In this week’s Artist Spotlight, I will cover the influential and controversial Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni. Boccioni was best recognized for leading the Italian Futurist movement in the 20th century, which was a heavily politicized art movement known for its passionate support of industrial domination and the dismantling of social norms and culture which glorified the past. This included calls for the destruction of museums, libraries, and an end to the feminist movement. Clearly a very nationalistic movement, it comes as no surprise that Italian Futurists would go on to rally in support of Italy’s Nazi leader Benito Mussolini at the advent of World War II. Boccioni’s influence on the movement came early on in its life, specifically during the 1910s before World War I (the war which would claim his life).
Boccioni began his artistic journey in the city of Milan, where he also met the leader of the Futurist movement, a poet by the name of Fillipo Marinetti. Marinetti urged Italians to embrace modernity, as he believed that on the world stage, Italy was falling behind its heavily industrialized neighbors. More specifically, in his manifesto The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti encouraged artists to abandon more traditional methods of artistic expression in favor of depicting the industrial revolution taking place in Italy. Having briefly experienced the youthfulness of Paris, Boccioni sympathized with Marinetti, having found a sense of belonging to the industrial city of Milan. This is best depicted in his painting The City Rises, which represents the laborious nature of Milan’s main industrial development in the agriculture industry.
In this article, I will analyze both Boccioni’s The City Rises and Antigraceful. Unlike The City Rises, Antigraceful is a cubist sculpture that focuses on creating spatial planes in his more expressionist style. In The City Rises, Boccioni experiments with a style most closely compared to a mix between expressionism and pointillism. He uses an impressively precise system of individual brush strokes to portray different characters. Although the piece’s background is a very calm portrayal of industrial Milan, the foreground contains a chaotic scene in which Italian agricultural workers symbolically attempt to rein a horse. The individual brush strokes he uses to portray the workers and horses give the foreground a lot more fluidity, indicating a drastic change in a positive direction, similar to the newfound modern aesthetic of Milan in the early 20th century. I especially like the colors he uses for the foreground; they are incredibly vibrant and really help create a good contrast with the relatively original portrayal of Milan in the background. The horses are done in bright orange and red, making the scene look like a growing fire, symbolic of the Futurist movement’s overpowering nationalism.
In contrast, Antigraceful doesn’t seem to relate to the Futurist movement. In actuality, it is a criticism of contemporary representations of beauty. The sculpture is a cubist bust of Boccioni’s mother, which utilizes geometrically unique pieces to assemble her face. Although if I was Boccioni’s mother I likely wouldn’t approve of it, I am entertained by Boccioni’s unique means of illustrating natural human features such as wrinkles and bone structure in a more playful manner. When I look at it, I see hints of industrial structures mixed in, such as pillars and tracks.
Although I can’t say I agree with Boccioni’s radical analysis of contemporary society and rejection of common social norms and traditional values, I still think that he is an incredibly talented and versatile artist. Oftentimes, people are very quick to write off artists simply because they do not agree with them. Art is often meant to be provocative or political: this is natural. I would encourage others to be less sensitive when analyzing art, as it makes it easier for the artist to communicate their ideas.
