Burlington Magazine • Clix • August 2017 647
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BOOKS and fantasy’ (p.17). The war drawings have if short, chapters. These build up to show been covered in two publications and nu- how such ideas were interconnected. My Dear BB . : The Letters of merous exhibitions and catalogues of war With another of these ideas – the solid- Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clarke, artists, but Alan Powers provides an intelli- ification of Impressionism – Boccioni reveals 1925–1959. Edited and annotated by Robert gent summary of Ardizzone’s war. some of Futurism’s internal dissonance. In the Cumming. 538 pp. incl. 50 b. & w. ills. Ardizzone’s commercial work, execut- chapter titled ‘Why We’re Not Impression- (Yale University Press, London and New ed under the name Diz, is covered in one ists’ Boccioni carefully defines what the York, 2015), £25. ISBN 978–0–300–20737–8. chapter. Although he was deprecatory about Italian movement takes and discards from its this work, it pushed him to find solutions French predecessors. Indeed, based on sim- Re viewed by ROBERT B. SIMON to new problems and directed him to alter ultaneity of line and colour, Boccioni’s book his style, albeit modestly. He illustrated invokes numerous antecedents, even pro- IN SEPTEMBER 1925 the twenty-two-year- company posters, film posters, Christmas ducing art-historical diagrams of Futurism’s old Kenneth Clark was brought to dine cards, advertisements and menu covers. His distant and recent predecessors. at I Tatti by Janet Ross, then the doyenne magazine commissions included covers for It is the time after, not before, the fabled of Anglo-Florentine society and the first Punch and Radio Times. His work for John Futurist tabula rasa of 1909 that marks out of dozens of luminaries from the cultural, Harvey & Sons of Bristol and other wine this book. Unlike the manifestos written be- political and social worlds that populate merchants was sometimes paid in bottles, fore a Futurist work of art was made, Futurist these letters. By the following day Bernard not cash. The most peculiar commission Painting Sculpture was written during the most Berenson had invited Clark, then a third- was the production of murals for a passenger fervent period of Boccioni’s career, and thus year history undergraduate at Trinity liner; these panels were removed when the provides an insight into the evolution of his College, Oxford, to become his assistant for ship was decommissioned and still exist in theory and practice. As Maria Elena Versari’s a proposed new edition of his Drawings of the P&O Collection. detailed introduction explains, Boccioni had the Florentine Painters. The immediate affin- The author concentrates on the artist’s completed a first, much shorter draft of the ity of the two would be explored, deepened work and comments on Ardizzone the man book by 1st December 1912, the end of the and questioned over the nearly thirty-five only when doing so informs our under- year in which the Futurists opened their no- years treated in these letters, which read less standing of the art. The book reproduces torious first group exhibition in Paris, and as art-historical dialogue than the corres- initial drafts, colour work and master copies then took up sculpture. He continued to pondence of passionate – if at times con- to demonstrate the processes involved. Final write throughout 1913, the year he launched flicted – lovers. printed pages show the layouts of text and his one-man sculpture show in Paris, includ- We can only speculate at what sparked image that Ardizzone supervised. The qual- ing numerous articles for the new Futurist their lifelong friendship. Certainly their ity of the reproductions is fittingly high. A review Lacerba (some of which became part approach to looking at paintings, rooted as chronology, endnotes, bibliography and of the book), which led to spats with fellow it was in experience and sensuous response, index make this a comprehensive source for Futurists and Parisian contemporaries alike. must have been critical. In one of the earliest those interested in a prominent figure in Through comparison of the published letters Clark confesses that he ‘spent hours British book illustration. text with the 1912 and 1913 manuscripts at the N.G. looking at Titians & Bellinis & in the Getty Research Institute’s Boccioni feeling some of them for the first time’. That papers, Versari traces the artist’s developing letter was written to Mary Berenson, whose ideas. Most noticeably, his increasing use of correspondence with Clark, as well as that the word ‘plastic’, particularly in conjunc- between Berenson’s companion Nicky Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic tion with ‘states of mind’, coincides with Mariano and Clark’s wife, Jane, is wisely Dynamism). By Umberto Boccioni. his shift from symbolism to the analysis of included in this volume. Edited by Maria Elena Versari, translated form. Versari’s introduction also substantial- Among the most telling parts of the cor- by Maria Elena Versari and Richard Shane ly refines our understanding of Boccioni’s respondence are those that involve Clark’s Agin. 304 pp. incl. 51 col. + 13 b. & w. ills. philosophical, scientific and political matrix. museum career and Berenson’s concern that (Getty Publications, Los Angeles, 2016), Through recontextualising his ideas, she administrative, social and political obliga- $49. ISBN 978–1–60606–475–7. convincingly argues that the intertwining tions would divert Clark from the lofty am- of avant-garde art and politics could be the bitions and goals that they shared. Clark’s Reviewed by ROSALIND McKEVER book’s fil rouge. professional success was rapid: from his The book had a political function. This appointment to the Selection Committee ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF Futurist rhetoric edition, like the original, includes Futurist for the Italian Exhibition of 1930 (which may no longer be a rarity, but this edition manifestos, exhibition lists of works and il- Berenson opposed), to being appointed of Umberto Boccioni’s 1914 book is a very lustrations (many in colour) by Boccioni and Keeper at the Ashmolean Museum the fol- welcome addition, providing a more nu- others, to make it a major reference work on lowing year, and Director of the National anced account of Futurist art and theory Futurist art. The 1914 original was a success- Gallery in 1933. Berenson cautions against from the pen of the movement’s most prom- ful ambassador. Not only did its illustrations petty connoisseurship (‘Let others decide inent artist.1 From its staccato title onwards, inspire collectors such as Eric Estorick, but which tenth rate drawing is by Pulcio di Boccioni’s analyses of Futurism’s prede- within a decade of its publication, it had been Ceaccio and which other is by Ciaccio di cessors, contemporaries and audiences, and referenced by Kazimir Malevich, Richard Pulcio’) and the potential pitfalls of a ca- impassioned defences of the movement, echo Huelsenbeck and Vasily Kandinsky. This reer at Oxford: ‘You certainly would be in the manifestos. The language is bombastic English edition should aid Futurist art’s ever- clover to be in such a toy-shop for grown- and the content weighted towards repudi- improving reputation among historians of ups’, but ‘the post will fix you down in the ating Futurism’s enemies. Yet in writing a the international avant-gardes. world of collectors, curators, dons’ and you seventeen-chapter book, about forty times 1 would become ‘embogged in a pudding. It longer than a manifesto, Boccioni could The classic edition of Futurist Manifestos, edited by is perhaps the finest pudding in the world, Umbro Apollonio (London 1973), has been superseded luxuriate in the time and space he had syn- by L. Rainey, C. Poggi and L. Wittman, ed.: Futurism: but pudding all the same’. thesised in his art and writing. Ideas such as An Anthology, New Haven and London 2009. The latter Clark writes almost apologetically that ‘force-lines’, ‘dynamic complementarism’ contains Boccioni’s article ‘The Plastic Foundations his National Gallery ‘appointment is only and the interpenetration of planes, previous- of Futurist Sculpture and Painting’, which became a for five years, after which I can retire & ly confined to a paragraph, are given whole, chapter in the book under review. lead a reasonable life, having worked the the burlington magazine • clix • august 2017 647 LAYOUT_Books_AUG17.indd 647 18/07/2017 16:29 BOOKSBOOKS poison out of my system’, while Berenson genuine bond that held the two together and developments in style and technique that is more encouraging about both the public that Clark described after a visit to I Tatti just were made in England and America since the and private benefits: ‘The N.G. will be a before the outbreak of the War: ‘There was beginning of the century [. .] and to give school in which you can be headmaster and a flow of reason and learning combined with their country a new conscience and spiritual first pupil all at the same time’. However, a genial warmth which made me feel I was perspective?’ (p.1). Simpson’s book provides twelve years later, when Clark resigned his living in a golden age of culture, a sunset of a culturally multifarious and exhilarating post, Berenson writes, ‘I congratulate you. culture no doubt, but none the less beautiful answer. You will now be able to devote yourself to for that. I loved every minute of it’. As with Lehmann’s field of literature, so tasks more worthy of your gifts and I look In this volume their correspondence is with Christchurch painting, book design and forward to the results’. reproduced in full, which inevitably means illustration, music and theatre. The stellar The playful wit that the two enjoyed is that there are repetitive topics of lesser inter- figure in the last category was Ngaio Marsh, present from the first, as when Clark ‘attrib- est to the contemporary reader – the medical famed internationally for her crime novels utes’ his new-born son Alan: ‘it seemed to travails of spouses, requests for photographs, but more celebrated by New Zealand literati me abnormally ugly, but people with more digests of visitors and social occasions.