Futurism

This movement originated with the publication of Italian poet, Filippo Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1909. His stirring words established futurism as a revolutionary movement in which all the arts were to test their ideas and forms against the new realities of scientific and industrial society. This manifesto voiced enthusiasm for war, the machine age, speed and modern life. It shocked the public by proclaiming, “we will destroy the museums, libraries, and flight against moralism, feminism and all utilitarian cowardice.” It rejected harmony as a design quality because it contradicted “the leaps and bursts of style running through the page.”

 On the pages of Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, three or four ink colours and twenty typefaces could redouble word’s expressive power e.g. Italics could be used for quick expression and bold for violent noises and sounds.  Free, dynamic and piercing words could be given the velocity of stars, clouds, airplanes, trains, waves, explosives, molecules and atoms. A new and painterly typographic design, called parole in libertá or “words in freedom” was born on these pages. Noise and speed were expressed in futurist poetry as they were two dominant conditions of 20^th century life. Marinetti urged poets to liberate themselves form servitude to grammar and open new world of expression.

Filoppo Marinettu, “Une assemblée tumultueuse”

(A Tumultuous Assembly), Foldout from Les mots en

Liberté Futuristes, 1919.

Since Gutenberg’s invention of movable type, most graphic designs used a vigorous horizontal and vertical structure. Futurist poets cast this structure to the wind as they deemed it as an unnecessary constraint. Freed form tradition, they animated their pages with a dynamic, non-linear composition achieved by pasting words and letters in place for reproduction from photoengraved printing plates.

The futurists believed that writing and/or typography could become a concrete and expressive visual form. This concept was explored in a visual writing style called pattern poetry, where the verse often took the shape of the object or religious symbols. The German poet Arno Holz used this device to reinforce intended auditory sounds by omitting capitalization and punctuation, varying word spacing to signify pauses, and using multiple punctuation marks for emphasis.

A poem called “Un coup de dés” (A Throw of the Dice) was published in 1897 by a French poet named Stéphane Mallarmé. This poem was constructed of 700 words on twenty pages in a typographic range: capitals, italics, lowercase and roman. Rather than surrounding a poem with white, empty margins, Mallarmé dispersed this “silence” through the work as part of its meaning. Instead of stringing words in linear sequence, like beads, he placed them in unexpected positions on the page to express sensations and evoke ideas. He was successful in relating typography to the musical score – the placement and weight of words relate to intonation, stress and rhythm in oral reading.

Stéphane Mallarmé, pages from “Un coup de dés” (A Throw of the Dice), 1897.

Mallarmé anticipated the formal and expressive typographic concerns that emerged in the twentieth

century when poets and painters became interested in the creative potential of the printed page.

Guillaume Apollinaire, also a French poet, who was closely associated with the cubists and Marinetti, championed African culture, defined the principles of cubist painting and literature and also observed that “ catalogs, posters, advertisements of all types contain the poetry of our epoch. He had a unique contribution to graphic design in the form of his 1918 book called Calligrammes. This book contained poems in which letterforms are arranged to form a visual design, figure or pictograph. He explored the potential fusion of poetry and painting in these poems by introducing the concept of simultaneity to the time- and sequence bound typography of the printed page.

Guillaume Apollinaire, poem from

Calligrammes, 1918.

The typography become a bird, a

 water fountain and an eye

In this expressive design.

Marinetti and 5 accompanying artists published the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters in 1910. In this Manifesto they declared that their intentions were to:

*      Destroy the cult of the past

*      Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation

*      Elevate all attempts at originality

*      Regard art critics as useless and dangerous

*      Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects that have been used in the past

*      Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.”

These futurist artists were extensively inspired by cubism, but they also attempted to express emotion, energy and cinematic sequence.

Antonio Sant’Elia wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Architecture. He called for construction based on technology and science and for design that addressed the unique demands of modern life. He declared decoration to be absurd and used dynamic diagonal and elliptic lines because they possessed emotive powers greater than that of horizontal and vertical lines. Unfortunately, Antonio was killed on the battlefield. Nevertheless, his ideas and visionary drawing influenced the course of modern design, particularly art deco.

Antonio Sant’Elia, drawing for the new city of the future, 1914.

These drawings were reproduced with Sant’Elia’s manifesto

In Lacerba. After the war, many of his ideas about

Form developed in architecture, product and graphic design.

Perspective drawing from La Città Nuova, 1914.

Fortunato Depero was amongst the artists who applied futurist philosophy to graphic and advertising design. He produced a dynamic body of work in poster, typographic and advertising design. As a young artist, he shifted form social realism, to symbolism, to futurism and published his Depero futurista in 1927. This was a compilation of his typographical experiments, advertisements, tapestry designs and other books.

Fortunato Depero, New Futurist Theater

Company poster, 1924.

Flat planes of vibrant color, diagonal composition,

and angular repetitive forms produce kinetic energy.

Depero worked in New York and designed covers for magazines such a Vanity Fair, Movie Makers and Sparks. The sophisticated and cosmopolitan audience nearly limited Depero, but he excelled and produced futurist work with appearance that proved somewhat influential. Futurism became majorly influential on other art movements. The Dadaists, constructivists and De Stijl adopted its violence and revolutionary techniques. Futurists also ignited the publication of manifestos, typographic experimentation and publicity stunts.