‘Every generation must build its own city.’
Antonio Sant’ Elia, Architect

I recently visited an exhibition of the work of Futurist painter Tullio Crali (The Estorick Collection, London - now closed, but you can still buy the excellent catalogue).

Futurism was a movement founded by the writer FT Marinetti. It began with his 1909 publication of a Manifesto in which he argued that Italy’s great artistic heritage was holding it back; that all its museums and libraries should be destroyed; and it should embrace a more vibrant, modern, innovative culture - one that articulated the dynamism of the city and the speed of the machine age.

‘There can be no modern painting without the starting point of an absolutely modern sensation.’

Born in 1910, Crali grew up in Croatia and north-east Italy. From an early age he loved to draw, and he was inspired when at 15 he came across an article about Futurism in his local paper. He began experimenting with Futurist techniques and themes, employing sharp angles, confident curves and bright colours to convey the vigour of the modern world; cubism and abstraction to express its vital energy.
Crali painted skyscrapers ascending magisterially into the clouds; sailors busying themselves beneath the bridge of a high-tech battleship; cranes and dredgers creating their own bustling rhythms; a bold red racing car taking a corner at full tilt.

The Futurists were particularly fascinated by aviation and they dedicated a new genre of art to it: ‘aeropainting.’ Flight was for them a supreme achievement of the industrial age. It represented speed and technology, progress and liberation. It intensified the gaze, created fresh perspectives on the familiar, and offered breathtaking new vistas.

‘The sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.’
FT Marinetti, ‘Manifesto of Futurism’

Crali was himself caught up in this enthusiasm when in 1928 he flew in an aeroplane for the first time.

‘Everything was wondrous, and when I found myself back on the ground I felt as if I had been robbed.'

Crali created many images that captured the elation of his experience in the air. Flying above the metropolis, floating above the clouds. The elegant curves of the propeller. The thundering roar of the engines. The bracing view from the cockpit as a pilot nose-dives into the city.

‘He who has to be a creator also has to destroy.’
Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

Crali’s work was thrilling, forceful, energetic and optimistic. But there was a shadow looming over the Futurist movement. From the very beginning their passion came wrapped in a nationalist flag, and they believed that wholesale destruction was necessary to make room for worthwhile creation. Increasingly through the ‘30s their work addressed military themes, and the movement became closely aligned with Mussolini’s Fascist regime.

Crali was something of an exception. Though he created some official war art, he often clashed with the occupying Nazi authorities who considered him a subversive.

Nonetheless Futurism ran out of road with Marinetti’s death in 1944 and the end of World War II. Crali, now sceptical about political dogma and disillusioned with the evolving Italian art scene, for a while took to painting mournful still lifes.

'My art changes form, but not substance. A lack of faith in mankind leads me to turn my attention to nature.’

Yet Crali remained a solitary enthusiast for Futurist ideals. And whilst over the coming years he found new forms of artistic expression, he kept returning to pictures of open skies, aerobatic display teams and supersonic flight. He always had his head in the clouds.

Crali died in 2000 in Milan, aged 90.

The Futurist story resonates today. On the one hand, there is something thrilling about their enthusiastic embrace of the modern world. Today, when the possibilities of technology seem boundless, we should retain something of the Futurists’ zeal, their optimism and their evangelism for change.

On the other hand, we need to be cautious. We may hear troubling echoes of Futurism’s transgressions in Silicon Valley’s obsession with creative destruction; with its corporate philosophy of ‘move fast and break things;’ with its clear eyed confidence in its own self worth and manifest destiny.

A bright sun casts dark shadows.

'My poor heart just flew away,
When it realized one day
The dreams that we planned
Would only end in shadowland.’

k.d. lang, ‘Shadowland'

No. 275