Begging for the war
Point nine was not a metaphor. When the First World War broke out in the summer of 1914, the Futurists did exactly what the manifesto had promised: they campaigned, loudly, for Italy to abandon its neutrality and join the fighting. This is the movement called interventionism, the push to get Italy into the war, and the Futurists threw their whole publicity machine behind it. Carrà made the case in paint with his Interventionist Demonstration (1914), a spinning collage of torn newspaper, slogans and shouting words, a picture that is literally war propaganda made of headlines. Many Futurists did not just agitate. They volunteered.
The war kills the movement
And then the war they had begged for destroyed them. In 1916 it killed two of the most important men in the movement in a single year. Boccioni, the best painter and the sharpest mind Futurism had, died on 17 August 1916, near Verona, and the manner of it is a cruelty almost too neat to believe. He had volunteered for the war he had spent years demanding. He was not killed in combat. He was on a cavalry exercise, a training ride, when his horse bolted; he was thrown and trampled, and he died the next day, aged thirty-three. The “died gloriously in battle” version that sometimes attaches to him is simply wrong, and the truth is worse: a training accident, not a heroic charge. And one detail makes it unbearable. He had named the horse Vermiglia, after the red dray-horse churning up the building site in The City Rises. The red horse that announced the movement threw and killed the man who painted it.
The same year, Sant’Elia, the architect of the New City, was killed in action. The heroic group did not survive the peace. Carrà drifted away into a still, dreamlike, classicizing manner called Metaphysical painting; Severini moved toward a calmer, more classical Cubism; the first and greatest phase of Futurism, the painters’ Futurism, was effectively over by 1918, gutted by the very catastrophe it had cheered on.
Marinetti and fascism
That is the tragedy. The disgrace: Marinetti did not stop. In 1919, with Alceste De Ambris, he co-wrote the Fascist Manifesto, the founding platform of Benito Mussolini’s new movement, published in Mussolini’s own paper that June. Marinetti had been there at the founding meeting in Milan that March. He was a genuine, founding-era fascist, and Futurism’s whole worldview, its romance with violence, with the machine, with national rebirth and the cleansing power of war, fed straight into the aesthetics of the regime. In the 1920s and 1930s he rebuilt a “second Futurism,” chiefly a style called aeropittura, aerial painting: pictures made from the dizzying viewpoint of an airplane, the ground tilting and rushing up at the viewer. Marinetti called it the daughter of fascist aviation and Italian Futurism, which tells you exactly whom it was painted for. He took a seat in the regime’s official academy of honored intellectuals in 1929, and he died in 1944 still serving Mussolini.
Hold the contradiction, because flattening it in either direction is a lie. Do not pretend Marinetti was anything other than a fascist who helped build fascism; the man earned the label. But do not run the disgrace backward over everything, either. Not every Futurist was a fascist; some had been anarchists or socialists, and some drifted away from both the movement and the politics. The masterpieces of the last chapter, the churning city and the blurred dog and the striding bronze, were painted between 1910 and 1913, years before the Fascist party existed. Even Marinetti’s own arc has a complication worth keeping: in 1920 he actually walked out on the fascists, calling them reactionary, before reconciling and serving them for the rest of his life. The dog on the leash is not a fascist object, and saying so is not laundering anything.
So the verdict is double and it has to stay double. Futurism taught Western art to show time and motion, the blur, the multiplied limb, the line of force, and it made the manifesto the avant-garde’s weapon, art launched by media campaign, so that Dada and Surrealism and Constructivism and Vorticism, every later movement that announced itself with a printed program, are downstream of one poet’s stunt on the front page of Le Figaro. And it is the movement that made art a recruiting poster for war, and whose founder helped write fascism into being. Both of those are true at the same time, and the reason Futurism is worth this much trouble is that you are not allowed to keep only the half you like.