Sironi a Capri

May 25 – June 16, 2013
Club Art Capri Epoché
Organized by Angela Maffia’s Galleria Nabis  (Capri) and Galleria 56 (Bologna)

Sironi a Capri in mostra dal 25 maggio al 16 giugno 2013: le tele di colui che fu uno dei massimi esponenti del Futurismo, che proprio a Capri negli anni ’30 vide protagonisti Prampolini, Depero e Cangiullo, saranno esposte in una mostra che si appresta a diventare uno degli appuntamenti artistici dell’estate.

Ad organizzare l’evento, la Galleria Nabis di Capri di Angela Maffia e la Galleria 56 di Bologna che si apprestano a dare il via ad una serie di eventi culturali che spaziano dalla galleria di via Fuorlovado al Club Art Capri Epoché dove saranno esposte le tele di Mario Sironi, poliedrico artista, figura di primo piano nel panorama europeo come sosteneva Picasso, che fu un suo grande estimatore.

This hour-long film will be produced summer/ fall 2013. Each section of Depero’s artistic activity will be presented with testimonies by artists, art historians, critics and scholars.

Depero and the Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe

September 16, 2013 – January 12, 2014
La Pedrera – Casa Milà, Barcelona
Produced and organized by Fundació Catalunya – La Pedrera
Curated by Antonio Pizza

The exhibition is being organized with the collaboration of Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART).

Thanks Clara Grífol!

February 21–September 1, 2014
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Curated by Vivien Greene
Catalog

The first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States, this multidisciplinary exhibition examines the historical sweep of the movement from its inception with F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto in 1909 through its demise at the end of World War II. Presenting over 300 works executed between 1909 and 1944, the chronological exhibition encompasses not only painting and sculpture, but also architecture, design, ceramics, fashion, film, photography, advertising, free-form poetry, publications, music, theater, and performance. To convey the myriad artistic languages employed by the Futurists as they evolved over a 35-year period, the exhibition integrates multiple disciplines in each section. Italian Futurism is organized by Vivien Greene, Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In addition, a distinguished international advisory committee has been assembled to provide expertise and guidance.

previous info

Modernità e nazione. Temi di ideologia visiva nell’arte italiana del primo Novecento.

Prima edizione: dicembre 2012© 2012 Quodlibet sr
264 p. : ill. b/n
ISBN 978-88-7462-516-1

View excerpt online or download the PDF

I rapporti del pittore Carlo Carrà con il mondo degli anarchici e dei socialisti rivoluzionari di Milano e poi, repentino, il suo innamoramento per Giotto. La pedagogia di Ardengo Soffici a favore d’una modernità italiana. Le scelte di Mario Sironi durante e dopo la grande guerra. L’idioma vernacolare di Giorgio Morandi negli anni venti. Il futurismo che si fa museo. I temi discussi in questo libro coprono un arco cronologico di quattro decenni, lungo una traiettoria che dalle dirompenti avanguardie d’inizio secolo giunge alle retoriche della tradizione nazionale promosse durante il fascismo.

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Tavola rotonda con Nicola Babini, Stefano Bianchi, Anna Gasparotto, Ivan Simonini, Franco Tagliapietra
Coordina Paola Pettenella
Sarà presente Eda Pratella

Sabato 27 aprile 2013 alle ore 15.30 nella sala “Ricerca”

all’interno della mostra La magnifica ossessione
Si parla di musica futurista presentando due pubblicazioni recenti:

Luigi Russolo. La musica, la pittura, il pensiero. Nuove ricerche sugli scritti,
a cura di G. Bellorini, A. Gasparotto, F. Tagliapietra, Firenze 2011

Francesco Balilla Pratella, Testamento, 1. ed. integrale
a cura di R. Berardi e F. Serra, Ravenna 2012

Ensemble Pratella

Saverio Mazzoni, voce recitante
Maria Claudia Bergantin, soprano
Nicola Babini, violoncello e intonarumori
Giulio Giurato, pianoforte

Intonarumori realizzati sui disegni originali di Luigi Russolo da Pietro Verardo

musiche

Francesco Balilla Pratella, Antonio Russolo, Silvio Mix

testi

Francesco Balilla Pratella, Luigi Russolo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Francesco Cangiullo, Arnaldo Ginna

Ingresso libero all’incontro e al concerto

Ingresso a pagamento alla mostra

International Symposium, Exhibitions, Concerts
Pärnu Days of Contemporary Music (Pärnu Nüüdismuusika Päevad)
5-13 January 2013

For more than two decades, the Estonian Arnold Schoenberg Society has been organizing the Pärnu Days of Contemporary Music. This year – building on past success – the horizon of the festival was broadened in order to introduce new topics and to appeal to a wider public. The focus in 2013 was on Futurism, and the art movement was discussed not only by musicologists, but also theater scholars, philosophers, semioticians, historians, and artists, both from Estonia and from other countries. Apart from scholars and academics also students were in attendance, mainly coming from the Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts.

The festival was held in Pärnu, a seaside resort considered the Estonian summer capital because of its fabulous beaches, rich nightlife and trendy art scene. Pärnu is also known to Futurism scholars as the first city in the Baltics where a group of Futurists came into existence, approximately 100 years ago. The event was therefore a belated Centenary of Futurism, Baltic style, and was celebrated with a bevy of activities, including a symposium, two concerts, workshops, two exhibitions and performances.

At the symposium, entitled Tracing Futurist Ideologies – co-organized by Estonian Arnold Schoenberg Society (Andrus Kallastu, Kerri Kotta, Gerhard Lock) and the Estonian Graduate School of Culture Studies and Arts, with support from the European Union Social Fund and the Goethe Institute – the focus was not just on the history of Futurism but also on the movement’s influence on the present. The keynote address was given by Günter Berghaus (University of Bristol), who spoke about The Futurist Fusion of Art, Life and Politics and discussed the movement’s complex relationship with the political situation that existed in Italy at the beginning of the twentieth century. He demonstrated the Futurists’ interest in radical politics and spoke about their connections with Anarchism, Bolshevism, and Mussolini’s Fascism. He also presented the first two volumes of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, which he set up in 2009 to offer opportunity for publishing essays and articles concerned with the international dimension of the Futurist movement, and to foster intellectual cooperation between Futurism scholars across countries and academic disciplines.

Futurism in the early twentieth century was a lively and stimulating force in the political, social and artistic domains. Many of its utopian ideas and projects were never fully realized, as was demonstrated by Edward Venn (Lancaster University) in his presentation, Ghosts in the Machine, and the Machine’s Ghosts: The Present Pastness of Futurism. Taking recourse to Derridean hauntological precepts, he argued that the very rejection of tradition served Marinetti and his followers to inscribe it all the more forcibly in those places where it was superficially rejected. He demonstrated some present invocations and echoes (intentional or otherwise) of Futurist ideologies in the music of Harrison Birtwistle and the 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony in London.

The second part of the day was made up of presentations of artistic research conducted by doctoral students from Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre in Tallinn (Christian M. Fischer on Motion Graphics, Musical Notation: An Example of the Topicality of Futurist Concepts; Arash Yazdani on The Musical Study of Future: Importance and Application of Music Acoustics on Education in Music; Hans-Gunter Lock on The Art of Noises and Acoustic Concepts of Sound and Noise). Connecting theme of their papers was the Futurist Way of Thinking. Artistic research conducted in workshops and classrooms was closely related to the symposium’s topic, and the resulting creative work was presented in illustrated lectures, as well as performances.

At the end of the first day of the symposium, the Ensemble U gave a theatrical concert inspired by Futurist aesthetics, especially the concepts of noise, technical innovations, machines, and industrialization. Presentations included Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem ”Small Noises, Noises and Big Noises” (Шумики, шумы, шумищи, 1913), electronically mixed by Tarmo Johannes with texts by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, using a TouchOSC as a controller. Sounds were converted into images and projected onto a screen in a manner that the rotational movement on the iPad were imitating the rotational movement of Russolo’s intonarumori. Another form of Futurist music was represented by the Russian composer Aleksandr Mossolov (1900-1973), author of the famous Symphony of Machines “Zavod” (Завод: Музыка машин, 1928). In the concert, this piece was presented in the form of a ”democratic remix”, in which every member of the orchestra could influence the order of the fragments of the composition, and the whole sound that resulted from the operation. Apart from these Futurist examples, the concert also included the Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948).

Opening of the exhibition of costumes for Victory over the Sun by Galina Gubanova (Kerri Kotta looking at a costume of the Futurist Strongman). Photographer: Harri Rospu.

The second day of the symposium started with a presentation by the theatre historian Galina Gubanova (Moscow/Vilnius) who has dedicated most of her professional life to researching the first Futurist opera, Victory over the Sun (Победа над Солнцем, 1913, music: Mikhail Matiushin, libretto: Aleksei Kruchenykh, set design: Kazimir Malevich). She discussed Malevich’s costumes and their relation with the Commedia dell’arte, and acquainted the audience with the extensive symbolic arsenal of the opera. During the Festival, the public had the opportunity to see an exhibition (open 5-25 of January at the Pärnu City Art Gallery), in which costumes and set designs from Gubanova’s production of the opera in Sankt-Petersburg were on display.

The art historian Raivo Kelomees (Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn) gave an extended visual presentation of examples of art inspired by the concept of a Total Work of Art. Starting with Giacomo Balla’s Abstract Speed + Sound (Velocità astratta + Rumore, 1913-14), Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio, 1912), Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio, 1913), and Natalia Goncharova’s Cyclist (Велосипедист, 1913) he continued with more contemporary examples stemming from architecture, performance, film, interactive art, virtual reality, all of which address various sensory forms of perception in an synaesthetic manner. Finally, Tiit Hennoste (University of Tartu) moderated a methodological round table discussion of the topic ”How to analyze the new?”

Second day of the symposium: Round table discussion with (from right to left) Edward Venn, Raivo Kelomees, Günter Berghaus, Galina Gubanova, Tiit Hennoste, Gerhard Lock. Photographer: Harri Rospu.

In the course of the day, there was an opportunity to visit a second exhibition of Futurist musical instruments that had been constructed during a workshop at the Estonian Academy of Arts led by Erik Alalooga, Andrus Kallastu and Tanja Kozlova. In the evening of 12 January in the Old Town’s Primary School, the students demonstrated how such instruments – inspired by Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), originator of the Futurist Art of Noises and inventor of the Intonarumori (Noise intoner) – could be used in a concert. The instruments carried names such as “The Wheel of the World”, “Framarr”, “Boiler”, “Excelsibur” and were not only visually intriguing, but also able to produce unusual sounds and timbres. During the concert, a further layer of allure was added by the fact that performers argued amongst themselves and sometimes left the hall in an agitated manner. However, these seemingly improvised performance elements were actually part of the score. After the presentation given by the art students followed fragments based on free interpretation of Kruchenykh’s libretto for Victory over the Sun, composed by Hans-Gunter Lock (b. 1974) using the Bohlen-Pierce scale, an alternative to the octave-based scales typical in Western music. The five movements were performed by the Repoo Ensemble and directed by PNP artistic director and composer Andrus Kallastu. In the end, a collective composition, The Way to the Future (2013) released the audience into a bitter-cold Estonian Winter night.

Second concert with instruments made by students from the Estonian Academy of Arts. From left to right: “Boiler” (Henry Griin), “Framarr” (Doris Feldmann and Marianne Jõgi), “Museib” (Kaarel Kütas). Photographer: Harri Rospu.

Taken altogether, the 2013 Pärnu Days of Contemporary Music offered a coherent series of events that focused upon some central ideas of historic Futurism. The organizers and the participants succeeded in addressing a variety of issues and artistic forms of expression, and demonstrated that Futurism was not just a “historical” avant-garde, but an all-encompassing cultural phenomenon that affected subsequent artistic developments and can still offer inspiration to young artists in our day and age.

Eredità e attualità del Futurismo

April 11-12, 2013
Centro Culturale Elsa Morante, Rome
Organized by Giancarlo Carpi and Antonio Saccoccio
*Corollary events

The focus of the conference is:

• The legacy of Futurism in the artistic movements and the avant-garde of the late twentieth century
• The legacy of Futurism in the poetics of individual artists working in the late twentieth century
• The currency of futurist poetics, aesthetics, ideology in artistic, cultural, scientific contemporary movements
• Current means of research, diffusion, promotion and reception in the range of studies on Futurism (archives, yearbooks, computerization of texts, etc.).

Il convegno intende realizzare una ricognizione critica e aggiornata sull’eredità e l’attualità del Futurismo.

Il centenario del 2009 ha offerto l’occasione per centinaia di eventi sparsi su tutto il territorio nazionale: convegni dall’alto profilo scientifico, esposizioni curate e allestite con rigore, rilevanti nuove pubblicazioni sul tema. Ma tutti questi eventi hanno mostrato un limite: quello di essere rimasti all’interno della pura ricostruzione storica e di non aver affrontato, se non sporadicamente, un nodo cruciale, quello dell’eredità e dell’attualità dell’ideologia e della poetica futurista. Obiettivo del convegno è mettere insieme e a confronto le voci di coloro che hanno contribuito a tracciare quella linea poetica e/o ideologica che, partendo dal Futurismo, si è sviluppata, con influssi più o meno manifesti, per tutto il XX secolo. Saranno quindi invitati a partecipare quegli studiosi o pensatori che hanno sviluppato nel tempo ricerche relative all’eredità e attualità dell’ideologia e/o poetica futuriste.

PROGRAM

APRIL 11

8.30 – 9.00 accoglienza e registrazione

9.00 – 9.45 apertura dei lavori

Saluti istituzionali e presentazione del convegno:

Federico Mollicone (Presidente Commissione Cultura, Sport, politiche giovanili e comunicazione)

Francesco Antonelli (Presidente Biblioteche di Roma)

Maurizio Cuoci (Vice Presidente XII Municipio)

Pier Luigi Manieri (Centro Culturale Elsa Morante)

Giancarlo Carpi (Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”)

Antonio Saccoccio (Università degli Studi di Roma “Tor Vergata”)

Francesca Barbi Marinetti

9.45 – 11.15 PANEL 1

Antonella Pesola (Responsabile della Biblioteca della Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna di Spoleto “Giovanni Carandente”)
Arte sacra futurista: esempi di continuità ed attualità.

Joan Abelló Juanpere (Universitat Pompeu Fabra de Barcelona)
Tracce di futurismo nel dopoguerra a Barcellona. Tra arti plastiche e letteratura.

Roberta Sciarretta (Università Tor Vergata di Roma)
Padri e figli: il dibattito sulla paternità delle scritture verbo-visive negli anni Settanta

11.15 – 11.45 pausa caffè

11.45 – 12.45 PANEL 2

Giovanni Antonucci (Già Professore Università La Sapienza di Roma)
L’influenza del futurismo italiano sull’arte e il teatro della seconda metà del Novecento

Luigi Tallarico (Presidente Centro Studi Futurismo Oggi)
Eredità vissuta come pensiero vivente.

13.00 – 15.00 pausa pranzo

15.00 – 16.30 PANEL 3

Stefano Gallo (Università Tor Vergata di Roma)
Balla nella figurazione astratta di Bruno Aller

Rossella Catanese (Università Sapienza di Roma)
Paul Virilio, la velocità e il cinema futurista

Andrea Baffoni (Università degli studi di Perugia)
Purilumetria e Agrà. Continuità futurista ed esiti aeropittorici negli anni delle conquiste spaziali

16.30 – 18.00 PANEL 4

Plinio Perilli (studioso indipendente)
Futurismo anteriore, Futurismi ulteriori. Sopravvivenze, ripercussioni, repêchages, post-novazioni… da F. T. Marinetti ad oggi

Jessica Palmieri (Fondatore, ItalianFuturism.org)
Coltivare una comunità e la sensibilità futurista

Ida Mitrano (Università Sapienza di Roma)
L’uomo moltiplicato di Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e la computer art di Ida Gerosa.

18.20 – 20.00 Proiezione del documentario “Sulle tracce del Futurismo”

Introducono: Francesca Franco e Marco Rossi Lecce
Modera: Pier Luigi Manieri

20.00 – 21.00 AperiVita futurista (buffet polisensoriale)

21.00 – 22.30 Proiezione in prima assoluta di interviste ai futuristi Tullio Crali, Giuseppe Sprovieri, Giannina Censi (Archivio Carlo Erba, PARTE 1)

APRIL 12

9.30 – 11.00 PANEL 5

Miroslava Hájek (Studio UXA)
Bruno Munari: condizione futurista

Lorenzo Canova (Università degli studi del Molise)
Corpo, ambiente, mass media: le eredità del futurismo nelle arti tra Ventesimo e Ventunesimo secolo

Gerardo Regnani (Curatore Collezione Fine)
Social network e Fotodinamismo. La fotografia (im)mobile.

11.00 – 11.30 pausa caffè

11.30 – 13.00 PANEL 6

Massimo Duranti (Presidente Archivi Gerardo Dottori)
I luoghi del Futurismo. Esiti e sviluppi della categoria storiografica.

Paolo Tonini (L’Arengario Studio Bibliografico)
Al di là del futurismo. Libri, riviste e immagini del Movimento ’77.

Vitaldo Conte (Accademia Belle Arti di Roma)
Futurismo manifesto di Arte Viva.

13.00 – 14.15 pausa pranzo

14.15 – 16.00 PANEL 7

Patrizio Ceccagnoli (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Marinetti ritrovato: Venezia, Ruskin e la ‘pupattola’

Maurizio Scudiero (Curatore Archivio Depero di Rovereto)
Depero, la Pubblicità e la Pop-Art.

Giancarlo Carpi (Università Tor Vergata di Roma)
Il Futurismo e la Commodity art: dal feticcio futurista al feticcio cute.

Carolina Fernández Castrillo (Universidad a Distancia de Madrid)
Dall’“animale metallico” futurista a GPF Bunny: transgenesi, arte e società.

16.00 – 17.30 PANEL 8

Riccardo Campa (Università Jagellonica di Cracovia)
Il futurismo dopo il Futurismo

Serge Milan (Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis)
Inattualità del Futurismo

Antonio Saccoccio (Università Tor Vergata di Roma)
Futurismo Duemila: il ritorno dei barbari nella civiltà delle reti

17.30 – 18.15 Tavola rotonda finale

Un futurismo e un’avanguardia per il XXI secolo?
Moderano: Giancarlo Carpi, Antonio Saccoccio

18.30 – 20.00 Proiezione in prima assoluta di interviste ai futuristi Tullio Crali, Giuseppe Sprovieri, Giannina Censi (Archivio Carlo Erba, PARTE 2)

20.00 – 21.00 AperiVita futurista (buffet polisensoriale)

21.00 – 22.30 Proiezione in prima assoluta di interviste ai futuristi Tullio Crali, Giuseppe Sprovieri, Giannina Censi (Archivio Carlo Erba, PARTE 3)

Umberto Boccioni. Dinamismo di un foot-baller (Dynamism of a soccer player). 1913. MoMA, New York.

Dr. Przemysław Strożek
Institute of Art Polish Academy of Sciences / Instytut Sztuki Polskiej Akademii Nauk

Dynamics of Futurist Football
Commemorating the 100th Anniversary of Umberto Boccioni’s Dinamismo di un Footballer (1913-2013)

In 1913, when Pro Vercelli won the Italian Championship for the 3rd time in a row, Umberto Boccioni painted Dinamismo di un footballer – most likely the first Futurist and avant-garde painting in which the topic of football appeared.(1) In the course of the year Boccioni was exploring the issues of human body dynamics with such paintings as Dinamismo di un corpo umano and Dinamismo di un ciclista. Dinamismo di un footballer and his two aforementioned paintings formed a kind of triptych on the topic of sport, meant to validate Boccioni’s proclamation from Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto (1910), that ‘the movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies’.(2) The figure of the footballer, caught in the ceaseless simultaneity of the action of kicking a football, would undergo a total dematerialization in the paintings’ dynamical and luminous surroundings. The silhouette of the moving footballer anticipated the theory of plastic dynamism, according to which ‘dynamic form is a species of fourth dimension in painting and sculpture’.(3) Boccioni expressed the need to introduce a dynamic element in painting so that the subject would seem to be in constant motion. The truth of the modern, quickly changing world was to be expressed by omnipresent dynamism. This is why Boccioni introduced elements connected to sports in his paintings – they allowed him to try and depict dynamic continuity as a single form.

Dinamismo di un footballer did not convey the atmosphere of the stadium – the field, the goalposts, the spectator stands, or the competing footballers. Were it not for the title, it would have been difficult to guess that football was its subject at all. Boccioni depicted a footballer, shaping his body so as to maximise his physical force, expressing the health and virility of the new century appealing to the masses. Painted in such way that he rises above the ground, the footballer seems to be making movements similar to those of airplane propellers. Boccioni thus explored the mechanical aspects of movement – muscles built to resemble those of a machine. It appears that Dinamismo di un footballer not only referenced the theory of plastic dynamism, but was also an allegory of the new man, of a superhero. It is no accident that Boccioni’s painting was one of Marinetti’s favourites – it hung in the central point of his Rome apartment. All in all, Dinamismo di un footballer constituted one of the greatest achievements of Futurist painting, where all that was dynamic, mechanical and modern merged with the vision of the Futurist superhuman.

Roberto Marcello (Iras) Baldessari. Giocatore di Pallone. 1920. Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Trento e Rovereto.

When it comes to painterly ‘dynamisation’ of the human form, the motive of ‘a footballer in movement’ resurfaced in the years to follow in the works of successive generations of Italian Futurists. At the beginning of the 1920s, impressions of football matches appeared in Iras Baldessari’s Giocatori di pallone (1920); Emilio Notte’s Partita di pallone (1920); Enrico Castello’s Calciatori (1920) and Il portiere (1922). These works showed footballers caught in the moment of field rivalry. Notte and Castello explored above all the dynamics of a football game – the competitivity, the struggle of muscular bodies. Baldessari in turn presented the footballers’ silhouettes as a composition of geometric forms, placing them not so much within the Futurist aesthetic as somewhere between Cubism and Constructivism.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Fortunato Depero created a series of sketches entitled Giocatori di pallone (1920-21), which examined the phases of movement of a footballer approaching a goalpost. The analysis of the stages of movement resembled an intervention not unlike Ettiene-Jules Marey’s chronophotography. The latter had used photography to track physiological functions and mapped out the transformation of corporeal energies while his subjects performed different movements. The silhouette of Depero’s footballer, with its shape of a dummy, resembled the characteristic toys (‘giocatoli Futuristi’) designed by the painter for the Casa d’Arte Futurista (founded in Rovereto in 1919), and the footballer-dummy’s kinetic phases of movement were evocative of his puppet theatre sketches.

Gerardo Dottori. Partita di calcio. 1928. Private Collection.

After 1926, when the fascist government seized control of calico and issued Carta di Vareggio, which reorganized, rationalized and nationalized the game, the subject matter of football would return in the art of the Futurists with additional force. One of the main representatives of Secondo Futurismo, Gerardo Dottori, created at the time a series of sketches called Appunti allo stadio which depicted a number of particular football situations. It had little to do with the Futurist aesthetic, but it indicated the painter’s particular interest in the subject. In 1928, he created one of his most known paintings Partita di calcio, in which the football players were surrounded by a landscape simultaneously rendered dynamic by circular forms, diverse perspectives, dimensions and scales. The players had been inscribed in rays of refracted light, which resembled Boccioni’s solutions from Dinamismo di un footballer. Yet in Dottori’s work, the silhouettes of the footballers’ moving bodies did not dematerialise so radically. The competing players were soaring towards the sky as if being drawn in by the sunlight, evoking Dottori’s use of refracted rays in his religious and landscape paintings of central Italy. This ascension of footballers takes place among the forests of Umbria, and is seen from an aerial point of view. In the entire scene one distinguishes players sporting blue shirts and white shorts. The national colours of Gli Azzurri suggest that the game depicted in Partita di calcio is taking place at an international level. In the 1928 Summer Olympics tournament in Amsterdam, which is described as the precursor to the first FIFA World Cup held in 1930 in Uruguay, Italy won the bronze medal. Partita di calcio might thus have been a painterly variation on one of the games, set in the local landscape of Umbria; it might also have been an idealisation of the first international successes of Italy’s national team.

Between 1928 and 1930, many Futurist painters turned to motifs connected to football. Among them were Pippo Rizzo, Vittorio Corona, Tato, Thayaht, Ivanhoe Gambini and Giulio D’Anna. A sketch by D’Anna entitled Calciatore (1930) bears a striking resemblance to the silhouette of the new 20th century hero: Boccioni’s sculpture Forme Uniche dalla Continuita’ nello spazio (1913), which sought to exemplify Marinetti’s dream of a man/machine hybrid.(4) D’Anna’s footballer resembled a soldier marching in the war, but here his intention was to catch the ball, and his duty – to shoot on goal.

Giulio D’Anna. Football. 1933. Collezione Gattuso, Palermo.

Three years later, Giulio D’Anna revisited football as a subject matter, once again referring to Boccioni’s oeuvre. In a 1933 painting called Football, he created the illusion of a running footballer, caught in the simultaneous action of taking aim and kicking the ball. D’Anna displayed the stages of movement, and as a consequence the footballer becomes two people – two heads, four arms, four legs. Such way of expressing the dynamics of a sportsman perfectly matched the fragment of a Futurist painting manifesto, where Boccioni, still in 1910, wrote: ‘On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular’.(5) This painting, like many others, is a testament tothe vitality of Boccioni’s ideas among the younger generations of Futurist painters. Dinamismo di un footballer continued in the 1930s to function as a model for the Futurist imagining of the dynamics of a footballer’s silhouette.

[Published 3/31/13 ItalianFuturism.org, © Przemysław Strożek. Above text is a fragment of an essay Football, in Futurismo. A Microhistory, forthcoming 2013]

NOTES

1) Up until that time, French modern painters Albert Gleizes, Robert Delaunay and André Lhote painted fragments of games, often entitling them ‘football’, but in reality painted rugby games. This indicates that in Europe the names of both games were not fully precise yet. Rugby was historically a form of football (the main association is still called Rugby Football Union, RFU) and it was only in the late 1800s that it split from ‘association football’ which is the present form of football.

2) Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 1910, in Futurist Manifestos, ed. and introduction by Umbro Apollonio (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), p. 30.

3) U. Boccioni, Plastic Dynamism 1913, in Futurist Manifestos, p. 93.

4) Ch. Poggi, Inventing Futurism. The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 170.

5) U. Boccioni [et. al.], ‘Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 1910’, in Futurist Manifestos, p. 28.

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT FUTURISM AND FOOTBALL (SOCCER):

Appunti allo stadio: 90 opere sul tema del calcio nell’Arte italiana del XX secolo

Antonio Sant’Elia. La centrale elettrica.25.2.1914. Matita e inchiostri colorati su carta. 31×20,5 cm. Milano, collezione privata.

La Città Nuova: Oltre Sant’Elia

March 24 – July 14, 2013
Villa Olmo & Pinacoteca Civica, Como
Curated by Marco De Michelis
Catalog: Silvana editoriale

The exhibition will analyse a century of urban visions, as depicted in 100 works, some of them on show here for the first time, including paintings, drawings, models, films and installations by artists, architects and film directors, including Antonio Sant’Elia, Umberto Boccioni, Fernand Léger, Mario Sironi, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Fritz Lang, Yona Friedman, Archizoom, Superstudio, Chris Burden, Carsten Höller and others.

A section hosted in parallel in the Civic Gallery will show 50 drawings by Antonio Sant’Elia belonging to the City of Como, which have been inaccessible to the general public for many years.

From 24 March to 14 July 2013, Villa Olmo and the Civic Gallery of Como (Italy) will be hosting an exhibition that analyses one hundred years of urban visions lasting the entire twentieth century, inspired by the drawings of Como’s illustrious son Antonio Sant’Elia (Como, 1888 – Monfalcone, 1916).

Curated by Marco De Michelis, lecturer at the IUAV University of Architecture in Venice, and organised by the City of Como Department of Culture, THE NEW CITY: BEYOND SANT’ELIA will show 100 works, some of which have never been shown before, including paintings, drawings, films and installations by artists, architects and film directors, including Antonio Sant’Elia, Umberto Boccioni, Fernand Léger, Mario Sironi, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Fritz Lang, Yona Friedman, Archizoom, Superstudio, Chris Burden, Carsten Höller and others.

A section hosted in the Civic Gallery will show 50 drawings by Antonio Sant’Elia belonging to the City of Como, which have been inaccessible to the general public for many years. The exhibition is a rare opportunity to admire such a substantial number of the Como architect’s works, which considerations of conservation have rendered inaccessible to the general public for many years. The show in the Gallery will illustrate Sant’Elia’s various different architectural projects, ranging from dams, power stations and major public buildings to residential developments with external lifts, airport hangars and railway stations, all featuring his typical dynamic signature oblique lines, elliptical shapes, traffic distribution and clearing towers and multi-level roads.

The first thing visitors will encounter is The New City, i.e. the series of twelve drawings presented by Sant’Elia at the Nuove Tendenze (New Trends) exhibition in Milan in del 1914, which encapsulated the urban visions of this young Como native who had then just drawn up his manifesto for a Futurist architecture.

Ever since its advent during the nineteenth century, the metropolis has been considered to be one of the most spectacular and contradictory manifestations of the modern era, featuring unprecedented and dramatic hygienic, moral, political, cultural and functional problems that called for radical reforms in the areas of roads and transport, of housing and of the organisation of everyday domestic life.

Attempts were made to offer radical responses to these challenges by such great architects as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright, with the extraordinary visions of the Contemporary city for three million inhabitants by Le Corbusier and Broadacre City, the ideal American city based on the single-family home and the car as means of individual transport, designed by Wright, whose large model is on show here. The future of the city was long a burning issue of the discussions and questions that agitated the neo avant-gardes in Europe, but also in the United States and Japan, until the beginning of the seventies: the Dutch architect Constant, his Franco-Hungarian counterpart Yona Friedman and the British from Archigram imagined cities suspended above the ground, whose inhabitants could organise their lives freely, not unlike what was proposed by the German Walter Jonas or the Japanese metabolist Arata Isozaki. In the tempestuous context of Europe’s 1968 upheavals, Italian groups like Archizoom and Superstudio then also developed an uncompromising critique of the capitalist city, questioning its very structure and meaning.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the modern city has been attracting the sometimes fascinated and often shocked eyes of generations of artists. The great boulevards of Paris packed with crowds and traffic were the undeniable stars of much of the work of the Impressionists, while the Futurist Umberto Boccioni interpreted their explosive growth in such paintings as The City Rises – a rare preparatory sketch of this work is on show here – and Mario Sironi followed suit with new cityscapes taken from outlying industrial areas. Nor were the Cubists insensitive to the suggestive growth of urban agglomerations, as demonstrated here by the oil on canvas by Fernand Léger, on loan from the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1926, the German film director Fritz Lang made his masterpiece Metropolis against a backdrop of visionary, expressionist scenery, while only a few years later Erich Kettelhut and Hungary’s Moholy-Nagy celebrated the luminous, febrile panorama of the contemporary city in the sequences for the film Things to Come (1936), which the artist Jan Tichy has now re-used in a spectacular three-channel video.

The exhibition ends with a series of key pieces of artistic research conducted in recent years: Pizza City, the boundless model of a city made of nothing but hundreds of toys by the American artist Chris Burden and the video by the Chinese artist Cao Fei, which depicts a city suspended in the virtual space of Second Life. In an attempt to bring the experiments conducted by the avant-gardes in the twenties together with the conditions of the present, the German artist Carsten Höller has “reconstructed” the fantastic project conceived by the Soviet architect and artist Krutikov in 1928 for a “flying city”, setting it free to waft above the skies of Como today.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Silvana editoriale, featuring essays by the curator and by Esther da Costa Meyer, Antonello Negri, Antonio Costa, Anna Rosellini, Jean-Louis Cohen, Aya Lurie, Mark Wigley, Manuel Orazi, Simon Sadler, Roberto Gargiani, Gabriele Mastrigli, Peter Pakesch, Paola Nicolin and Joseph Grima.

Como, March 2013