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Gallery · Room 04 · Italy, 1909–1916

Futurism

Italian artists in love with speed, machines and the noise of the modern city.

A huge red horse surges through a blur of straining workers and scaffolding, the scene dissolving into streaks of red, orange and blue.

Umberto Boccioni

The City Rises, 1910

Oil on canvas

The Museum of Modern Art, New York · View record ↗

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Wall text

On 20 February 1909 the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. It praised speed, machines and the modern city, called a racing car more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace, and promised to free Italy from museums that it said covered the country like cemeteries.

Painters soon followed. In 1910 Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini signed the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters. They borrowed the broken color of neo-impressionism and the fractured planes of Cubism to paint the energy and motion of modern life. Russolo went further: in 1913 he published The Art of Noises and built noise-making machines.

Boccioni died in 1916 after he was thrown from his horse during cavalry training. By then the original group had already split apart. Futurism's worship of speed and violence later fed into Italian Fascism, a legacy that sits alongside its influence on modern design.

Palette · Sampled from the works shown

  • Soot black

    #231D22

  • Red orange

    #EA4B31

  • Electric yellow

    #E4D051

  • Cobalt blue

    #4361AC

  • Steel grey

    #6B7B8B

How to recognize it

  • Diagonal lines of force that cut across the picture

  • Repeated, overlapping forms that show movement over time

  • Fractured Cubist planes in bright, broken color

  • Machines, crowds, trains and cities as subjects

More works

What to borrow

  1. 01

    Diagonals make a layout feel fast. One strong diagonal can carry a whole page.

  2. 02

    Show motion with repetition: a few offset copies of a shape read as speed without any animation.

  3. 03

    Write a manifesto. Putting down what you stand for makes every later design decision easier.

Sources