Italy: From Futurism Towards Abstract Painting
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As early as 1929, at the time of the exhibition in the Pesaro Gallery in Milan, it was obvious that Futurism was moving towards Abstraction. Outstanding examples of this trend were Prampolini with his Immagini Astratte (Abstract Images), Munari and Fillia. A tendency towards Abstraction had already been discernible in the work of the first generation of Futurists: though the object had not been eliminated, colour had had a plastic value of its own independent of representation and every kind of local tone had been abandoned. At the Lacerba exhibition in Florence in 194 not only had Boccioni exhibited Dimensioni Astratte (Abstract Dimensions), but Balla had also shown abstract tendencies, while Prampolini Le Linee-Forza hello Spazio (Energy-Lines in Space), suggested by the speed of a car, had displayed a decidedly autonomous use of colour.
Prampolini joined the Futurists as early as 1913 when he was still a young man and had been expelled for "non-conformity" from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome. He is usually classed with the second generation of Futurists, for whereas most of the first generation abandoned the idiom fairly soon, he always followed his own coherent line and became the liveliest personality of the second phase, though tending towards Abstraction. The nucleus of the second generation consisted of Munari, Tato, Depero, Fillia and Dottori. Bruno Munari, with his inexhaustible supply of imaginative invention, became one of the inspirers of A0bstraction; Fortunato Depero's mechanical stylizations tended towards description, while Fillia, a polemist and theoretician, rarely rose above pre-established formulas. Gerardo Dottori, lyrical and contemplative in temperament, original and tireless in his search for rhythms in space, painted his Incendio di Città (City Fire) in 1925 -- a work highly representative of the second Futurist phase.
But by far the most outstanding personality on a European level was Prampolini. Ungaretti wrote a perceptive article about him for the exhibition at the Twenty-seventh Venice Biennale. "Whoever meets Enrico Prampolini and is the object of his searching, inspired gaze, must inevitably feel in the presence of someone destined to have his say at all costs. . . ."
This will "to have his say" prompted Prampolini to write a whole series of manifestoes and to develop some of the original principles of Futurism in the direction of "absolute synthesis". Ungaretti sees Prampolini's images as "poetry". Perhaps we should give this word its original meaning of "making" or "producing", for in Prampolini there is a constant inventive compulsion; the image is in a continual state of becoming; the Futurist creed which he developed so coherently has kept him in a state of continual invention and pure production. The traditional idea of certain things being "beautiful" is a myth for Prampolini because anything can be made "beautiful" by the interaction of relationships. Space does not exist in itself but is a relationship which is transformed into the fourth dimension. Though first and foremost a painter, Prampolini is one of the most original scenographers of our time, and also a sculptor.
So we find him moving on from Futurism to the contemporary problem of abstract art. His paintings become "objects" in themselves: they are not drawn from nature-they are "Nature". Yet Prampolini was against Kandinsky: he believed not in "pure" painting but in "absolute" painting.
Prampolini has contributed something new to the concept of decoration and the applied arts. For him decoration is not mere ornamentation but a part of everyday life, something active, not merely aesthetic but practical. Here we see one of the Futurist tenets -- that works of art are not only to be looked at, but to be lived -- pushed to the extreme. All this represents the most modern and living aspect of Prampolini -- the one that drove him to produce work in many different media, whether porous, rough or shiny and in colours like sulphur: it is not to be looked at; it is life. The artist has become a demiurge with outstanding craftsmanship constantly refreshed on the intellectual side. The works of his last bioplastic series are a clear example of this tendency.
But Prampolini had another more traditional aspect, typified by his series of Metamorfosi Biologiche (Biological Metamorphoses) and Maternita Cosmiche (Cosmic Maternities) -- emblematic images under Metaphysical influence, at times showing signs of compromise and extraneous stylization. It was his decisive break with the contemplated image that marked his return to Futurist principles and the branching out into functional Abstraction, not as a result of decadence -- as was the case with the Dadaists -- but as a further outlet for his idiom and his new materials.
Prampolini was at all times a European. Up to his sudden death in 1956 he consistently sought and invented new idioms suited to the character of modern society.
In any account of abstract art in Italy it is necessary to distinguish between two trends -- the one towards absolute lyricism and the pursuit of form; the other, which is nearer to the neo-Plastic artists of the Bauhaus movement, towards what Argan calls "the art of pure perception". No clearcut division can be made between the two trends, as often they stem from the same international roots and have undergone the same influences.
Behind the first tendency lie our early traditions -- the fourteenth century, Piero delta Francesca, Paolo Uccello -- but considered exclusively in terms of rhythm and colour. This involves no creation of "objects" nor any tendency to applied art, but has Cubist and Metaphysical undertones. This sort of Abstraction, as we shall see, is capable of being figurative, and sooner or later its Italian exponents -- Soldati, Licini and Magnelli -- had to come into contact with Kandinsky and Klee.
The second group owes much more to Van Doesburg, Mondrian and Dutch neo-Plasticism in general, as well as to the experiments in industrial art made by the Bauhaus movement. Here the emphasis is not so much on lyricism as on the detached creation of pure autonomous rhythms to be perceived independently of any sort of representation whatsoever. Besides Prampolini, Munari was a Futurist who took this line. Interest lies not in the image but in the relationship of rhythms with their environment. There is no distinction between drawing, painting, functional rhythms and lines, and art as applied to industry. We find Bruno Munari, for instance, turning to applied graphic art, and Luigi Veronesi -- one of the first painters to follow this current -- seeking answers to the vital problems of modern society along Bauhaus lines, while Mauro Reggiani, Mario Radice and Manlio Rho pursue, in architecture as elsewhere, that absolute strictness of composition that can be grasped with pure perception.
Since the war the new abstract group of the Libreria Salto in Milan has adopted for its own kind of painting the name Concrete Art -- already used by Kandinsky, Van Doesburg, Mondrian, Max Bill and the Swiss and Argentine schools. They felt the distinction to be necessary "owing to the fact that Italian critics had taken to using the term 'abstract art' to designate either purely imaginative work, or neo-Cubist breaking-down of the object, or neo-Expressionist distortion" (from the notes in the fourth catalogue of the Concrete Art series published by the Libreria Salto, October 1949).
Thus, in 1948 Soldati, Gillo Dorfles, Monnet, Munari and Veronesi founded the Movimento di Arte Concreta (Movement of Concrete Art), commonly known as MAC, which subsequently became the Italian end of the French Espace.
And now we must clear up another difficulty. There has been too much insistence on the distinction between "abstract" art and "figurative" art -- a distinction which is in fact superficial. The object, as remembered, can be present and yet be worked out in an anti-Romantic and abstract way, as happens in many pictures by Soldati or Licini; just as a non-figurative work can have Naturalist origins.
So if a dualism does exist, it is not between "abstract" and "figurative" painting but between attitudes of mind and sensibility. On the one side we find the detached painter, objective, mathematical, intellectual, interested in pure relationships, setting out from rational principles, insulating his work from emotion and avoiding any intensity of expression. Whether he be "abstract" or "figurative" he is always in danger of falling for the mechanical pre-established formula.
On the other side we find the more restless painters who feel rhythm with cursive compulsion. Here the impulse, more or less filtered by the intellect, loses none of its immediacy and the effective charge can lead to intense expression. Whether "figurative" or not, the limitation of these painters may lie in the very fleetingness of the moment of inspiration -- however intense; the limitation, in short, of the Romantic principle as such.
But between these two extremes there is scope for infinite variety -- just as there is also scope for a "phoney" type of "modernism", whether abstract or figurative. By this I mean that certain forms can seem "modern" but, owing to the lack of true personal participation on the part of the painter, they are merely academic in a new way; or again a formula may be "modern" while the contents are traditional and Naturalistic.
In the history of abstract art in Italy the Milione Gallery in Milan has been the most active cultural centre. It exhibited gouaches and drawings by Léger in 1932, and the first exhibition of abstract art in the whole country took place there a year later with a one-man show of Atanasio Soldati. In 1934 the Milione Gallery exhibited works by Kandinsky for the first time, and there followed an exhibition of Vordemberge-Gildewart presented by Grohman. At the end of that year Bogliardi, Ghiringhelli and Reggiani exhibited their abstract work and issued a declaration that can be viewed as the first manifesto of Italian abstract art. "We are favourably disposed towards the classical cycle, but obviously there can be no question of arches or columns now. . . . We are particularly concerned with technics and science because they clear the ground . . . formidable collaborators, they bring us face to face with a wonderfully exact reality. . . ."
The next year, 1935, Josef Albers and Luigi Veronesi exhibited wood engravings, Lucio Fontana abstract sculpture, Soldati and then Osvaldo Licini abstract painting.
On the occasion of his exhibition Licini wrote: "Until four years ago I did my best to produce good pictures from reality, but then I began to have doubts. . . . Painting is the art of colour and form freely conceived; it is also an act of creation; and, unlike architecture, it is an irrational art governed by the imagination. In other words, it is poetry. So, four years ago, I began inventing my pictures." He concluded with the words: "We intend to prove that geometry can become feeling."
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