Umberto Boccioni (Reggio Calabria, October 19, 1882 - Verona, August 17, 1916) was an Italian painter, sculptor and writer, a leading exponent of Futurism. The idea of visually representing movement and his research into the relationships between object and space strongly influenced the fate of 20th-century painting and sculpture.
Umberto Boccioni's Biography
Early years
Umberto's parents were Raffaele Boccioni and Cecilia Forlani, originally from Morciano di Romagna (25 km from Rimini). His father, who worked as a prefectural usher, was forced to move to various cities in Italy according to service requirements. Umberto was born on October 19, 1882, in Reggio Calabria; here he attended his first elementary school classes, then the family moved to Forlì, then to Genoa and Padua.
In 1897 came the order for a new move to Catania. This time the family separated: Umberto and his father went to Sicily; his mother with his older sister Amelia, born in Rome, remained in Veneto. In Catania Umberto attended the technical institute until he obtained his diploma. He collaborated with some local newspapers and wrote his first novel, Pene dell'anima, which is dated July 6, 1900.
In 1901 Umberto moved to Rome, where his father was again transferred. He often frequents Aunt Colomba's house. Before long he falls in love with one of her daughters, Sandrina. Umberto is in his early twenties and attends the studio of a poster artist, where he learns the first rudiments of painting.
During this period he met Gino Severini, with whom he attended the studio of Divisionist painter Giacomo Balla at Porta Pinciana. In early 1903 Umberto and Severini attended the Free School of the Nude, where they met Mario Sironi, also a pupil of Balla, with whom they formed a lasting friendship. In that year Umberto painted his first work Campagna Romana or Meriggio.
With the help of both parents he managed to travel abroad: his first destination was Paris (April-August 1906), followed by Russia, from which he returned in November of the same year. In Paris he met Augusta Popoff: from their relationship a son, Pyotr (Peter), was born in April 1907.
In April 1907 Umberto enrolled in the Free School of the Nude of the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Venice. He begins another trip to Russia but interrupts it in Munich, where he visits the museum.
On his return he draws, actively painting, although he remains unfulfilled because he feels the limitations of Italian culture, which he still considers essentially "provincial culture." Meanwhile, he faces his first experiences in the field of engraving.
Umberto Boccioni's Futurism
In the fall of 1907 he went to Milan for the first time, where his mother and sister had been living for a few months. He immediately intuited that it was the city more than others on the rise and that it corresponded to his dynamic aspirations. He becomes friends with Romolo Romani, hangs out with Previati, whose influence is felt somewhat in his painting, which seems to turn to symbolism. He becomes a member of the Permanente.
During these formative years, he visits many museums and art galleries. He has, therefore, the opportunity to become directly acquainted with works by artists of all ages but, especially, ancient ones. Some of these, for example, Michelangelo, will always remain his ideal models.
Despite this, they will also become the main targets of the polemic launched in the Futurist period against ancient art and passivism. He met the futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. With him he collaborated on the drafting of the Technical Manifesto of the Futurist Movement (1910), which was followed by the Manifesto of Futurist Painters (1911), written together with Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla and Gino Severini.
The goal of the modern artist was to be, according to the drafters, to free himself from the figurative models and traditions of the past, in order to turn resolutely to the contemporary, dynamic, lively, ever-changing world.
As subjects of representation, therefore, the city, machines, and chaotic everyday reality were proposed. In his works, Boccioni masterfully knew how to express the movement of forms and the concreteness of matter.
Although influenced by Cubism, whose excessive static nature he reproached, Boccioni avoided straight lines in his paintings and used complementary colors. In paintings such as Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913), or Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1911), the depiction of the same subject in successive stages in time effectively suggests the idea of displacement in space.
Similar intent otherwise governs Boccioni's sculpture, for which the artist often neglected noble materials such as marble and bronze, preferring wood, iron, and glass. What he was interested in was illustrating the interaction of a moving object with the surrounding space. Very few of his sculptures have survived.
As part of the Società Umanitaria where he had just finished the large painting "Il Lavoro" (now at MoMA in New York under the title The City Rises), in April-May 1911, with Ugo Nebbia, Carlo Dalmazzo Carrà, Alessandrina Ravizza and others, he gave life in Milan to the First Pavilion of Free Art, an imposing exhibition with very modern guidelines, where the first ever group show of Futurist painters would also be held (in the disused Giulio Ricordi pavilions).
In 1912 Boccioni inaugurated a period of intense study both in preparation for the publication of his most important theoretical text, Pittura e scultura futuriste (1914), and for the realization of his masterpiece Materia (1912). He consulted many volumes on art-historical and philosophical subjects, of which he compiled a list of titles.
In particular, he deepened his knowledge of the thought of French philosopher Henri Bergson by reading the book Matter and Memory (1896).
Bergson's theories on spontaneous memory, understood as an intuition of the fundamental unity of matter, suggested to Boccioni the idea of the interpenetration of planes as "simultaneity of the interior with the exterior + memory + sensation," allowing him to combine personal memories (family, for example) with suggestions derived from ancient or primitive art, to the decomposition of Cubist-derived forms in the course of the creative process.
In the oil on canvas Materia, for example, Boccioni executes a portrait of his mother Cecilia Forlani, deified as the Great Mother, integrating Cubist decomposition and the use of complementary colors of Impressionist derivation with the hieratic frontality of Greek statuary from the Archaic period.
Among the books consulted in 1912, in fact, Boccioni mentions in his list, tome VIII, devoted to archaic sculpture, and in particular page 689, of Georges Perrot and Charles Chipiez's multi-volume work, Histoire de l'art dans l'antiquité (1882-1914) in which the two authors discuss the so-called law of frontality in ancient statuary.
Boccioni's most notable pictorial works include Il Lavoro (The Rising City) (1910), Rissa in the Gallery (1910), Stati d'animo (1911)-in which the motions of the soul are expressed through flashes of light, spirals and diagonally arranged wavy lines-Forces of a Street (1911), in which the city, almost a living organism, has preponderant weight over human presences.
Umberto Boccioni's World War I and death
In 1915 Italy entered the war. Boccioni, an interventionist, enlisted as a volunteer, along with a group of artists, in the National Corps of Volunteer Motorcyclists, but had no opportunity to enter combat. In a letter from the front in October 1915, the painter wrote, in fact, that war "when one expects to fight, is nothing but this: insects + boredom = obscure heroism....."
In June 1916 Boccioni (who at the time was waiting to leave for the front) with composer Ferruccio Busoni was a guest of the Marquises Della Valle di Casanova at Villa San Remigio on the western shore of Lake Maggiore.
During the same period Vittoria Colonna Caetani, while her husband Leone Caetani is at the front, spends her days in the quiet of Isolino di San Giovanni (the smallest of the Borromean Islands), which she has rented for the summer. Here she tends the garden and writes letters to her husband.
After an initial meeting at the Casanova's, where Vittoria went curious about the Busoni portrait she had just painted, Boccioni and Vittoria began to see each other every day. And, over the course of July, Boccioni is twice Vittoria's guest at the Isolino. His last stay ends on July 23; less than a month later, on August 17, he will die from a fall from a horse; in his wallet is the last of the letters he received from Vittoria.
On August 17, 1916, Boccioni died at the age of 33 in the military hospital in Verona, from injuries sustained after an accidental fall from his own mare, which bolted at the sight of a truck. The fall had occurred the day before during a military exercise at Sorte in Chievo, a suburb of Verona, where his memorial plaque now stands on a narrow road deep in the countryside.
Boccioni's body, on the other hand, found burial in Verona's monumental cemetery, in the ancient calti of the second field, next to which his mother also wished to be buried later. On the marble that encloses and bears the artist's name, one can see written testimonies left by other visiting artists and acquaintances.
After his death
In 1959 three of his works (Woman at a Table, Landscape and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space) were exhibited at the exhibition 50 Years of Art in Milan. From Divisionism to the Present, organized by the Permanente.
Umberto Boccioni wished to be present in his native Calabria with one of his sculptures. After his death, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wanted to follow up on the artist's wish by promoting the creation of a bronze casting of Boccioni's plaster masterpiece, "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space" of 1913.
After eighty years, the Boccioni-Marinetti project was realized with the donation of the bronze from the Bilotti collection to the National Gallery in Cosenza. The donated specimen is the only one declared of particularly important interest by a Decree, No. 77/2013 of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage.
Writings
- Painting, Sculpture, Futurists. Plastic Dynamism, Futurist Editions of "Poetry," 1914 (digitized version)
- Plastic Dynamism, 1916 (digitized version)
- Complete Works, 1927 (digitized version)
- Futurist Aesthetics and Art, 1946 (digitized version)
Quotes and tributes
- TV film The Colors of Youth by Gianluigi Calderone (2006)