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Dimensions: 66.5 by 59.5cm.
26 1/8 by 23 3/8 in.
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Provenance: THE PROPERTY OF A SWISS COLLECTOR, TO BENEFIT A FOUNDATION FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH
A gift from the artist to the husband of the present owner before 1939
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Exhibited: Verona, Galleria dello Scudo, Mario Sironi. Cinquant'anni di pittura italiana, 1982-83, illustrated in the catalogue (as dating from 1916)
Dusseldorf, Städtische Kunsthalle and Baden Baden, Staatlische Kunsthalle, Mario Sironi (1885-1961), 1988, no. 26, illustrated in colour in the catalogue (as dating from circa 1916)
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Literature: Raffaele de Grada, Mario Sironi, Milan, 1972, p. 73, pl. V, illustrated in colour (as dating from 1916)
Mauro Corradini, "L'antiborghese Sironi scopre la solitudine degli uomini moderni", in Bergamo oggi, Bergamo, 10th December 1982, illustrated (as dating from 1916)
Giovanni Testori, "Sironi a Verona", 19th December 1982, p. 65, mentioned (as dating from 1916)
Fortunato Bellonzi, Sironi, Milan, 1985, p. 29, pl. 12, illustrated (as dating from 1916)
Mario Sironi 1885-1961 (exhibition catalogue), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, 1993-94, p. 150, illustrated
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Notes: Born in Sardinia, Sironi first came to Rome to study mathematics. He soon developed an interest in art, and by 1905 he was attending the Free School of Nude Drawing at the Accademia di Belle Arti together with Umberto Boccioni, who remained his closest friend and mentor, and who introduced him to Giacomo Balla. It was primarily through Boccioni that Sironi was introduced to the art and ideology of the Futurist group and, having seen the first Roman exhibition of the Futurists in 1913, he wrote in a letter to Boccioni: "After your paintings left, having matured my ideas on your art, and indeed those of all of you, I have fallen in love with it, with yours in particular" (quoted in Futurismo & Futurismi (exhibition catalogue), Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1986, p. 574). In April-May 1914 he first exhibited with the other members of the group at the Galleria Futurista in Rome. In March 1915, Sironi officially joined the Futurist movement, in an announcement made by its leader Marinetti, who considered him "a real Futurist, in the true sense of the word, who has embarked in a profound and highly original way on research into plastic dynamism" (ibid., p. 574).
By the early 1920s, Sironi began to break away from the Futurists and their fascination with depicting integrated moving components or machines. His themes of deliberate timelessness, imagery of the industrial world, and his natural style embracing monumental and solid forms rendered in dark tones were much more encompassing than the more literal depictions of the Futurists. Throughout the 1920s, Sironi produced a number of drawings, paintings and collages of empty city streets, sometimes interrupted by a motorcycle, a lorry or a plane. Rather than depicting the bourgeois decadence of the German Expressionists, he depicted the working class environment, coloured in hues of ochre, brown and grey that characterised the industrial world, as well as the stuccoed facades typical of contemporary popular housing in Milan.
Motociclista has traditionally been considered to have been painted in 1916, as it shares its subject matter with several works of that period (fig. 1). Stylistically, however, the present painting is closer to Sironi's art of the first part of the 1920s, leaning towards solid form. Indeed, it represents a synthesis of the two styles in Sironi's art, and demonstrates his gradual development from one to the other. The artist's interest in dynamism and movement, embodied in the figure of the motorcyclist, draws on the imagery explored not only by his fellow Italian Futurists including Balla (fig. 2) and Boccioni (fig. 3), but also by members of other European avant-garde movements, such as Natalia Goncharova (fig. 4). In Motociclista, however, this affinity towards movement is coupled with his tendency towards volume and firmness, visible in the solid, geometric forms of the buildings in the background.
The desolate industrial street of the present painting was to become the main subject of Sironi's 'urban landscapes' of his later career, dominated by images of alienation of modern man. Discussing these works, Emily Braun commented: "Sironi's urban landscapes (paesaggi urbani) dominated his art from about 1916 to the mid-twenties, although he was to return to the theme throughout his life. [...] Although he closely followed the progress of his mentor and close friend, Umberto Boccioni, and experimented with the syntax of 'plastic dynamism' in the early 1910s, he was never comfortable with Cubist fragmentation or abstraction. Indeed, his preference for solid, emphatically tactile form modelled with dense areas of chiaroscuro was already apparent in Ciclista [fig. 1], one of his first urban landscapes. What did attract him to Futurism was its activist, avant-garde spirit, its call for a new artistic language for the working class" (E. Braun, in Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900-1988 (exhibition catalogue), Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1989, p. 175).
We are grateful to Francesco Meloni for his assistance in cataloguing this work.
Fig. 1, Mario Sironi, Ciclista, 1916, oil and collage on card, Private Collection, Rome
Fig. 2, Giacomo Balla, Velocità d'automobile, 1912, oil on panel, The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Fig. 3, Umberto Boccioni, Dinamismo di un ciclista, 1913, oil on canvas, Private Collection
Fig. 4, Natalia Goncharova, Cyclist, 1913, oil on canvas, The State Russian Museum, Saint Petersburg
