Marisa Mori and the Futurists: A Woman Artist in an Age of Fascism

This book introduces a compelling new personality to the modernist canon, Marisa Mori (1900-1985), who became the only female contributor to The Futurist Cookbook (1932) with her recipe for Italian Breasts in the Sun. Offering something more complex than a traditional biographical account, Jennifer S. Griffiths charts Mori’s studies with Felice Casorati, her meeting with the Futurists in 1931, and her complex engagement with Magic Realist and Futurist themes throughout the 1930s. She provides a feminist critique of the art, converging on issues of gender, culture, and history to offer new critical perspectives on Italian modernism.

Contributing to a growing body of knowledge on the women who participated in the Italian Futurist movement, this book highlights Mori’s artistic contributions before, during, and after her Futurist decade. It also details her fascination with the expressive potential of the female nude, analyses how her work evidences an early interest in the politics of the body, and situates her most significant artworks in their critical context looking through the historical, political, and cultural framework of interwar Fascism. Mori worked outside the major European capitals, fluctuated between traditional figurative subjects and abstract experimentation, and occupied a marginal place in a history that privileges the masculine, the urban, and the abstract; thus her art can help to re-think and re-situate the margins of modernism. It explores a woman artist’s struggle for modernity among the Italian Futurists in an age of Fascism.