The young Boccioni

There are numerous exhibitions that have investigated the figure and work of Umberto Boccioni in recent decades. Few, however, are those who have retraced the artist's youthful and formative phase with scientific rigor, in which the study of the past is linked to the unstoppable desire to know the present and experience the future. The exhibition Il Giovane Boccioni is dedicated to this period - full of suggestions - with which Galleria Bottegantica inaugurates the 2021 exhibition season.
Curated by Virginia Baradel, in collaboration with Ester Coen and Niccolò D'Agati, the exhibition offers an accurate selection of works executed by Boccioni between 1901 and 1909. Years in which the young Boccioni strengthens his artistic vocation through study experiences conducted in Rome, Padua, Venice and Milan, interspersed with the important stay in Paris in 1906 and the subsequent trip to Russia.
The influence of the different European figurative currents and the interest in the classical and Renaissance tradition emerge repeatedly in the works of the period and find, especially in the graphic production, a valid laboratory of experimental analysis, invention and stylistic verification that Boccioni conducts in parallel to painting. The sign, from time to time intertwined in a dense chiaroscuro network, either peremptory and deforming, or frayed and pulverized, accompanies the phases of Boccione's pictorial evolution: from the imprint of Giacomo Balla to the luminous dematerialization following the 'discovery' of the Divisionist works of Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati.
The exhibition dedicates particular interest to work on paper through a selection of drawings that cover the years of the apprenticeship of the young Boccioni. A first group of works with a scholastic imprint dating back to the period in which he was a pupil of Giacomo Balla and attended the schools of pictorial and nude drawing in Rome, is accompanied by another - more abundant and diversified - attributable to the years immediately following, in which the stroke acquires confidence in giving us precise architectural visions, curious portraits - some of which border on caricature - and human figures of extreme formal synthesis. Taken together, these sheets document an insistent and articulated internship, the aim of which is to acquire a mastery in the perspective rendering of the volumes, but also in the physiognomies and movements - studied or captured on the fly - of the human body in space: aspects common then to many artists of modernity. Museum copies also belong to this apprenticeship period.

Another aspect on which the exhibition focuses attention concerns the commercial tempera that Boccioni paints in recent years for mostly economic reasons, but which are nevertheless to be considered an important training ground in his path of artistic maturity and sounding of modernity, both for the issues addressed. as for the compositional and chromatic solutions adopted.
The eagerness to learn and to hone his artistic skills also characterizes the artist's Venetian period, during which he experiments - under the guidance of the painter Alessandro Zezzos - the engraving technique.
The exhibition path of the exhibition ends - as indeed the artist's formative one - with the transfer of Boccioni to Milan, in September 1907. The interest in the works of Giovanni Segantini and Gaetano Previati - admired a few months earlier at the Biennale of Venice and Paris in October - orient the young man towards the search for a style capable of reconciling positivist modernity with idealism, although economic problems force him to accept less qualified commissions in the field of illustration and poster design.
While aspiring to the sublimity of Previati, the contemporary pictorial production finds expression in small views of Lombard landscapes which nevertheless demonstrate an overcoming of the Impressionist plot still present in the canvases of the Venetian period. Definitely more experimental are the results carried out on the side of the portrait, where the brush becomes feverish in its urgency to restore the singularity of a face, an expression or a character on the canvas as in Portrait of a sculptor and in Il cavalier Tramello of 1907.

On display these themes are testified by valuable works starting with La madre malata (1908) and ending with La Madre from the Ricci Oddi collection. Others document the symbolist parenthesis of 1908-1910, which finds its most harrowing and esoteric outcome in Il mourning. Equally interesting are the sketches for the manifesto of the exhibition of painting and sculpture promoted by the Artistic Family in Brunate (May-June 1909): a perfect synthesis of the various stylistic figures acquired up to now by Boccioni, from Divisionism, to the broad and synthetic brushstroke of matrix post-impressionist, to Symbolism.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalog, published by Bottegantica edizioni, with contributions by Virginia Baradel, Ester Coen and Niccolò D’Agati, a register of drawings and tempera by Niccolò D’Agati.