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Your galleryHead Against the Light (The Artist's Sister)
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Trace the fan of pen lines that spreads down from the top edge, and notice where they thicken into dark bands and where they leave the paper bare.
Boccioni drew his sister more than once: the Met also holds a calm pencil drawing of her leaning on a chair, from about 1909. In this small pen sketch of 1912, the year he turned to sculpture, she sits against the light, and her face breaks apart along long rays of brown ink. The whole sheet is barely 13 centimeters tall.
Pen and brown ink with traces of copy pencil on paper · 4 15/16 in. × 4 in. (12.6 × 10.2 cm · The Metropolitan Museum of Art · Futurism
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Head Against the Light (The Artist's Sister)
- Artist
- Umberto Boccioni (Italian, Reggio 1882–1916 Sorte)
- Date
- 1912
- Medium
- Pen and brown ink with traces of copy pencil on paper
- Dimensions
- 4 15/16 in. × 4 in. (12.6 × 10.2 cm)
- Credit line
- Bequest of Lydia Winston Malbin, 1989
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.