Filippo Marinetti and the Futurist Manifesto of 1909
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| Marinetti, about 1915. |
"... and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust I hurled myself - vlan! - head over heels in a ditch.
"Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savoured a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!
"As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart."
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) was the principal author of the 1909 Futurist manifesto, and in the scene above he saves the lives of two clearly ungrateful bicyclists by swerving his car into a ditch. (It's clear that he was driving too fast for conditions. In fact, that was the whole point of his drive - speed.)
I'd been wanting to write a story about Marinetti for some time, but lacked a good source. And then one day my son was browsing in a used bookstore and came across a book by James Joll called Three Intellectuals in Politics. The intellectuals were Leon Blum, Walther Rathenau, and Filippo Marinetti. The book was originally published in 1960; Ben had the 1965 paperback in his hands, and soon it was in my hands. (It's been falling apart as I use it, but I just keep taping the covers back on, and I'm not yet into the next phase of paperback dissolution, which is when individual pages start to fall out of the "perfect binding"glue.)
A quick scan of the bibliography in Marinetti's Wikipedia article indicates that quite a bit of work has been done on him since 1960, but I've decided to content myself with Joll, who, in addition to being a good historian, is a very engaging writer.
Futurism was about speed - particularly cars and airplanes. It was also about love of violence and hatred of women. And it wanted to destroy whatever remained of the past. As the Futurist manifesto put it in point number 9, "We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman." (Joll, pp. 135, 182. The quotation at the beginning of this story is on pp. 181-182. Joll's book contains the full text of the manifesto on pp. 179-184. This is also available online. To see it, click here.)
Marinetti seems particularly annoyed by museums and libraries: "Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries!! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!" (P. 183.)
1910-1914 - Futurism
It's worth noting that none of these ideas was particularly new. The years before World War I were a period of extraordinary cultural ferment, with new ideas, both good and bad, coming forth at a very rapid clip. This was driven by very rapid change in the larger society, which in turn was driven by older movements that were reaching new peaks - particularly the industrial revolution that began in the eighteenth century and the scientific revolution that began in the sixteenth century.
Marinetti's contribution was to package a bunch of seemingly disparate ideas together and then mount an intensive, multi-country marketing campaign: "... during the years 1910 to 1914, he was travelling constantly, lecturing, reciting, organising demonstrations, shocking his hosts and provoking violent reactions everywhere." (P. 150.)
"By stopping at nothing, by using all the devices of publicity he could think of, by revelling in noise, fights and opposition, he forced the public to listen to his slogans, and a good many of them stuck in their minds." (P. 143.) Sounds like Jerry Rubin to me. Or maybe Abbie Hoffman.
A Parisian journalist called Marinetti "the caffeine of Europe." Joll concurs: "... it is as a stimulant to others rather than for its own achievements that Futurism has its greatest importance in the artistic history of the twentieth century." It was people like the Cubists and the Dadaists who actually made the art. (Pp. 155-156.)
1914-1920: Fascism
Marinetti's influence was strong in the literature and visual arts of several countries, but his greatest effect was in the politics of Italy. As Benedetto Croce, one of the grandees of Italian letters, put it: "For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism, in the determination to go down into the streets, to impose their own opinions, to stop the mouths of those who disagree, not to fear riots or fights, in this eagerness to break with all traditions, in this exaltation of youth which was characteristic of Futurism. ..." (P. 143.)
The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought "the end of Futurism as a coherent movement," although it continued to influence the thinking of progressive artists. (P. 168.) Marinetti turned his mind to the challenge of getting Italy into the war (perhaps the worst move the Italian nation has made between its unification in 1861 and the present day - although there are certainly competitors). In this effort he had an ally in Benito Mussolini, a prominent socialist who was in the process of trying to meld his socialism with a fierce Italian nationalism, eventually resulting in a form of national socialism known as fascism.
The two men soon found themselves appearing together at the same rallies. This happened for the first time on March 31, 1915, in Milan. Both men wound up being arrested in connection with a later rally in Rome, on April ll. They didn't stay in jail very long, and on May 23 Italy entered the war. (P. 168.)
Marinetti promptly joined the army, serving in the alpini, a formation of elite mountain troops. He received an award for gallantry. He was also wounded, but recovered and returned to the front, finishing out the war in 1918. (P. 169.)
With the end of World War I, Marinetti returned to Milan and immediately started work on the dopoguerra, or after-the-war. The year 1919 was, in Joll's words, "the year of Marinetti's greatest political notoriety." (P. 170.) He immediately gravitated to Mussolini's fascist party. At the party's foundational meeting in Milan's Piazza San Sepulcro on March 23, 1919, Marinetti spoke immediately after Mussolini, and was also elected to the party's central committee. (P. 171.)
In addition, Marinetti helped form a group of streetfighters called the arditi, building it around a core of combat veterans. (P. 171.)
In Milan on April 15, a socialist demonstration countered by a fascist demonstration turned into a street brawl. Marinetti and his arditi played a key part in the fighting and capped their day by invading and trashing the office of Avanti, the socialist paper that Mussolini had edited before the war. (Pp. 171-172.)
He also co-authored the Fascist manifesto that was published on June 6, 1919, in Il Popolo d'Italia, Mussolini's new newspaper. Marinetti's effort was in sharp contrast to his Futurist manifesto, concentrating on actual political issues like getting an eight-hour work day and giving women the vote. My sense is that Marinetti did not have the upper hand here.
The fascists looked forward to a triumph in the Italian elections at the end of 1919, but the voters had other ideas, and the election was a total flop for Mussolini and his followers. This led to some serious introspection and a search for a way forward. (P. 172.)
One result: "After 1919 the Futurist phase of Fascism was over." (P. 175.) Manifestos and street brawls were all well and good, but they clearly weren't enough. Mussolini looked for people and an approach that would help him seize control of the Italian government. The key result of this search was the discovery of Italo Balbo, who among other things organized the March on Rome in 1922, which resulted in the king of Italy offering the prime minister's chair to Benito Mussolini. (For a lot more on Italo Balbo, see What Happened in Ferrara?)
Mussolini also sought to turn the fascists to the right, even making overtures to the Vatican. Marinetti, a fierce anticlerical, quit the fascist party. After Italy became a fascist state he rejoined the party and continued to be a member until his death, but he was never again to have a position of leadership or influence in either politics or art, so his later life need not concern us here. It's largely unremarkable, but in you're interested, Joll does a good and sensitive job covering the ground on pages 175-176.. I get the sense that Joll actually likes Marinetti. This is not a feeling that I share.
Legacy of a Confusing Career
As I look at Marinetti's dual careers in art and politics, I find myself asking questions for which I do not have answers. I did poke around in his childhood, but I found nothing there that would predict either of his careers.
Filippo Marinetti came from a wealthy north Italian family. He was born and grew up in Egypt (hence the reference to his Sudanese nurse in the scene above where Marinetti is born again from a muddy ditch). His father worked for the local ruler in Egypt, facilitating trade with Italian companies. For his higher education Marinetti went to Paris and studied at the Sorbonne; later he received his law degree from the University of Pavia.
To say that Marinetti was comfortable in Paris would clearly be an understatement. Not surprisingly, since he was wealthy, he decided to write poetry in Paris instead of practicing law in Italy.
Marinetti did write poetry, and he had a large circle of artistically minded friends. But there is nothing here to indicate that his true vocation would be as a trail-blazing propagandist and provocateur.
We're still thinking about Marinetti today because he was the principal author and sole signatory of the Futurist manifesto. This was a document which, at the time, had significant influence across a number of art forms in a substantial number of countries.
May I have the temerity to say that the Futurist manifesto is a piece of crap? The writing is confused and often verges on incoherence. As a political platform it strikes me as a disjointed bit of carpentry with a number of rotten planks.
I know that misogyny was popular at the time, as it seems to be in America today, but misogyny does have the bad habit of bumping up against reality. As Joll notes, "There were few fields of Futurist activity where precept and practice were further apart." For instance, Marinetti happily lent a friend the money he needed to get married, "and yet it was equally typical that, when the young couple arrived back in Milan, the speeches against marriage at the party held by the Futurists to celebrate their return were so violent that ... the bride, who was only sixteen, burst into tears." (P. 161.)
I think Marinetti's career suffers from the same defects that mar the Futurist manifesto. I have yet to find a through-line between his work in the art world from 1909 to 1914 and his later political work from 1914 to 1920. The only thing that unites these two wildly different worlds is Marinetti's talent as a propagandist and a provocateur, which he used effectively in both worlds.
I do think I've started to see some other threads. Here's one. Joll's treatment of Futurism's influence on architecture centers on Antonio Sant'Elia, who died during the Eighth Battle of the Assonzo in 1916, leaving very little in the way of completed buildings, but also a number of drawings and writings that have influence to this day. His thought that "the use of steel and concrete and the absence of decoration would make 'the Futurist house like a giant machine'" was echoed by Le Corbusier, whose famous quote is "The house is a machine for living in," or La maison est une machine à habiter. (I found this in the 1925 edition of Le Corbusier's Vers une architecture, on page ix, in a section on airplanes, or avions. It's also on page 83. Vers une architecture was first published in 1923; it contains material from his contributions to the new periodical L'Esprit Nouveau, which first appeared in October 1920. None of this means that Le Corbusier owes his epigram to Sant'Elia, but it does seem that Sant'Elia, who died in 1916, got there first.)
Sant'Elia also insisted that buildings should have no stairs, only elevators. I'm pretty sure the fire marshals would have been unhappy with that idea. (On Sant'Elia, see pp. 148-149, 169.)
I think that Futurism had another important effect on architecture. It's an idea that was best expressed by an American army officer during the Vietnam war: "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
In its Apollonian moments, the Futurist manifesto talks about machines and speed, which are cool. In its Dionysian moments, it talks about violence and destruction, which creates space for the new to flourish.
This second idea seems to have appealed to many in the architecture profession in the first half of the twentieth century. I've spent a fair amount of time looking for documentation on this, but I haven't really found it. So I freely admit that my thought is simply a conjecture.
Here's my thought: A widely held belief in the architectural community that modern architecture should replace older forms of architecture contributed to a demolition mania that was particularly evident in the United States in the decades after World War II. This mania had, in my opinion, its greatest success with the destruction of Penn Station in New York City between 1963 and 1966 (it took a while) and its replacement by a new station that treats people like rats in a maze.
The old building, designed by McKim, Mead & White, had subscribed to the Ecole des Beaux Arts approach that treated humans with respect and provided a meaningful progression through a series of related spaces. Apparently these ideas were seen as unnecessary relics of the past.
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| Penn Station, main concourse, 1910. |
I think it would be unfair to blame Charles Luckman, the architect who fitted Madison Square Garden on top of the truncated train station, for all or even most of this travesty. The Pennsylvania Railroad owned the station, and I think it's fair to say that the company had lost interest in railroading (admittedly a tough business at the time) and had taken to viewing itself as at least aspirationally a real-estate company that was happy to generate cash flow by cannibalizing its crown jewel assets.
It's generally agreed that the destruction of Penn station triggered the birth of the historic preservation movement in the United States. The developers soon targeted Grand Central Terminal, but a curious thing happened. In 1975, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis wrote a letter to New York's mayor, Abe Beame, asking him to protect Grand Central from the wrecking ball. Here's an excerpt: "Is it not cruel to let our city die by degrees, stripped of all her proud monuments, until there will be nothing left of all her history and beauty to inspire our children? If they are not inspired by the past of our city, where will they find the strength to fight for her future?"
As I was reading this letter, it occurred to me why the Futurists were so devoted to "contempt for woman." Futurism was about unbridled activity by young men. Women often act as a stabilizing force on such young men - mothers, Sudanese nurses, girlfriends, wives. And possibly, later, if they're lucky, an older version of the young man may find a daughter to be a source of stability and support. Sons can also fulfill this role, although they will do it differently.
But the Futurists did not want to be stabilized, and Marcel Breuer really did want to knock down Grand Central. Jackie (and her many friends) stopped him.
For a recent article on Marinetti in the Guardian, click here.
See also Do We Secretly Want Ugly Cities and Dangerous Streets? Did Carpet Bombing Inspire Urban Renewal? What Happened in Ferrara? Night Lights in Coney Island.
