Marisa Mori and the Futurists: A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism 9781350232631, 9781350232662, 9781350232648

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts

Series Editor Dr. Sharon Hecker, Independent Art Historian Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts publishes innovative research into visual culture in modernist Italy, as well as in diasporic linguistic and cultural communities beyond this particular geographic, historic, and political boundary. The series invites cutting-edge scholarship by academics, curators, architects, artists, and designers across all media forms; it engages with traditional methods in visual culture analysis, as well as inventive interdisciplinary approaches, and seeks to encourage a dialogue among scholars in core disciplines with those pursuing innovative interdisciplinary and intermedial research.

Advisory Board Romy Golan, The Graduate Center, New York, USA Ara Merjian, New York University, USA Paolo Scrivano, Politecnico di Milano, Italy Arianna Arisi Rota, Università di Pavia, Italy Elena Dellapiana, Politecnico di Torino, Italy Rosetta Caponetto, Auburn University, USA Noa Steimatsky, Film Historian, USA Lucia Re, UCLA, USA Proposals for monographs, edited volumes, and outstanding scholarly studies by established as well as emerging writers from a wide range of comparative, theoretical, and methodological perspectives are welcome, especially those on colonialism, race, sexuality, gender, politics, and material history in twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury contexts.

Titles in the Series Curating Fascism: Exhibitions and Memory from the Fall of Mussolini to Today, edited by Sharon Hecker and Raffaele Bedarida

Marisa Mori and the Futurists A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism Jennifer S. Griffiths

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Jennifer S. Griffiths, 2023 Jennifer S. Griffiths has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Tjaša Krivec Cover image: Marisa Mori, Autoritratto (Self-Portrait), 1928, pencil on paper, 48 x 33 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte Roma/London and Monica Cardarelli. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3502-3263-1 ePDF: 978-1-3502-3264-8 eBook: 978-1-3502-3265-5 Series: Visual Cultures and Italian Contexts Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www​.bloomsbury​.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments

vi ix

Introduction 1 1 The Life of a Woman Artist 9 2 Between Modernity and Tradition 35 3 Edible Futurist Breasts 57 4 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 83 Appendix: Life of the Woman Artist Notes Bibliography Index

105 110 143 161

Illustrations Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Manifesto della Mostra nazionale di agricoltura (Poster Design for the National Agriculture Exhibition), 1934, Marisa Mori. Tempera on paper on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. Collezione M. Viglino Collection © Marco Viglino. Manifesto della II Quadriennale nazionale di Roma (Poster Design for the Second Roman Quadriennale), 1935, Marisa Mori. Tempera on paper on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. Collezione M. Viglino Collection © Marco Viglino. Autoritratto in Blu (Self-Portrait in Blue), 1929, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 49.5 × 69 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence © Uffizi Gallery. Autoritratto nudo (Nude Self-Portrait), 1929–30, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 39 × 32 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Ritratto di donna al mare: Nella Marchesini (Portrait of a Woman on the Beach: Nella Marchesini), 1928–9, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 48 × 67 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Via Lanfranchi (Lanfranchi Street), 1926, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 46 × 50 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. La Lettura (Reading), 1928–9, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 127 × 91 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Clinica Sanatrix (Sanatrix Clinic), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 58.5 × 47.5 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. L’Ebrezza fisica della maternità (The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity), 1936, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 70 × 100 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Aviatrice addormentata (Sleeping Aviatrix), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 97 × 70 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family.

Figures 1.1 1.2 1.3

Autoritratto (Self-Portrait), 1928, Marisa Mori. Pencil on paper, 48 × 33 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. 11 Ritratto di Mario Mori (Portrait of Mario Mori), 1925, Marisa Mori. Charcoal on paper, 50 × 34 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. 13 Mori at the I Mostra di scenotecnica e cinematografica (First Exhibition of Stagecraft and Cinematography) in front of her gesso model, photograph, Rome, January 1933. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 15

 Illustrations vii 1.4

Pamphlet for Mori’s solo show at the Bragalia Fuori Commercio, Rome, April 1934. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 17 1.5 Mori in a biplane, photograph, Rome, 1934. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 18 1.6 Ritorno dalle colonie marine (Return from the Seaside Camps), 1934–5, Marisa Mori. Oil on panel, 120 × 152 cm. Courtesy of Galleria Open Art Prato © Mauro Stefanini/Mori Family. 19 1.7 Maternità (Maternity), 1935, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 63 × 83 cm. Image reproduction taken from the Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 20 1.8 I Coloni fascisti partono per le terre dell’Impero (Fascist Colonists Depart for the Lands of Empire), 1940, Marisa Mori. Oil on panel, 99.5 × 120 cm. Courtesy of Galleria Open Art Prato © Mauro Stefanini/Mori Family. 21 1.9 Ritratto di soldato americano Joseph Romano (Portrait of American Soldier Joseph Romano), 1945, Marisa Mori. Charcoal on paper, 25 × 32.7 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 24 1.10 Ritratto di soldato americano senza nome (Portrait of an Unnamed American Soldier), 1945, Marisa Mori. Charcoal on paper, 33 × 48 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 24 1.11 Rovine (Ruins), 1945, Marisa Mori. Charcoal oil on tracing paper, 23 × 51 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 25 1.12 Nudo disteso (Reclining Nude), 1950, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 70 × 50 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 33 2.1 Cartoon, Nino Costa and Felice Vellani, Caval d’Brons, July 13, 1929. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 36 2.2 Autoritratto nel tondo (Self-Portrait in the Round), 1929–30, Marisa Mori. Charcoal and pastels on paper, 48.3 × 34.4 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. 44 2.3 Mori’s paintings arranged on a wall with Le uova benedette (Blessed Eggs) of 1927 seen at center, photograph, c. 1928–9. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 45 2.4 Ritratto di Felice Casorati (Portrait of Felice Casorati), Undated, Marisa Mori. Pencil on paper, 48 × 33.6 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. 47 2.5 Donna in camice bianco—Ritratto di Daphne Maugham (Woman in a White Shirt—Portrait of Daphne Maugham), 1928, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 48 x 34.5 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/ London © Monica Cardarelli. 48 2.6 Marina (Seaside), 1930, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 39 × 38.5 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. 49 2.7 Natura morta metafisica (Metaphysical Still Life), 1928, Marisa Mori. 46 × 50 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. 51 2.8 Divisione meccanica della folla (Mechanical Division of the Crowd), 1933, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 71 × 100 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. 52

viii 2.9 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 4.1

Illustrations Studio per argenteria (Study of Silver), 1940, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 89 × 66 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. Marisa Mori standing to Marinetti’s left in white at an Aeropranzo, or Aerolunch, photograph, Lido d’Albaro, July 7, 1932. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Ritratto di Giuseppe Mazzotti (Bausin) (Portrait of Giuseppe Mazzotti (Bausin)), 1931, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 40 × 50 cm. Private Collection © Giovanni Rossello. Mammelle italiche al sole (Italic Breasts in the Sun), Marisa Mori. Sketch in a letter from Mori to Tullio d’Albisola, December 1931. Courtesy of Tullio d’Albisola Archive © Giovanni Rossello. Untitled (Futurist Study), c. 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 32 × 22 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London © Monica Cardarelli. La danza della beguiné or Danza erotica: beguiné (Beguine Dance), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 101 × 69 cm. Now lost. Photograph courtesy of the Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Suonatore di jazz (Jazz Player), 1933, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 54 × 55 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Maternità futurista (Futurist Maternity), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 50 × 70 cm. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family. Possesso (Possession), 1932–5, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 39 × 27 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London. Enzo Sperone Collection © Monica Cardarelli. Mori sitting with F. T. Marinetti in front of L’Aviatore che cade (Falling Aviator 1932). Tullio d’Albisola is sitting at the left, Mino Rosso is standing in the center, and Fillìa is standing at far right. Photograph most likely taken at the IV Mostra Sindacale Interprovinciale Belle Arti Liguria, Genoa, 1933. Mori Family Archive © Mori Family.

53

63

65

67

74

74 75 78

79

90

Acknowledgments It was Terry Rossi Kirk whose contagious passion for the art and architecture of Italy filled me with a desire to know and inspired me to be an art historian. I am grateful that I was subsequently mentored by two brilliant figures of feminist art history, Mary Garrard and Norma Broude, at American University. My curiosity about Futurism’s complex relationship to women and gender began as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where I spent time pondering Umberto Boccioni’s Materia (1912). I will always be grateful for Peggy’s legacy. This project grew out of my doctoral dissertation at Bryn Mawr College, where I found support from professors David Cast, Roberta Ricci, Lisa Saltzman, and Dale Kinney. At every stage, this project moved forward, thanks to timely encouragement and support from colleagues. I decided to concentrate on Marisa Mori, thanks to a conversation with Sharon Hecker. I am grateful to John Champagne and Paula Birnbaum for their advocacy. Many thanks also to Günter Berghaus and Claudia Salaris who read this manuscript and generously offered their expert feedback. Alex Standen helped me with translational matters. A research grant from the American Philosophical Society and a publication grant from the Italian Art Society provided financial support for the completion of this manuscript. I am profoundly indebted to Drs. Franco and Gina Mori, to their two daughters Silvia and Laura, and to their grandchildren Margherita and Simone, for having opened the doors of their Florentine home to me and trusting me with precious personal archival materials. This book is in part dedicated to the memories of Franco and Silvia, who did not live to see it completed. I also wish to thank Anna Malvano for telling me about her mother, Nella Marchesini, and for sharing an afternoon with me in her family’s Turin archive of paintings and letters. Thanks also to Marco Viglino in Turin and Monica Cardarelli of the Galleria del Laocoonte in Rome. Photographer Zoey Wilson is responsible for all photographs from the Mori Archive. I also wish to thank Alessandro Sagramora of the Archivio Biblioteca Quadriennale di Roma, Federico Zanoner of the Museo di Arte Rovereto e Trento, and Luca Bochicchio of the Archivio Tullio d’Albisola for helping me to clarify various details. A special thank-you to my beloved husband who made it possible for me to have two small children while bringing this project to completion. Supportive communities, networks, and partnerships permit women to achieve their professional goals despite the challenges of motherhood.

x

Introduction

Across the Ponte Vecchio, past the Pitti Palace, and beyond the perimeter of the medieval wall, the modern urban cityscape of Florence appears like an abrupt postscript to its past. Standing at the Porta Romana, looking southward, is Michelangelo Pistoletto’s double female allegory of the city, Dietrofront, a contemporary sculptural monument to the burden of history in this place. Down the Via Senese and tucked away unseen behind a bright green gate stands a twentieth-century villa surrounded by gardens where Marisa Mori spent forty-five years living and painting. “There are no women equivalents for Michelangelo,” said feminist art history’s originating mother, Linda Nochlin, “although there have been many interesting and very good ones who remain insufficiently investigated or appreciated.”1 She was referring to Buonarroti rather than Pistoletto, but little changed for women artists in the intervening four hundred years. Women are more often celebrated as allegories than artists and their creative destinies are frequently of the earthly kind. The making of modern Italy, like the making of historic Italy, has been attributed to a male cast of characters, “great men” like Gabriele D’Annunzio, F. T. Marinetti, or Benito Mussolini. History is his story when it’s written as the rise and fall of epic cultural geniuses and political heroes. The history of art has almost always been told this way, as a story of the “Absolute Artist,” the isolated iconoclastic male genius whose greatness was somehow predestined, innate, and inevitable.2 Women artists have been peripheral to this kind of history. This book is about a woman artist who built a career among the Futurists in an age of Fascism. Maria Luisa (Marisa) Lurini Mori (1900–85) trained in Turin with one of Italy’s most significant modernists, Felice Casorati, between 1925 and 1931, executing enigmatic cityscapes, seascapes, and still lifes in the manner of Magic Realism3 and exhibited internationally with the later Futurists, during what has sometimes been referred to as “Second Futurism.”4 In its early years the movement was based in Milan, but following the deaths of Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant’Elia, Giacomo Balla’s studio in Rome became a new hive of activity and innovation.5 Mori’s career unfolded outside these epicenters among the Piedmontese, Ligurian, and Tuscan groups.6 She was given a solo show by Anton Giulio Bragaglia at his gallery in Rome in 1934 and in the same period she accepted F. T. Marinetti’s aviation challenge to fly in an early acrobatic biplane over the Italian capital, receiving his seal of approval as a bona fide aeropainter, or aeropittrice. Unlike many of her peers, she severed ties with Futurism because its leadership supported the regime even after the passage of the 1938 Race Laws. This was not merely lip service. During the Nazi occupation she gave shelter and aid to the Levi-Montalcini family who had fled Turin in 1943. After the war she produced a series of drawings and paintings that capture the bleak, dystopian appearance of her bombed city. Following the traumatic events of

2

Marisa Mori and the Futurists

the Second World War she remained an active member of the International Lyceum Club, a professional organization for women, and vigorously rededicated herself to studies of the nude at the Florence Academy. Her work was included in the Venice Biennales of 1930, 1934, 1936, and 1940 and the Rome Quadriennales of 1935, 1939, 1943, 1951, 1955, and 1959.7 In February 1937 she appeared in France’s landmark exhibition of contemporary women artists, “Les femmes artistes d’Europe,” at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, which then traveled to the Riverside Museum in New York.8 The outbreak of war prevented this show from traveling on to its final destination in San Francisco. In 1980 Lea Vergine included her in the groundbreaking show “The Other Half of the Avant-Garde,” which traveled between Milan, Rome, and Stockholm.9 This monograph is the first book dedicated to the artist in English and the first to contextualize her career against the backdrop of history or analyze her art through the lens of feminist theory. Over the years Mori has been the subject of multiple unpublished doctoral dissertations by Alessandra Marzuoli (2000), Eleonora Lauria (2004), Sabina Perricone (2007), Veronica Cavallaro (2012), and Paola da Ros (2000), who compiled an incomplete, yet still very useful, catalogue raisonné on Mori for her dissertation work. I have gratefully drawn on their research. In the Italian tradition, single artists are mostly explored via the exhibition catalogue and there have been multiple Italian exhibitions dedicated to Mori since her death: Marisa Mori at the Aurelio Stefanini Gallery (Florence 1994), Marisa Mori: dalla misura casoratiana al dinamismo futurista at the Narciso Gallery (Turin 2009), Marisa Mori: Pittura, Volo, Futurismo at the Fondazione Piaggo (Pontedera 2011), Marisa Mori: Viaggio in Sardegna at Castello San Michele (Cagliari 2014), Marisa Mori negli anni del Lyceum at the Lyceum Club (Florence 2017), and Marisa Mori 1900-1985: Disegni e Dipinti (Rome 2018). Several of these catalogues contained important essays that went beyond biography. I build on Enrica Ravenni’s insistence that Mori adopted a formal simplicity and expressive synthesis from Casorati that continued to characterize her Futurist pictures.10 Like Adriano Olivero, I think that to properly appreciate her creative project we must come to terms with her interstitiality, her place between traditionalism and modernism.11 I reiterate Chiara Toti’s insistence that her association with communities of other women represented an important and sustained focus for her.12 I share Alessandra Marzuoli’s belief that her renunciation of avant-gardist abstraction after the war was ideologically motivated.13 Admittedly, this book evidences a conflict that underpins feminist art history: on the one hand, it is invested in the idea that only if we recuperate the narratives and accomplishments of avant-garde women, can we reevaluate the pervasive myth of a masculine modernism;14 on the other hand, it is informed by the critical model of deconstruction, which insists that we should be skeptical of the heroic individualism that has underpinned art-historical narratives since the Renaissance. I believe a biographical account of the artist’s life is necessary because she is entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. I am also committed to making accessible scholarship that does not negate the power of human narrative. Yet I focus my study on the artworks themselves to consider them in relation to historical processes and cultural circumstances. I am not invested in the idea that Mori was touched by the divine hand

 Introduction 3 of genius, but I firmly believe she made several fascinating contributions to the avantgarde that have gone entirely unrecognized. Linda Nochlin first shook the absolute artist on his perch fifty years ago, but the history of European art still reads and exhibits like a canonical list of paterfamiliases. Feminist scholarship, argued Rita Felski in the 1990s, was positioning a subversive postmodernity against a repressive masculinizing modernity, effectively writing women out of this history by ignoring the ways they negotiated the challenges of the modern period.15 A decade ago Griselda Pollock pointed out that despite women having been active makers of the modern moment and gender constituting a pivotal issue of modernity,16 women artists were still largely absent from conventional museum accounts and histories.17 Their absence was compounded first by the mood of postwar scholarship, which busily reaffirmed the primacy of masculinity in art,18 and subsequently by post-structural theories that interrogated the significance of authorship at exactly the moment when scholars were beginning to rediscover women artists.19 One scholar has observed that the idea of “Woman” representing the forces of tradition against modernity is a recurrent refrain in modernist polemics, one that struck its most strident tone in the manifestos of Italian Futurism.20 Drowned out by misogynist rhetoric and overlooked in postwar accounts, the women of Italian Futurism have since been documented in numerous anthologies, the first of which was authored by Claudia Salaris (1982). Her pioneering work was followed up by other anthologies including those by Franca Zoccoli and Mirella Bentivoglio (English 1998; Italian 2008), Silvia Contarini (2006), Cecilia Bello Minciacchi (2008), and Giancarlo Carpi (2009). Yet even after M. Barry Katz announced America’s surprising discovery of women Futurists in a 1986 article for Woman’s Art Journal, Rosa Rosà (Edyth von Haynau), Enif Robert, Alzira Braga, Regina Cassolo Bracchi, Adriana Bisi-Fabbri, Adele Gloria, Bice Lazzari, Magda Falchetto, Fides Testi, Růžena Zátková, Magamal (Eva Kühn Amendola), Emma Marpillero, Frances Simpson Stevens, Wanda Wulz, Leandra Angelucci Cominazzini, Alma Fidora, Benedetta (Cappa Marinetti), Barbara (Olga Biglieri Scurto), and Marisa Mori remain unfamiliar names and are absent from textbooks on modern art. Serious critical and contextual analyses of their art are rarer still. Notable exceptions are Lucia Re’s many critical essays and Volume 5 of the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies (2015), edited by Günter Berghaus, which brought together eighteen essays on international women writers and artists for a Special Issue on Women Futurists and Women Artists Influenced by Futurism. Paola Sica’s Futurist Women: Florence, Feminism and the New Sciences (2016) is the most recent example of a sustained analysis on the broader significance of Futurist women’s literary output. Yet these writings do not focus on the visual arts or address Mori. Berghaus has declared there to be a lacuna in scholarship on women Futurists and attributes this to the possibility that male historians are simply not interested in women artists and feminist historians have been repelled by Marinetti’s inflammatory rhetoric.21 As research on women in other avant-gardes has flourished, he states, that into women Futurists has largely floundered.22 Studies have multiplied in the past thirty years,23 but the recuperation project has been hampered by an insidious belief that the feminine, and therefore women, were antithetical to the Futurist project.

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

Berghaus recounts his shock upon discovering women’s involvement with Futurism. Anna Nozzoli proclaimed “la scarsa presenza femminile all’interno del gruppo futurista—the lack of women in the Futurist group” in her important volume of 1978, an idea echoed elsewhere.24 Hal Foster identified misogyny and phallocentrism as being fundamental cornerstones of Marinetti’s platform and asserted the “absence of women in futurism” as recently as 2006.25 The notion was even reiterated by curators of a 2020 retrospective on Natalia Goncharova.26 So despite Italian attempts to create a separate canon of women Futurists, their stories have often remained marginal to our understanding of the movement. The staging of the exhibition Italian Futurism 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe marked a major turning point because women Futurists featured prominently in the New York show. Valentine de Saint Point was perhaps Futurism’s first female protagonist and the French author of two controversial manifestos that directly addressed matters of sexuality: Manifesto della donna futurista (Manifesto of the Futurist Woman 1912) and Manifesto futurista della lussuria (Futurist Manifesto of Lust 1913). Artist and poet Mina Loy penned her own satirical Feminist Manifesto in 1914, which mocked Futurist misogyny. In it she recommended, “Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not—seek within yourselves to find out what you are.”27 Loy along with the American Frances Simpson Stevens and the Russians Olga Rozanova and Aleksandra Ekster were among the first international artists to exhibit with the Futurists in the First Free International Exhibition of Futurist Art at the Sprovieri Gallery in Rome 1914.28 Unfortunately, the outbreak of the war stifled these types of cross-cultural collaborations and scattered exhibited works by Loy and Stevens, all now lost. Between 1916 and 1918 Maria Ginanni took over the direction of the periodical L’Italia futurista (Futurist Italy), overseeing public debates on la questione della donna, or the woman question, which unfolded on its pages under a column entitled “Donna + Amore + Bellezza,” or “Woman + Love + Beauty,” in 1917.29 Enif Robert and Rosa Rosà, who experimented across literary and visual media, became two key voices in these debates. In a playful rebuttal of F. T. Marinetti’s handbook on Come si seducono le donne (How to Seduce Women 1917), which assigned women to the role of weak and submissive sexual prey, Robert rejected stereotypes to assert “a woman knows what she wants.”30 Rosà has been called the only Futurist woman to take a fully feminist position in all aspects of her work,31 writing articles like “Le donne cambiano finalmente” (Women Finally Change) in which she stated that women were ready to take possession of a free consciousness.32 Women remained a major part of the movement under Fascism, continuing to find support among the Futurists. Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, known mononymously as Benedetta, published three novels, participated in five Venice Biennales, attended the First Futurist Congress of 1924, and executed a major public works project for the fascist regime in 1934 with a series of five murals installed in the Director’s Office of the Palermo Post Office, designed by architect Angiolo Mazzoni. Before they were married, the founder’s letters reveal that he encouraged her creative endeavors and in his oft-quoted introduction to her second novel, Marinetti stated, “I admire the genius of Benedetta, my equal not my disciple.”33 Leandra Angelucci Cominazzini exhibited with the Futurists in the 1930s, working in tapestry and ceramics, and making

 Introduction 5 paintings that have been likened to Surrealism in their oneiric or dreamlike qualities.34 Regina Cassolo Bracchi, who signed her sculptural works as Regina, was personally invited by Marinetti, as was Mori, to exhibit work at the Pesaro Gallery exhibition in honor of Umberto Boccioni in 1933. Olga Biglieri Scurto (pseudonym Barbara) was the only Futurist woman aeropainter to have a pilot’s license and Marinetti called her an “ingenious aeropainter.”35 He also praised Mori’s “strong plastic sensual abstract intuition.”36 Clearly Marinetti’s “evident need to control the threat of the construction of a female independent self ” is less evident than some would claim.37 Only by questioning his rhetoric and exposing the numerous contributions that women made, will we cease to reinscribe sexism and misogyny on the historiographical level. The dearth of scholarship on these women is one parameter of a complex problem related to invisibility. Their art tends to be in private collections where it cannot easily become part of the public discourse. So too have their archives often been lost, destroyed, or dispersed. In 1994 Francis Naumann resuscitated the life of the earliest American Futurist Frances Simpson Stevens in an article for Art in America called “A Lost American Futurist,” yet only one painting by this artist survives in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Likewise the early Futurist paintings of avant-garde artist and poet Mina Loy, Stevens’s more successful roommate, friend, and colleague, have largely been lost. None of Rosa Rosà’s paintings and sculptures appears to be extant, although her illustrations survive.38 Alena Pomajzlová was the force behind a major recovery operation of Czech Futurist Růžena Zátková, clearly a significant figure in the early history of abstract art. Many of her experimental abstract drawings and paintings were destroyed by unappreciative relatives after her premature death of tuberculosis in 1923.39 A large part of Alma Fidora’s production and archive was destroyed by aerial bombings of Milan in 1940. As the wife of the movement’s founder, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti has had better luck. A number of her paintings found their way into public museums,40 her papers are kept at the Getty Institute, and her murals, Sintesi delle comunicazioni (Syntheses of Communication 1934), traveled from the Director’s Office of the Palermo Post Office for the 2014 Guggenheim show. Yet the scarcity of surviving source material on many of these women has fed into their obscurity and hampered recuperative research. Yet there have been some important recent additions to the scholarship including a return to the subject of Donne d’avanguardia (2021) by Claudia Salaris and reference monographs prepared in conjunction with major exhibitions on Adriana Bisi-Fabbri (Museo del Novecento in Milan, 2019–20) and Regina Cassolo Bracchi (Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Bergamo 2021). The primary aim of this book is therefore to contribute to a growing body of knowledge about the women associated with Italian Futurism by documenting and preserving what remains of her legacy. Some of Marisa Mori’s works have been lost.41 Nevertheless, there is a large family archive of letters, notes, diaries, clippings, publications, photographs, and artworks in the possession of her descendents. With the generous permission of her family, this archive has formed the basis of my study. The second key aim of this account is to provide a feminist critique of the artist’s work, examining her distinctive brand of Futurism through the lens of feminist theory to offer new perspectives. The artist has occupied a marginal place in a history that privileges the masculine, the urban, and the abstract. She worked outside the major

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

European capitals and fluctuated between traditional figurative subjects and abstract experimentation. Yet her life and art can help rethink and re-situate the limits of Italian modernism offering a complex point of encounter between Magic Realism, Futurism, and Fascism. By focusing on the artist’s explorations of body politics, I seek, in the words of Griselda Pollock, to “understand a differentiating history of a nonheroic avant-garde ‘in, of, and from the feminine’” and thus to “retrieve an important legacy from the rereading of [a] modernist avant-garde moment.”42 I encountered opposition to this work. Leading specialists decried the quality, not only of Mori’s art but also of women Futurists in general. I was dubious of their criticisms. First, Mori’s works are almost exclusively in private hands, meaning that any sweeping judgement about quality had to be based on a mere handful of images. Second, accusations of inferiority have plagued women artists throughout the centuries,43 helping to rationalize their exclusion from the canon and ensuring the continued dearth of serious critical attention. As Lucy Lippard once argued, The notion of Quality has been the most effective bludgeon on the side of homogeneity in the modernist and postmodernist periods. .  .  . Time and again, artists of color and women determined to revise the notion of Quality into something more open, with more integrity, have been fended off from the mainstream strongholds by this garlic-and-cross strategy.44

Subjective determinations about quality, mastery, or aura are often self-interested or driven by political and economic concerns that lie outside the work itself. I believe Mori, and most women Futurists, generally possessed as much talent as their male peers. From all accounts, those male peers shared this view. Nevertheless, the focus of my study is intended to move beyond assessments of quality to consider the artworks as documents embedded in history and culture that may tell us something about the person who made it, but most certainly tell us about the conditions in which they did so. The first chapter sets the painter’s biography against the social, political, and historical backdrop of Italy between the wars. It further analyzes a public lecture Mori delivered in 1948 at the Lyceum Club of Florence. In “Vita di donna artista—The Life of a Woman Artist,” I argue that she tapped into the metaphorical relationship between procreation and creation to justify and celebrate the achievements of women artists, a tactic that empowered her via a history of women in the arts. I understand this approach in relation to the principle of écriture feminine. The three remaining chapters look closely at some of Mori’s works through the lens of feminist theory. The second chapter explores her formative years as part of Felice Casorati’s inner circle in 1920s Turin where she found a sense of solidarity among a group of other women artists. Here I examine the influences of an environment that may have impacted the artist ideologically as well as stylistically. Focusing on her figurative works, I explore how Neo-Renaissance and Magic Realist themes spill over into her subsequent Futurist work, giving them their unique appearance. The third chapter explores the artist’s initial encounter with Ligurian- and Piedmontbased Futurists, looking at her recipe for The Futurist Cookbook (1932), “Mammelle

 Introduction 7 italiane al sole (Italian Breasts in the Sun).” I analyze the artist’s intervention, the only contribution by a woman to this avant-garde experiment, as an illustration, concept, and visual work of edible sculpture, suggesting that it may exemplify Lucia Re’s notion of “paradoxical feminism.” I further argue that her recipe is ironic and can be illuminated by feminist philosophers like Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Kathy Ferguson, who have all argued that humor is a tool for empowerment and liberation. Chapter 4 focuses on Mori’s production as an aeropittrice, or female aeropainter, offering a close analysis of pictures like Aviatrice addormentata (Sleeping Aviatrix 1932), Aviatore che cade (The Falling Aviator 1934), and L’ebbrezza fisica della maternità (The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity 1936). The phenomenon of aeropainting is understood as a manifestation of modernist machine aesthetics and as a cultural expression of the politics of gender and visual domination that permeated interwar rhetoric. I argue that several of her aeropaintings may be ironic responses to narratives about militarism and aviation that characterized both Futurism and Fascism. In a final appendix, Mori’s 1948 Lecture to the Lyceum Club in Florence, “Vita della donna artista—Life of the Woman Artist,” appears in English translated for the first time. The inclusion of this text allows the artist to speak in her own words and permits readers to follow my analysis of the text in Chapter 1. Mori lived to witness the emergence of contemporary feminist philosophy in the 1970s, but at the peak of her career there was no post-structural language with which to challenge the entrenched model of heroic genius that had been established by Vasari during the Renaissance. Perhaps in retrospect, we can see larger political implications in her personal experiences. “The story of an individual psyche,” said Benedetto Croce, “is history.”45 In 1908 he was able to conceive of history as a collective act of remembering, constantly expanded by new perspectives. The telling of Mori’s story is an act of herstory that broadens the scope of our shared historical understanding. Her career evidences an episode of intersection between Magic Realism and Futurism. Her work offers us a different view of a movement frequently associated with a politics of the right as defined by militarism and misogyny, but which also gave rise to her images about female body politics. Her story highlights the complex intersection of Futurism and Fascism, pointing to the variety of political views held by individual Futurists. She is interesting with respect to her marginality and liminality. “Please don’t write a biography,” the artist beseeched a curious researcher making inquiries in 1978, Write if you wish about my paintings and drawings [. . .] it doesn’t matter if you criticize as long as you speak your mind. You can see and judge the pictures, but you cannot hope to know anything beyond the surface about their author. Even if the undersigned were to recount the events of her long existence hour by hour it would make no difference: not even I know what I am.46

Perhaps the artist was simply attempting to retain control over her own legacy; perhaps she was already skeptical of the heroic biography genre. Yet it is also interesting that her perspective aligns with the psychoanalytic idea that we are unknowable, even to ourselves. Given feminist art history’s conflicted relationship to biography,47 I hope

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

instead to offer a thematic case study that understands the artist as part of her historical moment and sees her as one woman among many who was negotiating the aesthetic practices and cultural conditions of making art in an age of Fascism. I hope to convince the reader that her life as a committed artist, a disillusioned wife, and a proud mother, lived between two cities, between two different modernisms, and between two world wars, is a life worth learning from.

1

The Life of a Woman Artist

Formerly at the epicenter of Italian Futurism, Marisa Mori found herself on the margins of the modern art world by 1948. Having been canceled in 1944 and 1946, the Venice Biennale saw a postwar relaunch that year. Despite the subsequent explosion of biennales and art fairs around the world, it remains the world’s most important global art exhibition. The 1948 edition marked Picasso’s first retrospective in Italy and made Peggy Guggenheim a household name. Mori witnessed these developments firsthand, describing her visit in a letter to fellow artist, Paola Levi-Montalcini. She lauded Turner and Klee. She dismissed Picasso and Guggenheim, expressing the opinion that most of the paintings at the Biennale that year represented “useless torture, for those who made them and those who look at them.”1 Postwar American art was turning decisively toward gestural abstraction and formalism as Italian artists struggled with the legacy of an avant-garde linked to Fascism. Cold War political divisions were being defined and elaborated through art and Italian artists were becoming polarized along realist and abstractionist lines.2 Yet Mori was no longer on an avant-garde path. As an overwhelmingly male postwar generation of Italian artists were debating Picasso, she was researching, writing, and delivering a lecture entitled “Vita della donna artista—Life of the Woman Artist”3 to the Florence branch of the International Lyceum Club, the first women’s club in Italy and a vital organization for professional women. In this, her only recorded public talk,4 she hinted at her personal disillusionment with marriage, offering a rare account of the experiences of a woman artist, wife, and mother, setting her personal artistic experience into conversation with women artists of the past. Her statements constitute a public acceptance of many traditional notions about the centrality of motherhood for women that seem essentialist in contemporary terms, however, there is little to indicate that she lived up to Catholic or Fascist ideals of womanhood. Divorce was not a legal possibility in Italy until 1970, but she chose to live with her husband only briefly and they spent most of their married life apart, largely at her insistence. If she did not embrace the role of sposa e madre esemplare (exemplary wife and mother),5 neither did she enter the ranks of the madre prolifica (prolific mother),6 ideals of womanhood that were encouraged and celebrated by Fascist propaganda. She had only one son, whom she raised with the help of her parents, and according to him, she was neither a submissive wife nor a paragon of motherhood. Futurism’s project of Italian cultural rejuvenation had national and political dimensions that aligned with those of emergent Fascism and the political ties between

10

Marisa Mori and the Futurists

them have been extensively explored,7 yet despite their many alignments, the respective male leaders of each put forward distinct views regarding what was then referred to as the questione della a donna, or woman question. The indisputably misogynist rhetoric of early Futurism notwithstanding, it opposed tradition, rejected many cultural stereotypes about women, criticized the institution of marriage, and questioned bourgeois family values, which resulted in it appealing to a group of women who viewed it as potentially liberating.8 It welcomed women writers who debated women’s issues on the pages of its periodicals. Rosa Rosà insisted that it would be impossible after First World War for women to return to their previously limited social status. “[A]t this moment millions of women have replaced men in jobs which it was previously thought that only men could do,” she wrote, “Women are useful now . . . the field to which they’re restricted has in all respects been enlarged and will never become as narrow as it was before.”9 Her comments correctly postulated that women would continue to gain economic and social ground. In response to a male contributor who insisted on the “colossal stupidity” of women, Enif Robert suggested that, while “smiling in a fecund silence,” women were preparing to challenge “myopic men” and their apparent “monopoly of intelligence.”10 With Benito Mussolini’s rise to power in the intervening years, women’s political voices and economic aspirations were thwarted for a time, but Mori’s career testifies to the reality that women achieved success even in the face of oppositional rhetoric and politics.11 The peak years of her personal and professional life were bracketed by Mussolini’s dramatic rise and fall. His twenty-year period of rule, the Ventennio, was marked by increasing restrictions on women’s personal lives and professional opportunities. Fascism’s seizure of power was marked by a pronounced attempt at regulating the private sphere.12 Its policies included a sustained demographic campaign begun in 1927 that targeted women’s bodies13 and repeated limitations on women in the workplace.14 Mussolini stated his opinion unequivocally: “A woman must obey . . . My opinion of her part in the State is in opposition to every feminism . . . in politics she must not count.”15 During these decades Mori separated from her husband, devoted herself to becoming a professional artist, and exhibited her work internationally with the Futurists. She illustrates how, in real terms, the demographic campaign and attempts to stymie women’s professional advances, failed.16 Yet regardless of outcomes, propaganda and policy impacted the kind of choices they could make and, above all, their strategies for success. As the granddaughter of a colonel in the Italian army and the daughter of an insurance executive, Mori was a woman of relative privilege with a degree of financial stability that afforded her much greater liberty than women of lesser means.17 In both Turin and Florence she possessed “a room of her own” as advocated by Virginia Woolf. In what follows I set Mori’s life into political and social context and look at the implications of her lecture.

A Life Born in Florence on March 9, 1900, Maria Luisa Lurini Mori preferred to be called Marisa. She took an early interest in painting and apparently didn’t care for school.

 The Life of a Woman Artist 11 Numerous self-portrait sketches and paintings capture her defiant character. In a signed and dated Self-Portrait charcoal drawing of 1928 (Figure 1.1), her chin is raised and her neck in shadow. She stares down the length of her nose at the viewer. She was the second child of Mario Lurini, an insurance inspector for La Fondiaria S.p.A who was eventually put in charge of the entire region of the Piedmont, and Edmea Bernini.18 Her older brother Gastone was killed by a bullet to the head that pierced his helmet after only a few months of fighting in the First World War. Just like the six early Futurists, who joined the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists,19 eighteen-year-old Gastone had ridden “his beloved bicycle” to the front in order to volunteer for the Army Cyclist Core. His mother, a devotee of Giuseppe Mazzini who spoke poetically about it being “a privilege to be able to fight for the liberty and independence of the homeland,” never recovered from the loss of her son. Almost six million Italians would be called to arms in this war, and while the number of casualties is uncertain, the artist and her family were directly affected by the “war to end all wars.” Mori became an only child whose parents denied her nothing and the war prompted dramatic social changes, sending unprecedented numbers of Italian women into the workforce and offering up new political, educational, and professional opportunities.20 Mori enjoyed painting and drawing from an early age.21 While staying with her cousins in the countryside outside Parma during the Great War, and perhaps subsequently stimulated by the traumatic loss of her brother, she turned increasingly to art as an expressive outlet. While her family had deep roots in Florence, Mario Lurini relocated his immediate family north to Turin when he was promoted to regional

Figure 1.1  Autoritratto (Self-Portrait), 1928, Marisa Mori. Pencil on paper, 48 × 33 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

inspector general of the Piedmont in 1918.22 Her artistic taste was cultivated in the two distinct regional atmospheres of interwar Florence and Turin, each with profound differences in terms of history, culture, and economy. The former was viewed as the historic cultural capital of Italy for its linguistic, aesthetic, and scientific contributions to Italy’s Renaissance while the latter was regarded as the modern urban and industrial capital that would fuel the future of the Italian economy. With its narrow medieval avenues, monumental piazzas, and colorful sculpted façades, the Florentine cityscape still encapsulates the presence of Italy’s Renaissance past, despite dramatic attempts at modern urbanization between 1865 and 1870. Turin, on the other hand, was beloved by Friedrich Nietzsche and Giorgio de Chirico. The latter described its wide streets, repetitive porticoes, and austere piazzas as features of “the most profound, the most enigmatic, the most disquieting city not just of Italy, but the world.”23 The dynamic between history and modernity forged Mori, just as it shaped culture and aesthetics in interwar Italy. Her parents had understandable reservations when Mori stubbornly married her first cousin Mario Mori at twenty years of age. The requisite special dispensation from the Pope that blessed their union didn’t make it less miserable. The couple’s only son, Franco, was born in Turin at the home of his maternal grandparents on November 2, 1922, four days after the Fascist March on Rome. Although mother and son subsequently returned to Mario in Tuscany for a period, they would separate after barely two years. Mori’s husband had been in South America before the First World War, where he became a citizen of Argentina and spoke Spanish. He intended to build a life in the new world, but with Italy’s entrance into the war in May 1915, his patriotism got the better of him and he returned to volunteer at the front on the French Somme. He battled until the war’s end despite losing a kidney to shrapnel and spent later years numbing whatever psychological traumas, regrets, and internal scars these experiences left by drinking heavily (an unwise choice for a man with one kidney). In the anxious lines and intense gaze of a 1925 charcoal portrait, the artist captured something of the frustration and anger that seems to have marked her husband’s personality (Figure 1.2). He shared his wife’s interest in Futurism and published a collection of Futurist poetry.24 Yet when he drank, he became, in the words of his son, “quite unpredictable and turbulent, of fiery nationalist sentiment.”25 Like so many of Mussolini’s ardent followers, he was a deluded veteran of Italy’s vittoria mutilata, or mutilated victory, a term coined by Gabriele D’Annunzio to describe Italy’s profound dissatisfaction with the outcome of the war. Despite having been promised Habsburg territories in the southern Alps and extensive regions of the Balkans, including the largely Italian-speaking city of Trieste, the Triple Entente (Russia, France, and the United Kingdom) did not deliver on these promises in the 1915 Pact of London. A sense of outrage over this betrayal fueled the Irredentist cause and Mussolini’s political rise to power. It became a key term in Fascist rhetoric. Mario was a cardcarrying member of the PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista—Fascist National Party) and a devotee of the regime. Shortly after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia in 1936, he departed for what were now Italy’s colonial territories, leaving from the port of Naples to work as a geologist in Addis Abbaba. Despite his repeated requests for his wife to join him there, she found any and every conceivable excuse not to do so.26 When he returned

 The Life of a Woman Artist 13

Figure 1.2  Ritratto di Mario Mori (Portrait of Mario Mori), 1925, Marisa Mori. Charcoal on paper, 50 × 34 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

with malaria she refused to have him back in the house and he spent several years on the island of Ischia before dying in a nursing home on the mainland in November 1943, just before Fascism’s ignominious end. In two separate diary entries, the artist recorded visits to the clinic and her thoughts and feelings about his death. Upon hearing the news, she pondered, “A sadness without name came over me . . . A wasted life, a slow suicide—for me 23 years of suffering. What was this life for him?”27 Gazing on his body the day after his death she wrote, “he caused so much pain to himself and to others.”28 In the end she felt pity as well as regret. In her professional relationships she garnered the respect of two major cultural forces of Italian modernism: Felice Casorati and F. T. Marinetti. If the former was a quiet, methodical liberal, the latter was a brash, impetuous, right-winger. If the former paid homage to Italy’s old masters, the latter celebrated the rise of the machine and contemplated the destruction of museums. The mysterious softness of Magic Realism and the colorful energy of Futurism come together in Mori’s interwar pictures, demonstrating an appreciation for the seemingly opposite tendencies of the so-called return-to-order and the avant-garde. Her influences were diverse and included the Metaphysical Painting and classicism of Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà29 as well as the aero-inspired Futurism of Fillìa (Luigi Colombo) and Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles).30 Mori occupied the middle ground, artistically and ideologically. While many of her Futurist peers were condemned for coming down on the wrong side of political history, she demonstrated moral fortitude in the dangerous times ahead.

14

Marisa Mori and the Futurists

Despite her ties to Futurism and the pervasiveness of Fascist ideas, she risked her own safety to help Jewish friends and colleagues. The primary phase of Mori’s artistic formation took place in Turin between 1925 and 1932 within an extraordinary community of antifascist intellectuals and artists whose ideas and influences are the subject of the following chapter. Mori courted Casorati, after briefly studying with Giovanni Guarlotti,31 viewing him as “the only painter of any significance in Turin.” She judged well for he became a titan in his adopted city. “I didn’t introduce myself timidly,” she boasted, “because I knew what I wanted.”32 As in marriage, she insisted on choosing her own path, this time with happier results. As the newly established Fascist government began to encourage women in their domestic duties, she left Franco in the care of her mother Edmea33 to pursue artistic ambitions at the Scuola Libera di Pittura, or Free School of Painting, at Via Mazzini 52. It was while still a protégé of Casorati that Mori met Futurist Tullio d’Albisola (pseudonym of Tullio Mazzotti), a master ceramicist from Liguria. He introduced her to his associates Farfa (Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini)34 and Fillìa (Luigi Colombo),35 the latter of whom then introduced her to F. T. Marinetti. She developed close friendships with each of these men, leaders within their regional branches of Ligurian and Piedmontese Futurism, respectively. Her new interest drove something of a professional wedge (although apparently not a personal one) between her and Casorati. Writing from Paris in 1931 he addressed his greetings to “Marisa Mori pittrice futurista.”36 In autobiographical notes, Mori remembered, “Casorati said I would ruin myself . . . that I would lose what I had gained.”37 Having actively cultivated all of his students’ artistic independence and creativity, he now worried about Mori’s professional direction. Structure, tradition, and adherence to the rules of painting were important to him and he rightly knew Futurism to disavow all three. She drew closer to the Futurists in the summer of 1931 and officially adhered at the start of the next year, becoming involved in evolving conversations about the technological miracle of aviation and droll culinary experiments.38 This association brought international attention to her art. Between 1931 and 1940 she exhibited Futurist works in Turin, Milan, Rome, Florence, Genoa, Venice, Naples, Athens, Nice, Warsaw, Paris, and New York.39 She exhibited with the Futurists at the Venice Biennales of 1934, 1936, and 1940 and the Rome Quadriennales of 1935 and 1939.40 She had a solo space in the Futuristi di Torino (Futurists of Turin) exhibition at Galleria Codebò in 1932 and a first solo exhibition, Marisa Mori, at the Bragaglia Fuori Commercio in Rome in April 1934.41 She embraced Futurism’s call for an active, all-encompassing, and integrated arte-vita or arte-totale, avidly experimenting across multiple artistic media that included ceramics, advertising, costume, furniture,42 and set design for film and stage. She apparently designed a series of ceramics for the Mazzotti studio, which were exhibited at the Mostra futurista di pittura e scultura e arti decorative in Chiavari (November–December 1931), but no evidence of these works remains. Among her advertising designs was a campaign for Florentine publishing house Sansoni.43 Her archive holds multiple unpublished color illustrations created for Giuseppe Scortecci’s colonial adventure novel Dubat all’erta! (1935).44 She exhibited a series of advertising posters with Turin’s Pro-Cultura Femminile’s Mostra femminile di arte decorative moderna (Exhibition of Modern Decorative Female Art) in 1932

 The Life of a Woman Artist 15 and created advertising posters for the Mostra nazionale di agricoltura (National Exhibition of Agriculture) of 1934 and the II Quadriennale nazionale di Roma (II Rome Quadriennale) of 1935 (Plates 1 and 2). Although this study focuses on her painting, she did significant work in theater and set design, participating in all of the major related Futurist exhibitions45 and signing the Secondo Manifesto della cinematografia Futurista (Second Manifesto of Futurist Cinematography) in 1933.46 In Florence she worked with the Accademia dei Fidenti, where she collaborated with Thayaht (Ernesto Michahelles)47 and studied costume design.48 She remained involved with the theater company, designing costumes, teaching costume design, and acting.49 She worked on designs, and possibly costumes, for Fillìa’s Sensualità (Sensuality) between 1932 and 1935 before his death.50 A photograph catches her in front of her silver-painted gesso model shown at the Prima Mostra futurista di scenotecnica cinematografica, First Futurist Exhibition of Cinematic Scenography (1933) (Figure 1.3). Made for the film set of Sintesi dell’Isola d’Elba (Synthesis of Elba Island), a film about industrial mining on the Tuscan Island of Elba that was possibly written by her husband and never realized, the gesso model won her a silver medal. She also made set sketches for this project in which tall black monuments overwhelm the human scale making man and mining machine look small and insignificant. Similarly, in a set of drawings that are difficult to identify, a small isolated figure stands at center stage surrounded by a series of tall ominous cutouts. One scholar notes the possible influences of German expressionist film on these dystopian settings.51 Yet the uncanny quality of these set designs is not far

Figure 1.3 Mori at the I Mostra di scenotecnica e cinematografica (First Exhibition of Stagecraft and Cinematography) in front of her gesso model, photograph, Rome, January 1933. Mori Family Archive.

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

removed from her paintings of empty cityscapes and silent seascapes so they may be linked stylistically to Metaphysical Painting and Magic Realism, which were primary influences. The dark shadows, ominous figures, and dystopian auras of these designs returned in her images of postwar Florence. Mori had been separated from her husband since 1924, but as a result of her son’s relentless pleas, agreed to a reunion in 1932. The ensuing years were personally intense but remained professionally fruitful. In 1933 she won third prize for her triptych Sintesi del golfo: romantica, militare, gioiosa (Syntheses of the Gulf: Romantic Synthesis, Military Synthesis, and Joyous Synthesis) at the Golfo della Spezia painting competition established by Marinetti, Prampolini, and Fillìa with Renato Righetti that year. Attempts to repair her relationship failed and the two slept in separate beds, parting ways again four years later. She maintained the momentum of her encounter with the avant-garde by developing Florentine connections with Antonio Marasco52 and Thayaht. She began associating with the Independent Futurists, led by Marasco, in the summer of 1932. In contact with the Bauhaus and several anarchist figures, he remained a committed political leftist, objecting strenuously to both marinettismo53 and Marinetti’s de-radicalization of Futurist politics in support of the regime. It was for this reason that he launched Gruppi futuristi di iniziative (Futurist Groups with Initiative), a manifesto issued January 1, 1933, signed by both Marisa and Mario Mori,54 subsequently renamed Gruppi futuristi indipendenti (Independent Futurist Groups), a name that didn’t sit well with Marinetti and was played down in official Futurist publications.55 Fillìa would ask Mori to suggest the name “New Futurist Groups” to Marasco instead.56 Mori didn’t share the “Independent” leader’s anti-Marinetti sentiments as she continued to welcome the founder’s funding and encouragement, but her involvement with this group may have encouraged her explorations of abstraction. Aeropittura I and Aeropittura II (also known as Ritorno degli Atlantici) use colorful geometries to capture visions of flight and appeared together at the Venice Biennale of 1934. The former pictures an android, or mechanomorphic pilot, looking at the viewer through fragmented airplane parts including a cylindrical barrel and a bright red wing. The latter looks onto a cityscape in aerial perspective twisted through the wind and noise of a rotating propellor. Two small white airplanes are visible at the bottom left and an Italian flag sits at center. These images evoke predictable Futurist tropes demonstrating that Mori could toe the line. While she took what seems to be an abrupt and sharp turn toward the unorthodoxy and unruliness of the Futurist avant-garde, propensities that her mentor would never understand, she never abandoned her interest in traditional figurative genres and continued to draw on her earlier training. By 1933 she was creating works of traditional and avant-garde subjects simultaneously, using various figurative and abstract languages. She had thrown herself into Futurist experimentation between December 1931 and December 1932, but reunited with Casorati on the occasion of a December 1932 exhibition in Florence.57 In some ways she had found her way to the fringes of Futurism by this time, as perhaps illustrated by a set of exhibitions demonstrating a reluctance to conform to an exclusively avant-garde approach. Immediately after exhibiting six canvases with the Group of Independent Futurists at the Palazzo Ferroni in February 1933, she sent five non-Futurist works to the same venue for the first

 The Life of a Woman Artist 17 exhibition organized by the Florentine section of the National Fascist Association of Professional Women Artists and Graduates (ANFDAL).58 She was therefore exploring very different methodologies in her art. The following year was one of the most significant in the artist’s career in terms of two major achievements: her first solo exhibition and her first flight in an acrobatic biplane. Founded by the photography and film pioneer Anton Giulio Bragaglia and his brother Carlo Ludovico, the Bragaglia Fuori Commercio was historically one of Rome’s most important vanguard galleries.59 It began as the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in 1918 on Via dei Condotti where it exhibited Italian artists like Giacomo Balla, Giorgio de Chirico, Mario Sironi, and Umberto Boccioni, as well as international ones like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele. It moved to a new location at Piazza Mignanelli in 1932 where Mori’s show was held from April 6 to 15, 1934 (Figure 1.4). Writing the short essay for her catalogue, art critic Aniceto del Massa said Mori learned about herself with Casorati but was driven to Futurism by “a need for freedom,” “a dissatisfaction with the results of a common approach to painting,” and a belief that the new technologies of the age press upon our spirit and demand new methodologies of expression.60 Preparations for the show are documented in multiple extant letters from Bragaglia.61 The exact date of Mori’s flight over Rome with pilot Count Costantino Biego di Costabissara is unknown, but it most likely occurred in conjunction with her solo exhibition and is documented in a series of photographs (Figure 1.5), one of which amusingly evidences that she wore high-heeled shoes for the occasion. The significance of this act is perhaps difficult for us to imagine today, but, in its infancy, flight posed a very real physical danger and taking to the sky was a mark of courage. Her decision to accept Marinetti’s challenge indicates a bold personality who longed for adventure. She was clearly willing to take risks in pursuit of her artistic passion, a fact proven again during the war. In one particular diary entry she notes that after painting at the Tuscan seaside she took a train home on August 31, 1943, during the bombing of Pisa. Before her departure she told a friend, “If I die for my work, this I will not regret.”62 Her strong personality may have been attracted to a movement that encouraged and celebrated daring, even among women. Mori had after all chosen to move from the intimate spaces of Casorati’s studio and its cerebral Magic Realism into the public and political

Figure 1.4  Pamphlet for Mori’s solo show at the Bragalia Fuori Commercio, Rome, April 1934. Mori Family Archive.

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

Figure 1.5  Mori in a biplane, photograph, Rome, 1934. Mori Family Archive.

world of Futurism’s arte-azione, or action art. She did so at the dawn of the 1930s when attention was focused on the airplane as a symbol of bravery and adventure. Yet it must be acknowledged that this symbol was increasing associated with politics of the right. Many Futurists would channel the image of this miraculous technology into an aero-aesthetic impulse that became deeply bound up with the regime and its imperial politics.63 Futurist aeropainting in the decade leading up to the war became a form of propaganda celebrating military conquest and colonial expansion.64 Mori, too, made a body of Futurist art that is underpinned by fascist themes.

Fascist Art It is likely that Mori embraced the social transformations made possible by association with Futurism without embracing its political affirmations.65 Never a party member and apparently derogatory of Mussolini in private,66 it has been suggested that her visual references to the Duce contain a hint of mockery.67 Nevertheless, the artist opted to participate with the Futurists in regime-sponsored exhibitions and competitions, not surprising given the extent of regime patronage. Mori’s participation in government initiatives explains many paintings that now appear overtly Fascist in character. These include Radiotrasmissione di una lezione di ginnastica (Radio Transmission of a Gymnastic Lesson 1933), Ritorno dalle colonie marine (Return from the Seaside Camps 1934–5), Ritorno dalle colonie estive (Return from the Summer Camps 1934–5), Maternità (Maternity 1935), Composizione su elementi dei campeggi balilla (Composition on Elements of the Balilla Camps 1936), Coloni fascisti partono per le terre dell’Impero (Fascist Colonists Depart for the Lands of the Empire 1940), and Ali italiane sull’Africa

 The Life of a Woman Artist 19 or Volo d’Italia (Italian Wings over Africa or The Flight of Italy 1940). Nearly all of these works utilize figural repetitions of human beings in rigid and schematic formations that evoke Fascist mass spectacles.68 Yet despite their clear propagandistic purpose, I believe some are dubious celebrations of such political events. Return from the Seaside Camps (1934–5) (Figure 1.6) is an ominously mechanized portrayal of girls and boys wearing mask-like smiles and marching in single file, as if on assembly lines. The boy at the end of the line has a transparent right arm raised in salute and his left arm has transformed into a hammer-like fascis. Emerging from the center is a smiling, ethereal, automaton-like face that surveils the children from above. Maternity (1935) was painted for a competitive national exhibition on the theme “Sogni di madre- Mother’s Dreams” for which a substantial catalogue was published69 (Figure 1.7). Here a series of children is arranged decoratively around a central female figure, or madre prolifica, over whose left shoulder flows a river of tricolor humans marching out of a triumphal archway. Three rosy-cheeked babies sit in her embrace, their heads arranged in an upward curve that gives way to another nine baby heads that recede in decreasing size to form a halo-like ring about the mother’s head. She looks diminutively downward, wearing a contented virginal countenance. The prolific mother appears to be an empty-headed mass-reproduction machine. Fascist Colonists Depart for the Lands of the Empire (1940) is a work of predominantly bright pastels and a medley of abstracted and figurative forms (Figure 1.8). Humanoid

Figure 1.6  Ritorno dalle colonie marine (Return from the Seaside Camps), 1934–5, Marisa Mori. Oil on panel, 120 × 152 cm. Courtesy of Galleria Open Art Prato.

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Figure 1.7  Maternità (Maternity), 1935, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 63 × 83 cm. Image reproduction taken from the Mori Family Archive.

figures in variously sharp or soft contours are sewn together with fragmented planes and segmented shapes of architecture and landscape. The central figure seems to raise a right hand in fascist salute. A collection of small figures at the top right stand to attention like castle crenelations. Two soldier profiles look stiffly right and a number of other shadowy heads hover beside them. Centered at the top of the picture is a very small fascis, placed like a beacon, from which emanates a triangular plane of golden light and three small Italian flags are visible at the peripheries. All the signs and symbols of Fascist power (flag, fascio, and soldier) are pictured here. Yet each of the flags hangs limply, the fascis is remarkably small, and the eyes of the figures are empty. Secured to the base of a flagpole and drawn tautly across the picture, is an illusionistic black chain. If this is a ship’s mooring, it can be read as an indication that those who depart for the colonies are safely moored to the homeland. Yet its diagonal position suggests the entire assemblage of convoluted fragments is held together by force. Italian Wings over Africa, sometimes referred to as The Flight of Italy (1940) is marked by the inherent racism of Italian colonialism. This is evident in the full original title, The Flight of Italy Drags the Roman Sky over the Black Threat (Il volo d’Italia trascina il cielo di Roma al di sopra della nera insidia), which was subsequently whitewashed. Airplanes fly in formation over a biomorphically abstracted territory. Four simplified contours fly vertically upward along the right side of the painting to an extremely small geographical outline of Italy in the upper right corner. From this miniature Italy three diagonal lines shoot leftward creating the wake turbulence of three more airplanes that fly across the canvas pushing against the perimeter of a

 The Life of a Woman Artist 21

Figure 1.8  I Coloni fascisti partono per le terre dell’Impero (Fascist Colonists Depart for the Lands of Empire), 1940, Marisa Mori. Oil on panel, 99.5 × 120 cm. Courtesy of Galleria Open Art Prato.

cloud-like form that encroaches on the territory of Africa, depicted as another dark biomorphic form. Set within the space of Africa are two mask-like faces that peer up behind a sun-disc in a very unthreatening way. Despite the jingoist and racist title, the truly threatening presence appears to be the Italian cloud that will blot out the African sun. Here, too, there is an element of ambiguity. Ruth Ben-Ghiat describes the regime’s grant-giving schemes and institutions of patronage, especially the founding of the Italian Academy in 1929, as extremely effective methods of allying intellectuals and their cultural production to the regime.70 If one wanted to work as a professional artist at this time then a degree of organizational collaboration was necessary, but as another scholar notes, this “did not necessarily mean ideological allegiance and it is certain that many intellectuals and creative professionals paid lip service to the regime while harboring oppositional politics.”71 Like many of her male peers, who harbored possible criticisms of the regime, Mori acted opportunistically with respect to her career.72 Ultimately her fire for Futurism burned itself out as the flames of war threatened Italy. After a decade of association, she apparently severed ties to the movement because of its continued loyalty to Fascism despite the passage of the Race Laws in 1938.73 In autobiographical notes she recorded, I cut ties with Futurism: I never belonged to any party—I was neither a fascist or an antifascist but when the racial persecutions began I took a position and sheltered Jews—two of whom were the architect [Gino] Levi-Montalcini of Turin

22

Marisa Mori and the Futurists and his sister Paola, a student of Casorati. But of this separation, which occurred when Hitler became the dictator of Italian laws it is best to write nothing. I participated even under advanced Fascism in the Rome Quadriennales complying with Marinetti who furnished the themes—and I chose “Seaside summer camps” where children were sent to enjoy the sea—and other themes of that kind. But then when Mussolini became Hitler’s slave and the racial persecutions began I stopped exhibiting with the Futurists.74

In fact Mori exhibited fascist-themed works as late as 194075 but had increasingly returned to traditional subjects and themes by the late 1930s.

Wartime Throughout her life Mori carried notebooks, making brief notes and remarks about the places, people, exhibitions, and museums she saw, but she kept a more systematic diary during the Second World War (between 1942 and 1945).76 She passed much of the war in the shelter of her Florentine home. Unfortunately, her friend Paola LeviMontalcini had to flee from hers. The Race Laws caused Paola’s twin sister, neurologist and future Nobel-winning scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini, to lose her position at the university. Heavy Anglo-American bombing of Turin in 1941 compelled the LeviMontalcini family to remove themselves to lodgings near Asti. Two years later, they fled again as a result of the German invasion, heading to Florence. Franco remembers Paola having telephoned from the train station. Paola, Rita, Gino, his wife Mariuccia, and their mother Adele, sought help and shelter from Mori and remained in Florence, living under the pseudonym Locatelli, for over a year while evading German capture. During this period Mori developed a close friendship with Paola’s brother, architect Gino Levi-Montalcini,77 and her act of friendship solidified her friendship with Paola. In diary pages of November 1943, Mori speaks of her annoyance at being interrupted while painting amicably with Paola. In May 1944 she recounts an outing with her friend to Alinari, where they bought art prints, then went to Masaccio’s frescoes at the Brancacci Chapel, which they hoped to see, but which were unsurprisingly walled up for protection. A stocky monk turned them away, saying, “After the war, if we’re still here.”78 Together they pursued their art despite the circumstances. A postcard from Paola dated September 15, 1957, and another letter of 1961 indicate she hosted Mori on planned visits through Turin en route to Paris. Copy number LXXXII of LeviMontalcini’s 1962 catalogue (containing a forward by Gillo Dorfles) is dedicated to “Marisa and Edmea,” the artist and her mother, “with affection.” In 1977 Paola gifted Marisa with one of her series of copper engravings, which still bears a dedication “To dearest Marisa with all my affection, Paola.”79 On July 25, 1943, a vote of no confidence removed Mussolini from office and a new government under Pietro Badoglio took charge. Multiple pages in Mori’s diaries describe the joy shared by her immediate family, her neighbors, and passersby. “Franco says to me—it is the first moment in my life of real freedom—and indeed he was born

 The Life of a Woman Artist 23 on November 2, 1922, he was born with Fascism.”80 German forces marched into Florence as occupiers on September 8, 1943, putting Paola, Rita, and Gino at ever greater risk of capture and deportation. Responding to the German invasion, Allied forces bombed Florence for the first time on September 25, 1943, killing 215 people. Intermittent bombing continued until September of the following year. In February 1944 the Banda Carità, a fascist military police squadron headed by Mario Carità, arrested Franco who had been circulating resistance materials at medical school in the months leading up to the occupation. He was beaten and spent eleven days in jail.81 In her war diary Mori would record her emotions as she made multiple attempts to visit him. Desperation begins to take increasing control of me. I cry all the time. [. . .] I meet Paola and Rita. We go together. Dark, wet, slimy streets. In the park, the hard stares intensify. I cry. I leave the food [for Franco]. I ask if I can see my son. A harsh “No.” Return to darkness. I go out. I feel ill. It seems impossible to find the strength to return home. A guard calls to me. I think they’ve been moved and will let me see Franco. Instead a policeman in civilian clothes arrives. Harsh. Hostile. He asks for the keys to the house. “The house is always unlocked.” They go. They come back.82

Like many other Italians, Franco abandoned his conscripted military post in the spring of that year, secure that the Allies were on their way to liberate the city. He disguised himself as a nun and took shelter in a local convent rather than report for duty.83 On the night of August 3, 1944, retreating German troops destroyed all of the city’s historic bridges save Ponte Vecchio at precisely ten minutes to ten. Approximately 5,000 Florentines took shelter in the Palazzo Pitti and adjacent Boboli gardens, having been warned of the impending destruction by an ordinance of July 29, which told citizens living in proximity to the Arno River to evacuate their homes.84 Among them was another former student of Casorati, exile and author of Christ Stopped at Eboli (1945), Carlo Levi. There too was Anna Banti, author and art historian, who would lose her first novel about Artemisia Gentileschi in the flames only to rewrite the work to great critical acclaim. The Arno acted as a dividing line between Allied and German halves for another week as Italian partisans bore the brunt of the struggle to drive out the German troops who finally left the city center on August 11.85 At the start of the battle for Florence Mori had gone with her son, dressed as a woman, on bicycles to stay in a family apartment on Via degli Alfani in the historic center, which she believed was less likely to be targeted by Allied bombs. They crossed back to the Oltrarno with difficulty after the Germans abandoned the city. When Allied armies approached the Porta Romana, they passed the Mori home, bringing food and relief. The war continued at the Gothic Line north of Florence until March 1945 and it was under these circumstances that American reinforcements were brought to Italy in December of 1944. In January and February of 1945 South African and American soldiers took refuge in Mori’s home. Franco Mori remembers the American soldiers fondly as having shared cigarettes and chocolate and giving him a ride to medical school. Mori took the opportunity to make at least seventeen portrait sketches of them. A few, like Joseph Romano of Bridgeport, Connecticut, identified themselves, adding

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

Figure 1.9 Ritratto di soldato americano Joseph Romano (Portrait of American Soldier Joseph Romano), 1945, Marisa Mori. Charcoal on paper, 25 × 32.7 cm. Mori Family Archive.

Figure 1.10  Ritratto di soldato americano senza nome (Portrait of an Unnamed American Soldier), 1945, Marisa Mori. Charcoal on paper, 33 × 48 cm. Mori Family Archive.

names and/or addresses ( Figures 1.9 and 1.10). This may suggest that Mori offered to sell them finished portraits and at least one portrait sketch corresponds to a finished painting. With the war won and an Allied victory declared on May 2, 1945, Mori began to contemplate the destruction of Florence in dozens of sketches, prints, and at least two oil paintings. The Uffizi gallery was badly damaged by bombing raids and only Ponte Vecchio had been spared, thanks to the intervention of Gerhard Wolf.86 A large series of ink washes convey the artist’s sense of the city as a dark shadow of its former self, haunted by ghostly figures that move between ruined buildings (Figure 1.11). Yet in one naturalistic oil painting Brunelleschi’s dome rises above the foregrounded ruins and in another highly expressionistic rendering, the tower of Palazzo Vecchio rises above a writhing mass of broken forms. Mori thus suggests the enduring symbolic power of her city’s past and its triumph in the face of the destruction.

The Postwar Lyceum Lecture With the defeat of European Fascism and the rise of the Cold War, Italian artists would be pulled between Soviet and American influences. “Italian painting,” as Adrian Duran puts it, “fell victim to a Gordian Knot of exclusionary binaries.”87 Yet there was one element of consistency as the art scene was dominated by resurgent notions of masculinity. Abstract Expressionism’s “aura of masculinity” apparently served the

 The Life of a Woman Artist 25

Figure 1.11  Rovine (Ruins), 1945, Marisa Mori. Charcoal oil on tracing paper, 23 × 51 cm. Mori Family Archive.

political function of differentiating the United States from a weakened and effeminate Europe88 and Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings epitomized a “metaphorics of masculity” linked to ideas of “scale, action, energy, space.”89 Even if Italian postwar artists like Piero Manzoni, Alberto Burri, and Lucio Fontana pushed back against the cultural hegemony of imported American capitalism,90 they did so by asserting their own heroic masculine gestures of action, energy, and space. For the left-wing Italian painters of Corrente and the New Front “Picassism was a political stance”91 and his Guernica became an emblem of the path toward a new kind of ethically engaged art. Joining the Communist Party in 1944, Picasso claimed that he was “again among brothers” and had joined the party because it was attempting “to make men clearer thinkers, more free and more happy.”92 It seems impossible to overstate this artist’s legacy for European modernism as both mythic genius and mythic chauvinist. The man many consider to be the most original artist of the twentieth century was remarkably unimaginative when it came to matters of sex and gender. “Like any artist I am primarily the painter of woman,” he reportedly told Francoise Gilot in 1950, “and for me woman is essentially a machine for suffering.” The mother of his two children, a painter and critic in her own right, with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne apparently replied ironically, “I thought woman was a machine for reproduction, indeed for creation.”93 He regurgitated an ancient philosophical binary assuming the active nature of masculine subjectivity and the passive nature of feminine objectivity. She enlisted a procreative metaphor to bite back and then became the only woman to leave him in 1953. In response he pressed art dealers not to buy her work and disinherited their children. Picasso evidenced no

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concern for the freedom or happiness of women and could never be a model of ethics for Gilot or Mori. In France suffrage was granted by decree and in Italy, it passed with support from both Christian Democrats and Communists. French women voted for the first time in 1945 and Italians the following year. Mori made no note of these events, but she did record her attendance at lectures sponsored by the Union of Italian Women (Unione Donne Italiane UDI), Italy’s largest political and social advocacy group for women initiated by partisans in 1944–5.94 It is in her talk for the Lyceum Club that we find the clearest insights into Mori’s attitudes on sex and gender. In her opinion there were substantial difficulties in being both wife and artist simultaneously. She accepted traditional roles for men and women within the institution of marriage and found marriage irreconcilable with her métier. A married woman artist, she said, is forced “to split herself between artist and wife insofar as the two have opposing and contradictory aims: the former an active being that wants to dominate and the latter a passive one who must submit to subjugation.” Her description of marriage as restrictive echoes those of pioneering feminist Sibilla Aleramo whose novel Una Donna (A Woman 1906) recounts the author’s liberation from a violent husband through gradual artistic awakening. In her account, the ideal wife is described as self-sacrificing and subservient, expectations outlined in the Papal Encyclical Casti Connubi of 1930, which insisted on “the ready subjection of the wife and her willing obedience.”95 Such notions were reiterated by fascist intellectual and Minister of Public Instruction, Giovanni Gentile, in his essay “La donna nella conscienza moderna” (Woman in Modern Consciousness 1934), wherein he describes women as belonging to the economy of the family and subservient, as all citizens, male or female, to the demands of the state.96 Aleramo’s novel was an early challenge to the idea that a woman should sacrifice her individuality within marriage, claiming the effects would be immoral and destructive.97 Una Donna was reprinted in 1919, 1921, 1930, and 1938, proving that the appeal of Aleramo’s message endured, despite fascist propaganda efforts. If during the First World War Italian women had entered the workforce and contributed to the national economy in unprecedented numbers, they faced a subsequent backlash. Marriage and family were regarded by Catholicism and Fascism as the cornerstones of Italian society and a woman’s primary function within those institutions was to procreate. Gentile celebrated motherhood as innate, original, and essential to all women. According to fascist sociologist Ferdinando Loffredo a woman was, “made to ripen a child within her body for three-quarters of the year, made to nourish this child, with a secretion of her organism, for longer than a year .  .  . ”98 Mussolini expressed the opinion that “Work, where it is not a direct impediment, distracts from conception. It forms an independence and consequent physical and moral habits contrary to child-bearing.”99 Criminologist and scientific racist Cesare Lombroso would go so far as to identify a lack of maternal feeling as an “indication of moral insanity” shared only by criminals, prostitutes, and lesbians.100 If the ideal Fascist New Man was a soldier and its ideal New Woman was primarily a mother, then neither was very new at all. Yet, as Fascists celebrated motherhood, Italy’s most prominent antifascist philosopher, Benedetto Croce, derided it as the source of women’s inferiority. “It is precisely woman’s maternal instinct, her ‘stupendous and all-consuming’ ability to

 The Life of a Woman Artist 27 mother a child,” he insisted, “that prevents her from successfully giving birth to a fully realized literary work.”101 For the hetero-normative woman it was a case of damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Many professional women today are familiar with this double-bind. To renounce motherhood was/is to be regarded as an imperfect woman, to embrace motherhood was/is to confirm the inescapable preordained condition of immanence tied to female embodiment.

(Pro)creative Power Mori was of her time in regarding motherhood as a key element of her womanhood. She insisted that while being a woman artist inevitably presented certain difficulties, it could also “be an advantage,” or inspiration. The “artist-mother” might be “less productive,” but she would also be “more intense in her expressions” having experienced a more “complete femininity.” As a young artist-mother she made dozens of drawings and paintings of her son, Franco, while he slept or when he was sick in bed and thus a captive sitter. He described being an unwilling model. “[P]erhaps she thought that I was proud to be her model, but I sure wasn’t . . . True, sometimes she sang me pretty songs and told me captivating stories .  .  . but then often she would stop because I would move a little and she would come put me back in the exact same position, or because, as usually happened, she forgot everything immersing herself completely in her work.”102 As a young boy he came to despise the art that his mother loved, for it stole her attention. Dragged from one museum to the next he would avert his eyes to spite her. “I was very jealous of painting,” he said, “It was her passion. My first memories are of my mother painting [. . .]. Art was my successful rival.”103 The Lyceum lecture reveals that she took pride in being a mother, but it also hints at the all-consuming drive she felt to make art. Mori attempted to find an equilibrium between her roles as mother and artist, recalling Sibilla Aleramo and Rosa Rosà, who both insisted on the need to merge life and art.104 Rosà insisted that by developing their independence women would become better mothers. “In our time,” she wrote, “women of a truly maternal temperament don’t possess that degree of free personality which would render them conscious of a strong and objective self that exists INDEPENDENTLY of its associations with others . . . [sic].”105 This position seems to align with Mori who advocated for a symbiosis between a woman’s personal role as mother and professional one as painter. At least by 1948 Mori seemed to conceptualize maternal experience as one source of creative power. The links she suggests between the procreative and creative offer a verbal capstone to her career and retrospective insights into a series of artworks that engage with the politics of the female body. In her Turin and Florence studios she made numerous nude self-portraits. In her recipe for The Futurist Cookbook (1932), “Mammelle italiane al sole—Italian Breasts in the Sun,” she imagined maternal life-giving organs dissected and devoured. In her set design for a Futurist film she paralleled the hills of a natural landscape with female breasts. In Futurist Maternity (1932), she contemplated the artistic and religious inheritance of idealized motherhood from Madonna and Child imagery. Later in The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity (1936) she made a picture that

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explodes the nature/culture divide by projecting the “miracle” of childbirth onto the technological “miracle” of the airplane. I read these examples as explorations of creative selfhood that prefigure Cixous’s call for feminists to “write through the body.” Inherent in Cixous’s articulation of écriture feminine106 is her drawing of a parallel between “the gestation drive” and “the desire to write,” to “live self from within.”107 Some scholars have decried the idea of elevating the body or using maternal metaphors as fundamentally essentialist.108 Yet as Mira Schor has countered, “women are waved away from the door marked ‘essentialism’ by deconstructionist critics, but to what?”109 Taking “a historical view of the feminist enterprise,” argues Mary Garrard, one recognizes how “feminist essentialism opened the way to political change in society, and a door of creativity and discovery in art.”110 Essentialist tactics constitute a long-standing form of feminist subterfuge in cultural history and should not be anachronistically condemned by a post-structural reading. Women of the past negotiated the conditions of their social environment by whatever means necessary and wielding the irrefutable biological, social, and political power of motherhood was often a key strategy, as can be seen among Futurist women.111 Historically European women artists have used this approach to establish legitimacy. It has been argued that Artemisia Gentileschi merged her biological and creative bodies in Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638), taking possession of a kind of innate creativity that no man could claim.112 Elizabeth Vigée LeBrun celebrated the conjunction of her creative and procreative capacities in multiple self-portraits with her daughter Julie, which reaffirmed her womanhood while helping her succeed as a professional painter in French society at a time when it denigrated women outside the roles of wife and mother.113 One of the most powerful modern visual examples is Paula Modersohn-Becker’s Self-Portrait, Age Thirty, 6th Wedding Day (1906) in which she boldly faces the spectator while holding her imagined pregnant belly. Here she drew a parallel between her biological and intellectual fecundity using visual metaphor.114 One powerful literary precedent with which Mori may have been familiar was Mina Loy, whose poem “Parturition” (1914) has been called “an extended metaphor for feminine creativity through the pain and fulfillment” of giving birth.115 Mori’s painting Ebbrezza fisica della maternità (The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity 1936) would echo Loy’s poem in several ways. Mori had no access to post-structural language or theory, but she identified and exploited an empowering conceptual link between physical procreativity and intellectual creativity like other creative women before her. The use of procreative metaphors constitutes an important strategy by women of the past because male writers and philosophers have frequently appropriated the language of childbirth for themselves, as Marinetti would do in Mafarka the Futurist (1909), a novel about parthenogenesis by a male protagonist. As Emily Braun put it, “unable to reproduce in fact, men reproduce in fiction, begetting immortality through art and usurping the procreative role for the furthering of humanity in an intellectual sense.”116 When women challenge this act of appropriation they are taking back a source of real and imagined power. In relation to literary production Susan Stanford Friedman has argued that when men use such metaphors they “reinforce the separation between creativities into mind and body, man and woman,” but woman’s use of the same metaphors challenge this concept “by suggesting a subversive community of artists

 The Life of a Woman Artist 29 who can literally and literarily (pro)create.”117 By merging the roles of artist and mother, Mori refuted the separation of mind and body, rejected the idea that maternal instinct and higher philosophical logic are mutually exclusive, and reappropriated a source of power in an age of patriarchy to insert herself into that “subversive community of artists” to which Stanford Friedman refers. Given the fact that Fascist propaganda inveighed against the intellectual and childless woman, it is not surprising that creative metaphors could be fruitful avenues for women artists and writers of this period. The tendency also marks the work of Mori’s Futurist peer, author, and painter Benedetta,118 who insisted on a direct link between creativity and procreativity writing, “a mother is an artist . . . It is femininity that breathes in a vibration from the unknown depths to enclose within her and make into life.”119 In an undated manuscript on “Feminine Art” Benedetta wrote, “And so the woman artist will stay within the boundaries of the earth, intentionally or instinctively here she remains, circumscribed by the clear curve of the globe that is also the weighty curve of maternity.”120 She links women and their creative abilities directly to the earthly realm and the mandates of nature and biology. Benedetta’s artistic career also unfolded in the interwar years and the two artists were acquainted.121 However, like her husband, Benedetta became an open advocate of the regime, delivered public lectures at Fascist events, and received a major commission from the government: a five-mural series for the Director’s Office of the Palermo Post Office entitled Sintesi delle comunicazioni (Syntheses of Communication 1934).122 Her writing and art repeatedly drew parallels between female intellect and biology, pioneering a deeply essentialist feminism. In public discourses she reiterated binary notions about sex and gender, refuting the idea that women would ever compete with men and celebrating motherhood as a woman’s primary responsibility.123 Other scholars have seen Benedetta’s work as repositioning heterosexual desire as a dynamic Futurist force124 and constituting the maternal body as a site of artistic creativity.125 Her claims to artistic power via the maternal body were an effective strategy then, even if we question them now.

Female Precedent In the spirit of Virginia Woolf ’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), Mori proceeded in her lecture to “look back through her [creative] mothers” offering an abbreviated history of women artists that included Artemisia Gentileschi, Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Rosa Bonheur.126 Abundant preparatory notes evidence that she carefully narrowed her analysis to these three artists, originally pondering Sappho, Sofonisba Anguissola, Vittoria Colonna, Rosalba Carrera, Berthe Morisot, and Suzanne Valadon as well. Her formal education was minimal, but her interest in other women artists is clear: she was thinking through their legacies and finding, as Woolf suggested, power in female precedent. One important source of information for her talk would have been other women and her long-lived associations with women’s organizations including Pro-Cultura Femminile of Turin, the National Association of Professional Women and Artists (Associazione Nazionale Donne Professioniste e Artiste—ANDPA),127 and the

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Florentine Lyceum Club. For Chiara Toti, Mori’s interest in women’s organizations represents the most consistent aspect of her career and she suggests that her association with such groups and her advance toward Futurism indicate expanding artistic ambitions and energies.128 Established in 1911, the declared aim of Pro-Cultura Femminile was “tenere viva la cultura della donna—to keep the culture of women alive.” At its heart was a library created for the exclusive use of its women members and in 1922 it registered over 1,800 users. In addition to this invaluable resource the organization hosted cultural events, conferences, social and political debates, and lectures. Among those to lecture here were Felice Casorati, Lionello Venturi, Gaetano Salvemini, and the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. Ada Prospero Gobetti numbered among its early members. There is no record of Mori’s membership here, but she exhibited her work at the society’s Prima Mostra di Arte Femminile (First Exhibition of Female Art) in March– April of 1930129 and Mostra femminile di arte decorative moderna (Exhibition of Modern Decorative Female Art) in May–June of 1932.130 Founded in 1929 the National Association of Professional Women and Artists (ANDPA) was a powerful and monopolizing institution for the artistic promotion of women under the regime, designed with the explicit intention of controlling women in the figurative arts and promoting a positive impression of Fascism.131 This association was responsible for organizing numerous national and international exhibition opportunities, making it critical to the success of women artists like Mori who sought professional opportunities during the years of regime control. It was only via her connection to this organization that Mori received invitations to exhibition at important state exhibitions like the Biennale, Quadriennale, and Sindacale. Mori’s link to the Florentine Lyceum Club was the longest-lived. Here she was an active member from the early 1930s through the 1950s. The Lyceum clubs were created to provide locations where women involved in literature, journalism, art, science and medicine could meet in a professional capacity and Italy’s first such association was founded in Florence in 1908 by feminist Constance Smedley and Berta Fantoni.132 It became a major cultural force in the early twentieth century.133 Here Mori met fellow artists,134 attended lectures by a variety of other professional women and cultural figures, exhibited her work, and spoke on the theme of the woman artist. Among the other speakers and/or members were poet Ada Negri, art historian Anna Banti, and painter Elizabeth Chaplin. According to one notebook, Mori met Ada Negri, the first woman to be admitted to the Italian Academy in 1940 and expressed in person her admiration for Vespertina (1931). Negri’s prose and poetry focused on women’s experience and discussed issues related to pregnancy and maternity. One scholar has argued that her writing explores “the paradoxical dimensions of maternal power.”135 Yet she was associated with the regime and dismissed by Croce as a “facile” and “tearful,” the writer who illustrated women’s innate intellectual inferiority. Like Mori, Negri and her work would largely be sidelined in the immediate postwar period.136 Chaplin moved back to Tuscany in the 1950s and Mori certainly knew of her, but there is no evidence of a personal encounter. Mori heard Banti lecture in October 1947 and cites her “original interpretation” of the life of Artemisia Gentileschi proving her familiarity with Artemisia (1947), which became Banti’s most celebrated work and has been called

 The Life of a Woman Artist 31 “a meditation on the woman artist” and her “struggle between public and private, work and marriage,” an experience shared by subject and author.137 Banti was a successful art historian overshadowed by the greater fame of her husband, Roberto Longhi. In her novel she would intertwine three narratives: a dramatized story about Italy’s most celebrated woman artist, her own struggle to rewrite the lost manuscript, and her imagined relationship with its long-dead protagonist. The lost manuscript comes to signify, in Susanna Scarparo’s words, “Artemisia’s second death” and “the lost histories of the many women who over the centuries have lived, loved, suffered and hoped for a better life.”138 The idea that women’s lives matter, so to speak, was at the heart of Banti’s novel and underwrote the activities of the Lyceum community. Mori’s talk was an early contribution to the growing discussion about the women artists of history and their forgotten legacies. Like Banti, she pondered the position of the woman artist and her frequent struggle to balance work and marriage. Like Negri, she explored issues of maternity in her art. In her lecture to the Lyceum Club Mori would use the example of Vigée Le Brun to argue that motherhood could be a catalyst for art. She was herself an avid portraitist and admired the great French portrait painter who had fled the French Revolution and come to Italy. Mori tells us that her primary source of information on the French painter is the artist herself. Souvenirs was not published in Italian until after Mori’s death, but she read French and is likely to have read it in the original language.139 This artist becomes for her an example of the benefits and inspiration to be found in motherhood. She describes Vigée Le Brun as being “wary of the bond with her lover because she is afraid of betraying her vocation,” but “not wary of her devotion to her creation, she abandons herself to it. She is inspired by maternal tenderness” (my italics). In her choice of words we read a conflation of creations. Mori interprets Vigée Le Brun as a case study for the mutually enriching functions of procreativity and creativity. As a mother, raised in a Catholic society, and reaching professional maturity under Fascism, it is not surprising that Mori extolled the virtues of motherhood. It is surprising, however, that she emphasized the individuality of every woman artist and her right to choose a path consistent with her own desires. She juxtaposes Vigée Le Brun with Bonheur as she attempts to demonstrate that historically women achieved professional success in different ways. If Vigée Le Brun embraces femininity and motherhood, then Bonheur, she says, renounced both. “Her life,” Mori states naively, “hinged solely upon love for her determined, formidable, difficult, work . . . perhaps because she did not find it to be a sacrifice, she renounced love and motherhood.” She is either unaware of, or chooses not to mention, Bonheur’s long-term lesbian relationship with fellow painter and biographer Anna Klumpke. Nevertheless, she comments on Bonheur’s decision “to renounce the female clothing that exposed her to men’s crude remarks” viewing it as a legitimate and understandable tactic for professional success. Mori therefore demonstrates a comfort with gender fluidity. About Gentileschi Mori says the least, simply emphasizing that the trauma of her life is mirrored in the trauma of her painting. She comments that “due to the offence done to her in adolescence,” she, “strove to put aside her femininity and be consumed by her love of painting, but she did not succeed in doing so.” These brief remarks

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might be a lament for Gentileschi’s isolation from the community of women. She notes that the artist’s mother died young, that she was the only girl in the family, that a man violated her as a young woman, and that her relationships with men would be painful. Mori suggests that men were not her allies and neither did she have many women to turn to. Like Vigée Le Brun she, “lived alone with a daughter.” Perhaps in this example, she reveals a personal belief in the value of female solidarity and community, something that nurtured her own development. Her comments also affirm that women artists can and do succeed, even in the face of obstacles, isolation, or hardship. Mori suggests that each of these artists, like herself, had an unstoppable creative urge or instinct, one that emerged no matter the circumstances. She insists that there is no universal experience or formula for artistic success, but that each individual woman must find a uniquely suitable path. She states that, regardless of sex, every artist, male or female, faced the same stylistic and formal dilemmas. “Only for the sake of solidarity and debate, and certainly not with respect to artistic values,” she states, “should we divide artists into male and female.” Her emphasis on solidarity, her rejection of binary dichotomies, and her insistence on the gender-neutral problems of painting sound remarkably postmodern in 1948. Delivered one year before the publication of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, the artist’s remarks represent an important act of self-reflection by a modern woman painter who lived through a series of key historical moments in Italian history.

Afterword Mori remained active, if more isolated, for another twenty years. She recommitted herself to the academic study of the nude at the Florentine Academy under Arturo Checchi between 1950 and 1951 as seen in numerous surviving drawings and paintings (Figure 1.12) and she had two other solo shows of postwar work at the Casa di Dante in Florence (1954) and the Goois Museum in Hilversum, Netherlands (1967). She continued to exhibit with female collectives like the Lyceum Club and the Federazione italiana donne arti professioni e affari (Italian Federation of Business and Professional Women or FIDAPA).140 Her many surviving postwar notebooks suggest that she followed political developments with interest through the 1970s, but she makes no mention of the most significant, Rivolta Femminile (Feminist Revolt).141 In her final years, she witnessed a revival of interest in her Futurist work, which must have been gratifying. In a last poignant memory, Franco Mori described his mother on her deathbed, reaching to give him a rare embrace rather than speaking any last words.142 She died in her bed on February 6, 1985, and was buried in the family tomb at the cemetery of San Felice a Ema. The “struggle for modernity,” which Emilio Gentile has identified as characterizing Italian culture in the first half of the twentieth century, was not a male-only enterprise. Mori struggled to insert herself into the male-dominated traditions of artistic representation, attracted by modernity’s promise of freedom and adventure. Drawn

 The Life of a Woman Artist 33

Figure 1.12  Nudo disteso (Reclining Nude), 1950, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 70 × 50 cm. Mori Family Archive.

to both traditional and vanguard subjects, crisscrossing between the visual languages of naturalism, abstraction, and expressionism, she was consistent only with respect to an interest in women’s issues. Her art, her participation in female artists’ collectives, her attendance at women’s conferences, and her single public lecture after the war are evidence of this sustained focus. At moments she seems to paint through the body prefiguring Cixous and undermining masculine authority. Yet even when she channeled the conceptual creative potential of the female body, she would do so in polysemous and enigmatic ways. It is difficult to categorize her stylistic approach to painting and nearly impossible to define her images in unambiguous terms as mere celebrations of womanhood or motherhood. Instead, she illustrates the kind of complex configurations of modern womanhood that we know to have circulated during the Ventennio.143 Her work offers a nuanced and unheroic reflection on the struggle to come to terms with the inherent complexities that being a woman, artist, wife, and mother represented in her lifetime and continue to represent today.​

34

2

Between Modernity and Tradition

Felice Casorati was a superbly gifted portraitist and it was a series of his Renaissanceinspired portraits that first captured Mori’s interest and drove her to become his student. She discovered something inherently seductive in his depictions of Riccardo Gualino, a wealthy industrialist, and his family. “It was as if,” she later recounted, “they had appeared with purpose beneath my eyes to lift me out of the boredom of a school where I did nothing but copy ugly pictures.”1 Her description suggests the start of an artistic awakening tied to the psychological draw of these mysterious likenesses. Highly indebted to Metaphysical Painting,2 Magic Realism3 is often used to describe pictures by Antonio Donghi, Achille Funi, or Casorati, however, the term is uncomfortably broad, elusive, and controversial.4 Massimo Bontempelli, the primary theorist of Magic Realism in Italy, described this style as capturing a “solidity of material” within “an atmosphere of magic,”5 and he cited the powerful influence of Quattrocento masters like Masaccio, Mantegna, and Piero della Francesca, whose “precise realism” was “enfolded in an atmosphere of lucid stupor.”6 This paradoxical kind of stupore lucido,7 beautifully illustrated in the Gualino portraits, is an idea that for Romy Golan “evokes a set of circumstances combining hypnotic surrender, surprise, and fear, capturing the climate of political violence in Fascist Italy.”8 She has argued that during the Ventennio artists like Casorati were compelled to “fashion refined techniques of undecidability”9 and Mori, I believe, learned from him how to cultivate her own art of ambiguity. Casorati once claimed never to have made a self-portrait,10 but Mori painted at least twenty-six.11 Autoritratto in Blu (Self-Portrait in Blue 1929) was made while she was living in Turin working as his studio assistant and it now belongs to the Uffizi’s vast collection of artist self-portraits on the Vasari Corridor where she would have been proud to keep company with Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, and Rosa Bonheur (Plate 3).12 The work represents a subtle exploration of the artist’s place between artistic past and present. Like women artists of the past, she opts to show herself at work with the tools of her trade. She paints by use of an invisible mirror on her right and stands at an easel that is also just out of sight. She wears a thin sleeveless pale blue dress, her naked right arm reflected reaching across the picture plane to make an unseen mark with an unseen hand. Her other hand, also hidden from view, appears to hold a wooden paint palette with no visible colors. Loosely gathered long dark hair falls down her back as she looks out over her right shoulder, contemplating her reflected expression. Instead of lucid stupor, she uses a modern sfumato to shroud herself in mystery. With so much unseen, she obscures things further by blurring

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

the contours of her form, clouding her face, and softening her features to render her expression more enigmatic. Initially there appears to be nothing quintessentially modern about Mori’s selfrepresentation in the Uffizi picture, but its modernity lies precisely in its liminality. She does not picture herself in the trappings of what we have come to identify as modern womanhood and her stylistic approach is figurative rather than abstract. If Romaine Brooks (1923) as a dandy with top hat and cane illustrates the phenomenon of the interwar Parisian garçon and if the fragmented forms of Alice Bailly’s SelfPortrait (1917) can be regarded as representative of a more modernist aesthetic, then can we identify any modern signifiers in this picture? According to one Italian fashion magazine, sleeves were old-fashioned to the liberated modern woman.13 It is a subtle marker of modernity but one that contemporaries picked up on. When it was exhibited,14 the painting attracted the attention of satirical reviewers whose cartoon in the Caval d’Bronso newspaper caricatured her figure in solid black contour lines, looking out with a mischievous smirk and sporting a muscular bicep (Figure 2.1). They took notice of her bare arm and found it to be at odds with her long hair. They joked that the picture was propaganda for ragazze moderne, or modern girls, who “observing the poor figure of a woman with long hair rush to get a haircut at the barber.”15 For them the image evoked a strange coupling of old-fashioned long hair and new dress code. The sitter appeared to them like a modern girl in the making. Mori’s subtle combination of contrasting signifiers may elude contemporary understanding, but it spoke to questions about femininity in her own time. Nevertheless, the picture’s

Figure 2.1  Cartoon, Nino Costa and Felice Vellani, Caval d’Brons, July 13, 1929. Mori Family Archive.

 Between Modernity and Tradition 37 plain background and simple composition simultaneously draw on touchstones of Renaissance portraiture. Is her foregrounded sleeveless arm and blue dress a playful reference to Titian’s Portrait of Gerolamo Barbarigo (1510)? Is her sfumato-ed melancholy suggestive of Giorgione’s presumed Self-Portrait as David (1509–10)? Her diaries (and son) attest to long hours spent in the Uffizi collections and it is plausible, if not demonstrable, that her posture and aloof three-quarter profile channel Raphael’s deceptively simple Self-Portrait (1504) with its calculated look of sprezzatura, or “artful artlessness.”16 These are certainly artists that she studied with Casorati. The portrait genre, deeply embedded in the history of European art since the Renaissance, was seemingly at odds with Futurism’s demand for dynamism, aversion to tradition, and repudiation of mimesis. When he founded his movement, Marinetti granted that an occasional pilgrimage might be made to offer a wreath in remembrance of Leonardo’s famed Mona Lisa, but in the same breath he denounced museums as cultural graveyards.17 A resurgent classicism nevertheless arose among European artists after the First World War.18 Many artists who had spearheaded radical Futurism alongside Marinetti now turned their back on its radical visual language, even if temporarily, in what Jean Cocteau debatably dubbed a rappel à l’ordre, or call to order.19 Carlo Carrà wrote of his vision for a timeless “new classicism of forms” in Valori Plastici (1918–21),20 a journal that, although short-lived, had considerable European impact.21 It brought together artists like Alberto Savinio, Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi, Arturo Martini, and Carrà under the auspices of a classical impulse that aimed to rediscover the roots of their artistic language in the Italian Medieval and Renaissance past.22 Many of these artists linked the destructive impulse of the avant-garde to the palpable destruction of the war, the conceptual death of traditional painting to the real deaths of millions of Europeans.23 Some critics have regarded this new focus on the figurative tradition disparagingly, as a conservative return to the past,24 while others have interrogated it as something more complex.25 In his recent book Devin Fore argues that although interwar realism was underpinned by the image of the human body, its representation ceased to signify a “privileged and spontaneous relationship to structures of human consciousness.”26 When Gino Severini abruptly abandoned the shattered forms of Cubo-Futurism, he did so with a portrait of his wife Jeanne nursing their daughter Gina in Maternity (1916). While he evokes the monumentality of a Renaissance Madonna and Child image, the painting is underwritten by modern malaise. Jeanne’s phlegmatic gaze points neither at artist-viewer nor child but toward nothing. Severini creates a rift between observer and observed, insinuating that, to paraphrase Mori, not even we know what we are. This chapter examines the intellectual atmosphere within which Mori spent her first six years of professional activity, the key period of her formation personally and professionally. As a member of Casorati’s vibrant intellectual circle she developed an aesthetic consciousness steeped in the history of art, formed close personal relationships with other women artists, and skillfully executed a large number of portraits, still lifes, landscapes, and nudes that digested and reflected the ideas and stylistic tendencies around her. Key motifs and styles linked to her understanding of Neo-Renaissance and Magic Realist tendencies spill over into her Futurist works, giving them their unique appearance. Her classical figurative training included a focus on the female nude, a

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

theme that Mori adopted and adapted in her subsequent explorations of the female body and its politics. “Literary history,” wrote Paolo Valesio, “should resist the pull of Futurism’s fascination with velocity, and insert modernism into the rhythm of a long and slow view of history.”27 Mori’s Futurism is better understood when positioned between figurative classicism and modernist rupture.

The Teacher and His School Loosely associated with the Valori Plastici group, Casorati’s interwar cultural impact in Italy took myriad forms as a thinker, teacher, and practicing artist. He has been variously described as Neo-classicist, Neo-Renaissance, Metaphysical, Novecento, and Magic Realist, many of which are stylistic tendencies that inform Mori’s work. It is perhaps Piero Gobetti who described him best. Confirming the artist’s crucial place in Turinese society, he published the first monograph in 1923, identifying in his artist-friend a deep intellectual curiosity, a solitary nature, and a humanist impulse. He described someone confusedly pulled between modernity and tradition but desperately seeking to capture in his art those unchanging truths.28 Elsewhere in his notes he commented, “Casorati is tradition [my italics] . . . he is a misoneist.”29 As one of many young Italian modernists cultivated by Nino Barbantini30 with a series of exhibitions at Ca’ Pesaro in Venice, he met Umberto Boccioni, but was “not taken with the contagion of his enthusiasm” for Futurism.31 Devoted to international modernist trends, he nevertheless rejected what he saw as the destructive radicalism of the avant-garde, maintaining the importance of history and the relevance of artistic tradition, thus exemplifying the aesthetic philosophies of Gobetti as well as Croce, who championed the ethical obligations of culture and the vital role of history in the present.32 James Thrall Soby and Alfred Barr tarred Casorati with the brush of provincialism for having “spent nearly all of his career in Italy.”33 Despite extensive international recognition in Europe, the United States, and South America,34 Casorati had few links to Paris or New York. He was deeply dedicated to his adopted city of Turin, shaping the artistic climate of this industrial metropolis during the interwar and postwar years.35 Carlo Levi (doctor, painter, author, political activist, and one of Casorati’s students) likened the older man’s arrival to “the falling of a mass into a pond,” implying the profound impact that his mentor brought to the cultural life of the city after his move there in 1918.36 Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco has indicated that he defined the atmosphere of interwar Turin through his work and school.37 Echoing the sentiments of Nietzsche and De Chirico before him, Casorati explained his devotion to Turin in terms that are evocative of its impact on Metaphysical Painting and Magic Realism: “I live in Turin, in this anti-touristic city, that I love for its mystery, for its non-obvious beauty, in this enigmatic and disquieting city that, as with an act of chicanery, you have to discover and rediscover every day, in which the fog is more luminous than the sun, in which moderation is never forgotten and can never be forgotten, in this squared and scrutinized city, only in this city could my paintings have been born.”38 The attributes he ascribes to his beloved city are those found in his art: order and enigma.

 Between Modernity and Tradition 39 Casorati rose to prominence at the center of a strongly antifascist cadre in the city with support from a generous patron, Riccardo Gualino,39 an important critic and art historian, Lionello Venturi,40 and Piero Gobetti,41 editor, liberal intellectual, political activist, and the dynamic intellectual force that brought them into contact.42 In a letter to her young son in 1929, Mori proudly reported, “Your mummie has received much praise for her painting from prof. Venturi, who is someone who critiques paintings, and she has sold a work to Gualino.”43 Perhaps the seven-year-old Franco was unimpressed, but the letter is a clear indication of the artist’s pride as well as a testament to the support she received from Venturi and Gualino. She subsequently became a regular guest at the Gualino villa in Arcetri (Tuscany).44 Yet Mori witnessed the gradual suppression of this cultural enclave. Mussolini instructed his minions to make life difficult for Gobetti who endured violent attacks.45 The government censured The Liberal Revolution, calling it “damaging to national esteem” and “a threat to law and order.”46 Within a year of Mori’s arrival at his school, Gobetti died in exile. Gualino opposed the regime’s economic policies and was arrested in 1931 for having personally “caused grave damage to the national economy.”47 His assets were seized, the large art collection he had amassed with Venturi’s advice was confiscated by the Bank of Italy, and he was sentenced to five years confino, or internal exile, on the island of Lipari.48 When an oath of loyalty to the regime was made obligatory for all university professors that same year, Venturi was one of twelve docents nationwide who refused to take it thus losing his position at the University of Turin and going into exile abroad until 1945.49 When speaking up means professional ruin or physical harm, self-censorship becomes a survival strategy.50 Arrested on February 6, 1923, for his collaboration with Gobetti on The Liberal Revolution, Casorati and associates were accused of “belonging to subversive groups,” jailed for several days,51 and labeled communists by one newspaper.52 This incident became a turning point for the artist who ceased overt political activity, choosing instead to focus on his recently established private school of art, later known as La Scuola Libera di Pittura—The Free School of Painting.53 Witnessing and facilitating its initiation in 1921, Gobetti proclaimed it as, “the most generous and most intelligent of Casorati’s works as a maker of aesthetic consciousness.”54 Despite his apparent renunciation of politics, he arguably maintained ethical and moral commitments of an antifascist nature in the private context of his personal associations and his school.55 Italian scholars tend to emphasize Casorati’s closeness to Gobetti56 and some see him as having adopted from the philosopher-activist a view of art as a tool for the building of moral and civic dignity.57 Writer Natalia Ginsburg, part of the artist’s ambit as a young girl, and another student, author Lalla Romano, both recounted how those in his circle were bound together by strong antifascist sentiment.58 In 1929 the critic Giacomo Debenedetti insisted, “Casorati doesn’t teach how to paint. He teaches something more serious and effective: the discipline and morality of art.”59 Albino Galvano, artist, critic, and former pupil, described his studies as having endowed him with a political consciousness: “I thought about painting, not culture more generally, even less so politics, lifestyle etc. But it was instead precisely this the critical outcome that resulted: finding myself participant in a post-Gobetti climate that so saved me

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Marisa Mori and the Futurists

from the risk of acritically adhering to the ruling regime.”60 The atmosphere of the school thus fostered critical discussion. Nella Marchesini was introduced to Casorati by Gobetti and became his first student.61 He then took on a much younger pupil, Silvio Avondo, who appears with Marchesini in Lo Studio—The Study of 1923, a painting documenting the early atmosphere of the school.62 Mori was the fifth student to join63 when, after reviewing her drawings, Casorati asked his sister Elvira to extend an invitation for her to come and see him “on a Tuesday, when he was more likely to be at home.”64 Upon acceptance, he insisted on total dedication, reportedly saying, in what Mori took to be an ironic tone, “You are a woman. You can embroider, stuff cushions, do many things, but if you come to me you will have to be serious.”65 A similar account is given by Lalla Romana, who reported him fixing her with his “penetrating black eyes,” and saying, “Here we take things seriously.”66 Such anecdotes suggest that even a liberal and open-minded mentor might assume a woman was more likely to dabble, more easily distracted, and would perhaps commit herself only half-heartedly. Nonetheless, he taught many women and all offer glowing reports of his character as a kind, devoted, loyal friend, and mentor. One, Daphne Maugham, became his wife. The following summer Mori received a communication from her teacher, which reveals that she had grown in his esteem. About to depart for an extended trip he wrote, “But you must work just the same—and don’t despair. Am I right in telling you this? Or perhaps your despair is the sure sign of the seriousness of your intentions and of the love you have for art? I have already told you one day—and this is contrary to my usual habits—how much I expect from you.”67 The maestro was apparently a stickler for rigorous practice and placed a high value on individual expression, encouraging students to experiment and cultivate a unique vision of their own. One early critic commented that Casorati “left absolute liberty to the student, contributing more to the formation of character than to a useless academic.”68 He seems to have recognized what Mori herself most appreciated. Describing her training she wrote, “He never made me copy his pictures and he never sought to influence our personalities. In fact there were five of us and each of us portrayed the object or the model in our own way and as needed.”69 Instead of rote repetition and imitation, he invited students to plumb their own expressive depths. If Gobetti insisted that the objective of education must be “a development of the critical spirit,”70 then some have argued that Casorati’s didactic model was a practical application of his belief in individuality.71 This was a period of artistic self-discovery for Mori. If she subsequently turned to the formal extremes of the Futurist avant-garde, then it could be argued that she was inspired to do so by an experimental instinct encouraged by her teacher. One way students developed their own sensibilities was via a study and discussion of art, historical and contemporary. Gobetti numbered Casorati “among the intellectual and philosophical painters,” saying he possessed a powerful “culture of curiosity” and a sensibility that could be described as “humanistic.”72 Writer and director Mario Soldati described him to a prospective student as being perhaps more intelligent than a true painter should be and therefore a perfect teacher.73 He demanded that his students make a careful study of art history as documented by the many catalogues and

 Between Modernity and Tradition 41 monographs found in his studio library.74 He insisted on broader discussions about history and culture as testified to by those students who documented the experience.75 A mythological reference to the Carthaginian Queen abandoned by Aeneas in a picture postcard that Mori sent to her professor, hints at the nature of studio discussions.76 Marchesini described their teacher as an evocative and eloquent expositor on art: “[W]ith a few references with a few observations it was as if Casorati had introduced us to the noble ranks of Giotto or P[iero] della F[rancesca] and Masaccio who paraded in their majesty.”77 Massimo Bontempelli celebrated Masaccio, Mantegna, and Piero della Francesca as key Magic Realist inspiraitons and they certainly inspired Casorati. His interest in Piero della Francesca predated Roberto Longhi’s monograph as evidenced in the early work of Silvana Cenni (1922) and it has been suggested that he drew on Adolfo Venturi’s publication Piero della Francesca (Firenze 1921–2).78 What Marchesini’s description evidences is that they also featured in his teaching. Marchesini’s Donne sulla terrazza (Women on the Terrace 1923) demonstrates the influence of the Legend of the True Cross frescoes, in particular the entourage of the Queen of Sheba, and when she came to visit her friend in Florence, Marchesini would take Franco Mori to visit the Bacci chapel in nearby Arezzo. Letters in the Malvano-Marchesini Archives reveal that an extensive discussion about the Italian primitives went on between the Marchesini sisters and their friends.79 Beyond the Tuscan primitives, Casorati admired and visually quoted a wide range of Renaissance painters including Venetian Old Masters Giorgione and Titian.80 His Le due sorelle (Two Sisters 1921) borrows compositionally from Carpaccio’s Two Venetian Ladies (1490) and his portrait of Cesarina Gualino is indebted to Leonardo’s La Belle Ferronnière (1490). Casorati may have revered the past, but his views were in line with Lionello Venturi, who argued for the equal aesthetic value of past and present in Il gusto dei primitivi.81 Casorati used the past as a reservoir for modern reinvention and impressed upon his students the vitality of European modernisms. His art was labeled “poco italiano—not very Italian” by Fascist newspapers in 192382 and despite his having exhibited with Margherita Sarfatti’s Novecento, a group often remembered for its ties to Fascism and commitment to italianità, or Italianness, his love of Italian tradition was balanced by a commitment to broader European tendencies. After seeing Gustav Klimt’s work at the 1910 Venice Biennale, he made a study of the Austrian Secessionists. Later he recounted the profound impact of seeing reproductions of Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso for the first time in 1913.83 Soby and Barr noted strong affinities with the work of Georges de La Tour, Ingres, Vermeer, Karl Hofer, and Balthus. It was also with his support that the “Sei di Torino,” or Turin Six, formed and exhibited together between 1929 and 1931.84 Jessie Boswell, Gigi Chessa, Nicola Galante, Francesco Menzio, Enrico Paulucci, and Carlo Levi, looked outward for inspiration to international modernisms, particularly Fauvism and Post-Impressionism, in what they termed europeismo, or Europeism, taking a firm stand against the intensifying nationalist rhetoric of the period and its cultural advocates.85 Casorati helped his students to think in international terms, rejecting provincialism, and insisting that Italian culture must be European as well. The Free School of Painting was an environment that encouraged critical thinking and individual style. Casorati emphasized the value of history as a source for innovative

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modernity. Yet Mori’s initiation into the art world happened during what Carlo Giulio Argan called “the most bitter years of the gobettian political and cultural debate,”86 a struggle that spilled dramatically into her private realm. Witnessing the fall of three powerful men, Gobetti, Gualino, and Venturi, she must have understood that there was a high price to pay for open resistance and opposition to the regime. Perhaps she identified visual ambiguity as a strategy of survival that permitted expressive freedom.

Sisters in Arms Lessons with Casorati took place three afternoons a week. He nurtured a creative atmosphere emphasizing collaboration, discussion, and friendship. He spent time socializing with his students, introduced them to his most important collectors, and exhibited with them. Mori showed her work at three group exhibitions.87 She remembered, “There was no difference between us students because he accepted only those he trusted. He loved us. We helped each other and Casorati was a true teacher and friend . . . He was our teacher, but also a colleague, he introduced us to his critics and his collectors. We traveled together and even after he married Daphne Maugham . . . he didn’t let that dim our friendship.”88 For Casorati, too, the importance of the school went beyond mere technical training. He claimed it was a community of likeminded individuals that “taught him about himself,” sharing “a spiritual life.”89 Thus sentiments of teacher and students indicate the strong bonds that were forged here. Mori studied and exhibited alongside other talented women artists including Nella Marchesini, Daphne Maugham, Andreina Bay, Elena Salvaneschi, Giorgina Lattes, Lalla Romano, Tina Mennyey, Paola Levi-Montalcini, and Jesse Boswell. It is an important aspect of her formation that she developed her sense of self within a close-knit community of like-minded women. Her years at the school might have been a “safe space,” an atmosphere that enabled a “consciousness-raising” experience with other women artists through the functioning of an informal professional “talking circle.”90 Notes in the Franco Mori Archive suggest a friendly working relationship with Jessie Boswell,91 but she established enduring friendships with Nella Marchesini, Daphne Maugham, and Paola Levi-Montalcini, as documented in correspondence.92 Reciprocal exchanges of portraiture also testify to a collaborative work environment. Marchesini painted Mori in Ritratto al cavaletto (Portrait at the Easel 1927),93 both artists painted Maugham in her white painting smock (c. 1927–8), and Mori exhibited a portrait of Levi-Montalcini in 1967. Mori’s friendship with Levi-Montalcini has already been discussed, but the Mori and Malvano-Marchesini Archives provide further evidence of the companionship Mori and Marchesini shared.94 Both were Tuscan immigrants to Piedmont and they shared the experience of being artist-mothers. Neither seems to have paid for lessons. Instead Casorati asked them to assume responsibilities as his assistants from 1929 onward, which afforded them special opportunities to travel and work together. It is a testament to their closeness that even after many hours spent together in a professional capacity, they chose to vacation together, too. There are written and pictorial accounts

 Between Modernity and Tradition 43 of these working vacations, numerous extant letters, diary entries, and portraits. They painted together, each other, and the same subjects. At Cervo Ligure on the Italian Riviera they painted their shared terrace, as seen in Mori’s La mia terrezza (My terrace 1929) and Marchesini’s Terrazza sul mare (Terrace on the Sea 1929).95 In Marina di Massa the following year they painted cabins on the beach. In La tenda al mare (Sail at the Seaside 1930) Mori pictured a sunshade or sail made of white under a noonday sun on a sandy beach before a calm blue sea with two empty chairs sitting in the shade beneath. The silhouettes of two figures reclining in the sand look out to sea. The same sunshade with two figures beneath appears in Marchesini’s Tenda sulla spiaggia (Sail on the Beach 1930). Franco Mori vividly remembered these shared vacations reporting that Marchesini taught him to swim and that his mother would slip out after bedtime to party on the beach.96 On another occasion Nella Marchesini and Ugo Malvano visited Mori in Florence and took Franco on a day trip to see Piero della Francesca’s Legend of the True Cross fresco cycle in Arezzo. Years later Mori looked back nostalgically during a return trip to Cervo Ligure writing, I remember 1929 when Nella and I wrote to our mentor asking him to visit us. I was here with the three Marchesini sisters: Maria, Dadi and Nella. Their mother was complaining because her daughters weren’t married yet. I was here with Franco. The following year Maria got married, then Dadi, and then Nella. Maria and Dadi died a few years later, Maria in childbirth and Dadi as a result of too many children. Nella passed on only a few years ago. Casorati never came to visit us.97

This melancholic private reflection seems to lament marriage and motherhood as the causes of profound loss. Marchesini described the dissolution of the school as a result of the “sad times,” writing, “A series of events brought the breath of modernity with all its many fluctuations and uncertainties and intricate variations of meaning blowing into even the cloistered spaces founded by Casorati. The atmosphere slowly dissipated that rare state of mind without having had time to produce the flowering that its seed promised.”98 The school was no doubt also collapsing as a result of Gualino’s political and financial troubles. Marchesini got married; Mori and Levi-Montalcini moved in newly avant-garde directions. Mori chose to bend in the breeze and embrace modernism’s promise of adventure. By doing so, she avoided the fate of being labeled derivative that marked many of Casorati’s students.99 She built strong bonds of solidarity with a dedicated mentor and fellow women artists at the school. It was an environment that fostered a sense of artistic camaraderie while allowing individual interests to blossom.

Self-Portraits Women artists have faced inherent challenges when trying to apply existing artistic conventions to their own representation and the self-portrait has attained special status within their production as a site of experimentation and self-expression.100 Via

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this genre women have asserted the specificity of their lived experience in opposition to the many allegorical meanings that have been assigned to them through the ages. While Casorati repudiated this genre, Mori and Marchesini embraced it. In her selfportraits Mori took the time to invite the intensity of her own gaze, conscientiously exploring herself as artistic subject and object.101 In contrast to the enigmatic haze of Self-Portrait in Blue, Mori appears in sharp focus in Autoritratto nel tondo (Self-Portrait in the Round 1929–30) (Figure 2.2). She is in a stiff upright posture and aims a deadly stare out at the viewer. We see her from the neck up and her hair is carefully collected at the nape, pulled back from her face to reveal a severe and dispassionate left-facing three-quarter profile. Her dark brow frames an expression that is difficult to read, but bespeaks a forbidding character. Confining herself to the space inside a round window-like pane she also strips herself of all augmentation. Without clothes, jewelry, or the long hair, this is perhaps as unvarnished and gender-neutral an image as she ever created. She also made a series of nude self-portraits that suggest a relatively liberal attitude, a degree of self-possession, and a desire to experiment. Nude self-portraits first appeared in the work of women artists like Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gwen John twenty years earlier and one scholar notes how images like this point to the development of curiosity among women artists in what was a “new world of self-discovery and artistic opportunities” for them.102 Mori never exhibited Autoritratto nudo (Nude Self-Portrait 1929–30) publicly and it may be unfinished (Plate 4). It is one of several nude or semi-

Figure 2.2  Autoritratto nel tondo (Self-Portrait in the Round), 1929–30, Marisa Mori. Charcoal and pastels on paper, 48.3 × 34.4 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

 Between Modernity and Tradition 45 nude images of herself from this period as evidenced by a photograph of 1929–30, which pictures fourteen framed paintings hanging on a wall, four of which appear to be self-portrait nudes (Figure 2.3). The picture in question, however, is more casual and intimate than others. Her legs are parted and her hips tilted on a seat as she leans into her canvas with a slightly twisted upper torso. Her dark hair disappears behind her very rosy face, which tilts slightly upward as she turns to contemplate the mirror that she must have placed directly in front of her. Her left arm, reflected in this mirror as her right, covers her breast to create a rather half-hearted, half-pudica pose. This is because she cannot spare her right hand which is too busy in the act of creating or re-creating herself. Here again there are conflicting elements that suggest both bashfulness and boldness. Her choice of classical reference suggests the modesty of Venus, caught off guard while bathing, yet her right hand stays busy leaving her bottom half completely exposed. Her flushed complexion implies the indignity of having been seen, but she is again shielded from full view by her hazy application of paint. As in Self-Portrait in Blue, there is an ephemeral anonymity permitted by sfumato. It is a sort of screen that shelters her (the subject) from the fixity of being and the dominance of the eye. About the self-portrait nudes of Modersohn-Becker, Diane Radycki has argued that there could be no male precedent, which renders “the female body from within its immanent life” reuniting erotic and maternal components that have long been bisected in the creative minds of male artists.103 Like Modersohn-Becker, Mori seems to feel her way

Figure 2.3  Mori’s paintings arranged on a wall with Le uova benedette (Blessed Eggs) of 1927 seen at center, photograph, c. 1928–9. Mori Family Archive.

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tentatively forward, considering herself as both an intellectual and sexual being. She frequently used both sides of her panels and, in this case, there is a second self-portrait nude on the verso done with greater restraint. She lets her hair down only literally as it hangs over her shoulders. Her lower half is covered in lilac-colored fabric. Her right hand works, her left hand sits in her lap. Comparatively, these two images suggest private boldness on the one hand and the moderating force of inhibition on the other. Many scholars have explored how the so-called modern woman was by no means a coherent one. The concept operated across Europe as an amalgamation of types and connotations, becoming a symbolic repository of both negative and positive reactions to profound economic, social, and cultural changes that were occurring at this time.104 Exploring women artists in interwar France, Paula Birnbaum noted the way that selfportraiture functioned with dual purpose, simultaneously permitting these women to insert themselves into an art-historical tradition dating back to the Renaissance while expressing their own contemporary social concerns.105 The same is certainly true of women artists in interwar Italy. Mori’s ambiguous representations of herself, both stylistically and iconographically, evidence a painter struggling to position herself between traditional expectations and modern freedoms.

Portraits Many of Mori’s early drawings are compelling studies of her immediate circle of family and friends, which include her grandmother, father, mother, husband, and son. Ritratto di Mario Mori (1925) (see Figure 1.2) is one of two charcoal drawings made in the same sitting that captures the intensity of her husband’s personality in the irregular and rough contour lines of her medium. His lips are pursed, his brow is drawn together over a focused downward gaze through his glasses and even his hair seems anxious. His collared shirt fits tightly under his chin and his profile casts a dark shadow on his shoulder. Here the artist demonstrates an ability to convey the mood of the sitter, in this case, a ferociously intense gaze. It was drawings of her sleeping son Franco that secured Mori’s entrance to Casorati’s school106 and she exhibited a series of them at the Galleria Milano in 1929. Il riposo di Franco (Franco’s Rest 1927–8) and Ritratto di Franco (Portrait of Franco 1928–30) are instead two finished paintings of her son. The former catches him having fallen asleep on the hard surface of a tabletop while the latter shows us a surprisingly morose boy sitting behind the wheel of a marvelous red toy car. These works have soft contours and muted tones that stylistically evoke an idealism often attributed to carefree childhood, but there is a sadness in Franco, whose eyes we cannot see, and it is difficult to detect any expected youthful exuberance in her numerous portraits of him. By comparison with Ritratto di Mario Mori, an undated pencil drawing of Casorati (Figure 2.4) shows us a man in the act of peaceful contemplation through the smooth uninterrupted lines of his profile. His eyes point downward at something in his lap or hands, but his brow is unwrinkled, there are no expression lines around his mouth or eyes, and his hair is neatly combed back from his face. In Donna in camice bianco—Ritratto di Daphne Maugham (Woman in a White Shirt—Portrait of Daphne

 Between Modernity and Tradition 47

Figure 2.4  Ritratto di Felice Casorati (Portrait of Felice Casorati), Undated, Marisa Mori. Pencil on paper, 48 × 33.6 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

Maugham 1928) Mori painted her friend and colleague, Daphne Maugham,107 who would become Casorati’s wife (Figure 2.5) Sitting frontally and wearing a grey painter’s smock, her gaze again signals inward reflection pointing firmly down in the manner of Piero della Francesca’s pensive madonnas. By avoiding their direct gaze, Mori suggests a contented contemplative silence between painter and subject. Fanciulla al sole—Ritratto di Nella Marchesini (Girl in the Sun—Portrait of Nella Marchesini 1928–9) (Plate 5) and Portrait of a Woman at the Seaside: Nella Marchesini (Ritratto di donna al mare: Nella Marchesini 1928–9), although undated, are labeled as depictions of her friend and fellow painter. Ritratto al sole—Fanciulla dormiente (Portrait in the Sun—Sleeping Girl 1928–9) is almost certainly a third such image.108 In Girl in the Sun, Marchesini wears a black bathing suit and twists her torso dramatically under the shelter of a red beach umbrella, a contorted pose ironically reminiscent of Michelangelo’s Night (1526–31). Her right arm presumably holds the umbrella while her left arm stretches out to the sand behind her. Her face is turned away showing us only an angled profile from below. The side of her face and her extended neck are illuminated by the reflection of the umbrella’s bright red underbelly and her left thigh cuts diagonally across the lower right quadrant of the picture. Mori apparently painted it as she sat beside her friend on the sand and her close cropping lends monumentality to the figure and, placing us closer, suggests greater intimacy. This cropping also has an effect of interrupting the object status of the figure who dominates the entire canvas, stretching into its corners as if to exude from its surface and exist outside the painting in the real world. Compared with Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510) or Casorati’s

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Figure 2.5  Donna in camice bianco—Ritratto di Daphne Maugham (Woman in a White Shirt—Portrait of Daphne Maugham), 1928, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 48 × 34.5 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

Pomegranate Dream (1912), Mori’s Girl in the Sun is clothed, unreachable, and unobtainable to the male gaze. Neither is Marchesini’s personality “captured” in the traditional spirit of a portrait. She turns her face toward the freedom of the open sea and sun. The picture allows us to imagine a relaxed companionship between surveyor and surveyed sharing the luminosity of a sunny day.

Landscapes Mori’s earliest exhibited pictures were shown in the Vedute di Torino (Turin Views) exhibition at the Antonio Fontanesi Society in 1926.109 To critic Enrico Zanzi these landscapes were “fairy-like” or “sickly”110 suggesting the kind of strangeness associated with Metaphysical Painting and Magic Realism. Even if Casorati was reluctant to acknowledge the influence of Giorgio de Chirico,111 Mori voiced a strong admiration for both De Chirico and Carlo Carrà,112 whose influences are apparent. Via Lanfranchi (1926) looks across nearby rooftops from her balcony to the flattened dome of the Neoclassical church of Gran Madre di Dio in Piazza Vittorio Veneto (Plate 6). The empty street below is ominously populated only by long shadows of adjacent buildings. A single skeleton of a small leafless tree sits in the courtyard where gates to the streets are closed. The atmosphere here, like in several city views captured from the window or

 Between Modernity and Tradition 49 balcony of her Turin studio, owes much to the eerie angles and shadows of De Chirico’s piazzas. Zanzi and others since have noted a strong affinity between Mori’s seascapes and those of Carlo Carrà, particularly with regard to their minimalism and muted colors.113 Mori’s first showing at the Venice Biennale, Marina (Seascape 1930), demonstrates these parallels (Figure 2.6). At its center is a cloudy sky, hanging over a patch of sea and seen from afar, framed between two buildings. Two steps at the bottom left suggest an ingress, but the sheer brown face of the building gives nothing away. A large area of unspecified ground stretches across the image toward a simple abode of white with a slanted roof and two windows. Here too the picture is dominated by empty space, stillness, and absence, the only activity intimated by distant, darkening clouds. Marina (1930), and others like Alassio (1930), Marina di Andora (1930), or Lido di Venezia (1931), are highly representative of Mori’s many cityscapes and seascapes, all of which resonate with Mario Ursino’s description of the metaphysical landscape, whether natural or urban, which is characterized by “absence, expanding emptiness, the deafening noise of silence, expectation.”114 During the Ventennio, the landscape genre was drawn into the complexity of cultural and political debates on italianità. Pulled between contending ideologies, it was promoted by groups like the Novecento and Strapaese, whose leading artists, Mario Sironi and Ardengo Soffici, respectively, claimed it as a source of spiritual renewal for Italian culture.115 The Free School of Painting was not isolated from this wider cultural discourse and Mori’s cityscapes or seascapes might sound a celebratory

Figure 2.6  Marina (Seaside), 1930, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 39 × 38.5 cm. Mori Family Archive.

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note of italianità in attempting to immortalize the beauty of Italian cities or seas. However, her views draw on the unsettling architectural geometries of De Chirico and the minimalism of Carrà to create visions of in-betweenness that are entirely Mori’s own. Her cityscapes often capture highly personal views that look outward from an interior. In her seascapes, Mori contrasts the rectilinear forms of the built environment with the flat space of the open sea, stretching invitingly into the distance. Artist and viewer are put into a kind of viewfinder that accentuates a sense of longing for the unrestricted space beyond.

Natura Morta When Giorgio de Chirico spoke about “the double life of a still life,” he noted the disconcerting way that “still lifes come alive or figures become still,” suggesting the shadow of human presence that inheres in the objects that populate our lives.116 Like De Chirico, Casorati insisted on the pathos of the object,117 exclaiming, “dear things, things of various colorations, tones, and forms, expressive things, good things! . . . by means of you every sentiment can be expressed, from the simplest to the most complex .  .  . In the most desperate moments of my artistic life have I been able to reconcile myself with painting by humbly painting a bowl, an egg, a pear.”118 Mori’s earliest studies and drawings testify to the central role that “expressive things” played in her education. While her still lifes engage the same themes that run through Casorati’s oeuvre, they repeatedly reveal her personal instincts and interests. Two early studio sketches feature eggs, egg cups, and bowls like those that populate so many of Casorati’s works, including Scodelle (Bowls 1919) or Le uova sul cassettone (Eggs on the Dresser 1920). Luigi Carluccio spoke of the egg as a form whose instability heightened the sense of psychological suspense in Casorati’s pictures.119 The egg has symbolized fertility, potentiality, and creativity in the history of art from Piero della Francesca’s Brera Madonna (1472) to Piero Manzoni’s thumb-printed Uova of the 1960s. Roberto Longhi described it as an object of formal purity and perfection.120 In Le uova benedette (Blessed Eggs 1927),121 Mori painted a bowl of eggs surrounded by various vessels set against a drapery (seen in Figure 2.3). An empty plate sits on the left, a large dark urn sits at the back, and between them a bowl of liquid and the plate of eggs. These juxtapositions evoke the historic symbolism of female fertility linked to eggs and urns while suggesting oppositions of absence/presence or lack/abundance. Her title suggestively points to the Catholic iconographic meaning of the six eggs, which take pride of place, and point by their number to the story of Catholic creation. While Casorati’s eggs always threaten to fall off the edge, hers are safely ensconced in the bowl; if his bowl is always empty, then hers is conspicuously full. These subtle indicators may be a self-referential nod to abundance, art, and creativity “in the feminine.” In La Lettura (1927–8) Mori makes the book a centerpiece of gentle togetherness and quiet contemplation between two girls (Plate 7). The older girl holds it open on her lap and turns it slightly toward the younger girl, perhaps guiding her through

 Between Modernity and Tradition 51 the text. It is a work that speaks directly to the notion of women’s solidarity and the importance of educating young girls, issues of particular significance to Ada Prospero and Mori’s friends, the Marchesini sisters.122 Books were common devices in paintings by De Chirico and Casorati evoking a sense of the known and unknown, the enigma of a past that is always present. In the history of religious and secular imagery books are indicative of wisdom and the inexhaustible life of the human mind and spirit, which are nevertheless contained in a mortal body. Viewed in relation to Casorati’s Two Sisters (1921), Mori’s painting looks like a retort. His two young ladies, one clothed and one nude, are surrounded by books, but locked into catatonic states that emphasize their objecthood. This effect is reiterated by the mirroring of the clothed figure with a closed book and the nude figure with an open book, making their bodies into allegories of Wisdom and Ignorance. Mori opts instead to depict a real moment in the intellectual life of women. Natura morta metafisica (Metaphysical Still Life 1928) exemplifies a body of works including La mendicante (The Mendicant 1930), Studio per due Maschere (Study for Two Masks 1931), and Maschere e Giocatoli (Masks and Toys 1935), wherein Mori explored gesso fragments, masks, and dolls, simulacra that populate many Metaphysical and Magic Realist paintings with other-worldly human presence (Figure 2.7). As one scholar puts it masks point to “themes of the fragmentation of the modern subject.”123 In Metaphysical Still Life an antique male gesso bust sits before a white curtain on a makeshift plinth created from a light blue drapery set over a wooden stool. The bust looks left and down its regal nose at an odd angle toward the bright pink mask hanging

Figure 2.7  Natura morta metafisica (Metaphysical Still Life), 1928, Marisa Mori. 46 × 50 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

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diagonally beside it. An overly large note is pinned to the blue drapery with Mori’s signature. Curtain, bust, and mask point to the motif of illusion or masquerade and Mori’s note tells us she is the set designer. To paint The Mendicant she set a despondentlooking pink mask atop her white painter’s smock against a chair, assembling a bizarre model. Masks became a favorite mirthful motif for Mori. They are a likely inspiration for her subsequent Futurist painting Divisione meccanica della folla (Mechanical Division of the Crowd 1933) in which the crowd is composed of a series of fragmented, disembodied, robotic mask-like faces (Figure 2.8). Mori would remain a committed still life painter throughout her life. She appears to have taken particular psychological refuge in this genre during the Second World War. She spent the war in relative seclusion and her many still lifes of this period seem to celebrate being alive by meditating on the sensuous colors of apples, grapes, pumpkins, or flowers. Perhaps the thought of her name embedded in the phrase memento mori crossed her mind as she painted Studio per argenteria (Study of Silver 1940), for here she abandoned bright colors in a carefully structured vertical composition comprised entirely of reflective surfaces that evoke the vanitas (Figure 2.9). A rectangular mirror occupies the foreground sitting diagonally on the edge of a tabletop and on its surface sits a glass. In the background an oddly angled window reveals a cloudy sky. A large round glass cake dish sits in the middle of the composition, reflected in the mirror below and actively scattering the light from above making it impossible to identify a single light source. On several surfaces are silver candlesticks and vases and in them multiple sprigs of Lunaria annua, a plant named for its round translucent moonlike seed pods and commonly referred to as honesty in English. The odd angles and

Figure 2.8  Divisione meccanica della folla (Mechanical Division of the Crowd), 1933, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 71 × 100 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

 Between Modernity and Tradition 53

Figure 2.9  Studio per argenteria (Study of Silver), 1940, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 89 × 66 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

competing reflections of mirror, glass, and silver suggest the distortions, uncertainties, and opacities of vision.

The Female Nude In the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910) Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini called for traditional subjects to be swept aside, declaring that “movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.” They announced their intention to fight, “Against the nude in painting, as nauseous and tedious as adultery in literature” and demanded that it be suppressed for a decade.124 Yet the nude would make a quick comeback. As early as 1912–13, Carrà and Boccioni were returning to the female nude as a subject of “good plastic material” for their studies.125 During the interwar years, the nude appeared in paintings by Enrico Prampolini, Fillìa, Gerardo Dottori, or Alfredo Ambrosi. Christine Poggi has described this phenomenon as a “return of the repressed,” explaining how, “history, nature, the idealized woman, religion and the cultic function of the work of art” would “return with renewed and uncanny force” during these years.126 Indeed representations of the female nude, as they appear in works such as Fillia’s Misteri d’ambiente (1929) or Alfredo Ambrosi’s Aerofecondità (1932), become allegories for Nature as mysterious creative source,127 linking these images to one of the most traditional subjects in the history of European art.

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If the Italian avant-garde explicitly rejected the nude for its links to the old masters, then Casorati, “the misoneist,” was drawn to its historic symbolic power. Albino Galvano commented that the nude represented an “essential figure” or “elementary form” within his oeuvre, likening the artist’s obsessive repetition of it to his love of bowls, eggs, and books.128 The comment reveals with what ease women’s bodies have been objectified in the history of Western art. Since the Renaissance, the female nude has operated as an allegory for beauty, truth, and the artistic act itself, one that miraculously seems to transform “base matter of nature into the elevated forms of culture.”129 This idea underpins Casorati’s fascination, as he likely identified with the artist-as-magus who gives physical form to divine ideas, in this case Woman as divine symbol of Nature and Art.130 He once expressed the opinion that the drama of history as experienced by the artist is better captured in Ingres’s Valpinçon Bather (1808) than in David’s Coronation of Napoleon (1807). In other words, more might be said in an intimate depiction of a nude with her back turned than in the representation of public spectacle and kingship.131 The statement reinforces his supposed preference for contemplative isolation, emphasizing what one scholar has described as the exclusively feminine character of solitude in his paintings.132 Among his many female figures, clothed or unclothed, real or allegorical, there is a predilection for those asleep or with closed eyes, yet another indication of his identification of art with intellect and interiority. Like his Metaphysical and Surrealist peers, Casorati demonstrated a fascination with sleep, dreams, and the subconscious. The recurrence of Ariadne in De Chirico has been interpreted both as a reference to antiquity and to the artist’s own exile.133 During the Renaissance, the sleeping Venus was particularly associated with fertility and divine creative force so it may be that references to this Renaissance subject functioned for Casorati on a personal level, symbolizing his philosophy of art. The sleeping nude evolved as an entirely unique subset in Renaissance Venice, where it grew out of Giorgione’s highly original rendering of Sleeping Venus (1510) and proliferated first in Venice and then in European art more broadly. As Millard Meiss explained, it had “positive moral significance” for Renaissance humanists who understood sleep as “a form of vacatio, which predisposed the soul to contemplation and to communication with the divine.”134 He notes that many related works depict a withdrawal less extreme than sleep, such as lowered or averted eyes, which nevertheless suggest the subject’s thoughts turned inward in an act of meditation, a gaze prevalent in Piero della Francesca. Giorgione’s image of Venus has been variously regarded by scholars as one of female masturbation,135 a symbol for divinely inspired creation and creativity,136 and as representing Venus Physizoa (a personification of living nature) who featured in Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), encompassing earthly and celestial realms as “the cosmic source of life in its female manifestation.”137 Given this context it is likely that the sleeping female held double symbolic resonance for Casorati, first as an allegory for art, and second as an allegory for art that is the product of a private, incorruptible, interior self. In the modern era the subject of the sleeping woman was adopted and adapted in the work of numerous artists. Some would fully exploit its voyeuristic potential, as Gustave Courbet did in his fantasy of lesbianism, The Sleepers (1866). For others

 Between Modernity and Tradition 55 it continued to resonate as a symbol for the mystery of creation, as, for example, in Odilon Redon’s Closed Eyes (1890). Yet in nearly every case it is a male artist who projects his worldview onto a passive female subject, over whom he has complete control.138 Casorati’s nudes necessarily reinscribe this relationship. It is probable that Mori took part in discussions about the allegorical significance of the female nude and it is certain that she was familiar with sleep as a theme in the work of Courbet—an artist of noted interest to De Chirico and the Valori Plastici circle.139 When she presented herself as a potential student, Casorati asked that she demonstrate her abilities via sketches of her sleeping child. Throughout her painting, before, during, and after Futurism, sleeping figures appear with frequency. She depicted her elderly grandmother resting, she captured her colleagues and friends reclining, asleep, or with lowered gazes, in the studio and on the beach, and she explored this subject in her postwar nudes. Naturally this position had practical advantages for an artist, but if the pose was occasionally nothing more than a formal choice, it became something more in some of her Futurist pictures. She would use sleep as a motif in her newly abstract avant-garde style. Metaphorical connotations of closed eyes or sleep underpin Aviatrice addormentata (Sleeping Aviatrix 1932), Clinica Sanatrix (Sanatrix Clinic 1932), and L’Ebrezza fisica della maternità (The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity 1936), which are explored in the fourth chapter of this book. Here Mori ascribes new Futurist-inflected meanings to a Magic Realist theme linked to interiority, ambiguity, and enigma. Perhaps drawing on Casorati or De Chirico, she pictured women with closed eyes or asleep. Yet her women resist associations with passivity as they fly, birth, and create. Whether asleep, meditating, or in a trance, they are activated by a Futurist visual language of light, force lines, and machines. They are not passive repositories of history or allegory; they cannot be equated with an egg or a bowl; nor are they available or attainable by a voyeuristic (presumably male) gaze, which is frustrated by the body’s representation through indefinite, abstracted, and fragmented forms.

Conclusions Piero Gobetti saw Fascism as the outcome of an infantile mindset and regarded its victory as a “catastrophe” that represented “the triumph of simplicity, confidence, optimism, and enthusiasm” over critical thought. Casorati chose to teach the value of individualism and critical thinking. He visually quoted the past, teaching his students to value and learn from it rather than rebel against it. Albino Galvano would write that being his disciple was a formative part of many of his students’ moral lives.140 While so much art of Futurism or Novecento focused on the exteriority of life and the public sphere, he and his students focused their attention inward on the private realm. As the regime celebrated the art of the collective, he and his school painted paeans to solitude. As many artists competed to celebrate Italianness or italianità in the loudest possible rhetoric of nationalism, he and his students took the position that Italy should be aligned with Europeanism or internationalism. As so much public interwar art pointed toward the myth of masculine strength, he offered up a refuge in the peaceful

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domesticity of what was traditionally imagined as a “feminine” world. By opting to paint interiors rather than exteriors, silence rather than sound, and “feminine” rather than “masculine” subjects, Casorati resisted the insidious culture of Fascist pageantry. With him, Mori learned rigorous technique, built up a repository of art-historical inspirations, and adopted an aesthetic idealism. Surrounded by a politics of liberal individualism and a circle of other women artists, she developed an independent sense of herself as a professional. Subsequently drawn to the avant-garde, she does not seem to have abandoned history, reflective interiority, or her own sense of individuality after joining the Futurists. Recent scholarship has repudiated the notion that realism is inherently conservative or that, conversely, avant-gardes are always radical.141 Authoritarianism prompted artists and writers to avoid politics and cultivate visual languages of ambiguity, enigma, and complexity. Figurative artists in interwar Italy like Filippo De Pisis,142 Giorgio de Chirico,143 and Casorati144 have each been understood as having adopted such tactics of evasion. Yet Futurist art is rarely associated with silence, subtlety, or enigma. The political leanings of its artists are often understood to have been radical, whether far left or far right. Mori not only traversed traditional and modernist practices, but she also knew how to construct enigmatic images that resist “the triumph of simplicity.” She tempered her exciting encounter with the noise and chaos of Futurism with a meditative outlook indebted to Magic Realism. By transplanting some of its ideas into her Futurism, she created unique and meaningful works, some of which suggest the feminist maxim that “the personal is political.” Even if she later claimed to have been apolitical, when a radicalized politics of hate posed an immediate threat to her friends, she recognized how the political had become personal and took action that saved lives.

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Edible Futurist Breasts

Marinetti “wasn’t to be taken seriously” according to Mori, “never—but he was fun.”1 One of the most amusing ways that the founder sought to bring art down to earth and into the public sphere was through a series of manifestos, art experiments, and events that aestheticized life via the stomach2 and her initiation into his world began with these sorts of experiences. Marinetti longed to pull the nation of his ancestors into the modern era. As the son of a lawyer who made a fortune by advising foreign businesses in Egypt, he received a substantial inheritance that assisted him in his rise to prominence as a cultural enfant terrible and generous patron. In 1905 he launched a literary magazine called Poesia, which would come under his sole direction as editor and publisher the following year.3 From this Milan-based platform he funded and promoted a rejuvenation of Italian literature by introducing modernist trends from elsewhere in Europe. The author of the Manifesto of Futurism built up the connections to ensure that his incendiary treatise repudiating tradition, advocating war, and infamously scorning women would be published widely in Italian newspapers and on the front page of the Parisian daily Le Figaro, in February 1909.4 Futurism became the country’s most significant avant-garde movement and he remained its irrefutable commander-in-chief for thirty-five years. Poesia became synonymous with the birth of Futurism because it spurred his growing belief that “articles, poetries, and polemics no longer sufficed.”5 He, and the artists who rallied to the cause, began to conceive of a total transformation of the relationship between art and life. Marinetti advocated for “Artists, alive at last, and no longer up in their ivory towers, despising aestheticism, asking to participate, like workmen or soldiers, in the progress of the world.”6 Artistdesigners Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero penned “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,” a manifesto in which they conceived of the idea of arte-azione, or action art, as “will, aggression, possession, penetration, joy, brutal reality in art.”7 Their phraseology, full of references to virility and domination, seems to reflect the degree to which the Futurists initially conceived of the artist as a sociopolitical agent and by default as a man of action in the public sphere. How perfectly paradoxical yet appropriately “punny” that Futurism’s aggressive action artist should be encouraged to “penetrate” the traditionally female domestic sphere of the kitchen. Marinetti’s love affair with gastronomic metaphors began in his play Le Roi Bombance (1905), which engaged with writers like Alfred Jarry8 and Paul Adam.9 Several scholars have identified this satirical play about an obese king and his court as an important step toward his break with symbolism and new Futurist consciousness

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in its dramatization of the fracture between the ideal and the material.10 With Roi Bombance, Marinetti’s food metaphors begin. Enrico Cesaretti describes this play as a “‘social-gastronomical’ text in which history is reduced to a sort of ‘dyspepsic’ digestive cycle.”11 Launching Futurism, he resorted again to evocative food imagery, declaring, “Let us leave wisdom behind, and cast ourselves, like fruit, into the immense twisting mouth of the wind! Let us become food for the Unknown.”12 As Günter Berghaus has shown, food experiments began almost immediately thereafter in the serata, or evening event, that took place at the Politeama Rosetti in Trieste, which concluded with a backward dinner.13 Claudia Salaris argues that the publication of Jules Maincave’s “La cuisine futuriste” (1913) seems to carry the mark of Marinetti’s influence and its ideas were repackaged for Italian audiences in the “Manifesto della cucina futurista” (1930).14 “Culinaria Futurista: Manifesto” was published in Roma Futurista in May of 1920 under the pseudonym Irba futurista15 and then a long campaign of celebratory events followed throughout the decade. Irba’s short announcement uses military terminology to speak of culinary experimentation as another “campo d’azione—field of action” for the Futurist artist. Yet it simultaneously celebrates how Futurists “enjoy life with all their senses” and acclaims the table should “laugh with joy” at diverse colors and “dance a tasty symphony.”16 With their new edible aesthetics, Futurists put into practice a series of strange and unappetizing dining experiments that enacted the movement’s call for destruction, violence, and transformation through the microcosm of the human intestine. Participants ate meals backward, created edible sculpture, calculated geometrical meals, and hosted tactile dinner parties, in which smell, taste, and touch substituted for vision as participants dined in the dark.17 Fun played an important role in these culinary experiments, but Futurist fun was often tainted by masculine aggression. The creation of The Futurist Cookbook (1932), which Marinetti put together with Fillìa (Luigi Colombo), documented the movement’s blurring of high and low culture and demonstrated how they were transforming the most routine aspects of life into forms of art and performance.18 The book is an avant-garde assemblage consisting of manifestos, articles, recipes, and descriptions of Futurist events and culinary experiments, but its character has been the subject of debate. On the one hand it has been described as one of the “best artistic jokes of the century”19 and viewed as celebrating its own absurdity in terms of “ironic self-reflexivity.”20 Roger Griffin has noted that although written at the height of Fascist consensus, it demonstrates how the founder never “abandoned the spirit of childlike playfulness that emanates from the ludic principle.”21 Others have remarked on a sinister undertone, pointing out that Futurism’s battle against pasta was synonymous with Fascism’s economic drive for self-sufficiency and eugenic hopes of creating faster, tougher, and stronger New Men.22 Interpretations that may view the cookbook as either one or other of these perhaps miss the point. For while seemingly antithetical, the book’s ability to function simultaneously as avant-garde satire and political propaganda was compatible with the cognitive dissonance that underpinned Marinetti’s larger project and the medley of voices that it pasted together. In Jokes and the Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), Freud suggested that jokes are a means of expressing sexual and aggressive impulses. Wyndham Lewis

 Edible Futurist Breasts 59 discussed satire as having a vital role for the avant-garde artist-intellectual, but the objective of satire as he saw it was always laughter of “explosive agency” that should “blast” not “tickle.”23 Marinetti and the Futurists earned a reputation for misogyny based on the inflammatory rhetoric of their manifestos and their phallogocentrism24 is undeniable. It cannot therefore come as any surprise that women and the romantic ideal of womanhood became primary targets of Marinetti’s sarcasm in both Le Roi Bombance and The Futurist Cookbook. The former play commences with Soffione’s announcement that women have departed from the realm and thus “the cause of all our indigestion has been abolished.”25 The latter revolves around what Cinzia SartiniBlum has described as an “ego-boosting ‘diet’ of seduced women,” needed to sustain Futurism’s masculine identity.26 She has gone so far as to argue that in the manifestos, “the Futurist artist is metaphorically transfigured into a warrior whose mission/prize is to ‘rape’ and ‘possess’ the mystery of feminized reality.”27 I aim to elaborate on the complexities of this interaction between Futurism, women, and the feminine. It has not been considered a significant fact that alongside recipes for “Ultravirile,” “Imprisoned Perfumes” (Profumi prigionieri), or “ManWomanMidnight” (Uomodonnamezza-notte) is a recipe entitled “Italian Breasts in the Sun” (Mammelle italiane al sole), which was written by a woman. Yet what happens to the logic of the culinary warrior when the artist or author is female? Mori’s food joke calls for a set of bosoms to be made of almond paste and topped with candied strawberry nipples, placed on a bed of custard and cream, all sprinkled with black pepper and decorated with red chili peppers.28 What, if anything, can we say about her role as the sole female contributor to this project and her recipe’s function inside the pages of what appears to be a darkly comic yet chauvinist enterprise? Mori made the female body a major subject of her Futurist work beginning with this recipe and many of her works communicate women’s experience through wry humor. When Hélène Cixous famously asserted that women must find ways to create “through the body” in 1976, she placed laughter at the heart of her essay, arguing that it is a powerful means of resisting phallogocentrism or what is often assumed to be truth in language. Trapped “between Medusa and the abyss,” it is laughter she identifies as the means “to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the ‘truth.’”29 It is when “laughs exude from all our mouths,” as she put it, that we cease to accept or believe the myths that have defined us.30 Echoing this sentiment Luce Irigaray has asked, “Isn’t laughter the first form of liberation from a secular oppression? Isn’t the phallic tantamount to the seriousness of meaning? Perhaps woman, and the sexual relation, transcend it ‘first’ in laughter?”31 These French feminists proposed laughter as a form of defense, an active path toward freedom. Other feminists have since built on such assertions, identifying a specific role for irony. Donna Haraway envisioned her cyborg manifesto as an “ironic political myth,” defining irony as “about the tension of holding incompatible things together” and “about humor and serious play.”32 Kathy Ferguson would elaborate on the importance of irony as a feminist strategy claiming that it “fends off despair by accepting its less fatal companion, ambiguity” and can “recruit humor to politically important ends.” “[I]rony,” she writes, “is also in bodies—their postures, expressions, presentations, decorations, omissions.”33 Interviewed in 2018, Lea Vergine said women Futurists in

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Italy seem to have been less daring than their Russian counterparts, but their survival strategy often consisted of “self-irony, irony, and sarcasm.”34 Mori felt free to laugh with, and sometimes at, the Futurists, using the female body to express herself in ways that prefigure this genealogy of feminist thought. She nicknamed Marinetti the rhinoceros: “He looked like one. I didn’t take him seriously: I don’t know about the others.”35 She exploited the movement’s contradictions to contribute a recipe for the cookbook that operates as a kind of “paradoxical feminism,” to borrow Lucia Re’s phrase. She highlights the humor in arthistorical precedent and “upcycles,” so to speak, Catholic iconography, to resist easy identification with the chauvinism of the text. If the cookbook has been described as a masterful episode of satire and the artist’s style of painting has also been viewed by one scholar as “flavored with subtle irony,”36 then the most probable reading of her recipe is one in the same vein. By her own account Futurism was “fun” and “a joy.” Her social encounters with Futurism’s Turin circle were exciting and liberating and the preceding years of her artistic training had been rooted in enigma, visual liminality, and Renaissance iconography. These contexts can illuminate the subtle nuances of “Italian Breasts in the Sun” and many of her early Futurist paintings, making it difficult to align her character or career with an uncritical acceptance of Futurist chauvinism.

Contradiction as Opportunity If Emerson proclaimed “a foolish consistency” to be “the hobgoblin of little minds”37 and Whitman sustained, “Well then I contradict myself! I am large. I contain multitudes,”38 then Marinetti went even further declaring, “To contradict oneself is to live.”39 These writers placed cognitive dissonance at the heart of the modernist enterprise and by doing so they made it possible to question all sorts of binaries. Walter Adamson once described Marinetti as having “shaped and reshaped his persona for the mystique, aura, and symbolic associations he wanted to project in precisely the same way as the manufacturer of a product does to attract buyers.”40 Ernesto Ialongo likewise emphasized the plasticity of the man’s politics, which “drew on a mixed bag of contradictory goals from across the political spectrum.”41 Marinetti’s stated attitudes toward “the woman question” were just as self-contradictory as the rest of his enterprise. His infamous pronouncement of “disprezzo della donna—scorn for women” in the Founding and Manifesto42 is at odds with his later assertion that “Amiamo le donne—We love women” in The Futurist Cookbook.43 His rant against marriage and “the tyranny of love” in Against Love and Parliamentarianism44 would not prevent him from dedicating reams of love poetry to painter and author Benedetta (whom he affectionately referred to as Beny)45 and marrying her in 1926.46 In the preface to Mafarka the Futurist, he claimed, “I don’t refute the animal value of woman, but the sentimental importance that is attributed to her.”47 This would suggest the author’s belief in a sort of biological essentialism, however, in Against Love and Parliamentarianism, he carefully explained that in his opinion, “If the body and spirit of woman were to experience an identical education to that received by the spirit and body of man, then perhaps it would be possible to speak about equality of the sexes.”48

 Edible Futurist Breasts 61 Therefore he also iterated a decidedly antiessentialist view. By cultivating the art of self-contradiction, Marinetti, wittingly or unwittingly, facilitated the rise of women writers and artists in his movement. Feminist scholarship has often revealed how it is precisely within an atmosphere of contradiction that feminist consciousness begins to arise. Sandra Lee Bartly writes, “often, features of social reality are first apprehended as contradictory, as in conflict with one another, or as disturbingly out of phase with one another, from the vantage point of a radical project of transformation.”49 “Due to their contradictory natures,” wrote one scholar, “Futurism and Fascism opened gaps in the social fabric that allowed women to express their own voices.”50 We are familiar with the ways that contemporary women artists have operated between contradictions or utilized self-contradiction as a form of rebellion,51 but avant-garde women exploited the same crevices. Women’s Futurist writing often wrestles with contradictory views on the nature of modern womanhood. Multiple scholars have noted Futurism’s “paradoxical” relationship to gender52 and describe women’s position within the movement as “ambivalent.”53 Paola Sica recently elaborated on the complex, ambiguous, and contradictory feminisms that appear in the writings of Futurist women authors and artists working in the Florentine circle before 1930.54 Above all Lucia Re pioneered an understanding of women Futurists as embedded in the paradox of Marinetti’s “radical irreverence,” out of which emerged “unexpected feminist overtones.”55 She coined the term “paradoxical feminism” to refer to this phenomenon.56 A broad range of scholarship shows how modernisms exploited the battle of the sexes as representative of much deeper philosophical oppositions.57 The gendered dynamics of the cookbook can be related back to this modernist drive to explore and explode gendered dualisms. In spite of the infamous rhetoric,58 Marinetti and his movement became a platform from which women were encouraged to explore the meaning of modern womanhood even after the rise of Fascism. When Marinetti acted as a founding member of the Fasci italiani di combattimento (Italian Fasces of Combat or FIC), he helped to champion inclusion in the new party’s manifesto of “universal direct and equal suffrage for all male and female citizens.”59 When the manifesto was published in Il Popolo d’Italia on June 6, 1919, a line demanding “Universal suffrage with eligibility for women” was still included.60 The progressive promises for women in the political activities of the FIC did not, however, carry over into the founding of the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party PNF) and Fascism in November 1921.61 The Fascist mandate to keep “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”62 subordinated the individual lives of all citizens to the national interest and the “Battle for Births” represented a conspicuous example of the subjugation of individual choice. In his Ascension Day speech of 1927 Mussolini asserted that the nation would find its strength in numbers and in a 1934 parliamentary address he famously proclaimed, “War is to man what maternity is to woman.”63 With this proclamation Mussolini asserted the respective obligations that women and men had to the state, placing women in a traditionally passive, private, domestic role and men in the driver’s seat of public life as cultural and political actors. As the Futurists were embarking upon their food adventures, individual bodies and personal lives were being closely monitored and the boundaries of sex and gender were being intensely policed.64

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Marinetti’s interwar concessions to the regime notwithstanding, he never changed his liberal attitudes when it came to the place of women in society. Like others, Mori probably saw the movement as liberating for the ways it rejected stereotypes, criticized marriage, and questioned bourgeois family values. When she encountered the Futurists in 1931, she had been separated from her husband for seven years. Her experiences had given her little faith in the institution of marriage, but a strong sense of solidarity with other women artists. Futurism would facilitate Mori’s professional aspirations and feed her longing for self-discovery, first through the ambit of culinary adventures and subsequently via aviation. It was a cultural platform where she and many other women could test out freer social and artistic identities, despite restrictive norms, and perhaps, under the auspices of a more light-hearted subject like food, it was easier to insert a note of resistance.

Futurist Friendships Luigi Colombo, known as Fillìa, was the youthful and energetic founding figure of Turinese Futurism who established the Sidacati Artistici Futuristi (Union of Futurist Artists) in 1923 with the help of Tullio Alpinolo Bracci and Ugo Pozzo. Thanks in part to his efforts, Turin became a center of Futurist activity and a key locale in the unfolding insurgency against pastasciutta. Other important regional representatives included Bulgarian designer Nicolay Diulgheroff (Nikolai Slavov Diulgerov) and the painter, poet, and photographer Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini (better known as Farfa). A venue to host the movement’s radical food experiments called the Taverna del Santopalato (roughly translated as the Tavern of the Holy Palate) opened on March 8, 1931, and was entirely decorated in aluminum panels, a material associated by Futurists and Fascists with “lightness, speed, mobility, strength, energy, and electricity.”65 While Marinetti and Fillìa apparently came up with the design concept, it was Diulgheroff who enabled its execution via his architectural and design expertise.66 Professional restaurant staff served up extraordinary dishes and Fortunato Depero designed advertising billboards and menus printed on tin sheets for the tavern’s inauguration. Interestingly the pages of The Futurist Cookbook reveal that among those who attended these events was Felice Casorati.67 A series of traveling exhibition lunches took place thereafter in Novara (April 18, 1931), Chiavari (November 22, 1931), Genoa (July 7, 1932), Milan (June 16, 1933), and elsewhere.68 This was the energized atmosphere that Mori stepped into in 1931. She was likely present in Chiavari, where her ceramic work was being exhibited, and certainly at the Genoa lunch (Lido d’Albaro) as documented in a group photograph (Figure 3.1). That summer Mori painted Giuseppe Mazzotti, the father of Tullio Mazzotti (Futurist ceramicist and poet who was dubbed Tullio d’Albisola by Marinetti).69 He was a central figure of Ligurian Futurism and well connected to the Piedmont group, who vacationed on the Ligurian coast. It was via this new friendship that Mori was introduced to Futurist art for the first time and became closer to other members of the avant-garde, eventually meeting Fillìa and Marinetti. The Mazzottis were a family of ceramic artisans with a growing reputation and a business based in their family hometown Albissola Marina on

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Figure 3.1  Marisa Mori standing to Marinetti’s left in white at an Aeropranzo, or Aerolunch, photograph, Lido d’Albaro, July 7, 1932. Mori Family Archive.

the Ligurian coast. Giuseppe founded the family workshop in 1903 and his son Tullio injected innovative modernist ideas after joining the Futurists in 1925. The town became a popular destination for the Turin-based group who gathered to execute “ceramiche dinamiche—dynamic ceramics,” or “anti-imitative ceramics,” as Tullio d’Albisola called them. Among the artists who came to have their designs transformed into ceramics at the MGA (Mazzotti Giuseppe Albisola) studio were Depero, Diulgheroff, Farfa, Fillìa, Tato, Tullio Crali, Bruno Munari, Ugo Pozzo, and Mino Rosso.70 Mori executed a series of ceramic designs for the workshop on d’Albisola’s invitation,71 none of which appear to be extant. From 1935 onward, the Mazzotti workshop collaborated closely with ItaloArgentinian artist Lucio Fontana as well as other sculptors such as Giacomo Manzù, Giuseppe Capogrossi, and Aligi Sassu. In her later memoirs, Mori vividly described her first experience of Futurism in the thriving Ligurian coastal town, listing some illustrious cultural figures she encountered there. She wrote: It was Tullio Mazzotti from Albissola who introduced me to Futurism. It was 1931. I made a portrait of his father and many veristic landscapes. Tina Mennyey was with me who later married both Enrico Prampolini and [Giuseppe] Capogrossi.72 Many artists came to Albissola and it was a varied and interesting atmosphere. Fontana and the Sardegnan[?] were there and not far from Albissola the sculptor Martini. Then there were the writers and poets. There was talk of Futurism of which I had seen nothing, being a student of Casorati at the time, and I knew only that during Futurist demonstrations the public shouted and protested Marinetti and his companions. But I had never seen a Futurist work. It was Tullio who showed me his ceramics.73

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Her friendship with the ceramicist became an important one, enduring after the war.74 Both took a playful approach to their creative practice,75 and it is possible they shared an antipathy for the political climate. Even if Tullio supported many of Futurism’s nationalist causes, like Mori, he never joined the PNF. He was active in local clandestine antifascist groups, a fact that impinged on his career and caused him to make concessions and compromises with the regime.76 Perhaps the two artists shared an interest in strategic self-preservation. After the death of his father, Tullio D’Abisola wrote to Mori saying, “the old potter favored your portrait, always exhibited at the entrance to our show room and shop. He had portraits by Spilimbergo, by Sassu, and by many others but he ‘loved’ that one in particular by Marisa Mori the student of Casorati.”77 Her Ritratto di Giuseppe Mazzotti (Bausin) (Portrait of Giuseppe Mazzotti (Bausin) 1931) depicts the older man in profile wearing a gentle smile and a white hat and shirt (Figure 3.2). He is rendered with just a few pastels and opaque colors, seen as if through murky water, yet the spare use of contour line and the soft spaces of passage seem to suggest a humble, quiet, and kind man. Through this connection she discovered the curious goings-on of Futurism as the cloistered atmosphere of Casorati’s school began to fall apart. The timing must have seemed right for her to seize a new opportunity and embrace a new creative community. Writing a letter from his studio in 1934 to their mutual Florentine Futurist friend, Thayaht, Tullio asked, “When you write to me, give me news of Marisa Mori who I initiated into Futurism and who I consider a painter of exceptional virtue. I would like to have from her the illustrations for a brief erotic poem I plan to publish as soon as L’anguria lirica (Lyrical Watermelon) comes out.”78 In this case it does not appear that Mori accepted the offer, which may or may not have been forthcoming, but she did receive a dedicated copy of A.A.A.500.000 urgonmi (A.A.A. 500,000 Urgently Needed 1937), perhaps the poem in question.79 Letters in the Mori Family Archive indicate that she had numerous social and professional encounters with Farfa and Fillìa. In a communication of September 1931, Farfa flirtatiously refers to an upcoming event in her company and trusts her enough to ask for help inquiring after the status of a manuscript he has with Turin publishers Fratelli Buratti whose offices were located near her Turin studio. Yet it is Fillìa who Franco Mori remembered coming to the house on many occasions. In several letters he writes about details of upcoming exhibitions, always extending a greeting to Mario Mori, and once promising to publish his poems. A letter to Mori dated September 1932 mentions his having just returned to the city from the mountains after a recent bout of bad health. His intense cultural activities ended abruptly upon his death in February 1936 of tuberculosis, aged only thirty-one. Fillìa was a significant figure for Mori, who shared his interest in theater and set design, and may have been influenced artistically by his theories on the relationship between color and spirituality, as articulated in “Alfabeto spirituale” (Spiritual Alphabet 1925) and “La Pittura Spirituale” (Spiritual Painting 1925).80 These manifestos insist that color is the most important element of painting and set design, asserting its psychological impact and defining a color system of spiritual and moral values. Between 1933 and 1935 Fillìa may have involved Mori in making set designs for a production that never took place.81 She made several sketches and drawings for Act V of Sensualità (Sensuality 1923), entitled Altoparlante: dinamica azioni di luci e sonorità (Loudspeaker: dynamic actions of lights and acoustics).

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Figure 3.2  Ritratto di Giuseppe Mazzotti (Bausin) (Portrait of Giuseppe Mazzotti (Bausin)), 1931, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 40 x 50 cm. Private Collection.

Her model of Act V was shown in the Mostra internazionale di scenotecnica teatrale (International Exhibition of Theatrical Scenography) section of the VI Triennial of Milan in 1936, organized by Anton Giulio Bragaglia and curated by Enrico Prampolini. Yet this occurred after Fillìa’s death earlier that year. Dedicating a copy of Fillìa pittore futurista (Fillìa Futurist Painter 1931) to her five years earlier, he wrote, “Alla Signora MORI approvando incondizionatamente le sue idee sulla ‘donna’—To Madam Mori with unconditional approval of her ideas on ‘Woman’.” Although we cannot discern from this dedication what opinions she may

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have voiced, we can be sure that “the woman question” was a topic of conversation. It seems plausible that Mori expressed views in 1931 that were akin to those of 1948, perhaps asserting that despite biological differences, women and men were equal in their capacity for artistic expression and perhaps discussing the role that technology played as an equalizer. The role of the machine as an equalizing force between men and women was a key theme for Fillìa in La morte della donna (The Death of Woman 1925), L’uomo senza sesso (Man without Sex 1927), and Sensualità (Sensuality 1923). In La morte della donna, the narrator posits that inequality between the sexes will gradually be eliminated in a utopian Futurist world. One recent scholar points out that Fillìa’s novels have strong female protagonists and describes him as “a male quasi-feminist” who “privileged the intellectual and spiritual over the physical” and “straightforwardly asserted the intellectual and spiritual equality of the sexes.”82 Tullio d’Albisola facilitated her experimentation with ceramics and initiated her into Futurism. Farfa trusted her with his business affairs. She was invited to collaborate with Tullio d’Albisola and Fillìa as an illustrator and designer. Initially drawn into Futurism’s eccentric social and cultural events through the enjoyable and supportive company of such individuals, she elected to join the Futurist fold officially, which is unsurprising if one considers that these professional friendships introduced her to new ideas and presented her with exciting opportunities.

Edible Bodies Mori’s correspondence with Tullio Mazzotti provides evidence that she had become a central participant in Futurist taste experiments by the end of 1931. In a letter dated Christmas of that year, she invited him to join in her plans for a New Year celebration: an aerial-inspired dinner party (a “cenaereo”) at her studio, reporting that she and Fillìa were planning “cose grandiose—grand things.” She closed the playful missive with an illustration of her own Futurist recipe that she referred to as “Mammelle italiche al sole— Italic Breasts in the Sun” and asked his opinion (Figure 3.3).83 The drawing depicts a set of circular breasts resting in perfect symmetry on an oval serving platter surrounded by waves of custard and cream, but the renamed “Italian Breasts in the Sun” subsequently appeared sans accompanying drawing in the final publication. The original sketch is significant because it didn’t remain on the page. The letter provides visual and literary evidence for what became a conceptual sculpture. Even as the title suggests coming into the light, the breasts were made to be eaten, subsumed, and digested by mostly male guests. Moving out of two dimensions and into three, the marzipan breasts would be molded into an edible sculpture that was presented on a serving plate, rising from the platter as severed parts of a whole. Conceived for the “cenaereo” with Fillìa on New Year’s Eve of 1931, it was remade for various aerial-inspired lunches or “aeropranzi— aero-lunches” organized by Marinetti over the course of 1932. As an “edible sculpture,” or “plastica mangiabile,” it was also part of a series of edible sculptures constructed for Glorificazione della cucina futurista, an exhibition lunch held at the Galleria Pesaro in Milan (June 1933). The edible nature of the work is important to its meaning.

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Figure 3.3  Mammelle italiche al sole (Italic Breasts in the Sun), Marisa Mori. Sketch in a letter from Mori to Tullio d’Albisola, December 1931. Courtesy of Tullio d’Albisola Archive.

In 1931 Marinetti and Fillìa put together a banquet lunch for the Colonial Exhibition in Paris in honor of, among others, Josephine Baker, whose celebrated legs Marinetti described as “afrodisiaci pennelli di color cioccolato al latte—afrodisiacal paint brushes the color of milk chocolate.”84 Throughout The Futurist Cookbook the female body is imagined as a culinary delight and Mori’s is one of a daunting inventory of recipes that metaphorically devour that body by part or by whole. In “Un Pranzo che evitò un suicidio—A Lunch That Stopped a Suicide” the Futurist artist-authors are asked by a seductive female visitor to explain their creation of an edible sculpture gallery. They reply: We love women. We are often tortured by a thousand gluttonous kisses in the anxiety of eating one. Even nude they appear tragically dressed. Their hearts, if gripped in the supreme pleasure of love, seem the ideal fruit to bite, chew and suck. All the forms of hunger that characterize love guide us in the creation of these works of genius and insatiable tongue. They are realizations of our states of mind . . . an artistic expression so intense as to compel not only the relative admiration of the eyes, not only the relative caresses of touch, but teeth, tongue, stomach and intestine, equally in love.85

The book unfolds like a catalogue of double entendres frequently likening the pleasures of food to those of the flesh in one of the oldest forms of humor. Food and sex would be at the heart of Marinetti’s early narratives about utopian materialism, says Enrico Cesaretti, because these are primary materialist needs. Roi Bombance, he says, “belong[s] to a landscape of corporeal degradation and ‘animalistic abjection’.”86 In these

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early literary experiments, he argues, the “borders of human subjectivity” are already at stake. The cookbook builds on this conception and women become representative of the material and the abject. They fulfill a familiar role as representatives of what Lucia Re calls “the negative other” that must be “repressed or exorcized.”87 As the only woman who contributed to The Futurist Cookbook, Mori represents a decisive outlier, but, at first glance, her recipe seems to fit the familiar Futurist formula. She too references the female body in fragmented and sexualized terms, so is hers just another recipe for consumption? There is of course a long history of humorous visual metaphors paralleling fruit and sexual anatomy. Of the trope linking succulent fruit and the succulent female body, Linda Nochlin would write that it “lends itself easily to artistic elevation: sanctioned by tradition and prototype, it may be raised to the level of the archetypal though it may indeed also sink to the level of the ridiculous.”88 She emphasized the mutability of these kinds of images that can go low or high, noting how the wry visual effects of a nineteenth-century erotic photograph like Achetez des pommes (Buy Some Apples) become archetypal in Gauguin’s Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms (1899). Giorgio de Chirico exploited this kind of double meaning in The Uncertainty of the Poet (1913), where a fragmented torso of Venus is coupled with a bunch of overripe bananas. He not only contrasts a “hallowed” or “sublime” subject with a “banal” or “ridiculous” one but also sets a hard, unyielding female fragment against a soft, ineffectual emblem of masculinity upending our expectations.89 Mori’s ripe strawberry nipples atop their sweet pastry bases suggest a fruity succulence in the tradition of Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms, but evoke the self-consciously ironic spirit of Achetez des pommes and suggest a multiplicity of meanings through their juxtaposition of sweet strawberry and spicy chili. Editors of the cookbook relied on an opposition of active masculine culture and passive feminine nature, assuming a universally male subject. One scholar has seen in these sensory experiments only the “ideological fantasies of subjective mastery unfold[ing] with new vigour,”90 and it has been the task of numerous scholars to explore how the female body became the object of subjective mastery within Futurism generally.91 The body, as Elizabeth Grosz explains, is defined as “unruly disruptive .  .  . coded in terms that are themselves traditionally devalued .  .  . as nonhistorical, organicist, passive.”92 Marinetti sought to disavow the body as feminine, in line with such historical tradition. Yet the cooking experiments unleash the “disruptive” body and elevate it as a site of knowledge, putting it back at the center of human experience. Enrico Cesaretti has posited that “an insatiable appetite for flesh, rather than protect the Futurist male identity and/or contribute to projecting the Futurist subject towards the realization of his theorized ‘metallized,’ a-historical, absolute existence free from the risk of abjection and the fetters of time and death, also contains in nuce the cause of his own dissolution and self-annihilation.”93 The inherently paradoxical nature of Futurist culinary experiments made it possible for Mori to infiltrate its language and lay bare its biases. Futurism’s taste and touch experiments conveyed, according to one scholar, the “dissonances and conflicts of contemporary life” by attacking the historic classifications of the body’s five senses and elevating the lowliest and most sensual.94

 Edible Futurist Breasts 69 Pagan and Christian philosophers alike had closely linked taste and touch with earthly embodiment and materiality; for this reason they were viewed as feminine and relegated to the bottom of a sensorial ranking. Plato and Aristotle linked vision to man’s spirit and mind, privileging sight as the noblest of the senses; during the Renaissance Alberti revived the antique view that the eye was “like a god of human parts;” Descartes reiterated the claim.95 Futurism celebrated the realms of taste and touch, long ranked as the “lowest” and most “feminine” of the senses,96 as offering new worlds of creative possibility. This rejection of classical sensorial hierarchies was another repudiation of the past, but it also theoretically made the body whole again by recuperating its dejected parts and opening it back up to total sensory perception. Looking at Futurism’s experiments with tactility offers a parallel with the taste experiments. In authoring Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto, Marinetti partnered with his wife Benedetta,97 who was the driving force behind the initiative and fabricated the first Tactile Panels.98 They explained, “Tactilism . . . must strive toward nothing but tactile harmonies, contributing only indirectly to the perfect spiritual communication between human beings through the epidermis.”99 Since the idea is to break down physical barriers between people through sensory stimulation, a highly sensual and sexual premise, there is potential benevolence and egalitarianism at the heart of this sense experiment. Marinetti’s personal feelings of love seem to spill into this manifesto. Taste and touch-enabled Futurists to press against the boundaries of the body and traditional gendered categories. On the one hand, touching and tasting another human being can be possessive and aggressive, thus fitting seamlessly into a familiar legacy of Futurist and Fascist chauvinism and pointing to the body as a site of violence. Yet if the same acts are fun, gentle, and mutual, then they are genuinely capable of breaking down emotional barriers and functioning as the highest form of physical togetherness, expressions of our capacity to love each other. Futurist experiments with taste and touch offer intriguing examples of how “paradoxical feminism” could emerge from the fluctuations of language between subjugation and liberation. The taste experiments not only empowered the potential of the “lowliest” and “feminine” senses, but they also elevated the act of preparing food out of the private sphere into the public space as a form of high art giving the everyday act of consumption, associated with the domestic duties of wives and mothers, a larger political and national significance. In each of these ways the cookbook challenged unspoken traditions of gendered signification. Nevertheless, with few exceptions, men remained the active protagonists. Like Benedetta’s contribution to the touch experiments, Mori’s role in The Futurist Cookbook has been neglected, but it represents a key instance when the normative Futurist male subject was decentered and the aggressive impulse we associate with Futurism takes an unexpected turn. To ignore, overlook, or undervalue the significance of such pioneering interventions is to accept the erasure of these women and to legitimize the historiographical legacy of modernism as a masculine enterprise. Rather these are instances when women directly shaped the Italian avant-garde from within. Mori’s recipe exploits the fertile ground of what was, and remains, the inherently complex issue of bodies and embodiment.

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Sacred and Profane Fragments The avant-gardes called for ruptures and disruptions, translating their demands into a language of the fragment in both literature and visual art.100 Antique fragments, as discussed in the previous chapter, featured in interwar Italian painting by De Chirico or Casorati. Often such fragments indicate nostalgia for a romanticized lost past, but among the Futurists, who celebrated the demise of the old order, fragments carried highly optimistic connotations, pointing to the birth of something new. In Cubist and Futurist collage, the act of deconstruction was celebrated as a means to reconstruct the future.101 Marinetti’s paroliberismo, or free-word poetry, called for the “destruction of syntax” in combinations of words and images that would liberate the poet from grammatical chains and permit new visions.102 While on the one hand frequent fragmentation, dismemberment, and abjectification of women’s bodies within Dada, Surrealism, and Futurism was part of a misogynist crisis of masculinity,103 on the other hand, it is evident that women artists often reappropriated tactics of bodily deconstruction and reconstruction to create empowering visual repostes.104 I understand Mori’s use of fragmentation in terms of this kind of positive reappropriation. Linda Nochlin elaborated on the particularity of the human fragment as a metaphor for modernity, locating its emergence to the destructive impulse of the French Revolution and highlighting Gericault’s human limbs and heads as an example of a unique foregrounding of abjectness.105 She connects such images to larger social themes such as the loss of wholeness and the disintegration of value in France at this time. The First World War represented another traumatic rupture of humanist values, one causing a cultural shift away from thinking about masculinity exclusively in terms of a flawless bodily specimen.106 In response to the numerous visibly fragmented bodies that returned from the war, the image of a fragmented male body acquired significance as emblematic of a moralizing rhetoric about masculine sacrifice, one that served a clear nationalist purpose.107 Yet Fascism in the interwar years demanded a very different kind of physical sacrifice from the bodies of its female citizens who were asked to give birth repeatedly, to nurture many sons at their breast, and to offer those sons up to the altar of nationalism. Originally referred to as “Mammelle italiche” in her letter of 1931, Mori’s breasts became “Mammelle italiane”108 in the published cookbook, an alteration that insists on a national rather than regional identity.109 Artistic training with Casorati ensured that Mori was familiar with the allegorical meanings historically attached to the female body, one of which was certainly the personification of the nation as in images of Britannia, Marianne, or Italia turrita. Represented in the context of modern movements for statehood, their breasts suggested that the newly established state would nurture the liberty and well-being of its citizens. In Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830) Marianne’s bare breasts symbolize the seductive possibility of freedom for which men should ironically give their individual lives in aid of a collective political rebirth. Daumier’s The Republic (1850) more literally suggests a maternal state that provides for its citizens. Francesco Hayez portrayed a more dejected Italy in La Meditazione (1850), whose single revealed breast seems here to accentuate her vulnerability, even

 Edible Futurist Breasts 71 if historically this trope was associated with the mythical warrior Amazons. She clings to a book and a cross for comfort, indicating the Catholic roots of the nation and the holy cause of national unity. Severini and Casorati borrowed the motif of the single bared breast in their paintings of Maternity (1916 and 1923–4, respectively), bolstering a subtext of italianità by virtue of association. Fascism promoted itself as heir to the Risorgimento, drawing on historic and religious symbolism to aestheticize politics.110 With Fascism, says Emilio Gentile, Italy became “the first western European country to institutionalize the sacralization of politics.”111 One way that Futurism and Fascism appropriated the cultural legacy and deep-rooted power of Catholic symbolism was to rebrand the sacrifice of the soldier in terms of the Catholic martyr. This was done at the massively popular Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution in 1932, which culminated in the Chapel of the Martyrs.112 Marinetti modelled this approach in his treatise, “Donne, preferite i gloriosi mutilati!,” first published in L’Italia futurista in 1916, wherein he rhapsodized about the beauty of truncated limbs. “Glory to human flesh torn apart by machine gun! . . . This is Futurism that glorifies the body modified and beautified by war.”113 Yet he invited women to make a sacrifice too, exhorting them to fight alongside men so as to be worthy of their love. What then of the mutilated female martyr? There was a powerful precedent within Catholicism. Whatever her personal convictions,114 the artist occasionally made a religious picture115 and repeatedly drew upon Catholic iconography. She did not simply revisit traditional religious themes with a new formal language, but often drew inspiration from Renaissance religious images. On this occasion, it is likely that inspiration came from Saint Agatha of Sicily, a fact that may be corroborated by Nella Marchesini’s coeval interest in this female martyr.116 In one iconographical tradition the saint holds her breasts on a plate, as in works by il Bergognone (1510), Zurbarán (1630–33), or Piero della Francesca whose Polyptych of St Anthony (1460–70) features a tondo of Agatha. The work is addressed in Roberto Longhi’s monograph and may have been discussed by Casorati during studio lessons. The saint’s iconography would have been as familiar to Mori then as they are today—part of a powerful Catholic imaginary. As the patron saint of martyrs, volcanic eruptions, breast cancer patients, and bakers she would have been a perfectly appropriate inspiration for The Futurist Cookbook. As a completed dish ready to be devoured, Mori’s breasts evoke this familiar hagiography of a popular female saint offering up her own severed breasts on a salver to symbolize her horrific martyrdom. For Catholic viewers Agatha’s dismemberment represented her initiation into sainthood and by virtue of martyrdom she achieved a level of gender neutrality often associated with Godly union. The surprising humor that can be read into this imagery is evidenced by the existence of a Sicilian confection that transforms Agatha’s agony into an amusing pastry, a cassatella di Sant’Agata, more festively called minnuzze di Sant’Agata, or Agatha’s tiny tits. Also made of almond paste, these treats are commonly capped with icing and a candied cherry. Abscised breasts act here as metaphors of materiality and synecdoches of the nourishing maternal body that Agatha offers up or sacrifices to God in exchange for her own spiritual nourishment. Agatha can therefore offer an appropriate framework within which to make sense of Mori’s methodology: perhaps she offers up a mock physical

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sacrifice to a higher power on behalf of the Italian woman in exchange for spiritual and intellectual fulfillment. I believe that if Mori’s reference to martyrdom taps into a nationalist discourse, then it does so with the modifying instruction of this Catholic virago. According to the Golden Legend, a popular medieval collection of hagiographies by Jacobus de Varagine, Agatha refuses to worship the pagan idols when summoned to do so by the lecherous provost Quintianus, resulting in her torture and martyrdom. He commands that her breasts should be twisted and cut off. In response to her torture, Agatha cries out, “Impious, cruel, brutal tyrant, are you not ashamed to cut off from a woman that which your mother suckled you with? In my soul I have breasts untouched and unashamed with which I nourish all my senses, having consecrated them to the Lord from infancy.”117 During the night she is visited by Saint Peter in the guise of an old nobleman who offers to heal her, but she initially refuses to be healed, saying, “I have never applied any material remedy to my body . . . Because I have my Lord Jesus Christ . . . and he by a single word can cure everything and by his word restores all things. If he so wills, he can cure me instantly.”118 The saint subsequently finds her wounds healed and her breasts restored. Two kilometers from Mori’s family home in the hallways of the Pitti hang several iconic images depicting Agatha’s gruesome sacrifice. It is clear from her diaries and accounts by her son that Mori spent a good deal of time exploring the Uffizi and Pitti collections. Sebastiano del Piombo’s sexually titillating Martyrdom of Saint Agatha (1520) depicts the moment prior to mutilation. The saint’s nipples are gripped and twisted with pliers by her two, clearly aroused, torturers, as the Roman provost looks on from the left. Her hands are bound at her back and her torso is on central display, emphasizing both the erotic charge and impending sacrifice of her body. Scholars have noted how Agatha’s story provides the viewer with an outlet for sadistic and voyeuristic tendencies in religious art such as this.119 The readied knife sits prominently at arm’s length from the torturers in the right foreground. The saint’s looming mutilation portends the transubstantiation of her earthly feminine materiality into transcendent celestial saintliness. As Renaissance scholars note, depictions of Agatha frequently take on overtones of the virago linked to her physical and spiritual heroism. The saint, says one, “has chosen to defy, even deny, her own sexuality” and “dismemberment is a form of disintegration and reintegration in the martyrdom for Saint Agatha, where mutilation occurs as a sacrifice in defense of Christianity.”120 In another less celebrated Pitti version, attributed to the Florentine School, the saint’s clothes are draped loosely about her as she turns her body and gazes upward. She extends a platter with two breasts upward and leftward toward a heavenly light. The symbolic value of her offering to God here becomes overt. As a self-proclaimed “virgo Deo dicta,” or bride of Christ, Agatha offers herself materially and spiritually to God. The light is both divine and natural, implying transcendence of the flesh through spiritual illumination. Like Agatha’s breasts, Mori’s are raised toward the light of the sun, intended perhaps not as the light of God but as the intense light of a Futurist or artistic salvation. As illustrated in her letter, Mori’s breasts deftly straddle the line between whole and fragment, surface and depth, and visibility and invisibility lending them a sense of

 Edible Futurist Breasts 73 duplicity. If in the Renaissance images Agatha’s breasts sit alone on the plate, then the ripples of custard and cream surrounding them in Mori’s recipe act like waves of the sea lapping around the mounds, suggesting that the rest of a body could lie beneath those waves. Like Agatha’s breasts being lifted into the heavenly light, they rise from below the depths up to the surface and toward the metaphorical light of the Mediterranean sun. It has been suggested that this exposure implies a violent encounter between the symbolic feminine (breast) and masculine (sun).121 In A Woman’s Womb Enif Robert would stage just such an encounter, opening her robe to feel the “wonderful uncivilized brutality” of the sun’s “all-encompassing embrace” lacerating her belly.122 Graziella Parati has described this in terms of Robert’s acquiescence to rape by the sun, an agent of Marinetti’s violence. For her, the incident points to the Futurist woman’s loss of control and alienation from her own body. Mori’s documented love of the seaside, her bright crystalline seascapes, her intimate paintings of dear friends lying joyfully in the sun, and her education in the visual arts suggest another reading. Italian sunshine had positive connotations for her. She was not overly familiar with Futurist writing, having only just approached the movement. She would have been far more likely to associate sunlight with knowledge and/or divine illumination linked to artistic and Catholic tradition. Before assuming the woman artist’s masochistic and acritical acceptance of her own victimization, thereby adding insult to injury, we might opt to take her seriously, believing that she didn’t take Marinetti seriously. Her breasts may then symbolize women emerging from the shadows and into the light in a liberating kind of exposure to the world. Mori explored the potential significance of the fragmented body in many paintings. In an untitled Futurist study of 1932, the exaggerated lips, teeth, and tongue of a dissected human face are discernable among fleshy pink geometric shapes (Figure 3.4). La danza della beguiné or Danza erotica: beguiné (Beguine Dance 1932) and Suonatore di jazz (Jazz Player 1933) were inspired by popular musical trends of the 1930s and have potentially humorous undertones (Figures 3.5 and 3.6). The former shows two human figures, a male and female, suggestively intertwined; the latter depicts the abstracted face of a black musician whose round eyes bulge out of his face as he wails on a trumpet that emits Futuristic force lines.123 One scholar described this painting as a “discordant composition of cylinders, spheres, and fractured planes in which the strident color and lyrical forms evoke the nature of the sound with just enough realistic referents to suggest musician and instrument.”124 A large phallic form rises up in the center of the Beguine Dance, suggesting the arousing consequences of what has been described as “the licentious national dance of Martinique” and “an erotic dance of fecundity.”125 Mori’s inflated appendage seems to suggest the perceived eroticism of the dance. The beguine was a type of dance and music first introduced to Europe at the Martinique pavilion of the French Colonial Exhibition in Paris of 1931, where it was played by musician Alexandre Stellio and his orchestra.126 The year that Mori made her painting, Turin’s La Stampa newspaper publicized beguine in an article.127 In Jazz Player the musician’s huge round bulging eyes recall Louis Armstrong’s exuberant stage presence. Between 1933 and 1935, the celebrated jazz composer, singer, and trumpeter was touring Europe128 so it is possible he inspired the work. In both works fragmentation gives the figures the movement

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Figure 3.4  Untitled (Futurist Study), c. 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 32 × 22 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

Figure 3.5  La danza della beguiné or Danza erotica: beguiné (Beguine Dance), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 101 × 69 cm. Now lost. Photograph courtesy of the Mori Family Archive.

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Figure 3.6  Suonatore di jazz (Jazz Player), 1933, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 54 × 55 cm. Mori Family Archive.

and energy of their musical subjects and a comical emphasis is placed on certain anatomical parts. Like the jazz player’s bulging eyes or the dancer’s engorged member, Mori’s breasts are parts that teasingly evoke a whole. During the Ventennio the word “jazz” was frequently used to reference a large range of Afro-American musical styles and while the Futurists initially promoted and celebrated these modern influences,129 jazz and other foreign cultural influences later became a target for racist and xenophobic cultural criticism by Fascists and their Futurist adherents.130 Mori made at least three works on the subject of African-inspired music and dance. Seen independently they are more ambiguous, but comparatively they seem humorous. It is entirely possible that she was overtly mocking these musical genres in racist terms by emphasizing the hyper-sexuality of beguine or the clownish stage presence of Armstrong. Yet given her ironic stance on the politicizing of other aspects of culture, it seems possible that she was celebrating the freedom and movement in music and dance.

New Woman? Mori’s breasts were not the only fragmented body parts conceived for consumption in the cookbook. Marinetti’s “Pranzo di scapolo,” or Bachelor’s lunch, envisioned edible portrait heads that included “the enemy”131 and Farfa’s “Fragolamammella,” or Strawberrybreasts, were another set of edible breasts. These were served on a pink

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plate and made “due mammelle femminili erettili—two feminine erectile breasts” from ricotta-tinged pink with Campari and nipples of candied strawberry. Other fresh strawberries were buried in the ricotta “per mordere un’ideale moltiplicazione di mammelle immaginarie—so as to bite down on a perfect multiplication of imagined breasts.”132 Comparatively, the duplicity of Mori’s recipe and its witty repartee becomes more apparent. If Farfa’s breasts are the epitome of fantasy: inviting, pink, and endlessly delectable, then Mori’s are less inviting or yielding. It matters whether it is a man or a woman who presents you with a plate of breasts because only one of them is offering you something of their own, something they are naturally entitled to offer. Female breasts are a multivalent symbol of motherhood, fertility, and femininity linked to sexuality and birth. They became a recurrent theme within Futurism powerfully symbolizing the conflicted relationship that it articulated with respect to women, “the feminine,” and the maternal. In his founding manifesto as in his novel Mafarka, Marinetti evoked breasts as symbols of the female body’s nourishing and life-giving abilities even as he used them to evoke the dangerously suffocating effects of feminine wiles.133 In Fillìa’s second volume of poetry Lussuria radioelettrica (Radioelectric Lust 1925) one of the headings is “Amore futurista ai seni degli altoparlanti” (Futurist Love for the Breasts of Loudspeakers). In his celebrations of radio technology, he associates the words of the loudspeaker with mother’s milk suggesting, according to one scholar, that this technology of communication can nourish the “new,” or perhaps newborn, man or woman of modernism.134 Evocations of the female breast do not merely represent a biological source of nourishment but stand for maternal creative power itself—female life force. It has been noted by others that the cookbook is underpinned by primitive substantialist beliefs according to which the qualities of foods ingested could be transferred to the individual consuming them.135 The religious notion of transubstantiation has been specifically discussed in relation to Tullio d’Albisola’s L’anguria lirica (Lyrical Watermelon).136 This idea underscores the significance of symbolically ingesting the life force of the opposite sex to empower one’s masculine or feminine side as needed. Interestingly, many recipes in the cookbook stipulate that they are for consumption by one sex or the other. Marinetti’s rhetorical desire to devour women leaves a bad taste in postmodern mouths and it is possible to interpret the violence done to these breasts twice over (severed and digested) as an act of annihilation or appropriation of womanhood. Yet in the context of Futurism’s “paradoxical feminism” it may likewise be that the consumption of female flesh represents a metaphorical ritual with the transformative potential to neutralize the power of sex and gender. One scholar argues that while The Futurist Cookbook affirms “the centrality of male actions and the final subordination of the woman,” in Tullio d’Albisola’s L’anguria lirica, the creative or generative process occurs only after ingestion of the female force thus permitting women an “autonomous agency” and producing an artistic conception “born from the encounter of irreconcilable opposites: tin and poetry, male and female, food and art, body and soul.”137 It is highly plausible to read Mori’s recipe in a similar way, as combining the cultural force of Catholic iconography and ritual in the creation of a new Futurist ritual. Her fleshy offering, though it may channel sacred symbolism in the spirit of these Futurist and/or Fascist times, can perform a liberating mutilation, a

 Edible Futurist Breasts 77 figurative sacrifice in defense of the artist’s creative claims, one in which she sheds her residual feminine/material/maternal associations in the process of self-actualization as a Futurist virago. If we read these edible breasts as an offering to the forces of Futurism, this is not necessarily synonymous with a sacrifice to the forces of Fascism. While edible breasts may represent an offering of female power, figuratively speaking, in a more literal sense, when dissected from the body, or the body politic, breasts no longer function in the state machine. Apropos both Futurism and Fascism, we may question the genuinely sacrificial spirit of her offering. Fascism gradually abandoned its radical anticlerical and proto-feminist positions to align itself with the Catholic Church and promote traditional gender hierarchies as legitimized by the “naturalness” of male authority and ideologies of “virilism.”138 The regime fought back against the masculinizing threat of the donna maschietto, advocating traditional ideals of femininity in which women were “expected to be daughters, wives and mothers, and nothing else.”139 Propaganda extolled marriage and motherhood as women’s sacred duties, drawing on the strong Catholic tradition of the Virgin Mary. The film Madri d’italia (1935) idealized and glorified motherhood while simultaneously stressing maternal sacrifice and responsibility.140 Interwar Italians were told to regard the family as the mother cell, or cellula madre. Church and state advocated the idea that mothers should be the glue holding the family together, sheltering husbands and children from the pressures of modern society.141 Yet on a personal level, Mori was disillusioned with these idealized notions of marriage and motherhood. Her decision to ask for a legal separation from her husband in 1924 was highly unusual and, after much family pressure, she attempted to reunite with him in Florence in the spring of 1932, thus leaving behind the stimulating professional atmosphere of Turin. Her paintings of this period testify to darkly pensive and personal reflections on the challenges of motherhood and marriage.142 Maternità futurista (Futurist Maternity 1932) demonstrates that despite her later verbal celebration of motherhood, she struggled with its limitations (Figure 3.7). She shows us a mother and child bound together with heavy black chains. If the Virgin Mary was a model of perfect motherhood channeled in Fascist propaganda, Mori challenges that model. Drawing on Renaissance Catholic precedent from Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna (1310) to Sandro Botticelli’s Madonna della Loggia (1467), she creates a tortured modern version of Theotokos. She transforms motherhood from a warm, heartfelt, saintly undertaking into a physical burden. A monkey-like child clings to the mother’s neck, weighing her down just like the chains that encircle them both. In its earthy brown tones, the painting suggests that nature itself has closed in around her. There is a clear blue light that filters in from the outer left of the picture frame, hinting at some distant possibility, but the light is behind them and her gaze is directed away from it. Mori has imagined the maternal body as an enslaved body, but her title adds a curious dimension to the image setting up a dialectical pull between biological reproduction and cultural production. What exactly is Futurist about this maternity? As dark shadows creep upward from below and a distant heavenly light shines across the figures from above, the figure seems caught between procreative immanence and creative transcendence. Perhaps the title suggests her personal experience of having

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Figure 3.7  Maternità futurista (Futurist Maternity), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 50 × 70 cm. Mori Family Archive.

turned away from the light of creative inspiration in Turin and dutifully returned to domestic responsibilities in Florence. Perhaps she shares a sense of disillusionment with the unfulfilled promises of Futurism or expresses an elusive desire to experience the world beyond the confines of motherhood. In Possesso (Possession 1932–5) she left a record of anxiety about male aggression and domination (Figure 3.8). A nude female figure is clasped in the arms of a darkly dressed male, whose hands appear like claws to ensnare her and whose eyes emit beams of light that penetrate through her form, looking like solid jail bars. The two figures are fused at the head in an embrace that conveys a sense of captivity rather than intimacy. Her title underscores this as a portrayal of violent ownership. Like Käthe Kollwitz in Death Seizing a Woman (1934), Mori uses spatial density, vertical composition, and figure placement to transform closeness into an aggression. This work shares a dark emotive quality with Casorati’s Woman and Armor (1921), in which a pale nude female figure sits with folded arms across her midsection as a massive suit of heavy dark grey armor looms over her. Both juxtapose female nudity with a threatening male or masculine presence. In Casorati’s picture the menacing hard edges of the hollow metal suit and its dark interior volumes contrast with the soft, pale, luminous skin of the young woman. Her vulnerability is emphasized by her apprehensive look toward the viewer. Possession suggests that the artist was thinking about connections between vision and domination. Casorati’s version of Susanna (1929) insinuates the voyeurism, manipulation, and treachery experienced by the biblical heroine into the scene of a contemporary studio. The model futilely seeks to conceal her lower half, her cheeks are flushed, and she regards the man beside her

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Figure 3.8  Possesso (Possession), 1932–5, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 39 × 27 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London. Enzo Sperone Collection.

warily. Mori’s painting might be a kind of Futurist Susanna that pushes the scene over the edge into violence as the male devours the female with his eyes. Clinica Sanatrix (Sanatrix Clinic 1932) is a more enigmatic work on the subject of maternity (Plate 8). The title may refer to a private maternity ward that opened that year in Turin.143 It depicts a sleeping figure set amid pale blue and white diagonal planes lying horizontally across the canvas. The color choices suggest a brightly lit hospital environment and the curved profile of the figure suggests an expectant mother. A triangular plane of blue light falls directly from above, spotlighting a heartshaped bright red form cradled at the center of the work and nestled into the curves of the figure. As in Futurist Maternity the presence of a bright light from beyond the picture might indicate divine illumination or inspiration. The red spot could be inflammation or disease, but it is more like a fetus. Could the picture be metaphorical in its evocation of procreation as synonymous with creation? It is possible that red is used as a means to indicate vigor, life, or energy in the spirit of Fillìa and Balla. For Fillìa, red signified “crea​tivo-​leale​-aper​to—cr​eativ​e-hon​est-o​pen.”144 ​ For Balla it was the “Violent: reanimator of muscles blood nerves brain.”145 If the previous two images suggest the misery and sacrifice of marriage and motherhood, this painting is a more uplifting view of pregnancy as a life growing within, one that suggests the metaphorical link between procreative and creative processes. Lisa Tickner asserted that women artists have historically had two options with respect to representing the female body: either to ignore it as “muddled or dangerous for the production of clear statements” or “to take the heritage and work with it—

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attack it, reverse it, expose and use it.”146 Benedetta and Mori evince this assertion, for while the former ignored the female figure to focus on abstract imagery, the latter used the female body in personal and expressive ways. Her nudes form part of this genre’s comeback in later Futurism, as discussed in the previous chapter. Yet Mori’s highly individual style often evokes associations with Magical Realism or Surrealism. She echoed her mentor’s habit of quoting past images, but utilized force lines, masses of color, and faceless figures, exploiting the formal freedoms permitted by Futurism and rendering such quotations less evident. Never having completely abandoned the stylistic tendencies she developed in Turin, she used the soft contours and enigmatic aura of Magic Realism to create pictures that often seem intentionally ambiguous. If Surrealist women like Leonor Fini or Frida Kahlo turned to their own realities and their own bodies for inspiration, Mori avoided explicit self-references. Yet she shared with these Surrealist women an interest in the mysteries or magic of embodied female experience. Likely inspired by personal experience, she gave her female figures an opaqueness and anonymity that confers more universal political significance. Like Enif Robert, who openly decried the regime’s pronatalist policies in an article for L’Impero of 1929,147 her figural paintings resist the idea that a woman should be a wife, a mother, and nothing more.

Conclusions Even if Mori’s recipe participates in a kind of sacralized modernist nationalism, she has become the subject and object of her own project, reclaiming the meaning and power of the female body from its various historical and contemporary appropriations. While “Italian Breasts in the Sun” can be read in phallocentric terms, to do so would ignore both the identity and context of its authorship. I see the recipe as performing an act of gender subterfuge inside the pages of The Futurist Cookbook. It speaks bilingually along the border of gender alterity, outwardly conforming to phallocentric expectations while offering a critical alternative reading. It actively illustrates the kind of “play with mimesis” that Irigaray has identified as a woman’s only means of gaining critical distance from masculine linguistic structures by trying to “recover the place of her exploitation by discourse, without allowing herself to be simply reduced to it.”148 Breasts, the ultimate source of original nourishment, are offered up for literal consumption, digestion, and excretion. They are sacrificial offerings on the altar of Futurist masculinity that Mori presents as a “fruit to bite, chew and suck.” In this respect she utilizes a misogynist Futurist language in which the female body is an emblem of material otherness. However, the liminal nature of materiality is highlighted in this unfolding of the gastronomic experience. Eater and eaten are merged. Mori’s culminating ingredient adds a final punning duality. She indicates that the dish is to be covered in hot pepper, ensuring that Futurist lips, tongues, stomachs, and intestines will burn with a painful aftertaste. In other words these breasts bite back. In its piquancy the dish is both sexually provocative and sharp. Masculinity experiences a bittersweet, or spicy-sweet, triumph over femininity; masculine dominance becomes self-defeating as the comforting symbols of women’s bodily otherness are integrated by ingestion into

 Edible Futurist Breasts 81 the universal One. In the end, the consumption of these mammary tissues indicates the finality of maternal sustenance. Once eaten, breasts can be suckled no more. Once devoured by the “insatiable tongues” of the Futurists, women can no longer be the material others against which Futurism makes its masculinist claims. Futurism would permit Mori to experience the new freedoms and adventures associated with modern womanhood. Her culinary and aviation adventures were two sides of an avant-garde utopian dream of transforming organic bodies from the inside as well as the outside. On the publication of The Futurist Cookbook, Marinetti and Fillìa welcomed Mori enthusiastically to the Futurist fold, dedicating a personal copy to the artist in which they describe her as having been “kidnapped in bitter battle with the enemy army.”149 She later repudiated their grandiloquent assertion, countering with, “I never gave myself over to the ‘courageous vanguard,’ nor was I ‘an aeropainter kidnapped in bitter battle with the enemy army,’ as written in an inflamed dedication to me by Fillìa and Marinetti . . . I only painted to express myself. Without concern for anything else.”150 She refused to be claimed.

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Depicting herself in the driver’s seat of a green Bugatti, left hand on the wheel, driving helmet fastened under her chin, and scarf flying in the wind, Tamara de Lempicka’s Autoportrait (1925) has long been regarded as an icon of the liberated “New Woman” of modern Europe. The femme moderne in Paris was constantly pictured on the move, going places in automobile, speedboat, or airplane.1 Yet for all its seductive qualities and emancipatory implications, Lempicka’s painting also communicates a conflicting, historically prescient, sense of “physical containment and repression” according to one scholar.2 Indeed when published on the cover of Die Dame in 1927, her image appeared at a crucial turning point in the Berlin magazine’s history: its celebration of independent professional women was waning and the women designers and illustrators who had previously filled its pages were gradually disappearing.3 Capturing a strange dualism between freedom and constraint, the painting can remind us that the “New Woman” occupied a precarious place. Held to be symbolic of the larger fastpaced changes effecting modern society, she came under constant scrutiny and debate. In Italy, as in France, ideas about modern womanhood proliferated during the interwar years as real women found themselves caught between the expectations of the past and the possibilities of the future. Modern machines represented those new possibilities and were the frequent subject of debate between conservative and liberal tendencies. Arguably one of Mori’s most fascinating pictures is L’Ebrezza fisica della maternità (The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity), which was shown at the Venice Biennale of 1936 and echoes Lempicka’s bold Art Deco ode to the modern woman on the move (Plate 9). Like her recipe for The Futurist Cookbook, this complex image speaks across multiple registers, reflecting ironically on the joys of childbirth while conveying, like Autoportrait, a paradoxical sense of contained freedom. The woman pictured is apparently in the throes of elation as she gives birth, but what we see is a foreshortened, compacted, bound, and twisting nude figure who appears asleep or dead. Lempicka presents herself looking out from the clear contours and solid square geometry of an automobile stronghold, but Mori’s evanescent silhouette of a woman is blurred, dissolving, and spinning. If the Art Deco painting conflates the seductive materiality of driver and vehicle, then the Futurist one ponders a more allegorical, intangible, or ethereal plane of existence inspired by the out-of-body experience of flight, conflating a Magic Realist theme with a Futurist one. Here it is not the woman’s face, but her lower half that is pressed up against the picture plane. She does not show us the urbane, refined, fashionable, and impenetrable exterior of the New Woman’s mask (or

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masquerade), but her vulnerable, naked, and penetrable insides. Despite its title, the painting disturbs as easily as it thrills. The hazy lines of her pink and red forms are laid out before us in a scene of fragmentation and disintegration. Areas of passage and curved force lines smear and slice through a body that appears to be spiraling around a red vortex of female genitals. Set against a dark circular backdrop of a spinning propeller, the female body is superimposed with the thin contours of other airplane parts such as a wing or tail section. One thick red streak of paint swipes across her throat, her head flops to one side, and her arms are pinned to her sides. The body on display is the subject of the painting even as it becomes an object of erasure. The pale pink skin mediates between the shadowy background of blue and grey and the intense red stain dominating the foreground. This is a celebration of the female body, but a messy one, that emphasizes the shared materiality of flesh and paint. Her inside becomes outside as pools of red spill from a heart-shaped center, perhaps evoking Fillìa’s description of this “creative-honest-open” color once more. Her image counters the erotic charge of a painting like Courbet’s Origin of the World (1866)4 by confronting a presumably male viewer with the uncontainable effluence of female interiority, generative lifeblood. It further challenges his voyeuristic realism with a foggy painterly abstraction that emphasizes the materiality of childbirth even as it shrouds the details. Mori made this body a battleground long before Barbara Kruger’s 1989 photographic silkscreen. No simple panegyric to the machine age, this painting departs from quintessentially Futurist macchinolatria, or machine worship, exemplifying Mori’s ambiguous approach to aeropittura, or aeropainting. Here Mori’s aeropaintings are examined in the cultural context of a Futurism and Fascism that often co-opted the symbolism of the airplane for masculinity and militarism. Some of her works, I suggest, frustrate such equivalencies by inserting women into the spaces of this technology.

Airplane Fever Enrico Crispolti was one of the first scholars to discuss later Futurist developments, initially advocating the use of the term “Second Futurism.”5 As he explained, “by the end of the 1920s, interest in the machine had given way to Aeropittura (Aeropainting) and its themes of flight and extraterrestrial fantasy.”6 A long list of terms, like aeropainting, aeropoetry, or aerosculpture, were coined in the manifestos of the 1930s to evoke a new aerial-inspired sensibility.7 “Aerovita,” a kind of branded term, encapsulated the interrelationship between art and life in the age of aviation and appeared as a supplement in the Futurist periodical Futurismo on November 12, 1933. Despite the very real propagandistic motives that marked much of this art, it constituted a significant manifestation of avant-garde machine aesthetics. Evidence of aviation technology’s immense cultural impact on the Italian avantgarde appears across a wide range of media as in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s film Forse che si forse che no (Maybe Yes Maybe No 1910), the experimental music of Balilla Pratella’s L’Aviatore Dro (Aviator Dro 1913–20), Paolo Buzzi’s poetry collection Aeroplani (Airplanes 1909), and Fedele Azari’s Teatro aerea futurista (Futurist Aerial

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 85 Theatre 1919),8 to name a few. In 1908 Marinetti cast himself and his car as modern and mechanical equivalents of Bellerophon and his winged horse in “To My Pegasus.” He flew for the first time in 1910 with Peruvian pilot Juan Bielovucic, an experience that inspired him to write Le Monoplan du Pape (The Pope’s Monoplane 1912), which was published two years later in Italian as L’Aeroplano del Papa. Later he went further, declaring, “We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and we are not joking when we declare that in human flesh wings lie dormant.”9 Here Marinetti makes a felicitous reference to Plato’s Phaedrus, a dialogue in which Socrates dwells extensively on the idea of madness as a divine gift of the Gods and explains the winged nature of the soul.10 The Futurist founder’s evocation of the tale is not merely a celebration of his own philosopher-madness; it also suggests his awareness of the mythical significance and metaphorical implications (spiritual and intellectual) of flight. Artists after the First World War drew increasing inspiration from both real and imagined experiences of aviation and Mori was saturated in this airplane romance. Futurism’s aviation craze was part of a broader cultural phenomenon whereby the spectacle of aviation became an integral part of public consciousness as large crowds gathered to watch air shows or competitive races and millions followed via newspaper and radio.11 Avant-garde machine aesthetics romanticized this spellbinding new technology, which represented the modern realization of a deeply rooted psychic desire to fly. Modern humanity had achieved an ancient dream. French inventor, engineer, and aviation pioneer, Louis Blériot, is often quoted as having said, “The most beautiful dream that has haunted the heart of man since Icarus is today reality.”12 Artists, architects and designers across Europe embraced the arrival of the airplane as the symbol of a rational and scientific new age. As early as 1913 Robert Delaunay highlighted three great symbols of modern technology in Sun, Tower, Airplane, picturing the Eiffel Tower, a Ferris wheel, and a biplane, and placing the biplane at the canvas’s apex. In Suprematist Composition: Airplane Flying (1915) Kazimir Malevich made a rare reference to the outside world, linking his Suprematist style of non-objective painting to the supremacy of the airplane by means of a shared escape from nature toward the cosmic. Echoing the mindset found in Futurist manifestos, he wrote, “I have destroyed the ring of the horizon and got out of the circle of objects, the horizon-ring that has imprisoned the artist and the forms of nature.”13 “The beautiful machine,” declared Fernand Léger, “is the modern beautiful subject.”14 The Museum of Modern Art in New York championed the idea of the machine as an aesthetic object early on with its exhibition Machine Art (1934) in which engines, pistons, and propellers were displayed as paintings and sculptures. Le Corbusier, too, celebrated the airplane as the pinnacle of modern machinery in Aircraft (1935). Here he captures the enthusiasm of the aviation age, describing the airplane as the symbol of the modern era and idealizing the aesthetic of the machine as offering a “clearness of function.” Although overshadowed by the emotive force of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and its condemnation of aerial warfare, the Hall Tronconique of the Aeronautical Pavilion, designed by Felix Aublet, Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay, and Leopold Survage for the Exposition Internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne, or Paris Expo, presented an antipodal celebration of the airplane as art. While Max Ernst’s

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Murderous Airplane collage (1920) or Picasso’s Guernica typify pessimistic responses to the age of aviation, such reactions were by no means universal, even among the Dada and Surrealists. Marcel Duchamp or Renée Magritte demonstrated complex and at times paradoxical responses to science and technology.15 “Painting is over and done with,” Duchamp is recorded to have said at a Paris aviation show, “Who could do anything better than this propeller?”16 Deeply inspired by her experience of airplane travel, Gertrude Stein wrote in 1938, “One must not forget that the earth seen from an airplane is more splendid than the earth seen from an automobile. The automobile is the end of progress on earth . . . I saw there on the earth the mingling lines of Picasso . . . I saw the simple solutions of Braque, I saw the wandering lines of Masson . . . ”17 Her words testify to the advent of aviation as signaling a profound shift in worldview, one that captured the visual imagination of modernists everywhere, albeit evoking a large range of reactions. Yet precisely because of its ability to straddle the line between myth and modernism, tradition and innovation, the sacred and secular, individual heroism and collective responsibility, aviation imagery was perfectly suited to capture and communicate Fascism’s embrace of oppositions. Flight was both a dream rooted in Mediterranean myth and a reality made possible by modern science. It was a grand adventure for body and mind, a symbol of the pilot’s individual bravery and his (or her) willingness to sacrifice for the collective good. Aviation technology may have been new in the twentieth century, but the dream of flight and the sacred symbolism of the sky provided familiar narratives with which first Futurism and then Fascism could activate the airplane as a powerful multivalent symbol of nationalist consciousness. Tapping variously into ancient myth and Catholic iconography, interwar airplane imagery often operated simultaneously as part of what Claudio Fogu has called Fascism’s “historic imaginary”18 and in collaboration with what Emilio Gentile described as the “sacralization of politics.”19

Knights of the Air The airplane became a key part of what Marjorie Perloff terms “the myth of the vertical”20 at the heart of the Futurist moment, which incrementally came to be emblematic of the virile “New Man” of Mussolini’s Fascism whose feats were comparable to those of Ulysses or Hercules and whose exploits announced the arrival of a new mythical golden era of manly heroes.21 The pilot embodied Marinetti’s superuomo, or superman, fantasies of an evolved “non-human, mechanical species” whose “metallic discipline” will only be “guessed at by the brightest spirits.”22 During the First World War aircraft became viable weapons and pilots were celebrated as modern knights of the air. Early airplanes offered no protection from high winds, plummeting temperatures or thin air and when Charles Lindberg crossed the Atlantic in 1927 he endured over thirty hours in the cockpit with little food, no sleep, and the very real threat of deadly storms. Summoning ideologies of heroic action, courage in the face of danger, self-sacrifice, and patriotism, aviation imagery of the interwar period was gradually marked as masculine terrain. Precisely because flight was experienced and envisioned as a battle

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 87 against the material elements with frequently tragic consequences for the pilot, a contest of mankind versus nature, women were seen as antithetical to this cultural fantasy. Images of the heroic aviator pervaded Italian popular culture and propaganda in the 1930s. Italo Balbo would be celebrated as a national hero after his transatlantic crossings of 1930–1 (to Brazil) and 1933 (to Chicago and New York), a major propaganda victory for the regime that brought Italy into the international spotlight. Time magazine even featured the Italian Minister of the Airforce on its cover in June 1933. Giacomo Balla celebrated his first triumphant crossing in Celeste metallico aeroplano (Balbo e trasvolatori italiani) (Celestial metallic Airplane (Balbo and the Trans(Atlantic) Italian Aviators) 1931). Enrico Prampolini paid homage to the Air Marshal in Aeroritratto simultaneo di Italo Balbo (Simultaneous Aeroportrait of Italo Balbo 1940), a picture of the pilot in a fiery cocoon-like cockpit, dissected from the rest of the aircraft, and hovering over a marble-sized earth. Merely by association the airplane conferred heroic or devotional status, as in Alfredo Ambrosi’s Aeroritratti (Aeroportraits 1939), where prominent figures of aeropainting stand on an aircraft in the sky. Gerardo Dottori’s La Famiglia Marinetti (Marinetti Family 1932) would communicate Marinetti’s patriarchal status by setting up a dichotomous relationship between the peaceful blue and green earthly realm occupied by his children and the intense fiery or violent “masculine” world of aviation that whirls about the founder’s head. If the work is a modern sacra famiglia, an apotheosis of Marinetti’s celebration as patron saint of Futurism,23 then his halo is constructed from the blaze of aerial bombardment. These artists used the same visual language in “aeroportraits” of Mussolini. It was, above all, Mussolini who was lionized in propaganda of the period as the nation’s “Primo Pilota,” symbolizing his role as the patriarch or “omnipotent and omniscient master” of Italy and the Italian people.24 Initiating something of a tradition among authoritarian leaders, he liked to present himself as a master of all machinery from tractors to motorcycles and airplanes.25 Guido Mattioli’s book Mussolini aviatore (Aviator Mussolini 1935–6) illustrates the way that Fascism appropriated and sacralized aviation symbolism on behalf of its cult of leadership. “No machine requires as much concentration of the human mind, as much human willpower, as the flying machine does. The pilot really knows what it means to govern. Hence there appears to be a necessary, inner spiritual affinity between aviation and fascism. Every aviator is born a fascist.”26 In his description, the flying machine intrinsically marks out the chosen ones: heroes, leaders, and Fascists. A telling example of aviator symbolism allied to the sacralization of political leadership lies in Ernesto Thayaht’s Il Grande Nocchiero (The Great Helmsman 1939), used to laud Mussolini as “primo pilota.” It transforms Mussolini into a metallic robot who straddles the horizon at the helm of an aerial ship among a mist of cumulous clouds while a chain, encircling his latter half, falls away with broken links. Three airplanes, flying in formation, race forward from the wheel of his airship and the immense image of the robot pilot and his aerial fleet looms above a map of Europe. Across the sky above stretches a sinister-looking barbed-wire fence, implying an ominous security in a new aerial sphere without borders; the chains that fall away imply the freedom of flight and the heights of Italy’s new place in the world, however, the map of Europe shown

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below implies the contradictory forces of an Italy able to conquer and deprive others of the same freedoms, rendering the terrestrial realm the object of aerial subjugation. This image captures a frightening blend of Futurist literary fantasy and Fascist political ideology, for the heroic, superhuman, and mechanical pilot has in fact been completely dehumanized. It has no eyes to navigate its way forward and no nerves to feel the pain of violence or death. It is a picture projecting the idea of a Futurist mechanomorph into the realm of aviation and political ambition, which shows us a Fascist ship, that is, the nation, (mis)guided by an indestructible, but soulless, blind, and unfeeling automaton. As aviation became increasingly linked to power and leadership, it became decreasingly accessible to the lower elements of society, women included. A woman’s enthusiasm for flight could be interpreted as a distraction from her expected domestic responsibilities to husband, home, and family because it facilitated disembodied freedoms that were theoretically reserved for men. One particular anecdote reveals the potency of flying as a powerful political act in the public sphere reserved for a heroic male elite. When in 1934 Mussolini read an advertisement for women members to join the local flying club in Bologna, he sent an immediate telegram to the mayor instructing him to retract the invitation and instead bar women from attending. “The most fascist thing Italian women can do is to pilot many children,” he wrote, “flying, on the other hand, is a serious affair that must be left to men.”27 The perceived power of flight, both real and symbolic, was, for Mussolini, something that belonged to men. Cultural discourses surrounding aviation in interwar Italy therefore seem to illustrate what Judith Butler has encapsulated as the “magical relations of reciprocity whereby the female sex becomes restricted to its body, and the male body, fully disavowed, becomes paradoxically, the incorporeal instrument of an ostensibly radical freedom.”28 When it came to the Fascist regime’s desire for conquest by land, sea, and air in automobile, speedboat, or airplane, women were supposed to be found in the home and not at the helm.

The Myth of Icarus In the age of aviation it is perhaps not surprising to discover a proliferation of references to Icarus and retellings of the ancient Greek myth, as in Blériot’s aforementioned quotation. In his first Futurist novel Marinetti reimagined this cautionary tale of an inventor father, Daedalus, and his hubristic son, Icarus, as a triumph rather than a failure, as a victory of culture over nature. His protagonist, Mafarka (a Futurist Daedalus), builds a mechanomorphic flying superson, Gazurmah (a Futurist Icarus), who kills his father and conquers the anthropomorphized earth and sky. Marinetti’s new Icarus no longer falls to earth, brought down by the forces of nature and his own arrogance, but is instead justified in that arrogance to conquer the world. Several Fascist revivals similarly recast Icarus from the foolish youth of myth into a conquering hero, exemplifying Fascism’s consistent effort to root itself in the language of youth, history, tradition, and the sacred. One such instance occurred during the Esposizione Aeronautica Italiana, or EAI (Exhibition of Italian Aeronautics) which took place at the Palazzo dell’Arte in Milan

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 89 between June and October 1934. Like the Mostra della Rivoluzione Fascista, or MRF (Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution) it helped to foster a mythic sense of the regime’s origin and purpose in the public eye.29 Over a million people visited the show, which represented a high point of modern architectural achievement in Italy,30 and sought to establish a lineage of Italian aviation history stretching back to the mythic Mediterranean figure, to whom a culminating room on the first floor, the Hall of Icarus, was dedicated. He was rendered in sculpture and, rather than falling, he was seen rising up to the second floor. If the first floor celebrated pre-fascist aerial achievements through the heroic exploits of individuals like Francesco Baracca and Gabriele D’Annunzio, then the upper floor documented the new heights of Fascist heroism via Mussolini, “Primo Pilota,” and Balbo, “trasvolatore.” As one scholar argues, the exhibition contributed to the regime’s construction of a “mythical politics of time,” “rewriting” the story of Icarus as a forerunner for the Fascist “New Man” who “ventured beyond known limits and aimed ever higher.”31 Another permanent display was the decoration of the Collegio Aeronautico or Aeronautics Institute in Forli, built in 1937. Black and white mosaics by Angelo Canevari pay homage to Icarus as a young man who dreamed of flight before his time. Mussolini’s words are embedded in stone: “The dream of Icarus the dream of every generation is being transformed into reality. Man has conquered the air.”32 Francesco Saverio Palozzi’s Icarus (1940) sculpture still stands outside, depicting the proud youth before leaving the ground, chest out and chin up. Erected some years after the completion of the building, it honors Mussolini’s son, Bruno, an experienced pilot who died in an aviation accident. Mori was almost certainly familiar with these heroic rebrandings of Icarus. She may also have been aware of Lauro de Bosis, a pilot, translator, author, and antifascist who brought international attention to the antifascist resistance and whose life tragically imitated his art.33 His only major literary work, Icarus, was a veiled criticism of the regime. Icarus is here cast as a “poet-superman” in conflict with the tyrant Minos for control over Dedalus (ancestor of the modern scientist) and his inventions.34 In other words the forces of good and evil, embodied in Icarus and Minos, are understood to do battle for the soul of technology. “The play intertwines the myths of antiquity with the myths of its own time,” writes Joseph Farrell, “The worship of flight is paramount, and the idea of progress is not questioned. At the same time, the concept of man which underlies the thinking was of the mainstream Renaissance humanist stamp worthy of Pico della Mirandola [. . .]”35 De Bosis became an increasingly committed antifascist in the late 1920s. In 1931, with minimal flying experience, he set out in an airplane he nicknamed Pegasus on a mission to drop thousands of antifascist leaflets over Rome, a mission that ended in his disappearance and death.36 L’Aviatore che cade (Falling Aviator 1932), seen here in a photograph of Mori, Marinetti, Mino Rosso, Tullio d’Albisola, and Fillìa in 1933, is implicit, rather than explicit, in its reference to Icarus (Figure 4.1). Yet it appears to be a parody of the inevitable triumph of the modern aviator, a contemporary Icarus whose challenge to the natural order resulted in a dramatic fall to the death. She depicts a pilot falling in a near vertical line of descent out of the sky as the miracle of technology fails and gravity hauls him back to earth. Whether representative of Marinetti’s mechanomorphic

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Figure 4.1  Mori sitting with F. T. Marinetti in front of L’Aviatore che cade (Falling Aviator 1932). Tullio d’Albisola is sitting at the left, Mino Rosso is standing in the center, and Fillìa is standing at far right. Photograph most likely taken at the IV Mostra Sindacale Interprovinciale Belle Arti Liguria, Genoa, 1933. Mori Family Archive.

superhero or Mussolini’s Fascist New Man, her figure drops dramatically in a streak of red that suggests several possible ironic references. “Soon we will witness the flight of the first angels!” declared the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, “There on earth, the very first dawn! There is nothing to match the splendor of the sun’s red sword, slashing for the first time through our millennial gloom.”37 The sun in Falling Aviator becomes a soft background pink as the dawn’s red sword slicing across the sky is replaced by the body of one of Marinetti’s angels, doomed to a very earthly end. The backdrop is built atop solid geometrical planes of sun, sea, sky, and land that, unlike the aviator, seem stable, eternal, and unmovable forces of nature. Her use of red again elicits color treatises, possibly those of Carlo Carrà or Giacomo Balla. Carrà’s first directive regarding color in The Painting of Sounds Noises and Smells advocates that the Futurist artist should paint “reds, rrrredest rrrrrrreds that shouuuuuuuut”38 and Balla described red as “Violent: reanimator of muscles blood nerves brain.”39 Her red pilot may be a visual translation of his intensely alive screaming voice as he plummets to a violent death. The painting may be poking fun at Marinetti or Mussolini whose grandiloquent rhetoric of epic virility here looks fatuous and things end badly for the hero. Mori’s interpretation may have been inspired by non-Futurist artists. Marino Marini’s Icarus (1933) sculpture is far from heroic. His feet dangle as he falls into the abyss without composure or control. Mori would have seen this sculpture at the Rome Quadriennale of 1935, where Marini won first prize. Casorati, too, intertwined

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 91 the myth with Neo-Renaissance humanism. His Icarus (1936) restores the story’s original moral purpose in his quintessentially understated manner. A solitary young male nude lies prostrate upon a ragged piece of cloth arranged like wings beneath his body. Whether a sleeping shepherd whose mind has conjured up a dream of escape, or the youthful victim of his fantasy, the image counters bravado with restraint, condemning, in the words of one critic, “those who arrogantly used classicism to seek their own vainglory and national power.”40 The stick in the foreground is a likely referent to the blindness Icarus experienced as a result of looking into the sun, the blindness of youth, ego, and arrogance. If Futurist and Fascist rhetoric acclaimed the airplane as a new source of vision and power linked to man’s mastery of the natural world, then here we read a contrasting commentary on the arrogance of mankind, his philosophical blindness, and the metaphysical impossibility of total vision for any mortal man. Despite being a willing and enthusiastic participant in the aviation adventure, several of Mori’s aeropaintings, none more so than The Falling Aviator, seem laden with irony and articulate a degree of skepticism with regard to the heroic imaginings of her fellows. Battaglia aerea notturna (Arial Night Battle 1932) is Mori’s most widely shown aeropainting. Apparently conforming to expectations of the aeropainting genre, it shows us nothing but shadows and angled reflections and may be illustrative of Mori’s propensity for ambiguity. The idea of battling in the dark evokes not only the uncertainties of the period but also a very real and obvious state of blindness. Associations of darkness and blindness with aviation certainly contrasted with prevalent Futurist and Fascist ideas.

Vision and Domination Lucia Re has described the developing psychological effects of fast-paced modern machines that seemed to make the earth, even the universe, answerable to “the strongest and most willful” of masculine nations.41 If, as Luce Irigaray argues, “the eye objectifies and it masters. It sets at a distance, and it maintains at a distance,”42 then flight exaggerated these mastering effects by further distancing the eye and proposing the earth itself as an object of conquest. The airplane amplified this sensation of visual subjugation, translating the conquest of a single individual into the conquest of the many and of nature itself. As Charles Lindbergh would apparently trumpet, “I owned the world that hour as I rode over it.”43 Like the single surveyor of Foucault’s panopticon prison tower,44 the pilot in his aircraft theoretically possessed even greater power to regulate, control, and discipline the surveyed on a vast scale aligning the airplane with the grand colonial aspirations of many European nations. In the highly politicized atmosphere of the Ventennio, images of the airplane thus became deeply bound up with themes of nationalism, militarism, and colonialism, while images of the pilot resonated within the Fascist cults of masculinity and leadership. Some Futurists, as I expound later, rejected this type of aeropainting, imagining an alternative cosmic genre. Nevertheless, there was a popular Futurist subgenre known as aeropittura di guerra, or war aeropainting, which celebrated man’s triumph of the air as signifying

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a domination of the earth below and its colonial territories. Critics have rightly interpreted aeropittura di guerra as evidence of the bond between Futurist art and Fascist politics and as documents of Marinetti’s interest in technology as facilitating war, nationalist supremacy, and colonial expansion.45 Dottori went so far as to define the experience of domination as the explicit goal of the genre writing, “When the Futurists tell painters to fly, it is not so much for the purpose of going up to observe objects from a new point of view that shows them in unusual ways, as it is to raise them above reality, dominate it, see it.”46 The most widely circulated Futurist aeropaintings often demonstrate a militaristic attitude toward aviation, one affirmed via participation in the regime’s colonial art exhibitions of 1931 and 1934–5.47 Guglielmo Sansoni’s Sorvolando il colosseo (Flying Over the Colosseum 1930), Tullio Crali’s In tuffo sulla Città (Nose Dive on the City 1939) or Alfredo Ambrosi’s Attacco con aereo Caproni (Attack with a Caproni Airplane 1942) are images that have been called “documentary.”48 Yet far from being objective accounts, each establishes a subjective and privileged viewing perspective from the air that implies the penetration, capture and/or consumption of the landscape below in the highly gendered terms of masculine culture verses feminine nature. In this sense aerpoaintings can be seen as a continuation of the idea captured by Renzo Ventura’s original illustrated cover for Marinetti’s novel L’alcova d’accaio (Steel Alcove 1921), in which a war machine akin to a tank is plowing into a hilly terrain that is depicted as a reclining, headless, nude woman. Much of the Futurist avant-garde celebrated masculinity and domination in visual representations conflating sexual and colonial conquest, thus reinforcing those characteristics that have come to define our understanding of both Futurism and Fascism as underpinned by chauvinism and hyper-masculinity.49 Among feminist art historians Albrecht Dürer’s print Artist with a Perspective Device (1525) has become a superlative symbol of gendered dynamics in Renaissance perspective.50 In this image, a frame screen separates the active male artist from the passive female model and he uses the controlling orders of geometry and mathematical perspective to impose logical order on her body, whose curved contours mirror the landscape outside the studio window, literally drawing the line that separates male culture from female nature. Paralleling the manner in which Dürer’s artist seeks to tame the mysteries of the female form, aeropaintings often attempt a new level of visual control over mysterious, untamed, often feminized landscapes via aerial perspective. Sansoni’s Flying Over the Colosseum of 1930 depicts the path of a biplane in flight spiraling vertiginously around the ancient amphitheater to create a vortex of force lines. The work represents a straddling of Futurist and Fascist directives by celebrating a symbol of Rome’s glorious Imperial past while simultaneously suggesting that its grandeur has been outdone by modern technology, the enormity of its historic weight swallowed in a maelstrom of speed. The earth and Colosseum are fashioned into a static vessel, receptable, or repository while the long aerodynamic airplane moves diagonally upward. Nose Dive on the City and Attack with a Caproni Airplane are works that fall into the category of aeropittura di guerra, picturing aviation as a symbol of Italy’s colonial and military supremacy. In Nose Dive on the City, a pilot dives between the skyscrapers of a modern urban center. The spectator perceives the

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 93 pilot from behind with a halo of gunfire emanating from around his head and the nose of the airplane pressing into the picture plane, as if to suggest his penetration of the urban depths. Crali has used the spiritual symbolism of light to consecrate an act of bombardment and its executioner, reviving a classical sense of perspective that transforms his canvas into a window onto the world of aerial warfare. We are drawn into the space, becoming co-pilots in the attack. Ambrosi makes use of a similar combination of religious symbolism and controlling visual perspective in Attack with a Caproni Airplane. The pilot holds in his sights a vast textured landscape that is littered with exploding targets, hanging like an omniscient deity or winged angel in the sky above. These paintings are constructed in subtle, but highly gendered, visual terms. If the visual operations of the earlier works are subtle in their gendered implications, then Aerofecondità (1932) and Aerosensualità (1932) by Alfredo Ambrosi make these relationships overt by conflating physical penetration and territorial domination. In Aerofecondità a nude female form is merged with the terrain depicted from earlier. A Futurist vortex spirals around her sex organs, highlighting the parallel reproductive roles of the prostrate female body and the fecund landscape. Ambrosi’s painting brings to mind Marinetti’s description of the “maternal ditch” in his Founding and Manifesto while perhaps also recalling the numerous agricultural policies of Fascist Italy, which aimed to increase domestic grain production and free the country from its heavy dependence on foreign supplies. Ambrosi conceptually merges the Battle for Births and the Battle for Grain on the battlefield of a prostrate woman. Earth is depicted as an object to be plowed and sown as the painting’s vaginal vortex insinuates itself as an aerial target. There is a literal equation here of the terrestrial landscape and the female body, which is ensnared by the phallic forces of the painter’s eye and the pilot’s plane. Ambrosi relies on codified notions of man versus nature to equate women with the enemy or object of subjugation. He pits masculine culture and technology against the uncontrollable or unknowable feminized “other.” If the vanguard artist’s obsessive painting of the nude has been interpreted as a celebration of the artistic virility of modern man’s creative freedom set against the “unfreedom” of the vulnerable studio model,51 then Ambrosi translates this notion into aeroaesthetics. Aerosensualità superimposes the front end of an airplane onto a horizon that is composed of sensual and compliant layered female forms. The plane’s propeller spins into invisibility, but in place of one blade is a strangely ethereal, yet shapely, female leg stretching outward from the nose of the aircraft, implying sexual penetration. The airplane becomes a metaphor for the pilot’s phallus. Following the path of the life-giving tip of a painter’s brush, the nose of the aircraft plows the canvas to plant a creative seed and the pilot/painter is endowed with supreme virility and total creative control. As in Crali’s Nose Dive on the City, the spectator is made complicit. Aligning or superimposing the actions of phallus, aircraft, and paintbrush, the artist constructs an operative phallic eye that forces the viewer into the space of the male gaze implying a universal masculine subject. Ambrosi’s work is a pictorial translation of the pilot’s allconsuming eye and its ability to serve a fascist agenda by reaffirming power relations of domination within this gendered visual structure. The painting inspired an ekphrastic

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poem by Piero Anselmi, a great admirer of Ambrosi’s work, which was published in Futurismo in 1933 and received considerable publicity.52 Leaving the ground, The air’s rising caress softening the goodbyes. Climbing. Pursuing the seductive heights with this marvelous dream machine. The motor bursts with enthusiasm in the fuselage. The propeller penetrates the atmosphere’s invisible resistence, whirling a shiny series of scorching, alogical, Futurist ideals. Now the amperometer’s needle-dancer begins its rhythmic electrodace, on the dial’s white stage, accompanied by the electrical circuits’ fragmentary orchestra. Responding to the air pressure’s ephemeral kisses, a second needle wavers back and forth on the altimeter’s tortured dial. Two air bubbles go crazy with geometrical delight, in the glass tubes that enclose them, as the angle changes. The flight map outlines an exciting celestial itinerary. Burning with ardor, man and airplane grow intoxicated from the myriad sensations. Flesh and airplane emit unique, complex erotic odors. The motor pulsates like a restless heart. The heart bursts like an airplane motor. The propeller yearns with amorous desire. Its desire is a whirling blade propelled by dream. The atmosphere bursts into flame like a bedroom. The airplane dissolves in a burst of erotic lyricism, stimulated by an overdose of dreams, a convulsion of senses metals clouds. A blue cloud, two blue clouds, a thousand blue clouds. The propeller is a new thumb for a new medium. Its whirling blade carves the blue, sculpting out two perfect bodies. Nudes. Of women. The memory of earth suffuses the heavens. The rudders’ stiff metal scarves fray in the fierce wind. The compass needle nods slyly, like an old man at his grandchildren’s follies.53

In these lines, Anselmi verbalizes the painting’s equation of flight with male sexual experience leaving little question as to whose orgiastic experience is being celebrated. He reiterates the masculinity of the machine and pilot while identifying nature and the earth with the female body. He also makes an explicit connection between artist and pilot, likening their apparent roles as masters of matter and the material world who mold nature to their whim. Summarizing the perception that flight constituted a battle between the forces of masculine technology and feminine earth, Gabriele D’Annunzio is reputed after his second brief experience of flight in 1909 to have reflected, “It is in the air that one feels the glory of being a man and of conquering the elements.”54 The sexually charged

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 95 metaphorical significance of upward thrust was never lost on Marinetti who similarly exclaimed in The Pope’s Airplane, “My monoplane flies always in the face of a woman!” suggesting that women had no place in the sky.55 In response to Blériot’s crossing of the English Channel, he again equated women with the terrestrial realm writing, “ . . . we feel ourselves suddenly cut off from woman . . . a symbol of the earth which had to be abandoned . . . ”56 In his conception of poetry as “a violent assault launched against unknown forces,”57 he established a reasoning that would drive many of his narrative tales wherein heroic protagonists aided by technology pit themselves against the forces of a feminized natural world. Artist and pilot Fedele Azari echoed these sentiments in his manifesto Teatro Aereo Futurista (1919), contending that his aviation spectacles were “worthy of the great futurist nation that we promote, absolutely free, virile, energetic and practical.”58 His sense of liberated virility suggests a highly masculinized national consciousness. Alice Yaeger Kaplan described Marinetti’s “imagination without strings” as having been born of aviation and its aerial worldview, which enabled the Futurists to cast an imaginary net around the “murky maternal force” of nature.59 Paintings by Dottori, Sansoni, Crali, and Ambrosi translated these principles into visions of a stark dualism between nature and technology, one predicated on the idea that technology is a force of virile Italian culture that has the power to raise mankind above nature, intrinsically linked to the feminine, the “Other,” and the foreign colonized territory.

Without Strings The Manifesto della Aeropittura (Manifesto of Aeropainting 1931) and Manifesto dell’arte sacra futurista (Manifesto of Sacred Futurist Art 1931) were timed to coincide with the increasing importance of air power in the lead-up to the Second World War and the regime’s rapprochement with the Vatican in 1929. At the Second Congress of the Fasci in May 1920, Marinetti had called for the Pope’s banishment to Avignon and Mussolini had called him “an extravagant fool.”60 Despite this divisive outburst a decade earlier, the politically savvy timing of these manifestos highlights Marinetti’s ideological elasticity.61 With typical bombast he declared that only Futurist aeropainters could successfully bring to life “the protean swiftness of the aerial life of angels and the apparition of saints.”62 Many Futurist artists would merge the symbolism of aeropainting and arte sacra, as discernible in the saintly aeroportraits of Marinetti and Mussolini, or in images that sacralize aviation. Enrico Prampolini, Fillìa, and Benedetta focused on the metaphorical or spiritual significance of flight. In contrast to visions of the airplane as an advanced weapon, works such as Prampolini’s Pilota dell’infinito (Pilot of the Infinite 1932), Fillìa’s Mistero Aereo (Aerial Mystery 1930–1), or Benedetta’s Prendendo Quota (Gaining Altitude 1934), picture aviation as a spiritual triumph of mystical significance linked to esotericism.63 Their abstracted biomorphic forms convey a sense of disembodied celestial escape in a style that Prampolini named “cosmic idealism,” and Mori’s distinct brand of aeropainting has been linked to this tendency.64 Fillìa explained the link between aviation and veneration as, “Aero = the most perfect vision of the mechanical nature . . . indication of the new spirituality.”65 It has been argued that Fillìa’s religious

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paintings are “superficially conformist,” while “undermin[ing] standard symbolic meanings and gestures” in proposing an “alternative, Futurist spirituality.”66 If, from one perspective, the airplane represented the ultimate technology of conquest, from another it could represent an unparalleled search for interior freedom. Even within Futurism, technology was interpreted in vastly different terms, pointing to the inherent complexity of human-machine relations. In 1944 Horkheimer and Adorno recognized the paradoxical nature of all technology, putting into words the contradiction that artists illustrated in images. Expressing profound disillusionment with the culture of the scientific Enlightenment, as having simply offered mankind new methods with which to dominate nature and other human beings, they nonetheless identified that by their very nature technologies built for the purposes of domination would inevitably become redemptive: [L]anguage, weapons, and finally machines—which are intended to hold everyone in their grasp, must in their turn be grasped by everyone. In this way, the moment of rationality in domination also asserts itself as something different from it. The thing-like quality of the means, which makes the means universally available, its “objective validity” for everyone, itself implies a criticism of the domination from which thought has arisen as its means.67

The diverse ways in which gender and technology have informed one another as categories have been broadly explored,68 but the airplane, too, is inflected by this double-edged operation. It was one of many modern technologies to aid in the century’s drive toward destructive militarism, but it simultaneously nurtured an optimistic reimagining of the human condition as endlessly improvable. Interventions by women artists into the genre of aeropainting epitomize the very nature of all technology, which can be a force for domination, or emancipation, depending on who wields it.

Mori Airborne Nothing for Marinetti, according to Günter Berghaus, “came closer to representing the force of emancipation, for both men and women, than the machine.”69 He did not share Mussolini’s opinion that women should remain earthbound and his intellectual encounters with strong women, particularly his romance with Benedetta Cappa, prompted a shift in his previous thinking.70 Notwithstanding his enduring reputation for misogyny and his close ties to the regime, he celebrated the idea of the modern woman. As previously noted, he remarked that if a woman was to be offered the same opportunities for edification as a man, then she might well prove to be his equal.71 As the Duce was ousting women from the cockpit, he helped them to take to the sky. Mori was one of a handful of Futurist women who experienced the revolutionary technology of flight firsthand, infiltrating what was a highly masculine space. During the 1930s, Barbara Olga Biglieri Scurto, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, and Marisa Mori reflected on their experiences of flight as aeropittrici, or women aeropainters, while Giannina Censi used her experience as inspiration for aerodanze, or aerodances.72

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 97 Olga Biglieri Scurto adopted the name Barbara to evoke the Amazons and was the only Futurist aeropittrice to possess a pilot’s license (and a gliding license). Marinetti offered his support of this “ingenious aeropainter,” declaring, “I have great faith in her pictorial genius.”73 Personal photographs and numerous paintings document less frequent but numerous flights taken by Benedetta who had already flown four times by October 1931 according to her statements for the catalogue of the Mostra futurista di aeropittura e di scenografia (Futurist Exhibition of Aeropainting and Scenography) at Milan’s Galleria Pesaro.74 The Futurist founder was personally responsible for arranging Mori’s flight in April 1934 with Costantino Biego. Neither Benedetta nor Mori could operate an airplane, but, as previously discussed, they were taking significant personal risk for the sake of modern art and doubtless found their experiences both inspiring and exciting. In response to a letter of thanks Mori must have sent him, Biego wrote that he was happy to hear that her experience had inspired in her the desire to become a pilot.75 The incursion of these aeropittrici into the celestial masculine space of the airplane problematized celebrations of this technology as the apotheosis of a heroic and virile culture. In the same year that Mussolini barred women from the flight school in Bologna, Marinetti made arrangements for Mori to face down the dangers of early flight strapped into the open cockpit of an acrobatic biplane over Rome that twisted, turned, and spiraled through the sky. As she subsequently explained, he and Fillìa had encouraged her to fly with the assertion that a true aero-instinct could only be born out of direct experience. “I was tied to the seat,” she remembered, “and those acrobatics, that extraordinary vision of the earth, inspired me to work and I became an aeropainter.”76 In what were certainly acts of bravery, she and other women Futurists were reappropriating a highly masculinized cultural space. If the airplane was an icon of modernity representing the pinnacle of power, speed, and freedom that Marinetti regarded as emblematic of the Futurist mechanized man and Mussolini viewed as the ultimate bastion of masculinity, it highlighted with particular clarity how science could liberate mankind from the limits of earthbound existence. Yet as the Bologna anecdote shows, a woman was never expected to experience the same disembodied freedoms or transcend the barriers of nature with which she was constantly identified. In translating real experience into aesthetic interpretation, Mori used the vanguard trope of the “woman-machine,”77 which Andreas Huyssen has described as signifying otherness during the period and its threat to traditional male authority and control.78 Aviatrice addormentata (Sleeping Aviatrix 1932) and The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity (1936) straddle the artist’s pre- and post-flight experience, both merging the art-historical symbolism of the allegorical female nude with that of the flying machine (Plate 10). These fusions were neither straightforward Futurist odes to a coming evolutionary merger of man and machine, nor glorifications of women’s passive or reproductive role in fascist society. If nature appears as the object of man’s conquest in many Futurist images, these works undermine the narrative of a heroic male flyer subjugating the earth. Several scholars contend that avant-garde modernism was underpinned by oppositional conceptions of masculinity and femininity,79 and Futurism made such oppositions explicitly corporeal. Futurism’s initial opposition to the female nude

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in art seems to confirm one scholar’s observation that “it is not only the body in Futurist theory but, specifically, the female body that forms the landscape of decay and disorder that afflicts Italian culture . . . ”80 In Marinetti’s Mafarka (1909), women and the feminine are even imagined as physical wounds to be excised from a healthy masculine society.81 If Marinetti envisioned technological triumphs as an escape from the delimiting laws of nature, for example, those of gravity and mortality, then the female form initially represented precisely those embodied realities. Yet, as previously discussed, the nude made a comeback in Futurism and aeropainters like Ambrosi returned to the traditional trope personifying nature as female. Female nudes also appeared as spiritually infused biomorphic abstractions in works by Prampolini and Fillìa. In Tendenze spirituali (Spiritual Tendencies 1929) Fillìa painted a strangely amorphous female nude with a guitar hovering over a horizon line between earth and sky. In La Sezione d’Oro—paesaggio femminile d’un attrice (Carmen Boni) (The Golden Section—feminine landscape of an actress (Carmen Boni) 1930), Prampolini pasted the curvilinear abstract forms of a reclining nude over a map cutout. These not only recall metaphorical associations between woman and nature, but they also draw on the corresponding notion of nature as muse, personified in a female body, whose beauty inspires male creativity. Whether subjugating or marveling at nature, these painters conflate the terms of nature and woman as passive, yielding objects. Benedetta and Mori evoked a more powerful and dynamic vision of generative female nature in their words and works. Benedetta activated the Woman–Nature metaphor in favor of the woman artist. Describing the Italian woman in terms that would have been acceptable to the regime, she declared her to be first and foremost a mother, but she then qualified this statement saying, “When we say mother we must give the word its most comprehensive significance as a creator: creator of men, of sentiments, of passions, of ideas.”82 Her images have been described as “a ‘feminized’ version of abstraction”83 and scholars have identified in her writing and painting an attempt to glorify the generative and creative potential of a feminized nature.84 Yet if Benedetta avoided the image of the nude, then Mori frequently emphasized embodiment, reappropriating and problematizing representation of the female nude as a passive object to be mastered by the artist-pilot. Aerofecondità and The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity both depict a prostrate female nude, anchoring the composition on a spinning vortex of female genitalia. Yet instead of the dark penetrable void at the center of Ambrosi’s work, there is a bright red cordate river flowing from the center in Mori’s painting. Instead of a sharp horizon line delineating a blue sky filled with airplanes above a green and orange landscape with houses, Mori offers an obscured field of vision. The penetrating gaze of pilot-artist is thwarted. Unlike the static prostrate woman in Ambrosi’s painting, we cannot take hold of her evanescent figure whose fecundity is active rather than passive, transcendent rather than immanent. She appears to be of mysterious origin and source. Sleeping Aviatrix likewise provides a counter-narrative to Aerosensualità, created in the same year. Both canvases superimpose mechanical and nude forms, yet Mori’s title identifies her nude as the active subject rather than the passive object and she turns the conquering gaze inward. The rough contours of a fleshy pink female nude are

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 99 intertwined with the fragmented and colorful forms of a propeller, wing, and cockpit. Behind the composite of human and machine forms is a bed of pale blue and a touch of green that imply the earth and sky. Flight becomes a metaphor for intellectual or spiritual ascent, but the subject and object of this ascent are female. She seems to maneuver a virtual airplane through a dreamscape in the land of Morpheus where a flying machine is a metaphor for the journey of the mind, a symbol of inner freedom. Deep asleep, the aviatrix occupies the literal and figurative interstice between earth and sky, matter and spirit, vision and dream. The figure is simultaneously in command of the flying machine and relinquishing all physical control in a state of sleep. At the peaceful helm of her own thoughts and fantasies, she deflates the martial image of a heroic masculine aviator who sees and conquers all he surveys. Her mind is absolutely free, even if her body is not. She is her own muse. Recalling the use of the sleeping female figure within Casorati’s circle, it is possible to recognize in Mori’s choice of subject, a conflation of Magic Realist and Futurist concerns. Sleep is the dream state, symbolizing the untouchable inner mystery of the human mind that so fascinated Metaphysical Painters, Magic Realists, and Surrealists. The real act of flight, however, represents the transformation of a dream into reality, exposing the body to the very real and volatile forces of nature and technology. Mori’s paintings suggest the interrelationship between the generative power of dream symbolism and the actuality of human flight. If Ambrosi paints earth and sky as separate female and male spheres, it is difficult in her pictures to identify any such distinctions or to disentangle the categories of nature and culture. Mori’s titles and images yoke the binaries of terrestrial and celestial, corporeal and ethereal, material and immaterial. As many Futurists actively constructed images of the artist as heroic New Man battling the feminine forces of Nature, Mori created alternatives in which women simultaneously embody art, nature, and the machine, conjoining these sources of creative power.

Sex, Gender, and Technology Some foundational second-wave feminists viewed pregnancy and the womb as a limitation to woman’s progress,85 while others adopted and elevated it as a female source of creative power.86 Some contemporary feminists still express fear of humanity’s alienation from the natural order seeing childbirth “as a sanctuary for the sacred.”87 Others insist more optimistically that technology offers new possibilities for a genderless world in which human subjectivities are endlessly complex.88 Feminists remain more divided than ever on the significance of sexual biology and on the role of technology to control or liberate women.89 When we reflect on the views expressed by women writers and artists within Italian Futurism we find many of the same concerns. Some articulated positions that correspond with what are now termed essentialist, while others expressed antiessentialist views in manifestos, manuscripts, memoirs, screenplays, and periodicals. Mori’s complex explorations of the female body in relationship to technology often echo their literary explorations of the liberating potential of technology.

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Science and technology inspired authors like Eva Amendola (pseudonym Magamal) and Fanny Dini to write about “sensual female bodies able to transform themselves through ecstasy of the senses.”90 Maria Ginanni and Rosa Rosà would “combine the power of machines with that of the spirit.”91 Enif Robert and Rosa Rosà have been described as setting female protagonists “against purportedly universal, scientific constructions,” illuminating the “plurality of woman’s intellect” and constructing “a uniquely female dynamism.”92 In Rosà’s Una donna con tre anime (Woman with Three Souls 1918), the protagonist, Giorgina, is contaminated by particles of the future from a scientific laboratory, which then prompt a series of transformations facilitated by her spiritual and intellectual capacities. Her final metamorphosis into a “dynamic mechanical entity”93 is emblematic of the disembodied freedoms women writers imagined possible via encounters with technology. Written as an autobiographical account made up of fragmentary details, notes, and letters of correspondence (including those of F. T. Marinetti and her friend Eleonora Duse), Robert’s book, Un ventre di donna: romanzo chirurgico (A Woman’s Womb: Surgical Novel 1919), narrates an experience of uterine cancer. A reconceptualization of female embodiment seems to be at the heart of the account, which describes a long series of treatments for the protagonist who struggles to overcome a weak, passive, and ailing female body by using the willpower of a strong, active intellect to help her heal. Her doctor eventually diagnoses the cause of the illness to be “an overly virile brain in an overly feminine body,”94 and following the required surgery, a hysterectomy, she is understood to reach her full potential. It is by exercising her literary mind and rigorously undergoing a kind of Futurist action therapy that the protagonist is able to heal and transform herself into a New Woman or donna moderna. As many scholars have observed, women Futurists take a multiplicity of approaches, illustrating the complexity of a struggle to articulate the meaning of modern womanhood.95 They embraced some gendered stereotypes while rejecting others, but they often imagined the transformative potential of technology as a means to secure greater freedom and personal power from the perceived biological limitations of female biology. Robert’s novel illuminates this struggle. She communicates strikingly ambivalent and contradictory emotions toward the womb as a symbol or marker of womanhood, sometimes reiterating the masculinist precept that it represents female weakness and at other times celebrating it as the source of female power. Robert’s text articulates the common experience of feeling “imprisoned within subjectivity” or “circumscribed within the limits of nature” by ovaries and a uterus, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir.”96 In a much-quoted line of the novel she cries, “How disgusting it is to be a suffering uterus while men fight each other!”97 Yet in lines that follow she describes the birth of her son as a “fully carnal joy.”98 She paradoxically represents the womb as the source of women’s shame and pride, pain and pleasure. Nevertheless, she requests a hysterectomy for the explicit purpose of birth control even before her illness makes it necessary. Robert certainly refuted the idea of women as mere reproductive machines,99 but she cannot escape the cultural notions that would tie women’s inherent weakness to the reproductive organ.100 If the male Futurist often eschews problematization by defining himself in opposition to the feminine, says Cinzia Sartini-Blum, Robert “problematizes the identity of the heroine, placing her in an uneasy, unstable position between the

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 101 masculine and feminine poles, the boundary line between the two polarized spaces cuts through her.”101 Indeed it seems that the introduction of doubt and alterity into the heroic narrative of the Futurist avant-garde constitutes an important transgressive contribution by many women writers and artists. According to Silvia Contarini, disease and healing in Robert’s novel should not be taken literally but understood as allegorical. She suggests, “the new female identity is forged by striking a balance between male and female prerogatives, between body, mind, and spirit.”102 If so, Robert traces an uncertain path toward self-healing, self-acceptance, and new womanhood via an exploration of the maternal abject. In this way the novel points to Julia Kristeva’s assertion that the best modern literature explores the abject as a place where binaries, boundaries and borders begin to break down.103 I suggest the same may be said of Mori’s The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity. Futurism’s relationship to the female body has elsewhere been described as compatible with Julia Kristeva’s theories on abjection104 and Mori’s painting taps into the violence that characterizes this relationship while illustrating the power of the maternal abject to “disturb identity, system, order.”105 More than any other Futurist precedent, Mori’s painting finds literary parallels in Mina Loy’s “Parturition” (1914). The expanding central circle in Mori’s painting suggests Loy’s “circle of pain exceeding its boundaries in every direction.” She describes “pain surpassing itself ” and “becom[ing] exotic” thus producing the effect of “unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation.” Even Mori’s blurred forms recall Loy’s “blurring spatial contours so aiding elusion of the circumscribed.” She seems to visualize the “cosmic reproductivity” of which Loy writes, situating the experience of “infinite Maternity” between death and life. Mori even places on her painted “woman-of-the-people” a “ludicrous little halo of which she is sublimely unaware.” As in Loy’s poem or Robert’s novel, the woman in The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity is vulnerable, exposed, and in the painful grip of physical transformation. Like Loy or Robert, Mori captures the paradoxical state of extreme pain and pleasure, prefiguring Kristeva’s description of the abject as “edged with the sublime .  .  . something added that expands us, overstrains us.”106 Mori’s figure occupies the borderline state between consciousness and oblivion, or selfhood and otherness, that exists for Kristeva par excellence in the experience of motherhood. If the abject is understood as a “‘subject’ and ‘object’ [that] push each other away, confront each other, collapse, and start again—inseparable, contaminated, condemned, at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable,”107 then it is not only the maternal subject/object of Mori’s painting that occupies this liminal space but also the viewer who is forced into the confrontation. This is a complex exploration of maternal experience that refuses a reductionist dichotomy between revulsion and glorification. The term “ecstasy” suggests precisely this kind of liminal experience between body and mind, one that recalls A Woman’s Womb and celebratory odes to the divine promise of machines in Futurist manifestos.108 During one of her surgeries, Robert dreams of a long line of children, a vision that fills her with “un’ebbrezza tutta fremiti—shuddering ecstasy.”109 In Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna (Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight! 1909), Marinetti describes the departure of a flight “nell’ebbrezza di un’agile evoluzione—amid the ecstasy of agile maneuvers.”110 In Discorso ai Triestini

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(Speech to the People of Trieste 1910) he describes the sense of literary liberty that Futurism would take from the automobile’s, “nuova ebbrezza della velocità—new ecstasy of speed.”111 In La nuova religione-morale della velocità (The New Ethical Religion of Speed 1916) he equates “l’ebbrezza delle grandi velocità—the ecstasy of great speeds” with the joy of feeling oneself fused with divinity. Yet the thrill of weightless spiritual freedom that Marinetti so frequently lauded as the product of man’s merger with machine is translated on Mori’s canvas into the agony and ecstasy of embodiment. Speaking at the Lyceum Club in 1948, she described the making of art as exactly such an ecstatic experience, offering her analysis of the term: “the artist is in ecstasy as s/he interprets sounds, as s/he sees forms and colors. The beautiful Greek etymology of the word ecstasy is to be outside of oneself [. . .] but I would say that it also means to be inside oneself, and that, being inside, in the deepest recesses of ourselves, is also to be in ecstasy.” Here she maintains the word’s transcendent spiritual implications rooting it in the dual reality of lived psychological and physical personhood. Marinetti’s manifestos summon up the original Greek ekstasis in their glorification of men with mechanical wings who are rebelliously “out of place,” resonating as a war-horn against nature, against maternal and paternal law. I would like to suggest that Mori’s painting and lecture align closely with the meaning conferred by seventeenth-century female mystic Teresa of Avila who used the term to describe a state of orgiastic physical rapture leading to self-transcendence and divine illumination, a scandalous description infamously captured in Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52). The faint red halo that encircles the drooping head in Mori’s painting may recall the saintly sacrifice or martyrdom of maternal experience as glorified by church and state, but her figure formally echoes Mantegna’s Dead Christ (c. 1480), Caravaggio’s Saint Francis in Ecstasy (1595), and Bernini’s Ecstasy. The dramas of birth, flight, and death are superimposed on her image via these visual references; by bleeding Catholic references into her Futurist aesthetics she communicates that sense of physical rupture and emotional rapture that can occur at the edge of consciousness, in childbirth, or during encounters with the divine. The transformative potential of the machine meets the equally transformative potential of flesh in the tradition of the tortured saints. The common Futurist refrain of escape from nature or the body is parodied in this understanding, which is profoundly historical. Bringing to mind Mussolini’s claim that “war is to man what maternity is to woman,” the painting suggests that men and women share the burdens of violence and abjection that are inherent to embodiment. It must be said that the more confronting or disturbing elements of The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity are not incompatible with optimistic readings that allow for the liberating gender possibilities of humanity’s interaction with technology found in Robert, Rosà, or her friend Fillìa. His play, Sensualità (Sensuality 1923), on which Mori worked, positioned the machine as a viable alternative to sexual difference itself, reflecting the Futurist concern for dissolving the subject in total experience to achieve “freedom from the limits and incompleteness of a gendered identity,” in the words of one scholar.112 In the first act he imagined a stage dominated by five vibrating metallic slabs against which is set a red spiral (masculine spirit), a white cube (feminine matter), and variously colored geometric shapes arranged in the form of a machine

 Aerovita and the Futurist Woman 103 (harmonious action). In a final declaration the three states proclaim in harmony, “it is necessary to liberate ourselves from TIME, ascend, ascend, ascend, ASCEND!”113 Perhaps she shared his belief that machines might one day liberate humans from the restrictions of the sexed body.

Conclusions The historian of Fascism Roger Griffin described Futurist technolatry, or worship of technology, as a new form of religious faith in which women played no active role.114 Cultural critic Hal Foster saw Marinetti’s machinic desires as the means by which he imagined his body psychically reforged, asserting that “technology is phallic for Marinetti” and claimed that misogyny is “more fundamental than either the absence of women in futurism or its attacks on feminism and femininity alike.”115 The position that women were somehow alien to Futurist machine aesthetics is not universal,116 but it has often reified, as one scholar puts it, the “historical, if relatively recent and twentieth-century Western tendency to view technology as an exclusively masculine affair.”117 A continued emphasis on the despotic, chauvinist, and/or phallic character of Futurism’s relationship to technology has helped to minimize, marginalize, or obscure the contributions of women. When we take their contributions more seriously, we discover these represent an important alternative legacy for Futurism within contemporary feminism as both Lucia Re and Paola Sica have suggested in relation to women’s writing.118 Elizabeth Grosz has argued that patriarchal systems insist on fixed notions of the body, which thus becomes a logical site of resistance for feminists seeking to “define themselves in non- or extracorporeal terms” and to find “equality on intellectual and conceptual grounds.”119 Against fixed notions of the body, women Futurists countered with visions of women metamorphosed by the machine. Even if Emilio Gentile recently asserted that the “mechanomorph,” or the idea of a man merged with iron, has “been relegated to a place in the ranks of the most boorish Futurist rhetoric,”120 Futurism’s interest in the transformation, extension, manipulation, and/or hybridization of the physical body through scientific developments represented a tantalizing discourse for women who began to conceive of their bodies as more malleable, less immanent, and perhaps less of a limitation. These pioneering women prefigured developments within posthumanism, new materialism, and cyberfeminism.121 In “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985) Donna Haraway postulated that technology might permit the development of a genderless world, a possibility envisioned in Rosà’s Woman with Three Souls (1918) or Fillìa’s Sensualità (1923). As a primary theorist of new materialism, Elizabeth Grosz has imagined the freedom of bodies to “struggle with matter” and “become more than they are”122 just as Robert imagined in A Woman’s Womb (1919). Mori’s active participation in the aviation adventure helped to repudiate the idea that the airplane was a man’s domain. She and the other aeropittrici occupied spaces reserved for so-called virile bodies demonstrating, to paraphrase Judith Butler, how the subaltern party can take up the terms of the dominant role so as to displace the site of authority.123 Yet while so many

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aeropaintings offer us a clarity of vision that celebrates the airplane’s power to control the landscape in aid of domination, hers offer us opaque or clouded views. In what are perhaps her most interesting paintings, she intersects the female body with the airplane to create pictures that play with the gendered dualities of vision/blindness, earthly/celestial, body/spirit, organic/mechanical in ironic and ambiguous ways and undermine the separation of these spheres. She interprets Futurism’s “lyrical obsession for matter” in ways that are compatible with the active rethinking of the human subject in terms of fragmentation, ambiguity, plurality, and multiplicity.124

Appendix Life of the Woman Artist*1

When someone first put to me the idea of giving this talk about the woman artist, I expressed my desire to have a real conversation with you all—to respond to questions, to discuss, to argue—because such a discussion would have been both more stimulating for me and less tiresome for you, for following a lively discussion better keeps our attention. But I was told that as the other ladies on the panel would be delivering uninterrupted lectures, so too should I. As I don’t have exceptional publicspeaking abilities and this is the first time that I have spoken to an educated public, I am somewhat nervous—listen, you can hear my voice shaking . . . it’s true, I am among my fellow members, many of whom are friends. But the ladies who preceded me in these discussions have spoken so well on their subjects that I am quite intimidated. We should first ask ourselves if those who practice the artistic professions of painting, music, sculpture, poetry, song, and dance have the right to call themselves artists. I think not. What do you think? We already know what an artist truly is: we know that s/he knows how to grasp the poetry of beauty and horror in our universe, and that s/he wants to respond in their voice and with their emotions to the ecstatic emotions they experience. Ecstatic emotion: and so the artist is in ecstasy as s/he interprets sounds, as s/he sees forms and colors. The beautiful Greek etymology of the word “ecstasy” is to be outside of oneself. Being outside of oneself perfectly captures the concept of ecstasy: but I would say that it also means to be inside oneself and that being inside, in the deepest recesses of ourselves, is also to be in ecstasy [. . .] It is not me who said this: they told me so. Who did? The life of every true artist, both the greatest and the less great, the life of the male artist and of the woman artist [. . .] So here we are at the life of the woman artist. And I will speak of the artist rather than the professional. We’ll look together at the lives of some artists, choosing from among them those whose lives are most in opposition with one another, and after we have looked at them together, I will try to determine the strengths and shortcomings that can be traced back to the lives of these women: the motives for their battles, the weapons they employed in their victories [. . .] We will start with a painter who, having written her memoirs, makes it easier for us to understand her: Madam Vigée Le Brun. And here I offer an aside: perhaps you all expected me to speak about my own personal experiences because I am a painter and I *1 Translated by the author and Alex Standen, University College London (UCL), “Vita della donna artista” was delivered to the Lyceum Club in Florence on February 28, 1948, as part of a conference on La donna nelle professioni.

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must have experiences to recount, both amusing and painful episodes, but I will never speak about myself or my contemporaries because who can claim that we are artists? We understand, it’s true, and it’s been said in principle, what an artist is, but we need the benefit of hindsight to really be able to judge whether one is an artist or not. How often are fame and recognition appropriated, it always happens and not just to women! How rare is the gift to be born an artist, for either a man or a woman; for one is born an artist, one does not become an artist. It might, on the other hand, be quite common to have the disposition for drawing, acting, singing, dancing, etcetera, and to have the patience and ability to acquire the technical mastery and become an expert in this or that artistic discipline. But it is one thing to be skillful and quite another to be an artist. Now you will understand why I, not being able to judge whether I am an artist, will not speak to you about my experiences, nor will I amuse you by recounting the recent defeats and victories in the female art world. Another aside: the female art world. Is it possible to claim that there is a female art world? Yes, but only in a superficial sense, only for the sake of argument and solidarity with the weaker sex that is too often denied by the majority of the stronger sex, the opportunity to thrive beyond domestic walls and or to arouse excitement for anything other than its beauty. Only for the sake of solidarity and debate, and certainly not with respect to artistic values, should we divide artists into male and female. But with respect to art, its anguish, its consequences, its responsibilities, and its objectives, the problems are the same. [. . .] Le Brun was well-known from a young age as much for her talent as for her beauty and character. People of note came to her studio to have the honor of having her paint their portrait and in her memoirs, she wittily recalls how some of these male visitors came to her not so much out of admiration for her painting, as because, having admired the young lady’s beauty while she was out walking, at her exhibitions they sought to be painted by her, in the hope she might take a personal liking to them. [. . .] On which matter, our charming Vigée Le Brun was a very spirited woman who understood how to take advantage of her charms without being caught in the hunter’s snare, and neither was she so hot-blooded as to drown in her amorous maelstroms. Indeed, she felt so little enthusiasm at the idea of sacrificing her liberty that on her way to church for her own nuptials that she asked herself again, will I say yes or no? She was confounded with fear that her husband would curtail her liberty, but joyful at the prospect of becoming a mother. On the occasion of receiving a great honor at the French Academy shortly after her marriage, with speeches given, poetry read, etcetera, she writes, “such joys of self-love are very far from the joys I felt when I dreamed of becoming a mother.” This painter, this woman artist, was immersed in motherhood, all her energy was concentrated around the fundamental mission of maternity and devotion to her artistic calling. She is wary of the bond with her lover because she is afraid of betraying her vocation, but she is not wary of her devotion to her creation, she abandons herself to it. She is inspired by maternal tenderness. The birth of her daughter was of great, of enormous, importance, for her: it becomes the theme of her best pictures inspired by maternity. Who doesn’t recall the celebrated Louvre selfportrait of mother and daughter in a tender embrace? [. . .] And so, having spent some time looking at the life of this elegant painter of the eighteenth century, let us turn to the life of another rather well-known painter, Maria

 Appendix 107 Rosa Bonheur. Her life, which began exactly sixty-five years after that of Elizabeth Vigée Le Brun, in the Paris of George Sand, is the opposite in both its exterior and interior shape to that of Le Brun. Her life hinged solely upon love for her determined, formidable, difficult, work, for this reason, and perhaps because she did not find it to be a sacrifice, she renounced love and motherhood. Her whole life was passed in service to her art; nothing distracted her from her artistic concerns during the course of her long career. [. . .] Since her art took inspiration from God’s original work, the trees and the meadows, as soon as she had the means to do so she moved to the country and, isolated from the world, she lived her last industrious years in a calm and tranquil atmosphere in a kind of compound with every sort of animal. As a young woman she had to go to the country with her sketchbooks and paints to study her beloved animals. She was a beautiful, proud girl, and although bothered by the vulgarity of men at butcher shops, stables, and markets who did not spare her their coarse attentions, she carried on working unperturbed, pretending not to hear them. Then, so as to avoid attracting attention, she decided to renounce the female clothing that exposed her to men’s crude remarks and, dressed as a man, she was able to go about happily to the stables, the butcher shops, and the markets mistaken for a young man. It would be beneficial to speak about Artemisia Gentileschi, whose life was so powerfully brought into focus by Anna Banti’s original interpretation. Her life was dramatic from the very beginning, the only girl in a family and a mother who died young. She, due to the offence done to her in adolescence, strove to put aside her femininity and be consumed by her love of painting, but she did not succeed in doing so and her love affairs were all painful. She too lived alone with a daughter and the art she made was intense and dramatic, just like her life. I hope to have demonstrated that the life of a woman artist can have any destiny and be lived in any number of ways; whether a virtuous gentlewoman or a courtesan, a spinster, or a married woman, a woman immersed in her maternal role or a woman childless by choice, each can be as excellent an artist as the other. [. . .] Can the fact of being a woman hinder the career of an artist? Yes, but it can also be an advantage, motherhood [. . .] Just as in art are all techniques valid when employed by a true artist, so too in life are all experiences useful if one has the courage to face up to them and make use of them with the required detachment. [. . .] So one can see that there is no right or wrong way of living to achieve artistic results. And for professional results? Not even. What are the biggest difficulties that women artists encounter in their careers, that is to say the difficulties they face in expressing themselves? They are the same as those encountered by men. How do they behave in overcoming them? Always with courage and with detachment from their transient human experiences. [. . .] For the married woman artist it is very difficult to resign herself to obedience and passivity. To have to split herself between artist and wife insofar as the two have opposing and contradictory aims: the former an active being that wants to dominate and the latter a passive one who must submit to subjugation. I am convinced of this! Only a superhuman need, where art and love coalesce, can make a miracle. [. . .] A trade is acquired only slowly, gaining experience before the model for all the arts; while it is fundamentally true that one needs an artistic sensibility and temperament, but oh how much patience and how much constancy are also needed in order to achieve the

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results that truly show who we are! Art needs time: for us there can be no schedule. Skills of observation and reflection: so much time is needed to be able to develop that which you desire. The primary condition for the artist, before taking pen or pencil in hand, is to feel an emotion such that it is impossible not to work. The work of the artist requires deliberation, concentration, and a habit of observation that is only acquired with time. The thought of being a painter was far from my mind, therefore; I didn’t want to reproduce a radiant sunset after a storm, but to express the emotion I was feeling in a way that might fully respond to the very height of the message of beauty that I was understanding for the first time. It seemed as though the divine had spoken to me through the universe and had invited me to respond. [. . .] When artists work, they burn with love, truly it is for this reason that artists are happy only when working and sad when they look upon their own works: because after the fire all that is left are ashes. While it is easy for anyone to distinguish between the male and female form, not everyone has eyes or eyeglasses that allow them to see the differences in feelings and thoughts, and to follow women’s artistic activities and judge them fairly one must not forget that we love, we hate, we think, we write, we play, we sing, we paint in a way that is different to men. [. . .] When my son was small: how much pain I went through, but so too did he, being so understanding that he wouldn’t speak in order not to disturb me and wouldn’t start to play until he was certain I had come to a definitive stopping point. Even when their children fall ill the artist-mother can work, and under such circumstances are the most beautiful works born: I always took my easel into my son’s room when he was sick, and I worked so well together with him and not separated from my artistic emotions. In the family the woman artist does not sacrifice the members of her family, if anything she may herself be sacrificed. When they are sick, she stays with them, making studies and observing them, and lovingly taking care of them without tiring of it, even for aging grandparents; her family may often protest against being her subjects, but in the end they are flattered and an atmosphere of affection and mutual understanding develops. [. . .] The single woman artist, one without a companion and without children, may sometimes be envied by the artist with a family, for the freedom she has as mistress of her own time. But that woman suffers more as the years pass. [. . .] I believe that even though the woman artist sacrifices herself for a family life, she must have that family life; even if it means she is less productive, her expressions will be more intense because she will follow the right path of complete femininity. Art is always the expression of an emotion, decline, and obligation corrupt and wither the emotions which art suffers for. [. . .] Before learning the technical aspects of any artistic discipline, the artist [. . .] in the contemplation of beauty, in the hearing of sounds, feels completely overwhelmed, completely lost before the indescribable splendor of creation, and weeps, and wants to be able to express those feelings. For myself, I recall, I was thirteen years old the first time I cried in the wake of an emotional response, which came from contemplating a sunset over Florence after a storm. I cried desperately, absolutely alone and promised myself that I would try and express the heart-wrenching pleasure that those colors provoked in me: the joy of that blue, of that gold which filtered through the clouds, enveloping my city and making it shine with a new beauty.

 Appendix 109 The woman artist in motherhood: [. . .] she can sever the matrimonial tie if she no longer feels that there is justice in it, but she could never abandon her own children. In her life, the woman artist doesn’t have professional difficulties that are different from those of men. It is the particular conditions of her family life that render everything more complicated, difficult, painful, dramatic even [.  .  .] The history of so many women artists teaches us that, when the calling is there, any obstacle can be overcome, courageously and without care for the sacrifices. [.  .  .] From direct observation and from the study of the lives of artists, both men and women, their reality shows us that all paths can lead the way to great art, all that is needed is to be a great artist.

Notes

Introduction 1 Feminist art history is said to have begun with the publication of Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” first published in Art News in 1971. 2 Catherine Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept, (1997). 3 Pittura metafisica, or Metaphysical Painting, is linked to Giorgio de Chirico and Carlo Carrà whose work inspired realismo magico, or Magic Realism. The latter term was coined by Franz Roh in 1925 and adopted in Italy by Massimo Bontempelli. 4 Enrico Crispolti coined this term in “Appunti sul problema del Secondo Futurismo nella cultura italiana fra le due guerre,” Notizie—Arti figurative a II, no. 5 (1958): 34–51. The need for such a term arose because many scholars dismissed the significance of Futurism after 1916. Crispolti was among the first to evaluate its later years. Scholars have since debated the usefulness of this periodization and Crispolti eventually conceded that the movement should be seen holistically. For a full analysis of the periodization of Futurism, see Sayaka Yokota, “Il ‘secondo’ futurismo: il problema della periodizzazione ed i suoi studi,” (2012). 5 Enrico Crispolti would examine the later Roman stages of Futurism in Il mito della macchina e altri temi del futurismo (1969). Maurizio Calvesi complained about reductionist views on Futurism in Il futurismo: La fusione della vita nell’arte (1975). 6 Some key studies of Futurism in Piedmont are Enrico Crispolti, Il secondo futurismo. Torino 1923–1938: cinque pittori e uno scultore (1962); Natalia Caldiere, Fillìa: il secondo futurismo torinese (1972); Cristina Giardini, Fillìa e il secondo futurismo (1973–4); Marzio Pinottini, ed., Mino Rosso e futurismo in Piemonte (2000); Ada Masoero, Renato Miracco, and Francesco Poli, eds., L’estetica della macchina: Da Balla al futurismo torinese (2004); Valentina Diodà, 1921–1927: il movimento futurista torinese (2016). Key studies of Futurism in Tuscany are Fabrizio Bagatti, Gloria Manghetti, and Silvia Porto, eds., Futurismo a Firenze (1984); Walter Adamson, AvantGarde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism (1993); Gloria Manghetti, Marinetti e il futurismo a Firenze: Qui non si canta al modo delle rane (1994); Enrico Crispolti, Il futurismo attraverso la Toscana: architettura, arti visive, letteratura, musica, cinema e teatro (2000); Alessandra Pucci Belluomini and Riccardo Mazzoni, eds., Il futurismo a Viareggio e in Versilia (2009); Cianchi, Marco ed., Futur1sm00ggi (2011); Gloria Manghetti, Firenze futurista 1909–1920 (2011); Maurizio Scudiero and Ana Maria Ruta, eds., Futurismo & futuristi a Firenze (2011); Guido Andrea Pautasso, ed., Versilia futurista (2015).

 Notes 111 7 Mori submitted a Marina to the first Quadriennale of 1931, but it was not admitted by the jury. 8 Several scholars have erroneously cited the exhibition location as the MET. The Riverside Museum closed in the 1970s. 9 Lea Vergine, L’altra metà dell’avanguardia: 1910-1940. Pittrici e scultrici nei movimenti delle avanguardie storiche, 1980. 10 Enrica Ravenni, “Marisa Mori: volo di ritorno,” Florence, Galleria Aurelio Stefanini (April 1994). 11 Adriano Olivero, “Marisa Mori: dalla misura casoratiana al dinamismo futurista,” Turin, Galleria Narciso, April 23–May 23, 2009. 12 Chiara Toti, “Marisa Mori: la certezza dell’arte,” Florence, Lyceum Club International, April 6–April 12, 2017. 13 Marzuoli expressed this view in her dissertation La pittura di Marisa Mori (1900– 1985): tra la Torino di Casorati e di Fillia e la Firenze di Marasco e Cecchi (2000) as well as in her article “Marisa Mori. Esperienze di Novecento,” (2002). 14 Early anthologies on women artists of European modernism include Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1991); Gillian Perry, Women Artists and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1995); Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, ed., Women in Dada (1998). 15 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (1995). 16 Pollock, “Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde ‘In, of and from the Feminine’,” (2010): 795. 17 Griselda Pollock, “The Missing Future: The MoMA and Modern Women,” (2010), 29–55. 18 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting (1997). 19 The fortuitous timing of Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1967) and Michel Foucault’s “What Is an Author?” (1970) for women artists is pointed out by Norma Broude and Mary Garrard in The Expanding Discourse (1992), 4. 20 Peter Nicholls, “Futurism, Gender and Theories of Postmodernity,” (1989), 203. 21 He states this in “Futurism and Women: A Review Article,” (2010): 401–10 and reiterates the point in his introductory “Editorial,” for International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, Vol. 5 (2015): x. 22 Berghaus, “Editorial,” x–xi. 23 For the best up-to-date assessment of research done on women futurists, see Barbara Meazzi, “Women Futurists in Italy: A Research Report,” in International Yearbook Vol. 5 (2015), 450–64. 24 Anna Nozzoli, “Le donne del posdomani: Scrittrici e avanguardia,” Tabu e coscienza (1978), 41–64; Rita Guerricchio, “Il modello di donna futurista,” (1976): 35–7. 25 Foster, Prosthetic Gods (2006), 120. 26 “In 1912 Natalia began for a short while to show an interest in urban and modern themes—machinery, factories, speed—in response to Futurism, yet she disputed the group’s celebration of war and its male chauvinism, for it admitted no women.” Natalia Goncharova, Una donna e le avanguardie tra Gauguin, Matisse, e Picasso (2019–20). 27 Reprinted in Mary Ann Caws, ed. Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2000), 611. 28 Loy exhibited five works and Stevens three. On Loy, Stevens, Ekster, and Rozanova at this exhibition, see Carolyn Burke, Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (1996). On Frances Simpson Stevens, see Francis Naumann, “A Lost American Futurist” and

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29 30 31

32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

Notes

Burke and Sawelson-Gorse, “In Search of Francis Simpson Stevens” both in Art in America (1994): 104–13. For a fuller discussion and analysis of these debates, see, for example, Paola Sica, Futurist Women, 25–58. “Come si seducono le donne (Lettera aperta a F.T. Marinetti)” L’Italia futurista, Anno II, n. 36 (1917). Reprinted Giancarlo Carpi, ed. (2009), 185–7. This is the assertion of Lucia Re in “Futurism and Feminism,” (1989), 263. She elaborates in “Scrittura della metamorfosi e metamorfosi della scrittura: Rosa Rosà e il futurismo,” (1994) and her “Critical Introduction” to “Rosa Rosà’s A Woman with Three Souls in English Translation,” (2011). “Le donne cambiano finalmente,” L’Italia futurista, Anno II, n. 27 (1917). Reprinted in Una Donna con tre anime. Romanzo futurista, ed. Claudia Salaris (1981). “Ammiro il genio di Benedetta, mia uguale non discepola,” Preface to Viaggio di Gararà (1998), 124. Massimo Duranti and Enrico Crispolti, Leandra Angelucci Cominazzini: futurista onirica (1983); Massimo Duranti, Leandra Angelucci Cominazzini: Futurismo al femminile (1992). “Sono lieto di dichiarare che la signorina Barbara è una aeropittrice geniale e che con quadri importanti ha partecipato alla ultima Biennale Veneziana . . . Ho molta fiducia nel suo ingegno pittorico. F. T. Marinetti” A photocopy of the original is published by Salaris in Barbara aeropittrice aviatrice futurista (1983). “A Marisa Mori al suo forte intuito plastico sensuale-astratto, con molti auguri Futurista, l’amico di Boccioni, F. T. Marinetti,” dedication in Boccioni Pittura scultura futuriste given to the artist by F. T. Marinetti. Mori Family Archive. Graziella Parati, “The Transparent Woman,” Feminine Feminists (1994), 57. These include the second edition of Bruno Corra’s Sam Dunn è morto (1917) and his Madrigali e grotteschi (1919), Mario Carli’s Notti filtrate (1918), and Arnaldo Ginna’s Le locomotive con le calze (1919). Alena Pomajzlová, Ruzena: Story of the Painter Růžena Zátková (2011). Velocità di un motoscafo (1924) forms part the permanent collection of the Galleria Comunale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Rome, Aeropittura di un incontro con l’isola (1935–6) forms part of the collection of the Galleria Nazionale di Arte Moderna also in Rome, and Monte Tabor (1936) belongs to the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. The whereabouts of Ballerina negra (1932) and La danza della beguiné (1932) are unknown. The location of two works, presumed lost by the family, were discovered by me during the course of this research. Pollock, “Moments and Temporalities of the Avant-Garde ‘In, of and from the Feminine’” (2010), 795–820. Cindy Nemser, “Art Criticism and Women Artists,” (1973). Lucy Lippard, “Mapping,” in Introduction to Mixed Blessings (1990), 7. “Ma la storia di un psiche individuale è storia . . . ” Benedetto Croce, Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica generale (1908), 33. “La prego di non fare una biografia—è quasi impossible conoscerci! Scriva, se vuole, delle mie pitture e disegni, se questi piacciono o non piacciono, non importa che le critichi—basta che dica quello che sente—le pitture le può vedere e giudicare ma non potrà conoscere dell’autore che la superficie. Anche se la sottoscritta Le raccontasse ore per ora ciò che è avvenuta durante la suo lunga esistenza sarebbe lo stesso: non so neanche io quello che sono.” (Franco Ceriotto Notes 1978). My translation. Letter to Franco Ceriotto, Mori Archive, 1978.

 Notes 113 47 For a discussion, see Kristen Frederickson and Sarah E. Webb, eds., Singular Women: Writing the Artist (2003).

Chapter 1 1 “Ecco, a me è sembrato che la maggior parte dei quadri esposti alla Biennale rappresentino torture inutili, per chi li ha dipinti e per chi li guarda.” Letter dated September 22, 1948. Mori Family Archive. 2 See, for example, Nicoletta Misler, La via Italiana al realismo (1976); Nancy Jachec, Politics and Painting at the Venice Biennale, 1948–1964 (2007); Adrian Duran, Painting, Politics and the New Front of Cold War Italy (2014). 3 See Appendix for all lecture quotations. 4 She also spoke on “La Mostra Internazionale Femminile d’Arte a Parigi” to the Federazione Italiana Donne nelle Arti, Professioni, Affari (FIDAPA) on June 6, 1961. 5 See Piero Meldini, Sposa e madre esemplare (1975). 6 The madre prolifica, robust and fertile, was one of the positive figures of Fascist propaganda often juxtaposed with the negative donna-crisi, or crisis woman, too thin and unhealthy. Representations of these figures are discussed in Elisabetta Mondello, La nuova italiana: la donna nella stampa e nella cultura del ventennio (1987); Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (1994); Perry Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy (2009). Natasha Chang’s recent study The Crisis-Woman: Body Politics and the Modern Woman in Fascist Italy (2015) discusses these oppositions as part of Fascism’s policing of women’s bodies through scientific, satirical, and political discourse. For a recent study on the institutionalized importance given to prolific mothers under Fascism, see Maria Morello’s study of the Opera nazionale maternità e infanzia (ONMI), Donna, moglie e madre prolifica: ONMI in cinquant’anni di storia (2010). 7 To name only a few important studies: Renzo De Felice, Futurismo, cultura e politia (1988); Claudia Salaris, Artecrazia (1992); Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics (1996); Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity (2003); Walter Adamson, “Fascinating Futurism: The Historiographical Politics of an Historical Avant-garde,” (2008); Emilio Gentile, La nostra sfida alle stelle (2009). 8 Lucia Re, “Futurism and Fascism, 1914–1945” (2000), 195. 9 Rosa Rosà, “Le donne del posdomani,” L’Italia futurista (June 17, 1917). Reprinted and translated as “Women of the Near Future [1]” in Futurism: An Anthology (2009), 233–4. For more on Rosà and this issue see Re, “Rosa Rosà and the Question of Gender in Wartime Futurism” (2014). 10 Enif Robert, “Una parola serena,” (October 7, 1917). Reprinted and translated as “A Tranquil Thought,” in Futurism: An Anthology, 243. 11 Sabrina Spinazzè says that at least 693 women artists were active in official state exhibitions. “Donne e attività artistica durante il Ventennio,” in L’arte delle donne: nell’Italia del Novecento (2001), 121. 12 Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy, 13. 13 Publicity or education regarding birth control and family planning were banned by the Rocco Code in 1927 and abortion was upgraded to be “a crime against the state.” For more on the demographic campaign and related legal policies, see Lelsey Caldwell, “Reproducers of the Nation: Women and the Family in Fascist Policy,” (1986).

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14 Attempts were made to bar women from certain teaching positions and from competing for state jobs with men. The state railways dismissed women hired before 1915. See Alexander De Grand (1976) or Victoria De Grazia (1992). 15 “La donna deve obbedire . . . La mia opinione della sua parte nello Stato è in opposizione ad ogni femminismo . . . Nel nostro Stato essa non deve contare.” Emil Ludwig, Colloqui con Mussolini (1932). Translated as Talks with Mussolini in 1933. 16 On the ineffectiveness of Fascist demographic policies, see Cecilia Dau Novelli, Famiglia e modernizzazione in Italia tra le due guerre (1994); Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography (1996); Lauren Forcucci, “Battle for Births: The Fascist Pronatalist Campaign in Italy 1925 to 1938,” (2010). 17 After the war she faced the difficulty of living off her art and consequently rented rooms in her large home to tourists. 18 It is family lore and has been reported elsewhere that Edmea was the daughter of the last surviving male descendent of Baroque sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini. 19 See Salena Daly, Italian Futurism and the First World War (2016), 50–4. 20 Allison Scardino Belzer, Women and the Great War: Femininity Under Fire in Italy (2010). 21 An amateur artist and neighbor named Simonetti made a sketch of Mori drawing intently at the age of about four. Mori treasured it and it still hangs in the family home. 22 Assicurazione La Fondiaria S.p.A was founded in Florence in 1879. 23 Giorgio de Chirico, “Paola Levi-Montalcini,” (1939), 461. 24 Mori, Parole messe in fila (1933). 25 In his words, “piuttosto inconstante e turbolente, di accesi sentimenti nazionalistici.” Franco Mori, Letter to Eleonora Lauria, January 18, 2005, 146. 26 Franco Mori says his mother had no intention of going to Ethiopia. In response to his father’s requests she apparently claimed, untruthfully, that their son was ill and unable to travel. 27 “Una tristezza senza nome é scesa su di me. Sono stata alla clinica, ho visto la salma. Un viso sconosciuto. Assenza di spiritualità . . . Una vita sciupata, un lento suicidio— per me sofferenza durata 23 anni. Per lui, cosa é stata la vita?” Personal diary entry dated November 19, 1943. Mori Family Archive. 28 “Accanto alla salma di mio marito mancano 10 minuti alle 13:30—ora in cui ieri é spirato. Tristezza infinita per non aver potuto fare niente per lui . . . tanto dolore ha dato a se stesso e agli altri e alle persone che amava . . . Forse adesso é qui con noi quello che voleva essere, non quello che é stato.” Personal diary entry marked Villa Salimbeni (day ripped) November 1943. Mori Family Archive. 29 As will be discussed in Chapter 2. 30 As will be discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. 31 Both Giacomo Grosso and Giovanni Guarlotti have been cited as Mori’s teacher, but a note in her hand on drawings in the FM Archive states, “copie disegni Guarlotti quando sono stata allieva 1 mese da lui prima di andare da Casorati.” Guarlotti was associated with Liberty style and trained at the Accademia Albertina. 32 Franco Ceriotto 1978, Quoted in Lauria, 14. 33 Franco Mori recounts that his grandmother, Edmea Bernini, was “una presenza costante, affettuosa, autorevole, e buona, che ha sostituito, più che integrato, molto spesso mia madre, la quale in questo modo poteva permettersi di dedicarsi alla pittura con la coscienza tranquilla.” Franco Mori’s letter to Eleonora Lauria, January 18, 2005, Appendix, 147.

 Notes 115 34 A Futurist painter, photographer, and poet who was one of the founders of the Turin Futurists, established in 1923, where he lived until moving to Savona in 1929 and undertaking ceramic work and becoming a key figure in Ligurian Futurism. 35 He was a signatory of the Manifesto of Futurist Cooking (December 1930) and the Manifesto of Futurist Sacred Art (June 1931) and coauthor with Marinetti of The Futurist Cookbook (1932). He introduced Mori to Marinetti and remained Mori’s close friend. 36 Paris Postmark December 7, 1931—Avenue D’Orleans. 37 “Il Futurismo per me e stata una gioia perché potevo inventare, arricchire di colori e ritmi ciò che studiavo dal vero . . . Casorati mi disse che mi rovinano, che perdevo quello che avevo guadagnato . . . sarebbe stato un vero fallimento . . . ” Mori kept many diaries and notebooks. In 1978 she wrote a biographical summary for Franco Ceriotto. Titled “Notazioni autobiografiche di Marisa Mori virgate su un testo di Franco Cerrioto” these were reproduced in Eleonora Lauria’s 2003 dissertation as an Appendix, 165–6. My translation. 38 “Sa che festeggeremo l’anno nuovo con un cenaereo nel mio studio? Viene anche lei? Stiamo preparando con Fillìa cose grandiose,” Quaderni di Tullio d’Albisola, ed. Danilo Presotto (1981), 64. 39 Her work was shown at the most significant Futurist shows including Enrico Prampolini et les aéropeintres futurists italiens (Paris 1932), Omaggio futurista ad Umberto Boccioni (Milan 1933), Prima Mostra di Scenotecnica Cinematografica and Prima Mostra Nazionale Futurista (Rome 1933), and Exposition des Futuristes Italiens (Paris 1935). 40 Alessandra Marzuoli and others include Mori’s participation in the first 1931 Quadriennale noting a label on the verso La tenda sulla spiaggia a Marina di Massa (1930) in the Mori Family Archive. There is no evidence in the Quadriennale Archives of her participation. A document on file in the artist’s own hand affirms that she participated in 1935 and 1939. Alessandro Sagramora of the Quadriennale Archive explained to me that during the first Quadriennales all works submitted were given a label therefore it seems likely that she submitted this work, which was not accepted by the jury for the exhibition in 1931. 41 Here she exhibited the Golfo della Spezia triptych: Sintesi romantica, Sintesi militare, and Sintesi gioiosa del Golfo della Spezia (1933) for which she received third place for painting in the Premio Nazionale di Pittura Golfo della Spezia, Casa d’Arte, La Spezia, a competitive show inaugurated that year by F. T. Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, Fillìa, and Renato Righetti. 42 Although there is no physical evidence remaining, Franco Mori remembers a Futurist set of furniture that his mother designed for a room in their Florentine home, which was entirely painted in silver metallic paint. 43 Designs are extant in the Mori Family Archive. 44 Her more modernist approach may have been rejected by the publisher. 45 She exhibited at the I Mostra futurista di scenotecnica cinematografica (Galleria Bardi, Rome, 1933), I Mostra interregionale sindacale di scenografica (Florence 1933), Mostra d’arte Toscana di scenografia e tecnica scenica (Florence 1934), and VI Triennale: Mostra di scenografica (Milan 1936). 46 She was a signatory alongside Antonio Marasco, Giuseppe Lega, and Fernando Raimondi. See Rossella Catanese, Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-garde film (2018), 237.

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47 A Florentine sculptor, painter, designer, architect, photographer, and inventor, he worked with fashion icon Madeleine Vionnet in Paris and is best known for his invention of the TuTa design in 1919. The name Thayaht is a bifrontal palindrome he took as a pseudonym. Together Marasco and Thayaht also organized the Arte Sacra Futurista exhibit at Palazzo Ferroni in Florence in 1933, in which Mori took part. 48 According to Franca Zoccoli, he became a close friend. “Futurist Women Painters in Italy,” International Futurism in Arts and Literature (2000), 382. 49 Official communications from the school in the Mori Archive evidence that she taught costume design in 1942–4, 1948, and 1954. Franco Mori described his mother’s commitment to the theater, “Il teatro insomma era una manifestazione artistica molto degna di interesse per la nostra famiglia . . . mia madre è stata la brillante protagonista di molte recita.” For more, see Carlo Menichi, “Marisa Mori tra moda e costume,” (2014). 50 Fillìa’s seven-act play was published in 1925 and the first act was called “Sensualità meccanica.” Mori’s teatrino was titled “Sensualità meccanica (scenodinamica di Fillìa).” More research is needed to clarify the details of Mori’s projects in theatre, costume, and set design. 51 Alessandra Marzuoli, “Marisa Mori. Esperienze di Novecento,” (2002), 48. 52 Born in Calabria, he spent most of his life in Florence where he attended the Academy of Fine Arts and made contact with Futurism via the periodical Lacerba. He founded a Futurist-fascist group in Florence after the war. For more on Marasco, see Sicoli, Tonino, ed. Antonio Marasco futurista (1989) and Günter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics (1996). 53 Coined in 1915 as a derogatory term by Aldo Palazzeschi, Ardegno Soffici, and Giovanni Papini in the Florentine periodical Lacerba to describe the Milan Futurists gathered around Marinetti, the term has since been used by scholars to describe the tendency to identify the movement with its charismatic founder. 54 Marisa signed as a painter and Mario as a poet. Reprinted in Luciano Caruso, ed., Manifesti proclami, interventi e documenti teorici del futurismo, 1909–1944 (1980), 215–18. 55 Berghaus, Futurism and Politics, 242–4. 56 “ma consigli Lei pure Marasco, come già gli scrisse Marinetti, di sostituire al nome non chiaro di ‘indipendenti’, il nome di ‘Nuovi gruppi Futuristi’.” Mori Family Archive. 57 Casorati and a number of students exhibited works at the Sala d’Arte “La Nazione” in December 1932–January 1933. She wrote to Casorati asking for confirmation that he would be coming and he responded December 6, 1932, “Esporrò anche qualche disegno fra i quali uno per Lei . . . appena arriverò, naturalmente con Daphne e la buona Signora Ida, la farò avvisata.” A Casorati drawing of a female nude in the Mori household is presumably the gift in question. After their visit, Daphne Maugham wrote a letter dated December 28, 1932 to say, “eravamo molto felici di rivederti e specialmente dispiacuti di non aver potuto arrivare a casa tua questa volta.” Mori Family Archive. 58 These two adjacent events are described by Chiara Toti in her catalogue essay “Marisa Mori: La Certezza dell’arte,” (2017), 15–17. 59 Mario Verdone, I fratelli Bragaglia (1991). 60 Aniceto del Massa, “Marisa Mori,” 1934. Mori Family Archive. 61 He discouraged her from incurring added expenses and asked that she communicate with Fillìa about debts owed regarding Tina Mennyey. Letters dated April 30, 1933, May 5, 1933, August 25, 1933, February 20, 1934, and February 21, 1934. Mori Family Archive.

 Notes 117 62 “ormai Franco basta a se stesso e i miei non hanno alcun bisogno di me . . . il lavoro è ciò che amo e se muoio per il mio lavoro di che non ho rimpianti.” Typed war diaries dated August 1943 recording a conversation with “Ester.” Mori Family Archive. 63 Giovanni Lista coined the term “aeroaesthetics” when, against Enrico Crispolti’s advocacy of the term “Second Futurism” he proposed to categorize Futurism by three decades: “plastic dynamism- dinamismo plastico” of the 1910s, “mechanized art—l’arte meccanica” of the 1920s, and “aero-estetica” of the 1930s in Le Futurisme (1985). 64 See Renato Miracco, Futurist Skies: Italian Aeropainting (2005); Emily Braun, “Shock and Awe: Futurist Aeropittura and the Theories of Giulio Douhet,” (2014); Lucia Piccioni, “Aeropittura futurista e colonialismo fascista: il paesaggio africano senza l’uomo,” (2017). 65 Marzuoli, La pittura di Marisa Mori, 52. 66 This according to Mori’s son. 67 Franca Zoccoli, “Futurist Women Painters in Italy” (2000), 383. 68 There is a collection of newspaper and magazine clippings featuring people at mass spectacles and public gatherings in the Mori Family Archive. 69 The exhibition was organized by the Associazione Nazionale Fascista Artiste e Laureate (ANDPA) Circolo di Genova on a theme assigned by Princess Maria Giuseppina di Savoia. Mori’s painting on page 80 is one of the few avant-garde images in the catalogue. 70 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 24. 71 Adrian Duran, Painting, Politics and the New Front of Cold War Italy (2014), 11. 72 Felice Casorati, Giorgio de Chirico, and Giorgio Morandi all participated in fascistsponsored exhibitions like the Rome Quadriennale or Venice Biennale. 73 First published anonymously on July 15, 1938, as “Fascism and the Problem of Race,” in Giornale d’Italia, and republished August 5, 1938, in La difesa della razza, the document known as the “Manifesto of Race” would lead to a series of Regio Decreto Leggi (RDL), or government decrees, in September and November of 1938. These decrees included: RDL September 5, n. 1390—regarding “Provisions for the defense of race in schools,” RDL September 23, n. 1630—regarding the “Institution of separate schools for Jewish children,” and RDL November 17, n. 1728—regarding “Provisions for the Italian race.” 74 “non ho mai appartenuto a nessun partito, non ero né fascista né antifascista ma quando ci fu la persecuzione razziale presi posizione . . . Partecipai anche durante il fascismo più avanzato alle Quadriennali romane ubbidendo a Marinetti che dava dei temi e io sceglievo Le colonie marine dove i bambini erano mandati per godere il mare e altri temi del genere.” Autobiographical Notes for Ceriotto (1978). Reprinted in Lauria Appendix (2003), 165–6. My translation. 75 Fascist settlers depart for the lands of the empire was shown at the Venice Biennale of 1940. 76 Her hand-written notes and sketches fill various small portable notebooks, which are not always dated. The war diaries are systematically dated and exist only as typed pages. Occasional comments reveal that she transcribed these diaries after the war. 77 Gino Levi-Montalcini (1902–74) was one of the first exponents of Rationalist architecture with Giuseppe Pagano and contributor to the architecture and design journal Casabella. He was also a skilled sculptor, designer, portraitist, and caricaturist.

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78 “Sono andata, per quanto mi seccasse perché ero con Paola a dipingere Aruffo in posa.” Entry dated November 7, 1943. “Con Paola siamo andate da Alinari a scegliere delle stampe poi passando dalla chiesa del Carmini ci siamo entrate per vedere gli affreschi di Masaccio: naturalmente erano murati: grande parete in mattoni con un piccolo usciolino che ci ha fatto sulle prime sperare che entrandovi qualcosa si potesse vedere; ma un fratone ci ha tolto ogni speranza dicendoci: Dopo la guerra, se ci saremo!” Entry dated May 20, 1944. 79 The catalogue of 1962 and the artwork of 1977 are still in the Mori Family Archive. The work is labeled LMP and dated November 14, 1977. It is damaged on right bottom corner apparently by workmen during house renovations. 80 “Franco mi dice—è il primo istante della mia vita di vera libertà—difatti è nato il novembre 2, 1922, è nato col fascismo.” Multi-page diary entry dated July 26, 1943. 81 Franco described his ordeal in Le Cronache, 64–7. 82 Typed diary entries dated February 1943 and translated by the author. Mori Family Archive. 83 Franco Mori, Cronache (2019), 67–9. 84 Annalisa Marchianò and Grazia Perugini, Firenze ferita: la Guerra, la devastazioni dei bombardamenti, l’arrivo degli Alleati: La città dal 1940–44 (2007). 85 On the liberation of Florence, see Giovanni Frullini, La Liberazione di Firenze (1982) or Ugo Cappelletti, Firenze, città aperta (1994). 86 The city of Florence mounted a memorial plaque to Wolf in the middle of Ponte Vecchio on April 11, 2007. 87 Despite a tendency to interpret Italian art via such rigid binary oppositions, Duran argues that the artists of the New Front made a considerable effort to escape these categories by navigating the spaces between. Painting, Politics and the New Front of Cold War Italy, 2. 88 Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s, 256. 89 T. J. Clark, “Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction,” Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, Serge Guibaut ed. (1990), 229. 90 Jaleh Mansoor, Marshall Plan Modernism (2016). 91 Duran, Painting, Politics and the New Front of Cold War Italy (2014), 81. 92 “Pourquoi j’ai adhéré au Parti communiste,” L’Humanite (October 29–30, 1944). 93 Francoise Gilot, Life with Picasso (1964). 94 In typed notes dated October 15–16, 1947, she describes hearing lectures by Paola Massino and Anna Banti. These lectures may have been organized in conjunction with the Second National Congress of the UDI, which took place in Milan from October 19–23. For more on UDI, see Patrizia Gabrielli, La pace e la mimosa: l’Unione donne italiane e la costruzione politica della memoria (1944–55) (Roma: Donzelli, 2005). 95 Quoted in Perry Willson, Women in Twentieth Century Italy (2010), 6. 96 See Lucia Re’s analysis in “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender,” in Mothers of Invention (1995), 76–99. 97 Fiora Bassanese, “Sibilla Aleramo: Writing a Personal Myth,” in Mothers of Invention, 140. 98 Quoted in Lucia Re, “Fascist Theories of ‘Woman’ and the Construction of Gender,” 87. 99 Mussolini, “Macchina e donna,” (1934) Opera Omnia XXVI, 311.

 Notes 119 100 Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero, Criminal Woman, the Prostitute and the Normal Woman (1893), 214. 101 Quoted in Lucia Re, “Futurism and Fascism, 1914–1945,” (2000), 190–1. 102 “. . . magari pensava che io fossi orgoglioso di fare il modello per lei, ma io non ero per niente: non dovevo fare altro che starmene lì, nella posa in cui lei mi metteva, ben fermo, in silenzio. È vero che lei mi cantava delle belle canzoni e mi raccontava delle storie affascinanti—e di solito lo faceva soltanto quando io ‘stavo in posa’—ma poi spesso si interrompeva perché io facevo un piccolo movimento e lei veniva a rimettermi nella esatta posizione di prima, o perché cambiava la luce e bisognava interrompere, o perché, come accadeva di solito, si dimenticava di tutto immergendosi completamente nel suo lavoro.” Franco Mori, Cronache della mia lunghissima vita (2019), 19. 103 Quoted in Bentivoglio and Zoccoli, Women Artists of Italian Futurism (1997), 123. 104 Ann Cesar, “Italian Feminism and the Novel: Sibilla Aleramo’s ‘A Woman’” (1980): 79–87; Olga Lombardi identifies Aleramo’s “tendenza a confondere in un’unica esaltazione la vita e l’arte,” in Passaggio (1919) and Trasfigurazione (1922) in “Sibilla Aleramo,” Belfagor 41, no. 5 (September 1986): 529. For Lucia Re Rosa Rosà attempts to forge a notion of motherhood that is not repressive for either mother or child. “Scrittura della metamorfosi e metamorfosi della scrittura: Rosa Rosà e il futurismo,” Chroniques italiennes 39/40 (1994): 320. 105 Rosa Rosà, “Women of the Near Future [2]” (October 7, 1917), translated in Futurism: An Anthology (2009), 244–5. 106 The term écriture feminine was first introduced by Cixous in “Le Rire de la Meduse,” (1975). For a full elaboration of the concept within French feminist philosophy, see Vanda Zajko and Miriam Leonard, Laughing with Medusa (2006). 107 Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” (1976), 891. 108 Stanton, Domna C., “Difference on Trial: A Critique of the Maternal Metaphor in Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva,” (1989), 156–79. 109 Mira Schor, Wet (1997), 58. 110 Mary Garrard, “Feminist Art and the Essentialism Controversy” (1995), 490, 485. 111 Lucia Re discusses the conceptual use of motherhood among Futurists in “MaterMateria: il potere materno e l’avanguardia futurista,” (2015). Sadly, she misinterprets my analysis of The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity (1936) as being sadomasochistic and unironic in a footnote. Here I hope I have clarified. 112 Mary Garrard, “Artemisia Gentileschi’s Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting,” (1980), 97–112. 113 Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman (1996). 114 Diane Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker (2014). 115 Swathi Krishna and Srirupa Chatterjee, “Mina Loy's PARTURITION and L’écriture Féminine,” The Explicator 73, no. 4 (2015): 257. 116 Emily Braun, “Antonietta Raphael: Artist, Woman, Anti-Fascist,” in Mothers of Invention, edited by Robin Pickering-Iazzi (1995), 189. 117 Susan Stanford Friedman, “Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse,” (1987), 76. 118 Benedetta Cappa Marinetti operated under the name Benedetta expunging marital and paternal surnames from her painting and writing. I refer to her here as she referred to herself simply as Benedetta. 119 “la madre è artista” . . . “È la femminilità che respira dall’ignoto profondo una vibrazione per rinchiuderla in se e farla vita.” Benedetta, “L’arte al feminile,” Box 6, Folder 9, page 14, Benedetta Papers, Getty Archive, Los Angeles.

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120 “E allora la donna artista si manterrà nei confini della terra, volutamente o istintivamente ci si mantiene, circoscritta dalla curva precisa del globo che è anche la curva pesante della maternità.” “L’arte al femminile,” 4. 121 There is a letter of April 14, 1936, that Mori wrote to Benedetta in the Mori Archive that indicates Benedetta was suffering from ill health. They likely met on many occasions including Mori’s 1934 visit to Rome, at the Venice Biennales of 1934 and 1936, and possibly at the Rome Quadriennales of 1935 and 1939. 122 The five murals are separately titled Sintesi delle comunicazioni telegrafiche e telefoniche; Sintesi delle comunicazioni Radiofoniche; Sintesi delle communicazioni Terrestre; Sintesi delle communicazioni maritime; Sintesi delle communicazioni aeree. See Siobhan Conaty, “Benedetta’s Monument to Futurism and Fascism,” (2004–5). 123 “La donna italiana non è, non sarà mai una concorrente dell’uomo. Ella è troppo ed essenzialmente madre. Quando si dice madre bisogna dare alla parola il suo grande significato di generatrice: generatrice di uomini, di sentimenti, di passioni, di idee.” (1935) Quoted in Lia Giachero, “Identità femminile e creazione artistica,” (2001), 74. 124 Lucia Re, “Impure Abstraction: Benedetta as Visual Artist and Novelist,” in La Futurista: Benedetta Cappa (1998). 125 Lisa Panzera, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti: Donna generatrice (2003); Erin Larkin, ‘Il mio futurismo’: appropriation, dissent and the ‘questione della donna’ in the works of the women of Italian futurism (2007). 126 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 76. 127 ANDPA is confusingly referred to by many names including Associazione Nazionale Fascista Donne Artiste e Laureate (ANFDAL), Associazione Nazionale Fascista Donne Professioniste Artiste e Laureate (ANFDPAEL), and Associazione Nazionale Fascista Artiste e Laureate (ANFAL), and Associazione Nazionale Fascista Donne Professioniste Artiste (ANFDPA). For a history of the organization, see Sabrina Spinazzè, “Donne e attività artistica duranate il Ventennio,” in L’arte delle donne nell’Italia del Novecento (2001), 121–36. 128 Chiara Toti, “Marisa Mori. La certezza dell’arte,” (2017), 7–30. 129 The show included Nella Marchesini, Andreina Bay, Giorgina Lattes, Daphne Maugham, Lalla Romano, Jessie Boswell, Tina Mennyey, and Paola Levi-Montalcini. 130 The show included Bella Hutter, Cesarina Gualino, Paola Levi-Montalcini. Mori exhibited four “motivi per bozzetti pubblicitari—advertising sketches” now held in the Pro Cultural Femminile Archive Folder 59, Dossier 66.2. 131 Sabrina Spinazzè, “Artiste nel Ventennio. Il ruolo dell’associazionismo femminile tra emancipazione e nazionalizzazione,” in Donne d’arte (2006), 57–75. 132 On the history of the Lyceum Club in Florence, see Barbara Imbergamo (2006), Donatella Lippi (2016) or Simonetta Soldani (2006). 133 It was the Lyceum Club, for example, that organized Italy’s first exhibition of Impressionism in 1910, which was lauded by Ardengo Soffici on the pages of La Voce on May 12, 1912. 134 One piece of evidence for associations with other women artists from the Lyceum is a portrait made of fellow Florentine painter Fillide Giorgi Levasti (1883–1966), likely painted around 1950. For more information see Lucia Mannini and Chiara Toti, ed. Artiste: Women Artists, Firenze 1900-1950 (2018). 135 Cristina Mazzoni, “Impressive Cravings, Impressionable Bodies: Pregnancy and Desire from Cesare Lombroso to Ada Negri,” (1997), 154. 136 See Lucia Re, “Futurism and Fascism, 1914-1945,” 190–1. 137 Sharon Wood, Italian Women’s Writing 1860–1994 (1995), 120.

 Notes 121 138 Susanna Scarparo, “‘Artemisia’: The Making of a ‘Real Woman,’” (2002), 364–5. 139 Many letters were written to Mori in French and she wrote some intimate diary entries in imperfect English. 140 Key examples are the Mostra nazionale d’arte femminile (Palazzo Carignano, Turin 1946); Mostra di pittrici fiorentine (Lyceum, Florence 1948); V Mostra internazionale d’arte femminile. Sei pittrici del Lyceum (London 1950); Mostra di sei pittrici fiorentine. Federazione italiana donne arti professioni e affari (FIDAPA) (Galleria Bevilaqua la Masa, Venice 1954); Mostra d’Arte FIDAPA (Galleria del Comune, Rome, 1956); Mostra d’Arte FIDAPA (Circolo artistico, Catania 1958); Mostra nazionale pittrici italiane, (Societa delle belle arti, Florence 1961); 6e Exposition Club International Féminin (Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris, 1961); Pittrici e scultrici FIDAPA (Galleria Cassiopea, Turin 1962). 141 A movement spearheaded by Carla Lonzi with Carla Accardi and Elvira Banotti in July 1970. 142 “Pochi giorni prima a un certo punto voleva proprio dirmi qualcosa, e non riusciva. Finalmente ha borbottato: “Farò cosi.” Mi ha abbracciato stretto stretto—non era mai successo!—mi ha baciato, mi ha stretto più volte a sé. Mi sono commosso, ed anche lei. È stato il suo commiato, se né è resa conto bene. Anche io.” Franco Mori, Cronache della mia lunghissima vita (2019), 135. 143 Mondello, La nuova italiana: la donna nella stampa e nella cultura del ventennio (1987).

Chapter 2 1 “Quei tre ritratti di Gualino dipinti da Casorati a me ignoto furono come se ne fossero venuti sotto gli occhi apposta per levarmi dalla noia della scuola che frequentavo solo per copiare delle brute pitture.” Autobiographical notes for Franco Ceriotto 1978, Mori Family Archive. 2 Fernando Tempesti, Massimo Bontempelli (1974), 40–7. 3 The term was coined by Franz Roh to describe the new realism emerging in German art of the 1920s in Nach-Expressionismus, magischer Realismus: Probleme der neuesten europäischen Malerei (1925). 4 Jeffrey Wechsler, “Magic Realism: Defining the Indefinite,” (1985). 5 “Precisione realistica di contorni, solidità di materia ben poggiata sul suolo; e intorno come un’atmosfera di magia che faccia sentire, traverso un’inquietudine intensa, quasi un’altra dimensione in cui la nostra vita si proietta.” Bontempelli, L’avventura novecentista (1974), 22. 6 “Per ora i pittori che più attraggono i nostri gusti di novecentisti, che meglio corrispondono con la loro alla nostra arte, sono pittori italiani del Quattrocento: Masaccio, Mantegna, Piero della Francesca. Per quel loro realismo preciso, avvolto in una atmosfera di stupore lucido, essi ci sono stranamente vicini.” Bontempelli, 21. 7 These ideas were originally published in French in Bontempelli’s article “Analogies,” 900 (1927). 8 Golan, “Is Fascist Realism a magic realism?” (2020), 224. 9 Golan, 232. 10 The artist made the claim in an interview of the 1950s with Emilio Fede, but two exist, one in a mirror reflection in Mannequins, 1924, and one post-dating the interview from 1959–60.

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11 Paola da Ros lists twenty-six self-portraits, but the catalogue is incomplete. Several nudes are, in my opinion, also self-portraits. The number does not include drawings or sketches of herself. 12 The Uffizi is home to the world’s largest collection of works by women artists of the past and Mori’s Self-Portrait in Blue was donated to the museum by Franco Mori in 2015. 13 “le maniche sono antiquate” says Mag (pseudonym), “Primi tepori estivi, primi abiti leggeri,” Lidel (May 1925) quoted in Natasha Chang, The Crisis Woman, 24. 14 It was exhibited at the LXXXVII Esposizione nazionale di Belle Arti, also called the I Esposizione Sindacale regionale fascista della società Promotrice di Belle Arti, Palazzo della Promotrice, Torino, June 1929. 15 “E’ una tela di propaganda. Le ragazze moderne osservando la brutta figura delle donne coi capelli lunghi corrono dal barbiere a farsi radere.” Nino Costa and Felice Vellani, “Passeggiata semiseria per le Sale dell’Esposizione,” Caval d’Bronso (July 13, 1929). Mori Family Archive. 16 On this concept, see, for example, Lynn Louden, “Sprezzatura in Raphael and Castiglione,” (1968). 17 Marinetti, “Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 1909. 18 For a broader European assessment in English, see Elizabeth Cowling and Jennifer Mundy, eds., On Classic Ground (1990). 19 Jean Cocteau, Le Rappel a L’Ordre (1926). The term has been translated as call to order or return to order in English and ritorno all’ordine in Italian. The idea that a return to figuration represented a return to order has been interrogated most recently by Devin Fore in Realism After Modernism (2012). 20 Carlo Carrà, “Il quadrante dello spirito” (1918). Reprinted in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, ed. Carlo Carrà (1987), 167–8. 21 Its influence on Magic Realism is explored in Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Realismo Magico: Pittura e scultura in italia 1919–1925 (1988). 22 Published in French and Italian by Mario Broglio, its contributors insisted that the timeless values of the past needed to be recuperated in Italian modern art. Its final issue came out in the Summer 1922 immediately before the rise of Fascism, however, as a publishing house it continued to put out monographs as, for example, Carlo Carrà’s treatise on Giotto published in 1924. See Paolo Fossati, Valori Plastici 1918–22 (1981) or Fabio Benzi, “‘Valori Plastici.’ Il ritorno all’ordine a Roma” (2013). 23 Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco, Classicismo Pittorico (2006) or Elena Pontiggia, Modernità e classicità (2008). 24 Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps (1989) or Romy Golan, Modernity and Nostalgia (1995). 25 Fore, Realism After Modernism, 2012. 26 Fore, Realism After Modernism, 11–12. 27 Paolo Valesio, “Foreword: After the Conquest of the Stars,” Italian Modernism, xv. 28 “La sua è la cultura del curioso”; “il suo calcolo chiuso di apostolico pittorico e di felice sensibilità potrebbe dirsi umanistico. Sotto queste confuse superstrutture di modernità e di tradizione che ricordano la figura di un quattrocentista interessato . . . una necessità di dimenticare nell’originalità nativa le ritrovate verità concettuali che non lo hanno mutato.” Gobetti, Felice Casorati Pittore (1923), 89–90. 29 “Casorati è misoneista e non ha trapiantato in Italia gli stranieri.” Quoted in Francesco Poli’s Afterword to Casorati Pittore (2018), 114.

 Notes 123 30 Nino Barbantini was an Italian art critic and key figure of the modern art scene in Venice who organized modern exhibits at Ca’ Pesaro between 1908 and 1925. 31 Statement made by Casorati in a lecture of 1953. Quoted in Francesco Poli, Felice Casorati (1995), 14. 32 On the relationship between Gobetti and Croce and the influence of Croce’s thought on Gobetti, see Giacomo De Marzi, Piero Gobetti e Benedetto Croce (1996). 33 James Thrall Soby and Alfred Barr, Twentieth-century Italian Art (1949), 28. 34 For an international exhibition history and discussion of his impact abroad, see Georgina Bertolino, ed. Felice Casorati. Collezioni e mostre tra Europa e Americhe (2014). 35 Casorati also mentored Carol Rama in the 1940s. FIAT commissioned a commercial poster from Casorati celebrating the launch of the 600 model and the car manufacturer’s link to the city entitled Fiat Seicento/Notturno Torinese in 1955–6. 36 “Il suo arrivo era stato . . . come la caduta di un masso in un stagno, e aveva modificato d’un tratto (non senza resistenza) la vita culturale della città.” Carlo Levi, “Ricordo di Casorati,” La Stampa (March 24, 1963), 3. 37 Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, ed. Casorati: opere 1914/1959 (1983). 38 “Vivo a Torino, in questa città antituristica, che amo per la sua misteriosa, non palese bellezza, in questa città enigmatica e inquietante come una cabala che ogni giorno bisogna scoprire e ancora riscoprire, in cui la nebbia è più luminosa del sole, in cui la misura non è mai stata dimenticata e non potrà mai essere dimenticata, in questa città quadrata e squadrettata, solo in questa città potevano nascere i miei quadri.” Quoted in Giorgina Bertolino and Francesco Poli, Catalogo generale (2004), 42. 39 On the Gualinos as patrons of art, dance, theater, and architecture, consult the digital exhibition Adele Marini, ed. Lo straodinario mondo di Riccardo e Cesarina Gualino (Libreria Marini): https://www​.libreriamarini​.it​/mostre​/i​-gualino​-e​-le​-arti. 40 On Venturi’s criticism, see Giulio Carlo Argan, “Ritratti Critici di Contemporanei: Lionello Venturi,” (1958); Maria Mimita Lamberti e Laura Castagno, Lionello Venturi e la pittura a Torino 1919-1931 (2000). 41 “. . . un enfant prodige che riesce, tra i diciotto e i venti anni, ad attirarsi l'attenzione e la stima, nonché una diretta collaborazione, di uomini come Gaetano Salvemini, Benedetto Croce, Giuseppe Lombardo Radice, Luigi Einaudi, Giuseppe Prezzolini, grandi nomi della cultura ufficiale,” says Paolo Spriano in “Gramsci e Gobetti,” (1976), 71. 42 On their relationship, see Maria Mimita Lamberti, “Un sodalizio artistico: Venturi, Gualino, Casorati,” 16–47. 43 “La tua mammina ha avuto tanti elogi per la sua pittura dal prof. Venturi, che è uno che critica i quadri, ed ha venduto un lavoro all’ avv. Gualino [sic].” Letter is dated either May 9, 1929, or September 5, 1929, as dates have been corrected by Mori’s own hand and are difficult to discern. 44 The villa was purchased in 1938. Franco Mori writes of her visits in his letter to Eleonora Lauria (January 18, 2005), 149. Mori’s diaries include a description of a visit with Cesarina in 1964. 45 Jomarie Alano, A Life of Resistance (2016). 46 Letter of October 27, 1925, described in a letter from Gobetti to Pasquale Prunas and quoted in a full account of events in Guido Bonsaver, Mussolini censore: Storie di letteratura, dissenso e ipocrisia (2013), 10–15.

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47 Fascist aims at economic autarchy frustrated his multiple international businesses related to mechanical engineering, textiles, and petrochemicals. He wrote a personal letter to Mussolini criticizing the August 1926 revaluation of the lira against the British pound, a policy known as Quota 90. See Giorgio Caponetti, Il Grande Gualino, 268–9. 48 Caponetti, Il Grande Gualino. 49 On Venturi’s antifascist activity abroad, see Giovanni Taurasi, ed. Lionello Venturi intelletuale antifascista, exhibition catalogue (2006) or Romy Golan, “The Critical Moment: Lionello Venturi in America,” (2006). 50 Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen. 51 Paolo Gobetti, Racconto Interrotto, quoted in Jomarie Alano, A Life of Resistance (2016), 53. 52 Quoted in Laura Malvano, “Il pittore e il critico: note sulla ricezione della prima monografia casoratiana,” in Piero Gobetti e Felice Casorati. 1918-1926 (2001), 27. 53 To date the most comprehensive study of Casorati’s school has been done by Veronica Cavallaro. La Scuola di Casorati (University of Torino Dissertation, 2012). 54 “l’opera più generosa e più intelligente di Casorati formatore di coscienze estetiche,” Baretti [pseudonym for Piero Gobetti], “Iniziative d’arte a Torino,” Gobetti, Opere complete, Vol. 2 (1970) 633. 55 M. M. Lamberti, “I giovani pittori torinesi e la solitudine di Casorati,” Realismo Magico: Pittura e scultura in italia 1919-1925 (1988), 65–78; Cavallaro discusses the importance of ethics to Casorati’s teaching in La Scuola di Casorati (2012); Most recently the relationship is examined in Pianciola, ed. Il critico e il pittore: Gobetti, Casorati e la sua scuola (2018). 56 M. M. Lamberti argues for the importance of their friendship in “Casorati e Gobetti: Un’amicizia tenace completa perfetta,” Piero Gobetti e Felice Casorati, 1918–1926, 14–22; Poli says Gobetti may have regarded Casorati as an alter ego in the arts in his “Postfazione,” to Felice Casorati pittore (2018), 113. 57 Laura Malvano, “Piero Gobetti critico d'arte: la ‘dignità dell'arte’ come arma d’opposizione nella Torino degli anni Venti,” (2000), 209–20. 58 Natalia Ginzburg recounts how her father thought highly of Nella Marchesini and her mother loved Casorati’s art reminding her husband “Did you know Casorati is an anti-fascist?” The Things We Used to Say! Trans. Judith Woolf (1997), 52–3; Lalla Romano writes, “Spesso Casorati rimaneva li a chiacchierare. I suoi paradossi mi intrigavano . . . I suoi giudizi sui pittori ugualmente mi stupivano . . . Verso sera venivano sovente visite: Alberto Rossi, Mario Soldati, Carlo Levi . . . C’era una base culturale commune: il disprezzo per il fascismo.” Una Giovinezza Inventata (1979), 192. 59 Giacomo Debenedetti, “Casorati fra i discepoli” (1929), 9. 60 “ . . . entrando nello studio di Casorati io pensavo alla pittura, non alla cultura in genere, tanto meno alla politica, a uno stile di vita ecc. Ma fu invece proprio questo il frutto determinante che ne ritrassi: il trovarmi partecipe di un clima postgobettiano, che mi salvava tanto dal rischio di un’adesione acritica al regime imperante.” Albino Galvano, “Autobiografia,” in Albino Galvano (1980), 17. 61 On Marchesini’s introduction to Casorati, see Giorgina Bertolino, “L’arte e’ la stella polare. Vita e pittura di Nella Marchesini,” Nella Marchesini Catalogo Generale (2015), 13.

 Notes 125 62 The painting was destroyed by the Glaspalast fire of 1931 in Munich, but Casorati regarded it as one of his finest works. 63 Andreina Bay and Elena Salvaneschi joined in 1924. 64 Elvira Casorati’s personalized calling card is dated 5-V-925 (May 5, 1925). Mori Family Archive. 65 Mori’s personal notes also quoted in Lauria (2003–4), 27. 66 Romana, Una Giovinezza Inventata, 189. 67 “Ma Lei deve lavorare egualmente—e non disperarsi. Faccio bene a dirLe questo? O forse la sua disperazione è il segno sicuro della serietà dei suoi intenzioni e dell’amore che Lei ha per l’arte? Le ho già detto un giorno—e questo un po contro le mie abitudini—quanto io mi aspetti da Lei.” Letter dated July 27, 1926, in the FM Archive. 68 “lascia un’assoluta libertà all’allievo, contribuendo più alla formazione delle personalità che ad una inutile accademica.” Marziano Bernardi, “Clima Italiano alla Biennale,” La Stampa (May 8, 1930), 3. 69 “Non mi ha mai fatto copiare i suoi quadri e mai ha influito sulla nostra personalità. Difatti—eravamo cinque allievi ed ognuno ritraeva a modo suo l’oggetto e la modella che serviva a tutti e cinque.” Autobiographical Notes for Franco Ceriotto, 1978. Mori Family Archive. 70 Gobetti criticized Croce’s aesthetic philosophy for not giving enough space to the role of individuality in the creative process. His term was “spirito che si realizza come individualità.” De Marzi, 41, 45. 71 M.M. Lamberti, “Casorati e Gobetti: un’amicizia tenace completa perfetta,” Piero Gobetti e Felice Casorati. 1918-1926, 14–22. 72 Gobetti, Felice Casorati pittore, 88. 73 “è un uomo intelligentissimo (forse più intelligente che vero pittore)—e perciò adattissimo a insegnare.” Letter from Mario Soldati to Sergio Bonfantini (July 7, 1927). Reproduced in Sergio Bonfantini opere 1929-1979, ed. Marco Rosci, n.p. 74 Casorati’s rich art library is documented in A. Zita Donini, “L’antico nell’apprendistato di Felice Casorati 1900–1912,” 237. Cavallaro suggests these books would have been available to Casorati’s students in La Scuola di Casorati, 15–16. 75 Some of these comments are collected in Allesandro Botta, “Felice Casorati nelle testimonianze e memorie dei suoi discepoli,” Il critico e il pittore: Gobetti, Casorati e la sua scuola (2018), 115–54. 76 She appears in white robes. The card reads: “Studio per il quadro Didone abbandonata, va bene?” Undated. Reproduced in Carlo Vanni Menichi, “Marisa Mori tra moda e costume,” Vestivamo alla futurista, exhibition catalogue, May 24–July 6, 2014, Forte dei Marmi (2014), 20. 77 “Non erano solo riproduzioni non erano freddi libri d’arte che trovavamo nello studio. Ma con pochi accenni con brevi osservazioni Casorati era come se ci introducesse nella nobile schiera in cui grandeggiavano Giotto o P. della F. e Masaccio nella loro maestà” [sic]. Nella Marchesini qtd. in Laura Malvano, “Salvare i giorni della vita dalla dimenticanza: pittura e scrittura nell’opera di Nella Marchesini Malvano,” in Nella Marchesini, eds. Anna Malvano, Laura Malvano e Pino Mantovani, Exhibition Catalogue, February 9–March 31, 2006, Galleria del Ponte, (2006), 9–12. 78 Veronica Cavallaro (2012), 78. 79 Giorgina Bertolino, “L’arte è la stella polare. Vita e pittura di Nella Marchesini,” Nella Marchesini catalogo generale, 18–20. 80 Gobetti noted the artist’s study of Carpaccio and Titian in Felice Casorati, 90.

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81 For more, see Bertolino and Poli, Catalogo generale di Felice Casorati, 63. 82 C. Bongiovanni, “I nemici del fascismo.” Published in L’assalto (September 6, 1923) and Il Piemonte (September 19, 1923). Quoted in Laura Malvano, “Il pittore e il critico: note sulla ricezione della prima monografia casoratiana,” Gobetti e Casorati 1918-1926 (2001), 23. 83 “Ebbi fra le mani per la prima volta le riproduzioni dei quadri di molti artisti stranieri e dei moderni maestri francesi: Cesanne [sic], Gauguin, Van gog [sic], e poi Matisse, Picasso, Rousseau.” Conference at the University of Pisa, May 26, 1943. Published in Pontiggia, ed. Felice Casorati: Scritti Interviste Lettere, 47. 84 The group has sometimes been erroneously regarded as competitive with Casorati, but was closely linked to and supported by Casorati. See Botta, “Felice Casorati nelle testimonianze dei suoi discepoli,” 121. 85 It was financed by Gualino and promoted by Lionello Venturi and Edoardo Persico, both cultural opponents of the regime. On the Turin Six, see Carlo Levi, Lo Specchio, edited by Pia Vivarelli (2001), 99–104. 86 Giulio Carlo Argan’s Preface to Lionello Venturi’s Il gusto dei primitivi, xxviii. 87 In addition to annual exhibitions at his studio, he organized a series of group exhibitions: Vedute di Torino at Antonio Fontanesi Gallery (Turin 1926); Casorati, Avondo, Bionda, Bonfantini, Marchesini, Maugham, Mori, Cefaly at Galleria Milano (Milan 1929); Casorati, Bay, Bionda, Bonfantini, Marchesini, Maugham, Mori at Galleria Valle (Genoa 1930); Bay, Bionda, Bonfantini, Casorati, Chicco Cremona, Dondi, Galvano, Levi, Maugham, Marchesini, Mennyey, Mori at Galleria Pesaro (Milan 1931). 88 Casorati married Maugham in 1931. “Non c’era alcuna differenza fra noi allievi perché accettava solo allievi dei quali aveva fiducia. Ci volevamo bene. Ci aiutavamo a vicenda e Casorati era Maestro vero e amico . . . Era Maestro ma anche compagno di lavoro. Ci presentava i suoi critici e i suoi collezionisti. Viaggiavamo insieme ed anche dopo avere sposato Daphne Maugham . . . Casorati non trascurava la nostra amicizia che fu la stessa.” Autobiographical Notes (1978). Mori Family Archive. Reprinted in Lauria, 165. 89 “Credetti anche che la mia scuola servisse per chiarire me a me stesso. Trascorsi tanto tempo fra i giovani che erano discepoli ed amici, dividendo da cuore umano a cuore umano la vita spirituale nelle sue più delicate fasi celebrative.” Transcribed notes for a conference at the University of Pisa in 1943. Reprinted in M.M. Lamberti and Paolo Fossati, Felice Casorati, 1883-1963 (1985), 24. 90 Such ideas were conscientiously practiced by many cultures long before the term was used by American feminists of the 1960s. Indigenous American communities have had the tradition of sharing circles for thousands of years and in her book, My Life on the Road, Gloria Steinem discusses her experience of an ancient practice of the talking circle in India. 91 There are two communications with Jessie Boswell dated to 1928. A postcard indicates she will wait for Mori later in the piazza. In a letter Boswell congratulates Mori for building quite a reputation, agrees to help Mori practice her English and also to sit for a portrait. Mori Family Archive. 92 Daphne Maugham sent postcards and letters from Paris undated postmarked 1931, Turin 28-12-1932, Pavarolo 9-9-1933, and Turin 12-3-34 asking on one occasion when Mori would visit Turin again and on another announcing the birth of her son Francesco. A letter from Paola Levi-Montalcini marked Torino- 16-luglio (no year) likely dates to 1937. Paola laments that times are bad and given circumstances she will have to stay put the whole summer mentioning that she is with her sister Rita.

 Notes 127

93 94

95 96 97

98

99

100 101

102 103 104

105 106

It discusses Mori’s upcoming trip to Paris when she would be stopping over with Paola on the way there and back. Paola indicates that Daphne Maugham also recently returned from London and Paris. There are also multiple letters from Mori and LeviMontalcini in the Malvano-Marchesini Archive. The picture is the Malvano-Marchesini Archive and in the artist’s raisonné: entry P/1927/12 in Bertolino, ed. Nella Marchesini: Catalogo generale, 186. Mori became friendly with the whole Marchesini family as evident in letters preserved in the Malvano Archive. Carlo Levi dubbed the three Marchesini sisters “Mariadanella” (Maria, Dadi, and Nella) indicating their inseparability and Mori vacationed with the whole family. While Nella focused on the visual arts, her sisters contributed articles to Gobetti’s periodicals. Gobetti’s widowed partner, Ada Prospero later married Nella’s brother, Ettore. Nella Marchesini: Catalogo Generale, 209. Franco Mori, Cronache, 23–4. “Riccordo 1929, quando con Nella si scrisse al maestro [. . .] di venirci a trovare. Ero qua con le tre sorelle Marchesini Maria, Dadi, e Nella. La mamma si lamentava perché le figlie non erano ancora sposate. Io ero qua con Franco. L’anno dopo si sposo Maria, poi Dadi e poi Nella. Maria e Dadi morirono pochi anni dopo, Maria di parto, Dadi per i troppi figli. Nella è mancata solo qualche anno fa. Casorati non venne mai a trovarci.” Entry in a notebook dated 1958. Mori Family Archive. “Ma i tristi tempi att.[uali] sono assai avversi a ogni raccoglimento fiducioso e sicuro. Per varie vicende di cose anche nel [. . .] Chiostro che Casorati aveva fondato è entrato il soffio del moderno con tutte le fluttuazioni e incertezze e intricato variare di valore. Si è dissipata a poco a poco questa atmosfera questo raro stato d’animo senza aver forse dato tempo di produrre quel che il timido germogliare prometteva. Si sconta la colpa di tanto confuso sovvertire delle leggi morali. L’arte è un delicato bellissimo strumento: si guasta e non dà più il bel suono (se pure debole e timido) qualora si interponga tra quello e l’artista panni o feltri o inutile ciarpame.” Malvano-Marchesini Archive. Quoted in Alessandro Botta, “Felice Casorati nelle testimonianze e memorie dei suoi discepoli,” (2018), 134–6. “Sul piano specifico dell’arte, la scuola forse non raggiungerà risultati significativi, anche per la difficoltà per gli alunni di sottrarsi alla ‘dittatura grammaticale’ (non ignobile, del resto) del docente.” Angelo D’Orsi, “La vita culturale e i gruppi intellettuali,” in Storia di Torino (1998), 586. Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection (1996); Frances Borzello, Ourselves: Women’s Self-Portraits (1998). The dilemma of the woman artist perceived as both subject and object originates in the Renaissance. See Mary Garrard in “Here’s Looking at Me: Sofonisba Anguissola and the Problem of the Woman Artist” (1994). Women artists continue to address this dilemma in their work. See Marsha Meskimmon, The Art of Reflection (1996). Frances Borzello, “Behind the Image,” in Mirror, Mirror (2001), 25. Diane Radycki, Paula Modersohn-Becker (2013), 180. Mary Louise Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes (1994); Katharina von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis (1997); Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, The Modern Woman Revisited (2003); Allison Scardino Belzer, Women and the Great War (2010); Natasha Chang, The Crisis Woman (2015). Paula Birnbaum, Women Artists in Interwar France (2011), 94. Autobiographical Notes (1978). Mori Family Archive.

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107 On verso of the portrait Mori wrote in pencil: “This portrait is of Daphne Maugham—Questo quadro è un ritratto di Daphne Maugham.” 108 Paola da Ros has dated these pictures c. 1927–9, but given how closely Marchesini and Mori’s subjects align during their vacation periods and given that Marchesini appears to have painted reclining women at the beach 1928–32, I suggest it is more likely that these pictures date to 1928 or 1929. 109 By her own account Mori exhibited here for the first time with Casorati, Carlo Levi, Gigi Chessa, Francesco Menzio, Enrico Polucci, and others. Three of her four exhibited paintings sold to Filippo Giordano, two of these were views of Via Lanfranchi and for the sale of these three works she received 810 lire after commission (a hand-written receipt is in the Mori Family Archive). 110 “[T]utto è finite, il sole pare luna, bengala, luce elettrica. Paesaggi malati.” Enrico Zanzi, “A passeggio con pittori. Le vedute di Torino alla ‘Fontanesi’” Mori Family Archive. Quoted in Cavallaro, 57. 111 “Quando ho cominciato a dipingere in qualla maniera che fu trovata metafisica, in realta non conoscevo De Chirico,” in Giovanni Cavicchioli, “Casorati: alla salletta,” 1947. Quoted in Bertolino and Poli, Catalogo generale, 48. 112 Franco Mori Letter published in Lauria, 148. 113 Zanzi notes Carlo Carrà’s influence in “Studio in bianco e azzuro—Scolari di Casorati,” La Gazzetta del Popolo. Torino (November 12, 1928), 8; Eleonora Lauria discusses his influence at length in Marisa Mori: Pittrice a Torino 1925-1932 (2004), 76–104. Franco Mori could not confirm whether his mother actually met Carrà, but recalled his name having often been spoken. 114 Mario Ursino, “Metafisica del paesaggio,” in L’effetto metafisico 1918-68, (2010), 110. 115 See Emily Braun, “Mario Sironi’s Urban Landscapes” (1997); Walter Adamson, “The Culture of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Crisis of Modernity: The Case of il Selvaggio” (1995). 116 “Sull’arte metafisica,” (1919) translated and quoted in James Thrall Soby, Giorgio de Chirico (1955), 66. 117 The word metaphysical for De Chirico meant, “the tranquil and senseless beauty of matter” . . . “objects which, in the precision of their color and the exactness of their dimensions, represent the antipodes of all confusion and nebulousness. ‘We Metaphysicians,’” Scritti, vol. 1 (2008), 275. 118 “Ohimè! Poveri oggetti, così cari, così vari di colorazione, di tonalità, di forma, così espressivi, cosi buoni! . . . per vostro mezzo si possono esprimere tutti i sentimenti, dai più semplici ai più complessi . . . Nei momenti più disperati della mia vita di artista, io ho potuto riconciliarmi con la pittura dipingendo umilmente una scodella, un uovo, una pera.” Casorati, “La crisi delle arti figurative,” La Stampa (February 29, 1928). Reprinted in Pontiggia, Felice Casorati Scritti Interviste Lettere, 19–20. 119 Carluccio, “Dalla parte di un’altra Europa,” in Casorati (1964), 1–30. 120 Longhi, Piero della Francesca (1927). 121 The work hangs at the center of the photograph in Figure 17. 122 All three Marchesini sisters were close to Piero Gobetti and Ada Prospero, who was an educator and writer of children’s books as well as a strong advocate for women’s solidarity and right to an equal education, even a sexual education, which was unusual for the time. See Alano (2016), 13. 123 Somigli, “Modernism and the Quest for the Real: On Massimo Bontempelli’s Minne la candida,” (2004), 317.

 Notes 129 124 Caws, ed. Manifesto (2001), 182. 125 Carrà is quoted by Joshua Taylor who notes these artists’ return to the nude as proof that subject matter was becoming less decisive for the movement. Futurism (1961), 79. 126 Poggi, Inventing Futurism (2009), 265. 127 This will be the subject of further discussion in Chapter 4. 128 Galvano, Felice Casorati (1940), 20. 129 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude (2002), 1–2. 130 On the artist as sorcerer or magus in the Renaissance, see Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964); On the relevance of the idea in feminism, see Sandra M. Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), 3–44; Romy Golan has explored the idea in realtion to Casorati in “Is Fascist realism a magic realism?” (2020). 131 Pontiggia, Felice Casorati: Scritti Interviste Lettere (2004), 22. 132 “In effetti la solitudine casoratiana sembra avere quasi esclusivamente un’identità femminile. . . . da contrappunto (anche in chiave ironica) ed enfatizzazione di un mondo al femminile chiuso nella sua lirica, intimistica e melanconica incomunicabilità verso l’esterno,” Francesco Poli, “I nudi nella pittura di Casorati,” Felice Casorati: il nudo, 13. 133 Theodore Ziolkowski, Ovid and the Moderns (2005), 3–9. 134 Millard Meiss, “Sleep in Venice. Ancient Myths and Renaissance Proclivities” (1966), 357–8. 135 Rona Goffen, “Renaissance Dreams” (1987): 682–706. 136 Maria Ruvoldt, The Italian Renaissance Imagery of Inspiration (2004), 91. 137 Mary Sheard quoted in Mary Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art and Gender (2010), 169. 138 Here I summarize Udo Kultermann in “Woman Asleep and the Artist” (1990). 139 De Chirico would author a text on Courbet published by Valori Plastici in 1925. On the reception of Courbet in interwar Italy, see Giuseppe di Natale, “Courbet in Italia: una storia novecentesca, II” (2018). 140 “La pratica di discepolato presso di lui e la frequente consuetudine di Casorati uomo, hanno valso ad alcuni di noi come un’esperienza fra le più profonde e decisive anche per quanto riguarda la vita morale.” Galvano, Felice Casorati (1940), 5. 141 For example Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (2001) or Devin Fore, Realism After Modernism (2012). 142 John Champagne has argued that figurative painters Filippo De Pisis and Carlo Carrà were undermining the concept of the Fascist “New Man” with their pictures of the male body in Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (2013). 143 Ara Merjian writes that De Chirico and Alberto Savinio were disparaging of “modernism and modern politics,” creating strategies that disavow its “herd perspective” and “foregrounding of politics” in Giorgio De Chirico and the Metaphysical City (2014), 65, 48. 144 Romy Golan, “Is Fascist Realism a Magic Realism?” (2020).

Chapter 3 1 “Marinetti non andava preso sul serio.” Mori autobiographical notes, Mori Family Archive. 2 For the first full analysis of the relationship between Futurism and food, see Claudia Salaris, Cibo futurista (2000).

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3 On Poesia, see Berghaus, The Genesis of Futurism (1995). 4 It was published in Bologna on February 5, Naples on February 6, Mantua on February 8, Verona on February 9, Trieste on February 10, Rome on February 16, and Paris on February 20. 5 Quoted in Mary Ann Caws, Manifesto: A Century of Isms (2000), 169. 6 “On the Subject of Futurism: An Interview with La Diana,” (January 1915) in Berghaus, Critical Writings (2006), 144. 7 “Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo,” (1915) in Apollonio, ed. Futurismo (1976), 255. 8 Brunella Eruli, “Preistoria francese del futurismo,” (1970); Pierre Gobin, “Goinfrérie et pouvoir: D’ ‘Ubu roi’ (1896) au ‘Roi Bombance’ (1905/1909)” (1994); Cinzia Sartini-Blum, The Other Modernism (1996), 12–14, 93–4. 9 Enrico Cesaretti, “Dyspepsia as Dystopia?” (2006). 10 According to Luca Somigli, “the bleak allegorical drama of Roi Bombance and his court is Marinetti’s own moment of questioning of the Symbolist values, and in particular of the sharp fracture between art and life, between aesthetic experience and daily praxis, between striving toward the Ideal and material reality.” “The Poet and the Vampire: ‘Roi Bombance’ and the Crisis of Symbolist Values,” (2014), 574. 11 Cesaretti, “Dyspepsia as Dystopia?” (2006): 355–6, 369. 12 “Usciamo dalla saggezza come da un orribile guscio, e gettiamoci, come frutti pimentati d'orgoglio, entro la bocca immensa e trta del vento! . . . Diamoci in pasto all'Ignoto, non gi per disperazione, ma soltanto per colmare i profondi pozzi dell’Assurdo!” F. T. Marinetti, “Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo” (1909) in Teoria e Invenzione Futurista, 7–14. My translation. 13 Berghaus, “The Futurist Banquet: Nouvelle Cuisine or Performance Art,” (2001). 14 Salaris, Cibo futurista, 8. 15 Cecilia Novero claims this manifesto may be the work of Irba Bazzi while Daniele Callegari seems to think the name is a pseudonym for Marinetti, Fillìa, Depero, and others. The latter seems probable given the language. 16 “Noi futuristi che godiamo la vita con tutti i sensi . . . La nostra tavola deve ridere di goia nella diversità dei rosso—giallo—verdi—azzuro dei piatti grandi—piccolo ovali—quadri—tondi che sembrano ballare una sinfonia gustosa . . . ” Irba, futurista. “Culinaria futurista,” La Pietra, Sarno, August 1, 1920. Yale University Library Digital Collections. 17 For a detailed account of Futurist food experiments and events, see Cecilia Novero, “Cuisine,” in Handbook of International Futurism, ed. Günter Berghaus (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 116–28 and Cecilia Novero, Anti-diets of the Avant-Garde (2010), 1–52. 18 Berghaus, “The Futurist Banquet,” (2001). 19 Lesley Chamberlain, “Introduction,” The Futurist Cookbook (1989), 7–20. 20 Cecilia Novero, Anti-diets of the Avant-Garde, 9. 21 Roger Griffin, “The Multiplication of Man: Futurism’s Technolatry,” in Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 96. 22 For example, Daniele Callegari, “The Politics of Pasta: La cucina futurista and the Italian Cookbook in History,” (2013); Selena Daly, “Le Roi Bombance: The Original Futurist Cookbook?” (2013); Ernesto Ialongo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (2015). 23 Quoted in Michael North, Machine Age Comedy (2008), 115. 24 A term coined by Jacques Derrida to indicate the privileging of masculinity in speech, writing, and thought.

 Notes 131 25 “Amici! Vi annunzio che la causa di tutte le nostre indigestioni è abolita. Lo stomaco sociale è salvo, poiché le donne ci lasciano . . .” Marinetti, Re Baldoria (1920), 9. 26 Cinzia Blum, The Other Modernism, 81. 27 Blum, “Marvellous Masculinity: Futurist Strategies of Self Transfiguration Through the Maelstrom of Modernity” (2014), 93–4. 28 Si formano due mezze sfere colme di pasta candita di mandorle. Nel centro di ognuna si appoggia una fragola fresca. Indi si versa nel vassoio zabaione e zone di panna montata. Si può cospargere il tutto di pepe forte e guarnire con peperoncini rossi. 29 Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), 888. 30 Cixous, 878. 31 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, translated by Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke. (1985), 163. 32 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Re-invention of Nature (1991), 149. 33 Kathy Ferguson, The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory (1993), 30–1. 34 “L’altra metà del futurismo: intervista a Lea Vergine di Chiara Gatti,” in L’elica e la luce: Le futuriste 1912–44 (2018), 18. 35 “Marinetti non andava preso sul serio—mai—ma era divertente, io lo chiamavo il rinoceronte, e gli assomigliava. Io non lo prendevo sul serio: gli altri non so.” Autobiographical notes. Mori Family Archive. 36 Franca Zoccoli, “Le Futuriste nelle arti visive L’arte delle donne: nell’italia del novecento,” in L’arte delle donne: nell’Italia del Novecento, eds. Laura Iamurri and Sabrina Spinazzè (2001), 27. 37 Self-Reliance (1841). 38 Song of Myself (1855). 39 “Lecture to the English on Futurism,” in Critical Writings (2006), 92. 40 Adamson, Embattled Avant-gardes (2007), 81. 41 Ialongo, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (2015), 2. 42 “Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo” (1909) in Teoria e invenzione futurista (1968), 11. 43 Marinetti and Fillìa, La Cucina Futurista (1932), Reprint (2007), 17–18. 44 “Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo” (1911) in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 292. 45 Marinetti’s love poems, written in French and taken from private letters between 1920 and 1938, were first published as Poesie a Beny (1991). 46 Most accounts date the marriage to 1923, but Lisa Panzera has determined the year to be three years later via a letter from Benedetta to her brother Alberto. See “Celestial Futurism and the ‘Parasurreal,’” in Italian Futurism 1909-1944 (2014), 326–9. 47 Eppure, io non discuto già del valore animale della donna, ma dell’importanza sentimentale che le si attribuisce. Preface to Mafarka il futurista (1909) Teoria e invenzione futurista, 254. 48 [N]oi pensiamo che se il corpo e lo spirito [della donna] avess[e] subito, attraverso una lunga serie di generazioni, una educazione identica a quella ricevuta dallo spirito e dal corpo dell’uomo, sarebbe forse possibile parlare di uguaglianza fra i due sessi. “Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo,” (1911) in Teoria e invenzione futurista, 293.

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49 Sandra Lee Bartky, “Toward a Phenomenology of Feminist Consciousness” (1975), 429. 50 Lisa Panzera, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti: Donna Generatrice (2003), 145. 51 See, for example, Luce Irigaray and Sara Speidel, “Veiled Lips,” in Mississippi Review (1983) or Valerie Renegar and Stacey Sowards, “Contradiction as Agency: SelfDetermination, Transcendence, and Counter-Imagination in Third Wave Feminism” (2009). 52 Peter Nicholls observed that Futurist understanding of gender “thrived on the ‘paradox’ that the lack and inadequacy which it aimed to abolish were the entailments not merely of traditional femininity by of sexual difference itself.” In “Futurism, Gender and Theories of Postmodernity,” (1989): 203. 53 Constance Classen describes women as having “an ambivalent position in Futurism.” In The Colour of Angels (1998), 129. 54 Sica, Futurist Women (2016). 55 Lucia Re, “Futurism and Feminism” (1989), 257. 56 Lucia Re, “Futurism, Seduction, and the Strange Sublimity of War” (2004), 83–111. 57 For example, Rita Felski in The Gender of Modernity (1995), Carol Duncan in The Aesthetics of Power (1993), or Griselda Pollock in Vision and Difference (2003). 58 For a discussion of the motivations behind masculinist rhetoric, see Cinzia SartiniBlum, “Marvellous Masculinity,” (2014). 59 “Suffragio universale uguale e diretto a tutti i cittadini uomini e donne. Scrutinio di lista a larga base. Rappresentanza proporzionale.” 60 “Suffragio universale a scrutinio di Lista regionale, con rappresentanza proporzionale, voto ed eleggibilità per le donne.” 61 On Marinetti’s political stance in relation to the distinct FIC and PNF, see Günter Berghaus’s critical commentary in Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Necessità e bellezza della violenza. Discorso futurista, edited by Günter Berghaus, Napoli: Diana, 2021. 62 “Tutto nello stato, niente al di fuori dello stato, nulla contro lo stato.” 63 “La maternità sta alla donna come la guerra sta all'uomo.” Speech to the Chamber of Deputies on May 26, 1934. Quoted in de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 281. 64 On women’s bodies, see, for example, Elisabetta Mondello, La nuova italiana (1987); Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women (1992); Robin Pickering-Iazzi, Mothers of Invention: Women, Italian Fascism and Culture (1995); Natasha Chang, The Crisis-Woman (2015). On bodies in advertising, see Karen Pinkus Bodily Regimes (1995). On male bodies, see Lorenzo Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man (2012) or Martina Salvante, La paternità nell’Italia fascista: Simboli, esperienze e norme, 1922–1943 (2020). 65 The political significance of the material is explored by Jeffrey Schnapp in “The Romance of Caffeine and Aluminum” (2001). 66 Valeria Garuzzo, Nicola Diulgheroff architetto (2005), 112–14. 67 I have not discovered who invited him and there is no mention of Mori’s attendance. It is not surprising, given Casorati’s cultural cachet, that his presence is mentioned. 68 Salaris, Cibo futurista (2000). 69 The artist’s birth name was Spartaco Mazzotti. 70 Tullio d’Albisola, “Sintesi storica della ceramica futurista italiana,” in La ceramica futurista: manifesto dell’aeroceramica. Opere e sintesi storica (1939). 71 Typed exhibition notes in the Mori Family Archive. 72 Costanza (Tina) Mennyey was married to Enrico Prampolini and never divorced him as this was illegal in Italy until 1970. They separated and she became the partner

 Notes 133

73 74 75 76

77 78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

of Giuseppe Capogrossi. They were never married although they had two children. According to Franco’s memoir Mori judged Mennyey to be a “loose woman.” Memoirs in the Mori Family Archive translated by the author. They wrote and she returned to Albissola in September 1956 and August 1958, signing and dating the back of her portrait to commemorate her visits. Tullio d’Albisola’s playfulness is noted by Silvia Barisione in “Futurist Ceramics,” Italian Futurism (2014). Luca Bochicchio has documented the artist’s imprisonment for antifascist activity between 1922 and 1923 and his continued local antifascist activities in Albissola, noting that he was monitored by the authorities and could not exhibit under his own name, making compromises in aid of his career. “Tullio d’Albisola between Futurism and Fascism,” (2020). Letter from Tullio Mazzotti to Marisa Mori dated March 27, 1948. Mori Family Archive. “Quando mi scrivi, dammi notizie di Marisa Mori, che ho iniziata io al futurismo e che ritengo pittrice di eccezionale virtù. Da essa desidererei le illustrazioni di un breve poemetto erotico che conto di pubblicare appena fuori L’anguria lirica . . . ” Letter from Tullio D’Albisola to Thayaht dated March 3, 1934. Reproduced in Alessandra Scappini, ed. Thayaht. Vita, Scritti, Carteggi (2005), 315–16. Alessandra Scappini has surmised that he is referring to A.A.A.500.000 urgonmi (Poema d’amore) (1937). “Albisola 8 aprile XV A Marisa Mori eccellente pittrice per il robusto ritratto di mio padre, devotissimo Tullio.” The Mori Archive holds a large collection of illustrations showing that she worked in this capacity. Alessandra Marzuoli first suggested this connection in her dissertation. Berghaus believes the production never took place but produced it himself in 1996. Adriana Marie Baranello, Fillìa’s Futurism: Writing, Politics, Gender and Art after the First World War (2014): 225, 229. “Sa che festeggeremo l’anno nuovo con un cenaereo nel mio studio? Viene anche lei? Stiamo preparando con Fillìa cose grandiose.” Presotto, ed. Quaderni di Tullio d’Albisola (1981), 64. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Fiorenza Tarozzi, Donne e cibo (2003), 112–13. “Amiamo le donne. Spesso ci siamo torturati con mille baci golosi nell’ansia di mangiare una. Nude ci sembrano sempre tragicamente vestite. Il loro cuore, se stretto dal supreme godimento d’amore, ci parve l’ideale frutto da mordere masticare suggere. Tutte le forme della fame che caratterizzano l’amore ci guidarono nella creazione di queste opere di genio e di lingua insaziable. Sono i nostri stati d’animo realizzati . . . un’espressione artistica tanto intensa da esigere non soltanto gli occhi e relativa ammirazione, non soltanto il tatto e relative carezze, ma i denti, la lingua, lo stomaco, l’intestino ugualmente innamorati.” F.T Marinetti and Fillia, La Cucina Futurista, 17–18. Cesaretti, “Dyspepsia as Dystopia?”, 355; 361. Re, “Futurism and Feminism,” 254. Linda Nochlin, “Eroticism and Female Imagery,” in Women, Art, and Power and Other Essays (1988), 141. Rosemary Barrow, “From Praxiteles to De Chirico: Art and Reception” (2005), 366. Simon Cooper, Technoculture and Critical Theory (2002), 80. Ann Bowler, “Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism” (1991); Sartini-Blum, The Other Modernism (1996); Spackman, Fascist Virilities (1996). Grosz, Volatile Bodies (1994), 3–4. Cesaretti, “Dangerous Appetites” (2009), 142.

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94 Classen, The Color of Angels (1998), 158. 95 On the prioritizing of vision in Western philosophy, see Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 14, no. 4 (June 1954): 50–519 or David Michael Levin, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (1993). 96 On the hierarchy of the senses, see Classen, The Color of Angels (1998). 97 Claudia Salaria first suggested that Benedetta was familiar with Montessori’s methods and Lia Giachero elaborated on the mobilization of the five senses as a pedagogical premise behind Tactilism identifying Benedetta as co-author of its manifesto in “Mani ‘palpatrici d’orizzonti:’ Il contributo di Benedetta Marinetti al manifesto per il tattilismo” (1991). Franca Zoccoli affirms these notions in Benedetta Cappa Marinetti: L’incantesimo della luce (2000). Berghaus dates the full bloom of Tactilism to the couple’s summer holiday in Atignano in September 1920 and names Benedetta the “midwife of Second Futurism,” in “Futurist Tactile Theatre” (2011). 98 Although claiming full credit in the manifesto, Marinetti later admitted that it was largely Benedetta who made the Tactile Panels: “When I worked with Benedetta on the first Tactile Panels, in part created and all of them executed by her, we dreamt of this completeness of poetry-art-life.” Quoted in Alberto Viviani, Dal verso libero all’aeropoesia (1942), 118. 99 “Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto” (1921) in Critical Writings (2006), 372–4. 100 See Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment: Avant-garde Avant-guerre and the Language of Rupture (1986) and Clara Orban, The Culture of Fragments: Word and Images in Futurism and Surrealism (1997). 101 Christine Poggi elaborated on the function of fragments in Cubist and Futurist collage in In Defiance of Painting (1992). 102 I reference Marinetti’s manifesto “Destruction of Syntax—Untrammeled Imagination—Words-in-Freedom” (1913). Reprinted and translated in Critical Writings (2006). 103 There is a large body of literature on this topic. For example on Dada, see Nancy Ring, “New York Dada and the Crisis of Masculinity: Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp in the United States, 1913–1921.” (1991) or Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, Women in Dada (1998). On Surrealism, see Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985), Rudolf E. Kuenzli, “Surrealism and Misogyny,” in Surrealism and Women (1990), or Mary Ann Caws, “Ladies Shot and Painted: Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art,” in The Expanding Discourse (1992); On Futurism, see Cinzia Sartini-Blum, The Other Modernism (1996) or Ursula Fanning, “Futurism and the Abjection of the Feminine,” in Forum Italicum (2011). 104 See Maud Lavin’s analysis of Hannah Höch in Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Hoch or Whitney Chadwick’s Mirror Images: women surrealism and self-representation (1985). 105 Linda Nochlin, The Body in Pieces (1994), 20. 106 See, for example, Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male (1996); Ana Carden-Coyne, Reconstructing the Body (2009); Martina Salvante, “Italian Disabled Veterans between Experience and Representation,” (2013). 107 See Barbara Bracco, “Il mutilato di guerra in Italia: polisemie di un luogo crudele,” (2011): 9–24 or Jennifer Griffiths, “Enrico Toti: A New Man for Italy’s Mutilated Victory,” (2015): 345–59.

 Notes 135 108 A shift that seems to move away from a broader geographical determination to a more specific delimited Italianness. 109 There is no evidence for why this change was made, but it is at least possible that it was a change requested or suggested by Marinetti. 110 The scholarship on this subject is extensive. See, for example, Simonetta FalascaZamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (1997); Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary: Politics of History in Fascist Italy (2003); Claudia Lazzaro and Roger Crum, eds., Donatello among the Blackshirts: History and Modernity in the Visual Culture of Fascist Italy (2005). 111 Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity (2003), 1. 112 Marla Stone, “Staging Fascism: The Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution” (1993), 215–43. 113 “Donne, fate che ogni italiano dica partendo: Voglio offrirle al mio ritorno una bella ferita degna di lei! [. . .] Gloria alla pelle umana straziata dalla mitraglia! [. . .] Questo è il futurismo che glorifica il corpo modificato e abbellito della guerra.” Republished in Come si seducono le donne (1918), 102–3. 114 According to Franco Mori his mother was not devout. 115 In May–July 1931 she exhibited Annunciation (1924) at the Prima Mostra internazionale di arte sacra Cristiana Moderna in Padova. The image is a strange picture of two figures in deep shadow. 116 At the same Mostra internazionale d’arte sacra Cristian Moderna in May–July 1931, Marchesini exhibited two paintings of Saint Agatha, Sant’Agata (con il vaso di calle) and Santa Agata (con il palmizio), both originally dating to 1930, one subsequently reworked into a self-portrait in 1947. See Nella Marchesini: catalogo generale, 214. 117 Jacobus de Varagine, The Golden Legend: Volume I (1993), 155. 118 Golden Legend, 156. 119 Martha Easton, “Saint Agatha and the Sanctification of Sexual Violence” (1994); Margaret Miles calls the episode of Saint Agatha’s breast torture “religious pornography,” in Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (1989), 156. 120 Liana De Girolami Cheney, “The Cult of Saint Agatha” (1996), 7. 121 Cecilia Novero, “Cuisine,” 124. 122 Graziella Parati, Public History, Private Stories: Italian Women’s Autobiography (1996), 66–7. 123 She apparently exhibited a painting of a Black female dancer (Ballerina negra 1933) at the Omaggio futurista ad Umberto Boccioni exhibition in 1933, but the location of this work is unknown to me and I have found no evidence of it. 124 M. Barry Katz, “The Women of Futurism” (1987), 8. 125 This description derives from the writings of dancer Katherine Dunham as discussed in Vèvè A. Clark, “Katherine Dunham’s Tropical Revue” (1982), 151, 149. 126 Jean-Pierre Meunier, “Stello et l’exposition coloniale (1929–31)” (2005) Web. 127 The article was entitled “Lezioni della nuova danza.” See Jacopo Tomatis, Storia culturale della canzone italiana (2019), 205–7. 128 He played two concerts in Turin in January 1935. See Adriano Mazzoletti, il jazz in italia: dalle origini alle grandi orchestre (2004), 273–5. 129 Futurist Ivan Jablowsky was literarily inspired by jazz. On jazz in Italy under Fascism see Fabio Presutti, “The Saxophone and the Pastoral. Italian Jazz in the Age of Fascist Modernity,” (2008).

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130 Luca Cerchiari, “How to Make a Career by Writing Against Jazz: Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s Jazz Band,” (2015); Jacopo Tomatis, Storia culturale della canzone italiana (2019), 160–70. 131 Cucina Futurista, 163. 132 Cucina Futurista, 226. 133 Lucia Re, “Mater-Materia: il potere materno e l’avanguardia futurista,” (2015), 50. 134 Baranello, 146. 135 Michel Onfray, “L’empire des signes culinaries,” (1995), 220; Reiterated by Novero in “Cuisine,” 120. 136 Dalila Colucci, “Tullio d’Albisola’s L’anguria lirica (1934): Female Transubstatiation and a New Religion of Poetic Materiality” (2021). 137 Colucci, 243. 138 On the subject of fascist gender and masculinity, see Spackman, Fascist Virilities (1996); Bellassai, L’invenzione della virilità (2011); Benadusi, The Enemy of the New Man (2012); Champagne, Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy (2013). 139 Gigliola Gori, Italian Fascism and the Female Body (2004), 59. 140 Lesley Caldwell, “Madri d’Italia: Film and Fascist Concern with Motherhood,” Women and Italy (1991), 43–63. 141 Victoria de Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 79. 142 Franco Mori relates that his mother was convinced of her husband’s infidelities and he describes frequent evenings in the household during these years when his father would return inebriated, ranting in rude language and his mother would scream and cry as he watched on wishing to run away. Cronache della mia lunghissima vita, 35. 143 The Società Anonima Civile Sanatrix acquired a building on Via Giovanni Lanza in 1929, which was transformed into a modern maternity ward, which opened in the presence of Prince Umberto at the end of 1932. The clinic was often referred to as “La Sanatrix.” 144 Fillìa and T. A. Bracci, “Alfabeto spirituale,” in Fillia fra immaginario meccanico e primordio cosmico (1988), 69–71. 145 Violento: ravvivatore di muscoli sangue nervi cervello, “Azione dei colori passatisti e Futuristi,” (1918). Reproduced in Ricostruzione di Casa Balla, ed. Maria Cristina Poma (1986), 76. 146 Lisa Tickner, “The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women Artists since 1970,” Art History 1, no. 2 (June 1978): 239. 147 Robert, “Maternità ed . . . economia,” L’Impero (February 5, 1929): 5. For more on Robert’s feminism, see Lucia Re, “Enif Robert, F. T. Marinetti e il romanzo Un ventre di donna: bisessualità, trauma e mito dell'isteria” (2014). 148 Irigaray, The Sex Which Is Not One (1985), 76. 149 “Aeropittrice rapita in aspro combattimento all’esercito nemico---auguralmente,” Marisa Mori’s personal copy of La Cucina Futurista. Mori Family Archive. There is no ideal translation for Marinetti’s unusual transformation of this term into an adverb, auguralmente, which suggests the dynamism of a state of becoming, perhaps in this way suggesting Mori’s own state of becoming a Futurist (my translation). 150 “Io non mi ero data alla ‘coraggiosa avanguardia,’ ne sono stata aeropittrice rapita in aspro combattimento all’esercito nemico, come scritto in una infiammante dedica che mi fecero Fillìa e Marinetti: ho solo dipinto per esprimermi. Senza occuparmi d’altro.” Letter to Franco Ceriotto, 1978. Published as Appendix in Lauria.

 Notes 137

Chapter 4 1 Tirza True Latimer and Whitney Chawick, “Introduction,” The Modern Woman Revisited (2003). 2 Paula Birnbaum, “Painting the Perverse: Tamara de Lempicka and the Modern Woman Artist,” in The Modern Woman Revisited, 95–108. 3 In Women in Weimar Fashion: Discourses and Displays in German Culture 19181933, Mila Ganeva explains that under the directorship of Ernst Dryden “a distinct shift in the politics of the magazine occurred in the second half of the twenties . . . By 1927 the photographs of ‘our valued female fashion editors and illustrators’ had virtually disappeared . . . His fashion layouts denied the individualization of modern women” (2008), 66. 4 Mori may have been aware of this painting. Courbet was the subject of much discussion by interwar critics and artists like Roberto Longhi and Giorgio de Chirico, who claimed him as a precursor to Metaphysical Painting. See Giuseppe di Natale, “Courbet in Italia: una storia novecentesca, II,” (November 2018), 19–47. 5 He coined the term in “Appunti sul problema del Secondo Futurismo nella cultura italiana fra le due guerre,” in Notizie—Arti figurative a II, no. 5 (1958): 34–51 and expounded in Il secondo futurism, Torino 1923-38 (1961). 6 Crispolti, “Second Futurism,” in Italian Art in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily Braun (1989), 167. 7 Claudia Salaris publishes several of the manifestos in Aero--: futurismo e il mito del volo (Rome: Parole gelate, 1985) including “L’aeropittura—Manifesto futurista (1931), ‘L’Aeropoesia—manifesto futurista ai poeti e agli aviatore’ (1932), and “Manifesto tecnico dell’aeroplastica futurista” (1934). 8 Teatro aerea futurista was a manifesto linked to Azari’s experimental flights, which gave rise to the first plays for an aerial theater. See Berghaus, “Fedele Azari and Futurist Aerial Theatre,” in Italian Futurist Theatre, 1909-1944 (1998), 485–94. 9 Published in English translation as “Extended Man and the Kingdom of the Machine,” Critical Writings, ed. Günter Berghaus, trans, Doug Thompson (2006), 86. 10 Socrates describes the soul as an immortal “self-mover” and an incarnation like a “team of winged horses and their charioteer.” While foulness and ugliness make these wings of the soul shrink, beauty and wisdom nourish the growth of these wings that lift man to heaven so that in fact “the mind of the philosopher alone has wings . . . but, as he forgets earthly interests and is rapt in the divine, the vulgar deem him mad, and rebuke him; they do not see that he is inspired. Phaedrus, 249d. 11 On the broad cultural impact of the airplane in Europe and America, see Robert Wohl’s two books, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination 1908–1918 (1996) and The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950 (2005). 12 It was Louise Faure-Favrier, herself an aviation pioneer and journalist, who first quoted Blériot in her book Les chevaliers de l’air (1922). 13 Malevich, “From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism: The New Realism in Painting” (1916), 118. 14 Fernand Léger, “The Machine Aesthetic: The Manufactured Object, the Artisan and the Artist” (1924). Reprinted in Modern Artists on Art, ed. Robert L. Herbert (2000), 94–100.

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15 See Raphael Sassower and Louis Cicotello, The Golden Avant-Garde: Idolatry, Commercialism and Art (2000), 21–47. 16 Remark to Brancusi at the Paris Aviation Show in 1919. Quoted in Looking at Dada, edited by Sarah Ganz Blythe and Edward D. Powers (2006), 49. 17 Stein, Picasso, 1938 (1984), 49–50. 18 Claudio Fogu, The Historic Imaginary (2003). 19 Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (1996). 20 Marjorie Perloff, The Futurist Moment (2003), xix. 21 Gerard Silk, “Il Primo Pilota: Mussolini, Fascist Aeronautical Symbolism and Imperial Rome,” in Donatello Among the Blackshirts (2005), 71. 22 Marinetti, L’Uomo moltiplicato e il regno della macchina (1915). Reprinted and translated in Berghaus, Critical Writings (2006), 86–7; De Maria, Teoria e Invenzione (1968), 299. 23 Silvana Sinisi, “Marinetti eroe solare,” in Marinetti Futurista: inediti, pagine disperse, documenti e antologia critica (1977), 241–6. 24 Gerard Silk, “Il Primo Pilota,” 81. 25 Luisa Passerini, Mussolini immaginario (1991), 169–70. 26 Guido Mattioli, Mussolini aviatore e la sua opera per l’aviazione (Rome, 1935–6). Quoted in Fernando Esposito, Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity (2015), 3. 27 Quoted in Renzo de Felice, Mussolini il duce. Gli anni del consenso 1929–36 (1974), 155. My translation. 28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990), 11–12. 29 Emilio Gentile argued that the exhibition of the fascist revolution was a kind of temple to fascist faith in The Sacralization of Politics (1996) and Fernando Esposito has explored the Exhibition of Italian Aeronautics as operating in a similar way in Fascism, Aviation, and Mythical Modernity (2015). 30 Jeffrey Schnapp, “Mostre,” Kunst und Propaganda im Streit der Nationen 1930-1945 edited by Hans-Jorg Czech and Nikola Dol (2007), 78–85. 31 Esposito, Fascism, Aviation, and Mythical Modernity, 337, 343. 32 The full quotation on the wall is dated to July 9, 1909, and reads: “I quattro elementi sono ormai in potere dell’uomo. La legge che ci forzava a strisciare per terra è superata. Il sogno di Icaro il sogno di tutte le generazioni va traducendosi in realtà. L’uomo ha conquistato l’aria.” 33 See Jean McClure Mudge, The Poet and the Dictator (2002). 34 Joseph Farrell, “Icarus as Anti-Fascist Myth: The Case of Lauro de Bosis,” (1992), 198–209. 35 Farrell, 204. 36 Before his mission De Bosis composed “Histoire de ma mort” outlining his plan and predicting his own demise. Published in Soir de Bruxelles (October 5, 1931). Translated by Gaetano Salvemini as Storia della mia morte (1948). 37 Translation from Futurism: An Anthology, 49. 38 Carrà, “La Pittura dei suoni, rumori e odori” (1913). Translated in Futurism: An Anthology, 156. 39 “Azione dei colori passatisti e Futuristi” (1918). Reproduced in Ricostruzione di Casa Balla, ed. Maria Cristina Poma (1986), 76. 40 Douglas Giebel, “Felice Casorati’s Icarus: A Modern Classical Moral,” (1996), 55. 41 Lucia Re, “Maria Ginanni vs. F. T. Marinetti: Women, Speed, and War in Futurist Italy” (2009), 111–12. 42 Irigaray interviewed in Les femmes, la pornografie et l’erotisme, edited by Marie Francois Hans and Gilles Lapouge (1978), 50.

 Notes 139 43 Quoted in Leonard Mosley, Lindbergh (1978). 44 Foucault parallels the function of the prison panopticon with many modern social structures that result in an increasing sense of conscious and permanent visibility. Discipline and Punish (1995), 202–3. 45 Christopher Adams, “Futurismo in Guerra: The Aesthetics and Reception of 1940s ‘Aeropainting of War’” (2012); Renato Miracco, Futurist Skies: Italian Aeropainting (2005); Lucia Piccioni, “Aeropittura futurista e colonialismo fascista: il paesaggio africano senza l’uomo” (2017). 46 “Quando i futuristi dicono ai pittori ‘volate’ non è tanto perché vadano in alto per osservare gli oggetti da un nuovo punto di vista che li mostra sotto aspetti inusitati, quanto per farli innalzare sulla realtà, dominarla, vederla . . . ” Quoted in Claudia Salaris, Aero: . . . Futurismo e mito del volo (1985), 17. 47 The Futurists had a room at the Prima mostra internazionaled’arte colonial (1931), which celebrated the conquest of Lybia and aeropainting took center stage at the Seconda mostra internazionaled’arte coloniale (1934–5) in Naples where the Futurists now had two dedicated rooms. 48 Pontus Hulten, Futurismo and Futurismi (1986), 413. 49 For elaboration, see Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities (1996), Sandro Bellassai, L’invenzione della virilità (2011), or Cinzia Sartini-Blum, “Marvellous Masculinity,” (2014). 50 See, for example, discussions of the image by Linda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity, and Sexuality (1992), 11 or Mary Garrard, Brunelleschi’s Egg (2010), 45–9. 51 Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting,” in The Aesthetics of Power (1993), 81–109. 52 The poem is discussed and translated by Willard Bohn in The Other Futurism: Futurist Activity in Venice, Padua, and Verona (2004), 126–9. 53 I have deviated from Willard Bohn’s translation in one instance: the line “L’elica è un pollice nuovo per una plastica nuova” is translated more literally as “The propeller is a new thumb for a new medium” rather than “The propeller becomes molds the clay with its trowel” [sic]. 54 Glenn Curtiss, The Curtiss Aviation Book (1912). 55 “Il mio monoplane vola sempre negli occhi di una donna!” Marinetti, L’Aeroplano del Papa. Italian translation from the French 1914. 56 “ci siamo sentiti subitamente staccati dalla donna, divenuta ad un tratto troppo terrestre . . . divenuta il simbolo della terra che si deve abbandonare . . . ” Contro l’amore e parlamentarismo (1911) in Carpi, 48. 57 “un violento assalto contro le forze ignote” Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo (1909) in Teoria e Invenzione, 12–13. Translated in Futurism: An Anthology, 51. 58 “. . . degno della grande nazione futurista che propugniamo, assolutamente libera virile energetica e pratica,” in Claudia Salaris (1985): 66–7. My translation. 59 Alice Yaeger Kaplan (1986), 85–6. 60 “Questo stravagante buffone che vuol fare della politica e che nessuno, nemmeno io, prende sul serio in Italia.” Qtd. in Cesare Rossi, Trentatré vicende mussoliniane (1958), 393. 61 Ialongo describes aeropainting and arte sacra as “Futurist initiatives in which Marinetti was working towards the Duce’s goals.” Marinetti: The Artist and His Politics, 210–11.

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62 “Soltanto gli aeropittori futuristi possono far cantare sulla tela la multiforme e veloce vita aerea degli Angeli e l’apparizione dei Santi.” Marinetti and Fillìa, “Manifesto dell’arte sacra futurista,” Teoria e Invenzione Futurista (1968), 201–5. 63 Simona Cigliana, Futurismo esoterico (2002), 244. 64 Enrico Crispolti, Aeropittura futurista, Aeropittori futuristi (1985), 29. 65 Fillìa, “Spiritualità aerea” in “Oggi e domani” (November 4, 1930) quoted in Günter Berghaus, “Futurism and the Technological Imagination: Poised between Machine Cult and Machine Angst,” Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 32. 66 Adriana Baranello, “Arte sacra futurista: Fillìa between Conformity and Subversion,” (2014): 350. 67 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (2002), 29. 68 See, for example, Evelyn Fox Keller, “The Gender/Science System: Or, Is Sex to Nature as Gender Is to Science?” (1987); Patrick D. Hopkins, ed. Sex/Machine: Readings in Culture, Gender and Technology (1999) or Nina Lerman, Ruth Oldenziel, and Arwen Mohun, Technology and Gender: A Reader (2003). 69 Berghaus, Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 20. 70 On Benedetta’s transformative influence, see Conaty, “Benedetta Cappa Marinetti and the Second Phase of Futurism” (2009) or Berghaus, “Marinetti’s volte-face of 1920” (2011). 71 Contro l’amore e il parlamentarismo (1911). 72 Rosina Ferrari, the first Italian female pilot, was Censi’s aunt. When introduced to Marinetti, he viewed her as the ideal interpreter of his Danza dell’aviatrice (Aviator’s Dance) and encouraged her to fly with acrobatic pilot Mario de Bernardi. See Berghaus, “Danza Futurista: Giannina Censi and the Futurist ‘Thirties’” in Dance Theatre Journal (1990). 73 Quoted in Salaris, Barbara aeropittrice aviatrice futurista (1983). 74 “I quadri presentati da me son oil risultato plastico dei mei voli su Roma (800 metri), Appennini (3.500 metri), Milano (2500 metri), Mediterraneo Palermo-Tunisi (800 metri).” Reproduced in Salaris, Aero . . . futurismo e il mito del volo (1985), 18. 75 “Sono molto lieto che l’impressione del volo sia stata così forte da suscitare in lei il desiderio di diventare pilota.” Postcard dated April 24, 1934. Mori Family Archive. 76 “Non avevo mai volato. Marinetti comprese che per diventare aeropittrice era necessario provassi l’emozione del volo.” Autobiographical Notes. Also quoted in Adriano Olivieri, Marisa Mori: dalla misura casoratiana al dinamismo futurista ex. cat. (2009) 9. 77 This trope was also essential to Giannina Censi’s work. See Berghaus, “Danza Futurista: Giannina Censi and the Futurist ‘Thirties’” (1990) and Anja Klöck, “Of Cyborg Technologies and Fascistized Mermaids: Giannina Censi's Aerodanze in in 1930s Italy,” in Theatre Journal (1999). The trope occasionally appears in the work of male Futurists as, for example, in Bruno Munari’s Femmina d’aeroplano (1936). 78 Andreas Huyssen argues that anxieties about powerful machines were increasingly “recast and reconstructed in terms of the male fear of female sexuality . . . Woman, nature, machine had become a mesh of significations, which all had one thing in common: otherness; by their very existence they raised fears and threatened male authority and control.” In “The Vamp and the Machine: Technology and Sexuality in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis” (1982), 226. 79 For example, see Carol Duncan, “Virility and Domination in Twentieth-Century Vanguard Painting” (1973) or Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (1995). 80 Bowler, “Politics as Art: Italian Futurism and Fascism” (1991), 771.

 Notes 141 81 Sartini-Blum, The Other Modernism (1996). 82 Quoted in Lia Giachero, “Identità femminile e creazione artistica,” in L’arte delle donne: nell’italia del Novecento (2001), 74. 83 Lucia Re, “Impure Abstraction: Benedetta as Visual Artist and Novelist” (1998), 39. 84 For example Panzera in Benedetta Cappa Marinetti: Donna generatrice (2003) or Conaty, in “Benedetta’s Monument to Futurism and Fascism” (2004–5). 85 Shulamith Firestone famously called for artificial wombs to liberate women from the tyranny of reproductive biology in The Dialectic of Sex (1970). 86 Hélène Cixous famously advocated a new kind of writing from the body, or écriture feminine, in the “Laugh of the Medusa” (1975). 87 See Julia Kristeva’s notable essay “Motherhood According to Giovanni Bellini” (1990), 441–66, or more recently Morag Martin and Marianne Delaporte’s edited collection Sacred Inception: Reclaiming the Spirituality of Birth in the Modern World (2018). 88 Ideas in Donna Haraway’s pioneering essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), blossomed in the theories of Rosa Braidotti: Metamorphoses (2002), Nomadic Subjects (2011), or Posthuman Feminism (2017). 89 For a summary of the abundant literature on feminist debates, see Sarah Franklin, “Postmodern Procreation: A Cultural Account of Assisted Reproduction,” in Conceiving the New World Order (1995). 90 Paola Sica, Futurist Women (2016), 87. 91 Ibid., 139. 92 Carmen Gomez, “Gender, Science and the Modern Woman: Futurism’s Strange Concoction of Femininity” (2010), 166. 93 Sica, 156. 94 “un cervello troppo virile in un corpo troppo femminile.” Enif Robert, Un ventre di donna: romanzo chirurgico (1919), 97. 95 Salaris, Le Futuriste (1982); Lucia Re, “Futurism and Feminism” (1989); Paola Sica: Futurist Women (2016). 96 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1989), xxi. 97 “Che schifo essere un utero sofferente, mentre gli uomini si battono!” Enif Robert, Un ventre di donna (1919), 25. Lucia Re describes Robert’s trajectory in terms of her path toward a rethinking or positive reconfiguration of the womb in “Enif Robert, F.T. Marinetti e il romanzo Un ventre di donna: bisessualità, trauma e mito dell'isteria” (2014): 47–8; Paola Sica sees her novel as “emblematiz[ing] the difficult task of Florentine Futurist women in representing new models of female identity through an empowerment of the body” in Futurist Women, 77. 98 “ricordo la gioia profondamente carnale che provai otto giorni dopo il mio parto . . . ecco la mia creatura, nata da me, voluta da me, portata da me nel mio ventre.” Un ventre di donna, 22. 99 Recall that she publicly advocated legal abortion in a 1929 letter repudiating radical Fascist and Futurist Mario Carli’s promotion of compulsory procreation. “Maternità e . . . economia,” L’Impero (February 6, 1929). 100 Cinzia Sartini-Blum and Lucia Re have written that Enif Robert is ultimately constrained by phallogocentric understandings. Re says she “reveals herself to be still a prisoner of the Futurist contempt of woman,” in “Futurism and Feminism,” 270; Sartini-Blum says that she “reinscribes traditional, male-centered values while representing an experience of transgression,” in “The Scarred Womb of the Futurist Woman” (1986–7), 23.

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101 Cinzia Sartini-Blum, “The Scarred Womb of the Futurist Woman” (1986–7), 26. 102 Silvia Contarini, “How to Become a Woman of the Future: Una donna con tre anime—Un ventre di donna” (2012), 208. 103 Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (1982), 207. 104 Fanning, “Futurism and the Abjection of the Feminine” (2011). 105 Kristeva, The Powers of Horror (1982), 4. 106 Kristeva, 12. 107 Kristeva, 18. 108 “Ebbrezza” can be translated as inebriation, thrill, exhilaration, or ecstasy. I have used the term “ecstasy” here because I believe it is most compatible with the Futurist love of theatrical, offensive, or confrontational language and because it is a term that captures the idea of transcending the body through sensual experience. 109 Robert, Un ventre di donna, 107. 110 Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna! (1909) in Teoria e Invenzione Futurista (1968), 25. My translation. 111 Discorso ai Triestini (1909) in Teoria e Invenzione Futurista, 249. My translation. 112 I quote Peter Nicholls, “Futurism, Gender and Theories of Postmodernity,” 210. 113 English translation published in Futurist Performance, edited by Michael Kirby (1971), 287–8. 114 Griffin, “The Multiplication of Man: Futurism’s Technolatry Viewed through the Lens of Modernism,” Futurism and the Technological Imagination (2009), 85. 115 Foster, Prosthetic Gods (2006), 120. 116 See Berghaus, “Danza Futurista: Giannina Censi and the Futurist ‘Thirties’” (1990) or Berghaus, “The Futurist Body on Stage,” in Homo Orthopedicus: Le corps et ses prothèses à l’époque (post)moderniste (2001). 117 Ruth Odenziel, Making Technology Masculine (1999), 10. 118 Lucia Re, “Scrittura della metamorfosi e metamorfosi della scrittura: Rosa Rosà e il futurismo,” (1994); Sica, Futurist Women, 176–83. 119 Grosz, Volatile Bodies (1994), 14. 120 Gentile, “The Reign of the Man Whose Roots Are Cut: Dehumanism and AntiChristianity in the Futurist Revolution,” in Italian Futurism, 1909-1944 (2014), 170. 121 Donna Haraway and Shulamith Firestone are seen as pioneers of “cyberfeminism,” but the term was first used in the 1990s. VNS Matrix, a four-women collective, authored “Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century” (1991). 122 Elizabeth Grosz, “Feminism, Materialism and Freedom” (2010), 152. 123 “The master—to use Hegelian terms—loses some of his claim to priority and originality precisely by being taken up by a mimetic double that effects a displacement of the first term.” Contingency Hegemony Universality (2000), 37. 124 Here I refer to the work of Rosa Braidotti in Metamorphoses (2002) or Nomadic Subjects (2011).

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Index Abject  67–8, 70, 101–2 abstraction  2, 9, 16, 33, 84, 98 aeropainting  7, 18, 84, 91–6, 104, 139 n.61 Aeropittura di guerra (war aeropainting)  91–2 Aeroportraits  87 Futurist Exhibition of Aeropainting and Scenography  97 Manifesto of Aeropainting  95, 97 Agatha (Saint)  71–3, 135 n.116, 135 n.119 Aleramo, Sibilla  26–7, 119 n.104 Ambrosi, Alfredo  53, 87, 92–5, 98–9 Angelucci Cominazzini, Leandra  3, 4 Arte-azione (action art)  18, 57 Arte sacra (sacred art)  95, 116 n.47, 139 n.61 aviation  1, 14, 62, 81, 103 in avant-garde painting  85–6 Colonialism and  91–2 Exhibition of Italian Aeronautics  88–9 Icarus and  85, 88–91 in literature  84–5, 89 Mussolini and  87–9 and spirituality  95 Avondo, Silvio  40 Azari, Fedele  84, 95, 137 n.8 Baker, Josephine  67 Balbo, Italo  87, 89 Balla, Giacomo  1, 17, 53, 87 Color theory  79, 90 Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe (manifesto)  57 Banti, Anna  23, 30–1, 107, 118 n.94 Barbara (Olga Biglieri Scurto)  3, 96–7 Beguine  73, 75 Benedetta (Benedetta Cappa Marinetti)  3–5, 80, 119 n.118, 120 n.121

aeropainting and  95–8 marriage to Marinetti  60, 131 n.46 procreative metaphors and  29 Tactilism and  69, 134 n.97, 134 n.98 Berghaus, Günter  3, 4, 58, 96 Biego, Costantino  17, 97 Biennale  9, 16, 83 Bisi-Fabbri, Adriana  3, 5 Blériot, Louis  85 Boccioni, Umberto  1, 5, 17, 38, 53 Bonheur, Rosa  29, 31, 35, 107 Bontempelli, Massino  35, 41 Boswell, Jesse  41, 42, 126 n.91 Bragaglia, Anton Giulio  1, 17, 65 call-to-order (ritorno all’ordine)  37, 122 n.19 Carrà, Carlo  13, 37, 48, 49, 53, 90 Casorati, Felice  1, 2, 6, 13, 16, 17, 30 antifascism and  39, 56 De Chirico and  38, 48, 51 fragments and  70–1 futurism and  14, 62–3 Icarus and  90–1 Mori’s portrait of  46–7 nudes and  54–6, 78, 99, 116 n.57 Old Masters and  37, 41, 71 self-portraits  35, 44 still lifes  50–1 students of  22, 23, 37–43, 64, 123 n.35 Turin Six and  41, 126 n.84 Catholic iconography  50, 60, 72, 76, 86 Cenaereo  66, 133 n.83 Censi, Giannina  96, 140 n.72 ceramics  4, 14, 63, 66 Cesaretti, Enrico  58, 67, 68 Chaplin, Elizabeth  30 childbirth  28, 43, 83, 84, 99, 102 Cixous, Hélène  7, 28, 33, 59 Cold War  9, 24

162 Colonialism  20, 91 Crali, Tullio  63, 92–3, 95 Crispolti, Enrico  84, 110 n.4 Croce, Benedetto  7, 26, 30, 38, 125 n.70 La Cucina Futurista  58, 66 Dada  70, 86 D’Albisola, Tullio  66, 67, 76, 89, 90 D’Annunzio, Gabriele  1, 12, 84, 89, 94 De Beauvoir, Simone  32, 100 De Chirico, Giorgio  12, 17, 38, 55–6 Ariadne and  54 fragments and  68, 70 influence of  13, 48–51 Nietzsche and  12, 38 Valori Plastici and  37, 55, 129 n.139 De Lempicka, Tamara  83 Della Francesca, Piero  35, 41, 43, 54, 71 eggs and  50 Madonnas  47 Depero, Fortunato  57, 62, 63 De Saint Point, Valentine  4 Donna moderna. See New Woman Dottori, Gerardo  53, 87, 92, 95 Écriture feminine  6, 28, 119 n.106 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution (MRF)  71, 89, 138 n.29 Expressionism  24, 33 Farfa (Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini)  14, 62–4, 66, 75–6 Fascism  1, 4, 8, 9, 13, 22–4, 41, 55 aviation symbolism and  84, 86–8 Fasci italiani di combattimento  61 Futurism and  6, 7, 21, 58, 61, 71, 84–6, 92 Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF)  61 Risorgimento and  71 women and  10, 26, 30, 31, 70, 77, 92 Faure-Favrier, Louise  137 n.12 feminism(s)  99, 103, 126 n.90 in art history  1, 2, 7, 92 cyber  103 essentialist  9, 28–9, 61, 99 Mussolini and  10 paradoxical  7, 60, 61, 69, 76 Ferguson, Kathy  7, 59 Ferrari, Rosina  140 n.72

Index Fidora, Alma  3, 5 Fillìa (Luigi Colombo)  13, 14, 53, 58, 62 First World War  11, 12, 26, 37, 70 aircraft in  85–7 women and  10 Foster, Hal  4, 103 Free School of Painting (Scuola Libera di Pittura)  14, 39, 41, 49 Friedman, Susan Stanford  28, 29 Futurismo (journal)  84, 94 Galleria Pesaro  66, 97 Galvano, Albino  39, 54, 55 Gentile, Emilio  32, 71, 86, 103 Gentile, Giovanni  26 Gentileschi, Artemisia  23, 28, 30–2, 35, 107 Gilot, Françoise  25–6 Ginanni, Maria  4, 100 Giorgione  37, 41, 47, 54 Gobetti, Piero  38–40, 42, 55, 128 n.122 Goncharova, Natalia  4 Griffin, Roger  58, 103 Gualino, Riccardo  35, 39, 42, 43, 126 n.85 Guggenheim, Peggy  5, 9 Haraway, Donna  59, 103 Hayez, Franceso  70–1 Independent Futurists. See Marasco, Antonio Irigaray, Luce  7, 59, 80, 91 irony  59–60, 91 Italian Academy  21, 30 Italian Federation of Business and Professional Women (FIDAPA)  32, 113 n.4, 121 n.140 Italianità  41, 49, 50, 55, 71 Italia turrita  70 Jazz  73–5 Levi, Carlo  23, 38, 41, 127 n.94 Levi-Montalcini family  1, 21–3 Gino  21, 22, 117 n.77 Paola  9, 22, 23, 42, 43, 126 n.92 Rita  22, 23, 126 n.92 Lindberg, Charles  86, 91

 Index 163 L’Italia futurista (journal)  4, 71 Loffredo, Ferdinando  26 Lombroso, Cesare  26 Longhi, Roberto  31, 41, 50, 71 Loy, Mina  4, 5, 28, 101 Lyceum Club  2, 6, 7, 9, 102, 105 history  30 lecture  26–7, 31–2 Mori’s membership  30 machine aesthetics  7, 84, 85, 103 Magic Realism  1, 6, 7, 17, 38, 48 Franz Roh and  110 n.3 influence on Mori  13, 16, 56, 80 in Italy  35 Mantegna, Andrea  35, 41, 102 Manzoni, Piero  25, 50 Marasco, Antonio  16, 116 n.47 Marchesini, Nella  40–4, 47–8, 51, 71 Marinetti, F.T., works by Come si seducono le donne  4 Discorsi ai Triestini (Speech to the People of Trieste)  101 Fondazione e manifesto del futurismo (Founding and Manifesto of Futurism)  90, 93 L’alcova d’accaio (The Steel Alcove)  92 La Nuova Religione-Morale della Velocità (New Ethical Religion of Speed)  102 Le Monoplan du Pape (The Pope’s Airplane)  85, 95 Mafarka  28, 60, 76, 88, 98 Paroliberismo (free-word poetry)  70 Re Baldoria (Roi Bombance)  57–9, 67 Tactilism: A Futurist Manifesto  69 Uccidiamo il chiaro di luna (Let’s Kill Off the Moonlight!)  101 Masaccio  22, 35, 41 Maugham, Daphne  40, 42, 46–7, 126 n.92 Mechanomorph  16, 88, 89, 103 Mennyey, Tina  42, 63, 116 n.61, 132 n.72 Metaphysical Painting  13, 16, 35, 38, 48, 110 n.3 Misogyny  4, 5, 59, 96, 103 Modersohn-Becker, Paola  44, 45 Mori, Franco  22, 32, 43, 64 arrest  23

asleep  27, 46 childhood  12, 14, 39, 41 Mori, Mario  12–13, 16, 46, 64 motherhood  28, 29, 43, 101 breast symbolism and  76 Fascist ideology and  26–7, 77 Madre esemplare  9 Madre prolifica  9, 113 n.6 Mori’s lecture and  9, 31, 106, 107, 109 Mori’s painting and  33, 77–9 Mussolini, Benito  1, 12, 18, 22, 39, 61 Marinetti and  90, 95–7 pilots and  86, 87 quotations by  10, 26, 61, 88, 89, 102 National Association of Professional Women and Artists (ANDPA)  29, 30, 117 n.69, 120 n.127 Negri, Ada  30, 31 Neo-Renaissance  6, 37, 38, 91 New Man  26, 86, 89, 90, 99, 129 n.142 New Woman  26, 75, 83, 100, 101 Nietzsche, Friedrich  12, 38 Nochlin, Linda  1, 3, 68, 70 Novecento  38, 41, 49, 55 Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF). See Fascism Picasso, Pablo  9, 25, 41, 85, 86 Pistoletto, Michelangelo  1 Poesia (journal)  57 Pollock, Griselda  3, 6 Prampolini, Enrico  16, 63, 65 aviation imagery  87, 95 female nudes  53, 98 Pro-Cultura Femminile  14, 29, 30 Prospero, Ada (Ada Gobetti)  30, 51, 127 n.94, 128 n.122 Quadriennale  2, 14, 15, 22, 30, 90 Race Laws  1, 21, 22, 117 n.73 Re, Lucia  3, 7, 60, 61, 68, 91, 103 Realism  35, 37, 56, 84 Regina (Regina Cassolo Bracchi)  3, 5 Reproduction  19, 25, 41, 77 Robert, Enif  3, 4, 10, 73, 80, 100 Romano, Lalla  39, 40, 42

164 Rosà, Rosa (Edith von Haynau)  3–5, 10, 27, 100 Salaris, Claudia  3, 5, 58 Second Futurism  1, 84, 117 n.63, 134 n.97 Second World War  2, 22, 52, 95 Severini, Gino  37, 53, 71 Simpson Stevens, Frances  3–5 Sironi, Mario  17, 49 Soffici, Ardengo  49, 120 n.133 Surrealism  5, 70, 80 Tactilism. See Benedetta Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni)  63, 92

Index Taverna del Santopalato (Tavern of the Holy Palate)  62 Teatro aereo (aerial theatre)  84–5, 95 Thayaht (Ernesto Michahellis)  13, 15, 16, 64, 87, 116 n.47 Valori Plastici  37, 38, 55, 129 n.139 Venturi, Lionello  30, 39, 41, 42 Vigée LeBrun, Elizabeth  28, 35 womanhood  27, 28, 59, 76, 101 Catholic ideals  9, 26, 31, 77 Fascist ideals  9, 26 modern  33, 36, 61, 81, 83, 100 Woolf, Virgina  10, 29

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166

Plate 1  Manifesto della Mostra nazionale di agricoltura (Poster Design for the National Agriculture Exhibition), 1934, Marisa Mori. Tempera on paper on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. Collezione M. Viglino Collection.

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Plate 2 Manifesto della II Quadriennale nazionale di Roma (Poster Design for the Second Roman Quadriennale), 1935, Marisa Mori. Tempera on paper on canvas, 70 × 100 cm. Collezione M. Viglino Collection.

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Plate 3  Autoritratto in Blu (Self-Portrait in Blue), 1929, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 49.5 × 69 cm. Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

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Plate 4  Autoritratto nudo (Nude Self-Portrait), 1929–30, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 39 × 32 cm. Mori Family Archive.

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Plate 5  Ritratto di donna al mare: Nella Marchesini (Portrait of a Woman on the Beach: Nella Marchesini), 1928–9, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 48 × 67 cm. Mori Family Archive.

Plate 6  Via Lanfranchi (Lanfranchi Street), 1926, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 46 × 50 cm. Courtesy of Galleria del Laocoonte, Roma/London.

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Plate 7  La Lettura (Reading), 1928–9, Marisa Mori. Oil on wood panel, 127 × 91 cm. Mori Family Archive.

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Plate 8  Clinica Sanatrix (Sanatrix Clinic), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 58.5 × 47.5 cm. Mori Family Archive.

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Plate 9  L’Ebrezza fisica della maternità (The Physical Ecstasy of Maternity), 1936, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 70 × 100 cm. Mori Family Archive.

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Plate 10  Aviatrice addormentata (Sleeping Aviatrix), 1932, Marisa Mori. Oil on cardboard, 97 × 70 cm. Mori Family Archive.

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