What a good idea the Umberto Boccioni retrospective was. Most of us know very little about this founding member of the vociferous Italian avant-garde movement known as Futurism. A few key images, legacies of art-history courses and visits to the Museum of Modern Art, serve to define him: the plunging red horse of his 1910 painting The City Rises, and the amazing bronze whirligig of his 1913 sculpture Development of a Bottle in Space. And then there is that famous statement about a galloping horse having not four legs but twenty and its movements’ being triangular. The prospect of seeing Boccioni’s beginnings and evolution, of having a context for the exploding bronze bottle and the horses, both painted and galloping, was promising.

Unfortunately, while the Metropolitan Museum’s Boccioni retrospective was a model of careful research and conscientious presentation, it simply didn’t make the heart leap up.[1] There were no real surprises, no unknown masterpieces among the hundred works on display. Knowing more about Boccioni’s tragically short working life (he died in World War I at thirty-four) turned out to be not all that illuminating. You came out of the exhibition feeling virtuous but not altogether delighted.

The show’s subtext—the career of an ambitious young provincial artist at a critical time in the development of modernism—proved more provocative than the individual works. Boccioni’s Italianness, his being at one remove from the center of radical innovation in Paris, gave the show a special dimension and raised