Art that embraces the new, industrialized world order of the 20 th century

Futurism is an Italian artistic style that first began as a literary movement founded in 1909 by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and later became an artistic movement in 1919. The famous painters of this group are Carlo Carra, Jacomo Bella, Umbreto Boccioni , Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini. They published their first manifest in reference to painting in 1910 and in 1912 and 1914 also published two more on the arts of sculpture, music, film-makings and architecture. Emerging from the violent changes in society and industry in that time period, the Futurists wanted to reflect a new, modern world order that moved at a pace never been seen before. They were deeply involved in the politics of the time, openly aggressive in their mentality and played the role of philosophical contributors to the rise of Fascism in Italy under the iron thumb of Mussolini. Much of their inspiration came from the French philosopher Henri Bergson in his essay “L'Evolution Creatrice”, in which Bergson places enormous importance on the natural evolution of events in history. The elements of progress, especially the technological changes taking the world by storm were not only inevitable, they were also moral and just. The essential factors to keeping this evolution going were the concurrent forces of dynamics and motion. For the Futurists, this would translate into color and form, composition and perspective.

The importance of speed and machinery as icons of progress

Industrialization was changing peoples life styles and all around could be seen the differences that these changes brought on. These were also the main characteristics of the group- past precision movement, mechanism and technology. In the very early period the most obvious artistic influence on the group came from the Neo-Impressionists and many of the Futurist paintings utilize the same technique of dissecting colored spots into smaller, purer colors. Speed was a new dimension to be dealt with and a chaos of flickering, recurring patterns and spots seemed to express the sense of speed with which the new world rushed by every day. Scenes of the city as seen from a high speed train, the sharp movements of some machine repeatedly moving back and forth, again and again. The Futurists preferred the celebration of this new world order over the sentimental, nostalgic look at the past and what would no longer be. They exhibited twice in Italy and then moved on the England , France , Holland and Germany . In France they came aware of the Cubist group and this influenced them greatly, driving the style to the direction of abstract imagery.