Speed, machines, and a darker creed

To understand why a man would paint a train station as a spiritual event, you have to know the movement he belonged to. Futurism was launched in 1909 by an Italian poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944), who published a fiery Manifesto of Futurism (a manifesto being a public declaration of what a movement believes and intends) on the front page of a Paris newspaper. Its message was a kind of intoxicated worship of the modern, machine-driven world: speed, electricity, the motorcar, the factory, the roar of engines. The Futurists thought the museums were tombs and the past was a weight, and they wanted an art made of energy and velocity instead of marble and nostalgia.

That is why a goodbye at a railway station, of all the human partings there are, became this goodbye. The train is not just the vehicle in The Farewells; it is the whole reason the subject appealed to Boccioni at all. A station is where modern feeling and modern machinery meet, where the speed the Futurists loved reaches into ordinary lives and pulls people apart. Boccioni was the movement’s sharpest painter and its leading theorist of how to do all this in pictures, and the lines of force we traced on the canvas are his contribution to it: a method for putting pure motion and pure feeling onto a flat surface.

Futurism was not only a cheerful festival of fast cars. Its founding document had a genuinely ugly side, and it is part of the honest history of this picture. Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto did not only glorify speed and machines; it also glorified war and violence, calling war (in the famous phrase) the world’s only hygiene, and in the same breath named a “scorn for woman,” sneering at the weak and the old. That worship of force and contempt was woven into Futurism from the start, and Marinetti would later, in 1919, help found the Italian Fascist movement, tying the avant-garde he had created to one of the catastrophes of the century.

One line of fairness has to be drawn carefully here. Boccioni did not live to see any of that. He died in 1916, at thirty-three, after a fall from a horse during military training in the First World War, the same war the manifesto had romanticized, which is its own bleak irony. He was gone three years before Marinetti turned toward Fascism, and well over a decade before it took power. So the ideology is real and it belongs in the story, but it is the movement’s later road, not a verdict on the man who painted this particular parting. What Boccioni himself put on this canvas is not a politics; it is a feeling, the oldest human one there is, of watching someone you love be carried away.