In this text, exaggerating urban realities in an expressive Nietzschean manner, the poet and writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti outlined his aesthetic, ideological and geopolitical position. The first manifesto, although it was presented as a program of "reforming" poetry, still had not only an aesthetic, but also an ideological character: "Proudly straightening our shoulders, we stand on top of the world and once again challenge the stars!"
Futurism became the first avant-garde movement of the twentieth century - with its declarative nature, rejection of tradition and radicalism. The definition given in the article of the same name "Enciclopedia Italiana" by Marinetti is characteristic: "Futurism is an artistic and political movement that renews, innovative, accelerates …".
However, the name as a designation of a certain artistic direction was announced before the material appeared to which it could be attached. In the first manifesto, Marinetti declared declaratively what Italian poetry "should be", however, apart from his own heritage, he had nothing to prove the existence of the movement as a single stylistic trend. Without stopping at a newspaper publication, the "father of futurism" continued to vigorously spread his ideas: he lectured, attracted supporters, arranged recitations of his own poems and works of sympathizers, as well as fights with the "passéists" (that is, with opponents of the radical anti-traditionalism of Marinetti's ideas), and not only in Italy, but also abroad - in Madrid, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow. Figures of other types of arts began to join the movement: artists (Carlo Carra, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, 1910), musicians (Francesco Balilla Pratella, 1911), architects (Antonio Sant'Elia, 1914); manifesto of futuristic sculpture was written in 1912 by one of the authors of the manifesto of painters - Umberto Boccioni. Both in music and in the field of easel art (painting and sculpture), "futurization" took place approximately according to the script of the 1909 manifesto: first, not without the participation of Marinetti himself, the program was composed, then, accompanied by a brisk text, the public was presented with works that did not differ special novelty, but possessed a light Parisian-Viennese avant-garde flair. Only after that did the actual search for appropriate new artistic means begin.
The gap between the desired and the actual in the creativity of the futurists is incredibly significant, moreover, it is he who determines the very essence of the movement, the purpose of which is to "master" the future, when reality loses its meaning, and the ephemeral future becomes, as it were, material. And the only way to express such aesthetic aspirations is not so much artistic language as literary language, which can somehow indicate intention, hang it in time-space and fix it in history.
For example, the futuristic painting, presented in February 1912 in the Parisian gallery Bernheim-Wien, rather disappointed the audience, in spite of, and perhaps because of, the innovativeness of the program. “Many people decided,” Umberto Boccioni recalled, “that we settled on pointillism…”. The text of the catalog was more "avant-garde" than the exhibited works themselves.
Architectural futurism, on the contrary, by the time of the proclamation of the "Manifesto of Futurist Architecture" was already an established phenomenon. The works of Antonio Sant'Elia, Mario Chiattone, Hugo Nebbia, members of the Nuove tendenze group appeared at exhibitions even before the publication of the Manifesto, the text of which was Marinetti's revision of the preface of the exhibition catalog New Town. Milan 2000 "in the Milan Palazzo delle Esposizioni 1914And although the actual face of architectural futurism was formed more under the influence of the architect Wagner than the writer Marinetti, nevertheless the designation "futurism" gave a special sound to the engineering aesthetics of the works of Chiattone and Sant'Elia, largely due to which the ideas of the latter largely influenced the further development of Italian architecture in the twentieth century.
The very poetics of futurism is built "from the opposite": from decadence - purposefully towards the future, from aestheticism - to brutalism, from European "cosmopolitanism" - to national self-determination. The main provisions are antonyms to the existing realities of art nouveau and the not-so-distant fin de siècle. That is, the "new" is interpreted quite straightforwardly, as opposition to the "old", as its negation. At the same time, these are activated, purified and absolutized ideas of the same modernity: vitality, irrationality, ephemerality and destruction. The elastic line of modernity in futurism turns into a dynamic spiral, floral ornament - into a machine rhythm, synthesis - into a "Futuristic Reconstruction of the Universe".
Being the earliest avant-garde movement, futurism existed as a more or less integral concept for quite a long time, compared to other "-isms" of the 1910s - until 1944, until the death of its creator.
The chronological division of futurism into "first" ("primo", before the First World War) and "second" ("secondo" - the interwar decade) is due to the change of characters. Umberto Boccioni and Antonio Sant'Elia died in the course of hostilities ("War is the only hygiene of the world" - sounded in the 1909 manifesto). Carlo Carra, who signed the Manifesto of Futurist Artists in 1910, gradually departed from Futurism in 1914, published his book Pittura metafisica in 1919, and since 1923 participated in exhibitions of the neoclassical movement Novecento. Gino Severini also abandons his former "counter-traditional" positions and turns to the development of heritage. A similar evolution is typical for other artists, for example, those who started out as futurists Mario Sironi and Achille Funi will remain in the history of art primarily as exponents of the aesthetics of the 1930s.
Futurism did not disappear with the end of World War I, thanks in large part to its creator, Marinetti. Although, as the writer and critic Giuseppe Prezolini wrote in his book Italian Culture (1930), “the war was an occasion for rethinking and eliminating the futurist adventure. After the cannonade, no one could hear Marinetti's Dzang-tumb-tumb. " However, futurism did not give up its positions. Along with literary and artistic concepts, Marinetti turned to politics, imputing to himself the merit that it was the Futurists who were the first to put forward the slogan: "The word Italy should dominate the word Freedom." Futurism was the first artistic movement in Italy to support the Mussolini regime (supporting radical regimes is characteristic of the avant-garde), and in 1931 the latter sent greetings to Marinetti with the following content: an old friend of the first fascist battles. " And from this collaboration, at times curious "conceptual" hybrids were obtained: the title of "Academician" awarded to Marinetti, or the manifesto of "Futuristic church painting" (Arte sacra futurista).
The main characters of the "second futurism" ("secondo futurismo") were Fortunato Depero and Giacomo Balla, who proclaimed in 1915 a manifesto called "Futuristic reconstruction of the Universe", which was later joined by Enrico Prampolini. After the First World War, they began to embody the idea of a "total" work of art, constructing "environments" - from tea sets to exhibition pavilions, and productively working on the fertile soil for such experiments - in the theater. The real practice of futuristic architecture embodied the slogan of Sant'Elia's "Manifesto of Futuristic Architecture": "Houses will last less than us."
"The second futurism" continued the search for expression in the plastic form of the sensations of speed, dynamism of the megalopolis and the beauty of technology, the result of which was "aeropittura", i.e. "Air painting" is an image of reality, as it is seen at the moment of flight on an airplane.
Thus, Italian futurism during the first manifestos developed in two different directions in spirit, and the classic reminiscences of the former futurists Carlo Carr, Mario Sironi and Achille Funi in their compositional constructions and color solutions turned out to be no less logical continuation of their own futuristic artistic searches than the aeropittura of the second generations of futurists Gerardo Dottori and Tullio Krali.
Architectural futurism, despite the propaganda of Virgilio Marka, was not embodied in the realized architectural structures, with the exception of the exhibition pavilions of Prampolini and Depero and - in part - the works of Angiolo Manzoni, who signed the Futuristic Manifesto of Aerial Architecture in 1933. However, the ideas expressed in the Manifesto of Sant'Elia in 1914, as well as the graphic sheets of his series "Città Nuova", had a definite influence on the architectural process of the subsequent time, not only in Italy, but also abroad. The two main directions of Italian architecture during the interwar period - rationalism and neoclassicism - proclaimed themselves (albeit in a different way) the successors of the Italian architectural tradition. However, this did not stop at the V Milan Triennial of 1933, where the leading masters of world architecture (Melnikov, Neutra, Gropius, Le Corbusier, Wright, Loos, Mendelssohn, Perret), Italian rationalists (Pagano, Libera) and neoclassicists (del Debbio, Piacentini), in the "gallery of individual masters" to give a special place to Sant'Elia, as the predecessor of all modern Western architecture. If in the neoclassical direction the "futuristic trace" is seen rather in the "subtext" - in the desire to express the irrational, then the work of rationalists can also be traced at the formal level, which was the reason for the "mixed" stylistic attribution of the buildings of such masters as the already mentioned Angiolo Manzoni enthusiasm was received by both futurists and rationalists, as well as Alberto Sartoris, who in 1928 simultaneously took part in the "First Exhibition of Rational Architecture" and in the exhibition "Futuristic City".
The main dedication to architectural futurism (however, rather to Sant'Elia himself) is the Monument to those killed in the First World War (Como, 1930-33), designed according to one of Sant'Elia's drawings by one of the main representatives of Italian rationalist architecture, Giuseppe Terragni.
Siegfried Gidion in his book "Space, Time, Architecture" (1941), one of the first "stories" of the modern movement, begins the 20th century with futurism - the creativity of Boccioni and Sant'Elia. And here the efficacy of the printed word is interesting: the text of the Manifesto of Futuristic Architecture "Had almost greater significance and influence than his graphics. However, from Sant'Elia there are two characteristic tendencies of architecture of the twentieth century - innovative architecture and utopian design. And you can hardly find today a historical work on the architecture of the last century, in which the Città nuova project of the first futurist architect would not be mentioned.
Futurism did not introduce radical innovations in the themes of art, but offered its own concept of a new artistic vision. Among his main formal discoveries are the activity of rhythm, color and form, entailing visual aggression ("there is no art without struggle" - the words of the first manifesto), which will develop both in art and in architecture of the twentieth century; and also - the concept of immateriality and transparency of an object in motion, introduced into art ("penetration of plans" by painters and the definition of Sant'Elia architecture as "an effort to freely and boldly bring the environment and man to agreement; the projection of the spirit world "). This has become a kind of leitmotif of artistic creativity of the last century and the subject of art criticism - like the essays by Colin Rowe and Robert Slutsky "Transparency: Literal and Phenomenal."
The history of art tends to reconsider the meaning of certain phenomena and personalities in the artistic process. However, it is difficult to exaggerate the influence of futurism, which spread throughout the world in the few years before the outbreak of the First World War. Then the artistic world wanted hooliganism and disgrace, but at the same time for the first time realized the need to depict the future, to which a positive look was turned for the first time in history.
