Dali House

I could remember only a couple of things about futurism from my art history course at university – speed, and Umberto Boccioni’s fast little statuette, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”, of which I made a drawing at the time.

I was never quite sure of the fuel behind this flamboyant bunch of hard-nosed Italians who seemed to love the fascists as much as they worshipped motion and, being quick, burned out just as fast as Mussolini.

Gino Severini’s “Armoured Train in Action” from 1915

Reading again about them lately, it surprises me that some didn’t end up like Il Duce, hung by the heels, quite dead, and spattered with rotten tomatoes. It’s eseential to be passionate about one’s art, but these guys would beat you up, noisily and with great gusto, if you disagreed with their point of view.

Then again, the futurists created some wonderful paintings, sculpture, poetry and prose, and if my art history prof had had the time, he might have placed this in front of me:

“We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned radiance of electric hearts.”

That is how Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s manifesto of futurism begins. That’s where the fuel was that I couldn’t locate. Le Figaro published it in Paris on February 20, 1909. That’s when the world first heard of futurism.

“We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness,” the Jesuit-reared son of a wealthy Italian lawyer wrote separately, forever immersed in manifesto. “Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.”

You don’t seem to get artists talking like this anymore. They talk in corporate riddles now. Invited to elucidate about meaning, they bluff about aesthetics.

Sant’Elia, Boccioni and Marinetti, off to blow something up.

But when I first learned about the futurists, I was working from a synthesis of shallow cliches. In that framework, I could understand the appeal of anarchy, but preferred mine less bullying, more whimsical, like the dadaists – art as a prank (and be careful of laughing, because sometimes the prank is profound).

Like dada, futurism had had quite enough of all the nonsense of its era, within the art world and without. Religion, politics, education and labour had become swamped by a dreary redundancy that needed dynamiting. The lot of the common man was too hemmed in by tradition. Shiva was whispering in the ears of revolutionaries.

There were airplanes in the sky, fast trains and cars rocketing through the rising cities. Technology was showing the way to a chromed, energetic future, and yet citizens were still going hungry for enlightenment. The past had to be murdered in its drugged sleep.

The year 1909 seems quaintly archaic now, all straw boater hats and penny farthing bicycles, but Marinetti, working alone, had heaved a gas can into the crowd, and the fire spread. The following year Boccioni (pictured right), Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini wrote a pair of “Manifestos of Futurist Painters” (there would be 200 of these by the time the futurists were finished, most of them deliberately inflammatory to seize attention and spur controversy):

“We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time.”

Adherence to traditional ways was denigrated as “pastism”, and anyone old-fashioned enough to defend it was just asking for an awakening smack in the face. In order to foment change and nurture originality, libraries and galleries would have to be pulverised, and war itself might well be necessary.

Russolo, Carra, Marinetti, Boccioni and Severini in Paris in 1912.

From the nuts and bolts of cubism, anarchy and a general ennui overlayed with individual frustrations, the futurists moved over the course of two decades through geometric abstracts, machine art and Aeropittura, or “aero-painting”, and their literature, theatre and music soared to the heights of their architecture. They influenced fashion, food and even toys.

Among the more infamous outcrops:

* Luigi Russolo’s 1913 theorem “The Art of Noises” resulted in an orchestra of “Noise Intoners”, 27 different amplified instruments that imitated industrial sounds – buzzes and shrieks and crackles and explosions.

“We enjoy creating mental orchestrations of crashing down of metal shop blinds, slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffle of crowds, the variety of din from the stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning mills, printing works, electric power stations and underground railways,” he wrote in his own manifesto.

Anticipating everyone from John Cage to Public Image Ltd, Russolo’s heavy-metal suite, “Awakening of a City”, was performed with Marinetti’s help in 1914. The program: Awakening of Capital, Meeting of cars and aeroplanes, Dining on the terrace of the Casino and Skirmish in the oasis. It ended in a melee between the musicians and the audience.

* In 1914, in a magazine called Blast that lasted all of two issues, Wyndham Lewis (the painter who also wrote, not the funny writer) unleashed a whirlwind called Vorticism, an English cousin to futurism, which drew on and dispersed influences from Ezra Pound to Marshall McLuhan.

The handful who bravely made up UK’s first abstract art movement – among them David Bomberg, whose “Mudbath” is seen here – regarded cubism as too static and futurism’s depiction of movement lacking randomness. There’s a fine website about it.

* Marinetti still earns raves today for being far ahead of his time as a typographer. His concept of parole in liberta (roughly, “words in freedom”) involved breaking down the “tyranny” of the paragraph and sentence through free-floating text.

The idea reached full fruit in 1927 with Fortunato Depero’s bolted-together book in which multicoloured text was printed on different kinds of paper, in typefaces of varying sizes and geometric shapes. The script meandered all over the place, so you had turn the book round and round to read it – like a machine.

In 1932 Marinetti had a go at topping Depero with a book entirely printed on metal sheets and containing different textures, scents and, somehow, temperatures.

* That same year, Marinetti rocked Italian kitchens with a cooking manifesto. “La cucina futurista” primarily advocated freedom from pasta, which he derided as an un-nutritious tummy-filler that caused “lethargy, pessimism and nostalgic inactivity”. The fascist government loved it – the wheat needed to make pasta was an expensive import.

Replace it on the plate, he demanded, with flowers, exotic fruit, coffee and raw eggs. To enhance degustation, spray warmed perfumes in the dining room, and give the diners textured materials like velvet and sandpaper to stroke with their left hands. (That’s just my Photoshop conception of a platter show here.)

On Marinetti’s menu were sardines with pineapple, salami with coffee and cologne, and an aphrodisiac made of pineapple juice, eggs, cocoa, caviar, red peppers, nutmeg and cloves.

Given their penchant for clearing out and moving forward, it was inevitable that the futurists would embrace the fascists when they came to power in Italy, and the conflicts that the fascists stoked. Marinetti revelled in the destruction of the First World War. In 1915 he published “War: The World’s Only Hygiene”:

Boccioni’s “Charge of the Lancers”, painted a few months before he was killed by charging lancers.

“As long as the war lasts let us set aside our verse, our brushes, scapels and orchestras! The red holidays of genius have begun! There is nothing for us to admire today but the dreadful symphonies of the shrapnels and the mad sculptures that our inspired artillery molds among the masses of the enemy.”

Boccioni should have stuck to his machines – he died after being thrown from his horse. In July 1915 he and Marinetti and Russolo marched gaily off to the front, enlisting in the Lombard Cyclists Brigade. A year later, reassigned to an artillery regiment, Umberto was chucked from his steed during a cavalry exercise and mortally trampled.

Boccioni’s “Unique Forms of Continuity” lived on to illustrate an Italian 20-euro coin, but the war killed futurism too, though not entirely because Italy lost.

Marinetti survived the racket, shells and hooves, and the year after World War I ended, while shacked up with a much younger woman, he wrote a manifesto called “Against Marriage”. They married in 1923. It couldn’t have been so bad, because he lived another 21 years.

Futurism’s legacy from a narrow point of view: the Terminator and Japanese manga. More positively, it had an affair with abstraction while cubism wasn’t looking and sired Jackson Pollock, the troubled genius of the pugnacious American ’50s.

There’s a terrific website called Futurism.org.uk that’s rather humorously suffering a case of “complete ISP ineptitude”, but there’s still lots to see there.

More from Marinetti’s first manifesto:

Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece …

Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd …