03.11.2011 ART IN THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Futurism, Manifesto of Futurist Architecture Constructivism Precisionism Week 6 THREE MODERNIST MOVEMENTS FUTURISM CONSTRUCTIVISM PRECISIONISM PERIOD: 1909-1918 1913-1932 1915-1930 LOCALE: Italy Russia United States ARTISTS: Boccioni, Balla, Severeni, Tatlin, Malevich, Sheeler, Carrà, Russolo Popova, Rodchenko, Demuth, Lissitzky, Gabo, Pevsner O’Keeffe FEATURES: Lines of force Geometric art, reflecting Sleek (düz) urban representing movement modern technology and industrial forms and modern life 1 03.11.2011 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) States of Mind II: Three States of Mind , 1911 Those Who Go, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). Futurism: Kinetic art States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). States of Mind I: The Farewells, Oil on canvas, (70.5 x 96.2 cm). The kinetic energy of an object is the energy which it possesses due to its motion. 2 03.11.2011 Futurism: Kinetic art Futurism was an Italian phenomenon. Futurism began in 1909 as a literary movement when the Italian poet F.T.Marinetti issued its manifesto. Marinetti a hyperactive self-promoter nicknamed ―The Caffeine of Europe‖ challenged artists to show ―courage, audacity, and revolt‖ and to celebrate “a new beauty, the beauty of speed.” . Futurist artists tried to unveil the poetry in motion. The key to Futurist art was MOVEMENT. The painters combined bright Fauve colors with fractured Cubist planes to express propulsion (itici kuvvet). Their quest was ―to throw all tradition,‖ therefore they published a manifesto to voice their highly reactionary philosophy. Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, (Milan) Poesia, February 11, 1910. Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini ―..... 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 earth’s deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for (gözüpek) daring!‖ 3 03.11.2011 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) States of Mind II: Three States of Mind , 1911 Those Who Go, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). Futurism: Kinetic art States of Mind III: Those Who Stay, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). States of Mind I: The Farewells, Oil on canvas, (70.5 x 96.2 cm). Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) States of Mind II: Three States of Mind , 1911 Those Who Go, Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). Set in a train station, this series of three paintings explores the psychological dimension of modern life's transitory nature. In The Farewells, (veda) Boccioni captures chaotic movement and the fusion of people swept away in waves as the train's steam bellows into the sky. Oblique lines hint at departure in Those Who Go, in which Boccioni said he sought to States of Mind III: express "loneliness, anguish, and dazed confusion." In Those Who Stay, Those Who Stay, vertical lines convey the weight of Oil on canvas, (70.8 x 95.9 cm). sadness carried by those left behind. States of Mind I: The Farewells, Oil on canvas, (70.5 x 96.2 cm). 4 03.11.2011 Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910-11. Carlo Carrà (Italian, 1881-1966) Oil on canvas, (198.7 x 259.1 cm), MoMA. Ritmi Plastici, 1911. Carlo Carrà (Italian, 1881-1966) Ink on paper, (10.7 x 7.4 cm). Carlo Carra met Umberto Boccioni and Luigi Russolo, and together they came to know Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and to write the Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (1910). Carrà continued, however, to use the technique of Divisionism despite the radical rhetoric of Futurism. In an attempt to find new inspiration Marinetti sent them to visit Paris in autumn 1911, in preparation for the Futurist exhibition of 1912. Cubism was a revelation, and in 1911 Carrà reworked a large canvas that he had begun in 1910, the Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (New York, MOMA). He had witnessed the riot at the event in 1904. The crowd and the mounted police converge in violently hatched red and black, as Carrà attempted the Futurist aim to place the spectator at the centre of the canvas. In the reworking he attempted to make the space more complex and the lighting appear to emerge from within. photographic studies of animal locomotion 5 03.11.2011 Balla, one of the founding members of Futurism, spent much of his career studying the dynamics of movement and speed. The subject of this painting is the flight of swifts; black wings whir before a window. Inspired by photographic studies of animal locomotion, Balla created an image of motion pushed close to abstraction. The wings each represent a different position in a trajectory of motion, and the bird’s body is rendered as a diagrammatic line. Here Balla looks to science to establish a new, Swifts: Paths of Movement + Dynamic Sequences, 1913. modern language for Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958) painting. Oil on canvas, (96.8 x 120 cm). 6 03.11.2011 Speeding Automobile, 1912. Giacomo Balla (Italian, 1871-1958) Oil on wood, (55.6 x 68.9 cm). 7 03.11.2011 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882–1916) Bronze H. (121.9 x 15 1/2 x 91.4 cm) Boccioni, who sought to infuse art with dynamism and energy, exclaimed, "Let us fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it." The contours of this marching figure appear to be carved by the forces of wind and speed as it forges ahead. While its wind–swept silhouette is evocative of an ancient statue, the polished metal alludes to the sleek modern machinery beloved by Boccioni and other Futurist artists. 8 03.11.2011 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882–1916) Bronze H. (121.9 x 15 1/2 x 91.4 cm) In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni puts speed and force into sculptural form. The figure strides forward. Surpassing the limits of the body, its lines ripple outward in curving and streamlined flags, as if molded by the wind of its passing. Boccioni had developed these shapes over two years in paintings, drawings, and sculptures, exacting studies of human musculature. The result is a three-dimensional portrait of a powerful body in action. In the early twentieth century, the new speed and force of machinery seemed to pour its power into radical social energy. The new technologies and the ideas attached to them would later reveal threatening aspects, but for Futurist artists like Boccioni, they were tremendously exhilarating. Innovative as Boccioni was, he fell short of his own ambition. In 1912, he had attacked the domination of sculpture by "the blind and foolish imitation of formulas inherited from the past," and particularly by "the burdensome weight of Greece." Yet Unique Forms of Continuity in Space bears an underlying resemblance to a classical work over 2,000 years old, the Nike of Samothrace. There, however, speed is encoded in the flowing stone draperies that wash around, and in the wake of, the figure. Here the body itself is reshaped, as if the new conditions of modernity were producing a new man. Armored Train in Action, 1915.Gino Severini (Italian, 1883-1966) Charcoal on paper, (56.9 x 47.5 cm), MoMA. This study for the most famous of the Futurist war paintings, The Armored Train (1915), Muscular Dynamism (1913). incorporates an unusual aerial Umberto Boccioni (Italian, 1882-1916) perspective in its depiction of a Pastel and charcoal on paper, (86.3 x 59 cm), train filled with armed MoMA. soldiers. Severini enjoyed a unique vantage point—from his studio in Paris, he was able to observe the constant movement of trains filled with soldiers, supplies, and weaponry. Severini did not combat during World War I, but he took the advice of Marinetti to "try to live the war pictorially, studying it in all its marvelous mechanical forms." The Futurists glorified modern technology, and World War I, the first war of the twentieth century to employ the technological achievements of the industrial age in a program of mass destruction, was for them the most important spectacle of the modern era. Their admiration for speed—made possible by machinery—is represented here by the fractured landscape, which accentuates the train's force and momentum as it cuts through the countryside. Armored Train in Action foreshadows a fundamental principle of Severini's later art: the "image-idea," in which a single image expresses the essence of an idea. Through a depiction of the plastic realities of war—a train, canon, guns, and soldiers—he provides a pictorial vocabulary necessary to grasp its deeper symbolism. 9 03.11.2011 Manifesto of Futurist Architecture It must soar up on the brink of a tumultuous abyss: the street will no longer lie like a doormat at ground level, but will plunge many stories down into the earth, embracing the metropolitan traffic, and will be linked up for necessary interconnections by metal gangways and swift-moving pavements.