Word: marinetti
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Futurism made the most noise at the start. The futurist painters' manifestos of 1910, written by that inspired poet and arch-hypester Filippo T. Marinetti and signed by a clutch of brilliantly gifted artists (Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini), declared war on cultural history -- "the enthusiasm for everything worm-eaten, rotting with filth, eaten away by time...
...antiquarian fakers, magnet of universal snobbishness and stupidity . . . We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice. Let us fill the stinking little canals with the rubble of the tottering, infected old palaces! Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots." Thus Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his friends, the futurist painters, in a manifesto from 1910. It is a delicious irony that the most important exhibition in Europe this summer (or indeed anywhere else) should be a giant display of futurist paintings, sculpture, books, pamphlets, posters and memorabilia in a palace, no longer tottering...
...excellent place to look at art. The show has art and a good deal else, including such totems of futurist affection as a 1911 Bleriot monoplane and a World War I Spad hanging from the cortile roof, and a vintage Bugatti by the canal entrance, to remind one of Marinetti's belligerent and much quoted dictum that "a roaring motorcar that seems to run ( on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace...
...bedded deep in Italian life. The core of the futurist group, which coalesced in the early 1900s, was made up of the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, the architect Antonio Sant'Elia and a few writers clustered around the figure of Marinetti, poet, dandy, ringmaster, publicist and red-hot explainer to the global village -- "the caffeine of Europe," as he called himself. They were all Italian; to be Italian then was to inherit a culture dominated by the weight of the Tuscan and Roman past and by a technologically backward economy based largely...
...invention, but also remembering. It is never in a real artist's interest to "abolish" the past, which is impossible anyway. Boccioni, in particular, kept paying it homage: his striding bronze figure in space, included in the Venice show, alludes to the same Victory of Samothrace that Marinetti thought less beautiful than a car; the figures who scurry frantically about the two battling women in the Milan Galleria in his Riot at the Gallery, 1910, look like the ghostly crowds in the background of Tintorettos. What the futurists opposed was not so much the past itself as the mind...