The Futurist Manifesto Against English Art

F.T. Marinetti

I am an Italian Futurist poet and I love England passionately. I want to cure English Art of the worst of all maladies: traditionalism. I thus have every right to speak out loud, without mincing my words, and together with my friend Nevinson, the English Futurist painter, to signal the start of the struggle.

Against

1. The cult of tradition, the conservatism of the academies, the commercial obsession of English painters, the effeminacy of their art and their efforts, which are purely, exclusively decorative.
2. The pessimistic, sceptical, and nostalgic tastes of the English public, which stupidly adores, to the point of ecstasy, everything that is affected, moderate, softened and mediocre, such as petty reconstructions of things medieval – the graceless Garden Cities, maypoles, Morris dances, Fairy stories, aestheticism, Oscar Wilde, the Pre-Raphaelites, the Neo-primitives, and Paris.
3. A badly focused snobbery that ignores and despises every English attempt at boldness, originality and invention, and which hurries off to venerate the boldness and originality of foreigners. It should never be forgotten that England had its innovators, such as Shakespeare and Swinburne in poetry; Turner and Constable (who was the very first of the Impressionists and of the school of Barbizon) in painting; Watt, Stephenson, Darwin and so on, in the sciences.
4. The false revolutionaries of the New English Art Club, which destroyed the prestige of the Royal Academy and which is now vulgarly hostile to the vanguard movements.
5. The indifference of the King, the State, and the politicians towards art.
6. The English perception of art as an idle pastime, good only for women and girls, while artists are regarded as poor madmen in need of protection and art is seen as a bizarre illness that anyone can talk about.
7. The right of absolutely anyone to discuss and pass judgements where art is concerned.
8. The grotesque, outmoded ideal of the drunken genius who is dirty, unkempt and classless, given to much drinking, which is synonymous with art; and Chelsea, seen as the Montmartre of London; the sub-Rossettis with long hair beneath their sombreros, and other kinds of traditionalist rubbish.
9. The sentimentalism with which your paintings are loaded to make up for (and here you are plainly mistaken) your lack of tenderness and feeling for life.
10. Innovators who are held back by weariness, by well-being, by desperation. Innovators lounging about on their islands or in their oases, who refuse to move forward. Innovators who declare; ‘Oh yes, we desire what is new, but not what you call new!’ The tired old innovators who say: ‘We admire and follow the Post-Impressionists; but we mustn’t venture beyond a certain desirable naïveté (Gauguin, etc.).’ These innovators demonstrate not only that they have stopped dead in their tracks, but that they have never understood how art evolves. If in painting and sculpture naïveté, with its deformations and archaisms, has been the goal at all costs, that has been because of the need to break violently free from the academic and the pretty, prior to advancing toward the plastic dynamism of Futurist painting.
11. The mania for immortality. The masterpiece must die with its author. Immortality – so far as art is concerned – is infamy. With their power of construction and their immortality, our forebears in Italian art have enclosed us in a prison of timidity, imitation and subjugation. They are always with us on their high-backed chairs, these venerable grandfathers of ours, telling us what to do. Their marble brows weigh heavily in the anguish of our youth: ‘Avoid motorcars, my children! Wrap up warm! Avoid draughts! Be careful of the lightning!’
12. Enough! Enough! … Long live the motorcar! Hurray for the drafts! Hurray for the lightning.

We desire!

1. A strong English art, virile and unsentimentalized.
2. That English artists strengthen their art through regenerative optimism, with a courageous desire for adventure and a heroic instinct for exploration, with a cult of strength and with moral and physical courage, the strong virtues of the English race.
3. That sport be considered as an essential element in art.
4. To create a great Futurist avant-garde which is the only thing that can save English art, threatened with death as it is, through the traditional conservatism of the academies and the habitual indifference of the public. It will prove a heady alcohol and a relentless goad for creative genius, and maintain a constant preoccupation with keeping the furnaces of invention and art aflame, thereby avoiding the laborious task and expense of clearing the blockages of slag and of continually relighting them.

England, a country that is rich and powerful, will have to uphold, defend and glorify absolutely its artistic, most revolutionary and most advanced avant-gardes, if it wishes to save its art from certain death.

F.T. Marinetti and C.R.W. Nevinson (1914)