Futurism
Its key figures included Italian artists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Fortunato Depero, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Luigi Russolo.
"[1] Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism, Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Balla's 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound, and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913).
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.
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.
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.
Boccioni's The City Rises (1910) represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control.
"[14] The work attempts to convey feelings and sensations experienced in time, using new means of expression, including "lines of force," which intend to convey the directional tendencies of objects through space; "simultaneity," which combines memories, present impressions and anticipation of future events; and "emotional ambience" in which the artist seeks by intuition to link sympathies between the exterior scene and interior emotion.
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.
The adoption of Cubism determined the style of much subsequent Futurist painting, which Boccioni and Severini in particular continued to render in the broken colors and short brush-strokes of divisionism.
The Futurists held their first exhibition outside of Italy in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, Paris, which included works by Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla.
The sculpture represents a striding figure, cast in bronze posthumously and exhibited in the Tate Modern (it now appears on the national side of Italian 20 eurocent coins).
He said that, after making twenty pictures in which he had studied the velocity of automobiles, he understood that "the single plane of the canvas did not permit the suggestion of the dynamic volume of speed in depth ...
The Futurist Manifesto had declared: "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.
[26] The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the movement, as were Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchyonykh; visual artists such as David Burliuk, Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Lyubov Popova, and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in the imagery of Futurist writings, and were writers themselves.
Poets and painters collaborated on theatre production such as the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun, with texts by Kruchenykh, music by Mikhail Matyushin, and sets by Malevich.
The Florence station was designed in 1932 by the Gruppo Toscano (Tuscan Group) of architects, which included Giovanni Michelucci and Italo Gamberini, with contributions by Mazzoni.
In the face of this mediocrity and conservatism, Pratella unfurled "the red flag of Futurism, calling to its flaming symbol such young composers as have hearts to love and fight, minds to conceive, and brows free of cowardice."
The score calls for a percussion ensemble consisting of three xylophones, four bass drums, a tam-tam, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, a siren, two "live pianists," and sixteen synchronized player pianos.
The altitude of a flying plane, the power of a car's motor, and the roaring loud sounds of complex machinery were all signs of man's intelligence and excellence which the art of dance had to emphasize and praise.
Poetry, the predominant medium of Futurist literature, can be characterized by its unexpected combinations of images and hyper-conciseness (not to be confused with the actual length of the poem).
Works in this genre have scenes that are few sentences long, have an emphasis on nonsensical humor, and attempt to discredit the deep rooted traditions via parody and other devaluation techniques.
[39] Its cultural importance was considerable and influenced all subsequent avant-gardes, as well as some authors of narrative cinema; its echo expands to the dreamlike visions of some films by Alfred Hitchcock.
[40] Most of the futuristic-themed films of this period have been lost, but critics cite Thaïs (1917) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia as one of the most influential, serving as the main inspiration for German Expressionist cinema in the following decade.
"[44] Within F. T. Marinetti's The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, two of his tenets briefly highlight his hatred for women under the pretense that it fuels the Futurist movement's visceral nature: 9.
[45] Casati, affluent host of parties in support of the Futurist artists in Marinetti's circle, was thought to be the muse of several of them, including Bragaglia and Balla.
They tended to oppose Marinetti's artistic and political direction of the movement, and in 1924, the socialists, communists and anarchists walked out of the Milan Futurist Congress.
Aeropainting was launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Cappa, Depero, Dottori, Fillìa, Marinetti, Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni).
Crispolti identifies three main "positions" in aeropainting: "a vision of cosmic projection, at its most typical in Prampolini's 'cosmic idealism' ... ; a 'reverie' of aerial fantasies sometimes verging on fairy-tale (for example in Dottori ...); and a kind of aeronautical documentarism that comes dizzyingly close to direct celebration of machinery (particularly in Crali, but also in Tato and Ambrosi).
Major figures include Fortunato Depero, Marisa Mori, Enrico Prampolini, Gerardo Dottori, Mino Delle Site, and Crali.
Echoes of Marinetti's thought, especially his "dreamt-of metallization of the human body," are still strongly prevalent in Japanese culture, and surface in manga/anime and the works of artists such as Shinya Tsukamoto, director of the Tetsuo (lit.
