The movement that wanted to sculpt speed

On 20 February 1909, the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro carried a manifesto by an Italian poet named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. It announced a movement called Futurism (Italian Futurismo), and it was less an art program than a war cry. It worshipped the new century’s machines, its speed, its electric cities, and its noise, and it sneered at everything old, slow, and revered. Its single most famous line declares that “a roaring car… is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”, meaning the Nike of Samothrace, the celebrated headless, winged, striding Greek statue in the Louvre that stood, in 1909, for the unquestioned glory of ancient art.

Marinetti was the impresario. The man who would become Futurism’s leading visual artist, and its only real sculptor, was Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916). Boccioni was a painter first, and a furiously ambitious one, but he came to believe that the thing Futurism most needed to do (show motion, show a moving body fused with the air and the speed around it) might be done even better in three dimensions than on a flat canvas. So he turned to sculpture, a medium that, in 1912, looked to him completely exhausted: marble nudes and bronze generals standing dead still on tall pedestals, exactly the kind of revered, frozen thing the manifesto had declared war on.

Boccioni did the theory first. On 11 April 1912 he published the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, and it reads like a demolition order. He called for “the complete abolition of the finished line and the closed statue”, meaning a sculpture should no longer be a sealed, self-contained lump that stops cleanly at its own outline. He wanted to “open up the figure like a window and enclose within it the environment in which it lives.” He wanted, in his own phrase, to “model the atmosphere”, to make the air around a thing part of the thing itself. A traditional statue was a solid object sitting in space, sealed off from it. Boccioni wanted a sculpture that grabbed the space it moved through and dragged it along.

That is a lot to ask of a chunk of bronze, and on the page it sounds like the kind of thing manifestos say and objects never deliver. The remarkable thing about the figure is that it actually does it. Before that, two facts to carry in, because both get garbled constantly. First: the version Boccioni made in 1913 was plaster, not bronze. Second: he never cast it in metal himself. Every shining bronze you have ever seen of this figure was made after he was dead. Theory in 1912, plaster in 1913, and the artist gone by 1916.