Futurismo umberto boccioni biography

Umberto Boccioni: Italian Artist, Sculptor, and Futurist Theorist

Umberto Boccioni, an Italian artist, sculptor, and theorist of Futurism, was born on October 19, 1882, in Reggio di Calabria, a city in southern Italy. He came from a family of a civil servant. Boccioni received his artistic education in Rome, where he studied from 1898 to 1902. During this time, he also learned the technique of pointillism from Giacomo Balla. In late 1906 and early 1907, he attended drawing courses at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.
At the beginning of his career, Boccioni's style was close to verism, a movement that depicted reality in a gritty and truthful manner. Later, he was influenced by cubism. Filippo Marinetti, the founder and theorist of Futurism in European literature, had a significant impact on Boccioni. Boccioni adapted Marinetti's ideas to visual arts and published the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting" in 1910. From that year onward, Boccioni became the leader and theorist of Futurism in Italian visual arts.
In his works, Boccioni attempted to embody the abstract sensation of dynamism in the industrial era by depicting the swirling movement of intersecting forms and planes. In 1912, after visiting the studios of Georges Braque, Alexander Archipenko, Constantin Brancusi, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and possibly Medardo Rosso in Paris, Boccioni also decided to pursue sculpture. Drawing from the experience of cubism, he actively worked as a sculptor, giving the process of fragmentation and "unraveling" forms a real connection to the surrounding environment. That same year, he and other Futurists exhibited their works at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery, and in 1913, a sculpture exhibition was organized.
At the beginning of World War I, Boccioni was drafted into the army. On August 16, 1916, he fell from a horse during cavalry training exercises and suffered a fatal injury, leading to his untimely death.

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