exhibition

Exhibition of Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors

Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, Severini, Soffici
ID: 662, Status: proof read
Exhibition period:
Apr‒May 1914
Type:
group
Organizing Bodies:
Doré Gallery
Currency:
s (Great Britain Pound (in Shilling))
Quickstats
Catalogue Entries: 80
Types of Work: other medium: 1, unknown: 79
Artists: 7
Gender: female: 0, male: 7
Nationalities: 1
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Date Title City Venue Type
Date Title City Venue # of common Artists
May 14‒Jun 10, 1914 Prima Esposizione di pittura futurista Naples Galleria Permanente Futurista 6 artists
Nov 1913‒Jan 1914 Esposizione di Pittura Futurista di "Lacerba" Florence Galleria Gonnelli 6 artists
May 18‒Jun 15, 1913 Les Peintres et les Sculpteurs Futuristes Italiens Rotterdam Rotterdamsche Kunstkring 6 artists
Feb 21‒Mar 21, 1913 Prima Esposizione Pittura Futurista Rome Foyer del Teatro Costanzi 6 artists
Feb‒Mar 1914 Esposizione di Pittura Futurista. Boccioni, Carrà, Russolo, Balla, Severini, Soffici Rome Galleria Futurista - Sprovieri 6 artists
Feb 5‒24, 1912 Les Peintres Futuristes italiens Paris MM. Bernheim-Jeune & Cie 5 artists
Mar 5, 1912 Exhibition of works by the Italian Futurist Painters London Sackville Gallery 4 artists
Apr 12‒May 15, 1912 Der Sturm. Zweite Ausstellung. Die Futuristen Berlin Gilka-Villa 4 artists
May 20‒Jun 1912 Les Peintres Futuristes Italiens / Exposition Brussels Galerie Georges Giroux 4 artists
Jul 1912 Die Futuristen [Wanderausstellung Der Sturm] Hamburg Hamburg (exact location unknown) 4 artists
Aug‒Oct 1914 Der Sturm. Die Futuristen [Achtundzwanzigste Ausstellung] Berlin Der Sturm [venues] 4 artists
1914 Der Sturm. Neunundzwanzigste Ausstellung Berlin Der Sturm [venues] 3 artists
Jan‒Feb 1913 A Futuristák és Expressionisták kiállitása [Exhibition of the Futurists and Expressionists] Budapest Nemzeti Szalon 4 artists
1915 Sammlung Walden. Gemälde, Zeichnungen, Plastiken Berlin Der Sturm [venues] 3 artists
Sep 20‒Dec 1, 1913 Der Sturm. Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon Berlin Lepke-Räume 6 artists
Dec 15, 1909‒Jan 8, 1910 Esposizione Annuale d'Arte della Famiglia Artistica Milan Famiglia Artistica 2 artists
Catalogue
Exhibition of Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors. 1914.
Nr. of pages: 35 [PDF page number: 40].
Holding Institutions: Victoria & Albert National Art Library, online: Fondazione Memofonte
Preface
Boccioni, Umberto; Carrà, Carlo D.; Russolo, Ligi; Balla, Giacomo; Severini, Gino; Soffici, Ardengo: The Exhibitors to the Public, p. 8-16

“We seek for a style of motion, a thing which has never been attempted before us.
Far from resting upon the examples of the Greeks and the Old Masters, we constantly extol individual intuition ; our object is to determine completely new laws which may deliver painting from the wavering uncertainty in which it lingers.
Our desire, to give as far as possible to our pictures a solid construction, can never bear us back to any tradition whatsoever. Of that we are firmly convinced.
All the truths learnt in the schools or in the studios are abolished for us. Our hands are free enough and pure enough to start everything afresh.
We declare, that there can be no modern painting without the starting point of an absolutely modern sensation and none can contradict us when we state that ''painting'' and ''sensation'' are two inseparable words.
If our pictures are futurist, it is because they are the result of absolutely futurist conceptions, ethical, aesthetic, political and social.
To paint from the posing model is an absurdity, and an act of mental cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the picture in linear, spherical or cubic forms. [p. 8]
To lend an allegorical significance to an ordinary nude figure, deriving the meaning of the picture from the objects held by the model or from those which are arranged about him, is to our mind the evidence of a traditional and academic mentality.
This method, very similar to that employed by the Greeks, by Raphael, by Titian, by Veronese, must necessarily displease us.
While we repudiate impressionism, we emphatically condemn the present reaction which, in order to kill impressionism, brings back painting to old academic forms.
It is only possible to react against impressionism by surpassing it.
Nothing is more absurd than to fight it by adopting the pictural laws which preceded it.
The points of contact which the quest of style may have with the so-called ''classic art'' do not concern us.

Others will seek, and will, no doubt, discover, these analogies which in any case cannot be looked upon as a return to methods, conceptions and values transmitted by classical painting.
A few examples will illustrate our theory.
We see no difference between one of those nude figures commonly called ''artistic'' and an anatomical plate. There is, on the other hand, an enormous difference between one [p. 9] of these nude figures and our futurist conception of the human body.
Perspective, such as it is understood by the majority of painters, has, for us the very same value which they lend to an engineer’s design.
The simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art : that is the intoxicating aim of our art.
Let us explain again by examples. In painting a person a balcony, seen from inside the room, we do not limit the scene to what the square frame of the window renders visible ; but we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced ; the sun-bathed throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies, etc. This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one another.
In order to make the spectator live in the centre of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto, the picture must be the synthesis of ''what one remembers'' and of ''what one sees''.
You must render the invisible which stirs and lives beyond intervening obstacles what we have on the right, on the left, and behind us, and not merely the small square of life artificially compressed, as it were, by the wings of a stage.
We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the ''dynamic sensation'', that is to say, the par- [p. 10] ticular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or, to put it more exactly, its interior force.
It is usual to consider the human being in its different aspects of motion or stillness, of joyous excitement or grave melancholy.
What is overlooked is that all inanimate objects display, by their lines, calmness or frenzy, sadness or gaiety. These various tendencies lend to the lines of which they are formed a sense and character of weighty stability or of aerial lightness.
Every object reveals by its lines how it would resolve itself were it to follow the tendencies of its forces.
This decomposition is not governed by fixed laws but it varies according to the characteristic personality of the object and the emotions of the onlooker.
Furthermore, every object influences its neighbour, not by reflections of light (the foundation of ''impressionistic primitivism''), but by a real competition of lines and by real conflicts of planes, following the emotional law which governs the picture (the foundation of ''futurist primitivism'').
Dynamism is the simultaneous action of the object's characteristic movement (absolute movement) with the transformations to which the object submits in its displacements in relation to its mobile or immobile ambience (relative movement).
The dynamism of an object, then, does not consist alone in the decomposition of objects. It is certain that decomposition and deformation (decentralization) have value for [p. 11] movement, because they interrupt the continuity of line, break the rhythm of the silhouette, and augment the shocks, indications, possibilities, the direction of forms. But this is not yet true futurist, plastic dynamism.
On the other hand, this consists neither in the trajectory, not in pendulem-like balance, nor in the displacement of a point ''a'' to a point ''b''. Dynamism is the lyrical conception of forms interpreted by infinite manifestation of their relations between absolute movement and relative movement, between ''ambience'' and object, until it forms a whole : ''ambience'' and object. It is a creation of a new form which gives the relation between weight and expansion, between rotatory movement and revolving (or revolution) movement. Dynamism is life itself seized in the form which life creates its infinite succession.
With the desire to intensify the aesthetic emotions by blending, so to speak, the painted canvas with the soul of the spectator, we have declared the latter ‘ ''must in future be placed in the centre of the picture.'' '
He shall not be present at, but participate in the action. If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaught of cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces, following the general law of violence of the picture.
Those ''force-lines'' must encircle and involve the spectator so that he will in a manner be forced to struggle himself with the persons in the picture. [p. 12]
All objects, in accordance with what the painter Boccioni happily terms ''physical transcendentalism'', tend to the infinite by their ''force-lines'' the continuity of which is measured by our intuition.
It is these ''force-lines'' that we must draw in order to lead back the work of art to true painting. We interpret nature by rendering these objects upon the canvas as the beginning or the prolongations of the rhythms impressed upon our sensibility by these very objects.
After having, for instance, reproduced in a picture the right shoulder or the right ear of a figure, we deem it totally vain and useless to reproduce the left shoulder or the left ear. We do not draw sounds, but their vibrating intervals. We do not paint diseases, but their symptoms
and their consequences.
We may further explain our idea by a comparison drawn from the evolution of music.
Not only have we radically abandoned the motive fully developed according to its determined and, therefore, artificial equilibrium, but we suddenly and purposely intersect each motive with one or more other motives of which we never give the full development but merely the initial, central, or final notes.
As you see, there is with us not merely variety, but chaos and clashing of rhythms, totally opposed to one another, which we nevertheless assemble into a new harmony.
We thus arrive at what we call the ''painting of states of mind''. [p. 13]
In the pictural description of the various states of mind of a leave-taking, perpendicular lines, undulating and as it were worn out, clinging here and there to silhouettes of empty bodies, may well express languidness and discouragement.
Confused and trepidating line, either straight or curved, mingled with the outlined hurried gestures of people calling one another, will express a sensation of chaotic excitement.
On the other hand, horizontal lines, fleeting, rapid and jerky, brutally cutting into half list profiles of faces or crumbling and rebounding fragments of landscape, will give the tumultuous feelings of the persons going away.
It is practically impossible to express in words the essential values of painting.
The public must also be convinced that in order to understand aesthetic sensations to which one is not accustomed, it is necessary to forget entirely one’s intellectual culture, nit in order to ''assimilate'' the work of art, but to ''deliver one’s self up'' to it heart and soul.
We are beginning a new epoch of painting.
We are sure henceforward of realising conceptions of the highest importance and the most unquestionable originality. Others will follow who, with equal daring and determination, will conquer those summits of which we can only catch a glimpse. That is why we have proclaimed ourselves to be ''the primitives of a completely renovated sensitiveness''. [p. 14]
In several of the pictures which we are presenting to the public, vibration and motion endlessly multiply each object. We have thus justified our famous statement regarding the ' ''running horse which has not four legs, but twenty.'' '
One may remark, also, in our pictures, spots, lines, zones of colour which do not correspond to any reality, but which, in accordance with a law of our interior mathematics, musically prepare and enhance the emotion of the spectator.
We thus create a sort of emotive ambience, seeking by intuition the sympathies and the links which exist between the exterior (concrete) scene and the interior (abstract) emotion. Those lines, those spots, those zones of colour, apparently illogical and meaningless, are the mysterious keys to our pictures.
We shall no doubt be taxed with an excessive desire to define and express in tangible form the subtle ties which unite our abstract interior with the concrete exterior.
Yet could we leave an unfettered liberty of understanding to the public which always sees as it has been taught to see, through eyes warped by routine ?
We go our way, destroying each day in ourselves and in our pictures the realistic forms and the obvious details which have served us to construct a bridge of understanding between ourselves and the public. ln order that the crowd may enjoy our marvellous spiritual world, of which it is ignorant, we give it the material sensation of that world.
We thus reply to the coarse and simplistic curiosity which surrounds us by the brutally realistic aspects of our primitivism. [p. 15]
Conculsion : Our futurist painting embodies three new conceptions of painting :
1. That which solves the question of volumes in a picture, as opposed to the liquefaction of objects favoured by the vision of impressionists.
2. That which leads us to translate objects according to the ''force lines'' which distinguish them, and by which is obtained an absolutely new power of objective poetry.
3. That (the natural consequence of the other two) which would give the emotional ambience of a picture, the synthesis of the various abstract rhythms of every object, from which there springs a fount of pictural lyricism hitherto unknown.

Umberto Boccioni. Carlo D. Carrà. Luigi Russolo. Giacomo Balla. Gino Severini. Ardengo Soffici.

N.B. – All the ideas contained in this preface were developed at length in the lecture on Futurist Painting, delivered by the painter, Boccioni, at the Circolo Internazionale Artistico, at Rome, on May 29th, 1911. [p. 16]”
Catalogue Structure
F. T. Marinetti: "Initial Manifesto of Futurism (Published by the 'Figaro,' February 20th, 1909.)", p. 4-7
"The Exhibitors to the Public", p. 8-16
Umberto Boccioni: "Sculpture. Ensemble Plastiques", p. 17-22
[cat. no. 1-73], p. 25-34
"Boccioni. Plastic Ensembles", cat. no. 1-4, [p. 36]
"Marinetti (Poet)", cat. no. 5, [p. 36]
"Marinetti and Cangiullo (Poets)", cat. no. 6, [p. 36]
Additional Information
Other Mediums listed
Note
- "Under Revision", cover page
- Catalogue images with no catalogue entry:
"Boccioni (Sculpture): Single Forms of Continuity through space (front view)", p. 18
"Balla: Abstract Dynamism", p. 31
Additional Notes
No date information on catalogue. Date taken from:
Marianne W. Martin: Futurist Art and Theory. 1909-1915. Oxford 1968. p. 213.

+Gender Distribution (Pie Chart)

+Artists’ Age at Exhibition Start(Bar Chart)

+Artists’ Nationality(Pie Chart)

+Exhibiting Cities of Artists(Pie Chart)

+Catalogue Entries by Type of Work(Pie Chart)

+Catalogue Entries by Nationality(Pie Chart)

Name Date of Birth Date of Death Nationality # of Cat. Entries
Umberto Boccioni 1882 1916 IT 18
Carlo Carrà 1881 1966 IT 15
Luigi Russolo 1885 1947 IT 5
Giacomo Balla 1871 1958 IT 10
Gino Severini 1883 1966 IT 14
Ardengo Soffici 1879 1964 IT 15
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti 1876 1944 IT 2
Recommended Citation: "Exhibition of Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors." In Database of Modern Exhibitions (DoME). European Paintings and Drawings 1905-1915. Last modified Aug 5, 2020. https://exhibitions.univie.ac.at/exhibition/662