Permeable Avant-Gardes: Intermediality in Italian Futurism. Investigations on Umberto Boccioni's Œuvre

For Boccioni, one of the main protagonists of Italian Futurism and thus of the aesthetic avant-gardes of the 20th century, art can only be understood as a synthesis of different genres. In his constant pursuit of making life representable in its immediacy and totality, of bringing art and life closer together in favor of a representable vitalism, Boccioni constantly reflects and explores the diverse fields of art and their boundaries. Boccioni is primarily known for his artistic practice as a painter and sculptor. Besides his dominant pictorial and sculptural work, the main theorist of Futurism however also has a literary practice which has received much less attention so far. This genuinely comparative project aims to examine Boccioni's Futurist works on the basis of an interdisciplinary analysis of literature and visual studies, and to integrate his literary futurist works, which have hardly been explored to date, into his entire work. The frequently emerging flowing transitions of the different semiotic systems and their discernible permeable structures shall be examined using the operational metaphorical concept of permeability as a fruitful instrument of description in order to reveal innovative perspectives in Boccioni's multilayered Œuvre and to visualize his specific concept of art as a synthesis.