Benedetta Cappa

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.

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. 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

In 1919, Cappa published Psicologia di un Uomo, a collection of poetry which incorporates “unusual word placement, typographic experimentation, and visual and auditory correspondences”. 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. 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. carried over into this new incarnation of Futurism. For this reason, Cappa’s oil painting Il Grande X (1931) is considered the culmination of one era and the prelude to another. She was a regular participant in the Venice Biennale, and was the first woman to have a painting reproduced in a Biennale catalog.

The 1998 exhibition in Minneapolis was the first major international solo retrospective of Cappa’s works, but it is perhaps the comprehensive Futurists’ exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York of 2014 that saw the most exposure for her work, as she was the best represented of the nine female artists included in one of the most expansive exhibitions of Italian Futurism ever mounted, covering more than 360 works by some 80 artists. Indeed, it was Benedetta’s five monumental mural paintings, Sintesi delle Comunicazioni (Synthesis of Communication)(1933-1934), which closed the show, on loan for the first time ever, and placed as they were, at the apex of the exhibition.

These murals are the best known of her works, stemming from the muralism movement of the second wave of Futurism, which began in the early 1930s. This new emphasis on murals by the Futurists was brought to prominence in 1934, when they published three articles on muralism in their new magazine, Stile Futurista. The effort was motivated by the younger Futurists, who thought the medium would allow them to utilize the panoptic and panoramic vision of the earlier, Aeropittura pictorial genre of the Futurists to best effect in creating the “total environment” in which they had long sought to immerse viewers with their works. (p. 317)

Futurist murals were unique in that they would contain only imagery inspired by modern technology. The Futurists were also keen to have public commissions for their murals, and cited numerous venues they wished to embellish with them in pamphlets published to accompany their two mural exhibitions of 1934. Their wish list included numerous political and public venues, such as train stations, posts offices, schools, and even a seaplane base.

Despite their efforts, the Futurists received few public mural commissions in the 1930s, with the exception of three mural-sized works for the new Palazzi delle Poste e Telegraphi (Post and Telegraph offices) in La Spezia, Palermo. La Spezia was an important port and also home to several military bases at the time. Almost all of Benedetta’s paintings which have survived were painted within a fifteen-year period. The earliest of these can be traced to 1924, when she created her well known Treno nella Notte in Velocità, (Speeding Train by Night), as well as Velocità di Motoscafo, (Speed of a Motorboat), considered her finest piece of abstract painting.

In addition to her rich artistic legacy, Cappa constantly reaffirmed in her works a desire that contributions by women would help to reduce aggression, although she did so in accordance with the Futurist’s revolutionary ideals. But even within the context of the male-dominated Futurist movement, and the marriage to its founder, Cappa insisted on direct action and participation for women: In her own words: “I believe that the feminine soul is at the dawn of her artistic expression...without copying the experiences of men.” (p. 69)