Master Art

In September 1929 the Futurist theorist and founder Filippo Tomasso Marinetti published an article entitled ‘Perspectives of Flight and Aeropainting’ in the Gazzetta del Popolo in Turin, signed by Giacomo Balla, Fortunato Depero, Enrico Prampolini and several other Futurist painters. Republished in a revised and more complete version in 1931, the text served as a manifesto of the nascent branch of Futurism known as aeropittura, or Futurist aeropainting:

‘We Futurists declare that: 1. The changing perspectives of flight are an absolutely new reality that has nothing to do with the traditional reality of terrestrial perspectives. 2. The elements of this new reality have no fixed point and are built out of the same perennial mobility. 3. The painter cannot observe and paint unless he experiences the same speed as these elements. 4. Painting this new reality from the air imposes a profound contempt for detail and a need to summarize and transfigure everything…7. Every aeropainting simultaneously contains the dual movement of the plane and the hand of the painter as he moves his pencil, brush or diffuser…

We Futurists declare that the principle of aerial perspectives and consequently the principle of Aeropainting is an incessant, graded multiplication of forms and colors with extremely elastic crescendos and diminuendos, which intensify and scatter to give birth to new gradations of form and colour...In this way, we outline the dominant features of Aeropainting which, by means of an absolute freedom of fantasy and an obsessive desire to embrace the dynamic multiplicity with the most indispensable of syntheses, will fix in place the immense visionary and sensitive drama of flight.’

This watercolour is pasted down onto what appears to be the cover of a small notebook with black pages. It is part of a series of small-scale watercolours of aeronautical subjects, drawn between 1931 and 1932, with such titles as Stormo, Aeronautica, Volo, Sintesi atmosferica, Eliche, Squadriglia veloce – Volo, Aeroporto and Madonna dell’aria. Most of these watercolours, including the three sheets here exhibited, appear to have been originally part of the same notebook.  

241 x 175 mm. (9 1/2 x 67/8 in.) [backing card]