Futurism
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.
Although Futurism was largely an Italian phenomenon, parallel movements emerged in Russia, 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 cooking.
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 in 1909 by the Italian 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 Le Figaro on Saturday 20 February 1909. 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 tradition. "We want no part of it, the past," he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, 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 wrote them on many topics, including painting, architecture, music, literature, theatre, cinema, photography, religion, women, fashion, and cuisine. 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 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. 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, attributed their backwardness in style and method at this time to their distance from Paris, the centre of avant-garde art. 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. Cubism offered them a means of analyzing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism.
File:The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni 1910.jpg|thumb|left|250px|Umberto Boccioni, The City Rises
They often painted modern urban scenes. Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli 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 uses a Divisionist technique to render isolated and faceless figures trudging home at night under street lights.
Boccioni's The City Rises represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control. 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." 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 the early pictorial phase of Umberto Boccioni. 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. 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.
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.
Boccioni's intentions in art were strongly influenced by the ideas of 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. The Futurists aimed through their art thus 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 .
File:Giacomo Balla, 1912, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, oil on canvas, 89.8 x 109.8 cm, Albright-Knox Art Gallery.jpg|thumb|left|Giacomo Balla, 1912, Dinamismo di un Cane al Guinzaglio, Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash 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 Rhythm of the Bow 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. But Futurist painting differed in both subject matter and treatment from the quiet and static Cubism of Picasso, Braque and 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, Severini's Self-Portrait, and Boccioni's Matter —it was the urban scene and vehicles in motion that typified Futurist painting; Boccioni's The Street Enters the House, Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin, and Russolo's Automobile at Speed for example.
The Futurists held their first exhibition outside of Italy in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, Paris, which included works by Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla.
In 1912 and 1913, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, he attempted to realize the relationship between the object and its environment, which was central to his theory of "dynamism". The sculpture represents a striding figure, cast in bronze posthumously and exhibited in the Tate Modern. He explored the theme further in Synthesis of Human Dynamism, Speeding Muscles, and Spiral Expansion of Speeding Muscles ; his ideas on sculpture were published in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. In 1915, Balla also turned to sculpture making abstract "reconstructions," which were created out of various materials, were apparently moveable, and even made noises. He said that, after making twenty pictures in which he had studied the velocity of automobiles, he understood that "the single plane of the canvas did not permit the suggestion of the dynamic volume of speed in depth... I felt the need to construct the first dynamic plastic complex with iron wires, cardboard planes, cloth and tissue paper, etc."
File:Aldo Palazzeschi, Carlo Carrà, Giovanni Papini, Umberto Boccioni, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1914.jpg|thumb|Aldo Palazzeschi, Carlo Carrà, Giovanni Papini, Umberto Boccioni, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, 1914|alt=|left
In 1914, personal quarrels and artistic differences between the Milan group around Marinetti, Boccioni, and Balla, and the Florence group around Carrà, Ardengo Soffici and Giovanni Papini, created a rift in Italian Futurism. The Florence group resented the dominance of Marinetti and Boccioni, whom they accused of trying to establish "an immobile church with an infallible creed," and each group dismissed the other as passéiste.
Futurism had, from the outset, admired violence and was intensely patriotic. The Futurist Manifesto had declared: "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman." Although it owed much of its character and some of its ideas to radical political movements, it was not much involved in politics until the autumn of 1913. Then, fearing the re-election of Giolitti, Marinetti published a political manifesto. In 1914, the Futurists began to campaign actively against the Austro-Hungarian empire, which still controlled some Italian territories, and Italian neutrality between the major powers. In September, Boccioni, seated in the balcony of the Teatro dal Verme in Milan, tore up an Austrian flag and threw it into the audience while Marinetti waved an Italian flag. When Italy entered the First World War in 1915, many Futurists enlisted. The experience of the war marked several Futurists—particularly Marinetti, who fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary — actively engaging in propaganda. Italian futurists included "visual poetry in futurist periodicals" to promote their cause or campaign, thus swaying public opinion in their favor after the war; the combat experience also influenced Futurist music.
The outbreak of war disguised the fact that Italian Futurism had come to an end. The Florence group had formally acknowledged their withdrawal from the movement by the end of 1914. Boccioni produced only one war picture and was killed in 1916. Severini painted some significant war pictures in 1915, but in Paris turned towards Cubism; post-war, he was associated with the Return to Order.
After the war, Marinetti revived the movement. This revival was called il secondo Futurismo by writers in the 1960s. The art historian Giovanni Lista groups Futurism into three distinct decades according to characteristics of each: "Plastic Dynamism" of the 1910s, "Mechanical Art" of the 1920s, and "Aeroaesthetics" of the 1930s.