UMBERTO BOCCIONI (Reggio Calabria 1882 - Sorte di Verona 1916) MAMMA E BAMBINO (Mother and Child). Etching, Bellini, 2004, no. 32 (titled 'Donna con bambina a tavola'), c. 1910. An extremely fine and rich impression of this rare etching, printed in reddish ink. With wide margins, in fine condition. To the platemark 140 x 180 mm, the entire sheet measuring 315 x 419 mm. Signed in pencil by the artist 'Umberto Boccioni' and entitled by him on verso 'mamma e bambino'. PROVENANCE: Galleria d'Arte Ferrari, Verona (stamped mark on verso). See Paolo Bellini, 'Umberto Boccioni, Catalogo ragionato delle incisioni, degli ex libris, dei manifesti e delle illustrazioni', Milano, 2004; no. 32. Umberto Boccioni was born in Reggio di Calabria. In 1889 he attended the painting school 'Scuola Libera del Nudo' in Rome, where he met Gino Severini and also Giacomo Balla who gave him his first instruction in the techniques of Divisionist painting. Boccioni continued to be influenced by both Divisionism and Symbolism, travelling to Paris – where he briefly met Modigliani – and through western Russia in 1906. Then he came back to Italy, visited Padua and then moved to Venice, where he spent the winter of 1906-07 taking life-drawing classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti. In 1907 he settled in Milan. Impressed by the revolutionary spirit of Marinetti’s Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909), Boccioni was responsible for integrating the visual arts into this literary movement, along with Russolo and Carrà. The dominant figure of the group and its most important theorist, Boccioni rigorously analysed dynamism and motion in his paintings. He moved away from a Divisionist technique and began to employ the formal vocabulary of Cubism from around 1911. The following year Boccioni became fascinated with sculpture after seeing the works of Medardo Rosso in Paris and he began to experiment with this medium. In 1914 he published his theoretical text Futurist Painting and Sculpture and served with Marinetti and other Futurists in the First World War. He died after falling from a horse during a training exercise in 1916.

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