Riot in the Gallery

Boccioni painted this in 1910, in the same months he signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, the document in which he and his friends declared that a galloping horse has not four legs but 20, and that art should seize movement itself. Here is his test of the idea. The setting is real, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, the great glass-roofed arcade, its cafe spilling light into the night. A fight has broken out between two women, and a crowd surges toward it from every side. He built the whole picture from small strokes of bright, clashing colour, so the light seems to vibrate and the crowd seems to pour rather than stand. Above the heads, the electric signs of the cafes blaze.