can art history be modified memory?

In Milan, 2009, the largest exhibition ever held on Futurism opened in Italy, at Palazzo Reale. Marking the movement’s first centenary, the display Futurismo 1909-2009: Velocità + Arte + Azione [Futurism 1909-2009: Speed + Art + Action] was organized to be the first great celebration and reconstitution of the Italian avant-garde movement.¹ The exhibition had, however, a little problem: the timeline of its works ended with World War I. It’s surely necessary to acknowledge that the conflict represented a breaking point for the futurist avant-garde, as it led to the death of some of its key figures, in special, Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia. But why should the main event in celebration of Futurism set aside, or, more specifically, erase from memory, half of its story as an art movement?

To answer that question, first and foremost, we ought to trace a timeline for the history of Futurism.

On February 20th, 1909, the parisian newspaper Le Figaro published Manifesto of Futurism, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. From the beginning, its avant-garde aspirations were clear. The term “avant-garde” stemmed from vocabulary used by the Italian military. As defined by the Treccani dictionary, it stands for the frontline unit of an advancing army, whose purpose is to secure it. However, from the beginning of the 20th century onward, this term also began to define art movements that stood for new forms of expression in contrast to tradition, underlining their impetuous and sometimes violent manner. The Manifesto establishes the key points that distinguish Futurism: love for technology, velocity and innovation; as well as violence and hatred to pastism. Marinetti, father of Futurism, concludes the manifesto:

“It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish FUTURISM, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians.”²

At the time, Italy faced a moment of rapid transformation and many grew closer to Futurism. Its debut was hosted in Milan, a city most well known for the technological innovation and industrial revolution brought upon the country, and where the Italian avant-garde movement shone through its first phase with great splendor, which established a connection between art and all aspects of life. It’s precisely the years of 1910s that represent the most intense and experimental moment of this art movement, the acclaimed phase known as Primo Futurismo [First Futurism]. Between 1909 and 1915, many futurist manifestos were published, such as the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (1915), by Fortunato Depero and Giacomo Balla.

With the advent of the first world war, the movement goes through a breaking point which marks the beginning of its new era: the Second Futurism. The conflict led to various deaths among members and dispersed the ideals of its many artists, but nonetheless, it undoubtedly brought life to a new wave of studies mostly dedicated to the mechanic arts and cult of the machine. We may pinpoint the end of the futurist trajectory only at the death of its idealizer and spokesperson, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, in 1944.³

But what had happened during Second Futurism so that in 2009 the curators for the Milanese exhibition would suppress more than half of its movement’s history? What is it about the memory of the only major Italian avant-garde that makes it so distressing?

Part of this lies within the fact that some of Futurism’s essential characteristics, such as the praise of masculinity and the glorification of violence, were continuously appropriated by the incipient fascist ideology⁴

It is necessary, however, to re-examine the First Futurism’s attitude. In its starting years, many futurists showed themselves fonder of the anarchist ideology than that of praise towards the State, which was the base for (then newborn) totalitarianism.

For many decades there has been some sort of assimilation between fascist ideology and the futurist movement, leading the latter to become a distressing subject. However, such association, which culminated on an overbearing correspondence between the two in public opinion and that still today results in commentary such as “all futurists were fascists” actually works in the opposite direction: it’s not futurists that adopt fascist culture, but rather fascism that appropriates part of futurist theory.

To examine in practice the gradual appropriation and purification process of Futurism’s most subversive aspects, we may analyse concrete examples: Futurist Synthesis of War (1914) [fig. 1] and Synthesis of The Great War (1918) [fig. 2].

The first stems from the work of Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo and Piatti, immediately following an interventionist protest⁵ that took place in Milan, a model that would be used again in 1919 by El Lissitzky to create the poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. In the former we see a large triangle grouping eight nations and their respective virtues, converging to the word FUTURISM and pointing to what it defeats, PASTISM. Outside the triangle lay all the notions which the futurists stood against, aligned with Germany and Austria: we read terms such as clericalism, papalism and even stupidity.

As for the Synthesis of The Great War, the difference is glaring. The poster’s communicative and typographical efficacy are entirely reutilized in a patriotic and nationalistic shift, replacing FUTURISM for FREEDOM and putting it against BARBARISM instead of PASTISM. Other than that, black and white are overridden by the colors of the Italian flag. Although this poster had been published in Il Montello magazine in 1918,⁶ hence in a time too early to speak of fascism (given that Fasci Italiani di Combattimento, political movement that later turns into the National Fascist Party, is founded only in 1919), it’s already blatant how futuristic aesthetic is instrumentalized within nationalistic coding.

For scholars of humanities, the role of memory in the perception of history is evident. Memory shifts and shapes itself with time, and for as long as that’s not properly addressed with proper education, risks are enormous. The diffusion of a narrative other than that of reality will always be the greatest of them. In Italy, distancing from Fascism and all that surrounded it led to the erroneous stigmatization of an artistic phenomena historically more complex than what the association with Fascism had allowed to see. Many are the difficulties to challenge a widespread common memory, to contradict a falsehood that mixes in between factual history and to distance oneself from clichés. Maybe the easiest path to take would be to turn a blind eye, swiping like dust everything distressing under the rug, but the results of an operation such as that would be devastating.

It’s that kind of logic that led to the erasure of Second Futurism from the Futurismo 1909-2009: Velocità + Arte + Azione exhibition. Therefore, our efforts as scholars should drive us to find a historical reality not yet distorted, to restore a memory that’s coherent with all that was reality and, above all, to reconstruct the process which the memory we have today was developed from.

In the case of Futurism, we could talk of a political instrumentalization of memory which is still occurring today and shows, by its own, the importance of the role carried out by art history in society.

Therefore, memory may in fact alter art history, and it’s up to scholars to shed light on the processes and mechanisms behind the creation of those memories.