Page 25 - Studio International - November 1973

with the Nabis Vuillard and Bonnard some
years previously, the other way round. Two of
these paintings were included in the 1912 Paris
show, Simultaneous Visions and The Street
Enters the House (Stadtische Galerie, Hanover).
Russolo gave above all a psychological
tension to urban space, beginning with The
Lamps which depicts lights in the night (Rome
Gallery of Modern Art), and was pre-Futurist,
divisionist or pointillist in manner.
Balla's studies were prepared in sketchbooks
in 1911 and 1912, and subsequently realized in a
cycle of paintings that began in 1912 with Speed
of an Automobile + Lights (Museum of Modern (Left) Fortunata Depero
Project for Campari Pavilion 1933
Art, New York) and continued in 1913, above (Above) Nicola Diulgheroff
all with Abstract Speed, Plasticity of Lights + Cora Pavilion at the Bari Fair 1934/35
Speed, Speed of an Automobile + Lights Noise,
and Dynamic Penetrations of an Automobile. The relationship : 'The picture for us is a radiant
lights entering into play in these architectural construction in which the artist
interpenetrations are those of the city, and not the object is the kernel. It is an emotive,
street-lamps and headlamps. architectural environment creating sensation
Even Carra, with his tonally humorous and enveloping the spectator.'
colour, underlined the moments of urban It was immersion, then, in modern life; the
simultaneity, as injogging of a Roundabout, 1911, active assumption and exaltation of its rhythm,
What the Tram Says to Me, exhibited in Paris in not its illustration; the adaptation of
[912, and the famous Galleria in Milan, 1912. sensibility and not just choice of subject matter.
Carra also stressed urban space in his first In the manifesto of Bruno Corradini (Corra) and
futurist experiments, Night-time in Piazza Emilio Settimelli, 11 March 1914, one may
Baccaria, 1910, and Exit from the Theatre, that your head can cross the street while your read 'We futurists affirm that to pass the
exhibited in the 1912 Paris show.8 In his lamp laces its web of plaster rays'.11 puffing of a locomotive and the feverish
manifesto, issued in Lacerba oni September Sculpture, too, like futurist painting, is an pulsation of a modern-life crowd through the
1913, The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Smells, emblematic site in which to place the bloodless body of art will have, as an immediate
he demanded the use of 'All the colours of spectator so that he may understand the consequence, the production and the selection
speed, of joy, of revelry, of the most fantastic dynamic multiplicity of the components of of works a thousand times better than we have
carnival, of fireworks, of café-chantants, of reality, the urban reality of the city. had up till now'.12
music halls, and all the colours of movement In Boccioni's fundamental theoretical text, The images of the futurist city given us by
heard in space and time.' included in 'Futurist Painting Sculpture' Sant'Elia in his manifesto of 11 July 1914, is
Carra is not speaking just for himself. (Poesia, Milan, 1914), the consciousness of intimately linked to intuitions of simultaneous
Several images recall the thematic material of urban space is made articulate in a series of relations, in a perspective of lyrical exaltation
Severini who had proposed once more the observations and references. Urban space is the and machine-worship :13
dance hall theme frequently used by the primordial state, the futurist means to reach out, `We must invent and fabricate the Futurist
impressionists, Manet and Renoir for example, in 'an enthusiastic and human adherence to the city like an immense workyard, tumultuous,
but in a dynamic-simultaneous key as in form of civilization growing before our very agile, mobile, dynamic in its every part, and the
Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin, 1912 eyes'. 'The yellow, red, green posters, the great futurist house like a giant machine. Lifts must
(Museum of Modem Art, New York).10 black and white and blue letters, the grotesque not be packeted in the stairwells like tapeworms;
In his manifesto, Futurist Sculpture, 11 April signs placarded on the shops and the bazaars, while the stairs, become useless, must be
1912, Boccioni wrote: 'In sculpture as in the clearance sales, the enamelled English abolished; and the lifts, like iron and glass
painting, no renewal is possible except by water-closets, negro dances to the serpents, must clamber up the facades'.14
seeking the style of movement, that is by brutal rhythm of gypsies among the lights At almost the same time, Prampolini, in
rendering as a systematic and definitive and the beautiful prostitutes, all this is `Futurist Atmosphere-Strructure. Basis for
synthesis that which impressionism has given what inspires and fascinates us' (pages 27 and Architecture' (later published in Noi, nos.
us as fragmentary, accidental and hence 28). However, the image of this which appears 2-3-4, February 1918), stressed that 'futurist
analytical. And this reordering of the vibrations in a futurist work does not accentuate the habitation and architecture will be a
of lights and of the interpenetrations of planes distinctions so much as emphasize the consequence drawn from the atmospheric
will produce futurist sculpture, the foundations continuity: 'To put the atmosphere in the place elements of spatial forms originating through the
of which will be architectural, not only as a of the figure means conceiving the bodies not as resolution of the intrinsic necessities of
construction of masses, but in such a way that isolated in space but as the nuclei, more or less futurist human life. Futurist architecture must
the sculptural block will contain the dense, of the same reality. One must keep in have an atmospheric genesis to reflect the
architectural elements of the sculptural mind that the distances between one object and intense life of motion, light, air, on which
environment in which the subject lives . . . we another are not empty spaces but continuous futurist man is nourished'.15 It is a generic
proclaim the complete and absolute abolition of matter of varying density to which we call declaration but nevertheless symptomatic. The
the bounding outline and of the closed statue. We attention with forms and directions manifesto of Balla and Depero, Futurist
will tear open the figure and close the corresponding to neither photographic truth Reconstruction of the Universe, 11 March .1915,
environment within it. We proclaim that the nor cold analytical reality, but which always on the other hand, is much more precise and
environment must be part of the plastic block, remain traditional experiences' (page 227). In programmes an inventive intervention, at an
as in a world of its own with its own laws; that his turn, he undertakes the constitution of an objective, and by extension environmental,
the footpath may climb on to your table and environmental, embracing, emotional level : 'We Futurists, Balla and Depero, wish to
173