A B O U T

• An Italian art movement of the early twentieth century that aimed to capture in art the dynamism and energy of the modern world.
• Created by the Italian poet and author Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909 through Futurist Manifesto.
• Fusion of the cubist painting and the futurist poetry
• Futurists were well versed and practiced in nearly every field of art, including painting, ceramics, sculpture, graphic design, interior design, theatre, film, literature, music and architecture.

F U T U R I S T  M A N I F E S T O

• • A poem written by Marinetti, and it first appeared as a preface to a volume of his poems (written in 1908)
  • Marinetti and his fellow futurists were tired of Italy’s reliance on its classical heritage and disdainful of the present, and thus wanted to create a new aesthetic based on industry, war and the machine.
  • They wanted to burn museums and libraries, as they contained traces of the old traditions of Italy.
  • They also demanded purification by war – which influenced fascism and chauvinism

A R T  S T Y L E S  I N  F U T U R I S M

Paintings

• Used elements of neo-impressionism (post-impressionist works) and cubism to create compositions that expressed the idea of the dynamism, the energy and the movement, of modern life.
• Used divisionism: breaking light and colour down into a series of dots or geometric forms.
• Also incorporates  high contrast and intersecting lines to show movement

Typography

• Words in Freedom: destroyed syntax, used verbs in the infinitive, abolished adjectives and adverbs, suppressed punctuation, and employed mathematical and musical symbols.
• Marinetti exhorted writers to “destroy the ‘i’ in literature: that is, all psychology,” to give up on being understood by the reader, and to abandon aesthetic concerns by creating the “ugly” in literature.
• His prescription for Futurist writing was not only phonetic but also visual. He wanted to take advantage of the “typographical revolution” to use new fonts and arrangements of words.
• use of different sizes, weights, and styles of type allowed them to weld painting and poetry, because the intrinsic beauty of letterforms, manipulated creatively, transformed the printed page into a work of visual art.
• used intersecting lines within words as well to create directional lines that lead the eye from line to word

A D A P T A T I O N S  I N  F U T U R I S M

• The use of Futurism has adapted into book covers and posters
• Adapted the use of futurist mindsets of skyscrapers and neon interface

The act of engraving text and image onto materials for commonfolk to read has dated back to 750CE. The first engraved printing units were wood engravings, such were seen in the Chinese Diamond Sutra that was created in the year 868.

After these wooden engravings gained popularity, people started to make printing units out of metal plates using different types of metal – specifically copper and pewter. These metal plates were made able to print by a process in which an image in wax or bitumen was drawn on, or transferred to, the surface of the plate and nonimage areas removed by action of appropriate acids.

Photoengraving was only invented in 1813 by researcher Joseph Nicephore Niepce. He coated a pewter or copper plate with a photosensitive asphaltum and exposed the surface to bright sunlight through an etching of a portrait, which served as a positive image. Sunlight passing through the background of the etching hardened the asphaltum, while the protected areas, under the inked portion of the etching, were developed in oil of lavender and white petroleum to create an image in exposed metal. This image was then etched into the plate, and from the intaglio image, prints were made on a copperplate press.

Example of photoengraving on wood

In 1851,  wet-collodion process for photography was introduced, and it provided a means for producing a photographic negative as the basic element in the preparation of engravings. This photographic process also provided a method of stripping the photographic image from the glass plate, permitting assembly of a number of images for plate making, and also making possible the geometric reversal of the image needed in letterpress plate making to produce a right-reading print on paper.

Soon after, the halftone process allowed people to produce shades of grey, in which the image is broken up into dots, and variations of gray tones are obtained by varying the size of the dots, thus controlling the amount of ink laid down in a given area.

The discovery of the halftone screen was primarily responsible for the development and growth of photoengraving; further growth was related to other developments in the printing and allied industries. The introduction in 1935 of the first practical colour film for amateur and professional use probably did more to accelerate printing developments than any single invention. By making bulky studio-type colour cameras obsolete and permitting the use of readily portable camera equipment for the production of colour images, on-the-spot colour photography became possible, greatly increasing the use of coloured illustrations.

At approximately the same time, the commercial production of coated paper and heat-drying printing inks for letterpress printing began. Many colour developments for films, printing processes, and materials followed.

Now in our current society, photoengraving is used for specialty printing, such as foil stamping, embossing on paper, wood and cork branding for the wine industry and chocolate coin engraving and molding plates. It is also used by designers to simulate various products for photography shoots and right reading plaques for casting in bronze.

R E F E R E N C E S

http://www.bauerengraving.com/

https://www.britannica.com/technology/photoengraving/Modern-photoengraving-techniques