Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Born	22 December 1876 Alexandria, Egypt
Died	2 December 1944(1944-12-02) (aged 67) Bellagio, Italy
Occupation	Poet
Literary movement	Futurism

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet and editor, the founder of the Futurist movement, and a fascist ideologue.

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).

His love for literature developed during his school years. At age seventeen he started his first school magazine, Papyrus; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for publicizing Emile Zola's scandalous novels in the school.

He studied in Egypt and Paris, where he obtained a baccalaureat degree in 1894 at the Sorbonne^[1]. He obtained a degree in law at Pavia University, graduating 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 is known best as the author of the Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote in 1908. 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 [...] can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice." Since that text proclaims the unity of life and art, Marinetti understood violence not only as a means of producing an aesthetic effect, but also as being inherent to life itself.^{[citation needed]} George 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.

A lover of speed, Marinetti 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".^[2]

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), presented in Turin was also not successful. Nowadays, the play is remembered mainly through a later version, named Elettricità sessuale (Sexual Electricity), and mainly for the appearance onstage of humanoid automatons, ten years before the Czech novelist Josef Čapek would invent 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, Luigi Russolo), who adopted 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, some of whom attended the performances in order to throw vegetables at them.

The most successful "happening"' of that period was the publicization of the "Manifesto Against Past-Loving Venice" 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, 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 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. Nevertheless, Futurism was an important influence upon Lewis's Vorticist philosophy.^[3]

About the same time he 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 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)

Marriage

After an extended courtship, in 1926 Marinetti married Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), a writer and painter in her own right, and a pupil of Giacomo Balla. Born in Rome, she had joined the Futurists in 1917. They'd met in 1919, moved in together in Rome by 1924, and chose to marry only to avoid legal complications on a lecture tour of Brazil.^[4] They would have 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 movement after its inception in 1929.^[5] She also produced three experimental novels. Cappa's major public work is likely a series of five murals at the Palermo Post Office (1926–1934) 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 was resigned to Benito Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento. Marinetti was one of the first affiliates of the Italian Fascist Party. In 1919 he co-wrote with Alceste De Ambris the Fascist Manifesto, the original manifesto of Italian Fascism.^[6] 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 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."

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 in order 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."^[7] 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 Soffici^[8]) wished to import the concept of "degenerate art" from Germany to Italy and condemned modernism, although their demands were ignored by the regime.^[9] 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. During the same year he protested publicly against anti-Semitism.^[10]

Marinetti made numerous attempts to ingratiate himself with the regime, becoming less radical and avant garde with each. 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.”^[10]

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^[10] and traveling to promote his ideas.

Marinetti volunteered for active service in the Second Italo-Abyssinian War and the Second World War, serving on the Eastern Front, despite his advanced age.

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.

He was an atheist.^[11]

Writings

• Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Mafarka the Futurist. An African novel, Middlesex University Press, 1998, ISBN 1898253102
• Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Selected Poems and Related Prose, Yale University Press, 2002, ISBN 0300041039
• Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso: Critical Writings, ed. by Günter Berghaus, New York : Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006, 549p., ISBN 0374260834, pocket edition 2008: ISBN 0374531072
• 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", Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2008.
• Giovanni Lista, Journal des Futurismes, Éditions Hazan, coll. "Bibliothèque", Paris, 2008 (ISBN 978-2-7541-0208-7)

References

1. ^ Critical writings / F.T. Marinetti ; edited by Günter Berghaus ; translated by Doug Thompson
2. ^ The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism
3. ^ Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance (London: Old Street Publishing, 2009), 138-40, 142, 147, 187-8
4. ^ Futurism: an anthology By Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman, page 30
5. ^ http://www.walkerart.org/archive/2/AC73F5BDEEF8DE5D6173.htm
6. ^ Dahlia S. Elazar. The making of fascism: class, state, and counter-revolution, Italy 1919-1922. Westport, Connecticut, USA: Praeger Publishers, 2001, p.73
7. ^ Quoted in Braun, Emily, Mario Sironi and Italian Modernism: Art and Politics under Fascism, Cambridge University Press, 2000
8. ^ Feinstein, Willy, The Civilization of the Holocaust in Italy, 2010, Associated University Presses
9. ^ Kay, Carolyn, "Review of Affron, Matthew and Antliff, Mark, Fascist Vision: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (1997)" Left History, 7.1, 191-193
10. ^ ^{a b c} The Crisis of the modern World - F.T. Marinetti
11. ^ Mario Isnenghi, Il mito della grande guerra da Marinetti a Malaparte, Laterza, 1970, p. 44.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

• ItalianFuturism.org: news, exhibitions, and scholarship pertaining to the Futurist Movement
• Works by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Image of Le Figaro with Le Futurisme (1909)
• Score to the sound poem Dune, parole in libertà (1914)
• Marinetti's "La Battaglia di Adrianopoli" (1926) recorded by Marinetti in 1935 published at Tellus Audio Cassette Magazine
• Marinettis' the Futurist Sensibility
• Zang Tumb Tumb
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Papers Photographs, postcards, and writings from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
• Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Libroni on Futurism Images derived from slides taken of seven scrapbooks compiled by Marinetti between 1905 and 1944 from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
• Marinetti student notebooks and other papers, 1891-1936. Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California. The collection includes class notes, essays and stories that Marinetti wrote for secondary school in Alexandria, Egypt. One notebook was written by Leone Marinetti. There is also correspondence, 1891–1936, a small amount of which is with school friends and the school rector, but most of which concerns the futurist enterprise. There are letters from Gino Severini, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Umberto Boccioni, Mario Carli, Benedetto Croce, B. Bottai, Giovanni Pascoli, and Paolo Orano, among others, and from Marinetti’s French publisher Sansot. There is a small number of Marinetti’s writings, primarily dramas and "syntheses," generally in typescript.
• Marinetti correspondence and papers, 1886-1974. Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California. Arranged in eight series: Series I. Letters and submissions to Marinetti and others, 1900–1974; Series II. Unsigned or undated letters and submissions, ca. 1910-ca. 1970; Series III. Letters from Marinetti, ca. 1905-1944; Series IV. Writings by Marinetti, 1896–1949; Series V. Biographies, 1927–1968; Series VI. Photographs, 1886–1972; Series VII. Agenzia Letteraria Artistica (A.L.A.): Circulars, 1934–1939; Series VIII. Letters to Alberto Cappa, 1923-1931.
• Papers of F.T. Marinetti and Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, 1902-1965 (bulk 1920-1939). Research Library at the Getty Research Institute. Los Angeles, California. Collection offers a view of F.T. Marinetti in the ceremonial role he played during Futurism’s second phase. Includes minor manifesto manuscripts, generally typewritten, sometimes translated or excerpted; a number of minor literary manuscripts; and 20,000 slides that reproduce the contents of Marinetti’s five scrapbooks. Material on Benedetta includes handwritten corrected drafts of her three novels, and a number of essays and speeches on women and art, women and Fascism, Futurism, and Marinetti. Some correspondence suggests the central role that Marinetti and Benedetta played relative to the other Futurists, whose activities the collection selectively documents via manuscripts, photos, clippings, slides, posters, scrapbooks, and musical scores.