A car crash into a ditch helped launch the Futurist art movement
In 1908, speed-obsessed poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti swerved into a ditch outside Milan to avoid two cyclists. He climbed out, by his own account, a new man, and the following year front-paged Le Figaro with the Futurist Manifesto, demanding that art break with the past and burn down its museums.
Marinetti was born on 22 December 1876 and spent his early years in Alexandria, Egypt. His father Enrico, a Piedmontese lawyer, and his mother Amalia Grolli, daughter of a Milanese literature professor, had arrived in 1865, invited by the ruler Khedive Isma'il Pasha, to give legal advice to foreign companies working on his modernising projects. His mother introduced him to European poetry, and at 17 he founded a school magazine, Papyrus, nearly getting expelled by his Jesuit teachers for promoting Emile Zola's scandalous novels.
He took a baccalaureate at the Sorbonne in 1894 and a law degree at Pavia in 1899, but chose literature instead, trying poetry, fiction, theatre and his experimental words in liberty. Around 1908 he visited the Abbaye de Creteil, a utopian artists' community founded in 1906 by the painter Albert Gleizes and several poets, inspired by the Abbey of Theleme in Rabelais's Gargantua; Constantin Brancusi was another guest before members shut it down that year.
The manifesto appeared in French on 20 February 1909 and was debated across Europe. It glorified speed and violence, called war the world's only hygiene, scorned women and urged the destruction of libraries and academies, rejecting the decorative Liberty style of the day. Futurism mixed anarchist and Fascist strains, echoing Georges Sorel's praise of violence, and Marinetti went on to co-author the Fascist Manifesto in 1919 and actively support Benito Mussolini.
His own early Futurist works fared worse than the manifesto. When his play The Feasting King, written in 1905, opened, the audience whistled it down, and Marinetti joined in, turning the urge to be heckled into another Futurist principle. He was less relaxed about a critic he found too harsh, whom he challenged to a duel. He died on 2 December 1944.
Source: Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
