Zang-tumb-tumb-zang-zang-tuuumb tatatatatatatata. As a war correspondent on the Ottoman battlefront two years before the First World War, the Italian poet F.T. Marinetti heard the language of the future. Sputtered by machine guns and intoned by exploding bombs, the language was immediate and emphatic. There were no adjectives.

Before the Parachute Opens (Prima che si apra il paracadute), by Tullio Crali, 1939. Oil on panel. Casa Cavazzini, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Udine, Italy. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Photo: Claudio Marcon, Udine, Civici Musei e Gallerie di Storia e Arte.

Marinetti published it as poetry, capturing the syntactic chaos with scattered blocks of mismatched type. His words-in-freedom – as he dubbed his new genre – stand today as one of the greatest artistic breakthroughs of the century, impacting everything from experimental music to urban graffiti. But at the time, words-in-freedom – and the Futurist movement they helped foment – were intended primarily as nationalist propaganda.

“We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers,” Marinetti famously wrote in the founding manifesto of Futurism. “No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.” While his movement had other interests (including fast cars and the demise of feminism), the core value was violence.

And as can be seen in a not-to-be-missed retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, it was contagious. Between 1909 and 1944, Futurism attracted hundreds of artists and encompassed poetry and painting and theater and architecture and music. All of these art forms were enlisted to lure Italy into World War I. When that catastrophic war was over – with 2,197,000 Italian casualties suffered – many of the surviving Futurists put their art in the service of Benito Mussolini.

Much of the Futurist art from the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s verges on kitsch. The aerial paintings in particular – known as Aeropittura ­– look like maquettes for posters advertising the air force. (One of the major influences on Aeropittura was ecclesiastic painting, a reminder that, with a few notable exceptions, the Vatican has specialized in peddling soft-core religious propaganda.) Despite the Guggenheim’s best effort to prove otherwise, Futurism produced little of distinction after World War I.

But that just draws attention to what Futurism achieved in the movement’s first decade. What’s so remarkable about early Futurism is that, despite their best efforts, Marinetti and his cohorts produced work that transcends the Italian cause and the glories of war. The work is far superior to the narrow minds that conjured it.

One key reason is that early Futurism was explosive in its own right – zang-tumb-tumb – an uncontrolled assault on complacency, broadly disruptive of an old world order in need of disruption. What followed the First World War, especially with the rise of Mussolini’s Fascism, was an art of conformity. Changing political circumstances made the radicals reactionary. All that remained was the war-mongering message. As an artistically vibrant movement, Futurism was history.

> via Forbes