Boccioni's fist: Italian futurism and the construction of fascist modernism

Italian Futurism, an avant-garde art movement that flourished in the years 1909 to 1916, established many of the preconditions that allowed for the creation of Fascist culture. This dissertation explores paintings and sculptures by Futurist artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and Giacomo Balla. These artists investigated transformations in gender and class structure in Italian society that devolved from the onset of Italy's imperialist venture in Libya and Intervention in World War I on the side of France. Boccioni died in the course of the war, but he became a hero of the Futurist movement thereafter. His legacy to Futurism was called "Boccioni's Fist," and this was a powerful conceptual force at the center of Fascist Modernism.;Chapter 1 is a discussion of historiography concerning the relationship of Futurism to Fascism. My own argument is that Futurism created an intellectual environment for Fascism that was characterized by the constructive, erotic energy of male relationships that existed across the spectrum of Italian culture. In Chapters 2 and 3, I show that Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1912) and Boccioni's States of Mind (1912) are formulations of new models of elitism and social conflict that pertained to the young Italian nation's new imperialist identity. Fascism was a colonialist state and Boccioni Carra addressed questions that had to be resolved before Fascist militarism could be implemented as a national culture. I discuss Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) in Chapter 4 as an expression of the sublimation of homoerotic energies that provided Fascism with a model for the representation of virility. In Chapter 5 we see that Futurism crumbled as a result of Boccioni's death and that Carra and Balla, in reinventing their artistic identities in works such as The Drunken Gentleman (1916) and The Fist of Boccioni (1916), provided new modes of artistic production that contributed to Fascist culture. Disillusioned with Marinetti's heroic Futurism, Balla invented a "feminine" Futurism of decoration and Carra invented Metaphysical Painting.