The interest of Mario Schifano in Futurism dates back to 1963. Towards the end of the year, just before the artist left for New York, the art critic and close friend Maurizio Calvesi handed him a copy of the catalogue of the retrospective of Giacomo Balla, held at Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin in 1963. Since then, Schifano started a thorough investigation of the imagery of the avant-garde movement, resulting in a body of work which is widely acclaimed as the most distinctive series elaborated by the artist. 

By perusing a few major publications, such as the Balla catalogue and the two volumes of Archivi del Futurismo (Archives of Futurism) published in Rome in 1962, Schifano appropriated some of the most iconic photographs and major artworks of Futurism. Initially, he concentrated mostly on the depiction of movement by Giacomo Balla and rendered figures and cars in motion by juxtaposing multiple silhouettes of the same object in each phase of the progression of the action in time. A few major works were painted during the residency of the artist in New York, from December 1963 to June 1964. By referencing the most important movement in Italian art of the 20th century, Schifano responded to the New York art scene. Confronted with the objective and mediatised images of Pop art, the artist asserted his own roots as a European and Italian artist. Alongside Futurism, he revived other moments and figures of modernism – ranging from Brancusi to Picabia, from Malevich to Matisse – and rendered images through a painterly style. 

Starting from 1965, a famous photograph of the five Futurists became the major subject of the artist’s variations on the imagery associated with the Italian avant-garde movement. The original photograph was taken in Paris in 1912 and shows the founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with four of the five signers of the manifesto of Futurist painting. From left to right, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, and Gino Severini stand next to each other on a sidewalk. Many variations on this image were made on canvas and paper by Schifano, who manipulated the photograph by cutting out the silhouettes of the five artists and using multiple mediums to lay pigments over the black and white reproduction. The most important group of works based on the photograph, titled Futurismo rivisitato (Futurism revisited), stemmed from this multifaceted experimental process. 

Works from the series were presented in solo shows of primary importance in Schifano’s career, such as the exhibition held in 1966 at Studio Marconi in Milan, which represented him for few years. A monumental version on canvas of Futurismo rivisitato stands out among the early iterations in the series. It comprises a grid of large squares made in Perspex, which covers the whole surface of the painting. Each section of the grid has a different color, as if it were a multicolored screen superimposed to the image of the photograph, rendered with enamel and spray paint. The painting was shown at Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome in 1967, where it was acquired by Giorgio Franchetti, a longtime collector of Schifano. The use of Perspex marks a step further in the artist’s experimentation with mediums and materials. As a screen, Perspex is a layer added to the surface, which doesn’t block the view at all, but complicates it, forcing the viewer to concentrate on the image. 

In this respect, the present drawing bears witness to the attention paid by the artist to the composition of his works. Dating to 1966, when his investigation of the iconography of Futurism was especially intense, it is not a sketch for a painting. Yet, it is closely related to a group of works, respectively titled Boccioni 1, Boccioni 2 and Boccioni 3. It is impossible to determine whether any of these paintings were exhibited at Studio Marconi or Galleria La Tartaruga, but they were definitely known at that time. For instance, Boccioni 1 was shown in the exhibition Immagini degli anni ’60: poesia e verità (Images of the 1960s: Poetry and Truth), which travelled among a few cities in Italy in 1966 and substantially impacted the discussion around the new figuration emerging in those years. As the title suggests, each work shows the figure of Boccioni taken from the photograph of the Futurists in Paris, deprived of the face and rendered with spray paint. Following the variations on Balla’s depiction of human dynamism, Schifano replicated the figure a few times in each painting, creating silhouettes which align or overlap. A Perspex screen was finally placed on top of the canvas. The three-dimensional effect of the translucent material resonate with the ‘aura' created by the multiple silhouettes painted around the figure. 

In the present drawing, the artist achieved an effect similar to the three paintings of the Boccioni series. As typical of the group of works based on the photograph of 1912, the artist traced a faceless figure and concentrated exclusively on the external outlines of the body and a few major details of the outfit, such as the hat and the tie. With regard to the position, the subject is way smaller than the size of the sheet, is off-center and tilted by 45 degrees. The resulting effect is that of a figure floating in a void, dimensionless space, which is a distinctive trait of several paintings and drawings made by Schifano in those years, including the Boccioni paintings. The use of black spray paint is meant to create a non-gestural layer of pigment, so that the overall black and white palette resembles the texture of the original photograph. Alongside paint, the artist used graphite to draw a few replicas of the subject. The first iteration shows the complete outline of the original figure. The additional silhouettes sprayed or drawn on the sheet differ from each other with regard to the portions depicted. By doing so, the artist emphasised the dynamic expansion of the figure reverberating through the outlines overlapping to each other. Such an effect compares to the sense of motion and volume which the artist achieved by laying the Perspex screen on top of the paintings. As in the paintings, the name of the artist is drawn in uppercase letters, resembling the style of the typeface used for commercial or street signage. The artist wrote the name twice. One inscription is positioned right below the figure and is total black. The other runs along the low margin of the sheet and is black and blue, thus adding the only touch of color. 

The drawing diverges from the paintings by one major aspect. Comparing it to the photograph shot in Paris in 1912, it immediately becomes clear that the figure rendered on paper is not the one of Boccioni. In the picture, the artist was slightly turning to his right and kept his hands in pockets, while the subject of the drawing is left-turned and holds a cane. Schifano drew the cane three times and extended it beyond the dimension of the figure, turning it into a diagonal that reaches the right side of the sheet. In the photograph of the Futurist, the only person holding a cane is Carlo Carrà, the second from left. Despite the name of Boccioni inscribed twice, the figure rendered by Schifano is undeniably that of Carrà. He probably just made a mistake, which he would promptly amend in the works of the Boccioni series. For this reason, it can be assumed that the drawing predates the execution of the paintings. 

Schifano also drew a form near the human figure, by the left side of the sheet. Consisting of an elongated curvilinear shape, it resembles a trigger, such as the one of a sprayer. It could be considered as a reference to the medium used to paint some portions of the drawing. Mechanical elements or machineries often recurred in the works made by Schifano in those years. Starting from 1965, he used to superimpose those shapes to the main subjects of his work. The inclusion of mechanical tools emphasized the artificiality of the images painted by Schifano and was reminiscent of the attention to machinery as an anthropomorphic alter ego, which was typical of the practice of the artists associated with the Dada movement. As mentioned above, Schifano’s focus on Futurism was part of a broader revival of modernism, in which Dada played a key role. The artist especially admired Francis Picabia and his depiction of impossible machines, identified as human subjects. The small circle depicted in the middle of the upper part of the form painted in the present drawing resembles the holes used to nail the part of a mechanism to each other, and could also reference the system by which the Perspex screens were often attached to the frame and stretcher of the canvas.

Text by Francesco Guzzetti