To my amateurish musical ear, it sounds quite puzzling that one may love Rienzi while detesting Le Prophete; and yet... By which I mean, that none of those regimes rejected certain artistic forms (or adopted others) on their artistic merits alone.

It is a common pitfall of our “liberal” sensitivity to assume that anyone who recognizes the artistic value of Wagner, should acknowledge as well that of Meyerbeer; and that art, true “art”, that is, can only be the insidious and irreducible enemy of authority and oppression. But art – like any other thing – isn't born out of Zeus' forehead; and art within the Fascist Regime – like any other thing – also had to exist “within fascism”, and while the boundaries of this “fascist space” were often rather flexible, they could not make room for those expressions (social, political or cultural) that were perceived as entirely irreducible to the ideal space representing the “thought sphere” of the national community.

First and foremost, this meant rejecting those artistic (but also social) expression which were more directly associated with the political formations the regimes presented themselves in direct opposition to. For Nazi Germany, this was the licentious and “degenerate” Republic of Weimar, weak and tolerant of all sort of excesses – for Italian Fascism, the ostensibly decrepit liberal State, smothering the vibrant “new” forces of the nation amidst musty volumes, chalky busts, and “senile conceit”, where the chief accountant, Giovanni Giolitti, had replaced the heartbeat of the nation with the rhythm of the cash register. You can see a certain divergence here between the Italian and German situation (my knowledge of Soviet Russia is so limited that I'll leave it entirely out of this discussion).

Both the Italian Futurists and the German vanguards (I'd rather not anger any expert of German art; forgive a certain degree of simplification) found their affirmation in contrast to a “traditional” art, identified in Italy with the liberal state, and in Germany with the Wilhelmine Reich. They were therefore both carriers of instances of “modernity”; but while the former were closely identified with Weimar, the latter were just as closely identified with the force which had taken down the liberal state, that is with fascism itself.

The Futurist weren't really accepted “despite being a vanguard” - they were accepted exactly and because they were a vanguard: a “fascist” one. The Futurists had launched their cry for a radical transformation, not only of Italy's art, but of its political institutions and social organization, long before the political crisis which took Mussolini to power in 1922. They had sung their praise of war – the “supreme hygiene of the world” - years ahead of the outbreak of the Great War, calling for a general European conflagration, a test of the nation's blood. And when the war came – just like they did for the Italian occupation of Libya – they celebrated it, and with D'Annunzio and a few weeks ahead of Mussolini (who was still figuring his way out of the “official” socialist “absolute neutrality”) loudly campaigned for the Italian intervention. Throughout the long months of war, they remained (overwhelmingly; and, of course, those who didn't die) not only staunchly supporting of the interventionist choice, but of the social and political impact of the war itself; celebrating both its idealized effects (the rise of a new aristocracy of the trenches, to use Mussolini's words; the crisis of the old political system represented by the defeat of Giolitti's neutralist front; the imminent realization of Italy's aspirations, but more broadly, the achievement of that long awaited ideal position of “greatness” among the great powers) and its most gruesome consequences: death, mutilation, corpses and carcasses, flesh and metal, blood and bile; which the sublime struggle of the Motherland transfigured into artistic forms. Violence, virility, aggression, at last revealed themselves in their profound “modernity” no longer to the artistic sensitivities alone, but to the masses as well. All but certain to herald a new age for the Grande Italia, a time when the word Italy could, once again, “stand tall above the word freedom”.

When the armistice came, the Futurists took position in favorof the Italian territorial aspirations – albeit not on the grounds of the miserly, greedy imperialistic aspirations of the nationalists and national-conservatives, but due to their sentiment of Italy's greatness which pushed them to embrace a form of “spiritual imperialism”. They lined up with Mussolini to heckle and hoot the socialist reformer Bissolati (one of the few supporters of Wilson's proposals) at the famous La Scala soiree of January 6^th 1919). When the Bolshevik revolution impacted the Italian political scene, the Futurists – despite a certain fascination with the more “modern-authoritarian” forms of the Bolshevik policies – embraced a violent anti-Bolsehvism in so far as internal politics were concerned. The mob which assaulted the Avanti! building on April 15^th 1919 was led by the ardito-futurista Ferruccio Vecchi, and Marinetti – who had already participated to the foundation of the first Fascio di Combattimento in Milan some three weeks earlier – openly celebrated the initiative as a sign of national awakening.

All that said, identifying the Futurists with fascism tout court would not be correct – and that regardless of those, relatively few, futurists who sooner or later openly distanced themselves from Fascism – as the Futurists, despite Marinetti's attempts to form a proper political organization during 1918-19 (indeed the Futurists were a few months ahead of any other Italian political force in so far as the publication of a postwar political program, coming in early 1918), were never a proper “political” force, with their main exponents (Vecchi, whose dubious talents earned him both early notoriety and an eventual criminal record; and above all the future gerarca and leading fascist intellectual Giuseppe Bottai) becoming, de facto, fascists as soon as Fascism acquired a definite political identity and consistency. As a consequence the Futurists could only provide fascism with a key note – a lead – a series of themes which declined their own particular view of “modernity”, and with those a collection of imageries, of symbols, tying the practices of the fascist immediate “community-building” to the imagined “new community” of the fascist state.

In this regard, both the identification of Futurism and Fascism, and the idea that the Futurists accepted Fascism in every regard would be incorrect. But Futurists never rejected the Fascist Regime – nor challenged the fundamental claims of Fascism, neither in regard to its role in relation to Italian history, to its “modernity”, to its representation of a “new state”. Some of them were (or chose to be) sidelined; but others (Marinetti above all) remained close to a Regime which, besides providing them with an unprecedented degree of recognition and with significant “artistic” opportunities, was also as close to their ideal of “modernity” as they could realistically expect. They had been, after all, one of the most vocal and representative – albeit numerically quite modest – forces of that general sentiment (more than a concrete political proposal) which E. Gentile has described as “national radicalism”, and which took impulse after the turn of the Century, drawing its energies from the “historical” and cultural roots of European fascism, in the same way that other (but not all) European vanguards interacted with declining authoritarianism and militarism.

Just the same, to say that the Regime “accepted” Futurism is not entirely correct: Futurism evolved, changing to remain “in touch” with Fascism, becoming in many ways almost an “official” artistic expression. A comparison between the works of Balla or Boccioni in the early 1910s and the aeropittura of the early 1930s should reveal a degree of transformation, of adaptation (and, to an extent “institutionalization”) even to the untrained eye. The old futurist art – no longer new, and no longer vanguard – took solace in its identification with the great achievement of the Regime: the grandiose “air cruises” across the Atlantic, the celebrations for the ten years anniversary of the revolution, the conquest of Ethiopia. Not entirely Futurist – properly speaking – but an art “of the Regime” and “for the Regime”, of which the Futurists could pride themselves with having been the heralds and forerunners. Perhaps not standing at the threshold of the centuries, but close enough to the threshold of fascism.

 

Art history is certainly not my main subject of interest. There are a few interesting examinations of the relations between “modernity” and Fascism in the reference works of Griffin, Esposito and Spackman. For the specific contributions of the Italian Futurists to the definition of a “fascist ideology”, the most extensive treatment is that of Emilio Gentile.

Esposito, F. - Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity

Gentile, E. - The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy

Gentile, E. - Il mito dello Stato nuovo dall'antigiolittismo al fascismo

Gentile, E. - La Grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo

Gentile, E. - "La nostra sfida alle stelle". Futuristi in politica

Gentile, E. - Le origini dell'ideologia fascista (1918-1925)

Griffin, R. - Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

Spackman, B. - Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy

Sternhell, Z. - The birth of fascist ideology