c. 1909–1944

Futurism

On 20 February 1909, the Paris newspaper “Le Figaro” printed on its front page a manifesto that wanted to abolish the past. Libraries were to be set on fire and museums flooded; speed, machines, the big city and war were to be celebrated. Italian Futurism invented a painting of movement and at the same time showed how dangerous an enthusiasm for violence can become.

A manifesto on the front page

Paris, 20 February 1909. Anyone opening Le Figaro that morning found on the front page a manifesto by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. A roaring racing car, it declared, was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. Museums and libraries were to be destroyed and war glorified as “the world’s only hygiene”. It even called for “scorn for woman”.

Marinetti was a master of self-promotion. With manifestos, scandalous evenings and calculated provocation, he made Futurism one of the first art movements to make deliberate use of the methods of modern advertising and the press.

Painting movement

In 1910 the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini joined Marinetti and published manifestos of their own. They no longer wanted to paint the still moment, but movement, noise and energy. Boccioni’s The City Rises shows workers and huge red horses in a whirl of force and light, with scaffolding and factory chimneys rising in the background.

From Cubism they took the fragmentation of form; from photography, the idea of showing successive phases of movement at once. Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash shows a dachshund whose legs and tail multiply in a fan of strokes.

Sculpture, sound and city

In 1913 Boccioni created the sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a striding figure whose body seems shaped by movement. The bronze casts were made only after his death. Today the figure appears on the Italian 20-cent coin. Luigi Russolo built noise machines and in 1913 wrote the manifesto The Art of Noises, an early step towards electronic music. The architect Antonio Sant’Elia designed a Città Nuova of high-rise buildings, bridges and traffic levels that was never built.

In 1912 the Futurists exhibited in Paris, London and Berlin. In Berlin, Herwarth Walden showed their pictures in his gallery Der Sturm, and German Expressionists such as Franz Marc took up ideas from them.

Women against Marinetti

Despite Marinetti’s misogynist slogans, women belonged to the movement. In 1912 the Frenchwoman Valentine de Saint-Point responded with a Manifesto of the Futurist Woman. Benedetta Cappa, later Marinetti’s wife, became one of the most important painters of the so-called second Futurism in the 1920s and 1930s.

War and Fascism

The Futurists called for Italy to enter the First World War and many of them volunteered. Boccioni died in 1916 after a riding accident during military training; Sant’Elia was killed at the front the same year. After the war Marinetti drew close to Benito Mussolini and remained tied to Fascism until his death in 1944. This connection still weighs on the assessment of Futurism today.

Why it still matters

Futurism showed how art can represent movement, speed and technology, and discovered the manifesto, performance and advertising as artistic means. It influenced avant-gardes from Moscow to London. At the same time it is a warning: its glorification of violence and war led straight into the orbit of Fascism.