The doorway into Futurism

In 1912, three years after Marinetti’s manifesto, Futurism went on tour. The painters mounted a travelling exhibition that moved through Paris, London, Berlin, and beyond, carrying their canvases to audiences who had read about the movement but never seen it. The City Rises was one of the headline pictures. And at the London stop, at a gallery called the Sackville Gallery in March 1912, the painting found its first private owner, and an unexpected one. The buyer was Ferruccio Busoni (1866–1924), one of the most famous concert pianists and composers in Europe. (The provenance, by the way, is the documented chain of who has owned a work of art, in order, from the artist’s hand to now. We can’t give you what Busoni paid, because no figure for the 1912 sale survives in the record. Better to leave that blank than to invent it.)

From Busoni the painting passed, by around 1950, to his son Raffaello Busoni, who had emigrated to New York. And in 1951, the Museum of Modern Artbought it from the son, with money from a fund called the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. That is where it hangs today: a Milan building site, by way of a London gallery and a composer’s family, on permanent view in New York. For a painting about the modern industrial city, it is fitting that it ended up in the city that, by 1951, was the modern industrial city.

And then there is Boccioni himself, who did not live to see any of that. When Italy entered the First World War, Boccioni (who, like the other Futurists, had loudly glorified war as a cleansing modern force) volunteered. He was stationed near Verona. On 16 August 1916, during a cavalry training exercise, he was thrown from his horse and trampled. He died the next day, 17 August 1916, in a Verona military hospital, at the age of thirty-three.

The man who put a violent, surging horse at the dead center of his first great painting (and another charging horse in his last great one, the Charge of the Lancers of 1915) was killed by a horse. It is not a prophecy; the painting foretold nothing. It is the blunt, authorless kind of irony that real history hands out, a coincidence and a sad fact and nothing more. The horse in The City Riseswas always a symbol of the city’s raw energy and the danger of modern force; that its maker would later die under a real one only sharpens the point without changing it.

What he left is the doorway. The City Rises is the first big Futurist painting, the one where a movement that had announced itself in a newspaper finally proved, in nine feet of straining red and churning dust, that you could paint not a thing but its motion, not a moment but a force. Everything Futurism did afterward came through this canvas. The man was gone at thirty-three; the surge he painted is still moving.