Great thread.
Futurism has just about the best on-line resource for any of the twentieth century 'isms' that I've seen-
http://www.futurism.org.uk The bloke does it all in his own time and it's pretty comprehensive.
The students that I teach are still fairly compelled by Futurism too- as much for its propagandising/marketing techniques as anything else. Marinetti was the first in the European 'avant-garde' to grap the possibility of a trans-national propaganda campaign; his relentless proselytising took him across Europe from London to Moscow and most places in between. By c. 1915 most European countries had a Futurist hiding somewhere or other thanks to this tremendous effort.
The two here were 1. CRW Nevinson in England, who went on to modify Futurist aestheitcs in WW1 to produce his celebrated images from the war, and 2. in Scotland, Stanley Cursiter, who saw Severini in London in 1913 and the Fry/Rutter mass exhbitions in London in 1912-13. he made about a dozen Futurist paintings before the start of the war.
Dubversion asked about Vorticism which I did loads of work on as an undergrad....Basically Vorticism was an odd fusion of three titanic egos: Lewis, Ezra Pound, and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The ideas of Vorticism developed to their fullest extent in the BLAST manifesto but had been brewing for several years in Lewis' mind. It was a fusion of Nietzsche, early Cubist aestheitcs and a Futurist narcissism/controvertialism. In the few weeks before the outbreak of WW1, BLAST was a very 'fashionable' thing for folk to be carrying around London.
Ultimately Vorticism was a radical right movement, concerned with militarism, a skepticism as to the potential for human improvement, the outworking of Wilhelm Worringer's Abstraction & Empathy through the unpleasant filter of TE Hulme, and, in art-politics terms, violent opposition to the fey aestheticism and emotional self indulgence of Bloomsbury.
It's hard to grasp now how polarised the London art world was before 1914- and how much these differing groups hated one another. Hulme and Lewis squabbled over the affections of a mutual girlfirend, with the burly philiosopher leaving Lewis hung upside down by his trouser cuffs from the railings on Bedford Square. Lewis spat at Bloomsbury critic and artist Roger Fry in the street. Lewis led a Voriticst delegation to the launch of the manifesto of English Futurists, fucking up the launch of said manifesto by Nevinson and Marinetti through a heady admixture of vulgar trolling and cowardly personal abuse from the audience.
Butchers' has already mentioned that great Hemingway quote about Lewis, but the best quote of all is in Lewis' autobiography,
Blasting and Bombardiering, when he said that in the run up to WW1
'Life was one giant bloodless brawl, before the great bloodletting'.
and the issue of Futurism was raised in the course of my reading. But I shan't be revising them in any way.
he became very influential, though: check this:
