On 20 February 1909 the Paris daily Le Figaro published on its front page the Manifesto of Futurism by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. It is a violent text, full of declarations about the automobile, about speed, about war as "the world's only hygiene", and against museums described as cemeteries. At that moment the movement did not yet exist: there was only the manifesto. The artists came afterwards.
They arrived in February 1910, with the Manifesto of Futurist Painters signed by Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. From then on Futurism became the first Italian avant-garde with a modern communication strategy: manifestos, public evenings, organized provocation.
The problem, for anyone looking today, is that the rhetoric has buried the painting. These five works are meant to put it back at the centre.
1. Umberto Boccioni, *The City Rises* (1910-11)
A red horse at the centre, workers holding it back, and behind them the building sites of a Milanese suburb under construction. It is the first fully Futurist canvas: colour is broken into filaments that suggest movement, and the scene offers no still moment from which to look at it.
The subject is not the horse but the labour that transforms a city. Boccioni paints industrial Milan as it grows, and paints it as an energy escaping the control of the men directing it. The work is at MoMA in New York.
2. Giacomo Balla, *Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash* (1912)
A dachshund on a leash, its legs multiplied into some twenty positions. It is the most loved and most misunderstood Futurist work: it looks like a joke, and it is in fact a technical problem solved with precision.
Balla is trying to paint duration, not the instant. The chronophotography of Étienne-Jules Marey and Anton Giulio Bragaglia had already shown how to break a gesture into phases; Balla puts those phases back together in a single image, producing something no photograph could give: the sensation of movement rather than its proof. The work is at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in the United States.
3. Carlo Carrà, *The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli* (1910-11)
As a young man Carrà had witnessed the funeral of the anarchist Angelo Galli in Milan in 1906, which degenerated into clashes with the police. From it he drew a canvas in which the crowd, the red banners and the horses compose into a radiating structure that seems to explode outward from the centre.
Here Futurism shows its political face, which is not a marginal detail: the movement was born inside Italian social conflict and took on its language. This canvas is also at MoMA.
4. Umberto Boccioni, *Unique Forms of Continuity in Space* (1913)
The best-known sculpture of the movement and probably the most reproduced image in twentieth-century Italian art: a walking figure, armless, its surface deformed by the air passing through it.
Boccioni is not sculpting a man in motion: he is sculpting the relationship between a body and the space around it, as though the volume had to include the wake as well. The work exists in plaster and in bronze casts made after the artist's death; one is at the Museo del Novecento in Milan. The same image is struck on the Italian 20-cent euro coin, which makes it the most widely circulated artwork in the country.
5. Gino Severini, *Blue Dancer* (1912)
Severini lived in Paris, which made him the least provincial of the group: he knew Cubism at first hand and crossed it with the Futurist obsession with movement.
His Blue Dancer breaks a dancing body into coloured planes, with real sequins applied to the surface of the canvas. There is no machine here, no industrial speed: there is movement as a form of pleasure, the lightest and perhaps most durable variant of the Futurist programme. The work is at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice.
Beyond Painting
Futurism is the only Italian avant-garde that tried to rewrite every language at once.
Luigi Russolo published The Art of Noises in 1913 and built the intonarumori, mechanical instruments producing non-musical sound: one of the starting points of twentieth-century experimental music.
Antonio Sant'Elia drew the plates of the Città Nuova in 1914: terraced skyscrapers, external lifts, stacked traffic levels. He built almost nothing, but those drawings shaped the architectural imagination for a century.
Fortunato Depero carried Futurism into advertising graphics and design, going so far as to found in Rovereto an art house that is a museum today.
The Break of 1916 and Second Futurism
1916 broke the movement: Boccioni died at thirty-three after a fall from a horse near Verona, and Sant'Elia was killed in the war on the Isonzo front. Within months the group lost its strongest painter and its architect.
Futurism continued through the 1920s and 1930s with a second generation and with aeropittura, declared in a 1929 manifesto, which shifted the subject from the city to the view from an aeroplane. It is also the period in which Marinetti tied the movement to Fascism, and this weighed on the Italian reception of Futurism for decades: until the 1980s Italian scholarship treated it with embarrassment, while abroad it was already studied as the first complete European avant-garde.
Where to See Futurism in Italy
- Museo del Novecento, Milan — the most coherent Futurist section in Italy, with Boccioni, Balla, Carrà and Severini in sequence.
- Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan — holds Boccioni's Riot in the Galleria (1910), a transitional canvas between Divisionism and Futurism.
- MART, Rovereto — the largest Italian Futurist holdings, with an extraordinary Depero core; minutes away is the Casa d'Arte Futurista Depero, a museum the artist himself created.
- Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome — important works by Balla and Boccioni within the nineteenth- and twentieth-century display.
- Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice — Severini and the international context of the avant-gardes.
Why It Still Repays Looking
Futurism is uncomfortable: rhetorical, often arrogant, politically compromised in its late phase. But it is also the moment when Italian art stopped being a custodian of inheritance and tried to produce its own present — with an idea no later avant-garde has abandoned: a work does not describe the world, it sets it in motion.
Looking at Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash today means realizing that its problem — how to represent time inside a still image — is still open, and runs through photography, cinema and every animated interface we use daily.
Where to go from here
For the generation that overturned the table again sixty years later, read it beside Arte Povera in five works. The collections holding Futurism are mapped in the guide to art in Milan and in the modern art in Milan section; Turin remains the other pole of the Italian twentieth century. If looking turns into buying, the artists in the catalogue and the price bands for modern art are the next step.