Art in love with the motorcar
Once Cubism proved the rules could be torn up, a wave of movements arrived, each with a slogan and a printed manifesto. In Italy the Futurists, led by the poet Marinetti, declared that a roaring racing car was more beautiful than an ancient Greek statue and that the museums should be flooded. They painted speed, crowds and machines as Cubist shards set violently in motion — and they meant the worship of force, youth and speed as politics too, a romance with the machine that would curdle, for some of them, into fascism.
Then the war answers with a urinal
The First World War turned the machine-romance into a slaughterhouse, and the artists who survived answered with disgust. In neutral Zürich, refugees founded Dada — deliberate nonsense, the name supposedly chosen by stabbing a knife at random into a dictionary — and staged performances built to insult an audience, and a civilization, that had marched into the trenches quoting poetry. Its sharpest weapon was the readymade: in 1917 Marcel Duchamp submitted a factory urinal, signed with a joke name and titled Fountain, to an art show. If the artist says it is art, his gesture asked, is it art? A century of conceptual art — art where the idea is the work and the craft is beside the point — has not finished answering. Dada had its women, too: in Berlin Hannah Höch was scissoring apart magazines and newspapers and reassembling the pieces into savage photomontages that dissected the gender politics of her day — arguably the movement’s most cutting visual work.
Order, not noise
Not every response to the chaos was a provocation; some were the opposite — utopian order. In Holland, Piet Mondrian and the De Stijl (“The Style”) group pushed abstraction to its purest end: nothing but black grids, white fields and rectangles of primary red, yellow and blue, a kind of cosmic plumbing diagram meant to picture universal harmony. In Germany, the Bauhaus — a 1919 art-and-design school that became the most influential of the whole century — took that clean abstraction off the canvas and into everyday life: the chairs, lamps, typefaces and glass-and-steel buildings that still look “modern” a hundred years on were largely dreamed up there. Cubism had broken the window; here, some of its heirs were quietly designing the whole new house.