Three Women

Boccioni painted this in 1909, and within a year he would be one of the loudest voices of Futurism, demanding that art tear up the past and worship speed, machines and violence. None of that is here yet. The three women are his own family, his mother Cecilia on the left, his sister Amelia on the right, and his lover Ines in the middle, built up in the flickering separated brushstrokes of Divisionism, the technique he had learned in Italy. The faces emerge out of a haze of tiny coloured touches, warm and still. He made this and a companion view of factories on the edge of Milan in the same stretch, the last quiet things before the manifestos. Boccioni died in 1916, thrown from a horse during army training, at 33.