Focus on Girl Running on a Balcony and analyze the Futurist theory.
The early Futurist movement began with Filippo Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto” in 1909 and is followed up by Umberto Boccioni’s 1910 manifesto, “The City Rises.” The manifestos represent the Futurists’ statement of artistic purpose and defined the creative work of its founders and later followers. Balla, among other artists, signed his name at the bottom of the latter manifesto and would later go on to publish his own renditions of the Futurist mission. The Futurists lived in a time of fierce social and political change. The industrial world was unfolding as technology continued to advance. They were quite avant-garde and used materials indicative of a modern age, as exemplified in Boccioni's bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. The Italian dictionary defines futurism as “wanting to make a clean slate of the past and traditional forms of expression to make way for the inquisition of dynamic modern life, a mechanical civilization projecting into the future in a riot of senses….” The Futurists were concerned with literal and figurative movement on both individual and larger, national scales. Physical movement often is used in Futurist art to represent machinery, which in turn represents technology and ultimately our progress and movement as a civilization into the future. The Futurists were an extreme bunch; not one of them was over the age of thirty and they considered war the world's own hygiene. They opposed ideas of morality and feminism, and they saw great promise in speed. Their world was hurtling into the future, and there was time only to depict only the truly beautiful. In 1909, they wrote, “Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” The Futuristic style borrows from other forward thinking movements: Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Divisionism, Cubism, and Pointillism.
futurism Futurist Pointillism Filippo Marinetti The City Rises Cubism Umberto Boccioni Post-Impressionism Symbolism Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Divisionism Boccioni