Italian Contemporary art refers to painting and sculpture in Italy from the early 20th century onwards. Futurism The founder and most influential personality of Futurism was the Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who launched the movement in his Futurist Manifesto in 1909. The Futurists expressed a loathing of everything old, especially political and artistic tradition. They admired speed, technology, youth and violence, the car, the airplane and the industrial city, all that represented the technological triumph of humanity over nature, and they were passionate nationalists. The Futurists practised 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. The leading painters of the movement were Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini. They advocated a "universal dynamism," which was to be directly represented in painting. At first they used the techniques of Divisionism, breaking light and color down into a field of stippled dots and stripes, later adopting the methods of Cubism. In 1912, Boccioni turned to sculpture to translate into three dimensions his Futurist ideas. Advocates of war as "the world's best hygiene," Marinetti, Boccioni, and Sant'Elia all volunteered to fight during World War One. The unofficial end of the first wave of Futurism (also known as the Heroic Years) was in 1916 - the same year Boccioni died in the war. After the War, Marinetti revived the movement, seeking to make Futurism the official state art of Fascist Italy. The main expression of Futurism in painting in the 1930s and early 1940s was Aeropainting (aeropittura), launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by Benedetta Cappa, Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, Fillìa, Marinetti, Enrico Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato. The technology and excitement of flight, directly experienced by most aeropainters, offered aeroplanes and aerial landscape as new subject matter. Futurism had depended so much on its energetic promotion by Marinetti that his death in 1944 brought the movement to an end. Its association with Italian Fascism meant that most of its artists were shunned in the post-war years, but it has received scholarly attention in recent decades and a major exhibition was launched to coincide with the centenary in 2009. In 2014, the Solomon R. Guggenheim held a major Futurist retrospective featuring over 300 Futurist pieces spanning all media they worked in. Novecento Italiano Novecento Italiano was an Italian artistic movement