FUTURISM / Overview I / Lix

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Futurism

1 Cubism 1

2 The Rise of Futurism 15

3 An Era of Manifestos 28

4 Futurist Typography 44

5 Guillaume Apollinaire 52

Cubism

1909 Stemming from numerous technological image-making innovations, Cubism, a new approach to handling space and pictorial representation unlocks a new chapter in the canon of art and design.

1878 Eadweard Muybridge uses photography as a research tool.

Combining artistic vision with scientific analysis, Muybridge showed how an image that paralyses motion can catch the fluency of phenomena.

–PETER CONRAD

Zoopraxiscope

1878 Muybridge is given credit as a scientist and artist.

His research has far-reaching affects

• Motion Pictures • Painters • Graphic Designers

1907–1911 Braque and Picasso influenced by:

• Muybridge • Motion pictures • African art

1907–1911 Braque and Picasso influenced by:

• Muybridge • Motion pictures • African art

1907–1911 Braque and Picasso influenced by:

• Muybridge • Motion pictures • African art

1907–1919 Cubism Picasso and Braque

• Design concept independent of nature • A new artistic tradition and way of seeing • Challenged the four-hundred-year Renaissance tradition • “Bizarreries cubiques” (cubic oddities)

• “Early Cubism”

1910–1912 Analytic Cubism • Abstraction into geometric planes • Classical norms for the human figure are broken • Simultaneous viewpoint • Flattened perspective • Figure/ground balance • “High Cubism”

1912 Collage Braque and Picasso begin to insert found paper into their artworks.

1912–1919 Synthetic Cubism • Juan Gris • Essence of the object • Geomertic construction • Pure invention • “Late Cubism”

The Rise of Futurism

1909 Cubism’s visual inventions became a catalyst for experiments that pushed art and design toward geometric abstraction and new attitudes toward pictorial space.

1909 Futurism An artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century.

It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England, and elsewhere.

The Futurists practiced in every medium of art.

• Painting • Urban design • Sculpture • Theatre • Ceramics • Film • Graphic • Fashion Design • Textiles • Industrial • Literature Design • Music • Interior design • Architecture

1909 It glorified radical themes:

• The future • Speed • Technology • Youth • Violence • Automobiles • Airplanes • Industrialized cities

1913 “Umberto Boccioni was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death.” [wikipedia]

1890 – 1960 Anton Giulio Bragaglia A pioneer in Italian Futurist photography and Futurist cinema. A versatile and intellectual artist with wide interests, he wrote about film, theatre, and dance. [wikipedia]

An Era of Manifestos

1909 Leveraging the powerful potential of text, scale and placement, the Futurists announced their intentions through a multitude of aggresive manifestos.

1909 FT Marinetti founded the movement after publishing his infamous Manifesto of Futurism in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro.

The manifesto voiced enthusiasm for war, the machine age, speed, and modern life.

1909 Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition.

We want no part of it, the past. We, the young and strong Futurists!

–FT MARINETTI

1909 We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry…

–FT MARINETTI

1909 We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed …

–FT MARINETTI

1909 A roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samoth-race…

–FT MARINETTI

The Winged Victory of Samothrace is a 2nd-century BC marble sculpture of the Greek goddess Nike (Victory). Since 1884, it has been prominently displayed at the Louvre and is one of the most celebrated sculptures in the world.

–WIKIPEDIA

“The greatest masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture.”

–H.W. JANSON

1909 Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.

–FT MARINETTI

1909 We will destroy museums, libraries, and fight against moralism, feminism, and all utilitarian cowardice.

–FT MARINETTI

1909 Destroy the cult of the past … Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation … Elevate all attempts at originality …

–FT MARINETTI

1909 … Regard art critics as useless and dangerous … Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects that have been used in the past …

–FT MARINETTI

1909 … Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.

–FT MARINETTI

1909–1915 Publishing manifestos was a feature of Futurism, and the Futurists (usually led or prompted by Marinetti) wrote them on many topics.

• The Founding and Manifesto • Futurist Manifesto • War, the World’s of Futurism of Lust Only Hygene • The Manifesto of the • Destruction of • The Futurist Cinema Futurist Painters Syntax—Imagination • A Slap in the Face without Strings— • Technical Manifesto of Public Taste Words-in-Freedom of Futurist Painting • The Futurist Universe • The Art of Noises • Technical Manifesto • Universal Camp of of Futurist Sculpture • The Painting of Sounds, Radio-Modernists Noises, and Smells • The Manifesto of Futurist Musicians • Manifesto of Futurist Architecture • Abstract Cinema— Chromatic Music • Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe

1910 Marinetti and his friends climb the clock tower in front of Saint Mark’s...

1910 ... and drop 800,000 copies of Marinetti’s leaflet Against Past- Loving Venice onto the Venetian crowds below.

1910 “Fill the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing and leprous palaces to prepare for the birth of an industrial and militarized Venice, capable of dominating the great Adriatic, a great Italian lake.”

–FT MARINETTI

Futurist Typography

1909 Marinetti wrote that a man who has witnessed an explosion does not stop to connect his sentences grammatically but hurls shrieks and words at his listeners.

The futurist poets believed that the use of different sizes, weights, and styles of type allowed them to weld painting and poetry, because the intrinsic beauty of letterforms, manipulated creatively, transformed the printed page into a work of visual art.

–PHILLIP MEGGS

1912 Noise and speed, two dominant conditions of twentieth-century life, were expressed in futurist poetry.

• Account of the Battle of Adrianople • Marinetti witnessed reporter for L’Intransigeant • Parole in libertà (words in freedom) • Sounds of gunfire and explosions • Onomatopoeia

1912 Free, dynamic, and piercing words could be given the velocity of stars, clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, molecules, and atoms.

–PHILLIP MEGGS

Since the invention of movable type, most graphic designs used a vigorous horizontal and vertical structure, but the futurist poets cast these constraints to the wind.

–PHILLIP MEGGS

Direclty Inspired by Marintetti’s struggle on the frontline, a girl reads a letter from her lover while explosion ring out overhead. • Freed from tradition • Dynamic, nonlinear composition • Pasting words and letters in place • Photoengraved printing plates

Guillaume Apollinaire

1880–1918 A French poet, Apollinaire was closely associated with the cubists, particularly Picasso, and was involved in a rivalry with Marinetti.

His poems explored the potential fusion of poetry and painting, introducing the concept of simultaneity to the time- and sequence- bound typography of the printed page.

1918 Calligrammes, subtitled Poems of war and peace 1913-1916, is a collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire.

A calligram is a poem, phrase, or word in which the typeface, calligraphy or handwriting is arranged in a way that creates a visual image.

The image created by the words expresses visually what the word, or words, say. In a poem, it manifests visually the theme presented by the text of the poem. “It’s raining my soul, it’s raining, but it’s raining dead eyes.”

Calligrammes is noted for how the typeface and spatial arrangement of the words on a page plays just as much of a role in the meaning of each poem as the words themselves.

The Calligrammes are an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.

–GUILLAUME APOLLINAIRE