RADIUM AGE ART (1929)

By: Joshua Glenn
October 26, 2024

Kandinsky’s “Inner Alliance” (1929)

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.


1929


By the late 1920s, the numerous abstract artists who’d moved to France found themselves (as Pepe Karmel puts it) “fighting a rear-guard defense against surrealism, the new cutting edge of the avant garde.” Feeling the need to assert their preferred approach, they began to discuss creating a united front. Many of these artists banded together in groups like Art Concret, Cercle et Carré, and Abstraction-Création. The Cercle et Carré group was more inclusive, the Art Concret group more exclusive.

“Aeropainting” was launched in a manifesto of 1929, Perspectives of Flight, signed by the Italian Futurists Benedetta, Depero, Dottori, Fillìa, Marinetti, Prampolini, Somenzi and Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni). The artists stated that “The changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective.”

Un Chien Andalou scene

Première of the Surrealist film Un Chien Andalou by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, in Paris.

The Chinese avant-garde painter Guan Zilan on the cover of The Young Companion, c. 1930

The Museum of Modern Art opens in New York City. An exhibit, “Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat and van Gogh”, at the new museum attracts 47,000 visitors.

Einstein’s “Unified Field Theory.”

1930 issue of Le Petit Vingtieme

First appearance of Hergé’s Belgian comic book hero Tintin.

“Black Friday” in US — Stock Exchange collapses.

1929 1st installment of “Buck Rogers” strip

The comic strip Buck Rogers first appears. The first non-humorous science fiction comic strip, it was based on a story published that year in Amazing Stories.

Fritz Lang’s movie Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) introduces the idea of counting down the time to a rocket launch.

Also see: RADIUM AGE: 1929.


COSMIC AWE


“Setting Sun” by Tarsila do Amaral, 1929

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Agnes Pelton, Star Gazer (1929)

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Paul Klee, Untitled (1929)

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Arthur Dove’s “Sole d’Argento”


DISENCHANTMENT


The Accommodations of Desire by Salvador Dalí (1929)

“The First Days of Spring” by Salvador Dalí, 1929

“The Great Masturbator” by Salvador Dalí, 1929

The Enigma of My Desire or My Mother, My Mother, My Mother, Salvador Dalí (1929)

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Magritte’s “On the Threshold of Liberty” (1929)

On the Threshold of Liberty (in French, Au seuil de la liberté) refers to two oil on canvas paintings by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte. The work depicts a large room with the walls paneled with different scenes or windows. Each panel reveals a different subject: a sky, fire, wood, a forest, the front of a building, an ornamental pattern, a female torso and a strange metallic texture featuring spherical bells (a common Magritte element). Inside the room is a cannon.

Magritte’s “The Treachery of Images” (1929)

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“Houses on a Barge” (1929) by Helen Torr


DYSTOPIA


Emil Bisttram’s “Metropolis” (1929)

Emil Bisttram’s artistic career is of special interest because of the fascinating array of spiritual, philosophical, and scientific traditions he brought to bear on his painting. Profoundly spiritual and convinced that all intellectual disciplines lead to divine truth, Bisttram enriched his compositions with references to such varied subjects as electricity, rebirth, the growth of plants, the healing power of the dance, planetary forces, the fourth dimension, and the male and female principles of nature.


FAR-OUT MATHEMATICS


Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Quatre espaces à cercles rouges roulants (Four spaces with red rolling circles), from 1932

In 1929, Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp left Zurich for Paris, Europe’s more fashionable art hub, and they soon fell in with a group of artists similarly exploring non-figurative art, including Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, and Marcel Duchamp. Taeuber-Arp joined two artists groups: Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. She also edited the short-lived Constructivist review Plastique/Plastic.

During that period she created some of her strongest work in abstract painting and painted reliefs. The works almost all feature perfect circular and rectangular forms depicted in primary colors cast against monochromatic backgrounds. The mood is calm, uncluttered and the focus is on color.


FOURTH DIMENSION


David Burliuk promotional poster (1929)


NEW TECHNOLOGIES



Giulio d’Anna’s “Aeropittura+Paesaggio (=Volo sulle Eolie)” (1929)

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Tullio Crali’s “In alto volo” (1929)

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Harue Koga’s The Sea (1929)

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Peter Blume’s “Study for Parade” (1929)


UNKNOWABLE ALIENS


Ruth Page in a photo from her 1929 performance in “Ballet Scaffolding” (Prokofiev)

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Léon Tutundjian, untitled (1929)

Léon Tutundjian, untitled (1929)

Pepe Karmel credits the French-Armenian artist Tutundjian with reviving the embryo theme that before WWI represented spiritual rebirth for some artists, but which had vanished after the war.

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“Anthropophagy” by Tarsila do Amaral, 1929

“City (The Street)” by Tarsila do Amaral, 1929

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Picasso’s Nude Standing by the Sea (1929)

In the 1920s Picasso developed a new kind of “curvilinear cubism” that — along with Arp’s new abstract motif, the blob — acted as a catalyst for the figural abstraction of the 1930s, in which the body (as Pepe Karmel points out) returns to its primal, embryonic state. Curvilinear cubism became the vehicle for the extension of embryonic imagery into “totemic,” tribal-style imagery.

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Max Ernst’s Son sourire, le feu, tombera sous forme de gelée noire et de rouille blanche sur les flancs de la montagne (1929)

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“The Claude Cahun, Self Portrait” by Claude Cahun, 1929

Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob)’s Photomontage for frontispiece for Aveux non avenus (unavowed confessions) 1929-30

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Photograph of Guan Zilan’s “Portrait of Miss L” (1929)

Guan Zilan was deeply influenced by Fauvism, while applying Western avant-garde painting style to traditional Chinese subjects. Her oil paintings use a high degree of simplification and abstraction, with rich contrasting colors. In Portrait of Miss L. (1929), her most famous work, she painted a modern woman in a Chinese qipao dress with a dog on her lap. Rather than painting an image of likeness, she turned the picture into a visual play by using broad strokes and vivid, flatly applied colours.

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Francis Picabia’s “Médéa” (1929)

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Picasso’s “Nude in a Red Armchair” (1929(


UNSEEN FORCES


František Kupka’s “Synthesis” (1927–29)

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Paul Klee’s Fire in the Evening (1929)

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“Composition with Red Blue and Yellow” by Piet Mondrian, 1929

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Arthur Dove’s “Foghorns” (1929)

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Cyril E. Power, “The Vortex” (1929)

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Kandinsky’s “Storeys” (1929)

Kandinsky’s “Upward” (1929)

Kandinsky’s “Inner Alliance” (1929)

Kandinsky’s “Varied Rectangles” (1929)


UTOPIA


Paul Klee’s “In the Land of Precious Stones” (1929)

In 1963, Penguin left behind their distinct colour-coded cover designs, launching a series of sci-fi books featuring abstract and surrealist works of modern artists such as Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, René Magritte, among others. The pairings held subtle connections between the art and the novel’s contents, allowing the reader to draw their conclusions. This painting was used for a new edition of Olaf Stapledon’s Sirius.


Also:

Klee’s “Old Man Calculating” (1929)

1974 edition of Lem’s “Futurological Congress”

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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.

Categories

Radium Age SF, Sci-Fi