Futurism: A Very Short Introduction

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From the motorcar to the radio, modern technology radically transformed urban life by the first decade of the twentieth century. As one of Western Europe's least industrialized countries, Italy appeared impervious to such developments. It was this state of affairs at which the Futurist movement took aim. With its founding in 1909, the poet and impresario F.T. Marinetti called for a revitalization of aesthetic expression by means of "movement and aggression."

A growing cadre of Futurist painters, poets, authors, and musicians exchanged Italy's cultural patrimony for new technologies, media, and metaphors, championing machine-propelled speed and its salutary hazards. Cubist painting, collage, and sculpture lent the Futurist campaign a revolutionary style to match its rhetorical fervor. Yet whereas Cubism remained a revolution of artistic form, Futurism sought to shatter the boundaries between art and life itself.

Indeed, the movement's challenge to twentieth-century culture lay not in any specific set of images or objects, but a more comprehensive revolution of sensibility. By the mid-1910s there circulated several dozen Futurist proclamations on everything from men's clothing to set design, photography to film, dance to politics. That political impetus proved relentlessly paradoxical in origin and upshot. From its base in Milan, Futurist activity spread throughout the entire peninsula, while related movements emerged almost immediately in Moscow, Lisbon, Tiblisi, and Tokyo. Prefiguring and then propagandizing Fascist imperialism, Futurism also galvanized a range of progressive modernist phenomena. More than a century later, the “activist model” of the Futurist avant-garde remains deeply fraught in its historical implications.

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Ara H. Merjian, Professor of Italian Studies, the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Ara H. Merjian is Professor of Italian Studies at New York University, where he is an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and the Department of Art History. He has written and edited several books, including Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (2024), Heretical Aesthetics: Pasolini on Painting (2023), Against the Avant-Garde: Pier Paolo Pasolini, Contemporary Art and Neocapitalism (2020), and Blueprints and Ruins: Giorgio de Chirico and the Architectural Imagination from the Avant-Garde to Postmodernism (forthcoming 2025). He has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the San Quentin State Penitentiary College Education Program.