Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou . In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and political theory. The movement has its theoretical roots in Dada and Surrealism . Isou viewed his fellow countryman Tristan Tzara as the greatest creator and rightful leader of the Dada movement, and dismissed most of the others as plagiarists and falsifiers. Among the Surrealists, André Breton was a significant influence, but Isou was dissatisfied by what he saw as the stagnation and theoretical bankruptcy of the movement as it stood in the 1940s.
100-539: In French, the movement is called Lettrisme , from the French word for letter , arising from the fact that many of their early works centred on letters and other visual or spoken symbols. The Lettristes themselves prefer the spelling ' Letterism' for the Anglicised term, and this is the form that is used on those rare occasions when they produce or supervise English translations of their writings: however, 'Lettrism'
200-494: A better, more fulfilling life. In 1913, Saint-Point further expressed her desire for women to have erotic freedom when writing the Futurist Manifesto of Lust . However, it has also been noted that both manifestos favored men, specifically those deemed heroic, contrasting with her ideas about shared human characteristics also present in the manifestos. In Russian Futurist and Cubo-Futurist circles, however, there
300-484: A corrective to both of them. Both currents, he felt, had simply failed to take into account a large part of the population, namely those young people and other 'externs' who neither produced nor exchanged goods or capital in any significant way. He felt that the creative urge was an integral part of human nature, but that, unless it was properly guided, it could be diverted into crime and anti-social behaviour. The Letterists sought to restructure every aspect of society in such
400-621: A diverse range of supporters. They tended to oppose Marinetti's artistic and political direction of the movement, and in 1924, the socialists, communists and anarchists walked out of the Milan Futurist Congress. The anti-Fascist voices in Futurism were not completely silenced until the annexation of Abyssinia and the Italo-German Pact of Steel in 1939. This association of Fascists, socialists and anarchists in
500-412: A few Futurists or had movements inspired by Futurism. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, urban design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture, and even cooking . To some extent, Futurism influenced the art movements Art Deco , Constructivism , Surrealism , and Dada ; to
600-478: A field of stippled dots and stripes, which had been adopted from Divisionism by Giovanni Segantini and others. Later, Severini, who lived in Paris, attributed their backwardness in style and method at this time to their distance from Paris, the centre of avant-garde art. Cubism contributed to the formation of Italian Futurism's artistic style. Severini was the first to come into contact with Cubism , and following
700-401: A full system like hypergraphy. Notwithstanding the considerably more recent origins of film-making, compared to poetry, painting or music, Isou felt in 1950 that its own first amplic phase had already been completed. He therefore set about inaugurating a chiselling phase for the cinema. As he explained in the voiceover to his first film, Treatise of Slime and Eternity : I believe firstly that
800-593: A greater degree, Precisionism , Rayonism , and Vorticism . Passéism [ fr ] can represent an opposing trend or attitude. Futurism is an avant-garde movement founded in Milan in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti . Marinetti launched the movement in his Manifesto of Futurism , which he published for the first time on 5 February 1909 in La gazzetta dell'Emilia , an article then reproduced in
900-473: A new language free of syntax punctuation, and metrics that allowed for free expression. Theater also has an important place within the Futurist universe. Works in this genre have scenes that are few sentences long, have an emphasis on nonsensical humor, and attempt to discredit the deep rooted traditions via parody and other devaluation techniques. There are a number of examples of Futurist novels from both
1000-546: A portrait of himself painted by Carrà to her, the dedication declaring Casati as a Futurist being pasted on the canvas itself. Casati, affluent host of parties in support of the Futurist artists in Marinetti's circle, was thought to be the muse of several of them, including Bragaglia and Balla. Journalist Eugenio Giovanetti would also declare her the "spirit protector" of Futurist art in 1918, as she had become one of Italy's leading collectors. In 1912, only three years after
1100-449: A satin costume with a helmet; everything that the plane did had to be expressed by my body. It flew and, moreover, it gave the impression of these wings that trembled, of the apparatus that trembled, ... And the face had to express what the pilot felt." Futurism as a literary movement made its official debut with F. T. Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism (1909), as it delineated the various ideals Futurist poetry should strive for. Poetry,
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#17327756819311200-520: A visit to Paris in 1911, the Futurist painters adopted the methods of the Cubists. Cubism offered them a means of analyzing energy in paintings and expressing dynamism. They often painted modern urban scenes. Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910–11) is a large canvas representing events that the artist himself had been involved with in 1904. The action of a police attack and riot
1300-603: A way as to enable these externs to channel their creativity in more positive ways. Although the Letterists have published hundreds of books, journals and substantial articles in French, virtually none of these have been translated into English. One recent exception is: Maurice Lemaître has privately published translations of a few of his own works, though these are not at all easy to find: Black Scat Books: 2012 ( http://www.blackscatbooks.com ) Hypergraphics Hypergraphy , also called hypergraphics or metagraphics ,
1400-592: A world of absurd nonsense, childishly crude. His brother, Bruno Corra, wrote in Sam Dunn è morto (Sam Dunn is Dead) a masterpiece of Futurist fiction, in a genre he himself called "synthetic" characterized by compression, and precision; it is a sophisticated piece that rises above the other novels through the strength and pervasiveness of its irony. Science fiction novels play an important role in Futurist literature. Italian futurist cinema ( Italian : Cinema futurista , pronounced [ˈtʃiːnema futuˈrista] )
1500-570: Is an experimental form of visual communication developed by the Lettrist movement. Hypergraphy abandons the phonetic values communicated by most conventional written languages in favor of an aesthetically broadened form. Given its experimental nature it can include any visual media. However, hypergraphy most commonly consists of letters, symbols, and pictographs. Hypergraphy is rooted in the core Lettrist concept that every major arena of human interaction, whether it be literary or economic , follows
1600-624: Is at least as common in English usage. The term, having been the original name that was first given to the group, has lingered as a blanket term to cover all of their activities, even as many of these have moved away from any connection to letters. But other names have also been introduced, either for the group as a whole or for its activities in specific domains, such as 'the Isouian movement', 'youth uprising', ' hypergraphics ', 'creatics', 'infinitesimal art' and 'excoördism'. 1925. Isidore Goldstein
1700-417: Is excoördism, the current incarnation of the Isouian movement, defined as the art of the infinitely large and the infinitely small. Isou identified the amplic phase of political theory and economics as that of Adam Smith and free trade ; its chiselling phase was that of Karl Marx and socialism . Isou termed these 'atomic economics' and 'molecular economics' respectively: he launched 'nuclear economics' as
1800-460: Is free to expand on the aesthetic plane. Rather than using words to signify ideas, the ideas can be more directly signified by pictographs or symbols from other sign systems. Traditional syntax is replaced by a two-dimensional plane in which select three-dimensional properties not possible with conventional orthography can be utilized (for instance, overlapping elements or perspective lines to indicate depth). With these additional dimensions available,
1900-706: Is rendered energetically with diagonals and broken planes. His Leaving the Theatre (1910–11) uses a Divisionist technique to render isolated and faceless figures trudging home at night under street lights. Boccioni's The City Rises (1910) represents scenes of construction and manual labour with a huge, rearing red horse in the centre foreground, which workmen struggle to control. His States of Mind , in three large panels — The Farewell , Those who Go , and Those Who Stay — "made his first great statement of Futurist painting, bringing his interests in Bergson , Cubism and
2000-405: Is young, new, and trembling with life." The Futurists believed that art should be inspired by the modern marvels of their newly technological world. “Just as our forebears took the subject of art from the religious atmosphere that enveloped them, so we must draw inspiration from the tangible miracles of contemporary life." The founding manifesto did not contain a positive artistic programme, which
2100-519: The Manifesto of Futurism was published, Valentine de Saint-Point responded to Marinetti's claims in her Manifesto of the Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti ). Marinetti even later referred to her as "the first futurist woman." Her manifesto begins with a misanthropic tone by presenting how men and women are equal and both deserve contempt. She instead suggests that rather than
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#17327756819312200-480: The Soviet establishment and the brief Agitprop movement of the 1920s; Popova died of a fever, Malevich would be briefly imprisoned and forced to paint in the new state-approved style, and Mayakovsky committed suicide on April 14, 1930. The Futurist architect Antonio Sant'Elia expressed his ideas of modernity in his drawings for La Città Nuova (The New City) (1912–1914). This project was never built and Sant'Elia
2300-469: The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. In 1915, Balla also turned to sculpture making abstract "reconstructions," which were created out of various materials, were apparently moveable, and even made noises. He said that, after making twenty pictures in which he had studied the velocity of automobiles, he understood that "the single plane of the canvas did not permit the suggestion of
2400-408: The deictic relationships between signifiers becomes a new channel for conveying information. This innovation in the visual mode is inherently idiosyncratic, symbols and meanings varying from person to person with no standard source of truth. While this quality of hypergraphy ostensibly furthers the goal of deconstructing language by separating public language from private language, it also presents
2500-469: The secessionist scenographies, the liberty furniture, and the abstract and surreal moments contribute to create a strong formal syncretism (the amalgamation or attempted amalgamation of different religions, cultures, or schools of thought). Thaïs is the only surviving example of the 1910s Italian futurist cinema to date (35 minutes of the original 70). When interviewed about her favorite film of all times, famed movie critic Pauline Kael stated that
2600-467: The Bow (1912) similarly depicts the movements of a violinist's hand and instrument, rendered in rapid strokes within a triangular frame. The adoption of Cubism determined the style of much subsequent Futurist painting, which Boccioni and Severini in particular continued to render in the broken colors and short brush-strokes of divisionism. But Futurist painting differed in both subject matter and treatment from
2700-471: The French daily newspaper Le Figaro on Saturday 20 February 1909. He was soon joined by the painters Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Giacomo Balla , Gino Severini and the composer Luigi Russolo . Marinetti expressed a passionate loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. "We want no part of it, the past," he wrote, "we the young and strong Futurists! " The Futurists admired speed , technology , youth and violence ,
2800-443: The Futurist movement in 1910 and wrote a Manifesto of Futurist Musicians in which he appealed to the young (as had Marinetti), because only they could understand what he had to say. According to Pratella, Italian music was inferior to music abroad. He praised the "sublime genius" of Wagner and saw some value in the work of other contemporary composers; Richard Strauss , Elgar , Mussorgsky , and Sibelius , for example. By contrast,
2900-502: The Futurist movement, which may seem odd today, can be understood in terms of the influence of Georges Sorel , whose ideas about the regenerative effect of political violence had adherents right across the political spectrum. Aeropainting ( aeropittura ) was a major expression of the second generation of Futurism beginning in 1926. The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape as new subject matter. Aeropainting
3000-482: The Futurists attempted to create in their subsequent Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting (published in Italian as a leaflet by Poesia , Milan, 11 April 1910). This committed them to a "universal dynamism," which was to be directly represented in painting. Objects in reality were not separate from one another or from their surroundings: "The sixteen people around you in a rolling motor bus are in turn and at
3100-465: The Italian symphony was dominated by opera in an "absurd and anti-musical form." The conservatory was said to encourage backwardness and mediocrity. The publishers perpetuated mediocrity and the domination of music by the "rickety and vulgar" operas of Puccini and Umberto Giordano . The only Italian Pratella could praise was his teacher Pietro Mascagni , because he had rebelled against the publishers and attempted innovation in opera, but even Mascagni
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3200-496: The Letterist films, Wolman's The Anticoncept and Debord's Howls for Sade , went even further, and abandoned images altogether. From a visual point of view, the former consisted simply of a fluctuating ball of light, projected onto a large balloon, while the latter alternated a blank white screen (when there was speech in the soundtrack) and a totally black screen (accompanying ever-increasing periods of total silence). In addition,
3300-487: The Letterists utilised material appropriated from other films, a technique which would subsequently be developed (under the title of ' détournement ') in Situationist film. They would also often supplement the film with live performance, or, through the 'film-debate', directly involve the audience itself in the total experience. The supertemporal frame was a device for inviting and enabling an audience to participate in
3400-623: The Letterists were always keen to insist on their own radical originality and to distinguish their work from other ostensibly similar currents. On the visual side, the Letterists first gave the name ' metagraphics ' ( metagraphie ) and then ' hypergraphics ' ( hypergraphie ) to their new synthesis of writing and visual art. Some precedents may be seen in Cubist , Dada and Futurist (both Italian and Russian ) painting and typographical works, such as Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tuum , or in poems such as Apollinaire's Calligrammes but none of them were
3500-659: The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910) by Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, and Carlo Carrà: "We want to fight implacably against the mindless, snobbish, and fanatical religion of the past, religion nurtured by the pernicious existence of the museums. We rebel against the spineless admiration for old canvases, old statues, and old objects, and against the enthusiasm for everything worm-eaten, grimy, or corroded by time; and we deem it unjust and criminal that people habitually disdain whatever
3600-535: The Russian Futurists were fascinated with dynamism, speed, and the restlessness of modern urban life; however, they were the complete opposite of them ideologically, as many embraced the political and social visions of the emerging communist movement in Russia. The Russian Futurists sought controversy by repudiating the art of the past, saying that Pushkin and Dostoevsky should be "heaved overboard from
3700-489: The ability to carry out important work, especially in architecture . After the Second World War , many Futurist artists had difficulty in their careers because of their association with a defeated and discredited regime. Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Fascist Italy, but failed to do so. Mussolini chose to give patronage to numerous styles and movements in order to keep artists loyal to
3800-463: The apex of the novel and thus the completion of its amplic phase. Alongside Lettrist founder Isidore Isou , Lemaître set to work on creating hypergraphic novels to begin the process of deconstruction. The chief means through which hypergraphy deconstructs language is by separating sound from meaning, abandoning the constraints imposed by the encoding of phonetic values. The resulting visual form, no longer tasked with conveying this phonetic information,
3900-450: The art. Whereas the form had formerly been used as a tool to express things outside its own domain—events, feelings, etc.--it would then turn in on itself and become, perhaps only implicitly, its own subject matter. From Charles Baudelaire to Tristan Tzara (as, in painting, from Manet to Kandinsky ; or, in music, from Debussy to Luigi Russolo ), subsequent poets would deconstruct the grand edifice of poetry that had been developed over
4000-448: The artist seeks by intuition to link sympathies between the exterior scene and interior emotion. Boccioni's intentions in art were strongly influenced by the ideas of Bergson, including the idea of intuition , which Bergson defined as a simple, indivisible experience of sympathy through which one is moved into the inner being of an object to grasp what is unique and ineffable within it. The Futurists aimed through their art thus to enable
4100-540: The audience while Marinetti waved an Italian flag. When Italy entered the First World War in 1915, many Futurists enlisted. The experience of the war marked several Futurists — particularly Marinetti, who fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary — actively engaging in propaganda. Italian futurists included "visual poetry in futurist periodicals” to promote their cause or campaign, thus swaying public opinion in their favor after
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4200-407: The binary being limited to men and women, it should be replaced with "femininity and masculinity;" ample cultures and individuals should possess elements of both. Yet, she still embraces the core values of Futurism, especially its focus on "virility" and "brutality." Saint-Point uses this as a segue into her antifeminist argument—giving women equal rights destroys their innate "potency" to strive for
4300-489: The car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature , and they were passionate nationalists. They repudiated the cult of the past and all imitation, praised originality "however daring, however violent," bore proudly "the smear of madness," dismissed art critics as useless, rebelled against harmony and good taste, swept away all the themes and subjects of all previous art, and glorified science. Publishing manifestos
4400-415: The carving of the image ( la ciselure d'image ), where the film-maker would deliberately scratch or paint onto the actual film stock itself. Similar techniques are also employed in Letterist still photography. (ii) Discrepant cinema ( le cinéma discrépant ), where the soundtrack and the image-track would be separated, each one telling a different story or pursuing its own more abstract path. The most radical of
4500-456: The centuries according to the Homeric model. Finally, when this process of deconstruction had been completed, it would then be time for a new amplic phase to commence. Isou saw himself as the man to show the way. He would take the rubble that remained after the old forms had been shattered, and lay out a new blueprint for reutilising these most basic elements in a radically new way, utterly unlike
4600-485: The chauvinistic nature of the Italian Futurist program, many serious professional female artists adopted the style, especially so after the end of the first World War. Notably among these female futurists is F.T Marinetti 's own wife Benedetta Cappa Marinetti , whom he had met in 1918 and exchanged a series of letters discussing each of their respective work in Futurism. Letters continued to be exchanged between
4700-467: The cinema is too rich. It is obese. It has reached its limits, its maximum. With the first movement of widening which it will outline, the cinema will burst! Under the blow of a congestion, this greased pig will tear into a thousand pieces. I announce the destruction of the cinema , the first apocalyptic sign of disjunction, of rupture, of this corpulent and bloated organization which calls itself film. The two central innovations of Letterist film were: (i)
4800-401: The concept of dance. Indeed, dancing was interpreted as an alternative way of expressing man's ultimate fusion with the machine. The altitude of a flying plane, the power of a car's motor, and the roaring loud sounds of complex machinery were all signs of man's intelligence and excellence which the art of dance had to emphasize and praise. This type of dance is considered Futuristic as it disrupts
4900-643: The creation of a work of art. In its simplest form, this might involve nothing more than the inclusion of several blank pages in a book, for the reader to add his or her own contributions. Recalling the infinitesimals of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , quantities which could not actually exist except conceptually, the Letterists developed the notion of a work of art which, by its very nature, could never be created in reality, but which could nevertheless provide aesthetic rewards by being contemplated intellectually. Also called Art esthapériste ('infinite-aesthetics'). Cf. Conceptual Art . Related to this, and arising out of it,
5000-465: The direction the group is going in, Lemaître—Isou's right-hand man for nearly half a century—begins to distance himself from it. He still continues to pursue traditional Letterist techniques, but now in relative isolation from the main group. Isou first invented these phases through an examination of the history of poetry, but the conceptual apparatus he developed could very easily be applied to most other branches of art and culture. In poetry, he felt that
5100-420: The director Dimitri Kirsanoff , in his silent experimental film Ménilmontant , "developed a technique that suggests the movement known in painting as Futurism." Within F. T. Marinetti's The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism , two of his tenets briefly highlight his hatred for women under the pretense that it fuels the Futurist movement's visceral nature: 9. We intend to glorify war—the only hygiene of
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#17327756819315200-567: The dominance of Marinetti and Boccioni, whom they accused of trying to establish "an immobile church with an infallible creed," and each group dismissed the other as passéiste. Futurism had, from the outset, admired violence and was intensely patriotic. The Futurist Manifesto had declared: "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman." Although it owed much of its character and some of its ideas to radical political movements, it
5300-576: The dynamic volume of speed in depth ... I felt the need to construct the first dynamic plastic complex with iron wires, cardboard planes, cloth and tissue paper, etc." In 1914, personal quarrels and artistic differences between the Milan group around Marinetti, Boccioni, and Balla, and the Florence group around Carrà, Ardengo Soffici (1879–1964) and Giovanni Papini (1881–1956), created a rift in Italian Futurism. The Florence group resented
5400-577: The essential lines of forms unprecedented from their simplicity. In the new city, every aspect of life was to be rationalized and centralized into one great powerhouse of energy. The city was not meant to last, and each subsequent generation was expected to build their own city rather than inheriting the architecture of the past. Futurist architects were sometimes at odds with the Fascist state's tendency towards Roman imperial -classical aesthetic patterns. Nevertheless, several Futurist buildings were built in
5500-438: The feet of the woman walking it—have been multiplied to a blur of movement. It illustrates the precepts of the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting that, "on account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations, in their mad career. Thus a running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular." His Rhythm of
5600-415: The first amplic phase had been initiated by Homer . In effect, Homer set out a blueprint for what a poem ought to be like. Subsequent poets then developed this blueprint, investigating by means of their work all of the different things that could be done within the Homeric parameters. Eventually, however, everything that could be done within that approach had been done. In poetry, Isou felt that this point
5700-543: The first members of the National Fascist Party . He opposed Fascism's later exaltation of existing institutions, calling them "reactionary," and walked out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, withdrawing from politics for three years; but he supported Italian Fascism until his death in 1944. The Futurists' association with Fascism after its triumph in 1922 brought them official acceptance in Italy and
5800-502: The futuristic-themed films of this period have been lost, but critics cite Thaïs (1917) by Anton Giulio Bragaglia as one of the most influential, serving as the main inspiration for German Expressionist cinema in the following decade. Thaïs was born on the basis of the aesthetic treatise Fotodinamismo futurista (1911), written by the same author. The film, built around a melodramatic and decadent story, actually reveals multiple artistic influences different from Marinett's futurism;
5900-616: The hope of modernizing a country divided between the industrialising north and the rural, archaic South. Like the Fascists, the Futurists were Italian nationalists, laborers, disgruntled war veterans, radicals , admirers of violence, and opposed to parliamentary democracy. Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party ( Partito Politico Futurista ) in early 1918, which was absorbed into Benito Mussolini 's Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, making Marinetti one of
6000-497: The imagery of Futurist writings, and were writers themselves. Poets and painters collaborated on theatre production such as the Futurist opera Victory Over the Sun , with texts by Kruchenykh, music by Mikhail Matyushin , and sets by Malevich. The main style of painting was Cubo-Futurism , extant during the 1910s. Cubo-Futurism combines the forms of Cubism with the Futurist representation of movement; like their Italian contemporaries,
6100-504: The individual's complex experience of the modern world together in what has been described as one of the 'minor masterpieces' of early twentieth century painting." The work attempts to convey feelings and sensations experienced in time, using new means of expression, including "lines of force," which intend to convey the directional tendencies of objects through space; "simultaneity," which combines memories, present impressions and anticipation of future events; and "emotional ambience" in which
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#17327756819316200-465: The initial period of Futurism and the neo-Futurist period, from Marinetti himself to a number of lesser known Futurists, such as Primo Conti, Ardengo Soffici and Bruno Giordano Sanzin ( Zig Zag, Il Romanzo Futurista edited by Alessandro Masi, 1995). They are very diverse in style, with very little recourse to the characteristics of Futurist Poetry, such as parole in libertà. Arnaldo Ginna's Le 'locomotive con le calze (Trains with socks on) plunges into
6300-728: The largest obstacle to scalable adoption. Futurism (art) Futurism ( Italian : Futurismo [futuˈrizmo] ) was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy , and to a lesser extent in other countries, in the early 20th century. It emphasized dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane, and the industrial city. Its key figures included Italian artists Filippo Tommaso Marinetti , Umberto Boccioni , Carlo Carrà , Fortunato Depero , Gino Severini , Giacomo Balla , and Luigi Russolo . Italian Futurism glorified modernity and, according to its doctrine, "aimed to liberate Italy from
6400-483: The musical score is twice the length of the film and now stands alone. The score calls for a percussion ensemble consisting of three xylophones , four bass drums, a tam-tam, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, a siren, two "live pianists," and sixteen synchronized player pianos. Antheil's piece was the first to synchronize machines with human players and to exploit the difference between what machines and humans can play. The Futuristic movement also influenced
6500-707: The performer to create and control the dynamics and pitch of several different types of noises. Russolo and Marinetti gave the first concert of Futurist music, complete with intonarumori , in 1914. However, they were prevented from performing in many major European cities by the outbreak of war. Futurism was one of several 20th-century movements in art and music that paid homage to, included, or imitated machines. Ferruccio Busoni has been seen as anticipating some Futurist ideas, though he remained wed to tradition. Russolo's intonarumori influenced Stravinsky , Arthur Honegger , George Antheil , Edgar Varèse , Stockhausen and John Cage . In Pacific 231 , Honegger imitated
6600-916: The poetry of the preceding amplic phase. Isou identified the most basic elements of poetic creation as letters —i.e. uninterpreted visual symbols and acoustic sounds—and he set out the parameters for new ways of recombining these ingredients in the name of new aesthetic goals. Isou's idea for the poem of the future was that it should be purely formal, devoid of all semantic content. The Letterist poem, or lettrie , in many ways resembles what certain Italian Futurists (such as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ), Russian Futurists (such as Velemir Chlebnikov , Iliazd , or Alexej Kručenych —cf. Zaum ), and Dada poets (such as Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters ) had already been doing, and what subsequent sound poets and concrete poets (such as Bob Cobbing , Eduard Ovčáček or Henri Chopin ) would later be doing. However,
6700-400: The predominant medium of Futurist literature, can be characterized by its unexpected combinations of images and hyper-conciseness (not to be confused with the actual length of the poem). The Futurists called their style of poetry parole in libertà (word autonomy), in which all ideas of meter were rejected and the word became the main unit of concern. In this way, the Futurists managed to create
6800-627: The quiet and static Cubism of Picasso , Braque and Gris . As the art critic Robert Hughes observed: "In Futurism, the eye is fixed and the object moves, but it is still the basic vocabulary of Cubism—fragmented and overlapping planes." Futurist art tended to disdain traditional subjects, specifically those of photographically realistic portraits and landscapes. Futurists thought of "imitation" art that copied from life to be lazy, unimaginative, cowardly, and boring. While there were Futurist portraits — Carrà's Woman with Absinthe (1911), Severini's Self-Portrait (1912), and Boccioni's Matter (1912) — it
6900-574: The reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective," and that "painting from this new reality requires a profound contempt for detail and a need to synthesise and transfigure everything." Crispolti identifies three main "positions" in aeropainting: "a vision of cosmic projection, at its most typical in Prampolini's 'cosmic idealism' ... ; a 'reverie' of aerial fantasies sometimes verging on fairy-tale (for example in Dottori ...); and
7000-412: The referential system of traditional, classical dance and introduces a different style, new to the sophisticated bourgeois audience. The dancer no longer performs a story with clear content that can be read according to the rules of ballet. One of the most notable Futuristic dancers is Italian artist Giannina Censi . She was inspired by the arial themes in the second wave of Futurism and sought to put in on
7100-576: The regime, becoming less radical and avant-garde with each. He moved from Milan to Rome to be nearer the centre of things. He became an academician despite his condemnation of academies, married despite his condemnation of marriage, promoted religious art after the Lateran Treaty of 1929, and even reconciled himself to the Catholic Church, declaring that Jesus was a Futurist. Although Futurism mostly became identified with Fascism, it had
7200-496: The regime. Opening the exhibition of art by the Novecento Italiano group in 1923, he said, "I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view." Mussolini's mistress, Margherita Sarfatti , who
7300-587: The relationship between the object and its environment, which was central to his theory of "dynamism." The sculpture represents a striding figure, cast in bronze posthumously and exhibited in the Tate Modern (it now appears on the national side of Italian 20 eurocent coins ). He explored the theme further in Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1912), Speeding Muscles (1913), and Spiral Expansion of Speeding Muscles (1913); his ideas on sculpture were published in
7400-478: The same basic pattern. A paradigm is introduced into a system and iterated upon until all possibilities are exhausted (this is deemed the amplic phase ), at which point the only path forward is to deconstruct the system down to its most granular elements (the chiseling phase ). Once the system has been fully deconstructed, the pieces are set into a new paradigm and the cycle begins again. According to Lettrist painter Maurice Lemaître , James Joyce's Ulysses marks
7500-411: The same time one, ten four three; they are motionless and they change places. ... The motor bus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the motor bus and are blended with it." The Futurist painters were slow to develop a distinctive style and subject matter. In 1910 and 1911, they used the techniques of Divisionism , breaking light and color down into
7600-559: The sound of a steam locomotive. There are also Futurist elements in Prokofiev 's The Steel Step as well as his Second Symphony. Most notable in this respect, however, is American artist George Antheil . His fascination with machinery is evident in his Airplane Sonata , Death of the Machines , and the 30-minute Ballet Mécanique . The Ballet Mécanique was originally intended to accompany an experimental film by Fernand Léger , but
7700-434: The stage. Trained as a classical ballerina, she is known for her "Aerodanze" and continued to earn her living by performing in classical and popular productions. She describes this innovative form of dance as the result of a deep collaboration with Marinetti and his poetry: "I launched this idea of the aerial-futurist poetry with Marinetti, he himself declaiming the poetry. A small stage of a few square meters;... I made myself
7800-413: The steamship of modernity." They acknowledged no authority and professed not to owe anything even to Marinetti, as they abhorred his commitment to fascism, and most of them obstructed him when he came to Russia to proselytize in 1914. The movement began to decline after the revolution of 1917 . The Futurists either stayed, were persecuted, or left the country. Popova, Mayakovsky and Malevich became part of
7900-415: The two with F. T. Marinetti often complimenting Benedetta – the single name she was best known as – on her genius. In a letter dated August 16, 1919, Marinetti wrote to Benedetta: "Do not forget your promise to work. You must carry your genius to its ultimate splendor. Every day." Although many of Benedetta's paintings were exhibited in major Italian exhibitions — the 1930-1936 Venice Biennales (in which she
8000-420: The viewer to apprehend the inner being of what they depicted. Boccioni developed these ideas at length in his book, Pittura scultura Futuriste: Dinamismo plastico ( Futurist Painting Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism ) (1914). Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) exemplifies the Futurists' insistence that the perceived world is in constant movement. The painting depicts a dog whose legs, tail and leash—and
8100-470: The war; the combat experience also influenced Futurist music. The outbreak of war disguised the fact that Italian Futurism had come to an end. The Florence group had formally acknowledged their withdrawal from the movement by the end of 1914. Boccioni produced only one war picture and was killed in 1916. Severini painted some significant war pictures in 1915 (e.g. War , Armored Train , and Red Cross Train ), but in Paris turned towards Cubism; post-war, he
8200-520: The weight of its past." Important Futurist works included Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto of Futurism , Boccioni's 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space , Balla's 1913–1914 painting Abstract Speed + Sound , and Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913). Although Futurism was largely an Italian phenomenon, parallel movements emerged in Russia, where some Russian Futurists would later go on to found groups of their own; other countries either had
8300-409: The world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and contempt for woman. 10. We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academics of every sort and to fight against moralism, feminism, and every utilitarian opportunistic cowardice. Marinetti would begin to contradict himself when, in 1911, he called Luisa, Marchesa Casati a Futurist; he dedicated
8400-829: The years 1920–1940, including public buildings such as railway stations, maritime resorts, and post offices . Examples of Futurist buildings still in use today are Trento railway station built by Angiolo Mazzoni and the Santa Maria Novella station in Florence . The Florence station was designed in 1932 by the Gruppo Toscano (Tuscan Group) of architects, which included Giovanni Michelucci and Italo Gamberini , with contributions by Mazzoni. Futurist music rejected tradition and introduced experimental sounds inspired by machinery, and would influence several 20th-century composers. Francesco Balilla Pratella joined
8500-442: Was a feature of Futurism, and the Futurists (usually led or prompted by Marinetti) wrote them on many topics, including painting, architecture, music, literature, theatre, cinema, photography, religion, women, fashion, and cuisine. In their manifestos, Futurists described their beliefs and appreciations of various methods. They also detailed their disdain for traditional Italian Renaissance works of art and their subjects. According to
8600-470: Was a higher percentage of women participants than in Italy from the start; Natalia Goncharova , Aleksandra Ekster , and Lyubov Popova are some examples of major female Futurists. Although Marinetti expressed his approval of Olga Rozanova 's paintings during his 1914 lecture tour of Russia, it is possible that the women painters' negative reaction to the said tour may have largely been due to his misogyny, as well as his explicit support for fascism. Despite
8700-585: Was a movement of literature and the visual arts, involving various Futurist groups. The Russian Association of Proletarian Writers were associated with Russian Futurists during the 1920s in relation to the Futurists theory "Literature of Fact," in which Soviet art can be expressed through literacy evolution. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the movement, as were Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchyonykh ; visual artists such as David Burliuk , Mikhail Larionov , Natalia Goncharova , Lyubov Popova , and Kazimir Malevich found inspiration in
8800-487: Was also one of the first to paint in Aeropittura , an abstract and futurist art style of landscape from the view of an airplane. Giannina Censi was the first exponent of Aerodanze. Similar to Aeropittura, this was a second wave Futurist dance style based in the fascination with aviation (in 1931 Censi was accompanied by F.T. Marinetti in a dance tour entitled Simultanina ). Many Italian Futurists supported Fascism in
8900-440: Was as able a cultural entrepreneur as Marinetti, successfully promoted the rival Novecento group, and even persuaded Marinetti to sit on its board. Although in the early years of Italian Fascism modern art was tolerated and even embraced, towards the end of the 1930s, right-wing Fascists introduced the concept of " degenerate art " from Germany to Italy and condemned Futurism. Marinetti made numerous moves to ingratiate himself with
9000-470: Was associated with the Return to Order . After the war, Marinetti revived the movement. This revival was called il secondo Futurismo (Second Futurism) by writers in the 1960s. The art historian Giovanni Lista groups Futurism into three distinct decades according to characteristics of each: "Plastic Dynamism" of the 1910s, "Mechanical Art" of the 1920s, and "Aeroaesthetics" of the 1930s. Russian Futurism
9100-510: Was born at Botoșani , Romania , on 31 January, to an Ashkenazi Jewish family. During the early 1950s, Goldstein would be signing himself 'Jean-Isidore Isou'; otherwise, it was always ' Isidore Isou '. 'Isou' was normally taken to be a pseudonym, but Isou/Goldstein himself resisted this interpretation. My name is Isou. My mother called me Isou, only it's written differently in Romanian. And Goldstein: I'm not ashamed of my name. At Gallimard, I
9200-552: Was killed in the First World War, but his ideas influenced later generations of architects and artists. The city was a backdrop onto which the dynamism of Futurist life was projected. The city had replaced the landscape as the setting for the exciting modern life. Sant'Elia aimed to create a city as an efficient, fast-paced machine. He manipulated light and shape to emphasize the sculptural quality of his projects. Baroque curves and encrustations had been stripped away to reveal
9300-464: Was known as Isidore Isou Goldstein. Isou, it's my name! Only in Romanian it's written Izu, but in French it's Isou. General continuation of existing currents, together with new research into psychiatry, mathematics, physics, and chemistry. Other members to join the lettrism during the seventies : Woody Roehmer , Anne-Catherine Caron , and during the eighties : Frédérique Devaux, Michel Amarger ... Development of excoordism. Uncomfortable with
9400-579: Was not much involved in politics until the autumn of 1913. Then, fearing the re-election of Giolitti , Marinetti published a political manifesto. In 1914, the Futurists began to campaign actively against the Austro-Hungarian empire , which still controlled some Italian territories, and Italian neutrality between the major powers. In September, Boccioni, seated in the balcony of the Teatro dal Verme in Milan, tore up an Austrian flag and threw it into
9500-400: Was reached with Victor Hugo (and in painting with Eugène Delacroix , in music with Richard Wagner .). When amplic poetry had been completed, there was simply nothing to be gained by continuing to produce works constructed according to the old model. There would no longer be any genuine creativity or innovation involved, and hence no aesthetic value. This then inaugurated a chiselling phase in
9600-415: Was the first woman to have her art displayed since the exhibition's founding in 1895 ), the 1935 Rome Quadriennale , and several other futurist exhibitions — she was often overshadowed in her work by her husband. The first introduction of Benedetta's feminist convictions regarding futurism is in the form of a public dialogue in 1925 (with an L. R. Cannonieri) concerning the role of women in society. Benedetta
9700-518: Was the oldest movement of European avant-garde cinema. Italian futurism, an artistic and social movement , impacted the Italian film industry from 1916-1919. It influenced Russian Futurist cinema and German Expressionist cinema . Its cultural importance was considerable and influenced all subsequent avant-gardes, as well as some authors of narrative cinema; its echo expands to the dreamlike visions of some films by Alfred Hitchcock . Most of
9800-810: Was the urban scene and vehicles in motion that typified Futurist painting; Boccioni's The Street Enters the House (1911), Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (1912), and Russolo's Automobile at Speed (1913) for example. The Futurists held their first exhibition outside of Italy in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, Paris, which included works by Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla. In 1912 and 1913, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), he attempted to realize
9900-503: Was too traditional for Pratella's tastes. In the face of this mediocrity and conservatism, Pratella unfurled "the red flag of Futurism, calling to its flaming symbol such young composers as have hearts to love and fight, minds to conceive, and brows free of cowardice." Luigi Russolo (1885–1947) wrote The Art of Noises (1913), an influential text in 20th-century musical aesthetics. Russolo used instruments he called intonarumori , which were acoustic noise generators that permitted
10000-609: Was varied in subject matter and treatment, including realism (especially in works of propaganda), abstraction, dynamism, quiet Umbrian landscapes, portraits of Mussolini (e.g. Dottori's Portrait of il Duce ), devotional religious paintings, decorative art, and pictures of planes. Aeropainting was launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight , signed by Cappa , Depero , Dottori , Fillìa , Marinetti, Prampolini , Somenzi and Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) . The artists stated that "the changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with
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