The Manifest Image

The futurist’s scorn for women is famously controversial. This week, to dig further into this facet of the movement, we look at Valentine de St Point’s response to F.T. Marinetti in her “The Manifesto Of The Futurist Woman.” St Point expands the Futurist provocation and leaves plenty of questions about the movement’s liberating potential as well as its fundamental shortcomings.

Venice has always been a dramatic setting for artistic expression, for the Futurists however it represented the decadent stagnation they so despised. This week we look at the Futurist manifesto “Against Passeist Venice”–sometimes translated as “Against Traditionalist Venice”– a screed against all those who love Venice for its past, its old palaces, and slow, easy going canals. But for all their de...

While we get the Patreon up and running enjoy some free bonus content. This week we look at Umberto Boccioni’s splendid triptych States of Mind (The Farewells, Those Who Go, Those Who Stay), Thomas reads some Rimbaud, and Ariel makes some puerile jokes. (Boccioni) States Of Mind I: The Farewells https://www.moma.org/collection/works/78648 (Boccioni) States Of Mind II: Those Who Go https://www.moma...

So far we’ve seen the theory behind a futurist aesthetic, but this week we look at Boccioni et al. try and make specific sense of what that would entail in Futurist Painting: A Technical Manifesto. We will cover Divisionism, Pointillism and other aspects of Impressionism to understand what makes a painting specifically Futurist while talking through examples by Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, amo...

This week, we look at the Manifesto of The Futurist Painters, the group’s first attempt at translating Marinetti’s passionate prose into a visual medium. Legend has it that it was written by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and Luigi Russolo in a café in Milan over the course of a single day, with F.T. Marinetti swooping in at nightfall to spruce it up. This being a podcast we thought it essential t...

How do you murder sentimentality, comfortable sensuality, and exhaustion?...How do you kill the moonlight? This week, we turn to F.T. Marinetti’s second manifesto, “Let’s Kill the Moonlight!”, (1909). Split into four sections, Marinetti begins with a defence of Futurism and a call to arms, before launching into a narrative, where the Mad, armed with cars and planes, wage war on Paralysis, Gout, an...

The Futurist Manifesto, composed by FT Marinetti and published in 1909, on the front page of Le Figaro, sparks not only the ignition of The Futurist Movement, but the entire avant-garde of the 20th Century. Subsequent movements – such as Vorticism, Dadaism, Surrealism etc. – would be heavily indebted to this manifesto. Either, supporting the Futurists, or using them as a foil, to put forward their...