A movement with no paintings
Most art movements begin in a studio, and you can read the rest of this era to watch them do it: a few painters quietly working out a new way of seeing, then a critic arriving years later to give the thing a name, usually as an insult. Futurism begins the opposite way. It begins on a newspaper’s front page, with a man who could not paint at all.
On 20 February 1909 the readers of Le Figaro, the most respectable daily in Paris, opened the most respectable position in their paper, the front page, and found a roar. It was a manifesto, a public declaration of beliefs and intentions, the form a political party or a religious sect uses to announce itself to the world. This one announced an art movement. It was titled the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, and it was signed by an Italian poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was thirty-two, wealthy, Paris-educated, born in Alexandria in Egypt in 1876, and who had, as yet, not a single painter behind him and not one Futurist painting in existence. He announced the movement first. He went and found the artists afterward.
That order, words before art, is the whole reason Futurism matters as much for its method as for its pictures. It is widely called the first movement launched by manifesto, the prototype of the way the twentieth-century avant-garde (the experimental, rule-breaking front edge of art) would announce itself: not by quietly painting but by issuing a printed declaration of war on the old. Be careful with the superlative. It was not the first manifesto ever written, and the text had in fact already appeared in an Italian paper, the Gazzetta dell’Emilia in Bologna, two weeks earlier. But Paris was the capital of the art world, the place a thing had to happen to become world news, and that is exactly why Marinetti spent his money on the front page of a Paris daily. The Bologna printing was the first ink. The Le Figaro front page was the launch that mattered.
Speed, the machine, burn the museums
The manifesto comes in two parts. The first is a swaggering prose preamble, a kind of origin myth, in which Marinetti and his friends argue all night under hanging lamps, then storm out at dawn and tear off through Milan in their motorcars, drunk on speed. Swerving to miss two cyclists, Marinetti flips his car into a factory drainage ditch and goes nose-down into the muck. He hauls himself out covered in industrial sludge and treats the crash not as bad luck but as a baptism: the old, careful world is the ditch, and he has just been reborn fast and modern. Then comes the program proper, eleven numbered points fired off like rounds.
What they demand is a clean break with everything old and a worship of everything fast. The proper subjects of art, the manifesto says, are no longer the nude and the myth and the saint but the things of modern life at full throttle: the car, the tram, the electric arc-lamp, the factory, the railway station, the great machine-made crowd, and above all speed itself, treated as a new kind of beauty. Point four says it most famously: a roaring racing car, it claims, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the celebrated ancient Greek statue of a winged goddess that stands at the top of the great staircase in the Louvre. A machine beats a goddess. And the past has to go: the museums and libraries and academies are graveyards, the manifesto says, and the right response to them is demolition. It is genuinely thrilling to read, which is part of the trouble, because the same document carries its rot right out in the open.
“The world’s only hygiene”
You cannot quote the manifesto honestly and quietly drop the ninth point. Point nine is where Marinetti writes that the movement wishes to glorify war, which he calls the sole cleanser of the world (the line is more often quoted in the older English translation as “war, the world’s only hygiene”), along with militarism, patriotism, and, in the same breath, scorn for women. Point ten adds that the movement means to fight against feminism. This is not a slip of the pen or a young man’s pose that the rest of the story walks back. Marinetti meant it. He spent the next years agitating for Italy to go to war, and ten years after the manifesto he helped write the founding document of Italian Fascism (the violent nationalist movement that would put Italy under the dictator Benito Mussolini in 1922, abolish elections, and become the model Hitler’s Nazis followed in Germany). Marinetti served that regime for the rest of his life.
So Futurism is two things at once from its very first sentence. On one side, a real and electrifying revolution in art, the movement that taught Western painting how to show motion. On the other, the movement that turned art into a recruiting poster for war and, in its founder’s case, for fascism.