The movement’s foremost painter, dead at 33

Umberto Boccioni was born on 19 October 1882 in Reggio Calabria, at the far southern tip of Italy, and moved north to Milan in 1907, where he joined the circle around Marinetti and signed on to Futurism near its very beginning. Boccioni is often wrongly called a founder of Futurism, so it is worth saying flatly: Boccioni did not found Futurism. Marinetti did, with a newspaper manifesto, in 1909. Boccioni was a founding signatory of the painters’ manifestos, one of the artists who put his name to the documents, and he became the movement’s leading visual artist and its chief theorist. The difference is real. Marinetti supplied the noise and the philosophy of speed; Boccioni was the one who could actually make a brush do it.

And he did not stop at painting. The same restless idea that drives the Cyclist, an object dissolving into its own motion, body and space made one continuous whole, he carried straight into sculpture, in the same year, 1913. His most famous object is a striding bronze figure whose muscles seem pulled out into wings of wind, a man remade as motion made solid. Painter and sculptor at once, writing the theory as he went, Boccioni was the rare artist who was also the movement’s best explainer of itself.

The career was short, and it ended with a bitter irony for a man who had spent it glorifying the machine age. When the First World War came, Boccioni, like Marinetti, who had cheerfully called war “the world’s only hygiene,” was an enthusiast for it. He enlisted, and was drafted in May 1916. On 17 August 1916, near Verona, during a cavalry and artillery training exercise, he was thrown from his horse and trampled, and died the next day. He was thirty-three. The prophet of the motorcar and the speeding bicycle was killed by the oldest machine of war there is, an animal, in a training accident, before the movement he had given its best pictures was a decade old.

It is hard not to read the Cyclista little differently once you know that, a young man’s ecstatic painting of speed and force and a body hurtling forward, made by someone who had only three years left. But the picture does not need the biography to work. It needed Boccioni to make it, and then it stood on its own, which is the last part of the story.