1913 | "Dynamism of a Soccer Player" by Umberto Boccioni

For more information please visit http://www.moma.org/1913

Subtitles by the 8th-graders of Institution Sainte Jeanne d'Arc, Saint-Maximin la Sainte-Baume, France (January 2014)

The Italian Futurists were one group of artists

who were doing incredible things in 1913,

thinking about art as something that

had to be for the new century.

Speed, noise, machinery, and the city

became a key part of all of their paintings.

“Dynamism of a Soccer Player”

challenges any viewer to

actually find a soccer player

– two arms, two legs, a face.

No way!

Colors and shapes moving, running, kicking.

Your eye is brought to the next place

or to a place further down.

And there is only one way when you look at a yellow form

or a red form, that you can see that form

which is in relation to the colors circulating around it.

The brushstrokes are extremely visible.

They’re tangible.

It’s material.

Photography, which was little more

than half a century old,

had an enormous impact.

Eadweard Muybridge did photography in sequence

bop bop bop bop bop.

They wanted to do that in painting too.

The Futurists believed that part of being modern

was not only painting modern things,

but creating a ruckus.

When their pictures appeared at exhibitions,

they issued manifestos, they had lectures,

they had performances that absolutely provoked

the people in attendance to realizing,

"Wow! Even if we didn't understand the picture,

what we're doing is being a witness to something

that is upsetting centuries of tradition.”

Sub-titling done by the 8th-graders of ISJA Middle School, Saint-Maximin, France