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On February 20, 1909, the country of Italy launched the only Italian historical avant-garde---Futurism---involving every form of art including painting, sculpture, literature, poetry, theatre, music, architecture, dancing, cinema and photography. Considered an extremely revolutionary current, the manifesto was begun with the words "We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness" and ended with "It is from Italy that we are launching this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism"---words from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, today considered the Italian poet, editor, ideologue, and founder of the entire Futurist movement.

In 1908, Marinetti wrote the Futurist Manifesto, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" which was printed on the front page of LE FIGARO, the most prestigious French daily newspaper.  Considered the very first manifesto of its kind, he summed up the major principles of the Futurists with a love of speed, technology and violence.  Those involved were of a modernist movement which honored and celebrated the future era of technology—cares, planes, industrial towns, motion of modern life, and the technological triumph of man over nature.

Artists to take this movement up were the cubist, Dadaist, surrealism, and the constructivist.  Technology was seen as a key metaphor of modern society, in the works of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, who is quoted as saying "The machine … it really part of human life, perhaps the very soul." Many of the works were to subvert the viewer's expectations with absurdity and shock. Salvador Dali, the most famous Surrealist artist, was related to Sigmund Freud's philosophy in his works due to its depth and connection with dream-like qualities. Cubism was the art of the day and is still present and growing to this moment. Having a strong impact on the evolution of art, cubism has connected to the culture of the United States. Realities of the industrial landscapes and the machine age were created in the late 1800s to the early 1900s, with new and different movements growing for its development.

Basically, Cubism inspired Futurism tremendously, allowing it to move beyond any specific techniques with the artists making a "rhythm of their repetitions of lines." Motion was broken down into small cubical sequences with one goal in mind---to incorporate the dimension of time inside one picture. But overall, the artists involved with Futurism organized events that were known to cause scandals, mixing activism with artistic research. The purpose was to glorify Italy and lead the world into the age of modernity. There was one major problem with this---Italy's Mussolini preferred the art of the Novecento Italiano, with artists identified with the Italian heritage and the classical order.

Today, in honor of the Futurism movement, the 100-year celebrations have begun in Paris at the Centre George Pompidou. An art exhibit will be combining the Italian and French origins,  limited to reconstructing the 1912 exhibition at the Bernheim-Heune Gallery, one of the greatest art shows of the Futuristic movement. It was here that the Futuristic artists redefined shape, while making it functional to the dynamism of representation through amplifying three-dimension. From February 20-24, the exhibit is at Rome's Scuderie del Quuirinale and from June 12-20, it will be in Rome's Tate Modern.