Page 24 - Studio International - November 1973

Front page of Roma Futurista
29 February 192o
example : Enrico Prampolini
`The sixteen people you have around you in a Project for Futurist Pavilion
tram while it's running are one, ten, four, three; Chicago 1932/33
they are still and they move; they come and go, seen'. Urban space, therefore, is not meant in The Change Horse of 1898 ; the already cited
jump into the street, are swallowed into a the static sense of nineteenth-century realism Luna Park of 1900, and the very
patch of sunlight, thence to return aboard and with its understanding through perception of extraordinary Lamp with Arch, 1909, so
sit down, persistent symbols of universal the topography of the environment, nor even surprising and new that someone, on no other
vibration. And sometimes on the cheek of the in the immediacy of the dynamics of grounds, thought fit to date it two years later.5
person we talk to, we see the horse that passes impressionist perception, turning the face of From the same root sprang Boccioni's
afar. Our bodies enter into the sofas we sit upon the city into a landscape, but in a total sense, as treatment of the outskirts of Milan, from the
and the sofas enter us, and in the same way the the place where the seen and the known, the first still neo-impressionist works of 1908 to
passing tram goes into the houses and the visible and the remembered, are a total psycho- those of 1909 and 1910, through which ran the
houses in their turn hurl themselves upon the physical environment. unmistakable indications of dynamism and to
tram and amalgamate with it.' The declarations of the futurist painters are which, too, the theme of building construction
Then the no less famous conclusion to this supported by an extensive range of figurative was tied. A particularly good example is the
section : investigations. It is worth recalling that famous Outskirts of 1909, in the collection
`Painters have hitherto shown up people and the city in its modern guise, prosaic, of the Banca Commerciale Italiana in Rome.
objects placed before us. But we will place the anti-pictorial, anti-historical, came into the Boccioni in a letter to Nino Barbantini,
spectator in the middle of the pictures. Here the futurist repertoire through Balla, who had described 'a great synthesis of work, light and
middle of the picture becomes that emblematic been occupied with it since the end of the movement'; this was The City that Rises, 1910,
site which is urban space at its most typical and previous century both in Rome and in Paris, originally titled Work and now in the New York
dynamic.' where he spent some months and produced the Museum of Modem Art. In another reference
In the catalogue of the first futurist exhibition famous Luna Park in 1900, in a formal to it, he wrote that he was 'animated by an
in Paris, at the Galerie Bernhein Jeune in pointillist style. He was attracted by the new intention so pure, that of raising an altar to
February 1912, the exhibitors, always the same districts that had appeared in Rome after the modern life, new, vibrant and dynamic, and as
five, Boccioni, Carra, Russolo, Balla, and destruction of the Villa Ludovisi, within the pure and exalting as those religious
Severini, further explain: limits of the Aurelian walls and scarcely beyond contemplation raised to the divine mystery.'6
`He (the spectator) will not just witness but them, as they appeared by day and by night with In the catalogue to the Paris exhibition of
will take part in the action. If we paint the their new electric street-lighting. It is the first 1912, the cavalry charge against a rioting crowd
phases of a riot, the crowd bristling with dawning of the theme that Boccioni was to take is cited, the reference being to Carra's The
clenched fists and the clamorous charges of the for the City that Rises, of work as human Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910-11. In La
cavalry are translated on to the canvas as progress with the growth of the city as its Retata and Riot in the Galleria, both of around
bundles of lines, corresponding to all the forces symbol. 1910, Boccioni also gives us two similar,
in the conflict and following the law of general The city, the new city, was Balla's constant typical situations of urban dynamism,
violence in the picture. These lines of force must theme, present even in works like the splendid developing the earlier feeling of the Outskirts
surround and draw in the spectator who will portrait of 1902 in the Rome National Gallery of paintings of 1908 — 10, analogous, in a way, to
thus be obliged in some way himself to struggle Modern Art, in the urban interiors, like The Balla's The Toast, but in the context of the
with the personages of the picture.' Toast of 1908, a dynamic intimation of street. From 1911 onwards, the works were
A little previously it is explained that in order Futurism, and in bits of urbanized nature like dominated by the idea of simultaneity in
to make the spectator live in the middle of the the articulate polyptych of 1910, Villa response to the active demands of urban space,
canvas, 'it is necessary for the picture to be a Borghese. But it was the city by night that and to the direct domestic-urban relations.
synthesis of what is remembered and of what is constantly and especially drew Balla's attention; Thus the city entered the house, and not, as
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