Painting
In his early years, Boccioni became a student of Giacomo Balla where he received instruction in the style of Italian Divisionism. Symbolism and Divisionism were to remain the chief influences on Boccioni's art for the next decade. He exhibited frequently from a relatively early age, taking part in many exhibitions between 1903 and 1906. During his travels he studied Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painting and life drawing.
Boccioni has been called the arbiter elegantarium of the Futurist group and, as the most articulate of the group, was the official declaimer (with Marinetti) of their manifestos at the various Futurist evenings. Boccioni was extremely ambitious and loved the publicity.
Painting
His highly original experimental paintings of this period are primarily concerned with reproducing on canvas the essence of dynamism and simultaneity postulated in the manifestos. At this time Boccioni was, perhaps, the truest Futurist of the group and it was he who tried to achieve most convincingly the theoretical postulations of the Futurist manifestos in his paintings. In 1910 Boccioni had his first solo exhibition at Ca' Pesaro in Venice.
During the period 1912 to 1913 Boccioni's work entered a period of change.
He was less interested in dynamism as an optical principle of retinal retention
but as persistence within the consciousness of memory.
Painting
Boccioni was heavily influenced by Cubism but in his painting and sculpture he used the Futurist approach to express dynamism of the human or animal form. However there is a marked difference between his work prior to his acquaintance with Cubism and that which came after. Cubism gave him not only a wider painting vocabulary but his concept of pictorial language changed and appears to be on an entirely different level of experience. His later works tended to break up the subject figure and shifting the parts within the painting rather than repeating them whole. In his works before Cubism, simultaneity was created in his art along the precepts of the Technical Manifesto of Painting which inferred the subject "coming and going" and "appearing and disappearing" with the subject presented in multiple visions of time and space.