Italian Futurism
Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.[1] Marinetti launched the movement in his Manifesto of Futurism,[3] 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.[4][5][6] 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 (usually led or prompted by Marinetti) wrote them on many topics, including painting, architecture, music, literature, theatre, cinema, photography, religion, women, fashion, and cuisine.[7][8] 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 (1910) 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."[9] 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."[9]
The founding manifesto did not contain a positive artistic programme, which the Futurists attempted to create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (published in Italian as a leaflet by Poesia, Milan, 11 April 1910).[10] 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."[11]