The bronzes he never saw, and the coin in your pocket

The bronze story starts in 1931, fifteen years after Boccioni’s death. That year the first two bronze casts were made from the plaster. A bronze cast is made by taking a mold off the original and pouring molten metal into it, so the bronze is a metal copy of the plaster, which is exactly why it could be done at all after Boccioni was dead, and why the same mold can yield copy after copy. One of those first two is now in the Museum of Modern Artin New York, which dates its cast, with admirable honesty, “1913, cast 1931 or 1934”, the museum itself is not certain of the exact year. Note what that means: the most famous version of this sculpture is a posthumous metal copy whose own owner cannot pin its birthday to the year. This is normal for posthumous casts, and it is exactly the kind of thing the careful version of art history says out loud rather than smoothing over.

More casts followed. Around mid-century there were further bronzes, the one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which the Met dates to 1950, came to that museum in 1989 as a bequest; another went to the Museo del Novecento in Milan. Then in 1972 a larger group was cast, and this is where it gets genuinely thorny: several of the 1972 bronzes were made not from Boccioni’s plaster but from one of the existing bronzes, a cast taken from a cast. The Tatein London holds one of the 1972 casts. So “the Boccioni in the museum” may be one step, or two steps, removed from anything the artist ever touched.

The strangeness here is real and rarely said plainly: every bronze of Unique Forms is posthumous. Not one was cast, finished, or approved by Boccioni. Some are copies of copies. The version the entire world recognizes (the gleaming, museum-lit, machine-perfect bronze) is precisely the version the artist had no hand in. The thing he actually made, the plaster, sits comparatively unseen in São Paulo, while its metal afterimages stand in New York, London, and Milan.

And there is a deeper irony folded inside that one. Futurism prized the new, the unique, the once-only burst of modern life, the title of this very work begins with the word unique. Yet the work survives, and is loved, through mechanical bronze multiples: a dozen-odd identical metal copies, manufactured after the fact, several of them copied from each other. A movement that hated the museum and the monument is now famous through monuments in museums. The artist would have had opinions.

The strangest turn in the figure’s afterlife is the smallest and the widest. In the late 1990s, when Italy was choosing the designs for its new euro coins, it put Unique Forms of Continuity in Space on the 20-cent coin, the striding figure, in profile, on a piece of metal you can carry loose in a pocket. The coins entered circulation in 2002. So the most reproduced Futurist sculpture in the world is now reproduced again, by the hundreds of millions, in a soft gold-colored alloy, riding around in the change of anyone who has ever bought a coffee in Italy.

It is a fitting and faintly absurd resting place for the work. A figure built to embody pure forward motion now travels constantly, hand to hand, across a whole currency union. A sculpture that began as one fragile plaster, made by an artist who died at thirty-three and never cast it, ended up (by way of the coin) as one of the most widely circulated images of any twentieth-century artwork. And you can still feel, in the small striding figure on the coin, the legs driving forward and the body torn open into wings of speed, exactly as Boccioni shaped it in plaster, more than a century ago, before he had any idea where it would go.