No city had ever looked quite like this before
This is how Umberto Boccioni interpreted the view from the balcony of his mother’s top-floor apartment in Milan, in 1911.
She stands at the railing, taking in the sprawl of the city. The riotous shards of colour and dynamic shifts in perspective create the sensation of a noisy, bustling town rushing up towards you.
When it was exhibited the following year, this startling painting signalled the radical new futurist movement. Its geometric elements and distorted panorama demonstrate the deep influence that expressionism and cubism had on Boccioni. The Street Enters the House was his first depiction of Milan from a futurist perspective; the title refers not only to the enveloping nature of urbanisation, but also to the drama of widespread expansion.
As you look more closely, it becomes clear that the scene below mainly consists of a large construction site, indicating the rapid modernisation taking place. There are labourers hard at work, and other women lean from their balconies to watch the activity – even the surrounding buildings are leaning into the scene.
Light descends on the busy view, and the painting’s geometric forms and intense colour palette are in perpetual interplay.
The clamour and vibrancy draw in the viewer into a vortex of energy, and some observers pointed out that the extraordinary picture even suggested “painted sounds”.
It was a contentious time for the Milanese and residents of other expanding cities whose lives were being invaded by disruption and upheaval.
However, Boccioni felt strongly that this was an inevitable process needed to help propel Italy into the modern world.
The painting also holds clues to Boccioni’s rebellious future and political concerns. His father was a minor government official, which required the family to move to a new home every few years, all over the country.
When he was 16, the young Umberto moved to Rome to study art at the Scuola Libera del Nudo. He became friends with another pupil, Gino Severini, who was also destined to become an outstanding champion of futurism. Severini’s diaries from the time tell of their mutual interest in Friedrich Nietzsche, a philosopher with a nihilist outlook. Boccioni had a critical and fractious nature and his own writings express outrage and irony, two powerful characteristics
The painting holds clues to Boccioni’s rebellious future and political views
As you look more closely it becomes clear that the scene below is mainly a construction site
that would become apparent in his later work.
Before fully developing his futurist approach, he had created several more conventional portraits, after studying impressionist and postimpressionist techniques.
In 1906, he went to Russia for three months, where he experienced civil unrest and the heavy-handed approach of the then government. When he moved to Milan in 1907 he met Filippo Marinetti, who had recently published his Manifesto of Futurism on the front page of the leading French newspaper Le Figaro. It demanded that Italian culture should stop looking back, and instead vigorously embrace modernity.
Soon, Boccioni was spearheading a group of painters who were drawn to the futurist proclamation. His first interesting work in this style, Riot in the Gallery (1909), remained closer to pointillism and the influence of Seurat – but suggestions of futurism were apparent.
By 1911, he had completed his extraordinary work titled The City Rises. A highly complex picture that took a year to complete, it was seen as a breakthrough in its representation of vigorous motion.
The crowds of swirling human figures are repeatedly fragmented with a rhythmic energy – Boccioni’s dexterity and vision were now unmistakable. Its large scale was reminiscent of traditional history painting, but instead it transformed a group of busy workmen into a monumental synthesis of light and movement.
The futurists merged the artistic with the political, and hoped to encourage change through their art. They were not a passive group – evening meetings would be noisy affairs, filled with strident rhetoric railing at society’s ills.
They advocated a quietly anarchist viewpoint, one in which agitation and opposition would end the status quo, and allow Italy to re-emerge as a stronger country. Their frustration had grown as they watched what they believed was the slow decline of the state. As painters, they wanted to portray the sensations and aesthetics of speed, motion and industrial revolution, and Boccioni became the leading theorist of the movement, considered its foremost intellectual, as he strove to disrupt the antiquated traditions that still dominated Italian art. Established attitudes were resolutely academic and classical, and had no place in futurism.
A trip to see Braque and Picasso in Paris in 1912 further inspired his work, and it was during this visit that Boccioni decided to also be a sculptor. He was transfixed by the idea of infusing sculptural figures with the modernity of futurist thinking. The result was one of the masterpieces of the medium. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a semi-abstract composition, depicted a striding figure with billowing drapery around his legs, giving the work a realistic yet aerodynamic form.
His first exhibition of sculptures in 1913 proved successful, and was warmly received by other artists and some critics. Today, his striding man is represented on the Italian 20 cent coin.
However, the Italian involvement in the First World War brought an end to Boccioni’s burgeoning career. He had long campaigned for Italy to join the war in support of the Allies, and when this finally happened, in 1915, he volunteered to fight. Within a year during cavalry exercises, Boccioni suffered a fatal accident when he fell badly from his horse, and died at just 33.
The avant-garde in Italy were famous for favouring the living over the dead – in Marinetti’s founding manifesto, he had ironically written that when he reached 40, he wanted to be “thrown in the wastebasket”.
At the retrospective exhibition presented to commemorate Boccioni, Marinetti’s words were simple: “Let us not offend Boccioni with a funeral eulogy.”