Aluminum in Italian Futurist Sculpture. A Medium of Regime Aesthetics or the Progressive Present?

The article examines aluminum — a new material of the 20th century — and its role in the Italian Avant-Garde art of the 1910s — 1930s, which was vividly expressed through the Futurist movement. The research focuses on Futurism with its vision of the future and its interest in aluminum as a material of modernity. The Futurists’ attention to aluminum is examined through the lens of the key manifestos and through a review of Italian Futurist aluminum sculpture created during the years of the movement. The analysis covers selected works in terms of execution quality and adherence to the aesthetics principles of both early Futurism and the movement’s ‘second wave’. The study reveals the distinctive features of Italy’s socio-cultural situation that influenced raw materials extraction and metal production in the country in the first half of the 20th century. The author addresses the Futurists’ relationship with the regime of B. Mussolini after the breakdown of their political alliance. The article analyzes aluminum plastic solutions created during the autarchy period, which in one way or another became a figurative expression of the ideas about building a new Italy, forming the image of a new Italian, and developing the iconography of the Duce image. The findings conclude that aluminum, contemporary to Futurism, was always in the focus of Futurist sculptors. Despite the popularity of the metal in the 1930s, the corpus of surviving monuments is small. Only one artist of the works under study worked with the metal consistently, while others did so sporadically. The themes of the created works indicate that the movement’s representatives responded more actively to promoting ideas of the progressive present, rather than expressing the regime aesthetics.