The manifesto that the Italian futurists published in 1909 was nothing if not spirited. "We want to demolish the museums, the libraries," they announced, "fight against moralism, feminism and all the opportunistic and utilitarian cowardices." Those strong espressos really heighten the rhetoric, don't you find?
How sad for the futurists, then, that the museums weren't destroyed. Instead, galleries show the very art that was supposed to be their death knell. Libraries still thrive, some of them housing art books that devote short chapters to that historical curio known as futurism. As for moralism and feminism, they aren't quite dead either. At least, let's hope not.
The futurists would have hated the fact that a railway station - that home of power, steam, energy and all the modern virtues they championed so naively - has been converted into the Musée d'Orsay. Worse still, this former temple to speed is celebrating the very art against which they affected to rebel. Until July the museum will house an exhibition of Italian art from 1880 to the launch of the futurist manifesto, as well as two nice little allied shows devoted to the poet Gabriele d'Annunzio and the designer Carlo Bugatti.
Futurism was purportedly a modernist revolt against worthy Victorian artistic movements. For artists such as Umberto Boccioni and Giacomo Balla, these movements were enemies of any kind of progress, and especially aesthetic development. The futurists championed "speed, war, the suppression of the subject". In the last room of the Musée d'Orsay's exhibition, we can only look on the works that grew out of this philosophy, and despair. We know how the futurists' own future turned out - thatspeed and war filled Flanders fields with dead and reduced Hiroshima to toxic ruins.
Typical of such art is Boccioni's 1910 painting A Fight in the Arcade, in which a mob of Lowry-esque stick figures lose their identities and form a rush of energy in a proto-vorticist force field. It's perhaps facile to see fascism rearing its ugly head in this kind of work, not least because if we do so, we fail to understand futurism as an artistic movement. But this formalist celebration of fist-fighting still seems jejune .
The Challenge of Modernity to Italian Art is hardly the summer blockbuster one might expect from the Musée d'Orsay. As soon as you step through the doors, the English-speaking hordes looking for "Van Go" disappear to be replaced by pockets of Italian intellectuals reflecting on a little-known chapter in their artistic history.
The exhibition starts with a bombastic flourish of outsized paintings. It was the 1880s, and canvas must have been cheap and paint free. Never, outside the rooms at the Louvre that house David's paintings of Napoleon crowning himself and The Tennis Court Oath, have I seen such big pictures so shriekingly displayed. Giulio Aristide Sartorio's Diane of Ephesus and the Slaves measures more than 13ft by 9ft. He was influenced by the British pre-Raphaelites, but his subjects' inviting buttocks are from a sexual world unimagined by the likes of Edward Burne-Jones - that chaste Brummie visionary. Some trans-species orgy, it would not be ludicrous to suppose, has just taken place. All the slaves look shagged, as do the horses, tigers and lions. Only Diana and a stuck-up eagle remain aloof. In Sartorio's equally big Gorgon and the Heroes, the wing-footed heroine walks across the vanquished bodies of her muscle-bound foes, brushing the luxuriant red locks that fall below her waist, the minx. She has an ivory body and the implausibly hairless genitals of a true pre-Raphaelite damsel but a raunchy pose beyond Burne Jones.
The first room is also delightful because it shows that rare thing - the French being humble. Paris looked down its nose at Italian paintings and sculpture in the late 19th century. The self-proclaimed world capital of art regarded Italy as a big museum where no great art had been produced since Tintoretto cleaned his brushes for the last time. This exhibition amounts to a detailed retraction of that attitude. Italy, announces a shame-faced note, had become unified in the 1860s and with that came a national self-confidence with which the French only recently got to grips.
In the second room, though, there are paintings created by Italians in Paris, as if to say: "Our chums across the Alps really had to come to France to find out what's what." The best are by Giovanni Boldoni, notably his portrait of the snooty dandy poet Le Comte Robert de Montesquiou, immortalised by Proust as Baron de Charlus - a spiteful snob and habitué of male brothels. The blue handle of the Comte's cane at the top left of the canvas matches the blue of his cuff-stud at the bottom right. What a ponce.
So far, so much like insipid appropriations of what Manet and Whistler had done already. But in Moldoni's Nocturne à Montmartre (1892-95), a seethingly brown canvas of horse-drawn speed and blurred top hats seems to prefigure the concerns of futurists.
The futurists may have come to bury recent Italian art such as Moldoni's rather than to praise it, but the chief virtue of this well-curated historical exhibition is that it explains that futurism wasn't just a reaction but borrowed from everything that it purported to condemn. Thus it was heavily influenced by the artistic movement called divisionism, which used strong complementary colours to produce powerful optical effects. The chief exponent was Gaetono Previati, whose 1907 triptych The Day seethes with the energy of rosy-fingered dawn and writhing horses. It has all the dynamism needed to turn the heads of those future futurists. It was only the allusions to classical mythology that got on their nerves.
Similarly, the futurists rejected the wet, socialist moralising of the generation of painters that preceded them. Typical is Angelo Morbelli's 1893-95 painting of Po Valley rice harvesters, exhibited in Paris under the title Pour Quatre-Vingts Centimes! A row of women are depicted gathering, no doubt, the marvellous short-grain arborio rice that has become fundamental to the well-made risotto. But the moralism of the title (80 centimes was hardly a living daily wage even a century ago) and the leaden depiction of the harvesters are alienating. One can't help but compare their gestures with the painfully bent figures of Millet's The Gleaners and find the Morbelli wanting as an engaging human drama. Confronted by such insipid socialist art, no wonder the futurists came to reject it.
But what is the point of art? Is it to dramatise social problems and thereby contribute to their eventual eradication? The futurists thought not. Instead, they threw out the moralising along with the fin de siècle symbolism and borrowed the technical advances of the realists. The exhibition concludes with photographs by the proto-futurist Anton Bragaglia. The human form is in the process of being destroyed in these prints of a hand in movement and a blurring blow to someone's face. The subject is being dispersed across the frame and is losing its identity in favour of what really interests the artist - dynamism, violence, form. Futurism launched itself with a slap in the face, and humanity became the first casualty of its art war. That, though, is another story. More espresso?
• At the Muse d'Orsay, Paris (00 33 1 40 49 48 14), until July 15.
