A time will come when the picture will no longer be enough. Its immobility will become an archaism with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colours as feelings within itself. Multiplied colours will not need form to be understood and paintings will be swirling musical compositions of great coloured gases, which, on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet conceive of. — Umberto Boccioni from lecture La Pittura Futurista, 1911

Birthday to Umberto Boccioni, Italian futuristic painter and sculptor, born in Reggio Calabria on this day, in 1882 and of tragically short life of just 33 years. Boccioni studied in Rome and then went to France; his early paintings were done under the strong influence of the Impressionism and Post-Impressionism he saw there, but also Divisionism and Cubism. After meeting Marinetti and other young artists turned to future in Milan, in 1907, he became one of the most prominent and important futurist artists and its theorist. Futurists believed that museums should be more or less destroyed and that the ultimate beauty lies in machine, in technology and dynamism. Unfortunately, as the First World War started, Boccioni was drafted; during an training he was thrown off his horse and the next day he died. 

Today he is more widely famous as a sculptor than as a painter, his iconic work being Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, made in 1913.