Paint the feeling, not the train

In 1911, in Milan, a twenty-eight-year-old painter named Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) set out to do something most painters would have called a contradiction in terms. He wanted to paint a goodbye at a railway station. Not the station, though. Not the train. The goodbye. The actual feeling of it, the lurch in the chest when someone you love climbs onto a train and you do not, painted directly onto canvas as if a feeling were a thing you could see.

That ambition is sitting right there in the title. The whole set is called Stati d’animo, Italian for States of Mind, meaning, quite literally, the conditions of the soul, the inner weather of a person. The title is a promise and a dare at once: this picture is not going to show you an event, it is going to show you a mood. A train station is just the place Boccioni chose because, in 1911, nothing in modern life was more loaded with arrivals and partings than a platform under a great iron shed.

Boccioni belonged to a brand-new movement called Futurism, an Italian avant-garde (that is, a self-consciously radical art group out ahead of the mainstream) that had announced itself two years earlier and was in love with everything fast, loud, and mechanical: motorcars, electric light, factories, and trains. A railway goodbye was the perfect Futurist subject. It is built out of a machine, and it is drenched in feeling, and Boccioni wanted both at once.

He did not try to cram the whole experience into one picture. He built it as a triptych, a single work made of three separate panels, three physical canvases, meant to hang side by side, the format old altarpieces used. The three panels split the goodbye into its three movements. Gli addii (The Farewells) is the embrace and the chaos of the parting itself. Quelli che vanno (Those Who Go) is the ones who board and are carried off into the dark. Quelli che restano (Those Who Stay) is the ones left standing on the platform, watching the train shrink.

It is a small, exact piece of psychology. A station goodbye really does have those three parts, and they really do feel different from the inside: the swirl of the last hug, the wrench of being taken away, the heavy stillness of staying behind. Boccioni gave each its own panel, and its own kind of line. The Farewells is the first of the three and the most turbulent: it is the moment of the embrace, when the parting is still happening and nobody has gone anywhere yet.

And here is the strange fact that the rest of this story turns on. The version of The Farewells that hangs in New York, the famous one, is not the first one Boccioni painted. It is the second. He painted the whole triptych twice in a single year, and the reason he did it is a train trip of his own.