Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text Book

In the early decades of the twentieth century, European artists, poets, and designers called for the destruction of outdated assumptions about vision and language. Numerous manifestos resulted, demanding new artistic forms. None of these manifestos was more aggressive and poetic, or wider in scope than Filippo Tomasso Marinettiâ??s Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, theatre, cinema, and music were all caught up in its net. Typographyâ??until then a distant relative in the artsâ??also played a major role in Marinettiâ??s program. Written by leading design scholar Alan Bartram, this fascinating book examines the rise and evolution of the Futuristsâ?? approach to typography and graphic design, placing it within the context of contemporary artistic and literary movements. The volume features examples of some eighty Futurist books or other designs for print, many of them relatively unknown or previously unpublished, accompanied by new translations of over twenty of the featured texts. Bartram illuminates the complicated meanings of the Futurist designersâ?? graphic works in order to provide a new understanding of their extraordinary and influential visual language.Read More