Search results
People also ask
What does Futurism mean?
What is Futurism based on?
What is Russian Futurism?
What does a Futurism writer do?
1. : a movement in art, music, and literature begun in Italy about 1909 and marked especially by an effort to give formal expression to the dynamic energy and movement of mechanical processes. 2. : a point of view that finds meaning or fulfillment in the future rather than in the past or present.
- Overview
- Painting and sculpture
Futurism, early 20th-century artistic movement centred in Italy that emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life. During the second decade of the 20th century, the movement’s influence radiated outward across most of Europe, most significantly to the Russian avant-garde. The most-significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry.
Futurism was first announced on February 20, 1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro published a manifesto by the Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti coined the word Futurism to reflect his goal of discarding the art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society. Marinetti’s manifesto glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power, and movement. Exalting violence and conflict, he called for the sweeping repudiation of traditional values and the destruction of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries. The manifesto’s rhetoric was passionately bombastic; its aggressive tone was purposely intended to inspire public anger and arouse controversy.
Marinetti’s manifesto inspired a group of young painters in Milan to apply Futurist ideas to the visual arts. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini published several manifestos on painting in 1910. Like Marinetti, they glorified originality and expressed their disdain for inherited artistic traditions.
Although they were not yet working in what was to become the Futurist style, the group called for artists to have an emotional involvement in the dynamics of modern life. They wanted to depict visually the perception of movement, speed, and change. To achieve this, the Futurist painters adopted the Cubist technique of using fragmented and intersecting plane surfaces and outlines to show several simultaneous views of an object. But the Futurists additionally sought to portray the object’s movement, so their works typically include rhythmic spatial repetitions of an object’s outlines during transit. The effect resembles multiple photographic exposures of a moving object. An example is Balla’s painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), in which a trotting dachshund’s legs are depicted as a blur of multiple images. The Futurist paintings differed from Cubist work in other important ways. While the Cubists favoured still life and portraiture, the Futurists preferred subjects such as speeding automobiles and trains, racing cyclists, dancers, animals, and urban crowds. Futurist paintings have brighter and more vibrant colours than Cubist works, and they reveal dynamic, agitated compositions in which rhythmically swirling forms reach crescendos of violent movement.
Boccioni also became interested in sculpture, publishing a manifesto on the subject in the spring of 1912. He is considered to have most fully realized his theories in two sculptures, Development of a Bottle in Space (1912), in which he represented both the inner and outer contours of a bottle, and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), in which a human figure is not portrayed as one solid form but is instead composed of the multiple planes in space through which the figure moves.
Futurist principles extended to architecture as well. Antonio Sant’Elia formulated a Futurist manifesto on architecture in 1914. His visionary drawings of highly mechanized cities and boldly modern skyscrapers prefigure some of the most imaginative 20th-century architectural planning.
Exclusive academic rate for students! Save 67% on Britannica Premium.
Learn More
a new way of thinking in the arts that started in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to express through a range of art forms the characteristics and images of the modern age, such as machines, speed, movement, and power. SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases.
Futurism ( Italian: Futurismo, Italian: [futuˈrizmo]) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy, and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city.
Futurism definition: a style of the fine arts developed originally by a group of Italian artists about 1910 in which forms derived chiefly from cubism were used to represent rapid movement and dynamic motion.. See examples of FUTURISM used in a sentence.
Feb 5, 2019 · Movements. Futurism. Started: 1909. Ended: 1944. "We want to fight ferociously against the fanatical, unconscious and snobbish religion of the past, which is nourished by the evil influence of museums.
noun [ U ] art, literature, architecture, music, theatre & film us / ˈfjuː.tʃɚ.ɪ.z ə m / uk / ˈfjuː.tʃ ə r.ɪ.z ə m / Add to word list. a new way of thinking in the arts that started in the 1920s and 1930s that tried to express through a range of art forms the characteristics and images of the modern age, such as machines, speed, movement, and power
