Category Archives: Futurism

An Italian poet named Emilio Filippo Tommaso (1876-1944) established Futurism in 1908. He envisioned a new society that would make a complete rupture with the present and the past even as the world underwent rapid changes in the new century. Tomasso imagined a perfect world, a utopia that included new art and literary forms. In essence, the new society would replace past social norms and offer something better for art and poetry. In his Futurist Manifesto in 1909, Tommaso elaborated more on the Futurist vision, including the Four Post-Modernizations.

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) created and embodied the Futurism painting form with his paintings The City Rises (1910) and States of Mind (1911-1912). The latter features red, blue, and white as the dominant colors and includes humans in motion and futuristic buildings under construction at the top of the canvas. The elements of Futurism are embedded in the complex composition. Many colors break up and come together to portray a man shown from behind. He looks like can pull the observer into the future. Boccioni also sculpted a bronze cast in 1913 called Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which now resides in the Museum of Modern Art. This human figure also embodies motion, a central concept of Futurism.

The Dada artist and writer, Marcel Duchamp, was the brilliant organizer of the Dadaists and the author of the Dada Manifesto. He had a brilliant older brother whose sculptures exhibit the impact of Futurism. Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918) created the magnificent bronze sculpture which was both mechanical and unique. He chose the simple name The Horse (1914), understating the complexity of this three-dimensional form as a complex representation of how humanity is propelling itself into an uncertain future.

It is hard to believe sometimes that the Dadaists and the Futurists, including the Duchamp brothers were creating such revolutionary work only a couple years after Braque and Picasso introduced Cubism to the Paris art world in the midst of the First World War. Joseph Stella also reverberated the Futurist sense of rhythm and motion in his painting, Battle of Lights, Coney Island painting (1914). Some historians even argue that Futurism even impacted Picassos Synthetic Cubism.

Architecture gave a vision to the idea of a futuristic city. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright built models of their visions for a futuristic metropolis. However, these elaborate plans were never built. Wrights plan is reminiscent of the city of the future one sees when riding the Mass Transit Authority through Walt Disney Worlds Space Mountain.

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Futurism and Art History

Early Russian Avant-garde Movements

During the first two decades of the 20th century. Cubism and Futurism were adopted and developed by Russian artists who. except for those living outside Russia, had not previously been involved in the European avant-garde movements. From 1905 until the outbreak of World War I and, subsequently, from the time of the October Revolution until the mid-1920s, three important initiatives were launched in succession: Rayonism, Suprematism, and Constructivism. Founded on intellectual discipline and geometry, these modes entailed original theoretical and pictorial developments, along the lines of Abstractionism. Although aware of its legacy in painting and literature, young Russian artists felt burdened by the cultural tradition of realism and rejected it in favour of the new developments in France. They were mesmerized by the collections of Post-Impressionist works by Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, which were brought to Russia by wealthy merchants such as Shchukin and Morozov. who allowed public viewings.

Russian artists also admired Italian Futurism, avidly reading translations of the manifestos and attending Marinetti's lectures, held in Moscow from 1910 onwards. The Golden Fleece exhibitions of 1908 and 1909 included works by Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov (1882-1964) that recalled national tradition in robust primitivist scenes. In 1912. however, work presented at the so-called "Donkey's Tail" exhibition showed that these two artists had already started to embark upon a modernization of Russian painting. Although independent and critical of Western culture, these painters set great store by the Cubo-Futurists' experiments in the use of colour, dynamism of line, and the liberation of art from naturalistic representation.

In his "Manifesto of Rayonism" (published in April 1912 and revised in 1913 for the Target exhibition in Moscow), Larionov defined his new artistic theories as "a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism". Rayonism is said to have drawn its inspiration and name from the scientific discoveries of radioactivity and ultraviolet rays, which revealed the sum of rays derived from an object and the dynamic and simultaneous transmission of light. The movement was promoted in Western Europe throughout 1913 and 1914, and was taken up zealously in Rome during 1917, but failed to survive the upheavals of war. Its main protagonist, Larionov, moved to France to concentrate on stage designs for the Ballets Russes.

The works shown by Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935) at "0.10. The Last Futurist Exhibition", held in St Petersburg in 1915, represented an important move towards nonrepresentational art. He had sought to "liberate art from the dead-weight of objectivity" in 1913 by painting a single black square on a white ground, the sole content of which was "the sensitivity of nonobjectivity". The aim of this new movement, which Malevich named Suprematism, was to express the absolute supremacy of sensitivity in the creative arts. The goals of his manifesto, produced in collaboration with the poet Maiakovsky, were to liberate painting from the shackles of naturalistic or symbolic references; to divest it of any practical purpose; and to ensure that it existed only as pure aesthetic sensibility. This involved the composition of elementary geometric shapes, usually squares, which were initially painted black, but were later produced in several colours. The quest for purity and immateriality of form reached its logical conclusion in 1918 with a white square on a white ground. Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) exhibited at the St Petersburg shows held in 1915 and was a pupil of Larionov. His work evolved from the Neo-Primitive style towards more abstract compositions. His stormy friendship with Malevich ended when theoretical disagreements arose between them in 1917. Malevich continued to reject any connection between the "pure plastic sensibility' of art and the problems of practical life, whereas the Constructivists, led by Tatlin, held that art had to abandon individual aesthetic stances if it was to help emancipate modern society.

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Rayonism [ Rus. Luchizm].

Term derived from the word for ray (Rus. luch), used to refer to an abstract style of painting developed by the Russian artist Mikhail Larionov. Larionov himself claimed that he had painted his first Rayist work in 1909, but modern scholarship has shown his first Rayist works to date from the latter half of 1912. These included Glass: Rayist Method (New York, Guggenheim) and Rayist Sausage and Mackerel (Cologne, Mus. Ludwig). In 1913 Larionov began to expound and elaborate his theory in a series of manifestos.

Rayonism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Russian Luchism (Rayism) Russian art movement founded by Mikhail F. Larionov, representing one of the first steps toward the development of abstract art in Russia. Larionov exhibited one of the first Rayonist works, Glass, in 1912 and wrote the movement's manifesto that same year (though it was not published until 1913). Explaining the new style, which was a synthesis of Cubism, Futurism, and Orphism, Larionov said that it is concerned with spatial forms which areobtained through the crossing of reflected rays from various objects.

The raylike lines appearing in the works of Larionov and Natalya Goncharova bear strong similarities to the lines of force in Futurist paintings. Rayonism apparently ended after 1914, when Larionov and Goncharova departed for Paris.

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Russian Avant-garde Movements

After the Bolshevik revolution and World War I, a new-artistic trend emerged in Europe. Unlike Dadaism's nihilistic stance, the aesthetic individualism of Suprematism, or Mondrian's abstract mysticism, which rejected all political and social value for art, this new movement stressed the need for artists to become actively involved in reshaping society. It declared that the combined forces of art, craftsmanship, and industry could help build a better world. In post-Tsarist Russia, the first Commissar of Education, Anatoly Lunacharsky, was broadly sympathetic towards modern artistic movements, and permitted avant-garde artists to play a role in cultural activity and teaching. Considered useful to society, art was expected to concentrate on architecture, the design of manifestos and household objects, and printing. Known as Constructivism, this movement sought to put these revolutionary aims and ideals into practice. It rejected any creativity that did not have a purpose and categorized it as a specific, purely aesthetic activity. From 1915 to 1916, Tatlin (1885-1953) and Rodchenko (1891-1956) made utensils and household objects in iron, glass, and other industrial materials. They were joined by two brothers. Antoine Pevsner (1886-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977). and the Mayakovsky group, organized by LEV (the Left Front) whose manifesto was published in 1923.

After the first flush of shared enthusiasm among the artists, differences soon emerged over methods and results. Following the subsequent schism in the Constructivist group, Pevsner and Gabo espoused the virtues of realism, which, as expounded in their "Realistic Manifesto" of 1920, supported the absolute value of art and its independence from the structure of society, be it capitalist or communist. Immediately, Rodchenko and his wife Varvara Stepanova delivered their riposte in the "Programme of the Productivist Group", airing extreme utilitarian and "functional" views and ending with the exhortation: "Down with art! Up with technology! Down with tradition! Up with Constructivist technical progress!" The art produced by Moscow artists who had emigrated, many of them before World War I, was much more in tune with international movements. Artists such as Larionov, Sonia Delaunay, Goncharova, Chagall, and Soutine settled in Paris, where they found the artistic climate more congenial than in their native country.

_____________ Cubo-Futurism

Alexander Rodchenko Vladimir Mayakovsky, Moscow, 1924

Cubo-Futurism

Term first used in 1913 in a lecture, later published, by the Russian art critic Korney Chukovsky (18821969) in reference to a group of Russian avant-garde poets whose work was seen to relate to French Cubism and Italian Futurism; it was subsequently adopted by painters and is now used by art historians to refer to Russian art works of the period 191215 that combine aspects of both styles. Initially the term was applied to the work of the poets Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksey Kruchonykh, Velimir Khlebnikov, Benedikt Livshits (18861939) and Vasily Kamensky (18641961), who were grouped around the painter David Burlyuk. Their raucous poetry recitals, public clowning, painted faces and ridiculous clothes emulated the activities of the Italians and earned them the name of Russian Futurists. In poetic output, however, only Mayakovsky could be compared with the Italians; his poem Along the Echoes of the City, for example, which describes various street noises, is reminiscent of Luigi Russolos manifesto Larte dei rumori (Milan, 1913).

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Vladimir Mayakovsky

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

born July 7 [July 19, New Style], 1893, Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire died April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period.

At the age of 15 Mayakovsky joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the MoscowArt School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifesto, Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Faceof Public Taste), and Mayakovsky's poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913. Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky completed two majorpoems, Oblako v shtanakh (1915; A Cloud in Trousers) and Fleytapozvonochnik (written 1915, published 1916; The Backbone Flute). Both record a tragedy of unrequited love and express the author's discontent with the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky sought to depoetize poetry, adopting the language of the streets and using daring technical innovations. Above all, his poetry is declamatory, for mass audiences. When the Russian Revolution broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as Oda revolutsi (1918; Ode to Revolution) and Levy marsh (1919; Left March) became very popular. So too did his Misteriya buff (first performed 1921; Mystery Bouffe), a drama representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the Unclean (the proletarians) over the Clean (the bourgeoisie). As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in the Russian Telegraph Agency as a painter of posters and cartoons, which he provided with apt rhymes and slogans. He poured out topical poems of propaganda and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, recording his impressions in poems and in a booklet of caustic sketches, Moye otkrytiye Ameriki (1926; My Discovery of America). He also found time to write scripts for motion pictures, in some of which he acted. In his last three years he completed two satirical plays: Klop (performed 1929; The Bedbug), lampooning the type of philistine that emerged with the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and Banya (performed in Leningrad on January 30, 1930; The Bathhouse), a satire of bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism under Joseph Stalin. Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love, which burst out again and again because of repeated romantic frustrations. After his early lyrics this need came out particularly strongly in two poems, Lyublyu(1922; I Love) and Pro eto (1923; About This). To makethings worse, during a stay in Paris in 1928, he fell in love with a refugee, Tatyana Yakovleva, whom he wanted to marry but who refused him. At the same time, he had misunderstandings with the dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and with Soviet authorities. Nor was the production of his Banya a success. Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow.

Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene, but much of his utilitarian and topical poetry is now out of date. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations, however, influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his impress has been strong, especially in the 1930s, after Stalin declared him the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.

Alexander Rodchenko Photomontage for rear cover of Mayakovsky's "Razgovor c fininspektorom o poezii" ("A Conversation with a Tax-collector about Poetry"), 1926.

_____________ Constructivism

Founded in 1913 by Vladimir Tatlin, the Russian Constructivist movement developed from Cubism, Italian Futurism, and Suprematism in Russia, Neo Plasticism in Holland, and the Bauhaus School in Germany. The term Constructivism is used to define non-representational relief construction, sculpture, kinetics, and painting. As a response to changes in technology and contemporary life, it advocated a change in the art scene, aiming to create a new order in art and architecture that referenced social and economic problems. Brothers Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner also supported the movement, infusing sculptural elements from cubism and futurism with an allusion to architecture, machinery, and technology. The movements first Constructivist manifesto was written in 1921 when the First Working Group of Constructivists was formed in Moscow. The movement later spread to Holland and Germany before gaining international popularity. The style was initially supported by the Soviet Regime, but later was deemed unsuitable for mass propaganda reasons. Following this decree, Gabo and Pevsner went into exile while Tatlin, Popova and El Lissitzky stayed in Russia. The Constructivist movement was also prominent in theatrical scene design, mostly spread by the efforts of Vsevolod Meyerhold.

Constructivism

Avant-garde tendency in 20th-century painting, sculpture, photography, design and architecture, with associated developments in literature, theatre and film. The term was first coined by artists in Russia in early 1921 and achieved wide international currency in the 1920s. Russian Constructivism refers specifically to a group of artists who sought to move beyond the autonomous art object, extending the formal language of abstract art into practical design work. This development was prompted by the Utopian climate following the October Revolution of 1917, which led artists to seek to create a new visual environment, embodying the social needs and values of the new Communist order. The concept of International Constructivism defines a broader current in Western art, most vital from around 1922 until the end of the 1920s, that was centred primarily in Germany. International Constructivists were inspired by the Russian example, both artistically and politically. They continued, however, to work in the traditional artistic media of painting and sculpture, while also experimenting with film and photography and recognizing the potential of the new formal language for utilitarian design. The term Constructivism has frequently been used since the 1920s, in a looser fashion, to evoke a continuing tradition of geometric abstract art that is constructed from autonomous visual elements such as lines and planes, and characterized by such qualities as precision, impersonality, a clear formal order, simplicity and economy of organization and the use of contemporary materials such as plastic and metal.

Constructivism (Encyclopaedia Britannica) Russian artistic and architectural movement that was first influenced by Cubism and Futurism and is generally considered to have been initiated in 1913 with the painting reliefsabstract geometric constructionsof Vladimir Tatlin. The expatriate Russian sculptors Antoine Pevsner and Naum Gabo joined Tatlin and his followers in Moscow, and upon publication of their jointly written Realist Manifesto in 1920 they became the spokesmen of the movement. It is from the manifesto that the name Constructivism was derived; one of the directives that it contained was to construct art. Because of their admiration for machines and technology, functionalism, and modern industrial materials such as plastic, steel, and glass, members of the movement were also called artist-engineers.

Other important figures associated with Constructivism were Alexander Rodchenko and El Lissitzky. Soviet opposition to the Constructivists' aesthetic radicalism resulted in the group's dispersion. Tatlin and Rodchenko remained in the Soviet Union, but Gabo and Pevsner went first to Germany and then to Paris, where they influenced the Abstract-Creation group with Constructivist theory, and laterin the 1930s Gabo spread Constructivism to England and in the 1940s to the United States. Lissitzky's combination of Constructivism and Suprematism influenced the de Stijl artists and architects whom he met in Berlin, as well as the Hungarian Lszl Moholy-Nagy, who was a professor at the Bauhaus. In both Dessau and Chicago, where because of Naziinterference the New Bauhaus was established in 1937, Moholy-Nagy disseminated Constructivist principles.

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Antoine Pevsner

(b Oryol, 18 Jan 1886; d Paris, 12 April 1962).

French painter and sculptor of Russian birth. Son of an industrialist and brother of the sculptor NAUM GABO, he grew up in Bryansk. He studied at the School of Art in Kiev (19029), where according to Gabo he first met Alexander Archipenko, and then spent a three-month probationary period at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg. Among his early paintings, The Giant (1907) shows the influence of the Symbolist painter Mikhail Vrubel, but Pevsner was also impressed by the Russian Byzantine tradition.

Antoine Pevsner Monde

Antoine Pevsner Vision spectrale

Antoine Pevsner Construction dans l'espace

Universal Flowering

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Universal Flowering (Mirovoi rastsvet)

Universal Flowering is the name given by Pavel Filonov to his system of analytical art. The system arose from cubo-futurist experiments and works that he undertook from 1913-1915. It is characterized by very dense, minutely facetted, and relatively flat surfaces created by working from the particular to the general, using the smallest of brushes and the sharpest of pencils. The images have both Cubism's multiple vantage points and Futurism's representation of a figure over time. A number of the paintings, while having a given orientation, are painted as though they could be oriented in a variety of ways. Filonov's philosophy was originally formalized in written form in 1915, which was revised and published as The Declaration of Universal Flowering in 1923 when Filonov was a professor at the (then) Petrograd Academy of Arts. Filonov's main theoretical work The Ideology of Analytical Art (Ideologia analiticheskogo iskusstva) was published in 1930.

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Neo-primitivism

Russian movement that took its name from Aleksandr Shevchenkos Neo-primitivizm (1913). This book describes a crude style of painting practised by members of the DONKEYS TAIL group. Mikhail Larionov, Natalia Goncharova, Kazimir Malevich and Shevchenko himself all adopted the style, which was based on the conventions of traditional Russian art forms such as the lubok, the icon and peasant arts and crafts. The term Neo-primitivism is now used to describe a general aspiration towards primitivism in the work of the wider Russian avant-garde during the period 191014. It embraces the work of such disparate painters as Chagall, David Burlyuk and Pavel Filonov, and poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksey Kruchonykh.

Russian artists associated with Neo-primitivism include: David Burlyuk, Marc Chagall, Pavel Filonov, Natalia Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, Kasimir Malevich, Aleksandr Shevchenko.

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Aleksandr Shevchenko (1883-1948) Cubist Composition (Man with Guitar). 1915

_____________ Synchromism

Style of painting based on the theory that colour provides the basis for both form and content. It was conceived in Paris shortly before World War I by Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright. It was Russells idea that paintings could be created based on sculptural forms interpreted two-dimensionally through a knowledge of colour properties. Synchromist paintings, stressing an emphasis on colour rhythms, were composed of abstract shapes, often concealing the submerged forms of figures, for example Synchromy in Blue (1916; New York, Whitney) by Macdonald-Wright. The two artists first attracted attention at the Neue Kunstsalon in Munich in June 1913. Their second exhibition of Synchromist painting was at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris from October to November 1913.

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Morgan Russell (1886-1953)

Morgan Russell Cosmic Synchromy

Morgan Russell Synchromy in Blue-Violet

Stanton MacDonald-Wright (1890-1973)

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Airplane Synchromy in Yellow-Orange

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Califronia Landscape

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Yin Synchromy No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Oriental Synchromy

Stanton MacDonald-Wright The Jade Flute No. 2

Stanton MacDonald-Wright Still Life wit Cyclamen and Fruit

_____________ London Group

English exhibiting society founded in November 1913. On its foundation it absorbed many members of the CAMDEN TOWN GROUP and also incorporated the more avant-garde artists influenced by Cubism and Futurism, some of whom afterwards joined the Vorticist movement. Among the founder-members were David Bomberg, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Jacob Epstein, Harold Gilman (the groups first president until his death in 1919), Charles Ginner, Spencer Gore, Percy Wyndham Lewis, John Nash, Christopher Nevinson and Edward Wadsworth. The group was organized in opposition to the conservatism of the Royal Academy and the stagnation of the formerly radical New English Art Club. Though, as can be judged from the names of its founders, it had no homogeneous style or aesthetic, it acted as a focal point for the more progressive elements in British art at that time.

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Harold Gilman Clarissa 1911

Harold Gilman (British, 1876-1919)

Harold Gilman Canal Bridge, Flekkefjord

Harold Gilman Edwardian Interior

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A Revolution in the Arts - All-Art.org

Futurism

In contrast with other early 20th-century avant-garde movements, the distinctive feature of Futurism was its intention to become involved in all aspects of modem life. Its aim was to effect a systematic change in society and, true to the movement's name, lead it towards new departures into the "future". Futurism was a direction rather than a style. Its encouragement of eccentric behaviour often prompted impetuous and sometimes violent attempts to stage imaginative situations in the hope of provoking reactions. The movement tried to liberate its adherents from the shackles of 19th-century' bourgeois conventionality and urged them to cross the boundaries of traditional artistic genres in order to claim a far more complete freedom of expression. Through a barrage of manifestos that dealt not only with various aspects of art, such as painting, sculpture, music, architecture, and design, but with society in general, the Futurists proclaimed the cult of modernity and the advent of a new form of artistic expression, and put an end to the art of the past. The entire classical tradition, especially that of Italy, was a prime target for attack, while the worlds of technology, mechanization, and speed were embraced as expressions of beauty and subjects worthy of the artist's interest.

Futurism, which started out as a literary movement, had its first manifesto (signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti) published in Le Figaro in 1909. It soon attracted a group of young Italian artists - Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), Carlo Carra (1881-1966), Luigi Russolo (1885-1947), and Gino Severini (1883-1966) - who collaborated in writing the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting" and the "Manifesto of the Futurist Painters", both of which were published in 1910.

Despite being the sole Italian avant-garde movement. Futurism first came to light in Paris where the cosmopolitan atmosphere was ready to receive and promote it. Its development coincided with that of Cubism, and the similarities and differences in the philosophies of the two movements have often been discussed. Without doubt they shared a common cause in making a definitive break with the traditional, objective methods of representation. However, the static quality of Cubism is evident when compared with the dynamism of the Futurists, as are the monochrome or subdued colours of the former in contrast to the vibrant use of colour by the latter. The Cubists' rational form of experimentation, and intellectual approach to the artistic process, also contrasts with the Futurists' vociferous and emotive exhortations for the mutual involvement of art and life, with expressions of total art and provocative demonstrations in public. Cubists held an interest in the objective value of form, while Futurists relied on images and the strength of perception and memory in their particularly dynamic paintings. The Futurists believed that physical objects had a kind of personality and vitality of their own. revealed by "force-lines" - Boccioni referred to this as "physical transcendentalism". These characteristic lines helped to inform the psychology and emotions of the observer and influenced surrounding objects "not by reflections of light, but by a real concurrence of lines and real conflicts of planes" (catalogue for the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition, 1911). In this way, the painting could interact with the observer who, for the first time, would be looking "at the centre of the picture" rather than simply viewing the picture from the front. This method of looking at objects that was based on their inherent movement - and thereby capturing the vital moment of a phenomenon within its process of continual change - was partly influenced by a fascination with new technology and mechanization. Of equal importance, however, was the visual potential of the new-found but flourishing art of cinematography. Futurists felt strongly that pictorial sensations should be shouted, not murmured. This belief was reflected in their use of very flamboyant, dynamic colours, based on the model of Neo-Impressionist theories of the fragmentation of light. A favourite subject among Futurist artists was the feverish life of the metropolis: the crowds of people, the vibrant nocturnal life of the stations and dockyards, and the violent scenes of mass movement and emotion that tended to erupt suddenly. Some Futurists, such as Balla, chose themes with social connotations, following the anarchic Symbolist tradition of northern Italy and the humanitarian populism of Giovanni Cena.

The first period of Futurism was an analytical phase, involving the analysis of dynamics, the fragmentation of objects into complementary shades of colour, and the juxtaposition of winding, serpentine lines and perpendicular straight lines. Milan was the centre of Futurist activity, which was led by Boccioni and supported by Carra and Russolo. These three artists visited Paris together in 1911 as guests of Severini, who had settled there in 1906. During their stay, they formulated a new artistic-language, which culminated in works dealing with the "expansion of objects in space" and "states of mind" paintings. A second period, when the Futurists adopted a Cubistic idiom, was known as the synthetic phase, and lasted from 1913 to 1916.

At this time, Boccioni took up sculpture, developing his idea of "sculpture of the environment" which heralded the "spatial" sculpture of Moore, Archipenko, and the Constructivists. In Rome, Balla and Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) created "plastic complexes", constructions of dynamic, basic silhouettes in harsh, solid colours. The outbreak of World War I prompted many Futurist artists to enlist as volunteers. This willingness to serve was influenced by the movement's doctrine, which maintained that war was the world's most effective form of cleansing. Both Boccioni and the architect Antonio Sant'Elia, who had designed an imaginary Futurist city, were killed in the war and the movement was brought to a sudden end.

During the 1920s, some Futurists attempted to revive the movement and align it with other European avant-garde movements, under the label of "Mechanical Art". Its manifesto, published in 1922. showed much in common with Purism and Constructivism. Futurism also became associated with "aeropainting" a technique developed in 1929 by Balla, Benedetta, Dottori, Fillia, and other artists. This painting style served as an expression of a desire for the freedom of the imagination and of fantasy.

Futurism

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

Italian Futurismo, Russian Futurizm, early 20th-century artistic movement that centred in Italy and emphasized the dynamism, speed, energy, and power of the machine and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life in general. The most significant results of the movement were in the visual arts and poetry.

Futurism was first announced on Feb.20, 1909, when the Paris newspaper Le Figaro published a manifesto by the Italian poet and editor Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (q.v.). The name Futurism, coined by Marinetti, reflected his emphasis on discarding what he conceived to be the static and irrelevant art of the past and celebrating change, originality, and innovation in culture and society. Marinetti's manifesto glorified the new technology of the automobile and the beauty of its speed, power, and movement. He exalted violence and conflict and called for the sweeping repudiation of traditional cultural, social, and political values and the destruction of such cultural institutions as museums and libraries. The manifesto's rhetoric was passionately bombastic; its tone was aggressive and inflammatory and was purposely intended toinspire public anger and amazement, to arouse controversy, and to attract widespread attention. Painting and sculpture

With the support of Marinetti, the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini published several manifestos on painting in 1910. Like Marinetti, they glorified originality for its own sake and despised inherited traditions of art. Although they were not as yet working in what was to become the Futurist style, theybegan to emphasize an emotional involvement in the dynamics of modern life, and toward this end they called for rendering the perception of movement and communicating to the viewer the sensations of speed and change. To achieve this, the Futurist painters adopted the Cubist technique of depicting several sides and views of an object simultaneously by means of fragmented and interpenetrating plane surfaces and outlines. But the Futurists additionally sought to portray the object's movement in space, and they tried to achieve this goal by rhythmic spatial repetitions of the object's outlines during its transit, producing an effect akin to that obtained by making multiple and sequential photographic exposures of a moving object. The Futurist paintings differed from Cubist ones in other important ways. While the Cubists favoured still life and portraiture, the Futurists preferred such subjects as speeding automobiles and trains, racing cyclists, dancers, animals, and urban crowds in movement. The resulting paintings had brighter and more vibrant colours than Cubist works and revealed dynamic, agitated compositions in which rhythmically swirling forms reached crescendos of violent movement.

Boccioni also became interested in sculpture, publishing a manifesto on the subject in the spring of 1912. Soon afterward, he began working in this medium, creating the highly original Development of a Bottle in Space (1912) and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). Antonio Sant'Elia formulated a Futurist manifesto on architecture in 1914. His visionary drawings of highly mechanized cities and boldly modern skyscrapers of the future prefigure some of the most imaginative 20th-century architectural planning. Sant'Elia was killed in action in 1916 during World War I.

Boccioni, who had been the most talented artist in the group, also died during military service in 1916. This event, combined with dilution of the group's daring as a result of expansion of its personnel and the coming of war, brought an end to the Futurist movement as an important historical force in the visual arts.

Literature

After his initial broad manifesto of 1909, Marinetti wrote or had a hand in creating a whole series of manifestos dealing with poetry, the theatre, architecture, and other arts. He founded the journal Poesia at Paris in 1905, and he later founded a press with the same name to publish Futurist works. On proselytizing visits to England, France, Germany, and Russia, Marinetti influenced the work of the English founder of Vorticism, Wyndham Lewis, and the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire.

In Russia the Marinetti visit took root in a kind of Russian Futurism that went beyond its Italian model in a revolutionary social and political outlook. Marinetti influenced the two Russian writers considered the founders of Russian Futurism, Velimir Khlebnikov (q.v.), who remained a poet and a mystic, and the younger Vladimir Mayakovsky (q.v.), who became the poet of the Revolution and the popular spokesman of his generation. The Russians published their own manifesto in December 1912, entitled Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (A Slap in the Face of Public Taste), which echoed the Italian manifesto of the previous May. The Russian Futurists repudiated Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy and the then-current Russian symbolist verse and called for the creation of new techniques of writing poetry. Both the Russian and the Italian Futurist poets discarded logical sentence construction and traditional grammar and syntax; they frequently presented an incoherent string of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone. As the first group of artists to identify wholeheartedly with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Russian Futurists sought to dominate post-Revolutionary culture and create a new art that would be integrated into all aspects of daily life of a revolutionary culture. They were favoured by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education, and given important cultural posts. But the Russian Futurists' challenging literary techniques and their theoretical premises of revolt and innovation proved too unstable a foundation upon which to build a broader literary movement. The Futurists' influence was negligible by the time of Mayakovsky's death in 1930.

Luigi Russolo (1885-1947)

Luigi Russolo Music

(b Portogruaro, Venice, 7 May 1885; d Cerro di Laveno, Lake Maggiore, 4 Feb 1947).

Italian painter, printmaker, writer and composer. The fourth of five children, he was trained in music by his father, who was a clockmaker and organist. In 1901 he went to Milan to join his family, who had moved there so that his two brothers, Giovanni and Antonio, could study music at the conservatory. Diverging from his fathers inclinations, Luigi was attracted towards other forms of art, especially painting. Though not actually enrolled at the Accademia di Brera, through new friends he indirectly followed the ideas taught there. In the same period he worked for the restorer Crivelli in Milan, serving his apprenticeship working on the interior decorations of the Castello Sforzesco and on Leonardos Last Supper in the refectory of S Maria delle Grazie. In December 1909 he took part in the exhibition Bianco e nero at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, contributing a series of etchings, made during the preceding year, which show a definite leaning towards Symbolist forms and images. The undulating quality of the line in such etchings as his portrait of Nietzsche (c. 1909; Milan, Gal. A. Mod.), which seems to translate a musical rhythm into visual form through a strong, enveloping sign, remained a distinctive and individual feature of Russolos work and poetics, especially in his Futurist work.

Luigi Russolo Revolt 1911

Luigi Russolo Dinamismo di un treno 1912

Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, Gino Severini

TO THE YOUNG ARTISTS OF ITALY!

The cry of rebellion which we utter associates our ideals with those of the Futurist poets. These ideals were not invented by some aesthetic clique. They are an expression of a violent desire which boils in the veins of every creative artist today.

We will fight with all our might the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past, a religion encouraged by the vicious existence of museums. We rebel against that spineless worshipping of old canvases, old statues and old bric-a-brac, against everything which is filthy and worm-ridden and corroded by time. We consider the habitual contempt for everything which is young, new and burning with life to be unjust and even criminal.

Comrades, we tell you now that the triumphant progress of science makes profound changes in humanity inevitable, changes which are hacking an abyss between those docile slaves of past tradition and us free moderns, who are confident in the radiant splendor of our future.

We are sickened by the foul laziness of artists, who, ever since the sixteenth century, have endlessly exploited the glories of the ancient Romans.

In the eyes of other countries, Italy is still a land of the dead, a vast Pompeii, whit with sepulchres. But Italy is being reborn. Its political resurgence will be followed by a cultural resurgence. In the land inhabited by the illiterate peasant, schools will be set up; in the land where doing nothing in the sun was the only available profession, millions of machines are already roaring; in the land where traditional aesthetics reigned supreme, new flights of artistic inspiration are emerging and dazzling the world with their brilliance.

Living art draws its life from the surrounding environment. Our forebears drew their artistic inspiration from a religious atmosphere which fed their souls; in the same way we must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary lifethe iron network of speedy communications which envelops the earth, the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, those marvelous flights which furrow our skies, the profound courage of our submarine navigators and the spasmodic struggle to conquer the unknown. How can we remain insensible to the frenetic life of our great cities and to the exciting new psychology of night-life; the feverish figures of the bon viveur, the cocette, the apache and the absinthe drinker?

We will also play our part in this crucial revival of aesthetic expression: we will declare war on all artists and all institutions which insist on hiding behind a faade of false modernity, while they are actually ensnared by tradition, academicism and, above all, a nauseating cerebral laziness.

We condemn as insulting to youth the acclamations of a revolting rabble for the sickening reflowering of a pathetic kind of classicism in Rome; the neurasthenic cultivation of hermaphodic archaism which they rave about in Florence; the pedestrian, half-blind handiwork of 48 which they are buying in Milan; the work of pensioned-off government clerks which they think the world of in Turin; the hotchpotch of encrusted rubbish of a group of fossilized alchemists which they are worshipping in Venice. We are going to rise up against all superficiality and banalityall the slovenly and facile commercialism which makes the work of most of our highly respected artists throughout Italy worthy of our deepest contempt.

Away then with hired restorers of antiquated incrustations. Away with affected archaeologists with their chronic necrophilia! Down with the critics, those complacent pimps! Down with gouty academics and drunken, ignorant professors!

Ask these priests of a veritable religious cult, these guardians of old aesthetic laws, where we can go and see the works of Giovanni Segantini today. Ask them why the officials of the Commission have never heard of the existence of Gaetano Previati. Ask them where they can see Medardo Rossos sculpture, or who takes the slightest interest in artists who have not yet had twenty years of struggle and suffering behind them, but are still producing works destined to honor their fatherland?

These paid critics have other interests to defend. Exhibitions, competitions, superficial and never disinterested criticism, condemn Italian art to the ignominy of true prostitution.

And what about our esteemed specialists? Throw them all out. Finish them off! The Portraitists, the Genre Painters, the Lake Painters, the Mountain Painters. We have put up with enough from these impotent painters of country holidays.

Down with all marble-chippers who are cluttering up our squares and profaning our cemeteries! Down with the speculators and their reinforced-concrete buildings! Down with laborious decorators, phony ceramicists, sold-out poster painters and shoddy, idiodic illustrators!

These are our final conclusions:

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 earths deepest bowels! The threshold of the future will be swept free of mummies! Make room for youth, for violence, for daring!

FUTURIST SCULPTURE

Umberto Boccioni published his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" in 1912, despite having completed only two sculptural works at the time. He had developed his new theories after coming into contact with Duchamp-Villon, Archipenko, Brancusi, and Picasso while in Paris. Boccioni's ambition was to make sculpture capable of expressing the dynamic structures of modern society. To this end, he aimed to capture the totality of reality, including psychological and emotional dimensions, and all its varied facets in their continual condition of change. The resultant work would be "sculpture of environment", in which he could "fling open the figure and let it incorporate within itself whatever may surround it".

The Cubists had already tried a fresh approach to reality, interrupting the continuity of line and breaking up the rhythm of forms according to analytical and geometric conceptions. However, they did not alter the static perception of reality. Futurists aimed to convey all the changes that an object undergoes during movement. After demonstrating the sculptural motion of an everyday object in his famous "bottles" series (Development of a Bottle in Space, 1912), Boccioni tackled the theme of movement in the human body, constructing aerodynamic, compressed compositions with a succession of concave and convex shapes. By stretching and distorting his figures, he created "syntheses" of "internal plastic infinity" and "external plastic infinity", as seen in his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913). The most conclusive work of Boccioni's sculptural experimentation was his inspired composition Horse + rider + buildings (1913-14). The materials chosen for this work, including wood, tin. copper, and cardboard, represented the need to progress from traditional sculpture made in a single material to the use of a multiplicity of colours and materials. Picasso's assemblage of various materials for his sculptures in 1911 and 1912 had already started to change the course of plastic art in Europe. The Horse (1914) by Duchamp-Villon showed a remarkable affinity with Boccioni's work, which was also discernible in Lipchitz's solid three-dimensional structures, and in Constructivist works.

I. Avant-garde sculpture (190920)

(Encyclopaedia Britannica)

In the second decade of the 20th century the tradition of body rendering extending from the Renaissance to Rodin was shattered, and the Cubists, Brancusi, and the Constructivists emerged as the most influential forces. Cubism, with its compositions of imagined rather than observed forms and relationships, had a similarly marked influence.

One of the first examples of the revolutionary sculpture is Picasso's Woman's Head (1909). The sculptor no longer relied upon traditional methods of sculpture or upon his sensory experience of the body; what was given to his outward senses of sight and touch was dominated by strong conceptualizing. The changed and forceful appearance of the head derives from the use of angular planar volumes joined in a new syntax independent of anatomy. In contrast to traditional portraiture, the eyes and mouth are less expressive than the forehead, cheeks, nose, and hair. Matisse's head of Jeanette (191011) also partakes of a personal reproportioning that gives a new vitality to the lessmobile areas of the face. Likewise influenced by the Cubists' manipulation of their subject matter, Alexander Archipenko in his Woman Combing Her Hair (1915) rendered the body by means of concavities rather than convexities and replaced the solid head by its silhouette within which there is only space.

Brancusi also abandoned Rodin's rhetoric and reduced the body to its mystical inner core. His Kiss (1908), with its twoblocklike figures joined in symbolic embrace, has a concentration of expression comparable to that of primitive art but lacking its spiritualistic power. In this and subsequentworks Brancusi favoured hard materials and surfaces as wellas self-enclosed volumes that often impart an introverted character to his subjects. His bronze Bird in Space became a cause clbre in the 1920s when U.S. customs refused to admit it duty free as a work of art.

Raymond Duchamp-Villon began as a follower of Rodin, but his portrait head Baudelaire (1911) contrasts with that by his predecessor in its more radical departure from the flesh; the somewhat squared-off head is molded by clear, hard volumes. His famous Horse (1914), a coiled, vaguely mechanical form bearing little resemblance to the animal itself, suggests metaphorically the horsepower of locomotive drive shafts and, by extension, the mechanization of modern life. Duchamp-Villon may have been influenced by Umberto Boccioni, one of the major figures in the Italian Futurist movement and a sculptor who epitomized the Futurist love of force and energy deriving from the machine. In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space and Head + House + Light (1911), he carried out his theories that the sculptor should model objects as they interact with their environment, thus revealing the dynamic essence of reality.

Jacques Lipchitz came to Cubism later than Archipenko and Duchamp-Villon, but after mastering its meaning he produced superior sculpture. In 1913, after several years of conservative training, he made a number of small bronzes experimenting with the compass curve and angular planes. They reveal an understanding of the Cubist reconstitution of the bodies in an impersonal quasi-geometric armature over which the artist exercised complete autonomy. Continuing towork in this fashion, he produced Man with a Guitar, and Standing Figure (1915), in which voids are introduced, while in the early 1920s he developed freer forms more consistently based on curves.

Lehmbruck's mature style emerged in the Kneeling Woman(1911) and Standing Youth (1913), in which his gothicized, elongated bodies with their angular posturings and appearance of growing from the earth give expression to his notions of modern heroism. In contrast to this spiritualized view is his The Fallen (191516), intended as a compassionate memorial for friends lost in the war.

Constructivism and Dada

Between 1912 and 1914 there emerged anantisculptural movement, called Constructivism, that attacked the false seriousness and hollow moral ideals of academic art. The movement began with the relief fabrications of Vladimir Tatlin in 1913. The Constructivists and their sympathizers preferred industrially manufactured materials, such as plastics, glass, iron, and steel, to marble and bronze. Their sculptures were not formed by carving, modelling, and casting but by twisting, cutting, welding, or literally constructing: thus the name Constructivism.

Unlike traditional figural representation, the Constructivists' sculpture denied mass as a plastic element and volume as an expression of space; for these principles they substitutedgeometry and mechanics. In the machine, where the Futurists saw violence, the Constructivists saw beauty. Like their sculptures, it was something invented; it could be elegant, light, or complex, and it demanded the ultimate in precision and calculation.

Seeking to express pure reality, with the veneer of accidental appearance stripped away, the Constructivists fabricated objects totally devoid of sentiment or literary association; Naum Gabo's work frequently resembled mathematical models, and several Constructivist sculptures,such as those by Kazimir Malevich and Georges Vantongerloo, have the appearance of architectural models. The Constructivists created, in effect, sculptural metaphors for the new world of science, industry, and production; their aesthetic principles are reflected in much of the furniture, architecture, and typography of the Bauhaus.

A second important offshoot of the Cubist collage was the fantastic object or Dadaist assemblage. The Dadaist movement, while sharing Constructivism's iconoclastic vigour, opposed its insistence upon rationality. Dadaist assemblages were, as the name suggests, assembled from materials lying about in the studio, such as wood, cardboard, nails, wire, and paper; examples are Kurt Schwitters' Rubbish Construction (1921) and Marcel Duchamp's Disturbed Balance (1918). This art generally exalted the accidental, the spontaneous, and the impulsive, giving free play to associations. Its paroxysmal and negativist tenor led its subscribers into other directions, but Dadaism formed the basis of the imaginative sculpture thatemerged in the later 1920s.

Conservative reaction (1920s)

In the 1920s modern art underwent a reaction comparable to the changes experienced by society as a whole. In the postwar search for security, permanence, and order, the earlier insurgent art seemed to many to be antithetical to these ends, and certain avant-garde artists radically changed their art and thought. Lipchitz' portraits of Gertrude Stein (1920) and Berthe Lipchitz (1922) return volume and features to the head but not an intimacy of contact with the viewer. Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko broke with the Constructivists around 1920. Jacob Epstein developed some of his finest naturalistic portraiture in this decade. Rudolph Belling abandoned the mechanization that had characterized his Head (1925) in favour of musculature and individual identity in his statue of Max Schmeling of 1929. Matisse's reclining nudes and the Back series of 1929 show less violently worked surfaces and more massive and obvious structuring.

Aristide Maillol continued refining his relaxed and uncomplicated female forms with their untroubled, stolid surfaces. In Germany, Georg Kolbe's Standing Man and Woman of 1931 seems a prelude to the Nazi health cult, andthe serene but vacuous figures of Arno Breker, Karl Albiker, and Ernesto de Fiori were simply variations on a studio theme in praise of youth and body culture. In the United States adherents of the countermovement included William Zorach, Chaim Gross, Adolph Block, Paul Manship, and Wheeler Williams.

II. Sculpture of fantasy (192045)

One trend of Surrealist or Fantasist sculpture of the late 1920s and the 1930s consisted of compositions made up of found objects, such as Meret Oppenheim's Object, Fur Covered Cup (1936). As with Dadaist fabrications, the unfamiliar conjunction of familiar objects in these assemblies was dictated by impulse and irrationality and could be summarized by Isidore Ducasse's often-quoted statement, Beautiful . . . as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine with an umbrella.

Of greater artistic importance was the sculpture of a second group that included Alberto Giacometti, Jean Arp, Lipchitz, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Picasso, Julio Gonzlez, andAlexander Calder. Although these sculptors were sometimes in sympathy with Surrealist objectives, their aesthetic and intellectual concerns prohibited a more consistent attachment. Their art, derived from visions, hallucinations, reverie, and memory, might best be called the sculpture of fantasy. Giacometti's Palace at 4 A.M., for example, interprets the artist's vision not in terms of the external public world but in an enigmatic, private language. Moore's series of Forms suggest shapes in the process of forming under the influence of each other and the medium of space. The appeal of primitive and ancient ritual art to Moore, the element of surprise in children's toys for Calder, and the wellsprings of irrationality from which Arp and Giacometti drank were for these men the means by which wonder and the marvelous could be restored to sculpture. While their works are often violent transmutations of life, their objectives were peaceful, . . . to inject into the vain and bestial world and its retinue, the machines, something peaceful and vegetative. ([Jean] Hans Arp, On My Way, Documents of Modern Art, vol. 6, p. 123, George Wittenborn, Inc., New York, 1948.)

Other sculpture (192045)

The sculpture of Moore, Gaston Lachaise, and Henri Laurens during the 1920s and '30s included mature, ripe human bodies, erogenic images reminiscent of Hindu sculpture, appearing inflated with breath rather than supported by skeletal armatures. Lachaise's Montagne (193435) and Moore's reclining nudes of the '30s and '40s are identifications with earth, growth, vital rhythm, and silent power. Prior to Moore and the work of Archipenko, Boccioni, and Lipchitz, space had been a negative element in figure sculpture; in Moore's string sculptures and Lipchitz' transparencies of the 1920s, it became a prime element of design.

Lipchitz' figure style of the late 1920s and '30s is inseparable from his emerging optimistic humanism. His concern with subject matter began with the ecstatic Joy of Life (1927). Thereafter his seminal themes were of love and security and assertive passionate acts that throw off the inertia of his Cubist figures. In the Return of the Prodigal Son (1931), for example, strong, facetted curvilinear volumes weave a pattern of emotional and aesthetic accord between parent and child.

The American sculptor John B. Flannagan rendered animal forms as well as the human figure in a simple, almost naive style. His interest in what he called the profound subterranean urges of the human spirit in the whole dynamiclife process, birth, growth, decay and death (quoted in Carl Zigrosser, Catalog for the Exhibition of the Sculpture of John B. Flannagan, p. 8, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1942) resulted in Head of a Child (1935), New One (1935), Not Yet (1940), and The Triumph of the Egg (1941).

Somewhat more mystical are Brancusi's Beginning of the World (1924), Fish (192830), and The Seal (1936). As with Flannagan, the recurrent egg form in Brancusi's art symbolizes the mystery of life. Nature in motion is the subject of Alexander Calder's mobiles, such as Lobster Trapand Fish Tail (1939) and others suggesting the movement of leaves, trees, and snow. In the history of sculpture there is no more direct or poetic expression of nature's rhythm.

Developments after World War II

The modern artist is the counterpart in our time of the alchemist-philosopher who once toiled over furnaces, alembics and crucibles, ostensibly to make gold, but who consciously entered the most profound levels of being, philosophizing over the melting and mixing of various ingredients (Ibram Lassaw, quoted by Lawrence Campbell in Art News, p. 66, The Art Foundation Press, New York, March 1954). While work in the older mediums persisted, it was the welding, soldering, and cutting of metal that emerged after 1945 as an increasingly popular medium for sculpture. The technical and expressive potential of uncast metal sculpturewas carried far beyond the earlier work of Gonzlez and Picasso.

The appeal of metal is manifold. It is plentifully available from commercial supply houses; it is flexible and permanent; it allows the artist to work quickly; and it is relatively cheap compared to casting. Industrial metals also relate modern sculpture physically, aesthetically, and emotionally to its context in modern civilization. As the American sculptor David Smith has commented, Possibly steel is so beautiful because of all the movement associatedwith it, its strength and functions. Yet it is also brutal, the rapist, the murderer and death-dealing giants are also its offspring (quoted in Garola Giedion-Welcker, ContemporarySculpture, Documents of Modern Art, vol. 12, p. 123, George Wittenborn, Inc., New York, 1955).

The basic tool of the metal sculptor is the oxyacetylene torch, which achieves a maximum temperature of 6,500 F (3,600 C; the melting point of bronze is 2,000 F). The intensity and size of the flame can be varied by alternating torch tips. In the hands of a skilled artist the torch can cut or weld, harden or soften, colour and lighten or darken metal. Files, hammers, chisels, and jigs are also used in shaping themetal, worked either hot or cold. The sculptor may first construct a metal armature that he then proceeds to conceal or expose. He builds up his form with various metals and alloys, fusing or brazing them, and may expose parts or the whole to the chemical action of acids. This type of work requires constant control, and many sculptors work out and guard their own recipes.

Other sculptors such as Peter Agostini, George Spaventa, Peter Grippe, David Slivka, and Lipchitz, who were interested in bringing spontaneity, accident, and automatism into play, returned to the more labile media of wax and clay, with occasional cire-perdue casting, which permit a very direct projection of the artist's feelings. By the nature of the processes such work is usually on a small scale.

A number of artists brought new technique and content to theDadaist form of the assemblage. Among the most important was the American Joseph Cornell, who combined printed matter and three-dimensional objects in his intimately sealed, often enigmatic boxes.

Another modern phenomenon, seen particularly in Italy, France, and the United States, was the revival of relief sculpture and the execution of such works on a large scale, intended to stand alone rather than in conjunction with a building. Louise Nevelson, for example, typically employed boxes as container compartments in which she carefully disposed an assortment of forms and then painted them a uniform colour. In Europe the outstanding metal reliefs were those by Alberto Burri, Gio and Arnaldo Pomodoro, Csar, Zoltn Kemny, and Manuel Rivera.

Development of metal sculpture, particularly in the United States, led to fresh interpretations of the natural world. In the art of Richard Lippold and Ibram Lassaw, the search for essential structures took the form of qualitative analogies. Lippold's Full Moon (194950) and Sun (195356; commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, to hang in its room of Persian carpets) show an intuition of a basic regularity, precise order, and completeness that underlies the universe. Lassaw's comparable interest in astronomical phenomena inspired his Planets (1952) and The Clouds of Magellan (1953).

In contrast to the macrocosmic concern of these two artists were the interests of sculptors such as Raymond Jacobson, whose Structure (1955) derived from his study of honeycombs. Using three basic sizes, Jacobson constructed his sculpture of hollowed cubes emulating the modular, generally regular but slightly unpredictable formal quality ofthe honeycomb.

Isamu Noguchi's Night Land is one of the first pure landscapes in sculpture. David Smith's Hudson River Landscape (1951), Theodore J. Roszak's Recollections of the Southwest (1948), Louise Bourgeois's Night Garden (1953), and Leo Amino's Jungle (1950) are later examples.

In the 1960s a number of sculptors, particularly in the United States, began to experiment with using the natural world as a kind of medium rather than a subject. Among the more notable examples were the American Robert Smithson, who frequently employed earth-moving equipment to alter natural sites, and the Bulgarian-born Christo, whose wrappings of both natural and man-made structures in synthetic cloth generated considerable controversy. The name environmental sculpture has come to denote such works, together with other sculptures that constitute self-contained environments.

The human figure since World War II

Since figural sculpture moved away from straightforward imitation, the human form has been subjected to an enormous variety of interpretations. The thin, vertical, Etruscan idol-like figures developed by Giacometti showed his repugnance toward rounded and smooth body surfaces orstrong references to the flesh. His men and women do not exist in felicitous concert with others; each form is a secret sanctum, a maximum of being wrested from a minimum of material. Reg Butler's work (e.g., Woman Resting [1951]) and that of David Hare (Figure in a Window [1955]) treat the body in terms of skeletal outlines. Butler's figures partake of nonhuman qualities and embody fantasies of an unsentimental and aggressive character; the difficulties andtensions of existence are measured out in taut wire armatures and constricting malleable bronze surfaces. Kenneth Armitage and Lynn Chadwick, two other British sculptors, make the clothing a direct extension of the figure, part of a total gesture. In his Family Going for a Walk (1953), for example, Armitage creates a fanciful screenlike figure recalling wind-whipped clothing on a wash line. Both Chadwick and Armitage transfer the burden of expression from human limbs and faces to the broad planes of the bulk of the sculpture. Chadwick's sculptures are often illusive hybrids suggesting alternately impotent De Chirico-like figures or animated geological forms.

Luciano Minguzzi admired the amply proportioned feminine form. Minguzzi's women (e.g., Woman Jumping Rope [1954]) may exert themselves with a kind of playful abandon. Marini's women (e.g., Dancer [1949]) enjoy a stately passivity, their quiescent postures permitting a contrapuntal focus on the graceful transition from the slender extremities to the large, compact, voluminous torso, with small, rich surface textures.

The segmented torso, popular with Arp, Laurens, and Picasso earlier, continued to be reinterpreted by Alberto Viani, Bernard Heiliger, Karl Hartung, and Raoul Hague. The emphasis of these sculptors was upon more subtle, sensuous joinings that created self-enclosing surfaces. Viani's work, for example, does not glorify body culture or suggest macrocosmic affinities as does an ideally proportioned Phidian figure; his torsos are seen in a private way, as in his Nude (1951), with its large body and golf ball-sized breasts.

Among the most impressive figure sculptures made in the United States in the late 1950s were those by Seymour Lipton. Their large-scale, taut design and provocative interweaving of closed and open shapes restore qualities of mystery and the heroic to the human form.

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History of Art: Art of the 20th Century - Futurism,Jack of ...

In a stylistic idiom that integrated some of the techniques of Cubism and Divisionism, the Futurists glorified the energy and speed of modern life together with the dynamism and violence of the new technological society. In their manifestos, art, poetry, and theatrical events, they celebrated automobiles, airplanes, machine guns, and other phenomena that they associated with modernity; they denounced moralism and feminism, as well as museums and libraries, which they considered static institutions of an obsolete culture. The Futurists sought to represent the experience of the modern metropolisnamely, the overstimulation of the individuals sensoriumby portraying multiple phases of motion simultaneously and by showing the interpenetration of objects and their environment through the superimposition of different chromatic planes. Artists and poets affiliated with Futurism include Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (the movements founder), Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini. Balla led a second generation of Italian Futurists, including Fortunato Depero, Gerardo Dottori, and Enrico Prampolini, in the 1920s and 1930s.

Almost concomitantly with Italian Futurism, a Russian version of Futurism developed under the leadership of Kazimir Malevich, who described most of his work from 1912 to 1915 as Cubo-Futurist. This Cubist fragmentation of space allied to the Futurist simultaneity of shifting forms was also taken up briefly by Liubov Popova and other Russian artists. Futurism, however, was more prevalent among Russias poets than its painters.

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Can you imagine being so enthusiastic about technology that you name your daughter Propeller? Today we take most technological advances for granted, but at the turn of theUmberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1931), bronze, 43 7/8 x 34 7/8 x 15 3/4" (MoMA) last century, innovations like electricity, x-rays, radio waves, automobiles and airplanes were extremely exciting. Italy lagged Britain, France, Germany, and the United States in the pace of its industrial development. Culturally speaking, the countrys artistic reputation was grounded in Ancient, Renaissance and Baroque art and culture. Simply put, Italy represented the past.

In the early 1900s, a group of young and rebellious Italian writers and artists emerged determined to celebrate industrialization. They were frustrated by Italys declining status and believed that the Machine Age would result in an entirely new world order and even a renewed consciousness.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the ringleader of this group, called the movement Futurism. Its members sought to capture the idea of modernity, the sensations and aesthetics of speed, movement, and industrial development.

Marinetti launched Futurism in 1909 with the publication his Futurist manifesto on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro. The manifesto set a fiery tone. In it Marinetti lashed out against cultural tradition (passatismo, in Italian) and called for the destruction of museums, libraries, and feminism. Futurism quickly grew into an international movement and its participants issued additional manifestos for nearly every type of art: painting, sculpture, architecture, music, photography, cinemaeven clothing.

The Futurist paintersUmberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini, and Giacomo Ballasigned their first manifesto in 1910 (the last named his daughter ElicaPropeller!). Futurist painting had first looked to the color and the optical experiments of the late 19th century, but in the fall of 1911, Marinetti and the Futurist painters visited the Salon dAutomne in Paris and saw Cubism in person for the first time. Cubism had an immediate impact that can be seen in BoccionisMateriaof 1912 for example. Nevertheless, the Futurists declared their work to be completely original.

Umberto Boccioni, Materia, 1912 (reworked 1913), oil on canvas, 226 x 150 cm (Mattioli Collection loaned to Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice)

The Futurists were particularly excited by the works of late 19th-century scientist and photographer tienne-Jules Marey, whose chronophotographic (time-based) studies depicted the mechanics of animal and human movement.

A precursor to cinema, Mareys innovative experiments with time-lapse photography were especially influential for Balla. In his painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, the artist playfully renders the dog's (and dog walker's) feet as continuous movements through space over time.

Giacomo Balla, Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, oil on canvas, 35 1/2 x 43 1/4 " (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo)

Entranced by the idea of the dynamic, the Futurists sought to represent an objects sensations, rhythms and movements in their images, poems and manifestos. Such characteristics are beautifully expressed in Boccionis most iconic masterpiece, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (see above).

Nike (Winged Victory) of Samothrace, c. 190 B.C.E. 3.28m high, Hellenistic Period, marge, (Muse du Louvre, Paris) The choice of shiny bronze lends a mechanized quality to Boccioni's sculpture, so here is the Futurists ideal combination of human and machine. The figures pose is at once graceful and forceful, and despite their adamant rejection of classical arts, it is also very similar to the Nike of Samothrace.

Futurism was one of the most politicized art movements of the twentieth century. It merged artistic and political agendas in order to propel change in Italy and across Europe. The Futurists would hold what they called serate futuriste, or Futurist evenings, where they would recite poems and display art, while also shouting politically charged rhetoric at the audience in the hope of inciting riot. They believed that agitation and destruction would end the status quo and allow for the regeneration of a stronger, energized Italy.

These positions led the Futurists to support the coming war, and like most of the groups members, leading painter Boccioni enlisted in the army during World War I. He was trampled to death after falling from a horse during training. After the war, the members intense nationalism led to an alliance with Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party. Although Futurism continued to develop new areas of focus (aeropittura, for example) and attracted new membersthe so-called second generation of Futurist artiststhe movements strong ties to Fascism has complicated the study of this historically significant art.

Essay by Emily Casden

Additional resources:

Unique Forms in the Continuity of Space at MoMA

The Futurist Manifestos and related materials

Charles Bernstein reading the Futurist Manifesto at MoMA (video)

Boccioni's Materia in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

tienne-Jules Marey at MoMA

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Learn Italian Futurism: An Introduction - Khan Academy

Due to the redesign of Guggenheim.org, past exhibitions prior to 2008 are archived externally; visiting these pages will open a new window.

February 21September 1, 2014

The first comprehensive overview of Italian Futurism to be presented in the United States, this multidisciplinary exhibition examines the historical sweep of the movement from its inception with F. T. Marinettis Futurist manifesto in 1909 through its demise at the end of World War II. Presenting over 300 works executed between 1909 and 1944, the chronological exhibition encompasses not only painting and sculpture, but also architecture, design, ceramics, fashion, film, photography, advertising, free-form poetry, publications, music, theater, and performance. To convey the myriad artistic languages employed by the Futurists as they evolved over a 35-year period, the exhibition integrates multiple disciplines in each section. Italian Futurism, 19091944 is organized by Vivien Greene, Senior Curator, 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. In addition, a distinguished international advisory committee has been assembled to provide expertise and guidance.

This exhibition is made possible by

Support is provided in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the David Berg Foundation, with additional funding from the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, The Robert Lehman Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

The Leadership Committee for Italian Futurism, 19091944: Reconstructing the Universe is also gratefully acknowledged for its generosity, including the Hansjrg Wyss Charitable Endowment; Stefano and Carole Acunto; Giancarla and Luciano Berti; Ginevra Caltagirone; Massimo and Sonia Cirulli Archive; Daniela Memmo dAmelio; Achim Moeller, Moeller Fine Art; Pellegrini Legacy Trust; and Alberto and Gioietta Vitale.

This exhibition is supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.

See original here:
Italian Futurism, 19091944: Reconstructing the Universe

Additional information

The song itself is about a futuristic world, hence the pre-release name of "Electro Empire", and fits into the theme of Origin of Symmetry, but wasn't included due to its difficulty to play live. The song was otherwise called "Spectrum" and "Tesseract" whilst in production; tesseract being the name given to the 4-dimensional shape analogous to a cube.

The song features a powerful bass line and is similar to Hysteria's. According to Matt in a tweet, Futurism led to the idea for Hysteria bassline.

An alternative interpretation is that the song is about a near-future world formed as a result of modern developments, particularly the way social networking in fact keeps us apart from people ("grounded, boxed in") and the use of technology makes us like "silent gods".

After playing the song twice in 2015, Matt cited Futurism and The Groove as two examples of b-sides he felt were better than some album tracks.[2]

The first seconds of the song bear a distinct resemblance to the song "Too Many Puppies" by Primus which has been occasionally played by Muse as a riff.

A first version of Futurism was performed live for the first time at Reading Festival 2000 in 2000, in which lyrics of the song were slightly different (the original live version is also one of only four Muse songs that contains swearing). Despite the band said it can get difficult to play, the song was performed live for the second time ever at Zepp Tokyo in 2013.

Other performances of the song were during the Psycho UK Tour in 2015, in Newport and in Exeter.

Futurism is actually an italian art movement started by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909. It containained the first glmpse of what is now known as modern art. The whole article can be found here: [2]

Apostasy and apathy still rules Yeah you know it's cool Just suck and see A future turns us into silent gods And I won't miss you at all

Grounded Boxed in Like the evil in your veins Grounded Boxed in I am stuck with you

Fate can't decide Alignment of the planets in your hands Come on crush our plans Just suck and see A future that won't let you disagree And I won't miss you at all

Grounded Boxed in Like the evil in your veins Grounded Boxed in I am stuck with you

Feel it, hear it, right apathy you are, see it, be it, you'll see

Apostasy and apathy still rules Yeah you know it's cool Can't wait and see A future turns us into silent gods And I won't miss you at all

Grounded Grounded Like the evil in your veins Grounded Boxed in I am stuck with you

Pursue Alignment of the planets in your hands Come on and fuck my plans Can't wait and see A future won't just let you disagree Won't miss you at all

Grounded Boxed in Like the evil in your veins Grounded Boxed in I am stuck with you

Be it, Be it, Be it, Be it

Go back to Origin of Symmetry

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Futurism (song) MuseWiki: Supermassive wiki for the band Muse

De Stijl (1917-31)

De Stijl (Dutch for "the style,") was the name of a group of artists (and the art, design and aesthetics journal they published, which was one of the most influential avant-garde magazines of the 1920s). Founded in the Netherlands during World War I, by Theo van Doesburg, the older Piet Mondrian, architect Gerrit Rietveld, and Bart Van der Leck, it advocated a geometrical type of abstract art, (later called concrete art, by Van Doesburg), based on universal laws of harmony that would be equally applicable to life and art. The movement had its greatest impact on architecture. Although Piet Mondrian seceded from the group in 1923, he remained faithful to its themes until the end of his life by which time he had become one of the most famous of all abstract painters. By comparison, the more restless Van Doesburg abandoned one of the basic tenets of De Stijl in 1924 when he substituted diagonals for verticals and horizontals in search of greater dynamism.

Neo-Plasticism (fl.1918-26)

Term used to describe the style of painting invented by Piet Mondrian. It comes from the Dutch words "Nieuwe Beelding", used by Mondrian in his articles in De Stijl magazine (1917-19), and in his book "Neo-Plasticisme" from 1921 onwards to describe his own type of abstract art. Essentially it means "new art", since sculpture and certain types of painting are considered 'plastic arts'. However the German version "Neue Gestaltung" (new forming) captures Mondrian's meaning best. He used the name to advocate a 'new forming' in the widest sense, as well as his own ideas and images. In his long essay "Neo-Plasticism in Pictorial Art", Mondrian wrote: "The new plastic idea ... should find its expression in the abstraction of form and colour, that is to say, in the straight line and the clearly defined primary colour". Thus in a sense Neo-Plasticism was an ideal form of painting, which used only pure colour, line and form. In addition to insisting only on primary colours (or non-colours), it advocated solely squares, rectangles, and straight horizontal or vertical lines. Despite his disagreement with Van Doesburg over the latter's launch of Elementarism, in 1924, Mondrian's theories exercised had a huge impact on later painting, and he is now regarded as one of the greatest of all modern artists.

Bauhaus School (Germany, 1919-1933)

Founded in 1919 by the innovative modern architect Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany, the Bauhaus Design School was a revolutionary school of art upon which so many others have been modelled. Its name, derived from the two German words "bau" for building and "haus" for house, together with its artist-community system, hints at the the idea of a fraternity working on the construction of a new society. Highly influential in both architecture and design, its teachers included Josef Albers, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Schlemmer, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Anni Albers and Johannes Itten. Its stated goal was to bring art into contact with everyday life, hence design was accorded as much weight as fine art. Among the leading principles taught at The Bauhaus were the virtues of simple, clean design; abstraction; massproduction; the ethical and practical advantages of a well-designed environment, as well as democracy and worker participation. In 1925, The Bauhaus moved into a new building in Dessau in 1925-6, and in 1932 relocated to Berlin where it was eventually closed by the Nazis in 1933. Its teachers then dispersed, with several moving to America: Moholy-Nagy went to Chicago where he established the New Bauhaus in 1937, while Albers took Bauhaus methods with him to Black Mountain College in North Carolina and later to Yale University.

Purism (Early, mid-1920s)

Fashionable 1920s Parisian Movement founded by Edouard Jeanneret (better known as Le Corbusier) and Amedee Ozenfant, based on theories outlined in their 1918 book Aprs le Cubisme (After Cubism). Disagreeing with Cubist fragmentation, they produced figurative art (mostly still lifes) basic forms stripped of detail and supposedly pure in colour, form and design. Other artists loosely associated with the movement which peaked at the International Exposition of Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925, were Fernand Leger, Juan Gris and the Russian-Lithuanian sculptor Jacques Lipchitz.

Precisionism (Cubist-Realism) (fl.1920s)

An important influence on modern art painting in the United States, Precisionism was an American movement (also referred to as Cubist Realism) whose focus was modern industry and urban landscapes, characterized by the realistic depiction of objects but in a manner which also highlighted their geometric form. An idealized, almost Romantic style, it was exemplified in works by Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler, while the urban pictures of Georgia O'Keeffe also fall into the Precisionist genre. See also Charles Sheeler's photographs of Ford's River Rouge Car Factory.

Surrealist Movement (1924 onwards)

Rooted in the Metaphysical Painting of Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), the revolutionary painterly ideas of Cubism, the subversive art of Dada and the psychoanalysis ideas of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, Surrealism was the most influential avant-garde art movement of the inter-war years. Its goal, according to its founding father, the French writer Andre Breton - in his 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism - was to fuse the unconscious (the part of the human mind where memories and instincts are stored) with the conscious, to create a new "super-reality" - a surralisme. A broad intellectual movement, Surrealism encompassed a diverse range of styles from abstraction to expressionism and full-blown realism, characteristically punctuated with weird, hallucinatory or fundamentally 'unreal' imagery. Leading surrealist artists included Salvador Dali (1904-89), Max Ernst (1891-1976), Rene Magritte (1898-1967), Andre Masson (1896-1987), Yves Tanguy (1900-55), Joan Miro (1893-1983), Jean Arp (1886-1966), and Man Ray (1890-1976). Their immediate impact was seen in Germany in the Magic Realism of Franz Roh, and later in Britain, where British Surrealism was founded in 1936 by the writer Herbert Read, together with the artists David Gascoyne, Paul Nash, and Roland Penrose. The First International Surrealist Exhibition opened in London in 1936 and sparked enormous interest, not least because of the talk given by the flamboyant self-publicist Salvador Dali from inside a deep-sea diving suit. Surrealism had a huge influence on Europe, and few European artists of the 1930s were unaffected by the movement. It continues to have a significant influence on art, literature and cinematography.

Art Deco (c.1925-40)

A popular and fashionable style of decorative design and architecture in the inter-war years (much beloved by cinema and hotel architects), Art Deco designs also extended to furniture, ceramics, textile fabrics, jewellery, and glass. Showcased in 1925 at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts held in Paris, Art Deco was essentially a reaction against Art Nouveau: replacing the latter's flowing curvilinear shapes with Cubist and Precisionist-inspired geometric forms. Classic examples of Art Deco design include the New York Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. Art Deco also drew inspiration from the modern architectural designs of The Bauhaus. Famous artists associated with Art Deco include the Polish-Russian society portraitist Tamara de Lempicka, glass artist Rene Lalique and graphic designer Adolphe Mouron.

Ecole de Paris (Paris School)

For half a century (1890-1940) Paris remained the centre of world art, culminating in the dazzling works of Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dada and Surrealism. The Paris School is a term used by art historians to denote the community of artists, both French and foreign, working in the city during the first half of the 20th century, rather than a strictly defined style, school or movement. For many reasons, Paris was exceptionally attractive to artists. It was free of political repression, it was home to a number of influential 20th century painters (eg. Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Georges Rouault, Henri Matisse, Fernand Leger, Amedeo Modigliani, Piet Mondrian, Marc Chagall, Cham Soutine, Mikhail Larionov, Wassily Kandinsky, Constantin Brancusi, to name but a few), and it boasted a booming art world with galleries, collectors and critics to support artists with talent. The twin leaders (chefs d'cole) were Picasso and Matisse.

Neue Sachlichkeit (Germany, c.1925-35)

Die Neue Sachlichkeit - a German term, meaning "New Objectivity" - was the name given to a group of Expressionist artists in Germany during the 1920s, derived from their 1925 Neue Sachlichkeit show in Mannheim. It was the third phase of the Expressionist movement in Germany, after Die Brucke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). Key members included Otto Dix, George Grosz, Christian Schad and to a lesser extent Georg Schrimpf and Max Beckmann. Although the exhibition curator, GF Hartlaub, described its paintings as "new realism bearing a socialist flavour", the style was vividly expressionist in its satirical portrayal of corruption and decadence in post-war Weimar Germany.

Magic Realism (1925-40)

Although influenced by Surrealism, Magic Realism was actually part of the 'return to order' trend which occured in post-World War I Europe in the 1920s. The name derives from a 1925 book by German art historian and critic Franz Roh called "Nach Expressionismus: Magischer Realismus" (After Expressionism: Magic Realism). Members included Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio, Alexander Kanoldt and Adolf Ziegler.

Socialist Realism (1928-80)

Socialist Realism was a form of heroic political propaganda employed by dictator Joseph Stalin in Russia, from 1929 onwards, to buttress his program of accelerated industrial development. Formally announced by his artistic stooge Maxim Gorky, at the Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, the style or direction involved the creation of bold optimistic imagery to evangelize the achievements of the Soviet State and inspire workers to Stakhanovite feats of labour. The most ubiquitous media used by Socialist Realist artists was the poster, although painting and sculpture was also produced, typically on a monumental scale, showing fearless individuals and groups in idealistic and heroic poses.

Social Realism (America) (1930-45)

A general category describing works of art which focus on relatively low-brow subjects to do with eveyday life, as opposed to the 'ideal' or romantic settings employed by artists up until the 19th century. It embraces American Scene Painting and Regionalism.

Social Realism denotes the socially-aware painters of the Depression era, such as Ben Shahn, Reginald Marsh, Moses Soyer, Raphael Soyer, William Gropper, Jack Levine, Jacob Lawrence and Isabel Bishop. They took their inspiration from the traditions of the earlier New York Ashcan School. Photographers like Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) and Walker Evans (1903-75) also contributed to the movement with their portraits of migrant workers from the Depression.

Mexican Murals/Muralism describes the national wall painting campaign, conceived by the education minister Jose Vasconcelos Calderon (1882-1959). The Mexican painters involved included Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros, as well as Alfredo Martinez (1871-1946), Roberto Nervo (1885-1968), Amado de la Cueva (1891-1926), Ramon Alva de la Canal (1892-1985), Pedro Nel Gomez (18991984), Rufino Tamayo (1899-1991), Fermin Revueltas Sanchez (1901-1935), Federico Heraclio Cantu Garza (1907-89), Jorge Gonzalez Camarena (1908-80), and Alfredo Zalce Torres (1908-2003), to name but a few.

American Scene Painting was a sort of patriotic reaction to avant-garde European abstract art. Artists turned their back on European hypermodernism and looked for truth in specifically American imagery. Regionalism was the midwest variant of American Scene Painting, which relied on the realistic nostalgic setting of rural and small-town America.

Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) (1933-45, Germany)

Coined by Adolf Hitler, the term "Entartete Kunst" meaning degenerate art, expresses the Nazi idea that any art which did not conform to the ideal of well-crafted figurative images depicting heroic acts or comfortable day-to-day living, was the product of degenerate people. Not surprisingly most modern art was labelled degenerate, which meant that most modern artists in Germany (from 1933 onwards) could not show or sell their works. In 1937, the Nazis removed all modern works from German art museums. A selection was then exhibited in Munich to demonstrate how repulsive they were, but the plan backfired and introduced modern art to huge crowds.

Read more here:
Modern Art Movements (1870-1970)

The Catholic Counter Reformation - Futurism The Jesuits were commissioned by the Pope to develop a new interpretation of Scripture that would counteract the Protestant application of the Bibles prophecies regarding the Antichrist to the Roman Catholic Church. All the reformers studies pointed the finger directly at the Roman Catholic Church as the Antichrist power described in Daniel as the little horn.

Francisco Ribera (1537-1591), a brilliant Jesuit priest and doctor of theology from Spain, answered Papacys call. Like Martin Luther, Francisco Ribera also read by candlelight the prophecies about the Antichrist, the little horn, the man of sin, and the beast of Revelation.

He then developed the doctrine of futurism. His explanation was that the prophecies apply only to a single sinister man who will arise up at the end of time. Rome quickly adopted this viewpoint as the Churchs official position on the Antichrist.

In 1590 Ribera published a commentary on the Revelation as a counter interpretation to the prevailing view among Protestants which identified the Papacy with the Antichrist. Ribera applied all of Revelation to the end time rather than to the history of the church. Antichrist, he taught, would be a single evil person who would be received by the Jews and who would rebuild Jerusalem.i Ribera denied the Protestant Scriptural Antichrist (2 Thessalonians 2) as seated in the church of God-asserted by Augustine, Jerome, Luther, and many reformers. He set on an infidel Antichrist, outside the church of God.ii The result of [Riberas] work was a twisting and maligning of prophetic truth.iii Following close behind Francisco Ribera was another brilliant Jesuit scholar, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine of Rome (1542-1621). Between 1581-1593, Cardinal Bellarmine agreed with Ribera in his work Polemic Lectures Concerning the Disputed points of the Christian Belief Against the Heretics of this Time.

The futurist teachings of Ribera were further popularized by an Italian cardinal and the most renowned Jesuit controversialists. His writings claimed that Paul, Daniel, and John had nothing whatsoever to say about the Papal power. The futurists school won general acceptance among Catholics. They were taught that antichrist was a single individual who would not rule until the very end of time.iv Through the work of these two clever Jesuit scholars, Jesuit futurism was born.

Read about the spread of futurism throughout the past centuries

View post:
Jesuit Futurism - Amazing Discoveries

Retrofuturism (adjective retrofuturistic or retrofuture) is a trend in the creative arts showing the influence of depictions of the future produced in an earlier era. If "futurism is sometimes called a 'science' bent on anticipating what will come, retrofuturism is the remembering of that anticipation."[1] Characterized by a blend of old-fashioned "retro" styles with futuristic technology, retrofuturism explores the themes of tension between past and future, and between the alienating and empowering effects of technology. Primarily reflected in artistic creations and modified technologies that realize the imagined artifacts of its parallel reality, retrofuturism can be seen as "an animating perspective on the world."[2] But it has also manifested in the worlds of fashion, architecture, design, music, literature, film, and video games.

The word "retrofuturism," then, combines more recent ideas of nostalgia and retro with older traditions of futurism. A recent neologism, the actual term "retrofuturism" was coined by American Lloyd Dunn[3] in 1983,[4] according to fringe art magazine Retrofuturism, which was published between 1988 and 1993.[5]

Retrofuturism builds on ideas of futurism, but the latter term functions differently in several different contexts. In avant-garde artistic, literary and design circles, Futurism is a long-standing and well established term. But in its more popular form, futurism (sometimes referred to as futurology) is "an early optimism that focused on the past and was rooted in the nineteenth century, an early-twentieth-century 'golden age' that continued long into the 1960s Space Age." [6]

Retrofuturism is first and foremost based on modern but changing notions of "the future". As Guffey notes, retrofuturism is "a recent neologism," but it "builds on futurists fevered visions of space colonies with flying cars, robotic servants, and interstellar travel on display there; where futurists took their promise for granted, retro-futurism emerged as a more skeptical reaction to these dreams."[7] It took its current shape in the 1970s, a time when technology was rapidly changing. From the advent of the personal computer to the birth of the first test tube baby, this period was characterized by intense and rapid technological change. But many in the general public began to question whether applied science would achieve its earlier promisethat life would inevitably improve through technological progress. In the wake of the Vietnam War, environmental depredations, and the energy crisis, many commentators began to question the benefits of applied science. But they also wondered, sometimes in awe, sometimes in confusion, at the scientific positivism evinced by earlier generations. Retrofuturism "seeped into academic and popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s," inflecting George Lucas Star Wars and the paintings of pop artist Kenny Scharf alike".[8] Surveying the optimistic futurism of the early twentieth century, the historians Joe Corn and Brian Horrigan remind us that retrofuturism is "a history of an idea, or a system of ideas--an ideology. The future, or course, does not exist except as an act of belief or imagination."[9]

Retrofuturism incorporates two overlapping trends which may be summarized as the future as seen from the past and the past as seen from the future.

The first trend, retrofuturism proper, is directly inspired by the imagined future which existed in the minds of writers, artists, and filmmakers in the pre-1960 period who attempted to predict the future, either in serious projections of existing technology (e.g. in magazines like Science and Invention) or in science fiction novels and stories. Such futuristic visions are refurbished and updated for the present, and offer a nostalgic, counterfactual image of what the future might have been, but is not.

The second trend is the inverse of the first: futuristic retro. It starts with the retro appeal of old styles of art, clothing, mores, and then grafts modern or futuristic technologies onto it, creating a mlange of past, present, and future elements. Steampunk, a term applying both to the retrojection of futuristic technology into an alternative Victorian age, and the application of neo-Victorian styles to modern technology, is a highly successful version of this second trend. In the movie Space Station 76 (2014), mankind has reached the stars, but clothes, technology, furnitures and above all social taboos are purposely highly reminiscent of the mid-1970s.

In practice, the two trends cannot be sharply distinguished, as they mutually contribute to similar visions. Retrofuturism of the first type is inevitably influenced by the scientific, technological, and social awareness of the present, and modern retrofuturistic creations are never simply copies of their pre-1960 inspirations; rather, they are given a new (often wry or ironic) twist by being seen from a modern perspective.

In the same way, futuristic retro owes much of its flavor to early science fiction (e.g. the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells), and in a quest for stylistic authenticity may continue to draw on writers and artists of the desired period.

Both retrofuturistic trends in themselves refer to no specific time. When a time period is supplied for a story, it might be a counterfactual present with unique technology; a fantastic version of the future; or an alternate past in which the imagined (fictitious or projected) inventions of the past were indeed real. Examples include the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, set in an imaginary 1939, and The Rocketeer franchise, set in 1938, both of which are also examples of the genre known as dieselpunk.[10]Adam Reed's animated comedy series Archer is also set in a retrofuture aesthetic world. The import of retrofuturism has, in recent years, come under considerable discussion. Some, like the German architecture critic Niklas Maak, see retrofuturism as "nothing more than an aesthetic feedback loop recalling a lost belief in progress, the old images of the once radically new."[11]Bruce McCall calls retrofuturism a "faux nostalgia" the nostalgia for a future that never happened.[12]

See the article here:
Retrofuturism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia