Artworks

In 1909, a group of wild, speed-worshipping Italian boys wrote a manifesto they called 'Futurism'. Thus was born one of the most politically incorrect but dynamic ISMs of the 20th century.

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Transcript

Extracts from the First Futurist manifesto, 1909:

'We will sing the great masses agitated by work, pleasure, or revolt; we will sing the multicoloured and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals; the nocturnal vibration of arsenals and docks beneath their glaring electric moons; greedy stations devouring smoking serpents, factories hanging from the clouds by the threads of their smoke; bridges like giant gymnasts stepping over sunny rivers sparkling like diabolical cutlery; adventurous steamers scenting the horizon; large-breasted locomotives bridles with long tubes; and the slippery flight of aeroplanes whose propellers have flag-like flutterings and applauses of enthusiastic crowds...

'We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed. A race-automobile adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath....a race automobile which seems to rush over exploding powder is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

'There is no more beauty except in struggle, no masterpiece without the stamp of aggressiveness. Poetry should be a violent assault against unknown forces to summon them to lie down at the feet of man.

'We will glorify war the only true hygiene of the world, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas one dies for and the scorn of woman.

'We will destroy museums, libraries and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice.'

Futurism. It's one of the least politically-correct art movements of the 20th century and arguably one of the most influential. On 20 February 1909, the French newspaper Le Figaro published the Futurist Manifesto on its front page. It's hard to imagine any paper doing this today. The author was Italian poet and publisher Filippo Marinetti and his manifesto was a call to arms for all writers and artists who were sick of everything traditional and, god-forbid, respectable.

His philosophy glorified danger, daring and revolt. Speed was the new god, manifested in the automobile and the aeroplane. Industrialisation, technology and noise were the future, as was war, and the past, especially the worship of Italian antiquity, was to be smashed. It worshipped youth; 'the oldest among us is thirty', the manifesto boasted, 'so we have ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let others, younger and more daring men -- throw us into the waste-paper basket like useless manuscripts!'

Marinetti was already 33 but he knew how to provoke, and through his soirees and theatrical happenings organised in his home town Milan and other Italian cities, he got maximum publicity. At these Serata Futurista, audiences were told to boo rather than applaud and fighting was encouraged. The whole aim of the exercise was to create scandal and send a shiver down the spines of bourgeois citizens.

Futurism as an art movement happened a year later with yet another manifesto by five young artists, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrą, Gino Severini and Giacomo Balla. With their manifestos (there were two, a general one 'A Manifesto of Futurist painting' and the 'technical manifesto of Futurist Painting') they established the Futurists not just as artists but as brilliant practitioners of manifestoism, later copied by the Dadaists, Surrealists and dozens of other groups and movements of the 20th century. Later Futurist manifestos had provocative titles such as 'Let's Murder the Moonlight' 'Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine'; 'The Art of Noises', 'Against the Professors'

So what was their work like? At its best, it brilliantly evokes speed and motion and pulls the viewer into the middle of the painting. Like Cubism, images are often fragmented. To show the blur of motion, a figure might have a dozen legs, or in a painting like Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, the individual becomes an indistinct part of the crowd. The viewer's vantage point is often vertiginous, the buildings crowd in and look like they will topple at any moment, search lights rake the skies and trains hurtle past. Colours are raw, brilliant, reds, blues, yellows, violet.

As well as painting, Futurism encompassed a wide range of art forms. You could say it was the first multi-media movement; sculpture, architecture, photography, film, literature, theatre, ballet, music, even food was grist for experiment. Skyscrapers, photographs using multiple exposure, mad theatrical happenings. The futurists invented the metallised man as a symbol of humanity's mechanised future eight or nine years before the term robot was coined by Czech writer Karel Capek. Boccioni's humanoid sculptures prefigure cyborgs and a race of super-heroes.

Although Futurism started in Italy, it greatly influenced other movements in other countries. In 1912, a St Petersburg group called Hylaea, which included the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, published a Futurist manifesto called 'A Slap in the Face of Public Taste'. This movement was more literary than artistic and like Marinetti's movement, experimented with text and typography. To a Futurist, the shape of letters and words and their place on the page were as important as their meaning.

In Britain the Vorticists took up some of the ideas of Marinetti, although its founder Percy Wyndham Lewis was hostile to a lot of what the Futurists stood for.

It's what they stood for that has made the Futurists controversial;
Marinetti was a Fascist and initially aligned with Mussolini.
The first wave of Futurism died with the First World War. A second wave was more politically aligned, although many admirers of Futurism were of the Left as well as the Right.

The second wave of Futurism, after WWI penetrated the worlds of domestic design and gave birth to Aeropainting, paintings done as if from a cockpit of a plane. Tullio Crali's paintings Nose-diving on the City 1939 and Air Battle 1 1936-8 are brilliant in giving a sense of whirling through the air at great speed but they are disturbing because they are pitiless poems to aerial bombardment. There aren't any bombs falling yet, but you know they will fall.

Whilst in no way excusing the violent values of Futurism, it was born at a time when 19th century values were being challenged by mass political movements and revolution was in the air. Communism, anarchism, fascism, were the new religions, and hindsight gives us a horrible awareness of what happened once these ideologies were unleashed. Carra, Balla and Severini turned away from futurism before the First World War and the architect Sant'Elia died in battle. Boccioni died in a riding accident in 1916. Marinetti sold out, becoming a professor at the Italian Academy.

Offensive, exciting, provocative, exhilarating, misogynistic, virile, fascist, stupid... the Futurists created a visual language that persists in science fiction films (Ridley Scott'sBlade Runner pays homage to Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia), in comics and in design. And every generation throws up iconoclasts who want to tear down what went before.

Presenter

Fiona Gruber

Story Researcher and Producer

Suzanne Donisthorpe