Mechanical Paradise
THE MECHANICAL PARADISE
The end of the 19th century was a time of idealism, confidence, and the belief that there was territory to explore and that art could explain culture to the world.
The great metaphor for change, the symbol for modernity was the Eiffel Tower. The tower was finished in 1889 and was the focal point of the Paris World’s Fair.
The Fairs were an opportunity for nations to show off the latest technologies. The French wanted the building to be the tallest manmade object. The theme of the Fair was manufacture and transformation, triumph over the past. The tower occupied unowned and previously useless space…the sky itself.
Eiffel was an engineer not an architect. Its remote inspiration was the human figure, planted with spread legs in the middle of Paris. The tower in unavoidable..you can see it from every point in Paris. It had a huge audience, it was accessible.
It’s height and its daring use of industrial materials for commemorative purposes: it was the promise of technology, of unlimited power over the world and its wealth.
In the late 19th century, they didn’t feel the uncertainty about the machine that we do now…they were naive to the idea of pollution or a meltdown. In the past the machine was the ogre but now it was good and strong. People were now living in the cities and you needed machines.
The predominant image in painting was no longer the landscape but the metropolis. The machine meant the conquest of horizontal space and the feeling of motion.
The viewer could see the ground from the tower, something we take for granted.
In the late 19th / early 20th century culture was reinventing itself through technology.
Thomas Edison invented the phonograph
1877 - Edison developed the incandescent light bulb
1882 - the recoil-operated machine gun
1883 – first synthetic fiber
1884 – steam turbine
1885 – photographed paper
1888 – telsa motor, the Kodak box camera, and the pneumatic tire
1893 – the ford car
1894 – the phonograph disc
1895 – X-rays, Marconi invented the radio telegraph, the movie camera and Freud published his fundamental studies on hysteria.
1898 – Curie discovered radium, the magnetic recordings of sounds
1903 – first powered flight by the Wright brothers
They represented the greatest alteration in man’s view of the universe since Isaac Newton!
What did emerge from this growth of scientific and technical discovery, as the age of steam passed to the age of electricity was the sense of accelerated change in all arears of human discourse, including art.
But how could art reflect the immense shift in consciousness that technology brought without becoming merely an illustrator.
The first artists to find an answer were the CUBISTS.
Cubist paintings can be obscure and hard to grasp, illegible and not at all like the beautiful work of the Impressionists. Cubism has very little to do with nature, instead almost every Cubist painting is a still life with man made objects, a pipe, a glass, yellowed newsprint or music instruments
The main Cubists were Picasso, Braque, Leger and Gris. It introduced a new way of seeing..something that had not happened in 500 years of painting.
Since the Renaissance, painting has obeyed a convention of one point perspective, a system of depicting reality, based on the fact that things got smaller as they go further back. This was an exciting discovery for the 15th century artists. They now had rules to represent space on a flat surface. It is a convention and it simplifies the relationship between the eye, brain and the object. Perspective gathers the visual facts and stabilizes them. But it is a generalization about experience. Look at an object….your eye is never still, it flickers, moves from side to side. Your head shifts slightly, the more you move the bigger the differences are. One artist that wanted to give aesthetic form to the abstract ideas was Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906)
His whole effort was directed towards the physical world, the shapes of Mont Ste Victoire, of the rocks and the apples. He remarked that one must detect in nature the sphere, the cone and the cylinder. Those shapes are not always so obvious. His motifs in his paintings were not just rocks and grasses but they were the relationships between these objects. The paintings are about the process of seeing. He claimed, “This is what I see.” Cézanne sparked one of the most revolutionary areas of artistic enquiry of the 20th century, one which was to affect profoundly the development of modern art.
Cubism would take these ideas about seeing to an extreme. Picasso already had a reputation based on his paintings of circus folk, beggars and nudes, his blue period.
George Braque (1882 – 1963) was not well known at the time.. The Cubists had a very small audience for their paintings and this meant that they were free to experiment; there was no public pressure when they first began to paint. They wanted to represent the fact that our knowledge of an object is made up of all possible views of it; top, sides, front and back…they wanted to compress all these views into one synthesized view. To render the sense of multiplicity. They used bland colors so as not to create space with those colors…red comes forward and cooler colors retreat into the picture plane. They wanted to find out, to “analyze” (hence – “Analytical Cubism”) the way the world is really “made” or organized, not the way it looks.
They were interested in other cultures. They appropriated forms and motifs from other cultures, specifically African art, and primitive and exotic, however they were not interested in their ritual uses or tribal meanings. Only their formal qualities. Look at Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon, 1907, and the African masks. Picasso cared about the formal vitality and the freedom to distort. With the hacked contours and staring eyes and unsettling feeling it is a disturbing painting. No painting has looked more convulsive. It is the classical nude, a traditional subject. But Picasso’s figures are angular and harshly lit, aggressive and not victims. They were whores. Picasso did not name the painting. In the sketch it included men but the final painting was only the women.
They stare at you, they are not welcoming. Braque thought it was ugly and was horrified by it. In 1908 Braque painted a timid response. Braque and Picasso were bonded in a partnership of questions and responses. Picasso was the fox and Braque was the hedgehog.
Braque knew Cezanne and identified with his tilted facets and planes. You can see the influence of Cezanne in the painting with cliffs.Their paintings were moving toward abstraction, they were so similar they are hard to distinguish. Picasso – green painting, Braque - brown painting.Their paintings are shifting relationships that include the onlooker. Picasso and Braque were not mathematicians but their work involves geometry.Picasso said “I paint forms as I think them not as I see them”
Picasso…said: ‘Cubism is an art dealing with forms’”, whereas Braque noted that “the main preoccupation of Cubism…was the materialization of that new space which I sensed”
Braque had begun to use non-art materials mixed with the paint to produce gritty surfaces, then Picasso began to use identifiable things from life, a piece of printed fabric of chair caning so collage was born: glueing. It had existed in folk art but Picasso introduced it to easel painting. Manufactured objects in the midst of man made paintings. Collage gave Picasso and Braque bolder shapes to play with, emblems of modernity based on industry: newspaper, packaging wallpaper. They used craft techniques: Braque had been house painter’s assistance and painted fake wood grain and imitation marble.
Analytic Cubism was concentrated on the act of taking apart or deconstructing an object, but Synthetic Cubism was all about its construction or synthesis....collage
Juan Gris did not like to use found objects but he painted them. In the still life there are calm shifts of transparency and opacity, over lapping planes, wood grain, marble, newspaper, the pipe. He created poetry from ordinary modern things.
Ferdnand Leger wanted to make a public style of his work. He wanted to make images of the machine age for all classes about everyday experience. He painted his fellow soldiers as though they were robots made of tubes and barrels and linkage..forms of warfare. “ a gun barrel in the sunlight." His work was not about inhumanity but systems, society as machine, bringing harmony and an end to loneliness. There are rhythms of shapes in his work.
Other artists saw the mechanical age as a chance to explore light and structure. Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) The Eiffel Tower was the master image. He painted the rapid interconnections, changing viewpoints. Delaunay painted the tower more than 30 times. There is the sensation of vertigo and movement. Delaunay and his wife Sonia were attracted to the disc: energy that radiated from all objects. There are emblems of newness, the tower and the plane…..of modernity. Though these paintings were new on the museums white walls, women still wore hobble skirts….a contradiction.
Futurism was the only major art movement to come out of Italy in the 20th century. It was the invention of Tommaso Marinetti. His ideas affected the entire European avant-garde. The futurists worshipped the machine. He thought that every kind of human behavior was “art”. He proposed a film called Futurist life with scenes called “How a futurists sleeps.” He also had written a cookbook and wrote ballets in which a girl dances with a machine. He conceived of theater that was loud and violent and chaotic.
The past was his enemy: technology had created a new kind of man. It was power and freedom from history. It is funny that this movement came from a country that was technologically backwards.
The Futurist typographical revolution began in 1912 when Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote his first “parole in libertà” (words in freedom), works in which words have no syntactic or grammatical connection between them and are not organised into phrases and sentences. The style was as phonetically revolutionary as it was visually. The sounds of the words, often onomatopoeic, and their typographical treatment on the page are of utmost importance in this blend of literature, music and visual art.
How do you translate this vision into paint. Umberto Boccioni (Boccioni died falling off a horse during a cavalry exercise) In City Rises, the large muscular red horse is dissolving and breaking up, shimmering, things are twisting.
But the problem of painting movement still remained The Futurist looked to new technology: x-ray photography and the sequential photograph of Muybridge. These images introduced time into space. Giacomo Balla's paintings were like literal transcriptions of photographs. Dog on a leash was a glimpse of boulevard life of a fashionable lady walking her dog. His other work was about speed and cosmic power.
Futurism could not have existed without Cubist ideas of dislocation and dismemberment.
Gino Severini’s painting is fragmented and charged with intense power and jerky. It is full of life. It looks like a machine out of control.
In the past the idea that the machine would rise against man and destroy him was the fear of the Industrial revolution. It inspired Mary Shelley’ Frankenstein. A century later Jacob Epstein created this bronze sculpture, an insect with amour.
Francis Picabia painted the machine in “The Daughter born without a Mother”, the modern counterpart to the story of the Virgin birth in which Christ was born without a father.
Picabia was obsessed with machines, partly because they were predictable and efficient but also he saw myth in them. Painting was his outlet for his machine fantasies. (He was very rich and owned many cars)
In “I see again in memory my dear udnie” there is blossoming petal like forms fused with machine symbolism. His effort to portray human relationships as mechanical processes, with its stiffness and poking and thrusting was very daring.
Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude descending the Staircase is based on Marey’s sequential photos, it was no more advanced than any other Cubist/Futurist piece but because of the Armory show in New York it was the butt of jokes and cartoons. And it opened the way for the large glass: The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even…he worked on it for 8 years and left it unfinished. The glass broke but he didn’t care.
There was a lot of interpretation of this piece, it was psycho analyzed.
Was it a machine or an unfinished contraption that could never be built because it did not make sense…it was not scientific but rather absurd. It was painted and outlined in lead wire on glass. It was an impossible machine. He made notes but they did not make sense either.
In the top half of the glass the bride is continually disrobing herself, in the bottom section the bachelors in their jackets and uniforms are grinding away, frustrated. Sigmund Freud and his interpretations of dreams influenced Duchamp.
In one sense this piece is a glimpse into hell, full of repetition and loneliness. But is it possible to see it as a declaration of freedom. It was a sad machine but also a defiant machine.
After 1914, the machine turned on its inventors. After 40 years of continuous peace, the worst war in history would cancel out all the good that technology had brought.
The myth of the Future went into shock and European art turned to irony, disgust and protest…..coming soon to an art history class!
