A movement before it had a single painting

Futurism is the rare art movement that arrived as a press release. On 20 February 1909, the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro carried a furious, ecstatic text by an Italian poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), the Manifesto of Futurism. It declared that a racing automobile was more beautiful than an ancient Greek statue, that museums were graveyards, and that the only fit subjects for art were speed, machines, and the modern city. (One detail worth getting right, because popular accounts garble it: that famous Le Figarofront page was not the manifesto’s first appearance. It had already run in Italian printings in January and February of 1909. The Paris splash is the version everyone remembers, but it was the loud second act, not the debut.)

It also said uglier things, and they are not incidental to it. The same manifesto glorified war as “the world’s only hygiene,” cheered militarism and violence and “the destructive gesture,” and listed, flatly, among its principles, “scorn for woman.” Futurism was an exhilarating idea about painting and a nasty politics in the same breath, and you cannot really take the first without reading the second on the page right next to it. Hold both as we go.

Here is what made it strange as a launch. Marinetti was a poet, not a painter. He launched a movement of painting (and, eventually, sculpture, music, architecture, and cooking) without, as yet, a single Futurist painting in the world. The manifesto was pure ambition with no canvases under it. So Marinetti did the next thing an impresario does: he went and recruited the painters who would have to make the words true.

The man who answered most seriously was Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), a young painter trained in Rome under Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), the older artist who had introduced him to the modern color techniques we’ll come to in a moment. On 11 February 1910, Boccioni and four others (Balla, plus Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini) signed the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, first read aloud to a rowdy theater crowd in Turin that March. Two months later, on 11 April 1910, the same five signed a second, more practical document, the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. This one was the how-to. It is largely Boccioni’s thinking, and it asked for things painting had never quite managed: to put the spectator inside the picture, to paint not a frozen pose but a body still moving, and to render what it called “lines of force,” the invisible energy a moving thing throws off into the air around it.

(Keep these straight, because the internet does not. The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, February 1910, is the loud declaration. The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, April 1910, is the recipe. A third document with a similar name, the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, comes two years later, in 1912, and is Boccioni’s alone. The painting we’re about to look at belongs to the 1910 pair.)

Where that politics led is worth saying plainly, because it is easy to launder a movement into pure style. Marinetti would go on, in 1919, to help write the founding manifesto of Italian Fascism, and to spend the 1920s as a noisy backer of Mussolini. Boccioni did not follow him there: he was dead by 1916, before Fascism existed. But the militarism was in the movement from the very first manifesto, years before this painting, and it is part of what “worship of force” meant to these men. Keep it in mind in front of the great red horse, because the raw energy Boccioni found beautiful is the same energy the manifesto wanted pointed at war.

So by spring 1910 the theory was complete and the manifestos were stacked up like promissory notes. What did not yet exist was the painting that would cash them. Marinetti had announced a revolution in pictures; the pictures had to follow. The first big one was Boccioni’s, and he made it that same year.