I was reading the April 2012 Smithsonian Magazine and noticed an article about FUTURIST art inspiring BMW designers. I was curious so I continued to read.
Futurism celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009 with retrospectives through Europe. The ITALIAN artists and intellectuals believed EMBRACING INDUSTRIALISM was the key to keeping up in the new world. Futurists sought to demonstrate SPEED AND MOVEMENT into their art. They saw these concepts a result of the industrial age.
Why wouldn't Italians want to catch up with the Industrial Revolution in the rest of the world? Why wouldn't they want to push the envelope a bit? After all, Italians have been the leader in art many times throughout history.
The leader of the Futurist Movement was a poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. He published the FUTURIST MANIFESTO in 1909 and the visual artists followed his lead.
To read more about Futurism, follow the link to the Smarthistory site. Here you will see a time lapse video that shows how the artists studied motion in an effort to include that dimension in their artwork.
After one understands FUTURISM, it is CLEAR why a cutting edge car designer would look to this art movement for inspiration. The Futurist movement would give designers clues how to embrace the industrialization, the assembly line concept of construction, while adding aesthetic nuances to demonstrate how the car "cuts through" space. One designer quoted in the article said that he saw his designs as capturing the essence of "a fourth dimension, that of wind". Read more (and view more images) from the Smithsonian.
The image included here is the iconic FUTURIST sculpture by Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.
