The Futurists at the Tate Modern

We will:

• Destroy the museums, libraries and academies of every kind
• Rebel against the tyranny of words: “harmony” and “good taste”
• Regard art critics as useless and dangerous
• Destroy the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.
  
  Extracts from Manifesto of Futurism (1909) and Manifesto of the Futurist Painters (1910)

A hundred years have passed, and Futurism is now considered a classic modern style within the canon of the early 20th century. Pupils are taught about it at school, and what’s more, the Futurists’ abhorred art critics and establishment’s European museums have prepared an expansive Futurist retrospective. After Paris and Rome, the Futurism exhibition has found its way to London’s Tate Modern.

The aims of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the Italian poet considered the spiritual father of the whole movement, to shock and agitate are self-evident. Even a person of today, considerably numbed by modern times, stops to consider assertions such as: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene” or perhaps “The roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” We may imagine therefore the reactions of an ordinary citizen in early 20th century Europe. We can thus see in Marinetti not merely the initiator of a movement and the author of many a futurist manifesto, but also the forerunner of today’s gurus of advertising and PR. With opinions like that even negative publicity is publicity, and that one who is not talked about is as good as non-existent. Aside from the simple desire to shock and capture people’s attention we should perhaps interpret these assertions in their wider temporal and geographical contexts.

After the long centuries of the very prominent position which Italy held in the days of the renaissance and the baroque, the days when Europe, nay the whole world, eagerly awaited the next creations of the masters of the Apennine peninsula, the country now found itself at the fringes of artistic interest. New trends came from Paris, and nobody seemed to take any interest anymore in what happened on the other side of the Alps. Italy was still enthusiastically visited, but predominantly by artists loyal to the values of academic painting, who often paid little attention to the developments of their Italian contemporaries, but rather who travelled there to study the Old Masters. From this came a provinciality complex, mixed with a feeling of frustration at their lost glory, which became more of a hindrance than an inspiration for the new and unproven artists. It was this atmosphere which influenced Marinetti’s shocking statements about the desire to destroy museums and libraries and his assertions about the artistic academies, institutions he termed ‘sepulchres of culture’. Something of this has survived to our own day; still we see young Italian artists out to prove themselves, moving to London or New York if they wish to make a name for themselves on the international art scene. Their immense cultural heritage it has, it seems, the quality of almost becoming a trap, a straight jacket for those wanting to reflect topical themes and the problems of today in their work.

Given an understanding of this context, some of the Futurists’ other assertions come across as justified:
We will:

• Elevate all attempts at originality, however daring, however violent.
• Sweep the whole field of art clean of all themes and subjects which have been used in the past.
• Support and glory in our day-to-day world…

Apart form the poet Marinetti, the main representatives of the Futurist movement were Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Luigi Russolo and Giacomo Balla. Most of these experienced their artistic beginnings in Divisionism, and they then, captivated by Marinetti’s rhetoric, were drawn to his new artistic language. The Futurists kept in close contact with the Parisian scene and so the evident stylistic similarities between Futurism and Cubism do not come as a surprise. The similar expressive tools they used, most concretely the simultaneous depiction of consecutive views, were deployed to achieve a very different aim than that of the Cubists however. Whereas the followers of Picasso concentrated on the still-life, the static view, expressed often with a limited scale of colours, the aim of the Futurists was to depict movement and its speed. They were fascinated by the city and by modern technology, and this is reflected in their choice of subjects; trains, cars, running horses and dogs, the flight of birds, cyclists, street commotion etc. as well as in the vibrant richness of the colours they used.

In February 1909 Marinetti published the First Futurist manifesto (that was to become one of many) on the front page of Le Figaro, the most prestigious French daily of the time. Reportedly this was possibly due to the influence of an Egyptian friend of Marinetti’s father who was an important shareholder in the paper. Although the avant-garde movement practically only ascended the stage of the international art scene three years later through the exhibition in 1912 hung in Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris, whence it travelled further through Europe (to London, Berlin, Brussels, Amsterdam and Munich among others). And it is this very first Futurist exhibition that the Tate Modern has aimed to reconstruct; as well as to explain the movement more fully in its wider context by showing Cubist, Orphist, Section d’Or, Russian avant-garde and British Vorticist works of the time in its other halls. From a historical perspective this is certainly an interesting enterprise, though from a curatorial perspective less so. A consequence of the desire to be as faithful as possible to Bernheim’s original exhibition has been the inclusion of a few lesser works, and conversely a few arguably essential works are missing. Umberto Boccioni, who was without doubt the most talented artist of the group, is represented in the first room by his emblematic sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) and then by two excellent triptychs from 1911, Streets of Minds, and a canvas on loan from Osaka The Forces of the Street, which I personally considered the greatest surprise of the exhibition. Unfortunately however, the works The City Rises (1910) and Materia (1912) have not been included.

To take the trouble to present the Cubist and Orphist movements as well as the other avant-gardes of the day and thus to place the Italian movement into a broader web of contexts is undoubtedly a laudable enterprise. It is however a shame that the creators of the exhibition have not managed to acquire loans of the kinds of artworks for which such an exhibition would be best suited. I allude of course to Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), a clear case of Cubo-Futurism, which Julian Street, an art critic of that period for the New York Times deridingly labelled “an explosion in a shingle factory”. The two pictures by František Kupka together with works by Robert Delaunay and Fernand Léger represent Parisian Orphism. It is saddening that in their eagerness to present the spread of Futurist ideas to the east, the curators have limited their focus to the Russian avant-garde alone. A Czech artist, Bohumil Kubišta and his Train in the Mountains (1913) would certainly stand up to any comparison, as would his contemporary Otto Gutfreund with his Head IV (1911-1913), where similar issues are dealt with as in Boccioni’s Antigrazioso - A Portrait of the Artist’s Mother (1913); the radical opening up of the sculpture into space.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is Severini’s massive canvas (measuring almost 4 by 3 metres) La Danse du pan-pan au Monaco (1909-1911) which captures the atmosphere of a Parisian bar with wavy figures of men and women drinking champagne. Not merely through its dimensions, but by its subject matter and striking richness of colour, this canvas caused a significant stir among viewers when first exhibited. Severini was the only member of the Futurist movement to have his permanent residence in Paris, and because of this he became something of a bridge figure and mediator between the Futurists living in Milan and the Parisian scene. What connected Severini with the Futurists was their common interest in the depiction of movement. Though in his case this was generally to be found in his favoured bar and cabaret scenes, and not in representations of the speed of automobiles and other such celebrations of technology. It is a shame that none of the seductive dancers, nor indeed any other of the works in the notable Gianni Mattioli Collection, exhibited at the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, are appearing in London.

In their celebration of technical progress and the perceived necessary fight for a new society it is understandable that the Futurists supported Italy joining the First World War, with many even volunteering themselves for the front. This was to be fateful for Boccioni who, falling off his horse on 1916 during a military exercise, died soon after of his injuries. His tragic death at the age of only 33 appears all the more eerily fatalistic when we consider how frequent a theme in his canvases the speed of a running horse was. The war and the death of Boccioni practically end the first wave of Futurism, as indeed they end the Tate exhibition. The notorious and problematic connection between Futurism and fascism in the 1920s is only dealt with very peripherally. It would be useful to have some further light shed on this overblown cliché, helpful too to be reminded that both Carrà and Balla set out in different directions following the war; that Russolo openly and directly opposed fascism, spending most of his time in Paris, with only Marinetti remaining from the original core group. Despite the fact that Futurism had its roots in anarchism, it was Marinetti, enjoying close ties with Mussolini, who pronounced the hitherto often repeated equation; that Futurism should be synonymous with fascism. It is to no avail that Mussolini, personally uninterested in art, never made any move to make Futurism an official art form of his regime. The fascist label is one from which even now, a hundred years on, this Italian avant-garde movement still finds it very hard to distance itself.

Futurism, Tate Modern, London; 12 June - 20 September 2009
Published in Art + Antiques, Summer 2009 (http://www.artantiques.cz/)