Futurism

FUTURISM. - It is a common opinion that F., a literary and artistic movement that burst forth clamorously with the Manifesto published by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on 20 February 1909 in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro, although imbued from its very beginnings with a fatuous dilettantism and a merely voluntaristic revolutionism, benefited Italian culture in its period of transition between Carduccian classicism and D'Annunzian decadentism on the one hand, and the new literature of the twentieth century on the other. The merit of F., in fact, lies not only in its ironic devaluation of a great deal of sentimental old rubbish, "romantic" in the pejorative sense of the term, but also in having restored the personality of the artist to its naked relation with the poetic world created.

For Marinetti, creating is "motion forward and revolution of terms and values" (Pellizzi), and F. "theorizes the closest adherence to the activism and dynamism of the modern world, hence the abandonment of stereotyped contents, of psychology, of intimate, affective motives, and the adoption of a repertoire of sensations drawn from today's life, from the new scientific and mechanical reality" (Sapegno). And, to let Marinetti speak, just as "literature has exalted, up to today, pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep," so now the Futurists want "to exalt aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the running step, the somersault, the slap and the punch." Here the inferior motives of F. leap into prominence (motives that quantitatively and spiritually were then the most substantial, unfortunately): a jumble of words without order or connection, and for that very reason "words in freedom," lyrical anarchy, mental confusion, programmatic and forced revolutionism carried to the point of the unbelievable, to the point of the ridiculous. In poetry, a din of words; in painting, an abstract whirling of lines and forms; in music, orchestral and choral compositions with intonarumori; in architecture, an abstract piling up of volumetric blocks; in sculpture, deformed plastic works to destroy staticity and exalt figurative dynamism. Moreover, the whole thing was trumpeted about with a series of lectures, conferences, manifestos, newspapers and reviews, with an intense and youthfully enthusiastic activity that may be said to have lasted, with ever-decreasing public attention, until the beginning of the Second World War.

The Futurists were Palazzeschi, Soffici, Papini, Carrà, Boccioni, Govoni, Severini, that is, some of the most important writers and artists of our century. But while for these F. was simply a human and literary experience, for others (Prampolini, Sant'Elia, Polgore, Buzzi, Balla, Corra, Depero, Russolo, Balilla, Pratella, etc.) F. was the completion and the fixed point of their entire artistic and cultural journey. With regard to religious thought and moral attitude, the Futurists, while not engaging in any particular polemic against the Faith and against the Church, were ironizing agnostics, skeptics in search of amusement. Their morality was not entirely poured out, not even in the raw state of an imperative of a mechanical conscience, in practical and propagandistic activity.

Giorgio Petrocchi
FUTURISM IN ART.
- Futurism in the field of the figurative arts, painting and sculpture above all, appears at the beginning of our century as an Italian movement of reaction against Impressionism (v.), to which, however, it is connected as is the contemporary Cubism (v.). But while Cubism has a static conception of things, whose form is understood as fixed and immutable, Futurism seeks to render the life of things themselves by depicting "the pulse," "the characteristic motion," that is, "the dynamic relationship between object and environment."

In this relationship, besides light and space, time too must find its expression, so that the artist will depict in his works "the synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees." In other words, once the object has been broken down, as the Cubists wish, into its formal elements, a sense of more or less swirling motion is imposed upon them. A gesture will no longer be a moment arrested within universal dynamism but a series of moments succeeding one another, generating a complex movement of lines and masses that convey the sense of objects themselves interpenetrating in a whirl of planes intersecting according to the motion of spirals, ellipses, triangles, or reflected in spheres, prisms, and so on.

Nevertheless, compared with Cubism, Futurism had "the disadvantage of shifting attention beyond the artistic fact instead of concentrating it, as the French movement did well or ill, on form" (Salvini, op. cit. in bibl., p. 186).

The first Futurist manifesto, in which the artistic theories of the movement were fixed, is dated March 8, 1910; others followed it, while between 1910 and 1915 the movement attracted to itself some of the most gifted Italian artists: particularly Boccioni, who was not only a painter and sculptor but also the best theorist of Futurism, Carrà, Severini, Soffici, Sironi, Balla, etc. And for all of them, even when they detached themselves from the movement, it was undoubtedly a school of freedom and daring that served to modernize the Italian artistic environment around 1910, which was still in many respects backward. In the exhibition of a substantial group of works by the leading Futurists that appeared at the Roman Quadriennale of 1948, it became evident how even in those now distant manifestations the most vital artistic qualities of the individual authors found an expression in no way ephemeral.

A place of great prominence the Futurists assigned in the field of architecture to Antonio Sant'Elia. He, who in 1914 had published a "manifesto of Futurist architecture" of his own and who only two years later died in the war fighting on the Karst, deserves to be remembered as a critic of architecture rather than as an architect (no architectures by him exist, and his drawings are more expressions of a fervid imagination spurred by a keen polemical taste than the manifestation of a builder). Some of his statements, such as: "By architecture one must understand the effort to harmonize freely" with great audacity the environment with man, that is, to render the world of things as a direct projection of the world of the spirit, or that the modern city must be understood as a "gigantic machine in which our tumult may unfold without appearing a grotesque anachronism, because only when architecture has its own rationale in the special conditions of modern life will it acquire its correspondence as an aesthetic value of our sensibility" are truly illuminating for identifying the ties that must unite modern sensibility with the most current architectural forms.

Emilio Lavagnino