On 5 February 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s founding Futurist manifesto was first published in Bologna’s La gazzetta dell’Emilia, before its better-known French appearance in Le Figaro on 20 February. The text announced a modernist program that rejected inherited artistic tradition and exalted speed, machinery, urban energy, youth, and violence. Although the manifesto did not yet give painters and sculptors a complete visual method, it provided the rhetoric and public strategy that made Futurism one of the first avant-garde movements to organize itself through manifestos, publicity, and provocation. Its later artistic program drew in Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, and Luigi Russolo, extending the manifesto’s polemics into painting, sculpture, design, sound, theater, and performance.
The manifesto made the art manifesto a central weapon of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
