First Sentence

"Nothing did more to shape the concept of the "avant-garde" in twentieth-century culture than Futurism, the strange phenomenon - groping for words, cultural historians have typically labeled it a "movement" - that was unleashed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti on February 20, 1909, when he published "The Founding and the Manifesto of Futurism" on the front page of the Parisian newspaper, Le Figaro."