"Kill the Moonlight!" They Cried

By ROBERT HUGHES

No city stood higher on their hit list than Venice. "We repudiate the Venice of the foreigners, market of antiquarian fakers, magnet of universal snobbishness and stupidity . . . We want to prepare the birth of an industrial and military Venice. Let us fill the stinking little canals with the rubble of the tottering, infected old palaces! Let us burn the gondolas, rocking chairs for idiots." Thus Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his friends, the futurist painters, in a manifesto from 1910. It is a delicious irony that the most important exhibition in Europe this summer (or indeed anywhere else) should be a giant display of futurist paintings, sculpture, books, pamphlets, posters and memorabilia in a palace, no longer tottering, on the Grand Canal. Titled "Futurismo & Futurismi" ("Futurism and Its Offshoots," more or less), the exhibition marks the opening of the Societa per Azioni Palazzo Grassi (Grassi Palace Society for Actions), housed in an 18th century structure whose restoration and conversion was brilliantly carried out by the Milanese architect Gae Aulenti. The new museum, lavishly funded by Fiat, is run by Pontus Hulten, former director of the Pompidou Center in Paris.

With its dignified rooms, passing from grand to aedicular scale and back again, Palazzo Grassi is an excellent place to look at art. The show has art and a good deal else, including such totems of futurist affection as a 1911 Bleriot monoplane and a World War I Spad hanging from the cortile roof, and a vintage Bugatti by the canal entrance, to remind one of Marinetti's belligerent and much quoted dictum that "a roaring motorcar that seems to run ( on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

No exhibition has ever made a stronger case for the quality of futurist art or gone into more detail about its roots. Futurism was the most influential art movement Italy produced in the early 20th century. Indeed, the word futurist became synonymous with modernity itself to people in America, England and Russia until around 1925. The movement took an aggressively internationalist stance, looking to a future world unified by technology. Yet its rhetoric was bedded deep in Italian life. The core of the futurist group, which coalesced in the early 1900s, was made up of the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, the architect Antonio Sant'Elia and a few writers clustered around the figure of Marinetti, poet, dandy, ringmaster, publicist and red-hot explainer to the global village -- "the caffeine of Europe," as he called himself. They were all Italian; to be Italian then was to inherit a culture dominated by the weight of the Tuscan and Roman past and by a technologically backward economy based largely on agriculture and craft.

Such weights evoke violent reactions. The futurists set out to create the image of an Italy that did not yet exist, a utopia of tension and transformation whose god was the machine. Its architecture would not be the old cellular stone hill town but the dream environment conjured up by Sant'Elia: all girders and concrete cliffs, with glass elevators zipping up the exterior walls. Its painting would try to encompass not just sight but noise, heat and smell; above all, it would depict movement. To fix this industrial mode in Italian (and European) culture, the pastoral mode had to be slaughtered. "Kill the moonlight!" one futurist manifesto exclaimed. Whatever lingered from the 1890s -- symbolism, impressionism, the cults of nuance and nostalgia, of the Arcadian countryside or the introverted personality -- was futurism's enemy.

Art is invention, but also remembering. It is never in a real artist's interest to "abolish" the past, which is impossible anyway. Boccioni, in particular, kept paying it homage: his striding bronze figure in space, included in the Venice show, alludes to the same Victory of Samothrace that Marinetti thought less beautiful than a car; the figures who scurry frantically about the two battling women in the Milan Galleria in his Riot at the Gallery, 1910, look like the ghostly crowds in the background of Tintorettos. What the futurists opposed was not so much the past itself as the mind-set they called passeism -- nostalgic or obsolete cultural attitudes.

Their problem was framing a pictorial language to describe rapid stimulus and movement. They came up with an amalgam of pointillism, cubism and photography. Picasso and Braque had built cubism on the scrutiny of a single object from multiple viewpoints: the table stood still, the eye moved. In futurism, the eye is fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of cubism -- fragmented and overlapping planes -- that tells us so. Carra, Boccioni and, above all, Balla prized the photographs of sequential movement taken by Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules Marey. Some of Balla's own paintings, like the famous Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, are virtually straight renderings of multiple-exposure photographs. But in his series of paintings inspired by a Fiat speeding down the Via Veneto, the game gets more complex. Nearly all of this series is assembled at Palazzo Grassi, culminating in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, one of the few large futurist paintings that can be called a pictorial masterpiece, a thundering black Doppler-effect image in which the shapes of wheel, mudguard and driver dissolve in and out of the shuttling buildings.

To go through this show is to realize how close futurism is to us in its cultural postures, even though its machine worship is dead. Anticipating punk rockers, Marinetti urged nightclub singers to dye their hair green and their cleavages sky blue. The worst mannerisms of late nouvelle cuisine were foreshadowed by his cucina futurista, with its "completely new, absurd combinations" of ingredients, its sauces of chocolate, red pepper, pistachio and eau de cologne. But above all, it is the futurists' genius for scandal and hype that makes them seem so modern, or rather, postmodern. As a provocateur, not as a poet, Marinetti turned himself into one of the key figures of 20th century culture. He was the prototype of avant-gardist promoters. For how do you create interest in something as utterly marginal to the public as new art? By turning it into fresh copy. The futurists, unlike the cubists, realized that the newspapers wanted to run sensational stories about weirdos, not virtuously tolerant reviews of the avant-garde. Marinetti brilliantly used this appetite by trumpeting an art movement as a broad "revolution" in living that aims to change life itself, embracing everything from architecture ) to athletics, politics and sex.

The futurist word spread far and wide, taking hold especially in Russia, whose primitive state of industrialization, like Italy's, favored exalted myths of machine progress among intellectuals. The futurist influence on the Russian avant-garde before the Bolshevik revolution was immense, and the show traces it through the works of such artists as Vladimir Tatlin, Natalia Gontcharova and Kasimir Malevich. Futurism linked up with a similar movement in England, named vorticism by its leader, the painter-critic Wyndham Lewis. Lewis, however, was critical of Marinetti's operatic cant about war as the hygiene of civilization and highly skeptical about paintings that illustrated movement. His own masterpiece, A Battery Shelled, 1914-18, turns whatever is mobile, even smoke, into a stiff-plated fossil of itself.

In their zeal, the curators of the Venice show have tracked futurist cells and influences to the most unlikely haunts, even Mexico and Japan. The result is a staggeringly compendious show, except in one area: relations with Fascism. Here the treatment suddenly becomes very bland indeed. Most of the futurists licked Mussolini's jackboots with their eloquent tongues, from the march on Rome through the end of World War II. Fascism and futurism were not identical, but Marinetti's praise of the metallization of the human body, of speed, war and domination represented, as Walter Benjamin put it, "the consummation of art for art's sake," a rampant aestheticization of war. To say, as the catalog does, that "Marinetti and futurism were never supported by the Fascist regime, but merely tolerated" is to miss the point. A glance at the catalog of the 1933 "Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution" in Rome, jammed with reproductions of futurist-style murals, montages and sculpture in praise of the regime, would have put such sophistries in perspective: "The artists had from il Duce a clear and precise order: to make something MODERN, full of daring." Just so. But this document is not in the show.

The centenary of Marinetti's birth was all but ignored in Italy in 1976; at that time no cultural institution wanted to touch the hot potato of futurism and Fascism. This show fumbles it by exhaustively displaying one and scanting the other. The reason probably lies in the facts of patronage. Palazzo Grassi is Fiat's gift to Venice; Fiat built cars, trucks and aircraft for Mussolini. It was the chief corporate patron, if one may so put it, of the futurist idea of war as ultimate artwork. Rarely has the tact of art historians about the messy history of the real world seemed more strained. That, but that alone, prevents this admirable show from being truly definitive.