1. A Voyage through the Mysteries of Female States of Mind in the Arts

_{Umberto Boccioni, Study for Female Figure (Ines) 1911, verso of States of Mind: The Farewells, New York, Metropolitan Museum}

The inspiration for this, admittedly daring, certainly controversial exhibition project, which is to be given an online sample here as a working hypothesis, came to me spontaneously while looking at one of Umberto Boccioni’s drawings States of Mind: The Farwells in the Metropolitan Museum New York, on the back of which a kind of receptive, as if intensely feeling female figure is drawn. My spontaneous thought was, of course, that these two drawings, front and back, must somehow have something to do with each other, from which the idea arose just as immediately that Boccioni, with his studies and ultimately also with his paintings, had initiated a kind of research into his own (feminine) emotional world in order to come closer to the mystery of female states of mind through his pictorial approach. To what extent this is a projection on my part, I would like to disclose here – what is certain is that it very quickly became clear to me that my modest activity as a collector and ultimately my art historical work was very deeply linked to this idea and hardly ever reflected upon, and perhaps even driven by it.