The Futurists

The Futurists where a group of artists who where around at the time of WW1 and WW2, in Italy. They where obsessed with modern life, machinery,the city, cars and speed. They tried to put the spectator at the center of their artwork.

Marientti was one of the famous futurists:

The Futurists aimed to create “words in freedom”, which means that they mixed, or jumbled up type from how it was usually presented. They where also very fond of manifestos.

Marinetti published the Futurist manifesto in a French far-right newspaper.Here is a small part of it:

“Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.

Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.

“Come, my friends!” I said. “Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.”

He also wrote out several rules for Futurists to follow:

“We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.”

“Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.”

“We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.”

“We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.”

Marinetti stated in this that he thought war was good, as it provided a clean slate for the world, and that music should be the sounds of the city, Marinetti himself was friends with Mussolinni.

Balla, Boccioni and Fortunato Depero where some other Futurist artists.