Three Women (Boccioni)

Transcription

(piano music) Voiceover: This is a very silly painting. I see a bottom of a woman's dress and a dog on a leash, scurrying along, One of those little long weiner dogs. Voiceover: It looks kind of silly, but maybe the way in which these silly things are painted is - not so silly? Maybe it's silly. It's an Italian futurist work by a man named Giacomo Balla and it's part of a movement which had a manifesto that preceded the works that were created by a man named Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and one of the things that he stipulated that the futurist art would set out to do was portray movement. That it was something very modern, very contemporary. And in Italy, people like Marinetti, the modern contemporary poet, thought that most things in the country were not very modern. It was filled with museums and libraries and - Voiceover: Stuffy old classical sculptures. Voiceover: Exactly and we should focus our attention on contemporary life and what are its defining elements, and motion and speed were one of those. Voiceover: Didn't he talk about burning down the museum? Voiceover: He did (laughter). Voiceover: I wasn't sure if I remembered that right. Voiceover: Rhetorical flourish was one of his strong points, and they would act on those sometimes, and the futurist performances, futurist evenings, which would be provacotive in nature. Voiceover: So he kind of thought of this as a battle, didn't he? A futurist battle, to overturn the old order and bring in a kind of new order, right? Voiceover: To bring Italy up to date, to make Italy like those other places, France [inaudible]. Voiceover: So why is motion a defining characteristic of the modern world? Voiceover: Because motion was one of the defining characteristics of technology, machine technology for Marinetti. He writes about speeding along in a car, and that experience, that it was a quintessentially modern experience to feel speed in a train or a car, and that painting and its concern for static things in its more traditional form, Renaissance, balance and symmetry, Classicism, the things that one would see in Italy at the time, didn't quite capture Voiceover: It's true. Paintings do tend to capture one moment in time. Voiceover: One moment in time. And Marinetti made a reference to horses galloping, and that horses' legs multiply, or four and twenty at the same time, in reference to how we see things. We don't see things as single, static, repetitive forms, but they tend to blend into one another. Voiceover: And wasn't Cezanne kind of exploring that, too, and also Cubism with Picasso and Braque, the idea of seeing things in multiples or seeing things simultaneously or from lots of different points of view? Voiceover: Simultaneity, it's one of the concepts Voiceover: Right. Marinetti talks about, simultaneity. Voiceover: So, is his being influenced by the Cubists? Voiceover: Not yet, not yet. If we look at this work, there's not Voiceover: That's true, that's true. Voiceover: Balla was an older painter who was recruited by Marinetti to join the group, and he decided that he would do that and he depicts motion through two very basic techniques. There's the use of diagonal lines, and we see those taking the place of the ground here, kind of an abstract ground of diagonal lines. They don't really read as pavement, per se - sidewalk. But Balla called these lines of force. Voiceover: (laughs) Voiceover: Lines which indicate the movement. And then of course, repetition. Voiceover: Right, and so we've got like, Voiceover: Multiple feet. Voiceover: Right, like the horse reference. Voiceover: Like the horse reference and the dog has Voiceover: And the dog, too. Voiceover: Multiple legs and feet, Voiceover: Right. Voiceover: As we multiply them to give a sense of motion and speed. Voiceover: So, is this being influenced by photography? Voiceover: Yes, it is being influenced by photography in a very direct way. Voiceover: Edward Muybridge. From 1878, a long time before this. Voiceover: But a good example of using technology to understand the concept of motion in its objective, scientific way. Voiceover: And seeing things that the naked eye can't see by using technology. Voiceover; Yes, exactly. And this was an old debate, I suppose, between - I don't know who would engage in this debate. Voiceover: (laughs) Voiceover: Leland White was the person who was engaged in the debate in this particular instance - do horses, all four legs, do they all leave the ground when the horse is in a gallop? Voiceover: Right, this is a big - no one knew, because no one could see it. It's not something the naked eye could see, but they determined through Muy Bridge's photographs that, indeed, it was true, but not in the way that they thought, right? I think they thought that the horse's feet left the ground when they were all sort of splayed out, but it turned out that they all leave the ground Voiceover: Yes. Voiceover: Right, so that was a kind of surprise. Voiceover: So, a good example of technology revealing information about nature through using it in an objective sense. Marinetti would have wanted to bring this kind of machine technology into art. Voiceover: (laughs) Voiceover: This is kind of a strange subject, I suppose, for modern life. Voiceover: It's true. What's modern about this? Voiceover: I don't - I guess we assume that we're Voiceover: I guess so. Voiceover: But other than that - Voiceover: Not a terribly modern - Voiceover: No. or a car, or a train, or anything like that. Voiceover: Taking the dog for a walk. Charming, I suppose, but it doesn't seem Voiceover: No. Voiceover: Avant-garde art that comes out of Italy that is working with and through machine technology. Voiceover: But there are other later futurist paintings that do kind of take that on, right? Voiceover: This work by Severini. And as you said, other artists and other art movements were dealing with these concepts of simultaneity and different perspectives, and Severini had been in Paris and had been visiting people like Picasso and Braque and assimilating these Cubist techniques into his style. Voiceover: But Cubism became this sort of thing that everyone had to kind of grapple with, right? Picasso's Cubism sort of changed the way everybody looked at what a painting could be. Voiceover: And many artists would go back and revisit their earlier choices after seeing Cubism and integrate it into their own styles, and this is what Severini is doing here. Voiceover: What's going on in this painting? Voiceover: We're at a cafe, at a cafe concert, it looks like. There are keys which give us - Voiceover: Dancing girls and dresses - reminds me of kind of an impressionist subject matter, Voiceover: And we have some elements of Cubist collage in there as well, the text, Valse waltz, in the lower right hand corner, and in the upper left hand corner there is a woman straddling a pair of scissors or floating in front of and above the space, which also functions as a kind of collage element. Voiceover: Oh, I see her, yes. Voiceover: And floating above it - Polka. So he's incorporating both the fracturing of space from Cubism and the collage elements, a lot more color than we usually see in Picasso and Braque. Voiceover: That's true, yeah. It makes it a lot nicer to look at, I think. Voiceover: And we are supposed to see this woman as in the process of moving, dancing around, swirling around the hall, I would think. We don't see that a lot with Picasso or Braque either. Voiceover: That's true - still-lives mostly with Picasso and Braque. Voiceover: Yes. Voiceover: So, this is one that we see very often with futurism, I think, right? This is Boccioni's unique forms of Voiceover: 1913. It was the end of a series of figures that he had been working on for a number of years of the human form striding through space, Voiceover: Mmm hmm. And it becomes more and more abstract until he ends up with this particular example. So, again, it's kind of a traditional subject matter for this futurist art movement, isn't it? Voiceover: Of movement capturing motion. Voiceover: A male nude. Kind of classical, isn't it? Voiceover: I guess. It's like Bernini, Voiceover: That's the way - Voiceover: And capturing things in motion, to me. Voiceover: And the forms seem to be indicating not just the body itself, but the body moving. That the movements of the muscles - I think, Boccioni calls this the expansion of the muscles out into space, out into what is surrounding the form, rather than just the form itself. The form is not - Voiceover: Contained. Voiceover: Contained, exactly. Voiceover: (laughs) It expands outward. It - Voiceover: And there's something else very machine-like about the human form here. Voiceover: Particularly those angular forms and head, I think. Voiceover: And there's something kind of frightening about it, too, The forcefulness that it strides forward with, don't you think? Voiceover: A sense of confidence and perhaps frightening, maybe a sense of violence. This is something that the futurists tended to introduce into their works, Voiceover: Eradicating the past, and moving forcefully into the future. Voiceover: The avant-garde was violent, yes. And going back to where that metaphor, that term comes from, has military origins. Marinetti and his friends really embraced that, very much so, they were pro-war, very, very clearly, called war the "sole hygiene of the world". There are anecdotes about how they would wait outside of churches and pelt people with fruit, kind of a violent act to try to convince them that they were living in the past. Voiceover: And here we are on the eve of the first World War here with this image in 1913, right? Voiceover: Yes. Voiceover: And so this terrible destruction that's going to happen and millions of people who die and terrible, terrible suffering and the terrible cost of war is not yet real in a way. Voiceover: Boccioni would be striding into that similar ideally, I suppose, in his mind to this figure and he wouldn't come out at the other end. He dies in that war, and Marinetti also signs up readily. Who else - Russolo is another futurist painter who is entered in the war, the futurist architect, Sant'Elia, Voiceover: So many people - Voiceover: Actual material experience of war. Voiceover: Yeah, the thinking that the war would cleanse and bring about a new kind of future at this point, right? Voiceover: Yeah. Pretty strangely optimistic at this point. Voiceover: Boy, did they learn their lesson (laughs).