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The City Rises
Umberto Boccioni · Early Modern (Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism)
- Artist
- Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916)
- Date
- 1910
- Dimensions
- 199.3 x 301 cm
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Location
- Museum of Modern Art, New York, United States
The City Rises shows a huge red horse charging through the foreground, its body blurred with speed, while workers strain to hold it back. Behind them, scaffolding and new buildings rise on the outskirts of a modern city, half dissolved in a whirl of light and colour.
A closer look
Boccioni was a leader of Futurism, the Italian movement that celebrated speed, machines, industry and the energy of the modern city. Here the horse, symbol of raw power, merges with the men's bodies in a storm of curving brushstrokes, so that we can hardly tell where one figure ends and another begins. The scene represents the construction of a new industrial suburb of Milan, but its real subject is dynamic force itself. Boccioni described it as a 'great synthesis of labour, light and movement'.