At the beginning of the 20th century, when the industrialization of society reached maturity, people began to agree with scientism. The advent of this industrialized society also had a profound effect on the arts. One of the best examples of this was Italian Futurism.

The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published his “Futurist Manifesto” in 1909, in which he instigated that what artists needed was courage, daring, and revolt. He praised the automobile, the steamer, the locomotive, and the airplane as machines of speed and motion; he praised the modern energies of labor, the factory and the multitude; he praised all warfare, militarism and patriotism, the subversive actions of the anarchists, and despised women and feminism. Five Italian painters (Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà and Gino Severini) agreed with this inhumane and radical declaration of masculinity and formed the Futurist Group.

The paintings of the Futurists were influenced by Cubism, but they were also based on themes of time, space, color, light, and dynamism, and used their own techniques of expression. In 1909 Balla painted Street Light, in which the romantic moonlight of modern science is eclipsed by the light of the city’s street lamps, a painting that shows a deep exploration of light and color. In Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, painted in 1912, he analyzes the dynamism of a moving dog and creates an image that resembles a multiple exposure photograph. His technique of expressing a sense of speed by drawing a greater number of legs and other parts of the body than usual also influenced the expression of dynamic forces in Japanese comics.

It should also be noted that the Futurist movement had a sense of integrating all the artistic disciplines, not only painting, but also literature, photography, cinema, music, sculpture, architecture, theater, design, and fashion. In 1917, Balla created a stage set for Igor Stravinsky’s ballet “Fireworks.” In five minutes, 49 different sequences and combinations of light were projected from the backstage keyboard, evoking the birth of light art as a formative element. In 1913, Russolo also invented and performed with a noise-making instrument, the Intonarumori. Russolo saw noise as something that could evoke life in a violent way, and he experimented to find the ideal combination of noises generated by trams, internal combustion engines, cars, and loud crowds. While traditional music was limited to the creation of ordered musical tones, his view of noise as a component of music was a visionary one that encouraged the expansion of the field of music at the time and has had an immeasurable impact on contemporary music. At the same time, it was an avant-garde attempt to transcend the differences between art and music and can be seen as the beginning of sound art, in which sound is the main element of expression.

Thus, the Futurists, despite their brief existence from 1911 to 1915, had a profound effect through their explosive and destructive avant-garde movement. The Futurists were involved in fascist politics and warfare, and were at the forefront of the battlefield, causing deaths and serious injuries, but their ideas and intentions, which suggested a fusion of art and technology, were passed on to Russian Constructivism and Dada, and contributed greatly to the development of art.

(KURIYAMA Hitoshi)

References

• 伊藤俊治（1991）『機械美術論 もうひとつの20世紀美術史』岩波書店
• 末永照和（2000）『20世紀の美術』美術出版社
• 橋本太久磨（1995）『近代デザインの歩み デザイナーのための』理工学社