futurism

futurism Italian school of painting, sculpture, and literature that flourished from 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first manifesto of futurism appeared, until the end of World War I. Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla were the leading painters and Umberto Boccioni the chief sculptor of the group. The architect Antonio Sant' Elia also belonged to this school. The futurists strove to portray the dynamic character of 20th-century life; their works glorified danger, war, and the machine age, attacked academies, museums, and other establishment bastions, and, in theory at least, favored the growth of fascism. The group had a major Paris exhibition in 1912 that showed the relationship of their work to cubism . Their approach to the rendering of movement by simultaneously representing several aspects of forms in motion influenced many painters, including Duchamp and Delaunay. Futurist principles and techniques strongly influenced Russian constructivism .

Bibliography: See studies by M. W. Martin (1968), J. Rye (1972), U. Apollino (1973), C. Tisdale and A. Bozollo (1985), and M. Perloff (1989).

fu·tur·ism / ˈfyoōchəˌrizəm/ • n. concern with events and trends of the future or which anticipate the future. ∎  (Futurism) an artistic movement begun in Italy in 1909 that violently rejected traditional forms so as to celebrate and incorporate into art the energy and dynamism of modern technology. Launched by Filippo Marinetti, it had effectively ended by 1918 but was widely influential, particularly in Russia on figures such as Malevich and Mayakovsky.