UNIQUE FORMS OF CONTINUITY IN SPACE / Umberto Boccioni
Can motion be captured in a form? What shape could it take? Is there any possibility to depict transient moments succeeding each other in a period of time? Even if it’s just a few seconds, the figure can transform itself in many ways.
Umberto Boccioni tried in 1913 to capture the dynamics of a moving man’s body in a sculpture. He created a unique piece of art, which belongs to Italian avant-garde movement, called Futurism. At the beginning of the 20th century, when new technologies came and new perspectives have appeared, the artists pursued the idea of conveying the progress of humanity’s development in their works.
Being a leading member of Italian Futurism, Boccioni rejected traditional styles in his paintings and sculptures. The striding man of the “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” is an abstract figure. There is no face and arms, but it still resembles the human being. The muscles and flesh are flapping, and the shoulders transform themselves into wings or remind tongues of flame. The legs look quite thick, as if the artist took a series of captures in different stages of the movement and “put” them all together. It looks like the figure is interacting with the space and the torrents, possibly symbolising that continuity mentioned in the sculpture’s name.
The helmet features on the man’s head, a cross in front of the face (or what it is supposed to be), together with all the folds and angles, resemble an image of a rushing forward warrior, probably a struggler, ready for new challenges and striving for development and progress. Followers of Futurist movement were glorifying war, however, what was quite common in the time when nationalism has just started to blossom in Europe.
The “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space”, like most of Boccioni’s works, possesses a specific energy. The man’s figure is striding through the space with a fast pace, symbolising the aspiration for the new future, new developments and achievements and incorporates dynamic, speed, and vitality of technological progress.
“Live fast, die young” could be a suitable slogan for futurists; they were inspired by innovative developments, by the high speed and dynamics of progress; they broke traditional conservative rules and invented their own style, which laid basis for the contemporary art and encouraged people to get a new view at the Art, a new understanding of its role and principles. Umberto Boccioni died young at the age of 33 in a horse riding accident, but he created lots of works in his life which made a valuable contribution to the history of art and which make the further generations admire them over the time.
The original version of the “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” was made of plaster, and it is exhibited now in Museu de Arte Contemporânea in São Paulo. This material conveys even more transiency and delicate nature of the work, which was an important part of the Futurist movement. The most famous version, which is made of bronze and exhibited at MoMA in New York, is a cast created in 1916 after Boccioni’s death. Interesting to know that many Futurist artists wanted their art works to be destroyed later by more innovative successors rather than stored in museums. That’s why they sometimes used quite fragile materials.
Some people who could see this sculpture in person, say that it has a specific feature of transforming its shapes and angles, while one walks around it, what is embodying the transformation of real figures moving in space. People witness that each perspective of it is different, the sculpture is ever-changing, and it’s hard to concentrate on a single particular part of it.
Boccioni was not the first one, trying to capture the motion. One year before, in 1912, Marcel Duchamp created his “Nude Descending a Staircase”, a fascinating painting, which looks like an abstract picture at first sight, but in fact it’s a series of stopped movements of a figure, which is going down the stairs. We can follow the motion of legs, knees, arms, bending of the head. Same like in a Boccioni’s sculpture, the details don’t play the most important role, and it’s difficult to see the face, as the idea was probably not to depict the object itself but to convey the charm of the action.
The idea of depicting a movable object in a static image has been fascinating the artists since centuries. Muybridge in 1878 created a series of sequential photographs of a horse and a human (“Attitudes of Animals in Motion”), although he didn’t put them together, like Duchamp did it later in oil, but suggested rotating them and therefore creating a moving picture.
It made me to recall the “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space” when I visited Art Basel in June 2015. A contemporary artist, Toni Cragg, created a beautiful steel sculpture in a shape of streaming metal, which is called “Runner”. We can observe here the same liquidity of forms, a bit more smoothed and streamlined, but even more abstract ones. Less than at Boccioni’s sculpture one can recognise there a human body, but it creates an incredible feeling of dynamics, speed, and the power of motion.
This is one of the most fascinating features of art — the possibility to depict some things by means which could seem completely opposite by their nature; like conveying a transiency of a movement in a static object, which starts to look not static at all.