Zemni Design

Design Explorations by Linda Mayoux

Constructivism

Author: lindamayoux

  • Constructivism

    Constructivism

    Constructivism was primarily an art and architectural movement originating in Russia after World War 1. It rejected the idea of art for arts’ sake and the traditional bourgeois class of society to which previous art had been catered. Instead it favoured art as a practise directed towards social change or that would serve a social purpose. The movement sought to push people to rebuild society in a Utopian model rather than the one that had led to the war.

    The term construction art was first coined by Kasmir Malevich in reference to the work of Aleksander Rodchenko. Graphic Design in the constructivism movement ranged from the production of product packaging to logos, posters, book covers and advertisements. Rodchenko’s graphic design works became an inspiration to many people in the western world including Jan Tschichold and the design motif of the constructivists is still borrowed, and stolen, from in much of graphic design today.

    More posts

    See also:

    Constructivist typography  Google images

    • Naum Gabo  wikipedia
    • Mayakovsky (poet)
    • Aleksandr Rodchenko

  • Bauhaus

    The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 in the city of Weimar by German architect Walter Gropius (1883–1969). Its core objective was a radical concept: to reimagine the material world to reflect the unity of all the arts. Gropius explained this vision for a union of art and design in the Proclamation of the Bauhaus (1919), which described a utopian craft guild combining architecture, sculpture, and painting into a single creative expression. Gropius developed a craft-based curriculum that would turn out artisans and designers capable of creating useful and beautiful objects appropriate to this new system of living.

    The Bauhaus combined elements of both fine arts and design education. The curriculum commenced with a preliminary course that immersed the students, who came from a diverse range of social and educational backgrounds, in the study of materials, color theory, and formal relationships in preparation for more specialized studies. This preliminary course was often taught by visual artists, including Paul Klee (1987.455.16), Vasily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and Josef Albers (59.160), among others.

    See more by Alexandra Griffith Winton Met Museum

    Typography

    One of the most essential components of the Bauhaus was the effective use of rational and geometric letterforms. Moholy-Nagy and Albers believed that sans serif typefaces were the future.

    Stencil by Joseph Albers: Albers designed a series of stencil faces while teaching at the Dessau Bauhaus. The typeface is based on a limited palette of geometric forms intended to remove any other artistic elements like expressionism from the forms.  Drawn on a grid, the elements of square, triangle, and circle were combined in a size ratio of 1:3.to form letters with an economy of form. Never intended for text and is difficult to read, but the face was designed for use on posters and in large scale signs.

    Universal type Herbert Bayer: geometric forms made by strokes of universal thickness. Designed to be used in print.

  • International Swiss Style

    International Swiss Style

    edited from Wikipedia International Topographic Style

    Overview

    The International Typographic Style, also known as the Swiss Style, is a graphic design style that emerged in Russia, the Netherlands and Germany in the 1920s and developed by designers in Switzerland during the 1950s. The International Typographic Style has had profound influence on graphic design as a part of the modernist movement, impacting many design-related fields including architecture and art.

    It emphasizes cleanliness, readability and objectivity. Hallmarks of the style are asymmetric layouts, use of a grid, sans-serif typefaces like Akzidenz Grotesk, and flush left, ragged right text. The style is also associated with a preference for photography in place of illustrations or drawings. Many of the early International Typographic Style works featured typography as a primary design element in addition to its use in text, and it is for this that the style is named. The influences of this graphic movement can still be seen in design strategy and theory to this day.

    History

    The style emerged from a desire to represent information without the influence of associated meaning; i.e.)objective information. In the year of 1896 the Akzidenz Grotesk Typeface was released by H. Berthold AG type foundry as an attempt to capture an objective style, and from this point the International Typographic style evolved as a modernist graphic movement that sought to clearly convey messages in a universally straightforward manner.

    Two major Swiss design schools are responsible for the early years of International Typographic Style. A graphic design technique based on grid-work that began in the 19th century became inspiration for modifying the foundational course at the School of Design in 1908. Shortly thereafter, in 1918 Ernst Keller became a professor at the Zurich School of the Applied Arts (Kunstgewerbeschule) and began developing a graphic design and typography course. He did not teach a specific style to his students, rather he taught a philosophy of style that dictated “the solution to the design problem should emerge from its content.”This idea of the solution to the design emerging from the problem itself was a reaction to previous artistic processes focused on “beauty for the sake of beauty” or “the creation of beauty as a purpose in and of itself”. Keller’s work uses simple geometric forms, vibrant colors and evocative imagery to further elucidate the meaning behind each design. Other early pioneers include Théo Ballmer and Max Bill.

    The 1950s saw the distillation of International Typographic Style elements into sans-serif font families such as Univers. Univers paved the way for Max Miedinger and collaborator Edouard Hoffman to design the typeface Neue Haas Grotesk, which would be later renamed Helvetica. The goal with Helvetica was to create a pure typeface that could be applied to longer texts and that was highly readable. The movement began to coalesce after a periodical publication began in 1959 titled New Graphic Design, which was edited by several influential designers who played major roles in the development of International Typographic Style. The format of the journal represented many of the important elements of the style—visually demonstrating the content—and was published internationally, thus spreading the movement beyond Switzerland’s borders. One of the editors, Josef Müller-Brockmann, “sought an absolute and universal form of graphic expression through objective and impersonal presentation, communicating to the audience without the interference of the designer’s subjective feelings or propagandist techniques of persuasion.” Many of Müller-Brockmann’s feature large photographs as objective symbols meant to convey his ideas in particularly clear and powerful ways.

    After World War II international trade began to increase and relations between countries grew steadily stronger. Typography and design were crucial to helping these relationships progress—clarity, objectivity, region-less glyphs, and symbols are essential to communication between international partners. International Typographic Style found its niche in this communicative climate and expanded further beyond Switzerland, to America.

    One of the first American designers to integrate Swiss design with his own was Rudolph de Harak. The influence of International Typographic Style on deHarak’s own works can be seen in his many book jacket designs for McGraw-Hill publishers in the 1960s. Each jacket shows the book title and author, often aligned with a grid—flush left, ragged-right. One striking image covers most of the jacket, elucidating the theme of the particular book. International Typographic Style was embraced by corporations and institutions in America from the 1960s on, for almost two decades. One institution particularly devoted to the style was MIT.

    Experimental Jetset Lars Muller Norm
    Wim Crouwel

    Associated movements

    During 1900s other design based movements were formulating, influencing and influenced by the International Typographic movement. These movements emerged within the relationships between artistic fields including architecture, literature, graphic design, painting, sculpting etc.

    De Stijl was a Dutch artistic movement that saw prominence in the period between 1917-1930. Referred to as neoplasticism, this artistic strategy sought to reflect a new Utopian ideal of spiritual harmony and order. It was a form of pure abstraction through reduction to the essentials of form and colour, employing vertical and horizontal layouts using only black and white and primary colors. Proponents of this movement included painters like Piet Mondrian, Vilmes Huszar and Bart van der Hoff as well as architects like Gerrit Rietveld, Robert van’t Hoff and J.J.P. Oud.

    Bauhaus was a German-based movement that emphasized purity of geometry, absence of ornamentation and the motto ‘form follows function’. This was a school of thought that combined craftsmaking with the fine arts and was founded by Walter Gropius. The goal was to work towards the essence of the form follows function relationship to facilitate a style that could be applied to all design problems; the International Style.

    Constructivism was an art/architectural philosophy that emerged from Russia in 1920s. The style develops by assorted mechanical objects that are combined into abstract mobile structural forms. Hallmarks of the movement include geometric reduction, photo-montage and simplified palettes.

    Suprematism, which arose in 1913, is another Russian art movement similarly focused on the simplification and purity of geometric forms to speak to values of spirituality.

    All of these movements including the International Typographic styles are defined by reductionist purity as a visually compelling strategy of conveying messages through geometric and colour-based hierarchies.

  • El Lissitsky

    El Lissitsky

    Lazar Markovich Lissitzky (1890 – 1941), better known as El Lissitzky  was a Russian artist, designer, photographer, typographer, polemicist and architect. He was an important figure of the Russian avant garde, helping develop suprematism with his mentor, Kazimir Malevich, and designing numerous exhibition displays and propaganda works for the former Soviet Union. His work greatly influenced the Bauhaus and constructivist movements, and he experimented with production techniques and stylistic devices that would go on to dominate 20th-century graphic design.

    El Lissitzky was devoted to the idea of creating art with power and purpose, art that could invoke change and saw the artist of an agent of change. “das zielbewußte Schaffen” (goal-oriented creation).

    Book and Graphic Design

    Lissitsky’s work with book and periodical design was perhaps some of his most accomplished and influential. He perceived books as permanent objects that were invested with power. This power was unique in that it could transmit ideas to people of different times, cultures, and interests, and do so in ways other art forms could not.

    In contrast to the old monumental art [the book] itself goes to the people, and does not stand like a cathedral in one place waiting for someone to approach . . . [The book is the] monument of the future.

    Lissitzky  began his career illustrating Yiddish children’s books in an effort to promote Jewish culture in Russia, a country that was undergoing massive change at the time and that had just repealed its antisemitic laws. In a visual retelling of the traditional Jewish Passover song Had gadya (One Goat)which El Lissitzky integrated letters with images through a system that matched the color of the characters in the story with the word referring to them. In the designs for the final page , El Lissitzky depicts the mighty “hand of God” slaying the angel of death, who wears the tsar’s crown.  Visual representations of the hand of God would recur in numerous pieces throughout his entire career, most notably with his 1925 photomontage self-portrait The Constructor, which prominently featured the hand.

    In the late 1920s Lissitzky began experimenting with print media again. He launched radical innovations in typography and photomontage. He even designed a photomontage birth announcement in 1930 for his recently born son, Jen. The image itself is seen as being another personal endorsement of the Soviet Union, as it superimposed an image of the infant Jen over a factory chimney, linking Jen’s future with his country’s industrial progress.

    In the late 1930s Lissitzky’s work on the USSR im Bau (USSR in construction) magazine took his experimentation and innovation with book design to an extreme. In issue #2 he included multiple fold-out pages, presented in concert with other folded pages that together produced design combinations and a narrative structure that was completely original. Each issue focused on a particular issue of the time – a new dam being built, constitutional reforms, Red Army progress and so on.

     Prouns

    In May 1919, on invitation from fellow Jewish artist Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky returned to Vitebsk to teach graphic arts, printing, and architecture at the newly formed People’s Art School.  Chagall also invited other Russian artists, most notably the painter and art theoretician Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky’s former teacher, Yehuda Pen.

    1919 propaganda poster “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge”. The image of the red wedge shattering the white form, simple as it was, communicated a powerful message that left no doubt in the viewer’s mind of its intention. The piece is often seen as alluding to the similar shapes used on military maps and, along with its political symbolism, was one of El Lissitzky’s first major steps away from Malevich’s non-objective suprematism into a style his own.

    In January 17, 1920, Malevich and El Lissitzky co-founded the short-lived Molposnovis (Young followers of a new art), a proto-suprematist association of students, professors, and other artists. After a brief and stormy dispute between “old” and “young” generations, and two rounds of renaming, the group reemerged as UNOVIS (Exponents of the new art) in February. The group,  disbanded in 1922, but was pivotal in the dissemination of suprematist ideology in Russia and abroad and launch El Lissitzky’s status as one of the leading figures in the avant garde.

    “The artist constructs a new symbol with his brush. This symbol is not a recognizable form of anything that is already finished, already made, or already existent in the world – it is a symbol of a new world, which is being built upon and which exists by the way of the people.”

    The exact meaning of “Proun” was never fully revealed, with some suggesting that it is a contraction of proekt unovisa (designed by UNOVIS) or proekt utverzhdenya novogo (Design for the confirmation of the new). Proun was essentially El Lissitzky’s exploration of the visual language of suprematism with spatial elements, utilizing shifting axes and multiple perspectives. Suprematism at the time was conducted almost exclusively in flat, 2D forms and shapes. El Lissitzky, with a taste for architecture and other 3D concepts, tried to expand suprematism beyond this. In Prouns, the basic elements of architecture – volume, mass, color, space and rhythm – were subjected to a fresh formulation in relation to the new suprematist ideals.  Jewish themes and symbols also sometimes made appearances in his Prounen, usually with El Lissitzky using Hebrew letters as part of the typography or visual code. His Proun works (known as Prounen) spanned over a half a decade, evolving from straightforward paintings and lithographs into fully three-dimensional installations that laid the foundation for his later experiments in architecture (architectons) and exhibition design.  Through his Prouns, utopian models for a new and better world were developed.

    Bauhaus and De Stijl

    In 1921, roughly concurrent with the demise of UNOVIS, suprematism was beginning to fracture into two ideologically adverse halves, one favoring Utopian, spiritual art and the other a more utilitarian art that served society. El Lissitzky was fully aligned with neither and left Vitebsk in 1921. He took a job as a cultural representative of Russia and moved to Berlin where he worked with and influenced important figures of the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements, most notably Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy, and Theo van Doesburg. Together with Schwitters and van Doesburg, El Lissitzky presented the idea of an international artistic movement under the guidelines of constructivism while also working with Kurt Schwitters on the issue Nasci (Nature) of the periodical Merz, and continuing to illustrate children’s books.

    Horizontal skyscrapers and exhibitions of the 1920s

    In 1923–1925, El Lissitzky proposed and developed the idea of horizontal skyscrapers (Wolkenbügel, “cloud-irons”). Lissitzky argued that as long as humans cannot fly, moving horizontally is natural and moving vertically is not. Thus, where there is not sufficient land for construction, a new plane created in the air at medium altitude should be preferred to an American-style tower. These buildings, according to Lissitzky, also provided superior insulation and ventilation for their inhabitants.

    “1926. My most important work as an artist begins: the creation of exhibitions.”

    In June 1926, Lissitzky designed an exhibition room for the Internationale Kunstausstellung art show in Dresden and the Raum Konstruktive Kunst (Room for constructivist art) and Abstraktes Kabinett shows in Hanover, and perfected the 1925 Wolkenbügel concept in collaboration with Mart Stam.

    One of his most notable exhibits was the All-Union Polygraphic Exhibit in Moscow in August–October 1927, where Lissitzky headed the design team for “photography and photomechanics” (i.e. photomontage) artists and the installation crew. His work was perceived as radically new, especially when juxtaposed with the classicist designs of Vladimir Favorsky (head of the book art section of the same exhibition) and of the foreign exhibits.

    In the 1928 Press Show scheduled for April–May 1928 the Soviets rented the existing central pavilion, the largest building on the fairground and the Soviet program designed by Lissitsky revolved around the theme of a film show, with nearly continuous presentation of the new feature films, propagandist newsreels and early animation, on multiple screens inside the pavilion and on the open-air screens. His work was praised for near absence of paper exhibits; “everything moves, rotates, everything is energized” Lissitzky also designed and managed on site less demanding exhibitions like the 1930 Hygiene show in Dresden.

    Final years

    In 1932, Stalin closed down independent artists’ unions; former avant-garde artists had to adapt to the new climate or risk being officially criticised or even blacklisted. El Lissitzky retained his reputation as the master of exhibition art and management into late thirties. In 1941, his tuberculosis worsened, but he continued to produce works, one of his last being a propaganda poster for Russia’s efforts in World War II, titled “Davaite pobolshe tankov!” (Give us more tanks!) He died on December 30, 1941, in Moscow.

     

     

     

     

  • Varvara Stepanova

    Varvara Stepanova (1894-1958) was a Russian painter, photographer and designer. She was influential as member of the Russian avant-garde movement and, later in her career, she would refer to herself as a constructivist. Her work shows a direct influence of the Cubists and the Futurist art movements and she spent her career dedicated to trying to use her work to create revolutionary change within society.

    Life

    Varvara Stepanova was born in a peasant family in Kovno (Kaunas), Lithuania. In 1910 she entered the Kazan Art School, where she met Rodchenko, her future husband and life-long colleague. Still at school she bought herself a Singer sewing machine, worked as a seamstress and learned dress design. She designed Cubo-Futurist work for several artists’ books, and studied under Jean Metzinger at Académie de La Palette, an art academy where the painters André Dunoyer de Segonzac and Henri Le Fauconnier also taught. She was a friend of the feminist artist and printmaker Lubov Popova.

    In the years before the Russian Revolution of 1917 she and Rodchenko leased an apartment in Moscow, owned by Wassily Kandinsky. In 1917 Stepanova began creating her innovative non-objective and graphic poetry, based on expressive combinations of sounds and their corresponding expression in form and color. In 1918 she published her books of graphic poetry “Rtny Khonle”, “Zigra Ar”, “Globolkim”. In her 1919 series of “Figures” the artist has moved towards shematization of the human figure. She painted them in geometrical simplified forms, in vivid and bold colors, against dark background or made of larger forms, busy with some kind of well-familiar human activity and social interaction: dance, play, music, walk. Rarely did the subject repeat. There is almost no trace of brush strokes, the paint was applied directly over a stecil plate, making the texture uniform. For the figures of 1920 a white backround was introduced, disattaching the figures as it was from their surroundings. At this time she also worked as assistant director of the Art and Literature section of IZO Narkompros (1919-1920).

    In the years following the revolution, Stepanova involved herself in poetry, philosophy, painting, graphic art, stage scenery construction, and textile and clothing designs. She contributed work to the Fifth State Exhibition and the Tenth State Exhibition, both in 1919.

    Constructivism

    In 1921, together with Aleksei Gan, Rodchenko and Stepanova formed the first Working Group of Constructivists, (the INKhUK 1920-1923) and was their research secretary. Together they redefined the concepts of composition and construction – they considered an object’s form already incorporated most of the construction and composition in its very structure; and therefore the designer artist’s role was to help bring it together in practical ways by use of colour and material design. They rejected fine art in favour of graphic design, photography, posters, and political propaganda.

    In her paper on Constructivism Stepanova wrote: “Industry and technology are developing continuously. … The realization of ideal beauty is thereby eliminated as a function of artistic activity, forcing the artist to move into industrial production in order to apply his objective knowledge of forms and constructions.” And then: “The intellect is our point of departure, taking the place of the ‘soul’ of idealism. From this it follows that, on the whole, Constructivism is also intellectual production (And not thought alone) incompatible with the spiritualuty of artistic activity”.

    In 1920-1921 the Constructivism group advanced from their definition “from invention to construction” to “from construction production”. They attempted to introduce various production art into the VKhUTEMAS.

    In 1920-1922 Stepanova was a member of the Presidium of the IZO section of the Union of Art Workers (RABIS), and taught in the studio at Krupskaya Academy for Communist Education (1920-1925).

    A pair of “5×5=25” exhibitions was held in the Union of Poets hall, with participation of five artists (A. Vesnin, L.Popova, A.Rodchenko, V.Stepanova, A.Exter), exhibiting five works each. The forum was used to announce the mvoe of the Constructivism artists from the easel to design and production. The second of the two, which was dedicated to graphic works, included designs  for construction of stage portals. This attracted the interest of Meierkhold, who invited Popova nad Stepanova to work in his theater.

    Stepanova declared in her text for the 1921 exhibition 5×5=25, held in Moscow: ‘Composition is the contemplative approach of the artist. Technique and Industry have confronted art with the problem of construction as an active process and not reflective. The ‘sanctity’ of a work as a single entity is destroyed. The museum which was the treasury of art is now transformed into an archive’.

    Theatre sets

    She designed the sets for The Death of Tarelkin in 1922. An adaptaion of play by A.Sokhovo-Kobylin, this was a total innovation in the theatre world. Stepanova made her set fully interactive with the actors and their play. The set was a combination of individual mechanical devices, designed to look like the most basic furniture, uniform in appearance and transforming at the actor’s will. The play itself included acrobatics and other fair-entertainment performance techniques, which interacted neatly with the set. The costumes were made of dark blue and light gray fablic, in stark geometric design.

    Clothing design and textiles

    In clothing design Stepanova developed the approach of “prozodezhda” (professional clothing) at a new angle: she differentiated between several groups of clothing, according to utilization. She designed several basic models, which could then be modified for the particular profession. In all she made the distiction between working “prozodezhda”, “sportodezhda” (sport clothing) and “spetzodezhda” (specialized clothing incorporating extra requirements, as for pilots, surgeons, firement etc). In article printed in the journal “LEF” 1923 the following observation is made: “Fashion, which psychologically reflects our daily life, habits and aestethic taste, is giving way to clothing organized for working in various branches of labor, for a specific social function, to clothing which can be worn only during the work process, to clothing which had no self-sufficient value outside real life”.

    In addition, she considered that the clothing has no need of additional decoration. The very seams, the design, the pockets, the fastening etc. are to provide the form; while the fabric design gives the color and visual pattern.

    From here the next step of fabric design was a very logical transition. Stepanova wrote: “We are now approaching a point where a gulf separating the fabric itself and the ready-made garment is becoming a serious obstacle to improving the quality of our cloting production. Itis time to move from designing clothing to designing the structure of fabric. This will allow the textile industry to jettison its present excessive variety, and help it standardize and improve, at long last, the quality of its production”.

    In the year the artist worked at the First Textile Printing factory she  designed more than 150 different fabrics. About two dozen were put into production. This was the very action upon the slogan “from construction into production”. Popova and Stepanova did not limit themselves in the textile industry with pattern design of the fabric. They were actively involved in incorporating designs into the production process, perfecting the printing processes; worked out models and cuts. To understand the processes and work together with its technological developers and engineers was essential in their approach. They strived to incorporate the design from within the very fabric, weave it in, dye it in, design the very physical properties of the fabric. And outside the process – there was the advertising of the industry and its achievements.

    In 1923 Stepanova became professor in the Textile Department at VKhUTEMAS. She held the view that the faculty needed to teach designer-artists, “artist-constructor in the textile industry, not an applied artist”. She made her students carry a special notebook, noting in it the people’s manner of dress, then anylizing it; created assignments of designing window-displays for fabric stores; designing actual clothes for people.Book illustration was Stepanova’s most consistent activity for over 30 years, from 1924 to 1958. In this field she was able to fully exploit her organizational and managerial skills along with the artistic and technical design of the polygraphic industry. She was a permanent staff member of the journals “LEF” and “New LEF” in 1923-1927. In 1933-1934 she served as an art editor for the “Partizdat” publishing house. When the conditions became difficult, in the 30s, 40s and 50s, she was forced to move more to the duties of technical editor, publisher and editorial secretary. But in the 20s this was the industry most suitable for the graphic expression of Constructivism – in the book, the poster, the periodicals of the time.

    During the WWII Stepanova and Rodchenko were evacuated to Perm and Ocher in Molotov District, and worked in the Ocher Agit-poster studio (1941-1942). At the end of 1942 they returned to their old apartment in Moscow.

    Varvara Stepanova died May 20th 1958

  • Filippo Marinetti

    Filippo Marinetti

    Edited from Wikipedia article

    Marinetti typography  Google images

    Marinetti is known best as the author of the Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote in 1909. It was published in French on the front page of the most prestigious French daily newspaper, Le Figaro, on 20 February 1909. In The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti declared that:

    “Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice.”

    Futurism

    See post: Futurism

    Futurism had both anarchist and Fascist elements; Marinetti later became an active supporter of Benito Mussolini.

    Marinetti, who admired speed, had a minor car accident outside Milan in 1909 when he veered into a ditch to avoid two cyclists. He referred to the accident in the Futurist Manifesto: the Marinetti who was helped out of the ditch was a new man, determined to end the pretense and decadence of the prevailing Liberty style. He discussed a new and strongly revolutionary programme with his friends, in which they should end every artistic relationship with the past, “destroy the museums, the libraries, every type of academy”. Together, he wrote, “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman”.

    The Futurist Manifesto was read and debated all across Europe, but Marinetti’s first ‘Futurist’ works were not as successful. In April, the opening night of his drama Le Roi bombance (The Feasting King), written in 1905, was interrupted by loud, derisive whistling by the audience… and by Marinetti himself, who thus introduced another element of Futurism, “the desire to be heckled”. Marinetti did, however, fight a duel with a critic he considered too harsh.

    Writings and sound poems

    His drama La donna è mobile (Poupées électriques), first presented in Turin, was not successful either. Nowadays, the play is remembered through a later version, named Elettricità sessuale(Sexual Electricity), and mainly for the appearance onstage of humanoid automatons, ten years before the Czech writer Josef Čapek would invent the term “robot”. In 1910, his first novel Mafarka il futurista was cleared of all charges by an obscenity trial.

    That year, Marinetti discovered some allies in three young painters, (Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo), who adopted the Futurist philosophy. Together with them (and with poets such as Aldo Palazzeschi), Marinetti began a series of Futurist Evenings, theatrical spectacles in which Futurists declaimed their manifestos in front of a crowd that in part attended the performances in order to throw vegetables at them.

    The most successful “happening” of that period was the publicization of the “Manifesto Against Past-Loving Venice” in Venice. In the flier, Marinetti demands “fill(ing) the small, stinking canals with the rubble from the old, collapsing and leprous palaces” to “prepare for the birth of an industrial and militarized Venice, capable of dominating the great Adriatic, a great Italian lake”.

    About the same time Marinetti edited an anthology of futurist poets. But his attempts to renew the style of poetry did not satisfy him. So much so that, in his foreword to the anthology, he declared a new revolution: it was time to be done with traditional syntax and to use “words in freedom” (parole in libertà). His sound-poem Zang Tumb Tumb exemplifies words in freedom. Recordings can be heard of Marinetti reading some of his sound poems: Battaglia, Peso + Odore(1912) Dune, parole in libertà (1914) La Battaglia di Adrianopoli (1926) (recorded 1935)

     Fascism

    Many Italian Futurists supported Fascism in the hope of modernizing a country divided between the industrialising north and the rural, archaic South. Like the Fascists, the Futurists were Italian nationalists, radicals, admirers of violence, and were opposed to parliamentary democracy. Marinetti founded the Futurist Political Party (Partito Politico Futurista) in early 1918, which was absorbed into Benito Mussolini’s Fasci di combattimento in 1919, making Marinetti one of the first members of the National Fascist Party. He opposed Fascism’s later exaltation of existing institutions, calling them “reactionary”, and walked out of the 1920 Fascist party congress in disgust, withdrawing from politics for three years; but he supported Italian Fascism until his death in 1944. The Futurists’ association with Fascism after its triumph in 1922 brought them official acceptance in Italy and the ability to carry out important work, especially in architecture. After the Second World War, many Futurist artists had difficulty in their careers because of their association with a defeated and discredited regime. Marinetti sought to make Futurism the official state art of Fascist Italy but failed to do so.

    Mussolini was personally uninterested in art and chose to give patronage to numerous styles and movements in order to keep artists loyal to the regime. Opening the exhibition of art by the Novecento Italiano group in 1923, he said, “I declare that it is far from my idea to encourage anything like a state art. Art belongs to the domain of the individual. The state has only one duty: not to undermine art, to provide humane conditions for artists, to encourage them from the artistic and national point of view.” Mussolini’s mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, who was as able a cultural entrepreneur as Marinetti, successfully promoted the rival Novecento group, and even persuaded Marinetti to sit on its board. Although in the early years of Italian Fascism modern art was tolerated and even embraced, towards the end of the 1930s, right-wing Fascists introduced the concept of “degenerate art” from Germany to Italy and condemned Futurism.

    Marinetti made numerous moves to ingratiate himself with the regime, becoming less radical and avant-garde with each. He moved from Milan to Rome to be nearer the centre of things. He became an academician despite his condemnation of academies, married despite his condemnation of marriage, promoted religious art after the Lateran Treaty of 1929 and even reconciled himself to the Catholic Church, declaring that Jesus was a Futurist.

  • Paul Rand

    Paul Rand

  • Dan Eldon

    Dan Eldon

    forthcoming

  • Sara Fanelli

    Sara Fanelli

    forthcoming

  • Phil Baines

    Phil Baines

    Forthcoming