Visions simultanées

In 1912 the Italian Futurists were trying to paint something the eye supposedly cannot hold, everything at once. Boccioni called it simultaneity, the idea that when you lean out of a window onto a busy street you don't see one tidy view but the buildings, the crowd, the noise and your own memory of it all folding together. Here a woman's face leans from a balcony while the street below curves up and around her, houses tilting inward as if the whole block were bending to be seen in a single glance. He had signed the Futurist painting manifesto two years earlier, which demanded that artists put the viewer in the centre of the picture. Boccioni was the movement's sharpest mind and its first great loss. He died in 1916 at 33, thrown from a horse during army training in the First World War.