Category: Industrialization

Italian Futurism: art, design, national rivalry and diagonal lines

La Rivolta (“The Revolt”) by Luigi Russolo
  • After Italy unified in 1861 it looked back to ancient Rome.
  • Subsequently, Italian architects fashioned Art Nouveau into a local strand.
  • Everything was subject to design: curtains, cabinets, staircases and door handles. Function persisted intact with new trimmings. With Marinetti, nothing was to remain intact.
  • Marinetti proclaimed a new Italian order, remaking an “agrarian backwater” into a nexus of cultural innovation.
  • Clothing, theatre, music, poetry and the built environment. Futurists took the city as the crucible of modernity, celebrated “throbbing boulevards”.
  • Boccioni offered a manifesto on futurist architecture.
  • Boccioni’s art: even a bottle sitting on a table is interpenetrated by various angles, intercepted by geometries. Still and static objects as bound up with their environment.
  • Futurist ideal: a chair with tacks on it that would make you stand back up. Futurism had an ambivalent relationship with objects because they are static and Futurism was about motion and movement.
  • Boccioni used Futurist watchwords like dynamism, said Italian art and architecture had to liberate itself from past glories and European trends.
  • Futurism came with increased functionalism and utilitarianism (anticipating “form follows function”).
  • Sant’Elia’s new cities drawings (Cita Nuova) included soaring trains and power stations, a ceaseless mobility that would defy the inertia associated with architecture. An Italy and a world stripped of history and constantly rebuilt.
  • Sant’Elia was killed during WW1 but his drawings transformed the architectural imagination. A 1930’s fascist architectural journal was published in his name.
  • Virgilio Marchi’s delirious “Fantastic City” looked like Disney and was first conceived as set designs for theatre.
  • Wenzel Hablik: new age mysticism, transcendence and passage to a new plane. Futurism, for all its emphasis on technology, has “flighty metaphysical tendencies” as well.
  • The notion of interpenetration was hardly amenable to architecture construction.
  • “Art into life” was the modernist Avant-garde drive, aesthetics not as a mirror of history but its engine.
  • Giacomo Balla painting: Abstract Speed + Sound.
  • Balla/Depero proposed transforming everything and demonstrated their ideas with models. They wrote “The Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, a manifesto.
  • The spiral staircase at the Guggenheim should be seen in light of Italian futurist precedents.
  • The futurist insistence on motion, mobility and activism.
  • Coat racks, bookshelves, end tables, bottles (work for the Campari company). Furniture and clothing in futurist terms, fashion designs. Even dress habits could contribute to this new sensibility of living.
  • The Futurist movement was frequently misogynist but many women contributed. When modernist male artists set about applying aesthetics to actual design it was women doing the work.
  • “Balla’s field of futurist flowers”: futurist flora and animals, rendering the organic world as something synthetic.
  • Balla named his daughter “Propeller”.
  • Italy didn’t produce an art-design school to rival the Bauhaus or Russia.
  • Mussolini said “fascism is a glass house”, implying complete transparency. Abstract murals, architecture of rationalist simplicity and chrome tubular chairs all feature in the Casa del Fascio.
  • Balla designed a FuturFascist sweater that can be seen in comparison to Alexander Rodchenko’s design for workers clothes, clothes as ideology.
  • Balla/Depero worked in the fascist cause into the 1930’s.
  • Balla’s “house of art” in Rome served through the 20’s/30’s as a nexus of experimentation, walls painted in Futurist style. It’s not just the canvas you’re painting but everything around it, the world itself is transformed.
  • Aeropainters painted from the perspective of flight. There were many Futurist and fascist motifs of flight.
  • The Futurists had a diagonal drive, used diagonal lines. The diagonal means something is in the process of moving. Horizontal and vertical are about stasis and solidity, the diagonal is in every example of Futurist design/architecture/painting. Example: a mirror unit made for Italy Balbo was tilted but still functionally vertical.
  • Marinetti hated symmetry because symmetry is about stasis and order.
  • The 1925 Paris Art Decoratif exhibition (ARTDECO). The pavilion incorporated seemingly futurist trees. Balla wrote back home and said “we won, Futurism has taken over Paris”.
  • In the 1920’s there was sympathy and rivalry between France and Italy. They fought on the same side in WW1 and considered themselves Latin brothers.
  • The Futurist trees are another example of synthetic nature.
  • Futurism had a problematic relationship with fascism. Most elements, designers, architects actively supported (or at least in no way dissented) from the regime.

Q&A

  • Italy and Russia were both seen as “backward” nations in the early 20th century.
  • Milan was the only industrial city in Italy at the time.
  • Progressive Avant-garde artists of the 20th century were working in synch with industrial production and turning away from the artist as individual genius.
  • Within Italian fascism, fascism was considered a revolution. Italian fascism was tolerant of modernist Avant-garde culture.
  • Under Mussolini a certain pluralism of culture was tolerated as long as it pledged allegiance to the regime. There were traditionalists who labeled the modernists degenerate.
  • The “Square Colosseum” building was a modernist version of the Colosseum.
  • A logic of pluralism and competition: have Futurism compete as one cultural current under fascism and it will contribute.
  • Fascism included superficially contradictory cultural phenomena under its umbrella. After fascism, people could claim they were being anti-fascist due to this ambiguity.

Germany’s rapid urbanization and industrialization

“In 1870 Germany’s population was two thirds rural; by 1914 that relationship had been reversed, and two thirds of all Germans lived in an urban setting. In 1871 there were only eight cities with a population of over 100,000, whereas in 1890 there were twenty-six, and by 1913, forty-eight. By then twice as many laborers worked in industry as in agriculture, and over a third of the population consisted of industrial workers and their families. The concentration of German industry was another of its striking features. By 1910 almost half of all employees worked in firms using more than fifty workers, and the capitalization of the average German company was three times that of the average British firm.

The speed of urbanization and industrialization in Germany meant that many workers were first generation urban dwellers, confronted by all the attendant social and psychological problems that the shift from countryside to city entailed. The concentration of industry and population also produced the rapid growth of a managerial class, of service personnel, and of municipal and state bureaucracies. As Gesellschaft, or society, overwhelmed the sense of Gemeinschaft, or community, as speed and bigness became the dominant facts of life, work and social questions, ambition and job enjoyment became abstract notions, beyond the individual and his scale of personal reference, a matter of theory and intuition rather than experience and knowledge. The rural pre-industrial setting had been replete with its own social problems and indignities, but it is undeniable that industrialization, particularly the rapid industrialization undergone by Germany, brought with it a disturbing measure of depersonalization that material well-being could not expunge or rectify. The so-called new middle class — this enormous army of semiskilled white-collar workers involved primarily in management and service — was a sudden and direct offshoot of the later phases of industrialization and was perhaps even more prone to a sense of isolation and hence vulnerability, than the laboring classes. The concentration of industry and of commerce meant that this social group was particularly large in Germany.”