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The main purpose of this study is to examine how the modern city is depicted in paintings from the beginning of the 20th century. The study is based on an analysis of three paintings: The Soul of the Soulless City (1920) by Christopher R. W. Nevinson, Metropolis (1916) by George Grosz and Storstadstrafik (1918) by Gösta Adrian-Nilsson. These three paintings have stylistic similarities with paintings of Italian futurists and therefore are analyzed with the help of the visual language of the futurists. The term style is used in this study as a rhetorical tool to indicate a set of characteristic elements and draw conclusions about motifs and objects depicted in the selected paintings. Another tool that is used in the study is contextualisation, which helps to understand the paintings in relation to the painters own texts, futurists manifests and other written sources sharing their ideas, urban environment of the analyzed period etc.

The analysis of these paintings consists of analysis of the formal elements of the paintings, particularly their composition, depiction of space and use of color as well as the depicted objects. In addition, text sources are analyzed, such as the Futurist Manifesto and other texts written by Italian Futurists, as well as artists' own texts such as George Grosz's autobiography or Gösta Adrian-Nilsson's book The Divine Geometry. There are three different cities depicted in these paintings: New Your, Berlin as well as Stockholm, and the image of the modern city they create differs. The modern city in Nevinson's painting is utopian, with tall buildings reaching into the sky but devoid of people. Grosz Berlin has a red color scale where the artist depicts an intersection of two major streets busy with a chaotic movement of people and traffic. Adrian-Nilsson's Stockholm is busy, colorful and full of men in uniform, traffic lights and movement. These three paintings create different feelings of a modern city: a hostile city of glass and concrete in The Soul of the Soulless City, a red jungle of people in Metropolis that almost seems to be on fire, and a colorful, energetic and friendly city in Storstadstrafik. All three artists use some of the stylistic features of the Futurists: the color scale, the multidimensionality of cubism or the use of lines, which help to create a more complex and dynamic image of the modern city with its movement and speed.