Olfactory Portrait of a Woman
Ritratto olfattivo di una donna / Olfactory Portrait of a Woman
From: Parole in libertà futuriste olfattive tattili termiche/ Futurist Olfactory Tactile Thermal Words in Freedom, 1932
Lithography on tin
The Futurists – a group of Italian avant-garde artists active during the first half of the 20th century – envisioned the total integration of everyday life and art, and consequently addressing all the senses.
This futurist artist’s book, based on the idiom of the machine, is exceptionally sensorial. It feels cool, smooth and hard to the touch, with a metallic smell, hence the title Futurist Olfactory Tactile Thermal Words in Freedom. Its contents address the olfactory experience; in the poem ‘Olfactory portrait of a woman’, a man tracks the scents of the object of his lust. The smell of moist earth and milk suggest the conclusion: the birth of a child after a bout of love-making on the ground.
Marinetti breaks down the classic hegemony of sight when it comes to beauty and aesthetics by stating in uppercase letters: DO NOT SEE HER SNIFF HER (Non verderla fiutarla’. This anti-visual and olfactory approach was typical for the Futurists. It was meant to intentionally challenge the ocular-centric gaze of the bourgeosie and traditional art. Smell was considered erotic, animalistic and non-intellectual: all things glorified by the Italian art movement.
What is absolutely unique about the olfactory descriptions in this poem – even compared to other contemporary poetry on the sense of smell- , is the way Marinetti described scents as moving volumes and shapes. There are multiplying spirals of cigarette smoke, egg-shaped volumes of red perfumes, dynamic arches of acacia and a clear spatial division of rosy scents on the left and violet ones on the right.
This vocabulary might be explained by the Futurists’ interest in both movement and synaesthesia, in which one sense is expressed in terms of another.
Full poem in English. Translation of the poem by Caro Verbeek and poet Han van der Vegt, for the PhD-project ‘In Search of Lost Scents’, by Caro Verbeek (Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam)
Ritratto olfattivo di una donna (Olfactory Portrait of a Woman) (1932)
F. T. Marinetti (1867 – 1944)
Olfactory Portrait of a Woman
The iron gate of the city
electricity carbon fire smoke
speed like a mouth drinks
the infinite
green of a spring
morning
I am the bitter tongue of the city
searching for freshness
wandering in the sweet breeze
eyes closed nostrils open
unraveling while walking
the great coil
of most elastic most vibrant
of perfumes odors
AND SHE
this soft
most agile egg shaped
volume of fresh red perfumes
with on top
3 6 nine spirals of scents of vanilla
DO NOT SEE HER SNIFF HER
to the left to the right
roses violets
roses violets
roses violets
roses violets
roses etc etc violets
On top of the smell of moist earth
proceeds a warm fresh smell
acute and velvety of her
breasts typical for an Italian woman in her twenties
Speed up pace
run chase
3 wafts of cigarette smell
stop
warmbittersweet smell
of a breathless sigh
from her invisible from her invisible
left hand dangles right hand dangle
a bouquet of carnations three bananas musty smell
sharp lillies and alcoholic of the sweetness
arabesques of romantic terror of disposing of it
caresses passion in the shadow
jealousy etc moist
odor of compressed hair
by the sun odor
brother of odor
of hot glowing stones
To the left and to the right globally on the head
moving arches of odor
milky and most fresh
of acacia
breastmilk childhood
Ué! Ué
START OVER
Caro Verbeek
Royal Academy of the Arts, The Hague
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Mediamatic, Amsterdam
