Artists of the Right

by Kerry Bolton

  Sorel became influential not only among Left-wing syndicalists but also among certain radical nationalists in both France and Italy. A manifestation of this was the Proudhon Circle in France comprising Maurrassian Rightist monarchists and Sorelian revolutionary syndicalists, and named after the so-called “father of anarchism,” in a synthesis that was to give rise to Fascism in that country at the same time as it appeared in Italy.[87]

  The Futurist Manifesto

  Marinetti’s artistic ideas crystallized in the Futurist movement that originated from a meeting of artists and musicians in Milan in 1909 to draft a Futurist Manifesto.[88] With Marinetti were Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini. The manifesto was first published February 20, 1909 in the Parisian paper Le Figaro,[89] and exhorted youth to, “Sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness.” The initial movement drew the interest of anarchists and syndicalists of the non-orthodox Left which sought a revolt against bourgeois democratic “safety.”[90]

  In 1913 the Futurist Political Program was published, which served as the basis for the establishment of the Futurist Political Party in 1918; that is, after Marinetti had undertaken a campaign for Italian entry in the World War, along with Mussolini and D’Annunzio.

  The First Fascist Congress was held in Florence in 1919, and Marinetti remarked that the atmosphere was thoroughly Futurist in sentiment, but an electoral pact between the Futurists and the Fascists was abortive, and Marinetti insisted on adhering to the radical Left, while he maintained a large element of support among the Fascists.[91]

  In contrast to those Fascists and nationalists who sought inspiration from Classical Rome, the Futurists were contemptuous of all tradition, of all that is past: “We want to exult aggressive motion . . . we affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”[92]

  The machine was poetically eulogized. The racing car became the icon of the new epoch, “which seems to run on machine-gun fire.”[93] The Futurist aesthetic was to be joy in violence and war, as “the only cure for the world.” Motion, dynamic energy, action, and heroism were the foundations of the culture of the Futurist future. The fisticuffs, the sprint, and the kick were expressions of culture. The Futurist Manifesto is as much a challenge to the political and social order as it is to the status quo in the arts.

  It declared:

  1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

  2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt.

  3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy, and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap, and the blow with the fist.

  4. We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath . . . a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

  5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.

  6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour, and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.

  7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.

  8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.

  9. We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for women.

  10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism, and all opportunist or utilitarian cowardice.

  11. We will sing of great crowds agitated by work, pleasure, and revolt; the multi-coloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in the modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridles, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propellers sound like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

  It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archeologists, tourist guides, and antiquaries.

  Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.

  Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side forever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and colour. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage, and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

  What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?

  To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of action and creation. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?

  Indeed, daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with the own talent and ambition.

  For the dying, for invalids, and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong, and living Futurists!

  Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!

  The oldest of us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty, let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the wastepaper-basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.

  But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter’s night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.

  They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl
themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, and injustice.

  The oldest among us are not yet thirty, yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage, and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath.

  Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred, and speed! Does that surprise you? It is because you do not even remember having been alive! Standing on the world’s summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

  Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what our beautiful false intelligence affirms: “We are only the sum and the prolongation of our ancestors,” it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up your head!

  Standing on the word’s summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars![94]

  A plethora of manifestos by Marinetti and his colleagues followed, encompassing Futurist cinema, painting, music (“noise”), and prose, as well as their political and sociological implications.

  War: The World’s Only Hygiene

  Marinetti’s manifesto on war,[95] written in the same manner as his manifesto to students the previous year,[96] shows the central place of violence and conflict in the Futurist doctrine:

  We Futurists, who for over two years, scorned by the Lame and Paralyzed, have glorified the love of danger and violence, praised patriotism and war, the hygiene of the world, are happy to finally experience this great Futurist hour of Italy, while the foul tribe of pacifists huddles dying in the deep cellars of the ridiculous palace at The Hague.

  We have recently had the pleasure of fighting in the streets with the most fervent adversaries of the war and shouting in their faces our firm beliefs:

  1. All liberties should be given to the individual and the collectivity, save that of being cowardly.

  2. Let it be proclaimed that the word Italy should prevail over the word Freedom.

  3. Let the tiresome memory of Roman greatness be canceled by an Italian greatness a hundred times greater.

  For us today, Italy has the shape and power of a fine Dreadnought battleship with its squadron of torpedo-boat islands. Proud to feel that the martial fervor throughout the nation is equal to ours, we urge the Italian government, Futurist at last, to magnify all the national ambitions, disdaining the stupid accusations of piracy, and proclaim the birth of Pan-Italianism.

  Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of Italy! As long as the war lasts let us set aside our verse, our brushes, scapulas, and orchestras! The red holidays of genius have begun! There is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnel and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.[97]

  Artistic Storm Trooper

  Marinetti brought his dynamic character into an aggressive campaign to promote Futurism. The Futurists aimed to aggravate society out of bourgeois complacency and safe existence through innovative street theater, abrasive art, speeches, and manifestos. The speaking style of Marinetti was itself bombastic and thunderous. The art was aggravating to conventional society and the art establishment. If a painting was of a man with a moustache, the whiskers would be depicted with the bristles of a shaving brush pasted onto the canvas. A train would be depicted with the words “puff, puff.”

  Both the words and deeds of the Futurists matched the nature of the art in expressing contempt for the status quo with its preoccupation with “pastism” or the “passé.” Marinetti, for example, described Venice as “a city of dead fish and decaying houses, inhabited by a race of waiters and touts.”

  To the Futurist Umberto Boccioni, Dante, Beethoven, and Michelangelo were “sickening,” whilst Carlo Carrà set about painting sounds, noises, and even smells. Marinetti traversed Europe giving interviews, arranging exhibitions, meetings, and dinners. Vermilion posters with huge block letters spelling “Futurism” were plastered throughout Italy on factories, in dance halls, cafés, and town squares.

  Futurist performances were organized to provoke riots. Glue was put onto seats. Two tickets for the same seat would be sold to provoke a fight. “Noise music” would blare while poetry or manifestos were recited and paintings shown. Fruit and rotten spaghetti would be thrown from the audience, and the performances would usually end in brawls.

  Marinetti replied to jeers with humor. He ate the fruit thrown at him. He welcomed the hostility as proving that Futurism was not appealing to the mediocre.[98]

  Politics

  The first political contacts of Marinetti and the Futurists were from the Left rather than the Right, despite Marinetti’s extreme nationalism and call for war as the “hygiene of mankind, and his support for Italy’s embryonic neo-imperial adventures, supporting the Italian invasion of Libya in 1912.”[99] There were syndicalists and anarchists who shared Marinetti’s views on the energizing and revolutionary nature of war and gave him a reception.

  In 1909, Marinetti entered the general elections and issued a “First Political Manifesto” which is anti-clerical and states that the only Futurist political program is “national pride,” calling for the elimination of pacifism and the representatives of the old order. During that year, Marinetti was heavily involved in agitating for Italian sovereignty over Austrian-ruled Trieste. The political alliance with the extreme Left began with the anarcho-syndicalist Ottavio Dinale,[100] whose paper reprinted the Futurist Manifesto. The paper, La demolizione was of a general combative nature, aiming to unite into one “fascio” all those of revolutionary tendencies, to “oppose with full energy the inertia and indolence that threatens to suffocate all life.” The phrase is distinctly Futurist.

  Marinetti announced that he intended to campaign politically as both a syndicalist and a nationalist, a synthesis that would eventually arise in Fascism. In 1910, he forged links with the Italian Nationalist Association,[101] which had a pro-labor, syndicalist program.[102] In 1913, a Futurist political manifesto was issued which called for enlargement of the military, an “aggressive foreign policy,” colonial expansionism, and “pan-Italianism”; a “cult” of progress, speed, and heroism; opposition to the nostalgia for monuments, ruins, and museums; economic protectionism, anti-socialism, and anti-clericalism. The movement generated wide enthusiasm among university students.[103]

  Intervention

  The chance for Italy’s “place in the sun” came with World War I. Not only the nationalists were demanding Italy’s entry into the war, but so too were certain revolutionary syndicalists and a faction of socialists led by Mussolini. From the literati came D’Annunzio and Marinetti.

  In a manifesto addressed to students in 1914, Marinetti states the purpose of Futurism and calls for intervention in the war. Futurism was the “doctor” to cure Italy of “pastism,” a remedy “valid for any country.” The “ancestor- cult far from cementing the race” was making Italians “anemic and putrid.” Futurism was now “being fully realized in the great world war.”

  His exhortation to Italian students to demand Italy’s place in the world via participation in the World War, provided an added poetical and romantic aspect to the interventionist campaign that was also taken up by D’Annunzio.

  However, far from drawing from Italy’s Roman heritage, Marinetti damned the great past as a hindrance to a greater future. His manifesto to students provides an insight into Marinetti’s revolutionary repudiation of “pastism,” because “an illustrious past was crushing Italy and an infinitely more glorious future.”

  This “pastism” was condemned along with “archaeology, academicism, senilism, quietism, the obsession wit
h sex, the tourist industry, etc. “Our ultra-violent, anti-clerical, and anti-traditionalist nationalism is based on the inexhaustibility of Italian blood and the struggle against the ancestor-cult, which, far from cementing the race, makes it anemic and putrid.”[104]

  Marinetti, like many syndicalists who broke from the internationalist outlook of orthodox socialism, saw the war as a revolutionary cause,[105] describing it as “the most beautiful Futurist poem which has so far been seen.” Futurism itself was artistic warfare, and “the militarization of innovating artists.” The war as a revolutionary act would sweep from power all the decrepit representatives of the past:

  diplomats, professors, philosophers, archaeologists, critics, cultural obsession, Greek, Latin, history, senilism, museums, libraries, the tourist industry. The War will promote gymnastics, sport, practical schools of agriculture, business, and industrialists. The War will rejuvenate Italy, will enrich her with men of action, will force her to live no longer off the past, off ruins and the mild climate, but off her own national forces.[106]

  According to Richard Jensen, the Futurists were probably the first to organize pro-war protests.[107] Mussolini and Marinetti held their first joint meeting in Milan on March 31, 1915. In April, both were arrested in Rome for organizing a demonstration.

  Futurists were no mere windbags. The Futurists were among the first to enlist for active service.[108] Nearly all distinguished themselves in the war, as did Mussolini and D’Annunzio. The Futurist architect Antonio Sant’Elia was killed, as was Umberto Boccioni.[109] Marinetti enlisted with the Alpini regiment and was wounded and decorated for valor.