ABSTRACT

The modernist avant garde was at odds with National Socialism because its specific aim was to challenge the classical aesthetic with its reference to balance and harmony and representation of ideal forms. Nevertheless, as R. L. Rutsky suggests, there was a tendency within modernism towards reconciling classical aesthetics with the technological, ‘even among the left avant-gardes’ and the work of the Italian Futurists, although, in general, non-representational was influenced by an explicitly fascist ideology. The Futurists, as their name implies, wanted to reinvigorate Italy by turning away from the past and celebrating the new technologies that were making dramatic changes to social and cultural life at the turn of the twentieth century. As Andrew Murphie and John Potts point out, Antonio Gramsci ‘saw the Futurists as cultural revolutionaries, praising their destruction of rigid traditions and values’.