Cleansing the nation: Italian art, consumerism, and World War I

This study explores the interconnections between Italian avant-garde art, consumer culture, and World War I. Beginning with its inception in 1909, Italian Futurism advanced the idea that war was a form of global hygiene. Chapter 1 introduces the political context of such a rhetoric of hygiene and violence and relates this to a group of art works depicting scenes of urban conflict. Chapter 2 considers hygiene as it was presented to Italy's mass audience in the nation's expanding consumer culture. The advertising of commercial hygiene products reflected a variety of bourgeois myths of order and controlled social change. This promotion became a source of reference for avant-garde artists. My discussion interprets Carlo Carra's free-word collage Patriotic Festival as an effort to mediate Italy's political crisis of June 1914, 'Red Week,' by invoking commercial mythologies of social health. The following two chapters focus on events after August 1914, when the government declared Italy's neutrality in the war. This led an unusual political coalition of nationalists, syndicalists, dissident socialists, irredentists, and members of the avant-garde to wage a heated campaign in support of intervention on the side of France. Chapter 3 analyzes Carlo Carra's interventionist book Guerrapittura (War-painting) of 1915. Carra creates analogies between a dynamic new Futurist perspective, based on the vision of aviators, and the defeat of programmatic party politics reflected in the political realignments occurring in this period of national debate. Cultural ramifications of Italy's political crisis are considered in Chapter 4, where causes are sought for the public rift that developed between the Milanese Futurists and Florentine Lacerbiani. The split within the avant-garde was motivated by divergent attitudes towards the mass public. Ardengo Soffici and Giovanni Papini became critical of F. T. Marinetti's 'free-word' poetry which they interpreted as an effort to reach a mass public by imitating the procedures of consumer marketing. Their belief that art should remain elite and "aristocratic" led to efforts to reform Futurist style with broad implications for visual artists. My final chapter surveys discursive and visual constructions of the war from both the mass media and the avant-garde.