O futurism was one of the aspects of 20th century artistic vanguards. It started as a movement in Italy, in 1909-1910, with a strong tone patriotic in his manifesto, but he had an influence on the arts of other countries, such as France, Russia and Brazil. These artists saw the future represented in the speed of the automobile, in industrial advances, in electricity, in the great metropolises, in the gears of machinery, in short, in the new social configuration of the beginning of the century, which for them represented a new world and a new man.
Glorifying technology and understanding the acceleration of engines and turbines as a release from the past, enthusiastically welcomed the new inventions as the horizon of the human future. “An electric iron is more beautiful than a sculpture”, said Giacomo Balla, one of the founders of the movement, an assertion that points to the rupture represented by the futurist proposal.
The main idea that futurists sought to incorporate into their artistic procedure was mainly the
velocity, capturing, whether in the fine arts or in literature, this accelerated movement that they perceived to intensify around them. in the words of Filippo Marinetti, another precursor of the movement:“The splendor of the world has been enriched with a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A career car is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
Historical context
Created in early 1909 in Milan, Italy, futurism reverberated a euphoria with discoveries and inventions gives Second Industrial Revolution, ongoing in Europe since the mid-nineteenth century, and whose technological advances were refined over the decades.
The replacement of iron by steel reinforced the productive potential, as well as the replacement of coal by oil as the main resource energy, which allowed the creation of combustion engines, which are still present in automobiles, which became popular at the beginning of the century. XX. It was also during this period, in mid-1908, that the first public flights took place in Paris, aboard the 14-bis. O environment was of great change, shortening distances, accelerating everyday life.
The Italian futurist movement was, in its genesis, marked by a aggressive nationalism, which led many of its members, especially Marinetti, to a enthusiasm for the war and to categorical support of Benito Mussolini's Fascism, officially founded in 1919.
Main features of futurism
- Dynamicity;
- Challenge of sentimentality and consequent valorization of the man of action;
- Extolling audacity and revolution;
- Exaltation of contemporary life, with an emphasis on technology themes and new industrial apparatus;
- Rejection of moralism and break with tradition;
- in painting: use of vibrant colors and contrasts; abstraction and dematerialization of objects (cubist influence); superimposition of images and traces in order to represent the idea of movement and speed;
- In the writing: “freedom for the word”; use of onomatopoeias, free verses, fragmented sentences or in unexpected places, to convey the idea of speed; technological vocabulary; use of exclamations and interjections to express energy.
Read too: Cubism: meet this other artistic vanguard
Excerpts from the Futurist Manifesto
The avant-garde movements of the beginning of the 20th century were, for the most part, officially started from the writing manifestos. As they are artistic strands that sought above all the break with the art hitherto established, the artists found, in this textual genre, the opportunity to clarify what the movement sought to express, in what way it intended to break with tradition, what was most important and significant to them. etc.
O Futuristic Manifesto was written by the poet Filippo Marinetti and became known after its publication, in 1909, in the French newspaper Le Figaro. See some excerpts:
“So, with the figure covered by the good mud from the factories – a slurry of metallic slag, useless sweat, soot heavenly -, bruised and bandaged our arms, but undaunted, we dictate our first wishes to all the living men of the Earth:
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and recklessness.
Courage, audacity and rebellion will be essential elements of our poetry.
To date, literature has extolled thoughtful immobility, ecstasy and sleep. We want to exalt aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, speed, somersaults, slaps and punches.
We affirm that the magnificence of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car adorned with thick snake-like tubes of explosive breath… a roaring automobile, which it seems to run over the shrapnel, it is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace [Roman sculpture from Classical Antiquity, approx. 190 a. Ç.].
We want to celebrate the man who holds the wheel, whose ideal shaft crosses the Earth, launched at full speed into the circuit of its own orbit.
The poet must lavish himself with ardor, ostentation, and munificence, in order to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
There is no longer any beauty except in the fight. No work that does not have an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent assault on unknown forces to force them to prostrate themselves before man.
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! …. Why should we look back if we want to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We already live the absolute, because we create the eternal omnipresent speed.
We want to glorify war – the only hygiene in the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which people die and the contempt for women.
We want to destroy museums, libraries, academies of all kinds, and fight moralism, feminism and all opportunistic and utilitarian vileness.
We will sing of the great crowds stirred by work, pleasure or upheaval; we will sing the multicolored and polyphonic tide of revolutions in modern capitals; we will sing the vibrant nocturnal fervor of arsenals and shipyards set ablaze by violent electric moons: the seasons insatiable, devouring of smoking snakes: the factories suspended from the clouds by the contorted threads of their smokes; the giant gymnast-like bridges that pierce the smoke, gleaming in the sun with a flash of knives; the adventurous steamships that sniff the horizon, the broad-chested locomotives that rear up on the tracks like huge steel horses restrained by tubes and the gliding flight of airplanes, whose propellers flutter in the wind like flags and seem to applaud like a crowd enthusiastic.
[...]”
Top artists
- Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944), founder of the movement; poet, editor, journalist and political activist.
- Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), also a forerunner of the movement, was a painter and sculptor.
- Carlos Carrà (1881-1966), Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), all Italian painters who signed the Futurist Manifesto.
- Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Russian poet and dramatist who was greatly influenced by the movement, being one of the forerunners of the russian cubfuturism, a strand that combined traces of cubism and futurism in its productions.
- Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), Portuguese poet, translator, essayist and thinker whose work is marked by the use of heteronyms. One of his heteronyms, Álvaro de Campos, had a marked futuristic phase.
- Almada Negreiros (1893-1970), writer and artist, belonging to the first generation of Portuguese modernists, was a great exponent of futurism in his country.
- Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954), Brazilian poet, dramatist and essayist, one of the central names of modernism national, was the first to mention the futurist movement.
- Mario de Andrade (1893-1945), poet, theorist, essayist and novelist. He rejected the categorization of “futurist”, but received direct influences from the movement, especially in his work Pauliceia Desvairada (1922).
Read too: Orphismo, the first phase of modernism in Portugal
A futuristic Fernando Pessoa
A poet of multiple expressions, Fernando Pessoa has several voices, each with its own characteristics, in a complex system of creation that he calls them heteronyms. More than pseudonyms, each of the heteronyms expressed its own universe, another personal self, each with its own literary style. The best known are Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, Álvaro de Campos and the semi-heteronym Bernardo Soares.
Álvaro de Campos, the most visceral and feverish of Pessoa's heteronym, had a futuristic compositional phase, in which the lyrical self exalts the modern world, structuring their verses so that they give the effect of the dynamism and speed of machines. See an example where the futuristic features are well delineated - vocabulary use related to technology, the vision of what the poet calls the beauty of this machinery, never seen before by humans; the presence of onomatopoeias, free verses, exclamations and interjections:
Triumphal Ode
In the painful light of the factory's large electric lamps
I have a fever and I write.
I write gritting my teeth, beast for the beauty of it,
For the beauty of it totally unknown to the ancients.
O wheels, o gears, r-r-r-r-r-r-r Eternal!
Strong restrained spasm of the furious machinery!
Raging inside and out,
For all my dissected nerves,
For all the buds out of everything I feel with!
I have dry lips, O great modern noises,
From listening to you too closely,
And my head burns from wanting you to sing with an excess
Expression of all my sensations,
With a contemporary excess of yourselves, O machines!
In fever and looking at the engines like a tropical Nature —
Great human tropics of iron and fire and strength —
I sing, and sing the present, and also the past and the future,
Because the present is all past and all future
And there's Plato and Virgil inside machines and electric lights
Just because there was a time and Virgil and Plato were humans,
And pieces of Alexander the Great from the maybe fifty century,
Atoms that will have fever for the brain of the Aeschylus of the century,
They walk through these transmission belts and these pistons and these flywheels,
Roaring, creaking, hissing, roaring, priming,
Making me an access of caresses to the body in a single caress to the soul.
Ah, to be able to express myself completely as an engine expresses itself!
Be complete like a machine!
To go through life triumphant as a state-of-the-art automobile!
To be able to at least physically penetrate all this,
Tear me all up, open me completely, become passy
To all scents of oils and heats and coals
From this stupendous, black, artificial and insatiable flora!
[...]
Hey! and the rails and the engine rooms and Europe!
Hey and hurrah for me-everything and everything, working machines, hey!
To climb with everything on top of everything! Hup-there!
Hup-la, hup-la, hup-la-ho, hup-la!
There it is! He-ho! H-o-o-o-o!
Z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z-z!
Oh don't be me everyone and everywhere!
London, 1914—June.
(Fernando Pessoa, in Complete Poetry by Álvaro de Campos, 2007)
Read too: Poems of the first Brazilian modernist generation
Futurism in Brazil
O Brazilian Modernism, which had its official debut from the 1922 Modern Art Week, received direct influences from the European avant-garde movements. the horizon of break with traditional art was the main driver for the emergence of modern art, and Brazilian artists saw a model in the avant-gardes, a source of inspiration to guide the emergence of a new national art. And the futuristic proposals of rejection of the past It's from cult of progress and the future they were in line with what Brazilian modernists were looking for.
In addition, the modernist movement in Brazil carried within itself an eagerness for its own modernization, a need to keep up with the modernity of Second Industrial Revolution, of which futurism was the most direct testimony.
The artists Oswald de Andrade and Mário de Andrade were influenced by futuristic aesthetics, although they were not strictly supporters of this movement. For Oswald, as written in his Pau-Brasil Manifesto (1924), futurism was important to “set the empire clock of national literature”. He even called Mário “my futurist poet” in a 1921 article, to which he replied: “I'm not a futurist (by Marinetti). I said and I repeat it. I have points of contact with futurism. Oswald de Andrade, calling me a futurist, was wrong”.
The futuristic influence was not reproduced, therefore, but assimilated and re-signified. Oswald and Mario mixed trends of cubism and futurism in some of his poetic compositions, without failing to establish a critical posture to Marinetti's proposal, since foreign aesthetics did not properly fit the context Brazilian - not least because, still mostly agrarian, Brazil was slowly beginning to industrialize. There was no such ambience of machines and technological advancement as in Europe.
The following poem is an example of the incorporation of some futuristic proposals in the verses of Mário de Andrade – sings the city of São Paulo, which at the time already concentrated several people from multiple origins, as well as already propagating the belief in industrial progress; reverberates the idea of freedom of words; makes repeated use of interjections; sings the asphalt and the airplane; but he also remembers that there is mud from the floodplain coexisting with the asphalt, there is a bit of archaic living with modern ambitions. Look:
You
Dying flame sticks,
Even more dead in the spirit!
gentleman spirit,
Who lives on a yawn between two gallants
And from far to far a cup of strong darkness!
longer woman
that the hallucinated astonishments
From the towers of São Bento!
Woman made of asphalt and floodplain mud,
All insults in the eyes,
Every invitation in that crazy mouth of blushes!
Seamstress from São Paulo,
Italo-Franco-Luso-Brasilico-Saxon,
I like your twilights,
Twilight and therefore more ardent,
Flagrantly!
Lady Macbeth made of fine mist,
Pure morning mist!
Woman who are my stepmother and my mother!
Upward crunch of my senses!
Airplane risk between Mogi and Paris!
Pure morning mist!
I like your Turkish crime wishes
And your ambitions twisted like robberies!
I love you from brooding nightmares,
Materialization of my Poe's Canaan...
Never more!
Emílio de Menezes insulted the memory of my Poe...
Oh! Incendiary of my soundings!
You are my black cat!
You smashed me into the walls of my dream!
This ghastly dream!
And you will always be, dying flame gobbles up,
Half noble, half belly,
the crucifying hallucinations
Of all the dawns in my garden!
(Mário de Andrade, Pauliceia Desvairada, 1922)
by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher