Features November 1988
Boccioni’s future: a retrospective
On the Umberto Boccioni retrospective.
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,...
A Message from the Editors
At The New Criterion we will always call things by
their real names.
As a reader of our efforts, you have stood with us on the front lines in the battle for culture. Learn how your support contributes to our continued defense of truth.
