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Friday, 4 January 2013

Umberto Boccioni and and the Futurist Movement

By William M. Martin


Umberto Boccioni was born in Reggio, Calabria on October 10, 1882 and he lived until August 17, 1916. Even though he was born in Southern Italy, he traveled around a great deal and spent a large amount of his childhood in Sicily. He had not matured showing a great deal of an affinity for art, however. It wasn't until 1901 that he showed any interest in art in any way.

He relocated at this stage to Rome and began to learn Art. As a formally trained artist he studied under Giacoma Balla, a renowned painter of the time. Boccioni also continued his education at various art schools. He became a painter first and then later on became a talented sculptor, also. In 1906 he moved very briefly to Russia with a family he had connected with when in France. In April of 1907 Boccioni was in Venice practicing etching. From 1907 to 1909 Boccioni tried out several subjects and methods.

During his brief lifetime, he became famous for his work as a sculptor and painter. Like many of his contemporaries, he was a futurist. Typical of that time frame he wanted to express movement together with speed and technology within his work. In 1909 Boccioni truly found himself in the Futurist movement.

Perhaps it's an understatement to state that he had been a part of the Futurist movement as he in fact co-wrote most of the principles of the movement in conjunction with poet, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. In 1910 Boccioni wrote The Manifest of the Futurist Painter along with other painters. It was in 1914 that they circulated this statement about the Futurists, "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." It was in 1913 that he accomplished his most well-known work titled, "Unique Forms of Continuity in Space." His futurist style merged Neo-Impressionism and Cubism. He stated of the futurists, "What we want to do is to show the living object in its dynamic growth." Even though many artists reject commercialism or popularity, Futurists spent a substantial amount of energy pushing their beliefs. They were met with a lot of resistance however, ultra-nationalists were in power and they were more conventional in their beliefs.

Futurists supported industry and modern technology. They looked forward to the future and wished to show motion in their art. While it can be hard to talk about the elements of artistic expression without seeing them, it is possible to describe some important elements. One of the basic approaches of the futurists was to separate lines into pieces or segments at progressively more intervals. This gave them the appearance of acceleration. While the Futurists loved technology, they still used more traditional techniques in painting, too. For example large, broad-brush strokes and bright colors were prevalent. Besides being an important movement in its own right, what's more, it highly affected later movements including Surrealism, Art Deco, and Constructivism.

At the outbreak of World War I Boccioni became a fervent nationalist himself and endorsed joining the war on the side of the allies to get back Italian terrain held by Austria. He found himself fighting in the army with a cavalry unit in 1916 and fell off his mount during maneuvers, the horse then stepped on him, and he only lived one more day. Boccioni was quite possibly the most capable of the futurist painters and his early death brought the movement to an sudden end.




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