Futurism ( ) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included Italian artists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo. Italian Futurism glorified modernity and, according to its doctrine, "aimed to liberate Italy from the weight of its past." Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913).
Although Futurism was largely an Italian phenomenon, parallel movements emerged in the Russian Empire, where some Russian Futurists would later go on to found groups of their own; other countries either had a few Futurists or had movements inspired by Futurism. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and cuisine.
To some extent, Futurism influenced the art movements Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, and Dada; to a greater degree, Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism. can represent an opposing trend or attitude.
Italian Futurism
Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan, Italy in 1909 by the Italian art theorist and poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti launched the movement in his Manifesto of Futurism, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia, an article then reproduced in the French daily newspaper on Saturday 20 February 1909.Le Figaro, Le Futurisme, 1909/02/20 (Numéro 51). Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de FranceFilippo Tommaso Marinetti, Declaration of Futurism, published in Poesia, Volume 5, Number 6, April 1909 (Futurist manifesto translated to English). Blue Mountain Project He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and the composer Luigi Russolo. Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic traditions: "We want no part of it, the past", [...] we the young and strong Futurists!". The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth, violence, the car, the airplane, and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate Italian nationalists. They glorified modernity and repudiated the cult of the past and all imitations, praised originality "however daring, however violent", bore proudly "the smear of madness", dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and glorified science.
Publishing manifestos was a feature of Futurism, and the Futurists (usually led or prompted by Marinetti) wrote them on many topics, including painting, architecture, music, literature, theatre, cinema, photography, religion, women, fashion, and cuisine.Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos, MFA Publications, 2001 Jessica Palmieri, Futurist manifestos, 1909–1933, italianfuturism.org In their manifestos, Futurists described their beliefs and appreciations of various methods. They also detailed their disdain for traditional Italian Renaissance works of art and their subjects. According to the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910) by Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Carlo Carrà: "We want to fight implacably against the mindless, snobbish, and fanatical religion of the past, religion nurtured by the pernicious existence of the museums. We rebel against the spineless admiration for old canvases, old statues, and old objects, and against the enthusiasm for everything worm-eaten, grimy, or corroded by time; and we deem it unjust and criminal that people habitually disdain whatever is young, new, and trembling with life." The Futurists believed that art should be inspired by the modern marvels of their newly technological world: "Just as our forebears took the subject of art from the religious atmosphere that enveloped them, so we must draw inspiration from the tangible miracles of contemporary life."
The founding manifesto did not contain a positive artistic programme, which the Futurists attempted to create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (published in Italian as a leaflet by Poesia, Milan, 11 April 1910).I Manifesti del futurismo, lanciati da Marinetti, et al, 1914 (in Italian) This committed them to a "universal dynamism" which was to be directly represented in painting. Objects in reality were not separate from one another or from their surroundings: "The sixteen people around you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten four three; they are motionless and they change places. [...] The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it."
The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911, they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been adopted from Divisionism by Giovanni Segantini and others. Later, Severini, who lived in Paris, France attributed their backwardness in style and method at this time to their distance from Paris, at that time the centre of avant-garde art.Severini, G., The Life of a Painter, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1995. Furthermore, Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism's artistic style. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism, and following a visit to Paris in 1911, the Futurist painters adopted the methods of the Cubists, which offered them a means of analyzing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism.
They often painted modern urban scenes. Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910–1911) is a large canvas representing events that the artist himself had been involved with in 1904. The action of a police attack and riot is rendered energetically with diagonals and broken planes. His Leaving the Theatre (1910–1911) uses a Divisionist technique to render isolated and faceless figures trudging home at night under street lights.
Boccioni's The City Rises (1910) represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control. Boccioni's intentions in art were strongly influenced by the ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson, including the idea of intuition, which Bergson defined as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. Thus, the Futurists aimed through their art to enable the viewer to apprehend the inner being of what they depicted. Boccioni developed these ideas at length in his book, Pittura scultura Futuriste: Dinamismo plastico (Futurist Painting Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism) (1914).For detailed discussions of Boccioni's debt to Bergson, see Petrie, Brian, "Boccioni and Bergson", The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 116, No.852, March 1974, pp.140–147, and Antliff, Mark "The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space", The Art Bulletin, December 2000, pp.720–733. His States of Mind, in three large panels—The Farewell, Those who Go, and Those Who Stay—"made his first great statement of Futurist painting, bringing his interests in Bergson, Cubism, and the individual's complex experience of the modern world together in what has been described as one of the 'minor masterpieces' of early twentieth century painting."Humphreys, R. Futurism, Tate Gallery, 1999 The work attempts to convey feelings and sensations experienced in time, using new means of expression, including "lines of force," which intend to convey the directional tendencies of objects through space; "simultaneity", which combines memories, present impressions and anticipation of future events; and "emotional ambience" in which the artist seeks by intuition to link sympathies between the exterior scene and interior emotion.
Francesco Filippini represents a decisive formative reference for Boccioni's early pictorial phase. His treatment of the agricultural landscape of Lombardy—characterized by a marked horizontal composition, the presence of the female figure in rural settings, and the use of atmospheric light—provided Boccioni with a fundamental figurative and poetic model during his formative years.V. Terraroli (ed.), Francesco Filippini. Catalogo generale delle opere, Skira, Milan, 1999, pp. 112–115.M. Carrà, La pittura moderna in Italia, Treves, Milan, 1919, pp. 34–38. Between 1903 and 1908, prior to his adherence to Futurism, Boccioni developed a figurative vision strongly indebted to naturalism in the post-Scapigliatura context, of which Filippini was one of the leading exponents. As Enrico Crispolti states, Filippini's agricultural landscape was the implicit model of Boccioni's early artistic period.Enrico Crispolti, Boccioni. Catalogo generale, Electa, Milan, 1971, vol. I, p. 42. This continuity between late 19th-century Lombard naturalism and Boccioni's early visual research highlights Filippini's historical and artistic role as a figurative precursor of Futurism.V. Terraroli (ed.), Francesco Filippini. Catalogo generale delle opere, Skira, Milan, 1999.F. Russoli, Arte e società in Italia, Garzanti, Milan, 1964, p. 201.
Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) exemplifies the Futurists' insistence that the perceived world is in constant movement. The painting depicts a dog whose legs, tail and leash—and the feet of the woman walking it—have been multiplied to a blur of movement. It illustrates the precepts of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting that, "on account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular." His Hand of the Violinist (1912) similarly depicts the movements of a violinist's hand and instrument, rendered in rapid strokes within a triangular frame.
The adoption of Cubism determined the style of much subsequent Futurist painting, which Boccioni and Severini in particular continued to render in the broken colors and short brush-strokes of divisionism. However, Futurist painting differed in both subject matter and treatment from the quiet and static Cubism of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Juan Gris. As the art critic Robert Hughes observed: "In Futurism, the eye is fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of Cubism—fragmented and overlapping planes." Futurist art tended to disdain traditional subjects, specifically those of photographically realistic portraits and landscapes. Futurists thought of "imitation" art that copied from life to be lazy, unimaginative, cowardly, and boring. While there were Futurist portraits—Carrà's Woman with Absinthe (1911), Severini's Self-Portrait (1912), and Boccioni's Matter (1912)—it was the urban scene and vehicles in motion that typified Futurist painting; Boccioni's The Street Enters the House (1911), Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912), and Russolo's Automobile at Speed (1913) for example.