Theater & Art

CHAMPAGNE LADY

(13 February 1989)

 

[In early July, I watched a cable broadcast of Mae West’s I’m No Angel (1933).  I thought of a play based on West’s career that I’d reviewed years ago—25, it turns out—but didn’t go beyond that brief thought.  Then West, who wrote the script for the film (which co-starred a very young Cary Grant, 29, who also starred in West’s previous movie of the same year, She Done Him Wrong), delivered one of her iconic lines: “When I'm good, I'm very good.  But, when I'm bad . . . I’m better.”  That’s a perfect paraprosdokian, a figure of speech on which I blogged on 12 July 2013, so I posted a short “Comment” on that ROT page with the quotation.  (There was already a line—apparently actually a paraphrase—from another Mae West movie in the posted list of examples: “Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before,” from 1936’s Klondike Annie.) Then I remembered my old review of the Mae West musical, Champagne Lady, and I thought it would be fun to look back at an oldie that predates not only ROT, but even the play reports I started sending some out-of-town friends in 2003.   

 

[This review appeared as half of “Drinking and Driving” in the New York Native on 13 February 1989.  (The second half of the column covered the French Canadian play The Cezanne Syndrome by Normand Canac-Marquis at Soho Rep.)  I’ve revised the review and inserted some information in the version below that didn’t appear in 1989.

 

[Champagne Lady doesn’t seem to have left much of a footprint: there’s nary a mention of it (or the cabaret space where it ran, for that matter) on the ’Net and even the “Paper of Record,” the New York Times didn’t run a review.  (To be fair, though the Times now covers Off-Broadway pretty extensively, Champagne Lady was more Off-Off than Off.)  The venue was the cabaret room, dubbed the Trocadero Theatre Club, of a Greenwich Village restaurant.  The play’s slugged as “A Bawdy, Intoxicating Musical Comedy Of The Prohibition Era” below the title in the program, and the setting is described as “New York City In The 20’s With Prohibition In Full Swing.”  Directed by Jon-Michael Delon, Champagne Lady was written by Nelson Jewell and Richard Atkins and produced by Jonel, Ltd. (presumably for Jon-Michael + Nelson), at The Trocadero Restaurant, at 368 Bleecker Street, on the corner of Charles.  (There were no set, costume, or lighting credits in the program.) The one-act non-Equity showcase, comprised of eight scenes and 10 musical numbers, opened on 5 January 1989 and ran Thursdays, Fridays, and Sundays until 26 February.]

 

In a low-ceilinged room below the Trocadero Restaurant, on a tiny, nearly bare stage, Champagne Lady relates the story of Ruby Lil, who’s “never fully dressed without a man,” and the men who come up and see her sometimes.  Taking its plot from the films of Mae West, it’s the tale of a bad girl who dupes the authorities while outfoxing the men who think they’ll take advantage of her.  This little musical, set in the Prohibition ’20s, is performed in the restaurant’s cabaret, creating the small irony of drinking while watching a play which notes the illegality of that practice. 

 

Irony’s in short supply in Champagne Lady.  Ruby Lil (Tracey Morse) is a straight impression of West, her name taken from Diamond Lil, the title character in West’s own eponymous 1928 Broadway play, the basis for her 1933 film She Done Him Wrong.  The plot elements that librettist Nelson Jewell’s borrowed from West’s films include the jilting of an unwelcome lover (John Combs), who then vindictively hales Ruby Lil into court for bootlegging.  She appears before the judge (Paul Campana), a lecherous drunk who places Ruby Lil under his own protection rather than jail her.  Despite Campana’s weak impersonation and intrusive New York intonations, Judge “Willy” Drakenfeld is supposed to be W. C. Fields (born, famously, near Philadelphia—not anywhere near New York City).  Their relationship is right out of My Little Chickadee (1940), and I waited in vain to hear him ask Ruby Lil if she were trying to show contempt for the court so she could reply, “Ooh, I’m tryin’ very hard not to, Judge.” 

 

The addition of a gigolo (John Patti) tangles the plot, but Ruby Lil unravels it assisted by her black maid, Beulah (Mari Briggs), a character and relationship taken directly from I’m No Angel.  (In that movie, West has the line, “Beulah, peel me a grape.”  In Champagne Lady, Ruby Lil orders some grapes, and Beulah responds, “Shall I peels ’em for ya?”)

 

All this is mildly amusing, even occasionally quite funny.  Morse does a creditable Mae West, and Briggs, despite the stereotyped role, is very comical as squeaky-voiced Beulah (calling to mind Butterfly McQueen’s Prissy in 1939’s Gone with the Wind, whom Briggs may have been channeling).  Morse has a good belt, and, although Patti’s baritone has little personality, he’s the best singer in the cast.  Richard Atkins’s music, though not particularly apt for either the Roaring ’20s or Mae West, is pleasant and Atkins and Jewell’s lyrics are often clever. 

 

The play, however, is neither a spoof in the vein of, say, A Night in the Ukraine (1980-81) nor a clever recreation like Little Mary Sunshine (Off-Broadway, 1959-62), but a vehicle seemingly written for the real West and Fields.  There are no comments on the absurdity of the characters or the blatant racism and sexism.  The producers, whose press release compares Champagne Lady to the Off-Broadway hits A Chorus Line (1975 at the Public Theater), Hair (1967 OB) and The Fantasticks (1960-2002), have hopes for a full two-act version that don’t seem justified.  It’s not campy enough to be a send-up, nor reverent enough to be an homage; however, the availability of drinks and the cabaret atmosphere of Downstairs at Trocadero render Champagne Lady an enjoyable way to pass an hour and ten minutes.   

 

[There were no other published reviews than my own in the Native that I could find 25 years after the fact: as I noted above, the Times didn’t cover Champagne Lady (though the paper did include it in its theater listings), and the other New York dailies didn’t, either.  I didn’t find a notice in the Village Voice or the theater trade paper Show Business, but I did happen upon a column in the other trade weekly, “Bistro Bits” in Back Stage (3 February 1989), in which Bob Harrington wrote about the show because it was part of a trend of putting on theater productions in nightclubs like Downstairs at Trocadero.  It may have been the only thing that passed for a review aside from my own notice.  Characterizing the performance as “as much a backers audition . . . as it is a cabaret revue,” Harrington wrote that “at times, it actually approaches those vintage ’30s films, though the similarities are mostly in derivative imitations.”  In addition, the cabaret columnist felt, “The whole production seems to teeter between a high camp spoof and a legitimate comedy, and it never seems to  fall one way or the other.”  Of Jewell and Atkins’s songs, as well as Morse’s “singing persona,” Harrington observed that they were “more Sophie Tucker than Mae West . . . .  But what do the Tuckerish tunes have to do with the West plot and impersonation . . . ?”  (Morse was a solo singer at clubs like the Duplex and Don’t Tell Mama before treading the boards in Champagne Lady.)  “‘Champagne Lady,’” the Back Stage columnist concluded, “has some fun moments and possibilities as a high camp frolic, but it needs a lot of work.” 

 

[As for Mae West (1893-1980), the ostensible subject of what Harrington dubbed a “mini-musical,” beginning with Sex in 1926, she wrote and starred in her own Broadway plays.  Writing under the pen name Jane Mast (her birth name was Mary Jane West), the star was already famous for her double entendres and distinctive walk (which she attributed to a popular female impersonator on the vaudeville circuit where she got her start).  “Discovered” by the New York Times at 18 in a Broadway revue (which closed after eight shows), West was already 33 when she began her playwriting career—and in 1927, after Sex was raided by city police, West was sentenced to 10 days on Welfare (now Roosevelt) Island for “corrupting the morals of youth.”  (Her morals trial was held at the Jefferson Market Courthouse at 10th Street and 6th Avenue in Greenwich Village—a beautiful red-brick building that’s now my neighborhood library!)  She went on to write The Drag (1927), The Wicked Age (1927), Diamond Lil (1928), Pleasure Man (1928), and The Constant Sinner (1931).  Hollywood called in 1932, when West was already 39.  Despite her age, usually a disadvantage for women in Hollywood, especially a newcomer, West was the definition of “star”—and she controlled her own career, a rarity not just for women but for any actor in the days of the powerful studios and their bosses.  In 1970, West came out of retirement to appear in Myra Breckinridge, and she made her last movie, Sextette, in 1978.  Mae West died in L.A. at the age of 87.

 

[W. C. Fields (1880-1946), whose real name was William Claude Dukenfield and who made scores of comic films from 1915 to 1944, starred opposite West in My Little Chickadee in 1940.  I used to howl with laughter watching his antics in the old flicks on TV when I was in college—Fields was a master of physical comedy of all kinds, but especially juggling, and an expert stick man in pool, doing his own trick shots, a routine he’d perfected in vaudeville, for many of his films.  I’ve always felt a special connection to Fields because he died (at 66) on the very day I was born (a distinction I share with singer Jimmy Buffett).]

 

THE AZTEC EMPIRE

(13 December 2004)

 

[In a recent ROT report on an art exhibit, I made passing mention of an art show I’d seen previously at the same museum.  When I was setting up my report on Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe (20 July), I noted that the last exhibit I’d seen at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was probably The Aztec Empire in 2004.  I wrote about that show five years before I ever launched ROT, but because it was part of an omnibus report covering several exhibits and performances, it’s very short.  Now, since I’m posting another archival report, I decided it would be interesting to combine the two brief pieces as a look back a decade or two (-and-a-half) at the theater and art scenes in New York City. 

 

[The Aztec Empire, organized in collaboration with the National Council for Culture and Arts and the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City, ran at the Guggenheim, on 5th Avenue at 89th Street, from 15 October 2004 to 13 February 2005.  The guest curator for Aztec Empire was Felipe Solís Olguín, director of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, co-curator of the large-scale survey Aztecs at the Royal Academy in London in 2003, and one of the world's foremost authorities on Aztec art and culture.  I’ve reedited this report slightly for posting on the blog.]

 

Both The Aztec Empire show at the Guggenheim, which my mother and I saw on 30 November 2004, and China: Dawn of a Golden Age, 200-750 A.D.at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (12 October 2004-23 January 2005), which we saw later in the holiday weekend, were good shows, but Aztec Empire, an exhibit of more than 440 works, many never before seen outside Mexico, drawn from both public and private collections—the first large-scale survey of Aztec art and culture to be seen in the United States in more than 20 years—was more interesting since we haven’t seen as much of that culture as we have China.  (We did have a Maya exhibit in D.C. this year, Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya at the National Gallery of Art’s East Building from 4 April to 25 July 2004, which was magnificent-—another really huge show, by the way [see my report below]—but China gets a lot of attention all the time here.) 

 

Slugged as “the most comprehensive survey of the art and culture of the Aztecs ever assembled outside Mexico,” the Guggenheim display, covering the 13th to 16th centuries but focusing on the 15th century, roughly the period of the Renaissance in Europe which it resembled in ancient Mexican culture, was more appealing as well as easier to access and traverse.  Riding an elevator to the top of the ramp—though there is also a floor higher we had to walk up to and then return—then taking a leisurely stroll down the spiral is much easier than going from exhibit case to exhibit case and room to room while dodging the other viewers following some other self-defined route.  (Actually, we did have to break the Aztec show part way through to grab a little lunch and then return to the spot where we interrupted our progress.  Couldn’t be helped!) 

 

A highlight of the exhibition are treasures only recently uncovered at the Templo Mayor archaeological site in Mexico City, including two monumental (both are about six feet tall) figures of fired clay, one of an eagle warrior (c. 1440–69), an elite Aztec soldier, and the other of Mictlantecuhtli (c. 1480), god of the dead.  (I’m constantly astounded at shows like Aztec Empire—as well as at, say, American Indian exhibits—how some of the relatively delicate items made of wood or clay or porcelain managed to survive intact or nearly for hundreds, even thousands of years buried underfoot.  Yes, many of the items were in tombs, but some were just buried.  It’s astonishing to imagine.)  The imposing Eagle Warrior depicts a standing man wearing a helmet in the form of an eagle, through whose beak the warrior’s face can be seen.  The warrior’s costume also includes stylized wings with feathers made of stucco and a raptor’s talons.  Portraying one of the two most prestigious Aztec warrior classes (the other wore jaguar costumes), this was one of two statues found flanking the door to a chamber where the eagle warriors met, and is believed to represent the morning sun.  (In Aztec mythology, the eagle was the symbol of the sun, to whom all sacrifices were made.)

 

Mictlantecuhtli (Lord of Mictlan, the Aztec underworld), who craves human blood, is quite a grotesque image.  The statue stands in a darkened corridor of the museum, the ghastly figure of a decomposing corpse, stripped of most of its flesh, its grinning skull cavernous, its hands in the form of huge claws, and its liver dangling from his exposed ribs.

 

Throughout the exhibit is a bestiary of naturalistically observed figures of the biosphere of Mesoamerica featuring wild beasts such as eagles, coyotes, jaguars, monkeys, rabbits, frogs, and snakes; insects like locusts, fleas, and a larger-than-life-size (over 7½ inches long), realistically detailed grasshopper (c. 1500), carved of orange, semi-precious carnelian stone, that looks like it’s ready to jump, as well as domesticated animals such as dogs and turkeys.  As stylized as Eagle Warrior and Mictlantecuhtli are, the Mexican bestiary, even the tiny insects magnified dozens of times actual size, is as lifelike as a zoological study.  (In Aztec mythology, animals play important roles in not only the human sphere, but the spiritual and celestial ones as well.  That’s why so many of the Aztec gods are shown as hybrids of several animals, such as Quetzalcoatl, the famous “feathered serpent”: to emphasize the presence of characteristics of a combination of symbolic powers.)  In addition to animal figures, Aztec Empire also includes images of plants and agricultural products.

 

In the end, the Aztec artifacts were the more interesting to me than the Chinese mostly because I have a thing for that art.  When I visited the Yucatan a dozen years ago, which is the northernmost extremity of the Mayan territory, I couldn’t get enough of their carvings and statuary.  I desperately wanted to find a really nice reproduction of something as my souvenir—but the ones I could afford weren’t nice enough and the ones I liked were just too expensive.  (The Maya simply disappeared—no one really knows why for sure—in about 900 C.E. and the Aztecs, who were centered on what is now Mexico City—Tenochtitlan in Aztec times—far to the north of the Maya, were just rising at that time; nonetheless, there is an iconographic similarity between Mayan art and Aztec, though I don’t know how much actual influence the older culture had on the newer one.)  Chinese art, especially the porcelain works, is beautiful—I brought home a fake Tang horse from China, as it happens (and my folks brought home a real one!)—but the imagery and style of the South and Central American Indians has always knocked me out. 

 

[I have a similar response to the art of the Indians of the Pacific Northwest—Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, Alaska—as my reaction to the Aztec and Maya exhibits.  In my estimation, the northwest Indian art may be the most aesthetically magnificent of all so-called primitive arts.  I didn’t even know about it until I went to Seattle back in 1989, and I just went nuts for it.  I brought back a mask—a piece of signed art by an Indian artist, not a real religious artifact—and half a dozen or so prints that were made up as fancy cards for stationery.  I had intended to give the cards away as gifts, but I only gave away one—plus one I bought specifically as a thank-you gift for someone who had been my host in San Francisco, where I had stopped before going on to Seattle—and have kept all the others because I can’t part with them!  If you read my journal of my trip to Alaska (“The Last Frontier”; 26 March, 5 April, 30 April, and 10 May 2014) you’ll see that I still love that art and that this was part of the reason I went there.]

 

THE COURTLY ART OF THE ANCIENT MAYA

(11-13 May 2004)

 

[Since I made so much in my report on The Aztec Empire of the Maya show at NGA that same year, I think it’s worth adding the earlier short report I wrote on that exhibit as well.  The coincidence of seeing the art of these two cultures within about seven months is enough to make the experience remarkable, but the fact that both shows so impressed me made the phenomenon all the more notable. 

 

[As I recorded above, The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya ran at the East Building of the National Gallery from 4 April to 25 July 2004.  My mother and I caught it while I was visiting her in Washington that April for her 81st birthday; I’ve revised this report, written about a month later, some for ROT.  Kathleen Berrin, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, curator of the art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and Mary Miller, Vincent J. Scully Professor of the History of Art at Yale University, were the curators for Courtly Art.]

 

The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya is a huge show, 156 works of art from about 30 public and private collections in Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, the U.S., Switzerland, the U.K., and Australia.  The exhibit, organized with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, focuses on the art of the various Mayan kings and queens and their courts from 600-800 C.E., a 200-year stretch during which they transformed Mayan art, “achieving a peak of dramatic expression and naturalism unmatched in the ancient New World,” according to the museum’s publicity.  (The Mayan civilization, which extended from what is now southern  Mexico into northern Central American—present-day Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—existed from about 2000 B.C.E. until after the arrival of the Spanish, but its classical period extended from about 250 to 900 C.E., after which, for reasons historians don’t understand, it went into a steep decline.  By about 1000 C.E., the grandeur of the Mayan civilization had ended.)  Like The Aztec Empire at the Guggenheim and exhibits of Native American art at the National Museum of the American Indian (as well as exhibits at the National Museum of African Art), the Maya exhibit’s focus is the artistic appeal of the items, not their anthropological value.  The works in The Courtly Art aren’t folk art, but highly refined works by well-trained professionals in a Mayan court which made stars of its artists. 

                                                            

A second aspect of this show is also interesting, in addition to the aesthetic focus: much of the Mayan culture is under reinterpretation because their hieroglyphics have only recently begun to be deciphered.  (It has been observed that the Mayan hieroglyphics took decades to decipher because there was no Rosetta Stone for them, which is true, of course.  I recall, however, that the code was first broken at just about the time my folks and I went to Yucatan back in ’92.  It had defied interpretation for centuries, leading to a massive misunderstanding of the Mayan culture.)  I think the repercussions of the first approach is self-evident, but the second, the reinterpretation of what we know about this people, meant that even artifacts that have been on view for decades have come to reveal or exemplify truths only recently understood. 

 

The most prominent of these reassessments is that the Maya, whom we used to believe were basically a peaceful people interested in the arts and astronomy, were warlike and bloody in the extreme.  The Maya of The Courtly Art not only loved blood, but pain.  This is borne out in the art on display at NGA, most clearly in the magnificent full-size modern reproduction of wall murals from Bonampak showing a king and court presiding over mutilated captives in “The Court at War” section of the exhibit.  Among the many “courtly” activities depicted in the mural are prisoners being scourged and killed—some having their fingernails pulled out or their fingers sliced off, some pleading for mercy, and others awaiting further mutilation and death—as well as other gruesome scenes.  (The mural is reminiscent of the work of a Mesoamerican Hieronymus Bosch, except that Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, for instance, portrays a grotesque fantasy world while the Bonampak fresco putatively represents a real one.)  In an earlier part of The Courtly Art, a pair of relief carvings show individual captives with their arms tied behind their backs—one seemingly stunned, another crying, a third staring up in wild-eyed panic.  In yet another carving, a limestone relief depicts the wife of a powerful ruler called Shield Jaguar pulling a thorn-studded rope through her tongue, the blood spattering on paper in a basket at Lady Xok’s feet.  (In terms of the Maya, ‘courtly’ doesn’t equate with the common usage in the world of European chivalry.  It refers to “the sanguinary horrors of Mayan imperial rites,” as the Washington Post said in an editorial review by Mark Jenkins.) 

 

But the one thing that hasn’t changed—except in our own appreciation of it—is that the Maya made incredibly beautiful art.  In that same relief of Lady Xok, the details of Mayan textile work is carved into the limestone in exquisite detail, showing the intricate weaving and delicate embroidery of the lady’s robes and Shield Jaguar’s form-fitting armor, replete with ornamental tassels, fringes, and elaborate edgings.  In “Life at the Maya Court,” the first gallery of the show, the Portrait Head of Pakal, a 7th-century ruler from Palenque, is stunning in its beauty.  (Beauty in Mayan culture was associated with the divine, in particular, with the Maize God.)  A stucco carving with an elaborate feathered headdress, the sculpture depicts a handsome young man (Pakal ruled from 615 C.E., when he was12, until he died at 80 in 683—a Methuselean span in his day) with classic Mayan looks: an elongated head and prominent nose, full lips, and piercing eyes. 

 

The Yucatan is the northernmost reach of the Maya territory, which is centered in southern Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.  The sites we saw near Cancun (Tulum, Coba, and Chichen-Itza) were smaller and poorer—outposts really of the major city-states to the south—and even the carvings and sculptures we saw there were magnificent.  [As I explained in the Aztec Empire report above, I tried in vain to find something I could afford—a replica, obviously, or a modern work that drew on the Mayan imagery—to bring home as my souvenir.]  Along with the Northwest Indian art, the Mayan stuff is the most striking of any indigenous culture I have seen.  The Courtly Art show, which has pieces small and large, even monumental—organized into six sections: “Life at the Maya Court,” “The Divine Model of Courtly Life,” “Women at Court,” “Word and Image in the Maya Court,” “The Court at War,” and “Palenque: An Exemplary Maya Court”—was breathtaking.  And exhausting. 

 

I was left with the question [which I reiterated recently in my report on Italian Futurism, 15 July 2014] of how to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of this art, which is undeniable, and not overlook the innate cruelty and brutality of the violence-loving, bloodthirsty culture that created it.  Paul Richard, the Washington Post  art reviewer, described Mayan art as “curiously unsettling, fabulous yet fearsome, opulent yet painful.”  (The New York Times tellingly titled art writer Holland Carter’s review “A Mystique of Blood and Beauty.”)  I haven’t reconciled this dichotomy for myself, so I can’t provide any guidance for anyone else.  The remoteness in time is certainly part of the calculus; after all, the Dark Ages in Europe were hardly a benign era in human history, particularly in terms of humankind’s treatment of its fellow creatures, yet we can admire the art of that time (or there’d be no point in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s magnificent Cloisters).  On the other hand, the Mayan art we see in The Courtly Art is not only the product of a brutal culture, but it openly celebrates that brutality and bloodlust.  Whatever the answer is—if, indeed, there is one—The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya is an astonishing experience, the impressions from which will doubtlessly remain with me for a long time.  Of course, as I’ve already admitted: I’m a sucker for this art anyway, so maybe I’m no gauge.

 

[It was only in the middle of the last century that museums, galleries, and the viewing public began to consider objects from the diverse cultures of Africa and the Americas as aesthetic items rather than sociological and anthropological ones.  Some Western artists appreciated the beauty of African art and were even influenced by it in their own work as early as the 1890s and the 1920s, but most art from Africa and ancient North, Central, and South America was shown not in art museums in the West but in museums of ethnography.  Big museums like NMAI and NMAA, opened in 2004 and 1986, respectively, were both originally small, private museums trying to break new ground in the world-art museum scene.  The eventual acceptance of this perspective allowed the establishment of institutions like NMAI and NMAA and exhibits like The Aztec Empire and The Courtly Art of the Ancient Maya.] 

'Italian Futurism'

I brought my mom up to New York City for a visit in the middle of June and because it’d been so long since we took in a real art exhibit, we decided to go up to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Fifth Avenue at 89th Street to catch Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe, running there from 21 February to 1 September 2014.  Having bought our tickets on line the day before (advance tix are only available on line at least 24 hours before the visit), we went uptown on Monday, 23 June, where I got Mother a wheechair to negotiate the spiral ramp at the Goog, and we took the elevator to the 6th floor to work our way down.  (I wasn’t about to push Mom up the ramp—I’m not all that spry my own self these days!)  I hadn’t been to the Guggenheim for several years (the last time may have been for Aztec Empire in 2004), but I thought I recalled that the shows started at the top of the helix and ended at the ground level, but either I remember wrong, the museum’s changed its practice, or this show is arranged backwards, so we actually ended up seeing the display from back to front, that is, from the ’forties down to the ’teens.  It was a little disorienting, trying to rearrange the development and history into ascending chronological order in my mind as we went along—adding new information to the start of every developmental step at each level rather than the normal process of accumulating new information sequentially.  It was counterintuitive, and not a few times I had one of those “so that’s where that came from” or “that’s what that was referring to” revelations.

Italian Futurism reminded me a lot of Dada, the show I saw at the National Gallery in Washington and MoMA in New York in 2006 and ’07 (my report on which I posted on ROT on 20 February 2010), not only because the movements overlapped—Futurism, arguably one of the lesser known developments in the arts, lasted from 1909 till the end of World War II, as the exhibit’s title suggests; Dada went from 1916 to about 1924, essentially the post-World War I period—but like Dada, I knew little about Futurism and found I had to read most of the explanatory panels for each section of the show as well as for each work of art at which we paused.  (Also like Dada, Italian Futurism turned out to be a delightful, enjoyable, and eye-opening art experience.  But I’ll be getting to that shortly.)  

Unlike most art and cultural movements, we can date the origin of Futurism with specificity (another parallel to Dadaism, by the way).  On 5 February 1909, poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published “Manifesto del futurismo” in a Bologna newspaper (and later, as “Manifeste du futurisme” on the front page of the Paris daily Le Figaro on 20 February 1909).  It was an aggressive and even belligerent statement of principals—the Futurists apparently didn’t have the sense of humor that the Dadaists had, even though the Dada movement was a direct response to the horrors of mechanized global warfare as the artists experienced it during the Great War.  The Futurists celebrated rather than decried modernism and the society-shaking developments of machines and electrification, speed (locomotives, automobiles, and eventually airplanes), long-distance communication (telegraph, telephone, and radio), and even space travel (which was still a fantasy in the 1920s and ’30s when it figured in Futurist art).  Intensely patriotic and enamored of violence from their inception, the Futurists were largely supportive of, first, Italy’s entrance into World War l, and then Benito Mussolini and his National Fascist Party.  (Mussolini, elected to head Italy’s government in 1922, is featured prominently in several Futurist art works on display in the Guggenheim exhibit, such as 1935’s Fascist Synthesis by Alessandro Bruschetti.  The movement came to an end with the death of Marinetti in 1944, one year after the Fascists were ousted from Italy’s leadership in 1943.)  The New York Times’s Roberta Smith called the movement “noisily contradictory,” noting that it was simultaneously “aesthetically revolutionary and politically reactionary.”  

Among the movement’s stated principals were these declarations:

We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.

Note not only the insurrectionary sentiment, but the strident language Marinetti used.  Indeed, the poet (Futurism was originally a literary movement before taking in the visual and performing arts, as well as architecture, fashion, home decor, advertising, and politics), promised: “It is from Italy that we launch through the world this violently upsetting incendiary manifesto of ours.”  The Futurists denied the past and meant to create an entirely new culture.  They expected their movement to lead to an actual revolution intended to influence social thinking as well as the arts. 

The Futurists were also adamantly nationalist (note Fortunato Depero’s 1935 mural-sized sketch for the mosaic Proclamation and Triumph of the National Flag), unlike the Dadaists who were staunchly internationalistic.  While Dadaism had many centers—Zurich, Paris, Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York—Futurism was almost exclusively an Italian movement.  (There was a small echo of Futurism in Moscow, mostly a literary force, but like Constructivism, a contemporaneous modernist movement centered in Russia around the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, it was smothered in its infancy when Stalin took over the reins of the Soviet state after Lenin’s death.)  As Mussolini and the Fascists drew a line directly connecting modern Italy with its Roman past (the fasces, the emblem and namesake of Mussolini’s party, was a Roman symbol of state authority), the Futurists celebrated technical advancements with which the country was prominently associated, particularly radio (pioneered by Guglielmo Marconi, 1874-1937) and aviation (long after Leonardo da Vinci’s fanciful flying machine designs , there were, among others, Enrico Forlanini, 1848-1930, who built an unmanned helicopter in 1877; Giuseppe Cei, 1889-1911, who flew around the Eiffel tower in 1911; Enea Bossi, Sr., 1888-1963, who was the first to cross the Andes Mountains in a balloon in 1916; Giuseppe Mario Bellanca, 1886-1960, designer of the first enclosed monoplane cabin in 1917; Gaetano Arturo Crocco, 1877-1968, an early flight pioneer, contemporaneous with the Wrights, who built the first liquid-propellant rocket motors in 1929).  

Declaring that “we want no part of it, the past,” and celebrating change, originality, and innovation, Futurism focused on the emerging urban world and those who lived and worked in the city, including factories, eschewing the farmer, the peasant, the country folk who’d been a frequent subject of the 19th-century art of Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism.  Emphasizing the speed, energy, dynamism, and power of machines and the vitality, change, and restlessness of modern life, the Futurists discarded all that was old and traditional, and glorified technology, machines, industry, gadgets, noise, commotion, movement, violence, and youth.  While the Dada artists were aghast at the brutality and mechanized death of World War I, the Futurists welcomed the war’s outbreak as a chance to destroy the old, to cleanse the static and decaying society of its outmoded ways, reactionary thinking, and old-fashioned art.  (Many Futurists enlisted in the Italian military when the war broke out.  Some of the movement’s leaders died in the conflict, including architect Antonio Sant’Elia, 1888-1916, whose drawings La Città Nuova [“New City”] and Station for Trains and Airplanes, both 1914, are in the exhibit, and Umberto Boccioni, 1882-1916, who was drafted into the cavalry and had been the principal author of “The Manifesto of the Futurist Painters,” 1910, and “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture,” 1912; Marinetti, a volunteer in the Lombard cyclists battalion, was seriously wounded in the Eighth Battle of the Isonzo River, Slovenia, in 1917 and decorated for bravery.)  

Futurist art never differentiated between abstract and representational, combining a symbolic imagery with impressionistic but literal depictions of figures and objects.  (Realism could even make significant appearances, such as the portraits of Il Duce and others that figure in some of the works.)  The art is powerful, muscular, masculine (conspicuously misogynistic, Futurism had only a few female adherents, among them Benedetta Cappa, known simply as Benedetta, who married Marinetti in 1923, and also Valentine de Saint-Point, who composed the 1913 “Manifesto of Futurist Woman”), and extremely colorful, with bright blues, oranges, yellows, and reds featured liberally in the canvases.  The most frequent motifs are machines, cars, and planes, but there are human and animal figures and other objects in the works, as well as geometric shapes and expressionistic swirls, washes, and splashes of color or black and gray.  (It’s odd, and I can’t explain the technique the artists used to accomplish it, but despite the bright and vibrant colors in most of the paintings, many are still dark and shadowy, giving them an ominous or threatening aspect, as if dense clouds had just closed in on a previously sun-lit landscape or brightly lit room and the painter had caught the instant of lowering darkness.  Morris Louis, an Abstract Expressionist and Colorist of the mid-20th century, painted canvases with rainbow-bright pigments which he then covered with black or brown, but that’s not what the Futurists have done.  It will take another painter to explain how they did this, I imagine.)  

The Futurists were vague about their unifying style and themes, declaring in the 1910 “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting” that their aim was a “universal dynamism” which they’d represent in their art.  The brilliant colors the painters used were initially broken into dots and stripes instead of blended (a technique known as Divisionism), forcing the spectator to integrate them subconsciously.  After 1911 (when Futurist artists Boccioni and Carlo Carrà visited Gino Severini, who lived in Paris), they encountered Cubism and adopted that movement’s methods, giving the Futurists a way to portray the dynamism they admired in the modern world in their paintings, drawings, and sculptures, characterized by vigorous motion and fractured forms.  (Marcel Duchamp’s 1912 Nude Descending a Staircase is a perfect example of this kind of imagery.  It’s not in the Goog exhibit, but ironically was rejected by the Cubists as too Futurist.  Several works in Italian Futurism bear a superficial resemblance to Duchamp’s iconic painting.)  In the 1920s, the Futurists introduced arte meccanica, works expressing the aesthetics of the machine; the 1930s brought aeropittura, with its abstract aerial imagery.  

Perspectives are often from the ground looking up at vertiginous heights (Mario Chiattone’s Buildings for a Modern Metropolis, 1914) or, more innovatively still, from an aerial point of view, as if the painter were in a plane looking down—even at a parachutist in mid-drop (Tullio Crali’s Before the Parachute Opens, 1939).  Along with the machines, automobiles, and trains (and later planes and even spaceships— depictions of moving vehicles), urban scenes, frequently showing construction and manual labor, typified Futurist art.  They saw the world as in constant motion and their art aspired to express the “interior essence” of the objects depicted.  (The “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture” lays out the principals of dynamism for the three-dimensional art that’s aimed at the realization of the relationship between an object and its environment.)    

The exhibit at the Goog, organized by the museum’s Senior Curator of 19th- and Early 20th-Century Art, Vivien Greene, includes over 360 works by more than 80 artists, architects, designers, photographers, and writers.  Among the paintings, drawings, sculptures, photos, and other art works are many of the Futurists’ manifestos.  (They published dozens; as David Freedlander observes on the Daily Beast: “[P]erhaps no collection of artists could manifest quite like the Futurists.”  These documents were usually distributed free on the streets or sometimes dropped from planes.)  According to the Guggenheim, Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe is the first comprehensive retrospective of the movement to be shown in the United States.  (Maika Pollack on Gallerist posits that “Futurism’s link with fascism may be why museums have shied away from the subject in the past.”)  Some of the works on display have seldom been seen by the public and others have never traveled outside Italy.  The works are arranged in essentially chronological order, generally separated into decades from the 1910s at the base of the ramp up through the ’20s, the ’30s, to the ’40s, taking up almost the entire museum (with the exception of a couple of side galleries devoted to non-Futurist exhibits).  The displays mix paintings and drawings with architectural sketches, advertising posters and objects, sculptures, toys, furniture, clothes, ceramics, photographs, and printed matter.  

Along some walls are also videos of Futuristic film works and one gallery contains items, including videos, related to Futurist theater and performance (programs, posters, set and costume designs, and so on).  Marinetti had published “The Variety Theatre” in 1913 in which he’d claimed that traditional theater merely “vacillates stupidly between historical reconstruction (pastiche or plagiarism) and photographic reproduction of our daily life,” but the “Variety Theatre . . . proposes to distract and amuse the public with comic effects, erotic stimulation, or imaginative astonishment,” “seeking the audience’s collaboration” so that it “forcibly drags the slowest souls out of their torpor and forces them to run and jump.”  Futurist painter and scenographer Enrico Prampolini published “Futurist Stage Design” (1915) in which he called for a break with the contemporary “static stage” that’s “a photographic enlargement of a rectangle of reality” to replace it with a “dynamic stage” in order to “live out the dramatic action” and “become an integral part of it.”  Prampolini proposed banning painted scenery, replacing it with “a colorless electromechanical architectural structure, enlivened by chromatic waves from a source of light.”  

Like Dada, Italian Futurism is a big show, with many works by many different artists.  That can make it hard for me to sort out and develop any kind of unified experience from it aside from awe.  While there were many Dadaists of whom I’d never heard, I knew a lot of the names and the work of a number of the artists in that exhibit before I went in, which helped me a little make a coherent experience out of it.  But with the Futurists, there was only one whose name I’d encountered before (Fortunato Depero, and my connection to him was pretty tangential to this show—though I may get around to explaining it later if it comes up)—so the art and the artists, not to mention the philosophy and ideas they expressed, were all new to me.  (I’d heard of Futurism in the vaguest sense, of course, and one of my NYU profs, Michael Kirby, was the author of Futurist Performance, so I had some general familiarity with what Futurism was about.)  Mother and I decided to go up to the Guggenheim partly because Italian Futurism promised to be an interesting art experience, but also partly because we hadn’t been to anything in a long time and we just wanted to find an art show of almost any acceptable type.  (We’d gone to movies from the same impetus, though not always with the same pleasant result.  An alternative choice was a Mark Rothko show at one of New York‘s commercial galleries, but it was closed on both Sunday and Monday, so we committed to the Goog and Futurism.)  

Even though we saw the exhibit from the end to the start, I’m going to try to describe it and assess my experience in the chronological order Italian Futurism was meant to be seen.  The first gallery is a small selection of Futurist sculptures, notably Development of a Bottle in Space (1912) and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) by Boccioni.  The latter is a striking and powerful evocation in gleaming bronze of a muscular human form, almost as if clad in armor, striding along, evoking flames, speed, strength, and energy.  Also on display here is Boccioni’s grotesque Antigraceful (1913), characterized by Lance Esplund in the Wall Street Journal as “an overwrought, misunderstood version of Picasso's first sculpted Cubist head” which “breaks free from a surrounding frame, which slices through the head like a guillotine.”  As its title implies, it’s the opposite of grace and beauty (it’s supposed to be the sculptor’s mother), a thumbed nose at the traditions of conventional art.  As Ariella Budick asserts in the Financial Times, the artist “dismantled old pieties and rebuilt awkwardness into dynamic elegance.”  

As a number of reviewers point out, the Guggenheim’s unique space, with its white walls and sloping, spiral walkway, sets off Italian Futurism extraordinarily.  It was almost as if Frank Lloyd Wright had expressly designed his iconic museum for a display of the aggressively modernist, iconoclastic works of Futurism.  (Marinetti explicitly eschewed museums for the art of his movement, but I wonder if they’d have made an exception for the Goog since it, too, broke the mold of art-exhibition space.)  The Boccioni sculptures are an example: standing alone in the small High Gallery, surrounded by white walls, even the hideous Antigraceful creates a striking impression that drew me in from the walking path.  (I parked Mother in her wheelchair momentarily so I could go up and see what this piece and the surrounding display were about.)  Needless to add, the manner of the exhibition was a large part of what made this visit such a special experience—the opposite of, say, the old Barnes Collection in Merion, Pennsylvania (before it moved to new digs in Philadelphia), which was such a hodge-podge of paintings, crowded haphazardly on dark-paneled walls, that it became tiring to peer at them to find those of particular interest.  In Italian Futurism, even works or items that might otherwise have raised little curiosity in me became objects of fascination. 

Boccioni’s figures were part of the period known as “heroic” Futurism, which stretched from the initiation of the movement until the middle of the Great War, about 1916 (the year two of the movement’s leaders died on the battlefield).  This was the period of fascination with industry, machinery, speed, and urban environments.  It was more utopian and exploratory than the later period, the so-called Second Futurism that followed the war.  (The following year, the United States declared war on Germany and the Bolshevik revolution toppled the Russian tsar and eventually replaced the Russian Empire with the Soviet Union.  In 1919, fearing a similar upheaval in Italy, Marinetti and the major Futurists allied with Mussolini and his Fascist Party.)  Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Cyclist (1913), for example, is an expression of pure, wild energy in vibrant yellow, blue, green, and red swirls of paint, overlapping and rearranging themselves into an abstraction of speed and vitality.  Giacomo Balla’s The Hand of the Violinist (1912), initially influenced by photography, shows a moving violinist’s hand on the instrument’s neck in repeated sequence (like a multiple exposure photo), and Automobile in corsa (“Speed of the car,” 1913), a study of speed, are other examples.

Following World War I, Futurism expanded rapidly into other areas of art and culture, including performance.  Marinetti had included serate, Futurist performance evenings (which some historians consider the origin of performance art), in his original concept for the movement.  In a side gallery, Fortunato Depero’s designs and marionettes for his Balli Plastici (1918) and Balla’s detailed diagrams for the lighting design of Igor Stravinsky’s Fireworks (1916; staged in 1917) are on exhibit.  Depero and Balla coined the Futurist phrase opera d’arte totale (“total work of art”), clearly a take on the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk Richard Wagner wrote about in 1900.  The idea was that the spectator would be enveloped in an entirely Futurist environment, designed to be of one single aesthetic.  (This notion, carried to its logical extreme, was also the foundation for Depero and Balla’s 1915 manifesto, “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe,” which gives the Goog’s exhibit its title.)

Depero’s Balli Plastici (“plastic ballets” or “plastic dances”) was a Futurist performance conceived for machine-inspired puppets which would replace human actors and dancers, set to compositions by various Futurist and experimental musical artists.  Designed in 1917, the dances, casting technology in the lead role with the mechanical meeting the fantastical, were presented at the Teatro dei Piccoli (Children’s Theater) in Rome the next year.  (Depero was one of the rare Futurists who had a sense of humor, or at least whimsy.  He also designed Futurist toys, a set of colorful fabric-collage men’s vests, and advertisements for Campari and Vanity Fair, examples of all of which are on display at the Goog.)  On exhibit in Italian Futurism are some of his whimsical marionettes and scenic sketches, as well as posters for performances.  (Balli Plastici was performed eleven times; considered novel, its reception was unenthusiastic—though Marinetti reportedly loved the work.)  Balla conceived of his Fireworks, produced by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the Teatro Costanzi, Rome Teatro Costanzi, Rome Teatro Costanzi, RomeTeatro Costanzi in Rome (only in a single dress rehearsal—the full production was scuttled by labor disputes), as an evocation of “the moods of fireworks” set to Stravinsky’s music rather than a recreation of pyrotechnical images.  With a fascination for artificial light, the artist designed a set of solid geometric wood pyramids and prisms covered in colored fabric and paper, inside which he placed electric lights which pulsed rhythmically and created startling movement and other effects.   (It wasn’t really a ballet in the conventional sense—there were no dancers—but a light show which is recreated at the Guggenheim.) 

(I alluded to my brief contact with Depero above, and this is where it fits.  In my research into Tennessee Williams’s concept of “plastic theater,” I came across an essay called “Gilberto Clavel: Depero’s Plastic Theater,” about the artist’s “Plastic Dances,” which appeared to define plasticity in the same terms that Williams did, but the original essay was published in Italian in a Milan newspaper in 1919 and wasn’t published in English until 1968, so I decided it would have been unlikely that Williams had read it and wrote the similarity off as an amazing coincidence.  In 1919, Williams was only 8 and by 1968, he’d already formulated and published his ideas about plastic theater 23 years earlier.  I published an article about this concept, “‘The Sculptural Drama’: Tennessee Williams’s Plastic Theater,” on ROT on 9 May 2012.)  

For most of the 1920s and ’30s, the Futurists tried to reconcile their drive for newness with their nationalism and militarism (these are the decades of their fervent alliance with Fascism), to marry their program of perpetual upheaval to the increasingly conservative tastes of Il Duce’s regime.  The Times’s Smith contends that “the art itself turned more benign, consistent and decorative” in the Second Futurism, and Speeding Train (Treno in corsa, 1922) by Ivo Pannaggi, constitutes a symbol of modernity and speed, the founding themes of Futurism, and depicts the sensory perception of a powerful locomotive rushing toward the viewer on a diagonal, illustrating the great speed in the blur of the cars and evoking the screech of the wheels, the scream of the whistle, and the roar of the engine.  Pannaggi’s painting is a prime example of the Futurist post-war sub-genre arte meccanica (“machine aesthetics”), articulated in Pannaggi and Vinicio Paladini’s 1922 “Manifesto of Futurist Mechanical Art.”  The next stage of Futurist art, prevalent in the years leading up to and into World War II, was aeropittura (“airplane painting”), works inspired by flight, and the automobile and locomotive, the symbols of speed, strength, and modernity that dominated Futurist art between World War I and the ’30s, were replaced by images of planes (and later spacecraft) and the bird’s-eye perspectives of views from flying machines (Virgilio Marchi’s Building Seen from a Veering Airplane, 1919-20, and Fantastic City, ca. 1919, are early prototypes).  Flying over the Coliseum in a Spiral (Spiraling) (1930) by Tato (Guglielmo Sansoni) presents an airplane soaring over the iconic Roman ruin, the circular path of the plane echoing the Coliseum’s shape.  

Giovanni Acquaviva’s 1939 design for a ceramic dinner service, The Life of Marinetti, however, makes the marriage of the two philosophies, one artistic, the other political, perfectly clear.  The dinner plate, Fascismo/Futurismo, has a multicolored abstract and geometric design surrounding a large letter F in the center with an ax blade extending from it, creating a stylized fasces.  Around the perimeter of the design, are the words FASCISMO at the top and FUTURISMO at the bottom, unambiguously expressing the painter’s leanings.  In Bruschetti’s Fascist Synthesis, a triptych painted in oil on plywood depicting movement and speed through repeated patterns of soldiers holding flags, soldiers with upraised swords, and the word DUX inscribed on an obelisk at the center of the left-hand panel, the artist included a host of Fascist symbols, from the obelisk to daggers to sheaves of wheat, and so on, placing a double portrait of Il Duce prominently in the center of the middle panel, all in a style that implies movement and dynamism, the central themes of Futurism.  (Dux is Latin for leader, commander, or ruler—the source of the Italian word duce, which Mussolini took as his sobriquet—and was the term in classical Rome for a high-ranking army commander.)

Italian Futurism ends at the top of the helix with a gallery devoted to five monumental canvases (each about 10 by 6½ feet) by Benedetta.  Syntheses of Communications (1933-34), in tempera and encaustic (they were intended to evoke the ancient frescoes of Pompeii), depicts various means of communication, including air, radio, sea, land, and telegraph and telephone.  Though Marinetti (Benedetta’s husband) had wanted Mussolini to name Futurism the official art of his regime, Syntheses, from the conference room of the Palermo, Sicily, post office, was among the very few public commissions awarded to a Futurist during the Fascist period; this exhibit marks the first time the paintings have been shown outside of their original location.  

The Guggenheim’s Italian Futurism, 1909–1944: Reconstructing the Universe is a beautiful show, both in terms of the art on exhibit and the aesthetic experience it yields—not to mention the curiosity it engenders about a little-known (at least to me) period in Western art.  It’s impossible to get around the Futurists’ reprehensible politics in the Fascist era, as well as their boosterism during World War I.  In fact, much of the movement’s philosophical basis is anathema to us today (and, I would hope, to most people even in the ’teens, ’20s, and ’30s).  But ironically, the art that came out of this movement, however justified and explained by the creators and apologists, is unquestionably stunning.  Can you separate artists and their work from the rationale used to conceive it?  I don’t know—maybe not.  But it’s also hard to dismiss both the beauty of the Futurist art—as blogger Molly Hashimoto put it bluntly, “Some of it, 100 years old, still looks very new”—or the influence the art had on those who followed even decades later, irrespective of its political and philosophical underpinnings.  I hope we can look at an exhibit like Italian Futurism, experience the work on display, and appreciate what is good and moving while also acknowledging what is awful and shameful—and I’m not trying to invoke the old bromide about Mussolini making the trains run on time—and not throw the artistic baby out with the political bathwater.  (On the other hand, maybe I feel that way because I was born after World War II and my only sense of the consequences of Italian Fascism is that my late father was a World War II vet.  I wonder if I’d feel the same way about Nazi art if any of it were good.  Maybe it’s too easy for me to shrug it off; maybe the beautiful and startling art work is Dorian Gray and the Fascism behind it is his portrait in the closet.)