Britain’s first, large-scale show on Futurism opens this week at Tate Modern. In essence it reunites the works displayed in the Futurists’ first European exhibition, which took place in Paris in 1912, when audiences swooned and reeled before modernist works of previously unimaginable emotional violence, dynamism and scale.

To a modern audience, accustomed to regular revolutions in the speed of travel and of the spread of information, our eyes are no longer astonished by the artistic fireworks of the Futurists. But the impact of their collective work has in no way been diminished, and the Tate has put together an exhibition that successfully reassesses the movement and remains astonishing on many levels.

It is now a century since the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti launched a movement that was intended to reject the nostalgia inherent in European culture, to destroy artistic tradition and to place all faith in the future. Futurism, as laid out in the First Futurist Manifesto of 1909, was designed as a means of social change. There was nothing gentle about it, mind you. This was a movement of drama and anarchy embracing violence, danger and fearlessness. “Turn aside the canals to flood the museums!” he wrote. “Take up your pickaxes, your axes and hammers and wreck, wreck the venerable cities, pitilessly!”

With a core group of artists who gathered around him (principally Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini) and many collaborators, Marinetti, Futurism’s idealistic ringmaster, spoke, recited and provoked on stages and at soirées all across Europe. He intended to introduce the fisticuff into the artistic struggle. Audiences shrieked in panic. Fights broke out and the police were called.

While pitching their tirades against anything they considered passé (in which they included academic art, museums, archaeology and antique dealers), the Futurists enthusiastically embraced the technological developments that were crowding in on everyday urban life in the 1910s. Urban centres were growing rapidly and out of them came electric street lighting, trains, liners, aircraft, telephones and radios, cinemas and sound recording.

Marinetti’s Futurist movement was an all inclusive one. In a welter of activity, he produced manifestos on everything: Futurist painting of course, Futurist poetry and Futurist sculpture, but also politics, theatre, cinema, lust, the art of noises, weights and measures and even cookery, of which the key principles were no pasta, no knives and forks and no after-dinner speeches (a typical dish might consist of mortadella served with nougat in a sauce of black coffee and eau de cologne).

In 1912, the Futurist artists launched themselves on the rest of Europe, first in Paris, the centre of the avant-garde, with an exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, and then, a couple of months later, at the Sackville Gallery in London, from where it went on to Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam and beyond. The exhibitions caused a sensation. Now, almost 100 years later, we have the chance to review this dynamic force at Tate Modern.

Futurism’s artists shared the ambition to be “placed . . . at the head of the European movement in painting”. You can just hear the bravado of these young Italian men, intoxicated with speed and dynamism, wanting to wipe out the old and stir the masses to embrace the new. Some of them, principally Umberto Boccioni, did make a lasting impact, but in general, though, Futurism threw out a great deal of rhetoric and ideas about a modern and dynamic new world, but its artistic results were less impressive.

The Tate show, which comes to London from the Pompidou Centre in Paris, reunites most of the works that appeared in the original 1912 exhibitions, placing the Italians in its central rooms, with related works in side rooms by the Russians, the French and the British, showing the spreading waves of Marinetti’s influence and ideas.

The Italian rooms provide us with a mixed impression. Dominating the central space is Gino Severini’s monumental La Danse du pan-pan au Monico, painted between 1909 and 1911. This canvas, 4m by almost 3m, was the sensation of the 1912 Paris exhibition, causing visitors, according to the Tate catalogue, to shriek with panic. The painting has the look of a giant jigsaw puzzle of hundreds of fragmented pieces, shards of bright colour that on inspection reveal the figures and flesh of dozens of undulating and gyrating women, men drinking champagne, and the sensation of light and noise and movement. Compositionally it was radical, but its content was also, to some, deeply shocking.

Equally shocking at the time, although less so to a modern audience, was Carlo Carra’s Funeral of the Anarchist, 1910-11. This is a huge, dark and daunting work that sucks the viewer into the scene in Milan in 1904 of the brutal clash between mounted troops and protesters at the funeral of the assassinated anarchist Galli. The crowds in motion fight with flaying sticks and mounted troops push in against them, swords slashing and horses bucking in a work of remarkable revolutionary idealism.

Other, weaker and less sophisticated works by Severini, and by Luigi Russolo, are hung in the core Italian Futurist rooms by virtue of having been in the original exhibitions. But it is Boccioni who stands out as the major talent in the group, his artworks managing to convey the changing relationship between Man and the mechanised world.

Not only did Boccioni depict the sensation of the speed of a tram and the vertiginous height of new buildings, the clamour of the new, electrically-lit night clubs, he also addressed the psychological impact of these exciting new developments on the human beings living with them. His painting The Force of the Street, for example, done in 1911, captures the tumultuous energy, noise and emotional disturbance of the modern city. A tram, emblazoned with its shining headlight and lit from above by a series of dramatic spotlights, moves through the picture, heading towards the viewer as if it is about to burst out of the canvas. Dark figures scatter to the side as it passes, reminiscent perhaps of early cinema experiences, when audiences scattered from their seats thinking that moving objects on the screen were about to burst out into the cinema.

By 1913, Boccioni had diversified from the plastic restraints of two-dimensional canvas into sculpture so as to render dynamism better with a third dimension. The first sculpture of the show, one of just a handful of bronzes, is his superb Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. More than 1m high, it depicts a figure walking, ploughing through space, as if against a great wind, the planes of its muscles and bones exposed, and the wake of its passage through air fashioned in beautiful trailing wings that spring out from its shoulders, buttocks and calves. In this way, he intended to bring his subject to life, depicting not only the figure itself but also the space in which it moves.

Movement, preferably fast movement, was one of the defining mantras of the Futurists. In its powerful depiction of speed, Natalia Goncharova’s Cyclist, 1913, accords with the purest expression of European Futurism. Her cyclist pedals away furiously as he bumps along over some pebbles, his head bent stubbornly against the wind, going obdurately against the direction indicated by the pointing finger in the background. But it is the repetitive whirring shapes of his moving wheels and legs that give us the sensation of frantic, urgent activity that appealed to the Futurists.

Goncharova did not approve of Marinetti, who visited Russia in 1914, rejecting his claim to be the founding father of Futurism, and laying claim herself to certain areas of the Russian avant-garde. She probably also disliked Marinetti’s misogyny and belief in Italian racial superiority, which had inspired documents declaring women valuable only for reproducing “pure” babies to be offered up as the future of the Italian race.

There was another dark side to Futurism: its tragic fascination with and celebration of war. This lead to the Futurists urging Italy to give up its neutrality once the First World War had broken out, and the eventual transformation in the 1920s of radical anarchism into Fascism.

Perhaps only Boccioni had understood that behind the marvels of science, and its great and prodigious inventions, there was doubt and uncertainty and the fear of a loss of values. As the war cut short the first phase of Futurism, the very technology that Marinetti and his cohorts had embraced was turned to terrible, unimaginable ends. In retrospect it is easy to conclude that the urgency and exuberance of Marinetti’s movement was naive. But it is clear that Futurism did effect a cultural transformation of modern life, bringing together aspects of contemporary thought and artistic practice in a way that altered public perceptions of modern life.

Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson was the only British artist to sign up to Futurism. He had been a student in 1912 when the Futurists first showed in London, and before the outbreak of war he made several fine Futurist paintings, including his painting of steamships, The Arrival, which depicted the impact of technological discoveries. However, when Nevinson enlisted in a Friends’ ambulance unit, his initial fascination with the machinery of war turned to the discovery of the tragic human reality. He immediately dissociated himself from the Futurists. His Bursting Shell of 1915 bears the shape of a shell; but what really exploded at that time were Futurism’s modernist ideals, its cult of violence and its prewar mechanisation.