Futurism - Italy

Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913–1914

Futurism in Italy 1909–1916 :

The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality

was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti

launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he

published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La

gazzetta dell'Emilia.

He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo

Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi

Russolo.

Tullio Crali, Shaking Flight - 1939

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.

Tullio Crali, The Strength of the Curve - 1930

The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive

style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911 they used the

techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down

into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been

originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others.

Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism and

following a visit to Paris in 1911. The Futurist painters

adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them

a means of analyzing energy in paintings and expressing

dynamism.

Giulio D’Anna. Il nuotatore (swimmer), 1930. Tempera on cardboard.

They often painted modern urban scenes. Carrà's Funeral of

the Anarchist Galli (1910–11) is a large canvas representing

events that the artist had himself been involved in, in 1904.

The action of a police attack and riot is rendered

energetically with diagonals and broken planes. (before you

ask, not flying airplanes, duh)

*REMEMBER reds, yellows, oranges - abstract

Funeral of the Anarchist Galli by Carlo Carrà, 1911

Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) exemplifies the

Futurists' insistence that the perceived world is in constant

movement. The painting depicts a dog whose legs, tail and

leash — and the feet of the woman walking it — have been

multiplied to a blur of movement. It illustrates the precepts

of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting that, "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.

Balla - Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

In 1912 and 1913, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate

into three dimensions his Futurist ideas. In Unique Forms of

Continuity in Space (1913) he attempted to realize the

relationship between the object and its environment, which

was central to his theory of "dynamism". The sculpture

represents a striding figure, cast in bronze posthumously and

exhibited in the Tate Modern (a modern art gallery in London).

It now appears on the national side of Italian 20 eurocent

coins.

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)