States of Mind: The Farewells

A railway-station goodbye painted not as a scene but as a feeling, the figures swept into a vortex of steam around the one cold-sober thing in it, a locomotive’s stencilled number, and the version in New York is the second one Boccioni painted, redone after Paris taught him Cubism.

1. 1
   The embracing couple, fused into the haze

   Center, low, the densest knot of figures, locked together and bleeding into the waves around them

   Find the clasped pair at the heart of the picture, two figures bent into a parting embrace. The thing to notice is what Boccioni refuses to do: he does not stand them clear of the scene like actors on a stage. He lets the curving waves of paint run straight through them, so the bodies and the steam and the station are the same substance, a vortex that looks like it is about to crumble. They are not people in a setting; they are people dissolving into one.
2. 2
   The locomotive, and its number

   Center-right, the dark mechanical mass half-buried in the swirl, carrying a row of painted digits

   The one solid, mechanical thing in the picture is the train engine, sunk to its shoulders in steam and curved line. On its body sits the single coldest, steadiest mark on the canvas: a stencilled number, read by the usual account as 6943. Everything else is in motion; the number is not. It is the one element that holds still while the world around it spins, the painting’s fixed point. (The digits are small and worked into the paint, so the exact reading is the standard one rather than a thing you can count off cleanly from a photograph.)
3. 3
   The swirling lines of departure

   Sweeping across the whole picture, the long curved arcs of paint that carry the figures up and around

   These long, curving, swirling arcs are the painting’s engine of feeling. Across the three panels Boccioni gives each its own kind of line: here in The Farewells the lines swirl and curve, the chaos of a goodbye; in Those Who Go they slant oblique, the pull of leaving; in Those Who Stay they fall strictly vertical, the dead weight of being left. Trace these curves and you are reading the emotion directly, drawn as a direction rather than described as a face.
4. 4
   The telegraph poles and wires

   Rising through the upper haze, the thin straight verticals of the station’s ironwork against the curved storm

   Look up through the swirl and you find the thin, hard, straight uprights of the station’s infrastructure, its poles and wires, cutting against the curving waves. They are the man-made grid of the railway, the proof that this storm of feeling is happening at a real platform and not in pure abstraction. (Sources describe a “railway post” here; on the canvas it reads as the pole-and-wire ironwork rising through the steam.)
5. 5
   The fragmented, faceted station

   Throughout, the platform and its structures broken into hard intersecting planes inside the curves

   Notice that the station itself is not drawn as solid architecture but broken into hard, intersecting, faceted shards, planes that cut across the curves. This faceting is the tell that you are looking at the second version. It is what Boccioni brought back from Paris and Cubism, laid over the softer Divisionist haze of the original. The whole environment, platform and building and crowd, is swept into one tumbling vortex.
6. 6
   The radiating composition

   The overall design, everything wheeling outward from the calm of the engine’s number

   Step back and read the whole picture as one shape. It is organized as a vortex, waves and lines radiating out, and the still center they wheel around is the engine and its number. Everything in the painting has been set spinning except that one stencilled mark. The composition itself is the argument: a parting felt as a whirlpool of motion with a single cold, unmoved point at its heart.