Futurism

a radically innovative movement in literature and the graphic arts begun in Italy by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), whose Futurist Manifesto of 1909 called for the exalted participation of the arts in the dynamically mechanistic ethos of modernity. The Manifesto of Futurist Painting (1910) by Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and others emphasized flux and movement as essentials of representation. Marinetti's Technical Manifesto of Literature (1912) called for disruption of syntax and use of words for their sounds alone as methods of liberating language ‘from the prison of the Latin sentence’. Russian Futurism was established in 1912 by Viktor Khlebnikov (1885–1922) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), whose manifesto entitled ‘A Slap in the Face for Public Taste’ rejected the validity of the nineteenth-century Russian literary tradition. Initially an active force in the cultural development of the revolution, the Russian Futurists were marginalized by official policy in the early 1920s. Futurism was a direct influence on Dada and Surrealism and the progenitor of numerous forms of poetic experimentation with sound and typography. Marinetti's controversial series of lectures in London in 1912 stimulated Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound to formulate Vorticism; the first issue of Blast expressed their agreement with Futurism's basic aesthetics, but maintained that the movement was flawed in its fundamentally romantic attitude to mechanical dynamism.