Futurism started as a literary movement, implanted by the poet and propagandist, Filippo Tomaso Marinetti in 1908. Marinetti's manifestos invited for the destruction of public establishments, such as libraries, museums, academies, and the cities themselves. Young intellectuals flocked to the heels of his radical ideologies. Enamored by his desire to bring about true anarchy as a means of revitalizing Italy's then stagnant culture, they began an artistic movement whose far reaching influences would be felt till this day. Futurism hinged on the worship of modern technology and the belief that technology should pervade every aspect of human life. It denounced the cultural heritage of Italy and all previous classical artistic movements. In Futurism, speed and the glories of the machine would be fully realized in art through the use of quasi-cubanistic angular lines, loud brazen colors, and frenzied brushstrokes. Highly influenced by Cubanism and Impressionism, Futurism pushed Italian art into the modern realm with its illustrated literary theories.

The Futurist movement 1909 - 1914 tried to portray phenomena such as speed and electricity in paintings and sculptures. The first dreamlike metaphysical paintings of de Chirico date from the same period. The paintings of Modigliani and the sculptures of Marini are among the finest Italian work of the period. More recently arte povera (a form of Conceptual art) developed during the 1960s, while in the 1970s and 1980s Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, and Enzo Cucchi became leading figures in European neo-expressionism (known in Italy as transavanguardia).

In those same years of fervent activity by De Chirico and Savinio, Giorgio Morandi, one of the most extraordinary figures of 20th century Italian art, was painting his still lifes, becoming renowned for the genre. Apart from brief associations with Futurism and Metaphysical painting, and painting landscapes early in his career and again during the 1940s, he painted still lifes almost exclusively. For Morandi the still life represented a manner of being: it was a filter through which reality was read, interpreted and sublimated. His paintings, in which mundane objects such as bottles, vases and jugs are painted over and over again in subtle permutations and muted tones, explore the ways we perceive and interpret the world around us, playing with negative and positive space and manipulating perspective. After Morandi, the genre ground somewhat to a halt; only at the end of the First World War did the genre of still life regain popularity in Italy and many artists sought to reconcile different schools and themes from the 1600s to the 1800s.

In the 20th century both American and European artists' most characteristic subject matter was still life. The cubist artists, Picasso, Braque, and Gris, painted still-life subjects predominantly. The artists in many schools of abstract painting, beginning with Cézanne and continuing to the present day, forsook the objective representation of still life and developed myriad varieties of treatment of the subject, concentrating on color, form, and composition. Occasionally they painted other subjects, applying to these their still-life stylistic techniques. The painters of the pop art movement and their followers frequently criticized contemporary social values using, almost exclusively, still-life subject matter. They chose objects of popular culture relevant to their thesis such as soup cans and comic strips.

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