Umberto Boccioni
1882-1916
Umberto Boccioni was an Italian painter and sculptor and a member of the Futurist movement. Like other Futurists, Boccioni’s work centered on the portrayal of movement (dynamism), speed, and technology.
One of Umberto Boccioni’s best known paintings is “The street enters the house” (La Strada Entra Nella Casa). He also worked in collage. Very important Boccioni work is the bronze sculpture, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” (1913) and the painting, “The City Rises” (1910). His first solo exhibition was held in 1910 at the Galleria Ca’ Pesaro in Venice.
Umberto Boccioni was born in Reggio Calabria, in Italy. He studied art through the Scuola Libera del Nudo at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Together with his friend Gino Severini, he became student of Giacomo Balla, a divisionist painter. In 1906, he studied Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles in Paris and took drawing classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice.
In Milan, Boccioni first visited the Famiglia Artistica and became acquainted with fellow Futurists including the famous poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The two would later join with others in writing manifestos on Futurism. Boccioni became the main theorist of the artistic movement.
Boccioni expressed the overarching beliefs of Futurism in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. Other works that he co-authored include Manifesto of the Futurist Painters and Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting published around 1910. All of these writings call for young artists to pursue intensely living, dynamic, and original forms of art. Futurists glorified transformations of the world brought on by science.
After he visited various sculptor studios in Paris, in 1912, among which those of Braque, Archipenko, Brancusi, Raymond Duchamp-Villon and, probably, Medardo Rosso, he started doing sculptures. In 1913 he showed his sculptures at the Gallerie La Boetie: all related to the elaboration of what he had seen in Paris.
In 1914, he published “Pittura e scultura futuriste (dinamismo plastico)” explaining the esthetics of the group. He exhibited in London, together with the group, in 1912 (Sackville Gallery) and 1914 (Doré Gallery): the two exhibitions made a deep impression on the young English artists: some joined then the Vorticism, lead by Wyndham Lewis.
Mobilized in the declaration of war, Boccioni was assigned at an artillery regiment at Sorte, near Verona. On 16 August 1916, Boccioni accidentally was thrown from his horse during a cavalry training exercise and was trampled. He died the following day, aged thirty-three.
