"The City Rises" Umberto Boccioni

Elizabeth Gagne

ENG 436.01

In  1911, Umberto Boccioni created a piece called “The City Rises”. This painting involves a strange mixture of abstraction and what could possibly be realism. The image shows several realistic looking men that seem to be fighting strange horse-like creatures. There are also the lower sections of several skyscrapers in the background that show the reflection of cars lined up along the edges of the street. Judging from the title, I am going to guess that the men in the painting are actually supposed to be working on a building in a modern city and that the “horses” might represent the animalistic nature that the men are trying to control. There seems to be a fight not only between the men and the horses that they are struggling with, but also between the movement and stillness in the image. The skyscrapers and other background buildings and reflections are stationary while the struggle is drawn in a way that shows movement, even in this two dimensional picture.

This painting could be looked at as and called many different forms such as modernism, vorticism, cubism, and futurism. Being the broadest describer of this image, modernism is the word used to describe paintings which emerged sometime in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries in many Western cultures. The art style was shaped by the creation of modern cities and the industrial period which brought about this movement toward ideas about new social and economical views, as well as turning away from outdated Enlightenment ideas and ways of writing and drawing.

Cubism and Futurism are both modernist forms which involve the depiction of images which look as if they are in motion. Cubism, which was developed somewhere in France around the beginning of the twentieth century, shows drawings and images of objects from many different views or positions to indicate the significance of the object in the picture. Futurism, however, although having emerged from Italy around the same time period, was all about speed and the advancements that were being made in technology at the time. It was also involved in youth and violence that went along with said advancements as well as, again, motion. This style took the idea of drawing multiple perspectives or views of the object from Cubism, but changed it to involve the depicting of motion more that the significance of the object.The way they did this was that they draw several images of the same object as it would have been seen at several different moments in time.

The style that I believe best describes Boccioni’s painting is Vorticism. This style, created by Pound, Lewis, and a group of other “artistic radicals” in the early 1910-20 period, “emphasized motion and imitated the violent rhetoric and brash modernity of cubism and futurism (from which they strove mightily to distinguish themselves)” (Lewis 85). It is written about by Lewis as involving “patterns of lines, arcs, and other geometric shapes . . . [that] often suggested the rapid movement of bodies or machines” (85). This form does not seem to be as well known as many of the others, but I believe that it represents and helps a person to understand the struggle in “The City Rises” more accurately than any of the other styles mention by Lewis or Macleod.

In conversation with Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness,” one could compare the wildness of the animalistic urges of the horses with the natives that Marlow and his white crewmen encounter when they finally reached Mr Kurtz at his station. In this manner, a person could also compare the men who are trying to control these metaphorical horses to those men who are not natives or black crewmen, such as Marlow. The native people and those non-white “workers” in “Heart of Darkness” are portrayed as not intelligent, not as civilized, and simply not people who would be welcome in European society. In this way, “The City Rises” shows what seem to be wild horses in the middle of a busy city street. This is how white men believe Native Americans and African American people would act in their communities if they were not enslaved and “broken", so to say, which is presumably what the men in the painting were trying to do with the horses.