Movement: The Italian Futurists

Photograph of Umberto Boccioni

Photograph of Marinetti, a leader of the Futurist Movement

Boccioni was an influential thinker during the Futurist movement, and many of his works, both artistic and literary, shaped the movement itself. The Futurist movement focused around the optimism of the progressing world. They were obsessed with the machine age that was occurring in Europe and these ideas of speed and dynamism that could be produced. They were led by a thinker named Marinetti and the Futurists were influential from the turn of the century up until the end of World War I.  Their art was carefully thought out to create a reality of objects in conjunction with the environment. Boccioni was a proponent for what he titled “plastic dynamism,” the inclusion of relative and absolute motion. He wanted to create “plastic dynamism” through his work which could only be achieved through the combination of movement in relation to the environment and the dynamism inherent to the object. In his manifesto “Plastic Dynamism” Boccioni wrote, “therefore, instead of the old-fashioned concept of a sharp differentiation of bodies, instead of the modem concept of the Impressionists with their subdivision and repetition and rough indications of images, we would substitute a concept of dynamic continuity as the only form.” For him, the dynamic continuity, or the unison of motion, presented the reality of a singular object that can take on many forms. The ultimate expression of this notion is “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” where just by the title alone he states his theory that one can create a single unique body that has many continuous forms and shapes as it moves through space. He created an object that had its inherent motion of running to it but simultaneously acted on the world around it by taking up space with its multiple forms.  The goal of Boccioni was to include the multiple forms of each limb all into one body that represents the action of running.