Futurism

• 1. Introduction

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  Futurism declared war on the past on the 5th of February 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Manifesto of Futurism in a small Italian paper called La gazzetta dell'Emilia. Two weeks later, the same text ran in the French daily Le Figaro, and suddenly the world had a name for a rage that had been building in Italian studios, cafes, and concert halls. The movement that followed would stretch across painting, sculpture, music, dance, architecture, fashion, cuisine, and cinema. It would glorify speed, violence, the airplane, the car, and the industrial city. It would attract nationalists and anarchists, communists and fascists, sculptors and noise composers. And it would end, officially, in 1944 with the death of the man who started it all. But before any of that, there is the question of what Futurism actually was, what it demanded of art, and why so many artists across Europe were willing to follow a movement that openly celebrated destruction.

• 2. The Manifesto Machine

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  Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism first in a regional Italian paper, then reproduced it in Le Figaro on the 20th of February 1909, a Saturday. He was soon joined by painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, and by the composer Luigi Russolo. From that nucleus, the group began churning out manifestos at a pace no other movement had matched. They wrote them on painting, architecture, music, literature, theatre, cinema, photography, religion, women, fashion, and cuisine. The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, published in 1910 and signed by Boccioni, Russolo, Severini, Balla, and Carra, declared war on what they called the "mindless, snobbish, and fanatical religion of the past." Museums, in particular, were targets: the manifesto condemned the "spineless admiration for old canvases, old statues, and old objects" and called it "unjust and criminal" to disdain whatever was "young, new, and trembling with life." Publishing manifestos was not incidental to Futurism. It was, in a sense, the primary medium. The text came first; the art came after.

• 3. Paint in Motion

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  Boccioni's The City Rises, painted in 1910, shows scenes of construction and manual labour dominated by a huge, rearing red horse that workmen struggle to control. In the earliest years, the Futurist painters had no distinctive style of their own. They borrowed Divisionism, the technique of breaking light and color into stippled dots and stripes, from Giovanni Segantini and others. Gino Severini, who lived in Paris, later admitted that their isolation from the French capital had left them stylistically behind. A visit to Paris in 1911 changed that: the painters encountered Cubism and adopted its methods for analyzing energy in fragmented planes. Art critic Robert Hughes later observed that in Futurism "the eye is fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of Cubism." Where Futurist painting diverged sharply was in subject matter. Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque worked in quiet, near-static compositions. The Futurists wanted the city in chaos: Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, painted across 1910 and 1911, renders a police attack and riot in diagonals and broken planes. Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash from 1912 illustrates the Technical Manifesto's claim that a moving object multiplied itself on the retina, so that "a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular." The dog's legs, tail, and leash blur into a wheel of repetitions, as do the feet of the woman holding it.

• 4. Boccioni's Inner Forms

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  Boccioni's States of Mind, a triptych with panels titled The Farewell, Those Who Go, and Those Who Stay, has been described as one of the "minor masterpieces" of early twentieth century painting. His thinking was shaped by French philosopher Henri Bergson, particularly Bergson's idea of intuition as a way of moving into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique within it. From that premise, Boccioni built a vocabulary of "lines of force" meant to convey directional tendencies of objects through space, "simultaneity" combining memories with present impressions and anticipations of future events, and "emotional ambience" linking the exterior scene to interior emotion. He laid out these ideas in his 1914 book Pittura scultura Futuriste: Dinamismo plastico. In 1912 and 1913 he turned to sculpture, producing Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a striding bronze figure that now appears on the national side of Italian 20 eurocent coins and is held at the Tate Modern. He then made Synthesis of Human Dynamism, Speeding Muscles, and Spiral Expansion of Speeding Muscles in 1913, followed by a Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. By 1915, Balla had moved to sculpture as well, making abstract "reconstructions" out of iron wires, cardboard, cloth, and tissue paper that were apparently moveable and even made sounds. Balla explained that after making twenty pictures studying the velocity of automobiles, he realized the flat canvas could not suggest "the dynamic volume of speed in depth."

• 5. The Sound of Machines

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  Luigi Russolo, who lived from 1885 to 1947, wrote The Art of Noises in 1913, one of the most influential texts in twentieth-century musical aesthetics. He built instruments he called intonarumori, acoustic noise generators that let performers create and control the dynamics and pitch of several different types of noise. Russolo and Marinetti gave the first concert of Futurist music, with the intonarumori, in 1914, though the outbreak of war prevented them from performing in many major European cities. Composer Francesco Balilla Pratella had joined the movement in 1910 and written a Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, attacking the Italian music establishment for what he saw as domination by the "rickety and vulgar" operas of Puccini and Umberto Giordano and praising only his teacher Pietro Mascagni, who had at least rebelled against the publishers. Russolo's noise instruments went on to influence Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, George Antheil, Edgar Varese, Stockhausen, and John Cage. Honegger imitated a steam locomotive in Pacific 231. George Antheil, the most committed machine-music composer, scored his Ballet Mecanique for three xylophones, four bass drums, a tam-tam, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, a siren, two live pianists, and sixteen synchronized player pianos. The piece was originally intended to accompany an experimental film by Fernand Leger, but the score runs twice the film's length and now stands on its own. Antheil's Ballet Mecanique was the first work to synchronize machines with human players and to deliberately exploit the difference between what machines and humans can play.

• 6. Women In and Against the Movement

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  Marinetti's founding manifesto declared an intention to glorify "contempt for woman" as one of its numbered tenets, alongside glorifying war and destroying museums. Yet in 1911, Marinetti called Luisa, Marchesa Casati a Futurist, dedicating to her a Carra portrait of himself with the dedication pasted directly on the canvas. Journalist Eugenio Giovanetti declared Casati the "spirit protector" of Futurist art in 1918, by which point she had become one of Italy's leading collectors. In 1912, Valentine de Saint-Point responded directly to Marinetti in her Manifesto of the Futurist Woman. Marinetti later referred to her as "the first futurist woman." Her manifesto argued that the binary of men and women should be replaced with "femininity and masculinity" as qualities that any person could possess in varying degrees. In 1913, Saint-Point wrote the Futurist Manifesto of Lust, pressing for women's erotic freedom. In Russian Futurist circles, the proportion of women participants was higher from the beginning: Natalia Goncharova, Aleksandra Ekster, and Lyubov Popova were major figures. Among Italian Futurists, Benedetta Cappa met Marinetti in 1918 and corresponded with him about their respective work. In a letter dated the 16th of August 1919, Marinetti wrote to her: "Do not forget your promise to work. You must carry your genius to its ultimate splendor. Every day." Benedetta exhibited at the Venice Biennales from 1930 to 1936, and was the first woman to show there since the exhibition's founding in 1895. She was also among the first painters working in Aeropittura, the abstract Futurist style depicting landscape from an airplane's perspective.

• 7. Fascism and the Long Decline

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  Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party in early 1918, and that party was absorbed into Benito Mussolini's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, making Marinetti one of the first members of the National Fascist Party. The connection made sense to many in the movement: the Futurists were nationalists, disgruntled war veterans, admirers of violence, and hostile to parliamentary democracy. When Fascism triumphed in 1922, the association brought official acceptance and the chance to carry out architectural work. But it came with costs. Marinetti wanted Futurism to be the official state art of Fascist Italy and failed; Mussolini preferred to patronize many movements at once. At the opening of a 1923 exhibition of the rival Novecento Italiano group, Mussolini said that "art belongs to the domain of the individual" and that the state should not encourage "a state art." Mussolini's mistress Margherita Sarfatti successfully promoted the Novecento group and even persuaded Marinetti to sit on its board. Marinetti made successive concessions: he moved from Milan to Rome, became an academician despite having condemned academies, married despite having condemned marriage, and after the Lateran Treaty of 1929 promoted religious art and reconciled himself with the Catholic Church, at one point declaring that Jesus was a Futurist. Anti-Fascist voices within the movement were not fully silenced until the annexation of Abyssinia and the Italo-German Pact of Steel in 1939. After the Second World War, many Futurist artists found their careers damaged by their association with a defeated regime. Futurism as an organized movement is now considered extinct, its end dated to 1944 with Marinetti's death.

• 8. Legacy and Echoes

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  Ridley Scott consciously evoked Antonio Sant'Elia's architectural drawings when designing Blade Runner. The record label ZTT took its name from Marinetti's poem Zang Tumb Tumb, and the band Art of Noise took theirs from Russolo's 1913 manifesto. The Adam and the Ants single "Zerox" featured a Bragaglia photograph on its cover. Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto's 1986 album "Futurista" was directly inspired by the movement and includes a speech by Tommaso Marinetti in the track "Variety Show." Futurism also produced reactions: the literary genre of cyberpunk took the machine fascination and turned it critical, and Neo-Futurism, a design and architecture movement, treats technology as a driver of sustainability rather than spectacle. A theatrical offshoot began in Chicago in 1988 with the creation of the Neo-Futurist style, which adapted Futurism's emphasis on speed and brevity into a new form of immediate theatre; there are now active Neo-Futurist troupes in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Montreal. In 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum staged the first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States, under the title Italian Futurism, 1909-1944: Reconstructing the Universe.