Abstract Art: Futurist influence, Severini, Russian Rayonism

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The most sympathetic are likely to have misgivings about Futurism, for such a mixture of bluff and self-advertisement is hard to reconcile with our lofty conception of the work of art or the artist's mission. But I believe there was something compelling, something that went deeper than it realised, beneath the loud-mouthed huckstering of futurfascismo. Indeed a reading of the first Futurist Manifesto of 1909 is enough to make us aware that the bloated rhetoric embodied an idea of genuine value.

Shade of Final Red Art Print
Kostolny, K.
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Stripped of its trappings, Futurism can be seen to have been inspired by the generous ambition of bringins life into art, of bringing about a closer union between them, while rejecting all dead art in favour of living life itself, the natural creator of new forms. Futurism also has other claims to our gratitude. By making such a noise, such a stir in so many countries and exciting critics and journalists in so many capitals of Europe, it did more than any other single movement to free art from the traditional forms of the past and, as a result, to open the public's mind, all over the world, to a totally new art.

Here again, abstract art was proclaimed in various statements to be found in a number of manifestoes. The painters were demanding lines of force and Boccioni wrote "We must assert that the sidewalk can find its way on to the dining-room table, that your head can cross the road all by itself, and that at the same time your own reading-lamp can weave a huge spider's web from one house to another with its chalky beams. We must assert that the whole visible world must make its impact on us, fusing itself with us and creating a harmony dictated by creative intuition alone." He also said "We must open up the figure or shape and fill it full of the environment in which it has its being." But it was Severini rather than Boccioni who was to come closest to abstraction, with his manifesto written in Rome during the winter of 1913-1914.

Futurism has left few works of any importance by way of giving a plastic justification of its programme. Perhaps its real creativeness lay in its influence on men's minds. However Severini's work prior to 1914 deserves close attention, especially his series of Dancing-girls painted in 1913. These are abstract compositions made up of graceful lines and delicate colours, usually applied in the pointilliste manner favoured by the Post-Impressionists. He gave up his abstraction only in order to revert to a kind of academicism which might perhaps be Italian but has nothing modern about it. He returned to abstract art only after 1945, in the same way as Picabia and others. He is now painting compositions in which harsh, abrupt lines are set against flat stretches of skilfully modulated colour. These canvases are also called Dance or Dancing-girls, though they are very unlike those of the pre-1914 phase.

Among the remaining Futurist painters mention must be made of Balla, who began painting abstracts in 1913, and of a few works by Carlo Carra and De Soffici, and especially of the later canvases by Boccioni, the great hope of Futurist painting and sculpture, who died after falling from a horse in 1916. Later, when Futurism degenerated into 'Aero-painting', the only one to continue on abstract lines was Prampolini.

The many exhibitors at the Blue Horseman included a few Russians, of whom Michael Larionov and Nathalie Gontcharova are worth recalling for their share in the first stirrings of abstract painting in Russia.

In 1909 Larionov, in Moscow, was as close to abstraction (viz, The Glass) as Braque and Picasso were to be three or four years later. He gave his first lecture on Rayonism at the A. Kraft Studio in Moscow in 1910. Two Rayonist canvases were exhibited at the same time, namely Larionov's The Boulevard which was mainly in greens and yellows, and Gontcharova's Cats, mainly yellow and black. In the following year both of them painted a long series of works the dominant characteristic of which was in a large number of straight lines either parallel ( Larionov, The Beach, 1911), or meeting ( Larionov, Portrait of Gontcharova, 1912) or else flying off in every direction. These represent the zenith of Rayonism, which was destined to be a short-lived movement.

Larionov was a restless artist, and Goncharova was equally versatile. In Moscow at that time artists were expected to invent a new form of art every 48 hours. Larionov painted soldiers and flowers, and even anecdotal paintings with inscriptions on them, while Goncharova excelled in many different fields, painting cavases covered with numbers, as well as streetscenes that anticipated Dr. Caligari. In 1914 all these Russian experiments were shown in Paris at Paul Guillaume's, a laudatory preface being written for the catalogue by Apollinaire. We are now concerned only with the Rayonist canvases. These are among the very first abstract paintings ever made and for this reason they are of considerable importance. (11) After 1914 Goncharova and Larionov, who were great friends of Diaghilev, did most of their work for the ballet and thus fell outside the main movement in painting. Nevertheless an exhibition of the two painters' Rayonist works was held in Rome in 1917, when an explanatory brochure entitled Radiantismo was produced for the occasion. Alfred Barr found an unexpected ancestor of Rayonism, in Leonardo da Vinci. In his remarkable work Cubism and Abstract Art he quoted, in this connection, a sentence of Leonardo's: "The air is full of an infinite number of radiating straight lines, which cross and weave together without ever quite coinciding; it is these which represent the true form of every object's essence."

One painter who was to be of considerable importance emerged from the Larionov group, namely Casimir Malevitch.

Nothing could look easier: all you have to do is to take a ruler, draw a square on a sheet of paper and black in its surface area with a pencil. To offer this 'discovery' as a work of art is obviously meant as a joke? By no means: it was an act of faith which was to have unforeseen consequences. It was an end and a beginning, the end of one form of painting and the beginning of a new art.

According to Malevitch art is an additional, extraneous element which thrusts itself into life and thought and evades all dialectical reasoning. This element used to be unconscious and was diffused throughout the world and in man himself, always mingled with many other elements. That is why there was never any pure art. But the time has come for making it visible and independent and ridding it of all its parasites. For half a century this eventuality had been prepared for by Impressionism and Cubism: all that remained was to learn how to read shapes and how to interpret and analyse them.

The book he wrote with the help of the advance-guard Russian poets and which was published in Moscow in 1915 was nothing more nor less than an attempt to isolate the datum or element of art itself. For such an operation to be successful the simplest element had to be found. Malevitch saw that element to be the geometrical square, patiently blacked in with a pencil.

Why the perfect square? Because it is the clearest assertion of man's will, the epitome of his mastery over nature. Why should it be blacked in with pencil? Because that is the humblest act the sensibility can perform.

Active nature and passive nature thus find themselves brought together and reconciled.

Malevitch gave the name Suprematism to this new art and exhibited the first Suprematist drawing, the famous square, at the Target exhibition in Moscow in 1913. In the same year he produced a series of other drawings of elemental forms, all in pencil. The first form to emerge from the square was the circle, then came the placing of two rectangular planes in the form of a cross. Progressively more complex compositions were developed in which there appeared the trapezium, the triangle, then the broken line, the curve, and finally the blurred, shaded-off line. This took four years.

Malevitch had to evolve quickly in order to reach that point. He was born at Kiev in 1878, and began painting in the post-Impressionist manner and after that as a Fauve. He soon came under Picasso's influence and became the leader of the Russian Cubists who included Pevsner, Puni, Alexandra Exter, Lyubov Popova and Udalzova. After 1911 cubo-futurist elements were to be seen in his work, which in other respects showed striking affinities to that of Fernand Léger (The scissors-sharpener, Woman carrying buckets, both painted in 1912). It was from that stage that he made the leap into Suprematism. When abstract art fell politically into discredit in 1922, Malevitch left Moscow and became Professor at the Academy in Leningrad. He contrived to go to Germany in 1926, and at the Bauhaus made arrangements for the publication of his book Die Gegenstandslose Welt (The Objectless World). This remarkable work is the only existing source of information on his art and thought.

Although Malevitch was the first painter in the world to use pure geometrical forms, it must be admitted that the Cubists had made everyone vaguely conscious of the idea, even if it was still undefinable. Without having even heard of Malevitch, in 1915 Hans Arp at Zürich and Magnelli in Florence were both making abstract compositions based entirely on geometrical forms.

In the following year Sophie Taüber, also at Zürich, composed a number of smallish works -- drawings in coloured crayon -- based on a strictly horizontal-vertical movement, thus anticipating Neo-Plasticism.

At the same time, behind the lines in Holland, Mondrian and Van Doesburg came together and began preparing their review, De Stijl.

Thus at the very same time, in four different parts of the world which were separated by frontiers that were closed on account of the war, very dissimilar artists who had all heard of Parisian Cubism were reaching exactly similar conclusions.

At Zürich the beautiful experiments of Sophie Taüber and Arp were soon overwhelmed by the Dadaist uproar, which was unlikely to favour such a pure and semi-religious art. Sophie Taüber, who was too retiring and modest to assert or defend herself, carried on working almost in secret until her death in 1943, always leaving the limelight to Hans Arp, whom she married in 1921. Few people knew or appreciated Sophie Taüber's work during her lifetime. One had to know the Arps well before one was admitted to Sophie's studio, in their house at Meudon where they lived after 1928. She rarely exhibited anywhere, although she took part in Circle an Square and helped Arp and Van Doesburg with the decorations for the various rooms in the 'Aubette' in Strasburg, a fine achievement which has since been destroyed. Sophie Taüber's works has grown in prestige since her death, revealing as it does such an inner store of honesty, candour and quiet strength. Her work has an extraordinary variety, but is always sober and full of integrity.

In 1918 and 1919 Arp, together with Sophie Taüber, made some horizontal-vertical collages out of paper which they cut with a bookbinder's guillotine. Then he went off in another direction and began exploiting a curved, supple line, that seemed to come as naturally to his hand as the fruit to a tree.

The contribution of Zürich Dadaism to abstract art lies mainly in the 'woods' by Arp which appeared in the review Dada or were used as illustrations for books by Hülsenbeck and Tristan Tzara.

Marcel Janco made abstract reliefs in a very personal style, most of which are now lost. Finally, Viking Eggeling in 1917 and Hans Richter in the following year produced some drawings which can also be credited to Dadaism. Late in 1918 Richter took Eggeling with him to Germany. It was there, in 1919, that Eggeling composed his famous strip-drawings on simple themes, which he called Horizontal-Vertical Mass, followed in 1920 by the strips for his Diagonal Symphony, a rather more complex theme of which he made a film in 1921.

Richter's output ran parallel with that of Eggeling who was seven years his senior. In 1919 he made his Prelude, the orchestration of a theme which was developed in eleven drawings. In the same year as Eggeling he also produced his first abstract film, Rhythm 21, screen orchestration in time and space. Eggeling died in 1925. After that Richter at first turned to more practical activities, and later to Surrealism, his Dreams that money can buy ( 1947) containing some beautiful abstract sequences.

It was in Holland, the last of the four great centres of geometrical abstraction, that this form of expression was to find its least compromising and best-reasoned formulation. This is not surprising, since it was in the case of Mondrian that the transition from figurative art to pure geometry took the longest to achieve, lasting from 1912 to 1917. It was only logical that he should be the one to state and explore the problem. Geometrical abstraction achieved its most complete and thorough form in a properly explained and demonstrated use of the horizontal and vertical, with only three primary colours (red, blue and yellow) supported by three 'noncolours', black, white and grey. It was left to Mondrian to work out the system as a whole, and to expound it in a few texts which have become classics thanks to their clarity of exposition. The first number of De Stijl was published by Van Doesburg in October 1917. This contained a long article on doctrinal lines by Mondrian, some essential parts of which are worth reproducing. This initial statement was followed by many others, notably, two years later, by a long platonic dialogue which is beyond doubt one of the most convincing essays of the 'heroic' period of abstract art. It certainly deserves a place alongside the famous works of Kandinsky and Malevitch. Mondrian continued to write almost as much as he painted for the rest of his life. In French he published Néoplasticisme ( Léonce Rosenberg, 1920) as well as contributing to several reviews. After his death an important collection of his English essays was published in New York ( Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art, Wittenborn, 1st edn. 1945, 3rd edn. 1951).

But we must not anticipate. To return to Holland in 1917, working with Mondrian and Van Doesburg were the painters Huszar and Van Der Leck (though the latter was not long in leaving the group), the painter and sculptor Vantongerloo, the poet Antonie Kok and a number of architects. Their literary contributions to the review all pointed in the same direction, all upholding the same central idea. But it was Mondrian who produced the most extensive and solidly-constructed writings during the first four years. At the same time Van Doesburg published, alongside his review De Stijl, several short but very interesting works which have never been translated from the Dutch. But he was first and foremost a man of action, both quarrelsome and fiendishly energetic. His bustling temperament made him poles apart from Mondrian, but he was one of those individualists who can serve to complement another individualist, with the result that the two of them made an ideal team, the one slowly ruminating and gathering material which the other wanted to explode like a bomb. That is how, through the medium of the little Dutch review, geometrical abstraction was to impose itself on a substantial part of the world, in spite of the fact that it was in its narrowest and most meagre form, at first sight the form which seemed most meaningless, in other words Neo-plasticism.

I was already familiar with these ideas and experiments when I happened to pass through Berlin at the end of 1922 and heard Marinetti give a talk at the Futurist Centre there. After a few scathing remarks about Goethe this brilliant mountebank began to expound his ideas on painting and the arts in general. Dynamism and art, he argued, were one and the same thing. Painting means giving life to a plane surface, and the life of a plane surface can never be intense enough, since speed is the only criterion by which any work of art can stand or fall. He wanted art and life to be like the waves of the sea, clashing and struggling together, all with their distinct individuality. In order to understand both life and art, it would be enough to watch the waves unfolding and folding on the beach in a kind of delirious anarchy . . . In these words I recognized the essence of Futurism, insisting that every man and every day should face a different task. What Marinetti was proposing was the very opposite of Neo-plasticism. That opposition is still going on around us, for everywhere we can see both directed fury and calm organization. Style on the one hand, and a human cry on the other, will no doubt always be the two poles of art.