Earlier this month, hundreds thronged to Rome’s National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art for the highly anticipated opening of a major exhibition on Futurism, arguably Italy’s most notable contribution to 20th-century art. Coming on the heels of cubism, Futurist art broke with the past to capture the movement and dynamism of the modern age. Yet with its nationalistic and warmongering rhetoric, Futurism is also intertwined, in part, with Mussolini’s Fascist regime.
Conspicuously absent at the inauguration were some of the Futurism scholars and critics who had spent the better part of the past year preparing the show. They were dismissed by culture ministry officials this summer and replaced with an organizing committee including an architect, an archaeologist and an expert in Medieval art.
“I was told, ‘arrivederci’ — you never existed” said Massimo Duranti, one of the ousted experts. “The exhibition became about exalting Futurism during the period of the regime.”
Massimo Osanna, the director of Italy’s state museums, denied that the changes to the committee were ideologically motivated. Duranti and others had never been formally appointed, he said, and the new panel had worked to present “an extraordinary era from many points of view.”
A show about Futurism had been high on the wish list of Gennaro Sangiuliano, whose turn as Italy’s culture minister was cut short last August after it emerged that he’d had an affair with a consultant in his department. Sangiuliano, a right-wing journalist and politician, had been handpicked for the ministerial post by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right leader of a party descended from post-Fascist roots.
