cover image Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni

Ester Coen. Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, $65 (272pp) ISBN 978-0-8109-0721-8

A leading Futurist painter and sculptor, Umberto Boccioni (1887-1916) was attracted to subjects like speed, violence and automobile travel long before the movement's birth. This superbly illustrated catalogue of a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City traces his development through early portraits of great sensitivity and depth, luminous landscapes, to the oils, graphics and bronzes that seem to strip motion down into its dynamic constituent parts. Boccioni's meteoric rise ended abruptly in 1916 when he died in a fall from a horse, a trajectory that parallels the Futurists' history. He concocted diverse theories, including ``physical transcendentalism,'' or moving beyond the palpable properties of things, a concept which seems to illuminate his most kinetic and mysterious works. This album includes an essay by Coen, a Rome-based scholar; it also reprints Futurist manifestoes and excerpts from Boccioni's diary. (Dec.)