An exceptional loan for the 140th anniversary of the birth of the great Futurist painter and sculptor

Work unveiling
Saturday 17 December at 11.00 | Palazzo Collicola

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), the greatest Futurist painter and sculptor, will be remembered in Spoleto 140 years after his birth with the exhibition in Palazzo Collicola of one of his well-known works, Dynamism of a Human Body, which is on temporary loan to the Spoleto Gallery of Modern Art. During the exhibition of the work, his painting and sculpture will be recalled in a conference with some of Boccioni’s leading specialists.

The work, a large lithograph made by the artist in 1913, will be placed in one of the rooms dedicated to the Avant-garde and Neo-avant-garde movements and represents the subject of the “walker”: the same subject as in Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, the celebrated Boccioni sculpture, also from 1913, which elevated Italian Futurism above all to the MoMa in New York. Indeed, it is a two-dimensional version of it. Only three other examples of the great lithograph exist, one of which is exhibited, among the artist’s other masterpieces, in the Museo del Novecento in Milan.

In 1913 Boccioni was thirty-one years old, living in Milan and experimenting with revolutionary intuitions, also derived from research in philosophy and physics. He believed that our gaze does not separate a figure from its environment. In the lithograph there is a man walking at night in the city, in the wind and rain. His going, his dynamism, is at one with the scene: the darkness, the dim light of a headlight, the small windows of a building. Many pages, in various languages, have been written on ‘Boccionian dynamism’.

Umberto Boccioni, an innovative pinnacle of 20th century art, met an accidental death at the age of thirty-four. With WWI in full rage, he enlisted as a volunteer and as a private soldier was assigned to a Hippotrained Field Artillery unit stationed at Chievo, near Verona. One day, he mounted his saddle and not far from the camps, the draught horse unhorsed him. He died at first light on 17 August 1916 in the Military Hospital in Verona. ‘He was a man who deserved to choose death himself’ – said D’Annunzio. Marinetti fell into despair. Giacomo Puccini mourned him. But the newspapers devoted little space to that death. After all, there was war.