Umberto Boccioni Research Articles

Becoming-Speed: Futurism’s Conflicts with Subjectivity and Motion

The futurist myth of speed was constructed around the possibility of a new subjectivity emanating from the altered sensations of a subject in motion. This myth of speed along with that of machinery emanated from an obsession with technological progress and its effects on the human subject. Like the majority of futurist myths, however, this subject on-the-move and his/her most typical experiences were constituted through a set of conflicting and ambiguous notions. This new subject, supposedly devoid of a hermetic identity, comprised multiple “beings,” each blurring into the new assemblages through which s/he travels. Yet, the experience of speed and the intensified perception it entails empowered the very same subject by reconstituting a strong sense of self. This paper analyzes some of Umberto Boccioni’s artworks, focusing particularly on the theme of the deconstruction and reconstruction of subjectivity via speed, movement and the type of represented mobility.

Issue Information

CoverLes forces d'une route, Umberto Boccioni, 1911, oil on canvas, 99.5 × 80.5 cm., Osaka City Museum of Modern ArtPhoto © Fine Art Images/Bridgeman Images

A Class Struggle in Umberto’s Boccioni’s Painting- Street Noises Invade the House (1911)

The modern art of the early twentieth century is the reaction to Realism, and impressionists were the first who broke away from so called rule bound represented bourgeoisie. That is to say that they are the harbingers of the twentieth century art. As Europe was shifting swiftly with the new things being built, the impressionists were changing the whole concept in the art with an attempt to avoid myths and history in painting and developed a new perspective to look at the painting and do it as it is for anyone. This avant-garde art has brought about symbolism, cubism, fauvism and futurism. It has also put the dimension of art and painting in a new mode of representation. Futurism embraces the chaos of the advances in technology with the features like dynamism, speed, energy, vitality and change as an inspiring way to reject the tradition and face the future. Against this backdrop, this paper examines how futurism, an artistic mode of representation has situated the context of art into a social change in Umberto Boccioni’s painting- Street Noises Invade the House (1911) vis-a-vis the Marxist approach of class struggle. In addition, the paper also analyzes the formal elements- color, structure, balance and harmony employed in the art by the artist that constitute the composite whole.

Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film ed. by Rossella Catanese (review)

Reviewed by: Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film ed. by Rossella Catanese Nenad Jovanovic Futurist Cinema: Studies on Italian Avant-garde Film. Edited by Rossella Catanese. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018. 258 pages. In his monumental Futurism and Futurisms, Pontus Hultén writes that “Futurist cinema does not exist and has never existed.” (448) This is a common position, based on such facts as the absence of references to film in the avant-garde movement’s inaugural text, Marinetti’s 1909 manifesto, the diminutive number of films produced under the movement’s auspices, and the failure of most of those films to live up to the aesthetic and ideational principles set forth in the manifesto and other programmatic writings of the Futurists. On the other hand, Marinetti eventually embraced film in 1916, scripting Vita futurista (Arnaldo Gina) and publishing “Manifesto of Futurist Cinema.” Futurist Cinema, a highly useful and readable collection of essays edited by Rossella Catanese (Adjunct Professor od Italian Cinema and Society at Lorenzo de’Medici Institute), draws much of its intellectual energy from Futurism’s ambiguous relation with cinema. The book consists of a preface, sixteen chapters concerning primarily either with theoretical issues or select case studies, and a detailed filmography and chronology. Futurist Cinema opens forcefully with a contribution by Giovanni Lista, which – along with Catanese’s preface – functions partly as a road map to the thematic preoccupations of the entire book, identifying an interest in medium specificity as the main field of convergence between Italian Futurism and subsequent cinematic avant-gardes, and positing the art movement’s imaginary to range “from streams of consciousness to the kaleidosciopic scenery of the metropolis in action.” (31) Paolo Bertetto’s “Speed and Dynamism: Futurism and the Soviet Cinematographic Avant-garde” narrows down the discussion of Italian Futurism’s influence on later “isms” of the twentieth century by comparing the movement with its counterpart in Russia (which Marinetti visited in 1914). Bertetto’s reference to Eisenstein’s use of the term “Futurist” in relation to the “expositive procedure […] based on the pure assembly of associations to describe a determined fact” (ibid.) is a succinct yet powerful evidence of Marinetti’s legacy in the art scene of the Soviet Union, and Bertetto is undoubtedly correct to cite the ideological fissure between the Italian and Russian Futurists as the reason that commentators have hitherto downplayed the lattter group’s lineage in a movement that would – in the 1920s – come to be associated with a political orientation proscribed throughout the second half of the twentieth century. However, he fails to pursue the implications of this crucial difference between the two related strains of theoretical and artistic production. The fact that their common attraction to speed and power (“in a word, dynamism” [33]) lead the two groups to antihetically opposed political positions, however, begs the question of whether the notion of dynamism possesses the breadth necessary for capturing the points of convergence between the two Futurisms. Valentina Valente’s “Futurism and Film Theories: Manifesto of Futurist Cinema and Theories in Italy in the 1910s–1920s” expands the canon of Italian Futurist theory on cinema by exploring theoretical ideas implicit in their films, critical texts, and manifestos. (45) Justified by the Futurists’ emphasis on the “interrelation among the arts,” (47) this choice obliquely opposes Lista’s in its demarcation of the boundaries separating cinema from other arts, but reveals a commonality with it in stressing the artists and theorists’ collective endeavor to transcend the mechanical mimeticism of the film apparatus and endow it with non-realistic properties available to such artforms as music. The theoretical basis of Futurist cinema is explored further in Sabine Schrader’s bifurcating “Film Aesthetics Without Films”. The first line of Schrader’s argument pits Marinetti’s eventual proclamation of cinema as his favorite artistic medium against the fellow Futurist Umberto Boccioni’s unwavering criticism of it. The comparison is warranted by Marinetti and [End Page 96] Boccioni’s common concern with cinema’s potential to represent mental time of duration, as well as velocity and simultaneity – which the Futurists perceived as key principles of modernity and consistently endeavored to articulate. The other line of argument explores the...

Mash-Up: The Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture

Mash-UpThe Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov [End Page 121] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Adam, Eve & Medor, Rennes, France, 2009 In 1912 at his Boulevard Raspail studio in Montparnasse, Picasso hung a changing installation of collages on a beige wall over a cot scattered with pillows and papers. He displayed six or seven pieces of new work selected from the nearly hundred collages he had created that year. Most notably, he shared variations on a study of a guitar, a paste-up of wallpaper and cardboard on newsprint. When artists heard about Picasso's new work, they flocked to his small studio to get a look. Intrigued by the method, futurists such as Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, and Giacomo Balla began using collage as a method of enriching the surfaces of their works. Picasso's displays of simple cutting and pasting of the detritus of daily life were declared "a pasted-paper revolution." The idea moved quickly; collage became a favorite medium among international modernists for [End Page 122] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Mickey Mouse Is Dead, Paris, 2009 [End Page 123] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Clair-obscur, Saint-Malo, France, 2010 its playful, ephemeral style and quick, spontaneous process—what Picasso called "one mad rush." ________ Picasso's work on collage had really begun five years before, when he forged an artistic friendship with Georges Braque. The French artist often compared their closeness to "two mountain climbers tethered together," and for years, in the evenings, they visited each other's studios to critique the day's work. They challenged each other to discover new techniques. When Braque began to add sand, cinder, sawdust, and coffee grounds to his works to increase the texture of his images, it launched in Picasso a flurry of activity. "I am using your latest papery and powdery methods," he wrote to Braque in a letter. He was referring to the scraps of wallpaper, sheet music, and oilcloth that he was pasting to his canvases. For Braque and Picasso, the medley of scraps salvaged from [End Page 124] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Escaping Criticism, Paris, 2011 ordinary existence and employed in their work replicated the chaotic spirit of the times. By coupling unlikely images and materials, they were commenting on the frenetic world of modern Europe, with its escalating technologies, proliferation of handbills and posters, and blaring newspaper headlines of mounting political unrest. While the explicit definition of collage refers to the pasting-on of scraps that originate beyond the artist's studio, the definition loosened as different artistic traditions engaged the practice and made it their own, and the technique evolved. The futurists embraced the fundamentals of collage, but the Dadaists found the method too dainty and precious for a crumbling civilization on the brink of disaster. Artists such as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch explored Picasso's and Braque's innovations in photomontage, releasing them from standard artistic [End Page 125] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov limitations in favor of foraging for and then reassembling fragments of photographic material. Through the process of cutting and pasting ready-made images from cast-off periodicals, they became, as Heartfield describes, "engineers" who sought to express the absurd nature of the times. While the basic technique of cutting and pasting offered the Dadaists a way to dissolve barriers between fine art and wider culture, the surrealists reveled in collage's tendency to synthesize contradictory pictorial elements, which perfectly suited their recurring themes of the unreliability of logic, the value of dream, and the embrace of the absurd. Selecting, arranging, and making connections between disparate images gave their compositions a higher level of expressiveness and emotional impact. In their associative leaps and juxtaposed imagery, the pieces became [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov came picture-poems of a world that existed somewhere between imagination and reality. In the 1940s, when artists and intellectuals escaping World War II made New York City the new hub of modern...

The chemistry of pastels: Investigation of the organic materials in a drawing by Umberto Boccioni

Abstract Although many prominent artists have experimented with pastels, this technique has been the subject of very limited scientific research. The first known recipes of pastels date back to the 16th century, but only during the 18th century did the pastel technique become more common. Identifying and characterising the organic constituents in pastels materials is challenging given that they are present in extremely low concentrations and could be produced using many organic substances, whose chemical composition alters during ageing. The chemical-physical behaviour of organic media in artworks is often crucial in causing the degradation problems, which need to be addressed by conservation. We evaluated the applicability of an analytical approach based on chromatography and mass spectrometry to investigate the composition of the pastels used by Umberto Boccioni in a drawing dated 1908 and conserved at the Museo del Novecento in Milan (Italy). The investigation of the formulation of artists’ pastels used in the first decade of the 20th century is particularly important in order to improve the knowledge of this technique. The analysis highlighted the presence of proteins and plant gums in the artwork samples, with differences in the composition for the different samples.

Futurism: A Microhistory by Sascha Bru Luca Somigli Bart van den Bossche

MLR, .,   became pressing for Levi as Fascism developed, and it was a constant feature in his work. He subsequently analysed the psychological nature of Fascism, built around the attribution of divine qualities to the leader and the simultaneous creation of a sacred aura for the underprivileged (p. ). Such an analysis was extended by Levi to totalitarianism in general (p. ). Gasperina Geroni observes that in Levi’s concept of freedom we can detect ethical connotations, as well as an ideological elaboration of Otto’s theories on the sacred (p. ), a number of concepts derived from Jung’s psychology (which also influenced the form of Levi’s painting, p. ), and some ideas from Caillois, Bataille, and Klossowsky (p. ). Moving on to Cristo si è fermato a Eboli, Gasperina Geroni examines several interlaced motives, and especially the other (‘l’altro da sé’, p. ), Levi’s reconsideration of official history and the archaic dimensions of traditional cultures. e concept of threshold which figures in the title of Gasperina Geroni’s monograph emerged in this phase of Levi’s work through a number of characters from Cristo si è fermato a Eboli who put the narrator in contact with what is hidden below the surface (p. ). is kind of threshold, following Benjamin’s concepts, is not a borderline to go beyond, but rather an area in which transformations occur and a rite of passage takes place. L’Orologio is seen by Gasperina Geroni as the indicator of a change from the atmosphere of the anti-Fascist Resistance to the post-war restructuring of conservative politics, a passage from chaos to order, and a situation in which Fascism was not a parenthesis in national life but, in Levi’s own words, a ‘male profondo di tutta la compagine sociale’ (p. ). Despite bitterness, in L’Orologio Levi hoped that a different future would still take place. As for the style of this work, Gasperina Geroni highlights Sterne-like procedures (p. ), and some influence is also attributed to Bergson (p. ). Quaderno a cancelli is examined from multiple perspectives, and among these we notice the interaction between the health of the author, who wrote this work while he was undergoing two eye operations, and the idea of restricted vision as a symbol of existence (p. ). e figure of a Burma hero fighting dictatorship appears prominently (p. ), accompanied by Jung’s archetypes, especially the archetype of the Senex (p. ). All in all, this is a rigorous work, well written and well documented through appropriate quotations and theoritical framework. ere is a good two-page bibliography . T C D R B Futurism: A Microhistory. Ed. by S B, L S, and B   B. (Italian Perspectives) Cambridge: Legenda. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Predictably, during and following the centenary of Futurism in  an abundance of scholarly work appeared on the movement founded by F. T. Marinetti. Even  Reviews within this thriving context of Futurism Studies, however, the edited collection Futurism: A Microhistory is an innovative volume and an important contribution to the field. e editors explain that their decision to adopt a microhistorical perspective was inspired by the claim by one of its most important exponents, Carlo Ginzburg, that Umberto Boccioni’s  painting La strada entra nella casa perfectly represents this approach. As they explain in their Introduction, aptly entitled ‘Futurism from Below’, microhistory is the ‘intensive historical investigation of a well-defined smaller unit of research’ (p. ), oen an event or an object. Such ‘close-up analyses [. . .] bring to the fore implications, associations, tensions, and contradictions that in a larger perspective are easily missed’ (p. ), and this volume fully showcases the benefits to be gained from such an approach. e collection brings together an array of renowned scholars of different aspects of Futurism, primarily coming from the discipline of Italian Studies but also from History, Comparative Literature, and Art History. ey represent the international vibrancy (though still predominantly Euro-American focus) of the field, featuring scholars from Italy, the USA, Canada, Great Britain, Belgium, Finland, Poland, and France. e chapter structure is cleverly designed to replicate a ‘day in the life’ of a Futurist ‘new man’, with chapters focusing on places both large and small from ‘e...

One Hundred Years of Futurism by John London

MLR, .,   Berghaus’s research, which has demonstrated that, contrary to popular belief, Futurism was not a neglected topic of scholarship in Italy aer , given that there were  publications on the movement between the end of the Second World War and , with , appearing overall between  and  (p. ). Berghaus’s most recent research, showcased in the International Yearbook of Futurism Studies, of which he is the founder and editor, has been focused on the manifestations of so-called ‘art of the future’ outside of Italy, ‘sometimes influenced by Italian Futurism, sometimes existing independently of it’ (p. ). He states that ‘the task for the future is to get out of this monolinguistic culture and to investigate the links between different forms of Futurism or para-Futurism or epi-Futurism’ (p. ). In the light of his perspective and these comments, it is perhaps somewhat incongruent that the focus of this volume is so resolutely Italian, with the partial exception of Matteo D’Ambrosio’s chapter on ‘Numbers’, which addresses some aspects of Russian Futurism. However, this is a minor quibble. is book was a pleasure to read and will reward both the serious scholar of Futurism and the more casual reader of twentieth-century Italian culture who may wish to dip in and out of the Futurist day. R H, U  L S D One Hundred Years of Futurism. Ed. by J L. Bristol and Chicago: Intellect. .  pp. £. ISBN ––––. One Hundred Years of Futurism presents an unconventional and innovative take on Italian Futurism and its cultural and artistic reverberations in the century that followed the founding of the movement in , when Futurism exploded onto the European stage. e ideas of the stage, as a physical and metaphorical space, and of performance were central to Futurism. In its assault on staid cultural institutions , Futurism has rightly been seen as a blueprint for many radical Avant-Garde movements of the early twentieth century and the first one to anticipate a new politics of the arts which placed the masses and the active participation of the spectator/viewer at the centre of its creative and ideological concerns. It was also a movement which programmatically aimed at a global reach. From Paris and Milan, Futurism produced waves and ripples that were far-reaching. John London and the contributors to this volume—many of them performers— reinvigorate our understanding of the cultural import of Futurism and its enduring impact upon and appeal for creative practitioners in the century that followed its first manifestation. e volume moves Futurism away from a much too common historical reading towards something more complex, hybrid, and refreshingly transnational. e first four chapters, grouped under the title ‘Aesthetics and Politics’, explore the international and transnational reach of Futurism. Andreas Kramer maps its geographies vis-à-vis the birth of the European Avant-Garde and reflects on Futurism’s characteristic combination of artistic internationalism and political nationalism . e contradictory nature of Futurism, with its odd alliance with Fascism  Reviews in the inter-war years and its genuinely radical call for transformation, is also addressed by James Martin in a chapter that focuses on some notable resemblances between the motif of ‘intersecting planes’, as developed in particular by Umberto Boccioni, and Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the industrial factory. Ricarda Vidal explores the continued presence of Futurist tropes in popular culture, especially in relation to gender construction. e machine man, and especially the idea of the metallized body, is explored through the close reading of Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (), a homage to s B-movies exploring speed, driving, and one-dimensional gender constructions. Shiing geographies, meanings, and tropes are also central to London’s excellent chapter on translating Futurism, which refocuses our attention on the role of translation and translatability in the geographical and transnational reach of Italian Futurism. e changes in Futurism according to the varying geographies, both spatial and cultural, are explored in relation to both manifestos and poetic texts. e result is a nuanced reflection on the translatability of Futurist ideology and the rich tapestry of further meaning that translation affords the movement as we move away from its two main languages, French and Italian. e section...

Souza-Cardoso e Boccioni: movimentos analógicos em confronto

RESUMO Embora não estivesse afiliado direta e especificamente a nenhum dos movimentos de vanguarda que eclodiram durante a sua breve existência, a produção fértil e vasta de Souza-Cardoso, com a leveza e a beleza que a caracteriza, conseguiu de certo modo tocá-los a todos. Umberto Boccioni, ativíssimo pintor e escultor, muito mais próximo dos movimentos vanguardistas inflamando algumas áreas europeias, é, pelo contrário, um autor plenamente futurista. Pretendo analisar sucintamente a obra destes dois artistas, tendo especialmente em conta o fato de ambos terem o mesmo objetivo - a dinâmica do corpo humano -, mas também a sua convergência e divergência relativamente às indicações programáticas do manifesto futurista.

As mulheres e a luz na obra de Umberto Boccioni

Este artigo reflete acerca da poética do artista italiano Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) tomando como eixo o tema da mulher em sua obra pictórica e escultórica, temática de importância na obra do artista, utilizada ainda em desenhos e telas de sua fase pré-futurista no sentido de compreender as relações entre os corpos, a luz e a atmosfera. A representação específica de mulheres junto a janelas e balcões persistiu em seus anos futuristas e possibilitou a expansão e o aprofundamento de suas pesquisas relacionadas à percepção da luz e sua incidência nos corpos, bem como a formulação do conceito de “escultura-ambiente”.

Matter Matters: An Unsolved Problem in Boccioni’s Art and Poetics

This essay focuses on relevant documentary evidence related to painting technique in Umberto Boccioni’s writings, showing his update to coeval treatises on technique in the context of the market of products for fine arts in Milan. The author shares the results of her research on Futurist written sources related to technique and materials, offering her perspective on Boccioni and his cultural background, gleaned from her work on the Umberto Boccioni papers (GRI, Special Collections). Furthermore, these documents are placed within the context of the painter’s early works in Padova and Milan, showing evidence of his struggles with compositional planning, his trials in the arrangement of colors, and his experimental attitude toward industrially produced painting materials, closely connected to his self-directed apprenticeship on Gaetano Previati’s treatises and other contemporary works. Boccioni’s reading practice is examined, attempting to suggest a possible relationship between theoretical equipment and ski...

Benedetta Marinetti and the Postwar Market for Umberto Boccioni Sculptures

A century after the untimely death of Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), his sculptures have achieved international renown through the multiple posthumous bronze casts in museum collections. The F. T. M...

Tetsuo and Marinetti: Akira as a cyberpunk critique of futurist modernity

ABSTRACTThis paper compares two aesthetic movements, Italian futurism and Japanese cyberpunk, which served as the high points of utopian modernism and nihilistic postmodernism, respectively. Through a comparison of aesthetics between the movie Akira and Italian futurist works by Fortuna Depero, Umberto Boccioni, Balla Giamoco, and others, this paper shows the cyberpunk movement as a postmodern critique of utopian modernist concepts: the machine body, the revolutionary character of youth and destruction, masculinity, speed, rational architecture, and the cleansing effect of war. Through a synchronic comparison, fundamental features of Italian fascist capitalism, the Japanese bubble economy, and the linkage between culture and economics in these contexts are explored. Finally, a close reading of the themes, aesthetics, and philosophy of the Akira movie shed new light on this movie’s place in the worldwide ‘anime boom’ and its universally resonant themes.

Futurist Sculpture Boccioni

Writing in 1914, Roberto Longhi describes sculptures and related drawings by the futurist Umberto Boccioni, and considers his work in the broader context of historical and contemporary artists, including Bernini, Michelangelo, Auguste Rodin, Medardo Rosso and Paul Cézanne. Longhi considers futurism superior to cubism and firmly situates Boccioni in the Italian canon of sculpture. His formal analysis of Boccioni’s work centers on the sculptures that were first exhibited in the Galerie La Boëtie in Paris in June-July 1913 and seen by Longhi at the Galleria Futurista in Rome in December of that year.

Recasting the past: on the posthumous fortune of Futurist sculpture

This article reconstructs the micro-history of some of the most influential examples of Futurist sculpture. It retraces the fate of Umberto Boccioni’s plaster sculptures and clarifies the context in which the bronze copies now in major international museums have been conceived, realized and interpreted over the years. It also reveals which technical specificities and theoretical models determined in the 1960s the fate and fortune of the sculptures by another major Futurist artist, Giacomo Balla. Elaborating further on current scholarly debates over the status of posthumous replicas, this article reconsiders the technical details proper to Futurist sculptures in the light of the interpretative models that were over time used to assess them. By doing so, it demonstrates how choices in the conservation and replication of Futurist sculpture have been closely intertwined with Futurism’s own process of canonization.

Scientific analysis and historical aspects as tools in the legal investigation of paintings: a case study in Brazil.

The faker makes use of several strategies to give credibility to his work, as for example by copying artist's style or by using artificial aging techniques. The characterization of artistic materials, such as pigments, binding media and supports through chemical and/or physico-chemical analysis, coupled with art historical information is essential to establish the non-authenticity of works of art. This paper presents a contribution in a legal case regarding paintings attributed to important Brazilian and European artists such as Candido Portinari, Juan Gris, Camille Pissarro, and Umberto Boccioni, among others. In the investigation, modern synthetic painting materials were identified in all the ground layers of the suspected paintings. The use of diverse instrumental analytical techniques such as Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, polarized light microscopy and pyrolysis-gas chromatography/mass spectrometry enabled this characterization. The results demonstrated the presence of titanium dioxide, calcium carbonate and kaolin as inorganic components of the paints, and polyvinyl acetate copolymerized with vinyl versatates or diisobutylphtalate as binding media in the ground layers of the paintings. The results obtained, along with art historical information and art technological studies, were very important in the judicial process, due to the possibility to use titanium dioxide and polyvinyl acetate copolymerized with vinyl versatates as chronological markers.

Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age

Mobilizing Desire in Boccioni’s “Small Dress Shoe + Urine”

AbstractThe handwritten version of Umberto Boccioni's “Small Dress Shoe + Urine” (1913) contains repetitions and deletions of a particular word, unknown (ignoto), which bear upon the interpretation of the artist's visual works from this period. Pivoting around an ingrained gender dichotomy, this word designates a quality of strangeness attributed variously to an erotic encounter, its uncertain outcomes, and to a more general sense of abandonment.

A Religious Futurism: The Catholic Modernist Crisis in the Maternal Imagery of Umberto Boccioni

In recent years scholars have attempted to reconsider the place of religion within Italian Futurism. A tendency to secularize the avant-garde has ensured that Futurism is often assumed to be in opposition to religion. This paper reassesses this notion by examining the religious dimension of the work of the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni. In particular, it examines the mother images the artist produced during the early years of the Futurist movement. The paper argues that in Boccioni’s 1912 work Matter (Materia) the maternal figures of the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Church coalesce through a process akin to what Sigmund Freud described as “condensation.” During the years preceding the work’s execution, Boccioni was recording the development of the Catholic Modernist Crisis in his diary. This crisis culminated in 1907 with the papal encyclical Pascendi Dominici Gregis. At this time, the Catholic Church was experiencing increasing pressure to adapt to new ways of thinking about ecclesiastical history. In this paper, Matter is reread as an investigation into the place of the Catholic Church in the modern world. In seeking to account for the religious significance of Boccioni’s maternal imagery, this paper challenges the claim that the early Futurist movement was wholly anti-Christian in orientation.

A Voice of the Crowd: Futurism and the Politics of Noise

Abstract In his 1913 manifesto “L'arte dei rumori” (The Art of Noises), Futurist painter Luigi Russolo exhorted readers to “walk across a great modern metropolis with ears more attentive than eyes.” For Russolo, attentive listening to the urban environment enacted a visionary aurality: the city was a mine for “new” noises, such as rumbling motors and jolting trams. However, Russolo's embrace of noise—much like that of Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni and Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti—was undeniably a product of its time and place. This article excavates the sounds of 1913 Milan as a crucial location for the noises of early Italian Futurism. Not only was this city the Futurists' base, but it also inflected their representations of noise both through its symbolic architectural sites (above all the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele) and the buzz of its human multitudes. In this latter respect, late-nineteenth-century positivist crowd psychology can provide an illuminating context because it shares with Futurism the notion of modern, urban crowd united by a collective unconscious—one that could, moreover, be heard by the attentive listener on a city's streets. This article tracks this historical mode of listening from Russolo's manifesto until the reception of his first concert for an entire orchestra of newly wrought noise intoners—his “Gran concerto per intonarumori,” held at Milan's Teatro Dal Verme in 1914—and explores what was, in this case, a slippery (but critical) distinction between “audience” and “crowd.” Russolo's clamorously received premiere forced its listeners and performers to attend to off- (rather than on-) stage noises, thus raising still-vital questions about where to locate Futurism's noise, influence, and politics.