Date: 30-06-2002
Owning Institution: Museum of Modern Art
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”        
Subject: 20th Century          

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 once of the acts of tackling, running, passing and shooting, I imagine the artist had a bustling midfielder in mind. The precise identity of the soccer player (or players) who inspired him is unknown, but it may be significant that 1913, the date of the picture, was also the year when the Italian football federation staged the first national soccer tournament, culminating in a final contested by Lazio of Rome and the Piedmontese team of Pro-Vercelli (who won 6-0). The game had never been more popular.

Football and artistic modernism might seem like somewhat unlikely team-mates, but Boccioni’s interest in the spectacle of twenty-two men kicking a ball around in front of a large crowd of onlookers had its own logic. Like his colleagues in the Futurist movement Boccioni objected to the stasis and predictability of conventional figurative painting and wanted, instead, to depict reality in the light of new science and philosophy. He took inspiration from contemporary physicists, who had begun to dissolve the traditional distinction between matter and energy. He was also influenced by the ideas of the philosopher Henri Bergson, who had rejected the notion of “spatialised time” – time seen as a succession of moments, distinct and separable – in favour of the more fluid concept of “duration”, in which time is regarded as both a continuum and as a function of consciousness, so that past and present, or that which is seen now and that which is remembered, merge seamlessly into one another (an idea which also influenced the novelist Proust). As Boccioni had written in his 1910 manifesto: “Everything is in movement, everything rushes forward, everything is in constant swift change. A figure is never stable in front of us but is incessantly appearing and disappearing. Because images persist on the retina, things in movement multiply, change form, follow one another like vibrations within the space that they traverse.”

No doubt Boccioni chose to express what he saw as the shifting nature of existence in the form of a painting about a footballer – rather than, say, a nude – partly because he considered football an appropriately “modern” subject, relatively untreated and therefore untainted by tradition. Football, being a predominantly working-class game, also chimed well with his left-wing politics. But I think he chose it as a subject, above all, because the spectacle of the game seemed like such a wonderfully clear enactment of his ideas about the flux of life. The footballer constantly moves. His efforts and energies of one instant “persist on the retina” of the observer even as he changes direction, responds to the other players in the game, or adjusts to the motion of the ball. What he does within the limited space of the playing field can, at a big football match, visibly ripple out into the space of the crowd, transmitting his energies to others who transmit them again in their turn: a palpable demonstration of what Boccioni poetically called “the universal vibration”.