Filippo Tommaso Marinetti Quotes

Mondrian is the greatest Futurist painter of the North.

The compliments you are about to pay could only sadden me, because what you love in our dear peninsula is exactly the object of our hatreds. Indeed, you crisscross Italy only to meticulously sniff out the traces of our oppressive past, and you are happy, insanely happy, if you have the good fortune to carry home some miserable stone on which our ancestors have trodden.

Before us, art relied on memory, an anxious re-evocation of an Object lost (happiness, love, a landscape), and hence was nostalgic, static, charged with suffering and distance. With Futurism, instead, art is turning into art-action, which is to say, into will, optimism, aggression, possession, penetration, delight, brutal reality within art (example: onomatopoiea; —example: noise-tuners = motors), geometrical splendor of forces, projections forward. Thus, art is becoming Presence, new Object, new reality created with the abstract elements of the universe. The hands of the passéist artist used to suffer for the sake of the lost Object; our hand will twitch for the new Object to be created. That is why the new Object (the plastic complex) has miraculously appeared in your hands.

..there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece.

Original Italian text:
Noi canteremo le grandi folle agitate dal lavoro, dal piacere o dalla sommossa: canteremo le maree multicolori e polifoniche delle rivoluzioni nelle capitali moderne; canteremo il vibrante fervore notturno degli arsenali e dei cantieri incendiati da violente lune elettriche; le stazioni ingorde, divoratrici di serpi che fumano; le officine appese alle nuvole pei contorti fili dei loro fumi; i ponti simili a ginnasti giganti che scavalcano i fiumi, balenanti al sole con un luccichio di coltelli; i piroscafi avventurosi che fiutano l'orizzonte, le locomotive dall'ampio petto, che scalpitano sulle rotaie, come enormi cavalli d'acciaio imbrigliati di tubi, e il volo scivolante degli aereoplani, la cui elica garrisce al vento come una bandiera e sembra applaudire come una folla entusiasta.

And now I am obliged to tell you what it is that clearly distinguishes Futurism from anarchism.

Original Italian text:
È dall'Italia, che noi lanciamo pel mondo questo nostro manifesto di violenza travolgente e incendiaria, col quale fondiamo oggi il «Futurismo», perchè vogliamo liberare questo paese dalla sua fetida cancrena di professori, d’archeologhi, di ciceroni e d’antiquarii.

We had stayed up all night — my friends and I — beneath mosque lamps hanging from the ceiling. Their brass domes were filigreed, starred like our souls; just as, again like our souls, they were illuminated by the imprisoned brilliance of an electric heart. On the opulent oriental rugs, we had crushed our ancestral lethargy, arguing all the way to the final frontiers of logic and blackening reams of paper with delirious writings.

A cry went up in the airy solitude of the high plains: 'Let's Murder the moonlight!' Some ran to nearby cascades; gigantic wheels were raised, and turbines transformed the rushing waters into magnetic pulses that rushed up wires, up high poles, up to shining, humming globes.

O my brother Futurists! All of you, look at yourselves!.. ..In the name of that Human Pride we so adore, I proclaim that the hour is nigh when men with broad temples and steel chins will give birth magnificently, with a single trust of their bulging will, to giants with flawless gestures.

Original Italian text:
Avevamo vegliato tutta la notte — i miei amici ed io — sotto lampade di moschea dalle cupole di ottone traforato, stellate come le nostre anime, perchè come queste irradiate dal chiuso fulgòre di un cuore elettrico. Avevamo lungamente calpestata su opulenti tappeti orientali la nostra atavica accidia, discutendo davanti ai confini estremi della logica ed annerendo molta carta di frenetiche scritture.

Idealists, workers of thought, unite to show how inspiration and genius walk in step with the progress of the machine, of aircraft, of industry, of trade, of the sciences, of electricity.

In order to win over Paris and appear, in the eyes of all Europe, an absolute innovator, the most advanced of all, I urge you to get to work with all your heart, resolute on being bolder, crazier, more advanced, surprising, eccentric, incomprehensible, and grotesque than anybody else in music. I urge you to be a madman.

Hail! great incendiary poets, you Futurist friends!.. Hail! Paolo Buzzi, Federico de Maria, Enrico Cavacchioli, Corrado Govoni, Libero Altomare! Let's flee the city of Paralysis, devastate Gout, and lay the great military Railroad along the flanks of Gorisankar, summit of the world!

..a member of anarchist and revolutionary circles, attracted in turn by violent action and by dream, before resolving to dedicate him to painting. [describing Boccioni ]