FUTURISM. — It is a common opinion that Futurism, a literary and artistic movement that arose with a clamorous impact, was launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s manifesto published on 20 February 1909 in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro. Though from its very beginnings it was steeped in dilettantism and a merely voluntaristic revolutionary spirit, it did benefit Italian culture during its transitional period between Carducci’s classicism and D’Annunzio’s decadentism on the one hand, and the new literature of the twentieth century on the other. The merit of Futurism indeed lies not only in its ironical devaluation of much of the old sentimental “romanticism” in the pejorative sense of the term, but also in having restored the artist’s personality to its naked relationship with the poetic world he creates.
For Marinetti, creation is “forward motion and revolution in terms and values” (Fellizzi), and Futurism “theorizes the closest adherence to the activism and dynamism of the modern world, thus abandoning stereotyped contents, psychology, intimate and affective motifs, and adopting instead a repertoire of sensations drawn from today’s life, from the new scientific and mechanical reality” (Sapegno). To let Marinetti speak for himself, just as literature has “exalted, until now, thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and yearning,” so now the Futurists wish “to exalt aggressive movement, feverish advancement, the running step, the somersault, the slap and the fist.” Here the more questionable aspects of Futurism come to the fore (aspects that quantitatively and spiritually were later to prove the most substantial, alas: a jumble of words without order), such as “words-in-freedom,” lyrical anarchy, mental confusion, and a programmatic and forced revolutionism verging on the absurd and ridiculous. In poetry, a cacophony of words; in painting, an abstract whirl of lines and forms; in music, orchestral and choral compositions with noise-instruments; in architecture, an abstract arrangement of volumetric blocks; in sculpture, distorted plastic forms to destroy staticity and exalt figurative dynamism. Moreover, all this was trumpeted through a series of lectures, congresses, manifestos, newspapers and journals, with an intense and youthfully enthusiastic activity that may be said to have lasted, albeit with ever-diminishing public attention, until the outbreak of the Second World War.
Futurism — Dynamism of a Footballer, by U. Boccioni (1910).