Guggenheim Is to Show Rare Murals by a Futurist Murals from 1933 and 1934 by the Italian Futurist Benedetta at home in a conference room in a post office in Palermo, Sicily. AGR/Riccardi/Paoloni As a capstone to its coming show "Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe," the Guggenheim Museum has managed a rare coup: securing the first loan of five major Futurist murals from the central post office in Palermo, Sicily, where they have hung since being commissioned for the space in the 1930s. These rarely seen murals, which have adorned a conference room for decades, are both figurative and abstract, cast in shades of blue, with fluid and straight lines that play with perspective. They were painted in 1933 and 1934 by an artist, Benedetta Cappa, who went by only her first name. She was married to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the poet who founded the Futurist movement in 1909 with a manifesto that rejected the past and called for an aggressive push toward the future. Called "Synthesis of Communications," the murals depict communication by air, radio, sea, land, telegraph and telephone. But they also convey the complexity of the Futurist vision. Even as the Futurists sought to free themselves of the burden of history and propel Italy into the future, they also drew on a concept they called "primordio," or a return to Italy's origins. For that reason, the murals were designed to evoke the frescoes of ancient Pompeii. One of five Benedetta murals bound for the Guggenheim's Italian Futurism show. A key strain of European Modernism, Futurism began in Italy as a literary movement in the years leading up to World War I, a time of rapid economic growth and political turmoil. Futurist artists often depicted images of industry, speed and machinery. The movement quickly evolved to have broader political ambitions, some later linked to those of the Italian Fascist party. The murals were commissioned during the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini, who set about modernizing Italy. The Guggenheim's multidisciplinary exhibition, which opens in New York on Feb. 21 and runs until Sept. 1, is the largest Futurist retrospective ever to be held outside of Italy. Taking up the museum's entire rotunda and most of its auxiliary space, it will bring together more than 360 works by over 80 artists, architects, designers, photographers and writers to show how the movement grew to encompass the arts. But the five murals, which each measure around 6 ½ feet by 10 feet, will be given pride of place. They are painted in tempera and encaustic (a wax process) on canvas. Futurist scholars have long known about the murals, but few have ever seen them. The Guggenheim requested the loan in 2012 from Poste Italiane, the Italian postal system, and was granted it in 2013, after the Italian cultural authorities agreed to it. Bringing the murals to New York is "such an incredible opportunity," said Vivien Greene, a senior curator of 19th- and early-20th-century art at the Guggenheim, who organized the retrospective and negotiated the loan. "They will get more visibility now than the whole time they've been there," Ms. Greene said, referring to the Palermo post office. Part of Ms. Greene's family is from Palermo, and her connections there helped secure the deal. "They trusted me," she said. A conservator from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, which is affiliated with the New York museum, traveled to Palermo to help take down the murals. They will be transported to New York in the coming weeks. "It's the grand finale of our exhibition," Ms. Greene said. It's such a beautiful way to end the show. It ends it on a really positive note. Instead of lingering more on the end of the war, when poor Italy is so beat up it's so depressing, I thought, "Let's have a finale that shows you at your best." " Ms. Greene said she hoped the exhibition would allow for a re-examination of Futurism after decades of scholars" dismissing its significance. One issue, Ms. Greene said, was that, for years, art historians who are "68ers" - meaning that they belong to the left-leaning culturally influential generation that came of age during the student protest years in the United States and Europe - "weren't willing to consider it after 1916, since, after Fascism, they thought it's no longer avant-garde," she said. The murals were one of many site-specific art projects commissioned under Mussolini to adorn public buildings, like the Palermo post office, a prime example of rationalist architecture. Benedetta Cappa, born into an intellectual family in Rome in 1897, studied under the avant-garde artist Giacomo Balla, through whom she met Marinetti. She and Marinetti married in 1923, and she managed to have a successful career as an artist, despite the Futurists" belief that women should primarily be mothers. "We didn't choose her because she was Marinetti's wife," Ms. Greene said, "but she's a really good painter and writer."