History of Design Lecture 3 Reflection – The art of Futurism

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

Author: Amanda Lee

Sometimes what you are most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free

Leave a Reply