were sensed. Their most important statement, and one which, because of
the dearth of significant art criticism, had not previously been set
down, is that the person who contemplates a picture should not feel
himself a mere observer of the events taking place in the painted work,
but one of the principal actors in the canvas. In illustration such
empathy is impossible unless the work is wholly and ultimately
synthesised as to volume, colour, line, direction, size and subject. No
such work has ever been produced because all the dramatic uses of these
elements have never been understood by one man. That there are hundreds
of canvases which entrain us into their ramifications is indisputable,
but the aesthetic emotion we feel in them has to do with formal line
alone, not with the perfect concord of line, form and subject. Marinetti
and his group have striven earnestly to accomplish this difficult feat,
but in every instance have failed. The explanation of their theories has
far more to do with the emotion their pictures arouse in us, than has
the actual application of these theories to canvas. They state that
perpendicular, undulating and worn-out lines attached to hollow bodies
express languor and discouragement; that confused, somersaulting lines,
straight or curved, confounded into suggested gestures of appeal or
haste, express the chaotic agitation of sentiments; that horizontal,
jerky lines which brutally cut into semi-obscured faces, and bits of
broken, irregular landscape give us the sensation of one departing on a
journey. But while all this may be true, it has nothing to do with the
aesthetic emotion which in painting grows entirely out of the dynamic use
of the elements inherent in that art.
The desire of many modern painters and theorists to introduce into their
own art emotions derived from the other arts results, first, from the
modern ambition to intensify each of the arts, and secondly, from
certain observations in aesthetic fundamentals, which have led artists
little by little toward a vague realisation that the basis of all the
arts is identical. But in this synthesis of the arts there is nothing
new. The Futurists, in attempting to fuse poetry and painting, are many
decades too late to lay claim to originality. Numerous attempts--all of
them failures--have been made along similar lines. Wagner's was the most
conspicuous. Then there were Sadikichi Hartmann, Madame Mary Hallock,
Rene de Ghil, Arthur Rimbaud and recently Alexander Scriabine, all of
whom commingled the different arts in an attempt to produce intensity.
Commendable as these efforts for a hybrid expression may be, they are a
futile expenditure of energy until the arts have been more precisely
understood; and it is worth noting that those who have tried to coalesce
them have been, in nearly every instance, the ones who understand none
of them profoundly. The Futurists prove no exception. Their
misapprehension of painting is analogous to that of Degas who, in
picturing the dance, imagined that the spectator, by contemplating its
static representations, would experience its rhythm.
The emotion of movement which the Futurists wish to call up can never be
produced by disordered and tumbling lines. The effect is chaos. Movement
grows out of the placement and displacement of volumes. It is a result
of rhythmic organisation. We are conscious of movement in a human body
when a position or pose is shifted, and we are conscious of it _only
during the process of shifting_. Should we look at a body in one
position, close our eyes during its change of attitude, and then behold
it completely altered, we should not experience a sensation of action at
all. But if the static points of movement present themselves to us with
sufficient rapidity they produce the effect of continuous movement, as
in the simulacra of the kinematograph. Otherwise we record merely the
result of the change of position--not the act of changing itself. In a
Michelangelo statue we see at first glance only a solid rigid mass; but
the moment we begin mentally to reconstruct the form, we sense the
opposition of volume-direction and the delicate poise of weights which
overhang hollows and which are proportionally exaggerated in order to
give a greater emotion of struggling forces. Then, our will guiding our
eye, the mind translates to us physically the statue's expansion and
contraction, the withheld completion of absolute balance, the
approximation to equilibrium: and it is only after we have passed
through discords and struggles and complicated developments--in other
words, after we have striven for physical completion--that the finality
comes as a satisfying consummation, like the knowledge of a tremendous
task, long laboured over, brought to perfect and final accomplishment.
Is not the desire for an emotion, so completely reflective of the very
undercurrents of life's forces, worthier of an artist's aim than the
desire for the momentary sensation that someone is going away or that
one is looking on at a dance? The emotional depictions of such episodes
are at best but remote reflexes of reality. Our participation in a
dance, for instance, is infinitely more intense than the Futurists'
kinematic representation of it. In the actual experience one not only
sees chaos but can touch the swirling forms, blink at the lights, smell
the perfumes and hear the noise and music. In other words, one is moved
to sensation or feeling by the physical forces themselves. To the true
artist these physical forces are only his weapons, never his ends. And
it is only through their intelligent use in the production of form that
aesthetic emotion results. The superficial portrayal of effects, whether
mental or physical, can never lead us inward to their causes. Any result
is simply the dead end of a force, like the sea-weed a submarine volcano
has thrown to the surface of the ocean. Art, being the causative force
itself, should bring about the upheaval whose final manifestation is
complete and satisfying. In great painting the spectator is led through
every step of kinetic energy from chaos to order. When he emerges he has
undergone a colossal dynamic experience. After all, energy is the
ultimate physical reality.
[Illustration: DYNAMISM D'UNE AUTO by RUSSOLO]
The Futurists, it is true, strove sedulously for dynamism. Several of
the titles of their later canvases contain the word. But their
consistent misinterpretation of Leibniz's doctrine led them into the
most superficial statements of the laws of force. By confusing action
with movement and tempo with rhythm, and by constantly juggling causes
and effects, they never arrived at a basic exposition of energy. In
contemplating their pictures we experience only visual confusion. There
is no movement because there is no static foil, no consummation. There
is no dynamism because there is no suggestion of the inherent force
which all substance involves. Let us assume the hypothesis that it is
possible to photograph a kinematic force in movement. The Futurists'
pictures wherein the representation of dynamism is attempted, as in
Dynamisme d'une Auto, there is a series of these hypothetical
photographs each of which has caught a segment of immobility, as any
snap-shot catches some static pose of a moving object. By
super-imposing each of these images successively on the other the
Futurists imagine that a state of action is created. But even were this
the case the picture would be innocent of dynamism. Again, Futurism
claims not to paint maladies but their symptoms and results. Admittedly
therefore it works against its own gropings for dynamism, for symptoms
and results are the outgrowth of causes, and as such can have only an
objective interest. Would the Futurists maintain, for instance, that, by
portraying a head from many viewpoints on the same canvas, they can give
us the emotion of a head turning? Even were it possible thus to extend
the contemplation of pictures into time, the effect of a series of
dissimilar profiles would be no more convincing than that obtained by a
slowly moving cinematograph film. Should we grant that by such a device
the effect of movement resulted, it would depend entirely upon which end
of the movement the eye alighted first whether the head moved one way or
the other. And if the picture was a perfect organisation the change of
direction would throw every part of the canvas out of gear.
Considering Futurism purely from the standpoint of illustration we
still are unable to justify its aims. In painting a picture of a person
setting forth upon a journey from a railway station, the Futurist
represents the departure by means of horizontal, fleeting and jerky
lines, half-hidden profiles, the station's interior, the engine, etc.
Then by introducing into the canvas bits of landscape and other
incidentals which depict the thoughts of the person about to depart, the
artist endeavours to call up the same mental state in the spectator of
the canvas. The associative process of the human mind, however, makes
such a proceeding unnecessary, because in beholding a simple, even an
academically pictured, scene of someone entering a train amid the
confusion and haste of passengers and guards, the spectator
involuntarily calls up the landscape running past, the telegraph poles
jerking by, the clanging of the bell, the shouts of attendants, the
shuffling of many feet and the hiss of steam. In setting these things
down the Futurists succeed only in limiting a highly imaginative
person's thoughts by restricted visions of objectivity, just as in the
theatre a producer, by placing many _papier mache_ trees and rocks and
fibre grass about the stage, circumscribes the onlooker's imagination.
The Greeks, whose theatrical presentations were sufficiently intense to
evoke an imaginative _milieu_, did not need factitious properties: but
the theatrical Belascos must necessarily make their settings absolute
and meticulously realistic. A Tintoretto needs no such tricks to
strengthen its emotive power; but the Futurists, unable to move us by
dynamic canvases, need recourse to dramatic tricks. At most their
pictures could be significant only as auxiliaries to literary texts.
The Futurists' contention that all modern art should have as a point of
departure an entirely modern sensation is wholly tenable, but they
mistake the fact that a modern sensation is merely the sensation which
pertains specially to the contemporary man. It has nothing to do
innately with the delineation of an automobile or an aeroplane. The
modern aesthetic spirit goes deeper. It implies the expression of an
emotion by use of the latest refinements and researches in the medium of
an art. In painting it is not limited to the illustrative portrayal of a
novelty. Were this the case any painter who confined himself to the
picturisation of the latest dreadnaughts and the highest skyscrapers
would be the pioneer of a new expression. In order to express himself in
a modern manner, an artist needs only to have divested himself of all
predilections for antiquity, to have subdued all conscious desire to
will himself into the bodies of an ancient people, and to have seen the
error of the childish maxim that there is nothing new under the sun. Any
painter free from tradition, with a comprehension of aesthetic movement
and an ability to apply it, will produce canvases which, though they
have no radical theory behind them, will be as distinctly modern as
those of the Futurists. Modernity has to do with methods and mental
attitude. It is in no wise related to subject-matter.
Consider, for instance, the famous Futurist statement that "a running
horse has not four legs, but twenty." Then contemplate Balla's picture,
Dog and Person in Movement, to which this theory is applied. Neither the
dog nor the person seems to move at all. They are static figures with
blurred triangles resembling lace where their legs should be. Such a
juvenile artifice to give the effect of movement is certainly not modern
or even novel. Long prior to the Futurists, caricaturists and comic
journalistic draughtsmen sought to express action by placing circular
lines round the wagging tails of dogs or by drawing long sweeping lines
behind a swiftly moving figure to indicate from what direction it had
come and the rapidity of locomotion. Such inventions are outside the
field of aesthetics. They have to do only with slow optical action. But
the modification of objects in contact with others, of which Cezanne
wrote, is a profound postulate of organisation. It creates a poise of
volume which causes us to experience an emotion of movement. The
Futurists' contrivance of endowing a horse with twenty legs precludes
any possibility of their calling up forcibly a running horse, for only
the legs seem to move, as of a horse in a treadmill. Save for the
pictorial side of a picture so presented there is nothing in it of
interest to us: and our memory of an actual horse clashes with the
vision of a multipedalian one.
The Futurists' statement, however, that a picture's lines should
subjectively drag the spectator into the centre of the canvas, where he
will personally experience the rhythmic interplay of forms, is not only
pertinent but expresses an absolute aesthetic necessity. Pictures which
do not so affect the beholder have failed as great art. But though the
Futurists were the first to give succinct utterance to this shibboleth,
the practice of constituting a work of art so that the spectator was
transposed into its stress and strain, had been going on ever since
great composition came into painting. One cannot study a Michelangelo or
a Rubens without feeling, even to the point of physical fatigue, the
struggle of their finally harmonised volumes. This does not hold true of
the Futurists' work. In studying their pictures our eyes alone become
tired; and, though we succeed in unravelling the involutions of their
pictures, there is for us no recompense of emotional satisfaction.
Action in itself has little charm for us, and action is what the
paintings of Futurism, in their ultimate expression, are founded on. But
while action may attract us when expressed by an interesting and
sympathetic personality, as in the paintings of Henri and in the
sculpture of Rude, there is in Futurism no actional sensation or
explicit element of deep enjoyment that we cannot obtain in greater
intensity by gazing upon a busy thoroughfare, or by watching the
landscape from a swiftly moving train, or by attending a dance. Even the
chaos of a Futurist painting does not present the interest of the Flight
Turning a Corner from Keion's panoramic roll of the Hogen Heiji war, or
the prints of Moronobu, or even The Heavenly Host by the primitive
Guariento. All these works, while they represent action, are also
ordered. And order, which the Futurists lack, is more than an arbitrary
ingredient in art. Just as the eternal desire in life is for something
positive and absolute, so the attempt at order in painting is an
outgrowth of the desire to make a picture complete and satisfying.
There is no doubt that the Futurists exerted much good in imbuing the
artists of the day with a greater consciosity and in showing them, by an
elaborate critical prospectus, the error of their ways. Futurism quieted
the animadversions the modernist painters were hurling at Monet and his
school, by pointing out that, to react against Impressionism by adopting
pictorial laws which antedated it, was futile, and that the only way to
combat it seriously was to surpass it. The Futurists, however, were
unable to fulfil their proposition. They were, in fact, the abstract
perpetuators of Impressionism through the Cubists who represented its
formal side. The man who surpassed Impressionism was Cezanne.
Furthermore, the Futurists chided the Cubists for painting from models,
whether in squares, cubes or circles; and thus turned the light of
analysis on the actual achievements, and away from the theories, of
Picasso and his followers. The consequence was that for a short time
the Cubists became somewhat Futuristic. Then, the strong impetus slowly
ebbing out, the two schools gradually approached each other. Futurism
has taken on a somewhat Cubistic mien; and the Cubists, having profited
by the Futurists' teachings and having partially divorced themselves
from the model, have begun to seek expression in Orphism and
Synchromism. The work of Boccioni and Carra has assumed a wholly
abstract appearance, and is much more interesting than formerly.
[Illustration: HIEROGLYPHE DYNAMIQUE DU BAL TABARIN by SEVERINI]
The methods of Futurism have their provenience in many preceding art
movements. One finds in this school's canvases cubes, spots,
divisionistic technique and wholly academic drawing; some of the
pictures are monotonously brown and grey, while others possess the acid
colouring of Neo-Impressionism. But aside from their work the Futurists
proved a salutary event in modern art. The painting of the day needed
just such a cataclysm to turn its eyes from the contemplation of partial
traits to a more encompassing vision. Their motto might be the saying of
Mallarme: "To name is to destroy, but to suggest is to create." Their
art is largely one of suggestion. Their initial mistake was in supposing
that the depiction of mental states would recall the causes of those
states. Life would indeed be monotonous if in it there was no struggle.
We could never appreciate its consummations were we ignorant of the
travail which brought them about. The Futurists present, as it were, the
conclusion of an oration in which has been developed a colossal thought,
and ask us to applaud. This we cannot do, for not having followed the
struggle of the new idea against opposing forces, we are unable to
appreciate the import of the results.
Notwithstanding their many failures the Futurists have greatly widened
the field of illustration; by a word they have given birth to a school,
Simultaneism; and they have forever turned Cubism from its narrow
formalism. But in themselves they were not significant. They were too
stringently literary, and in attempting to advance their own theories at
the expense of profounder doctrines, they have succeeded only in
assisting other painters toward a greater purity of expression, despite
the fact that they advocated a retrogressive objectivity. Marinetti, a
poet, is the spiritual (and monetary) father of Futurism; and the names
signed to the original manifesto were Umberto Boccioni, a sculptor as
well as a painter; Carlo D. Carra, the most genuine artist of the group;
Luigi Russolo, its most orthodox exponent; Gino Severini, its
illustrator _par excellence_; and Giacomo Balla, its high priest of
prettiness. In an attempt to preclude all censure, they closed their
manifest with these words: "There will be those who will accuse our art
of being cerebrally distorted and decadent. But we will answer simply
that we are, to the contrary, the primitives of a new and centuple
sensitivity, and that our art is drunk with spontaneity and power." With
the slight change of "theory" for "art" we would heartily agree with
them.
XIII
SYNCHROMISM
In order to understand the last step in the evolution of present-day art
methods, it is necessary to be thoroughly cognizant not only of what has
taken place before but of the chronological development of all the
qualities of modern painting, for Synchromism embraces every aesthetic
aspiration from Delacroix and Turner to Cezanne and the Cubists. At the
same time it reverts to the compositions of Rubens, complicating them
further to satisfy the needs of the modern mind. Delacroix took the
first decided step toward making colour an organic factor in art--a
factor which would help present a more homogeneous emotion of the
picture as a whole, and which would be intimately connected with the
picture's vital expression. He was a decided advance on those painters
to whom colour was as arbitrary a means of adorning a good work as the
gilt frame they placed about it. Colour with them was dictated by the
demands of an age of voluptuousness and unrestrained living. The great
art nations of Spain, Italy and Flanders were then passing through a
sensuous epoch, and the painters reflected in their work the tone of the
national temperament. The primitives of these countries and of Germany
had used colour because the religious qualities in their pictures
became more realistic when nature's general tints were employed. By
making their work more dramatic they were able to set forth more
forcibly the lesson they strove to teach. The art of the primitives was
primarily dogmatic. In it was none of those subtleties of composition
which come only with the conscious artist's delight in bringing order
out of chaos: it contained only that simple and instinctive order which
is the avoidance of chaos. That which the primitives had to say was so
rudimentary and well-learned that it took a definite visional form in
their minds. When dogmatism began to lose its charm for the painter his
forms gradually became more suave, and his colour likewise grew gracious
and ornamental. The lessons were forgotten, and composition as an
element of first importance, dressed in a robe of rich and varied hue,
supplanted them.
Such was the employment of colour at the advent of Delacroix whose
probing mind sensed not only its importance as drama, but also its
potentialities for brilliance. With him, however, it remained an adjunct
to drawing--something to be applied when the rest of the picture had been
laid in, an element with which to intensify the importance of subject.
He gave a great and necessary impetus to its study, but he outlined no
directions for its significant application: indeed, by following out his
original concepts one is led into the impasse of Neo-Impressionism. But
at so early a stage the impetus is the important thing, and to Delacroix
belongs the credit for having set in motion the wheels of colour
inquisition. It was Daumier, however, who, apparently ignoring it,
brought its exclusive use appreciably nearer. By conceiving contour and
form as one, he disposed, as it were, of these two elements which, in
the scale of pictorial importance, had always been placed before colour.
Had each successive painter profited by all the _apports_ and qualities
of his direct predecessor's art, the progress of painting might have
been more rapid, but it would never have been so perfect. Each painter
would have inherited both the shortcomings and the merits of his
forerunner. Thus one side of his art would have developed out of all
proportion to the other. Daumier, going back to tone, discovered a
wholly natural method for the achievement of intense form. His pictures
present themselves as great bulks of flesh and matter, crude but vital,
which have about them a force of actual weight. In nowise was he a
colourist. He lived in a time when prettiness was the keynote of the
day, and his whole life was a revolt against it. His reaction was so
extreme that he disregarded the capabilities of colour.
The Impressionists, on the other hand, over-emphasised its objective
uses. They held that the colour seen in nature is all-important for
picture making, and proceeded to copy it. As a result their work is
highly emotional, but only in the same way that a sunny landscape is
emotional. These artists were the slaves of nature, doing its bidding;
Gauguin bent everything into the mould of his own personality: and it is
only when these two types of creative impulse combine and modify each
other that great naturalistic art is possible. The Impressionists, being
receptive, believed all that nature openly proclaimed. They unearthed
none of its formal secrets; they probed none of its causes. Theirs was
only the joy of the discoverer. But their insistence upon the discovery
was important, because it helped give birth to Cezanne. He was a direct
outgrowth of Impressionism, but he was also an outgrowth of art's entire
history. Superficially he may seem more closely akin to Pissarro's
school than to the older painters, since it was from Pissarro he learned
his first colour lessons; but in reality he was more intimately related
to a Giotto or a Rembrandt, because his knowledge of colour was used
only to heighten the emotion of volume; and this volume, which Monet or
Sisley would not have understood, was the chief concern of the old
masters.