Speed and the Machine


If the beginnings of abstract art involved a thorough-going analysis of the basic principles of painting * form and colour * the particular conditions of the 20th century introduced the heady intoxication of speed and the power of the machine as new material to draw upon. The sense of excitement was encapsulated in the fourth point of the first Italian Futurist manifesto, published in Le Figaro (Paris, 1909): The declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched with a new form of beauty, the beauty of speed. A racing car adorned with great pipes like serpents with explosive breath* is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.*


Delaunay evolved the idea of creating a type of painting that would be technically dependent on colour and on colour contrasts, but would both develop in time and offer itself up to simultaneous* perception. He suggest that colour could be the major means by which not only form, but also the illusion of movement, could be created in abstract painting. He began to develop these ideas in a series of paintings, Windows, which from the spring of 1912 show a greater interest in the play of light than in the representation of an actual view. Delaunay wrote: ‘L"Light in Nature creates movement in colour." The celebration of colour and light, both in the Windows and in works such as Sun and Moon (1913) from the Circular Forms series, demonstrates Delaunay's diminished interest in painting objects and his increasing concern to capture optical effects.


In terms of painting, the Futurists wished to galvanize the static Cubist sill life: ‘TThe movement we want to reproduce on canvas will no longer be one single, fixed moment of universal dynamism. Quite simply, it will be dynamic sensation itself. For everything moves, runs, changes rapidly. No outline is ever still before our eyes: it appears and disappears constantly.* Gino Severini's Sea = Dancer suggests something of this ambition, as we have seen, but certain factors outside the sphere of painting contributed a sense of topicality to Futurist researches. Experimentation in chronophotography, by which multiple depiction of the figure were shown photographically frozen* in the process of consecutive movement. Considering also the recent invention of electricity, of X-rays and of the internal combustion engine (all alluded to in the various Futurist manifestos), a vast number of external factors served to prepare the ground for the exploration of dynamic sensation in abstract art.


Giacomo Balla (1871*1958), who was associated with the Futurists, was one of the first artists to evolve a fully abstract style through a fascination with motion and electric light. His first works to deal with the representation of movement, such as Girl Running on a Balcony (1912) or Dog on a Leash (1912), are rather literal; strongly indebted to chronophotography for the means of conveying motion, they rely on Divisionist techniques to render the forms.


Two series of paintings, Swifts in Flight and the Speeding Automobile, suggest the Futurist preoccupation with velocity, but here, movement is evoked through patterns of lines rather than broken contours. In the Swifts series, Balla concentrated not on the depiction of the birds themselves, but on the patterned curve of the flight path. Curved arcs lead the eye across the surface in a delicate series of sweeping lines. The physiological details are lost in the concentration on the physical investigation of wings flight. The second series explored the new phenomenon of mechanical power as embodied in the car. However, rather than depicting the vehicle itself, the series investigated the effect of its passage on the observer. Abstract Speed + Sound (1913*14) suggests the beams of the car's headlights crossing and penetrating the surrounding landscape, while the acoustic vibration of the car's engine are suggested by the sequence of small crosses. As related studies show, Balla was attempting to find visual equivalents to all the technical manifestations of the car's propulsion : light, speed, rhythm and sound. The optical and prismatic movement of light remained a starting point for these works, but the end result shows a geometric clarity and a fine honing of colour relations.


Meanwhile, in works such as Dynamism of a Speeding Horse + Houses (1914*15), Balla's colleague Umberto Boccioni (1882*1916) was exploring the potential of sculpture to evoke movement, basing his study on the recent physical notion that no one can any longer believe that an object ends where another begins*. The forms of the horse* are literally cut through by the planes of the houses*, and the interlocking shapes make a clear, free perception of the subject difficult without help from the title. Also underlying his conception is a recently formulated theory concerning the nature of vision: that an illusion of fused forms is created when a moving object crosses a stationary one. By concentrating on the dynamism of this interpenetration, rather than on the ‘figurative value* of the forms themselves, Boccioni was exploiting the abstract potential of sculptural construction and setting a major example for future artists. Futurist Carlo Carra: The stand for a use of colour free from the imitation of objects and things as coloured images; we stand for an aerial vision in which the material of colour is expressed in all of the manifold possibilities our subjectivity can create.*


Boccioni's Unique forms of continuity in space, 1913. The complex forms of the bronze figure arose from Boccioni's investigation into the phenomenology of moving muscles. Hence his image of strength and speed, a force form, the equivalent of the expansive power of the body*.

The notion of the efficacy of manifesto writing spread fast across Europe from Italy. In 1913 the Russian artist Mikhail Larionov (1881*1964) published his manifesto on Rayonism, cast in the same challenging spirit as that of the Italians. The style of Rayonist painting itself owes much to Futurism. In the early Rayonist Landscape (1912), for example, reflected rays of light from behind the trees cross over to meet the branches themselves.
Thus, in Rayonist Composition: Dominaton of Red (1913*14), any naturalistic starting point is obscured, and the painting, composed from a sequence of coloured rays crossing the surface, exudes dynamic energy.


In Paris, meanwhile, certain artists chose to use the machine as a reductive symbol or paradigm of energy. Notable examples are two more of Apollinaire's Orphic Cubists: Marcel Duchamp (1887*1968) and Francis Picabia (1879*1953). Marcel Duchamp had drawn upon the lessons of Cubism as well as chronophotography for his famous rendition of Nude Descending a Staircase (1911, 1912). Duchamp's declared concern was to decompose the forms, not to suggest movement for its own sake.
Inspired by the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, Nude Descending a Staircase, was painted by Duchamp in 1912. This is the first demonstration of his later interest in the development of machine-mythologies. This is the first successful attempt in painting to realize movement and depict the passing of time on a static flat canvas.
Francis Picabia, a close friend of Duchamp who was also to be closely associated with the Dada and Surrealist movements, was equally obsessed with the machine in the early part of his career. In Udnie (1913) and I see again in Memory my dear Udnie (1914) Picabia converted the female form into mysterious machine parts. In the watercolours made on his 1913 transatlantic crossing, of the ballerina who had inspired the title of the series, it is possible to see the gradual breakdown of form and its reconstitution into mechanomorphic shapes.


Russian Art -- Suprematism, Constructivism, Kinetic Sculpture.

In Malevich's later development of Dynamic Suprematism (1915), smaller geometric forms are superimposed upon larger elements. Consequently, a sense of floating movement becomes more evident than in the previous works, and a much greater spatial tug is established between the shapes, although the white ground remains consistent with the earlier paintings.

Influenced by Malevich's command of dynamic non-figurative design, he expanded the application of these principles to different materials, form chunky constructions in wood that are as spare as Minimal art -- or the paintings of Mondrian -- to hanging constructions that introduced physical movemnet -- purely abstract kinetic sculpture. Movement soon became a dominaant feature in Constructivist art.

Tatlin's non-representational Corner Counter Reliefs (1915) concentrated on physical matter by employing 'real materials in real space' (such as wood, metal and string) and by exploiting the inherent properties and colour of each substance.





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