Description
Writer and founder and leader of the Italian Futurist movement. Correspondence, writings, photographs, and printed matter
from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's papers, documenting the history of the futurist movement from its beginning in the journal
Poesia, through World War I, and less comprehensively, through World War II and its aftermath.
Background
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, born in Alexandria in 1876, attended secondary school and university in France, where he began
his literary career. After gaining some success as a poet, he founded and edited the journal Poesia (1905), a forum in which the theories of futurism rather quickly evolved. With "Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurismo," published
in Le Figaro (1909), Marinetti launched what was arguably the first 20th century avant-garde movement, anticipating many of the issues
of Dada and Surrealism. Like other avant-garde movements, futurism took the momentous developments in science and industry
as signaling a new historical era, demanding correspondingly innovative art forms and language. Like other avant-garde movements,
futurism found a solution in collage, which Marinetti called "parole in libertà" when applied to literary forms. Between 1909
and 1920, the period known as futurism's heroic phase, Marinetti energetically promoted his own work, and that of fellow futurists,
through numerous manifestos, speeches, essays, meetings, performances and publications. Following WWI, in which he served,
Marinetti became an active member of the fascist party; on April 15, 1919, he and Ferruccio Vecchi led the "battle" of piazza
Mercanti against socialists, communists, and anarchists, which was Italian fascism's first decisive victory. In 1929 he was
elected to the Academy of Italy. Throughout the 1920s and 30s and until his death in 1944, Marinetti sought to reconcile the
theories of futurism with the ideology of state fascism and to serve as impresario for both.