Fabriken bei Porta Romana

Boccioni painted this in 1909 from the balcony of the flat he shared with his mother and sister on the industrial edge of Milan, at Porta Romana. Workshops, new buildings and open ground stretch under a wide sky, the whole scene built from small separate strokes of pure colour in the Divisionist technique he had learned. That same year the poet Marinetti published the first Futurist manifesto in a Paris newspaper, calling for an art of speed, machines and the modern city, and Boccioni would soon be one of the movement's leaders. You can already feel the pull of it here, in the exaggerated lines rushing toward the horizon. He was watching Milan turn into a factory town from his own window.