Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961

DANIEL ROBBINS [00:00:00] Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the seventh and next-to-last lecture in this series. This afternoon, our subject is so vast and so complex, that I cannot pretend to do justice to it. I think I’ll cover substantially the same material next Thursday. [00:01:00] cubism and futurism have been the keywords of Modern painting for 50 years. cubism certainly the most influential and important movement at the beginning of our century, and futurism, that movement which, with its word and with its several manifestos, successfully captured the imagination of the public. For example, when the post-impressionist paintings and the cubist paintings and the futurist paintings came to America in 1913 for the Great Armory Show, almost the entire exhibition was referred to in flaming front page articles as “futurist work.” It was both a term of derision and a term of praise, depending on what [00:02:00] side of the issues one stood. What I propose to do this afternoon is to give a rather traditional run-through and analysis of cubism. It’s by no means the whole story. I propose to do likewise for futurism, and at the very end of my lecture, to suggest a few of the more complicated points that arise and which I hope I’ll be able to deal with next time.

Let’s begin by looking at a kind of work we’ve seen before: a Picasso of 1902. Here, on the left, the Woman with Bangs, very aptly titled. It’s a work of the artist’s Blue period, but more than that, it’s a work as, I’ve remarked in connection with similar works, in which the [00:03:00] influence of the end of the century art nouveau is still very evident. That is, there is a certain curvilinear quality to it and a certain simplicity of the curvilinear shape against a simple, flat background. Now, there are other features that are equally visible and equally important. For one thing, it’s very evident that Picasso, when he was just beginning his career — he was 21 years old when he made this picture — he was shuttling back and forth between Barcelona, where he came from, and Paris, where he wanted to be and would eventually settle. We see in it certain reminiscences of perhaps his Catalonian background; the emphasis on the eyes, the heavy eyelids. We see also a preoccupation with the kind of subject matter that Toulouse-Lautrec had made so popular [00:04:00] among the avant-garde, that is, a kind of sad quality, a kind of lonely quality, and this, as you know, is to be developed by him in the paintings of circus people that he went on to do in the next three and four years.

On the right, is his very famous painting of Gertrude Stein, in which so many people see evidence for the beginning of cubism. It’s a very notable advance. I don’t mean “advance” in terms of superior quality, but in terms of what actually did develop over the painting of the lady with the bangs [Woman with Bangs], because she is still somewhat flattened out, and the artist, in the painting of Gertrude Stein, which is in the Metropolitan and I expect you all know it, is obviously concerned with planes and with the structure of the head. Certain distortion appears in the form, distortion of a different sort than the distortion [00:05:00] you see here. Here, a mouth is twisted for obviously expressive and emotional reasons. Same is true of the treatment of the eyes — they’re exaggerated, the shadows are exaggerated, but this planarity that you see underneath the eyebrow, to the eyelid, which is an indication of the artist’s interest in how the eye goes back, how it’s set into the socket, is all the more carefully explored here, sharpened, and the plane of the face going back into space is simple of thought and made more acute, and the relationship of the figure, as it sits with one shoulder high and one shoulder dropped, is

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 explored, as is the hand dropped down and this one resting on the knee. So, perhaps, in a sense, people who see this great interest in the beginning of an investigation and analysis of structure are quite correct.

Traditionally, however, the great Demoiselles d’Avignon [00:06:00] of 1907-1908, painting that the Modern Museum is fortunate to possess, is usually considered as the beginning of cubism, the first cubist painting. Whether it’s perhaps futile to really look for the first cubist painting or not is a question that I will leave until next week. At any rate, in analyzing this painting, certain very important things become evident. For one thing, there’s a curious paradox in terms of space. This should be evident to all of us as we look at even the reproduction. That is: does space go back, or are there shapes set against a simple, flat area, which creates a very shallow space in which we saw in many art nouveau examples? [00:07:00] These planes that one reads as being in the background don’t stay put. They don’t describe a flat surface back there, against which these shapes are set. They go back, and they come forward, because they’re modeled. Modeled in the same way as the hands are modeled, or the flesh is modeled. So, there’s this kind of sense of going back, and going forward. It’s a shifty kind of space. It’s a space in which everything that’s located in it seems to come forward and engage us as spectators.

Now, as you look at the painting, one becomes conscious of great curiosities in the manner in which the figures are treated. For example, [00:08:00] this figure and this figure and let’s say the bottom part of this figure are treated in a similar fashion; very simplified, very angular, the sharp elbow here, the sharp elbow there, all the features on the face, sharp, although, to be sure, if you look at the eyes — if I can make my arrow sharper — you’ll see the same kind of heavy-lidded people you saw in the portrait of Gertrude Stein and in the lady with bangs before. Yet, the modeling is largely absent, it’s not emphasized. Contrast these two figures with this head over here, and you find something startlingly different. This would seem to be a reminiscence of perhaps Catalonian sculpture, which Picasso had grown up [00:09:00] with, but, this head is in turn different from this head, and this head, and these two bodies are treated in an entirely different way than these three. Look how this nose is simplified into two planes and comes jutting forward. Likewise, here: here, the heavy-lidded eye types are gone, and the whole thing, probably reminiscent to us now as it was to a very few people in 1907 and 1908, a primitive sculpture of African art, which had been very popular among artists, like Matisse and Derain, as early as 1905, and which we know that Picasso was collecting.

So, here then are the usual sources of inspiration, sources of inspiration which we have seen and I’ve discussed in previous lectures, in the primitive, in the simple, in the expressive, but now given a [00:10:00] new turn, a turn not exclusively for their expressive purposes, for their emotional impact, but simply because of what they do to form the way they are visually different and exciting and the way form is actually distorted so that you see around it in ways. That is, here there is a nose almost in motion and the mouth that indicates that the face is twisted in that direction, and this is very important. This painting was seen by Georges Braque in Picasso’s studio when he was working on it, and it went through a number of interesting and curious phases, and I’m afraid I haven’t slides to show you how originally it started out as an interior, with a recognizable space going back, a back wall, and how these women who started out to represent the inmates — perhaps that’s not the right word [00:11:00] — of a brothel in

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961

Barcelona, were surrounded with other figures, or at least, two other figures were present, one, a sailor, and the other, a kind of allegorical figure, holding the skull that would represent Death.

Now, all of this was eliminated as the artist’s very considerable interest in the visual aspects of form became a paramount. Braque, as I said, had seen this painting, and he was very impressed with the sort of thing that it revealed to him, the interest in form as form. He, previously, had been a faux, his color had been brilliant, it had been bright, but, that summer, the summer of 1908, he went to the South of France, to a place called L’Estaque. Those of you who’ve been coming to these lectures have heard that place mentioned before. L’Estaque is near Aix-en- Provence. It is a place associated, forever, with the [00:12:00] work of Paul Cézanne, because he painted so many pictures there and titled them L’Estaque. Well, Braque worked this summer at a simplification of nature according to modeling as you see in these houses and rock, everything organized and built up into a picture plane, which is flat and yet at the same time conveys a sense of going back into space, but not through conventional perspective means. He does, it’s true, use smaller shapes in the back than in the front. On the other hand, he doesn’t have any consistent perspective.

While looking at this picture, we might as well consider how it is that the word cubism, which is so inadequate, and yet which we’ve been using for the last 50 years, arose. It seems that Braque [00:13:00] submitted this painting to a salon, one of the great exhibitions in Paris, in the autumn of 1909. Now, there are various conflicting stories, some more amusing than others, but probably the most reliable is that Henri Matisse, a member of the jury, looked at it and didn’t particularly care for it, and remarked: “Look at those cubic oddities.” “Bizarreries cubiques,” I think, was the expression he used, and he was heard by a very clever critic, whose name we’ve discussed before, Louis Vauxcelles, the man who had christened the movement Fauvism and shortly thereafter, in the newspaper that Vauxcelles worked for, Gil Blas, [00:14:00] there came an article referring to the work of Georges Braque as cubist, and that was it. The artists gradually came to accept the word themselves, but I tell you this story simply to remind you that if you are encountering cubism or seriously trying to grapple with it for the first time, do not look for little cubes to have any particular significance, because, of course, they don’t.

At the same time, 1908, Picasso was pursuing the research that was opened up by his painting, the Demoiselles d’Avignon and the Woman in an Armchair, which you see on the right, painting which is in Moscow, you see how he has explored, still more, some of the paradoxes of [00:15:00] vision. The head is simplified to be sure, a little bit more consistently than the simplification you saw in the Demoiselles, so that this area here, surmounted by the black of the hair, gives the curious quality of looking at the forehead and down at the forehead, emphasized, of course, by the simplicity of these slits. For eyes, you have this double view, the column of the neck, and most interesting of all, something that Cézanne had done in an occasional still life, the shoulder here, and the shoulder here. You examine this shoulder as, for example, roughly seen from above, with all its thickness and depth, and yet this shoulder, an equally plausible, but different point of view, both combine, and this gives the whole figure something of its physiological [00:16:00] twist, something of the knowledge of how it sits in the chair and how thick it is and how strong it is and how weighty it is, and yet how reposed it is. Same is true of the treatment of the arm, down here, across, and the hand, in a quite odd position, a point of view which, as you sit there, try and hold an imaginary fan in your right hand, and you’ll see how

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 perhaps this position could be understood as well as seen, but certainly not seen as you would see that shoulder, not at the same moment in time. But, it’s just beginning. It’s just having its genesis, this preoccupation with simultaneous points of view.

In 1909, Picasso painted this head of a woman, it’s called [00:17:00] Woman with Pears and he’s carried the procedure still further. That is, he has broken the face into a multitude of interesting planes and shapes. He has emphasized the strong, muscular nature of the neck, which supports the head. In fact, he’s almost painted what seems as solid and as enduring as a piece of sculpture. The eyes don’t just sit in one place, they seem to have been seen from many places. The table in the background comes this way into the foreground. It’s seen from above, and the fruit and the cloth on it is explored, all the little crannies of it, the nooks of it. There was something else that’s very evident, as we look at this painting, in the early beginnings of analytical cubism [00:18:00], as it’s always called, and that is that the color is becoming increasingly limited. That is, that Picasso and Braque both, in these early days, sacrificed the joy of color and, particularly for Braque, this must have been a terrible sacrifice, a painful thing to endure, having been a Fauve and having enjoyed all those smashing reds and greens and yellows. They sacrificed this color presumably so that they could better explore the way in which the objects they looked at were put together and convey some of the excitement of seeing and some of the paradox of vision in this method.

On the left is a Braque called, very reasonably, The Lighthouse [Little Harbor in Normandy] from 1909, and a Picasso still life from 1908 on the right. I suppose I could point out, and I think I will, in each painting, how some of these paradoxes are explored, and how much [00:19:00] further they go than, for example, the impressionists, who, we saw in an earlier lecture, did, in a way, much the same thing, but on a much simpler scale. Look at the vase. You all know that if you look down on the top of a vase, you’ll see something like that, but if you were to move very rapidly from one view to another, or from one position to another, you might conceivably get this kind of curved effect as you swing from the top of the vase to the side. Same is true of all of the rest, and one more thing we can notice in this painting is that, as the objects that do form the basis for what’s here become dissected into all of these planes, the picture surface itself becomes fantastically intricate. All of these little facets, all rigidly organized, straight up and down, diagonals across, so that [00:20:00] perhaps, for us, the final interest becomes the work of art itself and the puzzle of the translation of these objects from physical reality into the two- dimensional surface that is the painting. All of what I’ve said of the Picasso I think applies, perhaps only a little less stringently, to the Braque on the left. That is, the brushstroke at the top, for the presumably open space, has become as complicated and as modeled as the brushstroke that describes the hulls of the boats. I’m sure you see them here and here, and the mast, and the sail, and this sail. This part here, as complicated, as interesting to the eye in perceiving the work of art as the other. [00:21:00]

This is a portrait that Picasso made in 1910 of the German dealer, Wilhelm Uhde, and let’s just look at it for a few minutes, carefully, and explore, in some detail, some of the paradoxes and yet some of the consistency in the way in which it is realized on the canvas. First of all, it’s a portrait, one of the earliest cubist portraits. Now, the idea of making a portrait in a cubist manner is itself and struck, you may be sure, those who first saw these pictures as being rather startling. But does it convey the quality of a personality? The answer is, inevitably, yes. People who

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 knew Uhde say that this was him, this is what he was like. This really captured [00:22:00] his whole spirit, his being. The head and the body and the background have been, to an extent, fused in these shifting plains, with the greatest emphasis running through the center, accenting a kind of verticality, well-balanced, of course, so that one never loses the sense of structure. Now, you can read very easily this eye, in profile, the lid, the pupil, and the bottom lid, and you can read this eyebrow, in profile, and you can read the knotted forehead in profile and down the nose, and the curve of the nostril, even to the mouth, even to the cleft chin, both ways, and the strength of the neck, and all the angularity of the feature, mirrored in the angularity of the stiff [00:23:00] Germanic formal collar that he wore, and the tie that went around, and the coat and the lapels and all the rest. Likewise, you can read it this way. Full front, with a tiny, small, pursed mouth. Think you know what kind of man Uhde was, but more than that, the satisfaction of exploring an intricate and fascinating painting and, of course, we might just note again that if the color was limited in the last painting, it is still more limited here. All is in gray and a few shades of very pale tan, and some black.

Braque and Picasso were, of course, to go still further. They were to paint pictures in 1911 and 1912 who were so close that many people have difficulty in telling them apart. I don’t think you’d have any difficulty in telling [00:24:00] who painted what here. That is, the Braque is on the left, and the Picasso, Ma Jolie, on the right, and partly cut-off. This is an important painting because, for one thing, it illustrates one of the early introductions of a new element into the cubist painting. That is, Ma Jolie, the title of a song, a figure which I do not want to encourage you to look for, of a woman playing a stringed instrument is known to have been the visual starting place for this painting. I don’t want to encourage you, I say, because I don’t think that it is necessary in our enjoyment or really our understanding of the painting, to find the figure hidden under the cubes. That is an approach that we should try to put in its place, from time to time. But at any rate, the letters Ma Jolie included on the bottom, which have now disappeared so that we could look at the top, [00:25:00] indicate a curious juxtaposition of one kind of reality from one kind of world, with the reality that is the picture. That is, here is a picture, all these fluctuating, shifting planes, in which our eye can explore all kinds of relationships from form to form — how one feeds into another. Here is a form; here is one beside it; but the white here blending into the brown, so that there is a kind of shift, and the brown here blending into the white, and so on, so that you can explore it with your eye for a long, long time and never exhaust it. But this we call the reality of the painting. And the Ma Jolie incorporates something from the very workaday world — Ma Jolie was the title of a song on everyone’s lips in 1911 — gives a kind of curious, magical shock. It makes you aware of the [00:26:00] difference between art and the rest of the world. And this is an important development for the years to come. The Braque painting — less rigid, less rigorous, more sensual — takes a delight that in earlier, more disciplined paintings we did not see — in the texture of the paint, in obvious reference to grapes and a [stem?], to a pipe. And in both works, I’d like to call your attention to the texture of the paint itself. That is, there are — with the possible exception of the grapes here — very few distinctions. That is, the brushstroke runs horizontally everywhere, and also, there is a general tendency to avoid the edges of the painting. This was a problem, the solution for which was only [00:27:00] posed, I think, a little bit later.

Let’s look at two more. The painting on the left is called Man with a Guitar. It’s by Braque. It’s from 1911. The painting on the right is a very famous Picasso called The Aficionado. If we

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 could see the bottom of the painting on the right, you’ll see why it’s called The Aficionado — “aficionado” referring to a lover of the bullfight. And now you see the inclusion, again, of letters, and a very clear and recognizable ticket type of shape, with the words “torero.” Somewhere in here was the genesis of the bullfight fan — all turned into [00:28:00] shapes, limited colors, in which to endlessly explore with your eye. At the same time, the Braque introduces something beyond letters to complicate the arrangement and set one kind of reality off against the other. Once again, as you look at the Braque, here is the concentration of the painting in the center: the planes that slip one into another, so that you never can absolutely, firmly say, “This is a shape” — because by color or by an open form, one shape slips into another. As I said, tending to avoid [the side?], tending to emphasize the horizontal texture. But here in the corner, you see a curious fool-the-eye effect — only not really so as to really fool the eye. That is, the inclusion of a piece of rope — [00:29:00] not a real piece of rope; a painted piece of rope. The inclusion of real pieces of rope were to wait just a few years. And this sharpens the contrast between reality and the new reality, which is the work of art.

We talk about Cézanne being the source for the cubists. We spoke about Cézanne three or four lectures ago. If you look at the Braque painting — the oval still life on the left — and look at the Cézanne on the right, I think you can see something of the affinity that the cubists felt for Cézanne. That is, in the Cézanne, yes, you do perceive nature — you recognize the house and the foliage and the shape of the hill and the chimney and the sky — yet, at the same time, how all of this is disciplined to the [00:30:00] structure of the picture. That is, everything — sky and earth and trees — seems to have diagonal motion throughout it, achieved by means of many modulated brushstrokes, each one describing a plane, and yet, each plane slipping into the next plane in the same fashion as in the Braque, with its diagonal movements. Each plane slips into another one, either by means of one side being left open or by means of color relationships — light and dark.

I’d like to quote from the first book that was ever written on cubism — written by two cubist artists, Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger — written in 1911, published early in 1912, about the time of the Braque painting on the left — in which they say this as far as Cézanne is concerned: “To understand Cézanne is to foresee cubism. Henceforth, we are justified in saying that between this school and the previous manifestations, there is only a difference of intensity, and that in order to assure ourselves of the fact, we need only attentively regard the methods of this realism” — Cézanne’s realism — “which, departing from the superficial reality of the Courbet” — you remember our first lecture on Courbet — “plunges with Cézanne into the profoundest reality, growing luminous as it forces the unknowable to retreat.” The emphasis in this quote is clearly that Cézanne was interested in the true structure of things, that the true structure of things reveals a reality which is different from simply superficially looking at life around one. This, of course, is the kind of Cézanne that we know best. And I’d like to remind you that the double points of view, and the triple, and the quadruple, and more, that we see in cubist work — and can trace and analyze if we really want to — has a root in impressionist work which was developed most of all by Cézanne — that is, the double point of view — the looking down on a village and the looking across at a harbor, something that came into French art by 1875 and that has not yet gone out of it.

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 cubism was to go in a different direction after about 1912, and I can only sketch this for you in the briefest way possible. We use the term “synthetic” instead of [00:33:00] “analytic” to describe the cubism of 1913 and after because the artists ceased to take apart forms so precisely and with such intricacy, and instead started to use big shapes and to reintroduce flat planes of strong color. On the left, a Picasso which seems to explore the anatomy of the woman in the armchair and to give us details of material as well as anatomy, almost like the inside of a ribcage, and two views of breasts, and hair rather more like hair than anything he had painted in the years earlier, and a paper with letters on it, and texture in a carpet underneath. And the same true of this rather austere Braque on the right, with its musical instruments, its explicit references to strings and to whatever these things are called in violins, and again, to the newspaper — these humble everyday objects so popular with the cubists, these objects which they elevated from ordinariness to the realm of art. And in 1915, on the left, Picasso, returning to a subject that was dear to his heart, the circus — harlequins — reducing the whole thing not to a multitude of tiny planes, but to big shapes, vivid colors — but still preserving, you might note, that sense of verticality, and still tending to avoid the problem of the edges.

Well, I’m supposed to deal with futurism this afternoon, and I’m clearly never going to get to it unless we go faster. So let me just show you one very magnificent example of synthetic cubism as practiced by Juan Gris, a Spanish painter, a compatriot and friend of Picasso’s. Here, all the shapes — austere, yes, but simplified and clear and strong, and involving, ultimately, Juan Gris’s own very intricate view of what reality was, which I hope to be able to discuss with you next week. Now, how different this conception — rather strong, rather monumental, but essentially static, because the objects that are analyzed stay there, and the viewer probes them with his moving eyes — or moves around them — from the kind of art that Italy inaugurated in such a violent way on the twentieth of February 1909 with the publication of the first [00:36:00] futurist manifesto, signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.

I think I will show you futurist paintings and read to you the Futurist Manifesto, if you promise not to rise up and tear through the building and onto the streets to destroy the city of New York. On the left, you see a painting by Boccioni called The City Rises. You can distinguish the horse form charging across the picture plane, everything in a blur, no feeling of solidity or structure or up and down, no moderation of color as you saw in Picasso. And why? Because, as Marinetti says — and I read to you — “We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness. The essentially elements of our poetry shall be courage and daring and rebellion. Literature has hitherto glorified [00:37:00] thoughtful immobility, ecstasy, and sleep. We shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double-quick step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff. We declare that the world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing motor-car, its frame adorned with great pipes” — this was in 1909 — picture it — “like snakes with explosive breath... a roaring motor-car, which looks as though running on shrapnel is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace. We shall sing of the man at the steering wheel, whose ideal stem transfixed the Earth, rushing over the circuit of her orbit. The poet must give himself with frenzy, with splendor, with lavishness, in order to increase the enthusiastic fervor of primordial elements. There is no more beauty except in strife, no masterpiece without aggressiveness. [00:38:00] Poetry must be a violent onslaught upon unknown forces, to command them to bow before man. We stand upon the extreme promontory of the centuries. Why should we look behind us when we have to break in the mysterious portals

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 of the impossible? Time and space died yesterday. Already, we live in the absolute, since we have already created speed, eternal and ever-present.”

I’d like to go on, but let’s look at these two paintings first. On the left, a painting by Carrà called What the Streetcar Told Me. On the right, a Picasso of 1911. Very different. The Picasso, so limited in its color, so careful, so calculated in the way it’s put together, with the shifting planes, so inviting you with your probing, moving eyes to explore every [00:39:00] nook and cranny of it. The Carrà, rushing [for across?], a blur of speed and jostling and movement. It reminds me of a remark published in the Technical Manifesto of Futurism — the Technical Manifesto being that which the futurist painters decided to publish to clarify their aims: “Space no longer exists. The street pavement” — they were fascinated by streets and cities and motion and trolley cars — “the street pavement, soaked by rain beneath the glare of electric lamps, becomes immensely deep and gapes to the very center of the Earth. Thousands of miles divide us from the sun, yet the house in front of us fits into the solar disc. Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium? [00:40:00] Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight, capable of giving results analogous to those of the X-rays?” And obvious references to the X-rays are present in the Carrà painting — these rays that flutter from right to left across the painting. “It would be sufficient to cite a few examples among thousands to prove the truth of our arguments. The 16 people around you in a rolling motor-bus are in turn and at the same time one, ten, four, three; they are motionless and they change places; they come and go, bound into the street, suddenly swallowed up by the sunshine, and then come back and sit before you, like persistent symbols of universal vibration. How often have we not seen upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking the horse which passes at the end of the street?” And so on and so on and so on.

Obsessed with movement, with energy, they adored [00:41:00] the word “dynamism,” and strove to capture it. On the left, a painting by Boccioni called Football Player — or actually called Dynamism of a Football Player [Dynamism of a Soccer Player]. Now, unlike a developed cubist painting, certain things are very clear. That is, ground is clear. Color is local. And the forms are not broken up in accordance with the structure or the given shape of the painting; instead, they try to rush and hurtle across it. Color is very brilliant, and color is local, as I said — of the grass, the leg, the hat of the player, all rolled into one convulsive movement is still [00:42:00] distinguishable — even the playing field, distinguishable.

Now, as you know — at any rate, as you certainly might suspect from those sections of the manifestos which I’ve read — the futurists were powerfully nationalistic. They were aggressive. And they exalted and exulted in war. They were delighted when the war of 1914 broke out. They screamed for Italy to enter the war and to take back certain cherishes possessions which had belonged to Austria for some time. And so the painting that you see on the right is a happy monument to that love of war and action. Painted by Boccioni in 1915, it’s called The Lancer Charge [The Charge of the Lancers]. The only thing that strikes us as odd now is that there should be lancers charging [00:43:00] in a war — it makes it somehow terribly quaint. But you can see the lancer charging; you can see the lance in a variety of ways; and up here, you can see how Boccioni has absorbed what he perfectly well knew was happening in Paris among the cubist painters and attached to the painting some fragment taken from a newspaper — only the

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 fragment taken from the newspaper here has very specific meaning. You perhaps can make it out: it refers to a French assault — “the press of the French” — that is, they had broken through the enemy lines, and this was very good news and worth including in a painting.

Perhaps one of the most amusing and at the same time one of the most remarkable examples of developed futurist art is Carrà’s Manifesto for Intervention [Interventionist Demonstration]. This is an attempt to integrate the effects of violence, of speed, of looking, and [00:44:00] to integrate and combine poetry and shouts and street noises all into one work of art, which will grapple at the spectator’s emotions and move him — that is, something to be kept in mind in considering futurism, again, is that it is not concerned with formal matters — structure — but rather, concerned with emotional matters. And all these words — this reference to “Viva the king” and to intervention — to all the noise of sirens and the tumult of the press and the surge of the crowds — is the way in which these painters expected to influence the emotions of the viewers.

Not all of them, however, began so extravagantly. [00:45:00] Perhaps the best of the futurist artists, Gino Severini, had been in Paris since 1906, and he, too, like so many of the other painters we’ve studied in previous lectures, had been most preoccupied with color and with the Divisionist technique. This is a painting of his as late as 1911 called Woman with Black Cat. You can see the black cat. The forms are broken up, yes, but the technique is still very clear and sharp and reminiscent of Paul Signac. And on the right you see a painting that he made only four years later called The Red Cross Train or Hospital Train — Train with Wounded Soldiers — the train speeding across, throwing back plumes of smoke, and all these brilliant flags — the Red Cross flag, the French flag — and decorative motifs, all integrated into what is really a very satisfying [00:46:00] and a very strongly put together painting.

Now, what happens when the notion of illustrating movement is combined with a deep and intense interest in the structure of objects? The futurists had said, “Never paint a nude. A nude is banal. A nude belongs to tradition. It’s academic.” Marcel Duchamp, that wittiest and most brilliant of anarchic minds, shattered the New York public in 1913 with this painting, called The Nude Descending a Staircase. His contact with the futurists themselves was not too great, but his interest in all ideas was. And so here you find a kind of cubist exploration of the structure of things — the way arms are attached to shoulders and the way hips are attached to legs — [00:47:00] all combined in this simultaneous viewing of a nude coming down a staircase. In 1913, when the painting was shown in New York and then subsequently in Chicago and then subsequently in Boston, the newspapers of all three cities ran contests in which they would award a $100 prize to anyone who could find the nude descending the staircase.

Well, I’m drawing near the end of the hour, and I want to show you just a few things to indicate that there was still another side of cubism which was somehow different. Robert Delaunay painted — on the left — the Eiffel Tower in 1910. Now he is, in this painting, submitting an object from everyday experience to an analysis [00:48:00] similar to the kind that Picasso and Braque were investigating. And yet, although he invites our eyes to turn about this extraordinary structure — this painting I’m sure you’ve all seen here in the Guggenheim Museum — he’s doing something more. He’s keeping the color quite brilliant, quite strong. And he is painting on the edges. He’s painting something dynamic — not dynamic in the futurist sense, but not something stable. He’s painting something that stabs into the sky and letting the sky come and

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961 be pulled down over the tower, so that there’s a tremendous quality of surging rhythms in it. It isn’t the small, discrete, modeled planes that shift back and forth that one sees in a Picasso; it’s instead something big and very swinging.

The same can be said [00:49:00] of the Albert Gleizes painting of a landscape on the left. Here, too, the color is not muted, as in the paintings of Picasso and Braque of a comparable period. It has a strong and, again, a swinging feeling — very big movements in the trees and down into the landscape, and the colors — the deep blues and the reds and the greens — also intense, a kind of vibration of effect that one doesn’t have in comparable Picassos and Braques. These men refused — absolutely refused — to abandon the color that they loved so much. Instead, they tried to achieve other things with color. And Delaunay, especially, explored and explored through various methods to do this. A year after the Eiffel Tower, he painted the Window on the City, also [00:50:00] in our collection here at the museum.

This is a fascinating painting to look at. Because for all the fact that the colors are broken, they aren’t broken into small, discrete dots, as in the Delaunay, and part-for-part describing little shapes; they fluctuate, they screen back and forth; and yet, there’s a sense of some tremendous force and rhythm behind all this. The Léger I just introduced to you because he, too, developed apart from Picasso and Braque and closer to Delaunay and to Gleizes. He, too, in the painting called The Smoker, uses strong color and tremendous swinging rhythms throughout the picture plane.

Finally, in 1912, 1913, Delaunay was to paint a picture with extraordinary [00:51:00] pure color — color as pure and as vivid as any (inaudible) have ever used. But these swinging rhythms, for lack of a better word, dominate the picture plane, and the whole thing seems to move and to twist and to turn — although if you look at it carefully, you will see why he called it, at this stage of the game, Woman with Umbrella.

At the same time, Gleizes went in his direction after a kind of monumentality. And Guillaume Apollinaire, the great poet — often called the cubist poet, because he wrote simultaneous verse — or simultaneous poem — described the paintings of Gleizes as having a quality of majesty — that is, the shapes were very big and very strong. Instead of being broken into a lot of small areas, they have these overpowering, large, swinging rhythms — [00:52:00] not so swinging as in the Delaunay, nor were the colors so bright, but nevertheless, there is a more of a relationship between these two men than there is between either one and Picasso and Braque.

Finally, Delaunay in 1912 and 1913 passed from these side-version variations of the traditional cubism of Picasso and Braque into abstraction by painting the Circular Forms, one of the earliest of his Disc paintings, in which the force of the color alone and the way they interact — as here, this half-circle against this half-circle — these prismatic, pure colors interacting one with another turn by themselves. You look at them and they move. They move — one color forces the next one, and they move and they intertwine and they join [00:53:00] to produce what, again, Guillaume Apollinaire called “pure painting” — or what we call abstract painting.

Now, next week, I’d like to talk more about abstract painting and discuss it in terms of Delaunay, Gleizes, and Kandinsky. Thank you very much. (applause)

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection “Cubists and Futurists” by Daniel Robbins, 1961

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Cubists and Futurists / Daniel Robbins. 1961/12/7. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York