An Artist Manifesto is a public declaration, often political in nature, of a group or individual’s principles, beliefs, and intent courses of action.
The first significant manifesto on our list is the infamous Manifesto of Futurism (Italian: Manifesto del Futurismo) written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published in 1909. As a matter of fact, he wrote the manifesto one year before as an introduction for a volume of his poems that were published in January 1909 in Milan. After the release, it automatically brought a lot of controversy for its outrageous, revolutionary ideas that marked the inauguration of Futurism as an art movement practiced largely by the members of the Italian bourgeoisie.
The manifest expressed a passionate vision of the role of art in the society by hailing speed, machinery, violence, youth, and industry, the modernization of Italy while rejecting the past, as well as feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice. This particular discourse nurtured fascist ideology and Futurism was embraced by Mussolini, the notorious Italian Duce.
https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/art-manifestos/surrealist-manifesto-breton
This is an early published English translation of the first Futurist manifesto. It was published in the catalogue for the Exhibition of Works by the Italian Futurist Painters, an exhibition of over 40 paintings held at the Sackville Gallery, London, in March 1912.
Futurism was an Italian art movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Flourishing in the early 20th century, Futurism called on artists to reject the past and to celebrate the energy and dynamism of the modern, mechanical world. Marinetti’s first Manifesto of Futurism was published in Italy in June 1909. Many avant garde art movements from this period produced manifestos – public declarations of shared aims and principles that were typically innovative and radical in nature.
Futurism set out to make Italy modern by attacking its traditions; to 'free Italy from her innumerable museums, which cover her like countless cemeteries'. A new beauty, which would replace traditional beauty, was found in the artefacts of modern industry and technology. Futurist imagery celebrated the power, force and speed of the machine. Futurists glorified war because they saw potential for freedom in its power to destroy. They admired the militarism, modernity and patriotism of Italian fascism which, according to Marinetti, was the natural extension of Futurism.
The abstract from
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/manifesto-of-futurism
"We recognize no theory. We have enough cubist and futurist academies: laboratories of formal ideas. Is the aim of art to make money and cajole the nice nice bourgeois? Rhymes ring with the assonance of the currencies and the inflexion slips along the line of the belly in profile. All groups of artists have arrived at this trust company utter riding their steeds on various comets. While the door remains open to the possibility of wallowing in cushions and good things to eat."
https://391.org/manifestos/1918-dada-manifesto-tristan-tzara/
Guerrilla Girls is an anonymous group of feminist, female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world. The group formed in New York City in 1985 with the mission of bringing gender and racial inequality into focus within the greater arts community. The group employs culture jamming in the form of posters, books, billboards, and public appearances to expose discrimination and corruption. To remain anonymous, members don gorilla masks and use pseudonyms that refer to deceased female artists. According to GG1, identities are concealed because issues matter more than individual identities, "Mainly, we wanted the focus to be on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work."
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/guerrilla-girls-6858
On November 15, 1932, at the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, eleven photographers announced themselves as Group f/64: Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, Brett Weston, and Edward Weston. The idea for the show had arisen a couple of months before at a party in honor of Weston held at a gallery known as "683" (for its address on Brockhurst Street in San Francisco)—the West Coast equivalent of Alfred Stieglitz's gallery 291—where they had discussed forming a group devoted to exhibiting and promoting a new direction in photography that broke with the Pictorialism then prevalent in West Coast art photography. The name referred to the smallest aperture available in large-format view cameras at the time and it signaled the group's conviction that photographs should celebrate rather than disguise the medium's unrivaled capacity to present the world "as it is." As Edward Weston phrased it, "The camera should be used for a recording of life, for rendering the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself, whether it be polished steel or palpitating flesh." A corollary of this idea was that the camera was able to see the world more clearly than the human eye, because it didn't project personal prejudices onto the subject. The group's effort to present the camera's "vision" as clearly as possible included advocating the use of aperture f/64 in order to provide the greatest depth of field, thus allowing for the largest percentage of the picture to be in sharp focus; contact printing, a method of making prints by placing photographic paper directly in contact with the negative, instead of using an enlarger to project the negative image onto paper; and glossy papers instead of matte or artist papers, the surfaces of which tended to disperse the contours of objects.
Hostetler, Lisa. "Group f/64". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/f64/hd_f64.htm (October 2004)
In 1947, following the aftermath of the Second World War, four pioneering photographers founded a now legendary alliance. Combining an extraordinary range of individual styles into one powerful collaboration, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, George Rodger and David Seymour started, over a celebratory bottle of champagne, the most important artists’ cooperative ever created: The Magnum Photos agency.
Magnum represents some of the world’s most renowned photographers, maintaining its founding ideals and idiosyncratic mix of journalist, artist and storyteller. Our photographers share a vision to chronicle world events, people, places and culture with a powerful narrative that defies convention, shatters the status quo, redefines history and transforms lives.
For more than 70 years Magnum has been creating the highest quality photographic content for an international client base of media, charities, publishers, brands and cultural institutions. The Magnum library is also a living archive updated regularly with new work from across the globe.
https://www.magnumphotos.com/about-magnum/overview/