Express Train

Unlike the rest of his fellow Italian Futurists, Gino Severini spent the First World War living just outside Paris rather than in Italy itself. Born April 7, 1883, Severini would watch the trains pass by carrying people, including soldiers, and supplies, including munitions. The increases speed of train travel epitomized the power of technology for Severini and the Futurists—a power on full, disastrous display in the war itself. J. M. W. Turner’s 1844 painting Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway, one of the first examinations of rail power’s thrilling and chilling implications, seems almost quaint beside Severini’s disjointed, Cubist-influenced scene, Suburban Train Arriving in Paris (above, from 1915). We have no idea from the painting or the title what the train holds, but the year itself makes it likely that soldiers, perhaps wounded or dying, were aboard, returning from the front in search of medical care. In the background, the word “Kneipp” rises recognizably. “Kneipp” was a popular malted beverage of the time. It’s advertising lends an ironic note of normalcy to the abnormality of the times, as if a Coca Cola sign hung on a graveyard’s entrance.

Later that same year of 1915, Severini painted another train scene, titled Red Cross Train Passing a Village (above). Severini makes the context clearer by including the Red Cross in the title and adding the recognizable Red Cross symbol to the side of the train. We now know exactly who is riding through the countryside and the urgency behind the train’s speed. Whereas the train in Suburban Train Arriving in Paris is almost inconspicuous thanks to the Cubist styling integrating it with the background, the train in Red Cross Train Passing a Village appears clearly against a jumbled landscape. The Red Cross train actually seems to slice through the Futurist style of the rest of the picture, as if Severini were trying to hint that the reality aboard the train trumped any visual games Futurism and its credo could produce. Guillaume Apollinaire mocked the Futurists for their disconnect with the main currents of art and society. Severini eventually agreed with Apollinaire, but only after the war. Red Cross Train Passing a Village may enact in paint the conflict in Severini’s mind as he struggled to hold onto his Futurist faith despite the evidence mounting against it.

Severini’s greatest train painting of this year 1915 remains Armored Train (above). He based it on a photo showing French soldiers firing back at German soldiers in trenches from the safety of an armored train. In 1915, such attacks against trenches remained possible, but eventually the war turned into a slow grind of attrition with entrenched armies locked in a seemingly endless stalemate. Severini makes the most of the lines of the rifles and cannon pointing outward. Lines of energy mark the bullets and bombs sped perpendicularly to the movement of the train itself. The soldiers enjoy the false sense of security of the armored car, much as Severini enjoyed the false sense of satisfaction in technological triumphs throughout the early war years. At this point, Severini might have identified with the isolation of the soldiers on the armored car as they are entrapped by the womb of steel plating against certain death outside. Severini didn’t face death himself in France, but he was surrounded by it, with new doses of reality arriving daily on the trains that passed him by.

Those Who Stay

A whole generation of Europe literally died on the battlefields of World War I. The Italian Futurists, more than any other art movement of the time, lost many of their brightest stars to that conflict, perhaps none brighter than Umberto Boccioni. Born October 19, 1882, Boccioni is best known for his 1913 sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which Italy chose to place on the reverse side of the Italian 20 cent euro coin, testifying to Boccioni’s enduring place in Italian art despite the shortness of his career and life. I’ve always found Boccioni to be as fascinating a painter as a sculpture, especially in such mysterious works as States of Mind III: Those Who Stay (above, from 1911). Borrowing heavily from the conventions of Cubism, which Boccioni learned firsthand from Pablo Picasso when the two artists met in Paris that same year of 1911, Boccioni explodes the bodies of the figures and tries to paint them from every angle at once. He complicates the issue by immersing the figures in a murky, blue-grey fog. Are these figures shuffling off to the afterlife or living beings caught up in the tempest of worldly events beyond their control? In retrospect, States of Mind III: Those Who Stay seems especially haunting in light of Boccioni’s tragic death in 1916 while training for combat, as if the artist saw himself as headed into a murky, indeterminate future.

Boccioni and fellow Futurist Gino Severini studied under Giacomo Balla just after the turn of the century. Years later, Italian writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti united these artists under the banner of his Futurist Manifesto to worship at the altar of technology and relentless, mechanized speed. Works such as Elasticity (above, 1912) illustrate how Boccioni saw the twentieth century as a huge explosion of energy and expansion. The duty of the modern artist was to celebrate that technology and give it artistic form. Just as the religious artists of the past painted saints and saviors to teach the unlettered masses, Boccioni and his fellow Futurists would paint and sculpt the works that would teach the masses of modern Europe to bow down before the gods of industry and technology. The color and energy found in Boccioni’s works are simply too infectious for me to resist, so it’s easy to judge their contemporary appeal. Faith in the future, when the past lay scattered behind them beneath a sea of disappointment, seemed the logical next step in a world that had yet to taste mechanized, large-scale destruction.

It’s tempting to condemn the Futurists for helping spur on the Great War, just as it’s tempting to say that they got what they deserved in their own destruction. (Marinetti, ironically, survived almost to the end of World War II, immune to the war-faring fever he may have contributed to.) Pushing all the politics aside, however, you cannot deny the creativity behind such a work as Boccioni’s The Street Enters the House (above, 1911). Equal parts Cubism, Futurism, and even Surrealism, The Street Enters the House depicts a believable home invasion in which the outside becomes the inside and all boundaries are erased. What kind of artist a post-war Boccioni would have been is a great guessing game to play, but ultimately unanswerable. Boccioni is much more than just Futurism or Cubism, so forcing an older Boccioni to continue along a similar path denies the expansiveness of his life and art. Boccioni couldn’t stay long enough to demonstrate everything he could do, but he remained long enough to give us enough to remember him by.