From Eternal Knight to Modern Hero: The Aviator as the New Man of the Avant-Garde at the Outbreak of the Great War1
p. 29-38
Résumé
Through Hommage to Blériot by Robert Delaunay and Festa patriotica by Carlo Carrà, both painted in 1914, this paper will seek to clarify the paradox underlying the attitude of the avant-gardes towards the aviator. The pilot and/or the plane constructor were venerated as Gods when the Great War broke out. He was the New Man of the future whose mission was to restore the essence of a greater humanity which many saw lost in years of degeneracy at the turn of the century. Combining spirituality and technical achievement, his crossing of the starry firmament embodied the revival of the humanistic ideal, the rebirth of a humanity reaching for its highest mission in the universe. If the First World War tended to prove that mankind could hardly handle the effects of their own inventions, the aviator, master of the machine and unlimited skies became a central figure to the discourse that used humanistic arguments to mask and justify the massacre.
Texte intégral
1In the Spring of 1914, the French painter Robert Delaunay showed at the Independents in Paris Hommage à Blériot [see Fig. 3, previous article]. In June of that same year, Italian artist Carlo Carrà started working on his collage Manifestazione interventista (Festa patriottica-dipinto parolibero) [Fig. 4]. Despite the differences in atmosphere and intrinsic meaning, these works exemplified the paradoxical attitude of the avant-garde, and that of a whole epoch, towards the aviator. Pilot or constructor, the aviator was venerated as a God when the Great War broke out in 1914.2 Simultaneously evocative of the ancient Greek hero, the medieval knight, the modern engineer, the timeless master of the heavens, the aviator became the symbol of a new humanism during the bloody industrialized massacre of the First World War. Taking the image of the aviator as represented in Delaunay’s and Carrà’s aforementioned works,3 this paper seeks to highlight the complex attitude of the avant-garde towards the Great War. After explaining more largely the identification of the aviator as the New Man, we’ll see how Delaunay and Carrà suggest the fusion aviator-artist, seeking to resolve some of the greatest paradoxes of modernity. The latter were probably never as evident as in the summer of 1914 when the First World War put an end to the old world.4
Fig. 4: Carlo Carrà, Manifestazione interventista (Festa patriottica-dipinto parolibero), [Interventionist Demonstration (Patriotic Holiday-Freeword Painting)], 1914, tempera, pen, mica powder, paper glued on cardboard, 38,5 x 30 cm. Venice, Collection Peggy Guggenheim.

The Aviator as the New Man
2The New Man is an-old fantasy, recurring throughout history. Mentioned in the Bible, he was regularly resurrected at decisive historical moments such as the French Revolution.5 At the turn of the 20th century, the New Man was a pervasive concept which came about in response to the crisis of modernity which was perceived as a threat to traditional notions of masculinity.6 In the context of the war itself this fantasy was encouraged through the glorification of a mythical national youth which epitomized extreme virility. Military conflict became the equivalent of a symbolic catharsis to be followed by a cleansed world having eliminated every trace of filth and incongruity. During and after the war, the New Man facilitated the bereavement. He stood for all the fathers, sons and husbands fallen on the front, who were celebrated through solemn commemorations choking personal suffering and uncomfortable questions.7 Indeed, one of the principal functions of the New Man was to gather the dispersed forces of the Nation. He embodied its reunification in one unique mystical body similar to that which was formed by the reunification of the Gentiles and the Jews claimed by Saint Paul, the apostle warrior, and referred to by himself as the “new man”.8
3In his desire for unity, this New Man followed a globally humanistic model: a linear unified self with spiritual bias, aesthetically based on Greco-Roman Antiquity, morally on Christian virtue, yet modern in his constant progression towards perfection through rationality. It was a humanism deprived of contradictions and suffering, hollow but reassuring. An engraving by Franz Stassen dated 1912 perfectly illustrates this New Man [Fig. 5]. The image was published in 1914 on the front page of an overtly nationalistic anthology showcasing flat-roof houses (in this case monumental country houses with flattened pitched roofs supposedly requiring a titanic effort to be built and thereby mobilizing a great deal of vital male energy).9 Stassen’s image clearly points at this ideal: the man is young and strong, his serene gaze is directed to the right, towards the future. His gestures denote strong will, but also a sense of measure and self-control. The setting, like the man and the architecture, clearly refers to Antiquity but also contains modern elements. The man is not isolated, his followers are not far behind as the seated man in the background suggests.
Fig. 5: Franz Stassen, Der Neue Mensch [The New Man], woodcut for the book of Friedrich Seeßelberg, Das flache Dach im Heimatbilde (Berlin, Verlag Weise & Co, 1912).

4From 1914 on, the mobilized soldiers epitomized the New Man becoming a ubiquitous presence in visual culture on postcards, posters, engravings; in photographs, newsreels and movies.10 In this context, the aviator played a particular role as the selfless heroic airman, risking his life in a continual battle against the elements in the name of human progress – an image which sparked popular imagination. In both camps, before, during and after the war, the pilot appeared as a courageous, virile, joyful, smiling young man, ready to set off without hesitation.11 As early as 1909, Pathé released the first documentary on aviation, Tous les aéroplanes, thus assigning movie-star status to airmen such as Henri Farman, Louis Blériot, Alberto Santos-Dumont, Léon Delagrange.12
5The First World War was paramount to the development of aviation despite the difficulty of integrating this force within the army. In France, in 1912, documents such as the report of Colonel Hirschauer, the person in charge of this integration, attest to the conflicts involved in organizing military aviation.13 In 1912, a national subscription for the purchase of war planes was launched in France, testifying to an involvement of public opinion.14 Armies didn’t have concrete plans of how to use aviation, partly because of the airplane’s limited technical performance.15 In any case, prior to the outbreak of the Great War, in France, Germany and Great Britain, military authorities had acknowledged the importance of aviation whose potential of prospection played a role in the First battle of the Marne in the Autumn of 1914.16
6During the war, the achievements of the “knights of the sky” were covered by the popular press, such as the illustrated magazine Le Miroir in France.17 The adventures of the aviators were exaggerated dramatically in the press which largely contributed to the mystification of the aviator and his identification with the New Man.18 The courageous acts of airmen seemed to resolve modernity’s aporias, reflecting simultaneously the virtue of the strong individual, the renewed vital force of the nation and universal ambition for human progress.19 Thus, when in April 1918 the German ace Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) was killed, the Allied newsreels gave considerable attention to his smashed Fokker and to the full military honors provided by his enemies celebrating the valiant individual and universal conqueror of space.20
7Moreover, the nobility of the pilot established a contrast with the banal reality of the industrial massacre in the trenches as the air duals reminded of the combats of the ancients gods and those of medieval knights.21 Though related to technological progress and the machine, flying was perceived as victory over matter due to the qualities of the man in the cockpit: valor, doggedness, virility, physical strength and beauty. Flying was like an act of a resurrection similar to Christ’s ascension, the shape of the airplane itself reminiscent of a crucifix.22 At the end of the war, the poet D’Annunzio wrote a famous World War I oration to the Italians fallen on the front “L’ombra delle ali e l’ombra della croce”.23
8As Jeffrey Schnapp has said, whether viewed by those “who would survey and conquer it by technological means, the continent of the air was seen by all as humankind’s final frontier: a last remaining source of mystery, miracles, novelty, and the unknown; a last refuge for the individual from the humdrum world of work; a last place of transcendence in a resolutely secular age.”24 The air was a space where new sovereign forms of individuality could be forged, where nations could compete in the name of international progress, where “metal and flesh, technology and instinct, mind and matter can be pressed together.”25 Aviation promised a new Golden Age for humanity, beyond the crisis of modernity. These utopian ideas converged with the avant-garde utopias in the beginning of the 20th century. Not surprisingly, the avant-garde artists, like the general public, were fascinated with the aviator.
Delaunay’s Hommage à Blériot
9To such a fascination testified Delaunay’s series, two paintings and five drawings, paying a tribute to the airman Louis Blériot, done just before the outbreak of the war.26 The most accomplished piece Hommage à Blériot. Disques solaires, simultané, forme: au grand constructeur Blériot, today at the Kunstmuseum in Basel, was displayed at the Salon des indépendants (March 1st –April 30), and spurred a famous debate involving Guillaume Apollinaire, Italian futurists and Delaunay himself.27 Several figurative elements of the painting clearly allude to aviation. A colorful propeller is represented in the low left corner, surrounded by colored disks. In the upper right part, above the Eiffel Tower, an accurately drawn Wright flyer biplane flanks at left a more stylized flat orange airplane outlined with green, reminiscent of the Blériot XXI monoplane whose engine allowed new technical achievements such as the first looping performed at Juvisy-sur-Orge in September 1913. The passive gliding motion of the former is opposed the vertical axis of the latter which defied the laws of gravity and bodily constraints.28
10If Delaunay was a keen amateur of aviation, it was more because of the solar symbolism involved rather than the technical perfection of propellers. In her autobiography Nous irons jusqu’au soleil, Sonia Delaunay insisted on her husband’s universalist, spiritual and humanistic interpretation of aviation.29 Robert had followed Blériot’s crossing of the Channel day by day, she wrote. However, Hommage à Blériot was not the story of this particular event but rather the ecstasy caused by the “flight of any plane in the light”.30 In her words, this painting was explosive because it expressed the movement of light, which was completely new; it was a true apotheosis, the premonition of the conquest of space. “Up to where could go those who can see?” she asked; and she answered “We shall not go to the woods with Robert […] we shall go up to the Sun.”31
11What Sonia Delaunay suggests here is that, as painters, she and her husband were ready for a flight; not a physical one of course but a spiritual one. Indeed, in Hommage à Blériot, the “solar potentials” of aviation and that of painting merge, the refracted pure-color-disks based on simultaneous contrasts (which since Impressionism had sought to render painted color more luminous and thus closer to the aspect of real light) becomes the rotational movement of the propeller. Delaunay himself referred to both when he commented on his work: “Analysis of the solar disk at sunset in a flawless deep sky, and close to the multiplied prisms flooding the Earth where the airplanes take off.”32 In the continuity of a larger series started in 1912-1913 exploring simultaneous contrasts, color disks and cosmic bodies, Hommage à Blériot epitomizes what Pascal Rousseau has called Delaunay’s “avidité rétinienne”, that is his desire to see everything,33 recalling Sonia Delaunay’s remark relating “going up to the Sun” and “seeing”. As Rousseau has also underlined, this “retinal greed” led Robert to abstraction shortly after this series.34 In Hommage à Blériot the propeller dematerialized by its own rotation could epitomize abstraction. Propeller and abstraction are both material – anchored respectively in technology and the physical quality of color – and immaterial – like light itself, endowed with spiritual qualities which overpower the technical aspect.
12Though Delaunay overtly privileged a universal interpretation – in the final version, he eliminated a rosette with the national flag present in one preparatory watercolor35 – the work is rooted in a period during which aviation and national pride went hand in hand. At the time of his Channel crossing, Blériot was considered a national hero. Five years later, amidst a heated public debate on the use of airplanes for military purposes,36 Bleriot had become the principal airplane constructor and supplier of military planes for the French State. After acquiring the Société Provisoire des Aéroplanes Deperdussin, he conceived SPAD VII, one of the best military aircrafts used by the Allies.37 As the handwritten title at the bottom of his painting literally suggests, Delaunay was celebrating Blériot the constructor-engineer more than Blériot the pilot. In doing so, Delaunay stressed the concrete social utility of the craftsman-creator in the modern world, thus avoiding the underlying elitism of both the aviator and the artist. Indeed “Delaunay appropriates the myth of Blériot, as much as he pays tribute to him,”38 his “homage” representing the ecstatic adventure of the painter echoing the adventure of aviation, the monoplane approaching the Sun echoing the colored simultaneous disks confining to real light. In this configuration, both painting and aviation are possible thanks to the creative and audacious human spirit longing for a ultimate ascension towards light; both epitomize newness, originality, modernity, allowing a better panoramic grasp of the human adventure in its totality.
Carrà’s Festa patriottica
13This same all-embracing panoramic gaze is the subject of one of the most famous futurist collages Carrà’s Manifestazione interventista (Festa patriottica-dipinto parolibero). The collage represents a popular gathering in a city as the title and some words dispersed in the composition (strada, piazza, folla) suggest. Here too, the propeller dematerialized by its rotating movement seem to fascinate the artist. The brownish color of the beaming diagonals tend to confirm the hypothesis of a crowd seen through moving propellers since at the time these were made out of wood in order to reduce the plane’s weight.39 Carrà used a similar irradiant composition a month later in Rapporto di un nottambulo Milanese, where a North-South vector is clearly expressed, as on a map, an explicit reference to the aerial view.40 We know that airplane looping was performed on June 7th 1914 in Milan, where Carrà lived, on the occasion of the Festa dello Statuto, the holiday of the recently unified Italian nation.41 The idea for an aerial view probably came from this event.
14Carrà alluded very probably to this holiday42 and we know that he started working on the piece in June 1914.43 It was indeed originally published under the title Dipinto Parolibero (festa patriottica).44 The patriotic connotation is reinforced by the inscription “Italia” appearing in bold type in the center, by several Italian flags, by the mentioning of Trieste, focal point of the Italian nationalist claims (irredentism) which the futurists supported. In this collage, the association of patriotism and aviation is articulated much more explicitly than in Delaunay’s painting. Carrà inscribed the word “aviatore” in the middle, just below “Italia” together with “battere il record” and “elichi perforanti”. Many clippings came from Marinetti’s book Zang Tumb Tumb, published in October 1912, in which the founder of futurism often refers to aviation.45
15As Giovanni Lista has stated, there is a close connection between Italian identity and the aerial view whose origin can be found in the Italian Renaissance humanistic project aiming to embrace, centralize and harmonize the world within a single absolute perspective.46 On a more modern note, in 1911, during the Battle of Tripoli, the pioneer of Italian cinema Luca Comerio, a Milanese like Carrà, took the first aerial footage filmed from the front of the plane.47 This footage became even more significant after Italy’s victory at Tripoli which further spurred nationalist fervor. Planes were used very early in Italy for political propaganda by the newly founded Lega Aerea Nazionale, a nationalist aviators’ association, which scattered tricolor manifestos over numerous Italian cities, calling upon the masses to defend Italy’s frontiers.48 This also may have inspired Carrà’s composition where flags and clippings resemble flyers thrown from the air.
16The aerial view, an allusion to the point of view of the aviator, stands for the desire to see better recalling Delaunay’s “retinian greed”. In Carrà’s composition, the viewer senses more directly the unifying power of such a vantage point, its centralizing absoluteness. In the Italian context of post-Risorgimento/Irredentist search for a stronger unified nation, largely shared by the futurists,49 the aviator’s omnipotent aerial vision epitomizes the New Italian leader, the one that would guide the Nation towards a better future. Interestingly, in 1914, the Festa dello Statuto led to the Settimana rossa, a week of revolt after the murder of three young anarchists.50 Like many futurists, Carrà was close to the anarchist milieus and the massacre of the Settimana rossa plunged him into despair.51 As Christine Poggi has suggested, the converging composition of Festa patriotica announced Carrà’s move towards a more conservative political perspective looking for a leader capable of unifying dispersed popular forces.52
17This move was not surprising considering the ambiguous attitude of the futurists towards the crowd/mass: idealized and distrusted, the crowd signified simultaneously the potential for revolution and for chaos.53 Carrà himself formulated this oscillation between crowd and leader a year later in Guerrapittura: “The crowd, the plebes, will never understand the superior man.”54 The aviator in the center of Festa patriotica, with its determinant centrifugal propeller, can be interpreted as an image of this superior man, the New Man, who would organize, totalize, galvanize and channel the dispersed movements of the crowd below. Thus, his position above the crowd, a vantage point from which he can see and control everything, represents not only the individual’s mastering of a modern machine; it is of paramount importance for the spiritual advancement of the Nation, and humanity as a whole,55 who, to put it in Carrà’s words do not yet fully “understand” the intentions of the superior man.
18This vision of the aviator fairly corresponds to the futurists’ image of themselves and their mission. They saw themselves as a leading force full of masculine vitality, strong enough to resist dissolution, like the aviator resists air pressure at flying altitude. As early as 1909, with the “Foundation manifesto of Futurism,” Marinetti announced the futurists as a new “race” meant to enact a major upheaval in the universe, and who would dictate its will to all the living men on earth.56 The manifesto’s poetic prologue narrates a car accident (referring to a real event in Marinetti’s life)57 in which a young car driver is flung into the mire from which he emerges transformed. Comparable to a baptism,58 this act washes out the young hero from the past ideals, enabling him to become the leader of the new world, a New Man. In 1909 as well, Marinetti wrote Mafarka the futurist, in which the first generation futurist male Mafarka gives birth (without any female contribution) to an improved second-generation-futurist-human being, a mythical winged son, a plane/aviator hybrid combining machine and human elements, whose ascension towards the Sun destroys the old Earth in the name of a stronger race of New Men.59
19Though the impetus and violent shattering of form in the futurist writings and artworks bypasses the conservative style of propaganda and popular visual culture, they are all structurally rooted in the demagogical vision of a New Man. In both cases, his paradoxical characteristics, evoked in the beginning of this article, are “overlooked”, “flown over” in the name of the reassuring idea of a flawless future where individualism doesn’t contradict devotion to the community, radical elitism popular approval, nationalism universalism, technology mysticism. To reach this ultimate accomplishment however, a price had to be paid and, for the futurists like many other avant-gardes,60 it was materialized in the terrible but, according to them, necessary war which marked the beginning of the new world.
20In 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War, the plane and the aviator had come to symbolize the spiritual victory of Man over matter: flying was seen as a spiritual audacity crowning the ever higher ascension of mankind, an ultimate fulfillment of humanism. Logically, the aviator became a key figure in the utopian project of the avant-garde in their desire to design a better world for a humanity improved through both technical progress and moral maturity. The two paintings examined here are intimately tied to this idea, just as many other aviation themed works of the same period.61 In fact, the aviator appeared as the alter ego of the artist: a pioneer of a new order, oscillating between elitism and populism, simultaneously the leader and the servant of other humans.
21Far from destroying the belief in a New Man who would accomplish the humanist project, the Great War reinforced this idea. For Delaunay and Carrà, and many other members of the vanguard, man could still claim a higher degree of civilization despite the war. Nonetheless Delaunay was definitely not a pro-war artist. Reformed for cardiac problems, he was in Spain and Portugal during the conflict and returned to Paris in 1921.62 Anxious about the return of conservative and nationalist trends in art,63 plunged in the “retinal greed” to see all, he didn’t see how modernist utopias could be exploited in the sake of a bloody massacre. Carrà’s case is much more ambiguous: though a supporter of the war in theory, he didn’t volunteer in 1915 unlike his fellow futurists. He was mobilized in 1917 but never fought. Having immediately presented mental troubles he spent the rest of the war in a military mental establishment.64 After the war, he yielded to the conservative “Return to order”, seeking humanistic certainties in the roots of classical Western art.
22In 1914, it was certainly impossible to forecast the collapse of civilization as we are able to see it today. Analyzing the implications of the panoramic view and the “retinal greed” the aviator stood for helps to further understand why this was not possible and why this war lasted so long.65 The deification of the aviator, both within popular culture and the avant-garde, embodied this utopian idealism galvanized by the hypnotic permanent motion of propellers and the feeling of omnipotence generated by the flight over earthly contingencies. Thus idealism and faith in humanism seemed to contribute to the persistent belief that nations were fighting in the name of civilization, despite the immediate horror. The aviator, as the most effective figure, was entrusted to make forget that behind the façade of an ultimate spiritual achievement, aviation meant ultimate potential for destruction, that civilization was not controlling anymore the effects of its own creations.
Notes de bas de page
1 My recognition goes to Brenda Lynn Edgar whose help and advice were very precious.
2 Facon, Patrick. “Les plus lourds que l’air.” Petite histoire de la conquête de l’air et de l’espace. La Cotardière, Philippe de, Patrick Facon, and Marie-Hélène Reynaud (dir.). Paris: Larousse, 1990, p. 98. Facon, Patrick. Conquête des airs, héros, énigme, drames. Paris: Sélection du Reader’s Digest, 2001, p. 11; Paris, Michael. From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995, p. 25.
3 The most detailed studies to date on the representation of the aviator in the arts are: Debray, Cécile (dir.). La Conquête de l’air. Une aventure de l’art du xxe siècle. Toulouse: Les Abattoirs, 2002 (fine arts). Paris, Michael (cinema).
4 Été 14. Les derniers jours de l’ancien monde. Paris: BNF, Ministère de la Défense, 2014.
5 Leterrier, Sophie-Anne. “L’homme nouveau, de l’exégèse à la propagande.” L’Homme nouveau dans l’Europe fasciste (1922-1945). Matard-Bonucci, Marie-Anne, and Pierre Milza (dir.). Paris. Fayard, 2004. p. 24. Ozouf, Mona. “La Révolution française et la formation de l’homme nouveau.” L’Homme régénéré, essais sur la Révolution française. Paris: Gallimard, 1989, p. 117-154. Baecque, Antoine de. “L’Homme nouveau est arrivé – la ‘régénération’ du Français en 1789.” xviiie siècle. N° 20 (1988), p. 194-203.
6 Mosse, George. Fallen soldiers. Reshaping the memory of the World Wars. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Id. The Image of Man, the creation of modern masculinity. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Courtine, Jean-Jacques (dir.). Histoire de la virilité: La virilité en crise? xixe-xxe siècles. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2011. More specifically the chapter by Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane. “Armées et guerres: une brèche au cœur du modèle viril?” where the role of the First World War is stressed, p. 201-204. Gentile, Emilio. L’apocalisse della modernità. La grande guerra per l’uomo nuovo. Milan: Mondadori, 2008.
7 On bereavement, see Audoin-Rouzeau, Stéphane, and Annette Becker. 14-18. Understanding the Great War. Trans. Catherine Temerson. New York: Hill & Wang, 2003, p. 221-225 (original French title: 14-18. Retrouver la guerre. Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
8 “The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Ephesians.” Holy Bible: New and Old Testament. Chapter II/15. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, n.d., p. 1163.
9 Seesselberg, Friedrich. Das flache Dach im Heimatbilde als kulturelles und wirtschaftliches Problem gefasst… herausgegeben von Dr. Friedrich Seesselberg. Berlin: Verlag Weise & Co, 1914. I am grateful to Wolfgang Pehnt for his help regarding this image: Die Architektur des Expressionismus. Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz, 1998, p. 79.
10 Mosse, George, p. 70-80.
11 Pairault, François. Images de poilus. La Grande Guerre en cartes postales. Paris: Le grand livre du mois, 2002, p. 116-119. Facon, Patrick. “Le danger aérien et la France d’avant la Première Guerre mondiale.” La Belle époque de la conquête de l’air, dans le sillage de Wilbur Wright, 1903-1914. Tison, Stéphane (dir.). Le Mans: Société historique et archéologique du Maine, 2010, p. 133-147.
12 Paris, Michael, p. 20-21.
13 The report is published online: http://www.asoublies1418.fr/_zdocs/77/avant-guerre/1912/hirschauer/397196794444444_____hirschauer-1912-01.jpg (retrieved 9/09/2014). For an extensive commentary see: Thollon-Pommerol, Claude. “Donnez des aéroplanes à la France, 1912-1913.” Les Cahiers des As oubliés 14-18. N° 2 (2012), p. 17-24.
14 Idem.
15 Facon, Patrick. “Les plus lourds que l’air.” Petite histoire…, p. 102-105.
16 Streckfuss, James. “World War I aviation.” Air Warfare. An International Encyclopedia. vol. 2, Santa Barbara: Walter Boyne, 2002, p. 702. Thollon-Pommerol, Claude. “1914: l’aviation entre en guerre.” Les Cahiers des As oubliés 14-18. N° 4 (2013), p. 76-100.
17 Roland Garros (25 avril 1915, p. 16), Albert Ball (29 octobre 1916, p. 10), first lieutenant Mouchard (28 mars 1915, p. 14), etc.
18 Patrick Facon develops the cases of Georges Guynemer and Manfred von Richthofen, Conquête des airs…, p. 12-25.
19 Ibid., p. 4-6
20 Paris, Michael, p. 27.
21 Mosse, George, p. 119-122.
22 Paris, Michael, p. 3, and Schnapp, Jeffrey. “Propeller’s talk.” Modernism/modernity Vol. 1. Issue 3 (1994), p. 162, n. 35.
23 D’Annunzio, Gabriele. “L’ombra delle ali e l’ombra della croce.” La Riscossa. Milan: Bestetti & Tumminelli, 1918, p. 105-110. Available online, https://archive.org/stream/lariscossa00dannuoft#page/n7/mode/2up (retrieved 9/09/2014).
24 Schnapp, Jeffrey, p. 170.
25 Ibid.
26 See the exhibition catalogue focusing on the series: Wetzel, Roland (dir.). Robert Delaunay, Hommage à Blériot. Leipzig: Kerber, Kunstmuseum Basel, 2008.
27 Rousseau, Pascal. “Hommage à Blériot.” Robert Delaunay, 1906-1914: de l’impressionnisme à l’abstraction. Rousseau, Pascal (dir.). Paris: Centre Pompidou, 1999, p. 226, and Molinari, Danielle. Robert Delaunay, Sonia Delaunay. Paris: Nouvelles éditions françaises, 1987, p. 87. Delaunay didn’t appreciate that Apollinaire called his work futurist.
28 Rousseau, Pascal, p. 228.
29 Delaunay, Sonia. Nous irons jusqu’au soleil. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1978, p. 37.
30 “L’envol d’un avion dans la lumière”. Delaunay, Sonia, p. 38. Text underlined by S.D., author’s translation.
31 Ibid.
32 Quote in Habasque, Guy, and Pierre Francastel. Du cubisme à l’art abstrait. R. Delaunay: documents inédits. Paris: SEVPEN, 1957, p. 126. Author’s translation: “Analyse du disque solaire au coucher dans un ciel limpide, profond, et près des prismes multipliés qui inondent la terre, d’où prennent le départ les aéroplanes.”
33 Rousseau, Pascal, p. 77.
34 Ibid.
35 Tribute to Blériot. 1914. Watercolor on paper, 78 x 67 cm. Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris.
36 Thollon-Pommerol, Claude. “Donnez des aéroplanes à la France, 1912-1913.” Les Cahiers des As oubliés, p. 39-41.
37 Streckfuss, James. “SPAD Aircrafts.” Air warfare… Vol. 2, p. 588. See also “Blériot Aircraft.” Air warfare… Vol. 1, p. 86.
38 “Delaunay s’approprie le mythe de Blériot autant qu’il lui rend hommage.” Rousseau, Pascal, p. 227.
39 Schnapp, Jeffrey, p. 162. Since 1911, propellers were placed at the front of the plane (p. 165).
40 Carrà, Carlo. Rapporto de un nottambulo milanese. 1914. Monferini, Augusta (dir.). Carlo Carrà: 1881-1966. Roma, Milan: Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna, Electa, 1994, p. 469.
41 Bohn, Willard. “Celebrating with Carlo Carrà: ‘Festa patriotica’.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte. N° 4 (1994), p. 678-679.
42 Bohn, Willard, p. 674-679. The date of the Festa dello Statuto was not fixed, but took place the first Sunday of June. At that time, this is much more logical than an interventionist demonstration.
43 Letter to A. Soffici, June 23, 1914. Carrà, Massimo, and Vittorio Fagone (dir.). Carlo Carrà, Ardengo Soffici: Lettere 1913-1929. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1983, p. 58-59.
44 Lacerba. August 1st 1914, p. 233.
45 Lista, Giovani. “Vue aérienne et aéropeinture futuriste: une métaphysique de l’espace.” La Conquête de l’air: une aventure dans l’art du xxe siècle. Debray, Cécile (dir.). Toulouse, Milan: les Abattoirs, 5 continents, 2002, p. 100.
46 Ibid., p. 89-90.
47 Ibid., p. 99. Schnapp, Jeffrey, p. 168-169. Pillitteri, Paolo, and Davide Mengacci. Luca Comerio: milanese, fotografo, pioniere e padre del cinema italiano: nel 150° anniversario dell’unità d’Italia, omaggio a Luca Comerio, 1878-1940. Milan: Spirali, 2011, p. 143-147.
48 Schnapp, Jeffrey, p. 167.
49 Lista, Giovanni. “The Activist Model or the Avant-Garde as Italian Invention.” South Central Review Vol. 13. N° 2/3 (1996). Trans. Scott Sheridan, p. 13-18. Slavkova, Iveta. “Le futurisme entre propagande et revendication libertaire.” Témoigner. N° 11 (Autumn 2011), p. 17-19.
50 Dadà, Adriana. L’Anarchismo in Italia, fra movimento e partito: storia e documenti dell’anarchismo italiano. Milano: Teti, 1984, p. 63-67.
51 Poggi, Christine. Inventing Futurism. The Art and Politics of Artifical Optimism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008, p. 52.
52 Ibid., p. 53.
53 Poggi, Christine. “Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd.” Critical Inquiry Vol. 28. N° 3 (Spring 2002), p. 709-748.
54 Carrà, Carlo. Guerrapittura. Milan: Pœsia, 1915, p. 51. Trans. taken from Poggi, Christine. Inventing futurism…, p. 53.
55 On the fusion universal/national, see Slavkova, Iveta, p. 19-21.
56 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “Fondation et manifeste du futurisme” [1909], Le Figaro, February 20 1909, in Teoria e invenzione futurista. Milan: Mondadori, 1990, p. 7-14.
57 Poggi, Christine. Inventing Futurism…, p. 7-8.
58 Foster, Hal. Prosthetic Gods. Cambridge, Londres: MIT Press, 2004, p. 118-119.
59 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. Mafarka the Futurist. Trans. from French by Carol Diethe and Steve Cox. London: Middlesex University Press, 1998 [1909].
60 Stavrinaki, Maria. “Messianic Pains. The Apocalyptic Temporality in Avant-garde Art, Politics and War.” Modernism/modernity Vol. 18. N° 2 (April 2011), p. 371-393.
61 Other examples in Debray, Cécile. “La conquête de l’air: une traversée du cubisme.” Debray, Cécile (dir.), p. 47-54.
62 Bière, Delphine. Le Réseau artistique de Robert Delaunay: échanges, diffusion et création au sein des avant-gardes entre 1909 et 1939. Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’université de Provence, 2005, p. 26.
63 Ibid., p. 29-31.
64 Monferini, Augusta, p. 519-520.
65 We hope thus to contribute to the historical debate over the reasons why the First World War lasted so long despite its horror, see Julien, Élise. “À propos de l’historiographie française de la Première Guerre mondiale.” Labyrinthe. N° 18 (2004) [published June 24 2008, retrieved September 23 2014, http://labyrinthe.revues.org/217].
Auteur
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Iveta Slavkova
Ph.D in modern and contemporary Art history, and Senior Lecturer at the American University of Paris (AUP). She is preparing a book based on her dissertation « L’Homme n’est peut-être pas le centre de l’univers. La crise de l’humanisme et l’Homme nouveau des avant-gardes autour de la Grande Guerre ». She has published several articles on the humanism crisis, and the New Man of the avant-garde. (Among the most recent: « La marginalité comme condition de l’art: l’alcoolisme de Wols vu par Sartre », in Arts drogués. Éxpériences psychotropiques et création artistique, Presses universitaires de Paris Ouest, « 20/21 siècles », 2013; « L’homme entre alpha et omega: vertus et périls de l’unité absolue. Le logo de Schlemmer pour le Bauhaus », in Histoire de l’art, n° 71, Autumn 2013; « Surviving the Collapse of Humanism after World War II: the “Abhumanist” Response of J. Audiberti and C. Bryen », in Contemporary French & Francophone Studies SITES, vol. 3, n° 17, May 2013).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
Arts drogués
Expériences psychotropiques et création artistique
Fabrice Flahutez et Miguel Egaña (dir.)
2013
