These scientific-alchemical themes never disappeared from Marinetti’s repertoire. In his 1933 manifesto La radia, he again announced the “overcoming of death” through futurism “with a metallizing of the human body and the appropriating of the vital spirit as machine force.”42 In this proclamation, Marinetti reelaborated his 1915 position, according to which the futurists had the power to reawaken mummies with the charismatic electricity of their hand movements. In a passage of “Guerra sola igiene del mondo,” Marinetti recounts some of the brawls after the futurist evenings of the first years: “Everywhere, we saw growing in a few hours the courage and the number of men that are truly young, and [we saw] the galvanized mummies that our gesture had extracted from the ancient sarcophagi, becoming bizarrely agitated.”43 By now it should be clear that Marinetti’s will futuristically to abolish death is a trope, a trope that will recur frequently in Marinetti’s writings (e.g., the closing of the manifesto “La matematica futurista immaginativa qualitativa”).44
PAINTING THE INVISIBLE: BOCCIONI’S SIXTH SENSE
Contro ogni materialismo.
—Umberto Boccioni, “Note per il libro”45
At the intersection of romantic impetuousness and Bergsonian critique of materialism, the personality of Umberto Boccioni stands out dramatically. Departing from a type of formation close to Marinetti’s, yet influenced by Marinetti’s theories, Boccioni too demonstrated a strong interest in the occult. Drawn to symbolism, Nietzsche, and Bergson, familiar with the ideas of Einstein, admirer of Wagner, and more generally attracted to the titanic and romantic aesthetic, Boccioni had the vocation and the presumption of the demiurge, the creator of worlds, the materializer.
Boccioni, like Marinetti, overcame the Bergsonian dualism of matter and movement by wedding himself to Einstein’s vision (and perhaps to that of Steiner, if one substitutes the term energy for spirit).46 Everything moves, everything vibrates (all bodies are “persistent symbols of the universal vibration,” can be read in the technical manifesto of futurist painting), all creation is energy, existing in the form of waves that organize the primal matter, the ether, into different levels of density or, as Boccioni puts it, of intensity. There is no separation between one body and another: in Boccioni’s thought, continuity is preferred. In fact, in his article “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste,” which appeared in the periodical Lacerba on March 15, 1913, Boccioni writes that “distances between one object and another are made up not of empty spaces but of the continuities of matter of different intensity,” immediately adding that in the paintings of the futurists one does not have “the object and the emptiness, but only a greater or lesser intensity and solidity of spaces.”47
And he adds, further advocating for continuity,
They accuse us of doing “cinematography,” which is an accusation that really makes us laugh, so much it is vulgarly moronic. We do not subdivide visual images: we search for a shape, or, better, a single form [forma unica] that would substitute the new concept of continuity to the old concept of (sub)division.
Every subdivision of motion is completely arbitrary, as it is completely arbitrary every subdivision of matter.48
In confirmation of this proposition, Boccioni presents two quotes form Bergson.
This passage can be better understood after reading the futurist Ardengo Soffici’s restatement of this principle of continuity, since he returns the concept to what would have been its original theosophical coordinates. In his article “Raggio,” published in Lacerba on July 1, 1914, and republished not by chance a few months later in the Roman theosophical periodical Ultra with the eloquent title “La teosofia nel futurismo,” Soffici wrote that bodies are not separated from one another but that “the entire universe therefore is a single whole without interruption of continuity,” and that, moreover, “the world is not a molecular aggregate, but a flux of energy with varied rhythms, from granite to thought.”49
Soffici goes on to maintain that “a privileged organism, a center of extra-powerful vital force, can in a certain moment and under certain circumstances attract and concentrate within itself its distant parts, the peripheral waves of its energies, making them concrete,” and that “an artist can live and make concrete in a work the life of another being, of things, of places that he has not visited. A prophet [can] see and reveal future events—future for sensibilities less acute than his own.” In a crescendo of self-centered hubris, Soffici maintains that his consciousness is “a globe of light that shoots its rays all around in accordance with its force,” and he concludes, “I am the point of confluence of history and of the world. I am one with eternity and with the infinite.”50
Soffici’s claim that the psychic energy of the artist could not simply reproduce but must re-create reality was shared by all futurists. I shall investigate how determinative this proposition is in analyzing the work of Russolo. This idea led to the futurists’ interest in the creation of ectoplasmic forms by sensitive subjects in a mediumistic trance. In “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste,” Boccioni wrote:
When, through the works, one understands the truth of futurist sculpture, one will see the form of atmosphere where before one saw emptiness and then with the impressionists a fog. This fog was already a first step toward atmospheric plasticity, toward our physical transcendentalism which is then another step toward the perception of analogous phenomena until now occult to our obtuse sensitivity, such as the perceptions of the luminous emanations of our body of which I spoke in my first lecture in Rome and which the photographic plate already reproduces.51
A year later, at the close of his volume Pittura, scultura futuriste, Boccioni wrote: “For us the biological mystery of mediumistic materialization is a certainty, a clarity in the intuition of psychic transcendentalism and of plastic states of mind.”52 In his preparatory notes for the book, which were published posthumously, Boccioni formulated yet another eloquent phrase: “Our painting is esoteric.”53
In the passage from “Fondamento plastico della scultura e pittura futuriste” quoted above, Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco read an allusion to the photographs of ectoplasms produced at the beginning of the century by the notorious Neapolitan medium Eusapia Palladino.54 Both Marinetti and Boccioni were fascinated by Palladino’s séances.55 These séances had became still better known after the director of the Corriere della sera tried to discredit them.56
Palladino based her credibility on the fact that she had agreed to repeat her mediumistic séances in the presence of neurologists and psychologists, and she was defended fiercely by the anthropologist Lombroso. Celant records that Lombroso, along with a Turinese group of faithful followers, was in those years investigating the study of phenomena of psychic condensation and materialization. Lombroso’s theories would have been fairly widespread in the artistic circles of the time. Kandinsky, for example, was well informed about the studies on spiritualism that Lombroso conducted in Palladino’s mediumistic séances,57 and the young Balla in his early years in Turin took Lombroso’s classes.58
Materialization phenomena were also the point of departure for the work of Anton Giulio Bragaglia, the author of that “futurist photodynamism” that incited Boccioni’s wrath. In two articles from 1913 titled “I fantasmi dei vivi e dei morti” and “La fotografia dell’invisibile,” Bragaglia published photos of fake ectoplasms; in doing so he was following a well-established international trend.59 But the year before, influenced by mediumistic photos and those theories of chronophotography of Muybridge or Maray on which Giacomo Balla based his 1912 paintings of the frame-based breakdown of movement (scomposizione del movimento), Bragaglia had already produced the first works of photodynamism.60 In these works he retraced blurs and trajectories of bodies in movement, aiming to reveal that spiritual essence that is lost as a result of the limitations of the human eye: “In motion, things, dematerializing, become idealized,” he declared in his Fotodinamismo futurista.61 Calvesi, considering this phrase to be a departure from
Bergsonian ideas, linked it to one of the key phrases of the technical manifesto of futurist painting of 1910: “Movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies.” Bragaglia’s interest in the supernatural did not exhaust itself in this first phase, as testified by his 1932 photograph Alchimia musicale.
But the passage from Lacerba of March 15, 1913, in which Boccioni talked about “perceptions of the luminous emanations of our body,” seems actually to refer to the particular metapsychics phenomena that Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater called “thought-forms.” Their book Thought-forms of 1901 was read assiduously in the early twentieth century by artists who were interested in abstract painting. In fact, it exerted great influence over the work of Kandinsky, Kupka, Malevich, and Mondrian.
The book’s central proposition is that all thoughts and emotions create corresponding forms and colors in the aura that surrounds the physical body of every human being. These forms and colors are directly determined by the vibrations of the aura, which only clairvoyants can perceive. According to Besant and Leadbeater, the aura of an individual is composed of the union of different “bodies,” among which are the astral body, generated by the passions, and the mental body, generated by the thoughts. The vibrations of the astral and mental bodies have the power to produce special psychic forms, both concrete and abstract, which they called thought-forms. Thought-forms can move freely, and they can distance themselves from the body if the energy of the mind that produced them is sufficient. Their color is based on the quality of the thought, their form on its nature, and their sharpness on its clarity.62
Besant’s and Leadbeater’s book contain a famous series of color plates painted by various artists on indications furnished by the authors after experiencing trances. Their indications were intended to document scientifically, down to the smallest detail, the thought-forms produced by subjects while feeling emotions ranging from devotion to fear and rage that were collected on specific occasions, at specific times of the day. The largely abstract plates attracted the interest of artists of the time, as did the illustrations of Leadbeater’s Man Visible and Invisible of 1902. Thought-forms was quickly translated into a number of languages; in Italy it was first disseminated in the 1905 French translation, in which version it was read by Luigi Pirandello and influenced his poetics from the writing of Il fu Mattia Pascal onward.63
It is useful, however, to remember that Boccioni first expressed interest in the occult in that Roman lecture of 1911 that he referred to in his Lacerba article of March 15, 1913, a lecture in which his spirituality is clearly revealed. The text of the lecture, which remained unpublished for a long time, represents one of the high points of Boccioni’s poetics. Conscious of its relevance, he referred to it often in his subsequent works. His familiarity with the books of Leadbeater and Besant, particularly Thought-forms, emerges from the very opening lines of the lecture, where, in prophesizing the art of the future, Boccioni affirms:
There will come a time when a painting will no longer be enough. Its immobility will be an archaism when compared with the vertiginous movement of human life. The eye of man will perceive colors like feelings in themselves. Multiplied colors will have no need of forms to be understood, and pictorial works will be whirling musical compositions of enormous colored gases, which on the scene of a free horizon, will move and electrify the complex soul of a crowd that we cannot yet imagine.64
The reference to the use of colors as “feelings in themselves,” the use of “colored gases” that can electrify the soul, and the synesthetic link between colors and musical composition are all concepts from Thought-forms. In that same year, 1911, Luigi Russolo exhibited perhaps his most ambitious canvas, on which he had worked for many years.65 Titled La musica, it represents a whirling azure wave that unfolds in the air while the protagonist of the painting, a pianist, executes equally whirling musical figurations on a keyboard. Russolo’s painting probably inspired Boccioni’s visionary remarks above; and it certainly inspired some elements of Città che sale, Boccioni’s masterpiece of 1910–1911 (fig. 3).66
FIGURE 3. Umberto Boccioni, Città che sale (1910–11). New York, Museum of Modern Art.
The synesthetic hypothesis returned in the closing words of Boccioni’s 1911 lecture, where Boccioni clarified that by painting the sensation, the futurists stop “the idea before it can be localized in any one sense and be determined either as music, poetry, painting, architecture, that way capturing without any mediation the primal universal sensation.”67 Moreover, because futurists live in the absolute, Boccioni maintained that it was necessary for those wishing to understand their works to be not only extremely intelligent but also ready “to enter into contact with pure intuition,” which is possible only “after a long and religious preparation.”68
Thanks to this spiritual preparation, we are endowed with a new sensitivity that, through new perceptive and psychic means, guides us in the search for the absolute. Boccioni writes:
We painters [. . .] feel that this sensitivity is a psychic divining force that gives the senses the power to perceive that which never until now was perceived.69 We think that if everything tends toward Unity, that which man until today has sought to perceive in unity is still a miserable blind infantile decomposition of things.70
Boccioni believed that the artist must aspire to re-create this unity from the “chaos that envelops things.” Sensation is the synthesis, the essence of things, their transfiguration. It is the “subjective impression of Nature.”
Moving from the more spiritual aspects of the artistic currents that had gone before (divisionism, impressionism, symbolism), Boccioni arrived at a definition of futurism as the culmination and overcoming of these previous artistic currents. Divisionism represents for Boccioni the achievement of a “symphonic and polychromatic unity of the painting that will become more and more a universal synthesis.” With the impressionists, figures and objects, although still in a fairly embryonic way, “are already the nucleus of an atmospheric vibration.” But the impressionists exchanged “appearance for reality.” It was their limit, and as a result they were trapped in a superficial representation of nature.
Boccioni considered the painting style of the Italian symbolist Gaetano Previati—in which he noted contacts with the “Rosa Croce”—to be the direct predecessor of futurist painting. In Previati, “forms begin to speak like music, bodies aspire to make themselves atmosphere, spirit, and the subject is ready to transform itself into a state of mind.”
Boccioni perceived futurism as a new kind of impressionism: “Our impressionism is absolutely spiritual since more than the optical and analytical impression, it wishes to give the psychic and synthetic impression of reality.” The spiritual role of futurist painting and the psychic force that it develops exhibits far loftier ambitions than French impressionism. In Boccioni’s words, it “hypnotizes, grasps, envelops and drags the soul to the infinite.” Boccioni had already defined this psychic synthesis as “simultaneity of state of mind.” It was a mnemonic-optical representation of what is remembered and what is seen; in substance, it was a spiritualization of the perceptive experience. As if it were an X-ray view, this psychic synthesis offered possibilities of “penetrating the opacity of bodies.”
The influence of X-rays and the mythology that the futurists developed around them returns with Boccioni’s mention of X-rays in a catalog note for the painting La risata (also painted in the year 1911), which was prepared for the program of the 1912 London exhibition: “The scene is round the table of a restaurant where all are gay. The personages are studied from all sides and both the objects in front and those at the back are to be seen, all those being present in the painter’s memory, so that the principle of the Roentgen rays is applied to the picture.”71
This quote shows similarities with his affirmations in the Roman lecture. For Boccioni the model of the modern artist was the “clairvoyant painter,” capable of “painting not only the visible but that which until now was held to be invisible.�
��72 He believed that the modern painter “can only paint the invisible, clothing it with lights and shadows that emanate from his own soul.” Thanks to the progress—spiritual and technological—of the modern age, the five senses can again be transcended: “It is our futurist hypersensitivity that guides us and makes us already possess that sixth sense that science strains in vain to catalog and define.”73
This perceptive sensitivity permitted the futurist artist to understand the spiritual essence of the movement of bodies. Everything is perennially in motion, all is composed of the same waves that have various grades of density and that vibrate at different intensities. “Bodies are but condensed atmosphere,” Boccioni wrote, and minerals, plants, and animals are composed of “identical nature.” This new sensitivity is a true and real “psychic divining force” that allows one to grasp that substantial “Unity” of everything that Boccioni considered—as he phrases it in his lecture notes in a crossed-out line—the symbol of the “universal vibration.”74 Futurist painting aspired to reproduce a more profound reality as it is perceived by the subject and as it produced states of mind in the subject: “If bodies provoke states of mind through vibrations of forms, it is those that we will draw.”
The following excerpt from the closing paragraph of the Roman lecture is both the most visionary passage of that document and the one where Boccioni’s familiarity with Leadbeater is most evident:
There is a space of vibrations between the physical body and the invisible that determines the nature of its action and that will dictate the artistic sensation. In short, if around us spirits wander and are observed and studied; if from our bodies emanate fluids of power, of antipathy, of love; if deaths are foreseen at a distance of hundreds of kilometers; if premonitions give us sudden joy or annihilate us with sadness; if all this impalpable, this invisible, this inaudible becomes more and more the object of investigation and observation: all of this happens because in us some marvelous sense is awakening thanks to the light of our consciousness. Sensation is the material garment of the spirit and now it appears to our clairvoyant eyes. And with this the artist feels himself in everything. By creating he does not look, does not observe, does not measure; he feels and the sensations that envelop him dictates him the lines and colors that will arouse the emotions that caused him to act.
Luigi Russolo, Futurist Page 4