Art: Kill the Moonlight! They Cried

In Venice, a superb retrospective of the futurists

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...

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