Futurism: Speed, Machines and Marinetti’s Manifesto

Futurism is an Italian art movement that took shape in 1909 and celebrated speed, technology, the city and change. The artists wanted to break with the past, and they tried to show movement and time in pictures using overlapping forms, lines and fragmented light.

Facts

A manifesto on the front page

Futurism began not with a painting but with a text. On 20 February 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his Futurist Manifesto on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro. In it he claimed that a roaring racing car is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, a direct provocation of the authority of museums and of antiquity. He wanted to tear down libraries and museums and celebrate speed, violence and youth.

The manifesto was also a kind of advertising campaign. Marinetti understood that attention was a weapon, and the movement spread through more manifestos, loud readings and stage evenings that often ended in brawls. Futurism was thus an early example of how the avant-garde could use the media; read more under the avant-garde.

Movement on the canvas

In 1910 the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini wrote a manifesto of their own for painting. They wanted to capture movement instead of freezing a moment. A galloping horse does not have four legs but twenty, they wrote. In the paintings and sculptures of Umberto Boccioni, such as the bronze he called Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913, the body flows together with the air around it. The works were shown in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris and then in London, and the exhibition made Futurism known to a wide international audience.

Balla painted a dog on a leash whose legs and tail are repeated in motion, and he investigated how light and speed could become a kind of rhythm. The Futurists borrowed techniques from Cubism and from the serial images of photography. Marcel Duchamp and Robert Delaunay in Paris played with similar ideas about movement and colour, but without the Futurists’ political tone.

More than painting

Futurism concerned everything. Luigi Russolo built noise instruments and in 1913 wrote the manifesto The Art of Noises, a forerunner of electronic music. The architect Antonio Sant’Elia drew visionary sketches in 1914 for a new city of skyscrapers, lifts and tunnels, but he fell in the First World War in 1916, the same year that Boccioni died after falling from a horse during military service. In 1932 Marinetti even published a Futurist cookbook, which wanted to renew the meal in the same way as art.

The movement also left its mark on graphic design, posters, fashion, theatre and film; see the posters in the design section. In Russia a parallel movement grew, Cubo-Futurism, in which Kazimir Malevich took the step towards purely abstract art. Its interest in the rational and the mechanical echoes in the functionalism of architecture.

Politics and the end

Futurism is difficult to assess. Its manifesto praised war as “the world’s only hygiene”, and many Futurists went to war in 1915 out of conviction. Marinetti later became a supporter of Mussolini’s Fascism, and the second wave of Futurism in the 1920s and 1930s, called aeropittura, celebrated flight and the regime. That has made the movement controversial even when the art is fascinating.

After the First World War the movement’s force faded, but many of its ideas lived on in Dada, Constructivism and the Bauhaus. Its ideal of speed and technology remains in advertising and design today. Read more about the movement’s place under Italian Futurism and in the guide to modernism.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Which newspaper published Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto in 1909?