School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemSwirls of shouts and rivers of shapes: futurism's crowd( 2016)This thesis sheds new light on the representation of crowds in paintings, drawings and illustrations by Italian futurist artists produced between 1900 and 1915. By focusing on the aesthetic and emotional responses of the Italian avant-gardist group to the urban multitudes, it proposes a new interpretation of how the Futurists conceived of the relationship between artist and crowd. Contrary to a tendency in recent scholarly literature to read Futurism's depictions of the crowd as constructing a political collective to be moulded in a manner akin to a proto-fascist vision of society, this thesis shows how in its early years the Italian artistic avant-garde elaborated a view of the crowd which resists such politically instrumental interpretations. Between 1910 and 1912 the Futurists artists, drawing upon attitudes to the crowd they had developed prior to joining the avant-garde movement, interpreted the spontaneous gatherings of the urban multitude as a startling visual phenomenon and as an expanded collective subject endowed with emotion. In such works, the futurist artists demonstrated their intention to implicate the viewer not in a collective action directed towards specific political goals, but rather in an intensely emotional, aesthetic experience. In 1914 and 1915, the Futurists turned their attention to mass gatherings associated with patriotic and interventionist campaigns in which the artists themselves were directly involved. In spite of their more explicitly political subject matter, in the artworks made during this period the Futurists were primarily concerned with depicting the crowd as a dynamic, heterogeneous context with which the artist was to merge and into which he disappeared. In both periods, this thesis argues, the Futurists did not envision the crowd in their visual works as a mouldable mass to be dominated and controlled by a political or artistic leader, but rather as an uncontrollable, immersive event in which the artist and viewer participated to the point of self-annulment and dispersion. Despite the rallying cries in the founding manifesto of 1909 and the various political views of the artists themselves in the period under analysis, futurist artistic depictions of the crowd between 1910 and 1915 were alternative to a proto-fascist imagery of political exhortation.