Killing the Moonlight

Electric light, the telephone, radio, the automobile, the movie camera, the airplane: the last years of the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth were a blur of technological innovation. In Italy, a provincial, largely agrarian country only recently unified after centuries of foreign occupation and economic and cultural stagnation, these changes sent a quickening charge through towns and cities that had long been tourist destinations valued for their past rather than their present. The resulting pockets of rapid industrialization soon came into conflict with a culture still dominated by the Vatican and other tradition-minded elites.

The poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the founder of the movement called Futurism, left little doubt which side he was on. “Italy has been too long the great second-hand market,” he wrote in his widely circulated manifesto of Futurism in 1909. “We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.” It was “to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries,” he wrote, “that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence.” He went on to sketch his vision of a new kind of culture:

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….  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.

Marinetti was Italian, but he had a distinctly cosmopolitan background. Born in Alexandria, where his father worked as a consultant to the Egyptian government as it strove to industrialize and modernize the country, Marinetti studied at the Sorbonne before getting a law degree at the University of Pavia. In Paris he observed the birth of cubism and absorbed the social theories of Georges Sorel, who preached the need for violence and myth in revolutionary movements. “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice,” Marinetti wrote in his manifesto, which appeared first in Italy to little fanfare but then, more notably, in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. 

“It is from Italy that we are flinging this to the world,” he wrote, but as the art historian Ara H. Merjian notes in Futurism: A Very Short Introduction, his concise but meaty and nuanced presentation of the movement, “no such ‘we’ existed at the time of writing.” Although Marinetti was primarily a poet, he was greatly influenced by the revolution in visual arts happening in Paris at the turn of the century, in which various forms of abstraction—in addition to cubism, post-impressionism and fauvism—were dismantling traditional forms of representation. After publishing his manifesto Marinetti brought a cohort of young Futurist artists—among them Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, and Luigi Russolo—to Paris to see the work of people like Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Constantin Brâncuși, and Marcel Duchamp. They drew particularly heavily on cubism, but where artists like Picasso and Braque often painted portraits and still lifes, the Futurists tried to capture motion and dynamic change: the riot, the dance, the motorboat. The Futurist painter Giacomo Balla, a major figure in the movement, took his appreciation of “dynamic sensation” so far that he named his daughters Luce (light) and Elica (propeller).

“Whereas Cubism remained a revolution of artistic form,” Merjian points out, “Futurism aimed its insurgency at every imaginable facet of experience, seeking to shatter the boundaries between art and life itself.” There were not just Futurist painting and Futurist sculpture but Futurist architecture, Futurist music, and Futurist advertising. Members of the movement organized “Futurist evenings”—sometimes credited with initiating performance art—that involved recitations of poetry and manifestoes, political provocations, and musical performances with machines that hummed and hissed. Sometimes these gatherings devolved into fistfights and ended with the intervention of the police.

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From the beginning Futurism had a clear political dimension. In his manifesto Marinetti sang the praises of aggression, physical violence, and war, which he called “the only way to cleanse the world.” Many Futurist evenings were agitations in favor of Italy’s entering World War I. Proclaiming a brand of “revolutionary nationalism,” in 1918 the movement even founded a Futurist Political Party that blended right and left, mixing bellicose support for Italy’s territorial expansion with promises to combat illiteracy, legalize divorce, abolish the secret police, and rid the country of the influence of the Catholic Church.

Much of this program anticipated the early incarnation of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Party, founded a year later. Fascism seemed to embody Futurism’s call for a cruel, violent break with traditions and social norms it found suffocating. Before long Futurists were quietly disappointed by many of the concessions fascism made to Italy’s conservative elite and the Catholic Church. Mussolini stopped short of making Futurism the official art of the regime, instead patronizing other modernists, such as the rationalist architects Marcello Piacentini and Giuseppe Terragni, as well as more traditional forms of monumental art that glorified the Roman past—hardly a Futurist program. Nonetheless Marinetti and most Futurists remained faithful fascists, and the histories of the two movements were profoundly intertwined. “For its part,” Merjian writes, “Futurism claimed full credit for Fascism’s rise.”

It was hardly surprising, then, when the right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni, whose Brothers of Italy party has its roots in neofascism, decided to make its first major exhibition at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art a retrospective of Futurism. Even before Il Tempo del Futurismo (The Time of Futurism) opened last December on the eightieth anniversary of Marinetti’s death, it generated controversy. Respected art historians involved in planning the exhibition either resigned or were forced out, fanning fears that the show would become a veiled celebration of fascism.

These concerns deepened not long before the opening, when the museum held a book launch for the conservative author Italo Bocchino’s Why Italy Went Right: Against the Lies of the Left. The event provoked three members of the museum’s four-person scientific committee to resign. In a joint letter they deplored that “an institutional venue, and therefore everyone’s,” had been “used for an event of an eminently partisan nature, without adequate prior discussion.”

In March I visited the show, which closed at the end of April, to get an idea of what culture in right-wing Italy might look like. What was most striking—and ultimately disturbing—was not its political content but the almost total lack of it.

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The first rooms gathered some of the works that put Futurism on the art-historical map. There, borrowed from the Museum of Modern Art, was Balla’s Street Light (1909), in which the artist used a postimpressionist style to depict the shafts of light emanating from a streetlamp with a faint crescent moon in the background. The picture “demonstrated how romantic moonlight had been surpassed by the light of the modern electric streetlight,” Balla wrote in a letter to MoMA years later, when he was eighty-four. “This was the end of Romanticism in art.” It inspired a memorable phrase from Marinetti: “Let’s Kill the Moonlight!”

There was Gino Severini’s Dynamism of Forms—Light in Space (1912), an exuberant fusion of cubism and pointillistic technique; Balla’s Abstract Speed + Noise (1913–14), a stormy clash of arcs and lines in blue, red, and green; and the wonderful Speeding Motorboat (1919), by Marinetti’s wife, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti. These are works that exude the energy and freedom of the movement’s early years.  

For hints of the movement’s politics, one had to look closely. The minimal wall labels offered almost no historical context for details like the phrase “only hygiene” in one of Marinetti’s collages—a partial quote from his famous declaration “war, the world’s only hygiene.” Nor did I see any discussion of Futurism’s enthusiastic support of Italy’s entrance into World War I, nor mention of the roughly 600,000 Italians who died in it. Among them were thirteen of Futurism’s young founders, including one of its most important painters (Umberto Boccioni) and the main proponent of Futurist architecture (Antonio Sant’Elia). 

Nor, most glaringly, was there mention of Futurism’s relationship to fascism. If it weren’t for the title, you could walk past Fortunato Depero’s Warlike Landscape (1916) and not realize that it had anything to do with war; only on close examination could you see what might be a bird of prey with sharp, mechanical bladelike beaks and ribbons in the Italian flag’s red, white, and green. Another Depero on display, Guerra-Festa (War Celebration, 1925), depicts its subject in bright, jubilant colors; in the foreground a figure behind a cannon shoots off three ribbons that reach up to the sky. The only two images of Mussolini I noticed were a 1933 sculpture by Renato Bertelli, The Head of Mussolini, and a painting from six years later of a man on horseback by Enrico Prampolini that crosses the line into regime hagiography, with its vision of a purposeful-looking figure charging ahead across a field of deep blue. Again the wall label gave little more than the painting’s title: Dynamic of Action: Mussolini on Horseback.

One curious choice was the inclusion of two paintings by Julius Evola, a mystic philosopher of fascism who has become a darling of the contemporary far right—praised by the likes of Steve Bannon—for his ferocious denunciation of the modern world in general and of liberalism and democracy in particular. The choice is odd: Evola had only a brief flirtation with Futurism and gave up painting in his twenties. No wall label said who he was or explained that he advocated vocally for Mussolini’s racial laws and fled to Nazi Germany after fascism fell in 1943.  One suspects that the presence of the paintings was less about noting his marginal contribution to Futurism than about normalizing the presence of a figure who until recently was considered taboo. Throughout the exhibition fascism was present at this kind of subtle, almost subliminal level, associated not with violence, war, and death but with the excitement of technological change.

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Indeed, if the show had an ideology, it was an unnuanced celebration of technology for its own sake. Along with hundreds of works of art, there were dozens of gadgets and machines, including a motorcycle, a bright red Maserati sports car, and even a full-scale model of a Macchi M.C.72 seaplane. There was a Futurist portrait of Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of radio technology. One wall bore a quote from Marinetti imagining that “one day there will be telephones without wires”—see, he even predicted the cell phone! It was moments like this that led the art critic and Futurism scholar Giancarlo Carpi, in an article for Artribune, to call Il Tempo del Futurismo “an ideological falsehood” that proceeds “as if the futurists were engineers dedicated to the development of the country.”

In its wildly enthusiastic and somewhat shallow embrace of everything new and technological, the show does keep faith with Marinetti, who advised readers in his “The Birth of a Futurist Aesthetic” to “put your trust in Progress, which is always right even when it is wrong, because it is movement, life, struggle, hope.” It is a philosophy with all too much influence over our current moment. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen—a major investor in companies such as Facebook, GitHub, Twitter, and the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase—self-consciously based his “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (2023) on Marinetti’s. It begins:

We are being lied to.

We are told that technology takes our jobs, reduces our wages, increases inequality, threatens our health, ruins the environment, degrades our society, corrupts our children, impairs our humanity, threatens our future, and is ever on the verge of ruining everything.

Nothing, Andreessen insists, could be further from the truth: “We believe that there is no material problem—whether created by nature or by technology—that cannot be solved with more technology.” As he picks up steam, Andreessen channels his inner Marinetti:

We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think….

We believe in the romance of technology, of industry. The eros of the train, the car, the electric light, the skyscraper. And the microchip, the neural network, the rocket, the split atom.

Finally he quotes Marinetti directly:

To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.”

Andreessen was one of the tech gurus who enthusiastically backed and financed Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign. When Trump won, he exulted, “it felt like a boot off the throat.” Presumably he was referring to any attempt at regulating cryptocurrencies, investigating big tech monopolies, or considering guardrails in the pursuit of artificial intelligence.

In Andreessen’s manifesto, as in Il Tempo del Futurismo, we are asked to believe that technology is politically neutral and an unalloyed good. But it would be dangerously devoid of history to merely celebrate the exuberance of the movement’s early years and ignore that the technology it celebrated was soon to industrialize warfare with catastrophic results. “Its relentless will to progress entailed the movement’s own self-destruction,” Merjian writes. “Its abrupt end with World War II proved a kind of fait accompli. Whatever the ambitions of its early adherents, Futurism’s ideological compromise with Fascism remains as indisputable as it is irreversible.”