The Truck

The urban landscape with trucks would become one of the most typical and striking images of Sironi’s “return to order,” finding in this painting one of its first focuses. Sironi approached Futurism at the end of 1913, through the study of the works of his friend Boccioni, who in principle inspired Sironi’s Futurist stylistic features at least until 1914; during that year the artist came into contact with works of Russian Cubo-Futurism, probably through materials brought back by Marinetti from the Russian tour undertaken in early 1914.

The encounter with those novelties of a geometric and constructive nature was extremely suggestive and decisive for the evolution of Sironi’s style, which abandoned the analyses and decompositions of Boccionian reference for simplifications of powerful and original synthetic, spatial and chromatic force.

Flat, sometimes bright, color fields replace the taches of color that in earlier paintings suggested a dynamic vibration of forms, while geometric surfaces replace the interlocking and intersecting volumes of Boccionian origin.

The number “14” painted on the truck’s license plate is probably the initials of the date (which in Futurist paintings is often expressed by a newspaper clipping); nevertheless, although the period between 1914 and 1915 corresponds to the “constructivist” structure of the painting, in keeping with the new and original style adopted at that time by the artist, developed in a series of paintings and illustrations, it is not excluded that Sironi might have returned later to the whole, judging by the thickness and quality of the pictorial material, which shows obvious color overlaps.

Dynamism and modernity, the operating myths of Futurist ideology, are summed up in the truck and the urban view, but the pictorial solution seems to lock dynamism into a potential force, expressed through geometrizing and monumental forms, which constitute Sironi’s very personal “synthetic” poetics.