Futurism: Summary of Key Points
The Futurist M anifesto:
• published in a Parisian newspaper on February 20, 1909
• written before the Futurist movement actually existed; a direct challenge to the French
avant-garde which is why it was published in a French newspaper
• a call for “war” on the old but this call is made by claiming that war is the world’s best
“hygiene” a call for speed and change and the rejection of all forms of tradition
• claims that “Art can be nothing but violence, cruelty and injustice.”
What t he Futurists share:
• their artistic origins begin with divisionism (neo-impressionism)
• a pervasive interest in the city, in agitation, in dynamism of all forms as subjects of their
art
• an interest in the experience of “simultaneity” or the experience of varied types of
sensations all at once
• a rejection of cubism because they believed it was too intellectualized and too static
• a conception of reality as emotional and dynamic; they cultivated new art for its shock
value
The futurist interest in movement leads to their focus on “lines of force,” lines radiating from
the object in the painting to the field of the spectator’s vision and to the spectator’s intuition,
lines revealing the object’s “vibrations,” or in some cases, the object’s impact on the
environment. Also in some cases, this leads to an attempt to reveal the object’s
“decomposition” over time, with decomposition referring to the diffusion and diminishment of
an object’s impact over time and space.
The notion of lines of force is similar to the Russian painter Larionov’s interest in rays of
light–rays which would be emitted by any object and which exist in conflict with each other.
Through this conflict between rays of light, the painting would lead to a vision of the 4th
dimension. But this is a very different understanding of the notion of “lines of force” since one
is directly related to a “spiritual” vision while the other is related to movement, even if
movement refers to decay.
Carlo Carra on movement: “The painter of pre-Futurist days who wished to depict the daring
leap of an acrobat confined himself to a study of the solidity and elasticity of the springboard;
the leaping acrobat was treated as if he were at rest. The painter forgot the plastic
phenomenon: the leap. We Futurist painters have been the first to feel the necessity of
painting not the springboard nor the still form of the acrobat, bu the leap into its plastic
expression. This, in its synthesis, is the basis of Futurist deformation and of spatial dynamism.”
At least two of the key futurists–Antonio Sant’Elia and Umberto Boccioni–were killed in the
first world war. Although futurism did not die with the war, it did become associated (because
