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Futurism, We Want

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Futurism, We Want 62 MANIFESTO OF THE FUTURIST PAINTERS Boccioni, Carrà, UMBERTO BOCCIONI, CARLO CARRÀ, LUIGI RUSSOLO, Russolo, GIACOMO BALLA, AND GINO SEVERINI 11 February 1910 Balla, Severini To the Young Artists of Italy! The cry of rebellion that we launch, linking our ideals with those of the Futurist poets, does not originate in an aesthetic clique. It expresses the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today. We want to fight implacably against the mindless, snobbish, and fanatical reli- gion of the past, religion nurtured by the pernicious existence of museums. We rebel against the spineless admiration for old canvases, old statues, and old ob- jects, and against the enthusiasm for everything worm-eaten, grimy, or corroded by time; and we deem it unjust and criminal that people habitually disdain whatever is young, new, and trembling with life. Comrades! We declare that the triumphant progress of science has brought about changes in humanity so profound as to dig an abyss between the docile slaves of the past and us who are free, us who are confident in the shining splendor of the future. We are nauseated by the vile laziness which, from the sixteenth century on,1 has made our artists live by an incessant exploitation of ancient glories. In the eyes of other countries, Italy is still a land of the dead, an immense Pom- peii of whitewashed sepulchers. But Italy must be reborn, and its political resur- gence is being followed by an intellectual resurgence.2 In this land of illiterates, schools are being continually constructed: in this land of “dolce far niente,”3 in- numerable factories are roaring; in this land of traditional aesthetics, today we see flights and lightning inspirations of newness that stand out. The only living art is that which finds its distinctive features within the environ- ment that surrounds it. Just as our forebears took the subject of art from the reli- gious atmosphere that enveloped them, so we must draw inspiration from the tan- gible miracles of contemporary life, from the iron network of speed which winds around the earth, from the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts,4 the marvelous flights that plow the skies, the shadowy audaciousness of submarine navigators, the spasmodic struggle to conquer the unknown. And how can we remain unre- sponsive to the frenzied activity of the great capitals, the ultra-recent psychology of noctambulism, the feverish figure of the viveur, the cocotte, the apache, and the alcoholic? Wanting to contribute to the necessary renovation of all artistic expression, we resolutely declare war on all those artists and institutions that, even when dis- guised with a false costume of modernity, remain trapped in tradition, academi- 63 cism, and above all a repugnant mental laziness. Manifesto of We denounce as insulting to youth that entire irresponsible rabble of critics who the Futurist Painters in Rome applaud a nauseating reflowering of doting classicism; who in Florence praise the neurotic cultivators of a hermaphroditic archaism; who in Milan remu- nerate blind and pedestrian handicrafts going back to 1848;5 who in Turin adu- late a painting made by retired bureaucrats; and who in Venice worship a woolly hodgepodge concocted by fossilized alchemists. In short, we rise up against6 the superficiality, banality, and handyman’s facility which render utterly contemptible the greater part of the artists currently respected in every region of Italy. So, down with mercenary restorers of antiquated incrustations! Down with ar- chaeologists afflicted by chronic necrophilia! Down with critics, complacent pimps! Down with gouty academies and drunken and ignorant professors! Down! Go ahead and ask one of these priests of the true cult, these repositories of aesthetic laws, where can you find the works of Giovanni Segantini today? Why do the arts commissions ignore the work of Gaetano Previati? Where does anyone appreciate the sculpture of Medardo Rosso?7 . And who bothers to think about the artists who don’t already have twenty years of struggle and suffering to their credit, but who nevertheless are preparing works destined to honor our country? They have quite different interests to defend, the paid critics! Exhibitions, con- tests, and criticism that is superficial and never disinterested, these condemn Ital- ian art to ignominy and a state of true prostitution! And what should we say about the specialists? Let’s do it! Throw out the Portrait- ists, the Genre Painters, the Lake Painters, the Mountain Painters. We have put up with enough from them, all these impotent painters of country vacations. Down with the defacers of marble whose works clog up the piazzas and profane our graveyards. Down with speculative architecture of contractors in reinforced concrete. Down with hack decorators, ceramicists who make forgeries, sold-out poster painters, and shoddy, idiotic illustrators. Here are our final conclusions. With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we want: 1. To destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with antiquity, pedantry, and aca- demic formalism. 2. To disdain utterly every form of imitation. 3. To exalt every form of originality, however daring, however violent. 4. To bear bravely and proudly the facile smear of “madness” with which innovators are whipped and gagged. 5. To regard all art critics as useless or harmful. 6. To rebel against the tyranny of words: harmony and good taste, those too loose 64 expressions with which one could easily destroy the work of Rembrandt and Boccioni, Goya. Carrà, 7. To sweep away from the ideal field of art all themes, all subjects that have been Russolo, already used. Balla, Severini 8. To render and glorify today’s life, incessantly and tumultuously transformed by victorious science. Let the dead stay buried in the deepest entrails of the earth! Let the threshold of the future be swept free of mummies! Make room for the young, the violent, the bold! FUTURIST PAINTING: TECHNICAL MANIFESTO UMBERTO BOCCIONI, CARLO CARRÀ, LUIGI RUSSOLO, GIACOMO BALLA, AND GINO SEVERINI 11 April 1910 In the first manifesto that we launched on the 8th of March, 1910, from the stage of the Chiarella Theater in Turin,1 we expressed our deep-rooted disgust with, our proud contempt for, and our happy rebellion against vulgarity, mediocrity, the fa- natical and snobbish worship of all that is old, attitudes which are suffocating Art in our Country. On that occasion we were concerned with the relations between ourselves and society. Today, instead, with this second manifesto, we are resolutely abandoning contingent considerations and rising instead to higher expressions of the pictorial absolute. Our growing desire for truth can no longer be satisfied with traditional Form and Color. The gesture that we want to reproduce will no longer be a moment in the univer- sal dynamism which has been stopped, but the dynamic sensation itself, perpetuated as such. Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing. A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves, change shape, succeeding one another, like rapid vibrations, in the space which they traverse. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.2 All is conventional in art, and what was the truth for the painters of yesterday is 65 only a falsehood for us today. Futurist We declare, for instance, that a portrait, in order to be a work of art, must not Painting: Technical resemble the sitter, and that the painter carries in himself the landscapes which he Manifesto would fix upon his canvas. To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render its surrounding atmosphere. Space no longer exists: a street pavement that has been soaked by rain beneath the glare of electric lamps can be an abyss gaping into the very center of the earth. The sun is thousands of miles away from us; yet the house in front of us can seem to fit into the solar disk. Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multi- plied sensibilities have already grasped the obscure manifestations of mediums?3 Why should we continue to create works that don’t take into account our growing visual powers which can yield results analogous to those of X rays?4 Countless examples positively sanction our claims. The sixteen people around you in a moving tram are in turn and at the same time one, ten, four, three; they are motionless and they change places; they are coming and going, they leap into the street, are suddenly swallowed up by a flood of sunlight, then come back and sit before you, persistent symbols of universal vibration. Or sometimes we look at the cheek of the person with whom we were talking in the street and can see the horse which is passing at the far corner. Again: Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas penetrate our bodies, just as the tram rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the tram and are merged with it. The construction of pictures has hitherto been stupidly traditional. Painters have shown us the objects and the people placed before us. We shall put the spec- tator in the center of the picture. Just as clear-sighted individual research has cast its light on the unchanging obscurities of dogma in every field of human thought, so in painting the vivifying current of individual freedom has to replace the academic tradition. We desperately want to reenter into life. Nowadays science has disowned its past in order the better to serve the material needs of our time; art, likewise disowning its past, must at last serve the intellectual needs of our time.
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