In probably the most famous futurist artwork, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), Umberto Boccioni depicted an erect man thrusting forward with velocity, abstracted into intersecting bronze planes and fluid surfaces, as if shaped by momentum. He has no arms and his head is a helmet; man and machine are merged.

The idealizer of futurism, Tommaso Marinetti, talked of “preparing the creation of the mechanical man with replaceable parts.” In Gino Severini’s 1915 painting, Armored Train in Action, five faceless, crouching soldiers are fragmented into composite elements of a train-mounted gun, their individual identities disappearing into the speed and rhythm of mechanized war.

For all that futurism was an audacious, thrilling embrace of the possibilities thrown up by breakneck technical progress — an attempt to reconnect human experience with new social forces. The death drive was always present: the subsumption of the human by the machine and of thought by the oblivion of speed.