The Guggenheim’s exhibit on Italian Futurism continues to inspire tributes to F.T. Marinetti’s movement. On a recent tour, Morgan Meis singled out a work by Umberto Boccioni:
Amusingly, perhaps maddeningly, you can scratch the surface of any work of Futurism
and the past comes rushing back in. Take Umberto Boccioni’s Futurist sculpture, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.” Boccioni’s work is to sculpture what Pannaggi’s “Speeding Train” is to painting. It is the attempt to make a solid, motionless piece of cast bronze into something that is fluid in space and time. Boccioni achieves this by breaking up the surfaces of a human figure. That’s to say, he sculpts a person in several moments of motion all at once.
Look, especially, at the legs of the figure. The legs are thick because Boccioni is showing us multiple positions of a moving leg. It is as if Boccioni took a series of photographs of a person striding forward, spliced those photographs together, and then made a sculpture of the result. The sculpture does not freeze a moment into sculptural eternity, as a more traditional sculpture might do. Instead, it shows us that form is never frozen, but always in transition from one state to another. That’s an essentially Futurist thought—all the emphasis is on dynamism, with little regard for the fixed state.
But the problem with Boccioni’s sculpture is that, though it may suggest movement, as a sculpture, it is still in a fixed state.
It may express dynamism, but it does so in static — one almost wants to say classical — form. Indeed, as has been noticed before, “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” resembles the classical sculpture, “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” You’ll recall that “Winged Victory of Samothrace” was the very sculpture that Marinetti referred to in his Manifesto. Marinetti claimed that the roaring motorcar was more beautiful than the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” This was his way of rejecting past notions of beauty in the name of the resolutely modern. But Boccioni’s sculpture is beautiful partly because of what it shares, formally and historically, with the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” Boccioni’s sculpture does not resemble an automobile; it resembles a stone statue from ancient times. Boccioni and the sculptor of “Winged Victory” share the assumption that there is something essentially compelling about the movement of human bodies. When a human being strides forward, the rest of us pause to take a look. The lyrical quality in “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” would have been beautiful to a citizen of 2nd century Hellenistic society, just as it is to someone wandering through the Guggenheim in the early 21st century.
Previous Dish on Futurism here.
(Image of “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” by Umberto Boccioni, 1913, via Wikimedia Commons)
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