Unique Forms of Continuity in Space
Umberto Boccioni (1882 to 1916) · 1913, cast 1931 or 1934
A figure strides forward on two small blocks, but it has no arms and no face, and its body is not so much a body as a set of flames and sails torn back by its own speed. Muscles swell into wings at the calves and hips, the chest splits open, and the head becomes a helmet of curves. Walk around it: from the front it seems to lean into a wind, from the side the surfaces ripple like fabric, and from behind it is almost abstract. The bronze is polished to a soft golden gleam.
Boccioni was the leading sculptor of Italian Futurism, the movement that in 1909 announced that a racing car was more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. Yet the pose here is exactly that of a classical striding figure, and the drama comes from the way he opened the silhouette to include the air around it, what he called the continuity of the figure with its environment. Look at the way each form flows into the next without a break, and at how the blocks under the feet ground the figure while everything above them seems to lift off.
Boccioni made the original in plaster in 1913 and died three years later, after a fall from a horse during military training. He never saw it in bronze; the casts were made from the 1930s onwards, and this one came to MoMA in 1948 through the Lillie Bliss Bequest. The sculpture became the emblem of Italian modernism and appears on the Italian twenty cent euro coin. Stand where the museum has placed it and let it stride past you.
Did You Know? The sculpture appears on the Italian twenty cent euro coin, a bronze that Boccioni himself never saw cast, since all the casts were made after his death.
Unlock the Full Guide
Read every room and listen to every work in all museums with premium.