Abstract

This essay argues that the painting "Bretonnes" (1913) by the Futurist Félix Delmarle represents a distinctive modernist use of pre-industrial, communal relations to death. An archaic social practice is manifested within the most radical of modernist styles, in an exemplary rendering of Futurism simultaneità. Thus, mourning, imbricated into the time and space of an apparently archaic community, is represented with the most modern of techniques and projected into industrial modernity as an alternative to its marginalisation and pathologising of excessive mourning.