Umberto Boccioni

Futuristische Malerei und Plastik (Futurist Painting and Sculpture )
(Plastic Dynamism)
VOLUME 153

The Aesthetics of Futurism

This major theoretical work by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) was first published in Milan in 1914 under the title Pittura Scultura Futuriste (Dinamismo Plastico). Five years after the proclamation of the first “Manifesto of Futurism,” the Italian artist used it to present an aesthetic theory that helped establish Futurism within the international art scene. Declared the movement’s official theorist by its founder Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Boccioni’s groundbreaking work laid the intellectual foundations of Futurist art. Moreover, he sought to position Futurism historically and to distinguish it from both the contemporary avant-garde and European art history. Now published in German for the first time, this edition provides an important primary source text on classical modernism. The appendix compiled by Boccioni contains eight of Futurism’s central manifestos and fifty-one historical illustrations of works, some of which have since been lost.

The painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (b. 1882 in Reggio Calabria, Italy; d. 1916 near Verona) published “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto” in 1910 together with his colleagues Giacomo Balla, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini. A reproduction of his sculpture Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio (Unique Forms of Continuity in Space), currently housed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, can be found on the Italian 20-cent coin.

Edited by the art and image historian Astrit Schmidt-Burkhardt. Translated from Italian by Angelika Chott. This is the first German edition to be published, and it received the City of Vienna’s translation award.