The painter who would become the noise man

Luigi Russolo was born into sound. His father was a church organist; two of his older brothers studied at the Milan Conservatory, the city’s great music school. By every reasonable expectation he should have ended up at a keyboard. Instead he picked up a brush, moved to Milan, and trained as a painter. Set that against the thing he is famous for, which is not painting at all: the gap between the two is the whole story of this picture.

At the very end of 1909 Russolo fell in with a young painter named Umberto Boccioni (pronounced “boh-CHOH-nee”), who would become the most important Futurist artist of them all, and through Boccioni he joined the founding circle of a brand-new movement. The movement was Futurism, and it had been launched the way you launch a product, with an announcement, by a poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (“ma-ree-NET-tee”). In 1910 Russolo put his signature on the two documents that turned Futurism from a poet’s press release into a painters’ program: the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (February 1910) and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910), signing alongside Boccioni and three others, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini.

One small precision, because the popular books get it wrong. Russolo did not sign Marinetti’s famous 1909 manifesto, the literary one that launched the whole thing in a Paris newspaper. That was Marinetti’s own solo opening shot. Russolo’s name is on the painters’ manifestos of 1910, a year later. The poet went first and alone; the painters signed up afterward.

So what had Russolo signed up for? Futurism was, in plain terms, a movement in love with the modern industrial world and impatient with everything old. It worshipped the machine, the electric-lit city, the factory, the crowd, and above all speed. Its painters wanted to do something painting had never quite managed: to show motion happening over time, not a single frozen instant but the whole rushing passage of a thing through space, a dog’s legs blurred into a fan, a building site churning, a body smeared into the lines of its own movement.

This was not a gentle program. The 1909 manifesto did not only celebrate cars and cities; it glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and preached “scorn for woman,” in the same breath as militarism, and rang with a violence that was part of the appeal. Marinetti would go on, after the First World War, to help found the Italian Fascist movement. The art is genuinely thrilling and the worship of force genuinely ugly, both at the same time. For now keep the part that built this painting: the cult of speed, and the conviction that the racing car was the new century’s most beautiful object.