Futurism

Based on Wikipedia: Futurism

In 1909, a group of Italian artists declared war on the past. They wanted to burn the museums, flood the libraries, and destroy every painting that showed a Virgin Mary or a saint in gentle repose. They worshipped speed, violence, and the roar of automobile engines. They called themselves Futurists, and for a brief, incandescent moment, they tried to remake art in the image of the machine age.

This was not metaphor. This was manifesto.

The Poet Who Hated History

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was an Italian poet with a problem. He lived in a country drowning in its own glorious past. Everywhere he looked, there were Renaissance masterpieces, Roman ruins, and tourists cooing over centuries-old frescoes. Italy had become a museum, and Marinetti couldn't stand it.

On February 5, 1909, he published his Manifesto of Futurism in an Italian newspaper called La gazzetta dell'Emilia. Two weeks later, the French daily Le Figaro reprinted it, and suddenly all of Europe was paying attention to this strange Italian who seemed to hate beauty.

"We want no part of it, the past," Marinetti wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!"

What did he want instead? Speed. Technology. Youth. Violence. The automobile. The airplane. The industrial city. Everything that represented humanity's technological triumph over nature. He wanted art that smelled of gasoline and sounded like factory machinery.

The manifesto didn't mince words. It declared that the Futurists would "glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman." Reading it today, you can feel the testosterone practically leaking off the page. This was not a movement interested in nuance or compromise.

The Painters Who Couldn't Quite Paint

Marinetti was a poet, not a visual artist, so he needed collaborators. He found them quickly: Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and the composer Luigi Russolo. Together, they would transform Futurism from a literary provocation into a full-blown artistic movement.

There was just one problem. When they started, they didn't actually have a distinctive visual style.

This is one of the funnier aspects of early Futurism. Here were these artists, screaming about revolution and the destruction of all artistic tradition, and their actual paintings looked remarkably similar to the work of other contemporary painters. In 1910 and 1911, they were essentially using Divisionism, a technique where you break light and color into tiny dots and stripes. It was hardly radical—Giovanni Segantini had been doing it for years.

Severini, who lived in Paris, later admitted the embarrassing truth: they were behind because they were too far from the action. Paris was the center of the avant-garde art world, and the Italian Futurists were essentially provincials trying to start a revolution without access to the latest ideas.

Everything changed when they discovered Cubism.

Stealing from Picasso

Cubism was the artistic movement pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, where they fractured objects into geometric planes and showed multiple perspectives simultaneously. When Severini brought these techniques back from Paris in 1911, the Futurists finally had the visual vocabulary they needed.

But they didn't just copy Cubism. They weaponized it.

Where Cubist paintings were quiet, analytical, often depicting still lifes or people sitting motionless, Futurist paintings were loud, kinetic, and aggressive. The art critic Robert Hughes put it perfectly: "In Futurism, the eye is fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of Cubism—fragmented and overlapping planes."

Consider Giacomo Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash from 1912. It shows a small dog being walked by a woman, but the dog's legs, tail, and leash—along with the woman's feet—have been multiplied into a blur of movement. The dog doesn't have four legs in the painting. It has dozens, all captured in different positions as it scurries along.

The Futurists explained this in their Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting: "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."

This was photography's influence creeping in. Eadweard Muybridge had famously used sequential photography to capture horses in motion, proving that artists had been painting galloping horses incorrectly for centuries. The Futurists took this insight and ran with it, creating paintings that looked like time-lapse photographs rendered in paint.

Universal Dynamism

The Futurists developed a concept they called "universal dynamism," which sounds like mystical nonsense but actually contained a radical perceptual insight. They believed that objects in reality were not truly separate from one another or from their surroundings.

Their Technical Manifesto offered this vivid example:

"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."

This wasn't just artistic license. It was an attempt to paint subjective experience rather than objective reality. When you're on a moving bus, your perception really does blur the boundaries between inside and outside, between the vehicle and the passing cityscape. The Futurists wanted to capture that feeling of interpenetration, that sense that modern life moved too fast for the eye to separate objects into neat categories.

Umberto Boccioni pushed this idea furthest. He was deeply influenced by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, who argued that intuition could reveal truths about reality that rational analysis could not. Bergson defined intuition as a kind of sympathetic experience where you move into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and inexpressible within it.

For Boccioni, this meant that painting should enable viewers to apprehend the inner being of what was depicted, not just its surface appearance. His triptych States of Mind—comprising three large panels called The Farewell, Those Who Go, and Those Who Stay—tried to convey feelings and sensations experienced in time. It combined memories, present impressions, and anticipation of future events into single images.

The Street Enters the House

Futurist paintings tended to focus on specific subjects: modern urban scenes, vehicles in motion, the chaos and energy of city life. They explicitly rejected traditional subjects like portraits and landscapes, which they considered lazy, unimaginative, and cowardly.

One of Boccioni's most famous works has a wonderfully literal title: The Street Enters the House, painted in 1911. It depicts a woman on a balcony, but the street below seems to surge upward and invade her space. Construction workers, horses, scaffolding—all of it presses into the domestic interior. The boundary between private and public space has collapsed.

Carlo Carrà painted Funeral of the Anarchist Galli between 1910 and 1911, depicting a real event he had witnessed in 1904: a police attack on mourners at the funeral of an anarchist activist. The painting is all diagonals and broken planes, rendering the violence of a riot in purely formal terms. You can almost hear the shouting.

His other notable work from this period, Leaving the Theatre, takes a gentler approach. Isolated, faceless figures trudge home at night under street lights, rendered in the dotted technique of Divisionism. It captures the particular loneliness of urban nightlife, the way city crowds can make you feel more isolated rather than less.

Sculpture That Moves

In 1912 and 1913, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate his Futurist ideas into three dimensions. The results were extraordinary.

His Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, created in 1913, has become the most iconic image of Italian Futurism. It depicts a striding human figure, but one that seems to be moving so fast that the air flows around it like water around a speedboat. The figure's muscles and drapery stream backward, creating a sense of aerodynamic force. The body is both recognizably human and strangely mechanical, as if flesh were transforming into something harder and faster.

The sculpture was cast in bronze posthumously—Boccioni died in 1916—and now sits in the Tate Modern in London. It also appears on the national side of Italian twenty-eurocent coins, which means this radical anti-establishment artwork is now literally the currency of the state. Marinetti would have been horrified, or perhaps secretly pleased.

Balla took sculpture in an even stranger direction. After spending years painting the velocity of automobiles, he concluded that the flat canvas couldn't adequately suggest "the dynamic volume of speed in depth." So he began building what he called "abstract reconstructions"—assemblages made from iron wires, cardboard, cloth, and tissue paper. They were apparently moveable and even made noises. These were essentially kinetic sculptures, proto-installations, artworks that existed in time as well as space.

The Art of Noises

The Futurists didn't limit themselves to visual art. They wanted to revolutionize everything: painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban planning, theater, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and—most bizarrely—cooking.

Publishing manifestos became their signature activity. Marinetti would write them on any topic, and the other Futurists followed suit. There were manifestos on Futurist painting, Futurist architecture, Futurist music, Futurist cinema, Futurist photography, Futurist religion, Futurist women, Futurist fashion, and Futurist cuisine.

Luigi Russolo wrote The Art of Noises in 1913, arguing that traditional musical instruments were inadequate for the modern age. He wanted to replace them with what he called "intonarumori"—noise machines that could produce the sounds of industry, war, and urban chaos. He built several of these devices, boxes with cranks and levers that produced various mechanical sounds. Most of them were destroyed during World War II, though a few reconstructions exist today.

Russolo's basic insight has proven remarkably prescient. From the musique concrète movement of the 1940s and 1950s to industrial music in the 1980s to contemporary electronic production, the idea that "noise" could be music has become central to modern sound art. Every time you hear a track that incorporates field recordings, samples of machinery, or deliberately harsh textures, you're hearing echoes of Russolo's manifesto.

The Politics of Speed

Futurism was not just an aesthetic movement. It was intensely political, though its politics were confused and eventually catastrophic.

From the beginning, Futurism was violently nationalist and militaristic. The original manifesto glorified war as "the world's only hygiene." This wasn't ironic or metaphorical—the Futurists genuinely believed that conflict would cleanse civilization of its accumulated rot.

In 1913, as Italian elections approached, Marinetti published a political manifesto. The following year, the Futurists began campaigning against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which still controlled some Italian territories, and against Italian neutrality in the conflicts brewing across Europe. In September 1914, Boccioni attended a performance at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan, tore up an Austrian flag, and threw it into the audience while Marinetti waved an Italian flag from beside him.

When Italy entered World War I in 1915, many Futurists enlisted with enthusiasm. Marinetti fought in the mountains of Trentino on the Italian-Austrian border. The war experience profoundly marked those who survived, influencing their later work and their propaganda.

But the war also killed the movement. Boccioni produced only one war picture before his death in 1916. Severini painted some significant war works in 1915—War, Armored Train, and Red Cross Train—but then moved toward Cubism and eventually joined the "Return to Order," a conservative reaction against avant-garde experimentation. The Florence faction of Futurists, who had already been feuding with the Milan group, formally withdrew from the movement by the end of 1914.

Second Futurism and the Fascist Connection

After the war, Marinetti attempted to revive the movement. Historians call this revival "Second Futurism" (il secondo Futurismo), and they typically divide the movement into three phases: "Plastic Dynamism" in the 1910s, "Mechanical Art" in the 1920s, and "Aeroaesthetics" in the 1930s.

The second and third phases coincided with the rise and consolidation of Italian Fascism, and here Futurism's history becomes darkest. Marinetti was an early supporter of Mussolini and helped found the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919. He saw Fascism as the political realization of Futurist principles: nationalism, violence, rejection of liberal democracy, worship of strength and action.

The relationship between Futurism and Fascism was complicated. Marinetti eventually grew disillusioned with certain aspects of the regime, particularly its accommodation with the Catholic Church and its increasingly conservative cultural policies. But he never broke with Fascism entirely, and Futurism remained associated with the regime throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

This political legacy has permanently complicated how we view Futurism. It's impossible to look at the movement's celebration of violence, its contempt for democracy, its aggressive nationalism, and its misogyny without seeing seeds of what would grow into one of the twentieth century's great catastrophes.

The Russian Variant

Futurism was not exclusively Italian. Russia developed its own version, which shared some aesthetic principles with the Italian original but had a distinct character and eventually a very different political trajectory.

Russian Futurism was primarily a literary movement, though it attracted visual artists as well. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was its most prominent figure, alongside Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchyonykh. Visual artists like David Burliuk, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in Futurist writings and often wrote poetry themselves.

Where Italian Futurism aligned with Fascism, Russian Futurism initially aligned with the Bolshevik Revolution. Mayakovsky became a prominent propagandist for the Soviet state, creating posters and poems that celebrated communist ideals. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers embraced the Futurists' theory of "Literature of Fact," which argued that Soviet art should emerge from direct engagement with material reality.

But Soviet authorities eventually grew suspicious of avant-garde experimentation. By the early 1930s, Socialist Realism had become the official artistic doctrine, and movements like Futurism were suppressed. Mayakovsky committed suicide in 1930, and most of the other Russian Futurists either fell silent, emigrated, or were purged.

The Long Shadow

Futurism as an organized movement essentially ended with World War II. But its influence continued to ripple through twentieth-century art.

Art Deco, the decorative style that dominated the 1920s and 1930s, drew on Futurism's machine aesthetics and its celebration of speed and modernity. The sleek, streamlined forms of Art Deco furniture, architecture, and graphic design echo Futurist principles, though usually without the violence and extremism.

Constructivism, the Russian movement that emerged after the Revolution, developed many ideas first explored by Futurists, particularly the embrace of industrial materials and the rejection of traditional artistic subjects. When Constructivists built monuments from steel and glass, they were fulfilling a Futurist prophecy.

Dada, the anti-art movement that emerged during World War I, shared Futurism's love of provocation and its contempt for bourgeois culture. But where Futurism worshipped machines and violence, Dada responded to the war's mechanized slaughter with horror and absurdist rejection. In a sense, Dada was Futurism's guilty conscience.

Surrealism built on Dada's provocations but moved in a more psychological direction, exploring dreams and the unconscious. The Surrealists' interest in automatism—creating art without conscious control—was partly inspired by Futurist experiments with simultaneity and intuition.

More directly, movements like Precisionism in America, Rayonism in Russia, and Vorticism in Britain developed Futurist ideas in their own national contexts. The British artist Wyndham Lewis, who founded Vorticism, was essentially doing Futurism with a British accent—the same fascination with energy and machinery, the same aggressive manifestos, the same eventual slide toward Fascist politics.

What Remains

Walk through any contemporary city and you're walking through a Futurist dream, though perhaps not exactly the one Marinetti imagined. The speed, the machinery, the constant sensory bombardment—all of it fulfills his vision of a world transformed by technology.

But we've also learned what the Futurists didn't know, or didn't want to know: that speed can kill as easily as it liberates, that machines can grind humans down as readily as they lift them up, that the worship of violence leads to horrors the Futurists never quite imagined even as they helped prepare the way.

The movement's opposite—what the Futurists contemptuously called "passéism"—now seems less like cowardice and more like wisdom. The past isn't just dead weight to be jettisoned. It's accumulated human experience, including experience of what happens when young men worship war and contempt for human weakness.

And yet. There's something exhilarating about the Futurist project, even now. They wanted to capture the feeling of modernity, the way it scrambles perception and collapses distances and accelerates everything. They wanted art that moved as fast as life. Looking at Boccioni's striding figure or Balla's blurred dog, you can still feel that energy, that insistence that art should not merely describe the world but embody its velocity.

The Futurists were wrong about almost everything important. But they were wrong in interesting ways, and some of what they were wrong about—the redemptive power of violence, the obsolescence of the past, the unstoppable march of technological progress—we're still wrong about today, just in different forms.

Perhaps that's their real legacy: not the specific paintings or sculptures, though some of those remain powerful, but the questions they raised about how art should respond to radical technological change. Every generation faces those questions anew, and every generation's answers look naive to those who come after.

The Futurists burned hot and fast, exactly as they wanted to. Most of them were dead or exhausted by the time they were forty. They left behind some extraordinary artworks, some embarrassing manifestos, and a cautionary tale about what happens when you worship speed and power without asking where they're taking you.

The motor bus is still rushing into the houses it passes. The houses are still throwing themselves upon the motor bus. We're all still trying to figure out how to see clearly when everything is moving this fast.