Peter Schjeldahl: Futurism and Italian Fascism.

Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe, at the Guggenheim, is a spectacular survey of what has long been the most neglected canonical movement in modern artbecause it is also the most embarrassing. An avant-garde so clownish, in its grandiose posturing, and so sinister, in its political embrace of Italian Fascism, has been easy to shrug off, but the show makes a powerful case for second thoughts. It arrays some superb paintings and sculptures, the best of them by Umberto Boccioni, whose death in the First World War, at the age of thirty-three, deprived the movement of its one great artist. And marvels of graphic and architectural invention reward a stroll up the Guggenheims ramp, through an eventful installation by the curator Vivien Greene. Yet even the most original Futurist artsuch as Boccionis gorgeous and explosive painting The City Rises (1910-11) and his dazzling sculpture of a body in motionfeels a bit unequal to the presumptions of the movements ringmaster, the poet and master propagandist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The show begins in 1909, the year of the publication of Marinettis first Futurist Manifesto; it ends in 1944, the year of his death, of heart failure, after service with the Axis forces on the Eastern Front. (He was at work on a poem celebrating an lite Italian Army unit.) Futurism was Marinettis creation. Both its glories and its miseries come home to him.

A cosmopolitan prodigy, Marinetti was born in Alexandria in 1876, and was educated at the Sorbonne and the University of Genoa, where he took a degree in law. He wrote most of his poetry in French. His father, a lawyer employed by the Ottoman administration in Egypt, staked him to a fortune. Like many a restless youth of his generation, he thrilled to new currents in the arts and philosophy, from Wagner, Nietzsche, and Bergson to the French apostle of revolutionary violence Georges Sorel. Marinetti streamlined a mlange of radical ideas into an aestheticized politics of upheaval for upheavals sake, with a strutting emphasis on heroic virility. He declared an intention to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and wrote, We intend to glorify warthe only hygiene of the worldmilitarism, patriotism, the destructive gestures of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman....

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Peter Schjeldahl: Futurism and Italian Fascism.