In 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched Futurism the way other people launch a product: with a press release. The art came later, when he went and recruited the painters, who then taught Western painting something it had never managed, how to show motion happening over time, the dog’s legs blurred into a fan, the building site churning, the body dissolved into lines of force. Their subject was the machine age at full throttle, the car and the tram and the electric light and the crowd. It is also the movement whose founder glorified war as the world’s only hygiene and went on to help write the founding manifesto of Italian Fascism, so the story has to carry both halves at once.
For as long as there had been painting, a picture froze a single instant. A horse, a dancer, a train were each caught in one fixed pose, in one fixed light, the way a photograph stops a clock. Even the most modern pictures, the bright Impressionist boulevards, the wild Fauve colors, the early Cubist still lifes, showed a world that was standing still, however oddly. And the proper subjects of serious art were still the old ones: the nude, the portrait, the landscape, the myth.
Look at Balla’s dachshund instead. The little dog trots along a sunlit path at the end of a lady’s leash, and Balla paints not one dog but the smear of a dog in motion: the four legs multiplied into a blur, the swinging leash repeated into a fan of arcs, the lady’s own feet stuttered into a row of steps. Nothing is frozen. The picture is trying to show the same legs in many positions at once, time itself laid out across the canvas.
Two moves stack to make it. First, the Futurists borrowed Cubism’s trick of breaking an object into faceted planes, but aimed those planes at speed and motion instead of a static studio object; they thought Cubism, for all its cleverness, stood perfectly still. Second, they threw out the old subjects entirely and painted the machine age, the car, the tram, the arc-lamp, the construction site, the rioting crowd, as the only fit subjects for modern art. Motion and the machine become the content.
“A roaring motorcar, which seems to race on like machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.”
“We wish to glorify war, the sole cleanser of the world, militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.”
“We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice.”
Most movements get named after the fact, by a critic, usually as an insult. Futurism arrived as a press release. In 1909 a poet who had never picked up a brush bought the front page of a Paris newspaper and announced a movement, then went and found the painters.
The manifesto is gorgeous, brutal, and not safely quotable. It wants to burn the museums; it calls a racing car lovelier than a Greek goddess; and in the same breath it glorifies war as the world’s only hygiene and preaches scorn for woman. Those last lines are not a youthful slip you can skip past. Marinetti meant them.
Ten years later he helped write the founding manifesto of Italian Fascism and served Mussolini for the rest of his life. The manifesto that launched a thrilling revolution in art is the same document that turned art into a recruiting poster for war. Both halves are true at once, and the page below is where you can read it whole.
