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Umberto Boccioni Quotes
1882–1916 Italy
Umberto Boccioni (October 19, 1882 – August 17, 1916) was an Italian painter and sculptor in Futurism. Despite his short life he helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of movement (dynamism), speed, and technology of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures.
Random Umberto Boccioni quote
21 quotes
No one can any longer believe that an object ends where another begins.
How is it possible still to see the human face pink, now that our life, redoubled by noctambulism, has multiplied our perceptions as colourists? The human face is yellow, red, green, blue, violet.
The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be whispered. We wish them in the future to sing and re-echo upon our canvasses in deafening and triumphant flourishes.
'The street enters the house'.
Sculpture is based on the abstract of the planes and volumes that determine the forms, not their figurative value.
With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will
..the moving whirlwind of modernity through its crowds, its cars, its telegraph poles, its bare, working-class neighbourhoods, its noises, its squeals, its violence, its cruelty, its cynicism, and its relentless pushiness.
The harmony of the lines and folds of modern dress works upon our sensitiveness with the same emotional and symbolical power as did the nude upon the sensitiveness of the old masters.
All shadows have their light, each shadow being an autonomous unit forming a new individuality with its own chiaroscuro: it is no longer a form that is half-shadow, half-light, as hat hitherto been the case.
.. the number of the engine [of the train], its profile shown in the upper part of the picture, its wind-cutting fore-part in the center, symbolical of parting, indicates the features of the scene that remain indelibly impressed upon the mind [of the viewer].
We wanted a complementarity of form and colour. So we made a synthesis of analyses of colour (the divisionism of Seurat, Signac and Cross) and analyses of form (of Picasso and Georges Braque).
Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motorbus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the bus and are blended with it.
..since our past is the greatest in the world and thus all the more dangerous for our life!.. .We must smash, demolish and destroy our traditional harmony, which makes us fall into a 'gracefullness' created by timid and sentimental cubs [cubs refers sneering to the Cubists ].
It will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing.
To the Young Artists of Italy!
The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself. Indeed, all things move, all things run, all things are rapidly changing.. .We would at any price re-enter into life.
While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus build the table.
..the characteristic motion peculiar to the object (absolute motion), with the transformations the object undergoes in its shifting in relation to the environment, mobile or immobile (relative motion; both motions should be conceived in art)
..if the objects will be mathematical values, the ambient in which they live will be a particular rhythm in the emotion which surrounds them. The graphic translation of this rhythm will be a state of form, a state of color, each of which will give back to the spectator the 'state of mind' which produced it..
A profile is never motionless before our eyes, but it constantly appears and disappears. On account of the persistency of an image upon the retina, moving objects constantly multiply themselves; their form changes like rapid vibrations.. .To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.