Futurism reflects a dynamic picture of the world in a state of restlessness and of a process that is neither complete nor clear nor accessible. Its exponents regarded themselves as trailblazers of a new era, as social revolutionaries. They experimented boldly and extravagantly in all areas of the aesthetic media, in painting, sculpture and architecture, as well as music and theatre. Modern life and existence, they believed, should be understood in all their manifestations, the visible and the invisible, the normal and the metaphysical. First and foremost, all living things and objects appearing to be static should be depicted, even their emotions and their relationships to one another.
George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916–1917.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 102 cm.
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
Gino Severini, Dynamic Hieroglyph at Tabarin Ball, 1912.
Oil on canvas with sequins, 161.6 × 156.2 cm.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Carlo Carrà, Manifestazione Interventista, 1914.
Tempera, pencil, sequins and pasted papers on cardboard, 38.5 × 30 cm. Mattioli collection, Milan.
Luigi Russolo, Dynamism of a Car, 1912–1913.
Oil on canvas, 106 × 140 cm. Gift of Sonja Delaunay, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Our bodies press into the sofas upon which we sit, and the sofas press into us, as the passing street car presses into the houses that in turn fall onto the street car and merge with it. Thereby, man is no longer at the centre, but rather merely a delicate being among many delicate beings. The Futurists touched upon the interrelatedness of all beings and felt strongly that the viewer should be included in the dynamism of a painting.
In order to permit the viewer to live at the centre of a painting, the painting must be a synthesis of that which one remembers and that what one sees. Even all non-living things reveal inertia and wildness, cheerfulness and sadness in their lines.
Making visible the invisible necessitated the transparency of all things. In the Technical Manifesto of 1910, the Futurist painters Balla, Carrà, Boccioni, Russolo and Severini expressed the following:
Who can still believe in the inscrutability of the body, when our increased and multifaceted sensibility allows us to imagine the dark revelations of mediumistic phenomenon? Why should we continue to work without taking into account our visual capabilities that are similar in their results to x-rays?
The newest scientific discoveries not only influenced the intelligentsia insofar as the discoveries appeared in somewhat simplified form in the daily press. In her paper, Radium and Radioactivity, Marie Curie, who in 1903 together with her husband, Pierre Curie and Antoine-Henri Becquerel, received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of radioactivity, wrote:
The discovery of the phenomenon of radioactivity adds another group to the great number of invisible rays that are now known, and we must recognise anew how limited our direct perception of the world around us is.
The Futurists were not alone in being caught up in the spirit of the times that distanced itself from the historic-mechanistic worldview due to the many new discoveries of numerous scientists and inventors. In 1907 the French philosopher, Henri Bergson published his paper, ‘L’Evolution créatrice.’ The Futurists emphatically referred to him. For Bergson, the term ‘intuition’ describes a condition of the correlation between the future and the past and of space and time. According to Bergson, by virtue of ‘sympathetic’ contact, which intuition produces between us all and everything living, we achieve an expansion of our consciousness permitting a correlating breakthrough. By this intuition with whose help one can, for example, put oneself in the place of an object in order to become one with its unique core being.
Umberto Boccioni referred to Marie Curie and Bergson as he wrote out his notes for a lecture in 1911: ‘Not the visible must be painted, but rather that which up until now was considered to be invisible, namely, that what the clairvoyant painter sees.’ The Futurist painters tried to realise the new view of the world artistically. All movements and states of mind, all noises and smells, everything moving and static, all life and all matter obligated Futurism to a universal dynamism. This was manifested in works of art by a whirling fragmentation or in the multiplication of images of an object, and indeed by means of disjointed perspective, through a change from distant and close-up views, through the expansion and shortening of time frames or by changing the density of action. The goal was to capture and present in a painting the visible and the invisible as a conglomerate of the past, present and future of an event, as it were in a time and space cluster.
Movement can be depicted differently. It can be depicted either as an ‘absolute movement’ by means of power strokes that ‘impact upon the mind of the viewer’ or as zigs and zags – or as waves. The ‘relative movement’ represents sequential phases of movement and indeed in the manner of photos that have been copied over one another placed next to each other. Through the simultaneous and reciprocal immersing of all things and events into one motif, the fourth dimension of time is added to the three known spatial dimensions. A space and time cluster arises in the painting.
Giacomo Balla, Little Girl Running above a Ball, 1912.
Oil on canvas, 125 × 125 cm. Galleria d’Arte moderna, Milan.
Umberto Boccioni, The Street Soaks into the House, 1911.
Oil on canvas, 100 × 100.6 cm. Sprengel Museum, Hannover.
Lyonel Feininger, Vollersroda V, 1916. Watercolour on paper, 23 × 30 cm.
Gift of Günther and Carola Peill, Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
Expressionism and the Search for Contemporary Form
Expressionism is a multi-faceted European movement to which the French, Germans, Austrians, Russians and Americans made significant contributions. It is a movement that was motivated by the same spirit, distancing itself from the reproduction of nature, seeking new shores of expression in ‘inner truth.’ Its manifestation is a fusion of the most varied forms. International exhibitions, public art collections and museums, paintings depicted in books and magazines, and primarily study trips by the artists themselves were not insignificant in contributing to the common direction of the new movement.
Since the middle of the 19th century, Paris had been the epicentre of innovative artistic forces and was an eagerly visited by artists from around the world as a capital of the arts. Congenial French nonconformists Paul Cézanne, Claude Monet, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Vincent van Gogh (though only a temporary resident in France)