futurism, Italian school of painting, sculpture, and literature that flourished from 1909, when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first manifesto of futurism appeared, until the end of World War I. Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Balla were the leading painters and Umberto Boccioni the chief sculptor of the group. The architect Antonio Sant' Elia also belonged to this school. The futurists strove to portray the dynamic character of 20th-century life; their works glorified danger, war, and the machine age, attacked academies, museums, and other establishment bastions, and, in theory at least, favored the growth of Italian fascism. The group had a major Paris exhibition in 1912 that showed the relationship of their work to cubism. Their approach to the rendering of movement by simultaneously representing several aspects of forms in motion influenced many painters, including Duchamp and Delaunay. Futurist principles and techniques strongly influenced Russian constructivism.
See studies by M. W. Martin (1968), J. Rye (1972), U. Apollino (1973), C. Tisdale and A. Bozollo (1985), and M. Perloff (1989); V. Greene, ed., Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (museum catalog, 2014).
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