UMBERTO BOCCIONI - Biography
He spends childhood and youth in various Italian cities due to the repeated transfers of his father, a clerk of the prefecture.
In 1901 he was in Rome where he learned the profession of draftsman and illustrator by attending the studio of a painter of affiches. Giacomo Balla is his great teacher: it is Balla who introduces Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini, then young painters, to the Divisionist technique and the study of light.
In 1906 Boccioni is in Paris where he has the opportunity to study impressionist painting from real life and to get in direct contact with the lesson of Cézanne. During the Parisian years, Boccioni attended the cultured Russian lady Augusta Petrovna Popoff, wife of Berdnicoff. Host of the Berdnicoff couple, Boccioni embarks on a five-month trip to Russia. It is during this period that the artist performs the famous Portrait of Sophie Popoff.
In 1906 he returned to Italy, enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice.
In 1907 he made a short trip to Paris to see the exhibition The Italian Divisionist Painters in Paris. At the end of the same year he moved to Milan: here he studied closely the pictorial lesson of Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo and the work of Gaetano Previati.
In 1909 he was very impressed by the Manifesto of Futurism, published by Filippo Marinetti on 20 February 1090 in the Parisian newspaper "Figaro".
In 1909 he exhibited Portrait of Mrs. Virginia at the Permanente in Milan.
In February 1910 he visited the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti with his painter friends Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo. In the same year he signed the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, signed together with Balla, Russolo, Carrà and Severini, and drafted the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting.
On 16 July of the same year, Boccioni's first solo show opens in Venice in Ca 'Pesaro where the artist presents 42 works.
Since 1911 Boccioni joins the futurist movement and promotes all the initiatives, personally contributing with texts and interventions.
In 1911 he went to Paris with Carrà to organize the exhibition of futurist painters. It is during this trip that his friend Severini puts him in contact with Picasso and Apollinaire.
In 1912 he returned to Paris for the inauguration of the exhibition Les Peintres Futuristes Italines at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery. In April of the same year he published the technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture.
In 1914 he published the book Painting Futurist Sculpture in which he theorized some key concepts such as simultaneous vision, plastic dynamism, force lines, light shape.
In 1915, with the entry of Italy into the war, he enlisted in the Lombard Battalion Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists. He died in 1916 following a fall from a horse.
