“Picasso/Boccioni in perspective”

PICASSO/BOCCIONI IN PERSPECTIVE Maria Elena Versari • Colloque Picasso Sculptures • 25 mars 2016 W e are still not sure what compelled Boccioni to write the Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture follow- ing the succès de scandale of the Futurist Exhibition of Painting, held in Paris in February 1912. More than the The manifesto and its reverberation in the press cata- direct inluence of one artist or another, I am inclined lyzed the activity of some artists working in Paris to believe that the conception and subsequent launch at that time. In his text, Boccioni had called for the of the Manifesto was Boccioni’s and Marinetti’s tactical use of different materials and even hypothesized response to the climate of expectations created by crit- the insertion of mechanical devices to impart move- ics and the press around modern sculpture, and Picas- ment to sculpture.3 A year later, his exhibited works so’s sculpture in particular. will not include any example of “mobile” sculptures. In January 1912, André Salmon, for example, had writ- Still, some time after the manifesto’s publication, ten in Paris-Journal : “Modern Sculpture : the painter Archipenko conceived and probably started working Picasso, without in any way throwing away his brushes, on the irst version of Medrano, described as the irst is undoubtedly going to execute some important sculp- mobile sculptural assemblage. In a handwritten note One year later, Boccioni’s Manifesto of found in his scrapbooks, Archipenko dated Medrano I Futurist Sculpture had radically altered the expecta- to the fall of 1912.4 He repeatedly insisted on this tions surrounding modern sculpture — this in spite of date, and on the fact that 1912 marked a decisive turn the fact that its author had yet to exhibit any actual in his production. It was the moment when he started works derived from his theories. We can see it from the using a plurality of nontraditional materials in his note that André Warnod published in Comoedia in Feb- sculpture.5 Archipenko’s retrospective self-narrative ruary 1913, which reads : “This summer an exhibition demonstrates the extent to which Boccioni’s mani- will open, which will make people talk. It is a show of festo acted as a conceptual watershed for the deini- sculptures conceived along the theories expressed in a tion of modern sculpture. In those same months of recent manifesto. These statues will be articulated and 1912, Picasso drew several studies for constructions. mobile ; they will be activated by an engine installed for Toward the end of the year, probably mulling over this speciic purpose.” Braque’s paper maquettes and busy with a newfound tural works.” 1 2 One of the most dificult, but more interesting chal- interest in papier collés, he created his Guitar, made of lenges for the study of modern sculpture is keeping paper, strings, and wires.6 Soon after, in 1913, he also track of the game of anticipations and delayed, or even made one of the irst examples of kinetic sculpture. indirect and misguided, inluences. It is an analysis that The work, now destroyed, was conceived as a rudi- takes into consideration the distance between theoriza- mentary propeller : a thin wooden arm was mounted tion and realization, words and works, and the fact that on a central pin and attached with a hook to the top of each of the two might produce very different results. the structure. When unfastened, the arm would swing down, with a rotating movement.7 Right at the beginning of 1912, that is four days after André Salmon announced Picasso’s imminent involve- Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 1 Several of the works that he conceived and created between the fall of 1912 and the spring of 1913 and exhibited in Paris in 1913 exploited the material quality of plaster to achieve these goals. Plaster ment — or better re-involvement — in sculpture, allowed for the insertion of real objects such as a Ambroise Vollard sold the second bronze cast of Head of window, wig, glass eye, and a piece of railing in the a Woman to Alfred Stieglitz. Maybe it was the sale of sculptural mass. It allowed itself to be colored, stip- the bronze that spurred Picasso to return to sculpture. pled and textured ; to be inscribed over with words ; Indeed the contract he signed with Daniel-Henry Kahn- and, through the process of casting, it even allowed weiler in December of the same year explicitly mentions for an alternative view of the same work, colored or the possibility of providing the dealer with new sculp- left white.16 As Apollinaire remarked shortly after the tures, which was to be expected, given the fact that the exhibition’s opening, the fragility of plaster decreased 9 artist had already successfully worked in that medium. the sculptures’ chances for survival. He even advised Picasso’s Head of a Woman must have allowed Boccioni Boccioni to cast some of them “in bronze” in order to to visualize the three-dimensional materialization of ensure their continued existence — a suggestion that some of Picasso’s early formal exercises in painting, amounted to a tacit dismissal of the artist’s rejection of when, after publishing the manifesto, he started to traditional materials in favor of colored surfaces and transfer what had been the subject of so many his real objects.17 The tepid reception of his assemblages paintings into sculpture. The inluence of Picasso’s in Paris pushed Boccioni to reconsider his original work is evident in the portraits of his mother that Boc- attitude toward the use of diverse materials. Writing cioni realized in this period across a wide variety of to Sofici at the time, he stated : “This had given me In other terms, in 1912, doubts that I still haven’t solved. What do you think ? Picasso’s Cubist head had a more considerable impact Has everything that relies too much on materiality on Boccioni’s painting and on his irst, hands-on exper- been extinguished in human sensibility ? 18 iments with sculpture than on his theorization of the The creation of plaster sculptures also allowed Boc- 8 10 materials and techniques. innovations necessary for this medium. cioni to relect once again on the relation between In the Manifesto, Boccioni had called for the use of perception and form, an issue that had progressively a plurality of materials, such as “transparent planes, distanced him from Cubism. It is through sculpture glass, [celluloid], sheets of metal, wires, external or that he became even more critical of Picasso’s ana- 12 He had theorized the use lytical style. Working three-dimensionally, Boccioni of color to “increase the emotive force of the planes.” struggled with the question of the gaze, and of how And he had rejected the idea of the statue as an iso- to transform the interaction between object and lated idol that “carves itself out of and delineates itself background from a two-dimensional depiction to a 11 internal electrical lights.” 13 against the atmospheric background.” 14 Instead, he proclaimed, “Let’s open up the igure and enclose the environment within it.” 15 Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 2 three-dimensional construction. This is evident in the solutions that he found for the problem in Antigrazioso (1912 – 13) and Head + House + Light (1912 – 13). These two works present a motif that Boccioni This wire marks an important shift in Boccioni’s atti- had already addressed in his paintings. They show a tude toward sculpture and vision. While the intro- frontal view of Boccioni’s mother sitting at the bal- ductory text that he published in the catalogue of his cony, facing the interior, her back turned to the urban 1913 sculpture exhibition presents multi-materiality landscape visible over her shoulders. Head and house and linear dynamism as two co-existing, equally valid form a single mass, a continuum. Similarly, in Fusion procedures (and he could not do otherwise, lest he of a Head and a Window (1912 – 13) (ig. 1), the frame repudiate his manifesto), the manuscript of this same of a real window is mounted on the plaster mass of text shows that Boccioni had arrived at the second a woman’s head. The assemblage is dotted with the solution after struggling with the irst. In the man- insertion of other real objects : part of a windowpane, uscript, in fact, he had written : “I thought that by a wig, a glass eye. It was in this way that Boccioni irst decomposing this [material] unity into several mate- tried to achieve the goal, outlined in the Manifesto, of rials… we could have already obtained a dynamic fusing the object and its environment.19 element. But through the process of working I realized that the problem of dynamism in sculpture is not In Fusion of a Head and a Window, however, we ind an contained in the diversity of materials but primarily in important metaphorical as well as literal deviation from the interpretation of form… We have therefore a more this route. A rare photograph of Alexandre Mercereau abstracted sculpture in which the spectator constructs posing next to Boccioni’s sculpture allows us to see a in his mind the forms that the sculptor suggests.” side-view of the sculpture.20 (ig. 2) The artist fashioned And probably relecting on his own experiments with the proile of his mother with one single, metal wire, the wire outline, Boccioni also wrote : “The sculptural thus exploiting the traditional procedure of construct- ensemble becomes a volumetric space by offering the ing a plaster sculpture with an armature. This wire sense of depth from any proile, and not several ixed, should not be read simply as one of the new material immobile proiles, in silhouette.” 22 additions designated by the Manifesto in order to ren- The solution of the wire was therefore a transitional ovate sculpture. Thinly jutting out into space, it has no step toward the conceptualization of the linear dyna- real structural function and is almost invisible from the mism of Unique Forms. And it was felt by Boccioni as a front. Its role is metaphorical ; it suggests the idea of problematic solution because of its cerebralism. the head’s proile without depicting any realistic, visual It was too close to what he considered to be Picas- impression of a face. It is a contrivance that establishes so’s greatest limitation as an artist — his tendency to a conceptual alternative to the single frontal viewpoint. engage in “scientiic analysis that examines life in the 21 cadaver, dissects muscles, arteries, and veins in order to study their function,”23 or his efforts “to re-invent human anatomy on the model of inanimate objects.” Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 3 Some of his collages of the spring-summer 1913 are devoted to the side view of a head. The Head now in Edinburgh, for example, consists of a human proile, encased in a pyramidal structure and positioned on Boccioni’s struggle with sculpture, perception, and a black pedestal — a coniguration that calls to mind form ind an echo in his book Futurist Painting Sculp- Fusion of a Head and a Window.30 Many years later, ture (Plastic Dynamism), where he wrote : “Picasso talking about Head of a Woman with Roland Penrose, copies the object in his formal complexity, decom- Picasso said : “I thought that the curves you see on the posing and enumerating its appearances. In this way, surface should continue into the interior. I had the he makes it impossible for himself to experience the idea of doing them in wire,” but “it was too intellec- object in its action. And he cannot do it because his tual, too much like painting.” 31 method — that is, the enumeration that I mentioned Boccioni’s and Picasso’s paths diverged when the Italian — stops the life of the object (its movement), detaches abandoned the use of polymateriality in order to con- its constitutive elements, and distributes them in the ceptualize Unique Forms of Continuity through Space. painting according to an accidental harmony that’s But a year later the Spanish artist offered an unexpected inherent to the object.” 25 solution exactly to the problems raised by Boccioni’s irst Again, in Boccioni’s archive, we ind the doubling of engagement with polychromy and polymateriality. a portrait in frontal and side views (perhaps the irst Picasso’s tin sculptures and the bronze series of the idea for the wire proile), right under a scratched- Glass of Absinthe (1914) (ig. 3), in fact, furthered his out note on Cubism that reads : “the Cubists create research on collage aesthetics, but also distilled some an unreal environment.” 26 Boccioni at this time was of Boccioni’s innovations into new formal and material trying to create a sculpture that was not limited to a choices. Compared with Boccioni’s still life, Develop- frontal gaze, as Medardo Rosso had done. But he was ment of a Bottle in Space, Picasso’s Glass avoids the also trying to steer away from the “plurality of succes- challenge of plastically conlating three objects (bot- sive views” recently theorized by Jean Metzinger and tle, glass, and plate), by focusing on one single item. 27 celebrated by critics as a conceptual key to Cubism. The glass, however, is topped by a real spoon — a In Futurist Painting Sculpture, we read : “We are not procedure that Boccioni had theorized and employed concerned only about the object given in its integrality in some of his earlier sculptures. Moreover, seen through Picasso’s higher-level analysis, as I have called from a side, Glass of Absinthe conjures up the proile it. Rather, we also want to convey the simultaneous a human face, a common feature in his collages but form that derives from the intense interaction devel- that in the case of this sculpture might also suggest oping between the object and its environment.” 28 an indirect reference to Boccioni’s struggle with the It is interesting to note that Picasso himself might wire silhouette.32 The work also marks the moment have seen Boccioni’s wire proile and recognized it as something more congenial to his own work and to the “drawing in space” later codiied by Gonzalez.29 Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 4 when Picasso embraced the Futurists’ obsession with color and appropriated and applied to tin and bronze some of Boccioni’s experiments with stippled, textured or colored plaster surfaces.33 Indeed, Picasso’s use of was only their publication under the title of “Nature stippling in painting and sculpture surfaced soon after morte” that sanctioned their status as autonomous Boccioni’s show. Finally, the surprising central opening works, creating a signiicant impact on the public of the glass, showing the level of the liquid contained identity of Picasso as a sculptor. This was particularly in it as a solidiied plane, recalls, without citing it needed, since Boccioni’s exhibition of sculptures in explicitly, Boccioni’s merger of interior and exterior in June had left the public wondering about how the the Bottle. A more striking visual resemblance can be Cubists would respond. found with the upper neck of another sculpture that With the publication of these photographs, Picasso Boccioni exhibited in Paris : the later destroyed Force- entered into the debate over polymateriality and Forms of a Bottle (ig. 4). Glass of Absinthe seems to sculpture, inaugurated by Boccioni’s manifesto. It is solve, therefore, many of the conceptual and technical probable however that Apollinaire’s choice to make quandaries raised by Boccioni’s sculptures. It elegantly Picasso’s sculptural constructions public was the suggested a way to maintain artistic experimentalism result of a last-minute decision. within the requirements imposed by the art market. Les Soirées de Paris had stopped publication in June As Apollinaire had remarked, a sculpture should 1913. It returned to press in November under the be durable, and reproducible — two characteristics direction of Apollinaire and Serge Férat who, along that Boccioni’s colored plasters ostensibly lacked. with his sister Hélène d’Œttingen, inanced its It was not however the colored and textured glass re-launch. We know that Apollinaire and Férat had that caught Boccioni’s attention. planned to illustrate the irst issue of the new series As in the case of Archipenko’s experiments and with only one work by Picasso and some others from Braque’s three-dimensional studies in paper, Picas- the Salon d’Automne.36 In the end, the issue featured so’s early constructions remained mostly a private no works exhibited at the Salon. In addition to Picas- affair, until their publication in Les Soirées de Paris so’s Violin, glass, pipe and anchor (1912) it reproduced in 1913, ive months after Boccioni’s exhibition of four of his sculptures. The reason for this is unclear sculptures in Paris.34 The unease with which, at that but it might have resulted from the Apollinaire’s dis- time, Kahnweiler described Picasso’s new works to appointment with the Salon, which he judged as “plus Vincent Kramàr is signiicant. He stressed that these que faible, cette année.” were not inished works — he called them “études en he was also concerned with the need to counter the papier pour des sculptures” — and he explicitly men- impression generated by the exhibition of Boccioni’s tioned the fact that they were not for sale. Indeed, it sculpture. The second installation of his review of the 35 37 It is clear, however, that Salon, published in the following issue, is in fact an elaborate argumentation for the centrality of French art, and against the preeminence of Futurism.38 Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 5 works had raised some doubts in him. Was it possible, he asked himself, that a new “architectural concept of the painting,” “limited on the surface and developed in depth,” had superseded and rendered obsoBoccioni certainly saw in Picasso’s constructions an lete the older concept of the monument, the statue echo of his own ideas, if not of his exhibited works. in the round ? But when, around 1915, he returned to sculpture, he conceivable only as a dialectical relationship between cautiously selected and reconigured only a limited object and background ? Three months later, Picasso’s amount of details. In particular, he engaged with the constructions allowed Boccioni to relect anew not protruding lower-right section of the paper guitar, only on the relationship between object and material which, in the photographs from Les Soirées, extends reality, but also on the idea of the gaze, which had toward the viewer. The journal’s illustration prob- deined so closely his earlier sculptures. ably also spurred Boccioni’s interest in the tabletop Compared to the works illustrated in Les Soirées de underneath the Guitar, which, as Christine Poggi has Paris, Boccioni’s assemblage reinstated the centrality suggested, has no real supportive value but extends of movement, and of the “necessity to plastically con- into the viewer’s space. The spatial instability and lat- ceive the world as continuity” 40 — two major Futurist eral dynamic tension created by this absurd tabletop, ideas that Boccioni would not recant. Picasso’s Con- slanted leftward, is further enhanced by the white struction with Guitar, however, allowed Boccioni to angled paper element underneath it. Boccioni recon- reformulate the idea of dynamism, which in Dyna- igured the visual disruptions of the frontal percep- mism of a Speeding Horse does not originate from the tion created by Construction with Guitar into a ploy clash of different materials or the multiplication of a to suggest movement itself. His Dynamism of a Speed- body’s visual outline, but is obtained by the contrast- ing Horse + Houses (ig. 5), completed in the spring ing interaction between the igure of the horse in the of 1915 and now heavily restored, was originally foreground and the angular projection of the houses conceived so that the body of the horse in the fore- in the background. ground protruded outward from the vertical plane of Two photographs taken in Marinetti’s apartment in the mostly white cardboard houses in the back. The the 1930s have further complicated the issue, causing horse’s head was positioned forward, suggesting the scholars to question whether Boccioni’s Horse should progressive detachment of the animal running away be considered a self-standing sculpture or a wall-re- from the background. The fact that, two years after lief, in the style of Picasso’s published Construction41. his 1913 exhibition, Boccioni decided to return to More research is needed to solve this issue (the hooks work on a multi-material assemblage in a style so used to hang the work are not visible in some pho- different from that of his earlier works reveals the tographs from Boccioni’s studio), but in any case, 39 In other terms, was sculpture now extent to which his ideas on sculpture had changed in the meantime. As we know, in the days following the show, he had written to Sofici that the reactions to his Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 6 whether Boccioni himself voiced the plan to hang the sculpture to the wall, or whether this was Marinetti’s idea to further “enhance” his fellow Futurist’s masterwork, Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses was eventually reconigured and updated according to Picasso’s published constructions — works that Boccioni, in turn, surely felt originated from his own. In conclusion, the relationship between Picasso’s and Boccioni’s sculpture, far from a simple set of direct inluences, reveals a more complex game of anticipations and delayed responses. Sculpture did not become simply a ield in which to test the validity of one’s ideas in painting. It established a cautious dialogue that was held at a distance and was constantly redeined by public expectations and by the struggle to ind a balance between radical innovation and artistic distinctiveness and coherence. Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 7 PABLO PICASSO Verre d’absinthe, Paris, Printemps 1914 Bronze peint et sablé, 21,5 x 16,5 x 6,5 cm Musée national d’art moderne, Paris. AM1984629 © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Philippe Migeat © Succession Picasso, 2016 FIG. 1 Fusion of a Head and a Window, 1912-13, plaster, objects and mixed media. Work destroyed FIG. 4 UMBERTO BOCCIONI Force-Forms of a Bottle (detail), 1912-13 Plaster. Work destroyed. © image Courtesy of Getty Research Institute FIG. 2 Alexandre Mercereau posing next to Umberto Boccioni’s Fusion of a Head and a Windowat the artist’s exhibition of sculptures at the Galerie La Boëtie (JuneJuly 1913). Image Courtesy of Skira, Milan FIG. 5 UMBERTO BOCCIONI Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses, 1915 Gouache, oil, paper collage, wood, cardboard, copper, and iron, coated with tin or zinc The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 8 NOTES 1. The text is cited in Pepe Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 2003), p.168. 2. André Warnod, “Petites Nouvelles des Lettres et Arts,” Comoedia, February 22, 1913, p.3. 3. Boccioni wrote : “Therefore, perceiving bodies and their parts as plastic zones, in a Futurist sculptural composition, we’ll use wooden or metal planes, immobile or mechanically mobile, in order to depict an object.” See Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), ed. and trans. Maria Elena Versari, trans. Richard Shane Agin (Los Angeles : Getty Research Institute, 2016), p.182. 4. The note was written on a photograph of the work taken from a 1919 journal clipping. See M. E. Versari, “The Style and Status of the Modern Artist : Archipenko in the Eyes of the Italian Futurists,” in Alexander Archipenko Revisited : An International Perspective, ed. Deborah Goldberg and Alexandra Keiser (Bearsville, NY : The Archipenko Foundation, 2008), pp.13–33. Archipenko stated that the work had been exhibited in Budapest in 1913, but the catalogue of the show does not list Medrano (see Katalógus a Művészház nemzetközi posztimpresszionista kiállításához, Művészház, Budapest 1913, p.13. I would like to thank Dr. Sándor Tibor of the Ervin Szabó Medtropolitan Library for providing me with a copy of this catalogue). Since we lack additional documentation on this now destroyed sculpture, Ilaria Cicali has suggested that Archipenko worked in the same period (second part of 1913 – early 1914) on Medrano I and Medrano II, as well as on Carrousel-Pierrot, another sculpture devoted to the theme of the circus. See Ilaria Cicali, “Archipenko e Boccioni,” in L’uomo nero. Materiali per una storia delle arti della modernità 13, n. 26 (forthcoming, 2016. My thanks go to Ilaria Cicali for sharing this essay with me). However, it is also possible that Archipenko was not completely mistaken in his recollections and at least started to work on Medrano I at the end of 1912. In this case, Medrano II might constitute a reworking of the previous sculpture, damaged at some point between the end of 1912 and 1913. As for Carrousel Pierrot, while it is true that it, too, addresses the theme of the circus, its formal unity and rejection of multi-materiality point to an ulterior, subsequent turn in Archipenko’s production. 5. See, for instance, his accounts reported in Erich Wiese, Alexander Archipenko. Mit Einem Titelbild und 52 Abbildungen (Leipzig : Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1923), p.5. 6. For the most recent discovery and critical reassessment of Guitar, see Christine Poggi, “Picasso’s First Constructed Sculpture : A Tale of Two Guitars,” The Art Bulletin 94, n. 2 (2012) : pp.274–298. See also Ileana Parvu, La peinture en visite. Les constructions cubistes de Picasso (Bern : Peter Lang, 2007) and Picasso Guitars 1912 – 1914, ed. Anne Umland (New York : The Museum of Modern Art, 2011). 7. See the illustration of the work, in which the hook is clearly distinguishable, in Les Soirées de Paris, n. 18, November 1913, plate p. 39. A photo of the work is also present in the archives of Kahnweiler’s gallery under the title Bouteille et guitare, while the Musée Picasso houses a preliminary sketch for the work (MP 706), as indicated by Alexandra Parigoris, “Les constructions cubistes dans Les Soirées de Paris : Apollinaire, Picasso et le clichés Kahnweiler,” Revue de l’Art (1988), pp.61 – 74. 8. See Dian Widmaier Picasso, “Vollard and the Sculptures of Picasso,” in Cézanne to Picasso : Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avant-Garde, ed. by Rebecca A. Rabinow (New York : The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2006), pp.182–188, particularly p. 185. 9. For the contract, dated December 18, 1912, see Parvu, La peinture en visite, p.54. Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 10. Apollinaire was the irst to suggest a relationship between Picasso’s Head of a Woman and Boccioni’s sculpture. See Apollinaire, “First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture,” in Apollinaire on Art, 320 as well as John Golding, Boccioni’s Unique forms of Continuity in Space (Newcastle upon Tyne : University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1985), 16. Flavio Fergonzi suggests Picasso’s 1909 paintings as a source for Boccioni’s 1912 treatment of his mother’s face in Materia (1912, reworked 1913). While it is important to consider the interchanges between sculpture and painting in Picasso’s works of this period, I believe that we can also identify a direct inluence of Picasso’s sculpture on the contrast between the sunken left cheek and the protruding right eye and cheekbone of Materia. See Fergonzi’s entry for Materia in The Mattioli Collection, ed. Flavio Fergonzi (Milan : Skira-The Solomon Guggenheim Foundation, 2003), p.168. 11. For Boccioni’s painting and sculpture in this period, see L. Mattioli Rossi (ed.), “Dalla scultura d’ambiente alle forme uniche della continuità nello spazio,” in Boccioni Pittore Scultore Futurista (Milan : Skira, 2006), pp.16 – 81 and Fergonzi, “The Question of ‘Unique Forms’: Theory and Works,” in Italian Futurism 1909 – 1944: Reconstructing the Universe, ed. Vivien Greene (New York : Guggenheim Museum, 2014), pp.127 – 130. On the impact of the Cubist Head of a Woman, see also my “Impressionism Solidiied — Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster and the Deinition of Modernity in Sculpture,” in Plaster Casts : Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present, ed. Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand (Berlin : De Gruyter, 2010), pp.331 – 350. 12. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, 182. The French version of the manifesto originally read “transparent planes of glass and celluloid,” see ibid., 282 n. 23. 9 NOTES 13. Ibid., p.182. 14. Ibid., p.181. 15. Ibid., p.182. 16. For the conceptual implications of these practices, and their impact on the reception and reproduction of Boccioni’s works, see my “Impressionism Solidiied” and the more recent “Recasting the Past : On the Posthumous Fortune of Futurist Sculpture,” Sculpture Journal 23, Issue 3 (November 2014) : pp.349 – 368. 17. For Apollinaire’s comments, see Umberto Boccioni. Lettere Futuriste, ed. Federica Rovati (Rovereto : Egon-Mart, 2009), p.72. 18. Ibid., p.74. 19. Laura Mattioli Rossi has recently suggested that since Boccioni abandoned the use of color and real objects in his later sculptures representing the human form in movement, we should date his sculptures individually, according their progressive detachment from the idea of polymateriality, She therefore identiies Fusion of a Head and a Window as Boccioni’s irst sculpture, followed by Head + House + Light, and Antigrazioso. While there is indeed a formal evolution in Boccioni’s sculptural production, I believe that its roots lay not so much in a refusal of polymateriality per se, but in a deeper conceptual reconsideration of what he identiied as the roots of visual dynamism and the limits of Analytic Cubism, the central themes of his theoretical relections of the time. For more on this, see my “Impressionism Solidiied.” Boccioni himself dated both Antigrazioso and Fusion of a Head and a Window to 1913 in two notes attached to the photographs of these two works, referring to their date of completion. From his letters, we know however that, in November 1912, he was busy working on sculpture and that, in June 1913, he still planned to “retouch” his works in Paris, before the opening of the show (See Umberto Boccioni. Lettere, pp.58 Colloque Picasso Sculptures – 59 and 72). From photographs of his studio from the spring of 1913, we know that at that date Antigrazioso and Head + House + Light were still uninished. Fusion of a Head and a Window does not appear in these photographs. The lack of information surrounding the artist’s technical procedures renders quite dificult any effort in dating with precision his works. It is clear however that, in May – June 1913, Boccioni still added to his earlier sculptures some of the details (real objects ; colored surfaces ; words) that he called for in the Manifesto and that he had originally envisioned for them, even if his conception of sculpture had changed in the meantime as exempliied by his later Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). In any case, his letter to Sofici from July 1913 shows that the real turning point in Boccioni’s attitude toward materiality came only after the tepid reception of his assemblages in Paris. See Umberto Boccioni. Lettere futuriste, p.74. 20. Until now, the identity of the man posing next to the sculpture was unknown. 21. Boccioni, untiled ms. (“Prefazione al Catalogo della Prima Esposizione di Scultura”), 4 handwritten pages, Umberto Boccioni Papers, acc. no 880380, box 3 folder 2, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 22. Ibid. 23. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, p.92. 24. Pepe Karmel, “Beyond the Guitar : Painting, Drawing, and Construction, 1912 – 14,” in Picasso : Sculptor/Painter, eds. Elizabeth Cowling and John Golding (London : Tate Gallery, 1994), p.195. 25. Ibid. 26. Boccioni, loose sheet, Umberto Boccioni Papers, acc. no 880380, box 3 folder 28, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. The sheet is contained in a folder of notes used for the chapter of Futurist Painting Sculpture titled “What Divides us from Cubism.” Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 27. Quoted in Maurice Verne, “Visages et Paysages : Un jour de pluie chez M. Bergson,” in L’Intransigeant, November 26, 1911, 1. For Boccioni’s reception of this concept, see my “Introduction,” in Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, p.20. 28. Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture, p.109. 29. We know that Picasso returned to Paris from Céret around the time of the opening of Boccioni’s show. See his letter to Gertrude Stein dated June 19, 1913, in Pablo Picasso - Gertrude Stein. Correspondence, ed. Laurence Madeline (London : Seagull Books, 2008), p.93. While he was reported to be ill at the time, in a letter to Apollinaire dated June 24, he talks about visiting the writer, which would suggest that he was not bedridden. See Peter Read, Picasso and Apollinaire : The Persistence of Memory (Berkeley, CA : University of California Press, 2008), p.105. 30. This work (Tête, 1913, National Galleries of Scotland), formerly in André Breton’s collection, in generally dated to the spring of 1913, but it might have been created in the early summer of the same year. Compare it with Head of a Man with a Mustache (Ink, charcoal, and pencil on newspaper, May 6, 1913 or later, private collection) and his sketchbook from the spring-summer 1913, particularly page 75R. 31. Roland Penrose, “Introduction,” in Picasso : Sculpture - Ceramic - Graphic Work (London : Arts Council of Great Britain, 1967), p.10. 32. I am grateful to Christine Poggi for this suggestion. For the use of these visual puns, and speciically of the reference to human faces, in Picasso’s work, see Poggi, In Deiance of Painting : Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, CT : Yale University Press, 1992), pp.55 – 57. 10 NOTES 33. For Picasso’s use of color and stippling, see Rebecca Rabinow, “Confetti Cubism,” in Cubism : The Leonard A. Lauder Collection, eds. Emily Braun and Rabinow (New York : The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2014), pp.156 – 163. 34. See Poggi, In Deiance of Painting, 3 ; Alex Danchev, Georges Braque : A Life (New York : Skyhorse Publishing Inc., 2012), pp.70 – 71. See also Read, Picasso and Apollinaire, p.87. 35. The letter is dated December 4, 1913. In it, Kahnweiler also refers to some “études en bois.” See Parvu, La peinture en visite, p.54. 36. Se Férat’s letter to Sofici, Paris, October 31, 1913, in Ardengo Sofici, Serge Férat, and Hélène d’Œttingen, Correspondance 1903-1964, ed. Barbara Meazzi (Lausanne : L’Âge d’Homme, 2013), p.339. 37. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Salon d’Automne,” Les Soirées de Paris, n. 18, November 1913, p.6. 38. Guillaume Apollinaire, “Le Salon d’Automne (Suite),” Les Soirées de Paris, n. 19, December 1913, p.46. 39. Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, p.74. 40. Boccioni’s letter to Emilio Cecchi, July 19, 1914, in Boccioni, Lettere futuriste, p.125. 41. See Federica Rovati, “Opere di Umberto Boccioni tra 1914 e 1915,” Prospettiva, no. 112 (2005) : pp.44 – 65. Colloque Picasso Sculptures Maria Elena Versari : Picasso/Boccioni in Perspective 11