EARLY 20TH CENTURY ABSTRACTION

Futurism & The Age of Machinery

Futurism came into being with the appearance of a manifesto published by the poet Filippo Marinetti on the front page of the February 20, 1909, issue of Le Figaro. It was the very first manifesto of this kind.

Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists. He and others espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. Futurism was presented as a modernist movement celebrating the technological, future era. The car, the plane, the industrial town were representing the motion in modern life and the technological triumph of man over nature. Some of these ideas, specially the use of modern materials and technique, were taken up later by Marcel Duchamp (French, 1887-1968), the Cubist, the Constructivist and the Dadaist.

Futurism was inspired by the development of Cubism and went beyond its techniques. The Futurist painters made the rhythm of their repetitions of lines. Inspired by some photographic experiments, they were breaking motion into small sequences, and using the wide range of angles within a given time-frame all aimed to incorporate the dimension of time within the picture. Futuristic works were marked by an effort to give formal expression to the dynamic energy and movement of mechanical processes. Brilliant colors and flowing brush strokes also assisted in creating the illusion of movement. Futurism influenced many other 20th century art movements, including Art Deco, Vorticism, Constructivism and Surrealism.

Futurists mixed activism and artistic research. They organized events that caused scandal. Everything was there to help them to glorify Italy and lead their country into the age of modernity. Certain Futurists vehemently promoted themselves to try to join forces with the Fascists, who were coming to power at the time. But Mussolini showed a preference for the Novecento Italiano, movement of artists who identified with the classical order and Italian heritage.

Futurism was a largely Italian movement, although it also had adherents in other countries, France and most notably Russia. Close to Futurism with its inspirations and motivations was Precisionism, an important development of American Modernism.

Although Futurism itself is now regarded as extinct, having died out during the 1920s, powerful echoes of Marinetti's thought, still remain in modern, popular culture and art.

Interest and appreciation of machinery was clearly in the air in the early decades of the 20th century. For a group of young Italian "Futurist" artists, the progress offered by machinery epitomized their increasing fascination with dynamic speed and motion. Though they translated this idea of progress into a frenetic exultation of the glory of war and the destruction of museums, their visual understanding of motion remained exciting.

The Italian Futurists, like the members of Die Brücke in Germany, aimed to free art from all its historical restraints and celebrate the new beauty of the modern age. Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Gino Severini (1883-1966), and Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), who all joined Futurism in 1910, wanted to express the onrush of events in the world with pictures of motion, dynamism, and power. In Street Noises Invade the House (1911), Boccioni attempts to give this sensation and succeeds remarkably well. Noise becomes something seen, something literally invasive of privacy. Boccioni said of the picture: "all life and the noises of the street rush in at the same time as the movement and the reality of the objects outside." The surging incoherence of the forms is both chaotic and ordered.

ADDITIONAL INSIGHT INTO FUTURISM AND THE FASCINATION WITH MECHANICAL PROCESS

Prior to the Fist World War, some painters took the significant step to move away from figuration and imitation. Instead of representing a moving car they gave expression to movement by means of abstract forms, as in Giacomo Balla's Abstract Speed. What these paintings show is that to represent a new concept of space, i.e. space-time, it was necessary to do it with a new formal vocabulary.

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Modern Art of the 20th Century which has inspired me!"
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