Category Archives: Futurism

Impressionism (c.1870-1890)

CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926) 'Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight', 1893-94 (oil on canvas)

Impressionism is the name given to a colorful style of painting in France at the end of the 19th century. The Impressionists searched for a more exact analysis of the effects of color and light in nature. They sought to capture the atmosphere of a particular time of day or the effects of different weather conditions. They often worked outdoors and applied their paint in small brightly colored strokes which meant sacrificing much of the outline and detail of their subject. Impressionism abandoned the conventional idea that the shadow of an object was made up from its color with some brown or black added. Instead, the Impressionists enriched their colors with the idea that a shadow is broken up with dashes of its complementary color.

Among the most important Impressionist painters were Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, Alfred Sisley and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec.

VINCENT VAN GOGH (1853-90) 'Caf Terrace at Night', 1888 (oil on canvas)

Post Impressionism was not a particular style of painting. It was the collective title given to the works of a few independent artists at the end of the 19th century. The Post Impressionists rebelled against the limitations of Impressionism to develop a range of personal styles that influenced the development of art in the 20th century. The major artists associated with Post Impressionism were Paul Czanne, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat.

Czanne was an important influence on Picasso and Braque in their development of Cubism. Van Gogh's vigorous and vibrant painting technique was one of the touchstones of both Fauvism and Expressionism, while Gauguin's symbolic color and Seurat's pointillist technique were an inspiration to 'Les Fauves'.

Impressionism and Post Impressionism Slideshow

HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) 'The Open Window, Collioure', 1905 (oil on canvas)

Fauvism was a joyful style of painting that delighted in using outrageously bold colors. It was developed in France at the beginning of the 20th century by Henri Matisse and Andr Derain. The artists who painted in this style were known as 'Les Fauves' (the wild beasts), a title that came from a sarcastic remark in a review by the art critic Louis Vauxcelles.

'Les Fauves' believed that color should be used at its highest pitch to express the artist's feelings about a subject, rather than simply to describe what it looks like. Fauvist paintings have two main characteristics: extremely simplified drawing and intensely exaggerated color. Fauvism was a major influence on German Expressionism.

ERNST LUDWIG KIRCHNER (1880-1938) 'The Red Tower at Halle', 1915 (oil on canvas)

German Expressionism is a style of art that is charged with an emotional or spiritual vision of the world. The expressive paintings of Vincent Van Gogh and Edvard Munch influenced the German Expressionists. They also drew their inspiration from German Gothic and 'primitive art'. The Expressionists were divided into two factions: Die Brcke and Der Blaue Reiter.

Die Brcke (The Bridge) was an artistic community of young artists in Dresden who aimed to overthrow the conservative traditions of German art. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were two of its founding members.

Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider) was a group of artists whose publications and exhibitions sought to find a common creative ground between the various Expressionist art forms. Kandinsky, Marc and Macke were among its founding members.

Fauvism and Expressionism Slideshow

GEORGES BRAQUE (1882-1963) 'Violin and Pitcher', 1910 (oil on canvas)

Abstract Art is a generic term that describes two different methods of abstraction: 'semi abstraction' and 'pure abstraction'. The word 'abstract' means to withdraw part of something in order to consider it separately. In Abstract art that 'something' is one or more of the visual elements of a subject: its line, shape, tone, pattern, texture, or form.

Semi-Abstraction is where the image still has one foot in representational art, (see Cubism and Futurism). It uses a type of stylisation where the artist selects, develops and refines specific visual elements (e.g. line, color and shape) in order to create a poetic reconstruction or simplified essence of the original subject.

Pure Abstraction is where the artist uses visual elements independently as the actual subject of the work itself. (see Suprematism, De Stijl and Minimalism).

Although elements of abstraction are present in earlier artworks, the roots of modern abstract art are to be found in Cubism. Among other important abstract styles that developed in the 20th century are Orphism, Rayonism, Constructivism, Tachisme, Abstract Expressionism, and Op Art.

Abstract Art Slideshow

PABLO PICASSO (1881-1973) 'Ambroise Vollard', 1915 (oil on canvas)

Cubism was invented around 1907 in Paris by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. It was the first abstract style of modern art. Cubist paintings ignore the traditions of perspective drawing and show you many views of a subject at one time. The Cubists believed that the traditions of Western art had become exhausted and to revitalize their work, they drew on the expressive energy of art from other cultures, particularly African art.

There are two distinct phases of the Cubist style: Analytical Cubism (pre 1912) and Synthetic Cubism (post 1912). Cubism influenced many other styles of modern art including Expressionism, Futurism, Orphism, Vorticism, Suprematism, Constructivism and De Stijl. Other notable artists associated with Cubism were Juan Gris, Fernand Leger, Robert Delaunay, Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Louis Marcoussis and Marie Laurencin.

GIACOMO BALLA (1871-1959) 'The Rhythm of the Violinist', 1912 (oil on canvas)

Futurism was a revolutionary Italian movement that celebrated modernity. The Futurist vision was outlined in a series of manifestos that attacked the long tradition of Italian art in favour of a new avant-garde. They glorified industrialization, technology, and transport along with the speed, noise and energy of urban life. The Futurists adopted the visual vocabulary of Cubism to express their ideas - but with a slight twist. In a Cubist painting the artist records selected details of a subject as he moves around it, whereas in a Futurist painting the subject itself seems to move around the artist. The effect of this is that Futurist paintings appear more dynamic than their Cubist counterparts.

Futurism was founded in 1909 by the poet Filippo Tommas Marinetti and embraced the arts in their widest sense. The main figures associated with the movement were the artists, Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini, the musician Luigi Russolo and the architect Antonio Sant'Elia.

Cubism and Futurism Slideshow

KAZIMIR MALEVICH (1879-1935) 'Suprematism', 1915 (oil on canvas)

Suprematism was developed in 1915 by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich. It was a geometric style of abstract painting derived from elements of Cubism and Futurism. Malevich rejected any use of representational images, believing that the non-representational forms of pure abstraction had a greater spiritual power and an ability to open the mind to the supremacy of pure feeling.

Suprematism was a style of pure abstraction that advocated a mystical approach to art, in contrast with Constructivism, the major Russian art movement of the 20th Century, whose imagery served the social and political ideology of the state.

EL LISSITZKY (1890-1941) 'The Red Wedge', 1919 (lithograph)

Constructivism used the same geometric language as Suprematism but abandoned its mystical vision in favour of their 'Socialism of vision' - a Utopian glimpse of a mechanized modernity according to the ideals of the October Revolution. However, this was not an art that was easily understood by the proletariat and it was eventually repressed and replaced by Socialist Realism. Tatlin, Rodchenko, El Lissitzky and Naum Gabo were among the best artists associated with Constructivism.

PIET MONDRIAN (1872-1944) 'Composition with White and Yellow', 1942 (oil on canvas)

De Stijl was a Dutch 'style' of pure abstraction developed by Piet Mondrian, Theo Van Doesburg and Bart van der Leck.

Mondrian was the outstanding artist of the group. He was a deeply spiritual man who was intent on developing a universal visual language that was free from any hint of the nationalism that led to the Great War.

Mondrian gradually refined the elements of his art to a grid of lines and primary colors which he configured in a series of compositions that explored his universal principles of harmony. He saw the elements of line and color as possessing counteracting cosmic forces. Vertical lines embodied the direction and energy of the sun's rays. These were countered by horizontal lines relating to the earth's movement around it. He saw primary colors through the same cosmic tinted spectacles: yellow radiated the sun's energy; blue receded as infinite space and red materialized where blue and yellow met. Mondrian's style which he also called 'Neo-Plasticism' was inspired by the Theosophical beliefs of the mathematician and philosopher, M.H.J. Schoenmaekers.

Suprematism, Constructivism and De Stijl Slideshow

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Modern Art Timeline - Artists, Movements and Styles

Futurism was an early 20th-century art movement which encompassed painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and gastronomy. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti initiated the movement with his Manifesto of Futurism, published in February 1909. Futurist music rejected tradition and introduced experimental sounds inspired by machinery, and would go on to influence several 20th-century composers.

The musician Francesco Balilla Pratella joined the movement in 1910 and wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Musicians (1910), the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Music (1911) and The Destruction of Quadrature (Distruzione della quadratura), (1912). In The Manifesto of Futurist Musicians, Pratella appealed to the young, as had Marinetti, because only they could understand what he had to say. He boasted of the prize that he had won for his musical Futurist work, La Sina dVargun, and the success of its first performance at the Teatro Communale at Bologna in December 1909, which placed him in a position to judge the musical scene. According to Pratella, Italian music was inferior to music abroad. He praised the "sublime genius" of Wagner and saw some value in the work of Richard Strauss, Debussy, Elgar, Mussorgsky, Glazunov and Sibelius. By contrast, the Italian symphony was dominated by opera in an "absurd and anti-musical form". The conservatories encouraged backwardness and mediocrity. The publishers perpetuated mediocrity and the domination of music by the "rickety and vulgar" operas of Puccini and Umberto Giordano. The only Italian Pratella could praise was his teacher Pietro Mascagni, because he had rebelled against the publishers and attempted innovation in opera, but even Mascagni was too traditional for Pratella's tastes.

In the face of this mediocrity and conservatism, Pratella unfurled "the red flag of Futurism, calling to its flaming symbol such young composers as have hearts to love and fight, minds to conceive, and brows free of cowardice".

His musical programme was:

Luigi Russolo (18851947) was an Italian painter and self-taught musician. In 1913 he wrote The Art of Noises,[1][2] which is considered[citation needed] to be one of the most important and influential texts in 20th-century musical aesthetics. Russolo and his brother Antonio used instruments they called "intonarumori", which were acoustic noise generators that permitted the performer to create and control the dynamics and pitch of several different types of noises. The Art of Noises classified "noise-sound" into six groups:

Russolo and Marinetti gave the first concert of Futurist music, complete with intonarumori, in April 1914 (causing a riot).[3] The program comprised four "networks of noises" with the following titles:

Further concerts around Europe were cancelled due to the outbreak of the First World War.

Futurism was one of several 20th century movements in art music that paid homage to, included or imitated machines. Ferruccio Busoni has been seen as anticipating some Futurist ideas, though he remained wedded to tradition.[4] Russolo's intonarumori influenced Stravinsky, Honegger, Antheil, and Edgar Varse.[5] In Pacific 231, Honegger imitated the sound of a steam locomotive. There are also Futurist elements in Prokofiev's The Steel Step.

Most notable in this respect, however, is George Antheil. Embraced by Dadaists, Futurists and modernists, Antheil expressed in music the artistic radicalism of the 1920s. His fascination with machinery is evident in his Airplane Sonata, Death of the Machines, and the 30-minute Ballet mcanique. The Ballet mcanique was originally intended to accompany an experimental film by Fernand Lger, but the musical score is twice the length of the film and now stands alone. The score calls for a percussion ensemble consisting of three xylophones, four bass drums, a tam-tam, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, a siren, two "live pianists", and sixteen synchronized player pianos. Antheil's piece was the first to synchronize machines with human players and to exploit the difference between what machines and humans can play.

Russian Futurist composers included Arthur-Vincent Louri, Mikhail Gnesin, Alexander Goedicke, Geog Kirkor (1910-1980), Julian Krein (1913- 1996), and Alexander Mosolov.

A collection of Futurist music and spoken word from the period 1909-1935 has been recorded on a CD, Musica Futurista: The Art of Noises, issued in 2004. As well as period recordings, including free-verse readings by Marinetti and Russolo's intonarumori, the CD includes contemporary performances by Daniele Lombardi of other key Futurist piano works. The material has been digitally remastered and includes a booklet with rare images and sleeve notes by Lombardi and James Hayward.

The tracks are:

Numerous recordings of Italian and Russian Futurist music have been made by Daniele Lombardi, notably the albums Futurlieder (works by Franco Casavola) and 'Futurpiano (works by George Antheil, Leo Ornstein and Arthur-Vincent Louri).

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Futurism (music) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Although a nascent Futurism can be seen surfacing throughout the very early years of that century, the 1907 essay Entwurf einer neuen ?sthetik der Tonkunst (Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music) by the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni is sometimes claimed as its true jumping-off point. Futurism was a largely Italian and Russian movement although it also had adherents in other countries.

The Futurists explored every medium of art, including painting, sculpture, poetry, theatre, music, architecture and even gastronomy. The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti was the first among them to produce a manifesto of their artistic philosophy in his Manifesto of Futurism (1909), first released in Milan and published in the French paper Le Figaro (February 20). Marinetti summed up the major principles of the Futurists, including a passionate loathing of ideas from the past, especially political and artistic traditions. He and others also espoused a love of speed, technology and violence. The car, the plane, the industrial town were all legendary for the Futurists, because they represented the technological triumph of man over nature.

Marinetti's impassioned polemic immediately attracted the support of the young Milanese painters ? Boccioni, Carr?, and Russolo ? who wanted to extend Marinetti's ideas to the visual arts (Russolo was also a composer, and introduced Futurist ideas into his compositions). The painters Balla and Severini met Marinetti in 1910 and together these artists represented Futurism's first phase.

The painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni (1882 - 1916) wrote the Manifesto of Futurist Painters in 1910 in which he vowed: "We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal."

Futurism in the 1920's and 1930's

Many Italian Futurists instinctively supported the rise of fascism in Italy in the hope of modernizing the society and the economy of a country that was still torn between unfilled industrial revolution in the North and the rural, archaic South. Some Futurists' glorification of modern warfare as the ultimate artistic expression and their intense nationalism also induced them to embrace Italian fascism. Many Futurists became associated with the regime over the 1920's, which gave them both official recognition and the ability to carry out important works, especially in architecture.

However, some leftists that came to Futurism in the earlier years continued to oppose Marinetti's domination of the artistic and political direction of Futurism.

Futurism expanded to encompass other artistic domains. In architecture, it was characterized by a distinctive thrust towards rationalism and modernism through the use of advanced building materials. In Italy, futurist architects were often at odds with the fascist state's tendency towards Roman imperial/classical aesthetic patterns. However several interesting futurist buildings were built in the years 1920?1940, including many public buildings: stations, maritime resorts, post offices, etc. See, for example, Trento's railway station built by Angiolo Mazzoni (as you can see in the picture on the right).

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Futurism - Styles & Movements - Art in the Picture.com

Arthur C. Clarke, science fiction author and futurist, crossed paths with the scientists of the Bell System on numerous occasions. In 1945, he concurrently, but independently, conceived of the first concept for a communications satellite at the same time as Bell Labs scientist, John Robinson Pierce. Pierce too, was a science fiction writer. To avoid any conflict with his day job at Bell Labs, Pierce published his stories under the pseudonym J.J. Coupling.

In the early 1960s, Clarke visited Pierce at Bell Labs. During his visit, Clarke saw and heard the voice synthesis experiments going on at the labs by John L. Kelly and Max Mathews, including Mathews computer vocal version of Bicycle Built for Two. Clarke later incorporated this singing computer into the climactic scene in the screenplay for the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the computer HAL9000 sings the same song. According to Bob Lucky, another Bell Labs scientist, on the same visit, Clarke also saw an early Picturephone, and incorporated that into 2001 as well.

In 1976, AT&T and MIT held a conference on futurism and technology, attended by scientists, theorists, academics and futurists. This interview with Clarke during this conference is remarkably prescientespecially about the evolution of communications systems for the next 30+ years.

The interview was conducted for an episode of a Bell System newsmagazine, but this is the raw interview footage.

Footage Courtesy of AT&T Archives and History Center, Warren, NJ

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Interview with author/futurist Arthur C. Clarke, from an ...

Early Russian Avant-garde Movements

During the first two decades of the 20th century. Cubism and Futurism were adopted and developed by Russian artists who. except for those living outside Russia, had not previously been involved in the European avant-garde movements. From 1905 until the outbreak of World War I and, subsequently, from the time of the October Revolution until the mid-1920s, three important initiatives were launched in succession: Rayonism, Suprematism, and Constructivism. Founded on intellectual discipline and geometry, these modes entailed original theoretical and pictorial developments, along the lines of Abstractionism. Although aware of its legacy in painting and literature, young Russian artists felt burdened by the cultural tradition of realism and rejected it in favour of the new developments in France. They were mesmerized by the collections of Post-Impressionist works by Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, which were brought to Russia by wealthy merchants such as Shchukin and Morozov. who allowed public viewings.

Russian artists also admired Italian Futurism, avidly reading translations of the manifestos and attending Marinetti's lectures, held in Moscow from 1910 onwards. The Golden Fleece exhibitions of 1908 and 1909 included works by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov (1882-1964) that recalled national tradition in robust primitivist scenes. In 1912. however, work presented at the so-called "Donkey's Tail" exhibition showed that these two artists had already started to embark upon a modernization of Russian painting. Although independent and critical of Western culture, these painters set great store by the Cubo-Futurists' experiments in the use of colour, dynamism of line, and the liberation of art from naturalistic representation.

In his "Manifesto of Rayonism" (published in April 1912 and revised in 1913 for the Target exhibition in Moscow), Larionov defined his new artistic theories as "a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism". Rayonism is said to have drawn its inspiration and name from the scientific discoveries of radioactivity and ultraviolet rays, which revealed the sum of rays derived from an object and the dynamic and simultaneous transmission of light. The movement was promoted in Western Europe throughout 1913 and 1914, and was taken up zealously in Rome during 1917, but failed to survive the upheavals of war. Its main protagonist, Larionov, moved to France to concentrate on stage designs for the Ballets Russes.

The works shown by Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) at "0.10. The Last Futurist Exhibition", held in St Petersburg in 1915, represented an important move towards nonrepresentational art. He had sought to "liberate art from the dead-weight of objectivity" in 1913 by painting a single black square on a white ground, the sole content of which was "the sensitivity of nonobjectivity". The aim of this new movement, which Malevich named Suprematism, was to express the absolute supremacy of sensitivity in the creative arts. The goals of his manifesto, produced in collaboration with the poet Maiakovsky, were to liberate painting from the shackles of naturalistic or symbolic references; to divest it of any practical purpose; and to ensure that it existed only as pure aesthetic sensibility. This involved the composition of elementary geometric shapes, usually squares, which were initially painted black, but were later produced in several colours. The quest for purity and immateriality of form reached its logical conclusion in 1918 with a white square on a white ground. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) exhibited at the St Petersburg shows held in 1915 and was a pupil of Larionov. His work evolved from the Neo-Primitive style towards more abstract compositions. His stormy friendship with Malevich ended when theoretical disagreements arose between them in 1917. Malevich continued to reject any connection between the "pure plastic sensibility' of art and the problems of practical life, whereas the Constructivists, led by Tatlin, held that art had to abandon individual aesthetic stances if it was to help emancipate modern society.

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Rayonism [ Rus. Luchizm].

Term derived from the word for ray (Rus. luch), used to refer to an abstract style of painting developed by the Russian artist Mikhail Larionov. Larionov himself claimed that he had painted his first Rayist work in 1909, but modern scholarship has shown his first Rayist works to date from the latter half of 1912. These included Glass: Rayist Method (New York, Guggenheim) and Rayist Sausage and Mackerel (Cologne, Mus. Ludwig). In 1913 Larionov began to expound and elaborate his theory in a series of manifestos.

Rayonism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Russian Luchism (Rayism) Russian art movement founded by Mikhail F. Larionov, representing one of the first steps toward the development of abstract art in Russia. Larionov exhibited one of the first Rayonist works, Glass, in 1912 and wrote the movement's manifesto that same year (though it was not published until 1913). Explaining the new style, which was a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, Larionov said that it is concerned with spatial forms which areobtained through the crossing of reflected rays from various objects.

The raylike lines appearing in the works of Larionov and Natalya Goncharova bear strong similarities to the lines of force in Futurist paintings. Rayonism apparently ended after 1914, when Larionov and Goncharova departed for Paris.

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Russian Avant-garde Movements

After the Bolshevik revolution and World War I, a new-artistic trend emerged in Europe. Unlike Dadaism's nihilistic stance, the aesthetic individualism of Suprematism, or Mondrian's abstract mysticism, which rejected all political and social value for art, this new movement stressed the need for artists to become actively involved in reshaping society. It declared that the combined forces of art, craftsmanship, and industry could help build a better world. In post-Tsarist Russia, the first Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, was broadly sympathetic towards modern artistic movements, and permitted avant-garde artists to play a role in cultural activity and teaching. Considered useful to society, art was expected to concentrate on architecture, the design of manifestos and household objects, and printing. Known as Constructivism, this movement sought to put these revolutionary aims and ideals into practice. It rejected any creativity that did not have a purpose and categorized it as a specific, purely aesthetic activity. From 1915 to 1916, Tatlin (1885-1953) and Rodchenko (1891-1956) made utensils and household objects in iron, glass, and other industrial materials. They were joined by two brothers. Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977). and the Mayakovsky group, organized by LEV (the Left Front) whose manifesto was published in 1923.

After the first flush of shared enthusiasm among the artists, differences soon emerged over methods and results. Following the subsequent schism in the Constructivist group, Pevsner and Gabo espoused the virtues of realism, which, as expounded in their "Realistic Manifesto" of 1920, supported the absolute value of art and its independence from the structure of society, be it capitalist or communist. Immediately, Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova delivered their riposte in the "Programme of the Productivist Group", airing extreme utilitarian and "functional" views and ending with the exhortation: "Down with art! Up with technology! Down with tradition! Up with Constructivist technical progress!" The art produced by Moscow artists who had emigrated, many of them before World War I, was much more in tune with international movements. Artists such as Larionov, Sonia Delaunay, Goncharova, Chagall, and Soutine settled in Paris, where they found the artistic climate more congenial than in their native country.

_____________ Cubo-Futurism

Alexander Rodchenko Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moscow, 1924

Cubo-Futurism

Term first used in 1913 in a lecture, later published, by the Russian art critic Korney Chukovsky (18821969) in reference to a group of Russian avant-garde poets whose work was seen to relate to French Cubism and Italian Futurism; it was subsequently adopted by painters and is now used by art historians to refer to Russian art works of the period 191215 that combine aspects of both styles. Initially the term was applied to the work of the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksey Kruchonykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshits (18861939) and Vasily Kamensky (18641961), who were grouped around the painter David Burlyuk. Their raucous poetry recitals, public clowning, painted faces and ridiculous clothes emulated the activities of the Italians and earned them the name of Russian Futurists. In poetic output, however, only Mayakovsky could be compared with the Italians; his poem Along the Echoes of the City, for example, which describes various street noises, is reminiscent of Luigi Russolos manifesto Larte dei rumori (Milan, 1913).

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Vladimir Mayakovsky

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born July 7 [July 19, New Style], 1893, Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire died April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period.

At the age of 15 Mayakovsky joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the MoscowArt School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifesto, Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Faceof Public Taste), and Mayakovsky's poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913. Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky completed two majorpoems, Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers) and Fleytapozvonochnik (written 1915, published 1916; The Backbone Flute). Both record a tragedy of unrequited love and express the author's discontent with the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky sought to depoetize poetry, adopting the language of the streets and using daring technical innovations. Above all, his poetry is declamatory, for mass audiences. When the Russian Revolution broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as Oda revolutsi (1918; Ode to Revolution) and Levy marsh (1919; Left March) became very popular. So too did his Misteriya buff (first performed 1921; Mystery Bouffe), a drama representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the Unclean (the proletarians) over the Clean (the bourgeoisie). As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in the Russian Telegraph Agency as a painter of posters and cartoons, which he provided with apt rhymes and slogans. He poured out topical poems of propaganda and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, recording his impressions in poems and in a booklet of caustic sketches, Moye otkrytiye Ameriki (1926; My Discovery of America). He also found time to write scripts for motion pictures, in some of which he acted. In his last three years he completed two satirical plays: Klop (performed 1929; The Bedbug), lampooning the type of philistine that emerged with the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and Banya (performed in Leningrad on January 30, 1930; The Bathhouse), a satire of bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism under Joseph Stalin. Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love, which burst out again and again because of repeated romantic frustrations. After his early lyrics this need came out particularly strongly in two poems, Lyublyu(1922; I Love) and Pro eto (1923; About This). To makethings worse, during a stay in Paris in 1928, he fell in love with a refugee, Tatyana Yakovleva, whom he wanted to marry but who refused him. At the same time, he had misunderstandings with the dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and with Soviet authorities. Nor was the production of his Banya a success. Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow.

Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene, but much of his utilitarian and topical poetry is now out of date. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations, however, influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his impress has been strong, especially in the 1930s, after Stalin declared him the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.

Alexander Rodchenko Photomontage for rear cover of Mayakovsky's "Razgovor c fininspektorom o poezii" ("A Conversation with a Tax-collector about Poetry"), 1926.

_____________ Constructivism

Founded in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian Constructivist movement developed from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Suprematism in Russia, Neo Plasticism in Holland, and the Bauhaus School in Germany. The term Constructivism is used to define non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics, and painting. As a response to changes in technology and contemporary life, it advocated a change in the art scene, aiming to create a new order in art and architecture that referenced social and economic problems. Brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner also supported the movement, infusing sculptural elements from cubism and futurism with an allusion to architecture, machinery, and technology. The movements first Constructivist manifesto was written in 1921 when the First Working Group of Constructivists was formed in Moscow. The movement later spread to Holland and Germany before gaining international popularity. The style was initially supported by the Soviet Regime, but later was deemed unsuitable for mass propaganda reasons. Following this decree, Gabo and Pevsner went into exile while Tatlin, Popova and El Lissitzky stayed in Russia. The Constructivist movement was also prominent in theatrical scene design, mostly spread by the efforts of Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Constructivism

Avant-garde tendency in 20th-century painting, sculpture, photography, design and architecture, with associated developments in literature, theatre and film. The term was first coined by artists in Russia in early 1921 and achieved wide international currency in the 1920s. Russian Constructivism refers specifically to a group of artists who sought to move beyond the autonomous art object, extending the formal language of abstract art into practical design work. This development was prompted by the Utopian climate following the October Revolution of 1917, which led artists to seek to create a new visual environment, embodying the social needs and values of the new Communist order. The concept of International Constructivism defines a broader current in Western art, most vital from around 1922 until the end of the 1920s, that was centred primarily in Germany. International Constructivists were inspired by the Russian example, both artistically and politically. They continued, however, to work in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, while also experimenting with film and photography and recognizing the potential of the new formal language for utilitarian design. The term Constructivism has frequently been used since the 1920s, in a looser fashion, to evoke a continuing tradition of geometric abstract art that is constructed from autonomous visual elements such as lines and planes, and characterized by such qualities as precision, impersonality, a clear formal order, simplicity and economy of organization and the use of contemporary materials such as plastic and metal.

Constructivism (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the painting reliefsabstract geometric constructionsof Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was to construct art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers.

Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and laterin the 1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States. Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian Lszl Moholy-Nagy, who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because of Naziinterference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy disseminated Constructivist principles.

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Antoine Pevsner

(b Oryol, 18 Jan 1886; d Paris, 12 April 1962).

French painter and sculptor of Russian birth. Son of an industrialist and brother of the sculptor NAUM GABO, he grew up in Bryansk. He studied at the School of Art in Kiev (19029), where according to Gabo he first met Alexander Archipenko, and then spent a three-month probationary period at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Among his early paintings, The Giant (1907) shows the influence of the Symbolist painter Mikhail Vrubel, but Pevsner was also impressed by the Russian Byzantine tradition.

Antoine Pevsner Monde

Antoine Pevsner Vision spectrale

Antoine Pevsner Construction dans l'espace

Universal Flowering

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Universal Flowering (Mirovoi rastsvet)

Universal Flowering is the name given by Pavel Filonov to his system of analytical art. The system arose from cubo-futurist experiments and works that he undertook from 1913-1915. It is characterized by very dense, minutely facetted, and relatively flat surfaces created by working from the particular to the general, using the smallest of brushes and the sharpest of pencils. The images have both Cubism's multiple vantage points and Futurism's representation of a figure over time. A number of the paintings, while having a given orientation, are painted as though they could be oriented in a variety of ways. Filonov's philosophy was originally formalized in written form in 1915, which was revised and published as The Declaration of Universal Flowering in 1923 when Filonov was a professor at the (then) Petrograd Academy of Arts. Filonov's main theoretical work The Ideology of Analytical Art (Ideologia analiticheskogo iskusstva) was published in 1930.

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Neo-primitivism

Russian movement that took its name from Aleksandr Shevchenkos Neo-primitivizm (1913). This book describes a crude style of painting practised by members of the DONKEYS TAIL group. Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Shevchenko himself all adopted the style, which was based on the conventions of traditional Russian art forms such as the lubok, the icon and peasant arts and crafts. The term Neo-primitivism is now used to describe a general aspiration towards primitivism in the work of the wider Russian avant-garde during the period 191014. It embraces the work of such disparate painters as Chagall, David Burlyuk and Pavel Filonov, and poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh.

Russian artists associated with Neo-primitivism include: David Burlyuk, Marc Chagall, Pavel Filonov, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kasimir Malevich, Aleksandr Shevchenko.

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Aleksandr Shevchenko (1883-1948) Cubist Composition (Man with Guitar). 1915

_____________ Synchromism

Style of painting based on the theory that colour provides the basis for both form and content. It was conceived in Paris shortly before World War I by Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. It was Russells idea that paintings could be created based on sculptural forms interpreted two-dimensionally through a knowledge of colour properties. Synchromist paintings, stressing an emphasis on colour rhythms, were composed of abstract shapes, often concealing the submerged forms of figures, for example Synchromy in Blue (1916; New York, Whitney) by Macdonald-Wright. The two artists first attracted attention at the Neue Kunstsalon in Munich in June 1913. Their second exhibition of Synchromist painting was at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris from October to November 1913.

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Morgan Russell (1886-1953)

Morgan Russell Cosmic Synchromy

Morgan Russell Synchromy in Blue-Violet

Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973)

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Airplane Synchromy in Yellow-Orange

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Califronia Landscape

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Yin Synchromy No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Oriental Synchromy

Stanton MacDonald-Wright The Jade Flute No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Still Life wit Cyclamen and Fruit

_____________ London Group

English exhibiting society founded in November 1913. On its foundation it absorbed many members of the CAMDEN TOWN GROUP and also incorporated the more avant-garde artists influenced by Cubism and Futurism, some of whom afterwards joined the Vorticist movement. Among the founder-members were David Bomberg, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Harold Gilman (the groups first president until his death in 1919), Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore, Percy Wyndham Lewis, John Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. The group was organized in opposition to the conservatism of the Royal Academy and the stagnation of the formerly radical New English Art Club. Though, as can be judged from the names of its founders, it had no homogeneous style or aesthetic, it acted as a focal point for the more progressive elements in British art at that time.

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Harold Gilman Clarissa 1911

Harold Gilman (British, 1876-1919)

Harold Gilman Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord

Harold Gilman Edwardian Interior

Originally posted here:
A Revolution in the Arts - All-Art.org

Futurism

In contrast with other early 20th-century avant-garde movements, the distinctive feature of Futurism was its intention to become involved in all aspects of modem life. Its aim was to effect a systematic change in society and, true to the movement's name, lead it towards new departures into the "future". Futurism was a direction rather than a style. Its encouragement of eccentric behaviour often prompted impetuous and sometimes violent attempts to stage imaginative situations in the hope of provoking reactions. The movement tried to liberate its adherents from the shackles of 19th-century' bourgeois conventionality and urged them to cross the boundaries of traditional artistic genres in order to claim a far more complete freedom of expression. Through a barrage of manifestos that dealt not only with various aspects of art, such as painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and design, but with society in general, the Futurists proclaimed the cult of modernity and the advent of a new form of artistic expression, and put an end to the art of the past. The entire classical tradition, especially that of Italy, was a prime target for attack, while the worlds of technology, mechanization, and speed were embraced as expressions of beauty and subjects worthy of the artist's interest.

Futurism, which started out as a literary movement, had its first manifesto (signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) published in Le Figaro in 1909. It soon attracted a group of young Italian artists - Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), Carlo Carra (1881-1966), Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), and Gino Severini (1883-1966) - who collaborated in writing the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting" and the "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters", both of which were published in 1910.

Despite being the sole Italian avant-garde movement. Futurism first came to light in Paris where the cosmopolitan atmosphere was ready to receive and promote it. Its development coincided with that of Cubism, and the similarities and differences in the philosophies of the two movements have often been discussed. Without doubt they shared a common cause in making a definitive break with the traditional, objective methods of representation. However, the static quality of Cubism is evident when compared with the dynamism of the Futurists, as are the monochrome or subdued colours of the former in contrast to the vibrant use of colour by the latter. The Cubists' rational form of experimentation, and intellectual approach to the artistic process, also contrasts with the Futurists' vociferous and emotive exhortations for the mutual involvement of art and life, with expressions of total art and provocative demonstrations in public. Cubists held an interest in the objective value of form, while Futurists relied on images and the strength of perception and memory in their particularly dynamic paintings. The Futurists believed that physical objects had a kind of personality and vitality of their own. revealed by "force-lines" - Boccioni referred to this as "physical transcendentalism". These characteristic lines helped to inform the psychology and emotions of the observer and influenced surrounding objects "not by reflections of light, but by a real concurrence of lines and real conflicts of planes" (catalogue for the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition, 1911). In this way, the painting could interact with the observer who, for the first time, would be looking "at the centre of the picture" rather than simply viewing the picture from the front. This method of looking at objects that was based on their inherent movement - and thereby capturing the vital moment of a phenomenon within its process of continual change - was partly influenced by a fascination with new technology and mechanization. Of equal importance, however, was the visual potential of the new-found but flourishing art of cinematography. Futurists felt strongly that pictorial sensations should be shouted, not murmured. This belief was reflected in their use of very flamboyant, dynamic colours, based on the model of Neo-Impressionist theories of the fragmentation of light. A favourite subject among Futurist artists was the feverish life of the metropolis: the crowds of people, the vibrant nocturnal life of the stations and dockyards, and the violent scenes of mass movement and emotion that tended to erupt suddenly. Some Futurists, such as Balla, chose themes with social connotations, following the anarchic Symbolist tradition of northern Italy and the humanitarian populism of Giovanni Cena.

The first period of Futurism was an analytical phase, involving the analysis of dynamics, the fragmentation of objects into complementary shades of colour, and the juxtaposition of winding, serpentine lines and perpendicular straight lines. Milan was the centre of Futurist activity, which was led by Boccioni and supported by Carra and Russolo. These three artists visited Paris together in 1911 as guests of Severini, who had settled there in 1906. During their stay, they formulated a new artistic-language, which culminated in works dealing with the "expansion of objects in space" and "states of mind" paintings. A second period, when the Futurists adopted a Cubistic idiom, was known as the synthetic phase, and lasted from 1913 to 1916.

At this time, Boccioni took up sculpture, developing his idea of "sculpture of the environment" which heralded the "spatial" sculpture of Moore, Archipenko, and the Constructivists. In Rome, Balla and Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) created "plastic complexes", constructions of dynamic, basic silhouettes in harsh, solid colours. The outbreak of World War I prompted many Futurist artists to enlist as volunteers. This willingness to serve was influenced by the movement's doctrine, which maintained that war was the world's most effective form of cleansing. Both Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant'Elia, who had designed an imaginary Futurist city, were killed in the war and the movement was brought to a sudden end.

During the 1920s, some Futurists attempted to revive the movement and align it with other European avant-garde movements, under the label of "Mechanical Art". Its manifesto, published in 1922. showed much in common with Purism and Constructivism. Futurism also became associated with "aeropainting" a technique developed in 1929 by Balla, Benedetta, Dottori, Fillia, and other artists. This painting style served as an expression of a desire for the freedom of the imagination and of fantasy.

Futurism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Italian Futurismo, Russian Futurizm, early 20th-century artistic movement that centred in Italy and emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life in general. The most significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry.

Futurism was first announced on Feb.20, 1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro published a manifesto by the Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (q.v.). The name Futurism, coined by Marinetti, reflected his emphasis on discarding what he conceived to be the static and irrelevant art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society. Marinetti's manifesto glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power, and movement. He exalted violence and conflict and called for the sweeping repudiation of traditional cultural, social, and political values and the destruction of such cultural institutions as museums and libraries. The manifesto's rhetoric was passionately bombastic; its tone was aggressive and inflammatory and was purposely intended toinspire public anger and amazement, to arouse controversy, and to attract widespread attention. Painting and sculpture

With the support of Marinetti, the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini published several manifestos on painting in 1910. Like Marinetti, they glorified originality for its own sake and despised inherited traditions of art. Although they were not as yet working in what was to become the Futurist style, theybegan to emphasize an emotional involvement in the dynamics of modern life, and toward this end they called for rendering the perception of movement and communicating to the viewer the sensations of speed and change. To achieve this, the Futurist painters adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several sides and views of an object simultaneously by means of fragmented and interpenetrating plane surfaces and outlines. But the Futurists additionally sought to portray the object's movement in space, and they tried to achieve this goal by rhythmic spatial repetitions of the object's outlines during its transit, producing an effect akin to that obtained by making multiple and sequential photographic exposures of a moving object. The Futurist paintings differed from Cubist ones in other important ways. While the Cubists favoured still life and portraiture, the Futurists preferred such subjects as speeding automobiles and trains, racing cyclists, dancers, animals, and urban crowds in movement. The resulting paintings had brighter and more vibrant colours than Cubist works and revealed dynamic, agitated compositions in which rhythmically swirling forms reached crescendos of violent movement.

Boccioni also became interested in sculpture, publishing a manifesto on the subject in the spring of 1912. Soon afterward, he began working in this medium, creating the highly original Development of a Bottle in Space (1912) and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). Antonio Sant'Elia formulated a Futurist manifesto on architecture in 1914. His visionary drawings of highly mechanized cities and boldly modern skyscrapers of the future prefigure some of the most imaginative 20th-century architectural planning. Sant'Elia was killed in action in 1916 during World War I.

Boccioni, who had been the most talented artist in the group, also died during military service in 1916. This event, combined with dilution of the group's daring as a result of expansion of its personnel and the coming of war, brought an end to the Futurist movement as an important historical force in the visual arts.

Literature

After his initial broad manifesto of 1909, Marinetti wrote or had a hand in creating a whole series of manifestos dealing with poetry, the theatre, architecture, and other arts. He founded the journal Poesia at Paris in 1905, and he later founded a press with the same name to publish Futurist works. On proselytizing visits to England, France, Germany, and Russia, Marinetti influenced the work of the English founder of Vorticism, Wyndham Lewis, and the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

In Russia the Marinetti visit took root in a kind of Russian Futurism that went beyond its Italian model in a revolutionary social and political outlook. Marinetti influenced the two Russian writers considered the founders of Russian Futurism, Velimir Khlebnikov (q.v.), who remained a poet and a mystic, and the younger Vladimir Mayakovsky (q.v.), who became the poet of the Revolution and the popular spokesman of his generation. The Russians published their own manifesto in December 1912, entitled Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Face of Public Taste), which echoed the Italian manifesto of the previous May. The Russian Futurists repudiated Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy and the then-current Russian symbolist verse and called for the creation of new techniques of writing poetry. Both the Russian and the Italian Futurist poets discarded logical sentence construction and traditional grammar and syntax; they frequently presented an incoherent string of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone. As the first group of artists to identify wholeheartedly with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian Futurists sought to dominate post-Revolutionary culture and create a new art that would be integrated into all aspects of daily life of a revolutionary culture. They were favoured by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education, and given important cultural posts. But the Russian Futurists' challenging literary techniques and their theoretical premises of revolt and innovation proved too unstable a foundation upon which to build a broader literary movement. The Futurists' influence was negligible by the time of Mayakovsky's death in 1930.

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947)

Luigi Russolo Music

(b Portogruaro, Venice, 7 May 1885; d Cerro di Laveno, Lake Maggiore, 4 Feb 1947).

Italian painter, printmaker, writer and composer. The fourth of five children, he was trained in music by his father, who was a clockmaker and organist. In 1901 he went to Milan to join his family, who had moved there so that his two brothers, Giovanni and Antonio, could study music at the conservatory. Diverging from his fathers inclinations, Luigi was attracted towards other forms of art, especially painting. Though not actually enrolled at the Accademia di Brera, through new friends he indirectly followed the ideas taught there. In the same period he worked for the restorer Crivelli in Milan, serving his apprenticeship working on the interior decorations of the Castello Sforzesco and on Leonardos Last Supper in the refectory of S Maria delle Grazie. In December 1909 he took part in the exhibition Bianco e nero at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, contributing a series of etchings, made during the preceding year, which show a definite leaning towards Symbolist forms and images. The undulating quality of the line in such etchings as his portrait of Nietzsche (c. 1909; Milan, Gal. A. Mod.), which seems to translate a musical rhythm into visual form through a strong, enveloping sign, remained a distinctive and individual feature of Russolos work and poetics, especially in his Futurist work.

Luigi Russolo Revolt 1911

Luigi Russolo Dinamismo di un treno 1912

Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini

TO THE YOUNG ARTISTS OF ITALY!

The cry of rebellion which we utter associates our ideals with those of the Futurist poets. These ideals were not invented by some aesthetic clique. They are an expression of a violent desire which boils in the veins of every creative artist today.

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

Comrades, we tell you now that the triumphant progress of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable, changes which are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of past tradition and us free moderns, who are confident in the radiant splendor of our future.

We are sickened by the foul laziness of artists, who, ever since the sixteenth century, have endlessly exploited the glories of the ancient Romans.

In the eyes of other countries, Italy is still a land of the dead, a vast Pompeii, whit with sepulchres. But Italy is being reborn. Its political resurgence will be followed by a cultural resurgence. In the land inhabited by the illiterate peasant, schools will be set up; in the land where doing nothing in the sun was the only available profession, millions of machines are already roaring; in the land where traditional aesthetics reigned supreme, new flights of artistic inspiration are emerging and dazzling the world with their brilliance.

Living art draws its life from the surrounding environment. Our forebears drew their artistic inspiration from a religious atmosphere which fed their souls; in the same way we must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary lifethe iron network of speedy communications which envelops the earth, the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, those marvelous flights which furrow our skies, the profound courage of our submarine navigators and the spasmodic struggle to conquer the unknown. How can we remain insensible to the frenetic life of our great cities and to the exciting new psychology of night-life; the feverish figures of the bon viveur, the cocette, the apache and the absinthe drinker?

We will also play our part in this crucial revival of aesthetic expression: we will declare war on all artists and all institutions which insist on hiding behind a faade of false modernity, while they are actually ensnared by tradition, academicism and, above all, a nauseating cerebral laziness.

We condemn as insulting to youth the acclamations of a revolting rabble for the sickening reflowering of a pathetic kind of classicism in Rome; the neurasthenic cultivation of hermaphodic archaism which they rave about in Florence; the pedestrian, half-blind handiwork of 48 which they are buying in Milan; the work of pensioned-off government clerks which they think the world of in Turin; the hotchpotch of encrusted rubbish of a group of fossilized alchemists which they are worshipping in Venice. We are going to rise up against all superficiality and banalityall the slovenly and facile commercialism which makes the work of most of our highly respected artists throughout Italy worthy of our deepest contempt.

Away then with hired restorers of antiquated incrustations. Away with affected archaeologists with their chronic necrophilia! Down with the critics, those complacent pimps! Down with gouty academics and drunken, ignorant professors!

Ask these priests of a veritable religious cult, these guardians of old aesthetic laws, where we can go and see the works of Giovanni Segantini today. Ask them why the officials of the Commission have never heard of the existence of Gaetano Previati. Ask them where they can see Medardo Rossos sculpture, or who takes the slightest interest in artists who have not yet had twenty years of struggle and suffering behind them, but are still producing works destined to honor their fatherland?

These paid critics have other interests to defend. Exhibitions, competitions, superficial and never disinterested criticism, condemn Italian art to the ignominy of true prostitution.

And what about our esteemed specialists? Throw them all out. Finish them off! The Portraitists, the Genre Painters, the Lake Painters, the Mountain Painters. We have put up with enough from these impotent painters of country holidays.

Down with all marble-chippers who are cluttering up our squares and profaning our cemeteries! Down with the speculators and their reinforced-concrete buildings! Down with laborious decorators, phony ceramicists, sold-out poster painters and shoddy, idiodic illustrators!

These are our final conclusions:

With our enthusiastic adherence to Futurism, we will:

1.Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.

2. Totally invalidate all kinds of imitation.

3. Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.

4. Bear bravely and proudly the smear of madness with which they try to gag all innovators.

5. Regard art critics as useless and dangerous.

6. Rebel against the tyranny of words: Harmony and good taste and other loose expressions which can be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin...

7. Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.

8. Support and glory in our day-to-day world, a world which is going to be continually and splendidly transformed by victorious Science.

The dead shall be buried in the earths deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!

FUTURIST SCULPTURE

Umberto Boccioni published his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" in 1912, despite having completed only two sculptural works at the time. He had developed his new theories after coming into contact with Duchamp-Villon, Archipenko, Brancusi, and Picasso while in Paris. Boccioni's ambition was to make sculpture capable of expressing the dynamic structures of modern society. To this end, he aimed to capture the totality of reality, including psychological and emotional dimensions, and all its varied facets in their continual condition of change. The resultant work would be "sculpture of environment", in which he could "fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it".

The Cubists had already tried a fresh approach to reality, interrupting the continuity of line and breaking up the rhythm of forms according to analytical and geometric conceptions. However, they did not alter the static perception of reality. Futurists aimed to convey all the changes that an object undergoes during movement. After demonstrating the sculptural motion of an everyday object in his famous "bottles" series (Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912), Boccioni tackled the theme of movement in the human body, constructing aerodynamic, compressed compositions with a succession of concave and convex shapes. By stretching and distorting his figures, he created "syntheses" of "internal plastic infinity" and "external plastic infinity", as seen in his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). The most conclusive work of Boccioni's sculptural experimentation was his inspired composition Horse + rider + buildings (1913-14). The materials chosen for this work, including wood, tin. copper, and cardboard, represented the need to progress from traditional sculpture made in a single material to the use of a multiplicity of colours and materials. Picasso's assemblage of various materials for his sculptures in 1911 and 1912 had already started to change the course of plastic art in Europe. The Horse (1914) by Duchamp-Villon showed a remarkable affinity with Boccioni's work, which was also discernible in Lipchitz's solid three-dimensional structures, and in Constructivist works.

I. Avant-garde sculpture (190920)

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

In the second decade of the 20th century the tradition of body rendering extending from the Renaissance to Rodin was shattered, and the Cubists, Brancusi, and the Constructivists emerged as the most influential forces. Cubism, with its compositions of imagined rather than observed forms and relationships, had a similarly marked influence.

One of the first examples of the revolutionary sculpture is Picasso's Woman's Head (1909). The sculptor no longer relied upon traditional methods of sculpture or upon his sensory experience of the body; what was given to his outward senses of sight and touch was dominated by strong conceptualizing. The changed and forceful appearance of the head derives from the use of angular planar volumes joined in a new syntax independent of anatomy. In contrast to traditional portraiture, the eyes and mouth are less expressive than the forehead, cheeks, nose, and hair. Matisse's head of Jeanette (191011) also partakes of a personal reproportioning that gives a new vitality to the lessmobile areas of the face. Likewise influenced by the Cubists' manipulation of their subject matter, Alexander Archipenko in his Woman Combing Her Hair (1915) rendered the body by means of concavities rather than convexities and replaced the solid head by its silhouette within which there is only space.

Brancusi also abandoned Rodin's rhetoric and reduced the body to its mystical inner core. His Kiss (1908), with its twoblocklike figures joined in symbolic embrace, has a concentration of expression comparable to that of primitive art but lacking its spiritualistic power. In this and subsequentworks Brancusi favoured hard materials and surfaces as wellas self-enclosed volumes that often impart an introverted character to his subjects. His bronze Bird in Space became a cause clbre in the 1920s when U.S. customs refused to admit it duty free as a work of art.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon began as a follower of Rodin, but his portrait head Baudelaire (1911) contrasts with that by his predecessor in its more radical departure from the flesh; the somewhat squared-off head is molded by clear, hard volumes. His famous Horse (1914), a coiled, vaguely mechanical form bearing little resemblance to the animal itself, suggests metaphorically the horsepower of locomotive drive shafts and, by extension, the mechanization of modern life. Duchamp-Villon may have been influenced by Umberto Boccioni, one of the major figures in the Italian Futurist movement and a sculptor who epitomized the Futurist love of force and energy deriving from the machine. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and Head + House + Light (1911), he carried out his theories that the sculptor should model objects as they interact with their environment, thus revealing the dynamic essence of reality.

Jacques Lipchitz came to Cubism later than Archipenko and Duchamp-Villon, but after mastering its meaning he produced superior sculpture. In 1913, after several years of conservative training, he made a number of small bronzes experimenting with the compass curve and angular planes. They reveal an understanding of the Cubist reconstitution of the bodies in an impersonal quasi-geometric armature over which the artist exercised complete autonomy. Continuing towork in this fashion, he produced Man with a Guitar, and Standing Figure (1915), in which voids are introduced, while in the early 1920s he developed freer forms more consistently based on curves.

Lehmbruck's mature style emerged in the Kneeling Woman(1911) and Standing Youth (1913), in which his gothicized, elongated bodies with their angular posturings and appearance of growing from the earth give expression to his notions of modern heroism. In contrast to this spiritualized view is his The Fallen (191516), intended as a compassionate memorial for friends lost in the war.

Constructivism and Dada

Between 1912 and 1914 there emerged anantisculptural movement, called Constructivism, that attacked the false seriousness and hollow moral ideals of academic art. The movement began with the relief fabrications of Vladimir Tatlin in 1913. The Constructivists and their sympathizers preferred industrially manufactured materials, such as plastics, glass, iron, and steel, to marble and bronze. Their sculptures were not formed by carving, modelling, and casting but by twisting, cutting, welding, or literally constructing: thus the name Constructivism.

Unlike traditional figural representation, the Constructivists' sculpture denied mass as a plastic element and volume as an expression of space; for these principles they substitutedgeometry and mechanics. In the machine, where the Futurists saw violence, the Constructivists saw beauty. Like their sculptures, it was something invented; it could be elegant, light, or complex, and it demanded the ultimate in precision and calculation.

Seeking to express pure reality, with the veneer of accidental appearance stripped away, the Constructivists fabricated objects totally devoid of sentiment or literary association; Naum Gabo's work frequently resembled mathematical models, and several Constructivist sculptures,such as those by Kazimir Malevich and Georges Vantongerloo, have the appearance of architectural models. The Constructivists created, in effect, sculptural metaphors for the new world of science, industry, and production; their aesthetic principles are reflected in much of the furniture, architecture, and typography of the Bauhaus.

A second important offshoot of the Cubist collage was the fantastic object or Dadaist assemblage. The Dadaist movement, while sharing Constructivism's iconoclastic vigour, opposed its insistence upon rationality. Dadaist assemblages were, as the name suggests, assembled from materials lying about in the studio, such as wood, cardboard, nails, wire, and paper; examples are Kurt Schwitters' Rubbish Construction (1921) and Marcel Duchamp's Disturbed Balance (1918). This art generally exalted the accidental, the spontaneous, and the impulsive, giving free play to associations. Its paroxysmal and negativist tenor led its subscribers into other directions, but Dadaism formed the basis of the imaginative sculpture thatemerged in the later 1920s.

Conservative reaction (1920s)

In the 1920s modern art underwent a reaction comparable to the changes experienced by society as a whole. In the postwar search for security, permanence, and order, the earlier insurgent art seemed to many to be antithetical to these ends, and certain avant-garde artists radically changed their art and thought. Lipchitz' portraits of Gertrude Stein (1920) and Berthe Lipchitz (1922) return volume and features to the head but not an intimacy of contact with the viewer. Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko broke with the Constructivists around 1920. Jacob Epstein developed some of his finest naturalistic portraiture in this decade. Rudolph Belling abandoned the mechanization that had characterized his Head (1925) in favour of musculature and individual identity in his statue of Max Schmeling of 1929. Matisse's reclining nudes and the Back series of 1929 show less violently worked surfaces and more massive and obvious structuring.

Aristide Maillol continued refining his relaxed and uncomplicated female forms with their untroubled, stolid surfaces. In Germany, Georg Kolbe's Standing Man and Woman of 1931 seems a prelude to the Nazi health cult, andthe serene but vacuous figures of Arno Breker, Karl Albiker, and Ernesto de Fiori were simply variations on a studio theme in praise of youth and body culture. In the United States adherents of the countermovement included William Zorach, Chaim Gross, Adolph Block, Paul Manship, and Wheeler Williams.

II. Sculpture of fantasy (192045)

One trend of Surrealist or Fantasist sculpture of the late 1920s and the 1930s consisted of compositions made up of found objects, such as Meret Oppenheim's Object, Fur Covered Cup (1936). As with Dadaist fabrications, the unfamiliar conjunction of familiar objects in these assemblies was dictated by impulse and irrationality and could be summarized by Isidore Ducasse's often-quoted statement, Beautiful . . . as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine with an umbrella.

Of greater artistic importance was the sculpture of a second group that included Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Lipchitz, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Picasso, Julio Gonzlez, andAlexander Calder. Although these sculptors were sometimes in sympathy with Surrealist objectives, their aesthetic and intellectual concerns prohibited a more consistent attachment. Their art, derived from visions, hallucinations, reverie, and memory, might best be called the sculpture of fantasy. Giacometti's Palace at 4 A.M., for example, interprets the artist's vision not in terms of the external public world but in an enigmatic, private language. Moore's series of Forms suggest shapes in the process of forming under the influence of each other and the medium of space. The appeal of primitive and ancient ritual art to Moore, the element of surprise in children's toys for Calder, and the wellsprings of irrationality from which Arp and Giacometti drank were for these men the means by which wonder and the marvelous could be restored to sculpture. While their works are often violent transmutations of life, their objectives were peaceful, . . . to inject into the vain and bestial world and its retinue, the machines, something peaceful and vegetative. ([Jean] Hans Arp, On My Way, Documents of Modern Art, vol. 6, p. 123, George Wittenborn, Inc., New York, 1948.)

Other sculpture (192045)

The sculpture of Moore, Gaston Lachaise, and Henri Laurens during the 1920s and '30s included mature, ripe human bodies, erogenic images reminiscent of Hindu sculpture, appearing inflated with breath rather than supported by skeletal armatures. Lachaise's Montagne (193435) and Moore's reclining nudes of the '30s and '40s are identifications with earth, growth, vital rhythm, and silent power. Prior to Moore and the work of Archipenko, Boccioni, and Lipchitz, space had been a negative element in figure sculpture; in Moore's string sculptures and Lipchitz' transparencies of the 1920s, it became a prime element of design.

Lipchitz' figure style of the late 1920s and '30s is inseparable from his emerging optimistic humanism. His concern with subject matter began with the ecstatic Joy of Life (1927). Thereafter his seminal themes were of love and security and assertive passionate acts that throw off the inertia of his Cubist figures. In the Return of the Prodigal Son (1931), for example, strong, facetted curvilinear volumes weave a pattern of emotional and aesthetic accord between parent and child.

The American sculptor John B. Flannagan rendered animal forms as well as the human figure in a simple, almost naive style. His interest in what he called the profound subterranean urges of the human spirit in the whole dynamiclife process, birth, growth, decay and death (quoted in Carl Zigrosser, Catalog for the Exhibition of the Sculpture of John B. Flannagan, p. 8, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942) resulted in Head of a Child (1935), New One (1935), Not Yet (1940), and The Triumph of the Egg (1941).

Somewhat more mystical are Brancusi's Beginning of the World (1924), Fish (192830), and The Seal (1936). As with Flannagan, the recurrent egg form in Brancusi's art symbolizes the mystery of life. Nature in motion is the subject of Alexander Calder's mobiles, such as Lobster Trapand Fish Tail (1939) and others suggesting the movement of leaves, trees, and snow. In the history of sculpture there is no more direct or poetic expression of nature's rhythm.

Developments after World War II

The modern artist is the counterpart in our time of the alchemist-philosopher who once toiled over furnaces, alembics and crucibles, ostensibly to make gold, but who consciously entered the most profound levels of being, philosophizing over the melting and mixing of various ingredients (Ibram Lassaw, quoted by Lawrence Campbell in Art News, p. 66, The Art Foundation Press, New York, March 1954). While work in the older mediums persisted, it was the welding, soldering, and cutting of metal that emerged after 1945 as an increasingly popular medium for sculpture. The technical and expressive potential of uncast metal sculpturewas carried far beyond the earlier work of Gonzlez and Picasso.

The appeal of metal is manifold. It is plentifully available from commercial supply houses; it is flexible and permanent; it allows the artist to work quickly; and it is relatively cheap compared to casting. Industrial metals also relate modern sculpture physically, aesthetically, and emotionally to its context in modern civilization. As the American sculptor David Smith has commented, Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associatedwith it, its strength and functions. Yet it is also brutal, the rapist, the murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring (quoted in Garola Giedion-Welcker, ContemporarySculpture, Documents of Modern Art, vol. 12, p. 123, George Wittenborn, Inc., New York, 1955).

The basic tool of the metal sculptor is the oxyacetylene torch, which achieves a maximum temperature of 6,500 F (3,600 C; the melting point of bronze is 2,000 F). The intensity and size of the flame can be varied by alternating torch tips. In the hands of a skilled artist the torch can cut or weld, harden or soften, colour and lighten or darken metal. Files, hammers, chisels, and jigs are also used in shaping themetal, worked either hot or cold. The sculptor may first construct a metal armature that he then proceeds to conceal or expose. He builds up his form with various metals and alloys, fusing or brazing them, and may expose parts or the whole to the chemical action of acids. This type of work requires constant control, and many sculptors work out and guard their own recipes.

Other sculptors such as Peter Agostini, George Spaventa, Peter Grippe, David Slivka, and Lipchitz, who were interested in bringing spontaneity, accident, and automatism into play, returned to the more labile media of wax and clay, with occasional cire-perdue casting, which permit a very direct projection of the artist's feelings. By the nature of the processes such work is usually on a small scale.

A number of artists brought new technique and content to theDadaist form of the assemblage. Among the most important was the American Joseph Cornell, who combined printed matter and three-dimensional objects in his intimately sealed, often enigmatic boxes.

Another modern phenomenon, seen particularly in Italy, France, and the United States, was the revival of relief sculpture and the execution of such works on a large scale, intended to stand alone rather than in conjunction with a building. Louise Nevelson, for example, typically employed boxes as container compartments in which she carefully disposed an assortment of forms and then painted them a uniform colour. In Europe the outstanding metal reliefs were those by Alberto Burri, Gio and Arnaldo Pomodoro, Csar, Zoltn Kemny, and Manuel Rivera.

Development of metal sculpture, particularly in the United States, led to fresh interpretations of the natural world. In the art of Richard Lippold and Ibram Lassaw, the search for essential structures took the form of qualitative analogies. Lippold's Full Moon (194950) and Sun (195356; commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, to hang in its room of Persian carpets) show an intuition of a basic regularity, precise order, and completeness that underlies the universe. Lassaw's comparable interest in astronomical phenomena inspired his Planets (1952) and The Clouds of Magellan (1953).

In contrast to the macrocosmic concern of these two artists were the interests of sculptors such as Raymond Jacobson, whose Structure (1955) derived from his study of honeycombs. Using three basic sizes, Jacobson constructed his sculpture of hollowed cubes emulating the modular, generally regular but slightly unpredictable formal quality ofthe honeycomb.

Isamu Noguchi's Night Land is one of the first pure landscapes in sculpture. David Smith's Hudson River Landscape (1951), Theodore J. Roszak's Recollections of the Southwest (1948), Louise Bourgeois's Night Garden (1953), and Leo Amino's Jungle (1950) are later examples.

In the 1960s a number of sculptors, particularly in the United States, began to experiment with using the natural world as a kind of medium rather than a subject. Among the more notable examples were the American Robert Smithson, who frequently employed earth-moving equipment to alter natural sites, and the Bulgarian-born Christo, whose wrappings of both natural and man-made structures in synthetic cloth generated considerable controversy. The name environmental sculpture has come to denote such works, together with other sculptures that constitute self-contained environments.

The human figure since World War II

Since figural sculpture moved away from straightforward imitation, the human form has been subjected to an enormous variety of interpretations. The thin, vertical, Etruscan idol-like figures developed by Giacometti showed his repugnance toward rounded and smooth body surfaces orstrong references to the flesh. His men and women do not exist in felicitous concert with others; each form is a secret sanctum, a maximum of being wrested from a minimum of material. Reg Butler's work (e.g., Woman Resting [1951]) and that of David Hare (Figure in a Window [1955]) treat the body in terms of skeletal outlines. Butler's figures partake of nonhuman qualities and embody fantasies of an unsentimental and aggressive character; the difficulties andtensions of existence are measured out in taut wire armatures and constricting malleable bronze surfaces. Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick, two other British sculptors, make the clothing a direct extension of the figure, part of a total gesture. In his Family Going for a Walk (1953), for example, Armitage creates a fanciful screenlike figure recalling wind-whipped clothing on a wash line. Both Chadwick and Armitage transfer the burden of expression from human limbs and faces to the broad planes of the bulk of the sculpture. Chadwick's sculptures are often illusive hybrids suggesting alternately impotent De Chirico-like figures or animated geological forms.

Luciano Minguzzi admired the amply proportioned feminine form. Minguzzi's women (e.g., Woman Jumping Rope [1954]) may exert themselves with a kind of playful abandon. Marini's women (e.g., Dancer [1949]) enjoy a stately passivity, their quiescent postures permitting a contrapuntal focus on the graceful transition from the slender extremities to the large, compact, voluminous torso, with small, rich surface textures.

The segmented torso, popular with Arp, Laurens, and Picasso earlier, continued to be reinterpreted by Alberto Viani, Bernard Heiliger, Karl Hartung, and Raoul Hague. The emphasis of these sculptors was upon more subtle, sensuous joinings that created self-enclosing surfaces. Viani's work, for example, does not glorify body culture or suggest macrocosmic affinities as does an ideally proportioned Phidian figure; his torsos are seen in a private way, as in his Nude (1951), with its large body and golf ball-sized breasts.

Among the most impressive figure sculptures made in the United States in the late 1950s were those by Seymour Lipton. Their large-scale, taut design and provocative interweaving of closed and open shapes restore qualities of mystery and the heroic to the human form.

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