Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

In 1909 the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the founding manifesto of Italian Futurism, an inflammatory celebration of "the love of danger" and "the beauty of speed" that provoked readers to take aggressive action and "glorify war--the world's only hygiene." Marinetti's words unleashed an influential artistic and political movement that has since been neglected owing to its exaltation of violence and nationalism, its overt manipulation of mass media channels, and its associations with Fascism. Inventing Futurism is a major reassessment of Futurism that reintegrates it into the history of twentieth-century avant-garde artistic movements.


Countering the standard view of Futurism as naïvely bellicose, Christine Poggi argues that Futurist artists and writers were far more ambivalent in their responses to the shocks of industrial modernity than Marinetti's incendiary pronouncements would suggest. She closely examines Futurist literature, art, and politics within the broader context of Italian social history, revealing a surprisingly powerful undercurrent of anxiety among the Futurists--toward the accelerated rhythms of urban life, the rising influence of the masses, changing gender roles, and the destructiveness of war. Poggi traces the movement from its explosive beginnings through its transformations under Fascism to offer completely new insights into familiar Futurist themes, such as the thrill and trauma of velocity, the psychology of urban crowds, and the fantasy of flesh fused with metal, among others.


Lavishly illustrated and unparalleled in scope, Inventing Futurism demonstrates that beneath Futurism's belligerent avant-garde posturing lay complex and contradictory attitudes toward an always-deferred utopian future.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Preface (p. ix)
• Acknowledgments (p. xiii)
• 1 Futurist Velocities (p. 1)
• 2 Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd (p. 35)
• 3 Umberto Boccioni's The City Rises: Picturing the Futurist Metropolis (p. 65)
• 4 Photogenic Abstraction: Giacomo Balla's Iridescent Interpenetrations (p. 109)
• 5 Dreams of Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body (p. 150)
• 6 Futurist Love, Luxury, and Lust (p. 181)
• 7 Return of the Repressed: Vicissitudes of the Futurist Machine Aesthetic under Fascism (p. 232)
• 8 Epilogue (p. 266)
• Notes (p. 273)
• Works Cited (p. 349)
• Index (p. 361)
• Photography Credits (p. 375)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The phrase "artificial optimism" in the subtitle of this study hints at the inherent contradictions of an artistic style based on polemical theorizing, which is the traditional understanding of futurism. Poggi (Univ. of Pennsylvania) acknowledges the influential and strident voice of F. T. Marinetti, the founder of futurism, but she moves beyond the poet-impresario's rhetoric in her examination of the individual artistic struggles of the major futurist painters with the primary themes of Marinetti's public manifestos. Poggi explores key subjects that appealed to the futurists by examining major futurist works that deal with such early-20th-century concepts as the exhilaration of speed, the mass behavior of the crowd, the projection of individual personality traits onto machines, and other themes that still motivate a century later. By relating studies and journal entries to popular intellectual currents, the author reveals the simultaneous fascination and apprehension experienced by these artists as they encountered and contemplated these strange new experiences at the beginning of the modern era. In this respect the individual artists are revealed as thoughtful, sensitive creators rather than foot soldiers in a modernist campaign, and futurism is revealed as a more serious artistic endeavor. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers. W. S. Bradley Mesa State College