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.