Unique Forms

Two years after Boccioni helped create the Technical Manifesto on Futurist Painting in Milan with a group of other young Italian artists, he published a Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture. In it, he extended the general ideas he had helped to articulate earlier, arguing that traditional sculpture was "a monstrous anachronism." The tone of this later work is very similar to his previous manifesto, as he calls for other sculptors to join him on his exhilarating journey: "Let's proclaim the absolute and complete abolition of finite lines and the contained statue. Let's split open our figures and place the environment inside them."

Boccioni's own work, which is displayed in its gilded glory as the front piece to Chapter Twenty-Three in our textbook, is the perfect expression of these principles and goals. His Unique Forms of Continuity in Space highlights the formal and spacial effects of motion rather than the source, which is here the striding human figure. As opposed to in the stagnant traditional sculpture that he so vehemently argued against, in his statue the figure is so expanded, interrupted and broken in plane and contour that the form is almost lost, as the movement eclipses it in importance. This sculpture in its power and sense of vital activity, embodies all that the Futurists stood for, symbolizing the dynamic quality of modern life.