Introduction: Vitalizing Energies, Creativity and Evolution

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book illuminates how manly vitality, virility and hygiene were perceived to arise through French male bodies becoming immersed in water sports. It shows how Delaunay simulated the chromatic sensation of strident billboards and colourful rugby guernseys at football stadiums in his paintings to generate the intense experience at rugby matches of vitalist sensations. The book explores how Boccioni then developed this into Futurism's chromatic strategy to vitalize intuitive perception of all energizing phenomena, transform the Italian beholder and inspire new social configurations. It stresses the hostility of Hugo Ball to utilitarianism and mechanization, particularly given their linkage to the mass destruction of war. The psychological energies to be released by this process were conceived as entailing the emancipation of creative energies, particularly through the unleashing of raw emotions, feelings, instincts, intuition, memory, fertility and virility.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Vitalist Modernism: Art, New Energies and Creative Evolution on 27/02/2023, available online: https://www.routledge.com/9781032423487