Follow me here. Much has been written about how little has been written about Futurism, a movement that burned brightly at the top of the 20th Century but had essentially been reduced to embers once it became entirely misunderstood, co-opted, and recallibrated after the death of its youngest, fiercest, most gifted proponent, Umberto Boccioni in 1916 at the tender age of 33.
Boccioni co-authored a manifesto in fact, calling for an art that addressed the everyday, the worker, but most visually telling, a dynamism of radiating energy through line and color that placed the viewer at the heart of the work, at the heart of the artist's vision, a connectivity between artist and audience, ergo, all of us.
The Cubists would deconstruct and abstract, the Futurists were more interested in creating an emotional landscape that was active and intuitively recognizable. I find it less nihilistic. And profoundly moving.
Here, his States of Mind III: Those Who Stay is the third painting of a triptych that hangs together at MoMA thanks to an extraordinary gift of curation by Nelson Rockefeller.
The third hits me hardest. At a train station, The Farewells are frantic, Those Who Go have their anxious fear countered by anticipation, but Those Who Stay, they are the people I want to know, their loneliness occupying a space transformed simply by the lack of a loved one, the familiar rendered unbearable.
And look how Boccioni enshrines that loss here. Monochromatic, as though the only thing that connects the leftovers is the blue of their mood, but solid vertical lines in close proximity cut them off from one another and even parts of themselves like some kind of cruel solitary confinement, like a rain that obscures, with a power that is almost heartless, but an evenness and egalitarianism that conveys an understanding that is full of grace and compassion.
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