Abstract
Urban modernity, a theme that does not interest cubist painters—with the exception of Delaunay, who was influenced by Futurism—becomes for De Chirico, quite differently from his German contemporaries Kirchner and Grosz, the centre point for a reflection on a new aesthetics. De Chirico composes his cityscapes through a language only seemingly derived from antiquity, but in fact hiding within its forms, like an optical illusion, the potential for a revelation of a truly contemporary vision. In this sense, he distances himself from the futurists who experiment with a scientific lexicon to reinvent painterly practice but entertain its possible expression only conceptually.
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Notes
- 1.
“For the impassioned observer it is a limitless joy to take up residence in the number, in the undulating, in the movement, in the fugitive and in the infinite. (…) The observer is a prince who enjoys anonymity everywhere. (…) Thus the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as into a great electric power station. It might be compared to a mirror as immense as the crowd, to a kaleidoscope with a conscience which, at each movement, depicts the multiple life and mutable grace of all the elements of life. It is an insatiable I of the not-I which, at every instant, renders and expresses it in more alive images of life itself, always unstable and fleeting”.
- 2.
De Chirico describes this interesting period in his book Memorie della mia vita (105–107). I cite the most significant passage (106): “I understood that something vast was taking place within me. Formerly, in museums in Italy, France and Germany, I had looked at the Masters’ pictures and had always seen them just as everyone sees them. That is, I saw them as painted images. Of course what was then revealed to me at the Villa Borghese Museum was nothing but a beginning; subsequently, with study, work, observation and meditation I made giant-step progress and, just as I understand now, painting is such a phenomenon that when I see others, those who still don’t know, those who are still plodding in the dark and toiling to save their face, to deceive their neighbour and themselves and not succeeding in anything are unhappy, and being unhappy are ill-natured, then, I say, when I see this sad and distressing spectacle I am taken by a great pity for those unfortunates and would like to be able to offer myself as a sacrifice, to bare my breast to those forlorn people and shout at them: ‘Strike me! Strike me! Let yourselves go!’, would like to embrace and kiss them and weep and sob with them, and between one sob and the next, to make them happy, solemnly swear to paint no more!”
- 3.
From the programme text published in the catalogue of the exhibition of Futurist painters, signed by the same artists, at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, February 1912.
- 4.
With the years and a greater lexical and stylistic mastery the Futurists’ interest in a new dimension of reality extended to hypothesizing actual construction projects, as in the case of Boccioni’s 1914 Manifesto of Architecture, while leaving the same revolutionary intentions concerning architectonic discipline to seep amply through: “We have said that in painting we shall place the spectator at the centre of the picture, making him the centre of emotion rather than simply a spectator. Also the city’s architectonic environment will be transformed in an enveloping sense. We are living in a spiral of architectonic forces. Until yesterday building took place in a successive panoramic sense. One house was followed by another house, one street by another street. Today we are beginning to have around us an architectonic environment that develops in all directions: from the bright basements of the great stores, from the various levels of tunnels of the underground railways to the gigantic rise of American skyscrapers”. But it was still and above all in the perceptual dimension that these images of irrepressible dynamism and laceration of the static nature were being carried out and taking form. In Mario Sironi’s work of those years, close to the programmatic tensions of the Futurists, the city instead appears gloomier, plastically constructed in accordance with a solitary and meditated dimension. It would be Antonio Sant’Elia who recalled and interpreted the sense of movement and speed as a vital subject, as against the tradition of the monumental and heavy, in the manifesto he signed on 11 July 1914, published in the August number of the magazine Lacerba the same year: “We must invent and rebuild the futurist city like an immense tumultuous site, agile, mobile, dynamic in every part, and the futurist house like a gigantesque machine”. And the new metropolis rises in his projects: cities with gigantic interconnections between one building and the next, in an exceptional thrust of upward verticalism. Mere semblances of a dream transposed in the calculations and in its balances without seeing them transformed into inaccessible heights. From that magical moment on, there was a flourishing of proposals that replaced the sensitive vision, the extraordinary pictorial representations of the early years. Mario Chiattone’s “proto-rationalism” was echoed by the imaginary and lively propositions of Balla or, again, of Fortunato Depero (1916) in his plastic-mechanistic conception, or of Enrico Prampolini (1913–1914) more aimed at dynamic decomposition. Towards the end of the 1910s the architecture of Virgilio Marchi’s visionary city would approach expressionist models and typologies and, in subsequent decades, new proposals would follow after the inevitable intermingling of languages (Fillia [Luigi Colombo], Prampolini, Alberto Sartoris, Tullio Crali, Nicolaj Diulgheroff, Nicola Mosso and Angiolo Mazzoni) until they wholly consumed the original utopian tension to become fully immersed in reality or, with the second generation of Futurists, until they raised and lost themselves in the dimension of a new aerial mythology.
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Coen, E. (2017). Urban Metaphysics versus Metropolitan Dynamisms: The Italian Vision Before the First World War. In: Gabriele, A. (eds) Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56148-0_11
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