(Reggio Calabria 1882–1916 Sorte (VR))
Calesse e auto in corsa, c. 1904, signed: U. Boccioni, tempera on paper, 52 x 81 cm (the paper 60 x 100 cm), framed

We are grateful to Mrs. Esther Coen, who has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work

Provenance:
Private Collection, Italy

Exhibited:
(Travelling exhibition) Auto d’Autore, Maranello, Galleria Ferrari and Rome, Galleria Biasucci 1995, cat. p. 9 with ill.
Serra de’Conti, Maestri del XX secolo, 1997, cat. p. 28 with ill.
Chieti, Il Futurismo e la sua eredità, Museo Barbella, 2002, exh. cat. p. 28 with ill.
Frascati, Oltrepassare la Pace, Scuderie Aldobrandini, October 2003, exh. cat. p. 14 with ill.
Maestri Italiani del XX secolo (travelling exhibition), Serra de’Conti, Chiostro di San Francesco, 2003, exh. cat. p. 48-Pordenone, Galleria Sagittaria, 2004, exh. cat. p.48-Umbertide, Rocca di Umbertide, 2008, exh. cat. p. 30 L’Aquila, Dal Futurismo al Contemporaneo, Convento di San Francesco, 2009, exh. cat. p. 16

Comparative Literature:
G. Ballo, Boccioni, la vita e l’opera (Maestri del Colore), Il Saggiatore, Milan 1964
M. Fagiolo dell’Arco, Boccioni, in Bolaffi Arte, n. 14, 1971
A. M. Damigella, Modernismo, Simbolismo, Divisionismo, cat. of the exhibition. “Aspetti dell’Arte a Roma dal 1870 al 1914”,
Ente Premi Roma, 1972
M. Calvesi, Umberto Boccioni incisioni e disegni, Florence, 1973
M. Calvesi/E. Coen, Boccioni. L’opera completa, Electa (ed.), Milan 1983
E. Coen, Umberto Boccioni, cat. of the exh. at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1988/1989

The aspiring artist’s contact with the world of commercial art came very early. Severini and other sources indicate that the youth, arriving in Rome at the turn of the century, took drawing lessons from a painter named Mataloni who specialised in publicity posters.
By 1904 the creation of such works constituted the young man’s sole source of income. True to his personality, Boccioni caught something more in his assigned subjects than his employers may have been looking for, studying all the possibilities wherever they were to be found. He was a frequent visitor of the racetracks, where he made quick sketches of the jockeys (…..). In a letter to his mother and sister, written from Paris (April 17 1906), the youthful explorer of a vast and still unknown world wrote about how, in taking off for France, he felt freed from a great weight, the heaviest part of his burden being his work as a poster painter : “(…)For two years now I no longer study because of those cursed posters…..”
Though he resented the time taken away from more serious work, the years of having to “think big” in designing advertisements deepened his capacity to organise the space of a composition and encouraged him to seek out ever more daring perspectives and angles(…..).
This illustration and the others for the Automobile Club, presumably completed around 1904, are of considerable interest. They contain a series of motifs Boccioni would develop later and are extraordinary evidence of how early his imagination was caught by what, in mature years, he would think of as “dynamism”. The subject imposed by the sponsor was “le derniere ecri” at the moment (also a key topic for Futurism): the automobile, representing the New against the Old.
The machine is represented in movement: whirlpools of arrow signs that sweep around the wheels to give the impression the tyres are revolving
rapidly. The well-defined outlines of figures and objects seem to leap out from a uniform background.
Boccioni would return to the theme of the automobile in a drawing for the cover of the weekly “Avanti della Domenica” (Rome 12/11/1905). There, a detail of the vehicle is isolated and the diagonal composition is exploited to convey the impression of motion even more effectively and intensely