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From Xavier Duran, Barcelona, Spain

While Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is said to have founded futurism in 1909, in 1904 by Catalan writer Gabriel Alomar at a Barcelona conference (8 February, p 22).

His was an aesthetic movement, but also a political one, in a sense opposite to Marinetti’s. Alomar was unequivocally democrat, Catalanist and leftist and, probably, agreed with the Italian futurists only in their anticlericalism.

Alomar’s theses were echoed in the Mercure de France magazine in 1908. Perhaps this is how Marinetti learned of the term and took advantage of it.