Futurism
Tate Modern, London
A photograph of five smartly dressed if slightly shifty-looking, over-coated men, each one wearing a bowler hat and brightly polished shoes, taken in 1912, gives no indication of their revolutionary zeal or their determination to create a new form of art in both literature and the visual arts that was in keeping with the technological developments of the new century. In the centre of the group, stepping forward slightly, is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: philosopher, poet, self-publicist and the charismatic leader of the Futurists.
Futurism looks at the often startling work produced by artists in the few years leading up to the First World War, in which speed, the moving image, electricity and the machine were some of the attributes welcomed as signs of a new, vibrant society. With evangelical ardour, the Futurists, like any proselytising party, issued a manifesto in 1909. While inspired by the Communist Manifesto, this had little of its political idealism. It embraced a love of danger, fearlessness, audacity and revolution as essential elements in its aim to modernise art and social attitudes. Other manifestos were added later on such diverse subjects as politics, prose, lust and cinema.
At first literary, Futurist ideas were quickly adopted by artists eager to find ways of depicting the speed, movement and spectacle of modern city life. In rejecting the art and culture of the past and welcoming the new, artists such as Sonia Delauney sought in abstract compositions to use pure, saturated colour to evoke excitement and joy. Many artists were fascinated by the hustle and power of automobiles, trains and aeroplanes, featuring them often as symbols of the new order.
In bringing together works from the ground-breaking Futurist 1912 exhibition that began in Paris and travelled to London before sweeping across Europe like a plague, its ideas inspiring artists as far a field in Russia, Futurism gives a flavour of the new language of art. Sculptors as well as painters sought to find ways of capturing this sense of change. It was caught magnificently by artists such as Umberto Boccioni in the striding figure with stylised flames flowing out from the body. In its evocative sense of movement, Boccioni’s sculpture has taken on an iconic significance.
War cut short the first wave of Futurism, but the conflict fascinated and excited Marinetti, who even celebrated it. “We wish to glorify war – the sole cleanser of the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women”, was one of his more unpleasant declarations.
After the war, radical anarchism was transformed into fascism, chaos into order and individualism into conformity – a great contrast to the revolutionary zeal of 10 years earlier. Equally controversial was the misogyny of many of the Futurists.
Yet, despite the contradictions presented by such a movement that embraced, for a short time, artists such as Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and, in Britain, Louise Nevelson, David Bomberg and Wyndham Lewis, it introduced the concept of the new. Responding to the way photography (a medium not discussed in the exhibition) revealed aspects of movement that had hitherto remained unknown, artists used overlapping, abstraction and multiple images to picture the world as they saw it.
If much of the ideology remains suspect, Marinetti was at the centre of a modern movement that opened up new possibilities. It was for others to take them in different directions.
Emmanuel Cooper
