FUTURISM

Norbert Lynton

In several respects Futurism was unique among modern art move

ments. It was Italian. It originated in a view of civilization and
found expression first in words; rather than springing from some
dissatisfaction with inherited idioms of art and from an ambition
to create a new idiom, it started with a general idea and found
artistic expression only with difficulty. In some ways it was the most
radical, noisily rejecting all traditions and time-honoured values
and institutions. It propagated its ideas very rapidly throughout
Europe, from London to Moscow, and it was short-lived - a meteoric
episode, the lasting importance of which has usually been underrated.
It chose its own name - unlike movements like Fauvism and
Cubism which were so dubbed by antagonistic critics - and went to
great lengths to provide its own rationale in literary form: the
modern tradition of artists' manifestos stems primarily from here.
The poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) invented the
movement. In the autumn of 1908 he wrote a manifesto which
appeared first as preface to a volume of his poems, published in
Milan in January 1909. It was, however, its appearance in French
on page one of Le Figaro on 20 February the same year that gave it
the sort of impact he was after and that is usually taken as the
birthdate of Futurism.
Marinetti had hesitated between Dynamism, Electricity and
Futurism as the name of his movement. The alternatives suggest
where his interests lay. More conscious than most writers and artists
of the burgeoning world of technological power, he wanted the arts
to demolish the past and celebrate the delights of speed and mechani
cal energy: re declare', he wrote in his manifesto,

that the splendour of the world has been increased by a new beauty:
the beauty of speed. A racing car, its body ornamented by great pipes
that xesemble snakes with explosive breath . . . a screaming automobile
that seems to run on grapeshot, is more beautiful than the Winged
Victory of Sarnothra.ce [the famous Hellenistic sculpture in the Louvre)
 98 Concepts of Modern Art
... Beauty now exists only i n struggle.A work that is not aggressive in
character cannot be a masterpiece .. . We want to glorify war -the
world's only hygiene-militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the
a,narchists, the beautiful ideas for which one dies, and contempt for
women. \Ve want to destroy museums, libraries, and academies of all
kinds, and to make war on moralism, feminism and on every opportun
istic and utilitarian vileness. We shall sing the great crowds excited by
'Work, pleasure or rioting, the multicoloured, many-voiced tides of
revolution in modern capitals. We shaH sing the nocturnal, vibrating
- incandescence of arsenals and shipyards, ablaze with violent electric
moons, the voracious stations devouring their smoking serpents ... the
broadbreasted locomotives that paw the grounds of their rails like
enormous horses of steel harnessed with tubes, and the smooth flight of
the aeroplanes, their propellers flapping in the wind like flags and seem
ing to clap approval like an enthusiastic crowd. We launch from Italy
into the world this our manifesto of overwhelming and incendiary
violence, with which today we found Futurism, because we want to
liberate this land from the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists,
guides and antiquarians.
There is more in the same vein. 1\Iarinetti's vehemence is com
mensurate with his impatience at Italy's uncompleted national
development, at the vast burden of grandiose tradition which
pressed on Italian culture more inhibitingly than in any other couu
try - Italy had contributed next to nothing to nineteenth-century
developments - and also perha.p s at the confusion i n his own mind
and in the minds of his friends that came from a rather sudden con
frontation with a variety of contradictory trends in modern litera
ture and art. The first decade of the century had seen Italy made
aware, through new magazines and through exhibitions, of Impres
sionism, Post-Impressionism of various sorts including early works
of Matisse and Picasso, Symbolism, varieties of Art Nouveau, and
so on. One way to overcome the confusion was to cut through it by
proposing a new view of the world that would supersede them all.
Much the same sentiments were expressed in much the same words
in a manifesto addressed 'to the young artists of Italy'. This was
composed directly under Marinetti's supervision by three painters:
Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and Carlo
Carra. (1881-1966). Dated 11 February 1910 though written in the
Fututism 99
la.st days of February, and made public for the first time by Boc
cioni's declaiming of it from the stage of the Teatro Chiarella in
Turin on 8 March, the Manifesto of Futurist Painters firmly de
manded a new art for a new world and denounced every attach
ment to the arts of the past. What character this new art should
have became clearer in another manifesto, Boccioni's Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Painting, published as a leaflet early in Apri l:
Everything moves, everything runs, everything turns rapidly. A figure
is never stationary before us but appears and disappears incessantly.
Through the persistence of images on the retina, things in movement
multiply and are distorted, succeeding each other like vibrations in the
space through which they pass. Thus a galloping horse has not got four
legs: it has twenty and their motion is triangular ...At times, on the
cheek of a person we are speaking to in the street, we see a horse passing
in the distance. Our bodies enter into the sofas on which we sit, and the
sofas enter into us, as also the tram that runs between the houses enters
into them, and they in turn hurl themselves on to it and fuse with it
... We want to re-enter life. That the science of today should deny its
past corresponds to the material needs of our time.In the same way art,
denying its past, must correspond to the intellectual needs of our time.
Boccioni gave little in the way of specific instructions as to how this
multiplicity of sensations was to be incorporated in a picture, but he
did stress as an essential basis the system of colour divisionism
developed a quarter of a century earlier by the Neo-Impressionists.
It was to take some time for the futurist painters, early on augmen
ted by Giacomo Balla (1871-1958) and Gino Severini (1883-1965),
to find the pictorial vehicle for their ideas. When Boccioni showed
forty-two works in Venice in July they were quite well received by
the critics, not striking anyone as particularly revolutionary; in
deed, one commentator noted the wide gap between Boccioni's
bold words and his temperate pictures. At this point the Futurists'
knowledge of avant-garde art north of the Alps was negligible. For
lack of more adventurous forerunners they admired the pictures of
Sega.ntini and Previati, and they stirred their imaginations through
reading Nietzsche and Bakunin. Their paintings of this time prove
their interest in urban and preferably violent subject matter, and
there were some interesting experiments (particularly by Boccioni,
 100 Concepts of ;llodern Art
Carn\ and Russolo) at painting electric light, but their methods were
entirely those of the 1890s. Meanwhile l!Iarinetti and they, together
"ith a growing variety of other adherents to the basic futurist
beliefs such as the musician Pratella, effectively propagated their
theories through publications and personal appearances. In a lecture
of 1911, Boccioni formulated the painters' concept in these words:
'We want to represent not the optical or analytical impression but the
psychical and total experience,' undoubtedly the most clearsighted
definition of, at least, his own intentions, stressing his divergence
from the essentially visual concerns of so many modern develop
ments. He went on to speak of the possibility of temporary forms of
painting, such as might be executed with searchlights and coloured gas.
The first major showing of futurist paintings took place in Milan,
opening on 30 April 1911. Boccioni, Russolo and Carra sent fifty
works to an open exhibition (that included also a show of child
art). It was still the subject matter rather than the idiom of their
work that was new. Subjects like A Brawl in the Milan Galleria
(Boccionl), A Moving Train (Russolo) and The Funeral of an
Anarchist (Carra) are emphatically futurist, but they were presented
, in more or less traditional ways. Ardengo Soffici's cutting criticism
of their pictures, published in the Florence magazine La Voce, was
characteristically dealt with by violence: 1\farinett.i, Carra and
Boccioni descended on Florence and attacked Soffici as he sat out
side a cafe. Mter the police had delivered the Milanese raiders to the
railway station the next morning, the editorial staff of La Voce
appeared on the platform to expedite their departure and the police
had again to intervene in the ensuing battle. The outcome, sur
prisingly, was friendship between Soffici and most of his colleagues
and the Futurists, but this in itself did not give greater substance to
futurist art. Severini, who had for some time been>Vorking in Paris,
at this point arrived in Milan and insisted that it was essential for
Boccioni and the others to familiarize themselves with recent de
velopments. l\Iarinetti was persuaded to finance the trip and so
Boccioni, Russolo and Carra followed Severini to Paris for a fort
night's visit. Severini introduced them to Picasso, Braque and
others, and showed them some of the galleries. The three visitors
were deeply impressed by what they saw, especially Boccioni who,
Futurism 101
now a warm friend of Severini, stayed on for a few days after his
friends had left.
Back in l\Iilan they all worked feverishly, bravely re-orientating
their efforts in accord with what they had learned, especially about
Cubism which at that time was almost totally unknown outside
Paris. They now pinned less faith on the power of new subject
matter and strove to complement their colour divisionism with
formal fragmentation of a cubist sort. They painted new pictures and
repainted old ones, and with astonishing speed and foolhardiness
they assembled an exhibition to appear in Paris itself. It opened in
the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune on 5 February 1912. Subsequently it
travelled around Europe. In March it was at the Sackville Gallery in
London; in April and May it showed at the Der Sturm gallery in
Berlin, where a banker bought twenty-four pictures out of the thirty
five shown. The exhibition went on to Brussels (May-June), and the
banker's futurist collection was subsequently seen in Hamburg,
Amsterdam, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, Budapest, Frankfurt,
Breslau, Zurich and Dresden. These tours, backed as they were by
publications and lectures, were to amount to the most emphatic act
of proselytism modern art has witnessed. It was further extended in
1913-14. The banker's collection was shown in Chicago; Marinetti
lectured with great success in Moscow; and there were several
futurist demonstrations and appearances of various kinds in Italy
and elsewhere. As a result Futurism found disciples and effective
supporters in other countries and its basic ideas were applied to an
ever-increasing range of concerns. A Frenchwoman, Valentine de
Saint-Point, in spite of Marinetti's original dismissal of women in
general, joined the movement, wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Women
('Instead of putting men under the yoke of miserable, sentimental
needs, drive your sons, your men, to excel themselves. You create
them. You can do everything with them. You owe humanity heroes.
Provide them!'), and followed it up with a Manifesto of Pleasure.
Others wrote new statements of futurist views on politics, literature,
music, but more important than these from the point of view of
art was the support the movement got from the leading avant
garde critic and poet, active in the chief citadel of modern art: in
June 1913 Apollinaire wrote his essay The Futurist Anti-Tradition,
102 Concepts of J}f odern Art
published in the magazine Lacerba, Florence, the following Septem
ber. It set out very graphically the hates and loves of Futurism and
the means whereby the cultural world might be renewed, and ended
by wishing merde on the heads of almost everybody, from critics to
Siamese twins via Dante and Bayreuth, and by blessing a list of
people that joined such artists as Picasso, Delaunay, Kandinsky
and Matisse to the Futurists themselves.
What was Futurism offering to the world? Its basic views, amount
ing to an insistence that the growth of technology and concurrent
developments in society and thought required expression in new,
bold, art forms, were not unique but bad never been presented so
vehemently. Moreover, here was an art movement that put idea
before style, thus challenging not only traditional artistic values but
also the aesthetic ambitions of most avant-garde art. Futurist
paintings tested and proved the possibility of using art as a means of
capturing non-visual as well as visual aspects of an environment
recognized as dynamic rather than static. They also, by showing
bright colour joined to cubist broken forms, encouraged the lesser
Cubists of Paris to move away from the more or less monochromatic
idiom of Picasso and Braque, and may also have pushed these two
into the less limited, more outgoing manner of Synthetic Cubism.
Sometimes their compositions offered viable alternatives to the
centralized arrangements of the Cubists, and there are a few futuri s t
works that, in describing specific movement, turn the picture area
into a section only of what must seem a continuous motion: the
action passes through the painting and has no centre.
But it is dangerous to generalize too much about the productions
of the Futurists: they varied in their interests as in their abilities.
Balla's work, for instance, tends more readily to abstraction.
Although he was the painter of the famous Dog on a Leash (1912;
Goodyear Collection, New York), the closest Futurism ever came to
imitating the photographic studies of movement done by Muy
bridge and others in the last decades of the nineteenth century, a
great proportion of his work is devoted to finding more or less in
tuitiv.e evaluations of movement through abstract patterns. In a
series of paintings entitled Iridescent Interpenetrations (about 1913-
14) he even turned from the movement of things to the optical
Futurism 103
mobility or instability of contrasting tones and colours, an isolated
forerunner of the Op Art of the 1960s. Carra remained closest to
Cubism, Analytic and Synthetic, until, during the war, he moved
to a poetic sort of realism, subsequently attaching himself to the
giants of the early Renaissance. Severini also, more involved in
Paris than the others, was deeply attached to Cubism but for a
while combined cubist planes with divisionist colour notation for
pictures that look abstract but have explanatory titles such as
Ballerina + Sea. Several of Russolo's paintings explore what we
have learnt to call shock-waves as symbols of movement and energy,
but his contribution to history was less as painter than as revolu
tionary composer. He aimed at creating a music fit for an age of
mechanical power by inventing various noise machines and com
posing pieces for them with such titles as The Awakening City and
The Meeting of Aeroplanes and Motorcars. Concerts of this music
were given in Italy, provoking the predictable fury of critics and
audiences, and in June 1914 the first noise music concert outside
Italy took place at the Coliseum in London.
Boccioni was undoubtedly the most gifted artist amongst them,
and also the most inventive. His paintings vary a great deal. At
times, in pictures like the night scene Forces of a Street (1911-12;
Hangi Collection, Basle), he seems to give perfect expression to the
basic themes of Futurism: metropolis, light, energy, mechanical
movement and noise, urban pleasure-seeking, all fused into one visual
experience. He also researched into more limited themes, such as the
interpenetration of single, stationary figures and their environments.
In his great triptych entitled States of Mind (No. 1: The Farewells;
No. 2: Those who go; No. 3: Those who stay. 1911-12) he fused the
futurist interest in trains, crowds, movement and multiple sensa
tions into a poetic work of remarkable epic power.
Even more impressive, however, is Boccioni's triumphant venture
into sculpture. In March 1912 he again visited Severini in Paris.
This time he was thinking about sculpture. He met Archipenko,
Brancusi, Duchamp-Villon and others, and soon after he wrote his
Manifesto of Futurist Sculptute, backdating it to ll April 1912.
Revolted by the jungle of bronze and stone statues and monuments
with which sculpture seemed to be stifling itself, and also by the
104 Concepts of Modern Art
Greco-Michelangelesque tradition behind it, he demanded total
renewal:
Let us get rid of the lot, and let us proclaim the ABSOLUTE AND
FINAL DISCARDING OF THE FINITE LINE AND OF THE CLOSED
FORM STATUE. LET USTEARTHE BODY OPEN AND LET US INCLUDE
ITS SURROUNDINGS IN IT . .. Thus a figure may have one arm clothed
and the other naked, and the varying lines of a vase of flowers may chase
each other freely between the lines of a hat and of a neck. Thus can the
transparent planes of glass, of sheet metal, wires, electric outside and
inside lighting indicate the planes, the directions, the tones and the half
tones of a new reality.
To this end all sorts of materials should be brought into sculpture:
'We list only a few: glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement, horse
hair, leather, cloth, mirror, electric light, etc.' He mentions the
possibility of built-in motors to give sculptures actual movement.
His sculptures were almost as revolutionary as his words. Already
in June/July 1913 he held an exhibition of sculpture at the Galerie
La Boetie in Paris. He used the occasion to develop his manifesto in
a catalogue introduction and to give a lecture (in bad French).
Several pieces have been lost and are known only through photo
graphs. Some of them use much the same kind of interpenetration of
dissimilar objects (head, window, frame, light) that we find i n
futurist painting. Others, like Unique Forms o f Continuity i n Space
(1913; really a statue of a man striding forward, and not at all unlike
Marinetti's maligned Winged Victory of Sanwthrace), and Develop
ment of a Bottle in Space (1912), show a more essentially sculptural
attempt to open form out in order to reveal the energies implied
in its structure and to fuse it with the surrounding space. The most
impressive work is the Horse+ Rider+ House in wood and card
board (1914), a coloured sculpture of abstract appearance whose
open, spatial forms belong to the world of Constructivism.
One other extension of futurist creativity remains to be recorded.
In 1914, in the person of Antonio Sant'Elia (1888-1916), architecture
entered the futurist sphere. A Manifesto of Futurist ArchitefJure,
dated 11 July 1914, presented his ideas, which were also more
graphically expressed in a large number of imaginative drawings,
Put urism 105
some of which were exhibited under the title The New City. With a
vision that suggests science fiction - which is not to say that it was
unpractical or impracticable - Sant'Eiia proposed a new kind of
metropolis, designed without backward glances to historical styles
but in accord with the new materials and structural inventions of
engineering to meet new concentrations of population in an age of
rapid transport. His drawings suggest a sense of form owing much
to the influence of Art Nouveau and this is supported by his rejec
tion (in the Manifesto) of perpendicular and horizontal lines, static
bulky forms, and his demand for an architecture of 'reinforced
concrete, iron, glass, textiles and all those substitutes for wood,
brick and stone that permit the greatest elasticity and lightness'.
The 1914-18 war spelt the end of Futurism. The 'world's only
hygiene' removed Sant'Elia and Boccioni in 1916. The remaining
futurist artists moved into more traditional styles and attitudes.
Marinetti fulfilled his political ideals by helping Fascism to take
power in Italy. Some younger adherents of the movement, such as
Prampolini, were able to carry aspects of Futurism into the 1930s
but various attempts to refurbish Futurism after 1918 had little
impact.
Yet its influence was of fundamental and long importance. Be
cause Futurism was deeply involved in Cubism, its conquests were
conquests also for Cubism. Without the Italians' activity, Cubism
could never have played so big a role in modern art. More specific
echoes of Futurism can be found in a variety of artists and move
ments: Vorticism in London (in 1914 l\Iarinetti and the English
Vorticist C. R. W. Nevinson collaborated on a manifesto, Vital
English Art) , some forms of Expressionism in Germany, avant
garde painting and typography in Moscow around 1913-15, archi
tecture of the twenties in Holland, Germany and France. Russia
may be claimed as futurism's greatest immediate debtor. 1\fayakov
sky's literary Futurism owed much to l\Iarinetti's, even if their
political views were largely opposite, and the revolutionary art of
Russia, especially the architecture, in several respects is the fulfil
ment of what the Milanese men had attempted.