Kunsthalle Mannheim / Cem Yücetas
)Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio
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Intro
The title of this sculpture already announces the artist’s revolutionary intentions. The »Unique Forms of Continuity in Space« represents an assault on the fundamental constants of sculpture.
Boccioni, actually a painter but active as a sculptor since 1912, was a member of the group of Italian Futurists, who propagated a radically modern vision of life. Technology, speed, and progress were at the center of their art, with rebellion against the old, especially the aesthetic tradition, a matter of course.
The energetically striding figure—half human and half machine—provides an exemplary demonstration of this manifesto. All the body parts are dissolved into vigorously moving, abstract elements. Flowing forms and angles suggest a continually changing appearance—the body looks as if it is entirely geared to speed and transformation, although paradoxically, as a sculpture, it is completely immobile. With this work, Boccioni created the epitome of the Futurist vision, while simultaneously attempting to break with the “mummified art” of past epochs.
Background
Futurism was the avant-garde movement, which announced its presence on 20 February, 1909 in the founding manifesto by the Italian writer, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944). It was accompanied by a new attitude towards life that glorified the modern metropolis, speed and progress. As the expression of a future-orientated world that was determined by technology, the Futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni demanded that new subjects and laws of aesthetics should bring about a radical renewal of “mummified art”. “The old walls and old palaces, the old subjects, the memories disgust me! […] I want what is new, expressive, grand!”, postulated the artist, who tried at first to transfer the ideas of Futurism to painting. After he had taken part in the first international exhibition of Futurists in Paris in 1912, he turned to sculpture and drew up his own manifesto on the problems of three-dimensional art. Here, and in his fundamental text on Futurist sculpture, which was published two years later, he radically questioned the representation of the traditional image of humanity.
Based on the Futurist precepts, during the years 1912/13, Boccioni created not only intellectually but also visually the design for a “New Man” in his depiction of a figure striding dynamically forward. Starting out from the basic idea of an artistic penetration of the figure and its surroundings, he developed in a series of four plaster sculptures the »Unique Forms of Continuity in Space«. In this last version, also labelled as such, which is of programmatic importance for the history of twentieth century sculpture, the artist arrived through the accelerated depiction of movement sequences at an architecturally constructed metamorphosis of man and machine. With the exception of the legs, the upper torso and the locomotion mechanism, the individual parts of the body are limited to abstract elements, acute geometrical forms and angles. The angular head of the hybrid creature has been replaced by a sort of helmet, and the over-sized back and leg muscles, which seem to expand out into space, are stylised as metallic wings.
Not only through the act of striding forward, but also through the alternation of convex and concave forms, space and the environment, as well as the atmosphere which they generate, penetrate the figure. In line with the Futurist credo that a racing car was more beautiful than the »Winged Victory of Samothrace«, Boccioni was interested less in form as such than in the speed of form. In its depiction of transformation and simultaneous movement through the dissolution of three-dimensional corporeal forms, as well as in its glorification of the world of machines, his »Unique Forms of Continuity in Space« ultimately became the artistic epitome of the Italian Fascist vision of the future. Indeed, the recording of movement processes in a single striding subject, as achieved in around 1882 by the French scientist and photographer Etienne Marey (1830–1904) in his then famous chronophotographs, was also related to a collective ideology of movement at the dawn of Modernism. Within the context of the intellectual and industrial changes that occurred during the first years of the twentieth century, Boccioni thus created a valid expression of an image of humanity on the eve of the First World War.
On loan from the State of Baden-Württemberg since 1986
Transkription
Note the cross-like face, the jaw represented by an angle bracket, the left, triangular shoulder striving forward, the blade on the right thigh. All body parts in this striding figure have been dissolved into abstract elements: wing-like heels, calves like waves, drop-shaped buttocks, with smooth transitions in-between. Doesn’t this body look as if it were destined for metamorphosis, for dynamics?
„Unique Forms of Continuity in Space“, that’s how Italian painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni called this sculpture he designed in 1913. The painter hailed from Calabria and, as of 1910, was part of the Futurist movement, the group assembled around Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Futurists embraced a radically modern, progress- and technology-inclined, even violent attitude towards life, and they despised traditional ideals on art and culture. Boccioni is no exception:
"There is more truth lying within the intersection of a book’s planes, or that of a table’s corners, or within the straight lines of a matchstick (…) than in all swelling muscles, breasts, or thighs of hero and Venus images which enchant the incurable stupidity of contemporary sculptors!", so his mocking statement.
He remained fascinated by the beauty of speed, the aesthetics of technical items, and industrial progress in general. But how to visualize a person’s movement in space? Boccioni was inspired by photographs, by series capturing motion sequences, like the recent invention of chronophotography. In this spirit, his „Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio“ expresses space, time, velocity, ever-changing movement, and technological progress equally, creating a kind of machine man.