''The Street Enters the House'' (''La Strada Entra Nella Casa'') is an
oil on canvas
Oil painting is the process of painting with pigments with a medium of drying oil as the binder. It has been the most common technique for artistic painting on wood panel or canvas for several centuries, spreading from Europe to the rest o ...
painting by Italian artist
Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni (, ; 19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916) was an influential Italian painter and sculptor. He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures. Despite his short life, his approach ...
. Painted in the
Futurist
Futurists (also known as futurologists, prospectivists, foresight practitioners and horizon scanners) are people whose specialty or interest is futurology or the attempt to systematically explore predictions and possibilities abo ...
style, the work centres on a woman on a balcony in front of a busy street, with the sounds of the activity below portrayed as a riot of shapes and colours.
The first public display of the painting was in
Paris
Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, most populous city of France, with an estimated population of 2,165,423 residents in 2019 in an area of more than 105 km² (41 sq mi), ma ...
, in 1912, as part of the first Futurist exhibition. It is now housed in the
Sprengel Museum
Sprengel Museum is a museum of modern art in Hanover, Lower Saxony, holding one of the most significant collections of modern art in Germany. It is located in a building situated adjacent to the Masch Lake (german: Maschsee) approximately south ...
in
Hanover, Germany
Hanover (; german: Hannover ; nds, Hannober) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Lower Saxony. Its 535,932 (2021) inhabitants make it the 13th-largest city in Germany as well as the fourth-largest city in Northern Germany ...
.
Background
Boccioni was one of the founding members of the Futurist movement. Until 1910, the group concentrated primarily on capturing "emotion and multiple states of mind" using techniques derived from
Neoimpressionism style (for example,
Severini's ''
The Black Cat'' or ''
The Obsessive Dancer''). After hearing second-hand reports of the innovations of
Picasso and
Braque, Boccioni and his compatriots adapted their technique to match, incorporating angular lines and intersecting planes as a way of capturing multiple viewpoints in a two-dimensional image.
[Glueck, Grace;]
On a Trip Back to Futurism, Women and Settings Merge
, ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
'', 3 July 1998. Retrieved 12 October 2010. While this was going on, there was a corresponding shift in ''what'' the group was attempting to capture as well. They began to focus more heavily on the physical and the external rather than the emotional and internal.
[Rye, Jane; ''Futurism'', ]Studio Vista
Studio Vista was a British publishing company founded in 1961 that specialised in leisure and design topics. In the 1960s, the firm published works by a number of authors that went on to be noted designers.
History
Studio Vista was founded by Cec ...
(1972). pp. 46-48.
In 1910, Boccioni began a series of works based on modern urbanism. The first, ''
The City Rises
''The City Rises'' (''La città che sale'') (1910) is a painting by the Italian painter Umberto Boccioni. It was his first major Futurist work.
Background
The original title of the painting was ''Il lavoro'' (''Work''), as it appeared at the '' ...
'', described the construction of a new city and the sights and sounds of men and horses at work. He described it as a "great synthesis of labour, light, and movement." His later works, such as ''
The Forces of the Street'', ''The Street Enters the House'', ''
Simultaneity of Vision'', and ''
Street-pavers'' and ''
A Study of a Woman Among Buildings
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes' ...
''were elaborations on the same theme.
Composition and interpretation
The central figure of ''The Street Enters the House ''is a woman dressed in blue and white, viewed from behind and above. She looks over her balcony at a busy street scene, a riot of colours, lines, and angles. On the road in front of her, workers lift poles to form the walls of a new building, surrounded by a pile of bricks. On every side of this construction, white and blue houses lean into the street. Two of the balconies are occupied by other figures peering down into the road. A line of horses flies past the foreground.
The identity of the woman in ''The Street Enters the House'' is the subject of some debate. While several scholars postulate that she was an entirely imagined character, Boccioni had a history of employing the women of his family as models.
This has led some to the conclusion that the figure is Boccioni's mother, and use the depiction in ''The Street Enters the House'' as evidence of Boccioni's changing view of women in general and mothers in particular.
The painting in general showcases Boccioni's evolution from a Neoimpressionist style to one more aligned with the ideals of
Cubism, and the catalog description for the piece demonstrates his increasing fascination with scientific terminology. It includes lines such as "The principles of
Roentgen rays
An X-ray, or, much less commonly, X-radiation, is a penetrating form of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Most X-rays have a wavelength ranging from 10 picometers to 10 nanometers, corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 ...
is applied to the work, allowing the personages to be studied from all sides, objects both at the front and the back are in the painter's memory."
[Tisdall, Caroline; Bozzolla, Angelo; ''Futurism'', ]Thames and Hudson
Thames & Hudson (sometimes T&H for brevity) is a publisher of illustrated books in all visually creative categories: art, architecture, design, photography, fashion, film, and the performing arts. It also publishes books on archaeology, history, ...
(1977). pp. 42-43. Boccioni experiments with Cubist techniques as a way of keeping elements in both the foreground and background "rushing into the window at the same time"
He also weaves in references to his earlier works. See for example, the visual pun of the horse's appearance on the woman's buttock when compared with a line from his earlier Manifesto: "How often have we seen upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking the horse which passes at the end of the street."
Provenance
''The Street Enters The House'' was completed after Boccioni's return from Paris in November 1911. Its first public display was at the
Bernheim-Jeune
Bernheim-Jeune gallery is one of the oldest art galleries in Paris.
Opened on Rue Laffitte in 1863 by Alexandre Bernheim (1839-1915), friend of Delacroix, Corot and Courbet, it changed location a few times before settling on Avenue Matignon. Th ...
gallery in Paris as part of the first Futurist exhibition. The exhibition featured works by Boccioni,
Carrà, and Severini, among others. It remained at Bernheim-Jeune from 5 to 24 February 1912, before moving on to
Herwarth Walden
Herwarth Walden (actual name Georg Lewin; 16 September 1879, in Berlin – 31 October 1941, in Saratov, Russia) was a German expressionist artist and art expert in many disciplines. He is broadly acknowledged as one of the most important discove ...
's
Sturm Gallery in Berlin, and finally to the
Sackville Gallery
The Sackville Gallery was an art gallery at 28 Sackville Street, London, Sackville Street, London, best known for hosting the exhibition of Futurism, Futurist art in 1912.
The gallery opened in May 1908.Pezzini, Barbara"London: an avant-garde sh ...
in London. The painting, along with several others, was purchased by
Albert Borchardt in 1913, who later donated it to the
Sprengel Museum
Sprengel Museum is a museum of modern art in Hanover, Lower Saxony, holding one of the most significant collections of modern art in Germany. It is located in a building situated adjacent to the Masch Lake (german: Maschsee) approximately south ...
in Hanover, Germany,
[(''German'') Hanno Ehrlicher: ''Die Kunst der Zerstörung: Gewaltphantasien und Manifestationspraktiken europäischer Avantgarden''. ]Akademie Verlag
:''There also were unrelated publishing houses in Stuttgart and in (East-)Berlin, and there is the (JAVG).''
Akademie Verlag (AV) is a German scientific and academic publishing company, founded in 1946 in the Soviet-occupied eastern part ...
(2001), pp. 118–119. where it remains.
References
External links
''Umberto Boccioni'' a full text exhibition catalog from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which contains material on this work
{{DEFAULTSORT:Street Enters the House
Paintings by Umberto Boccioni
Futurist paintings
1911 paintings
Paintings in Hanover