7.3 — Futurism & the Machine Age
Futurism, launched in Italy in 1909 by F. T. Marinetti’s manifesto, exalted speed, technology, and urban energy. Artists fractured form and multiplied contours to render motion, embracing the machine as the emblem of a new age.
Manifesto Culture
Marinetti’s texts called for the destruction of museums and a break with the past. Futurist artists issued their own manifestos on painting, sculpture, architecture, and even cuisine, promoting dynamism and anti-traditionalism.
Definition: Dynamism
The Futurist principle of depicting movement and energy through repeated contours, force lines, and rhythmic fragmentation.
Painting Futurism
- Umberto Boccioni: “States of Mind” series; “Dynamism of a Soccer Player.”
- Giacomo Balla: “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,” “Abstract Speed + Sound.”
- Carlo Carrà: “Funeral of the Anarchist Galli” — political turmoil rendered as swirling force.
- Gino Severini: Parisian dance halls, trains, and war subjects fragmented into vibrating planes.
Sculpture and Space
Boccioni’s “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” twists the human figure into aerodynamic volumes, rejecting static mass for flowing momentum. Futurist sculpture embraced mixed materials and open, interpenetrating forms.
Architecture & Design
Antonio Sant’Elia envisioned vertical cities with elevated walkways, power stations, and glass-and-steel dynamism—anticipating later modernist skylines. Futurists designed posters, stage sets, and typography with slanted text and diagonal thrusts.
The Machine Age Beyond Futurism
- Vorticism (Britain): Wyndham Lewis and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska fused machine geometry with Cubist fracture.
- Constructivism (Russia): Post-1917 focus on industrial materials, utilitarian design, and graphic agitation.
- Precisionism (U.S.): Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler depicted factories and skylines with crisp, hard-edged clarity.
Note: War and Contradiction
Futurists initially glorified war as “hygiene of the world.” World War I’s devastation, and Boccioni’s death in 1916, exposed the costs of this rhetoric, reshaping avant-garde attitudes toward violence and technology.
Techniques for Motion
- Force Lines & Repetition: Echoing limbs, wheels, and contours to imply speed.
- Fragmented Planes: Borrowed from Cubism to break objects into trajectories.
- Diagonal Composition: Tilted axes and slashing diagonals suggest thrust and acceleration.
Legacy
Futurism’s fascination with velocity and machines influenced later modern design, kinetic art, and graphic futurity. Its methods of motion depiction filtered into advertising, film montage, and digital aesthetics of speed.
Looking Ahead
Next, Chapter 8.1 moves to Dada and Surrealism, where anti-war absurdity and dream logic explode conventional meaning.