HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (; 22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and
Symbolist Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realis ...
artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the first '' Futurist Manifesto'', which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.


Childhood and adolescence

Emilio Angelo Carlo Marinetti (some documents give his name as "Filippo Achille Emilio Marinetti") spent the first years of his life in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father (Enrico Marinetti) and his mother (Amalia Grolli) lived together ''more uxorio'' (as if married). Enrico was a lawyer from Piedmont, and his mother was the daughter of a literary professor from Milan. They had come to Egypt in 1865, at the invitation of
Khedive Khedive (, ota, خدیو, hıdiv; ar, خديوي, khudaywī) was an honorific title of Persian origin used for the sultans and grand viziers of the Ottoman Empire, but most famously for the viceroy of Egypt from 1805 to 1914.Adam Mestyan"Kh ...
Isma'il Pasha, to act as legal advisers for foreign companies that were taking part in his modernization program. His love for literature developed during the school years. His mother was an avid reader of poetry, and introduced the young Marinetti to the Italian and European classics. At age seventeen he started his first school magazine, ''Papyrus''; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for publicizing Émile Zola's scandalous novels in the school. He first studied in Egypt then in Paris, obtaining a ''
baccalauréat The ''baccalauréat'' (; ), often known in France colloquially as the ''bac'', is a French national academic qualification that students can obtain at the completion of their secondary education (at the end of the ''lycée'') by meeting certain ...
'' degree in 1894 at the Sorbonne, and in Italy, graduating in law at the University of Pavia in 1899. He decided not to be a lawyer but to develop a literary career. He experimented with every type of literature (poetry, narrative, theatre, ''words in liberty''), signing everything "Filippo Tommaso Marinetti".


Futurism

Marinetti and
Constantin Brâncuși Constantin Brâncuși (; February 19, 1876 – March 16, 1957) was a Romanian Sculpture, sculptor, painter and photographer who made his career in France. Considered one of the most influential sculptors of the 20th-century and a pioneer of ...
were visitors of the Abbaye de Créteil c. 1908 along with young writers like Roger Allard (one of the first to defend
Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In Cubist artwork, objects are analyzed, broken up and reassemble ...
), Pierre Jean Jouve, and Paul Castiaux, who wanted to publish their works through the Abbaye. The Abbaye de Créteil was a ''
phalanstère A ''phalanstère'' (or phalanstery) was a type of building designed for a self-contained utopian community, ideally consisting of 500–2000 people working together for mutual benefit, and developed in the early 19th century by Charles Fourier. ...
'' community founded in the autumn of 1906 by the painter Albert Gleizes, and the poets
René Arcos René (''born again'' or ''reborn'' in French) is a common first name in French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and German-speaking countries. It derives from the Latin name Renatus. René is the masculine form of the name (Renée being the feminine ...
, Henri-Martin Barzun, Alexandre Mercereau and Charles Vildrac. The movement drew its inspiration from the ''Abbaye de Thélème,'' a fictional creation by Rabelais in his novel '' Gargantua''. It was closed down by its members early in 1908.Daniel Robbins, ''Albert Gleizes, 1881–1953, a Retrospective Exhibition'', Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 1964 (Guggenheim website)
/ref> Marinetti is known best as the author of the '' Futurist Manifesto'', which he wrote in 1909. It was published in French on the front page of the most prestigious French daily newspaper, '' Le Figaro'', on 20 February 1909. In ''The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism'', Marinetti declared that "Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice." Georges Sorel, who influenced the entire political spectrum from anarchism to Fascism, also argued for the importance of violence. Futurism had both anarchist and Fascist elements; Marinetti later became an active supporter of
Benito Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (; 29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 194 ...
. Marinetti, who admired speed, had a minor car accident outside Milan in 1908 when he veered into a ditch to avoid two cyclists. He referred to the accident in the Futurist Manifesto: the Marinetti who was helped out of the ditch was a new man, determined to end the pretense and decadence of the prevailing Liberty style. He discussed a new and strongly revolutionary programme with his friends, in which they should end every artistic relationship with the past, "destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy". Together, he wrote, "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene— militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman". The Futurist Manifesto was read and debated all across Europe, but Marinetti's first 'Futurist' works were not as successful. In April, the opening night of his drama ''Le Roi bombance'' (The Feasting King), written in 1905, was interrupted by loud, derisive whistling by the audience... and by Marinetti himself, who thus introduced another element of Futurism, "the desire to be heckled." Marinetti did, however, fight a duel with a critic he considered too harsh. His drama ''La donna è mobile'' (Poupées électriques), first presented in Turin, was not successful either. Nowadays, the play is remembered through a later version, named ''Elettricità sessuale'' (Sexual Electricity), and mainly for the appearance onstage of humanoid automatons, ten years before the Czech writer Karel Čapek invented the term '' robot''. In 1910 his first novel, ''Mafarka il futurista'', was cleared of all charges by an obscenity trial. That year, Marinetti discovered some allies in three young painters ( Umberto Boccioni,
Carlo Carrà Carlo Carrà (; February 11, 1881 – April 13, 1966) was an Italian painter and a leading figure of the Futurist movement that flourished in Italy during the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to his many paintings, he wrote a number ...
, Luigi Russolo), who adopted the Futurist philosophy. Together with them (and with poets such as Aldo Palazzeschi), Marinetti began a series of Futurist Evenings, theatrical spectacles in which Futurists declaimed their manifestos in front of a crowd that in part attended the performances to throw vegetables at them. The most successful "happening" of that period was the publicization of the "Manifesto Against Past-Loving
Venice Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400  ...
" in Venice. In the flier, Marinetti demands "fill(ing) the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing and leprous palaces" to "prepare for the birth of an industrial and militarized Venice, capable of dominating the great
Adriatic The Adriatic Sea () is a body of water separating the Italian Peninsula from the Balkans, Balkan Peninsula. The Adriatic is the northernmost arm of the Mediterranean Sea, extending from the Strait of Otranto (where it connects to the Ionian Sea) ...
, a great Italian lake." In 1911, the Italo-Turkish War began and Marinetti departed for Libya as war correspondent for a French newspaper. His articles were eventually collected and published in ''The Battle of Tripoli''. He then covered the First Balkan War of 1912–13, witnessing the surprise success of Bulgarian troops against the Ottoman Empire in the Siege of Adrianople. In this period he also made a number of visits to London, which he considered 'the Futurist city par excellence', and where a number of exhibitions, lectures and demonstrations of Futurist music were staged. However, although a number of artists, including Wyndham Lewis, were interested in the new movement, only one British convert was made, the young artist
C.R.W. Nevinson Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (13 August 1889 – 7 October 1946) was an English figure and landscape painter, etcher and lithographer, who was one of the most famous war artists of World War I. He is often referred to by his initial ...
. Nevertheless, Futurism was an important influence upon Lewis's Vorticist philosophy. About the same time Marinetti worked on a very anti- Roman Catholic and anti- Austrian verse-novel, ''Le monoplan du Pape'' (''The Pope's Aeroplane'', 1912) and edited an anthology of futurist poets. But his attempts to renew the style of poetry did not satisfy him. So much so that, in his foreword to the anthology, he declared a new revolution: it was time to be done with traditional syntax and to use "words in freedom" (''parole in libertà''). His sound-poem '' Zang Tumb Tumb'', an account of the Battle of Adrianople, exemplifies words in freedom. Recordings can be heard of Marinetti reading some of his sound poems: ''Battaglia, Peso + Odore'' (1912); ''Dune, parole in libertà'' (1914); ''La Battaglia di Adrianopoli'' (1926) (recorded 1935).


Wartime

Marinetti agitated for Italian involvement in World War I, and once Italy was engaged, promptly volunteered for service. In the fall of 1915 he and several other Futurists who were members of the Lombard Volunteer Cyclists were stationed at Lake Garda, in Trentino province, high in the mountains along the Italo-Austrian border. They endured several weeks of fighting in harsh conditions before the cyclists units, deemed inappropriate for mountain warfare, were disbanded. Marinetti spent most of 1916 supporting Italy's war effort with speeches, journalism, and theatrical work, then returned to military service as a regular army officer in 1917. In May of that year he was seriously wounded while serving with an artillery battalion on the Isonzo front; he returned to service after a long recovery, and participated in the decisive Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto in October 1918.


Marriage

After an extended courtship, in 1923 Marinetti married Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), a writer and painter and a pupil of Giacomo Balla. Born in Rome, she had joined the Futurists in 1917. They'd met in 1918, moved in together in Rome, and chose to marry only to avoid legal complications on a lecture tour of Brazil. They had three daughters: Vittoria, Ala, and Luce. Cappa and Marinetti collaborated on a genre of mixed-media assemblages in the mid-1920s they called ''tattilismo'' ("Tactilism"), and she was a strong proponent and practitioner of the
aeropittura Aeropittura (''Aeropainting'') was a major expression of the second generation of Italian Futurism, from 1929 through the early 1940s. The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters,
movement after its inception in 1929. She also produced three experimental novels. Cappa's major public work is likely a series of five murals at the Palermo Post Office (1926–1935) for the Fascist public-works architect Angiolo Mazzoni.


Marinetti and Fascism

In early 1918 he founded the ''Partito Politico Futurista'' or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later merged with
Benito Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (; 29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who founded and led the National Fascist Party. He was Prime Minister of Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his deposition in 194 ...
's '' Fasci Italiani di Combattimento''. Marinetti was one of the first affiliates of the
Italian Fascist Party The National Fascist Party ( it, Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF) was a political party in Italy, created by Benito Mussolini as the political expression of Italian Fascism and as a reorganization of the previous Italian Fasces of Combat. The ...
. In 1919 he co-wrote with Alceste De Ambris the Fascist Manifesto, the original manifesto of Italian Fascism. He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, terming them "reactionary," and, after walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, withdrew from politics for three years. However, he remained a notable force in developing the party philosophy throughout the regime's existence. For example, at the end of the ''Congress of Fascist Culture'' that was held in Bologna on 30 March 1925, Giovanni Gentile addressed
Sergio Panunzio Sergio Panunzio (20 July 1886 – 8 October 1944) was an Italian theoretician of national syndicalism. In the 1920s, he became a major theoretician of Italian Fascism. Early life Sergio Panunzio was born on 20 July 1886 in Molfetta, Italy. ...
on the need to define Fascism more purposefully by way of Marinetti's opinion, stating, "Great spiritual movements make recourse to precision when their primitive inspirations—what F. T. Marinetti identified this morning as artistic, that is to say, the creative and truly innovative ideas, from which the movement derived its first and most potent impulse—have lost their force. We today find ourselves at the very beginning of a new life and we experience with joy this obscure need that fills our hearts—this need that is our inspiration, the genius that governs us and carries us with it." As part of his campaign to overturn tradition, Marinetti also attacked traditional Italian food. His ''Manifesto of Futurist Cooking'' was published in the Turin '' Gazzetta del Popolo'' on 28 December 1930. Arguing that "People think, dress and act in accordance with what they drink and eat", Marinetti proposed wide-ranging changes to diet. He condemned pasta, blaming it for lassitude, pessimism and lack of virility, and promoted the eating of Italian-grown rice. In this, as in other ways, his proposed Futurist cooking was nationalistic, rejecting foreign foods and food names. It was also militaristic, seeking to stimulate men to be fighters. Marinetti also sought to increase creativity. His attraction to whatever was new made scientific discoveries appealing to him, but his views on diet were not scientifically based. He was fascinated with the idea of processed food, predicting that someday pills would replace food as a source of energy, and calling for the creation of "plastic complexes" to replace natural foods. Food, in turn, would become a matter of artistic expression. Many of the meals Marinetti described and ate resemble performance art, such as the "Tactile Dinner", recreated in 2014 for an exhibit at the Guggenheim Museum. Participants wore pajamas decorated with sponge, sandpaper, and aluminum, and ate salads without using cutlery. During the Fascist regime Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Italy but failed to do so. Mussolini was personally uninterested in art and chose to give patronage to numerous styles to keep artists loyal to the regime. Opening the exhibition of art by the Novecento Italiano group in 1923, he said: "I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view." Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, successfully promoted the rival Novecento Group, and even persuaded Marinetti to be part of its board. In Fascist Italy, modern art was tolerated and even approved by the Fascist hierarchy. Towards the end of the 1930s, some Fascist ideologues (for example, the ex-Futurist Ardengo Soffici) wished to import the concept of " degenerate art" from Germany to Italy and condemned modernism, although their demands were ignored by the regime. In 1938, hearing that Adolf Hitler wanted to include Futurism in a traveling exhibition of degenerate art, Marinetti persuaded Mussolini to refuse to let it enter Italy. On 17 November 1938, Italy passed The Racial Laws, discriminating against Italian Jews, much as the discrimination pronounced in the Nuremberg Laws. The antisemitic trend in Italy resulted in attacks against modern art, judged too foreign, too radical and anti-nationalist.''Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe''
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2014
In the 11 January 1939 issue of the Futurist journal, ''Artecrazia'' Marinetti expressed his condemnation of such attacks on modern art, noting Futurism is both Italian and nationalist, not foreign, and stating that there were no Jews in Futurism. Furthermore, he claimed Jews were not active in the development of modern art. Regardless, the Italian state shut down ''Artecrazia''. Marinetti made numerous attempts to ingratiate himself with the regime, becoming less radical and avant garde with each attempt. He relocated from Milan to Rome. He became an academician despite his condemnation of academies, saying, "It is important that Futurism be represented in the Academy." He was an atheist, but by the mid 1930s he had come to accept the influence of the Catholic Church on Italian society. In ''Gazzetta del Popolo'', 21 June 1931, Marinetti proclaimed that "Only Futurist artists...are able to express clearly...the simultaneous dogmas of the Catholic faith, such as the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception and Christ's Calvary." In his last works, written just before his death in 1944 ''L'aeropoema di Gesù'' ("The Aeropoem of Jesus") and
Quarto d'ora di poesia per the X Mas
' ("A Fifteen Minutes' Poem of the tenth MAS"), Marinetti sought to reconcile his newfound love for God and his passion for the action that accompanied him throughout his life. There were other contradictions in his character: despite his nationalism, he was international, educated in Egypt and France, writing his first poems in French, publishing the Futurist Manifesto in a French newspaper and traveling to promote his ideas. Marinetti volunteered for active service in the
Second Italo-Abyssinian War The Second Italo-Ethiopian War, also referred to as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, was a war of aggression which was fought between Italy and Ethiopia from October 1935 to February 1937. In Ethiopia it is often referred to simply as the Itali ...
and the Second World War, serving on the Eastern Front for a few weeks in the Summer and Autumn of 1942 at the age of 65.Ialongo, Ernest; ''Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics'', p.289; Rowman & Littlefield, 2015; , 9781611477573 He died of cardiac arrest in Bellagio on 2 December 1944 while working on a collection of poems praising the wartime achievements of the Decima Flottiglia MAS.


Writings

* Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, ''Il Fascino dell'Egitto (The Charm of Egypt),'' A. Mondadori – Editore, 1933, https://archive.org/details/marinetti_fascino_1933A/page/n3/mode/2up
Italian version available online
*Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: ''Mafarka the Futurist. An African novel'', Middlesex University Press, 1998,
Italian version available online
* Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: ''Selected Poems and Related Prose'', Yale University Press, 2002, * Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: ''Critical Writings'', ed. by Günter Berghaus, New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006, 549p., , pocket edition 2008: * Carlo Schirru, Per un’analisi interlinguistica d’epoca: Grazia Deledda e contemporanei, Rivista Italiana di Linguistica e di Dialettologia, Fabrizio Serra editore, Pisa-Roma, Anno XI, 2009, pp. 9–32 * Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ''Le Futurisme'', textes annotés et préfacés par Giovanni Lista, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1980 * Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ''Les Mots en liberté futuristes'', préfacés par Giovanni Lista, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1987 * Giovanni Lista, ''F. T. Marinetti'', Éditions Seghers, Paris, 1976 * ''Marinetti et le futurisme'', poèmes, études, documents, iconographie, réunis et préfacés par Giovanni Lista, bibliographie établie par Giovanni Lista, L’Age d’Homme, Lausanne, 1977 * Giovanni Lista, ''F. T. Marinetti, l’anarchiste du futurisme'', Éditions Séguier, Paris, 1995 * Giovanni Lista, ''Le Futurisme : création et avant-garde'', Éditions L’Amateur, Paris, 2001 * Giovanni Lista, ''Le Futurisme, une avant-garde radicale'', coll. "
Découvertes Gallimard (, ; in United Kingdom: ''New Horizons'', in United States: ''Abrams Discoveries'') is an editorial collection of illustrated monographic books published by the Éditions Gallimard in pocket format. The books are concise introductions to pa ...
" (n° 533), Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2008. * Giovanni Lista, ''Journal des Futurismes'', Éditions Hazan, coll. "Bibliothèque", Paris, 2008 () * Antonino Reitano, ''L'onore, la patria e la fede nell'ultimo Marinetti'', Angelo Parisi Editore, 2006 * Barbara Meazzi, ''Il fantasma del romanzo. Le futurisme italien et l'écriture romanesque (1909–1929)'', Chambéry, Presses universitaires Savoie Mont Blanc, 2021, 430 pp.,


References


Further reading

* Robbins, Daniel
''Sources of Cubism and Futurism'', Art Journal, Vol. 41, No. 4, (Winter 1981): pp. 324–327
College Art Association * * * *


External links


ItalianFuturism.org: news, exhibitions, and scholarship pertaining to the Futurist Movement
* * *
Works of F.T. Marinetti
digitized on Internet Archive by Archivio del '900 of Mart, in Rovereto
Image of Le Figaro with ''Le Futurisme'' (1909)




published at LTM * Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Libroni on Futurism
Images derived from slides taken of seven scrapbooks compiled by Marinetti between 1905 and 1944 from th
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Italian male classical composers Italian classical composers Italian male poets Italian anti-communists Italian Futurism Italian military personnel of World War I Italian military personnel of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War Italian military personnel of World War II Italian Roman Catholics Converts to Roman Catholicism from atheism or agnosticism 1876 births 1944 deaths Futurism Futurist composers Futurist writers Italian writers in French Italian magazine editors Italian art critics Members of the Royal Academy of Italy Italian magazine founders Modernist writers People from Alexandria People of the Italian Social Republic War correspondents of the Balkan Wars Burials at the Cimitero Monumentale di Milano 19th-century classical composers 20th-century classical composers 19th-century Italian composers 20th-century Italian composers 19th-century Italian poets 20th-century Italian poets 19th-century Italian writers 20th-century Italian male writers 19th-century Italian male writers Anti-Masonry Italian male non-fiction writers 20th-century Italian male musicians 19th-century Italian male musicians