What is Futurism?

Defining Futurism 

Futurism was an avant-garde art movement originating in Italy in the early 20th century. Its primary principle was the celebration of the modern world, revelling in the technological, industrial, and social developments modernity brought. Most avant-garde movements reappraised the function of art, looking to subvert the representational and figurative work that previously dominated western culture. Futurism was no exception, offering an extreme vision for the future of art and society alike. In Italy, historic cultural standards were particularly oppressive, with students and scholars coming from far and wide to study the greats like da Vinci and Michelangelo. Futurism was developed by a spirited young group of painters, poets, and composers who were in direct opposition to the artistic standards these classical Italian figures maintained. The futurists expressed this resistance through the idolatry of machines. Rather than looking to historical ideas and relics for artistic understanding, the Futurists proposed a radical detachment from history in favour of a vigorous adoption of the future’s promises. This manifested as a glorification of accelerated transportation and industry, the exaltation of youth and violence, and the dynamism of abstraction.

The Futurist project was one that traversed the polarities of nationalism and internationalism, art and mechanisation. Primarily due to its celebration of War and its relationship with the fascist regimes of Mussolini, Günter Berghaus notes that ‘Italian Futurism fell into oblivion or was treated with great mistrust and suspicion’ (1012, 1). In International Futurism in Arts and Literature, Berghaus asserts that, since the 1960s — ‘once the old prejudices had been removed’ — it is now generally agreed that ‘Futurism, at least up until the First World War, was one of the most original and prolific elements of the modernist movement’ (2012, 1).

The Manifesto of Futurism

The Manifesto of Futurism was written by poet and Futurist founder, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1908. It was first published in the preface to a collection of Marinetti’s poetry in 1909 and went on to appear in Italian and French newspapers later that same year. Largely due to its radical acceptance of the machine age and the intended controversy that this entailed, it has become one of the most well-known artistic manifestos in history.

Marinetti was determined to establish Italy not as a harbourer of ancient history but as a pioneer in the advancement of industry.

To this end, Marinetti wrote:

Marinetti’s method of freeing Italy from the oppression of its cultural past was to ‘destroy the museums, libraries, academies of all kind’ (2016). By disconnecting the promise of the present from a hindering past, the Futurists hoped to establish their home as an unstoppable force of forward motion.

Allusions to this acceleration feature heavily in The Manifesto of Futurism. Alongside the celebration of ‘war’, ‘militarism, patriotism’ and ‘rioting’, Marinetti asserted that the Futurists ‘affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed’ (2016). This concept of speed was a guiding principle in the creation of Futurist works; it symbolised the methodology of Futurism through the arrival of new transportation technologies. 

Marinetti continues by evoking the image of,

For the Futurists, the beauty of nature and ancient ruins had been exceeded by the beauty of the machine, especially one that sanctioned speed and dynamism.  

With this machine, Marinetti posited that ‘time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed’ (2016). Between the availability of automobiles and air travel, as well as the arrival of the telephone and telegraph, modernist technologies saw the world shrink with accelerated movement and the quickened spread of information. For the Futurists, this was a powerful dissolution of the confines of time and place. The modern machine represented the ability to be all-knowing and ‘omnipresent’, a circumstance that would prove nature and history weak and obsolete. The project laid out in The Manifesto of Futurism was one that facilitated liberation from the trappings of the past in Italy and farther afield.  

The Futurists acknowledged that ‘when the future is barred to them, the admirable past should be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sick, the prisoner’ (2016). ‘But’, Marinetti continues, ‘we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!’ (2016).

The Futurist aesthetic 

With the soft and still precision of Italian classicism and neoclassicism looming large, the Futurists turned to the machine and the concept of speed to escape their cultural history. This is observable in much of their work. Painter Giacomo Balla captured the exciting speed of modernity. His famous painting Street Light (1909) depicts an electrical streetlamp emitting a bright and colourful light. Towards the top right corner of the canvas, a crescent moon is barely noticeable, absorbed by the explosive light coming from the streetlamp. The streetlamp would have been an unusual subject at the time and exhibited the Futurist’s keen interest in technology. The moon — an emblem of the steadfast natural world and a more common painterly subject for Italian renaissance or romantic works — fades into the background, dwarfed by the power of this new urban light source. Furthermore, the painting style shows small, jagged, and colourful brush strokes that have become indicative of the Futurist depiction of speed and dynamism. From the reverence of technology and the dissolution of symbols of the past, to the visual representation of modernist acceleration, Balla’s Street Light exemplifies the project of Futurism.

Umberto Boccioni was another artist whose work has become emblematic of the Futurist movement. His 1913 sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, is a bronze rendering of a vaguely human form, made up of abstract curves and edges. Appearing half human, half machine, Boccioni’s sculpture is understood by critics and theorists to be an idealised depiction of the mechanisation of the human body. With the rise of industrialization came the treatment of the human body as a machine, designed for productivity. The Futurists were fascinated by the industrial worker; the closer humans approximated machines, factories, and the urban landscape, the better. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space shows the power and movement of this abstract human-machine hybrid, typifying the dynamism of the Futurist aesthetic. It is a sculptural work that exemplifies the way that Futurism ‘anthropomorphised, eroticised and fetishised modern technology in escapist function’ (Pizzi, 2019). 

Both Balla’s Street Light and Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space exhibit the Futurists subversion of traditional standards of aesthetic beauty; Balla through the subject matter of a streetlamp and Boccioni through the abstract rendering of mechanical shapes. Neither would be a feature of renaissance or classical art, which was precisely the point. They hoped instead to usher in a new artistic era of machines and technology.

The legacy of Futurism

Because of its fraught relationship with history and politics, Futurism did not prove to be a particularly durable avant-garde movement. Futurism’s ideas of Italian supremacy, violence, and power aligned it with the growing fascist movement after the First World War. By the start of World War II some Futurists even explicitly supported Fascism, with several suggestions of a ‘collaboration’ between Marinetti and Mussolini (2012, 2). 

Although Futurism’s influence on fascism is contentious, Berghaus affirms that,

As a result of this political affiliation, Futurism’s popularity declined after the war as the idolization of mechanical power and violence waned. As Katie Pizzi proposes in Italian Futurism and the Machine, it became the opinion, after the horrors of war, that in the machine age, ‘intense dynamism, rapid exchanges and fast modes of travelling are achieved at the expense of reflection, analysis and contemplation’ (2019). Hence, the Futurist project lost its attraction.

Renewed interest in Futurism from the 1960s onwards has reconsidered the movement as an important moment in cultural history. In 2009, a series of exhibitions of Futurist works were hosted by some of the biggest modern art galleries like MoMA and Tate Modern to commemorate the publication of The Manifesto of Futurism 100 years earlier. It is worth noting the  irony of the Futurist call to ‘flood the museums!’ when those institutions kept public consciousness of the movement alive a century later. Despite its importance to European cultural history, the artistic offerings of Futurism were not particularly stirring to gallery-goers. In One Hundred Years of Futurism, John London claims that these 2009 Futurist exhibitions and the reviews they received ‘did much to consolidate a general perception of its mediocre artistic achievements and quaint obsolescence’ (2018). Although Futurism may not have had the same lasting influence or respect as movements like Cubism, Dada, or Surrealism, traces of the Futurist aesthetic can be found in science fiction subgenres like steampunk and Futurism’s dynamic shapes remain a recognized painting style. Despite some of the more unsavoury aspects of the Futurist movement, it has proven to be a fascinating object of study for what it reveals about the tensions of the early 20th century and what abstract expressions of speed, technology, and pure modernity might look like.

Further Futurism reading & resources on Perlego:

Cubism and Futurism by R. Bruce Elder.

Russian Cubo-Futurism, 1910-1930 by Vahan D. Barooshian.

Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy by Nicolas Fernandez-Medina, Maria Truglio.

Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism by Anthony White

Bibliography

Berghaus, Günter. International Futurism in Arts and Literature. 1st ed. De Gruyter, 2012.

London, John. One Hundred Years of Futurism. Intellect Books, 2018.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. The Manifesto of Futurism. Passerino, 2016.

Pizzi, Katia. Italian Futurism and the Machine. 1st ed. Manchester University Press, 2019.