Futurism is an early-20th-century italian avant-garde movement that glorified speed, machinery, youth, and the rupture with the past.
Futurism was launched on 20 February 1909 with Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's manifesto published on the front page of 'Le Figaro' in Paris. It glorified speed, mechanisation, modern war, urban energy, and youth, and called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and academies — everything that tied Italy to its overvalued past. The painters Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini issued their own manifesto in 1910 and developed a visual language for representing motion: multiple superimposed images, lines of force, fragmented planes derived from Cubism. Boccioni's sculpture 'Unique Forms of Continuity in Space' (1913) and Balla's 'Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash' (1912) are the movement's most famous works. Futurism's celebration of war and Marinetti's eventual alignment with Mussolini's fascism complicated the movement's legacy fatally; many of its members died in the First World War. But its influence on Russian Cubo-Futurism, Vorticism, Dada, and a century of avant-garde manifesto-making was enormous.