The Age of Machinery



Artists discussed:
Delaunays
Duchamp and Picabia
Futurists
Kasimir Malevich






Delaunays

The founder of Orphism, Robert Delaunay, moved from a Cubist technique in which colour and construction were all-important towards non-objective colour compositions which foreshadow later developments.

With knowledge of both these texts and of Cubism, 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. Delaunay extended the scientist’s sense to suggest that colour could be the major means by which not only form, but also the illusion movement, could be created in abstract painting.

Delaunay wrote: "Light in Nature creates movement in colour. The movement is provided by the relationships of uneven measures, of colour contrasts among themselves and constitutes Reality." 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.

Delaunay's wife Sonia also produced abstract art at this time. Apart from a slight echo of the Eiffel Tower at the base of the design, the composition evolves in a dynamic colour arrangement of the composition evolves in a dynamic colour arrangement of billowing curves.
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Duchamp and Picabia

In 1912 he developed, with Francis Picabia and Guillaume Apollinaire, the radical and ironic ideas that independently prefigured the official founding of Dada in 1916 in Zurich.

Duchamp was an artist troubled by the role of art in the mechanical age.
Nude Descending a Staircase Inspired by the photographic motion studies of Eadweard Muybridge, Nude Descending a Staircase, was painted by Duchamp in 1912. When it was first exhibited at the legendary Armory Show in New York (February 17-March 15, 1913), it caused an uproar which both outraged many people and made Duchamp famous in America. One critic called it "an explosion in a shingle factory". 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.

The Large Glass, or The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915-23), a construction of wire and painted foil fitted between plates of transparent glass.
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Futurism

Futurism, early 20th-century movement in art that pointedly rejected all traditions and attempted instead to glorify contemporary life, mainly by emphasizing its two dominant themes, the machine and motion. The principles of Futurism were laid down by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published by him in a manifesto in 1909. The following year the Italian artists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini signed the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting.

Futurism was characterized by the attempted depiction of several successive actions of positions of a subject at the same time. The result somewhat resembled a stroboscopic photograph or a series of photographs taken at high-speed and printed on a single plate. Interesting examples are Severini's Dynamic Hieroglyphic of the Bal Tabarin (1912, Museum of Modern Art, New York) and his Armored Train.

For a group of young Italian ``Futurist'' artists, the progress offered by machinery epitomized their increasing fascination with dynamic speed and motion. Though they translated this idea of progress into a frenetic exultation of the glory of war and the destruction of museums, their visual understanding of motion remained exciting.

The Italian Futurists aimed to free art from all its historical restraints and celebrate the new beauty of the modern age. Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Gino Severini (1883-1966), and Giacomo Balla (1871-1958), who all joined Futurism in 1910, wanted to express the onrush of events in the world with pictures of motion, dynamism, and power. In Street Noises Invade the House (1911), Boccioni attempts to give this sensation and succeeds remarkably well. Noise becomes something seen, something literally invasive of privacy. Boccioni said of the picture: ``all life and the noises of the street rush in at the same time as the movement and the reality of the objects outside.'' The surging incoherence of the forms is both chaotic and ordered.
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Kasimir Malevich

In the Suprematist painting Eight Red Rectangles (1915) by the Russian artist Kasimir Malevich (1878*1935), geometric elements are placed against a white ground, and their colour sings out from the surrounding space. Here there may be no dynamic tension between line and shape, no grid to hold the elements in place, but there is an extraordinary sense of movement between shape (figure) and ground. Eight Red Rectangles suggests this effect as a kind of spatial dislocation. Each rectangle is placed flatly and separately on the white ground. Yet they shift almost imperceptibly in their mutual relationships * some push forward while others slip back * and a strong sensation that the rectangles are floating, as though gravity had ceased to have a hold on them.
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Note:
Orphism - A style of painting related to Cubism, sometimes called Orphic Cubism, that employed overlapping planes of bright, contrasting colors. It was generally both more abstract and more colorful than other forms of Cubism.

Movement - When there is no actual motion, this refers to an implied motion-- the arrangements of the parts of an image to create a sense of motion by using lines, shapes, and textures that cause the eye to move over the work. A principle of art, it can be a way of combining elements to produce the look of action.





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