To establish some initial coordinates at the outset – between late Symbolist impulses from the East, Expressionist origins in Germany and familiar French imperialist bias towards the Parisian literary avant-garde – the received wisdom that Italian Futurism was ‘the actual seedbed of Dada art’ is often enough repeated and does not, therefore, bear repeating here (fig. 2). Beyond the political, however, the complex problematic nature of the relation between Futurism and Dada is a far less frequent site of address, and Dada's aesthetic negotiation of anti-nationalist politics, for instance, is largely ignored. We know that in rejecting all cultural precedents, the Dadaists implicitly rejected Futurism. They declared their rejection explicitly, sloganising under Paris Dada that ‘The futurist is dead. What killed it? Dada.’ To name and shame, it was Dada drummer Richard Huelsenbeck who famously denounced Filippo Marinetti's world view and Futurism's goals, despite being notably among the most enthusiastic Dada exponents of Futurist sound art – embracing as he did the concepts of simultaneity and of bruitism, even if he well recognised how bruitism was taken over by the Dadaists without their having ‘any idea of its underlying philosophy’. And it is perhaps by its remarkable prescience that Roman Jakobson's essay on Dada, written in 1921, draws critical distinction, noting there the Futurists’ impassioned cry ‘long live the future’ in opposition to the Cabaret Voltaire players’ no less impassioned ‘down with the future’.

Chronologically, Futurism comes before Dada, but the two formations overlap: strictly speaking, Futurism outlives formal Dada through the convolutions of Italian Dada and the emergence from the latter of the doubly misunderstood case of Giulio Evola, for instance – historical fact, ultimately, that compromises the preferred linear passaging of easy art history. Properly to consider the relationship between the two movements demands recourse to the less distinct position put into words by Hans Richter, who described Dada's failure to digest Futurism, simply swallowing it whole, ‘bones, feathers and all’.