Rosa Rosà is the Futurist pseudonym that artist Edith von Haynau adopted around 1908, when she came to Italy from Vienna and became a feminist contributor to L’Italia futurista. She published articles and parolibere (liberated words) compositions that defied the notorious misogyny of the Futurist movement, championing a proud, emancipated female identity. One of her bolder pieces, Le donne del posdomani (1917), praises women’s heroic courage in bearing the burdens of war, inviting them to preserve the same mettle when their husbands return from the front. In an updated version, Rosà even calls for a revolution in gender norms, urging the “women of the day after tomorrow” to take a metaphorically more virile attitude to avoid being crushed by the overwhelming experience of motherhood. Her arguments are accompanied by an abstract illustration: the title Conflagrazione geometrica, in block letters down the right side, lets the drawing be interpreted as a conflict between opposing forces, with black-and-white geometric shapes representing the tumultuous social, physical, and psychological metamorphoses faced by the Futurist woman. Like other women in the Florentine group, which was known as the Pattuglia Azzurra, Rosà approached the movement with positions far removed from the bombast of her male colleagues.
Stefano Mudu
