edited by Chiara Gatti and Raffaella Resch
After the projects on German Expressionism and the couples of the Russian avant-garde, the MAN is pleased to present “The propeller and the light. The futurists. 1912_1944”, an exhibition dedicated to futurism and women. This completes the trilogy with a new approach, created with the artistic direction of Lorenzo Giusti and focused on the movements of the historical avant-garde.
The presence of women in the art of the twentieth century has been highlighted by various studies starting from the end of the seventies: beyond the intention of discovering a gender, a specific female one in art, historical-critical surveys have been carried out which they brought or brought to light exceptional personalities, works of high value, existences with complex plots, whose dates of birth or death were previously unknown, and they gave us a panorama of the art of women in the avant-garde, up until that moment remained in the background.
A still open and controversial case is the role of women in futurism, a programmatically misogynistic movement, which since its foundation proclaimed contempt for women and built a totalizing vision of art on values such as strength, speed, war, from which the female gender had to remain excluded (“We want to glorify war – the only hygiene in the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of libertarians, the beautiful ideas for which people die and the contempt for women”, Manifesto of Futurism, 1909).
The exhibition traces – through over 100 works including paintings, sculptures, papers, fabrics, theatrical maquettes and applied art objects – the work of these women who worked from the 1910s to the 1940s, signing the theoretical manifestos of futurism, participating in exhibitions, experimenting with innovations in style and materials in transversal fields such as decorative arts, scenography, photography and cinema, but also dance, literature and theatre. Independent figures, artists and leading intellectuals in aesthetic research at the beginning of the century.
The events are sometimes unscrupulous (exemplary is the biography of Valentine de Saint-Point), often passed over in silence compared to the news, sometimes unnoticed by contemporary critics, or absorbed by the anonymity of family life (as happened to Brunas) or deleted from the wars (Alma Fidora, whose library and archive of documents were destroyed in the bombings). Total artists stand out, not only the best-known Benedetta, but also Marisa Mori, Adele Gloria and the group of those who collaborate on “L’Italia futurista”: the fields of interest are vast, from writing, to painting, to illustration , to ceramics, not excluding metapsychic studies and occultism, towards which the Futurist Science Manifesto also shows attention.
The exhibition, which boasts loans arriving from Italian public and private collections, with even little-known works, starts from Manifeste de la Femme futuriste, published by Valentine de Saint-Point on March 25, 1912, in response to the Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism by Marinetti published in Paris in 1909 in “Le Figaro”.
The path identifies the characteristics of a collective research which – free from stereotypes, clichés, clichés and banal dependencies linked to kinship relationships with the “males” of the movement – testifies to the depth of an aesthetic reflection shared by the women of the group, rich in peculiar implications.
The selection of works is supported by a large documentary apparatus, first editions of texts, autograph letters, period photographs, original posters, studies, sketches.
Each chapter of the journey, which proceeds by macro-themes – the body and dance, flight and speed, landscape and abstraction, forms and words – documents a particular vein of futurist artists, now dedicated to the applied arts , to fabric, now to the use of metal and, in general, to multi-material and multidisciplinary experimentation in the field of figurative, but also literary and dance arts.
The exhibition tells the fascinating biographies of each of them, which are intertwined with the artistic and cultural life of the period (the salons, the major national exhibitions, the magazines, the theatres) but are also set against the backdrop of a country, at the same time time, excited by progress, wounded by conflict.
The exhibited works will be published in the catalog with texts by Giancarlo Carpi, Enrico Crispolti, Chiara Gatti, Lorenzo Giusti, Raffaella Resch and an interview with Lea Vergine, author of the memorable exhibition curated in 1980 for the Palazzo Reale in Milan, “The other half of the avant-garde”, dedicated to female artists active between 1910 and 1940.
