Dialog International

Marinetti's Century

Last weekend I spent a day at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Once again I encountered Umberto Boccioni's exquisite bronze sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. It stands on a pedestal in the center of the room and everyone entering is immediately drawn to its beauty.

Boccioni's piece represents the most perfect realization of Italian Futurism, and today marks the 100th anniversary of Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto, originally published in Le Figaro.  The Manifesto is a masterpiece of bombast and hyperbole.  Marinetti glorifies the velocity of modern life, represented by the automobile:

"We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

And already in this manifesto Marinetti intimates his later embrace of pure fascism with his aestheticizing of warfare:

We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

All of the modernist movements of the 20th century can be traced back to Marinetti and his Manifesto: Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism all grew out of this ode to dynamism.  But perhaps the purest successor movement was German Expressionism. Painters such as Kandinsky and Kirchner display the same infatuation with motion and color as Boccioni and Severini, and the poet Ernst Stadler could have been under the influence of the Futurist Manifesto when he wrote his 1913 poem Fahrt über die Kölner Rheinbrücke bei Nacht where the speed of the train and the explosion of lights bring the poet to a state of frenzied ecstasy.

Not as well known is Marinetti's political influence on the German avant-garde painters and writers, for Marinetti saw Fascism as the political expression of modernism. Some of this was already apparent in Ernst Jünger's 1920 book Storm of Steel (in Stahlgewittern), in which the horrors of World War I combat were transformed into a mystical, aesthetic experience.  But the connection between Marinetti and German artists was much deeper, as the art historian Regine Reinhardt discusses in an interesting piece in Freitag.  Reinhardt writes about Marinetti's embrace of National Socialism, and as late as 1934 it seemed like modernist art had a future in the Third Reich:

Die relative Marginalisierung hinderte Marinetti jedoch nicht daran, im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland die futuristische Kunst als die faschistische Staatskunst zu präsentieren. 1934 nahm Marinetti eine Ausstellung futuristischer Kunst in Berlin zum Anlass für diese Darstellung. Die Allianz von künstlerischer Avantgarde und Faschismus schien zum damaligen Zeitpunkt auch in Deutschland noch möglich. (The relative marginalizing (of Futurism) did not prevent Marinetti from presenting futuristic art as the fascist state art of National Socialist Germany.  In 1934 Marinetti attempted to make the case at an exhibition of Futurist Art in Berlin.  At that time an alliance between the artistic avant-garde and fascism seemed like a possibility even in Germany.)

Of course, not long after this the Nazi functionaries rejected Modernist art totally, and those painters and writers - such as Emil Nolde and Gottfried Benn- who had embraced the Nazi movement now found themselves persecuted as "degenerate " (entartet).

Marinetti and his Futurists fared much better in fascist Italy. And even though he couldn't stand German painting in the Third Reich, he did appreciate the Nazi art of total warfare, and even followed the German army to Stalingrad.  Unfortunately, Marinetti died before he could witness the most sublime realization of his Manifesto: the mushroom cloud.

Max Beckmann in New York

If you hurry you can still catch the Max Beckmann exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan. This small gem of a museum is located just across from Central Park, a stone's throw away from the sidewalk where Beckmann keeled over and died in 1950. The museum is famous for its collection of Austrian painters - especially Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka, - but for now some of the greatest Germans from the Weimar era have taken over the third floor.

The centerpiece of the exhibit is Beckmann's Self-Portrait with Horn, which he painted in exile in 1938.

Of all the self-portraits Beckmann painted, this is his most enigmatic - and his most melancholy.  Like the other painters represented in the exhibit - Otto Dix, Kirchner, Christian Schad, and Georg Grosz,  - Beckmann's artistic sensibility was shaped by the horrors of the Great War. In Self-Portrait with Horn Beckmann is no longer the self-confident, aloof artist in the tuxedo. He is in a strange dressing gown that has a timeless, harlequin-like quality. The hunting horn, as well, appears as if from the distant past. The artist is staring off to the side expectantly, waiting for an echo of the horn call he has just sounded.  Has he sounded the alarm of the war to come?  But the artist seems enveloped in silence; the warning will not be heeded. The artist's huge hand is suspended at the center of the frame, its creative work is powerless to penetrate the silence or stave off the horrors to come.

Beckmann towers above his peers in the exhibit.  The artists have been categorized as belonging to the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement of Weimar painting, but Beckmann was never really a member of any school.

The Beckmann exhibit only runs until September 1, but Self-Portrait with Horn is part of the Neue Galerie's permanent collection (the museum acquired the painting in 2001 for $22.5 million), so presumably we will be able to view it in the future.

As a bonus for visitors to the museum, there is a room of wonderful photographs of Beckmann, Dix, Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Lyonel Feininger all at work in their studios.

Marsden Hartley and the Volk

Maine has been the home of some of America's greatest painters such as Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and - my personal favorite - John Marin. But these artists were not from Maine; as we say here: they were from away. In his watercolors Marin captured the beauty and violence of Maine's rocky seacost, but he was a New Yorker, dividing his time between Manhattan and Maine. Marsden Hartley is the one great American modernist we in Maine can call our own. Hartley (1877-1943) was born in the central Maine city of Lewiston, and he died in Ellsworth, Maine.  He aspired to become known as "the painter from Maine" and sought to capitalize on the Maine brand as a popular tourist destination. His work is today seen in the context of the American Regionalist movement in painting, which celebrated the diverse landscapes and people across the country.  Hartley desired to see his name attached to Maine just as Georgia O'Keefe's name is connected to New Mexico, Thomas Hart Benton's with Indiana and Missouri and Grant Wood's with Iowa. But Hartley was much more complex than the folksy, backwoods persona he sought to cultivate.  And, in fact, the greatest influences on his art came not from his fellow American regionalist painters but from Germany.  This is what the art historian Donna Cassidy explores in her very interesting book: Marsden Hartley: Race, Region and Nation.