GX1993.500

Unità di misura: cm; Altezza: 103; Larghezza: 248

olio su tela

Presented in 1920 at Canegallo's solo exhibitions at the Teatro Argentina in Rome and the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa with the caption in the catalogue: "Analysis of collective life rendered in cerebral vibrations. Human faces expressing oscillations of the collective mood', the painting was later exhibited in 1925 at the prestigious Galerie La Boëtie in Paris, where Boccioni had held a major exhibition of his sculptures in 1913. The transcription of emotions and psychic manifestations, resolved in Canegallo's works of this period through undulating rhythms and dynamic radial tracings, seemingly expanding beyond the confines of the frame, finds an evocative depiction in the painting 'The Crowd': in a hallucinated and visionary scenario - accentuated by the radial expansion, over the entire pictorial surface, of force lines inspired by the tracings of psychic energy fields - all the dismay aroused by the sense of alienation provoked by the disturbing and obscure metropolitan atmospheres is revealed. In the concise breakdown of the work, different expressions emerge from the anonymous depiction of the crowd, crystallised in the anguished fixity of gazes, of calm, pleasure, pain and hatred.