The leading figures in New York Dada

 

The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even by Marcel Duchamp

Alfred Stieglitz

In 1903 Stieglitz founded an influential journal initially called Camera Work. Under its subsequent name of 291 it became a fairly independent American anti-art art development enriched by some subsequently famous European émigrés, for example from 1913 contributors included the French Cuban artist Francis Picabia.

The photographer Alfred Stieglitz stated ‘Art is dead, long live Art’. Primarily he was talking about the development of photography and encouraging people to think of it as art rather than journalism but, retrospectively, it also has a Dadaist anti-art ambiguity. Stieglitz and Edward Steichen founded a group called Photo Secession in 1902 echoing this withdrawal from mainstream painting in the definition of art. In 1905 their gallery opened at 291 Fifth Avenue, New York. Ironically modern painters were also represented by a group Stieglitz founded called the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. They included John Marin, Alfred Maurer, Charles Demuth, Abraham Walkowitz, Max Weber, Morgan Russell, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, Patrick Bruce, Arthur Dove, Joseph Stella and Marsden Hartley.

The Association of American Painters and Sculptors, founded in 1911 by their chairman Arthur Davies and secretary Walt Kuhn, organised an International Exhibition of Modern Art in the armoury of the 69^th Infantry Regiment on Lexington Avenue. It became known as the Armory Show and opened on 17^th February 1913. The most celebrated painting in the exhibition was Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase of 1911. It introduced modern art to a much larger American public and press albeit controversially.

In 1915, when Camera Work changed its name to 291, it published Picabia’s diatribes against art, together with some of his ‘machine pictures’. In one of 291’s successors, 391, Picabia extended his ideas of freedom from all values associated with art.

Arthur Cravan

Another figure from Europe that had an impact on the New York cultural scene around this time was the Swiss boxer and literary agent provocateur Arthur Cravan. He arrived in New York on 13^th January 1916 on the same ship as Leon Trotsky. Cravan already had a reputation for provocative and often violent gatherings earning him the admiration of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, André Breton and the hatred of Guillaume Apollinaire. His career in New York was short lived, including a drunken lecture on “The Independent Artists of France and America”, and he moved onto Mexico on 1^st September 1917 where he disappeared the following year presumed drowned at sea.

Marcel Duchamp

Most famous for the “ready-mades” such as the Bicycle Wheel, Bottle Rack and Fountain of 1915. These objects became art works merely by the artist saying so and presenting them for exhibition. Duchamp was trying to make people aware of the inherent beauty of utilitarian objects as a philosophical gesture to challenge accepted concepts of crafted hand-made works of art. As a member of the jury of the First New York Salon des Indépendants he submitted the Fountain signed R. Mutt (the name of a firm of sanitary engineers). When it was rejected Duchamp resigned from the jury.

Further works, with or without minimal personal intervention, included Mona Lisa with moustache, Cheque (completely hand drawn in payment for a dentist’s bill), a closed window with the title The Battle of Austerlitz and Why not sneeze Rose Sélavy? in which Duchamp had marble cut to look like sugar lumps and put them in an iron cage. The recurrent theme of these works was to blur or ridicule the barriers between high art and mundane reality.

The Great Glass or the bride laid bare by her bachelors, even was largely completed in 1918. He let New York dust settle on one section of the structure. Then he cleaned all but the cones on which he secured the dust with a fixative. The glass was fractured in transit and, acknowledging the element of chance, Duchamp declared if thus finally completed in 1923. By this time Duchamp had more or less given up spending time on art in favour of playing chess. But produced the Glass Machine of 1920 in which segments of circles revolve to create the illusion of a continuous form. In 1925-6 he designed a number of similar optical machines or ‘rotoreliefs’ exploring the nature of vision. He incorporated some of his discoveries into a film Anémic-Cinéma of 1926 in which he brought the reality of science into art.

Duchamp said, “the solution of this artistic problem finally came with the Discs (1925) in which true three-dimensionality was achieved, not with a complicated machine (for example the Glass Machine of 1920) and a complicated technique (such as development by hand using four hundred nails) but in the eyes of the onlooker, by a psycho-physiological process.”

Man Ray

Man Ray began his career as a painter but, influenced by Stieglitz, he also took up photography. He became known for “the invention of the useless” or anti-art objects such as Boardwalk of 1917 or Object To Be Destroyed of 1923 which was shot at in the Paris Dada Exhibition of 1957. It was a metronome with a photograph of an eye clipped to the swinging arm. The machine with its usefulness taken from it enables the elements of humour, and potentially pathos, to enter an otherwise sterile object. Man Ray also used photographic techniques to produce images by shining lights on photographic paper. These he called ‘rayograms’.

Both the American Man Ray and the Frenchman Francis Picabia shared a disklike of conventional art and  a contempt for many of the tropes and habits of mankind and share a passion for the game of chess. As well as Stieglitz they shared an association with the patron Walter Arensberg, the Life caricaturist Marius de Sayas, the composer Edgar Varèse and the cubist Albert Gleizes. They found publicity, political and cultural support from de Haviland who was editor of the Washington Post. From 1915 to 1923 Walter Arensberg had a salon on West 67^th Street in New York that was regularly used.

Francis Picabia

To avoid the war in Europe Picabia travelled to New York in 1915. He contributed to Stieglitz’ magazine 291. 1915 also sees the start of his mechanomorphic style. In an interview with the New York Tribune in October 1915 he said, “Almost immediately upon coming to America it flashed on me that the genius of the modern world is in machinery, and that through machinery art ought to find a most vivid expression…of life. It is really a part of human life – perhaps the very soul. In seeking forms through which to expose human characteristics I have come at length upon the form which appears most brilliantly plastic and fraught with symbolism.”

Picabia seems to use the machine, not as an object in itself, but as the modern image of the human, with all that the term ‘human’ implies ie. pathos, wit etc. Picabia was familiar with the Italian Futurists who glorified the modern, machine-orientated era. He also knew the robot-like figures of Léger. The description of the machine as being ‘born of man without a mother’ was used for Picabia’s first metamorphic drawing Girl Born Without a Mother (1916-18) and his Portrait of a Young American Girl in the State of Nudity (1915) is a spark plug. With Here, This is Stieglitz (1915) the choice of camera is obvious. The faint form behind the camera on the right is formed from the gear and brake levers of an automobile. The gears are in neutral and the camera is broken. This may be interpreted as a parody of Stieglitz who often seemed to be criticised in his own magazine 291. His lithograph portrait published in 291 as the Saint of Saints is purely diagrammatic and taken from technical camera documentation. A diagrammatic approach can also be found in De Zayas of 1915.

But in Here She Is the sexual symbolism of pistol and target form a fairly obvious metamorphosis from human to mechanical and represent an automatic repeat-firing love machine. There are other examples of sex as a mechanical action in Amorphous Procession (1917) and The Marquesas Island (1916-17) which was a sketch for a work called Universal Prostitution. You could draw parallels with Marchel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even. In American (1917) a retouched photograph of a light bulb associates it’s on/off switch with a flirt/divorce dichotomy.

Picabia helped to launch a sequel to 291 which was 391. One of the covers of the New York edition was his Mechanical Ballet of 1917. This was an automobile which resembled a circle of dancing figures. Ballet mécaniques were quite a common theme. The best known being Léger’s 1924 film of the same name. Picabia’s other mechanomorphic works have the same symmetrical diagrammatic frontal presentation. Other examples of mechanomorphic work from 1915 to 1919 include: Machine without name, Girl born without a mother,  Guillaume Apollinaire irritable poete, Very rare picture on the earth, Amorous Procession, The Child Carburetor, Composition Mecanique, Mona Lisa with Moustache, Femme!, Voila Elle De Zayas and Dada 4-5 (Picabia with Tzara).

Man Ray

Man Ray’s early mechanomorphic wrks were rather painterly compared to Picabia’s. In the following years he mastered the technique of the air brush and would use it in conjunction with whatever happened to be lying about. La Vallière (1919) was made from a dressmaker’s dummy which his landlady had abandoned in the studio; Composition with Key and Triangle (1919) derived from items picked up on his drawing desk. He also used his sculptures as stencils in pictures eg. Sclulpture By Itself II (1918) and Untitled (1919). ‘I put all kinds of things in it, a press for holding wood together, parts of a camera, pieces of cut out cardboard, some of my draughtsman’s instruments etc. I moved everything around and sprayed, and moved again and sprayed, changing their position all the time.’  Man Ray used found objects in both painting and sculpture. The idea of the found object is something which was pursued by Surrealists and used to create novel semi-sculptural objects indicative of a dream state of mind. New York (1917) is Man Ray’s first sculpture to incorporate bits of found wood. Sculpture By Itself I and II (1918), Portrait of Marcel Duchamp (photographed in 1920), Gift (1921) and Emak Bakia (1926) followed.

Emak Bakia is an interpreted found object. It is the neck of an old cello picked up in the Paris fleamarket. The horse hair is taken from its bow and hung loose. The cello had grown old so Man Ray gave it a long white beard. The top of the cello neck is a spiral which is a form that appealed to Man Ray. ‘Nature,’ he said ‘from the sea shell to the galaxy, is full of spirals; when I was a young man, I was already obsessed by this form.’

Lampshade (1919) was the first fully Found Object. It was a discarded paper wrapping of a lampshade, attached to the top of a log rod, around which it revolved. However, when it was later exhibited, the janitor thought it was a paper wrapping for the stand, so crumpled it up and threw it away. Man Ray hurriedly had some metal cut, twisted and painted it white, and so, by the time the exhibition opened, it had become a metal sculpture.

In 1918, two years before his first true Found Object, Man Ray chose his first object which he subsequently termed a Readymade. A Readymade is a common manufactured object which is redesignated as a work of art by the artist. Unlike the Found Object, which may be a product of the action of time, weather and accident, the Readymade is an artifact used in its original unaltered state but within an altered context: that of art. The assisted Readymade is an extension of this concept which may be equated to the interpreted found object; though in both cases the intervention of the artist may only be slight. Man (1918) is an egg-beater. Woman (1918) is an assemblage of two hemispherical reflectors (symbolising vanity) and six laundry pins (to indicate domestic duties) pinching a sheet of glass with a strong light to exploit the shadows. Man Ray was in a difficult marriage at the time and so his satire included the idea of woman being symbolised by the egg and himself as the egg-beater. His wife’s name was Donna which is related to the Italian for woman. Certainly Man was a pun on his own name.

Gift (1921) was an assisted readymade . Man Ray was in Paris in an exhibition when the composer Erik Satie approached  him and they went off to a corner café to talk. On leaving the café they passed a shop of household utensils and bought a flat iron, tacks and glue/ Back in the gallery Man Ray stuck some tacks to the bottom of the flat iron, added it to the exhibition and called it the Gift since he wanted to give it away by drawing lots amongst his friends.

 

Marcel Duchamp

Considering the dates of Man Ray’s readymades it is almost certain that their inspiration lies with his close friend Marcel Duchamp. Influential pieces include Apollinaire Enameled (1916-17), Nine Malic Moulds (1914), The Coffee Mill (1911), Chocolate Grinder No.1 (1913), Cover of the Blind Man (1917),  Nude descending a staircase (1911), Large Glass and Tu’m in K Dreier’s library (1937), LHOOQ (1919), Dust Breeding (1920?), Revolving Glass (1920), Rotoreliefs (1935), With Hidden Noise (1916), Fountain (1917), Bottle-rack (1914), Fountain etc (1917), Why Not Sneeze? (1921), In advance of the broken arm (1915), Duchamp’s studio with Bicycle Wheel and Trap (1917-18), Revolving Glass in Motion’ (1920), Rotary demi-sphere (1925), 3 Standard Stoppages (1913-14) and Pharmacy (1914).

Duchamp’s interest in mechanical imagery may be traced to a much earlier date than Picabia’s (1915). In 1911 Jacque Villon decided it would be nice to have some paintings to decorate his kitchen. Marcel’s contribution was The Coffee Mill (1911). It was the first of his paintings to display an interest in mechanical objects and the first to use the sequenced overlapping phases of representation to depict movement which he used in Nude descending the staircase.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art in the Armoury of the 69^th Infantry Regiment on Lexington Avenue which opened in 1913. The Armoury Show, as it became known, is often credited with introducing modern art to America. Whether that is the whole story or not, it is significant that the most talked about painting in the exhibition was Duchamp’s Nude descending a staircase.

Duchamp’s first painting after his declared renunciation of traditional painting was Chocolate Grinder No.1 and confirms his interest in the world of machines. It was inspired by a chocolate grinder featured in a shop window. It is basically a still life of a machine.

As for readymades as early as 1913 Duchamp conceived the idea that a work of art, such as the Bicycle Wheel (1913), could be made by choice of standardised objects with very little intervention by the artist. The following year, in a shop for artists materials, Duchamp bought three copies of a sentimental winter landscape. To each he added two small marks: one in read and the other yellow. These rectified readymades, or readymades aided, incorporated the idea of limitless quantity.-

Bottleneck (1914) was purchased in the same year. Duchamp was not necessarily trying to show the inerent beauty of these objects, he was showing that art could be produced by the action of choice upon commercially available materials. After all the tubes of paint an artist uses are manufactured readymade products. A painting is a sort of readymade aided. Duchamp first coined the term readymade in 1915 in association with his work In Advance of the Broken Arm (1915).

Apollinaire Enameled (1916-17) was originally an advertisement for Sapolin Enamil but Duchamp has crossed out the S and added the rest of Apollinaire’s name.  In pencil, in the mirror above the chest of drawers, he added the reflection of the hair of the girl. The commercial slogan at the bottom right was altered to make it nonsensical.

In 1917, as a member of the First New York Salon des Indépendants, Duchamp submitted the Fountain signed R. Mutt. Although there was no jury system the work was rejected and Duchamp resigned. A unsigned anonymous letter from Duchamp complained ‘Whether Mr. Mutt, with his own hands, made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.’

Duchamp has always regarded the reverence bestowed upon artists and the financial values placed upon their products as ludicrous. If a common object can be made into art then art can be made into a common object. His Ready Reciprocal L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) asks us to ‘use a Rembrandt as an ironing board’. L.H.O.O.Q., when spelled out in French, sounds like ‘elle a chaud au cul’ which in American slang would be ‘she’s got a hot ass’.

Throughout this period Duchamp was working on a Large Glass machine entitled The Bride Stipped Bare By Her Bachelors Even. Working on the glass solved the problem of provided a background since the transparency of the glass would provide a readymade one.  He used lead wire, oil paint and lead foil; he also allowed New York dust to settle on part of the structure - Dust Breeding.  Several parts of the composition were tried out as independent works eg. Nine Malic Moulds (1914). The first version was broken in transit. Duchamp accepted the breaks as a chance contribution to the composition. The composition itself is impossibly complicated, as witnessed by the body of literature that was  part of the work, but is basically a seduction machine. The bottom half is the bachelor’s domain and the upper half is the bride’s. The object of the machine is to ‘strip the bride of her garments’ and spark off the bride’s points of desire.

Other machines were designed by Duchamp to explore visual perception such as Revolving Glass (1920) in which segments of circles revolve to create the illusion of continuous circles. In 1925 and 1926 he produced a number of optical designs or rotoreliefs such as  Rotary demi-sphre (1925). Some of these were incorporated into a film Anémic – Cinéma (1926).

 

Chalk, Wood and Water

 

Eric Ravilious - Chalk Paths (1935) 

This exhibition is on at the Pallant Gallery in Chichester until 23rd April 2023. It features the Sussex Downland landscape from Blake and Turner through the Bloomsbury Group and beyond. The highlights are probably early twentieth century when the style of simplified, watercolour and print landscapes best show the whale-back shapes of this unique landscape. Highlights include Edward Burra, Ivon Hitchens, Vanessa Bell, Lucien Pisarro, Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash, Gwenda Morgan, John Piper and Eileen Agar.

Futurism and Fascism

Speeding Train - Ivo Panaggi

Amongst art historians it seems generally acknowledged that the Futurists were Fascists despite the fact that their period of peak activity is usually taken as 1909 to 1915 when Mussolini called himself a Socialist and the term Fascism hadn’t yet been articulated.

But, to be fair, such a glib equation can be found in the early anti-Fascist writers. Benedetto Croce, writing in La Stampa on 15^th May 1924, said, “For anyone who has a sense of historical connections, the ideological origins of Fascism can be found in Futurism.” Croce argues on the basis that they both glorify street fights and are youthful and revolutionary in outlook. Not unique qualities, to be sure. The case for Marinetti being a Fascist is rather more complex and one has to be wary of remarks like those of Wyndham Lewis in Blasting and Bombadiering, “Marinetti, for instance. You may have heard of him! It was he who put Mussolini up to Fascism. Mussolini admits it. They ran neck and neck for a bit, but Mussolini was the better politician.” Certainly it was Futurism that made Fascism attractive to Lewis and Ezra Pound rather than Mussolini’s pragmatic political manoeuvres and alliances which influenced the likes of the Fabian George Bernard Shaw.

According to Marinetti’s First Futurist Political Manifesto the Futurists “sole political programme is national pride, energy and expansion”. Both in style and idea there are more straightforwardly political writings which Marinetti may well have read but not copied. Compare the Nationalist Enrico Corradini’s Discorsi politici: “the programme involves the sole plank: the grandeur of the fatherland.” It would be a mistake merely to view Futurism as a hyperbolic literary expression of nationalism, but Corradini has expressed the concept of war as a moral hygiene which liberates heroism from the manacles of liberalism and democracy, which relates to the most often quoted founding manifesto with reference to Fascism. “We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for.” Corradini, in The Principles of Nationalism, put it this way: “a moral imperative. In a word, we propose a ‘means of national redemption’ which we sum up, extremely concisely, in the expression ‘the need for war’. War is the last act.” Both this strain of Nationalism and Futurism believe that parliament shows that the rule of the majority cannot work – it just becomes the tool of base interest. For both of them only the “intoxicating intuition” of revolution and war can restore the vision of life as a constant struggle for change. Violence, then, is a moral necessity. This is 1909 when the reality of the First World War is unknown and when Nationalism is not the same as Fascism, not least because the term doesn’t yet exist although clearly some themes can be traced building in European culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Futurism is a minor not a major part of this trend. Marinetti’s second political manifesto was written to celebrate the Italian conquest of Tripoli in 1911. The same themes of danger, violence, patriotism and war are praised in “this great Futurist hour of Italy” and he coined the expansionist phrase “Panitalianism”.

Marinetti also commented on the Balkan War but how important the Futurists were in any encouragement of Italian intervention, and their entry into the First World War, is difficult to determine. Giovanni Giolitti was in power and pursued the moderate line of pacification. The majority of Italians, at first, were opposed to war. Giolitti was supported by the Catholics, socialists and liberals. The Nationalists and the Futurist movement campaigned actively for war and were subsequently joined by the Syndicalists and other radical groups. In turn some liberals and socialists, including Mussolini, agreed on the basis that war could force Italy out of a sense of useless stasis. The Futurist’s contribution to the debate included a contribution to the literary journal Lacerba devoted exclusively to interventionism and was the only publication to do so. The Syndicalist Sergio Panunzio, writing in 1910, had attacked the Futurists for their irrationalism and exaltation of violence but in 1914 the Syndicalists supported intervention to bring order and justice out of chaos. Mussolini’s L’Avanti! ridiculed the Futurists but they still met on the same side in the massive interventionist demonstrations. The Futurist’s burning of the Austrian flag in Trentino and the demonstration in Milan, for which they were arrested, were spectacular publicity for Boccioni, Marinetti, Mazza and Piatti but they were never a popular or populist movement capable of influencing government policy or were significant enough to prevent other disparate groups who despised or ridiculed the Futurists generally from joining the highly vocal minority in Italy clamouring for intervention.

The art of this period is noticeably more patriotic and, as in Germany, collage became a new tool to reference contemporary conflicts. Carlo Carra, in particular, started to make ‘free-word paintings’, for example Patriotic Celebration contained phrases like ‘Long Live the Army!’ and ‘Long Live the King!’ These seem to be selected to reflect war fervour as an objective observer rather than being a particularly personal or Futurist statement. Marinetti and, one assumes, other Futurists usually have a less cheery recipe for monarchy. Carra’s Pursuit is built up mostly from sports and entertainment clippings but under the horse’s mouth is the word ‘JOFFRE’. Marshall Joffre was the French Commander in Chief during the early years of the First World War and widely celebrated as a hero for success at the First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. These war collages were illustrated in Lacerba and also formed the basis of Carra’s publication Guerrapittura. Boccioni didn’t use collage except for Cavalry Charge of late 1914 which includes clippings of news from the war in France. Balla took a less literal approach but used the colours of the Italian flag in his Patriotic Chant in Piazza di Siena and The Flag on the Altar of its Country. Severini produced The Armoured Train which was first exhibited in Paris in January 1916 in the First Futurist Exhibition of Plastic Art of the War.

The death of Boccioni and Sant’Elia does not seem sufficient explanation for the death of Futurism, however what concerns us here is that the second wave of Futurism is not generally regarded in such esteem. The second wave of Futurism is officially aligned to Fascism whereas supporting patriotism and militarism in the immediately pre-war period could equally apply to many European countries. The later Futurist artists are, perhaps, written off unfairly and, more importantly, they did not create the ideal Fascist art despite attempts like Enrico Prampolini’s Cosmic Synthesis of Fascist Italy and Fillia, Oriani and Rosso’s The Revolution Continues. A tighter conjunction of ‘modernistic’ art serving the cause is provided by Mario Sironi and Arturo Martini. Sironi was art critic for Il Popolo d'Italia and helped design numerous Fascist exhibitions including the tenth anniversary of the regime in 1932. Sironi and Martini’s group Novecento in Milan managed to blend modernism, classicism and propaganda in an easily digestible form that made modernism more appealing to the public. Bontempelli, in the Novecento journal, writes, “Futurism was necessarily avant-gardist and aristocratic. Novecentist art must make itself ‘popular’ and attract the ‘public’…Marinetti has conquered and courageously held certain advanced trenches. Behind these I have been able to begin the city of the conquerors.”

Fascism shares some philosophical background with Futurism. In Replica a Graziadei Mussolini says he was influenced by Henri Bergson, though he does not say in what way. Nietzsche is less important to the Italians. Rather than the superman or übermensch there is Georges Sorel’s myth of heroism and virility, “the formation of aggressive and conquering elites driven to conquest by expansiveness and vitality. There is something of this in the programme of the so-called Futurists but they are limited to an aesthetic and literary conception of life.”

Both Mussolini and Marinetti borrowed terminology from French philosophers and, as one would expect, Italian politics; but there are two phrases or slogans referring to what became common concepts that Mussolini may have borrowed from Marinetti. The first is referring to war as “igiene del mondo” or ‘hygiene for the world’. “We might accept war…as the only hygiene for the world” would seem to refer back to the Futurist slogan “War is the only hygiene for the world.” The term ‘race’ is used a lot by Marinetti which he conceived as ‘people’ or ‘nation’ possessed of a “will to conquest and adventure” in phrases such as “racial pride”, “a new national consciousness”, “the prestige of our race”, “the Italian race”, “Italian blood” and “Italian people”. Mussolini had a similar interpretation of the word ‘razza’ in phrases like “racial solidarity” and “a union of free spirits in the Italian nation”. In other words the interpretation was not racist in terms of a natural assumption of racial supremancy. It was a call to action: an appeal to the will of the Italians rather than their genes, to their heroism rather than their heredity. As in Roman times the Italian view of citizenship was about granting rights for your achievements or by agreement of good behaviour under conquest. Anti-semitism, for example, had no place in Italian fascism until 1938 and the Italian army’s record in Africa or the Balkans may be no better than any other but at least they were not justified by spurious intellectual doctrine.

In the manifestos War, the World’s Only Hygiene 1911-15 and Futurist Democracy 1919 there are suggestions of programmes to reduce the birth rate, for the benefit of health and sport, and to create a credit bank for artists. Both these ideas seem to have interested Mussolini and he even promised a credit bank although one was never set up. Marinetti’s tract Portrait of Mussolini is often quoted to show how close they had always been. In fact it was written in 1929 in reverence to a President of seven years standing. It is hard to believe that there were no manifestos in the art world before the Futurists but certainly they seem to have encouraged the idea in the media and common consciousness of it being a political vehicle. Previously it often referred to a poster although there is a link to political demonstrations which were known as manifestazione.

It’s worth appending some of the politcal history and military activity that connects Marinetti to Mussolini’s Fascist era to add that perspective. 1918 saw the foundation of a Futurist Party which founded clubs in Ferrara, Florence, Rome and Taranto. Marinetti used his techniques of public disruption to drown out a speech by Bissolati at La Scala. Mussolini was also there and seems to have developed the same talent for creating torrents of abuse that a rational lecture cannot penetrate. The Fasci di Combattimento was formed at the Piazza San Sepolcro in 1919 with Marinetti in attendance. A few weeks later he staged a “patriotic demonstration” with the Arditi (special forces veterans) and the Fascists. They attacked a Red rally in Milan. The resulting ‘battle of Via Mercanti’ is said to have been conducted by Marinetti from the back of one of the lion monuments. They wrecked and burned the offices of L’Avanti after the main confrontation. Mussolini knew about and approved the action but did not take part personally. In the elections of 1919 Marinetti and Mussolini stood as Fascist candidates along with eighteen others. The party received 4,657 votes out of a possible 270,000 in Milan. Perhaps this result was key to Mussolini realising he needed the support of conservatives, nationalists, industrialists and landowners more than a few Futurist intellectuals and was the start of broader alliances. Before the elections of May 1921 Mussolini, who was an atheist, even began to make overtures to the Catholic church for their support.

Around this time Marinetti ceased his active support and referred to Mussolini in characteristic style as “this extravagant buffoon who wants to play politics and whom nobody in Italy, least of all me, takes seriously.” Marinetti left the Fascist party in 1920 and in 1924 stated that the Futurists “intervene in political contests only in hours of great danger for the Nation.” He was not completely estranged, however, and in 1929 was made Secretary of the Fascist Writers’ Union and a member of the Accademia d’Italia. In 1930 he performed propaganda on Giornale Radio. He volunteered for active service in the Second World War and fought on the Russian front even though he was in his mid-Sixties by then. He was given a state funeral when he died a couple of years later peacefully in Italy whilst working on a collection of poems about the Navy commando unit Decima Flottiglia MAS.

In 1913 Papini declared that “Futurism means frantic love for Italy and for her greatness…an Italy greater than the one we have known, more modern, more courageous, more progressive than other nations.” The patriotism of Futurism proper seems no more complex than that, a desire to drag Italy into the Twentieth Century. Patriotism is not Fascism, though they seem to derive their patriotism from a movement capitalised as Nationalism and which, like Syndicalism, contains embryonic elements of Fascism. Both Fascism and Futurism originated in Milan in the metropolitan industrial heartland of northern Italy (closer in mind and body to the rest of Europe) and formed part of a general shift in political and cultural weight since the unification of Italy in the late nineteenth century and only really complete in 1918. The Bernheim-Jeune catalogue of 1912 states that “If our paintings are futurist, it is because they are the result of absolutely futurist conceptions, ethical, aesthetic, political and social.” Yet it is primarily Marinetti’s writings that claim to address this broad spectrum. The link with Fascism rests heavily on the assumption that Marinetti is Futurism. Since Futurism is primarily known for the plastic arts rather than as a literary movement, ie. by its artists and their paintings and sculptures, this is hardly fair.

Fascism, once established in the mainstream, follows hierarchy, tradition and respect of the law; it sets it’s standards by the Roman empire, the Renaissance and the Catholic Church. The spirit of Futurism is anti-clerical, anti-tradition and perpetually revolutionary, rather than being revolutionary to a reactionary end. Futurism, despite it’s national focus, had blood brothers in other countries such as Russian Futurism, which aligned itself with Bolshevism, and Dada which expressed anti-war anarchism. In 1919 Marinetti wrote, “To the oppressed classes, to the impoverished workers, let the entire parasitical plutocracy of the world be sacrificed.” For similarities with Dadaism one could quote from the first Futurist manifesto which called for “the abolition of museums, libraries and academic institutions of every kind, and a campaign against ethics and aestheticism.” Fascism represented something new and exciting and modern in Italy between the two world wars. Marinetti saw in it some of his own tendencies – the craze for speed and violent action, the extolling of war and patriotism, a hatred of Parliament and bureaucracy - and carried his second generation of Futurists with him.

Copywright 1982 Ade Annabel 

Selective Bibliography:

Futurism – Jane Rye

Futurist Manifestos – ed. Umbro Apollonio

Futurism – Joshua C Taylor

The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism – David D Roberts

The Ideology of Fascism: The rationale of totalitarianism – A James Gregor

Fascism in Italy: Its Development and Influence – Elizabeth Wiskermann

Fascism – Giuseppe Prezzolini

Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile – ed. Adrian Lyttelton

Mussolini – Laura Fermi

Marinetti: Selected Writings – ed. R W Flint

The Fascist Experience: Italian Society and Culture 1922-45 – Edward R Tannenbaum

Kunst und ideologie des Faschismus – Umberto Silva

 

 

Nevinson and Marinetti: English Futurist Manifesto

 

A Futurist Manifesto: Vital English Art by Marinetti and Nevinson was published on the 7^th June 1914 in the Times, the Observer and the Daily Mail. The first point I want to make is the level of attention in the press that modern artists in London were getting at the time, both in art journals and in the popular press.

John Rodker in Dial Monthly in 1914 said that, “The leaders of the new movement, be it painting or music or literature, are paragraphed daily, their eccentricities detailed, and their photographs scattered broadcast…” and Wyndham Lewis, with characteristic humility, “The painter could really become a ‘star’…Pictures, I mean oil paintings, were ‘news’. Exhibitions were reviewed in column after column. And no illustrated paper worth its salt but carried a photograph of some picture of mine or of my ‘school’…or one of myself, smiling insinuatingly from its pages.” (Blasting and Bombadiering 1937).

The press is able to report on developments immediately and thus stress the ephemerality of the latest thing possibly, thereby accelerating change in the pursuit of what is literally “news”. The pre-Vorticist group moved in a very fashion-conscious society, in which the papers seemed to have assisted their notoriety, but like the latest fad they presumably face the same fate as being as obsolete as yesterday’s newspaper.

Journalists, particularly in the popular press, were not always complimentary and so we also have the shock value and controversy of modern art being part of the attraction for coverage. In fact they seem to have boosted the avant-garde stereotype and propagated various “ism” labels with the idea of leaders, followers, dogmas and schisms. The Vorticists could make their presence publicly known simply by making a noise about disowning Futurism and the Futurists.  It could be said that newspapers inadvertently caused the schism that led to Vorticism but it would be closer to the truth to say that artists learned to exploit publicity and its tropes and techniques in their event management and manifesto publications, hence the use of headlines in the formatting of the publication Blast.

The English Futurist Manifesto follows the familiar Italian setting out of those things that are “passatisti” and those that are “futuristi”; in other words there were two sections of things that they are “Against” and things “We Want”. The early Futurist manifestos were known in England and The Futurists themselves exhibited at the Sackville Gallery in March 1912 and included an extensive catalogue. It was printed in English and contained the founding manifesto, the painters’ first manifesto, a bespoke section called ‘The Exhibitors to the Public’ and some explanation of individual paintings. Earlier, in August 1910, Tramp (Douglas Goldring’s magazine) had published extracts from the initial manifesto and a letter from Marinetti to Poesia about his ‘sink Venice’ campaign. Harold Monro’s Poetry and Drama of September 1913 published Marinetti’s Imagination Without Strings and Words At Liberty manifesto and some of his poetry. Most of Marinetti’s self-publicity was done by personal appearances, or what he liked to call conferenza, at places like The Cave of the Golden Calf, the Poet’s Club, The Poetry Bookshop, Clifford Inn Hall and the Doré Gallery with resultant press reviews.

It's surprising that Marinetti didn’t gain more disciples – especially amongst the literary cognoscenti. Nevinson seems to have learned about Marinetti largely through Severini, whom he followed back to Paris after Severini’s exhibition at the Marlborough Galleries in 1913. Although it should be mentioned that Henry Nevinson, Christopher’s father, had met and written about Marinetti in the Evening News. Christopher Nevinson regarded himself as aligned with the Futurists after meeting them in Paris and distanced himself from the Cubists and Post-Impressionists. Nevinson signs the manifesto as a member of the Art Rebel Centre but he is mentioned in it as an English Futurist. Amongst the artists who funded Marinetti’s performance at the Art Rebel Centre Wyndham Lewis was particularly enthusiastic calling him ‘the intellectual Cromwell of our time’ and ‘England has need of these foreign auxiliaries to put her energies to right and restore order.’ In contrast it might be useful to compare Nevinson’s note to Lewis that ‘I had quite a great deal of difficulty in preventing Marinetti from again expounding and proposing his philanthropic desire to present us to Europe and be our continental guide etc.’ And yet it was this resentment of patronage that Lewis was to harness to his own ambition and subsequently use against Nevinson and Marinetti.

The subtitle ‘Vital English Art’ seems to demonstrate a lack of effect of Hulme’s theories upon the group. Hulme had substituted the terms ‘geometric’ and ‘vital’ for Wilhelm Worringer’s ‘abstraction’ and ‘empathy’. Vital art meant a soft, naturalistic relation to life and environment and a reverence of the Renaissance and classical periods in art. Geometric styles, associated at this time with Byzantium, India and Egypt, and showing a separation from nature, was seen as the foundation of the new art. To Hulme and Epstein ‘vital art’ would be gross blunder in aesthetic terminology but to Nevinson and Marinetti in merely meant art that is alive and growing.

As in the first Futurist manifestos, acadamies are attacked, in this case the Royal Academy. As early as 1893 George Moore had called the Academy an ‘incubus’ that must be destroyed before new art can arise (quoted in Cooper – The Courtauld Collection; a Catalogue and Introduction p.36). In 1900 Roger Fry complained ‘The Academy becomes every year a more and more colossal joke.’ (quoted in Woolf – Roger Fry p.108). The Royal Academy was the public’s concept of what art should be like.

The New English Art Club had been founded in 1886 to advance the concept of art beyond that of the Academy – but it was reformist, not revolutionary, and its sole aim was to catch up with French Impressionism, not overtake it. Thus Nevinson and Marinetti criticise it for its effeteness and unwillingness to go beyond Gauguin. The Slade, too, demonstrated an increasing gap between the attitude of its lecturers and its students.

The accusation of effeminacy and the purely decorative art seem directed against Fry and the Omega Workshop plus their general reliance on inspiration from French Impressionism. The manifesto makes the point that foreign daring is occasionally praised but English innovations are despised. If this particular comment is also directed against the Fry group it would seem a little unfair if abstraction is taken as key to this period. Vanessa Bell and others’ occasional abstracts from this period are in a very different, but no less daring, style. Perhaps, though, they regard this as part of the effeminate decorative style of the Omega. Also Marinetti, in asking the English to be their own innovators, is doing himself out of a job. He expresses the wish to create an ‘advance guard’ movement. He did so, but by default since it was a new British based movement.

In the original version of the manifesto it closed by saying, “so we call upon the English public to support, defend and glorify the genius of the great Futurist painters or pioneers and advance forces of vital English Art – Atkinson, Bomberg, Epstein, Etchells, Hamilton, Nevinson, Roberts, Wadsworth, Wyndham Lewis.” Those artists, particularly Lewis, resented being subsumed, without their permission, under Futurism and coined their own term Vorticism. Lewis was working on the publication Blast in 1914, to which Nevinson had given the name. Marinetti and Nevinson were both blasted in the publication, in performance and by Lewis in letters to the press distancing himself from any notion of English Futurism. But as Lewis well knew, a spat, no matter how fatuous, was likely to good for business in attracting attention to the major Vorticist exhibition at the Dore Gallery in 1915. Unfortunately war eclipsed their publicity and in some cases cut short their lives; for example Gaudier-Brzeska was killed in France 5 days before the show opened and Wadsworth, Lewis and Roberts were soon sent on active service.

Copyright 1982 Ade Annabel 

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

 

The Ballets Russes: a union of the arts?

 

On hearing the title L’Apres-Midi D’Un Faune most people that have heard of it would think of the music of Claude Debussy. Yet we would be as justified to think of Leon Bakst’s costume and set designs of 1912. We might also think of Nijinsky and Nijinksa dancing or of the famous impresario Serge Diaghilev. Although the music is probably now it’s most enduring component the Ballet Russes initiated the work and the choice of music was by no means the first of the arts to contribute.

Alexandre Benois, one of Diaghilev’s designers, was particularly captivated by the idea of art as a single entity. ‘It was no accident that what was afterwards known as the Ballets Russes was originally conceived not by the professionals of the dance but by a circle of artists, linked together by the idea of Art as an entity. Everything followed from the common desire of several painters and musicians to see the fulfilment of the theatrical dreams which haunted them.’ Presumably what Benois thinks of as art does not include literature and poetry; unless one substitutes for literature the folk tales and mythology which forms the original inspiration for themes in classical ballet. Some of the other arts, though, are more prominently represented. Dance and music are evident, plus the artistic value of the décor, costumes and so on.

Although Diaghilev is such a key figure in Ballet Russes his artistic work is not easy to trace. The choreography, for example, is not his. Although a trained musician and singer Diaghilev’s role as impresario was in selecting, organising and inspiring people. Of the early ballets Michel Fokine was chief choreographer; he produced such works as The Firebird, Petrushka, Les Sylphides and so on. Despite the success of these ballets Diaghilev turned to Nijinsky because he thought a younger mind would be more receptive to his own ideas. At this time Diaghilev aspired to music visualisation theories and fashions in dance movement such as eurhythmy which is a system of performance, education and therapy based on the harmony of bodily movement and music. Diaghilev might have harboured the wish to be a choreographer and is credited with having arranged Les Orientales. He also produced Fireworks, which featured a complex light show with plastic Cubist scenery set to the music of Stravinsky.

Diaghilev regarded his next major choreographer, Leonide Massine, as stubborn and provincial, though Massine was actually very receptive to the ideas of Cocteau and Picasso for the Cubist work Parade. For example, Picasso’s French Manager of 1917 was a very difficult costume in which to dance.

Nijinsky had performed in and choreographed L’Apres-Midi D’Un Faune and Jeux, both with music by Debussy, and the controversial Rite Of Spring with music by Stravinsky. His gestures were deliberately angular and disrupted the normal flow of body movement. They were anti-classical. Cyril Beaumont praised Nijinsky in Petrushka and Jeux as portraying impersonality and ritual. Fokine was the choreographer for Petrushka but Nijinsky played the lead role in their combined style. Angular anti-classical gestures were used first by Fokine in Tannhӓuser in which Nijinsky danced the faun. Such anti-classicism might also be seen in the occasional lack of correspondence between the music and the pace of movement. This idea was an attempt to express the agitation of the soul in a relatively still body. Fokine had been influenced by Isadora Duncan in the same way that Massine was later to be influenced by expressionist dance. Massine also made great use of folk and national dances to extend the ballet repertoire.

Diaghilev’s conception of artistic unity was transmitted to his choreographers not only by the closeness with which they worked with composers, but also by advising them to study painting. Diaghilev told Fokine to look at the composition of Renaissance art to find aesthetic grouping of figures. He also introduced Fokine to eighteenth century painting at this time. Another example of taking visual inspiration from art history can be found in L’Apres-Midi D’Un Faune where, at the suggestion of Leon Bakst, poses from Greek vases were copied.

Part of the reason why Diaghilev was such a good organiser may well be his passionate interest, but lack of direct ability, in different art forms. This is most evident in music where you would think he would be strongest. Diaghilev had originally wanted to be a composer but was advised by Rimsky-Korsakov to give it up. At first Diaghilev was content to adapt established music for his ballet. Les Sylphides was constructed in this way by taking assorted pieces by Chopin. For example, the Waltz in C-Sharp Minor, Opus 64, Number 2, which formed the pas de deux between the fourth solo dance and the final ensemble. Adrian Stokes, describing his reaction to the ballet, wrote, ‘An art form, the classical dance, comes to meet another entity, the art of Chopin…For myself there is nothing as beautiful as a perfect performance of Sylphides by the Russian ballet with the Benois décor and the Diaghilev lighting.’

There was one exception in Diaghilev’s first season to his policy of using established music. This was a commission for a young Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, to write music for a ballet to be called The Firebird. Diaghilev met with some opposition to this idea, not least from the dancers who found Stravinsky’s music too rhythmically complex for dancing. However, Diaghilev pushed forward with the idea in order that the choreography of Fokine and the music of Stravinsky should be closely worked out together. This was not a unique concept; Ivanov, Fokine’s teacher, had been in favour of it and Fokine had worked closely with Tchaikovsky to create ‘Swan Lake’. But in ‘The Firebird’ there was the possibility of the closest mutual inspiration of choreographer and composer. Adrian Stokes, writing in Russian Ballets on the success of The Firebird, contends ‘that the universal appeal of modern Russian ballet lies in the fact that it has occasionally achieved the only complete form known to history of musical drama. Dramatic action or movement and music have consistently inspired the one the other in modern Russian ballet alone.’

Diaghilev went on to commission Stravinsky to write Pulcinella, Petrushka, Les Noces, Le Chant De Rossignol and others including The Right of Spring. But Stravinsky was by no means the only composer to find work with Diaghilev; others include Maurice Ravel, Richard Strauss, Erik Satie, Serge Prokofiev and Claude Debussy. Debussy, in particular, was interested in art forms other than his own. He was fond of painters such as Whistler, the French Symbolists and Turner (who he called the greatest creator of mystery in art). He was interested in theatre, novels like Edgar Alan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and especially poetry. L’Apres Midi D’Un Faune was inspired by a ‘musical poem’ by Mallarmé to which Debussy worked very closely. Mallarmé and Debussy conceived of music and poetry as being totally synchronous art forms.

On the visual side most people’s expectation of the design work would be that it was competent,  efficacious, perhaps even imaginative, but not ‘proper art’ like you’d see in a gallery. Such terminology artificially separating art and design is often fairly meaningless and unhelpful but in the context of the design work for the Russian Ballet it appears especially trite and unnecessary. Diaghilev organised many Russian art exhibitions outside of Russia which brought him into contact with many leading artists in Europe. Such was the ballet’s impact that Rodin championed Nijinsky’s choreography of L’Apres Midi D’Un Faune against it’s critics and celebrated it in his own sculpture with a statuette of Nijinsky dancing.

The painters Konstantin Korovin and Alexander Golovin had already merged the worlds of art and decoration in their sets for Sava Mamontov’s private opera company in Moscow which were regarded as being of the highest artistic value in Russia. In 1914 Diaghilev used two other Russian painters who achieved notoriety for developing cubist rayonism. There were Natalia Gontcharova and Mikhail Larionov. Goncharova made designs for The Firebird, Le Coq D’Or and for Liturgie. In the latter she drew on historical influences from Cimabue. Larionov was initially employed to supervise the choreography – something for which he was not experienced and that shows Diaghilev’s attitude to smashing rigid departmentalism in artistic trades.

Diaghilev’s next important acquisition of designer was Pablo Picasso. Picasso had been a founder member of the St. Petersburg dilettantes who wanted to unite music, design and choreography. Picasso produced designs for Le Train Bleu and others including Parade. This was originally the idea of the poet Jean Cocteau and used music by Erik Satie. Cocteau had wanted to incorporate voice and gramophone but it was decided against. Picasso’s designs were mostly cubist as he was developing this style with Georges Braque at the time. But he also uses clown images (which he mostly used in his paintings from 1905-6) and some Futurist influence is also evident plus the enigmatic style of Giorgio de Chirico who had designed sets for Le Bal.

In the same way that Picasso’s style was often eclectic in its fusion of influences, so Diaghilev’s use of artists spanned the whole spectrum of contemporary art styles from the time: cubism, French symbolism, surrealism, socialist realism and constructivism. Constructivism was associated with the Russian revolution but by the time Diaghilev used it in 1927, with Naum Gabo and Anton Pevsner, it was no longer politically or culturally aligned with the Russian state as it evolved under Stalin. Alexandre Benois, one of the chief designers, had been heavily influenced by Wagner’s ideas of artistic unity or ‘total work of art’ where different artistic disciplines combined. Picasso occasionally worked alongside Benois.

Although not a symbolist himself, Leon Bakst’s designs were used for Scherazade which had a storyline of the type that would appeal to French symbolists. Another friend of Picasso, the naïve painter Christopher Wood, designed the sets for Romeo and Juliet. The costumes were to be by Augustus John. However Max Ernst and Joan Miró eventually worked on Romeo and Juliet. Ernst worked on the designs and Miró on the costumes. Ernst and Miró’s involvement with the Ballets Russes made them unpopular with the other surrealists because they regarded ballet as a pastime of the bourgeoisie. One ballet was even planned to be based on William Blake’s Book of Job with music by Vaughn Williams but Diaghilev turned it down. Most of the ballet design work was by modern artists. Other modern painters who worked for Diaghilev include André Derain, Henri Matisse, Juan Gris, Marie Laurençin, Georges Braque, Henri Laurens, Maurice Utrillo, Pavel Tchelitchew and Georges Rouault.

Diaghilev’s involvement with the ‘world of art’, and his attempt to export Russian art in particular, never received the same acclaim as his facilitating the infusion of art into ballet. This is born out by Alexandre Benois, writing in his Reminiscences of the Russian Ballet, ‘Strange to say, of all these “export” items, the most decisive, stable and universal success fell to the Russian ballet, while our endeavours to ‘export’ Russian pictorial art did not get the success it deserved. Nevertheless, after the music, it was the painting that had the predominant part in our productions.’

The essence of Diaghilev’s ballets is choreography, but less so than in any previous ballet. The Firebird, and possibly Swan Lake, make important advances in bringing the normally subservient music on to an equal basis. In Les Sylphides, in fact, the choreography is subservient to the music. Superficially the costumes and backcloths might be expected to play the most low-key role, but by using artists of the highest calibre they take on a new dynamism. That is not to say that art invariably acts on an equal basis. That is not the question. The overall effect of the ballet relies on the contribution of all the parts, whether equal or not. In so far as a union is a whole resulting from a combination of parts, then, the Ballets Russes can accurately and to totally justifiably be seen as a union of the arts.

Copyright 1982 Adrian Annabel

Hendrik Petrus Berlage's Exchange Building

In 1881 he joined Th. Sanders in an Amsterdam architectural office. And from 1884 to 1889 they were partners.

This is their competition design of 1884 for the ‘Amsterdam Exchange’. It reached the semi-finals out of 119 entries which was when this version was submitted. The earlier version was much richer in ornament, particularly the interior. However, when asked to produce more detailed plans, they stripped down the extravagance to keep within the projected budget. The jury were not pleased with this meanness. The style could loosely be called Dutch Renaissance, which doesn’t tell you much; of more interest is the overtly Italianate style of the interior which Berlage seems to have picked up, not only from his training but, at first hand in Italy.

In 1886 Berlage said, ‘If we want to be honest, then we must admit that artists of the last half of the Nineteenth century do nothing but “copy”’ and that what we should be looking for is a new, non-derivative, style. Yet his designs of this period, such as ‘Vestibule of a Royal Palace’, ‘Design for a Painter’s Studio’ and especially his ‘Monument Historique’ mercilessly plunder past buildings.

In practice the buildings of the Sanders period are more sedate, less eclectic, than Berlage’s competition entries. ‘De Hoop’ 1883-4 was a working men’s coffee house. The façade was asymmetrical. The main innovation was in trying to limit the stone strips and plaster, which often covered buildings, to expose the brick it was made of, but they don’t seem to have tried too hard.

The Focke & Meltzer building, ‘Kalverstraat 152’ of 1884-6 is a small block of offices with a shop on the ground floor. The building is stone-faced and is covered in things like granite columns, bronze capitals, lunettes, a turret and so on. It even has wooden pediments in the bay window frames. That’s not to say it is a bad building, not that Berlage would eventually dispose of historical elements, but we may see them more effectively integrated into the structure of the building.

Berlage left Sanders in 1889 but it wasn’t until 1891 that he got his first commission. It was to build a house for Dr. E.D. Pijzel at 72 Van Baerlestraat. There’s not much stone used to disguise the building material, merely three short bands at basement level. Berlage had been working on stripping back superficial ornamentation as the design for the office building of Kerkhoven & Co. at Herengracht 115 shows. Although not as explicit as the Pijzel house it does show a movement towards less decoration and covering of the brick. The Pijzel house has no palatial pretensions; it’s comfortable being just a rather well-to-do town house.

Berlage then built two office buildings for ‘De Nederlanden Van 1845’ – one in 1894-5 and the other in 1895-6. The first one was in the Amsterdam Muntplein. The main feature is the rounded projection to house the staircase and terminating in a turret. As well as the wide, low arches for the shop windows, the general impression is vaguely historic and haphazard. Symmetry is lacking but some order is present. He was aiming for what he calls, ‘Unity in Plurality’. In other words, he felt that an irregular design that still holds together is better than a simple symmetrical and repetitive pattern. The second ‘De Nederlanden Van 1845’ in the Hague Kerkplein also had an irregular façade. For example the fenestration on one street differs from the other, especially at the top where on one side there is a photographer’s studio with dormer windows and on the other side there is a porter’s dwelling with a recessed balcony below an arcade. The staircase for this second building is similarly placed but does not project as obviously as it’s original design or the Muntplein office. This building is topped by a tower with a stepped gable. There is a fair degree of ornament on both buildings, largely by the sculptor Lambertus Zijl, for example the carved stone above the entrance to the Kerkplein branch. Both buildings were somewhat regularised when extensions were built: the Kerkplein in 1901 and 1909 and the Muntplein in 1911.

 In 1896 Berlage was appointed to give technical advice to the Amsterdam Exchange Committee. In October he managed to convince the committee that he should build it. The plan was in some ways similar to his original plan, in that it would be divided into three halls for stock, corn and produce. The Stock Exchange wanted to be separated from the others so he placed the postal, telegraph and telephone facilities, which they all had to have easy access, between the Stock Exchange and the Corn and Produce Exchanges which he placed side by side. The Stock Exchange, in any case, was bigger than the other two and, partly because it was allocated an irregular width of site. Berlage expressed satisfaction with the plot of land because its limited shape made for a more interesting design challenge requiring a concise individual solution. The plan was completed with adding surrounding offices and, at the main entrance, vestibules and cloakrooms above which was housed the Chamber of Commerce with its conference meeting room. The internal spaces are all rectangular except on the Eastern side where the plot widens. This is expressed in the exterior at the centre of the Eastern façade where three arched windows become gradually deeper in order to remain parallel with the other side of the building. Berlage allows the difference in shape between the two sides of the site to show in the room design but remain harmonious.

Generally the features that have been mentioned before can be seen to bear fruit in the exterior: asymmetry, towers, unadorned brick, a knowledge and awareness of historical forms but greater concision in the expression of internal spaces and with disposal of superfluous decoration. Berlage said, ‘I have made of it a question of principle. The main distribution is now expressed as much as possible in the silhouette’ and ‘Order is regularity, even where it appears not to be present, even where there are no so-called academic plans, also where we have nothing to do with symmetry, in the usual sense of the word.’

The ground floor of the interior of the Produce Exchange has wide arches, one for every two bays of the two arcades above with openwork balustrades. There are steel roof trusses below the double glass roof. The floor is in Java teak but the columns are connected by a strip of granite so that the columns don’t appear to stand on wood.

In the Stock Exchange the bases of the roof trusses are asymmetrical.

The Corn Exchange has different lighting requirements due to the need to judge samples of corn. This is expressed internally by straight girders and externally by raising roof to gain greater light on the Northern elevation.

In the Chamber of Commerce conference room the original Romanesque arch over the public gallery had to be split into three as cracks appeared when the building settled on its foundations. Despite carpeting the room also turned out to have a loud acoustic echo so curtains were placed half way up the wall and over the doors and the remaining wall spaces wainscoted.

Copyright Ade Annabel 1980