“We declare that the world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed.” Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, February 20, 1909 Le Figaro.
F.T. Marinetti was the founding member of the Italian Futurist movement that argued for the beauty of a speeding machine, progression, and a move away from the tired thinking of Antiquity. Boccioni (1882-1916) was the first artist to convert F.T. Marinetti’s theories into forms. Boccioni felt that Italian art needed to be revolutionized and brought into the 20th Century. In 1912 he directed his attention from painting to sculpture. That same year he wrote to a friend: "These days I am obsessed by sculpture! I believe I have glimpsed a complete renovation of that mummified art" (http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ ho/11/eust/ho_1990.38.3.htm). Shortly after Boccioni wrote The Manifesto for Futurist Sculpture. The following year in 1913 his show at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris his sculptures manifest his discoveries explained in his Manifesto. The sculptures Boccioni created around the time of the exhibition, specifically Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and the Dynamism of the Speeding Horse + House (1914-1915), pushed sculpture from sheer classical representation and into modernity through his use of new materials and his representation of the sensation of motion in an environment. In doing so, Boccioni opened up the possibility of other artists making further sculptural advances to this “mummified art.”
Boccioni revolutionized the materials used in sculpture by rejecting the idea that sculpture had to be made from only marble and bronze. Boccioni in his Manifesto on Futurist Sculpture wrote, “That new plastic art will therefore involve translating the atmospheric planes that link and intersect things into plaster, bronze, glass, wood, and any other material one may wish” (as qtd. in Coen 191). He believed that in order to progress, sculptors should mix new varying materials into their creations. Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + House created in 1914-1915 as a gift to F.T. Marinetti manifests the developments Boccioni was making of incorporating new mediums into sculpture. Boccioni used coated iron and copper to represent the horses head and neck, wood to represent his body and cardboard for the house in the background. When you look at the piece, it seems that the sculpture is all made out of one material. Boccioni fuses all the different media by painting in oil and gouache on the various elements to create unity. By using this various medias and found objects in this sculpture Boccioni is rejecting art theory from antiquity that high art must be made out of marble and bronze. Boccioni was one of the first to incorporate found objects into his art by using cardboard and iron pieces in Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + House.
By breaking the mold and using untraditional media in his work, Boccioni allowed for later artists to explore with even more unconventional materials in sculpture. Boccioni was influenced by the collages of Picasso and Braque. Boccioni traveled to Paris around 1912 and was friends with these artists. He took these Cubist ideas about opening up possibilities of new materials in two-dimensional art and converted them into his sculptures. These ideas were not incorporated into sculpture in France until the forties when Picasso created the Bull Head and Duchamps made his Ready Mades many decades after Boccioni’s sculptures. Contemporary artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Jeff Koons and countless others have pushed Boccioni’s idea of using found objects further by incorporating more usual things into their pieces such as wool, dead sharks, pills, etc. Boccioni pushed sculpture into Modernity through his use of different found objects in his work, which allowed later artists to experiment with new media in their three-dimensional work.
Not only did Boccioni use new materials, which inspired other sculptors, his use of classical materials like bronze in new ways was also inspiring. Through Boccioni’s use of shiny bronze and jagged forms in Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, he draws the connection that the motion of a striding human is like the motion of a machine. Like the other Futurists Bocccioni believed in the beauty of the machine’s motion. F.T. Marinetti is famous for saying that, “A roaring motor-car which operates like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Winged Victory of Samothrace.” (as qtd. in Edwards 25). Boccioni translates Marinetti’s theories on the importance of industry and progression into sculpture by creating a machine like being instead of a smooth organic representational of a human in motion. Posthumously Boccioni is best known for Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). Arguably its the most famous art piece associated with Futurism because of Boccioni’s use of shiny bronze to create a machine-like motion to man’s stride.
Not only is the machinery aesthetic of his sculptures new, Boccioni also was the first artist to shift the focus of the sculpture from the subject itself to the subject’s motion. In doing so, Boccioni was able to show the continuity of motion, the violent nature of action and the motion’s interaction with its environment. Furthermore by doing so he built on the ideas developed in Impressionism and opened the door of possibilities for later sculptors to explore motion in their 3D forms. The sculptural representation of people or animal before Boccioni’s sculptures had alluded to motion by showing the subject in the midst of action. The focus of previous sculptures before Boccioni was on the facial details and the importance of the figure. In the Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni shifts the focus off the face of the subject, which has been abstracted past the point of recognition and focuses on the subject’s motion. The striding person does not represent one person but the motion that all people make when running. Likewise with the Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses, the specifics of the house or the horse are unimportant in the sculptural representation. The focus is on the abstraction of the horse’s motion. According to Dr. Phillip Rylands, Director of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where the sculpture is shown, the sculpture was originally hung in Marinetti’s house from the ceiling and therefore was suppose to be seen from below. At this angle the diagonal movement from the back of the horse to its pointed nose is even more clearly shown. Boccioni’s move of the attention of the sculpture from the subject’s details to its motion was groundbreaking for sculpture.
Other Futurist artists also shifted the focus of their paintings from the subject to the subject’s motion, however, Boccioni was the only Futurist artist to portray the continuity of motion. Other Futurists such as Giacomo Balla, Boccioni’s former teacher, would represent motion in a photomontage fashion in his paintings. Balla’s painting would show the form at different points during the action drawing from the scientific consecutive photos taken to study motion. Boccioni went beyond his teacher and sought to represent the continuous dynamism of the motion. Boccioni explained his approach by saying that “To render a body in motion, I definitely do not present the trajectory, that is, the passage from one state of repose to another state of repose, but force myself to ascertain the form that expresses continuity in space” (as qtd. in Met xxix). Boccioni sculptures represent the continuance nature of motion. While Balla represented the sequential instants of action in space and time in his paintings. Boccioni’s portrayal of uninterrupted motion is far more advance that other Futurists illustration of movement.
Unlike other Futurist Boccioni was also able to represent in his forms the violent nature of action. In the Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, through the combination of jagged edges and curves, Boccioni expresses the motion through force lines. Cleaver in The Concept of Time in Modern Sculpture explains how “Boccioni’s Unique Form in Space” stresses more the violence of movement through lines of force and multiple edges" (Cleaver 235). Cleaver explains how Boccioni expresses motion through the subject’s ferocious transition through continuous action. In the Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses the sharp point of the horse’s head and the jagged edges of the wood and iron represent the intensity of the horse’s speed. Likewise the sharp edges of the forms representing the moving body in the Unique Forms of Continuity in Space highlight the forcefulness of the action. Boccioni unlike other Futurists was able to portray the intensity of motion in his artwork.
Boccioni’s sculptures show the violent continuous nature of fast motion’s interaction with its environment. Boccioni was the only sculptor of his time to push the art form to represent abstractly the subject’s fusion with its environment. In the book Umberto Boccioni, Ester Coen explains how “Boccioni sought a synthetic form, a single image which could express the fusion of the object and its surrounding environment” (Coen xxx). He explains how Boccioni merges the intensity of motion with its environment all in one form. In the Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses fusion of the galloping horse with its environment is shown, where the viewer is not aware which elements of the sculpture represent the house and which the horse. On the Guggenheim website, this piece is explained by saying that the, “nature of vision produces the illusion of a fusing of forms.” It goes on to say that “Sculptures such as the present example are concerned with the apparent compression of space as an object traverses it, and with the nature of the object’s redefinition by that space” (http://www.guggenheimvenice.it/inglese/collections/artisti/dettagli/boccioni_dinamismo_cavallo.html). The author is explaining how in this piece the horse’s speeding form is redefining its environment. Likewise in the Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, the subject appears to fuse with its environment when in motion through the effects of perception of vision. This sculpture demonstrates how the body parts in motion appear to take on different shapes, as the eye perceives them to fuse with the air around them. The fusion of the moving body parts and the air around them is seen in the way that the figure’s legs have multiple smooth pointed forms sticking out to represent how the feet when in motion are perceived to fuse with the air. Similarly the shape of the buttock cheeks of the subject are pointed to represent the fading persistence of vision as the buttock cheek moves to a new space as the figure strides forward. Through sculpture Boccioni is able to show how an object when in motion is perceived to fuse with its environment.
Boccioni would create the fusion of the subject’s continuous motion with its surroundings by following his intuition. Boccioni writes, “Intuition is the process, which enables us to grasp, “La vita stessa”, Life itself. It grasps what is Unique, what is absolute, what is Real, rather than what is subject to approximative scientific laws, which can only be relative (as qtd. in Petrie 142). Boccioni explains his method by saying that instead of representing motion in a scientific photomontage approach, Boccioni explains his method by saying he relies on his gut feeling to abstract the motion’s energy and its interaction with the space around it. He continues by writing about the “Intuitive search for the Unique form of continuity in space” (as qtd. in Petrie 142). By using his intuition Boccioni pushed what was possible with art by abstracting the motion to make his forms represent the subject’s powerful synergy with its surroundings.
Boccioni’s sculptures and the whole Futurist movement built on the ideas developed in Impressionism and pushed the possibilities in art into Modernity. Boccioni felt that Futurism was a continuation from Impressionism because it sought to represent abstractly the sensations of the world. Impressionism broke away from Classical representation and into a more expressive way of rendering our impressions of our world. Boccioni pushed this thinking even further with his experiments with representing motion’s sensations. Futurism was such a radically new way of thinking in Italy that it encouraged later avant-garde movement such as Surrealism and Abstraction.
Boccioni’s experiments with motion paved the way for other artists to explore the interaction of an object in motion with its environment. Brancusi’s Bird in Space (1923) built on the idea explored in Unique Forms of Continuity in Space by exploring the motion of a bird in flight in similar shiny bronze. In the Bird in Space, the motion of the bird is abstracted even further than Boccioni’s form. Brancusi simplifies the bird’s upward motion down to one main vertical simple smooth shape. Calder’s mobiles, an example of one being Big Red (1959) are another example of the influence of Boccioni. Calder however does not recreate the movement of the subject in artwork like Boccioni, but uses light forms so the subject will experience motion through the air currents in the surrounding environment. Calder has gone further with Boccioni’s understanding of motion by creating a situation where the viewer can see the subject’s motion first hand. Boccioni opened up the possibilities to explore motion in sculpture so later artists such as Brancusi and Calder could push the boundaries of three-dimensional art even further.
Boccioni revolutionized sculpture forever in shifting the attention of the sculpture to a moving creature’s forceful interaction with the space around it. His experiments made in 1913 to 1915 in sculpture opened up the possibility of sculptural representation of motion and new material use in sculpture. It is important to remember that Boccioni was the first artist to show motion in sculpture and incorporate found objects in his pieces, so we will never forget the huge impact he had on later artists such as Jeff Koons, Brancusi and Calder. It’s also important for contemporary audiences to cherish the few remaining Boccioni sculptures. The respected art historian, Apollinare, when he first visited Boccioni’s 1913 exhibition of sculptures was overwhelmed and desperate for Boccioni to cast the plaster sculptures into bronze so they would last forever. Boccioni describes Apollinare’s reaction as; “He says there is no one but me in modern sculpture. He said that some of my works are genuine historical documents that must be preserved” (as qtd. in MET 204). Unfortunately Boccioni did not follow this advice soon enough. None of his sculptures were bronzed till after his young death at 34 years old. By then nine of the original eleven plaster sculptures from the 1913 exhibition were destroyed. We should cherish the remaining few because of the advances Boccioni made to forever revolutionize the “mummified art form.”
Works Cited
Boccioni, Umberto. Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. . 21 October, 2008
Boccioni, Umberto. Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. 23 October, 2008
Cleaver, Dale. “The Concept of Time in Modern Sculpture.” Art Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4 (1963): 232-245.
Coen, Ester. Umberto Boccioni. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988.
Edwards, Hugh. “Umberto Boccioni.” The Art Institute of Chicago Quarterly, No. 2 (1958): 25-28.
Petrie, Brian. “Boccioni and Bergson.” The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 116, No. 852 (1974) 140-147.
Rylands, Phillip. Personsal interview. 12 June 2008.
"Umberto Boccioni: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1990.38.3)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. 2006. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 14 Oct . 2008
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