DYNAMISM OF A SOCCER PLAYER
UMBERTO BOCCIONI, 1913
Okay. Somewhere in here there's a soccer player. Good luck with that one! Six and a half feet of orange and blue going off like a grenade, and a guy who's been more or less deleted by his own speed. These are the Futurists. Italy, around 1913, completely high on the future. Engines, speed, machines, anything loud and new and fast. And they hated the past so much they wanted the museums burned down. Called them cemeteries. Boccioni was their big painter, and the whole point was to kill the one thing painting always did. Hold a body still so you can look at it. He wanted the opposite. Make it move. Make it come apart. They had other plans too. Figured a good war would scrub the world clean and start it fresh. So when the real one showed up, they signed up thrilled. Here's how that goes for the painter of pure speed. He's thirty-three, in training, and he falls off a horse. Not the war. A horse. The fastest mind in Italy, taken out by the slowest thing in the army. And yeah, some of this future-worship runs straight into Fascism later. So no, you don't get to call it innocent. But the painting still works. That's the uncomfortable part. The player's still in there. Still moving. The one thing in the whole building that won't hold still. Which is exactly what they wanted. They just didn't picture the wall. White paint, a guard a few feet off, a little label with his name. One of the cemeteries they swore they'd burn. Permanent collection now.