Futurism: The Artistic Revolution and Marinetti's Manifesto

The movement began its transformation of Italian culture in February 1909, with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, written by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

Although initially printed in The Gazette of Emilia in Italy, it was reproduced a few weeks later on the front page of the famous French Le Figaro.

The manifesto called for the glorification of progress, industry, and mechanization and the removal of old ideas and institutions.

This was the first of many manifestos published by the group.

Marinetti's ideas attracted the support of artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà, who believed they could be translated into a modern and figurative art that explored the properties of space and movement.

Futurist Manifesto

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and of boldness.

Courage, audacity, and rebellion will be essential elements of our poetry.

Literature has until now exalted immobility, thought, ecstasy, and sleep.

We want to exalt aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the racing step, the leap, the punch, and the kick.

We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.

A racing car with its hood adorned with thick tubes, similar to the hissing of explosive serpents... a roaring car that runs over the machine gun is more beautiful than the Vitruvian Man.

We want to sing hymns to the man who holds the steering wheel, whose ideal axis traverses the Earth, also launched into a race on the circuit of its orbit.

It is necessary that the poet lavish ardor, splendor, and munificence to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

There is no more beauty, except in the struggle.

No work that does not have an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.

Poetry must be conceived as a violent assault on the unknown forces to force them to prostrate themselves before man.

We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, if we want to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible?

Time and Space died yesterday.

We are already living in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

We want to glorify war - the only hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of libertarians, beautiful ideas for which one can die, and contempt for women.

We want to destroy museums, libraries, and all kinds of academies, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all opportunistic and utilitarian filth.

We will sing the great agitated multitudes by work, pleasure, or subversion;

we will sing the multicolored and polyphonic tides of revolutions in modern capitals;

we will sing the vibrant nocturnal fervor of arsenals and incendiary shipyards under violent electric moons;

the stations that devour serpents that smoke;

the workshops suspended in the clouds by the twisted threads of their fumes;

the bridges, similar to giant gymnasts that ride the rivers, sparkling in the sun with a gleam of knives;

the adventurous pyres that sniff the horizon, the locomotives with a broad chest, that kick on the rails like enormous iron horses entangled with cars;

and the low-flying airplanes, whose propeller shudders in the wind, like a flag, and seems to applaud like an enthusiastic crowd.

The group was initially formed in Milan, but the movement quickly spread to Turin and Naples and, in the following years, Marinetti promoted it vigorously abroad.

While Marinetti was the main writer, theorist, and promoter of futurism, Umberto Boccioni was the artistic leader.

It is from Italy that we launch this our incendiary and violent manifesto, with which we found today the 'futurism', because we want to liberate this country from its fetid gangrene of professors, archaeologists, cicerones, and antiquarians.

It is time for Italy to stop being a market of belchiers.

We want to liberate it from the numerous museums that cover it with numerous cemeteries.

The futurist principles, in the desire to renew themselves, sought new realities that served as a reference, finding them in machines, which, according to them, transmitted: force, speed, energy, movement, and dehumanization.

The futurist thought tended towards misogyny and bellicosity, becoming a suitable basis for the fascist thought of Italian origin that followed.

In 1910, along with Balla, Carrà, Severini and Luigi Russolo, they wrote the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, declaring: "the desire to fight with all our strength against the fanatical, senseless, and snobbish religion of the past and to elevate all attempts at originality, no matter how bold, no matter how violent, to sustain and glorify in our daily world, a world that will be continuously and splendidly transformed by victorious science."

In 1911, the group presented their work for the first time at the Free Art Exhibition, in Milan.

Many of the paintings exhibited presented brushstrokes in the form of wire and the use of bright colors.

The images depicted space as fragmented and fractured and themes focused on technology, speed, and violence.

Among the paintings was The Work, by Umberto Boccioni, the first futurist painting due to its advanced style of influence cubist.

The reaction of the public was mixed.

French critics from the literary and artistic media expressed hostility, while many praised the innovative content.

To understand the rest of this journey, continue to our next article: Futurism: Dynamism, Speed, and the Notable Works of the Movement.