Letter: Back to the Futurists

Sir: Rhys Williams writes of aesthetics in the dressing rooms at Wembley Stadium ('Psychology offers colourful cure for football manager's blues', 19 February), but describes the copyist's mural as 'red samurai warriors', without acknowledging the inspiration behind it.

In fact, they are from Italy's Umberto Boccioni's Futurist sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which can be seen in the Tate Gallery in London. A good choice of stimulus, I grant you. As Boccioni wrote: 'The force form, with its centrifugal direction, represents the potential of the living form . . . The spectator ideally should construct the continuity (simultaneity) evoked by the force form, the equivalent of the expansive power of the body.'

Many of the Futurists died in the First World War, and their manifesto advocated the purifying aspects of war which swept away the old to be replaced by the new, a view that a lot of people would disagree with. This is the only connection that I can see between the samurai and war, but the more important one was between sport and dynamism.

Yours faithfully,

CYNTHIA McLAGLEN

Huddersfield,

Yorkshire

19 February