Futurist Manifesto

All of F.T. Marinetti’s manifestos have been translated from Italian to English, but rather commonly, translations can diminish intended cultural contexts or meanings. For one, the despicable “heavy Love,” (55) translated by Doug Thompson from its original context, implies Love as being a more powerful and intense love or devotion. However, according to context note 3, Marinetti’s original version, “amore Amore” makes no clear distinction between the same two words. The original version “amore…

premiered at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, on December 21, 1879. Considering this date in time, it is obvious that this is the type of work that fueled the avant-garde movement. Not to take anything away from Ibsen’s play, but from the eyes of the Futurists, the characters were mirrors of the audience members, and performed what was ‘expected’ of them in the current male-centric culture. The Norwegian critic Erik Bøgh, writing for newspaper Folkets Avis, admired Ibsen's originality and…

throughout the Renaissance Era. The art advocated for expansion of industry and territory, believed only achievable by the destruction of reverence and past nostalgia. It was a wholesale assault on conventional values that was transcribed into a manifesto. It extolled the belief that revolution, war, the dynamism of machines, and the destruction of the past was the only way their new ideas could take hold and flourish. This cultural upheaval made its way to Russia and started a domino effect…

funny thing about Mina Loy is that she liked a lot of things feminists and futurists stood for, but she did not consider herself to be either, because there were parts of both movements that infuriated and repulsed her. Her manifesto critiques the feminist movement’s inability to establish their own position, shedding a new light on feminism. Marinetti’s offensive support for women suffragettes irritates Loy, so “Feminist Manifesto”…

oil painting Street Light (1910-11) I uncover the passion behind an ordinary street lamp. The historical period in which the Futurist movement is started is in a time frame of tensions between the nations. There were several wars that broke out that headed the 20th century and shaped the artwork of the Futurist. They not…

landscape, interiors, structures, fashion, transportation, cities and government have been [at least initially] moved by ideals and passion. The assigned bulleted manifestos and pointed proclamations seemed to carry an evolutionary theme. This theme is not chronological, but emotive. It begins with a sense of loss in Alexander’s manifesto, the desire for loss to gain simplicity in Loos’s essay, the welcomed loss of design tyranny in the cooperative proclamation of Sant’Elia and Marinetti,…

Italian Futurism and English Vorticism are generally considered to be Modernist movements. Indeed, literary scholar Peter Childs includes Futurism and Vorticism in his seminal book aptly titled Modernism, placing them amongst other Modernist movements like Expressionism, Surrealism, and Dadaism (14). In one of Childs’s many definitions of Modernism, he argues that the movement is imbued with “radical aesthetics, technical experimentation, spatial or rhythmic rather than chronological form,…

black breast of my Sudanese nurse… When I came up – torn, filthy, and stinking – from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart!” – Filippo Marinetti in The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism This passage from The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism poetically says that technological advances were at an all-time high in the dawn of the 20th century. This exciting time with revolutionary inventions such as the radio, the airplane, and the car hit…

Though suprematism was a short lived movement in the art and design worlds, it’s leading theories and principles helped to shape what we see today. Beginning in 1913 and being heavily influenced by the avant-garde poets of the time, Suprematism revolves heavily around the “Zero Degree” of painting, in which artists would aim to push the medium they were using as far as they could, in order to emphasize the material itself rather than what it depicted. The movement’s founder, Kazimir Malevich,…

Marinetti challenges the longstanding traditions of Italian life by constructing provoking manifestos that undermine customary syntax and rationality; because much of his writing comprises the use of subtle and contradictory nuances, Marinetti’s ideas appear to display a more fascist and misogynist organization. He does not want men and women to be equal, but he wants to empower women to enhance the races. However, Marinetti is not a misogynist; he actually displays more of a quasi-feminist…