Woman in a Café: Compenetrations of Lights and Planes 1912

Umberto Boccioni made this painting with oil on canvas—look closely and you can see the way he was thinking about light, not just as illumination, but as something that penetrates and transforms everything it touches. Imagine Boccioni standing before this canvas, wrestling with how to show the energy of a café scene. It’s like he’s trying to capture not just what he sees, but how it feels to be there, all those overlapping sensations. The blues and greens feel deep and immersive, like being underwater or maybe lost in thought. Then you have these sharp yellows and reds cutting through, like sudden bursts of excitement or anxiety. That one swipe of yellow, right across what might be a hand, feels so immediate, so decisive. I love how he’s not afraid to let things be ambiguous. It’s like he’s saying that life, like painting, is messy and uncertain, but full of possibility. You can see echoes of Cubism here, but Boccioni brings his own kind of dynamism to it, pushing towards something more emotional, more alive.