Filippo Marinetti and the Dawn of Futurism

Filippo Marinetti was an Italian author and poet from the early 1900's to the mid-1920's. Marinetti was the founder of a style of art that started in about 1909 known as Futurism. Futurism is the product of the Cubist movement even though it didn't originally start out that way. Originally, there was no specific style to the Futurism movement and it took inspiration from a lot of other periods such as Symbolism and Post-Impressionism. Futurism became of on the more important stepping stones of 20th century art history. Artists such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and Carlo Carrà took Marinetti's ideas and turned it into art, exploring the concepts of space and movement. Marinetti founded the Futurism movement with the Futurist Manifesto in which he says "We want no part of it, the past...we the young and strong Futurists!" Marinetti hated the old forms of politics and art and that he wanted to embrace the future of new technology, travel, warfare, nationalism, & violence. The philosophy

all Futurists should have was they should forget about political correctness and adopt all new cultural modernisms regardless of how daring and violent while also having a "smear of madness". Their new found ways eventually led to excitement of the First World War. Marinetti was inspired by the world to change his view and create something different.
One of Marinetti's most famous works of art was Zang Tumb Tumb.

Zang Tumb Tumb was created at the beginning of 1912 and was finish in 1914. This was Marinetti's first published work within a collection of works he called parole in libertá. Parole in libertá translates to "words in liberty." All of the parole in libertás were a type of poetry in which it was verbal as well as visual. He took words from his book of the same title and rearranged them on the page. Zang Tumb Tumb is a poem written in 1912 about Marinetti's experience of the Siege of Adrianople during the Balkan War in which he was an war correspondent. The title, Zang Tumb Tumb, is actually multiple onomatopoeias that come from the sounds of the war; the bombs, explosions, and artillery shelling. The typography is draw so that the person viewing it can get a feel the noises as they read it. Also, the way it is positioned you get a sense of which noises are further away or a little louder than

others.
Vive La France was created somewhere between late 1914 and February of 1915 with ink, crayon, and cut-and-pasted printed paper on paper. Similar to the first work of art, he used the words and page numbers from Zang Tumb Tumb. The difference is that this once is an actual collage while the other was printed in a book. The M's are supposed to be mountains, the V's valleys, and the S's paths while the number is the number of soldiers he visited. He turns the S to show how the paths curved and even seemed to make Z's to indicate sharper path. Also similar to Zang Tumb Tumb, the words Zang Tumb Tumb are written a couple times to show the same as the latter. There is also additional onomatopoeias such as "crooc-craac" which symbolizes the slow rumble of battalions and "pic-pac-poum-toum" is symbolic of the sound of air fire.
In 1919, Marinetti made a work of art called In the Evening, Lying on Her Bed, She Reread the Letter from Her Artilleryman at the Front . He seemed to make a lot of art having to do with war but this one in particular shows military life from the other side. This work shows what it's like for the wife of an officer to receive a letter from him and everything she feels. The woman is lying down on her stomach on the bottom right hand corner of the paper and have everything "exploding" out from behind her head which symbolizes her thoughts or parts of the letter as she reads it. These also symbolize, like all the others, the noises heard on the battlefield. "Traak-traak" is the noise of a whip cracking or a slap while "SCRABrrRrraaNG" suggests the noise of artillery firing. Very 'similar to Zang Tumb Tumb this is a visual representation of a poem in letterpress form instead of collage. This wasn't a parole in libertá like the other two; this was published in Les Mots en Liberté Futuristes.
Les Mots en Liberté Futuristes was published in 1919 as a book with four fold out plates in print. It included multiple example of intricate typography. It shows his genius and his use of eccentricities to produce multiple types of typography while still all kind of being the same. Even the cover includes things such as plus & minus signs and onomatopoeias. Les Mots en Liberté Futuristes translates to words in futuristic freedom. This was different than everything else because this was a book with a collection of typographies versus all the others where a book or a poem and just the cover was typography. There are about 6 works of art within the book. The cover though is the first instance where we see color; every other work of art has been all black and using scale and rotation to covey what he is trying to say.
In 1915, Marinetti created The Dirigible. The Dirigible is unlike the others because it is stands out. It uses actual images instead of letters and words to symbolize what he means. He still does use onomatopoeias to bring to life the noises of the things in the collage. The Dirigible has an actual blimp and hills with the sounds coming from them. The blimp is dropping bombs and that is what the "BOOOOOOOOOMBAA" is depicting. Like Vive La France, this is an example of collage in which he uses cut-and-pasted printed paper and ink on paper. This is another example of Marinetti's love for war. He once said, " War is beautiful...because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns."
Marinetti inspired multiple people with his work; one of them being Enrico Prampolini. Prampolini paid homage to Marinetti and made a portrait of him in 1925 in the style of Futurism. It is considered a Futuristic painting because of the time it was made along with the use of lines and color even letters like Marinetti did. Prampolini was referred to as one of the most graphic design oriented artist among the Futurists.
I think Marinetti's work is utterly amazing. The fact that he was able to use the words of books he wrote to construct something so innovate and creative constitutes talent. The fact that he was also able to inspire so many other people to do such beautiful paintings and works of art is something most artists can't do. I think all his has done, artistically and literally, really shows his true genius.