FUTURIST INFLUENCE, FUTURISM
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The most sympathetic are likely to have misgivings about Futurism, for such a mixture of bluff and self-advertisement is hard to reconcile with our lofty conception of the work of art or the artist's mission. But I believe there was something compelling, something that went deeper than it realised, beneath the loud-mouthed huckstering of futurfascismo. Indeed a reading of the first Futurist Manifesto of 1909 is enough to make us aware that the bloated rhetoric embodied an idea of genuine value.
Stripped of its trappings, Futurism can be seen to have been inspired by the generous ambition of bringins life into art, of bringing about a closer union between them, while rejecting all dead art in favour of living life itself, the natural creator of new forms. Futurism also has other claims to our gratitude. By making such a noise, such a stir in so many countries and exciting critics and journalists in so many capitals of Europe, it did more than any other single movement to free art from the traditional forms of the past and, as a result, to open the public's mind, all over the world, to a totally new art.
Here again, abstract art was proclaimed in various statements to be found in a number of manifestoes. The painters were demanding lines of force and Boccioni wrote "We must assert that the sidewalk can find its way on to the dining-room table, that your head can cross the road all by itself, and that at the same time your own reading-lamp can weave a huge spider's web from one house to another with its chalky beams. We must assert that the whole visible world must make its impact on us, fusing itself with us and creating a harmony dictated by creative intuition alone." He also said "We must open up the figure or shape and fill it full of the environment in which it has its being." But it was Severini rather than Boccioni who was to come closest to abstraction, with his manifesto written in Rome during the winter of 1913-1914. It was never published till now, when it can be read in the Appendix A of this book.
Futurism has left few works of any importance by way of giving a plastic justification of its programme. Perhaps its real creativeness lay in its influence on men's minds. However Severini's work prior to 1914 deserves close attention, especially his series of Dancing-girls painted in 1913. These are abstract compositions made up of graceful lines and delicate colours, usually applied in the pointilliste manner favoured by the Post-Impressionists. He gave up his abstraction only in order to revert to a kind of academicism which might perhaps be Italian but has nothing modern about it. He returned to abstract art only after 1945, in the same way as Picabia and others. He is now painting compositions in which harsh, abrupt lines are set against flat stretches of skilfully modulated colour. These canvases are also called Dance or Dancing-girls, though they are very unlike those of the pre-1914 phase.
Among the remaining Futurist painters mention must be made of Balla, who began painting abstracts in 1913, and of a few works by Carlo Carra and De Soffici, and especially of the later canvases by Boccioni, the great hope of Futurist painting and sculpture, who died after falling from a horse in 1916. Later, when Futurism degenerated into 'Aero-painting', the only one to continue on abstract lines was Prampolini.
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