In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—a member of the Italian literati who had studied in Egypt, France, and Italy—published his radical Futurist Manifesto, a document whose exaltations of technological disruption ignited the Italian Futurism movement. Marinetti called for art that embraced new innovations like automobiles, glorified war, “fought” morality, and did away with libraries and museums, which focused too heavily on the past.

The Italian Futurism he spawned revolted against the old: Futurist poetry, for instance, often discarded grammar rules and appeared in non-linear jumbles, while Futurist paintings experimented with perspective and a collapsing of space.