The Street Enters the House (La Strada Entra Nella Casa) is an oil on canvas painting by Italian artist Umberto Boccioni. Painted in the Futurist style, the work centres around a woman on a balcony in front of a busy street, with the sounds of the activity below portrayed as a riot of shapes and colours. The first public display of The Street Enters the House was in Paris in 1912, and it is now housed in the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany.

Background

Prior to 1910, works by the Futurist movement, of which Boccioni was a central figure,[1] had primarily focused on depicting emotion and multiple states of mind in a somewhat Neoimpressionistic style (see Severini's The Black Cat or The Obsessive Dancer, for example.)[2] However, after listening to second-hand descriptions of new works by Cubist artists such as Picasso and Braque, Boccioni and his compatriots began adopting their technique of using angular lines and planes to capture multiple viewpoints in a two-dimensional image.[3] At the same time, the movement shifted their attention from depiction of internal stimuli to external sensory information such as sound and smell.[4]

Boccioni, who only a year earlier had coauthored the Manifesto of the Futurist Painters with Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carra,[5] began a series of works based on modern urbanism. The first, The City Rises, described the construction of a new city, and the sights and sounds one would see of men and horses at work. Boccioni described it as a "great synthesis of labour, light, and movement."[6] Later works included The Forces of the Street, The Street Enters the House, Simultaneity of Vision, and Street-pavers and A Study of a Woman Among Buildings.[4]

Composition and interpretation

The central figure, viewed from behind and above, is a woman dressed in blue and white. From a balcony, she is overlooking a busy street scene, described in a riot of colours, lines, and angles. On the road in front of the woman, workers lift poles to form the walls of a new building, a pile of bricks surrounding them. On every side of this construction, white and blue houses lean into the street. From the balconies of two of these, we see a pair of other figures peering down into the road. A line of horses flies past the foreground.

The identity of the woman in The Street Enters the House is the subject of some debate. While several scholars think her anonymous, Boccioni had a history of employing the women of his family as models.[3] This has led some to the conclusion that the figure is Boccioni's mother, and use the depiction in The Street Enters the House as evidence of Boccioni's changing view of women in general and mothers in particular.[7][8]

The painting in general showcases Boccioni's evolution from a Neoimpressionist style to one more aligned with the ideals of Cubism, and his increasing fascination with scientific terminology. In his catalogue description for The Street Enters the House, Boccioni stated: "The principles of Roentgen rays is applied to the work, allowing the personages to be studied from all sides, objects both at the front and the back are in the painter's memory."[9] With the use of Cubist techniques, Boccioni keeps all elements in both the foreground and background "rushing into the window at the same time"[9] He also weaves in references to his earlier works. See for example, the visual pun of the horse's appearance on the woman's buttock when compared with a line from his earlier Manifesto: "How often have we seen upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking the horse which passes at the end of the street."[9]

Provenance

The Street Enters The House was completed after Boccioni's return from Paris in November 1911. Its first public display was at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris as part of the first Futurist exhibition. The exhibition featured works by Boccioni, Carra, and Severini, among others. It remained at Bernheim-Jeune from 5 to 24 February 1912, before moving on to Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery in Berlin, and finally to the Sackville Gallery in London. The painting, along with several others, was purchased by Albert Borchardt in 1913, who later donated it to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany.[10] It remains there to this day.

References

   1. ^ Clough, Rosa Trillo; Futurism: The Story of a Modern Art Movement, Greenwood Press (1961). pp. 22-23. ISBN 0837121663
   2. ^ Clough, Rosa Trillo; Futurism: The Story of a Modern Art Movement, Greenwood Press (1961). pp. 68-70. ISBN 0837121663
   3. ^ a b Glueck, Grace; "On a Trip Back to Futurism, Women and Settings Merge", The New York Times, 3 July 1998. Retrieved 12 October 2010.
   4. ^ a b Rye, Jane; Futurism, Studio Vista (1972). pp. 46-48. ISBN 0289701058
   5. ^ Humphreys, Richard; Futurism, Cambridge University Press, 1999. p. 19-20. ISBN 0521646111
   6. ^ Lista, Giovanni; Futurism, Terrail (2001). p. 50. ISBN 2879392349
   7. ^ Poggi, Christine; Inventing futurism: the art and politics of artificial optimism, Princeton University Press (2009). pp. 165-169 ISBN 9780691133706
   8. ^ Antliff, Mark; "The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space", The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 730-731.
   9. ^ a b c Tisdall, Caroline; Bozzolla, Angelo; Futurism, Thames and Hudson (1977). pp. 42-43.
  10. ^ (German) Hanno Ehrlicher: Die Kunst der Zerstörung: Gewaltphantasien und Manifestationspraktiken europäischer Avantgarden. Akademie Verlag (2001), pp. 118–119. ISBN 305003646X

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