Benedetta Cappa (14 August 1897 – 15 May 1977) was an Italian artist who has had retrospectives at the Walker Art Center and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Her work fits within the second phase of Italian Futurism.
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Biography
Benedetta was born in Rome, the second of five children. Her mother, Amalia Cappa, was a numerologist and believed in the properties of alphabetic letters and gave her four sons names that begin with the letter A and her only daughter, Benedetta, a name that began with B. Her mother was a cultured woman and a Protestant. Her parents were rigid, but affectionate in her upbringing. Cappa’s father, Innocenzo Cappa, was an official of the Ministry of Railways and later an officer in the Italian army. He died after returning from World War I, a tragic event that impacted her so deeply that she described her emotional and psychological state as a “broken core”. Her brothers Alberto and Arturo, a historian and a journalist, also had ties to the military and Italian politics, bringing the family in close contact with the Socialist Party and eventually many Futurist thinkers.
The Cappas were a middle-class family. Benedetta Cappa had access to an education that allowed her to nurture her strong vocation to painting and literature. As a child, Cappa wrote poetry and took painting and piano lessons. She attended Vittoria Columna high school in Rome and graduated in 1914. During World War I she worked at an after-school program for underprivileged children. Her interest in educational science led her to explore the pedagogy of Maria Montessori, whose ideas and concepts treat learning as a primarily sensory experience. Cappa’s interest in tactile exploration continued and would later be reconfigured in her version of Futurist ideology. She received a degree in elementary education from the "Universita degli Studi di Roma" in 1917.
Around 1917, Cappa’s brother’s activities with the Futurists and friendship with Futurist artist Růžena Zátková inspired her to leave teaching. She began her training as a painter in the studio of Giacomo Balla, an abstract artist who created pieces that captured movement and light. Cappa initially modeled her choices of theme and style after her mentor, depicting dynamic objects and the impact they have on their surroundings. Balla became an important mentor and a lifelong friend.
Cappa began to meet avant-garde artists, poets and writers who gathered in the studio. In 1918, she met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti at Casa Balla. Their friendship was first based on intellectual pursuits and they began exchanging letters in 1918. Initially, these are written with a certain formality on both parts and deal with Futurist ideas and a discussion of their literary works. By 1920 Marinetti is addressing his correspondence to B. Cappa Marinetti. Cappa and Marinetti married three years later.
Artwork and influence
Though she was an artist active in Futurist circles, Cappa felt labels were restrictive and initially rejected the designation. In a 1918 correspondence with F.T. Marinetti she writes, “I am too free and rebellious – I do not want to be restricted. I want only to be me.” Despite entering her marriage with such determined independence, the considerable contributions made by Cappa are often overshadowed by the figure of Marinetti and the vociferous manner with which he directed the movement. Cappa’s body of work spanned a range of media that included pen, paper, paint, metal and textiles. She wrote poetry and prose, signed, and spoke as an individual, but only recently has she garnered independent recognition.
In 1919, Cappa published Psicologia di un Uomo, a collection of poetry which incorporates “unusual word placement, typographic experimentation, and visual and auditory correspondences”. Subsequently published in 1924, Le Forze Umane: Romanzo Astratto con Sintesi Grafiche (Human Forces: Abstract Novel with Graphic Synthesis), has a similar structure presented in an extrapolated form. Two images from this novel provide an interesting conceptual contrast. The first, Forze Femminili: Spirale di Dolcezza + Serpe di Fascino (Feminine Forces: Spiral of Sweetness + Serpent of Charm) consists simply of three curved lines, one of which provides a central axis for the other two. The linear composition of the second drawing, Forze Maschili: Armi e Piume (Masculine Forces: Weapons and Feathers), has numerous straight lines and arcs arranged in an impenetrable tangle.
Cappa's publication of Le Forze Umane was one of three books she has written. The release of her book made many futurists question her allegiance with Futurism, for her book seemed to align more with Neo-Plasticism at the time by many male Futurists who have written reviews on Cappa's book. Cappa collected all of the reviews in her Librone which can be found at the Getty Research Institute. It was a decision made from many reviewers that Cappa's first book represents the unwillingness from the reviewers to accept a women's work as part of Futurism.
The action and aesthetic of the machine age is a trope within Futurism that appears frequently in Cappa’s artwork. One early abstract painting, Velocità di Motoscafo, (Velocity of a Motorboat), (1923–24), contains many of the elements that would come to mark Cappa’s painting style. Well defined, curvilinear shapes, painted in gradient tones are compositionally arranged to imply objects in motion: “… the interplay of ‘force lines,’ become the subject”. The artist’s exploration of the machine continued with Luci + Rumori di un Treno Notturno, (Lights + Sounds of a Night Train), (ca. 1924) and with Aeropittura (1925). A trip to Latin America in 1926 was followed by a series of abstract paintings done in gouache on paper.
Exhibition history and legacy
Cappa’s works were exhibited widely, along with the rest of the Italian Futurists, both during her lifetime and after, with major exhibitions as early as 1926 and up until the outbreak of World War II. She was a regular participant in the Venice Biennale, and was the first woman to have a painting reproduced in a Biennale catalog. A long pause ensued after the war, which lasted until the 1980s, when the works of the Futurists were, once again, starting to be appreciated. Selected exhibitions of her works include the following:
1926 15th Venice Biennale; 4th Calabrian National Biennale; 34 Pittori Futuristi, Galleria Pesaro, Milan
1927 Mostra di Pittura Futurista, Casa del Fascio, Bologna; Mostra d’Arte Futurista Nazionale, Convegno, Palermo
1928 Grande mostra futurista, Teatro comunale, Imola
1929 Terza Mostra d’Arte Marinara, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome
1930 17th Venice Biennale
1931 2nd National Rome Quadriennale of Art, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Prima Mostra degli Futuristi, Galleria La Camerata degli Artisti, Rome; Prima Mostra Triestina di Pittura e Aeropittura Futurista, Circolo Artistico di Trieste; Mostra di Aeropittura e di Scenografiamm, Galleria Pesaro, Milan
1932 18th Venice Biennale; Enrico Prampolini et les Aeropeintures Futuristes Italiens, Galerie de la Renaissance, Paris
1934 19th Venice Biennale; La Plastica Murale, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa
1935 3rd National Rome Quadriennale of Art, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome
1936 20th Venice Biennale