What is thought to be a lost Boccioni painting resurfaces in England

In England, in the town of Dorchester, a center of 16,000 inhabitants in Dorset (Cornwall), what is thought to be a lost painting by the great futurist Umberto Boccioni has resurfaced in a flea market sale. The Daily Telegraph broke the news: it is a portrait of a young woman that, in 2021, had been displayed unframed and rolled up at a junk sale, in a folder with twenty other works. The buyer had purchased the entire folder for only one hundred pounds.

After the purchase, the buyer contacted Colin Gleadell, an art market expert (who moreover wrote the article in the Daily Telegraph), anonymously, stating that the portrait appeared to him to be the work of American Impressionist William Merritt Chase. After discovering some inscriptions on the front and back of the painting that had pointed him toward Boccioni, he approached three auction houses, namely Sotheby’s, Christie’s, and Bonhams, to get a valuation, but got only skepticism in return, not least because Boccioni is a rather rare artist (only 250 of his paintings, 25 sculptures, and a thousand drawings are known). A fourth major auction house, however, decided to take him seriously: the Dorotheum in Vienna, which put the buyer in touch with art historian Alberto Dambruoso, a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Foggia, and author, in 2016, of the catalog raisonné of Boccioni’s work along with Maurizio Calvesi, the latter author of the first monograph on Boccioni, published in 1953.

It was Dambruoso who attributed the work to Boccioni, calling it, reports the Daily Telegraph, a work “of exceptional beauty,” so much so that he chose it as the cover for the book Boccioni. Unpublished Works, published a few days ago by publisher Maretti. According to Dambruoso, it would be a work made by Boccioni in 1911, the year in which the artist was beginning to break away from his Divisionist painting beginnings to embrace a more spontaneous, fast-paced style of rapid, almost impulsive brushstrokes. For Dambruoso, the portrait is a “masterpiece,” and its value could approach three hundred thousand euros. Not all scholars, however, seem to agree: art historian Ester Coen, another Boccioni expert, preferred to suspend judgment for the time being.

We do not know at the moment how the painting came to England: further studies will be needed. Meanwhile, concludes the Daily Telegraph, a major exhibition of Boccioni’s unpublished works is expected to be held between 2024 and 2025 at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.

Pictured is the newly discovered painting.

What is thought to be a lost Boccioni painting resurfaces in England

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