The Strengths of a Street 1911

Curator: Boccioni's 1911 oil painting, "The Strengths of a Street," hangs before us, pulsing with the raw energy of the urban experience. What strikes you first about it? Editor: It’s electric, literally and figuratively! All these intense blues slicing through the darkness...it’s as if the street is a living circuit board overloaded with light. The painting appears to be composed by the energetic projection of rays over architectural volumes. Curator: Precisely! It's not just light but *electric* light, quite new at the time and therefore, symbolic of the advancements, modernity. Look closely, and you might discern rudimentary architecture beneath. A suggestion of buildings, scaffolding, even...trees? Editor: The skeletal architecture layered with dynamic geometries recalls nascent assembly lines or a burgeoning shipyard, full of laborers working through the night! Are those people I see as I study its form? I am thinking of industrial innovation... Curator: Well, if you look hard you will certainly find them! What's amazing is how Boccioni employs a Cubist vocabulary to capture a sensation rather than a static representation of a city street. He almost seems to be pulling energy from the ground. Did he feel empowered? I mean the painting does make the title seem honest... Editor: Possibly. I mean consider the materials at play: oil paint on canvas, commodities in themselves fueled by industrial processes. Perhaps, he saw the street itself as an apparatus, like some engine. Even the lines function mechanically almost, they are precise, geometric, perfect in projection... Curator: You know, Boccioni wanted to portray movement itself—the way forms interact with the space around them—so this might be why the forms almost burst into being before us in all this frenetic geometry! His brushwork mirrors a time moving away from tradition into dynamic uncertainty... Editor: That makes perfect sense! Given his commitment to the Futurist cause. Although all that energy... do you find it a bit anxious, the color choice, I think lends itself well to an urban, yet melancholy expression. The promise, like any industry, is tinged with darkness perhaps. Curator: Maybe it’s just the inescapable moodiness of midnight, captured so viscerally. I think Boccioni understood this well, capturing it in those frenzied lines of blue. Editor: Well put. So next time you find yourself walking at night through some skeletal urban grid perhaps the paintings' mood will have one in rapture with those long angular illuminations.