Born in early 20th-century Italy (and with parallel movements in other parts of Europe, from the UK and Belgium to Russia), Futurism was characterized by a passion for technology, youth (including a certain penchant for youthful violence) and urban modernity. Its passion for the new and its love of change and development were reflected in a wish to overturn the old order and establish new forms, although mainly within the traditional genres of painting, sculpture and, to a lesser extent, architecture.
In 1909 Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ in France’s largest-circulation newspaper, Le Figaro. For a movement celebrating the modern, mass-production society, the choice of mass media to communicate its message was an obvious one. Marinetti wrote:
We want to fight ferociously against the fanatical, unconscious and snobbish religion of the past, which is nourished by the evil influence of museums. We rebel against the supine admiration of old canvases, old statues and old objects, and against the enthusiasm for all that is worm-eaten, dirty and corroded by time; we believe that the common contempt for everything young, new and palpitating with life is unjust and criminal.
He found support from Italian artists including Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà – all of whom wished to explore how the heat, space, speed, violence and excitement of modern, urban life might be captured in figurative art. After finding initial enclaves of support in Milan, Naples and Turin, Futurism soon became a national, and then an international, phenomenon, and had developed a clear style of its own by the early part of the 1910s. At a famous exhibition in Milan in 1911 perhaps the star piece was Boccioni’s fragmented depiction of an urban landscape, The City Rises. He would also contribute important sculptural work such as 1913’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Other Futurists, meanwhile, adopted new technologies such as chrono-photography, which allowed for an animation-like treatment of images by projecting them across a series of frames.
The demise of futurism
Such was the Futurists’ passion for the age of the machine and all that threatened the old order that many of them embraced the arrival of the First World War. As the true nature of that conflict became apparent, the passion for ‘the new’ diminished, as did the stature of the movement as a whole. What had once seemed avant-garde and vital now appeared frivolous and irrelevant. By the war’s end, Futurism was all but dead.