On April 11, 1910, a group of young Italian artists published Futurist Painting: A Technical Manifesto, in an attempt to apply the writer Fillippo Tommaso Marinetti’s views on literature to the visual arts. As our textbook mentions, Marinetti had “called for a radical renewal of civilization through courage, audacity, and revolt,” referring to “a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed.” In their Futurist painters’ manifesto, Boccioni, Cara, Russolo, and Ball emphasize the same belief in a modern age, a world so different due to the Second Industrial Revolution that not even the world of art remained unchanged:
What was true for the painters of yesterday is but a falsehood today…the vivifying current of science [must] soon deliver painting from academic tradition…We declare…that all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified…that all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed…that movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.
In such language, the idealism of scientific progress, of the present, the modern as superior to all that had come before, is very evident. These high-minded notions came on the heels of new developments in the arts and sciences that challenged tradition in every sphere of society. However, as the text notes after its short introduction to the futurists and their ideas, strongly foreshadowing the troubled ahead, “few Europeans embraced the modern era with the unflinching abandon of the futurists.”
What was true for the painters of yesterday is but a falsehood today…the vivifying current of science [must] soon deliver painting from academic tradition…We declare…that all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified…that all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed…that movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.
In such language, the idealism of scientific progress, of the present, the modern as superior to all that had come before, is very evident. These high-minded notions came on the heels of new developments in the arts and sciences that challenged tradition in every sphere of society. However, as the text notes after its short introduction to the futurists and their ideas, strongly foreshadowing the troubled ahead, “few Europeans embraced the modern era with the unflinching abandon of the futurists.”
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