A discussion of two Futurist works

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, 1913 (cast 1972), bronze, 117.5 x 87.6 x 36.8 cm, Tate Modern, London.

Gino Severini (1883-1966), Suburban Train Arriving in Paris, 1915, oil on canvas, 105.1 x 132 cm, Tate Modern, London.

The two works chosen for discussion were conceived by Italian Futurist artists at the height of that movement in the 1910s. This essay will begin with a consideration of some of the more notable characteristics of these works with reference, where appropriate, to the Futurist context. The second half of the essay will provide a short discussion of the presentation and appreciation of these works with reference to the ideas of the Futurists relative to their situation in the modern museum environment.

Gino Severini’s Suburban Train Arriving in Paris is a representative example of the kinds of Futurist painting that appeared in the light of these artists’ exposure to Cubism after 1911. Severini was living in Paris when the 1910 Manifesto of Futurist Painting appeared (unlike Boccioni who was situated in Milan) and was therefore well placed to assimilate the ideas being pioneered by Braque and Picasso. It is well documented that Severini was a key influence on his colleagues in this respect - he apparently felt that the Manifesto showed ‘his fellow countrymen in a provincial light, and he induced them to pay more attention to Cubism’ (Murray, L. and P. eds Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, p. 389). Suburban Train Arriving in Paris demonstrates both a continuing Futurist commitment to the presentation of the iconography of modern world together with a concern to convey a sense of ‘dynamism’ or sensation of movement. Cubist techniques are present in terms of the familiar higgledy-piggledy occluded juxtapositions of square, rectangular and triangular shapes, representing views of roofs, sides of buildings, chimneystacks and grass-covered embankments. These fragmented planes in juxtaposition do much to convey the density of the Parisian urban environment and suggest the blur of buildings that might be encountered by a viewer from the train itself. Movement and direction of the train are expressed by the artists’s positioning of the various shapes in the lower and upper halves of the picture to produce diagonals, or ‘lines of force’ which incline like arrows towards the right hand edge of the painting.  The manner in which the buildings in the upper half of picture appear to lean to the left also contributes to the effect. Billows of smoke from the engine trail away in the opposite direction to the left hand side of the picture, heightening the sense of the train’s rightwards momentum. A red stop light marks the culminating point of this trajectory and is conspicuous both by its redness relative to the more sombre blues, browns and greens of the buildings and by its being the only circular object on the canvas. The word ‘KNEIPP’ is prominent in the painting and is instantly recognizable as a‘flatness’ inducing device, much associated with the Cubists (consider Braque’s 1911 Clarinet and a Bottle of Rum on the Mantelpiece for example). It also has a particular purpose here relative to the Futurists: The word is shown above a hand which appears to be pouring from a container of some kind, and according to the Tate Modern’s own caption (http://www.tate.org.uk/) refers to an advertisement for Malt Kneipp, a popular drink during this period. Such imagery is certainly in tune with the Futurists’ aim to convey the ubiquitous facets of modern urban life - in this case the advertising billboard, a symbol of emerging consumer society. The Tate Modern’s caption also suggests that the trains painted by Severini in Paris during this period were used to transport munitions and soldiers, suggesting a typically Futurist preoccupation with modern machinery in the context of war (see also the artist’s painting, Armoured Train, of the same year).

The second work, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, is by an artist who was primarily a painter, and produced sculpture only briefly between 1912 and 1914. Boccioni, along with Carlo Carra and Luigi Russolo was involved initially in the formulation of the two influential Futurist manifestos of 1910 Manifesto of the Futurist Painters and Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto.  He then published his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture in 1912 which set out his specific aims in regard to the medium. Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, like Severini’s Suburban Train Arriving in Paris, is concerned to convey a sense of the machine in forward motion - in this instance, a kind of human machine. The sculpture presents a remarkable impression of a powerful striding figure, in which specific human attributes are apparent in the general sense of two legs, a torso and a vague impression of a head, but otherwise the surface detail of the sculpture is rather abstract. While Severini’s work transfers Cubism to the domain of Futurist painting, Boccioni (as Jane Rye maintains in Futurism, p. 80) was the first to translate Cubist-Futurist ideas into sculptural form, the work appearing after a period of experimentation with Cubist techniques on canvas, most notably in the States of Mind triptych of 1911. Like Severini’s painting, Boccioni’s sculpture comprises a conglomeration of shapes, some rounded, others with sharper edges, which give the impression of a complex musculature. Parts of the sculpture are rather machine-like in appearance - for example, the short horizontal bar at the front of the figure’s ‘head’ - reminding one of Boccioni’s earlier more extreme fusions of objects with human forms in sculptures such as Fusion of a Head and a Window, 1912-13).  Boccioni wrote that:

A Futurist composition in sculpture will embody the marvellous mathematical and geometrical elements that make up the objects of our time. And these objects will not be placed next to the statue as explanatory attributes or dislocated decorative elements, but, following the laws of a new conception of harmony, will be embedded in the muscular lines of the body.

(quoted in Rye, Futurism, p. 81)

There are also reminiscences of elements familiar from earlier traditions of sculpture. For example the flame-like drapery billowing outward from the backs of lower part of the figure’s legs, which creates a strong sense of its dynamism (like the smoke in the Severini). When viewing the sculpture’s right hand side from the front, it is possible to discern the outline of a wing-like protrusion from the back of the upper half of the figure which reminds one of Greek Nike sculpture (the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace being the most famous example, and at least two commentators have drawn specific parallels with this work - see Golding and Humphreys). John Golding offers an interesting concluding point in this regard that Boccioni’s sculpture expresses the artist’s ‘recognition, however grudging, of an indigenous Italian and ultimately classicizing tradition, which he had originally rejected out of hand.’ (Golding, Boccioni: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, p. 25).

Golding’s foregoing point provides an appropriate position from which to begin to consider the presentation of these two works in the modern museum context. It is pertinent at this juncture to highlight certain ideas expressed in the original Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism of 1909. Marinetti’s belligerent statement that ‘We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind’ (Text 10, p. 88) and his later amplification of this point in the Manifesto presents a considerable indictment of museum culture:

Museums: cemeteries! … Identical, surely, in the sinister promiscuity of so many bodies unknown to one another. Museums: public dormitories  where one lies forever beside hated or unknown beings. Museums: absurd abattoirs of painters and sculptors ferociously slaughtering each other with colour-blows and line-blows, the length of the fought-over walls!

(Text 10, p. 89)

It is important, as Meyer Schapiro (Text 13) makes clear, to appreciate that the Futurist position on traditional art, and by implication, the value of the museum as expressed here, is unique to the social condition of Italy during this period and this is not therefore necessarily to be taken as a broad comment upon museum culture per se. Marinetti aims to downgrade the worship of past Italian art in order to clear the way for an art particular to a country in the process of modernisation - an art which is concerned with forward momentum. The Futurists still needed to reach their public by traditional means of exhibition and it seems that the situation here was rather like that of the Impressionists in the nineteenth century (whose work had a considerable influence upon the early Futurist movement) - namely the mounting of dedicated exhibitions to promote themselves (such as those of Milan in 1911 and London in 1912). Futurism in this sense may be seen as another instance of revolt against the academy - the ideological position of the Futurists precluded presentation of this art alongside Italy’s classical heritage. More importantly, the Manifesto makes clear that this was also an art designed to be ‘of the moment’. As Marinetti puts it: ‘When we are forty, other younger and stronger men will probably throw us in the wastebasket like useless manuscripts - we want it to happen!’ (Text 10, p.89). and in 1911, ‘We insist that a masterpiece must be burned with corpse of its author.’(quoted in Rye, p. 107). Presumably then the retrospective display of Futurist art seventy years later in major galleries around the world would not be exactly in keeping with this outlook.

    It is also interesting to consider the Futurist context of the two works discussed relative to the architecture of the Tate Modern building. The Futurist Manifesto on Architecture echoes Marinetti’s position on Italian museum culture in that those cities which outwardly embodied the great traditions of Italian art originating in the Renaissance - Rome, Florence and Venice - are rejected in favour of the relatively more industrialized environments of Milan (a centre of Futurist activity), Turin and Genoa. Antonio Saint’Elia’s exhibition of perspective drawings in 1914 entitled ‘The New City’ offered an idealized vision of modern building design through futuristic cityscapes, airports and power stations, the latter being of particular interest in regard to the Tate. Marinetti also wrote enthusiastically of the power station, for example in his 1914 Manifesto of Geometrical and Mechanical Splendour:

Nothing is more beautiful than a great humming power station, holding back the hydraulic pressures of a whole mountain range, and the electric power for a whole landscape, synthesized in control panels bristling with levers and gleaming commentators.

(quoted in Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, p. 125)

As an ex-power station, Tate Modern is perhaps a more fitting location than any other for housing art of the Futurists. It is a modernisation of a building that the Futurists themselves would have considered modern in the first place - in essence a post-Futurist structure. It retains some original features of Bankside power station, for example, its transformers which continue to operate behind the building’s southern wall, and the gantry crane in the Turbine Hall. Reminiscences like this of the Tate Modern’s industrial past ensure that it does not feel like a museum in the traditional sense. Frances Morris, in her essay ‘From then to now and back again’ (Tate Modern Handbook), notes that in the most recent reorganisation of the layout of the collection, there was a deliberate attempt to avoid the Alfred Barr-style canonisation of artistic movements and instead arrange works along the lines of juxtapositions which promote multiple readings and which are not necessarily understood diachronically.  Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, for example is found in the first room of the ‘States of Flux’ section and is shown alongside a single work from a contrasting Pop Art context, Roy Lichtenstein’s Whaam! (1963). Morris describes the impact thus:

Both are violent emotionally charged images of technology and power - as well as complex responses to the glories and horrors of war - yet profoundly different images for profoundly different eras.

(Morris ed., The Tate Modern Handbook, p. 27)

One is not obliged or inclined in these circumstances to read this or any of the works on display in the Tate Modern as inevitable period-specific steps towards the present condition of art, but rather as objects uniquely expressive of their ideologies. The message of the Futurists in this context thus remains in its own way, contemporary.

Bibliography

Banham, Reyner (1980) Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, London, Architectural Press, 1960.

Coen, Ester (1988) Umberto Boccioni, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Golding, John (1985) Boccioni Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, London, Tate Gallery Publications.

Hanson, Anne Coffin (1995) Severini futurista: 1912-1917, New Haven, Yale University Art Gallery.

Harrison, Charles and Wood, Paul, eds (2003) Art in Theory 1900-2000, Oxford, Blackwell.

Morris, Frances, ed. (2006) Tate Modern: The Handbook, London, Tate Publishing.

Murray, Linda and Peter eds (1989) Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists, London, Penguin.

Humphreys, Richard, (1999) Movements in Modern Art: Futurism, London, Tate Gallery Publishing.

Open University (2007) AXR 272 The art history residential school: Offprints book, Milton Keynes, Open University.

Read, Herbert (1964) Modern Sculpture, London, Thames and Hudson.

Rye, Jane, (1972) Futurism, London, Studio Vista.

Wittkower, Rudolf (1991) Sculpture, London, Penguin.