts (1895–1959). Both were hardly impressed by the poetry recitations, but later,
in the early 1920s, variations of Cubo-Futurism appeared in Liberts’ painting and
stage design. During the First World War, several Latvian artists, including the future
Modernist leaders Jāzeps Grosvalds and Jēkabs Kazaks (1895–1920), visited Russian
Futurist exhibitions in Moscow and Petrograd, yet they were unconvinced by what
they saw and remained sceptical towards the movement. Nonetheless, Kazaks
attached an excerpt from Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (Manifesto of the Futurist
Painters, 1910), copied by Romans Suta (1896–1944) from a Russian source, to his
unpublished essay, Manas domas par glezniecību (My Thoughts on Painting, 1917;
see Archival sources).
658 Aija Brasliņa

Niklāvs Strunke (1894–1966), inspired by the Saint Petersburg avant-garde scene

and Matvejs’ ideas, dismissed tradition in a radical manner, using slogans reminis-
cent of the aggressive rhetoric of Futurist anti-traditionalism. Strunke’s manifestos
written in 1917–1918 were summed up in his article, Jaunā māksla (The New Art,
1919), a text that is one of the earliest and most passionate testimonies of Futurism
in Latvian art history. Possibly around the same time, Strunke drew a stylized por-
trait of Marinetti (Alberts Prande collection. Academic Library of the University of
Latvia) and painted a Futurist Kompozīcija (Composition, c. 1918–19; Zuzāns collec-
tion, Riga). In Enrico Prampolini’s magazine Noi (issue no. 6-9, 1924), Strunke pub-
lished a sketch of his dynamic, geometric stage design for the play Zelta zirgs (The
Golden Horse, 1918, location unknown) by the Latvian poet Rainis (pseud. of Jānis
Pliekšāns, 1865–1929). It echoed Kazimir Malevich’s abstract stage for the Futurist
opera Pobeda nad solntsem (Victory over the Sun, 1913), reproduced on the cover
of the script. Sculptor Teodors Zaļkalns (1876–1972) also came close to adopting
a Cubo–Futuristic manner in 1918–1919 with his portraits of composers Alexander
Scriabin and Modest Mussorgsky, which were created as part of the Bolshevik Plan for
Monumental Propaganda in Petrograd but were never realized as actual monuments.
At the time, Zaļkalns and Zāle had established contact with the Italian sculptor Italo
Griselli (1880–1958), who had joined the Russian Cubo-Futurists after coming to
Russia in 1913. Griselli painted two portraits of Zaļkalns in a Futurist manner (Ritratto
di un amico di Teodors Zaļkalns, Ritratto di Teodors Zaļkalns, both 1915; see Brucciani:
Griselli nelle avanguardie, 36–38). Futurist influences also shaped the graphic work
of Sigismunds Vidbergs (1890–1970), more precisely, his dynamic and calligraphic
ink drawings of urban motifs. Having become politically engaged in the wake of the
October Revolution, Vidbergs drew covers and vignettes for the Petrograd magazine
Plamya (Flame, 1918–1920) in which he glorified the ‘victorious proletariat’. Echoes of
Proletkult and Futurist propaganda art also reached Riga in the form of decorations
made by local Modernists for the celebration of 1 May 1919, during the brief period of
Soviet rule in Latvia.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, Latvian literary circles were well
informed about early Modernism in Russian literature, especially owing to their close
contact with Symbolist groups. The most significant local ‘urban poet’ was Aleksandrs
Čaks (1901–1950), who made his début in post-war independent Latvia. He found
inspiration for his work in 1918–20 from Futurist and Imaginist gatherings in Moscow
and from Mayakovsky’s poetry reading in Penza. Another person with an interest in
Russian Futurism was the writer, critic and theorist Andrejs Kurcijs (pseud. of Andrejs
Kuršinskis, 1884–1959), who lived in Petrograd for a while and brought back to Latvia
rare copies of books by Aleksei Kruchenykh. In 1918–19, three future members of the
Latvian artist group Zaļā vārna (Green Crow, 1925–1940) – Kārlis Baltgailis (1893–1979),
Jānis Plase (1892–1929) and Francisks Varslavāns (1899–1949) – took part in Futurist
activities in the Russian Far East. In Chita, the painter Plase, together with the Russian
sculptor Innokenty Zhukov (1875–1948) from Petrograd, opened an exhibition (1918)
 Latvia 659

and organized a public debate entitled “Old and New Art”, which contemporaries
saw as an attempt to make Futurism more accessible. In 1919, Plase and his Russian
colleagues Petr Lvov, Pavel Lyubarsky and others came together in Khabarovsk to
form a group called Zelenaia koshka (Green Cat), whose activities have variously been
described as Futurist, Cubist and Expressionist, but which can also be associated with
Russian Neo-Primitivism (see Omuka: “Futurism in the Far East”). In Vladivostok –
the so-called Futurist capital of the Far Eastern Republic – Plase met David Burliuk
who, having joined Russian Futurist circles in the Far East, was now part of the legend-
ary Balaganchik club. The painter Varslavāns became Burliuk’s pupil in Vladivostok,
but his early Futurist work is now considered lost. Balaganchik in turn served as an
example for more public forms of action aimed at democratizing art, which were later
carried out in Latvia in a moderate and apolitical manner under the slogan “More art
in life, more life in art!” Burliuk and his followers were also acknowledged by the inno-
vative Riga Artists’ Group (1920–1940), but the Franco-centric orientation chosen by
them in the 1920s, as well as the patriotic climate of the newly founded State, eventu-
ally led to a neglect of the former Russian avant-garde impulses.

Encounters with secondo futurismo within the

international avant-garde
In the early 1920s, the Latvian Modernists established direct contact with repre-
sentatives of the second generation of Italian Futurism. Seeking to overcome their
isolation in the periphery of the European cultural landscape, they became part
of an international avant-garde network. The financial support provided by the
Latvian Culture Fund gave artists an opportunity to travel abroad and enter into
contact with avant-garde circles in the European metropolises. Some Latvian artists
had episodic encounters with the Futurist leader and ideologue Marinetti, but they
collaborated more closely with the representatives of secondo futurismo, Enrico
Prampolini (1894–1956) and Ruggero Vasari (1898–1968), or with the leading figure
of ‘mechanical art’, Ivo Pannaggi (1901–1981). After the First World War, the artistic
practices of Latvian Modernists were shaped by a rational, abstract and geometric
stylization of form, which echoed the aesthetics of Futurist arte meccanica, as well
as the prevailing atmosphere of a pan-European rappel à l’ ordre. Along with the
dominant influence of French Cubism, Latvian Modernists received impulses from
Purism, Constructivism and second-wave Futurism. Both in visual art and litera-
ture, themes, motifs and images typical of urban culture and the cult of technical
progress became increasingly popular, as did Futurist representations of movement
and speed. Secondo futurismo, as altered by ‘mechanical art’, echoed the main
interests of Latvian Modernists in the local ‘episode of Cubism’, but it is difficult
to identify specific impulses of style in the general modernization of form dictated
660 Aija Brasliņa

by the ‘new rationality’. The leftist cultural circles constituted a fertile ground for
innovation in formal expression due to their link with proletarian ideology and
social utopianism.

Berlin, 1921–1923
In the early 1920s, sculptor Kārlis Zāle (known then as Karl Zalit) became part of an
international avant-garde movement in post-war Berlin. Zāle established a close asso-
ciation with Italian Futurists and formed contacts with representatives of the Sturm
Gallery (Herwarth Walden), the Novembergruppe (Rudolf Belling) and the founders
of the Dom iskusstv (House of Arts), the Russian émigrés Ivan Puni (1892–1956) and
Kseniya Boguslavskaya (1892–1972). At the same time, Zāle continued his collab-
oration with Italo Griselli, who came from Petrograd to Berlin. Taken under Zāle’s
wing, Latvian Modernists were able to participate in two major art exhibitions in
Berlin (Große Berliner Kunstausstellung, 20 May 1922–1917 September 1922, 19 May–17
September 1923) and collaborate with the principal representative of secondo futur-
ismo in Germany, the poet and playwright Ruggero Vasari, thus becoming part of
his ‘International Futurist’ circle. By carrying out Marinetti’s post-war strategy and
forming new alliances with avant-garde artists of Central and Eastern Europe, the
Italian writer became the main intermediary in the encounter between Latvian
Modernists and second-wave Futurists.
In 1922–1923, the work of Zāle, of the sculptor Arnolds Dzirkals (1896–1942)
and of the painters Romans Suta, Aleksandra Beļcova (1892–1981) and Niklāvs
Strunke became part of the permanent exhibition in Vasari’s art gallery, then
functioning as the Headquarters of the German branch of Futurism (Direktion der
Futuristen-Bewegung), also known as Casa internazionale degli artisti (see p. 494
in the entry on Germany in this volume). Reproductions of Zāle’s and Dzirkals’
sculptures were included in the gallery’s postcard series Futuristische Postkarten,
and in Puni’s book Sovremennaia zhivopis’ (Contemporary Painting, 1923), which
was to be published in Italian – with a preface by Vasari – as part of a series of art
books edited by Noi. In the monthly magazine Der Futurismus (1922), Vasari com-
mended the core members of the ‘Berlin Futurists’ – Belling, Puni and Zāle who,
in turn, were described by Viktor Shklovsky in the rubric Charakterköpfe futuris-
tischer Künstler (Portraits of Futurist Artists). The Latvian avant-garde art maga-
zine, Laikmets (Epoch, nos. 1–4, 1923), published for a short period in Berlin, was
advertised in Noi as Rivista internazionale d’avanguardia from Riga. The Latvian
editors had intended to issue a special edition of the journal dedicated to Italian
Futurism, as can be gleaned from an advertisement in Noi, 2nd series, no. 2 (May
1923), p. 16. Unfortunately, they failed to bring the project to fruition. The ‘Berlin
Futurists’, among them Zāle, Dzirkals and Puni, formed the Gruppe Synthès
 Latvia 661

(Synthesis Group) and attended the first Congress of the Union internationaler
fortschrittlicher Künstler (International Union of Progressive Artists) that took
place in Düsseldorf in May 1922 and had Prampolini and Vasari amongst its dele-
gates. The Latvian members of the unofficial group of ‘International Futurists’ in
Berlin were later mentioned by Marinetti as followers of his movement (Marinetti:
“Le Futurisme mondial: Manifeste à Paris”, 1).
The sculptures of Zāle’s Berlin period (now lost) have been interpreted in the
context of ‘Berlin Cubism’ and compared to the work of Cubists belonging to the Paris
School (Henri Laurens, Jacques Lipchitz, József Csáky). Plastiskas formas (Masu kus-
tības) (Plastic Forms [Movements of Masses], 1922) and Dejotāja (Deja) (Dancer [Dance],
1922) show an architectonic and geometric stylization of form, a constructive logic and
a strict tectonic structure that complement a dynamic tension arising from the author’s
unrestrained synthesis of similar impulses gained from late Cubism, Constructivism and
Futurism. Similar traits can be found in a now lost painting by Strunke, Automātiskās
durvis (Automatic Doors, 1923, location unknown), which depicts human silhouettes in
motion in the famous revolving door of the Romanisches Café.

Italy, 1923–1927
Following Ruggero Vasari’s invitation to visit Italy, Niklāvs Strunke was the only one
among the Latvian Modernists to continue his collaboration with Futurist artists
and writers (e. g. Marinetti, Vasari, Prampolini, Pannaggi and Marasco). He stayed in
Rome, Florence and Capri, and later recalled in his memoirs:

At that time, I had friendly and close connections with Marinetti and his group as well as with the
Italian avant-garde theatre theoretician and director Antonio Giulio Bragaglia. I signed several
of Marinetti’s manifestos as representative of the new generation of Latvian artists, worked on
their monthly Noi and also INDEX, edited by Antonio Giulio Bragaglia, actively partaking in their
events and life, just like one of them (Brasliņa: “Latvian Modernists in Berlin and Rome in the
1920s”, 247).

The artist stated, without going into detail, that sculptor Kārlis Zāle had also signed
Marinetti’s manifestos. The Latvian painter and illustrator was interested in the nov-
elties of stage design and the idea of experimental theatre, which were being pursued
at the time in the artistic circles of the Teatro degli Indipendenti, led by Anton Giulio
Bragaglia, and the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia, where Strunke had a solo exhibition in 1924.
Prampolini was held in high esteem by Niklāvs Strunke, whose stage-design practices
were modelled on ideas expressed in Prampolini’s manifesto, L’ atmosfera scenica
futurista (The Futurist Scenic Atmosphere, 1924), as well as other Futurist principles
with which he had become acquainted, both theoretically and practically, during his
stay in Italy.
662 Aija Brasliņa

The editors of the Futurist magazine Noi continued their collaboration with the
publishers of Laikmets and included an article by Strunke on Tairov and the Moscow
Kamerny Theatre in their special issue on Teatro e scena futurista (Strunke: “Il teatro
russo di Tairoff”). Before that, Noi had already collaborated with the Paris-based
Latvian journalist and editor of the journal Revue baltique, Arturs Tupiņš (also known
as Arthur Toupine, 1889–1952), who had written an article on the Russian composer
Alexander Scriabin (Noi 4:1, January 1920). In 1924, Strunke contributed several carica-
tures to Bragaglia’s satirical magazine, INDEX rerum virorumque prohibitorum (Index
of Forbidden Things and Men, 1921–1924), including one of Ivo Pannagi as “leader”
of the Futurist painters. In Rome, he painted a portrait of his friend, entitled Galvas
konstrukcija (Ivo Pannadži portrets) (Construction of a Head: Portrait of Ivo Pannaggi,
1924, Latvian National Museum of Art). Two of Pannaggi’s paintings, Il fumatore
(The Smoker) and Tetti di Roma (The Roofs of Rome), were subsequently displayed
in an exhibition organized by the Riga People’s University (June 1924). Strunke’s
Constructivist, rationally abstract Italian landscapes (Capri, 1924, Zuzāns collection;
Sorrento, 1924–1925, Latvian National Museum of Art) exemplify the typical tendency
of the period to accentuate the architectonic qualities in painting, while restrained
motion, represented in the manner of secondo futurismo, organized the scenographic
composition of his painting Cilvēks, kas ieiet istabā (Man Entering the Room, 1927,
Latvian National Museum of Art).

Paris, 1927–1928
Former connections with the avant-garde almanac Keturi vėjai (Four Winds), pub-
lished in Kaunas, as well as with the Purist circle of L’ Esprit nouveau prompted
Romans Suta and Andrejs Kurcijs to take part in the publication of the French-
Lithuanian multilingual literary and art magazine MUBA: Revue internationale (nos.
1–2, 1928), issued in Paris and gaining wider recognition abroad than in Lithuania.
The editor of the journal was the Lithuanian Futurist poet Juozas Tysliava (1902–1961),
who attracted not only like-minded artists and writers from the States of the Baltic
region, but also a considerable number of European avant-garde representatives from
various movements, including the Italian Futurists Marinetti, Prampolini and Luigi
Russolo (see also pp. 674 and 676 in the entry on Lithuania in this volume). Among
other things, Keturi vėjai published an article on Futurist theatre by Vittorio Orazi
(pseud. of Alessandro Prampolini, 1891–1976); on the initiative of Strunke and Kurcijs,
a general preview of contemporary Italian theatre, provided by Orazi, had already
been published in the Latvian magazine Domas in a version adapted by Andrejs
Kurcijs (Kurcijs: “Teātris Itālijā”). In 1927, the painter Francisks Varslavāns took part
as an actor in the performances of Prampolini’s Theâtre de la Pantomime Futuriste
(Futurist Pantomime Theatre, 1927) in the capital of France.
 Latvia 663

The resonance of Futurist impulses in

interwar Latvia
In his theoretical treatise Aktīvā māksla (Active Art, 1923), one of the few manifestos
of the Latvian avant-garde, Andrejs Kurcijs declared the beginning of a new era in art,
which he called Activism. It never evolved into a fully fledged movement, but it did
bear witness to a shift in aesthetic and social positions, in which artistic innovation
was united with the pathos of social change. Latvian interwar literature turned to
the description of the urbanized environment and thus echoed Futurist poetics, its
characteristic vocabulary, intonation and poetic technique. These impulses served
as catalysts for formal experiments with Free Verse, line breaks and visual arrange-
ments of text, as well as the invention of new words. In the search for a new form of
poetry, Futurist elements overlapped and interacted with the more prevalent local
tendencies. This can be seen, for example, in the semi-Futurist poetry anthology Es
sludinu (I Declare, 1920) by the Expressionist poet Pēteris Ērmanis (1893–1969), and
later on in works that operated with elements borrowed from Russian Constructivism.
Increasingly, Vladimir Mayakovsky became a focus of attention, as he embodied what
was regarded as Russian Futurist literature.
Futurist influences took an original turn in the work of the urban poet and pro-
vocative aesthete Aleksandrs Čaks, especially in his collections of poems, Es un šis
laiks (This Age and I, 1928), Sirds uz trotuāra (Heart on the Pavement, 1928), Apašs
frakā (Hoodlum in a Tailcoat, 1929), Pasaules krogs (World’s Tavern, 1929). Here,
as well as in poems published in a variety of magazines, he juxtaposed life at the
heart of the city with that in the outskirts of town. In an attempt to provoke his
readers, the poet presented himself as an apolitical rebel and ‘hooligan’, an extrav-
agant reformist of poetic imagery and form, a master of Free Verse. Čaks’ lyrical
persona – a cynical ‘street urchin’ – was inspired by the poems of Mayakovsky.
Čaks’ poetic rendering of the unpoetical and his use of colourful, paradoxical
metaphors reflected impulses received from Russian Futurism and Imaginism and
German Expressionism.
Although Čaks rejected traditional values, he did not accept the pronounced
anti-traditionalist and aggressive stance of Futurism. Instead, he associated with the
Zaļā vārna (Green Crow) group and the leftist literary circle Trauksme (Alarm, 1928–
1930). In their manifesto, Mēs esam (We Are, 1928), they advocated the concept of
Presentism in an attempt to dissociate themselves from Futurism and all other avant-
garde -isms. On 22 September 1929, several young members of the Trauksme group
organized a clamorous, Futurist-like procession, with the aim of promoting poetry:
they marched through the streets of Jelgava, accompanied by Čaks beating a drum.
The magazine Trauksme propagated internationalism, promoted new literary move-
ments and published translations of poems by foreign authors, including Russian
and Baltic poets associated with Futurism.
664 Aija Brasliņa

By combining Modernism with social utopianism, the left-wing Modernist Linards

Laicens (1883–1938) stirred the Latvian literary scene to activity with Dzejas principi
(The Principles of Poetry, 1922), an essay that can also be considered a manifesto. The
revolutionary rhetoric of Laicens, an advocate of Socialism, was in part shaped by the
propaganda texts, oratorical intonations and laconic phrasing of Russian Futurists, as
is evident from his familiarity with Mayakovsky’s work in his poem, Mans Majakovskis
(My Mayakovsky) in the collection Politika un lirika (Politics and Poetry, 1936) and
the essay Krievu jaunākā literatūra (The Latest in Russian Literature, 1924). Laicens
expressed a fervent rejection of the old world through a ceaseless repetition of “Down
with...!” and the determined and destructive stance of his lyrical persona. The rhythm
and motion of the modern metropolis – a pulsating, mechanical organism – were
brought to life in his collection of urban poetry, Berlīne (Berlin, 1924), composed in
Germany in a poetic style reminiscent of Futurism and Expressionism. Laicens also
produced several propaganda plays with his so-called ‘constructive games’, for
example Mītiņš ballē (Meeting at a Ball, 1923) and Alfa un Auto (Alpha and Auto, 1925).
In the second half of the 1920s, certain trends of Constructivist literature – which
evolved from Futurism in Soviet Russia – became popular in Latvia. Reflecting an
enthusiasm for ‘machinism’, these trends saw various reinterpretations in the work of
leftist writers, such as Pēteris Ķikuts (1907–1943), a local apologist of Constructivism,
whose poem Mašīna (Machine, 1930) was written in the manner of veshchizm (thing-
ism). The influence of the Russian Left Front of the Arts (Levy front iskusstv) was evident
in the magazines edited by Laicens, Kreisā Fronte (Left Front, 1928–1930) and Tribīne
(Tribune, 1931–1932). The unusual writing style of poet and clergyman Jānis Steiks
(1855–1932), with its references to Futurism and Dadaism, stands out in the context of
Latvian literature. Steiks had a passion for rhythmic poetry, new and bizarre words and
etymological games; his linguistic experiments were akin to the transrational language
of zaum’ used by the Russian Futurists (see pp. 283, 776-777 and 806 in this volume).
During the 1920s, Strunke produced stage designs for Latvian and Italian the-
atres, in which he turned to an aesthetics of architectonic and geometric form. His
work at the Workers’ Theatre and the National Theatre echoed the scenographic
reforms carried out by Latvian theatre innovator Jānis Muncis (1886–1955) at the
Daile Theatre. The modernization of Latvian theatre was mostly inspired by the ideas
of Alexander Tairov and Vsevolod Meyerhold, a re-shaping of the Futurist teatro sin-
tetico (Theatre of Essential Brevity), Russian Constructivist stage design and other
sources, which were re-interpreted by local artists. An echo of the Italian theatre of
mass propaganda can be found in grandiose, multi-media outdoor performances.
Atdzimšanas dziesma (The Song of Rebirth, 1934) and Tev mūžam dzīvot, Latvija
(Long Live Latvia, 1934), directed by former stage reformer Jānis Muncis. They were
an expression of right-wing ideology and reflected Kārlis Ulmanis’s authoritarian
régime (1934–1940).
In the applied arts, the progressive porcelain painting studio Baltars (1924–
1928) combined Futurist impulses with typical Cubist, Constructivist and Art Déco
 Latvia 665

elements, which appeared not only in their signature style, but also in the sub-
jects depicted (for example, the plate “Aviation” by Sigismunds Vidbergs [1925] or
“Aviator” by Aleksandra Beļcova [1925–1928]). The typographic revolution brought
about by parole in libertà, as well as Futurist and Constructivist impulses, gained
recognition in Latvia around 1930 during the rise of ‘New Typography’, when
excerpts of Marinetti’s manifesto Distruzione della sintassi – immaginazione senza
fili – parole in libertà (Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-
in-Freedom, 1913) was translated into Latvian in Latvijas Grāmatrūpniecības
Apskats (Marinetti: “Tipogrāfiska revolūcija un brīva izteiksmes ortogrāfija”), as
part of essay by the unknown author “A.”, “Jaunās tipogrāfijas vēsture” (History of
the New Typography).
When the declaration “On the Restoration of Independence of the Republic
of Latvia” was adopted on 4 May 1990, and Latvia’s independence was restored in
August 1991, the literary magazine Grāmata (Book, no. 4, April 1991) issued a special
edition dedicated to Futurism, symbolically mapping out potential areas of research
that had been and impeded during the period of Soviet occupation. Although some of
this work has been undertaken in the past twenty-five years, more thorough research
and a re-estimation are required in order to assess the contextual developments of
Modernism in Latvia and Europe and reinterpret the impact of Futurism on Latvian
literature, theatre, book design and visual arts.

Works cited

Archival sources
Kazaks, Jēkabs: Manas domas par glezniecību [My Thoughts on Painting, 1917]. Latvijas Valsts
arhīvs, f. 2204 (Jānis Pujāts Collection), apr.3v, dossier 110.

Printed sources
A.: “Jaunās tipogrāfijas vēsture.” [History of the New Typography] Latvijas Grāmatrūpniecības
Apskats [Review of Latvian Book Industry] 3:22 (April 1930): 18–22.
[Anon.]: “Futūrisms.” [Futurism] Domas [Thoughts] 1:11 (November 1912): 1223–1226.
[Anon.]: “Futūristu klauni.” [Futurist clowns] Domas [Thoughts] 3:5 (May 1914): 624–626.
Avenarius, Ferdinand: “Futuristen.” Der Kunstwart 25:17 (25 June 1912): 278–281.
Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini: “Manifeste de
peintres futuristes.” Les Peintres futuristes italiens. Paris: Galerie Bernheim-Jeunes, 1912.
15–22. Russian translation by Varvara Bubnova “Manifest futuristov.” Soiuz molodezhi 1:2
(June 1912): 23–28.
666 Aija Brasliņa

Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini: “Les Exposants au
publique.” Les Peintres futuristes italiens. Paris: Galerie Bernheim-Jeunes, 1912. 1–14. Russian
translation by Varvara Bubnova “Eksponenty k publike.” Soiuz molodezhi 1:2 (June 1912): 29–35.
Brasliņa, Aija: “Latvian Modernists in Berlin and Rome in the 1920s: Encounters with ‘secondo
futurismo’.”International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 1 (2011): 231–261.
Brucciani, Patrizio: Griselli nelle avanguardie (1911–1923). Firenze: Nerbini, 2010.
Čaks, Aleksandrs: Apašs frakā [Hoodlum in a Tailcoat]. Rīga: Seši, 1929.
Čaks, Aleksandrs: Es un šis laiks [This Age and I]. Rīga: Seši, 1928.
Čaks, Aleksandrs: Pasaules krogs [World’s Tavern]. Rīga: Seši, 1929.
Čaks, Aleksandrs: Sirds uz trotuāra [Heart on the Pavement]. Rīga: Seši, 1928.
[Editorial Collective]: “Mēs esam: Manifests.” [We Are: Manifesto] Trauksme [Alarm] 1 (November
1928): 1–3.
Der Futurismus 1 (May 1922) – 7/8 (November–December 1922).
Ērmanis, Pēteris: Es sludinu. Rīga: Vaiņags, 1920.
J. J. [Jaunsudrabiņš, Jānis]: “Futūristi.” [Futurists] Druva [Field] 1:11 (November 1912): 1390–1392.
Kļaviņš, Eduards: Džo: Jāzepa Grosvalda dzīve un māksla [Joe: Jāzeps Grosvald’s Life and Art]. Rīga:
Neputns, 2006.
Kurcijs, Andrejs: Aktīvā māksla [Active Art]. Potsdam: Laikmets, 1923.
Kurcijs, Andrejs: “Teātris Itālijā.” [Theatre in Italy] Domas [Thoughts] 1:8 (1924): 278–280.
Ķikuts, Pēteris: Mašīna: Poēma [Machine: Poem]. Rīga: Jaunās sliedes, 1930.
L. [Laicens, Linards]: “Krievu jaunākā literatūra.” [The Latest in Russian Literature] Domas [Thoughts]
1:2 (February 1924): 172–175; 1:4 (April 1924): 366–368.
Laicens, Linards: Alfa un auto: Konstruktīva spēle. 5 darbības [Alpha and Auto: A Constructive Game
in 5 Steps]. Rīga: TNT, 1925.
Laicens, Linards: Berlīne: Dzejoļi [Berlin: Poems]. Rīga: Promets, 1924.
Laicens, Linards: Dzejas principi [Principles of Poetry]. Rīga: Promets, 1922.
Laicens, Linards: Mītiņš ballē: Linarda Laicena pasaku spēle ar kolektīviem: Trīs nodaļas [Meeting at
a Ball: A Dramatic Fairytale for a Collective in 3 Acts]. Rīga: TNT, 1925.
Laicens, Linards: Politika un lirika: Dzeja, 1930–1936 [Politics and Lyrics: Poetry, 1930–1936].
Maskava: Prometejs, 1936.
Laikmets [Epoch] 1:1 (January 1923), 2 (February 1923), 3 (March 1923), 4 (1923).
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: «Le Futurisme mondial: Manifeste a Paris.» Noi, 2nd series, 2:6–9
(1924): 1–2.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Tipogrāfiska revolūcija un brīva izteiksmes ortogrāfija.” [Typographic
Revolution and Free Expressive Orthography] Latvijas Grāmatrūpniecības Apskats [Review of
Latvian Book Industry] 3:22 (April 1930): 20.
Muba: Revue internationale 1 (July 1928) – 2 (August–September 1928).
Omuka, Toshiharu: “Futurism in the Far East.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5 (2015):
550–557.
Shklovskii, Viktor Borisovich: “Charakterköpfe futuristischer Künstler: Karl Zalit.” Der Futurismus
5–6 (Oktober 1922): 4–5. Reprinted in Ryszard Stanisławski, and Christoph Brockhaus, eds.:
Europa, Europa: Das Jahrhundert der Avantgarde in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Vol. 3. Dokumente.
Bonn: Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, 1994. 205.
Sillarts [pseud. of Ernests Puriņš]: “Futūrisms.” [Futurism] Druva [Field] 2:10 (October 1913):
1237–1239.
Strunke, Niklāvs: “Il teatro russo di Tairoff.” Noi, 2nd series, 2:6–9 (1924): 16–17. Reprinted in
Teatro: Periodico di nuove commedie 3:9 (1925): 31–32.
Strunke, Niklāvs: “Jaunā māksla.” [The New Art] Taurētājs [Bugler] 4:1–2 (January–February 1919):
52–54.
 Latvia 667

Strunke, Niklāvs: “Il ‘leader’ dei pittori futuristi IVO PANNAGGI in una apoteosi costruttivista.” Index
rerum virorumque prohibitorum: Breviario romano. Periodico della Casa d’arte Bragaglia 7:85
(30 May 1924): 16.
Toupine, Arthur [pseud. of Arturs Tupiņš]: “Skriabine.” Noi 4:1 (January 1920): 14–15.

Further reading
Andrušaite, Dzintra: Niklāvs Strunke: Versija par Palmēnu Klāvu [Niklāvs Strunke: A Version on
Palmēnu Klāvs]. Rīga: Valters un Rapa, 2002.
Apsītis, Vaidelotis: Kārlis Zāle. Rīga: Liesma, 1988.
Brasliņa, Aija: “Latvian Modernists in Berlin in the Early 1920s: Impulses and Resonance.” Centropa
12:3 (September 2012) : 286–303.
Crispolti, Enrico, ed.: Pannaggi e l’ arte meccanica futurista. Exhibition catalogue. Macerata: Palazzo
Ricci, 22 luglio – 15 ottobre 1995. Milano: Mazzotta, 1995.
Fabre, Gladys C.: “Baltic and Scandinavian Art Searching for Modern Synthesis and Identity”.
G. Fabre, et al.: Electromagnetic: Modern Art in Northern Europe, 1918–1931. Ostfildern: Hatje
Cantz, 2013. 31–54.
Howard, Jeremy: The Union of Youth: An Artist’s Society of the Russian Avant-garde. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1992.
Kļaviņš, Eduards, ed.: Art History of Latvia. Vol. 5. Period of Classical Modernism and Traditionalism,
1915–1940. Riga: Institute of Art History of the Latvian Academy of Art, Art History Research
Support Foundation, 2016.
Korsakaitė, Ingrida: “Susipažinkime: Antrasis žurnalo ‘MUBA’ numeris.” [Get Aquainted with the
Two Issues of the Periodical ‘MUBA’] Naujasis židinys–Aidai: Religijos, kultūros ir visuomenės
gyvenimo mėnraštis [New Hearth – Echoes: Religious, Cultural and Social Life Newsletter] 7–8
(July–August 2003): 416–418.
Lamberga, Dace: Klasiskais modernisms: Latvijas glezniecība 20. gadsimta sākumā [Classical
Modernism: Early-Twentieth Century Latvian Painting]. Rīga: Neputns, 2004. 2nd edn, Rīga:
Neputns, 2016. French edn Le Modernisme classique: La peinture lettone au début du XXème
siècle. Rīga: Neputns, 2005. English edn Classical Modernism: Early 20th Century Latvian
Painting. Rīga: Neputns, 2018.
Palmēnu Klāvs [i. e. Niklāvs Strunke]: “Vēstule no Romas.” [Letter from Rome] Latvijas Vēstnesis
[Latvian Messenger] 6 February 1924.
Pelše, Stella: “Futūrisma atbalsu dominante: Niklāvs Strunke.” Latviešu mākslas teorijas vēsture:
Mākslas definīcijas valdošo laikmeta ideju kontekstā (1900–1940). Rīga: Latvijas Mākslas
akadēmijas Mākslas vēstures institūts, 2007. 76–80. English translation “Predominance of
Futurist Echoes: Niklāvs Strunke.” History of Latvian Art Theory: Definitions of Art in the Context
of the Prevailing Ideas of the Time (1900–1940). Ph.D. Dissertation. Riga: Institute of Art
History, Latvian Academy of Art, 2007. 72–75.
Pelše, Stella: “Latviešu futūrists un tradīciju noliedzējs: Niklāvs Strunke. Jaunatklātās teorētisko
uzskatu liecības [The Latvian Futurist and Anti-traditionalist Niklāvs Strunke: Newly Discovered
Theoretical Statements] Inguna Daukste-Silasproģe, ed.: Materiāli par latviešu un cittautu
kultūru Latvijā [Materials on Latvian and Foreign Cultures]. Rīga: Zinātne, 2003. 101–109.
Radzobe, Silvija: “Čaks futūrisma, ekspresionisma, imažinisma spogulī.” [Čaks in the Mirror of
Futurism, Expressionism, Imaginism] Andra Konste, ed.: Aleksandra Čaka gadagrāmata
[Yearbook of Aleksandrs Čaks]. Rīga: Pils, 2002. 32–39.
668 Aija Brasliņa

Siliņš, Jānis: “Niklāvs Strunke.” Rūta Kaminska, ed.: Latvijas mākslas un mākslas vēstures
likteņgaitas [The Destiny of Latvian Art and Art History]. Rīga: Neputns, 2001. 142–175.
Steiks, Jānis: Izlase [Anthology]. Rīga: Zinātne, 2003.
Strunke, Niklāvs: Niklāva Strunkes Trimdas grāmata [Niklāvs Strunke’s Exile Book]. Stokholma:
Daugava, 1971.
Strunke, Niklāvs: Svētā birze: Esejas [The Sacred Grove: Essays]. Stokholma: Daugava, 1964.
Tabūns, Broņislavs: “Futūrisms.” [Futurism] B. Tabūns: Modernisma virzieni latviešu literatūrā
[Modernist Movements in Latvian Literature]. Rīga: Zinātne, 2003. 60–69.
Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė
41 Lithuania
Introduction
In the history of Lithuania, there was no coherent development of a Modernist art
and literature. Instead, a variety of paths emerged and broke off unexpectedly, and
all for very unclear reasons. Art and life in early twentieth-century Lithuania were
full of shimmering, kaleidoscopic fragments and surprising turns. The first clear ref-
erence to Futurism can be found in two absolutely unrelated publications of the year
1914. The first was a Russian-language brochure, O futurizme, published by an oth-
erwise unknown student, ‘K. Morozova’, on behalf of a group of students in Kaunas.
As Lithuania at that time was part of the Russian Empire, this publication, strictly
speaking, belongs to the history of Russian Futurism and appears to have no con-
nection to the very first allusion to Futurism in the Lithuanian cultural press, in an
article by Ignas Šeinius, “Iš kur ateina chamizmas?” (Where Does Boorishness Come
From?, 1914). The Lithuanian word ‘chamizmas’ (boorishness) was used to character-
ize Modernism and Futurism in a Lithuanian newspaper published by émigrés in the
USA. Šeinius’s reference here was to the priest Adomas Jakštas (1860–1938), a well-
known literature critic, who used to refer to all of his political opponents as ‘boors’.
For Šeinius, the Futurists belonged to the same category, because, in his view, the
modern worldview was based on atheism and a disdain for all forms of authority,
whether individual or institutional.
Studies of Italian and Russian Futurism regularly interpret the movement as the
origin of avant-gardism. According to Jan Peter Locher, the term ‘avant-garde’ was
not widely used by Eastern European critics before the late 1920s (Locher: Poniatije
avangard v russkoi, 42). In Lithuanian publications of the inter-war period, references
are usually to ‘modern art’ rather than ‘Modernism’.

Keturi vėjai (The Four Winds group)

In Lithuanian cultural history, Modernism emerged alongside the avant-garde with
the literary group Keturi vėjai (The Four Winds), active between 1922 and 1928.
Originally, it consisted of three or four individuals, and slowly yet steadily grew to
a circle of around ten. The two most important members were the ‘poetic genius’
Kazys Binkis (1893–1942) and the artist/writer Petras Tarulis, pseudonym of Juozas
Petrėnas (1896–1980). As the group’s activity evolved, other like-minded artists and
bohemians regularly met in Binkis’s apartment on Mondays to discuss ideas, read-
ings, and their newly created texts. Amongst them were Juozas Tysliava (1902–1961),

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-041
670 Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė

Juozas Žlabys-Žengė (1899–1992), Antanas Rimydis (1905–1994) and Salys Šemerys

(1898–1981).
The group sought to demonstrate that they were unified, organized and had an
institutional structure with secretariat, assembly, council, publishing house and so on.
Considerable time was spent arguing about the group’s name. Binkis originally pro-
posed “Geležinis vilkas” (Iron Wolf), a motorized infantry brigade in the Lithuanian
army, for which he had written a military song, “Geležinio vilko maršas” (Iron Wolf
March). The name Iron Wolf was also associated with a medieval legend of the found-
ing of the capital city Vilnius. Eventually, Binkis chose the reference to wind, because
it had connotations with Lithuanian words such as ‘vėjavaikis’ (scatterbrain) and
‘vėjo pamušalas’ (harum-scarum), denoting persons of frivolous, unsteady or reck-
less behaviour. The origins of the name ‘Four Winds’ may also have been inspired by
the “Quatres Vents” battleground mentioned in Bernhard Kellermann’s novel Der 9.
November (The Ninth of November, 1921; see Šemerys: Žmonės mano gyvenime, 22;
Kittstein: “Die Revolution als heilsgeschichtliches Ereignis”, 82–83), or by a passage
in the Bible that says: “And then he will send out the angels and gather his elect from
the four winds” (Mark 13:27).
Several members of the Keturi vėjai movement indicated in their later memoirs
that they were united by the common ideas of Modernism and that they did not dis-
tinguish at the time between Expressionism and Futurism. It was only gradually and
through extended debates that a Futurist orientation emerged. Their first publication
was an eight-page booklet entitled Keturių vėjų pranašas (The Herald of Four Winds,
1922). This was late in comparison with manifestations of Futurism in Italy and Russia,
but early in the context of Lithuania, which at the time was preoccupied with urgent
matters of statehood.
On 16 February 1918, an independent and democratic State of Lithuania was
founded after centuries of Polish, Russian and German occupation. Until the end of the
First World War, Germany remained in control over Lithuania. In November 1918 the
Council of Lithuania gained control over the territory, but for years, there were territo-
rial disputes with Poland and Germany. Vilnius was annexed by the Polish army, and
for two decades Kaunas became the temporary capital of the country. The Klaipėda
Region was ceded to Germany in 1923 and became ‘Memelland’. Furthermore, there
were armed conflicts with the Russian Bolsheviks, and it took years for civic institu-
tions to be established and brought to function.
In view of such tumultuous political affairs, the men of Keturi vėjai did not pick
an arbitrary date for the publication of their almanac: 16 February 1922 was a State
holiday, celebrating four years of independence. The first Lithuanian Modernists
found themselves in a complicated situation. They could not be true cosmopolitans
and reject patriotism, because their small nation was surrounded by hostile neigh-
bours. The government had to establish a properly functioning public administration,
a well-organized health and education system, law enforcement through courts and a
police force. Consequently, the Lithuanian avant-garde was primarily concerned with
 Lithuania 671

the creation of a flourishing cultural life rather than with dismantling and demolish-
ing art institutions. Following the invasion of the Red Army in 1918, the poets Kazys
Binkis, Juozas Tysliava and Juozas Žlabys-Žengė volunteered for military service and
contributed to the liberation of several Lithuanian towns. This shows that the poets
of Keturi vėjai were men of action, and often intensely so.
Shortly after the appearance of the one-off, eight-page publication, designed by a
painter Adomas Galdikas and called Keturių vėjų pranašas (The Herald of Four Winds),
Kazys Binkis gave a public lecture at the newly opened Vytautas Magnus University in
Kaunas on the topic “Art for an Active Spirit, or: Expressionism in Literature”. In the
memoir Žmonės mano gyvenime: Prisiminimai (People in My Life: Memories, 1997),
Šemerys wrote that he had received from Kazys Binkis as a present Kurt Pinthus’
anthology, Menschheitsdämmerung (The Dawn of Humanity, 1919), with the signa-
ture “For the first Lithuanian Expressionist”. Finding themselves at the crossroads
of complex, sometimes contradictory interests, the “young, proud, irrepressible,
rabble-rousers seized life and held the flag of New Art” (Keturių vėjų pranašas, 1).
Between 1924 and 1928, the movement issued the periodical Keturi vėjai (Four
Winds), but in their first issue they had to admit that the cultural climate in Lithuania
was not conducive to innovation and experimentation (Binkis: “Laiškas apie gegnes,
spalius, vėjus, poeziją, poetus ir kitokius daiktus”). However, Binkis was convinced
that the situation would change and a ‘new Eldorado’ would arrive. The group under-
took concerted efforts to establish a network of contacts with like-minded artists
abroad and advertised in such magazines as L’ Esprit nouveau, De Stijl, Unovis, LEF,
Vešč, Dada and others. They published the ideas of artists such as Theo van Doesburg,
as well as critical views about Futurism by Alexander Archipenko. In the periodical
Keturi vėjai (Four Winds), Binkis cleverly drew attention to the youthfulness of the
Four Winds editors, reminding readers that the authors of classic Lithuanian literary
texts had also once been restless and unconventional. He recalled writers such as
Antanas Strazdas (also known as Strazdelis, 1763–1833), pastor Kristijonas Donelaitis
(1714–1780) and Archbishop Motiejus Valančius (1801–1875) and reminded readers
that indecencies had to be edited out of texts by Professor Vaclovas Biržiška (1884–
1956). Binkis’ article ended with some humorous moralizing, saying that only the
first sixty years of a person’s life are challenging and that after that, everything goes
according to script.

Futurist poetry
As in the rest of Europe, Lithuanian writers immersed themselves in new technol-
ogies and media of communication and relished the experience of urbanization.
The era of technology and progress also gave rise to a new model of manhood: the
sports hero with bulging muscles. In 1923, Juozas Tysliava published the collection
672 Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė

Traukinys (Train). Salys Šemerys, one or the pioneers of sailing in Lithuania, antholo-
gized his poetry in Granata krūtinėj (A Grenade in the Chest, 1924) and Liepsnosvaidis
širdims deginti (A Flamethrower for Burning Hearts, 1926). The first football tourna-
ment, with ten teams competing, took place in Kaunas in 1922, and the Lithuanian
Football League joined FIFA in 1923. Juozas Žlabys-Žengė responded with publish-
ing the collection Anykščių šilelis: Nervuota poema (The Forest of Anykščiai: Nervous
Poem, 1930), which included the poem Baranausko pamokslas apie lietuvišką futbolą
(Baranauskas’s Sermon About Lithuanian Football, 1930), in which he mocked the
Lithuanian writer, translator and linguist Bishop Antanas Baranauskas (1835–1902).
Juozas Tysliava marked the occasion with the poem “Futbolas” (Football, 1927), which
praised the game in enthusiastic tones: “Wherever you look / everything resembles
football / the sun rises on football, / the moon sets on football, / the earth rotates
around football. / Eh! Millions of sport fans! / Beat the earth under your feet – / there
will be a new music, / there will be new tones! / We will fly to Mars / on the wings of
football” (Tysliava: Coup de vents, 38–39).
The members of the Four Winds group introduced significant variety into lit-
erary creation, partly by enlivening the intonation and energizing the visual space
of a poem, partly by enriching its vocabulary and by refreshing its tone. Juozas
Švaistas deplored the lack of vocabulary in the relatively young Lithuanian lan-
guage and addressed those issues in the article “Kalbos kultūra” (The Culture
of Language, 1924), in which he discussed the Russian Futurists, especially the
recently deceased Velimir Khlebnikov, whose decomposition of language and slo-
votvorchestvo (Futurist ‘word creation’) served as an inspiration to Grigory Vinokur,
Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eikhenbaum and many others (Švaistas:
“Kalbos kultūra”, 50–53).
Futurism did much to change that situation and, as in Russia, its Lithuanian fol-
lowers took inspiration from ‘primitive’ layers in folklore and street language. They
also may have been following Expressionist models, for example the almanac Der
Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider, 1912), with its illustrations of ethnic artifacts, children’s
drawings, medieval woodcuts and Bavarian and Russian folk art. Similarly, the Four
Winds group believed that the best visual equivalent of their innovative creative
work could be found in Lithuanian folk art, which they reproduced next to Antanas
Rimydis’s poems, Piliečio gyvenimo protokolas (A Citizen’s Life Protocol) and Plytos
(The Brick). The editors of Keturi vėjai also included an article on religious folk statues
called Dievukai (Little Gods). These wooden statuettes from roadside altars, whose
faces “still glow with the strong spirit of the ancients” ([Anon.]: “Dievukai”), were
an important source of inspiration for the artists’ group “Ars”, active from 1932 to
1935. It included the painters Antanas Gudaitis (1904–1989), Adomas Galdikas (1893–
1969), Viktoras Vizgirda (1904–1993), Antanas Samuolis (1899–1942); sculptor Juozas
Mikėnas (1901–1964); and graphic artists Vytautas Kazimieras Jonynas (1907–1997),
Telesforas Kulakauskas (1907–1977) and Jonas Steponavičius (1907–1986). They
organized two exhibitions with works characterized by harsh deformation and highly
 Lithuania 673

emotional expression. On the occasion of their 1932 exhibition, they published Ars
manifestas, which became the first manifesto of modern Lithuanian art, edited by
Four Winds member Juozas Petrėnas (Tarulis). The group’s work is often described
as ‘Lyric Expressionism’; the statement in the catalogue (i. e. their manifesto) was
determined both by the artists’ aesthetic beliefs and the editor’s own thinking (see
Mulevičiūtė: Modernizmo link, 109). In any case, the religious wooden carvings from
Lithuanian folk tradition suited everyone – Expressionists and Futurists alike.

The four issues of Keturi vėjai (1924–28)

A number of diagrams included in Keturi vėjai made the journal appear, at first
glance, like a scientific publication. The publishers did not randomly add illustra-
tions, but developed a cohesive design and gave the pages as well as the cover, with
the journal’s title printed in nine languages, an ambitious and refreshing tone. The
“Contents” page organized the type in vertical columns, while the inside back leaf
abandoned the customary horizontal and vertical layout of typography for dynamic,
geometric zigzags.
Salys Šemerys was the first Lithuanian poet with a deep interest in Vladimir
Mayakovsky’s poetry. He translated one of his poems, Brat’ia pisateli (Brother Writers,
1917), in which the Futurist declared that he was not going to hang around in the
‘Bristol’ café in Saint Petersburg, as other ‘gentlemen poets’ do, but rather would
embrace life, open a shop and sing his songs in a tavern (Maiakovskii: “Broliai rašy-
tojai”). Mayakovsky’s tone resurfaced not only in Šemerys’ but also in Kazys Binkis’
poems:

We could not help but be influenced by Mayakovsky’s resolute and unconditional rejection of out-
dated forms and ideas. It seemed to us that in order to create something valuable and long-lasting,
we had to move down the same road, turning down compromises and isolating ourselves from the
past. (See Archival sources: Petrėnas: Prisiminimai apie K. Binkį ir žurnalą “4 vėjai”)

Similarly, Petras Janeliūnas, in his article “Kazio Binkio pavasaris” (Kazys Binkis’
Spring, 1924), found the ideas in Mayakovsky’s “Prikaz № 2: Armii iskusstv” (Order
No. 2: To the Army of Arts, 1918) a great inspiraton. Keturi vėjai also printed two poems
by the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro, creator of the Futurist-inclined Creacionismo
movement. Another disciple of Futurism, the Polish writer and editor of Zwrotnica,
Tadeusz Peiper, contributed an essay on “Naujoji ispanų poėzija” (The Newest
Hispanic Poetry), in which he wrote about ultraísmo. Tysliava, who like Huidobro was
living in Paris at the time, published in his magazine MUBA – Revue Internationale
an essay by the Chilean poet, entitled “Jacques Lipchitz: Arba pirštų kosmogonija”
(Jacques Lipchitz, or the Cosmogony of Fingers, 1928), in which the Lithuanian origins
of this famous sculptor was highlighted.
674 Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė

The second issue of Keturi vėjai, published in 1926, was designed like a news-
paper without a cover. The multi-language title was replaced by Keturi vėjai / Les
Quatres Vents and the group’s publishing ambitions had been reduced to a mere
eight pages (issue 1 had sixty-five pages plus a dozen pages of advertisements). The
first page sported the humorous slogan “Calling All Literary Authorities to the Service
of Four Winds”. Two other slogans recalled the group’s principal aesthetic enemies:
“Down with Sour National Romanticism!” and “Down with Anaemic Symbolism!”
Otherwise the publication contained fewer experimental works and innovative ideas.
This, however, could not be said about the group as a whole. Members of Four Winds
organized, on 9 December 1926, a broadcast of a “poetry-concert”, a literary format
initiated by the Polish Futurists in 1920 under the name ‘Poezokoncerty’ (see Strożek:
“ ‘Marinetti is foreign to us’ ”, 92, 96). According to the “Chronica” (News) section of
Keturi vėjai, the newly established Kaunas radio station was “making inroads into
the area of literary and art propaganda” (quoted in [Anon.]: “Chronica”, 1). Machines
were not only invading the cities and streets, but – with telephones and radios –
homes as well.
Binkis’s poem Radioekspromtas (Radio Impromptu, 1926) and its slogan “Away
with the mouldy baggage of books” (Binkis: “Radioekspromtas”, 1) emphasized
that radio receivers and telephones were the language of the twentieth century.
There were no longer any remote corners of the globe – neither Lhasa, nor the
monastery at Częstochowa, nor a distant Pacific island – that were not connected
by the world’s central nerve, the antenna. Juozas Žengė contributed a poem,
Pavasario futurizmas (Futurist Spring) in which he declared that now, thanks to
radio, Chile, Peru and Argentina had become nearby countries (Žengė: “Pavasario
futurizmas”, 2). This emphasis on the modern means of communication may well
have been inspired by Marinetti’s manifesto, Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled
Imagination – Words-in-Freedom (1912), in which he described with great perspi-
cuity how the new forms of communication, transport and information (telegraph,
telephone, motorcycles, automobile, trains, ocean liners, airships, radio, cinema,
daily newspaper, etc.) had synthesized the world, established links between
human beings and thus had “a far-reaching effect on their psyche” (Marinetti:
“Destruction of Syntax”, 120).
The members of the Four Winds group were amongst the first Lithuanians to
draw on the ideas of Marinetti and his fellow Futurists, and they were concerned
with representing the dynamics of social change and the expanding consciousness
due to the new experience of time and space. “It is time to join the world family” in
the creation of a new art, they proclaimed (Keturi vėjai 2, 8). For them, Futurism was
not a uniform, dogmatic ‘school’, but an evolving stream of innovation, intimately
related to Expressionism in Germany, Cubism in France and Budetlianstvo in Russia.
The members of Four Winds believed that a Lithuanian form of Futurism was fea-
sible, and Juozas Žlabys-Žengė wrote an anthem for it: his poem “Keturi vėjai ir jų
keturvėjybė” (Four Winds and their ‘Four-Windedness’, 329) had a whistling tune
 Lithuania 675

imitating a starling, “fju-fju-fju- turism” (Žlabys-Žengė: “Keturi vėjai ir jų keturvė-

jybė”, 329).
The third issue of Keturi vėjai, edited by Petrėnas, was published in November
1927. This time, the cover page displayed the title only in Lithuanian. An impor-
tant piece in the issue was Juozas Žlabys-Žengė’s poem, Lietuviškas pavasaris
(Lithuanian Spring). Some popular characters from Lithuanian poetry, a young man
(“bernelis”) and young maid (“mergelė”), apparently transported from folk songs,
were transformed into a bullish lad (“bernas”), while the girl (“merga”) variously
emerged as a cow, larva and a woven straw shoe. The sun was compared with a
toad and a snake (Žlabys-Žengė: “Lietuviškas pavasaris”, 5). At first impression, the
poem abounds with common national epithets from folk songs, but immediately
one perceives that the tune is not at all lyrical. Nothing is static here: everything
flows, rushes by and has the rough and harsh intonation of street language. The
poem has a vitalistic feel and uses an advanced style, reminiscent of Marinetti’s
admonition to speak in condensed metaphors and telegraphic images (Marinetti:
“Destruction of Syntax”, 123).
The fourth issue of Keturi vėjai (1928) had an exceptionally effective visual
design. Key information was presented in the manner of a poster with varying sizes
and styles of fonts and first letters set in heavy bold. Sentences with exclamation
marks enthusiastically addressed the reader, and the text was arranged in distinct
blocks. The issue also contained a report by Šimėnas on André Breton’s Manifeste
du surréalism (1924) and a description of a mock trial of the Four Winds group. On
12 December 1927, students of the faculty of humanities had organized a literary
show trial in the hall of Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas. The judges were
professors, and the defence attorney a first-year literature student, Petras Juodelis,
who made the case that Futurism was an art for the present and therefore had to
emerge in Lithuania as it did in other parts of the world. The writers Balys Sruoga
and Juozas Tumas-Vaižgantas appeared as consultants who criticized the Four Winds
group because in six years they had published only four issues of their journal and
six books and had held a mere three literary soirées. Kazys Binkis, when asked why
they had not published any further issues of Keturi vėjai, answered: “Why should we
publish more when already everyone writes in the style of Four Winds? (Žlabys-Žengė:
“Keturi vėjai ir jų keturvėjybė”, 330). ‘Prof. Tumas’, whom the magazine interviewed
as one of the trial ‘experts’, expressed the view that writers were linguistic engineers
and “use their deeds, and not words, to weed the moss from citizens’ hearts” (Tumas-
Vaižgantas: “Keturių vėjų dialogas su ekspertu doc. Tumu”, 8). Nonetheless, the
procurator condemned the literary rebels for bravura, socially shocking attitudes,
the corruption of youth, mimicking foreigners, etc.
The Four Winds group was a very unstable organization, with members coming
and going. Salys Šemerys left to work as a teacher in Klaipėda. Juozas Tysliava
received a grant and left to study journalism in Paris, where he published two issues
of the avant-garde journal MUBA and included, amongst many other international
676 Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė

contributions, an essay by Luigi Russolo on his mechanical noise generator called

Russolofono (Russolo: “Rumorharmonium”). Binkis threw himself into working on
new publications and tried to support his large family with a series of humoristic
works.

The aftermath: The 1930s

After the demise of Keturi vėjai in 1928, subsequent journals and cultural publications,
such as Piūvis (Incision, 1929–1931), Granitas (Granite, 1930), Trečias frontas (Third
Front, 1930–1931) could not ignore the tone that had been set by the Four Winds group
and by their multifaceted activities. The group’s cultural rôle was widely recognized in
discussions and critical accounts of Latvian Modernism. The difference between Four
Winds and its successors was that the former “made revolution in art”, while the latter
took up the challenges of “revolutionary art” (Striogaitė: Avangardizmo sukūryje, 118).
The critic Petras Tarulis judged in 1929 that “before ‘K.V.’ [i. e. Keturi vėjai] our liter-
ature had not had such a virtuoso as Žengė (or even Tarulis). ‘K.V.’ taught us how
to write” (Juodelis: “Kodėl mums nepakeliui su Keturiais vėjais?”, 24). Although he
criticized the modest output of texts, he grudgingly admitted the achievements of the
Four Winds group who, like a strain of bacteria, had created the conditions for the
spread of other avant-gardes, such as Constructivism (Juodelis: “Pjūvio skaitytojams
ir kritikams”, 104).
The opening manifesto in the first issue of Trečias frontas of January 1930 pro-
moted ideas professed by the Four Winds group, but it criticized Futurism for having
an “aged youth” and for causing “Lithuanian literature, like vodka, to suffer from a
monopoly” (Rašytojų aktyvistų kolektyvas: “Mes pasiryžom”, 1). Former members of
the Four Winds group continued to participate in cultural life. They did not remain
neutral in the debates and were puzzled that almost anyone looking for a new artistic
language was labelled a ‘Futurist’. In Lithuania, as in Western European countries,
Expressionism and Futurism were born almost simultaneously, although not in the
1910s, but in the early 1920s. Both streams rejected the ‘old world’ and welcomed the
‘new’; both sought freedom from established artistic canons, from the ‘dead culture’
of the past:

It must be stated from the outset that neither “influence” nor “rejection” should be taken at face
value. [...] Therefore, when analysing and assessing Futurist ‘influences’, one needs to consider
the manner in which Futurist ideas were conveyed from one culture to another. Many of these
routes would sometimes be better described as absorption, assimilation, adaptation, osmosis, or
similar”. (Berghaus: “Aims and Functions of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies”, xi)

In a similar way, the Four Winds group absorbed Western and Eastern cultural influ-
ences, assimilated key Futurist ideas and adapted them to the Lithuanian context.
 Lithuania 677

They enriched the Lithuanian language with their creative use of neologisms, vul-
garisms and profanities, words taken from various dialects, folk songs, folk tales,
proverbs, riddles, etc., borrowing from street language, colloquial speech, and so on.
All of this, as well as eroticism, boosted the nation’s culture and gave it vitality and
youthfulness. The texts in Keturi vėjai disrupted linear reading and communicated on
not only a linguistic, but also a visual level. The novel design of the journal offered not
merely texts but graphically enhanced content. It gave the words plasticity, rhythm
and energy. These fundamental methods of aesthetically enhancing language cor-
responded with Marinetti’s ideas propagated in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature (1912) and its sequel, Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination –
Words-in-Freedom (1913). The untiring battle of the Four Winds group with the dis-
ciples of Romanticism (Decadents, Symbolists, etc.) also echoed Marinetti’s We
Renounce our Symbolist Masters, the Last of All Lovers of the Moonlight (1911) and
Against Sentimentalized Love and Parliamentarianism (1915).

Conclusion
Studies of the Lithuanian avant-garde and its debts to Futurism, Expressionism and
Constructivism made some headway only in the 1990s, when Christopher Zürcher, a
Swiss political scientist and scholar of Baltic cultural studies published his dissertation,
accepted at Berne University in 1995, which soon afterwards appeared in a Lithuanian
translation: Lietuvių avangardo pavasaris (The Spring of the Lithuanian Avant-garde,
1998). This investigation into the triad of Juozas Žengė, Juozas Tysliava and Kazys Binkis
revealed “how intensely Lithuanian literature of the 1960s, 1970s and even 1980s drew
on the experience of the Four Winds writers” (Locher: “Pratarmė”, 11–12).
The perpetual question regarding which Futurism – the Russian (Mayakovsky’s) or
the Italian (Marinetti’s) variant – nurtured the Four Winds group can be best answered
by taking recourse to the poet and critic Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (1919–2015), who
argued that, for the most part, Italian Futurism came to Lithuania via Russia (Nyka-
Niliūnas: “Nepriklausomos Lietuvos poezija”, 113). The Four Winds group shook up
and renewed the entire cultural system in Lithuania just as Marinetti’s group had
done in their soirées and Mayakovsky and his friends in their poetry recitations. These
literary events attracted many people from beyond the traditional public, discovered
new ways of relating to their audiences, and gave their readings an emphatically
‘performative’ quality. Rimydis and Tysliava, in particular, established a heightened
mood in their theatrical events, poetry evenings and discussions, and their use of
‘literary trials’, which had first been introduced by the Dadaists in Paris, were a novel
and highly effective way of promoting their social and aesthetic concerns.
The Four Winds group destroyed hierarchical relations, closed the gap between
the hitherto unconnected elements of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, the sacred and the profane,
678 Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė

rural and urban culture, fiction and reality. All of these new art forms of diverse
origins were fused into an explosive whole. The group possessed an excellent sense of
humour and thus was able to say disturbing things openly, even ridiculing their own
work. Later Modernist groups did not succeed in doing the same: parodies became
coarse, and humour spilled over into insult.
The Four Winds group accepted the modernization and urbanization of Lithuania
with all of its associated technical and communication innovations (radio, telegraph,
cinema, aviation, soccer, etc.). Fearless, and without the feelings of inferiority that are
so often typical of a small nation, the group’s members integrated themselves into a
larger world without jettisoning Lithuania’s cultural specificity.
The Keturi Vėjai group has been praised for its temperament, courage and
search for new styles. However, its influence on subsequent generations was not
very strong because of the cultural policies imposed by the Stalinist régime that gov-
erned Lithuania after 1940. Tysliava and Petrėnas emigrated to the USA. Žlabys-Žengė
was deported to the Vorkuta labour camp in 1940 and spent fifteen years in various
Gulags. Keturi Vėjai was banned from the official chronicles of Soviet Lithuania. Only
after the country’s independence in 1990 and its historiography’s complete revision
was the innovative rôle of Futurism in Lithuania recognized. Nowadays the Keturi
Vėjai group is treated like a classic, and the avant-garde is recognized to have found a
home also in this Baltic State.
Translation: Karla Gruodis

Archival sources
Petrėnas, Juozas: Prisiminimai apie K. Binkį ir žurnalą “4 vėjai” [Memories about K. Binkis and Four
Wind]. Institute of Lithuanian Literature and Folklore, Vilnius. LLTI BR, F 1 – 5969, 1. 7.

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 Lithuania 679

Juodelis, Petras: “Kodėl mums nepakeliui su Keturiais vėjais?” [Why Should We Not Join the Four
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Keturių vėjų pranašas [The Herald of Four Winds]. Kaunas: Lietuvos Valstybės spaustuvė, 1922.
Kittstein, Ulrich: “Die Revolution als heilsgeschichtliches Ereignis: Zur Symbolik in Bernhard
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680 Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė

Švaistas, Juozas: “Kalbos kultūra.” [Culture of Language] Keturi vėjai [Four Winds] 1 (1924): 50–53.
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Tysliava, Juozas: “Le Football.” J. Tysliava: Coup de vents. Traduction de Halina Izdebska.
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Žlabys-Žengė, Juozas: “Baranausko pamokslas apie lietuvišką futbolą.” [Baranauskas’s Sermon
About Lithuanian Football] J. Žlabys-Žengė: Anykščių šilelis: Nervuota poema [The Forest of
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Žlabys-Žengė, Juozas: “Lietuviškas pavasaris.” [Lithuanian Spring] Keturi vėjai [Four Winds] 3
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Žlabys-Žengė, Juozas: “Pavasario futurizmas.” [Futurist Spring] Keturi vėjai [Four Winds] 2 (1926): 2.
Žlabys-Žengė, Juozas: “Keturi vėjai ir jų keturvėjybė.” [Four Winds and their ‘Four-Windedness’]
Albinas Bernotas, ed.: Poezijos pavasaris. [Spring of Poetry].Vilnius: Vaga, 1992. 325–332.
Zürcher, Christoph: Lietuvių avangardo pavasaris [The Spring of the Lithuanian Avantgarde]. Vilnius:
Lietuvių literatūros ir tautosakos institutas, 1998.

Further reading
Bakaitis, Vytautas, ed.: Gyvas atodūsis: Lietuvių poezijos vertimai = Breathing Free: Poems from the
Lithuanian. Vilnius: Lietuvos rašytojų sąjungos leidykla, 2001.
Bernotaitė, Jurgita: “Maištautojo dalia: Juozo Žlabio-Žengės pėdomis.” [The Rebel’s Fate: In the
Footsteps of Juozas Žlabys-Žengė] Darbai ir dienos [Works and Days] 35 (2003): 181–210.
Bière, Delphine: “Muba: Une revue lituanienne d’avant-garde.” La Revue des revues 26 (1999):
53–63.
Binkis, Kazys: 100 pavasarių [One Hundred Springs]. Kaunas: Niola, 1923. 2nd edn 1926.
Binkis, Kazys: Raštai [Works]. Vol. 1–4. Ed. by Adolfas Juršėnas. Vilnius: Pradai, 1999–2005.
Ciplijauskaitė, Birutė: “Kazys Binkis and the Poetic Traditions of the 1920’s.” Lituanus 1 (1970):
43–51.
Galinis, Vytautas: “ ‘Keturių vėjų’ sąjūdis.” [The Movement “Four Winds”] V. Galinis: Naujos kryptys
lietuvių literatūroje: Nuo simbolistų iki trečiafrontininkų [New Trends in the Lithuanian
Literature: From the Symbolists to the Members of the Third Front]. Vilnius: Vaga, 1974.
181–263.
Greimas, Algirdas Julius: “Binkis-vėliauninkas.” [Binkis, the Flagman] Saulius Žukas, ed.: Iš arti ir
iš toli: Literatūra, kultūra, grožis [From Near and from Far Away: Literature, Culture, Beauty].
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 Lithuania 681

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 Lithuania 683

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Sergio Delgado Moya
42 Mexico
Early responses to The Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism
News of the Futurist movement made its way to Mexico soon after the publication of
The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism in February 1909. Amado Nervo (1870–1919),
the acclaimed Mexican poet and writer, was the first to report on Marinetti’s inaugural
text. His impressions of Marinetti’s manifesto, gathered while he resided in Spain,
appeared in the Boletín de instrucción pública (Public Education Bulletin) in August
1909, under the title “Nueva escuela literaria” (New Literary School). After translating
into Spanish the eleven Futurist precepts outlined in the manifesto, Nervo, in a rather
jaded tone, laid out his vision for the future of Futurism: “All that”, he wrote, referring
to the fires, the howls and the violence conjured up in the first Futurist manifesto,
“ends up in scholarly societies, in lecture halls, in spinning office chairs and in the
illustrated bourgeois magazines” (Nervo: “Nueva escuela literaria”, 9). And so it did.
Nervo, a poet known for his mystical reveries and his affiliation with modernismo,
introduced Futurism to Mexican audiences. A decade later, it was precisely modern-
ismo (widespread in Spain and Spanish America and known for its lyrical, dream-like
odes to Parnassian beauty) that served as foil for the one group of Mexican poets,
writers and artists that would take up Futurist aesthetics in earnest: the Estridentistas,
discussed below. The first manifesto of estridentismo did not appear until 1921, but a
few articles on Futurism were published in Mexico between the time of Nervo’s intro-
ductory note and the rise of the estridentista movement.
In April 1912, Revista de revistas (Magazine of Magazines), a national weekly
magazine, published “La paleta del futurismo” (The Palette of Futurism), an article
by the remarkable Mexican poet José Juan Tablada (1871–1945), forerunner of visual
poetry in Mexico. In 1919, the same magazine published a review by Marinetti and
illustrations of the Grande esposizione nazionale futurista (Great National Exhibition
of Futurism) at the Palazzo Cova in Milan (11 March – 30 April 1919) under the title
“El futurismo: La última palabra en el arte” (Futurism: The Last Word in Art). Two
years later, in February 1921, a translation of Marinetti’s manifesto La danza futurista:
Danza dello shrapnel – Danza della mitragliatrice – Danza dell’aviatore: Manifesto
futurista (1917) appeared in the same publication with the title La última palabra del
futurismo: Las danzas del aviador, del shrapnell y de la ametralladora (The Last Word
on Futurism: The Dances of the Aviator, of Shrapnel and of the Machine Gun). In 1920,
Guatemala-born Carlos Mérida (1891–1984), a noted visual artist and active partici-
pant in the Mexican Muralist movement, wrote a brief but insightful note, “Cuestiones
de arte moderno: Algo sobre el futurismo” (Matters of Modern Art: Something about

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-042
 Mexico 685

Futurism), for El universal ilustrado (The Universal Illustrated Magazine), a widely

read weekly magazine. A year later, in March 1921, the same periodical printed
“Marinetti y la última renovación futurista: El tactilismo” (Marinetti and the Latest
Futurist Novelty: Tactilism), a noteworthy review of Il tattilismo: Manifesto futurista
(Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto, 1921), by Rafael Lozano (1899–?), a Europe-based
Mexican intellectual with close ties to many prominent figures in the European
avant-gardes (Lozano: “Marinetti y la última renovación futurista”). These two pub-
lications, Revista de revistas and El universal ilustrado along with Zig-Zag, were the
principal sources of information in Mexico regarding avant-garde movements on both
sides of the Atlantic. Notes on Ultraism and Dada appeared sporadically in each of
these publications, and it was Futurism that received the most coverage from the cor-
respondents sending news from abroad.

The first manifesto of the Mexican avant-gardes

Futurism is referenced in one of the very first manifestos written by a Mexican artist,
published in May 1921 in Barcelona by David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896–1974), one of the
leading figures of Mexican Muralism. The manifesto, with the long and descriptive title
3 llamamientos de orientación actual a los pintores y escultores de la nueva generación
americana (3 Calls for a Modern Direction to the New Generation of American Painters
and Sculptors), was something akin to an editorial for the one and only number of the
magazine Vida-Americana (see Segoviano: “Vida-Americana”). The manifesto bears
all the traits of Siqueiros’s long-winded writing style. It opens with a reference to “the
vigour of our great racial faculties”, a reference that certainly would have been palatable
to the ears of Marinetti (Siqueiros: “3 llamamientos”, 2). The exhortation that the text set
out to make in the service of young artists throughout Latin America was fairly straight-
forward: put aside the saccharine influences of Art Nouveau and other passé styles, and
start looking at the newer, experimental art that was booming all over Europe.
In the second paragraph, Siqueiros lists the avant-garde movements most preva-
lent in the accounts of experimental art and literature that appeared in Latin America
in the first decades of the twentieth century. Impressionism, Futurism, Cubism, Dada
and Constructivism are all ticked off. Direct and indirect references to characteristic
precepts of each of these movements appear scattered throughout this dense, two-
page text. A call to “LIVE OUT OUR MARVELLOUS DYNAMIC EPOCH” (capitalized in
the original) and to “love modern mechanics, which puts us in touch with unexpected
emotions” (Siqueiros: “3 llamamientos”, 2) is the most obvious echo of Futurism to
be found in this founding manifesto of the Mexican avant-gardes. Siqueiros would
follow through on this exhortation ten years later, in the 1930s, when he engaged in
intense and rigorous experimentation with mechanical tools and industrial materials
(discussed below). In the immediate aftermath of the publication of 3 llamamientos,
686 Sergio Delgado Moya

the most important outcome was its influence on Manuel Maples Arce (1898–1981)
and his estridentista group, which burst onto the Mexican literary scene a few months
after Siqueiros’s manifesto appeared in print.

The estridentista movement

The term estridentismo comes from ‘strident’, denoting a raucous, harsh noise. The
term was cherished by the Italian Futurists and appeared in a number of Marinetti’s
writings (Gallo: “Wireless Modernity”, 142). Like the Italian Futurists (and unlike the
Russian Futurists, who opposed the kind of personality cult that would see Marinetti
rise as an undisputed and uncontested leader of his movement), the Estridentistas in
Mexico had a leader in command: Manuel Maples Arce (1898–1981). It was he who
wrote and published in December 1921 the broadsheet manifesto that marked the
beginning of estridentismo: Actual No. 1: Hoja de vanguardia (Current No. 1: Vanguard
Sheet). The manifesto was plastered on walls facing the streets, and care was taken
to target city quarters with university buildings. Maples Arce, it seems, was keen
to attract the attention of students in order to magnify the scandalous polemics he
hoped to spark off with his manifesto. The two-sided broadsheet had a title and head-
line printed in large, bold type; a large photograph of the author looking dandy on
the front side; a brief introductory text, with a playful layout that read like a poem; a
fourteen-point programme; and, on the back, an “avant-garde directory” with about
three hundred names of artists and intellectuals with different degrees of association
with avant-garde movements (for a discussion of the directory, see Gallo: “Wireless
Modernity”, 155). A few of these names featured prominently on the front side of the
broadsheet, right after the title and headline. Marinetti’s was among them, suggest-
ing from the outset what most scholars of estridentismo have affirmed with varying
degrees of emphasis: that Italian Futurism stands as primary precursor to the move-
ment (for a rebuttal of this thesis, see Escalante: “Los noventa años de ‘Actual No.
1’ ”, 19–21). In the first years of the movement, estridentismo was so closely linked to
Futurism that, as the Mexican critic Olivier Debroise has noted, futurismo and estri-
dentismo (and later bolchevismo) were used interchangeably in the Mexican press to
denounce acts of subversion, regardless of their affiliation (or lack thereof) with a
particular literary or artistic movement (Debroise: “Action Art”, 26).
Writers and poets made up the most active part of the membership of the estriden-
tista movement: Maples Arce, Germán List Arzubide (1898–1998), the Guatemala-born
Arqueles Vega (1899–1977), Salvador Gallardo (1893–1981) and Kyn Taniya (pseud. of
Luis Quintanilla, 1900–1980). Aside from this core group, a few visual artists – Ramón
Alva de la Canal (1892–1985), Jean Charlot (1898–1979), Leopoldo Méndez (1902–1969)
and Germán Cueto (1883–1875), husband of Dolores ‘Lola’ Cueto (1897–1978) – contrib-
uted graphic material to illustrate estridentista publications. Estridentista exhibitions
 Mexico 687

and publishing activities took place in Mexico City and also in Jalapa in Veracruz,
where a government administration sympathetic to the politics of the group provided
resources as well as governmental posts for the group’s members. A number of women
aligned themselves with the movement’s ideals and took part in activities organized
by the Estridentistas. Among them was Dolores ‘Lola’ Cueto, a gifted artist whose tap-
estries garnered much praise and critical attention in Europe in the late 1920s. Also
among them was Tina Modotti (1896–1942), the celebrated Modernist photographer.
Her Fili elettrici (Telegraph Wires, 1925) stands as an exemplary photographic image
of the estridentista vision of the city: criss-crossed by wires, stimulating and rhythmi-
cal in the arrangement of its technological emblems, entirely devoid of any sign of the
traditional Mexico that coexisted (and continues to coexist) with the Mexico obsessed
with progress, the Mexico glorified by the Estridentistas. We should note, as Tatiana
Flores does in an article on women artists in post-revolutionary Mexico, that neither
Cueto nor Modotti remained within the aesthetic parameters defined by Actual No. 1
for long, producing instead a rich variety of works that include media, subject matter
and styles either unmentioned, mocked or outright condemned in the founding doc-
ument of estridentismo (Flores: “Strategic Modernists”, 16–18).
Like Marinetti, and in line with a series of polemics in mid-1920s Mexico among
intellectuals concerned with the ‘virility’ of post-revolutionary literature (see Sánchez
Prado: Naciones intelectuales, 33), the Estridentistas linked their ideas of literary
and artistic merit to traditional, often oppressive ideals of masculinity (for further
discussion and some qualifications, see Espinosa: “La masculinidad marginada”).
In the writings of the Estridentistas, and partly following the precedent established
by the Italian Futurists, followers of the movement were invested with strong, vig-
orous, manly qualities. Non-adherents were accused of being weak and effeminate,
sometimes for no other reason than resisting, or being indifferent to, the estriden-
tista movement. When portrayed, women in estridentista writings appear as sexual
objects, devoid of any quality or interest aside from their possible function as a source
of carnal satisfaction. The Estridentistas did not put into writing the kind of misogy-
nist statements penned by Marinetti in the early years of the movement. Their degree
of prejudice against women was less rabid and more juvenile, but no less contemp-
tuous. A case in point is the (fictional?) anecdote, recounted by List Arzubide, of an
auction of women described as fashionable accessories or pieces of clothing, with
prices ranging from the modest ($150) to the extravagant ($10,000) (List Arzubide:
El movimiento estridentista, 286). The winners of the auction, all Estridentistas, are
listed at the end of the anecdote, in rising order according to their place in the hierar-
chy of the movement. Germán Cueto is listed first. The author, List Arzubide, places
himself modestly towards the middle. At the end of the list comes Maples Arce, the
winner of the most expensive ‘model’: the estridentista woman.
Actual No. 1 was written in an incendiary tone, in tune with the characteristic rhet-
oric of Futurist manifestos. But whereas Marinetti called for the burning of libraries
and museums, Maples Arce personalized the attack on cultural institutions, leading
688 Sergio Delgado Moya

a charge first against Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, ‘El Cura Hidalgo’ (Father Hidalgo’),
founding figure of the Mexican nation, and later against Chopin, condemned by
Maples Arce to death by electric chair: “Chopin a la silla eléctrica!” (Maples Arce:
Actual No. 1). Maples Arce was keenly aware of the impact that this type of sensation-
alist quip could have on his desired audience. His keen attention to publicity value
comes to the fore several times throughout the manifesto, and in several guises. The
manifesto’s subtitle presents it as a “comprimido estridentista” (Maples Arce: Actual
No. 1) – an estridentista pill or medication. Marinetti himself was known for colour-
ing his pronouncements with a medical or surgical tone; he signed many of his early
essays and programmatic writings as ‘Dr F. T. Marinetti’ (see Berghaus: Italian Futurist
Theatre, 398–399).
Maples Arce plays out the utopian ambition to bridge the gap between art and
life in pharmaceutical terms. Facing a world transformed by modern technologies,
he lays out the programme for a literary movement modelled as a fast-and-furious
treatment: a pill for the maladies of backwardness. This twist, another clever mar-
keting ploy by a poet hungry for public attention, is a telling reflection of a wider
socio-cultural context in Mexico in the 1920s, where the urban landscape was being
transformed by new technologies as much as it was being redrawn by a burgeoning
advertising industry backed by pharmaceutical and tobacco industries; the latter was
a key source of corporate support for the estridentista movement (see Gallo: “Wireless
Modernity”, 24–26).
The use of large, bold type for the title and headline, and the strategic placing of
Maples Arce’s photograph on the front of the broadsheet, ensured that Actual No. 1
would get its fair share of attention amidst the posters on the walls where it made its
public début. In the course of laying out his literary programme, Maples Arce makes
a point of emphasizing his “passion for the literature of commercial advertisements”.
Further down the manifesto, in its sixth point (one of the most intriguing in terms of
its imagery and the craft of its language), Maples Arce gives voice to the exhilarat-
ing experience of driving a car through some of Mexico City’s thoroughfares, linking
together architectural landmarks, advertisements and visions of automobile parts in
a stream-of-consciousness account of his experience. Indeed, for Maples Arce, the
modernity that he so feverishly extols is broken down into three key elements: modern
buildings, modern communication and modern advertisements. The language of
poets and the craft of artists, he argues throughout the manifesto, should feed off of,
and be in line with, the aesthetic (i. e. perceptual and emotional) experiences afforded
by these elements of urban life (Maples Arce: Actual No. 1).
In an essay entitled “El espíritu nuevo” (The New Spirit, 1931), Maples Arce pro-
vided a more detailed account of his views on how exactly these experiences were
shaped by the technologies of urban life in the 1920s. Citing Max Nordau and Jean
Epstein, Maples Arce argues, much like Georg Simmel had done in his essay “Die
Großstädte und das Geistesleben” (The Metropolis and Mental Life, 1902), that tech-
nological innovations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries effect
 Mexico 689

a transformation in human nature, which becomes increasingly and intensely

“nervous”. Maples Arce goes on to say that this is not simply a matter of evolving tech-
nologies, but rather a “biosocial phenomenon” (Maples Arce: “El espíritu nuevo”,
413). Maples Arce’s way of presenting the impact of technology on the constitution
of human faculties provides further clues about the way in which he envisaged his
poetry and the way he conceived the work of the Estridentistas at large.
All in all, the estridentista group produced the following works: four manifestos,
the last three of which were relatively inconsequential compared to the impact of the
first in the history of the Mexican avant-gardes; a well-known novel, Arqueles Vela’s
La señorita Etcétera (Miss Etc., 1922); List Arzubide’s memoir El movimiento estriden-
tista (The Estridentista Movement, 1926); a longer narrative account of the group’s
principal meeting place, Arqueles Vela’s El café de nadie (No One’s Café, 1926); about
a dozen poetry collections; the two journals Irradiador and Horizonte; masks and
sculptures by Germán Cueto; and various etchings, drawings, paintings and other
works in the visual arts (for a more detailed discussion of the estridentista œuvre, see
Rashkin: The Stridentist Movement in Mexico).
Among the longer prose works, Arqueles Vela’s La señorita Etcétera is particu-
larly noteworthy. It was published in instalments in 1922 in El universal illustrado, and
was singled out by Luis Mario Schneider, author of the monograph El estridentismo,
o Una literatura de estrategia (Estridentismo, or A Literature of Strategy, 1970), as the
best published prose work to emerge from the group. Its plot is constructed around
a mode of transport: railway travel. This choice is itself a significant departure from
the tendency in the estridentista movement to highlight only the latest technologies.
A century old by the time La señorita Etcétera was published, train travel featured far
less frequently in estridentista writings than the more modern automobile. This step
away from the newest of transport technologies is but one gesture of displacement the
narrating protagonist makes from the world of gadgets and dazzling new machines
feverishly embraced by most Estridentistas. He weaves a story of missed encounters
with both a mysterious modern woman (branded a feminist and a machine) and also
with the modernizing city settings that surround them. The result is sobering and
highly introspective: a welcome respite, not quite an apostasy, from the compulsive
odes to machines and technology that have come to characterize both the estridenti-
sta movement and the more generalized brand of Futurism.
The work of Maples Arce presents the most sustained effort to inscribe modernity
and technology, particularly radio, into the literature of post-revolutionary Mexico.
The nouns, the adjectives and the occasional verb coined to describe the look and
function of telegraphs, radios, cars, motorcycles, skyscrapers, jazz, fox-trot and so on
appear prominently in Maples Arce’s poems. His first collection of estridentista poems,
Andamios interiores: Poemas radiográficos (Interior Scaffolding: Radio Poems, 1922), is
written in Free Verse and plays at length with radio imagery. The first poem in the col-
lection, Prisma, places the lyric subject in a city “insurgent with neon signs” (Maples
Arce: Andamios interiores, 35). In the latter part of the collection, themes of technology
690 Sergio Delgado Moya

and modernized, urban landscapes give way to more traditional, romanticized topics
and settings: scenes of dawn in Y nada de hojas secas (And no Dry Leaves), park scenes
in Por las horas de cuento (For the Hours of the Story) and garden settings in En la dolen-
cia estática (In an Ecstatic Ailment]). They are peppered with just enough mechanical
objects to give these otherwise conventional lyric poems the sheen of modernity.
A later publication, the long poem Urbe: Superpoema bolchevique en cinco cantos
(Metropolis: Bolshevik Super Poem in 5 Cantos, 1924), is an ode to a city thoroughly
modernized, humming with factories and electrified with the spirit of revolution. It
is dedicated to the workers of Mexico; its subtitle reads like a statement of solidarity
with the principles of the Russian Revolution. This was a gesture made frequently
in post-revolutionary Mexico, where a Communist party had been in existence since
1919. But the poem goes a step beyond solidarity: it embodies Maples Arce’s ambi-
tions to revolutionize poetry in Mexico by aligning it with the interests of the working
classes enfranchised (at least in principle) by the Constitution of 1917, the founding
document of the modern Mexican state. Having met Maples Arce in Mexico City, John
Dos Passos translated Urbe into English in 1927, publishing it in New York in 1929
(Maples Arce: Metropolis).
Poemas interdictos (Forbidden Poems, 1927) is Maples Arce’s last collection of estri-
dentista poetry, published in the year that marks the end of most estridentista activities
and publications. Poemas interdictos opens with a song rendered from the perspective
of a person flying in an aeroplane (Canción desde un aeroplano), a poem voiced by a
lyric subject flying over cities and oceans, rapturous in the experience of mechanized
flight. T.S.H., the Spanish-language acronym for wireless telephony (telefonía sin hilos),
is the title of another notable poem included in the collection – a fitting name for a text
read in 1923 during the inaugural broadcast of Mexico’s first radio station, and the first
poem to be read over the radio in Mexico. Some play with typography and layout can
be found here and there in Maples Arce’s poems. Overall, though, his poetry remains,
for the most part, conventional in its use of the visual dimensions of language, as does
most estridentista poetry. Readers looking for estridentista varieties of Marinetti’s parole
in libertá would do well to read La Marimba en el patio (The Marimba in the Courtyard)
by Gonzalo Deza Méndez (pseud. of José María González de Mendoza, 1893–1967),
included in the second issue of Irradiador, a magazine devoted to the estridentista pro-
gramme (it was first published in 1923 and ran to three numbers).

Aligning literary and social revolution

In an interview in 1976, conducted by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño, Arqueles
Vega stated, with reference to the estridentista group: “We gave aesthetic meaning
to the Mexican Revolution” (Bolaño: “Tres estridentistas”, 52). He shared this belief
with the group as a whole and the group’s leader, Maples Arce, in particular. Ideals of
 Mexico 691

revolution permeated Mexican politics and culture (in spirit if not always in practice)
in the 1920s and 1930s, and the estridentista movement conceived of itself as an active
promoter of these ideals. The Mexican Revolution ended a few years before the move-
ment emerged. Estridentismo only came to the fore in the aftermath, or, as Evodio
Escalante calls it, the “constructive” phase of the Revolution (Escalante: “Los noventa
años de ‘Actual No. 1’ ”, 13).
As a historical event, the Mexican Revolution is unwieldy, a long and drawn-
out series of episodes unified in retrospect but historically and intellectually dispa-
rate. No single, unified revolutionary programme emerged in the aftermath of the
Revolution. No central conflict defined it, and nothing during the ten years of struggle
came close to being a guiding ideology for it. Nonetheless, by the 1920s – and thanks
in large part to the dominant rôle played by Mexican Muralism in the cultural syn-
thesis of the Revolution’s legacy – agrarian reform and the inscription of indigenous
cultures into the history of Mexico appeared as two defining traits of the post-revolu-
tionary national project. Estridentismo, as an urban, cosmopolitan and forward-look-
ing movement, engaged with neither of these traits, at least not in a sustained or
otherwise significant manner; List Arzubide dedicated El movimiento estridentista to
Huitzilopochtli, Meso-American deity of war, for patently anecdotal reasons (see List
Arzubide: El movimiento estridentsta, 265, 289).
Estridentismo’s brand of revolution constituted, in this sense, an original con-
tribution to ongoing debates about the culture and identity of post-revolutionary
Mexico. The vision of the New Man produced by the Estridentistas was excised of
any and all references to the rural, the indigenous and the national. The new, revolu-
tionary man imagined by the Estridentistas in their writings was categorically urban,
cosmopolitan, technologically informed, machine-like.

A Futurist strongman for children’s literature

This vision was taken a step further in 1932 with the arrival of Troka, el poderoso (Troka
the Strongman), a post-estridentista media phenomenon created by German List
Arzubide. The character first starred in a children’s radio show and was thoroughly
Futurist: Troka, all-powerful, bellicose, embodying the latest in technology, was a thing
of marvel. The show was created with a young audience in mind; indeed, List Arzubide
hoped that it would be a substitute for the stories and legends told to children and
institute, in their place, the myth of a heroic automaton whose looks, origins, deeds,
speech and ideology were more in line with the estridentista ideal of the modern city.
Troka was broadcast in 1932 from a government-controlled radio station. The
character had imposing proportions; his metal limbs, head and torso dwarfed the
human characters that appeared beside him. He introduced musical programmes
for children, chronicled technological advances for young audiences and featured in
692 Sergio Delgado Moya

stories where humans controlled nature by means of technology. Troka appeared on

radio three times a week, to great success. At the time of its emergence, the public
reach of radio was unprecedented: it mediated between cultural and political agents
and their desired audiences on a scale beyond the reach of any single print medium.
Troka’s popularity speaks volumes for the resonance that his message of the cult of
the machine found in the minds of Mexican audiences at the time. Furthermore, the
character served as inspiration for a musical composition, Silvestre Revueltas’s Suite
Troka: Danza pantomima para niños (Troka Suite: Pantomimic Dance for Children,
1934), and in 1939, List Arzubide published Troka, el poderoso: Cuentos infantiles, a
book of short stories for children. It formed part of a series marketed at teachers in
primary education and featured illustrations by Julio Prieto and Salvador Pruneda.
Every ounce of the enthusiasm that the Estridentistas had shown for machines
and new technologies was invested into the figure of Troka, whose reach was much
larger than anything the Estridentistas had created before. And his message was more
messianic. More than a new language, more than a new art, more than a new city (like
the imagined ‘Estridentópolis’) – what Troka came to preach was a world view accord-
ing to which human beings, empowered by technology, become masters over Nature.

Futurism and Muralism

David Alfaro Siqueiros’s engagement with Futurism was longer and, in a sense, more
far-reaching in its consequences than that of estridentismo. The Italian movement
appeared in his very first manifesto, the above-mentioned 3 llamamientos. Although
Siqueiros stands out as one of the most prolific writers among Mexican visual artists,
his printed references to Futurism are scarce. Siqueiros was a staunch, dogmatic
Communist; he distanced himself from anything directly linked to Fascist politics and
ideology, the Futurist movement included. Nonetheless, echoes and complex elab-
orations on Futurist themes and principles can be found in the following aspects of
Siqueiros’s work: his use and theorization of mechanical tools and industrial mate-
rials, his interest in movement as a central component of works of visual art and his
ambition to render his work revolutionary, an ambition pursued with greater consist-
ency than that shown by any of the Estridentistas or, indeed, by the group collectively.
A decade of experimentation transformed the way Siqueiros used and thought
about technologies and their revolutionizing effect on everyday life. A stay in Los
Angeles in 1932 initiated a series of experiments with photo cameras, film projectors,
spray-paint guns and industrial materials (synthetic boards and acrylic paints from
the car industry) that would become mainstays of his Muralist practice. No other
Muralist, and few other artists in Mexico, embarked on the kind of experimentation
with industrial tools with the rigour and consistency that Siqueiros did. Evidence of
the impact of this experimentation on Siqueiros’s work is manifest from the outset.
 Mexico 693

Two of the three murals he painted in Los Angeles, América tropical (Tropical
America, 1932) and Mitin obrero (Workers’ Meeting, 1932), were completed in record
time, thanks, in large part, to the faster working speeds afforded by tools such as
the spray-paint gun. A mural work completed in Argentina soon afterward, Ejercicio
plástico (An Artistic Exercise, 1933), took Siqueiros’s work a step further: he created a
total visual environment that surrounded the spectator on every side. Sketches for the
human, female figures depicted on the mural were made from photographs of models
posing on a glass surface, in such a way that their shapes could be captured from the
variety of perspectives afforded by the different walls. More importantly, the move-
ment of the spectator was incorporated as a fundamental aspect of the completed
mural, echoing the Futurist slogan “We shall put the spectator in the centre of the
picture” (Boccioni et al.: “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto”, 65).
At the end of the decade, Siqueiros completed one of the most outstanding of his
mural projects, Retrato de la burguesía (Portrait of the Bourgeoisie, 1939–1940). Set
on a staircase located in the building housing the Electricians’ Union in Mexico City,
this narrative mural tells a story of class struggle against the background of conflict-
ing Fascist, capitalist and communist forces. The mural is such that the four painted
surfaces form a string of scenes with a narrative that follows the movement of specta-
tors walking up the staircase. The final scene – the last one seen by spectators as they
leave the staircase – is grounded in a large working-class figure brandishing a gun,
looking fearlessly at the scenes of war and destruction that precede him. Later, in the
1950s, Siqueiros would explore his preoccupation with the movement of the spectator
by taking into account the experience of a viewer in a motorized vehicle. In preparation
for the murals he completed in Ciudad Universitaria – an ambitious urban project com-
pleted in Mexico in the 1950s to house the headquarters of UNAM, the largest university
in Mexico – Siqueiros had his then-wife Angélica Arenal drive around the site of the
mural at different speeds to get a sense of what the viewing conditions of a motorized
spectator would be like. To account for these conditions – a fast approach to the painted
surface, a relatively short time to take in the figures and themes depicted – Siqueiros
resorted to a kind of graphic economy reminiscent of logo types and large-scale adver-
tisements. Velocidad (1953), a mural commissioned by the Automex Factory in Mexico
City (a subsidiary of the Chrysler Corporation), allegorized a defining feature of Futurist
aesthetics, speed, rendering it beautifully in mosaic and raised concrete (‘sculpo-paint-
ing’, as Siqueiros called it).

Summary and further perspectives: Futurism in

contemporary Mexico
As early as 1909, news of the Futurist movement arrived in Mexico, but it was not
until the 1920s that artists and writers entered into a serious dialogue with aesthetic
694 Sergio Delgado Moya

principles first put into practice by the Italian Futurists. The estridentista movement
constituted a nucleus of artists and writers who were the most notable to give conti-
nuity to the legacy of the Italian avant-garde movement in Mexico. Echoes of Futurist
influence reverberate in contemporary Mexican poetry, mediated by Estridentismo,
for example at the Fourth Biennial of Visual Poetry in Mexico in 1992 (see Pineda:
Poesia visual mexicana). David Alfaro Siqueiros’s work with technological tools and
industrial materials, as well as his development of an aesthetics of speed and move-
ment, would be another important area of attention for scholars interested in the
legacy of Futurism in Mexico.

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Further reading
Blanck, Guillermo: “El futurismo italiano y el mito del unanimismo estridentista.” Noé Jitrik, ed.:
Revelaciones imperfectas: Estudios de literatura latinoamericana. Buenos Aires: NJ Editor,
2009. 215–222.
Borges, Jorge Luis: “Sobre ‘Andamios interiores’.” Proa 1:2 (December 1922): 120–123. Reprinted in
La palabra y el hombre: Revista de la Universidad Veracruzana 40 (October–December 1981):
147–148.
Crispín [Carlos M. Ortega]: “Una tarde de estridentismo: En el restaurant de nadie.” El universal: El
gran diario de México (Mexico City), 13 April 1924.
Escalante, Evodio: Elevación y caída del estridentismo. México, D.F.: Ediciones Sin Nombre, 2002.
Fernández, María: “Estri-Dentistas: Taking the Teeth out of Futurism.” Annmarie Chandler, and Norie
Neumark, eds.: At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet. Cambridge/MA:
MIT Press, 2005. 342–371.
Flores, Tatiana: “Murales estridentes: Tensions and Affinities between Estridentismo and Early
Muralism.” Alejandro Anreus, Robin A. Greeley, and Leonard Folgarait, eds.: Mexican Muralism:
A Critical History. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press, 2012. 108–124.
Flores, Tatiana: “Starting from Mexico: Estridentismo as an Avant-Garde Model.” World Art 4:1
(2014): 47–65.
Gallo, Rubén: “Maples Arce, Marinetti and Khlebnikov: The Mexican Estridentistas in Dialogue with
Italian and Russian Futurists.” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 31:2 (2007): 309–324.
Gallo, Rubén: Mexican Modernity: The Avant-Garde and the Technological Revolution. Cambridge/
MA: MIT Press, 2005.
González Mello, Renato, and Anthony Stanton, eds.: Vanguardia en México 1915–1940. Exhibition
catalogue. Ciudad de Mexico: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2 de mayo – 4 de agosto de 2013.
México, D.F.: Museo Nacional de Arte, 2013.
Maples Arce, Manuel: Incitaciones y valoraciones. México, D.F.: Ediciones Cuadernos Americanos,
1956. Maples Arce, Manuel: Las semillas del tiempo: Obra poética 1919–1980. México, D.F.:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1981.
Martínez, Elizabeth Coonrod: “Mexico’s First Rebellious Novel: Futurism and Arqueles Vela’s ‘El
Café de Nadie’.” Will Wright, and Steven Kaplan, eds.: The Image of Technology in Literature,
the Media and Society. Selected Papers from the 1994 Conference of the Society for the
Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, March 10–12, 1994, Colorado Springs/CO. Pueblo/CO:
The Society, 1994. 105–108.
Mena Martín, Ismael: “Estridentismo, muralismo y futurismo: La influencia de la vanguardia italiana
en México.” XI. Congreso Encuentro de Latinoamericanistas Españoles: Tordesillas, 26–28 de
mayo 2005. Tordesillas: Consejo Español de Estudios Iberoamericanos, 2005. 556–571.
Mercura, Elio, ed.: Dal futurismo all’ ultraismo. Special issue of Carte segrete: Rivista trimestrale di
letteratura ed arte 2:5 (January–March 1968).
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Olea, Héctor: “El preestridentismo: Siqueiros un antihéroe en el cierne del antisistema

manifestarlo.” Olivier Debroise, et al., eds.: Otras rutas hacia Siqueiros. México, D.F.: Instituto
Nacional Bellas Artes; Curare, 1996.
Pappe, Silvia: Estridentópolis: Urbanización y montaje. México, D.F.: Universidad Autónoma
Metropolitana, Unidad Azcapotzalco, 2006.
Rashkin, Elissa J., and Carla Zurián: “The ‘Estridentista’ Movement in Mexico: A Poetics of the
Ephemeral.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 7 (2017): 309–333.
Rovira, José Carlos: “Naufragios en andamios esquemáticos: Los estridentistas mexicanos en la
ciudad futurista”. Enrique Giménez López, et al., eds.: Relaciones culturales entre Italia y
España. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, 1995. 149–161.
Sánchez Prado, Ignacio M.: “Vrbe: Marxism and the Imagination of the Mexican City in the 1920s.”
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 18:1 (2014): 15–30.
Schwartz, Jorge: “Futurismo.” J. Schwartz, ed.: Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: Textos
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Cultura Economica, 2002. 398–403. Portuguese translation in J. Schwartz, ed.: Vanguardas
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Ton van Kalmthout
43 The Netherlands
In the Netherlands, in the decades preceding the Second World War, the Futurist
movement was understood as Italian Futurism; Russian Futurism was rarely dis-
cussed. Moreover, the Futurists almost exclusively attracted attention in the fields
of fine art and literature. Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) appears to have been the only
person who called, in 1921, for a new musical practice corresponding with contem-
porary reality and lacking any harmonic melody or individual expression. To achieve
such a musical art form, it seemed to Mondrian that new instruments would be
needed. The Futurists did not go far enough in this respect, he thought, although he
predicted that the sound machines which Luigi Russolo had developed over the pre-
vious decade (see p. 196 in this volume) would deal a fatal blow to traditional music.
Mondrian expected the emerging practice to profoundly influence music in the future
(see Mondrian’s two-part article, “De ‘Bruiteurs futuristes Italiens’ ”). After his essay,
however, nothing more was heard of musical Futurism in the Netherlands.
In the period during which Futurism presented itself in Dutch art and literature,
four phases can be distinguished: after a prelude from 1909 until 1912, Futurism
experienced a breakthrough in 1912–1913. In the years 1913–1924, it received a modest
response, but those critics who wrote about it tended to malign the movement.
Between 1924 and 1940 it fell into obscurity.

Prelude (1909–1912)
The Netherlands first encountered Futurism after Marinetti published his Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism in Le Figaro of 20 February 1909. Six months later, in the month-
lies Den Gulden Winckel (The Golden Angle) and De Gids (The Guide), the poets and
literary critics Jan Greshoff (1888–1971) and Johan de Meester (1860–1931) respectively
quoted passages from Marinetti’s manifesto, accompanied by their own ironic com-
ments (Greshoff: “Il futurismo..!..”; Meester: “Krachtsvertoon”). At the same time, their
fellow writer Frans Coenen (1866–1936), also a museum curator, adopted a more ambiv-
alent attitude in the weekly De Amsterdammer (The Amsterdam Weekly), reproducing
the complete manifesto. Coenen could imagine that the Futurist movement would have
some positive effect. Although it was less revolutionary than it claimed to be, it might
turn out to bring a wind of change to a civilization that had become stifling and ineffec-
tive. Coenen abhorred the ‘humbug’ and ‘advertising’ of Futurism, but he fully endorsed
what the movement was essentially trying to achieve (Coenen: “Il futurismo”).
A year later, the Netherlands received another introduction to Futurism by the
new Amsterdam journal De Kunst (Art). In the coming years, this “Illustrated Weekly

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-043
 The Netherlands 699

for Drama, Music, Visual Arts, Letters, Architecture and Applied Arts” came to dis-
tinguish itself as the most important medium in the Netherlands that reported on
Futurism. In the issue of 10 September 1910, permanent staff member Wenzel
(Wenceslaus Hendricus Vincentius) Frankemölle (dates unknown) wrote about the
Manifesto of Futurist Painters, which had recently been discussed by the critic Fritz
Stahl in the Berliner Tageblatt. Frankemölle translated the main passages and, fol-
lowing the example of Stahl, assessed them in positive terms. On the basis of quo-
tations, Frankemölle revealed some important principles that appeared to underlie
Futurism. According to Frankemölle, “some of these sentiments exist in some of the
youngest of the young from all countries” (Frankemölle: “Futuristen”). For the time
being, however, those sentiments were barely perceptible in the Netherlands. It would
not be until 1912 that Futurism would again appear on the Dutch scene. In August of
that year, the editor-in-chief of De Kunst, Nathan Hijman Wolf (1872–1942), printed a
Dutch translation of Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism in his maga-
zine (Marinetti: “Het manifest der futuristen”). He did so in the context of a series of
exhibitions of the Borchardt collection (see p. 486 in this volume), which finally gave
the Futurists their breakthrough in the Netherlands.

The Borchardt collection on tour (1912)

At the beginning of 1912, the first Futurist exhibition to be mounted outside Italy took
place at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris and turned the Futurists into the talk of
the international art world. Immediately, the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring (Rotterdam
Art Club) and several art galleries vied to be the first to exhibit the controversial paint-
ings in the Netherlands. Eventually, the gallery Biesing in The Hague succeeded and
would show the first Dutch exhibition of the Futurists from 5 to 28 August 1912. For
the opening, Herwarth Walden, editor-in-chief and publisher of the Berlin weekly Der
Sturm, was present to explain the intentions of the exhibitors, the Gesellschaft zur
Förderung Moderner Kunst (Association for the Promotion of Modern Art), to which
the Berlin banker Dr. Borchardt had entrusted the twenty-four Futurist paintings he
had bought at the Sturm Gallery in May 1912.
The show was accompanied by several articles by Wolf in De Kunst, the first of
which appeared on 10 August. Wolf reiterated what Walden had said in his opening
speech. He did so on the basis of a German translation of the Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Painting, signed by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo D. Carrà, Luigi
Russolo and Gino Severini. It had appeared in Der Sturm and was reprinted in the
exhibition catalogue. All Futurist painters, except for Balla, displayed their work in
the exhibition, which comprised twenty-four paintings in total. Wolf learned from
Der Sturm that quite a few German painters and writers had joined the movement,
including Alfred Döblin, Else Lasker-Schüler and Oskar Kokoschka. Wolf reproduced
700 Ton van Kalmthout

a portrait drawing of Walden by Kokoschka and he further illustrated his article with
reproductions of some of the works exhibited (Wolf: “De Futuristen”).
Most of the critics, however, were rather ill at ease with the paintings. They
objected to the fact that the Futurists were neglecting the specific restrictions of
visual art. Moreover, both proponents and opponents cast a doubt on the originality
of Futurism, stressing the relationship between the Futurists and several prominent
contemporary Dutch artists, such as the architect Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1856–
1934), the painter Jan Toorop (1858–1928) and writers such as Lodewijk van Deyssel
(1864–1952) and Herman Gorter (1864–1927). Furthermore, the militaristic attitude of
the Futurists was greeted with incomprehension, as were their views on women. On
18 August 1912, De Amsterdammer had presented a translation of Valentine de Saint-
Point’s Manifeste de la femme futuriste (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, 1912), and
De Kunst hastened to reprint it in its issue of 24 August 1912. Not long after, the maga-
zine published a number of other Futurist texts, to mark the next presentation of the
Borchardt collection, this time in Amsterdam.
It was the editor-in-chief of De Kunst himself who organized the next stop of the
touring exhibition at the art gallery De Roos in Amsterdam, owned by auction house
C.F. Roos & Co. It ran from 29 August to 22 September 1912 and, again, was given pub-
licity via De Kunst. For instance, the magazine presented an essay by Alfred Döblin, in
which he expressed his sympathies for Futurism (Döblin: “Die Bilder der Futuristen”)
and, in the same issue, published a portrait of Walden by Else Lasker-Schüler
([Anon.]: “Aktueele lektuur”). Once again, Walden sought to provide more insight into
“the nature and significance of Futuristic art” and gave a lecture on 18 September,
in which he elucidated the exhibited works one by one, concluding with a consid-
eration of the future of Futurism. Literature was now deployed in order to propagate
Futurism. Wolf published not only Döblin’s essay but also Marinetti’s Supplemento al
Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista (Supplement to the Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Literature, 1912). There were few responses in the press, but the reasonable
success of the show – 4,300 visitors had seen it – prompted Wolf to transfer the paint-
ings to Rotterdam.
Wolf did so at the request of the Rotterdam art gallery Oldenzeel, which thus
managed to beat the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring, a multidisciplinary art club that was
also extremely interested in the exhibition. The Borchardt collection was to be seen for
the last time in the Netherlands from 24 September to 6 October 1912. Due to illness,
Walden could not attend the opening this time, so Wolf took care of the verbal expla-
nations himself. After two weeks, about two thousand people had seen the paintings,
but art critics were still unable to come to terms with Futurism and expressed the
well-known objections that the artworks went beyond the boundaries of painting,
that they represented outdated artistic views, that they were incomprehensible and
that the public kept coming because of all the advertising undertaken on behalf of
the Futurists. Remarkably enough, it seems that Wolf himself was unwilling to stake
his reputation on the commercial and artistic potential of Futurism. In October 1912,
 The Netherlands 701

he quoted the leader of the Dutch Cubists, Conrad Kickert (1882–1965), who had
recently called the Futurists “bandits and impostors”, and gave Henri le Fauconnier
an opportunity in his periodical to explain his conception of art and why he disagreed
with Marinetti’s (Wolf: “Moderne Kunstkring”). Wolf also had reservations about the
Futurists’ representation of dynamic movements, their destructiveness and propa-
ganda. A new exhibition in 1913 – this time finally at the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring –
provoked similar reactions.

The exhibition and lectures at the Rotterdamsche

Kunstkring and the Phoenix Club (1913)
In February 1912, the Kunstkring sent a request to the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in
Paris, asking whether the society would be allowed to show the works of the Italian
Futurists. This request was turned down, as the exhibition had already been promised
to venues in London, Berlin and Brussels. In June, however, Marinetti personally took
over the negotiations with the Kunstkring. This was the beginning of an extensive
correspondence, mainly with Kunstkring secretary Albert Reballio (1865–1936), with
whom the Futurist leader now organized the next Dutch exhibition. In an attempt
to remain on good terms with the board of the Kunstkring, he promised a new and
more comprehensive selection of works, which was to include, as a special scoop, the
very first Futurist sculptures, as well as some lectures. Its members were considerably
annoyed by the appearance of the Borchardt collection at several locations, even in
Rotterdam at Oldenzeel’s gallery. The pompous manifestos the board was receiving
in the meantime did not help to increase their enthusiasm. The same was true of a
lecture on Cubism and Futurism by the painter Willem van Konijnenburg (1868–1943)
at the Haagsche Kunstkring (The Hague Art Club) on 12 November 1912, and again in
the Rotterdam Doelenzaal on 18 December. Van Konijnenburg, too, appeared to have
reservations about the Futurist movement.
From now on, the board became rather nervous about the whole affair of Futurism
– not least because of the manifestos it received – and decided not to pay Marinetti a fee
if he were to travel to the Netherlands. Following reports in the press that the Futurists
had been given a beating by the public at a demonstration in Rome in connection with
an exhibition being held there – the exhibition that would come to Rotterdam – the
board hoped to be spared their arrival altogether. Marinetti continued assiduously with
his preparations, however, and the Kunstkring was obliged to honour the agreements
they had entered into. So, in the end, Marinetti arrived and personally hung the exhibi-
tion. It ran from 18 May to 15 June 1913, featuring paintings by Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo,
Severini and, this time, also by Balla and Soffici, as well as two sculptures by Boccioni.
The catalogue Marinetti had compiled for the occasion, Les Peintres et les sculpteurs
futuristes italiens, therefore had a slightly misleading title. It included an adapted version
702 Ton van Kalmthout

of the introduction “Les Exposants au public” that had previously been printed in the
catalogue of the Paris exhibition.
Marinetti gave the promised lectures on 20 and 23 May. In the first one, he spoke
about the rise of the Futurist movement in Italy and explained the works on display.
He concluded by reciting his own poetry, including one poem about the bombing
of Adrianople, which he had recently experienced in the Balkan War. In the second
lecture, he first gave a theoretical introduction to Futurism in general, paying special
attention to the dynamics and increased human sensibility of modern times. In the
second part, he turned to the type of literature advocated by Futurism to express the
dynamics of the new era. Finally, he demonstrated this new sensibility again by recit-
ing his own texts. Marinetti had also given an additional lecture earlier that day in
the neighbouring city of Delft, presented at the Phoenix Club to an audience predom-
inantly composed of students from the technical university.
The lectures did not attract a large audience, but the exhibition was visited
by 1,192 people. In De Kunst, Wolf published the introduction from the catalogue
([Anon.]: “Een nieuw manifest der Futuristen”), and other periodicals also paid due
attention to the activities of the Kunstkring, although not always in a positive tone. It is
not certain whether the board of the association finally came to see more in Futurism
than they admitted to in 1913. Nevertheless, it did invite Marinetti to contribute to
a commemorative publication that marked the association’s tenth anniversary that
same year. He responded by sending an autograph.

Recognitions and rejections (1913–1924)

A few months later, the writer Louis Couperus (1863–1923) discovered Futurism, prob-
ably as a result of his short stay in Florence, where he attended the Futurist serata at
the Teatro Verdi, accompanied by Maurits Wagenvoort (1859–1944), a correspondent
for several Dutch periodicals. From the end of December 1913 until mid-February 1914,
Couperus devoted his weekly newspaper column in Het Vaderland (The Fatherland) to
the Futurists. He declared himself to be a dedicated passéiste, while at the same time
admiring their fortitude and innovative ideas. He was very impressed, for instance,
by Giovanni Papini’s Un uomo finito (A Failed Man, 1912) which, in 1916, had been
partly translated into Dutch, probably by Couperus, and published in instalments in
Het Vaderland from 31 December 1915 until 24 June 1916 under the name of his wife
Elizabeth Couperus-Baud (Ellen Russe’s full Dutch translation Jeugdstorm was not
published until 1932). Couperus recognized in this novel much of his own life and of
the generation of writers who had been reforming Dutch literature since the 1880s.
Wagenvoort arranged a short interview between Papini and Couperus, but the latter
was not won over to Futurism. He felt uncomfortable with Papini’s xenophobic atti-
tude and with the Futurists’ destructiveness. Couperus expected Futurism to prevail
 The Netherlands 703

for a while, but to be defeated in the end by the irrepressible human attraction to
Beauty.
Nevertheless, after the touring exhibitions of 1912–1913, Futurism was regarded in
the Netherlands as a movement to be reckoned with. There were several indications that
Marinetti and his followers managed to elicit a certain response. In 1916, for instance,
Wagenvoort published a roman à clef, Het koffiehuis met de roode buisjes: Roman uit
het Italiaansche kunstenaarsleven (The Coffeehouse with the Red Jackets: Novel from
Italian Artistic Life), dedicated to Marinetti. The main character is the Marinetti-like
writer A.F. Donaldi, leader of the “aveniristic” movement in Italy, whose followers
gather in public places in Florence, such as a coffeehouse where the waiters wear red
jackets (Café Reininghaus, known as Giubbe Rosse [Red Jackets], although not named
as such). The wealthy, fast-living A.F. Donaldi is fond of speed and technology, and
he travels exclusively by motorcycle, automobile and airplane. Wagenvoort describes,
among other things, a scandalous event in a Florentine theatre, undoubtedly based
on the serata at the Verdi Theatre mentioned above. The plot of the novel, however,
revolves around the burgeoning love and subsequent marriage between A.F. Donaldi
and the Roman Catholic Gemma Parini. In this context, Marinetti’s visit to Rotterdam
is mentioned twice. Remarkably enough, the story ends with A.F. Donaldi making a
fatal dive in his aeroplane, shortly after becoming a father. Both the main plot and an
additional intrigue explained the artistic ideas of the Futurists. However, this novel
of ideas was at least as emphatically concerned with the emancipation of prostitutes
and homosexuals. Wagenvoort was clearly opposed to the Catholic faith and bour-
geois morality. Yet it would be difficult to call him a disciple of Futurism. The novel
relied heavily on Naturalistic ideas of genetics and race, and it was written in a rather
dated, romanticizing style. Wagenvoort was not a closet-Futurist; the movement only
inspired him to a limited degree.
This also goes for several Modernist painters in the Netherlands, amongst them
Jan Sluyters (1881–1957), Leo Gestel (1881–1941), John (Johannes Anton) Raedecker
(1885–1956) and the designer and painter Theo van Doesburg (1883–1931). From 1915
onwards, Van Doesburg became more supportive of Marinetti’s ideas, after having
condemned Futurist ideology at the Hague exhibition in 1912. This change of heart
was probably resulting from his contact with Erich Wichman (1890–1929), a Dutch
artist who contributed to Der Sturm and who defended Futurism. Van Doesburg’s
dislike of sentimental poetry and the primary importance he attributed to independ-
ent words was directly correlated to Marinetti’s Futurism and caused him to open his
magazine De Stijl (The Style, 1917–1931) to contributions by Futurists and on Futurism.
Piet Mondrian contributed the essays on modern music mentioned above, and works
by several Futurists were repeatedly discussed in other contributions, alongside
reproductions of their works. Van Doesburg himself, using the pseudonym Aldo
Camini, pleaded for a revival of Futurism at a time when some leading lights of the
movement, such as Carrà and Severini, had turned their backs on Marinetti’s group.
In another magazine, entitled Het Getij (The Tide), Van Doesburg reprinted in 1921
704 Ton van Kalmthout

the eleven points of the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism as well as the main
points of the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910) (Doesburg: “Revue der Avant-
garde”). Despite this, he never turned into a thoroughbred Futurist and remained
interested in other Modernist schools as well. The same goes for Dutch poets such as
Hendrik Marsman (1899–1940) and Martinus Nijhoff (1894 1953), who wholeheartedly
endorsed Marinetti’s demands for linguistic austerity, but never identified with the
Futurists’ aesthetic programme in other respects.
Thanks to the Dutch press, Futurist ideas radiated beyond a small circle of experts
and insiders in the Netherlands. Magazines with a general readership sometimes ran
educational articles in which Futurism was popularized. Around 1915, however, the
majority of art critics had had enough of the Futurists. Several of them declared that
Futurism was past its prime. The decline of Futurism from about 1915 is also high-
lighted by the fact that it became an increasingly rewarding subject to joke about.
More and more, the Futurists were derided in cartoons, at artists’ parties and in
cabaret songs. Futuristic art, its critics mocked, was an odd combination of fragments
randomly thrown together, which could represent almost anything or in which, by
contrast, it was impossible to identify almost anything.

Obscurity (1924–1940)
In the course of the 1920s, the Dutch inclination to ridicule Futurism waned sig-
nificantly. It gradually became almost impossible to find anyone who either sup-
ported or actively opposed the movement. In the 1924/25 volume of De Stijl, even
Van Doesburg declared Futurism a failure, just like other Modernisms. He now
regarded movements such as Futurism, Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism and
Constructivism as mere stages in a transition to a truly new art that was more than
just a traditional form of expression in a new guise. According to Van Doesburg,
Futurism itself was defunct because it had ended its resistance to ‘classicomania’.
Once it allied itself with Fascism, “the museum spirit and the conservation of the
romantic-lyrical form” had taken the upper hand (Doesburg: “De dood der modern-
ismen”). Van Doesburg therefore concurred with the by now widespread opinion
that Futurism was a dead-end belonging to the past. It had been a movement full
of excesses, it had never taken root and, hence, it had been unable to exert any
substantial influence.
Occasionally, Futurist events were still reported on, but only as phenomena to be
considered relics of the past. In 1922, Wolf stated that he would welcome the moment
when ultramodern currents such as Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism were fin-
ished, for they had alienated the public from art (Wolf: “Fransche graveurs”). In the
second half of the 1920s, the Dutch art world turned more and more to Neo-Classicism
and to the romantic sentimentalism and beauty Couperus had referred to earlier.
 The Netherlands 705

In the 1930s, Futurism came to be regarded as a mistake and Futurist art was only
very rarely exhibited. If there was any talk of Futurism in the Dutch press at the time,
it was seen as a purely Italian affair, where it seemed to have retained some signifi-
cance and therefore still featured in a few exhibitions. The fact that Marinetti failed
to have Futurism accepted as the official art of Mussolini’s Fascist State did not go
unnoticed in the Netherlands. As of 1929, when he was appointed Accademico d’Italia
and became chairman of the Classe di Lettere, he came to be seen as a Fascist heavy-
weight and classified as a servant to the establishment, or, as Nathan Hijman Wolf
wrote, “a very normal and calm Fascist” (Wolf: “De Wagner-Vereeniging”). Between
1930 and 1940, Wolf was one of the few publicists in the Netherlands who still regu-
larly reminded his readership of Futurism, albeit by repeatedly observing that no one
talked about it anymore.

Afterlife
After the Second World War, reflections of Futurist styles and techniques could be
found in Dutch-language avant-garde magazines such as Gard sivik (Civic Guard,
1955–1965) and De Nieuwe Stijl (The New Style, 1965–1966). However, by that time the
Futurists had long disappeared from the radar of the Dutch art world. An explana-
tion for this reluctance can be found in the fact that in the Netherlands, starting from
around 1885, the “Eighties Movement” had already rejected many of the outdated
artistic values of the nineteenth century, to the effect that the radical reform advo-
cated by the Futurists had already been put in place before the turn of the century.
Several of Marinetti’s contemporaries in the Netherlands confirmed this assessment,
but they also suggested other reasons for Futurism’s lack of resonance. Some of these
objections concerned Futurist art itself, which mystified people and could often not
be understood without additional information. The radicalism of the underlying
ideas, including the repudiation of the culture of the past, the passion for war and
violence and the disdain for women, were not at all appreciated by the Dutch public.
Furthermore, the excessive promotional campaigns undertaken by Marinetti annoyed
many people and, finally, in the 1920s, Futurism’s association with Fascism was not
well received in the Netherlands. As a consequence of all these factors, Futurism only
enjoyed a short-lived presence in Dutch art and literature.

Works cited
[Anon.]: “Aktueele lektuur.” De Kunst 4:240 (31 August 1912): 754.
[Anon.]: “Een nieuw manifest der Futuristen.” De Kunst 5:279 (31 May 1913): 548–550.
Coenen, Frans: “Il futurismo.” De Amsterdammer: Weekblad voor Nederland 33:1683 (26 September
1909): 3–4.
706 Ton van Kalmthout

Couperus, Louis: “Un uomo finito.” Het Vaderland, 14 February 1914.

Döblin, Alfred: “Die Bilder der Futuristen.” Der Sturm 3:110 (11 May 1912): 41–42. Reprinted in De
Kunst (Amsterdam), 31 August 1912, 754–757. A. Döblin: Kleine Schriften I. Herausgegeben von
Erich Kleinschmidt. Olten: Walter, 1985. 112–117.
Doesburg, Theo van: “De dood der modernismen: Diagnose van het Futurisme, Kubisme,
Expressionisme, Purisme, Dadaïsme Constructivisme enz.” De Stijl 6:9 (1924/25): 122–126.
Doesburg, Theo van: “Revue der Avant-garde. Italië.” Het Getij, 2nd series, 6 (1921): 138–141.
Frankemölle, Wenzel: “Futuristen.” De Kunst 2:137 (10 September 1910): [3].
Greshoff, Jan: “Il futurismo..!..” Den Gulden Winckel 15 (September 1909): 139–140.
Les Peintres et les sculpteurs futuristes italiens: Exposition du 18 mai au 15 juin 1913. Rotterdam:
Rotterdamsche Kunstkring, 1913.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Het manifest der Futuristen.” De Kunst 4:238 (17 August 1912): 727–728.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Supplément au manifeste technique de la littérature futuriste.” De
Kunst 4:240 (31 August 1912): 757–760.
Meester, Johan de: “Krachtsvertoon.” De Gids 73 (1909): part IV, 160–162.
Mondrian, Piet: “De ‘bruiteurs futuristes italiens’ en ‘het nieuwe’ in de muziek.” De Stijl 4:8 (August
1921): 114–118; 4:9 (September 1921): 130–136.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifest der futuristische vrouw, gepubliceerd door het tijdschrift ‘Der
Sturm’: Antwoord aan den Heer F. T. Marinetti.” De Amsterdammer: Weekblad voor Nederland
36:1834 (18 August 1912): 5.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifest der futuristische vrouw, gepubliceerd door het tijdschrift ‘Der
Sturm’: Antwoord aan den Heer F. T. Marinetti.” De Kunst 4:239 (24 August 1912): 746–747.
Wagenvoort, Maurits: Het koffiehuis met de roode buisjes: Roman uit het Italiaansche
kunstenaarsleven. Amsterdam: Becht, 1916.
Wolf, Nathan Hijman: “De Futuristen.” De Kunst 4:237 (10 August 1912): 705–713.
Wolf, Nathan Hijman: “De Wagner-Vereeniging. Richard Wagner’s Siegfried.” De Kunst 11:1166
(28 June 1930): 311–312.
Wolf, Nathan Hijman: “Fransche graveurs: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.” De Kunst 14:749 (3 June
1922): 427–429.
Wolf, Nathan Hijman: “Moderne Kunstkring: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.” De Kunst 5:246
(12 October 1912): 17–21.

Further reading
Boef, August Hans den: “Futurisme in domineesland: Aantekeningen bij de receptie van het
futurisme in Nederland.” Frank Joostens, ed.: Het esthetisch belang: Nieuwe ontwikkelingen in
de literatuursociologie. Tilburg: Tilburg University Press, 1990. 65–80.
Boef, August Hans den: “Een verflauwende interesse: De interesse: Theo van Doesburg, de Stijl en
het futurisme.” De Revisor 16:5 (November 1989): 82–87 and 93.
Dorleijn, Gillis Jan: “Weerstand tegen de avantgarde in Nederland. “ Hubert F. van den Berg & Gillis
J. Dorleijn, eds.: Avantgarde! Voorhoede?: Vernieuwingsbewegingen in Noord en Zuid opnieuw
beschouwd. Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2002. 137–155 and 226–228.
Dorleijn, Gillis, and Wiljan van den Akker: “Futurisme/Fascisme.” Jacqueline Bel, Eep Francken and
Peter van Zonneveld, eds.: Land van lust en weelde: Italië, Nederland en de literatuur. Leiden:
SNL, 2005. 45–48.
Eliason, Craig: “Theo van Doesburg, Italian Futurist?” Ton Jozef Broos, Margriet Bruyn Lacy, and Thomas
E. Shannon, eds.: The Low Countries: Crossroads of Cultures. Münster: Nodus, 2006. 47–56.
 The Netherlands 707

Entrop, Marco: “Apachen aan de Arno: Couperus, Wagenvoort en de Futuristen.” De Parelduiker 18:4
(October 2013): 49–60.
Fontijn, Jan Henricus Antonius, and Inge Polak: “Modernisme.” Gerrit Jan van Bork, and Nico Laan,
eds.: Twee eeuwen literatuurgeschiedenis: Poëticale opvattingen in de Nederlandse literatuur.
Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1986. 182–207.
Foppe, Han: “ ‘Oude principes in een nieuwe bustehouder?’: Futuristische aspecten in de poëzie van
Gard Sivik en De Nieuwe Stijl.” De Gids 148:7 (October 1985): 585–596.
Heijerman-Ton, Helma: “Gino Severini en De Stijl.” Jong Holland 1:4 (November 1985): 28–47 and 63.
Jaffé, Hans Ludwig Cohn: De Stijl 1917–1931: The Dutch Contribution to Modern Art. Amsterdam:
Meulenhoff, 1956.
Kalmthout, Ton van: “ ‘Batailles et idées futuristes’: 17 letters from F. T. Marinetti, 1912–13.” Simiolus
21:3 (1992): 139–161.
Kalmthout, Ton van: “Futurism in the Netherlands, 1909–1940”. International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 4 (2014): 165–201.
Kalmthout, Ton van: Muzentempels: Multidisciplinaire kunstkringen in Nederland tussen 1880 en
1914. Hilversum: Verloren, 1998.
Larmoyeur, Ingrid: “Theo van Doesburg / I.K. Bonset en het Italiaanse futurisme.” De Revisor 16:2
(April 1989): 83–93.
Petersen, Ad, ed.: De Stijl. Vol. 2. 1921–1932. Amsterdam: Athenaeum – Polak & Van Gennep; Den
Haag: Bert Bakker, 1968.
Revier, Kees: “De Nederlandse pers over het futurisme.” De Gids 148 (1985): 578–585.
Stapert-Eggen, Marijke: Het mysterie van de man die op was: Louis Baud-Couperus, Elizabeth
Couperus-Baud en de Papini-vertalingen in “Het Vaderland”. Lunteren: LM, 2017.
Stoop, Nancy: “De rol van het futurisme in Nederland: Het futurisme en De Stijl.” M.H. Würzner,
et al., eds.: Aspecten van het Interbellum: Beeldende kunst, film, fotografie, cultuurfilosofie
en literatuur in de periode tussen de twee Wereldoorlogen / Leids kunsthistorisch jaarboek 7
(1988). ‘s-Gravenhage: SDU [Staatsdrukkerij en -Uitgeverij], 1990. 122–141.
Woods, William: “Focus on Noun and Verbs.” Dutch Crossing 7 (March 1979): 26–30.
Carlos García
44 Peru
Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, published in Paris in the newspa-
per Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, was not reproduced at the time in the newspapers
of Lima or Arequipa, the most important literary centres in Peru. However, Peruvian
poets had access to other channels through which to get acquainted with the novelty.
The first known Spanish translation of the main points of Marinetti’s manifesto to
appear in Latin America, including an initial evaluation of its importance, was pub-
lished on 21 March 1909 in Buenos Aires by Juan Más y Pi (1878–1916; see also p. 299 in
the entry on Argentina in this volume). More effective for the introduction of the new
literary modalities propagated by Marinetti may have been the commented transla-
tion which Rubén Darío (1867–1916), who lived in Paris at the time, published in the
newspaper La nación, also in Buenos Aires, on 5 April 1909 (see p. 299), and again
in his book, Letras (Letters, 1911). Other translations and commentaries appeared
in Honduras, Venezuela and Mexico (Osorio Tejeda: El futurismo y la vanguardia,
19–20; see also the entries on Venezuela and Mexico in this volume). The very first
two Spanish translations of the manifesto appeared in Madrid, notably produced by
persons living in Paris: Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927) and Ángel Guerra (pseud.
of José Betancort Cabrera, 1874–1950; see p. 825 in the entry on Spain in this volume
and Anderson: “Futurism and Spanish Literature in the Context of the Historical
Avant-Garde”; for other aspects of the Iberian reception of Futurism, see Berghaus:
Iberian Futurism and Corsi: Futurismi in Spagna).
If translation was the way in which notions of Futurism were introduced to Latin
America, it is likely that Darío’s version found the widest distribution across the conti-
nent, since he was a well-known and highly recognized author in the whole Spanish-
speaking world. Darío’s attitude towards Futurism furnished a background for the
reception of Futurism in the older Peruvian generation, for example Clemente Palma
(1872–1944; see below, p. 711). Rubén commented on Marinetti’s ideas and stated,
not without some irony, that most of them could already be found, avant la lettre, in
Homer and other poets of classical Antiquity.
Darío’s contributions to La nación were often reproduced in the Lima newspaper
El comercio. This appears not to have been the case with the essay “Marinetti y el futu-
rismo”. At least, no evidence has been found so far of any explicit mention or translation
of Marinetti’s manifesto in Peru in or soon after 1909. A Spanish rendering may have
been unnecessary anyway, since the cultural élites in most Hispano-American coun-
tries spoke fluently French. The first Peruvian author to offer an in-depth analysis of the
new movement was Francisco García Calderón (1883–1953). He published in the Havana
magazine El Fígaro two essays on the European avant-garde: “Sobre el futurismo” (On
Futurism, 23 November 1913) and “Sobre el arte futurista” (On Futurist Art, 21 December
1913). Another Peruvian author dealing in detail with Futurism was the poet Abraham
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-044
 Peru 709

Valdelomar (1888–1919). He visited Europe in 1913–1914 and spent some time in Italy,
where he met Marinetti. He published an ironic portrait of the ‘apostól futurista’ and his
acolytes in La opinión nacional on 15 May 1914 (Valdelomar: “Recuerdos de Roma”; on
Valdelomar and García Calderón, see Velázquez Castro: “Los signos de la ceniza”).
The examples of García Calderón and Valdelomar show that the reception of
avant-garde literature in the Spanish-speaking Americas took place with consider-
able delay compared to European cities. Furthermore, the Latin American responses
mixed, varied and enriched the suggestions for a renewal of art and culture with local
elements (indigenismo, criollismo, negrismo and so on). The praise of the machine
intoned by Futurism was particularly misplaced in the underdeveloped regions of
South America, which were only sparsely industrialized in the early twentieth century
(as for Peru, see Lauer: Musa mecánica). Some aspects of the Italian avant-garde
movement met with responses of scepticism or disapproval. They included, in addi-
tion to innovative formal devices, the break with previous ways of creating works of
art, the intention of shaking up the established cultural scene and replacing it with
an independently shaped one, and the pronounced desire to provoke the cultured
bourgeois élites. The favourite means of achieving these objectives included issuing
manifestos which summarized and explained the theories of the group, carrying out
confrontational public actions and creating publishing organs that could spread the
new message. In Peru, however, as in other Latin American countries, these charac-
teristics, typical of an avant-garde movement, were hardly ever present, and certainly
not in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. In a very limited sense,
they would only appear some ten to twenty years later.
During the period 1909–1916 one can discern in Peru several attempts to break with
the established order. There was, for example, the group Colónidas, named after the
magazine Colónida (roughly meaning: ‘persons with a similar spirit as Columbus’, i. e.
discoverers or conquerors), of which four issues were printed in 1916 (for a list of the
magazine’s content, see Tauro: “Colónida en el modernismo peruano”). The members
of the group, headed by Valdelomar, expressed aesthetic opinions that went beyond the
Symbolist-inclined modernismo movement but were not yet ‘avant-garde’ in the sense
of European Expressionism, Cubism or Futurism. Futurism never existed in Peru as an
organized movement. There was no literary group that called itself ‘Futurist’, and no
writer declared himself to be a ‘Futurist’ author. Nonetheless, Futurist ideas affected
some authors in a variety of ways. As examples, I shall concentrate here on two figures:
Alberto Hidalgo (1897–1967) and José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930).

Alberto Hidalgo
It is not entirely correct to classify Hidalgo as a ‘Peruvian’ author. While it is true that
he was born in Peru and began to publish 1913 in local newspapers, and that his first
710 Carlos García

book, Arenga lírica al emperador de Alemania (Lyric Address to the German Emperor),
appeared there in 1916, he established himself in Buenos Aires in 1919 and for the
rest of his life pursued his literary career in Argentina, interrupted only by occasional
visits to Peru and Europe.
Hidalgo’s most significant works were written and published between 1921 and
1927 in Buenos Aires, where he was a member of several avant-garde circles, some-
times acting as a driving force, sometimes supporting the efforts of other people,
sometimes battling against them (see Sarco: Alberto Hidalgo). However, since his first
Peruvian books reveal some influence of Marinetti’s Futurism, they will be briefly dis-
cussed here.
In political matters, Hidalgo was a somewhat capricious and confusing personality.
He is often held to be a leftist because he wrote odes to Lenin and Stalin, as well as some
poems glorifying the Russian Revolution. He was also linked to the Alianza Popular
Revolucionaria Americana (APRA, or American Popular Revolutionary Alliance), a
socialist party devoted to anti-imperialism (specifically against that represented by the
US), Pan-Americanism, international solidarity and national economic independence.
However, contradicting the received view, Martín Greco has demonstrated that, during
the 1930s, Hidalgo joined some Nazi-friendly, Catholic and anti-Semitic groups and
published in at least one of their organs (Greco: “El crisol del fascismo”, 334–381). An
antecedent of this can be found in the ideas expressed in his first book, Arenga lírica
al emperador de Alemania, which shows him to be an admirer of Germany and of the
German language, which he reportedly learned on the ship that carried him to Europe
in 1920. It might have been during this visit that he established contact with Marinetti,
who was always keen to find followers who would spread his message across the world.
As we shall see below, the two shared certain concepts and ideas.
The impact of Futurism on Hidalgo is mainly perceptible in his first book, Arenga
lírica al emperador de Alemania, an unusually small volume of poetry measuring
10.5 × 15 cm. It contains some poems in which war is glorified and a diffuse concept of
modernity is eulogized. However, such markers do not appear very often; they are not
very profound and do not show a deep theoretical elaboration. Rather, these motifs
are used within a framework of conventional, modernista and post-modernista pat-
terns.1 Hidalgo’s book is strange in many ways and has numerous paratexts in its
ninety-two pages: (1) a “Note” in which the author proclaims that he is consciously
disregarding the orthographic rules of the Spanish Academy and instead adhering
to the reforms instigated by Andrés Bello and Manuel González Prada (the latter,
whom Hidalgo regards as his teacher, is often mentioned in his early works); (2) an
announcement of works planned for the future, De tierras adentro: Sonetería loca-
lista (From the Inland: A Local Sonnet Collection), which appeared in Panoplia lírica

1 Modernismo is a Latin American art movement, 1888–c.1910, not European Modernism. See
pp. 300–301 in this volume.
 Peru 711

(Collection of Lyrical Weapons, 1917), and Desde mi trono: Crítica (From My Throne:
Criticism); (3) the announcement of a title in preparation, which may refer to Cuentos
de febo (Fairy Tales); (4) a list of typographical errors; (5) a “Dedication” to Hidalgo’s
deceased brother Eduardo Rafael, to his enemies, whom he calls “dogs” and threatens
to kill, and to old friends who have turned away from him, and a final slogan which
he attributes to Aeschylus, “Time and I Against Everybody”; (6) a “Foreword” signed
“Arequipa, 5 August 1916” by Miguel Ángel Urquieta (1893–1947), who was, together
with Hidalgo, director of La semana, a newspaper from their hometown, Arequipa; (7)
a poem by César A. Rodríguez called Presente (Offering), dedicated to Hidalgo.
The Arenga lírica is, as the author states, a testimony of ‘virility’, a concept fore-
grounded twice in the “Dedication”, and a favourite topic of avant-garde literature
from Futurism to the many art movements of the 1920s. Hidalgo remained one of its
champions and later made use of it to discriminate against the young Spanish poets
of Ultraism, whom he regarded as homosexuals and androgens (Hidalgo: España no
existe, 104). The first poem by Hidalgo, Autorretrato (Self-Portrait), would reappear
with minor changes in Panoplia lírica (1917).
Finally, the reader arrives at the poem that gives the book its title, Arenga lírica
al emperador de Alemania, which has an epigraph by Rubén Darío. Shortly before
the end of the poem there is an “Envío” (Dedication) to the German Emperor, from
a “young citizen of Latin America”, a half-breed parented by a Quechua Indian and
a “Spanish lion”, i. e. Hidalgo himself. The last poem is called Alemania (Germany).
Hidalgo fills an entire page with quotations from Immanuel Kant, Ernest Renan, Victor
Hugo, Friedrich von Bernhardi, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe and Walt Whitman. Only then comes Canto a la guerra (Song to War), in which
he expresses his admiration for Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930). In his book
Deutschland und der nächste Krieg (Germany and the Next War, 1912), this Prussian
general had outlined Germany’s path to an impending position of hegemonic power;
in his foreword to Hidalgo’s volume, Urquieta makes Bernhardi responsible for
Hidalgo’s ideology. The last poem, Reino interior (Inner kingdom), has no dedication.
The book ends with a table of contents.
It is now time to return to Urquieta’s foreword, because here we find, for the first
time, the word ‘Futurism’. Hidalgo never called himself a Futurist; only some of his
first commentators did, either in a positive sense (as Urquieta did to some degree)
or with a negative intention, as Clemente Palma did when reviewing Arenga lírica
and criticizing it for having a Futurist orientation (he nevertheless recognized Hidalgo
as a poet with a great future; see Palma: “Notas de artes y letras”). Urquieta’s unu-
sually long introduction takes up more than a third of the book (thirty-six pages).
He struggles mainly with Hidalgo’s political position, since he himself sympathized
with France and was therefore hostile to the country which, since 1914, had been at
war with France and other Western countries. Urquieta’s attitude suggests that the
reading public of the time would not agree with Hidalgo’s hymn to the Kaiser. Only on
p. xxi does Marinetti’s name appear: “Alberto Hidalgo sings the praises of Germany
712 Carlos García

and its Emperor. Without any further reflection, he is attracted to the Futurist and
lightning-like solemn speech of Marinetti, who proclaimed with blaring voice that
war is the sole cleanser of the world” (a citation of the phrase “We wish to glorify
war – the sole cleanser of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the
libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women” [Marinetti: “The
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14]). Urquieta’s cursory mention of Marinetti
set the tone for the way in which Hidalgo’s work was to be received in Peru, although
his poetics was rooted much more in Walt Whitman than in the aesthetics proclaimed
by the Futurist leader.
Hidalgo reprinted several poems from Arenga lírica (Autorretrato, Reino interior,
Arenga lírica, Canto a la guerra) in his next book, Panoplia lírica (1917). Its most impor-
tant section for our purposes is headed “Plus Ultra” and contains the poem La nueva
poesía: Manifiesto (The New Poetry: Manifesto), which includes the lines: “Yo soi un
bardo nuevo de concepto i de forma” (I am a new poet in both concept and form; see
Reedy: “ ‘Soi un bardo nuevo’ ”). Although Hidalgo claims to be very modern, he uses
an old-fashioned word (bardo) that designates an ancient reciter of epic poetry and
somehow contradicts his avant-garde attitude. Moreover, Hidalgo deals in this poem
with a whole gamut of Futurist tropes, which accumulate in something akin to a cata-
logue: velocity, virility, muscles, power, motors and machines, aeroplanes, tramways,
cars, skyscrapers, war and the future. This is done in a formal language that comes
straight from the nineteenth century. In Oda al automóvil (Ode to the Automobile),
Hidalgo produces lines like these: “The car is a huge mechanical pachyderm / its
blood is petrol / and the rudder / is the soul of the car which moves / under the titanic
impulse / that shows it the way.” And, in a clear reference to Marinetti’s famous adage,
“A roaring motorcar, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful
than the Winged Victory of Samothrace” (Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism”, 13), Hidalgo exclaims: “The automobile is more beautiful and artistic
than Day, / more serene than Night/ and more beautiful than Woman” (Hidalgo: “Oda
al automóvil”, 114). At a later stage, in Índice de la nueva poesía americana (Index to
New American Poetry, 1926), he would publish a similar poem, Sensación de velocidad
(Sensation of Speed), in a more modern manner. Panoplia lírica has many paratexts as
well, among them a quote from Marinetti: “contradecirse es vivir” (to contradict oneself
is to live; for the original, see Marinetti: “Lecture to the English on Futurism”, 92). The
last text of the book is a lyrical address by Juan Parra del Riego, dedicated to Hidalgo.
To return to Hidalgo: some of his above-mentioned poems were later reprinted in
Joyería (Jewellery, 1919), an anthology of what Hidalgo considered to be his best work
up to that point, which he used as a kind of calling-card upon his arrival in Buenos
Aires. By far the largest part of Panoplia lírica is (again) not by Hidalgo himself, but
by his fellow poet and critic Abraham Valdelomar. The twenty-five densely printed
pages by the latter are headed “Exégesis estética” (Aesthetic Exegesis) and serve as
an introduction to the volume. On the one hand, Valdelomar seeks to explain to the
Peruvian public how hard the life of a true poet is, and that everybody in his Colónidas
 Peru 713

group is a true poet. In fact, Hidalgo never published in the magazine Colónida, but he
was connected to the circle and did adopt its iconoclastic attitude; Mariátegui would
state in 1928 that Hidalgo pursued the stance of Colónida to its most extreme limits.
Valdelomar is full of praise for Hidalgo and states: “Hidalgo’s poetry has a well-de-
fined Futurist colour, in as much as Futurism is theory and not praxis, idea and not
vivid action; however, it also has something that differs fundamentally from that
illustrious and distinguished group of madmen who follow Marinetti: HUMOUR.”
Valdelomar uses the word ‘humour’ in English and explains:

HUMOUR is not what is commonly assumed by our ignorant writers […]; it is something that goes
beyond the frivolous concern of making people laugh; it involves the speaking out of essential
truths, the discovering of pronounced spiritual contrasts between things and universal phen-
omena where pain is disguised behind the mask of an idiot. (Valdelomar: “Exégesis estética”,
xxxii)

Further on in his text (xliii), Valdelomar comments on the Arenga lírica volume and
emphasizes that the poem of the same title contains more beauty than reason. With
reference to the Ode to the Automobile and the regenerative value of war, he stresses
that Hidalgo’s ideas coincide with those of Marinetti, but he also contrasts Marinetti’s
anti-Teutonism with Hidalgo’s Germanophilia.
Was Hidalgo a Futurist poet, or was he at least considered one when he arrived
in Buenos Aires in autumn 1919? This does not seem to be the case, because when the
pseudonymous Juan Silenciario introduced him to the Argentine public with a long
article in the periodical Fray Mocho (Friar Mocho), he did not mention Futurism at all
(Silenciario: “Poetas sudamericanos: Alberto Hidalgo”). In 1918, Hidalgo himself had
already made an attempt to clarify the question of his literary affiliation:

I am not a Futurist poet, as someone called me. I am even less a disciple of Marinetti, as erro-
neously postulated by Luis Varela Orbegoso […]. I have some points of contact with the author
of the manifesto Let’s Kill off the Moonlight, but I recognize no other teachers than Victor Hugo,
Walter Whitman [sic], Manuel González Prada and Leopoldo Lugones. (Hidalgo: Hombres y
bestias, 182)

Hidalgo forgot to mention Nietzsche, of whom Marinetti had also been a disciple in
his pre-Futurist phase. On the same page as the above quotation Hidalgo describes
himself as the first poet of a school that could be termed ‘transcendentalist’. He did
not consider his early work as belonging to the avant-garde. In Química del espíritu
(Chemistry of the Mind, 1923), he requested that judgments on his artistic achieve-
ments should only be based on some of his books, and not on all of them. “On the
right side”, he writes, “Panoplia lírica and Las voces de colores [The Colourful Voices]
on the left side, Tu libro [Your Book] and Química del espíritu” (Hidalgo: Química del
espíritu, 2). “Left” and “right” are not meant here in a political sense, but as indicators
of a position within the literary space: “right” meaning the traditional, “left” meaning
the progressive and avant-garde œuvre.
714 Carlos García

Hidalgo adopted in his first books some of the motifs and ideas of Futurism, but
he was unable or unwilling to embrace Marinetti’s most important literary innova-
tion, the parole in libertà (Words-in-Freedom), propagated in the Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Literature (1912). Throughout the 1910s, Hidalgo remained attached to
post-modernista habits. Only several years later, after nurturing himself with novel-
ties in Buenos Aires, in Spain and in some other European countries, did he attempt
to establish his own version of avant-garde literature: Simplismo (Simplicism, 1925).

José Carlos Mariátegui

The 1920s saw the rise of José Carlos Mariátegui, one of the finest Latin American
minds in the twentieth century, a left-wing politician who was also a lucid critic of
literature in general and of Hidalgo in particular. Mariátegui monitored Hidalgo’s
career from the very beginning, and sent him an open letter as early as 1917, greet-
ing the publication of Arenga lírica (Croniqueur [pseud.]: “Carta a un poeta”). Some
days later, Hidalgo, Valdelomar and Mariátegui wrote a sonnet together, published
on 12 January 1917 in a Lima newspaper and reprinted years later in Hidalgo’s
Hombres y bestias (Men and Beasts, 178–179).
At that time, Mariátegui considered Hidalgo to be a genius and agreed with him
on the advantages of progress and modernity. But one year later, he changed his atti-
tude and gave up his devotion to Aestheticism and Decadentism. He became a left-
wing journalist whose concept of a socialist revolution – organically rooted in Latin
American conditions and not mechanically adopted from European models – became
a major influence in South America and beyond. Perhaps due to Mariátegui’s initial,
enthusiastic support, Hidalgo remained a loyal friend and exchanged many letters
with him. When Mariátegui founded Amauta, a magazine named after an old Inca
term for a teacher of noble children, he created one of the leading cultural magazines
in Latin America, published from 1926 to 1930. He published in it Hidalgo’s Ubicación
de Lenin (Positioning Lenin), Biografía de la palabra ‘revolución’ (Biography of the
Word ‘Revolution’), Envergadura del anarquista (The Breadth of the Anarchist), La
hora cero (The Hour Zero) and Pequeña retórica personal (A Small Personal Rhetoric;
see Sarco: Alberto Hidalgo, 299–330).
Mariátegui lived in Italy between December 1919 and March 1923 and travelled
across several European countries, where he interacted with both intellectuals and
artists. By this time, other movements had absorbed the principles of Futurism, and
digested and surpassed them in several ways. Mariátegui’s view of avant-garde litera-
ture was sceptical. In 1925, he stated that

European avant-garde literature […] represents the ambiguous flora of a world in decadence.
[…] In the ultramodern schools, everything is in decay, gets anarchized, and the old art evapo-
rates in an exasperated search for the New and in tragicomic acrobatics. […] The function of the
 Peru 715

avant-garde schools […] is negative and destructive. They have the function of disconnecting and
destroying all ideas and sentiments of bourgeois art. (Mariátegui: “Oliverio Girondo”)

And, one year later, he wrote:

Not every new art is revolutionary, nor is it really new. In the contemporary world, two souls
coexist: those of the revolution and of decadence. Only the presence of the first bestows upon a
poem or a painting the artistic quality of the New. (Mariátegui: “Arte, revolución y decadencia”)

If his theoretical attitude towards avant-garde literature was critical in general, the
same applies to his opinions about the achievements of Futurism specifically, as
shown by his two important articles on the movement: “Aspectos viejos y nuevos del
futurismo” (Old and New Aspects of Futurism, 1921) and “Marinetti y el futurismo”
(Marinetti and Futurism, 1924). In the former text (of which Marinetti kept a copy in
his archive), Mariátegui stated that Futurism re-emerged after the interruption caused
by war and after some original members of the movement had left the group, thus
affirming their individuality. Mariátegui argued furthermore that the period that
followed the Great War was a revolutionary one, and the Italian youth embraced a
range of new ideas, also artistically. Post-war Futurism intermingled with Cubism,
Expressionism and Dadaism. There are differences between these movements, but
they overlap in their aim of being avant-garde, Futurism being the Italian manifes-
tation of this desire. Throughout Europe, the avant-garde had become fashionable,
Mariátegui continued, with the effect that many wanted to possess avant-garde art,
not because they understood it or sympathized with its aims, but due to snobbery.
Mariátegui showed in “Aspectos viejos y nuevos del futurismo”, as well as in his
later “Marinetti y el futurismo”, that he knew the history of the movement and was
well acquainted with its manifestos. However, he thought that Marinetti committed
a fundamental error in deciding to politicize the movement, and believed that he
should have stuck to artistic universalism and abrogated his nationalist attitude. It
was not that Mariátegui wished to separate art and politics out of principle, but he did
feel that artists were not able to formulate political theories and goals. On balance,
he judged that it was not the Futurist movement that had failed, but its orthodoxy.
The later text of 1924 went a step further and voiced a more profound criticism of the
specifically artistic aspects of Futurism:

Futurism has not produced, as Cubism, Expressionism and Dadaism did, a concept or a well-de-
fined, specific form of artistic creation. It adopted, partially or totally, notions or forms of related
movements. However, it represents less an effort to create new art than an effort to destroy the
old one. (Mariátegui: “Marinetti y el futurismo”)

The rest of the article deals more with the political aspects of the movement and shows
that Mariátegui was disappointed by the political attitude of avant-garde movements
in general, and by Futurism in particular, because he considered it to have become a
conservative force.
716 Carlos García

In 1928, Mariátegui published a further commentary on Hidalgo’s work in his

Siete ensayos de interpretacion de la realidad peruana (Seven Interpretive Essays
on Peruvian Reality; first published in Mundial, Lima, 6 July 1928), which had a
strong impact on the critical reception of this poet. He postulated that, around 1917,
Hidalgo had brought into the Peruvian sensibility a virile taste for the mechanical,
for skyscrapers and velocity, all assimilated from Marinetti. Mariategui stated that,
later on, Hidalgo (who was already living in Buenos Aires) acquired his real stature
as an American author, but represented, due to his individualism, the last stage of
Romanticism. Mariátegui considered Hidalgo as a kind of Anarchist (with Anarchism
being understood as the extreme left of Liberalism). Commenting on Hidalgo’s last
book, Descripción del cielo (Description of the Sky, 1928), Mariátegui disagreed with
the author’s eulogy of pure revolution, of revolution itself, whatever its target might
be. Mariátegui, who had a great deal more political experience than Hidalgo, found
such an abstract concept of revolution unacceptable. For him, a revolution could be
liberal, socialist or otherwise in nature, but it always had to be concrete. Hidalgo
responded in his Tratado de poética (Treatise on Poetics, 1941) that Mariátegui had
not understood him properly and that he was really talking about a permanent revo-
lution, the desire for perpetual improvement bolstered by nonconformity and protest.

From the mid-1920s to the 1930s

Returning now to Hidalgo, there are some lesser-known episodes of his relationship
with Futurism and Marinetti that should be highlighted. As indicated above, it is
quite possible that Hidalgo met Marinetti on his travels in Europe in the first half of
the 1920s. Marinetti’s visit to Buenos Aires in 1926 (see pp. 308–309 in the entry on
Argentina in this volume) had a catalytic effect on writers and poets, who were eager
to know the father of the European avant-garde in person, regardless of whether or
not they shared his aesthetic or political ideas. Hidalgo was one of them. He gave an
interview on the matter in a popular newspaper:

“Marinetti did not create Futurism”, Hidalgo says; “Futurism was created by the poet Walt
Whitman. I admit that Futurism has two aspects: one is the formal one, the other the philosophi-
cal one. Whitman was the creator of the latter. The formal aspect of Futurism derived from Cubist
methods, and the first Cubist book, Apollinaire’s Alcools, contains poems from 1902, which
means they are seven years older than the first Futurist manifesto, which Marinetti published in
the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro.” (Hidalgo: “Marinetti no creó el futurismo”)

Curiously enough, Hidalgo had sent Marinetti some of his books one year earlier, in
1925 (see Schwartz: “A bibliografia latino-americana na coleção Marinetti” 140–141),
probably motivated by the publication of Simplismo. They contain dedications from
Hidalgo to Marinetti, and, in the case of España no existe (Spain Does not Exist), also
 Peru 717

to his wife Benedetta. The dedication “To Marinetti” was repeated 31 times on 13 lines
(Química del espíritu, 1923) and 10 times on 5 lines (Simplismo, 1925). Other dedica-
tions, such as “To Marinetti, remembering a friend” in Los sapos y otras personas
(The Frogs and Other Persons, 1927), suggest that they had some discussions during
Marinetti’s visit to Buenos Aires in 1926. In the Marinetti papers at Yale University
there is further indication of this, in an issue of the Revista oral (Oral Magazine),
which Hidalgo founded in 1926, containing his Biografía de la palabra ‘revolución’
(Biography of the Word ‘Revolution’, 1926). On the backside of the page on which the
poem appears we can read: “With cordial greeting to the rancorous, and why ranco-
rous? Marinetti.” Another number of the Revista oral, containing Hidalgo’s Ubicación
de Lenín: Poema de varios lados (Positioning Lenin: Poem of Several Sides) was sent
with a dedication “To Marinetti; with the Simplist admiration of Alberto Hidalgo. Bs.
As. 926”.2
Hidalgo kept an eye on Marinetti’s literary output. In “Liquidación del futurismo”
(Settling Accounts with Futurism) in El hogar (The Home) of 13 November 1931, Hidalgo
issued his final assessment of the movement and commented on Marinetti’s Manifesto
della cucina futurista (Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine, 1930), narrating how he went to
see Marinetti at the Santopalato, a Futurist restaurant that opened in March 1931 in
Turin. However, his main aim in this article was to declare the death of the movement.
Hidalgo felt that Marinetti had never been a great writer but was a fascinating person-
ality who had left his mark wherever he went. We can close with this quotation:

Marinetti has suddenly become old. He never had a great literary value. Besides a few images
in his early works, accomplished but somewhat following in the steps of Victor Hugo, and the
Romantic fervour as well as hyperbolic exaggerations of the first manifestos, his literary produc-
tion did not enjoy, not even among his own disciples, a great deal of support. For many people,
he was never more than a charlatan. But they are exaggerating and, actually, quite mistaken.
Marinetti should not be judged as a creator, but as an actor. His work is literature-in-action. His
books are constructed, not written. And in this respect, he was simply superb. He was equipped
with an overwhelming dynamism, and wherever he went he spread contagion. He was a commu-
nicating spirit who infused the soul of his audience, a person who in Creole would be called ‘un
hombre entrador’ (an outgoing man). (Hidalgo: “Liquidación del futurismo”)

Works cited
Anderson, Andrew A.: “Futurism and Spanish Literature in the Context of the Historical Avant-Garde.”
Günter Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000.
144–181.

2 Simplismo was a literary movement launched by Hidalgo, characterized by dense poetic language,
innovative metaphors and experimental typography.
718 Carlos García

Berghaus, Günter, ed.: Iberian Futurisms. Special issue of International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies. Vol. 3. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter, 2013.
Corsi, Daniele: Futurismi in Spagna: Metamorfosi linguistiche dell’avanguardia italiana nel mondo
iberico 1909–1928. Roma: Aracne, 2014.
Croniqueur, Juan [pseud. of José C. Mariátegui]: “Carta a un poeta.” La prensa (Lima), 1 January 1917.
Reprinted in Mariátegui total. Vol. 2. Lima: Amauta, 1994. 2523.
Darío, Rubén: “Marinetti y el futurismo.” La nación (Buenos Aires), 5 April 1909. Reprinted in
R. Darío: Letras. Paris: Garnier, 1911. 229–237. Nelson Osorio Tejeda, ed.: El futurismo
y la vanguardia literaria en América Latina. Caracas: Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios
Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1982. 45–48.
García Calderón, Francisco: “Sobre el arte futurista.” El Fígaro: Revista universal ilustrada (La
Habana) 29:51 (21 December 1913).
García Calderón, Francisco: “Sobre el futurismo.” El Fígaro: Revista universal ilustrada (La Habana)
29:47 (23 November 1913): 576. Reprinted in F. García Calderón: Ideologías. Paris: Garnier,
1917. 287–296.
Greco, Martín: “El crisol del fascismo: Alberto Hidalgo en la década del 30.” Álvaro Sarco, ed.:
Alberto Hidalgo: El genio del desprecio. Materiales para su estudio. Lima: Talleres Tipográficos,
2006. 334–381.
Hidalgo, Alberto: “Liquidación del futurismo.” El hogar (Buenos Aires) 1152 (13 November 1931).
Reprinted in A. Hidalgo: Diario de mi sentimiento. Buenos Aires: Edición privada, 1937.
242–247.
Hidalgo, Alberto: “Marinetti no creó el futurismo: Así nos dice Alberto Hidalgo. A su criterio fue el
poeta Walt Whitman el iniciador.” Crítica (Buenos Aires), 9 June 1926.
Hidalgo, Alberto: “Oda al automóvil.” A. Hidalgo: Panoplia lírica. Lima: Fajardo, 1917. 111–115.
Hidalgo, Alberto: Arenga lírica al emperador de Alemania: Otros poemas. Con prólogo de Miguel
Ángel Urquieta. Arequipa: Quiroz Hermanos, 1916.
Hidalgo, Alberto: España no existe. Edición y notas de Carlos García. Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert;
Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2007.
Hidalgo, Alberto: Hombres y bestias. Arequipa: Tipografía artística Perú, 1918.
Hidalgo, Alberto: Panoplia lírica. Lima: Fajardo, 1917.
Hidalgo, Alberto: Química del espíritu. Buenos Aires: Mercatali, 1923.
Hidalgo, Alberto: Tratado de poética. Buenos Aires: Feria, 1941.
Lauer, Mirko: Musa mecánica: Máquinas y poesía en la vanguardia peruana. Lima: Instituto de
Estudios Peruanos, 2003.
Mariátegui, José Carlos: “Arte, revolución y decadencia.” Amauta (Lima) 1:3 (November 1926): 3–4.
Reprinted in J.C. Mariátegui: Ediciones populares de las obras completas. Vol. 6. El artista y la
época. Lima: Amauta, 1959. 18–22.
Mariátegui, José Carlos: “Aspectos viejos y nuevos del futurismo.” El tiempo (Lima), 3 August 1921.
Reprinted in Nelson Osorio Tejeda: El futurismo y la vanguardia literaria en América Latina.
Caracas: Centro de Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1982. 61–63.
Mariátegui, José Carlos: “Marinetti y el futurismo.” Variedades (Lima), 19 January 1924. Reprinted in
J.C. Mariátegui: Ediciones populares de las obras completas. Vol. 1. La escena contemporánea.
Lima: Amauta, 1959. 185–189. J.C. Mariátegui: La escena contemporánea. Lima: Amauta, 1976.
140–144.
Mariátegui, José Carlos: “Oliverio Girondo.” Variedades (Lima), 15 August 1925. Reprinted in J.C.
Mariátegui: Obras completas. Vol. 12. Temas de Nuestra América. Lima: Empresa Editora
Amauta, 1960. 73–78.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Lecture to the English on Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings.
Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 89-93.
 Peru 719

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson: El futurismo y la vanguardia literaria en América Latina. Caracas: Centro de
Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1982.
Palma, Clemente: “Notas de artes y letras.” Variedades (Lima) 12:454 (11 November 1916). Reprinted
in Mirko Lauer, ed.: La polémica del vanguardismo, 1916–1928. Lima: Fondo Editorial de la
Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, 2001. 49–52.
Reedy, Daniel R.: “ ‘Soi un bardo nuevo de concepto i de forma’: La poesía futurista de Alberto
Hidalgo.” Discurso literario 4:2 (1987): 485–495.
Revista oral. Inventada por Alberto Hidalgo. Aparece quincenalmente en el Royal Keller de Buenos
Aires (Buenos Aires), Nos. 1-2 (April – May 1926).
Sarco, Álvaro, ed.: Alberto Hidalgo: El genio del desprecio. Materiales para su estudio. Lima: Talleres
Tipográficos, 2006.
Schwartz, Jorge: “A bibliografia latino-americana na coleção Marinetti.” Boletim bibliográfico
biblioteca Mário de Andrade 44 (1983): 131–145.
Silenciario, Juan [pseud.]: “Poetas sudamericanos: Alberto Hidalgo.” Fray Mocho: Semanario festivo,
literario, artístico y de actualidades (Buenos Aires) 388 (30 September 1919): s.p. Reprinted in
Álvaro Sarco, ed.: Alberto Hidalgo: El genio del desprecio. Materiales para su estudio. Lima:
Talleres Tipográficos, 2006. 119–126.
Tauro, Alberto: “Colónida en el modernismo peruano.” Letras (Lima) 15–16 (1940): 81–91.
Valdelomar, Abraham: “Exégesis estética.” Alberto Hidalgo: Panoplia lírica. Lima: Fajardo, 1917.
xix–xliv. Reprinted in Mirko Lauer, ed.: La polémica del vanguardismo, 1916–1928. Lima: Fondo
Editorial de la Universidad Nacional de San Marcos, 2001. 101–130.
Valdelomar, Abraham: “Recuerdos de Roma: Enrique Serra.” La opinión nacional (Lima), 15 May
1914. Reprinted in A. Valdelomar: Obras, textos y díbujos. Lima: Pizarro, 1979. 458–462.
Velázquez Castro, Marcel: “Los signos de la ceniza: Las primeras lecturas en el Perú del fenómeno
de las vanguardias.” Hueso húmero 39 (2001): 131–148.

Further reading
Bremer, Thomas: “Canté un día la alegría de las locomotoras: Aspekte der Futurismus-Rezeption
bei Juan Parra del Riego (Perú/Uruguay) und Manuel Maples Arce (México) und der
Übergang vom Modernismus.” Harald Wentzlaff-Eggebert, ed.: Europäische Avantgarde
im lateinamerikanischen Kontext = La vanguardia europea en el contexto latinoamericano.
Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert, 1991. 105–146.
Foresta, Gaetano: “Primo Novecento italiano nel Peru: Il futurismo.” Nuova antologia 503:2009
(May 1968): 89–98.
García, Carlos: “Alberto Hidalgo: Bibliografía comentada.” Álvaro Sarco, ed.: Alberto Hidalgo:
El genio del desprecio. Materiales para su estudio. Lima: Talleres Tipográficos, 2006.
583–646.
Lorenzo Alcalá, May: “El futurismo rioplatense de Hidalgo.” Álvaro Sarco, ed.: Alberto Hidalgo: El
genio del desprecio. Materiales para su estudio. Lima: Talleres Tipográficos, 2006. 127–140.
Mariátegui, José Carlos: “Ubicación de Hidalgo.” Mundial (Lima) 7:421 (6 July 1928). Amauta (Lima)
3:18 (July 1928): 41–42. Reprinted under the title “Alberto Hidalgo.” J. C. Mariátegui: Siete
ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Biblioteca “Amauta”, 1952. 323–329.
Más y Pi, Juan: “Una tendencia de vida: El futurismo.” El diario español (Buenos Aires) 4:1279
(21 March 1909): 7. Reprinted in Gilberto Mendonça Teles, and Klaus Müller-Bergh, eds.:
720 Carlos García

Vanguardia latinoamericana: Historia, crítica y documentos. Vol. 5. Sudamérica. Chile y países

del Plata: Argentina –Paraguay – Uruguay. Frankfurt/Main: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana,
2009. 157–160.
Mojarro Romero, Jorge: “Mariátegui y el futurismo italiano.” Tonos Digital: Revista electrónica
de estudios filológicos 14 (December 2007). www.um.es/tonosdigital/znum14/secciones/
estudios-18-futurismo.htm (consulted 9 September 2015).
Monguió, Luis: “El agotamiento del modernismo en la poesía peruana.” Revista iberoamericana
18:36 (September 1953): 227–267.
Montenegro, Giovanna: “ ‘Indigenismo’ and Futurism in Latin America: José Carlos Mariátegui and
the Peruvian Avant-Garde.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 7 (2017): 29–59.
Nieto, Luis: “Juan Parra del Riego, el poeta de los polirritmos.” L. Nieto: Poetas y escritores
peruanos. Cuzco: Sol y Piedra, 1957. 17–23.
Núñez, Estuardo: “Alberto Hidalgo y el futurismo.” El comercio (Lima), 10 March 1968. Reprinted in
Álvaro Sarco, ed.: Alberto Hidalgo: El genio del desprecio. Materiales para su estudio. Lima:
Talleres Tipográficos, 2006. 114–118.
Palma, Clemente: “Alrededor de Panoplia lírica.” El tiempo (Lima), [1917?].
Parra del Riego, Juan: Himnos del cielo y de los ferrocarriles. Montevideo: Imprimería Tipografía
Morales, 1925.
Parra del Riego, Juan: Tres polirritmos inéditos. Montevideo: Ministerio de Instrucción Pública,
Institutos Penales, 1937.
Parra del Riego, Juan: Poesías. Editado por Esther de Cáceres. Huancayo [Perú]: Casa de la Cultura
de Junín, 1978.
Parra del Riego, Juan: Polirritmos y otros poemas. Lima: Instituto Nacional de Cultura, 1987.
Salaris, Claudia: “Perù = Peru.” C. Salaris, ed.: Futurismi nel mondo = Futurisms in the World.
Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2015. 724–739.
Unruh, Katherine Vickers: The Avant-Garde in Peru: Literary Aesthetics and Cultural Nationalism.
Ph.D. Dissertation. Austin/TX: The University of Texas at Austin, 1984.
Przemysław Strożek
45 Poland
Early responses to Futurism (1909–1917)
News of Italian Futurism first reached Poland in October 1909, when Ignacy Grabowski
(1866–1933) published the article “Najnowsze prądy w literaturze europejskiej: Futuryzm”
(The Latest Current in European Literature: Futurism), containing a translation of the
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism. Two years later, Cezary Jellenta (1861–1935)
re-translated the manifesto and related it to the Italo-Turkish war (1911–1912) and Italy’s
policy of colonialist expansion. When, in 1912, an exhibition of Italian Futurist paint-
ings travelled to Paris, London and Berlin, reviews by Witold Bunikiewicz (1885–1946),
Tadeusz Nalepiński (1885–1918) and Jellenta appeared in the Polish press; they included
translations of the catalogue’s introduction, The Exhibitors to Their Public, as well as
the Manifesto of Futurist Painters. The Berlin display at the gallery of Der Sturm was
supplemented by Herwarth Walden with works by various Expressionists and sent to
Budapest under the title Futuristák és expresszionisták (Futurists and Expressionists, 25
January – 28 February 1913) and to Lviv under the heading Wystawa futurystów, kubistów,
itp. (Exhibition of Futurists, Cubists, etc., June 1913). However, by the time it reached Lviv,
and despite its title, the exhibition only included works by Czech, Russian and German
Expressionists (Clegg: “Futurists, Cubists and the Like”). A year later, the Futurist group in
Florence organized, at the Libreria Gonnelli, an Esposizione di pittura futurista di “Lacerba”
(Exhibition of Futurist Paintings, Curated by Lacerba; November 1913 – January 1914).
In 1914, Maria Sławińska (dates unknown) reviewed the exhibition for Kłosy Ukraińskie
(Ukrainian Ear of Grain) and complemented the review with a description of the Grande
serata futurista held on 12 December 1913 at the Teatro Verdi, as well as giving a summary
of recent manifestos published in the volume I manifesti del futurismo (1914). One of the
leading traditional Polish novelists, Stefan Żeromski (1864–1925), was living in Florence
at the time and was deeply involved in the city’s cultural life. He was eager to have sec-
tions of his drama Róża (The Rose) published in the magazine Lacerba, an aspiration that
remained unfulfilled. Nonetheless, in his novel Nawracanie Judasza (Judas’s Conversion,
1916), he evoked the boisterous gatherings of the Futurists at the Giubbe Rosse café.
By 1914, Italian Futurism had taken firm root in Polish intellectual circles.
In January 1914, a major article by Anna Limprechtówna appeared in Echo
literacko-artystyczne (Literary and Artistic Echo), summarizing Marinetti’s concepts
and ideas as outlined in the collection Le Futurisme (1911). In 1914, too, Aleksander
Kołtoński (1882–1964), who was resident in Italy at the time and an important
promoter of Italian Futurism in Poland, issued a summary of the manifestos on
Futurist music by Francesco Balilla Pratella and Luigi Russolo. Kołtoński was
clearly familiar with the collection I manifesti del futurismo: Prima serie (1914),
and demonstrated his extensive knowledge in a groundbreaking article entitled “O
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-045
722 Przemysław Strożek

futuryzmie jako zjawisku kulturalnym i artystycznym” (On Futurism as a Cultural

and Artistic Movement), published in the journal Krytyka (Critique) in 1914. It also
included an excerpt from Marinetti’s Zang tumb tuuum: Adrianopoli ottobre 1912
(Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianople, October 1912).
In 1914, Futurism was beginning to make inroads into Polish literature. The
poetry of Jerzy Jankowski (1887–1941) contained echoes of Futurist aesthetics, as is
evident from his poem Spłon Lotnika (Pilot’s Ignition, 1914), which featured the heroic
death of a pilot who transcends time and space by perishing with his burning aero-
plane. Julian Tuwim (1894–1953) became the first to characterize himself as a ‘Polish
Futurist’ in a poem-manifesto, Poezja (Poetry, written in the period 1914–1916). Very
familiar with the work of the Italian Futurists, Tuwim distinguished himself from their
aesthetics by opposing Marinetti’s attempts to introduce violence into the spheres of
literature and art. Instead, Tuwim modelled his work on Walt Whitman’s ideas about
democracy and poetry.

Polish Expressionist Groups in Poznań and

Krakow, and Polish Formism (1917–1922)
By the end of the First World War, the first Polish avant-garde groups entered
the scene in Krakow and Poznań. In 1917, the Ekspresjoniści Polscy (Polish
Expressionists; from 1919 onwards known as Formiści [Formists]) association
was established in Krakow. In 1918, Poland regained its independence after one
hundred and twenty-three years of partition, and a need arose to modernize
art and literature in line with other European models. As part of this attempt to
create a modern national art scene, the Poznań-based magazine Zdrój (Spring,
1917–1922) was launched and subsequently developed into a mouthpiece for the
Expressionist group Bunt (The Revolt). In 1919, Zdrój initiated a discussion about
Polish Futurism, which began with an article entitled “Futuryzm Polski” (Polish
Futurism), by Radosław Krajewski (1887–1956), who considered Jankowski’s early
poetry to be the first example of Futurist aesthetics in Poland and thereby located
the roots of Polish Futurism in 1914. Jerzy Hulewicz (1886–1941), editor-in-chief of
Zdrój and a member of Bunt, disagreed. Hulewicz, who was influenced by German
Expressionism, believed that Futurist aesthetics did not have any useful function
in Poland at that time. He strictly distinguished between the two poles of ‘spirit’
(Expressionism) and ‘matter’ (Futurism), choosing the first pole to shape the pro-
gramme of the Bunt group.
Expressionism and Futurism acted as important reference points and were
reflected in the manifestos of Polish Expressionists and their association,
Bunt. However, Hulewicz saw Futurism as an Italian current in opposition to
Expressionism, whereas Zbigniew Pronaszko (1885–1958) and Leon Chwistek
 Poland 723

(1884–1944), the main theorists of the group of Polish Expressionists (Formists),

considered it a style of art interacting with, rather than standing in opposition to,
other movements. In the programmatic text O ekspresjonizmie (On Expressionism,
1918), Pronaszko viewed ‘Futurism’ as a label which, together with ‘Cubism’ and
‘Orphism’, could be attached to Expressionism. For Chwistek, ‘Futurism’ was the
appropriate tag for a movement embracing all manifestations of avant-garde art.
His theory was published in the first four issues of Maski (Mask, 1918) and then as
a book entitled Wielość rzeczywistości w sztuce (The Multiplicity of Reality in Art,
1921). In it, he distinguished four categories of reality, to which he assigned par-
ticular currents in the visual arts: the popular reality of daily experience and things
(Primitivism), the reality of physical bodies (Realism), the reality of emotions and
sensations (Impressionism) and the reality of images (Futurism). ‘Futurism’ was
not a term denoting Marinetti’s movement, but rather one representing all new
art currents in Europe. Chwistek used ‘Futurism’ as a name for any type of art con-
cerned with the future and for any new style of painting, including the works of
the French Fauves and Polish Expressionists. In his view, Futurism constituted a
‘style’ that embraced the whole gamut of Modernist currents. This style was even-
tually defined in Poland as ‘Formism’, a term that was used from 1919 onwards.
It replaced the rather vague term ‘Polish Expressionists’ and was focussed on the
common factors that characterized Futurism, Cubism and Expressionism, namely
new approaches to the question of form. This emphasis on form was intended to
signify a preoccupation with aesthetic concerns and a willingness to launch a
totally new and contemporary style in Polish art.
The Formists established themselves in Krakow and also had representatives in
Lviv and Warsaw. The Krakow group included Pronaszko, Chwistek, Tytus Czyżewski
(1880–1945), Tymon Niesiołowski (1882–1965), Eugeniusz Zak (1884–1926), Jan
Hrynkowski (1891–1971), August Zamoyski (1893–1970), Pronaszko’s brother
Andrzej (1888–1961) and one of the most versatile artists of the interwar period,
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (1885–1939, better known under the pseudonym
Witkacy). Ludwik Lille (1897–1957) represented Lviv, and Roumald Kamil Witkowski
(1876–1950) and Wacław Wąsowicz (1891–1942) spoke for Warsaw. Although com-
prised of artists representing diverse styles and affiliations, the Formists were
unified in their interest in modernity and its relation to autonomous form. They
drew their inspiration mainly from two different sources: Polish folklore and the
European avant-garde. The Pronaszko brothers leaned towards Cubist structures,
whereas Chwistek depicted modern life as a visionary experience, which resembled
Futurist aesthetics and was particularly pronounced in his works from 1919 to 1920.
He sought to represent the vibrant life of the contemporary metropolis, as in Miasto
fabryczne (Factory City, 1920), which depicted an imaginary cityscape and applied
clearly Futurist notions of simultaneity. In other works, he explored issues of dyna-
mism, as in Szermierka (Swordplay, 1919), which captured the rhythmic repetition of
movement, recalling Giacomo Balla’s experiments. Similarities to Balla’s works can
724 Przemysław Strożek

also be found in Czyżewski’s ‘multiplanar pictures’ made of polychrome wood and

cardboard, which resembled the assemblage-like Futurist works called complessi
plastici (Three-Dimensional Aggregations, 1914). However, Czyżewski was most
probably not familiar with Balla at that time, and his work developed in parallel and
independently of its Italian counterpart.
Although Formism had its roots in the fine arts, it spread to other domains such
as poetry, for example Czyżewski’s volume Zielone Oko – Poezje formistyczne –
Elektryczne wizje (Green Eye – Formist Poetry – Electric Visions, 1920), and drama, best
represented by Czyżewski’s short play Włamywacz z lepszego towarzystwa (A Burglar
from High Society, 1922). The latter recalled the Italian sintesi (see pp. 251–252 in this
volume), known to the Formists through translations by Janina de Witt, which appeared
in the December 1919 and January 1920 issues of Zdrój. Together with Czyżewski’s
short plays, they were considered by Chwistek as prototypes of the Formists’ attempt
to revive Polish theatre. In 1925–1927, Witkacy as director of the Formist Theatre in
Zakopane staged mainly his own plays, guided by his idea of a ‘theatre of pure form’.
Witkacy opposed Chwistek’s view that Futurist sintesi should constitute the theatre
of the future because sintesi were closely connected to life experience. Witkacy’s own
idea of a ‘theatre of pure form’ turned towards metaphysics and envisaged an absolute
construction of formal elements, in contradistinction to the mimesis of reality.
Czyżewski and Chwistek, the most radical of the Formists, established the
magazine Formiści (The Formists, 1919–1921). They issued the first two numbers
together, and the next four were edited by Czyżewski together with Konrad
Winkler (1882–1962), a painter and theoretician of the movement, who authored
an elaborate treatise on Formism and its relation to other new trends in the arts.
These three editors were the sole publishers of theoretical accounts of Formism’s
place in the context of Polish and European art. Formiści became the mouthpiece
of the group and featured, among other things, reproductions of their paint-
ings, poems by Czyżewski, prose pieces by young Polish writers and examples
of the latest avant-garde literary trends from France. It also introduced German
Dada poetry, as well as translations from Russian and Italian Futurists. From the
second issue onwards (April 1920), Bruno Jasieński (1901–1938) and Stanisław
Młodożeniec (1895–1959), who had just returned from Russia and were influenced
by the Bolshevik Revolution, began to cooperate with the magazine. Thanks to
Czyżewski’s protection, they found a place in Krakow’s literary circles and, with
him, formed a Krakow-based Futurist club, Pod Katarynką (At the Hurdy-gurdy).
They were seeking a breakthrough in Polish literature and, at this time, Formiści
was the only place open to the publication of their poems. To spread their concep-
tions of a new Polish poetry, they organized recitation evenings that recalled the
Brodiachaia Sobaka (Stray Dog) cabaret in Russia or the Italian serate, and they
began to call themselves ‘The Futurists’. The last issue of the magazine appeared
in June 1921, and a year later, the Formist group dissolved.
 Poland 725

Polish literary Futurism

The first manifesto of Polish Futurists was a leaflet called Tak (Yes), issued in 1918 and
attributed to Anatol Stern (1899–1968) and Aleksander Wat (1900–1967). From 1919
onwards, the label ‘Futurism’ was used simultaneously in Krakow and in Warsaw.
In February 1919, Stern and Wat organized the first reading of their Futurist poetry
in a soirée they called “Wieczór podtropikalny urządzony przez białych Murzynów”
(Subtropical Evening Organized by White Negroes). By the end of 1919, they had
issued their first books: Nagi człowiek w śródmieściu (Naked Man in the City Centre,
1919) and Futuryzje (Futurisions, 1919) by Stern, and Ja z jednej strony i ja z drugiej
strony mojego mopsożelaznego piecyka (Me from One Side and Me from the Other
Side of My Pug Iron Stove, 1919) by Wat. In the first half of 1920, they co-authored
a volume, To są niebieskie pięty, które trzeba pomalować (These Are the Blue Heels
That Must be Painted, 1920). They performed together at a newly established Futurist
Club in Warsaw. The evenings at this venue were frequented by Jerzy Jankowski, who
issued his début poetry volume, Tram wpopszek ulicy (A Tram Akros the Street), in
1919, although it was dated 1920. The words w poprzek (across) were spelled phonet-
ically as wpopszek (‘akros’) in order to give it a Futurist touch. A similar strategy was
employed in 1920 in a catalogue accompanying an exhibition of works by a young
painter from Warsaw, Mieczysław Szczuka (1898–1927). The text was drawn up by his
friend, the Warsaw poet Edmund Miller (dates unknown), and was based on phonetic
orthography; it asserted that the young artist was the greatest living artist and that
his works broke with tradition. Although neither Miller nor Szczuka claimed to be
Futurists at the time, Szczuka’s views on painting resembled those presented in the
Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910), and the exhibition catalogue suggested
a clear connection with the orthographic revolution espoused in Jankowski’s volume.
The Futurists’ negative attitude to tradition made them reject existing grammar and
orthography, as was summed up in Jasieński’s Manifest w sprawie ortografii fonte-
tycznej (Manifesto Concerning Phonetic Spelling, 1921).
In December 1920, Stern and Wat signed the manifesto Prymitywiści do narodów
świata i do Polski (Primitivists to the Nations of the World and to Poland), which
appeared in the volume Gga: Pierwszy polski almanach poezji futurystycznej (Gga: The
First Polish Almanac of Futurist Poetry). It was not received well in Krakow. Jasieński
deemed it anachronistic, and Czyżewski accused the two authors of plagiarizing the
concepts of Italian Futurism. To promote their new literary concepts, they adopted
Marinetti’s strategy of organizing poetry evenings. In March 1921, Stern and Wat per-
formed together with the Krakow Futurists Czyżewski, Młodożeniec and Jasieński for
the first time at a joint poetry evening. The police and the audience often interrupted
these legendary soirées of the Polish Futurists. Following one of them, Stern was
arrested because conservative critics interpreted the poem Uśmiech Primavery (The
Smile of Primavera) as an obscene attack on the Virgin Mary. Another memorable and
scandalous evening occurred in Zakopane in August 1921, when a member of the more
726 Przemysław Strożek

traditional Skamander group, Jan Lechoń (1899–1956), demonstrated his contempt for
Futurist poetry by slapping Stern in the face. The performance ended with fisticuffs,
the throwing of eggs and stones, and more fighting in the street.
In early 1921, several volumes of Futurist poetry were released in Poland, includ-
ing Jasieński’s But w butonierce (A Boot in a Buttonhole), Młodożeniec’s Kreski
futureski (Marks and Futuresques) and Stern and Wat’s Nieśmiertelny tom futuryz
(Immortal Futurist Volume). Afterwards, the Polish Futurists decided to join forces
and to fight together for the renewal of Polish literature. Inspiration received from
European avant-garde groups was fused with indigenous elements taken from native
folklore. Consequently, Polish Futurism did not formulate a single coherent style or
aesthetic but instead remained a multifaceted phenomenon. Moreover, Jasieński
and Młodożeniec, who lived in Moscow during the First World War, were exposed
to Russian rather than Italian Futurism, especially to the Russian poets Velimir
Khlebnikov and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Młodożeniec drew inspiration from Polish
folklore, as Czyżewski had done in his poem Pastorałki (Pastoral, 1919 and 1925). Some
of Stern’s works resembled Dadaist optophonetics, and Wat’s so-called namopaniks
(an untranslatable neologism for a new genre of trans-rational poetry) were aligned
with the theory and practice of Velimir Khlebnikov’s zaum’ (transsense, beyonsense;
see p. 776 in the entry on Russia).
Among the Polish literary Futurists, only Czyżewski was a visual artist, and
as such was considered a Formist. As a Futurist poet, he drew inspirations from
Guillaume Apollinaire and created visual poems in the calligram tradition, for
example Mechaniczny ogród (The Mechanical Garden, 1921) and Płomień i studnia
(The Flame and the Well, 1921). In the poem Hymn do maszyny mego ciała (A Hymn
to the Machine of My Body, 1921), he described, without any syntactic subordination,
human organs in juxtaposition with electrical terms. Czyżewski was of the view that
the machine was either going to kill or elevate humankind. Ironically, he called for a
“love of the machines” and the “birth of dynamo-children” (Czyżewski: “O zielonym
oku i o swoim malarstwie”, 4), but at the same time expressed apprehension about
the direction in which civilization was moving. For this reason, Czyżewski neither
fully rejected nor fully endorsed the machine.
The Polish Futurists’ attitude towards the machine was not unequivocal and was
certainly different from Marinetti’s. In Jasieński’s view, art did not have the task of
extolling the beauty of the machine, but rather of constructing “new organisms, based
on the machine’s rationality, purposefulness and dynamism” (Jasieński: “Futuryzm
polski (Bilans)”, 183). In his opinion, the Italian Futurists pursued an erotically
charged machine-cult at the expense of humanist values and intellectual reflection.
In June 1921, the first collection of manifestos authored by Jasieński and other
Futurists, Jednodńuwka futurystuw (Leaflet of the Futurists), was released in Krakow.
It contained Do narodu polskiego: Manifest w sprawie natychimiastowej futuryzacji
życia (To the Polish Nation: A Manifesto Concerning the Immediate Futurization of
Life), Manifest w sprawie poezji futurystycznej (Manifesto Concerning Futurist Poetry),
 Poland 727

Manifest w sprawie krytyki artystycznej (Manifesto Concerning the Critics) and Manifest
w sprawie ortografii fontetycznej (Manifesto Concerning Phonetic Spelling). In the
first of these texts, Jasieński wanted to rid Poland of its messianic tradition. He called
for a liberation from logic and advocated the rule of nonsense and humour. In order
to reach the masses, he argued, artists had to go into the streets and ‘futurize life’.
The leaflet also included various poems by Jasieński, Czyżewski, Młodożeniec and
Stern. One of the poems was a provocative poem-manifesto written by Jasieński, enti-
tled Krytyka (Critique), also known as Zmęczył mnie język (Language Wears Me Out,
1921), in which he cited important figures of the European avant-garde (Apollinaire,
Mayakovsky, Marinetti, Sergei Yesenin, Aldo Palazzeschi and others) and claimed
that their works were inferior to those of the representatives of Polish Futurism.
By adopting the label ‘Futurism’, Jasieński was forced to clarify his attitude
towards Marinetti’s movement. To avoid any charges of plagiarism, he decreed that
Polish ‘Futurism’ was a term that did not fit hand-in-glove with the poetic revolution
that had taken place in Italy after 1909: “We do not intend to repeat in 1921 what
has already been done in 1908 [sic]” (Jasieński: “Manifest w sprawie poezji futury-
stycznej”, 2). In a second Futurist leaflet, phonetically spelled Nuż w bżuhu: 2 jed-
nodńuwka futurystuw (A Nife in Stomak: Second Leaflet of the Futurists), signed on
13 November 1921, he stressed: “Marinetti is foreign to us”. It was a provocative pub-
lication, shocking to bourgeois tastes and convention, as well as to right-wing and
leftist political groups. It was therefore soon confiscated by the police. Chwistek’s par-
ticipation in its preparation resulted in the delayed awarding of his doctoral degree at
Krakow’s Jagiellonian University.

Futurism and Zwrotnica (first series)

Following the publication of A Nife in Stomak, the Polish Futurists and Formists
entered into a brief period of cooperation with Nowa Sztuka (New Art), published from
1921 to 1922 and launched by Stern in Warsaw. This new avant-garde magazine advo-
cated the idea of Polish literature marching shoulder-to-shoulder with the European
avant-garde; consequently, it published some translations of Russian Futurists and
Spanish Ultraists. When Nowa Sztuka ceased publication, the Polish Futurists and
Formists contributed to the Krakow-based review Zwrotnica (Railway Switch’; first
series, 1922–1923), edited by Tadeusz Peiper (1891–1969). Zwrotnica resembles a syn-
thesis of previous publications, such as Formiści and the Futurist leaflets, despite the
fact that Peiper’s aesthetic ideals were closer to Purism and Constructivism than to
Futurism. Similarities could be explained by the fact that Peiper knew that, without
the support of former Formists and Futurists, his attempts at launching a new artis-
tic and literary movement in Poland would be destined to failure. The Futurists
employed Zwrotnica as a medium for promoting their own agenda, which led many
728 Przemysław Strożek

readers to see the magazine as a mouthpiece of Polish Futurism. Only the sixth and
final issue (October 1923) – almost entirely devoted to Italian Futurism – settled the
matter: Jasieński and Czyżewski took stock of their Futurist activities and proclaimed
the imminent death of Polish Futurism. The number also contained translations of
four poems by Marinetti – Il bombardamento di Adrianopoli (The Bombardment of
Adrianople, 1912), Sì, sì, così: L’aurora sul mare (Yes, Yes, Just Like That: Daybreak
on the Sea; published in Italian in 1925), Alberi (Trees, undated), Lettre d’une jolie
femme à un monsieur passéiste (Letter from a Pretty Woman to an Old-fashioned
Man, 1914–1919) as well as several reproductions of Futurist works of art. The poems
were translated by the nineteen-year-old Jalu Kurek (1904–1983). Following this
début in the pages of Zwrotnica, Kurek became the most important popularizer of
Italian Futurism in Poland and the pre-eminent translator of Italian Futurist poetry
into Polish. The last issue of Zwrotnica included a letter of introduction by Marinetti,
dated May 1923, in which he declared: “Je sens que Zwrotnica est un lieu habité
par le Divin!” (I have the feeling that Zwrotnica is a place inhabited by the divine;
Marinetti: “List”, 161) In the following pages, however, Peiper launched a fierce
attack on Italian Futurism. Peiper saw in Marinetti the man who had opened up a
new path for the arts, a road towards the future and towards previously unknown
forms of expression. Nonetheless, he blamed Marinetti for operating with what he
felt were seriously flawed assumptions, namely valuing life above art, idealizing the
machine, seeking to destroy syntax and logic in poetic works of art and misunder-
standing the rôle of dynamism in art and literature.
According to Peiper, literature could not be created by loosely organizing nouns
and verbs in the infinitive without recourse to established syntax and grammar. This,
he felt, would only create an inventory, not a poetic evocation of the world. For Peiper,
literary achievements rested in well-wrought sentences. In contrast to Marinetti’s
anarchic concept of literature, Peiper developed his own Constructivist concept of
‘blossoming’, whereby a poem defines objects or situations by using ever-extending
arrangements of sentences that grow in conjunction with the chain of images in the
reader’s mind. Likewise, Peiper criticized the Futurists’ approach towards dynamism
in art and literature. In his opinion, Marinetti’s poetry and Boccioni’s paintings
operated with entirely false notions of dynamism. He was eager to emphasize that
dynamism in art should be understood as an aesthetic and not as a physical concept.
Therefore, ‘plastic dynamism’, as proposed by the Futurists, presented only a symbol
of movement and could not create an actual impression of movement in the reader’s
or viewer’s mind. Only Kasimir Malevich, he felt, and not Boccioni and Carrà, had
ever achieved authentic dynamism in art.
In terms of ideology, Peiper’s programme was reminiscent of the ideas promoted
in the French magazine L’ Esprit nouveau (1920–1925), which demanded that art fulfil
strict creative rules in accordance with the functional efficiency of the machine and
architecture. Peiper wrote articles on Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant and Charles
Edouard Jeanneret (Le Corbusier), and he published Władysław Strzemiński’s
 Poland 729

(1893–1952) opinions on Vladimir Tatlin and Kazimir Malevich. This helped Peiper
to establish a Purist and Constructivist concept of the organic connection between
art and society. In effect, these articles reinstated the programme first proposed in
Zwrotnica at a time before it was swamped with contributions from former Polish
Futurists, Formists and the poets of Nowa Sztuka.
Zwrotnica had introduced a new approach to art that resembled Constructivism,
and Strzemiński had, through the magazine, made contact with Mieczysław
Szczuka, who published an article in it, entitled “Reakcja otoczenia” (Reaction to the
Environment, 1923), on the need to create an art that matched the progress of the
modern world. The appearance of both artists in Zwrotnica foreshadowed the Warsaw-
based Constructivist group Blok, which was established by Szczuka and Strzemiński
together with Witold Kajruksztis (1890–1961), Teresa Żarnower (1895–1949), Karol
Kryński (1900–1944) and Henryk Stażewski (1894–1988). From 1924 to 1926, they pub-
lished eleven issues of Blok: Czasopismo awangardy artystycznej (Block: Journal of the
Artistic Avant-Garde), which had a strongly internationalist outlook and was enthu-
siastically greeted by Marinetti in a short note published in the second issue of 1924.

Jalu Kurek and Futurist theatre

Since his début in Zwrotnica, Kurek had been engaged in an all-out effort to dissem-
inate information on the Italian Futurist movement in Poland. On 17 November 1923,
he organized a reading in Krakow to promote modern Italian poetry, which was adver-
tised in the Roman magazine Noi: Raccolta internazionale d’arte d’avanguardia (We:
International Collection of Avant-garde Art). Beginning in 1924, he published essays
on Italian Futurism in Wiadomości Literackie (Literary News) and Głos Narodu (The
Voice of the Nation), sometimes using the Futurist pseudonym ‘Mafarka’, derived
from Marinetti’s African novel, Mafarka il futurista. From mid-1924 to early 1925, Kurek
was resident in Naples. In Capri and Rome, he met Marinetti and Prampolini, and he
was subsequently recognized by them as a truly Futurist poet. L’ impero published
his article “Poesia futurista e avanguardista della Polonia” (Futurist and Avant-Garde
Poetry in Poland, 6 February 1925), in which he offered a portrait of the Poznań Bunt
group, the leading figures of Futurism in Warsaw, the associates of Almanach Nowej
Sztuki (Almanac of the New Art, 1924–1925) and the Skamander group. Much of the
essay was devoted to poets from Krakow: Czyżewski, Jasieński, Młodożeniec and
Peiper. In the article, he presented Zwrotnica as “L’ Esprit Nouveau di Polonia” and
claimed that the Zdrój leaders were the first avant-garde poets in Poland.
Kurek not only popularized Futurist poetry in Poland; he also disseminated
Futurist concepts of theatre. The most apposite example is the drama Gołębie Winicji
Claudel (Winicja Claudel’s Doves, 1924), entitled in an earlier version Winicja Claudel
czyli renesans miłości (Winicja Claudel, or The Renaissance of Love). It recalled the
730 Przemysław Strożek

Futurist mini-dramas (sintesi) and contained stage directions that suggested the design
should adopt Prampolini’s stage aesthetics (see pp. 252–254 in the Theatre entry in this
volume). The objective was to introduce the teatro sintetico (the Futurist Theatre of
Essential Brevity; see the entry on Theatre) and to ridicule Polish national symbols.
Kurek subtitled the play “anti-symbolic”, suggesting that cherishing the tradition of
national literature and recalling solemn symbols of Polishness had become outworn
and could no longer drag audiences out of their lethargy. He sought to engage them in
a modern type of performance, as the Futurists had done in their serate, and for this
purpose he published, between 1924 and 1926, a considerable number of articles on
Futurist theatre, in which he appraised the work of Marinetti, Prampolini and Vasari.
At this time, the Teatr Polski in Warsaw showed an interest in performing
Marinetti’s Tamburo di fuoco (The Drum of Fire, 1922) and Ruggero Vasari’s L’ angoscia
delle machine (The Anguish of the Machines, 1925). Kurek wanted to be involved in
both undertakings, but the task of translation was ultimately given to Edward Boyé
and Irena Krzywicka, respectively. Kurek sent reports to Marinetti and Vasari about
the preparations for performing the plays, but in the end neither was actually staged.
Kurek hoped that Vasari would help him find a theatre that might be willing to host his
drama Winicja Claudel’s Doves. Unfortunately, neither the Teatro degli Independenti
in Rome, nor the Art et Action or the Théâtre Alfred Jarry in Paris were interested in
staging the play.
The only Italian Futurist plays to be performed in Poland were Boccioni’s Genio
e cultura (Genius and Culture) at one of the Zdrój evenings in 1919 and, somewhat
later, Marinetti’s Prigionieri (The Captives, 1925) at the Grand Theatre in Lviv in 1933,
directed by Wacław Radulski with a stage design by Andrzej Pronaszko. Marinetti
came to the première while travelling to Poland in March 1933 and claimed that the
production was superior to the first staging at the Teatro di Villa Ferrari in Rome (May
1925). Prigionieri was presented again by Radulski at the Teatr im. Słowackiego in
Krakow in 1937, with stage sets by Tadeusz Orłowicz.

Futurism and the Krakow avant-garde

During the interval between the last issue of the first series of Zwrotnica (October
1923) and the second series, launched between 1926 and 1927, preparations were
made for establishing a Krakow avant-garde group called Awangarda Krakowska
(Cracow Avant-garde). At that time, several poets belonging to the group published
important books, such as Peiper’s A (1924) and Żywe linie (Alive Lines, 1924),
Kurek’s Upały (Heatwaves, 1925), Tętno (The Pulse, 1925) by Jan Brzękowski (1903–
1983) and Śruby (Screws, 1925) by Julian Przyboś (1901–1970). Poems in these works
celebrated the development of large conurbations, the work of labourers and
modern civilization, largely following Peiper’s idea of finding an adequate poetic
 Poland 731

expression for the so-called ‘3M’: “Metropolis, Mass, Machine” (Peiper: “Miasto,
Masa, Maszyna”). Peiper was often given the sobriquet of ‘pope of the avant-garde’,
derived from his name, which sounded similar to papież, ‘pope’, and was con-
sidered a master among the young poets in Krakow. In 1928, Przyboś published
an article, “Przeciw frazesom w poetyce” (Against Platitudes in Poetry), in Głos
Literacki (Literary Voice), in which he claimed that Peiper’s readings constituted
an ideal for Polish poetry and Formalist criticism. The article met with fierce oppo-
sition from the magazine’s editor, Józef Podhalicz (1899–1940), who unleashed
a discussion about originality (or lack thereof) among the representatives of the
Krakow avant-garde. In his view, Krakow poets merely repeated Marinetti’s exper-
iments and did not undertake a Futurist poetic revolution of their own. Podhalicz
even called Marinetti the ‘Roman Peiper’ (Ryon: “Właśnie przeciw frazesom”, 2).
This drew a response from Maryla Jurtkiewiczówna, who, in her text “Marinetti-
Peiper”, pointed out the significant differences between the two literary figures,
citing Peiper’s criticism of Italian Futurism, which had been published in the last
issue of the first series of Zwrotnica (1923).
In 1929, Kurek published a volume of poetry, Śpiewy o Rzeczypospolitej (Songs
about the Republic of Poland). It included his Manifest poetycki o Rzeczpospolitej
(Manifesto of Poetry of the Republic of Poland) , which bore a resemblance to
Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism in several points: “Poets – we throw
this organized appeal at you because our wish is to free Polish poetry from a legal-
ized scribomania, unrelenting egoism, psychological self-exposure, devouring of the
abstract, phraseological snobbery, a poetic vacuum and shameless crassness” (Kurek:
“Manifest poetycki o Rzeczpospolitej”, 7). Kurek demanded that poetry should be
brought onto the streets and that works of art should be made available to the general
public. However, he did not argue against literary tradition; rather, he proclaimed the
dawn of a ‘New Romanticism’ in which the beauty of factories, great industrial centres
and human labour would collide with traditional lyricism. Despite obvious relations
to Futurism, Kurek strongly opposed the view that he was ‘Marinetti’s student’ (Kurek:
“Czy Marinetti wpłynął na poezję polską?”, 43).
Calling Peiper the ‘Roman Marinetti’ and Kurek ‘Marinetti’s student’ suggested
that Polish literary critics were unwilling to accept the poetry of members of the
Awangarda Krakowska group on their own terms. Undaunted by criticism, Kurek pub-
lished a text entitled “Czy Marinetti wpłynął na poezję polską” (Has Marinetti Exerted
an Influence on Polish Poetry?), in which he rejected the classification of the poetry
of the Krakow avant-garde as ‘Futurist’. This article appeared in the newly established
magazine of avant-garde poetry, Linia (The Line, 1931–1933). Kurek, as editor of the
magazine, was the only Polish avant-garde poet who translated poems by Italian
Futurists. However, he was of the view that Marinetti’s poetry did not have any influ-
ence in Poland because – so he claimed – the atmosphere, style and defiant attitude
of Italian Futurism did not suit the Polish sensitivity and imagination. Peiper was
chosen by Linia as a patron, but Peiper himself considered it a revisionist journal
732 Przemysław Strożek

that strayed too far from his theory. Consequently, he did not publish anything in the
magazine.
The disagreement between Kurek and Peiper escalated further when Marinetti
visited Poland in 1933. Kurek frequently told the Polish press about his long-term
friendship with the founder of Futurism and praised his poetic revolution. Peiper
took offence at this, as he felt that Kurek was paying tribute to Italian Futurism at the
expense of the Polish literary avant-garde.

Futurism and the Polish avant-garde of the 1930s

A representative of the Awangarda Krakowska group, Jan Brzękowski, went to Paris in
1928, and a year later joined the Cercle et Carré group. In 1929, together with Wanda
Chodasiewicz-Grabowska (1904–1982), he began issuing the magazine L’ Art contem-
porain / Sztuka współczesna, with which he sought to bring the achievements of the
Polish avant-garde to the attention of the international community. He published
French translations of works written by the poets associated with Zwrotnica, as well
as Futurist works by Czyżewski, Adam Ważyk (1905–1982) and Stanisław Brucz (1899–
1978). When Brzękowski met Marinetti in 1930 in Paris, the Futurist leader expressed
his interest in getting Kurek to translate Polish avant-garde poetry in Italian maga-
zines. Although such publications would have legitimized the work of Polish poets at
home and enhanced their prestige abroad, the project did not come to fruition due to
Kurek’s lack of cooperation.
In 1929, a group that called itself a.r. (an abbreviation for ‘real avant-garde’ and/or
‘revolutionary artists’ in Polish) was formed; its members included Katarzyna Kobro
(1898–1951), Strzemiński, Stażewski, Przyboś and Brzękowski. The group undertook
attempts to establish an a.r. book series with translations of important critical texts
and creative writings from the international avant-garde. Another project was the
acquisition of an international collection of modern art for the Municipal Museum
of History and Art in Łódź. Strzemiński wanted to involve Kurek in a translation of
Marinetti’s Les Mots en liberté (Words-in-Freedom, 1919). His intention was to broaden
the notion of Italian Futurism in Poland so as to distinguish it from art associated
mainly with the activity of Futurist poets in Krakow and Warsaw. Strzemiński claimed
that pure Futurism (the machine cult, the printing revolution, abbreviations, the
breaking of word order) was non-existent in Poland, and that nothing had been done
to explain to the Polish public what Futurism actually was. Thus, he hoped, Kurek’s
translations would help broaden the discussion about the significance of Futurism for
the contemporary avant-garde. However, Kurek declined to join the a.r. group.
Strzemiński managed to involve Brzękowski in his second project and assem-
bled a substantial collection of paintings with his help. One of the first donors was
Prampolini, who gave the Museum in Łódź one of his works from 1920, entitled
 Poland 733

Tarantella. Brzękowski maintained close contact with Prampolini, which in 1935

enabled him to publish an article, “Le Futurisme Italien en Pologne”, for a new Futurist
magazine, Stile futurista, issued in Turin. The text elaborated briefly on the Futurists’
activity in Krakow and Warsaw and explored the criticism of Futurism expressed by
Peiper. Additionally, it mentioned Kurek’s translations of Italian Futurist texts scat-
tered across various magazines. Brzękowski pointed out that Futurist painting did not
have as much influence on Polish art as Futurist poetry had had on Polish literature.
In the second half of the 1930s, Kurek was still publishing translations of texts by
Paolo Buzzi, Francesco Cangiullo and Aldo Palazzeschi in magazines such as Kamena
(The Nymph), Miesięcznik Literatury i Sztuki (The Monthly of Literature and Art) and
Skamander. He wanted to issue the first anthology of his own translations of Italian
Futurist texts, but it was not until 1977 that it could finally appear. From the late
1930s onwards, Futurism had no longer any significant influence on Polish literary
and artistic life. However, Wojciech Krukowski’s Academy of Movement in the 1970s
used Polish Futurist poetry to challenge the Communist régime, and Polish ‘concrete
poetry’ of the 1970s (represented by Stanisław Dróżdż, among others) resembled the
poetic experiments of the Futurists.

Works cited
Clegg, Elisabeth: “Futurists, Cubists and the Like: Early Modernism and Late Imperialism.” Zeitschrift
für Kunstgeschichte 56:2 (1993): 249–277.
Czyżewski, Tytus: “O zielonym oku i o swoim malarstwie.” [On Green Eye and His Painting]
Jednodńuwka futurystuw [First Leaflet of the Futurists]. Kraków: s.n., 1921. 4.
Jasieński, Bruno: “Futuryzm polski (bilans).” [Polish Futurism: A Balance Sheet] Zwrotnica [Railway
Points] 2:6 (October 1923): 177–184. Reprinted in Andrzej Lam, ed.: Polska awangarda
poetycka: Programy lat 1917–1923 [The Polish Poetical Avant-Garde: Programmes of the Years
1917–1923]. Vol. 2. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1969. 385–395.
Jasieński, Bruno: “Manifest w sprawie poezji futurystycznej.” [Manifesto Concerning Futurist Poetry]
Jednodńuwka futurystuw [First Leaflet of the Futurists]. Kraków: s.n., 1921. 2. English translation
“Manifesto Concerning Futurist Poetry.” Timothy O. Benson, and Éva Forgács, eds.: Between
Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes, 1910–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT
Press, 2002. 191–192.
Jednodńuwka futurystuw. Kraków: s. n., 1921
Kurek, Jalu: “Czy Marinetti wpłynął na poezję polską?” [Has Marinetti Influenced Polish Poetry?]
Linia [Line] 1:1 (May 1931): 43.
Kurek, Jalu: “Manifest poetycki o Rzeczpospolitej: Poeci na front, Grudzień 1929.” [Manifesto
of Poetry of the Republic of Poland: Poets to the Front, December 1929] J. Kurek: Śpiewy o
Rzeczypospolitej [Songs of the Republic of Poland]. Kraków: s.n., 1932. 5–7.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “List.” Zwrotnica [Railway Points] 2:6 (October 1923): 161.
[Miller, Edmund]: Wystawa M. Szczuki, maj – czerwiec 1920, Hotel Polonia [Exhibition of M. Szczuka.
May - June 1920. Hotel Polonia]. Warszawa: s. n., 1920.
Nuż w bżuhu: 2 jednodńuwka futurystuw. Wydańe nadzwyczajne [A Nife in Stomak: Second Leaflet of
the Futurists]. Kraków & Warszawa: s. n. November, 1921.
734 Przemysław Strożek

Peiper, Tadeusz: “Miasto, Masa, Maszyna.” [City, Mass, Machine] Zwrotnica [Railway Points] 1:2 (July
1922): 23–21.
Ryon, I. [Józef Podhalicz]: “Właśnie przeciw frazesom.” [Against Clichés] Głos literacki [Literary
Voice] 1:17 (1–15 October 1928): 2.

Further reading
Ajres, Alessandro: Avanguardie in movimento: Polonia, 1917–1923. Melfi: Libria, 2013.
Balcerzan, Edward: “Le Futurisme polonaise.” Europe: Revue littéraire mensuelle 53:552 (April 1975):
181–193.
Balcerzan, Edward: “Wstęp.” [Preface] Bruno Jasieński: Utwory poetyckie, manifesty, szkice [Poetic
Works, Manifestos, Sketches]. Opracował Edward Balcerzan. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1972. 3–84.
Baluch, Alicja: “Wstęp.” [Preface] Tytus Czyżewski: Poezje i próby dramatyczne [Poetry and Dramatic
Experiments]. Opracował Edward Balcerzan. Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1992. 5–77.
Bartelik, Marek, Polish Modern Art: Unity in Multiplicity. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2005.
Carpenter, Bogdana: The Poetic Avant-Garde in Poland, 1918–1939. Seattle/WA: University of
Washington Press, 1983.
Eberharter, Markus: Der poetische Formismus Tytus Czyżewskis: Ein literarischer Ansatz der frühen
polnischen Avantgarde und sein mitteleuropäischer Kontext. München: Sager, 2004.
De Simone, Rosario: “Polonia.” Ezio Godoli, ed.: Il dizionario del futurismo. Firenze: Vallecchi, 2001.
903–909.
Drews, Peter: Die slawische Avantgarde und der Westen: Die Programme der russischen, polnischen
und tschechischen literarischen Avantgarde und ihr europäischer Kontext. München: Fink, 1983.
Folejewski, Zbigniew: Futurism and Its Place in the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative
Study and Anthology. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1980.
Gazda, Grzegorz: Futuryzm w Polsce [Futurism in Poland]. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im.
Ossolińskich, 1974.
Heistein, Józef, ed.: Futuryzm i jego warianty w literaturze europejskiej [Futurism and its Variants in
European Literature]. Wrocław: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1977.
Jakimowicz, Irena, ed.: Formiści [The Formists]. Exhibition catalogue. Warszawa: Muzeum Narodowe
w Warszawie, 28 kwietnia – 14 lipca 1985. Warszawa: “Arkady”, 1989.
Jarosiński, Zbigniew: “Wstęp.” [Preface] Zbigniew Jarosiński, and Helena Zaworska, eds.: Antologia
polskiego futuryzmu i Nowej Sztuki [Anthology of Polish Futurism and New Art]. Wrocław:
Ossolineum, 1978. 3–125.
Jaworski, Stanisław: U podstaw awangardy: Tadeusz Peiper. Pisarz i teoretyk [The Foundations of the
Avant-Garde: Tadeusz Peiper. Writer and Theorist]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1968.
Kłak, Tadeusz: Materiały do dziejów awangardy [Materials for the History of the Avant-Garde].
Wrocław: Ossolineum, 1975.
Kolesnikoff, Nina: Bruno Jasieński: His Evolution from Futurism to Socialist Realism. Waterloo/ON:
Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982.
Kowalczykowa, Alina: Programy i spory literackie w dwudziestoleciu 1918–1939 [Literary Programmes
and Writings in the Period 1918–1939]. Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1981.
Kurek, Jalu, and Henryka Młynarska, eds.: Chora fontanna: Wiersze futurystów włoskich [The Sick
Fountain: The Poems of Italian Futurists]. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1977.
Lam, Andrzej: Polska awangarda poetycka: Programy lat 1917–1923 [The Polish Poetical
Avant-Garde: Programmes of the Years 1917–1923]. Vol. 1. Instynkt i ład [Instinct and Order].
 Poland 735

Vol. 2. Manifesty i protesty: Antologia [Manifestos and Protests: Anthology]. Kraków:

Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1969.
Majerski, Paweł: Odmiany awangardy [Varieties of the Avant-Garde]. Katowice: EGO, 2001.
Pollakówna, Joanna: Formiści [The Formists]. Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich, 1972.
Strożek, Przemysław: “ ‘Marinetti is foreign to us’: Polish Responses to Italian Futurism, 1917–1923.”
Günter Berghaus, ed.: Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe. Special issue of International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 85–109.
Strożek, Przemysław: Marinetti i futuryzm w Polsce, 1909–1939: Obecność – kontakty – wydarzenia
[Marinetti and Futurism in Poland, 1909–1939: Reception – Contacts – Events]. Warszawa:
Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk, 2012.
Strożek, Przemysław, ed.: Enrico Prampolini: Futurism, Stage Design and the Polish Avant-garde
Theatre. Łodz: Muzeum Sztuki, 2017.
Śniecikowska, Beata: “Poetic Experiments in Polish Futurism: Imitative, Eclectic or Original?”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012): 171–200.
Śniecikowska, Beata: “Nuż w uhu”? Koncepcje dźwięku w poezji polskiego futuryzmu [“Knife in
the Ear”? Concepts of Sound in the Poetry of the Polish Futurism]. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo
Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 2008. Tomassucci, Giovanna, and Massimo Tria, eds.: Gli altri
futurismi: Futurismi e movimenti d’avanguardia in Russia, Polonia, Cecoslovacchia, Bulgaria,
Romania. Atti del Convegno Internazionale Pisa, 5 giugno 2009. Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2010.
Turowski, Andrzej: Budowniczowie Świata: Z dziejów radykalnego modernizmu w sztuce polskiej
[Builders of the World: From the History of Radicalism in Polish Art]. Kraków: Universitas 2000.
Waśkiewicz, Andrzej: W kre̜gu futuryzmu i awangardy: Studia i szkice [In the World Sphere of
Futurism and the Avant-Garde: Studies and Sketches]. Wrocław: Oficyna Wydawnictwo Atut,
2003.
Waśkiewicz, Andrzej: W kręgu “Zwrotnicy”: Studia i szkice z dziejów Krakowskiej awangardy [The
“Zwrotnica” Circle: Studies and Sketches from the History of the Krakov Avant-Garde]. Kraków:
Wydawnictwo Literackie, 1983.
Woźniak, Monika: “L’esperienza del futurismo in Polonia.” Avanguardia: Rivista di letteratura
contemporanea 1:2 (1996): 127–139.
Żurawska, Jolanta: “Pierwsze reakcje na futuryzm włoski w Polsce.” [First Reactions to Italian
Futurism in Poland] Przegląd humanistyczny [Humanist Review] 21:9 (1977): 197–208.
Nuno Júdice
46 Portugal
Introduction:
The beginnings of Portuguese Modernism
The first notice of Futurism reached Portugal soon after Le Figaro published Marinetti’s
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism. Only one week later, on 26 February 1909,
the Porto newspaper Jornal de notícias printed an article by its Paris correspond-
ent, José Xavier de Carvalho Júnior (1861–1919), entitled “Uma nova escola poética:
O futurismo” (A New Poetic School: Futurism). Also in 1909, the 5 August issue of
Diário dos Açores published a partial translation of the manifesto made by the poet
Luis Francisco Bicudo (1884–1918). This was a time when the Portuguese press ful-
filled many important civic functions and even French newspapers were read by the
cultivated public. This explains why Futurism had an early impact in Portugal, and
not only in the capital and major cities, but in the provinces and even on its distant
islands as well.
Following Portugal’s ‘Golden Age’ in the sixteenth century, the country had been
going through a long period of decline, which at the beginning of the twentieth century
turned into crisis. King Carlos I and his son were murdered in 1908 and the Republican
Revolution of 5 October 1910 forced his successor, Manuel II, into exile. A new genera-
tion, influenced by liberal ideas and a dream of turning Portugal into a modern society,
appeared on the scene. The most important group was led by Teixeira de Pascoaes
(pseud. of Joaquim Pereira Teixeira de Vasconcelos, 1877–1952). He propagated his idea
of a Portuguese Renaissance (Renascença portuguesa) in the Oporto-based magazine
A águia (The Eagle, 1910–1932). It was here, in 1912, that Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)
published several articles about “new Portuguese poetry”, in which he predicted that
Portugal would experience a period of “literary and social creativity like the world has
rarely seen before” (Pessoa: A nova poesia portuguesa, 57).
Teixeira de Pascoaes, founder of the saudosismo movement (1912),1 aspired to
lead Portugal not into the Future but back to the Portuguese lyrical tradition. In a
lecture given at the Institut de Estudis Catalans in Barcelona in June 1918, he attacked
the “futuristas da bomba e da desordem” (the Futurists of the bomb and the disor-
der), associating them with terrorism and anarchist violence (Pascoaes: Os poetas
lusíadas, 38). Nonetheless, it was in his magazine A águia that Fernando Pessoa and
Mário de Sá-Carneiro (1890–1916) began their literary career. However, as soon as

1 Saudosism was an early-twentieth century movement that looked back at Portuguese history and
took the achievements of the past as a yardstick for contemporary cultural initiatives.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-046
 Portugal 737

they embraced the Modernist ethos, they dissociated themselves from Pascoaes and
established their own publication in which the voice of the new, Modernist genera-
tion could be heard. This periodical, initially intended to be called ‘Europe’, became
instead the magazine Orpheu, of which two numbers appeared in 1915 (no. 1, January–
March; no. 2, April–June). Financial difficulties prevented the realization of a planned
third number and concluded the magazine’s run.
Orpheu was an eclectic publication that offered space to new trends in Portuguese
Modernism, such as Paulism (a deliberately vague and dreamlike art that was the
expression of a delayed Symbolism) or Intersectionism, created by Fernando Pessoa
as a poetry that operates with a sophisticated juxtaposition of objectivism and sub-
jectivism in order to express the complexity and intersection of sensations perceived
by a subject, or the interpenetration and overlapping planes and lines of objects in a
modern world (thus being akin to Futurist Simultaneism). Furthermore, it contained
illustrations by Santa Rita Pintor (Guilherme de Santa Rita, 1889–1918), odes by Álvaro
de Campos, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms that represented the revolution-
ary side of his personality (even though later he preferred to designate himself as a
Sensationist) and some poems by Mário de Sá-Carneiro that followed, perhaps tinged
with some element of parody, Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.
The magazine Orpheu had also contributions from José de Almada Negreiros
(1893–1970), but these prose poems were not inspired by Futurism. Nonetheless, they
pointed in the same direction and announced the provocative poem Cena do ódio
(Scene of Hate), written for the third number of Orpheu, which never appeared in print
as the main sponsor, Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s father, who was living in Mozambique at
the time, experienced difficulties in sending money for the magazine to his son. The
piece by Almada, dedicated to Álvaro de Campos and written during the three-day rev-
olution against the dictatorial government of General Pimenta de Castro (May 1915),
was excessive in tone and form and possessed a violent spirit entirely in line with
Futurist poetry, even though Almada signed it as “Sensationist Poet and Narcissus
from Egypt”. The poem was partially printed in 1923, in the magazine Contemporânea,
and in full in 1958 in the anthology Líricas portuguesas, organized by the poet and
critic Jorge de Sena.
The magazine Orpheu was attacked by the critics and the cultural and social
establishment, who considered it to be the work of a group of madmen, saying they
deserved to be confined to a lunatic asylum. Júlio Dantas, an academic and one of
the most brilliant writers of the period, even went a stage further and declared that
“the madmen, in this case, are not the more or less extravagant poets, who simply
want to be read, discussed and purchased; insane, in fact, are those who read them,
who discuss them and who purchase them.” (Dantas: “Poetas paranoicos”, 481) After
this article, Júlio Dantas became the target of the Modernist group and towards the
end of 1915, Almada Negreiros published a Manifesto Anti-Dantas, with the refrain
“Morra o Dantas!” (Die, Dantas!) and the onomatopoeic repetition “Morra! Pim!”
(Die, whizz!), signed: “José de Almada Negreiros, Poeta d’Orpheu, Futurista e Tudo”
738 Nuno Júdice

(Poet of Orpheu, and Futurist too). (Almada-Negreiros: “Manifesto Anti-Dantas e por

extenso”, 20)
The scandal surrounding Orpheu enhanced the public profile of this new genera-
tion of poets. Pessoa himself took care of the distribution of the magazine and proudly
declared in a letter on 4 April 1915: “We are the talk of the town in Lisbon; I say this
without exaggeration. The scandal is huge. We get accosted in the street, and every-
one, even people who have nothing to do with literature, speaks about Orpheus.”
(Cartas de Fernando Pessoa a Armando Côrtes-Rodrigues, 70). Most newspapers and
magazines carried reports on the Orpheu group, published their photographs and
made readers aware of the fact that the origin of this vanguard movement was Paris.
It is fair to say that in 1915 Futurism had made its entry into Portugal by way of the
magazine Orpheu and opened Portuguese culture up to the avant-garde, with all the
changes this brought to the intellectual climate of that period.

A Futurist circle in Faro

After the failure to bring out the planned third issue of Orpheu, the group dispersed,
and it was not in Lisbon but in Faro, capital of the Algarve in the most southern part of
the country, that we find the next manifestation of a Futurist group, which also turned
out to be the most persistent and coherent in the country. On 5 November 1916, the
periodical O heraldo began publishing a supplement called “Gente nova” (“The New
People”), a title that on 4 February 1917 changed to “Futurismo”. Most contributions
followed the literary models set by the poets of Orpheu and evolved increasingly into
the direction of Futurist poetry. In May 1917, an art exhibition was held at the Cine-
Teatro in Faro, in which some of the pictures displayed showed the characteristic traits
of a Futurist aesthetic, for example the Cabeça futurista (Study of a Futurist Head) by
Carlos Porfírio (1895–1970). The Lisbon poets were not indifferent to this initiative
coming from a southern province. Both Fernando Pessoa and Almada Negreiros sent
contributions to O heraldo, the poem Litoral by Almada being one that emulated the
Futurist concept of parole in libertà (Words in Freedom). It was also in the supplement
of O heraldo that the first notice of the creation of a “Lisbon Futurist Committee”,
composed of José de Almada Negreiros and Santa Rita Pintor, appeared. In July 1917,
both men sent a letter to the director of O heraldo, Lyster Franco (1880–1959), thank-
ing him for the support he had given to the movement and for announcing the forth-
coming publication of the magazine Portugal futurista. Furthermore, they praised the
regular “Futurismo” column of O heraldo as a contribution to the “construction of our
New Fatherland” (O comité futurista: [Open Letter to Lyster Franco]). The link with the
Lisbon Futurists proved to be of great significance, as Carlos Porfírio, who also pub-
lished under the pseudonym ‘Nesso’ some poems in O heraldo, became the official
‘Director and Founder’ of the only number of Portugal futurista.
 Portugal 739

In 1917, Portugal entered the First World War on the side of the Allies. This resulted
in a distinct lack of paper, which in the summer of that year caused the closing down
of many periodicals and also of the Futurist group in Faro. The originality of the
O heraldo supplement is unquestionable; however, it does not explain the impact
that Futurism had in Portugal. O heraldo was a provincial paper, far removed from the
capital, Lisbon, where cultural life was concentrated, or Coimbra, where an important
university served as an intellectual centre, or Porto, where the Portuguese economy
was based. Most of the poets of O heraldo did not pursue an artistic career, with the
noted exception of Carlos Porfírio, who after a failed attempt at becoming a film direc-
tor, returned to Faro and resumed his previous activity of painting landscapes and
other regional themes in a rather academic style. He also became director of the mag-
azine Portugal futurista, whose only number was printed in Lisbon in November 1917,
but copies of it were confiscated on the orders of an interim government headed by
Sidónio Pais.

The single issue of the magazine Portugal futurista

(November 1917)
Portugal futurista can be seen as the most significant achievement of the Futurist
poets and artists in Lisbon. These include Santa Rita Pintor, Fernando Pessoa (aka
Álvaro de Campos), the mystic and prophetical Raúl Leal (1886–1964), who wrote an
article in French about his companion Santa Rita Pintor, the architect José Pacheko
(1885–1934), who became director of Contemporânea, the magazine that in the 1920s
published works by most Modernist authors in Portugal, and the musician Ruy
Coelho (1889–1986) who, in 1918, influenced by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes,
presented at the São Carlos National Opera in Lisbon his ballets Princesa dos sapatos
de ferro (The Princess with the Iron Shoes) and Bailado do encantamento (The Ballet
of Enchantment), with a choreography and costumes by Almada-Negreiros and décor
by José Pacheko. The magazine also published Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifeste
futuriste de la luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust, 1913) and Marinetti’s Il teatro di
Varietà (The Variety Theatre Manifesto, 1913), in translations by João de Bettencourt-
Rebelo, and texts in the original French by Guillaume Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars.
Furthermore, it reproduced paintings by Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso and Santa Rita
Pintor, as well as a photograph of the latter dressed as a clown.
A highlight of the magazine was the page that reported on a Futuristic lecture
given by Almada, dressed in workman’s clothes, at the Teatro República on 14 April
1917. The performance consisted of three parts: a recitation of Almada’s Ultimatum,
Valentine de Saint-Point’s Futurist Manifesto of Lust and Marinetti’s Variety Theatre
Manifesto and Let’s Kill off the Moonlight. The text describes how Almada was received
by his audience with a “spontaneous and tremendous choir of whistles”, followed by
740 Nuno Júdice

a round of applause when he presented “the Futurist Santa Rita Pintor” (Almada-
Negreiros: “1ª conferência futurista”, 35). According to this account, the reading of
the manifestos was accompanied by violent reactions that he managed to quell in a
typically Futurist manner.
The magazine closed with a text by Marinetti on Variety theatre, which mirrored
the opening section of the magazine dedicated to the Ballets Russes season in Lisbon
(to be opened on 13 December 1917). Following Marinetti’s manifesto at the end of
the magazine there was a note of a “Futurist Committee” (i.e Almada and Santa Rita)
that declared, “1. That there are no Futurist musicians in Portugal. 2. that therefore Mr
Ruy Coelho cannot be considered a Futurist musician, despite his pretensions chiefly
exhibited on beaches and in casinos.” (O comité futurista: “Attenção”, 42).
The single number of Portugal futurista was prepared with the intention of prop-
agating key tenets of the Futurist aesthetic: a refusal to adhere to the moral standards
and customs of the bourgeoisie, a rejection of traditionalist art, a refusal of the past
and an appeal to revolutionize mentalities and politics. It therefore does not come as
a surprise that the semi-dictatorial régime of Sidónio Pais ordered the seizure of the
magazine soon after its release in November 1917. This act of censorship may have
been due to the fact that some obscene words and sexual innuendos were used in
the magazine, rather than because Pessoa’s “Ultimatum de Álvaro de Campos” and
Almada’s “Ultimatum futurista ás gerações portuguesas do século XX” (Futurist
Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations of the Twentieth Century) glorified war
at a time when Sidónio endeavoured to end his country’s participation in the First
World War. However, the confiscation did not stop the circulation of at least Pessoa’s
“Ultimatum”, as an eight-page off-print made the text accessible to the literary world
of Lisbon. All of these activities of the comité futurista ultimately showed that, despite
Mário de Sá-Carneiro’s premature death in 1916, a Portuguese brand of Futurism and
a group that supported it came into existence in 1917.

The protagonists of Portuguese Futurism

Mário de Sá-Carneiro was the first member of the Lisbon group to become an adher-
ent of the Futurist formulas and ideas, as his life in Paris between 1912 and 1916 put
him in direct contact with that avant-garde movement, both in the arts and in litera-
ture. He transmitted to Pessoa his impressions of what he saw, read and experienced.
These reports were not always very positive, but they show that he recognized the
need to provoke scandal and to make original use of the “Modernism” that Baudelaire
had conceived of as something linked to the present, which could also be expressed in
‘minor’ genres such as the fantastic tale and science-fiction.
In 1913, Mário de Sá-Carneiro had published a novel, A confissão de Lúcio (Lucio’s
Confession), in which he outlined the tenets of an artistic group, called ‘Selvagens’
 Portugal 741

(Savages). The violence and originality of their aesthetic proposals were a parody of
the artists Sá-Carneiro had met in Paris, where he lived on and off with the purpose of
studying. In actuality he led a bohemian lifestyle financed by his father’s riches until
he committed suicide in a hotel room in 1916. All this we encounter in the plot and
characters of Lucio’s Confession, which to some degree is modelled on Oscar Wilde’s
Portrait of Dorian Gray (1891), but it also transcends Decadent ideals and adopts
new trends that are more in line with the aesthetic changes his own generation was
looking for. Even though Sá-Carneiro kept a distance from Futurism, he fashioned
the character of the novel, Gervásio Vila-Nova, as a double of Santa-Rita Pintor and
presented him as a disciple of Marinetti, who confesses his admiration for poets and
novelists who spit on the altar of art and experiment with bizarre stylistic devices that
create neither beauty nor meaning.
However, the novel also reflects Sá-Carneiro’s personal problems: living a life
totally absorbed in art, he found it impossible to come to terms with the realities that
surrounded him: his lack of means to survive in an expensive city such as Paris, the
First World War that restricted his freedom of movement and all the problems caused
by the scandals of Orpheu 1 and 2 in 1915. After the third number of the magazine
could not be published, he fell into a deep depression and committed suicide on 26
April 1916 in the city he loved most.
We can almost look at Sá-Carneiro as if he were one of the characters in his novel.
Sá-Carneiro liked the highly charged atmosphere of the theatre world and conducted
his own death like a coup de théâtre. He had scripted it in an announcement sent
to Pessoa in Lisbon and also to a friend in Paris (see Sá-Carneiro: Em ouro e alma,
491–494). The latter received the note too late and arrived at the hotel room when
nothing could be done any longer to save him.
Sá-Carneiro’s deeply rooted personal problems are well reflected in his poems,
where solitude and disgust for one’s own body (the “fat sphinx”, as he called it) take
up much space. The historian will also appreciate the letters he wrote to Pessoa, as
they can be counted amongst the best documents we possess of the generation of
Orpheu (for a recent edition see Sá-Carneiro: Em ouro e alma). Without complaisance,
he described the defaults and virtues of each of its members. The admiration he felt
for Pessoa can make us forget Sá-Carneiro’s own talent and originality, especially in
his psychological refinement that came close to the new Freudian analysis of the sub-
conscious world and the narcissist subject. His two Futurist poems, “Manucure” and
“Apotheosis”, served as a paradigm for the Futurist poets of O heraldo, and they, in
turn, celebrated him as a literary revolutionary. His formalist experiments with typo-
graphical arrangements of words on the page and the use of onomatopoeias influ-
enced Almada’s poem Litoral, which can be considered the most canonical Futurist
poem in Portugal.
Sá-Carneiro put Pessoa way above all the other members of the Orpheu circle, and
thus anticipated the recognition that was given to his friend’s genius many decades
later. After Sá-Carneiro’s death, Pessoa took charge of his literary estate and published
742 Nuno Júdice

some of the poems in magazines. Later on, in the 1930s, the editors of the magazine
Presença published the first posthumous book of Sá-Carneiro poetry, Indícios de ouro
(Traces of Gold, 1937), which Pessoa, who had died in 1935, could not see in print.
Fernando Pessoa was born in Lisbon in 1888, but he lived and studied in Durban,
South Africa until 1905 when he returned to Lisbon to study Letters. He quickly aban-
doned the idea and began work as a commercial correspondent in downtown Lisbon.
His part-time work left him with many free hours to spend in cafés and bookshops. He
created an immense literary œuvre that he signed either in his own name or in one of
several heteronyms, each of which distinguished different aspects of his personality:
Alberto Caeiro, the philosopher, Ricardo Reis, the Latinist, and Álvaro de Campos, the
Futurist (or, as he preferred to say, the ‘Sensationist’). Later on, Pessoa revealed in the
magazine Presença the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares, by which he understood a
character halfway between himself and a fictional autonomous individuality (Pessoa:
“Trecho do ‘Livro do Desasocego’ [sic] composto por Bernardo Soares”). The Livro do
desassossego (Book of Disquiet) had its first Portuguese edition in 1982 and became
a key to the understanding of Pessoa’s life, as it gives a unique impression of Lisbon
commercial life and the wanderings of an employee trying to escape the dreary medi-
ocrity of his existence.
Even though Pessoa wrote on one occasion about the idea of winning the Nobel
Prize, he never bothered publishing his works in books but rather issued them in
magazines that very few people actually read. In the year of his death, he published
the poetry anthology Mensagem (Message), at the insistence of his friend António
Ferro (1895–1956), one of the companions of the Orpheu circle, who in the meantime
had become Secretary of Propaganda in the Salazar régime. He played a decisive rôle
in keeping interest in Futurism alive by supporting artists like Almada and by inviting
Marinetti to Portugal in 1932. However, reactions to this visit were far from positive
amongst the Portuguese Modernists: Almada was infuriated because Marinetti was
received by Júlio Dantas, his archenemy, and Pessoa complained about the pomp and
circumstance granted to the Futurist leader by the Portuguese Academy, presided by
Dantas.
Although praised by Presença as a superior artist and a literary master, Pessoa
had remained silent since the days of Orpheu. The scandal caused by the magazine
may explain, perhaps, why he vanished into an almost anonymous way of life after
the years 1912–1917. Pessoa knew that he would not be understood by his contempo-
raries, and even though from time to time he published works of theory, criticism and
poetry in magazines with limited print runs, he was of the view that the time of artistic
revolutions has passed, especially after the death of his mentor, Mário de Sá-Carneiro.
With Orpheu, Pessoa had crated an avant-garde magazine that reconciled many
styles, from the Symbolism of Luis de Montalvor to the delirium of Raúl Leal and
Ângelo de Lima, from the Paulism of Alfredo Guisado and Armando Cortes-Rodrigues
(who also wrote under the feminine pseudonym ‘Violante de Cisneiros’) to the Futurist
paintings of Santa Rita Pintor.
 Portugal 743

The period between 1915 and 1917, between the two numbers of Orpheu and the
single issue of Portugal futurista, was the most important in terms of Pessoa’s avant-
garde œuvre. First of all, he created ‘Paulism’ (derived from paùl meaning ‘bog’ or
‘marshes’), a vague and dreamlike poetry of Decadent and crepuscular quality. He
quickly grasped that Paulism was an epigonous phenomenon imitative of Mallarmé’s
Symbolism, even though some of the poems written in that style were very striking,
as for example Impressões do crepúsculo (Crepuscular Impressions, 1913) or the ‘static
verse drama in one act’, O marinheiro (The Mariner, 1913). Pessoa then launched
‘Intersectionism’, an aesthetics that can be compared to the Cubism of Braque or
Picasso or, better yet, the Simultaneism of Sonia and Robert Delaunay. The collage
element and superposition of images that characterize this technique can be seen in
Chuva oblíqua (Slanting Rain, 1915), one of his major poems.
During the years when Fernando Pessoa transmogrified into Álvaro de Campos,
he adhered, at least partially, to Marinetti’s school. At the same time, he worked out
a programme for himself, called Sensacionismo (Sensationism), which was intended
to replace Futurism but failed to win a following and assure a place for itself in the lit-
erary establishment of the time. The similarities between Sensationism and Futurism
were most apparent in the Ode marítima (Maritime Ode, 1912), published in Orpheu,
and the Ultimatum, published in Portugal futurista, which were Pessoa’s greatest
contributions to Portuguese Futurism. Nonetheless, Ultimatum does not mention the
Italian movement nor any of its members among the long list of writers (Yeats, Shaw,
D’Annunzio, Wells, Chesterton, etc.) otherwise referred to in it.
Many of Pessoa’s works were influenced by the proto-Futurist Walt Whitman,
whose long-verse poetry spoke about the civilization of the present and the technical
changes that were transforming life. ‘Álvaro de Campos’, whose fictitious biography
characterized him as a naval engineer from Glasgow, was a citizen of the world that
was about to disintegrate in the catastrophe of the First World War. Pessoa/Campos
sought to respond to the war in Ultimatum denounced all the politicians and writers
of Europe and announced the advent of a Scientific Monarchy ruled by King Media.
In the arts he predicted the replacement of thirty or forty poets by only one or two,
each furnished with fifteen or twenty personalities to reflect the diverse social ten-
dencies of the epoch. He also advocated the integration of philosophy into arts and
science and the abolition of all religions. In the end, he announced “the necessity of
the coming of a humankind of engineers and the scientific creation of Supermen”
(Pessoa: “Ultimatum de Álvaro de Campos”, 34.).
Santa Rita Pintor was portrayed in Portugal futurista in a clownish costume,
with a caption calling him “the great initiator of the Futuristic movement in Portugal”
(Portugal futurista, 5). He represented himself in the magazine with some of his paint-
ings, in which Cubistic linearity was associated with dynamic projections of light
and colour. Conceived as works of precision, they resembled more the minimalism
of Mondrian or Duchamp than the complexity of Braque or Picasso. Santa Rita’s pre-
mature death in 1918, and the almost total destruction of his work, executed by his
744 Nuno Júdice

family in accordance with his own will, prevents us from gaining true insight into his
art, except for an excellent self-portrait that survived and for the poor quality pho-
tographs published in Orpheu and Portugal futurista. But there is also evidence of a
provocative stance, for example his self-portrayal as a man equal or superior to kings.
Sá-Carneiro met him often in Paris and gave some humorous descriptions of
his extravagant opinions and fascinating stories. In a letter to Pessoa of 28 October
1912, we read that Santa Rita told Sá-Carneiro that when his former wet nurse died,
she left a letter to his mother in which she stated that Mrs Costa de Santa Rita’s son
had died and that Guilherme was in actual fact her son. His literary opinions were
highly unusual for the time: he refused the notion of a plot or any form of narra-
tive in prose and poetry, and detested any literature of ideas. In politics, he was an
ultra-monarchist, even an Imperialist. When Orpheu was disbandoned, they fell
out, possibly because Sá-Carneiro portrayed Santa Rita in his novel A confissão de
Lúcio (Lucio’s Confession, 1914) as the artist Gervásio Vila-Nova, founder of the new
school of sauvagisme, whose one novelty lay in the fact that its proponents’ books
were printed in different-coloured inks on various types of paper, and were arranged
eccentrically on the page in extravagant typefaces.
Amadeo de Sousa-Cardoso (1887–1918) was introduced to the Futurist move-
ment by Almada Negreiros, who admired him as the most important figure in
twentieth-century Portuguese art. But his works published in Portugal futurista had
not the same impact as those of Santa Rita or Robert and Sonia Delaunay, who took
refuge from the Great War in Portugal. Amadeo had lived in Paris from 1906–1914,
where he had become acquainted with Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni. Back in
Portugal, he developed a style of painting that fused elements of Cubism, Futurism
and Simultaneism. Sousa-Cardoso became a recognized figure in the international
artistic milieu, and the work he left behind is still considered on a par with Cubist and
Futurist paintings of the period.
His genius was nourished by all the experimental art movements of the early
twentieth century, from Fauvism to Expressionism. Of course, he did not ignore
Futurism, but it was Almada, who in a passionate text about an Amadeo exhibition
in Lisbon made a first link between his paintings and Futurist art (Almada Negreiros:
Exposição Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Liga Naval de Lisboa). Almada saw the episodic
influence of Futurism in the letters and numbers or mechanic parts used in some of
Amadeo’s paintings, or the complex titles such as Arabesco dinâmico = REAL ocre
rouge café Rouge ZIG ZAG → vibrações metálicas (esplendor mecano-geométrico),
which in a similar way had also been used by Santa Rita Pintor. Amadeo’s premature
death in 1918 therefore left a great void in the Portuguese Modernist scene.
Raúl Leal (1886–1964) came from a family of high economic standing and began
his professional career as a lawyer. After his father’s death, he received a substan-
tial inheritance that enabled him to dedicate himself fully to philosophy and liter-
ature. In 1914 he met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Paris and began to develop an
enthusiasm for Futurism. It brought him in touch with the group that was setting up
 Portugal 745

the literary magazine Orpheu, where he published “Atelier” (The Studio, 1915), a tale
that described a sensual, homosexual relationship between an artist and his model.
He contributed to Portugal futurista an essay entitled “L’ Abstractionisme futuriste:
Divagation outrephilosophique-vertige à propos de l’ œuvre géniale de Santa Rita
Pintor, ‘Abstraction Congénitale Intuitive (Matière-Force)’, la suprême réalisation du
Futurisme” (Futurist Abstractionism: Ultra-philosophical and Dizzying Ramblings
on the Works of Genius Created by Santa Rita Pintor, “Congenital [sic] and Intuitive
Abstraction (Force of Matter)”, the Supreme Realization of Futurism). Apart from
being a tribute to Santa Rita Pintor, this essay was also a critique of Marinetti, whose
form of Futurism Leal considered too narrow. He favoured a form of Modernism that
incorporated suitably updated aspects of traditional art and literature. He wanted it to
be impregnated by the highest, mystical spirituality and to achieve a fusion of all the
arts. He therefore called his conception “ultra-Futurism”.
Leal was a highly eccentric character with a scandalous lifestyle that provoked
the establishment to such a degree that in 1916 he had to seek exile in Spain, where he
lived penniless and in poor health for a year. During that time he worked on an exem-
plary Futurist novel, which was never completed. In 1921, he wrote a letter to Marinetti
in which he suggested the establishment of “a new Religion and a new Church [with]
an entirely Futurist character”, a “supreme Synthesis” of art and spiritualism (quoted
in Silva: “Ultra-Futurism, Occultism and Queer Politics”, 407). The letter informed
Marinetti that he was well acquainted with some of the Futurist manifestos and that
he had also read Boccioni’s book on Futurist painting and sculpture. He stressed: “I
am therefore not ignorant of Futurism; I am even to a certain extent on your side”.
However, he was not in agreement with the present state of Futurism and emphasized
the need to make the Infinite “the supreme Futurist aspiration”. He gave Marinetti
instructions on how to “develop further and leave his exaggerated exclusiveness
behind. It seems to me that your conception of history is not Futurist enough, because
you imagine a historical evolution that is too well-ordered.” (Silva: “Ultra-Futurism,
Occultism and Queer Politics”, 408).
Although Leal aimed at creating a Paracletian Theocracy with himself at the helm
as Supreme Pontiff-Magician, his epistle was well received by the Italian leader. In
1923, he caused a new scandal with the publication of a defence of pederasty, Sodoma
divinizada (Sodom Deified). His later life was largely concerned with developing a
transcendental aesthetics and an ecstatic philosophical doctrine that was linked to
occultists such as Aleister Crowley.
José de Almada Negreiros was the youngest of the Orpheu group. Poet, novelist,
playwright, painter and designer, he was the most dynamic Portuguese supporter of
the Futurist idea, alongside the provocative Santa Rita Pintor. His talent to agitate and
provoke was the result of an exhibitionism that manifested itself in the way he dressed
and recited in public the long and – according to the morality of the epoch – obscene
A cena do ódio (The Scene of Hate, 1915). The prose poems he published in Orpheu
were not yet penned in a truly Futurist vein, but he adopted all the rules of Marinetti’s
746 Nuno Júdice

Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912) and published in 1916 the Manifesto
Anti-Dantas e por extenso (Manifesto Against Dantas, Without Abbreviations, 1915), a
violent diatribe against a renowned and acclaimed journalist and writer, Júlio Dantas,
who had attacked the magazine as the product of a bunch of madmen. The manifesto
was the first Portuguese publication in the style of the anti-conformist proclamation
Marinetti was so famous for and became a symbol of the Modernist spirit of irrever-
ence. The next year, he published two small prose works, A engomadeira (The Ironing
Girl, 1915) and K4 O quadrado azul (The Blue Square K4, 1917), both of which can be
considered emblematic works of Portuguese Futurism.
A engomadeira was a novel that anticipated Surrealist writings with its dreamlike
quality. K4 O quadrado azul adopts a Futurist style of punctuation, neologisms and out-
sider figures such as circus people and prostitutes. In the magazine Portugal futurista,
Almada was a central author who contributed texts that were clearly based on some
of the aesthetic proposals of Marinetti, for instance, the short story, Saltimbancos:
Contrastes simultaneos (Acrobats: Simultaneous Contrasts), the poem Mima-Fatáxa
sinfonia cosmopolita e apologia do triangulo femenino (Mima-Fatáxa: Cosmopolitan
Symphony and Vindication of the Feminine Triangle) and the Ultimatum futurista ás
gerações portuguesas do século XX (Futurist Ultimatum to the Portuguese Generations
of the Twentieth Century). Each of these caused offence, either because of their sala-
cious language or, in the case of Ultimatum, because it accused the Portuguese people
of being decadent and spineless. Almada presented his youth (“22 years with good
health and intelligence”; Portugal futurista, 36) as advantageous in comparison to the
old generation who ruled the country. He pursued a revolt against what he called the
“decay of the race”, stated his pride of being Portuguese and asked for the creation
of a “Portuguese nation of the twentieth century” (Portugal futurista, 36). He was the
only member of the group who followed Marinetti’s ideas more closely and praised
the cathartic rôle of war as a “great experience” that “destroys all the formulas of the
old civilizations” (ibidem). Nor did he shirk from concluding in a provocative manner:
“The complete people will be the one that gathers in its zenith all of its virtues and all
of its defects. Have courage, Portuguese, it’s only the virtues that you lack.” (ibidem).
Almada survived well into the 1970s and was the only figure listed here to remain
faithful to the Futurist spirit of irreverence and insubordination. Like Marinetti in
Italy, Almada collaborated with the Fascist régime of Salazar. Many public buildings
are graced with his decorations, but he never surrendered to academic art. Instead he
continued to introduce forms and themes from avant-garde aesthetics and proclaimed
himself a Futurist until the end of his life. In his novel, Nome de guerra (Name of War,
1925, published in 1938 by Presença), where he describes the sexual initiation of a
young man by a prostitute, we can find a portrait of the bohemian lifestyle of the 1920s,
the decade following the Modernist years. The elaborate style and the intelligence to
present with elegance such a sordid theme shows the art of a writer who could be situ-
ated between Cocteau and Valéry. Due to his long life, Almada was the only member of
that generation to make a mark in radio and film, even appearing in a popular TV show,
 Portugal 747

some months before his death. Until the end, he continued to pursue his idea of revo-
lution and provocation just as he had done in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Conclusion
Portuguese Futurism had a precise duration: from the first issue of Orpheu, in April
1915, to the single issue of Portugal futurista (November 1917). This does not mean
that after 1917 it did not serve any longer as a point of reference for Portuguese artists
and writers. In the 1920s, some of the former contributors to those magazines, namely
Pessoa, José Pacheko, Almada, António Ferro and others, continued to intervene in
cultural life and published innovative works in other magazines. However, the deaths
in 1918 of Santa Rita Pintor and Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso, the two painters who
had introduced to Portugal a formal renewal inspired by the Futurist movement, was
a blow to the group. Similarly damaging was the exile of Almada Negreiros in Spain
(1927–1934). He continued his career with a free and irreverent spirit inherited from
Futurism after he returned during the military dictatorship that followed the coup
of 28 May 1926. He gained a certain amount of official respect with his decoration of
public buildings, including the University of Lisbon’s new headquarters and the main
entrance of the private Gulbenkian Foundation.
Futurism had only a brief presence in Portugal, but the impression it left and the
reactions it caused gave rise to a mythology around the poets and artists who had
created Orpheu and later Portugal futurista. For this reason, we can say that the move-
ment lived longer than that short two-year period and extended well into the second
half of the twentieth century, especially because of the belated recognition given to
Pessoa and his heteronym Campos. Portuguese Futurism received a second life span
when the Futuristic poems and manifestos of Pessoa, Sá-Carneiro and Almada were
rediscovered. These works proved to the public that Portuguese Futurism was much
more than an episodic affair; in fact, it was an essential ingredient of the extended
family of international Futurisms.

Works cited
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Reprinted in Obras completas. Vol. 6. Textos de intervenção. Lisboa: Estampa, 1972. 25–28.
Almada Negreiros, José de: “A cena do ódio.” Contemporânea 3:7 (1923): Suppl. 1–8. Jorge de Sena,
ed.: Líricas portuguesas. Ser. 3, Vol. 1. Lisboa: Portugália, 1958. 28–58. Reprinted in Obras
completas. Vol. 1. Poesia. Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1985. 47–66.
Almada-Negreiros, José de: “Ultimatum futurista ás gerações portuguesas do século XX.”
Portugal futurista 1 (November 1917): 36–38. Reprinted in Obras completas. Vol. 6.: Textos de
intervenção. Lisboa: Estampa, 1972. 29–39.
748 Nuno Júdice

Almada Negreiros, José de: Exposição Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso Liga Naval de Lisboa. s.l.: s.n., 1916.
Reprinted in Obras completas. Vol. 6. Textos de intervenção. Lisboa: Estampa, 1972. 19–24.
Almada-Negreiros, José de: Manifesto anti-Dantas e por extenso. [S.l.]: Edição do Auctor, [1916].
Reprinted in Obras completas. Vol. 6. Textos de intervenção. Lisboa: Estampa, 1972. 9–17.
Carvalho Júnior, José Xavier de: “Uma nova escola poética: O futurismo.” Jornal de notícias (Porto),
26 February 1909. Reprinted in Revista da Biblioteca Nacional 1:1 (1981): 94.
Dantas, Júlio: “Poetas paranoicos.” Ilustração portuguesa (Lisboa), 2nd series, 478 (19 April 1915): 481.
O comité futurista: “Attenção.” Portugal futurista 1 (November 1917): 42.
O comité futurista: [Open Letter to Lyster Franco] O heraldo (Faro), 15 July 1915. Reprinted in Nuno
Júdice, ed.: Poesia futurista portuguesa (Faro 1916–1917). Lisboa: A Regra do Jogo, 1981. 9-10.
Pascoaes, Teixeira de: Os poetas lusiadas: Conferencias realisadas no Institut de Estudis Catalans
da cidade de Barcelona, em junio de 1918. Porto: Tipogr. Costa Carregal, 1919. Reprinted in T.
de Pascoaes: Obras. Vol. 5. Lisboa: Assírio & Alvim, 1987. 35–38.
Pessoa, Fernando: “Trecho do ‘Livro do Desasocego’ [sic] composto por Bernardo Soares, ajudante
de guarda-livros na cidade de Lisboa.” Presença 1:27 (June-July 1930): 9.
Pessoa, Fernando: “Ultimatum de Álvaro de Campos.” Portugal futurista 1 (November 1917): 30–34.
Reprint Ultimatum de Alvaro de Campos sensacionista: Separata do Portugal futurista. Lisboa:
Tip. P. Monteiro, R. do Mundo, 1917. Prosa de Álvaro de Campos. Edição Jerónimo Pizarro.
Lisboa: Ática, 2012. 143–150.
Pessoa, Fernando: A nova poesia portuguesa. 2nd edn Lisboa: Inquérito, [1950]. (= Cadernos
Culturais “Inquérito” 84).
Portugal futurista. Edicação fac-similada. Estudos prévios de Nuno Júdice e Teolinda Gersão. Lisboa:
Contexto, 1981.
Sá-Carneiro, Mário de: A confissão de Lúcio. Edição de Alexandre Cabral Martins. Lisboa: Assírio e
Alvim, 2010. English translation Lúcio’s Confession. Sawtry: Dedalus, 1993.
Sá-Carneiro, Mário de: Em ouro e alma: Correspondência com Fernando Pessoa. Edição Ricardo
Vasconcelos e Jerónimo Pizarro. Lisboa: Tinta da China, 2015.
Silva, Manuela Parreira da: “Ultra-Futurism, Occultism and Queer Politics: Concerning an (almost
unpublished) Letter of Raul Leal to F. T. Marinetti.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 3
(2013): 394–415.

Further reading
Alcântara, Maria Beatriz Rosário de: Fernando Pessoa e o momento futurista de Álvaro de Campos.
Brasília: Fundação Waldemar de Alcântara, “Thesaurus”, 1985.
Alge, Carlos d’: “A inspiração futurista e o vanguardismo de ‘Orfeu’.” C. d’Alge: A experiência
futurista e a geração de “Orpheu”. Lisboa: Ministério da Educação: Instituto de Cultura e
Língua Portuguesa, 1989. 57–70.
Almada Negreiros, José de: Orpheu 1915–1965. Lisboa: Ática, 1965.
Almeida, Bernardo Pinto de: “O futurismo em Portugal. “ B. Pinto de Almeida: Pintura portuguesa no
século XX. Oporto: Lello, 1993. 2nd edn 1996. 21–40. 3rd rev edn. Lisboa: Lello, 2002. 21–46.
Alvarenga, Fernando: A arte visual futurista em Fernando Pessoa. Lisboa: Notícias, [1984?].
Berghaus, Günter: “A primeira conferência futurista no Teatro República (14 de abril de 1917):
Uma ‘serata’ futurista?” Colóquio-Letras 194 (January–April 2017): 23–37. Revised English
translation “The Futurista ‘serata’ at the Teatro República in Lisbon (14 April 1917).” Ricardo
Marques, ed.: “Portugal futurista” e outras publicações de 1917. Lisboa: Biblioteca Nacional de
Portugal, 2018. 15–28.
 Portugal 749

Besse, Maria Graciete, ed.: Le Futurisme et les avant-gardes au Portugal et au Brésil. Actes de
colloque international, Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, et Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La
Défense, 29–30 octobre 2009. Argenteuil: Convivium Lusophone, 2011.
Branco, Rui: “Futurismo del passato: L’ integralismo lusitano all’inizio del Novecento.” Passato e
presente: Rivista di storia contemporanea 22:62 (2004): 33–56.
Castanho, Arlindo José Nicau: “Avanguardia lustiana, innovazione lessicale e informa ortografica:
Pessoa e i suoi campagni nell’avventura futurista.” Stefania Stefanelli, ed.: Avanguardie e
lingue iberiche nel primo Novecento. Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007. 121–140.
Chaves, Joaquim Matos: Santa-Rita: Vida e obra. Precisões e considerações. Lisboa: Quimera, 1989.
Corti, Vittoria: “Pessoa e il futurismo.” Critica radicale 2: 1 (1990): 5–10.
Costa, Paula Cristina: “Futurismo, futurismos: De ‘A confissão de Lúcio’ a ‘Nome de guerra’.” Estudos
italianos em Portugal NS 4 (December 2009): 113–128.
Crespo, Ángel: “Portugal futurista.” Á. Crespo: La vida plural de Fernando Pessoa. Barcelona: Seix
Barral, 2007. 213–229.
Dantas, Júlio: “Um almoço com Marinetti.” J. Dantas: Páginas de memórias. Lisboa: Portugália,
1968. 125–130.
Delgado, Antonio Sáez: “ ‘Portugal futurista’ (1917), o El futurismo en Portugal.” A. S. Delgado:
Órficos y ultraístas: Portugal y España en el diálogo de las primeras vanguardias literarias
1915–1925. Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura, 1999. 135–174.
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Irina Cărăbaş
47 Romania
Immediately after the publication of the Manifesto of Futurism in 1909, Futurist ideas
enjoyed a reasonably wide reception in Romania. On 20 February, the ‘same’ date1
as that of the publication of the founding text of Futurism in Le Figaro, a Romanian
translation appeared in Democraţia (Democracy), a newspaper published in Craiova,
a major city at the time, located in the south of the Kingdom of Romania (see, with mis-
spelling ‘Cracovie’, in Ottinger: “Cubisme + futurisme = cubofuturisme”, 21; ‘Krakow’,
in Poggi: Inventing Futurism, 5). Even before the launch of Futurism, the international
promotional campaign waged by F. T. Marinetti had brought him to the attention of
unconventional cultural figures. As Futurism’s identity took shape, the sphere of its
reception extended and acquired greater nuance, becoming one of Romania’s best-
known and most-discussed avant-garde movements. Not even after the emergence of
local avant-garde groups did Futurism lose its aura, perhaps also thanks to the char-
ismatic figure cut by Marinetti. The wide range of guises in which Marinetti presented
himself – from revolutionary and innovator to destroyer, troublemaker and practical
joker – made his public appearances and publications newsworthy events from which
periodicals of every kind fully profited. Thus, it was not only the élite and the avant-
garde that became familiar with Marinetti’s programme; he also secured a place for
himself in popular culture. Undoubtedly, the members of the Romanian avant-garde
had the most consistent relationship with Futurism as it became a model for their own
artistic ideas and strategies. Although there were no groups or artists who declared
themselves Futurists, Romania had “its own Futurism”, as Marcel Janco stated after
Marinetti’s visit to Bucharest in 1930. He described with irony the local context in
which Futurism had ultimately failed to gain a stable position but where, nonetheless,
“its symbol energized everyone, the same as any other avant-garde. We nurtured our-
selves on its ideas and it bolstered our enthusiasm” (Janco: “Futurismul nostru”, 614).

Early responses to Futurism

In a country that had undergone numerous political and cultural transformations and
where there had been multiple breaks with the past and tradition within a relatively

1 At this time, Romania followed the Julian calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar used in Wes-
tern Europe. Thus, although the Romanian journal in which the translation of the Manifesto of Futu-
rism was published bore the same date as the original in Le Figaro (20 February), it actually appeared
thirteen days after the latter. The coincidence of dates was something of a practical joke on the part
of the Romanian publishers.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-047
754 Irina Cărăbaş

short period of time, the Manifesto of Futurism was viewed with sympathy or at least
curiosity. After its publication in Democraţia on 20 February 1909, it was reprinted by
newspapers in a number of cities, including Romanian newspapers in Transylvania
(a province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire which was to be unified with Romania
in 1918). Daily newspapers and magazines such as Biblioteca modernă (The Modern
Library), Ţara noastră (Our Country), Rampa (The Ramp), Viaţa românească
(Romanian Life), Viitorul (The Future) and Universul literar (The Literary Universe)
kept readers up to date with the launch of exhibitions and theatre performances, and
translated several Futurist manifestos into Romanian (David Drogoreanu: “Aesthetic
Affinities and Political Divergences Between Italian and Romanian Futurism”,
181–188).
Marinetti’s first contacts with Romania were the result of social as well as literary
connections. His name first appeared in the Romanian press in articles by the fem-
inist writer and journalist Maica Smara (Sister Smara, pseud. of Smaranda Gîrbea,
1857–1944), who presented him as the young hope of Italian poetry (Pop: Avangarda,
178). Smara herself was published in Marinetti’s magazine Poesia, together with Elena
Văcărescu (1864–1947), a poet and lady-in-waiting to Queen Elisabeta of Romania, the
anarchist publicist Panait Muşoiu (1864–1944) and the controversial Symbolist poet
Alexandru Macedonski (1854–1920). The translator and author of the first commen-
tary on the 1909 manifesto (published without the narrative section) was the now-
forgotten journalist Mihail Drăgănescu (1878–?). In Democraţia and later Biblioteca
modernă, the manifesto appeared alongside an appeal by Marinetti to join Futurism
and a response on the part of Drăgănescu, who introduced Marinetti as a “brilliant
Italian–French poet” but also highlighted the fact that in a country like Romania,
where modernity was barely in its infancy, there were no barriers of the past to remove
in order to open a breach into the future: “We do not have any museums to burn down
or libraries to flood” (Drăgănescu: “Viitorismul”, 5).
The reservations with which pre-First World War commentators greeted Futurism
reflected the instability of Romanian cultural identity and, as a result, a need to rely
on recognized values and traditions, or to establish them if required. For the linguist
Ovid Densusianu (1873–1938), Futurism was out of keeping with the Latin and, conse-
quently, the Romanian temperament. Although Futurism presented itself in a French
and Italian guise, its brutal, barbarous, extravagant nature was deemed to be more
suited to the German spirit (Cernat: Avangarda românească, 94–95).
After 1909, the manifestos continued to be almost the sole source of information
about Futurism in Romania, and they were usually commented on without reference
to other literary or artistic genres. Their provocative rhetoric aroused enthusiastic
support among some members of the Symbolist movement, who felt the Futurist dis-
course about a noxious past and heroic present bore some resemblance to their own
attempts at cultural renewal. “He is right”, said the Symbolist poet Ion Minulescu
(1881–1944) with reference to Marinetti: “We are all gasping for air, for freedom and
something new!” (Minulescu: “Poetul italian”, 1). Thus, by commenting on Marinetti’s
 Romania 755

programme, Minulescu reasserted his own claims under the title Aprindeţi torţele!
(Light up the Torches, 1908). In the same vein, the Romanian poet further stated
the rôle in shaping Futurism played by writers such as Émile Verhaeren, Maurice
Maeterlinck and Gustave Kahn, whom he highly cherished, thereby indirectly justi-
fying his own attraction to Futurist ideas (Minulescu: “Poetul italian”, 1). The irony
and playfulness of his poetry published at the beginning of the twentieth century
was to become one of the models for the new generation of poets, including Ion Vinea
(pseud. of Ion Iovanaki, 1895–1964), Tristan Tzara (pseud. of Samuel Rosenstock,
1896–1963) and Benjamin Fondane (pseud. of Benjamin Wechsler, 1898–1944, who
also published under the pseudonyms Benjamin Fundoianu and Barbu Fundoianu).
In the 1920s, when the Bucharest avant-garde movements began developing their
own genealogies, Minulescu was considered one of the fathers of the Romanian
avant-garde. A 1920s caricature by Horaţiu Dimitriu (1890–1926), entitled Minuletti il
futurista, depicts the poet, wearing only short trousers, sitting on an ovoid sculpture
by Constantin Brancusi (Constantin Brâncuși, 1876–1957) on which the name of the
Constructivist periodical Integral is inscribed. The Futurism invoked in the carica-
ture’s title did not make any specific reference to Marinetti’s movement, but played
with its wider significance as an umbrella term that signified the ‘avant-garde’ in
its wider sense in Romania (Pintilie: “Ion Minulescu”, 22; Cărăbaş: “Minuletti il
futurista”).
Responses to Futurist art only began to appear in the Romanian press in 1912,
when the touring exhibition of Futurist paintings was presented in Paris, Berlin and
other locations. Whilst some found in the works of Luigi Russolo, Umberto Boccioni,
Carlo Carrà and Gino Severini merely “a mixture of curved and straight lines running
in different directions”, others regarded them as “psychological painting” and “poetry
described in colours” (Vlasiu: “ ‘Arta viitorului’ ”, 4–5). It is very likely that some of the
reviewers visited the Futurist exhibition at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris (5–24
February 1912), as was the case with Poldy Chapier (pseud. of Leopold Schapira, dates
unknown), who was a contributor to the Little Magazine Simbolul (The Symbol) and
befriended with its founders, Tzara and Vinea. Poldy’s terminology at that time was
still Symbolist, but he regarded Futurist painting as nothing less than the long-awaited
new art that would match the innovations of Symbolist poetry (Poldy: “Futurism”, 2).
Due to a lack of a suitable critical vocabulary, Romanian art critics of the early
twentieth century adopted the term ‘Futurism’ to signify, in a generic sense, any
modern alternative to either Academism or Impressionism. Painters such as Iosif Iser
(1881–1958), Nicolae Dărăscu (1883–1959) and Ion Theodorescu-Sion (1882–1939),
who at the time were dubbed ‘pre-Futurist’, may be regarded as belonging to a kind
of non-ideological avant-garde. Their engagement with Futurism did not last very
long and, after the First World War, they returned to the fold of the official establish-
ment. However, around the year 1912 they developed strategies of representation that
bore some resemblance to Futurism, especially in their depiction of subjects such as
battles, crowds and café life.
756 Irina Cărăbaş

Towards a Romanian brand of Futurism

The historiography of the Romanian avant-garde ascribes particular significance
to the year 1924, as it was a period when a number of successive events led to the
emergence of a group of artists and writers with radical aims and international strat-
egies. Within a very short span of time, under the guidance of Marcel Janco (Marcel
Hermann Iancu, 1895–1984) the Manifest activist către tinerime (Activist Manifesto to
the Young) was launched, as well as three journals that were to lend the avant-garde
a public dimension (Contimporanul [Present Time], Punct [Point] and 75HP [75 Horse
Power]). Another public launch took place in November 1924 on the occasion of the
Expoziţia internaţională a revistei “Contimporanul” (First International Contimporanul
Exhibition) at Bucharest’s Hall of the Syndicate of Fine Arts, in which, alongside
local artists such as Marcel Janco, Max Herman Maxy (1895–1971), Victor Brauner
(1903–1966) and Hans Máttis Teutsch (1884–1960), a number of Central European
artists connected to Constructivism participated; they included Mieczysław Szczuka,
Katarzyna Kobro, Karel Teige, Hans Richter, Hans Arp, Paul Klee and Erich Buchholz.
The exhibition was notable for its internationalism, something rarely encountered in
Bucharest, which lay outside the routes taken by travelling avant-garde exhibitions
at the time. Moreover, independence from political and cultural authority was part
of the statement made by the exhibition, which aimed to be recognized as “a demon-
stration of the joint and simultaneous movement here in our country and in the other
countries of the European homeland” (Maxy: “Demonstraţia plastică”, 2). Like the
journal from which it took its title, the exhibition presented itself as Constructivist, as
a supporter of abstract and intellectual principles in art. As such, a re-evaluation of
Futurism took place; it came to be integrated into a local context and was no longer
viewed from an outsider’s perspective.
On the one hand, Marinetti had been trying, particularly after 1920, to extend or
consolidate his links with Central Europe, and his visit to Bucharest, announced by
Contimporanul in 1923, seems to have been part of this project (Contimporanul 2:42
[1923]: 4). Although Marinetti did not actually travel to Bucharest until many years
later, his publications were repeatedly announced and translated in a number of
avant-garde journals. Many of the members of the avant-garde group formed around
1924 had connections with, or at least knowledge of Futurism. However, their infor-
mation was not necessarily acquired in Italy. The convoluted networks that Marinetti
had created throughout Europe meant that members of the Romanian avant-garde
could familiarize themselves with Futurism both on travels abroad and also via mag-
azines in their own homeland.
Thus, in 1915/16 the situation could arise that Futurism came to be exported
from Romania to other parts of Europe, for example through Marcel Janco, who
travelled from Bucharest to Zurich and then, via Paris, back to Bucharest. Much has
been written about Futurism’s rôle as a catalyst for Dada performances and ideas,
as well as about the rivalry that would spring up between these two avant-garde
 Romania 757

movements, particularly after the war (Berghaus: “Tristan Tzara: From Pre-Dadaism
to Post-Futurism”, 289–295). There are reasons to believe that, like Marcel Janco, also
Tristan Tzara took with him to Zurich intellectual resources that included a familiar-
ity with Futurism. Janco joined Tzara in a wide-ranging correspondence with major
avant-garde figures that he began during his time in Zurich. In this way, literary and
theoretical texts and Futurist artworks came to be published in magazines such as
Cabaret Voltaire (1916) and Dada (1, 2; 1917), and to be included in performances and
lectures (Sturm soirée, 14 April 1917, at the Dada Gallery). As usual, such connections
also worked in the opposite direction, and so texts by Tzara and graphic works by
Janco were also to appear in Noi (1; 1917), as well as in Italian journals such as Le
pagine (6, 7, 11; 1917) and Procellaria (5 February 1920) (Berghaus: “Tristan Tzara:
From Pre-Dadaism to Post-Futurism”, 291–292; Drogoreanu: Influenţe ale futurismului,
234). In the process of creating an international network for Dada, it is possible that
Tzara may have been inspired by the previous success enjoyed by Marinetti, who, via
similar channels, had succeeded in creating a name for Futurism worldwide. Links
between the two movements subsequently weakened, and were finally severed so
that a specific identity of Dada could be shaped and claims could be made that Dada
rather than Futurism formed the origin of the avant-garde.
With the passing of time, Futurism and Dada grew wider and wider apart; after
1918, the two movements looked almost like opposites. Marcel Janco, in an interview
given in 1984, minimized the contacts that the incipient Dadaists had with Futurism
(Dachy: Archives Dada, 30). His account showed that, by the time of the interview, he
had aligned himself with the ‘official’ history of Dada and had re-evaluated his own
past following the historical reassessment of Dada after the Second World War. In the
interview he also spoke about the continuation of Dada in Romania due to his activ-
ities between 1922 and 1941. However, a closer examination of his pre-1945 writings
and the articles in Contimporanul reveal very few references to Dada. The quarrels
between Tzara and Janco, as well as Janco’s decision to pursue a career in architec-
ture, which caused him to diverge even more from the path taken by Dada, might
provide a reasonable explanation for this absence. Futhermore, we find that Futurism
featured constantly in Contimporanul and in Janco’s correspondence. It appears
that, for a while, Janco excised Dada from his personal history and the history of the
Romanian avant-garde, replacing it with Futurist references.

Romanian Integralism
The position of Futurism was re-evaluated yet again at the birth of the avant-garde
journals Punct (1924–1925) and Integral (1925–1928). The latter pursued a Constructivist
direction, albeit as a rival to Contimporanul, from where its founder, M.H. Maxy,
drew most of his contributors. The newly formed Integralist group preserved some
758 Irina Cărăbaş

aesthetic links to Futurism and forged new relationships with the Italian avant-garde
via the writer Mihail Cosma (pseud. of Ernest Spirt, 1902–1968, later known as Claude
Sernet), who had been resident in Pavia since 1925. It was also probably thanks to him
that a special issue devoted to Futurism (Integral 12) was published in 1927. It included
poems and articles written by members of the Romanian avant-garde in honour of
Marinetti, as well as articles and reproductions of works by Farfa (pseud. of Vittorio
Osvaldo Tommasini), Enrico Prampolini, Fortunato Depero and Franco Casavola.
Marinetti’s greetings to the Integral group were given pride of place on the cover. The
publisher’s efforts to launch a new -ism – Integralism – involved not just friendly
exchanges with Futurist artists along the lines already taken by Contimporanul, but
also embedded Futurism in its theoretical underpinnings. Integralism placed at its
core the concept of synthesis, to which it lent multiple meanings, from being a neces-
sary ingredient of life to crossing the boundaries between artistic fields or between art
and life. Furthermore, Integralism itself aimed, via the principles of Constructivism,
to be a synthesis of all avant-gardes, namely Futurism, Dada, Expressionism, Cubism
and, with some reservations, Surrealism. By virtue of a shared spirit, these move-
ments were appropriated by the new -ism, which presented itself in a double and
perhaps paradoxical position: on the one hand, as a critical revision of the avant-
gardes, and on the other, as a new historical phenomenon. Although one of the major
Integralist strategies for acquiring legitimacy involved reactivating the Dada model by
assiduously courting Tristan Tzara, Futurism was also given a special rank among the
avant-gardes. Cosma, one of Integralism’s major theorists, regarded Futurism, with
a critical and ironically detached eye, as the infancy of the avant-garde: “Futurism
was an unfinished junior schooling” (Cosma: “De la futurism la integralism”, 8–9).
Almost all the Romanian avant-garde groups included Futurism in their identity; and,
even if they never officially adhered to it, they made productive use of its ideas, par-
ticularly in literature.

Pictopoetry: An encounter between word and image

Shortly before the launch of Integral, two of its future contributors, the poet Ilarie
Voronca (pseud. of Eduard Marcus, 1903–1946) and the painter Victor Brauner, pub-
lished a single-issue magazine called 75HP (1924), which for the first time articu-
lated the idea of synthesis in a consistent way. The unrepeatability of their venture,
the spectacular typographic design, and the ‘pictopoetry’, a type of visual poetry
resulting from a collaboration between the two artists, were to make the magazine
a cause célèbre in the history of the Romanian avant-garde. Pictopoetry was made
up of abstract coloured shapes within a rectangular border, in which words from
urban, technological and advertising lexicons were inscribed. Besides the tautolog-
ical definition “pictopoetry is pictopoetry”, the authors also declared it to be “the
 Romania 759

true synthesis of Futurisms, Dadaisms and Constructivisms” (Brauner and Voronca:

“Repertoire abstrait suprarational”, 15). Subsequent commentators on pictopo-
etry have relegated Constructivism to the sidelines, emphasizing instead either its
Futurist or Dadaist colouring. Ion Pop regarded the decontextualized words of pic-
topoetry to be the result of chance, as suggested by Tzara in Pour faire un poème
dadaïste (To Make a Dadaist Poem, 1924), and examined it in the general context
of 75HP, viewing it as a myth-demolishing enterprise that was vehemently Dadaist
in its origins (Pop: Avangarda, 84–88). More recently, Emilia Drogoreanu has iden-
tified the model of pictopoetry in the visual language of the Futurist tavole paro-
libere (Drogoreanu: Influenţe ale futurismului, 179–235). Without elaborating, Marina
Vanci-Perahim challenged literature as the context for understanding pictopoetry
by drawing a parallel with Carlo Carrà’s Interventionist Manifesto (Vanci-Perahim:
“75HP”, 17). Its genealogies can be further expanded given that many artistic groups
or movements were exploring encounters between word and image at the time. One
might cite, for example, the similarity between pictopoetry and Gino Severini’s
description of his work Danzatrice = Mare (Female Dancer = Sea, 1912) as letteratura-
pittura in 1914 (letter to Papini of 2 May 1914, reproduced in Bagatti et al.: Futurismo
a Firenze, 1910–1920, 96). The intention of employing analogy in the visual domain
as well as finding “an autonomous form of literary expression” marked a series of
paintings by Severini to which the Romanian avant-gardists may have had access
(Cărăbaş: “Lumea trebuie reinventată”, 42–43).
Although there is no definite information about Brauner’s interest in Futurism,
Voronca’s poetry, published in 75HP and Punct, has been placed under a Futurist
banner. Declarations such as “The free, lightning-quick word slides as surely as a sti-
letto into the reader’s meninx” (Voronca: “Gramatică”, 3) reveal the manner in which
Marinetti’s literary theories became productive in the local context. Equally asso-
ciated with Futurism was the ‘poet-boxer’ Stephan Roll (pseud. of Gheorghe Dinu,
1903–1974), who contributed to a number of avant-garde magazines in Bucharest and
for whom poetry meant energy, urban spectacle and the violence of language.

Marinetti as a member of the Royal Academy of Italy

visits Bucharest (1930)
In a different context, Futurism often appeared alongside other avant-gardes within
the category of ‘extremist’ movements. Against the backdrop of an ever-growing
nationalist discourse about cultural tradition and specificity in the 1920s and 1930s,
mention of Marinetti or Futurism became a pretext for criticism of the avant-garde
as a whole. By contrast with the national tradition, Futurism could only be labelled
as an intruder and “a creator of ephemeral ideals” (Jianu: “Un creator”, 1). In spite
of that, thanks to his association with Mussolini, Marinetti began to be of interest in
760 Irina Cărăbaş

his official capacity and to garner sympathy on the part of many admirers of Il Duce.
Some recognized a similarity between Fascism and Futurism and regarded Marinetti
as the forerunner of Fascism, or even as the spiritual father of Mussolini himself
(Ştefănescu: “Marinetti”, 2).
It was in his official capacity as a member of the Reale Accademia d’Italia,
founded by Mussolini in 1926, that Marinetti visited Bucharest in May 1930 (see David
Drogoreanu: “Aesthetic Affinities and Political Divergences Between Italian and
Romanian Futurism”, 191–195). His grandiose reception at the Romanian Academy
and the Society of Romanian Writers did not resemble the kind of welcome the avant-
garde had for many years dreamed of giving him. Over the course of a number of days,
the receptions in his honour seemed to dissolve the differences between the most
diverse cultural groups, from right-wing nationalist academicians to avant-garde com-
munist sympathizers. The former praised him for his Fascist present whilst the latter
applauded his past as an inventor of the avant-garde. There were also moments when
the avant-gardists took over his schedule: they took Marinetti to Tîrgul Moşilor, a fair
in Bucharest frequented by people of every social category, and to Moreni to see the oil
wells and to play with gas torches. Marinetti later responded to their hospitality with
the poem L’ incendio della sonda di Moreni (translated by Alexandru Marcu as Incendiul
sondei din Moreni [The Probe Gas Fire in Moreni]) and with an invitation to the local
avant-garde artists to participate in the Mostra nazionale d’arte futurista (National
Exhibition of Futurist Art) held in Rome in 1933 (Vlasiu: “ ‘Arta viitorului’ ”, 13).
In spite of the glorious welcome, attitudes towards Marinetti were nonetheless at
variance within the avant-garde. The most enthusiastic group, from Contimporanul,
seemed to hold on to the view expressed by Ion Vinea in 1924, according to whom
art and politics had to be maintained as separate categories (Vinea: “Futurism şi
fascism”, 8). From the now defunct Integral, Ilarie Voronca and M.H. Maxy joined the
chorus of praise for Marinetti, unlike a number of contributors to the Surrealist unu,
who refused to join the official festivities on political grounds.
Marinetti’s visit coincided with the end of the heroic phase of the Romanian
avant-garde and at the same time brought to a close its links with Futurism. For
others, situated on the political Right, it was only now that the discovery of Futurism
began. In their writings from the 1930s, Mircea Eliade and Emil Cioran re-evaluated
various aspects of Futurism and singled out those features that were in keeping
with their own aims of vitality, power and authoritarianism (Cernat: “Futurismul
Italian”, 27–28). Only recently has Romanian historiography re-examined the polit-
ical connotations of Futurism’s reception and above all its overlap with Fascism,
which attracted right-wing intellectuals to the movement. On the other hand, its
rôle in the history of the avant-garde has been established with far greater nuance.
Nevertheless, Futurism has remained somewhat marginalized, especially in relation
to Dada, which achieved international acclaim due to the great merits and achieve-
ments of its Romanian members.
Translation: Alistair Ian Blyth
 Romania 761

Works cited
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Sansoni, 1984.
Berghaus, Günter: “Tristan Tzara: From Pre-Dadaism to Post-Futurism: Italian Influences in the
Cabaret Voltaire.” Caietele Tristan Tzara 18–23:60–105 (2013): 203–216.
Brauner, Victor, and llarie Voronca: “Repertoire abstrait suprarational.” 75HP (October 1924): 16.
Cărăbaş, Irina: “ ‘Lumea trebuie reinventată’: Câteva note despre pictopoezie şi futurism.” [‘The
World Has to Be Reinvented’: On the Relationship between Pictopoetry and Futurism] Ioana
Vlasiu, and Irina Cărăbaş, eds.: Viitorismul azi: 100 de ani de la lansarea Manifestului
futurismului [Futurism Today: The 100th Anniversary of the Launch of the Futurist Manifesto].
Special issue of Studii şi cercetări de istoria artei. Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române, 2010.
33–46.
Cărăbaş, Irina: “Minuletti il futurista: An Avant-Garde Poet in Disguise.” International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 6 (2016): 467–470.
Cernat, Paul: “Futurismul italian şi moştenirea sa culturală în România interbelică: Între avangardă
şi tânăra generaţie.” [Italian Futurism and its Cultural Impact in Interwar Romania: Between
Avant-garde and the Young Generation] Ioana Vlasiu, and Irina Cărăbaş, eds.: Viitorismul azi:
100 de ani de la lansarea Manifestului futurismului. Futurism Today: The 100th Anniversary
of the Launch of the Futurist Manifesto] Special issue of Studii şi cercetări de istoria artei.
Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române, 2010. 27–32.
Cernat, Paul: Avangarda românească şi complexul periferiei [Romanian Avant-garde and the
Complex of Periphery]. Bucureşti: Cartea Românească, 2007.
Cosma, Mihail: “De la futurism la integralism.” [From Futurism to Integralism] Integral (Bucureşti)
1:6–7 (1925): 8–9.
Dachy, Marc: Archives Dada: Cronique. Paris: Hazan, 2005.
David Drogoreanu, Emilia: “Aesthetic Affinities and Political Divergences Between Italian and
Romanian Futurism.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 1 (2011): 175–200.
Drăgănescu, Mihail: “Viitorismul, o nouă şcoală literară.” [Futurism, a New Literary School]
Biblioteca modernă [Modern Library] (Bucureşti) 2:11 (14 June 1909): 4–5.
Drogoreanu, Emilia: Influenţe ale futurismului italian asupra avangardei româneşti: Sincronie şi
specificitate [Influences of Italian Futurism on the Romanian Avant-garde: Synchronism and
Specifity]. Piteşti: Paralela 45, 2004.
Jianu, Ionel: “Un creator de idealuri efemere – F. T. Marinetti.” [F. T. Marinetti – Creator of Ephemeral
Ideals] Rampa [The Ramp] (București)13:3019 (17 February 1928): 1.
Janco, Marcel: “Futurismul nostru.” [Our Own Futurism] Facla [The Torch] 9:358 (19 May 1930): 4. English
translation “Our Own Futurism.” Timothy O. Benson, and Éva Forgács, eds.: Between Worlds: A
Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2002. 713–714.
Janco, Marcel, and Ion Vinea: “Manifest activist către tinerime.” [Activist Manifesto to the
Young] Contimporanul (Bucureşti) 46 (16 May 1924): 10. Reprinted in I. Vinea: Opere. Vol. 5.
Publicistica. Cluj: Dacia, 1978. 417–418.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Incendiul sondei din Moreni.” [Fire at the Moreni Well] Contimporanul
[Present Time] (Bucureşti) 9: 96–98 (January 1931): 2–3.
Maxy, Max Hermann: “Demonstraţia plastică internaţională a Contimporanului.” Contimporanul
[Present Time] (Bucureşti) 3:49 (November 1924): 2.
Minulescu, Ion: “Aprindeţi torţele!” Revista celorlalţi [Others’ Magazine] (București) 1:1 (20 March
1908): 1. English translation “Light the Torches!“ Timothy O. Benson, and Éva Forgács, eds.:
Between Worlds: A Sourcebook of Central European Avant-Gardes. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press,
2002. 134.
762 Irina Cărăbaş

Minulescu, Ion: “Poetul italian F. T. Marinetti pune bazele unei noi şcoli literare.” [The Italian
Poet F. T. Marinetti Lays the Foundation Stone of a New Literary School] Viitorul [The Future]
(Bucureşti) 25 October 1909. 1.
Ottinger, Didier: “Cubisme + futurisme = cubofuturisme.” Didier Ottinger, ed.: Le Futurisme à Paris:
Une avant-garde explosive. Exhibition catalogue. Paris: Centre Pompidou, 15 octobre 2008 – 26
janvier 2009. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou; Milan: 5 Continents, 2008. 20–41.
Pintilie, Andrei: “Ion Minulescu şi artele plastice.” [Ion Minulescu and the Fine Arts] Arta: Revista de
arte vizuale [Art: Magazine for Visual Arts] (Bucureşti) 28:12 (December 1981): 22–23.
Poggi, Cristine: Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton/NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2009.
Ch[apier], Poldy: “Futurism.” Rampa [The Ramp] (Bucureşti) 2:316 (8 November 1912): 2.
Pop, Ion: Avangarda în literatura română [The Avant-garde in Romanian Literature] Bucureşti: Atlas,
1999.
Ştefănescu, I[on]: “Marinetti împotriva nudului.” [Marinetti against the Nude] Rampa [The Ramp]
(Bucureşti) 15: 3685 (8 May 1930): 2.
Vanci-Perahim, Marina: “75HP: La revue pictopoétique.” M. Vanci-Perahim, ed.: 75HP: 1924. Paris:
Place, 1993. 7–19.
Vinea, Ion: “Futurism şi fascism de F. T. Marinetti.” [F. T. Marinetti’s Futurism and Fascism]
Contimporanul [Present Time] (Bucureşti) 3:45 (April 1924): 8.
Vlasiu, Ioana: “ ‘Arta viitorului’ în România la început de secol XX.” [Art of the Future in Romania at
the Beginning of the Twentieth Century] Ioana Vlasiu, and Irina Cărăbaş, eds.: Viitorismul azi:
100 de ani de la lansarea Manifestului futurismului. Futurism Today: The 100th Anniversary
of the Launch of the Futurist Manifesto] Special issue of Studii şi cercetări de istoria artei.
Bucureşti: Editura Academiei Române, 2010. 3–14.
Voronca, Ilarie: “Gramatică.” [Gramar] Punct [Point] (Bucureşti) 6–7 (3 January 1924): 3.

Further reading
Beldiman, Alexandru, and Magda Cârneci, eds.: Bucureşti, anii 1920–1940: Între avangardă şi
modernism = Bucharest in the 1920s–1940s: Between Avant-Garde and Modernism. Bucureşti:
Simetria, 1994.
Berghaus, Günter: “Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism: Some Cross-fertilizations Among the Historical
Avant-Gardes.” G. Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2000. 271–304.
Cosma, Mihail: “F. T. Marinetti.” Integral (Bucureşti) 3:12 (April 1927): 3–5.
Cugno, Marco, and Marin Mincu, eds.: Poesia romena d’avanguardia: Testi e manifesti da Urmuz a
Caraion. Milano: Feltrinelli, 1980.
David [Drogoreanu-David], Emilia: Futurismo, dadaismo e avanguardia romena: Contaminazioni fra
culture europee (1909–1930). Torino: L’ Harmattan Italia, 2006.
Lista, Giovanni: “Marinetti et Tzara.” Les Lettres nouvelles, 4th series, 72:3 (May–June 1972): 82–97.
Lista, Giovanni: “Prampolini et Tzara: Inédits.” Les Lettres Nouvelles, 4th series, 73:3 (September–
October 1973): 17–25.
Livezeanu, Irina: “Romania: ‘Windows Towards the West’: New Forms and the ‘Poetry of True Life’.”
Peter Brooker, et al., eds: The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Vol.
3. Europe 1880–1940. Part 2. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 1157–1183.
Mansbach, Stephen A.: Modern Art in Eastern Europe: From the Baltic to the Balkans, ca. 1890–1939.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
 Romania 763

Marino, Adrian. “Echos futuristes dans la littérature roumaine.” Littérature roumaine, littérature
occidentales: Rencontres. Bucureşti: Editura Ştiinţifică şi enciclopedică, 1982. 169–205.
Passuth, Krisztina: “The Exhibition as a Work of Art.” Timothy O. Benson, ed.: Central European
Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation, 1910–1930. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2002.
226–246.
Pop, Ion: ed.: Réhabilitation du rêve: Une anthologie de l’ avant-garde roumain. Bucureşti: Institutul
Cultural Român - Éditions Samuel Tastet; Paris: Nadeau, 2006.
Răileanu, Petre, ed.: The Romanian Avant-Garde. Special issue of Plural Magazine 3 (August–
October 1999).
Sandqvist, Tom: Dada East: The Romanians of Cabaret Voltaire. Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 2006.
Şchiopu, Michaela: “Ecouri şi opinii despre futurism în periodicele româneşti ale vremii.” [Echoes
and Opinions about Futurism in Romanian Periodicals of the Time] Revista de istorie şi teorie
literară [Journal for Literary History and Theory] 26:4 (October–December 1977): 595–603.
Versari, Maria Elena: “The Central European Avant-Gardes of the 1920s: The Battleground for Futurist
Identity?” Vojtěch Lahoda, ed.: Local Strategies, International Ambitions. Prague: Artefactum:
The Institute of Art History, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, 2006. 103–110.
Henryk Baran, Christina Lodder
48 Russia
In the history of Futurism, Italy and Russia played an outstanding rôle. In no other
countries did the movement gain so much support amongst writers and artists, and
no other branches of Futurism are so well researched. Yet, the differences between
Russian and Italian Futurism were profound. Italian Futurism had in Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti a prominent leader whom many recognized as an outstanding
representative and key theorist. He was a cultural manager who could marshal a
vast network of artists with branches spread across all major, and many provincial,
centres of the peninsula. Russian Futurism, by contrast, was much more heteroge-
neous and largely concentrated in two cities. It was never a cohesive movement as
such, but rather a conglomeration of highly diverse cenacles. Each of them had a
number of prominent figures, some of them of outstanding importance for Russian
twentieth-century culture. But none of them could be considered an undisputed
leader who outlined the core theoretical tenets, organized key publications, planned
major public actions, laid down policy guidelines, issued directions and so on.
Russian Futurist groups were formed on the basis of personal friendships rather than
an elaborate aesthetic programme. The Russian Futurists did write manifestos and
they issued theoretical statements, but this output barely amounts to ten percent of
what was published in Italy.
Although the term ‘futurizm’, borrowed from the Italian, circulated in the early
1910s as a designation for one of the two principal post-Symbolist trends in literary
innovation (the other being the Acmeist school in poetry), many Russian poets and
artists preferred the neologism ‘budetlianstvo’ (futurianism) in order to highlight
their Russian roots and independence from Western European influences. One of the
distinctive features that separated Russian from Italian Futurism was the attitude in
Italy towards technological progress and urban civilization. Although traces of a
machine cult could also be found in Russia, primitivism played a more important
rôle and had a distinctly nationalistic orientation. The vital force of Eurasian anti-
quity fused with the verve of modernist innovation to such a degree that past and
future led a heterochronous co-existence. By contrast, the Italian Futurists’ inter-
est in the archaic, barbarian or primitive was tied to a mythical Africa, a vaguely
defined folk art or the subconscious, rather than an indigenous tradition (Etruscan
or otherwise).
The greatest difference between Russian and Italian Futurism can be found in
their political fates. In their early phases, both movements counted amongst their
membership left-wing and patriotic artists, but after the Great War political develop-
ments in the two countries took entirely different directions. Marinetti and a certain
number of other prominent Italian Futurists aligned themselves with Mussolini.
When the Fasci di combattimento were purged of their leftist and anarchist members,
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-048
 Russia 765

most Futurists moved in a different direction. However, after the establishment of the
Fascist régime, artists and writers had to toe the line; otherwise they were not able to
pursue a professional career. Some Futurists paid lip service to the new authorities
but otherwise refrained from political activities. Others joined the Party and sought
to curry favours from the official cultural organizations. A handful even entered the
institutions of State politics and managed to occupy some influential posts. But by
and large, the gerarchi shunned the Futurists because of their unruly past and con-
troversial artistic programme. Marinetti failed in his attempts to have Futurism recog-
nized as the Art of the State; the biggest emoluments handed out to servants of the
régime went to non-Futurist artists, and few of the official prizes or commissions in
art and literature were won by Futurists.
In Russia, by contrast, the links between Futurism and the political régime
were more nuanced and many Futurists embraced communism, while retaining
their pre-revolutionary sympathies with anarchism. The October Revolution of 1917
offered radically-minded creative figures in the arts an early opportunity to par-
ticipate in a political, social and cultural revolution, which they enthusiastically
accepted. Until 1921, when the end of the Civil War enabled the government to
impose its own, more traditional, aesthetic requirements, the Futurists sought to
control Soviet artistic, literary and cultural organizations. In the 1920s, Futurism
underwent a considerable transformation and the term ceased to be a significant
indicator of creative affiliations. Although Futurist ideas continued to exert some
influence, these were often subsumed within other movements. In the fine arts, for
instance, abstract art, Suprematism and Constructivism emerged as the dominant
approaches among progressive artists, although all of these came under attack from
groups subscribing to a Realist agenda, which were actively supported and pro-
moted by the government. Futurists and former Futurists were prominent figures
in the cultural debates of the early 1920s, but their influence in cultural institu-
tions was increasingly curtailed. Their aesthetic radicalism was not shared by the
Bolsheviks and was openly opposed by many functionaries. Consequently, by the
second half of the 1920s, the number of Futurists was on the wane and very few of
them were politically engaged.
Just as second-wave Futurism in Italy moved into new directions that were mark-
edly influenced by coeval movements such as Dada and Surrealism, Russian Futurism
borrowed new ideas from Constructivism, and vice versa. In the end, the forces of aes-
thetic conservatism gained the upper hand and Socialist Realism became the State
doctrine that left no room for avant-garde aspirations. In some ways, this resembled
the Italian Futurists’ defeat by the conservative Novecento group. But as Futurism was
not suppressed by the Fascist State, it could stay alive into the 1930s and continue to
develop new forms of expression, partly to comply with the exigencies of the Fascist
régime, but partly also in tune with other international trends. Mayakovsky’s suicide
in 1930, on the other hand, signalled the ultimate death of Futurism in Russia and, in
fact, of the Russian avant-garde as a whole.
766 Henryk Baran

Futurist Literature in Russia

Futurism in Russia was part of a complex, fluid environment in literature, painting
and other arts, one in which a variety of native and foreign influences, Western and
non-Western, came together to form that extraordinary period known as the Silver
Age of Russian culture (approx. 1890s–early 1920s). During its heyday, 1912–1914, the
Futurist movement, which was predominantly literary but closely connected to the
avant-garde in the fine arts, attracted an enormous amount of public attention. Its
period of prominence largely came to an end with the onset of the Great War, while
the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and subsequent Civil War brought a radical
political environment that shaped it in new ways. Its place in Soviet culture was
adversely affected by the ideological constraints of the 1930s. These restrictions deter-
mined who could publish what and in which manner, as well as which authors could
be studied and how they were to be interpreted. As a consequence, despite occasional
important publications in the Soviet Union, the first history of Russian Futurism
appeared in English (Markov: Russian Futurism, 1968). During the 1970s and 1980s,
Nikolai Khardzhiev, Evgenii Kovtun, Susan Compton, John Bowlt, Gerald Janecek
and other Western and Soviet specialists did much to reclaim the legacy of Futurism
and the avant-garde at large. Most recently, Dmitry Sarabianov and his students
greatly deepened the conceptual and factual foundations of avant-garde studies (see,
for example, some of the articles in Sarabianov: Russkaia zhivopis’), while Andrei
Krusanov has produced an unmatched chronicle of how the Russian artistic and lit-
erary avant-garde developed and how it was received (Krusanov: Russkii avangard).

Background

“Futurism is not a monolithic aesthetic school, but a motto, an ideological platform

around which an entire conglomerate of schools has gathered”, wrote a contempo-
rary, the critic Genrikh Tasteven (also known as Henri Tastevin, 1880–1915) in 1914
(Tasteven: Futurizm, 24). Today, scholars echo this assessment and emphasize the
difference between Russian and Italian Futurism:

In Russian culture, Futurism became, above all, a programme and ideology of creating the art of
the future, one that would transform life and man himself. Various artistic and literary groupings
were connected with this programme, elements of which also may be noted in the work of very
different artists. Russian Futurism never possessed the monolithic character and programmatic
unity of the Italian movement. Various groupings constantly polemicized with each other, clai-
ming their right to be regarded as true Futurists. (Bobrinskaia: “Russkii futurizm”, 144)

The most important of the several groups of poets who identified themselves as
Futurists – or were so labelled by the critics – was Gileia (Hylaea); its members,
 Russia 767

together with their allies in the artists’ group Soiuz molodezhi (The Union of Youth),
ultimately came to be known as the Cubo-Futurists. During the heyday of their col-
lective activity (1912–1914), the Cubo-Futurists, with two great poets, Vladimir
Mayakovsky (1893–1930) and Viktor (Velimir) Khlebnikov (1885–1922),1 among them,
created a substantial body of texts that reflected a distinctive poetics and gave book
publishing a radically new direction. Egofuturizm (Ego-Futurism), for a time led by
the highly popular Igor Severyanin (pseud. of Igor Vasilʹevich Lotarev, 1887–1941),
emerged in 1911, went through two major changes and remained on the scene
until early 1916. The group Mezonin poezii (Mezzanine of Poetry) appeared in the
second half of 1913 and by January 1914 had ceased to exist. The group Tsentrifuga
(Centrifuge), which included Boris Pasternak, formed in March 1914 and was active
until 1916. Among provincial groups that arose during the Russian Civil War, the most
notable was 410, which operated in Tiflis (Tbilisi) during 1918–1919 (see pp. 471–474 in
th entry on Georgia in this volume).
Information about Italian Futurism first appeared in the Russian press in March
1909 (Sem-v.: “Futurizm: Literaturnyi manifest”) at a time of major changes in painting
and literature. New developments in Russian art had been demonstrated in the months
of December 1907 to January 1908, when Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964), Alexandra
Exter (1882–1949), Aristarkh Lentulov (1882–1943) and the brothers David (1882–1967),
Nikolai (1890–1920) and Vladimir Burliuk (1886–1917) organized the first of several
‘Stephanos’ exhibitions. Some of the avant-garde painters, such as Mikhail Larionov,
Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962) and Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), were also profoundly
involved in literary Futurism, while some of the poets, such as Vasily Kamensky (1884–
1961) and Vladimir Mayakovsky, were trained as professional artists or made use of their
expertise as amateur artists (e. g. Velimir Khlebnikov). Such multiple connections had a
deep and varied impact on the programmes, themes and techniques of Futurist group-
ings. The overlap between groups of artists and poets led their members to engage in
joint actions to advance recognition of avant-garde art and new kinds of literature. Well
aware of the publicity methods used by Italian Futurists, they staged lectures, disputes
and other provocative activities that challenged the public and generated a great deal of
press attention.
Literature, long the dominant element of Russian culture, had, since the 1890s,
undergone major changes that created a special environment for the arrival of
Futurism. Moving beyond the civic and socially-conscious thematics of the second
half of the nineteenth century, the Symbolist movement enlarged the imaginative
space of Russian poetry, enriched it with new forms of expression and broadened
the range of its technical instruments. By 1910, all the principal Symbolist poets and

1 In the discursive context of this entry, names will be spelled in the form under which a writer or
artist is commonly known in the Anglo-Saxon world, and in a scholarly transliteration in the biblio-
graphic references.
768 Henryk Baran

writers remained as active as before and continued to produce major works. However,
they were no longer perceived as being on the cutting edge of literary development;
the Acmeists, on the one hand, and the Futurists, on the other, vied for that position.
There was a marked difference in how the two new movements related to their
predecessors. While the Acmeists acknowledged their filiation, the response of the
Futurist groups varied. The Centrifuge group willingly admitted to the Symbolists’
influence on their art, whereas in their manifesto, “Poshchechina obshchestven-
nomu vkusu” (A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, 1912),2 the Cubo-Futurists categor-
ically rejected any connection with previous stages of literature. Yet, there is much
to support Krystyna Pomorska’s view that the stimulus received from Symbolism
helped differentiate Russian Futurism from the Italian (Pomorska: Russian Formalism
and Its Poetic Ambiance, 53). In particular, work undertaken by the Symbolists on
renewing the language of Russian poetry set the stage for the Futurists’ path-breaking
experiments in that sphere. Moreover, a comparison between the Futurists and the
Decadents – representatives of the initial period of Russian Symbolism – reveals
more than a few similarities in the devices both groups employed to assert themselves
within the literary milieu of their time.

Hylaea and Cubo-Futurism (1912–1913)

The nucleus of the “literary company” (literaturnoe sodruzhestvo) Hylaea was made
up of the brothers David, Nikolai and Vladimir Burliuk, Elena Guro (1877–1913),
Vasily Kamensky, Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–1968), Benedikt Livshits (1887–1938),
Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov. The name derived from Herodotus’
History, where it designates a part of the ancient kingdom of the Scythians situated
on the coast of the Black Sea. In modern times, this area included the city of Kherson
near the mouth of the Dnieper River (in today’s Ukraine). Some 50 km away lay the
country estate of Chernianka, managed by the father of the Burliuk brothers and reg-
ularly visited by radical poets and artists. Since the late nineteenth century, numer-
ous archaeological excavations revealed much about the ancient past of the area.
Memoirs by Benedikt Livshits and other Hylaeans underscore the degree to which
the presence of nearby antiquities fostered a consciousness of a multilayered history
and created a special atmosphere that helped shape some of the key features of the
group’s programme (Livshits: The One and a Half-Eyed Archer, 35–68).
Several specialized coinages are to be found in the critical and scholarly literature
dealing with Hylaea and its allies. Concerning one of these, ‘Cubo-Futurism’, Nikolai

2 To distinguish between the manifesto and the brochure of the same name, the former is set in
inverted commas.
 Russia 769

Khardzhiev simply observed that it “is a generalizing term that arose on the pages
of articles by critics”, rooted in the fact that “Futurist poets acted in close proximity
to Cubist painters” (Khardzhiev: “Poeziia i zhivopis’ ”, 91). By 1913, the term ‘Cubo-
Futurism’ was being commonly used in literary criticism. Members of Hylaea gener-
ally avoided naming themselves in their programmatic texts; however, in some cases
they used the term ‘budetliane’ (Futurians), which had been coined by Khlebnikov.
A shift in usage appeared in a statement released to the press following a July 1913
meeting to organize a Futurist theatre enterprise (see below, p. 774): the easily under-
stood combination poetov-futuristov was linked with baichei budushchego, which
contained the neologism baiach, used by the Hylaeans as one alternative to the Latin-
derived poet. Notably, the planned theatre enterprise was to be called Budetlianin. In
August, the miscellany Dokhlaia luna (The Croaked Moon) for the first time used the
term ‘Futurists’ together with ‘Hylaea’. This combination was prominently displayed
in several later publications. By early 1914, in line with attempts to unite different
groups, the manifesto Idite k chertu! (Go to Hell!) declared: “1. All Futurists are united
only by our group” and “2. We have rejected our accidental labels Ego and Cubo and
have united into the one and only literary company of the Futurists” (Burliuk et al.:
“Go to Hell!”, 86).
Some of the Hylaeans claimed that their movement started in 1907 and thus
antedated Italian Futurism. However, this “mythological date of birth” has no factual
basis (Bobrinskaia: “Russkii futurizm”, 144). The group coalesced gradually. In
October 1908, Kamensky, then editor of a minor Petersburg periodical, published a
short prose piece, “Iskushenie greshnika” (The Sinner’s Temptation), by the univer-
sity student Viktor Khlebnikov, who later called himself Velimir Khlebnikov. The nar-
rative featured numerous neologisms and grotesque mythic imagery. In early 1909,
Kamensky met the poet and painter Elena Guro and her husband, the musician and
artist Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934), whose apartment served as a meeting place for
‘left-wing’ artists. When they became acquainted with Khlebnikov’s writings, they all
recognized and welcomed his poetic radicalism.
In March 1909, Elena Guro published Sharmanka (Hurdy-Gurdy), a selection of her
verse, prose, and plays.3 Although David Burliuk subsequently sought to appropriate

3 Publications referred to but not quoted have not been listed in the bibliography below. For more
detailed information on these works see Peter Hellyer and Christine G. Thomas: A Catalogue of Rus-
sian Avant-garde Books, 1912–1934. London: The British Library, 1994; David Woodruff and Ljiljana
Grubišić, eds.: Russian Modernism: The Collections of the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art
and the Humanities. Santa Monica/CA: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Huma-
nities, 1997; or the checklists by Harper Montgomery: “Checklist of The Judith Rothschild Foundation
Gift.” Margit Rowell and Deborah Wye, eds.: The Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910–1934. New York:
The Museum of Modern Art, 2002. 249–284; Russian Avantgarde, 1904–1946, attached to Russian
Avant-garde, 1904–1926: Books and Periodicals from the National Library of Russia, Sankt-Peterburg.
1362 Mikrofiches, ed. by Andrei Vasil’evich Krusanov. Leiden: Inter Documentation Company,
770 Henryk Baran

this book for Russian Futurism, scholars have pointed to its links with the tradition
of literary Impressionism and the strong influence of Symbolism on its imagery and
stylistics (Poliakov: Knigi russkogo kubofuturizma, 380). In November 1909, Guro and
Matyushin were among the founders of Soiuz molodezhi (Union of Youth), but follow-
ing disagreements with several other members concerning the goals and the manage-
ment of the group, they left in early 1910. Subsequently, the Union of Youth regularly
collaborated with Hylaea.
In February 1910, Khlebnikov met Guro and Matyushin, as well as David Burliuk.
This resulted in his inclusion in the collection Studiia impressionistov (Impressionists’
Studio), put together by the remarkable physician and artist Nikolai Kulbin (1868–
1917). The volume opened with Kulbin’s lengthy essay “Svobodnoe iskusstvo kak
osnova zhizni” (Free Art as Foundation of Life), which Markov considers “perhaps the
first declaration of avant-garde art in Russia” (Markov: Russian Futurism, 7). One of
Khlebnikov’s two contributions to the volume, the short poem “Zakliatie smekhom”
(Incantation by Laughter), was composed almost entirely of neologisms created
by adding various prefixes and suffixes to the root smekh- (laughter). Once Hylaea
attracted the attention of the critics, this poem became one of the most frequently
cited examples of Russian Futurist verbal art.
The key event in the ‘prehistory’ of Russian Futurism was the publication of the
miscellany Sadok sudei (A Trap for Judges) in April 1910. With a print run of 300 copies,
this small-format book featured verse and prose by Kamensky, Ekaterina Nizen (Elena
Guro’s sister), David and Nikolai Burliuk, Guro, Sergei Miasoedov and Khlebnikov
(the latter’s texts made up more than half of the collection); it also included Vladimir
Burliuk’s portraits of the contributors. A plethora of Symbolist and other miscellanies
had conditioned the reading public to expect books to be aesthetically refined, in
terms of both contents and typography. A Trap for Judges challenged these assump-
tions on several levels. It was printed on the reverse side of two varieties of cheap,
colourful wallpaper; a third variety used for the cover featured yet another design.
The typesetter left out the letters Ѣ (jat) and ъ (‘hard sign’), then systematically used
in the Russian alphabet; most texts were titled (or subtitled) with the nondescript
word ‘opus’ and a number, thus obscuring genre distinctions; and many texts fea-
tured confusingly eclectic subject matter and stylistics, and in the case of Khlebnikov
and Kamensky, neologisms.
By the start of 1912, Hylaea was taking shape as a literary group. In the preced-
ing months, David Burliuk had met the art student Vladimir Mayakovsky and the
poet Benedikt Livshits. During January and February 1912, members of Hylaea par-
ticipated in public disputes about contemporary art, alongside radical artists such

2004; Robert H. Davis Jr. and Megan Duncan-Smith, eds.: Checklist of Russian, Ukrainian & Belarusian
Avant-Garde & Modernist Books, Serials & Works on Paper at The New York Public Library & Columbia
University Libraries. New York: Academic Commons, 2015.
 Russia 771

as Goncharova and Larionov. These events provided opportunities to develop not

only their overall aesthetic positions, but also their public speaking style. From
the start, Hylaea was regularly represented by David Burliuk, who was soon joined
by Mayakovsky and Aleksei Kruchenykh. In November and December 1912, David
and Nikolai Burliuk, together with Mayakovsky, took part in several disputes that
prompted a distinctly negative press.
In May 1912, Khlebnikov published an essay, Uchitel’ i uchenik: Razgovor (Teacher
and Student: A Conversation), in a brochure where, for the first time, he laid out some
of his ideas on the relationship between sound and meaning, as well as his theory
of cyclical recurrences in history (Khlebnikov: “Teacher and Student”, 277–287). In
August 1912 followed Guro’s Osennii son (Autumnal Dream), a book containing a play
of the same name and several shorter prose and lyric pieces.
The highpoint of Hylaea’s activity in 1912 came in December, with the appearance
of the miscellany, Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Face of Public
Taste). Like A Trap for Judges, the new collection overturned traditional book aes-
thetics: it was printed on grey and brown wrapping paper and had a cover of coarse
brown sackcloth. Yet, it was the contents of the volume, especially its opening mani-
festo of the same title, that immediately secured the group’s reputation and shaped
its scandalous image for decades to come. The short, iconoclastic declaration, signed
by David Burliuk, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh and Mayakovsky, took aim at both the
classics and the current idols of Russian literature. It declared boldly that “the past
is too tight. The Academy and Pushkin are less intelligible than hieroglyphics” and
demanded radical action for the sake of the future: “Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky,
Tolstoy, etc. etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity. He who does not forget his
first love will not recognize his last”; “We order that the poets’ rights be revered: 1. To
enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words (Word-
novelty)”. The declaration emphasized the group’s defiant rejection of the authority
of both critics and audience and ended with a visionary image of future achievements
(Burliuk et al.: “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, 51–52).
The major portion of the new collection consisted of works by Khlebnikov. These
included his long poem “I i E” (I and E), subtitled “A Tale of the Stone Age”; his play
Devii bog (The Virgins’ God), which combined a pagan Slavic context with Greek
myth; his neologism-filled prose piece “Pesn’ miriazia” (The Song of the Worldling);
as well as other verse and prose. Guro, Livshits, David Burliuk, Kruchenykh and
Mayakovsky all contributed verse to the collection, Nikolai Burliuk some elegant
prose pieces, including one that alluded to the group’s ‘Scythian’ roots, and Wassily
Kandinsky four prose poems (although he had not granted permission to print them
and publicly protested against his inclusion in the anthology). A Slap in the Face of
Public Taste, which had a print run of 600 copies, sold out instantly and provoked a
storm of protests in the press, not only in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, but also from
newspapers in the provinces. During the succeeding years, each publication, and
even more so the Hylaeans’ provocative public lectures and disputes, strengthened
772 Henryk Baran

their scandalous reputation. Within Hylaea itself, Elena Guro, whose multifaceted
creative work reflected the influence of Impressionism, Symbolism and Primitivism,
had a profound influence on the rest of the group, as can be seen in the moving
introduction to the collection Troe (The Three), which featured texts by Khlebnikov,
Kruchenykh and Guro herself, as well as four drawings and cover by Malevich. The
volume, planned while Guro was alive, was published following her premature
death in May 1913.
In a four-page leaflet, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, published after the scan-
dalous miscellany of the same name, the Hylaeans accorded Velimir Khlebnikov
the status of the group’s leader, although emphatically not in practical matters.
Khlebnikov was Hylaea’s most significant poet; only Mayakovsky, who began to create
major works during the period of the Great War, possessed a voice of comparable mag-
nitude. To a considerable degree, much of the Hylaeans’ programme may be regarded
as an extension and implementation of Khlebnikov’s early theoretical explorations
and poetic practice. The Hyleans’ assertion that poets have the right to enlarge vocab-
ulary with arbitrary and derivative words echoed Khlebnikov’s programmatic article
from 1908, “Kurgan Sviatogora” (The Burial Mound of Sviatogor), in which he called
upon Russian literature to reject Western influences and to make use of “the right of
word creation”, which for him meant lexical coinages from non-standard combina-
tions of roots, prefixes and suffixes (Khlebnikov: “The Burial Mound of Sviatogor”,
234). At the same time, Khlebnikov’s focus, during the prewar period, on Russian
and Slavic history, myth and folklore paralleled the Neo-Primitivist trends in Russian
painting and helped give the Hylaeans’ collections a distinctly archaizing orientation
(see pp. 801–806).
David Burliuk – the ‘Father of Russian Futurism’, as he later called himself, with
considerable justification – played an exceptional rôle within Hylaea. “Poet, orator,
painter, theorist and publisher all rolled into one, he was both a fanatical Kulturträger
and an exceptionally talented person” (Basner: “The Phenomenon of David Burliuk in
the History of the Russian Avant-Garde”, 150). It was he who recognized Khlebnikov’s
genius and took him under his wing, he who brought Hylaea together and shaped its
tactics and provocative actions. He was a talented, if eclectic painter, and as a poet he
was influenced by the poètes maudits, especially Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Burliuk
often created works that were striking in their deliberate carelessness of form, eroti-
cism and anti-aestheticism.
The poet Benedikt Livshits was a ‘moderate’ Hylaean, although “Liudi v pei-
zazhe” (People in a Landscape), his lyrical prose text in A Slap in the Face of Public
Taste, demonstrates that he could undertake very interesting verbal experiments. He
participated in some of the Cubo-Futurists’ attempts to catch the public’s eye, but
only in his second anthology, Volch’e solntse (The Wolves’ Sun, 1914), did he reveal
himself as a Futurist author, due to his use of a new syntax in poetic and non-poetic
speech. Another moderate was Nikolai Burliuk, a talented poet and prose writer who
authored some theoretical articles about poetic language.
 Russia 773

Vasily Kamensky – poet, artist and professional aviator – was perhaps the most
‘Futurist’ of the Hylaeans, in life as well as in art. His poetry and prose are filled
with emotional celebrations of life and nature. His novel Zemlianka (The Mud Hut,
1910) is determinedly anti-urbanistic; subsequently, after having been exposed to
Khlebnikov’s work, he followed the latter into experiments with neologisms, with
words drawn from local Russian dialects and folk poetry.
Vladimir Mayakovsky debuted as a poet in A Slap in the Face of Public Taste with
two short texts, “Noch’ ” (Night) and “Utro” (Morning). In these and his other prewar
urbanist poems, “elements of painterly Cubism are transposed into a system of poetic
images”, while the lyrical ‘plots’ often involve “the application of the principles of
Cubist and Futurist painting: dynamic displacement of objects and their interpen-
etration” (Khardzhiev: “Poeziia i zhivopis’ ”, 61). His grotesque, discordant imagery
of the city and his unpredictable use of tropes resemble the visual art of the German
Expressionists.
Aleksei Kruchenykh’s main contribution to both the poetic and artistic avant-garde
was in the area of theory. He also made a distinct contribution to Russian Futurism
through his development of zaumnyi iazyk (transrational language) or zaum’ (trans-
sense, beyonsense; see below, pp. 776–777 and 806). During 1912, he published several
series of lithographed postcards, featuring original drawings by Larionov, Goncharova,
Aleksandr Shevchenko, Vladimir Tatlin and others (Borovkov: Zametki o russkom
avantgarde, 17–32). This collaboration led to the invention of a new genre, the litho-
graphed, hand-lettered book, created jointly by poets and artists (see pp. 283–284 in
the entry on Visual Poetry in this volume). The initial ones appeared in 1912: Starinnaia
liubov’ (Old-Time Love), Igra v adu (A Game in Hell) and Mirskontsa (Worldbackwords).
A Slap in the Face of Public Taste was succeeded by another collective volume,
Sadok sudei II (A Trap for Judges II, 1913). Following Hylaea’s joining of The Union of
Youth as an autonomous poetic section, its members published a number of works in
the third issue of Soiuz molodezhi (March 1913). In April, the volume Trebnik troikh:
Sbornik risunkov i stikhov (The Missal of the Three: A Collection of Drawings and Verse)
featured poetry by Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, David and Nikolai Burliuk, and drawings
by five artists. As noted previously, August 1913 saw the appearance of The Croaked
Moon miscellany. In September, Troe (The Three) became a posthumous tribute to
the recently deceased Elena Guro. October brought the collection Zatychka (Stopper),
with poems by Khlebnikov, David and Nikolai Burliuk, as well as, in booklet form,
Kruchenykh’s and Khlebnikov’s manifesto, Slovo kak takovoe (The Word as Such, 1913).
In late December, Kruchenykh issued a small selection of Khlebnikov’s texts, Riav!
Perchatki 1908–1914 g.g. (Roar! The Gauntlets 1908–1914), and the libretto of his own
recently staged ‘opera’, Pobeda nad solnstem (Victory over the Sun). During the course
of the year, in parallel with their larger, typeset miscellanies, the Cubo-Futurist poets,
together with artists, continued to publish lithographed books. Kruchenykh produced
most of them (a few with Khlebnikov); Mayakovsky contributed to the genre his first
poetic collection, Ia! (I!), undertaken together with the painter Vasily Chekrygin.
774 Henryk Baran

The Cubo-Futurists’ participation in public lectures and scandalous disputes con-

tinued to increase their notoriety. Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) recalled: “These same
years just before World War I brought with them a passion for all sorts of evenings and
discussions. […] The evenings of the Futurists brought together an amazing number of
the public […] The public’s reaction to them was various: many came for the sake of
scandal, but a broad segment of the student public awaited the new art, wanted the
new word” (Jakobson: My Futurist Years, 4). A few of these events may be noted here.
In February 1913, the press accused the Futurists of being responsible for an
outrage committed by Abram Balashov, a mentally disturbed, ultra-Orthodox icon
painter who slashed a famous painting by Ilya Repin. David Burliuk rejected such
charges and criticized Repin’s painting at a dispute on modern art. In late March, at
a dispute on “The Newest Russian Literature”, Mayakovsky linked together the words
Cubism and Futurism. On 13 October, at the “Pervyi v Rossii vecher rechetvortsev” (The
First in Russia Evening of Wordsmiths), Mayakovsky for the first time wore a yellow
blouse. And in November of the same year, David Burliuk gave a series of public lec-
tures on “Pushkin and Khlebnikov”, in which he compared the Hylaeans’ leader to the
greatest Russian poet and was met, unsurprisingly, with overwhelming derision.
Mayakovsky’s yellow blouse was but one example of deliberately provocative
Futurist “sartorial travesties” (McQuillen: The Modernist Masquerade, 178), often put
on display during well-advertised strolls through the city. Some of the Cubo-Futurist
poets also joined artists in face-painting, a practice given a conceptual framework
by Larionov and Ilya Zdanevich (1894–1975) in their manifesto Pochemu my rask-
rashivaemsia (Why We Paint Ourselves, 1913). Bobrinskaya notes that the Russian
Futurists, like the Italian ones, developed the theatrical, emphatically ‘fashionable’
aspect of their behaviour and appearance, and that Mayakovsky was particularly suc-
cessful in creating for himself a public image of an unorthodox and eccentric artist.
However, the Russians’ public events shied away from the Italian Futurists’ aggressive
style of arte-azione (art-in-action), emphasizing instead theatricality and playfulness
(Bobrinskaia: Futurizm, 153).
In late July 1913, Kazimir Malevich and Kruchenykh visited Mikhail Matyushin at
his country house in Uusikirkko (Karelia), a meeting that they subsequently styled
as the Pervyi vserossiiskii sezd Baiachei Budushchego (poetov futuristov) (First All-
Russian Congress of Bards of the Future [The Futurist Poets]). The press release issued
at the conclusion of this event combined verbal provocation with quasi-bureaucratic
language. Along with information about the Hylaeans’ publication plans, the docu-
ment grandiloquently stated that the Congress would “transform Russian theatre”
by establishing a “new ‘Futurian’ theatre” that would be run by the poets and artists
themselves (Railing: Essays on “Victory over the Sun”, 14–15).
Notwithstanding the predictable negative response they received, the Futurists’
theatrical productions contributed to a significant shift in avant-garde performance
aesthetics (see the entry on Russian Futurist Theatre in this volume). The staging of
Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh’s opera Pobeda nad
 Russia 775

solntsem (Victory over the Sun) at the Luna-Park theatre in Saint Petersburg (2–5
December 1913) was a notable achievement. It offered a tangible demonstration of the
close collaboration of poets and artists and of the successful synthesis of the verbal
and visual arts pursued by the Hylaeans and their allies.

Cubo-Futurist poetics: Theory and practice

The cover of A Slap in the Face of Public Taste carried the motto “In Defence of Free
Art”, echoing the principle of “Free Art” formulated by the artist and theorist Vladimir
Markov (pseud. of Voldemārs Matvejs, 1877–1914) and espoused by the avant-garde
at large. In 1913, the Hylaeans came forward with various programmatic statements
that reflected the rapid development of their ideas about the nature of poetry and
their own craft. Notwithstanding the group’s emphasis on collective publications
and actions, such ‘declarations’ were in no way obligatory or ‘normative’; rather,
they offered explanations of what could be found in the published works by one or
more of Hylaea’s members. Moreover, as Benedikt Livshits emphasized in the article
“Osvobozhdenie slova” (The Liberation of the Word, 1913), Hylaea’s creative work was
dynamic, evolving, and its essence could not be reduced to any single technique: “All
of this is peripheral to the new current, all of this is but a means relevant to our tran-
sient today, which, without detriment to our poetry, we will perhaps reject tomor-
row. But, what sets us apart from our predecessors and our contemporaries by an
unbridgeable gap is the exclusive emphasis that we place on the creative word, free
for the first time, freed by us” (Livshits: “The Liberation of the Word”, 81).
Hylaea’s programme was presented in greater detail in an untitled manifesto in
the almanac A Trap for Judges II. It was signed by all members of the group (“the
new people of a new life”), who declared that they had already moved far beyond
the achievements of previous years: “In the name of the freedom of the individual
caprice” they declared their will to “reject normal orthography”, “abolish punctu-
ation marks” and abandon “meters in textbooks” (Burliuk et al.: “From ‘A Trap for
Judges’, 2”, 53–54). The Cubo-Futurists followed – or anticipated – these formulations
by bringing their texts into proximity with everyday speech, which, unlike written
discourse, is less predictable, stylistically more varied and grammatically less strict:
“All that is beautiful is random”, wrote Nikolai Burliuk in Poeticheskie nachala (Poetic
Principles, 1914), and “the slip of the tongue – lapsus linguae” he called the “centaur
of poetry” (Burliuk and Burliuk: “Poetic Principles”, 84). In reality, however, most of
the poets did not implement all the demands voiced in the declaration. In A Trap for
Judges II, for example, only Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh omitted punctuation marks
in a small selection of verse.
Along with an orientation towards oral discourse, Cubo-Futurist manifestos
emphasized the materiality of the signifier and the rôle of sound texture. In their
776 Henryk Baran

booklet Slovo kak takovoe (The Word as Such, 1913), Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov
stressed that “a splintery texture, very rough” (Kruchenykh and Khlebnikov: “From
‘The Word as Such’ ”, 57) set the poetic work of the Hylaeans apart from the euphonic
orchestration in Romantic and Symbolist verse. Or as Kruchenykh put it in “Novye
puti slova” (New Ways of the Word, 1913): “Our goal is to underscore the great signif-
icance for art of all strident elements, discordant sounds (dissonances) and purely
primitive roughness” (Kruchenykh: “New Ways of the Word”, 75). A “discordant”,
“rough”, “prickly” sound texture may be achieved by creating verse with a high
percentage of consonants. This is seen not only in Hylaean texts, but also in the
writings of other poets, such as Vasilisk Gnedov (1890–1978), Konstantin Bolshakov
(1895–1940), Boris Pasternak (1890–1960), etc., who were drawn to Cubo-Futurist
poetics.
The Cubo-Futurist experiments with sound texture were linked to attempts to
have the signifier (the expression plane) affect the signified (the content plane): “We
started to endow words with content on the basis of their graphic and phonic charac-
teristics” (Burliuk et al.: “From ‘A Trap for Judges’, 2”, 53). The poetry of Khlebnikov, in
particular, offers striking examples of such interplay between the two planes.
The most radical experiment in the realm of sound and meaning was carried
out by Kruchenykh, who in 1912 came up with the idea of zaum’ (transrational
poetry) – supposedly at the suggestion of David Burliuk, who had asked him to
write a poem using only “unknown words”. The result was a five-line poem: “Dyr
bul shchyl / ubeshchur / skum / vy so by / r l ez.” Like Khlebnikov’s “Incantation
by Laughter”, Kruchenykh’s miniature attracted widespread attention: “It became a
symbol of the Futurist movement and, for its critics, of Futurism’s wildest excesses”
(Janecek: Zaum, 52). Unlike Khlebnikov’s text, however, where the coinages from the
root smekh- (laughter) were regulated by sentence structure and overall lyrical com-
position, Kruchenykh’s short poem was pure, ‘rough’ sound.
The nature of the ‘transsense’ found in Dyr bul shchyl has been the subject of
extensive discussions (see Janecek: Zaum, 49–69). In the leaflet Deklaratsiia slova kak
takovogo (Declaration of the Word as Such, 1913), Kruchenykh put forward explana-
tions for why zaum’ was necessary:

Thought and speech cannot keep up with the emotions of someone in a state of inspiration,
therefore the artist is free to express himself not only in the common language (concepts), but
also in a personal one (the creator as an individual), as well as in a language which does not
have any definite meaning (not frozen), a transrational language. Common language binds, free
language allows for fuller expression. (Kruchenykh: “Declaration of the Word as Such”, 67)

Elsewhere, in Vzorval’ (Explodity, 1913), he linked zaum’ to the glossolalia voiced

by the khlysty (flagellants) in a state of “religious ecstasy” (Kruchenykh: “From
‘Explodity’, 65). In texts by other poets, ‘transsense’ may have had a very different
motivation; for example, in Khlebnikov’s Bogi (Gods, 1921), it is the language spoken
by various divinities.
 Russia 777

Not surprisingly, with oral discourse serving as a pattern, Cubo-Futurist works

are notable for their plethora of sdvigi (shifts, dislocations): violations of grammatical
rules, unexpected tropes, stylistic variability, fragmentation of composition and plot.
Kruchenykh regarded such grammatical and semantic ‘dissonances’, invented by ‘con-
temporary bards’, to be a consequence of a new perception of the world (see Kruchenykh:
“New Ways of the Word”, 73). Khlebnikov’s poetry and prose offer many striking exam-
ples of these phenomena (see the exhaustive discussion in Grigor’ev: Budetlianin).
A concept underlying various Cubo-Futurist texts was that of mir s kontsa (world
from the end, world backwards), that is, the reversibility of the arrow of time. It first
came up in the title of Kruchenykh’s and Khlebnikov’s lithographed book, Mirskontsa
(Worldbackwards, [1912]). It also served as the basis of the plot of a short play by
Khlebnikov by the same name, written in 1912, in which the lives of the two main
characters are shown running in reverse, from funeral to baby carriage. Kruchenykh
used the technique again in a poem printed in A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, while
Khlebnikov took it a step further in the tale Ka (1915), in which he intermingled dif-
ferent points on the axis of time so that certain events precede their causes, and the
reader is obliged to reconstruct their logical sequence.
Manipulation of the unidirectional flow of time was part of a wider aspect of Cubo-
Futurist works, in which the reasons for particular plot developments or for actions
taken by the dramatis personae could be cloaked in obscurity. In such cases, the reader
is encouraged to try to fill in the ‘blanks’ of the work in question. The task may be com-
plicated by sudden shifts from the ‘real’ to the metaphorical plane, or by materialized
tropes that appear without any prior indication in the plot. Roman Jakobson, writing
about Khlebnikov in Noveishaia russkaia poeziia (The Newest Russian Poetry, 1921),
explained such constructions as a “laying bare of the literary device” (obnazhenie
priema; see Iakobson: Noveishaia russkaia poeziia, 28). The Futurists used traditional
tools and methods while refusing to support them with psychological or other types of
traditional motivation. However, as studies of the last several decades have shown, in
many instances a motivation is present, but is either hidden deeply within the text or
else is to be found beyond its boundaries; it may be connected, for example, to mytho-
poetic or historiosophical theories adhered to by the author.

Cubo-Futurist books

The Hylaeans’ experiments with book production led to striking results because some
of the poets had a professional background in the fine arts and others were talented
amateur artists. This was true of both collective and individually authored volumes,
produced either by means of traditional typography or lithographed hand-lettering
(samopisnye; see Kovtun: Russkaia futuristichskaia kniga, and Poliakov: Knigi russ-
kogo kubofuturizma, 231–290).
778 Henryk Baran

As previously noted, the external appearance of A Slap in the Face of Public Taste
was a significant part of the provocation experienced by the readers. Subsequent col-
lective volumes featured similarly coarse covers and paper; however, beginning with
Trebnik troikh (The Missal of the Three, 1913), they also began to include considerable
amounts of original artwork on lithographed inserts. The next step involved exper-
iments with typography. The theoretical basis for these innovations was suggested
by Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in Bukva kak takovaia (The Letter as Such, 1913; see
Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh: “The Letter as Such”, 83, and the entry on Visual Poetry
in this volume).
With Marinetti’s ‘typographical revolution’, outlined in his manifesto Destruction
of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom (1913), as an immediate
precedent, the Hylaeans, led by David Burliuk, attempted to stimulate the read-
er’s perception of the printed text by using various typefaces, arranging verses in a
step-ladder (lesenka) pattern, modifying an expected sequence of verse lines or by
shifting words or parts of words into another line. Such unusual arrangements were
first encountered in Dokhlaia luna (The Croaked Moon, 1913), where Burliuk used dif-
ferent combinations of typefaces on the cover and, in the section showcasing his own
works, experimented with using a variety of typefaces within a single poem. Fairly
modest experiments were carried out in volumes such as Zatychka (Stopper, 1913),
Moloko kobylits (The Milk of Mares, 1913) and Khlebnikov’s collection, Tvoreniia,
1906–1908 (Creations, 1906–1908), printed in 1914. A much more extensive degree of
typographical innovation distinguishes the first publication of Mayakovsky’s tragedy
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1913).
The boldest Cubo-Futurist experiments in typography were carried out by Vasily
Kamensky (for a detailed discussion, see Janecek: The Look of Russian Literature,
123–147, Molok: “Tipografskie opyty poeta futurista”, and Strigalev: “ ‘Kartiny’,
‘Stikhokartiny’ i ‘Zhelezobetonnye poemy’ Vasiliia Kamenskogo”). In the Pervyi
zhurnal russkihh futuristov (First Journal of the Russian Futurists, 1914; see below,
p. 785) he published his poetic cycle Tango s korovami (Tango with Cows), where
combinations of different typefaces were freely used, even within the boundaries
of a single word. This was followed by a separate book under the same name, con-
taining a small collection of ‘ferroconcrete poems’ – some featuring episodes of
Kamensky’s biography, others depicting scenes of Moscow life. The book’s appear-
ance was highly unusual (see pp. 165–166 in this volume): its upper right corner
was cut off at a 45º angle; the poems were printed on the verso side of yellow wall-
paper, while the recto side of the wallpaper – the back of each page of text – was
decorated with large, colourful flowers. The result was an exotic, beautiful space
for Kamensky’s striking typographic and design experiments. Several of the poems
were placed within a framed space made up of several geometric segments, each of
which contained a part of the text, set with different fonts. The resulting “unity of
space and time”, as Yuri Molok noted, “allowed one to simultaneously read and see
the entire poem” (Molok: “Tipografskie opyty poeta futurista”, 8).
 Russia 779

The lithographed books of the Cubo-Futurists are discussed below in the entry on
Russian Futurist art, which takes into account the considerable scholarly attention
paid to these works in recent years. Much more critical attention can be expected in
the future, especially analyses of the interrelationships between the verbal and visual
components of specific books.

Ego-Futurism

A group of poets calling themselves Ego-Futurists constituted another important

stream within Russian literary Futurism. Unlike Hylaea, with its focus on the collec-
tive nature of its poetic enterprise, Ego-Futurism emphasized the individual creative
personality.
The history of Ego-Futurism is typically divided into three periods. The first,
lasting from 1911 to November 1912, is associated with the highly popular poet Igor
Severyanin, who used the term ‘ego-futurizm’ as a subtitle to his poem Riadovye
liudi (Ordinary People) in a July 1911 brochure, Ruch’i v liliiakh (Brooks Full of Lilies).
During the second phase, from late 1912 to January 1914, the poet and critic Ivan
Ignatyev played a leading rôle. The final period of Ego-Futurism (spring 1914 to spring
1916) was linked to the editor and publisher Viktor Khovin (1891–1944) and no longer
involved a coherent group.
In November 1911, the prolific Severyanin published as a brochure his program-
matic poem, Prolog Ego-Futurizm (Prologue Ego-Futurism), in which he proclaimed
himself as a poet-elect who possessed an intuitive perception of the entire world. This
poeza-grandioz (Severyanin and his followers often used the exotic sounding poeza
as ‘replacement’ for poema) came out as a publication of Ego – a circle of young poets
grouped around Severyanin, which initially included Konstantin Olimpov (pseud.
of Konstantin Konstantinovich Fofanov, 1889–1940), Georgy Ivanov (1894–1958)
and Graal-Arelsky (pseud. of Stefan Petrov, 1888–1937). In January 1912, the group
renamed itself ‘The Academy of Ego-Poetry’ and published a leaflet containing its
programme. It was headed in Old-Testament style “Skrizhali” (The Tables) and was
signed by the Academy’s ‘Rectorate’. The very brief, and rather opaque text begins
with the declaration, “I. The Glorification of Egoism”, further justified in a logical
“proof”. The remaining assertions include “II. Intuition. Theosophy. III. Thought until
madness: madness is individual. IV. The prism of style – restoration of the spectrum
of thought. V. The Soul is Truth” (Severianin et al.: “Academy of Ego-Poetry (Universal
Futurism)”, 109). Nikolai Khardzhiev aptly called this manifesto an instance of “prim-
itive solipsism” (Khardzhiev: “Maiakovskii i Igor’ Severianin”, 38), yet its provocative
style, a forerunner of Cubo-Futurist épatage, is of some note. Graal-Arelsky fleshed
out the Tables in his article, “Egopoeziia v poezii” (Egopoetry in Poetry, 1912), but
remained rather vague about the nature of the group’s verse: “The aim of Egopoetry
780 Henryk Baran

is the glorification of egoism as the only true and vital intuition” (Graal’-Arel’skii:
“Egopoetry in Poetry”, 111).
Members of the Ego group held several public events in 1912 designed to draw
attention to their work; unfortunately, not much is known about them. Severyanin
and Olimpov published individual books of verse, and the group as a whole issued
collective almanacs, three of which appeared in 1912 through Ignatyev’s “Petersburg
Herald” publishing house: Oranzhevaia urna (The Orange Urn), Stekliannye tsepi
(Glass Chains), Orly nad propast’iu (Eagles over the Abyss). Significantly, works by
poets belonging to the Symbolist movement appeared alongside those of members of
the Ego group, which sharply contrasts with the Cubo-Futurists’ dramatic rejection of
all previous literary formations.
Early on, critics noted Severyanin’s attempts to renew the language of poetry
by using both his own lexical coinages and borrowings from the rapidly changing
urban slang, as well as by employing metaphors based on phenomena found in urban
life rather than Nature. Severyanin’s poems typically combined foreign or foreign-
sounding words associated with an idealized bourgeois-aristocratic existence. This
refined aestheticism is reminiscent of Oscar Wilde and, all too often, verges on kitsch.
As Markov wrote, “the slightly ridiculous never-never land of Severyanin’s poetic
dreams” is “populated by fragrant demimondaines, habitués of fashionable restau-
rants, limousine passengers, and exotic captains” (Markov: Russian Futurism, 63).
Unlike Khlebnikov, who primarily drew on lexical items found in Slavic lan-
guages, Severyanin tended to borrow from Romance languages, and his verses are
both euphonic and comprehensible. This heightened the melodiousness, and the
‘musicality’ of his texts, which pleased not only Severyanin’s readers, but also the
large audiences attracted to his ‘poetry concerts’ following the publication of his most
popular collection, Gromokipiashchii kubok (Thunder-seething Goblet, 1913).
The Severyanin phase of Ego-Futurism ended in November 1912 when he officially
broke with the group because of conflicts with both Olimpov and Ignatyev. In typical
fashion, he announced his action both in a letter printed in a popular newspaper and
in a poem, Epilog. Ego-Futurizm (Epilogue. Ego-Futurism), printed as a brochure. Still,
he continued to identify himself as an Ego-Futurist and contributed to the group’s pub-
lications in their final stage. Following Severyanin’s departure, Ivan Ignatyev (pseud.
of Ivan Vasil’evich Kazansky, 1892–1914), who possessed considerable organizational
skill, took charge of the group. He replaced the ‘Academy’ in its name with ‘Intuitive
Association’ and in January 1913 published a manifesto, Gramata (a deformation of
gramota [charter]) that opened with the statement “1. Ego-Futurism – the incessant
striving of every egoist to attain the possibilities of the future in the present” (Ignat’ev:
“Ego-Futurism”, 122). The ‘Aeropagus’ that signed this document – Ignatyev, Pavel
Shirokov (1893–1963), Vasilisk Gnedov and Dmitrii Kriuchkov (1887–1938) – had no
members in common with the previous ‘Rectorate’.
Under Ignatyev’s leadership, the group continued to publish actively. Six miscel-
lanies came out in 1913: Dary Adonisu (Gifts to Adonis), Zasakhare kry (The Candi[ed]
 Russia 781

Ra[t]), Bei! No vyslushai!... (Strike! But Hear Me!), Vsegdai (The Alwayser), Nebokopy
(The Sky Diggers) and Razvorochennye cherepa (Shattered Skulls). Several of these
included texts by Vadim Shershenevich (1893–1942), who would soon become the
leader of the Moscow-based Mezzanine of Poetry, as well as, in the final issue, Sergei
Bobrov (1889–1971), the future founder of the Centrifuge group. There were also publi-
cations by individual authors: Gnedov’s brochure Smert’ iskusstvu (Death to Art, 1913)
and collections of verse by Olimpov and others.
While the new group cultivated the individual poetic personality and under-
scored the rôle of intuition, its poetic programme and practice differed sharply from
those of the “Ego-Severyaninists”, as Ignatyev called them in his 1913 brochure, Ego-
Futurizm: “Ego-Futurism is arising only on the ‘grave’ of Severyanin the Ego-Futurist”,
he claimed. Drawing on his own works and those of others, he listed the group’s
achievements as: “a. Movement and a disregard for the theme in prose. b. Renewal
and a disregard for meter in verse. c. Abrupt shifts in the area of rhyme. d. Ego-prism.
e. Contemporaneity and f. Mechanization” (Ignat’ev: “Ego-Futurism”, 123). Ignatyev
demonstrated in his references the broad scope and considerable variety of Ego-
Futurist writing as well as the (unacknowledged) similarity with experiments carried
out by members of Hylaea. Throughout this period, Ignatyev continued to attack the
rival group, saying that “the Futurists of Moscow give nothing of their own; they put
forward someone else’s ideas as their own” (Terekhina and Zimenkov: Russkii futur-
izm, 136).
The most radical of the Ego-Futurists was unquestionably Gnedov, who arrived
in Saint Petersburg at the end of 1912 wanting, as he put it in his autobiography, “to
overturn, to renew literature, to point out new paths” (quoted in Parnis: “Gnedov
Vasilisk”, 589). He quickly became a leader of the Association, published two small
books of verse and actively participated in Futurist evenings that also involved David
Burliuk, Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky. Gnedov’s experiments with semantics and
syntax, with alogisms, neologisms, etc. demonstrated his affinity for Cubo-Futurist
aesthetics and poetics; in early 1914, there was even the possibility of his joining
Hylaea. His book Smert’ iskusstvu (Death to Art) consisted of fifteen poems, each on
a separate page. Whereas each of the first twelve included a title and a single-line
poem mostly made up of neologisms, the thirteenth contained a part of a word, the
fourteenth a single vowel (iu) and the last only the title “Poema kontsa” (Poem of the
End) on an otherwise blank page. Gnedov became notorious for his public reading
of this poem, which consisted of a quick hand gesture. Today, this experiment and
some others are seen as having influenced the Russian avant-garde of the late Soviet
period and as anticipating John Cage’s 4’33” as well as many other instances of per-
formance art.
In January 1914, Ivan Ignatyev committed suicide. His death meant the end of
the Association and of his publishing house. His place at the head of what remained
of Ego-Futurism was taken by Viktor Khovin (1881–1944), whose series of ten eclec-
tic miscellanies, Ocharovannyi strannik (Enchanted Wanderer, 1914–1916) provided a
782 Henryk Baran

ready publishing vehicle for not only Ego-Futurists, but also Cubo-Futurists and rep-
resentatives of other literary trends.

The Mezzanine of Poetry

The Moscow-based group Mezzanine of Poetry, active from the second half of 1913 to
January 1914, was led by the poet and artist Lev Zak (Léon Zack, 1892–1980) and the
poet Vadim Shershenevich and featured amongst its members Konstantin Bolshakov,
Riurik Ivnev (pseud. of Mikhail Alexandrovich Kovalev, 1891–1981), Sergei Tretyakov
(1892–1939) and other poets. Formally organized as a publishing house, the group pub-
lished three miscellanies during its brief period of existence: Vernissazh (Vernissage,
1913), Pir vo vremia chumy (A Feast during the Plague, 1913) and Krematorii zdravomys-
liia (The Crematorium of Common Sense, 1913). In addition, individual collections
of verse by Shershenevich, Ivnev and Bolshakov were issued under the ‘Mezzanine’
label. The group was close to the Ego-Futurists, some of whose works appeared on the
pages of A Feast and Crematorium.
Mezzanine’s aesthetic programme involved a rejection of the public posture
and poetics of Cubo-Futurism. In the unsigned “Uvertiura” (Overture) to Vernissage
(authored by Zak), the “tenants” of Mezzanine are called “terrible eccentrics”, “very
nice people”, and “romantics from head to toe” (Zak: “Overture”, 133, 135). The decla-
ration emphasized an avoidance of extremes in both expression and content. Vladimir
Markov characterized the affected, superficial aesthetic doctrine of Mezzanine as
“futurist dandyism”, a description that is widely accepted nowadays.
In another declaration in Vernissazh, “Perchatka kubofuturistam” (Throwing
Down the Gauntlet to the Cubo-Futurists), Lev Zak, writing under the pseudonym of
“M. Rossiianskii”, stated that members of Hylaea did not understand “what a word
is”, because they failed to operate with the connotations – “indescribable associa-
tions”– of a word: “These associations give the word its individuality. One can say
that every word has its own smell. A poetic work is not so much the combination
of word-sounds as of word-smells” (Rossiianskii: “Throwing Down the Gauntlet to
the Cubo-Futurists”, 137). He was dismissive of Kruchenykh’s experiments with “per-
sonal language” and of the Cubo-Futurist approach to poetic semantics: “The com-
plete destruction of content (plot) is not, as the Cubo-Futurists assume, the opening
of new fields for art; on the contrary, it is a narrowing of the art’s field” (Rossiianskii:
“Throwing Down the Gauntlet to the Cubo-Futurists”, 138).
Vadim Shershenevich, the leader of Mezzanine, published two Futurist collections
in 1913, Romanticheskaia pudra (Romantic Face Powder) and Ekstravagantnye flakony
(Extravagant Scent Bottles). In the former, he revealed his debts to Severyanin’s
pseudo-aristocratic style, while in the latter he focussed on urban themes, handled in
part in the spirit of Marinetti and in part in the tradition of the French poètes maudits.
 Russia 783

Of the poets involved with Mezzanine, Konstantin Bolshakov was undoubtedly

the most talented. His biography demonstrates how difficult it is to draw sharp dis-
tinctions between the various Futurist groups. While his early collection, Mozaika
(Mosaic, 1911), shows the influence of the Symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont, in
the autumn of 1913 he published a small lithographed volume, Le futur (The Future),
which Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov illustrated in the style of Rayism.
He also published in 1913 his collection Serdtse v perchatke (Heart in a Glove), in
which he combined elements of urbanism (the influence of the early Mayakovsky is
apparent) with elements of Severyanin’s overly refined interior monologues. During
1914–1916, Bolshakov cooperated in turn with both Hylaea and the Centrifuge group,
and his poetic style, clearly influenced by Mayakovsky’s wartime poetry, evolved in
the direction of ‘left’ art.

Centrifuge

The group “Centrifuge” was formed in January 1914 by three former members of the
Symbolist-oriented poetic group “Lirika” (Lyric) – Sergei Bobrov, Boris Pasternak
and Nikolai Aseev (1889–1963). In March of the same year they formed a publishing
house by the same name and in late April produced their first miscellany, Rukonog
(Brachiopod, 1914). It featured, along with their own writings, a number of texts by
the Ego-Futurists Ivan Ignatyev (recently deceased), Vasilisk Gnedov and others.
Prior to becoming the leader and theoretician of Centrifuge, Sergei Bobrov
had demonstrated his talents both as a poet and critic connected to the legacy of
Symbolism, and as an artist involved with the painterly avant-garde. Tellingly, in
1913 he published an important theoretical essay, “O liricheskoi teme” (Concerning
the Lyric Theme) in a major Symbolist journal, and in 1914 he republished it with
only minor changes under the Centrifuge label: Liricheskaia tema: XVIII ekskursov v
ee oblasti (The Lyric Theme: 18 Excursions into the Lyric Field). His ideas on poetry
are reflected in a verse ‘oratory’ published in Brachiopod: “Lira lir” (Lyre of Lyres),
marked by bold combinations of clashing images.
The almanac contained two manifestos. The poem “Turbopean” (Turbopaean),
with fantastical imagery made more complex by neologisms, pictured Aseev, Bobrov
and Pasternak ‘nesting’ above the world. The prose text “Gramota” (Charter), signed
by the three Centrifuge founders and the poet Ilya Zdanevich, was aimed squarely at
the Hylaeans, a “high-handed gang which has conferred upon itself the name Russian
Futurists”. The authors settled scores for personal attacks recently published in the
First Journal of the Russian Futurists (see below, p. 785). The Hylaeans were considered
“traitors and renegades” for jeering at the work of the late Ignatyev, false pretenders,
mediocrities (Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky were excluded), cowards and, above all,
passéists (Aseev et al.: “Charter”, 162–163).
784 Henryk Baran

Nikolai Aseev’s first collection, Nochnaia fleita (The Night Flute, 1914), reflected
the influence of Symbolism, but also indicated his interest in Futurism. Subsequently,
influenced by Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky, Aseev turned to folklore and regional dia-
lects. His experiments with verse rhythms were already reflected in one of his poems
in Brachiopod and are evident in another small collection, Zor (Zor), published in 1914
by a new publishing house “Liren’ ” (Lyroon), set up in Kharkov by Aseev and the poet
Grigory Petnikov (1894–1971).
Although Boris Pasternak, later in life, displayed a rather ambivalent attitude towards
his early career, the Futurist period of his biography left an imprint on his creative develop-
ment. In 1914, the Symbolist maître Valery Bryusov, reviewing the publications of so-called
‘moderate’ poets, noted that “the Futuristicity” of Pasternak’s verses did not result from
taking recourse to theory, but from “a peculiar disposition of his soul” (Briusov: Sredi
stikhov, 443). In Brachiopod, Pasternak published three poems, which Christopher Barnes
considered “his farthest and most fascinating venture down the avenue of obscurity” and
“probably commissioned by Bobrov to demonstrate Tsentrifuga’s avant-garde prowess”
(Barnes: Boris Pasternak, 167). In Vassermanova reaktsiia (The Wassermann Test, 1914),
Pasternak revived the polemics initiated in the “Charter” by attacking Shershenevich for
allegedly not comprehending the true basis of lyric poetry; he was, claimed Pasternak,
“a sacrificial victim of the legal accessibility of poetry writing as an emancipated trade”
(Pasternak: “The Wassermann Test”, 168). In analysing Shershenevich’s faults, Pasternak
briefly outlined his own thoughts on the poetic method and thus provides a useful com-
mentary on his own future development as a poet.
Centrifuge published another collection in 1916, Vtoroi sbornik Tsentrifugi
(Second Centrifuge Miscellany). It included poems and articles by Bobrov, Pasternak
and representatives of other groups, such as Khlebnikov, Bolshakov, Ivnev the former
Ego-Futurist ‘Rectors’ Shirokov and Olimpov, and so on. Pasternak’s contribution,
“Chernyi bokal” (The Black Goblet), discussed Futurism’s relationship to Symbolism
and Impressionism, and put forward his own conception of Futurism.
By early 1917, Bobrov, with Pasternak’s help, put together a Third Centrifuge
Miscellany, but lack of funds kept it from being published. However, the Centrifuge
publishing house continued to exist until 1922 and released books such as Bobrov’s pre-
viously mentioned Lyric Theme, his collection of verse Lira lir (1917 – the same title as
the poem in Brachiopod), the anthology Raspevochnoe edinstvo (Rhythmic Unity, 1916)
by Bozhidar (pseud. of Bogdan Gordeev, 1894–1914), Ivnev’s Zoloto smerti (The Gold of
Death, 1916) and Pasternak’s collection, Poverkh Bar’erov (Over the Barriers, 1917).

Cubo-Futurism in early 1914

The start of 1914 was a very active period within the Russian Futurist movement,
with Hylaea again at the forefront. Their numerous publications included Guro’s
 Russia 785

posthumous Nebesnye verbliuzhata (Baby-camels of the Sky), Khlebnikov’s Tvoreniia

(1906–1908) (Creations, 1906–1908) and Izbornik stikhov, 1907–1914 gg. (Selected
Poems, 1907–1914), Mayakovsky’s tragedy Vladimir Mayakovsky, Livshits’s Volch’e
solntse (The Sun of Wolves), Kamensky’s collection of ferroconcrete poems, Tango
s korovami (Tango with Cows), as well as lithographed books by Kruchenykh and
Khlebnikov.
Members of Hylaea and the other groups undertook attempts at cooperation in
order to consolidate their joint strength. The miscellany Moloko kobylits (The Milk
of Mares), which came out in February 1914, included a poem by Igor Severyanin in
addition to contributions by the Hylaeans themselves. The alliance with Severyanin
was made official in the miscellany Rykaiushchii Parnas (Roaring Parnassus), which
opened with the manifesto, Idite k chertu! (Go to Hell!), signed by five Hylaeans and
Igor Severyanin. With Mezzanine of Poetry having faded from existence, the Hylaeans
not only involved Shershenevich and Bolshakov in their new project, the Pervyi
zhurnal russkikh futuristov (First Journal of the Russian Futurists), but even put the
former in charge of its criticism section and had him supervise the printing of the
initial double issue. The result was unfortunate, since Shershenevich used the oppor-
tunity to fill his section with attacks on his poetic foes, including the founders of
Centrifuge, and to include a panegyric to his own collection of verse. Shershenevich
was also in charge of publishing the last collective project of Hylaea, the second
edition of the miscellany The Croaked Moon. This led to a scandal caused by his deci-
sion not to reprint several texts published in the original volume in order to make
room for poems by Bolshakov and himself.
A different attempt at cooperation marked the beginning of 1914. David Burliuk,
Kamensky and Mayakovsky organized a lecture tour of sixteen cities, starting on
14 December 1913 in Kharkov and ending on 29 March 1914 in Baku. In three of the
cities visited in January (Simferopol, Sevastopol and Kerch), Burliuk and Mayakovsky
appeared on stage with Severyanin and his epigone, the poet Vadim Baian (pseud. of
Vladimir Sidorov, 1880–1966), in a programme entitled Pervaia olimpiada futuristov
(The First Olympics of Futurism).
The Cubo-Futurists – their skills honed in public disputes in Saint Petersburg and
Moscow – typically kept to a standard programme. Kamensky took on the principal
burden of responding to attacks by critics of various stripes, Burliuk sought to explain
the newest movements in painting, while Mayakovsky, in a talk entitled either “The
Achievements of Futurism” or “Futurism in Literature”, linked the rise of new poetry
to the growth of a modern, machine-based civilization and claimed that the contem-
porary reader was alienated from nineteenth-century poetry, including Pushkin’s.
The visiting poets also read selections of their verse.
The provincial tour generated an enormous amount of local attention and typi-
cally drew large audiences, attracted by the Hylaeans’ scandalous reputation. For their
part, the poets deliberately manipulated their image by engaging in publicity stunts,
such as taking walks dressed in colourful clothing and with their faces painted, or by
786 Henryk Baran

deliberately provoking their audience from the stage. Such tactics were one reason
for the quick withdrawal of the more restrained Severyanin from the speaking tour;
another was the fact that he felt overshadowed by his Cubo-Futurist rivals.
Although financially successful, the lecture tour generally did not improve the
Russian public’s comprehension of Futurism. As is clear from newspaper accounts
in various local papers, it did greatly enhance Mayakovsky’s stature as an impressive
public speaker (cited extensively in Krusanov: Russkii avangard. Vol. I.2, 375–436).

Russian Futurists and Marinetti

From 26 January to 17 February 1914, F. T. Marinetti, invited by Russian representa-

tives of the Société des Grandes Conferences, visited Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
His stated purpose was to meet and establish contacts with Russian Futurists; this
proved to be only partially successful, since his claims of leadership over a worldwide
movement, of which Russian Futurism was a subordinate unit, were incompatible
with the independent stand taken by many of the Russian poets and artists. Marinetti
first arrived in Moscow and lectured there on 27, 28 and 30 January to enthusiastic
audiences. He received very favourable press coverage, but was spurned by local
representatives of the avant-garde. In Saint Petersburg, Marinetti lectured twice, on
1 and 4 February. At the first of these lectures, Khlebnikov and Livshits attempted to
distribute a leaflet with a harsh declaration aimed both at Marinetti and at those who
welcomed his arrival. When Nikolai Kulbin, an admirer of Marinetti, interfered, the
angry Khlebnikov challenged him to a duel (it did not take place). The next day, at a
supper in his honour at Kulbin’s apartment, Marinetti was able to become acquainted
with several local Futurists. Kruchenykh described in his memoirs an episode, which
possibly took place during that evening, of how he astonished Marinetti with his lith-
ographed editions (Krusanov: Russkii avangard. Vol. I.2, 136).
Marinetti’s return to Moscow for the last part of his stay was preceded by the
arrival of Mayakovsky, Burliuk and Kamensky, who had interrupted the Crimean
portion of their tour. On 5 February 1914, the newspaper Nov’ carried an open letter
signed by all the Hylaeans: it declared that the development of the “young Russian
literature” was determined by the “historically isolated structure of Russian, which
is developing without any kind of dependence on Gallic sources” (Krusanov: Russkii
avangard. Vol. I.2, 140). It soon became clear that at least some signatures of the letter
had not been authorized. A public discussion between Marinetti and representatives
of Russian Futurism took place on 13 February. Conducted in French for the sake of
the guest, it was not productive, especially because two of Marinetti’s opponents,
Mayakovsky and Burliuk, were denied the right to respond to him in Russian.
For the Hylaeans and other poets and artists close to them, Marinetti’s visit served
as an opportunity to publicly reiterate their claims of originality and autonomy from
 Russia 787

Futurism in Western Europe. For his part, Marinetti noted, in both public statements
and private comments, that most of what he had been shown in Russia was not true
Futurism, but rather, as he put it to Burliuk, “aesthetic atavism”. Nonetheless, in spite
of the Russians’ programmatic statements, they frequently borrowed from and were
influenced by Italian Futurism, and many such possible connections remain to be
uncovered (Parnis: “K istorii odnoi polemiki”, 178).

Futurism during the Great War

Members of Hylaea and other Futurist poets headed into the summer months of 1914
riding a wave of continued public interest in their activities. The onset of the First
World War changed the conditions under which they operated, just as it changed
everything else in Russia. Some of the Futurists found themselves in the army
(Livshits, Bolshakov, Gnedov, Aseev, Shershenevich, Nikolai and Vladimir Burliuk,
etc.), others – Kruchenykh, Khlebnikov, Kamensky – at one time or another ended
up living far away from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. All this limited their opportu-
nities to engage in collective undertakings and led to changes in the composition of
the avant-garde as a whole: some of its more ‘moderate’ members, such as Livshits,
distanced themselves from Futurism, while new poets and artists became active par-
ticipants (Grigory Petnikov, Sergei Spassky, Dmitrii Petrovsky, etc.).
Another, highly significant factor was the shift in public attitudes: previous
intense interest in new, highly visible literary and artistic trends gave way to a wave of
patriotism that prompted most Russian poets and writers to focus on producing texts
supportive of the war effort. During this period, there was a marked change in the
Futurists’ relationship with the cultural élites. While they remained faithful to their
own art, they ceased their attention-seeking scandals and provocations and, together
with other cultural figures, took part in charitable exhibitions and similar war-related
undertakings. One result of such contacts was the publication, in February 1915,
of the miscellany Strelets (The Archer), in which the Hylaeans found themselves in
the company of the very same celebrated authors (Aleksandr Blok, Fyodor Sologub,
Mikhail Kuzmin, Aleksei Remizov, etc.) whom they had inveighed against in A Slap
in the Face of Public Taste. The result was jarring: reviewers noted and criticized, for
example, the appearance of a gloomily ironic poem by Blok in the same section as two
poems by the exuberant Burliuk. The traditional look and feel of the volume under-
scored its break with Futurist experiments with the medium of the book. A second
issue of The Archer, which sought to continue the policy of uniting the Futurists and
the Symbolists, appeared in August 1916. Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky participated,
but their publications were overwhelmed by the rest of the material in the collec-
tion. In addition, the underlying anti-Semitism of an article contributed by the writer
Vasily Rozanov caused a scandal and led Mayakovsky to issue a public protest.
788 Henryk Baran

With help from occasional sponsors, other miscellanies appeared during this
period. Together with the Moscow poet and theatre figure Samuil Vermel (1889–1972),
David Burliuk published Vesennee kontragentstvo muz (The Vernal Forwarding Agency
of the Muses, May 1915), which contained texts by most of the Hylaeans, members of
Centrifuge, Vermel and others. The volume concluded with Burliuk’s “Otnyne ia otka-
zyvaius’ govorit’ durno dazhe o tvorchestve durakov” (From Now On I Refuse to Speak
Ill Even of the Work of Fools). In this essay, subtitled “A Unified Aesthetic Russia”, he
appealed for mutual respect and tolerance among representatives of all trends in the
arts, among critics and among the public at large.
Financial support from Osip Brik (1888–1945), soon to become a leading Formalist
theoretician, made it possible to publish, in December 1915, the miscellany Vzial:
Baraban futuristov (Took: The Futurists’ Drum), which contained contributions,
among others, by Khlebnikov, Kamensky, Pasternak, Aseev, Shklovsky and Brik
himself. Mayakovsky featured prominently with his manifesto, Kaplia degtia (A Drop
of Tar), which responded to insinuations that Futurism was dead by admitting that it
had died “as a specific group”, but that the war had brought about the broadest pos-
sible realization of the goals formulated in A Slap in the Face of Public Taste: “Today,
everyone is a Futurist. The entire nation is Futurist! Futurism has seized Russia in a
death grip!” (Mayakovsky: “A Drop of Tar”, 101).
Together with the amateur poet Georgy Zolotukhin (1886–1942), Burliuk pub-
lished the collection Chetyre ptitsy (Four Birds, March 1916). This “last Hylaean
miscellany” (Markov: Russian Futurism, 295) featured poetic cycles by Khlebnikov,
Burliuk, Kamensky and numerous, highly imitative, poems by Zolotukhin himself. In
April 1916, Vermel independently published his own miscellany, Moskovskie mastera
(Moscow Masters). Although its external appearance was highly ‘aesthetic’ and
non-Futurist, it did contain a good selection of Futurist prose, including Khlebnikov’s
very complex, exotic story “Ka” (the Ancient Egyptian word for a person’s spiritual
double).
Following the success of his tragedy, Vladimir Mayakovsky made great strides
in his development as a poet. During the war period, he created large-scale works
that combined the lyrical with the epic and the personal with the universal. Osip Brik
published Mayakovsky’s first longer poems, Oblako v shtanakh (A Cloud in Trousers,
September 1915) and Fleita-pozvonochnik (The Backbone Flute, February 1916).
Both were severely cut by the censor. During 1915–1916, Mayakovsky wrote “Voina
i mir” (War and the Universe), published as a book in 1917. The publishing house
Liren (Lyroon), organized in 1914 by Aseev and Petnikov (see above, p. 784), with
the involvement of the poet Bozhidar (pseud. of Bogdan Gordeev, 1894–1914) and the
artist Maria Siniakova (Maryia Mykhailovna Syniakova-Urechyna, 1890–1984), con-
tinued its activities in Kharkov, Moscow and Petrograd, with works such as Aseev
and Petnikov’s Letorei: Kniga stikhov (Soaring of Years: A Book of Poems, 1915),
Bozhidar’s Buben (The Tambourine, 1916) and Aseev’s Chetvertaia kniga stikhov (The
Fourth Book of Poems 1916).
 Russia 789

Futurism, the revolution and Civil War

The two revolutions of 1917 and the subsequent Civil War (1918–1921) revitalized
and reshaped the Futurist movement, creating distinct lines of development within
it. During the autumn of 1917, Mayakovsky, Kamensky and David Burliuk resumed
their collaboration, appearing jointly in the Moscow Poets’ Café (which Kamensky
helped establish). The venue’s closure in April 1918 brought to an end this attempt
at resuming the Futurists’ prewar rôle of poet-provocateurs. On 15 March 1918, the
three former Hylaeans published the first (and only) issue of Gazeta futuristov (The
Futurists’ Gazette), mostly filled with their poems, articles and programmatic texts.
In “Manifest letuchei federatsii futuristov” (Manifesto of the Flying Federation of
Futurists), signed by all three, and in “Otkrytoe pis’mo rabochim” (Open Letter to
Workers), signed by Mayakovsky alone, the authors returned to the Cubo-Futurist
theme of struggling against the culture of the past, but interpreted it in a new way.
While the February and October Revolutions did away with political and social
slavery (two of the three pillars of the ‘old order’), a third upheaval, the “bloodless
but cruel [...] revolution of the Spirit” was needed to achieve liberation from the “rags
of old art”, in which task the “proletarians of art” – that is, the Futurists – require the
assistance of the “proletarians of factories and the land” (Jangfeldt: Majakovskij and
Futurism, 22). At the same time, “Dekret No. 1 o demokratizatsii iskusstv” (Decree No.
1 on Democratization of the Arts), also signed by the three poets, called for the pro-
ductions of artists and poets to be taken out of the “storerooms and barns of human
genius” and shown in the streets, where they would entertain and instruct the masses
during a “holiday of art for all” (Jangfeldt: Majakovskij and Futurism, 23). In line with
this programme, copies of the Gazette were pasted on walls of houses in Moscow.
Although the newspaper was criticized for its ideological stance (and proved to be
a commercial failure), Mayakovsky adhered to and sought to implement the agenda set
out in its pages. In autumn 1918, he began to collaborate with “Otdel Izobrazitel’nykh
Iskusstvo” (IZO –Department of Visual Arts), a section within Narkompros (People’s
Commissariat of Enlightenment). During this early period of the new Soviet State,
‘left’ artists (David Shterenberg, Natan Altman, Vladimir Tatlin, etc.) grouped in and
around IZO and proclaimed themselves the Bolsheviks’ natural allies. They sought to
win for the avant-garde a dominant position within the sphere of culture – analogous
to the Bolshevik dictatorship within the political and economic realm. Mayakovsky,
who entertained close contacts with the Bolsheviks after their seizure of power, con-
tributed to this endeavour by working on two periodicals published by IZO, Iskusstvo
Kommuny (Art of the Commune; Petrograd, December 1918 – April 1919) and Iskusstvo
(Art; Moscow, January – December 1919). In these, he published a number of poems
that served as editorials and hence as statements of IZO’s aesthetic policies. These
included, among others, Prikaz po armii iskusstv (Order to the Army of the Arts),
which developed themes found in The Futurists’ Gazette, as well as the immensely
popular Levyi marsh (Left March), addressed to revolutionary sailors.
790 Henryk Baran

At this point, Mayakovsky and his comrades in IZO used the word ‘Futurist’ to
designate “all radical, avant-garde […] artists and writers” (Jangfeldt: Majakovskij
and Futurism, 35). For a brief time, attempts by this extraordinarily talented, inno-
vative group to be “recognized as leaders of the Revolution in the cultural sphere”
(Jangfeldt: Majakovskij and Futurism, 37) appeared to meet with success. Ultimately,
however, notwithstanding the very real achievements of IZO, resistance to their
claims in various quarters, especially the Communist Party, led to the dissolution of
the Department in 1922.
Starting before the Revolution, during the Civil War and for some time afterwards,
Futurism – specifically Cubo-Futurism – played a rôle in stimulating the develop-
ment of Russian Formalist theory in literary scholarship. Contemporary poetry was
one of the topics discussed by two groups of young scholars: the Petrograd-based
“Obshchestvo po izucheniiu poeticheskogo iazyka” (Opoyaz – Society for the Study
of Poetic Language, 1916–1925) and the “Moskovskii lingvisticheskii kruzhok”
(Moscow Linguistic Circle, 1915–1924). Thus, for example, the young critic Viktor
Shklovsky defended the concept of the “word as such” and wrote about “Zaumnyi
iazyk i poeziia” (Transrational Language and Poetry, 1916). In 1919, Roman Jakobson,
scholar and radical Futurist poet (under the name “Aliagrov”), delivered a paper on
Khlebnikov’s art at a meeting of the Circle, also attended by Mayakovsky. The latter’s
presence there was not something exceptional: Mayakovsky was an early member of
the group and regularly took part in its deliberations. Similarly, Sergei Bobrov, former
leader of the Centrifuge circle, was an active participant, as were Kruchenykh, Aseev
and Pasternak at various times (see Pomorska: Russian Formalism and Its Poetic
Ambiance; Erlich: Russian Formalism; Eagle: “Afterword”).
A different kind of Futurism, far removed from the political aspirations of
Mayakovsky and the IZO group, flourished in the Caucasus region of Russia. It was
inspired by Aleksei Kruchenykh, who in spring 1916 found himself in Georgia, and
who, together with Ilya Zdanevich (1894–1975), actively propagandized new art and
literature (see pp. 471–473 in the chapter on Georgia). During the period 1916–1920,
Kruchenykh produced a number of manuscript and hectographed publications.
He also gave talks and participated in several literary groupings, in particular, the
short-lived “Sindikat futuristov” (Syndicate of Futurists), formed in November 1917,
and the “Kompaniia 41°” (Company 41°), which flourished from February 1918 to
mid-1919. Ilya Zdanevich, the Armenian poet and journalist Kara-Darvish (pseud. of
Hagop Genjian, 1872–1930) and the Georgian artist and poet Lado Gudiashvili (1896–
1980) were among members of the Syndicate, which emphasized the close links
between poetry and painting and focussed on folklore and the primitive (Beledian:
“Kara-Darvish and Armenian Futurism”; Tsipuria: “H2SO4: The Futurist Experience
in Georgia”). Along with Kruchenykh, Zdanevich and the poet Igor Terentyev (1892–
1937) were the main figures in 41°, which, according to its manifesto, “unifies left-
wing Futurism, and affirms transreason as the mandatory form for the embodiment
of art” (Zdanevich, Terent’ev and Cherniavskii: “Manifesto of the 41°”, 177). The 41°
 Russia 791

group published an issue of a newspaper bearing the same name as well as various
books and collections, and it also organized art exhibitions.
Kruchenykh’s principal poetic collection from this period was Lakirovannoe triko
(Lacquered Tights, 1919), which contained a theoretical piece, “Malakholiia v kapote”
(Melancholy in a Robe), in which he outlined his theory of sdvig (shift). Zdanevich,
while involved with 41°, wrote several parodic plays in which the characters employed
transrational language; of these, the best known is Ianko krul’ albanskii (Yanko the
King of Albania, 1918). Terentyev debuted as a member of 41° in two collections of
verse, three ‘treatises’ and a couple of studies, including A. Kruchenykh – gran-
diozar’ (A. Kruchenykh the Grandiosaire, 1919). Following the breakup of the 41°
group, its members dispersed geographically. In October 1920, Ilya Zdanevich left
for Constantinople, ultimately settling in Paris. Kruchenykh returned to Moscow in
autumn 1921, and Terentyev moved there in April 1923.
Members of the avant-garde were active in other parts of the former Russian
Empire. Thanks to Marc Chagall and Kazimir Malevich, Vitebsk became a world-
renowned centre of ‘left’ art. In Kazan, with its highly-regarded art school (founded
in 1895) and an extensive and sophisticated publishing industry, interest in the avant-
garde was stimulated by visiting Futurists from Moscow and Saint Petersburg, some
of whom had personal links to the city. During the Civil War, the Kazan School of Art
was transformed into the Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennye masterskie (ArKhuMas;
Architecture and Art Workshops), run by local and visiting ‘left’ artists such as Pavel
Mansurov (1896–1983). Out of the Workshops emerged, among others, a notable col-
lective of graphic artists, ‘Vsadnik’ (Rider), which between 1920 and 1923 produced
three miscellanies under this name as well as a variety of other publications. In
1920–1921, a newly-organized Union of Poets published several collections and staged
poetic soirées.
Ukraine saw the development and coexistence of two autonomous avant-garde
currents, linked to separate languages and traditions, albeit rooted in prewar devel-
opments in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. Ukrainian Futurism, led by the poet
Mykhail Semenko (1892–1937), is discussed in a separate chapter in this volume. As
for the Russian avant-garde, it flourished in Kharkov in spite of an unstable political
situation and involved the artist Vasily Ermilov (1894–1967), the poet Petnikov, as well
as, among others, Khlebnikov, who spent a considerable amount of time in the city
and wrote there some of his best poems. ‘Left’ artists and poets were also very active
in Kiev as well as Odessa (for more detail, see Krusanov: Russkii avangard. Vol. II.2,
225–273).
In Russia’s Far East, avant-garde activity, which lasted from early 1918 to late 1922,
was initially concentrated in the cities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok; subsequently
it spread to other towns. It received a powerful stimulus from the influx of refugees
from Central Russia, among them artists and writers who had participated in Futurist
groups in Saint Petersburg and Moscow. David Burliuk, who arrived in September/
October 1919, played a leading rôle in organizing a local group of Futurists, which
792 Henryk Baran

in February 1920 published a “Manifesto”, signed by Burliuk, Nikolai Aseev, Sergei

Tretyakov and others. The Bolshevik journalist Nikolai Chuzhak (pseud. of Nikolai
Nasimovich, 1876–1937) became another leader of ‘Far Eastern Futurism’, thanks
in large measure to his editing the enormously popular literary-artistic journal
Tvorchestvo (Creation, 1920–1921). A committed revolutionary, Chuzhak sought to
place Futurism on a solid ideological foundation and wrote of it as having been “ferti-
lized” by the Revolution (Turchinskaia: Avangard na Dal’nem Vostoke, 124–125).
In September 1920, Burliuk, together with his family, travelled to Japan as organ-
izer of an exhibition of Russian artists; two years later he left for the United States. By
late 1922, several key figures of Far Eastern Futurism, including Chuzhak, had moved
to Moscow.
Special note must be taken of Khlebnikov’s life and creative work during this
period. The poet, who had led a Bohemian existence during a more peaceful time,
now travelled from one region to another, experiencing the dangers and privations
of the Civil War. He continued to develop his conception of the ‘laws of time’ and to
create new poems and prose works that interwove visions of a utopian future with
grotesque images of present-day suffering (e. g., the longer poem Ladomir [Lightland,
1920–1921]). His time in Kharkov proved especially productive, as did his subsequent
stays in Baku, in the Caucasus and in Iran, which he visited as a member of a Soviet
expeditionary force. In late December 1921, Khlebnikov arrived quite ill in Moscow
and several months later, on 28 June 1922, died in the village of Santalovo (Novgorod
region).

Futurism in the 1920s

The final chapter in the saga of Futurism in Russia unfolded within the context of
Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). Introduced in March 1921 in order to stimu-
late recovery, it involved a limited restoration of capitalism; at the same time, the
Communist Party retained full control of the levers of power. In the realm of culture,
NEP resulted in a broadening of publishing possibilities and a continuation of debates
about what kind of art and literature were needed in a society moving towards
socialism.
In March 1922, Mayakovsky established a publishing house, “Moskovskaia – V budu-
shchem mezhdunarodnaia – Assotsiatsiia futuristov” (MAF; Moscow – In the Future
International – Association of Futurists). This venture, which published several of his
books, became the predecessor of an even more ambitious enterprise, the journal Lef,
an organ of the “Levyi front iskusstv” (Left Front of the Arts), formed at the end of 1922.
In early January 1923, Mayakovsky, acting on behalf of the new group, applied
to the Communist Party for permission to publish a journal. The proposed publica-
tion, he indicated in his memorandum, would strive to, among other goals, “rethink
 Russia 793

the ideology and practice of so-called ‘left’ art, freeing it from individualistic buf-
foonery and developing its valuable Communist aspects” (Katanian: Maiakovskii,
239). The idea that the creations of the avant-garde should be reshaped in line with
ideology was implemented in various ways in the journal LEF: Zhurnal levogo fronta
iskusstv, the first issue of which, with Mayakovsky as principal editor, appeared in
March 1923. Thus, for example, the opening collective manifesto, Za chto boretsia
Lef? (What Does LEF Fight For?), deliberately reshaped, if not distorted, the history
of prewar Futurism by emphasizing the revolutionary credentials of the signatories
(Aseev, Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner, Mayakovsky, Tretyakov, Chuzhak)
and of the journal as a whole. This manifesto and other, unabashedly militant,
programmatic texts asserted the group’s claim to play a leading rôle in shaping the
new, proletarian culture: “Working at strengthening the conquests of the October
Revolution by strengthening leftist art, Lef will agitate art with the ideas of the
commune and open for art the road to tomorrow. […] We believe that through the
correctness of our agitation, through the force of the things we are doing, we will
demonstrate that we are on the true path to the impending future” (Aseev et al.:
“What Is Lef Fighting For?”, 194–195).
Alongside this emphasis on a redefined, politicized Futurism, the journal retained
a strong connection to its roots in the pre-October avant-garde. It published not only
Mayakovsky’s poems, starting with his masterpiece, Pro eto (About That, 1923), but
also verse by Aseev, Kamensky, Kruchenykh, Pasternak, Tretyakov and, posthu-
mously, Khlebnikov. Several articles were devoted to Futurist experimentation with
poetic language, while the poet Dmitry Petrovsky’s reminiscences about Khlebnikov,
included in the first issue, inscribed the latter’s creative path into an innovative
process that had been initiated more than a decade previously.
A total of seven issues of Lef were published, the last in March 1925. By then, as
Halina Stephan has noted, “the Lef group no longer called itself Futurist, because the
pre-revolutionary reputation of Futurism as a Bohemian movement had proven too
difficult to live down in the Soviet period” (Stephan: “LEF” and the Left Front of the
Arts, xi). From January 1927 to December 1928, another journal, Novyi Lef (New Lef),
was published as a monthly. While the original authors, as well as new ones, contin-
ued to appear in its pages, there was no more discussion of Futurism; the principal
emphasis was now on the theory and practice of literatura fakta (literature of fact; see
Zalambani: Alle origini della literatura fakta).
The posthumous appearance of several works by Khlebnikov as well as a memoir
about him in the original Lef comprises an early episode in a separate chain of events
that began immediately after Khlebnikov’s death: the struggle not only to locate, pre-
serve and publish Khlebnikov’s poetic legacy, but also to give a particular profile to
his biography and define his relationship to the Futurist movement. The poet’s rel-
atives, his former comrades in Hylaea and the scholars who prepared a five-volume
edition of his works in 1928–33 were drawn into a protracted polemic that lasted
794 Henryk Baran

throughout the 1930s, and, in a different form, continues to this day as we study and
deepen our understanding of Russian Futurism.

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Aseev, Nikolai, Boris Arvatov, Osip Brik, Boris Kushner, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Sergei Tret’iakov, and
Nikolai Chuzhak: “What Does Lef Fight For?” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian
Futurism Through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 191–195.
Barnes, Christopher: Boris Pasternak: A Literary Biography. Vol. 1: 1890–1928. Cambridge:
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Basner, Elena: “The Phenomenon of David Burliuk in the History of the Russian Avant-Garde
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Modernism: An Introductory Reader. Boston/MA: Academic Studies Press, 2012. 150–169
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Burliuk, David Davidovich, et al.: “Go to Hell!” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian
Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 85–86.
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Burliuk, Nikolai Davidovich, and David Davidovich Burliuk: “Poetic Principles.” Anna Lawton, and
Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell
University Press, 1988. 82–84.
Eagle, Herbert: “Afterword: Cubo-Futurism and Russian Formalism.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert
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Erlich, Victor: Russian Formalism: History – Doctrine. The Hague: Mouton, 1996.
Graal’-Arel’skii [pseud. of Stepan Stepanovich Petrov]: “Egopoetry in Poetry.” Anna Lawton, and
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Jakobson, Roman Osipovich: My Futurist Years. Ed. by Bengt Jangfeldt, and Stephen Rudy. New York:
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[Jakobson] Iakobson, Roman Osipovich: Noveishaia russkaia poeziia: Nabrosok pervyi. Praga:
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Janecek, Gerald: The Look of Russian Literature: Avant-Garde Visual Experiments, 1900–1930.
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Jangfeldt, Bengt: Majakovskij and Futurism 1917–1921. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1976.
Katanian, Vasilii Abgarovich: Maiakovskii: Khronika zhizni i deiatel’nosti. 5th edn Moskva: Sovetskii
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v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 2. Moskva: RA, 1997. 37–71.
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avangarde v dvukh tomakh. Vol. 1. Moskva: RA, 1997. 18–97.
Khlebnikov, Velimir: Collected Works. Vol. 1. Letters and Theoretical Writings. Trans. by Paul Schmidt,
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“The Burial Mound of Sviatogor.” V. Khlebnikov: Collected Works. Vol. 1. Letters and Theoretical
Writings. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. 231–236.
Khlebnikov, Velimir: Uchitel’ i uchenik: Razgovor. Kherson: Parovaia tipografiia preemnikov O.D.
Khodushinoi, 1912. English translation “Teacher and Student: A Conversation.” V. Khlebnikov: Collected
Works. Vol. 1. Letters and Theoretical Writings. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.
277–287.
Kovtun, Evgenii Fedorovich: Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1989.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich: “Declaration of the Word as Such.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle,
eds.: Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press,
1988. 67–68.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich: “From ‘Explodity’.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian
Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 65–66.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich: “New Ways of the Word.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.:
Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press,
1988. 69–77.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich, and Velimir Khlebnikov: “From ‘The Word as Such’.” Anna Lawton,
and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY:
Cornell University Press, 1988. 57–62.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich, and Velimir Khlebnikov: “The Letter as Such.” Anna Lawton, and
Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell
University Press, 1988. 63–64.
Krusanov, Andrei Vasil’evich: Russkii avangard, 1907–1932: Istoricheskii obzor v trekh tomakh. Vol.
1. Parts 1–2. Boevoe desiatiletie. Sankt-Peterburg: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2010. Vol. 2.
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Kul’bin, Nikolai Ivanovich: Studiia impressionistov. Sankt-Peterburg: Bukovskii, 1910.

Livshits, Benedikt: “The Liberation of the Word.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian
Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 78–81.
Livshits, Benedikt: The One and a Half-Eyed Archer. Translated, introduced and annotated by John E.
Bowlt. Newtonville/MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977.
Markov, Vladimir: Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley/CA: University of California Press, 1968.
Mayakovsky, Vladimir: “A Drop of Tar.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism
Through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 100–102
McQuillen, Colleen: The Modernist Masquerade: Stylizing Life, Literature, and Costumes in Russia.
Madison/WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.
Molok, Iurii: “Tipografskie opyty poeta futurista.” Vasily Kamenskii: Tango s korovami:
Zhelezobetonnye poemy. Facsimile reproduction of 1914 edition. Supplement. Moskva: Kniga,
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Parnis, Aleksandr: “Gnedov Vasilisk.” Russkie pisateli 1800–1917: Biograficheskii slovar’, Vol. 1.
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Parnis, Aleksandr: “K istorii odnoi polemiki: F. T. Marinetti i russkie futuristy.” E. A. Bobrinskaia,
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177–185.
Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich: “The Wassermann Test.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.:
Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press,
1988. 162–163.
Poliakov, Vladimir Vladimirovich: Knigi russkogo kubofuturizma: Izdanie vtoroe, ispravlennoe i
dopolnennoe. S prilozheniem kataloga futuristicheskikh izdanii. Moskva: Gileia, 2007.
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Railing, Patricia, ed.: Essays on “Victory over the Sun.” Forest Row: Artists Bookworks, 2009.
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Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/
NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 137–139.
Sadok sudei. Vol. 1–2. Peterburg: Zhuravl‘, 1910–1913.
Sarab’ianov, Dmitrii Vladimirovich: Russkaia zhivopis’ kontsa 1900-kh nachala 1910-kh godov:
Ocherki. Moskva: Iskusstvo, 1971.
Sem-v., E.: “Futurizm: Literaturnyi manifest.” Nasha gazeta 54 (6 March 1909): 4.
Severianin, Igor’, Konstantin Olimpov (Konstantin Mikhailovich Fofanov), Georgii Ivanov, and Graal’-
Arel’skii (Stepan Stepanovich Petrov): “Academy of Ego-Poetry (Universal Futurism).” Anna
Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism Through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/
NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 109.
Stephan, Halina: “Lef” and the Left Front of the Arts. München: Sagner, 1981.
Strigalev, Anatolii. “ ‘Kartiny’, ‘Stikhokartiny’ i ‘Zhelezobetonnye poemy’ Vasiliia Kamenskogo.”
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Tasteven, Genrikh, ed.: Futurizm: Na puti k novomu simvolizmu. S prilozheniem perevoda glavnykh
futuristskikh manifestov Marinetti. Moskva: Iris, 1914.
Terekhina, Vera Nikolaevna, and Aleksei Pavlovich Zimenkov, eds.: Russkii futurizm: Teoriia,
praktika, kritika, vospominaniia. Moskva: Nasledie, 1999.
Tsipuria, Bela: “H2SO4: The Futurist Experience in Georgia.” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 1 (2011): 299–322.
Turchinskaia, Elena Iur’evna: Avangard na Dal’nem Vostoke: “Zelenaia koshka”, Burliuk i drugie.
Sankt-Petersburg: Aleteia, 2011.
Zak, Lev Vasil’evich: “Overture.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through its
Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 133–136.
 Russia 797

Zalambani, Maria: Alle origini della literatura fakta. Pisa: Istituti Editoriali e Poligrafici
Internazionali. 2000. Russian translation Literatura fakta: Ot avangarda k sotsrealizmu.
Sankt-Peterburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 2006.
Zdanevich, Il’ia, Aleksei Kruchenykh, Igor’ Terent’ev, and Nikolai Cherniavskii: “Manifesto of
the 41°.” Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through Its Manifestoes,
1912–1928. Ithaca/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 177.

Further reading
Al’fonsov, Vladimir Nikolaevich, and Sergei Rudol’fovich Krasitskii, eds.: Poeziia russkogo futurizma.
Sankt-Peterburg: Akademicheskii proekt, 1999.
Autour du futurisme russe. Special issue of Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 25:4 (1984).
Baudin, Katia, ed.: Der Kubofuturismus und der Aufbruch der Moderne in Russland. Exhibition
catalogue. Köln: Museum Ludwig, 26. Mai 2009 – 3. Januar 2010. Köln: Wienand, 2011.
Bowlt, John E., ed.: Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1988.
Burliuk, David: Fragmenty iz vospominanii futurista: Pis’ma, stikhotvoreniia. Sankt-Peterburg:
Pushkinskii fond, 1994.
Compton, Susan P.: The World Backwards: Russian Futurist Books, 1912–16. London: British Museum
Publications, 1978.
De Michelis, Cesare G., ed.: Il futurismo italiano in Russia, 1909–1929. Bari: De Donato, 1973.
Revised and enlarged 2nd edn L’ avanguardia trasversale: Il futurismo tra Italia e Russia.
Venezia: Marsilio, 2009.
Ivaniushina, Irina Iur’evna: Russkii futurizm: Ideologiia, poetika, pragmatika. Saratov: Izd-vo
Saratovskogo universiteta, 2003.
Kazakova, Svetlana: “Tvorcheskaia istoriia obedineniia Tsentrifuga: Zametki o rannikh poeticheskikh
sviaziakh Pasternaka, Aseeva i Bobrova.” Russian Literature 27 (1990): 459–482.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich: K istorii russkogo futurizma: Vospominaniia i dokumenty. Ed. by
Nina Gurianova. Moskva: Gileia, 2006.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich: Our Arrival: From the History of Russian Futurism. Moskva: RA, 1995.
Lapshin, Vladimir Pavlovich: Marinetti e la Russia: Dalla storia delle relazioni letterarie e artistiche
negli anni dieci del XX secolo. Milano: Skira, 2008.
Magarotto, Luigi, Marzio Marzaduri, and Giovanna Pagani Cesa, eds.: L’ avanguardia a Tiflis: Studi,
ricerche, cronache, testimonianze, documenti. Venezia: Università degli Studi di Venezia, 1982.
Markov, Vladimir, ed.: Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov = Die Manifeste und
Programmschriften der russischen Futuristen. München: Fink, 1967.
Marzaduri, Marzio: Scritti sul futurismo russo. Bern: Lang, 1991.
Messina, Roberto: “Futurismo tataro: L’ avanguardia a Kazan’.” Europa orientalis 28:1 (2009):
227–269.
Nikol’skaia, Tat’iana L’ vovna: “Fantasticheskii gorod”: Russkaia kul’turnaia zhizn’ Tbilisi (1917–1921).
Moskva: Piataia strana, 2000.
Rakitin Vasilii Ivanovich, and Andrei Dmitrievich Sarab’ianov, eds.: Entsiklopediia russkogo
avangarda. Vols. 1–3. Moskva: Global Expert & Services Team, 2013–2014.
Robel, Léon, ed.: Manifestes du futurisme russe. Paris: Editeurs Français Réunis, 1972.
Sakhno, Irina Mikhailovna: Russkii avangard: Zhivopisnaia teoriia i poeticheskaia praktika. Moskva:
Dialog MGU, 1999.
798 Christina Lodder

Shruba, Manfred: Literaturnye obedineniia Moskvy i Peterburga 1890 – 1917 godov: Slovar’. Moskva:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2004.
Sola, Agnès: Le Futurisme russe. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989.
Tschižewskij, Dmitrij [Chyzhevs’kyi, Dmytro; Dmitrii Chizhevskii]: Anfänge des russischen
Futurismus. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1963.

Russian Futurist Art

As the painter and musician Mikhail Matyushin (1861–1934) explained in his
memoirs, Russian artists first became aware of the Italian Futurists’ ideas in March
1909 (Matiushin: “Russkie kubo-futuristy”, 143; “The Russian Cubo-Futurists”, 176).
A mere few weeks after Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had published the Foundation
and Manifesto of Futurism in the Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro, on 20 February 1909,
the text appeared in the Russian press as “Futuristy” (The Futurists, 8 March 1909).
Marinetti’s declaration had vividly conveyed a general impression of the movement’s
rejection of tradition, its aspirations to embrace modernity and its desire to find a way
of expressing the dynamic qualities of contemporary urban life, but the iconoclastic
and provocative text had not provided any real indication of precisely how such ideas
might be translated into creative concepts and actual works of art.
Like other European artists, the Russians had to wait until the Italian Futurists
had their first major exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris (5–24 February
1912) to discover what kind of paintings might be produced embodying this new
approach. Before this, the Russians were reliant on scraps of information derived from
a variety of sources: articles, lectures, reviews of exhibitions and performances, first-
hand accounts of public activities, etc. Since no Italian Futurist paintings were actu-
ally shown in Russia, these scattered and rather haphazard hints of new visual ideas
were particularly valuable. A few articles about the movement had appeared in the
Russian artistic press before 1912, but nothing very substantial. For instance, Futurist
Painting: Technical Manifesto (April 1910) was paraphrased in July 1910 in the Saint
Petersburg art journal Apollon (Buzzi: “Khronika. Pis’mo iz Italii. Zhivopis’.”); but it
was only two years later, in June 1912, that a full translation was published in the Soiuz
molodezhi (Union of Youth) journal under the heading “Manifest futuristov” (Boccioni
et al.). In February 1910, Futurism was discussed at some length in Apollon, but more
detailed information about specific Futurist paintings only became available in the
reviews of the 1912 exhibition at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. They included extracts
from the manifestos and detailed analyses of some of the paintings on display, such
as Umberto Boccioni’s Stati di animo (States of Mind, 1911) and Visioni simultanee
(Simultaneous Visions, 1911), as well as Luigi Russolo’s La rivolta (Revolt, 1911) and
Ricordi di una notte (Memories of a Night, 1912). This type of information was later
augmented by reports about Boccioni’s Paris show of 1913 (Galerie La Boëtie, 20 June –
16 July 1913; see Sillart: “Vystavka futuristicheskoi sculpture Bochchioni”). Personal
 Russia 799

contacts amplified these sources of information. For instance, Alexandra Exter (1882–
1949) travelled regularly between Russia and France, had been a personal friend of
Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) since April 1912 and was able to give her colleagues first-
hand reports of Futurist developments (Soffici: Opere, II, 395, Livshits: The One and a
Half-Eyed Archer, 44, Tobin: “Alexandra Exter 1908–1914” and Bowlt et al.: Alexandra
Exter, 43). Similarly, David Burliuk (1882–1967) had seen the Futurist exhibition when
he was in Germany in April – June 1912, and returned with images to show his col-
leagues (Douglas: “The New Russian Art and Italian Futurism”, 232).

Embracing the new aesthetic

It seems, therefore, that although information about Futurism was available to

Russian artists from 1909 onwards, it was only really in 1912 that they were able to
acquire more concrete knowledge about the theory and practice of Italian Futurist
painting. Hence, 1912 marked the date when Russian artists began to assimilate and
adapt these principles and techniques in their own work. From this time onwards,
the Russians had increased access to the movement’s visual achievements, although
no Italian Futurist paintings were ever shown in Russia. On 8 April 1913, for instance,
the poet and writer Ilya Zdanevich (1894–1975) gave a lecture on Futurism in Saint
Petersburg, where he read Futurist manifestos and apparently showed reproduc-
tions of Futurist paintings (Howard: The Union of Youth, 158 and 182 n.17, and Geiro:
“Predislovie”, 9).
In June 1912, the Saint Petersburg exhibiting society Soiuz molodezhi (Union
of Youth) published the statement Les Exposants au public (The Exhibitors to the
Public), issued by Boccioni and his colleagues on the occasion of their Paris show
in February 1912 (Boccioni et al.: “Eksponenty k publike”). This prompted the artist
and poet David Burliuk to compose Russia’s own Futurist manifesto, Poshchechina
obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, December 1912), which
demanded that Russians “throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc., overboard
from the ship of Modernity” (Burliuk et al.: “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”, 51).
The following year, this process of assimilation gathered pace. In March 1913, what
might be called the first manifesto of Russian Futurist painting appeared, Manifest
obshchestva khudozhnikov “Soiuz molodezhi” (Union of Youth Manifesto). This was
written by Olga Rozanova (1886–1918) and published by the Union of Youth group
of artists (Gurianova: Exploring Color, 185–187). For the scholar Nina Gurianova, this
text represents perhaps “the only manifesto of Russian painters directly connected
with the documents of Italian Futurism” (Gurianova: Exploring Color, 25). Emulating
the forceful tones of their Italian colleagues and reflecting their ideas, the Union of
Youth announced: “We declare war on all the jailers of the Free Art of Painting”, “The
Future of Art is uninterrupted renewal!” and “Enough of this Cult of cemeteries and
800 Christina Lodder

corpses” (Gurianova: Exploring Color, 186-187). The Italians’ “universal dynamism”

was expressed as “the impetuous rush of time”, while their call to “free the eye from
the scales of atavism and culture” was echoed in the appeal to “view the world open
wide” (Gurianova: Exploring Color, 187, 186). Like the Italians, the Union of Youth
rejected the past and sentimentality, asserting that “freedom of creativity is the first
condition of originality”, and “We only value works whose novelty generates a new
individual in the viewer” (Gurianova: Exploring Color, 186).
At the same time as Russian artists began to adopt Futurist ideas in 1912, they also
began to become interested in the theory and practice of Cubism. Indeed, so tightly
bound up was the influence exerted on Russian artistic developments by these two
Western European movements that the resulting mixture of styles is, and was, often
called kubo-futurizm (Cubo-Futurism), indicating that it represented various combi-
nations of the principles associated with both movements: From Cubism it took the
new ideas of pictorial space, the fragmentation of the object and the emphasis on
geometric form; from Futurism it adopted an iconoclastic ethos, an emphasis on dyna-
mism and an urban and industrial subject matter. The term ‘Cubo-Futurism’ had been
coined in 1912 by Korney Chukovsky (1882–1969) to characterize poetry, but it was
rapidly adopted by critics and artists alike as a convenient label to describe the new
art. The painter Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935), for instance, in a letter to Matyushin in
spring 1913, wrote that “the path of Cubo-Futurism is the only way out” of the impasse
of contemporary Russian painting (quoted in Vakar and Mikhienko: Malevich o sebe.
Vol. 1, 48).
In harnessing the formal devices developed by the Cubists, the Russians were
also following the Italian Futurists, who had become familiar with the latest innova-
tions of the French avant-garde in 1911 and had adopted techniques such as ‘faceting’
(facet-like fragmentation), which had been developed by Georges Braques and Pablo
Picasso to negate the opacity and materiality of individual objects and fuse them
with the surrounding environment in order to create a purely pictorial equivalent
of volume and space. Ultimately, Cubist techniques (which destroyed conventional
approaches to painting and discarded notions of spatial and volumetric coherence)
allowed the Futurists to fulfil their desire “to insert ourselves into the midst of things
in such a fashion that our self forms a single complex with their identities” (Carrà:
“Piani plastici come espansione sferica dello spazio”, 54).
Despite their reliance on Western creative precedent, Russian writers and artists
possessed a strong sense of their own identity, and this is reflected in the fact that
alongside the term ‘Futurist’, they also used the Slavic-based words budetlianin and
budushchnik, both of which might be translated as “Futurian”, “person of the future”
or “Futurist” (see Markov: Russian Futurism, p. 27, and Bowlt: Russian Art of the Avant-
Garde, 87–91). So strong was the Russians’ spirit of independence that when Marinetti
visited Russia in early 1914, he was attacked by Mikhail Larionov (1881–1964) and
others (Tupitsyn: “Collaborating on the Paradigm of the Future”, 18). Of course,
Russian Futurism did adopt certain theories from the Italian movement, but it fused
 Russia 801

these with other ideas and concerns to develop its own distinctive character. One of
the most important concepts specific to Russian Futurism was the theory of vsechestvo
(everythingness), which allowed (and even encouraged) artists to experiment simul-
taneously with various artistic traditions and styles (see Sharp: Russian Modernism,
254–260). Zdanevich seems to have conceived the notion, which was then adopted by
Larionov and Natalia Goncharova (1881–1962), who stated in 1912: “We acknowledge
all styles as suitable for the expression of our art, styles existing both yesterday and
today” (Larionov and Goncharova: “Rayonists and Futurists”, 90).
As a practical demonstration of this approach, Russian artists tended to mix
Italian ideas not only with Cubism but also with Neoprimitivism (c. 1909–1912) – a
movement that had been committed to developing a new pictorial language rooted
in the native traditions of the icon and the lubok (popular print). While profoundly
nationalistic and celebrating Russia’s asiatic past, Neoprimitivism was also inspired
by the aesthetic freedom and innovative work of French Post-Impressionism and
Fauvism. Inevitably, Russian artists who became involved in Futurism took from
Neoprimitivism a tendency towards a primordial vitality. As the philosopher Nikolay
Berdyaev (1874–1948) observed, “[Russian] Futurism […] has a barbaric crudity, bar-
baric wholeness and barbaric ignorance” (Berdiaev: Krizis iskusstva, 26). At first sight,
the differences between Neoprimitivism and Futurism might seem irreconcilable:
Marinetti’s idea of a technological world embodying the future differed so fundamen-
tally from the culturally nostalgic Russian “vision of a mythical and timeless Russia,
of Scythian settlements on the Black Sea, Vikings on the Volga, Siberian shamanism
and Asian invasions” (Milner: A Slap in the Face!, 10). Nevertheless, the Russians and
Italians shared a profound disdain for aesthetic conventions, a rabid hatred for the
constraints of the Academy, an ardent nationalism, a fervent commitment to innova-
tion, and a passionate desire to renew the artistic culture of their respective countries.
Given this context, it is perhaps not surprising that the critic and scholar Nikolai
Khardzhiev asserted categorically that “in Russia, there was really no such thing
as Futurist painting” (Khardzhiev: “Formirovanie kubofuturizma”, 31; Khardzhiev:
“Cubo-Futurism”, 81). He did, however, qualify this statement by making an excep-
tion for a few works. These were Kazimir Malevich’s Tochil’shchik. Printsip mel’ka-
niia (The Knife Grinder: The Principle of Flickering, 1912), Goncharova’s Aeroplan
nad poezdom (Aeroplane over the Train, 1913), her Velosipedist (The Cyclist, 1913), as
well as her Dinamo. Mashina (Dynamo Machine, 1913), Larionov’s Gorod (Progulka)
(The City: Out Walking, usually known as Boulevard Venus, 1912) and finally Olga
Rozanova’s Pozhar v gorode (Gorodskoi peizazh) (Fire in the City: Cityscape; see
Khardzhiev: “Formirovanie kubofuturizma”, 31; Khardzhiev: “Cubo-Futurism”, 81).
Although Khardzhiev’s list identified some of the masterpieces of Russian Futurist
painting, it also excluded several important works that contained Futurist imagery
and employed Futurist devices, such as Goncharova’s Fabrika (The Factory, 1912) and
Elektricheskaia lampa (The Electric Lamp, 1913) as well as two canvases by Liubov
Popova (1889–1924), both entitled Puteshestvennitsa (Travelling Woman, both of
802 Christina Lodder

1915). Khardzhiev also took no account of Russian Futurist sculpture, most notably
Probegaiushii peizazh (The Landscape Rushing By, 1913) by Ivan Kliun (1873–1943).
Yet Khardzhiev’s statement does reflect the fact that there is not a large body
of Russian Futurist work and that only a few Russian artists produced paintings or
sculptures that could be categorised as Futurist. For instance, neither Vladimir Tatlin
(1885–1953) nor Pavel Filonov (1882–1941), who became leading figures of the Russian
avant-garde, developed a style that could be unequivocally described as ‘Futurist’.
Filonov’s paintings are stylistically eccentric, depicting the working man and urban
environment, as in Pererozhdenie cheloveka (Degeneration of Man, 1914–1915), or
evoking the organic evolution of humanity, while Tatlin’s paintings of 1912–1913 really
belong to Neoprimitivism (see Markov: Russian Futurism, 53).
The fact that only a few works in Russia can be called Futurist is not due to any
lack of talent, or to a failure by Russian artists to engage with Futurist ideas; rather,
it is due to the brevity of the movement, which only lasted for a few years and was
frequently fused with other (non-Futurist) aesthetic concerns. Matyushin observed
that “by 1913–14, the names of the Cubo-Futurists had become common currency”,
but during the difficult years of the First World War, “the art front stagnated, and only
a few continued to seek new forms” (Matiushin: “Russkie kubo-futuristy”, 168; “The
Russian Cubo-Futurists”, 182). Moreover, the limited number of artists who continued
to pursue a path of creative innovation developed in directions that may have been
stimulated by Futurist ideas, but could no longer be called ‘Futurist’.
In actuality, Italian Futurist ideas were far more influential than Matyushin and
Khardzhiev’s statements imply. Indeed, the theoretical and pictorial principles pro-
moted by Boccioni and his colleagues exerted a profound influence on Russian artists,
stimulating the genesis of a wealth of new theoretical and practical approaches that
frequently had little to do with the initial concepts. Ultimately, the movement laid
the foundation for the move into abstraction in Larionov’s Rayism and Malevich’s
Suprematism. Of course, this essay will not analyse all the Russian works that can be
classed as ‘Futurist’, but will focus on those items that illuminate various strands in
the art produced by the Russian Futurists.

Implementing Futurist Ideas

Initially, Russian Futurist painting focussed on mundane reality. This represented

a certain continuity with the type of subject matter encountered in Neoprimitivism,
which had celebrated the everyday lives of ordinary people, especially in the Russian
provinces. The links between Futurism and Neoprimitivism are evident in Natalia
Goncharova’s The Cyclist (1913; reproduced in Petrova: Russian Futurism, 33). This is
one of the earliest works of Russian Futurism and is often regarded as an archetypal
example of the movement. The artist embraced the emphatically modern ethos of
 Russia 803

the Italians by injecting suggestions of dynamism into a prosaic contemporary scene.

The motion of the figure across the canvas is suggested by the repetition and disloca-
tion of the contours of the body and bicycle (wheels and frame), implying movement
both in space and over time. This approach is very similar to Giacomo Balla’s repeti-
tion of forms in Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,
1912), a technique that was itself inspired by chronophotography. In Goncharova’s
painting, the curved echoing forms of the wheels and figure not only imply movement
across the picture plane, but also evoke motion up and down as the bicycle bounces
over the cobbles. The hustle and bustle of the street is indicated by the shop signs.
The flat nature of the letters reinforces the elements of dynamism, while the way these
signs are fragmented and dislocated also suggests scraps of information perceived by
the pedalling cyclist. In this way, the painting conveys the notion of time and motion,
as well as the cyclist’s state of mind and visual memories.
Despite its Futurist elements, echoes of Neoprimitivism are especially evident in
the lettering, which is based on the painted shop signs of the period: the pointing
hand at the top left indicating the way to a bar selling beer, on which is superimposed
a telephone number, “T. 402”. Other shop signs are indicated by different-sized letters
and fragments of words: “шелк” (shelk – silk) “шля[па]” (shliapa – hats) indicat-
ing silk top hats, “нит[ка]” (nitka – thread). Like a lubok, the image is arranged in a
sequence of planes, and the indication of space and volume is limited. The cyclist’s
cap, the cobbled street and the signs for the bar and haberdashery all suggest a
provincial town or city suburb rather than the centre of a bustling metropolis like
Moscow. At the same time, the painting undoubtedly possesses characteristics that
are related to French Cubism. Not least of these is the palette of muted tones of grey,
brown and blue. The lettering identifies the urban environment, but also serves as
a real two-dimensional element that highlights the arbitrary nature of painting as a
medium and emphasizes the flatness of the picture plane. Moreover, the “я” and the
indication of a top hat are both diagonally divided into two parts that are pulled apart
in a typical example of the Russian Cubist device of sdvig or dislocation. Sensations
of transparency and suggestions of reflections are indicated by the superimposition
of “нит[ка]” on the body of the cyclist and the superimposition of “T.402” on the bar
sign. In this use of Cubist devices, Goncharova’s Cyclist possesses strong parallels
with paintings such as Umberto Boccioni’s Stati d’animo serie II. Gli addii (States of
Mind II. The Farewells) rather than with the Italian artist’s later treatment of a cyclist,
in which the figure is completely fused with the surrounding environment to create a
vortex of energies.
The continuing influence of Neoprimitivism within Russian Futurism is also
present in Mikhail Larionov’s Boulevard Venus (1913; reproduced in Parton: Mikhail
Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde, plate 14). This depicts a prostitute holding
an umbrella, apparently strolling along a street. The extensive amount of green and
blue suggests a rural rather than urban location, relating the work to Larionov’s
earlier Neoprimitivist depictions of people in provincial towns, including his series of
804 Christina Lodder

Venuses of 1912. Also characteristic of the artist’s Neoprimitivism is the crude letter-
ing and vibrant colour, applied in distinct patches with bold hatching strokes. Like his
partner Goncharova, Larionov used fragmentation and repetition to suggest motion –
a technique that seems to have been directly inspired by having seen a reproduction
of Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash in the catalogue of the Erster Deutscher
Herbstsalon (First German Autumn Salon) at the Galerie “Der Sturm” (20 September –
November 1913; see Parton: Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde, 121). The
device also reflects the Italians’ statement that “a running horse has not four legs,
but twenty, and their movements are triangular” (Boccioni et al.: “Futurist Painting:
Technical Manifesto”, 64). The central legs in Larionov’s image represent a woman
walking, but the two legs at the extreme right and left are spread-eagled, as if belong-
ing to the same figure lying down. These two sets of legs may simply represent the two
activities of a prostitute – walking the streets in search of clients and then pleasuring
them. This duality suggests motion over time and would also account for the way that
the woman’s profile is shown in a sequence of positions from left to right, indicating
movement in different directions. Alternatively, as Anthony Parton suggests, Larionov
may simply have been having a joke at Balla’s expense (Parton: Mikhail Larionov and
the Russian Avant-Garde, 121).
In accordance with the Futurists’ enthusiasm for technology, Larionov used
transparency and X-ray technology to reveal the lady’s voluminous bloomers as well
as her bare breast and what is apparently supposed to be the bone structure of her
legs – a revelation that is particularly apparent in the provocatively raised leg on the
right. X-rays, discovered by Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, generated a new concept of
reality. Penetrating beyond the superficial surface of objects and showing their inner
structure and essence, X-rays naturally aroused the interest of artists like Balla and
Larionov. Ultimately, the implications of this fascination with a reality invisible to
the human eye led Larionov to develop the non-figurative style of Rayism. According
to his theoretical statement of 1913, this approach entailed depicting the rays of
light reflected from bodies and their points of intersection (Larionov: “Luchistskaia
zhivopis’ ”, 93). In 1914, Larionov exhibited Boulevard Venus with the sub-title
“pneumo-rayism”, indicating that it was related to his new style (Parton: Mikhail
Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde, 75).
The city became an important subject for Russian artists, including Alexandra
Exter, who was in direct contact with the Italian Futurists and actually exhibited three
works at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome as part of the Esposizione libera futurista inter-
nazionale: Pittori e scultori italiani russi inglesi belgi nordamericani (Free Exhibition of
International Futurists: Painters and Sculptors from Italy, Russia, England, Belgium
USA, 13 April – 25 May 1914). Although one of her exhibits was a still life, the other two
depicted more urban themes: a café interior and the Boulevard des Italiens in Paris,
both of which indicate a decided interest in Futurist ideas (Bowlt et al.: Alexandra
Exter, 80). During 1913, while Exter was sharing a studio with Soffici in Paris, she
produced Firenze (Florence, 1913; reproduced in Bowlt et al.: Alexandra Exter, 66).
 Russia 805

The interest in the resonances of colour ally the work with Orphism developed by her
friends Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) and his wife Sonia (1885–1979), while Exter’s
use of lettering indicates her long-term association with Cubism. Despite this and
the absence of any overt references to machinery, the overall spirit of the work, with
its vibrant colour and architectural fragments, is Futurist. The Gothic doorways and
elegantly arched bridges are interspersed with abstract forms, which suggest but
do not describe buildings. Space is compressed and there is no indication of how
the various forms relate to each other. Movement is not depicted, but is inherent
in the fluctuation of forms, the ambiguous juxtaposition of the various fragments and
the dynamic interplay of colours on the surface of the canvas and their optical action
on the viewer. The whole work seems to hover on the border of abstraction and points
forward to the completely non-figurative works that Exter started producing a few
years later.
Perhaps more fully in tune with the Futurists’ celebration of technology and
the dynamic sensation is Kazimir Malevich’s The Knife Grinder: The Principle of
Flickering (1912–1913 reproduced in Nakov: Kazimir Malewicz, No. F. 354). Exhibited
in March 1913, this is perhaps one of the most consummate fusions of Cubism and
Futurism to be found in Russian art. The traditional nature of the machine and the
lowly itinerant worker possess a Neoprimitivist resonance. Nevertheless, in conform-
ity with Futurist ideas, the machine is in motion and the stone steps evoke an urban
setting, while the muted tones and faceting indicate a strong input from Cubism.
Fragmenting the worker, his machine and environment into a multitude of facets
and planes, Malevich represented successive stages in the motions of the figure’s
hands, feet, legs and face, so that the repetition and sequence of shapes suggest
movement over time: the speed of the rotating stone, the motion of the hands, the
vibrations of the knife and the pedalling action of the feet. The conception of The
Knife Grinder is close to the Futurists’ depiction of sequences of movements and their
emphasis on the interaction between internal and external energies, that is, on the
forces within the object moving outwards and interacting with the dynamic elements
in the environment, which in turn penetrate the object, while the lines of force encir-
cle the viewers and draw them into the painting. Such ideas had been explained in
the Futurists’ statement The Exhibitors to the Public (1912). Like the Italian Futurists,
Malevich seemed to be evoking the sensations encountered in sharpening a knife,
including the sparks generated by the friction of the blade on the wheel, suggested
by the subtitle.
Malevich used a similar technique for conveying movement in Bolshaia gostinitsa
or Zhizn’ v bolshoi gostinitse (The Grand Hotel, or Life at the Grand Hotel, 1913–14;
reproduced in Nakov: Kazimir Malewicz, No. F. 389), which seems to show a man
going through a revolving door. Such doors (which exclude draughts) epitomized
modernity, the first having apparently been installed in 1899 at Rector’s restaurant
on Times Square in New York. It may well be that the hotel in Malevich’s painting
represents the Metropole Hotel in Moscow, which was completed in 1906 with all
806 Christina Lodder

the latest amenities, including a revolving door. However, Andréi Nakov has iden-
tified the central figure as the Futurist poet and artist David Burliuk (Nakov: Kazimir
Malewicz, No. F. 389). Unlike the ambiguous environment and theme of The Knife
Grinder, which possesses continuities with Neoprimitivism’s focus on Russian pro-
vincial life, The Grand Hotel depicts the glamorous life of big city hotels. Even so,
the latter painting retains a strong connection to Cubism in the use of facets, muted
colours and lettering. The blues and greys suggest a night-time scene, and the word
“гостиница” (gostinitsa – hotel) towards the top left identifies the location, while the
flat letters serve to emphasise the movement of the figure and door below.
When Malevich exhibited The Knife Grinder in November 1913, he called it zaumnyi
realizm (transrational realism), alluding to the literary theory of zaum’, developed
by the poets Velimir (Viktor) Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Aleksei Kruchenykh (1886–
1968) in 1913. The neologism zaum’ literally means ‘beyond the mind’, ‘beyond sense’
or ‘beyond reason’ and is often translated as “transrational” or perhaps more evoca-
tively as “beyonsense” (Khlebnikov: The King of Time, 3; see also Janecek: Zaum: The
Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism). Zaum’ involved the complete rejection of
rational thought along with the conventional relationships between words and their
meanings. By isolating sounds, developing new combinations of syllables, invent-
ing words and giving them entirely new meanings, the poet could produce a kind
of universal language that would be comprehensible to all humans, being rooted in
primary sounds and emotions that were common to all languages. Likewise, by aban-
doning the accepted norms of narrative structure and subverting established rules
of grammar and syntax, the poet could create “a new understanding of the world”
and generate “a new deepening of the spirit” (Kruchenykh: “New Ways of the Word”,
75 and 77). The parallels between The Knife Grinder and zaum’ are clear. Just as the
poets discarded rational grammatical and linguistic structures, Malevich discarded
artistic conventions, namely the laws of perspective and mimesis. He fragmented the
objects into autonomous elements, recombining these into new and unexpected con-
figurations, just as the poets approached language by dividing words up arbitrarily
and blending syllables and sounds to create new combinations and meanings that
transcended logic and reason.
The spiritual aspect of zaum’ drew on the mystical experiences of speaking in
tongues, common to some Russian sects, as well as the heightened mental states cul-
tivated by Eastern religions and Yoga. Kruchenykh identified the destruction of con-
ventional linguistic structures with Cubo-Futurism’s destruction of traditional visual
languages and that advanced level of consciousness or ‘higher intuition’ celebrated
by the esoteric thinker Pyotr Ouspensky (1878–1947). Despite the rather banal subject
matter of The Knife Grinder, the compositional arrangement was clearly intended to
undermine a rational view of the world, dematerialize visual perceptions and foster
a more metaphysical attitude towards reality. This spiritual resonance is stronger in
Malevich’s subsequent works like Vsemirnyi peizazh (Universal Landscape) of 1913,
discussed below.
 Russia 807

Celebrating Technology

The technological emphasis of the Italians stimulated Russian artists to develop a

new type of subject matter: factories as power-houses of modernity, exemplified
by Goncharova’s Fabrika (Factory, 1912; reproduced in Petrova: Russian Futurism,
34) and Rozanova’s Fabrika i most (The Factory and the Bridge, 1913; reproduced in
Gurianova: Exploring Color, plate 5). Both artists arranged the elements of an industrial
complex at conflicting and intersecting angles to convey energy and vitality. Whereas
Goncharova focussed almost exclusively on the chimneys, Rozanova depicted a wider
range of structures, including glazed areas (indicated in blue) and the solid walls of
the machine halls. In both paintings, white accents dematerialize the object, rein-
forcing sensations of dynamism and flux. At the same time, the Cubist technique of
fragmentation was used to break up the coherence of the scene into distinct enti-
ties (rather than to shatter individual objects), while adapting the Italian practices
of repeating and fragmenting forms to evoke movement and dividing the space into
various geometric areas. The absence of any horizon or indications of recession give
the images immediacy, as if they are advancing towards the viewer.
In contrast to Neoprimitivist images of the city, Futurist depictions were full
of energy and vigour. Rozanova’s Fire in the City (Cityscape) (1914: reproduced
in Gurianova: Exploring Color, plate 10) contains no overt allusions to Cubism or
Neoprimitivism in its attempt to capture the entirety of the urban environment, pro-
ducing a strong overall impression of the constant flux and the excitement of the city.
Rozanova adopted a high viewpoint, so that the panoramic scene completely fills the
picture’s surface, without any skyline. The factory chimneys, bridges and buildings
are broken down into jagged fragments, some of which are difficult to identify with
specific structures. The shards are arranged on various overlapping diagonals which
roughly meet in the centre. Although the dominant colours are grey, black, brown and
white, the streaks of red, orange, yellow and white add vitality, which is intensified by
the emphatic brush strokes. While these have affinities with the Italians’ linee-forza
(force-lines), first presented in The Exhibitors to the Public, Rozanova’s brushstrokes
are deliberately crude and the pigments are applied thickly. To reinforce the indus-
trial ethos of the work, Fire in the City was painted on tin. The train, which streaks
through the composition from bottom left towards the centre, symbolizes modernity,
technology and the beauty of contemporary life and acts as a powerful line of force
within the painting.
Trains and travel epitomized the speed and technological nature of modern
life. In 1915, Liubov Popova produced two paintings with the same title in Russian,
Popuchitsa, translated respectively as The Traveller and The Travelling Woman (repro-
duced in Dabrowski: Liubov Popova, 54–55). Both deal with a woman travelling, but
in The Traveller, which is probably the earlier version, the female figure is easily
identified and is clearly sitting in a railway carriage, holding a green umbrella and
wearing a black cape, blue skirt and yellow beads, surrounded by hatboxes and the
808 Christina Lodder

accoutrements of travel. Popova used Cubist devices – fragmenting the composition,

employing fairly muted colours and using certain clearly identifiable signs that serve
to root the image in reality, such as the yellow beads, the netting of the luggage rack
and the scroll to denote the arm of the armchair, as well as lettering: “журналы”
(zhurnaly – magazines), “газ” from “газета” (gazeta – newspapers), “шляп” from
“шляпа” (shliapa – hat) implying the presence of a hat box, while “IIКЛ” (IIcl[ass])
suggests a second class wagon. The “OP” (OR) at the top is more ambiguous and may
refer to the title of a station or be part of the sign for “ресторан” (restoran – restau-
rant), indicating the platform and environment outside the railway carriage, which
may have been seen while the train was stationary or moving. In this respect, the
treatment recalls Boccioni’s Stati d’animo serie II, Quelli che vanno (States of Mind
II – Those Who Go, 1911), as well as Restoran (Restaurant, 1915; reproduced in Petrova,
Russian Futurism, 61) by Nadezhda Udaltsova (1886–1961), which combines interior
and exterior, with signs for a city restaurant, including words such as “Menu” and
“Tango”, as well as figures, a table, grapes, glasses and a violin.
Popova’s later painting of the same theme, Travelling Woman, is more complex,
more dynamic and more enigmatic. The objects are more thoroughly fragmented
and less legible, creating a sense of energy that is reinforced by the numerous diago-
nals and circular lines of force that organize the composition. These recall Giacomo
Balla’s Mercurio passa davanti il sole (Mercury Passing in Front of the Sun, 1914),
which Popova would have known (see Dabrowski: Liubov Popova, 5). The diagonal
lines suggest the train’s trajectory by emulating how railway tracks seem to meet on
the horizon, while the circular lines evoke the motion of the wheels. Strangely, the
woman of the title barely seems present. Strands of hair are combined with a shirt
front (which appears masculine rather than feminine), steps, the repeated circular
outlines of wheels, diamond patterned flooring and the train’s echoing lights. The
dominant colours of dark red and black (with occasional white highlights) create an
oppressive and claustrophobic atmosphere, vividly recalling the confined space of a
railway carriage. Mixing imagery from the train’s interior and exterior serves to fuse
the two spaces and conveys the sensation of the train moving rapidly through the
countryside as well as the more subjective experience of the passenger within.
The meanings and allusions of the syllables are elusive: “тлф” probably stands
for “телефон” (telephone), especially as it is followed by the number “3”, but the
other fragments are difficult to identify, evoking the sounds of the trains or perhaps
the places through which the woman has travelled: “роры” (rory); “ги” (gi); “ви”
(vi); шт (sht). The painting seems to suggest the duration of the journey and the
woman’s sensations, impressions and perhaps even her memories as she travelled
or travels through the countryside. In this respect, the work possesses strong affin-
ities with Boccioni’s ‘states of mind’ and Popova, like her Italian colleagues, seems
to have derived some inspiration from Henri Bergson’s concepts of memory and
consciousness. Equally, the painting seems to obey the injunctions of the Futurist
manifesto The Exhibitors to the Public (1912), which extolled “the dislocation and
 Russia 809

dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted
logic, and independent from one another” (Boccioni et al.: “The Exhibitors to the
Public”, 106).
Trains and aeroplanes epitomized modernity. Goncharova’s Aeroplane over the
Train (1913; reproduced in Parton: Goncharova, 174) not only combines both modes
of contemporary transport, but also links time and space. While train journeys were
common occurrences (enabling Russians to move around the Empire and beyond),
travelling by aeroplane was still in its infancy. Aviation freed humans from gravity
and opened up new vistas and possibilities, but it was still highly dangerous. In 1911,
the avant-garde poet Vasily Kamensky (1884–1961) had abandoned literature for
aviation, but returned to poetry after a serious plane crash in 1913. In Goncharova’s
painting, the plane and train seem in a perilous state of fusion, which may reflect
Kamensky’s plight or a more general sense of unease. Anthony Parton maintains that
the painting expresses “Goncharova’s confusion and fear in the face of modernity”
(Parton: Goncharova, 199), arguing that the landscape format creates a claustropho-
bic space and that the interpenetrating forms suggest an aeroplane flying into a train,
rather than over it. Yet it is also possible to interpret Goncharova’s image as a celebra-
tion of these two powerful emblems of modernity, which gave humanity the potential
to transcend its physical limitations and move with unprecedented speed through the
countryside and even into the sky.
Goncharova’s train and plane can also be viewed as occupying the same loca-
tion at different times. In this way, the image evokes both time and space, indicat-
ing the space-time continuum and the fourth dimension (understood variously as
time, a different spatial dimension and a higher intuition). This nexus of ideas had
been firmly connected with Cubism (and hence with Cubo-Futurism) by Matyushin
in March 1913. Responding to the publication of two Russian translations of Albert
Gleizes and Jean Metzinger’s Du “Cubisme” (1912), Matyushin had combined extracts
from Du “Cubisme” with long quotations from Ouspensky’s writings on hyperspace
philosophy, notably Tertium Organum (The Third Canon of Thought, 1912). Matyushin
announced: “Cubism has raised the banner of the New Measure – of the new doc-
trine of the merging of time and space” (Matiushin: “O knige Metsenzhe – Gleza ‘O
kubizme’ ”, 368). He stressed that art could play a vital rôle in promoting a new per-
ception of the world and revealing the true nature of reality.
During 1913, Matyushin became a close friend of Malevich, and ideas of the fourth
dimension seem to underlie the artist’s extraordinary lithograph Smert’ cheloveka
odnovremenno na aeroplane i zheleznoi doroge! (Simultaneous Death of a Man in an
Aeroplane and on the Railway, 1913; reproduced in Nakov: Kazimir Malewicz, No. F.
391). It was published in Kruchenykh’s collection of poems Vzorval’ (Explodity, 1913).
In Malevich’s composition, the radiating lines of the propeller slice through the path
of the train, producing an explosion of forms and destroying any legible notion of the
object or its environment. Although the subject may refer to Kamensky’s accident, it
is rooted in the Italian Futurists’ sense of simultaneity and their mechanical vision of
810 Christina Lodder

the world. It is even possible that Malevich may have been inspired by the section in
Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto that describes how he had acquired his new perception of
reality when he had confronted death while travelling in a speeding car (Simmons:
Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square” and the Genesis of Suprematism, 27). Malevich sub-
sequently wrote of Futurism in terms that seem especially relevant to Simultaneous
Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on the Railway:

Thus the construction of the Futurist pictures […] arose from the discovery of the points on the
plane, where the placing of real objects at the moment of their exploding or colliding would lend
time to their maximum velocity. These points can be discovered without regard to the natural
physical law of perspective. Thus we see in Futurist pictures the appearance of clouds, horses,
wheels and various other objects in positions not corresponding to nature. The condition of
objects has become more important than their essence and meaning. (Malevich: From Cubism
and Futurism to Suprematism, 30)

This statement also relates to Malevich’s lithograph, Vsemirnyi peizazh (Universal

Landscape, 1913; reproduced in Nakov: Kazimir Malewicz, No. F. 390), which fuses
a view from above with numerous other viewpoints to produce a landscape of
fragments, all lacking coherence. Perspective, gravity and rational relationships
have been discarded, and the chaotic composition creates “a plastic equivalent
of flight” that evokes the turbulence of the flying experience (Simmons: Kasimir
Malevich’s “Black Square”, 33). Above all, the image represents a new type of
ambiguous space. Instead of a traditional vanishing point, the centre contains a
propeller-like form, which can also be read as a sign of infinity. Time and space are
fused into an image that conveys an acute sense of dynamism and an intimation of
the fourth dimension.
The self-consciously innovative and iconoclastic spirit, evident in this image,
permeated the Russian avant-garde at this time and underpinned the whole con-
ception of the Cubo-Futurist opera Pobeda nad solntsem (Victory over the Sun), per-
formed in Saint Petersburg in December 1913 (see pp. 263–266 the entry on Russian
Theatre in this volume). It was a collaborative venture for which Khlebnikov wrote
the prologue, Kruchenykh produced the libretto, Matyushin composed the music
and Malevich designed the sets and costumes (see Lodder: “Kazimir Malevich and
the Designs for ‘Victory over the Sun’ ”). The aim was “to transform the world into
chaos, smash established values into fragments and create new values out of those
fragments, producing new generalisations, and discovering new, unexpected and
unseen connections” (Matiushin, and Malevich: interview in Den’, 1 December
1913, reprinted in Kruchenykh, Our Arrival, 67). Malevich achieved this goal in his
designs, which like Universal Landscape and the practice of zaum’ itself, destroyed
conventional structures, reconfigured space and volume (of both the stage and the
human body), fragmenting and recasting them into almost abstract assemblages.
Eventually, in 1915, these experiments led Malevich to develop the totally abstract
pictorial idiom of Suprematism (discussed below).
 Russia 811

Futurist sculpture

By the second half of 1914, the Russian avant-garde had begun to experiment with
constructing work in three dimensions, and one of the most significant sculptures
produced in a Cubo-Futurist idiom was Ivan Kliun’s Probegaiushchii peizazh (A
Landscape Rushing By, 1915; reproduced in Lodder: “Sculpture at The Last Futurist
Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 (Zero Ten)”). This was first shown at 1-ia Futuristicheskaia
vystavka kartin Tramvai V (The First Futurist Exhibition of Paintings Tramway V) in
early 1915 and then at the Poslednaia futuristicheskaia vystavka kartin 0,10 (nol’-de-
siat’) (The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10 [Zero-Ten], 19 December 1915 – 17
January 1916) later that year. At first sight, the sculpture looks like an abstract work
and is very similar to the painting of the same name, which was shown alongside it
at 0.10. Indeed, displaying the relief and painting together provided a literal demon-
stration of the process of “the plastic translation of painting into a three-dimensional
painterly relief” (Strigalev: “An Excursion Around the 0.10 Exhibition”, 72). According
to the artist, the work was intended to depict “the landscape outside the window
of a rapidly moving train” (Kliun: Moi put’ v iskusstve, 84). Using the Cubist device
of fragmenting an object into facets in order to show its different aspects, including
its interior, Kliun cut up the landscape into a series of painted and unpainted flat
wooden elements, combining them with some wire and a few ceramic terminals. The
circular shards at the centre of the composition seem to convey the sense of radiating
electricity, evoked by the ceramic components and the poles around which the curved
wooden elements appear to circulate. At the same time, these shapes also suggest the
turning wheels and motion of the locomotive and serve to fuse the train in which the
presumed observer was travelling and the landscape, through which the train and its
occupant were moving at speed, into a single image.
Many of the techniques that Kliun employed in his relief closely correspond to the
approach advocated by Boccioni in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912).
Vadim Shershevich had published a translation of this important text in Manifesty
italianskogo futurizma (1914), so Kliun could have read it. Moreover, certain of its prin-
ciples and some of the works embodying those principles had been described in a
review of Boccioni’s Paris exhibition of 1913, which appeared in the journal Apollon
(Sillart: “Vystavka futuristicheskoi skul’ptury Bochchioni”). The show had included
sculpture and painting, while the catalogue printed the artist’s Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Sculpture. In describing Boccioni’s approach, the Russian review alluded
to “interpenetrating planes, the atmosphere, light […] the use of heterogeneous
materials within a single work […and] the figure as ‘the centre of plastic movements
in space’ ” as well as the Italian’s desire “to bring his viewers into the centre of the
sculpture and make them participants in his work” (Sillart: “Vystavka futuristich-
eskoi skul’ptury Bochchioni”). Kliun seems to have adopted all of these ideas. In his
manifesto, Boccioni had mentioned that “areas between one object and another are
not merely empty spaces, but continuing materials of different intensities, which we
812 Christina Lodder

reveal with visible lines that do not correspond to any photographic truth” (Boccioni
et al.: “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto”, 63). Certainly there are no empty
spaces or voids in Kliun’s work, where photographic truth is sacrificed to the require-
ments of conveying a dynamic sensation. Boccioni also observed that there existed
“an infinity of lines and currents emanating from our bodies, making them live in
the environment, which has been created by their vibrations” (Boccioni: “The Plastic
Foundations of Futurist Sculpture and Painting”, 89). While the figure is absent from
Kliun’s relief, the different shards of material and the various wires and other com-
ponents seem to obey this injunction; fused together, they form a unified whole.
Through this fusion of different spaces and the evocation of movement over time, sug-
gestive of a space-time continuum, Kliun might have been trying to capture Boccioni’s
‘states of mind’ as well as sensations of the fourth dimension, which Matyushin had
related to Cubism and which were so crucial to Malevich and other innovative artists
at this period (see Henderson: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in
Modern Art, 274–294).
Kliun and Malevich were close friends, and there are strong affinities between
Kliun’s creative approach to capturing the dynamic sensation in this sculpture and
Malevich’s works of the same period, such as The Knife Grinder and Simultaneous
Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on the Railway. Kliun’s sculpture vividly conveys
the experience of travelling rapidly through a landscape, the impression of objects
speeding past, not fully grasped or really seen, as well as the optical and visual con-
fusion caused by rapid motion. The fragmented forms and the amassing of conflict-
ing lines and angles create a vivid visual equivalent for the whirlwind of sensations
the traveller experiences in a world of shifting forms, ever-changing horizons and
constantly altering perspectives. The composition eloquently transmits sensations of
movement through time and space, and in this respect it communicates a heightened
awareness of the fourth dimension as both time and space.
Of course, the subject of travel had been treated by Boccioni in his States of
Minds: Those Who Go, Goncharova in The Plane over the Train and Malevich in The
Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on the Railway. Yet, in these works,
the experience is seen from afar and is rendered in a fairly impersonal manner,
whereas Kliun’s imagery is highly subjective and emotional, literally thrusting out
of the picture plane towards the viewer, demanding the viewer’s involvement and
immediate response.

Futurist books

It has been said that Russian Cubo-Futurism was really formed from the combina-
tion of Russian poets and Cubist painters (Bobrinskaia: Futurizm i kubofuturizm, 30).
This collaboration is most evident in the series of illustrated books that appeared
 Russia 813

from 1912 onwards usually known as ‘Russian Futurist books’ (see also the entries on
Visual Poetry and on Graphic Design, Typography and Artists’ Books in this volume).
In some respects, this title is a misnomer, obscuring the fact that these books do not
represent a single stylistic entity. It is true that they contain poems that often employ
adventurous combinations of words and letters based on the theory of zaum’, but
the illustrations are in a variety of styles and not always in idioms that can be cat-
egorized as ‘Futurist’. In actuality, the books epitomize the notion of vesechestvo or
everythingness, and the distinctive qualities and eccentricities of Russian Futurism
are nowhere more apparent than in these publications (see Dorofeeva: Budetlianskii
klich!, Greve: Writing and the ‘Subject’, Hellyer: A Catalogue of Russian Avant-Garde
Books, Kovtun: Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga, Janecek: Zaum and Rowell and Wye:
The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934). The collaboration between the writers
and the artists was particularly close, since many of the poets, including Mayakovsky
and Kruchenykh had originally trained or worked as artists before devoting them-
selves to poetry, while some of the artists, like Rozanova and Malevich, also wrote
zaum’ verses (see Kovtun: Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga, 11).
The first lithographed books, Igra v adu (A Game in Hell), Mirskontsa (The World
Backwards) and Starinnaia liubov’ (Old-Time Love), were published between October
and December 1912 (Kovtun: Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga, 6). Kruchenykh was
apparently the instigator of the series (Kovtun: Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga, 11).
Yet from the very beginning, a certain diversity in the visual character of the books
was evident. For Khlebnikov and Kruchenyh’s A Game in Hell, Goncharova created
sixteen illustrations in a Neoprimitivist style, inspired by the imagery of icons and
lubki and executed in a deliberately crude manner, so that the traces of individual
lines and marks in the finished drawings convey a sense of vitality, spontaneity and
immediacy (reproduced in Boissel, Ouvrard and Reyss: Nathalie Gontcharova, Michel
Larionov et les collections du Musée National d’ Art Moderne, 67) This approach is
evident in the cover, which depicts a rather puzzled-looking demon. Occasionally,
the illustrations occupy a full page (pages 9 and 13) and sometimes a half page
(pages 2, 3, 8 and 10), but mostly they form a strip to one side of the hand-written
text. This placement along with the Old Church Slavonic lettering recalls the format
of medieval manuscripts.
A more mixed visual aesthetic is present in Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s The
World Backwards, for which Goncharova, Larionov and Tatlin all supplied illustra-
tions (reproduced in Kovtun: Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga, 17–26, and Boissel,
Ouvrard and Reyss: Nathalie Gontcharova, Michel Larionov et les collections du Musée
National d’ Art Moderne, 70–71). Tatlin’s minimal drawings of fluid lines differ from
Goncharova’s, which are also figurative, but lack volumetric and spatial coherence
and are fairly varied in style. Her Neoprimitivist depiction of a seated nude is accom-
panied by a more Futurist rendering of a street with houses in a landscape of pointed
shards full of motion, as well as an almost abstract drawing of boats on water, which
consists simply of a few vibrant lines. This innovative approach is also apparent in
814 Christina Lodder

Goncharova’s cover design, which comprises the title and a single collage element
suggestive of fantastic vegetation, similar to the plant forms encountered in
eighteenth-century lubki. This was the first time that collage had been used by
a Russian artist, and the element was applied individually to each book, so that
the shape and colour of the paper vary slightly from volume to volume. Similarly,
Larionov’s illustrations range from the Neoprimitivist Akhmet to the more Rayist
rendition of Ulichnyi shum (Street Noises). In the latter, Larionov included a bar of
musical notation as well as visual clues to the sounds encountered – a horse-drawn
vehicle, telegraph poles and wires. Lines radiate out from these items, sometimes
obscuring their identity. The vehicle carries the letters “меб”, which may be derived
from мебель (mebel - furniture). In this image, Larionov seems to have followed the
Italian Futurists’ aspiration to use sounds to capture the essence of modernity, create
a synthesis of present and past experiences and place the viewer in the centre of the
picture (Parton: Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde, 119).
In contrast, Larionov’s illustrations for Kruchenykh’s Starinnaia liubov’ (Old-
Time Love, 1912) were very much in the new style of Rayism, which he had developed
towards the end of 1912 on the basis of Cubism and Futurism (reproduced in Boissel,
Ouvrard and Reyss: Nathalie Gontcharova, Michel Larionov et les collections du Musée
National d’ Art Moderne, 69). While there are links with the repeated and broken lines
in Boulevard Venus, the linear configurations are more complex and less tied to any
descriptive function. Although the vase of flowers on the cover is clearly legible, this
is not the case with the image of the woman walking in the rain (page 7), and in some
instances, the lines seem to become the actual subject of the work.
The stylistic diversity and innovative approaches that characterized these first
three books, to some extent, reflected the different strands in zaum’ and Cubo-Futurism
and remained constant features of the whole series of publications. Neoprimitivism
was frequently used in various guises. For the 1914 edition of A Game in Hell, for
instance, Rozanova’s illustrations (which were less descriptive than Goncharova’s)
were distributed fairly haphazardly, recalling the way in which incidental marginalia
are sometimes found in medieval manuscripts (reproduced in Gurianova: Exploring
Color, 45, 46, 49). Some of her illustrations intrude into the writing, disrupting the
orderly arrangement of the lines and subverting the conventional relationships
between text and illustration.
Several different artistic styles frequently co-exist within a single volume, as for
example in Kruchenykh’s Vzorval’ (Explodity, 1913; reproduced in Kovtun: Russkaia
futuristicheskaia kniga, 115–118). The cover by Nikolai Kulbin is like a cartoon drawing
and shows a chaotic skirmish, with a speaker elevated above the quarrelling mass.
Undoubtedly, this represents a Futurist soirée, vividly evoking the subversive and pro-
vocative nature of the movement and its activities. Other illustrations by Goncharova,
Malevich and Rozanova are less figurative, but equally reflect the explosive theme.
These include Malevich’s The Simultaneous Death of a Man in an Aeroplane and on
the Railway (discussed above, pp. 809–810), the abstraction and confusion of which
 Russia 815

complements the exploding forms of Rozanova’s designs, while both echo the delib-
erate dissonance and provocative nature of Kruchenykh’s poems.
Sometimes one artist employed a range of styles in a single book. For instance,
Larionov used a Neoprimitivist image (a fluid line drawing of a barber rubbing pomade
into the hair of a big head) in his cover for Kruchenykh’s Pomada (Pomade, 1913,
reproduced in Boissel, Ouvrard and Reyss: Nathalie Gontcharova, Michel Larionov et
les collections du Musée National d’ Art Moderne, 82–83). The remaining illustrations,
however, are in a less descriptive, more rectilinear style, which was clearly moving
towards Rayism. Larionov also used collage and gold paper to frame his images.
Pomade includes the important poem, “dyr bul shchul”, which “inaugurated the most
extreme of all Futurist achievements, zaum” (Markov: Russian Futurism, 44). In this
publication, therefore, the stylistic diversity and innovative qualities of Larionov’s
visual design match the linguistic and poetic inventions of the text.
Likewise, for Kruchenykh’s autobiographical poem, Utinoe genedyshko … durnykh
slov (Duck’s Nest … of Bad Words, 1913; reproduced in Gurianova: Exploring Color,
Plates 12–13), Rozanova supplied a variety of illustrations and visual accents intended
to capture and reflect the emotional flow of the narrative (Markov: Manifesty i pro-
grammy russkikh futuristov, 61). Some drawings are Neoprimitivist in spirit, while
the dislocated forms of others suggest movement and urban and industrial imagery.
Some drawings are figurative, but others are abstract. A few are quite detailed, while
others are sketchy. Some drawings stand alone, whereas others are integrated into
the text. Occasionally, lines of colour sweep over the verses, creating structures that
interact with or are totally independent of the writing.
The most purely Futurist book was perhaps Le Futur (1913) by Konstantin
Bolshakov (1895–1938), which was illustrated by Goncharova and Larionov (repro-
duced in Parton: Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde, 121, 123). Despite the
poem’s French title, it was written in Russian and was about the havoc caused by
the appearance of a naked woman in a modern city street, arousing atavistic yearn-
ings and leading many men to die from exhaustion (Markov: Russian Futurism, 110).
Complementing this tale, Larionov produced a portrait of the woman’s head with
lettering and a bicycle racing across her cheek, updating the Futurists’ observation
that “sometimes we look at the cheek of the person with whom we were talking in
the street and can see the horse which is passing at the far corner.” (Boccioni et al.:
“Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto”, 63). The drawing of a clock, with faces,
numerals and hands moving in various directions, alludes to time, while epitomizing
the Futurist emphasis on movement and the machine (Parton: Mikhail Larionov and
the Russian Avant-Garde, 122–123). Similarly in the street scene, Larionov indicated
that the three figures (a man and two women) were walking by multiplying their out-
lines. He even emphasized the continuous nature of that motion and the street itself,
by inserting another head and other elements on the extreme right, indicating that
another figure was coming into the frame. As in Boulevard Venus, Larionov alluded to
X-rays by revealing the women’s underclothes. This strategy also served to underline
816 Christina Lodder

the sensual theme of the poem. The atmosphere of urban bustle is indicated by the
repeated outlines of wheels and horses, along with the numerals (presumably a tele-
phone number), the lettering and a lamp standard. The dynamism of the whole is set
in relief by the bold letters “фил”(fil), possibly standing for “филм” (film), which
would certainly be appropriate in view of the cinematic nature of the illustration as
a whole.
Naturally, the books became important forums for experimentation and inno-
vation in their own right, and their visual qualities developed significantly over the
period. For instance, Rozanova’s illustrations for Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh’s Te
Li Le (1914) fuse the processes of drawing and writing (reproduced in Rozanova:
“Lefanta chiol…”, 100–105). No longer distinct, illustration and text form a single
entity, which has been called “coloured handwriting” (Gassner: “Olga Rozanova”,
234–235). Elements of colour act as autonomous means of expression, evoking
emotion independently or in parallel to the actual content of the verses, which are
also coloured. Dispersed randomly among the drawings and texts, coloured forms
help to unify the whole, transcend the conventional distinctions between text and
illustration and create a synthesis of colour and sound, the visual and the verbal, the
painterly and the poetic (Gurianova: Exploring Color, 52).

The First World War and the Emergence of Abstraction

This type of intense experimentation was disrupted when Russia went to war with
Germany on 1 August 1914. The Russian Futurists had not greeted the conflict with
the fervent enthusiasm of the Italians, although there had been a brief upsurge of
patriotism, expressed in a series of anti-German posters by Malevich and other artists
in the style of the lubok (see Lodder: “Kazimir Malevich and the First World War”,
99–102). Most artists had moved away from Neoprimitivism by this time, but because
of its connection with the lubok, which was regarded as a quintessentially Russian
idiom, Neoprimitivism was deemed to be the most appropriate style for patriotic
images. It was certainly the style chosen by Goncharova for her fourteen lithographs
entitled Voina: Misticheskie obrazy voini (War: Mystical Images of War, 1914, repro-
duced in Boissel, Ouvrard and Reyss: Nathalie Gontcharova, Michel Larionov et les
collections du Musée National d’ Art Moderne, 96–97). She championed the allies by
joining Saint George (the patron saint of Russia) with Alexander Nevsky (the national
hero of Russia) and the Russian eagle with the French cockerel and the British Lion.
She also depicted angels leading the troops and the Madonna and child giving them
protection.
Strong resonances of Neoprimitivism can also be found in the ten linocuts and
two collages that Rozanova produced to accompany Kruchenykh’s five poems for
Voina (War, 1916; reproduced in Mason: Guerres: Trios suites insignes sur un thème
 Russia 817

1914–1916, 31–47; 70–77; and Gurianova: Exploring Color, 72, 77, 78–80, 83–84).
While the linocuts employ the idiom of the lubki, the collage on the cover is com-
pletely abstract, and Aeroplany nad gorodom (Aeroplanes over the City) combines
abstract and figurative forms. The tone of the publication is far less celebratory than
Goncharova’s earlier production, undoubtedly reflecting the disillusion and horror
that had rapidly developed in the face of Russia’s military catastrophes.
Yet the period of the First World War also saw the emergence of abstraction. By
the end of 1915, Larionov, Goncharova, Rozanova and Malevich had all abandoned
figuration for a non-objective or objectless style. Rozanova’s non-figurative work
had emerged directly from the paper collages that she had developed for the Futurist
books, and these collages are rightly considered among the “earliest appearances of
abstraction in Russia” (Douglas: “The Art of Pure Design”, 100). Before War went to
press, Rozanova showed several abstract works at the 0.10 exhibition in Petrograd,
including at least one painting and four sculptures, among which were the reliefs
Avtomobil’ (Automobile, 1915) and Velosipedist (chertova panel’) (Cyclist: The Devil’s
Footpath, 1915) (see Lodder: “Sculpture at The Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings
0.10 (Zero Ten)”).
At 0.10, Malevich had also displayed his Suprematist paintings. Acutely aware
that he might be conscripted into the Imperial Army at any moment, he had worked
intensively, pursuing the implications of the pictorial ideas that he had developed in
his work, including his designs for the Cubo-Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun, of
December 1913. By late Spring 1915, he had painted his first completely abstract can-
vases, comprising coloured geometric forms against white grounds, along with the
iconic Chetyreugolnik (The Quadrilateral, better known as The Black Square). As his
designs for the opera and Universal Landscape indicate, Futurism had made Malevich
radically reconsider art’s relationship to reality and had ultimately encouraged him to
discard all commitment to mimesis. In his pamphlet Ot kubizma i futurizma k supre-
matizmu. Novyy zhivopisnyy realism (From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The
New Pictorial Realism, 1916), he justified his new non-figurative or objectless style
(bezpredmetnoe) of Suprematism with the words:

The new life of iron and the machine, the roar of automobiles, the glitter of electric lights, the
whirring of propellers, have awoken the soul, which was stifling in the catacombs of ancient
reason and has emerged on the roads woven between earth and sky.
If all artists could see the crossroads of these celestial paths, if they could comprehend these
monstrous runways, and the weaving our bodies with the clouds in the sky, then they would not
paint chrysanthemums. (Malevich: From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, 29)

In 1929, seventeen years after completing The Knife Grinder and fourteen years after
developing Suprematism, Malevich acknowledged that the Futurist conception of a
painting as a centre of radiating energy had been vital in overthrowing the restrictive
laws of perspective, in creating a new type of subject – the dynamic sensation – and
in revolutionizing the notion of pictorial space. He also suggested that these formal
818 Christina Lodder

implications for painting embraced a spiritual dimension. In discussing Boccioni’s

Materia (Matter, 1912–1913), he wrote:

Man is made one with the condition around him, dissolved in the particles of matter in an abs-
tract world. But, being dissolved, he has grown into his environment in spirit as well as body.
This is why this work, like Balla’s works, contains that mysteriousness that we sense if we look
through a telescope into space and suddenly notice that the unknown forces of the cosmos are
drawing nearer. (Malevich: “Dynamic and Kinetic Futurism”, 103)

Postscript

Matyushin observed that “the climax of Cubo-Futurism came in 1913, after which it
began losing its edge” (Matiushin: “Russkie kubo-futuristy”, 155–156; Matiushin:
“The Russian Cubo-Futurists”, 182). This process gained momentum during the final
years of the First World War. The 0.10 exhibition of December 1915–January 1916 had,
as its title announced, been the last Futurist exhibition. Futurism as a style and as an
artistic movement ceased to exist, but its iconoclastic spirit and fervent attachment to
the technical and urban essence of modernity lived on. After the October Revolution
of 1917, the term ‘Futurist’ became synonymous with an avant-garde aesthetic that
embraced the revolutionary cause. In 1918, the anarchist newspaper Anarkhiya
(Anarchy) declared: “Futurism is all that is revolutionary, rebellious, daring, coura-
geous and wild. No power, authority or influence from anywhere […] Our true Futurism
can only be presented in its revolutionary form – the revolt of art” (Plamen’: “Pis’mo
tovarishcham futuristam”, 4; Plamen’: “It is we who are blind”, 21). The Futurist spirit
endured among artists as the avant-garde applied their art and expertise to creating
a new art for the new state. Unfortunately, individualistic and rebellious attitudes
were not in tune with the more pragmatic aims and propaganda requirements of the
Communist régime – a conflict that was only resolved when art and its practitioners
became effectively subjugated to ideological control.

Works cited
Berdiaev, Nikolai: Krizis iskusstva. Moskva: Leman i Sakharov, 1918.
Bobrinskaia, Ekaterina Aleksandrovna: Futurizm i kubofuturizm. Moskva: Galart, 2000.
Boccioni, Umberto: “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futurista.” Lacerba 1:6 (15 March
1913): 51–52. English translation “Plastic Foundation of Futurist Sculpture and Painting.”
Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New
Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 139–143.
Boccioni, Umberto: “[Technical Manifesto of] Futurist Sculpture.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi,
and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009.
113–119.
 Russia 819

Boccioni, Umberto, Cario [sic; Carlo] D. Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini:
“Eksponenty k publike.” Soiuz molodezhi 2 (June 1912): 29–35.
Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo D. Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini: “Futurist
Painting: Technical Manifesto.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.:
Futurism: An Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 62–67.
Boccioni, Umberto, Cario [sic; Carlo] D. Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini:
“Manifest futuristov.” Soiuz molodezhi 2 (June 1912): 23–28.
Boccioni, Umberto, Carlo D. Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini: “The Exhibitors
to the Public, 1912.” Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds.: Futurism: An
Anthology. New Haven/CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 105–109.
Bolshakov, Konstantin: Le Futur: Stikhi [Moskva?]: [s.n.], [1913].
Bowlt, John E., Jean Chauvelin, Nadia Filatoff, and Dmytro Horbachov: Alexandra Exter.
Chevilly-Larue: Max Milo Editions, 2003.
Bowlt, John E., ed.: Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism 1902–1934. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1988.
Burliuk, David, Aleksandr [Aleksei] Kruchenykh, Vladimir Maiakovskii, and Viktor [Velimir]
Khlebnikov: “Poshchechina obshchestvennomu vkusu” in Poshchechina obshchestvennomu
vkusu. Moskva: Kuzmin i Dolinskii, 1912. English translation “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.”
Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928.
Ithaca /NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 51-52.
Buzzi, Paolo: “Khronika. Pis’mo iz Italii. Zhivopis’.” Apollon 9 (July–August 1910): 16–18.
Carrà, Carlo: “Piani plastici come espansione sferica dello spazio.” Lacerba 1:6 (15 March 1913): 53–55.
Dabrowski, Magdalena: Liubov Popova. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1991.
Dorofeeva, Liudmila Pavlovna, ed.: Budetlianskii klich!: Futuristicheskaia kniga. Moskva: Fortuna EL,
2006.
Douglas, Charlotte: “The Art of Pure Design: The Move to Abstraction in Russian and English Art and
Textiles.” Susan E. Reid, and Rosalind P. Blakesley, eds.: Russian Art and the West: A Century
of Dialogue in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts. DeKalb/IL: Northern Illinois
University Press, 2006. 86–111.
Douglas, Charlotte: “The New Russian Art and Italian Futurism.” Art Journal 34: 3 (1975): 229–239.
Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon. Exhibition catalogue. Berlin: Galerie Der Sturm, 20. September – 1.
November 1913. Reprint ed. by Eberhard Roters. Köln: König, 1988.
Gassner, Hubertus: “Olga Rozanowa.” Künstlerinnen der russischen Avantgarde, 1910–1930.
Exhibition catalogue. Köln: Galerie Gmurzynska, 10. Dezember 1979 – 31. März 1980. 220–239.
Geiro, Rezhis [Gayraud, Régis]: “Predislovie.” Il’iazd [Il’ia Zdanevich]: Sobranie sochinenii. Vol.
1. Parizhach’i: Opis’. Podgotovka teksta i predislovie R Geiro, pod redaktsiei T. Nikol’skoi.
Moskva: Gileia; Dusseldorf Goluboi Vsadnik, 1994. 7–31.
Goncharova, Natal’ia: Voina: Misticheskie obrazy voini: 14 litografii. Moskva: Kashin, 1914.
Greve, Charlotte: Writing and the ‘Subject’: Image-text Relations in the Early Russian Avant-garde
and Contemporary Russian Visual Poetry. Amsterdam: Pegasus, 2004.
Gurianova, Nina: Exploring Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1918.
Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2000.
Hellyer, Peter, ed.: A Catalogue of Russian Avant-Garde Books. London: The British Library, 1994.
Hendersen, Linda Dalrymple: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art.
Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983.
Howard, Jeremy: The Union of Youth: An Artists’ Society of the Russian Avant-Garde. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1992.
Janecek, Gerald James: Zaum: The Transrational Poetry of Russian Futurism. San Diego/CA: San
Diego State University Press, 1996.
820 Christina Lodder

Khardzhiev, Nikolai: “Formirovanie kubofuturizma.” N. I. Khardzhiev: Stat’i ob avangarde. Ed. by

Rudol’f Duganov, Iurii Arpishkin, and Andrei Sarab’ianov. Vol. 1. Moskva: RA, 1997. 29–34. English
translation “Cubo-Futurism.” John E. Bowlt, and Mark Konecny, eds.: A Legacy Regained: Nikolai
Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde. Saint Petersburg: Palace Editions, 2002. 81–82.
Khlebnikov, Velimir: The King of Time: Poems, Fictions, Visions of the Future. Trans. by Paul Schmidt,
ed. by Charlotte Douglas. Cambridge/MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.
Khlebnikov, Velimir, and Aleksei Kruchenykh: Igra v adu. Moskva: Tipo-litografiia Rikhter, 1912.
Khlebnikov, Velimir, and Aleksei Kruchenykh: Mirskontsa. Moskva: Kuzmin & Dolinskii, 1912.
Khlebnikov, Velimir, and Aleksei Kruchenykh: Te Li Le. Sankt Peterburg: EUY, 1914.
Kliun, Ivan Vasil’evich: Moi put’ v iskusstve. Vospominaniia, stat’i, dnevniki. Moskva: RA, 1999.
Kovtun, Evgenii Fedorovich: Russkaia futuristicheskaia kniga. Moskva: RIP, 2014.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: “New Ways of the Word (The Language of the Future, Death to Symbolism).”
Anna Lawton, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928.
Ithaca /NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. 69–77.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: Our Arrival: From the History of Russian Futurism. Moskva: RA, 1995.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: Pomada. Moskva: Kuz’min & Dolinskii, 1913.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: Starinnaia liubov’. Moskva: Kuzmin & Dolinskii, 1912.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: Utinoe gnezdyshko… durnykh slov. Sankt-Peterburg: EUY, 1913.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: Voina. Petrograd: Shemshurin, 1916.
Kruchenykh, Aleksei: Vzorval’. Sankt-Peterburg: EUY, 1913.
Larionov, Mikhail: “Luchistskaia zhivopis’.” Mikhail Larionov, ed.: Oslinyi khvost i “Mishen’.”
Moskva: Miunster, 1913. 83–124. English translation: “Rayonist Painting.” John E. Bowlt, ed.:
Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and Criticism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988.
93–100.
Larionov, Mikhail, and Natal’ia Goncharova: “Luchisty i budushchniki: Manifest.” Mikhail Larionov,
ed.: Oslinyi khvost i “Mishen’.” Moskva: Miunster, 1913. 9–48. English translation: “Rayonists
and Futurists: A Manifesto.” John E. Bowlt, ed.: Russian Art of the Avant-Garde: Theory and
Criticism. London: Thames and Hudson, 1988. 87–91.
Livshits, Benedikt: The One and a Half-Eyed Archer. Trans. and ed. by John. E. Bowlt. Newtonville/
MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1977.
Lodder, Christina: “Kazimir Malevich and the Designs for Victory over the Sun.” Rosamund Bartlett,
and Sarah Dadswell, eds. Victory over the Sun: The World’s First Futurist Opera. Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2012. 178–193.
Lodder, Christina: “Kazimir Malevich and the First World War.” John E. Bowlt, Nicoletta Misler, and
Elena Sudakova, eds.: A Game in Hell: The Great War in Russia: Graphic Art and Photography
from the Collection of Sergey Shestakov. Exhibition catalogue. 26 September – 27 November
2014. London: GRAD Publishing, 2014. 99–109.
Lodder, Christina: “Sculpture at the Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings ‘0.10’(Zero-Ten).”
Experiment = Eksperiment: A Journal of Russian Culture 18 (2012): 159–188.
Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich: “Kubofuturizm i futurizm dinamicheskii i kineticheskii.” Nova
generatsiia (Kharkov) 11 (1929) 71–80. English translation “Dynamic and Kinetic Futurism.”
K. S. Malevich: Essays on Art 1915–1933. Vol. 2. London: Rapp & Whiting, 1971. 103.
Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich: Ot kubizma i futurizma k suprematizmu: Novyi zhivopisnyi realizm.
Moskva: Tret’e izdanie, Tipografiia “Obshchestvennaia pol’za,” 1916. Reprinted in K.S.
Malevich: Sobranie sochinenii. Vol. 1. Stat’i, manifesty, teoreticheskiie sochineniia i drugie
raboty, 1913–1929. Moskva: Gileia, 1995. 35–55. English translation “From Cubism and Futurism
to Suprematism: The New Painterly Realism, 1915.” K.S. Malevich: Essays on Art 1915–1933. Vol.
1. London: Rapp & Whiting, 1969. 19–41.
Markov, Vladimir: Russian Futurism: A History. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1969.
 Russia 821

Markov, Vladimir, ed.: Manifesty i programmy russkikh futuristov. München: Fink, 1967.
Mason, Rainer Michael, ed.: Guerres: Trois Suites insignes sur un theme 1914–1916. Natalija
Gontcharova, Ol’ga Rozanova, Aleksej Kruchenykh. Exhibition catalogue. Geneve: Cabinet des
Estampes, Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 23 avril – 15 juin 2003. Paris: Biro, 2003.
Matiushin, Mikhail: “O knige Metsenzhe – Gleza ‘O kubizme’.” Soiuz molodezhi 3 (March 1913):
25–34. English translation “Of the Book by Gleizes and Metzinger ‘Du Cubisme’.” Linda
Dalrymple Henderson: The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art.
Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. 368–375.
Matiushin, Mikhail: “Russkie kubo-futuristy.” Nikolai Khardzhiev, Kazimir Malevich, and Mikhail
Matiushin: K istorii russkogo avangarda. Stockholm: Hylaea Prints, 1976. 135–158. English
translation “The Russian Cubo-Futurists.” John E. Bowlt, and Mark Konecny, eds.: A Legacy
Regained: Nikolai Khardzhiev and the Russian Avant-Garde. Sankt-Peterburg: Palace Editions,
2002. 173–182.
Milner, John, ed.: A Slap in the Face! Futurists in Russia. Exhibition catalogue. London: Estorick
Collection of Modern Italian Art, 28 March – 10 July 2007; Newcastle upon Tyne: Hatton Gallery,
Newcastle University, 23 June – 18 August 2007. London: Wilson, 2007.
Nakov, Andréi: Kazimir Malewicz: Catalogue Raisonné. Paris: Adam Biro, 2002.
Parton, Anthony: Goncharova: The Art and Design of Natalia Goncharova. Woodbridge: Antique
Collectors’ Club, 2010
Parton, Anthony: Mikhail Larionov and the Russian Avant-Garde. Princeton/NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993.
Petrova, Yevgenia, ed.: Russian Futurism and David Burliuk, “The Father of Russian Futurism.”
Sankt-Peterburg: Palace Editions, 2000.
Plamen’, Baian [pseud. of Vladimir Ivanovich Sidorov]: “Pis’mo tovarishcham futuristam:
Revoliutsionnyi anarkho-futurizm.” Anarkhiia 27 (26 March 1918): 4. English translation in
Yevgenia Petrova, ed.: Russian Futurism and David Burliuk, “The Father of Russian Futurism”.
Bad Breisig: Palace Editions, 2000. 21.
Rowell, Margit, and Deborah Wye, eds.: The Russian Avant-Garde Book, 1910–1934. New York: The
Museum of Modern Art, 2002.
Rozanova, Ol’ga: “Lefanta chiol...”. Vstupitel’naia stat’ia, publikatsiia pisem i kommentarii k nim
Very Terekhinoi; sostaviteli “Khroniki zhizni i tvorchestva” Andrei Sarab’ianov i Vera Terekhina.
Moskva: RA: Palace Editions, 2002.
Rozanova, Ol’ga: Manifest obshchestva khudozhnikov “Soiuz molodezhi”. Sankt-Peterburg: Zhivoe
slovo, 1913. English translation “Union of Youth Manifesto.” Nina Gurianova: Exploring
Color: Olga Rozanova and the Early Russian Avant-Garde, 1910–1918. Amsterdam: G+B Arts
International, 2000. 185–187
Sharp, Jane Ashton: Russian Modernism between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the
Russian Avant-Garde, 1905–1914. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Sillart [pseud.]: “Vystavka futuristicheskoi skul’ptury Bochchioni.” Apollon 7 (September 1913):
61–63. English translation “Boccioni’s Futurist Sculpture Exhibition (1913).” Ilia Dorontchenkov,
ed.: Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art 1 890s to Mid–1930s. Berkeley/LA:
University of California Press, 2009. 156–157.
Simmons, William Sherwin, Kasimir Malevich’s “Black Square” and the Genesis of Suprematism
1907–1915. New York: Garland Publishing, 1981.
Soffici, Ardengo: Opere. Vol. 1–7. Firenze: Vallecchi, 1959–1968.
Strigalev, Anatolii Anatol’evich: “An Excursion Around the 0.10 Exhibition.” Yevgeniia Petrova, ed.:
The Russian Avant-Garde: Representation and Interpretation. Saint Petersburg: Palace Editions,
2001. 71–107
Tobin, Jordan: “Alexandra Exter 1908–1914: Futurist Influences from Russia and the West.”
International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 252–265.
822 Christina Lodder

Tupitsyn, Margarita: “Collaborating on the Paradigm of the Future.” Art Journal 52: 4 (1993): 18–24.
Uspenskii, Petr Dem’ianovich: Tertium Organum: Kliuch k zagadkam mira. Sankt-Peterburg: Trud,
1911. English translation Tertium Organum: The Third Canon of Thought: A Key to the Enigmas
of the World. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1923; 2nd edn 1934.
Vakar, Irina A., and Tat’iana N. Mikhenko, eds.: Malevich o sebe. Sovremenniki o Maleviche: Pis’ma.
Dokumenty. Vvospominaniia. Kritika. Vol. 1–2. Moskva: RA, 2004. English translation Kazimir
Malevich: Letters, Documents, Memoirs, Criticism. Ed. by Wendy Salmond. Translated by
Antonina W. Bouis. Foreword by Charlotte Douglas. London: Tate Publishing, 2014.

Further reading
Basner, Elena Veniaminovna: “ ‘Eto my slepy, a oni vidiat novoe solntse’: Futurizm i futuristy v zerkale
russkoi pressy 1910-kh godov.” Elena V. Basner, ed.: Russkii futurizm i David Burliuk, “otets
russkogo futurizma”. Bad Breisig: Palace Editions, 2000. 17–22. English translation “ ‘It is we
who are blind; they see the new sun’: Futurism and the Futurists in the Mirror of the Russian
Press of the 1910s.” Yevgenia Petrova, ed.: Russian Futurism and David Burliuk, “The Father of
Russian Futurism.” Bad Breisig: Palace Editions, 2000. 17–22.
Budanova, Natalia: “Penetrating Men’s Territory: Russian Avant-garde Women, Futurism and the First
World War.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 168–198.
De Michelis, Cesare G.: “Il primo manifesto di Marinetti nelle sue versioni russe.” Sergio Lambiase,
and Gian Battista Nazzaro, eds.: F. T. Marinetti futurista: Inediti, pagine disperse, documenti e
antologia critica. Napoli: Guida, 1977. 307–326.
Dorontchenkov, Ilia, ed.: Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art 1 890s to Mid–1930s.
Trans. Charles Rougle. Berkeley/LA: University of California Press, 2009.
Drutt, Matthew, ed.: In Search of 0,10: The Last Futurist Exhibition of Painting. Exhibition catalogue.
Riehen (Basel): Fondation Beyeler, 4 October 2015 – 10 January 2016. Stuttgart: Hatje/Cantz,
2015.
Glez, Al’bert [Albert Gleizes], and Zhan Metsenzhe [Jean Metzinger]: O kubizme. Perevod
Maksimilian Voloshin. Moskva: s.n., 1913.
Glez, Al’bert [Albert Gleizes], and Zhan Metsenzhe [Jean Metzinger]: O kubizme. Perevod Ekaterina
Nizen. Sankt-Peterburg: Zhuravl’, 1913.
Gur’ianova, Nina: “Pis’ma O.V. Rozanovoi v arkhive Khardzhieva.” Experiment: A Journal of Russian
Culture 5 (1999): 68–81.
Gur’ianova, Nina: “Voennye graficheskie tsikly N. Goncharovoi i O. Rozanovoi.” Panorama iskusstv
NS 12 (1989): 63–88.
Karshan, Donald: Malevich: The Graphic Work: 1913–1930: A Print Catalogue Raisonné. Jerusalem:
The Israel Museum, 1975.
Kliun, Ivan Vasil’evich: “Predislovie.” Katalog posmertnoi vystavki kartin, etiudov, eskizov i risunkov
O. V. Rozanovoi 1918–1919. Moskva: V. Ts. V. B., Otdela izobrazitel’nykh iskusstvo, Nar.[odnyi]
kom.[isariat] po prosveshcheniiu, 1919. 1. English translation “A Foreward to the Catalogue
of the Posthumous Exhibition of Paintings, Studies and Drawings by Olga Rozanova in
1918–1919”. Olga Rozanova 1886–1918. Helsinki: Helsingin kaupungin taidemuseo, 1992. 18.
Kuzmin, Mikhail Alekseevich: “Futuristy.” Apollon 2:9 (February 1910): 20–21.
Lawton, Anna, and Herbert Eagle, eds.: Russian Futurism through its Manifestoes, 1912–1928. Ithaca
/NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Lodder, Christina: “Olga Rozanova: A True Futurist.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 5
(2015): 199–225.
 Russia 823

Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich: Essays on Art, 1915–1933. Vol. 1–2. Ed. by Troels Andersen.
Translated by Xenia Glowacki-Prus, and Arnold McMillin. London: Rapp & Whiting; Chester
Springs/PA: Dufour Editions, 1969. 2nd edn London: Rapp & Whiting, 1971. New York:
Wittenborn, 1971.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
Freedom.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. 120–131.
Matiushin, Mikhail, and Kazimir Malevich: Interview in Den’ (Sankt-Peterburg) 1 December 1913.
English translation in Alexei Kruchenykh, Our Arrival: From the History of Russian Futurism.
Moskva: RA, 1995. 67.
Panda [pseud.]: “Nabroski sovremennosti: Futuristy.” Vecher 269 (8 March 1909): 3.
Polatovskaia, Evgeniia A., and Vera N. Terekhina, eds.: Ol’ga Rozanova: Uvidet’ mir preobrazhennym.
Exhibition catalogue. Moskva: Gosudarstvennaia Tret’iakovskaia galereia, 30 marta – 21 maya
2007. Moskva: Pinakoteka, 2007.
Rudenstine, Angelica Zander, ed.: The George Costakis Collection: Russian Avant-Garde Art. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1981.
Shershenevich, Vadim Gabrielevich: Manifesty italianskogo futurizma. Moskva: Tipografiia russkogo
tovarischestva, 1914. Reprint Tumba: International Documentation Centre, 1968.
Tasteven, Genrikh, ed.: Futurizm: Na puti k novomu simvolizmu. S prilozheniem perevoda glavnykh
futuristskikh manifestov Marinetti. Moskva: Iris, 1914.
Andrew A. Anderson
49 Spain
1909: The First Futurist Manifesto, Prometeo and the
Spanish press
In approximately the first eighteen years of the twentieth century, Spanish culture
was not at all receptive to the various avant-garde movements that emerged and
developed in several other European countries. New styles had appeared in Spanish
literature around the turn of the century, but they were unrelated to the historical
avant-garde, and their dominance on the literary scene would not be challenged for
quite some time.
Ramón Gómez de la Serna (1888–1963) stands out, therefore, because he gave
early signs of serious discontent with the new status quo and also because, at least
to a certain extent, he sought to act on his desire for change. The magazine Prometeo
(Prometheus, 1908–1912) was founded by his father, Javier Gómez de la Serna, but
directorship of the magazine passed to him in the autumn of 1909. When Marinetti
published his Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism in Le Figaro in February 1909,
he also sent out thousands of copies of the document to potentially interested indi-
viduals, among them quite a number of Spaniards and doubtless all those who had
contributed to his magazine Poesia or been mentioned in its pages (Rampazzo:
“Marinetti’s Periodical ‘Poesia’ ”, 88–90). Gómez de la Serna received a copy; given
that it fitted, broadly speaking, into his set of preoccupations, he promptly set about
translating it for Prometeo, where it appeared, as “Fundación y manifiesto del futur-
ismo” (Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism), in April 1909. Although several other
versions of the ‘eleven points’ were later printed in Iberian publications, Prometeo
seems to have been the only Spanish magazine to translate the entire text as it
appeared in Le Figaro. Accompanying the manifesto was an anonymous commentary,
“Movimiento intelectual: El futurismo” (Intellectual Activity: Futurism), in fact also
penned by Ramón Gómez de la Serna; there he seems heartily in favour of Futurism,
not so much because of the specific features of its doctrine (to which he barely alludes)
but rather because of its general effect of provoking outrage and turmoil.
Gómez de la Serna was far from the only Spaniard to register the publication of the
manifesto, and indeed not the only one to translate it into Spanish, but he afforded it
probably the most enthusiastic reception and remained in touch with Marinetti over
the ensuing months. Almost all of the other early reports appeared in daily newspa-
pers: the first articles were published at the end of February, and others trickled out
over the subsequent months. The majority opinion was that Marinetti must be a meg-
alomaniac and/or mentally unbalanced and/or a consummate humourist (Herrero-
Senés: “ ‘Polemics, jokes, compliments and insults’ ”), as exemplified in articles by

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-049
 Spain 825

Andrenio (pseud. of Eduardo Gómez de Baquero, 1866–1929), Ángel Guerra (pseud.

of José Betancort Cabrera, 1874–1950), Fray Candil (pseud. of Emilio Bobadilla,
1862–1921), Manuel de Sandoval (1874–1932), Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) or
an anonymous journalist from the Heraldo de Madrid ([Anon.]: “El futurismo”). The
minority view was represented by Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927) (“París: Una
nueva escuela literaria. El futurismo”), whose treatment was more indulgent, and by
the brothers Edmundo (1877–1938) (“El programa social del futurismo”) and Andrés
González-Blanco (1886–1924) (“El futurismo: Una nueva escuela literaria”), who
were, not coincidentally, part of Gómez de la Serna’s circle. These articles appeared
between 28 February 1909 and March 1910. Of all the early commentaries, the most
detailed and nuanced was offered by Andrés in his March 1910 magazine article (cited
above).
Just as the stir caused by the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism was beginning to
subside, news about a variety of new events deemed ‘scandalous’ by Spanish journalists
emerged from Italy, such as the Naples serata of 20 April 1910, the fourth serata held in
Venice at the Teatro La Fenice on 1 August 1910 or Marinetti climbing to the top of the
clock tower on the Piazza San Marco in Venice and dropping copies of his manifesto
Against Past-loving Venice to the crowd below (a translation of the short version of this
text was provided). Other manifestos reported on were the Manifesto of Futurist Painters
by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini (Milan, 11 February
1910), and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (Milan, 11 April 1910), again with a
Spanish translation of its list of demands and things to be fought against.

1910: Marinetti, the Futurist Proclamation to the

Spaniards and Prometeo
Soon letters were going back and forth between Ramón Gómez de la Serna and
Marinetti (Anderson: “Futurism and Spanish Literature”). These show that the for-
mer’s enthusiasm for Futurism was, if anything, on the increase, and that it was he
who actually commissioned from Marinetti the second Futurist manifesto that was to
be published in Spain, the Manifiesto futurista a los españoles. This was a text later
known in several variant versions: Proclamation futuriste aux espagnols (Futurist
Proclamation to the Spanish, 1911), Contro la Spagna passatista (Against Passéist
Spain, 1914) and Proclama futurista agli Spagnuoli (Futurist Proclamation to the
Spanish, 1915). By the early autumn of 1910, Gómez de la Serna had received the text
from Marinetti, and in Prometeo 19 (July 1910), a note (Goméz de la Serna: “Un man-
ifiesto futurista sobre España por F. T. Marinetti”) proudly announced its upcoming
publication in the following issue. Goméz de la Serna also incorporated part of the
letter from Marinetti accepting the commission: “I shall condense in that manifesto,
in a violent and decisive fashion, all anguished observations, which I myself made on
826 Andrew A. Anderson

an excursion by car across Spain, concentrating more than anything else on the tragic
aridity of your central ‘table land’ of Castile” (Marinetti: “Carta a Ramón”, 474).
The Proclama futurista a los españoles (Futurist Proclamation to the Spaniards)
appeared in Prometeo 20 (corresponding to August 1910, but actually published at
the beginning of November).1 It was divided into two parts, “I” and “II. Conclusiones
futuristas sobre España” (II. Futurist Conclusions about Spain), and preceded by a
note, “Proclama futurista a los españoles por F. T. Marinetti: Escrita expresamente
para Prometeo”, where Gómez de la Serna, using his pen name “Tristán”, boasted
that it had been “written expressly” for his magazine. In this manifesto, which
together with the introductory note also appeared in plaquette form, Marinetti fore-
sees a better future for the Spaniards, although serious obstacles lie in their path:
while workers and soldiers are striving towards this goal, they are side-tracked by
lust and by the apparent consolations of the Church, and he exhorts the Spanish to
abandon the “black Cathedral” for the light and dynamism of “sublime Electricity”
(Marinetti: “[Proclama futurista a los españoles]”, 521, 522). In the second section, the
tone becomes more down-to-earth and pragmatic; here Marinetti is concerned with
the progress of Spain, which will be brought about by both agricultural and industrial
growth. He also identifies eight principal points or desiderata, including the promo-
tion of militarism and the destruction of archaism, the cult of the past.
There are a number of curious similarities between Marinetti’s text and the con-
tents of the letters from Ramón Gómez de la Serna, in which the latter had laid out
specific features that he hoped Marinetti would touch upon. These apparent coin-
cidences cover such themes as womanizing and lust, monks, ecclesiastical monu-
ments, bullfights, lovers of the past and the aridity of the Spanish landscape. What
seems to have occurred is a complex process of back-and-forth influence and trans-
mission. Gómez de la Serna was clearly inspired by the first Futurist manifesto, and
perhaps other Futurist texts of 1909–1910. Traces of these are to be found in his letters
to Marinetti, with additional, more Spain-specific material added by Gómez de la
Serna himself. Marinetti would then, in the process of composing his manifesto, have
had at his disposal his own fund of Futurist ideas, some of them, as it were, repeated
back to him by Gómez de la Serna but supplemented by Gómez de la Serna’s own
critique of Spain (Anderson: “Futurism and Spanish Literature”, 152).
There is a further dimension to how the two manifestos came to be published.
The founder of Prometeo, Javier Gómez de la Serna, was a member of the Liberal Party
of José Canalejas and interested in recruiting young intellectuals to the cause. The
magazine, then, was far from exclusively literary or cultural, and Navarro Domínguez
(“Ramón, Marinetti y el contexto político de ‘Prometeo’ ”) has argued that Ramón

1 There is a complex relationship between the exact text (now lost) used for the Spanish translation,
and the other known French and Italian versions (Sbriziolo: “Futurist Texts in the Madrilenian Review
Prometeo”).
 Spain 827

Gómez de la Serna was attracted as much, if not more so, by Marinetti’s socio-po-
litical programme as by his aesthetic one. When one considers that the Futurist
Proclamation discussed with some familiarity the contemporary Spanish political
scene and named individual politicians such as Canalejas, Lerroux and Iglesias, it
is hard not to conclude that our retrospective search for avant-garde origins has dis-
torted, at least to some extent, our understanding of the original context and purpose
of the texts appearing in Prometeo.
Perhaps because it was published in a Spanish magazine with a fairly restricted
circulation, and perhaps because it did not have the sheer novelty value of the first
manifesto, Marinetti’s Futurist Proclamation to the Spaniards did not stimulate much
response. There is an article by Cristóbal de Castro, and according to Gómez de la
Serna (Ismos, 114), in Barcelona the authorities tried to prosecute a journalist who
reproduced it with commentary.
While Futurism as a nascent avant-garde movement certainly received a fair
amount of coverage in the Spanish press in 1909–1910, the publication of Marinetti’s
two manifestos in Prometeo hardly caused a ripple in Spanish society at large or
indeed, with few exceptions, on the literary scene. At this time and for several years to
come, Ramón Gómez de la Serna was the only writer unabashedly enthusiastic about
Marinetti, while more moderate opinions were voiced by the critic Andrés González-
Blanco and by the Guatemalan Enrique Gómez Carrillo (Paris correspondent of the
Madrid newspaper El liberal [The Liberal]).

Gabriel Alomar
Gabriel Alomar (1873–1941), born in Mallorca but based in Barcelona and writing
under the pen name “Fòsfor”, greeted the Le Figaro text with hostility on 9 March
1909 (“Sportula”), taking Marinetti to task for presenting Futurism as a new move-
ment when he – Alomar – had already created it several years earlier. Indeed, his
lecture given at the Barcelona Athenæum on 18 June 1904 was entitled “El futurisme”
(Futurism); the text had been printed in book form the following year, and translated
into Castilian in 1907. However, the response to Alomar’s claims and complaints
was not universally sympathetic, and in April he replied in two articles (“Paraules”,
“Sobre l’ affaire futurisme”), reaffirming his chronological priority and at the same
time describing his doctrine as being “almost the opposite” of Marinetti’s (Alomar:
“Sobre l’affaire futurisme”, 213).
Despite Alomar’s own avowed position, in more recent decades there has been a
polemic amongst literary critics and historians regarding the paternity of the Futurist
movement and the degree of Marinetti’s indebtedness to Alomar. Lily Litvak took
the lead in propounding the importance of the Mallorcan, while Giuseppe Sansone
argued convincingly against any significant link (Sansone: “Gabriel Alomar ed il
828 Andrew A. Anderson

futurismo italiano”). Looking at the case dispassionately, David W. Bird is of the view
that the two writers and movements did not share a great deal more than a common
title, for which Marinetti may indeed have been in debt to Alomar (“Differentiating
Catalan and Italian Futurisms”, 14). Beyond this, Alomar valued tradition while
also looking ahead to the future (which grows out of the past), and his primary
concern, as becomes clear, was socio-political in nature. Catalan self-determina-
tion within a federalist State, which is the fundamental theme of his agenda, could,
he claimed, only be achieved by adopting a progressive, forward-looking – that is,
“Futurist” – attitude.

Futurist echoes in the Spanish press, 1911–1918,

and El futurismo (1912)
Spanish press coverage continued over the period 1911–1918, providing information
on new manifestos by Marinetti and other Futurist writers, artists and musicians,
new publications, theatre performances, art exhibitions, concerts, dance recitals, lec-
tures, serate and related events. This period can conveniently be split into two halves:
pre-war and wartime.
From 1911 to 1914, even though Futurism was still in its infancy, some general,
retrospective surveys were published by Padre M. Blanco García (dates unknown;
“El futurismo”) and Isaac Muñoz (1881–1925; “Futurismo”, “Problemas modernos”).
Writing with fourteen manifestos, four books and an issue of Lacerba spread out in
front of him, Cipriano de Rivas Cherif (1891–1967) contributed a well-disposed, major
survey article (“El futurismo”); and Federico Giolli (dates unknown) also offered a
wide-ranging perspective (“Los pintores futuristas italianos”), as well as reproduc-
tions of paintings by Severini, Russolo, Carrà and Boccioni.
Predictably, manifestos received the most coverage, ranging from summaries or
descriptions to mockery or withering critique. There were mentions of the Manifesto
of Futurist Playwrights (1911), the Political Programme of Futurism (1913), Marinetti’s
War, the Sole Cleanser of the World (1915), the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature
(1912) and Supplement to the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature (1912), the
Destruction of Syntax – Untrammelled Imagination – Words-in-Freedom (1913, with
a discussion specifically of the “Typographical Revolution” section; see Critical
Writings, 128), the Variety Theatre Manifesto (1913), Down with the Tango and Parsifal
(1914), Boccioni’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture (1912), Francesco Balilla
Pratella’s The Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910), Luigi Russolo’s The Art of Noises:
Futurist Manifesto (1913), Jules Maincave’s Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine (1913) and
Aldo Palazzeschi’s Il controdolore (An Antidote to Pain, 1914).
Literary and critical works were mentioned much less frequently: the tally
includes only Mafarka the Futurist: African Novel (1909/10), Destruction (French 1904;
 Spain 829

Italian 1911), The Pope’s Aeroplane (French 1912; Italian 1914) and Boccioni’s Futurist
Painting and Sculpture: Dynamism in Space (1914).
Futurist ‘events’ and other occurrences made for better press fodder. There was
commentary on the trial of Marinetti and his novel Mafarka for offending against the
laws of decency and decorum (October 1910 – January 1911), the violent street protests
against a prohibited serata in Parma in late March 1911, Marinetti’s response to the
outbreak of the Italo-Turkish war (in Libya) and Italian military manoeuvres in The
Battle of Tripoli, 26 October 1911 (1912), the Futurist serata at the Teatro Constanzi
in Rome (9 March 1913) and the subsequent brawl, and Marinetti’s lecture at the
Boccioni exhibition at the Galerie La Boëtie in Paris (22 June 1913).
There was also coverage of the Futurist Exhibition of Free Art that opened the
Padiglione Ricordi in Milan (30 April – 30 June 1911), which subsequently transformed
into the 1912 touring exhibition that went to Paris (Galerie Bernheim-Jeune), London
(Sackville Gallery) and Berlin (gallery of Der Sturm). Likewise, there were reviews
of Boccioni’s first exhibition of his sculptures at the Galerie La Boëtie in Paris (20
June – 16 July 1913) and his subsequent exhibition at the Galleria Futurista in Rome
(6 December 1913 – 15 January 1914).
Andrés González-Blanco treated Futurist desires to revolutionize the theatre
indulgently, but wondered if there was really anything new under the sun (“El futur-
ismo en el teatro”, 28 December 1914). However, only one performance was actually
reported on, that of Marinetti’s play Elettricità (Electricity) at the Teatro dei Fiorentini
in Naples (5 November 1913). There were allusions to the famous photograph of Luigi
Russolo and Ugo Piatti in their Laboratory of Noise-tuners (Milan), and mention of
the demonstration of Futurist noise music at the Casa Rossa (Marinetti’s apartment in
Milan) in August 1913. Finally, a scandalized critic (pen name “Roamer”: “Los bailes
modernos”, 28 June 1914), described his adverse reaction to Valentine de Saint-Point’s
dances performed at the Theatre-Léon Poirier (the studio of the Comédie des Champs-
Elysées) on 20 December 1913.
In 1911, Marinetti had published in Paris an extensive compilation of his mani-
festos and other programmatic writings (Le Futurisme). In April 1912, the publishing
house Sempere in Valencia issued a Spanish translation (see Marinetti: El futurismo),
undertaken by Germán Gómez de la Mata (1887–1938) and Nicasio Hernández Luquero
(1884–1975). As had previously been the case with Prometeo, this event triggered some
modest press commentary.
After the outbreak of the First World War, and with the attention of the news-
papers focussed elsewhere, coverage of Futurism waned. Still, more than one com-
mentator remarked on the coincidence of the destructive bent of Futurism and the
ravages of war: José Francés (1883–1964) confronted the topic head-on (“Los futuris-
tas y la guerra”, 11 December 1915), and reproduced three paintings on the subject by
Mac Delmarle (Felix Del Marle), Severini and Boccioni. The Spanish press also took
note of some new manifestos, such as A Futurist Theatre of Essential Brevity (1915)
by Marinetti, Bruno Corra and Emilio Settimelli and The Futurist Refashioning of the
830 Andrew A. Anderson

Universe (1915) by Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero. An account was given of
the Berti-Masi company’s performance of ten short works of the Futurist Theatre of
Essential Brevity in Ancona (1 February 1915); as late as 1916, Matilde Muñoz (1895–
1954) reviewed (“De música”) Pratella’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music (1911)
before debunking his score Musica futurista (1912); in the same year there was a short
notice about the Futurist concert conducted by Russolo at the Teatro dal Verme in
Milan on 21 April 1914; while Gómez de la Serna (“Andanzas”, 23 March 1917) reported
briefly on the screening of Vita futurista (Futurist Life) at the Teatro Niccolini in
Florence on 27 January 1917.
At the end of February 1918, Enrique Díez-Canedo (1879–1944) undertook a major
retrospective of the movement (“Letras extranjeras”), motivated by his rediscovery of
a copy of I poeti futuristi (Futurist Poets, 1912). But the conclusions that he drew were
negative: the passing of time had outstripped the movement’s topicality, its technical
innovations had not proved fruitful and Futurist creative works often contradicted the
programmatic statements of their authors.

Futurism and Spanish ultraísmo

Despite this relative wealth of reporting and information about Futurism, coinciding
with its principal years of development and expansion, no Spanish creative writer
took up its challenge over the ten years up to 1918. In part, this may be explained by
the fact that the whole phenomenon of the historical avant-garde was very late in
establishing itself in Spain. The predominant attitudes towards all the -isms – Cubism,
Expressionism, Dada and so on, as well as Futurism – were characterized by incom-
prehension, mistrust or derision. The situation began to change when a number of
foreign writers and artists relocated to Madrid during the First World War, and this
in turn was partly responsible for the emergence of the Ultra movement at the end
of 1918. Ultraísmo started out chiefly as a reaction to Romantic and Symbolist styles.
Ultra did not produce any unique thematic or stylistic innovations of its own; rather, it
defined itself as open to all modern influences, willing to absorb and assimilate them
eclectically, and the new ultraísta poets (most of them ‘converts’ from modernismo,
as Symbolism was called in Spain) started to look abroad for models of strictly up-to-
date writing.
Ultra, then, was a kind of catch-all movement, and its compositions, conse-
quently, were often hybrid in nature. It borrowed above all from the créationnisme/
creacionismo of Pierre Reverdy and Vicente Huidobro (see p. 370 in the entry on Chile
in this volume), although not to the exclusion of Dada, Expressionism and, of course,
Futurism. However, direct evidence of ultraísta poets’ acquaintance with the writings
of Marinetti or other Futurists is slim. Alongside the more numerous translations of
French texts, the Ultraist periodicals only printed two pieces by Marinetti. The first
 Spain 831

was La canción del automóvil (The Song of the Automobile), a translation of À mon
Pégase (To My Pegasus) from La Ville charnelle (The Sensual City, 1908) in the mag-
azine Grecia (Greece, 30 April 1919), accompanied by a note entitled “Marinetti: El
estilo y el hombre” (Marinetti: The Style and the Man) written by Pedro Luis de Gálvez
(1882–1940). The second, “Una página de Marinetti” (A Page from Marinetti), offered
a translation entitled “Los 4 pisos de un establecimiento de baños” (The 4 Floors of
a Bath House), which is part of the section “5ª Anima” (The 5th Soul) from 8 anime in
una bomba (8 Souls within One Bomb, 1919). The translation, and a preceding intro-
ductory note, were both by Guillermo de Torre (1900–1971); they also appeared in
Grecia on 1 July 1920.
In April 1919, the magazine Cervantes translated into Spanish the text “Il futur-
ismo, nato a Milano 11 anni fa” (Futurism, Born in Milan 11 Years Ago), that served as
an introduction to the catalogue of the Great National Futurist Exhibition that started
at the Palazzo Cova in Milan (11 March – 30 April 1919) and then travelled to Genoa and
Florence; the writer of the introductory note, César Álvarez Comet (dates unknown),
felt that it demonstrated not only the survival but the “considerable preponderance”
(Comet: “Un manifiesto futurista”, 91) of the Futurist movement. However, two and a
half years later (November 1921), Jaime Ibarra (dates unknown), in the pages of the
magazine Vltra, proclaimed that art was always of the present, and so concluded,
rather abruptly, that “Futurism has died” (Ibarra: “Marginales”).
Spanish ultraísta verse was published mainly in Little Magazines. Futurist
traits in this poetry were quite plentiful, but their nature suggests that most of the
members of Ultra had a relatively superficial understanding of the Italian movement.
Consequently, the most obvious area where the impact of Futurism can be observed
is in the choice of subjects for poems or motifs that appear in them – aeroplanes and
airports, transatlantic steamers and docks, locomotives and railway stations, auto-
mobiles, lorries and trams, big-city life, skyscrapers, urban streets and suburbs,
advertisements, cinemas, jazz bands, electric light, guns and explosives, the tele-
graph, radio transmission, factories, sport and athletes – almost always depicted
either in a neutral or a positive light. Likewise, we find the same typically Futurist
exaltation of speed, power and technological prowess.
Most ultraísta poems were written in Free Verse and were printed fairly convention-
ally on the page; stylistically, the chief influence on Ultra was again créationnisme/crea-
cionismo, with its primary stress on the image as the essential building-block of poetry.
However, typographical experimentation, of the kind first pioneered by the Futurists,
did occur occasionally in ultraísta verse (Bohn: The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 146–171).
Marinetti described this kind of innovation as a “typographical revolution” (Marinetti:
“Destruction of Syntax”, 128), in particular with the categories of “ortografia e tipografia
libere espressive” (free expressive spelling and typography) and “analogie disegnate”
(shaped analogies; Marinetti: “Geometrical and Mechanical Splendor”, 139). Given the
spirit of eclecticism characteristic of Ultra, it is not surprising to find in some poems
the melding of Futurist typography with the calligrammatic innovations of Guillaume
832 Andrew A. Anderson

Apollinaire. On the other hand, a thorough application of the features and techniques
associated with parole in libertà (Words-in-Freedom), as laid out in several manifestos
by Marinetti from 1912 to 1914 was, generally speaking, very rare.
The Spanish writer most involved with Futurism was Guillermo de Torre. Although
he later gave Futurism relatively short shrift in his Literaturas europeas de vanguardia
(European Avant-Garde Literatures, 1925), it would be hard to deny its influence on
the poems that he composed and published between 1919 and 1922, and then col-
lected in Hélices: Poemas (1918–1922) (Propellers: Poems [1918–1922], 1923). Indeed,
this collection contains many examples of Futurist subject matter, a good deal of
typographical experimentation and a couple of attempts at parole in libertà (Corsi:
“Futurist Influences in the Work of Guillermo de Torre”, 395–414).
Scores of articles mentioning Marinetti and/or Futurism appeared in the
Spanish daily and periodical press during the period coincident with the existence
of ultraísmo (approximately 1919–1923), representing a return to the pre-war level of
interest, although the majority of the reports were, as usual, in some way negative or
mocking. Mauricio Bacarisse (1895–1931) reacted (“Afirmaciones futuristas”, 10 July
1920) to two recently published manifestos: Contro tutti i ritorni in pittura (Against
All Revivals in Painting, 1920), signed by Leonardo Dudreville, Achille Funi, Luigi
Russolo and Mario Sironi, and Marinetti’s “Against Feminine Extravagance” (1920).
Enrique Gómez Carrillo (“El apóstol del futurismo”, 8 April 1921) almost nostalgically
evoked different moments from Marinetti’s career (and claimed a part in the compo-
sition of the section on typography in Destruction of Syntax), and then proceeded to
gloss the Manifesto of Futurist Dance (1917). Rather belatedly, in 1921, Julio Gómez de
la Serna (1895–1983) brought out a translation of Mafarka the Futurist. Luis García de
Valdeavellano (1904–1985) meditated on 30 June 1923 (“El arte nuevo”) on the nature
of Futurist innovations, and asked not only what had been changed but also what
could be changed in literature and art. Meanwhile, politics began to enter the dis-
cussions. Josep Pla (1897–1981) reported on 22 November 1922 (“Notas de Italia”) on
the growing rapprochement of Marinetti and Mussolini, Futurism and Fascism. An
anonymous writer in España (“Revistas”, 27 October 1923) summarized Marinetti’s
article “I futuristi nella lotta fascista” (The Futurists in the Fascist Struggle, a chapter
of his then-forthcoming volume Futurismo e fascismo [1924]), mentioned the journal
Roma futurista (founded in September 1918) and its policy of political action, and
briefly described the violent conflict between Futurists and Socialists at the so-called
‘Battle of Via Mercanti’ in Milan (15 April 1919).

Futurism and the Catalan avant-garde

The world of Ultra, based essentially on the Madrid-Seville axis, existed largely
separately from the early Catalan literary avant-garde, centred on Barcelona,
 Spain 833

which started to get under way two or three years before its Castilian counterpart.
In 1914, the journal Revista nova (New Magazine) was already paying attention
to the signs of artistic renewal in Italy: a brief, anonymous note about Lacerba
([Anon.]: “Les revistes”) was followed by an article on Cubism and Futurism
(Pujols: “Cubisme i futurisme”) and then an article critical of Futurism (Iribarne:
“Consideraciones sobre el futurismo”), with examples of poems by Carrà (expres-
sive typography) and Marinetti (Words-in-Freedom) excerpted from Lacerba. In
1916, Rafael S’Ala (1891–1927) published an extensive piece on the movement and
its members (“Els futuristes i el futurisme”), rounded off with a Catalan trans-
lation of Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifesto of the Futurist Woman (1912). This
was also the year that La revista (directed by Josep Maria López-Picó, 1886–1959)
began to cover Futurist activities (Aragay: “La filosofia i les ciences en art”); a year
later, the heading “Poesia futurista” was used as a catch-all for various poems
(Drieu La Rochelle et al.: “Poesia futurista”), including one by Luciano Folgore;
in October 1918, the magazine offered anonymous Catalan translations of three
poems (Marinetti: “Poetes estrangers d’avui”) drawn from Marinetti’s recent Scelta
di poesie e parole in libertà (A Selection of Poems and Words-in-Freedom, 1918);
and in July 1919 it ran an informative, anonymous survey of Futurism ([Anon.]:
“Llettres”)].
Josep Maria Junoy (1887–1955) seems to have been the first Catalan poet to
publish compositions where the impact of Futurism could be appreciated. Three
of these poems came out in the opening number (0, dated 1916) of his magazine
Troços (Pieces); these and other compositions from 1917 were collected in Poemes i
cal·ligrames (Poems and Calligrams, 1920). Despite the title of the book, which sug-
gests a preponderance of French influence, Junoy in fact used the term ‘calligram’
very loosely, and the poems are actually much more reminiscent of Futurist models
(Bohn: The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 85–102). In 1918, in the renamed Trossos,
there appeared a translation of a text by Luciano Folgore, “Estacions d’affiches”
(Poster Seasons).
Perhaps the best-known poet of the Catalan avant-garde is Joan Salvat-Papasseit
(1894–1924) who, within this group, was probably also the one most influenced
by Futurism, both temperamentally and stylistically. Poems that demonstrate this
tendency appeared in the journal Un enemic del poble (An Enemy of the People,
1917 and 1919) and in another of his magazines, Arc-Voltaic (Voltaic Arc, 1918;
Bohn: The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 123–145). His first collection of verse was
Poemes en ondes hertzianes (Poems in Hertzian Waves, 1919); it was illustrated by
Joaquín Torres García and Rafael Barradas, two Uruguayan artists closely allied
with the Catalan avant-garde and familiar with Futurism. As a prologue, it had
a “Lletra d’Itàlia” (Letter from Italy) addressed to the Catalan writer Josep Maria
Millàs-Raurell (1896–1971); although Salvat-Papasseit never actually visited Italy,
this purports to give information on Futurist goings-on in Siena, Florence, Rome
and Modena.
834 Andrew A. Anderson

The following year, Salvat-Papasseit published in broadsheet form his Contra els
poetes amb minúscula: Primer manifest català futurista (Against Lower-case Poets: First
Catalan Futurist Manifesto). Configured in five “points”, its proposals and exhortations
were a good deal less iconoclastic than most things that Marinetti wrote; España titled
its review “Futurist, but not a lot” ([Anon.]: “Futurista, pero no mucho”, 21 August 1920);
nonetheless, it was reproduced and commented upon by several Italian magazines. 1921
saw Salvat-Papasseit anonymously reviewing Marinetti’s 8 anime in una bomba: Romanzo
esplosivo (8 Souls within One Bomb: An Explosive Romance, 1919) in a third magazine
that he had founded, Proa (The Prow), and also the publication of an important collection
of his poetry, L’ irradiador del port i les gavines (The Port Beacon and the Seagulls, 1921), in
which he included several visual poems with characteristically Futurist motifs.
Sebastià Sánchez-Juan (1904–1974) was another enthusiast where Futurism was
concerned, but his achievement is not as significant as Salvat-Papasseit’s. Under the
pseudonym of David Cristià, he was the author, in March 1922, of a Segon manifest
català futurista: Contra l’ extensió del tifisme en literatura (Second Catalan Futurist
Manifesto: Against the Spread of Typhoidism in Literature, 1922). There was some
typographical experimentation in poems in his collection Fluid: Poemes (1924).
In 1928 he lectured on Futurism at the Ateneu Democràtic Regionalista (Regional
Democratic Athenæum) of Poble Nou, and the Companyia Belluguet presented an
evening of Futurist theatre in Barcelona’s Teatro Studium in March 1929, including
works by Sánchez-Juan and Marinetti.

The mid-1920s
Over the years 1924 to 1927, there was a growing number of references in the periodi-
cal press to Marinetti and Futurism. This surprising observation can be explained in
several ways: 1. with time, the terms futurismo and futurista gained a wider accept-
ance and often, with this, a looser range of meanings; 2. fifteen years on, Futurism
was rapidly becoming a historical category, and was often to be found linked to other
-isms, most notably Cubism; 3. General Primo de Rivera’s 1923 military coup in Spain
had been inspired in no small measure by Mussolini’s ‘March on Rome’ of 1922, and
there was, consequently, a good deal of curiosity in Spain about Italy, Mussolini and,
given their connection, Marinetti; and 4. Marinetti’s visit to Buenos Aires in 1926
sparked a new wave of coverage.
However, there is very little evidence that, over this period, Spanish writers found
inspiration from Marinetti or the Futurist movement more broadly. Ultraísmo had run
its course, and the Catalan avant-garde was evolving in other directions. Furthermore,
from the end of 1924 onwards, news of the recently founded Surrealist movement
began to filter down to Spain, and this would come to dominate as the most discussed
foreign avant-garde movement for the next few years.
 Spain 835

Marinetti’s trip to Spain (1928), Ernesto Giménez

Caballero and La gaceta literaria
Marinetti visited Spain in early 1928 and gave a number of lectures in Madrid,
Barcelona and Bilbao (we also know that he must have been in Spain at least once
prior to 1910). He arrived in Barcelona on 10 February; he was in Madrid from 11 to
18 February, in Barcelona from 18 to 22 February (see the documents in Mas: Dossier
Marinetti, pp. 47–64) and in Bilbao on 23 February. Marinetti’s official engagements
were 1. a lecture at the Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid, entitled “El futurismo
mundial” (Worldwide Futurism); 2. the same lecture, now entitled “El futurismo en
el arte y en la literatura” (Futurism in Art and Literature), at the Teatro del Círculo de
Bellas Artes, Madrid; 3. a short lecture to the Literature Section of the Lyceum Club
Femenino, Madrid, entitled “La teoría del futurismo” (Futurist Theory); 4. a lecture at
the Teatro Novedades, Barcelona; 5. an inaugural speech at an exhibition mounted at
the Dalmau Galleries, Barcelona; and 6. once again the same lecture referenced in “1”
and “2” at the Ateneo de Bilbao.
Newspaper and magazine coverage of Marinetti’s engagements, accompanied by
interviews, was quite extensive, but the tone of the reports ranged from the coolly
neutral to the openly critical. Nineteen years on, one of the most common opinions
was that Futurism had served its purpose and had run its course. The other aspect that
cropped up repeatedly was, predictably, Marinetti’s connections with Mussolini and
Italian Fascism. Still, Ramón Gómez de la Serna published an affectionate evocation
in El sol (The Sun), focussing on the first years of the movement and tracing its literary
consequences (Gómez de la Serna: “Variaciones”), and the future Falangist Rafael
Sánchez Mazas (1894–1966) praised him warmly in ABC (“Un ejemplo moderno”).
Ernesto Giménez Caballero (1899–1988) had become increasingly interested in
Italy, Mussolini and Fascism, so it is logical that he celebrated the visit. A part of
the 15 February 1928 issue of his journal La gaceta literaria (The Literary Gazette)
was given over to “Marinetti en España: Letras italianas” (Marinetti in Spain: Italian
Letters); highlights included his own “Conversación con Marinetti” (Interview with
Marinetti), which protested against the low esteem in which Marinetti was generally
held, and a poem by Marinetti entitled Macchina lirica (Lyrical Machine, 1928) in its
original Italian.
In August 1928, La gaceta literaria printed “España veloz. Por F. T. Marinetti.
Poema en palabra libre (fragmento)” (Speedy Spain. By F. T. Marinetti. Poem in
Words-in-Freedom. [Fragment]), subtitled “Contra el viento adusto, comandante de
las fuerzas del pasado” (Against the Grim Wind, Commander of the Forces of the Past).
This was the first of the four parts of Marinetti’s Spagna veloce e toro futurista (Speedy
Spain and Futurist Bull, 1931). The first three derived their inspiration from a long and
troubled car journey from Barcelona to Madrid that Marinetti made at the beginning
of February, and the fourth part, together with the accompanying text, “Testamento
836 Andrew A. Anderson

di Negro II, toro di Andalusia” (The Testament of Black II, an Andalusian Bull), were
inspired by a bullfight that Marinetti attended in Barcelona.

1928: Late examples of Futurist influence

The Manifest antiartístic català (Catalan Anti-artistic Manifesto) was signed by
Salvador Dalí (1904–1989), Sebastià Gasch (1897–1980) and Lluís Montanyà (1903–
1985); the latter two were Catalan art and literary critics. Here, despite the Dada-
esque title, Futurism looms quite large, from ‘expressive’ typography to the attitudes
expressed therein. The text is composed primarily of two series of stark affirmative
and pejorative statements: many aspects of modernity, the machine age and mass
production are praised, while a number of traditional features of Catalan culture and
the Catalan nationalist movement are denounced. A major model may well have been
Apollinaire’s L’ Antitradition futuriste (Futurist Anti-tradition, 1913), with its twin lists
of “Rose aux …” (A Rose to the…) and “Merde aux …” (Shit to the…).
The poetic collection Urbe (Metropolis, 1928) by César M. Arconada (1898–1964)
is another outlier. In contradistinction to a new trend that would run from T.S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land (1922) to Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (A Poet in New
York, written 1929–1930) and beyond, Arconada adopted a stance in favour of the
urban and deployed a number of characteristically Futurist motifs of modernity. A
further work that seems to take up Futurist themes was Giménez Caballero’s collec-
tion of essays Hércules jugando a los dados (Hercules Playing Dice, 1928). He waxed
lyrical about new sports, the race-car driver and the aviator, all the while invoking
well-known Futurist motifs such as dynamism, the cult of the machine and the exal-
tation of war. Some critics have seen in the work, written after his 1928 visit to Italy, a
hidden political agenda insofar as Mussolini may be invoked in the book and praised
under the guise of the figure of Hercules.

1929 onwards
Marinetti and Futurism continued to be mentioned with considerable frequency in
the press. Heraldo de Madrid celebrated the twenty-year anniversary of the first mani-
festo with a profusely illustrated two-page article by Matilde Ras (1881–1969). After the
well-documented visit of 1928, Marinetti made more trips to Spain, but these were the
subject of less commentary. In June 1929 he attended the III Congreso Internacional
del Teatro (part of Barcelona’s International Exposition), and in May 1935 he was
again in Barcelona, this time at the XIII Congreso Internacional del PEN Club.
Spanish critics continued to write, intermittently, about Marinetti, but mainly
from the Left and hence mainly negatively (Peña: Intelectuales y fascismo). Juan
 Spain 837

Chabás (1900–1954) spent some years in Genoa as a lector in Spanish, and he col-
lected his experiences and observations in a book, Italia fascista: Política y cultura
(Fascist Italy: Politics and Culture, 1928). He saw in Futurism a clear antecedent of the
doctrine of Italian Fascism and depicted Marinetti as a buffoon and an opportunist.
José Díaz Fernández (1898–1941), in El nuevo romanticismo: Polémica de arte, política
y literatura (The New Romanticism: Polemical Essays on Art, Politics and Literature,
1930), wanted to give Futurism its due, but argued that its potential had been viti-
ated by its ideological turn, and saw Futurism and Fascism as sharing some roots in
common (Purkey: “ ‘Nuevo Romanticismo’ and Futurism”).
The section on “Futurismo” in Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s Ismos (-Isms, 1931)
was neutral; based on the newspaper article of 1928, the author tells us that he met
Marinetti in 1909, and he nostalgically evokes his “old friend’s” (107) scandalous
manifestos and lectures illustrated with slides. On the Right side of the political spec-
trum, Giménez Caballero remained the chief apologist. In an essay in Julepe de menta
(Mint Julep, 1929), he offered commentary on Marinetti’s 1928 Spanish trip, which to
his mind had been more political than literary, but he still dedicated a good deal of
space to Futurism’s contribution to Spanish Ultraism.

Conclusion
In Spain, anyone who consistently read the daily and periodical press would have been
reasonably well informed about developments within Italian Futurism, be it the pub-
lication of a new manifesto or an outrageous speech delivered by Marinetti. However,
no Spanish writer or artist can be said to have become a true adept of Futurism, and
certainly no attempt was ever made to establish a Spanish branch of the movement.
Instead, its influence was felt patchily at different times and in different places. In this
regard, Ramón Gómez de la Serna, the Catalan avant-garde, Ultraísmo and Ernesto
Giménez Caballero stand out as particular cases where we can readily observe either
a strong interest in Marinetti and the movement, or undeniable evidence of the incor-
poration of Futurist motifs and styles into literary compositions. In Spain, Futurism
had an impact on the notion of what constituted an avant-garde, affecting to some
degree how such movements were conceptualized and put into practice, and it had
a certain influence too in the field of poetry, but there is little or no trace of it in most
of the other spheres (e. g. theatre, painting, sculpture) in which it operated in Italy.

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838 Andrew A. Anderson

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840 Andrew A. Anderson

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Le Futurisme. Paris: Sansot, 1911.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Mafarka: Novela. [Trans. Julio Gómez de la Serna.] Madrid: Imprenta
Clásica Española, 1921.
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Muñoz, Matilde: “De música: Los futuristas.” El imparcial, 21 February 1916. 3.
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Domínguez, and Rosa García Gutiérrez, eds.: Nacionalismo y vanguardias en las literaturas
hispánicas. Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2002. 131–170.
Peña Sánchez, Victoriano: Intelectuales y fascismo: La cultura italiana del ventennio fascista y su
repercusión en España. Granada: Universidad de Granada, 1995.
Pla, José: “Notas de Italia: Futurismo, fascismo y acción directa.” El sol, 22 November 1922. 1.
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Purkey, Lynn C.: “ ‘Nuevo Romanticismo’ and Futurism: Spanish Responses to Machine Culture.”
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International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 3 (2013): 64–95.
Ras, Matilde: “Marinetti y los futuristas.” Heraldo de Madrid, 5 April 1929. 8–9.
Roamer [pseud.]: “Los bailes modernos.” Alrededor del mundo, 2nd series, 16:787 (28 June 1914):
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S’Ala, Rafael: “Els futuristes i el futurisme.” Themis 2:18 (20 March 1916): 1–5.
Salvat-Papasseit, Joan: Contra els poetes amb minúscula: Primer manifest català futurista.
Barcelona: Galeries Laietanes, 1920.
Sánchez Mazas, Rafael: “Un ejemplo moderno: Patriotismo y civilidad de Marinetti.” ABC, 17
February 1928. 7, 9, 11.
Sansone, Giuseppe E.: “Gabriel Alomar ed il futurismo italiano.” Lettere italiane 28:2 (April–June
1976): 178–196.
Sandoval, Manuel de: “El futurismo.” La ilustración española y americana 53:30 (15 August 1909): 95, 98.
Sbriziolo, Carola: “Futurist Texts in the Madrilenian Review ‘Prometeo’, Directed by Ramón Gómez de
la Serna.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 3 (2013): 99–122.
Torre, Guillermo de: “El movimiento futurista italiano.” G. de Torre: Literaturas europeas de
vanguardia. Madrid: Caro Raggio, 1925. 239–268.
Unamuno, Miguel de: “El trashumanismo.” Los lunes de “El imparcial”, 29 March 1909. 3.

Further reading
Abelló Juanpere, Joan: “Presencia e influencias del futurismo en Cataluña.” Joan Ramon Resina, ed.:
El aeroplano y la estrella: El movimiento de vanguardia en los Países Catalanes, 1904–1936.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 65–83.
Anderson, Andrew A.: “Futurism in Spain: Research Trends and Recent Contributions.” International
Yearbook of Futurism Studies 3 (2013): 21–42.
Ardolino, Francesco: “Fortuna e fraintendimenti del futurismo nella letteratura catalane.” Stefania
Stefanelli, ed.: Avanguardie e lingue iberiche del primo Novecento. Pisa: Edizioni della
Normale, 2007. 141–164.
 Spain 841

Bartol Hernández, José Antonio: “Ramón Gómez de la Serna y el futurismo marinettiano.” Studia
philologica salmanticensia 5 (1980): 21–35.
Berghaus, Günter, ed.: Iberian Futurisms. Special issue of International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies 3 (2013).
Bonet, Juan Manuel: “Futurismo: Ecos hispánicos (y brasileños).” Revista de Occidente 340
(September 2009): 53–63.
Brihuega, Jaime: “El futurismo y España: Vanguardia y política (?).” Gabriele Morelli, ed.: Treinta
años de vanguardia española. Sevilla: El Carro de la Nieve, 1992. 29–54.
Brihuega, Jaime: “Futurismo, ultraismo e culture politiche nell’area ispanica.” Renzo de Felice, ed.:
Futurismo, cultura e politica. Torino: Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1988. 407–437.
Camps, Assumpta: “El futurismo de Gabriel Alomar.” A. Camps, ed.: Italia-España en la época
contemporeánea: Estudios criticos sobre traducción y recepción literarias. Bern: Lang, 2009.
57–75.
Camps, Assumpta: “La vanguardia histórica en España: El futurismo.” A. Camps, ed.: Italia-España
en la época contemporeánea: Estudios criticos sobre traducción y recepción literarias. Bern:
Lang, 2009. 77–93.
Corsi, Daniele: Futurismi in Spagna: Metamorfosi linguistiche dell’avanguardia italiana nel mondo
iberico 1909–1928. Roma: Aracne, 2014.
Fauchereau, Serge: “L’ Image hispanique du futurisme: L’ ultraisme.” S. Fauchereau: Avant-gardes du
XXe siecle: Arts & littérature, 1905–1930. Paris: Flammarion, 2010. 282–315.
Gómez Menéndez, Llanos: “Espejo e identidad: Marinetti, ultraísmo y ‘Spagna veloce e toro
futurista’.” Diacronie: Studi di storia contemporanea 5:1 (January 2011): 1–21.
Ilie, Paul: “Futurism in Spain.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 6:3 (Summer 1964):
201–211.
Ladrón de Guevara Mellado, Pedro Luis: “Il primo futurismo in Spagna: Da Gómez de la Serna e il
circolo della rivista Prometeo a Garcia Lorca.” Pietro Frassica, ed.: Shades of Futurism. Atti del
convegno internazionale, Princeton University, 8–9 ottobre 2009. Novara: Interlinea, 2011.
89–104.
Lentzen, Manfred: “Marinetti y el futurismo en España.” Sebastian Neumeister, ed.: Actas del IX
Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas. Vol. 2. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert,
1989. 309–318.
Mazzocchi, Giuseppe: “Guerra civile spagnola e futurismo italiano.” Maria Camilla Bianchini, ed.:
I linguaggi della guerra la guerra civile spagnola. Atti del congresso internazionale, Venezia:
Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Dipartimento di Studi Anglo-Americani e Ibero-Americani, 26–28
novembre 1996. Padova: Unipress, 2000. 271–287.
Merjian, Ara Hagop: “An Older Future: Gabriel Alomar’s ‘El futurisme’ (1904).” Modernism /
Modernity 17:2 (April 2010): 401–408.
Pintacuda, Paolo: “Marinetti si rivolge agli spagnoli: Note al ‘Proclama futurista’ (1910) tradotto da
Ramón Gómez de la Serna.” Giuseppe Barletta, ed. Futurismi. Atti del convegno, Bari: Palazzo
Ateneo, Salone degli Affreschi, 4–6 November 2009. Bari: B.A. Graphis, 2012. 175–220.
Saludes i Amat, Anna Maria: “Il futurismo in Catalogna.” Luciano Caruso, and Stelio M. Martini, eds.:
Futurismo. Special issue of Dettagli (December 1976). 25–50.
Jesper Olsson
50 Sweden
“The outcome was established in advance, the opposing team won. Modernism,
or ‘ultra-art’, as it was also called, never got a real foothold in the life of Swedish
art. It remained a marginal phenomenon and was removed from the agenda at the
beginning of the 1920s. Neoclassicism took over, the critics put their bets on docile
colourists and intimists” (Ekbom: Bildstorm, 183). Thus wrote the novelist and critic
Torsten Ekbom in the mid-1990s in a retrospective investigation of the reception
of Modernism and, more specifically, of the avant-garde in Sweden in the early
twentieth century. The melancholy tone of this essay is tangible, and there was a
good reason for it. Even though poets and artists such as Picasso and Apollinaire,
Marinetti and Boccioni were partially known to a Swedish audience in the 1910s,
and even though they left some traces in the work of Swedish artists and writers,
a more powerful and productive response to the modern surge did not take place
at that time. The necessary social, material and aesthetic conditions were just not
present.
It took almost half a century for a new generation of writers and artists to emerge,
among them Ekbom himself, who would explore more fully the legacy of Cubism,
Futurism and Dada. The poet and artist Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) published in
1954 a manifesto of concrete poetry, Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben, the title of which is
culled from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh’s birthday greeting, ‘Hipy papy bthuthdth
thuthda’. It opens with an epigraph from Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Literature (1912): “Replace the psychology of man with the lyrical obsession for
matter.” (Marinetti: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”, 111) This was a wind
of change that animated the practice and criticism of literature and art in Sweden,
manifested, for example, in the surge of Concrete Poetry in the 1960s. Around 1970,
the forces of attraction changed again, and the tradition of the avant-garde, although
not disappearing altogether, ceased to be a focus of attention.
Futurism was very much part of this fate. At the same time, this is just one way
of describing how the avant-garde was received and explored in “our province”, as
Ekbom localized his position. As recent research has reminded us, one cannot con-
ceive of the history of the avant-garde as a strictly linear narrative of forerunners and
latecomers, but must take into account geography, space and local transformations.
And the avant-garde did get a reception in Sweden already in the 1910s. Marinetti’s
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism was, in part, published on 24 February 1909 in
the mass-circulation newspaper, Svenska Dagbladet. In the following years, Futurist
exhibitions and events were reported on and discussed. But this reception was
usually marked by hostility or incomprehension or parodic deflection. Futurism was
surveyed but considered foreign; it was observed and controlled, and, in a certain
way, kept at a distance.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-050
 Sweden 843

Still, this reception is also part of Futurism’s legacy in Sweden. It will, thus,
play an important rôle in this entry, which focuses on the relationship to Italian
Futurism – Russian Futurism will be addressed in regard to poetry – and which also
considers, briefly, a belated, more affirmative approach to Futurist aesthetics; an
approach that brings us far beyond the time when Marinetti and his peers first sug-
gested a revolution in culture and society.

First responses in 1909–1912

Marinetti was, as is well known, a proficient spin-doctor of literature and art, and
he had the resources to promote his ideas. Still, considering the Swedish outlook on
culture in the early twentieth century, it is surprising to learn that the first Futurist
manifesto was published in one of the biggest Swedish newspapers, Svenska
Dagbladet, less than two weeks after its appearance in Le Figaro and other periodicals
on the European continent. The headline in Svenska Dagbladet that day reads:
“Futurismen. Den nyaste litterära skolan” (Futurism: The Latest Literary School),
thus emphasizing the movement’s literary side. The author himself was presented in
the following, rather flattering words:

Marinetti is the name of a young French-Italian poet, a violent and sensational talent, whose
daring manifesto has made him famous in the Romance countries and has formed a group
of keen followers. He has inaugurated what is called the school of Futurism, the theories of
which surpass every previous or contemporary school in their audacity. (Svenska Dagbladet, 24
February, 1909, quoted in Luthersson: Svensk modernism, 67)

The immediate reaction among the readers of the time is not known, but quite easy
to imagine, and the topic of Futurism would, symptomatically, be exploited again
very soon. This time, Marinetti had probably played his part as a public-relations
manager. In spring 1909, both Svenska Dagbladet and the other major daily, Dagens
Nyheter, received copies of Marinetti’s journal Poesia in the mail, and the latter of the
two newspapers was the first to comment upon it. On 23 June, the female journalist
Elin Brandell (1882–1963) wrote about the “childish” and “boastful” Futurists, who
wanted to set fire to the libraries and museums, and who, nonetheless, were led by “a
hell of a man”, who made the latest in Swedish art and literature seem bland. The cul-
tural editor and conservative critic, Fredrik Böök (1883–1961), of Svenska Dagbladet,
would not react until after the summer (13 September), but then he offered a proleptic
retrospective on the movement and diagnosed it as a rich “bacterial culture”, which
would give food for thought for literary historians to come.
These mass media comments were followed up on, as Peter Luthersson shows
in his important study on early Swedish Modernism, by journalists, who were in the
beginning keener to respond to the Futurist challenge than the artists and the art critics
844 Jesper Olsson

(Luthersson: Svensk modernism, 68). An article from 1910, for example, described, in a
vivid manner, how a reading of the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910), provoked a

complete riot among the listeners, more than three thousand people, and many of them artists.
Fisticuffs and cane lashes hailed down. Noise and wrangles in the stalls and galleries. The police inter-
vened [...] Swooning ladies were carried away [...]. At the exit, thousands were waiting for the Futurists,
and they followed them through the streets, shouting ‘Long live Futurism! Long live Marinetti! Long
live the Futurist painters!’ (Svenska Dagbladet, 30 May 1910, quoted in Luthersson: Svensk modernism,
70–71; on the event referred to see Berghaus: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909–1944, 97–99)

Two years later, another article (Svenska Dagbladet, 7 April 1912, quoted in Luthersson:
Svensk modernism, 71), reported on how Marinetti’s lecture at the opening of the
Bernheim-Jeune exhibition in Paris (5 February 1912) resulted in a “bombardment of
rotten eggs, apples, and mandarins”.
It was against this background that a review of the Futurist exhibition at the
Bernhein-Jeune Gallery in Paris appeared in two consecutive issues of the journal
Konst (no. 8 of 1 March, and no. 9 of 15 March 1912). The piece was written by the artist
Thyra af Kleen (1874–1951), who had encountered the new movement in Paris. While
the first part of the review was dominated by a series of negative judgements, similar
to those in the newspapers of 1909–1910, the second part consisted to a large degree
of excerpts from Futurist declarations, which offer not only an image of how Futurist
politics played out, but also of the aesthetic ideas underpinning the movement’s
artworks – the latter illustrated in the article by small reproductions of paintings by
Boccioni, Carrà and Severini. “To produce spiritual situations – that is the intoxicat-
ing goal of our art”, Kleen pontificated; she described the anti-realism at stake and
the “dynamic sensation” of being immersed in a painting rather than standing in
front of it (Kleen: “Futuristutställning”, 84). These were important observations, but
in the final evaluation of the exhibition she excoriated disorder, immorality, laziness
and even cowardice. The Futurists, she thought, tried to reap the fruits of what they
had never sown; art demands talent as well as hard work, and, as Kleen concluded
her article, neither could be found amongst the Futurists.
As we shall see later on, there were also more benevolent responses to Italian
Futurism during the first half of the 1910s. For example, in 1912, Thalia: Tidning för
scenisk konst och litteratur (Thalia: Magazine for Scenic Art and Music) published a
short (unsigned) presentation of the movement, together with a translation of the
Manifesto dei drammaturghi futuristi (Manifesto of Futurist Playwrights, 1911; see
[Anon.]: “Ett manifest”). Still, Sweden was no exception to Holmberg’s observation
“that the European diffusion and dissemination of futurist doctrines was often facil-
itated by the most passionate opponents of the new movement.” (Holmberg: “The
Reception of the Early European Avant-Gardes in Sweden”, 427).
A similarly negative, but often creative response to the Futurist manifestos, per-
formances and exhibitions was articulated by means of parodies and satires. An
early, emphatic example of this was a poem by the writer Martin Koch (1882–1940)
 Sweden 845

who, in 1914, published “Futuristisk dikt” (A Futurist Poem) in the humorous maga-
zine, Söndags-Nisse (reprinted, with a slightly but significantly changed title in Koch:
Dikter, 66–68). The piece mockingly displayed a Nietzschean expressivity, and not
only did it connect with the verbal rhetoric of Marinetti, especially his use of ono-
matopoeia, but it also explored typography in a manner reminiscent of Zang tumb
tuuum – with variations of upper and lower case, different font sizes, and so on.
As Luthersson underlines, this form of parody would continue to be produced and
become part of Modernism in Sweden throughout the first half of the century, and
one should not neglect it when studying its history. However, parody was not the only
aesthetic mode of reception, and in the 1910s and 1920s, a number of artistic and lit-
erary works were produced that exposed other kinds of affinities with the theory and
practice of Futurism.

Traces of Expressionism, Cubism and Futurism in

poetry and visual art
The perhaps most productive poetic parody to be published during these early
decades of the twentieth century was by the Finnish-Swedish poet Bertel Gripenberg
(1878–1947) in his book Den hemliga glöden (The Secret Glow, 1925), written under
the pseudonym Åke Eriksson. The poetry in this collection imitated a new poetic
idiom in almost too successful a way, as the parody initially passed unnoticed. The
target of Gripenberg was a group of young poets and critics in Finland, such as Edith
Södergran (1892–1923), Elmer Diktonius (1900–1961), Hagar Olsson (1893–1978) and
Gunnar Björling (1887–1960), who, since the late 1910s, had come forth as the first
authors in the Swedish language to more fully explore a Modernist or avant-garde
mode of writing (see also the entry on Finland in this volume). Most prominent was
the development of an Expressionist style, influenced by writers such as Alfred
Mombert and Else Lasker-Schüler, the dramatist August Strindberg and philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche. Especially in the works of Björling one could also detect traces of
Dada, and sometimes strands that led to Futurism.
The links to Italian Futurism were perhaps weak, but they could be discerned in a
heterogeneous mix of sentiments, tones, ideas and poetic operations – in the aggres-
sive ambition to embrace something new and vibrating, in the critique of older art and
philosophy, in the celebratory invocations (among some poets) of the machinery of
modernity and a supposedly powerful and virile masculinity. While the former quali-
ties can be found in Edith Södergran, whose dynamic poetry was the first in the group
to be published, the latter can, to some extent, be observed in Elmer Diktonius’ writ-
ings, and were also explored among self-proclaimed Modernists within the Swedish
borders, such as Artur Lundkvist (1906–1991), who, in his first collection of poetry,
Glöd (Glow, 1929), was very much influenced by Diktonius.
846 Jesper Olsson

However, these features can also be traced back to a form of Futurism emerging
in a country geographically closer to Finland and Sweden – and most notably to the
work of Russian Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky. Exactly to what extent Södergran was
familiar with and influenced by Mayakovsky is unclear, but she seems to have read
him, and her poetry is definitely part of the same cultural ‘structure of feeling’. It is
marked by a modern force and pace and oriented towards the future (see Espmark:
Själen i bild and Witt-Brattström: Ediths jag). Similar remarks could be made about
Diktonius, who read Mayakovsky in translation in 1924 (Romefors: Expressionisten,
168). Still, it is easier, as with Södergran, to excavate an Expressionist heritage in his
poems. In distinction to this, the impact of Russian Futurism – and its theoretical
partner, Formalism – was explicitly acknowledged and developed in the work of Henry
Parland (1908–1930), who, just like Södergran, had grown up in Saint Petersburg.
Parland’s literary career was short (he died in 1930 at the age of twenty-two), but his
poetry and prose were coloured by a sprawling and accelerating urban modernity.
Parland was in many ways the most modern of Finnish-Swedish Modernists – and
Mayakovsky had, as has often been underlined, a crucial influence on his work (see
Ruutu: “Diktens uppror”).
Even though one can stretch the genealogy of literary Modernism in Sweden to
some writers around the turn of the century – most notably to Strindberg, whose fas-
cination with speed in some texts from the 1890s might be said to anticipate a Futurist
aesthetics – the earliest, most versatile response to Modernism and Futurism, specifi-
cally, would take shape in the field of visual art. The background to this development
can be located in Paris, where Swedish artists were wont to study and where, in the
first decade of the twentieth century, they could familiarize themselves with the early
stirrings of Modernist art. Moreover, proto-Modernists, such as Ernst Josephson (1851–
1906), Carl Fredrik Hill (1849–1911) and Ivan Aguéli (pseud. of John Gustaf Agelii,
1869–1917), had begun to make an impact around 1910 – the most famous Swedish
abstractionist, Hilma af Klint (1862–1942), was still unknown at this time. At first,
Futurism was linked to Cubism and could then be inserted into a broader concept
of ‘modern’ art. In the course of the 1910s, a number of young painters such as Isaac
Grünewald (1889–1946), Einar Jolin (1890–1976), Nils Dardel (1888–1943), Sigrid
Hjertén (1885–1948) and Siri Derkert (1888–1973) would also introduce elements from
Matisse, Cezanne or Picasso into their work. But the metamorphosis to a Modernist
mode evolved quite cautiously (see Lidén: Sveriges konst). Even though a painting
such as Vision II (1915) by Agnes Cleve (1876–1951) can be designated as Cubist, mixed
with Futurist elements inspired by Severini, Swedish art usually refrained from chal-
lenging innovations such as the collage, visual poetry or provocative performances.
An important factor in this moderate introduction of the New was the pamphlet
Ordkonst och bildkonst (Verbal and Visual Art, 1913) by writer, and later Nobel laure-
ate, Pär Lagerkvist (1891–1974). Lagerkvist’s presentation of the tendencies in France
became influential and paved the way for a formalist and apolitical reception of the
avant-garde, which, accordingly, did not take Futurism very seriously (see Luthersson:
 Sweden 847

Svensk modernism). The drift toward a softer form of Expressionism, which we can
observe in literature, would also mark the conceptual framing of visual art pro-
duced at the time. The fact that the first exhibition with the new painters – held at
Herwarth Walden’s Sturm Gallery in Berlin (April–May 1915) – was called Schwedische
Expressionisten (Swedish Expressionists) should therefore come as no surprise.
If one looks out for Futurist elements in this context, one can indeed discern
them in the first half of the 1910s in the Swedish art world. A figure worth mentioning
here is the Italian Arturo Ciacelli (1883–1966), who had studied with Robert Delaunay
in Paris and moved to Stockholm in 1912 (see Öhrner: “Claiming Futurism: Arturo
Ciacelli in Scandinavia”). He first showed his work at Lund University (14 January –
4 February 1912) and somewhat later, with the title Futuristutställning, at the Salon
Joël in Stockholm (28 March – 15 April 1913). The expectations of Ciacelli’s events
were, thus, quite high, due to the earlier reports on the scandalous exhibition at the
Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. But instead of a revolutionary insurgency, the visitor
was confronted with a “dreamy atmosphere”, as one journalist wrote with obvious
disappointment (Dagens Nyheter, 13 April 1913).
Ciacelli continued to pursue his Futurist ambitions. For instance, he organized a
Futurist cabaret one evening at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm in 1915, which turned
out to be a pleasant entertainment event for the bourgeoisie. The Swedish artist who
would most insistently explore a Futurist aesthetics was the one whom the Swedish
critics did not mention when reviewing the exhibition at the Sturm Galerie in Berlin:
GAN (Gösta Adrian Nilsson, 1884–1965). GAN was not from Stockholm, but from
Lund, and he was not part of the coteries of the capital. He had become acquainted
with Herwarth Walden in 1912 as a student in Berlin and was thus the person the
art dealer had first contacted when he planned his Schwedische Expressionisten
exhibition. However, the Stockholm-based Isaac Grünewald soon took up the baton
and became Walden’s key Swedish collaborator – a move that affected Swedish
Modernism and decreased the immediate impact of Futurism (see Luthersson:
Svensk modernism, 88).
GAN made himself known in Sweden in 1915. An important early public appear-
ance was his review of Pär Lagerkvist’s new collection of poetry, Motiv (1914), and
his brochure called Konst och kritik (Art and Criticism, 1915), which was a polemic
defence of modern art against its detractors. After Walden’s Swedish Expressionists
exhibition, GAN presented his works at Lund University Art Museum, together with
Einar Jolin. In an article published in the newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet on the day
after the opening, he took the opportunity to position himself. With a rhetoric culled
from Marinetti, GAN celebrated “steel and light”, the new machines, the aeroplane
and the railroad as symbols of the present (quoted in Lärkner: Det internationella
avantgardet och Sverige, 127). However, in suggesting an art in tune with his epoch,
GAN still used the term ‘Expressionism’, while explaining that this concept covered
both Futurism and Cubism. Somewhat later though, in the pamphlet Konst och kritik,
848 Jesper Olsson

he declared himself a “Cubist Futurist” (quoted in Lärkner: Det internationella avant-

gardet och Sverige, 128), who looks and moves forward.
During the following decade, GAN would not only incorporate some of the atti-
tude, life philosophy and politics of Futurism into his art, he would also investigate
Futurism’s new techniques and methods. While his paintings employed identifiable
motifs such as aeroplanes and commercial billboards in urban spaces, the formal pro-
cesses at play were dynamic – both in colour and shape – and shared the Futurist
ambition of staging time, movement and speed in emotionally charged images.
GAN was also one of the few artists who would embrace the collage as a productive
method, and if his essays were redolent with the tone of Marinetti’s manifestos, his
visual art embraced an aesthetic that was reminiscent of Boccioni and Russolo’s paint-
ings. Furthermore, in his own poems, he would emulate the verbal attacks typical of
Futurist poetry:

Electricity —!
Energy —!
Glorious, strong, stern time!
Force and victory of manful will!
The motor of an aeroplane rumbles in the air
The artist follows its escape with his eyes.
His gaze is radiant, firm, and free.
(Flamman 4 [April 1917]: s.p.)

The poem was published, with a somewhat varying typography, conspicuous enough
to evoke ‘avant-garde’ ideas, in the art journal Flamman: Tidskrift för modern konst
(The Flame: A Journal of Modern Art) in the spring of 1917. Flamman ran from 1917
to 1921 under the editorship of Georg Vilhelm Pauli (1855–1935) and was the most
Modernist or avant-garde of publications in Scandinavia at the time. Still, it would
never be much more radical than GAN’s statement above, which also says something
about the twisted and selective reception of movements such as Cubism, Futurism
and Dada in Sweden at this time. With a few exceptions such as filmmaker Viking
Eggeling (1880–1925), whose Diagonalsymfonin (The Diagonal Symphony, 1924)
belongs to the international Dada legacy, it would take decades before a more hetero-
geneous and dynamic avant-garde art and poetry took shape in Sweden.

Re-reading the avant-garde after WWII

When Öyvind Fahlström published his manifesto for concrete poetry in the spring of
1954 and addressed the work of Futurism and Dada, it was the first real avant-garde
manifesto to emerge in Swedish, at least if one agrees with critics such as Marjorie
Perloff or Martin Puchner that Marinetti and his peers inaugurated something new
in the arte di far manifesti (see Perloff: The Futurist Moment; Puchner: Poetry of the
 Sweden 849

Revolution). Fahlström’s text was hyperbolic and humorous, playful and rhetorically
dynamic. It contributed something that to a large extent had been lacking in the
Swedish reception of Modernism and avant-garde art. In the literature of the 1930s
and 1940s, Surrealism and the Anglophone Modernism of T. S. Eliot, James Joyce
and William Faulkner were processed by Swedish writers, and a poet such as Gunnar
Ekelöf let something of Dada into his early work in the first half of the 1930s. The
visual art during the same period went through a long conservative turn before a more
geometrical ‘Concretism’ emerged in the mid-1940s. The Futurist view of technolog-
ical modernity had been partially adapted and transformed by the engineers of the
welfare society, who channelled it into functionalist architecture and city planning.
But with Fahlström, the Neo-avant-garde had a fresh start and, for the first time, move-
ments of the early part of the century were submitted to a more productive reading
(see Olsson: Alfabetets användning).
This can be discerned in all the arts during the 1950s and 60s. Avant-garde film
explored montage as well as abstraction (Hans Nordenström, Pontus Hultén, Peter
Weiss, etc.). After the publication of Fahlström’s manifesto, sound poetry and visual
poetry exploded in the early 1960s; and during the same decade, Futurist perfor-
mance found a counterpart in Happenings, poetry readings and text-sound events by
Jarl Hammarberg, Åke Hodell, Bengt Emil Johnson and others. Music became serial
and concrete and, by extension, indebted to Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noises, leading,
eventually, to the electronic and recorded soundscapes of Lars Gunnar Bodin, Sten
Hanson, Jan Morthensen, Bo Nilsson, etc. Novelists inserted visual materials into col-
lage-like compositions (Torsten Ekbom and others), and visual artists cultivated an
expanded field where all of the above was staged next to variable paintings, collages,
installations, minimalist sculptures, conceptual and land art, artists’ books, etc. by
Elis Eriksson, Öyvind Fahlström, Bengt af Klintberg, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd, Ulla
Wiggen and many others.
The Neo-avant-garde and, by default, the historic avant-garde were by this time
welcomed by major institutions of art and literature in Sweden. Concrete poets explor-
ing the legacy of Futurism and Dada were published by major publishing houses such
as Bonniers and Rabén & Sjögren, and State-funded institutions such as Moderna
Museet in Stockholm opened their doors to experimental artists and composers.
When Little Magazines such as Rondo (1961–1964) introduced the latest in literature
and art, established journals such as BLM and Ord & Bild (founded in 1892) soon fol-
lowed suit. That a major press would publish the translations of Futurist, Dada and
Surrealist manifestos, collected in three volumes in the early 1970s, was just the final
touch of this belated but warm embrace (Qvarnström: Moderna manifest).
But, as mentioned at the beginning of this entry, the two decades at the close
of the twentieth century ushered in a colder relationship with avant-garde art (with
some exceptions, most notably in the field of sound art). It took until the mid-1990s
for a renewed interest to emerge, signalled by Torsten Ekbom’s complaint about the
non-existent reception, eighty years earlier, of Futurism and Dada. Around the turn
850 Jesper Olsson

of the millennium, it was once again not only feasible, but fruitful and fascinating to
perform sound poetry or off-gallery actions, or to refer, as poet Jörgen Gassilewski did
in 1998, to the concrete poetry of Öyvind Fahlström as a viable source of inspiration,
without being considered a ‘drunk-driver-writer’ (Gassilewski: “Bobb: Om Öyvind
Fahlströms diktning”, 33). “Remplacer la psychologie de l’ homme [...] par l’ obsession
lyriqe de la matière” (Replace the psychology of man with the lyrical obsession with
matter) was now heard again, echoing between the lines of the so-called ‘language
materialists’ among a new generation of poets.
But this time, the hundred-year-old idea of the Futurists marked something
slightly different that perhaps even points towards a ‘post-Futurist future’, in which
the ever-closer interrelation between man and machine (the “becoming-machine”)
of the last century had come to an end, and the poetic obsession with matter was
transformed into something more open and fluid than the technologies of 1909 could
offer (Berardi: After the Future). Anyhow, the first decade of the new millennium bears
witness to a return of the Futurist legacy in Swedish literature and art. Futurism is
definitely there. It just took some time for it to evolve, and to gain a more tangible and
interesting shape in the Swedish context.

Works cited
Adrian-Nilsson, Gösta: Konst och kritik [Art and Criticism]. Malmö: Framtiden, 1915.
[Anon.]: “Ett manifest.” [A Manifesto] Thalia: Tidning för scenisk konst och litteratur litteratur [Thalia:
Magazine for Dramatic Art and Literature], 17 February 1912. 54–55.
[Anon.]: “Futurismen: Den nyaste litterära skolan.” [Futurism: The Newest Literary School] Svenska
Dagbladet [Swedish Daily Newspaper], 24 February 1909.
Berardi, Franco “Bifo”: After the Future. Edinburgh: AK Press 2011.
Berghaus, Günter: Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998.
Ekbom, Torsten: Bildstorm [Picture Storm]. Stockholm: Bonniers 1995.
Espmark, Kjell: Själen i bild: En huvudlinje i modern svensk poesi [An Image of the Soul: A Main
Tradition in Modern Swedish Poetry]. Stockholm: Norstedts, 1977.
Fahlström, Öyvind: “Hätila ragulpr på fåtskliaben.” [Hipy papy bthuthdth thuthda] Odyssé 2–3
(1954); s.p.
Gassilewski, Jörgen: “Bobb: Om Öyvind Fahlströms diktning.” [Bobb: On Öyvind Fahlström’s Poetry]
Ord & Bild [Word & Image] 1–2 (1998): 29–35.
Holmberg, Claes-Göran: “The Reception of the Early European Avant-Gardes in Sweden.” Hubert van
den Berg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1900–1925.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 423–433.
Kleen, Thyra af: “Futuristutställning.” [Futurist Exhibition] Konst [Art] 8 (1 March 1912): 75–77; 9
(15 March 1912): 84–86.
Koch, Martin: Dikter [Poetry]. Hedemora: Gidlunds, 1989.
Lärkner, Bengt: Det internationella avantgardet och Sverige [The International Avantgarde and
Sweden]. Malmö: Stenvalls, 1984.
Lidén, Elisabeth: Sveriges konst 1900-talet [Swedish Art in the 20th Century]. Vol. 1. 1900–1947.
Stockholm: Sveriges allmänna konstförening, 1999.
 Sweden 851

Luthersson, Peter: Svensk modernism: En stridsskrift [Swedish Modernism: A Polemic]. Stockholm:

Atlantis, 2002.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 107–119.
Öhrner, Annika: “Claiming Futurism: Arturo Ciacelli in Scandinavia.” International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 8 (2018): 107–128.
Olsson, Jesper: Alfabetets användning: Konkret poesi och poetisk artefaktion i svenskt 1960-tal [The
Use of the Alphabet: Concrete Poetry and Poetic Artifice in the Swedish 1960s]. Stockholm: OEI,
2005.
Perloff, Marjorie: The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture.
Chicago/IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Puchner, Martin: Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifesto, and the Avant-Gardes. Princeton/NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2006.
Qvarnström, Gunnar, ed.: Moderna manifest [Modern Manifestos]. Vols. 1–3. Stockholm: Almqvist &
Wiksell, 1973.
Romefors, Bill: Expressionisten Elmer Diktonius. Stockholm: Akademilitteratur, 1978.
Ruutu, Hanna: “Diktens uppror: Om Henry Parland och den ryska futurismen.” [The Revolt of Poetry:
On Henry Parland and Russian Futurism] Clas Zilliacus, ed.: Erhållit Europa / vilket harmed
erkännes: Henry Parland-studier [“Europe Received / Which is Hereby Acknowledged”: Henry
Parland Studies]. Helsingfors: Svenska litteratursällskapet; Stockholm: Atlantis, 2011. 145–156.
Witt-Brattström, Ebba: Ediths jag: Edith Södergran och modernismens födelse [Edith′s Self: Edith
Södergran and the Birth of Modernism]. Stockholm: Norstedts, 1997.

Further reading
Ahlstrand, Jan Torsten: GAN. Gösta Adrian-Nilsson: Modernistpionjären från Lund 1884–1920 [GAN.
Gösta Adrian-Nilsson: A Modernist Pioneer from Lund 1884–1920]. Lund: Signum, 1985.
Edwards, Folke: Från modernism till postmodernism: Svensk konst 1900–2000 [From Modernism to
Postmodernism: Swedish Art 1900–2000]. Lund: Signum, 2000.
Flamman: Tidskrift för modern konst [The Flame: Journal of Modern Art]. Stockholm: AB. Nord
Bokhandeln, 1917–1921.
Hackman, Boel: Jag kan sjunga hur jag vill: Tankevärld och konstsyn i Edit Södergrans diktning
[“I can sing how I like”: Worldview and Artistic Vision in the Poetry of Edith Södergran].
Helsingfors: Söderströms, 2000.
Hertzberg, Fredrik: Moving Materialities: On Poetic Materiality and Translation with Special
Reference to Gunnar Björling‘s Poetry. Åbo: Åbo Akademi University Press, 2003.
Hertzberg, Fredrik, Vesa Haapala, and Janna Kantola: “The Finland-Swedish Avant-Garde Moments.”
Hubert van den Berg, et al., eds.: A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries
1900–1925. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2012. 445–459.
Lalander, Folke, ed.: Svenskt avantgarde: Kubism, futurism, purism, nonfiguration, från 10-talets
genombrott till tiden efter andra världskriget [The Swedish Avant-garde: Cubism, Futurism,
Purism, Nonfiguration, from the 1910s Breakthrough to the Post-WWII Period]. Exhibition
catalogue. Norrköping: Norrköpings Museum, 1 juni – 9 september 1979.
Lindgren, Nils: Gösta Adrian-Nilsson. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1949.
Peterson, Karolina, ed.: Agnes Cleve: Svensk modernist i världen [Agnes Cleve: A Swedish Modernist
in the the World]. Exhibition catalogue. Halmstad: Mjellby Konstmuseum, 10 maj – 7 september
2014.
852 Jesper Olsson

Sandström, Sven: “Gösta Adrian-Nilsson före 1920: Livsförklaring, konstförklaring.” [Gösta Adrian-
Nilsson before 1920: Declaration of Life, Declaration of Art] Paletten: Tidskrift för konst, design
och konsthantverk [The Palette: Journal of Art, Design and Crafts] 47:2 (1986): 33–35.
Schönberg, Karin: “Lyftkranens dynamik och maskinen i konsten.” [The Crane’s Dynamics and
the Machine in Art] Eva Kjerström Sjölin, ed.: Kulturen: En årsbok till medlemmarna av
Kulturhistoriska föreningen för södra Sverige. 1997. Aspekter på modernismen. [Culture: A
Yearbook for Members of the Cultural History Association of Southern Sweden. 1997. Aspects of
Modernism]. Malmö: Malmö Stadsbibliotek, 1997. 63–67.
Widenheim, Cecilia, and Eva Rudberg: Utopia and Reality: Swedish Modernism, 1900–1960. New
Haven/CT: Yale University, 2002.
Wretholm, Eugen: “Gan.” Konstrevy [Art Review] 29 (1953): 156–159.
Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj
51 Ukraine
Mykhail (Mykhailo Vasylovich) Semenko (1892–1937), the founder and uncontested
leader of Ukrainian Futurism, wrote a poem in 1922 in which he declared that it was
“easier for three camels and a calf to traverse the eye of needle than for a Futurist to
make his way through Ukrainian literature to his own people” (Semenko: “Promova”,
617). This was Semenko’s way of marking his own tenth literary anniversary as a writer
and the eighth anniversary of the appearance of his poetry collections Derzannia
(Bravado, 1914) and Kvero-Futurism (Quaero-Futurism, 1914), which inaugurated the
movement in Ukraine. Characteristically impertinent and sarcastic, this poem never-
theless captured the challenges Futurism faced in overcoming conservative artistic
tastes and unforgiving economic and political conditions to finally establish itself as
one of the pre-eminent artistic forces of the 1920s – only to be relegated to cultural
oblivion in the 1930s. A slow process of rediscovery began in the 1960s, which took
hold only in the 1990s, after Ukrainian independence.

The 1910s
Semenko’s founding Futurist manifesto, Sam (Alone), printed in his collection
Derzannia, was an attack on the “primitive” artistic tastes of his compatriots and
involved the symbolic burning of the revered works of Taras Shevchenko (1814–
1861), the Romantic poet, bard and founder of modern Ukrainian letters. The inev-
itable scandal that ensued was construed as a total success by Semenko and his
two colleagues, the painters Bazyl (Vasyl) Semenko (1895–1915) and Pavl (Pavlo)
Kovzhun (1896–1939), but it was also short-lived due to the outbreak of the First
World War, which led to Mykhail’ being drafted into the tsarist army and sent to the
Far East (Vladivostok) for three years. In the interim, his homeland, as part of the
Russian Empire, went through the Bolshevik Revolution, an unsuccessful struggle
for national independence and, finally, incorporation into the Soviet Union. Amidst
this upheaval, Semenko returned to Kyiv in 1918 to resume his Futurist activities.
However, it was not until the advent of the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1921) and
the programme of indigenization (i. e. ‘Ukrainization’, the name given in 1923 to
Soviet reforms that were designed to undo more than a century of tsarist repression
of Ukrainian culture) that Ukrainian Futurism rebounded in step with the general
upsurge in cultural activity.
Although born under the ancien régime, Ukrainian Futurism was destined to make
its mark on Ukrainian society under completely different circumstances. It was in part
the product of the patriotic and even nationalistic trends of the early twentieth century.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-051
854 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

Semenko appeared in print as a melancholy Modernist in the journal Ukrains’ka

khata (Ukrainian House, 1909–1914), where the Ukrainian intelligentsia was mount-
ing a resolute attack on pan-Imperial or so-called ‘all-Russian’ culture, with which
Ukrainians since the time of Nikolai Gogol (Mykola Hohol’, 1809–1852) had main-
tained strong ties due to political necessity and the underdevelopment of Ukrainian-
language national institutions. The growing estrangement of the Ukrainian élite’s
cultural activity from the Imperial mainstream became a hallmark of the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries. In keeping with these trends, Semenko’s
Futurism staked out an undeniably independent position vis-à-vis pan-Imperial and,
later, Soviet (Russian-language) avant-garde movements. Unlike some Ukrainians
(e. g. David Burliuk [1882–1967], a self-confessed “faithful son” of Ukraine [Shkandrij:
“Steppe Son”, 71], who found himself fathering Russian Futurism in 1910 on his
family estate in Kherson and on the stage of the Empire’s major cities), Semenko
made it his mission from the very start to carve out for Ukrainian Futurism a separate
organizational and artistic identity, almost exclusively in the Ukrainian language.
His movement, which centred primarily on Kyiv and Kharkiv, persistently resisted
the hegemonic tendencies of Moscow and Leningrad. In the second half of the 1920s,
Ukrainian Futurists engaged in very sharp polemics with their Russian counterparts
in order to assert their uniqueness, but when the Russian journal Novyi Lef (New
Lef [Left Front of the Arts]) collapsed (1928), Semenko welcomed contributors from
Russia onto the pages of his own publications in the name of avant-garde solidarity.
During the early 1920s, Ukrainian Futurism began internalizing the fashionable and
mandatory Marxist (‘leftist’) ideologies in its own discourse, and voiced strong oppo-
sition to Ukrainian nationalism in favour of internationalism, a tactic that allowed
it to conjoin mainstream revolutionary slogans with a Western European artistic ori-
entation, and to fend off the growing influence of proletarian and peasant artistic
organizations that were antagonistic to the avant-garde. Nevertheless, from its first
to its last days, Ukrainian Futurism remained a controversial movement devoted to
the destruction of traditional art.
While westward looking, Ukrainian Futurism was nevertheless intimately con-
nected to the pre-revolutionary and early Soviet artistic trends that are still known by
the misleading name of the ‘Russian avant-garde’, which was in fact a multi-ethnic
and multinational phenomenon of the Empire. Semenko was aware of the earliest
Futurist developments among Russians and was strongly impressed by Marinetti’s
controversial visit to the Russian Empire in 1914 (Marinetti arrived in Moscow on 26
January, and Semenko’s Derzannia appeared in February). However, Ukraine also nur-
tured the avant-garde spirit independently of Western and Russian imperial centres.
The country served, to borrow a phrase form Valentine Marcadé, as the “cradle” of
the Imperial avant-garde (Marcadé: “Vasilii Ermilov and Certain Aspects of Ukrainian
Art”, 46). Although technically a province of the Empire, Ukraine was home to some
of the major artistic developments of the twentieth century. For example, before the
October Revolution, David Burliuk and Alexandra Exter (1882–1949) organized the
 Ukraine 855

seminal exhibition Zveno (Link, 1908) in Kyiv. Writing about the early Soviet period,
Andrei Krusanov has observed:

In general, the art of the Left (avant-garde) in Ukraine from 1917 to 1922 represents a phenome-
non that is not at all provincial, especially if we take into consideration the rôle played in its
history by natives (vykhodtsy) from Ukraine, both in the pre-revolutionary period and the subse-
quent 1920s. (Krusanov: Russkii avangard. Vol. 2, part 2, 273)

During the early years of Ukrainian Futurism, Kyiv functioned as a multicultural epicenter
of abstraction, theatrical life, graphic art and ballet (see Makaryk and Tkacz: Modernism
in Kyiv, e.g. 167). It served as an early locus of activity for seminal figures such as Kazimir
Malevich (Kazymyr Malevych, 1889–1935), whose impact would be felt well beyond
Ukrainian and Soviet borders. Similarly, Alexander Archipenko (Olexandr Arkhipenko,
1887–1964), who was born in Kyiv like Malevich, left for Paris in 1908, where he had an
indelible impact on the avant-garde, including Italian Futurism (see Susak: Ukrainian
Artists in Paris, 67–73; Leshko: Alexander Archipenko). Maria Elena Versari judged:

For Marinetti and even Boccioni, Archipenko was and had to be publicly celebrated as an ally in
the modernist cause. At the International Futurist Open Exhibition (1914), he was presented as a
member of the group of “Russian” Futurists, along with Alexandra Exter, Nicolai Kulbin and Olga
Rozanova. (Versari: “The Style and Status of the Modern Artist”, 17)

She concludes:

The influence of Alexander Archipenko is perhaps the most far-reaching and powerful exerted
by a single non-Futurist artist in the history of Futurism […]. Through (a) constant re-enacting
of a dialogue with Archipenko, the (Italian) Futurists, in the end, structured their identity as a
movement, measuring his style and status within a canon of modernity that they were trying to
build for themselves. (Versari: “The Style and Status of the Modern Artist”, 25).

Kyiv was for a time also home to Vladimir Tatlin (1885–1953), born in Kharkiv as
Volodymyr Ievhrafovych Tatlin. He taught for two years (1925–1927) at the National
Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture, during which time he designed the cover
for the Ukrainian Futurist publication Zustrich na perekhresnii stantsii: Rozmova
tr’okh (Meeting at the Crossing: A Three-way Conversation, 1927, by Mykola Bazhan,
Mykhail Semenko and Geo Shkurupii). Kazimir Malevich returned to his native city
from 1928 to 1930 to teach at the Kyiv Art Institute, publishing twelve articles on art
in the Futurist journal Nova generatsiia, which began appearing in Kharkiv in 1927.
In fact, if Kyiv was associated with the founding and early history of Ukrainian
Futurism, Kharkiv became the city where Futurism reached its apogee and attained
its highest achievements. In the 1920s (and until 1934), this city was the political
capital of Ukraine and a major industrial centre, representing a better match for a
movement that celebrated speed, urban life and the new technological age.
856 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

When Semenko returned to Kyiv from the Far East in late 1917, he found himself
in the autonomous Ukrainian National Republic, which in January 1918 broke from
Bolshevik Russia and briefly became independent. This political gesture brought
on a frenetic struggle for control, involving foreign military interventions on the
part of Germany, Poland and Russia. In 1921, the western Ukrainian lands fell to
Poland, while the central and eastern part went to Russia. In 1922, Ukraine became
the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and a founding member of the USSR. During
this pre-Soviet period, which encompassed the Russian Bolshevik occupation of Kyiv,
starting in February 1919, Ukrainian Futurism, like all cultural life, was severely con-
strained. Futurism managed nevertheless to make some inroads into an environment
still dominated by Modernists and Symbolists, primarily by voicing opposition to
them, publishing collections of Futurist poetry (mostly by Semenko), participating
in short-lived periodical publications and attempting to create avant-garde literary
groups and alliances.

After the Great War and the Russian Revolution

In January 1919, Semenko and four colleagues launched the Flamingo art group. It pub-
lished three books of Semenko’s poetry, two covers of which were marked with wild,
almost indecipherable typographical designs by Anatol (Anatolii) Petrytskyi (1895–
1964). The latter artist would remain Semenko’s faithful colleague all the way into
the late 1920s, contributing to the bold design that distinguished Ukrainian Futurist
publications. Futurism’s star rose in 1919 in particular, because Semenko became the
editor of the Ukrainian-language literary journal Mystetstvo (Art), which was made
possible by his close association with a Ukrainian socialist-revolutionary party, the
Borotbists. Mystetstvo, of which six issues where published, overtly recognized the
new political and proletarian reality imposed by Russia. Although the journal was
never a strictly Futurist publication – it was designed to serve as a channel of expres-
sion for a broad spectrum of Ukrainian writers and artists – it did publish a significant
number of Futurist works and helped convert some Symbolist writers, such as Oleksa
Slisarenko (1891–1937), to the new radical faith. Under very difficult circumstances,
Semenko also published Al’manakh tr’okh (Almanac of the Three, 1920) with Oleksa
Slisarenko and Mykola Liubchenko (pseud. of Kost Kotko, 1896–1937). After escap-
ing from war-ravaged Kyiv (which was briefly held by the anti-Bolshevik White Army
of General Denikin), in Kharkiv he formed a group called the Udrana hrupa poetiv-
futurystiv (Poet-Futurists’ Shock Brigade).
The most successful of his efforts proved to be the Association of Panfuturists,
known as Aspanfut, which he launched on his return to Kyiv in November 1921. This
organization marked the beginning of a new and sustained phase of activity for the
movement, which for several years exerted strong influence on the ‘cultural front’, for
 Ukraine 857

which they were repaid by attacks from proletarian writers and the Neo-classicists.
By now, Semenko had around him a reliable cohort of participants and supporters,
writers who engaged in poetry as well as prose, virtually all of whom were refugees
from the Modernist and Symbolist camps. They included Iulian Shpol (pseud. of
Mykhailo Ialovyi, 1895–1937), Oleksa Slisarenko, Mykola Tereshchenko (1898–1966),
Vasyl Aleshko (1889–1944), Geo Shkurupii (1903–1937), Andrii Chuzhyi (1897–1989)
and Mykola (Nik) Bazhan (1904–1983). Two publications, both printed in 1922, came
to exemplify the organization: Semafor u maibutnie: Aparat panfuturystiv (Semaphore
into the Future: Apparatus of the Panfuturists) and Katafalk iskusstva (Catafalque of
Art), subtitled “a daily journal of the Panfuturists-Destructivists”.

Panfuturism and proletarian culture

It was at this time that Ukrainian Futurists began to codify their positions into a
theory called ‘Panfuturism’, which was defined as being “at once Futurism, Cubism,
Expressionism and Dadaism – but […] not simply a synthesis of these useful
things” (Semafor u Maibutnie 1 [May 1922], 12). As a work in progress, the theory
was elaborated during the second half of the 1920s, sometimes under the duress
of Futurist critics. Essentially, Panfuturism tried to account for the appearance of
the avant-garde and justify its ongoing relevance, especially in the Soviet setting.
The theory traced avant-gardism back to an artistic crisis that had begun in France
with Impressionism and was soon made manifest by Italian Futurism, suggesting
that art was dying and that a new historical phase of creativity was emerging. The
Panfuturists argued that the new Soviet States, among them Ukraine, were obliged
to recognize this truth and choose the correct historical path. Culture, in their view,
was a complex, ever-changing system in which some domains were ‘constructing’
and others ‘deconstructing’. To the extent that art was in a degenerative phase, it was
important to speed up this process through destructive activity while also preparing
the ground for the emergence of a new system, a meta-art. This was the goal of the
avant-gardes, which needed to go beyond mere formalistic experimentation. Since it
was clear that technology and science were the new emergent domains that would
structure society, the new system, the new art or meta-art, was to align itself with
principles of rationalism and reject emotion and religion, which had buttressed the
existence of art up to this point.
The Panfuturists allied themselves with the radical and experimental theatre of
Les Kurbas and artists such as Vadym Meller (1884–1962) and his wife Henke Meller
(Nina Genke-Meller, 1893–1954), both of whom created cover designs for Futurist pub-
lications. The pressure on the Futurists, however, to renounce their ‘anarchic indi-
vidualism’ (as opponents dubbed it) and toe the Party line was immense. This led to
attempts within Aspanfut to develop a more ‘constructive’, civic-minded and utilitarian
858 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

approach to art with a focus on the masses in the hope of deflecting criticism. This
resulted, in 1924, in the founding of Asotsiatsiia robitnykiv komunistychnoi kul’tury
(AsKK, or Association of Communist Culture), modelled on organizations such as Hart
(Tempering) and Pluh (Plow) that tried to appeal to large swathes of the worker and
peasant population by subordinating artistic and literary activities to their levels of
interest and education. Futurists, too, began organizing cells in small towns and vil-
lages; they appeared before workers with speeches about art and read their works at
large public gatherings. In 1924, Semenko published a long article entitled “Pro zas-
tosuvannia leninizmu na 3-mu fronti” (On Applying Leninism to the Third Front), in
which he elaborated on a modified and expanded theory of Panfuturism. Still intent
on eventually weaning the masses off high art, the Futurists were nonetheless willing
to accept that they lived in a transitional age that required some compromises if their
eventual goals were to be attained. Instead of art, they emphasized certain ‘crafts’ like
short stories, rhetoric, posters, film and photography. Principles of rationalism and
the scientific organization of labour were seen as useful intermediary steps to move
readers away from the emotional aspects in art. Although a ‘constructive’ social and
cultural organization, AsKK did preserve many of its Futurist, ‘destructive’ features
and elements. In fact, after only a short time, interest in social activities waned among
its core Futurist members who longed to return to publishing and writing – that is, to
strictly literary and artistic matters – and away from mass activities. Following a com-
plicated crisis within AsKK, the organization rather abruptly terminated its existence
in April 1925.

Third-wave Futurism in Ukraine

Between the demise of AsKK in April 1925 and October 1927, there was no organized
Ukrainian Futurist movement. Even before the official dissolution of AsKK, Semenko
had left for Odesa (Russian: Odessa), where he was employed by the All-Ukrainian
Photo-Cinema Administration (VUFKU), the Ukrainian motion picture industry,
which was about to be made famous through the films of Alexander Dovzhenko
(1894–1956). Semenko summarized: “I worked conscientiously. I did whatever was
possible at that time to integrate this industry into the Ukrainian cultural process. I
think I did a lot” (“My i kino”, 6). Through Semenko’s efforts, some of his closest lit-
erary allies also came to work for VUFKU as editors or scriptwriters. Even Dovzhenko
was associated very briefly with the Futurist publication Bumeranh (Boomerang,
1927), but distanced himself from his friend Semenko soon after its appearance due
to its controversial nature.
Ukrainian Futurism reached the pinnacle of its success in Kharkiv between
October 1927 and December 1930, the years during which Semenko was editor of
 Ukraine 859

the journal Nova generatsiia (New Generation) and Geo Shkurupii edited a sister-
publication in Kyiv, Avanhard: Al’manakh proletars’kykh myttsiv Novoi generatsii
(Avant-garde: Almanac of the Proletarian Artists of the New Generation), of which
two issues appeared in 1930. The State Publishing House (DVU) printed Nova gen-
eratsiia and gave the Futurists for the first time official support. At its peak, the
journal named over eighty associates on its cover, although the actual number of
contributors was smaller. They included staunch Futurists as well as more generally
experimentally-inclined authors exhibiting various degrees of avant-gardism. The
journal covered the whole spectrum of avant-garde activities, from painting, archi-
tecture, theatre and film to literature. The central figures of the journal were Mykhail
Semenko, Geo Shkurupii and Oleksii Poltoratskyi (1905–1977). Leonid Skrypnyk
(1893–1929) and Oleksa Vlyzko (1908–1934) closely supported them. Notable con-
tributors included Andrii Chuzhyi, Oleksandr Mariamov (1909–1972), Dmytro Buzko
(1891–1943), Ievhen Iavorovskyi, (1893–1954), Geo Koliada (1904–1941), Oleksandr
Korzh (1903–1984), Favst Lopatynskyi (1899–1937) and Leonid Nedolia (1897–1963),
amongst others. Nova generatsiia carried frequent reports on artistic developments
in Western Europe and often replicated its titles and subtitles in French, German,
English and even Esperanto, providing occasional foreign-language abstracts for
some articles. It touted an international editorial board, which included such illustri-
ous figures as Herwarth Walden, Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Enrico Prampolini, Johannes R.
Becher and Rudolf Leonhard, as well as several representatives from Russia. Actual
contributions from these foreigners were negligible, but Walden, for example, con-
tributed to the journal’s pages in 1928.
Nova generatsiia was both an organ of the Futurist movement and a magazine
devoted to avant-garde trends in general, vacillating between a maximally
‘destructive’ or experimental position in art and the willingness to compromise
with proletarian and Party directives so as to maintain a place of influence in the
culture of the period. The concessions were most obviously political, as when the
journal sided ideologically against the so-called ‘Right’ – that is, literary groups
such as Vil’na akademiia proletars’koi literatury (VAPLITE, or Free Academy of
Proletarian Literature) that tended to emphasize a Ukrainian national and aesthetic
approach to art instead of the requisite class and ideological orientations demanded
by the Party. As believers in high art, writers in VAPLITE were popular targets of
the Futurists. Even as Nova generatsiia paid lip service to the requirement to attack
‘rightist’ trends in the arts, it stubbornly defended its right to an independent style,
namely, to define itself through innovative formal experimentation in the avant-
garde tradition. It saw itself justified in criticizing proletarian writers for their artis-
tic (Realist) conservatism. However, such a balancing act was difficult to maintain
for long. What praise the journal won for its ideological positions, it tended to loose
on account of its Formalist bourgeois artistic practices, which were seen as siding
with the capitalist West.
860 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

As late as 1929 and 1930, Nova generatsiia was declaring on its title pages:

Art as an irrational category of culture is dying. The gradual process of art’s demise has been
marked in recent decades by the destructive current. The rational demands placed upon art
today are redirecting it into the constructive path of functional art. Functional art plays a soci-
ally useful rôle in the general process of socialist construction within the universal orientation
toward communism. Nova generatsiia unites the destructive stage of art, which is drawing
to a close, with the constructive, which is beginning, [and] considers both these stages as
component parts of a single dialectical process in the development of the left (avant-garde)
formation of art.

However, as the 1920s wore on and the first signs of Stalinism began to take hold in
earnest, the Futurists found themselves under ever-increasing pressure to abandon
their ways. As an organized artistic entity, New Generation mounted the longest and
fiercest resistance to self-liquidation, but ultimately capitulated in December 1930,
like other organizations before this group. Mykhail Semenko was executed on 24
October 1937, accused of ‘anti-Soviet agitation’. Many other Futurists and avant-garde
poets also became victims of the Soviet régime.

Literary praxis
The hallmarks of Ukrainian Futurism were experimentation, denial of tradition and
the pursuit of the New. In the broadest sense, it was a highly formalistic movement,
with a rationalist philosophy and aversion to emotionalism. It embraced innovative
typography (e. g. combining Latin and Cyrillic scripts), bold page layout, visual poetry
(and even visual layouts of prose) and acoustic poetry. A favourite tactic was the cre-
ation of hybrid or synthesized genres. Its prose practice ranged from literatura faktu
(Literature of Fact) to the promotion of strongly plotted, self-reflective prose, which
was seen as a necessary response to nineteenth-century Realism and the emergent
Socialist Realism of the day, which the Futurists treated as ‘boring’ fiction.
Semenko’s earliest work and manifestos were calculated to undermine contem-
porary literary authorities, both in the broadest sense and, more especially, in order
to erode the authority of the classics of Ukrainian literature like the work of Taras
Shevchenko (1814–1861). Semenko’s work was a revolution in poetic metre, thematics,
tone and the social function of literature. Unlike his predecessors, his poetry did not
seem to have any grand national or social purpose or goal, avoided edifying topics
and was, in fact, often demonstratively banal and annoyingly ironic or snide. He dis-
mantled the mellifluous lyrics devoted to Beauty as practiced by the Modernists and
Symbolists, by engaging in colloquial, sometimes rather coarse, accentual verse that
had tendencies towards vers libre. His poetic language was sometimes deliberately
substandard, was full of neologisms and introduced the reader to the city, modern
 Ukraine 861

transport and industry. Semenko wrote his share of intimate lyrics as well, but these
were permeated with self-conscious irony and filtered through various unheroic
masks or personae (Pierrot, for example). In the mid 1920s, his poetry turned to topical
issues dealing with literary and political polemics. In these verses he succeeded in
establishing a highly personal, boisterous tone and vision, far from the officious
poetry practiced by many proletarian writers. He was also a successful practitioner
of visual poetry, called poezomaliarstvo (poetry-painting), which he created in two
series between 1920 and 1922. The first, Kablepoema za okean (Cablepoem beyond
the Sea), was realized in black and red colours. Among the works of the second
series, Moia mozaika (My Mosaic), was a poem paying homage to Malevich, entitled
Suprepoezia (Suprematist Poem), that imitated the painter’s famous rectangles and
squares. Semenko was a very prolific poet, and the first ‘collected works’ appeared in
1924 under the plagiarized and immodest title Kobzar (taken from Shevchenko’s 1840
collection and meaning ‘The Bard’). Semenko had defined art in 1914 as a process
and was less concerned with leaving a permanent record of his best work than in
showing his evolution as a writer. As a result, this massive anthology of almost 650
pages became an uninhibited exhibition of both his sophistication and his naïvety.
Futurism produced a number of good poets, among whom Geo Shkurupii, Oleksa
Slisarenko and Mykola Bazhan might be named as the most representative examples.
Shkurupii was Semenko’s closest and most loyal collaborator, making his poetic
début in 1922 with a small, strangely titled book of poetry, Psykhetozy (Psychetosis),
subtitled Vitryna tretia (Display Window Three). A year later, Baraban (Drum)
appeared as “Display Window Two”. The first collection struck readers with its erot-
icism and narcissism, but what went unnoticed was that it was also a carefully con-
structed book that melded visual elements, such as images and typography, with text
(e. g. slogans), to praise machines or to make a political statement. Like Semenko and
others, Shkurupii shied away from emotions and sentimentality and had a propen-
sity for grotesque images. His poetry has a clearly ‘destructive’ (formalistic) character,
sometimes showing the influence of Dada.
Oleksa Slisarenko exemplifies the transition that poets, including Semenko, went
through from Modernism and Symbolism to Futurism. In his case, this occurred in 1919
and demonstrates the overt change in sensibility, form and theme that this entailed in
a writer. As a Futurist, Slisarenko embraced reason, science and progress and was not
averse to displaying his ego. Mykola Bazhan (1904–1983) was a highly gifted poet and
became a major twentieth-century literary figure. He began his career as ‘Nik Bazhan’
and signed at least one of his poems as a ‘Panfuturist’. Despite his close contacts with
Semenko and Futurism (which lasted from 1922 to 1927) he became one of the fore-
most figures in the Ukrainian Soviet literary establishment, producing during his long
career poetry both of great importance as well as embarrassment to himself, the inev-
itable consequence of succeeding in the Soviet system. His Futurist period was gener-
ally dismissed or ignored at the height of his fame. Yet his achievements as a young
Futurist, although quantitatively small, were very original. He wrote highly evocative
862 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

trans-sense poetry, Free Verse, experimented with typography and sound, and even
produced topical agit-prop verse (Bazhan: “Six Unknown Poems”, 20). From such
endeavours, he slowly expanded and transformed his writing. By the second half of
the 1920s he had turned to classical metres and genres, publishing complex, almost
baroque poems of a philosophical yet narrative character, centred on contemporary
and historical themes. Even in his Futurist work, Bazhan stood out with his uncom-
mon lexicon, but his work towards the end of the decade was marked by archaisms
and a turn to other unexpected linguistic resources, like medical terminology, which
marked his verse with distinctly anti-aesthetic images. The sound of his poetry had
a harsh, consonantal quality and was both rational and intellectualist, qualities he
inherited from his association with Futurism and its distaste for Symbolist aesthetes
and Romanticism.
Futurist and, more broadly, avant-garde poetics influenced writers both in and
outside the movement itself. A recent anthology identifies more than forty avant-
garde writers, some of whom made their début in Nova generatsiia and betrayed the
strong influences of Semenko, which the journal told young authors they needed to
overcome (see Kotserev and Stakhivs’ka: Antolohiia ukrainis’koi avanhardnoi poezii).
Prose was not initially a major factor in the Ukrainian Futurist movement, as its
key figures were poets and painters. In 1923, Semenko published a short mystery-
adventure story, entitled Mirza Abbas-Khan, about an eponymous Afghan diplomat
whom the narrator encounters on a train from Moscow to Berlin. Anecdotal, light and
ironic, it was later hailed by Geo Shkurupii as an example of what Ukrainian literature
needed: interesting prose without boring psychology. In fact, it was Shkurupii who
became the major representative of Futurist prose with his collections of short stories
and two novels, which helped to define Futurist prose as formalistic experimenta-
tion, often focussed on plot. Given that this prose was playful and self-consciously
exploited literary devices, it naturally led to a preference for popular genres – in a
word, the very type of fiction that was almost completely unknown in Ukrainian lit-
erature. Futurists saw this type of practice as their contribution to moving Ukraine
closer to Europe and America. Shkurupii’s stories overtly make reference, for
example, to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Fenimore Cooper, and they betray two key
features. On the one hand, there is a recurrent effort to be as faithful as possible to the
generic requirements of the detective, mystery or adventure story; at the same time,
his work is just as likely to contaminate the purity of a popular genre as assert it. This
is done by self-consciously revealing literary devices or by intrusions of the authorial
voice, both of which disrupt the very illusion the narrative is creating. Shkurupii also
produced works that were a conscious melange of genres, tones and narrative per-
spectives, works that never settled into something unified or coherent. This is true,
for example, of his Povist’ pro hirke kokhannia poeta Tarasa Shevchenka (A Novella
about the Bitter Love of the Poet Taras Shevchenko, 1930), a fragmented piece which
at times reads like a novel, and at others like a biography or historiographical work,
and in which fictionalized dialogue in one chapter alternates with documentary-like
 Ukraine 863

quotations from Shevchenko’s diary in the next. His most famous novel is Dveri v den’
(Gateway into Day, 1929), which is also a mixture of various literary genres.
Like Shkurupii, Oleksa Slisarenko made a successful transition from poetry to
prose. During the 1920s, critics and readers associated him with Futurist prose less
readily than they did Shkurupii, but his work exhibited the same interest in adventure
and plot. His fiction was an important step away from long descriptions, lyricism and
ornamentalism, in other words, from the impressionistic poetic prose of the 1910s
and early 1920s. In addition, Slisarenko also wrote strongly satirical stories on con-
temporary themes, and its coarse language offended critics like the advocate of Neo-
classicist aesthetics Mykola Zerov.
Although a latecomer to the Futurist ranks, Dmytro Buzko (1890–1937) gave clear
expression to their attitudes on prose, both in theory and in practice. In an article
published in 1927, the year he joined the Futurists, Buzko voiced his opposition to phi-
losophy and deep human problems in literature and the notion of writer-as-mentor,
saying that he “hated Leo Tolstoy for assuming the rôle of mankind’s teacher” (Buz’ko:
“Problematychna ‘problemnist’: Protest chytacha”, 58). “The Western European and
the American literature”, he pointed out, “comfortably distinguish themselves from
our own in that the author hardly ever assumes the pose of a philosopher or
teacher, but remains a pure belletrist, dedicated to perfecting […] his craft” (Buzko:
“Problematychna ‘problemnist’: Protest chytacha”, 59). In line with such sentiments,
his own works in Nova generatsiia (which frequently were satires) tended toward
dynamic, clever composition and surprise endings instead of profundity. What he con-
sidered his best story, Asta Nielsen, plays with the narrative and makes use of autho-
rial asides and digressions. Some of his other stories, however, feel stilted precisely
because of their conscious pursuit of Formalist devices. Buzko’s most provocative work
was a novel, or, rather, an anti-novel, Holiandiia (Nudia, 1930), the title of which is a
play on the Ukrainian words for ‘Holland’ and ‘Naked’. As he put it in a pre-publication
note: “The formal goal is to prove that the [the commune and collectivization themes]
cannot be treated through the devices of ‘artistic literature’ ” (Buz’ko: “Vyrobnycha
khronika”, 64). As a result, the work is largely a meta-narrative, more about itself, the
act of writing, about literature and the author, than about its flimsy plots and politi-
cally correct themes.
Among the new cadres that Nova generatsiia attracted was a former engineer and
pilot turned writer and avant-garde theoretician, who believed that writing required
administrative and engineering skills to control literature’s material. His name was
Leonid Skrypnyk (1893–1929), and he died at an early age from tuberculosis. In addi-
tion to authoring books on photography and film, he published one novel, Intelihent
(The Intellectual; serialized in Nova generatsiia, 1927–1928, published as book in
1929), and one short story, Materiialy do biohrafii pys’mennyka Loputs’ky (Materials
Towards a Biography of the Writer Loputs’ka, 1928). Also surviving are two fragments
from an incomplete novel. Modest as this literary legacy is, it stands out as one the
best in the entire Futurist repertoire, proving, perhaps, in its critical and satirical
864 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

intellectualism the Futurist motto that “art was dying as an irrational category” (a
slogan on Nova generatsiia’s title page). His prose is controlled and economical,
and directs a dispassionate gaze at the pre-revolutionary bourgeoisie, especially its
erotic and sexual mores, while also criticizing the nascent and hypocritical Soviet
reality. From a Formalist point of view, the most interesting is Intelihent. The genre is
identified as a ekranizovanyi roman (screened novel), in other words, it is written in
the form of a film script, which is interspersed with running commentaries from the
author (which appear in smaller type) and includes his observations on the events
occurring on the ‘screen’ along with conversations with the reader/viewer of the
‘film’ that unwinds on the pages of the novel. The author/narrator introduces himself
to the reader in these words: “I, the author and your friend, will at all times be near
you. I will be that interpreter who is always present in every Japanese film. Be sure
to listen to me carefully even though I will only whisper into your ear in small print”
(Intelihent, 8).
Another good example of Nova generatsiia’s openness to experimentation was a
novel written by Andrii Chuzhyi (pseud. of Andrii Leonidovych Storozhuk, 1897–1989)
and serialized over six issues in 1927 and 1928. Entitled Vedmid’ poliuie za sontsem (The
Bear Hunts the Sun), it was apparently never completed. This was a ‘difficult’ piece of
prose, a radical departure from the more or less transparent plot- and device-centred
writings of other Futurists. Here, meaning is elusive and arduous to reconstruct. The
tone is lyrical and the effect surreal. However, beyond the problematic text itself, the
novel was typeset in an unusual manner. The words of some sections were laid out
like figure poems, creating discernible outlines of bodies or words on the page. Nova
generatsiia recognized that the work was, in some ways, a throwback to an earlier
time, but defended its publication: “Although A. Chuzhyi’s work is permeated with
the scent of early Futurism, it is not without positive significance in the context of
our literary practice and, at any rate, the positive sides [of the novel] outweigh the
negative” (editorial comment in the table of contents of Nova generatsiia 10 [1928]).

Ukrainian Futurism in the visual arts

Ukrainian Futurist writers often partnered with painters and graphic designers to
help stamp a visual identity on their movement. As mentioned above, Semenko’s
brother, Vasyl, and Pavlo Kovzhun (1896–1939) – painters both – presided over the
birth of the movement. Vasyl died on the front during the First World War, but a rare
photo of him from 1914 survives, showing him standing against the background of
his abstract, dynamic painting Misto (City), his face in the foreground ornamented
with black lettering, spelling out “Semenko” and “1914” (reproduced in Mudrak
Ciszkewycz: Nova generatsiia, 11, fig. 1.2). The gesture is reminiscent of photos of David
Burliuk, who was known to decorate his face with images of animals or aeroplanes.
 Ukraine 865

Pavlo Kovzhun, after a long absence from the Futurist scene, reappeared briefly in
Semenko’s company in the middle of 1929 with a design for the June cover of Nova
generatsiia, a bold and energetic explosion of typography and geometric shapes, both
rectilinear and curved. By then, three pre-eminent designers had already shaped the
journal in radically different ways: the painters Vadym Meller and Anatolii Petrytskyi,
and the photographer Dan Sotnyk (dates unknown). Among Semenko’s early asso-
ciates, Oleh Shymkov stands out, even though today he is an unknown figure. He
designed the cover for Semafor u maibutnie (Semafor into the Future, 1922), where he
was referred to as “Ole” and described as a “Meta-artist Panfuturist” who, through
the device of “painterly jiu-jitsu” (dzhiufarbdzhitsu), “defeated and floored” the
likes of Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Schwitters, Boccioni, Severini, Archipenko,
Tatlin and Meller (Semafor u maibutnie, 55). His cover played with Cyrillic and Latin
typefaces that were arranged in geometric shapes and used red, green and black
colours (see Ilnytzkyj: “Under Imperial Eyes: Ukrainian Modernist and Avant-Garde
Publications”). Another little-known figure associated with the design of Futurist
publications was Nina Henke-Meller, who created the cover for Zhovtnevyi zbirnyk
panfuturystiv (Panfuturists’ October Anthology, 1923), edited by Geo Shkurupii and
Mykola Bazhan, and various Suprematist compositions (see Ilnytzkyj: “Nina Henke-
Meller and Ukrainian Futurism”). A much more famous figure was Vladimir Tatlin,
designer of the cover for Zustrich na perekhresnii stantsii: Rozmova tr’okh.
Nova generatsiia reproduced on its pages works by a variety of painters. Among
these were Jean Arp (Hans Arp), Willi Baumeister, Rudolf Belling, Georges Braque,
Erich Brendel, Marcel Breuer, Giorgio de Chirico, Kurt Schwitters, Juan Gris, Walter
Gropius, Fernand Léger, Jacques Lipchitz, László Moholy-Nagy, Pablo Picasso,
Aleksander Rodchenko, Ismaël González de la Serna, Victor Servranckx and Jan
Tschichold from the West European avant-garde; Ukrainian artists included Vasyl
Iermilov, Kazimir Malevich, Viktor Palmov, Anatolii Petrytskyi and others. These
names speak of the broad and eclectic interests of the journal in keeping with its
Panfuturist, pan-avant-gardist orientation, although closer examination reveals a
clear bias towards German artistic trends, in particular Bauhaus and Expressionism.
If one looks beyond Semenko’s immediate circle of associates, the signs
of Futurism in Ukrainian art become even more pronounced. A large number of
Ukrainian painters – a category that must include non-ethnic Ukrainians (e. g. Jews)
who were born in Ukraine or whose careers were in one way or another linked to
the country – reflect Cubo-Futurist influences. The art historian Dmytro Horbachov,
for example, identifies Cubo-Futurist trends in the works of the following artists:
Alexander Archipenko, Alexandra Exter, Alexander Bohomazov (Bogomazov),
Volodymyr (Vladimir) Burliuk, Davyd (David) Burliuk, Lazar Lissitzky (El Lissitzky),
Kazimir Malevich, Sonia Delaunay, Isaak Rabinovich, Viktor Palmov, Vadym Meller,
Vasyl Iermilov, Anatolii Petrytskyi, Mark Epstein, Mykhailo Andriienko-Nechytailo
(Michel Andreenko), Ivan Kavaleridze, Oleksii Usachov, Semen Zaltser and Pavl
Kovzhun. Horbachov also identifies a category he calls “Folk Futurism”, to which
866 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

he assigns Hanna Sobachko (see Ukrainsʹkyi avanhard 1910–1930 rokiv, s.p.).

Jewish, Russian, French and even US-American cultures have laid claim to some of
the above-mentioned artists, given that their creative periods occurred not only in
Ukraine and in Russian Imperial and Soviet capitals, but also in other major cultural
centres of the Western world (see Makaryk and Tkacz: Modernism in Kyiv, 176–181).
Of the names enumerated above, Oleksandr (Alexander) Bohomazov (1880–1930) –
sometimes called a ‘Ukrainian Futurist’ and at other times a ‘Ukrainian Picasso’ – might
serve here as the best representative, especially in connection with Futurism. Bohomazov
was born near Kharkiv; the major events in his creative life were linked with Kyiv. He
became a leading figure on the city’s art scene, participating in an exhibition with
Alexander Archipenko as early as 1906, then in the Kyiv avant-garde show Zveno (The
Link, 1908), which was organized by David Burliuk; he was also a major contributor to
Kol’tso (The Ring), an exhibition in 1914 that he arranged with Alexandra Exter. He was
also productive in the field of art theory, discussing questions about non-representational
art in Zhivopis’ i elementy (Painting and Its Elements, 1914; see Ukrainian translation by
Horbachov: Zhyvopys ta еlementy). In 1913–1914, his works began displaying the influ-
ence of Cubo-Futurism and Italian Futurism, resulting in dynamic abstract compositions
and portraits, as well as scenes of urban life.
Another Ukrainian painter influenced by Futurism/Cubo-Futurism was Borys
Kosarev (Kosariev, 1897–1994), a Kharkiv artist who worked as a painter, stage and
costume designer, photographer and cinematographer, and whose rediscovery is
only now taking place (see Mudrak and Kosarev: Borys Kosarev: Modernist Kharkiv,
1915–1931). He was associated with the Cubo-Futurist Group of Seven (Soiuz semi,
c.1916–1919), participating in the striking publication Sem’ plius tri (Seven plus
Three, 1918), the cover of which was designed by Vasyl Ermilov. Like many artists
of this period, his work went through several phases, including a Cubo-Futurist and
Suprematist one that evolved toward Constructivism and even Expressionism.

Conclusion
Ukrainian Futurism recognized the Italian movement as a watershed in the history
of art and unashamedly linked its own Formalist artistic activity to it by steadfastly
sticking with the name ‘Futurism’. At the same time, Ukrainians resolutely distanced
themselves from the politics and ideology of their Italian brethren. The Ukrainian
Futurists never saw themselves as a derivative movement but rather as a histor-
ically attuned group that was responding to a continually evolving and inevitable
artistic process – as well as to their own very specific socio-cultural environment,
in which it was their duty to combat inertia. They pursued a pan-avant-garde ori-
entation and were sensitive to new developments in Europe and the Soviet Union.
Dada and Expressionism and Soviet Constructivism left strong traces in Ukrainian
 Ukraine 867

Futurism, which despite its forced forays into ‘constructive’ creativity was always at
heart devoted to ‘destruction’ and ‘anti-art’ as the precondition for the advent of a
truly new phase in the history of art.

Archival sources
Bohomazov, Oleksandr [Aleksandr Bogomazov]: Zhivopis’ i elementy [Painting and its Elements].
[Manuscript, 1914]. Kyiv: Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv-muzei literatury i mystetstva [Central
State Archival Depository Museum of Ukrainian Literature and Art]. Archival Fund No. 360.
[For Ukrainian translation, see Bohomazov below]

Works cited
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Bazhan, Mykola: “Six Unknown Poems: Compiled and Introduced by Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj.” Journal of
Ukrainian Graduate Studies 4:2 (1979): 20–32.
Bazhan, Mykola, Mykhail’ Semenko, and Geo Shkurupii: Zustrich na perekhresnii stantsii: Rozmova
tr’okh [Meeting at the Crossroad Station: A Conversation Among Three]. Kyiv: Bumeranh, 1927.
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generatsiia 2 (1930): 64.
Buz’ko, Dmytro: Holiandiia: Roman [Nudia: A Novel]. Kharkiv: Knyhospilka, 1930.
Bobritskii, Volodymyr: Sem’ plius tri [Seven plus Three]. Khar’kov: Pechatnoe dielo, 1918.
Bohomazov, Oleksandr: Zhyvopys ta еlementy = Painting and Elements. Intro. by Dmytro Horbachov.
Transl. and comp. by Tatiana and Sashko Popov. Kyiv: Zadumlyvyi straus, 1996.
Chuzhyi, Andrii: “Vedmid’ poliuie za sontsem.” [The Bear Hunts the Sun] Nova generatsiia 1:3
(1927): 17–23, 2:3 (1928): 186–194, 2:4 (1928): 279–285, 2:7 (1928): 22–27, 2:10 (1928):
230–235, 2:11 (1928): 304–309.
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Art. Kyiv: “Mystetstvo”, 1996.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: “Nina Henke-Meller and Ukrainian Futurism.” International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 5 (2015): 292–296.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: “Under Imperial Eyes: Ukrainian Modernist and Avant-Garde Publications.”
Peter Brooker, et al., ed.: Modernist Magazines: A Critical and Cultural History. Vol 3. Europe
1880–1940. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013: 1341–1362.
Katafalk iskusstva: Ezhednevnyi zhurnal pan-futuristov-destruktorov [The Catafalque of Art: A Daily
Journal of Panfuturists-Destructivists]. Kyiv: Hol’fshtrom, 1922.
Kotserev, Oleh, and Iuliia Stakhivs’ka, eds.: Antolohiia ukrainis’koi avanhardnoi poezii [An Anthology
of Ukrainian Avant-garde Poetry]. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2014.
868 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

Krusanov, Andrei: Russkii avangard, 1907–1932: Istoricheskii obzor v trekh tomakh [The Russian
Avant-garde, 1907–1932: Historical Survey in Three Volumes]. Vol. 1–3. Sankt-Peterburg: Novoe
literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003–2010.
Leshko, Jaroslaw: Alexander Archipenko: Vision and Continuity. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The
Ukrainian Museum, 3 April – 4 September 2005; Northampton/MA: Smith College Museum
of Art, 31 March – 30 July 2006; Madison/WI: Elvehjem Museum of Art, 16 September – 3
December 2006. New York: The Ukrainian Museum, 2005.
Makaryk, Irene R., and Virlana Tkacz: Modernism in Kyiv: Kiev/kyïv/kiev/kijów/ḳieṿ. Jubilant
Experimentation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010.
Marcadé, Valentine: “Vasilii Ermilov and Certain Aspects of Ukrainian Art in the Early Twentieth
Century.” Stephanie Barron, and Maurice Tuchman, eds.: The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910–1930:
New Perspectives. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980. 46–50.
Mudrak Ciszkewycz, Myroslava Maria: Nova generatsiia (1927–1930) and the Artistic Avant-Garde in
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Mudrak, Myroslava M., and Borys V. Kosarev, eds.: Borys Kosarev: Modernist Kharkiv, 1915–1931 =
Borys Kosarev: Kharkivs’kii modernizm, 1915–1931. New York: The Ukrainian Museum, 4
December 2011 – 2 May 2012; Kyiv: Muzei teatral’noho ta kinomystetstva Ukrainy, 17 travnia –
12 chervnia 2012. Kyiv: Rodovid, 2011.
Nova generatsiia: Zhurnal revoliutsiinoi formatsii mystetstv = Die neue Generation = La nouvelle
génération [The New Generation: A Journal of the Revolutionary Front of Art]. Kharkiv:
Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, 1927–1930.
Semafor u maibutnie: Aparat panfuturystiv [Semaphore into the Future: Apparatus of the
Panfuturists]. Kyiv: Hol’fshtrom, 1922.
Semenko, Mykhail’: Kobzar [The Bard]. Kyiv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, 1924.
Semenko, Mykhail’: “Mirza Abbas-Khan.” [Mirza Abbas-Khan] Hlobus [The Globe] (Kyiv)
1 (1 November 1923): 1–8.
Semenko, Mykhail’: “My i kino: Ukrains’ki pys’mennyky pro svoiu robotu v VUFKU.” [We and the
Cinema: Ukrainian Writers on their Work in the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration]
Shkval [The Squall] (Odesa) 21:206 (25 May 1929): 6.
Semenko, Mykhail’: “Do postanovky pytannia pro zastosuvannia leninizmu na 3-mu fronti.”
[On the Question of Applying Leninism to the Third Front] Chervonyi shliakh [The Red Path]
11–12 (1924): 169–201.
Semenko, Mykhail’: “Promova.” [Speech] Kobzar [The Bard]. Kyiv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy,
1924. 617.
Semenko, Mykhail’: “Sam.” [Alone] Derzannia: Poezy [Bravado: Poetry]. Kyiv: Kvero, 1914. s.p.
Semenko, Mykhail’: Derzannia: Poezy [Bravado: Poetry]. Kyiv: Kvero, 1914.
Semenko, Mykhail’: Kvero-Futuryzm [Quaero-Futurism]. Kyiv: Kvero, 1914.
Shkandrij, Myroslav: “Steppe Son: David Burliuk’s Identity.” Canadian American Slavic Studies 40:1
(Spring 2006): 71–72.
Shkurupii, Geo: “Povist’ pro hirke kokhannia poeta Tarasa Shevchenka.” [A Tale about the Bitter
Love Affair of Taras Shevchenko] Nova generatsiia 5 (1930): 8–17
Shkurupii, Geo: Baraban: Vitryna druha [The Drum: Display Window Two]. Kyiv: Panfuturysty, 1923.
Shkurupii, Geo: Dveri v den’ [Gateway into Day]. Kharkiv: Proletarii, 1929.
Shkurupii, Geo: Psykhetozy: Vitryna tretia [Psychetosis: Display Window Three]. Kyiv: Panfuturysty,
1922.
Shkurupii, Geo, and Mykola Bazhan, eds.: Zhovtnevyi zbirnyk panfuturystiv [The October Collection
of the Panfuturists]. Kyiv: Hol’fstrom, 1923.
Skrypnyk, Leonid: “Materiialy do biohrafii pys’mennyka Loputs’ky.” [Materials toward a Biography
of the Writer Loputs’ka] Nova generatsiia 11 (1928): 293–303.
 Ukraine 869

Skrypnyk, Leonid: Intelihent: Ekranizovanyi roman na shist’ chastyn z prolohom ta epilohom

[The Intellectual: A Screened Novel in Six Parts with a Prologue and Epilogue]. Kyiv: Proletarii,
1929.
Susak, Vita: Ukrainian Artists in Paris, 1900–1939. Kyiv: Rodovid Press, 2010.
Versari, Maria Elena: “The Style and Status of the Modern Artist: Archipenko in the Eyes of the
Italian Futurists.” Deborah Goldberg, and Alexandra Keiser, eds.: Alexander Archipenko
Revisited: An International Perspective. Proceedings of the Archipenko Symposium,
Cooper Union, New York City, September 17, 2005. Bearsville/NY: The Archipenko Foundation,
2008. 11–25.

Further reading
Bila, Anna: Futuryzm. Kyiv: Tempora, 2010.
Dmitrieva, Marina: “ ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Futurism’: The Ukrainian
Panfuturists and Their Artistic Allegiances.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 1 (2011):
132–153.
Folejewski, Zbigniew: “Ukrainian Quero- and Pan-Futurism.” Z. Folejewski: Futurism and Its Place in
the Development of Modern Poetry: A Comparative Study and Anthology. Ottawa: University of
Ottawa Press, 1980. 51–56, 222–226.
Göbner, Rolf: “ ‘Signale in die Zukunft’: Entwürfe und Entdeckungen der ukrainischen Futuristen in
den Zwanziger Jahren.” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena:
Naturwissenschaftliche Reihe 38:1 (1989): 85–88.
Hol’fshtrom: Zbirnyk I. Litsektor AsKK [The Gulf Stream: Collection I. Literary Section of the
Association for Communist Culture]. Kharkiv: Derzhavne vydavnytstvo Ukrainy, 1925.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: “Abstraction and Ukrainian Futurist Literature.” Irena R. Makaryk, and Virlana
Tkacz, eds.: Modernism in Kyiv: Jubilant Experimentation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2010. 387–406.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: “Leonid Skrypnyk: Inteligent i futuryst.” [Leonid Skrypnyk: Intellectual and
Futurist] Suchasnist’ [Modern Times] 23:10 (1984): 7–11.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: “Ukrainian Futurism: Re-appropriating the Imperial Legacy.” Günter
Berghaus, ed.: Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011. 37–58.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: “Visual Dimensions in Ukrainian Futurist Poetry and Prose.” Zeitschrift für
Slawistik 35:5 (1990): 722–732.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: Nova Generatsiia (The New Generation), 1927–1930: A Comprehensive Index.
Edmonton/AB: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, University of Alberta, 1998.
Ilnytzkyj, Oleh Stepan: Ukrainian Futurism: A Historical and Critical Study. Cambridge/MA: Harvard
University Press; Ukrainian Research Institute, 1997.
Magarotto, Luigi: “I manifesti futuristi di Mychail’ Semenko.” Luca Calvi, and Gianfranco Giraudo,
eds.: L’ Ucraina nel XX secolo: Atti del secondo Congresso dell’Associazione Italiana di Studi
Ucraini, Venezia, 4–6 Dicembre 1995. Padova: E.V.A., 1998. 99–106.
Markade, Zhan-Klod [Jean-Claude Marcadé]: Malevych. Kyiv: Rodovid, 2012.
Myroslava Mudrak, Valentyna Chechyk, and Tetiana Pavlova, eds.: Borys Kosarev: Modernist
Kharkiv, 1915–1931 = Borys Kosarev: Kharkivs‘kyi modernizm, 1915–1931. Exhibition catalogue.
New York: Ukrainian Museum, 4 December 2011 – 2 May 2012; Kyiv: Muzei teatral’noho,
muzychnoho ta kinomystetstva Ukrainy, 17 May – 12 June 2012. Kyiv: Rodovid, 2011.
Nazaruk, Bazyli, ed.: Futuryzm na Ukrainie: Manifesty i teksty literackie [Futurism in Ukraine:
Manifestos and Literary Texts]. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1995.
870 Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj

Nevrli, Mykola [Mikuláš Nevrlý]: “Mykhail’ Semenko, ukrains’kyi futuryzm i slovats’ki davisty.”
[Mykhail’ Semenko, Ukrainian Futurism and the Slovak Davists] Duklia [The Duklia Pass] 3
(1966): 23–28.
Nowacki, Albert: “Mychajl Semenko i futuryzm ukraiński.” [Mykahil’ Semenko and Ukrainian
Futurism] Roczniki humanistyczne [Humanities Yearbooks] 54–55 (2006/2007): 97–107.
Shkandrij, Myroslav, ed.: The Phenomenon of the Ukrainian Avant-Garde, 1910–1935 =
Le Phenomene de l’avant-garde ukrainienne, 1910–1935. Exhibition catalogue. Winnipeg/MB:
Winnipeg Art Gallery, 10 October 2001 – 13 January 2002.
Sternstein, Malynne: “Ukrainian Futurism, 1914–1930.” Modernism / Modernity 6:3 (September
1999): 157–159.
Sulyma, Mykola Matviiovych, ed.: Ukrains’kyi futuryzm: Vybrani storinki = Az ukrán futurizmus:
Szemelvények [Ukrainian Futurism: Selected Aspects]. Nyiregyháza: Bessenyei György
Tanárképző Főiskola Ukrán és Ruszin Filológiai Tanszéke, 1996.
Verdone, Mario: “Note sulle ‘esplorazioni’ futuriste in Ucraina.” Terzo occhio: Trimestrale darte
contemporanea 32: 3 (#120) (September 2006): 2–3.
Pablo Rocca
52 Uruguay
Uruguay, a small nation often overshadowed by its two giant neighbours, Argentina
and Brazil, was in fact the first country in Latin America that printed the Futurist
manifesto published by Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. On 20 March 1909, El día
(The Day), a newspaper in Montevideo, published a translation of the eleven points,
together with a brief anonymous introduction, under the heading “El futurismo.
Nueva escuela de principios. Contra los viejos moldes” (Futurism: A New School
of Ideas. Against the Old Ways). In October 1909, the periodical Apolo reprinted a
report from Paris, “El futurismo”, by Guillermo Andreve (1879–1940), originally pub-
lished in July 1909 in Páginas ilustradas, a cultural magazine from Costa Rica. No
doubt, some of the many articles on Futurism that appeared in the Spanish press (see
Herrero-Senés: “The Reception of Futurism in the Spanish Press”) also found their
way to Uruguay, but it was only after the advent of Ultraism that another Futurist
manifesto appeared in the Uruguayan press: Valentine de Saint-Point’s Manifeste
futuriste de la luxure (Futurist Manifesto of Lust, 1913), published by El hombre on
6 November 1919.
The Peruvian poet, Juan Parra del Riego (1894–1925), who lived in Uruguay, is
considered to have been the first in the country to respond to Futurism in Montevideo.
He was one of the first poets to celebrate sport and, in particular, football. His poem
Loa al fút-bol (“A Eulogy on Football”, 1915) begins:

¡La pelota ríe y canta! The ball laughs and sings!

¡La pelota zumba y vuela!
Y es el polvo una serpiente de algodón
que se levanta
tras el ágil jugador que de un salto se
revela.
¡La pelota ríe y canta!
¡La pelota zumba y vuela!
(Parra del Riego: “Loa al fút-bol”, 606)
The ball hums and flies!
And dust is like a rising cotton snake
When the agile player who jumped
reveals himself.
The ball laughs and sings!
The ball hums and flies!

Unlike his predecessors such as Rubén Darío (1867–1916), who were concerned with
contemplation and spirituality, Parra emphasized movement and rhythm, and in the
last stanza of the poem asserts:

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-052
872 Pablo Rocca

Y guardadme ahora un secreto que os
revelo,
yo no sé si por encargo de Rubén o de
Perrault:
que la luna es la pelota de fút-bol que
está en el cielo
para ese otro futbolista de colores,
que en las tardes es el sol.
(Parra del Riego: “Loa al fút-bol”, 607)
And now keep a secret I reveal to thee,
I do not know if by instruction of
Rubén or Perrault:
The moon is the football high up in
heaven
For that other colourful player,
That is evening sun.

Parra’s vitalism had a counterpart in one of the early critics of Marinetti, Álvaro
Armando Vasseur (1878–1969). In the politically calm, democratic and economically
thriving Uruguay of the 1920s, the national football team achieved one international
victory after another. However, not everyone was enthusiastic about these surpris-
ing victories. When the first World Cup was held in Uruguay (13–30 July 1930), the
editors of the magazine Cartel were disapproving of the larges sums of public money
being invested in monumental stadia and players from abroad at the expense of high
culture. Nevertheless, their protest was modest and discreet, for these were times
when intellectuals were lenient with the authorities.
If the ‘new art’, and Futurism in particular, left its mark on literary discourses, it
was especially in the field of poetry. This becomes obvious in four poetry anthologies
that have been published on the Uruguayan avant-garde. Three of these were
released between 1927 and 1930. The first, Antología de la moderna poesía uruguaya
(Anthology of Modern Uruguayan Poetry, 1927), was prepared by Ildefonso Pereda
Valdés (1899–1996), who had been encouraged by the audacious publications that
had appeared in Buenos Aires, especially those by Jorge Luís Borges (1899–1986),
who in fact contributed a postscript to the volume. The second was Mapa de la
poesía, 1930. Con los nuevos valores del Uruguay (Map of Poetry, 1930: With the New
Values of Uruguay, 1930), put together by the intriguing but long-forgotten Juan
M. Filartigas (c.1900–1970), with the stamp of approval of Albatros, a short-lived
magazine that published heterodox local avant-garde literature. Finally, Poeti della
terra orientale: Antologia di poeti uruguayani (Poets of the Eastern Territories: An
Anthology of Uruguayan Poets, 1930) was edited and translated by Camillo Cardu
(1890 – [?]), an Italian Doctor of Letters who was working at the time as a diplomat
for the Fascist régime in Montevideo. When Uruguay broke off its relations with
the government of Benito Mussolini, Cardu had to return to Italy, where the Alpes
publishing house in Milan issued his anthology, which was the first of its kind
in a language other than Spanish. It opened with texts by the traditionalist Juan
Zorrilla de San Martín (1855–1931) and continued with works by young poets who
 Uruguay 873

considered themselves to be Futurists: Nicolás Fusco Sansone (1904–1969), Alexis

Delgado (c.1900–1970) and Alfredo Mario Ferreiro (1899–1959). Among the poets
represented, there were no sympathizers of the Fascist régime, with the exception
maybe of the young Fusco, who later became a well-known professor of literature
and a liberal activist.
The most recent collection in the field is Poesie che sanno di nafta (1909–1932)
(Poetry that Smells of Diesel Fuel, 2014), edited by Riccardo Boglione and Georgina
Torello. The subtitle of this judiciously assembled volume is Antologia della poesia
futurista uruguaiana (An Anthology of Uruguayan Futurist Poetry). However,
the editors worked with a strongly Italian perspective and treated Futurism as a
synonym for the ‘avant-garde’. Seen from a South American, and specifically
Uruguayan, viewpoint, it needs to be emphasized that Futurism acquired on its
inter-continental travel a number of traits that it had not possessed in its original
setting.

Alfredo Mario Ferreiro: The only Futurist?

No author can better represent the simultaneous foreignness and indigeneity of
Uruguayan Futurism than Alfredo Mario Ferreiro. He was in the words of the editors
of the above-mentioned volume, “il piu dotato degli avanguardisti uruguaiani” (the
most talented of the Uruguyan avantgardists; Boglione and Torello: Poesie che sanno
di nafta, 63). His books include El hombre que se comió un autobús: Poemas con olor a
nafta (The Man Who Ate a Bus: Poems that Smell of Diesel Fuel, 1927), whose subtitle
served as the model for the title of the recent Italian collection, and Se ruega no dar la
mano (Please Do not Shake Hands, 1930).
Ferreiro published his first book when he was close to thirty in an edition issued by
the literary magazine La cruz del sur (The Southern Cross). He asked it to be read as an
open work, where each piece interacted with the others, like the engine of a motorcar.
This nonlinear presentation owed much to Italian Futurism, which, in the wide horizon
of avant-garde writing, was not unusual, although it certainly was in Uruguay, where
the literary establishment had resisted any overt break with the past. By then, in 1927,
many years had passed since Marinetti had praised “our modern capitals […] ablaze
with their violent electric moons” (“The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14)
and had linked the “Futurist sensibility” to the “great capital city, bristling with lights,
action, and noise” (“Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
Freedom”, 120). However, Montevideo was not Paris, la ville lumière. It took until 1930
for Ferreiro, in his Poema hasta el tercer “no” (Poem to the Third ‘No’), to celebrate the
age of electricity and, incidentally, prophesize the advent of a digital age:
874 Pablo Rocca

Encenderé una luz. I will light a light.

Ahora es muy fácil encender las luces.
Y llegará una época en que todo estará
dispuesto
para apretar botones únicamente.
(Ferreiro: “Poema hasta el tercer ‘no’,” 105)
Now it’s easy to turn on the lights.
And there will come a time when
everything will be ready
For pushing buttons only.

These verses make Ferreiro look like an uncompromising avant-gardist. But this
assumption vanishes when his public activity from that time is reviewed and some
of his poems and prose works scrutinized. Ferreiro formed part of a new trend in the
Uruguayan république des lettres, exemplified by La cruz del sur (1924–1931) and the mag-
azine Cartel (1929–1931), which he founded together with Julio Sigüenza (1900–c.1958)
to promote his unusual ideas. However, he also published in the journal Vida femenina
(Female Life), which addressed a readership of housewives from the middle and upper
classes. Everything indicates that Ferreiro, like many other contemporary writers, earned
his livelihood from the articles and poems he published in these magazines.
He staked a claim to a position of stature in the artistic revolution that had its
origin in Futurism; however, he also accepted the generous patronage of the editor of
Vida femenina, Raquel Sáenz (1887–1955), a young bourgeois lady who in her spare
time wrote romantic poetry. Oscillating between these two extremes, he could offer
a vigorous defence of the New and then make a quick about-turn and argue that the
avant-garde was a reserve for men and that women had stayed behind in an earlier
stage of development: “Let women concentrate on their domain and focus on verses
about love, the twilight, the heart, the eyes. And let us men get dirty with grease in
our attempt to pull out the entrails of a motorcar and sing a song that oozes with the
new ways” (Ferreiro: “Nota sobre Raquel Sáenz”, 166).
To achieve their aims, the moderns had to join forces and follow and discuss the
daily news that arrived from far and near. There was also the need to free oneself from
ingrained prejudices. Those who, like Ferreiro, were aware of that task of renewal,
promoted the ‘new art’ and adopted the same outrageous attitudes as other vanguard
artists around the world had done. Yet, at the same time they tuned down their sug-
gestions, because in a country like Uruguay it was not possible to advocate radical atti-
tudes. Following Gabriel Terra’s coup d’etat in 1933, the Parliament had been dissolved
and the Constitution abolished, substituted by a new one in 1934. These years were
a period of economic depression and of conservative adjustment. In a society where
Marinetti’s radical cultural policies were not accepted, Ferreiro paid respect to the
Futurist leader’s technophilia and observed with great interest the impact of the global
automobile industry, which not only opened up new possibilities of mobility in the
Americas but also fostered a literary school that interpreted this development. Ferreiro
had the feeling of being on the right track, even though he knew little of Futurism and
was late in adopting its precepts. Marinetti’s glorification of the “roaring motorcar,
 Uruguay 875

which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, [and] is more beautiful than the Winged
Victory of Samothrace” (Marinetti: “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 13),
found an echo in Uruguay, when Ferreiro declared: “What is stupendous is that an
automobile is as much a poem as a poem – mobile by itself – is an automobile. [...]
Away with consonants! Away with conventional words!” (Ferreiro: “La entrecasa en el
arte”, 1). And this conviction was turned into verse in Poema acelerado del automóvil
en marcha (Fast-moving Poem of a Car in Motion, 1930):

todo se convierte en manchas; Everything turns into spots;

todo gira; Everything revolves;
todo pasa; Everything passes by;
todo viene a ver qué ocurre Everything comes to see what happens
y, en seguida, And, soon,
como huyendo de nosotros, As if fleeing from us,
asustado huyendo de nosotros, Scared of us, running away
asustado va el paisaje Scared goes the landscape
por los gritos del motor. Of the roaring engine.

Mi automóvil es tropero My car is a cattle-driver

de los éxtasis del campo; Of the ecstasy of the fields;
con los dos ojos clavados, With both eyes fixed,
fijos en el radiador, Fixed on the radiator,
atravieso en mi automóvil I cross in my car
la vida toda color. The colourful life.
(Ferreiro: “Poema acelerado del automóvil
en marcha”, 101)

Rocked between fascination and doubt, Ferreiro’s adherence to a Futurist matrix is

evident, especially in the poems and articles he wrote for La cruz del sur, Cartel, Alfar,
the supplements of the newspaper El país and even in the magazine Vida femenina.
However, he not only felt fascination for the roaring engine, but also for the American
landscape. It would seem that some influence of the modernista Julio Herrera y Reissig
(1875–1910) with his Los éxtasis de la montaña (The Ecstasy of the Mountain, 1920),
written between 1904 and 1907 and including the poem La vuelta de los campos (The
Return from the Fields), had penetrated Ferreiro’s verse in an unfuturistic manner that
looks more like homage than irony. Or maybe Futurism had gathered other properties
on its way from the European metropolitan setting to Uruguay, while losing some of its
original traits during the move across the Atlantic. Nonetheless, the debt to and rec-
ognition of Futurist ideas are conspicuous. Marinetti’s well-known metaphor of Tuons
le clair de lune! / Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna (Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight) resonates in
compositions such as Canción para alcanzar la luna cuando pase (Song to Reach the
Moon when It Passes by), the final stanza of which sounds almost like a manifesto:
876 Pablo Rocca

Te alcanzaremos, We will reach you,

faro petrificado,
y te pondremos en el pedestal más alto
de la Plaza Roja,
para que te puedan ver, bien de cerca,
los astrónomos, los poetas de antes y
los enamorados cursiS.
(Ferreiro: “Canción para alcanzar la
luna cuando pase”, 46)
Petrified lighthouse,
And we’ll put you on the highest pedestal
Of the Red Square,
So that you can be seen, up close,
By astronomers, poets of yore and senti
mental loverS.

The debt to Futurism was absorbed and took on personal traits, such as in the way
Ferreiro composed a poem on the basis of onomatopoeia: Tren en marcha (Train on the
Move) goes to the border of questioning meaning and expression, exploring the fine
line between the signifier and the signified. In Treno di soldati ammalati (Train of Sick
Soldiers, 1914), Marinetti had already used pure onomatopoeia to represent a moving
locomotive, and, by establishing three sub-sections, Contraccolpo viscerale delle ono-
matopee liriche del treno (Visceral Recoil of the Train’s Lyrical Onomatopoeia), Ruote
(Wheels) and Locomotiva (Locomotive), he had offered a model for internal divisions
(see Marinetti: Teoria e invenzione futurista, 685–686) that was used by Ferreiro in El
hombre que se comió un autobús, where the section headings alluded to automative
parts: Radiador (Radiator), Diferencial (Differential), Carburador (Carburetor), Rueda
de auxilio (Spare Wheel), Caja de herramientas (Tool Box).

Marinetti in Montevideo (1926)

Marinetti’s writings were fairly well known among the literate élites of Montevideo in
the mid-1920s, thanks to short-lived magazines like Calibán or El camino (The Road), the
latter of which was directed by the very young Fusco Sansone, and ephemeral anarchist
newspapers and tabloids with large print runs, such as Imparcial (The Independent) and
El día (The Day). Marinetti’s brief stay in Montevideo in June 1926 renewed general inter-
est in his work. The new poet Enrique Ricardo Garet (1904–1979), author of Paracaídas
(Parachutes, 1927), and the younger poet Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui (1907–1959), author of
Palacio Salvo (Salvo Palace, 1927), were amongst those who could not have been indif-
ferent to Marinetti’s lecture on the Uruguayan-French poet Jules Laforgue (1860–1887),
one of the forefathers of Futurism. Nor could they ignore the statements Marinetti
offered to the press and the swathes of articles that reported on the clamorous reactions
each of his public appearances had caused in neighbouring countries (see the entries
on Argentina and Brazil in this volume). The political class also followed Marinetti’s
brief visit with interest. The Italian League in Montevideo considered the presence of
 Uruguay 877

the poet, and especially its positive coverage from the batllist newspaper El día, as a
danger worthy of being communicated to the Minister of Foreign Affairs. On the other
hand, when the day approached for Marinetti’s lecture, a Fascist journal in Montevideo
– a newssheet of little import called Italia nova: Organo degli Italiani fidenti nella Patria,
nel Re e nel Governo (New Italy: Mouthpiece of Italians Faithful to the Homeland, the
King and the Government) – availed itself of the occasion and announced on 24 June in
an unsigned note: “ITALIANS! On 30 June the poet-genius Marinetti will give a speech
at the Artigas Theatre. ARRIVE in great numbers!” Marinetti’s voice had, again, become
the object of a political debate.
On 29 June 1926, the Futurist leader delivered the promised talk, peppered with
some poetry recitations. As has been documented by Castro Rocha and Schnapp,
on that day 398 tickets were sold, just half of the theatre’s capacity and the speaker
received $65.84 of the box office taking of $354.20. The show was so disappointing
for the organizers and propagandists that Italia nova was obliged to offer the follow-
ing excuse: “The audience may not have been large, but it consisted of intelligent
people, who knew how to bestow the right honours to a talented orator who spoke for
over two hours in a clear and precise language” ([Anon.]: “Marinetti all’Artigas”, 3).
Another organ of the Italian community in Montevideo, linked to the Fascist régime
overseas but more measured in its political statements, wrote that Marinetti had a
“very friendly welcome and the public – not large because the theatre was cold and
wet – listened with intense interest and was conquered by his vibrant words and his
powerful delivery” ([Anon.]: “Marinetti in Montevideo”, 1).
At that time, Montevideo had only one literary magazine that was sensitive to the
New: La cruz del sur. Here, Marinetti’s performance was reviewed by Gervasio Guillot
Muñoz (1897–1956), who described the “amazing speaker” as a “creator and theoreti-
cian capable of ending the quietism and passivity that envelops Italy”, but he did not
excuse the bad choice of venue and its resulting audience size. For him, the event was
a complete fiasco:

Marinetti spoke at the Artigas, a theatre that for quite some time now has presented eccentrics,
acrobats and dancers from all continents. [...] He said he would return next year to the Rio de la
Plata to hold an international exhibition of Futurist art. The Italian public that night in the Artigas
hall was stunned and conquered. Most of them consisted of opera buffs, lovers of sugary melo-
dies, devotees to divas with opulent necks and dancers in spongy costume turning their romantic
pirouettes or measured dances. (H. W. [Guillot Muñoz]: “Conferencia de F. T. Marinetti”, 23)

Marinetti apparently met a number of sympathizers while in Uruguay, one of whom

was Pereda Valdés who had been among the attendees at the Artigas performance
and, as he confessed in an interview with Wilfredo Penco in February 1980, had
thrown into the audience a bundle of sheaves with poems in honour of the visitor,
surprising and even frightening Marinetti. Jorge Schwartz has identified in Marinetti’s
personal library, preserved at the Beinecke Library of Yale University, New Haven/CT,
878 Pablo Rocca

three books by Uruguayan writers (see Schwartz: “A bibliografia latino-americana na

coleção Marinetti”, 142–144). El arquero (The Archer, 1924) contains Ildefonso Pereda
Valdés’s dedication in which the author declares his “admiration” for the Futurist;
in La guitarra de los negros (The Black People’s Guitar, 1926) he went a stage further
and expressed his esteem for “my teacher F. T. Marinetti. With Futurist sympathy”.
Another admirer was Julio Raúl Mendilaharsu (1887–1923), who wrote a dedication in
his Voz de vida (Voice of Life, 1923), in a manner that was consistent with the aesthet-
ics of transition he confessed at the time: “To the great poet F. T. Marinetti, reformer
of poetry, with fond memories of his admirer and friend.” The documents preserved
in the Mendilaharsu archive in the Universidad de la República (Sección de Archivo
y Documentación del Instituto de Letras, Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la
Educación) in Montevideo do not show if Marinetti returned Mendilaharsu’s compli-
ments. The poet died three years before Marinetti visited Uruguay.
Ferreiro’s estate has not survived, so we do not know precisely how he judged
Marinetti or his writings. However, as mentioned above, it is obvious that in his poems
he paid tribute to the Italian. Perhaps to stop the proliferation of such admiration, the
sophisticated Uruguayan writer and critic Clotilde Luisi (1896–1969) reproduced in
the magazine Alfar a passage from Treno di soldati ammalati as a deterring example
to warn young people not to emulate this “scandalous Marinetti, enfant terrible, dis-
respectful and contemptuous, who takes a childish joy in scaring writers of the older
generation and, like a school boy, is having fun pulling faces at his teacher” (Luisi:
“Un aspecto de Marinetti”, s.p). However, Luisi also postulated in the same essay
that there was another Marinetti who “in a somewhat ironic tone displays sensitiv-
ity, melancholy and finesse”. She obviously felt that there was something else that
emerged from his poetry, something that had more to offer than mere opposition to
the establishment. Luisi’s apologetic criticism was not new, but here it was accompa-
nied by practical examples, three poems by Marinetti, translated by her to confirm
her hypotheses.

Limits of Futurist technophilia

Ferreiro was only ten years old when the first Futurist manifesto was published. Yet,
his articles and verses bear some resemblance to the initial pulse of the Futurist
movement with their scathing criticism of the establishment. Usually, they were
without a precise target, with the exception of the last verse of El dolor de ser Ford
(The Pain of Being Ford), which can be read as a parody of Rubén Darío’s Cantos
de vida y esperanza (Songs of Life and Hope, 1905), and a short article in Cartel in
which he attacked Leopoldo Lugones (1874–1938). In a review of El hombre que se
comió un autobús, Borges noticed certain differences between Italian and Uruguayan
Futurism:
 Uruguay 879

Alfredo Mario Ferreiro is the only Futurist I have met. He is not, like the Italian orator Marinetti,
an admirer of machines nor is he dominated by their drive and speed. He is a man who is simply
happy that machines exist, like wind or horses or life. That means, reality provides him with
pleasure. (Borges: “Alfredo Mario Ferreiro: El hombre que se comió un autobús”, 405)

As Luisi reminds us, not all of Marinetti’s works clung to the monotonous rhythm of
the machines. But it was Futurist technophilia that reached the eastern banks of the
Plata river, where it caused a moderate provocation. One can infer from Borges’ obser-
vation that Ferreiro’s joyfulness merged with a Futurist matrix, but in one respect
Borges was wrong: to the poet from Montevideo the machines could also have dis-
tressing and oppressive forms, as can be observed in the poems Buenos Aires and
La balada de los frenos (The Ballad of the Brakes). Ferreiro disagreed also with the
Italian school over the question of how to confront the past. Rather than ignoring or
battling against it, he felt that one should struggle to give it new meaning. Rather than
slavishly following tradition, he sought to safeguard its symbols and metaphors and
restore life to them by adapting them to modern everyday situations. In that sense,
even Nature could be linked to the machine, as in Campo abierto (Open Field), or both
be merged into a new whole, as in the magnificent Poema ultra-rápido de la liebre
arisca (Ultra-fast Poem of a Wild Hare):

Es un relámpago pardo It is a brown lightning

sobre una nube verde. on a green cloud.
Son varios puntos ojalados They are several eyelet spots
en el pastizal. in the pasture.
Es un temblor en zig-zag It is a zig-zag earthquake
y un terror en línea recta. and a terror straight.
Es un relámpago pardo It is a brown lightning
sobre la redonda falda on the round skirt
de un cerro verde. of a green hill.
Un relámpago, cuyo trueno Lightning, whose thunder
estalla en la boca de mi escopeta. explodes in the mouth of my
shotgun.
(Ferreiro: “Poema ultra-rápido de la liebre
arisca”, 135)

When Futurism is primarily seen as machinism, there can be no place for nativists
such as Fernan Silva Valdés (1887–1975) and Pedro Leandro Ipuche (1889–1976), the
most skilled innovators of traditional country-inspired verse, who borrowed their
images from the avant-garde and some formal resources from Futurism. There were
other signs of Futurist influences in Uruguay, but they vanished as Marinetti moved
closer to Fascism. The mainstream of Uruguayan intelligentsia was strongly opposed
880 Pablo Rocca

to this ideology and therefore decided to reject a fundamental trend of aesthetic

transformation, for without Futurism the new art would not have come about, espe-
cially in the southernmost part of America, where innovative expressions were hes-
itant and cautious.

Archival sources
Colección Julio Raúl Mendilaharsu. Universidad de la República, Montevideo. Facultad de
Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación, Sección de Archivo y Documentación del Instituto de
Letras.

Works cited
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3892–3893. Reprinted in Apolo (Montevideo) 32 (October 1909): 245–246.
[Anon.]: “El futurismo. Nueva escuela de principios. Contra los viejos moldes.” El día (Montevideo),
20 March 1909. 2.
[Anon.]: “Marinetti all’ Artigas.” Italia nova (Montevideo) l:12 (1 July 1926): 3.
Boglione, Riccardo, and Georgina Torello, eds.: Poesie che sanno di nafta: Antologia della poesia
futurista uruguaiana (1909–1932). Con una nota di Pablo Echaurren. Foggia: Sentieri Meridiani,
2014.
Borges, Jorge Luís: “Alfredo Mario Ferreiro: El hombre que se comió un autobús.” Síntesis (Buenos
Aires) 1:6 (November 1927): 405–406. Reprinted in J. L. Borges: Textos recobrados (1919–1929).
Barcelona: Emecé, 1997. 321–322.
Cardu, Camilo, ed.: Poeti della terra orientale: Antologia di poeti uruguayani. Milano: Alpes, 1930.
Ferreiro, Alfredo Mario: “Canción para alcanzar la luna cuando pase.” A.M. Ferreiro: Se ruega no
dar la mano: Poemas profilácticos a base de imágenes esmeriladas. Montevideo: Impresora
Uruguaya, 1930. 45–46.
Ferreiro, Alfredo Mario: “La entrecasa en el arte.” Cartel 1:2 (15 January 1930): 1. Reprinted in
Nelson Osorio Tejeda, ed.: Manifiestos, proclamas y polémicas de la vanguardia literaria
hispanoamericana. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1988. 358–359.
Ferreiro, Alfredo Mario: “Nota sobre Raquel Sáenz.” Raquel Sáenz: La almohada de los sueños:
Poemas. Montevideo: “La Industrial”, 1925. s.p.
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dar la mano: Poemas profilácticos a base de imágenes esmeriladas. Montevideo: Impresora
Uruguaya, 1930. 100–101.
Ferreiro, Alfredo Mario: “Poema hasta el tercer ‘no’.” A.M. Ferreiro: Se ruega no dar la mano:
Poemas profilácticos a base de imágenes esmeriladas. Montevideo: Impresora Uruguaya,
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Montevideo: Banda Oriental, 1998. 135.
 Uruguay 881

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Ferreiro, Alfredo Mario: Se ruega no dar la mano: Poemas profilácticos a base de imágenes
esmeriladas. Montevideo: Impresora Uruguaya, 1930.
Filartigas, Juan M., ed.: Mapa de la poesía, 1930. Con los nuevos valores del Uruguay. Montevideo:
Albatros, 1930.
H. W. [Guillot Muñoz, Gervasio]: “Conferencia de F. T. Marinetti sobre el poeta montevideano Jules
Laforgue y el futurismo integral en el Teatro Artigas.” La cruz del sur (Montevideo) 14 (October
1926): 23.
Herrero-Senés, Juan: “ ‘Polemics, jokes, compliments and insults’: The Reception of Futurism in the
Spanish Press (1909–1918).” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 3 (2013): 123–153.
Luisi, Clotilde: “Un aspecto de Marinetti.” Alfar (Montevideo) 64 (August–September 1929): s.p.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Destruction of Syntax – Untrammeled Imagination – Words-in-
Freedom.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2006. 120–131.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Teoria e invenzione futurista. Milano: Mondadori, 1968. 2nd edn 1983.
Parra del Riego, Juan: “Loa al fút-bol.” Alejandro Romualdo, ed.: Poesía peruana: Antología general.
Vol. 2. De la conquista al modernismo. Lima: Edubanco, 1984. 606–607.
Pereda Valdés, Ildefonso, ed.: Antología de la moderna poesía uruguaya. Buenos Aires: El Ateneo,
1927.
Saint-Point, Valentine de: “Manifiesto futurista de la lujuria.” El hombre (Montevideo) 163
(6 November 1919): 2.
Schwartz, Jorge: “A bibliografia latino-americana na coleção Marinetti.” Boletim bibliográfico
biblioteca Mário de Andrade 44 (1985): 131–145.

Further reading
Achugar, Hugo: “La década del veinte. Vanguardia y batllismo. El intelectual y el Estado.” Vida
y cultura en el Río de la Plata. Montevideo: Universidad de la República, Departamento de
Publicaciones, 1987. 99–116.
Espina, Eduardo: “Vanguardia en el Uruguay: La subjetividad como disidencia.” Cuadernos
hispanoamericanos 529–530 (July–August 1994): 33–59.
García, Carlos, and Dieter Reichardt, eds. Bibliografía y antología crítica de las vanguardias
literarias: Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert,
2004.
Martínez Moreno, Carlos: “Las vanguardias literarias.” Enciclopedia uruguaya 47 (September 1969):
121–140. Reprinted in C. Martínez Moreno: Literatura uruguaya. Vol. 1. Montevideo: Cámara de
Senadores, 1993. 169–194.
Orcajo Acuña, Federico: Javier de Viana. El futurismo y Marinetti: Dos ensayos de crítica.
Montevideo: La Bolsa de los Libros, 1926.
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson: El futurismo y la vanguardia en América Latina. Caracas: Centro de Estudios
Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1982.
882 Pablo Rocca

Peluffo, Gabriel, ed.: Los años veinte: El proyecto uruguayo. Montevideo: Museo Municipal “Juan
Manuel Blanes”, 1999.
Rocca, Pablo: “Epílogo.” Nicolás Fusco Sansone: Las trompetas de las voces alegres. Montevideo:
Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2005. 109–127.
Rocca, Pablo: “Las rupturas del discurso poético: De la vanguardia y sus cuestionamientos,
1920–1940.” Heber Raviolo, and Pablo Rocca, eds.: Historia de la literatura uruguaya
contemporánea. Vol. 2. Una literatura en movimiento. Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda
Oriental, 1997. 11–59.
Rocca, Pablo: “Marinetti en Montevideo: Idas y vueltas de la vanguardia.” Cuadernos
hispanoamericanos 631 (January 2003): 105–117.
Rocca, Pablo: “Prólogo.” Juvenal Ortiz Saralegui: Palacio Salvo y otros poemas. Montevideo:
Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 2005. 7–26.
Rocha, João Cezar de Castro: “ ‘Futures Past’: On the Reception and Impact of Futurism in Brazil.”
Günter Berghaus, ed.: International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: De
Gruyter, 2000. 204–221.
Rocha, João Cezar de Castro, and Jeffrey T. Schnapp: “As velocidades brasileiras de uma
inimizade desvairada: O (des)encontro de Marinetti e Mário de Andrade em 1926.” Revista
brasileira de literatura comparada 3 (1996): 41–54. English translation “Brazilian Velocities:
On Marinetti’s 1926 Trip to South America.” South Central Review 13:2–3 (Summer–Autumn
1996): 105–156.
Rodríguez Monegal, Emir: “El olvidado ultraísmo uruguayo.” Revista iberoamericana 48:118–119
(January–June 1982 ): 257–274. Reprinted in E. Rodríguez Monegal: Obra crítica. Vol. 1. Uruguay
y sus letras del centenario de la generación del 45. Montevideo: De la Plaza, 1994. 85–102.
Schwartz, Jorge, ed.: Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: Textos programáticos y críticos. Madrid:
Cátedra, 1991. 2nd edn México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2002. Portuguese edn
Vanguardas latino-americanas: Polêmicas, manifestos e textos críticos. São Paulo: Editôra
da Universidade de São Paulo; Iluminuras; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São
Paulo, 1995. 2nd rev. edn 2008.
Ara H. Merjian and Nicola Lucchi
53 United States of America
The reception of Italian Futurism in the United States forms a fitful chapter in both
the history of the movement and that of the first American avant-garde. By the turn of
the twentieth century, industrial and technological advancements had transformed
American cities into urban environments that could inspire the fantasies of Futurist
artists. And as the USA had been a destination for some four million Italians who con-
tinued to entertain strong ties with their families at home, images of New York City and
Chicago reached Italy through postcards and other popular formats. Consequently,
the country’s bustling factories, widespread electrification and throbbing nocturnal
life came to figure prominently in the early Futurist imagination. The urban utopias
conjured up by the architects Antonio Sant’Elia, Mario Chiattone and Virgilio Marchi
owe much to the soaring infrastructures observed in both real and fantastic depic-
tions of New World cityscapes. Well into the 1930s, the American metropolis remained
a model (albeit an imperfect one) for the Futurists’ proverbial “reconstruction of the
universe”; indeed, the artist Fortunato Depero (1892–1960) reflected on the ‘Futurist
life’ experienced daily in the United States, despite a Fascist rhetoric increasingly
insistent upon Italy’s cultural autarchy (see Depero: “Un futurista a New York”). As
the only core member of the early Futurist group to have resided there for any length
of time, Depero remains a key point of reference for measuring America’s – or at least,
New York City’s – impact on the movement.
While the United States constituted a consistent source of inspiration for Futurist
artists and theoreticians, the movement remained, by contrast, largely unknown
across the Atlantic. Numerous factors limited Futurism’s early diffusion. First among
these was the group’s absence from the New York Armory Show of 1913, an event
that played a vital rÔle in presenting the European avant-gardes on American shores.
Although Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and others had expressed an interest in
participating, F. T. Marinetti refused to send Futurist works, criticizing the exhibition’s
venue and format alike (see Severini: “The Life of a Painter”). To complicate matters,
by the early 1910s the adjectives ‘futurist’ and ‘futuristic’ had entered common par-
lance as epithets for any and all phenomena redolent of the avant-garde. The itinerary
of an exhibition of avant-garde works inaugurated at the Montross Gallery in New
York, for example, occasioned headlines across the country such as “Weird Futurist
Paintings Exhibited at Art Museum” (Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, 29 March 1914).
This shorthand discounted Futurism as a movement unto itself, while conflating its
origins and aims with a more generic Modernism. Finally, the extensive affinities
between Italian Futurism and Fascism cast a long historical shadow following the
régime’s demise, prompting numerous scholars either to avoid or to dismiss out-
right Marinetti’s movement for several decades. In spite of these limitations, some
American critics, curators and collectors remained apprised of Futurist activity from
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-053
884 Ara H. Merjian and Nicola Lucchi

an early date. A few artists, meanwhile, began emulating Futurist strategies, or even
declared their allegiance not long after the movement’s founding.

Responses to Futurism in the 1910s

Futurist ideas reached English-speaking audiences as early as August 1910, when the
British magazine The Tramp published Futurism’s founding manifesto. Marinetti’s
London lectures and the movement’s art exhibition at the Sackville Gallery (March
1912) also enjoyed wide publicity in the English press. In a similar fashion, the Florence-
based, English-language journal The Mask, edited by the British set designer and the-
orist Edward Gordon Craig (1872–1966), frequently reported on Futurist matters during
the 1910s. While it is hard to estimate the diffusion and impact of these publications in
the United States, they certainly played a rôle in spreading knowledge about Futurism
among British and American expatriates, who maintained an exchange of informa-
tion with Futurist artists in cities like Florence and Rome throughout the 1920s. The
English-language journals Broom: An International Magazine of the Arts (founded in
Rome in 1921 and subsequently published in Berlin and New York until 1924) and
Futurist Aristocracy (New York, 1923) attracted an American readership and featured
contributions by Italian artists such as Corrado Govoni and Enrico Prampolini (see
Fochessati: “ ‘Broom’ and ‘Futurist Aristocracy’ ”). The launching of Vorticism in
England in 1914 had the further effect of introducing certain Futurist bywords into
Anglo-American circles (although inevitably conditioned by the Vorticists’ professed
defiance of Futurist dogma).
By 1911–1912, accounts of Futurist art and aesthetic principles made their appear-
ance in American newspapers. As John Hand carefully surveyed, French-American
journalist and translator André Tridon (1877–1922) began publishing supportive arti-
cles on the Italian avant-garde movement in December 1911 to February 1912, first in
the New York Herald and then in the New York Sun (see Hand: “Futurism in America:
1909–1914”). Tridon’s article for the New York Sun included reproductions of paintings
by Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and Luigi Russolo, as well as an English trans-
lation of the manifesto on Futurist painting. While these articles provided an early
mix of direct and indirect exposure to the American public, actual Futurist presence
in the United States remained nonexistent for several years. Following their absence
from the Armory Show, Marinetti’s group did not exhibit in the United States until the
Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco (20 February – 4 December
1915), where an entire gallery in the annex of the Palace of Fine Arts was given over
to their works before they travelled to San Diego for the final leg of the show. Both
exhibitions went almost unnoticed in the press.
Instead, Futurist tendencies and theories reached American artists in a some-
what watered-down and indirect manner, bound up with the activity of the prominent
 United States of America 885

photographer and avant-garde lightning rod, Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946). Like his
gallery 291, Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work formed a clearing house of the latest
European innovations. Its January 1914 issue featured “Aphorisms on Futurism” by the
British painter and poet Mina Loy (1882–1966), who had joined the movement the pre-
vious year, while 291 staged a (largely overlooked) exhibition of works by Gino Severini
(6–17 March 1917). At the same time, a host of artists and poets centred around 291
and Camera Work – Arthur Dove (1880–1946), Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890–1973),
John Marin (1870–1953) and Max Weber (1881–1961), to name but a few – maintained
close contact with their European counterparts and demonstrated a nuanced assimila-
tion of Cubist-derived forms and facetting. Like the angular architectonics in Cityscape
(1915) by Abraham Walkowitz (1878–1965), Weber’s visual and written work on the
fourth dimension paralleled aspects of Futurist imagery and theory. Marin’s early
acquaintance with Severini, as well as his familiarity with the Parisian avant-garde
more broadly, appears evident in drawings and watercolours that celebrate the dyna-
mism of modern American architecture with elements borrowed, at least in part, from
Futurist aesthetics.
Synchromism, the short-lived Modernist movement founded by American expa-
triates Morgan Russell (1886–1953) and Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1890–1973),
also owed a debt to Futurism and deserves a mention for its early championing of
Modernist aesthetics in the United States. Born among the Parisian avant-gardes in
1913, and later revived in New York City on the occasion of the Forum Exhibition
of Modern American Painters (13–25 March 1916), the movement advocated a picto-
rial style that embraced a colour-based abstraction. While Synchromist artists drew
inspiration from a variety of sources as diverse as Pablo Picasso, Paul Cézanne and
Michelangelo, their emphasis on light, colour and rhythm led to pictorial outcomes
that closely recall the most abstract works by Boccioni, Balla and Severini (see
Levin: “Morgan Russell’s Notebooks”). Spiralling vortexes and dynamic, geometric
fragmentations of colour envelop the seldom-recognizable outlines of figurative sub-
jects, which occasionally include Futurist motifs such as aeroplanes and scenes of
urban life.
The only American woman directly associated with Futurism, Frances Simpson
Stevens (1894–1976) was – like her roommate Mina Loy – one of the movement’s ear-
liest non-Italian adherents tout court. Residing in Florence and Rome for two years,
Simpson Stevens worked on the translation of Futurist documents and exhibited
various works at Giuseppe Sprovieri’s Galleria Futurista. Although she maintained
close contact with several key members of the Futurist group, her meteoric artistic
career has only recently been brought back to light through photographic documen-
tation of lost works. Her painting Battle of Gorizia (c.1916), for example, reveals a keen
understanding of the movement’s chief concerns (including war), just as her earlier
Dynamism of a Printing Press (1914) and Dynamism of Pistons (1914) evince a concern
with Futurist tropes in both subject matter and rhetoric. Battle of Gorizia juxtaposes
concentric, semi-conical planes interspersed with armoured tanks and Italian flags.
886 Ara H. Merjian and Nicola Lucchi

The composition recalls elements of English Vorticism and alludes to the collage
prominent in Carrà’s free-word panel, Manifestazione interventista: Festa patriottica
(Interventionist Demonstration: Patriotic Holiday, 1914), while her Dynamic Velocity
of Interborough Rapid Transit Power Station (c.1916) offers a local (and looser) gloss on
Antonio Sant’Elia’s Futurist blueprints. Upon her return to the United States, Simpson
Stevens frequented the circle of artists at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery and exhibited there
several of the canvases and drawings completed in Italy. Despite some favourable
reviews of her work in the New York press, and exhibitions alongside the most promi-
nent members of the American avant-garde (from Francis Picabia to Charles Demuth),
Simpson Stevens seems to have ceased her artistic pursuits by the end of the decade,
as nothing remains extant of her production after 1919.
Having emigrated to New York from Bologna in 1909, Athos Casarini (1883–1917)
was, next to Joseph Stella who had been resident in New York since 1896, the only
Italian painter to take part in the Armory Show. Although an affiliate of Futurism
since 1912–1913, he became best known on American shores for his satirical drawings
and traditional cityscapes, published in magazines such as Harper’s Weekly. During
the same period, Casarini composed images that reveal a keen sense of Futurist
dynamism, a throbbing interpenetration of light and volume, and a rhythmic, near-
abstract representation of urban space recalling the paintings of Luigi Russolo. One of
the few Futurists to oppose Italy’s intervention into the First World War, Casarini nev-
ertheless returned to enlist in the Italian army in 1915; he died in combat in September
1917 during an Austrian offensive. His works were hung in the United States post-
humously in a group exhibition of modern art at the Bourgeois Gallery (April 1918)
as well as at the Esposizione Nazionale della Guerra, held at the Palazzo Bonora in
Bologna (November 1918).

Futurism in the work of Joseph Stella

During his time in New York, Casarini had come to frequent the Italian-American
painter Joseph Stella (1877–1946), with whom he helped introduce Futurism to
American avant-garde circles. Indeed, more than any other artist of the period,
it is Stella who came to be associated with the movement’s activity in the United
States, although he never exhibited alongside the group itself. Hailing originally
from Muro Lucano in the province of Potenza, Stella retained strong ties with Italy
even after settling in New York City. Following a course of study at the Arts Students
League, his first efforts bear out a concern with the subjects of industrial labour, in
the gritty, socially engaged tradition of Ashcan-School painting. A return to Italy in
1909 coincided with Futurism’s founding, as well as a widespread surge in European
avant-garde experimentation. Stella visited the landmark exhibition the Futurists
held at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris (5–24 February 1912) and familiarized
 United States of America 887

himself with the group’s motifs and stylistic strategies. However, his exhilaration
at the latest aesthetic developments during his 1911–1912 residence in the French
capital made him – as Barbara Haskell has detailed – too overwhelmed to paint (see
Haskell: “Joseph Stella”, 34). Upon returning to New York, he contributed a rela-
tively tame still life to the Armory Show, informed by post-Impressionist chromatism
and brushwork, but unaffected by the Cubist revolution that had so transformed
Modernism in Europe.
It was not until Stella’s exhibition at the Montross Gallery in 1914 that he unleashed
a critical storm, centred upon his swirling, hallucinatory canvas Battle of Lights: Coney
Island, which adapted Futurist dynamism (particularly Severini’s sophisticated inter-
pretation thereof) to a local urban motif (see Merjian: “A Caricature of Futurism in the
‘New York Sun’ (1914)”). However, it was Stella’s large-scale paintings of the Brooklyn
Bridge that cemented his status as an American avant-gardist. Ranging from oil on
canvas to pastel to watercolour, and from single canvases to sprawling polyptychs,
the Brooklyn Bridge works offered a kaleidoscope of coloured, prismatic shards and
pushed his visual idiom to the brink of abstraction. In the tradition of Walt Whitman
and anticipating the work of the Modernist poet Hart Crane, Stella’s images evoked
the bridge as a feat of modern engineering as a particularly American symbol of ambi-
tion. Along with his contemporaries Charles Demuth (1883–1935) and Charles Sheeler
(1883–1965), Stella contributed significantly to the American Precisionist movement,
with its celebration of vernacular cityscapes, industry and sharp geometric forms – all
of which owed a certain debt to Futurist imperatives. Stella would paint the Brooklyn
Bridge well into the late 1930s, although after a while the motif ceded to highly styl-
ized flower studies and somewhat arcane religious iconography.

Fortunato Depero in New York (1928–1930)

Just as Stella abandoned his Futurist-inspired efforts, another artist crossed the Atlantic
to take up that somewhat frayed thread. As one of the youngest and most precocious
of the movement’s early devotees, Fortunato Depero established a personal studio in
New York City from 1928 and 1930, attempting a number of (largely failed) business ven-
tures in the realm of theatre, advertising, publishing, home furnishings and restaurant
design. While prized today, his cover proposals for popular magazines such as Vogue
and Vanity Fair were mostly rejected; his exhibitions of artworks and textiles at venues
such as the Guarino Art Gallery and the Wanamaker Auditorium likewise yielded paltry
sales and did not lead to any further commissions (see Bedarida: “ ‘I Will Smash the
Alps of the Atlantic’ ”). Still, Depero’s observation of ballet and variety theatre in the
United States allowed him to draft sketches for theatre costumes which, as Maurizio
Scudiero has noted, demonstrate a new interest in the free movements of the human
body (see Scudiero and Leiber: “Depero futurista and New York”, 68).
888 Ara H. Merjian and Nicola Lucchi

These images notably depart from the puppet-like and robotic costumes typical
of Depero’s previous work. Their quality was not lost on the most important names
in New York’s theatre industry. Depero’s familiarity with Léonide Massine, also resi-
dent in New York at the time, allowed him to present his portfolio to choreographers
and impresarios such as Leon Leonidoff (1894–1989) and Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel
(1882–1936). While Depero’s art may have left only a marginal impact on American
soil, the memory of his time there furnished the artist with inspirational mate-
rial long after his return to Italy and served as a major element of self-promotion.
Indeed, written accounts of his New York sojourn constitute a recurrent theme of his
work during the 1930s. The free-word compositions commonly known as Grattacieli
e tunnel (Skyscrapers and Tunnel, 1934–1935) and Subway (1931) display an original
and sophisticated typographical configuration of words that double as architectural
blocks, evoking the spaces and subjects of a complex urban landscape, reviving an
earlier mode of Futurist experimentation in the light of American themes.

Futurist exhibitions in the USA

Aside from Depero’s rÔle as a champion of Futurist aesthetics in the United States,
the 1920s and 1930s also saw the emergence of gallery and museum exhibitions that
increasingly featured avant-garde European art, including those on Marinetti’s roster.
A major showing of Futurist art took place in 1926 within the context of the itiner-
ant Exhibition of Modern Italian Art, organized by the Italy America Society. During
the same year, the Modernist architect Friedrich Kiesler (1890–1965) and intellectual
Jane Heap (1883–1964) organized the International Theatre Exposition in New York
City, under the auspices of Heap’s literary magazine, The Little Review. This exhi-
bition featured a sizeable assembly of Futurist theatrical drawings, stage models,
masks, photographs and costume designs by artists such as Depero, Gerardo Dottori,
Virgilio Marchi, Enrico Prampolini, Luigi Russolo and Tato. Ten years later, in 1936,
the Museum of Modern Art organized the landmark exhibition, Cubism and Abstract
Art, curated by Alfred H. Barr, Jr., a supporter of Italian Modernism in general. The
show included masterpieces by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and
Gino Severini alongside other works of the European avant-gardes.
In fact, MoMA played a fundamental rôle in reassessing the importance of
Futurism in the post-war years, when the relationship between Marinetti’s movement
and Fascism had come to prove a significant liability. In the aftermath of the Second
World War and in the wake of the cultural politics favoured by the Marshall Plan,
MoMA inaugurated the exhibition Twentieth Century Italian Art (1949), a broad ret-
rospective of contemporary artistic trends in Italy. Its selections were telling, as was
the fact that the section dedicated to Futurism included works solely from the years
1910 to 1915. This decision (and Barr’s accompanying catalogue essay) proposed a
 United States of America 889

clear demarcation between “early Futurism” and “second-wave Futurism”, essentially

casting the former as the fruit of a worthy, politically acceptable avant-garde and the
latter a stilted (and politically compromised) reiteration of early motifs.
This critical reading influenced the discourse on Futurism in the United States for
the better part of the last century. This is well exemplified in the large 1961–1962 itiner-
ant exhibition Futurism, curated by Joshua C. Taylor, in which the years 1914–1915 are
identified as the movement’s “closing years” (see Taylor: “Futurism”, 102–118). Only
in recent decades have scholars begun to re-evaluate the rôle of secondo futurismo
from a more detached, historical perspective. The 2009 centennial anniversary of the
Futurist manifesto occasioned various reassessments of the movement and its prob-
lematic legacy in the United States, while Italian Futurism 1909–1944 at New York’s
Guggenheim Museum (2014) became the first exhibition in the United States to repre-
sent Futurism as a complex avant-garde enterprise, developing organically over the
course of nearly four decades in an unprecedented range of media.

Futurism after the Second World War

Despite the movement’s extinction upon Marinetti’s death in 1944, as well as the
relative lack of attention from the scholarly community in the early post-war years,
Futurist practices significantly influenced the development of neo-avant-garde the-
atrical performance in the United States. Theatre scholar Michael Kirby traced the
influence of Futurism in American theatre starting from the work of interwar play-
wrights such as Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), whose one-act play The Happy Journey
to Trenton and Camden (1931) requires actors to perform a pantomime in which
they mimic the movements of riding in an imaginary automobile (Kirby: Futurist
Performance, 67–68). Futurist theatre echoed loudest not in its thematic emphasis,
but rather in its interaction between performers and their audiences, and its focus
on anti-traditional music and multimedia experimentation. Futurism’s irreverence
and its assault upon traditional notions of beauty notably influenced American Beat
culture, with the poet Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) announcing, for example, that the
“prophecies of Marinetti are coming true, some of them, the wilder, more poetic ones”
(interview in a 1967 documentary film by Antonello Branca, What’s Happening?). The
Happenings staged during the late 1950s by composer John Cage and later by perfor-
mance artist Allan Kaprow (1927–2006) had, at least in part, the same ethos as the
early twentieth-century serate futuriste. The shock value and relational antagonism
that characterized the work of American performance and body artists in the 1960s
and 1970s, such as Carolee Schneeman (b. 1939) and Vito Acconci (1940–2017), as well
as the multisensorial strategies of projects like Exploding Plastic Inevitable (1966–
1967) by Andy Warhol (1928–1987) find their roots in early avant-garde performance,
and particularly in the Futurist programmatic attempts to épater la bourgeoisie.
890 Ara H. Merjian and Nicola Lucchi

To this day, several artists in the United States reflect upon Futurism in ways that
engage critically with its aesthetic and political legacy. Luca Buvoli (b. 1963), a New York-
based Italian artist, successfully challenges Futurism’s aggressive rhetoric through video
projects and installations that deny and fragment the assertive character of Marinetti’s
manifestos and proclamations (Sai: “ ‘A Very Beautiful Day after Tomorrow’ ”). Similarly,
Marinetti’s theatrical ideas have provided early blueprints to groups such as the Chicago-
based ensemble The Neo-Futurists; Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noise manifesto for the acous-
tic performances by Joseph Young (aka Giuseppe Marinetti, b. 1960) and The NeoFuturist
Collective, and Antonio Sant’Elia’s architectural visions for the collective ArchiGO, based
at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The loosely-defined Neo-futurist movement has
found fertile terrain in the United States by embracing the less troubling and iconoclas-
tic aspects of early Futurism, recuperating the pars construens championed by Futurist
architects and craftsmen and bringing back into discussion the fundamental impor-
tance of Balla and Depero’s manifesto, Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (The Futurist
Reconstruction of the Universe, 1915).

Works cited
[Anon.]: “Weird Futurist Paintings Exhibited at Art Museum.” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, 29
March 1914.
Barr, Alfred Hamilton: “Early Futurism.” James Thrall Soby, and Alfred Hamilton Barr, eds.: Twentieth-
century Italian Art. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 28 June – 18
September 1949. 7–16.
Bedarida, Raffaele: “ ‘I Will Smash the Alps of the Atlantic’: Depero and Americanism.” Manuel
Fontán del Junco, ed.: Futurist Depero (1913–1950) = Depero futurista (1913–1950). Exhibition
catalogue. Madrid: Fundación Juan March, 10 de octubre de 2014 – 18 de enero de 2015.
329–337.
Branca, Antonello: What’s Happening? (DVD video). Roma: Kiwido, 2010.
Depero, Fortunato: Un futurista a New York. A cura di Claudia Salaris. Montepulciano: Del Grifo,
1990.
Fochessati, Matteo: “ ‘Broom’ and ‘Futurist Aristocracy’: When the Futurist Movement Met the
Machine Age.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012): 69–103.
Hand, John Oliver: “Futurism in America: 1909–1914.” Art Journal 41:4 (Winter 1981): 337–342.
Haskell, Barbara, ed.: Joseph Stella. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Whitney Museum of American
Art, 21 April – 18 September 1994. New York: Abrams, 1994.
Kirby, Michael: Futurist Performance. New York: Dutton, 1971.
Levin, Gail: “Morgan Russell’s Notebooks: an American Avant-Garde Painter in Paris.” RACAR: Revue
d’art canadienne / Canadian Art Review 3:2 (1976): 73–75, 77–87.
Merjian, Ara H.: “A Caricature of Futurism in the ‘New York Sun’ (1914).” International Yearbook of
Futurism Studies 4 (2014): 107–110.
Sai, Elisa: “ ‘A Very Beautiful Day after Tomorrow’: Luca Buvoli and the Legacy of Futurism.”
Simona Storchi, and Elza Adamowicz, eds.: Back to the Futurists: Avant-gardes 1909–2009.
Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2013. 284–298.
Scudiero, Maurizio, and David Leiber: Depero futurista and New York. Rovereto: Longo, 1986.
 United States of America 891

Severini, Gino: The Life of a Painter. Princeton/NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Taylor, Joshua C., ed.: Futurism. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 31 May –
5 September 1961; Detroit/MI: Institute of Arts, 18 October – 19 December 1961; Los Angeles/
CA: County Museum, 14 January – 19 February 1962. New York: Doubleday, 1961.
Tridon, André: “The Futurists, Latest Comers in the World of Art.” New York Sun, 25 February
1912.
Tridon, André: “The New Cult of Futurism Is Here.” New York Herald, 14 December 1911.
Wilder, Thornton: The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. New York: French, 1931.

Further reading
Agee, William C.: “Willard Huntington Wright and the Synchromists: Notes on the Forum Exhibition.”
Archives of American Art Journal 24:2 (1984): 10–15.
Andréoli-de Villers, Jean-Pierre, ed.: “Dossier inédit sur les Futuristes et la percée du Futurisme
aux États-Unis.” Studies on Futurism and the Avant-Garde / Etudes sur le Futurisme et les
Avant-Gardes 2:1 (1991): 1–126.
[Anon.]: “Futurist Manners.” Atlantic Monthly 112 (September 1913): 421–423.
Arnold, Elizabeth: “Mina Loy and the Futurists.” Sagetrieb: A Journal Devoted to Poets in the Imagist-
Objectivist-Tradition (Orono/ME) 8:1–2 (Spring–Fall 1989): 83–117.
Bacigalupo, Massimo: “Rapallo fra futurismo e vorticismo: Marinetti e Ezra Pound.” Franco Ragazzi,
ed.: Marinetti: Futurismo in Liguria. Genova: De Ferrari, 2006. 192–203.
Baldacci, Luigi: “À propos du pavillon futuriste italien à la Panama Pacific International
Exposition de San Francisco (février–décembre 1915).” Ligeia 20:77–80 (July–December
2007): 5–32.
Belli, Gabriella, ed.: Depero futurista: Rome, Paris, New York, 1915–1932 and More. Exhibition
catalogue. Miami Beach/ FL: The Wolfsonian Florida International University, 11 March – 26 July
1999. Milan: Skira, 1999.
Bignami, Silvia: “Futurismo, nazionalismo, massoneria: L’ Italia alla Panama-Pacific International
Exposition di San Francisco, 1915.” L’ uomo nero: Materiali per una storia delle arti della
modernità 1:1 (June 2003): 110–118.
Billingsley, Paula: “ ‘Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras’: Un dipinto futurista a New York.”
Ricerche di storia dell’arte 45 (1991): 23–40.
Brave New Worlds: America’s Futurist Vision. The Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Collection of Decorative and
Propaganda Arts. Exhibition catalogue. Miami/FA: Miami-Dade Community College, Mitchell
Wolfson New World Center Campus, 1984.
Burke, Carolyn, and Naomi Sawelson-Gorse: “In Search of Frances Simpson Stevens.” Art in America
82:4 (April 1994): 106–115.
Burke, Margaret Reeves: Futurism in America, 1910–1917. Ph.D. Dissertation. Newark/DE: University
of Delaware, 1986. Ann Arbor/MI: UMI, 1987.
Chiesa, Laura: “Transnational Multimedia: Fortunato Depero’s Impressions of New York City
(1928–1930).” California Italian Studies Journal 1:1 (2010): 1–33.
Cianci, Giovanni: “Pound e il futurismo.” Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani 1(1981): 123–131. English
translation “Pound and Futurism.” Seamus Cooney, et al., eds.: Blast 3. Santa Barbara/CA:
Black Sparrow Press, 1984. 63–67.
Clough, Rosa Trillo: Futurism: A Re-evaluation (1961–1985). West Palm Beach/FL: Advertisers Press,
1987.
892 Ara H. Merjian and Nicola Lucchi

Clough, Rosa Trillo: Looking Back at Futurism. New York: Cocce, 1942. 2nd edn Futurism: The Story
of a Modern Art Movement: A New Appraisal. New York: Philosophical Library, 1961. Reprint
Westport/CT: Greenwood, 1969.
Coen, Ester: “I futuristi e l’ Armory Show.” Elisa Acanfora, and Micaela Sambucco Hamond, eds.:
Studi di storia dell’arte in onore di Mina Gregori. Milano: Silvana, 1994. 377–380.
Depero, Fortunato: Fortunato Depero nelle opere e nella vita. Trento: Mutilati e Invalidi, 1940.
Eddy, Arthur Jerome: “Futurism.” A. J. Eddy: Cubists and Post-Impressionism. Chicago: McClurg,
1914. 164–188.
Fitzpatrick, Tracy: “An Italian Futurist in New York: Fortunato Depero.” T. Fitzpatrick: Art and the
Subway: New York Underground. New Brunswick/N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2009. 75–78.
Francini, Antonella: “Futurismo contro: I manifesti, le poesie e il teatro di Mina Loy.” Semicerchio:
Rivista di poesia comparata 42:1 (2010): 17–23.
Francini, Antonella: “Mina Loy’s Florentine Days: The Birth of a Poet against the Backdrop of
Futurism.” Bruno P. F. Wanrooij, ed.: Otherness: Anglo-American Women in 19th and 20th
Century Florence. Fiesole: Cadmo, 2001. 27–40.
Futurism and Later Italian Art. Exhibition catalogue. Palm Beach/FL: Society of the Four Arts, 1951.
Glazer, Diane L.: “Among Friends: Italian Futurism Comes to America.” New Sound: International
Magazine for Music 34 (2009): 62–75.
Kiesler, Friedrich, and Jane Heap, eds.: The International Theatre Exposition. New York 1926.
Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Little Review, 1926.
Klöck, Anja Isabel: “ ‘For Consciousness in Crises-Races’: Florence around WWI and Mina Loy’s
‘Affairs’ with Futurism.” A. I. Klöck: SPEED Dissolving TIME and SPACE: Technologies of
Representation and the Women of Italian Futurist Theater. Ph.D. Dissertation. Minneapolis/MN:
University of Minnesota, 2000. 120–175.
Liederman, Marie: “Il futurismo negli Stati Uniti.” Eugenio Battisti, and Leona Vitello, eds.: L’ albero
solitario: Arte e politica. USA 1870–1970. Rimini (FO): Guaraldi, 1973. 166–173.
Loy, Mina: “Aphorisms on Futurism.” Camera Work 45 (January 1914): 10–15.
Maerhofer, John W.: “Ezra Pound, Futurism, and the Culture of Fascism.” J. W. Maerhofer: Philosophies
of Confrontation: Aesthetic and Political Vanguardism, 1917–1956. Ph.D. Dissertation. City
University of New York, 2007. 118–136.
Marra, Claudio, et al., eds.: Athos Casarini futurista (1883–1917). A cura di Claudi Poppi. Exhibition
catalogue. Bologna: Palazzo di Re Enzo e del Podestà, 4 dicembre 2003 – 7 marzo 2004.
Bologna: Abacus, 2003.
Merjian, Ara H.: “ ‘Italian Futurism’: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.” Artforum
International 52:9 (May 2014): 313–314.
Merjian, Ara H.: “ ‘Those ars all bellical’: Luca Buvoli’s ‘Velocity Zero’ (2007–2009) and a Post/
modernist Poetics of Aphasia.” Word & Image 28:2 (April–June 2012): 101–116.
Milkovich, Erica Anne: A History of Neo-Futurism. Ph.D. Dissertation. Eugene/OR: University of
Oregon, Department of Theatre Arts, 2010.
Naumann, Francis: “A Lost American Futurist.” Art in America 82:4 (April 1994): 105–114.
Panzera, Lisa: “Italian Futurism and Avant-garde Painting in the United States.” Günter Berghaus,
ed.: International Futurism in Arts and Literature. Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2000.
222–243.
Pozorski, Aimee L.: “Eugenicist Mistress & Ethnic Mother: Mina Loy and Futurism, 1913–1917.”
MELUS: The Journal of the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United
States 30:3 (Fall 2005): 41–69.
Re, Lucia: “Mina Loy and the Quest for a Futurist Feminist Woman.” The European Legacy: The
Official Journal of the International Society for the Study of European Ideas 14:7 (December
2009): 799–819.
 United States of America 893

Ricciotti, Dominic: “The Revolution in Urban Transport: Max Weber and Italian Futurism.” American
Art Journal 16:2 (Spring 1984): 47–63.
Sansone, Luigi: “Joseph Stella e i rapporti con i futuristi italiani.” Walter Pedullà, ed.: Il futurismo
nelle avanguardie. Atti del convegno internazionale di Milano: Palazzo Reale, Sala delle otto
colonne, del 4–6 febbraio 2010. Roma: Ponte Sisto, 2010. 613–629.
Sborgi, Anna Viola: “ ‘Italian Pictures’: Il percorso futurista di Mina Loy.” Leo Lecci, and Manuela
Manfredini, eds.: Prima e dopo il 1909: Riflessioni sul futurismo. Roma: Aracne, 2014. 71–83.
The Futurists: Balla. Severini, 1912–1918. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Rose Fried Gallery, 1954.
Virelli, Giuseppe: “L’ arte all’Esposizione Nazionale della Guerra.” Elena Rossoni, and Sonja Moceri,
eds.: Grande Guerra e costruzione della memoria: L’ Esposizione Nazionale della Guerra del 1918
a Bologna. Bologna: Editrice Compositori, 2009. 86–100.
Weber, Max: “The Fourth Dimension from a Plastic Point of View.” Camera Work 31 (July 1910): 25.
Zapponi, Niccolò: “Ezra Pound and Futurism.” Angela Jung, and Guido Palandri, eds.: Italian Images
of Ezra Pound: Twelve Critical Essays. Taipei: Mei Ya Publications, 1979. 128–138.
Zoccoli, Franca: “Il futurismo e le Americhe: Influssi del movimento italiano oltre atlantico.” Rivista
di studi italiani 17:1 (June 2009): 375–388.
Giovanna Montenegro
54 Venezuela
Introduction
Futurism was a short-lived phenomenon in Venezuela, yet it had a decisive impact on
the nation’s art and literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s. At this time, the discovery
of oil deposits along the banks of Lake Maracaibo was transforming the traditional,
agriculturally dependent Venezuelan economy. Consequently, the country’s artists
and intellectuals expressed a desire for new art forms that would leave behind the
stale fin-de-siècle culture and respond to the profound changes in the social fabric of
Venezuela. At the same time, they demanded political reforms that would overcome
the repressive dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez (1857–1935), who ruled the nation
from 1908–1935.
The artistic avant-garde trickled into the cities of Caracas and Maracaibo in two
waves. The first was associated with the writers of the Generación del ‘18 (Generation
of 1918), an artistic movement that was characterized by its response to the horrors of
the First World War, and which formed a national literature counteracting the repres-
sive régime of Juan Vicente Gómez (Noguera Mora: La generación poética de 1918, 8).
Historically, this group would be identified as the ‘bridge’ between Latin American
Modernism and the later avant-garde.
The other artistic school emerged with more audacity around 1925 and would
become the Generación del ‘28 (Generation of 1928), characterized by its use of print
media including literary journals and Little Magazines to diffuse its experimentation
with avant-garde form (Schwartz: “Venezuela”, 185–187). As in other Latin American
regions, the avant-garde in Venezuela pursued an artistic and political mission that
brought them into conflict with the State authorities, which many artists and intellec-
tuals paid for with a prison term or even death (Gomes: “Retrato convencional de este
libro”, xxiii).
In 1921, the Venezuelan writer José Gil Fortoul (1861–1943) pondered the devel-
opment of Modernism and the avant-garde in both Europe and the Americas: “Is the
recent [Modernist] cycle finding its conclusion over there [on the American Continent]?
It will probably wind up later there than here [in Europe], as trends tend to travel with
a certain sluggishness” ([Gil Fortoul quoted in Tejeda: El futurismo y la vanguardia
literaria en América Latina, 33). Gil Fortoul, a criollo (i. e., a Latin American, in this
case a Venezuelan, born of European descent), was representative of the intellectual
élite who could engage in transatlantic travel and round off a higher education in
Europe. Gil Fortoul wrote these words in Europe and published them in the Caracas
daily El universal (no. 4424, 11 September 1921). His comments were based on the
common understanding that vanguard movements travelled in one direction only:
from Europe to the post-colonial outposts, where a cultural élite would consume and
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-054
 Venezuela 895

respond to these novel trends. However, in Venezuela the avant-garde could also
mix criollo (Spanish American) and European elements to conceptualize an original
perspective influenced by a Futurist aesthetic.

Futurism in Venezuelan magazines: The first

wave, 1909–1910
The history of Futurism in Venezuela began in 1909 with various reports in the
country’s cultural press. One of the best-known literary magazines of fin-de-siècle
Caracas, El cojo ilustrado, reported on Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto of
Futurism on 15 May 1909 ([Anon]: “El futurismo de Marinetti”). Even if the move-
ment’s aesthetic influence only came to be felt much later, the various accounts of
Futurism between 1909 and 1911 suggest that Futurism was well known and critically
responded to in intellectual circles. El cojo ilustrado was published between 1892
and 1915 as the Venezuelan cultural magazine and was distributed internationally.
According to Arturo Uslar Pietri (1906–2001), it was the renewed spirit of Positivism
and fin-de-siècle culture that allowed such a periodical to exist. However, Cipriano
Castro’s repressive régime (1899–1908) also ensured that its cultural output did
not have too much of an effect on society at large (Uslar Pietri: Letras y hombres de
Venezuela, 16).
In the first reference to Futurism in El cojo ilustrado of 15 May 1909, the journal’s
editors wrote: “Futurism, the new school invented and proclaimed in a recent mani-
festo by F. T. Marinetti, has invoked many adverse or ironic responses” ([Anon]: “El
futurismo de Marinetti”, 283). After quoting the French writer Maigret’s1 ironic cri-
tique of Marinetti, the journal continued:

Marinetti, with his rebel appearance, can only make us smile. His doctrine is profoundly bour-
geois, obsolete, reactionary. Instead of offering him the insult of believing in his convincingly
presented inanities, we prefer to suppose that he has chosen the carnival period to dispatch a
good joke. ([Anon]: “El futurismo de Marinetti”, 283)

This short excerpt exemplifies the attitude taken towards Futurism by most Venezuelan
writers and literary critics at the time. Marinetti was often seen as nothing more than
a bourgeois trickster who liked to play jokes on unassuming intellectuals in a Carnival
season characterized by exuberant parties. In the same article, the magazine’s editors

1 Although it is not specified in El cojo ilustrado, we can assume that this article refers to François
Guillaume de Maigret’s article, “Par delà le Futurisme.” L’ Opinion 2:9 (27 February 1909): 275.
896 Giovanna Montenegro

parodied the Futurist manifesto by referring to an invented new movement called

Energumerismo.2 The Energumerist Manifesto called for:

1. [… the] radical destruction of the cosmos as it exists now;

2. (the) reconstitution of a new world without any preconceived plan (why are planets round
instead of adopting the shape that each one of them would prefer to have?)
([Anon.]: “El futurismo de Marinetti”, 283–284)

In the next issue of 1 June 1909, the editors published an abridged version of the
Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism from Marinetti’s magazine, Poesia, without
much commentary ([Anon]: “El futurismo”, 312). Later, in the issue of 1 October 1909,
the editors would call Poesia “a beautiful literary journal” and “an intense effort
of pure art” ([Anon.]: “Revistas extranjeras”, 538). Their criticism was reserved for
Marinetti’s lack of recognition of Spanish and Latin American authors. For them,
being part of a Romance-speaking community meant that Poesia should include more
Iberian and Latin American writers:

It is time that our literature, which despite its initial stage of development is already so rich,
be published and known throughout other Romance- speaking communities who, despite our
superficial and romantic ethnic sympathies, only think of our problems so that they can show
their dismay and hypocritical astonishment and to say nonsense about our region. ([Anon]:
“Revistas extranjeras”, 538)

The next time Futurism was mentioned in El cojo ilustrado was on 15 December 1912,
in an unflattering review by Jesús Semprúm of Valentine Saint-Point’s Manifeste de la
femme futuriste (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, 1912):

Many readers will remember Mr. Marinetti and his Futurist school, which aroused the public’s
curiosity for some time. This was to be expected, as Mr. Marinetti and his disciples and col-
leagues would proclaim a score of atrocities, or at least that which we are wont to consider as
atrocities, as part of their aesthetic credo. They glorified war, militarism, patriotism, anarchism,
assassination and scorn for women. (Semprúm: “Las mujeres futuristas”, 676–677)

Hence, Futurism was a fascinating topic to El cojo ilustrado, but it was often mocked
for its atrocidades (atrocities). ‘War’, ‘militarism’, ‘anarchism’ and ‘assassination’
were difficult terms to deliberate in a Venezuelan literary journal, considering that
the country had traded Cipriano Castro’s repressive dictatorship for yet another one,
run by Juan Vicente Gómez. Another text from the critic Henrique Soublette (1886–
1912), “El futurismo italiano y nuestro modernismo naturalista” (Italian Futurism
and Our Naturalist Modernism), which appeared in El tiempo (Caracas) on 1 August

2 An energúmeno is a madman, a fanatic, a person possessed by the devil.

 Venezuela 897

1910, criticized the Futurists. The text, excerpted below, warned a young generation
of Venezuelan writers against Futurists that would

burn the four shelves full of brochures and worn books that we call our National Library as well
as the salon in which we have our diminutive Museum of Fine Arts.
Oh no, young people! Do not fall for such a thing, do not fall for the verses of the millionaire
Marinetti.
Sing, though, of the trains, the cars and the aeroplanes, as they represent the civilization that
we need so much; sing of the battles between Man and the Jungle [...]; sing of the true ideals of
the century: hygiene, social economy, the diffusion of knowledge, and internationalism (which
does not exclude patriotism) [...] Finish with the slave spirit of imitation, the primordial cause of
our literary cretinism [...] Let’s go and get down to work! [...] Let’s listen to the true poetry, ener-
getic, virile, dedicated [...] to serving the interests of humanity.
(Soublette, “El futurismo italiano y nuestro modernismo naturalista”, 27–29)

Soublette’s response to Futurism was typical of the Latin American mistrust of the
avant-garde. Venezuelan intellectuals applauded modern civilization and welcomed
technological emblems such as the train, car and aeroplane. They protested against
misogyny while adopting a macho perspective and ridiculing ‘effeminate’ male
poets and their verses. In the text above, Soublette demanded that it was the task of
Latin American civilizers to “cut down” the jungle while the Futurists go on “beating
women”. Soublette identified himself with a group of writers whose aim was to civ-
ilize the jungle on their side of the Atlantic while Marinetti ranted a misogynist and
anti-establishment tirade in the Mediterranean.
All in all, it would take about ten more years before Futurism truly ‘arrived’ in
Venezuela. In the meantime, the First World War erupted and the lack of paper con-
tributed to the closing down of El cojo ilustrado, one of the most beloved illustrated
literary journals of fin-de-siècle Latin America. The Chilean critic Nelson Osorio
Tejeda, who investigated the influence of Futurism in Venezuela, notes that, during
this time, it was primarily visual artists, particularly in the Círculo de Bellas Artes,
who took an interest in Futurism, Cubism and Impressionism and discussed the ideas
of Marinetti, along with those of Tristan Tzara and Guillaume Apollinaire (Osorio
Tejeda: El futurismo, 29). The círculo counted among its members the painters Antonio
Edmundo Monsanto (1890–1948), Federico Brandt (1878–1932), Marcos Castillo
(1897–1966), Rafael Monasterios (1884–1961), Armando Reverón (1889–1954), Manuel
Cabré (1890–1984), Leoncio Martínez (1889–1941) and Raul Santana (1893–1966) (see
Segnini: “Vida intelectual y Gomecismo”, 208).
Nelson Osorio Tejeda identifies the mid-1920s as the period of the emer-
gence of a Venezuelan avant-garde (Osorio Tejeda: El futurismo, 34). Like the
other movements emerging after the First World War in Argentina, Chile, Cuba,
Mexico and Peru, the Venezuelan avant-garde was a response to Modernist aes-
thetics that permeated literary and artistic circles throughout the Western hem-
isphere (Osorio Tejeda: El futurismo, 41). However, Osorio Tejeda, writing in the
898 Giovanna Montenegro

1970s and 80s, also interpreted the Latin American avant-garde as a movement
that was different from its European counterparts; it relied on intra-American
exchange and formed a conjunto continental (continental ensemble) that was
“not simply an informative sum of isolated national manifestations” (Lasarte:
Juego y nación, 77).

Second Wave: The 1920s

The emergence of a Venezuelan avant-garde in the 1920s was linked to the student
and popular movement called La generación de 1928 (The Generation of 1928;
see Osorio Tejeda: La formación de la vanguardia literaria, 90–91). The late re-
emergence of Futurism depended upon this generation of students who were polit-
ically engaged, demanded reforms and cried out for a rupture with modernismo, a
Latin American variant of Symbolist aesthetics not to be mistaken with European
‘Modernism’.
A spirit of resistance linked the 1928 generation to its 1918 predecessor (La gen-
eración de 1918), whose poetic manifestations were severely repressed by a govern-
ment when it shut down universities and persecuted student ‘rebels’. For example,
the country’s main university, the Universidad Central de Venezuela, had been
closed between 1912 and 1921 as a consequence of the student protests. Likewise, the
Asociación General de Estudiantes (General Students’ Association) was suspended as
it had been involved in plans to oust Cipriano Castro from power (Osorio Tejeda: La
formación de la vanguardia literaria, 90).
However, the Generation of 1918, which included José Antonio Ramos Sucre
(1890–1930), Fernando Paz Castillo (1893–1981) and Andrés Eloy Blanco (1896–1955)
among its members, has often been characterized as being “pre-avant-garde” or acting
as a “bridge” between modernismo and the avant-garde (Zambrano: “Modernidad y
vanguardia en la poesía venezolana de los años veinte”, 80–81). Schwartz calls the
Generation of 1918 “the first attempt to get over modernismo in Venezuela” (Schwartz:
“Venezuela”, 185). That said, both generations were united aesthetically and politi-
cally in their attempts to create new art forms within a repressive political and social
system.
Yolanda Segnini, who has investigated cultural life under Vicente Gómez,
considers the country’s literary journals as a public voice of the groups labelled
the ‘Generations of 1918 and 1928’. At the turn of the century, 90% of Venezuela’s
2,300,000 inhabitants lived in the countryside, and most of them were illiterate.
The country’s small educated élite was based in the urban populations of Caracas
and Maracaibo, where they had at their disposal an astonishing number of 500
dailies and magazines. Caracas alone, which had a population of 100,000, had
about 200 journals, newspapers and magazines (Segnini: “Vida intelectual y
 Venezuela 899

gomecismo”, 211). Segnini sees the journals Cultura venezolana, Élite, válvula and
Gaceta de América as representative of this age. The first two published works by
members of the Generation of 1918, while the latter was run by representatives of
the later Venezuelan avant-garde (Segnini: “Vida intelectual y gomecismo”, 216).
Futurism re-emerged in the late 1920s and exercised an influence on literary mag-
azines such as válvula, Indice and Élite.
válvula, a periodical published in Caracas in January 1928 (there was only one
issue printed), imparted the Italian Futurists’ sense of urgency with its visual and
editorial content. Its editor, Arturo Uslar Pietri, was one of the main proponents of the
Futurist aesthetic in Venezuela before he became one of the country’s most beloved
intellectuals, politicians and writers. In 1927, he defended Futurism publicly in an
essay written for the literary magazine Indice. The young Uslar Pietri set out to rescue
Futurism from the satirical critiques through which journalists had represented the
Futurist school. He ridiculed “Don Perfecto Nadie” (Don Perfect Nobody), a bour-
geois with a belly, “because with cotton in his ears he does not hear the scream of
the fanfare that is nearing” (Uslar Pietri: “El futurismo”, 1). He also subscribed to
Marinetti’s ninth point in The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism (“We wish to
glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act
of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women”; Marinetti:
“The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 14), but, in an Iberoamerican twist,
he used Cervantes’s Don Quixote to explain natural selection and to bring Futurism
to an audience familiar with Spanish literature. For Uslar Pietri, Don Quixote was an
unconventional Futurist hero and a model to emulate in a Venezuela about to erupt
into massive student protests.
However, Don Quixote’s sentimental tendencies did not sit well with Uslar Pietri.
In the Indice essay, he adopted Marinetti’s early misogynist rhetoric and praised
man’s struggle against “la belleza-mujer” (beauty-woman). While Don Quixote pined
for his idealized Dulcinea, Uslar Pietri saw in women nothing but a force that chained
men to a life “reeking of cemetery flowers”. In his view of modernity, a woman was
only a “complementary organ; if her physiological function ceases, she has no other
function” (Uslar Pietri: “El futurismo”, 1). Don Quixote, the hero, stood tall for Uslar
Pietri, yet Sancho Panza and Dulcinea were worthless in his interpretation.
The year 1928 proved to be an important year for young Venezuelans. válvula
was published a month before the planned events of the Semana del estudiante, a
week of student protests organized by the Federation of Students of Venezuela for the
Carnival season of 6–12 February 1928. Several speeches at a gathering at the National
Pantheon were deemed subversive by the government, which therefore stopped all
planned activities and thus caused massive protests throughout the country. Over
200 students were detained, some were exiled and many were sent to forced labour
camps. In this situation of repression and unrest, válvula was an appropriate title for
a magazine edited by the Generación del ‘28. The magazine served as an artistic ‘valve’
that vented grievances caused by the country’s social and demographic changes and
900 Giovanna Montenegro

became a voice for both aesthetic renewal and social reform. Juan Carlos Santaella
was of the view that it was political repression that gave birth to the movement’s
creative output: “This was the first time since he took political power that a group
of artists would react against the dictatorship of the terrible Juan Vicente Gómez”
(Santaella: Manifiestos literarios venezolanos, 33). However, as Santaella noted, the
group would do so by not criticizing the government directly, but by “expressing and
exposing aesthetic rebellion only” (Santaella: “válvula”, 33).
As one of válvula’s editors, Uslar Pietri promoted an Italian Futurist aesthetic that
would uphold form as its highest ideal. In the first page of the magazine, he emulated
the genre of the literary manifesto (which was to become important in Venezuelan
cultural history) as well as the dynamism of Futurism and called for social and artis-
tic renewal (Infante: “Estética de la rebelión”, 409). A passage from the manifesto
“Somos” reads:

On the other hand, we have come to restore the true concept of a new art, already extremely
abused by hypocrites and disfigured by untalented imitators, when not discredited by manne-
risms that easily allow deserters and incompetent men to cut a fine figure.
The new art does not admit definitions because its liberty rebukes them, because it is never
stationary in order to gain profile. The only idea capable of covering all “newisms” (literary,
pictorial or musical), the only one, we repeat, is that of provoking new thoughts.
The new art’s ultimate purpose is to suggest, to say all with the least possible amount of words
(hence the need for metaphor and the double or multiple image) or to say it in a highly conden-
sed manner, so that the aesthetic ensemble might flourish (with all attached possibilities) in the
soul to whom it is directed rather than in the raw and limited instruments of expression.
We aspire to an image that will exceed or condense all that a treatise may say to an intellectual.
To a canvas on which four brushstrokes capture more transcendence than all of the drawing
manuals of the pompous schools of the past, to a music in which one musical note encompasses
the whole state of a soul.
In short, we aspire to give the masses their own rÔle as collaborators of a work of art, so that the
artwork may realize itself in the soul with a totality denied by the instruments.
Our global purpose has already been stated: To suggest.
We know that rancid tradition wants to lock us out, and for this purpose it is already wielding
one of its vicious maxims: Nihil novum sub sole. Like all respectable fighters, we like to concede
the advantaged position to the enemy; we accept a priori that there is nothing new, in the aca-
demic sense of the word, but in return – and whoever dares to deny it? – there are a lot of virgin
things under the sun that have never been contemplated: The possibility of discovery is still out
there! (Uslar Pietri: “Somos”, translated in Montenegro: “Futurism in Venezuela”, 299–300)

Although válvula was published only once, its rebellious nature imparted itself on
all those writers who took part in the journal’s creative output: Carlos Eduardo Frías
(1906–1986), Antonio Arraíz (1903–1962), Miguel Otero Silva (1908–1985), Fernando
Paz Castillo (1893–1981), Nelson Himiob (1908–1963), José Antonio Ramos Sucre,
Juan Oropeza (1906–1971), José Salazar Domínguez (1902–1966), Pedro Sotillo (1902–
1977) and José Nucete Sardi (1897–1972) (see Santaella: Manifiestos, 33). Uslar Pietri’s
manifesto can therefore be seen as programmatic statement of the Generation of
 Venezuela 901

1928 and a spigot from which a Venezuelan form of Futurism would flow into the
cultural debates.
The magazine also printed literary works for which Futurism acted as a model.
For example, Pedro Rivera’s poem, “vocales” contained five stanzas, each dedicated
to a vowel (a, e, i, o, u) . Under the letter “i” we can read:

futurism
cubism
interior and exterior
angles
prows
camouflage
the masts of the skyscrapers
tickle the stars.
(Rivera: “vocales”, s.p.)

Despite the nod in the direction of formal aspects of the European avant-garde,
the editors were convinced that form was the catalyst for aesthetic renewal. They
explained in the section entitled “Forma y vanguardia” (Form and the Avant-garde):

The avant-garde, more so than other movement, has had to rely on form to present the tangible con-
viction that it proposes to renew and to reform. This is the reason why we opt for lower-case letters;
the suppression of archaic punctuation, substitution by other signs or by blank spaces; capricious
and innovative typography as in Apollinaire’s calligrams; the multi-coloured pages by Marinetti
with a different colour for each emotion; vertical writing. ([Anon.]: “Forma y vanguardia”, s.p.)

The group’s insistence on form as an agent of social renewal during a time of repres-
sion characterized Futurist ideas in Venezuelan literature of the 1920s. It was a time of
emulation, yet also of creating new forms. Writers and artists influenced by Futurism
rejected the Real Academia Española, which they viewed as an umbilical cord that
sought to tie Venezuelan language to a Spanish colonial model. That is why Uslar
Pietri and his companions turned towards Iberian and Italian Futurism and then
complemented European avant-garde concepts with specifically Latin American
elements. This can be seen in Agustín Silva Díaz’s Responso (Prayer for the Dead,
1928) which addressed, by means of satire, the process of modernization in Venezuela
and the North American colonizing influence. In a passage on the replacement of
wood by oil and metal it states:

Yankeeland affirms it / in one way or another / that petroleum has won the competition in the
kitchen and in the furniture store; either because of snobbism or thriftiness, metal succeeds you.
[...] You are almost useless in these times / in the modern march of things. / You are a failure / in
these times. You do not serve as an example any more / nor do you serve, like before, as a pillory,
/ for in this century Judas has become civilized / and does not think about the noose. / You are a
faithful copy one and many/ failed attempts. (Silva Díaz: “Responso”, s.p.)
902 Giovanna Montenegro

According to Nelson Osorio Tejeda, who examined the critical reception of válvula in
the 1920s, the magazine was regarded as being either “completely worthless” or as
offering examples of beautiful polyphonic Venezuelan poetry. Others again esteemed
the journal as the first rebellious cry against Venezuela’s cultural and artistic coloni-
zation and asked the editors to embark on a project that would make the vanguard
unite the South American continent (Osorio Tejeda: La formación de la vanguardia
literaria, 276–280).

The visual arts

Futurism made an impact not only on the Venezuelan literary avant-garde, but also
on Cubo-Futurist painters such as Rafael Rivero (1904–1992), whose La cupletista
(The Cabaret Singer) was reproduced in válvula. Clearly, the manifesto genre was
adopted by many snbsequent avant-garde groups, including Los Disidentes, a circle
of Venezuelan visual artists residing in Paris and active between 1945 and 1950. Their
“No” manifesto (1950) was clearly influenced by Marinetti’s Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism. The group upheld their Venezuelan identity, yet rejected the fine arts in
Venezuela, the mass media, folk music and corrupt art critics.
More work remains to be done before we can fully understand the impact Futurism
had on the visual arts in Venezuela. But clearly, Venezuelan poets and artists absorbed
and responded to Marinetti’s aesthetics in manifold ways, producing both support and
rejection of Futurism’s aesthetic and political propositions.

Works cited
[Anon.]: “El futurismo.” El cojo ilustrado 18:419 (1 June 1909): 312.
[Anon.]: “El futurismo de Marinetti.” El cojo ilustrado 18:418 (15 May 1909): 283–84.
[Anon.]: “Forma y vanguardia.” válvula 1 (January 1928): s.p.
[Anon.]: “Revistas extranjeras.” El cojo ilustrado 18: 427 (1 October 1909): 538.
Gomes, Miguel: “Retrato convencional de este libro.” Hubert Pöppel, and Miguel Gomes, eds.: Las
vanguardias literarias en Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y Venezuela: Bibliografía y antología
crítica. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008. xx–xv.
Infante, Ángel Gustavo: “Estética de la rebelión: Los manifiestos literarios.” Carlos Pacheco, Luis
Barrera Linares, and Beatriz González Stephan, eds.: Nación y literatura: Itinerarios de la
palabra escrita en la cultura venezolana. Caracas: Fundación Bigott, 2006. 407–413.
Lasarte, Javier: Juego y nación: Postmodernismo y vanguardia en Venezuela. Caracas: Fundarte,
1995.
Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Montenegro, Giovanna: “Futurism in Venezuela: Arturo Uslar Pietri and the Reviews ‘Indice’ and
‘válvula’.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 2 (2012): 286–303.
 Venezuela 903

Osorio Tejeda, Nelson: El futurismo y la vanguardia literaria en América Latina. Caracas: Centro de
Estudios Latinoamericanos Rómulo Gallegos, 1982.
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson: La formación de la vanguardia literaria: Antecedentes y documentos.
Caracas: Academia Nacional de la Historia, 1985.
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson, ed.: Manifiestos, proclamas y polémicas de la vanguardia literaria
hispanoamericana. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1988.
Noguera Mora, Neftali: La generación poética de 1918. Bogotá: Iqueima, 1950.
Rivera, Pedro: “vocales.” válvula 1 (January 1928): s.p.
Santaella, Juan Carlos: [“válvula.”] J. C. Santaella, ed.: Manifiestos literarios venezolanos. Caracas:
Monte Avila, 1992. 33–36.
Schwartz, Jorge: “Venezuela.” Jorge Schwartz, ed.: Vanguardas Latino-Americanas: Polêmicas,
manifestos e textos críticos. São Paulo: Editora da Universidade de São Paolo, 1995. 185–187.
Schwartz, Jorge: “Venezuela.” Jorge Schwartz, ed.: Las vanguardias latinoamericanas: Textos
programáticos y críticos. México, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2002. 227–229.
Segnini, Yolanda: “Vida intelectual y gomecismo.” Elías Pino Hurrieta, ed.: Juan Vicente Gómez y su
época. Caracas: Monte Avila 1993. 203–229.
Semprúm, Jesús: “Las mujeres futuristas.” El cojo ilustrado 21:504 (15 December 1912): 676–677.
Silva Díaz, Agustín: “Responso.” válvula 1:1 (January 1928): s.p.
Soublette, Henrique: “El futurismo italiano y nuestro modernismo naturalista.” El tiempo (Caracas),
1 August 1910. Reprinted in Nelson Osorio Tejeda, ed.: Manifiestos, proclamas y polémicas de
la vanguardia literaria hispanoamericana. Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1988. 27–29.
Uslar Pietri, Arturo: “El futurismo.” Indice 1:1 (19 February 1927): s.p.
Uslar Pietri, Arturo: “Sómos.” válvula 1:1 (January 1928): s.p.
Uslar Pietri, Arturo: Letras y hombres de Venezuela. Madrid: Mediterráneo, 1974.
Zambrano, Gregory: “Modernidad y vanguardia en la poesía venezolana de los años veinte.” Carmen
Díaz Orozco, ed.: Modernidad y alteridades: Antología de trabajos de grado de la maestría en
literatura iberoamericana. Mérida: Universidad de Los Andes, 1999. 71–105.

Further reading
[Anon.]: “La revista ‘Valvula’.” El universal (5 January 1928).
[Anon.]: “Un fiasco.” El cojo ilustrado 18:422 (15 July 1909): 396.
[Anon.]: “Uslar Pietri, Arturo.” Garrido Mezquita, ed.: Diccionario biográfico de Venezuela. Madrid:
Blass, 1953. 1185–1186.
Apablaza, Claudia, ed.: Manifiestos vanguardistas latinoamericanos. Barcelona: Barataria, 2011.
Darío, Rubén (Félix Rubén García Sarmiento): “Marinetti y el futurismo.” La nación (Buenos Aires)
5 April 1909. Reprinted in Poesia 5:7–9 (August–October 1909): 28–30. Nelson Osorio Tejeda,
ed.: Manifiestos, proclamas y polémicas de la vanguardia literaria hispanoamericana. Caracas:
Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1988. 3–7. English translation. “Marinetti and Futurism.” University of
Denver Quarterly 12:1 (Spring 1977): 147–152. Reprinted in R. Darío: Selected Writings. New
York: Penguin Books, 2005. 465–470.
El cojo ilustrado: En el centenario de su fundación 1892–1992. Exhibition catalgoue. Caracas:
Biblioteca Nacional de Venezuela, 29 de noviembre de 1992 – 30 de enero de 1993. Banco
Maracaibo, 1992.
Lasarte, Javier: “Historia de vanguardia.” Hubert Pöppel, and Miguel Gomes, eds.: Las vanguardias
literarias en Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y Venezuela: Bibliografía y antología crítica.
Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008. 357–373.
904 Giovanna Montenegro

Lasarte, Javier: “Los aires del cambio: Literatura y cultura entre 1908 y 1935.” Carlos Pacheco,
Luis Barrera Linares, and Beatriz González Stephan, eds.: Nación y literatura: Itinerarios de la
palabra escrita en la cultura venezolana. Caracas: Fundación Bigott, 2006. 379–405.
Ortega, Wilmen: La asociación general de estudiantes en Venezuela. Caracas: Centro Nacional de
Historia, 2009.
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson: “Antecedentes de la vanguardia literaria en Venezuela (1909–1925).”
Hispamérica 11:33 (1982): 3–30. Reprinted in Hubert Pöppel, and Miguel Gomes, eds.: Las
vanguardias literarias en Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y Venezuela: Bibliografía y antología
crítica. Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2008. 331–356.
Picón Salas, Mariano: “Las nuevas corrientes del arte.” Nelson Osorio Tejeda, ed.: Manifiestos,
proclamas y polémicas de la vanguardia literaria hispanoamericana. Caracas: Biblioteca
Ayacucho, 1988. 50–59.
Pöppel, Hubert, Miguel Gomes, and Amalia Salazar-Pöppel. Las vanguardias literarias en Bolivia,
Colombia, Ecuador, Perú y Venezuela: Bibliografía y antología crítica. Madrid: Iberoamericana,
2008.
Santaella, Juan Carlos, ed.: Diez manifiestos literarios venezolanos. Caracas: Monte Avila, 1986.
Silva, Pausides Gonzáles: “De La Alborada a Cantaclaro: Literatura y compromiso en cinco revistas.”
Carlos Pacheco, Luis Barrera Linares, and Beatriz González Stephan, eds.: Nación y literatura:
Itinerarios de la palabra escrita en la cultura venezolana. Caracas: Fundación Bigott, 2006.
415–29.
Videla de Rivero, Gloria, ed.: Direcciones del vanguardismo hispanoamericano. Vol. 2. Documentos.
Mendoza: Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1990.
Irina Subotić, Janez Vrečko, Sanja Roić,
Bojan Jović and Jasmina Čubrilo
55 The Former Yugoslavia and Its Republics
Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia
Introduction
At the time when Futurism was emerging in Italy, the West Balkans consisted of some
twenty ethnic groups clustered in a variety of States that were developing in different
historic, political and social directions: Serbia was an autonomous kingdom, which,
after many centuries of subordination to the feudal system of the Ottoman Empire,
was seeking to join the European process of modernization. Croatia and Slovenia
(and, after 1908, Bosnia and Herzegovina as well) were parts of the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy and thus closely connected to European mentalities and values. A number
of intellectuals, among them many artists, envisioned the unification of all Southern
Slavs. This concept had been nourished since the nineteenth century and the time of
Romanticism and was realized after the First World War with the Treaty of Versailles
(1918), when the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was established (after
1929, it was called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia; after 1945, the Democratic Federative
Yugoslavia, the Federative Popular Republic, then Socialist Federative Republic of
Yugoslavia). However, these attempts at creating a unified, unitary Yugoslav nation
and, accordingly, a Yugoslav culture were never fully brought to fruition. During the
existence of Yugoslavia, nationalist and separatist interests prevailed and ultimately
brought about the dissolution of the State in the 1990s.
Although cooperation between various cultural centres – primarily Belgrade,
Zagreb and Ljubljana – had been intensive both before and after the formation of
Yugoslavia, there had never been a uniform culture and there were visible differences
in attitude towards the emerging forms of Modernism. The various art movements
of the historical avant-garde, including Futurism, arrived in Yugoslavia from the cul-
tural centres where the country’s intellectual élite was educated (Vienna, Budapest,
Prague, Munich, Paris and more rarely Rome, Trieste or Milan). Given the diversity of
social and cultural conditions in different Balkan regions, the reception of Futurism
was rather distinct in Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia. Yet, although each region had its
own autonomous manifestations of Modernism in line with local traditions and value
systems, they also shared a number of common traits.
Information about Marinetti’s Futurism reached the Yugoslav public at an early
stage, but only in exceptional cases did creative artists accept its radical ideas and
concepts. No Futurist group ever came into existence, and no artist ever developed a
distinctly Futurist aesthetic. However, in a number of cases one can observe aspects
of Futurism being amalgamated with traits taken from Symbolism, Expressionism,

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-055
906 Irina Subotić

Cézannism, Cubism and Constructivism. The Futurist ideals of anti-traditionalism,

dynamism, rhythm, confidence in new technologies and scientific progress, libera-
tion from the existing canons, etc. found an echo in Yugoslavia and led to hybrid cur-
rents that gave encouragement to youthful desires to experiment, either in relation to
international or to local art. This produced valuable results, which have only recently
been fully recognized. At the time, the largely conservative Yugoslav art world lacked
knowledge of and insight into the new developments on the international scene,
and it therefore commented on the Futurist manifestations in derogatory tones.
Experimental art was considered obnoxious, even dangerous, and the very name of
Futurism was used as a negative stereotype to stigmatize and marginalize the new
Modernist phenomena.
Still, a number of artists accepted Futurist propositions and developed them
further in their works. Unfortunately, certain innovative ideas, such as the Futurist
magazine Zvrk-Trottola (Whirligig), planned in 1914, could not be realized due to the
outbreak of the First World War.

Slovenia

Literature

In 1908, Marinetti’s journal Poesia published translations of works by three Slovene

poets, France Prešeren (1800–1849), Oton Župančič (1878–1949) and Josip Murn
(1879–1901). Vice-versa, Marinetti had sent some of his books to the poet Anton
Aškerc (1856–1912) and supplied Slovene newspaper publishers and individuals with
his poetry. The Slovene public had the opportunity to become familiar with Futurist
ideas as early as 1909, when the periodic press began to analyse the Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism. In 1910, they wrote about Marinetti’s novel Mafarka (1909/10),
the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910), the Technical Manifesto of Futurist
Painting (1910), the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910) and described Futurist anti-
traditionalism in a sympathetic manner.
Thus, already in the early phase of Futurism, the Slovene reader came to be
informed about the movement’s aesthetics of speed and the literary techniques of
‘wireless imagination’, ‘Words-in-Freedom’, and so on, without, however, gaining
access to the practical application of these programmatic ideas. The reception of
Futurism in Slovenia was further hampered by a number of factors. First of all, the
Futurist attempt at abolishing syntax, orthography, punctuation, etc. could not have
a positive resonance in a nation lacking its own university and high-ranking cultural
institutions. As language at that time was the only external sign of Slovenia’s exist-
ence, sophisticated forms of literature were dear to the Slovenes, and they did not
want to see this destroyed. Furthermore, at the turn of the twentieth century, Slovenia
 Slovenia 907

had experienced the birth of the Moderna movement, led by Ivan Cankar (1876–1918)
and Oton Župančič (1878–1949), and its influence was so great that the majority of
young writers adhered to its stereotypes well into the mid-1920s. Therefore, Futurism
only had an influence in so far as it represented anti-traditionalism, and because its
anti-Austrian stance was shared by the Slovenes, who still suffered from political
repression originating in Vienna.
In spite of the attention of Slovene periodicals to Futurism, only a handful of
individuals responded positively to its programme: Vladimir Levstik (1986–1957),
Fran Albreht (1889–1963), Anton Debeljak (1887–1952), Ivan Mrak (1906–1986), Anton
Podbevšek (1898–1981), Srečko Kosovel (1904–1926), Ferdo Delak (1905–1968), Ivan
Čargo (1898–1950) and Avgust Černigoj (1898–1985). In his programmatic essay,
“Poizkus o lepem slovstvu v Slovencih” (An Attempt at Beautiful Literature Among
Slovenes, 1909), Vladimir Levstik adopted Marinetti’s anti-traditionalism and rejected
the derivative Moderna movement. He celebrated modern technology and the fusion
of art and life and made a call for a Europeanization of Slovene literature. Instead of
composing sonnets dedicated to death and dreams like most Slovenian authors at
the time, he recommended “a poem to the future” that would celebrate “beautiful
turbines”, “wireless telegrams” and cars “with as much as 100 HP” (Levstik: “Poizkus
o lepem slovstvu v Slovencih”, 395).
In 1910, Levstik published the first instalment of his “novel-like Futurist mani-
festo” (Troha: Futurizem, 97), Sphinx patria, in the journal Slovan. Futurist aesthetics
became explicit in the story’s main character, a painter, who expresses his hatred of
Antiquity and history, sings the praise of dynamos and declares that the sound of
steam engine wheels is more powerful than the Venus de Milo (Levstik: Sphinx patria,
184–185). The parallel with Marinetti’s assertion, “a roaring motorcar […] is more
beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace” (Marinetti: “The Foundation and
Manifesto of Futurism”, 13) is obvious. As Troha notes in her monograph on Futurism,
“in this way [Levstik] introduced a model of the Slovene avant-garde as literature, its
flight beneath the safe wings of fiction, where the writer risks less than with a direct
declaration of radically different aesthetic viewpoints” (Troha: Futurizem, 96). His
attitude towards modern technology was already a critical one, for with the “thunder
of locomotives, with the blue dawn of electricity, there approach the Napoleons, the
Attila the Hun and the Genghis Khan of the future” (Levstik: Sphinx patria, 7). In
Italian Futurism, this ambivalent and critical stance towards modern technology only
emerged later. After 1910, Levstik’s Futurist enthusiasm faded and the novel Sphinx
patria remained unfinished.
Anton Debeljak was a mediatory figure for Italian and French literature. His
poetry contained Futurist themes, such as modern technology and automobiles,
and like Marinetti in his Second Futurist Proclamation: Let’s Kill off the Moonlight, he
attacked the moon, extolled the Eiffel Tower and so on.
Anton Podbevšek held a special place among Slovene Futurists. His Žolta pisma
(Yellow Letters, 1914) and the manifesto that he sent to the editor of the journal
908 Janez Vrečko

Ljubljanski zvon (The Ljubljana Bell) expressed his desire to create a “new movement”
(Podbevšek: Letter to Šlebinger, quoted in Šalamun-Biedrzycka: Anton Podbevšek in
njegov čas, 55). Troha saw in his campaign for “a reduction of punctuation and […]
syntax an echo of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (Troha: Futurizem,
102). In the poetry collection Človek z bombami (Man with Bombs, 1925), Podbevšek
“created uniquely dynamic Words-in-Freedom, through which he also achieved
visual effects” (Troha: Futurizem, 103). He was particularly close to Marinetti in the
poem Himna o carju mavričnih kač (Hymn about the Emperor of Rainbow Snakes,
1920), as it glorified speed and the freedom that derives from it. In 1920, Podbevšek
gathered around himself a circle of like-minded artists who published the magazine
Trije labodje (Three Swan, 1922). They participated in poetry soirées and manifesto
readings, causing much furore and scandal. Regrettably, none of the Futurist mani-
festos from these soirées has survived.
Podbevšek’s Futurism was also an inspiration to Ivan Mrak, who in his avant-garde
drama Obločnica, ki se rojeva (The Birth of Light, 1925) attacked the petit-bourgeois
narrowness, traditionalism and clericalism of the time. One figure with a particular
interest in Futurism was Srečko Kosovel, who was born near Trieste and was very well
informed about the latest developments in Italian literature and culture. From his
manuscripts it is evident that he was familiar with Futurist manifestos and Marinetti’s
Mafarka, but also with the works of Ardengo Soffici, whose poetry made use of images
from technology and industrial society. Kosovel’s Futurist poems include Moja duša
(My Soul, 1919) and his expressively visual Pesem o sanji (Poem About a Dream, 1921),
which involves the antithetical duality of an erotic vision and the arrival of a train,
separated by the poet in terms of colour – with the dream part printed in red and the
fleeing train in black (both poems are published in Kosovel’s Integrali ‘26). In the view
of the critic Aleksandar Flaker, this poem also demonstrates Kosovel’s revolt against
Futurism, since he was fundamentally opposed to the Futurist idea of a technological
civilization (Flaker: Nomadi ljepote, 251). Kosovel knew that among the group of poets
gathered around Podbevšek there were “so-called Futurists” who failed to “recognize
the border between the beautiful and the non-beautiful” (Kosovel: Zbrano delo III,
352). He attended Podbevšek’s scandalous soirées and disagreed with the fact that
they renounced the ideals of “the old and established aesthetics and art” as well as
patriotic enthusiasm (Kosovel: “Perspektive moderne umetnosti”, 810).
When Fascism threatened to forbid the public use of the Slovene language in
the Primorska region adjoining Italy, Kosovel as a Slovene from that region declared
his mother tongue to be sacred and to be protected at all cost. Therefore, Futurist
literary practices – just like the destructive tendencies in Dada and Surrealism –
could not really be accepted as a valid creative process. But there were other stum-
bling blocks, too. In point 5 of his Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti
had expressed his desire “to sing the praises of the man behind the steering wheel”
(Marinetti: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism”, 13). Such a “mechanical
man, one who will have parts that can be changed” (Marinetti: “Technical Manifesto
 Slovenia 909

of Futurist Literature”, 113), was unacceptable to Kosovel who, as a left-wing intel-

lectual, saw the heroic ‘man of the future’ in the ‘Red Man from the East’. Similarly,
he made a distinction between the Futurist parole in libertà and his own ‘letters that
grow into space’. Although Slovene scholars have tried to link Kosovel’s construc-
tions (konsi) with Futurism, they actually possessed a greater dependence on Russian
Constructivism (see Vrečko: Srečko Kosovel, 120–426). Just how critical Kosovel grew
towards Futurism is clear in his manifesto, Mehanikom (To the Mechanics, 1925), sub-
titled Mehaniki in šoferji! (Mechanics and Drivers!), in which he declared: “Uničiti
moramo vse mehanizme” (We must destroy all mechanisms) (Kosovel: “Mehanikom:
Mehaniki in šoferji!”, 113).

Painting

The painter Ivan Čargo came in contact with Futurism between 1920 and 1922 and
most probably took part in a few group exhibitions. For a short time, he contributed
to a Futurist magazine Energie futuriste (Futurist Energies; Trieste, 1923–1924). In 1924
he exhibited together with Giorgio Carmelich (1907–1929), a Futurist from Trieste, in
Gorica (Gorizia) at the 1° Esposizione goriziana di belle arti (First Exhibition of Fine
Arts in Gorizia). In 1926, he participated in the Quarta Esposizione d’ Arte delle Tre
Venezie (4th Art Exhibition of the Three Veneto Regions), which included a retro-
spective of works by Umberto Boccioni and a one-man show by Enrico Prampolini.
Amongst others, it included works by Sofronio Pocarini (1898–1934), Lojze Špacapan
(Italianized as Luigi Spazzapan, 1889–1958), Mario Mirko Vucetich (1898–1975) and
Ivan Čargo (italianized as Giovanni Ciargo). In the magazine Tank: Revue internation-
ale active / Tank!: Revue internationale de l’ art vivant (Ljubljana, 1927–1928), edited by
Ferdo Delak and Černigoj, Čargo published one of his etchings called Džungla (The
Jungle, 1927/28). Also published in Tank was a photograph of the art pavilion made
by Čargo for the Ljubljana Great Fair (Ljubljanski velesejem, 15–25 August 1924). His
work was discussed in a comprehensive assessment of Slovenian modern art, “Die
Revolutionierung der Kunst in Slowenien” (The Revolutionization of Art in Slovenia),
which Ferdo Delak and Heinz Luedecke published in the magazine Der Sturm in
January 1929. In 1926, Čargo created an Avtoportret (Self-Portrait), which is his only
surviving Futurist work. From the early 1930s until his death, he lived a bohemian
lifestyle and eked out a poor existence on the margins of society.

Theatre

In 1925, Ferdo Delak founded in Ljubljana a theatre and a magazine called Novi oder
(New Stage), which bore close resemblance to the Futurist teatro sintetico (Theatre of
910 Janez Vrečko

Essential Brevity; see Toporišič: “The New Slovene Theatre”, 243–252 and pp.256 and
590-591 in this volume). A year later, Avgust Černigoj asserted himself as a theatre
designer at the Sala Petrarca in Gorizia during a Serata artistica giovanile (Artistic
Soirée for Young People, 21 August 1926), in which he staged a Arlecchinata inspired
by Meyerhold’s concept of erasing the border between the audience and actors.
Delak’s manifesto, Moderni oder (A Modern Stage, 1925), jointly written with Černigoj,
referred to Prampolini’s theatre manifestos and echoed some of the artistic slogans of
Russian Constructivism.

Futurism revisited

In 1927, Delak and Černigoj edited a number of manifestos in a Futuristic manner

and published them in the magazine Tank. On invitation by Herwarth Walden, Delak
gave a lecture in Berlin on Junge Slowenische Kunst (Young Slovenian Art), a topic
to which the magazine Der Sturm dedicated a special issue in January 1929. Some
of these ideas were taken up again in the 1980s and 1990s by the retro-garde collec-
tive Neue Slowenische Kunst. This organization had several sections (Laibach, Irwin,
Cosmokinetic Theater Cabinet “Noordung”, Theater of the Sisters of Scipion Nasica,
Cosmokinetic Theatre “Red Pilot”, New Collectivism Studio and Department of Pure
and Applied Philosophy), which exercised an influence not only on the cultural life of
Slovenia but also far beyond. Some sections of Junge Slowenische Kunst are still active
today and have even developed new offshoots, such as Kulturno središče evropskih
vesoljskih tehnologij (KSEVT; Cultural Centre of European Space Technologies).

Works cited
Delak, Ferdo: “Moderni oder.” [The Modern Stage] Mladina [Youth] 1 (1926–1927): 83–90.
Delek, Ferdo, and Heinz Luedecke: “Die Revolutionierung der Kunst in Slowenien.” Der Sturm 19:10
(January 1929): 329–333.
Flaker, Aleksandar: Nomadi ljepote: Intermedijalne studije [Nomads of Beauty: Intermediate
Studies]. Zagreb: Grafički zavod Hrvatske, 1988.
Kosovel, Srečko: Integrali ‛26. Ed. by Anton Ocvirk. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, 1967. 2nd edn
1984. 3rd edn 1995.
Kosovel, Srečko: “Perspektive moderne umetnosti.” [Perspectives of Modern Art] S. Kosovel: Zbrano
delo [Collected Works]. Vol. 3.1. Članki, eseji, ocene, pisma, dnevniki [Articles, Essays, Reviews,
Letters, Diaries]. Ljubljana: Državna Založba Slovenije, 1977. 810-811
Kosovel, Srečko: “Mehanikom: Mehaniki in šoferji!” [To the Mechanics!: Mechanics and Chauffeurs!]
S. Kosovel: Zbrano delo [Collected Works]. Vol. 3.1. Članki, eseji, ocene, pisma, dnevniki
[Articles, Essays, Reviews, Letters, Diaries]. Ljubljana: Državna Založba Slovenije, 1977. 113–114
Kosovel, Srečko: Zbrano delo [Collected Works]. Vol. 1–3. Ljubljana: Državna Založba Slovenije.
1946–1977.
 Croatia 911

Levstik, Vladimir: “Poizkus o lepem slovstvu v Slovencih.” [Essay on Literature Amongst the
Slovenes] Ljubljanski zvon [The Ljubljana Bell] 29: 7–8 (1909): 394–400; 464–469.
Levstik, Vladimir: “Sphinx Patria.” [The Sphinx of the Fatherland] Slovan [The Slav] 8:1 (1910): 5–9.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Second Futurist Proclamation: Let‘s Kill off the Moonlight.” F. T.
Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006.
22–31.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. By Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 107–119.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “The Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical
Writings. Ed. by Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 11–17.
Mrak, Ivan: Obločnica, ki se rojeva [The Birth of Light]. Maribor: Obzorja, 1987.
Podbevšek, Anton: Človek z bombami [The Man with the Bombs]. Ljubljana: Štefanija Ravnikar-
Podbevškova, 1925.
Šalamun-Biedrzycka, Katarina: Anton Podbevšek in njegov čas [Anton Podbevšek and His Time].
Maribor: Obzorja, 1972.
Toporišič, Tomaž: “The New Slovene Theatre and Italian Futurism: Delak, Černigoj and the Historical
Avant-garde in Venezia Giulia.” International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 4 (2014): 230–262.
Troha, Vera: Futurizem. Ljubljana: Državna založba Slovenije, 1993.
Vrečko, Janez: Srečko Kosovel: Monografija. Ljubljana: Založba Znanstvenoraziskovalni center
Slovenske akademije znanosti in umetnosti, 2011.

Further reading
Dović, Marijan: “Anton Podbevšek, Futurism, and the Slovenian Interwar Avant-garde Literature.”
Günter Berghaus, ed.: Futurism in Eastern and Central Europe. Berlin & Boston: De Gruyter,
2011. 261–275.
Erjavec, Aleš: Ideologija in umetnost modernizma [Ideology and Modernist Art]. Ljubljana:
Partizanska knjiga, 1988.
Mrak, Ivan: Obločnica, ki se rojeva [The Birth of Light]. Maribor: Obzorja, 1987.
Vrečko, Janez: “Futurizem, berlinska dada, nadrealizem in Manifest mehanikom.” [Futurism, Berlin
Dada, Surrealism and the Manifesto ‘To the Mechanics’] Revija 2000 40:1 (2009): 189–202.

Croatia
In the early twentieth century, Croatia was a heterogeneous cultural space with its
northern region under the sway of Austro-Hungary and its south influenced by Italian
culture. In both regions, young intellectuals tried to form an authentic national
culture in their own language and in accordance with European ideals.
In 1906, Marinetti published in his magazine Poesia the poem Eloi, Eloi Lamma
Sabactani!: Versi croati by the Croatian writer Silvije Strahimir Kranjčević (1865–
1908), in an Italian translation by ‘Stiepko Ilyc’ [i. e. Stjepko Ilijić], which shows that
Marinetti had good connections in Croatia and took an interest in its poetic production.
Five years later, in a conversation with a critic from Zagreb, Zdenka Marjanović (dates
912 Sanja Roić

unknown), he characterized the mentioned poem as Futurist and also expressed the
highest respect for the sculptor Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962). Yet, despite his general
sympathy for the Croatian people, he expressed great reservations about the political
future of Trieste and Rijeka/Fiume (Marjanović: “Književna”, 394).
The first article that informed the Croatians about Futurism was published
in March / April 1909 in the Zagreb magazine Savremenik (The Contemporary; see
Wenzenlides: “Il futurismo”, 175–176). The reception was ambivalent: some critics
felt sympathetic towards the new movement, while others were suspicious and ill-
disposed. Futurist ideas influenced the young Dalmatians, as well as the intellectu-
als of Split, Šibenik and the island of Hvar, who aspired to unification with other
South-Slavic nations and wrote about it in their newspapers using Futurist rhetoric
(Bošković: “Recepcija”).

Protofuturism and the magazine Zvrk / Trottola

Janko Polić Kamov (1886–1910), a poet, novelist and playwright from Rijeka, was an
anti-traditionalist and prone to excess, but not a Futurist writer (Matoš: ‘‘Apologija
futurizma’’, 424). His friend Vladimir Čerina (1891–1932), a young Croatian writer,
spent time in Florence and published under the pseudonym “Gian Paolo” a short
prose piece called “Accenni” in Lacerba of 15 June 1913 (see Maroević: “Kamov”, 53).
At the same time, in 1914, the Dalmatian painter Vinko Foretić-Vis (1888–1958) pub-
lished some cartoons that can be considered Futurist.
Joso (Joe) Matošić (1890–1966) made an authentic Croatian contribution to
Futurism in the spring of 1914 in the multicultural coastal town Zadar when he pre-
pared for publication a Croatian-Italian magazine of some forty pages (in the format
34×30, type- and handwriting) called Zvrk / Trottola (Whirligig). As he was arrested
after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo, the maga-
zine remained unpublished for decades. The Croatian public only found out about the
project in 1973 (Pavlović: “Unprinted Croatian Futurist review ‘Zvrk’ ”, 216–219), when
the complete manuscript was published and commented on by Sofia Zani (Zani: “La
mai pubblicata rivista Futurista ‘Zvrk’ ”, 302–349). This Italian Slavist noticed autoch-
thonous Futurist motifs in the texts and an intention to overcome the provincialism
and traditionalism then dominant in Croatian cultural life. The articles in Zvrk criti-
cized and satirized not only dishonest values pervasive in Central Europe, but also
mythologies and attitudes then prevalent in South-Slavic cultures. The first page of
the magazine was meant to contain a programmatic text graphically stylized as a
circle: on its left side there are capital letters forming the acrostic ‘‘U FUTURIZAM’’
(Into Futurism). The section below contains a text, headed Futurismo, which was
an excerpt from the manifesto, In quest’anno futurista (In this Futurist Year, 1915),
followed by a Croatian translation undertaken by Matošić (Zani: “La mai pubblicata
 Croatia 913

rivista Futurista ‘Zvrk’ “, 312–318). At the end, there is a handwritten letter by Marinetti,
dated 16 April 1914:

Dear colleagues from the Croatian Futurist Magazine Zvrk. I greet with enthusiasm the birth of
the first Croatian Futurist magazine, and I send you an article herewith that will serve to clarify
some ambiguous points. I recommend you publish this article both in Italian and Croatian. I look
forward to your magazine. Please accept my welcoming hug – yours F. T. Marinetti. (Zani: “La
mai pubblicata rivista Futurista ‘Zvrk’ ”, 319)

Apart from contributions by Matošić, Anton Aralica and Ulderiko Donadini, Zvrk
intended to publish Palazzeschi’s poems La fontana malata (The Sick Fountain,
1909) and Lasciatemi divertire (Let Me Have Fun, 1910; both translated by Gabro
Pilić), as well as the prose Confessione al tipografo by Giovanni Papini (Confession
to the Typographer; originally published as “Dichiarazione al tipografo: Mezz’ora” in
Lacerba of 1 May 1914, here translated by Matošić). The magazine was also to contain
the modernist fragment, Početak ‘solo-varijacije’ (The Beginning of ‘Solo-variation’)
by Antun Gustav Matoš. The author was already dead in March 1914, but in 1913 he had
sent a critical assessment of Futurism to Marinetti in 1913. He satirized the name of the
movement, suggesting that it should be called Presentism (Matoš: “Futurizam”, 3),
to which the latter responded with a stereotypical expression of gratitude and sent
him the book I poeti futuristi with the inscription “a Gustave Matoš omaggio di viva
simpatia Futurista” (“In homage to Gustave Matoš with great Futurist sympathies”;
see in Archival Sources: Marinetti: Dedication to Antun Gustav Matoš). The final part
of Zvrk was to include an “Inquiry into Futurism” and the announcement of a “Prize
for Futurist literature” (for a piece of poetry, drama, short story, causerie, review or
travel book).

A Futurist import in Rijeka

During the occupation of Fiume / Rijeka by Gabriele D’Annunzio, a majority of citizens

declared on 26 October 1919 that they wanted their city to be part of Italy. Profound
changes followed in all aspects of the city’s life, and among the most noted of the
Legionnaires were the Futurists Mario Carli, Guido Keller, Mino Somenzi, Federico
Pinna-Berchet, Cesare Cerati, Tito Testoni, Alessandro Forti, Angelo Scambelluri and
Furio Drago. They founded the magazine La testa di ferro as the voice of Fiumanesimo,
published at the same time in Milan and Rijeka. Since D’Annunzio was now extolling
“the Futurist man” as a born revolutionary, he was forgiven his former traditional-
ism. In line with their libertine and iconoclastic ideology, the Futurists demanded
the burning of the City Library (Biblioteca civica), the Literary Club (Circolo letter-
ario) and the Manzoni Library (Biblioteca Manzoni). The Futurists Keller, Cerati and
914 Sanja Roić

Somenzi, supported by the writer Giovanni Comisso, founded on 13 November 1920

the magazine Yoga, dedicated to “tutti gli spiriti nuovi e rinnovati della razza italica”
(the new and refashioned spirits of the Italic people).
The same group edited an anthology, Il ballo di San Vito: Primo quaderno della
Yoga (The St Vitus’s Festival: First Workbook of ‘Yoga’, 1920). However, this Futurist
episode ended with the “Bloody Christmas” of 1920 and D’Annunzio’s withdrawal from
the city. Futurism only returned to Rijeka when the painter and sculptor Romolo
Venucci, who had discovered Futurism while studying at the Fine Arts Academy in
Budapest (1923–1928), established himself in Kvarner Bay and created works in a style
that mixed Cubo-Futurism and Constructivism (Toncinich: “Il maestro”, 29–35).

The beginning of Zenitism

Although Futurism was a movement that sought to liberate poetry, painting and
sculpture from the chains of norms and canons, Marinetti’s prose was not free from
clichés and stereotypes, for example the cruel and merciless Croatian soldier serving
in the ranks of the Austro-Hungarian army, portrayed in L’ alcova d’acciaio (The Steel
Alcove, 1921). One of the followers of Futurism was Ljubomir Micić (1895–1970),
who was fighting in Galicia as an Austro-Hungarian soldier and then, together with
his younger brother, Branko Ve Poljanski (1897–1947), launched the first avant-
garde magazines in Croatia: Zenit: Revue Internationale pour l’ Art Nouveau (Zenith:
International Magazine for New Art, 1921–1926). In February 1921, the first number
appeared in Zagreb and contained texts in French, Italian, German, Russian,
Flemish, English and other languages. Its aim was to liberate European culture from
all ‘-sms’ and to focus artistic aspirations on the magical triangle of Earth – Sun –
Man. The magazine’s slogan was: “Every new idea is Zenitist. Every Zenitist idea is
new.” (Poljanski: “S onu stranu istine i laži”, 10). It contained elements taken from
Futurism and Expressionism and mixed them with a new concept developed by
Micić: the Slavic Barbarogenius (Subotić: “Zenitism / Futurism”, 218–220). In 1923,
the editorial staff moved to Belgrade, and from then on Zenitism sought to operate
as an innovative force in the Balkans and to promote the poetics of the machine.
The Zenitists also took a strong interest in cinema: Poljanski edited Kinofon, the first
film magazine with Futurist elements, published in Zagreb in 1922, and Boško Tokin
(1894–1953) wrote extensively on film aesthetics.
In the 1920s, another avant-garde group close to the Zenitists and Dadaists in
Zagreb emerged: Traveleri (The Travellers). They presented Marinetti’s dramas
Vengono (They Are Coming, 1915) and Tamburo di fuoco (The Drum of Fire, 1922)
in the gymnasium of the city’s First Grammar School (Sudac: Traveleri). Also the
Futurist teatro della sorpresa (Theatre of Surprises, 1921–1922) exercised an influ-
ence in Croatia (Andrić: “Pismo”, 317). In the period between the two World Wars,
 Croatia 915

Futurism came to be widely criticized because of its alliance with Fascism (Iljadica:
“Futurizam”, 156–172; Ujević: “Simultane”, 177–181).

Futurism during the Second World War

In his diary notes from 1943, Miroslav Krleža (1893–1981) commented on the Futurist
Words-in-Freedom, as well as Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature
(1912). He quoted the text in French and provided a Croatian translation of almost the
whole text. He was of the opinion that the manifesto was connected to a visit Marinetti
made to Belgrade on 11 May 1912. At that time, the First Balkan War (1912–1913) was
raging, and Marinetti’s text appeared to Krleža to be just a frivolous ‘‘incoherent
rambling of a homunculus’’ and an epigonic paraphrase of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra
(Krleža: “Fragmenti: F. T. Marinetti”, 142–143). In Krleža’s view, Futurism led to dehu-
manization because of its deficiency of syntax and an inability to distinguish between
good and bad. Krleža’s essay about Marinetti was probably written on the occasion
of Marinetti’s report from the Russian Front, published in 1943 in the newspaper
Hrvatski narod from Zagreb.

Futurism revisited

Futurist ideas and concepts arrived in Croatia from different directions: from Italy it
travelled through the Adriatic Sea and came to Split and Zadar, by land via Trieste
and also from Budapest to Rijeka. Milan, Rome and Paris were well connected to
culturally significant cities, such as Zagreb. Different manifestations of Futurism
(in literature, artistic magazines, painting, on the stage or in architectural projects)
could be defined as ‘symptoms’ of an intercultural practice that was apparent in
the works of certain artists. Their strong personalities did not submit to a mono-
lithic aesthetic, and the groups that were influenced by Futurism were not long
lasting.
After 1945, the Socialist government censored Futurism, judged it in negative
terms, even rejected it in toto because it was seen as bourgeois art satiated with
Fascist ideology. The first signs of a reevaluation could be noticed at the Congress
of the Writers Alliance of Yugoslavia held in Ljubljana in October 1952, but the deci-
sive breakthrough happened after 1968, when the historical avant-gardes aroused
significant interest in all South-Slavic cultures. In 1973, Boro Pavlović issued a text
about Zvrk (Pavlović: “[Unprinted] Croatian Futurist review ‘Zvrk’ [Whirligig]”), in the
1980s, the Institute for Literary Studies in Zagreb started a project concerned with
the Russian avant-garde, and the magazine Quorum from Zagreb published in 1989
a comprehensive dossier about Futurism (Kipke and Koščević: “Futurizam I”; Župan
916 Sanja Roić

and Čegec: “Futurizam II”). A collection of articles and documents about Futurism in
Croatia was edited by Božidar Petrač in 1995 (Petrač: Futurizam u Hrvatskoj: Dossier),
an anthology by Joja Ricov in 2004 (Ricov: Talijanski futurizam). The Italianist Mladen
Machiedo edited a collage for radio drama Futurizam 100 godina kasnije (Futurism 100
Years Later, 2009), and the author of this entry wrote about Futurism in the Balkans in
2011. Thus, the Futurist ‘whirligig’ is constantly spinning, and there was more atten-
tion to it in the centenary year of the magazine from Zadar (Marinetti: “Marinettijev
manifest za prvi broj Zvrka”; Matošić: “Brzovoz”; Petrač: “Iznašašće hrvatskoga futur-
izma i Boro Pavlović”).

Archival sources
Marinetti, F. T.: Dedication to Antun Gustav Matoš. I poeti futuristi. Milano: Edizioni Futuriste di
“Poesia, 1912. Književna ostavština A. G. Matoša, Hrvatska akademija znanosti i umjetnosti,
Zavod za povijest hrvatske književnosti, kazališta i glazbe, Zagreb. HR HAZU/172-50/2819.
Marinetti, F. T.: Letter to Antun Gustav Matoš (1913). Književna ostavština A. G. Matoša, Hrvatska
akademija znanosti i umjetnosti, Zavod za povijest hrvatske književnosti, kazališta i glazbe,
Zagreb. HR HAZU/172-50/2819.jana: l

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Wenzenlides, Arsen: “Il futurismo.” Savremenik [Contemporary] 4:3 (1909): 175–176.
Yoga: Unione di spiriti liberi tendenti alla perfezione 1 (13 November 1920) – 4 (4 December 1920).

Serbia

Literature

Although there were no movements, groups or individual writers who explicitly labelled
themselves as Futurists, the influence of Futurist aesthetics and specific poetic notions
are clearly identifiable in the works of some of the most significant Serbian authors in
the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia).
An introduction to the emergence, characteristics and activities of the first
avant-garde movement was given in several pre-war articles about Marinetti and
918 Bojan Jović

Futurism, published in 1911 in the reviews Bosanska Vila (Bosnian Fairy) and in 1913
Narod (People). After the Great War and the formation of the State of the South Slavs,
detailed surveys of Futurist ideas and works were written on the basis of first-hand
experience and personal contacts with the West, as well as with the North and the
East of Europe. Serbian authors Todor Manojlović (1883–1968), Stanislav Vinaver
(1891–1955), Boško Tokin (1894–1953), Rastko Petrović (1898–1949), Konstantin
Perić (1891–1938?) and Ljubomir Micić, together with emigrants such as Evgeny
Anichkov from Russia, described and explained works of important Italian (F. T.
Marinetti, Fedele Azari), Polish (Julian Tuwim, Kazimierz Wierzyński) and Russian
(Igor Severyanin, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vasily Kamensky, Vladimir Mayakovsky)
writers, in a number of articles in the literary periodicals Zenit (Zenith) and Misao
(Thought).
Although by the end of the 1910s, Futurism had lost its ground-breaking and
provocative appeal on the international scene, for Serbian writers it still represented
a vital source of inspiration for their rejection of cultural traditions and renewal of
poetry and literature, by means of introducing speed, dynamism, simultaneism, spa-
tio-temporal omnipresence, etc. At the same time, Serbian authors activated motifs
and techniques of archaic and mythic poetry, folklore, primitivism and exoticism –
similar to what the Russian Futurists had done. Common traits of both variants of
Futurism and fascination with aviation and airplanes are regarded as a sign of the
vitality and endurance of Futurism in Serbian literature.
In poetry, the opening verses of Lirika Itake (Lyric of Ithaca, 1919) by Miloš
Crnjanski (1893–1977) indicate knowledge of the poem-manifesto of Julian Tuwim,
Poezja (Poetry), in which the Polish author characterized himself as “the first
Futurist”, without, however, intending “to spit on the past” (Tuwim: “Poezja”,
283). For his part, Crnjanski wrote in Lirika Itake about the need for new verses
that would bring spiritual elation and would be suitable for a future-oriented,
modern life. The early poetry of Milan Dedinac (1902–1966), later to become one
of the most important Surrealists in Belgrade, was also noticeably influenced by
the Futurist spirit. In his first poetic cycle, Zar zora, već? – Zora! (Is It Dawn, Yet? –
Dawn!, 1921–1922), he wrote about a simultaneous journey in a “flying automobile”
and a “machine gone insane” that “charged through the world” with the “speed of
heavenly machines” (Dedinac: “Zar zora, već? – Zora!”). Reviewing a short lyrical
novel by Crnjanski, Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću (Diary about Čarnojević, 1921), Dedinac
declared that the young generation “recite to the tune of falls and cascades, […]
to the rhythm of the clatter of aeroplane propellers in the air, with enthusiasm
of speeding steamboats, the waves, the sun” (Dedinac: “ ‘Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću’
Miloša Crnjanskog”, 29). According to Dedinac, the young generation of poets had
to overcome conventional literary forms as they no longer corresponded to modern
emotions. Instead, they ought to focus on “agitated towns and hallucinating
landscapes, cinemas, dawns at sea, distances covered with deep snow, silent and
snowy summits of the Urals, the new universe and chaos” (Dedinac: “ ‘Dnevnik o
 Serbia 919

Čarnojeviću’ Miloša Crnjanskog”, 29). New forms of creativity would not emerge
by means of burning down museums, but by working towards spiritual edifica-
tion, rejection of epigonism, individualism, and a revival of the old Slavic culture.
Marinetti’s conversion to a bourgeois lifestyle following his marriage to Benedetta
Cappa (1923) and his acceptance of a seat in the Royal Italian Academy (1929) dis-
appointed Dedinac and caused him to publish an ironic account of a literary soirée
Marinetti held on 9 January 1930 at the Galerie 23 in Paris (Dedinac: “Vođ futurista
F. T. Marineti član je italijanske Akademije”, 7).
Boško Tokin (1894–1953), one of the most important Zenitists, propagated Fedele
Azari’s Futurist Aerial Theatre (see p. 233 in this volume) in an article entitled Pozorište
u vazduhu (Theatre in the Air, 1921). Tokin suggested that Futurism, as a precursor of
Zenitism, aimed at a liberation not only of the word but also of painting, sculpture,
music and theatre and that it sought to give rise to a new “Man-Poet”. Describing
Futurism in the visual arts as a thing of the past, Tokin stressed that new means of
expression could be found in the theatre in the air, and that this form of popular,
democratic spectacle would be the beginning of the triumph of man over matter. The
Futurist Aerial Theatre, according to Tokin, demonstrated that there was still novelty
and creativity to be found in Marinetti’s movement.
Works of Rastko Petrović (1898–1949) contained elements that were characteris-
tic of both Italian and Russian Futurisms and brought together poetic and aesthetic
ideas derived, on the one hand, from Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini,
and, on the other hand, from Khlebnikov and Mayakovsky. Throughout his œuvre,
Petrović combined primitivistic tendencies, carnevalization, mythopoetic, anthropo-
morphic and folkloric models of the world, the grotesque concept of the body, poetics
of heroism, simultaneism, dynamism, velocity and fast-moving means of transporta-
tion: cars, motorcycles, trains and aeroplanes.
In his prose-poem-manifesto, Probuđena svest (Juda) (Awakened Consciousness:
Judas, 1922), Petrović expressed his ideas on bodily and epidermic contacts that were
similar to Marinetti’s manifesto Il tattilismo (Tactilism, 1921), which suggested that
touch was a sensitive or sexual form of bodily communication that transferred emo-
tions and thoughts and was typical of refined and potent erotic temperaments. In
Helioterapija Afazije (Heliotherapy of Aphasia, 1923), Petrović described a particular
‘mechanics’ of human relations that was analogous to Marinetti’s “learning scale for
touch” and “tactile panels” (Marinetti: “Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto”, 372–273).
After declaring that language has “fallen ill” and was unable to transfer meaning,
and that a general numbness of the senses had befallen humans in their perception
of reality, Petrović proposed a twofold solution: healing language and human rela-
tionships through a radical transformation of Nature. On the one hand, he planned a
kind of ‘super-tale’ structure similar to Khlebnikov’s ‘supersaga’ (sverkhpovest) that
would ‘cleanse’ words and restore expressivity to literature. On the other hand, he
reflected on Futurist dynamism and on the problems of perception of movement,
similar to what Boccioni had done in Pittura, scultura futuriste (Futurist Painting and
920 Jasmina Čubrilo

Sculpture, 1914), and in his paintings of a horse in motion in Elasticità (Elasticity,

1912) or Cavallo + cavaliere + caseggiato (Horse + Rider + Houses, 1913–1914). Petrović
felt that a cure for deadened perception could also be achieved “in the air”, as when
an aviator is liberated from the laws of gravity and extends the dimensions of space
into the realm of the Improbable (Petrović: Helioterapija Afazije, 762–763).
Petrović later dedicated an essay, Primeri rada i junaštva: Svedočenje mog pri-
jatelja, pilota A.D. (Examples of Work and Heroism: Testimony of My Friend, the Pilot
A.D., 1923), to the life and death of a Serbian fighter pilot in the First World War, ser-
geant Siniša Stefanović. He offered several accounts of war missions, air raids and
aerial dogfights, along with a highly aestheticized episode of an aircraft shot down
from the sky. In all of these texts, a heroic individual conquered death and wilfully
changed the dimensions of life, in as much as “the past could become future one
more time; and the future, before we even have lived it, can signify the past for us”
(Petrović: Primeri rada i junaštva, 430).
In summation, some of the most significant Serbian writers of the interwar years
adapted aspects of Futurist aesthetics, in a manner and to an extent that shows thor-
ough knowledge of and deep affinity with the poetics of Futurism.

Fine and visual arts

The links of Serbian fine and visual arts with Futurism were most distinct and most
articulated in the activities around the review Zenit (Zagreb 1921–1923; Belgrade 1923–
1926). The magazine propagated the principles of speed, dynamism and energy and
showed a highly positive attitude towards the technical innovations of the modern
age. In terms of media, Zenitism and Futurism took a particular interest in the writing
of manifestos and in the organization of soirées or serate, in which the ideas of both
movements could be propagated. They revolutionized typography and graphic design
by introducing elements of dynamism and operating with a mechanical and geomet-
rical style. Even the conceptualization of the Barbarogenius, the most authentic con-
tribution of Zenit to the European avant-gardes and a specific feature linked to both
Dadaist and Expressionist Primitivism, can be interpreted as a (dynamic) correlation
with Futurist aspirations to create “heroic forms of male subjectivity through fusion
with machines and metal” (Poggi: Inventing Futurism, xi–xii). Futurism and Zenitism
were two complementary sides of a traumatic response to the rise of industrial cap-
italism, to the encounter with new technologies, to chaotic urban crowds, to chal-
lenges coming from the new media of photography and film and from various forms of
popular culture.
Both Futurism and Zenitism adopted a strategy based on the principles of the
fast circulation of commodities, information and advertising. They were at the same
time cosmopolitan and nationalist. Futurism aimed at an affirmation of the newly
established modern Italian identity, while Zenitism was devoted to the affirmation of
 Serbia 921

a slightly vague concept of ‘the Balkans’ and, after 1930, Serbian identity. The Futurist
and Zenitist subject was essentially of Nietzschean origin; he sought to rebel against
industrialized bourgeois society, to overcome the conventional and sterile ‘modernity’
of the middle classes, and to establish alternative, emancipatory forms of expression.
This overlap of concerns and artistic strategies is not surprising, given that the editors
and key contributors of Zenit had personal connections with Marinetti, Paolo Buzzi,
Ruggero Vasari, Fortunato Depero and Vinicio Paladini. Yet, there were also disagree-
ments, and the Zenitists regularly engaged with their Italian colleagues in heated and
often acerbic debates (Subotić: “Zenitism”, 201–230). The difference between the two
movements lay in their diverging concepts of the heroic male subject: the Futurist
figure was a ‘demon’ of velocity and a representative of the mechanical age, whereas
the Zenitist figure was the ‘demon’ of Bataillean ‘formlessness’, a creature of crude
and primary energy.
Pavle Lagarić’s article, Izložba beogradskih slikara i vajara futurista (The
Exhibition of Belgrade Futurist Painters and Sculptors, 1924) did not really iden-
tify Futurism as a distinctly articulated phenomenon within art in Belgrade at that
time. The exhibition he referred to, Izložbi beogradskih slikara i vajara (Exhibition of
Belgrade Painters and Sculptors), held in Belgrade 1924 and organized by the Cvijeta
Zuzorić Society of Friends of Arts, made use of the term ‘Futurism’ in a pejorative
manner to criticize some of the works selected for the show and to bestow a nega-
tive mark on modern art or the modern artist per se. Jovan Bijelić (1886–1964) was
amongst the artists who took part in the above-mentioned exhibition. His paintings
Apstraktni pejzaž (Abstract Landscape, 1920), Planinski pejzaž (Mountain Landscape,
1920) and Borba dana i noći (Struggle between Day and Night, 1921) raised radical
questions about the Serbian art scene and the autonomous reality and morphology
of painting. In some of his works, especially Borba dana i noći (Struggle Between Day
and Night, 1921), one can recognize Futurist dynamism produced through interior and
exterior force lines, geometrically constructed rectangles arranged diagonally across
the canvas and coloured ovalar and triangular surfaces, all of which exist in a rela-
tionship of mutual permeation and rhythmic interpenetration of straight, curved and
sharply angled lines.
Mihailo S. Petrov (1902–1983), one of the most active collaborators of Zenit in
its early period (1921–1922), created linocuts influenced by German Expressionism,
drawings and watercolours ranging from figural to entirely abstract scenes that
emerged through the interpretations of various idioms: Cubist, Expressionist,
Constructivist, but also Futurist. Examples of this hybrid style could be found in
Ritam (The Rhythm, published on the cover of Zenit 10 [1921]), Linoleum (Linoleum;
published in Zenit 12 [1922]) and U čast Zenita (In Honor of Zenit; published in Zenit
13 [1922]). His watercolour of 1924, Kompozicija 77 (Composition 77), represented
also a combination of Expressionist abstraction and Constructivist elements with
Futurist effects (rhythmic repetition, simultaneous, horizontal-vertical movements
of some surfaces). His depiction of a new human being in a dynamically changing
922 Jasmina Čubrilo

environment could also be interpreted as a Cubist structure, with traces of Cezannism

(in the treatment of objects, typography, colouring), and some Constructivist effects
(in the construction of scenery out of geometrical forms in a more or less rigorous
order).
Ivan Radović (1894–1973) manifested in his watercolours, drawings and
collages of 1921 and 1924 a strong affinity towards experimentation and
the dissolution of form. Lazar Trifunović sees the origins of this in German
Expressionism (Trifunović: Srpsko, 116), whereas Miodrag Protić finds them in
Cubism, but also in “an Expressionist, Cubist and Futurist way, very much aware
of the idea of simultaneity” (Protić: Treća, 94). Radović’s drawings and watercol-
ours are entitled Kompozicija (Composition, 1921 and 1923) or Apstraktna kompo-
zicija (Abstract Composition, 1923) and avoided narratives and imitative forms of
representation. By contrast, his colleagues at the time matched the sign with the
signified and redirected the works to themselves, to their own pictorial reality.
Radović’s repeated or rearranged geometrized forms refer to Futurist conceptual-
izations of the élan vital.
Futurism in Serbia was always a marginal phenomenon, due to the proclivity
of Serbian painters toward Middle-European, and especially German and French,
cultural models. By the beginning of the 1920s, Futurism was well known in these
international milieux, due to exhibitions and publications, and a number of paint-
ers from those countries produced works that were clearly influenced by Futurism.
Thus, Serbian artists absorbed Futurism predominantly in its ‘middle-European’ or
‘Parisian’ variants (see the entries on France and Germany in this volume), and regu-
larly mixed in Fauvist, Divisionist, Cubist, Orphist, Expressionist and other features.
For example, Franz Marc’s paintings after 1913 were important for Bijelić, who resided
in Prague, Dresden and Berlin during 1920. Marc and Lyonel Feininger influenced
Radović, who was educated in Budapest (1917–1919) and during 1921 delved into the
art scenes of Munich, Prague, Venice and Paris. Der Sturm played a major rôle for
Mihailo S. Petrov, who pursued an independent artistic line of development and
became acquainted with the artistic and theoretical work of Paul Klee and Wassily
Kandinsky during a two-month visit to Vienna in 1921.
It could therefore be said that Futurism arrived in Serbia in an indirect manner,
mediated by adaptations that had been made in Germany and France. Besides
Ljubomir Micić and his brother Branko Ve Poljanski, few Serbs entertained personal
connections with Italian Futurists. Hardly any of them was familiar with the full
aesthetic programme as formulated in Futurist manifestos. In most cases, individ-
ual examples of Futurist paintings or sculptures from any variety of countries were
responsible for stimulating the youthful desire for experimentation in Serbia, encour-
aged the formation of an emancipatory process in its culture and conditioned the
otherness of its modern art.
 Serbia 923

Works cited
Crnjanski, Miloš: Lirika Itake [Lyric of Ithaca]. Beograd: Cvijanović, 1919.
Dedinac, Milan: “ ‘Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću’ Miloša Crnjanskog.” [“Diary about Čarnojević” by Miloš
Crnjanski] Putevi [Roads]1:1 (January 1922): 29–32.
Dedinac, Milan: “Vođ futurista F. T. Marineti član je italijanske Akademije.” [The Futurist Leader F. T.
Marinetti Is a Member of the Italian Academy] Politika 7796 (17 January 1930): 7.
Dedinac, Milan: “Zar zora, već? – Zora!” [Is It Dawn, Yet? – Dawn!] M. Dedinac: Od nemila do nedraga
[From Bad to Worse]. Beograd: Nolit, 1957. 71–78.
Lagarić, Pavle: “Izložba beogradskih slikara i vajara futurista.” [A Belgrade Exhibition of Futurist
Painters and Sculptors] Zastava [Flag] (Novi Sad), 6 March 1924. Reprinted in Miodrag B. Protić,
ed.: Ideje srpske umetničke kritike i teorije, 1900–1950 [Ideas of Serbian Art Criticism and
Theory, 1900-1950]. Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1981. 284.
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: “Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto.” F. T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Ed. by
Günter Berghaus. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 370–376.
Petrović, Rastko: “Probuđena svest (Juda).” [Awakened Consciousness: Judas] R. Petrović: Dela
[Works]. Vol. 2. Poezija. Sabinjanke Poezija [Poetry. The Sabine Women]. Beograd: Nolit, 1974.
93–107.
Petrović, Rastko: “Primeri rada i junaštva: Svedočenje mog prijatelja, pilota A.D.” [Examples of Work
and Heroism: The Testimony of My Friend, Pilot A.D] Novi život [New Life] 15:12 (27 October
1923); 16:1 (3 November 1923); 16:3 (17 November 1923). Reprint in Rastko Petrović: Eseјi i
članci [Essays and Articles]. Beograd: Nolit, 1974. 419–430.
Petrović, Rastko, and Marko Ristić: “Helioterapija Afazije.” [Heliotherapy of Aphasia] Misao
[Thought] 12:2 (#82) (16 May 1923): 758–771.
Poggi, Christine: Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism. Princeton/NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2008.
Protić, Miodrag B., ed.: Treća decenija: Konstruktivno slikarstvo [Third Decade: Constructive
Painting]. Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1967.
Subotić, Irina: “Zenitism/Futurism: Similarities and Differences.” International Yearbook of Futurism
Studies. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter, 2011. 201–230.
Tokin, Boško: “Pozorište u vazduhu.” [The Theater in the Air] Zenit 1:2 (March 1921): 11–13.
Trifunović, Lazar: Srpsko slikarstvo 1900–1950 [Serbian Painting 1900-1950]. Beograd: Nolit, 1973.
Tuwim, Julian: “Poezja.” [Poetry] J. Tuwim: Wiersze [Poems]. Vol. 1. Warszawa: Czytelnik, 1986.
281–288.

Further reading
Bière-Chauvel, Delphine: “ ‘Zenit’: Une avant-garde entre particularisme identitaire et
internationalisme.” Sascha Bru, et al., eds.: Europa! Europa? The Avant-garde, Modernism and
the Fate of the Continent. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009. 138–152.
Čubrilo, Jasmina: “The Yugoslav Avant-garde Review ‘Zenit’ (1921–1926) and Its Links with Berlin.”
Centropa: A Journal of Central European Architecture and Related Arts 12:3 (September 2012):
234–252.
Denegri, Ješa: “Likovni umetnici u časopisu ‘Zenit’.“ [Artists in the Magazine ‘Zenit’] Vidosava
Golubović, and Staniša Tutnjević, eds.: Srpska avangarda u periodici [The Serbian Avant-garde
in Periodals]. Beograd: Matica srpska; Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1996. 431–442.
924 Jasmina Čubrilo

Golubović, Vidosava, and Irina Subotić: Zenit 1921–1926. Beograd: Narodna biblioteka Srbije /
Institut za književnost/SKD Prosvjeta, Zagreb, 2008.
Hulten, Pontus, ed.: Futurismo & Futurismi. Exhibition catalogue. Venezia: Palazzo Grassi, 3
maggio – 12 Ottobre 1986. Milano: Bompiani, 1986.
Miller, Tuyrus: “A Geography of Dispersion: Central Europe and the Symbolic Spaces of the
Avant-Garde.” Wang Keping, ed.: Diversity and Universality in Aesthetics, International
Yearbook of Aesthetics 14 (2010), 180–198.
Petrov, Mihailo, S.: “Moj biografski autoportret.” [My Biographical Self-portrait] Sreto Bošnjak, ed.:
Mihailo S. Petrov: slikarstvo, grafika, crteži, primenjena grafika, umetnička kritika [Mihailo
S. Petrov: Painting, Graphics, Drawings, Applied Graphics, Art Criticism]. Beograd: Umetnički
paviljon “Cvijeta Zuzorić” / Beogradski Izdavačko-Grafički Zavod, 1979. 47–53.
Protić, Miodrag B., ed.: Ideje srpske umetničke kritike i teorije, 1900–1950 [Ideas of Serbian Art
Criticism and Theory, 1900-1950]. Beograd: Muzej savremene umetnosti, 1981.
Protić, Miodrag B., ed.: Ivan Radović. Beograd: Galerija Srpske akademije nauka i umetnosti. 1971.
Protić, Miodrag B., ed.: Jugoslovensko slikarstvo 1900–1950 [Yugoslav Painting 1900-1950].
Beograd: Beogradski Izdavačko-Grafički Zavod, 1973.
Subotić, Irina: “Tipografska i likovna rešenja ‘Zenita’ i zenitističkih izdanja.” [Typographical and
Visual Designs in ‘Zenith’ and Zenithist Editions] Vidosava Golubović, and Staniša Tutnjević,
eds.: Srpska avangarda u periodici [The Serbian Avant-garde in Periodicals]. Beograd: Matica
srpska; Institut za književnost i umetnost, 1996. 443–454.
Tokin, Boško: “Kako će se zvati današnje doba.” [How Will It Be Called Today] Letopis Matice srpske
[The Chronicle of Matica Srpska Library] 316:2 (May 1928): 318–319.
Vićentić, Tanja: Mihailo S. Petrov: Umetnost na poklon [Mihailo S. Petrov: Art from a Gift Collection].
Arandjelovac: Narodni muzej, 2013
Notes on Contributors
Andrew A. Anderson is Professor of Spanish at the University of Virginia. He has published widely
on modern Spanish literature, concentrating particularly on the work of Federico García Lorca and
the historical avant-garde in Spain. His most recent monographs are entitled El momento ultraísta:
Orígenes, fundación y lanzamiento de un movimiento de vanguardia (2017) and La recepción de las
vanguardias extranjeras en España: Cubismo, futurismo, dadá. Estudio y ensayo de bibliografía (2018).

Henryk Baran is O’Leary Professor Emeritus of Russian Studies at the University at Albany. His
interests range from Russian Futurism, especially the writings of Velimir Khlebnikov, to the history of
the forged Protocols of the Elders of Zion. He has published two collections of his own studies, more
than one hundred research articles, and ten edited or co-edited scholarly volumes.

Krikor Beledian is an academic as well as a novelist and poet teaching Armenian language and
literature as a Maître de Conférences at the Institut National de Langues et Civilisations Orientales
in Paris as well as at the Institut Catholique in Lyons. His has published many books on Armenian
history and literature, most recently Fifty Years of Armenian Literature in France (California State U P,
2016), and is also a prolific translator of Armenian poetry and memoirs.

Günter Berghaus is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Bristol and has published some
twenty books on various aspects of theatre and performance studies, art history and cultural
politics. He currently serves as general editor of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies and
of International Futurism, 1945–2015: A Bibliographic Handbook.

Jonathan Black, FRSA and FRHistS, is a Senior Research Fellow in History of Art at Kingston
University, London. He has published several books on the visual culture of Britain, avant-garde art
and the First World War, including studies on Edward Wadsworth and C.R.W. Nevinson.

Willard Bohn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State
University and the author of twenty-one books on avant-garde literature and art. He is particularly
interested in Futurism, Dada and Surrealism and has published extensively on Guillaume Apollinaire.

Aija Brasliņa is Head of Collections and Research Department (18th to first half of 20th C.) at the
Latvian National Museum of Art in Riga, for whom she has curated a number of exhibitions, as well
as permanent displays. Her research is focussed on Latvian art during the interwar period.

Edward Braun † was Professor Emeritus of Drama at the University of Bristol, where he taught for 28
years. He is best known for his pioneering work on the theatre director Meyerhold. His study The Director
and the Stage has become a standard work on the subject. The author sadly passed away in March 2017.

Marta Braun is director of the Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management
Programme at Ryerson University in Toronto and author of Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey,
1830–1904 (1992), Eadweard Muybridge (2010) and Muybridge and the Riddle of Locomotion (2013).

Stephen Bury is Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library, New York, and
an adjunct professor at Long Island University. He is author of Artists’ Books: The Book as a Work of
Art 1963–2000, published in 2015.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-056
926 Notes on Contributors

Irina Cărăbaş is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and Theory at the National
University of Arts in Bucharest. She is the author of several studies concerning the Romanian avant-
garde, Constructivism, avant-garde magazines and Socialist Realism, published in periodicals and
collective volumes.

Kyoo Yun Cho is Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian Language and Literature at Chung-
Ang University in Seoul. His main fields of research are Russian Futurism, esp. Mayakovsky, and
Soviet avant-garde art and literature

Irene Chytraeus-Auerbach is an independent researcher and Research Associate at the

International Center for Cultural and Technological Studies, IZKT, at the University of Stuttgart, for
whom she has organized several German-Italian conferences, amongst others on Italian Futurism
and on Herwarth Walden and Der Sturm. Her current work is focussed on the reception of Italian
Futurism in Germany.

Jasmina Čubrilo is an Associate Professor at the Art History Department of Belgrade University. Her
academic research is focussed on art of the 20th C., Modernism, avant-garde art, Neo-avant-gardes
and contemporary art practices.

Selena Daly is Lecturer of Modern European History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has
published a range of studies on the history and literature of Futurism, most recently Italian Futurism
and the First World War (2016) with University of Toronto Press, which was nominated for The Bridge
Book Prize 2017.

Greg Dawes is Distinguished Professor of Latin American literature and culture at North Carolina State
University. He is the editor of the journal A Contracorriente and Managing Editor of the publishing
house “Editorial A Contracorriente”. He is the author of Aesthetics and Revolution: Nicaraguan Poetry,
1979–1990 (1993), Poetas ante la modernidad: Vallejo, Huidobro, Neruda y Paz (2009) as well as two
books on Pablo Neruda.

Sergio Delgado Moya is Acting Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University.
He is the author of Delirious Consumption: Aesthetics and Consumer Capitalism in Mexico and Brazil
(University of Texas Press, 2017).

Giuseppe Dell’ Agata is Professor Emeritus of Bulgarian and Slavic Philology. He taught at the
University of Pisa and the University of Sofia. He was president of AIS (Italian Association of Slavists)
and has widely published on Bulgarian, Czech, Ukrainian and Russian literature and linguistics. In
2004 he was awarded the Order of the Cherubim.

Giorgio Di Genova is a critic and historian of contemporary art. He has long taught history of art at the
Academies of Fine Arts in Catania, Naples and Rome and curated a large number of exhibitions. He is
the author of a ten-volume history of Italian art in the 20th C., and of a number of monographs related
to Italian artists of the last century.

Charlotte Douglas is Emeritus Professor of Fine Arts and Slavic Studies at New York University. She
is the author and editor of many books and articles on the Russian avant-garde, and is the Founding
President of the Malevich Society (New York).
 Notes on Contributors 927

Aleš Erjavec is a Research Professor at the Institute of Philosophy in the Scientific Research Center of
the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and professor of aesthetics at the University of Ljubljana
and Zhejiang University (Hangzhou, China). He is the author or editor of books concerned with critical
aesthetics, contemporary art history, the avant-gardes, visual studies, and philosophy of culture.

Margaret Fisher is an independent scholar and video artist who has published extensively on Ezra
Pound’s music and radio operas of the 1920s and 1930s. She is editor/translator of RADIA: A Gloss
of the 1933 Futurist Radio Manifesto by Pino Masnata (2012) and is currently writing about the 1924
film Ballet mécanique (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press).

Matteo Fochessati is a curator at the Wolfsoniana – Palazzo Ducale Fondazione per la Cultura,
Genova, and a lecturer in History of Design at Genova University. He organized many exhibitions,
edited a number of catalogues and contributed essays to collective volumes devoted to the Italian
art history of the 20th C.

Carlos García is an independent researcher, based in Germany, and has written extensively on avant-
garde literature in Argentina, Spain, Peru and Mexico. Most recently, he published a book on the
relation between Jorge Luis Borges and German literary Expressionism, and edited, together with
Martín Greco, the papers of Evar Mendez, director of the periodical Martín Fierro (1924–1927).

Tiit Hennoste is a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Tartu. He is the author of some 120
articles and essays on history of Estonian avant-garde, modernism and literary manifestos. His most
recent book is Eesti kirjanduslik avangard 20. sajandi algul: Hüpped modernismi poole 1 (Estonian
Literary Avant-Garde in the Early 20th Century: Leaps towards Modernism, Vol. 1, 2016).

Benedikt Hjartarson is Professor of Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University
of Iceland. He has been a member of the steering committee and publication commission of the
European Network for Avant-garde and Modernism Studies, of the Nordic Network of Avant-garde
Studies and the editorial board of a four-volume Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the Nordic
Countries. He is the author of numerous books and essays concerned with the European avant-
garde, published in Icelandic, German, Danish, English and Swedish.

Man Hu, is a Ph.D student at Shanghai Jiao Tong University with a research focus on Marxist theory
and aesthetics.

Oleh S. Ilnytzkyj is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies
at the University of Alberta. His major research lies in Ukrainian Modernism, Futurism, Ukrainian-
Russian cultural relations, and computing in the humanities. He was editor-in-chief of Canadian
Slavonic Papers and, more recently, East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies.

Torben Jelsbak is Associate Professor of Nordic Literature at the Department of Nordic Studies and
Linguistics at University of Copenhagen. He is the author or editor of many books and articles on
early 20th C. Nordic and European avant-garde art and literature.

Bojan Jović is Principal Research Fellow and Director of the Institute for Literature and Art in
Belgrade. He specializes in Serbian and European avant-garde, science fiction, utopian and serio-
comical literature. Recent publications include a book on Junaci modernih vremena: Čarli Čaplin u
očima evropske avangarde (2012).
928 Notes on Contributors

Nuno Júdice is professor of Portuguese and French Literature at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
From 1997–2004, he served as cultural attaché at the Portuguese embassy in Paris and as Director
of the Camões Institute, also in Paris. He published widely on Modernism and Futurism in Portugal,
and since 2009 acts as director of the literary magazine Colóquio-Letras.

András Kappanyos is a Hungarian literary scholar, professor and translator, working in Budapest.
He has authored and edited a good dozen books on the subjects of English literary Modernism (T. S.
Eliot, James Joyce), the avant-garde, Hungarian literary movements and, most recently, on translation
studies.

Ekaterina Lazareva is a Senior Research Fellow at the State Institute of Art Studies, Moscow. Her
fields of research include Italian Futurism, Russian avant-garde art, international Modernism and
contemporary art. In 2013, she published an anthology of manifestos from the Second Futurist
movement. She is currently preparing a Russian translation of around one-hundred Italian Futurist
texts ranging from 1909 to 1941.

Christina Lodder is Honorary Professor of Art History at the University of Kent, Canterbury,
UK, President of the Malevich Society and a co-editor of Brill’s “Russian History and Culture” series.
She is one of the leading authorities on Russian modernist art, Constructivism and Kazimir Malevich
and has published extensively in these fields.

Daniele Lombardi † was an artist, composer and musician. Twenty-five years of research into Italian
and international Futurist music has resulted in numerous concerts and recordings of CDs and DVDs.
He also published a large number of essays and books on the subject, including Il suono veloce:
Futurismo e futurismi in musica (1996) and Nuova enciclopedia del futurismo musicale (2009). The
author sadly passed away in March 2018

Nicola Lucchi is a Substitute Lecturer of Italian at Queens College, CUNY. He works on the
intersection between twentieth-century Italian literature and the visual arts. He has published
essays on Eugenio Montale, Bruno Munari and Italian Futurism. He is currently working on his first
monograph, dedicated to the cultural impact of the automotive industry on Italian society during the
interwar years.

Ara H. Merjian is Associate Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an Affiliate
of the Institute of Fine Arts and Department of Art History as well as Director of Undergraduate Studies.
He is the author of Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Modernism, Paris (2014)
and has written various essays on international Futurism. At NYU he teaches the history of Modernist
painting, the historical and neo-avant-gardes, Fascism and anti-Fascism.

Chris Michaelides † worked in the Italian and Modern Greek Section of the British Library and
was one of the core curators of Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant-garde,
1900–1937. He has published widely on French, Italian and Modern Greek art and literature, amongst
others a chapter on Futurist magazines in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist
Magazines. Vol. 3. Europe, 1880–1940. The author sadly passed away in June 2017.

Giovanna Montenegro is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Languages at

Binghamton University (SUNY). Her interests include Futurism and the avant-garde in Latin America,
as well as colonial Latin American literature and history.
 Notes on Contributors 929

Cecilia Novero is a Senior Lecturer in German and European Studies at the University of Otago. She
has investigated the rôle of food in art and cinema and is author of Antidiets of the Avant-garde:
From Futurist Cooking to Eat Art (2010) and a contributor to the catalogue of Expo 2015, Arts&Food,
edited by Germano Celant.

Maria Elena Paniconi is a lecturer in Arabic Language and Literature at the University of Macerata.
She works on modern and contemporary Arabic literature and culture, on 20th-C. women’s writing in
the Arab world, and on the cultural aspects of modernity in the Arab world, with a specific focus on
Egypt.

Domenico Pietropaolo is Professor of Italian Literature and Drama at the University of Toronto and
Senior Fellow of Massey College. He is particularly interested in the relationship between science
and literature, theatre history and stage improvisation, all areas in which he has published widely.

Alena Pomajzlová is an Associate Professor of Modern Art History at Masaryk University, Brno, and
a member of the International Association of Art Critics. Her research is concerned with modern and
avant-garde European and Czech art. She has curated a large number of exhibitions and published
many articles and books on Czech modern art.

Jesper Olsson is Associate Professor and Research Fellow at Linköping University, where he leads
the research group “Literature, Media History, and Information Cultures”. He is Programme Director
of the research unit “The Seed Box: A Mistra-Formas Environmental Humanities Collaboratory”. He
has published extensively on literature, media and the avant-garde, his latest book being Spaceship,
Time Machine: On Öyvind Fahlström’s “Ade-Ledic-Nander” (2017).

Ramutė Rachlevičiūtė is an art historian, Associate Professor at the Department of Art Historian and
Criticism at the Academy of Arts in Vilnius, where she teaches Western Modernism, Russian avant-
garde art and architecture, and Lithuanian art of the 20th C. She currently serves as President of the
Lithuanian section of the International Association of Art Critics

Nadia Radwan is Assistant Professor in World Art History at the University of Bern. Her research
interests include Egyptian Modernism and the avant-gardes, transcultural interactions between the
Middle East and Europe, and curatorial practices in the United Arab Emirates. She is the author of
articles and essays on Egyptian modern art and architecture. Her book Les Modernes d’Egypte was
published by Peter Lang in 2017.

Jed Rasula is Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University
of Georgia. His most recent books are a history of Dada, entitled Destruction Was My Beatrice (2015)
and History of a Shiver: The Sublime Impudence of Modernism (2016).

Lucia Re is Professor of Italian and Gender Studies at University of California, Los Angeles. Her interests
include poetry and the novel, women writers and artists, feminist theory, Futurism and the avant-garde,
Italy and the Mediterranean, race studies and literary translation. She has published more than eighty
scholarly essays on authors and artists ranging from Gabriele d’Annunzio to Mariza Merz.

Hannu K. Riikonen is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. He is

also member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters and of the Finnish Society of Sciences
and Letters.
930 Notes on Contributors

Pablo Rocca is Professor of Uruguayan Literature at the University of the Republic, Montevideo,
where he was director of the Archive of the Institute of Letters. He taught at universities in Argentina
and Brazil and published 35 años en Marcha (1991); Horacio Quiroga: El escritor y el mito (1996). He
co-edited Historia de la literatura uruguaya contemporánea; Modernismo brasileño y vanguardia
uruguaya and Revistas culturales latinoamericanas

João Cezar de Castro Rocha is Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of Rio de
Janeiro and currently President of the Brazilian Association of Comparative Literature. He is the
author of nine books and editor of more than twenty publications in Portuguese, English, Spanish
and French.

Sanja Roić is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Zagreb and the author or editor of
books on Giambattista Vico, imagology, and on Italian and South Slavonic literary and cultural
interactions from the 16th to the 21st century. She has translated many classic and modern Italian
authors into Croatian.

Anna Maria Ruta taught with various rôles in the University of Palermo and published many
fundamental studies on Futurism in Sicily and on Italian decorative arts in the 19th and 20th C.
She curated several exhibitions on Futurism and collaborates with a number of private galleries
in the Sicilian region. She is also active in the “Save Palermo” Foundation, with ANISA (National
Association of Teachers of Art History) and UTLE (European University of Adult Education)

Michelangelo Sabatino is a Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, and Director
of its Ph.D. Programme in Architecture. His monograph Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture
and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2011) won the Society of Architectural Historians’ “Alice Davis
Hitchcock Award”. With Jean-François Lejeune, he edited a collective volume on Modern Architecture
and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (2010).

Rosa Sarabia is Professor at the University of Toronto, where she teaches Latin American literature
and culture. She is the author of two books and several publications on visual poetry, Hispanic
avant-garde, art, literature and film, women in Latin America and on Cuban detective fiction.

Luca Somigli is Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Toronto. His many publications
on aspects of European Modernism and avant-garde literature include Legitimizing the Artist:
Manifesto Writing and European Modernism (1885–1915) (2003), Italian Modernism, edited with
Mario Moroni (2004), and Futurism: A Microhistory, edited with Sascha Bru and Bart Van den
Bossche (2017).

Per Stounbjerg is an Associate Professor in Scandinavian Studies at Aarhus University. His

publications focus on 19th and 20th C. Danish and Scandinavian literature, with a particular
attention to Realism, Modernism and avant-garde literature, and on literary genres, in particular
autobiography. He is co-editor of and contributor to A Cultural History of the Avant-garde in the
Nordic Countries (3 vols., 2012–16).

Wanda Strauven is an Adjunct Professor of Media Studies at the Goethe University Frankfurt, where
she habilitated in 2015 with a study on Tactile Media: A Media-Archaeological Study. She is the
author of Marinetti e il cinema: Tra attrazione e sperimentazione (2006) and has edited several
volumes, including The Cinema of Attractions Reloaded (2006).
 Notes on Contributors 931

Przemysław Strożek is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of
Sciences. He is a freelance curator and author of numerous texts on avant-garde and sports, the
reception of Italian Futurism in Poland and Egypt. In 2017, he curated an exhibition at the Museum
of Art in Łódź, entitled Enrico Prampolini: Futurism, Scenotechnics and Theatre of the Polish
Avant-garde.

Irina Subotić is Professor Emeritus of Modern Art History at the University of Novi Sad and the author
of several books on modern, contemporary and avant-garde art. She is particularly interested in
Zenitism and its relations to other European avant-garde movements, such as Futurism, Dada,
Surrealism, Constructivism and Bauhaus.

Bela Tsipuria is a Professor of Comparative Literature and a Director of the Institute of Comparative
Literature at Ilia State University, Tbilisi. Her book and articles are focussed on Georgian
Modernism and postmodernism, Georgian Futurism, Soviet influences on Georgian literature and
postcolonialism.

Bart Van den Bossche is Professor of Italian Literature at the University of Leuven. His main areas
of interest are modern and contemporary Italian literature, with a focus on myth and literature,
Realism, avant-garde and Modernism. He is a founding member of the research team MDRN,
studying Modernist literature in Europe, 1890–1960 at the Catholic University of Leuven.

Ton van Kalmthout is a Senior Researcher in Literary History at the Huygens Institute for the History
of the Netherlands, a research institute within the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
His research and publications are concerned with various forms of cultural transmission in national
and international contexts.

Patrizia Veroli is an independent scholar, who has written numerous of books on 20th-C. dance
and ballet and has recently extended her research into the 19th C. She has curated a number of
exhibitions and has lectured extensively in Italy and other countries.

Janez Vrečko is a Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the
University of Ljubljana. He published a number of books and over 300 essays on the Slovene avant-
garde, the Greek epic and tragedy, on fundamental literary concepts such as mimesis, catharsis and
inspiration.

Pierantonio Zanotti is a Research Fellow in Japanese Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. His
research interests focus on Japanese literature of the early 20th C. and the reception of European
avant-garde movements (especially Italian Futurism) in Japan.

Franca Zoccoli is an independent art historian and critic. Her research focusses on the period
between the two world wars, with special attention to women artists. A prolific contributor to
national dailies and art magazines, she has published many essays and several books in Italy,
the United States and France. She published in 2009, the centenary of Futurism, two books on Le
futuriste italiane nelle arti visive and Benedetta Cappa Marinetti.
Name Index

Aalto, Ilmari 44 Alimandi, Enrico (pseud. of Enrico

Aaltonen, Wäinö 444, 445 Allemandi) 178, 616
Abasheli, Alexander 475 Alk Gian (pseud.), see Gian, Alk
Abate, Gianantonio 17 Alkhazishvili, Shalva 476, 477
Abbas-Khan, Mirza 862 Allari, Henrik (pseud. of Heinrich Richard
Abbatecola, Oronzo 618 Seppik) 423, 427–428
Abov, Gevorg 319–320 Allemandi, Enrico, see Alimandi, Enrico
Abuladze, Bidzina 476 Allendy, René 459
Acconci, Vito 889 Almada-Negreiros, José, see Negreiros, José
Achille, Giuseppe 234 Sobral de Almada
Acquaviva, Anna Traverso (pseud. Annaviva) 55 Almeida, Guilherme de 337, 342
Acquaviva, Giovanni 9, 96, 186, 201, 202, Aloisio, Ottorino 75, 77
615, 619 Alomar i Vallalonga, Gabriel (pseud.
Aczél, György 550 Fòsfor) 299, 336, 599, 827–828
Adamovich, Mikhail Mikhailovich 89 Altman, Nathan (Natan Isaevich Al’tman) 89, 789
Adamson, Walter Luiz 19, 37, 301 Altomare, Libero (pseud. of Remo Mannoni) 9,
Ady, Endre 541 543, 545, 580, 600
Aeschylus (Aischylos) 711 Alva de la Canal, Ramón 686
Agelii, John Gustaf, see Aguéli, Ivan (pseud.) Amadori Depero, Rosetta 56, 147, 611
Agnese, Gino 4 Ambrosi, Alfredo Gauro 498, 613, 615, 618
Aguéli, Ivan (pseud. of John Gustaf Agelii) 846 Amirkhanian, Charles 206
Ai, Qing 376 Amphion (pseud.), see Karachalios, Dēmētrios
Aiginitēs, Nikolas 534 Anderson, Andrew Angus 824–841, 925
Akhmeteli, Sandro 480 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de 342
Alazan, Vahram 320 Andrade, Mário de 337, 339, 340, 343–345, 346
Albanese, Giuseppe 188 Andrade, Oswald de 336, 337, 338, 341, 346
Albéniz, Isaac 199 Andreenko, Michel, see Andriienko-Nechytailo,
Albert-Birot, Pierre 164, 168, 255, 285, 456, Mykhailo
457–458, 463 Andrenio (pseud.), see Gómez de Baquero,
Albreht, Fran 907 Eduardo
Alcaro, Rodolfo 495 Andréoli-de Villers, Jean-Pierre 4
Aldington, Richard 511 Andreoni, Cesare 9, 96, 178, 615
Aleksandrov, Grigori (Grigorii Vasil’evich Andreve, Guillermo 871
Aleksandrov) 106 Andreyev, Leonid (Leonid Nikolaevich
Aleshko, Vasyl’ 857 Andreev) 317
Alexander the Great (Aléxandros ho Mégas, Andriienko-Nechytailo, Mykhailo (Michel
Alexander III, King of Macedonia) 419 Andreenko) 865
Alexandrov, Alexander (pseud. Serzh, or Andronescu, Smaranda, see Gîrbea, Smaranda
Serge) 269–270, 273–274 Angelucci Cominazzini, Leandra 187, 615,
Alexandrov, Grigory (Grigorii Vasil’evich 618, 619
Alexandrov) 277–278 Anichkov, Evgeny (Evgenii Vasil’evich
Alfano, Franco 194, 235 Anichkov) 918
Aliagrov (pseud.), see Iakobson, Roman Anita, Zina 339
Osipovich Annaviva (pseud.), see Acquaviva, Anna Traverso
Alighieri, Dante (Durante degli Alighieri) Annenkov, Yury (Iurii Pavlovich Annenkov)
542, 581 268–269, 273, 375

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110273564-057
934 Name Index
Antheil, George 205–206
Anttila, Aarne 437
Apollinaire de Kostrowitzky, Albert 455
Apollinaire, Guillaume (pseud. of Guglielmo
Alberto Wladimiro Alessandro Apollinare de
Kostrowitzky) 119–120, 163–165, 167, 168,
284–286, 376, 401, 450–451, 453–456,
458–459, 462–463, 589, 637, 716, 726,
727, 739, 832, 836, 842, 897, 901
Apollonio, Umbro 8, 9, 10
Appia, Adolphe 246
Aprea, Tina 619
Aragay, Josep 833
Aragon, Louis (pseud. of Louis-Marie
Andrieux) 289
Aralica, Anton 913
Aranha, José Pereira da Graça 337, 339,
342–344, 347
Arany, János 538
Arbell (pseud. of Arnaldo Bellabarba) 619
Arcas, Pol (pseud.), see Dēmētrakopoulos,
Polyvios
Archipenko, Alexander (Oleksandr Porfyrovych
Arkhipenko) 454, 589, 603, 671, 855,
865, 866
Arconada, César Muñoz 836
Arishima, Ikuma 631, 641, 642
Arkhipenko, Olexandr, see Archipenko,
Alexander
Arp, Jean (Hans Arp) 380, 756, 865
Arraíz, Antonio 900
Artaud, Antonin 471
Artioli, Umberto 11
Artsybashev, Mikhail Petrovich 545
Arvatov, Boris Ignat’evich 276, 793
Asatiani, Levan 478
Aschieri, Bruno 618
Aschieri, Tullio 618
Aseev, Nikolai Nikolaevich (Nikolay Aseyev)
783–784, 787, 788, 790, 792, 793
Aseyev, Nikolay, see Aseev, Nikolai Nikolaevich
Ashiya, Shigetsune 631
Aškerc, Anton 906
Asterēs, Lampros, see Karachalios, Dēmētrios
Attila, King of the Huns 907
Autant-Lara, Claude 108
Ayad, Ragheb (Rajib Ayad; Rāghib ‘Ayyad) 413,
417–418
Azari, Fedele 168, 177, 233, 418, 595, 614, 643,
918, 919
Babini, Serafino 619
Babits, Mihály 539–540
Bacarisse, Salvador 832
Bäckström, Per XVII
Baer, Nancy Van Norman 266
Baer, Vico 508
Bagriana, Elisaveta 360
Baian, Vadim (pseud. of Vladimir Ivanovich
Sidorov) 785
Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich 30
Balabanov, Aleksandăr Mikhailov 359
Balashov, Abram Abramovich 774
Balázs, Béla 541
Balbo, Italo 234–235, 614
Baldessari, Iras (pseud.), see Baldessari,
Roberto Marcello
Baldessari, Luciano 13, 180
Baldessari, Roberto Marcello (pseud. Iras
Baldessari) 498, 611
Balice, Stefano 620
Ball, Hugo 487, 488, 491–492
Balla, Elica (pseud. Ballelica) 56, 182, 187, 614
Balla, Giacomo 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 14, 16, 73, 90, 91,
92, 102, 116, 121, 134–136, 143, 144–146,
148, 149, 150, 155, 175, 176, 177, 179,
180–182, 184, 185, 215, 216, 218–220,
223, 224, 251, 252–253, 254–255, 306,
307, 326, 328, 354, 387, 391, 418, 450,
457, 460, 489, 509, 513, 516, 520, 557,
572, 581, 591, 593, 601, 602, 604,
606–610, 612, 613, 614, 616, 632, 699,
701, 723–724, 803, 804, 808, 818, 830,
885, 888, 890
Balla, Luce 56, 182, 187
Balla, Luisa 182
Ballelica (pseud.), see Balla, Elica
Ballo, Guido 9
Balmont, Konstantin (Konstantin Dmitrievich
Bal’mont) 783
Baltgailis, Kārlis 658
Bandeira, Manuel 342, 343
Banham, Reyner 69
Baran, Henryk 766–798, 925
Baranauskas, Antanas 672
Baratashvili, Nikoloz 479
Barbara (pseud. of Olga Biglieri Scurto) 55, 613
Barbarus, Johannes (pseud. of Johannes
Vares) 423, 424, 428
Barbieri, Osvaldo, see Bot, Oswaldo (pseud.)
Bardi, Pier Maria 75
 Name Index 935

Barilli, Renato 17 Berdyaev, Nikolay (Nikolai Alexandrovich

Barnes, Christopher 784 Berdiaev) 801
Barney, Natalie Clifford 459 Berény, Róbert 548
Barr, Alfred Hamilton Jr. 888 Berg, Alban 194
Barradas, Rafael 307, 833 Berger, René 9
Bartoccini, Mario 198 Berghaus, Günter XI–XX, 3–27, 120, 121, 477,
Bartók, Béla 199, 255 491, 586n, 925
Bartolini, Dario 81 Bergmann, Pär 16
Bartolini, Lucia 81 Bergson, Henri 30, 215, 216, 217, 221, 239,
Barzun, Henri-Martin 428 381, 384–385, 386, 390, 455, 577, 580,
Bastianelli, Giannotto 194 601, 808
Bataille, Georges 921 Berlage, Hendrik Petrus 700
Baudelaire, Charles Pierre 102, 143, 740, 772 Bernard, Carlo (pseud. of Carlo Bernari)
Bauer, Rudolf 487 594, 617
Baum, Julie 488 Bernari, Carlo, see Bernard, Carlo (pseud.)
Baumeister, Willi 865 Berners, Lord (Gerald Tyrwhitt), see
Baumgarth, Christa 16 Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Gerald Hugh
Bazhan, Mykola (Nik) 855, 857, 861–862, 865 Bernhardi, Friedrich von 711
Beauduin, Nicolas 325, 428 Bernini, Franco 532
Becher, Johannes Robert 488, 859 Berta, Giovanni 78
Bekhterev, Vladimir Mikhailovich 274 Bertarelli, Ernesto 337
Beļcova, Aleksandra 660, 665 Bertelli, Renato 614
Belforte, Paolo 12 Berti, Ettore 256, 830
Beliashvili, Akaki 476 Bertieri, Oreste 224, 225
Bellabarba, Arnaldo, see Arbell (pseud.) Berti-Masi, Elisa (née Elisa Berti) 256
Belli, Carlo 180 Bertoglio, Italo 235
Belli, Domenico 616, 619 Betancort Cabrera, José (pseud. Ángel Guerra)
Belling, Rudolf 493, 494, 495, 660, 865 708, 825
Bello, Andrés (Andrés de Bello López) 710 Bettencourt, Rebelo de (pseud.), see Rebelo de
Belloli, Carlo 10, 596 Bettencourt, João
Bellusi, Mario 223 Bettencourt-Rebello, João (pseud.) see Rebelo
Bely (Belyi), Andrei (pseud. of Boris Nikolaevich de Bettencourt, João
Bugaev) 271 Bevk, France 38
Belyaev, Viktor (Viktor Mikhailovich Bicudo, Luis Francisco 736
Beliaev) 204 Biglieri Scurto, Olga, see Barbara (pseud.)
Benedetta (pseud. of Benedetta Marinetti, née Bijelić, Jovan 921, 922
Cappa) 9, 53, 55, 76, 91, 148, 187, 234, Billero (pseud. of Guido Borrelli) 619
342, 498, 533, 595, 614, 616, 717, 919 Billy, André 119–120
Benedetti, Fulvio 106 Binkis, Kazys 669–671, 673, 674, 675, 676, 677
Benedetto Record (pseud.), see Benedetto, Enzo Biržiška, Vaclovas 671
Benedetto, Enzo 6, 10, 12, 17, 91, 595, 613, 616, Björling, Gunnar 845
617, 619 Björnsson, Jón 565, 567, 569–570
Benjamin, Walter 126, 143, 157, 290 Black, Jonathan 506–526, 925
Benn, Gottfried 497 Blackton, Jack Stuart 110
Bentivoglio, Mirella 57 Blake, William 282
Berardelli, Michele 617 Blanco García, Padre M. 828
Berckelaers, Fernand (pseud. Michel Blanco Meaño, Andrés Eloy 898
Seuphor) 78, 330 Blok, Alexander (Alexandr Alexandrovich Blok)
Berdiaev, Nikolai Alexandrovich, see Berdyaev, 264, 441, 787
Nikolay Blum, Justin A. 111
936 Name Index

Blümner, Rudolf 485, 494, 497–498 Borges, Jorge Luís 301–304, 307, 308, 872,
Blyth, Alistair Ian 760 878–879
Boas, Sarah 183 Bormioli, Costantino 88
Bobadilla, Emilio (pseud. Fray Candil) 825 Borrelli, Guido, see Billero (pseud.)
Bobrinskaya, Ekaterina (Ekaterina Bossche, Bart van den, see Van den Bossche, Bart
Aleksandrovna Bobrinskaia) 154, 774 Bot, Oswaldo (pseud. of Osvaldo Barbieri) 178
Bobrov, Sergei Pavlovich 781, 783–784, 790 Bottai, Giuseppe 37, 38
Bocca, Carlo 411 Bottone, Umberto, see D’Alba, Auro (pseud.)
Boccardi, Piero Luigi 224, 225 Boulez, Pierre 203
Boccioni, Umberto 4, 5, 7, 8, 11, 13, 16, 30, 31, Bowlt, John Ellis 766
50, 61, 70, 72, 79, 104, 116, 119, 148, 162, Boyé, Edward 730
215, 216, 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 226, 250, Bozhidar (pseud. of Bogdan Gordeev) 784, 788
285, 286, 301, 306, 307, 308, 309, 315, Bracchi, Regina, see Regina (pseud.)
326, 327, 328, 329, 354, 361, 382, 383, Bracci, Tullio Alpino 612
384, 385, 386, 387, 388, 389, 391, 392, Braga, Alzira 54
398, 410, 411, 417, 418, 450, 451, 453, 455, Braga, Dominique 459
456, 457, 485, 486, 487, 489, 490, 492, Bragaglia, Anton Giulio 73, 90, 91, 101–102,
493, 494, 495, 508, 509, 512, 513, 514, 104, 121, 136–137, 146, 179, 180–182, 199,
543, 548, 555, 558, 600, 601, 602, 603, 215, 216–218, 219–224, 226, 239, 330,
604, 605, 606, 607, 608, 609, 610, 618, 358, 367, 389, 495, 604, 610, 612, 661, 662
619, 631, 632, 633, 642, 650, 656, 657, Bragaglia, Arturo 215, 216, 217, 219, 220,
693, 699, 701, 728, 730, 744, 745, 755, 798, 224, 604
799, 802, 803, 804, 808, 809, 811, 812, Bragaglia, Carlo Ludovico 106, 180, 604,
815, 818, 825, 828, 829, 842, 844, 848, Bragaglia, Giuseppina, see Pelonzi-Bragaglia,
855, 865, 883 884, 885, 888, 909, 919 Giuseppina
Bock, Eugène de, see De Bock, Eugène Bramante, Donato (pseud. of Donato di
Bodin, Lars Gunnar 849 Pascuccio d’Antonio) 419
Bogler, Theodor 89 Branca, Antonello 3, 889
Boglione, Riccardo 873 Brancusi (Brâncuşi), Constantin 181, 755
Bogomazov, Alexander (Oleksandr Brandell, Elin 843
Kostantynovych Bohomazov) 865 Brandes, Georg 396–397, 398, 405
Boguslavskaya, Kseniya (Xenia Boguslavskaja; Brandt, Federico 897
Kseniia Leonidovna Boguslavskaia) 63, Branzi, Andrea 81
155, 493, 660 Braque, Georges 455, 605, 743, 800, 865
Bohn, Willard 449–468, 925 Brasliņa, Aija 656–668, 925
Bohomazov, Oleksander, see Bogomazov, Braun, Edward 262–281, 925
Alexander Braun, Marta 215–230, 925
Bolaño, Roberto 690–691 Brauner, Victor 756, 758–759
Bolshakov, Konstantin Aristarkhovich 776, Bravi, Rolando 619
782–783, 784, 785, 787, 815 Brecheret, Victor 339
Bombal, María Luisa 365 Brecht, Bertolt (Eugen Berthold Friedrich
Bonaventura, Gustavo 220 Brecht) 239, 359
Bonifazi, Virgilio, see Virgì (pseud.) Breker, Arno 38
Bønnelycke, Emil 400–402, 403, 405 Brendel, Erich 865
Bonset, I.K. (pseud.), see Doesburg, Theo van Bresztovszky, Ernő 540
Bontempelli, Massimo 235 Breton, André 532, 675
Bonzagni, Aroldo 600, 601 Breuer, Marcel 865
Böök, Fredrik 843 Brik, Osip Maksimovich 41, 156, 157, 479,
Borchardt, Dr 486, 489, 490, 699–701 788, 793
Bordoni, Enrico 88 Broby, Rud (Rud Broby-Johansen) 403–405

Brooke, Rupert 511, 513
Brucz, Stanisław 732
Brun, Gabriel 459
Brunas (pseud. of Bruna Pestagalli
Somenzi) 147, 187, 614
Bruschetti, Alessandro 498, 618, 619
Bryusov, Valery (Valerii Iakovlevich
Briusov) 784
Brzękowski, Jan 730, 732–733
Buarque de Holanda, Sérgio, see Holanda,
Sérgio Buarque de
Bubnova, Varvara Dmitrievna 636, 657
Bucarelli, Palma 4–5
Buccafusca, Emilio 618
Bucci, Anselmo 88, 91
Buchholz, Erich 756
Budgen, Frank 555
Buldorini, Ermete 202
Bunikiewicz, Witold 721
Buñuel, Luis 109
Burdese, Cesare 122
Burliuk, David (Davyd Davydovych Burliuk) 40,
61, 107, 154, 155, 165, 168, 317, 427, 468,
635–636, 640–641, 649, 657, 659, 767,
768, 769, 770, 771, 772, 773, 774, 776, 778,
781, 785, 786, 787, 788, 789, 791–792,
799, 806, 854, 864, 865, 866
Burliuk, Nikolai (Mykola Davydovych Burliuk)
40, 767, 768, 770, 771, 772, 773, 775, 787
Burliuk, Vladimir (Volodymyr Davydovych
Burliuk) 168, 427, 767, 768, 770, 787, 865
Bury, Stephen 162–174, 925
Busoni, Ferruccio 194, 204, 491, 610
Busoni, Gerda (née Sjöstrand) 610
Buvoli, Luca 890
Buzko, Dmytro 863
Buzzi, Paolo 9, 12, 28, 233, 235, 237, 288, 411,
493, 494, 540, 543, 579–580, 582, 583,
733, 798, 921
Cabré, Manuel 897
Caeiro, Alberto (heteronym of Fernando
Pessoa) 742
Caesar, Gaius Julius 237
Cage, John 197, 208, 781, 889
Cahill, Taddeus 196
Čaks, Aleksandrs 658, 663
Calas, Nicolas (Nikolas Kalas, pseud.), see
Kalamarēs, Nikos
Calatrava, Santiago 81, 188
Name Index 937
Calder, Alexander 615
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 65, 270
Calderone, Giani 637
Calendoli, Giovanni 6, 11
Calverton, Victor Francis 374
Calvesi, Maurizio 10, 11, 15, 16, 19
Calzavara, Attilio 79
Cambellotti, Duilio 606
Camini, Aldo (pseud.), see Doesburg, Theo van
Cammarota, Domenico 7, 588, 590
Campa, Riccardo 620
Campendonk, Heinrich 487
Campos, Álvaro de (heteronym of Fernando
Pessoa) 737, 739, 740, 742, 743, 747
Campos, Augusto de 169
Canalejas y Mendez, José 826–827
Cangiullo, Francesco 11, 12, 13, 18, 29, 73, 135,
164, 177, 181, 184, 201, 209, 250, 251, 286,
287, 290, 330, 338, 374, 411, 494, 532, 586,
589–590, 591, 605–606, 607, 637, 643, 733
Cangiullo, Pasquale (pseud. Pasqualino
Tredicianni) 532, 607
Cankar, Ivan 907
Cantarelli, Gino 457, 492
Cappa, Benedetta, see Benedetta (pseud.)
Cappellin, Giacomo 177
Caputo di Roccanova, Carmine 125
Cărăbaş, Irina 753–763, 926
Cardazzo, Carlo 8
Cardoso, Amadeu Ferreira de Sousa (Amadeo
Souza-Cardoso) 739, 744, 747
Cardu, Camillo 872
Carducci, Giosuè 528
Čargo, Ivan (Giovanni Ciargo) 616, 907, 909
Carli, Mario 35, 36, 185, 223, 224, 411, 493,
495, 514, 532, 591, 592, 593, 595, 913
Carlos I, King of Portugal 736
Carmelich, Giorgio Riccardo 616, 909
Carol-Bérard (pseud. of Bernard Ollivier) 195
Carpeaux, Otto Maria 341
Carrà, Carlo 7, 8, 16, 30, 31, 34, 38, 119, 144,
148, 164, 215, 216, 219, 235, 250, 286,
306, 308, 315, 326, 354, 417, 450, 453,
454, 455, 486, 489, 490, 495, 496, 510,
512, 543, 548, 589, 600–602, 604, 605,
607, 608, 609, 610, 612, 632, 643, 650,
699, 701, 703, 728, 755, 759, 800, 825,
828, 833, 844, 886
Carramusa, Maria (Maria Carramusa Rizzo)
184, 187
938 Name Index
Carrieri, Raffaele 8, 284
Carrozza, Francesco 493, 494
Cartella Gelardi, Giuseppe 13
Caruso, Luciano 7, 12
Carvalho Júnior, José Xavier de 736
Carvalho, Ronald de 337, 339, 342, 343
Casarini, Athos 886
Casati, Luisa (Luisa Amman, Marchesa Casati
Stampa di Soncino) 133
Casavola, Franco 137, 199–201, 235, 439, 758
Casella, Alfredo 73, 193–195, 198–199,
254–255
Caserini, Mario 104
Casorati, Felice 122
Cassolo Bracchi, Regina, see Regina (pseud.)
Castagnedi, Riccardo, see Ricas, Riccardo
(pseud.)
Castagneri, Mario 225
Castellana, Rodolfo 617
Castiglione, Baldassare 419
Castillo, Marcos 897
Castro Rocha, João Cezar, see Rocha, João Cezar
de Castro
Castro, Cipriano 895, 896, 898
Castro, Cristóbal de 827
Castro, José Joaquim Pereira Pimenta de 737
Cavacchioli, Enrico 580
Cavafy, Constantine, see Kavaphēs,
Konstantinos Petrou
Cavalcanti de Albuquerque e Melo, Emiliano
Augusto, see Di Cavalcanti, Emiliano
Cavalcanti, Emiliano di, see Di Cavalcanti,
Emiliano
Cavenna, Cesare 166
Caviglioni, Angelo 91, 617, 619
Cendrars, Blaise (pseud. of Frédéric Louis
Sauser) 163, 168, 284, 353, 634, 739
Censi, Giannina 55, 130, 137–138
Centonze, Nené (pseud. of Antonietta
Drago) 331
Cerati, Cesare 411, 913
Čerina, Vladimir 912
Cerio, Edwin 73
Černigoj, Avgust (Augusto) 907, 909, 910
Cézanne, Paul 455, 557, 610, 846, 885
Chabás, Juan 837
Chachava, Nikoloz (Niogol) 476–479
Chagall, Marc (Mark Zakharovich
Shagal) 594, 791
Chakărmov, Teodor 353
Chalk, Warren 81
Chamecki, Rosane 111
Chapier, Poldy (pseud. of Leopold Schapira) 755
Chaplin, Charles Spencer (“Charlie”,
“Charlot”) 109, 271, 273, 478
Charents, Yeghishe 314, 318–321
Charlot, Jean 686
Charlot, see Chaplin, Charles Spencer
Chashnik, Ilya (Il’ia Grigor’evich Chashnik) 89
Chatzēkyriakos-Gkikas, Nikos 530
Chavchavadze, Ilia 469, 479
Chawki, Ahmed, see Shawqī, Ahmad
Chekhonin, Serge Vasil’evich 89, 150
Chen, Yanqiao (pseud.), see Li, Wucheng Chen
Cherniavsky, Kolau (Nikolai Andreevich
Cherniavskii) 471, 473, 790
Chernikhov, Yakov (Iakov Georgievich
Chernikhov) 80
Chesimò (pseud.), see Monachesi, Mario
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith 516, 743
Chetoffi, Giovanni (Ivan Ketoff) 615
Chiattone, Mario 70, 72, 93–94, 883
Chiff (Chiffon), see Lombardini, Angela
Chiff Lombardini, Angela, see Lombardini,
Angela
Chikhradze, Mzia 472
Chikovani, Simon 476, 477–479
Chiti, Remo 223, 591
Cho, Kyoo Yun 648–655, 926
Chodasiewicz-Grabowska, Wanda 732
Chomette, Henri 108
Chopin, Frédéric (Fryderyk Franciszek
Chopin) 103, 199, 688
Chourmouzios, Aimilios (pseud. Antreas
Zevgas) 533
Chrysanthēs, Dēmētrēs G. 529
Chukovsky, Korney (Kornei Ivanovich
Chukovskii, pseud. of Nikolai Vasil’evich
Korneichuk) 800
Chuzhak, Nikolai (pseud. of Nikolai Fedorovich
Nasimovich) 792, 793
Chuzhyi, Andrii (pseud. of Andrii Leonidovych
Storozhuk) 857, 859, 864
Chwistek, Leon 722–724, 727
Chytraeus-Auerbach, Irene 484–505, 926
Ciacelli, Arturo 496, 847
Ciargo, Giovanni, see Čargo, Ivan
Cimino, Guido 185
 Name Index 939

Cinti, Decio 581, 600 Cowell, Henry 206

Cioran, Emil 760 Craig, Edward Gordon 246, 884
Cisneiros, Violante (pseud.), see Rodrigues, Crali, Tullio 9, 13, 18, 93, 96, 145, 149, 169,
Armando Côrtes 498, 615, 616, 618, 619
Clair, René 109 Crane, Hart (pseud. of Harold Hart) 887
Clark, Timothy James 130 Crisi Ginanni, Maria, see Ginanni, Maria
Claudel, Paul 545, 640, 729–730 Crispolti, Enrico 4, 5, 11, 14, 16, 19, 91
Clavel, Gilbert 221, 254 Cristià, David (pseud.), see Sánchez-Juan,
Cleve, Agnes (Agnes Cleve-Jonand) 846 Sebastià
Clough, Rosa Trillo 16 Crnjanski, Miloš 918
Clutton-Brock, Arthur 507, 517 Croce, Benedetto 455
Cocchia, Carlo 184, 617 Crommelynck, Fernand 64, 158, 274
Cocteau, Jean 478, 746 Crompton, Dennis 81
Coelho, Ruy (Rui) 739–740 Cromwell, Oliver 512, 515
Coenen, Frans 698 Crowley, Aleister (Edward Alexander
Colin, Armand 163 Crowley) 745
Collin, Marcus 444 Csáky, József 661
Colombo, Cristoforo (Christopher Čubrilo, Jasmina 920–924, 926
Columbus) 478, 709 Cucini, Dina 55
Colombo, Luigi Enrico, see Fillìa (pseud.) Cueto, Dolores (“Lola”, née María Dolores
Comet, César Álvarez 302, 831 Velázquez Rivas) 686–687
Comisso, Giovanni 914 Cueto, Germán 686, 687, 689
Compton, Susan 766 Cursiter, Stanley 510
Conti, Primo 18, 493, 592, 605, 611 Czyżewski, Tytus 723, 724, 725, 726, 727, 728,
Contri, Paride 96 729, 732
Cook, Peter 81
Cooper, Fenimore 862 D’Alba, Auro (pseud. of Umberto Bottone) 286
Copland, Aaron 205 D’Albisola, Tullio (pseud. of Tullio Mazzotti)
Coquiot, Gustave 321 88–89, 91, 92–95, 96, 97, 163, 178,
Corazzini, Sergio 496 617, 619
Cordero, Tina (Calistina or Celestina) 101, 105 D’Ambrosio, Matteo 7
Coromaldi, Umberto 418 D’Anna, Giulio 185, 617
Corona, Gigia (née Luigia Zamparo) 148, 184, 187 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 35, 49, 308, 439, 449,
Corona, Immacolata 55 528, 583, 743, 913, 914
Corona, Vittorio 90, 184, 617 D’Arcais, Flores 11
Corra, Bruno (pseud. of Bruno Ginanni D’Arezzo, Maria (née Maria Cardini) 492
Corradini) 11, 12, 28, 101, 102, 103–104, D’Azeglio, Massimo 31
106, 109, 120, 148, 209, 234, 251, 256, D’Errico, Corrado 106
257, 263, 409, 493, 590, 591, 592, 595, Da Vinci, Leonardo 460
606–607, 608, 610, 611, 643, 829 Dadourian, Aharon 315
Corradini, Arnaldo, see Ginna, Arnaldo (pseud.) Dal Monte, Mario Guido 88, 91, 183, 617, 619
Corradini, Enrico 34 Dalí, Salvador (Salvador Felipe Jacinto Dalí i
Corretti, Gilberto 81 Domènech) 109, 460, 836
Cortes-Rodrigues, Armando, see Rodrigues, Dallapiccola, Luigi 195
Armando Côrtes Dalmau i Rafel, Josep 835
Cosma, Mihail (pseud. of Ernest Spirt) 758 Damerini, Adelmo 199
Costa, Franco 616 Damiani, Enrico 359
Couperus, Louis 702–404 Danovski, Boian Ivanov 353, 358–359
Couperus-Baud, Elizabeth 702 Dantas, Júlio 737–738, 742, 746
940 Name Index

Dantas, Manuel 336 Delak, Ferdo 907, 909–910,

Dante, see Alighieri, Dante Delaunay, Robert 60, 383, 453, 462, 488, 509,
Daphnēs, Stephanos 529 743, 744, 805, 847
Daphnis (pseud.), see Kalogeropoulos, Delaunay, Sonia (née Sara Il’inichna Shtern,
Dēmētrēs adopted name Sophie Terk) 60, 145, 147,
Dărăscu, Nicolae 755 163, 168, 186, 284, 743, 744, 805, 865
Dardel, Nils 846 Delgado, Alexis 876
Dargos, Jean 528 Delgado Moya, Sergio 684–697, 926
Darío, Rubén 299, 300, 301, 302, 336, 708, 711, Dell’Acqua, Gorno, see Gorno Dell’Acqua,
871, 878 Alessandro
Däubler, Theodor 491 Dell’Agata, Giuseppe 352–364, 926
Davanzati, Valentino 12 Dell’Isola, Massimo 632
David Drogoreanu, Emilia (Emilia David) 759 Della Pergola, Mina 53
Davydova, Natalia (Nataliia Mykhailivna Della Rovere, Francesco Maria 419
Davydova) 63, 155 Della Vedova, Aldo 15
Dawes, Greg 365–372, 926 Delle Site, Mino 145, 146, 150, 618, 619
De Amicis, Edmondo 107 Delmarle, Félix, see Del Marle, Félix
De Amicis, Ludovico 178 Demanins, Ferruccio 225
De Bock, Eugène (Eugeen Karel Marie De Dēmētrakopoulos, Polyvios (pseud. Pol
Bock) 329 Arcas) 528
De Chirico, Giorgio 440, 492, 495, 496, 865 Demetz, Peter 497
De Giorgio, Quirino 78–79, 618 Demuth, Charles 886, 887
De Libero, Libero 9 Densusianu, Ovid 754
De Maria, Luciano 6, 13, 17, 587 Depero, Fortunato 5, 6, 10, 13, 18, 50, 73, 74,
De Marzi, Fernando 105 76, 79, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 116, 121,
De Micheli, Mario 9 123, 125, 134, 135, 136, 144, 145, 147, 155,
De Miomandre, Francis 326 168, 169, 175–180, 181, 182, 183, 185, 198,
De Pistoris (pseud. of Federico Pfister) 616 220–221, 234, 239–240, 252–253, 254,
De Rokha, Pablo, see Rokha, Pablo de 255, 287, 308, 329, 418, 457, 460, 493,
De Sabata, Victor 205 494, 581, 590, 606, 607, 609, 610, 611,
De Taeye, Edmond-Louis 325 612, 614, 645, 758, 830, 883, 887–888,
De Troyer, Prosper 329, 331 890, 921
De Witt, Janina 724 Depero, Rosetta, see Amadori Depero, Rosetta
Deambrosio, Antonio 617 Derain, André 450, 533, 557
Debeljak, Anton 907 Deri, Max 496
Debroise, Olivier 686 Derkert, Siri 846
Debussy, Claude 194, 203 Derrick, Thomas 519–520, 521
Dedinac, Milan 918–919 Deslaw, Eugène (pseud. of Ievhen Antonovych
Deed, André (pseud. of Henri André Chapai) 108 Slabchenko) 101, 105
Deganello, Paolo 81 Dessy, Mario 374, 411, 532, 644
Degen, Yuri (Iurii [Georgii] Ievgen’evich Deyssel, Lodewijk van (pseud. of Karel Joan
Degen) 471, 473, 475 Lodewijk Alberdingk Thijm) 700
Dehong, Shen (pseud.), see Mao, Dun Deza Méndez, Gonzalo (pseud.), see González
Dekeukeleire, Charles 110 de Mendoza, José María
Del Marle, Félix (Félix Delmarle; Aimé Félix Mac Di Bosso, Renato (pseud. of Renato Angelo
Del Marle) 451–542, 461, 463, 829 Righetti) 146, 615, 618, 619
Del Picchia, Menotti, see Menotti del Picchia, Di Cavalcanti, Emiliano 339
Paulo Di Cocco, Fernando 106
Del’vari, Zhorzh (Georges Delvari; pseud. of Di Cocco, Francesco 611
Georgi Il’ich Kuchinskii) 268, 269, 270 Di Collalto, Rambaldo 411
 Name Index 941

Di Genova, Giorgio 17, 599–627, 926 Duchamp, Marcel 109, 198, 239, 301, 307, 386,
Di Lorenzo, Tina (Concettina) 256 388, 603, 743
Di Sacco, Elda 12 Duchamp, Raymond 386
Diaghilev, Serge (Sergei Pavlovich Diagilev) Duchenne de Boulogne, Guillaume-Amant 221
62, 63, 132, 133, 134–136, 137, 204, 457, Dudreville, Leonardo 92, 177, 607–608,
610, 739 643, 832
Diavatēs (pseud.), see Kondylakēs, Iōannēs Duhamel, Georges 439, 545
Díaz Fernández, José 837 Duncan, Ellen 557
Díez-Canedo, Enrique 830 Duncan, Isadora 132, 133, 137
Diktonius, Elmer 437, 443, 445, 446, 845–846 Duranti, Massimo 18
Dimitriu, Horaţiu 755 Duse, Eleonora 273, 534
Dimitrov, Georgi Mikhailov 358–359 Dzirkal, Arnold, see Dzirkals, Arnolds
Dini, Francesca (Fanny) 53 Dzirkals, Arnolds 493, 494, 660–661
Diniz, Almáquio 336
Dinu, Gheorghe, see Roll, Stephan (pseud.) Eagleton, Terry 557
Diulgheroff, Nicolay (Nicolai Diulgerov) 14, 91, Eatough, Matt XVII
93, 94, 122, 178, 361, 533, 614, 616, 617 Eddy, Arthur Jerome 632, 633
Divoire, Fernand 428, 458 Edison, Thomas 366, 391
Dix, Otto 487 Eggeling, Viking 109, 848
Döblin, Alfred 485, 488, 699, 700 Ehlvest, Jüri 430
Dobuzhinsky, Mstislav Valerianovich 361 Ehrenburg, Ilya (Il’ia Grigorevich Erenburg) 353,
Doesburg, Theo van (pseud. of Christian Emil 494
Marie Küpper) 284, 289, 671, 703–704 Eikhenbaum, Boris Mikhailovich 627
Domínguez, Navarro 826–827 Einstein, Albert 273, 301, 601
Donadini, Ulderiko 913 Einstein, Carl 487
Donarelli, Ugo 232 Eisenstein, Sergei (Sergei Mikhailovich
Donelaitis, Kristijonas 671 Eizenshtein) 64, 106, 107, 271–272,
Dormal, Carlo Maria 105, 618 275–278
Dos Passos, John 690 Ekbom, Torsten 842, 849
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (Fedor Mikhailovich Ekelöf, Gunnar 849
Dostoevskii) 771, 799 Ekster, Aleksandra, see Exter Aleksandra
Dottori, Gerardo 18, 91, 145, 183, 185–186, 418, El Lissitzky, Lazar, see Lissitzky, El
493, 498, 612, 614, 615, 616, 618, 619, 888 Eliade, Mircea 760
Douglas, Charlotte Cummings 60–66, 926 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 594, 836, 849,
Dove, Arthur Garfield 885 Elisabeta, Queen of Romania (Elisabeth zu
Dovzhenko, Alexander (Oleksandr Petrovych Wied) 754
Dovzhenko) 858 Elytēs, Odysseas 530
Doyle, Arthur Conan 862 Emar, Juan (pseud. of Alvaro Yáñez
Doyle, Laura XVII Bianchi) 365, 368–369, 371
Drăgănescu, Mihail 754 Engonopoulos, Nikos 527
Draganov, Teodor 353 Enrie, Giuseppe 224
Drago, Antonietta, see Centonze, Nené (pseud.) Epstein, Jean 688
Drago, Furio 913 Epstein, Mark 865
Dragoev, Petăr 359 Erba, Carlo 607–608, 610
Dragoumēs, Iōn 531 Erenburg, Ilja, see Ehrenburg, Ilya
Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre 833 Eriksson, Åke (pseud.)¸ see Gripenberg, Bertel
Dróżdż, Stanisław 733 Eriksson, Elis 849
Drudi Gambillo, Maria 4–6, 10, 14–15 Erjavec, Aleš 28–46, 927
Duce, see Mussolini Ermilov, Vasily see Ermylov, Vasyl’ Dmytrovych
Duchamp, Jacques 386 Ermylov, Vasyl’ Dmytrovych 791, 854, 865, 866
942 Name Index

Ernst, Max 460, 472, 487 Ferrieri, Enzo 237–238, 309

Erznkian, Suren 318–319, 320 Ferro, António 742, 747
Erzya (pseud.), see Nefedov, Stepan Dmitrievich Ferval, Jean 449
Esakia, Leo 480 Fiala, František (pseud. Ferenc Futurista) 380
Escalante, Evodio 686, 691 Fidora, Alma 56, 147, 150, 177, 186
Escher, Maurits Cornelis 74 Filartigas, Juan M. 872
Esclasans, Augustí 285 Filla, Emil 380, 383
Escodamè (pseud. of Michele Lescovich) Fillìa (pseud. of Luigi Enrico Colombo) 14, 50,
202, 441 76–78, 91, 92, 95–97, 116, 120, 122–124,
Esenin, Sergei, see Yesenin, Sergey 178, 186, 287, 361, 418, 498, 594, 612–613,
Etchells, Frederick 509, 517 614, 616, 645
Evola, Julius (Giulio Cesare Andrea Evola) 593 Filliou, Robert 14
Evreinov, Nikolai Nikolaevich, see Yevreinov, Filonov, Pavel Nikolaevich 264–265, 802
Nikolai Finlay, Ian Hamilton 169
Exarchos, Theodōros 529–530 Finnbogason, Guðmundur 570
Exter (Ekster), Aleksandra (née Oleksandra Fiore, Antonio 17, 619
Oleksandrivna Hryhorovych) 60–65, 108, Fiori, Teresa 6
155, 156, 158, 186, 455, 767, 799, 804–805, Fiozzi, Aldo 91, 543
854–855, 866 Fischinger, Oskar 110
Fisher, Margaret 231–245, 927
Fabbri, Giuseppe 88, 90–91, 184 Fiumi, Lionello 644
Fabbri, Remo 91, 617 Flaker, Aleksandar 908
Fabre, Marcel (pseud. of Marcel Fernández Flaubert, Gustave 49
Peréz) 108 Flores, Tatiana 687
Fabris, Annateresa 338, 340, 346 Fochessati, Matteo 88–100, 927
Fahlström, Öyvind 169, 842, 848–849, 850 Fofanov, Konstantin Konstantinovich, see
Falconi, Armando 256 Olimpov, Konstantin (pseud.)
Falqui, Enrico 4, 9 Folgore, Luciano (pseud. of Omero Vecchi)
Fani Ciotti, Vincenzo, see Volt (pseud.) 9, 12, 137, 216, 219, 232, 240
Farfa (pseud. of Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini) 91, Folguera, Joaquim 285
92, 94, 186, 617, 758 Fondane, Benjamin (pseud. of Benjamin
Farinacci, Roberto 38 Wechsler) 755
Farouk I, King of Egypt (Fārūq al-Awwal) Fontana, Lucio 93, 603
416, 419 Forcella, Paolo 417
Fasolo, Italo, see Fasullo (pseud.) Foregger, Nikolai Mikhailovich 270–272,
Fasullo (pseud. of Italo Fasolo) 615, 618 274, 275
Faulkner, William 849 Foretić-Vis, Vinko 912
Favalli, Augusto 616 Forlin, Corrado 613, 615, 618
Favorsky, Vladimir (Vladimir Andreevich Fort, Jeanne 454
Favorskii) 375 Fort, Paul 246, 454, 545
Fechter, Paul 440, 491 Forti, Alessandro 913
Feininger, Lyonel 487, 922 Fortoul, José Gil, see Gil Fortoul, José
Feldmann, Otto 486–487 Fosca, Lydia 411
Fénéon, Félix XII Fòsfor (pseud.), see Alomar i Vallalonga, Gabriel
Ferenc Futurista (pseud.), see Fiala, František Fournier, Colin 81
Fermi, Enrico 38 Frampton, Hollis 110
Fernández-Shaw, Casto 80 Francastel, Pierre 23
Ferrazzi, Ferruccio 413, 418 Francés, José 829
Ferreiro, Alfredo Mario 873–876, 878–879 Franco, Lyster 738

Frankemölle, Wenzel (Wenceslaus Hendricus
Vincentius) 699
Franz Ferdinand, Archduke of Austria 912
Franzson, Björn 565, 571
Frassinelli, Carlo 28
Frattini, Alberto 9
Fray Candil (pseud.), see Bobadilla, Emilio
Freud, Sigmund 52, 521, 741
Freze, Varvara Petrovna 89
Frías, Carlos Eduardo 900
Friedman, Yona 71
Fuad I, King of Egypt (Fu’ād al-Awwal) 416, 418
Fuchs, Georg 246
Fugà, Signor 411
Fukui, Kyūzō, 649
Fuller, Loie (Loïe; Marie Louise Fuller) 133
Fumon, Gyō 635
Fundoianu, Barbu (pseud.), see Fondane,
Benjamin
Fundoianu, Benjamin (pseud.), see Fondane,
Benjamin
Funi, Achille 607, 643, 832
Funke, Jaromír 390
Furlan, Gelindo 615
Fusco Sansone, Nicolás 873, 876
Futurluce (pseud. of Elda Simeoni Norchi) 54
Gabe, Dora Petrova 357
Gabo, Naum (pseud. of Naum Neemia
Pevsner) 603
Gaetani-Lovatelli d’Aragona, Filippo 181
Galdikas, Adomas 671, 672
Galitzky, Thaïs 102
Gallardo, Salvador 686
Gallen-Kallela, Akseli (pseud. of Axel Waldemar
Gallén) 445
Gálvez, Pedro Luis de 831
Gambetti, Dino 617
Gambini, Ivano (Ivanhoe) 498, 615
Gamrekeli, Irakli 476, 478, 479, 480
Gamsakhurdia, Konstantine 475
GAN (pseud.), see Nilsson, Gösta Adrian
Gan, Alexei Mikhailovich 42
Gao, Ming 374–375
García, Carlos 708–720, 927
García Calderón, Francisco 708–709
García de Valdeavellano, Luis 832
García Lorca, Federico 836
Gardiner, Clive 521
Name Index 943
Garet, Enrique Ricardo 876
Gasch, Sebastià 836
Gassilewski, Jörgen 850
Gastev, Alexey (Aleksei Kapitonovich
Gastev) 159, 272
Gatti, Riccardo 88, 91–92, 187, 617
Gaudenzi, Alf (Alfredo) 93, 617
Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri 514, 515
Gauguin, Paul 557
Gautier, Théophile 527
Gayraud, Régis 469, 473
Geddes, Norman Bel 71
Gehry, Frank 188
Genghis Khan (Çingis hán) 907
Genjian, Hagop (Akop), see Kara-Darvish
(pseud.)
Genke, Nina, see Henke-Meller, Nina
Genov, Todor 357
Genrikhovna von Notenberg, Ekaterina, see
Nizen, Ekaterina (pseud.)
Genrikhovna von Notenberg, Elena, see Guro,
Elena (pseud.)
Gentilucci, Armando 14
Georges (circus artist), see Rudenko, Pyotr
Georgieva, Emiliia 361
Gestel, Leo 703
Gheorghiu, Smaranda, see Gîrbea, Smaranda
Ghika, Nikos, see Chatzēkyriakos-Gkikas, Nikos
Gian Paolo (pseud.), see Čerina, Vladimir
Gian, Alk (pseud. of Alkiviadis
Giannopoulos) 531–532
Giannattasio, Ugo 90, 183, 489, 606, 610
Giannopoulos, Alkiviadis, see Gian, Alk (pseud.)
Gibshman, Konstantin (Konstantin Eduardovich
von Gibschman) 268, 269
Giedion, Sigfried 69
Gil Fortoul, José 894
Giménez Caballero, Ernesto 835–837
Ginanni Corradini, Arnaldo, see Ginna, Arnaldo
(pseud.)
Ginanni, Maria Crisi 53, 532, 591, 592
Ginna, Arnaldo (pseud. of Arnaldo Ginanni
Corradini) 101, 102, 103, 106, 109, 181,
209, 591, 606–607
Ginsberg, Allen 3, 889
Giolli, Federico 828
Giolli, Rosa, see Menni, Rosa
Giophyllēs, Phōtos (pseud. of Spyros
Mousourēs) 528, 529–531, 533
944 Name Index

Giordano, Umberto 541 Gorno Dell’Acqua, Alessandro 198, 255

Girace, Piero 4 Gorter, Herman 700
Gîrbea (Gârbea), Smaranda (pseud. Maica Gotsiridze, Mikheil 478
Smara) 754 Gourianova, Nina, see Gurianova, Nina
Giroux, Georges 326–327 Gourmont, Rémy de 589
Giuliani, Fulvia 53 Governato, Giovanni 493
Giuntini, Aldo 201–202 Govoni, Corrado 42, 234, 234, 286, 337, 494,
Glaser, Milton 164 579, 583, 884
Gleizes, Albert 383, 450, 809 Graal-Arelsky (pseud. of Stefan Petrov)
Gloria, Adele 55 779–780
Gnedov, Vasilisk Ivanovich 776, 780, 781, Grabbe, Christian Dietrich 391
783, 787 Grabowski, Ignacy 721
Goehr, Walter 232 Graça Aranha, José Pereira da, see Aranha, José
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 711 Pereira da Graça
Goffin, Arnold 325, 326 Gramaglia, Maggiorino 224
Gogh, Vincent van 521, 557 Grammatica, Emma (Aida Laura Argia
Gogoberidze, Zhango 476, 477 Grammatica) 256
Gogol, Nikolai, see Hohol’, Mykola Gramsci, Antonio 32, 167, 577, 612
Goll, Ivan (Iwan or Yvan) 495 Grandi, Luigi 202
Gómez, Juan Vicente 894, 896, 898, 900 Grassi, Carlo 413
Gómez Carrillo, Enrique 708, 825, 827, 832 Grautoff, Otto 484
Gómez de Baquero, Eduardo (pseud. Graves, Michael 188
Andrenio) 825 Greco, Martín 710
Gómez de la Mata, Germán 829 Greene, David 81
Gómez de la Serna, Javier 824 Greshoff, Jan 698
Gómez de la Serna, Julio 832 Grieco, Agripino 342
Gómez de la Serna, Ramón 824–827, 830, Griffith, David Llewelyn 401
835, 837 Griffiths, Jennifer 124
Gomringer, Eugen 169 Grignani, Franco 615–616
Goncharova, Natalia (Natal’ia Sergeevna Gripenberg, Bertel (pseud. Åke Eriksson) 845
Goncharova) 60, 62–63, 107, 154–155, Gris, Juan (pseud. of José Victoriano González-
186, 387, 767, 771, 773, 783, 801–804, Pérez) 557, 865
807, 809, 812–817 Griselli, Italo 658, 660
Gonnelli, Ferrante 200, 557, 604, 605, 606, 721 Gropius, Walter 594, 865
González de la Serna, Ismaël (Ismael de la Grosso, Albino 88
Serna) 865 Grosvalds, Jāzeps 657
González de Mendoza, José María (pseud. Grosz, George (pseud. of Georg Ehrenfried
Gonzalo Deza Méndez) 690 Groß) 404, 427
González Prada, Manuel 740, 713 Groys, Boris Efimovich 160
González-Blanco, Andrés 825, 827, 829 Grünewald, Isaac 846, 847
González-Blanco, Edmundo 825 Gruodis, Karla 678
Gorbachev, Dmitrii, see Horbachov, Dmytro Guarini, Guarino 69
Omelianovych Guarino, Carmine 201, 202, 232
Gorbachev, Mikhail Sergeevich 429 Guarnieri, Giovanni Giuseppe 224
Gordeev, Bogdan, see Bozhidar (pseud.) Guazzoni, Enrico 104
Gordeziani, Beno 476, 477 Gudaitis, Antanas 372
Goretti, Maria 56 Gudiashvili, Lado 473, 474, 475, 790
Gorky, Maxim (Maksim Gor’kii (pseud. of Alexei Guðjónsson, Halldór, see Laxness, Halldór
Maximovich Peshkov) 270 Kiljan (pseud.)
 Name Index 945

Guðnadóttir, Kristín G. 568 Hennoste, Tiit 423–436, 927

Guerra, Ángel (pseud.), see Betancort Cabrera, Henseler, Franz Seraph 487
José Herbert, George 282
Guerra, Roberto 620 Hernández Luquero, Nicasio 829
Gui, Vittorio 199 Herodotus (Hērodotos) 768
Guidi, R. (possibly Virgilio Guidi?) 496 Herrera y Reissig, Julio 875
Guidi, Walter 4 Herron, Ron 81
Guillot Muñoz, Gervasio 877 Herzfeld, Helmut, see Heartfield, John (pseud.)
Guisado, Alfredo Pedro de Meneses 742 Hevesy, Iván 542, 548
Gulácsy, Lajos 548 Hidaka, Shōji 631
Guo, Moruo 374, 375 Hidalgo Lobato, Alberto 304–305, 309,
Gurianova (Gourianova), Nina (Nina Al’bertovna 709–714, 716–717
Gur’ianova) 799 Hidalgo Lobato, Eduardo Rafael 711
Guro, Elena (pseud. of Elena Genrikhovna von Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel (El Cura Hidalgo) 688
Notenberg) 768–773, 784–785 Hiir, Erni 423, 425–427, 432
Gutfreund, Otto 381, 384–385 Hill, Carl Fredrik 846
Guzmán Cruchaga, Juan 365 Himiob, Nelson 900
Hind, Charles Lewis 518
Haavio, Martti, see Mustapää, P. (pseud.) Hirano, Banri 636–637
Hablik, Wenzel 485, 487, 498 Hirato, Renkichi (pseud. of Shōichi
Hackner, Thomas 632 Kawahata) 638, 639–641
Hadid, Zaha (Zahā Mohammad Ḥadīd) 81, 188 Hiroshige, Utagawa (Andō) 518
Hadwiger, Else (née Else Strauß) 485, 491, 495 Hitler, Adolf 38, 496, 497, 498
Hagiwara, Sakutarō 635 Hjartarson, Benedikt 565–575, 927
Hakhumian, Tigran 318 Hjertén, Sigrid 846
Halabian, Garo 321 Höch, Hannah 288
Hammarberg, Jarl 849 Hodell, Åke 849
Hanson, Sten 849 Hohol’, Mykola Vasylovych (Nikolai Gogol)
Harding, James Martin XVII 273, 854
Harrison, Charles 507 Hokusai, Katsushika 518
Hart, Harold, see Crane, Hart (pseud.) Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de 337, 340, 342
Hasegawa, Tenkei 629 Homer (Homēros) 305, 507, 528, 586, 708
Hasenclever, Walter 630 Hone, Evie 557
Haskell, Barbara 887 Horbachov, Dmytro Omelianovych (Dmitrii
Hassan, Mohamed (Muḥammad Ḥassan) 417–418 Gorbachev) 865–866
Hausmann, Raoul 167 Houle, Gabrielle 111
Haynau, Edyth von, see Rosà, Rosa (pseud.) Hradil, František Míťa 137
He, Bitao 376 Hrynkowski, Jan 723
He, Qifang 376 Hu, Man 373–379, 927
Heap, Jane 888 Huelsenbeck, Richard 488, 491
Heartfield, John (pseud. of Helmut Hugo, Victor 534, 711, 713, 717
Herzfeld) 222 Huidobro, Vicente 288, 302, 365, 369–371,
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich XV, 30 673, 830
Hellaakoski, Aaro 442 Hulewicz, Jerzy 722
Hellens, Franz 326–327 Hulme, Thomas Ernest 515
Hellman, Ben 444–445 Hultén, Pontus (Karl Gunnar Pontus Vougt
Hendrich, Hermann 490 Hultén) XVII, 399, 849
Henein, Georges 412, 413, 419 Hussein, Taha (Ṭāhā Ḥusayn) 413, 419
Henke-Meller, Nina 865 Huuhtanen, Päivi 439
946 Name Index

Iakobson, Roman Osipovich, see Jakobson, Jakobson, Roman (Roman Osipovich

Roman Iakobson) 588, 672, 774, 777, 790
Ialovyi, Mykhailo, see Shpol, Iulian (pseud.) Jakštas, Adomas 669
Iancu, Marcel, see Janco, Marcel James, William 274
Iantar, Nikolai, see Marangozov, Nikolai Janáček, Leoš 239
Iashvili, Pavlo 470, 473 Janco, Marcel (Marcel Hermann Iancu) 492,
Iavorovskyi, Ievhen (Ievhen Ievheniiovych 593, 753, 756–757
Iavorovs’kyi) 859 Jandl, Ernst 169
Iazykanov, Ivan, see Yazykanov, Ivan Janecek, Gerald James 472, 473, 474, 766
Ibáñez, Carlos 368–369, 370 Janeliūnas, Petras 673
Ibarra, Jaime 831 Jankowski, Jerzy 722, 725
Ibsen, Henrik 396 Jannelli, Guglielmo 90, 182, 185, 493, 494, 591
Ichiuji, Yoshinaga 638 Jasieński, Bruno 724, 726–728, 729
Idelson, Vera (née Vera Steiner) 201, 493, 495 Jaunsudrabiņš, Jānis 656
Iermilov, Vasyl’, see Ermylov, Vasyl’ Dmytrovych Javal, Émile 166
Iglesias Posse, Pablo 827 Jawdat, Salih (Ṣāliḥ Jawdat) 413
Ignatyev, Ivan (Ivan Vasil’evich Ignat’ev, pseud. Jean-Jacques (pseud.) see Jakob, Hans
of Ivan Vasil’evich Kazanskii) 165, Jeanneret, Charles-Édouard, see Le Corbusier
779–781, 783 (pseud.)
Iliazd (Il’iazd; pseud.), see Zdanevich, Ilya Jellenta, Cezary 721
Ilijić, Stjepko 911 Jellett, Mainie 557
Illari, Pietro 28, 306, 308 Jelsbak, Torben 396–407, 927
Ilnytzkyj (Il’nyts’kyi), Oleh Stepan 853–870, 927 Jespers, Oskar 168
Ilyc, Stiepko, see Ilijić, Stjepko Jiang, Guangci 375
Inagaki, Taruho 639 Jin, Eun-young 654
Inga-Pin, Luciano 17 Joffre, Joseph Jacques Césaire 276
Inkizhinov, Valery (Valerii Ivanovich Jóhannesson, Alexander 565, 566
Inkizhinov) 277 Johnson, Bengt Emil 849
Innocenti, Camillo 416 Jolin, Einar 846, 847
Innocenzi, Alfredo 616 Joly, Auguste 30, 327
Inojosa, Joaquim 346 Jónsson, Jónas 566, 572
Ipuche, Pedro Leandro 879 Jonynas, Vytautas Kazimieras 672
Irba Futurista (pseud. of Irma Bazzi) 121–122 Josephson, Ernst 846
Iribarne, Francisco 833 Jouvenel, Henry de 183
Iser, Iosif 755 Jović, Bojan 917–920, 927
Ishikawa, Giichi 638–639 Joyce, James 555–556, 849
Iutkevich, Sergei Iosifovich, see Yutkevich, Júdice, Nuno 736–752, 928
Sergei Jullian, René 16
Ivanov, Georgy (Georgii Vladimirovich Junoy, Josep-Maria 285, 833
Ivanov) 779 Jurtkiewiczówna, Maryla 731
Ivanov, Vladimir-Georgii (pseud. Vladimir
Polianov) 359 Kádár, Béla 548
Ives, Charles 206 Kahn, Gustave 164–165, 451, 455, 579, 755
Ivnev, Riurik (pseud. of Mikhail Alexandrovich Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 455
Kovalev) 471, 782, 784 Kajanus, Robert 443
Iwamura, Tōru 632 Kajruksztis, Witold 729
Kakabadze, David 474, 480
Jacob, Max 589 Kalamarēs (Kalamaris), Nikos (pseud. M. Spieros,
Jacobbi, Ruggero 6 Nikētas Randos, Nikolas Kalas) 532
Jakob, Hans (pseud. Jean-Jacques) 404 Kalas, Nikolas (pseud.), see Kalamarēs, Nikos
 Name Index 947

Kalatozishvili, Mikheil 480 Khan-Magomedov, Selim 156

Kaleuras, Achilleus 528–529 Khardzhiev, Nikolai Ivanovich 766, 769, 779,
Kalmthout, Ton van 698–707, 931 801, 802
Kalogeropoulos, Dēmētrēs (pseud. Daphnis) Khlebnikov, Velimir (Viktor Vladimirovich
528, 530 Khlebnikov) 40, 107, 263, 265, 283, 470,
Kamel, Youssef (Yūsuf Kāmil) 417–418 471, 726, 767–774, 776–778, 780, 781,
Kamenova, Anna 360 783–788, 790–794, 806, 810, 813, 816,
Kamensky, Vasily (Vasilii Vasil’evich 918, 919
Kamenskii) 155, 165–166, 283, 284, 317, Khovin, Viktor Romanovich 779, 781
427, 469–470, 472, 657, 767, 769, 770, Khristov, Panaiot Todorov, see Skitnik, Sirak
773, 778, 785, 786, 787, 788, 789, 793, (pseud.)
809, 810, 918 Khrushchev, Nikita Sergeevich 443
Kanbara (sometimes spelled ‘Kambara’), Kickert, Conrad 701
Tai 321, 635, 636, 637, 638, 638, 639, Kiesler, Frederick (Friedrich) 888
640, 641, 642–645, 649 Kiki de Montparnasse (pseud.), see Prin, Alice
Kandinsky, Wassily (Vasilii Vasil’evich Ernestine
Kandinskii) 89, 399, 429, 454, 484, 487, Kikutake, Kiyonori 81
509, 545, 630, 771, 865, 922 Ķikuts, Pēteris 664
Kant, Immanuel 30, 711 Kim, Gi-rim 468, 649–650
Kaplinski, Jaan 430 Kim, Soo-young 651–652
Kaplinski, Lauris 430 Kimura, Shōhachi 630–631
Kappanyos, András 538–554, 928 Kinoshita, Shūichirō 635, 636, 638, 641
Kaprow, Allan 889 Kirby, Michael Stanley 889
Karachalios, Dēmētrios (pseud. Amphion; Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 487
Lampros Asterēs) 529 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara 117, 122
Kara-Darvish (pseud. of Hagop Genjian) 314, Kishida, Ryūsei 630
316–318, 319, 320, 321, 473, 790 Kitaev, Zyama (Ziama) 277
Karinian, Artashes (pseud. of Artashes Kiun, Eva (Eva Kühn Amendola) 52, 53, 54
Balasievich Gabrielian) 318 Kivi, Aleksis (pseud. of Alexis Stenvall) 445
Karinthy, Frigyes 540, 542, Kivikas, Albert 423, 424–427, 431
Karloni, Alexander (Aleksandr Iur’evich Kivimaa, Arvi 442
Karloni) 268, 269, 270 Kivisildnik, Sven (pseud. of Sven Sildnik)
Karyōtakēs, Kōstas 531 430–432
Kasabov, Georgi Milev, see Milev, Geo (pseud.) Kjarval, Jóhannes Sveinsson 565, 566,
Kassák, Lajos 289, 539, 541–550 568–569, 573
Kasyanov, Vladimir (Vladimir Pavlovich Klee, Paul 487, 756, 922
Kas’ianov) 107 Kleen, Thyra af 844
Katō, Asatori 633 Klein, Richard 38
Kauffer, Edward McKnight 521 Klemetti, Heikki 443
Kaufman, David Abelevich 107 Klintberg, Bengt af 849
Kavaleridze, Ivan Petrovich 865 Kliun, Ivan Vasil’evich 802, 811–812
Kavaphēs, Konstantinos Petrou (Constantine Knosp, Gaston 327
Cavafy) 533, 534 Kobayashi, Mango 632
Kawabata, Yasunari 639 Kobro, Katarzyna 732, 756
Kawahata, Shōichi, see Hirato, Renkichi (pseud.) Koch, Martin 844–845
Kawaji, Ryūkō 374, 637, 640 Koehler, Bernhard 487
Kazaks, Jēkabs 657 Kokkinos, Dionysios A. 533
Kazansky, Ivan, see Ignatyev, Ivan (pseud.) Kokoschka, Oskar 699–700
Keller, Guido 913 Koliada, Geo 859
Kellermann, Bernhard 670 Kollontai, Aleksandra Mikhailovna 271
948 Name Index

Kołtoński, Aleksander 721–722 Kulakauskas, Telesforas 672

Kondor, Ladislao 184 Kulbin, Nikolai (Nikolai Ivanovich Kul’bin) 354,
Kondylakēs, Iōannēs (pseud. Diavatēs) 770, 786, 814, 855
527–529 Kume, Masao 633
Konijnenburg, Willem Adriaan van 701 Kupka, František 381, 385–387
Konody, Paul George 515–516 Kupreianov, Nikolai Nikolaevich 375
Korneichuk, Nikolai Vasil’evich, see Chukovsky, Kurbas, Les (Oleksandr-Zenon Stepanovych
Korney (pseud.) Kurbas) 857
Korompay, Giovanni 617 Kurcijs, Andrejs (pseud. of Andrejs
Korzh, Oleksandr 859 Kuršinskis) 658, 662–663
Kosarev (Kosariev) Borys 866 Kurek, Jalu 728, 729–733
Kosovel, Srečko 907, 908–909 Kuroda, Jūtarō 638
Kostabi, Mark Kalev 430 Kurokawa, Kisho 81
Kosztolányi, Dezső 540–541, 542 Kuršinskis, Andrejs 658
Kotko, Kost, see Liubchenko, Mykola (pseud.) Kurtz, Rudolf 485
Kotopoulē, Marika 534 Kushner, Boris Anisimovich 41, 793
Kovalev, Mikhail Alexandrovich, see Ivnev, Kuusinen, Otto Ville 443–444
Riurik (pseud.) Kuutola, Kalle 444
Kovtun, Evgenii Fedorovich 766 Kuzmin, Mikhail Alekseevich 787
Kovzhun, Pavl’ (Pavlo) 853, 864–865 Kwon, Hyuk-woong 652–654
Kozintsev, Grigory (Grigorii Mikhaiovich
Kozintsev) 107, 272–274, 277, 278 L’Herbier, Marcel 108
Krachulev, Milcho 353 Laarmann, Märt 429
Krajewski, Radosław 722 Labriola, Arturo 30
Kramář, Vincenc 380, 383 Laforgue, Jules 612, 876
Kranjčević, Silvije Strahimir 911 Lagarić, Pavle 921
Kresteff, Cyrile, see Krăstev, Kiril Lagerkvist, Pär 846–847
Krimer (pseud. of Cristoforo Mercati) 619 Laicens, Linards 664
Krinsky, Vladimir (Vladimir Fiodorovich Lakhovsky, Georges 234
Krinskii) 375 Lamar (pseud.), see Ponchev, Lalio Marinov
Kristensen, Tom 400, 403, 405 Lamarr, Hedy 206
Kriuchkov, Dmitrii Aleksandrovich 780 Lamartine, Alphonse de 452, 534
Krleža, Miroslav 915 Lambiase, Sergio 7
Kroha, Jiří 391 Laming, Denis 81
Kropotkin, Pyotr (Petr Alekseevich Laplagne, Guillaume 416
Kropotkin) 30 Larionov, Mikhail Fedorovich 62, 107, 154–155,
Kruchenykh, Aleksei Eliseevich 40, 62, 166, 387, 429, 767, 771, 773, 774, 783,
107, 263, 265–267, 283, 316, 318, 426, 800, 801, 802, 803–804, 813–814, 815,
471–473, 658, 768, 771–778, 782, 785, 816, 817
786, 787, 790–791, 793, 806, 809, 810, Larmola, Maija 443
813–816 Larronde, Carlos 458
Kruglikova, Elizaveta Sergeevna 375 Lasker-Schüler, Else (Elisabeth) 699, 700, 845
Krukowski, Wojciech 733 Laurens, Henri 661
Krusanov, Andrei Vasil’evich 766, 855 Lauri, Olavi (pseud.), see Paavolainen, Olavi
Kryński, Karol 729 Laurila, Kaarle Sanfrid 437–439
Kryzhitsky, Georgy (Georgii Konstantinovich Laxness, Halldór Kiljan (pseud. of Halldór
Kryzhitskii) 273 Guðjónsson) 566, 567, 570–572
Krzywicka, Irena 730 Lazareva, Ekaterina Andreevna 154–161, 928
Kubišta, Bohumil 381–383 Lazzari, Bice 186–187
 Name Index 949

Le Brun, Roger 618, 631 Lipchitz, Jacques (Khaim-Iakov Abramovich

Le Corbusier (pseud. of Charles-Edouard Lipshits) 457, 661, 373, 865
Jeanneret-Gris) 69, 71, 72, 75, 76, 301, Lissitzky, El (pseud. of Lazar’ Markovich
353, 728 Lisitskii) 42, 288, 380, 494, 865
Le Dantiu, Mikhail Vasil’evich (Michel List Arzubide, Germán 686, 687, 689, 691–692
Ledentu) 169, 290, 154, 474 Lista, Giovanni 101, 102, 103
Leal, Raúl d’Oliveira Sousa 739, 742, 744–745 Liszt, Franz 203
Lebedeva, Maria Vasil’evna 89 Litvak, Lily 827
Lechoń, Jan 726 Liubchenko, Mykola (pseud. of Kost’ Kotko) 856
Ledentu, Michel, see Le Dantiu, Mikhail Livshits, Benedikt Konstantinovich (Venedikt
Vasil’evich Livšic, Benedikt Lifscitz) 40, 264, 265,
Lee, Jang-wook 653, 654 266, 317, 768, 770, 771, 772, 775, 785, 786,
Lega, Achille 611 787, 799
Lega, Silvestro 532 Lizama, Patricio 368–369
Léger, Fernand 31, 60, 408, 205, 453, 728, 865 Lo Duca, Giuseppe XV
Lehtinen, Urho 444 Lo Jacono, Rosita, see Lojacono, Rosita
Lenin (pseud. of Vladimir Il’ich Ul’ianov) 32, Lobato, Monteiro 337
159, 267, 270, 441, 710, 714, 717, 792, 858 Lobner, Corinna del Greco 55–56
Lentulov, Aristarkh Vasil’evich 767 Locher, Jan Peter 669
Leonhard, Rudolf 859 Lodder, Christina 798–823, 928
Leonidoff, Ileana (pseud. of Elena Sergeevna Lodola, Marco 17
Pisarevskaia) 136–137 Lojacono (Lo Jacono), Rosita 148, 187
Leonidoff, Leon 888 Lombardi, Daniele 193–214, 928
Leonviola, see Viola, Antonio Leone (pseud.) Lombardini, Angela (Chiffon or Chiff
Leopold, Schapira, see Chapier, Poldy (pseud.) Lombardini) 178, 186
Lepore, Mario 618 Lombroso, Cesare 49, 551, 221
Lerat, Pierre 457 London, Jack (John Griffith London) 107
Lerner, Andrea 111 Lonzi, Carla 52
Lerroux García, Alejandro 827 Lopatinsky, Boris (Boris L’vovich
Lescovich, Michele, see Escodamè (pseud.) Lopatinskii) 469
Levé, Frédéric 168 Lopatynskyi, Favst (Favst L’vovych
Levinson, André (Andrei Iakovlevich Lopatyns’kyi) 859
Levinson) 268 López-Picó, Josep Maria 833
Levstik, Vladimir 907 Loreti, Tancredi 18
Lewin, Georg, see Walden, Herwarth (pseud.) Lotti, Stefania 12, 619
Lewis, Percy Wyndham 164, 168, 509, 510–516, Lourié, Arthur Vincent (Artur Vintsent Lur’e;
517, 518, 521 Artur Sergeevich Lur’e) 203–204, 317
Leybold, Hans 491 Lovatelli, Filippo, see Gaetani-Lovatelli
Lhote, André 457 d’Aragona, Filippo
Li, Wucheng (pseud. of Yanqiao Chen) 376 Lowenberg, Richard 240
Libera, Adalberto 75 Löwenstein, Arthur 181
Liberts, Ludolfs 657 Löwenstein, Grethel (née Margaretha Ehlers
Licini, Osvaldo 611 Speyer) 181
Lilien, Ignace 13–14 Löwry, Mina Gertrude, see Loy, Mina (pseud.)
Lille, Ludwik 723 Loy, Mina (pseud. of Mina Gertrude
Lima, Ângelo de 742 Löwry) 52, 885
Limprechtówna, Anna 721 Lozano, Rafael 685
Lindig, Otto 89 Lü, Qinzhong 374
Linze, Georges 30 Lu, Xun 375
950 Name Index

Lucchi, Nicola 883–893, 928 Malfatti, Anita 339

Luciani, Sebastiano Arturo 199 Malipiero, Gian Francesco 194–195, 199, 255
Lucini, Gian Pietro 315, 853, 596 Mallarmé, Stéphane (Étienne Mallarmé) 103,
Luedecke, Heinz 909 162–163, 169, 282–283, 587–589, 743
Lugaresi, Giovanni 14 Mallet-Stevens, Robert 108
Lugné-Poë, Aurélien-Marie 246 Malmerendi, Giannetto 607, 610
Lugones, Leopoldo 301, 713, 878 Mandel, Gabriele 15
Luisetti, Federico 239 Mandelstam, Osip (Osip Emil’evich
Luisi, Clotilde 878–879 Mandel’shtam) 471
Lunacharsky, Anatoly (Anatolii Vasil’evich Manet, Édouard 455
Lunacharskii) 41, 276 Mannheimer, Fritz 183
Lundkvist, Artur 845 Mannoni, Remo, see Altomare, Libero (pseud.)
Luo, Qingzhen 376 Manojlović, Todor 918
Lur’e, Artur, see Lourié, Arthur Vincent Mansourov, Pavel, see Mansurov, Pavel
Lur’e, Naum Izrailevich, see Lourié, Arthur Andreevich,
Vincent Mansurov, Pavel Andreevich (Paul Mansouroff,
Luri, Vasco 411 Pavel Mansourov) 791
Luthersson, Peter 843–844, 845 Mantia, Aldo 198
Luxemburg, Rosa 402 Manuel II, King of Portugal 736
Lvov, Petr 659 Manuel, Gaston 288
Lye, Len 110 Manuel, Lucien 288
Lyubarsky, Pavel (Pavel Vasil’evich Manzoni, Carlo 615
Liubarskii) 659 Manzotti, Luigi 130, 132
Mao, Dun (pseud. of Shen Dehong) 374, 375
Maassen, Henry 325 Maples Arce, Manuel 686–690
Mac Del Marle, Aimé Félix, see Del Marle, Félix Mariamov, Oleksandr (Aleksandr Moiseevich
Mac Delmarle, Aimé Félix, see Del Marle, Félix Mar’iamov, Ezra Mar’iamov) 859
Macconi, Gino 15 Marabini, Claudio 14
Macdonald-Wright, Stanton 885 Marangozov, Nikolai (pseud. of Nikolai Tsanev
Macedonski, Alexandru 754 Neikov) 360
Machiedo, Mladen 916 Marasco, Antonio 18, 28, 493, 494, 618,
Macke, August 486–487 619, 661
Maeterlinck, Maurice 246, 755 Marc, Franz 90, 484, 486–487, 922
Magamal (pseud.), see Kiun, Eva Marcadé, Valentine 854
Maganzini, Umberto (pseud. Trilluci) 494 Marchi, Virgilio 72–74, 77, 121, 180, 611–612,
Magarotto, Luigi 470, 474 644, 727, 883, 888
Magnelli, Alberto 454 Marcks, Gerhard 89
Maiakovskii, Vladimir Vladimirovich, see Marconi, Guglielmo 77, 234, 606
Mayakovsky, Vladimir Marcu, Eduard, see Voronca, Ilarie (pseud.)
Maigret, François Guillaume, comte de 895 Mardzhanishvili, Konstantine (Kote
Maincave, Jules 119 Mardzhanishvili; Konstantin
Maino, Angelo 612 Aleksandrovich Mardzhanov) 480
Maki, Fumihiko 81 Mardzhanov, Konstantin, see Mardzhanishvili,
Makintsian, Poghos 318 Konstantine
Malevich, Kazimir Severinovich (Kazimir Marenga, Franco 12
Severynovych Malevych) 40, 62, 63, 80, Marey, Étienne-Jules 166, 215–216, 217, 386
154, 155, 156–157, 264–268, 658, 728, Mariátegui, José Carlos 709, 713, 714–716
729, 767, 772, 774, 791, 800, 801, 802, Marin, John 885
805–806, 809–810, 812–814, 816–818, Marín, Juan 365
855, 861, 865 Marinetti, Giuseppe (pseud.), see Young, Joseph

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso (pseud. of Emilio
Angelo Carlo Marinetti) XI–XVIII, 3–4, 6,
7, 9, 11–13, 16–18, 28–38, 48–56, 61–62,
69–79, 88, 91–97, 102–111, 116–124,
129,134, 137, 144, 146–148, 154, 156,
162–170, 180, 183, 184, 187, 193, 194,
195, 197, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 208,
209, 216, 221–225, 231–240, 247–252,
254, 256, 258, 263, 268, 282, 285–288,
290, 299–310, 314–317, 325–331,
336–347, 352–361, 370, 373, 374,
386–389, 396–397, 400–405, 408–414,
417–420, 423–427, 431, 437–441, 443,
445, 449–462, 469–470, 478, 484–485,
488–498, 506–521, 527–534, 540–550,
555–562, 566–572, 577–596, 599–620,
628–645, 648–650, 653, 656–662, 665,
674–677, 684–690, 698–705, 708–717,
721–732, 736–746, 753–760, 764–765,
778, 782, 786–787, 798, 800, 801, 810,
824–837, 842–845, 847–848, 854–855,
872–879, 883–884, 888–890, 895–902,
905–908, 911, 913–916, 917–921
Marinetti, Luce 258
Marinetti Cappa, Benedetta, see Benedetta
(pseud.)
Marjanović, Zdenka 911–912
Markov, Vladimir (pseud.), see Matvejs,
Waldemars
Markov, Vladimir Fedorovich 470, 770, 780, 782
Marlier, Georges 329
Marnano, Silvio 17
Marsh, Edward 510–511, 513
Marsman, Hendrik
Martin, Marianne Winter 16
Martina, Guido 101, 105
Martínez, Leoncio 897
Martini, Arturo 590
Martini, M. (printer in Prato) 168
Martini, Stelio Maria 7
Martins, Wilson 346
Marzaduri, Giuseppe 472
Más y Pi, Juan 299–300, 708
Mascagni, Pietro 234
Masi, Giuseppe 256, 830
Masnata, Pino (Giuseppe) 9–10, 202, 231–232,
236–240, 287, 331
Maspero, Gaston 167
Mass, Vladimir Zakharovich 271
Massarani, Renzo 202
Name Index 951
Massine, Léonide (Leonid Fedorovich
Miasin) 888
Masterman, Charles Frederick Gurney
519–520, 521
Matisse, Henri 166, 533, 557, 846, 865
Matiushin, Mikhail, see Matyushin, Mikhail
Matoš, Antun Gustav 912–913, 916
Matošić, Joso (Joe) 912–913
Matsuo, Kuninosuke 644
Matsuura, Hajime 633
Matta, Roberto 365
Mattè Trucco, Giacomo 69
Máttis Teutsch, János (Hans) 756
Matvejs, Voldemārs (Hans Waldemars Yanov
Matvejs; pseud. Vladimir Markov) 657,
658, 775
Matyushin, Mikhail (Mikhail Vasil’evich
Matiushin) 263–266, 769–770, 774, 798,
800, 802, 809–810, 812, 818
Mauclair, Camille 450, 630, 631
Mauriac, François 545
Maxy, Max Herman 756, 757, 760
Mayakovsky, Vladimir (Vladimir Vladimirovich
Maiakovskii) XVI, 40–41, 107, 154, 155,
156, 157, 263–268, 271, 317, 355–357, 360,
375, 376, 425, 427, 428, 441, 469–470,
479, 584, 651–652, 653, 657, 658, 663,
664, 673, 677, 726, 727, 765, 767, 768,
770–775, 778, 781, 783–790, 792–793,
813, 846, 918, 919
Mayerová, Milča 289
Mazmanian, Mikhail Davidovich 321
Mazza, Armando 9, 287, 331, 532, 582, 608
Mazzoni, Angiolo 75–76, 96, 187
Mazzotti, Giuseppe 92, 187
Mazzotti, Torido 92
Mazzotti, Tullio, see D’Albisola, Tullio (pseud.)
McCullagh, Francis 560
Medin, Gastone 106
Meester, Johan de 698
Meidner, Ludwig 487
Meierkhol’d, Vsevolod Emil’evich, see
Meyerhold, Vsevolod
Méliès, Georges 110
Meller, Nina, see Henke-Meller, Nina
Meller, Vadym Heorhiiovych 857, 865
Melnikov, Konstantin (Konstantin Stepanovich
Mel’nikov) 80, 89
Melnikova, Sofia Georgievna 317–318,
474, 475
952 Name Index

Melotti, Fausto 180 Modotti, Tina 687

Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Felix 103 Moholy-Nagy, László (pseud. of László
Méndez, Evar 303, 304 Weisz) 285, 548, 859, 865
Méndez, Leopoldo 686 Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl (née Sybille Pietzsch) 497
Mendilaharsu, Julio Raúl 878, 880 Mohr, Alexander 493, 494
Mendini, Alessandro 187 Möhring, Max 497
Menni Giolli, Rosa 186 Molière (pseud. of Jean-Baptiste Poquelin) 270
Menotti del Picchia, Paulo 337, 339, 340–341 Molinari, Aldo 104
Mense, Carlo 487 Molinari, Bernardino 205
Mercati, Cristoforo, see Krimer (pseud.) Molinari, Luciano 257
Meriano, Francesco 285, 286, 492 Molinari, Mario 617
Mérida, Carlos 687–688 Molok, Yuri (Iurii Vladimirovich Molok) 778
Merjian, Ara Hagop 883–893, 928 Momberg, Harald Landt 403–405
Merli, Gian Franco 233 Mombert, Alfred 845
Meštrović, Ivan 912 Monachesi, Mario (pseud. Chesimò) 202
Metzinger, Jean 307, 383, 450, 809 Monachesi, Sante 106, 619
Meyer, Alfred Richard 485 Monaci Gallenga, Maria 187
Meyerhold, Vsevolod (Vsevolod Emil’evich Monasterios, Rafael 897
Meierkhol’d) 158–159, 263, 264, Mond, Alfred 519, 521
266–269, 271, 272, 274–275, 277, 359, Mondrian, Piet (Pieter Cornelis) 698, 703, 743
664, 910 Monro, Harold 162
Miasin, Leonid Fedorovich, see Massine, Monsanto, Antonio Edmundo 897
Léonide Montale, Eugenio 3
Miasnikian, Alexandr 320, 321 Montalvor, Luís de (pseud. of Luís Filipe de
Miasoedov, Sergei Nikolaevich 770 Saldanha da Gama da Silva Ramos) 742
Michaelides, Chris 527–537, 928 Montanyà, Lluís 836
Michahelles, Ernesto, see Thayaht (pseud.) Montenegro, Giovanna 894–904, 928
Michahelles, Ruggero Alfredo (pseud. Ram) 149 Montessori, Maria 231
Michelangelo (Michelangelo di Lodovico Monti, Carlo 619
Buonarroti Simoni) 401, 885 Moore, Nancy Gaye 131
Micić, Branislav (Branimir, Branko, Valerij, Vij, Morais Neto, Prudente de 342, 344
Virgil, or Ve), see Poljanski, Branko Ve Moras, see Morais Neto, Prudente de
Micić, Ljubomir 914, 918, 922 Morgunov, Aleksei Alekseevich 154
Mikėnas, Juozas 672 Mori, Marisa 55, 124, 618
Mikhailova, Klavdiia Ivanovna 155 Mori, Ōgai 628
Milev, Geo (pseud. of Georgi Milev Morita, Kamenosuke 633
Kasabov) 352–358, 360–361 Morozov, Savva Timofeevich 276,
Millàs-Raurell, Josep Maria 833 Morozova, K. 669
Miller, Edmund 725 Morozzi, Massimo 81
Milne, Alan Alexander 842 Morpurgo, Carlo 409
Minulescu, Ion 754–755 Morpurgo, Nelson 287, 409–414
Miomandre, Francis de, see De Miomandre, Morris, William 175
Francis Mortari, Virgilio 201, 235
Miró, César 369 Morteo, Gian Renzo 12
Miró, Juan (Joan Miró i Ferrà) 460, 472 Morthensen, Jan 849
Mix, Silvio (Silvius Aloysius Micks, pseud. of Moscardelli, Nicola 492
Silvio De Re) 137, 199–201, 439 Moscatelli, Jean 410
Młodożeniec, Stanisław 724, 725, 726, 727, 729 Mosolov, Alexander (Alexandr Vasil’evich
Möbius, Paul Julius 49 Mosolov) 204–205
Modesti, Renzo 15 Moulton, Shana 111
 Name Index 953

Mousourēs, Spyros, see Giophyllēs, Phōtos Nazzaro, Gian Battista 7

(pseud.) Nebbia, Ugo 177
Mrak, Ivan 907, 908 Nedolia, Leonid (Luk’ian Volodymyrovych Leonid
Mülber, Alexander 429 Nedolya Honcharenko) 859
Munari, Bruno 9, 92, 94, 169, 170, 178, 233, Nefedov, Stepan Dmitrievich (pseud. Erzya) 269
238, 240, 615–616 Negreiros, José Sobral de Almada 737–740,
Muncis, Jānis 664 744, 745–746, 747
Muñoz, Isaac 828 Negri, Piero 532
Muñoz, Matilde 830 Neikov, Nikolai Tsanev, see Marangozov, Nikolai
Murād, Zaynab Muḥammad, see Nabarawi, Nelson, Robert 110
Saiza (pseud.) Neruda, Pablo 365
Muramatsu, Masatoshi 638 Nervi, Pier Luigi 75, 78
Murayama, Tomoyoshi 493, 635, 637–638 Nervo, Amado 684
Murn, Josip 906 Nesso (pseud.), see Porfírio, Carlos
Murphy, Patrick J. 557 Neto, João Cabral de Melo 342
Muşoiu, Panait 754 Neumann, Israel Ber (J. B. Neumann) 496, 637
Mussolini, Arnaldo 233 Neumann, Stanislav Kostka 380
Mussolini, Benito XIII–XIV, 3, 4, 15, 28–29, Nevinny, Lilly (pseud. of Yvan Goll and Else
33–39, 48, 53–55, 73, 79, 118, 222, Hadwiger) 495
225–226, 234–235, 276, 308, 419, 440, Nevinson, Christopher Richard Wynne 251, 305,
460, 521, 533, 542, 546, 593, 595, 596, 506–521
608, 611, 613–615, 616, 619, 705, 759–760, Nevinson, Henry 508–509, 513, 518
764, 832, 834, 835, 836, 872 Nevinson, Margaret Wynne Jones 506–507
Mussorgsky, Modest (Modest Petrovich Nevinson, Richard, see Nevinson, Christopher
Musorgskii) 658 Richard Wynne
Mustapää, P. (pseud. of Martti Haavio) 443 Nevsky, Alexander (Alexandr Iaroslavich
Mutafov, Chavdar 353, 359 Nevskii) 816
Muti, Armando 202 Newbolt, Henry John 374
Muybridge, Eadweard 215 Nezval, Vítězslav 289
Nicastro, Luciano 493, 494, 591
Nabarawi, Saiza (pseud. of Zaynab Muḥammad Nielsen, Asta 863
Murād) 413 Nielsen, Jais 399
Naber, Henri Adrien 196 Niemeyer, Oscar 81
Nádass, József 546 Niesiołowski, Tymon 723
Nagano, Yoshimitsu 493, 635, 367 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 30, 49, 51, 396,
Naghi, Mohamed (Muḥammed Nājī) 416–417, 397, 403, 438, 453, 528, 580, 581, 631, 713,
419 845, 915, 921
Naguib, Mustafa (Muṣtafā Najīb) 413 Nijhoff, Martinus 704
Nakada, Katsunosuke 632 Nijinsky, Vaslav (Vatslav Fomich
Nakayama, Yōichi 637 Nizhinskii) 132–133
Nakazawa, Rinsen 631 Nikolskaya, Tatiana (Tat’iana L’vovna
Nakov, Andréi Boris 361, 805 Nikol’skaia) 472, 476
Nalepiński, Tadeusz 721 Nilsson, Bo 849
Napoleon (Napoleone di Buonaparte, French Nilsson, Gösta Adrian (pseud. GAN) 847–848
Emperor Napoléon I) 35, 119, 163, 408, 907 Nirvanas, Paulos 533
Napoli, Gennaro 194 Nishino, Yoshiaki 628–629, 632
Nasimovich, Nikolai Fedorovich, see Chuzhak, Nizen, Ekaterina (pseud. of Ekaterina
Nikolai (pseud.) Genrikhovna von Notenberg) 770
Navarro Domínguez, Eloy 826–827 Nizzoli, Marcello 149, 177
Nazariantz, Hrand 314–315, 316 Nobori, Shomu 633
954 Name Index

Nordal, Sigurður 565, 566, 570, 572 Paavolainen, Olavi 469–442, 443, 444, 445, 446
Nordau, Max 337, 688 Pacetti, Ivo 93
Nordenström, Hans 849 Pacheco (Pacheko), José 439, 747
Nosenzo, Vincenzo 94 Pagano, Giuseppe 76
Novero, Cecilia 116–128, 929 Pais, Sidónio de Freitas Branco 739, 740
Novelli, Enrico (pseud. Yambo) 12 Paladini, Vinicio 135–136, 185, 199, 222, 224,
Nozadze, Pavlo 476, 477 329, 595, 612, 616, 643, 921
Nucete Sardi, José 900 Palamas, Kōstēs 530–531, 534
Nygaard, Fredrik 400, 402–403 Palazzeschi, Aldo (pseud. of Aldo Giurlani) 10,
Nyka-Niliūnas, Alfonsas 677 104, 167, 234, 417, 454, 490, 493, 555, 579,
Nyst, Raymond (Ray) 326, 327, 461 581, 584, 589, 596, 600, 634, 637, 727,
733, 828, 913
O’Brien, Elaine XVII Palazzoli, Daniele 15
O’Byrne, Robert 556 Palazzoli, Luca 15
O’Grady, Deirdre 555 Palma, Clemente 708, 711
Ogasawara, Shūjitsu 633 Palmgren, Raoul 443, 444
Ogata, Kamenosuke 635 Palmov, Viktor (Viktor Nikandrovich
Olanda, see Holanda, Sérgio Buarque de Pal’mov) 636, 865
Olimpov, Konstantin (pseud. of Konstantin Paniconi, Maria Elena 408–415, 929
Konstantinovich Fofanov) 779–781, 784 Pannaggi, Ivo 135–136, 185–186, 199, 222,
Olsson, Hagar 444, 845 224, 329–330, 493, 494, 495–496, 612,
Olsson, Jesper 842–852, 929 613, 616, 643, 645, 659, 661, 662
Omuka, Toshiharu 628, 631, 632, 643 Paolo, Gian (pseud.), see Čerina, Vladimir
Onchi, Kōshirō 635 Papantoniou, Zacharias 534
Onfray, Michel 116, 120 Papazov, Georgi (Zhorzh Papazov, Georges
Orazi, Vittorio (pseud. of Alessandro Papazoff) 361
Prampolini) 11, 662 Papini, Giovanni 28, 162, 164, 167, 216, 250,
Orbeliani, Grigol 479 337, 410, 417, 439, 453, 454, 455, 496,
Oriani, Pippo (Giuseppe) 13, 14, 101, 105, 178, 532, 588–589, 592, 603, 605, 609, 702,
498, 614, 616, 619 759, 913
Oriani, Gabriele 13 Pareto, Vilfredo 34
Orłowicz, Tadeusz 730 Parisio, Giulio 184, 223, 224
Ornstein, Leo (Lev Ornshteyn; Iuda- Park, Chung-hee 652
Leib Gornshtein; Lev Abramovich Park, Young-hee 649
Gornshtein) 206, 207, 630 Parland, Henry 446, 846
Oropeza, Juan 900 Parra del Riego, Juan 712, 871–872
Ortiz Saralegui, Juvenal 876 Parseghian, Kegham 315
Ortolani, Mario 88, 91, 184, 187 Parthenēs, Kostis (Kōnstantinos Parthenis)
Osborn, Kevin 168 533, 534
Ose, Keishi (Aika) 633 Parton, Anthony 804, 809
Oshakan, Hagob 316 Pascoaes, Teixeira de (pseud. of Joaquim Pereira
Osorio Tejeda, Nelson 897–898, 902 Teixeira de Vasconcelos) 736–737
Ostaijen, Paul van, see Van Ostaijen, Paul Pascoli, Giovanni 34
Ostrovsky, Aleksandr Nikolaevich 275–276 Pascutti, Luigi 12
Osvát, Ernő 539 Pasqualino Tredicianni (pseud.), see Cangiullo,
Otake, Chikuha 636 Pasquale
Otero Silva, Miguel 900 Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich 652, 767, 776,
Ouspensky, Pyotr (Petr Demianovich 783–784, 788, 790, 793
Uspenskii) 806, 809 Patalano, Roberto 619
Ozenfant, Amédée 457, 728 Pauli, Georg Vilhelm 848
 Name Index 955

Pavlinov, Pavel Iakovlevich 375 Piatti, Ugo 196, 608, 609, 632, 829
Pavlov, Ivan Petrovich 274 Piattoli, Alberto 417
Pavlović, Boro 915 Picabia, Francis (Francis-Marie Martinez
Pavolini, Corrado 611 Picabia) 109, 288, 594, 603, 606, 886
Paz Castillo, Fernando 898, 900 Picasso, Pablo Ruiz 135, 203, 290, 380–381,
Peeters, Jozef 329–330 383, 450, 455, 474, 484n 509, 533, 557,
Peiper, Tadeusz 673, 727–733 558, 589, 594, 602, 603, 605, 743, 800,
Peirce, Guglielmo 617 842, 846, 865, 866, 885
Pellerin, Auguste 455 Picchia, Menotti del, see Menotti del Picchia,
Pelonzi-Bragaglia, Giuseppina 150, 181, 187 Paulo
Peluzzi, Eso 122 Picchia, Paulo Menotti del, see Menotti del
Penco, Wilfredo 877 Picchia, Paulo
Pepe Diaz, Luigi 618 Piccinelli, Ernesto 122
Pepediaz (pseud.), see Pepe Diaz, Luigi Piel, Harry 276
Pepo (Clown) 274 Piergentili, Gino 619
Pereda Valdés, Ildefonso 872, 877–878 Pierre, José 16
Peri (pseud.), see Perissinotto, Giorgio Pietropaolo, Domenico 247–262, 929
Perić, Konstantin 918 Piha, Rodolfo 411
Perissinotto, Giorgio (pseud. Peri) 618 Pilić, Gabro 913
Perloff, Marjorie Gabrielle 28, 232, 848 Pimenta de Castro, Joaquim, see Castro, José
Perret, Jean-Louis 439 Joaquim Pereira Pimenta de
Perugino, Pietro (pseud. of Pietro Vannucci) 419 Pingoud, Ernest 445, 446
Peruzzi, Osvaldo 613, 315, 618, 619 Pinna-Berchet, Federico 913
Peschi, Umberto 419 Pinottini, Elio 15
Pessoa, Fernando (Fernando António Nogueira Pinthus, Kurt 671
de Seabra Pessoa) 736–744, 747 Pinto, Simões 342
Pestagalli Somenzi, Bruna, see Brunas (pseud.) Pio XI (Pope) 616
Petersen, Robert Storm, see Storm Petersen, Pirandello, Luigi 35, 358, 532
Robert Pisarevskaia, Elena Sergeevna, see Leonidoff,
Petkov, Vasil 352 Ileana (pseud.)
Petnikov, Grigory (Grigorii Nikolaevich Piscopo, Ugo 7
Petnikov) 784, 787, 788, 791 Pitigrilli (pseud. of Dino Segre) 493
Petőfi, Sándor 538 Pittakēs, Stilpōn 529
Petrač, Božidar 916 Pizzetti, Ildebrando 194, 201
Petrėnas, Juozas (pseud. Petras Tarulis) 669, Pla, Josep (José) 832
673, 675, 678 Plamen’, Baian, see Baian, Vadim (pseud.)
Petrolini, Ettore 257–258, 338, 339, 411 Plase, Jānis 658–659
Petronius Arbiter, Titus 120 Pliekšāns, Jānis (pseud. Rainis) 658
Petrov, Mihailo S. 921–922 Plumcake (Corporate name) 17
Petrov, Stefan, see Graal-Arelsky (pseud.) Pocarini, Sofronio 612, 616, 909
Petrović, Rastko 918, 919–920 Podbevšek, Anton 907–908
Petrytsky, Anatol (Anatol’ Halaktionovych Podhájska, Zdenka 130, 138
Petryts’kyi) 856, 865 Podhalicz, Piotr Józef (pseud. I. Ryon) 731
Pettoruti, Emilio 301, 303, 307, 308, 619 Podrecca, Vittorio 135
Pevsner, Antoine (Antuan Abramovich Poggi, Cesare Augusto 77
Pevzner) 603 Poggi-Longostrevi, Giuseppe 138
Pfemfert, Franz 490–491, 544 Poggioli, Renato 346
Pfister, Federico, see De Pistoris (pseud.) Poli, Paolo 12
Pfitzner, Hans 491 Polianov, Vladimir (pseud.), see Ivanov,
Piacentini, Marcello 76, 80 Vladimir-Georgii
956 Name Index

Polić Kamov, Janko 912 Protić, Miodrag B. 922

Poljanski, Branko Ve (pseud. of Branislav Protopopov, Sergei 205
Micić) 914 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 30, 31
Pollini, Gino 180 Pruneda, Salvador 692
Poltoratskyi, Oleksii (Oleksii Ivanovych Pruraux, Henri de 218
Poltorats’kyi) 859 Przyboś, Julian 730–731, 732
Pomajzlová, Alena 380–395, 929 Puccini, Giacomo 541
Pomorska, Krystyna 768 Puccini, Mario 309
Ponchev, Lalio Marinov (pseud. Lamar) 355, 358 Puchner, Martin 848
Ponente, Nello 10 Pudovkin, Vsevolod (Vsevolod Illarionovich
Pongetti, Silveira 342 Pudovkin) 106
Popov, Gavriil 204 Puni, Ivan (Iwan Puni; Jean Pougny) 155, 493,
Popova, Lyubov (Liubov’ Sergeevna Popova) 42, 494, 660
60, 61, 63, 64, 155, 156, 158–159, 185, 274, Punin, Nikolai Nikolaevich 273
275, 801, 807–808 Puriņš, Ernests (pseud. Sillarts) 656–657
Poquelin, Jean-Baptiste, see Molière (pseud.) Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich 771, 774,
Porfírio, Carlos 738–739 785, 799
Postal, Umberto 17 Puvis de Chavannes, Pierre 534
Pougny, Jean, see Puni, Ivan
Pound, Ezra 162, 239, 515 Quest, Caesar 104
Pozzo, Ugo 123, 615 Quilici, Nello 183
Prado, Pedro 365 Quintanilla, Luis (pseud. Kyn Taniya) 686
Prado, Yan de Almeida 343
Prampolini, Alessandro, see Orazi, Vittorio Rabinovich, Isaak 865
(pseud.) Rachlevičiūtė, Ramutė 669–683, 929
Prampolini, Enrico 11, 13, 14, 38, 54, 73, 74, Radlov, Sergei Ernestovich 269–271
76, 78, 90, 91, 92, 95, 96, 102, 105, 130, Radnitzky, Emmanuel, see Ray, Man (pseud.)
136–137, 145, 180, 182–183, 186, 199, Rados, Nikētas (pseud.), see Kalamarēs, Nikos
252–255, 308, 329, 330, 360, 387, 418, 439, Radović, Ivan 922
440, 457, 460, 461, 492, 493, 494–495, Radulski, Wacław 730
496, 498, 533, 543, 593, 603, 606, 607, Radwan, Nadia 415–422, 929
611, 612, 613, 614, 615, 616, 638, 643, 645, Raedecker, John (Johannes Anton) 703
658, 659, 661, 662, 729, 730, 732, 758, 859, Railo, Eino 437
884, 888, 909, 910 Rainis (pseud.), see Pliekšāns, Jānis
Pratella, Francesco Balilla 12, 13, 14, 137, Rainov, Nikolai Ivanov 360
193–195, 198, 199, 207, 209, 232, 235, 327, Ram (pseud.), see Michahelles, Ruggero Alfredo
439, 457, 484, 540, 541, 610, 638, 721, Ram, Harsha 470
828, 830 Ramos Sucre, José Antonio 898, 900
Pratsikas, Geōrgios 533 Ramstedt, Yrjö 444
Prešeren, France 906 Ränik, Valeria 430
Previati, Gaetano 601 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino) 419
Prezzolini, Giuseppe 162 Ras, Matilde 836
Prieto, Julio 692 Rasputin, Grigorii Efimovich 276
Primo de Rivera, Miguel 834 Rasula, Jed 282–296, 929
Procházka, Antonín 381, 383–384 Rautala, Aku 444
Prokofiev, Sergei Sergeevich 204, 205 Ravel, Maurice 135, 197, 459
Pronaszko, Andrzej 723, 730 Ray, Man (pseud. of Emmanuel Radnitzky) 109,
Pronaszko, Zbigniew 722–723 288, 594
Protazanov, Yakov (Iakov Aleksandrovich Raynal, Maurice 546
Protazanov) 108 Re, Lucia 48–60, 929
 Name Index 957

Reballio, Albert 701 Rokha, Pablo de (pseud. of Carlos Díaz

Rebelo de Bettencourt, João 739 Loyola) 365, 366–368, 371
Recchi, Mario 182 Roll, Stephan (pseud. of Gheorghe Dinu) 759
Regina (pseud. of Regina Bracchi, née Prassede Romain, Rolland 455
Cassolo) 55, 178, 186, 615, 616 Romains, Jules 309
Reis, Ricardo (heteronym of Fernando Romani, Romolo 600–601
Pessoa) 742 Rond, Ralf (pseud. of Jaan Kurn) 423, 427–428
Remizov, Aleksei Mikhailovich 787 Röntgen, Wilhelm 804
Renan, Ernest 30, 711 Rosa, Noel 338
Renoir, Auguste 589 Rosà, Rosa (pseud. of Edith von Haynau) 52–54,
Repin, Ilya (Ilia Efimovich Repin) 63, 774 148, 592, 611
Respighi, Ottorino 194, 199 Rosai, Ottone 38, 606, 611
Reuterswärd, Carl Fredrik 849 Rosati, Roberto 90, 619
Reverdy, Pierre 830 Rosenstock, Samuel, see Tzara, Tristan (pseud.)
Reverón, Armando 897 Rossi, Attilio 169
Revueltas, Silvestre 692 Rossi, Rampa 754
Ricardo, Cassiano 337 Rossiianskii, M., see Zak, Lev
Ricas, Riccardo (pseud. of Riccardo Rossini, Gioachino 106
Castagnedi) 238, 615–616 Rössler, Jaroslav 690
Ricci, Paolo 617 Rosso, Medardo 123, 601
Ricciardi, Achille 199 Rosso, Mino 14, 16, 178, 498, 614, 616
Richter, Emil 486, 487 Rothafel, Samuel Lionel (“Roxy” Rothafel) 888
Richter, Hans 109, 110, 593, 756 Rouse, John XVII
Ricotti, Maria 54, 137, 439–440 Rozanov, Vasily (Vasilii Vasil’evich Rozanov) 787
Ricov, Joja 916 Rozanova, Olga (Ol’ga Vladimirovna
Rifaat Almaz, Sahab 418 Rozanova) 60–64, 155, 186, 799, 801, 807,
Righetti, Renato Angelo, see Di Bosso, Renato 813, 814, 815, 816, 817, 855
(pseud.) Rozendorf, Elizaveta Berngardovna 89
Riikonen, Hannu Kalevi 437–448, 929 Rozványi, Vilmos 542–543
Rimydis, Antanas 670, 672, 677 Rubiner, Ludwig 545
Ripellino, Angelo Maria 10, 12 Rudenko, Pyotr (Petr Korneevich Rudenko; artist
Rivas Cherif, Cipriano de 828 name: Zhorzh or Georges) 277
Rivero, Rafael 902 Ruggeri, Ruggero 256
Rizzo, Maria, see Carramusa, Maria, Ruggles, Charles Sprague “Carl” 206
Rizzo, Pippo 90, 91, 146, 176–177, 180, Ruin, Hans 438–439
184–185, 418, 613, 617 Ruskin, John 175, 506–507
Roamer (pseud.) 829 Ruspoli, Maria, Duchess of Gramont 183
Robert, Enif (née Enif Angelini) 53–54, 592 Russe, Ellen 702
Rocca, Enrico 35 Russell, Morgan 885
Rocca, Pablo 871–882, 930 Russolo, Antonio 197, 459
Rocha, João Cezar de Castro 336–381, 877, 930 Russolo, Luigi 7, 8, 13, 14, 16, 31, 73, 105,
Rodchenko, Aleksandr Mikhailovich 42, 158, 119, 134, 137, 195–198, 202, 206, 207,
158, 865 209, 215, 216, 219, 235, 240, 255, 306,
Rodin, Auguste 475 315, 326, 329, 354, 357, 418, 440, 450,
Rodrigues, Armando Côrtes 738, 742 456, 459, 461, 486, 489, 490, 512, 556,
Rodríguez, César Atahualpa (César Augusto 600–602, 604, 605, 607, 608, 609, 610,
Rodríguez Olcay) 711 612, 632, 633, 641, 643, 662, 676, 698,
Rognoni, Angelo XV 699, 701, 721, 755, 798, 825, 828, 829,
Roht, Richard 424 830, 832, 848, 849, 884, 886, 888, 890
Roić, Sanja 911–917, 930 Ruta, Anna Maria 175–192, 930
958 Name Index

Rutter, Frank 509, 512, 514 Sarabianov, Dmitry (Dmitrii Vladimirovich

Ruttmann, Walter 109, 543 Sarab’ianov) 766
Ryon, I. (pseud.), see Podhalicz, Piotr Józef Saraja, Viljo 442
Sarfatti, Margherita 39
S’Ala, Rafael 833 Saroldi, Angelo 88
Saarinen, Eero 81 Sartini Blum, Cinzia 581
Sabatino, Michelangelo 69–87, 930 Sartori, Franco 202
Sá-Carneiro, Mário de 290, 736, 737, 740–742, Sartoris, Alberto 75–76, 77, 78, 330, 331, 619
744, 747 Satie, Erik (Éric Alfred Leslie Satie) 109
Sacchetti, Quirino 618 Satō, Yukio 644
Saccoccio, Antonio 620 Savchenko, Evgeny, see Deslaw Eugène (pseud.)
Sáenz, Raquel 874 Savinio, Alberto (pseud. of Andrea Francesco
Saillard, Georges 453 Alberto de Chirico) 193, 492, 532
Saint-Point, Valentine de (pseud. of Anna Jeanne Savonari, Baldo 619
Valentine Marianne Desglans de Cessiat- Sawaki, Kozue 633
Vercell) 51–52, 53, 131–132, 133, 315, Sayyid, Ahmad Lutfi al- (Aḥmad Luṭfī
397, 409, 410–411, 452–453, 461, 463, al-Sayyid) 419
485, 490, 634–635, 700, 739, 829, 833, Scambelluri, Angelo 913
871, 896 Scarpa, Piero 4
Saitō, Yori 630 Scelsi, Giacinto 202, 207
Sakellariadēs, Charilaos 531 Schadl, János 548
Sakheim, Arthur 496 Schaeffer, Pierre 13, 197
Sakuma, Kanae 632 Scharff, William 399
Sala, Pierre 187 Schawinsky, Xanti (Alexander) 136
Saladin, Paolo Alcide 122, 617 Scheiber, Hugo 548
Salaris, Claudia 56 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 711
Salazar, António de Oliveira 742, 746 Schlemmer, Oskar 136
Salazar Domínguez, José 900 Schlichter, Iwan M. 486
Salomonsen, Carl Julius 566 Schmalzigaug, Jules 327–328, 461
Salvat-Papasseit, Joan 285, 833–834 Schmidt, Kurt 136
Samuel, Horace Barnett 633 Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 485
Samuolis, Antanas 672 Schnapp, Jeffrey Thompson 587, 877
Sánchez Mazas, Rafael 835 Schneeman, Carolee 889
Sánchez-Juan, Sebastià (pseud. David Schneider, Luis Mario 689
Cristià) 834 Schönberg (after 1934 Schoenberg),
Sandoval, Manuel de 825 Arnold 194, 206, 209, 630
Sangallo, Giuliano da 419 Schopenhauer, Arthur 49
Sanminiatelli, Bino 492, 611 Schreyer, Lothar 404
Sansone, Giuseppe Edoardo 827 Schumann, Robert 204
Sansoni, Guglielmo, see Tato (pseud.) Schwartz, Jorge 341, 877, 898
Sant’Elia, Antonio 4, 9, 69–75, 76, 78–79, 92, Schwarz, Arturo 15
93, 97, 122, 176, 197, 308, 558, 607–608, Schwarz, Roberto 365
610, 612, 632, 644, 883, 886, 890 Schwarzwald, Eugenie 486
Santa Rita Pintor (Guilherme de Santa Rita) 737, Schwitters, Kurt 284, 289, 353, 488, 497, 543,
738, 739–740, 741, 742, 743–744, 745, 747 547, 603, 865
Santaella, Juan Carlos 900 Scriabin (Skryabin, Scriabine, Skrjabin),
Santana, Raul 897 Alexandr Nikolaevich 203, 205, 658, 662
Sanzin, Bruno Giordano 224, 225, 287, Scrivo, Luigi 6, 13, 17–18
495, 594 Scudiero, Maurizio 887

Scurto, Ignazio 9, 146, 234, 236, 618
Seehaus, Paul Adolf 487
Seganti, Giovanni 13
Segantini, Giovanni 103, 601
Segnini, Yolanda 898, 899
Šeinius, Ignas 669
Semenko, Mykhail (Mykhailo Vasylovich
Semenko) 791, 853–862, 865
Semenko, Vasyl (Bazyl‘) 853, 864
Šemerys, Salys 670, 671, 672, 673, 675
Semper, Johannes 423, 425, 427, 429
Sempere i Masià, Francisco 299, 829
Semprúm, Jesús 896
Sem-v. (pseud.) 767
Sena, Jorge de 737
Sepherēs, Giōrrgos 530
Sepúlveda Llanos, Fidel 366
Serge (pseud.), see Alexandrov, Alexander
Serna, Ismael de la, see González de La Serna,
Ismaël
Sernet, Claude (pseud. of Ernest Spirt) 758
Serra, Laura 55
Servadei, Davide 619
Servi, Renato 411
Servranckx, Victor 330–331, 865
Serzh (pseud.), see Alexandrov, Alexander
Settimelli, Emilio XV, 28, 35, 36–37, 54, 120,
251, 256, 257, 263, 493, 495, 590, 591, 592,
593, 594, 611, 643, 829
Setubal, Paulo 337
Seuphor, Michel (pseud.), see Berckelaers,
Fernand
Severianin, Igor’, see Severyanin, Igor
Severini, Gino 7, 8, 11, 16, 61, 90, 148, 215,
219, 306, 315, 326, 328, 354, 398, 418,
450–451, 454–457, 485, 486, 488–489,
490, 495, 507, 509–510, 512, 518, 519, 548,
568, 601–602, 603, 604, 605, 606, 610,
619, 699, 701, 703, 744, 755, 759, 825,
828, 829, 844, 846, 865, 883, 884, 885,
887, 888, 919
Severus, Lucius Septimius (Roman
Emperor) 180
Severyanin (Severianin), Igor (pseud. of Igor’
Vasil’evich Lotarev) 40, 319, 424–425,
767, 779–783, 785, 786, 918
Shaarawi, Huda (Hoda Sha’rawi; Hudá
Sha’rāwī) 419
Shakespeare, William 270, 401, 528
Name Index 959
Shaw, George Bernard 149, 743
Shawqī, Ahmad 413
Shchekotikhina-Pototskaia, Alexandra
Vasil’evna 89
Sheeler, Charles 887
Shengelaia, Demna 478, 479, 479
Shengelaia, Nikoloz 476, 477, 479
Sherman, Cindy 226
Shershenevich, Vadim Gabrielevich 165, 271,
781, 782, 784, 785, 787
Shevchenko, Aleksandr Vasil’evich 773
Shevchenko, Taras Hryhorovich 853, 860, 861
862–863
Shin, Hyung-chul 654
Shirokov, Pavel Dmitrievich 780, 784
Shklovsky, Viktor (Viktor Borisovich
Shklovskii) 478, 660, 672, 788, 790
Shkolnik, Iosif Solomonovich 265
Shkurupii, Geo (Heorhii) Danilovych (Iurii
Danilovich Shkurupii) 855, 857, 859, 861,
862, 863, 865
Shostakovich, Dmitrii Dmitrievich 204
Shpol, Iulian (pseud. of Mykhailo Ialovyi) 857
Shterenberg, David Petrovich 789
Shymkov, Oleh 865
Sickert, Walter Richard 508, 519
Sidorina, Elena Viktorovna 157
Sidorov, Vladimir Ivanovich, see Baian, Vadim
(pseud.)
Sigüenza, Julio 874
Silenciario, Juan (pseud.) 713
Sillarts (pseud.), see Puriņš, Ernests
Silva Díaz, Agustín 901
Silva Valdés, Fernan 879
Silveira, Paulo 338, 342
Simmel, Georg 150, 688
Simonetti, Cesare 287, 440–441
Sindreu i Pons, Carles 285
Siniakova, Maria (Maryia Mykhailovna
Syniakova-Urechyna) 788
Sinijärv, Karl Martin 430–431
Siqueiros, David Alfaro 685–686, 692–693,
694
Sironi, Mario 1, 16, 38, 418, 606, 610, 643, 832
Sister Smara (pseud.), see Gîrbea, Smaranda
Sivadi, Ardo (pseud. of Anatol Sivard) 429
Siviero, Albino, see Verossì, Plinio (pseud.)
Skitnik, Sirak (pseud. of Panaiot Todorov
Khristov) 359, 360–361
960 Name Index
Skrypnyk, Leonid Gavrilovich 859, 863
Sławińska, Maria 721
Slisarenko, Oleksa 856, 857, 861, 863
Sluyters, Jan (Johannes Carolus Bernardus
Sluyters) 703
Smara, Maica (pseud.), see Gîrbea, Smaranda
Šmejkal, František 381
Soares, Bernardo (heteronym of Fernando
Pessoa) 742
Sobachko, Hanna 866
Södergran, Edith 845–846
Sodoma (pseud. of Giovanni Antonio Bazzi) 419
Soffici, Ardengo 16, 28, 34, 60–61, 119, 162,
164, 167, 168, 219, 226, 250, 287, 289, 410,
417, 450, 453, 454, 455, 456, 469, 471, 473,
488, 489, 495, 496, 509, 510, 513, 588,
589, 601, 603–604, 605, 609, 612, 701,
799, 804, 908
Sologub, Fyodor (pseud. of Fedor Kuz’mich
Teternikov) 317, 787
Solovyov, Vladimir (Vladimir Nikolaevich
Solov’ev) 268
Sōma, Gyofū 634
Somenzi, Bruna, see Brunas (pseud.)
Somenzi, Mino (Stanislao) XV, 38, 76, 233, 235,
241, 610, 614, 913–914
Somigli, Luca 578–599, 930
Sommi-Picenardi, Guido 235, 240
Song, Chunfang 374
Sorel, Georges 30–31, 34, 300, 580
Sotillo, Pedro 900
Sotnyk, Dan 865
Sottsass, Ettore 187
Soublette, Henrique 896–897
Souza-Cardoso, Amadeo, see Cardoso, Amadeu
Ferreira de Sousa
Špacapan, Lojze, see Spazzapan, Luigi
Spadaro, Odoardo 257
Spasov, Petăr 353
Spassky, Sergei (Sergei Dmitrievich
Spasskii) 787
Spazzapan, Luigi (Lojze Spacapan, Luis
Špacapan) 909
Spieros, M. (pseud.), see Kalamarēs, Nikos
Spirt, Ernest (pseud. Mihail Cosma, Claude
Sernet) 758
Sprovieri, Giuseppe 61, 76, 90, 179, 219, 232,
251, 328, 605, 606, 607, 804, 885
Sruoga, Balys 675
Stagni Testi, Fides, see Testi, Fides
Stagnitti, Barbara 17
Stahl, Fritz 699
Stalin, Joseph (pseud. of Iosif Vissarionovich
Dzhugashvili) 160, 204, 443, 476, 678,
710, 860
Stanislavsky, Konstantin (pseud. of Konstantin
Sergeevich Alekseev) 359
Staples, Tim 168
Stażewski, Henryk 729, 732
Stefanović, Siniša 920
Steiks, Jānis 664
Stein, Gertrude 558
Steiner, Giuseppe 287
Steiner, Vera, see Idelson, Vera
Stele, France 38, 42
Stella, Joseph 886–887
Stepanova, Varvara Fedorovna 64, 158–159,
186, 275
Stephan, Halina 793
Steponavičius, Jonas 672
Stern, Anatol 725–727
Stevens, Frances Simpson 885–886
Stieglitz, Alfred 885, 886
Stirner, Max 30
Stockhausen, Karlheinz 204
Storm Petersen, Robert 398
Storozhuk, Andrii Leonidovych, see Chuzhyi,
Andrii (pseud.)
Stounbjerg, Per 396–407, 930
Strada, Nino 92
Stramm, August 353, 404, 488
Straus, Beth (née Elizabeth Allen) 557
Stravinsky, Igor (Igor’ Fedorovich
Stravinskii) 106, 132, 135, 194, 200, 204,
206, 207, 209, 254, 391
Strazdas (Strazdelis), Antanas 671
Strindberg, August 246, 396, 845, 846
Strindberg, Frida, see Uhl, Frida
Strożek, Przemysław 721–735, 391
Strunke, Niklāvs 658, 660–662, 664
Strzemiński, Władysław 728, 729, 732
Subotić, Irina 905–906, 931
Sudeikin, Sergei (Sergei Iur’evich [Georgievich]
Sudeikin) 474
Suetin, Nikolai Mikhailovich 89
Sukhovo-Kobylin, Aleksandr Vasil’evich
158, 275
Sun, Xizhen 375
 Name Index 961

Surkhatian, Harut’iun (Harut’iwn Teineke, J. P. (pseud), see Torop, Kaido

Surkhatian) 317, 218 Tempesti, Giulio 256
Survage, Léopold 109 Terentyev, Igor (Igor’ Gerasimovich
Suta, Romans 657, 660, 662 Terent’ev) 316, 471, 473, 790–791
Sutti, Stefano, see Vaj, Stefano (pseud.) Tereshchenko, Mykola 857
Swanzy, Mary 556–558 Terra, Gabriel 874
Syniakova, Maryia, see Siniakova, Maria Terragni, Giuseppe 75, 225
Szabó, Dezső 541–542 Testi, Carlo Vittorio 187
Szczuka, Mieczysław 725, 729 Testi, Fides (née Fides Stagni) 187
Szerb, Antal 550 Testoni, Tito 913
Teternikov, Fedor Kuz’mich, see Sologub, Fyodor
Tabatadze, Tea 475 (pseud.)
Tabidze, Galaktion 475 Thannhauser, Heinrich 486, 487
Tabidze, Nino 474–475 Thayaht (pseud. of Ernesto Michahelles) 78,
Tabidze, Titsian 470, 474 145, 149–150, 158, 186, 498, 613
Tablada, José Juan 684 Themerson, Stefan 168
Taeye, Edmond-Louis de, see De Taeye, Theodorescu-Sion, Ion 755
Edmond-Louis Theotokas, Giōrgos 530–531
Tairoff, Alexander, see Tairov, Alexander Thorak, Josef 38
Tairov, Alexander (Oleksandr Iakovlevych Þórðarson, Þórbergur 565, 566–568, 571
Tairov, pseud. of Aleksandr Iakovlevich Tihanyi, Lajos 548
Korenblit) 64, 662, 664 Tōgō, Seiji 632, 635, 636, 641–642, 645
Takamura, Kōtarō 630, 634, 635 Tokin, Boško 914, 918, 919
Takamura, Shinpu 633 Tolstoy, Leo (Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoi) 268–269,
Takehisa, Yumeji 636 771, 799, 863
Takoshimo, Tatsunosuki 269, 273 Tomashevsky, Kolya (Konstantin Bronislavovich
Tallarico, Luigi 18 Tomashevskii) 264, 266
Tamara, Nina 273 Tomassetti, Gianni 616
Tange, Kenzo 81 Tomba, Ernesto Amos 618
Taniya, Kyn (pseud.), see Quintanilla, Luis Tommasini, Vittorio Osvaldo, see Farfa (pseud.)
Tano, Bruno 616, 619 Tommei, Ugo 605
Tarulis, Petras (pseud.), see Petrėnas, Juozas Tompros, Michalēs 534
Tasteven, Genrikh Edmundovich 165, 766 Toorop, Jan (Johannes Theodorus Toorop) 700
Tasteven, Henrik, see Tasteven, Genrikh Torello, Georgina 873
Tastevin, Henri, see Tasteven, Genrikh Torop, Kaido (pseud. J. P. Teineke) 430, 431
Tatlin, Vladimir (Volodimyr Evgrafovych Torre, Guillermo de 831, 832
Tatlin) 32, 42, 63, 156, 157, 158, 273, 603, Torres García, Joaquín 307, 833
729, 773, 789, 802, 813, 855, 865 Toscanini, Arturo 36, 195
Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo Sansoni) 9, 76, 91, Toupine, Arthur (pseud.), see Tupiņš, Arturs
93, 96, 145, 180, 182, 183, 187, 222–225, Trauberg, Leonid Zakharovich 107,
389, 409, 418, 498, 612, 614, 615, 616, 272–274, 278
617, 644, 645, 888 Tretyakov, Sergey (Sergei Mikhailovich
Taureg, Ivan Vatslavovich 270 Tret’iakov) 276, 479, 782, 792, 793
Taurek (Clown), see Taureg, Ivan Vatslavovich Tridon, André 884
Taut, Bruno 74 Trifunović, Lazar 922
Tavolato, Italo 496 Trilluci (pseud.), see Maganzini, Umberto
Taylor, Frederick Winslow 272, 274 Troyer, Prosper de, see De Troyer, Prosper
Taylor, Joshua Charles 889 Tsankov, Aleksander Tsolov 355, 358
Teige, Karel 381, 388–390, 756 Tsarouchēs, Giannēs 530
962 Name Index

Tschichold, Jan (Johannes Tzschichhold, Iwan Valančius, Motiejus 671

Tschichold, Ivan Tschichold) 162, 169, Valdelomar, Abraham 709, 712–713, 714
289, 865 Valeria, Irma (pseud. Irma Zorzi Gelmetti)
Tsipuria, Bela 469–483, 931 53, 532
Tulli, Wladimiro 619 Valéry, Paul 746
Tumas-Vaižgantas, Juozas 675 Valishevsky, Ziga (Sigizmund), see Waliszewski,
Tumiati, Gualtiero 256 Zygmunt
Tupiņš, Arturs (pseud. Arthur Toupine) 662 Vallecchi, Attilio 10, 162, 167
Turner, Mark David 111 Valsecchi, Marco 8
Tuukkanen, Bruno 444 Van de Velde, Henry (Henricus
Tuulio, Tyyni 436 Clementinus) 176
Tuwim, Julian 722, 918 Van den Bossche, Bart 325–335, 931
Tyrwhitt-Wilson, Gerald Hugh (14th Baron Van Doesburg, Theo, see Doesburg, Theo van
Berners; known as Lord Berners) 198, 255 Van Gogh, Vincent, see Gogh, Vincent van
Tysliava, Juozas 662, 669, 671, 672673, 675, Van Ostaijen, Paul 168, 290, 329
677, 678 Vannutelli, Gino 411
Tzara, Tristan (pseud. of Samuel Varela y Orbegoso, Luis 713
Rosenstock) 167, 287, 353, 472, 492, 593, Varèse, Edgar 197, 209, 461
755, 757, 758, 759, 897 Varik, Alfred (pseud. of Henrik Visnapuu and
Richard Roht) 424
Udaltsova, Nadezhda (Nadezhda Andreevna Varini, Emilia 256
Udal’tsova) 60, 61, 63, 155, 156, 808, Varoujan, Daniel 315–316
Ueda, Juzō 633 Varslavāns, Francisks 658–659, 662
Ueno, Torao 638 Varvaro, Giovanni 90, 184, 617
Ufagrà (pseud.), see Fiore, Antonio Vasari, Ruggero 79, 201, 460, 493–498,
Uhde, Wilhelm 455 595–596, 637, 642, 659, 660–661,
Uhl, Frida (Maria Friederike Cornelia Strindberg- 730, 921
Uhl) 510 Vasil’ev, Vladimir Pavlovich (Vladimir
Uitz, Béla 548 Vassilev) 360
Ülle, Kauksi (pseud. of Ülle Kahusk) 430 Vasseur, Álvaro Armando (Armand Vasseur) 872
Ulmanis, Kārlis 664 Vassilev, Vladimir, see Vasil’ev, Vladimir
Umberto I, King of Italy 508 Pavlovich
Unamuno, Miguel de 825 Vecchi, Ferruccio 35, 36
Ungaretti, Giuseppe 35, 309, 417, 419, Vechorka, Tat’iana (pseud. of Tat’iana
420, 496 Vladimirovna Efimova, married name
Ungari, [?] (Florentine Futurist) 111 Tolstaia) 471
Urquieta, Miguel Ángel 711–712 Vega, Arqueles 686, 690
Uryū, Yōjirō 630 Velázquez Rivas, María Dolores, see Cueto,
Usachov, Oleksii Ivanovych 865 Dolores
Uslar Pietri, Arturo 895, 899–901 Velde, Henry van de, see Van de Velde, Henry
Uspenskii, Petr Demianovich, see Ouspensky, Vellan, Felice 122
Pyotr Venini, Paolo 177
Uvaliev, Petăr 360 Venna, Lucio 611
Venucci, Romolo 614
Vabbe, Ado 428–429 Verdone, Mario 6, 11–12, 19, 101, 111, 258
Văcărescu, Elena 754 Vergara Grez, Ramón 10
Vaccari, Walter 9 Vergine, Lea 56
Vahtra, Jaan 429 Verhaeren, Émile 425, 545, 755
Vaj, Stefano (pseud. of Stefano Sutti) 620 Veríssimo, José 336–337
 Name Index 963

Verlaine, Paul 360 Waliszewski, Zygmunt (Sigizmund [Zigmunt;

Vermel, Samuil Samuilovich 788 Ziga] Valishevsky) 473
Veroli, Patrizia 129–142, 931 Walkowitz, Abraham 885
Veronesi, Luigi 106 Wall, Jeff 226
Verossì (pseud. of Siviero Albino) 613, 618 Waltari, Mika 442, 443
Versace, Luigi 619 Warchavchik, Gregori 80–81
Versari, Maria Elena 495, 855 Warhol, Andy (pseud. of Andrew Warhola) 889
Vertov, Dziga (pseud. of David Abelevich Wąsowicz, Wacław 723
Kaufman) 107 Wat (Chwat), Aleksander 725–726
Vesnin, Alexander 80 Watanabe, Kichiji 631
Vesnin, Leonid 80 Waterhouse, John Charles Graham 14
Vesnin, Victor 80 Wauer, William 429, 495
Vidbergs, Sigismunds 658, 665 Ważyk, Adam 732
Viggiani, Niccolino 345, 347 Webb, Michael 81
Viljanen, Lauri 442 Weber, Max 885
Villa-Lobos, Heitor 339 Webern, Anton 194
Vinaver, Stanislav 918 Wedekind, Frank 246
Vincenzi, Alberto 533 Weelen, Guy 9
Vinea, Ion (pseud. of Ion Eugen Iovanaki) Weill, Kurt 195
755, 760 Weininger, Andor 136
Vinokur, Grigorii Osipovich 672 Weininger, Otto 49
Viola, Antonio Leone (pseud. Leonviola) 105 Weiss, Peter 849
Viola, Bill 226 Wells, Herbert George 515, 743
Virgì (pseud. of Virgilio Bonifazi) 619 Westheim, Paul 496
Visnapuu, Henrik 423, 424–425, 429 Whitman, Walt (Walter) 367, 425, 711, 712, 713,
Vitali, Lazarneko 107 716, 722, 743, 887
Vittorio Emanuele III, King of Italy 234 Wichman, Erich 703
Viviani, Alberto 60 18, 596 Wiene, Robert 106
Vizgirda, Viktoras 672 Wierzyński, Kazimierz 918
Vlyzko, Oleksa (Oleksa Fedorovych Vlyz’ko) 859 Wiggen, Ulla 849
Volt (pseud. of Vincenzo Fani Ciotti) 145, 149, Wilde, Oscar 64, 741, 780
286–287, 590 Wilder, Thornton Niven 889
Voronca, Ilarie (pseud. of Eduard Marcu) Wilhelm II. (Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert von
758–759, 760 Preußen) 711
Vottero, Elia 533 Williams, William Carlos 283
Vrečko, Janez 906–911, 931 Winkiel, Laura XVII
Vshtuni, Azat 318–320 Winkler, Konrad 724
Vucetich, Mario Mirko 312, 316, 909 Winther, Christian 401
Witkacy (pseud.), see Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy
Wadsworth, Edward 509–510, 512–514, 515, 517 Witkiewicz, Stanisław Ignacy (pseud.
Wagenvoort, Maurits 702–703 Witkacy) 723
Wagner, Otto 68 Witkowski, Roumald Kamil 723
Wagner, Richard 195, 438, 528, 542, 547 Wolf, Nathan Hijman 699–701, 702, 704–705
Wakatsuki, Shiran 632 Wollaeger, Mark XVII
Walden, Herwarth (pseud. of Georg Lewin) 357, Wood, Paul 158
398, 404, 484–498, 660, 699–700, 721, Wright, Edward 169
847, 859, 910 Wulz, Marion 225
Walden, Nell (Nelly Anna Charlotta Wulz, Carlo 225
Urech-Roslund) 485 Wulz, Wanda 225
964 Name Index

Xu, Xu 375–376 Zani, Sofia 912

Zanotti, Pierantonio 628–647, 931
Yakulov, Georg (Gevorg Bogdani Yakulyan) 317 Zanovello Russolo, Maria 13
Yamamoto, Kanae 633 Zarian, Kostan 315–316
Yamamoto, Yūzō 661 Żarnower, Teresa 729
Yamamura, Bochō 635 Zátková, Růžena 16, 52, 148, 381, 385, 387
Yambo (pseud. of Enrico Novelli) 12 Zdanevich, Ilya (Il’ia Mikhailovich Zdanevich;
Yanase, Masamu 635 pseud. Il’iazd; Eli Eganbiuri) 154–155, 168,
Yang, Ju-dong 649 290–291, 316, 469, 471–476, 774, 783,
Yazykanov, Ivan (Ivan Fedorovich 790, 791, 799, 801
Iazykanov) 276 Zdanevich, Kirill Mikhailovich 316, 471–476, 478
Yeats, William Butler 555 Żeromski, Stefan 721
Yermylov, Vasyl’, see Ermylov, Vasyl’ Dmytrovych Zervos, Christian 8
Yesenin, Sergey (Sergei Alexandrovich Zevgas, Antreas (pseud.), see Chourmouzios,
Esenin) 271, 360, 441, 727 Aimilios
Yevreinov, Nikolai (Nikolai Nikolaevich Zhang, Xichen 374
Evreinov) 264, 273 Zharov, Mikhail Ivanovich 275
Yi, Sang 648, 650 Zheng, Zhenduo 375
Yorozu, Tetsugorō 635 Zhgenti, Besarion 478–479
Yosano, Hiroshi 634 Zhorzh (Georges; circus artist), see Rudenko,
Young, Joseph (pseud. Giuseppe Marinetti) 890 Pyotr
Yutkevich, Sergei (Sergei Iosifovich Zhukov, Innokenty Nikolaevich 658
Iutkevich) 271, 273 Žlabys-Žengė, Juozas 670, 671, 672, 674–675,
678
Zacconi, Ermete 256 Zoccoli, Franca 144–153, 931
Zack, Léon, see Zak, Lev Vasil’evich Zola, Émile 445, 527
Zak, Eugeniusz 723 Zolotukhin, Georgy (Georgii Ivanovich
Zak, Lev Vasil’evich (Léon Zack) 782 Zolotukhin) 788
Zāle, Kārlis 494, 657, 658, 660–661 Zoncada, Luigi 256
Zalit, Karl, see Zāle, Kārlis Zorrilla de San Martín, Juan 872
Zaļkalns, Teodors 658 Zucco, Mario 533, 617
Zaltser, Semen 865 Zumthor, Paul 343
Zamoyski, August 723 Župančič, Oton 906, 907
Zamparo, Luigia, see Corona, Gigia Zürcher, Christopher 677
Zampini, Erso 185, 612 Zwaart, Piet 289