RADIUM AGE ART (1914)
By:
May 23, 2024
A series of notes regarding proto sf-adjacent artwork created during the sf genre’s emergent Radium Age (1900–1935). Very much a work-in-progress. Curation and categorization by Josh Glenn, whose notes are rough-and-ready — and in some cases, no doubt, improperly attributed. Also see these series: RADIUM AGE TIMELINE and RADIUM AGE POETRY.
RADIUM AGE ART: 1900 | 1901 | 1902 | 1903 | 1904 | 1905 | 1906 | 1907 | 1908 | 1909 | 1910 | 1911 | 1912 | 1913 | 1914 | 1915 | 1916 | 1917 | 1918 | 1919 | 1920 | 1921 | 1922 | 1923 | 1924 | 1925 | 1926 | 1927 | 1928 | 1929 | 1930 | 1931 | 1932 | 1933 | 1934 | 1935.
The year 1914, in my periodization scheme, marks the beginning of the cultural decade known as the “Nineteen-Teens.” Of course there are no hard stops and starts in culture, so it’s more accurate to describe 1914 (and 1913) as cusp years during which the Aughts end and the Teens begin.
1914 considered the final year of Cubism. First year of Vorticism.
WWI: Franz Ferdinand assassinated, triggering a train of military presumptions and defensive alliances — in semiautomatic way that seemed to exclude considerations of prudence, moral purpose, or even national interest. For many intellectuals, WWI would produce a collapse of confidence in the rhetoric of the culture of rationality that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment.
Mondrian returns to the Netherlands with the outbreak of WWI. There, he applies his new visual language of abstract grids and understated colors to the themes of landscape and architecture.
The Vorticists were a British avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 with the aim of creating art that expressed the dynamism of the modern world. Wyndham Lewis was its leader; other artists involved with the group included: Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, Cuthbert Hamilton, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Edward Wadsworth, and the sculptors Sir Jacob Epstein and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. More info below.
The first issue of BLAST: The Review of the Great English Vortex, published in July 1914.
Clive Bell’s theory of significant form was explained in his book Art published in 1914. He begins the book with the lines: “What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions?” The answer, according to Bell, is “significant form,” which he goes on to loosely describe as: “lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, [that] stir our aesthetic emotions.”
Arthur Jerome Eddy, writing about abstract art in 1914, describes the goal as a “pure art” which “speaks from soul to soul, it is not dependent upon one’s use of objective and imitative forms.” Art as telepathic communication, a means of creatine sympathetic vibrations in the viewer.
Francis Picabia continues to act as an ambassador of modernist art in the USA. Shown above: A 1915 photo, by Alfred Stieglitz, of Picabia in front of his painting “This Has to Do with Me.”
J.H. Jeans’ “Radiation and the Quantum Theory.”
Robert Goddard makes his first experiments with rocketry, in 1914; in 1926, he would be the first to launch a liquid-fueled rocket.
Manning’s Geometry of Four Dimensions.
Charlie Chaplin arrives in Los Angeles and begins working for Keystone.
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons — multiple prose-poems covering the everyday mundane — published. Its first poem, “A Carafe, That Is a Blind Glass,” is arguably its most famous, and is often cited as one of the quintessential works of “Cubist literature.” Stein, whose portrait was being painted by Picasso while she was writing the book, here reveals herself as a Cubist artist in her determination to reconfigure a one-sided perspective while revealing a subject’s essence through multiple perspectives.
SEE: RADIUM AGE: 1914
Speaking of catastrophe, H.G. Wells’s The World Set Free (reissued by the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series) appears in 1914.
Balla may be best known for his paintings of automobiles, birds, etc., in motion — but this amay be his most influential composition, according to Pepe Karmel. It depict the transit of Mercury that took place on November 7 1914. The sun is represented at least three times — as a large orange sphere and as two overlapping smaller spheres. Mercury appears as a black dot traveling on a curved path across the smallest of the suns. A large black conical form descends from the curve like a shadow of the planet.
Synchromism was an art movement founded in 1912 by American artists Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Morgan Russell. Their “synchromies,” based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music, were among the first abstract paintings in American art. The abstract ones, that is; some of their synchromies were representational.
Synchromy in Orange: To Form is considered a pinnacle work of the movement. Its complex composition and impressive scale is a spectacular visual synopsis of the experiments Russell and Macdonald-Wright pursued. Although this work appears abstract, numerous preparatory studies reveal that Russell related the underlying configuration to the human figure and the Cubists’ treatment of objects. In fact, Russell’s painting developed from a pencil sketch he did of Picasso’s Three Women while visiting Gertrude Stein’s Paris salon.
London-based painter David Bomberg’s combustive canvas is a carefully managed bomb blast of crosscutting grids and jagged edges. (He was associated with the Vorticists but wasn’t willing to be a member of the movement, I believe…)
In Bomberg’s study for the painting, per Pepe Karmel’s analysis, the stevedores at work loading or unloading cargo seem to be constructed from lengths of metal ductwork. “The men are mechanical Morlocks, toiling in the service of a pale race of Eloi,” he says in Wellsian sf mode. (Bomberg was atypical in using abstraction as an allegory for the dehumanization of labor; most abstract artists of his generation celebrated industrialization.) Karmel points out that in Bomberg’s study a lattice of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines have been inscribed over the figures at work; in the final version, the resulting triangles Nd rhomboids have been assigned colors — thus shattering the figures into seemingly random fragments whose original forms can just barely be glimpsed. “The process of dehumanization is complete.”
From MoMa’s website:
In this large painting, rhythm is intimated via a series of repeated, interpenetrating pistons and orifices, fusing the mechanical with the biological. The work illustrates Picabia’s predilection for machines, which intensified during his 1913 visit to New York. As one reviewer noted that year, “Picabia… admits to having put all former things behind him and to having grasped the genius of American machinery as the new medium through which his art may be expressed.” The painting’s conflation of mechanized movements with erotic bodily forms, along with its half-stolen title, exemplifies the irreverent approach that made Picabia a central figure in the Dada movement during the World War I years.
Francis Picabia’s “Comic Wedlock” (1914)
Picabia’s biomorphic paintings were shown in 1915 at Stieglitz’s gallery in NY.
See below for an example of this image used as an sf book cover.
From MoMA’s website:
In 3 Standard Stoppages, Duchamp had explored the possibility of adjusting the metric standard through a random procedure. In this large canvas he complicated that idea, multiplying the curves of the fallen threads from 3 Standard Stoppages by reproducing each one three times and positioning them in a diagrammatic arrangement. He also made the work by painting over the images on a canvas he had already used, those images being a female figure and a schematic, quasi-mechanical drawing of his ongoing project The Large Glass. The visible and semi-visible layers of Network of Stoppages seem to contrast three representational systems: traditional figuration, chance operations, and the diagram, which maps the world without picturing it.
The Met’s website: “The tabletop tips up vertically, all but negating spatial recession, and the glinting bottle and wineglasses seem to push through the picture plane in classic trompe l’oeil style.”
Léger created a personal form of cubism (known as “tubism”) which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style. His boldly simplified treatment of modern subject matter has caused him to be regarded as a forerunner of pop art.
He’d co-founded the Section d’Or in 1911, and his paintings, from then until 1914, became increasingly abstract. But Léger’s experiences in World War I would have a significant effect on his work….
The outbreak of war in August of 1914 and the subsequent loss on the Western Front of his close friend and probable lover, Lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, threw Hartley into deep grief. The artist discarded an existing project and began pouring his feelings onto 12 canvases. Known as the “War Motif” series, this body of work would become his passionate memorial to von Freyburg and, by extension, to the generation of men who surrendered their lives in the trenches.
See this website.
A semiotic painting.
Belongs to the series Disks — inspired by the colour theory of French chemist Michel Eugène Chevreul, and the concept of the simultaneous contrasts of colour.
This canvas celebrates the French aviation pioneer and constructor Louis Blériot, in a typical simultaneist composition, by representing symbols of progress, namely a biplane, seen flying above the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, at the right, and a propeller, at the left. However, the inscription left below the canvas reads “first simultaneous solar disks form” to the great constructor Blériot, suggesting that the painting is dedicated to Blériot, as the constructor and not as the pilot of the biplane.
Delaunay described the work the following way: “Blériot–1914 A simultaneous solar disc. Creation of a constructive disc. Solar fireworks. Depth and life of the sun. Constructive mobility of the solar spectrum; dawn, fire, evolution of airplanes. Everything is roundness, sun, earth, horizons, intense plenitude of life, a poetry which one cannot render into language… The driving force in the picture. Solar strength and strength of the earth.”
In 1914 Malevich turned to a new style of painting but with the same purpose (as his “zaum realism”) in mind. His Alogist pictures, such as An Englishman in Moscow (1913–1914) project a dense collection of whole and partial images, words, collage elements, objects fastened to the canvas, and puzzling titles. They replace the structural “higher geometries” of Cubism with the secret logic of content devised by the artist.
Malevich may have solved the problem of giving a visual image to “zaum” through reading descriptions by Hinton and Ouspensky of the geometric cross-sections produced by a cube falling through a plane.
The painting features a collage of geometric shapes and items such as a lit candle, scimitar, a ladder, a wooden spoon and other items. Malevich also painted symbols and text characters onto the canvas—segments of the words “partial” and “solar eclipse” are seen in Russian. The picture suggests the elements of a complex riddle without a solution.
This painting is resonant of the “alogical” style that Malevich adopted as a direct response to the zaum language introduced and explored by Alexei Kruchenykh and others in the early 1910s. Alogism centered on a complete reversal of the logic upon which one typically relies when reading a painting. The artist intentionally ruptures the viewer’s attempt to reconcile objects.
Reviewing the 2014 Malevich exhibit at the Tate Modern, The Evening Standard said the painting is, “anti-rational forerunner of surrealism, colliding cubist fragments with apparently random objects.”
Delaunay-Turk was born in the Ukraine, and married Robert Delaunay in 1910. She is noted for her use of “simultaneous contrasts” and for her design for stage costumes.
From a New York Times review of a 2024 Orphism show at the Guggenheim:
It was Delaunay’s odd fate to devise a style that other artists put to better and more memorable use. One of them was his intrepid wife, Sonia Delaunay, who was born Sarah Stern, in Ukraine. She veered between high art and applied art, especially textile design, and is rightfully held up today as a multimedia pioneer, a woman of the zeitgeist who speaks to our own impatience with high-low boundaries.
Mondrian’s work becoming more Cubist — but it deviates from orthodox Cubism in its theosophy-driven thinking about line and color. Radically reducing lines to horizontal and vertical, radically reducing color to the three primary colors… Mondrian was essentially painting semiotic charts of a unity that would resolve harmoniously all antitheses.
The geometry of this composition, made two years after Mondrian moved from Holland to Paris, is directly based on sketches of partially demolished buildings, with exposed floors, chimneys, and patches of wallpaper.
The cubic forms of the small buildings in the foreground of his original sketch and the taller ones at left merge into a grid of strict verticals and horizontals. The letters KUB can vaguely be discerned — from an advertisement for a popular brand of bouillon cube.
In his 1917 essay “The New Plastic in Painting,” Mondrian insists that “In the metropolis, beauty is expressed more mathematically; it is here that the mathematical artistic temperament of the future will develop — here the New Style will emerge.”
One of only four fully non-representational paintings within Bell’s oeuvre. From the Tate’s website: “They show the artist experimenting with abstraction and investigating through her practice theories of significant form propounded by her husband, the art critic Clive Bell, and her close friend and former partner, the painter and critic Roger Fry.”
Oil and gouache on cut-and-pasted paper.
Depicting steam baths used by the Jewish population near his home in east London, Bomberg reduces human figures to geometric shapes, a process he described as “searching for an intenser expression … where I use Naturalistic Form I have stripped it of all irrelevant matter.”
In late 1912 to early 1913 Giacomo Balla turned from a depiction of the splintering of light to the exploration of movement and, more specifically, the speed of racing automobiles. This led to an important series of studies in 1913–14.
The Italian-born Joseph Stella wrote that Coney Island presented the “most intense arabesque… [of the] surging crowd and the revolving machines generating… violent, dangerous pleasures.” This cacophony of electric lights, gyrating dancers, and radiating steel beams of the Ferris wheel and roller coasters was his first American subject.
Antonio Sant’Elia (1888–1916) was an Italian architect notable for his visionary drawings of the city of the future. Between 1912 and 1914 he made many highly imaginative drawings and plans for cities of the future. A group of these drawings called Città Nuova (“New City”) was displayed in May 1914 at an exhibition of the Nuove Tendenze group, of which he was a member.
His designs have influenced technocrats and urban planners throughout the 20th century — the most famous being Le Corbusier, whose unrealized Ville Radieuse (“Radiant City”), like Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova, was characterized by central planning, ease of transport, and the overall organization of its inhabitants.
NOTES ON VORTICISM
Around 1914, Ezra Pound began criticizing his fellow Imagistes for their sloppiness with regard to le mot juste; he felt that unrhymed, irregular verse in and of itself wasn’t enough. So he joined forces with Wyndham Lewis, whose Vorticism was stricter and more intense — experimenting with forms and geometric abstractions in an attempt to transfer energies between literature and the visual arts. Pound’s essay “Vorticism” in the Fortnightly Review of September 1914 became the movement’s aesthetic manifesto. In the visual arts, the movement was about sharply defined form with distinct and geometrical lines and shapes as the expression of energy or emotion.
See Ezra Pound and Neoplatonism (2004) by P. Th. M. G. Liebregts.
Vorticist painting combined cubist fragmentation of reality with hard-edged imagery derived from the machine and the urban environment. It was a British equivalent to Italy’s Futurism, although with doctrinal differences; Lewis was hostile to the Futurists.
MORE RADIUM AGE SCI FI ON HILOBROW: RADIUM AGE SERIES from THE MIT PRESS: In-depth info on each book in the series; a sneak peek at what’s coming in the months ahead; the secret identity of the series’ advisory panel; and more. | RADIUM AGE: TIMELINE: Notes on proto-sf publications and related events from 1900–1935. | RADIUM AGE POETRY: Proto-sf and science-related poetry from 1900–1935. | RADIUM AGE 100: A list (now somewhat outdated) of Josh’s 100 favorite proto-sf novels from the genre’s emergent Radium Age | SISTERS OF THE RADIUM AGE: A resource compiled by Lisa Yaszek.