Old dots, new speed

Walk right up to the surface, closer than is polite in a museum, and the churning haze you just saw breaks apart into something surprising: thousands of small, separate strokes of bright color, set down side by side and not blended. A patch of the horse’s flank is not one red; it is dabs of red and orange and pink and even green and blue, laid next to each other so your eye, from a few steps back, mixes them into a single vibrating tone. This technique has a name. It is Divisionism: the Italian descendant of the French method called Pointillism, the dot-by-dot method the painter Georges Seuratbuilt in the 1880s out of color science. Instead of mixing colors on the palette, you “divide” them into separate touches on the canvas and let the eye do the mixing, which keeps the color brighter and gives the whole surface a faint, restless shimmer.

This was not new to Boccioni; it was where he came from. He had been raised in this technique through his teacher Balla and the older Italian Divisionists, painters like Gaetano Previati (1852–1920), who theorized the method, and Giovanni Segantini (1858–1899). When Boccioni signed the Futurist manifestos in 1910, the Divisionist dab was still the language his hand knew best. So The City Risesis painted, surprisingly, in a slightly old technique, the careful optical color he’d been doing for years.

Here is the move that makes the painting matter, and it is small and enormous at once. Boccioni took the Divisionist stroke and stretched it. In Seurat’s pictures, and in Boccioni’s own earlier work, the touches are short, dotty, and static; they sit in place and shimmer, building calm, sunlit, frozen scenes. In The City Rises, the strokes are pulled long, feathered, and directional. They run with the motion. They follow the lunge of the horse and the curve of the dust and the haul of the men’s arms, so the very brushwork is moving in the direction the picture is moving.

That is the whole break, in one technical decision. Boccioni didn’t throw out the old method; he bent it to a new purpose. The optical-color trick that used to make a sunlit lawn vibrate in place was now made to carry speed. The flicker that had served stillness was set to serve motion. So the painting stands with one foot in each world: it is still made of Divisionist dabs (the past Boccioni came from) and it is already doing Futurist dynamism (the future the manifesto demanded). That hinge, an old surface bent to a new energy, is why this picture, and not the manifesto, is where Futurist painting actually begins.

Which is exactly the claim that follows it around, and the claim is true if you scope it carefully: this is Boccioni’s first major Futurist painting, the first time the theory became a monumental picture. Not the first modern painting, not the first painting of motion in all of art, just the first big one of this movement. From here Boccioni would go much further, fracturing his subjects far more violently in the States of Mind series of 1911 and the sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913. The City Rises is the doorway, still half in the old technique, that all of that walks through.