Umberto Boccioni--<i> Faux</i> Revolutionary? : His Art Belonged to Futurism and His Heart Belonged to Mama

Of all the early radical modern European art movements of the century, none reveled in its own high-spirited attack on the sacred cows of the past more than Italian Futurism. It was founded in Milan in 1909 by the poet Filippo Tomaso Marinetti who styled himself “The caffeine of Europe.” Launched as a literary movement attacking the somnolent backwardness of Italian culture, it fanned out to embrace everything from painting to politics and wound up as an influence on everybody from Paris Cubists to Russian rebels, British Vorticists and Americans like Joseph Stella. Its “manifestoes” certainly provided the bedrock of all satire on fervid, slightly daffy artistic polemic.

“We want to fight to the bitter end against the fanatical, thoughtless and purely snobbish religious faith in the past stoked by the nefarious existence of the museums,” trumpeted the Futurist Manifesto of 1910. Ideologically, the movement worshiped the dynamics of the machine in that brief time before two world wars turned miraculous technology into a rapacious Frankenstein.

Futurist painting tends to look like multi-image stroboscopic photography that developed later and is now familiar in countless shots of pole-vaulters making pretty spoked half-circles through the air.

The Futurists made paintings as funny as that of a multi-legged dog endlessly running in place, leash flapping furiously. When such images are added to the movement’s now quaintly risible pronouncements there is a tendency to take it less than seriously. Factually, that is a mistake. On the stupid side they flirted dangerously with fascism. On the smart side they originated visual poetics that parallel modern understanding of the continuity of matter moving in space.

None of them did that better than Umberto Boccioni, an acknowledged Futurist chef d’ecole whose aesthetic is reflected in his best and best-known sculpture, “The Unique Continuity of Forms in Space.” You’ve seen it, the one that looks like a literal transcription of the patterns of invisible wind running over the body of a walking man. Incredibly, there had never been a full-dress U.S. survey of Boccioni’s oeuvre until the Metropolitan Museum opened the one on view here until Jan. 8. The show will not travel, which is too bad since it is a revelation, if of an unexpected sort.

Boccioni joined Marinetti in Milan in 1910 and along with fellow painters Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini set out to attack Italian history.

“We are nauseated by the despicable sloth that . . . has let our artists survive only through incessant reworking of the glories of the past,” they chorused in manifesto.

Boccioni manifested his disgust with provincialism in youthful pilgrimages to Paris and Russia. He painted his self-portrait in a fur hat that gave him the look of an elegant Cossack.

After igniting various aesthetic brouhahas and actual brawls around exhibitions in Italy, the Futurists mounted artistic assaults on Berlin and Brussels, Paris and London. In the French capital they were embroiled in the heated style-wars of the day. Accused of being Cubist copy-cats by Guillaume Apollinaire and pronounced “dull” by Gertrude Stein, they were thwarted by the insularity of the reigning Parisian in-group.

All their heartfelt rebellion and self-promotional strategies caused history to neaten up the Futurist enterprise, so it appears as radical and visionary as that of the Dadaists, Expressionists, Purists and all. In its general theory and stylistic contribution, it certainly was both advanced and potent but this showing concentrates on the legacy of one man and therefore his individual artistic temperament and the way it accords with both our stereotype of the Futurists and their image of themselves.

When you actually look at Boccioni’s work you think, “Well, you can take the the artist out of Italy, but you can’t take Italy out of the artist.” Imagine Boccioni delivering one of the Futurists fiery manifestoes. He intones, “Let the dead be buried in the deepest bowels of the earth! Let the future’s threshold be swept clean of mummies! Make way for the young, the violent, the headstrong!”

You just know all the girls in the audience would go away gaga, cooing, “What a beautiful voice.”

“Isn’t he handsome?”

“And so dashing.”

Marinetti told a story of how Boccioni held a Parisian art audience spellbound despite the fact he spoke no French and was especially admired by, “The beauties stretched out on red rugs under the bold musculature of the white plastic structures.”

Nowhere is it written that an artistic revolutionary can’t be charming but looking at Boccioni’s art, it is not always easy to see what made him revolutionary.

Early work does absolutely nothing the Impressionists hadn’t done before. A canvas like “Roman Landscape” is as serenely contented as the cow that stands in its corner. A 1906 self-portrait shows him as an austere dandy in black velvet but drenched in sunlight and standing next to a peach tree. So much for natural decadence.

And then there is mama.

Boccioni painted and drew his mother repeatedly and when he was not actually doing her he was doing surrogate aunts, hostesses and anonymous old ladies. She was no Freudian Oedipal vampire mama. This was your regulation Italian earth-mom, stout, face lined with care and love, stable and reassuring. And this from a young artist who professed to mistrust Rembrandt.

Well, nowhere is it written that a revolutionary can’t be charming and love his mother. But some how we expect some anger, anxiety, mordancy or sense of subversion in an artist who read Nietzsche and Marx and wanted to throw all images of the madonna into the Tiber.

One searches in vain for hints of the future Futurist in Boccioni’s early work. After he becomes an avant-garde convert you fully expect to find radicalism manifest in a painting like “Riot in the Galleria.” Good thing the title spells out the theme, otherwise it might be called “High Spirited Italians Rushing for a Cinzano.”

The Expressionist “The Laugh” ought to be a denunciation of the carnival grotesque of urban life along the lines of similar works by Ensor or Grosz, but it’s not. Boccioni’s fat lady is loveable and he has a good time at the sideshow. He was a terrific artist but it is hard to equate rebelliousness with an art that so clearly got a huge kick out of life as it is.

What about “The City Rises”? Now there is a title to quicken the proletariat pulse. It is a very fine if somewhat chaotic painting, but it is so full of heaving giant horses and straining dishrag figures, so generalized in its allegory, that it becomes a painting about sheer dynamic surface movement that is about as political as a rodeo.

Sure, but isn’t it modern in its formal freedom and surreal imagery? About equally modern and Baroque. Seventeenth-Century Italian Baroque. And this from an artist who held his cultural heritage in contempt.

Boccioni came closest to filling his own image of himself in his Cubist phase, but even his radical wind-tunnel Cubist sculpture owes a lot to Bernini’s operatic sense of movement. And when you look close at the hurricane-stressed portraits, guess who you see?

Mama.

Boccioni best fulfilled his vision of himself in a Cubist influenced trilogy of 1911-12 called “States of Mind.” He believed that art should be based not on a formal technique but on a kind of visual memory. That sounds almost literary-nostalgic but these images seem to predict the future. They have the turgid, ominous movement of men and machines at war. “The Farewells” looks like a smoky battlefield where we glimpse slogging soldiers and the numbers painted on lumbering death machines.

When war broke out in 1914, Boccioni joined a volunteer cyclists brigade. He got some wonderful pictures out of the experience, but his whooshing multi-image bikers are far from war-like. The artist’s lyricism and intimacy were irrepressible. By the time he was transferred to the regular army in 1916, he was doing Matisse-like portraits of motherly women, more cyclists and a man on horseback. He seemed to love horses and they may have been a symbol of his own high-strung, earthy and dynamic ego. He died after a fall from a horse on Aug. 17, 1916, at age 34.