Carlo Carrà pasted the prototype of a two-dimensional Futurist paper collage using paper and newspaper cut-outs. The Manifestazione Interventista appeared on 1 August 1914, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, in the newspaper Lacerba in Paris. From the central point, printed strips of paper rotate outwards from the painting in all directions with incredible force. For the Futurists, the collage became, for the first time, a document of the period, consisting of scraps of news, advertising and musical scores. As if liberated, words and letters rolled out making sounds and noises, juggling and tumbling with an overflow of simultaneous information into the painting. The Futurist collage for the most part uses the typography of printed paper.
A short time later, Dadaism further developed the Futurist text and sound painting. Printed fragments of paper were now put together in new contexts of meaning; looked at separately, the images and symbols could illuminate radically different meanings. In reciprocal interaction, even unrelated levels of reality obtain a surprisingly deep significance.
In the works of Kurt Schwitters, the collage became the leading focus. He did not aspire to a synthesis of the arts in the sense of Kandinsky. Instead, he wanted, much more resolutely than either the Futurists or the Dadaists, to put everything in interplay of time and wipe away the boundaries. For him, art meant the integration of everything, including technology. The natural result of this view of life was the collage, which brought together all the arts of all manifestations. In his Merz-paintings and Merz-objects, Schwitters utilised materials and papers of all types and origins.
In the works of Max Ernst, collage played an essential role. Using already existing visual material, he opened up possibilities that completely changed the original meaning of the image elements. By 1919, Max Ernst began to expand the aesthetic background of the papiers collés. For him, collage was also ‘negation as a possible method of resistance against the overflow of images and their boundless blending.’ While staying at the home of the well-known Swiss criminal defence lawyer, Vladimir Rosenbaum and his wife, Aline Valangin, whose houses in Zurich and Comologno became the refuge for many of émigrés Ernst scandalised many by cutting up pages from the old books in his library to make collages out of them. For the art of the 20th century, the collage as a way of thinking opened unknown paths and unexpected possibilities.
Max Ernst, Frucht einer langen Erfahrung (Fruit of Long Experience), 1919.
Relief in painted wood and metal, 45.7 × 38 cm. Private collection, Genoa.
Albert Gleizes, Brooklyn Bridge, 1915.
Oil on cardboard, 148.1 × 120.4 cm. Private collection.
Sonja Delaunay, Simultaneous Contrasts, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 46 × 55 cm. Gift of Sonja and Charles Delaunay, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Robert Delaunay, Windows, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 92 × 86 cm. Morton G. Neumann collection, Chicago.
In 1913, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire dedicated his work Les Peintures cubistes to Cubism thereby helping Cubism attain world renown. Painters like Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes made impressive contributions to the Cubist language of shapes. In 1912 one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century was created: Nude Descending A Staircase. The painter was Marcel Duchamp. Aided by the Cubist vocabulary of shapes and his familiarity with the photos depicting movement made by Etienne Jules Marey, he painted a picture that moved the world. Five moments of the movement of one person, descending a spiral staircase, are captured in time-lapsed sequence, showing all the reciprocal movements triggered by her walking. Duchamp made time the fourth dimension in the painting. Though this nude triggered a scandal at the famous 1913 Armory Show in New York, but some recognised the innovative character of this new work: ‘the light at the end of the tunnel’ – simultaneity in four dimensions. Duchamp, brother of the painter Jacques Villon, the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon, and the painter Suzanne Duchamp, was anything but a consistent worker. His restless spirit quickly led him to art experiments that shocked people. In New York, he became friends with Francis Picabia, with whom he became responsible for Dada.
Simultaneity is the lyric expression of the modern view of life and signifies the rapidity and the simultaneousness of all existence and action. Simultaneity for the Futurists was the ‘lyrical exultation, the artistic visualisation’ of velocity. It is the result ‘of those great causes of universal dynamism.’ Simultaneity was also the focus of Robert and Sonja Delaunay. However, they both interpreted the term simultaneity in a completely different manner. When Guillaume Apollinaire credited both the Delaunays with the term, the Futurist Boccioni accused them of plagiarism. Boccioni was not prepared to cede this key term to others.
The Delaunays did not use this term for dynamism. They did not refer to the élan vital as Bergson did, but rather to Chevreul’s theory of the law of simultaneous contrast. This theory, dating to 1839, and which had already played a role with the Impressionists, related colours and the relationship of coloured objects to one another. This work was republished in 1890. Sonja Delaunay, in the Simultaneous Contrasts, dared to jump directly into the abstract. Her painting was already a formal reference system of colour rhythms at a time when her husband Robert, as well as Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Picasso were still slowly making way towards detaching themselves from objects.
Robert Delaunay founded Orphism. On account of the orchestration of colour, Guillaume Apollinaire named the Delaunays’ painting style after Orpheus, the singer of Greek mythology. The origins of his painting style are derived from Impressionism, Analytical Cubism, and from Cézanne. The new landmark of Paris, the Eiffel Tower, built in 1898, fascinated Delaunay. Its elegant design became the subject of The Window series. He painted it again and again, in new variations and refractions, in light and bright colour harmonies based on the colour values of light separated by a prism. He painted the dizzying views of the tower, the delicate construction, the fantastic view that he always saw and yet always saw anew with new perspectives.
From his examination of Cubism and Orphism, the French-Czech painter Frantisek Kupka already early on arrived at colour rhythms completely free of objects. Living in Paris since 1895, he taught religion and served as a spiritualist medium. From 1911 to 1912, he painted Fuge in Two Colours. On a white surface, rhythms in red, green, blue and black move concentrically. He was a pioneer of abstract art, but he did not achieve much fame with his Diagrammes and Arabesques tournoyantes. He understood his paintings as philosophical architecture.
Marc Chagall also experimented with the simultaneity of time and place. He is considered to be one of the most significant artistic personalities of the first half of the 20th century. His narrative, expressive style had a calming effect on European and Russian painting and had a stimulating effect on the Surrealists in Paris. André Breton noted that ‘through Chagall alone, the metaphor entered triumphantly into modern painting.’ Metaphor was the basis for Chagall’s painting. Alternating between dream and reality, Chagall linked his memories of Russia with the present and the prophetic. His visual language depicts the real in a fairy tale-like surrounding. Figures move in the weightlessness of the unreal. Behind the often riddle-like compositions of this master storyteller hides an artist who has seen and experienced the highs and lows of human existence.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 147.5 × 89.2 cm. Louise and Walter Arensberg collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia.
František Kupka, Apathetic – Escape in Two Colours, 1912.
Oil