Italian movement that emerged in the late 1920s from the second
wave of Futurism,
which it eventually supplanted. It was announced by the publication on
22 September 1929 of the Manifesto dell’Aeropittura, signed by
Giacomo Balla, Benedetta (Marinetti’s wife, the painter and writer
Benedetta Cappa, 1897–1977), Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Fillia,
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, the painter and sculptor
Mino Somenzi (1899–1948) and the painter Tato (pseud. of Guglielmo
Sansoni, 1896–1974). This text became the key document for the new
adherents of Futurism in the 1930s. Although Marinetti had written the
first Futurist manifestos, and Balla, Depero and Prampolini were
senior figures within the movement, it was Dottori and younger
painters who developed the new form most impressively. Building on
earlier concerns with the speeding automobile, both Marinetti and the
Fascist government gave particular importance to aeronautics in the
1920s, extolling the pilot as a type of Nietzschean ‘Superman’.
