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Maddened by mobiles, road-rage and rat-racing? Blame the Italian Futurists. Particularly poet, techno-junky and fancy moustache breeder, Filippo. T. Marinetti (1876 - 1944). He set the whole movement clanking, whirring and screaming into motion in 1909 with his Le Figaro article extolling the virtues of smoky factories churning out all manner of shiny metal stuff (the industrialists must have loved him), speeding motor cars which he reckoned were more beautiful than any work of art (Jeremy Clarkson would have loved him) and unrest and violence (several thousand equally batty Italians did love him).
Marinetti and his modernist machine-mad mates felt bad about Italy's outmoded mindset and inferior place in the European pecking order. In addition to which they'd had it up to here with the soppy romantic art of the past and wanted to bung it in the incinerator of history and pig out on a bright new future full of cars, chrome, Cubism and cruelty.
No wonder their meetings so often ended in tears, injuries and arrests. Like Surrealism, Futurist art was initially kicked off by a literary movement, but in the end, rather than the writers, it was painters like Boccioni, Severini, Carra, and Russolo, who began to buzz under their berets, cranking out some great art as a result. Sadly, all that got knocked on the head when the most talented of the lot, Bocciono, suffered a similar fate at the feet of the horse he happened to fall off whilst serving in World War One. Well, at least he'd had time to realise and acknowledge that war wasn't the 'only hygiene of the world' as he and his mates had once so manifestly stated.
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