World War 1: artists and intellectuals’ responses

Roberta Piazza

The Dreyfus Affair

• Political scandal that divided France (1890s – beginning of 1900)

• Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Captain of artillery.

• Due to his Alsatian origins (German annexation of Alsace in 1871) although he remained French, he was accused of espionage (paper found in a waste basket).

Dreyfus cont.ed

• France divided between pro and anti Dreyfus, i.e. socialists, republicans, anticlericalists, or conservatives, respectively.

• Zola’s letter published in L’Aurore on Jan. 13, 1898. Titled ‘J’accuse’

• Emergence of intellectuals’ views vis-à-vis the case

Dreyfus cont.

• The divide in French society persisted for decades.

• Dreyfus was rehabilitated in 1906

Intellectuals & artists and the great war

• Joyce, Kraus, Ezra Pound, Thomas Mann fiercely against the war

• Many others were pro war.• Interventist Prezzolini (Italian journal, La Voce):

‘Today’s democracy is no longer satisfactory. It has lowered standards while it pretends to have raised to the higher level of the new citizens. Political parties no longer exist. People seek their own interest. One day they are with the left next they move to the right.’

• Italian poet D’Annunzio strongly pro war, accused by Mann of being a ‘charlatan master of verbal orgies as well as ‘Wagner’s parrot’

• War as the object of visual representation regardless of the artists’ ideological persuasion. Why?

• WW1 as the first ‘total mechanised warfare’

Some examples

• Against Dufy’s optimism (The End of the Great War, 1915), Chagall’s realism (The Newspaper Vendor, 1914), Meidner’s 1912 Apocalyptic Landscape in war foreboding.

Meidner

Meidner

Vorticism in Britain

• Wyndham Lewis, editor of Blast• Belligerent & polemical accusations to

conservative & mediocre bourgeoisie.• Vorticism, an aesthetic movement NOT in favour

of war, but its volcanic and boisterous enthusiasm well suited the spirit of the time.

• Monumental canvas, Plan of War (huge geometrical figures) six months before the hostilities.

End of optimism

• War as politician’s flood of lies (cf. BBC4, The Shock of the New powers That Be, in LC)

• Jacob Epstein, Rock Drill, 1913-15

Torso in Metal from Rock Drill, 1913-16 (the stump of a maimed warrior replaces the original ardour of the drill)

Avant-gardes and the great war

• Militaristic terminology from Saint-Simon. Part of the modernist challenge to conventions

• Mission of XX cent. avant-gardes: abolition of any separation between art and experience of the world

Some avant-gardes: the Futurists

• Global phenomenon with impact on multiple fields.

• First movement aimed at a mass audience.

• Anti-bourgeois (against sentimentalism and women, functional to supporting the bourgeois status quo)

Futurist principles

• Against anachronistic culture. For ex. repudiation of Symbolist poets, the last ‘moon-lovers.

• In favour of modernity, technology (e.g. photography), dynamism, simultaneity, speed.

Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism 1909 and 1911

• ‘A roaring automobile…is ore beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace’

• ‘Parole in libertà’ (words in freedom): i.against canons of syntax, grammar and punctuation; ii. words freed form their conventional meaning (‘wireless imagination’); iii. analogy as unusual correspondences between elements (as in Mallarmé & Baudelaire): woman/gulf and man/torpedoboat

Marinetti

• ‘We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervour of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung from clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke... ‘

Futurism cont.ed

• ‘Nothing is more beautiful than a great humming power station that contains the hydraulic pressures of whole mountain chain and the electric power of a vast horizon, synthesized in marble control panels bristling with dials, keyboards and shining commutators’

• Marinetti’s Zang Tum Tuum

• Marinetti’s Bombardamento: poetic collage and onomatopoeic distortion

‘Booooomboooombaaaardaaamento’

• Futurist prescriptivism: several manifestos

• Futurist painters:

Boccioni (1st picture), Balla, Russolo, Severini, Carrà

Balla

Severini

Severini

Other futurists

• Futurist architect: Sant’Elia (Manifesto, 1914)

• Futurist musicians: Pratella, Manifesto with Russolo, 1910

Futurism and the war

• In favour of Italy’s African Campaign (Lybia, 1911-1912), nationalism and war intervention.

• ‘We will glorify war – the world’s only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women’ (Futurist Manifesto 1909)

• Class conflict between bourgeoisie and the proletariat

• Similar clash between bourgeois and proletarian countries. Italy as the great proletarian (justification for war and annexation of foreign territories)

• Italy entered the war in 1915 with Britain and France

Another avant-garde: Dada

• Zurich, June 1915, venue: Cabaret Voltaire (ironic echo of 18th century rationalist thinker of Enlightenment !)

• Hugo Ball (sculptor), Marcel Jancso (painter), Hans Arp (painter) Tristan Tzara (poet).

Equality accorded to visual and literary production:

• Hennings sang and gave puppet shows

• Ball and Tzara recited poetry

• Marcel Jancso made masks

• Jean Arp contributed colourful wooden sculptures and paper collages (cf. Jones, 2005)

• Magazine Dada (Hugo Ball)

Dada cont.

• Two different currents in Dada: contemplative and violent: Zurich (age of innocence) and Berlin (1918 Weimar Republic after the end of the Monarchy, which lasted 15 yrs till Hitler’s era).

• Hugo Ball: volunteered but was unfit for the war. Pacifist after a visit to the front.

Dada as protest against the war

• Away from the ‘slaughterhouses of the world’ Hans Arp:

• ‘While the thunder of guns sounded in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would … save mankind from the furiously folly of these times. We aspired to a new order that might restore the balance between heaven and hell. … the bandits were unable to understand us. Their puerile mania for authoritarianism leads them to use art itself as a means to stultify mankind’ (M. Dachy, 1990: 34)

The Dada spirit

• Criticism of the moral, political and cultural values of the bourgeoisie.

• Disgust and contempt for any form of conventionalism and conformism.

Dada principles

• Desire to express absolute spontaneity: provocative and scandalous gestures.

• Desire to go back to the beginning (Dada = Rocking horse in Rumanian).

• ‘Art is not a serious thing’. Dadaist negation of art as an organically and logically elaborated product.

• Dada means nothing, ‘it stood for everything and nothing’.

• Hans Arp says that Tzara found the word ‘Dada’ on 8 Feb 1916 at 6 pm!

Aim: Provocation and challenge.

• Provocativeness: poet Arthur Cravan: ‘I prefer all the eccentricities of even a commonplace mind to the tame works of a bourgeois fool’.

• Tristan Tzara, Dada Manifesto, 1918:

‘Logic is a complication. Logic is always wrong. It draws the threads of notions, words, in their formal exterior, toward illusory ends and centers.’

(ibid.: 37)

• The admiral’s in Search of a House to Rent, collective poem published in Cabaret Voltaire.

• Jugo Ball and primitivism.

• Hausmann’s experimentalism in The Art Critic Photomontage

Dada cont.

• Dada ended in 1923 and many of its members moved to Surrealism (e.g. Picabia and Man Ray)

• Limit of Dada: little beyond protest and provocation, e.g. Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Urinal’ and ‘Monna Lisa’ with moustaches.

Marcel Du Champ

• Urinal: sent to the New York 1917 Independent Artists Exhibition with the title ‘Fountain’.

• Mr Tutt: No need to create art objects. Functional change.

Du Champ’s ‘The Fountain’

Dada and Futurism

• Differences. • Pro-war Futurism (proto-fascists) v. Pacifist and

Anarchist (Ball and Bakunin) Dada. Cravan against Futurists who were ‘fighting evil with evil’

• Dada as the taste of innocence, play and serendipity in art (Tzara’s poetry, haphazard words out of a sac) v. Polemical and aggressive thrust of Futurism.

More differences

• At the core of Dada aesthetics: the notion of ‘doubt’. Assurance and belligerent chauvinism among Futurists

• Dadaist irony and satire. Self-assurance and assertiveness of Futurism

Dada & Futurism: similarities

• Similarities. • Praise of the new, tiredness with the old world. • Multiplicity of arts involved• However: Dada: machines are ‘man-eating

creatures’ AND (contradiction) they are ‘eroticised and placed in a mysterious, alchemical system of relationship’ with the artist ‘ingenieur’ and ‘monteur’ (Bergius, 1980: 36).

Similarities cont.

• Provocativeness (Marcel Duchamp in New York with Parisian air!)

• Anti-bourgeoisie attitude

• Presence of several manifestos

• Simultaneism: the attempt to express reality in all its aspects not in succession but all at the same time (Delaunay’s rhythmical simultaneousness).

Similarities

• Futurist evenings (Serate futuriste): Insults hurled at the audience, tomatoes and eggs flying about. Evening performances at Cabaret Voltaire.

References

• Sheppard, R. 1980. Dada and politics. In Sheppard, R. (ed.) Dada. Studies of a Movement. Chalfont St Giles, Alpha Academic.

• Bergius, H. 1980. The aesthetic of Dada. In Sheppard (ed.)• Cork, R. 1994. A Bitter Truth. Avant-Garde Art and the Great War.

New Haven and London, Yale Univ. Press• Faulkner, F. 1977. Modernism. London, Routledge.• Dachy, M. 1990. The Dada Movement 1915-1923. New York,

Rizzoli. • Hopkins, D. 2004. Dada and Surrealism: A Very Short Introduction.

Oxford, OUP• Jones, J. 2005. ‘Make art not war’. The Guardian 08.11.05• BBC4, The Shock of the New Powers That Be (SLI LC)