"In the Evening, Lying on Her Bed, She Reread the Letter from Her Artilleryman at the Front", published in Les Mots (en Liberté futuristes), 1919

Futurism was launched when the Italian poet Filippo Marinetti published his Manifesto in the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1909. On the same page one would find three, four ink colors, and twenty different type faces (italics for quick impressions, bold-face for violent noises and sounds). 

Futurists believed that typography could become a concrete expressive visual form to impact and change social norms.

Here are some excerpts:

*We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential elements of our poetry. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. *We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap. *We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. Above, Filippo Marinetti's Futurist Words-in-Freedom (1919).

Let's analyze this poster by Marinetti.

1. (language) This collage-poem contains fragmented words, onomatopoeias, and distorted letters. It's a clear example of Marinetti’s tavole parolibere (free-word pictures), in which he mixed innovative typography with imagery, contributing a kind of visual and aural cacophony. 

2. As the woman depicted in silhouette reads a note from “her artilleryman,” fragments of words both real and constructed, and distorted in size, shape, and form, thunder above her, reflecting the sounds of the war as well as the Futurists’ fight against convention. 

3. Fragmentation is a new form of communication & part of Futurism's manifesto. Cacophony is repetition; repetition is a typical form of the machine (the best metaphor of Modernism). 

War is another Futurist metaphor. Why? Futurism had from the outset admired violence and was intensely patriotic. The Futurist Manifesto had declared, 

We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for.   

A famous photo of the Futurist group in Paris (1912). From left to right: Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrá, Filippo Tomasso Marinettti, Umberto Boccioni, Umberto Severini.  

So, we get the following symbols: Speed, light, machine (car, train, ship), violence, and patriotism.