Umberto Boccioni

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(b Reggio Calabria, 19 Oct 1882; d Sorte, Verona, 17 Aug 1916). Italian sculptor, painter, printmaker and writer. As one of the principal figures of FUTURISM, he helped shape the movement's revolutionary aesthetic as a theorist as well as through his art. In spite of the brevity of his life, his concern with dynamism of form and with the breakdown of solid mass in his sculpture continued to influence other artists long after his death.

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The Italian artist Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) was the leading theoretician of futurism, the mosttalented of its painters, and the creator of its first sculptures. He is considered the master of the innovative esthetic generated by the machine age.

Umberto Boccioni was born on Oct. 19, 1882, in Reggio Calabria. He went to Rome in 1900 and studied with Giacomo Balla, who revealed the theory of divisionism to him. Boccioni also studied at the Academy of the Brera in Milan. In 1904-1905 he visited Paris and Russia.

To Boccioni's searching spirit the meeting with the poet Filippo Marinetti in 1909 was an event of the utmost importance. Marinetti, the initiator and great orator of the futurist movement, converted Boccioni to his principles. Together with Gino Severini, Carlo Carrà, Balla, and Luigi Russolo, Boccioni signed the "Manifesto of Futurist Painters" in Milan in 1910.

Futurist Painting

Boccioni became the leading theorist of futurist art, both in painting and sculpture. He was the most intellectually active and artistically creative of all the futurist artists. One of his aims was to vitalize matter (Materia, 1912). Matter had to serve as the expression of emotion and states of mind (States of Mind, 1911). The term linee forze, or lines of force, signifies in Boccioni's work the energies which dominate matter and spirit. His famous picture Forces of a Street (1911) is a synthesis of the time and space elements and of form, color, and tone. All the lines of force are in action: the traffic in the streets, the light rays coming from the windows and doors, the light from the sky descending on the busy scene and adding a transcendental quality to it. Geometric forms and intensive colors are in perpetual interplay. The beholder is drawn into the vortex of this field of energies, which even includes "painted sounds." Figures float through the picture in a shadowy, schematic manner. What is more important to Boccioni than the representation of the figures is the human reaction to the experience of the forces of the street. Pictures like this are the esthetic reflections of the industrial era.

The painting Elasticity (1912) is the synthesis of the movement of a galloping horse. Similarly, a synthesis of human movement is found in the paintings Muscular Dynamics and Dynamics of a Human Body.

Futurist Sculpture

Boccioni's first futurist sculpture dates from 1911. In 1912 he wrote his "Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture," in which he propounded the use of unconventional, hitherto unacceptable materials. The "totality" Boccioni strove for was the simultaneous representation of the temporal evolution of an action. His revolutionary dictum for sculpture, "Let us open the figure like a window and include in it the milieu in which it lives," is illustrated by Development of a Bottle in Space (1912) and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). Even rays of light were formally incorporated in such sculptures as Head and House and Light.

Boccioni took part in all the important futurist exhibitions in Europe and America, beginning with the Paris exhibition of 1912. His book Pittura, scultura futuriste: Dinamismo plastico (1914) is the most comprehensive statement of futurism written by one of the original members of the movement.

Boccioni was wounded in World War I. While convalescing, he was killed in a riding accident in Sorte in 1916.

Further Reading

In English, Boccioni's work is discussed in Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art (1936); James Thrall Soby and Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Twentieth-Century Italian Art (1949); and Raffaele Carriere, Avant-Garde Painting and Sculpture in Italy, 1890-1955 (1955) and Futurism (1961; trans. 1963). There are several good works on the artist in Italian.

Boccioni, Umberto (1882-1916), painter, sculptor, and principal theoretician of Italy's avant-garde art movement, Futurism. Boccioni formally joined the Futurists after a meeting with Filippo Marinetti in 1910; his ideas on ‘plastic dynamism’ subsequently established him as the group's foremost theoretician. Like other Futurists, he was concerned with both the expression of emotion and the representation of time. His interest in photography extended to the experimental work of Muybridge, Marey, and the Bragaglia brothers. Later, however, Boccioni decided that painting and sculpture were the best means for conveying dynamism, and denounced all photography as antithetical to Futurist concerns. He particularly rejected the photodynamism of the Bragaglias and engineered their excommunication from the group.

— Molly Rogers

Umberto Boccioni self-portrait

Umberto Boccioni (19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916) was an Italian painter and sculptor. Like other Futurists, his work centered on the portrayal of movement (dynamism), speed, and technology. He was born in Reggio Calabria, Italy.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Gallery 3 References 4 External links

Biography

A native of Reggio Calabria, Boccioni studied art through the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome, beginning in 1901. He also studied design with a sign painter in Rome. Together with his friend Gino Severini, he became a student of Giacomo Balla, a divisionist painter. In 1906, Boccioni studied Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles in Paris. During the late 1906 and early 1907, he shortly took drawing classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice. In 1901, Boccioni first visited the Famiglia Artistica, a society for artists in Milan. After moving there in 1907, he became acquainted with fellow Futurists, including the famous poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The two would later join with others in writing manifestos on futurism.

Boccioni became the main theorist of the artistic movement. He also decided to be a sculptor after he visited various studios in Paris, in 1912, among which those of Braque, Archipenko, Brancusi, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and, probably, Medardo Rosso. While in 1912 he exhibited some paintings together with other Italian futurists at the Bernheim-Jeun, in 1913 he returned to show his sculptures at the Gallerie La Boetie: all related to the elaboration of what Boccioni had seen in Paris, they in their turn probably influenced the cubist sculptors, especially Duchamp-Villon.

In 1914, he published Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico) explaining the aesthetics of the group: “While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus build the table.” He exhibited in London, together with the group, in 1912 (Sackville Gallery) and 1914 (Doré Gallery): the two exhibitions made a deep impression on the young English artists: some joined then the Vorticism, led by Wyndham Lewis.

Mobilized in the declaration of war, Boccioni was assigned at an artillery regiment at Sorte, near Verona. On 16 August 1916, Boccioni was thrown from his horse during a cavalry training exercise and was trampled. He died the following day, age thirty-four.

Gallery

Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 bronze (depicted on Italian 20 cent euro coin) Museum of Modern Art, New York	States of Mind III; Those Who Stay, 1911 oil on canvas painting Museum of Modern Art, New York	Portrait (detail) of Ferruccio Busoni, 1916 Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome
A strada entra nella casa, 1911 Sprengel-Museum, Hannover	Self-portrait, 1905 (oil on canvas) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York	Visioni simultanee, ca. 1912 Von Der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

References

• Guggenheim Collection's Boccioni entry

External links

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