Feb. 20, 1909: Le Figaro publishes Manifesto of Futurism. Original copy exhibited in Verona.

From February 19, 2022, an original copy of the French newspaper Le Figaro with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifeste du Futurisme will arrive at Palazzo Maffei - Casa Museo in Verona, in the room dedicated to Futurism, thus joining some of the most significant Futurist works in the Carlon collection. It was Feb. 20, 1909, when the Manifesto of Futurism was published on the front page of Le Figaro: the historic French newspaper thus sanctioned 113 years ago the birth of one of the significant avant-gardes of the early 20th century.

In popularizing Futurist principles, Verona also played an important role, as theArena, the city’s daily newspaper, was one of seven newspapers in the peninsula to anticipate the publication of the famous Manifesto by a few days, on February 9.

A facsimile of theArena ’s front page of Feb. 9, 1909, found in the newspaper’s historical archives, thanks to the collaboration of the Athesis Publishing Group, will be on display at Palazzo Maffei. “The Futurist movement has always fascinated my father because of its innovative scope,” explained Vanessa Carlon, director of Palazzo Maffei. “ That’s why an important nucleus of the collection is dedicated to the major protagonists of the movement. The rooms dedicated to Futurism open with an almost programmatic work by Mario Schifano, who takes up and reinterprets a famous photograph from 1912, made precisely for Le Figaro with Russolo, Carrà, Marinetti, Boccioni and Severini, on the occasion of their first exhibition in Paris. At Palazzo Maffei, the public finds works by all these artists; only the ideologue of Futurism, Marinetti, was missing, and now he is too.”

The Futurism rooms in the House Museum house works by Giacomo Balla, including Iridescent Compenetrations 1 from 1912, which sees the Futurist artist engaged in rendering dynamism and light refractions, evoking the sequences of electromagnetic waves through geometric modules, and Mercury passing in front of the sun from 1914. Linea di velocità e vortice, on the other hand, is a kind of chrome-plated brass installation conceived by Balla in the same years but made around the 1930s, when the artist shows himself close to the positions of the aeropainters and their formulations on canvas of dynamic vortex structures in space. Also significant is Boccioni’s Linea - forza del pugno, a probable preparatory cartoon for a tapestry designed for the 1925Exposition des arts décoratifs in Paris.

Pictured, room dedicated to Futurism at Palazzo Maffei.

Feb. 20, 1909: Le Figaro publishes Manifesto of Futurism. Original copy exhibited in Verona.

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