Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  Ilaria Schiaffini resolved the question of who influenced whom in her discussion of Russolo’s and Boccioni’s mutual interest in “occult sciences and paranormal phenomena which, although not actually documented before WWI [sic], have a primary inspirational role in Russolo’s painting.”25

  SPIRITUAL 1940S

  Occultist themes pervade Russolo’s last paintings. To analyze the late works—from 1940 until the year of his death—would strain the limits of this work. A brief overview of these works would be useful however, not only because this is a vast body of work with considerable artistic merit but because these paintings occupied Russolo during the time he systematically committed into writing his metapsychic investigations. Thus they provide a fitting visual complement for the investigations that are the primary subject of this book.

  No formalized studies of Russolo’s late paintings existed before the publication of the MART catalog; in fact, Russolo’s activities of the 1930s and 1940s have never been seriously studied in their entirety.26 The late paintings have suffered from the negative judgment of modernist-inspired criticism (that of Maffina, among others), which considered Russolo’s return to the figurative to be unpardonable. This superficial point of view ignores the fact that Russolo—like Boccioni—had never completely abandoned the figure, not even during the years of his most radical pictorial experimentation. Russolo never, in fact, produced an abstract painting.

  The many remarkable works from his later years—Autoritratto (1940; fig. 7), Eremo sotto la luna (1942), Il fico (1944), Trio (1946)—are marked by allegory and absolute clearness of tone; the atmospheres evoked are pervaded by a moving spirituality. Purity of line, stasis, silence, and an intense sense of calm are some of the elements that distinguish these works. They point to a religious aspect implicit in reality and nature, and they reveal the superior metaphysics that manifests itself once the appearance of things is overcome and the supreme harmony reverberating through and in them is heard.

  Russolo defined this style of painting as classical modern.27 These late canvases, in their timeless classicism, are certainly distant from futurism, but Russolo actually planned them as a further evolution of futurism—a further synthesis, and a natural continuation of investigations never abandoned.28 Rather than the “return to order” generally promoted by the “Novecento” group—a group Russolo vehemently criticized—his late paintings show the influence of Achille Funi’s magical realism; more than a naïf element in general, here surfaces the spirit of le Douanier.29 But over every influence there predominate the lessons of the great Italian painting tradition, from Giotto to Masaccio, Titian to Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Bellini to Michelangelo.

  FIGURE 7. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto (1940). Portogruaro, Collezione del Comune di Portogruaro.

  OCCULT BEFORE THE NOISE

  It is not difficult to demonstrate the influence of the occult arts in Russolo’s visual work: most of his canvases are laden with symbols of death, skeletons, skulls, globes of fire; supernatural, hallucinatory, ethereal, and residual images; and synesthetic representations—in short, all the caravanserai of icons typically associated with the occult.

  Certainly the study of symbolism and decadentism helps explain the presence of these subjects in Russolo’s paintings. The most immediately evident sources of literary influence are Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Laforgue, Huysmans, and Péladan; also evident is the influence of Poe, whom Russolo and Marinetti knew well, as well as that of Bergson and, even more so, Nietzsche, whose ideas the futurists probably became acquainted with through Gabriele D’Annunzio’s disseminatory work.30

  In fact, the young Russolo must have been first led to the study of the occult arts by symbolism, a movement that matured in France from 1880 on, when materialism and positivism were no longer fashionable. During this time, theosophy—and the publication of works by Papus, Éliphas Lévi, and Éduard Schuré—reconnected with the esoteric tradition, returned to concepts of platonic philosophy and Swedenborgian mysticism, revived the cabalistic tradition, and promoted a rebirth of spirituality in the arts.31

  The influence of the Belgian painter James Ensor and his allegorical works was more important in Russolo’s early works than Lista and Maffina have acknowledged. Ensorian elements can be perceived in a number of Russolo’s early works, in particular in the subject matter of Carezza-Morte (1909), which is strongly allegorical and Düreresque, as well as in Autoritratto con teschi and Maschere (fig. 8), both from 1908, and the subsequent La musica (1911). Russolo adopted some of Ensor’s preferred themes—masks or skeletons dancing in grotesque formation, memento mori orchestrating a satire of society (as can also be found in Aroldo Bonzagni and the early, Jarry-influenced Marinetti)—but in his works he gave these themes a spiritual, rather than political, spin.32

  If Martin is right, Marinetti may have been the first of the futurists to become familiar with Ensor. According to Martin, Marinetti visited the Ensor exhibit promoted by La Plume in 1898, and he was credited with introducing Ensor to Russolo and the other futurists.33

  Russolo shared Ensor’s rejection of impressionist painting for its sensual superficiality, and both men began their artistic careers as printmaker. Half of Ensor’s work is printmaking; as the artist explained in his famous letter to Albert Croquez: “Pictorial materials still worry me. [. . .] I dread the fragility of painting, exposed to the crimes of the restorer, to insufficiency, to the slander of reproductions. I want to survive, to speak to the people of tomorrow for a long time yet. I think of solid copper plates, of unalterable inks, of easy reproductions, of faithful printing, and I am adopting etching as a means of expression.”34

  Other important models for Russolo, Boccioni, and Balla were the symbolist painter and printmaker Odilon Redon and, among the Italians, the symbolist painter Gaetano Previati, who in 1892 exhibited in Paris with the Rose+Croix group of painters (Boccioni mentioned this event in his 1911 Roman lecture). The allegorical world of Previati, infused with mysticism and symbolic proclamations of the victory of light, soon found a place of honor in futurist poetics. This is clear from the technical manifesto of futurist painting, cosigned by Russolo, which closed with words that strike a disturbingly Luciferesque tone: “We proclaim ourselves Lords of Light.”35

  FIGURE 8. Luigi Russolo, Maschere (1907–08). Milan, Civica Raccolta delle Stampe “Achille Bertarelli” Castello Sforzesco.

  Russolo was also influenced by Romolo Romani who was himself influenced by Ensor and Redon. Romani is known to have been always extremely sensitive to occult themes. Many of Romani’s paintings are based on observation of the spiritual levels of reality; this is in line with one of futurism’s defining goals, to plumb the depths, without stopping at the superficial and sensory level. This irrational, antipositivist component unites futurism and occult study and practice. Romani’s painting was also solidly grounded in synesthetic interests and on the relationship between music and painting, which would also concern Russolo. In his autobiography, Carrà declared that Romani “following the guide of the aesthetic principle, valid in the musical world, wanted to require from painting an effect similar to that of music.”36

  Apart from these influences, Russolo seems also to have been inspired by his direct interest in symbolism (which he shared with Kandinsky) and, possibly, the theories of the Munich circle Der Blaue Reiter, as well as of those of Schoenberg.37 Sixten Ringbom, in his seminal book The Sounding Cosmos, has shown clearly the direct relationship between the ideas of Kandinsky in The Spiritual in Art and theosophy. I am convinced that Russolo, like Kandinsky and Ginna, drew directly from theosophy: by 1908 he must already have been exposed to the occult and theosophy, and he may even have read Besant’s and Leadbeater’s Thought-forms.38 As Martin has noted, it is plausible that Russolo influenced Boccioni in spiritual matters, rather than vice versa.39

  Death themes with a strongly symbolist flavor pervade some of Russolo’s early etchings and aquatints of 1908–09, including Carezza-Morte, Medio Evo, and
Il Trionfo della Morte; the last-named even borrows its title from a novel by D’Annunzio, the acknowledged source of Italian symbolism. Even more clearly occultist, in my opinion, is the climate of the etching and aquatint Maschere, also of 1908. If Ensor and Munch influenced Russolo in the choice of subject, the work’s grotesque character and the peculiar deformations of the figure reveal Romani’s prominent influence.40

  Russolo’s Maschere bears no relationship to the Nietzschean mask—this hypothesis was advanced by Ethel Piselli—or to the mask as a Baudelairean image.41 Instead, I believe that Russolo must have found inspiration in Romani’s analysis and reproductions of diverse expressions of the human face, which Romani transformed into comic or tragic masks (Il riso and Il crapulone of 1903–04, Il risentimento and Il dubbio of 1905, Il ricco of 1905–06, and Il guerriero and Lo scettico of 1905–07).42 Evangelisti has correctly related this series of masklike portraits, executed from 1904 on, to the ideoplastic experiments (mediumistic images materialized and transmitted at a distance) of Eusapia Palladino.43

  Far from being an ingenuous early exercise in composition, Maschere is a precocious representation of forms of fluctuating thought (thought-forms) produced by the mental energy of a subject in a trance who has been able to overcome the barrier of the aura: a process thoroughly illustrated in Thought-forms. Maschere is a representation of different states of mind that only a sensitive subject (a clairvoyant painter, Boccioni would say) has the power to see and eventually himself produce.44 In other words, Maschere is a representation of a plastic materialization.

  It may be impossible to prove definitively that Russolo was familiar with Besant’s and Leadbeater’s book already in 1908, but certainly the concept of thought-form was known at the turn of the twentieth century, particularly in the circles Russolo traveled in. Russolo’s awareness of these theories convincingly explains why Maschere shows resemblances not just with his 1910 etching and aquatint Città addormentata (see the masks visible in the upper margin) but also with the masks in the more overtly occultist La musica, a painting essentially inconceivable without assuming Russolo’s familiarity with Thought-forms.45 Much like Maschere, La musica presents a series of flying masks with different expressions that can easily be read as a visualization or materialization of the different states of mind induced in an interpreter-medium by spirits he himself has evoked.

  The striking Autoritratto con teschi can be analyzed using this same critical frame. Despite being Russolo’s first canvas, it already offers a complete synthesis of the artist’s intellectual world. Painted in the same year of Maschere, this self-portrait seems to have been particularly dear to Russolo’s heart: he mentioned it more than twenty years later in a letter to his wife of December 5, 1929.46 Buzzi wrote about this painting with a display of futurist code words: “There Russolo, almost mediumistically approaching the self-portrait, where the shadow of the intellectual goatee has the power of an essential poem, overflows with his enharmonic genius onto the walls of a kaleidoscopic constellation of masks that have all the supreme vehemence of a great Verdi chorus.”47

  Giovanni Lista related the Autoritratto con teschi to a specific practice of the occultists: divination through a black mirror. By observing a black mirror for ten consecutive minutes, Lista claimed, one can enter into a trance in which hallucinatory or prophetic images emerge into view.48 It is impossible to claim that the clearly hallucinatory vision represented in Russolo’s painting derived from his direct experience with the black mirror. But Lista believed that it did, seeing confirmation in the fact that Russolo returned to the subject of this painting in his Lo specchio della verità of 1944.

  Russolo’s self-portrait of the artist crowned by skulls, a most evident symbol of death, was probably inspired by the Northern-European tradition of memento mori. This reading is confirmed by Zanovello’s claim that the painting represents nothing less than “a preoccupation with death.”49

  Russolo’s careful reproduction of skulls from different angles may be one of the first instances in his work of the influence of Leonardo da Vinci.50 But in the self-portrait, the focal point around which the whole painting revolves is not the crown of craniums but rather the gaze of the artist. This painting inaugurates a long series of self-portraits in Russolo’s oeuvre in which the gaze will be the focus. The 1910 etching Autoritratto plays mysteriously with light and shadow on a face distinguished by deep-set eyes; the Autoritratto (con doppio eterico) of 1910–11 (fig. 9), which features Mephistophelean eyes, shows a Russolo with his etheric double in a pose that surprisingly matches Stravinsky’s description of Russolo: a figure “with wild hair and beard.”51 A 1911 study for an Autoritratto in watercolor and tempera reproduces a sharpened face, highly stylized, with enigmatic eyes and almost extraterrestrial features.52 If this sketch is authentic, it might be a preparatory study for the so-called Autoritratto “verde” of 1913, which shows a face whose features are almost entirely obscured and a spiral line that repeats and amplifies its form, like an aura, or a double. In both of these works, the mannequinlike interrogative aspect of the face is almost metaphysical, and it resembles the work of De Chirico, a painter hardly associated with futurism.53

  Russolo’s series of self-portraits continued with Io Dinamico of 1912–13, which was lost after the futurist exhibit at the San Francisco Universal Exposition of 1915, and in which the angular features of the face commence a whirling rhythm of turbulent, spiraling, rotating lines amplifying the figure in a double. This work was followed by the greater realism of the 1920 Autoritratto, where Russolo shows his double as a diabolic shadow on the wall (fig. 10), and the Autoritratto in black and red chalk of 1925, in which the refined features are negotiated between the two contrasting colors (red and black) without, however, any diminution of the magnetism of the eyes.54

  There is, in addition to the series of self-portraits a sequence of photographic portraits of Russolo: Il fumatore, an ectoplasmic example of the photodynamic trajectory, taken by Arturo Bragaglia in 1913; a second portrait by Bragaglia reproduced in Maffina, in which an older Russolo looks into the lens with a penetrating eye; a conceptual double portrait of Russolo taken in the mid-1920s and featuring him in front of his La musica and between two keyboards of two models of his noise harmonium (fig. 11); and the portrait featured on the dust jacket flap of the second edition of Al di là della materia in 1966, in which Russolo wears what looks like a priest’s robe. Crowning Russolo’s many portraits and self-portraits, however, is the superb and hypnotizing Autoritratto in oils of 1940.

  FIGURE 9. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto (con doppio eterico) (1910). Location unknown.

  Maurizio Calvesi once said of Auto-stato d’animo, a self-portrait by Giacomo Balla of 1920, that it was an attempt on the part of the artist to ”dematerialize his own image, rendering it like an ectoplasm [. . .] to spiritualize his own gaze.”55 It seems that Russolo’s principal objective in many of his self-portraits was precisely that: the spiritualization of his features. It is interesting to note how constantly, throughout his life, he pursued this objective in the representation of his own figure.

  Immediately evident in many of the portraits is the aura, which Russolo represented in various ways around the face. Buzzi, in a description of Russolo from January 1918, wrote: “Whence he passed [. . .] there was a burst of sparks that resembled an aura. Moreover, his brain added there the halos of scintillations of his genius.”56

  FIGURE 10. Luigi Russolo, Autoritratto (con l’ombra) (1920), Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi.

  The gaze is crucial. In all of the above-mentioned representations, and, for that matter, in most of the surviving photographs of Russolo, the eyes are always fixed, profound, magnetic, enchanting. This visual rhetoric evokes in the observer that reverential fear arising in encounters with a spiritual master; this is certainly the function of the serious, even severe, gazes found in portraits of Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner, both of whom aspired to build a cult of personality. The iconographic nature of Russolo�
��s portraits solidifies the continuity of his interests.

  Most of Russolo’s works reveal his occultist sensitivity and prove that his interest in theosophy and spiritualism must have preceded his taking part in séances in Paris in the mid-1920s.57 Already in 1911, Uomo che muore reproduced spirit in the act of abandoning a dying body.58 The original of this work disappeared, but Russolo was so attached to the subject that he repainted it completely in 1941 with the title L’uomo morente. The subject of Uomo che muore was one of the topoi of occultist iconography, as shown, for example, in an illustration taken from The Projection of the Astral Body by Muldoon and Carrington.59

  FIGURE 11. Luigi Russolo seduto in mezzo ai suoi rumorarmoni (1924–28; photographer unknown). Rovereto, The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto Archivio del’900, Fondo Fortunato Depero.

  The doubling of the etheric body by the material body, a recurring theosophical theme, interested Russolo for most of his life.60 The Autoritratto (con doppio eterico) is overwhelming proof of this and aptly subtitled.61 Zanovello explains that in the portrait “the author, with an almost diabolical effect, appears near his ‘etheric double,’ who commiserates with him.”62

  The other, above-mentioned Autoritratto, which Lista has claimed was painted in 1930, was a kind of “remake” of his Autoritratto (con doppio eterico). This painting, for years known only in the reproduction in Apollonio, and now in MART (where we learn that it is now owned by the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence), effectively shows the face of its author accompanied by a mysterious shadow projected on the wall, which sharpens the contours of Russolo’s profile.63 This is the self-portrait “with the shadow” that Russolo mentioned in a letter to his wife of December 5, 1929.64 I have argued that it must have been painted before 1922, in the period preceding Russolo’s departure for Thiene, and this is confirmed by the reproduction in the MART catalog, where, unlike in Apollonio, the signature and the year 1920 are clearly visible.65