Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (; 22 December 1876 – 2 December 1944) was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908. Marinetti is best known as the author of the Manifesto of Futurism, which was written and published in 1909, and as a co-author of the Fascist Manifesto, in 1919.
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 mother, Amalia Grolli, lived together more uxorio (as if married). Enrico was a lawyer from Piedmont, and his mother was the daughter of a literary professor from Milan. They had come to Egypt in 1865 at the invitation of Khedive Isma'il Pasha to act as legal advisers for foreign companies that were taking part in his modernization program.
Marinetti's love for literature developed during the school years. His mother was an avid reader of poetry and introduced her young son to the Italian and other European classics. At 17, he started his first school magazine, Papyrus; the Jesuits threatened to expel him for publicizing Émile Zola's scandalous novels in the school.
He studied in Egypt and then in Paris, obtained a baccalauréat degree in 1894 at the Sorbonne UniversityCritical writings / F.T. Marinetti; edited by Günter Berghaus; translated by Doug Thompson and in Italy, and graduated in law at the University of Pavia 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) and signed everything "Filippo Tommaso Marinetti".
Futurism
Marinetti and Constantin Brâncuși were visitors of the Abbaye de Créteil around 1908, along with young writers like Roger Allard (one of the first to defend Cubism), Pierre Jean Jouve and Paul Castiaux, who wanted to publish their works through the Abbaye. The Abbaye de Créteil was a phalanstère community founded in the autumn of 1906 by the painter Albert Gleizes, and the poets René Arcos, Henri-Martin Barzun, Alexandre Mercereau and Charles Vildrac. The movement drew its inspiration from the Abbaye de Thélème, a fictional creation by Rabelais in his novel Gargantua. It was closed down by its members in early 1908.Daniel Robbins, Albert Gleizes, 1881–1953, A Retrospective Exhibition, Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, 1964 (Guggenheim website).
Marinetti is known best as the author of the Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote in 1909. It was published in French on the front page of the most prestigious French daily newspaper, Le Figaro, on 20 February 1909. Marinetti declared in it, "Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice". Georges 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.
Marinetti, who admired speed, had a minor car crash outside Milan in 1908 after he veered into a ditch to avoid two cyclists. He referred to the crash 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".
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, however, fought a duel with a critic whom he considered too harsh.
His drama La donna è mobile (Poupées électriques), first presented in Turin, was not successful either. Nowadays, the play is remembered through a later version, Elettricità sessuale (Sexual Electricity), mainly for the appearance onstage of humanoid automatons ten years before the Czech writer Karel Čapek invented 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 and Luigi Russolo), who adopted the Futurist philosophy. Together with them and 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 in part attended the performances 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 a war correspondent for a French newspaper. His articles were eventually collected and published in The Battle of Tripoli. He then covered the First Balkan War of 1912–1913 and witnessed the surprise success of Bulgarian troops against the Ottoman Empire during the Siege of Adrianople. In this period, 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.
Marinetti sought to establish an English Futurism and initially had an ally in Harold Monro, the editor of Poetry and Drama, a London literary journal. Monro devoted the September 1913 issue to Futurism, praising Marinetti in a long editorial. 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. Marinetti's campaign both threatened and influenced Ezra Pound, who founded his own literary movement, Imagism and wrote manifestos to publicize it and attack Futurism. One result of Pound's strong reaction to Marinetti was his advocacy of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot. Joyce was exposed to Futurism while living in Trieste. The movement's techniques are reflected in Ulysses and in Finnegans Wake, one section of which alludes to “crucial elements of Futurism".
Futurism was an important influence upon Lewis's Vorticist philosophy.Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance (London: Old Street Publishing, 2009), pp. 138–40, 142, 147, 187–8. Vorticism, named by Pound, was founded with the publication of Blast to which Pound was a major contributor. An advertisement promised that Blast would cover "Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and All Vital Forms of Modern Art". Blast was published only twice, in 1914 and 1915. Writing to Monro, Marinetti said that he was saddened by the reviews of Vorticism in the English press unfavorably comparing it with Futurism and would rather have worked in collaboration with the Vorticists. He and Pound later became friends, and in Canto LXXII, written in Italian, Pound meets the spirit of the recently deceased Marinetti.
Meanwhile, Marinetti worked on a very anti-Catholic and anti-Austro-Hungarian 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, an account of the Battle of Adrianople, 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).
First World War Marinetti agitated for Italian involvement in the First World War and, once Italy had been engaged, promptly volunteered for service. In the fall of 1915, he and several other Futurists who were members of the Lombard Volunteer Cyclists were stationed at Lake Garda, in Trentino Province, high in the mountains along the Italo-Austrian border. They endured several weeks of fighting in harsh conditions before the cyclists units, deemed inappropriate for mountain warfare, were disbanded.
Marinetti spent most of 1916 supporting Italy's war effort with speeches, journalism and theatrical work and then returned to military service as a regular army officer in 1917. In May 1917, he was seriously wounded while serving with an artillery battalion on the Isonzo Front. He returned to service after a long recovery and participated in the decisive Italian victory at Vittorio Veneto in October 1918.Berghaus, Günter (editor; introduction to) Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso; Critical Writings: New Edition; Macmillan, 2007; .
Marriage After an extended courtship, in 1923 Marinetti married Benedetta Cappa (1897–1977), a writer and painter and a pupil of Giacomo Balla. Born in Rome, she had joined the Futurists in 1917. They had met in 1918, moved in together in Rome, and chose to marry only to avoid legal complications on a lecture tour of Brazil.Futurism: An Anthology, edited by Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, Laura Wittman, published by Yale University Press, p. 30. They had 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. She also produced three experimental novels. Cappa's major public work is likely a series of five murals at the Palermo Post Office (1926–1935) for the Fascist public-works architect Angiolo Mazzoni.
Fascism
In early 1918, Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party, which only a year later merged with 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.Dahlia S. Elazar. The making of fascism: class, state, and counter-revolution, Italy 1919–1922. Westport, Connecticut, USA: Praeger Publishers, 2001, p.73 He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, terming them "reactionary". After walking out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, he 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: "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."