Futurism’s first wave lived fast and died young – but has it left a good-looking corpse?

One hundred years ago, in February 1909, the Italian poet and dilletante FT Marinetti hijacked the front page of Le Figaro to promulgate the white-hot gospel of a provocative new art movement. As just one among a rash of aesthetic ‘-isms’ profilferating at the turn of the century, Futurism needed to make itself heard above the din of other people’s rhetoric. Declaring a total break with the past, Marinetti called on his contemporaries to “destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy,” and embrace the thrilling new world of flux brought about by mass mechanisation.

Above all, Futurism was about speed: instead of the curves of bathing ladies, the new art would celebrate the sleek lines of roaring racing cars; in place of haystacks and water lilies, the landscape painting of the future would describe the kinetic, jutting rythmns of urban space as seen blurring by in the windows of a railway carriage.  The leap from gas lamp to street lamp meant painters saw society, quite literally, in a new light. “Let’s murder the moonlight!” urged Marinetti, determined to jettison the soft-focus impressionisms of the late 19^th century in favour of modernity’s electric pulse.

Marinetti was soon joined by a clutch of Italian artists that would make up Futurism’s inner circle:  Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini.  Marinetti’s sloganeering made them come across as a boorishly macho bunch – a kind of bohemian version of the Top Gear team, and they allowed him to take them into some distinctly dodgy ideological territory.  The Futurist Manifesto combined an unpleasant streak of misogyny with a dose of nationalistic militarism, washed down with some quasi-Nietzschean posturing:  “We want to glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman… Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.”

But for all their visionary ardour, the Futurists’ ambition far outstripped their artistic and technical resources.  Were it not for a handful of iconic images, it would be tempting to dismiss the movement as little more than a backwater tributary of Cubism. For a movement that prized clarity and energy, the Italian Futurists’ painting could be surprisingly turgid and over-wrought; their choice of colours gauche and dismal, almost kitsch. No wonder Apollinaire warned that the Futurists were in danger of becoming “mere illustrators.”   As if in recognition of these weaknesses, the Tate has bolstered the show with more heavyweight fare bearing a tangential relationship to Futurism, including Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande) of 1909, as well as works by artists such as Braque, Malevich and Duchamp.

Yet the best of the Italians’ work is truly memorable, some of it brilliantly so. Boccioni’s sculpture Unique Forms of Certainty in Space (1913) is a muscular, striding figure that looks like some new breed of soilder-citizen on the march, and manages to be both beautiful and disturbing.  Russolo’s The Rebellion (1911) is still a deeply arresting image, with its scarlet spearhead of anarchistic rioters surging as one body into the geometric grid of the streets. Similarly, Carlo Carra’s stunning The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli from the same year also documents the movement’s early identification with anarchism, thrillingly re-imagining the battle scenes of classical painting through the swirling vectors of the new art. Carra also responded to the augmented realities of the nocturnal city: Leaving The Theatre (1909) captures opera goers bursting out of La Scala into the night air, transformed by the street lights into abstracted jellysfish, the whole canvas ablaze with ghostly motion smears.

The exhibition does well in exploring the cross-pollination between different national expressions of the movement. Its forays into Russian Futurism are fascinating, particularly the work of one of the few women represented, the brilliant Natalia Goncharova.  We also get to see examples of Futurism’s Parisian equivalent, Orphism, which was altogether more lyrical and transparent, more French – two highlights here are Leger’s The Wedding and Picabia’s Dancers At The Spring.

Next we are in England, where the movement influenced Vorticists like Windham Lewis and the superbly gifted sculptor Jacob Epstein, a frangment of whose masterpiece The Rock Drill  (1913-16) features here. This sleek, black dystopian man-machine, with its humanoid progeny seeded in its ribbed belly, is disturbing and prophetic; its visored torso could serve as the prototype for virtually every automaton in popular culture since, from The Terminator to Attack of The Clones.

This exhibition teeters on the brink of Wolrd War I.  The final room includes a few examples of Futurism’s wartime utterances, including CRW Nevison’s Bursting Shell (1915).  As a member of an ambulance unit in the conflict, Nevison’s affiliation with the war-mongering Futurists died in the trenches – he disassociated himself from the movement from then on.

It is Balla’s Patriotic Demonstration of 1915, a piece of interventionist agitation against Italy’s wartime neutrality, that hints at the movement’s future trajectory. But here the trail ends. There is no reference to the course Futurism took next, which was, inevitably, to align itself with Fascism. Marinetti saw Mussolini as the political corollary to his super-austere aesthetic. In 1924 he issued his pamphlet Futurismo e Fascismo, enrolled in the fascists’ party, and eventually joined Mussolini in his rump Fascist Republic at Salò, dying in northern Italy in December 1944.

That the Tate makes no mention of this, nor includes a single one of the artworks that issued from this second phase of Futurism, seems bizarre, especially given that its Fascistic leanings are made conspicuously evident at the entrance to the exhibition, where Marinetti’s demagogic Manifesto is blown up in wall-sized text.  This is a kind of vanilla-isation of Futurism, an unforgivable omission for a show about a movement in which the fizz of ideas was every bit as powerful as the lure of its images – sometimes more so.

Futurism runs until 20 September.

Peter Robb dials M for maverick in his flawed but brilliant account of the life of Caravaggio

“M? M was a painter. This is a book about him.”  So begins Peter Robb’s epic biography of Caravaggio, the enigmatic giant of Italian baroque art, and as the rather self-conscious introduction suggests, it’s a book of its time: ‘M’ is soaked in the influence of the 1990s New Historicists, who regarded the lives of artists as unfinished jigsaw puzzles riddled with contentious spaces.

Of no artist is this more true than the 17th century painter Michelangelo Merisi, better known by the name of his home town Caravaggio, but also by a host of other names beginning with the letter M, a fact Robb seizes on as a device to remind us of the impossibility of fixing the painter with a stable identity.

Documentation on the life is indeed astonishingly scant given the fame, not to say infamy, Caravaggio enjoyed in his day, when he was regarded by many as ‘ the wonder of the age’.  Much of what we do know has been gleaned from police and court records left over from his many brushes with the law. He left no correspondence and even his death at the age of 38 is a mystery. Within a few decades he was all but forgotten, and it took the 20th century to rediscover him. Tantalisingly, given how profoundly his work speaks to us now, Caravaggio the man remains out of reach.

Instead, we must look to the paintings – treasures that demonstrate to modern eyes that Caravaggio was undoubtedly the greatest Italian artist of his day, and among the greatest of all European painters. But perhaps what fascinates most, for us as much as for his contemporaries, is the incongruity between his status as a great master and his reputation as a street-tough libertine who drew his inspiration from life at the margins of his society.

This is the scandalous bisexual celebrity who by day kept company with aristocrats and cardinals and by night mixed it up on the backstreets of Rome; the impetuous, sword-wielding brawler who, when he wasn’t embroiled in back-alley skirmishes, spent his leisure hours carousing with hookers, pimps and other lowlife. It’s hard not to see this wild-man persona mirrored in the waywardness of his genius, his radical approach to technique and his fierce disdain for the contemporary art establishment. Until a spell on the run from his enemies forced him to paint figures from memory, Caravaggio worked from life and life only. He also refused to draw, applying paint directly to the canvas.

It’s all the more remarkable that this intransigent outsider made his name in Rome at the height of the counter-reformation, when the Catholic church was busy harnessing art as the chief organ of its propaganda machine. This was the time of the Inquisition, when any behavior that didn’t conform to pious religious orthodoxy was regarded as dangerously subversive. As a result, the culture’s vital signs – particularly sex and free thought – went underground.

Much as he purports to deconstruct the Caravaggio myth, Robb ultimately does little to dispel this seductive image of M as a reckless transgressor, whose dark canvasses mirror an inner anguish. The difference is that what critics once viewed with puzzlement and dismay, Robb positively celebrates. He is in love with this romantic maverick, who he views as a victim of crushing religious totalitarianism and the deadly hypocrisies of the powerful. ‘M’ is very much a portrait of Robb’s Caravaggio, just as Derek Jarman’s 1986 film treated the painter’s life as a canvas on which to project the director’s own fantasies and preoccupations. In fact, ‘M’ often approaches biographical fiction: it’s as if, having debunked art history as a disingenuous join-the-dots exercise, Robb feels more than justified in indulging his own flights of conjecture.

But it’s precisely when he indulges himself that Robb is at his best. He has lived and breathed this artist, painstakingly subsuming a vast body of learning into a polemical 600-page labour of love. Few writers can bring a work of art leaping off the canvas and down the corridors of four centuries as can Robb in full flow.  A fabulous stylist, his best sentences are orgiastic, visionary affairs, plundering his voluminous vocabulary to rain down willfully idiosyncratic insights. He’s a master communicator, one of the great contemporary autodidacts, his impressive intellect always playing second fiddle to gut-level engagement with the art.

Yet Robb is much more than a gushing canvas-gawker. Some of the book’s most fascinating passages are those that unveil the sideshows to the life: context-setting anecdotes detailing the intrigues of 17th century Italian society. Robb skillfully captures the everyday atmosphere of palazzos and tennis courts; their air of indolence and danger; the street corner subcultures of a world in which beauty and brutality, the grotesque and the exquisite, rubbed cheek to cheek.

Robb is also superb at portraying Rome – a Janus-faced society whose economy pivoted on the dual cogs of the Church and the sex industry – as a metaphor for the diseased culture of counter-reformation Europe.  He compares church patronage of artists’ workshops to the Hollywood studio system, and the ideological stand-off between Catholicism and Protestantism as a proto-Cold War.  Robb also persuasively argues that the sensibilities at work in the paintings of Caravaggio – a contemporary of Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Galileo (who he likely knew) – were part of a wider burgeoning humanistic worldview that would eventually lead to the Enlightenment.

Influenced by the naturalism of the Lombard school, Caravaggio soon found himself in revolt against the artificialities of his Mannerist predecessors and the anodyne religious art of his day. He increasingly plunged his subjects into darkness, exquisitely rendering the play of light on surfaces and virtually inventing the tenebrist style that would echo through European painting for decades after his death. Caravaggio was also a great storyteller: paintings like ‘The Cardsharps’ (1595) are full of delicious intrigue and social observation. Equally fascinating is what the paintings say about Caravaggio’s own story – not least, the power politics of his relationships with boy apprentices and models.

But it was in the shocking physicality of his work that Caravaggio was perhaps most revolutionary, and nowhere more so than in the visceral power he brought to his religious commissions.  ’The Crucifiction of Peter’ (1601) stunningly captures the obscenity of the spectacle of an old man being hoisted aloft on a cross.  With unflinching clarity, Caravaggio shows us the insane indignity of it all: the stupefied, glassy look in Peter’s eyes, and the sheer physical effort of the men tasked with getting the job done.

Everything that religious art sought to hide in its quest for transcendence – the prosaic mechanics of daily life – were the very things Caravaggio was most interested in. He dared to imagine what these Biblical scenes might have actually looked and felt like. Through his works we sense the awe-struck turmoil in Thomas as he pokes a finger between the folds of Christ’s wound; the terror of the mourners as Lazarus’ light-bathed body twitches to life. While all painters used street urchins and prostitutes as cheap modeling fodder, Caravaggio’s paintings did little to disguise the fact.  Even his most religious pictures are littered with unpretty details – the pinched, blistered texture of a piece of fruit on the turn; the goiter in a crone’s neck.

Paradoxically, it was precisely this willingness to drag religious art kicking and screaming into the modern world that gave Caravaggio’s Biblical scenes their unprecedented mystical power.  And much as his naturalism prompted scandal and rejection, it also made him sought after.  Even the most ignorant counter-reformation ideologue could grasp that Caravaggio was bringing a much-needed immediacy and relevance to the Christian story. Suddenly, thanks to Caravaggio, in place of tired, freeze-framed stylizations, the Church had stories that lived and breathed. M did more than paint a tale: he made it so alive you felt that, like Thomas, you could poke your finger in the proof of it.

This is where Robb’s revisionist stance is weakest. For Robb, every canvas seems to be evidence of a secular, atheistic mindset that would have been bizarre in a 17th century Italian citizen. He does not want to recognise that Caravaggio’s radical re-imaginings of Biblical encounters served to rehabilitate, not undermine, the depiction of religious faith in painting. He is willfully blind to the empathy the painter brings to his depictions of troubled spiritual searchers like Saul and Matthew; the way his intense use of chiaroscuro dramatises the struggle between faith and doubt; and of how perfectly Caravaggio’s naturalism suited tales from an age when miracles were regarded as part of the everyday world.

Caravaggio is supposed to have died on a treacherous stretch of malarial coastline, trying on foot to reach Rome, where he’d been promised a pardon for committing homicide in an argument over a tennis match in 1606. Robb spends much of the latter part of the book pulling apart the flimsy official version of events and claiming a cover-up. His theory that Caravaggio was murdered by the Knights of Malta after committing an unforgivable sexual misdemeanor under their roof is intriguing and persuasive – to a point. But here, as elsewhere, so determined is he to make ‘M’ a corollary of the rebel artist – a book in revolt about an artist in revolt – that he over-eggs the pudding.

‘M’ is a book that wears its dissent quite literally on its sleeve: the book jacket relishes the scorn poured on it by the old guard, quoting from critics like Craig Brown and Brain Sewell, who famously declared that it deserved to be pulped. Sewell was wrong. ‘M’ may be guilty of trying too hard, but as an antidote to the dead weight of academic art criticism this book is more than justified – it’s wholly necessary.