Modernism in Art: An Introduction: 'Standing in the sumit...' Futurisms' becoming

“Standing on the World’s Summit”: Futurism’s becoming...


Cancelled

by decree

of the

Futurists!


Cancelled

by decree

of the

Futurists!

Serata futurista

Poetry Readings:

The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

Front page of Le Figaro (1909)F. T. Marinetti (1876-1944)

Umberto Boccioni (1911) A Futurist Evening in Milan

It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we are today founding futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries

Giovanni Giolitti (1842- 1928)

Vittorio Emmanuele II monument, Rome

Gaetano Previati (1890-1) Maternity

Merdado Rosso (1906) Behold the boy

“Is not the machine today the most exuberant symbol of the mystery of human creation? Is it not the new mythical deity which weaves the legends and histories of the contemporary drama? The machine in its practical and material function comes to have today in human concepts and thoughts the significance of an ideal and inspiration.”

Prampolini, E. (1922) The Aesthetics of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art

Giacomo Balla (1909) Street Lamp

1852 - Elevator (USA)

1852 - First Concrete House

1861 – Telegraph (New York to San Francisco)

1860-4 – First Underground Railway (London)

1866 - (successful transatlantic cable)

1864 - Steel Furnace (France)

1866 – First steel bridge

1868 Scholes’ typewriter (first commercially successful typewriter)

1867 -Reinforced concrete

1876 – Bell patents Telephone (USA)

1878 – Commercial telephone exchange (USA)

1882 - Electric street lights (New York)1882 – Trolleybus (Berlin)

1885 – Daimler patents petrol engineDevelopment of internal combustion engines from 1820s onwards

1887-9 Eiffel Tower

1889 – Benz and Daimler’s petrol-propelled motor car (Germany)

1888 – Kodak Camera

1907-8 - Colour photography

1872 - Dry plate photography (basis for modern photography)

1894 – Escalator (USA)

1896 – Radioactivity discovered

1897 – Wireless transmission

1897 – Subatomic particles discovered

1895 – X-rays discovered

1895 – Public showing of Cine Film

1897 – Fully automatic telephone exchange.

1900 – Rigid frame airships

1903 – Wright Brothers’ biplane

1908 – Model T Ford

1910 – Neon lighting

1912 – Stainless Steel

1913 – Ford introduces Assembly Line

1901 – Transatlantic radio transmission

1919 – First non-stop flight over Atlantic

1911 – Motorised washing machine

1901 – Vacuum Cleaner patented

Henri Bergson (1859-1941)

Spatial time

Spatial time

Bergsonianism

Creativity Duration Intuition Elan Vital Multiplicity Becoming Simultaneity


Introduce the central motivations for Futurism. Allow you to think about ideas that remain relevant to

artists working today, such as dynamism. Provide an account of the development of the

Futurists’ visual language, focusing on individual artists.

Consider the work of Futurists across areas, including architecture and fashion.

Offer a point starting point for our consideration of artist’s attempting to redesign every aspect of a new world.

This lecture should:

Giacomo Balla

Giacomo Balla (1912) Rhythms of a Bow

Umberto Boccioni

Umberto Boccioni (1910-11) Riot in the Galleria

Umberto Boccioni (1910) The City Rises

Umberto Boccioni (1911) The Street Penetrates the House

Umberto Boccioni (1911)State of Mind. From top: the Farewells, Those Who Depart, Those Who Stay.

Carlo Carrà

Carlo Carrà (1914) Interventionist Manifesto

Carlo Carrà (1911) Funeral of the Anarchist Galli

Luigi Russolo

Luigi Russolo (1911) The Revolt

Luigi Russolo (1911) Music

Luigi Russolo, with Noise intoners

Anton Guillo Bragalia

Both works 1912-13


Cancelled

by decree

of the

Futurists!

Serata futurista

Poetry Readings:

The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism

Interlude:

Do you think that futurism was the most successful of the modernist movements we have studied so far? What criteria are you using to develop your answer?

Of the movements we have studied so far, which do you think you would be most drawn to?

How does modernism effect your relationship to art?

How does this relate to the visual changes occurring within the work?

Sant’Elia, Boccioni and Marinetti in uniform

Alfredo Ambrosi (1930) Portrait of Benito Mussolini in front of a view of Rome

Giacomo Balla (1920, designs date back to 1913) Furturist Men’s Suit

Designing the world

Centemporary reproduction stool on design by Fortunato Despero

Antonio Sant’Elia

Antonion Sant’Elia (1914) Design for New City

Sant’ Elia (1914) Futurist City

Rural to UrbanThe Growth of Cities

New Working and Living Conditions

The Transformation of the Landscape

Social Alienation

Factories

Joseph Wright of Derby, Richard Arkwright’s cotton mill [detail] (1771)

A view of Sheffield [detail] (1858)

Hand-crafted to Machine Made

New Technologies: Steam pumps, Gas Lighting, Stream Locomotives and Ships, Electricity, Internal Combustion Engine

New Materials: Refined Iron, Sheet Glass, Steel

Mass ProductionSkilled Craft Worker to Factory Labourer

Arkwright’s Spinning Frame (1769)Illustration of carding, first appearing in Edward Baines History of Cotton Manufacture (1835)

The Great Exhibition 1851

Joseph Paxton, Crystal Palace (1851)

“The history of the world, I venture to say, records no event comparable in its promotion of human industry with that of the Great Exhibition… A great people invited all civilized nations to a festival, to bring into comparison the works of human skill.” Henry Cole (1851), one of the organisers of the Great Exhibition.From Gidds-Smith, C. H. (1981) The Great Exhibition of 1851, London, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. P.7

The Objects of Mass-production.

“The arguments put forward by the nineteenth century design reformers … rested upon the assumption that machines had usurped the craftsman’s control over the form of the product: the effect of machines they believed had been to change the practice of design by separating responsibility for the appearance of a product from the tasks of fabricating it, with the consequence that the quality of design had deteriorated.”

Forty, A (2005 [1986]) Objects of Desire: Design and Society Since 1750, London, Thames and Hudson. P. 43

The Objects of the Victorian Era.

Henry Eyles (1850)

Arts and CraftsInfluenced by the social critic John Ruskin the Arts and Crafts Movement was centred around the principle that buildings and objects should be the products of a designer’s enjoyment of the making process. Against the ornamental, eclectic styles of the Victorian period the Arts and Crafts Movement stressed a simplicity of form, harmony and quality of workmanship.

Morris and Co. [Philip Webb], Sussex Chair (1865)

Arts and Crafts

C.R. Ashbee, made by T. Jeliffe, W. Stevens, J.Pyment, W.White and L.

Bailey (1898-99)

C.R. Ashbee, decanter. Made by

James Powell & Sons. (1904-5)

Arts and Crafts

Philip Webb, Red House, entrance hall (1859-60)

William Morris was a very influential figure and one of the leaders of the movement. He had strong socialist beliefs and wanted design to benefit everyone.

William Morris,Pomegranate Wallpaper(1866)

Arts and Crafts

“[Morris] became increasingly dismayed … by the obvious contradiction between his ideal of a democratic art and the ‘idle privileged class’ who formed his patrons. His pursuit of good design translated into carefully executed, cheap products remained a dream…

[His] love for the beauty of careful, slow craftwork remained unquenched and sat uncomfortably beside his Socialist ideals.”

Cumming, E and Kaplan, W (1991) The Arts and Crafts Movement, London, Thames and Hudson. P. 18

Christopher Dresser (1834-1904)Form follows Function.

“Dresser made it his business to understand design from the manufacturer’s perspective… He regretted to hear manufacturers state that graduates from the schools of Design were of little use when they arrived and that they simply did not understand the workings and limitations or potential of the machines for which they designed, with predictable results.” Kettle by James Dixon and Son, Designed

by Christopher Dresser, c.1870Lyons, H. (2005) Christopher Dresser: The Peoples Designer 1834-1904, Suffolk, Antique Collectors’s Club. P.18

Art Nouveau

Louis Majorelle (1900)Antoni Gaudi, Sagrada Familia (1883-1926)

Art Nouveau was a very complex and diverse movement or series of movements between 1890-1914.

“Art Nouveau was the first self-conscious, internationally based attempt to transform visual culture through a commitment to the idea of the modern” (Greehalgh, see below)

Turning away from traditions and conventions they drew upon nature, history and symbolism.

“It was an age of engines and of ghosts”. Greenhalgh, P and Wood, G. (2002) London, V & A Publications. P. 73.

Art Nouveau

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Willow Chair (1904)

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Glasgow School of Art (1897-1909)

Like the Arts and Crafts Movement, artists and writers involved with Art Nouveau rejected any hierarchies between art, design and craft. They believed that art could improve life.

Art Nouveau

Frans Hoosemans (1900) Rupert Carabin (1896)

Sexuality, fantasy and changing roles… ‘Femme Nouvelle’

World War I (1914-1918)

Designing a New World

Reject: Ornamentation Hierarchy of arts over

applied arts History and tradition Elitism

Embrace: Simple, rational forms Progress New technologies New Materials

Reflecting upon the themes covered in this lecture: If we imagine ourselves to be (idealist) designers keen improve social conditions with a democratic design, what ideas might we embrace or reject?


Left, Gerrit Reitveld, Armchair (1918), Right, Marcel Breuer, Armchair (1924)


Gerrit Reitveld, Schroder House (1924)

Walter Gropius, Colour Plans for the exterior of Bauhaus Masters’ Houses (1926) [Detail]

Modernism

Marianne Brandt and Hans Przyrembel (1926)

References Boccioni, Umberto (2002 [1910]) Futurist Painting: Technical

Manifesto. In Harrison, C. and Paul Wood (2003) Art in Theory: 1900-2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas. Blackwell Publishing, Oxford.

Humphrey’s, Richard (1999) Futurism. Tate Gallery, London. Martin, Sylvia (2005) Futurism. Taschen, Cologne. Ottinger, Didier (2009) Futurism. Adagp, Paris. Tisdall, Angelo (1996) Futurism. Thames and Husdon, London. Wood, Paul (ed.) (1999) The Challenge of the Avant-Garde.

The Open University, London.

Reading: Marinetti, F. T (1909) The Futurist Manifesto. Available at:

http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

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Modernism in Art: An Introduction: 'Standing in the sumit...' Futurisms' becoming