Futurism for beginners: speed, noise and the machine

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Most art movements are named by critics. Futurism named itself, loudly, on the front page of a newspaper. In February 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti announced that a roaring racing car was more beautiful than an ancient Greek statue, and that museums should be flooded. Painters followed, trying to put speed, noise and electric light onto canvas. It is thrilling art, and it carries a warning.

Three layers

Historical What the works and records show. Later tradition The legends. Modern How we see it now.

The manifesto

Historical Marinetti’s Founding and Manifesto of Futurism appeared in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. It praised speed, machines, the city and youth, and in the same breath praised war as “the world’s only hygiene” and declared scorn for women. A year later the painters published their own manifestos. Futurism was a movement of manifestos: about painting, music, cooking, clothing and even lust.

Painting speed

Umberto Boccioni, The Street Pavers, 1914. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (1990.38.5). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical Umberto Boccioni (1882 to 1916) learned from Cubism how to break forms, and added movement and energy. In The Street Pavers (1914), at the Met, the workers bend and strike until their bodies dissolve into the rhythm of their work. His bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), a striding figure pulled by wind, now appears on the Italian 20 cent coin. In Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), Giacomo Balla painted a dachshund whose legs blur into dozens as it trots, and studied the flicker of electric streetlights.

Noise and Russia

Historical Luigi Russolo wrote The Art of Noises (1913) and built noise machines, an ancestor of electronic music. In Russia, painters like Natalia Goncharova and Kazimir Malevich mixed Cubism and Futurism into Cubo-Futurism. In 1913 Malevich designed the opera Victory over the Sun, in which the sun is captured; one of his stage designs contained a black square.

Women and Futurism

Historical Despite the first manifesto, women answered back. In 1912 the dancer and poet Valentine de Saint-Point published a Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, arguing that women too had strength and wildness. Later Benedetta Cappa, who married Marinetti, painted dreamy aerial views and in 1933 and 1934 created five large murals on communication for the post office in Palermo, which are still there today.

The esoteric angle

Historical Futurism looked like pure machine worship, but the scholar Simona Cigliana has shown an esoteric strand. Balla and others read Theosophy, and the brothers Arnaldo Ginna and Bruno Corra experimented with abstract film and color music while writing about occult ideas. Boccioni’s paintings of “states of mind” tried to show invisible forces between people.

Later tradition Boccioni volunteered for the war the movement had praised and died in 1916 after a fall from a horse during military training. Many Futurists, Marinetti above all, later supported Mussolini’s Fascism. The 2014 Guggenheim exhibition was one of the first large shows in the US to face that history directly.

Modern Futurism reminds me that a beautiful style can carry an ugly message. I try to look at both.

Try it yourself

Take a photo of something moving, a dog, a bicycle, a hand waving, with a slow shutter or just a shaky phone. Then draw it, keeping the blur. Where does the movement live: in the object, or in the space around it?

Before and after

Before this: Cubism.

After this: Early abstraction.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.