The City Rises

The work I have selected is, Umberto Boccioni’s, The City Rises, created in 1910. The painting was placed in the Modern and Contemporary art gallery 908 amongst other works of Boccioni. Umberto Boccioni was an Italian painter and sculptor. He is famously known for his futuristic works as he helped shape the aesthetic of the Futurism movement. He became a student of Giacomo Balla, a painter focusing on the modern Divisionist technique and in 1906, he moved to Paris, where he studied Impressionist and Post-Impressionist styles. Boccioni became the main theorist of the artistic movement. The City Rises is an oil on canvas. The artwork is considered the first futuristic work by Umberto Boccioni as it depicts realistic elements such as buildings, a modern city or town. It shows the urbanization of a city as high buildings is portrayed throughout the artwork. Construction seems to be occurring as there are plenty of workers who are in the middle of a task. The building takes up the background while what we see more prominently are several men and large horses. The painting itself shows an almost chaotic, moving and busy scene as there seems to be an effect of a motion blur. In the visual arts, the roots of Modernist painters broke away from ideas of perspective and subject matter. The avant-garde movements followed and Futurism was included. Futurism can be defined as Modernist. Artists increasingly abandoned past styles and conventions in favor of a form of architectural painting such as buildings because of what was going on around them in terms of the advancement in technologies after World War I. The tendency to create art in this form and leaving behind old traditional techniques became more of an international style and aesthetic. In this painting, we can see elements of futurism as we see the force and power of human work and see how important and necessary the creation of a modern town can be. Umberto Boccioni portrays the creation of a new city, with developments and technology. What first drew me to this piece was how much movement and blur was captured in the painting. On a quick glance I was unable to see the details as it looked almost chaotic and like scribbles but with further inspection, I was able to make out the movement of the workers and see the horses. The buildings in the back are in progress and stand larger behind them.