A cause goes looking for its artists
Amanifesto with no art is a stunt. To become a movement, Futurism needed people who could actually make things, and within a year Marinetti had them. He gathered a handful of young painters, mostly in Milan, some in Rome, and signed them up to his cause. What Marinetti gave them was not a technique, which he did not have, but a banner, a publicity machine, and permission to be as loud and modern as they wanted.
They were not interchangeable, and it is worth telling them apart, because the rest of the story keeps splitting along their differences. Umberto Boccioni (born 1882) was the engine of the group, an intense, theoretical man who argued in print as hard as he painted and who wanted, as he put it, to show that everything moves and runs and turns at top speed; he would push furthest, all the way into sculpture. Giacomo Balla (born 1871) was the odd one out by a decade, the eldest, the teacher, a patient experimenter who had taught the younger men their craft and would end up chasing the painted blur further toward pure abstraction than anyone. Carlo Carrà (born 1881) was the political one, drawn to crowds, riots and funerals, the painter of the mob. Gino Severini (born 1883) was the cosmopolitan, the one who actually lived in Paris and knew everybody. And Luigi Russolo (born 1885) was the youngest and the strangest, a painter who would soon get bored of paint and walk off to invent a new kind of music. Five very different men, one borrowed banner.
In 1910 they paid Marinetti back in the only currency the movement traded in: manifestos. In February they issued the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, signed by all five, and in April the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, largely written by Boccioni. The April document is the one that actually says how to paint. It demands the painting of what it calls the dynamic sensation, the felt energy of things in motion, and a “universal dynamism” in which nothing is ever truly at rest. It rejects the nude. It is, for the first time, an aesthetic program and not just a slogan, the painters working out what the poet’s noise was supposed to look like on canvas.
Italian Divisionism
The textbooks tend to skip this: at this moment, in 1910, these men were not yet doing anything that looks like the Futurism you have seen. They were not Cubists, they had not yet been to Paris, and their canvases shimmer with an entirely Italian technique called Divisionism. Divisionism is the Italian cousin of the French pointillism of Georges Seurat: instead of mixing colors on the palette and laying down a smooth field, you paint in many small separated dots and strokes of pure unmixed color and let the viewer’s eye blend them, which makes the surface vibrate with a peculiar inner light. The Italians had their own line of it through Previati, Segantini and Pellizza da Volpedo, and Balla had learned the method and taught it to the younger men. So early Futurist pictures shimmer with little broken strokes of bright color before they ever learn to fracture into planes. The light comes first. The motion comes later.
There was a second pull on them too, this one from a machine. In the years just before Futurism, the photographers Étienne-Jules Marey in France and Eadweard Muybridge in America had been making what are called chronophotographs, sequences that froze a galloping horse or a running man into a row of separate instants on one plate, the body caught in a dozen positions at once. Those motion studies were famous and widely reproduced, and they prefigure the most recognizable Futurist trick of all, the multiplied limb, the single body shown in many positions across one image. The camera had already chopped motion into frames. The Futurists would paint the frames back into a blur. By 1910 the painters had their shimmering color and a head full of motion studies, but still no way to make a canvas actually move. That tool was about to be handed to them, by their rivals, on a train trip to Paris.
