For the Futurists, the beauty of nature and ancient ruins had been exceeded by the beauty of the machine, especially one that sanctioned speed and dynamism.
With this machine, Marinetti posited that ‘time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed’ (2016). Between the availability of automobiles and air travel, as well as the arrival of the telephone and telegraph, modernist technologies saw the world shrink with accelerated movement and the quickened spread of information. For the Futurists, this was a powerful dissolution of the confines of time and place. The modern machine represented the ability to be all-knowing and ‘omnipresent’, a circumstance that would prove nature and history weak and obsolete. The project laid out in The Manifesto of Futurism was one that facilitated liberation from the trappings of the past in Italy and farther afield.
The Futurists acknowledged that ‘when the future is barred to them, the admirable past should be a solace for the ills of the moribund, the sick, the prisoner’ (2016). ‘But’, Marinetti continues, ‘we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!’ (2016).
The Futurist aesthetic
With the soft and still precision of Italian classicism and neoclassicism looming large, the Futurists turned to the machine and the concept of speed to escape their cultural history. This is observable in much of their work. Painter Giacomo Balla captured the exciting speed of modernity. His famous painting Street Light (1909) depicts an electrical streetlamp emitting a bright and colourful light. Towards the top right corner of the canvas, a crescent moon is barely noticeable, absorbed by the explosive light coming from the streetlamp. The streetlamp would have been an unusual subject at the time and exhibited the Futurist’s keen interest in technology. The moon — an emblem of the steadfast natural world and a more common painterly subject for Italian renaissance or romantic works — fades into the background, dwarfed by the power of this new urban light source. Furthermore, the painting style shows small, jagged, and colourful brush strokes that have become indicative of the Futurist depiction of speed and dynamism. From the reverence of technology and the dissolution of symbols of the past, to the visual representation of modernist acceleration, Balla’s Street Light exemplifies the project of Futurism.
Umberto Boccioni was another artist whose work has become emblematic of the Futurist movement. His 1913 sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, is a bronze rendering of a vaguely human form, made up of abstract curves and edges. Appearing half human, half machine, Boccioni’s sculpture is understood by critics and theorists to be an idealised depiction of the mechanisation of the human body. With the rise of industrialization came the treatment of the human body as a machine, designed for productivity. The Futurists were fascinated by the industrial worker; the closer humans approximated machines, factories, and the urban landscape, the better. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space shows the power and movement of this abstract human-machine hybrid, typifying the dynamism of the Futurist aesthetic. It is a sculptural work that exemplifies the way that Futurism ‘anthropomorphised, eroticised and fetishised modern technology in escapist function’ (Pizzi, 2019).
Both Balla’s Street Light and Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space exhibit the Futurists subversion of traditional standards of aesthetic beauty; Balla through the subject matter of a streetlamp and Boccioni through the abstract rendering of mechanical shapes. Neither would be a feature of renaissance or classical art, which was precisely the point. They hoped instead to usher in a new artistic era of machines and technology.
The legacy of Futurism
Because of its fraught relationship with history and politics, Futurism did not prove to be a particularly durable avant-garde movement. Futurism’s ideas of Italian supremacy, violence, and power aligned it with the growing fascist movement after the First World War. By the start of World War II some Futurists even explicitly supported Fascism, with several suggestions of a ‘collaboration’ between Marinetti and Mussolini (2012, 2).
Although Futurism’s influence on fascism is contentious, Berghaus affirms that,
