futurism

futurism, Italian school of painting, sculpture, and literature that flourished from 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first manifesto of futurism appeared, until the end of World War I. Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla were the leading painters and Umberto Boccioni the chief sculptor of the group. The architect Antonio Sant' Elia also belonged to this school. The futurists strove to portray the dynamic character of 20th-century life; their works glorified danger, war, and the machine age, attacked academies, museums, and other establishment bastions, and, in theory at least, favored the growth of fascism. The group had a major Paris exhibition in 1912 that showed the relationship of their work to cubism. Their approach to the rendering of movement by simultaneously representing several aspects of forms in motion influenced many painters, including Duchamp and Delaunay. Futurist principles and techniques strongly influenced Russian constructivism.

Bibliography

See studies by M. W. Martin (1968), J. Rye (1972), U. Apollino (1973), C. Tisdale and A. Bozollo (1985), and M. Perloff (1989).

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Futurism

Early 20th-century art movement, centred in Italy, that celebrated the dynamism, speed, and power of the machine and the vitality and restlessness of modern life. The term was coined by Filippo Marinetti, who in 1909 published a manifesto glorifying the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed and power. In 1910 Umberto Boccioni and others published a manifesto on painting. They adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several views of an object simultaneously with fragmented planes and outlines and used rhythmic spatial repetitions of the object's outlines in transit to render movement. Their preferred subjects were speeding cars and trains, racing cyclists, and urban crowds; their palette was more vibrant than the Cubists'. With Boccioni, the most prominent Futurist artists were his teacher, Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), and Gino Severini (1883–1966). Boccioni's death in 1916 and World War I brought an end to the movement, which had a strong influence in postrevolutionary Russia and on Dada.

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Futurism

Literary, artistic, and political movement. Futurism, which began in Italy about 1909, was marked especially by violent rejection of tradition and an effort to give formal expression to the dynamic energy and movement of mechanical processes. Its most significant results were in the visual arts and poetry. Futurism was first announced in a manifesto by Filippo Marinetti. The principal Italian Futurist artists were Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), and Gino Severini (1883–1966). Russian Futurism, founded soon afterward by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Velimir Khlebnikov (1885–1922), went beyond the Italian model in its revolutionary political and social outlook. The movement's influence had ceased to be felt by 1930.

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futurism

an artistic movement that arose in Italy in 1909 to replace traditional aesthetic values with the characteristics of the machine age
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