Futurism

Early 20th-century art movement, centred in Italy, that celebrated the dynamism, speed, and power of the machine and the vitality and restlessness of modern life. The term was coined by Filippo Marinetti, who in 1909 published a manifesto glorifying the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed and power. In 1910 Umberto Boccioni and others published a manifesto on painting. They adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several views of an object simultaneously with fragmented planes and outlines and used rhythmic spatial repetitions of the object's outlines in transit to render movement. Their preferred subjects were speeding cars and trains, racing cyclists, and urban crowds; their palette was more vibrant than the Cubists'. With Boccioni, the most prominent Futurist artists were his teacher, Giacomo Balla (1871–1958), and Gino Severini (1883–1966). Boccioni's death in 1916 and World War I brought an end to the movement, which had a strong influence in postrevolutionary Russia and on Dada.