#industrial

I couldn't track down a name for this one, but the year puts it right in the stretch where he was working with an engineering firm to mass-produce cast aluminium forms — some from that batch were built as literal playground equipment for a shop. He's tagged as the godfather of Pop Art, but this run of work reads more like an industrial catalogue than a collage of magazine cuttings.

This is from years before Boccioni co-signed the Futurist manifesto and started painting industry as speed and noise instead of smoke drifting over a quiet field.

The Latin title translates to something like 'from the greatest to the least' — apparently the idea was to move from huge industrial machinery down to the smallest particles of matter, all packed into one bronze. It's set right by a glasshouse full of tropical plants, an odd pairing that might be the whole point. By this stage he'd moved a long way from the collage aesthetic that got him called the godfather of Pop Art — this is all cast gears and blocky machine parts instead.