119 W. 23rd Street, New York, NY 10011
September 27, 2025 – February 22, 2026
I was first introduced to radical art forms—Dadaism (Tzara), Surrealism (Dalí), Expressionism (Dix), and the rest—by my high school art teacher. But it was Futurism that captivated me most: the speed, violence, and explosive energy of Marinetti’s manifestos. For teenage me, it felt electric, as if art might leap off the canvas and rewire the world overnight. Looking back, I jokingly call this my “Left Wing phase,” a brief but earnest flirtation with the avant-garde. Like most teenage obsessions, it didn’t last—but I confess, I still carry a soft spot for some of it.
That same electricity courses through Poster House today, where the walls vibrate with the anxious optimism of a century past—the so-called Fascist century (Ventennio Fascista). The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy presents 75 works from the Fondazione Massimo e Sonia Cirulli in Bologna and explores the deliberate marriage between avant-garde aesthetics and authoritarian politics during Benito Mussolini’s reign. It asks not only what art became under Fascism, but what art helped Fascism to become.
The show begins in the charged atmosphere of Futurism—a movement that adored the speed of machines, the dynamism of modern life, and the destruction of what it called “museal” stagnation. [1] Many Futurists, led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, greeted the Duce as the embodiment of their ideals. Artists like Fortunato Depero eagerly aligned their work with the regime, finding in Fascism both ideological kinship and practical opportunity. Mussolini’s government was commissioning posters, buildings, and product design on a massive scale, offering modern artists unprecedented patronage and visibility.
What emerges is an Italy whose visual identity was not simply imposed from above, but shaped through a complex collaboration between the state and its artists. Propaganda was often indistinguishable from art: a commercial advertisement for pasta shares the same aggressive typography and geometric forms as a rally poster, while furniture design echoed the clean, martial lines of Fascist architecture. Even Depero’s vibrant, playful color schemes were harnessed for Fascist propaganda, proof that no aesthetic—however whimsical—escaped politicization.
As the regime matured, the balance shifted. By the 1930s, Futurist experimentation had given way to the state’s preference for Romanità—a revival of classical Roman grandeur that cast Fascism as heir to the Caesars and architect of a new empire. What began as co-option became control, as the regime sought to bend the art world to its vision of the uomo fascista—the “new man” it claimed would embody discipline, strength, and national destiny.
The strength of the exhibition lies in its refusal to sanitize. Many of the works are dazzling: shimmering lithographs, bold designs by Giacomo Balla, and the somber dreamlike abstractions of Mario Sironi. Their beauty, however, carries an unease for over-refined viewers, who cannot help but interpret them through an effete modern lens. For their contemporaries, by contrast, these same images were not troubling at all; they embodied vigor, progress, and national pride, and were celebrated as stylish, modern, and unmistakably Italian.
Poster House, itself devoted to the history of visual persuasion, proves a fitting venue. The display contextualizes each piece with care, situating Italian Fascist aesthetics within a broader story of twentieth-century modernism. The loans from the Cirulli collection—one of the richest archives of Italian design—give the show breadth: decorative arts, architectural sketches, graphic design, and illustrations all interweave into a portrait of a society where no medium was too trivial for ideology.
Walking through, one feels the entanglement between creative freedom and political vision. The Futurists sought to overthrow the past; the Fascists sought to enshrine themselves as the future. Their temporary alliance left behind works of startling vitality, but also of haunting beauty—once again reminding us that art can be seduced, that artists are never immune from the allure of power, and that beauty can serve any master. The Future Was Then does not merely illuminate the past; it holds up a mirror. The lesson is not that propaganda was once powerful, but that it always is. The seductions of image and language are at work all around us today—in the academy, in the media, in entertainment—revealing yesterday’s tools of persuasion not as relics, but as prototypes of the world we inhabit now.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, October 6th, Feasts of San Bruno di Colonia, San Renato di Sorrento, and Santa Maria Francesca delle Cinque Piaghe
Notes
[1] The Futurists used the word museal as a slur to describe culture they considered lifeless, frozen in museums, and overly reverent of tradition. For them, it symbolized stagnation and the dead weight of history, which they countered with Futurism’s celebration of speed, modernity, and technological dynamism.
