Manifesto of Futurism Filippo Tomaso Marinetti 1909

1 We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.

2 Courage, audacity and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry.

3 Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap.

4 We affirm that the world's magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath - a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

5 We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along the circle of its orbit.

6 The poet must spend himself with ardour, splendour, and generosity,to swell the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.

7 Except in struggle there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.

8 We stand on the last promontory of the centuries! . . . Why should we look back, when what we want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9 We will glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10 We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

11 We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like he hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd.

It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours. With it, today, we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors archaelogists, ciceroni and antiquarians. For too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes. We mean to free her from the numberless museums that cover her like so many graveyards.

Museums: cemeteries!. . . Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one goes to the graveyard on All Souls' Day - that I grant. That once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the Giocanda, I grant you that . . . . But I don't admit that our sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why poison ourselves? Why rot?

And what is there to see in an old picture except the laborious contortions of an artist throwing himself against the barriers that thwart his desire to express his dream completely? . . . Admiring an old picture is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn stead of hurling it far off, in violent spasms of action and creation.

Do you, then, wish to waste all your best powers in this eternal and futile worship of the past, from which you emerge fatally exhausted, shrunken, beaten down?

In truth I tell you that daily visits to museums, libraries, and academies (cemeteries of empty exertion, Calvaries of crucified dreams, registries of aborted beginnings!) are, for artists, as damaging as the prolongied supervision by parents of certain young people drunk with their talent and their ambitious wills. When the future is barred to them, the admirable past may abe a solace for the ills of teh moribund, the sickly, the prisoner. . . . But we want no part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!

. . . .Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.

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Umberto Boccioni et al. Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 11 April 1910

cosigners Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini

...

WE DECLARE:

1 That all forms of imitation must be despised, all forms of originality glorified.

2 That it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms 'harmony' and 'good taste' as being too elastic expressions, by the help of which it is easy to demolish the works of Rembrandt, of Goya and of Rodin.

3 That the art critics are useless or harmful.

4 That all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever and of speed.

5 That the name of 'madman' with which it is attempted to gag all innovators should be looked upon as a title of honour.

6 That innate complementariness is an absolute necessity in painting, just as free metre in poetry or polyphony in music.

7 That universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation.

8 That in the manner of rendering Nature the first essential is sincerity and purity.

9 That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.

WE FIGHT:

1 Against the bituminous tints by which it is attempted to obtain the patina of time upon modern pictures.

2 Against the superficial and elementary archaism founded upon flat tints, and which, by imitating the linear technique of the Egyptians, reduces painting to a powerless synthesis, both childish and grotesque.

3 Against the false claims to belong to the future put forward by the secessionist and independents, who have installed new academies no less trite and attached to routine than the preceding ones.

4 Against the nude in painting, as nauseous and as tedious as adultery in literature.

We wish to explain this last point. Nothing is immoral in our eyes; it is the monotony of the nude against which we fight. We are told that the subject is nothing and that everything lies in the manner of treating it. That is agreed; we too, admit that. But this truism, unimpeachable and absolute fifty years ago, is no longer so today with regard to the nude, since artists obsessed with the desire to expose the bodies of their mistresses have transformed the Salons into arrays of unwholesome flesh!

We demand, for ten years, the total suppression of the nude in painting.