Styles & Periods

Futurism

Futurism is an early 20th-century art movement centered in Italy and announced in the 1909 "Futurist Manifesto" by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Futurism emphasized the vitality of the machine above all, and the speed, power and energy of modern life. In his Manifesto, Marinetti discarded what he saw as the irrelevant art of the past; he celebrated invention, originality and change. Futurism glorified technology and conceived of the beauty of violent conflict; it was openly inflammatory and bombastic, seeking to dismantle museums and libraries and to celebrate the vigor of machines, such as the automobile. Violence was glorified, and many Futurists were active in revolutionary and anarchistic movements. Force and motion were their supreme foci. Along with Marinetti, the Futurists included Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. Influenced first by Post-Impressionism, the Futurists developed alongside and independently of Parisian Cubism, which they denounced as lifeless. The Futurists lauded heroism, patriotism and courage, and they sometimes responded with physical violence to criticism of their agenda. In the militancy of their stance, they clearly heralded the avant-garde strains of modernism. Their work demonstrates a preoccupation, not only with the modern world's flood of visual stimuli, but with the temporal storm of fast, violent, powerful machines relentlessly propelling the world into the future.