CRW Nevinson - Leaving the future behind

Futurism still thrills me and Nevinson was perhaps its greatest painter.

Born out of the mechanisation of Italy, very little compares to the aesthetic as a means of expressing the industrialised age. The Fascist politics associated with it are unacceptable to me, but that is not something to muse over now. In so far as it is possible to separate the images from the politics I intend to do so as Nevinson was a little apart from the rest, not least because he was in England, operating in a very different political environment from his Italian counterparts.

Futurism was founded by a poet, Marinetti, and extended to every aspect of Italian cultural life. I will point you to the assorted Futurist Manifestos so you can explore the scope. In the context of Nevinson, perhaps the key points from the original manifesto, published in Gazetta dell'Emilia almost exactly 104 years ago, are "we intend to sing the love of danger", "the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed", "No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece", "We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene" and "We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot". As the manifesto moves away from bullet points and back to rhetoric we come to a summation: "Art, in fact, can be nothing but violence, cruelty, and injustice."

One particularly interesting aspect for me is the relationship of the movement to history. It was officially anti-history, decrying the past and making prophecies that the Futurists themselves would be torn down ten years hence. Yet if you didn't know this and simply tried to draw a family tree of visual style there are clear linguistic links all the way back to Uccello - compare how the girders here are arranged on diagonals to delineate space and movement in the same way the dogs are used in Hunt in the Forest.  The cranes and funnels have the same function as the trees and, blue sky apart, even the colours are related.

For me the most bewildering aspect of his work is that immediately after his brutalised war work, Nevinson could be found painting pastoral scenes and even gardens in a half futurist and half cubist style. In the 1980's you would assume it was a dose of post-modern irony, but being made in the 20's makes it far more intriguing. Was he painting using mannerisms from habit? Or did he deliberately take two contrary traditions (the English picturesque rural idyll and a painting language developed to explore violence, mechanisation and de-personalisation) and use the one to subvert the other? And if he was using one to subvert the other, which is the subverter and which the subverted? At first glance one would assume as a Futurist he was anti-tradition and trying to industrialise the scenes, but I get the impression from his work that, as with Nash and so many others, the First World War changed aspects of him beyond recognition. Maybe this is history and tradition mounting a counter-offensive. If so, after these equivocal initial skirmishes, tradition won. By the 1930's Nevinson was firmly in the British landscape tradition along with Nash, Sutherland, Ravilious et al, the fields with their hedgerows the only reminder of his previous angular aesthetic.