The mechanical nature of the subject, accentuated by its topical relevance in the context of the war in Europe, must have prompted the artist in his development of brightly coloured, silhouetted and interlocking geometric shapes, completely divorced by now from the formal poetics of the Italian Futurists. 

Mario Sironi was born in Sassari, in Sardinia, on 12 May 1885. His father Enrico, born in Lombardy, was a state civil engineer. The family moved definitively the following year to Rome, where the artist grew up culturally. It was at the Scuola Libera del Nudo on Via Ripetta that he met Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and their older friend and teacher Giacomo Balla in 1903 at the age of eighteen. This meeting was a crucial turning point for the young man, who had abandoned his engineering studies shortly before to devote himself entirely to painting. He went to Paris in 1906 and lived there with Boccioni, who described him as “my best friend and the last”. The work of those years was hampered by a series of nervous breakdowns and bouts of depression. On recovering from this complicated mental and physical condition, Sironi embraced Futurism with renewed energy and enthusiasm at the end of 1913. In 1915, on the outbreak of war, Sironi’s cultural centre of gravity shifted from Rome to Milan and he became one of the leaders of the Futurist group. This period saw a series of illustrations that appeared in Gli Avvenimenti in 1916 and Montello in 1918. 

Presented here with no sense of history alongside a memento of the Great War (a leaflet regarding the flight over Vienna of 8 August 1918 signed by the aviator Gabriele D’Annunzio and various other figures), Sironi’s work is the sketch for an advertisement that appeared in issue number 20 of the Milanese magazine Gli Avvenimenti on 16 May 1915.¹ 

This is a period of great interest for the evolution of Sironi’s Futurism, departing from the Boccioni approach to develop an original form of synthetism based on Russian Cubo- Futurism. The cadenced expanses of bright colour and the geometric and “mechanical” syntheses restrained by taut constructivism may well constitute Sironi’s most original and independent contribution to the history of Futurism in that period. He resolved his inherent artistic need for solid construction of the image by turning the dynamic principle of Futurism into a purely ideological and environmental factor, and practically ignoring the representation of movement. Lorries and cities, aeroplanes and cyclists became metaphors of a dynamism intrinsic to the subject, Futurist in terms of essential content but with potential movement as though blocked by the geometric solidity of the framework. 

This Russian-oriented attitude took explicit shape early in 1915 in the magazine Noi e il Mondo (no. 2, 1 February 1915) through a series of highly geometric and “mechanical” illustrations with cadenced planes of bright colour, one of which also bears a Cyrillic inscription to emphasise its Russian inspiration. 

Together with the contemporary collage Aereo (private collection), this illustration is one of the first Futurism representations of an aeroplane, a theme that was to be developed on such a scale in “aeropainting” as to characterise the second phase of the movement. Sironi was thus its first great practitioner. The mechanical nature of the subject, accentuated by its topical relevance in the context of the war in Europe, must have prompted the artist in his development of brightly coloured, silhouetted and interlocking geometric shapes, completely divorced by now from the formal poetics of the Italian Futurists. A primal and “constructivist” synthetism identifies the subject with the aesthetic of dynamism, blocking any attempt at the representation of movement with contrasting, contracted, angular planes of pure, glowing colour. 

Sironi moved to Milan in March 1915 and was appointed to serve in place of Soffici² on the movement’s central committee the same month, together with Carrà, Balla, Boccioni and Severini, precisely on the grounds of what Marinetti called his “highly original investigations of plastic dynamism”. Italy entered the war on 23 May and Sironi enlisted immediately, together with Marinetti, Boccioni, Sant’Elia, Erba, Funi, Russolo, Bucci, Piatti and Buggelli, in the Lombard volunteer cyclist battalion. He was stationed in Gallarate shortly afterwards. 

It is the period between the end of 1914 and the end of 1915 (excluding the months from June to November, when he was involved in military operations and presumably had no time to work) that must have seen Sironi’s singular “constructivist” parenthesis, his highly original, Russian-oriented contribution to Futurism, giving birth among other things to the first images of modern cities, the initial, Futurist harbingers of the well-known urban views of the 1920s. 

Sironi stopped producing illustrations for the Roman magazine Noi e il Mondo in April 1915 and started to work for the Milanese weekly Gli Avvenimenti, whose editor was the journalist, writer and collector Umberto Notari, a cultural figure closely connected with Marinetti and Margherita Sarfatti.³ Marinetti, Carrà and Boccioni were also contributors to the magazine (a daily publication for a short period), which published a brief but glowing article on Sironi’s work as an illustrator in February 1916.⁴ It was Gli Avvenimenti that published the illustration for which the work in the Cerruti Collection is a preparatory sketch: an advertisement for the magazine that appeared just a few days before Italy entered the war. 

Fabio Benzi 

The work was purchased from the Mitzi Sotis gallery, probably after 1993, as it is not recorded in the inventory of the collection drawn up in June of that year [Ed.]. 

¹ Benzi, Sironi 1988, no. 76. 

² See the letter from Marinetti to Severini of 26 March 1926, in Druidi Gambillo, Fiori 1958-62, vol. I, pp. 355-356. 

³ Sironi was to produce about seventy of his finest illustrations in 1920 and 1921 for Notari’s new magazine I.I.I., that he edited and directed. 

⁴ The author, Boccioni, drew attention to the “power”, “dramatic interest” and “ironic spirit” of Sironi’s illustrations (Gli Avvenimenti, 6-13 February 1916).