The Manifesto

The Futurists wrote countless manifestos and distributed them in cities around the world to communicate their aesthetic, social, and political ideals. Through this entrepreneurial method of mass promotion the artists expressed their ideas about visual art, literature, music, dance, cinema, politics, and contemporary life, among other subjects. In visual, typographic, verbal, and aural attacks on the academic and bourgeois classes, the past, and the conservative institutions that represented it, the Futurists freed expression from the bounds of tradition and propriety.

F. T. Marinetti. “Manifeste du futurisme” [Manifesto of Futurism]. February 20, 1909

One of the most well-known and representative declarations of this manifesto, first published on February 20, 1909, in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro, is a cornerstone of Futurist thought: “We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916)

Italian sculptor, painter, writer and printmaker, Umberto Boccioni was one of the principal figures of the Italian Futurism movement and one of the greattwentieth century sculptors.

In 1912, he published Futurist Painting Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism, which expounded his ideas on the relationship between form, motion and space. Despite the brevity of his life, dying at the age of 34, Boccioni's influence onsculpture continued to influence other artists many years after his death. His iconic masterpiece is Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913, original in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sao Paulo, Brazil; casts in the Tate London, MoMA New York and elsewhere), a work which illustrates his theory of "dynamism", a concept he also explored in other works like: Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1912), Spiral Expansion of Speeding Muscles (1913) andSpeeding Muscles (1913). Umberto Boccioni's works can be seen in several of the best art museums in Europe and America.