Dynamisme d’un cycliste

Boccioni painted this in 1913, at the height of Italian Futurism, a movement that wanted to tear the country loose from its museums and its Roman past and celebrate speed, machines, and modern life instead. So he paints a bicycle racer, but not as a snapshot. The rider and the bike are broken into curves, cones, and slashing lines that drive across the canvas, an attempt to set down the sensation of moving fast rather than a frozen instant of it. The colour is stippled on in the divisionist way, small separate strokes, with a hard Cubist splintering of the planes over the top. The Futurists loved the energy of the machine age and the roar of modern engines. Three years after this, Boccioni was dead at 33, thrown from a horse during army training in the war he had welcomed.