A huge red horse with a dark blue mane plunges across the canvas, its harness straining as blurred figures of men pull, lean and fall around it, while a second, pale horse surges at the left. Everything dissolves into streaks of red, orange, blue and white, as if caught in violent motion. Along the top edge, scaffolding and buildings under construction rise into a smoky sky. Umberto Boccioni moved to Milan in 1908 and began a series of studies of the city and its industry; in 1910 he brought those impressions together in this canvas, his first major Futurist painting.

It was first called Labor, and across his studies a single huge horse gradually takes over the composition, becoming a symbol of the overwhelming force of the growing metropolis. Boccioni described the work as "a great synthesis of labor, light, and movement." The composer Ferruccio Busoni bought the canvas in London in March 1912, and the Museum of Modern Art purchased it from his son, Raffaello Busoni, in 1951 with the Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund.

The museum also owns a study for the painting from 1910. It is in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.