Boccioni, fiery genius – Corriere.it

Of the life of an artist – a painter, a musician, a poet – what can one know if not the work? Let’s face the masterpiece of Umberto Boccioni – The rising cityalso known as The Work – and we admire, enraptured and overwhelmed, that storm of colors, shapes, movements, materials, souls that in 1910 already contained modernity and the man of the twentieth century who creates and destroys himself and his history. That work, now exhibited at the MoMA in New York, certainly has something subversive in it: it manages to speak to our soul by putting movement on the canvas and that red horse that is at the center of the canvas is both modern and ancient. , like the ancient and the modern, there is in the horses – this time one black and one white – of the famous myth of Plato in which the restless nature of the human soul which is the source of the work is staged.

What did the painter really put on the canvas: modernity or its restlessness? Perhaps, there is really no difference. But to try to get an answer you have to read the book that Rachele Ferrario, historian and art criticdedicated to the life and work of this brilliant painter who, with the colors and the taste for beauty, inherited from his mother’s blood and kindness, showed us the twentieth century even before the twentieth century came into the world: Umberto Boccioni. Life of a subversive (Mondadori).

The biography of Umberto Boccioni written by Rachele Ferrario has one characteristic: it tries to bring life and art as close as possible, assuming the risk that one of the two catches fire. It certainly seems that, at some point, the pages of the book catch fire because the story of Boccioni’s heart is highly flammable material. Suffice this consideration, which really has something incredible in it: Boccioni died, like Christ, at the age of 33 in the rear of the Great War falling from his horse in August 1916, but his intellectual, moral and vital figure will therefore weigh heavily on his intellectual and moral figure. time the shadow and curse of fascism. Yet, Benito Mussolini’s regime will begin to take shape only six years after the death of the young painter who, with the poet Tommaso Filippo Marinetti, brought Futurism into the world.

It is right to ask the question “but if he hadn’t died so beautiful and so young he would have become a fascist”? It is really a strange and bewildered question because although the feelings that stirred the heart of Raffaele’s son – usher of the prefecture – and Cecilia Forlani – seamstress – could be in tune with the myth of youth, violence, nationalism that are typical of the fascism, what remains of the great painter to us are the works that in a single leap go far beyond both the life and death of the artist and the beginning and end of the Mussolini regime, to become part simply and truthfully of the beauty of suffering humanity. You don’t see this heartbreaking beauty in the paintings of this one “Thoroughbred from Romagna”, as Aldo Palazzeschi defined him, born by chance in Reggio Calabria, or this Italian Picasso who died too early? Boccioni’s biography written by Rachele Ferrario runs like the red horse de The rising city which anticipates the horse of Enzo Ferrari’s engines. They range from the childhood of Morciano di Romagna and Padua to the decisive meeting in Rome with Balla, from friendship with Sironi and Severini to the bond with Marinetti, from loves and women – such as Margherita Sarfatti and Vittoria Colonna, but the irreplaceable woman of painter was the mother – to travels to Russia and Paris, from fistfights to controversies about art and love.

But after having run at breakneck speed in Umberto Boccioni’s fast thirty-three years, one realizes that he has burned a century in a young life and, therefore, one can say with Ferrario that «it is not Futurism that makes Boccioni ; it is Boccioni who makes Futurism ”and he, despite being a son of his time, has a“ universal breath ”that speaks to all men of every age. One can go so far as to say, as in fact art criticism does, that Marinetti owes Boccioni more than Boccioni owes Marinetti: the Moods And The rising city but also Brawl in the gallery they would have been painted even without Marinetti, but not without “Cézanne’s revolutionary painting” and the speed he carried in his chest, which was nothing more than the new form of the eternal restlessness of the human heart. It can also be understood by putting aside many speeches and looking at them Unique forms of the continuity of space to see together, the human, the superhuman and the inhuman. All in one.