‘Elasticity’ Umberto Boccioini Museo del Novecento
‘Elasticity’ Umberto Boccioini
Museo del Novecento
It would be a minor miracle to achieve a small percentage of Umberto Boccioni’s creative output in 66 years…. well 67 years to be precise.
“We shall sing the great masses shaken with work, pleasure, or rebellion; we shall sing the multicoloured and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis.” The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism. Marinetti
The influence of Cubism on the Futurist painter Boccioni is apparent in this detail from the painting ‘Elasticity’ (below) and the watercolour study (above). For me, the art world has not moved significantly beyond Cubism in the last 100 years. Cubism established the dissolution of space and time, Futurism added a dynamic context focusing on kinetics.
Once you have decided that the world is multi-faceted and in constant motion, the notion of a fixed viewpoint collapses under the weight of reason and quantum physics. Time waits for no man. Experimental artists, painters, photographers and filmmakers continue to ‘push’ against a wide-open door. The horse has long since bolted.
The Cubists penetrated the illusionistic space of the canvas, and from that moment on, the only way back was a harmless preoccupation with design and a modicum of self-delusion. But why worry, it has kept us all therapeutically occupied ever since.