Umberto Boccioni

Italian, 1882–1916. Umberto Boccioni started his artistic career as a draftsman, after which he moved to Rome and created cartoons and posters commercially to finance his fine arts training. The influential Italian painter and sculptor lived a short life but created art that merged with the speed, power, and dynamism of the future. In his seminal sculpture “Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,” he applies the law of synthesizing relative motion and absolute motion to combine the movement of the striding figure with the displaced air surrounding it. Boccioni also created several three-dimensional works in mixed media, many of which have been destroyed.