Massimo Carpi (Rome, 9 May 1946 – Rome, 22 March 2025), it was a great collector of works by masters of Futurism, created the Futur-ism association and the website of the same name in 2001, which quickly became a database that makes available to museums and exhibition curators over 1,500 certified and catalogued works by famous and little-known artists of the Avant-garde founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Always passionate about art, he began to surround himself with masterpieces by Futurist masters, Balla, Depero, Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Severini, to which he added works by authors of the 1920s and 1930s from Prampolini to Dottori, Crali, Baldessari, Tato. Thanks to his relationship with Enrico Crispolti, an art historian and scholar of Futurism, he met Luce and Elica Balla, daughters of the great Turin artist who was one of his favourites. "Balla is the greatest of all, he did everything. He is a total artist", was his comment. When curators of important exhibitions began to ask him to lend works, Carpi thought of creating a collectors' association to facilitate the search for paintings and graphic works to propose to museums and organizers of exhibitions. Today there are about 200 members.

In 25 years Futur-ism has collaborated with hundreds of institutions, large Italian and foreign museums, such as the Guggenheim in New York and the Centre Pompidou and the Musèe d'Orsay in Paris and, more recently, with the large exhibition still underway at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna in Rome. In 2017 Carpi opened the small Galleria Futurism & Co, a short distance from Piazza di Spagna, directed by his daughter Francesca, which has since then proposed exhibitions and exhibitions dedicated to the great names and themes of the avant-garde.

Massimo Carpi had come late to art after having nevertheless put his creative streak to good use. In 1975, at the age of 23, he plunged into the world of fashion by creating the Emanuel Zoo brand, which became very popular in Italy and abroad, conquering a high-end clientele. "We had stores in Via Frattina in Rome, in Milan, Florence, Paris - he said -. I designed collections for exclusive retailers in Japan and the USA. One of my designs from 1981 is kept at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. It became a stressful job, I no longer enjoyed it and in 2000 I sold everything, dedicating myself only to my passion for Futurism".

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