Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

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The Futurists in Paris, February 1912. (L to R. Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, F. T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini.)

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti (December 22, 1876 – December 2, 1944) was an Italian ideologue, poet, editor, and main founder of the futurist movement of the early 20th century.

[edit] Biography

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was born at Alexandria, Egypt.

In early 1918 he founded the Partito Politico Futurista or Futurist Political Party, which only a year later was absorbed into Benito Mussolini's Fasci di combattimento, making Marinetti one of the first supporters and members of the Italian Fascist Party. He opposed Fascism's later canonical exultion of existing institutions, calling them "reactionary." He however stayed a notable force in developing the party thought throughout the regime. For example, at the end of the Congress of Fascist Culture that was held in Bologna on March 30, 1925, Giovanni Gentile addressed Sergio Panunzio on the need to define Fascism more purposely by way of Marinetti's opinion, stating:

Great spiritual movements make recourse to precision when their primitive inspirations - what F. T. Marinetti identified this morning as artistic, that is to say, the creative and truly innovative ideas, from which the movement derived its first and most potent impulse - have lost their force. We today find ourselves at the very beginning of a new life and we experience with joy this obscure need that fills our hearts - this need that is our inspiration, the genius that governs us and carries us with it.

Thus Futurism continued to influence Fascist thinkers outside of the Futurist school of thought on the furthering of Fascism.

Marinetti is most noted for his authorship of the Futurist Manifesto, first published in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, and the sound poem Zang Tumb Tumb. In The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti declared that "Art [...] can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice". Since that text proclaims the unity of life and art, Marinetti understood violence not only as a means of producing aesthetic effect, but also as being inherent in life itself, a stance which brought Futurism close to Fascism.

In 1938, when Adolf Hitler included creations of Futurism in an exhibition deriding what Nazi propaganda called degenerate art, Marinetti persuaded Mussolini not to allow the exhibition entrance into Italy.

He published works in both French and Italian, among them are Le Roi Bombance (1905) and Mafarka il futurista (1910).

Fellow notable Italian futurists include Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, and Luigi Russolo.

Marinetti died at Bellagio, Italy.