Not just painting, a way of living
Futurism never stayed inside the picture frame, because it was never really about painting alone. Marinetti’s idea was a total program, a wholesale remaking of modern life, and so the manifestos kept coming, for sculpture, for photography, for theatre, for cooking, even for clothing. The point was to drag every corner of life into the machine age.
It even had a live arm. The Futurists staged what they called serate, “evenings,” rowdy stage events at theatres in Milan, Turin, Rome and beyond. A serata was not a performance so much as a scripted ambush: the Futurists would take the stage in front of a paying crowd, read incendiary manifestos and free-word poems, insult the audience and the city’s most sacred local heroes, and wait for the room to turn. It usually did, into jeering, then thrown vegetables and coins, then outright brawls and the occasional arrest. That was the goal; the riot was the art. The serata was Futurism’s most direct invention, the artistic event staged to provoke, and it became the template for the noisy public provocations of Dada a few years later.
Russolo and the noise machines
Start with sound. Russolo, who had begun as a painter, put down his brushes and effectively invented noise music. In 1913 he wrote a manifesto called The Art of Noises, which argued that the modern ear, raised on factories and engines and trams, was bored by the polite sounds of the orchestra and craved the actual noise of the machine age. Then he built the instruments to make it. He called them intonarumori, which means “noise intoners,” a family of boxes with cranks and levers and horns that produced rumbles, hisses, roars and shrieks on command, a machine-age orchestra of pure noise. It sounds like a joke and it was a foundation: Russolo’s noise machines are one of the starting points of twentieth-century experimental and electronic music.
Sant’Elia’s New City
Then architecture, and the drawings are extraordinary objects in their own right. Antonio Sant’Elia, a young architect, drew a visionary metropolis he called the Città Nuova, the “New City,” and wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Architecture (1914) to go with it. Look at one of the sheets and you see a single colossal building drawn at a steep upward angle, like a tower photographed from the gutter: a stepped, set-back power station, sheer and many storeys tall, its elevators run up the outside of the wall in glass and steel shafts instead of being hidden inside, and below it the streets, the tramlines and the railways stacked in open layers one above another. No columns, no domes, no ornament, no nod to a single thing built before. It is a city designed for speed and electricity rather than for monuments, and it looks like nothing that existed in 1914. Almost none of it was built, and Sant’Elia did not live to build any of it, but the drawings shaped how the whole twentieth century pictured the city of the future.
Marinetti’s words in freedom
Marinetti, for his own part, kept writing, but he attacked the page itself. He pushed a style he called parole in libertà, “words in freedom”: poems with the grammar torn out, the words scattered across the page at different sizes and angles and typefaces, sometimes mixed with mathematical signs and onomatopoeia, the layout doing the work that sentences used to do. His showpiece was Zang Tumb Tumb (1914), a book-length sound-poem about a battle he had reported on in the Balkans, in which the title itself is the noise of the artillery and the typography lurches and explodes to mime the bombardment. It reads less like a poem than like a page trying to be an engine.
Valentine de Saint-Point
Now the part the movement’s admirers tend to skip. The manifesto’s scorn for women was not an accident, and it did not go unanswered. In 1912 a French writer and performer named Valentine de Saint-Point published a Manifesto of the Futurist Woman, and she pointedly subtitled it “An Answer to F.T. Marinetti.” What makes her interesting is that she did not simply scold him. She out-radicalized him: she rejected the soft, muse-like idea of woman just as fiercely as he did, and demanded a fierce, strong, even violent womanhood to match the violent age, and the next year she pushed further with a scandalous Futurist Manifesto of Lust (1913). She took Futurism’s own logic and turned it back on its misogyny.
Marinetti himself later offered a defense, worth reporting precisely so it can be measured. He claimed that “scorn for woman” had been aimed at the old sentimental-muse cliché and not at actual women. That is his after-the-fact gloss, and it does not survive contact with point ten of the founding manifesto, which calls in plain words to fight against feminism. You do not get to scorn the cliché and outlaw the movement for women’s rights in the same breath and then say you only meant the cliché. And the movement leaned on women even as it scorned them in print: Benedetta Cappa, a serious painter who would become one of the leading figures of Futurism’s aerial-painting second phase, was also Marinetti’s wife. Futurism scorned women on the page and depended on them in fact.