Umberto Boccioni Art

Umberto Boccioni (1882 - 1916) was born in Reggio di Calabria, Italy. He was a theorist, sculptor, and painter. Although he first matured as a Neo-Impressionist painter, he deserves a great amount of credit for evolving the style now associated with Italian Futurism. Boccioni was drawn to portrait and landscape subjects. After encountering Cubism, he developed a style that matched the violent societal upheaval and the ideology of dynamism that lay at the heart of Futurism. Boccioni borrowed the French-style geometric forms and employed them to evoke startling, crashing sounds to accompany the depicted movement. Boccioni believed that the experience of modernity and scientific advances demanded that the artist abandon the tradition of depicting legible, static objects. He believed the challenge was the experience of flux, to represent movement, and the inter-penetration of objects. Despite his fascination with physical movement, he had a strong belief in the importance of intuition, an attitude he inherited from the Symbolist painters of the late 19th century and the writings of Henri Bergson. This shaped his approach to depicting the modern world, encouraging him to give it symbolic, almost mythical dimensions that evoked his emotions as much as the objective reality of modern life. Boccioni was important not only in introducing the visual innovations, but also in developing the movement's theories that led to the development of a unique style now so closely associated with Futurism. Many collectors like to stock framed Umberto Boccioni art first because of the uniqueness and secondly because of the history behind them.