The World of Myth Magazine

"We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts."

This is the opening of 'The Futurist Manifesto' written in 1909 by F. T. Marinetti. This was the first step of the 'Futurist' movement onto the world stage, a movement that is not often talked about now. It was only active for about two decades, but Futurism proved to be very influential on the wider 'Modernism' that was happening around the first half of the last century. We can see a clear Futurist influence on, for example, the Cubism of Picasso, or the Surrealism of Salvador Dali, but these names have come to overshadow the Futurists, and this is a shame. Many Futurist paintings are still striking, feel very fresh, and show genuine artistic merit - such as Gino Severini's 1915 'Armored Train in Action'.

Light colours and interesting use of lines and curves characterize the Futurist style, trying to make the viewer feel a strong sense of movement or action is taking place with a force and directness very different from traditional, Realist works. There is also a lot of sharp, hard angles used to make something that should look familiar look strange, or somehow machine-like – or these 'should be familiar' subjected are painted in strange and impossible ways. City blocks can be turned upside down or be at very noticeably odd angles, and so look a little like robots that are dancing around or rushing toward the viewer. These are aspects of a Futurist painting can create a feeling of discomfort or disorientation when seeing them.

All of this is based on a general Futurist philosophy, which could be summed up as: a fascination with modernity and machinery, aiming to either exclude or reinterpret anything classical or traditional, an idealisation of urban landscapes (unlike the idealisation of rural landscapes often seen in earlier works), an exaltation of originality in technique and ideas, and in motion, speed and violence. One line from Marinetti's 'Futurist Manifesto' sums the general attitude of the movement up quite succinctly, saying that the sputtering of a motorcar sounds (as it very much did at the time) like machine gun fire, and that it was 'more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace', a 2nd century BC statue from Ancient Greece:

To a Futurist, mechanization, force and progression are more beautiful than the crumbling relics and ideas of the past.

Gino Severini painted ' Armored Train in Action' in 1915, the year Italy entered WW1 on the side of the Entente against Germany and Austria-Hungry. The subject of the piece is an armored train, then still a symbol of modernity, with what is very clearly a few soldiers inside it, all shooting rifles while a heavy cannon behind them is firing on the unseen enemy, while all around the train we see the smoke of whirling bullets and gunfire. The aesthetic philosophy and underlying principles of Futurism has contributed to the very striking style of this painting. The painting has such a stylized, almost cartoonish, appearance that it might not at first be clear that it is a train being depicted, and without knowing the title a viewer could see and interpret the painting in wildly different ways from Severini's original intentions. All the sharp angles and unconventional shapes in this painting has a very strange effect, almost like the painting is a bit overwhelming on an unconscious level. It is difficult to see it and not pay attention to it.

In our collective cultural memory, we cannot help but imagine WW1 as colorless and somber. We picture it with the dead brown and exploding mud of No Man's Land under an iron- gray sky. This painting is instead a canon- blast of color, with blues whites and greens almost literally shining from it like rays of light from the divine. A viewer might even get the impression that the artist even enjoys the idea of a heavily armored train firing a mass of ammunition at the enemy, and at speed, and that is no accident. In the Futurist Manifesto it is explicitly stated that the Futurists 'want to glorify war' because they see it as 'the only cure for the world' – possibly because war is the quickest way to pull down the old power structures, and replace them with more modern, revolutionary ones.

It is appropriate that the soldiers in the armored train car are not clearly distinguishable, and so are not clearly individuals. They are also not doing anything unique: such as reloading, or yelling a command - these soldiers are all in unison, aiming in the same direction. with their indistinct appearance they almost blend into the armored train like they are as mechanical as the train itself. A lot of art can be subject to an individual's own interpretation, and this painting could work as a satire of attitudes that glorify war, however it is also worth remembering that it was generally the Futurist's intention to glorify war – which is something that a modern viewer might find harder to sympathize with or properly rationalize. This might make the Futurist painters more interesting, because of their remoteness from (broadly speaking) our modern mindset alongside their intentional strangeness. While we might want to reconceptualize a work of art for our own times – the artist might have had a worldview, and so an intention with their work, that is very different from our worldview. One that we might even find objectionable. Not anyone who views it, however, might see an armored train, or if they do see it in a much more metaphorical way. For example, someone might see the soldiers as the forces of creativity bursting out of a blank page. Should the artist's original intention, when it is known, stop us from enjoying a work of art in another way – or allow us to enjoy purely because of its artistic merits? There probably is no real answer to that.