The style developed in the first quarter of the twentieth century mainly in Italy. Some ironically call it Cubism with a scandalous flavor. The founding fathers urged us to stop worshipping the art of the past, and to exalt the industrial spirit of the future: to paint airplanes, automobiles, metal bridges, steamships, and other achievements of progress.
Filippo Marinetti, one of the founders of futurism in literature, said: “The heat emanating from a piece of wood or iron excites us more than the smile and tears of a woman. The technical perfection of the machine was considered more important than human emotion.
Style is often confused with Cubism. The fundamental difference: the Cubists did not glorify technological progress.
The Futurists often sing of military technology, explosions and revolution as the driving force for progress. The Futurists tried to convey the dynamism and changeability of the world, and borrowed techniques from the Cubists for this purpose. The paintings are characterized by clear lines, zigzags, beveled cones, spirals, fragmentation of objects on the geometric shapes. A striking example is the work of Gino Severini “Sanitary Train, rushing through the city”, which is kept in the Guggenheim Museum. On the artist’s paintings, trains are “broken up” by clouds of steam in such a way as to create the effect of a moving car.
Futurists often emphasized the mobility of the world by depicting successive movements on the same canvas. For example, in one of Giacomo Balla’s canvases-it seems that the artist drew a storyboard of her running, and superimposed the drawings one on top of the other.
The futurists paid much attention to external brilliance and progress, but did not pay attention to the emotional state, so the style lost the interest of the public literally within a few years. After World War I, no one turned to it anymore.