Gifted by Nelson A. Rockefeller to the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Boccioni set The Farewells (1911) inside a train station, and what he wanted to capture wasn’t the scene itself but the feeling of it, the way modern life pulls people apart even as it rushes them forward. He doesn’t paint the platform clearly. Figures blur, edges dissolve, and the whole canvas seems to be moving before anything comes into focus.
A few things do stand out on close observation. The locomotive sits at the center, steam rising from its chimney. There’s a signpost off to the side. And near the engine, barely holding together, a couple wrapped in an embrace, already half swallowed by the surrounding haze. Everything else gives way to a wash of red, orange and yellow that spirals in from the upper left, sweeps across the canvas, then curls back down and cuts straight through the body of the train.
This was the first panel of his States of Mind triptych, painted right after a trip to Paris where he encountered Cubism up close for the first time. That trip left its mark. The fractured faces, the way bodies seem to fold into the space around them, even the stenciled numbers on the locomotive’s side, all of it echoes what the Cubists were doing in Paris around the same time.
Boccioni, a crucial figure of Futurist art style, wasn’t painting a busy railway station crowded with activity but the psychological impression of what chaos leaves behind. Nothing in the picture still holds long enough for the eye to rest, and that seems to be the point. Boccioni wanted the viewer pulled into the same disorientation gripping the people on that platform, caught somewhere between staying and leaving.
This artwork is a very emotional peace for me as railway stations carry a lot od inexplainable stories that is difficult to express. Through this painting, we can see the emotional and psychological turmoil that happens in such places which makes this a very precious piece of art.
