The Street Enters The House, Umberto Boccioni

• How does The Street Enters the House demonstrate the influence of Expressionism and Cubism on Boccioni?

  The geometric elements and the perspectival distortion
• Grace Glueck 


  "The dominating sensation is that which one would experience on opening a window: all life, and the noises of the street rush in at the same time as the movement and the reality of the objects outside."
• Description of the painting

  The woman (possibly Boccioni’s mother) leans over the balcony rail of the top-floor apartment and views the dynamic city of Milan. The scene bustles with life: labourers, horses and buildings collide in an almost audible way. Windows fly everywhere and the heads of two horses can be seen within the balcony railing, while shafts of light penetrate the figure.
• Style: Futurism


  This work features Futurist simultaneity. The title, The Street Enters the House, refers not only to the dynamic city streets but also to urban expansion as construction literally invades the lives of every citizen.
• Colour


  Intense, saturated and prismatic colour, with greens and oranges predominating. They are layered like X-rays and meld confusingly into one another.
• Concept of 'faceting' in the Futurist style

  The Futurist’s borrowed the concept of faceting from the Cubism of Pablo Picasso and Braque. The technique of faceting allowed for different perspectives/events to be shown simultaneously, appearing fused in one image.
• How is 'faceting' present in this work?

  The woman's face and hair are fragmented in a recognisably Cubist style, as in Picasso's 1909 portraits of his mistress Fernande Olivier (see below) and the disorienting effect is heightened with Boccioni’s shafts of intense light that enter the window.
• How is a sense of dynamism created

  Boccioni creates the dynamism of the modern Milan town with faceted intersecting planes (inspired by Cubism) which create a moving and dizzying effect. The angularity of the planes create a certain violence too.
• The female figure is the recipient of the ‘noise’ in the street...

  She becomes the indicator of how the boundaries between inside and out have blurred. Boccioni wants to use these techniques to blend art with life, us with the painting.
• Futurist Technical Manifesto, 1910: ‘To paint a human figure you must not paint it , you must render the whole of its surrounding atmosphere”/”space no longer exists”; form and environment become “blended”.
• German art historian and critic Walter Grasskamp interprets the painting with reference to Henri Bergson’s durée (the multiplicity, simultaneity, and flux of sensation in modern, urban life).


  The colour palette is vibrant and prismatic. The paired complementary colours are reminiscent of the Neo-Impressionists and their effects are heightened with shafts of bright light. When colour blazes like this it adds to the dizzying effect Boccioni wanted to capture because it chimed with the rush of a new and truly modern world.
• The central figure of The Street Enters the House


  • A woman dressed in blue and white, viewed from behind and above
  • She looks over her balcony at a busy street scene, a riot of colours, lines, and angles
• On the road in front of her

  1. Workers lift poles to form the walls of a new building

  2. Surrounded by a pile of bricks
• The houses in the painting

  • White and blue houses lean into the street
  • Two of the balconies are occupied by other figures peering down into the road
• In the foreground


  • A line of horses flies past
• Several scholars postulate that she was an entirely imagined character
• Boccioni had a history of employing the women of his family as models
• This has led some to the conclusion that the figure is Boccioni's mother


  And use the depiction in The Street Enters the House as evidence of Boccioni's changing view of women in general and mothers in particular
• The painting in general

  • Showcases Boccioni's evolution from a Neoimpressionist style to one more aligned with the ideals of Cubism
  • Boccioni's increasing fascination with scientific terminology
• The catalog description for the piece includes lines such as "The principles of Roentgen rays is applied to the work, allowing the personages to be studied from all sides, objects both at the front and the back are in the painter's memory."
• Boccioni's techniques in the painting

  • Experiments with Cubist techniques as a way of keeping elements in both the foreground and background "rushing into the window at the same time"
  • Weaves in references to his earlier works, such as the visual pun of the horse's appearance on the woman's buttock when compared with a line from his earlier Manifesto