Futurism Italy Giacomo Balla Abstract Speed Sound 1913

Futurism - Italy Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound, 1913– 1914

Futurism in Italy 1909– 1916 : The founder of Futurism and its most influential personality was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto, which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo.

Tullio Crali, Shaking Flight - 1939

Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past", he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists!" The Futurists admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists.

Tullio Crali, The Strength of the Curve - 1930

The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911 they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been originally created by Giovanni Segantini and others. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism and following a visit to Paris in 1911. The Futurist painters adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analyzing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism.

Giulio D’Anna. Il nuotatore (swimmer), 1930. Tempera on cardboard.

They often painted modern urban scenes. Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910– 11) is a large canvas representing events that the artist had himself been involved in, in 1904. The action of a police attack and riot is rendered energetically with diagonals and broken planes. (before you ask, not flying airplanes, duh) *REMEMBER reds, yellows, oranges - abstract

Funeral of the Anarchist Galli by Carlo Carrà, 1911

Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) exemplifies the Futurists' insistence that the perceived world is in constant movement. The painting depicts a dog whose legs, tail and leash — and the feet of the woman walking it — have been multiplied to a blur of movement. It illustrates the precepts of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting that, "On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

Balla - Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)

In 1912 and 1913, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) he attempted to realize the relationship between the object and its environment, which was central to his theory of "dynamism". The sculpture represents a striding figure, cast in bronze posthumously and exhibited in the Tate Modern (a modern art gallery in London). It now appears on the national side of Italian 20 eurocent coins.

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913)