Christine Poggi's Inventing Futurism cuts a sharp cross-disciplinary swath through the founding avant-garde of the twentieth century. With meticulous scholarship, interpretive depth, and attention to nuance, it brilliantly upends the once-standard cliches regarding a Futurism reducible to the acritical worship of modernity. -- Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Stanford University The best book on Futurism that I have read in some time. Inventing Futurism is the first critical study in English to consider Futurism from an interdisciplinary perspective. Poggi brings a new and stimulating perspective to such issues as violence and the representation of women, showing that Futurist practice was much more contradictory than its official rhetoric. This is a truly first-rate and original contribution. -- Luca Somigli, University of Toronto A very significant contribution to the field. Poggi demonstrates in her well-written and cogently argued book that the traditional interpretation of Futurism as a naive celebration of the shocks and traumas of modernity is in need of revision. It is refreshing to finally see this understudied group of works and artists get the fine-grained attention they deserve. -- Anthony White, University of Melbourne
Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii CHAPTER ONE: Futurist Velocities 1 CHAPTER TWO: Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd 35 CHAPTER THREE: Umberto Boccioni's The City Rises: Picturing the Futurist Metropolis 65 CHAPTER FOUR: Photogenic Abstraction: Giacomo Balla's Iridescent Interpenetrations 109 CHAPTER FIVE: Dreams of Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body 150 CHAPTER SIX: Futurist Love, Luxury, and Lust 181 CHAPTER SEVEN: Return of the Repressed: Vicissitudes of the Futurist Machine Aesthetic under Fascism 232 CHAPTER EIGHT: Epilogue 266 Notes 273 Works Cited 349 Index 361 Photography Credits 375
Christine Poggi is professor of the history of art at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of "In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage".
Co-Winner of the 2010 Howard R. Marraro Prize, Modern Language Association "In Inventing Futurism, art historian Christine Poggi describes how the Futurist movement's raw passion for technology was moulded by the atmosphere of political foreboding of the times... The visions and concerns of the Futurists, Poggi tells us in this ... always illuminating study, emerged out of the uncertainty and confusion produced by modernity."--Ziauddin Sardar, Nature "[T]he book's important contribution to the field [is] most notably its close readings of particular works. The prodigious application of primary documents (many of them previously unpublished or unaddressed in any detail) to illuminate specific images and objects, is sustained throughout with impressive pertinence... Poggi's account is a new way of considering works that have become, in spite of their author's most earnest intentions, old... Inventing Futurism makes an intelligent case for taking seriously that optimistic alchemy, one that consistently wrought the vacillations of ambivalence into an aesthetics of decision."--Ara H. Merjian, European Legacy "Poggi's analyses of some of Boccioni's and Balla's works ... have been developed here to a level of great sophistication and can be thoroughly recommended. I also found some of her observations on works by the lesser-known Fill?a quite pertinent."--Gunter Berghaus, Modern Language Review
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