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| On Futurism, Mussolni and Niklāvs Strunke in Italy Aija Brasliņa Ever since the very first text, published in 1909 in Le Figaro of Paris, Italian Futurism, recognised as the most radical of the modernist movements of the early 20th century, paved its way with countless provocative manifestos, aggressive bravado and pathos-filled rhetoric, active propaganda and public scandal. | |
 Cover of the exhibition catalogue. 1932 | |
| Guided by their tireless leader, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944), who was generous with his own energy, charisma and his father's inheritance in the name of the idea, Futurists fought for a new aesthetic, broadening the boundaries of the concept of art and belligerently disowning any existing conventions and academic institutions. Their rebellious manifestos exploded like noisy, dazzling fireworks on the testing-grounds of their avantgarde experiments and utopian ideas as their regular programmatic declarations acquired an almost ritual meaning.
The "flag" of the movement was an agglomeration of expressions of modern life and perception of art - speed, dynamics, simultaneity, attempts at visualising the time dimension, sound and other phenomena imperceptible to the human eye. Praises of urbanised environment and the triumph of the technical civilisation broke forth with unmatched, obsessive fervour. The Futurist innovations encompassed literature (parole in libert·), painting, sculpture, architecture, music, theatre, film, photography, dance, fashion and even culinary art, showing truly interdisciplinary aspirations. After all, Futurism was meant to be likened to a new perception of the world. Since its inception, Futurism also manifested itself as an ambiguous political movement, subject to the political oscillations and whims of its leader, which at times provoked discontent within the Futurist movement itself. Positioning war as "the only hygiene of the world" in their fascination with militarism, in 1914 Futurists called for Italy to join the war, organising street demonstrations with Marinetti at their helm. Many members of the movement volunteered for action, becoming victims of the ruthless machinery of war (Antonio Sant'Elia, Umberto Boccioni et al.). Nationalism and patriotism often flared into chauvinism as the war politicised the Futuristic avantgarde. After World War I the further development of the movement led it into an ambiguous, ambivalent relationship with fascism which was by then flourishing in Italy, with the relationship between Marinetti and Mussolini echoing this connection in simultaneous splendour. Having started his career as a socialist, the creator of the first fascist state in Europe, future dictator Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) met Marinetti - symbolist, anarchist and the ideological heir to Nietzsche and Croce - in 1914, as they were side by side calling for Italy to enter the war. In 1918 the poet Marinetti, in yet another manifesto, announced the birth of the Futurist Political Party, while former journalist Mussolini laid the foundations for the National Fascist Party in 1919. At this time the founding father of the Blackshirts was inspired by the ideas of the spiritual leader of the Futurists and the forced propaganda of the highly organised movement. The flop of the 1919 election temporarily separated the paths of the two ambitious leaders - Marinetti and his supporters leaned leftward, while Mussolini moved further to the right. After the legendary "March on Rome" of the fascist forces, Mussolini was appointed Prime Minister by the King of Italy and established his dictatorship in 1925. Shortly before these events Marinetti dedicated to him his brand new book, Futurismo e Fascismo (1924), but later was unable to resist the temptation to become a member of the Academia d'Italia, thus betraying the ideals he had formerly advocated. In the interwar period the political regime of Benito Mussolini served as an example to all rightist dictatorships of Europe, including Kārlis Ulmanis' authoritarian Latvia of 15 May, 1934. One of the photographs of the collection of the Latvian War Museum captures a historic moment in Rome, on 24 July 1925, showing the future "saviour of Italy" next to Zigfrīds Meierovics - the first Latvian Minister of Foreign Affairs - on his last official visit abroad. On this day a trade agreement between the two countries was signed in Villa Torlonia. A month later Meierovics was killed in an accident while travelling from Tukums to Rīga by car - one of the modern symbols of speed, venerated by Futurists. While serving as the Prime Minister of Italy, Mussolini was awarded with the highest military honour of the Republic of Latvia, the Lāčplēsis Military Order. Looking back today, it seems to be another historical paradox; however, Italy was the first country to pave the way for de iure recognition of Latvia. Personal acquaintance with il duce notwithstanding, Marinetti was unable to obtain for Futurism the position of the official art of fascist Italy. To express the ambition of the state on an imperial scale, Mussolini, like other Interbellum dictators, craving the grandeur of Ancient Rome, promoted a boom of the classicist canon and pompous megalomania, and cultivated the glorification of the past and grand visions of the future. The regime did not openly support futurism, unwilling to allow any association with a phenomenon derived from anarchism, internationalism and extreme modernism. But the cultural policies of Mussolini's dictatorship was very different from the totalitarian experience of Russia and Germany, which reached the extreme of discrimination of avantgarde art. In Italy the official state guidelines for art, never defined in full detail, encouraged pluralistic attitudes - green light was given to the conservative novecentists without, however, dismissing the Futurist practice, and reaching a particular mutual understanding with it in the 1930s, which also became the golden age of the Futuristic aeropittura. Through Marinetti's mediation Futurism underwent a partial trans-formation - from a radical modernist movement into art under authoritarian contract. Il duce was aware of the potential of art as an instrument of propaganda, and knew how to make use of the Futurist achievements - for instance, using them as the "face" of Italy at representative exhibitions abroad. In 1932 Futurists Enrico Prampolini and Fortunato Depero, acquaintances of Latvian artists, also took part in putting together the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, a local exhibition in Rome, devoted to the tenth anniversary of the fascist "march" and Mussolini's rule; the "architecture" of the exhibition was guided by Futurist and constructivist influences. The few Latvian modernists who had firsthand experience with secondo futurismo in Berlin and Rome in the 1920s, remained immune to Marinetti's political games and the aforementioned dilemma of power and art, which intensified considerably in the 30s. The first or original phase of Futurism (1909-1916), with the arrival of its main heroes - classics Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr‡, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini - on the stage of painting and sculpture, was already part of the movement's heroic past. The Latvians met with representatives of the second wave of Futurism, among whom an important figure was Enrico Prampolini (1894-1956), eminent in the field of scenography - and, briefly, also with the authoritative "founding father", Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. | |
 Niklāvs Strunke. Man entering the room. 1927 | |
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After World War I Marinetti began actively recruiting supporters of the no longer relevant movement outside Italy. Among such sympathisers his 1924 manifesto Le futurisme mondiale also lists the Latvian artists admitted to the circle of the so-called Berlin Futurists or "international Futurists" in the early 1920s: Kārlis Zāle, Arnolds Dzirkalis, Romans Suta, Aleksandra Beļcova and Niklāvs Strunke. At the time the Futurist leader was drawn by the avantgarde spirit of the "new recruits", not an obligatory formal compliance with the stylistics of the movement, which, in addition, changed with the overall trends of the era. Secondo futurismo, which was heavily influenced by machine aesthetics and was more constructive and synthesizing than the dynamic, analytic early phase of the movement, was in tune with the interests of the Latvian modernists at that time. Niklāvs Strunke (1894-1966), who used the contacts established in Berlin, one of the cosmopolitan metropolises of post-war avantgarde, was the only Latvian modernist to continue meeting and collaborating with Futurists in their native Italy. Much later, Strunke declared: "I have never been a Futurist myself, but I joined them and worked with them in the early 1920s because of the daring joy they took in destroying old conventions and their creative search for form in painting. I was already looking for my own constructivism, based on the foundations of the Futurist and Cubist schools." Niklāvs Strunke, possessed of the "innate" leftism of a modernist and indirectly inspired by Futurism in the environment of the Russian avantgarde in Petersburg, was (unusually for Latvian art) already an extreme opponent to convention in the early professions of his theoretical beliefs around 1917-1919. In 1914, when the Russian followers of the movement were honoured with a visit by Marinetti, the subsequent member of the Berlin circle Kārlis Zāle was not yet ready to accept the public manifests of Vladimir Mayakovsky, David Burlyuk and other Russian Futurists he had seen in Kazan. Strunke, however, soon became militant in his texts: "Art is the most revolutionary of revolutions, the freest of freedoms," "Art is anarchy," and "The function of tradition in art is exclusively like that of the former gendarmerie in relation to revolutionaries." In true Futuristic spirit, academies were awarded with the title of funeral parlours, entrusting the new art with expressing "the noises of cannons and streets, the architectural simplicity of the fleeting movements of a car". In 1923 Niklāvs Strunke, formerly a member of the Riga group, joined the aforementioned circle of the "Berlin Futurists", which for a short while and by coincidence brought together Kārlis Zāle and the former Suprematist and Cubo-futurist Ivan Puni, stars of modernist sculpture Alexander Archipenko, Rudolf Belling and other "brothers in fate". The Latvian sculptor and his companion, Arnolds Dzirkalis, had already acclimatised themselves in the German capital, having "checked in" with the circles of Herwart Walden's gallery Der Sturm and the November-gruppe, where foreign exhibitors were always warmly welcomed, as well as with the Russian ÈmigrÈ set. Walden, who popularised Italian Futurism before the war, was still keeping up his relationship with its representatives, especially Prampolini. In the post-war situation that has been called the Futurist renaissance of Germany, another ambassador of the movement, poet and playwright Ruggero Vasari (1898-1968) opened the Directorate of the Futurist Movement, which was also an art gallery. Alongside the works of foreign artists, including Italian Futurists Depero, Dottori, Governato, Marasco, Panaggi, Prampolini, the late Boccioni and others, it featured pieces by Zāle, Dzirkalis, Suta, Beļcova and Strunke, as the invited Latvian modernists were unwilling to miss a chance to exhibit abroad. In addition, all of them were described as "most notable futurist artists" by gallery owner Vasari. In 1922 Ruggero Vasari published the first issue of monthly journal Der Futurismus, in which considerable space was devoted to Kārlis Zāle, who had been "discovered" by the influential German critic and publisher of Das Kunstblatt magazine Paul Westheim, and was by now a seasoned participant of the artistic life of Berlin. He was also featured in the "Portraits of Futuristic Artists" section of the magazine. The Latvian sculptor's German period with its constructive, rationally geometricised shapes relayed not just affinity with the Cubism of the Paris school or the Constructivism that was widespread in Berlin at that time, but also a dynamic tension and an enthusiasm for exploring the shaping of volumes in space. Zāle's "Dancer" ("Dance", 1922) acquired a futuristic additional name, "The Development of Two- and Three-Dimensional Shapes", or Construzione a tre dimensioni in Italian. At the 1922 Congress of the International Union of Progressive Artists in D¸sseldorf, where Zāle, Puni and Dzirkalis took part as the Synthesis Group with a common proclamation, Enrico Prampolini presented the delegates with the programme of Italian avant-garde, calling constructivists the followers of Futurists. Futurism was supposed to be the main subject of one of the issues of Laikmets, the first Latvian art magazine, which was founded by Kārlis Zāle in 1923 and published in Berlin. Unfortunately, the idea, along with the short-lived modernist publication, came to nothing in the hyper-inflation conditions of post-war Germany, having seen no more than an announcement in Prampolini's Futurist magazine Noi, which was published in Rome and in the context of European avant-garde periodicals devoted equal attention to Laikmets, publishing pictures of works by the Latvian colleagues encountered in Berlin. In 1921, when Marinetti and Prampolini were organising exhibitions of the Italian futurists on an international scale in Prague, Berlin and D¸sseldorf, and the following year, when a production of Il tamburo di fuoco, a play by the "father" of futurism, was staged in Prague using sets designed by Prampolini (with reproductions also published in Laikmets), both artists visited Berlin repeatedly. On one such visit in late December 1922, Kārlis Zāle with Suta and Beļcova allegedly joined the crowd welcoming Marinetti on his arrival, while Niklāvs Strunke was destined to meet him somewhat later, in Rome. On that occasion the futurist leader presented a paper at the German casa d'arte - Vasari's gallery. In Svētā birze ("The Holy Grove", 1964), a collection of essays written in exile, Strunke recalls that Marinetti's manifestos "[..] were also signed by Latvians: sculptor Kārlis Zāle and Niklāvs Strunke," but neglects to mention which particular manifestos were signed, where it happened, and when. Could one of them be the 1922 "brainchild" of Prampolini, Panaggi and Paladini, L'Arte meccanica? Or Marinetti's tactilist manifesto from January 1921, Tattilismo, also published in German on the pages of Der Futurismus? After the Berlin episode Niklāvs Strunke, having arrived in the Eternal City in the autumn of 1923, stayed in Italy until the end of 1927, with just a short interruption. In Rome, which had become a notable Futurist hotspot on par with Milan due to the newly established casa d'arte, he leased a glazed studio on the roof of a six-storey building and found new acquaintances and friends in the Futurist circles - Marinetti himself, Ivo Panaggi, Fortunato Depero, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Antonio Marasco, Aldo Bandinelli, Ardengo Soffici and others, who joined Prampolini and Vasari, old acquaintances from the Berlin era and part of the Noi editorial staff by then. Just as in the case of the manifestos, there is as yet no indisputable evidence of the quite believable event of the Latvian artist's solo exhibition in late 1924 at the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia, which Strunke describes as an "exhibition space, artists' club and theatre" in his "Letter from Rome"(Latvijas Vēstnesis newspaper, 6 February 1924). In Italy the modern theatre environment, charged by the tension of the Futurist stage art manifestos, was primarily explored at the Casa d'Arte Bragaglia, founded by Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890-1960), photographer, theoretician of futuristic photography and theatre and film director, and also at his experimental theatre. Strunke also managed to get published in Italian periodicals Noi and Il Seccolo XX. In 1924 il pittore Strunke settled on the island of Capri, the summer "residence" beloved of the Futurists of the second wave. His Italian impressions are immortalised in skilful paintings and drawings, where the breath of the era permeates the style of expression influenced by constructive, abstracted geometrisation, cool perfection and the metaphysical aspects of painting; alongside these the artist created some architectural scenographic designs and illustrations commissioned by Latvian publishers, and also enthusiastically pursued studies of pre-renaissance art in Rome and Florence. In his Italian publications and correspondence from the 1920s Niklāvs Strunke makes no comment on the events taking place on the political stage ruled by Benito Mussolini, holder of the Lāčplēsis Military Order. The interest of the Latvian artist was at the time captured and captivated by the art, sun, picturesque nature and flavour-some wine of Italy, and preoccupied with his own creative ideas and empty pockets, or the guests arriving from Latvia. From the country of his dreams, where he later returned again and again, Strunke brought a renewed store of artistic observations and a pilfered Italian greeting - "ciao" - to give to Riga. | |
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