Futurism
"We give plastic planes a plastic expansion in space, obtaining this feeling of something in perpetual motion which is peculiar to everything living."
Futurism is one of the most important Italian avant-garde movements of the 20th century. It was founded in Milan by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti who launched the Futurist Manifesto on 5 February 1909. Futurism was an artistic and social movement that celebrated advanced technology and urban modernity. Committed to the new, its members wished to destroy older forms of culture and demonstrate the beauty of modern life. They emphasized speed, technology, change, movement, violence, and the industrial city. Explore the Futurism Movement by starting from What is Futurism? and browse our curated list of artworks from futurism painters such as Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla and others.
Futurism Quotes
We Futurists are trying with the power of intuition, to place ourselves at the very center of things, in such a way that our ego forms with their own uniqueness a single complex. We give plastic planes a plastic expansion in space, obtaining this feeling of something in perpetual motion which is peculiar to everything living.
Carlo Carrà
Idealists, workers of thought, unite to show how inspiration and genius walk in step with the progress of the machine, of aircraft, of industry, of trade, of the sciences, of electricity.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
We insist that our concept of perspective is the total antitheses of all static perspective. It is dynamic and chaotic in application, producing in the mind of the observer a veritable mass of plastic emotions.
Carlo Carrà
A horse in movement is not a stationary horse that moves but a horse in a movement, which is to say something other, that should be conceived and expressed as something completely different. It is a question of conceiving objects in movement over and above the motion they carry within themselves. That is, a question of finding a form which is the expression of this new absolute.. ..A question of studying the aspects that life has taken on in haste and in consequent simultaneity.
Umberto Boccioni
[Futurism's] ..superficial expression of velocity, the aeroplane, the racing-car and so on, is but a weak expression of the inner velocity of thought compared to which the velocity of radium represents nothing but inertia.. .The mimetic expression of velocity (whatever its form may be: the aeroplane, the automobile, and so on) is diametrically opposed to the character of painting, the supreme origin of which is to be found in inner life.
Theo van Doesburg
There is movement and movement. There are movements of small tension and movements of great tension and there is also a movement which our eyes cannot catch although it can be felt. In art this state is called dynamic movement. This special movement was discovered by the futurists as a new and hitherto unknown phenomenon in art, a phenomenon which some Futurists were delighted to reflect.
Kazimir Malevich
..there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
