Futurism . Artistic movement that appeared in Italy around 1909 opposing the rigidity and statism of the previous systems. It gives the idea that Italy must show a new dynamism, adapt to progress and look to the future, even if it has to destroy memories of the past. He tries to present the movement and for this he draws block shapes from different points of view, just as he would do with a camera. They don’t want anything static. His favorite themes are found within urban life.
Summary
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- 1 Description
- 2 Features
- 1 Particularities
- 3 Aesthetics
- 4 Transcendence
- 5 Futuristic photography
- 6 Bibliography
- 7 Sources
Description
Futurism emerged in Milan , Italy , promoted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who wrote the Manifeste du Futurisme , on February 20 , 1909 , in the Le Figaro newspaper in Paris . This movement broke with tradition, the past and the conventional signs of art history. He considered courage, audacity and revolution to be the main elements of poetry, since aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, gymnastic gait, dangerous leap and slap were proclaimed.
It had as postulates: the exaltation of the sensual, the national and warrior, the adoration of the machine, the portrait of reality in motion, the objective of the literary and the special disposition of the written, in order to give it a plastic expression .
He rejected traditional aesthetics and tried to extol contemporary life, based on his two dominant themes: machine and movement. In this way, any expressive medium was used (plastic arts, architecture, urban planning, advertising, fashion, cinema, music, poetry) capable of creating a true art of action, with the purpose of rejuvenating and rebuilding the face of the world.
The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti compiled and published the principles of Futurism in the 1909 manifesto . The following year the Italian artists Giacomo Balla , Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini signed the same.
characteristics
Futurism was an avant-garde that sought to reflect movement, dynamism, speed, the internal force of things, the exaltation of war, machines, the national and the sensual and everything that was modern. This movement broke with the traditional, the past and academicism.
Prominent examples are the Dynamic Hieroglyph of Bal Tabarin ( 1912 , Museum of Modern Art, New York ) and the Suburban Train ( 1915 , Richard S. Zeisler Collection, New York), both by Gino Severini . In the field of photography, the Bragaglia brothers and their moving images stood out, offering successive times and a trajectory of gestures, as in Carpintero serrando or Joven rocking.
In 1914 the first drawings about a modern city by Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone were also presented . That same year Sant’Elia presented his Manifesto of futuristic architecture , a utopian project that crystallized in the images of the New City: the new measure was no longer the building, but the urban structure, and it was also betting on new typologies , such as train and airplane stations, power plants, tiered houses with elevators …
It was a new vertical and mechanical world, connected through networks of iron and glass elevators.
Although Futurism had a short existence, approximately until 1914 , its influence is appreciated in the works of Marcel Duchamp , Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay in Paris , as well as in Russian Constructivism .
In 1915 some of the representatives of Futurism, such as Marinetti and Sant’Elia, enrolled in a battalion of volunteers, in accordance with point nine of its founding decalogue, where war was extolled as the only hygiene in the world. Some of them died, like Sant’Elia, and the others radicalized their positions, such as the well-known conversion to fascism in the 1919 elections .
Particularities
- Exaltation of originality.
- Movement structures: time, speed, energy, force, etc.
- Content related to the modern world, cities and cars, its bustle and dynamism. As well as machines, sports, war, etc.
- Use of shapes and colors to generate rhythms.
- Glowing colors
- Transparencies
- Multiplication of lines and details, similar to the succession of images from a kaleidoscope or a film, (as a result it gives the impression of dynamism).
Esthetic
Marinetti conceived this new aesthetic, inspired by Alfred Jarry and Remy de Gourmont’s Pataphysics and stylistic procedures, which this literary movement did not assume, with respect to any previous formal or cultural tradition. Futurism was named for its intention to completely break with the art of the past (the so-called Pasadismo ), and for considering that museums, especially in Italy, were equivalent sites to cemeteries, where the common artistic tradition permeated everything. .
Futurism
According to Marinetti, it was necessary to make a clean slate of the past and create a new art, from scratch, in accordance with the modern mentality and the new realities. For this, machines and their virtues are taken as a model: force, speed, speed, energy, movement, dehumanization.
In literature, Futurism completely abjures the past and encourages not to respect the metric. Likewise, he tries to replace the algebraic links and search for a lexicon radically made of technicalities and barbarisms, riddled with infinitives, exclamations and interjections that denote energy and freedom.
The so-called synthetic theater of Futurism is the space in which the actions occur at breakneck speed, with plots of no more than ten minutes, and where human presences are hidden, and only the feet of the actors are seen, whose figures are guess by metonymy.
Futurist aesthetics proclaims an ethic, fundamentally macho, misogynistic and provocative. Among its postulates, war is dignified as a formula for the sanitation of an anachronistic and decrepit world and proscribes sentimental or anecdotal arguments.
Futurism was a fundamentally Italian movement with a literary character (Marinetti), although it had important expressions in art (the Argentine painter Emilio Pettoruti and the Italian painters Gino Severini , Carlo Carrà , Giacomo Balla or the sculptor Umberto Boccioni ).
He also had adhesions in other artistic manifestations, in architecture (Antonio Sant’Elia) and in music (the Noise of the composer Luigi Russolo , direct antecedent of the so-called concrete music).
Futurism also had some followers in Russia (the poet Vladímir Maiakovski ), in Belgium (the writer Émile Verhaeren ), in Portugal ( Fernando Pessoa , who published the movement through the Orpheu magazine , 1915 ) and in Uruguay (the poet Alfredo Mario Ferreiro ); However, after reaching its peak, in the mid-twenties, the futuristic aesthetic was disintegrating until it disappeared in the 1940s.
Transcendence
The importance that Futurism had, beyond its artistic merits, at the beginning of the 20th century , was to recreate an aesthetic from scratch, thus making possible a spectacular renewal of artistic principles and techniques, which still has consequences, even today.
It was the first of the artistic avant-gardes and its value as a rupture movement paved the way for the other currents that refreshed the artistic panorama at the dawn of the 20th century.
In general, we must understand the concept of futurism in the strict sense, as that art that makes a radical critique of the past and seeks to open new paths to aesthetic expression, emphasizes the representation of speed as the most characteristic element of the modern world. Obviously, to represent speed in a painting, one must try to apprehend the movement of the figures and this was the greatest contribution of futurism: the superposition of planes, so that the forms acquire dynamism. For the rest, the different authors have a personal style, which does not identify them as current, beyond their common desire for movement, speed and fleeting scenes. If anything, they share a taste for loose brushstrokes and bright colors and certain references to the cubist style.
Futuristic photography
In the field of photography, the Bragaglia brothers and their moving images stood out, offering successive times and a trajectory of gestures, as in Carpintero serrando or Joven rocking.
In 1914 the first drawings about a modern city by Antonio Sant’Elia and Mario Chiattone were also presented. That same year Sant’Elia presented his Manifesto of Futuristic Architecture, a utopian project that crystallized in the images of the New City: the new measure was no longer the building, but the urban structure, and it was also betting on new typologies , such as train and airplane stations, power plants, tiered houses with elevators … It was a new vertical and mechanical world, connected through networks of iron and glass elevators.
Although Futurism had a short existence, approximately until 1944 -finished with the death of Marinetti- its influence is appreciated in the works of canonical authors such as Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay in Paris, as well as in the definitive Russian constructivism.
In 1915 some of the representatives of Futurism, such as Marinetti and Sant’Elia, enrolled in a battalion of volunteers, in accordance with point nine of its founding decalogue, where war was extolled “as the only hygiene in the world”. Some of them died, like Sant’Elia, and the others radicalized their positions, such as the well-known conversion to fascism in the 1919 elections.
