Two movements of the 1910s reacted to the modern world in opposite ways. The Futurists loved it; the Dada artists, after the horror of World War I, mocked it, and mocked art itself.
Futurism
On February 20, 1909, the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of the Paris newspaper Le Figaro. He praised speed, machines, cities and even war, and called for destroying museums and libraries. Painters such as Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Balla and Carlo Carrà joined him, using the broken forms of Cubism to show motion.
Describe. A huge red horse charges across the canvas, with workers straining to hold it; behind them are scaffolding, factory chimneys and new buildings. Analyze. Everything is blurred by sweeping, curving strokes; forms melt into each other, so the eye cannot rest. The colors are hot and bright. Interpret. The horse stands for the energy of the growing industrial city. Boccioni (1882 to 1916) painted it as a hymn to progress and labor. He died in World War I, in 1916.
Key idea
Dada
In 1916, in neutral Switzerland, the writer Hugo Ball and the performer Emmy Hennings opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Artists and poets from countries at war, among them Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber, gathered there for nonsense poems, noise music, masks and collages. They took the name Dada, a nonsense word (in French a child's word for a hobbyhorse). Dada spread to Berlin, where Hannah Höch made photomontages from magazine pictures, to Paris and to New York.
In New York in 1917, Marcel Duchamp (1887 to 1968) bought a porcelain urinal from a plumbing supply store, turned it on its back, signed it "R. Mutt 1917" and submitted it, under that false name, to an exhibition that claimed to accept any work by any artist who paid the fee. The board refused to show it. Called Fountain, it is the most famous of Duchamp's readymades: ordinary manufactured objects that the artist chose and called art. The original is lost and is known from a photograph by Alfred Stieglitz; replicas were made in the 1950s and 1960s. It is still in copyright and is not shown here.
Common mistake
Why it works
Worked example: What is the question?
- He did not make the object; he chose it.
- He entered it in an art exhibition with no jury, under a false name.
- The refusal showed that the "open" show did have rules after all.
- His question: who decides what counts as art, and does art require the artist's hand?
Answer: Who decides what art is, and whether choosing an object can make it art.