Roberto Marcello Baldessari, (Italian, 1894-1965)

Dinamismo di forme (forme dinamiche 19o)

Dinamismo di forme (forme dinamiche 19o)
signed with the artist initials 'R.M.B.' (lower left)
oil on burlap
60 x 84.5cm (23 5/8 x 33 1/4in).
Painted circa 1915

The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by the Archivio unico per il catalogo delle opere futuriste di Roberto Marcello Baldessari.

Provenance
Salvatore Betti Collection, Rome & Buenos Aires.
Thence by descent.
Private collection, Rome (acquired from the above).

'Among the many ideas advanced by me, I take note of one (...) that the sea has been vanquished as an artistic theme, that the last great inspiring source for avant-gardists and innovators, and now everybody, is up in the sky' The Manifesto of Aeropainting, 22 September 1929

In the first years of the twentieth century the Futurists were fascinated by the power of machines, speed and technology. They embraced modernity with unbridled passion, and to them, the automobile and the train were their idols. Led by Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti, the great poet and theorist who published the Futurist Manifesto in 1909, this was a movement that believed in the modernising qualities of violence and war. Marinetti advocated the burning of libraries, the destruction of museums and felt that war was the great cleanser that would bring about the end of the Liberty style to which he was so opposed. Joined initially by artists like Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo, Futurism drew international attention through the publication of Marinetti's writings (the Manifesto was published first in France, not Italy, on the cover of Le Figaro) and the good word of international artists such as Wyndham Lewis and C. R. W. Nevinson.

However, when war broke out in Europe in 1914, the reality of Marinetti's wishes were far more terrible than he or the artists around him could have imagined. Machine warfare had torn Europe asunder, and many of the painters and poets that had celebrated the coming of modernity had left the battlefields of Northern France and Belgium shattered men. Some did not survive the conflict at all: Boccioni and the Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia both fell during the war. Images from this period, such as Baldessari's Dinamismo di forme from 1915, still encapsulate the concerns of dynamism and movement, whilst being redolent with the colours and sounds of war. For Futurism a movement so closely tied to the violence and machinery of war this horror seemingly signalled the end, and much study of the movement focuses on the years from 1909 to 1916 (the year of Boccioni's death).

Despite the so-called 'heroic' period of Futurism ending in 1916, the movement continued to develop and grow well into the inter-war period. By the late 1920s, Futurism had found new, reinvigorated form in Aeropittura, a celebration of both the movement's initial interest in dynamics and Italy's pre-eminence in aviation during this period. Artists such as Gerardo Dottori, Mino Delle Site, Giulio d'Anna and Benedetta Cappa-Marinetti (the wife of Filippo) depicted a stylised Italy, viewed from the skies, displaying the landscape's sinuous curves mirrored by the smooth metallic wings of aircraft in flight. Enrico Prampolini's 1932 oil, Composizione cosmica, is an example of the group's interest in astrology and cosmology. They were fascinated by the unreal experience and transformative vision that flight had given man, allowing him to see into the atmosphere and beyond: 'The shifting perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality which has nothing in common with reality as traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective' (G. Balla et al., 'Manifesto of Aeropainting', reprinted in L. Rainey, C. Poggi & L. Wittman (eds.), Futurism: An Anthology, Newhaven, 2009, p. 283).