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Dynamism of a Cyclist

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Dynamism of a Cyclist
Italian: Dinamismo di un Ciclista
Umberto Boccioni, Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913.
ArtistUmberto Boccioni
Year1913
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions70 cm × 95 cm (28 in × 37 in)
LocationMuseo del Novecento (long term loan from the Gianni Mattioli Collection), Milan

Dynamism of a Cyclist (Dinamismo di un Ciclista) is a 1913 painting by Italian Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) that demonstrates the Futurist fascination with speed, modern methods of transport, and the depiction of the dynamic sensation of movement.

Background

Futurism was an early twentieth-century movement in Italy that sought to free the country from what the Futurists saw as the dead weight of its classical past. The Futurists were preoccupied with the technology and dynamism of modern life.[1] The movement found its expression primarily in literature and art.

Subject and composition

Boccioni's preparatory drawings for the painting (two shown below) depict a head-down racing cyclist, behind in the air, his movement indicated by the characteristic Futurist "force lines" and echoing curves.[2] Force lines, which the Futurists claimed to have invented,[3] show how an object would resolve itself if it followed the tendencies of its own forces[4]: 284  and reflected the interest of the Futurists in the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who believed that material objects exist in a state of continual flux. The painting is therefore an attempt to represent the dynamic sensation of a cyclist moving through time and space rather than a snap-shot of a particular moment in time.[4]: 280 [5] The bicycle, figure, and the surrounding space seemingly fuse together in a single form. [6] Although the bicycle had been invented in the early nineteenth century, it did not come into widespread use until the 1890s. Even in 1913, the bicycle, and the high speeds obtainable on it, still represented for the Futurists one of the modern forms of transport that they idealised.[2]

In the final work, the lines of the preparatory drawings are translated into curves and cones, outlined using Boccioni's characteristic divisionist technique.[2] This technique was primarily derived from the early Futurist Giacomo Balla. Boccioni, after visiting Parisian avant-garde painters, added new elements to the style, including the typical Cubist segmentation of planes.[7] The discordant colour choices reflect the failure of the Futurists to develop a coherent colour theory to match their theories in other areas.[1]

  • Sketch for Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913. Estorick Collection, London.[8]

    Sketch for Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913. Estorick Collection, London.[8]

  • Sketch for Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913

    Sketch for Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913

  • Detail of Dynamism of a Cyclist showing the use of divisionism

    Detail of Dynamism of a Cyclist showing the use of divisionism

Discover more about Subject and composition related topics

Henri Bergson

Henri Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson was a French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War, but also after 1966 when Gilles Deleuze published Le Bergsonisme. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.

Bicycle

Bicycle

A bicycle, also called a pedal cycle, bike, push-bike or cycle, is a human-powered or motor-powered assisted, pedal-driven, single-track vehicle, having two wheels attached to a frame, one behind the other. A bicycle rider is called a cyclist, or bicyclist.

Divisionism

Divisionism

Divisionism, also called chromoluminarism, was the characteristic style in Neo-Impressionist painting defined by the separation of colors into individual dots or patches which interacted optically.

Giacomo Balla

Giacomo Balla

Giacomo Balla was an Italian painter, art teacher and poet best known as a key proponent of Futurism. In his paintings he depicted light, movement and speed. He was concerned with expressing movement in his works, but unlike other leading futurists he was not interested in machines or violence with his works tending towards the witty and whimsical.

Avant-garde

Avant-garde

In the arts and in literature, the term avant-garde identifies a genre of art, an experimental work of art, and the experimental artist who created the work of art, which usually is aesthetically innovative, whilst initially being ideologically unacceptable to the artistic establishment of the time. The military metaphor of an advance guard identifies the artists and writers whose innovations in style, form, and subject-matter challenge the artistic and aesthetic validity of the established forms of art and the literary traditions of their time; thus how the artists who created the anti-novel and Surrealism were ahead of their times.

Related works

This work is one of a series of "dynamism" paintings he created in 1913, including Dynamism of a Human Body, The Dynamism of a Soccer Player, Dynamism of a Footballer, [9] and Plastic Dynamism: Horse + Houses. [10] In these paintings, Boccioni utilized a more vivid color palette than in his previous works, and his application of the paint was thicker and denser.[11]

The Russian Futurists explored many of the same themes as the Italians. Natalia Goncharova's Cyclist (1913) includes some of the same techniques for portraying movement used by Boccioni and the other Futurists,[12] although the work is far more directly representational than Dynamism of a Cyclist and much less ambitious.[13]

Discover more about Related works related topics

Natalia Goncharova

Natalia Goncharova

Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Goncharova's lifelong partner was fellow Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Larionov. She was a founding member of both the Jack of Diamonds (1909–1911), Moscow's first radical independent exhibiting group, the more radical Donkey's Tail (1912–1913), and with Larionov invented Rayonism (1912–1914). She was also a member of the German-based art movement Der Blaue Reiter. Born in Russia, she moved to Paris in 1921 and lived there until her death.

Cyclist (painting)

Cyclist (painting)

Cyclist is a 1913 Cubo-Futurist painting by the Russian artist Natalia Goncharova. The painting is considered an "archetypal work" of Futurism by its current holder, the State Russian Museum.

Jean Metzinger

Jean Metzinger

Jean Dominique Antony Metzinger was a major 20th-century French painter, theorist, writer, critic and poet, who along with Albert Gleizes wrote the first theoretical work on Cubism. His earliest works, from 1900 to 1904, were influenced by the neo-Impressionism of Georges Seurat and Henri-Edmond Cross. Between 1904 and 1907 Metzinger worked in the Divisionist and Fauvist styles with a strong Cézannian component, leading to some of the first proto-Cubist works.

Au Vélodrome

Au Vélodrome

Au Vélodrome, also known as At the Cycle-Race Track and Le cycliste, is a painting by the French artist and theorist Jean Metzinger. The work illustrates the final meters of the Paris–Roubaix race, and portrays its 1912 winner Charles Crupelandt. Metzinger's painting is the first in Modernist art to represent a specific sporting event and its champion.

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Peggy Guggenheim Collection

The Peggy Guggenheim Collection is an art museum on the Grand Canal in the Dorsoduro sestiere of Venice, Italy. It is one of the most visited attractions in Venice. The collection is housed in the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, an 18th-century palace, which was the home of the American heiress Peggy Guggenheim for three decades. She began displaying her private collection of modern artworks to the public seasonally in 1951. After her death in 1979, it passed to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, which opened the collection year-round from 1980.

Museum of Modern Art

Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.

Source: "Dynamism of a Cyclist", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2022, November 30th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamism_of_a_Cyclist.

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Further Reading

Futurism

Umberto Boccioni

Giacomo Balla

Gino Severini

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art

Cubo-Futurism

Italian modern and contemporary art

The Street Enters the House

Eric Estorick

Development of a Bottle in Space

Au Vélodrome

Girl Running on a Balcony

Les Joueurs de football

Three Women (Boccioni)

Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses

Dynamism of a Human Body: Boxer

Dynamism of a Soccer Player

Riot in the Gallery
See also
References
  1. ^ a b Little, Stephen. (2004) Isms: Understanding Art. London: Herbert Press, pp. 108–109. ISBN 9780713670110
  2. ^ a b c Umberto Boccioni. Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Retrieved 10 February 2015.
  3. ^ Joe Bray; Alison Gibbons; Brian McHale (2012). The Routledge Companion to Experimental Literature. Abingdon: Routledge. p. 26. ISBN 978-1-136-30174-2.
  4. ^ a b Heard Hamilton, George. (1993) Painting and Sculpture in Europe 1880–1940. 6th edition. New Haven: Yale University Press ISBN 0300056494
  5. ^ "Umberto Boccioni and 100 years of Futurism". Archived 2013-12-03 at the Wayback Machine Andrew Graham-Dixon, 18 January 2009. Retrieved 10 February 2015.
  6. ^ "Dynamism of a Cyclist". Guggenheim. Retrieved 13 August 2015.
  7. ^ Futurism 1911-1918. Philippe Daverio Gallery. 1988. pp. 11–12.
  8. ^ On The Move, 13 January – 18 April 2010. Archived 19 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine Estorick Collection. Retrieved 11 February 2015.
  9. ^ Dynamism of a Football Player by Umberto Boccioni. Archived 2015-02-11 at the Wayback Machine Andrew Graham-Dixon, 30 June 2002. Retrieved 11 February 2015.
  10. ^ Wolf, Ester Coen; [translated by Robert Eric (1988). Umberto Boccioni. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. pp. 160–174. ISBN 0-87099-522-7.
  11. ^ Wolf], Ester Coen ; [translated by Robert Eric (1988). Umberto Boccioni. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. p. 160. ISBN 0-87099-522-7.
  12. ^ "Women of the futurists". Sarah Kent, The Telegraph, 16 June 2009. Retrieved 11 February 2015.
  13. ^ "The Futurists’ Futile Chase After Motion". Souren Melikian, The New York Times, 19 June 2009. Retrieved 11 February 2015.
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