The trip that made the second version

Boccioni painted the first version of States of Mind in the late summer of 1911, before he had ever really seen the newest art coming out of Paris. He painted it in the style he had grown up in, called Divisionism, a technique of building a picture out of many small, separate strokes of pure color set side by side, so the eye mixes them at a distance. (It is a close Italian cousin of the dotted French method, tiny dots of pure color, behind Seurat’s Grande Jatte.) That first Farewells is a swirling, hazy, atmospheric thing, all shimmer and steam, pure Futurism before any outside influence got to it.

Then, in the autumn of 1911, Boccioni got on a train himself. He went to Paris with two fellow Futurist painters, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo, urged on and shown around by a fourth, Gino Severini, who actually lived in Paris and knew the scene. (Sources split on whether the trip was October or November, so call it late 1911.) Severini wanted his Italian friends to see what was happening in the French capital with their own eyes, because something was happening there that no description could quite carry.

What they saw was Cubism. This was the radical Paris invention of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and the simplest way to describe it is this: instead of painting an object from one fixed viewpoint, the Cubists broke it into flat, hard, intersecting planes, faceted shards, and showed several of its angles at once, as if you could see around a thing and through it in the same glance. It looked like reality run through a cracked pane of glass. To a young painter obsessed with motion, that fracturing was electric, because a thing seen from several angles at once is, in a sense, a thing caught moving.

Boccioni came home and did something a less restless painter would never have done. He had a finished triptych already. He painted the whole thing again. The second version keeps the same scene, the same embrace, the same engine, but it rebuilds the soft Divisionist haze with the hard Cubist faceting he had just seen: the swirling waves are now cut across by sharp intersecting planes, the station broken into shards. He took the feeling of the first version and gave it a new skeleton.

So there are two Farewells, and the difference between them is the whole point. The first, Divisionist, pre-Paris version (the haze without the faceting) stayed in Italy and is now in Milan. (Sources disagree on exactly which Milan museum, so we will leave it at the city.) The second, post-Paris, Cubist-inflected version (the one with the hard cut planes) is the more famous one, and it is the one that hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. When you stand in front of the MoMA Farewells, you are looking at a picture that records, inside its own surface, a young painter’s mind being changed by a trip to Paris. The faceting is the souvenir.