Literary and artistic movement of the beginning of the XXe century, which rejects the aesthetic tradition and exaltes the modern world, in particular the urban civilisation and its dynamism.

Born in 1909 with the first Proclamation of the futurism by Marinetti,, this movement will give, (starting in Italy), a decisive impulse to the art of the XXe century.
This mouvement exaltes the speed, the machine, the dynamism of the modern life, with the love of danger, the aggressiveness and the violence which are attached to it.

The Proclamation of the futuristic painters, of 1910, is signed among others,
by Boccioni, Carrà and Russolo.
These artists, with the research of the "dynamic feeling" and the "line-forces", adopt the divisionnist technique and a geometry inspired from the cubism.

The futuristic program is pole apart to the artists of the time who, from Gauguin to the expressionnists, made the choice of "primitivism" in the name of a negative reading of industrial progress and positivists myths of the middle-class society.
For these artists, the scientific and industrial progress announces the decline of the European culture and the humanism.

The futuristic artists, on the contrary, think that the scientific progress and the industrial city can provide the basis for a revival of the artistic expression and that, art must agree with the forms and the way of life of the modern world.
They thus pose the problem of an immediately sensitive vision, in direct catch with reality.

For them, painting and art are initially the instruments of knowledge in the service of the human progress of the modernity.

Personal Remark:
I find this movement very interesting in its representative form, but not in the dictatic, ideological and political contents made by Marinetti.