XII Futurism
The dramatic enhancement of painting by line so well understood by the ancients, and the literary intensification of subject-matter by colour foreshadowed by the primitives and made more conscious by Delacroix, reached their highest development in the theories of Kandinsky and the Futurists. With Delacroix’s comments concerning the harmonising of line and colour with subject and Seurat’s and Signac’s subsequent addenda to these comments, began scientific observation in painting. So long as these theories remained secondary to the great truths of composition they were admissible, because they had to do only with the unimportant ornamentation of an æsthetic organisation. But when, as in Kandinsky and the Futurists, they became the all in all of the artist’s ambitions, they ceased to produce painting, and gave birth only to bad music, as in the Russian, and to bad poetry, as in the Italians. But while the Futurists’ work had little to commend it to the discriminating spectator, their ideas were interesting and inspiring, and it is from their manifestos that has come what little influence they have exerted. Their pictures are neither pretty nor agreeable, while Kandinsky’s, to the contrary, possess dainty and pleasing traits. In both cases the pictures are puzzles to be deciphered at length: they are expressions of moods brought about by half veiling reality and by making symbolically concrete an abstract force or cause.
In music where the form is an abstract result of concrete causes and in literature where the form is wholly abstract and represented by symbols, moods can be easily expressed, for they are the natural outgrowth of the media of these two arts. But in painting and sculpture, which are the visual arts wherein the form itself is concrete, emotion can be provoked only by a plastic poise of subjective weights. The balance and opposition of such weights or volumes when rhythmically organised give rise to complete æsthetic satisfaction and engender a feeling of finality which encompasses both line and colour. The Futurists, as did Delacroix and Seurat, count on “force-lines” to express an emotion, thereby branding themselves two-dimensional artists. And their desire to represent an emotion of objectivity on canvas places them at once in the ranks of illustrators. The highest art has nothing to do with objective reality whether as a spectacle or as a means to sensation. It is true that painting, in becoming pure, will eventually incorporate the associative emotions, but these emotions will be the psychological results of abstract form, not memorial experiences produced by cognitive objects. And the line, of which we have heard so much, will then become a direction and equality of pure form; it will no longer be simply an indication on a flat surface by means of a mark. The Futurists did not strive for purity. Rather did they emphasise an irrelevant side of painting. They declared themselves the renovators of subject-matter. Their whole ambition worked toward that end; and it is from that standpoint they must be judged.
In arriving at their conclusions many necessities of æsthetic emotion were sensed. Their most important statement, and one which, because of the dearth of significant art criticism, had not previously been set down, is that the person who contemplates a picture should not feel himself a mere observer of the events taking place in the painted work, but one of the principal actors in the canvas. In illustration such empathy is impossible unless the work is wholly and ultimately synthesised as to volume, colour, line, direction, size and subject. No such work has ever been produced because all the dramatic uses of these elements have never been understood by one man. That there are hundreds of canvases which entrain us into their ramifications is indisputable, but the æsthetic emotion we feel in them has to do with formal line alone, not with the perfect concord of line, form and subject. Marinetti and his group have striven earnestly to accomplish this difficult feat, but in every instance have failed. The explanation of their theories has far more to do with the emotion their pictures arouse in us, than has the actual application of these theories to canvas. They state that perpendicular, undulating and worn-out lines attached to hollow bodies express languor and discouragement; that confused, somersaulting lines, straight or curved, confounded into suggested gestures of appeal or haste, express the chaotic agitation of sentiments; that horizontal, jerky lines which brutally cut into semi-obscured faces, and bits of broken, irregular landscape give us the sensation of one departing on a journey. But while all this may be true, it has nothing to do with the æsthetic emotion which in painting grows entirely out of the dynamic use of the elements inherent in that art.
The desire of many modern painters and theorists to introduce into their own art emotions derived from the other arts results, first, from the modern ambition to intensify each of the arts, and secondly, from certain observations in æsthetic fundamentals, which have led artists little by little toward a vague realisation that the basis of all the arts is identical. But in this synthesis of the arts there is nothing new. The Futurists, in attempting to fuse poetry and painting, are many decades too late to lay claim to originality. Numerous attempts—all of them failures—have been made along similar lines. Wagner’s was the most conspicuous. Then there were Sadikichi Hartmann, Madame Mary Hallock, René de Ghil, Arthur Rimbaud and recently Alexander Scriabine, all of whom commingled the different arts in an attempt to produce intensity. Commendable as these efforts for a hybrid expression may be, they are a futile expenditure of energy until the arts have been more precisely understood; and it is worth noting that those who have tried to coalesce them have been, in nearly every instance, the ones who understand none of them profoundly. The Futurists prove no exception. Their misapprehension of painting is analogous to that of Degas who, in picturing the dance, imagined that the spectator, by contemplating its static representations, would experience its rhythm.
The emotion of movement which the Futurists wish to call up can never be produced by disordered and tumbling lines. The effect is chaos. Movement grows out of the placement and displacement of volumes. It is a result of rhythmic organisation. We are conscious of movement in a human body when a position or pose is shifted, and we are conscious of it only during the process of shifting. Should we look at a body in one position, close our eyes during its change of attitude, and then behold it completely altered, we should not experience a sensation of action at all. But if the static points of movement present themselves to us with sufficient rapidity they produce the effect of continuous movement, as in the simulacra of the kinematograph. Otherwise we record merely the result of the change of position—not the act of changing itself. In a Michelangelo statue we see at first glance only a solid rigid mass; but the moment we begin mentally to reconstruct the form, we sense the opposition of volume-direction and the delicate poise of weights which overhang hollows and which are proportionally exaggerated in order to give a greater emotion of struggling forces. Then, our will guiding our eye, the mind translates to us physically the statue’s expansion and contraction, the withheld completion of absolute balance, the approximation to equilibrium: and it is only after we have passed through discords and struggles and complicated developments—in other words, after we have striven for physical completion—that the finality comes as a satisfying consummation, like the knowledge of a tremendous task, long laboured over, brought to perfect and final accomplishment.
Is not the desire for an emotion, so completely reflective of the very undercurrents of life’s forces, worthier of an artist’s aim than the desire for the momentary sensation that someone is going away or that one is looking on at a dance? The emotional depictions of such episodes are at best but remote reflexes of reality. Our participation in a dance, for instance, is infinitely more intense than the Futurists’ kinematic representation of it. In the actual experience one not only sees chaos but can touch the swirling forms, blink at the lights, smell the perfumes and hear the noise and music. In other words, one is moved to sensation or feeling by the physical forces themselves. To the true artist these physical forces are only his weapons, never his ends. And it is only through their intelligent use in the production of form that æsthetic emotion results. The superficial portrayal of effects, whether mental or physical, can never lead us inward to their causes. Any result is simply the dead end of a force, like the sea-weed a submarine volcano has thrown to the surface of the ocean. Art, being the causative force itself, should bring about the upheaval whose final manifestation is complete and satisfying. In great painting the spectator is led through every step of kinetic energy from chaos to order. When he emerges he has undergone a colossal dynamic experience. After all, energy is the ultimate physical reality.
The Futurists, it is true, strove sedulously for dynamism. Several of the titles of their later canvases contain the word. But their consistent misinterpretation of Leibniz’s doctrine led them into the most superficial statements of the laws of force. By confusing action with movement and tempo with rhythm, and by constantly juggling causes and effects, they never arrived at a basic exposition of energy. In contemplating their pictures we experience only visual confusion. There is no movement because there is no static foil, no consummation. There is no dynamism because there is no suggestion of the inherent force which all substance involves. Let us assume the hypothesis that it is possible to photograph a kinematic force in movement. The Futurists’ pictures wherein the representation of dynamism is attempted, as in Dynamisme d’une Auto, there is a series of these hypothetical photographs each of which has caught a segment of immobility, as any snap-shot catches some static pose of a moving object. By super-imposing each of these images successively on the other the Futurists imagine that a state of action is created. But even were this the case the picture would be innocent of dynamism. Again, Futurism claims not to paint maladies but their symptoms and results. Admittedly therefore it works against its own gropings for dynamism, for symptoms and results are the outgrowth of causes, and as such can have only an objective interest. Would the Futurists maintain, for instance, that, by portraying a head from many viewpoints on the same canvas, they can give us the emotion of a head turning? Even were it possible thus to extend the contemplation of pictures into time, the effect of a series of dissimilar profiles would be no more convincing than that obtained by a slowly moving cinematograph film. Should we grant that by such a device the effect of movement resulted, it would depend entirely upon which end of the movement the eye alighted first whether the head moved one way or the other. And if the picture was a perfect organisation the change of direction would throw every part of the canvas out of gear.
Considering Futurism purely from the standpoint of illustration we still are unable to justify its aims. In painting a picture of a person setting forth upon a journey from a railway station, the Futurist represents the departure by means of horizontal, fleeting and jerky lines, half-hidden profiles, the station’s interior, the engine, etc. Then by introducing into the canvas bits of landscape and other incidentals which depict the thoughts of the person about to depart, the artist endeavours to call up the same mental state in the spectator of the canvas. The associative process of the human mind, however, makes such a proceeding unnecessary, because in beholding a simple, even an academically pictured, scene of someone entering a train amid the confusion and haste of passengers and guards, the spectator involuntarily calls up the landscape running past, the telegraph poles jerking by, the clanging of the bell, the shouts of attendants, the shuffling of many feet and the hiss of steam. In setting these things down the Futurists succeed only in limiting a highly imaginative person’s thoughts by restricted visions of objectivity, just as in the theatre a producer, by placing many papier maché trees and rocks and fibre grass about the stage, circumscribes the onlooker’s imagination. The Greeks, whose theatrical presentations were sufficiently intense to evoke an imaginative milieu, did not need factitious properties: but the theatrical Belascos must necessarily make their settings absolute and meticulously realistic. A Tintoretto needs no such tricks to strengthen its emotive power; but the Futurists, unable to move us by dynamic canvases, need recourse to dramatic tricks. At most their pictures could be significant only as auxiliaries to literary texts.
The Futurists’ contention that all modern art should have as a point of departure an entirely modern sensation is wholly tenable, but they mistake the fact that a modern sensation is merely the sensation which pertains specially to the contemporary man. It has nothing to do innately with the delineation of an automobile or an aeroplane. The modern æsthetic spirit goes deeper. It implies the expression of an emotion by use of the latest refinements and researches in the medium of an art. In painting it is not limited to the illustrative portrayal of a novelty. Were this the case any painter who confined himself to the picturisation of the latest dreadnaughts and the highest skyscrapers would be the pioneer of a new expression. In order to express himself in a modern manner, an artist needs only to have divested himself of all predilections for antiquity, to have subdued all conscious desire to will himself into the bodies of an ancient people, and to have seen the error of the childish maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. Any painter free from tradition, with a comprehension of æsthetic movement and an ability to apply it, will produce canvases which, though they have no radical theory behind them, will be as distinctly modern as those of the Futurists. Modernity has to do with methods and mental attitude. It is in no wise related to subject-matter.
Consider, for instance, the famous Futurist statement that “a running horse has not four legs, but twenty.” Then contemplate Balla’s picture, Dog and Person in Movement, to which this theory is applied. Neither the dog nor the person seems to move at all. They are static figures with blurred triangles resembling lace where their legs should be. Such a juvenile artifice to give the effect of movement is certainly not modern or even novel. Long prior to the Futurists, caricaturists and comic journalistic draughtsmen sought to express action by placing circular lines round the wagging tails of dogs or by drawing long sweeping lines behind a swiftly moving figure to indicate from what direction it had come and the rapidity of locomotion. Such inventions are outside the field of æsthetics. They have to do only with slow optical action. But the modification of objects in contact with others, of which Cézanne wrote, is a profound postulate of organisation. It creates a poise of volume which causes us to experience an emotion of movement. The Futurists’ contrivance of endowing a horse with twenty legs precludes any possibility of their calling up forcibly a running horse, for only the legs seem to move, as of a horse in a treadmill. Save for the pictorial side of a picture so presented there is nothing in it of interest to us: and our memory of an actual horse clashes with the vision of a multipedalian one.
The Futurists’ statement, however, that a picture’s lines should subjectively drag the spectator into the centre of the canvas, where he will personally experience the rhythmic interplay of forms, is not only pertinent but expresses an absolute æsthetic necessity. Pictures which do not so affect the beholder have failed as great art. But though the Futurists were the first to give succinct utterance to this shibboleth, the practice of constituting a work of art so that the spectator was transposed into its stress and strain, had been going on ever since great composition came into painting. One cannot study a Michelangelo or a Rubens without feeling, even to the point of physical fatigue, the struggle of their finally harmonised volumes. This does not hold true of the Futurists’ work. In studying their pictures our eyes alone become tired; and, though we succeed in unravelling the involutions of their pictures, there is for us no recompense of emotional satisfaction. Action in itself has little charm for us, and action is what the paintings of Futurism, in their ultimate expression, are founded on. But while action may attract us when expressed by an interesting and sympathetic personality, as in the paintings of Henri and in the sculpture of Rude, there is in Futurism no actional sensation or explicit element of deep enjoyment that we cannot obtain in greater intensity by gazing upon a busy thoroughfare, or by watching the landscape from a swiftly moving train, or by attending a dance. Even the chaos of a Futurist painting does not present the interest of the Flight Turning a Corner from Keion’s panoramic roll of the Hogen Heiji war, or the prints of Moronobu, or even The Heavenly Host by the primitive Guariento. All these works, while they represent action, are also ordered. And order, which the Futurists lack, is more than an arbitrary ingredient in art. Just as the eternal desire in life is for something positive and absolute, so the attempt at order in painting is an outgrowth of the desire to make a picture complete and satisfying.
There is no doubt that the Futurists exerted much good in imbuing the artists of the day with a greater consciosity and in showing them, by an elaborate critical prospectus, the error of their ways. Futurism quieted the animadversions the modernist painters were hurling at Monet and his school, by pointing out that, to react against Impressionism by adopting pictorial laws which antedated it, was futile, and that the only way to combat it seriously was to surpass it. The Futurists, however, were unable to fulfil their proposition. They were, in fact, the abstract perpetuators of Impressionism through the Cubists who represented its formal side. The man who surpassed Impressionism was Cézanne. Furthermore, the Futurists chided the Cubists for painting from models, whether in squares, cubes or circles; and thus turned the light of analysis on the actual achievements, and away from the theories, of Picasso and his followers. The consequence was that for a short time the Cubists became somewhat Futuristic. Then, the strong impetus slowly ebbing out, the two schools gradually approached each other. Futurism has taken on a somewhat Cubistic mien; and the Cubists, having profited by the Futurists’ teachings and having partially divorced themselves from the model, have begun to seek expression in Orphism and Synchromism. The work of Boccioni and Carrà has assumed a wholly abstract appearance, and is much more interesting than formerly.
The methods of Futurism have their provenience in many preceding art movements. One finds in this school’s canvases cubes, spots, divisionistic technique and wholly academic drawing; some of the pictures are monotonously brown and grey, while others possess the acid colouring of Neo-Impressionism. But aside from their work the Futurists proved a salutary event in modern art. The painting of the day needed just such a cataclysm to turn its eyes from the contemplation of partial traits to a more encompassing vision. Their motto might be the saying of Mallarmé: “To name is to destroy, but to suggest is to create.” Their art is largely one of suggestion. Their initial mistake was in supposing that the depiction of mental states would recall the causes of those states. Life would indeed be monotonous if in it there was no struggle. We could never appreciate its consummations were we ignorant of the travail which brought them about. The Futurists present, as it were, the conclusion of an oration in which has been developed a colossal thought, and ask us to applaud. This we cannot do, for not having followed the struggle of the new idea against opposing forces, we are unable to appreciate the import of the results.
Notwithstanding their many failures the Futurists have greatly widened the field of illustration; by a word they have given birth to a school, Simultaneism; and they have forever turned Cubism from its narrow formalism. But in themselves they were not significant. They were too stringently literary, and in attempting to advance their own theories at the expense of profounder doctrines, they have succeeded only in assisting other painters toward a greater purity of expression, despite the fact that they advocated a retrogressive objectivity. Marinetti, a poet, is the spiritual (and monetary) father of Futurism; and the names signed to the original manifesto were Umberto Boccioni, a sculptor as well as a painter; Carlo D. Carrà, the most genuine artist of the group; Luigi Russolo, its most orthodox exponent; Gino Severini, its illustrator par excellence; and Giacomo Balla, its high priest of prettiness. In an attempt to preclude all censure, they closed their manifest with these words: “There will be those who will accuse our art of being cerebrally distorted and decadent. But we will answer simply that we are, to the contrary, the primitives of a new and centuple sensitivity, and that our art is drunk with spontaneity and power.” With the slight change of “theory” for “art” we would heartily agree with them.