Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni was an Italian painter, sculptor and theorist born October 19, 1882, in Reggio di Calabria, and killed August 16, 1916, near Verona, after falling from a horse during military training in the First World War. He became the leading artist-theorist of Futurism, co-signing the movement's founding manifestos and, in 1912, publishing his own Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, which called for sculpture to abandon static, closed forms and represent bodies dissolving into their surrounding space and motion. His bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913, depicting a striding figure whose momentum seems to fuse with the air around it, is considered one of the masterpieces of early twentieth century sculpture and the clearest realization of Futurist dynamism in three dimensions.