Futurism: 1909-1944

Futurism is an avant-garde art movement in which speed, technology and modernity were the predominant focus. Futurist artists attempted to illustrate the 'force lines' of objects, and depict feelings as a "synthesis of what one remembers and of what one sees". There was also a lot of cross-stimulation between painters and poets. Marinetti’s 1912 publication of ‘free word’ poetry, in which words were printed in a variety of fonts and sizes and linked with mathematical symbols rather than grammatical structure, influenced painters to use words in their work – not for their forms as in Cubism, but rather for their suggestive sounds and additional illustrative associations.

The futurists' representation of forms in motion, dynamism, intuition and the emphasis on process rather than things influenced many painters and had far-reaching effects on artistic movements such as Russian Constructivism, the English Vorticists, and subsequently on Dadaism and Surrealism. It has often been linked to Cubism but both its roots and its goals were quite different, being more closely linked to the new movement in German painting that was to become known as Expressionism.

Our Art on Demand gallery contains the following futurism prints, posters and canvases: