Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio

"Forme uniche della continuità nello spazio" would be one of eleven "plastic entities" presented by Umberto Boccioni in the Parisian exhibition organised by Gallerie Boëtie, between June and July of 1913. Chronologically speaking it is the last sculptural work by the artist and also the "most free," as himself wrote in a letter dated the 4th of September 1013 to Giuseppe Sprovieri. After Rome (December 1913), Florence (March-April 1914) and London (April 1914), the gesso version wuold be exhibited at the Galleria Centrale d'Arte in Milan (December 1916 - January 1917), in the months immediately preceding Boccioni's premature death. It did not result among the sculptures left in the studio of the fellow artist Pietro da Verona, after the Milanese exhibition, and it is plausible that the gesso model of "Forme uniche" was already in the hands of the Futurist painter Fedele Azari who, in 1928, would cede it to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. The sculpture reappeared to the public on May of 1933, during the great exhibition dedicated to the artist at Castello Sforzesco in Milan. For this occasion, Marinetti conceded the polished dark bronze realised at the Chiaruzzi foundry in 1931 (by the Master Luigi Ciampaglia), with the declared expectation that the Municipal Administration Would buy it, reimbursing him only for the cist of the casting (8000 Lire). As well as this bronze copy of "Forme Uniche", which entered the Milanese collection in February 1934 and was exhibited at the pivotal exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art" of 1936 in New York., Marinetti certainly commissioned the same foundry with a second cast of the sculpture, this time in polished brass: This second cast would be acquired by the Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1948 with funds taken from the bequest of Lille P. Bliss. Before the original gesso was sold to Francesco Matarazzo Sobrinho (1952), who would subswquenttly donate it to the Museu de Arte of Sao Paulo in Brazil (1963), Benedetta Marinetti commissioned two more bronze versions from Giovanni and Angelo Nicci of Rome (1949), which in turn ere bought by the Winston couple from New York and by Paolo Marinotti of Milan (1956). Following this example, the Galleria La Medusa of Rome, in agreement with the collector, had eight further copies made (1972). The last noted pieces in the complex puzzle that surrounds "Forme uniche", of which there number six or sever versions executed in different periods, is the casting of 1972 for the collection of the Tate Gallery in London, authorised by the Museo di Sao Paulo, which besides the original gesso, also owns a bronze cast of the sculptures. Praised by Roberto Longhi in his essay "Scultura futurista-Boccioni" of 1914, "Forme uniche" has always been considered the most successfully realised work of Boccioni's sculptural oeuvre, that work in which his theories on plastic dynamism were interpreted with a masterly capacity for synthesis and equilibrium. The sequence of the four sculptures in which the artist would confront the theme of the "relative movement" of a human body in space ("Muscoli in velocità", "Sintesi del dinamismo umano", "Espansione spiralica di muscoli in movimento" and "Forme uniche") shows a progressive distancing from naturalistic description and cinematic reproduction of movement in favour of a larger degree of abstraction: the still decorative nature of the first two, realised according to the pictorial solutions found in "Elasticità" (1912), gave way to an increasingly pronunced volumetric synthesis in the latter two works, a theory best realised in "Forme uniche". Eliminating all elements of the spatial environment surrounding the figure, Boccioni sought to translate the concepts expounded in the article "Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futurista" in sculptural terms. This article, published in the journal "Lacerba" in March 1913, maintened that it was necessary to substitute "defined shapes" with a "continuity" of the medium. In the elaboration of his notions on dynamism and in his choice to return to the male nude in order to translate them sculpturally, it is thought that the theories of Auguste Rodin could, to a degree, have played a part. These theories had been published in 1911 by Paul Gsell in the volume "L'Art", and indicated his "L'Homme qui marche" - then on display in a monumental version in Rome - as a good example of motion rendered through a synthesis of different movements. On the other hand, Boccioni also owned, and had done so far a few years, the volumes entitled "Human Figure in Motion" and "Animal in Motion" by Eadweard Muybridge, whose illustrative plates depicting athletes and nude male figures sequentially photographed during a series of movements, would be closely studied by the artist. [Massimo De Sabbata]