This volume is the guide to the exhibition presented in Milan at the Museo del Novecento and Palazzo Morando | Costume Moda Immagine, from 5 April to 3 September 2023. The scholarly curatorship is by Ester Coen, the artistic direction by Federico Forquet for the fabrics.
The exhibition and the accompanying guide explore the history of the Futurist movement in an unprecedented connection between painting and the applied arts in the two venues of the Area Musei d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of the Municipality of Milan. Works by leading figures in the Futurist movement, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Fortunato Depero, engage in a dialogue with the vorticist paintings by coeval British artists, such as Wyndham Lewis and Christopher Nevinson, starting from the Vital English Art manifesto of 1914 signed by the “caffeine of Europe”, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. These artists in turn were the source of inspiration that guided Federico Forquet and the design team at Liberty in the creation of two new collections.

The inspiring avant-gardes of Futurism and Vorticism express the break with the past through a keen look to the future, influencing the culture expressed in costume and all aspects of everyday life. Strength, energy and dynamism are factors that reflect the vitality of the forms that in different ages have accompanied the creative impulses of the designers of Liberty.

Art-life, space-time and identity remixed in an aesthetic of the future, in a vision reshaping principles and traditions.

Over 200 works are exhibited at the two venues. At the Museo del Novecento the exhibition focuses on the interdisciplinary character of avant-garde movements, while at Palazzo Morando the emphasis is on the extraordinary creativity characterising the history of Liberty and its designers past and present.