Name
Filipo Tomasso Marinetti
Birth
December 27, 1876, Alexandria, Egypt
Death
December 2, 1944, Cadenabbia, Italy
Country of Origin/Citizenship
Egypt
Kind of Artist/Cultural Worker
Writer
Avant-Garde Movements Associated With
Futurism
Date & Places of Overlap with Loy
1913-1915 in Florence and Rome, Italy
Filipo Tomasso Marinetti (born Emilio Angelo Carlo in Alexandria, Egypt in 1876), the face and founder of Futurism, was the son of Italian parents who moved to Egypt five years after the opening of the Suez Canal. The Canal rendered Egypt a thriving center for trade, an ideal relocation for Marinetti’s father who specialized as a lawyer in commercial contracts. (Rainey 2). Urged by his father, Marinetti studied law, receiving his degree from the University of Genoa in 1899. Showing an inclination to the arts, however, he published his first poem, “The Cup Bearer,” in the Anthologie Revue in 1898. Marinetti began contributing prolifically to several journals and by 1902 published his first book, The Conquest of the Stars, a long poem recounting an apocalyptic war between the sea and the sky (Rainey 3). In 1905, he founded the journal Poesia, intending to “shock the driveling Italy that still reads a poet such as Carducci” (4). On February 20, 1909, the “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” was published on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro. For the Futurist, beauty manifested as speed, and the manifesto expresses specific intent to “glorify war—the only hygiene of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for women” (“The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” 51).
Upon meeting Loy, Marinetti asked that she “give herself to him,” beginning an intermittent love affair, which later evolved into a conflicting love triangle between Marinetti, Loy, and Giovanni Papini (Burke 154). While Futurism, and her relationship with Marinetti, surged a poetic drive in Loy, as seen in her Futurist, satirical work such as “Aphorisms on Futurism”, “The Feminist Manifesto”, and “Lion’s Jaws,” she could not accept the movement’s debasement of women (Burke 157). Loy would never be convinced by Marinetti’s defense and explanation of Futurism’s “scorn for women” (156).
Futurism’ constituency grew as new manifestos were published well into the 1930s with topics ranging from art, architecture, and clothing to the Futurist political party (“Manifesto of the Italian Futurist Party”). In 1919, Marinetti was one of 130 participants in the founding meeting of Fascism held in Milan by Mussolini and chaired by Ferruccio Vecchi (Rainey 25). It was not long before Marinetti’s own views were openly contested by Mussolini himself the following year at the second Fascist convention, and Marinetti withdrew from the Fascist movement and from political activism at large.
After a series of health concerns in the early 1940s, including surgeries for an ulcer in 1940, a hernia in 1941, and a heart attacked in 1942 that left him bedridden for months,Marinetti moved closer to Switzerland and away from the militaristic flurry and civil war surging through Italy. Marinetti died that year of a heart attack in December before receiving his Swiss residence permit.
Related
Works Cited
Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997.
Rainey, Lawrence, et al., editors. Futurism: An Anthology. Yale University Press, 2009. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1nq4q3.
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