One short step from abstraction

Stand back from the Cyclist and you can see how close it is sitting to the edge of a cliff. Strip away the last few clues, the lean, the arc of the wheel, and there would be no subject at all, just colored force moving across a rectangle. This is abstraction (painting that has given up on showing recognizable things and presents pure shape and color instead), a frontier several painters were crossing at almost the same moment, among them Kandinsky, Kupka, and Delaunay, and the Cyclist is one short step away from it. What is fascinating is that Boccioni refused to take that step. He kept the real cyclist in the real modern world, the bicycle as an emblem of modern speed, even as he pushed the figure almost out of existence. The picture insists on being about something even as it nearly becomes about nothing but motion.

The idea did not stay on the canvas. That same year, 1913, Boccioni took this exact thought, an object dissolving into its motion, body and space fused, into three dimensions, in his striding sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a walking figure whose body is pulled out into the wind it is making. And the larger ambition behind the Cyclist, to paint not a fast thing but movement itself, fed straight into a century of artists trying to do the same: the painting of speed, of the machine, of the world as flow rather than as fixed objects. Whatever else Futurism got wrong (and it got plenty wrong, not least its founder’s love affair with war and, later, with Fascism), it taught Western painting a genuinely new trick, how to show motion happening over time, and the Cyclist is among the cleanest demonstrations of it.

Now the life of the object. Boccioni painted the Cyclist in 1913 and died in 1916, and the early chain of ownership, how it traveled from the artist to its great collector, is not documented in the accessible record, so we will leave that gap honestly empty rather than invent a story to fill it. What is documented is where it ended up: in the hands of Gianni Mattioli (1903–1977), a Milan textile businessman who assembled one of the finest private collections of early-twentieth-century Italian art, especially Futurism, with Boccioni at its center. Mattioli built the collection mainly across the late 1930s and 1940s, including a big 1949 purchase of eighty-seven works from another collector, Pietro Feroldi. (The exact date he acquired the Cyclist is, again, not recorded.)

On Mattioli’s death in 1977 the collection passed to his daughter, the art historian Laura Mattioli, and it is here that the most famous, and most misquoted, line in the painting’s record comes from. In 1997, Laura Mattioli arranged for twenty-six of the family’s Futurist masterpieces to go on long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, the small canal-side museum of modern art that the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim had left to the city. The loan opened on 6 September 1997, and the Guggenheim’s own curators called this canvas “his most beautiful.” That is the line you will see attached to the painting everywhere: “on long-term loan to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.” It is worth being clear that this describes a loan, not a sale, and that the loan has ended. The Mattioli Collection remained the owner the whole time, and around 2015 or 2016 the loan came to a close and the picture left Venice.

So where does the Cyclist hang today? In Milan, where it started. After the Venice loan ended, the Mattioli Collection’s twenty-six Futurist works, this canvas among them, went on a renewable long-term loan to the Museo del Novecento, Milan’s museum of twentieth-century art, beginning in the spring of 2022. The owner is still the Gianni Mattioli Collection; the painting simply hangs in the city it was made in rather than across the water in Venice. The old “now at the Peggy Guggenheim, Venice” label you may still see is out of date: that loan ran from 1997 to about 2015 and is over.

Which is a fitting place to leave it. A picture about a thing that will not hold still has, true to form, refused to hold still itself: from a young painter’s studio in 1913, through one of the great private collections of Italian modernism, across two decades on the wall of a Venetian palazzo, and back to Milan, the smoky industrial city where Marinetti first went looking for someone who could paint his slogans. He found Boccioni, and Boccioni gave him this: a man on a bicycle abstracted almost out of existence, still hammering forward, more than a century later, and not slowing down.