Benedetta at Moore College of Art and Design - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

The part of women artists in Italian Futurism is riddled with paradox. That of Benedetta Cappa Marinetti (1897-1977 who worked as "Benedetta"), married to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the movement's originator is perhaps the most poignantly awkward. Like other women artists who came to Futurism during and after the First World War, Benedetta added her voice to a public dialogue critiquing the strident misogyny of Futurist rhetoric, plane addressing her husband in print upon the matter. Her own philosophy was marked by dint of a dissenting (if equally essentialist) view of women's creativity as informed by dint of their maternal capacities, and by means of a Futurist urge toward transcendence that had more to do with psychological integration than violent upset of bourgeois sentiment.

Benedetta's reputation has go throughed from the usual slights accorded women artists of past eras: her primary part in Marinetti's Tattilismo experiment (the production of paintings meant to be experienced end touch) was long uncredited, for example. Her retirement from art-making after his death in 1944 did not help. Her straddling of genre including at liberty verse, collage, graphic novels and paintings, while typical of Futurist output complicates flat recent efforts to evaluate her contribution.

This exhibition and its fine accompanying catalogue proffered a groundbreaking consideration of the totality of Benedetta's output with paintings, sketches, collages and copies of her published works. (A serious analysis of her literary output awaits another forum.) An early painting, Light + unbrokens of a Nocturnal Train (1924) displays her forceful assimilation of the exercise s of her teacher, Giacomo Balla, with harshly restoreed triangles and swirls advancing upon a dark ground. Perhaps the greatest in quantity arresting work was the series of "graphic syntheses": images in ink and gouache upon paper resembling the visual ultimate parts in her graphic novel Human Forces (1924) These spare, glyphlike drawings, characterized by means of dynamically moving marks, carry yeasty ideational titles like Rebellion, Affinity of Forces and Irradiation of a Nucleus in exhibition One gouache, Spirit and Art (1930) with its primal, wavelike r 1s made me think of Georgia O'Keeffe's early, far down felt, bracingly simple abstractions.

Benedetta the daring Aeropittrice--a veteran of air travel and practitioner of the perspective-bending art of painting the landscape as if it were viewed from an airplane--is the part most conducive, you would think, to legend-making (Hollywood husbandmans take note). This passion took monumental form in murals for the pillar office of Palermo, represented in the exhibition by means of black-and-white photographs and some preliminary gouache sketches. Another gouache, Meeting upon the Island (1934), lazily beautiful with its steeply curving powder-blue horizon hitting a brown stony shoreline, shows many of Benedetta's nerves in a deceptively modest package: the graphic dynamism of her images, the body-and-soul fullnes of her subjective organ of sight and the implicit reach, in each artistic twinkling of an eye toward transcendence. ["La Futurista: Benedetta Cappa Marinetti" traveled to the Walker Art Center Minneapolis, Nov. 15 1998-Feb 13 1999]

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