Brief Biography-Umberto Boccioni was born the son of an Italian Government official who travelled extensively. He spent his early years moving from city to city until finishing his education in Sicily at fifteen. In 1898, he moved to Rome to study art with a commercial artist and was not disposed to formal instruction.
In 1901, he met the Divisionist painter Giacomo Balla; he studied with Balla and Gino Severini, who became his good friend. In 1906, he went to Paris for a short spell, where he earned a meagre living from doing illustrations. A year later, he moved to Milan to live with his mother and sister. He was firmly attached to his mother and stayed there for eight years. Up to 1907, he was unsure what style he was developing in his art, but Boccioni knew he wanted to paint the new industrial age.
In 1909, everything changed when he encountered the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who launched The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, an attack on the establishment. With Marinetti and two other artists, Luigi Russolo and Carlo Carra, Boccioni drew up the Manifesto of Futurist Painters. Shortly afterwards painted his first actual futurist painting, Riot in the Galleria.
Futurism took off in Milan while, at the same time, Cubism was emerging in Paris. Boccioni and Carra went to Paris to study Picasso and subsequently merged Cubism into their work. In 1912, they had a successful exhibition in Paris despite considerable criticism; futurism was unpopular in Paris. Nevertheless, it travelled to several European Capitals after Paris.
Boccioni took up sculpturing the following year, culminating in his most famous work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which many of us in Europe today carry in our pockets on the Italian 20-cent coin. Boccioni felt tempestuous about Italy not being part of the war when it broke out, and when Italy became involved, he joined up with enthusiasm. But unfortunately, his content spell in the army was short-lived, he had a fatal horse-riding accident in 1916, and the war ended the Futurist movement.