Italian Futurism, the first comprehensive avant-garde movement of the twentieth century, sought to integrate modern life across a broad spectrum of mediums and aesthetic practices. Centered on sculpture in Italy and other European countries between the world wars, Fragments of Totality ventures a new history of Futurism and its fraught ideological ambitions. This first major study of Futurist sculpture, which illuminates understudied works by prominent artists such as Giacomo Balla, Enrico Prampolini, Fortunato Depero, and Bruno Munari, further considers the efforts of many lesser-known figures. Merjian’s book also engages a number of social and political issues, such as Futurism’s relation to labor and the left, to the politics of aesthetic autonomy, and to the intersections between race, imperialism, and materials. Futurism’s shifting definitions of “plasticity” underscore the volatile political economy not only of interwar Italy, but also perhaps of a wider Western epoch.

Ara H. Merjian is an art historian and Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an Affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the departments of Art History, Comparative Literature, and the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. He has written and edited several books, including Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (2024), Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (2023), Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (2020), and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism (forthcoming 2027). His most recent volume, Beat, Black, Queer: Pasolini’s Other America, is due out with Verso in 2026.