To coincide with the World Cup final, today’s choice of picture is the Italian artist Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Football Player. Painted in 1913, three years before the painter’s life was suddenly cut short by a fall from his horse during wartime cavalry exercises, it marked the culmination of a brief but intriguing career devoted to visual experiment and pictorial innovation.
Dynamism of a Football Player was a work of art created with (so to speak) a new and unusual goal in mind. Boccioni’s ambition, as his title partly implies, was not to depict a football player in action – although it is just possible, perhaps, to make out a flash of muscled calf and thigh in the gyrating kaleidoscope of brightly coloured forms at the heart of the image – but, instead, to represent the release of his energy. Three years earlier, in helping to compose the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting – a self-consciously avant-garde document which, he hoped, would inaugurate a new era in the visual arts – the artist had obscurely adumbrated his purposes. “Our desire for truth cannot be satisfied by traditional Form or traditional Colour! Gesture, for us, will no longer be a single moment within the universal dynamism brought to a sudden stop. It will be, outrightly, dynamic sensation given permanent form.”
The picture shown here was one attempt to put theory into practice. It is as if the artist has tried to compress all of his memories of a player’s actions during the course of a game into one single image. His subject is not a person in a particular pose, but the flurry of all his acts. Given the hectic sense of activity conveyed by the painting, with its whirling centrifuge of muscular intent, suggestive all at...
