Three Women 1910

Umberto Boccioni painted Three Women with oil paint, using a shimmering palette of yellows, greens, and browns. I can imagine him building up the image through repeated, layered strokes of color, until a world gradually takes shape on the canvas. You can really feel the artist trying to figure something out as he’s painting – how to capture not just the appearance, but the essence, of these three figures and their relationships. It feels very intimate. Look at how the paint seems to want to dissolve the women into their surroundings. What do you make of these almost translucent streaks covering the whole surface? There’s a sense of the painting almost vibrating before your eyes. It reminds me a bit of the later work of someone like Gerhard Richter, where the paint is both there and not there, present and absent, all at once. We’re all in conversation, across time. Painting is not fixed, but something living, breathing, and evolving.