THE HISTORY AND CHRONOLOGY OF CUBISM Page: 9
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History and Chronology of Cubism:
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Futurism's debt to Cubism was universally recognized. Apollinaire pointed out that Boccioni's best works were those in which he came nearest to recent works by Picasso which he had seen in Paris. Hourcade wrote of the Futurist exhibition in the Revue de France: 'L'on jurerait qu'un sage disciple des cubistes et un encore plus sage disciple de Signac les ont peintes en collaboration . . . Nos hétes aux paroles rouges voudraient-ils bréler les musées pour détruire les preuves?'. Even pictorial Futurism of course contained much that was new; as opposed to Cubism it was primarily an art of movement, concerned with treating large ambitious subjects, and with an aggressively contemporary aesthetic which expressed itself in its destructive attitude towards the past and a glorification of the machine; unlike Cubism it was a highly romantic and literary kind of painting. But the means by which the Futurists were expressing themselves at this point were largely borrowed from the Cubists, and occasionally in some less well-informed criticism, the two terms became synonymous. The linear Cubist grid was adapted to become the Futurist 'lines of force' by which the representational elements are traversed. The fusion of the figure and its surroundings on which the Italians insisted was something that the Cubists had already achieved, and although the Futurists went further and added that the painting must be a synthesis of things seen and things remembered, visible and invisible, this had very little effect on the means employed. The interacting transparent planes used by the Cubists to achieve this fusion and to explain and develop form, coincided with the Futurists' conception of the transparency of objects, and proved capable of adaptation to give a sense of dynamic balance or movement. Explaining one of the sections of their manifesto in the preface to the exhibition at Bernheim's, the Futurists, now aware of Cubist painting, talked for the first time of 'battaglie dei piani'; and Boccioni summarizes most concisely the debt of Futurism to Cubism when in Pittura Scultura Futuriste, published in 1914, he wrote under the heading Compenetrazione dei Piani: 'È il modo plastico di rendere possibile il movimento in un quadro facendo partecipare gli oggetti dell'ambiente alla costruzione dell'oggetto che vi é immerso.' The end is purely Futurist but the means are Cubist.
But as the movement became more fiercely nationalistic, the Futurists began to complain that they in turn were being plagiarized in France. In articles in Der Sturm and Lacerba Boccioni claimed that the Futurists had been the first to introduce the concept of Simultaneity into painting, and that Léger's article Les Origines de la Peinture et sa Valeur Representative was really a Futurist statement. Léger was certainly more in sympathy with Futurism than most of the other artists associated with the Cubist movement. Delaunay, for example, violently repudiated any analogy between his own art and that of the Futurists, both in an open letter to the press and in a long essay written immediately after attending a lecture given by Marinetti at the time of the first Futurist exhibition in Paris. Actually the quarrel was largely due to Apollinaire's careless use of terms and to a rather wilful misunderstanding on the part of Boccioni. The idea of Simultaneity first appeared in the preface to the Futurist exhibition at the Bernheim Gallery: it had its origin in Boccioni's series of States of Mind, and was primarily the rather literary concept that a picture must be a synthesis of what is remembered and what has been seen, a synthetic visual impression comprising not merely the various aspects of a single object, but any feature related to it, physically or psychologically. A painting by Carrà entitled Simultaneità, which shows a figure in a series of successive attitudes, indicates that Simultaneity had for the Futurists also the simpler meaning of the combination of different aspects of objects or people in motion into a single painting. For Delaunay and Leéger the term had much more purely plastic connotations.
For Delaunay it was the interaction of colours which produced a sense of form and space in a picture, whereas for Léger it meant the simultaneous presence in a painting of the three pictorial elements of line, form and colour, all used in a system of deliberate contrasts.
The Futurists, however, undoubtedly had an influence on the terminology of French painting and literature, and the bewildering mass of 'isms' springing up in 1913 and 1914 reflects also some of the spiritual restlessness which Futurism did so much to engender. The first Futurist manifesto was published originally in French in the Figaro, and the manifesto of the Futurist painters appeared in full in Comoedia shortly after its publication in Italy. Apollinaire, whose enthusiasm and readiness to support any new cause (often without any very deep understanding or sympathy with its aims) did much to add to the artistic confusion of the period, was himself persuaded to write a Futurist manifesto which appeared in Milan in June 1915 -- L'Anti-tradizione Futurista. Late in 1913 he wrote on a more factual note: 'Le futurisme n'est pas sans importance, et ses manifestes rédigés en France n'ont pas été sans influence sur la terminologie qu'on emploie aujourd'hui parmi les peintres les plus nouveaux.'
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