PARIS - The lights came on in Paris as the sun set, some on one wall of the Hotel de Ville were arranged like a constellation and blinked. It was lightly raining, now dark, and we sank into the courtyard to enter the museum of modern art in the Pompidou Center. In small dark square rooms off the giant entry hall of the center, the Beaubourg as the building is called, we left coats, went to the toilet, and bought tickets. Back in the center of the grand hall, we were directed to ride an escalator, walk through a glass-walled room, and back outside into what seemed like the cold, black night. Instead it is the glassed-in colonnade of escalators that take us to the 6th floor to see a show about Futurism.
I know that Futurism was declared in a manifesto around 1910 by Filippo Marinetti, a French Italian poet. He tried to include the Cubists like Picasso, Braque and Gris but they had their own manifesto and outlines for working. Intellectually, the curators of this show are telling us that these guys really were thinking along the same lines.
Marinetti wrote poems, got press in Figaro for the Futurists and drew cartoons. Umberto Boccioni stands out as the master artist - sculptor and painter - and the rooms with his work are extraordinary, beauty of the machine age, bright colors and dark shadows expressing hope for man-made inventions that will make the world a more wondrous place.
In these early years of the teens, Marcel Duchamp was painting. He mades "Nude Descending a Staircase." Cubists are trying to show all faces of something at one time, and Duchamp paints cubism and time. His Spanish-French friend Francis Picabia is painting on plywood - illustrating -- mechanical drawings.
The English speakers are making paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge (Joseph Stella) and wild, abstract still lifes from the English anti-Academy group of Vorticists, lead by Wyndham Lewis. David Bomberg occasionally removes even abstract reference to real things. Then the French-Russian couple, Sonia and Robert Delauney, remove all realistic subject matter to the point of making fabic desgn-like paintings of circles (Robert) and shape (Sonia). Of course, fabric did not look like this in the teens. This has come later, after it was done in art.
When the World War starts in 1914, it gets nasty. The most promising new British sculptor Brzeska dies in combat. The English get commissioned by their government to paint war and portraits. The Russian who have been doing Futurism and calling it Constructivism over throw the Czar in 1917 and democratize. They try to keep the hope of man-made machines and thinking alive. It is eventually autocratized into the Social Propaganda art we now think of as 20 Century Russian art. Then, a small group of artists and poets declare DADA. (Andre Breton, Tristan Tzara, Richard Huelsenbeck, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Ball -- and they invite Marinetti in).
Dada was an anti-art movement. The war was an anti-art movement, too. And after these two things, all the bright and shiny things from Futurism turned into surrealism. Intellectualism was dead, and dreamy emotive stuff was in. A short life for Futurism.
The show here at the Pompidou Center took you through all these countries and what they attempted in do. I was surprised at how little I'd learned about the Futurists in art school. Like it was an under appreciated movement between Matisse and the Fauvists and the equally emotional Surrealists.
Were does it fit in today. A Detroit artist Jeff Mills added his answer with a video installation that was in Room 3. It included a montage of stuff from the teens: ballet was big, film was just getting started. It was in a nice dark room where you could sit on the floor and relax. Be entertained. There was a lot of moving images to help us see into this futuristic thing. The futurists were brighter than the cubist, that's true. Looked like they were happier, and each artist is more discernible from others, even in his own country.
Just a few floors below it is the city's collection - displayed on two huge floors - of artwork since Matisse (1900). The Futurist show was intimate and huge at the same time, and they had open spaces where you could sit on chairs and relax or read the catalog.
