Woman at the Cafe

Hidden inside this dizzying tangle of shapes is a café scene, if you know where to search. A bottle stands near a glass, and somewhere in the mix sits a woman, though Umberto Boccioni was far more interested in the mood of the place than in painting her clearly. Working around 1914, he was a driving force behind Futurism, an Italian movement wild about speed, machines, and the electric energy of the modern city. Rather than freezing the room in a tidy portrait, he shattered it into jagged fragments, trying to bottle the sensation of sitting inside a loud, crowded space.

Blues flood nearly every corner of the canvas, sliced open by sudden bursts of red, green, and gold that clash and hum against one another. For Boccioni, this was proof that nothing ever really sits still, that sound and light and motion are constantly spilling together. His story ended far too soon, though. In 1916 he died at just 33 during a military training accident, thrown from a horse. Paintings like this hint at the strange and thrilling directions his mind might have taken had he lived longer.