The Street Enters The House

This is how Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) interpreted the view from the balcony of his mother’s top-floor apartment in Milan.

She stands at the railing, taking in the sprawl of the city. The riotous shards of colour and dynamic shifts in perspective create the sensation of a noisy, bustling town rushing up towards you.

This startling painting signalled the radical impact of the new Futurist movement in 1912.

The geometric elements, and distorted panorama, demonstrate the deep influence that Expressionism and Cubism had on Boccioni. The Street Enters the House was Boccioni’s first depiction of Milan from a Futurist perspective; the title not only refers to the enveloping nature of urbanisation, but also the drama of widespread city expansion.

Looking more closely, it becomes clear that the scene below mainly consists of a large construction site, indicating the rapid modernisation taking place. There are labourers hard at work, as other women lean from their balconies to watch the activity – even the surrounding buildings are leaning into the scene.  

The light descends on the busy view, with its geometric forms and intense colour palette in perpetual interplay. The clamour and vibrancy draw in the viewer into a vortex of energy, and observers pointed out that the extraordinary picture even suggested ‘painted sounds.’

It was a contentious time for the Milanese, and residents of other expanding cities, as their lives were invaded by the disruption and upheaval. However, Boccioni strongly felt this was an inevitable process to help propel Italy into the modern new world.

The painting clearly holds clues to Boccioni’s rebellious future, and political concerns. His father had been a minor government official, whose job took the young boy to a new home around the country every few years.

When he was 16, young Umberto moved to Rome to study art at the Scuola Libera del Nudo. He became friends with another pupil, Gino Severini, also destined to become an outstanding champion of Futurism, and Severini’s diaries from the time tell of their mutual interest in Nietzsche, socialism and a nihilist outlook.

Boccioni had a critical and fractious nature, and his own writings express outrage and irony, two powerful characteristics that would become apparent in his later work.

Before fully developing his Futurist approach, he had created more conventional portraits after studying Impressionist and Post-Impressionist techniques.

In 1906, Boccioni visited Russia for three months, where he experienced the civil unrest and heavy-handed approach of the government. When moving to Milan he met Filippo Marinetti, who had recently published his Manifesto of Futurism, reproduced on the front page of the leading French newspaper Le Figaro.

It demanded that Italian culture should stop looking backward, and instead vigorously embrace modernity.

Soon, Boccioni was spearheading a group of painters who were drawn to the Futurist movement. His first interesting work in this style, Riot in The Gallery from 1909, remained closer to Pointillism and the influence of Seurat – but already the pervading suggestions of Futurism were apparent.

By 1911 he completed his extraordinary work, The City Rises. A highly complex picture that took a year to painstakingly complete, it was seen as an undoubted breakthrough in its representation of vigorous motion.

The crowds of swirling human figures are repeatedly fragmented with a rhythmic energy – Boccioni’s dexterity and vision were now unmistakable. The large scale was reminiscent of traditional history painting, but instead transformed a group of busy workmen into a monumental synthesis of light and movement.

The Futurists merged the artistic with the political, and hoped to propel change through their art. They were not a passive group – evening meetings would be noisy affairs, filled with strident rhetoric railing at society’s ills.

They advocated a quietly anarchist viewpoint that agitation and opposition would end the status quo, and allow Italy to re-emerge as a stronger country. Their frustration had grown as they watched what they believed was the slow decline of the state, and believed in a new world order spurred by the machine age.

As painters, they wanted to portray the sensations and aesthetics of speed, motion, and industrial revolution.

Boccioni became the leading theorist of the movement, considered its foremost intellectual, as he strove to disrupt the antiquated traditions that still dominated Italian art.

Established attitudes were undoubtedly academic and classical, and had no place in Futurism – one of the most politicised art movements of the twentieth-century.

A trip to see Braque and Picasso further inspired his work, and it was during this visit that Boccioni decided to also be a sculptor. He was transfixed with the idea of infusing sculptural figures with the modernity of Futurist thinking.

The result was one of the masterpieces of the medium. Unique Forms Of Continuity in Space, a semi-abstract composition, depicted a striding figure with billowing drapery around his legs, giving the work a realistic yet aerodynamic, fluid form.

His first exhibition of sculptures in 1913 proved successful, and was warmly received by other artists, and some critics. Today, his striding man is represented on the Italian 20 eurocent coin.

However, the Italian involvement in the World War 1 brought an end to Boccioni’s burgeoning career. He had long campaigned for Italy to join the war in support of the Allies, and when this finally happened in 1915, he volunteered to fight.

Within a year during cavalry exercises, Boccioni suffered a fatal riding accident when he fell badly from his horse, dead at just 33.

The avant-garde in Italy were famous for favouring the living over the dead – in Marinetti’s founding manifesto he had ironically written that when he reached 40, he wanted to be ‘thrown in the wastebasket’.

At the retrospective exhibition presented to commemorate Boccioni, Marinetti’s words were simple: ‘Let us not offend Boccioni with a funeral eulogy’.