Luigi Russolo, Futurist

by Luciano Chessa

  2. Many of the futurists’ sources—including Henri Bergson and Charles Webster Leadbeater—were at opposite poles in respect to materialism. To Marinetti, the machine was a metaphor for spiritual energy, akin to Nietzsche’s action. For Boccioni, a similarly spiritual dynamic ideal was represented by a horse (see Calvesi, Fusione, 64).

  3. In Edgar Varèse, “VERBE,” 391 [vol.] 5 (1917): 42.

  4. Gino Severini was one of the few to object to Marinetti’s censorship of and interpolations to his writings; according to Calvesi, this explains why Severini’s 1913 manifesto “Le analogie plastiche del Dinamismo” remained unpublished (see Calvesi, Fusione, 78).

  5. The volume Pittura e scultura futuriste (Dinamismo plastico) (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia,” 1914) is reprinted in Umberto Boccioni, Gli scritti editi e inediti, ed. Zeno Birolli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971), 75–204; henceforth Boccioni, Scritti.

  6. Calvesi, Fusione, 48.

  7. Calvesi, Fusione, 39.

  8. Among them should be mentioned the influence on both Marinetti and Boccioni of 1905 Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

  9. In fact, a variety of scientists of the time such as Wilhelm Röntgen, Camille Flammarion, Thomas Alva Edison, and Cesare Lombroso conducted research on the margins of what was considered “science,” in effect blurring the lines between occultism and official science.

  10. A partial list would at least include Hertz’s electromagnetism, Röntgen’s X-rays, Becquerel’s radioactivity, Curie’s radium, Marconi’s radio waves, but also the non-Euclidean geometries promoted by Gauss, Lobachevsky, Bolyai, Riemann; Einstein’s relativity, Planck and Bohr’s quantum theory, Heisenberg’s indetermination principle, etc. See Flavia Matitti, “Balla e la Teosofia,” in Giacomo Balla 1895–1911: Verso il futurismo, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 41; henceforth Matitti, “Balla e la Teosofia.” See also Giuseppe La Monica, “Il tempo e lo spazio morirono ieri,” in Il futurismo (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1976), 49; henceforth La Monica, “Il tempo e lo spazio morirono ieri.”

  11. Cited in Linda D. Henderson, Duchamp in Context (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 6; henceforth Henderson, Duchamp in Context.

  12. In 1892, Gaetano Previati was the only Italian painter invited to participate in the exhibition of painters affiliated with Joséphin Péladan’s Rose+Croix. See Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 41. Boccioni was aware of this, and it is certainly because of Previati that he mentioned the “pittura dei Rosa Croce” at his 1911 lecture at the Circolo Artistico in Rome. The full text of that lecture can be found in Boccioni, Altri inediti e apparati critici, ed. Zeno Birolli (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1972), 11–29; henceforth Boccioni, Altri inediti.

  13. Germano Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” Il Verri 15, nos. 33–34 (October 1970): 109; henceforth Celant, “Futurismo esoterico.”

  14. See especially the first chapter in Henderson, Duchamp in Context, “Duchamp’s First Quest for the Invisible: X-Rays, Transparency, and Internal Views of the Figure, 1911–1912.”

  15. Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 113.

  16. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, “La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico,” in I manifesti del futurismo: Prima serie (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di “Poesia,” 1913), 28; henceforth I manifesti del futurismo. If not Russolo, Boccioni may have been the author of this sentence. He will refer again to X-rays and Röntgen in his critical text for La risata in the catalog for the 1912 Sackville Gallery futurist exhibit. Moreover, the reference to “opacità dei corpi” recurs verbatim in the text of Boccioni’s lecture in Rome in May 1911. For a transcription of a newspaper article that was found in Boccioni’s documents, entitled “I misteri della radioattività” (The mysteries of radioactivity), see Boccioni, Scritti, 442.

  17. See “La pittura futurista: Manifesto tecnico,” in I manifesti del futurismo, 27, 28, 30.

  18. Marianne W. Martin, Futurist Art and Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 53; henceforth Martin, Futurist Art and Theory.

  19. My book will privilege these three critical sources (Calvesi, Fagiolo dell’Arco, and Celant) rather than Cigliana’s book, because they focus on the group of futurist painters. The type of information that can be obtained from these sources is more useful for a research that aims to redraw a map of Russolo’s influences. Ginna, Corra, Balla, Soffici, and Russolo were all, directly or not, influenced by theosophical writings. We cannot therefore exclude the possibility that other futurists may not have been equally interested in theosophy. Others who are known to have been interested in the occult arts include Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Severini, Bragaglia, Romani, Buzzi, Valeria, and Settimelli.

  20. Marinetti had after all modeled futurism on symbolism from the beginning, deriving not just fundamental philosophical and aesthetic elements but also promotional strategies. The writer Jean Moréas founded Symbolism on 18 September 1886 with a manifesto published in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro; Marinetti chose the same literary genre and international forum to launch futurism.

  21. Calvesi proposed that Marinetti’s knowledge of Einstein came by way of Minkowsky; see Calvesi, Fusione, 37.

  22. La Monica, “Il tempo e lo spazio morirono ieri,” 49. La Monica adds that Boccioni makes this assumption a central point of both his poetics and his art. I find that this is evident from an analysis of “Stati d’animo: quelli che vanno” and “Stati d’animo: quelli che restano” of 1911, in which the central subject is always in movement, either because the observer, standing still, is watching a subject in motion, or because the observer, in motion, is watching a still subject. See also Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 93–95, 112–14.

  23. Calvesi, Fusione, 39.

  24. Calvesi, Fusione, 39. This denial of the independent existence of matter, as well as of the dualistic opposition of matter and movement, is also found in a series of lectures that Rudolf Steiner presented around 1908 at the Architektenhaus in Berlin. As Sixten Ringbom notes, for Steiner “there is no such thing as matter; Spirit, and Spirit only, exists, but it exists in varying degrees of condensation.” Ringbom, “The Sounding Cosmos: A Study in the Spiritualism of Kandinsky and the Genesis of Abstract Painting,” in Acta Academiae Abonensis, series A, 38, no. 2 (1970), 68; henceforth Ringbom, “The Sounding Cosmos.” Marinetti’s denials about the nature of matter and movement, and especially the belief in the existence of various degrees of condensation (and of the principle of continuity), would become important points in Boccioni’s theoretical writings. See Umberto Boccioni, “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste,” Lacerba (March 15, 1913); henceforth Boccioni, “Fondamento.” Similar ideas are found in the article “Raggio” by Ardengo Soffici, which was later reprinted under the title “La teosofia nel futurismo” in the periodical of Roman theosophical writings, Ultra. Steiner was well known among futurists, and I believe that Boccioni and Russolo may have even attended his lectures in Milan in 1912. Furthermore, Mario Verdone claims that Ginna, Corra, and Sprovieri were familiar with his work; see Mario Verdone, introduction to Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra, Manifesti futuristi e scritti teorici, ed. Mario Verdone (Ravenna: Longo, 1984), 27; henceforth Ginna and Corra, Scritti.

  25. The very existence of primal matter, another name for ether, would be seriously questioned by Einstein’s theories.

  26. In Filippo T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista (Milan: Mondadori, 1968; 6th ed., 2005), 125; henceforth Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista. A further point of contact between Marinetti’s Words in Freedom and the occult is suggested by Calvesi in a 1975 article in which he claimed that behind the automatic writing that Marinetti described in 1912 was the influence of mediumistic writing, which Calvesi thought was “directed” by spirits to a medium in a trance state, filtered by way of Bergson’s concept of “intuition” and the Romantic theory of “inspiration.” See Calvesi, “L’écriture médiumnique comme source de l’automatisme futuriste et surré
aliste,” Europe 53 (1975): 47; henceforth Calvesi, “L’écriture médiumnique.”

  27. Marinetti, La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista: Una sensibilità italiana nata in Egitto (Milan: Mondadori, 1969), 104; henceforth Marinetti, La grande Milano.

  28. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 209. These words likely inspired a number of John Cage’s projects, including his amplification of a wood in Ivrea, Italy, in 1984. He employed Marinetti’s and Masnata’s language and rhetoric to describe this project to the Italian press; see “Arriva John Cage: ‘Sonorizzerà’ un bosco?” Il Secolo (Genoa), April 28, 1984.

  29. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 209.

  30. According to Calvesi (Fusione, 39), Boccioni was interested in X-rays since 1910.

  31. The futurists’ interest in synesthesia, and in the theory of vibrations implied by synesthesia, is crucial in explaining Russolo’s intellectual evolution (think of his paintings Profumo and La musica, for instance). Russolo probably began to study acoustics and the synesthetic theory of vibrations through Röntgen’s theories of the vibration of ether and how these would be historically interpreted to explain the phenomenon of ectoplasms. The connection between Röntgen’s theories and the ectoplasm is mentioned in Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 113.

  32. The scapigliatura was a northern Italian literary movement of the second part of the nineteenth century. The scapigliati took as a model the French maudit poets and their bohemian lifestyle.

  33. Found, among others, in Busoni’s “Il regno della musica (epilogo della nuova estetica)” [The kingdom of music (epilogue of the new aesthetics)].

  34. Marinetti, “Tattilismo,” in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 178. (The excerpts from “Tattilismo” are from pages 177–79.) This catastrophic hypothesis shows a debt to the early twentieth-century trope of thermodynamic death, the end of the world through entropy, as found in Flammarion’s writings. See the chapter on Flammarion in Bruce Clarcke and Linda D. Henderson, From Energy to Information: Representation in Science and Technology, Art and Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); henceforth From Energy to Information.

  35. In this case also, as in the case of ether, a reduction takes place: just as all matter can be reconducted to ether, so all senses can be reconducted to the sense of touch.

  36. In fact, Marinetti encouraged the “avoidance of [. . .] variety of colors in the tactile tables.”

  37. See Marinetti, La grande Milano, 58.

  38. To invoke Balla was by no means a casual choice.

  39. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 196–97.

  40. This will also occur in his Mafarka il futurista, in which a wooden puppet—reminiscent of Pinocchio?—comes to life thanks to the transfer of psychic energy from the father, Mafarka, to the son, Gazurmah. Once born, Gazurmah will aspire to fly.

  41. In Guerra, sola igiene del mondo, in Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 299–300.

  42. In Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 206. The project of metallizing the human body is expanded ad absurdum in “Il macchinesimo,” a futurist manifesto by Renato Di Bosso and Ignazio Scurto of the same 1933.

  43. “Prime battaglie futuriste” in Guerra sola igiene del mondo, Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 239.

  44. In Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, 231.

  45. This opening sentence of Boccioni’s posthumous Note per il libro includes his most strenuous attacks against philosophical systems that dominated in the second half of the nineteenth century: idealism, materialism, and positivism, against whose rationality Boccioni (and the whole futurist movement) were fiercely opposed. See also Boccioni, Altri inediti, 72–74.

  46. On Steiner’s Architektenhaus lectures, see note 24. To futurists’ ears, the term spirito must have sounded too reminiscent of Hegel’s idealism. At the “serata futurista” that took place at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome, Papini said: “What matters is to have an Absolute Principle—whether this is God or the Spirit, this is essentially the same—and it is also important for men to be happy in the worship of this good and high principle.” See Calvesi, Il futurismo (Milan: Fratelli Fabbri Editori, 1970), 16; henceforth Calvesi, Futurismo.

  47. Boccioni, “Fondamento.”

  48. Boccioni, “Fondamento.”

  49. Ardengo Soffici, “Raggio,” Lacerba (July 1, 1914).

  50. Soffici, “Raggio.” This is not the first time that Soffici addressed occult themes in his writings; on synesthesia, see Soffici’s article “La pittura futurista” in Lacerba (December 15, 1913). Several years later, Russolo echoed Soffici’s words in his late philosophical work Al di là della materia: “You should feel your Self becoming a power, a solar center around which gravitate the body, the mind, feelings and thoughts!” Russolo, Al di là della materia, 2nd ed. (Milan: Luciano Ferriani editore, 1961), 144; henceforth Russolo, Al di là della materia.

  51. Boccioni, “Fondamento.” As Boccioni wrote in his “Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista,” the lecture in Rome took place in May 1911 at Rome’s Circolo Artistico (Boccioni, Altri inediti, 11–29). The term “trascendentalismo fisico” might be derived from Lombroso’s “Ricerche sui fenomeni ipnotici e spiritici,” published in 1909; see Henderson, Duchamp in Context, 117–18. Celant provides a short quotation from this passage by Boccioni, erroneously claiming that the lecture was held in 1915. Marinetti (La grande Milano, 83) mentions a photographic plate, in a passage describing Russolo in the process of building the intonarumori.

  52. Boccioni, Scritti, 203.

  53. In “Note per il libro,” from Pittura e scultura futuriste, reprinted in Boccioni, Altri inediti, 76.

  54. In Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Boccioni, Beyond Painting,” Art International 11, no. 1 (1967): 19; henceforth Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Boccioni, Beyond Painting.”

  55. Matitti, “Balla e la teosofia,” 43, and Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Boccioni, Beyond Painting,” 19.

  56. Calvesi, “L’écriture médiumnique,” 45.

  57. Kandinsky wrote about this in his journal; see Ringbom, “The Sounding Cosmos,” 51–52. Ringbom also mentions that Kandinsky studied criminology in Lombroso’s manuals.

  58. Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 111.

  59. For Bragaglias’s articles, see Simona Cigliana, La seduta spiritica (Roma: Fazi, 2007), 295.

  60. Calvesi, Fusione, 107.

  61. Cited in Calvesi, Fusione, 109.

  62. See Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater, Thought-forms (Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1999), 21 (henceforth Besant and Leadbeater, Thought-forms); and Robert Galbreath, “A Glossary of Spiritual and Related Terms,” in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1986), 390 (henceforth Galbreath, “A Glossary of Spiritual and Related Terms”). According to this theory, though everybody can produce thought-forms, only the clairvoyant has the power to see them with the naked eye, and certainly only a medium can gather the power to materialize them.

  63. See Giovanni Macchia, Pirandello o la stanza della tortura (Milan: Mondadori, 1981), 54.

  64. Boccioni, “La pittura futurista (conferenza tenuta a Roma nel 1911),” in Boccioni, Altri inediti, 11; the lecture is from pages 11 to 29. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent Boccioni quotes in the text are from this lecture.

  65. The claim that the painting took many years to complete is found in Paolo Buzzi, “Souvenirs sur le futurisme,” Cahiers d’art 25 (1950): 26; henceforth Buzzi, “Souvenirs sur le futurisme.”

  66. See Martin, Futurist Art and Theory, 93, 106.

  67. This concept will percolate in Marinetti’s “Tattilismo.” See also Russolo’s theory of “colloquio spirituale,” a spiritual dialogue among artists across history, in Russolo, Al di là della materia, 210.

  68. Intuition is a Bergsonian keyword.

  69. Boccioni, Altri inediti, 86. “Gives the eye the power to perceive the invisible,” reports a variant.

  70. The concept of
unità is further explained in a phrase that Boccioni wrote in the preparatory notes for his Roman lecture but did not include in the final version, “aspiring to unity as universal vibration”; see Boccioni, Altri inediti, 35.

  71. Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, and Severini. “Presentazione alle opere esposte alla Sackville Gallery,” in Archivi del futurismo 1, ed. Maria Druidi Gambillo and Teresa Fiori (Rome: De Luca, 1958), 110; henceforth Archivi del futurismo 1.

  72. Boccioni, Altri inediti, 34.

  73. The notion of a utopian overcoming of the five senses returns in Marinetti’s “Tattilismo.” The notion of hypersensitivity was already in the technical manifesto of futurist painters published the year before; see I manifesti del futurismo, 28.

  74. Boccioni, Altri inediti, 35.

  75. This analysis is found in Calvesi, Fusione, 112.

  76. Henderson, “Vibratory Modernism,” in From Energy to Information, 131.

  77. Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 111n11.

  78. Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 111n9.

  79. Cf. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni iridescenti (Rome: Bulzoni, 1968), 12; henceforth Fagiolo dell’Arco, Compenetrazioni. Balla’s portrait of Ghilarducci is mentioned in Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 111n11.

  80. Celant, “Futurismo esoterico,” 111.

  81. See also the amplification of this effect in the series of photographs made by the ambassador Cosmelli, a friend of Balla. In these photographs, Balla is shown first with Ritratto della madre and then with Fallimento. See Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla pre-futurista (Rome: Bulzoni, 1968), 4, 5; henceforth Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla pre-futurista.

  82. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Balla pre-futurista, 28; Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Giacomo Balla verso il futurismo,” in Giacomo Balla 1895–1911: Verso il futurismo, ed. Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco (Venice: Marsilio, 1998), 20; henceforth Fagiolo dell’Arco, “Giacomo Balla verso il futurismo.”