Collection: Futurism

Futurism is the Italian avant garde movement founded by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) with the Manifesto of Futurism, published on the front page of Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, signed by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), Carlo Carrà (1881–1966), Luigi Russolo (1885–1947), and Gino Severini (1883–1966), followed on 11 February 1910. The movement glorified speed, machinery, the modern city, and a violent break with the Italian academic past.

The painters borrowed Cubist faceting and pushed it into lines of force and chronophotographic sequences registering a body or vehicle as multiple simultaneous positions. Canonical works include Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912), Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912), Carrà's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911), and the architect Antonio Sant'Elia's Città Nuova drawings of 1914. The First World War devastated the first wave, with Boccioni and Sant'Elia killed in 1916. A second Futurism, including Fortunato Depero, Enrico Prampolini, and the aeropittura painter Tullio Crali, ran from 1918 to Marinetti's death in 1944, increasingly aligned with Italian Fascism.