A Cidade que Sobe

In 1909 a group of young Italians declared that they wanted to paint speed, machines and the roar of the modern city, and to be done with quiet landscapes and old masters. They called themselves the Futurists. The very next year Umberto Boccioni, one of them, made this, his first big statement of that idea. It shows the edge of Milan being built up, with scaffolding and smokestacks behind, but the whole foreground is taken over by a huge red horse straining against the men trying to hold it. The muscle and the dust blur together so you feel the pull rather than see it cleanly. Boccioni first titled it simply The Work, and showed it in Milan in 1911. He was dead five years later, killed in a fall from a horse during military training in the First World War, at 33.