From Marinetti’s wall to New York

Here is the painting’s life as an object, its provenance, meaning the documented chain of who has owned a work, from the artist’s hand to wherever it hangs now. The MoMA Farewells has a short, clean one, and it begins with the most fitting owner imaginable. The three panels went straight from Boccioni to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the poet who had invented Futurism in the first place; the museum records him owning them from at least 1912. The founder of the movement owned the movement’s masterpiece of feeling, acquired directly from the painter. No price is recorded, and we will not invent one.

After Marinetti died in 1944, the triptych passed to his widow, Benedetta Cappa Marinetti, a Futurist painter in her own right, who held it until she sold it on in 1949. The buyer was the American collector and politician Nelson A. Rockefeller(1908–1979), who had a deep appetite for modern art and the fortune to indulge it; he acquired the panels in October 1949 and kept them in his New York collection for the next three decades.

In 1979, the panels entered the Museum of Modern Art in New York as the Gift of Nelson A. Rockefeller (accession number 64.1979), where the three of them hang together to this day, the embrace and those who go and those who stay, reunited on one wall. It is a tidy ending for a set of pictures about being parted: the triptych, at least, never has to say goodbye to itself.

Except, of course, for its twin. Remember that there are two of everything here. While the second, Cubist version made its way to New York, the first, Divisionist version (the hazy pre-Paris original) stayed behind in Milan, where it remains. So the two States of Mindtriptychs are themselves parted across an ocean, the before and the after of a single year in a young painter’s life, hanging in two cities that never see each other. Boccioni painted a picture about separation, twice, and the two pictures ended up separated. He would, one suspects, have appreciated the symmetry.

And there is the harder grace note under it. Boccioni was dead by 1916, at thirty-three, with most of his career still ahead of him. The painter who wanted, above all, to put pure motion onto a still canvas was stopped almost before he had started, and yet this small, swirling goodbye outlived him by more than a century, still spinning, still holding its one cold number perfectly still at the center of all that motion. It turns out you can paint a feeling after all. He proved it, and then he was carried away himself, on the very kind of machine he had spent his short life trying to make beautiful.