Futurism was an artistic and social movement that originated in Italy in the early 20th century. It emphasized and glorified themes associated with contemporary concepts of the future, including speed, technology, youth and violence, and objects such as the car, the airplane and the industrial city. It was largely an Italian phenomenon, though there were parallel movements in Russia, England and elsewhere. The Futurists practiced in every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, industrial design, interior design, theatre, film, fashion, textiles, literature, music, architecture and even gastronomy. Key figures of the movement include the Italians Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla, Antonio Sant'Elia, Tullio Crali and Luigi Russolo, and the Russians Natalia Goncharova, Velimir Khlebnikov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Important works include its seminal piece of the literature, Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism, as well as Boccioni's sculpture, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, and Balla's painting, Abstract Speed + Sound (pictured). Futurism influenced art movements such as Art Deco, Constructivism, Surrealism, Dada, and to a greater degree, Rayonism and Vorticism.

Cubism is a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, that revolutionized European painting and sculpture, and inspired related movements in music, literature and architecture. In cubist artworks, objects are broken up, analyzed, and re-assembled in an abstracted form—instead of depicting objects from one viewpoint, the artist depicts the subject from a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Often the surfaces intersect at seemingly random angles, removing a coherent sense of depth. The background and object planes interpenetrate one another to create the shallow ambiguous space, one of cubism's distinct characteristics.

Luigi Russolo “Dynamism of a Car” 1912-1913

The Futurist movement, an offshoot of Cubism initiated by the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876 – 1944), displayed an obsession with motion and speed to such an extent that led Marinetti once declare, in a fit of exaggeration, that a racing car was more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace. The Futurist painters produced images reminiscent of chronophotography, systematically introducing the time dimension in painting. In “Dynamism of a Car”, a Futurist classic, Luigi Russolo attempts to convey the idea of motion by the apparent compression of sound waves in front of the car. The picture is strikingly similar to Physics textbook pictures illustrating the Doppler effect.

Giacomo Balla “ Dynamism of a dog on a leash” 1912 Futurism

Giacomo Balla's oeuvre was characterized by continual development. In the first phase of Futurism, Balla defined a type of dynamism that captured physical motion in the painted image. In parallel he developed color-light schemes and varied them in a range of patterns. After 1915 Balla explored the potentials of expansive plastic forms that reflected a universals Futurist theory of energy. In addition, he translated his pictorial approaches into craft applications. Dynamism of a dog on a leash (Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio) is the first Futurist painting in which Balla defined his position as if in a visual manifesto. He has divided the movements of a woman walking her dog into a multiple separated motion sequences. A horse did not have four but twenty legs, maintained the "Thecnical Manifesto of Futurist Painting", which Balla among others signed in 1910. The device of multiplying limbs was developed by reference to the chronophotographs of Etienne-Jules Marey, who back in 1882 sequentially reproduced the gait and flight of human beings, animals and birds using a special construction known as a photographic gun. Marey's analysis resulted in a graphic sequence of motions, which Balla copied almost exactly in studies made in 1912.

Kazimir Severinovich Malevich „Aviator” 1914 Cubism

A reference to symbols of the past and of the future, or more specifically, of the "old" human and the new.  We should also note that in both paintings, we can make out the figure and other recognizable objects.  Since these were done in the same year as the Woman at the Kiosk (and other similar collages), we have a visual clue that for Malevich, the figure may not have left the painting, even when it is replaced by a rectangular essence.

Suprematism was an art movement focused on fundamental geometric forms (in particular the square and circle) which formed in Russia in 1915-1916. It was founded by Malevich. He created a suprematist 'grammar' based on fundamental geometric forms; in particular, the square and the circle. In the 0.10 Exhibition in 1915, Malevich exhibited his early experiments in suprematist painting. The centerpiece of his show was the Black Square, placed in what is called the red/beautiful corner in Russian Orthodox tradition ; the place of the main icon in a house. "Black Square" was painted in 1915 and was presented as a breakthrough in his career and in art in general. Malevich also painted White on White which was also heralded as a milestone. "White on White" was a breakthrough from polychrome to monochrome Suprematism.

Malevich “Black Square” 1915 Suprematism

The Black Square of Kazimir Malevich is one of the most famous creations of Russian art in the last century. The first Black Square was painted in 1915 to become the turning point in the development of Russian avant-garde. Black Square against white background became the symbol, the basic element in the system of the art of suprematism, the step into the new art. The artist himself created several variants of the Black Square. All four Squares painted by Malevich from 1915 to the early 1930s developed the same idea. Different are not only the sequence and year of creation, but also the color, design and texture. Malevich turned back to the Black Square every time he needed to present his work in an assertive and significant way, often in connection with the most important exhibitions. However he always created a new version rather than copied the previous one.
Malevich for the first time showed his Black Square (now at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow) at the Last Futurist Exhibition 0,10 in Petrograd in 1915. A Black Square put against the sun appeared for the first time in the 1913 scenery designs for the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun.

El Lissitzky, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge” 1919 Suprematism

El Lissitzky "Beat the Whites with the Red wedge", a 1919 lithograph is a perfect and famous example of using abstract art for very clear political message. Text in Russian (left side) "Klinom krasnim" (Meaning: "With Red Wedge") Red is left: political color and position of communists. Red was a standard symbol of revolution. Edge was asupremtist symbol of something new. Painted during the Civil War in Russia (1917-1921) between Reds and Whites. White was a standard color of anti-revolutionary forces. Circle was suprematist’s symbol for unchangeable. Text in Russian (right side): Bey Belych (Meaning: "Beat Whites"). White is right: political color and position of anti-revolutionaries.

Piet Mondrian „Pier and Ocean” 1915

Like the precursors in this series, the image presents as a diffuse oval containing detail. This is a common mechanism employed by Mondrian in the period 1913 to 1916 and although portrait formats such as his previous cathedral façade series also manifest a sparse or blank periphery, the landscape formats serve as portals to visual acuity by representation; Mondrian wants us to ‘see’ what he does. Not just look at a scene. Rather, we are not observing a vista rendered in two dimensions. We are instead presented with Mondrian’s own retinal perception; his own experience. We also note that the marks towards this perceptual boundary fade deliberately but seamlessly. Rather than create an analogue of tunnel-vision, Mondrian acknowledges the vague nature of our peripheral vision in a manner that can be inspected at close-quarters. It is at once illusion and allusion. This artistry also shares common ground with a more cognitive explanation of visual perception but is at odds with such analyses when one scrutinizes the marks themselves.

Unlike the many drawings that share parentage, this painting is clearly intended as a summation; a crystallizing of recurring subject matter. We know this because each mark is no longer merely dense charcoal line as in previous hasty studies, but instead a rectangle, sensitively and precisely established. Each mark represents length alone and does not diminish in width as they recede to the vanishing point. This use of the mark to represent one dimension, one variable, is fundamentally mathematical in incept. It is a reasoned response to the need to remove that which is not essential to the structure of the image. It is also a harbinger of Mondrian’s reductionism and efficiencies in the later paintings of Neo Plasticism. That the image represents a clear effect of perspective is of course the over-riding effect of the composition. The image’s potency relies on the clash between rigid, quantitative mark-making and the resulting serenity of the seascape. Sentimentality is eliminated by devotion to the linear forms but yet the satisfying representational nature of the image is maintained by implied perspective alone. Again, the drive for calm efficiency is paramount. The field of vision is unified.

Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red 1937-1942 De Stilj movement; neo plasticism

The abstract painting of Mondrian consists in canvases with vertical and horizontal black stripes, filled fundamentally with white, despite some details in primary colors. Time makes Mondrian to evolve regarding the black stripes, the amount of color, etc.

Composition in yellow, blue and red represents a mature stage of Mondrian’s abstraction. It seems to be a flat work, but there are differences in the texture of different elements. While the black stripes are the flattest of the paintings, in the areas with color are clear the brushstrokes, all in the same direction. The white spaces are, on the contrary, painted in layers, using brushstrokes that are put in different directions. And all of these produce a depth that, to the naked eye, cannot be appreciated.

Constructivism was an artistic and architectural philosophy that originated in Russia beginning in 1919, which was a rejection of the idea of autonomous art. The movement was in favour of art as a practice for social purposes. Constructivism had a great effect on modern art movements of the 20th century, influencing major trends such as Bauhaus and the De Stijl movement. Its influence was pervasive, with major impacts upon architecture, graphic and industrial design, theatre, film, dance, fashion and to some extent music.

Vladimir Tatlin, Monument to the 3rd International 1920

Planned in 1920, the monument, was to be a tall tower in iron, glass and steel which would have dwarfed the Eiffel Tower in Paris (the Monument to the Third International was a third taller at 1,300 feet high). Inside the iron-and-steel structure of twin spirals, the design envisaged three building blocks, covered with glass windows, which would rotate at different speeds (the first one, a cube, once a year; the second one, a pyramid, once a month; the third one, a cylinder, once a day). High prices prevented Tatlin from executing the plan, and no building such as this was erected in his day.

The tower consisted of a spiraling assemblage of vertical and diagonal iron bracing, bent at a 23.5 degree-angle over the Petrograd skyline. It’s corseted body housed three large glass structures, each an autonomous Platonic mass dedicated to a different function: a cube, towards the base of the tower, would serve as a grand assembly hall; a pyramid would hover above wherein the executive bodies of the state would convene; and, a cylinder, the uppermost chamber, would be reserved for a newspaper and the proliferation of information. Each of these crystal palaces would revolve at various speeds, from yearly to monthly to daily, respectively. A large radio mast installed atop the structure would transmit the Communist message of brotherhood to the furthest reaches of the Motherland.

Nearly a century since its creation, Tatlin’s Tower has become a universal cultural artifact, an iconic yet critical work of art imbued with a restlessness that refuses the comforts of the historical archive. Its continual potency lies not only in its daring and evocative form, which is undeniable, but also in the heady optimism embedded within the vortices of its coiling body as it launches the utopian dream upwards and outwards.

Raoul Hausmann, Mechanical Head 1919

Before the war, modernists had splintered perception, dismantled the Renaissance pictorial system and demolished naturalism - but all that became more literal, somehow, in Berlin. Perhaps German artists were too committed to beer-swilling reality to practise abstraction. For them, the fragmentation of art was a measure of the fragmentation of life, which the war had made grotesquely manifest.

Subject: Der Geist Unserer Zeit - Mechanischer Kopf specifically evokes the philosopher George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). For Hegel, whose books include Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807), everything is mind. Among Hegel's disciples and critics was Karl Marx. Hausmann's sculpture might be seen as an aggressively Marxist reversal of Hegel: this is a head whose "thoughts" are materially determined by objects literally fixed to it. However, there are deeper targets in western culture that give this modern masterpiece its force. Hausmann turns inside out the notion of the head as seat of reason, an assumption that lies behind the European fascination with the portrait. He reveals a head that is penetrated and governed by brute external forces.

Distinguishing features: Hausmann's crudely carved head, that of a tailor's dummy, has a fantastically stupid and gloomy look, an absence of life that travesties all the great expressive faces of sculpture, from Michelangelo's Moses to Rodin's Thinker.

Dead of eye and moronic of mouth, the head is given identity only by the objects stuck to it: a tape measure, a wooden ruler, a tin cup, a spectacles case and a piece of metal, which could be a plate plugging the damaged skull of a soldier. If this is a "mechanical head", the prototype for humanity become robotic, it is a crude, Frankensteinian early experiment, in which the emotions and the soul survive only as a heart shape engraved on the empty tin cup.

Does Hausmann fear or welcome the disappearance of the Geist in a new mechanical age? The Berlin Dadaists, with their communist affiliations, were utopian as well as alienated. As George Grosz jokingly suggests in Daum Marries Her Pedantic Automaton George in May 1920: John Heartfield Is Glad of It, they thought of themselves as modern automata.

Yet Hausmann's pitiable, mutant sculpture, in its summing-up of the death of an entire notion of self, has a tragic poetry that makes it exactly what the Dadaists repudiated: a timeless masterpiece saying something fundamental about the human condition

Marcel Duchamp “Fountain” 1917

Fountain is one of Duchamp's most famous works and is widely seen as an icon of twentieth-century art. The original, which is now lost, consisted of a standard urinal, laid flat on its back rather than upright in its usual position, and signed 'R. Mutt 1917'. The Tate's work is a 1964 replica and is made from glazed earthenware painted to resemble the original porcelain. The signature is reproduced in black paint. Fountain is an example of what Duchamp called a 'readymade', an ordinary manufactured object designated by the artist as a work of art. It epitomises the assault on convention and good taste for which he and the Dada movement are best known.

The idea of designating such a lowly object as a work of art came from a discussion between Duchamp and his American friends the collector Walter Arensburg and the artist Joseph Stella. Following this conversation, Duchamp bought an urinal from a plumbers' merchants, and submitted it to an exhibition organised by the Society of Independent Artists. The Board of Directors, who were bound by the constitution of the Society to accept all members' submissions, took exception to the Fountain and refused to exhibit it. Duchamp and Arensburg, who were both on the Board, resigned immediately in protest. An article published at the time, which is thought to have been written by Duchamp, claimed, 'Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' shop windows. Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object.' ('The Richard Mutt Case', The Blind Man, New York, no.2, May 1917, p.5.)

Later in life Duchamp commented on the name of the alter ego he created for this work: 'Mutt comes from Mott Works, the name of a large sanitary equipment manufacturer. But Mott was too close so I altered it to Mutt, after the daily cartoon strip 'Mutt and Jeff' which appeared at the time, and with which everyone was familiar. Thus, from the start, there was an interplay of Mutt: a fat little funny man, and Jeff: a tall thin man ... I wanted any old name, And I added Richard [French slang for moneybags]. That's not a bad name for a pissotière. Get it? The opposite of poverty. But not even that much, just R. MUTT.' (quoted in Schwarz, p.649.) Duchamp's use of a false signature, 'R. Mutt', anticipates his adoption of the alter ego Rrose Sélavy a few years later (indeed, in a letter of the period Duchamp referred to Mutt as a woman). Some commentators have noted how the inverted urinal resembles a female body, and see this as reflecting the play with gender boundaries which was an important leitmotif of Duchamp's career.

Soon after the 1917 exhibition, Duchamp took Fountain to be photographed by his friend, the photographer and gallery owner Alfred Steiglitz. Since the original was lost thereafter, this photograph (reproduced in Ades, p.129) became the basis for the later replicas. Altogether fifteen authorised replicas of Fountain were issued, one in 1951, 1953 and 1963 respectively and a further twelve in 1964. The Tate's version is number two in an edition of eight made by the Galleria Schwarz in Milan in October 1964. Four further examples were also made at this time, one for both Duchamp and Arturo Schwarz, and two for museum exhibition. Duchamp signed each of these replicas on the back of the left flange 'Marcel Duchamp 1964'. There is also a copperplate on the base of each work etched with Duchamp's signature, the dates of the original and the replica, the title, the edition number and the publisher's name, 'Galleria Schwarz, Milan'