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Their provocative manifestos and outrageous performances earned the Italian Futurists international fame but, surprisingly, very little recognition outside of Italy for their actual achievements. The few English and American critics who have studied the movement in any depth have focused on the first phase, which spanned the years 1909?15 and was centred in Milan, Rome, and Florence. By contrast, the second phase covered a much longer period and represented a pan-Italian phenomenon. Despite the wealth of material available about this later part of the movement, there has been little attempt to survey Futurist activity outside of the major geographical centres in any detail or to relate it to the Futurist mainstream.

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One of the last surviving members of the futurist generation, Bruno Munari has been the enfant terrible of Italian art and design for most of this century. Munari was born in 1907 in Milan and it was against the active background of futurism that his artistic experiments developed, but his mechanical fantasies, practical inventions, and didactic writings continue to be enjoyed by a public that has no memory of Balla, Prampolini, and Marinetti.

Munari's 40-odd books, ranging from futurist manifestoes to design manuals to children's books, have been widely read in many languages. But this book, itself designed by Munari, is the first comprehensive account of his total achievement. Here are the Unreadable Books (that told stories through the possibilities of typography, papermaking, and binding), Traveling Sculptures, Fossils of the Year 2000, Theoretical Reconstruction of Imaginary Objects, Original Xerographies, Negative Positives, and the famous Useless Machines of the 1930s (constructions for wagging the tails of lazy dogs, predicting dawn, making sobs sound musical) as well as numerous other works, some published for the first time.

The hundreds of illustrations, many in full color, recreate Munari's relentless inventiveness, his love of irony, chance and humor, his intensely experimental orientation and constantly fresh approach to new technologies and materials.

Aldo Tanchis lives in Milan where he is currently collaborating with the advertising agency Pirella Göttsche. He is the author of The Anomalous Art of Bruno Munari. ... Read more

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Webster's bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on "Futurism," including when used in literature (e.g. all authors that might have Futurism in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Futurism when it is used in proper noun form. Webster's timelines cover bibliographic citations, patented inventions, as well as non-conventional and alternative meanings which capture ambiguities in usage. These furthermore cover all parts of speech (possessive, institutional usage, geographic usage) and contexts, including pop culture, the arts, social sciences (linguistics, history, geography, economics, sociology, political science), business, computer science, literature, law, medicine, psychology, mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology and other physical sciences. This "data dump" results in a comprehensive set of entries for a bibliographic and/or event-based timeline on the proper name Futurism, since editorial decisions to include or exclude events is purely a linguistic process. The resulting entries are used under license or with permission, used under "fair use" conditions, used in agreement with the original authors, or are in the public domain. ... Read more

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This study analyzes the aesthetic thrust of what are considered the three most important avant-garde movements in the 20th century, defining both similarities and differences in their poetics. In essays like "A Will to Art", "Modern Drama and Nonverbal Poetics," "Le Chapelet du hasard: Ideas of Order in Dada-Surrealist Imagery", "Three Modes of Semantic Accrual", and "The Aesthetics of Ambiguity", Eric Sellin explores the inner workings of the creative impulses and the resulting poetic structures which inhere in the creative works of these early avant-garde movements. ... Read more

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Gino Severini's first solo exhibition took place in London's Marlborough Gallery in 1913. Its reception ranged from adulation among the cognoscenti to bewildered reactions from the popular press. Though his paintings were shown in the context of Futurist group exhibitions or thematic shows of twentieth-century Italian art, there was never a museum exhibition in Britain devoted solely to his work. Gino Severini: From Futurism to Classicism, part of the National Touring Exhibitions program of the Hayward Gallery, aims to redress this situation. The exhibition and the lavishly illustrated book that accompanies it bring into focus the essence of Gino Severini's highly distinctive talent, and the contribution he has made to modern art. Gino Severini concentrates on the most significant decade of theartist's career: the years from 1910 until 1920. It follows the development of his art from his Futurist works of the early 1910s, with their rejection of the past and their emphasis on dynamism and the modern world, to his adoption of a Synthetic Cubist style during the war years and finally to the timeless and mathematically composed still lifes and figures he painted from 1919 onwards.

Reflected in a broad range of contemporary themes from war to dancers, Severini's stance during a decade of political and artistic upheaval--made especially distinctive by the move from his native Italy to Paris--is exceptional. His development is a fascinating parallel to the directions taken by his Paris contemporaries including Picasso, Gris and Metzinger. This fully-illustrated book includes insightful essays by Simonetta Fraquelli, curator, and Christopher Green, History of Art Professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art. ... Read more

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The invention of collage by Picasso and Braque in 1912 was a turning point in the development of Cubism and Futurism and a significant innovation of 20th-century art. Collage has traditionally been viewed as a new expression of modernism, one allied with modernism's search for purity of means, anti-illusionism, unity and autonomy of form. This book - in its study of collage and its relation to modernism - challenges this view. Christine Poggi argues that collage did not become a new language of modernism but a new language with which to critique modernism. She focuses on the ways Cubist collage - and the Futurist multimedia work that was inspired by it - undermined prevailing notions of material and stylistic unity, subverted the role of the frame and pictorial ground and brought the languages of high and low culture into a new relationship of exchange. Poggi discusses the theory and history behind the invention and early practice of collage, focusing first on the Cubists and then on the Futurists.Moving between the verbal and visual arts and between French and Italian traditions, she explores a number of related pictorial and poetic innovations: collage, "papier colle", constructed sculpture, Futurist "parole in liberta" and Apollinaire's "calligrammes". Poggi provides insights into the differences between the ways Cubists and Futurists questioned and subverted traditional genres and forms of expression. At the same time she shows how both groups made important contributions to the spirit of invention that prevailed before World War I. ... Read more

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During the 20th century, Italy experienced some regrettable political developments. It was the first European nation after World War I in which a mass militia-party of revolutionary nationalism achieved power and abolished parliamentary democracy with the goal of building a totalitarian state. It was also the first in Europe to institutionalize the sacralization of politics and to celebrate officially the cult of the leader as a demi-God. In this book, the author analyzes the ideological undercurrents and cultural myths that unite various 20th century Italian nationalist movements, from the radical nationalism of "La Voce" to futurist nationalism and fascism. ... Read more