Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Boccioni Art Period

The Futurists wanted art to suspension from the Classical and Renaissance styles however ascendant in Italia at the start of the Twentieth Century. For some, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space shows a effigy striding into the future. Its undulating surfaces seem to transform earlier our eyes. About l years after Charles Darwin introduced the theory of evolution and almost xxx years after Nietzsche described his "super-man," Boccioni sculpted a future-man: muscular, dynamic and driven.

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Infinite, 1913 (cast 1931), statuary, 111.2 x 88.five x 40 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York)

Movement as Form

Auguste Rodin, The Walking Human being, 1907, bandage made by Fonderie Alexis Rudier in 1913, statuary, 213.5 x 71.seven x 156.5 cm (Musée Rodin, Paris)

The face of the sculpture is abstracted into a cantankerous, suggesting a helmet, an appropriate reference for the war-hungry Futurists. The figure doesn't appear to have artillery, though wing-similar forms seem to emerge the rippling back. However, these protrusions are not necessarily even a part of the figure itself, since Boccioni sculpted both the figure and its immediate surround. The air displaced by the figure's movement is rendered in forms no different than those of the actual trunk. Come across, for case, the flame-like shapes that begin at the calves and show the air swirling away from the body in motility.

This idea of sculpting the environment around a figure is expressed in Boccioni'south "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" (1912) and shows the influence of the sculptor Medardo Rosso, an Italian contemporary of Auguste Rodin who worked in Paris (and who was becoming more pop back in Italian republic in this period thanks to the efforts of sometime-Futurist Ardengo Soffici. Rosso fabricated impressionistic plaster or bronze busts, covered in wax, of people in Paris, in which the figures merge into the space around them, equally seen in his Impressions of the Boulevard: Woman with a Veil, 1893. Unique Forms of Continuity in Infinite has also been compared to Rodin's armless Walking Human being of 1907.

Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913, oil on canvas, 193.two 10 201 cm (The Museum of Mod Art, New York)

Unique Forms is one of a series of sculptures of striding figures that Boccioni created in 1913. Up until 1912, Boccioni had been a painter, only later visiting Paris and the seeing sculptural innovations like Braque's three-dimensional Cubist experiments in paper, Boccioni became obsessed with sculpture. His striding sculptures continued the theme of human motion seen in his paintings such as Dynamism of a Soccer Thespian, 1913.

Movement was a primal chemical element for Boccioni and the other Futurists, as the technology of transportation (cars, bicycles, and advanced trains) allowed people to experience ever greater speeds. The Futurist artists frequently depicted motorized vehicles and the perceptions they made possible—the blurry, fleeting, fragmentary sight created by this new velocity.

Breaking his Own Rules

Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Domestic dog on a Leash ( Dinamismo di un Cane al Guinzaglio), 1912, oil on canvas, 95.57 x 115.57 10 six.67 cm (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, New York)

Dissimilar fellow Futurist Giacomo Balla, who used repeated forms to represent movement, in work such as Dynamism of a Dog on a Ternion (1912), Boccioni synthesized different positions into ane dynamic figure. Although Unique Forms of Continuity in Space is the most famous Futurist sculpture, there are some aspects of the work that do not fit neatly with the artists' declarations. For instance, three years before he made this sculpture, Boccioni and the other Futurist artists had banned the painting of nudes for being hopelessly mired in tradition—and Unique Forms is a nude male, admitting 1 abstracted through exaggerated muscles and possibly shielding its head with a helmet.

Boccioni as well breaks rules from his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" where he declared that Futurist sculpture should be made of potent, straight lines, "The directly line is the merely mode to achieve the primitive purity of a new architectonic structure of masses or sculptural zones." Clearly, he had non withal recognized the potential for the dynamic curves so powerfully expressed hither. His manifesto too states that sculpture should not be fabricated from a single material or from traditional materials such as marble or bronze.

Bronze or Plaster?

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, plaster (Museu de Arte Contemporânea in São Paulo)

Boccioni produced several mixed media sculptures and the original Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, was, like the majority of his sculptures, made of plaster. The bronze versions nosotros are then familiar with are casts made long after the creative person'due south death in 1916. The original white plaster sculpture, today in São Paulo, looks more transient and fragile than the later statuary casts, and is thus far more fitting for Futurism, since many Futurists claimed to want their works of art destroyed by more innovative creative person successors, rather than preserved in a museum.

Maria Angela Cassol (signed M.A.C. on the money) Twenty Cent Euro coin, 2002 (copyright: Repubblica italiana. Issuing authority: Ministero dell'Economia eastward delle Finanze)

Unique Forms appears on the Italian 20-cent Euro money and is both Futurism's almost famous symbol and a reminder that the movement itself was dynamic and did not ever follow its ain declarations. The Futurists sought to clear away the legacy of art's history and so that the hereafter could come more quickly, but Unique Forms has often been compared to the aboriginal Greek Nike of Samothrace and Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Apollo and Daphne. The Futurists wanted to destroy the museums, but in the terminate, their piece of work was added to the canon of Italian sculpture.

"Museums: absurd abattoirs for painters and sculptors who ferociously slaughter each other with color-blows and line-blows along the disputed walls!"

–F.T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," 1909

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Additional Resources:

This sculpture at The Museum of Modern Fine art, NY

Ester Coen, Umberto Boccioni (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988)

This sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Fine art

Medardo Rosso,Impressions of the Boulevard: Woman with a Veil, 1893 (Estorick Drove of Modern Italian Art, London)

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Smarthistory images for teaching and learning:

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Source: https://smarthistory.org/umberto-boccioni-unique-forms-of-continuity-in-space/

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