Word: severini
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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...
...futurists promised a bright churning world of dynamism, machine worship, speed and conflict. As the machines dated, so did some of the paintings. A work like Severini's Plastic Synthesis of the Idea "War," 1915 -- his response to the general mobilization of the French army, painted in Paris -- seems, with its antique gun limber and biplane wings, almost as nostalgic an image as a battle piece by Paolo Uccello. But others have not dated. In particular, the spiking and whorling of translucent mechanical forms in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, can be seen as one of the great pictorial images...
...aggressively internationalist stance, looking to a future world unified by technology. Yet its rhetoric was 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...
...only avant-garde movement in our century that can be shown to have had some formative effect on politics, and even that is debatable, acted on the right, not on the left. It was futurism, whose ideas and rhetoric (rather than the works of art actually painted by Balla, Severini or Boccioni) bodied forth some of the mythology of Italian Fascism. The futurist ethos expressed by Marinetti before World War I, with its cult of speed, male potency, antifeminism and violent struggle, supplied the oratorical framework for Mussolini's rise to power and set the stage for his appearance...