Discussed Futurism exhibition opens in Rome, preview photos. Giuli: "a celebration of revolution."

The exhibition of controversies finally opens to the public: from Dec. 3 to Feb. 28, 2025, the National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art in Rome is hosting Il tempo del Futurismo, curated by Gabriele Simongini, promoted and supported by the Ministry of Culture, which financed the operation with 1.5 million euros, joined by private sponsors (the exhibition enjoys the support of main sponsors Autostrade per l’Italia and Enel, sponsors Gruppo Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane and Unipol Gruppo, and technical partner ACI Storico).

The exhibition builds on the celebration of the 80th anniversary of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s death on December 2, 1944, with the aim of investigating the developments of the movement and its relationship with science and technology. Marinetti and his followers saw time as a dynamic and unstoppable flow, embodied by technological advancement and the frenzy of modern life: the exhibition aims to trace this history.

“I’m happy to have an exhibition here because as many as 100 works of the 350 on display come from the deposits of this museum,” Ministry of Culture Director General Museums Massimo Osanna told a press conference. “So this is a first opportunity to put together material that is linked through a red thread, and that is not always available. Starting from the museum’s extraordinary collections, the exhibition will rise to a high national scope with loans that come from prestigious collections and museums. I would like to emphasize the importance of the national museum system of this operation and with all the operations we do with the Ministry of Culture: we are not individual museums, but a museum system and this is the great added value of our heritage. So we are talking about 70 lenders including archives, libraries, as well as museums.”

“This exhibition,” said instead the director of GNAM, Renata Cristina Mazzantini, “is the result of a wonderful teamwork that was able to be established with the curator Gabriele Simongini, with the organizing committee, and with all the offices of the ministry that collaborated, in particular with the general directorate of museums, but also with the department for enhancement. Ours is a homemade exhibition, an exhibition that was done by the ministry office without relying on one of the big agencies, which do this work very well, and this is not only to save public money, but also to show that the ministry is perfectly capable of organizing a great exhibition, because I don’t remember from memory that I have seen such a great exhibition perhaps in the last ten years in Italy. There have been other exhibitions on futurism, but this one has a very interesting and current slant in my opinion, because the intention is to bring it toward a vision that is very open to the new generations.”

Intents and goals of the exhibition

Futurism, born in 1909 with the Manifesto published by Marinetti first in the Gazzetta dell’Emilia and then in the French newspaper Le Figaro, was not only an artistic movement, but a true cultural revolution. With a language of rupture, the Futurists railed against the past and academic tradition, embracing instead speed, movement and energy. The exhibition aims to analyze how these themes found expression in multiple artistic forms: painting, sculpture, literature, design, film, and music.

“On the 80th anniversary of Marinetti, on the importance of his creative revolution, everything has been said, everything has been written,” said Culture Minister Alessandro Giuli, “and I imagine that the best way to maintain and to retain what is a contemporary state of mind is to visit this exhibition, which is a truly total exhibition, which also needs a certain amount of patience and good will, because it is truly immense in its size and quality. I doubt that we could have done better, and indeed I think that anything that could have been further would have resulted in an overabundance that would have even endangered a concept, an idea, an organic vision of Futurism and especially the ability that Simongini had to illuminate the most contemporary aspect. I truly believe that today we are inaugurating a great celebration of revolution, but it is a great Futurist and contemporary revolution, so to the visitors, to all of you, to critics and non-critics, to friends and non-friends, I wish you all the greatest enjoyment.”

The exhibition devotes a focus to the link between art and technology,. Futurist art did not merely represent the world, but sought to recreate it, interpreting the novelties introduced by scientific inventions and new means of transportation such as the automobile, train and airplane.

In this regard, The Time of Futurism also aims to highlight how futurist insights are still modern today, and it does so through two multisensory installations (one by Lorenzo Marini and one by Magister Art) that invite visitors to reflect on the role of man in an increasingly automated society. The exhibition thus aims to propose a dialogue between past and future, questioning the challenges posed by today’s technological acceleration and the lessons we can learn from the futurists’ visionary approach.

“As many scholars, professors and experts in art history have pointed out, Futurism represented a vital heritage for the society and culture of the 20th century,” Federico Mollicone, chairman of the Culture Committee at the Chamber, told a press conference. “For too many years Futurism has been belittled as a uniquely Italian phenomenon, but it represented the world’s first true literary artistic avant-garde, inventing a real code of behavior adopted by all subsequent historical and artistic avant-gardes, from German to Russian. With Futurism, art is total, stepping outside a space of the picture, entering everyday life and intercepting a world where everything runs, everything moves and everything turns quickly. From Boccioni to Balla, albeit with very different points of view, the protagonists of this movement grasped the becoming that technology and the machine are bringing about and that we are experiencing today. In this sense Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in his manifesto entitled Wireless Imagination of May 1913 wrote that the man of the future will have only a modest interest in knowing how the men of the past lived, but will rather have a continuous eagerness to know how the other men of his time all over the planet live and what they are doing at every moment, and through books telephones and the net he will have the means at his disposal to be continuously informed at every moment. He has in fact prefigured the current contemporary way in which we live. The exhibition we are presenting today represents in all its contemporaneity the technological revolution of that time and the innovative ideological interpretation that was given by the futurist intellectuals.”

The itinerary

The exhibition unfolds through an itinerary that includes more than 350 works, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, films and design objects. In addition to the works of the movement’s main exponents, such as Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini and Fortunato Depero, there are also materials on display that testify to Futurism’s connection with science and technology, including scientific instruments and means of transportation. There is also a section on aeropainting, with works by artists such as Tullio Crali and Gerardo Dottori, who sought to capture the feeling of freedom and vertigo offered by flight.

“I don’t think a great exhibition should be measured only in the quantity of works,” curator Simongini stressed at the press conference. “The exhibition presents 350 objects and works of art, exactly like one of the most internationally praised exhibitions right now, which is the Surrealism exhibition at the Centre Pompidour in Paris. We have nothing to envy the French, on the contrary: the French have reconstructed Breton’s voice with artificial intelligence, we have Marinetti’s original voice,” says curator Gabriele Simongini, referring to Magister Art’s installation.

The installation also includes a section devoted to typography and graphics, areas in which Futurism introduced decisive innovations. Futurist posters and books, with their experimental forms and revolutionary use of text and image, profoundly influenced visual communication in the 20th century.

To enrich the exhibition, the National Gallery has collaborated with a number of Italian and international cultural institutions. These included MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Estorick Collection in London, and the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, which loaned some works. One-third of the exhibition is made up of works from the National Gallery, most of which have been recovered from the museum’s storerooms, so the public can see works that are rarely seen on display.

Practical information

Full ticket: €10.00 (from December 3, 2024, the cost of the full ticket will be €15.00), Reduced ticket: €2.00. Hours: Tuesday to Sunday from 9:00 am to 7:00 pm. Last admission 45 minutes before closing. For Dec. 24 and 31, 2024: closing at 6:00 pm, with last entry at 5:15 pm. Closing days: 25 December, 1 January

Discussed Futurism exhibition opens in Rome, preview photos. Giuli: "a celebration of revolution."

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