The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Umberto Boccioni · Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio · a single striding figure, armless, set on two separate block plinths, one under each foot, in the round, under life size · modelled in plaster in 1913 and shown that summer at the Galerie La Boétie, Paris, in Boccioni’s first exhibition of sculpture · no bronze was cast in his lifetime; the first bronzes were cast after his death, in 1931, and others later · the plaster now in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo · scored as the figure in its posthumous bronzes, the form in which it has stood and been seen since 1931; the plaster, the one object Boccioni made, is named as the source of that form, and the date, number and finish of the casts bear on its survival only
Mode
A figure in the round modelled as its own trajectory; the closed contour of the statue opened so that space enters the form and the form is drawn out into space
Mythos
The oldest striding figure of sculpture, the walking figure, the kouros and the Nike, rebuilt from within: the hero is no longer one who walks but walking itself; the man become machine
Phase
Modelled in plaster in 1913 and shown in Paris that summer; no cast in the maker’s lifetime; the first bronzes cast in 1931; on the Italian 20 cent coin since 2002
Presentation
One figure in the round, under life size, armless, on two separate blocks; known in its posthumous bronzes, the plaster in São Paulo
Register
Grandeur in motion: a sustained forward surge, flame and metal, held at one height
Scale
One body, one stride, two blocks
Governing Proposition
A figure strides forward on two blocks, leaning into its step. It has no arms; its head is closed into a ridged, helmet-like mass; and behind each thigh and calf the surface is drawn out into flanges like flame, the wake of the limb, the space it has just left. Seen from the side it is a surge; seen from the front it closes into a narrow upright. The wager of the figure is that a body in motion is not a thing moving through space but a form continuous with the space it passes through, and that sculpture, walked round, can show that continuity where painting cannot.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In the summer of 1913 Umberto Boccioni showed his sculpture for the first time, at the Galerie La Boétie in Paris. He was a painter, one of the Futurists gathered round Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and he had taught himself to model. The year before he had written the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, and the plasters he brought to Paris were its proof. Among them was a single striding figure, armless, set on two separate blocks, one under each foot: Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio.
He did not see it cast. Boccioni died in August 1916, after a fall from a horse during cavalry training near Verona, and no bronze of the figure was made in his lifetime. Most of the plasters he had made were scattered and destroyed after his death. This one survived, and is now in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo. The first bronzes were cast from it in 1931, fifteen years after his death and eighteen after the Paris show, and others followed later.
The work scored here is the figure in those bronzes. They are its standing form, the form in which it has been seen and reproduced for ninety-five years, and the form is his: the plaster is the one object he made and saw, and the casts carry its shape entire. Their metal and finish are not his choice, and how many there are and with what authority is not settled. Those are matters of survival. The other sculptures of the same programme, the manifesto and the paintings of the same years are context, and are not scored.
Movement II
Marinetti’s founding manifesto of 1909 set a roaring motor car above the Victory of Samothrace. Four years later Boccioni made a figure that turned out to need her. The striding figure is one of the oldest patterns sculpture has: the Egyptian walking figure, the kouros with its left foot advanced, the Nike stepping into the wind from the prow, Rodin’s armless Walking Man of 1907. Boccioni does not allude to the pattern. He builds it: the stride is the whole structure of the figure, and its forward step into resisting air is the Nike’s own.
What he changes he changes from within. The body is burnt into motion and the face withdrawn behind a helmet-like mass with a ridge and a hollow. The arms are gone, and their absence lets the torso drive forward as one wedge. The hero is no longer a person who walks but walking itself. And the closed figure of Western sculpture, a body bounded by its skin and finished at its contour, is opened: space enters the form, and the form is pulled out behind the limbs into flanges that are the wake of their passage, the space a thigh or a calf has just left.
The step was a wager, and it was prepared. Medardo Rosso had dissolved the surface of the figure into light, Rodin had made the fragment a whole, the Cubists had faceted the head, and Boccioni’s own paintings had already broken bodies into fields of force. The manifesto had called for more than this, for mixed materials, glass and motors; the figure takes the more conservative of its paths, one body in one material. But it was a painter staking his movement’s claim on sculpture in the city of Rodin, and the price was paid in ridicule, in the loss of almost all his plasters, and in eighteen years without a cast.
Movement III
The title is the claim, and the figure has to be walked round to make it. From the side it is a surge: the stride and the backward flare read as one movement, the head the front of the wave and the rear calf its wake. Turn to three-quarters and the flanges become planes turning in light. From the front the masses that were flame close into a narrow, almost classical upright on its two blocks. The knowledge is in the passage between those views. Boccioni’s own paintings of the same years, Dynamism of a Cyclist and Dynamism of a Soccer Player, state the same idea flattened into a field, and lose exactly the continuity the title names.
One law governs every surface. Each mass is the body’s form compressed or extended by its motion, pressed forward where it meets the air and drawn back where it leaves it. The convex and concave planes alternate so that light runs along the flanges and the figure flickers as it is circled; the passage from smooth limb to drawn-out flare is one surface, with no seam between body and motion; the balance, leaning forward on two narrow points, is exact. The profile is one of the most finished silhouettes in modern sculpture. The plinths, rectilinear blocks under a figure of curves, are the one place the law seems to lapse, and read as the two points from which the motion springs they belong to it.
The costs are in the same places. The flanges on the front thigh and the back repeat a little, a third flare where two have made the point. The blocks are summary, blunter than the figure they carry. And the finish that the bronzes now show, on which much of the figure’s present beauty depends, was given by founders after the maker’s death. What is his is the idea and the silhouette, and both are commanded. The idea is one idea, and the range the law governs is one figure, one material and one action.
Movement IV
The figure discloses something it did not set out to disclose. Futurist doctrine celebrated speed, the machine and war, and the figure gives that doctrine a body: armoured, faceless, armless, pure forward will, the modern man fused with his own momentum. Within five years of the Paris show the doctrine had become fact on the battlefields of Europe, and its maker had died in uniform, in a fall during cavalry training. The figure did not argue this. Its history did, and the history now stands round it.
What the figure itself states is narrower and it holds: a body in motion is a form continuous with the space it passes through, and its edges are where body and air press on each other. That is a proposition about perception, plain to anyone who walks round the bronze. It is close to the look of speed, near a mood, and it reaches no human or social condition beyond the body that moves. The modern myth of the man become machine bears load in the figure, but much of what it carries as myth, the war and the new man, comes from the doctrine and its reception and not from the walker on his two blocks.
A single figure holds few orders of the world. This one holds the body in its muscle and its motion, the machine it is becoming, the eye that sees movement as form, and, implicit, the state and war. It holds them in one stride. There is no other person, no family, no labour shown, no nature, no sacred order and no place. It is well under life size, and its elevation is one sustained height, a figure walking into a wind of its own making, which can go cold under museum light.
Movement V
The form is whole. The plaster survives and the bronzes carry it entire; nothing that carried meaning is lost. Its presence was interrupted for eighteen years, and has been wide since: the figure became the emblem of Futurism, and since 2002 it has been on the obverse of the Italian 20 cent coin. That is presence more than pressure. In its field the turn of sculpture into space was shared with Archipenko’s voids, Duchamp-Villon’s Horse, Epstein’s Rock Drill and the Vorticists, and it ran most strongly through Constructivism, which took the manifesto’s other path. A figure barely seen until 1931 could only redirect its field late.
The questions stay open. Whether it is a man or a force. Whether it completes the classical striding type or ends it. Whether its faceless will is a prophecy of the war or an innocence before it. Whether the plaster or the bronze is the work, and what polished metal, which Boccioni never chose, does to a figure of flame. Return to the object yields in the round, each angle a different figure; much of the return is to the movement and its politics through the figure, and the formal questions settle on a few readings of its views.
The desk sets it a tenth below the Winged Victory of Samothrace at 8.3, whose carving and elevation are of another order, and a tenth below Rodin’s The Thinker at 8.3, the closed tradition it opened; under Brâncuși’s Bird in Space at 8.4, the more necessary and more consequential sculpture of motion, and Giacometti’s Walking Man I at 8.5, the striding figure’s later heir; and above Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 and Fountain, at 8.0, the nearest works of its decade and its problem. It is one idea, about the body and the air, held in one figure and opened all the way round: the walk become the walker, cast in metal by others after the walker’s maker was dead.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is hard on this figure, and it mostly passes. The arms are already gone, and their absence is what lets the torso drive forward as one wedge. Take a flange from the rear calf and the trailing motion goes, for each flange is the wake of a limb. Take away the forward lean and the figure stands; take away the stride and it is a statue. The helmet of the head, with its ridge and its hollow, is the one place the figure faces its direction of travel, and it is required. What yields: the flanges on the front thigh and the back repeat a little, a third flare where two have made the point, and the two plinths are blunter than the figure and could be otherwise. Dense and nearly closed, held below the top by ornament in its own idiom.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What it brings into the open can be stated, through image and space, and is credited as fully as a statement in words. A body in motion is a form continuous with the space it passes through: the figure’s edges are where body and air press on each other. That is a proposition about perception, plain to anyone who walks round the bronze, and it holds. A second disclosure the figure makes without intending it is the modern man as armoured, faceless, armless, pure forward will, which the next five years would turn into fact. Held below the gate because the first truth is about the look of movement, close to a mood of speed, and the second is disclosed by the figure’s history more than argued by it. Nothing in it reaches a human or social condition with the force of the summit.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation is real and of one kind: grandeur in motion, a figure that seems to walk into a wind of its own making. It rises at the first sight of the profile, where the stride and the backward flare read as one surge, and again in the turn round the figure, where the masses that were flame from the side close into a narrow, almost classical upright from the front. The Winged Victory of Samothrace, which Marinetti set below the motor car, is the figure’s real rival, and in the elevation it borrows from her, the forward step into resisting air, it meets her on her own ground. What holds the axis: the figure is well under life size, the transport is one sustained height rather than a repeated rising, and the surface of flame and metal can go cold and decorative under museum light.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The striding figure is one of the oldest patterns sculpture has: the Egyptian walking figure, the kouros with its left foot advanced, the Nike, Rodin’s armless Walking Man of 1907. Boccioni builds the pattern rather than alluding to it. The stride is the whole structure, and the departure from the type, the body burnt into motion and the face withdrawn, is made by changing the archetype from within: the hero is no longer a person who walks but walking itself. The modern myth it carries, the man become machine, bears load too. Held below the gate because the myth built is single, and much of what the figure carries as myth, war, the new man, the motor car beating the Nike, comes from the doctrine round it and its reception rather than from the particular, which stays an armless walker on two blocks.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance is the closed figure of Western sculpture, from the antique through Rodin: a body bounded by its skin, set in space, finished at its contour. The departure opens the contour, so that space enters the form and the form is pulled out into space, a figure modelled as its own trajectory. In 1913 this was a real wager: a painter, self-taught in modelling, staking the movement’s claim on sculpture in Paris, the city of Rodin and of the Cubist sculptors. The cost was paid: ridicule, the scattering and destruction of almost all his plasters after his death, and no cast for eighteen years. Held below the top because the step was prepared by Medardo Rosso’s dissolving surfaces, Rodin’s fragments, Cubist faceting and Boccioni’s own paintings; and because this is the conservative path of his own manifesto, which had called for mixed materials: one figure in one material.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Very largely. What the work knows is the continuity of body and space, and only sculpture, walked round, can know it: from the side the flanges are wake and flame; from the front they close into a narrow pillar; at three-quarters they read as planes turning in light. The knowledge is in the passage between those views, which a painting cannot give. Boccioni’s own Dynamism of a Cyclist and Dynamism of a Soccer Player state the same idea flattened into a field, and lose exactly the continuity the title names. The armlessness, the blocks and the lean are each the form of a knowledge. Held below the top because the knowledge is one idea, and some of the form, the plinths and the repeated flare, serves the idea’s statement rather than its discovery.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Evidence over promise: more than a century of return, in the history of modern sculpture, in the literature on Futurism and on Italian modernism and fascism, and in the eye. The questions stay open. Whether the figure is a man or a force; whether it completes the classical striding type or ends it; how far it is a machine and how far a body; whether its armoured, faceless will is a prophecy of the war or an innocence before it; whether the plaster or the bronze is the work, and what polished metal, which Boccioni never chose, does to a figure of flame. The object yields on return in the round: each angle gives a different figure. Held below the top because much of the return is to the movement and its politics, and the formal depth, though real, settles on a few readings of its views.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The field is European sculpture of the 1910s. The intrinsic force is high: a reorganisation of the figure, from a mass with a contour to a form continuous with its space, and the clearest single statement of that idea in its decade. The redirection is shared: Archipenko’s voids, Duchamp-Villon’s Horse, Epstein’s Rock Drill and the Vorticists came alongside it, and the larger turn of sculpture into space ran through Constructivism, which took the manifesto’s other path. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: real, delayed and partly emblematic. The figure was barely seen between 1913 and 1931, and its influence is credited and discounted for that delay; its reach since is wide as image, the emblem of Futurism and a figure on a national coin, and image is presence, not redirection. Held below the gate for a field moved jointly.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. Form: whole. The figure as modelled survives in its plaster, and the bronzes carry it entire; no part that carried meaning is lost. Span: 113 years since modelling, 95 since the first cast. Presence: wide but interrupted, almost unseen for eighteen years, the plaster in São Paulo and the work known through its casts; since 2002 it has been on the Italian 20 cent coin. Fabric and the maker’s hand: the plaster is the one object he made, in a fragile material, and the destruction of most of his other plasters after his death shows how near it came to the same fate. The standing form is a set of posthumous casts in a material and finish he did not choose, in an edition whose number and authority are not settled. These charges take it below the usual figure for its span.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Command of modelling, judged to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing: convex and concave planes alternate so that light runs along the flanges and the figure flickers as it is circled; the balance, leaning forward on two narrow points, is exact; the passage from smooth limb to drawn-out flare is handled as one surface, with no seam between body and motion. The profile is one of the most finished silhouettes in modern sculpture. The costs: Boccioni was a painter first and taught himself to model; the plinths are summary; and the final finish of the bronzes, on which much of the figure’s present beauty depends, is the founders’ and not his. A maker in command of the figure’s idea and its silhouette, held a step below the top by the thinness of the craft round them.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the closed helmet of the head and the trailing flare of the rear calf. They obey one law: every mass is the body’s form compressed or extended by its motion, pressed forward where it meets the air, drawn back where it leaves it. The head is the front of the wave, the calf its wake, and the torso between is their transition. The law holds through every surface. The one element that seems to obey another law is the pair of plinths, static rectilinear blocks under a figure of curves; read as the two points from which the motion springs, the ground made part of the stride, they are included. Held below the top because narrowness is not coherence: the law governs one figure, one material and one action, and the range it covers is small.
Score: 8.6 / 10
A single figure holds few orders, and these are integrated in one stride. The body, its muscle and its motion. The machine: the modern man fused with speed. Perception: the eye that sees movement as continuous form. And, implicit, the state and war, in the armoured, faceless will that the doctrine round it celebrated. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: no other person, no family, no labour shown, no nature, no sacred order, no place. The mark describes the form: one striding figure under life size holds what one figure can, and holds it in one action. Level with Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 at 6.3, under The Thinker at 6.6 and Walking Man I at 6.5.
Score: 6.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.9, then The Swerve, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.6. A form that survives whole in its plaster and its bronzes after 113 years, with a presence wide since 1931; a turn that opened the closed figure of sculpture so that space enters the form, staked by a painter in Paris and paid for in ridicule and loss; a knowledge, the continuity of body and space, that exists only in a figure walked round; and one law of compression and extension from the helmeted head to the trailing calf.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.3: one striding figure holds the body, the machine, perception and, implicitly, war, and nothing of other people, labour, nature, the sacred or place. Below the rest of the twelve, The Unconcealment at 7.9: a true proposition about perception, close to the look of speed, with its larger disclosure supplied by history. Then The Archetypal Deep at 8.2: one myth built, much of the rest supplied by doctrine and reception. The three are one fact: a single figure stating one idea about the body in the air.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.6, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on three of five: The Imperishable at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 and The Unconcealment at 7.9 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Unconcealment at 7.9, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 98.9, an average of 8.24 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV, two tenths above the 8.0 at which it begins and short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the figure, its form, its views and its history, from long study of the bronzes in reproduction and of the literature, with no viewing in the room for this page; known better in its form and history than in the present state of the plaster. The work scored is the figure Boccioni modelled in plaster in 1913, in its posthumous bronzes, the first cast in 1931: the standing form in which it has been seen since. The plaster, now in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, is the one object he made and is named as the source of the form; nothing of the form is lost or replaced. The bronzes are in a material and finish he did not choose, made after his death in an edition whose number and authority are not settled, and that is weighed only on The Imperishable and, for the finish, noted under The Made. The other sculptures of 1912 to 1913, the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture of 1912 and the paintings of the same programme are context and are not scored. The figure carries no words. Marinetti’s manifesto of 1909 is given in paraphrase, not quoted. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the plaster and of any cast, the plaster’s repairs and the state of its surface, the number and sequence of the casts, their dates after 1931, the collections that hold them and when each was acquired, and the titles of the lost companion sculptures.