The Street Enters the House

Boccioni finished this late in 1911, just after coming home from Paris, where he and the other Futurists had seen what the Cubists were doing and set out to answer it. Their idea was simultaneity, putting the viewer in the middle of the scene and painting sensation itself rather than solid objects. Here a woman leans over her balcony onto a building site and a busy morning street, and the whole clatter of it, scaffolding, horses, workers, blocks of colour, surges up and breaks over her. Boccioni said he wanted to paint the noise, so the sound and movement below literally push into her body and the room behind her. He was 29, and within five years, having volunteered for the war, he was dead after a fall from a horse.