Futurism, Constructivism, and Geometric Abstraction

Italian Futurism announced itself not with a painting but with a text: the Futurist Manifesto, written by the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro on February 20, 1909. Marinetti called for a wholesale rejection of the past, urging Italians to burn down museums and libraries and to embrace instead the beauty of speed, the machine, the automobile, and even war, which he notoriously described as "the world's only hygiene". Painters and sculptors who rallied to the movement, including Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and Carlo Carrà, sought to capture motion and dynamism directly on canvas, layering successive positions of a moving body into a single image, as in Balla's Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912) and Boccioni's bronze sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), which reduces a striding human figure to a blur of streamlined, wind-shaped mass. Many Futurists, including Boccioni, died fighting in the war they had glorified.