Women on the beach (1920)

Signed and dated lower right: ‘Marasco 1920’.

Provenance: Zurich, private collection

One of the fiercest, most provocative and innovative futurists of the Italian avant-garde period, defined as a «companion of miracles»¹ by Umberto Boccioni, Antonio Marasco was an intuitive forerunner of the more modern installation and environmental practices: as early as the 1920s, he staged his anti-exhibitions, urban performances in which luminous paintings were mounted on the roofs of houses so as to go «beyond the solemn, gloomy and cocooned»² museum rooms.

Born in Calabria, where he spent his entire childhood, he and his family moved to Florence in 1906. There, he attended the technical institute and the artistic high school and then enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts (from which he was expelled after having used a sabre to destroy a series of paintings by Galileo Chini’s students). In the Florentine cultural environment, he was drawn to Futurism in around 1913, thanks to his association with the group that revolved around the magazine “Lacerba”. He met Ardengo Soffici and Giovanni Papini and, in 1914, had a first meeting with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, with whom he took a trip to Russia. The fruitful interest in the Russian avant-garde of Malevič and Tatlin, from which he borrowed dynamic and constructivist elements, allowed him to develop a style based on the shattering of space and on the multiple observations of form over time, heir to the plastic dynamism of Boccioni.

Together with Russian and Italian Futurists, in 1914 he made his debut at the I International Futurist Exhibition at the Galleria Sprovieri in Rome and, in the same year, he met Umberto Boccioni in Florence, forever marking his interest in Futurism. Together with the latter, he participated in a Futurist exhibition in California and then in New York. At the outbreak of the First World War, he enlisted as a volunteer in the Sapper Corps. Sent to Monte Grappa, in 1918 he suffered a serious accident in which he inhaled a large quantity of mustard gas and immediately returned to Florence, at which point he began his correspondence with Anton Giulio Bragaglia.

In the 1920s, Antonio Marasco assiduously frequented Switzerland, where he founded the futurist group Der Schrittweiter. While in Berlin, together with Enrico Prampolini, he collaborated in the activities of the November Gruppe, participating in several important collective and solo exhibitions, including the one at the Galleria of Ruggero Vasari, director of the periodical “Der Futurismus”. Those were the years in which he was present at the great international futurist exhibitions, including the Exhibition of Italian Futurist Art in Bologna, the Die Grosse Futuriste Ausstellung in Berlin and the Erste internationale Kunstausstellung in Düsseldorf.

It was during this crucial phase that the foundations of his mechanical, theatrical, non-conformist poetics were established, consisting of intersecting spatial planes, figures and objects synthesised in plastic and geometric accents.

Donne sulla spiaggia, dated 1920, is the perfect summary of this prolific phase of international openness and the artist’s utmost expressive explosion in the aftermath of the conflict: a solid scenographic system, inhabited by three figures in which the force lines are insinuated into the spatial planes and in the dynamism of time. A futurism that undoubtedly takes into account the legacy left by Boccioni, but also cubism and abstractionism, resolved in a combination of colour, symbols, order and vigour. The vibrant chromaticism, built with small pieces and segmented contours create plastic, rhythmic sensations, but also a dimension that is «privately evocative»³ and which is also found in other contemporary works, all with a marine theme, such as Terrazza a Capri and Vele in partenza a Marina grande, both dated 1920 and very close in style and setting to Donne sulla spiaggia. The same spatial matrix and the same dynamism of lines, featuring the intersection of planes and figures, are also present in some works from 1919, including Bevitore and Calciatore, also characterised by a similar chromatic management, attuned to dull tones and the distribution of colour in small, close strokes.

During the years of Fascism, he supported every initiative of the Regime for which, after 1943, he was arrested for collaboration. For some time, after the war, he suffered a sort of isolation, which nevertheless did not prevent him from participating in Futurist exhibitions around the world, even holding a solo exhibition in 1950 at Yale – whose collection conserves his early work entitled Espansione delle forze plastiche di un villaggio (Expansion of the plastic forces of a village).

Elena Lago

¹ U. Boccioni, Compagno di miracoli, in “La tribuna illustrata”, 27 December 1959-

² Silvio Mix, Antonio Marasco. L’atelier d’arte decorativa, in “Energie Futuriste”, October 1924, p. 2.

³ E. Crispolti, Antonio Marasco, exhibition catalogue (Rome, Ciak Galleria d’Arte, June 1969), p.7