Novecento

Novecento (pronounced no-vee-chen-toh)

(1) In Italian, nine hundred (900).

(2) In Italian the “twentieth century (1900s)”, the term used in the modern way to define the century as 1900-1999 rather than the strictly correct 1901-2000.

(3) As Novecento Italiano (literally the “Italian 1900s”), the Italian artistic movement founded in Milan in 1922 with the aim of representing the fascism of Benito Mussolini (1883-1945; Duce (leader) & prime-minister of Italy 1922-1943) in artistic form.

An Italian word which translates literally as nine-hundred (900), the construct being nove (nine) +‎ cento (hundred).  Nove was from the Latin novem, from noven (contaminated by decem, the original form preserved in nōnus), from the Proto-Italic nowem, from the primitive Indo-European hnéwn̥, the cognates including the Sanskrit नवन् (navan), the Ancient Greek ἐννέα (ennéa), the Gothic niun and the Old English nigon (which became the English nine).  Cento was from the Latin centum, from the Proto-Italic kentom, from the primitive Indo-European ḱm̥tóm, the formal cognates including the Sanskrit शत (śata), the Old Church Slavonic съто (sŭto) and the Old English hund (from which English, with an appended suffix, gained “hundred”. In Italian, the adjective novecentistico (feminine novecentistica, masculine plural novecentistici, feminine plural novecentistiche) is used generally of “twentieth century art” while “Novecento Italiano” was specifically of the movement (1922-1943) associated with Italian fascism.  However, “novecentistico” is sometimes used casually in the sense of “modern art”.  Novecento is a noun and novecentesco & novecentistico are adjectives.

Mussolini, Italian fascism and the Novecento Italiano 

In Italy and beyond, the curious coming to power in 1922 of Benito Mussolini (an event less dramatic than the Duce’s subsequent “March on Rome” propaganda would suggest) triggered many events and Adolf Hitler (1889-1945; Führer (leader) and German head of government 1933-1945 & head of state 1934-1945) always acknowleded the debt the Nazi state owed because "Mussolini was the one who showed us it could be done").  One of the more enduring Italian footnotes of the epoch was the Novecento Italiano, opportunistically announced as having been “formed” in Milan in 1922 (although some “members” at the time appear not to have been aware they’d "joined".  What attracted the movement’s founders was the what Mussolini called “la visione fascista” (“the Fascist vision” and sometimes translated as “the Fascist platform” (la piattaforma fascista)) although, as the years went by, most seemed to conclude Mussolini dealt more in concepts than plans (even the so-called "corporate state" was never really "corporatized").  The Duce had expressed his disgust at the decadence of the modern Italian people, believing they had been seduced by French ways into “elevating cooking to the status of high art”, declaring he would never allow Italy to descend to the level of France, a country ruined by “alcohol, syphilis and journalism”.  His vision extended also to reviving national vigour with “the beneficial hygiene of war”, something which worked only until his army was confronted by forces with more firepower than the brave but out-gunned (and out-gassed) Abyssinian (Ethiopian) tribesman.  Mussolini was harking back to the glories of the Roman Empire which has once stretched from “Hadrian’s Wall to the first cataract of the Nile, from Parthia to the Pillars of Hercules” and while so much of fascism was fake and bluster, the Duce genuinely was intoxicated at the notion he might be a “new Roman Emperor”.

Paesaggio urbano (Urban Landscape, circa 1924), oil on paper mounted on board by Mario Sironi.  Despite his latter day reputation, not all Sironi's representations of streets and buildings were gloomy, cold scenes but the ones now most popular seem to be; they must suit the twenty-first century zeitgeist.  Sironi was a devoted and leading Futurist and traces of that really never left his works; his most compelling technique was to exclude the human element from his urban scenes or deliberately have the figures dwarfed by the built environment.  The supremacy of the state over the individual was a core component of fascism and although as a motif it isn't apparent in all of the Novecento Italiano's output, it's a recurrent theme in Sironi's works. 

It was a vision which appealed to a certain sort of artist, one with a mind full of the grandeur of Italy's classical artistic heritage and the possibilities offered by science and the techniques of modernity, something seen as an authentic continuation of the works of Antiquity and the Renaissance whereas other threads in modern art, like the Futurism which had come to dominate avant-garde Italian art, were derided as “the work of skilled draftsmen”.  Futurism had also been disruptive and Italy had suffered more from the effects of World War I (1914-1918) that its status as a nominal victor might have been expected and like Mussolini, one of the Novecento Italiano’s key themes was a “return to order”, presumably the cultural analogue of “making the trains run on time”.  Again reflecting the post-Renaissance “construction” of a certain “idea” of the perfection of things in the ancient world, the movement sought a “return” to the Classical values of harmony, clarity, and stability.  They were pursuing a myth which remains to some persuasive, even today.

Lindsay Lohan as the Novecento Italiano might have depicted her: Lindsay (2019) by Sam McKinniss (b 1985), from a reference photograph taken 22 July 2012, leaving the Chateau Marmont, West Hollywood, Los Angeles.

The most obvious influence on the movement was a return to the imagery associated with Antiquity (albeit with many of the exemplars from later artists), with mythological or historical subjects, emphasizing form and balance, a deliberate rejection of the abstraction and dynamism of Cubism, Vorticism or Futurism.  Instead, a figurative and realist prevailed, an attempt deliberately to place the movement as the inheritor of Italy’s artistic heritage.  The movement was founded by a number of prominent figures but remains most associated with art collector, critic & journalist Margherita Sarfatti (1880–1961).  That focus is probably unfair to others but signora Sarfatti also wrote advertising copy for the Partito Nazionale Fascista (the PNF, the National Fascist Party) and perhaps more significantly, was also Mussolini’s mistress, a form of administrative horizontal integration not unfamiliar to the Duce.  Prominent members of the movement included Mario Sironi (1885-1961), known for his monumental and often sombre depictions of urban landscapes and political figures, Achille Funi (1890-1972) who focused on classical subjects with modern interpretations and Felice Casorati (1883-1963), in many ways the most interesting of the movement because few were more accomplished in the technique of fusing elements of modernism with a sharp focus on form and structure; the (not always complimentary) phrase “technical ecstasy” might have been invented to critique his output.  The most comprehensive collection of the movement’s works is displayed in Rome’s La Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (National Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art).

Donna al caffè (Woman in the Café, 1931), oil on canvas by Antonio Donghi (1897-1963). The subject matter (a lone woman at a café table) was familiar in European art but the artists of the Novecento Italiano anticipated the later technique of "photographic clarity", achieved with the air of stillness, reminiscent of the precision with which Renaissance portraits were staged though without their sumptuous detailing.  As well as the movement's focus on clarity, order, and balance, there was a new interest in depicting "ordinary" urban citizens in scenes of a detached, almost serene realism.  In the work of the Novecento Italiano, woman tended to be represented as what the fascist state would have liked their citizens to be.

The comparisons with “Nazi art” are sometimes made but because art was a topic of little interest to Mussolini (who preferred the Autostrada (the world’s first motorways (freeways)), tanks and battleships, never in Italy as there anything so so dictatorial and the funding was spread to ensure the widest support for the regime.  That was a contrast with Hitler who to his dying day never ceased to think of himself as “an artist” and assumed the role of the Third Reich’s chief critic and censor, meaning there was a recognizably political theme to the art of the period.  Interestingly, while artists in the Reich increasingly “worked towards the Führer” and dutifully churned out what they knew would be “regime approved”, more than one memoir from his contemporaries recorded how little interest he took in them, responding with delight only to stuff like landscapes or portraiture he thought works of genuine beauty.  Really, there were probably fewer than a couple of dozen “Nazi” paintings or sculptures; it was just that hundreds of artists produced them thousands of times.

Dafne (1934), oil on plywood by Felice Casorati.  Casorati’s work often featured mythological subjects but, unlike many, he surrounded them with simplified forms, drawing attention to his sense of focus, precise structure and clarity.  Here, Daphne (in Greek mythology transformed into a laurel, the tree sacred to Apollo), is rendered in a figurative, geometric style with flat, muted colors, the work, while obviously modernist, owing a debt to classical traditions, Mannerism and hinting even at the Italian Primitives.

So the movement was neither monolithic nor “political” in the way things were done in the Third Reich and certainly nothing like the even more severe regime which prevailed in comrade Stalin’s (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) Soviet Union but it was supported to some extent by the Fascist state and while that association proved helpful, even before the tide of World War II (1939-1945) turned against Italy, as early as the mid-1930s the historic moment of Novecento Italiano had already passed as the world responded to the latest “shock of the new”, the language of surrealism and other adventures in abstraction capturing the imagination.  When in 1943 Italian Fascism “burst like a bubble” and Mussolini was removed from power, the movement was dissolved.  However, artistically, the legacy was real in that it did foster a dialogue between modernism and tradition in European art and ensured the Italian state during the inter-war years became involved in the commissioning of monumental and representational public art, beginning a tradition which continues to this day.

Réclame

Réclame (pronounced rey-klahm)

(1) In historic French use, publicity; self-advertisement; notoriety (in a positive sense).

(2) In historic French use, a talent for generating interest & getting attention; a gift for dramatization; a hunger for publicity.

(3) In modern English use (as a critique of social media content, celebrity culture etc), of public attention or acclaim achieved to an extent disproportionate to value or achievement.

1865–1870: From the French réclame, from the early fourteenth century reclaimen (call back a hawk to the glove) from the Old French reclamer (to call upon, invoke; claim; seduce; to call back a hawk) (which in the twelfth century entered Modern French as “réclamer”) and directly from the Latin reclāmāre.  Because the hawks used in falconry were, by definition, tame, “reclaim” by the mid fifteenth century was used to mean “make tame” (ie “reclaimed from the wild state of nature”), the use taken from the late fourteenth century sense of “subdue, reduce to obedience, make amenable to control”.  In Middle English, many “re-” words had conveyed no sense of “return or reciprocation”, the meaning “revoke” (an award, grant, gift etc) dating from the late fifteenth century while the sense of “recall (someone) from an erring course and direct them to a proper state” had emerged decades earlier.  The sense of “get back by effort” is thought by etymologists to have evolved under the influence of claim and the specific meaning “bring waste land into useful condition fit for cultivation” seems first to have been used in the context of agriculture in 1764, the idea again being again on the probably on notion of “reclaimed from the wild state of nature” rather than a suggestion of a return to a previous state of cultivation (although there were instances of both).  Land reclamation (the extending of the area available for urban settlement has been practiced for thousands of years but it has been practiced at scale only since the mid-nineteenth century when large-capacity mechanical devices became available.  Réclame is a noun; the noun plural is réclames.

In French, réclame was a noun & verb and by the mid nineteenth century it was used usually to mean “a small advertisement” of the type which typically appeared in newspapers or other publications (as opposed to billboards or banners or buildings).  Depending in context, the forms avertissement & publicité (often clipped to pub) could be used as synonyms.  The word spread in Europe and other colonial empires including the Mauritian Creole reklam, the Danish reklame, the Dutch reclame, the Indonesian reklame, the German Reklame, the Hungarian reklám, the Polish reklama, the Romanian reclamă, the Italian reclame, the Norwegian Bokmål reklame, the Norwegian Nynorsk reklame, the Spanish reclame, the Swedish reklam, the Finnish reklaami, the Turkish reklam, the Estonian reklaam and the Russian рекла́ма rekláma.  The noun in French has a special use in the sport of falconry (in the sense of “reclaim”) where it was a call and sign for the bird of prey to return to the gauntlet of the falconer.  The use in falconry was inherited from the Old French verb reclamer (to implore; to shout to), from the Latin reclāmāre, from reclāmō, the construct being re- (used as an intensifier in the sense of “opposite, against” + clāmō (cry out, shout), from the primitive Indo-European root kele (to shout).  In the Old French, as a transitive verb, reclamer could mean (1) to protest, (2) to object or (3) to claim, reclaim.

In English, for centuries, words have come and gone, some going extinct and some later revived, sometimes enduringly.  The twenty-first century rediscovery of réclame though is unusual in that when reclame previously was used in English it was as an alternation spelling or reclaim whereas the newly re-purposed réclaim is a borrowing from late nineteenth century Modern French.  That which is embarked upon in the quest for fame or notoriety can be described neutrally (commercial, promotion, advertizing, content provision etc) or negatively (hoopla, hype, noise, propaganda etc) and réclame recently was added the latter class.  It is used to describe those who by virtue of their activities on social media, in “reality” content generally or as part of celebrity culture have achieved a level of acclaim or public attention wildly disproportionate to any substantive achievement or contribution.

L'Homme réclame (Publicity man, 1926), collage on cardboard by Aleksandra Ekster (1882-1949), collection of the National Gallery of Australia (Accession Number: 77.11.1 (1977)).

Aleksandra Ekster (who in the West is often exhibited as Alexandra Exter)) was a Russian artist whose work covered a remarkable range of twentieth century movements.  Beginning as a noted figure in the pre-revolutionary Russian avant-garde before moving to the West, her output included Cubism, Futurism and even some in the vein of Vorticism although it was Art Deco which owes her the greatest debt and her influence there was neglected by historians until recently.  Had she been a man, she might earlier have been better appreciated.

Réclame as now used is thus a word of cultural snobbery and one which encapsulates a certain hierarchical model of what’s a respectable profile and what’s not: being “Instagram famous” definitely is not.  Curiously, it seems the word is deployed as a weapon by those with definite opinions on the difference between “high quality” pop culture and that in the field less deserving rather than by those of the type who distinguish only between the “high or experimental” and “everything else”.  As a critique, réclame is a new way of describing those “famous for being famous”, a characteristic identifiable in the West for well over a century but now a genuine mass-phenomenon because the distribution channels have become so extensive and wide.  What is derided as the community of réclame is just a business model in action, content providers providing supply to fulfill demand.  Of course, the model has operated to increase both the audience and the volume of aggregate demand, something which seems further to depress the critics but culturally, probably little has changed in the internet age; it’s just that things are on a bigger scale and more obvious.

Paris Hilton (b 1981, left) & Lindsay Lohan (b 1986, right), Los Angeles, 2003.

Also helpful in many ways is Ms Hilton’s recently published book Paris: The Memoir (Harper Collins London, (2023), pp 336, ISBN 0-0632-2462-3) which, while genuinely a memoir is interesting too for the deconstruction of the subject the author provided in a number of promotional interviews.  There have over the years been many humorless critics who have derided Ms Hilton for being “famous for being famous” but the book makes clear being the construct that is Paris Hilton is a full-time job, one which demands study and an understanding of the supply & demand curves of shifting markets; a personality cult needs to be managed.  She displays also a sophisticated understanding of the point made by comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) who once explained the abstraction of a personality cult by pointing to his huge portrait and saying “…you see, even I am not Stalin, THAT is Stalin!”  Ms Hilton may never have done anything as useful as find a cure for cancer or invent a new nuclear weapon but she’s a cog in the machine which keeps the economy ticking over and collectively, the activities of the réclame set continue to generate a not insignificant chunk of the revenue which funds some of the advances in technology which have been so transformative.  Their contribution need not be seen as culturally inferior to that of the literary festival circuit, it's just different.

Vorticism

Vorticism (pronounced vawr-tuh-siz-uhm)

A short-lived movement in the British avant-garde, nurtured by Wyndham Lewis, which climaxed in a London exhibition in 1915 before being absorbed.

1914: The construct was vortic + -ism.  The Latin vortic was the stem of vortex, (genitive vorticis), an archaic from of vertex (an eddy of water, wind, or flame; whirlpool; whirlwind whirl, top, crown, peak, summit), from vertō (to turn around, turn about) from vertere (to turn), from the primitive Indo-European wer (to turn; bend).  The –ism suffix is from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Vorticism is a noun, vorticist is a noun & adjective and vorticistic is an adjective; the noun plural was vorticists,  The forms vorticistically & vortical seem never to have come into use.

Hieratic head of Ezra Pound (1914), by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915).

The name Vorticism was said to have been coined in 1914 by the poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972) years before fascism and madness possessed his soul.  Pound had already used the word "vortex" to describe the effect modernist poetry was having on intellectual thought in Europe and he used the word not in the somewhat vague sense it often assumed when used figuratively to suggest swirling turbulence but rather as a mathematician or meteorologist might: an energy which gathers from the surrounding chaos what’s around, imparts to it a geometrical form which, intensifying as it goes, arrives at a single point.  Pound’s coining of the name is generally accepted but some historians claim the name was chosen by the Italian futurist Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) who claimed all creative art could emanate only from a vortex of emotions.

Blast Magazine, July 1915.

Vorticism flourished only briefly between 1912-1915 as an overly aggressive reaction to what was held to be an excessive attachment to and veneration for delicacy and beauty in art and literature, preferring to celebrate the tools of modernity, the violence and energy of machines.  In painting and sculpture the angles were sharp and the lines bold, colors displayed in juxtaposition to emphasize the starkness of their difference and there was a reverence for geometric form and repetition.  The movement in 1914 published its own magazine: Blast: the Review of the Great English Vortex which was more manifesto than critique, a London-based attempt to gather together the artists and writers of the avant‐garde in one coherent movement.  It wanted the shock of the new.

Composition (1913), by Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957).

The idea was an art which reflected the strains of the vortices of a modern life in what was increasingly a machine age.  Thus, although it remains a footnote in the history of modern art, the label Vorticism refers to a political and sociological point rather than a distinct style such as contemporaries like Cubism or Futurism.  The timing was of course unfortunate and the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) robbed Vorticism of much of its initial energy; the exhibition eventually staged in London’s Doré Gallery in 1915 remained a one-off and, like much of the pre-1914 world, Vorticism didn’t survive the World War.

Dance Hall Scene (circa 1913), by CRW Nevinson (1889-1946).

Being unappreciated at the time, most of the paintings of the vorticists were lost but retrospectives have been assembled from what remains and the still extant photographic record and there’s now a better understanding of the legacy and the influence on art deco, dada, surrealism, pop art, indeed, just about any abstract form.  Graphic art too benefited from the techniques, the sense of line and color identifiable in agitprop, twentieth century advertising and, most practically, the “dazzle” camouflage used by admiralties in both world wars as a form of disguise for ships.

Juan Garrido, a graphic designer based in Caracas, Venezuela, created the display typeface Vorticism in 2013.  Reflecting the cultural and linguistic influences, while there are a number of typefaces called futurism (or some variation) and some based on the word "vortex", Mr Garrido's "Vorticism" is uniquely named.

Lindsay Lohan in the Vorticism typeface.

Ezra Pound (1919), by Wyndham Lewis.

Even in 1912, Vorticism’s use of bold, abstract, and geometric forms (often depicting movement and mechanical apparatuses) wasn’t new but the movement had an energy which attracted those wanting to create imagery which marked a dramatic break from the representational forms which then were still dominant early in the ear which would come to be known as the dawn of modernity.  In that sense, Vorticism is understood as one of a number of movements embracing a new aesthetic reflecting the dynamism and energy of the modern world.  That as a distinct entity Vorticism didn’t endure was in a way an indication of success rather than failure because its motifs and techniques were co-opted to serve as foundational aspects of many movements in modern art, the abstract and geometric forms underpinning Futurism and Constructivism as well as becoming a staple of commercial graphic art and advertising.  Perhaps the most obvious influence was the artistic legitimization of the integration of text into images, a practice borrowed from commerce and a notable signature of Dada and Surrealism.  The use of text as a visual element challenged traditional boundaries between different art forms, a tension which enabled Pop art to create was in some ways a novel ecosystem.  However, those same motifs have been used also as something illustrative of the destructive tendencies of the speed and spread of mechanical and industrial reality which the vorticists championed and Precisionism & Bauhaus celebrated, at least in a sanitized and idealized way which hid the essential ugliness below.

Formalism

Formalism (pronounced fawr-muh-liz-uhm)

(1) Strict adherence to, or observance of, prescribed or traditional forms, as in music, poetry and art.

(2) In religion, a strong attachment to external forms and observances.

(3) In philosophy (ethics), a doctrine that acts are in themselves right or wrong regardless of consequences.

(4) In literary theory, an approach to the interpretation of texts focused on the structure rather than the content, context of its origin or reception.

(5) In mathematics (formal logic), a doctrine that mathematics, including the logic used in proofs, can be based on the formal manipulation of symbols without regard to their meaning (the mathematical or logical structure of a scientific argument as distinguished from its subject matter; the theory a statement has no meaning but that its symbols, regarded as physical objects, exhibit a structure that has useful applications).

(6) A scrupulous or excessive adherence to outward form at the expense of inner reality or content.

(7) In Marxist criticism, scrupulous or excessive adherence to artistic technique at the expense of social values etc; also a view adopted by some non-Marxist critical theorists).

(8) In performance art, theatre a deliberately stylized mode of production.

(9) In both structural engineering and computer science, the notation, and its structure, in (or by) which information is expressed.

1830–1840: The construct was formal + -ism.  Formal was from the Middle English formel, from the Old French formel, from the Latin formalis, from forma (form) of unknown origin but possibly from the Etruscan morma, from the Ancient Greek μορφή (morphḗ) (shape, fashion, appearance, outward form, contour, figure), dissimilated as formīca and possibly formīdō.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek –ismos & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, often through the Latin –ismus & -isma, though sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Greek.  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form action nouns from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Although actual use of the word formalism dates only from its adoption (1830s) in critical discourse, disputes related to the matter can be found in texts since antiquity in fields as diverse as agriculture, literature and theology.  Formalism is a noun, formalist is a noun & adjective, formalistic is an adjective and formalistically is an adverb; the noun plural is formalists.

The Russian Formalists

In literary theory, the term “form” is used of the “structure & shape” and the manner in which it is constructed, as opposed to the substance (theme, topic and such).  Form and substance are so intertwined as to be inseparable (although that hasn’t stopped some authors of “experimental” works trying to prove otherwise) but long before the post-modernists made deconstruction a thing, the two strands separately had been assessed and analysed.  The other way the word is used is as a synonym of genre (novella, essay, play et al).  Formalism was different; it was a literary theory with origins in the early Soviet Union of the 1920s, the practitioners and followers labelled “formalists”, a pejorative term which implied limitations.  In the way things then were done by the Bolshevists, Formalism as an identifiable entity faded quickly and fell into desuetude by late in the decade; movements which of which comrade Stalin (1878-1953; Soviet leader 1924-1953) didn’t approve had bleak prospects.

Influenced by the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915) and The Society for the Study of Poetic Language (1916), Formalism was in 1917 founded by literary theorist, & writer Viktor Shklovsky (1893-1984) and author & political satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884–1937) with the then novel assertion art primarily was a matter of technique, the style not merely a method of execution but also the object of the art.  In an example of the way political forces in the post-tsarist state evolved, although Formalism began in the year of revolutions as something with the obvious socialist theme of the artist as a “worker” or “artisan”, its credos came under suspicion in the Kremlin because it was thought to have been captured by authors, artists & composers who found intoxicating the idea their work could be an exercise in pure technique, sometimes of such intricacy that it was only their colleagues who could understand, the public left unmoved or baffled.

Lindsay Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December, 2011.

Reflecting what was going on in intellectual circles in Moscow, the Formalists were interested in applying to literary criticism what had come to be understood as the “scientific method” and were dismissive of the role of ideas, emotions, & actions (and “reality” in general) in defining what was specifically “literary” about a text.  What this meant was any distinction between form and content ceased to be relevant and the writer became a kind of cipher, re-working available literary devices and conventions, some practitioners even holding there were no poets or other literary figures, just the output, encapsulated in Shklovsky’s pithy definition of literature as “the sum total of all the stylistic devices employed in it”.  Shklovsky was the most influential figure in the early days of the movement and he was influenced by the Futurists who had been drawn to the speed and mechanical creations of modernity, something manifested in his concept of ostranenie (making strange, later to be called defamiliarization) which was an attempt to divorce art from conceptions such as beauty, elegance or other conventional benchmarks.

Despite the implications of that, Formalism was dynamic (and in the way movements tend to be) schismatic, a theory of narrative also developed which made a distinction between plot and story, the technique adopted reflecting the approach of the Futurists’ understanding of machinery.  Syuzbet (the plot) referred to the order & manner in which events were presented in the narrative while fabuh (the story) tracked the chronological sequence of events.  Another of the Formalists infused with the tenets of Futurism was the literary critic & theorist Boris Tomashevsky (1890–1957) who used the term modf to denote the smallest unit of plot and distinguished between “bound” & “free” motifs, the former one which the story absolutely requires while the latter was inessential; it was a model as familiar to engineers then as it would be to software developers now.  Formalists of course regarded content as subordinate to the formal devices used in its construction and this dependence on external “non-literary assumptions” was called “motivation”, and a text’s motivation was defined by Shklovsky as the extent to which it was dependent on non-literary assumptions, an example of a work totally without motivation cited as The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (in nine volumes, 1759–1767) by the Anglo-Irish novelist & Anglican cleric Laurence Sterne (1713–1768).  Whether or not one concurs with Shklovsky’s absolutism, in writing Tristram Shandy, Sterne used so many devices and techniques that had the term “mash-up” then existed, it would have been applied and it can be argued it was with that work the distinction between the techniques of plagiarism and sampling can best be identified.  Formalism’s life was brief but the churning of theory was constant and later the concept of “device” gave way to the notion of “function”, depending on the purpose or mode or genre; it was no longer the device per se which was defamiliarizing but its function in the work.  While comrade Stalin was content he’d killed off Formalism, its elements and deconstructive tools took root in the academic reaches of Western literary criticism and if not a fork, post-modernism is at least a cul-de-sac.

Comrade Stalin, comrade Shostakovich and Formalism

Comrade Shostakovich at his dacha.

Comrade Stalin (1878–1953; leader of the USSR, 1924-1953) didn’t invent the regime’s criticism of formalism but certainly made it famous after comrade Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) was denounced in the Soviet newspaper Pravda (Truth) in January 1936, after the Moscow performance of his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District.  Stalin didn’t like music he couldn’t whistle and the complex strains of Shostakovich’s opera, sometimes meandering, sometimes strident, certainly didn’t permit that; he labeled the composition формализм (formalism), "chaos instead of music", a self-indulgence of technique by a composer interested only in the admiration of other composers, an audience of no value in the school of Soviet realism.  It’s believed the Pravda article may have been written by Stalin himself and he used the word "formalism" in the sense it was understood English; formality being the observance of forms, formalism the disposition to make adherence to them an obsession.  To Stalin, the formal rules of composition were but a means to an end and the only legitimate end was socialist realism; anything other than that "an attack on the people".  Lest it be thought the defeat of fascism in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945) might have mellowed his views in such matters, Stalin at the 1948 party congress made sure the point was hammered home in the Communist Party's brutish way:  

"Comrades, while realistic music is written by the People's composers, formalistic music is written by composers who are against the People.  Comrades, one must ask why it is that realistic music is always written by composers of the People? The People's composers write realistic music simply due to the fact that being by nature realists right to their very core, they simply cannot help writing music that is realistic, while those anti-People composers, being by nature unrepentant formalists, cannot help... cannot help... cannot help writing music that is formalistic."

Comrade Stalin signing death warrants.

In the Soviet Union, producing or performing stuff hated by Stalin was not good career move.  Shostakovich completed his Fourth Symphony in C minor, Opus 43, in May 1936 and, even after the attack in Pravda, planned to stage its premiere in Leningrad December but found the orchestra unwilling to risk incurring the Kremlin’s wrath and almost as soon as rehearsals began, the orchestra's management cancelled the performance, issuing a statement saying comrade Shostakovich had withdrawn the work.  Actual responsibility for the decision remains unclear but it was certainly in accord with the views of the Kremlin and not until 1961, almost a decade on from Stalin’s death, was it performed.

All is forgiven: Soviet postage stamp issued in 1981 to honor 75^th anniversary of Dmitri Shostakovich’s birth.

Shostakovich became a realist, his response to denunciation the melodic Fifth Symphony in D minor, Opus 47.  Premiered in November 1937 in Leningrad, it was a resounding triumph, attracting a standing ovation that lasted more than thirty minutes.  The following January, just before its first performance in Moscow, an article, under the composer’s name, appeared in the local newspaper Vechernyaya Moskva in which he described the Fifth Symphony as "…a Soviet artist's creative response to justified criticism."  Whether Shostakovich actually wrote the piece isn’t known but there’s never been any doubt it’d never have been published without Stalin’s approval and the success of the Fifth Symphony re-personed Shostakovich.  Whatever it lacked in glasnost (openness), it made up for in perestroika (restructuring) and the party engineered his rehabilitation as carefully as it had his fall a couple of years earlier, anxious to show how those bowing its demands could be rewarded as easily and fully as dissidents could be punished.

Futurism

Futurism (pronounced fyoo-chuh-riz-uhm)

(1) A movement in avant-garde art, developed originally by a group of Italian artists in 1909 in which forms (derived often from the then novel cubism) were used to represent rapid movement and dynamic motion  (sometimes with initial capital letter)

(2) A style of art, literature, music, etc and a theory of art and life in which violence, power, speed, mechanization or machines, and hostility to the past or to traditional forms of expression were advocated or portrayed (often with initial capital letter).

(3) As futurology, a quasi-discipline practiced by (often self-described) futurologists who attempt to predict future events, movements, technologies etc.

(4) In the theology of Judaism, the Jewish expectation of the messiah in the future rather than recognizing him in the presence of Christ.

(5) In the theology of Christianity, eschatological interpretations associating some Biblical prophecies with future events yet to be fulfilled, including the Second Coming.

1909: From the Italian futurism, the construct being futur(e) + -ism.  Future was from the Middle English future & futur, from the Old French futur, (that which is to come; the time ahead) from the Latin futūrus, (going to be; yet to be) which (as a noun) was the irregular suppletive future participle of esse (to be) from the primitive Indo-European bheue (to be, exist; grow).  It was cognate with the Old English bēo (I become, I will be, I am) and displaced the native Old English tōweard and the Middle English afterhede (future (literally “afterhood”) in the given sense.  The technical use in grammar (of tense) dates from the 1520s.  The –ism suffix was from the Ancient Greek ισμός (ismós) & -isma noun suffixes, often directly, sometimes through the Latin –ismus & isma (from where English picked up ize) and sometimes through the French –isme or the German –ismus, all ultimately from the Ancient Greek (where it tended more specifically to express a finished act or thing done).  It appeared in loanwords from Greek, where it was used to form abstract nouns of action, state, condition or doctrine from verbs and on this model, was used as a productive suffix in the formation of nouns denoting action or practice, state or condition, principles, doctrines, a usage or characteristic, devotion or adherence (criticism; barbarism; Darwinism; despotism; plagiarism; realism; witticism etc).  Futurism, futurology, & futurology are nouns, futurist is a noun & adjective and futuristic is an adjective; the noun plural is futurisms.

Lindsay Lohan in Maison Martin Margiela (b 1957) Futuristic Eyewear.

As a descriptor of the movement in art and literature, futurism (as the Italian futurism) was adopted in 1909 by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) and the first reference to futurist (a practitioner in the field of futurism) dates from 1911 although the word had been used as early as 1842 in Protestant theology in the sense of “one who holds that nearly the whole of the Book of Revelations refers principally to events yet to come”.  The secular world did being to use futurist to describe "one who has (positive) feelings about the future" in 1846 but for the remainder of the century, use was apparently rare.  The (now probably extinct) noun futurity was from the early seventeenth century.  The noun futurology was introduced by Aldous Huxley (1894-1963) in his book Science, Liberty and Peace (1946) and has (for better or worse), created a minor industry of (often self-described) futurologists.  Futures, a financial instrument used in the trade of currencies and commodities appeared first in 1880; they allow (1) speculators to be on price movements and (2) producers and sellers to hedge against price movements.  In theology, the adjective futuristic came into use in 1856 with reference to prophecy but use soon faded.  In concert with futurism, by 1915 it referred in art to “avant-garde; ultra-modern” while by 1921 it was separated from the exclusive attachment to art and meant also “pertaining to the future, predicted to be in the future”, the use in this context spiking rapidly after World War II (1939-1945) when technological developments in fields such as ballistics, jet aircraft, space exploration, electronics, nuclear physics etc stimulated interest in such progress.

The Arrival (1913), oil on canvas by Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson (1889-1946), Tate Gallery.

Given what would unfold over during the twentieth century, it’s probably difficult to appreciate quite how optimistic was the Western world in the years leading up to the World War I.  Such had been the rapidity of the discovery of novelties and of progress in so many fields that expectations of the future were high and, beginning in Italy, futurism was a movement devoted to displaying the energy, dynamism and power of machines and the vitality and change they were bringing to society.  It’s also often forgotten that when the first futurist exhibition was staged in Paris in 1912, the critical establishment was unimpressed, the elaborate imagery with its opulence of color offending their sense of refinement, now so attuned to the sparseness of the cubists.

The Hospital Train (1915), oil on canvas by Gino Severini (1883-1966), Stedelijk Museum.

Futurism had debuted with some impact, the Paris newspaper Le Figaro in 1909 publishing the manifesto by Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Marinetti which dismissed all that was old and celebrated change, originality, and innovation in culture and society, something which should be depicted in art, music and literature. Marinetti exalted in the speed, power of new technologies which were disrupting society, automobiles, aeroplanes and other clattering machines.  Whether he found beauty in the machines or the violence and conflict they delivered was something he left his readers to decide and there were those seduced by both but his stated goal was the repudiation of traditional values and the destruction of cultural institutions such as museums and libraries.  Whether this was intended as a revolutionary roadmap or just a provocation to inspire anger and controversy is something historians have debated.  Assessment of Marinetti as a poet has always been colored by his reputation as a proto-fascist and some treat as "fake mysticism" his claim his "visions" of the future and the path to follow to get there came to him in the moment of a violent car crash. 

Uomo Nuovo (New Man, 1918), drawing by Mario Sironi (1885-1961).

As a technique, the futurist artists borrowed much from the cubists, deploying the same fragmented and intersecting plane surfaces and outlines to render a number of simultaneous, overlaid views of an object but whereas the cubists tended to still life, portraiture and other, usually static, studies of the human form, the futurists worshiped movement, their overlays a device to depict rhythmic spatial repetitions of an object’s outlines during movement.  People did appear in futurist works but usually they weren’t the focal point, instead appearing only in relation to some speeding or noisy machine.  Some of the most prolific of the futurist artists were killed in World War I and as a political movement it didn’t survive the conflict, the industrial war dulling the public appetite for the cult of the machine.  However, the influence of the compositional techniques continued in the 1920s and contributed to art deco which, in more elegant form, would integrate the new world of machines and mass-production into motifs still in use today.

Jockey Club Innovation Tower, Hong Kong (2013) by Zaha Hadid (1950-2016).

If the characteristics of futurism in art were identifiable (though not always admired), in architecture, it can be hard to tell where modernism ends and futurism begins.  Aesthetics aside, the core purpose of modernism was of course its utilitarian value and that did tend to dictate the austerity, straight lines and crisp geometry that evolved into mid-century minimalism so modernism, in its pure form, should probably be thought of as a style without an ulterior motive.  Futurist architecture however carried the agenda which in its earliest days borrowed from the futurist artists in that it was an assault on the past but later moved on and in the twenty-first century, the futurist architects seem now to be interested above all in the possibilities offered by advances in structural engineering, functionality sacrificed if need be just to demonstrate that something new can be done.  That's doubtless of great interest at awards dinners where architects give prizes to each other for this and that but has produced an international consensus that it's better to draw something new than something elegant.  The critique is that while modernism once offered “less is more”, with neo-futurist architecture it's now “less is bore”.  Art deco and mid-century modernism have aged well and it will be interesting to see how history judges the neo-futurists.