Themes in ArtArt Manifestos
Art Manifestos
Defining new realities
A manifesto is a declaration of intent, usually the intent to bring radical change to the world. Throughout history many art movements have written manifestos, and it’s always a sign that things have gotten real.
Just a word, and the word a movement.
Even if someone paints a 'green sun', I will not say it is wrong.
By eliminating everything superfluous to the technical means of their craft the Cubists finally reached the common ground where a general, synthetic culture becomes possible.
We are like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration and decomposition.
There is an old and a new consciousness of time
Elementarism is the purest, and...the most direct means of expression of the human spirit
Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant. I have untied the knots of wisdom and liberated the consciousness of color!
One must not look at color by itself, but in conjunction with the color of the sky! That sky is grey - but so iridescent that even our pure white would be unable to render the light and shimmer.
Just as the ancients drew inspiration for their art from the elements of nature, we—who are materially and spiritually artificial—must find that inspiration in the elements of the utterly new mechanical world we have created.
We will declare war on all artists and institutions which insist a façade of false modernity...they are ensnared by tradition, academicism and nauseating cerebral laziness.
Now which is the worse defect? to be blind or dumb?
Art for life and even more—life for art!
Painting...can only consist of the representation of real and existing things
Space and time are re-born to us today
The essential character of symbolic art consists in never approaching the concentrated kernel of the Idea in itself.
The motor bus rushes into the houses, and the houses throw themselves on the motor bus. The construction of pictures has hitherto been foolishly traditional.
How can generations of sculptors can continue to construct dummies without asking why the exhibition halls of sculpture have become reservoirs of boredom and nausea?
Ancient life was all silence. Today, Noise reigns supreme over the sensibility of men.
This is how we decompose and recompose the universe according to our marvelous whims
Literature has exalted pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia...The world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.
Total fusion in order to reconstruct the universe making it more joyful
I could spend my whole life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own.
The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
Futurist poets, painters, sculptors, and musicians of Italy! As long as the war lasts let us set aside our verse, our brushes, scapels, and orchestras! The red holidays of genius have begun!
