A poet’s movement, four years on

Futurism began as a press release. On 20 February 1909, an Italian poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944; pronounced “ma-ree-NET-tee”) bought space on the front page of the big Paris newspaper Le Figaro and published the Manifesto of Futurism, a noisy declaration that the past was a museum to be burned down, that speed and machines and danger were beautiful, and that Italy should stop worshipping its own ruins and start worshipping the motorcar. Popular books get this backwards, so be precise: Marinetti founded Futurism. He was a poet, not a painter. When he launched the movement, it did not yet contain a single Futurist painting. The pictures had to be recruited.

So Marinetti went and found his painters in Milan, the industrial capital of northern Italy, all smoke and trams and electric light, the most modern city in a country famous for being old. Chief among the recruits was a young artist named Umberto Boccioni(1882–1916; pronounced “boh-CHO-nee”), who had moved to Milan in 1907 and fallen in with Marinetti’s circle. Boccioni would become the movement’s foremost painter and its sharpest thinker, the man who took Marinetti’s slogans about speed and turned them into actual oil paint on actual canvas. He is the one we are following here.

Now jump four years, to 1913. By this point Boccioni has stopped painting recognizable scenes. Only a little earlier, in The City Rises (1910–11), he had painted a legible picture: laborers, rearing horses, a city going up, all of it churning but all of it readable as things. By 1913 the readable thing is nearly gone. He is in the middle of a run of canvases he calls his “dynamism” pictures, Dynamism of a Human Body, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, Plastic Dynamism: Horse + Houses, and the one we are here for, Dynamism of a Cyclist (in Italian, Dinamismo di un ciclista). They came in a concentrated burst across 1913, and across the series the readable subject thins out canvas by canvas: the palette gets more vivid, the paint goes on thicker and denser, and the subject is pushed closer to dissolving than at any earlier point in his work.

The choice of subject is itself the argument. Not a saint, not a king, not a landscape: a man on a racing bicycle. The bicycle, by 1913, was already a decades-old machine, but Futurism had decided the modern world, the bike, the tram, the car, the crowd, was the only fit subject for a modern painting. And Boccioni did not want to paint a portrait of a cyclist. He wanted to paint cycling itself: the event of speeding, not the person doing the speeding. That distinction, cycling rather than the cyclist, is the whole picture. The hard part was making it: how do you take a man on a bike and turn him into a burst of pure motion without losing the fact that he is a man on a bike?