Solidity of Fog - Luigi Russolo 1912
In the initial manifestos (for example The Manifesto of
the Futurist Painters 1910) the Futurists championed their predecessors the
Italian Divisionists and Impressionists.
‘Ask these priests of a veritable religious cult, these
guardians of old aesthetic laws, where we can go and see the works of Giovanni
Segentini 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
Rosso’s sculpture, or who takes the slightest interest in artists who have not
yet had twenty years of struggle and suffering behind them, but are producing
works destined to honour their fatherland?’
Nationalism is, of course, a feature of Futurism and it is
natural that they should cite their own heritage. Italian Impressionism and,
for that matter, Italian Art Nouveau, did influence them. This influence is
also French in style but filtered locally. This can be seen in the swirling
brushstrokes and bright colours of Giovanni Segentini’s paintings of alpine
herds in the 1880s and 90s which had an effect on Umberto Boccioni’s The Morning
and Luigi Russolo’s Lightning, both of which date from 1909.
Medardo Rosso, the Impressionist sculptor who created Conversation
in a Garden, attempted “to render plastically the influence of an
environment and the atmospheric ties that bound it to the subject.” Boccioni
was also interested in the effect of the environment on the figure but in a
more explicit and didactic way as in his Fusion of Head and Window 1913.
The aims of Italian Neo-Impressionism seem to be slightly
different from the French model. More of the Italian artists use divisionism,
introduced to Italy by the Grubicy brothers, for expressive rather than
analytical ends. That’s not to say that Signac or Seurat were not expressive,
merely that the application of divisionism in Italian Neo-Impressionism seems
to be more limited and vague. In other words it appears to be more of a
stylistic trope than a scientific breakdown of colour, light and shape.
Giacomo Balla, who taught Divisionist technique to
Boccioni and Severini, first went to Paris in 1900. He spent several months
there and then returned to Paris in 1901. On the second occasion he brought back
reproductions of Impressionist and Divisionist paintings to show his friends
and to advance his own studies and practice. Balla’s work at this time included
Girl walking on a balcony, Window in Dusseldorf and Self Portrait
of 1902. For comparison look at Seurat’s Evening at Honfleur 1886 and
Signac’s Le ville et les Pins 1902. Carlo Carrà
also visited Paris as early as 1900, as well as London where he expressed admiration
for Turner, Constable and the French Impressionists on view.
See Carrà’s Piazza del Duomo of 1909 for
possible influence but I don’t want to over-emphasise the link as I think it is
part of a general absorption of painting. According to Carrà the
three major Post-Impressionist painters are Matisse, Derain and Picasso, none
of whose influence is strong in Piazza del Duomo.
Boccioni’s first trip to Paris was in 1906 and influence can be
seen in his painting Riot in the Galleria of 1910. In the Technical Manifesto
he writes, “Painting cannot exist today without Divisionism. This is no process
that can be learned and applied at will. Divisionism, for the modern painter,
must be completely innate, deemed by us to be essential and necessary.” However
Boccioni is said to have been mostly influenced by Cezanne on this trip and it
is reasonable that his use and knowledge of Divisionism is primarily from Balla
while studying under him with Severini. The latter was certainly not content to
learn Divisionism secondhand. He moved to Paris in October 1906 to study Seurat
and became friends with Signac and had extended his painting through
Divisionism before the Futurists formed as a group. He wrote, in A Painter’s
Life, “My preference for Neo-Impressionism dates from my earliest works:
occasionally, I have wanted to supress it, but it always reasserts itself…I
wrote to Boccioni that he could put my signature under the famous manifesto; as
for Divisionism, to which it seemed he was so attached, I told him that it was
certainly still, and more than ever, my own path. In fact, at that time, after
having penetrated both the letter and the spirit of Seurat’s work (which was
the principal reason for my coming to Paris) I had begun to divide forms in the
same way that I had divided colours…”
You can see the progression of Severini’s work through French
Divisionism, and beyond, through three key paintings: the straightforward
divisionism of Spring in Montmatre 1909, to the more occluded Obsessional
Dancer of 1911 where Divisionism affects the form, to Dynamism in Light
and Space 1912 where the process is complete and much more closely aligned
to Futurism and Cubism.
In the title of Dynamism in Light and Space you have some
indication of the ways in which Futurism is derivative, and the ways in which
it is distinctive. The sensation of colour and light can be seen as stemming
from Impressionism, and in particular form the Divisionists or Neo-Impressionists
Seurat, Signac and Cross. But the division and conflict of lines and planes is
probably not a logical extension of Divisionism created in a cultural vacuum as
Severini seems to be suggesting. We know that Ardengo Suffici published an
article on Picasso and Braque in La Voce (August 1911). The Futurists
were proposing to exhibit in Paris at this time when Severini visited them in
Milan. He was disappointed with their work and wanted to bring them up to date
with the latest French art. In mid-October, financed by Marinetti, Boccioni,
Carrà and possibly Russolo, visited Severini in Paris. They saw a Cubist
exhibition and were introduced by Severini to many contemporary artists.
Certainly there was a flurry of new activity before the Futurist art
was exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris in February 1912. The
Futurists main objection to Cubism philosophically is that it was produced by a
static, albeit rotating, analysis of form and was low on colour, motion and emotion.
The Futurists naturally considered themselves to be at the head of their own
European art movement even stating “Why We Are Not Impressionists” where they
show a synthesis of other influences (but possibly miss out Symbolism and, later
perhaps, Expressionism).
The Futurists main achievement on top of Impressionist theory and
painting is to provide a solidification of atmospheric and fleeting moments.
For example in Russolo’s Solidity of Fog 1912 and Balla’s The Streetlight 1909.
Increasingly the atmospheric vibrations of light and colour became more
violent, more dynamic and thus more in harmony with the forms which thereby
become simultaneous and interpenetrated with lines of force and motion.
Ade Annabel copyright 1981
