Center Acquires Futurist’s Archives

The J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Arts and the Humanities has acquired a large part of the personal archive of F. T. Marinetti, the founder of the Italian futurist movement.

“Futurism was one of the most important early 20th-Century European avant-garde movements,” said J. M. Edelstein, senior bibliographer and resource coordinator at the center. “The movement provides an ideal focus for interdisciplinary studies of the kind the Getty Center seeks to encourage because it embraced so many forms of expression such as literature, painting, architecture, dance, music, photography, cinema, fashion and cuisine. It was also deeply linked to the political ideology and the science and technology of the time.”

Marinetti, who was born in 1876, was a major theorist and promulgator of futurism in Europe during the first half of the century. He eventually joined with the fascists and died in 1944.

According to a Getty Center official, the acquisitions include material documenting the career of Marinetti’s wife, Benedetta, a feminist and also a prominent futurist.