Читать книгу Art of the 20th Century - Dorothea Eimert - Страница 6

Among the artistic movements at the beginning of the 20^th century, Italian Futurism was one of the most vocal. Manifestos and proclamations were the manner by which new artistic theses were formulated and discussed in public. Often, this led to riots and brawls. This loud aggressiveness lay in the social tradition of Italian art, which in the course of the 19^th century had become sterile, academic and museum-like. It was against this mummified art that the militant anger of the Futurists was directed. The Futurist upheaval understood itself to be a modern movement, open to all the forces of life and encompassing all art genres.

The poet, Tommaso Marinetti, was the force behind this movement that seized the entire art world of the West. His first Futurist manifesto came out at the end of 1908. Therein, he formulated the tenets of this new way of thinking that influenced the intelligentsia of the time.

Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute. Since we have already created the eternal, omnipresent speed… We declare that the glory of the world has been enriched by yet another beauty: the beauty of speed. A race car, whose body is decorated with pipes that are like snakes with explosive breath the roaring car, is more beautiful than the Nike of Samothrace.

This sweeping success, primarily in the French art world, made the headlines of the conservative Paris newspaper, Figaro, when the manifesto was made public in French on 20 February, 1909. Shortly thereafter it appeared in Russia on 8 March, 1909, and was translated into Russian in the Petersburg newspaper Vetcher (Evening). The effect on primarily the literary avant-garde was significant. The transfer of the new intellectual trend into the visual arts happened later. However, the decisive breakthrough for the Futurist painters first happened when their travelling exhibit was opened in February 1912 at the Paris Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. They spared no expense with advertising. On the eve of the opening, the names of the five painters, Giacomo Balla, Carlo Carrà, Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo and Gino Severini, lit up the night in neon lights. In March, the Futurists showed their art at the London Sackville Gallery. The success was even greater than in Paris. ‘More than 350 critics showed up in one month and four days, and the gallery did not want to remove the paintings because of the great numbers of paying visitors’, Marinetti wrote to his friend, Praletta.

In April and May 1912, the Futurist exhibition travelled to the Berlin gallery, Der Sturm (The Storm). Herwarth Walden offered a platform for the Futurists in the magazine of the same name. From Berlin, the exhibition travelled to Brussels, The Hague, Amsterdam, Cologne, and in a somewhat reduced format to other German cities, as well as Austria, Hungary and Switzerland. In France, Duchamp, Kupka, Léger, Delaunay and Mondrian were influenced by Futurist ideas. In England, Wyndham Lewis and Christopher Richard Wynn Nevinson subsequently founded Vorticismus. In Hungary, Sándor Bortnyik, Béla Uitz and Gizella Dömötör took up Futurist ideas, and, in Poland, Formism thus became famous. From Paris, John Marin and Joseph Stella spread these principles to the ‘New World’. In Germany, Futurism left indelible impressions with artists belonging to the Blaue Reiter, in the works of August Macke and the Rhenish Expressionists, with Otto Dix, George Grosz and Lyonel Feininger, and with artists in Berlin, who gathered around the Sturm and the Novembergruppe (November Group). The international influence of Futurism lasted only a few years, but it was so strong that it left an indelible impression upon the arts. The Futurists even exhibited in Japan.

Futurism reflects a dynamic picture of the world in a state of restlessness and of a process that is neither complete nor clear nor accessible. Its exponents regarded themselves as trailblazers of a new era, as social revolutionaries. They experimented boldly and extravagantly in all areas of the aesthetic media, in painting, sculpture and architecture, as well as music and theatre. Modern life and existence, they believed, should be understood in all their manifestations, the visible and the invisible, the normal and the metaphysical. First and foremost, all living things and objects appearing to be static should be depicted, even their emotions and their relationships to one another.

George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916–1917.

Oil on canvas, 100 × 102 cm.

Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.

Gino Severini, Dynamic Hieroglyph at Tabarin Ball, 1912.

Oil on canvas with sequins, 161.6 × 156.2 cm.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Carlo Carrà, Manifestazione Interventista, 1914.

Tempera, pencil, sequins and pasted papers on cardboard, 38.5 × 30 cm. Mattioli collection, Milan.

Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of a Car, 1912–1913.

Oil on canvas, 106 × 140 cm. Gift of Sonja Delaunay, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Our bodies press into the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas press into us, as the passing street car presses into the houses that in turn fall onto the street car and merge with it. Thereby, man is no longer at the centre, but rather merely a delicate being among many delicate beings. The Futurists touched upon the interrelatedness of all beings and felt strongly that the viewer should be included in the dynamism of a painting.

In order to permit the viewer to live at the centre of a painting, the painting must be a synthesis of that which one remembers and that what one sees. Even all non-living things reveal inertia and wildness, cheerfulness and sadness in their lines.

Making visible the invisible necessitated the transparency of all things. In the Technical Manifesto of 1910, the Futurist painters Balla, Carrà, Boccioni, Russolo and Severini expressed the following:

Who can still believe in the inscrutability of the body, when our increased and multifaceted sensibility allows us to imagine the dark revelations of mediumistic phenomenon? Why should we continue to work without taking into account our visual capabilities that are similar in their results to x-rays?

The newest scientific discoveries not only influenced the intelligentsia insofar as the discoveries appeared in somewhat simplified form in the daily press. In her paper, Radium and Radioactivity, Marie Curie, who in 1903 together with her husband, Pierre Curie and Antoine-Henri Becquerel, received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of radioactivity, wrote:

The discovery of the phenomenon of radioactivity adds another group to the great number of invisible rays that are now known, and we must recognise anew how limited our direct perception of the world around us is.

The Futurists were not alone in being caught up in the spirit of the times that distanced itself from the historic-mechanistic worldview due to the many new discoveries of numerous scientists and inventors. In 1907 the French philosopher, Henri Bergson published his paper, ‘L’Evolution créatrice.’ The Futurists emphatically referred to him. For Bergson, the term ‘intuition’ describes a condition of the correlation between the future and the past and of space and time. According to Bergson, by virtue of ‘sympathetic’ contact, which intuition produces between us all and everything living, we achieve an expansion of our consciousness permitting a correlating breakthrough. By this intuition with whose help one can, for example, put oneself in the place of an object in order to become one with its unique core being.

Umberto Boccioni referred to Marie Curie and Bergson as he wrote out his notes for a lecture in 1911: ‘Not the visible must be painted, but rather that which up until now was considered to be invisible, namely, that what the clairvoyant painter sees.’ The Futurist painters tried to realise the new view of the world artistically. All movements and states of mind, all noises and smells, everything moving and static, all life and all matter obligated Futurism to a universal dynamism. This was manifested in works of art by a whirling fragmentation or in the multiplication of images of an object, and indeed by means of disjointed perspective, through a change from distant and close-up views, through the expansion and shortening of time frames or by changing the density of action. The goal was to capture and present in a painting the visible and the invisible as a conglomerate of the past, present and future of an event, as it were in a time and space cluster.

Movement can be depicted differently. It can be depicted either as an ‘absolute movement’ by means of power strokes that ‘impact upon the mind of the viewer’ or as zigs and zags – or as waves. The ‘relative movement’ represents sequential phases of movement and indeed in the manner of photos that have been copied over one another placed next to each other. Through the simultaneous and reciprocal immersing of all things and events into one motif, the fourth dimension of time is added to the three known spatial dimensions. A space and time cluster arises in the painting.

Giacomo Balla, Little Girl Running above a Ball, 1912.

Oil on canvas, 125 × 125 cm. Galleria d’Arte moderna, Milan.

Umberto Boccioni, The Street Soaks into the House, 1911.

Oil on canvas, 100 × 100.6 cm. Sprengel Museum, Hannover.

Lyonel Feininger, Vollersroda V, 1916. Watercolour on paper, 23 × 30 cm.

Gift of Günther and Carola Peill, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.