How important was Impressionism to the development of Futurism?

 

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