Explain how imagery and ideas connected with the machine age feature in Cubism and Futurism.

The machine and the revolution of mechanical industry took Europe by storm.  Many new structures made of steel and glass were constructed, mass production of automobiles and other vehicles progressed, new materials never before readily available were suddenly everywhere.

The Orphic Cubists were inspired by the new exciting structure built in Paris -- the Eiffel Tower.  Although scorned and hated by many older generations, the Tower provided pure inspiration for younger artists.  Robert Delauney, a Frenchman, was enraptured with the Tower, and made multiple studies of it.  His painting, the Red Tower of 1911--12, a towering red monstrosity reaching for the sky, owes much to the Cubist techniques which inspired him-- the twisting appearance of the tower is a result of multi-view pointing, the faceted space around and appearing through the tower a result of analyzing the clouds and light touching the tower.  The painting, however, differs from Cubism in its brightened colourful palette and sense of realism.  The Orphists were expressing the joy of colour and the machine age and brought Cubism through to pure abstraction in their analyses of light in space.  Their references to machinery still existed though, as in Robert Delauney's Homage to Bleriot, in which light tumbles and churns through the propeller of a red aeroplane.  On the distance, Delauney has included the tiny emblem of the Eiffel Tower, a symbol included in many of his works. 

In Italy, the rise of the machine age brought added excitement to the Futurists who believed the machinery and new materials would bring change to the country they considered stuck in its ways.  They considered their paintings to be the vehicle for this change, and through their love of sound, noise, movement and speed, they expressed the excitement of the machine age, and thes qualities in their work.  

Inspired by time sequential photography such as that done by Marey and Muybridge, teh Futuist artist Balla explored movement of forms in his work.  His early works such as "Dynamism of Dog on a Leash", were not as successful, the dog's legs moving but the body still too realistic and stationary.  His later attempts, with works such as Dynamism of a Speeding Car, and Flight of Swifts, both of 1914, show a much more expressive and analytical approach: band-like movements of diagonal and horizontal linear lines, moving repeatedly across the page, successfully portray movement, and in Flight of Swifts, the swooping movements made by the swifts are lift trailing in space and light fragments -- an influence of Cubism.

Boccioni perhaps best summed up the Futurist' movement in his phenomenal bronze sculpture of 1913, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.  The sculpture portrays a robotic striding figure, a symbol of the Futurists' dream of the future world.  The sculpture is a study of the movement of form and the moving form's interaction with the space it enters.  Movement and the figure are not separate in the sculpture; the movement becomes a dimension of the body.  Previous positions stream of f the limbs in smooth lines, trailing off in waves of bronze.