Umberto Boccioni, "Dynamism of a Soccer Player"
About this video
Umberto Boccioni's Dynamism of a Soccer Player (1913) shows how the Italian Futurists celebrated speed, noise, machinery and the city. Instead of a recognisable player, colors and shapes move and run, influenced by sequence photography like Muybridge's, and the Futurists deliberately caused a ruckus to upset centuries of tradition.
You'll be able to
- name the key themes of Italian Futurism.
- explain how Boccioni shows motion without painting a recognisable figure.
- explain how photography and provocation shaped Futurist art.
Key words
- Futurism
- An Italian art movement that celebrated speed, machines, cities and the modern age.
- Dynamism
- Energy and continuous movement.
- Manifesto
- A public statement of a group's beliefs and aims.
- Sequence photography
- A series of photos showing stages of a movement, as Muybridge made.
Transcript
(drum beat music) Ann: The Italian futurists were one group of artists who were doing incredible things in 1913. Thinking about art as something that had to be for the new century. Speed, noise, machinery, and the city became a key part of all of their paintings.
Dynamism of a Soccer Player challenges any viewer to actually find a soccer player: two arms, two legs, a face. No way. Colors and shapes moving, running, kicking. Your eye is brought to the next place or to a place further down. There's only one way when you look at a yellow form or a red form that you can see that form which is in relation to the colors circulating around it.
The brush strokes are extremely visible, they are tangible its material. Photography which was little more than half a century old had an enormous impact. Eadweard Muybridge did photography in sequence: bop, bop, bop, bop. They wanted to do that in painting too.
The futurists believed that part of being modern was not only painting modern things but creating a ruckus. When their pictures appeared at exhibitions they issued manifestos, they have lectures, they had performances that absolutely provoked the people in attendance to realizing, "Wow."
Even if we didn't understand the picture, what we're doing is being a witness to something that is upsetting centuries of tradition. (drum beat music)
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