Futurism

In canvases vivid with movement, light, color, and speed, the Futurists created one of the most lively documents of the technological turn of the 20th century. This monograph covers the key protagonists, influences, and controversies of the movementwhich at once championed progress and glorified war, scorned femininity, and undermined the academy elite.

The action men of modernism

With motion and machines as its most treasured tropes, Futurism was founded in 1909 by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, along with painters Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini. With affiliate painters, sculptors, designers, architects, and writers, the group sought to subsume the dusty establishment into a new age of sleek, strong, purified modernity.

Futurism’s place in art history is as ambivalent as it is important. The movement pioneered revolutionary methods to convey movement, light, and speed, but sparks controversy in its glorification of war and fascist politics. Their frenzied, almost furious, canvases, are as remarkable for their macho aggression as they are for their radical experimentation with brushstrokes, texture, and color in the quest to record an object moving through space.

With key examples from the Futurists’ prolific output and leading practitioners, this book introduces the movement that spat vitriol at all -isms of the past and, in so doing, created an -ism of their own.

The author

Sylvia Martin received her PhD in art history at the University of Cologne, trained at the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, and worked as curator and academic collaborator at the Kunstmuseum as well as at the Kunstpalast Museum in Düsseldorf. She currently works as a freelance curator in Munich.

FuturismHardcover, 21 x 26 cm, 0.59 kg, 96 pages