Boccioni A Retrospective

Traces the life and career of the Italian artist, discusses his connection to the Futurist movement, and looks at his paintings, drawings, and sculpture.

Traces the life and career of the Italian artist, discusses his connection to the Futurist movement, and looks at his paintings, drawings, and sculpture.

Italian futurism visualized diverse types of motion, which had been rooted in pervasive kinetic and vehicular forces generated during a period of dramatic modernization in the early 20th century. Yet, as David Mather's sweeping intellectual and art historical scholarship demonstrates, it was the camera-not the engine-that proved to be the primary invention against which many futurist ideas and practices were measured. Overturning several misconceptions about Italian futurism's interest in the disruptive and destructive effects of technology, Futurist Conditions provides a refreshing update to the historical narrative by arguing that the formal and conceptual approaches by futurist visual artists reoriented the possibly dehumanizing effects of mechanized imagery toward more humanizing, spiritual aims. Through its sustained analysis of the artworks and writings of Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla, and the Bragaglia brothers, dating to the first decade after the movement's founding in 1909, Mather's account of their obsession with kinetic motion pivots around a 1913 debate on the place and relative import of photography among traditional artistic mediums-a debate culminating in the expulsion of the Bragaglias, but one that also prompted a range of productive responses by other futurist artists to world-changing social, political, and economic conditions.

This book reveals how, when, where, and why vitalism and its relationship to new scientific theories, philosophies and concepts of energy became seminal from the fin de siècle until the Second World War for such Modernists as Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Hugo Ball, Juliette Bisson, Eva Carrière, Salvador Dalì, Robert Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Edvard Munch, Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Gino Severini and John Cage. For them, Vitalism entailed the conception of life as a constant process of metamorphosis impelled by the free flow of energies, imaginings, intuition and memories, unconstrained by mechanistic materialism and chronometric imperatives, to generate what the philosopher Henri Bergson aptly called Creative Evolution. Following the three main dimensions of Vitalist Modernism, the first part of this book reveals how biovitalism at the fin de siècle entailed the pursuit of corporeal regeneration through absorption in raw nature, wholesome environments, aquatic therapies, electromagnetism, heliotherapy, modern sports, particularly rugby, water sports, the Olympic Games and physical culture to energize the human body and vitalize its life force. This is illuminated by artists as geoculturally diverse as Gustave Caillebotte, Thomas Eakins, Munch and Albert Gleizes. The second part illuminates how simultaneously Vitalism became aligned with anthroposophy, esotericism, magnetism, occultism, parapsychology, spiritism, theosophy and what Bergson called "psychic states", alongside such new sciences as electromagnetism, radiology and the Fourth Dimension, as captured by such artists as Juliette Bisson, Giacomo Balla, Albert Besnard, Umberto Boccioni, Eva Carrière, John Gerrard Keulemans, László Moholy-Nagy, James Tissot, Albert von Schrenck Notzing and Picasso. During and after the devastation of the First World War, the third part explores how Vitalism, particularly Bergson’s theory of becoming, became associated with Dadaist, Neo-Dadaist and Surrealist notions of amorality, atemporality, dysfunctionality, entropy, irrationality, inversion, negation and the nonsensical captured by Hans Arp, Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kazimir Malevich, Kurt Schwitters and Vladimir Tatlin alongside Cage’s concept of Nothing. After investigating the widespread engagement with Bergson’s philosophies and Vitalism and art by Anarchists, Marxists and Communists during and after the First World War, it concludes with the official rejection of Bergson and any form of Vitalism in the Soviet Union under Stalin. This book will be of vital interest to gallery, exhibition and museum curators and visitors, plus readers and scholars working in art history, art theory, cultural studies, modernist studies, occult studies, European art and literature, health, histories of science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, sport studies, heritage studies, museum studies and curatorship.

The Art Dealer’s Apprentice tells the story of how the author moved to New York in 1989 as a young Midwesterner, found a job at an Upper East Side gallery, and became the protégé of Carla Panicali, an Italian countess and major international art world figure. From Carla – an extraordinary woman whom he deeply admired – the author learned to navigate the treacherous waters of authenticity, power and money in the art business and his own life. As gallery director, he gradually piloted the gallery through a sea of fakes, frauds, and unscrupulous colleagues, competitors, collectors and experts, until the art market crashed, and in the ensuing crisis, in the increasingly money-driven art world of the 1990s, he came to question even the authenticity of his friendship with Carla. In The Art Dealer’s Apprentice, the author recounts how he learned the New York art business from the inside, including the roles of dealers, auction houses, runners, collectors and experts; the personal histories of famous artists and the art historical importance and salability of their work; and how paintings and sculptures were (or were not) authenticated and sold, often based, surprisingly, on factors having little to do with the artwork itself. The author also details how international business was done, in some cases through illicit transport of artworks, payoffs to experts, and Swiss bank accounts. Increasingly disillusioned, the author ultimately concludes that by the early 1990s, the art business was no longer really about art.

The Handbook of International Futurism is the first reference work ever to presents in a comparative fashion all media and countries in which the movement, initiated by F.T. Marinetti in 1909, exercised a particularly noteworthy influence. The handbook offers a synthesis of the state of scholarship regarding the international radiation of Futurism and its influence in some fifteen artistic disciplines and thirty-eight countries. While acknowledging the great achievements of the movement in the visual and literary arts of Italy and Russia, it treats Futurism as an international, multidisciplinary phenomenon that left a lasting mark on the manifold artistic manifestations of the early twentieth-century avant-garde. Hundreds of artists, who in some phase in their career absorbed Futurist ideas and stylistic devices, are presented in the context of their national traditions, their international connections and the media in which they were predominantly active. The handbook acts as a kind of multi-disciplinary, geographical encyclopaedia of Futurism and gives scholars with varying levels of experience a detailed overview of all countries and disciplines in which the movement had a major impact.

Volume 10 examines how the innovative impulses that came from Italy were creatively merged with indigenous traditions and how many national variants of Futurism emerged from this fusion. Ten essays investigate various aspects of Italian Futurism and its links to Austria, Georgia, France, Hungary and Portugual and in fields such as Typography, Olfaction, Photography. Section 2 examines seven examples of caricatures and satires of Futurism in the contemporary press, followed by Section 3, reporting on the Archiv der Avantgarden (AdA) in Dresden. Section 4 communicates bibliographic details of 120 book publications on Futurism in the period 2017-2020, including exhibition catalogues, conference proceedings and editions.