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HISTORY
Italy's Futurist Painters
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The iconic works of arts from the Italian Futurist movement of the early 20th Century.
By Will Street
Jul. 25, 2019, 11:30 AM
Introduction
At the beginning of the 20th Century, artists across Europe began to produce artworks that broke away from the classical style of the Academy that had guided painters since the Renaissance period. What had been stringent diagonal lines and perspective, evident in the paintings of Canaletto for instance, now found itself in the 20th Century with the rule book completely turned on its head.
In Italy, at the beginning of the 20th Century, a style began to emerge that was labelled “futurism.” Stylistically, viewers were met with explosive lines of force and fragmentation of the image, that drew its inspiration from Cubists artists painting at a similar time across France. Below, I explore the Futurist painters of Italy in more detail.
Futurist Artists' Approach to "The Modern"
Futurist art is commonly described as “modern” art. It was indeed the very futurists artists who labelled themselves as such. The artists aimed to achieve what they described as a transformation of the mentality of an anachronistic society through art, aside other mediums, conveying and befitting the modern era. One of the most important founders of the movement was the Italian poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who verbally proclaimed, “Let’s go… Friends away! Let’s go! Mythology and the Mystic Ideal are defeated at Last!” and vividly called for the destruction of old art forms. It was Marinetti who founded the movement, initiating it with his announcement of the Futurist Manifesto in 1909 in Le Figaro.
The leaders of this movement were Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Balla, and Severini. Together they launched the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters in 1910 and further the Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto later in 1910. These manifestos outline the aesthetic aims of the movement. Futurism originated as ideas-lead movement, stressing its literary rationale in the multitude of manifestos, finding artistic expression for these ideas secondarily. The aims of these manifestos does not necessary result absolutely in successful accomplishment. Indeed, the Futurist Boccioni was, for instance, criticized at a Venice exhibition July 1910 by one commentator for the gap between his “bold words and temperate pictures.” Nonetheless the, Futurist movement has left behind a wealth of artistic masterpieces, a selection of which I explore below.
Futurist Artworks
An important artwork, that expresses the core new style of the futurists, is found in the form of Russolo’s Dynamism Of a Car (1912). Here, Russolo uses abstract colour and six diagonal lines facing the direction of the motion of the car to convey its speed. The lines increase in size behind the vehicle, evoking its speed. It links back to what Boccioni had written the futurist technical manifesto that artists must reproduce in art no longer a “moment in the universal dynamism which has been stopped, but the dynamic sensation itself, perpetuated as such.” The use of “lines of force” was viewed as abiding to the credentials set forth by writers such as Boccioni and, as such, was incorporated in the Futurist’s visual language.
Fragmentation is developed further in Severini’s Dancer at the Tabarin (1912) where the pictorial space is significantly fragmented to express the sensation of viewing the dancer in motion. Dancer at the Tabarin reflects the Futurist appropriation of the Cubist aesthetic form, which had been pioneered among the Futurists by Severini, having lived and worked in Paris for a period in 1911, and who introduced Boccioni, Russolo and Carrà to Picasso and Braque during their visit in 1912. We can observe the appropriation of the Cubist fragmentation of the image in other Futurist works, evident for example in Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913). In Cubist composition objects are fractured into fragments “so that the viewer does not have to move through space within a certain period of time to view them in sequence.” In Cubist theory, outlined in Gleizes and Metzinger’s Du Cubisme, “qualitative” space is the “pictorial analog" to temporal heterogeneity, which the Cubists aim to portray. The Cubists could therefore present diverse elements of an object simultaneously, outside of time or, in the futurists’ case, the speed of the object.
Taking with it speed and also time, the futurist aesthetic could also incorporate psychological emotions in its visual language. Boccioni’s States of Mind triptych (1911) addresses the different feelings associated with the modern world. The first painting, The Farewells (1911) depicts a schematic train with embracing figures in the cloud of smoke as the train gets ready to depart. The second, Those who Depart (1911) presents the view of a train travelling through the night merging the faces of the passenger with the outside world in a unified sense of speed. The final painting, Those who Stay (1911) depicts in sombre mood those who have remained at the departure point. Boccioni States of Mind triptych is an attempt to express the state of the mind experiencing “the modern”. Boccioni wrote, “we must consider the work of art in painting and sculpture as a construction of a new, inner reality, which, obeying a law of pictorial analogy virtually unknown to us, constructs the elements of external reality. Through this analogy – which is the essence of poetry itself – we attain to the pictorial states of mind.”
Finally, the futurists also sought to offer an ontological perspective. “Being” and the nature of oneself in the newly modern world they lived in, was on their list of objectives for analysis. Boccioni stated the aim of his artwork is “to represent reality in its essential manifestations.” To do this, Boccioni takes influence from the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Bergson’s epistemology distinguished between objective knowledge, akin to scientific knowledge, and subjective knowledge, which is the “projection of our intimate self-awareness on the external world”, termed by Bergson as “Intuition”. Intuition is, Bergson argues, the guide to the “true” nature of Reality. Subjective experience, therefore, offers ontological insight. The “reality” searched for by Boccioni is revealed in movement. This leads to an attempt to render a synthetic and not analytical impression of movement, which Boccioni does in his painting Elasticità (1912). It is a highly dynamic depiction of a horse-rider, which renders “transcendent truths about the ontological status of matter” through a subjective paradigm of the motion depicted, rather than give a fixed configuration
Conclusion
Futurist artworks are a mainstay of modern art galleries right up the present day. What had been the pinnacle of the advancement of art in the early 20th Century, soon moved on to other forms of modern art such as fauvism, surrealism and expressionism. Nonetheless, Italian Futurism rightly deserves a prominent spot in the modern art hall of fame.