The Futurists ventured into art forms that seemed even less apt for people obsessed with motion. Boccioni experimented with sculpture, capturing the movement of striding figures as they cut via the air. The photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890- 1960) invented Futurist Photodynamism. Utilizing this technique, a gesture could be traced in one picture; previously, photographers had recorded movement by taking a rapid succession of numerous pictures.

Balla’s painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Lead, a light-hearted study of a whirry-Iegged mutt, was influenced by Bragaglia’s work. Futurists had been eager to design the city of tomorrow; Marinetti enrolled Antonio Sant’Elia (1888-1916) to be the movement’s official architect. Sant’Elia’s New City was full of soaring towers and straight, forceful lines – but it was never built, and remained a science fiction vision. Futurists thought that each generation should build its own environment, and that buildings should last no longer than a single lifetime.

War artists

Within the months before World War I, Futurists took up the interventionist cause. Their anarchic fieriness became a strident patriotism, as they urged Italy to rise up against the old enemies; Austria and Germany. Futurist Evenings had been now war rallies – Marinetti waved Italy’s flag and burned Austria’s. Carra’s Interventionist Manifesto is the key image of the era. The Futurists glorified war.

Most of them enlisted; for Boccioni, the fighting was ‘wonderful, marvellous, terrible, immense, life and death’ – and at the front, he proclaimed ‘I am happy.’ The war combined modern technology and old-fashioned violence, but weapons such as the machine gun offered no grand passion; just death on a huge, industrial scale. The movement lost its momentum; Boccioni and Sant’Elia had been killed, and the survivors went their separate ways.

Like an old soldier, Futurism didn’t die; when the fighting was over, bits and pieces of it had been picked up by other individuals. Many European artists fiddled with Futurist ideals, and some Italians pursued them into the 1930s. Immediately after the war, Marinetti took part in political campaigns alongside Benito Mussolini, who was to become Italy’s Fascist dictator.

Many individuals have condemned the Futurist movement for this flirtation with Mussolini’s repressive ideas, but the men seem to have had little in common politically; every may have been merely using the other’s notoriety to drum up publicity for his own schemes. Futurism was chaotic and impulsive; Fascism, to say the least, was not! Mussolini, the square-jawed Emperor of Earnestness, soon distanced himself from the Futurists and their embarrassing taste for riotous disruption.