STANFORD ITALIAN REVIEW Editor John Freccero Associa.docx

STANFORD ITALIAN REVIEW
Editor
John Freccero
Associate Editor
Jeffrey Schnapp
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Beverly Allen Judith Brown Robert Harrison Carolyn Springer
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Teresa De Lauretis

Dante Della Terza
Giuseppe Mammarella
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Eduardo Saccone
John Scott
Maria Picchio Simonelli
Founder
Alphonse J uilland
The Stanford Italian Review, published under the auspices of
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and Italian of Stanford University, is devoted to critical essays
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STANFORD ITALIAN REVIEW
VOLUME VIII, NO. 1-2
FASCISM AND CULTURE
Edited by
JEFFREY SCHNAPP AND BARBARA SPACKMAN
Contents
Jiffrey Schnapp & Barbara Spackman, Introduction
Renzo De Felice, Fascism and Culture in Italy:
Outlines for Further Study
Heesok Chang, Fascism and Critical Theory
Russell A. Bennan, The Aestheticization of Politics:
Walter Benjamin on Fascism and the Avant-Garde
Jiflrey Schnapp, Forwarding Address
Barbara Spackman, The Fascist Rhetoric of Virility

Paolo Valesio, Ungaretti and the Miles Patiens:
Dannunzian Genealogies
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, The Politics of Realism: Corrente
di Vita Giovanile and the Youth Culture of the 1930s
Diane Ghirardo, .City and Theater: The Rhetoric
of Fascist Architecture
Italo Calvina, The Dictator's Hats
David Humphrey, The Dictator's Bodies
Dux Italiae
Jiffrey Schnapp & Barbara Spackman, Selections from
the Great Debate on Fascism and Culture:
Critica Fascista 1926-1927
1
5
13
35
53
81
103
139
165

195
211
221
235
52 Fascism and Culture
"refeudalization," i.e., the demise of a public of rational debate,
re-
placed by a consumerist culture of manipulation and
acclamatory
politics. 29 The historical episodes of fascism undoubtedly
represented
a major acceleration of this aestheticization of politics. Yet as
little
as that theoretical designation captures all the unique
characteristics
of the thirties, its association solely with that single historical
moment
underestimates its critical viability forty years after the collapse
of the
Central European fascist states.
29 J ii:rgen Habennas, Strukturwandel der 61fentlichkeit:
Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie
der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied and Berlin:
Luchterhand, 1974 [ 1962]) 233, 273.
Jeffrey Schnapp

FORWARDING ADDRESS
Fascist modernism. The phrase still has the power to produce_ a
certain
turbulence on the lips, as if the pairing were unnatural. ,
In the place of the noun staods the ism which marks the founda-
tions of contemporary culture. A mostly luminous and diurnal
con-
cept associated with narratives of emancipation,
experimentation, and
scientific progress, it is still very much alive in our institutions
and
at their margins. Although to some modernism now seems less
like
an invitation to adventure than a heavily touristed ruin, its
legacy
stretches across the entire cultural field, from the gallery cub~
to the
television tube, from the boardroom to the classroom.
In the more shifty place of the modifier stands the fascist: our
culture's main depository of the demonic. His is the stain that is
forever
returning from history's crypt to disfigure the foremost members
of
an entire generation: from Martin Heidegger to Maurice
Blanchet
to Paul de Man. Commonly associated with narratives of
reaction
and regress, fascism retains its hold on the contemporary
imagina-
tion because it is thought to occupy a dark subcutaneous region
haunted by heroism, eros, and death. Its "world" is one of myth
and
ritual, of broken taboos, of fantasies of dominance and

submission
allowed out of the closet until the inevitable apocalypse. Hence,
the
conviction that it has ended and, hence, its continuing power to
return
and shock.
Whenever one weds such apparently opposed terms, an explana-
tion is calli::d for. The phrase "fascist modernism" does not
describe,
at least in my view, a genuine contradiction, nor is the pairing
of
:he word "fascist" with the word "modernism" unnatural. The
phrase
s not an oxymoron because, contrary to the imaginative
construe-
ion just evoked, fascism was, for better or for worse, one
dominant
Orm which modernization took in Italy and elsewhere. The
evidence
o this effect is incontrovertible. Beyond the vicissitudes of the
historical
·egime's changing cultural policies, Italian fascism was, from
its roots
n the urban upheavals of 1914 and 1915 to the Republic of Salo,
irmly on the side of modernity.
This suggests that the time has come to go beyond the
comfortable
lichotomies of modernism/fascism, progress/regress,
action/reaction,

10liticized aesthetics/aestheticized politics, which still abound
in con-
emporary theoretical discourse. The time has come, moreover,
to
bandon the view of fascism as a simple and stable monolith, and
J envision it instead as a mobile and contradictory formation
orga-
,ized around a core of ideological/cultural leitmotifs. The task
is surely
delicate one, requiring both a stern refusal of the domesticating
gaze
f the overzealous revisionist and a resistance to the temptation
to
1ake monsters. The problem with the former is that it refuses to
take
n ethical stance, placing all individual and collective
responsibilities
nder the dangerously broad umbrella of Historical Necessity.
The
roblem with the latter is that its creations are extravagant: we
hunt
1e monster in the remotest regions- in nesses, tundras, and
limalayan snowfields- but never look for him where he is most
likely
) be: knocking on our own back door.
Even the most acute discussions of fascist-modernist texts and
ar-
facts still tend to conceive of their task as a critical rescue
mission:
o effort must be spared to protect the modernist project from the
LScist shadow. 1 In the case of futurism, for instance; there is
the com-
ton practice of placing a cordon sanitaire around the
movement's first

ine to ten years: the period tellingly referred to as the "first
futurism"
· "heroic" period. The effect is to mark off the movement's
greatest
movations from the inferior so-called "second" and "third"
futurisms
The neo-Conservative polemics of theorists such as Daniel Bell
perform the in-
·rse operation. Modernism for Bell is always already guilty by
association with our
ntury's two great scourges: Communism and Fascism. As such
his position seems
Jsely affiliated with the long predominant view of futurism as a
debased form of
odernism. (Widespread both in Italy and abroad, this view went
mostly unchal-
1ged until the early 1970s.) Because neither offers a
particularly nuanced account
futurism, I omit them from present consideration.
Schnapp: Forwarding Address 55
which are stigmatized as more genuinely fascist, despite the
over-
whelming continuities and the instrumental role played by the
"first"
futurism in shaping early fascism.
Renzo De Felice's recent apologetics perform much the same
move,
arguing correctly against any crude equation between futurism
and
fascism, but in the process falling into the opposite error. 2 De
Felice
would have us believe that Marinetti's "genuine" political

commitments
do not extend beyond 1921: one year, conveniently enough,
before
the March on Rome. The later Marinelli thus becomes nearly
unrecognizable: he is a disillusioned hero-victim withdrawn into
the
utopia of Art, but repeatedly forced into the Mussolinian orbit
either
by idealism or circumstance. 3 The futurist movement, in turn,
is no
longer to be considered one of a number of cultural-political
"ideologies"
vying for hegemony within the fascist fold. Instead, for De
Felice,
it becomes something at once more trivial ·and more auspicious:
a
buoyant "attitude towards life" founded on the values
of"democracy"
and "individualism"- values diametrically opposed to the
"oppor-
tunism," "authoritarianism," and cultural "conservatism" of
fascism.+
Further examples of the attempt to limit the convergence
between
fascism and modernism may be found in the field of
architectural
history. Historians of rationalism, the Italian version of the
Interna-
tional style, have generally ignored the fascist resonances of Le
Cor-
busier's Vers une nouvelle architecture while at the same time
maintain-
ing that there was a clear disjunction between the so-called
"pro-
gressive" and "regressive" (or pro- and anti-International style)

phases
2 "L'avanguardia futurista," vii-xxxv in F. T. Marinetti,
Taccuini 191511921, ed.
Alberto Bertoni (Bologna, 1987). De Felice's essay extends an
earlier polemic with
the hi$torian George Masse over the fascism/futurism
connection. I share some of
De F~lice's hesitations about Masse's approach, yet find his
"corrective" overstated.
It appears to mistake criticism" from within the fascist fold for
actual opposition, distorts
the historical record on a number of points, and underestimates
the seriousness of
futurism's longstanding effort to fUse the spheres of culture and
politics.
3 Note the emphasis on external agency (italics mine): " ...
l'aggravarsi della crisi
politica, Ia mancanza di alternative pill consone coni suoi
progetti e, probabilmente,
Ia speranza che-entrati in forze nei Fasci-i futuristi potessero
sia evitare che gli
Arditi sfuggissero !oro di mana, sia contrastare il tatticismo e
l'opportunismo di
Mussolini ... lo avevano indotto ad aderire ai Fasci di
combattimento e, anzi, a
partecipare alia lora fondazione" (xxviii). "Negli anni
successivi Marinetti si lasciO
cos! andare ad una serie di concessioni e di riconoscimenti al
fascismo ... " (xxx).
4 De Felice's attempt to differentiate fascism from futurism in
terms of the supposed
contrast between "ideologies" and "attitudes towards life" tries
to take the edge off

of the fascist regime's cultural politics. The archival evidence
suggests
mostly the contrary: both a remarkable continuity in the state's
patronage of modernist architects and a strong bond between ra-
tionalist planning and fascist ideology. 5
The problem is not restricted to art and architectural history
alone.
Frederic Jameson's fine study ofWyndam Lewis, Fables of
Aggression:
The Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979),
suffers from
:1 similar flaw. Adopting the categories of molecular and molar
from
Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-OedijJus, Jameson views Lewis's
writing
iS an allegory of subjugation, structured by a struggle of
irreconcilable
'pposites. On the molecular level, the level of the immediate
here-
md-now of the microtextual surface,Jameson locates Lewis the
moder-
1ist: the practitioner of a progressive, even revolutionary-
almost
;ocialist, alas! -writing. On the molar level, the level of
narrative,
1e locates Lewis the fasCist: the creator of a series of
reactionary and
mthoritarian structures of containment which reform, or better,
deform
he explosive surfaces of modernist experimentation into fascist
1arratives.

While such a model may have certain heuristic virtues, it leaves
me wondering why it is that molar and molecular cannot
intercon-
lect: are they truly opposed or is there a passageway that runs
be-
ween them? Is the modernist as fascist always wearing a mask?
6 Is
he choice really between modernism and fascism or is it
between
lifferent redactions of modernism? The task of a more
adventurous
:ultural criticism, as I see it, would be precisely to tunnel
between
he conventional dichotomies. The brief analysis of the futurist
con-
.truction of "national address" I propose here, explores only one
of
L number of such passageways between aesthetics and politics,
the
uturism's political rhetoric. "War' becomes little more than a
metaphor for moral
ranscendence (xxii-xxiv), "ultrapatriotism" merely the
"Italianism" shared by an entire
:eneration (xix-xx) and "anti-parliamentarianism" a reformist
slogan (xviii). This
guralization of futurist slogans coincides with a narrowly literal
view of the policies
nd debates of the fasCist regime,
On this subject see Diane Ghirardo's study in the present
volume, as well as her
lui/ding New Communities: New Deal and Fascist Italy
(Princeton, 1989).
It seems that for Jameson the answer to the latter question must
be affirmative

ecause of his a priori commitment to a view of history as an
emancipation narrative
1 which modernist cultural production may play an inaugural
role. Moreover, despite
s po~.t-structuralist trappings, his dialectical reading of Lewis
seems haunted by
1e classical Marxian base/superstructure dyad.
molecular and the molar. Although narrowly focused on the
special
case of futurism and, more precisely, on futurism's inaugural
role as
one of the founders of a genuinely fascist subjectivity, it is
motivated
by a larger concern: that of delineating a general topology of
fascist
modernism that might also adequately account for such varied
oeuvres
as those of Ezra Pound, Ernst Junger, and Gottfried Benn.
* * *
"Every writer must have an address" says Isaac Bashevis Singer,
and by "address" what Singer means is not simply a place to
hang
one's shingle or a post office box. Rather, the term evokes a
symbolic
place to which the imagination can repair, whether a physical
site
or a theater of memories either lived or invented. There, art may
work its patient alchemy on daily life without impediment:
translating
private events, ghosts, and tongues into the commonplace,

bringing
them to the collective address of humankind.
If first exile and then the Holocaust had not rendered the
Warsaw
ghetto an empty pharitasm, Singer's concept of the artist's
"address"
might seem like something of an anachronism. It longs for an
act of
art-making rooted in a stable sense of community and place: an
art
of communion with a dead and living collectivity, an art of
homecom-
ing in which the artist bears a privileged relation to a readily
cir-
cumscribable space. The notion of"address" is thus intertwined
with
that of Geist (or "spirit"), which with Herder came to be viewed
as
that indelible imprint of a collectiVe attribute, whether national,
regional, or simply urban, found in every individual belonging
to that
collective (and most acutely so among its creative spirits).
For writers and artists the idea was productive because it placed
their labor at the very heart of civilization just as a new
patronage
system and new technologies were relegating them to the
margins.
In one familiar early Romantic version, it manifested itself in
the cult
of the bard as the genius loci (or "genius of the place") bound
by uni-
que ties of mutual interdependence to the landscape in which he
makes
his home. All that remained was to ascribe to that particular

locus- be
it Wordsworth's Lake District or Millet's Barbizon-a
universality
which rendered it the common place of the nation as a whole.
One of the major achievements of modernism was its
dismantling
of this concept of "address" and of the rooted subjectivity it
implied.
The operation was carried out within the laboratory of the
industrial
metropolis which, with its pressured surfaces and shuttling
carnival
masks, provided the proper conditions for an explosive
disjunction
between public and private, past and present, collectivity and
in-
dividual. The redrawn cultural map that resulted was
transnational
and nomadic and, more importantly, was sharply polarized
between
extremes of privacy and publicity, hermeticism and
exhibitionism.
After decades of being belittled by French-biased
historiography,
futurism has now come into its own. Widely acknowledged as
the first
full-fledged literary/artistic avant-garde movement-the ancestor
of
everything from 1920s Dada to 1970s Punk- it has conquered

one
of the most influential positions on the exhibitionist segment of
the
modernist map. In accordance with this position, futurism ought
to
prove exemplary in its dimontage of nineteenth-century notions
of time
and place. And at first glance, this would seem to be so.
Temporal and spatial dislocation were at the core of futurist
theory
and practice from the very start. The 1909 founding manifesto
jumped
the Italian border to appear on the front page of the Parisian
daily
.Le F£garo. Addressed to a supranational class of restless youth,
it
adopted the lingua franca of the era- namely, French- to launch
a
violent assault on the principal institutional guardians of history
and
memory: universities, libraries, museums, and churches. Its
bl£tzkrieg
campaigns from 1910 through at least 1924 were unabashedly
cosmopolitan, scattering in their wake a plurality of converts
and philo-
futurist movements everywhere from Russia to Spain to Japan
and
Latin America. Hence, the apposite title of the recent Venice
show:
Futurism and Futurisms. 7
This aggressive cultural nomadism seemingly translated into the
no less aggressive construction of a rootless anticontemplative
sub-

jectivity in futurist works of art. In his 1914 experimental
epicZang
Tumb Tuuum, for instance, Marinetti attempted to stage, via an
orgy
of forgetting and exteriorization, the death of the "literary I"
with its
cult of memory, interiority, and psychological "depth." In the
latter's
7 The show's catalog was published as Futun'srrw efuturismi,
ed. Pontus Hulten (Milan,
1986). While its virtues were considerable, the Venice
exhibition also exposed the
limitations of the curatorial formalism prevalent in today's
museum world. Tokens
of futurism's conquests and influence were, of course,
everywhere on display. The
topic of its genetic relation to fascism, however, was relegated
to an isolated display
case. There, within an anaesthetizing glass cube, a notebook
ofMarinetti's lay open
(as if by chance) to a page replete with fascist clippings.
Schnapp: Forwarding Addre.-s 59
place Marinetti interpolates the futurist "multiplied man": a
public
being free from the fetters of history, class and analytical
reason, in
whom the Cartesian cogito has been dispersed into an infinitely
mobile
futurist ago.
The same roving athletic subject reappears in Umberto
Boccioni's
1913 icon, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (fig. 1).

Caught in the
1.
Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913.
Photo courtesy of Museu de Arte Contempor3nea
da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil.
LCt of clearing an unmarked threshold, futurist man leaves the
past
1ehind like a broken toy. Striding out into the streamlined
machine-
ike body which is now his home, he enters a realm of pure
becom-
ng: a realm of dynamic subjectivity beyond all socializing
constraints,
>eyond the ticking of external clocks.
But what if Boccioni's abstract allegory of crossing were to be
in-
erted into a more concrete historical landscape? What if the
move-
nent of"unique forms of continuity in space" were linked to a
precise
tinerary: say that of Italian imperialism, from Italy into Libya
or
lthiopia? If so, the forward stride of modernist man might find
itself
,ddly in step with that of the conquering fascist warrior. In the
case
f Boccioni's masterpiece such a prospective reading seems
patently

bsurd. Yet, as I hope to suggest in this essay, the futurists'
advocacy
[internationalism and nomadism is, to say the least,
problematical.
'ar from offering an exemplary dbnontage of nineteenth-century
no-
ions of place, I will suggest that futurism proposed a remontage
which
1arks it as the first proponent of a distinctively fascist redaction
of
1odernism.
Let me be more precise. From its foundation in 1909, I believe
1at futurism elaborated a highly specific, yet generalizable,
theory
f place and "race" which may be aptly described as proto-
fascist. In
armony with the fascist doctrine which it helped to inaugurate,
it
nvisaged a new agonistic and activist subjectivity-whether on
the
:vel of the individual or of a collective national subject-
founded on
1e principle of hierarchy imposed by force. 8 Likewise, first
anticipating
nd later complementing fascist doctrine, it asserted the absolute
claim
f the "national address" over all forms of internationalism,
nomadism,
nd localism. Heir to nineteenth-century concepts of "address,"
whose
·ace it still bears, the futurist reformulation cannot be dismissed
as
mere repetition or regression. It thinks "address" as
simultaneously
Joted and nomadic: "rooted" to the extent that it is bounded by

the
By invoking the principle of"hierarchy" I do not wish to
underestimate futurism's
1archist components (which were sufficient to persuade
Mussolini that Marinetti
as a political liability). Nor do I mean to suggest a simple one-
to-one correspondence
~tween the Regime's official cult of gerarchia and the futurist
concept of hierarchy.
limited overlap there is, but what I intend to underscore is: a)
futurism's vision
·social relations and organization as properly founded on force;
b) its heroic con-
:ption of the subject as master over his social and natural
environment; c) its
laracteristically fascist blend of populism and elitism
(artecrazia); and d) its bellic
mception of gender relations and foreign policy.
national territory; "nomadic" to the extent that it is dispersed
across
this entire territory and that, in wars of imperial conquest,
national
boundaries will inevitably rove.
• • •
Even a superficial reading of the futurist manifestos reveals the
em-
phatic assertion of national boundaries precisely when one
might least
expect it. The founding manifesto of 1909, for instance, begins

in
a landscape without names. In a swift narrative parabola, it
leads
through a sequence of symbolically charged locales: first, the
sump-
tuous fin de sitcle chamber with Persian carpets and flickering
mosque
lamps; next, the shadowy streets of an unnamed metropolis
viewed
from the windows of a speeding car; and then, the
maternojossato (or
"maternal ditch") of an urban factory confronted face to face in
the
overturned car. As the sun rises and the mythical chariot
emerges
reborn from its womb of fertile and fortifying mud, the moment
of
speechmaking arrives.
A collective speaker, marked only by the pronoun "we," puts
forth
an eleven-point program which seems to respect no national
border.
Affirming the beauty of speed, the advent of the kingdom of the
machine and the universality of war, this pronoun is engaged in
a
dran1a of the highest order: it knocks on the door of the
Impossible,
celebrates the Earth, proclaims the death of Space and Time.
Only
at the very end of the list of pronouncements is the discourse
anchored
in the word "Italy'': "E dall'Italia, che noi lanciamo pel mondo
questa
nostro manifesto di violenza travolgente e incendiaria" ("It is
from

Italy that we launch into the world this manifesto of ours with
its over-
powering violence and incendiary powers" [DM 11]). 9
With the sudden imposition of a national fran1e, enforced by
the
cascade of detailed references to the Italian landscape whim
follow,
the preceding allegory is restricted and reoriented. The
"maternal ditcl1"
becomes quite literally the terra madre or motherland, the
reborn beast
the sign of a vigorous and virile industrial order and the
collective
pronoun "we" the signature of Italy's new masters: they are at
once
giants, like Antaeus, with chthonic powers and angels ready to
take
flight from their earthly mother. As for the eleven-point
progran1,
9 DM ~ F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzionefuturista, ed.
Luciano de Maria (Milan,
1968). All translations are my own.
it remains addressed to an international audience, but now
begins
to take on the semblance of a threat. Its proclamation that the
world
is soon to be free from the cultural and institutional gangrene
brought
upon it by its museums, academies, and universities, can now be

translated into an affirmation of Italy's about-to-be-restored
mobility
and health. Soon the diseased members will have been
amputated.
Then a dynamic industrial Italy will reemerge as an aggressive
con-
tender in the international arena.
The rhetorical shift comes to a climax in Marinetti's closing
tour
de force: the twice repeated cry of "ritti sulla cima del mondo,
noi
scagliamo ... Ia nostra sfida aile stelle ("erect on the summit of
the earth,
we hurl... our challenge at the stars" [DM 13]). The lowly
homeland
has now become the heroic launching pad for the conquest of
the
universe in a fantasy that seems unabashedly imperialist. Like
the
cosmic empire of Augustus Caesar, proclaimed by Virgil's
Anchises
in Aeneid 6, the futurists' empire shall extend "to a land beyond
the
stars ... where heaven-bearing Atlas turns on his shoulders the
star-
tricked cosmic sphere'' (Aen. 6. 795-97).
This alternation between a militant advocacy of internationalism
and an imperial conception of culture and politics is
characteristic
of the manifestos as a whole. Indeed, the contradiction was
openly
embraced by Marinetti in a public letter addressed to the
Belgian
futurist Mac Delmarle in 1913. In this letter he portrays

futurism as
the international "of all the world's innovators and intellectual
sharp-
shooters'' ("la parola d'ordine di tutti gl'innovatori o franchi
tiratori
intelletuali del mondo"), while in the very same breath
affirming that
futurism is dedicated uniquely to building an ever more glorious
future
for the Italian race: "we profess a nationalism that is
ultraviolent, an-
ticlerical and antisocialist, an antitraditional nationalism
founded on
the inexhaustible vigor of the Italian blood."10
10 "Noi professiamo un nazionalismo ultraviolento,
anticlericale e antisocialista, un
11azionalismo antitradizionale che ha per base il vigore
inesauribile del sangue italiano"
:nM 80). Marinetti embraces the contradiction between
internationalism and na-
:ionalism, because he sees futurism as the solution to every
nation's problems: "II
:imedio vale per gli ammalati di ogni paese" (DM 80). The same
goes for imperialism.
[n Democraziafuturista (1919) he declares that futurism is
firmly anti-imperalist, that
~ach race will achieve glory in its own special field and that
none is predestined to
tchieve world hegemony (DM 322). Yet he also defines Italy's
"natural" boundaries
lS encompassing "il Trentino;-l~Istria, la Dalmazia, Vallona,
Rodi, Smirne, Bengasi,
rripoli" (DM 337) and presents the Italian populace as "una
minoranza genialissima

Schnapp: .Forwarding Address 63
The tension also pervades Marinetti's orations, which preach a
gospel of cultural revolution without boundaries, while all the
while
emphatically positioning each audience in relation to their
national
origin. Whether in Venice, Trieste, Barcelona, or London,
Marinetti
never represents or addresses his listeners as a random sampling
of
autonomous individuals. Rather, he invests them with all of the
at-
tributes of a single national body-not the stable figurative body
im-
agined in classical rhetorical and political theory, but a swirling
material body: "in its circular expansion the heart of man
ruptures
the suffocating familial circle, touching the extremities of the
Fatherland, where it feels the pulse of border compatriots as if
they
were the outer nerves of its own body. "11 For Marinetti the
audience
is always the dynamic point of convergence between a
particular na-
tional physiognomy or race, a natural and cultural landscape,
and
a precise historical heritage whose imprint is in the blood.
It ought to be emphasized that, as in the case of D' Annunzio,
Marinetti's concept of "race" never implies an ideal of racial
purity.
On the contrary, the word razza indicates a dynamic fusion of
body
and environment, a corporeal identification of self and nation,
and

an incorporative principle of fertility grounded in a body which
is
savage, impure, and aggressively gendered. Accordingly, the
homosex-
ual, the Jew, and the gypsy, fascism's usual phantoms of
sterility,
rootlessness and genetic confusion, emerge as futurism's
enemies on-
ly to the extent that they undercut the dynamism and integrity of
the
collective national subject.
A series of ambiguities results. On the one hand, Marinetti
could
praise the Great War for having promoted the promiscuous
"fusion
of the most distant races which thus strengthened themselves
physiologically" ("Ia fusione delle razze piu lontane che si
rinforzavano
tutta costituita di individui superiori ... " and as "[una] massa di
tipi unici ... [che]
pub e deve dominare il mondo e dirigerlo con la sua maggiore
potenzialita e altezza
di luce" (DM 328-29).
11 "II eucre dell'uomo rompe nella sua espansione circolare il
piccolo cerchio
soffocatore della famiglia, per giungere fino agli orli estremi
della Patria, dove sente
pal pi tare i suoi connazionali di frontiera, come i nervi
periferici del proprio corpo"
(DM 412). Corporeal/racial metaphors recur obsessivdy in
Marinetti's definitions
of patriotism ("il patriotismo futurista e la passione accanita,
violenta e tenace per
il divenire-progresso-rivoluzione della propria razza lanciata

alia conquista delle mete
pill lontane" [DM 337J) and of the nation ("la democrazia
italiana e per noi un corpo
umano che bisogna liberare, scatenare, alleggerire, per
accelerarne la velocita e cen-
tuplicare il rendimento" [DM 330]).
cosl fisiologicamente" [ DM 306]) and could actively oppose
the racial
laws of the 1930s." On the other hand, with Pino Masnata, he
could
cite approvingly the call of the 1933 futurist congress for "an
even
more fervent patriotism transformed into an authentic religion
of the
Fatherland warning Semites that they identify themselves with
their respective
homelands if they do not wish to disappear."" Or, similarly, he
could extol
the Sudanese wetnurse from whom he took suck and make of her
a
myth of his "savage" African origins, while arguing
concurrently that
Italy is "destined" to rule the world- but Italian Africa first and
foremost-with the genius of its art and the power of its
incomparable
army: "l'Italia e destinata a dominare il mondo col genio
creatore della
sua arte e Ia potenza del suo Esercito imparagonabile" (DM
439).14
The situation is much the same in the domain of gender

relations.
Here Marinetti advocated legal parity and sexual freedom, while
championing a revolt against the love of "woman." This virile
aver-
sion to the conventional feminine value-sphere, however, could
not
take the form of a homoerotic male Bund, because the race
"requires
ardent males and impregnated women" ("esige maschi accesi e
donne
fecondate" [DM 478]) if it is to maintain a strictly ascensional
parabola.
Hence, futurism affirms a paradox: "the overcoming of the love
of
woman via an ever intensified love of woman against the
erotica-
sentimental deviations of many foreign avant-gardes"
("superamento
dell'amore per Ia donna con un pill intenso amore per Ia donna
con-
tra le deviazioni erotico-sentimentali di molte avanguardie
estere ... "
[DM 176]).
12 Cf. Marinetti's counterfactual claim in Al di 10. del
communismo that "non esiste in
ftalia antisemitismo. Non abbiamo dunque ebrei da redimere,
valutare o seguiren
:nM 415).
13 "Superamento del patriottismo 'con un pill fervido
patriottismo trasformato cos1
in autentica religione della Patria am17Wnimento ai semiti
perche si identifichino con le diverse
'Jatn.e se non vogliono sparirr (DM 176 [emphasis mine]). De
Felice's attempt to dismiss
:he futurist theory of race is unconvincing: "negli scritti di

alcuni futuristi vi sana
:tccenni che possono far pensare ad una sorta di suggestione
(quanta consapevole
~ impossibile dire) di una elementare (e subito tradotta in
termini estetico-vitalistici)
~eoria dell'influenza del clima sui caratteri dei popoli; certo e
che il 'nazionalismo'
:talianismo futurista moho risenti dell'applicazione della
contrapposizione futuri~mo-
)assatismo alia definizione dell'immagine di vari popoli e delle
lora 'qualita' e
debolezze' ... " ( xxii). If the parenthetical insertions confess a
certain nervousness
:he phrase "alcuni futuristin evades the fact that race is one of
Man'netti's leitmotifs:
+ "Cominciai in rosa e nero; pupa fiorente e sana tra le braccia
e le mammelle color
:arbone della mia nutrice sudanese. CiO spiega forse Ia mia
concezione un po' Negra
:lell'amore e Ia mia franca antipatia per le pelitiche e le
diplomazie allattemielen
:nM 503).
But beyond the decadent androgyne and the rootless wanderer
there
looms one final "racial" menace. Namely, the world of
disembodied
ideas: ideas which violate national borders and national
physiogno-
mies-what Marinetti once calledfilosofomi or "philosofumes"
(DM
316). The bulk of futurism's political and cultural enemies were
in
fact the purveyors of such erring vapors. They were

"germanophile"
artists and intellectuals like Giacomo Puccini, Claudio Treves,
Filip-
po Turati and, first and foremost, Benedetto Croce.
• • •
With this sketch of futurist nationalism and Marinetti's dynamic
concept of his audience's national address, it seems appropriate
to
move away from the domain ofthematics (where the fascist
resonances
are obvious enough) to the close analysis of visual works. Only
an
examination of how subject and place are constructed in the
futurist
artwork-or, in other words, of how the concept of national
address
is pictorialized- can hope to illumine the passageway that leads
back
and forth from molecular to molar, politicized aesthetics to
aestheti-
cized politics, modernist "bribe" to fascist ideology.15
I would suggest that the key doctrine in this regard is that of
"in-
terpenetration." First formulated in 1912 by Boccioni in the
Technical
Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture and by Marinetti in the
Technical Manifesto
of Futurist Literature, "interpenetration" or compenetrazione
defines a new
relationship of mutuality between the human subject, the object
world
and the physical setting in which he or she appears." It also
implies

a vitalist theory of artistic expression in which art becomes, in
Marinet-
ti's own words, a "prolongation of the forest of our veins which
pours
itself out of the body into the infinity of space and time.""
15 The phrase "modernist bribe" is adapted from Alice Kaplan,
Reproductions of Banali-
ry: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life
(Minneapolis, 1986) 76.
16 The doctrine, which weds Nietzschean psychology to
Bergsonian phenomenology,
was given its definitive foimulation by the philosopher T. E.
Hulme in "The
Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds,n reprinted in Speculations:
Essays on Humanism
and the Psychology of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London, 1924)
173-214. Hulme was,
of course, not only a prominent right·wing revolutionary and
the English translator
of Sorel's Reflections on Violence, but also a close friend of
such prominent fascist moder-
nists as Ezra Pound and Wyndam Lewis.
11 " ••• prolungamento della foresta delle nostre vene, che si
effonde, fuori dal corpo,
nell'infinito della spazio e del temper (DM 47). This vitalist
formula is also na-
tionalistic, the nation being "il massimo prolungamento
dell'individuo o meglio: il pill
The art of the future can be at once mimetic and intuitive,
objec-

tive and subjective, because for the futurists interpenetration is
a
verifiable physical phenomenon and not a mere poetic fiction.
This
is so because they envision our world as an infinitely agitated
molecular
field structured by the moving force lines emitted by permeable
machine-like bodies and body-like machines. 16 Fusing
elements from
Cubism (and Symbolism) with metaphors from contemporary
nuclear
physics, this conception might seem apolitical if a relay to
fascism
were not provided by the Nietzschean/Bergsonian psychology
which
subtends it.
Described by Marinetti as the "intuitive psychology of matter,"
this
psychology invokes a return to intuition and instinct in order to
usher
in a new kind of heroic civilization founded on the untrammeled
ex-
pansion of the Will to Power. In this futurist kingdom, the
individual
is by definition an artist or a soldier: a creator and destroyer
who
need obey no law except that which he makes his own. New
technologies and machines have even freed him from having to
respect
the limits imposed on his body by space and time. What this
means
with respect to the doctrine of interpenetration is that the
futurist sub-
ject's corporeal immersion in the world of objects cannot lead to
the

sort of explosion or dissolution one might normally expect in a
moder-
nist context. Rather, in the futurist kingdom there is ultimately
no
dispersion, no tragedy or self-loss, for "a qualitative
mathematics"
abolishes even death ("una matematica qualitativa aboli~ce la
morte
che e quantitativa" [DM 198]). The taking in of matter, the
penetra-
tion of the body by external objects and forces, will always
translate
vasto individuo vivo capace di vivere lungamente, di dirigere,
dominare e difendere
tutte le parti del suo corpo" (DM 337 [italics mine]).
18 Hulme offers the following psychological account: "Imagine
now that you are turned
into a cross section of this flowing stream [mental life], that
you have no sense of
sight, that in fact your only sense is a sense of pressure. Then
although you will
have no clear picture or representation of the stream at all, you
will in spite of that
have a complete knowledge of it as a complex sense of the
varying directions of the
forces pressing on you. If you put yourself in this position with
regard to your own
inner life-and this is what Bergson means by an intuition-then
you will realise
that it is composed not of separate things but of interpenetrating
tendencies ... It
is composed of a million different elements which at the same
time are not elements
at aU, because they melt into one another with not the least
tendency to be separated

one from the other. Such a state can be directly experienced,
and yet is a state which
is absolutely inconceivable intellectually, simply because it
can't be analysed" (188).
into an ever more heroic expansion and affirmation of the
subject and,
especially, the national subject. 19
From this new perspective it becomes possible to understand
what
is at stake in the futurists' resistance to abstraction and to
formalism:
a politics of direct and unmediated action centered in the
expanded
and multiplied futurist subject. Particularly telling in this regard
is
the operation which futurist art performs on its borrowed Cubist
form
vocabulary. If one were to compare a classic analytic Cubist
image
such as Georges Braque's 1912 Fille a Ia guitare (fig. 2) with
Umberto
Boccioni's contemporaneous study for MaJeria (sometimes
referred to
as Costruzione orizzontale) (fig. 3), fundamental differences in
attitude
toward the interplay of figure and ground come into view which
bear
with them ideological consequences.
In the case of Braque, the girl, her instrument, the table in front
of her, the bench on which she sitS, the newspaper ... all are
organ-

ized into a centered image which at its edges seems to dissolve.
Yet
the sense of dissolve is also at the center of the picture, where
the
forms intersect one another so elusively and allusively, that
they deny
each other a rigid sense of definition, movement or volume.
Where,
for instance, the guitar player's body threatens to acquire
solidity-
around the black forms on the upper right and left- a passage of
at-
mospheric whites and grays promptly empties them out.
Likewise,
in the lower center, where the edge of the girl's guitar begins to
disclose
its volume and depth, it is flattened out and pulled to the
surface by
an intruding brown overlay. The resulting feeling of the picture
plane
as a shallow shadowbox in which the scattered contours of
humans
and things partake of the same elusive materiality, leaves us
with a
rebus whose key is perhaps to be found in the newspaper's
fractured
title: Le R2ve or "the dream."
The futurist image adopts the same pictorial vocabulary to an
in-
verse end. Here, as in Braque, the world of objects
interpenetrates
19 At its outer limit, this economy of loss as gain can conceive
of the absolute disper-
sal of an individual. Yet what it cannot accept is the tragic: the

moment of loss is
always made good via the expansion of a larger subject-the
collectivity, the army,
the nation. This theory of sacrifice is pervasive in futurism from
the very start: Ita-
ly's futurist youth are said to make a fiery holocaust of
themselves on the altar of
the future; their heroic flame in turn inflames those who come
to bury them ... Where
the principle of interpenetration spills over into a theory of
sacrifice one can find
links, prospectively, with the fascist ritualization of violence
and, retrospectively, with
the ancient cult of heros and the Christian cult of martyrs.
2.
Georges Braque Fille a Ia guitare. 1912.
Photo courtesy of Musee National d'Art Moderne,
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
3.
Umberto Boccioni, Costruzione orizzontale. 1912.
Photo courtesy of Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich.
the human figure and vice versa. Yet the female figure at the
center
of Boccioni's study for Materia is not refracted and dispersed;
rather,

she acquires an authority and monumentality which suggests
that all
of that which hovers around her- the wrought-iron balcony, the
public
square, the city's architecture- is but the immediate extension of
her
body. That the city should become "the prolongation," as
Marinetti
would have it, "of the forest of her veins," plants us firmly in
that
space of intersection between the instinctual world of the body
and
the public realm of politics which futurism so eagerly sought.
Gone
are Braque's guitar and the private world of dreams it had
evoked.
In its place is a human monolith whose outward expansion can
even
le rigorously quantified: the force lines from her shoulders
measure
~00 and 210 meters; those from her arms, 122 meters; those
from
1er base, 60 feet.
What I am suggesting is that Boccioni has reinstituted a
pictorial
derarchy which, contrary to Cubist practice, subordinates the
ground
o the central figure in order to pictorialize the new heroic
subjectivi-
y. So far so good. But to bridge the gap between this female

monu-
nent and futurist multiplied man, it will be necessary to say
something
1bout her immobility. Was not the futurist hero supposed to be
ac-
ive and virile? The answer is that Materia is a painting not
about end_s,
mt about origins. In fact, its pictorial subject matter is the
materiali-
y of the painter's own mater or mother. Signora Boccioni
appears,
hus, as the literal double of the "maternal ditch" out of which,
in the
ounding manifesto of 1909, the new order was to be born. The
nistress of her own pictorial ground, she is also the fertile terra
madre
md motherlode: the passive but precious foundation upon which
the
nobile masculine order is to be constructed (but only in order tO
take
light).
If we turn to the depiction of masculine figures, this
remotivation
1f the Cubist theme of interpenetration becomes all the more
strik-
ng. In Carlo Carra's Simultaneity, dated 1912, a muscular nude
strides
hrough a similarly fractured urban landscape. Instead of losing
its
ontours (as it would in a Cubist context), it gains in materiality
and
nonumentality. As it quite literally pierces the space of the
fragments
ircling about with its stride, the entire field is structured by its
pass-

ng. Similarly, in Boccioni's splendid figure studies of 1913, in-
~rpenetration once again translates into the dilation of the
human
ubject. In Muscoli in Velocita (Muscles in Motion) the body's
trajectory
ssumes monumental proportions; in Dinamismo. di un corpo
umano
'>yntheses of Human Dynamism) its stride drives a wedge right
through
1e picture plane, redistributing in its wake all of the pictorial
elements;
1 two Scomposizioni, instead of being decomposed by speed,
the body
; dynamically expanded. In every case the figure's forward
momen-
llm also results in a drive toward volume. (It is as if there were
an
nplicit threat that it will break out into the third dimension.)
This economy of expenditure as expansion is even further
literalized
1 Boccioni's sculptural experiments from the 1911-1914 period.
In
1eir effort to offer a concrete rendering of the itinerary ofthe
human
Jrm through space, they forge an iconography of savage
machine-
ke warriors which will occupy a prominent place in later
futurism,
rhether in literary works such as Marinetti's African novel Gli
in-
domabili (The Untamables) or in the whimsical mechanical
savages of

Fortunato Depero's Balli Plastici (Plastic Dances). Boccioni's
earliest
sculptural efforts, exemplified by Fusion of Head and Window
(fig. 4),
attempt to compress figure and landscape into a single body by
adop-
ting a procedure which is purely accumulative. In this case that
meant
the inclusion of real world objects such as the fragment of a
window
pane, a wig, and so/forth.
The net effect of this additive procedure is illustrated rather
dramatically by th~ initial study for Unique Forms of
Continuity in Space:
a massive striding monster loaded down by a considerable
extraneous
baggage of wedges, flanges, and frames which represent the in-
terpenetrating landscape (fig. 4). To arrive at his final product,
Boc-
cioni had to shift to a more synthetic procedure, progressively
strip-
ping the figure of most of these protrusions such that they
remain
readily visible but no longer detract from the sculpture's overall
effect.
Whereas initially they seemed to slow down and even bury the
figure
in the field it was supposed to be traversing, the final
streamlining
has them inte;,sifYing our sense of the strider's powerful
forward drive
and monumental musculatuie. The result is a reassertion of the
figure's
priority over its surroundings with overtones that are at once
bellic

and heroic.
So far I have examined: a) how, even in its earliest theoretical
statements, futurism begins to elaborate a dynamic theory of
place
and race; b) how this theory is anchored in the futurists' heroic
con-
ception of multiplied man; and c) how the doctrine of
interpenetra-
tion allows for a pictorial transcription of the hierarchical
relation be-
tween multiplied man and the ground against which he is
profiled.
What remains to be seen is how this ground can be allegorized
as
the nation. Stated otherwise, the futurist subject enjoys a unique
rela-
tion to the place in which he appears: indeed, it can even be
said to
run in his blood. This is the sense in which it may be referred to
as
his "address." Yet in the case of the futurist work of art, both
figure
and ground, subject and address are, by definition, perpetually
mobile.
How, then, beyond the repeated affirmations of Marinetti and
others,
can we be sure that they are structured by the nation's borders?
How
can we be sure that futurist place and race are not simply no-
place
and no-race, that is, utopian?
A single answer is not easy to establish on the level of
microanalysis
being attempted. But a provisional response may be offered by

chart-
ing the recurrence of one of the futurists' master-symbols: the
Italian
flag . .T ust as in the founding manifesto the arrival of the word
"Italy"
72 FasciSm and Culture
4a.
Umberto Boccioni, Fusion of Head and Window. 1911~1912.
4b.
Umberto Boccioni, Syniheses of Human Dynamism. 1912.
4c.
Schnapp:· Forwarding Address 73
signalled a nationalist localization and literalization of the
allegory
that preceded it, so the appearance of the Italian flag in futurist
pic-
torial space defines the drama of the expanding and multiplying
sub-
ject as a specifically national one. In this new context,
interpenetra-
tion ceases to describe the foundation of a new individual
subjectivi-
ty. It now comes to indicate both the foundation of a perpetually
mobilized collective subject and a corresponding nationalist
politics
of expansionism and war.
A case in point is an interventionist fantasy, dated 1914, by

Carlo
Carra, whose title is lnseguimento (or Pursuit) (fig. 5). The
interpenetra-
tion of figure and landscape is rendered here by a horse and
rider
flying through a field of French, English, and Italian
newspapers itself
traversed by a chalky luminous median strip. In the upper right-
hand
corner is the Italian word AVVENIMENTO or "event," the
event in ques-
tion being evidently a pursuit. Whereas in the examples with
which
I will close, the Italian flag will be fully integrated into the
pictorial
field, in Carra's collage it is strictly a local motif. It is draped
across
the body of the forward-arching jockey and partially shared by
the
side of the galloping horse in what is a rather conventional
allegory
ofleadership. The horse's flank bears the adjective "nuova"
while the
flag suggests the noun that ought to follow: ltalia ... /a nuova
ltalia,
the new Italy.
A new Italy, with a dynamic leader at the reins, is in hot
pursuit. ..
but of what or of whom? Carra furnishes an answer via the
scattered
5.
Carlo Carra, Pursuit. 1914.
r"-11--!--- ~K-u!-1! D---

7 4 Fascism and Culture
letters that at the head of the horse spell out the name JOFFRE:
the
nation pursues the course ofMarshallJoffre, who had just
triumphed
over the Germans at the battle of the Marne. Granted this level
of
historical specificity, it is now easy to reinterpret Carra's white
road
as the road to glory and the pictorial field as the international
field
of battle, restructured and redefined by Italy's (as yet
imaginary) light-
ning strike.
If in Pursuit the doctrine of interpenetration was used to
dramatize
and indeed provoke Italy's bellic intrusion into the international
pic-
ture plane, in Balla's Flags on the Altar of the Fatherland (fig.
6), Patriotic
Song, and Patn'otic Demonstration it permits a dynamic
remapping of
the national territory itself. In varying ways, eaCh of these three
works
6.
Giacomo Balla, Flags on the Altar of the Fatherland. 1915.
Private collection.
Schnapp: .Porwarding Address 7 5

(all of which date from 1915-the year ofltaly's entry into the
war),
explore the movement from perimeter to center and center to
perimeter, aggressively asserting the pictorial border and/or
simultaneously breaking it. In them, the place of the horse and
jockey
of Pursuit is occupied by an emblem of the tricolor flag. The
flag's
spiral emanations-floating metaphors for carnival ribbons, the
paths
of bombers and flying projectiles- suggest the festive attitude of
the
nation at war. But, more importantly for present purposes, they
also
suggest how via the principle of interpenetration the pictorial
ground
can become quite literally identified with the national territory,
its
borders identified with the nation's borders.
7.
Gino Severini, Armored Train in Action (Train blinde en
action). 1915.
Oil on canvas, 45% x 34Ya (115.8 x 88.5 em).
Collection, The Museum of Modem Art, New York. Gift of
RichardS. Zeisler.
One possible result of this equation may be seen in works such
as
Boccioni's 1915 Charge of the Lancers and Gino Severini's
Armored Train

:also from 1915) (fig. 7). In both the picture becomes a sort
ofbattle-
sround th~t must be defended against forces which lie in the
empty
!pace outside 1ts border. But if the surrounding void- here the
gallery
wall- m~y represent a potential menace, its very emptiness, like
that
Jf the Libyan desert, may also be read as an invitation to
occupa-
:ion. The theme is developed in Carlo Carra's justly famous
1914 Jn-
'eruentionist Demonstration (Manifestazione interventista) (fig.
8), whose moral
;eems to be that the best defense is an aggressive pictorial
offense.
Here the monumental but expanding figure usually encountered
at
he center of futurist images is multiplied and exploded, leaving
as
8.
Carlo Carra, Interventionist Demonstration. 1914.
Collezione Mattioli, Rome.
its residue the much more abstract but no less heroic commotion
of
a frenzied nationalist mob. Seemingly viewed from an aerial
perch,
we see the crowd's futurist banners, slogans, and shouts
intermin-
gled with the shattered fragments of an urban landscape and
spun

out along the spiral axis of what is, surely, an airplane's
propeller.
The result is a taut and dynamically expanding centrifuge which
pushes hard against its borders.
Swept up in its outward momentum are two Italian flags.
Represented as whole and integral forms, they seem to
concretize the
tricolor palette of the field as a whole. One is already edging
over
the border, the other has been fired like a projectile-note the
zang
tumb tuuum in the upper left-hand corner- and is well along its
way.
What I am suggesting, then, is that, once again, one of
modernism's
heroic themes, the pressuring and breaking of the picture frame,
has
been remotivated and thematically enhanced by futurism. No
longer
the simple allegory of art's direct intrusion into the space of
daily life,
it now comes to stand quite specifically for a politics of
national
expansion. 20
In the context of futurist painting, the theme of breaking the
frame
undergoes a number of further transformations, but by way of a
con-
clusion, I will examine only the most literal of these. It first
appears
as a strictly internal motif in a number of now classic early-
futurist
images_, such as Balla's Dynamic Depths and Luigi Russolo's
Dynamism

of an Automobile. Here, the passing of a speeding vehicle
through a
mythic industrial cityscape is rendered by a series of internal
frames
which are successively bent and/or ruptured. Within a few short
years,
the dynamism of the central figure and the violence of its force-
lines
become such that they can no longer be contained within the
limits
of the picture. Hence, in Balla's 1914 Plastic Construction, they
have
erupted right out of the picture plane and come to occupy the
third
dimension. Hence, also, in his Abstract Speed + Sound of 1913
(fig.
9), they have overflowed onto the surface of the frame and
continue
to press beyond.
From our distance of half a century the gesture of breaking the
frame
which divided art from life may seem liberatory, and indeed it
was.
20 The same conflation is operative in futurist performance and
poetry. Marinetti's
war epic Zang Tumb Tuuum, for instance, aspires to a liminal
form of mimesis that
would physically polarize and mobilize its reader/audience. On
paroliberismo, "ab-
solute mimesis" and futurist performance theory, see my
"Politics and Poetics in F.
T. Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tuuum," Stanford Italian Review 5.1
(Spring 1985) 75-92.

78 Fascism and Culture Schnapp: Forwarding Address 79
10.
Gino Severini, Plastic Rhythm of july 14th. 1913.
9. Collezione Franchina, Rome.
Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound. 1913-1914.
Photo courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.
But, as we are reminded by Severini's 1913 Plastic Rhythm of
july 14th
:fig. 10), for the futurists it leads irreversibly into war. In this
in-
:tdvertently poignant image, the forward stride of a marching
soldier
Jushes him out beyond the edge of the picture plane toward the
uncer-
:ain abyss which lies beyond. He is so propelled by some
momentous
:osmic force that, in a hint of the tragedy to come, the
extremities
Jf his machine-turned body have already begun to fly off into a
field
iefined by the aerial meshing of the French and the Italian
tricolors.
fhe day being celebrated marks the seizing of the Bastille, but,
in
:t move emblematic of the fascist modernity which futurism in-
mgurated, the festival offreedom from tyranny has also become

the
:'estival of militarized nations and mechanized wars.
Barbara Spackman
THE FASCIST RHETORIC OF VIRILITY
Dacche tutto ei-a, allora, maschio e Mavorte: e insino le femine
e le
balie: e le poppe della tu' balia, e l'ovario e le trombe di
Falloppio e
la vagina e la vulva. La virile vulva della donna italiana. 1
Thus Carlo Emilio Gadda, through his anagrammatic narrator
All
Oco de Madrigal, maliciously summarizes the fascist era in his
novel
Erose Priapo, by carrying the obsession with virility in fascist
discourse
to its limit: the virilization of woman herself. 2 His malice is
double,
for the novel is not only a critique of fascism through an
idiosyncratic
Gaddian psychoanalysis, but also through a figuration of the
recep-
tive masses as woman, and a subsequent. attack upon those
masses
through a not-so-idiosyncratic misogynist discourse. The
"feminine,"
a term of invective in fascist discourse, is retained as a target of
in-
vective in Gadda's presumably antifascist parody:
KU-ce, KU-ce, KU-ce, KU-ce. La moltitudine, che al dire di
messer
NicolO amaro la e femmina, e femmina a certi momenti

nottivaga,
simulava a quegli ululati l'amore e l'amoroso deliria, siccome lo
suol
mentire una qualunque di quelle, ad "accelerare i tempi": e a
sbrigare
il cliente: torcendosi in ne' sua furori e sudori di entusiasta,
mammillona
1 Carlo Emilio Gadda, Erose Priapo (Milan: Garzanti, 1967) 73.
2 Gian Paolo Biasin points out that All Oco de Madrigal is an
anagram of"Carlo
Emilio Gadda" in "L'eros di Gadda'e il priapo di Mussolini,"
Belfagor 24.4 (31 July
!969) 471-78.
Fall 2017
PUBH 6033—Week 5 Assignment:
Steps to Hypotheses Testing
(Rubric included)
Instructions
For this Assignment, review this week’s Learning Resources,
including the 5 step approach to hypothesis testing document.
Read the research scenario, below, and then answer the
questions related to the steps that must be followed to make the
appropriate decision as to reject or fail to reject the null
hypothesis.
Submit this Application Assignment by Day 7.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------------------------
Research Scenario
Hemoglobin levels (g/dL) from the general population of adult
women form a normal distribution with ( = 13.6 and ( = 0.86.
Several studies have shown that vegans and vegetarians suffer
from lower than normal hemoglobin levels, which indicates
anemia. Using clinical data, a researcher measured hemoglobin
levels from a sample of n = 100 adult women who followed a
vegan or vegetarian diet. The average hemoglobin level (g/dL)
for this sample was x̅ = 12.5. Do these data indicate that
following a vegan or vegetarian diet has a significant effect on
hemoglobin levels? Test with p=.05.
Note
µ = population mean
x̅ = sample mean
( = standard deviation
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------
Note: Each response is worth 4 points
Step 1: Set up your hypothesis and determine the level of
significance
State the null hypothesis
1. In written format
Answer:
2. In mathematical format
Answer:
State the alternative hypothesis
3. In written format
Answer:
4. In mathematical format

Answer:
Determine the Level of significance
5. Based on information in the scenario, what is the level of
significance to be used?
Answer:
Step 2: Select the appropriate test statistic
6. The appropriate test statistic for the above scenario is the
one-sample z test. What is a Z test? Describe why this is the
appropriate test for the scenario?
Answer:
Step 3: Set up the decision rule
7. Based on the level of significance you set in Step 1 (Question
5) and whether your alternative hypothesis is directional or non-
directional, what is your decision rule? (In other words, what is
your rejection region?)
Answer:
Step 4: Compute the test statistic
8. Calculate the z statistic. Please show your work.
Answer:
Step 5: Conclusion
9. Do you reject or fail to reject the null hypothesis?
Answer:
10. Are hemoglobin levels affected by a vegan or vegetarian
diet?
Answer:
Section below (scoring) is to be completed by Instructor

Scoring Rubric for Week 5 Assignment1.v1—Hypothesis
Testing (24 points)
Questions
10 questions worth 4 points each
____ / 24 points possible
Initial Score (24 possible points):
Timeliness Factor (late points deducted):
Total Score (24 possible points):
Instructor comments:
-Continued below-
http://www.jstor.org
Orphism and Color Theory
Author(s): Herschel B. Chipp
Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 40, No. 1, (Mar., 1958), pp. 55-
63
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3047747
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ORPHISM AND COLOR THEORY*
HERSCHEL B. CHIPP
I
IN accounts of the development of nonfigurative painting, the

brief movement known as
Orphism has generally been considered merely an offshoot of
Analytical Cubism. Generally,
historians have studied more prominent movements for evidence
of the abandonment of the
physical object; for the moment at which colors and forms for
their own sake are substituted
for abstraction from nature. The evolutionat of Picasso's work
through the "analytic" period of
Cubism has been followed step by step and month by month,
from the first fragmentation of the
human figure in the Demoiselles dAvignon to its reconstitution
in terms of geometric forms as
in collage and later Cubism. Cubism was basically materialistic
in that the shapes employed
were derived from natural objects and existed in a space that,
while drastically restricted and
distorted, nevertheless still referred to the space of the physical
world.
A second important channel leading to the ideal of a
nonfigurative painting, contemporary
with the early Cubist period of Picasso and Braque, is the work
of Wassily Kandinsky. The
Russian, reaching his artistic maturity in Munich under the
stimulus of the Expressionist move-
ments then current in Germany, developed a nonfigurative
vocabulary of colors and lines that,
while rejecting the appearances of nature, still evoked the
dynamism of visual experiences of it.
Kandinsky's approach is distinct from the Cubist's abstraction of
the forms of physical objects;
his paintings objectify the interior world of the feelings by
means of forms and colors that corre-
spond with emotional states.

The painters who were called Orphists were indebted to the
analytical period of Cubism for
the concept of the fragmentation of objects, but their absorption
with the optical characteristics
of colors led the most daring of them eventually to reject
objects altogether and produce an art
based upon the dynamic contrasts of colors. This attitude
represents a third course toward non-
figurative painting.
The word Orphism was invented by the poet and critic,
Guillaume Apollinaire, and was appar-
ently first applied in October 1912 to the colorful paintings of
Franois Kupka.' Kupka's concern
with colors as abstract elements dates from before this time,
however, for a painting of I9Io was
entitled "Yellow Scale," and several others of 1911 and I9I2
"Planes by Colors."2 He is gen-
erally credited with painting the first completely nonfigurative
works in Paris, the Amorpha,
Fugue in Two Colors' and the Discs of Newton (Fig. 9), both of
1912, and both of them composed
of interlocking circular shapes in brilliant colors. They were
stimulated by his interest in Neo-
impressionist theories of color contrast and by the direct
influence of Analytical Cubism. Prior to
this time his work was mainly composed of vigorous decorative
patterns similar to those employed
in the Art Nouveau poster style.4 After 1912 he continued with
nonfigurative painting in two
major modes; one composed of vertically arranged geometric
planes of flat color, and the other
* This paper was first presented at the meeting of the Col- 2.
Titles are translated from those given in the catalogues

lege Art Association in Detroit, January I957. of the salons.
Sometimes they vary slightly as given by differ-
i. One author states that this occurred at a lecture given by ent
authors.
Apollinaire at the Section d'or exhibition (October 10-30, 3.
Exhibited at the Salon d'Automne, 1912. Reproduced in
I9I2); Emmanuel Siblik, Francois Kupka, Prague, Aventium,
Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, New York,
1929, p. 13. Another states that Kupka's entries in the Salon
Museum of Modern Art, 1936, fig. 61, under the title Fugue
d'Automne (October i-November 8) inspired the word; L. A. in
Red and Blue.
Gremilly, Frank Kupka, Paris, Povolozky, n.d. (ca. 19a1), 4.
See illustrations for Lysistrata (1907) and Promtheus
p. 14. (I909) reproduced in Siblik, op.cit.
THE ART BULLETIN
of dynamic curvilinear or irregular shapes sometimes
reminiscent of his earlier style.5 Kupka em-
ployed brilliant colors, but his compositions were based upon
line and pattern more than upon
color contrasts, and he eventually rejected the title of Orphism
altogether. His early statements
on his art deal mainly with concepts of nonfigurative painting
and its analogies with music, rather
than with color problems.6
Francis Picabia was placed with the Orphists by Apollinaire in
his book of I9I3,7 and again
in 1914 when reproductions of six of his paintings were
featured to accompany the poet's review
of the Salon des Independants.8 His colorful quasi-figurative

work, Dance at the Spring of 1912,'
is heavily dependent upon early Cubist simplification, but lacks
the Cubist fragmentation of
objects into a dense matrix of forms. Even in these Cubist-
inspired works is a latent Dadaism
that was soon to emerge in a quite different style. Picabia's
theories, also, deal mainly with the
aesthetics of nonfigurative art and its similarity to music, and
not with color.l0
Robert Delaunay is the artist most closely identified with
Orphism. For the brief period from
about I912 to I914, he aspired toward a nonfigurative painting
based upon the optical charac-
teristics of brilliant, prismatic colors so dynamic that they
would function as the form. His theories
are almost entirely concerned with color and light.'l He exerted
considerable influence upon several
of his contemporaries including the Americans, S. Macdonald
Wright, Morgan Russell, and
Patrick Bruce, and the Blaue Reiter group, August Macke, Franz
Marc, Paul Klee, and also
upon Lyonel Feininger. Apollinaire became a close friend of
Delaunay during I9I2, and is chiefly
responsible for publicizing Orphism. The poet had praised the
Ville de Paris shown at the Salon
des Independants of I9I212 as an example of color creating
structure and, when he revised the
page proofs of his book on Cubism in the fall of that year,
included Orphic Cubism as one of his
four categories. He named Delaunay as a contributor to the new
movement and mentioned Leger,
Picabia, and Duchamp as participants.'3 Apollinaire was
strongly influenced by Delaunay's theories
of. color and quoted from them in his own explanations of the
new movement. The implications

of a "pure" painting that they contained appealed to the poet,
who for many years had been in the
circle of the Symbolist poets where the rejection of the physical
world was a constant theme."1 At
the time of the Independants in March I914, Andre Salmon
wrote that there was a school of
Delaunay.'5 Apollinaire had commenced a book on Orphism
during the time that he had lived
with Delaunay prior to their trip to Berlin in December 1912.16
The first Herbstsalon in Berlin
in 1913 featured a salon of Orphism with the paintings of
Delaunay and the decorative art objects
of his wife, Sonia Delaunay, based on the same color
principles.7
II
Delaunay's obsession with color as the sole expressive and
structural means was sustained by
5. See reproductions in Barr, op.cit., fig. 62, and Gremilly,
op.cit., passim.
6. See his statement in the New York Times, October 19,
I913.
7. Les peintres cubistes, Paris, Figuiere, 1913, p. 25.
8. Les soirees de Paris, March 15, 1914.
9. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Reproduced in color in
The Arensberg Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1954,
I, no. i58.
o. See his essay "Cubism by a Cubist," in Views on the
International Exhibition Held in New York and Chicago
(pamphlet), New York, Association of American Painters and

Sculptors, Inc., 1913, pp. 45-48.
i i. As revealed in his notes entitled Sur la lumi're (ms. in
possession of Mme. Sonia Delaunay, Paris), translated by Paul
Klee as "Ober das Licht," Der Sturm, nos. 144-145, January
1913. A facsimile of the manuscript in French and Klee's
translation are printed in Ausstellung Robert Delaunay (cata-
logue), Berne, Kunsthalle, 195I.
iz. L'intransigeant, March 2o, I9I2.
I3. Apollinaire, op.cit., p. 25. The poet often seemed to
base his judgment of pictures upon appearances rather than
conceptions, for he cited Picasso's light as an example of
Orphism, and he included almost every important painter under
some category of Cubism, even Matisse and Laurencin. His
writings on Orphism, however, are much more consistent than
those on Cubism.
14. See the first part of his book, which is mainly a pastiche
of articles written between 1905 and 913.
I5. Montjoie!, March 1914.
16. See letter from Delaunay, Art: Documents, Geneva,
January 1951, p. 3. An article by the poet, entitled "Realite-
peinture pure," that was given as a lecture at the Delaunay
exhibition in Berlin, consisted mainly of quotations from the
artist (Les soirees de Paris, December 1912, pp. 348-349).
17. See review in Les soirees de Paris, November I5, 1913,
pp. 2-5.
56

I. Robert Delaunay, Night Scene (Le Fiacre), I906-I907. Paris,
Collection Louis Carre (photo: Solomon R. Guggenheim
Museum)
2. RKooert LJelaunay, windovw on the Ctty, NIo. 4, I 9 I - 19
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
3. <obert lelaunay, tLiffe ower, i910. Basel, Kunstmuseum
4. Robert Delaunay, Ville de Paris, 1912. Paris, Musee National
d'Art Moderne (photo: Marc Vaux)
5. August MvacKe, iathing Ci3rls, 1 93. Munich
Bayerische Staatsgemildesammlungen
7. Robert Delaunay, Discs, 1913
New York, Museum of Modern Art
6. Franz Marc, Mountains, I912
San Francisco Museum of Art
8. Paul Klee, City of Towers, I9I6
Philadelphia, Museum of Art
io. Robert Delaunay, Simultaneous Windows, 1912
Paris, Collection Louis Carre
9. Francois Kupka, Discs of Newoton, 1912
Philadelphia, Museum of Art
ORPHISM AND COLOR THEORY

his study of color theory. Most important for him was a study of
the experiments in color per-
ception conducted by Eugene Chevreul, chemist and director of
the dyeing processes at the Gobelins
tapestry works, first published in i839.18 Chevreul made no
great contributions to the science of
color, but his empirically determined, practical theories of color
contrast and harmony were
widely read by artists. He sought to systematize the use of
colors by constructing a color wheel
composed of a physicist's spectrum arranged in a circular form,
just as Newton had done more
than a century before.1 He divided the wheel into 72 equal parts
making each part a uniform
color instead of retaining the normal gradations of the spectrum,
and he constructed a series of
similar wheels adding different proportions of black to each of
them. Thus he had a complete
vocabulary of colors of fixed hue and value. Of most
importance to artists were his practical
experiments that proved what they knew intuitively-that when
complementary colors are juxta-
posed, each appears to be more intense than when seen in
isolation. He also showed that if there
is a perceptible difference in dark-light value between the two
colors, then the darker will appear
to be even darker and the lighter more light. Further, he made
extensive tables of his experiments
and observations showing that all colors present in the field of
vision at the same time mutually
modify one another in specific ways and to a predetermined
extent. These phenomena were not
merely vagaries of the human eye, but were based upon laws

that were scientifically demonstrable,
and were, furthermore, predictable.20
Paul Signac's theories of Neoimpressionism, first published in
1899, were highly influential on
later artists.21 Signac was convinced by his own study of
Chevreul and other theoreticians that
the eleriient of color in painting could be controlled by the
mind, and could be employed to
It was in an attempt to control the chaotic multiplicity of colors
and the uncontrolled sensations
of Impressionism that he proposed the four principles of
Divisionism. These provide that the
various aspects of color in a painting, that is, color of the
object, of the light, and of the reflections,
should be analyzed separately,22 and that they may be brought
into equilibrium according to the
laws of contrast as set forth by Chevreul and other scientists.
Thus, color was considered apart
from a descriptive function and was thought of as thought of as
an independent expressive means. Finally,
Signac would subordinate the role role of color, traditionally
conceived of as the more emotional
element, to the linear composition, or the more intellectual
element. Thus color was to be brought
under conscious control as one of the elements of the painting.
In terms of Signac's immediate
aims the transitory and sensuous aspects of Impressionism were
systematized; as he expressed it
"the hand is of no importance, only the mind and the eye."28
In his conviction that color could be scientifically controlled,
Signac was dependent chiefly
upon Charles Henry, director of the Laboratory of the
Physiology of Sensations at the Sorbonne.

Henry was well known to the artists, having discussed his
theories with Signac, Seurat, and others,
and Signac had made diagrams to illustrate the theories in his
books. He had written extensively
on the theories of art and music, on mathematics, and on
techniques of painting, and was himself
a poet in the circle of the Symbolists. His major works dealt
with the physiology of aesthetic
i8. Michel Eugene Chevreul, Dc la loi du contraste simul- by
the Symbolist journal, La revwue blanche, 1899).
tane des couleurs, Paris, Pitois-Levrault, 1839. Chevreul's prac-
22. Ibid., pp. 13-14. According to an observer, Seurat ac-
tical approach and readable accounts made his books easily
tually proceeded by these stages; first laying in the local
understandable to artists. Signac had visited him and Delacroix
color, then "achromatizing" it with the color of the light
had hoped to, although it is not believed that he had actually
falling on the surface, then adding the color of the reflections
done so. from neighboring objects, and finally including the
comple-
19. A later work is made up of plates of his color wheels:
mentaries of these colors. See Felix Feneon's article reprinted
Des couleurs et de leurs applications aux arts industriels, Paris,
by John Rewald in "Seurat: the Meaning of the Dots," Art
Bailliere, 1864. News, XLVIII, April 1949, p. 27.
20. Chevreul, De la loi du contraste.. ., ch. I and passim. 23.
Paul Signac, "Les besoins individuels et la peinture,"
21. Paul Signac, D'Eugne Delacroix au neo-impressionisme,
Encyclopidie francaise, xvi, x935, p. 16.84-8.
4th ed., Paris, Floury, 1939, ch. I and passim (first published
57

THE ART BULLETIN
sensations, and they analyzed experiments by which he
attempted to reduce the effects of color
and line to simple nervous reactions. Red is the most dynamic
color, he states, and therefore corre-
sponds to an upward direction, while its complementary blue-
green is the most inhibiting color
and therefore is downward in its movement.24 Henry's study of
the physiological effects of colors
appealed to Signac and to Seurat since it reduced colors to
measurable quantities, in contrast to
the symbolic or metaphysical meanings attributed to them by
the romantic and symbolist poets.
The possibility of a rational control of color in painting had
already been stated by the theore-
tician Charles Blanc in his artists' handbook of 1867, which was
well known to Signac.25 Blanc
stated that color is feminine because it is emotional, mobile,
and intangible; but that drawing is
masculine for it is precise, fixed, and constant. This duality may
be solved by giving order to color.
Color may be made to conform to fixed rules just as music, and
it can be taught in the same way.
In a painting color must be made subservient to form, and thus
it is identified not with irrationality,
vagueness, and emotionality, but rather with rationality, clarity,
and order.
The theories of Chevreul and Blanc were the foundation for the

articles of David Sutter that
were so influential on the young Georges Seurat. Sutter
somewhat dogmatically proclaimed the
supremacy of the mind over the emotions in art, and he sought
for laws that would govern the
harmony of colors just as he believed that there were laws
governing musical harmony.26
The views of these theoreticians, conditioned partly by
observation and partly by scientific
experiment, were given the sanction of modern science in 1879
by the textbook of an American
physicist, Ogden Rood.27 This book was carefully studied by
Signac and other later artists. Basing
his work upon the studies of Helmholtz in the sensations and
perceptions of vision, Rood dealt
with colors solely as visual phenomena, and hence, like Henry,
freed them from the symbolic
and metaphysical associations with which they had been
endowed by earlier artists and theoreticians.
He proved by controlled experiments that the brilliance and
transparency of colors in nature could
be simulated by placing on a surface adjacent dots of different
colors, so that at the proper distance
from the eye they would produce a lively flicker and glimmer.
His experiments dealt with colored
light, not with the pigments of Chevreul, and they showed that
mixtures of colored light tend
toward white while mixtures of pigment tend toward black; a
discovery of the greatest importance
to artists seeking greater brilliance and purity in their color. His
familiarity with the actual practice
and problems of painting gave the artists confidence in his
work, and his careful laboratory ex-
periments lent the prestige of science to the general theory of
the optical mixture of colors.

III
Delaunay's own writings on color, although influenced by
scientists and theoreticians, are intui-
tive and sometimes random statements based upon the belief
that color is a thing in itself with
its own powers of both expression and form.28 Painting is a
purely visual art, he writes, without
24. Charles Henry, Le cercle chromatique, Paris, Verdin, Paris,
Bailliere, 188I); see especially ch. xvi. Rood's book
I888, pp. 62-67. See Seurat's cover design for a theater pro- was
written in clear, nontechnical language, comprehensible to
gram made according to Henry's theories, reproduced in John
the artists. He was himself a painter, had discussed his theories
Rewald, Post-Impressionism, From Van Gogh to Gauguin, with
other artists, and had studied John Ruskin's writings.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1956, p. I39. This book
Helmholtz's works (posthumously collected in Hermann von
contains much valuable material on the theories and criticism
Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik, Hamburg
of Neoimpressionism, some of it translated for the first time.
and Leipzig, L. Voss, x896) expressed the physiologist's view
25. Charles Blanc, Grammaire des arts du dessin, Paris, of color
theory in contrast to the physical views of Newton,
Renouard, 1867. For the following theories, see p. 595 and yet
they still were highly technical, dealing with relations
passim. between the wave lengths of colors from the spectrum
and
26. David Sutter, "Les phenomenes de la vision," L'Art, I,
optical sensations. They were, therefore, beyond the under-
I88o (series of six articles, paissim): "The laws of the aesthetic
standing of almost all the artists.

harmony of colors can be taught as the rules of musical har- 28.
Excerpts from his notes are included and discussed in
mony are taught" (p. 219). FranSois Gilles de la Tourette,
Robert Delaunay, Paris, Mas-
27. Ogden N. Rood, Modern Chromatics, New York, Ap- sin,
x950, passim; Denys Sutton, "Robert Delaunay," Maga-
pleton, 1879 (translated as Thiorie scitntifiqu des couleurs, ine
of Art, XLI, October 1948, pp. 208-211; LUon Degand,
58
dependence upon intellectual elements, and the act of
perception is in the impact of colored light
upon the eye. The contrasts and harmonies of color produce
within the eye simultaneous move-
ments that correspond to movements in nature. This
phenomenon of vision is the "subject" of
painting."
His early painting, like his theory, is deeply rooted in
Neoimpressionism. In Night Scene (Le
Fiacre) of 1906-1907 (Fig. I) the vigorous activity of the lively
brushstrokes in brilliant, spectral
colors glowing against the dark ground is an intensification of
Signac's vitalistic touch. Signac had
insisted that the entire canvas be enlivened with touches of
color; flat colors appear weak and
smothered, he writes, while the divisionist touch and the optical
mixture of colors give the surface
the movement and vitality of life.0 Night Scene represents a
step closer to abstraction than Signac's

work, since the brushstrokes do not conform so closely to the
contours of objects but often seem
to float on the surface without a descriptive function. They do
not define solid objects, but the areas
surrounding them, thus dematerializing the objects themselves
into shadowy areas. These areas
are merged into other adjacent areas, creating irregular and
sometimes ambiguous shapes that
are now substance and now shadow, a heritage of the fin-de-
sicle taste for the organic unity of
indefinite shapes, as in the compositions of Bonnard and
Vuillard."'
Although the spectral colors of Neoimpressionism were
momentarily abandoned in the next
stage, the Eiffel Tower series, a new lesson was learned-the
fragmentation of solid objects and
their merging with space. Influenced by Cezanne, Analytical
Cubism, and Futurism, Delaunay
found in the Eiffel Tower, which Seurat also admired, a
structure adequate to his own need for
form, and at the same time one that in reality actually fragments
space and light. In the Eiffel
Tower of 1910 (Fig. 3),"32 this interpenetration of tangible
objects and surrounding space is ac-
companied by an intense movement of the geometric planes that
is more active than the static
equilibrium of Cubist forms, and yet it conforms more to the
pictorial structure of the picture
than the somewhat cinematographic movements of Futurism.
Delaunay writes that the unification
of object and space is possible only after the homogeneity of the
object as a solid physical entity
has been destroyed, a step which was already anticipated by

Cezanne and demonstrated in Analyti-
cal Cubism. He continues: "The watercolors of Cezanne
announce Cubism; the colored, luminous
planes destroy the object. . . . To destroy the object means to
destroy the expressive means
which painters have employed since David. . . . After having
broken the line, the line which
has existed for a long time, one can no longer restore it or
reassemble it.""8
In some of the Eiffel Tower series, he begins to employ color
that is as dynamic as the form,
in fragmented areas and strong contrasts of vermilion, orange,
yellow, and green. With this
series he begins to combine the coloristic tradition of
Neoimpressionism with the formal structures
of Cubism.
The unification accomplished between the fragmented physical
objects and the space as attempted
in the Eiffel Tower series is carried further in the dense matrix
of forms in the later Window on
the City of 1910-1911i (Fig. 2).84 Although based on
architectural forms, it is more abstract than
the Eiffel Tower series and most of Cubism of the same date.
The uniform divisionist stroke re-
"Robert Delaunay," Art d'Auiourd'hui, October g1951, pp. 6-
1895, reproduced in John Rewald, Pierre Bonnard, New York,
ii. For a study of color theory in modern painting, which
Museum of Modern Art, 1948, p. 68.
includes sections on Delaunay, Signac and Seurat, the Cubists,
32. See color reproduction in Maurice Raynal, Picasso to
Kandinsky, Marc, and Klee, see Walter Hess, Das Problem
Surrealism, Geneva, 1950, p. 71.
der Farbe, Munich, Prestel, x953. A study of Delaunay's writ-

33. Translated from Delaunay's notebook, collection of
ings is being prepared by Pierre Francastel: Robert Delaunay:
Mme. Sonia Delaunay, Paris. Cited in part in Gilles de la
Du cubisme a 'Part abstrait, S.E.V. P.E.N., Paris. Tourette,
op.cit., pp. 36-38.
29. Sur la lumiere, loc.cit. (cf. note x above). 34. See color
reproduction in Werner Haftmann, Malerci
30. Signac, D'Eugene Delacroix... , p. I6. im 2o Jahrhundert,
Munich, Prestel, x955, plates, p. 188.
31. Cf. Bonnard's The Cab Horse, Bd. des Batignollcs, ca.
59
THE ART BULLETIN
appears in a more controlled and abstract manner, and the vivid
contrasts of violet, blue, pink,
and crimson partake more of the quality of light.
But here a major problem arose, Delaunay writes, in the conflict
between color that should
exist by and for itself, and the fragments of objects that refer to
the physical world. His distinction
is similar to Kandinsky's dualism between "concrete" art that
includes only nonrepresentational
colors and lines, and "objective" art, where colors and lines are
tainted by their dependence upon
natural objects.85 The existence of the reminiscence of nature
in painting is not a problem for the
Cubists, Delaunay continues, for Cubism is basically graphic or
linear, and the fragments of real
things that refer to the physical world can be assimilated. But
when painting is motivated entirely

by color, then these fragments of real things cannot exist along
with it. He writes: "I set myself
the problem of formal color."86
This problem is still unresolved in the Ville de Paris of 1912
(Fig. 4),87 where the figures
and landscape elements retain their representational character
even though broken up into a
vibrant pattern of colored planes. Delaunay believed that a
resolution was possible only when
the color contrasts were felt to be sufficiently dynamic to
sustain the picture when the objects had
disappeared. Apollinaire explained this painting as: ". .. forms
fractured by light create colored
planes. These colored planes are the structure of the painting
and nature is no longer a subject
to be described, but a pretext, a poetic evocation of expression
by colored planes which order them-
selves by simultaneous contrasts. Their colored orchestration
creates an architecture which unrolls
as phrases of color and ends in a new form of expression in
painting, Pure Painting."88
In the several versions of Sim'ultaneous Windows of I9I2 (Fig.
io),"8 there are still suggestions
is a grid of quasi-geometric forms that are almost completely
nonfigurative. The color is even more
brilliant than in the Window on the City series, and partakes of
the quality of colored light. It
was this series that inspired Apollinaire to write the poem Les
fenetres where he extols the
lyricism of color.
"La fenetre s'ouvre comme une orange,

Le beau fruit de la lumiere."4'
It was also at this time that he included Orphic Cubism among
his four categories in his book on
the Cubist painters, and named Delaunay as a major contributor
to it. He explained that it "is the
art of painting new structures out of elements which have not
been borrowed from the visual
sphere, but have been created entirely by the artist himself, and
have been endowed by him with
a powerful reality.""4
In this series the objects so important for Cezanne and Cubism
were almost completely purged,
and with them were purged the characteristics of the physical
world: tangibility, space, and light
and dark. Light and dark values, which were retained from the
phenomenal world by the Cubists,
were abolished in favor of differences of hue. The vigorous
simultaneous contrasts of these hues
were to create within the picture proper a luminous colored
light that permeated the painting.
During 1913 in the Discs series (Figher intensity and movement
of the color contrasts
convinced Delaunay that he had approached the ideal of a pure
color, where color conveyed the
expression, so that the shapes of the objects of nature were no
longer necessary. His intoxication
35. See Peter Selz, "The Aesthetic Theories of Wassily 39. See
color reproduction of a similar work in this series,
Kandinsky and Their Relationship to the Origin of Non- ibid.,
pL. I2.
Objective Painting," ART BULLETIN, XXix, 1957, pp. 127- 40.

Andre Billy, Guillaume Apollinaire, Paris, Pierre
136. Seghers, 1947, p. 128.
36. Notebook, loc.cit. (cf. note 33 above). 41. Les peintres
cubistes, p. 25.
37. See color reproduction in Gilles de la Tourette, op.cit., 42.
See color reproduction in A. H. Barr, Jr., ed., Masters
pi. I0. of Modern Art, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1954,
38. Quoted in ibid., p. 39. p. 77-
60
with color is reflected in his statements. "In painting by pure
colors it is the color itself and its
contrasts that form the structure . . . and not the use of other
devices such as geometry. Color
is form and subject. It is the sole theme that develops,
transforms itself, aside from all analysis,
psychological or otherwise. Color is a function of itself; all its
action is in force at every moment.
... I used the scientific word of Chevreul: 'the simultaneous
contrast.'... I played with colors as
one would express himself in music by a fugue of colored,
varied phrases."48
IV
While the Orphists' concern with nonfigurative painting and
their taste for brilliant color were
unique traits among the Cubists in I9I2, the artists of the Blaue

Reiter group in Munich were
deeply concerned at this time with these very problems. By
about I911 Wassily Kandinsky had
purged the visible aspects of nature from many of his paintings
in favor of an "inner meaning,"
and in I912 he wrote that "the inner note of the organic form
will be heard even though this
organic form has been pushed into the background.""
In contrast to the more rational attitude of the French artists and
theoreticians, Kandinsky, Paul
Klee, Franz Marc, and August Macke rejected scientific
theories, considering colors in rather
specific psychological or metaphysical terms, as in the theories
of Phillipp Otto Runge and
Goethe."4 Kandinsky worked out a synesthesia where musical
sounds, states of nature, emotions,
and colors were all related in a manner similar to the theories of
"correspondence" of the Symbolist
poets. While he writes that colors are combined in a painting
solely according to their "spiritual
significance," yet he recognizes the optical effects of certain
colors, such as the apparent tendency
of cool colors to recede and contract and warm colors to
advance and expand.'6
The Blaue Reiter artists were well acquainted with recent
painting in Paris, all of them having
lived and studied there prior to the formation of the group.
When Delaunay's entries in the Salon
des Independants of 91 stood out from the austere tonalities of
the Cubists, Kandinsky invited

him to show in the first Blaue Reiter exhibition in Munich in
December of that year. Among his
four entries were two of the View of the City series of 1911,
similar to Window on the City
(Fig. 2). His work was greatly admired by the German artists;
three of the paintings were sold
and three were reproduced in the Blaue Reiter almanac.'7 He
was visited in Paris in I9I12 by Klee,
Marc, and Macke at the time that he was developing his most
brilliantly colorful work, the series
of Windows and Discs, and their own interest in color was
stimulated by his concept of simultaneous
contrasts. An exhibition of his work was arranged by Herwath
Walden at the Sturm gallery in
Berlin late in 1912, and Delaunay and Apollinaire traveled
there, visiting Macke in Bonn on
the way. Apollinaire gave a lecture in the gallery, quoting
mainly from Delaunay's theories
43. Notebook, cited in part in Gilles de la Tourette, op.cit.,
p. 37, and Sutton, op.cit.
44. Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art (trans.),
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946, p.
5o. First published as Ober das Geistige in der Kunst, Munich,
Piper, 1912. See another account of Kandinsky's transition to
nonfigurative painting in Kenneth Lindsay, "The Genesis and
Meaning of the Cover Design for the First 'Blaue Reiter'
Exhibition Catalog," ART BULLETIN, XXXV, 1953, pp. 47-50.
45. Despite the mystical nature of his views of color that
based the three primary colors on the symbolism of the Trinity
and conceived of white as good and black as evil, Runge de-
veloped first the idea of the complete color sphere, with white

at the top, black at the bottom and pure hues about the middle.
In his system every color had a specific place and no color
could exist in more than one place. In this respect he was
ahead of the scientists, for even Chevreul did not conceive of a
complete color system. (J. B. C. Grundy, Tiecke und Runge,
Strasbourg, 1930, and Wilhelm Ostwald, Colour Science
[trans.], London, Winsor and Newton, 1931, I, p. i2).
Goethe's theories are mainly an attempt to draw color theory
out of the realm of physics, where Newton's discoveries had
placed it, and into physiology and psychology; from an ex-
ternal physical to an internal psychological phenomenon (J. W.
von Goethe, Farbenlehre, Jena, I928, and Ostwald, op.cit.,
pp. 15-I7). Adolph Hoelzel (1853-1934), to a greater extent
than most other artists, consciously used colors according to a
system of pairs of contrasts: dark-light, cold-warm, comple-
mentaries, high and low intensities, quantities, color - no color,
and simultaneous contrasts. (Adolph Hoelzel [catalogue], Stutt-
garter Galerieverein, 1953.)
46. Kandinsky, op.cit., pp. 5 f., 60.
47. Reproduced: St. Severin (1909), Eiffel Tower (I9I0)
and View of the City (I9 I). An article, "Die Kompositions-
mittel bei Robert Delaunay," praised his movement acquired
by means of color. (Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, ed.,
Der Blaue Reiter, Munich, Piper, 1912.)
61
THE ART BULLETIN
of simultaneous contrasts and on light. The first Herbstsalon in

Berlin in I913 featured a
salon of Orphism with forty-five works by Robert and Sonia
Delaunay.
Delaunay's brilliant color was for the Blaue Reiter artists a
continuation in post-Cubist terms
of the French coloristic tradition as in Impressionism,
Neoimpressionism and Fauvism, all of
which had been seen in major exhibitions in Germany and were
greatly admired. His colorful
and rhythmic versions of the constructive principles of Cubism
were more easily assimilable for
the German artists than the austere and monochromatic works of
Picasso and Braque. Klee wrote
in 1912 that he liked his work because he had avoided the
Cubist absorption with construction and
the materiality of objects.'8
Macke's painting had more in common with Delaunay's subject-
matter, form, and color than
it did with his fellow members of the Blaue Reiter. He was not a
theorist, but through conversa-
tions and correspondence came to agree with Delaunay's
concept of the simultaneous contrast of
prismatic colors. Shortly after the beginning of their close
friendship he began to achieve in his
paint the purity of colored light, and he divided the picture up
into colored planes that vibrated
simultaneously over the surface, as in the Bathing Girls of 1913
(Fig. 5).49
Although Marc had developed his own system of
complementary colors, his views on color
were not scientific but were Expressionist associations of colors
with sounds and metaphysical states
of nature similar to those of Kandinsky.50 He had worked with

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