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Paintings
Initially Boccioni focused on painting.
In his famous canvas The City Rises (1910) he attempted
to synthesize the complex visual imagery triggered by everyday urban experience.
In 1911 he visited Paris and came into contact with Picasso, Braque and
Cubism. This experience led
him to rework some of his paintings for the first Paris showing of Futurist
art in early 1912. Although Boccioni was impressed with Cubism, he transformed
the style into something very different from what he found in Paris. His
triptych States of the Mind: The Farewells, Those Who Stay, Those Who
Go (1911-12, Museum of Modern Art New York), pictured the sensations
evoked by a railway journey; it dominated the exhibition and remains his
best painting piece. Other important paintings include:
- Street Noises Invade the House
(1911, Private Collection)
- Materia (1912, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice)
- Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913, Private Collection)
- Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913, Museum of Modern Art, NY)
- Dynamism of a Man's Head (1914, Museum of Contemporary Art, Milan)
- Dynamism of a Woman's Head (1914, Museum of Contemporary Art,
Milan)
- Still Life with Glass and Siphon (1914, gouache and ink, Yale
University)
- Interior with Two Female Figures (1915, Castello Sforzesco, Milan)
- Charge of the Lancers (1915, Ricardo and Magda Jucker Collection,
Milan)
Sculpture
Though primarily active as a painter for
much of his short career, it was as a sculptor that Umberto Boccioni made
his most important contribution to the history of art. While on one of
his trips to Paris, he was seized with the idea of infusing sculpture
with the modernity of Futurism. In 1912 he published his Futurist Painting
Sculpture: Plastic Dynamism (Pittura scultura Futuriste: Dinamismo
Plastico), and the following year he unveiled his masterpiece Unique
Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). The sculpture depicts a striding
figure, with billowing drapery around its legs, giving the sculpture an
aerodynamic and fluid form. Although as a Futurist, Boccioni had no time
for traditional art, the work is still realistic and the lack of arms
on the figure pays homage to Walking Man (1877, Rodin Museum, Paris)
by Auguste Rodin.
Boccioni's original work was made in plaster,
and this is on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Sao Paulo.
Two bronze casts were made in 1931 and are on display at the Museum
of Modern Art (New York) and the Tate Modern (London). The
sculpture is now represented on the Italian 20 eurocent coin. Other sculptures
Boccioni created in plaster (now destroyed and only known from photographs)
include Synthesis of Human Dynamism (1912); Speeding Muscles
(1913) and Spiral Expansion of Speeding Muscles (1913), as well
as the bronze Development of a Bottle in Space (1912).
Legacy
Italian Futurism had a major influence
on artists across Europe, including: the Vorticists in Britain, the Dada
movement in Zurich and Berlin, Delaunay's Simultaneisme, Art Deco and
Surrealism, while Russian Futurism had a strong effect on Rayonism and
Constructivism. As for Boccioni himself, he joined the War and died in
August 1917 after falling from his horse. Despite his untimely death,
Boccioni is seen as one of the great sculptors of the 20th century, while
his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space has become an updated version
of the classical marble statue known as The Winged Victory of Samothrace
(c.190 BCE, Louvre), and one of the iconic sculptures of the 20th century.
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