The Intoxicated Five

The art critic of Milan's Corriere della Sera sat down in shock and bewilderment to write a review of the wildest exhibition he had ever seen. It consisted, said he, of the "maddest coloristic orgy, the most insane eccentricities, the most macabre fantasies, all the drunken foolishness possible or imaginable." That was the general reaction a few years before World War I to a group of Italian rebels who called themselves futurists. This week 129 of their works went on display at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art in the first comprehensive exhibit of futurism ever held in the U.S. Accompanying the show is a luci,. 154-page catalogue by Professor Joshua C. Taylor of the University of Chicago--the best book in English to date on the movement.

Futurism got its name from the Italian Poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who in 1909 issued a flamboyant manifesto calling for a new philosophy of art suitable to the age of the machine. Not Pegasus, he declared, but the racing car, "with its hood draped with exhaust pipes like fire-breathing serpents," should be the new symbol of poetry. "A racing car, rattling along like a machine gun, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." The artist should "sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness."

"Burn the Museums!" Inspired by the Marinetti manifesto, a second appeared the next year signed by the painters Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carr`a, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini and Giacomo Balla--futurism's big five. Among other things, it declared that THE NAME OF "MAD MAN" WITH WHICH IT IS ATTEMPTED TO GAG ALL INNOVATORS SHOULD BE LOOKED UPON AS A TITLE OF HONOR. The five themselves sounded a bit mad with anti-tradition slogans of "Burn the museums!" and "Drain the canals of Venice!" But their underlying purpose could not have been more serious. "We choose to concentrate our attention on things in motion,'' said Severini. "The era of the great mechanized individuals has begun," said Boccioni. "All the rest is paleontology."

The five declared war on all forms of artistic isolation: the isolation of the artist from society, the isolation of one object from its environment, the isolation of the individual senses. Even a static object had motion, for it could not escape having some sort of tug-of-war with its surroundings. "Our bodies enter into the divans on which we sit, and the divans enter into us," explained the futurists. Motion subjected each object to minute-by-minute change: one thing always led to another, sight invariably involved sound, vision turned into emotion. All this--the total feeling of life in the modern age--was what the futurists tried to portray.

Lunge, Dart, Pierce. Unlike the contemporary cubists, who had moved steadily away from subject matter, the futurists depended on subjects as their springboard. Gino Severini prized abstract, rhythmic forms that could evoke associations involving all the senses. His Dynamic Hieroglyph of the Bal Tabarin (see color) is a jumbled panorama of twirling skirts, a laughing face, the monocle of an aristocratic cafegoer, hints of music and noise through words ("valse," "polka," "bowling").

Carlo Carr`a found an inspiration in the memory of the funeral of a man killed during a 1904 strike in Milan. A riot broke out, and the result was a scene of flailing clubs and lances. In the painting, no one figure stands out; the observer is drawn into the scene as if he were a part of it. The whole painting becomes a series of lines and shafts of light that lunge, dart and pierce. The effect is of action and emotion at the highest pitch; in a word, frenzy.

Umberto Boccioni fancied states of mind and the contagion of emotion. In his The Laugh, he uses round, floating forms beginning with the great moonface at the left. The laughter seems to spread over dancing objects, bits of anatomy, fragments of landscape, all eerily slashed by spotlights, until the eye comes to rest on the flaming convulsion in the middle.

"We wish to glorify war, the only health giver of the world," Marinetti had cried in his manifesto. True to the master, the futurists all welcomed World War I when it came, and one--Boccioni--was killed. His four colleagues vanished from the center of the stage as quickly as they had appeared, and futurism's future is now long past. It helped to bring the artist face to face with the machine age and the magic of motion, was one of the main roads to abstractionism. "Our art," the futurists said, "will probably be accused of tormented and decadent cerebralism. But we shall merely answer that we are the primitives of a new sensitiveness, multiplied hundredfold, and that our art is intoxicated with spontaneity and power."

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