Umberto Boccioni was an Italian artist known for his Futurist paintings and sculptures. Boccioni along with Gino Severini and the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti founded Futurism with the intention of conveying mechanical movement and social upheaval. The artist’s painting The City Rises (1910) and sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913), are hallmarks of this dynamism and energy. “If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaughts of cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces, following the general laws of violence of the picture,” he once proclaimed. Born on October 19, 1882 in Reggio Calabria, Italy, he moved to Rome to study at the Academy of Fine Arts there in 1901. While attending the painting class of Giacomo Balla he met Severini, with whom he later travelled to Paris and Russia. Stifled by most Italian art of the time, Boccioni traveled to Milan where he met Marinetti and became an outspoken critic of Italy’s dependence on Classical Roman and the Renaissance values. In 1915, he along with Marinetti joined the Italian military to fight in World War I. The artist died during a training exercise at the age of 33 on August 17, 1916 in Sorte, Italy. Today, Boccioni’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.