From Marinetti to MoMA

Here is the painting’s life as an object, its provenance, the documented chain of who owned it, from the studio to the wall it hangs on now. It starts where a lot of Futurist things start: with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement’s founder and tireless impresario, the man who wrote the 1909 manifesto and ran Futurism like a one-man publicity machine. The canvas was held on consignment to Marinetti in Milan (meaning he kept it to show and to sell on the artist’s behalf, not as his outright property) from 1912 until around 1925.

There is a wrinkle worth flagging, because museums are usually too proud to print this kind of thing and MoMA, to its credit, does. Severini himself later told a different early story: that he first sold the painting to the Paris dealer Léonce Rosenberg, who then sold it on to its next owner. Severini did sign a contract with Rosenberg, in 1919, so the names aren’t invented. But MoMA states plainly that this part of the artist’s account could not be confirmed. So we do what a careful record does: we follow the documented chain, Marinetti’s consignment, and we keep Severini’s Rosenberg version where it belongs, as the artist’s own unverified recollection. Memory, fittingly for this painting, is not quite the same as the record.

By 1935 the painting was in England, in the collection of Richard Wyndham (1896–1948), a British painter and collector. It stayed with him until he died in 1948, and then his estate did what estates do: it sold. On 24 November 1948, the canvas went up at Sotheby’s in London, and it was there that the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it. (The hammer price isn’t published in MoMA’s record, so we won’t guess at one.) The museum dates the accession to 1949, the year just after the sale closed, under a credit line you will see on other great MoMA pictures: Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest (by exchange), meaning it was funded not by fresh cash but by trading away or selling other works from a founding donor’s gift. Its accession number is 288.1949, and it has hung in New York ever since.

It is worth ending honestly, because Futurism does not have a clean afterlife and this picture is the gentle face of a movement that turned ugly. Marinetti’s founding manifesto had glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene” and sang the praises of violence and contempt for the past; the worship of force was baked in from the first sentence. When the First World War came, the Futurists cheered it on, and several of them marched into it. Boccioni, the movement’s strongest painter, died in 1916 after a fall from a horse in training. Marinetti himself went further still: in 1919 he helped found the political movement that became Italian Fascism, the authoritarian, violence-celebrating nationalist movement Mussolini would ride to power in 1922. Marinetti co-wrote its first manifesto and tied Futurism’s name to Mussolini’s. The cult of speed and force found its terrible logical home in politics.

Severini’s own path was milder but not clean. He drifted away from Futurism after the war, swung back toward a calmer, more classical kind of painting, and lived a long, productive, much-honored life; in the 1920s and ’30s he took official commissions, murals and mosaics, from the Fascist state, as many Italian artists of his generation did. None of that is in the painting on the wall. Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin was made in 1912, before the war, before the fascism, by a young man in Paris remembering a good night dancing, and it remains the warmest thing the whole hard-edged movement ever produced. A movement that loved machines and war left, as its friendliest monument, a picture of a dance hall with real sequins in the paint. There are worse epitaphs, and there are far worse paintings to be remembered by.