Critical Writings by F T Marinetti

Critical Writings by F T Marinetti

The Futurist movement was founded and promoted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, beginning in 1909 with the First Futurist Manifesto, in which he inveighed against the complacency of "cultural necrophiliacs" and sought to annihilate the values of the past, writing that "there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece." In the years that followed, up until his death in 1944, Marinetti, through both his polemical writings and his political activities, sought to transform society in all its aspects. As Günter Berghaus writes in his introduction, "Futurism
sought to bridge the gap between art and life and to bring aesthetic innovation into the real world. Life was to be changed through art, and art was to become a form of life."

This volume includes more than seventy of Marinetti's most important writings--many of them translated into English for the first time--offering the reader a representative and still startling selection of texts concerned with Futurist art, literature, politics, and philosophy.

Filippo Tommaso Emilio Marinetti was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist, and founder of the Futurist movement who lived from December 22, 1876 until December 2, 1944. From 1907 and 1908, he was a member of the Abbaye de Créteil, a utopian and Symbolist artistic and literary commune. Marinetti is most known for writing and publishing the original Futurist Manifesto, which he wrote and published in 1909.