Umberto Boccioni

Italian painter and sculptor

• Born: October 19, 1882
• Birthplace: Reggio di Calabria, Italy
• Died: August 17, 1916
• Place of death: Sorte, near Verona, Italy

Boccioni was the foremost painter and sculptor of the Italian Futurist movement, which developed in the years immediately preceding World War I. In addition to being an artist, Boccioni was the leading technical theorist of the movement. His principles of sculpture, in particular, shaped the mixed-media and dynamic productions of the twentieth century.

Early Life

Umberto Boccioni (ewm-BEHR-toh boht-CHYOH-nee) was born in Reggio di Calabria, at the “toe” of Italy’s “boot,” but his family moved often as his father, Raffaele, a minor civil servant, was transferred. The Boccioni family, including Umberto’s mother and his sister, Amelia, moved shortly after his birth to Forli; subsequently, they lived in Genoa, Padua, and Catania, at the latter of which Umberto attended the Technical Institute. Apparently he was interested in art even as a child. While in school, he also contributed critical articles to a local newspaper.

Just before the turn of the century, Boccioni moved to Rome, where he divided his time between commercial work and art study. At the insistence of his father, he studied with a sign maker, and at least part of his income was derived from commercial advertising work. He also studied at the Free School of Nude Painting, but the most significant event of his stay in Rome was his acquaintance with another painting student, Gino Severini, and his introduction through Severini to the older painter Giacomo Balla, who taught the younger men modern painting techniques and with whom Boccioni studied until 1902. The young artist traveled extensively, spending time in Paris, Munich, and St. Petersburg, and studied in Padua and Venice before settling in Milan in 1907 with his mother, who served as a model for his work through most of his short life, and his sister. His earliest paintings show influences as disparate as the medieval artist Albrecht Dürer and the Art Nouveau movement. He seems to have been most significantly affected by the work of the Impressionists and the Symbolists. Although those influences remain in his later works, Boccioni’s aims and his methods were dramatically changed by his meeting in 1910 with the writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the originator of Futurism.

Life’s Work

Within a year, Marinetti’s ideas for a nationalist art movement that would include disciplines as diverse as music and fashion design had begun to gain adherents, including Boccioni. Marinetti was an avant-garde poet and critic who had spent time in Paris, where he was exposed to the sparks that would ignite the efflorescence of modern art. While publishing a literary magazine, Poesia, in Milan, Marinetti wrote the first Futurist Manifesto, published February 20, 1909, in the French newspaper Le Figaro, for which he was the Italian literary correspondent. Drawing on such sources as the German writer Friedrich Nietzsche and the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Marinetti constructed a purposely offensive and radical anthem for a new movement that turned its back on the past subjects and techniques of art. In place of homages to the great artists, Marinetti extolled the portrayal of speed, machismo, and violence. Although some of the Futurist rhetoric may have been an Italian nationalist reaction against the European perception of Italy as backward, many critics have found affinities to fascism in some tenets of the Futurist movement.

Boccioni was one of five painters to sign the first manifesto of the Futurist painters on February 11, 1910. On April 11 of the same year, the group issued the Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista (published by Boccioni in 1912; technical manifesto of Futurist painting); as usual with this movement, theory preceded practice. Although five names, including those of Severini and Balla, are affixed to these documents, Boccioni is thought to be largely responsible for them. The first painting manifesto echoes Marinetti’s ideas, placing science above nature and arguing for the replacement of traditional static human or natural representations with the symbols of technology, such as ocean liners and automobiles. The technical manifesto is more specific, as Boccioni had begun the work of transforming words into new, or recycled, techniques. The painters vowed to abandon traditional forms and colors, but the Impressionist and Symbolist painters had already begun that task. Most significant for the new Futurist movement was the interest in dynamism: the representation of the multiplication of images caused by the speed of modern life.

A prime example of Futurist dynamism in painting is Boccioni’s Città che sale (1910-1911; the city rises), which is typical in its urban subject: a construction site. Despite the Futurist celebration of technology in the manifestos, Boccioni chose to depict horses rather than machines at work. The painting’s glowing colors and elongated brushstrokes create a violent and vibrant sense of action; in fact, the horses seem to drag their masters into a vortex of movement that may seem as much destructive as constructive. Another major painting by Boccioni, the triptych Stati d’animo: Gli Addii, Quelli che vanno, Quelli che restano (states of mind: the farewells, those who go, those who stay), painted and repainted in 1911-1912, also reveals an interest in action unfolding over time. The triptych depicts expressionistically the departure of a train and the feelings of those described in the subtitles. The source of the main title is the work of Bergson; his interest in the relativism of human perspective and perception as well as contemporary experiments with time-lapse photography and film influenced Boccioni’s efforts. Also, perhaps surprisingly, there seems to be an affinity between Boccioni’s theories of dynamism and Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity; for both theorists, matter and energy are related states of being.

The repainted version of Stati d’animo includes numerals that reflect the influence of the cubists, particularly Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Boccioni’s friend and fellow Futurist, Severini, had returned from a stay in Paris to report that the Italians were out of touch with the latest artistic developments. Thanks to financial support from Marinetti, Boccioni visited Paris in 1911 and 1912. Cubist works he saw there supplemented the reading he had done in Italy. After exhibiting several times in Italy, the Futurists finally mounted an exhibition in Paris in 1912 at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. This exhibition toured Europe, and only a denial of the Futurists’ request for separate gallery space blocked their participation in the historic Armory Show in New York in 1913, the show that introduced European modern art to the United States.

Included in the Bernheim-Jeune catalog for the Futurist show is a discussion of “force-lines,” or the idea that objects contain unique and characterizing lines of emotion. Boccioni and other Futurists combined the cool of analysis of the cubists and their dismemberment of subjects into their parts with the Italian movement’s expressionistic dynamism, the representation of movement over time. This Futurist interest in all four dimensions as well as the beginnings of cubist sculpture may explain Boccioni’s shift to a new field to which he would make his most important contributions: sculpture.

In 1912, Boccioni published his Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista . Perhaps the two most significant elements are a focus on a new relation between the art object and its environment and a call for mixtures of unconventional sculptural materials. His suggestions for materials include glass, cardboard, concrete, and even electric lights. In 1913, Boccioni first exhibited in Paris sculptures intended to illustrate his techniques; the ten pieces and twenty drawings shown survive in photographs, but only four or five pieces of Boccioni’s sculptural output still exist (one is of questionable authenticity). Conflicting stories have circulated about the loss or destruction of most of his pieces, after a posthumous exhibition in 1917. They may have been thrown in a stream by a distraught or jealous friend; they may have been exposed accidentally to the elements.

Fortunately, one of the surviving sculptures is the 1913 bronze Forme uniche della continuatà nello spazio (unique forms of continuity in space), the last of three striding figures that Boccioni created. Although the energy and sense of a figure caught in time suggest the influence of Rodin, Boccioni’s figure is mechanical as well as romantic. It seems to be a form rather than a body, and Boccioni has attempted to break up the form according to the theories most clearly enumerated in the book Pittura scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) (Futurist painting and sculpture [plastic dynamism]), published in 1914.

Artistic, personal, and political differences soon sundered the Futurist movement. Boccioni joined Marinetti in 1914 in supporting the fascist call for Italian intervention in Eastern Europe. Their opposition to Italian neutrality and their romanticization of war made them ripe for service. Boccioni joined the cycling unit of the Italian army; he eventually landed in the artillery. The horrors and the nuisances of war cured Boccioni of his romanticism, but there was little time or opportunity for producing art. A leave in the summer of 1916 did allow him to produce a few paintings. Although they seem to suggest that he was abandoning Futurist methods in favor of an exploration of Paul Cézanne’s geometric techniques, the change may be attributable to the fact that these paintings were commissioned.

In August, after returning to his unit in Sorte, near Verona, Boccioni fell from a horse during military exercises and died the next day, August 17. Despite the loss of most of his sculpture and the relatively short duration of his career, Boccioni’s reputation has been enhanced by exhibitions of the remaining sculptures and of his paintings. His theoretical concerns have also proved to be wider than imagined. Besides his manifestos on painting and sculpture, an unpublished manifesto of Futurist architecture was rediscovered in 1971. His fascination with the interplay between object and space might have led him in other directions as well, if not for his early death.

Significance

Although Boccioni is the best known of the Italian Futurist painters, his influence through the rest of the twentieth century is primarily in sculpture and in the application of his dynamic theories. Despite the loss of most of his sculptural pieces, Boccioni’s insistence on merging sculpture and environment can be recognized in works as diverse as Alexander Calder’s giant mobiles and Robert Smithson’s environmental sculptures, which mold the landscape itself.

Boccioni is open to charges that he never fully succeeded in transforming his theories into art that faithfully represented them. His embrace of fascism has also made him the object of criticism. Yet his work in paint, words, and shapes remains an enduring contribution to the erasure of traditional artistic boundaries and the rise of modern art.

Bibliography

Coen, Ester. Umberto Boccioni. Translated by Robert Eric Wolf. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988. Produced in conjunction with a 1988-1989 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this remains the most updated book-length work in English on the artist. Includes lavish illustrations and supporting materials.

Futurism and Futurisms. New York: Abbeville Press, 1986. A monumental resource on all forms of Futurism, including a dictionary of Futurist terms and personalities and illustrations of the Venice exhibition that the book documents. A catalog organized by Pontus Hultén.

Golding, John. Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. Newcastle upon Tyne, England: University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1972. A transcription of a lecture exploring the evolution of Boccioni’s most famous sculpture and his ambivalence about his sources.

Martin, Marianne W. Futurist Art and Theory, 1909-1915. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1968. Reprint. New York: Hacker Art Books, 1978. Perhaps the seminal work in English on Futurism, this book documents the rise of the movement and its influences from such French artistic movements as Surrealism and cubism.

Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture. New ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Labeling a whole cavalcade of prewar radical artistic movements Futurist, Perloff insists that they all tore down barriers, both in art and between the art object and the world. New preface by the author.

Rossi, Laura Mattioli, ed. Boccioni’s Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the Avant-Garde in Milan and Paris. New York: Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, 2004. Collection of essays accompanying the exhibition Materia Boccioni’s massive painting of his mother which was mounted at the Guggenheim Museum. The essays explore Boccioni’s evolution as an artist, the relationship of his painting to his sculpture, his role in the history of modernism, and other aspects of his work.

Soby, James Thrall, and Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Twentieth Century Italian Art. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1949. Published in conjunction with an exhibition, this books remains valuable for its clear exposition and its early bibliography.

Taylor, Joshua C. Futurism. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1961. A good introduction to the Futurist movement, including translations of four Futurist manifestos, illustrations, and a bibliography.