Word: futurist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rather claustral kind, but atmosphere just the same -- bathe the bodies and unify them as objects in the world while threatening always to dissolve them as emblems of personality. The surfaces look as if they came via Philip Guston from Monet, picking up some of Giacomo Balla's futurist dissections of light particles along the way -- a sober flicker in which images flash and are gone like the sides of fish in dark, weedy water...
With its dignified rooms, passing from grand to aedicular scale and back again, Palazzo Grassi is an excellent place to look at art. The show has art and a good deal else, including such totems of futurist affection as a 1911 Bleriot monoplane and a World War I Spad hanging from the cortile roof, and a vintage Bugatti by the canal entrance, to remind one of Marinetti's belligerent and much quoted dictum that "a roaring motorcar that seems to run ( on shrapnel is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace...
...exhibition has ever made a stronger case for the quality of futurist art or gone into more detail about its roots. Futurism was the most influential art movement Italy produced in the early 20th century. Indeed, the word futurist became synonymous with modernity itself to people in America, England and Russia until around 1925. The movement took an aggressively internationalist stance, looking to a future world unified by technology. Yet its rhetoric was bedded deep in Italian life. The core of the futurist group, which coalesced in the early 1900s, was made up of the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra...
Such weights evoke violent reactions. The futurists set out to create the image of an Italy that did not yet exist, a utopia of tension and transformation whose god was the machine. Its architecture would not be the old cellular stone hill town but the dream environment conjured up by Sant'Elia: all girders and concrete cliffs, with glass elevators zipping up the exterior walls. Its painting would try to encompass not just sight but noise, heat and smell; above all, it would depict movement. To fix this industrial mode in Italian (and European) culture, the pastoral mode...
...virtually straight renderings of multiple-exposure photographs. But in his series of paintings inspired by a Fiat speeding down the Via Veneto, the game gets more complex. Nearly all of this series is assembled at Palazzo Grassi, culminating in Balla's Abstract Speed, 1913, one of the few large futurist paintings that can be called a pictorial masterpiece, a thundering black Doppler-effect image in which the shapes of wheel, mudguard and driver dissolve in and out of the shuttling buildings...