Futurism and Pop Art

Italian Futurism debuted in 1909 with the emergence of the "Founding and Manifesto of Futurism which was published in the newspaper Le Figaro, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Not only was Marinetti the individual who pushed for futurism and the father of the movement, but he was the one who essentially shepherded it from start to finish, until he died in 1944. One of the most refreshing aspects about Futurism was the fact that it was young and fresh mode of art, and started via the written word, and then crossed over into other art forms and media. "To be a Futurist in the Italy of the early 20th century was to be modern, young, and insurgent. Inspired by the markers of modernity -- the industrial city, machines, speed, and flight -- Futurism's adherents exalted the new and the disruptive. They sought to revitalize what they determined to be a static, decaying culture and an impotent nation that looked to the past for its identity" (Guggenheim.org). As a result of the fact that Futurism began as a form of literary representation, the printed word was a major form of expression and influence for this particular group. Thus, manifestos, poetry, diaries, and articles were all crucial to the distribution of ideas, as the Futurists were all devoted to the spread of their ideas, embracing all art forms and experimenting with the elimination of time and space. As this paper will explore, heavy experimentation truly influenced the futurists, as they dabbled in the act of collapsing time and space, depicting motion and spinning and trading perspectives. This paper will look at two forms of futurism in particular, heroic futurism and literary futurism.

The artist Giacomo Balla, also contained at the Guggenheim, played with elements like the movement of light and the manifestation of electromagnetic waves in the piece Iridescent Interpenetrations. Balla uses bold colors and presents them in an array of shapes that look like spikes, standard of so many of his geometric shapes harnessed in his paintings. There's a strong variance of width and length and a strong sense of the precision of the natural world and the importance of all that is taken for granted in how we see light and color.

Similarly, the piece, Abstractions of Speed, was a meditation on the imagistic elements contained in velocity (Guggenheim.org). These disarming and challenging subjects were precisely what futurism was motivated by and fascinated with: a desire to portray the unportrayable and to give an image and form to things which were previously considered inaccessible to men. Inspired by cars passing by a window, this piece gives a strong and provocative meditation on the promise of the future and modernity, conveying all of these aspects in a rush of color and movement across the canvas.