Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto launched Futurism from Milan
Futurism began in Milan in 1909 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism—first on 5 February in La gazzetta dell’Emilia, then on 20 February in Le Figaro. Painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini, plus composer Luigi Russolo, soon joined his cult of speed, machines, and youth.
Italian Futurism aimed, in its own doctrine, to free Italy from the weight of its past. Signature pieces range from Boccioni’s 1913 bronze-cast stride Unique Forms of Continuity in Space to Balla’s 1913–14 canvas Abstract Speed + Sound and Russolo’s 1913 noise manifesto. Manifestos poured out on painting, architecture, music, literature, theatre, cinema, women, fashion, and cuisine. The 1910 Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, issued 11 April by Poesia in Milan, demanded “universal dynamism,” insisting a motor bus and the houses it passes blend into one another.
Early pictures leaned on Divisionism’s stippled colour, a habit borrowed via Giovanni Segantini and others. After Severini, living in Paris, brought Cubist analysis home following a 1911 visit, Futurists used fractured planes for energy rather than Cubism’s quiet still lifes. Robert Hughes later put it: in Futurism the eye stays fixed while the object moves, still using Cubism’s overlapping planes. Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) multiplies legs into a blur, echoing the manifesto’s claim that a running horse has not four legs but twenty.
Boccioni’s The City Rises (1910) and States of Mind panels fused Henri Bergson’s intuition with urban sensation through “lines of force” and simultaneity. Sculpture followed: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space was cast in bronze posthumously, shown at Tate Modern, and now appears on Italian 20-eurocent coins. Parallel Russian movements arose; influence reached Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and especially Precisionism, Rayonism, and Vorticism—proof that a movement obsessed with tomorrow still reshaped how modern eyes track motion. Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910–1911) turns a 1904 riot the painter had witnessed into diagonals and broken planes, while Boccioni’s States of Mind panels fuse farewell, departure, and staying into one modern emotional weather.
Source: Futurism
