Umberto Boccioni Quotes

There is neither painting, nor sculpture, nor music, nor poetry. The only truth is creation.

We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles that surround us.

A portrait, to be a work of art, neither must nor may resemble the sitter... one must paint its atmosphere.

A time will come when the eye of man will perceive colors as feelings within itself.

To paint a human figure you must not paint it; you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere.

Art is viable when it finds elements in the surrounding environment. Our ancestors drew their subject matter from the religious attitudes which weighed on their souls. We must now learn to draw inspiration from the tangible miracles around us.

The time has passed for our sensations in painting to be whispered. We wish them in the future to sing and re-echo upon our canvasses in deafening and triumphant flourishes.

While the impressionists make a table to give one particular moment and subordinate the life of the table to its resemblance to this moment, we synthesize every moment (time, place, form, color-tone) and thus build the table.

All art critics are useless or harmful.

To the Young Artists of Italy! The cry of rebellion that we launch, linking our ideals with those of the Futurist poets, does not originate in an aesthetic clique. It expresses the violent desire that stirs in the veins of every creative artist today.

These days I am obsessed by sculpture! I believe I have glimpsed a complete renovation of that mummified art.

If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaughts of cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces, following the general laws of violence of the picture... These force-lines must encircle and involve the spectator so that he will in a manner be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture.

Our bodies penetrate the sofas upon which we sit and the sofas penetrate our bodies. The motorbus rushes into the houses which it passes, and in their turn the houses throw themselves upon the bus and are blended with it.

In the first manifesto that we launched on the 8th of March, 1910, from the stage of the Chiarella Theater in Turin,1 we expressed our deep-rooted disgust with, our proud contempt for, and our happy rebellion against vulgarity, mediocrity, the fanatical and snobbish worship of all that is old, attitudes which are suffocating Art in our Country.

Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... ...Divisionism, for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.

It isnecessary to destroy the pretended nobility, entirely literaryand traditional, of marble and bronze? The sculptor can use twenty different materials, or even more, in a single work, provided that the plastic emotion requires it.

It will be readily admitted that brown tints have never coursed beneath our skin; it will be discovered that yellow shines forth in our flesh, that red blazes, and that green, blue and violet dance upon it with untold charms, voluptuous and caressing.