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Origins and development ofKinetic Art!□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□□
Frank Poppertranslated from the French by Stephen Bann

New York Graphic Society© English translation Studio Vista 1968
Published in the United States of America
by New York Graphic Society Ltd, Greenwich, Connecticut 06830
and in Great Britain by Studio Vista Ltd
Blue Star House, Highgate Hill, London N19
Library of Congress catalog card number 69-10920
Set in 10 pt Plantin, one point leaded
Made and printed in Holland by the Hooiberg Printing Co. Ltd, Epe

Contents

Introduction

7

Part I
1 Movement and the Impressionist generation 11
2 Movement in the Post-impressionist era 22
3 Movement in the arts around 1910 37
4 Movement in the age of surrealism and geometrical abstraction

71

Part II
5 The origins of kinetic art: virtual movement 93
6 Three-dimensional works in movement 121
7 Light and movement 156
8 Recent developments in kinetic art 190
Part III
9 The typology of movement: simple procedures for the expression of
movement in the plastic arts 215
10 Sketch for an aesthetic of movement 224
Conclusion 244
Appendices
The generations of artists 249
Classification of kinetic art 251
Movement in art 253
Bibliography 255
List of illustrations and acknowledgments
Index 267

262

.

.

Introduction

The date 1860 is a good point of departure for a study of movement in the plastic
arts for several reasons.
It was in the 1860s that the new way of seeing which later became known as
Impressionism contributed its first significant works. This period also marks thefirst stage in the ‘isolation1 of sense data - colours, lines, tones and eventually
movement - that was to be the indispensable stage in the preparation of a pure or
abstract art.
In the scientific field, Fechner’s Elemente der Psychophysik appeared in 1860.
In the May of the same year, Herbert Spencer wrote his First Principles and the
new theory of evolution was born. From this point onwards, there is a kind ofchronological parallelism in the way in which the arts and the sciences evolve, orrather mutate. The date 1860 is also highly significant in the history of photogra¬
phy: witness the lively interest aroused by the photography of objects in movement
and by stereoscopic vision, which was later to have important repercussions on
ci ne matograp hy.
If the historical aspect is relatively clear, it is much more difficult to set boundaries
to this subject from the purely logical point of view. There seem to be six different
ways of envisaging movement which are of interest to the aesthetician.
First of all we have the element of movement in the work: this element thatcan be perceived could be called the ‘image’ of movement in the widest sense,
extending further than the notion of ‘representation1. Then there is the movementof the artist’s hand, and of his whole body: the way in which these are involved
closely affects the genesis of the work, and perhaps even its structure. Thirdly,
there are the eye movements of the spectator, who registers the successive perceptions
and finally comes to a judgement of aesthetic value. Obviously these movements
can be subordinated to the actual movement of the spectator himself, as in the caseof a walk around a sculpture or within an architectural monument.
There are three other problems involved in the logical classification of movement:
the relationship between movement in the plastic arts and movement in the otherarts, the relationship between physical, psychological or biological moveme?it andmovement in the arts in general, and finally the highly contemporary problem
of real movement in the plastic arts.
This study will be confined as far as possible to the analysis of movement in
the work of art, but it will necessarily involve the treatment of spectator movement
up to a certain point, especially where it is a question of experiencing the mobility7

of the work and identifying with this aspect. Only incidental reference will be madeto the difficult problem of eye movements, and the problem of the artist’s gestures,
since both of these topics require a completely separate study. But there will be someconsideration of the three categories which were mentioned above: analysis of works
in real movement, in particular, will occupy a substantial part of the book.
As far as the different arts are concerned, this study is devoted almost exclusively
to painting and sculpture (and in a lesser degree to the graphic arts). These aretreated in close conjunction, and it is the main intention of the author to show how
the evolution of the use of movement during the period results in an entirely new
category of art, which is frequently termed ’■kinetic’. In this new category, thetraditional division between the plastic arts loses a great deal of its relevance.
Although the other arts are formally excluded from this study, there are occasionalreferences to the cinema, music, drama and choreography in the historical section.

Frank Popper
8Part 1

1 Movement and the Impressionist
generation

The first part of this study centres upon the conflict between subjective andobjective movement which renews itself in every generation - or did so, at any
rate, until the early 1950s, when the element of movement became autonomousand so resolved the dilemma. Our starting point for this investigation is aroundthe year 1860, when the revolutionary concerns of the Impressionist group firstbecame apparent.
The Impressionists dealt above all else with visual data, and consequently
with movement as an objective phenomenon. Among their most frequent themes
were horses, railways and railway bridges, barges, sailing boats, crowds, flags,smoke, clouds, water and its reflections, and, of course, dancers. These subjects
can be traced back through history, and related in particular to the immediate
predecessors of the Impressionists: Turner, Jongkind, Boudin, Courbet, Corotand even Ingres and Delacroix. But the various threads were drawn together
quite distinctively in the personalities, aims and ideas of the Impressionist
generation. By examining a few selected works by Manet, Degas, Monet,
Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley, Cezanne, Guillaumin, Bazille and Berthe Morisot, we
can gain some idea of what has been called ‘the progressive conquest of light’taken as the major theme of Impressionism.

• Manet - Impressionist vibration and conventional movement

Giacomo Baila

La Bambina che corre su/ balcone, 1912

Manet’s position in relation to Impressionism proper is rather hard to define.
If we choose three pictures at random from the time at which his style was
emerging, and analyse them summarily from the point of view of movement,
we come to realize that Manet’s art, while remaining close to the classical andeven academic manner, contributes in certain ways to the development of the
new style - and in particular to the very first stages of the liberation of theelement of movement in painting.
Le Ballet espagnol, which dates from 1862, clearly takes as its theme the artof choreography depicted through the classic medium of character attitudes.
But the procedure which Manet has used conveys a new sense of movement.
He makes contour coincide with gesture in such a way that the lack of equilibriumin the subject matter is strongly accentuated. The same thematic and plastic
procedures are to be seen in the famous Dejeuner sur I’herbe of 1863, in whichconversation and weekend activity as an expression of movement combine with11

the major preoccupation of Impressionism, the open air - represented by thenude in the landscape. Here we already have a new interpretation of light, andthe spots of colour perform an entirely new function.
Finally, in VExecution de Vempereur Maximilien of 1867, a picture whichhardly seems impressionistic except in the sense in which the word could beapplied to Velasquez, the different motifs of movement - rifles, smoke etc. convey in a dramatic and, at the same time, visually objective way the flightof the bullets and the act of execution. The plastic procedure is no different fromthat of the Renaissance (Uccello, Piero della Francesca) - except for the blurringof the atmosphere which dominates certain parts of the picture, particularly on
the left. This is also the direction in which our eyes are led by the line of therifles, a tendency reinforced by the diagonal counterpoint of the rifle which an
officer (probably General Dias) is in the process of reloading.

• Degas - a modern collection of themes involving bodies in movement
Degas goes further than Manet in his investigation of subjects involving move¬
ment. His favourite themes coincide in at least two respects - race-horses andsubjects from modern life - with those of the Impressionists. But it was his
remarkable variations on the theme of the dance, pursued over several decades,that influenced subsequent painters most considerably and gave the greatest
impetus towards the popularization of the Impressionist vision. In expressing
himself principally through the arabesque, Degas also stands at the head of a
tradition which leads to Toulouse-Lautrec and the artists of the Jugendstil.
Jeunes Spartiates s’exergant d la lutte, a painting by Degas which dates from1860, belongs recognizably to the lineage of David. But the kinetic theme ofnudes in a landscape which was characteristic of the early 1860s is brought out
in the placing of the bodies and the use of dramatic gesture, both of which
combine to suggest an interpretation of youth in movement.
Degas’ two favourite themes, the horse and the dancer - which were to domi¬
nate his work as a painter and as a sculptor - appear together in a picture datingfrom 1868 which is entitled Mademoiselle Fiocre dans le ballet de la source. The
relationship between Impressionism and the academic manner in Degas’ work
here becomes manifest in the juxtaposition of the dancer at rest, the horse andthe reflections of light on the water. The combination of motifs results in aquality at once calm and dynamic that is a frequent feature of his style. Anotherpicture from this year, U Orchestre de VOpera, introduces musicians in theforeground as well as the glimmering presence of dancers in the background - anallusion to the correspondence of different forms of movement in different arts
expressed in the Impressionist manner.
Degas’ statuettes of horses at the trot and at the gallop, which were spreadover the years 1865 to 1881, contain elements which appear to derive from
Gericault and Delacroix. However they are delightful studies of an almost
photographic realism. Exactly the same applies to the pictorial studies of racing
scenes which Degas produced in abundance. Faux depart focuses attention ona particular moment, while Voiture aux courses (1873) displays the horses in a
striking perspective as if fixed by a snap-shot. In Aux Courses: deux personnes

12parlant a un jockey, Degas’ light and misty touch brings out the changing effects
of light on the racecourse: the similarly named Aux Courses: jockeys amateurs
is more directly concerned with the suggestion of movement, through a techniquewhich recalls cut-outs and superimpositions. Another work, the Jockeys fromthe Vollard collection, is also concerned with this cut-out effect: forms andcolours are directly juxtaposed and the accents of black which divide themincrease the impression of dynamism. Finally Chevaux de course (1884), whichtakes as its theme the actual movement of the horses, successfully integrates thismovement into a background of landscape. The way in which the movements
are conveyed by successive phases in a rhythmic composition was prefigured
in Avant le depart, a superb picture dating from ten years before.
Throughout his life Degas was attempting to give his own personal inter¬
pretation of the phenomenon of movement. He made use of photographs to adda kind of authenticity which could not be detected by the naked eye to the feelingof satisfaction which he both felt and transmitted in the consideration of move¬
ment. This becomes clear in a letter which he wrote to Henri Rouard. ‘I am stillat Paris... One must continue to look at everything, small boats and large ones,
peoples’ stirrings on earth and land as well. It is the movement of things andpeople which provides distraction and even consolation, if one can be consoledin such unhappiness. If the leaves on the trees did not move, how sad the trees
would be, and how sad we would be as well! There is a type of tree in the gardenof the house next door which stirs at the least breath of wind. Well, I may be inParis, in my almost dirty studio, I can still that say this tree is delightful...’The years 1872 to 1874, which were crucial in the development of Degas’
pictorial technique for expressing movement, saw at the same time a high point
in his series of racecourse pictures and a first stage in his subtle representationsof choreographic movement. With La repetition de danse au foyer the figures ofthe dancers and the curve of the staircase combine to create an effect of corre¬
spondence between the two forms of movement. In Danseuses vertes the attitudesof the two dancers are emphasized by the presence of bursts of colour. Degas
was to carry over into his wax statuettes of ballet dancers the technique ofsuggesting movement by fixing the human figure in extreme positions.

2 Eadweard Muybridge'Chronophotography' of a horse at thegalop c. 1878

There are several reasons for regarding Degas as a precursor of the cinemaThe point is not whether his pictures take the experiments of Marey and Muys
bridge as their point of departure. Germain Bazin has shown that Degas use.
a characteristic cinematographic procedure in several of his works. First of all,he makes use of ‘mobility of scale and plane’ - in Le Ballet de Robert le Diable13

(Victoria and Albert Museum) the various planes are fused and in the pastel
Chanteuse au gant, one overall plane is employed. Secondly, he uses ‘spatial
mobility’, as in the Salle de danse (Jeu de Paume Museum, Paris), where thekind of multi-dimensional perspective which we associate with the cinema is set
up through the obliqueness of the viewing angle and the dramatic division of
space. Thirdly, he is particularly interested in ‘successive’ images, as in theseries Danseuse tenant son pied, where the same action is followed from one work
to another, and the Femme aux chrysanthemes, which involves a decentralized
type of composition very close to that of some photographers.
We must admit that Degas was preoccupied above all with interpreting his
chosen themes, in particular those of the racecourse and the ballet. Yet it ispossible to conclude at the same time that he was intimately concerned withthe purely plastic problems which arose from his distinctive use of movement
and light vibration.

• Monet - photography and landscape painting

3 J.-E. Marey
Chronogramme, c. 1885

It has been suggested that: ‘If the eye of Monet was apt to grasp the least varia¬
tions in light effects, that of Degas was acute enough to grasp the slightest nuances
in movement.’ This distinction reveals clearly the difference in the aesthetic
aims of the two painters. But we must not overemphasize this difference inapproach. Degas and Monet held one extremely important feature in common:
both relied on a direct retinal impression for their experience of variation andmovement - that is to say, upon an object or natural phenomenon which camefrom outside. Both must therefore be regarded as interpreting movement in an
objective way.
Of course this approach can be related to the indirect influence which photo¬graphy exercised upon Degas and Monet, as with the majority of the painters of
this generation. Photography had a double significance, since it provided amodel for imitation and at the same time challenged the painter to go further.
The famous article on the relationship of photography and landscape painting
which had appeared in the Spectator in 1842 had prophesied that ‘only landscapepainters, in imitating the colour of their surroundings and atmospheric effects,
will be able to resist this formidable rival (photography), an emanation of nature
herself. That is why they will have to apply themselves more than ever to thestudy of light and its effects on the tints of objects and the general tonality of thesubjects represented, and attempt to render impressions of the movement ofliving creatures, foliage, water and clouds.’
Already at the stage of his work in the Gleyre studio, and especially in his
Argenteuil period, Monet - with the painters of his entourage - can be termed‘visionary and cosmic, haunted by the movement of waters and the wheelingof light’. At the same time the painters of the Swiss academy and those of Pontoise, grouped around Pissarro, were working in a more stable vein, more ‘earthy
and bucolic, careful to take account of the construction of their pictures andvery faithful to the spirit of Corot’.
The way in which Monet extended and developed his plastic treatment of lightand light vibrations can be seen from a consideration of a few pictures in suc-14

4 Edgar Degas
Danseusecession. Already in 1865, with Le Pave de Chailly-en-Biere (Ny Carlsberg
Glyptotek, Copenhagen), the motif of the forest road leading towards an illdefined horizon brings into play the effects of light on a whole range of different
textures. In a picture dating from the next year, Le Dejeuner sur Vherbe (Hermit¬age), Monet is beginning to represent the filtering of light by the plastic proce¬dure of small brush-strokes, which foreshadow the vibrant colour effects of hislater work. The composition is also extremely unusual, suggesting the influenceof Japanese prints as well as that of photography. All these characteristics recurin Les Femmes au jar din (Jeu de Paume), which dates from 1866-7. But there isalso a sudden brightening which seems to prove that Monet’s discovery of new
methods of expression took place in a rather sudden and dramatic way.
The pictures which Monet completed during this period refer to the central
preoccupations of Impressionism. Earth, water, sky and human figures are fused
together by the operation of light. Figures, gulls, barges, boats, sailing ships,
smoke, waves, clouds and rainbows retrace the life of the sea in calm or agitatedmovements. Monet’s plastic procedures range from a style involving the juxta¬
position of strong touches of pure colour - still connected with traditional realism- to a final stage where wave and cloud seem to become one. In his wonderful
picture. La Grenouillere (1869), he passes beyond the barges, the human sil¬houettes and the reflections on the water to a pure vibration which engulfs man
and the elements. This impression of overall vibrancy is obtained through theuse of streaks of pure colour.
There are four main landmarks in Monet’s development as a painter. First ofall, in a picture like Impression, Soleil levant, the element of vibration is extended
to cover all natural phenomena: in plastic terms, this innovation is marked by
the juxtaposition of complementary colours - orange and green in this case which unify in a soft overall atmosphere that covers the whole area of the picture.
Secondly, there is the renewal of Monet’s vision which took place in the Argenteuil period, when the movement of water, clouds and other features of thelandscape mingled with such passing features as the smoke of barges, the flappingof sails and the characteristically modern motions of the railway train. In Regates
par temps gris a Argenteuil, Monet achieves technical mastery over the theme of
movement, allowing the sailing boats to merge into the vibrant atmosphere.
Another stage is reached in Le Bateau-Atelier sur Seine (1875), which demon¬
strates the remarkable swiftness of Monet’s touch. The same technical expertise
is apparent in Gare Saint-Lazare (1877-78), which also illustrates the artists
interest in the modern theme of mechanical mobility. But the final stage in hislong investigation of the impressions caused by the fleeting instant comes withhis series of studies of the facade of Rouen Cathedral, and his remarkable
Nenuphars. The light on the facade of Rouen Cathedral recalls in temporal or
kinetic terms the way in which the passing moment is reflected in the mouldingof architectural mass by colour and light, while the immateriality of the lilies on
the water is conveyed by a minute and almost hallucinatory treatment of surface.
If we admit that the essential feature of Impressionism is the technique of isolating
the elements of colour, light and movement, then Monet is clearly one of themost significant pioneers in this revolutionary development. As it has beenstated, he ‘exalts and divides pure colour with unbelievable boldness, not merely15

5 Claude Monet
Rochers de Belle-lie

to make the most of the picture surface - a major preoccupation for any painter- but also to express in concrete terms the transparency and vibrancy of space,the bright revolutions of the sun, and all the movement of light which is thecontinual feast and life of nature.’
We must, however, modify our view of Monet as the direct interpreter ofnatural phenomena to leave room for the profound influence which Japanese
art exerted upon his work. More than any other painter, Monet derived in¬spiration from nature - from the play of light on water, on a cathedral facadeor on aquatic plants; but he also owed much to Japanese artists such as Hokusai,
Utamaro, Hiroshige, Kiyonaga and Moronobu, whose vogue in France beganaround 1862, and of course to European painters such as Turner, Jongkind,
Boudin and Pissarro. If Monet’s original discovery of the Tokugawa objects,
with their powerful enhancement of vegetable life, left its mark upon his ex¬pression of movement in plastic terms, his later series of Nympheas suggests that
he was by no means insensitive to the wider context of Japanese art, as displayed
to the French public in the Universal Exhibition of 1900.
If Monet is the painter of the Impressionist generation who was most success¬ful in exploiting the types of vibration which arose from physical data perceived
by the painter’s sensitive and analytic eye, there were other painters - in particu¬
lar, Pissarro, Sisley and Cezanne - who investigated the possibilities of move¬
ment in connection with their own artistic preoccupations. There is no room to16

follow the careers of each of these artists. But mention should certainly be madeof Sisley’s fascination for the sky, which he explained in these terms to the critic
Tavernier towards the end of his life: ‘It not only helps to give depth by its
planes (for the sky has planes just as land has), but also provides movement
through its form, and its arrangement, in relation to the general effect or com¬position of the picture.’ Sisley went on to exclaim: ‘Is there anything moremagnificent and more full of movement than what takes place frequently insummer - I mean, the blue sky with its fine white strolling clouds. What move¬
ment! what pace, don’t you agree? it gives the same effect as the waves when one
is at sea, it exalts and carries one away.’ We may also add that Cezanne, who
was concerned from the very start of his career with questions of theory, dis¬played even during the Impressionist period a preoccupation with duration
rather than with successive moments of time.

• Subjective movement in RedonThe Impressionist period also saw an expression of movement of an entirely
different kind, which derived from the innermost recesses of the human person¬
ality and foreshadowed research into the unconscious. This was to be found in thework of Odilon Redon, a member of the same generation as Degas and Monet,
but with closer affiliations to the later movement of Expressionism. Despite
Redon’s late development as an artist, it is possible to compare his use of move¬
ment in both stylistic and chronological terms with that of the Impressionists particularly in the case of his graphic works.
It is in the works labelled ‘Les Noirs’, dating from 1869 to 1879, that Redon
consciously adopts a different path from that of the Impressionists, and develops
his own plastic and thematic use of movement. This departure had its origin
in Redon’s early experience, as he has indicated in a book entitled A soi-meme:‘My father often used to say to me: “Look at those clouds. Can you see, as I can,the changing forms there?” Then he would show me, in the shifting sky, appa¬
ritions of bizarre, chimerical and marvellous beings.’ Redon continues: ‘Much
later - I dare not say up to what age for you would regard me as immature - I
passed hours, or rather the whole day, stretched out on the ground, in the deserted
parts of the countryside, watching the clouds go by and following, with enormous
pleasure, the fairylike glitter of their fleeting transformations.’
Redon shows a rare degree of lucidity in assessing the possibilities of utilizing
movement for aesthetic ends. ‘There is the static element and the dynamic
element. Beauty can be calm and represent restfulness, or it can represent move¬
ment and life.’ He is aware of the limitations in the use of contour and line. ‘I feel
only the shadows, and the elements that are clearly in relief; every contour
being, without any doubt, an abstraction.’ But he is responsive ‘to the stimulusof line on its own - as to the charm of chiaroscuro’.
Once the elements in this plastic conflict are laid down, there is free rein for
the rhythmic interplay which lies at the basis of Redon’s art. ‘The whole of myart is limited simply to the resources of chiaroscuro,’ he maintains, ‘and it also
owes much to the effects of abstract line, that deep-rooted instrument whichacts directly on our inner awareness. The art of suggestion can achieve nothing

17without its unique recourse to the mysterious interplay of shadows and therhythm of lines conceived in the mind.’ In Redon’s case this area of suggestion isdominated by dream and melancholy - a melancholy which, like Diirer’s, isperhaps plastic in origin, since it exists ‘on the confines of thought’ and can be‘written solely in terms of line with its mighty powers’. Redon’s ‘art of suggestion’is in fact a premature form of Symbolism, which relies strongly on the arabesque.
‘Imagine arabesques or various forms of meandering line winding themselves
out not on a plane surface but in space, with all that is conveyed to our innerawareness by the deep indeterminate margins of the sky; imagine this interplayof lines carried forward and combined with the most diverse elements, includingthat of the human face; if that face has the particular features of the one which wemeet every day in the street, with its fortuitous, immediate and wholly real truth,
you will have the usual combination of a large number of my drawings.’
Redon reveals a profound knowledge of the conscious and unconscious elements
in art when he states: ‘We cannot move our hands without causing a corresponding
movement in the whole of our being, in obedience to the laws of gravity. A
draughtsman knows that. I believe that I have obeyed these intuitive promptingsof instinct in the creation of certain monsters. They do not reveal, as Huysmanshas suggested, the aid of a microscope in confronting the frightening world of
the infinitely small. No. In making these creatures I was preoccupied with themore important task of organizing their structures.’ Whether we accept Redon’sdisavowal of the microscope or not, it is certain that he has been influenced inthis direction by the work of such artists as Diirer, Goya, Grandville and Gustave
Moreau.
The theme connected with movement which plays the largest part in Redon’swork is that of flight. Originally, and particularly around 1865, he was pre¬occupied with the frenzied activity of battle scenes and the motion of horses.
His oil painting Apollon, which dates from around 1900, represents the final
culmination of a research into movement which tended more and more towards
the fantastic.
The plastic methods which Redon chose to underline the motifs of movement
derived from the unconscious were directly related to the techniques which
he preferred to use: charcoal, Indian ink, black-lead and lithography. Anyone
who runs through a sequence of Redon’s graphic works will see how he has madeuse of two types of movement - the one a product of contour or linear tension andthe other a kind of unstable chaos resulting from a range of tonal values that
extends from a troubled white to an almost absolute degree of blackness. Move¬ment in Redon’s work is inseparably linked with graphic technique and the
choice of materials. But its particular importance lies in the fact that here, forthe first time, the image of ‘scientific’ movement is challenged in a context
which relates to modern psychology.

• Rodin - metamorphosis
From the point of view of movement, Rodin the art theorist interests us almost
as much as Rodin the sculptor. This artist has left behind a great number ofviews on the aesthetic problem of movement, as it applies to both painting and18

sculpture. A contemporary of the Impressionists, he felt the need to remainfaithful to natural appearances. But he held that the mind was also a part ofnature, and explained his working method in the following terms: ‘I take downon the spot the movements which I observe.’ Rodin’s classical preoccupation
with the model in fact concealed an element of complete novelty - a desire tocoordinate his expression of movement with the effects of light. ‘In my art,’ heexplained,4 the illusion of life is obtained by good modelling and by movement.
Those two qualities are like the blood and the breath of all fine works.’
Rodin’s written works contain several analyses of pictorial movement, suchas those which deal with Delacroix’ Barque de Don Juan (Louvre) and Watteau’s
Embarquement pour Cythere. In the first he interprets the movements as mainly
symbolic, in the second he makes a distinction between the lengthy dramatic
enactment and the gestures of the passengers. Rodin also makes a minute analysis
of certain sculptures, such as Barye’s Les Fauves, Carpeaux’ La Danse and Rude’s
La Marseillaise and Le Marechal Ney. In discussing the last of these, he states

6 Odilon Redon
Ange/ique et Roger,J30 cm x 27 cm.

19

7 Auguste Rodin
Les Bourgeois de Calais, Bronze (plasterfrom 1886)

a particularly important point: ‘The movement of this statue is simply themetamorphosis of an initial attitude... into another... There you have thewhole secret of gesture interpreted by art.’
In fact Rodin claims to see the separate phases of an action in the single
sculptured figure, which the spectator must interpret according to the intentionsof the artist. ‘The maker of the statue compels, so to speak, the spectator tofollow the development of an action through a person. In the case which wehave just chosen, the eyes are bound to rise from the legs to the raised arm andas, in the course of their journey, they come across different parts of the statue
represented at successive moments, they experience the illusion of seeing the
movement draw to completion.’
Rodin has also analysed his own works. He has left technical descriptions of
the movement in L’Age d’airain (1877), Saint Jean-Baptiste and the Bourgeois
de Calais, which was begun in 1884 and finished in 1894. In the last work, there
is a kind of order which represents the varying degrees of heroism in the persons
represented. The arrangement of the figures leads us from Eustache de SaintPierre, past the figure with the key, to one man who is walking quickly andanother who is gripping his head, and finally to the one with his hand in frontof his eyes and the youth. It is interesting to recall that Rodin anticipated oneof the most important aspects of contemporary research into movement when
he arranged for the placing of this particular work. The ‘Burghers of Calais’
were to have been bolted, one after the other, directly on to the flags in front of
the Hotel de Ville at Calais, so that ‘the present inhabitants of Calais, who would
almost have rubbed shoulders with them, would have had a stronger sense of the
traditional solidarity which linked them to these heroes’. What Rodin describedto Paul Gsell as potentially ‘a powerful impression’ seems to us very close to thepresent goal of ‘spectator participation’.
Two of Rodin’s main preoccupations can be classed as ‘kinetic’: his desire
to interpret movements and his search for ‘the science of animating marble’ andbronze. Both of these qualify him to be classed as an innovator. For Rodin,‘movement is the transition from one attitude to another’ - a true metamorphosis.

• Intellectual and technical development arond 1860
The great events in the physical, biological and psychological sciences around theyear 1860 point to the importance of the ‘dynamic’ element at this crucial stage.
Darwin’s On the Origin of Species dates from 1859. Spencer’s First Principles, whichwere at the centre of Darwin’s theory of evolution, were to be published in thefollowing year. 1860 also saw the publication of Fechner’s Elemente der Pyschophysik, while R. H. Lotze, a follower of Leibnitz, composed his Mikrokosmus
between 1856 and 1864.
It should be noted that the physicists and philosophers who originated these
new theories were in general older than the artists whose work we have been
considering. Darwin was born in 1809, Spencer in 1820 and Lotze in 1817. We
may therefore decide in principle that the physicists and philosophers of thegeneration born around 1820 should be discussed in relation to the artistic
generation born twenty years afterwards. This conjunction can also be made20

in the case of Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, who was born in 1798
and exerted great influence in the 1860s through the mechanical and mathe¬
matical notions contained in Corns de Philosophie positive. Comte saw the his¬
torical development of mathematics in terms of a transition from concrete to
abstract, and held that the major principles of mechanics - equality of action
and reaction, inertia etc - were the result of observation. It therefore followed thata great number of the properties of movement which had at first been determinedby direct methods could be transformed into demonstrable theorems.
Mention has already been made of the physiologist Marey, who clearly
influenced the Impressionists and Post-impressionists by his teaching and hisscientific writings as well as by his photographic work which led to the develop¬
ment of cinematography. Marey’s La Machine animale and Du Mouvement dansles fonotions de la vie both contained a large number of statements which lentthemselves to partly scientific and partly artistic discussion on the subject of
movement. J. B. Pettigrew’s Animal locomotion also belongs to this frameworkof parallelism between physiology and artistic expression.
From a philosophical point of view, we can say that the years 1860-70 saw
a return to Kantianism after the rout of the Hegelian school in Germany. New
versions of vitalism and dynamism began to make their way.

21

Movement in the Post-impressionist era

It was in the years around 1890 that there began to be a genuine interaction
between works of art and scientific or intellectual preoccupations. The artists
born around 1860, who produced their first work of importance roughly between
1887 and 1894, were aware of the initial investigations of Theodule Ribot, who
had published an article on the psychological importance of movement in 1879,
and they also knew of the theories of David Sutter, who had classified 167
scientific principles specially for artists in an article published in the following
year. The thesis of Paul Souriau on the perception of movement, which was
written in Latin, dates from 1881. The same author’s Esthetique du mouvement
followed in 1889, which was also the year of Bergson’s Donnees immediates de laconscience. If we shift our emphasis to the study of colour, we find that this was
the period when Ogden Nicholas Rood’s work on ‘Chromatics’ and Chevreul’s
theories of colour contrast first began to exercise a perceptible influence on
painters. And this was also the stage at which the experiments of Muybridge andMarey, both of whom were born in 1830, reached their apogee.
The painters and sculptors who succeeded to the heritage of the Impressionists
continued their investigation of movement and took it one stage further. The
Impressionists had taken observation of nature - whether objects or humanbeings - as their point of departure. The next generation was to apply scientificmethod to the same fundamental problems.

• Objective movement - Seurat and the scientific study of colour
The art of Seurat bears a direct relation to scientific theory. But this relation is
not easy to define. As far as movement is concerned, the technical and scientificinfluences are apparent chiefly in the drawings: they can also be traced in Seurat’s
method of setting out theories of colour. The influence of photography - inparticular, the ‘chronophotographie’ of Marey - can clearly be sensed.
Seurat’s interest in movement increased towards the end of his life. At the
beginning of his career he tended to concentrate on a type of ‘fixed’ movement
which is perhaps akin to that of photography. Le Chahut, which dates from 1890,shows us the theme of the dance treated in such a way as to ‘paralyse’ the move¬
ment. ‘There remains only one movement,’ Germain Seligman suggests, ‘as if
the music had been suddenly interrupted and the dancers were waiting for the
next beat to put their feet back on the ground.’22

8 Georges Seurat

Le Chahut, 1890. 169 cm. x 139 cm.

Later in his life, Seurat made use of a new type of circular rhythm. ‘The
construction of Jeune femme se poudrant,’ writes the same critic, ‘comprises
circles and ellipses, which bind together the brightest and most important points
on the canvas. In Le Chahut the rhythms are on the surface, parallel to the canvas:
in Le Cirque there is movement in depth, and the characters fall with a circle.’
Andre Lhote has stated that ‘composition is the art of uniting in a coherent
mass of colour the contradictory elements which tend, in everyday life, toseparate one from another and become fragmented under the influence of lightand movement.’ He elaborates this point in relation to the ‘engineers of painting’- Brunelleschi, Uccello, Piero della Francesca. ‘In the pictures of these painters(to whom we must add Rubens, Tintoretto and several others who are lessaustere in appearance)... you feel, behind the pictorial subject, that something
secret and vastly important is going on: the rhythmic articulation of the parts.’
Lhote sees Seurat as the modern representative of this tradition, which hecontinues to describe in the following passage. ‘A carefully mounted mechanicalsystem allows its beating and rumbling to be sensed deep down below the rustlingof the surface. The spectator is unconsciously affected by this architecture inmotion which disturbs him without him being able to decipher the complex
rhythm. It is like the way in which the mechanics of breathing and blood cir¬
culation lie hidden behind the epidermis of every living form.’
But it was Seurat’s intensive exploitation of the theories of colour which hefound in the Impressionists that allowed him to develop a truly scientific useof movement. He responded to the Impressionist vision - with its vibration ofsmall strokes of colour and its objective forms of composition - as to a scientificand artistic wager. His main concern, which was stimulated by the reading ofcontemporary works of theory, lay in the attempt to convey light through chro¬matic means. The new technique which he finally evolved was that of ‘pointillisme’.
We may state with certainty that Seurat’s search for harmony between tonalvalues, cold or warm tints and ascending or descending lines was the result of hisneed to establish a new dynamism in the work of art. This generalized ‘vibrancy’is in fact the most characteristic mark of Post-impressionism. The technique or‘aesthetic’ which was Seurat’s special contribution conveys to perfection the way
in which the work moves from the registering of sensations to the creation - in acontrolled, conceptual manner - of the luminous image. We might say thatlinear directions, given a chromatic treatment and endowed with a concealed
emotional charge, served him as a point of departure in his search for new plastic
values. But it was the relationship between light and colour which provided thefoundation of his new technique.
Seurat’s method of working was as follows. After sketching the outline of his
picture, he applied local colour in large strokes of the brush as Corot had done.
Next he succeeded in obtaining a vibration of local colour by placing neighbouring
tints in juxtaposition and ‘breaking up’ the colour in the manner of Delacroix.
Next he added touches of ‘solar’ orange on the surfaces which were irradiatedwith light. Later he set to work with ‘warm’ and ‘cold’ colours, corresponding
to light and shade, and in this way was able to indicate the reflection of the colourof the sky in the shadows. The last two stages of the process involved the addition23

of small points of colour to indicate the reciprocal reflections of neighbouring
objects, as Rubens had done, and the final application of complementary ‘environ¬mental’ colours - green, purple, red, blue-green, yellow, ultramarine, violet,
greenish yellow, orange, cyanide blue.
This was how Seurat obtained his ‘contrast of tints’. The other factor whichmust be taken into account is his contrast of ‘tonal values’, which involved
making the brightest passages even brighter and the darkest even darker. This
tonal contrast also helped to control the contrast of tints. Once this theory ofcolour had been applied over the whole surface of the canvas, the result was theformation of a kind of chromatic movement, which dominated the other elementsof the picture.
Seurat’s ‘scientific’ procedure did not always win him the approval of con¬temporary critics. ‘Perhaps it would be right,’ wrote one of them, ‘to mention...
the unhappy Seurat with his science - in itself so sterile - of the decompositionof light and linear rhythms.’ The mention of linear rhythms recalls Seurat’s
graphic work, which was strikingly similar to the ‘Noirs’ of Redon, but strucka note of its own in the use of large numbers of lines in many directions. The
dynamic quality introduced by this use of line was in fact reproduced in thedevelopment of Seurat’s painting, which slowly evolved towards a new visionof movement.
The stages in this evolution can be sketched quite shortly. Like many of thepainters in his generation, Seurat began his career as a draughtsman influenced
by Ingres. His appreciation of movement was therefore academic. But his various
Casseurs de pierres of 1882 make us fully aware of a transformation in the thematicand plastic treatment of movement which is almost complete by the time of Un
dimanche apres-midi a la Grande-Jatte (1884-6). The various sketches, drawings
and versions of this work display a wealth of procedures and motifs which areentirely characteristic of Seurat’s ambiguous use of movement. These appear
once again in the Poseuses and especially in Parade, which dates from 1887-8.
They are accentuated even more strongly in his last masterpieces, Le Chahut(1889-90) and Le Cirque (1890-1). Yet the Chenal de Gravelines series, whichdates from 1890, reminds us that Seurat was fundamentally a painter in the
Impressionist tradition who gave the picture an objective type of vibration by his
scientific treatment of the surface.

• Paul Signac - Neo-impressionist theorist of movement
Seurat’s observation of movement in nature and his development of a fairly
rigid theory of movement were reflected in the work of several of his friends anddisciples. Paul Signac (1863-1935), who was the most fruitful successor to
Seurat’s tradition, responded not only to the scientific theories and chromatic
technique of his master, but also to the brand of decorative and dynamic ab¬
straction which was characteristic of his times and later became identified withthe style of ‘Art Nouveau’.
Signac’s portrait of Felix Feneon, which dates from 1890, deserves a lengthy
analysis from the point of view of movement. An astonishingly modern picture,it has been described in terms of ‘a rhythmic base of angles and measurements,24tones and tints’, Other pictures dating from the same year, such as the portraitof the artist’s mother, testify to similar concerns.
In his capacity as a theorist, Signac warns us that the ‘neo-impressionist’
painters, since they are ‘respectful of the permanent laws of art - rhythm,
measure and contrast - have been led to this particular technique by their desire
to achieve a maximium of luminosity, coloration and harmony, which they do
not believe it possible to attain by any other method of expression.’ Throughout
this account, Signac is clearly defending the method of animation and vibration
for its capacity to ‘give colour the strongest possible impact’ - the objective of
Delacroix and the Impressionists as well as the artists of his own generation.
But he realizes that the basic problem is one of adapting plastic effects of move¬
ment or vibration to a general or particular kinetic theme. So he criticizes
Delacroix in these terms: ‘The tragic effect of the Naufrage de don Juan is dueto the dominance of a deep glaucous green, darkened by lugubrious blacks. The
funeral note of a white, shining sinisterly amid this sombre scene, completes
this harmony of desolation... And yet Delacroix has not yet attained the fullpossibilities of colour impact and harmony.’
According to Signac, therefore, the Neo-impressionists were indebted to the
Impressionists for their palette and to Delacroix for their scientific and methodi¬
cal technique: they took the notion of optical mixture from both Delacroix and
the Impressionists. But Signac could also see a direct evolution in one of themost interesting aspects of painting - the creative gesture. Delacroix’ hatchingsgave way to the ‘comma-like or sweeping touches’ of Impressionism, and finallyto the Neo-impressionist system, where each touch was broken into separate
elements. He held that this ‘division did not necessarily imply touches in theform of a point'.
By this stage in the history of painting, plastic elements such as touch andmovement were beginning to supplant thematic elements to an increasing degree.
Signac saw the process quite clearly, and wrote of the ‘painters who are truly
painters’: ‘We are searching simply for beautiful lines and beautiful colours,with no concern for fashion, anecdote or literature.’ The literary men of theperiod did not see the problem in the same light. An interesting passage by
Aurier demonstrates this point with finality, while at the same time throwing
a sidelight upon the popular taste for real movement in late nineteenth-century
France. ‘In music and in painting the public seems even more avid for novelty.
My concierge used to have a musical picture. When the small clock, inset intoa belfry which you can just imagine, stood at midday, an ingenious carillon
hidden behind the canvas played ‘Ah! vous dirai-je, maman...’ It was very
amusing. All the visitors remarked on it without fail. But a month ago my con¬cierge, like everyone else, was bitten with the bug of modernism - artistic
modernism. He had his picture repainted by a pupil of M. Signac. He had themechanism of the carillon changed. Now the belfry rises up in a hail of small
multicolored blobs, and, when the clock is at midday, the new carillon plays the
Ride of the Valkyries. An impressionist picture with Wagnerian music - there
you have the summit of modernity in art.’25• Subjective movement - Van Gogh
There is a direct link between Odilon Redon, whom we have already considered
under the heading of subjective movement, and the major painters of the socalled ‘tragic’ generation, who were born around 1860. This link is evident intheir respective methods of treating the element of movement. Van Gogh andGauguin, in particular, interpret movement by an attempt to translate highly
subjective feelings, organic internal forces, the pulse and breathing of the in¬dividual, the biological rhythms and the life-force. This subjective attitude
distinguishes them from the post-impressionist painters with their objective andscientific concerns.
Van Gogh, the most tormented painter of his generation, has left an abundantcorrespondence which enables us to disentangle the element of‘subjective’ move¬
ment which is so apparent in his work. It appears first and foremost in graphic
and gestural terms (line and touch), but it is also evident in his attention tocolour. These two features contribute greatly towards the kind of cosmic syn¬thesis which he was approaching towards the end of his life.
If we were not aware of the curious features of Van Gogh’s personality andof his art, we would be tempted to take the following extract from a letter to his
sister as the judgement of a painter serenely preoccupied with plastic problems.
‘What strikes me here, and what makes painting here so attractive to me, is thetransparency of the air: .. .you can distinguish the colour of things at an hour’s
distance away... line remains firm up to a very great distance, and form remains
recognizable. It gives an idea of sky and spaciousness.’ In fact, Van Gogh had
been tormented from the beginning of his career by violent activity among men
and movement in nature. He remarks in an early letter to his brother Theo:‘Here is a sketch of the potato market at Noordwal - the teeming movement ofworkmen and their wives, with the baskets being unloaded from the barge,
presents a very fine spectacle. Those are the motifs that I would dearly like topaint or draw. The life and movement of such a scene, and the type of people
in that particular world.’ In another letter to his brother, he writes: ‘Here isanother scribble of the dunes. There were some little bushes there whose leaves- white on one side and dark green on the other - shone and were in continual
movement.’ Once again: ‘The waves followed one another at such a short intervalthat each was hustling the other; the collision of these masses of water produced
a kind of foam like moving sand, which covered the sea like a veil. Still, it wasin a furious bustle... when you looked at it for a long time, all the more impres¬sive because of the small amount of noise which it made.’
Van Gogh was particularly interested in the problem of gesture. ‘Somedraughtsmen,’ he believed, ‘work with a nervous hand, so that their techniqueacquires so to speak the characteristic resonance of a violin - artists like Lemud,
Daumier and Lan^on - whilst others such as Gavarni and Bodmer make you
think of a piano, and Millet of a solemn organ.’ The year after he had made thisremark, Van Gogh wrote of the movement of machines, referring to the work of
Rappard, who had ‘brought into his drawing all kinds of machines in action,a subject which virtually no one would dare to venture upon, as it is outside thefield in which we are used to discovering what are generally known as picturesquesubjects’. At the same date, he made a very interesting attempt to analyse the269 Vincent Van Gogh
La Nuit etoilee, 1889

movement in his own Arracheurs depommes de terre: ‘I made a careful study of it,with that express intention, and I drew a man sinking his fork into the ground(first movement), another tearing out the plant (second movement), the shapeof a woman in the same attitude and finally a third figure of a men tipping thepotatoes into the basket.’
Here Van Gogh’s attitude is primarily objective. But from 1885 a highly
subjective attitude to movement began to dominate his work. He wrote that headmired Delacroix for the way in which he ‘made you aware of the life of things,
of expression and movement, to the point of finding himself all at once out of
the sphere of colour, and of paying no attention to colour.’ And he also worked
towards an expression of movement through the artist’s personal touch. ‘I should
say that nowadays I am trying to discover a kind of brush-work which does not
involve dots or anything else - just variations of touch.’ Later he expanded on
this teme: ‘what a curious thing touch - the stroke of the brush - is! In the open
air, exposed to wind, sun and people’s curiosity, you work away according to
your capacity, furiously filling up your canvas. And yet you capture what is trueand essential - that is the most difficult thing. When you take the study up again
after a time, and arrange your brushstrokes to fit the objects, it certainly becomes
more harmonious and agreeable to look at, and you add to it whatever you may
have in the way of smiles and serenity.’

27

Van Gogh’s transition from graphic movement to generalized or ‘cosmic5,
movement takes place in parallel stages to his almost pathological intensificationof colour. It was at Nuenen, probably in April 1885, that he first became awareof the theory of complementary colours and the law of simultaneous contrast.
He became a colourist during his period in Paris, developing a technical range
which corresponded to a complete scale of violent emotions. In his view, thework of the Impressionists had hardly gone beyond Delacroix and Puvis deChavannes in the treatment of colour. His own treatment was to be entirely
different, as he emphasizes in the following passage: ‘In my picture, Cafe de nuit,
I tried to express the fact that the cafe is a place where you can ruin yourself,
become mad or commit crimes. Through contrasts of tender pink and blood red,or the red that you find in the lees of wine, of soft Veronese and Louis XV greensand yellowish or hard blue greens - all in an atmosphere of pale sulphur, likea furnace in the underworld - I tried to express what you might call the powerof darkness in a loaded trap. All this under an appearance of Japanese gaiety anda bonhomie like that of the Tartarin.’
Van Gogh was tempted to move in the direction of pure abstraction, butshowed an understandable reluctance. ‘Aurier’s article would bring me en¬couragement,’ he explained, ‘if I dared to let myself go, and take the great riskof moving out of reality and using colour to make a kind of music of all things,
as with some of Monticelli’s works. But truth is so dear to me, as is the search to
make true, and I believe that in the last resort I would rather remain a shoemakerthan become a musician of colour. In all events, the attempt to remain true isperhaps a remedy for fighting the illness which still continues to trouble me.’Yet, despite this statement, and despite his violent use of colour, Van Goghaimed to discover a kind of serenity which was connected in his mind with theideal of music. He wrote to his sisters: ‘But in playing with all these colours you
manage to create a calm, a harmony. And something happens which is analogous
to what happens in the music of Wagner, which is no less intimate for being
played by a large orchestra.’Van Gogh’s final period involved an attempt to express in a complex andpersonal manner subjects that were ordinary and even banal. In addition to his
Cafe de nuit, there are a large number of pictures from the years 1888-90 which
demonstrate the different degrees of movement - and different types of defor¬
mation - that Van Gogh exploited. A study of cypress trees which he sent to
Aurier was accompanied by the following note: ‘The study which I have done
specially for you represents a group of them at the corner of a wheat field on asummer’s day - around the season of the Mistral. You therefore get the accentof a particular kind of black enveloped in the blue that moves about in the open
air, circulating, and to provide a contrast to the black accent, the vermilion of
the poppies.’ From Arles to Saint-Remy and Auvers, Van Gogh’s ‘cosmic’ styledeveloped towards a final crescendo. ‘First of all the twinkling stars vibrated,but remained motionless in space, then all the celestial globes were united into
one series of movements. At Auvers-sur-Oise, firmament and planets both
disappeared, but the mighty breath which gives life to all things and in which all
is bound up, remained.’28• Gauguin - the arabesque
Several of the quarrels which have arisen in the course of art history have apositive interest which transcends their anecdotal value, in the sense that they
are concerned with particular plastic problems of the first importance. Gauguin,the other protagonist of the ‘tragic generation’, was involved in two of these.
First of all, he had a quarrel with Van Gogh which was essentially that of two
draughtsmen and colourists holding very different conceptions of the role of art.
We read in one of Gauguin’s letters to Emile Bernard that Van Gogh ‘admires
Daumier, Daubigny, Ziem and the elder Rousseau, all artists whom I cannot
stand. By contrast he detests Ingres, Raphael, Degas, all of whom I admire;...
He is a romantic while I am more inclined towards the primitive. As regards
colour, he looks for chance events in the pigment, as you get in Monticelli,
while I detest a botched-up facture.’’The second quarrel which Gauguin embarked upon was with Emile Bernard,
his correspondent in the letter which has just been quoted. In this case, thedifference between the two artists lay essentially in their different interpretationsof movement. Gauguin’s characteristic contribution to the liberation of ‘sub¬jective’ movement lay in his use of the arabesque. The qualities of line which heobserved first of all in nature, then in Maori women and in primitive art, were
to become essential, and indeed almost autonomous elements in his painting.
They held both a sensual and a symbolic significance.
Victor Segalen, Gauguin’s friend and shrewd critic, writes on this subject:‘From the shoulder to the finger-tips, the Maori woman traces, whether inmotion or bending, a continuous line.’ He continues: ‘The whole leg is anothermoving spindle; motionless, the legs are two powerful columns... The smallof the back is cleanly cut, drawn for action, for the rhythms of dance or pleasure.’
Gauguin’s remarkable sensitivity to nuances of rhythm, whether in moving or
motionless objects, is demonstrated in the following passage from a letter which
he sent to Andre Fontainas in 1899, during his stay in Tahiti: ‘Animal figures ofa statuesque rigidity: an indefinable trace of the ancient, the august and thereligious in the rhythm of their gestures, in their rare immobility. In their
dreaming eyes, the troubled surface of an unfathomable enigma.’
Is Gauguin’s ‘world of rhythm’ dynamic or static, when it comes to the point?
As far as line, contour and the discreteness of forms are concerned, he was
doubtless aiming for life and movement. But we must remember that he wasintimately aware of the dialectic between life and death, and tried to express thisin his art. His aim was to create a form of art which was complete or ‘synthetic’;
he had no interest in ‘piecemeal’ presentation. Therefore he made extensive useof linear rhythms and arabesques, even of the classic diagonal, to emphasize
the quality of continuity.
In his use of colour, Gauguin was far from insensitive to the possibilities
of colour vibration, which he identified with the internal forces of nature. In a
letter to Fontainas, he exclaimed: ‘Think of the musical role which colour will
be playing in modern painting from now on. Colour, which is vibration justlike music, is capable of attaining what is most general and, in its origins, mostvague in nature: its internal force.’ Hence his counsel to Serusier that he should
paint colours as he saw them and not as they were - a piece of advice that resulted

29

in the famous Talisman which Serusier painted in Gauguin’s company andwhich was to inspire the research of the Nabis.
A detailed study of the evolution of the use of movement in Gauguin’s work
would have to take into account both the way in which he isolated this elementby his use of the arabesque, the contour and the arrangement of figures in space,and his expressionist treatment of colour, which in fact added to this isolation
by cancelling the illusion of three-dimensional space. In spite of the degree towhich he made use of procedures from other periods and other civilizations, his
use of the arabesque was original and important. We can concur with the opinion
which Gauguin himself expressed a few days before his death in a letter toCharles Morice: ‘So I can say: no one has taught me anything; it is true that
I know very little! But I would rather have this small amount which is my own.
And who can say whether it will not be exploited by others and become something
considerable? How many centuries it has taken to create an appearance of move¬
ment!’• Ensor - Crowds in movement: Munch - the expressionist touch
The artists of the post-impressionist generation who went to the furthest extreme
in their expression of subjective movement were not Van Gogh and Gauguin,but their contemporaries Ensor, Munch, Nolde and Jawlensky, who can be
regarded as the first Expressionists. Their work was to lead them outside theconfines of rationality towards an art of the imaginary and the transcendent.
James Ensor, who was born in 1860, completed his work as an innovator in the‘brief period of thirteen years between his nineteenth and his thirty-second year’.
His art is a mixture of the social and the macabre. His final masterpiece, VEntree
du Christ a Bruxelles, combines elements of the realistic and the imaginary in an
expression of crowd movement which is accentuated by the jarring interplay ofcolours. His drawing, Les Cuirassiers a Waterloo (1891), is a melee of graphic
movements, in which he took an evident pride. As it has been suggested: ‘Ensor
has mastered the art of bringing crowds in movement on to the stage. He knows,
without insisting on the point, how to give them an epic character: he makes useof the magic of his art to endow their to-and-fro movements with meaning andindeed with cosmic implications.’ Engravings like his Bataille des eperons d’or
(1895), or his Bains at Ostend (1899), demonstrate many other aspects of theirony and caricature in his graphic treatment of crowd movement.
It may, however, be Ensor’s treatment of nature and the elements that con¬stitutes his most important achievement in the expression of subjective movement.
In pictures like Le Christ apaisant la tempete (1891), he shows himself to be oneof the very first artists to interpret movement through a distinctively expressionist
use of colour and touch.
The expressionist universe of Edward Munch began to take shape in the years
1889-90. As in the case of Ensor, his new method of observation and expression
first became perceptible in his treatment of crowd movements, in such pictures
as Bande militaire dans la rue Karl-Johan a Oslo. Munch returned to this themewith a new note of anguish in Soiree de printemps dans la rue Karl-Johan a Oslo(1892), where the dominant emotional tone was expressed both in the treatment30

of the faces and in the range of colours used. This note of anguish was to become
more and more common in later years - in his graphic work, for example, where
the line of the engraver and the lithographer is used to express the uneasiness ofthe soul. Munch’s distinctive use of line and movement was to have considerable
influence on the various Central European painters who were later to form theSecession, Die Briicke and Blaue Reiter groups.
Munch’s most ambitious project was an incomplete ‘Frieze of Life’ which
involved a synthesis of different types of movement - including tensions
produced by the use of gesture, dynamic treatment of contour and symbolic
elements drawn from nature and humanity. The various pictures which are held
to belong to this cycle - some of which were assigned to it by the artist at a laterstage - represent the joys and trials of the individual, as Munch himself ex¬pressed it. The frieze was therefore conceived as a series of decorative paintings
which, in conjunction, gave an impression of the continuity of life, especiallyas they were all crossed by a continuous line beyond which the image of an
eternally moving sea was presented. For Munch the sea possessed a particularsymbolic value as the element which unites all manifestations and phases of life.
Munch also evoked the eternal forces of nature in a cycle of paintings which
he completed on walls within the University of Oslo. Here he did in fact achieve
the ideal which he had held before him throughout his years of maturity: thatof creating a synthesis in cyclic form on a monumental scale, and so exorcising
the demon.
As a contemporary of the Symbolists in literature, Munch was constantly
preoccupied with the movements of the inner life. His comments on the art ofhis times remind us of Plato’s famous allegory. ‘In realism, it was the facade
which counted, in Impressionism the character. Now it is shadow and move¬
ment ... the shadows which a prisoner sees in his cell, the trailing shadowswhich disappear and return again, separating softly and uniting once again likefans, inclining, bending, dividing.’ In his use of movement, he was the decisive
influence upon the early Expressionists of the turn of the century. This was
not only a question of his plastic techniques - the use of waving lines and thejuxtaposition of symbolic colours - but also a matter of content. For Munch
had succeeded in imbuing his work with the fruits of profound psychologicalexperience.

• The primitive dynamism of Nolde - Jawlensky and the developmentof a theme
Emil Nolde, who was born in 1867, belongs strictly speaking to the ‘tragic
generation’. But he completed his first oil painting in 1896, and his most in¬teresting works from the point of view of movement came as late as 1910, in the
post-Fauvist period. In spite of this, he belongs directly after Munch in theessentially nineteenth-century tradition of the Expressionists. He is the great
solitary of German Expressionism, symbolizing the reaction against materialism
and positivism which began around 1890.
In Nolde’s art, there is a subtle marriage between dynamic elements thatderive from primitive art and the mythical and dionysiac outpourings which31sometimes tempted him into the realm of the grotesque. Already in 1901, he wasshowing a taste for this frenzied type of movement in a picture entitled Before
the dawn, which involved two flying monsters. He took up similar themes in a
few graphic works which date from the same period - when he was in sympathy
with the Briicke of Dresden, but did not formally belong to the group. But it wasin 1909-13 that he gave the best demonstrations of expressionist techniqueapplied to kinetic themes. Throughout his long life, Nolde maintained thisinterest in the portrayal of ecstatic movement which evidently drew its strengthfrom his unconscious. As late as 1940, he painted three canvases which recalled
the themes of his earlier years.
Of the remaining painters who belonged at one stage to the Expressionist
movement, Jawlensky and Kandinsky were born in 1864 and 1866 respectively,
and, like Nolde, joined the movement at a relatively late stage. Kandinsky reallybelongs to the next generation, and his important work as an artist and a theo¬
retician will be discussed in its relation to the development of non-figurative art
around 1910. Jawlensky, who brings in a connection with the Blaue Reiter group,
is relevant here because of his custom of painting a series of pictures on the same
theme, whether portraits or landscapes, in a strict order. This was his way ofworking over a long period of years. In addition to his subjectivization of colour,
Jawlensky was directly concerned with expressing ‘religious sentiment throughthe human face’. He claimed that he subordinated the act of painting to ‘what
one feels in the soul’, and so managed to reconstitute ‘by form and colour what¬ever of the sacred’ there was in him. What he created was therefore the result ofa genuine ‘movement of the soul’. Before his time Jawlensky had establisheda permutational art of human suffering.

• Hodler - parallelism
German Expressionism belongs properly speaking to the maturity of the gener¬
ation of artists born around 1880. The Fauve painters, with the exception of
Matisse, who was born in 1869, also belong to this generation. A painter froma stifle arlier date who shows affinities with both Expressionism and Art Nouveau
is Ferdinand Hodler, whose work is particularly interesting from the pointof view of movement.
1890 is a significant date in Hodler’s career, since it was at this stage that hepainted Night, the first of his works to incorporate his key notion of parallelism
in a clear form. By parallelism, Hodler meant a search for unity through therepetition of similar component parts. The fundamental plastic problems which
he had to solve were those of the order, succession and sequence of these parts.
Hodler’s art has been described in terms of a dialectical relationship between
the will of the artist, his personal and to a great extent arhythmic dynamism,
and the rhythmic movement implied in his ‘series’. It is the relationship between
the parts and the unity of the series that gives rise to the expressive movement.
Swellings in the form of the human body, different types of gesture and pan¬tomime can be used to stress this movement, which appears merely superficial
when it has been followed to the finish, since the psychological agitation of theperson depicted seems to come to an end at the same time.

32

10 Ferdinand Hodler
Night, 1890. 116 cm. x 299 cm.

In Eurythmie (1894-5), the theme - as the title suggests - is one of measured
movement, conveyed by means of a group of people. Movement therefore
becomes an important element in the formation of the series. In Day (1899-1900),
the series is made up of a flawless succession of individual movements, whichbind together and bring to the fore the psychological content of the movementin each episode.
On the subject of ‘parallelism’ itself, which may be a theory deriving fromnature or alternatively may have arisen from a study of the Egyptian and As¬
syrian collections in the Louvre, Hodler has left these remarks: ‘the parallelismof the emotions is translated on an external level into a formal (or plastic) paral¬
lelism’. Here we have the key to several of his works which clearly reveal a unityof emotional states. Again, in specific relation to the ‘artist’s mission’, he explainsthat the eye should practise sensitivity to ‘the whole rhythm of forms which areproduced by man’s movement, attitudes and gestures’. At the same time, theartist should take note of ‘the grouping of figures in the relationships of everyday
life.’ ‘The unpractised eye is slower to catch the movement of things,’ he claims.
And he goes on to underline the importance of drawing: in his view, the draughts¬
man’s line alone ‘expresses infinity’ and ‘man’s contour is modified according to
the movement of the body and is in itself an element of beauty’.
Hodler is entirely conscious of the importance of contour in Expressionism
and Art Nouveau. ‘Today contour is made to play a fine role,’ he admits, ‘graphic
line is stressed and, as a result of this very fact, it becomes ornamental.’ He also
has a lucid view of the possible isolation of the formal elements of the future’.
‘Colour has a penetrating and musical charm which is independent of form,’ hesuggests, ‘and when it is associated with form, it comes across even more strongly
and brings out the rhythms which arise from variety and repetition.’ As the lastsentence bears witness, Hodler’s aim was to create a type of work in which
different types of movement combined in a new order: the work was to testify
to this order by the ‘idea of wholeness’ to which it gave rise.

• Art Nouveau - Loie Fuller and her influence on artists - Klimt
The expression of movement by graphic methods clearly derives from the
British tradition of Blake, Burne-Jones and William Morris, represented in thisperiod chiefly by Aubrey Beardsley and Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Where33

11 Kolo Moser
La Danseuse Loie Fuller, Sketch for aposterBlake’s use of line had been devoted to largely symbolic ends, that of Beardsley
and Mackintosh was decorative and ornamental. Besides these two British
artists, the most characteristic exponents of Art Nouveau were the artists from
Holland and Belgium, like Van de Velde, Khnopff and Toorop. But at the sametime in France the Nabis - Maurice Denis, Paul Serusier, Paul Ranson and later
Bonnard and Vuillard - in addition to Maillol, the painter of La Vague, and ofcourse Toulouse-Lautrec - were all developing the possibilities of line in move¬
ment and the arabesque. In L. F. Johnson’s terms, ‘Lautrec created characterswith movement directly in view. He made use of the divergence between forms
and lines, the angular area cut out by the decollete and the tensions arising fromjuxtapositions of angles and forms. In his case the movement inheres in theenergy of shapes and lines and tones, and in the tensions among them, rather
than in the action of the figure represented.’
The movements of choreography, and in particular the arrival at the Folies
Bergeres of the American dancer Loie Fuller, which took place in 1892, had
had a profound effect upon the imagination of artists. Loie Fuller’s dance ofveils or ‘serpentine dance’ was carried out with long swathes of material, whichwere lit by groups of coloured lights as they swirled around her head. Anatole
France claimed that she ‘gave us back the lost marvels of Greek mime, the artof these movements at once voluptuous and mystical which interpret the phe¬nomena of nature and the metamorphoses of beings’. Loie Fuller herself has left
some interesting comments on the relationship between colour, light and move¬
ment. She writes: ‘In the peaceful atmosphere of a greenhouse with green panes,
we make entirely different movements from those which we would make in agreenhouse with red, yellow or blue panes. But we give no attention to thiscorrelation between movements and their causes. These are nonetheless thethings which must be watched when you are dancing to the accompaniment oflight and music in harmony. Light, colour, movement, and music. Observation,
intuition and finally comprehension.’
Some of Klimt’s work was also conceived in terms of the decorative dynamismof Art Nouveau. But his aim was to go much further in an attempt to divide
the composition into arabesques. In origin his art was directed against repre¬
sentational values, tending towards an increasing suppleness in its contours. But
he was undecided in his style between 1880 and 1890, using pastels like Degas,
imprecise borders like Carriere and graphic elements that recalled Khnopff andToorop - as well an impressionist sense of colour and a type of composition
deriving from Puvis de Chavannes.
Shortly after 1890, he began to move towards a style which combined richornament with the rhythmic interplay of female forms. As Max Eisler has put it,‘Ornament absorbs even the structure of the surface and becomes the vehicle ofa moving rhythm... and yet the monumental art of Klimt looks beyond, andseeks to suppress, the decorative; it seeks to establish the complete dominanceof a more elaborate rhythm which manifests itself in two “forms” - that of themonumental decor, which is rhythmic and flat, and that of the monumental
painting, which is rhythmic and spatial.’ If we can say that Klimt’s aim was togive the plastic arts a musical quality through the use of ornament, then we canunderstand readily why one of his major preoccupations was time and movement.

34

• Architecture and the minor arts - Sculpture: Von Hildebrand,
Bourdelle, Maillol
References to movement in the minor branches of Art Nouveau are very numer¬
ous. In the Munich Werkstatten, artists like Hermann Obrist, Hans Schmithals
and August Endell succeeded in realizing graphic projects of an astonishingcomplexity as well as ornaments in relief, embroideries and other works. In
France, the so-called Nancy school, represented by Emile Galle and Louis
Majorelle, put the accent upon floral ornament. But this was a ‘logical’ ornament,
based on structures which had been studied from a botanical point of view andapplied with due consideration of function. At the same time in Paris, a group ofartists formed around Bing. Its principal members were Gaillard, Georges deFaure and Hector Guimard.
In England the draughtsman Walter Crane acknowledged the influence ofBlake’s ‘linear expressive rhythm’. ‘[Line] does not require us to stop andthink,’ he wrote, but to ‘appreciate the rhythmic silent music which the moreformalized and abstract decorative design may contain, quite apart from theforms it actually represents.’ In its vital, organic aspect, line is for Crane animage of ‘growth’, and undulating line - which he prefers above all else - is not
simply capable of suggesting movement to a fine degree, but also of conveying
direction and force.
It is extremely difficult to give logical, geographical and historical definitions
for the sculpture associated with Art Nouveau. Adolf von Hildebrand can be
regarded as a precursor of the style, however, and his book Das Problem derForm in der bildenden Kunst merits close consideration. Von Hildebrand makes
a distinction between ‘optical representation’ and ‘representation of movement’.
He describes the latter as ‘the sculptor’s “spiritual” substance, which comes to
him in part directly from the movement of the eye, and in part from opticalimpressions. The sculptor then carries them into effect manually in a material
substance which, in its turn, provokes an optical impression and at the same time
gives unity to the image.’ At another point, von Hildebrand suggests that: ‘Our
comprehension of space depends on a movement of our field of vision executedin depth.’
Von Hildebrand’s conclusion from these observations is that it is very difficult
to determine the difference between nature in movement and in repose. In bothcases the life of the form depends upon an effectively managed representation of
movement. As a result the representation of actual mobility would be a factor
not of perception but of representation in the mind.
These ‘representations of movement’ must be managed differently according
to whether the sculptor is working with plaster or stone. In the case of stone,
the representation of the form is transmuted into real representation of movement,
whilst in modelling the sculptor shows us representations of movement at thestart, but has to wait until the process is complete before the optical effect can betruly appreciated. Von Hildebrand mentions the art of Michelangelo as an
example of the identity of representation in the mind and representation pureand simple.
The sculptor Emile-Antoine Bourdelle is less directly associated with the
movement of Art Nouveau. He took his inspiration from ancient Greek art,35

in particular from the work which he saw at Aegina and Olympia. His own
work is dominated by contained force and passionate elan. ‘It is the elan,’ hewrites, ‘that is the supreme law. Go on your way, whoever you are. Live, go
on your way, hurry past. All is in turmoil, all is in a process of becoming, allis in a whirl. You are just one more whirl.’ But he pays tribute to the timelessquality of Greek art. ‘Austere Olympia... Nothing in all the concrete universe
measures up to your rhythms.’ It is not surprising that he saw a modern equivalent
to these ‘rhythms’ in the dancing of Isadora Duncan and the ‘savage liberty of
movement’ which he found in Nijinsky.
At the start of his career, nonetheless, Bourdelle was a ‘dynamic’ sculptor in
the tradition of Rodin. His astonishing monument to the Defenseurs de 1870-71
at Montauban, which was completed between 1893 and 1902, displays an almost
abstract treatment of masses and lines of force. This is an expressionistic stylein which movement plays a fundamental role. Yet it becomes increasingly
stylized until, in Heracles archer (1907-10), the final point is reached. The various
versions of this sculpture suggest that Bourdelle’s free treatment of masses has
been replaced by a system of unequal tensions. The sculptor has become a‘constructor’ or ‘sculptor-architect’.
At first sight Maillol (1861-1944) seems to be concerned simply with classicaland sensual harmonies of form. But his work in the last years of the nineteenth
century suggests a more dynamic vision of art. In his paintings he took great
pains to render the movement of the waves in a convincing manner. In his
sculptures also, there are inflections of the arms and feet, effects of light dis¬equilibrium and forward projection, which are lively and dynamic in feeling.
In a sense the influence of Rodin in sculpture and Cezanne in painting persistsin the work of the tragic generation. At the same time there are two distinctive
types of synthesis between objective or scientific movement and subjective or
expressive movement that arise at this stage. The first is Art Nouveau, with its
tendency towards the abstraction of line. The second, which is no less of asynthesis, derives more directly from Cezanne and the previous generation. It
is characterized particularly by a dynamic treatment of volumes and an ab¬
straction of forms, colours and their vibrations in the Impressionist tradition.
Cezanne wrote to Emile Bernard on 15 April 1904: ‘Treat nature in terms of thecylinder, the sphere, the cone, all in perspective, (so that) each side of an object
or plane, is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon givethe breadth, or if you like a section of nature, or if you prefer it, the breadth of thespectacle which the Pater Omnipotens Aeterne Deus spreads out before our eyes.
Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. Now nature, for us men, is morein depth than on the surface: hence the necessity of introducing into our lightvibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient quantity of bluenessto let us feel the air.’36

3 Movement in the arts around 1910

Perhaps the most potentially fruitful period in the whole history of modern
art was the space of a few years around 1910. Yet, partly because of the large
number of different currents which combine at this stage, our distinction between
objective and subjective movement ceases to hold good. This does not mean thatit must be abandoned completely. The Cubists, for example, belong on thewhole to the category of objective movement. And it can be seen in quite anumber of cases that groups of artists who are opposed to one another on atheoretical level do in fact share common procedures for the representation of
movement.

• The Cubists - Picasso, Braque, Juan Gris
Cubism, which derived from the work of Cezanne and was intended to be thevery opposite of Impressionism, took as its basis an imaginary movement aroundthe object. This later became stylized, and fixed in an overall decorative scheme.
The subject was ‘essentialized’ through a combination of multiple views, andthe resultant impression was one of ‘static movement’ or stable rhythm. In spiteof the fact that Cubism involved a secondary intellectual process, we shouldclass it with ‘objective’ movement, since the visual observation always represented
the first stage.
In the early stages of Cubism, movement as a theme also continued to play animportant part. Numerous plastic procedures involving the use of line, colourand composition were exploited. One of the most original of these was thedislocation of the axes of the picture: another was the use of flat areas of colour
in such a way as to create effects of vibration. The Futurist system of ‘lines offorce’ finds a direct parallel in the linear networks of cubist compositions.
It is worthwhile recalling, in connection with the graphic dynamism whichcharacterizes the origins of Cubism, that Picasso made use in his Demoiselles
d’Avignon of flat negro masks with the facial planes picked out by stripes andhatching rather than by implied relief. Perhaps this was the dynamic element
which Apollinaire referred to when he wrote:‘We hear from Montrouge‘On apprend de Montrougethat friend Picasso
que Vami Picasso
is making a picture which moves
fait un tableau qui bouge
just like this cradle.’
ainsi que ce berceau.’

37

The most important characteristic of Cubism as far as movement is concerned
was, however, the abandonment of the unique viewpoint. Picasso the sculptor
has left a bronze Tete which is enlivened by an emphatic turning movement: thespectator is obliged to look at it from all angles before he can gain a complete
idea of it. And this effort makes him see a good many more details than he wouldin the ordinary conditions of vision. This strong accentuation of detail is alsoa feature of the work of Juan Gris, who came to Cubism at a later stage. Gris
was also concerned with the problem of total or ‘synthetic’ organization of
distinct elements in a single image.
It is interesting to look at the opinions of some of the more intelligent paintersand critics on the subject of movement and time in the work of the Cubists.
In 1910 Allard made this judgement: ‘the very antithesis of Impressionism,(Cubism is) an art which does not concern itself with the occasional cosmic
episode, but offers to the intelligence of the spectator in their pictorial fullness
the essential elements of a synthesis situated in the field of duration.’ Twocubist painters, Gleizes and Metzinger, were ready to write of Cezanne: ‘Heteaches us to dominate the universal dynamism. He reveals to us the modifications
inflicted on one another by supposedly inanimate objects... He prophesies thatthe study of primordial volumes will open up vistas beyond our dreams. His
body of work, which forms a homogeneous block, moves under our glance,
contracts, becomes drawn out or takes fire - proving irrefutably that painting is
not - or is no longer - the art of imitating an object by lines and colours, but ofgiving our instinct plastic awareness.’
It was in fact Metzinger who first recognized free movement around the object
as one of the innovations of Cubism. ‘Cezanne,’ he explained, ‘shows us living
forms in the reality of light. Picasso supplies a material account of their reallife in the mind, he brings into being a free, mobile perspective... To visible
perceptions he adds tactile perceptions.’ Again Metzinger writes of Braque: ‘When
he paints a face or a fruit, the total image radiates in time; the picture is no longer
a lifeless section of competing masses.’
We have seen that several of the protagonists of Cubism took as their pointof departure an acute sense of ‘objective’ movement. They were aware from thestart of the need to render this in terms of multiple views which followed aprecise itinerary around the object. But although they were aware of this need,
they continued to work towards a single image, or occasionally an analysis ofdifferent views which remained separate. Eventually the original sense of theartist’s movement around the object disappeared altogether from their work, atleast as far as the spectator was concerned.
The part which movement plays in the work of Picasso is largely determinedby the character of his earlier paintings. The Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907),
Le Nu a la draperie (1907) and Trois femmes (1908) depend for their animationmuch more on the attitudes of the figures and the way in which they fit into thecomposition than on any challenge to the spectator to make an imaginary jour¬ney around the object which is represented. Elements that recall the work ofCezanne become more and more noticeable in Picasso’s pictures after the Horta
and Cadaques period. But even so this dynamic quality inherent in the figures isnever completely eliminated from Picasso’s work. It appears in certain of the38

cubist pictures, and is even reflected in the still lifes, especially in cases where
elements of collage are introduced. It is in fact a kind of expressionist movement
which reappears in a different form at every stage in Picasso’s subsequent career.
In the work of Braque, this dynamic quality is entirely a matter of visual andatmospheric effects. Le Grand Nn (1908) already has a highly ordered architec¬
tural movement, despite its mixture of techniques, its curving contours and its
almost expressionistic finish. La Maison a I’Estaque, which dates from the same
year, and Pay sage de I’Estaque are both animated by the ordering breath ofnature, whilst the works which date from 1909-11 are permeated by the move¬
ment of light. Braque’s collages - more so than Picasso’s - follow musicalrhythms which transcend the object that is represented, whether the theme of
the work is musical or not.
The dynamic elements in the work of Juan Gris have already been mentioned
in passing. Gris’ Portrait de Picasso (1911-12) is dominated by an analytic
treatment of movement, often involving diagonals. His still lifes in the KrollerMiiller Museum, which date from 1912-13, are masterpieces of this particular
style. On the other hand, the fact that Gris introduces real objects into his works- such as the fragment of mirror in Le Lavabo (1912) - sets him apart from
Braque and Picasso, who undertook similar experiments but did not introduce
this hard touch of realism.

• Leger: Dynamism of modern life
Fernand Leger shows little interest in the possibilities of unifying different viewsof his models in a single image. He makes use of the range of distinct points ofview for the specific purpose of acquiring greater freedom in his manipulationof pictorial forms. His constant theme is the dynamism of modern life, expressed
particularly in new methods of transport such as the locomotive.

12 Fernand Leger
Skating-rink, 1922.
Stage-set for Swedish Ballet of Rolf
de Mare39Leger himself has left an interesting description of the procedure by which
he placed graphic and chromatic elements in dialectical opposition and so createda movement or a form of mobility. ‘Concentrate your curves with the greatest
possible degree of variety that is compatible with their remaining united; framethem by bringing them into relation with the hard, dry surfaces of houses, deadsurfaces, which will take on mobility by virtue of the fact that they are coloured
in a way that is contrary to the central mass, and contrast with forms that arealive... ’In his Fumees sur les toits, Leger uses the mobile element of smoke to animate
an urban landscape in his very personal manner. But his Nus dans la foret(1909-11) reveals a more characteristic use of movement. Frequently his solution
to the problem on the purely plastic plane involves the introduction of a seriesof short, energetic diagonals to consolidate the composition.
It was in 1917 that Leger began to take particular notice of the forms ofmachine civilization, and to introduce them into his work in a series of paintings
which suggested a synthesis between the cubist dynamic and the theme of
movement as it appeared in the work of the Futurists. A decisive step came in1920, when he began to employ real movement in a number of different ways.
He designed the sets for two ballets, La Patinoire (1921) to music by Honegger
and La Fin du Monde (1922) to music by Milhaud. Both of these, which were
performed by the Swedish Ballet of Rolf de Mare, incorporated elements of real
movement in their decor. But Leger’s most interesting departure was in therealm of the cinema. ‘I made the Ballet mecanique with Murphy in 1923-4,’ helater recalled. ‘The true subject of this film is the object and it is this that I have
set in rhythm and movement... A straw hat, the moment it starts to move - well,it becomes even more interesting. Between the principle and the form, there is an
abstract element.’ Leger also wrote: ‘The Ballet mecanique represents an ex¬
periment into the value of the object in itself, both fixed and mobile. It is ananti-romantic work.’
Leger’s predilection for movement is carried over into his work in more
traditional fields. ‘For me,’ he claimed, ‘a picture is the very opposite of a wall
- that is to say, it is eclat and movement.’ Yet his passion for movement always
remains at the level of everyday life. He maintained that the link between his
own work and that of Delaunay lay in their common ‘love of life’ and theircommon concern with movement. Even more than Delaunay, he was ready toyield to kinetic inspiration wherever he found it.

• Delaunay and simultaneity of colour

13 Frank Kupka
Planes by colours, 1 910-11

Delaunay’s contribution to the study of movement was the result of his intensive
research into the use of chromatic light. This programme of research, which
took him from Chevreul to the Impressionists and Seurat, finally led to his
distinctive method of bringing out the dynamism of colour through the use of‘simultaneous circles’. Delaunay’s view of the relationship of movement andcolour, which places him among the pioneers of abstract art, distinguished himfrom the Cubists of the first generation. ‘I was the heresiarch of Cubism,’ helater claimed. ‘Great discussions with my friends who had banished colour from40

14 Robert Delaunay
Oisques, 1 938. 538 cm. x 396 cm.

their palette, and thereby deprived it of any element of movement.’
Delaunay’s term ‘simultanisme’ was the origin of the famous quarrel between
Boccioni and the Futurists, on the one hand, and Delaunay himself, on the other,in the autumn of 1913. Boccioni also used the term, but in the sense of a stateof mind, a synthesis between memory and vision. Delaunay insisted on using
it to signify the interaction of colours and their role of creating a sense of formand space in the picture. Leger had yet another interpretation, based upon thenotion of the simultaneous presence of line, form and colour.
Delaunay has explained the origin of his particular usage in these terms:‘Around 1912-13 I had the idea of a type of painting which would be technicallydependent on colour alone, and on colour contrast, but would develop in timeand offer itself to simultaneous perception all at once. I used Chevreul’s scientificterm of simultaneous contrasts to describe this.’ The importance of Delaunay,
and of his wife Sonia Delaunay, lies precisely in the fact he succeeded in making
colour the unique vehicle of movement. His writings on several occasions confirm
that this was his aim. There is his letter to Kandinsky about colour and move¬
ment, and a letter to Mile de Bonin in which he proclaimed: ‘I make no rigid
distinction between painting and sculpture. Everything is colour in movement(depth), that is the construction of what I call simultaneous representation. There
are qualities of colour movement for all degrees of force: for slow movements,
complementary colours, and for quick movements, dissonant colours. This is not
the descriptive movement of the Cubists and Futurists which painters refer to as
dynamism. The movements which I mention are actually felt - I do not simply
describe them. They are simultaneous, working by contrast, and not successive.’
Sonia Delaunay has explained that both she and her husband were concen¬
trating on the ‘infinite rhythmic’ properties of the various colours. They assumed
that each colour had its own life, but was transformed completely by its relation¬
ship to other colours. Colour was in fact a genuine language which offeredunlimited possibilities of variation. ‘No one will ever know all there is to be
known about colour,’ she has stated. The principle was put into application in
her Rythmes sans jin, which is a somewhat paradoxical work in the sense that the‘endless rhythms’ do in fact come to an end, in her system, with the colour black.
Sonia Delaunay assures us that, apart from some pictures painted in Madridand Portugal, her husband’s work was always more directly concerned withcolour than with light. His first period, which has been termed ‘destructive’,lasted till 1913-14. Delaunay was still preoccupied at this stage with architectural
themes such as Villes, Tours and Saint-Severin. But there were indications ofa dynamic use of colour, and he himself referred to these works in terms of a‘total dissolving dynamism’ - ‘catastrophic art’. A work like Ville de Paris(1910-12) suggests the ‘transition towards constructive colour’, whilst Fenetres
sur la ville (1911-12) is ‘the first germ of colour for colour’s sake’. Delaunay’s first
Disque and his Soleils followed in the course of 1912. Here ‘colour was used interms of gyration: the form developed in a dynamic circular rhythm of colour.’Finally, in UEquipe de Cardiff (1913), he completed his first large-scale demon¬
stration of‘realization in colour on a large surface... alive and simultaneous; thewhole picture is a coherent set of rhythms.’
Delaunay’s second step in giving colour a full dynamic treatment came in42

1914, when he began to associate this aim with an ‘optimistic and cosmic ideology
of life.’ His Hommage a Bleriot contains a ‘simultaneous solar disc’, that is to say,a representation of the ‘constructive mobility of the solar spectrum’. From thispoint he set out upon a long period of research, in which investigation of the‘rhythm’ of abstract colour alternated with figurative periods - such as that of theFootball series in 1917-18. He pursued movement through the spiral in his
Helices (1923), and followed with the Coureurs (1924) and the Rythmes sans fin.
Perhaps his pictures under the title Rythme: Joie de vivre, which date from 1930,
mark the summit of this optimistic and constructive style of affirmation, carriedthrough by means of the resources of chromatic movement. But the decorative
panels which he designed for the Paris international exhibition of 1937 are hismost impressive achievement.
Delaunay’s ‘art of movement’ - a term which he originally used to describethe ‘simultaneous’ textile designs of Sonia Delaunay - can be related to his
own career in a variety of ways. Besides the features which have been discussed,
it fits in with his passionate concern with the relationship between art and life
- ‘the great movement’, in his terms - and his interest in correspondences
between the arts. He wrote on one occasion: ‘I shall always remember seeing
Cendrars’ poem ‘Le Transsiberien’ (illustrated by Sonia) for the first time, theway it looked with all its rhythms of savage and lively colours.’• Intellectual movement - The Futurists: Boccioni, Balia, Carra,
Severini
Many references have been made to the intellectual character of Futurism.
Here for the first time in modern art, the idea of movement takes precedence
over the perception of movement or the emotions associated with it. Not all
futurist works observe this criterion, however, and it is necessary to add that theprocedures used by the Futurists to indicate movement are very often similar
to those of the Cubists - in particular to the methods of Leger and Delaunay.
In terms of our original categories, the forms of movement which appear
in the works of the Futurists stand half-way between the objective movementof the Impressionists and Cubists and the subjective movement of Expressionism.
The new category which they suggest could perhaps be called ‘conceptual move¬
ment’. But here it is necessary to mention the exceptional cases of Boccioni,
who puts the emphasis on states of mind, and Balia, who undertakes to analyseand dissect the phenomenon of movement in several of his drawings and paintings,
including the well-known Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (Dynamism ofa dog on the lead). These cases can just be fitted into the general scheme because
it is clear that the emotion, on the one hand, and the optical impression, on theother, were preceded by the artist’s reflections on the concept of movement.
Boccioni, who as painter, sculptor and theoretician was the most wide-ranging
of the Futurists, managed to render in concrete terms the most important
ambition of the group: to find a modern artistic equivalent for speed and move¬
ment. In a sense he represents most clearly - at least as far as the plastic arts
are concerned - the achievement of a dynamism which is at once an object ofthought and an object of feeling.

43

15 Jean Arp
Peinture mura/e abstraite

1 6 Piet Mondrian
Composition in red, yellow and blue,
1928

17 Sophie Tauber-Arp
Composition verticaie-horizontaie: cerc/es
et demi-cercles, 1928

Besides his theoretical and practical work on the subject of‘plastic dynamism’,Boccioni was also extremely original in his wish to introduce a dynamic element
through the juxtaposition of materials in sculpture. ‘The traditional aim of fixing
gesture in a line,’ he claimed, ‘and the nature and homogeneity of the materials
employed (marble or bronze) have played their part in making sculpture thestatic art par excellence. I therefore came to the conclusion that, if I broke down
this unity of material into several materials - each of them serving to characterize
by its natural distinctness a difference in the weight and expansion of molecularvolumes - we would already have achieved one element of dynamism.’ Boccioni
has also left a statement of his aims and intentions in the treatment of space, form,
light and movement. ‘I would like to make a synthesis from the unique formsof spatial continuity, to effect a fusion of a head and its environment, to showhow objects are prolonged in space, to model light and atmosphere, to fix humanforms in movement.’ It is interesting to note that he relates Manet to the various
ambitions of Futurism both on the basis of his chromatic innovations and on thatof his morphological characteristics. Futurism is held to be concerned with the‘plastic abstraction’, which is a synthesis of form and colour, reveals the interior
and the exterior of objects in ‘simultaneous copenetration’, and finally does notneglect the subject or state of mind of the beholder.
From 1909 onwards, Boccioni’s work developed apace. The exaltation of speed
and movement expressed itself in a number of ways - through gestures, sweeping
views, and graphic motifs representing lines of force and rays of light. His
triptych Stati d'animo (1911), which was divided into the sections Gli addii,.
Quelli che restano, and Quelli che vanno, is dominated by a spontaneous graphic
expression of movement. Shortly afterwards, when Boccioni had visited Paris,
he completed another triptych on the same theme which was by contrast very
‘organized’ and testified to the influence of the Cubists. His sculpture during thisperiod was already tending towards the juxtaposition of disparate elements ina coherent whole, as in Fusione di una testa e di una finestra and Testa + Casa +Luce. His painting, which reached its peak in 1913 as far as the expression of
movement is concerned, continued to tackle the problem of reconciling thegraphic dynamism of his early work with the multiple viewpoints and surfaceorganization that he discovered in Cubism.
Giacomo Balia, who was more than ten years older than Boccioni, did notshare the fanatical interest in dynamism which was characteristic of his colleagues.
But this does not mean that he was any less interested in using movement asa plastic element. Although his writings were less copious than those of Boccioni,
it is possible to reconstruct his ‘kinetic’ procedures from the innumerable graphic
studies which he made from 1909 onwards, in particular in notebooks datingfrom 1910-11. As early as 1909 we find that his interest in sweeping views andstructures of scaffolding has led him to make a systematic study of colour andlight vibrations, the fruit of which appears in a painting like Lampada al arco
(1909).
In 1912, Balia painted his Cane al guinzaglio, which involved a recompositionin plastic terms of an analysis of movement and gave rise to research of a similar
nature into analytic and geometrical abstraction. We can see similar links between
his analysis of movement in Le mani del violonista (1912) and the entirely non-45

18 Umberto Boccior.i
Forme uniche nella continuita del/ospazio, 1913. Bronze, height 110 cm.

figurative composition of the Compenetrazione iridescente, dating from the sameyear.
The next stage in Balia’s evolution comes with La Bambina che corre sul
balcone, a painting composed of pointilliste touches which continues his analytic
research into the problem of movement. A picture dating from 1913 which
directly derives from this - the Volo di rondine - shows that Balia is drawing
closer to Boccioni and the other Milanese Futurists, although his work retains
a more abstract and geometrical character. In Spessori di atmosfera we candistinguish quite clearly the headlamps of a moving car, but the structure which
they set up within the picture can also be seen in non-figurative terms. In asimilar way, the lines which indicate speed in several works dating from 1913
lead up to the ‘iridescent copenetrations’ of his Vortici and Orbite celesti of
1913-14.
Balia’s emotional reactions to movement and speed are therefore controlled
both analytically and plastically, so that he arrives at a synthesis of movement,
in which the graphic elements form a network of lines and hedge in the colour.
In thematic terms, movement is suggested through human activity, through thedisplacement of objects and machines, or through astronomical motion. The
latter is the subject of Balia’s masterpiece in this field - Mercurio passa davantial sole visto dal Cannocchiale (The planet Mercury passes before the sun, seen
by telescope). The work of Delaunay and Kupka also comes to mind.
Balia was interested not only in movement, but in the phenomena of light,
expansion, noise and perfume. But however wide his concern with a whole rangeof forces, he preserved at all times his lucidity of thought and his precision of
facture. His pictorial essays in the field of movement occupy an important placein the Futurist achievement. But his work with real movement, as in the Complessi
plastici (1913-15), was closer to the domain of humour and playful experiment,
for all its aesthetic interest.
The manifesto entitled Ricostruzione futurista deH’universo, which Balia
published with Depero in 1915, contains a great number of interesting remarks
about movement. At one stage, after reflecting upon ‘universal vibration’, theywrote: ‘We shall find abstract equivalences for all the forms and all the elementsin the universe, and then put them together, according to the whims of ourinspiration, to form plastic complexes which we shall set in motion.’ After
describing the events which led up to the creation of Balia’s first complesso plasticodinamico, they went on to enumerate the eleven characteristics of this ‘sculpture’:
it was abstract, dynamic, ultra-transparent, coloured and luminous, autonomous,transformable, dramatic, volatile, odorous, noisy and explosive. They thenproceeded to a technical explanation of the way in which this object had been
constructed in purely material terms. Finally, after sketching an aesthetic, they
put in a plea for fusion between art and science. But their manifesto ended withan unfortunate degeneration into aggressive nationalism. Concluding with thejudgment that Futurism would dominate our sensibilities for several centuries,
they signed themselves: ‘Balia - Depero, astrattisti - futuristi.’In 1918-19, Balia set up a small theatre in his home, where he gave perfor¬
mances of a spectacle involving movement in which the protagonists were two
fishes. Experimental music by Kleen accompanied the spectacle. At this stage,46

1 9 Giacomo Balia
Dinamismo di un cane a guinzaglio,
1 912. 91 cm. x 1 00 cm.

he had already produced an interesting set for Stravinsky’s Feu dartifice, which
was performed by Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet at the Costanzi Theatre, Rome, in
1917. A contemporary wrote that ‘Balia’s work, which allows the most unexpectedinterplay of colour and light to enter the theatre in plastic form, destroyed thenormal equilibrium of the stage.’
Of the other Futurists, Carra began by sharing his colleagues’ interest in
the dynamism of water, light and crowds. But the influence of Cubism led him
to apply a new type of dynamism in his collages. This was derived from theparole in liberta of Marinetti, but showed considerable originality. Severini,on the other hand, had been in contact with Picasso and the Parisian Cubists
from the outset. He joined the Futurists in 1910 probably because of his wish
to react against the structural analysis of the object which had become character¬istic of Cubism, and his desire for colour. Maritain has written that, in thisperiod: ‘Futurism arrived in France like a fine attack of lyrical impatience andgenerosity from beyond the Alps. Under the cover of theories of becoming anduniversal copenetration which were outrageously Bergsonian, it displayed above
all, in conjunction with a spirituality that was in reality quite paltry, a candid
return to nature - not a copied nature, but one that was simply loved - and an
animal delight in rolling oneself in its flood of colour.’
Severini himself has confirmed that the Futurists held strongly to colour. ‘Iwould like to recall,’ he writes, ‘that in 1910 a group of painters, taking Seurat
as their point of departure, expressed the wish to put into practice certain aims
which were based precisely on colour: these were the Futurists. They believedin 1910 - though their researches had begun in 1909 - that the doctrine of complementaries should be taken as the essential basis of their research. This research
into colour was soon supplemented by studies in the expression of movement,
studies of the dynamism which is to be found in a motionless chair or table aswell as that of a car on the move. The first period of research into movement
carried on the tradition of the Impressionists. But when these painters went moredeeply into the problem, they understood that it was not the aim of painting
to express a body in motion, since the cinema was able to do this. Yet in one
sense, some ideas and some pictures by Renoir so to speak anticipated the cinema.
Ultimately, this research into movement was directed towards the experience,in plastic terms, of linear contrast in colours. Today the most important elementin the dynamism and movement is colour.’
Severini omits to mention the influence of the dance upon interpretations of
movement, although, in his particular case, it was decisive. In 1910 he became
completely free from the influence of the Neo-impressionists and began to
introduce the themes of dancers and moving crowds in night-clubs into his
pictures. With the aid of certain elements from the vocabulary of Futurism andCubism, he continued to develop this type of theme, combining the various
elements with the skill and patience of a mosaicist.

• De La Fresnaye: Cubo-futurism - Villon, Metzinger, Gleizes: geometry
and movement - Kupka: musical rhythms - Valensi: 'musicalism'
Although Roger de La Fresnaye cannot strictly speaking be associated with47

20 Jacques Villon
Galop, 1 921.45 cm. x 81 cm.

21 Frank Kupka
Abstraction, 1928-30.

Futurism, it is clear that, like Severini, he relied partly on the discoveries of the
Futurists and partly on those of Cubism. Two of his most interesting picturesfrom the point of view of movement are Le Cuirassier and UArtillerie, whichwere derived from a series of drawings to illustrate Claudel’s Tete d’Or. Conver¬sations with his brother about the future of aerial navigation served him as apretext for the picture entitled La Conquete de Fair, which dates from 1913.
Jacques Villon and the Section d’Or group, who began to be active in 1911-12,
were heavily dependent on the experiments of the Cubists. But their principal
aim was to find ‘a plastic translation of movement’. ‘The Cubism of Braqueand Picasso,’ said Villon at a later stage, ‘interested us very much, but it seemed
too static to us... We thought, on our own account, that it was rhythm, andthe breaking down of surfaces into coloured planes that made the picture live.’
Villon’s group contained a wide range of personalities, and it is not surprisingthat they differed in their interpretations of movement. Metzinger and Gleizes,
who were Cubists but also belonged to the Section d’Or, treated it primarily inits geometrical aspects. The varying approaches of Leger, La Fresnaye andDelaunay, who were also in contact with the group, have already been indicated.
Le Fauconnier and Kupka provided an additional element of variety.
Kupka, who was born in 1871, began to paint in a non-figurative manner at avery early stage. At first he was interested in making analogies with musicalrhythms, but around 1910 his approach became more ‘conceptual’. ‘Music,’ hewrote in 1913, ‘is the only art of sound which does not exist in nature and mustbe almost wholly created. Man has created words to articulate his thought. He
has created writing, the aeroplane and the locomotive. Why then should he notcreate in painting and sculpture, independently of the forms and colours whichsurround him in the world?... I believe that I can find something between
vision and hearing and that I can produce a figure in colours just as Bach did inmusic. In all events, I shall no longer be satisfied with a slavish copying of
nature.’Kupka is therefore searching for a ‘true known reality’ as opposed to the ‘false
seen reality’. The way in which he proceeded can be followed either throughthe sequence of his oil-paintings or through his many drawings and gouaches.
These contain many striking examples of the use of astronomical and biologicalthemes of a kinetic type, which demonstrate Kupka’s importance in the develop¬
ment of a non-figurative art at the same time ‘lyrical’ and ‘geometrical’. But themusical analogy is always present in his work.
Kupka’s subjective form of dynamism perhaps reaches its highest point in
the series of variations on the theme of universal gravitation entitled Autour d’unpoint, which he completed between 1911 and 1930. These works gave rise to alarge number of paintings and drawings on similar themes. Kupka’s interest in
physics is expressed particularly in the Plans en fuite (1912-13) and Disques deNewton. His appreciation of the dynamic possibilities of physiological andbiological phenomena can be seen in such works as Traits, plans et profondeur,Contes de pistils et d’etamines, and Bleus mouvants.
Henry Valensi, who exhibited with the Section d’Or and took an importantpart in their discussions at Puteaux, pursued a similar path of research, whichlay between music and plastic dynamism. He was the inventor of the theory of48

22 Jacques Villon
So/dats en marche, 1913.
65 cm. x 92 cm.

‘musicalism’. His contribution to the art of light and movement will be discussed
in Chapter 7.

• Picabia - Marcel Duchamp
Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, who did not share the positive ideals of the Sectiond’Or, were to set in motion a programme of research into analytic movement,
and later into ‘real, spatial’ movement. Picabia has in fact been classed with thepainters who went under the title of Orphists - a word chosen by Apollinaire to
signify a connection with the study of light and not with the so-called Orphic
lyrics. Although the painters associated with this movement did not in any sense
form a homogeneous group, it is possible to state as a general principle that they
had little interest in the pictorial transposition of musical impressions, but aimed
at a more direct expression of movement through contrasts of coloured forms.
The theme of machine movement, signifying a ‘new symbolism of modern
reality’, began to occupy Picabia’s attention in 1913, when he visted America for
the first time. It is hard to establish how much he owed to Duchamp in his inter¬
pretation of mechanical movement and its ‘ironic’ implications. But there isperhaps some interest in citing Picabia’s boutade from 1921: ‘The first mechanicalwork was created by Madame Tzara the day she brought little Tristan into theworld, and yet she didn’t know funny-guy (Picabia).’
It cannot be denied that besides the reciprocal influences of Duchamp,
Delaunay, the Futurists and poets such as Whitman and Verhaeren, America
played a decisive role in the evolution of Picabia’s art. ‘Almost as soon as I
49

arrived in America,’ he wrote, ‘I experienced the revelation that the genius of themodern world is the machine, and that in the machine art can discover a living
form of expression.’ What Picabia chooses to display in his work is usually theabsurd qualities of the machine, as an emblem of industrial civilization. But it
is important to bear in mind that the earlier works, which date from before hisjourney to America, are haunted by the theme of the dance, which he attempted
to recreate in figurative terms.
Picabia’s decision to join the Dadaists in 1919 was a passing episode dictatedprimarily by personal loyalties. His ‘Dadaism’ is essentially thematic, relating
to his concern with a machine aesthetic, and cannot be compared with, forexample, the purely plastic researches of Jean Crotti, whose Developpement deVamour en mouvement dates from 1915-16.
The cold and detached personality of Marcel Duchamp qualified him to be
the first painter of his generation to indicate the successive phases of movement
in a logical and schematic way. His famous Nu descendant un escalier, which was
the dominant work at the Armory Show, New York, in 1913, seems to establishthat we must grant to him ‘the initiative in applying machinism to the humanbeing, as La Mettrie had done at an earlier stage.’ In order to appreciate the useof movement in this picture, we should compare the four separate versions which
exist: a pencil sketch, an oil study (both dating from 1911), the picture which was
originally withdrawn from the Salon des Independants in February 1912 andJater exhibited both with the Section d'Or in October 1912 and at the Armory
Show, and finally the picture traced photographically on the preceding one andlater executed in water-colour, ink, pencil and pastel in 1916 for the Arensbergs,
who own all four versions.
The movement in the pencil sketch is in the opposite direction to that of theothers. A figure is mounting a staircase. This sketch was in fact originally con¬ceived as an illustration to Jules Laforgue’s poem, Encore a cet astre, whose title
had struck Duchamp. If the movement in this sketch had a literary connotation,
the oil study was a fusion of movement in the Futurist tradition with a rather
elementary attempt to break down movement into its component parts. In the
Armory Show picture, Duchamp aimed for a much more comprehensive inter¬
pretation of movement, and chose the method of putting together a number ofexperiences simultaneously. He was attempting to capture the entire course of
movement and the entire form of the moving figure in the same image. The
continuous downward movement was expressed by subtle effects of transparency
and lines leading from one stage to another. In the 1916 version, Duchampdecided to make the figure half-woman and half-machine, underlining this by
his use of the photographic process and above all by his choice of steel blue andgrey as the dominant colours, which gave a definitely ‘mechanical’ atmosphere.
There is in fact a fifth version of the Nu - a pen and pencil drawing for Carrie
Stettheimer which dates from 1918.
Duchamp himself has written of the Armory Show picture: ‘This picture is
not a painting, but an organization of kinetic elements - an expression of timeand space through the abstract presentation of movement... But we must bearin mind that, when we consider the movement of form in space over a certain
time, we are entering the realm of geometry and mathematics, as when we50

23 Marcel Duchamp
descending a staircase

24 Marcel Duchamp
Nu descendant un escalier, 1 91 2. Second
version, 144 cm, x 88 cm.

51

construct a machine.’
If Duchamp’s Nudes, Kings, Queens and Virgins were primarily machines inmovement, his Mariee - a preliminary study for the Mariee mise a nu par lescelibataires, meme (Bride stripped bare by her bachelors, even) which was completedin Munich during the summer of 1912 - is a ‘silent machine’. To continue
Marcel Jean’s description, it is ‘static, but ready to revive with a human ardour
which is betrayed by the ironically impassioned radiation of some of its wheels...
The image only appears motionless in so far as it is a snap-shot of a motor inaction.’ The work on glass, or ‘delay’ in glass, for which this was a study, wasonly ‘incompleted in 1923’, to use Duchamp’s own phrase. It was a ‘collage inspace’, which can only be understood with reference to Duchamp’s involvementin the Dada movement. Already in 1913 he had invented the ready-made, an‘anti-art object’ which was intended to ‘desacralize the ikon’. The point was that
Duchamp selected these objects from their original context by a preliminary
act of will. As he himself put it, ‘he (Richard Mutt, i.e. Duchamp) took an
ordinary element out of everyday existence and arranged it in such a way thatthe utilitarian significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - hecreated a new thought for this object’.
The process which Duchamp describes here would be interesting to study
from the point of view of movement. Clearly the gesture which takes place in theselection of the ready-made is quite different from the creative gesture in painting
and sculpture. Another point of interest is the way in which the ready-madeleads Duchamp eventually to the incorporation of real movement. There is adirect line of descent from his Roue de bicyclette (a bicycle wheel mounted on astool) to his Rotative demi-spheres, the Anemic cinema and finally the ‘suitcase’
which contained the sum total of his ‘pictorial, optical and kinetic experiments’
up to the outbreak of the Second World War. We shall return at a later stageto Duchamp’s work with real movement.
If we return to Duchamp’s masterpiece in the Dadaist vein - the Mariee we can find a number of connections with movement. Duchamp’s choice of glassin place of the many different materials which he originally planned to use,
opened up wide ‘kinetic’ possibilities through the exploitation of transparency.
The area devoted to the Bachelors is invaded by ‘machine groups’ and the‘bride-machine’ is conceived as a moving element. Both serve to symbolize‘erotic machines’.

• The Vorticists: Wyndham Lewis
Among the groups of artists who were directly concerned with objective move¬
ment of a cerebral type in the years around 1910, the English group known as
the Vorticists occupies an important place. As with all other general designations,
the word Vorticism covered a wide range of artistic experiments undertaken by
a number of very different personalities. It would be wrong to take Wyndham
Lewis at his word and to agree with the opinion expressed in his catalogue to theTate Gallery exhibition of Vorticism in 1956: ‘Vorticism, in fact, was what I,
personally, did, and said, at a certain period.’ There can, however, be little doubtthat it was Wyndham Lewis who gave the movement its initial momentum in the52autumn of 1912. If Vorticism inclined towards some of the currents which havealready been mentioned, and was a matter of establishing the independence ofcolour and form and creating a visual language ‘as abstract as music’, it was also
directly inspired by the world of the machine, which Wyndham Lewis con¬sidered ‘real - or more than real’ in relation to the world of natural forms. We
should note in passing that Wyndham Lewis abandoned this particular set ofvalues completely around 1920, and that his book The Demon of progress in theArts takes exactly the opposite line to the principles which lay at the origin of
Vorticism.
Wyndham Lewis defined the movement in the following terms in the catalogue
to the 1915 Vorticist exhibition: ‘by Vorticism we mean a) activity as opposedto the tasteful passivity of Picasso; b) significance as opposed to the dull or
anecdotal character to which the Naturalist is condemned; c) essential move¬
ment and activity (such as the energy of a mind) as opposed to the imitative
cinematography, the fuss and hysterics of the Futurists.’ Besides the hostile
reactions to other contemporary artists, it is worth noting the insistence on
movement and the fact that activity is presented in an intellectual context.
Wyndham Lewis’ most interesting pictures, from the point of view of move¬
ment, are The Vorticist (1912), which is executed in chalk, ink and water¬
colour, Creation (1912), which is now lost but was exhibited at London in thesame year, Composition (1913), in pencil, ink and water-colour, New York (1914),
in ink and gouache, and finally The Revolution (1915), which is in oils. Amongother Vorticist works which present features of equal interest are In the Hold, byDavid Bomberg, Bicyclists by William Roberts, Rock-drill by Epstein andseveral sculptures by Gaudier-Brzeska.
The fact that a large number of important Vorticist works have disappearedor been dispersed makes it particularly difficult to gain a coherent idea of theways in which they used movement. But if we cannot make a methodical com¬
parison between the ideas which they expressed and the works which they
completed in practice, we can at least identify the ways in which their ideas
differed from the various other movements. The Vorticists put the main emphasison energy rather than on the analytic investigation of movement undertaken by
the Futurists. In Wyndham Lewis’ case, at any rate, this energy was intellectualin origin. And Gaudier-Brzeska’s manifesto, published in Blast No. 1, ended
with these words: ‘Will and consciousness are our vortex.’ It would be fair tosay that the Vorticists viewed the intellect as the artist’s most valuable instrument.
As Geoffrey Wagner has concluded, the ‘Vortex’ was ‘a principle of unity in themaelstrom of life’s diversity and change’.
In spite of these primarily intellectual associations, the dance was also of great
importance in the origins of Vorticism. Walter Michel has claimed that the artof Wyndham Lewis was based on a duality: the dancers expressed the intense
vitality and energy which binds us to the natural order, while the artist’s detach¬ment and his creation of‘monuments of egotism’ represented the rational faculty
which puts us outside this natural order. The way in which Wyndham Lewis
creates a synthesis between these two factors suggests that his satirical powers
conceal a profound humanism.
If the Vorticist style can be characterized by the use of elements which are
53

well defined by straight lines or geometrical arcs, and of forms with snipped
contours making up almost abstract compositions, the use of movement is aseparate issue, which can often only be understood in relation to the machineaesthetic. It is significant that Epstein was in fact considering the possibility ofadding a working pneumatic drill to his Rock-drill, but eventually rejected theidea as being too ‘childish’.

• Rayonnism: Larionov, Goncharova - Suprematism: Malevich
If there is a lack of Vorticist work, which makes it difficult to study their use of
movement, there are even greater obstacles in the way of getting to grips with
Russian art around 1910, since there is so great a variety of tendencies and solittle chronological exactitude.
Larionov developed the theory of Rayonnism in 1913. But his experiments in
the relationship of light and movement began as early as 1909, and his works
anticipated the theoretical formulation. Larionov took as his point of departure
Einstein’s theories on light, which he wished to interpret through representing
the radiation of objects and spaces. His works Rayonnism, Blue Rayonnism,
Beach, and Red and Blue Rayonnism, which extend over the period 1909 to 1912,
must be counted among the first examples of ‘abstract’ art in their reliance onlight and movement. Larionov’s ‘rayonnist’ experiments went hand in hand witha tendency towards geometrical abstraction.
Larionov also used real movement in the stage-sets which he designed for
Diaghilev in 1915. And it appears that he incorporated a mechanized ventilator
in one canvas which he exhibited in the ‘Year 1915’ exhibition at Moscow. Thiswas intended ‘to give the boat a natural movement’.
Natalia Goncharova, who also designed sets incorporating real movement for
Diaghilev, put greater emphasis on the theme of movement in her rayonnist
works than did her colleague Larionov. She tried to discover ‘the inner essenceof the work through graphic and coloured rhythm’. Her taste for ornament wasalways well to the fore. Already in 1907, she was inclined to arrange the figuresin her pictures in arabesques. She began her rayonnist period with The Reapers,
The Cats and Electricity. But her masterpiece in this style, the Forest series, dates
from 1910-11. The abstract treatment of movement in this series contrasts withthe rather more cubist treatment of movement in certain other pictures which shecompleted at this time. And her eclecticism also extended to the treatment of
movement in terms of the machine aesthetic in a number of works.
The theory of Rayonnism depended upon a notion of invisible energy: ‘thetotal of (invisible) rays emitted by object A is intercepted by object B. The
form created by the painter appears to our eyes within the presumed limits ofthe space situated between these two objects... The rays which emanate fromthe objects and cross over one another give rise to the rayonnist forms. The artist
transfigures these forms by bending them and submitting them to his desire foraesthetic expression.’
Movement plays an important role in the work of Casimir Malevich (1878—
1935) from 1909-10 onwards. This is no doubt related to the fact that Malevich
seems to have been constantly tormented by man’s relationship to the cosmos.
54

25 Casimir Malevich
Suprematism, 1 91 6—1 7

From the time of the first exhibition of the ‘Knave of Diamonds’ group in 1910,
his work was clearly influenced by his interest in ‘fluid and cosmic rhythms’. In
the last pictures of this early series, Malevich ‘reduced all volumes to the cylinder
and the cone and made them “turn” by means of a violently stated chiaroscuro,
while limiting the spatial cube by bringing the background very much closer’.
Once Malevich had passed the stages of ‘super-rational realism’ and ‘cubofuturist realism,’ he was able to develop his own ‘Suprematism’ - an abstract stylein which the element of movement played a predominant role. The date at which
Suprematism first appeared as a plastic phenomenon is still under dispute. Somecritics consider Malevich’s first black and white squares, which were preparedin 1913 for the set of Kruchenik’s futurist opera Victory over the Sun, to be thefirst suprematist works: others believe that the crucial point was between the‘Tramway W’ and ‘0.10’ exhibitions, in 1915. If this date could be establishedwith any certainty, it would be possible to determine whether some of Tatlin’s
works, in particular the first ‘counter-reliefs’, did in fact have an influence on thedevelopment of Suprematism.
But our main subject of interest is Malevich’s use of movement, both as ameans of ‘dynamizing’ form and colour and as a method of conveying ideas
relating to the cosmos. Malevich’s writings, in particular the manuscripts on
Suprematism which date from 1922-24, clearly demonstrate his preoccupation
with movement. Yet they can hardly be said to contain any coherent general
theory. In fact they are often contradictory. Malevich notes that the scientificphenomena of wave vibration have a certain interest, but he asserts that, in
relation to eternity, vibrations of this order must be considered immobile - or,on the other hand, artificially increased in speed. In any case, we can state that
Malevich imagined that there was movement in every space - a principle thatapplied to pictures as much as to the universe. He also held that the movementof thought was in all respects comparable to the movement of light or the move¬
ment of the comets, and that, by taking stock of various forms of movement
through human thought, it was possible to arrive at new concepts which would
reflect the movement of the universe.
Suprematism itself was for Malevich ‘the supremacy of pure sensation in theplastic arts’. Pure sensation was the result of tensions and movements between
colour, form and ground. Malevich believed that simple forms were akin to thedrawings of primitive man, which were not ornamental in their aims, but served
to express rhythmic sensation.
These forms in movement, which at first sight seem to be entirely abstract,
are the summit of Malevich’s art. Their significance is explained in an interesting
letter which he wrote to Moholy-Nagy in April 1927, in which he stated: ‘thenon-objective sensations which should put me in harmony with the cosmos are
the content of my works’. According to this principle we can follow the rangeof Malevich’s sensations through his use of forms in movement and vibrating
colours. In the majority of his pictures, the ballet of Suprematism takes placearound a diagonal axis, as in his Ballet of 1916 which gives rise to the series
including Sensation of the space of the Universe (1916) and Sensation of a mystic
wave coming out of the Earth (1917). Finally, in 1917-18, he reaches the cul¬minating point of Suprematism in his White on white series. Even when he had56

announced that Suprematism had come to an end, in 1919, Malevich still con¬tinued to study the problem of movement.

• Tatlin : juxtaposition of materials - De Stijl: Mondrian
Tatlin’s Constructivism seems to date from 1913, though certain historians
situate it in 1914 or later. In any case, the question of whether he or Malevich
deserves the priority as an innovator must take second place to the undeniable
fact that their conceptions of art were radically different. This difference of
opinion became apparent at an early stage, and grew more and more acute. The
echoes of their final rupture have not entirely died down, even today.
If Malevich stood for the rights of pure art and for the idea of art as a spiritual
activity, Tatlin, by contrast, foretold the death of painting and the rise of appliedart. He made himself the spokesman of the doctrine that artists should be re¬trained as qualified technicians in order to be able to make use of modern materials
and tools. While Kandinsky, Pevsner and Gabo rallied to Malevich, Tatlinattracted Rodchenko, Stepanova, Alexander Vesnin, Alexandra Exter andLiubov Popova to his chosen method of ‘culture of materials’.
Tatlin was also one of the most important pioneers of real movement. His
suspended ‘counter-reliefs’ and his model for the Monument to the Third
International will be discussed in Chapter 6. But it is noteworthy that his very
first Reliefs, which date from 1913-14, involve a dynamic, open form of con¬struction which ‘sculpts space’. This method lent itself to the use of real move¬
ment, which was to be added in due course. In fact the concept of the ‘real’
and the search for the ‘real’ were extremely important features of the Con¬
structivist programme. Tatlin set out to recreate real space, and he did so withthe help of real materials and real movement. Rodchenko and Gabo followed
a similar path up to 1920, while Popova and Exter investigated ‘spatial force’ andthe ‘mutual chromatic tensions and their rhythms’.
All these artists, together with Pevsner and El Lissitsky, can be legitimately
placed with the next generation. They were born around 1890, and their main
influence took place around 1920 and later. We shall return to their work at
a later stage.
The path of research in the plastic arts which was being developed in Holland
at this time does not appear, at first sight, to have dynamic or kinetic associations.
The Dutch group De Stijl, which was founded at Leyden in 1917, took as its
programme the following sentence: ‘Style is: to contemplate truth in peace.’ It
was probably the philosopher Schoenemaekers, of Blaricum, who invented theterm ‘new plastic’ and defined it as ‘a new organization of the surface’. It is also
possible that the theoretical origins of ‘neo-plasticism’ lie in Kandinsky’s book
The Spiritual in Art. But even if this is granted, and if we admit that Van Doesburg, Van der Leek and Huszar took an important part in launching the move¬
ment, it remains true that Mondrian’s work deserves by far the most detailed
attention. Mondrian’s slow but sure evolution towards a form of abstraction
which, even in its origins, was not wholly devoid of movement, culminated in a
joyful and optimistic style where movement was very much in evidence.
There were three important stages in this process. The first led, from the57

abstraction of moving themes like the tree, the sea and perhaps scaffolding in
Paris, to the crystallization of the horizontal and vertical elements which were toserve henceforth as the basis of composition. The second involved the choice ofplanes of colour which were truly abstract, that is to say based exclusively upongeometrical forms. The third, which began in 1935 and has been called the stageof ‘victorious dynamization’, began with a lightening of the dividing lines, andthen with them being coloured: finally came Mondrian’s last masterpieces inwhich spirituality was combined with a newly discovered joie de vivre. Somewhat
paradoxically, Mondrian found happiness in dynamism.
He had already written in his notebooks in 1914: ‘Positiveness and negativenessare the causes of all action. They are the causes of the loss of immobility, whichis happiness. They are the causes of the eternal movement, which is vertiginous
and undergoes successive changes. They explain the impossibility of happinessin time.’ This dualism is reflected in another central passage. ‘The rhythm ofrelationships between colours and measurements brings out the absolute in therelativity of time and space. So the new plastic art is dualistic in its composition.
Through the plastic exactitude of cosmic relationships, it is a direct expressionof the universal. Through rhythm, through the material reality of its plasticity,
it is an expression of the subjectivity of the artist as individual.’
When, at the end of his research, Mondrian allows himself an outbreak ofdynamism, he is not betraying the intellectual and spiritual basis of his develop¬
ment. As he explains: ‘It is important to distinguish between two kinds ofequilibrium: 1. static balance; 2. dynamic equilibrium. Because of this, it is quite
understandable that some people are opposed to equilibrium in art, while others
defend it. The great struggle for the artist is to annihilate the static equilibriumby the continuing statement of the means of expression. It is a feature of humannature to love static balance. But the vitality of the continuing sequence of time
destroys this balance all the time. Abstract art is a concrete expression of thisvitality.’ The position which Mondrian here describes is of course not very far
removed from that of Malevich as far as dynamic abstract composition isconcerned. And like Malevich, Mondrian combined the use of movement in its
conceptual, intellectual and spiritual forms with a passion for life, music and thedance. Although it may seem surprising for an artist of so austere a character,the dancing which Mondrian delighted in was that of public festivities and street
fairs.

• Subjective movement: Matisse and the Fauves
It cannot be said that the subjective movement which is based on an emotion
or a sensation is directly opposed to spiritual movement or objective (and mainly
visual) movement in the work of the generation born around 1880. If Kandinsky,
whom we have placed within this grouping, places the emphasis on the spiritualin his own work, he often gives the impression of a reasonably well-defined
expression of feeling. He is in fact trying to awaken precise emotions in the
spectator by means of dynamic elements. In the same way, the German ex¬pressionists often look for emotional participation by the spectator on the basisof a directly plastic use of movement.
58

26 Henri Matisse
Le Luxe

In the case of Rouault, the French expressionist, and the group of painters
known as the Fauves, the fact that feeling is the origin and the desired end of
the exercise is much less obviously in the foreground. It is nevertheless per¬missible to interpret their use of movement from the angle of subjectivity. The
Fauves, with their tendency to abstraction through colour, attempt to underline
the ‘instinctual’ origin of painting and are thus compelled to put the act of feelingat the very centre of their preoccupations. Their art is consequently the productof a deliberate, and often violent, act of will. According to Vlaminck it can be
identified from 1903 onwards with an aggressive touch, full of implied movement.
In the case of the more thoughtful Matisse, this taste for movement belongs
particularly to the final years of the nineteenth century, when he was under
the influence of Rodin. But Matisse was also greatly impressed by the rising
reputation of Cezanne, and was ready to write in 1899: ‘Tones are forces in the
picture.’ Since he was born in 1869, Matisse was already over thirty at this stage.
But he only realized his true vocation with the coming of the new century, when
he began to make use of the wonderfully subtle type of arabesque which was to be
characteristic of his future style. By 1905 he had added colour to line, and although
his method of application was still fragmented, his painterly touch was becoming
more pronounced and more rhythmic. By 1906 he was learning to elevate every¬
day themes ‘by rhythm so that they expressed essential themes’ - an objective
which betrays his relationship with the ‘pantheistic’ research of German painterslike Franz Marc. Finally, in 1907-08, the musicians, dancers and bathers madetheir appearance.
Matisse underlined the element of movement in these works by strong blacklines. Perhaps the project which illustrates this concern with movement mostsuccessfully is the scheme for three panels representing dance, music and a sceneof repose. Only the first two were completed. Matisse himself wrote of the first.
‘My first panel represents the dance, the round taking flight over the hill.’
Throughout the years 1903 to 1909, Matisse found a plastic equivalent forthematic movement either in the arabesque or in the overall composition andtreatment of colours. This was the stage at which Fauvism had most to contributein the way of isolating the various plastic elements - line, colour and eventually
movement. And in this respect it stood clearly in contrast to the work of theExpressionists. But, despite this difference, it must be added that the art ofMatisse, and of the Fauvists in general, was concerned with the expressive - andsensuous - properties of pure colour. They intended colour to make itself felt
‘in a purely instinctive way’, and indeed some of their number - Vlaminck andDerain in particular - developed a cult of primitivism similar to that of the pain¬
ters of Die Brticke. If we wish to identify the characteristic qualities of theFauvists, we might say that Derain’s work is dominated by virtuosity and variety,Dufy’s work by an increasing attachment to pure line, and Marquet’s work by a‘love of movement, a taste for precise observation, often relieved by humour,and an inward bent for contemplation.’ In the case of Matisse, the goal is purity
and tranquillity, to be achieved through the dynamic qualities of the various
plastic elements. ‘What I am searching for above all is expression,’ he explains.
‘Expression, in my case, does not reside in the passion that breaks out on a faceor makes itself felt through violent movement. It exists in the whole arrangement59

of my picture: the place occupied by the bodies, the empty spaces around them,
the proportions, all of these play their part... The drawing must possess a force
of expansion which animates the objects surrounding it... The expressive aspectof the colours comes to me in a purely instinctive way... I have to paint aninterior, I have a cupboard before me, it gives me a sensation of very lively red,and I put down a red, a red which satisfies me... What I dream of is an art ofequilibrium, purity, tranquillity, with nothing to disturb or preoccupy. ..’• German Expressionism - Die Briicke: Kirchner, Schmitt-Rottluff

27 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
A couple of dansers, c. 1 91 3.
90 cm. x 63 cm.

In contrast to Matisse, the German Expressionists specifically tried to instil
psychological and metaphysical unease into their works, although they did not
for that reason renounce the aim of thematic and plastic equilibrium. The paintersbelonging to the group called Die Briicke (The Bridge) began by practising a
spontaneous form of art which, in Kirchner’s case particularly, involved a‘natural’ eroticism. But although Kirchner’s favourite subject at this stage was
the nude in landscape, his means of expressing movement frequently made useof retinal effects.
The techniques of wood engraving played an important role in forming thestyles of the Die Briicke group, and clearly affected their methods of conveying
movement. So did their interest in primitive wood statuettes, which Kirchner
claims to have pioneered in his Chronicle - though his colleagues did not accept
the claim. Around 1907, when Kirchner was exploring this field, SchmidtRottluff was refining his techniques of chromatic rhythm at Dangast, whilst
Heckel was making use of the ‘brushstrokes full of colour and movement’ which
Buchheim has described by the term Pinselfurioso. Heck el’s ‘Flowering cress’is a good example.
It is significant that Kirchner wrote in the preface for his own exhibition atBerne - composed under the pseudonym of ‘de Marsalle’: ‘He (Kirchner) has
devised a personal way of studying movement which is opposed to the academic
study of the model.’ But in spite of this claim, Kirchner seems to have clung too
closely to the subject for his purely plastic aims to be realized. Although hefrequently dealt with themes of movement, he was not entirely successful in
integrating them into the work and bringing out the dynamic element in plastic
terms. Towards the end of 1911, when he was painting his series of‘Spectres ina modern city’ at Berlin, the initial style of Die Briicke gave place to a new, lesscoherent approach. In Kirchner’s case it heralded a concentration on dance
themes, which were more and more closely associated with the circus.
Schmitt-Rottluff, whose temperament was heavier and more melancholic thanthat of Kirchner, was also influenced by negro sculpture. It represented for him
and for Kirchner a direct parallel to the research into closed composition which
preoccupied the painters of Die Briicke. Around 1910 Schmidt-Rottluff’s con¬suming interest in rhythmic and violent colour resulted in the formation of astyle which reflects the aims of the group but is distinctively personal.
• Der Blaue Reiter: Marc, Kandinsky
The artists of Die Briicke have been called the first German Expressionists.
60

28 Franz Marc
The Great Blue Horses, 1911.
62 cm. x 160 cm.

After they had rallied to Die Sturm at Berlin in 1911, it was the artists of Der
Blaue Reiter who took the tradition one stage further. Although the artists who
have just been mentioned were far from neglecting the element of movement,
the Blaue Reiter group went well beyond them in their acute sense of the potential
importance of movement as an aesthetic element. This was already foreshadowed
in the programme which was laid down by its future members in the Kunstlervereinigung Miinchen in 1909. Of course it was implicit in the choice of the title‘Blue Rider’, which recalled the motif of the horseman that Kandinsky had beendeveloping since 1906.
According to Marc and Kandinsky, two of the most prominent members of thegroup, the artist’s task was to make comparisons in plastic terms with the mysticalinternal structure of the world. Often these comparisons would take the formof the ‘rhythms’ and movements of the universe as ‘felt by the painter’. Eachwork would be the sum total of a large number of similar feelings and experiences.
Or as Paul Klee, who exhibited with the Blaue Reiter in 1916, was to put it:‘I adopt a detached and primitive creative attitude from which I can put forward
signs for man, animals, plants, minerals and the elements - for all the revolving
forces.’Both Futurism and Orphism, arriving through the intermediary of the Sturmgroup of Berlin, influenced the way in which the artists of the Blaue Reiterpresented movement. Kandinsky, who was from the outset preoccupied with thespiritual dimension of the work of art, learned from both these movements.
August Macke, on the other hand, was particularly attracted to Orphism, while
Franz Marc’s water-colours betray a strong Futurist influence. And behind thelinear and ornamental work of Kandinsky and Marc there are clear signs of the
dynamic approach pioneered by the masters of Art Nouveau.
Marc’s most individual achievement was that of assimilating himself to the
movement of the world beyond humanity by identification with the animal world.
He wrote: ‘I am attempting to increase my capacity for sensing the organic
rhythm in all things, I try to make a pantheistic identification with the tremblingand circulation of blood in nature, in the trees, in the animals and in the air - thenI try to make a picture from it, with new forms of movement and with colours
that make a mockery of the old easel paintings.’ By 1908 he had made a profoundstudy of animal anatomy, and had even ventured into sculpture. The decisive
event in his career took place in 1912, when he visited the Futurist exhibitionat the Tannhauser Gallery, and decided to replace his so-called ‘dynamic’ style,which consisted in repetition of contour and parallel movements, with theprinciple of‘interpenetration of forms’. In the last years of his life he succeededin anticipating abstraction in a particularly rational way, but his most memorable
works were the animal paintings produced between 1911 and 1913, thoughforeshadowed in the Rider in the Sea of 1907. This series of works, though richin nuance, was an illustration of the Expressionist motto - ‘Detachment fromNature’.
Kandinsky became aware at a very early stage of the notion that art was an
intuitive or psychic process. This belief can be found on almost every page ofhis book On the Spiritual in Art, and in other writings which date from theBlaue Reiter period. It was to be one of the essential features of his teaching at61

the Institute of Artistic Culture, Moscow, and the Weimar Bauhaus. Two of
Kandinsky’s other principal points are the correspondence between music andpainting and the need for a personal interpretation of the ‘spiritual mission’ ofart.
These three aspects of Kandinsky’s thought are reflected in his treatment of
movement, on the theoretical and practical planes. In his preface to the Spiritualin Art, he searches for the ‘internal’, human meaning in movement: ‘In appear¬
ance, the movements of the monkey are the same as those of man: the monkey
sits down, holds a book under his nose, leafs through it with a grave look. But
this mimicry is devoid of all meaning.’ Kandinsky’s conclusion is that man’s
emotions have a much greater range of nuance, and that his aim must be torender states of mind, which may have been disguised, into natural forms.
As far as the spiritual life of art is concerned, Kandinsky represents it in termsof movement. ‘The spiritual life to which art belongs, and of which it is one of
the most powerful agents, can be transcribed by means of a forward and upward
movement, complex but firm, and capable of being reduced to a simple element.
This is the very movement of the act of knowledge. Whatever form it adopts,
it keeps the same profound meaning and the same goal.’ Kandinsky compares
the situation of humanity to that of a carriage occupied by human beings who
must be drawn forwards and upwards, and he develops this ‘kinetic’ image at
length, ending up with a schema which he calls the ‘spiritual triangle’. ‘A large
triangle divided into unequal parts, the smallest and the most acute being at theapex, is quite a good schematization of the life of the spirit. The further one
goes in the direction of the base, the greater, the larger, the more spacious andthe higher these parts are. The whole triangle, with hardly perceptible move¬
ment, advances and rises slowly, and the part which is closest to the apex will
arrive “tomorrow” at the spot where the door was “today”. In other words, what ismerely an incomprehensible jumble today, and only means something for theextreme point of the triangle, will become charged with emotion tomorrow for
the part which is nearest to it, and filled with new meaning.’
Finally, there is Kandinsky’s interest in the link between music and painting,which relates closely to what has just been said. ‘For the artist-creator, who isanxious to express and must express his “interior universe”, the imitation of theobjects of nature, even if successful, cannot be an end in itself. And he envies theease and facility with which the most immaterial art - music - achieves its goal.
It is understandable that he should turn towards this art and attempt to discoversimilar procedures in his own. This is why we now have, in painting, research
into rhythm, abstract and geometrical construction, and why such value isattached to the repetition of coloured tones and the dynamism of colour.’Kandinsky developed this idea into a very exact theory of correspondence
between the ‘internal sound’ or ‘internal resonance’, on the one hand, and theforms and colours on the other. He believed that it was possible to apply thelaws of harmony, musical composition and rhythm to painting. Under the
influence of Scriabin and Mme A. Sacharijn-Unkowsky, he drew up a schema of
correspondence between musical tones and colours which was included in his
book. This was based on the principle of ‘internal necessity’. ‘The colour is thekey,’ he wrote, ‘the eye the hammer which strikes it, the soul the instrument62

29 Wassily Kandinsky
Theatre set for Moussorgsky's Pictures at
an Exhibition at the Friedrichtheater,
Dessau, 1928

with a thousand strings. The artist is the hand which, with the aid of such andsuch a key, obtains from the soul the vibration which is appropriate. It is there¬
fore evident that the harmony of colours rests solely on the principle of effective
contact. The human soul, touched at its most sensitive point, replies. We shallcall this principle the Principle of Internal Necessity.’ For Kandinsky, this is the
dynamic element in all forms of artistic creation.
Kandinsky bases his dynamic theory of colour on the results of empiricaland psychological contact with nature and natural phenomena, rather than on
positive scientific knowledge. Two broad divisions appear from the outset. I. The
warmth or coldness of a colour tone; II. The clearness or obscurity of this tone.
Each colour can be divided into four principal tones, since it may be 1) clear
and warm, 2) clear and cold, 3) dark and warm, 4) dark and cold. In fact Kan¬dinsky’s notion of the warmth or coldness can be restated as the tendency of acolour to approach, on the one hand, yellow, and on the other, blue. When the
distinction operates on the same surface, each colour keeps its own fundamental
tone. But the tones become either more or less material, according to their degreeof warmth or coldness. If there is a horizontal movement, the warm tone tends
to come closer to the spectator while the cold tone draws away.
Even the colours which provoke this movement in a horizontal direction areaffected by it. But at the time they are differentiated one from another in their' internal values. The tendency of a colour towards the warm or the cold is there¬
fore offset by the internal value of that particular colour. This is what Kandinsky
refers to as the First Great Contrast. The Second Great Contrast is brought about
by the black/white polarity, since these colours are the equivalent of the ten¬dencies towards blue or yellow in the previous category. They represent theultimate distance between clarity and obscurity. In this case, there is the same
type of phenomenon as with the previous example: the clear approaches the
spectator and the dark recedes.
Kandinsky sees the movement between yellow and blue, or the First GreatContrast, repeating itself in terms of eccentric and concentric movement. If
there are two circles, one in yellow and the other in blue, the yellow circle gives
the impression of radiation: it takes on an outward movement and almost visibly
approaches the spectator. The blue circle, on the contrary, takes on a concentric
movement, like a snail retiring into its shell. It draws away from the spectator.
These various effects are illustrated by tables in Kandinsky’s work.
Kandinsky glimpses the plastic and psychological possibilities in pure move¬
ment. ‘To obtain that,’ he writes, ‘form, movement, colour and the objects takenfrom nature (whether real or unreal) should not be allowed to suggest any
external effect, or anything that could take on external form in narrative. The
more the movement is lacking in external motivation, the more the effect which
it produces is pure, profound and internal. A simple movement, as simple as you
can imagine, without any identifiable end, already operates on its own, and takes
on a solemn, mysterious importance. This lasts as long as one remains in igno¬
rance of the external and practical goal of the movement. It is therefore operatingin the same way as a pure sound... Simple movement, which does not appear
to be motivated by any external agent, hides an immense treasury of possibilities.
You sense it most when you are plunged in abstract thought, which snatches63man away from the utilitarian bustle of everyday life. So it is outside the practicalrealities of life that these simple movements can be observed. Yet we need only
remind ourselves that nothing at all enigmatic can happen in our streets without
the interest which we were taking in this movement vanishing completely: its
practical significance destroys its abstract significance. This is the principle onwhich the ‘New Dance’ both could be and will be created - which will develop
integrally the internal meaning of movement in Time and Spaced‘And here as well,’ Kandinsky continues, ‘it will be the law of necessary
utilization of the internal meaning of movement as principal element in thedance that will determine the evolution of the enterprise and lead it to its goal.
Here as well the conventional “beauty” of movement has to be abandoned...
every chord is beautiful, that is to say useful, when it is dictated by Internal
Necessity, just as, in the dance, the internal value of every movement will soon
be felt. In that case as well, internal beauty will replace external beauty. A poweras yet unsuspected, a living force, will emanate from the “non-beautiful” move¬ments.’
Kandinsky places the main emphasis on the musical value of movement offorms, and above all on colours. Scriabin’s influence is always well to the fore.
When Kandinsky speaks of rhythmic compositions on a ground bass or thescience of harmony in painting, he is already thinking of his Improvisations (inthe style of Bocklin), his Compositions and his Impressions. But there is an evenmore direct contact between his musical theories and his work as an artist in thetheatrical projects known as Sounds. He had already been working on similar
projects at Murnau in 1909, and the final result was his spectacle based on
Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an exhibition, which was given at the Dessau municipal
theatre in 1928 while he was professor at the Bauhaus. Apparently he also
invented a colour organ.
Kandinsky’s concern with the possibilities of linking sequential arrangementsof colours and forms to subjective movement persisted throughout his career.
At the Blaue Reiter stage, this was genuinely new. His lyrical abstraction was
to have a widespread influence on the next generation. He persisted in this earlystyle, which can be traced back to 1908 and involved an enormous number ofexperiments in movement, up to 1921, when his work began to take on a morearchitectural and geometrical character. Even beyond this stage, movement
continued to play an important role. After 1934, the period of Kandinsky’s fullmaturity, it was successfully adapted to his changing style.
At this point, however, we are concerned with Kandinsky’s theoretical, plastic
and pedagogic work in the years before the First World War. In all of thesefields, his achievement marked an essential step in the evolution of a new abstract
vision in art. He anticipated the mutual isolation of the various plastic elementscomposing the traditional work of art, and in particular pointed towards theliberation of the element of movement. And, although he realized that all theseelements should be presented in their pure evocative power, he succeeded inenriching the whole development with an emotional and spiritual dimension.

64

• Klee: itinerant movement

30 Paul Klee
Tanzt Entsetzen, c. 1925. Pen drawing

Paul Klee, who was also a member of the Blaue Reiter, was kept somewhat in the
background during the years 1910-14 by the dynamic personalities of Kandinsky
and Franz Marc. His contemplative, yet humorous character scarcely fitted him
for active participation in an artistic group. But his taste for music, his tendency
towards abstraction and his pedagogic capacity all suggest comparison with
Kandinsky. In effect, his development followed an exactly opposite path to the‘abstractionist’ trend.
The problem of movement was at the centre of Klee’s preoccupations. But
it figured there more as a feeling that had to be tamed than as a principle of pureanimation or dynamism. Klee was anxious to go beyond the original emotion,in what might be called a new Romanticism in painting. ‘Ingres is supposed tohave ordained immobility,’ he wrote, ‘I would wish, beyond pathos, to ordain
movement.’ This particular concern with movement can be traced to a very earlystage in Klee’s life. In the course of his first year at the Knirr studio, Munich,
which lasted from 1898 to 1899, he noted in his journal that a retired lieutenant
had been visiting him to explain the movement of line. When he visited theMichelangelo frescoes during his visit to Rome in 1901, he wrote of them: ‘The
movement and the uneven musculature are not pure art, but something morethan pure art.’ He has left an amusing comment on a classical statue in the Palaisdes Conservateurs: ‘a female statue that is mobile and as perfect as nature. The
German makes it revolve. His young wife is seated on a bench and admiring her
husband... ’Klee gives a detailed account of his intentions in the plastic field, which involve
an elaboration of movement and organic growth in the work: he also gives a
special place to light. ‘Light and natural forms fight one another, light puts themin movement, evening out the curves, “ovalizing” the parallels, making circles turnin the interstices, and animating the interstices themselves.’ At the end of 1910,
he makes the further comment that ‘light is capable of fulfilling a new function,that of colour movement’. In September 1914 he states that the genesis of move¬
ment in the forms is the essential feature of the work.
In 1917 Klee reached a definite attitude on the problem of movement, which
was based on analogies from polyphonic music - although the conceptual side
was not by any means abandoned. An object that was in ordinary terms invisible
but figured in a complex and simultaneous process of organic movement was tobe the very centre of his procedure as an artist. Klee had learned by experiencethat every interlocking rhythmic figure that could be seen was at the same time
one of nature’s vibration formulae, contained somewhere in the human rhythmsof walking, breathing and the beating of the pulse, or in the cosmic rhythms of
day and night, the years, the moon and the earth. ‘His plastic work,’ remarks
Werner Haftman, ‘has its origin in movement, it is itself movement perceived
and made precise.’ Klee invites us to make acquaintance with the kinetic qualities
of water, of lines, circles and spirals, and of arrows.
The sheer quantity of Klee’s work makes it impossible to sketch a full pictureof the way in which he utilized movement. There are over 10,000 known works
by him. But for our purposes the most relevant material is the series of graphic
and pictorial works which he completed between 1910 and 1920. After 1920 his
65treatment of movement held an important place in the experiments of the newgeneration of artists, since it lay mid-way between abstraction and surrealism.
At all stages, however, he made a distinctive combination between the different
forms of movement and the principle of organic development in nature and in thework of art, indicating turn by turn - in the words of Flinker and Lachenal - ‘ataste for the burlesque, precision of psychological observation, above all poetry• Sculpture: Duchamp-Villon, Laurens, Archipenko,
Brancusi, Zadkin, Arp
Sculpture frequently lags behind innovations in the pictorial sphere. In this case,however, there are several sculptors who deserve to be mentioned for their new
ways of envisaging movement. Rodin and Medardo Rosso had concentrated
attention on the importance of the play of light on the modelled surface. DuchampVillon, Archipenko and Brancusi all reacted against this tradition in their various
ways, and developed new conceptions of movement in the process. Laurens andZadkin, who were influenced at the start by Rodin, affiliated themselves tocontemporary movements, Laurens to Cubism which he reflected in his reliefs
and polychrome sculptures, and Zadkin to Expressionism, which accorded withhis dynamic lyricism. Meanwhile Arp began to incorporate ‘moving symbols’ in
his sculpture and reliefs.
The quality of movement in the work of Duchamp-Villon, who was also
closely associated with Cubism, is ‘objective’ in the sense in which we have beenusing the word. His Torse dejeune homme (1911) has been called an ‘incarnationof the athletic sportsman of the twentieth century... the equal of the greatest
masterpieces of antique statuary. By collecting the lines of force and essential
volumes of the torso of a young man in movement, in a concentrated form whichis intended to increase the desired impression of power, the sculptor transcends
his subject by introducing the idea of a mimetic relationship between the torso
and a tree with its branches amputated.’
Duchamp-Villon’s masterpiece, Le Cheval (1913-14), illustrates a form ofdynamism that in some ways recalls Futurism. The horse - symbol of speed - wasalmost his only theme in 1914, the most fruitful year of his career. ‘People andthings brush us by rapidly, and displace us,’ he wrote, ‘we have become used toit and are unable to distinguish the specific forces of the former from those of theforces which they control. Hence a conception of life in which it would reveal
itself to us quite simply in its highest pitch of dynamism, it is only a step away,
and that is quickly passed over.’In Laurens’s work from the Cubist period, there is evidence of ‘objective’
mobility. Laurens also pursued this path in the series of collages, reliefs, wooden
sculptures and polychrome plaster sculptures which he completed between 1911
and 1918. In the case of Archipenko, it is difficult to say which of the various
categories of movement is dominant. In 1911 he adopted the procedures ofprimitive sculpture and was able to suggest movement in this way. In 1912, hetreated his bronze La Danse in quite a different way: he himself described it as‘modelling in space’. Then there is his juggler Medrano /, also dating from 1912,
and its successor Medrano II from 1914, both of which recall the Cubist style66

31 Jean Arp
Drawing according to the laws ofchance', c. 1917

as well as possessing elements in real movement which will be described in
Chapter 6. The polychrome plaster entitled Pierrot de Carrousel (1913) is very
close to the research in objective movement which was being undertaken by theother Cubists and relates to the collages which Archipenko was also producing
in this year. Archipenko’s stylistic eclecticism, and his consequent readiness touse movement in very different ways, is demonstrated by the wide disparity
between the works which have just been mentioned and the Reflexions or the
Boxeurs of 1914, which make use of interplay between geometrical elements in amanner that recalls the Silhouette of 1910. Archipenko’s work becomes evenmore complicated as his interest in different styles and materials develops. The
culminating point is his invention of the ‘Archipentura’ system which will be
discussed in Chapter 6.
Constantin Brancusi’s research into movement was entirely on a spiritualplane. His thought was dominated by the notion of circular movement, and heassociated geometrical volumes such as the pyramid with the idea of progress
which he believed to be illusory. ‘The fateful pyramid with which Brancusi has
characterized the false notion of elevation and progress was present all around.
He took a sheet of paper which was lying before him and drew upon it. At thesame time, as if to give himself a rest, he looked at the spiral which surrounded
the portrait of James Joyce, and I saw it in that moment moving in the cycles ofrotation, in the curves of the eternally returning history of humanity that wasdear to Vico and to the Irish poet.’
Brancusi’s spirals of life and death, which belong to a later stage, recall the
preoccupations of Klee. But his dominant theme is always that of flight. ‘Through¬out my life I have searched only for the essence of flight,’ he wrote. ‘Flight, what
happiness!’ At the same time it is important to bear in mind the role of suchgeometrical elements as the segments of circles and the ovoid in creating thesuggestions of movement which were typical of his work. Both are combined, ofcourse, in his many variations on the subject of the bird. From Maiastra onwards,
the bird held a ‘cosmic’ significance for Brancusi, and he was able to refer to the‘bird, a project which must be enlarged to fill the vault of the sky’.
In the case of Zadkin, who was born in 1890, the use of movement is ‘sub¬jective’, as is appropriate to the lyrical and poetic style of this sculptor. Although
it is not very much in evidence, Zadkin’s subjective movement has a certain
interest because of the important influence which he exerted upon the next
generation.
Jean Arp, who was born in 1887, has written of the collages and tapestries
which he completed in 1915: ‘As the disposition of planes, the proportions ofthese planes and their colouring seemed to depend simply on chance, I declaredthat these works had been ordered ‘according to the law of chance’, as it is in theorder of nature - chance being for me no more than a restricted part of an un¬
attainable principle of existence, of an order which cannot be grasped in its
totality. The Russian and Dutch artists who were producing works apparently
quite close to mine at this period were subscribing to entirely different aims.
[My works from this period] are in fact an act of homage to modern life, aprofession of faith in the machine and in technique. Although their treatment
is abstract, they always retain a basis of naturalism and trompe-l’oeil.’ This can
67be regarded as the first statement of the idea which was later to become famousas ‘automatic writing’ in the next generation. Arp, a surrealist in advance of histime, stands at the head of this development.

• Ballet, theatre, cinema - Reflections on movement
Reference has already been made to the relationship between the theatre and theplastic arts at the beginning of the twentieth century. As far as movement and theidea of mobility are concerned, the most spectacular theatrical events of thisgeneration were those connected with the Russian Ballet of Diaghilev, the stagesets of Leon Bakst which involved ‘painted’ actors, the art of Nijinsky and theSwedish Ballet of Rolf de Mare. A remarkable pioneer in this field was Edward
Gordon Craig, who had planned the operation of his ‘art of movement’ or ‘art ofrevelation’ as early as 1907, and eventually put it into effect in Scene (1923).
Craig’s aim is to present movement of objects in its pure state by means of light.
His experiments, together with those of Appia, will be dealt with under theheading of real movement.
Another synthesis between dramatic and plastic art, in which movement plays
an integral part, is that which was being developed in Russia, where Tairov,
Alexandra Exter and Yakulov were trying to find a ‘system’ for integrating decor,
costume, acting and mime in a ‘dynamic whole’. The Sturm group in Germany
were concerned with similar objectives. Later Schlemmer, Moholy-Nagy andFarkas Molnar took up the same path of investigation at the Bauhaus. Gropius’‘total theatre’ of 1926, which existed in plans and models, was to influence theuse of movement in dramatic and architectural circles, while at the same time
holding out the hope of collaboration between these professions and plastic
artists with a strong sense of the aesthetic principles of movement.
It is probable that the cinema exercised a major influence on the plastic arts
around the years 1910-20. It was around 1920 that plastic artists with abstract
tendencies first began to take part in cinematographic projects. In Fernand Leger’s
Ballet mecanique of 1924, the movement of the camera and the techniques offilm montage were the only methods employed. From this work, there is a longline of ‘kinetic’ experiments of this kind leading from Henri Chomette, MoholyNagy and Len Lye to Fischinger, McLaren, Valensi and the artists of the presentday.
Literary works from the beginning of the century which contain importantpassages on movement may have had a reciprocal influence on the plastic arts.
Bergson’s books seem to have had a reasonably rapid effect on the generation ofartists who began to produce important work around 1910. Both James Joyce
and Marcel Proust tackled the problem of movement. Joyce wrote in his Journalof movement in sculpture: ‘Sculpture is associated with movement in as much as
it is rhythmic; for a work of sculptural art must be surveyed according to its
rhythm and this surveying is an imaginary movement in space. It is not false
to say that sculpture is an art of repose in that a work of sculptural art cannot bepresented as itself moving in space and remain a work of sculptural art.’ Proustwrote in one of his letters: ‘And then, like a town which, while the train follows
its twisting track, appears to us at one stage on our right, at another on our left,68the different aspects that the same character will have assumed, to the point ofbeing like a succession of different characters, will demonstrate - but only in thisrespect - the sensation of the passage of time. Some characters will reveal them¬selves at a later stage to be different from what they are at first, different fromwhat one will believe them to be as it happens very often in life.’69□
32 Josef Albers (top)Plate from the album Homage to thesquare, 1966
33 Olle Baertling (right)
Og. Plate from the album Triangles,
1961
34 Auguste Herbin
Clarte, 1961

4 Movement in the age of surrealism andgeometrical abstraction

Between the two World Wars, there were very few important developments inthe use of movement in art. A large proportion of the artists of this period simply
continued, or took up once again, the sequence of experiments which had begun
before the widespread dislocation of their activity which took place in 1914.
There were, however, two opposing currents - geometrical abstraction andsurrealism - which evolved in direct relation to contemporary discoveries in thefield of psychology. From this relationship, which involved psychophysiology
in the first case and psycho-analysis in the second, two new ways of envisaging
movement gradually arose. Of course, the surrealist use of movement was on athematic plane, while the movement that related to geometrical abstraction wasstrictly plastic.
The greater number of the artists who belonged to the Cercle et Carre grouping- founded by Michel Seuphor and Torres-Garcia in 1930 - were attempting
to bring simple geometrical elements like the square and the circle into close
connection or juxtaposition, in order to create a sensation of movement. Suchartists as Arp, Sophie Tauber-Arp, Van Doesburg, Robert and Sonia Delaunay
had already made similar attempts, as had the members of the Bauhaus to alesser degree. But the so-called ‘geometrical’ abstract painters concentrated upon
the new problem of taking into account a kind of spatial feeling which they had
no wish to represent in conventional terms. ‘The Futurists,’ Marcel Brion has
explained, ‘nourished the ambition of carrying out in terms of movement thekind of deployment of form which the Cubists had fixed in a static geometricalstructure, by bringing the individual moment to the point where it was the
addition of all the possible moments. Yet the weakness of Futurism, apart fromits excessive reliance upon theory, lay in the fact that they erroneously believed
a synthesis to be no more than the result of the addition of different analyses.’
It was precisely the new awareness of psycho-physiological methods of en¬
livening the canvas, from a basis of simple elements, that helped to relegate the
Futurist conceptions to the background.
The innovators of the generation born around 1910 were therefore eager toabandon the theme of movement, and to take up the methodical investigation ofplastic possibilities which had already been foreshadowed in Impressionism. Thistransition from a type of objective movement that was still dominated by im¬pressions of nature to a type of movement which held unequivocal indicationsof the phenomena of perception was initiated by the artists of the previous
71generation - Magnelli, Freundlich, Herbin, Baumeister, Schwitters, Albers andthe former teachers of the Bauhaus. Freundlich, for instance, devised a methodof associating planes of colour in painting in the same way as volumes wereassociated in sculpture. His aim was to go beyond the traditional framework of
the arts, and to use abstraction to give a new sense of movement.
• Herbin - Schwitters - The Bauhaus - Cercle et Carre Abstraction-Creation

35 Kurt Schwitters
Interior of the Merzbau, c. 1 925,
Hanover (destroyed)

36 Henryk Berlewi
Mecano-facture black on white,
Berlin, 1923. It was around 1922-3 that
Berlewi invented the principle of'mechano-facture' - or superimpositionof repetitive geometrical elements withthe aim of setting up surface vibrations

Herbin began by using the abstract motif of undulating lines, but later managed
to develop an alphabet of geometrical elements upon which he based his theory
and practice of colour juxtaposition. ‘Time and space are limited by movement,’
he wrote. ‘Everything is complete. Everything is destined to be complete.
Electricity and microbes existed before they were discovered. The earth turned
before it was understood to turn. The realities of tomorrow are contained in therealities of today. Movement embraces everything, envelops everything, domi¬nates everything and penetrates everything. Nothing is isolated from the whole,nothing is independent of the whole, in volume, in line, in plane or in colour.’
Herbin continues: ‘Since colour is the means of painting, painting will haveto be conceived in terms of two-dimensional form to obtain a unity of expression.
Painting has no need of the third dimension, either in reality or in any artificial
way, since colour expressed broadly in two dimensions possesses in itself aspatial power. Some colours express space in depth (blue), and others space thatprojects forward (red). Some colours express radiation from within to the outside(yellow) and others from the outside to the inside (blue). Some colours express
mobility (red, yellow, blue) and others immobility (white, black, green): others
mobility and immobility according to their proportions (pink and violet). All
these findings are liable to be modified yet again by the relationships of colours
between themselves.’
The aim of the poet and artist Kurt Schwitters was to ‘construct a new worldfrom the debris’. He carried out this plan by means of a purely abstract techniqueof expression. His subtlety and humour make him one of the pioneers of intel¬
lectual movement in this generation of Dadaist and surrealist manifestations.
Reference has already been made to the importance of linear movement in
the teaching of Klee and Kandinsky at the Bauhaus. The preparatory courses
which were introduced at the Bauhaus and given first by Itten and later byAlbers and Moholy-Nagy, introduced a more generalized study of movement.
This Vorlehre (or Vorkurs) was intended to serve as preparation for the study of
construction and the theatre, and it involved demonstrations of displacementon plane surfaces as well as studies of movement in relation to various different
materials. There can be little doubt that Itten’s statements on colour contrast
and its applications to architecture, and Albers’ work on the kinetic utilizationof colour have both exerted considerable influence on present-day research intocolour.
Finally, Moholy-Nagy made some important theoretical statements on pho¬tography, the cinema and three-dimensional constructions, which have encour¬
aged the development of an art of movement. These were summed up in the
manifesto which he published with Kemeny.

72

37 Oskar Schlemmer
Metallic dance, c. 1928.
Performed by Karla Grosch at the
Bauhaus theatre

38 Students from Josef Albers' class at the
Bauhaus: Study on paper, c. 1928

Oskar Schlemmer, who gave courses on man in art, and, of particular interestin this connection, the art of choreography, placed considerable emphasis on theways in which man’s movements could be related to aesthetic movement (on aplastic, choreographic and dramatic level). He did in fact use the word ‘Kinetik’in his teaching programme.
Another member of the Bauhaus, Lothar Schreyer, was writing in 1919: ‘The
rhythm of the work of art is a movement, a movement which is both compellingand necessary. This movement is compelling because the eye of the artist isforced to submit to it. Movement is an artistic necessity, since only a precise
movement, conceived creatively, can give his vision structure.’
The main programme of teaching at the Bauhaus was instrumental in spreading
kinetic ideas on both the sculptural and the pictorial level, which belonged tocategories outside the traditional division between art and craftsmanship. Oneof the main points of this teaching was to exploit the new dimensions, such asthat of movement, through the use of new materials: ‘constructivist’ works inrelief and sculptural or architectural constructions which have been pared down
to the most elementary forms demonstrate this new departure to the full.
The artists of the generation which was born around 1900 were therefore heirs
to a new type of plastic movement. This became characteristic of the large andloose groupings to which they belonged - Cercle et Carre and, in particular,
Abstraction-Creation. Vordemberge-Gildewart was expressing a general feelingwhen he wrote in 1933: ‘For me, the object only plays an entirely secondaryrole. For, in the last resort, it does not exist at all because of its static character.
My art is anti-static.’
This particular ‘Nordic’ current of abstraction is well represented by theslowly and carefully developed styles of Cesar Domela, Ben Nicholson, Baertling,
Mortensen, Pasmore and Geer Van Velde. All these artists helped to awakeninterest in the perceptual psychology of movement by elaborating linear tensions,juxtaposing planes of colour and making conscious oppositions between positive
and negative volumes. Domela, for example, makes frequent use of different
metals to create sinuous lines indicating movement. Pasmore proceeds from thepurely pictorial expression of geometrical elements in tension or vibration to thejuxtaposition of materials as diverse as wood, glass, perspex and other plastics.
Baertling’s hard-edge paintings and moving sculptures have been described in thefollowing terms by Sartoris: ‘In his staggering clear-cut paintings (flashes ofcolour of an extraordinary purity which seem to tear apart the space and flesh¬liness of a metallic sky), just as in his mobile, threadlike, rectilinear, ascending,aerial and floating sculptures (which are infinitely extensible without weight,
measurement and even physical presence), there is never any conflict between
one and another - the incommensurable is never an abstraction of the monu¬
mental.’The Salon des Realites Nouvelles played an important part in determining theevolution of this type of work from 1946 onwards. Leo Breuer, one of thefounders of the salon, made use of the juxtaposition of different planes - repre¬
sented as they actually are in space - to create movement through interference.
In his work the psychological effects of movement were often reinforced by aclever use of colours, and also by the introduction of stripes to give vibration.

74• Gleizes and the use of rhythm - The School of Paris
It is in the writings and paintings of Gleizes that the transition from Cubism
to a psychological awareness of plastic rhythm or movement can be followedwith the greatest ease. Gleizes stated: ‘Human creation implies the total
renunciation of external sensation. It forces you to come to terms with theprinciple of living order, which links the organs simultaneously within theorganism. This is the principle which transforms power into action, and makes
mobility out of the immobile. When you have understood what movement is,
you have the means of creating it in human terms.’ At another point Gleizes
writes: ‘Movement is certainly the thing which most needs clarifying nowadays.
Beneath the mirages of speed we believe that we are discerning its character.
But this is an error. That movement is merely a perceivable agitation with no direct
relationship to the movement which is a spiritual continuity.’ ‘With having
understood the character and the necessity of rhythm - the ultimate principle ofspace-measurement and time-cadence - and having added it at a later stage topaintings which had been completed without foreseeing this need, I managed totake account of all the potential weaknesses in spatial and temporal organization.’
The point which Gleizes’ theory of movement had reached around 1933 is wellillustrated by the position which he adopted between movement and stasis. He
claimed: ‘I have completed pictures by forcing myself to situate clearly, andin their natural places, the expressions of space and time - the latter being no
more than a counterpoint or fugue on the former.’ The works which Gleizes
produced from this period up to 1950 reflect his preoccupation with these themes,
which also cover the ‘dimensions’ of light and movement.
In the same way, the art of Esteve, Bazaine, Manessier, displays a subtle
animation of the picture surface, while other painters of the Ecole de Paris suchas Poliakoff, de Stael, Singier, Vieira da Silva, N. Dumitrescu and Hella Guthuse constructed and coloured ‘planes’ with geometrical associations which betray
their preoccupation with mobility. It has been suggested that the work of Polia¬
koff, ‘eminently static, but not exempt from subterranean currents of subdued
violence... is of a rare discretion, so enigmatic that a long period of intimacy
with his work, a patient period of waiting in front of his pictures, is necessary’.
On the other hand, the paintings of Singier ‘demand with as much force and in
the same way - and for the same reasons - as a Chinese landscape from theSung dynasty, that movement towards, that setting in motion of the whole being,
body and soul, of the spectator into the innermost centre of the picture.’ Thiselement of participation by the spectator, which takes place through an intimate
movement, it particularly up to date. ‘A collective movement of the heart andthe senses, as long and patient as is necessary for the accomplishment of thatkind of fusion of the spectator with the work which is, in the last resort, the goalof contemplation - this movement is penetration, association, and confusion: it
lasts up to the point when man has become what he is looking at, through bringing
to it the best, most lively and most active part of himself.’
Some of the innovations of Lapicque, a notable theoretician of movement, canbe placed within the French tradition of abstraction. For Lapicque, ‘pictorial
movement is never obligatory’. He makes a distinction between ‘subjective
movement’, which is that of the spectator, and ‘objective movement’, which is75

that of the object. The attempt to conciliate these forms of movement and tocompromise between the exigencies of abstraction and representation lie at theheart of his work. It may be added that some artists of the generation born around1900 continue to use unambiguously figurative forms in their work. Pignon is
one example of this class of artists who continue to view the problem of move¬
ment from its realistic side.

• Intellectual movement: Surrealism - Max Ernst, Masson

39 Max Ernst
Monument aux oiseaux, 1927.
Private collection, Paris. Photo Roche,
Editions du Seuil.
© SPADEM, Paris

If we go back to the problem of intellectual movement, we can recall that thistype of movement originates in an act of the mind, but was successfully assimi¬
lated in the Futurist and Vorticist programmes before the 1914-18 war. In asimilar way, the Dadaists relied upon making satirical commentaries on a formof movement that was cerebral in origin. Among the Dadaists who were still
very active in the 1920s, we can mention Arp, Janco and future adherents ofsurrealism like Max Ernst, Masson, Joseph Sima, Toyen and Styrsky, all ofwhom made use of intellectual movement.
The surrealist contribution to the art of movement was made manifest firstof all in their very individual use of the semantics of movement, which borderedon the symbolic interpretation of the favourite themes of psychoanalysis, andsecondly by their direct application of automatic writing in works of plastic art.
In both cases it was more a question of allusions to movement on an unconscious
level than of genuine movement.
The painting of Max Ernst has been described by Andre Breton as a pro¬gramme of optical research which takes as its point of departure ‘irritability ofmind’ and a systematic habit of placing things out of context. Ernst himself has
frequently referred to this hypersensitivity, which finds expression in surrealist
imagery that is often developed from the basis of childhood experience while
making use of an ‘intellectual’ method resembling psychoanalysis. He relates the
subjects of his work in particular to the experiences which he underwent at theage of five to seven, as a result of the psychological shock from the dynamic
personality of his father. ‘A blind swimmer,’ he writes, ‘I made myself a seer.
I saw.’ He has in fact made a close comparison between the titles of his pictures
and the images of his childhood experience. ‘Very beautiful women crossed a riverscreaming. A man, walking on the water, took one girl by the hand and jostledanother. People who were rather reassuring to look at - in fact, they had slept toolong in the forest - made their savage gestures only for the sake of charm. Someone
said: “ The motionless father.” It was then that I saw myself, showing my father’s
head to a young girl. The earth only quaked mildly. I decided to put up a monu¬
ment to the birds.’
The images and symbols, both abstract and concrete, which occur in this text,
situate Max Ernst in a personal universe which is both literary and plastic.
On 10 August 1925, Ernst discovered the technique of frottage, about which
he was to write: ‘This process later disclosed itself to be the genuine equivalentof what was already known by the term automatic writing. The author takes partas a spectator - whether indifferent or passionately involved - in the birth of his
work and observes the phases of its development.’ In making the conjunction76

between chance and the act of ‘plunging into the springs of deeper life, in orderto bring back the hidden reality,’ he enriched pictorial art with an element ofnovelty. His art shares with psychoanalytic techniques the process of transcen¬
dence whereby ‘the artist appears in a modern role, that of receiver of waves,rather than creator.’
Max Ernst has incorporated elements of movement both in the thematic andthe plastic sense into a large number of his works. He has made particular useof them in his three-dimensional objects, which can be traced back to his Dada
period and to works such as the Objet dad’art of 1919. At a later stage he was toconcentrate on displaying his objects from different angles - a process whichbrought out an element of‘visual’ sexuality, as in the Belle Allemande of 1935,
and also in the Objet mobile recommande aux families of 1936, which makes useof real movement with a surrealist intention as do the contemporary constructionsof Giacometti.
Andre Masson, who was born in 1896, combines thematic movement andtechniques of automatism with a distinctly personal graphic virtuosity. But what
distinguishes him from the line adopted by the Surrealists around 1930 is his
concern with a predominantly physiological vitalism, which is translated by aparticular quality of movement. Here it is a question of an authentic inward
movement, which is often expressed in a calligraphic manner that reveals theexistence of a section in time. Masson follows a Chinese aesthetician of the fifth
century in claiming: ‘The sound of the spirit... makes movement alive.’
There is a deep affinity between this Surrealist who uses movement in an in¬tellectual way and the Expressionist painters using pure gesture who are tending
more and more towards a form of movement that is entirely conditioned by astate of mind (Hartung, Soulages, Tobey).

• Surrealism and thematic movement - Magritte, Brauner, Tanguy, Dali
Poetic irrationalism, and the inward flow of consciousness played an importantrole in Surrealism from the very start. Aragon wrote in 1924: ‘Surrealism, sonof frenzy and shadow. Enter, enter, it is here that the kingdoms of the instanta¬
neous commence... ’ From this point we arrive at the first attempts at automatic
writing, which took place after the first surrealist exhibition, held with the workof Arp, Chirico, Klee, Man Ray, Miro, Picasso and Pierre Roy. ‘In the immense
shadows of the unconscious, ‘writes Michel Carrouges, ‘there are mental slopes
over which stream words, miraculous torrents, shining with all the fires of theirimagery.’ This is an idea which can also be applied to surrealist painting, which
can be seen primarily as a will to metamorphosis and the ‘setting in motion of thedialectic by automatism.’ This dialectic is resolved by the ‘fusion of the deam andthe watch into a superior state.’
Among the artists who have most faithfully followed the line of symbolism
in the realm of movement, we can place Magritte, Delvaux, Victor Brauner,
Salvador Dali and, in a more precise sense, Yves Tanguy. Magritte, who wasborn in 1898, puts the accent on the symbolic and poetic significance of pictorial
themes. Movement thus appears at the same time in a poetic and a popular lightin a painting like his Aube a Cayenne (1926). It takes place within a symbolic

77perspective while at the same time indicating something beyond. ‘The real
problem,’ suggests Pierre Demarne, ‘is today no longer one of representing
anything other than the movements of self-awareness, and of stimulating themin the spectator. In that case, Magritte’s pictures are far more dynamic thanthose of the majority of the great illustrators of the century. Only the movementtakes place on the inside, as people say of stage productions that they take place
within the auditorium.’ Demarne holds that Magritte’s images ‘create movement,
but not the movement which displaces lines in space - rather the movement which
effaces them. So a new world is born..- the world of poetry and the dream.
Tanguy, who was at one time a sailor, has built up a universe which is domi¬
nated by maritime movements. The majority of his works feature the fantastic
remains of flotsam, which the salt water has purged of all its associations. ‘The
things seem to float and swim like algae of tadpoles but they appear to do so in theair, for they have the solidity of objects and cast shadows.’ Besides the movementof the sea, Tanguy’s work also refers to the movement of clouds and of the Milky
Way - his individual sky.
Victor Brauner, who was born in 1903, incorporates a form of movement in
his work which is mental in its construction although it subsequently lends itself
to ‘a world of projection of objective chance’. Other surrealist artists, who wereat work in the years before the Second World War, convey a movement that is
subconscious^in origin, but under intellectual control. Several of Dali’s pictures
have been conceived through the method of ‘paranoiac-criticism’ which was
defined by Andre Breton in the following terms: ‘A spontaneous method ofirrational knowledge based on the critical and systematic objectivization ofdelirious associations and interpretations.’• Automatic signs and paintings: Dominguez - Miro, Michaux
Oscar Dominguez, who, in his development of automatic painting, renewed forthe last time the expression of intellectual movement, painted his Decalcomanies- sans-objet in 1935. These works are like rocky landscapes, and they give placein 1939 or thereabouts to ‘cosmic’ paintings, which represent the last phase of
the surrealist research into movement on a traditional intellectual basis.
Two painters whose work is surrealist or very close to Surrealism succeededin making drawings and signs the vehicle of expression for a new form of move¬
ment based on a new type of attitude. The world of Miro, with its coloured
signs and its miraculous naivety, stands at the other pole from the style of Max
Ernst and his divinatory intelligence. This new spirit, which is associated withan entire lack of artificial constraint, is often conveyed by a type of draughts¬
manship that is full of movement and has no master other than the imagination.
In the years after 1927, Miro himself passed through a period of ‘anti-painting’
which resulted in collages and paintings ‘of a wild frenzy’. The element of move¬
ment was still playing an important role at this stage, and it continued to do soin the next phase of Miro’s work, which began in 1935.
Movement which is employed and controlled in a surrealist manner is a featureof the draughtsmanship of the poet Henri Michaux. But in his case it is used
‘more violently, more electrically, more fantastically’. Michaux’ aim as a plastic

78

artist is not to put into use a particular vocabulary of signs, but to convey theprocesses of life itself. He has written: ‘Instead of a vision which excluded allothers, I would have been content to draw the moments which, put end to end,
make up life, to bring into evidence the internal sentence, the sentence withoutwords, a cord which unrolls its sinuous coils without ceasing and is the intimate
accompaniment to all that presents itself from the outside as well as from theinside. I wanted to draw the self-awareness of existence and the passage of time.
Like taking the pulse. Or again, on a smaller scale, what appears when theevening has come and there is a performance (in a shortened and muted form)of the exposed film which has been open to the day. A cinematic drawing.’
When he proceeds to a larger scale, Michaux makes the following discovery.
‘To my extreme surprise... something that had always been closed opened up
within me. .. through this breach a whole quantity of movements were to pass.’
Thus ‘the amplitude of the gesture... had transformed the spirit of the drawing’in Michaux’ works and the signs had become ‘elan, participation, involvement’.
Through this amplitude he was henceforth able to communicate with his own
capacity for speed. ‘And so there pressed into vision a whole number of move¬ments, of which I had been full - indeed overflowing - for many years. In mychildhood dreams, if I remember rightly, I was never a prince, and not very
often a conqueror, but I was remarkable in my movements. A real prodigy inmovements. A Proteus in movements. These were movements which, in effect,
left no trace in my attitudes and could not possibly have been suspected byothers, except by a certain air of absence which I possessed and a certain ability
to abstract myself from what was going on.’In order to arrive at a violent extreme of movement - a ‘terrible’ degree of
speed - Michaux experimented with mescalin and lysergic acid. He attempted toconvey the internal sensation produced by these drugs in the following passage.
‘This carpet of vibration, which had points in common with the wide-spreading
sparks of electrical discharges, and also with the spectrum of magnetism, thisindefinable trembling, burning, teeming thing, like spasms which have become
nerves, this tree with fine branches, which could just as well be bursting out
at the side, this fluid which is tempestuous, liable to contraction and shaking
movements, vibrant as Champagne but held in elastically and prevented fromoverflowing by a sort of tension at the surface, this nervous projection screen,even more enigmatic than the visions which came to rest there - I do not know,
I shall never know how to speak of it in suitable terms.’
The act of translating this state into poetic or graphic images is the expressionof one of the subsidiary phenomena which relate to this complex situation. All
the graphic and pictorial work of Michaux - all his ‘Phantomism’ of ‘Psycho¬logism’ - is therefore produced without a conscious act of will. It can be placedon the borderline between intellect and sensation, and the ensuing movement
between that which is an object of thought and that which is an object of sen¬sation. ‘A portrait,’ claims Michaux, ‘is a compromise between the lines of force
in the head of the draughtsman and those in the head of the sitter. The definitive
path is the result of this struggle. Some paths are reinforced, others annulled,
a few turned aside... I would like to be able to draw the effluvia between thetwo people...’ At another point he draws attention to the role of movement in

79

his work: ‘The ship responds to the hundreds of waves which strike its keel by
an ample pitching movement. Under the blows, you tend to recover a measureof unity. Lean on them. Derive support from them. The waves which create
dislocation can also be viewed as radiating.’• Subjective movement: German and American Expressionism —The gestural painting of Hartung, Schneider, Soulages, Mathieu,
LapoujadeThe expressionist type of abstraction, which we have already mentioned inconnection with the Sturm group and in particular Lothar Schreyer, represented
a relatively original use of movement in the context of the early 1920s. ‘Ex¬pressionism is the expression of the spiritual by the form,’ wrote Oswald Herzog.’
Form is movement-rhythm On the material level, form in the Fine Arts consistsof lines, planes and light (colour)... Objects are in themselves ensembles derived
from the phenomena of expression and movement.’
American Abstract Expressionism was to have at least as large an effect asGerman Expressionism on the artists practising gestural movement in the 1940s.
Artists such as Thomas Benton (the master of Jackson Pollock), Andrew Dasburg,and Marsden Hartley (in his pictures entitled Movements) may be insufficiently
known in Europe, but their influence was strong in the United States from
1915-16 onwards.
Some originality in the use of movement can be found in the violent brush¬strokes of a number of painters of the Ecole de Paris, from 1930 onwards. Hartungand Schneider were the first to take up this line of‘gestural’ experiment, followed
a little later by Soulages and Mathieu. Hartung’s work is essentially graphic, but
has very little in common with the automatic writing of the Surrealists. In hiscase, movement is expressed through the medium of a vocabulary of signs. ‘It
happens in his work that the arabesque becomes the trace of a journey throughthe infinite, carried out by a force in motion that writes in a space not vacant but
electrified a figure which, if interpreted correctly, would be one of the clues tothe world order.’ ‘An art of anguish, his painting reassumes, beyond its tragic
appearance, a strange quality of serenity, at the very moment when this sur¬mounted tragedy becomes transformed into an image of Nature in its original
stage, not perceived as a geometrical entity, fixed and immobilised by eternity- but on the contrary seen as a material in the process of fusion, whose movement
is that of the storm and the volcano.’
Gerard Schneider, who was born in 1896, is perhaps the best representativeof the generation of painters born around 1900 for whom gesture is, at firstsight, the essential element in their art. In more accurate terms, this movementof the hand must be seen in relation to the problem of expressing an internal
state which is itself eminently mobile. The work of these painters can therefore
be placed in the tradition of‘subjective’ movement - as we have called it. This is
the sense which we must attribute to the following remark by Schneider: ‘The
work is thus above all an improvisation on an internal state which is there to be
formulated in terms of a final solution which realizes the necessities of expression,plastic and technical means.’ By temperament, Schneider is a man of strong80

passions, with a tendency to violence. It is therefore understandable that the useof movement in his works, an element already present in his Nature morte
of 1926 but particularly evident from 1944 onwards in his numbered Compositions
and Peintures, should be full of vitality and psychological force.
This type of gestural painting which conveys a psychological movement wasreflected during the 1950s in France in the work of such painters as Soulages,
Tal Coat and Mathieu. ‘In the work of Soulages,’ writes Hubert Juin, ‘thespectator is not invited to see or agree upon the element of dynamism. On thecontrary, he is solicited by the dynamism: he tests it.’ In the case of Tal Coat,the brush-mark is just as evidently an expression of the psychological intentionsof the painter, which were to be seen in his half-figurative pictures from 1947-8
onwards. Finally Mathieu betrays the same fundamental intention by his
professed attempt to leave ‘the embryology of signs’ behind, and to concentrateon what he refers to as ‘the aesthetic of speed.’ ‘In introducing the notion of
speed into the aesthetics of the West, I was only responding to the internal
necessity in the methods of painting which are determined by its inexorable
evolution.’ After he had exhausted the possibilities of ultra-rapid gestural painting,Mathieu later turned towards what he calls an ‘aesthetic of risk.’ Gestural move¬
ment in the painting of the Ecole de Paris had by this stage arrived at a final
degree of paroxysm.
Some of the processes which have just been described were a feature of thework of Fautrier, Lanskoy and Lapoujade. But Fautrier often showed himself
to be a protagonist of what we have called ‘objective movement.’ ‘Reality not
only exists,’ he maintained,’ but must not in any circumstances be purely andsimply rejected. The gesture of painting is not simply the need to spread painton a canvas, and it must be admitted that the desire for self-expression arises, inorigin, from the observed object.’ Nevertheless, it seems fair to conclude that,from the time of the Les Otages series (1942-44), gestural movement in the workof Fautrier was a matter of psychological expression. The same can be said of
Lanskoy, who can be associated with this tendency towards subjective movementin spite of his meticulous composition.
Lapoujade, who was a man of the cinema and a theoretician of movement aswell as a painter, very frequently used the term ‘subjective movement.’ In his
view, ‘in painting, movement only exists as a function of our sensations as
spectators. Every one of the elements of the picture is motionless.’ In contra¬
diction to Claudel, who holds that ‘all that is movement is time’, Lapoujade
affirms: ‘All that is time is movement and serves to indicate movement.’ In otherwords, time is the notion which we have of real movement. ‘But from our birth
to our death, we are no more than movement.’ ‘Movement, which does not reallyexist in the painting, therefore becomes a subjective effect, which is caused by
the time which we are.’ ‘I thought it interesting to demonstrate this capture oftime and energy by the painting - a radiating block before which we station
ourselves ‘in the process of becoming’.’
The Venetian painter Vedova, who is the only member of the recent generationin Italy to have assimilated the lessons of the Futurists, can be identified withthis tendency towards subjective movement. In the words of one critic, he ‘isattempting an active organization of black and violent signs’.

81• Nordic Expressionism
Nordic Expressionism survived into the 1930s as a result of the work of a numberof painters who practised a graphic style that was directly at variance with theformal colouring and organization of the canvas associated with geometricalabstraction. Movement was not the avowed aim of these Flemish Expressionists,
but it is of course an integral part of any aesthetic which seeks to remain faithful
to reality. It may be noted that this particular style was formed above all in
Holland. From 1914 onwards De Smet and Van den Berghe were in contact
with a very lively group in Amsterdam, among whom Le Fauconnier was
regarded as having a more genuine claim to be considered the author of cubism
than Picasso and Braque. Le Fauconnier’s ‘physical cubism’ - as Apollinairetermed it - was characterized by an element of dynamism somewhat reminiscentof Futurism, which was particularly apparent in Le Chasseur (Salon des In¬
dependants, 1912). This type of dynamism can be found in a rather less acuteform and with obvious debts to analytical cubism in the pictures by Sluyterswhich were inspired by Spakenberg. Both of these artists were trying to adapt
the lessons of modernism to a particular type of landscape.
The most significant development from our point of view in the course of
Flemish Expressionism was that of Permeke. When this artist returned to Ostend
after the First World War, he became familiar with Cubism, which was being
featured around this time in exhibitions at Antwerp and Brussels, and con¬sequently began to abandon the rather heavy and static style which still clungto the pictures which he had completed in England. What Permeke took from
Cubism was essentially a method of opening up form and giving it dynamism,
paying special attention to the points where the planes passed from one toanother, and using a technique that was much lighter than that of the original
Cubists. A picture like Le Pain noir (1923) possesses this experimental
character.
It is only insofar as it is a natural phenomenon that movement plays a partin the concerns of Permeke. UHomme au panier (1925) appears in this light asa kind of snapshot of an Ostend fisherman, whose position represents a kind of
equilibrium between two areas of oscillation. Besides the two types of movement
which have already been implied - that which is the result of an aesthetic ex¬perience and that which is the accidental modification of a static situation Permeke’s work also involves a third, which is akin to the one which has justbeen mentioned. This is movement as a transcription of the interplay of elements
in a physical feature such as sea or landscape. Here it is no longer a question of an
intellectual operation, but of the dynamism of execution - a principle which canbe related, with all the necessary reservations, to the freedom of gesture even¬tually claimed by the action painters, and, in their wake, by a significant fractionof modern painters.
This use of gestural movement, which persisted for a long time among Dutch,
Belgian and Danish painters, was strongly affected by the personality of Picassoin his more expressionistic and surrealistic phases. An example of this influencecan be seen in the career of Jan Wiegers, who was born in 1893, and Bran Van
Velde, who was born in 1895. In a sense it also exists in the work of Hendrik
Werkman (1882-1945), an expressionist using sober forms who developed82

towards the end of his life a technique which he called ‘impressions’. This wasa process which involved printer’s ink on a paper background, and lent itself
particularly to the expression of movement - as in his Porte tournante of 1941.
Charley Toorop, the daughter of Jan Toorop, combined the lessons of theJugendstil and strongly emotional, ‘felt’ painting in a style which opened theway for a renewal of the art of the brush-mark. Another Dutch painter, Ouborg,
took particular interest in the problem of expressive movement and had aconsiderable influence on the Cobra group, which was formed in 1948. This
group, which was also influenced by Danish painters such as Jacobsen, Pedersen,
Heerop and Bille and the Dutch painters associated with the magazine Reflex,
took its title from the initial letters of the three capitals Copenhagen, Brussels andAmsterdam. Among its most notable members were the Dutchmen Jorn,
Constant, Corneille, Benner and Appel and the Belgian Alechinsky. The main
doctrines of the group could be summed up in the following terms. Creation is anexperiment into the unknown, which has freedom, courage and revolution as its
main objectives. Art is a rough, rather than a refined, pleasure. The freedom of
the imagination is the ultimate value. The painters in this group were aimingfor ‘direct concentration of sensibility and emotion on to the canvas, by the
spontaneous movement of their ‘writing’ and the direct effect of colour... Theirefforts were therefore more or less similar to those of the Expressionists.’• The action painting of Jackson Pollock - Tobey, Kline etc.

40 Jackson Pollock working in his studioat East Hampton, Long Island, c. 1945

The most spectacular development in the use of subjective and gestural move¬
ment by the painters who reached maturity in the 1930s took place in the UnitedStates. The unchallenged leader of the American ‘action painters’ was Jackson
Pollock, who was born in 1912 and died in 1956.
Pollock’s art can best be understood as an attempt to animate the very act ofpainting. As he remarked in 1947, ‘painting has its own life’. He aimed to par¬ticipate in this act with his whole being, stating on several occasions: ‘I am in
my painting.’ He held that this method corresponded to his need for a ‘natural
growth’. As he remarked in a film commentary which was made in 1951, hisaim was ‘to express my feelings rather than to illustrate them.’
Pollock began his use of gestural movement with the traditional paint-brush,
but he later began to work with sticks, trowels and knives. Finally he reached
the point where everything was left to the free movement of the fluid material- his famous ‘drip’ technique. Obviously this particular technique was firmly
anchored in the world of the emotions.
It seems to have been in reaction to the teaching of his master Benton that
Pollock first began to develop his distinctive style. At a later stage he was in¬fluenced, or at least impressed, by the work of Picasso and Miro. There wastherefore a surrealist streak in his Expressionism, and a leaning towards the
exploration of the unconscious which was to be reflected in his characteristic
expression of movement. The ‘golden age’ of this style - referred to both asabstract expressionism and as action painting was to come between 1943 and1948. Pollock’s aim was to bring out the potentiality of a kind of cursive writing
which was entirely divorced from the image, a continual stream of arabesques

83which gave the appearance of having been generated automatically. In the last
analysis, he was concerned with an entirely pure plastic notation.
After this initial phase. Pollock introduced new techniques both in 1947 and1949, while retaining the dominant idea of the picture surface as a field of conflictand struggle. In 1947 he painted his first work on aluminium, which was entitled
Cathedral, and in 1949 he went on to his first ‘splashes’ in an attempt to destroy
the unity of the material itself and to liberate its internal forces. Some of Pollock’s
works - such as Autumn rhythm - can be seen as a result of delirium or ecstasy,
but it is important to remember that his most colossal pictures spring directlyfrom the need to inscribe the record of ‘felt’ movement in a limitless space.
Pollock’s art is therefore one of ‘internal necessity’ in the same sense at that of
Kandinsky.
There can be little doubt that Pollock’s violent revolt was the cause of therenewal of creative activity in America after the Second World War, and that
he has made an important contribution to the liberation of movement as a plastic
element - while retaining all the time certain vestiges of emotional content.
This is the typically American component of the history of movement in theplastic arts. It can be traced back through Pollock’s career to his figurative periodof 1933-34, when he completed Landscape with Rider and Seascape. But themost significant dates are 1945, when his abstract works were exhibited for the
first time, and 1947, when those involving free use of the liquid material werefirst shown.
The vocabulary of signs used by Mark Tobey gives an effect of greater in¬
timacy than those of the majority of American painters. Tobey is attempting
to achieve a contemplative interiority that is almost oriental. As Alvard remarks,
he ‘is concerned with being and not with appearance. Signs, shapes and strokes
melt into a larger multitude that vibrates intensely. He has discovered themeaning of phenomena without limit, of pictures without beginnings, and of
perfections without end.’ The very titles of Tobey’s work are a worthy illustrationof the way in which he has slowly and carefully worked at the development of
this calligraphic approach to plastic art which is at the same time an extensionof the thematic variety of movement.
Leon Kochnitzky has written that ‘in the oppressive atmosphere of the Ameri¬can metropolis... the individual can only save himself by embracing in thought
the frenetic mass of the city’. Franz Kline, who was born in 1910, belongs thistradition. But with his broad and incisive treatment of black pigment he is never¬theless outside the calligraphic tradition. ‘In Kline’s paintings,’ it has beensuggested, ‘the whites are not negative or positive spaces. They have the same
significance as the blacks. There is in this interplay of values an equivalence offorces which recalls the equivalence of rectilinear elements in Mondrian. His
pictures have no connection with oriental calligraphy.’Of the other American painters who may be mentioned in this connection.
Brooks replied to a questionnaire prepared by the Whitney Museum, New York,in 1957: ‘It is probable that the movements of forms in my paintings are borrowed
from human gestures rather than from dumb nature.’ Gottlieb replied at thesame time: ‘The problem which concerns me most consists in projecting intangi¬
ble and fugitive images which appear to me to have significance in terms of84

sensibility.’ A similar concern with gestural and ‘subjective’ movement is afeature of the work of other American painters such as Baziotes, Guston, evenArshile Gorky - and in particular Barnett Newman with his ‘unique, verticaland obsessive’ line.

• Sculpture - Pevsner, Gabo, Vantongerloo, Max Bill

41 Georges Vantongerloo
Chrysalis, 1950.
Transformation by rotation

42 Max Bill
Construction with suspended cube
1935-6In the case of sculpture, the break with the traditional scheme of references
to movement comes with the inter-war period, as a result of the achievementsof Moholy-Nagy and Calder. Real movement already occupies an interesting
place in the work of the sculptors in the generation born around 1900 - as will beseen at a later stage in the book. If we restrict the present enquiry to those
sculptors who were content to use the traditional resources of movement - inother words, figurative representation, the play of light on surfaces and thespectator’s classic itinerary around the object - it becomes clear that some paid
particular importance to the element of movement and in this way contributed
towards its establishment as an independent aesthetic factor.
This contribution by the traditional sculptors is connected with a new treat¬ment of space and a willingness to employ a wide variety of new materials. MoholyNagy saw the evolution of sculpture in the following terms: from the block, ofwhich the pyramids provided an obvious example, there was a transition tomodelled sculpture (in positive and negative volumes), and finally the processcame to an end at kinetic sculpture, having passed through the stages of per¬foration and suspension. In his opinion the constructivist sculptures of Pevsner
and Gabo remained at the stage of modelling, with the exception of the few
which made use of real movement. But it must surely be argued in contradiction
to this view that the innovations in the treatment of space which were madeat this stage in the field of static sculpture were still extremely important in thehistory of objective movement. Carola Giedion-Welcker is right to emphasizethat the constructivist manifestoes and exhibitions proclaimed the ‘supreme
value of movement.’ Material solidity was being decomposed through the aidof light and movement was in consequence becoming a plastic element. Pevsner’s
works can in many cases be regarded as ‘free symbols of the movement of theuniverse’, expressing ‘space and energy’ even if their original source is ‘thedepths of human emotion.’
G. Vantongerloo deserves to be placed among the modern artists who havecontributed most to the development of new aesthetic possibilities. His passionate
interest in the problems of space and movement led him, as early as 1918, toattempt a new form of distribution of elements in space, which was based uponmathematical coordinates. This was, in effect, a demonstration of Euclidian
geometry by means of the absurd. Vantongerloo’s subsequent research persuaded
him that it was impossible to ‘fix’ an object by the use of points: this could only
be done by bringing out the energy or inner tension of the object. The way inwhich he developed this idea - in a number of works that suggest comparison
with mathematical formulae - was to be of permanent value to all artists who
were attempting to use three-dimensional, conventional, virtual or real movement.
Max Bill, a sculptor and theoretician who has been closely concerned with85

43 Sonia Delaunay
Plate from the album Poesie de mots,poesie de couleurs (Soupault), 1962

the problem of movement in space, began his career as a student at the Bauhaus.
‘From the very beginning,’ it has been suggested, ‘his plan of research tended
to place the plastic work in space, to deprive it of its frontal, static appearance
in favour of a visible mobility.’ Like Vantongerloo, Max Bill has often had
recourse to mathematical formulae in the course of his career, with the ultimate
purpose of providing a firm, constructive base for his work and of enabling theelement of movement to ‘extend beyond the established forms.’ In most cases,
it has been a question of objective movement, expressed in materials such as
bronze and marble when the work is on a large scale, and brass and copper when
it is somewhat smaller. In his Endless ribbons, which date from between 1935 and1953, and his Rhythms in space, which were constructed in 1947-48, Bill has
managed to achieve an impression of symmetry when the work is seen from thefront, which breaks up into ‘endless’ interlacing the moment the spectatorchanges his point of view. His Construction with suspended cube, which is madeof brass and iron and dates from 1935-36, is a mobile involving real movement.

• Bloc, Jacobsen, Zadkin, Moore, Hepworth, Gonzalez, Smith

44 Victor Vasarely
Plate from Kinetic album no. Ill, 1959
45 Richard Mortensen
Plate from the album Le Ve Chant, on atheme from the Odyssey, 1960

Andre Bloc succeeded in developing a way of using space in a dynamic manner,which was equally applicable to sculpture and architecture. ‘We continue to use
the word sculpture,’ writes Michel Seuphor, ‘to describe the widely differingachievements of abstract artists. In order that the necessary comparisons should
be made, it would be better to use a new expression, such as ‘the art of occupying
space’. This art extends from townscape to the individual work, since theproblems are often analogous in these fields, even though the scale and thematerial conditions are transformed.’ The work which Bloc completed according
to these principles is reflected in that of Robert Jacobsen, who was born in 1912.
Jacobsen, however, used more specifically kinetic effects.
Lipchitz, who was born in 1891, made use of positive-negative volumes inorder to obtain a half thematic and half plastic type of movement. Gargallo,
who lived from 1881 to 1934, had already exploited the interplay of concaveand convex volumes in a series of works which began in 1924. Zadkin, whobegan his development with a form of expression which tended ‘simply to set
up a plastic rhythm,’ was impelled by his poetic nature to attempt more complex
groupings, more varied combinations of form and more expansive arrangements
of movement as his career proceeded.
If we follow Moholy-Nagy’s argument, we arrive at the principle of per¬foration which is also one of earliest characteristics of the English sculptor Henry
Moore, who was born in 1898. Moore has written that: ‘A work of art must havea vitality of its own... not... a reflection of the vitality of life, of movement,
physical action... dancing figures and so on, but... a work can have in it apent-up energy, and intense life of its own, independent of the object it may
represent. When a work has this powerful vitality, we do not connect the word
beauty with it. Beauty, in the later Greek or Renaissance sense, is not the aimof my sculpture.’
Moore is in fact calling for a metamorphosis, based on the notion that nature
is itself filled with energy. He has pursued this idea in his investigation of a wide8646 Alberto Giacometti
Homme quimarche /, Bronze

variety of materials. Barbara Hepworth, who was born in 1903, has followed asimilar path in the development of her art, opening up sculptural mass bypiercing and hollowing it. Her aim is to liberate the external form, as she has
explained in the following passage. ‘I was the human being in the landscape. The
colour of the concavities (of my sculptures) plunged me into the depths of waters,
caves, shadows, more profoundly than those concavities themselves. The threads,
that was the tension that I felt between myself and the sea, the wind, the hills.’
Moholy-Nagy, whose work in real movement will be discussed at length in a
subsequent chapter, made some investigations into objective movement at thisperiod with the use of numerous different materials, of which perspex is themost important.
The counterpart to intellectual or surrealist movement in the sculptural field
was a branch of activity which derived its individuality from the use of new
flexible materials, in particular wire. Julio Gonzalez, who was born in 1876,
played an important role as an innovator from 1927 onwards, and was responsible
for the reintroduction of iron as a sculptural material. As far as the expressive
and surrealist possibilities of movement were concerned, he was the interpreterof Picasso in terms of sculpture. His influence was widely felt in Europe andAmerica, especially on the generation of sculptors who were born around 1900.
Iron and wire have also been the favourite materials of several English sculptors,
such as Chadwick, Armitage and Reg Butler. Since the dynamic and rhythmic
qualities of their works spring from an essentially linear view of sculpture, theelement of movement is often prevalent. But this is essentially an intellectual
movement, which reflects surrealist inspiration. Movement also occurs in theirworks as a result of the juxtaposition of materials - ‘lines’ of iron, blocks ofstone and fragments of glass.
Among the American sculptors who have been strongly influenced by thespirit and technique of Gonzalez and Picasso, David Smith occupies a prominentplace. Smith, who was born in 1906, began his career as a Cubist and later becamea Surrealist. He sculpted his first polychrome wood constructions in 1931, andbegan to work with soldered iron in 1933. He has written of this technique,which he pioneered in the United States: ‘Metal by itself has no history in art.
What it possesses is the power of evoking the essential features of our age: power,
structure, movement, progress, destruction and brutality.’ At a later stage,
David Smith showed a preference for steel as a material, since it allowed at least
some suggestion of movement in the working of the surface.

• Hans Arp - Giacometti - Lardera - The climate ofthought around 1930
The surrealist use of movement is also a feature of the sculptures of Hans Arp
and Giacometti, two artists who belong to the generation which was born around1900. Mention has already been made of the work of Arp, who exercised apersistent influence during the 1920s and 1930s with his remarkable reliefs,
which went beyond the open sensuality of their contours. The unusual work of theself-taught artist Jean Peyrissac, who was born in 1895, recalls the path which
Arp followed. Peyrissac started to use iron, cord and pieces of wood after he had

88left the Bauhaus, and succeeded in creating sculptures like Engins plastiques andConstructions dans Vespace which were full of vitality and movement. And yet
he stated in 1960: ‘Although sculpture suggests movement, its static rigour isreally its essential quality.’
The sculpture of Alberto Giacometti, who was born in 1901, bordered upon
the researches of the Surrealists around 1930. But as far as movement is concerned,
it should be placed in the category of ‘felt’ movement. ‘In any case,’ Giacometti
has remarked,‘it is the type of sculpture in which I can sense a continual violence
that touches me most.’
A student of Bourdelle, Giacometti has displayed a new quality of visionin his desire to ‘seize the wholeness of a figure’. ‘The form goes to pieces, there
is no longer anything but a movement - as if of seeds - on a deep black emptiness.’
He makes use of elements from the unconscious, from his own memory andfrom his dreams. Objects like his Boule suspendue, and UHeure des traces, bothof which date from 1930, and L’Objet desagreable from 1932 employ a combinationof real movement and magical or divinatory movement as a means of expression.
‘These sculptures,’ wrote Auguste Herbin, ‘either form themselves into small
groups or stand alone in a remarkable emptiness which they themselves seemto create.’
Between 1935 and 1945 the art of Giacometti passed through a stage of crisis.
At this point his study of the model and his interior vision did not see to agree
any more. It was only through a long series of experiments that he managed tofind a new and appropriate way of expressing the problems which faced him.
‘The problem of movement claims his attention. And it is the image of walking
which appears - the gesture of an arm or a stretched-out hand.’ ‘The attitude,
the gesture creates a disturbance in space, cuts it up and sculpts it, while the eyeregisters its very slightest alterations. Sculpting a man on the move is also, in one
sense, a matter of representing space in a state of agitation, modified by thepassage of the walker.’ ‘A motionless figure surrounds itself with closed space.
A figure in motion opens up space and attracts other figures, without encoun¬
tering them in the process: in an open space, solitude is plural.’
It is perhaps a rash undertaking to look in the work of Lardera for indicationsof research into subjective movement. At first sight, the work of this sculptor,
who was born in 1911, seems to belong to the region of the most rigid Con¬
structivism, with its various elements in copper and iron. But in one sense move¬
ment plays an important part. As Michel Seuphor has remarked, ‘these large
black metal sheets, cut out in lines of force, make you think of brush-strokes
thrown into space’. And Lardera has himself pointed out the influence of thepioneers of movement and of new materials on the artists of the younger gener¬
ation: ‘It was necessary to reach the same point as the researches of Gonzalez,
Calder and several sculptors of the younger generations in order to find new
solutions to the problems of the plastic arts, in which the quality of emptinesswould take on expressive values in an absolute sense.’ Lardera’s iron sculptures
are essentially based upon this kind of rhythmic relationship between emptiness,space and movement. He moves from plane geometry to spatial geometry, andby intercutting two or more different contours manages to give the whole worka dynamic feeling. Despite its rigorous calculation and its cold metallic exterior,89

his sculpture springs from strong conviction and genuine sentiment.
Other members of the younger generation who have made use of ‘felt’ move¬
ment - with the aid of new materials applied to half-figurative and half-abstract
forms - include Maria (Martin), a surrealist sculptress from South America
whose work is particularly fertile, the American Mary Callery, who derives her
sculptures from gestures and movements which ‘universalize themselves into
attitudes which themselves tend to be abstracted into signs,’ Carmelo Cappello,
the Italian sculptor, and Harold Cousins, whose ‘linear sculptures’ of metal rods
and stalks combined with iron, bronze and nickel elements make up perforated
masses that ‘carry this way and that antennae which vibrate with the slightest
breath.’The very persistence of the traditional themes and procedures connected withmovement in the work of Italian sculptors like Mario Marini, who was born in
1901, and Pericle Fazzini, who was born in 1913, helps to explain the revolution
in the expression of movement which took place in the 1930s. Marini’s work,
including the Horses and Riders which conjure up a vision of‘antiquity freshenedby an authentic naivete and a completely independent turn of mind,’ and thatof Fazzini, which is ‘surprisingly rhythmic but always graceful’, both aroused
a violent reaction and helped to provoke the introduction of real movement into
avant-garde sculpture.
The three-dimensional movement which has just been reviewed involves nomore than the suggestion of movement in the work. In the next chapter a more
intense degree of movement will be discussed - that of the ‘virtual’ movement
which compels the attention of the spectator. Finally the degree of real move¬
ment will be taken into account. We shall attempt to relate this process to thedevelopment of painting. But, at least as far as kinetic art is concerned, it isdifficult to maintain the distinction between painting and sculpture in any usefulway. The art of movement emerges as a more or less separate phenomenon,
as the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Bachelard, Freud and the general develop¬
ments in experimental psychology and the natural sciences might have led us to
expect. The researches of these various scientists, philosophers and thinkers havetended to establish a new and realistic conception of movement, principally
through interchange between applied science and technology. Striking examplesof this development are to be seen in the fields of astronautics and cybernetics - thenew science established by N. Wiener in 1948. At the present day, all this activity
in the application of scientific thought to the problems of movement has strong
repercussions in the plastic arts.

90

Part 2

□
47 Nicolas Schoffer
Lux II, 1 957-65. With multiple prism

5 The [origins of kinetic art:
virtual movement

The element of movement has now assumed an important place in the researchof contemporary artists. At this point we must turn to what has been calledkinetic art, or, in the vocabulary of some critics, the kinetic arts.
In the table at the end of this book, I have made an attempt to classify thevarious types of work which involve movement, and to define the boundaries ofthe field. I have classed works which employ ‘virtual’ or apparent movement
within kinetic art, but joined them by a dotted line to static art - that is to say,work whose motion or tempo only becomes appreciable after an effort of concen¬
tration. In a sense virtual movement occupies a half-way ground between themobile and the static. The reason for including it here lies in the fact that it is
the artist’s avowed intention to create a sensation of movement through trans¬parency, arrangements of line and colour etc. A work of this kind only realizes its
aesthetic value when the spectator has responded in accordance with this inten¬
tion.
The methods used in the past to indicate movement - which have already been
described here - survive to this day. But they are associated with styles that arequite different from kinetic art. Action-painting and the various styles involving
expressive marks are cases in point. Artists of our generation are still interested
in animating the image by juxtaposition of elements, as can be seen in Pop artand ‘Neo-Dada’ or ‘Neo-realist’ movements.
If we turn to the remote sources of kinetic art - inspiration from nature, fromart itself, and indeed from psychological states of mind - the variety is immense.
Artists have derived inspiration from - or at least determined their choice of
method in response to - intellectual and imaginative tendencies such as the
dynamic philosophy of vitalism, the mathematical calculus of movement andother theories of the relationship between time and movement, also from thenotion of progression as a factor of movement. They have considered both an¬
cient and modern theories relating to order, repetition, combination and permu¬
tation. A particular example would be information theory, with its notions ofentropy and redundance. And here we must not forget the theories of artistengineers, who derive a genuine aesthetic of dynamism from the field of scienceand transpose it into the use of movement in thematic or purely plastic terms.
Of a more permanent nature are the natural manifestations of movement whichhave influenced the kinetic artist. Phenomena connected with light - especiallythe cycle of night and day - with wind and air, gravitation and weightlessness,93belong in the first rank. But other common phenomena such as the movement ofwater - from the smallest drop to the scale of the ocean - fire and smoke, atoms
on the microcosmic and stars on the macrocosmic scale, have inspired artists ofour time. Particular mention should be made of biological movement, from thatof the smallest organism seen under the microscope to the immensely varied
movements of man and the animals.
There is also a group of relatively distant sources belonging to the technologicalsphere. The most striking and the most permanent of these are technical inven¬tions such as the wheel - and motor-car - boats, clocks and cameras. But there
is also the less tangible effect of theories of the relationship between art andscience, and theories of the repercussions of technological progress in the realmof art. Here we are close to a field that is partly artistic, partly natural and partly
technological, that of firework displays, water and smoke fountains, automata
and robots. The artists themselves often quote these sources and their works
confirm the influence.
Next we come to the domain of the arts, where there are two opposing theories
that must be taken into account. On the one hand, art is tending more and more
towards the dynamic. On the other, movement only plays an important part in
the history of art at certain periods - of course the second theory does not ruleout the possibility that our own period is one of these. Both these points of view
have had an effect on the attitudes of contemporary artists. And perhaps themost significant factor in the realm of art theory is the suggestion that the elementof movement has now become autonomous, resulting in the birth of a new art
form - kinetic art. This notion, which is of course the basis of the present book,can be taken both as a point of historical fact and as a working hypothesis which
the artist can adopt at a purely practical level.
More specific parallels can be made between kinetic art and the characteristic
forms of movement which are to be found in the other arts. Music, in particular,
has played an important role in the development of a plastic art in motion. It has
always represented the ideal to be attained, and musical terminology - though
it can only be adapted with difficulty to other fields of activity - has often been
carried over into the statements of kinetic artists, in such words as rhythm,
rubato, tempo, rallentando and accelerando. Another influence from a neigh¬bouring art which must be taken into account is that of choreography and thedrama. And the relationship between the plastic art of motion and cinematography
is of particular importance in coming to terms with a certain class of works.
Finally there is the influence from the plastic arts themselves, which is thestrongest and the most direct. Here, in the full range of forms of movement
indicated, suggested and represented from prehistoric times to the present day,
we may expect to discover the true guiding lines for our chronological andanalytic survey.
But first of all let us take a look at the origin of the word ‘kinetic’ and the term‘kinetic art’. As far as can be determined, the two words were not used together
in ancient literature and philosophy. Our starting point must therefore be therevival of the Greek root as a scientific term at the beginning of the nineteeth
century. The word ‘kinetic’ (French: cinetique) was universally employed around1860 to describe phenomena connected with movement in physics and chemistry.

94

In particular, it was applied to the field of ‘gas kinetics’. In mechanics it helda different sense from the words ‘cinematic’ and ‘dynamic’.
Around 1890 these terms acquired an added range of meaning. The research of
Muybridge and Marey, which had resulted in the invention of an apparatus
capable of taking up to sixteen photographs per second, led to Edison’s kinetoscopeof 1892. Edison’s invention made possible a rapid succession of photographs,
which gave an illusion of movement when seen together. And finally, in 1895,
the brothers Lumiere put on view their ‘cinematographic’ apparatus, whichenabled whole audiences to take part in the display of projections. It is to thistechnique, which developed into a new art form, that we owe the association of
the word ‘kinein’ with the vocabulary of aesthetics. The Germans, however, hadadopted the term ‘kinetic arts’ for the arts of gesture.
It was in 1920 that the word ‘kinetic’ was first used in connection with theplastic arts. Gabo and Pevsner spoke of‘kinetic rhythms’ in their Realist manifesto
which dates from this year. But the term soon became associated with precise
physical phenomena. Gabo himself exhibited a steel strip, set in motion by anelectric motor, under the title ‘kinetic sculpture’ that same year. In effect, theword ‘dynamic’ was still used most frequently to denote movement in theplastic arts. Even Moholy-Nagy, who, with Gabo, was to make the most coherent
use of the terms ‘kinetic’ and ‘cinematic’, used the alternative word for the
majority of the phenomena involving movement mentioned in the manifesto
which he signed with Kemeny in 1922. Fernand Leger, Schlemmer and Kiesler
all made use of the words ‘kinetic’ and ‘cinematic’. The Czech artist Zdenek
Pesanek referred to his works as kinetic, and even published a book called
Kinetismus in 1941. Yet a term for a type of work involving movement which
acquired much more general currency between the wars was that of ‘mobile’- probably introduced by Duchamp in 1932 to describe work by Calder.
It was only around 1954 that the word ‘kinetic’ finally became an accepted partof critical terminology. The Yellow manifesto, published on the occasion of thefirst ‘Movement’ exhibition at the Galerie Denise Rene, Paris, in 1955, containedreferences to the ‘kinetic arts’ by Vasarely - artist and theoretician - and Hulten art historian. In this case, the word was being used partly for purely visualresearch which compelled the spectator to respond to certain stimuli. When
Agam had adopted the term ‘kinetic art’ for his own work begun around 1952-3,
it was also being applied to works whose temporal structure only became apparent
if the spectator himself moved. And later it spread to cover works which derived
from the colour-organs, or involved light projections and moving forms, in the
tradition of Scriabin, Wilfred, Baranoff-Rossine and the members of the Bauhaus. Wolfgang Ramsbott drew the dimensions of this wider field when hepublished his elaborate chronology of kinetic art in 1960. From this date wemight say that kinetic art belongs to art history.
For the purposes of this study, kinetic art covers all two or three-dimensional
works in actual movement, including machines, mobiles and projections, whether
controlled or uncontrolled: it also covers works in virtual movement, that is to say,in which the spectator’s eye responds quite clearly to the physical stimuli. Within
the last category we must obviously place the work of such artists as the membersof the Nouvelle Tendance, who allow optical phenomena to play a predominant95

48 «,cit966V8oacmVx 88 cm

role. Finally, we are bound to admit those works which require active participa¬tion by the spectator, either through his own movements or by virtue of the partwhich he plays in composing or recomposing the elements of the work.
The fact that the term ‘kinetic art’ can be applied to this wide range of works
must not be taken to imply that the aesthetic experience of movement is identicalin all cases. In fact, this experience seems to vary in direct relationship to theexistence of the three basic groups: those which are stable but stimulate physi¬
ological reactions in the spectator, those which challenge the spectator to physicalaction, and finally those which are themselves in movement. Of these threegroups, it is the one which is concerned with virtual movement that poses themost difficult problems of classification. This is not because the artists derive
their inspiration from a great number of different sources - a problem whichrecurs in all branches of the arts - but because there is no decisive frontier
between traditional images of movement, whether semantic or plastic, and the
new vision which leads to the liberation of the element of movement. Nonetheless,
it is possible to cite the names of a few artists who are generally regarded as
pioneers in this area, since they succeeded in bringing the issue of virtual move¬
ment into prominence by their treatment of colour, line and volume. These are:Delaunay, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, Herbin, Albers, Sophie TauberArp, El Lissitsky, Berlewi, Klee and several other members of the Bauhaus.
• Vasarely

Victor Vasarely, who was born in 1908 at Pecs in Hungary, spent some time as aprofessional draughtsman. But it would be wrong to speak in his case of a tran¬
sition from purely technical to artistic expression. In his studies at the Miihely(Hungarian Bauhaus) under Alexander Bortnyk, he had entered into the spiritof the new educational method which made no distinction between the artisan
and the artist. It was from his continual attention to drawing, and the problemsof space and movement, that he gradually evolved his ‘plastique cinematique’- or ‘cinetique’ as he later described it. His work comes within our classification
under the category of linear virtual movement.
Vasarely views his own contribution as a synthesis of what went before. He
writes that ‘the vestiges of recent figurative art linger on in the first abstract
works. One stroke calls to mind the old horizon, while another suggests the
Italian conventions of perspective. One background is still atmosphere, and nota purely plastic element, another is chiaroscuro... All this had to be left behind’.
Vasarely’s own research has led finally to the vision of ‘a new city - geometrical,
sunny and full of colours’ in which art is to be ‘kinetic, multi-dimensional andcommunal. Abstract, of course, and closer to the sciences.’
For Vasarely the notion of movement is inseparably linked with that of spatial
illusion. It is from the union of these two elements that the plastic word develops.
‘By virtue of the opposing perspectives these positive and negative elements
alternately arouse and dispel a ‘sense of space’, an illusion of movement andduration.’ Again he writes: ‘We should not assume from the term ‘plastiquecinetique’ that it is a question of making the pictures and objects move at all
costs. What is being expressed is a generous concept of plasticity, in which96

movement is the vehicle.’
Vasarely’s sense of space and movement does in fact remain close to the sense
which is aroused by cinematographic works and techniques. The art of the cinema,
involving as it does modern techniques of enlarging the work by projection anddiffusion, has for a long time been foremost in his thoughts. He has spoken of‘the quantitative augmentation of the image’ and suggests that he views theoriginal work as ‘no more than a potential’. And his predilection for the cinema
is amply demonstrated by this remark - printed in capitals in the Yellow Manifes¬
to: ‘the screen is a plane surface; yet allows movement; it is also space.’
The two words ‘mouvante et emouvante’ (in the sense of‘motion’ and ‘emotion’)
which he used to identify the beauty of the future at the end of this manifesto,
were taken up in the title of the first large exhibition of works in movement at theStedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 1961. This was called ‘Mouvement emouvant’.
But Vasarely was not to be content with a purely graphic expression of move¬
ment. By 1955 he was already considering a further development of his ‘plastiquecinetique’. He wrote that: ‘Pure composition is a matter of colour/forms, or units
involving contradictory perspectives which cancel one another out.’ And, on thetheoretical side, he predicted the abolition of traditional divisions in art. ‘Painting
and sculpture are becoming anachronistic terms. It is more appropriate to speakof a plasticity which exists in two, three or many dimensions. We are no longer
concerned with distinct manifestations of the creative sensibility, but with thedevelopment of an unique plastic sensibility in a variety of spatial situations.’
Work from the earlier stages of Vasarely’s career anticipated many of his more
recent concerns, as can be seen from the comparisons which were made in the
catalogue of his one-man exhibition at the Galerie Denise Rene, 1955. A detailfrom a publicity hand-out of 1930 - beautifully drawn - is reproduced besidea painting from 1955. A zebra from 1939, which illustrates the creation of form bydeviation from the straight line, is placed beside the ‘photographismes’ of 1951.
Another study of two overlapping zebras helps to explain the principle of elabo¬
rating the form through a positive/negative disparity, and puts into effectVasarely’s favourite formula: 1 = 2, 2 = 1. So there is a link between this study
and the final discovery of the ‘Colour/Form unit’, which he sees as ‘the basis of anew plastic language’.
The study of the two zebras is placed next to a more geometrical painting,
Decalee (1952), and finally a study of chessboards with their pieces is juxtaposedwith the Hommage a Malevitch (1948-55), where Vasarely turns the artist’s
famous square into a third dimension by ‘dynamizing’ it - and so marks his
progress towards the kinetic ideal.
There remains one further point of comparison, which is of the greatest
importance in tracing Vasarely’s steps towards this ideal. The Notes noires sur
feuille translucide s’estompant par superposition (1935), the ‘trompe-l’oeil’ studyof superimposed Mouvements sur ecrans (1938) and the composition on fivesuperimposed transparent sheets (1946) - all of these invite comparison with awork from 1954, the kinetic study on transparent screens arranged in depth,
which brings into play the kinetic potentiality of transparent materials andsuperimposed drawn or coloured surfaces - as well as enabling the spectator toanimate the work by his own movement.
98

In many of the works since 1964, the eye of the spectator is guided along a
precise itinerary. If he follows this for a certain time, strong sensations of move¬
ment are aroused. Here we are in the uncertain territory which lies between
the traditional suggestion of movement in the visual arts and the ‘virtual’ move¬
ment which forces itself upon the spectator. Although it is clear that Vasarely
tends, both in theory and practice, to direct his research towards ‘cinetisme’,
this element of ambiguity remains. It is partly due to the fact that he has pursued
two principal types of work in which the element of movement has been impor¬tant. First of all, there are those works which utilise graphic and chromaticelements in two dimensions, in the tradition of Delaunay and Albers, and confine
themselves to no more than a strong suggestion of movement. Secondly, thereis the path of research in which Vasarely discovered a new significance for theelement of movement. He has written:‘From 1948, the year in which I discovered the plastic unity (l’unite plasti99

I have recognized that there is a polarity, in plastic terms, between the‘corpuscular’ and the ‘undulatory’. My time was divided between these two areasof activity... During these crucial years, I devoured numerous works on Rela¬tivity, Wave Mechanics, Cybernetics and Astrophysics..
If Vasarely’s juxtaposition of blacks and whites reflects this preoccupation withwave vibrations, his transposition into colour of the black and white framework
comes closer to his interest in corpuscular theories. And it is this last area of
research which lends itself to Vasarely’s ideal of the ‘polychrome city’, where
the plastic works are perfectly integrated into the architectural scheme.
We must return to another branch of Vasarely’s activity - that of the works inthree dimensions which invite the spectator to change position. Since he wasdissatisfied with the research into three dimensions which he undertook particu¬
larly in 1954-5, he reverted to the plane surface - as in the ‘photogrammes’ - andsuperimposed compositions on cellophane or perspex which he had previously
placed at a distance from one another. As a result the plane surface held together
compositions that were subtly out of phase. Vasarely had embarked upon an
illusionistic kinetic method which he believed to have richer and more durable
qualities than the ‘spectacular’ effects of real movement or movement resulting
from the spectator’s change of position. But it must still be borne in mind that his
research into transparent materials and superimpositions takes its place among
the achievements of other pioneers such as Agam, Soto and Bury in that stage inthe development of movement in art which hinged upon the active participationof the spectator. Nor should it be imagined that Vasarely made no practical useof this relationship between the work and the spectator. His various architecturalprojects, such as the work for the University of Caracas and for the University
Theatre at St-Louis (completed by 1954), demonstrated the wide range ofpossibilities which lay in the ‘kinetic’ animation of outside walls and fa9ades.
Vasarely’s work has led many artists of the younger generation to undertakea purely optical study of movement, both in Europe itself - among the membersof the Nouvelle Tendance for example - and in America, where the teaching ofAlbers has also been an important contributory factor. In reality, Vasarely’s
ideas are far from being confined to the context of optical experiment. He hassuggested that the kinetic work, which can be ‘recreated at will’, epitomizes‘the indestructibility of a thought-art (pensee-art) - that is, the everlasting qualityof the object which remains perpetually young in its original form - and the vast
prospect of art becoming a common treasure, distributed on the very widest
scale’. He has also suggested that: ‘The kinetic idea in the plastic arts gives rise
to a philosophy of art which involves at the same time aesthetic, ethical, soci¬ological and economic aspects. Taking into account the perpetual outdistancingof the self in a world on the move, favouring transformation in the techniques,
functions and ideas of art, this notion assumes as its own the idea of the identityof the physical and the psychical in the unending cycle of evolution.’ Finallyhe has revealed that he sees the future of ‘movement’ - on the plastic and on theintellectual level - in the transformation of the ‘kinetic discovery’ into a genuine
presence which human beings can appreciate in the context of everyday life.
He believes that in this future there is the prospect of a ‘humanistic enrichment’,
eventually leading to what he calls a ‘planetary language’.
QUe),

50 <PhTsi°mmie no. 260, 1966101• The Nouvelle Tendance - Its theoretician Mestrovic
Vasarely’s ideas were taken up and developed in particular by the generation ofartists who were born around 1930. These artists tended to form small groups,
like the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel of Paris, and it was a combination ofthese groups - French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch - that came together toform the Nouvelle Tendance. However vague the rules and objectives of thisassociation may have been, there was at least some measure of agreement in theattitude which the members adopted towards the use of movement in their work.
The majority of them seized upon the element of spectator-participation andplaced it at the centre of their programmes. They were attempting to bring into
evidence the psychological and physiological aspects of movement.
When the Nouvelle Tendance exhibited at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs,
Paris, in April 1964, Karl Gerstner wrote in the introduction to the catalogue that
here was an art which was based upon the idea of reciprocity between the artistand his partner, the spectator. The work at the same time provided visual sensa¬
tions for the spectator and tested his talent for action or reaction. Finally, thistype of art clearly lent itself to multiple production on an industrial basis. The
visual statement was to be conceived subjectively but brought to completion inan anonymous, objective fashion.
Matko Mestrovic, who organized the first exhibition of the Nouvelle Tendanceat Zagreb in 1961, has summed up the aims of the movement in greater detail.
‘The work is designed to operate upon the psycho-physical mechanisms of per¬ception and not upon the psychological or cultural background of the spectator.
The spectator is not invited to contemplation or passive consideration of thework, but should take an active part in its enactment, which is a matter of con¬stant variation either as a result of his own movements or because of the intrinsic
mechanism which keeps it in a state of continual movement and change. A
complex visual-kinetic process develops in response to the activity of the spec¬tator.’ Even at this early stage, the combination of light and movement played an
important part in the programme of the Nouvelle Tendance. Since their aim wasto deprive form of its material qualities, the use of light - both as an immaterial
substance and as a completely self-sufficient phenomenon - became one of theirprincipal methods of ‘formation’. Mestrovic himself chose to employ this word‘formation’ because he considered that there were no longer any ‘forms’ in thistype of work. He looked forward to the utilization of indeterminism, entropy,
and information theory in providing more advanced solutions to the problems ofaesthetics - what he called ‘productive action’. However he maintained his viewof the particular significance of the relationship between the movement and theact of visual perception, claiming that ‘in the Nouvelle Tendance the objective
factors which correspond to visualisation are more closely associated with move¬
ment’ than in the case of traditional art.

• The Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel of Paris - Le Parc
Programmed art - Munari, Eco, Mari
We find the same theories and the same ultimate objectives in the work of theGroupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel of Paris. The written material which they have102

produced ranges from the polemical to the esoteric. But it is nonetheless particu¬
larly revealing.
The group give pride of place to the phenomenon of movement. The manifesto‘Propositions sur le mouvement’, published under their collective authority in
1961, began by underlining the importance of a constant relationship between thehuman eye and the plastic object and went on to make a classification of different
types of movement. The first two of these - movement on the surface and move¬
ment in static reliefs - correspond to the area which we have identified under thetitle ‘virtual movement’. The other four types must be left to a later chapter.
While this programmatic development of different possibilities of movement
was central to the intentions of the group, their ultimate objective was the devel¬
opment of what they referred to as a ‘new visual situation’. They were looking
for a constant relationship between image, movement and time, which would
only make itself manifest, in their opinion, within ‘the field of vision’. Theirinterest lay exclusively in the object/eye relationship, rather than in the object
considered for its intrinsic plastic properties. And this emphasis led them in¬evitably to a doctrine of formal anonymity in their concern with surfaces andstatic reliefs. This anonymity of form, combined with an overall homogeneityof surface, resulted in the creation of unstable structures that could be perceived
only in the field of peripheral vision. Thus the spectator was no longer able tomaintain the distant relationship with the work which had previously been therule. A virtual movement had been set up.
We must not forget the significance of the word ‘recherche’ (research) in thegroup’s title. Each member intended his own work to be part of the common
programme of research which had been instituted at this early stage. But it is,of course, permissible to look more closely at the individual careers of these
artists. The Argentinian Le Parc began his own line of research in isolation
with the investigation of what he referred to as ‘surface-sequences’. Beginningwith a chess-board pattern, he obtained effects of progression and juxtaposition
by decreasing the diameter of successive black and white circles, by using similar
sequences with a range of twelve (later fourteen) colours, and by gradually
inclining the position of a line in a clockwise or anti-clockwise direction. When
traced by the eye of the spectator, these surface-sequences gave rise to im¬pressions of new and surprising structures, a form of movement which we mightcall consecutive. Each small modification of the sequences in fact brought into
evidence a different structure - one that was, so to speak, hidden within theframework of the progression. In this way Le Parc laid the foundation for a new
type of plastic and perceptual research in which the subjective element was
virtually eliminated. It is possible to hold that this already represented a different
line of development from the subjective optical works of Vasarely. In fact, Le
Parc and some of his friends, later to be members of the group, had visited
Vasarely several times on their arrival from Argentina in 1958. They had also
met Denise Rene who was already showing interest in this type of work and was
to mount several of their subsequent exhibitions. Their very first studies suggest
an attempt to come to terms with the plastic vocabulary of surface patterns which
they derived from the work of Vasarely. But their rigorous concern for the elimi¬
nation of pictorial composition - that is to say, the animation of such and such103

a part of the surface by the arbitrary modification of certain elements - led Le
Parc and his friends to surface patterns in which one or two parameters weremodified according to a regular plan. These surface-sequences lent themselves
to repetition and multiplication. And, as has been noted above, they madepossible the appearance of new unstable structures, perceptible only in the
periphery of vision, without the slightest degree of intervention by the artist.
The artists and aestheticians of Italy have also provided an interesting responseto the problems of movement. In the course of their writings on ‘programmed’art, Bruno Munari and Umberto Eco defined kinetic art in these terms: ‘A genreof plastic art in which the movement of forms, colours and planes is used to
procure a totality in the process of change. The aim of kinetic art is therefore not
to secure a definitive and fixed composition.’ To meet the problems of classifica¬tion imposed by contemporary research in the plastic arts, Eco also brings in theconcepts of the ‘open work’ and - perhaps in collaboration with the Swiss artist
Spoerri - the ‘multipliable work’. The open work is a ‘genre which involves awhole constellation of elements, with the result that the observer can detect
different possibilities of combination - and so different possibilities of distinct
configurations - by the way in which he interprets the work. In the extreme case,the observer actually intervenes by modifying the relative positions of theelements.’ The multipliable work, on the other hand,’ is devised by the author
with a view to production in several examples, through the use of industrial
techniques. Thus there is no question of an approximate reproduction of an
unique original piece, as is normally the case in art reproduction.’ Finally thereis the possibility of ‘programmed art’. ‘From precise programming a multitudeof similar forms can be obtained.’
Enzo Mari, Italian coordinator of the Nouvelle Tendance, believes that, in
response to the new aesthetic conditions in architecture, industrial design andthe plastic arts, researchers should experiment with methods of programming
prefabricated modular elements. There should therefore be a number of canonsor programmes within which they can compose with a great degree of latitude.
Mari holds that this programming is a necessary conclusion from the fact that the
spectator goes from element to element in the completed scheme without evergaining an overall view of the work. Hence traditional concepts are called into
question and the goal of research must be to provide new solutions to the problem.
Through a programming that takes the spectator into account, the relationshipbetween the work and its creator acquires a profound social significance.

• Psycho-physiological phenomenaWorks in virtual movement which are dependent on optical phenomena can becomposed with the aid of graphic or chromatic elements, reliefs or volumes. Or
they can be related in particular to tonal values, composition, transparency andtexture. In the group of works at present under consideration, the graphic element
has gained particular importance. This is partly because a good number of young
artists have secondary occupations as graphic designers in industry. They there¬
fore reflect in practice the experience of Vasarely and the ideals of the Bauhaus.
But before we discuss the work of these artists it is important to devote some104

space to the scientific classification of the phenomena which they use. Mention
has already been made of Purkinje’s discovery of consecutive movement, or the‘after-image’, in 1925. This is the illusion produced by first of all observing
the continuous movement of waterfalls, marching troops, rotating striped
cylinders, spirals etc. - and then turning to fixed objects, which take on an
appearance of movement in a contrary direction. This effect is particularly
noticeable in the field which borders on the area of actual movement - whatever
this may be. However, to the extent that the movement arouses in the eyes akind of variable oscillation, known as nystagmus, the illusion extends to thewhole field of vision. This is because perceptual factors intervene to suggest aplausible type of movement - displacement or deformation of the whole object
or simply its surface. The whole effect depends, of course, upon the conditions
under which observation takes place.
Wertheimer’s phi phenomenon and its numerous subsidiary varieties havebeen used by a great number of artists. This is the name for the illusion of move¬
ment produced by two fixed objects or shapes of similar form when one of thetwo appears shortly after the other has disappeared - but in another place. If
conditions are right, we see a single object passing swiftly from one place toanother. Although this phenomenon has been studied principally in relation tovision, it can also be found in touch and hearing.
Three varieties of the phi phenomenon known as alpha movement, beta move¬
ment and gamma movement are linked with the name of the physiologist Kenkel.
Alpha movement can be observed when the successively presented shapes appear
to alter in dimensions while remaining in the same place. The spectator registers
a shape in the process of transformation. Beta movement is very similar. But
in this case the two successive stimuli do in fact differ in their respective positions
or dimensions - or in both. The spectator sees the shape move while undergoingtransformation. Gamma movement, which Kenkel discovered in 1913, is theillusion of expansion or contraction produced by an isolated shape appearing for a
relatively short time. The illusion takes place at the moment when the shapeappears or disappears without warning, or when the light is suddenly increased
or diminished.
Further instances of the phi phenomenon, discovered by Korte and Linke
respectively, have been classed under the names of delta and epsilon. Delta
movement is a more complex manifestation of the phi phenomenon. The observer
notes that the second stimulus is quite wrong in relation to the first. The move¬
ment which appears to take place in the interval between the two stimuli is
initially directed towards the first, but reverses direction and finally ends up at
the second. Epsilon movement, or positive/negative movement, is the name given
to the effect which involves a white line on a black ground. This is transformed
into a black line on a white ground in response to a change in position.
Among other kindred phenomena are gamma-pi movement, discovered by
Kanisza in 1951, which arises from the illusion of partial expansion, adopting
a particular direction in accordance with the structure of the field of vision. The
theta effect, discovered by Thorne in 1935, results from the illusion of relative
movement. A point of light is observed through a prism with one eye and througha piece of red glass with the other. If the prism is revolved, it is the red light105

which appears to turn around a fixed white point. Finally, there is Saucer’s
omega perception, discovered in 1953. This is also a matter of apparent move¬
ment, but movement of a rough and ready kind, such as might occur with aprimitive nervous mechanism, or a vision impaired by scotoma (an obscurationof part of the visual field).
It is quite clear that the principal psycho-physiological illusions can be related
to fundamental elements in aesthetics. Phenomena involving line interference,such as the moire effect used by Soto, Malina, Cruz-Diez, Asis, Yvaral, andOster - the effect of dazzle and the play of conflicting interpretations in black
and white which we find in Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Steele, Nusberg and others- all bear witness to the kinship. And the reversible perspective of Schroder,apparent in some of Albers’ work, has been mentioned in connection with theframes of Morellet, which are built up from a rigorous pattern of straight lines
and yet suggest a rosette traced with the aid of the compass. Although we arequite aware that the picture is made up of straight lines, the impression of curves
persists. Of course the parallels between psycho-physical phenomena and therealm of art are not all contemporary. Poggendorf’s illusion, which involves the
distortion of a straight line cutting obliquely through two parallels (that mask it
to a certain extent), appears to have been used by the painters and sculptors of
the Renaissance - e.g. by Donatello in the Cantoria, which is in the museumof the Cathedral of Florence. The same effect has been applied in many different
ways in virtual kinetic art.
As regards the use of colour, psycho-physiological illusions resulting fromsuccessive contrasts, consecutive movement (the Purkinje effect), and chromatic
vibration have all been put to use. Agam, Cruz-Diez and Tomasello have allachieved effects of an unusual intensity by careful control of the chromaticelements in their reliefs. And, of course, there are an immense number of optical
illusions relating to volume, which depend upon the exploitation of different
angles of viewing, the superimposition of elements in real space and many otherfactors. The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel and Roy Ascott should be
mentioned in this connection.

• Soto - The moire effect
The Venezuelan Jesus-Raphael Soto, who was born in 1923 at Ciudad Bolivar,
began around 1951 to exhibit pictures like Repetition optique (Damier) andTableau optique (Rrr) which involved an element of vibration through therepetition of formal elements. Soto used repetition as a means of getting rid of
traditional concepts of form and composition, which were still, in his view, at thestage of figurative art. He had formed the conclusion that true abstraction in theplastic arts could only be achieved by a sort of transfiguration which movement
alone could perform. And yet he did not, for the most part, go beyond the stageof ‘optical’ and virtual movement. In Repetition optique he was already making
use of a technique of relief which lent his work a status between painting andsculpture. But it was only in 1952, with his picture Synthese, that he finallycame to terms with the complex graphic problems involved in this attempt. The
next phase in his work was concerned with the superimposition and systematic106

51 J-R. Soto
Vibration (La boite), 1962.
60 cm. x 40 cm.

distribution of coloured dots over the whole surface. At this stage he worked
from the basis of the three primary colours, the three secondary colours, black
and white. But later he continued this line of research with the regular super¬
imposition of simple geometrical elements. Through his ‘punctualized’ surface
he managed to acquire a thorough knowledge of optical and virtual movement,
without being obliged to resort to the devices of composition.
The next stage in Soto’s work came in 1953, when he began to investigate thepossibility of enriching his style by a more daring use of optical movement. For
the first time he made use of kinetic ground patterns - striped surfaces whichwere suitable for causing the moire effect. He took as his subjects various stock
themes. But his interest was never concentrated upon the form or the subject- any more than it is now - but on what he has called ‘relations’. By this term
he means to cover relationships between different formal elements, between
different types of movement.
In the same year, Soto carried his interest in the superimposition of plastic
elements and the effect of progression on transparent surfaces to a further stage,in what he referred to as ‘Structures cinetiques’. These were spirals traced on
perspex and superimposed in depth, which gave rise to optical movement in
direct relation to the interval of space between the plane surfaces. Soto had
chosen to explore the problems of progression and rotation, and the result waswhat he called a ‘vision of movement’, created without any mechanical aid.
The next important stage in Soto’s development opened in 1958, when hebegan his ‘superimpositions’ of wire and other metallic elements on stripedbackgrounds, and backgrounds of various materials. As in the previous phases, it
involved a kinetic element, since the spectator was impelled to alter his position in
relation to the work and so to experience sensations of optical movement. One of107the earliest of these works was also of considerable proportions. This was theGrille de fer which was on show at the Brussels Universal Exhibition of 1958
and measured 7x5 metres. Even in a work of this size Soto continued to workin a pictorial manner, considering himself as a painter rather than ‘an architect’s
model-maker’. And since this time he has continued to make progress on astrictly pictorial level. He has made increasing use of striped backgrounds to
induce an effect of optical dazzle, using them as a foil to different elements
suspended or fixed in front. He sees his work as a series of steps towards thecomplete transformation of matter - a progress in which light is more and more
effectively made to serve his purposes and the immateriality of the work makes
an increasingly acute impression.
It is perhaps important to stress the strict continuity in Soto’s development.
The line of research which he began in 1951 was based from the very first upon
the visual representation of movement, and it was also quite clearly characterisedby the utilisation of light. In a work like the Premiere boite transparente, the light
seemed to change position in time with the spectator. Soto has finally reacheda stage where he is able to make use of a range of kinetic devices - movement in
the fixed object, the spectator’s movement in front of the work and the separate
movements of free elements incorporated in the work, as well as any combinationof these three. But since movement remains in his view ‘a relation, and not an
object changing position’, we can say that his fundamental aims have not changed.
Since he is concerned above all with the impression made upon the spectator,and not with the technical details of the work, it would be fair to state that his
method is still that of optical movement.
Soto looks at his development purely from an artistic point of view, andrefuses to admit any influence from the natural world. The artists who he admires
are Cezanne, the Cubists, Klee, Mondrian and Calder. But we very often get
the impression when looking at his work that optical movement has a secretlink with music, not merely because of its poetic qualities but because it is also
based upon a kind of abstract algebraic code.

• Agam - transformable, polyphonic and tactile works

52 Yaacov Agam
Double metamorphose, 1964

Like Soto, Agam has constructed works which only reveal their structures when
the spectator moves in front of them. Both artists believe with reason that worksof this kind should be placed in a different category from those which only
involve movement upon a plane surface. And like Soto once again, the musicalanalogy immediately comes to mind. Agam has in fact used musical terminology
in the naming of his works. The words ‘contrapuntal’ and ‘polyphonic’ are usedagain and again in the titles of these remarkable pictures, which undergo acomplete metamorphosis as the spectator passes in front of them.
It should, however, be emphasized that Agam is trying to reach beyond thetime-scale which is implicit in traditional music. He regards mere duration as
infinitely less rich than the quality of time which is involved in his transformablepaintings - a time that is dynamic, irreversible and unforeseen. He believes thatthe whole question of incorporating kinetic effects into painting is inevitablybound up with the notion of time. But his own notion centres upon the concepts

108

of irreversibility and the simultaneity of acts and events in nature. This is where
he sees the true unity - a key-word that testifies to his profound knowledge ofHebrew spirituality. ‘Time is the unforeseen,’ he writes, ‘duration is the foreseen.’With this principle in mind, he sets out to create an art which exists solely in therealm of the possible - the virtual. And for this reason he might be said to be
making use of ‘virtual’ movement in every sense of the word.
Agam has stated in the preface to an album of his work:‘Indeed, nothing is fixed in nature nor in the cosmos, and the painting that
attempts to attain the truth through,representations falls far shortnaturereality
can be transformedof touching this truth of nature. Everything increationwith endless variety, while preserving a particular and definite character.’ The
superimposed words signify what Agam calls a ‘word-accord’ (mot-accord), andthey are typical of his attempt even on the verbal level to achieve new types ofunity - and hence a new vision of reality. In the artistic field this impulse istranslated into a desire to pass beyond the isolated plastic statement, beyond
the forms and images which, for him, can only be a partial representation ofreality. And his first practical step towards the attainment of this aim lies in thedestruction of the form by movement, which alone can make visible the unfoldingof a structure in time.
Although we have already noted the musical analogy which exists in Agam’s
work, at least on the level of terminology, we should remember that music does
not provide the inspiration for his kinetic creations. It was only when he hadreached an advanced stage in their development that he began to see the corre¬
spondences between music and the plastic arts. What must be borne in mind
above all is that Agam was the son of a rabbi, and that he has attempted through¬out his life to dissociate spirit from physical matter. He is quick to mention that
he was brought up on the study of the Kabbala and in that way ‘learned thenecessity of the quest for inner truth’.
The crucial date in the development of Agam’s work was 1952. Since that date
all his efforts have been directed to the expression of structural movement, andto the task of engaging the spectator to participate actively in this movement.
He has written of the first group of works, the ‘Tableaux transformables’:‘By transformable paintings I mean more precisely paintings based principallyon the modification of their pictorial structures, either by means of a pivoting
element, or by means of elements which can really be moved within predeter¬
mined limits into holes distributed at regular or irregular intervals, or finallybyelements which can be moved freely over the whole surface of the paintwithing.’
The spectator is thus able to modify the position of the forms which Agam has
provided. He enters into a kind of game, and thereby achieves the liberty ofaction which Agam is anxious to grant him.
In a second group of works, which carry musical titles, the element of spectator

110participation is transformed into actual physical movement in front of the work.
These ‘contrapuntal’ pictures unfold their structures in a simple, rudimentary
fashion, being based upon the fusion of two or three themes in the same way as
Bach’s musical exercises. The attentive spectator can pick out the various themes
as he moves in front of the picture. The works which Agam calls ‘polyphonic’
have a far greater harmonic richness, and are composed of at least five different
plastic themes. Agam has written of them:‘The surfaces of these paintings are composed of parallel triangles in relief,
which set up a rhythmic measure over which the different themes are painted. I
can paint up to eight distinct themes in one work: these appear to be integrated
with one another if one stands straight in front of the picture, but they separate
and recompose in turns When one moves to the right or the left. I began by
painting two different themes on the two different parallel surfaces. If the painting
is viewed from the side, only one composition on one of the parallel surfaces canbe seen. But as the spectator moves towards the centre, he perceives both thiscomposition and a fraction of the composition painted on the other face, which
gradually incorporates itself into the first in counterpoint. From the front, hesees the totality of the compositions in one comprehensive pictorial orchestration.
The values and relationships of these compositions are modified and transformedby the diminishing of one motif and the growth of another, as the spectatormoves in front of the work.’
Agam reserves the term ‘metapolyphonic’ for pictures in which there is a
modification of the basic elements (circles, squares etc.) as well a polyphonyof form. In these works line is transformed into structure, and form dissolves inorder to take on essentially different characteristics. The kinetic - and indeed
the dialectical - element is more firmly underlined. Agam has compared thepolyphonic paintings to a book which one reads in comparative calmness, while
the metapolyphonic works suggest and animated discussion between several
people.
A further extension of Agam’s artistic and philosophical premises has been thecreation of works ‘liberated from the earth’s force of attraction’ and ‘independentof the wall’. He has drawn inspiration from the Venetian Mannerists, for example
C. M. Mitelli (1634-1718), in the composition of pictures which have no ‘rightside up’ but can be turned through 360 degrees. And he has also designed works
which are ‘in their essence... liberated from and even opposed to integration
with a wall’. Yet both of these types of work retain their essentially pictorial
character, in spite of the addition of the third dimension. In effect, they are thedirect consequence of Agam’s previous innovations - as he has admitted in thefollowing passage:‘After works hung by an invisible nylon thread in the actual space of the frame,
creating an illusion of complete independence from frame and wall, only one step
was necessary to arrive at pictures completely liberated from the wall.’Agam’s recent research has led him to yet another interpretation of movement
and of spectator participation. His paintings ‘with vibratory movement’, con¬structed since 1960, lend themselves to virtual movement through their metal
springs. Agam writes:‘These are paintings with elements attached by means of springs, which begin111

to vibrate at the slightest contact, and thereby transform the initial

data
forms,^

frequency
creating new immaterial forms that vary according to therhythm,°\a
movement.
| speed
These vibratory pictures are the culmination of Agam’s work, in the sense thatthey carry to one extreme the lines of research that he began in 1953. Here aremany of the hallmarks of his style - a concern with the infinite elaboration ofrelationships between colour and form, an attachment to the creation of move¬
ment in circulating planes, and above all the desire to make the spectator partici¬
pate in a game which is full of surprises. For Agam, this has its human side. It is
the expression of a new type of liberty. On the artistic level, it represents thedisappearance of the form and the manifestation of movement itself. The impli¬
cations of this radical programme are even more boldly demonstrated in the tworemarkable works which Agam exhibited at theLumiere et Mouvement exhibition(Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris) in the summer of 1967. In one ofthem, a picture turning at many thousand revolutions per minute is lit periodical¬
ly by stroboscopic rays, thus creating an occasional illusion of immobility. In
the other, a light source within a bare white dome is activated by the humanvoice. Man recreates the divine prescription ‘Let there be light’. And in so doing,
Agam proclaims, he fulfils ‘his most intimate and secret ambition’.
It will be obvious that in works such as these we must dispense with the tra¬ditional opposition between subjective and objective movement. In fact, this is acase in which the traditional divisions of the plastic arts cease to have any imme¬
diate application. Agam is aiming not for the development of any particular genre,
but for the achievement of a ‘total visual synthesis’.

• Bridget Riley - The Moire effect - Cruz-Diez
We have already established that virtual movement, while dependent upon theeffective participation of the spectator, is bound up with the operation of various
plastic elements - such as line, colour, relief and volume. The kinetic possibilities
of line have engaged the attention of three pioneers whose work has already been
discussed - Vasarely, Soto and Agam. More recently, the same subject has
occupied the English artist Bridget Riley, who uses graphic elements to con¬centrate the spectator’s attention upon fluctuating movements which appear to
emanate directly from the object of perception. Her aim is to ‘construct a plastic
situation which leads to the enactment of an autonomous event.’ Anton Ehrenzweig has written of the way in which she achieves a minute balance between
geometrical elements, in such a way that they cancel each other out. This gives
rise to a precarious kind of equilibrium, as if we were dealing with an organism
in motion which is nonetheless stable.
A particular type of linear organization which produces strong sensations of
movement is the so-called ‘moire’ effect, which can be obtained by using a
striped background (as in the case of Soto) or by placing a grille in front of thecomposition. Malina produced a series of works of this kind before proceeding
to investigate the field of light and movement. The same technique, whose112

53 Antonio Asis
Spirales en vibration, 1966

theoretical basis was clarified by Oster in 1963, has also been exploited by Asis,
Cruxent and Wilding - but with widely differing results. For example, Asis
supplements his use of grilles and moire patterns with the introduction ofvibrating metal spirals, while Cruxent uses them in conjunction with back¬grounds of coloured light.
We have noted the use of black and white elements to create virtual movementin the cases of Vasarely and Soto. This is an area which has also occupied mostof the attentions cf Y^aral, Leblanc and Dadamaino. An equally large numberof artists are investigating the type of virtual movement which is produced bychromatic effects, often by means of the transformation of geometrical forms.
Garcia Miranda, Lily Greenham, H. Sommerrock and Cruz-Diez come to mind
in this connection.
Cruz-Diez has been working since 1955 on what he calls ‘vibrations’. Originally
he drew his inspiration from the natural world - from plant life and especiallyfrom the seasonal changes in European vegetation that had not been the rulewith the evergreens of his native Venezuela. At this stage he attempted to trans¬
form these impressions from nature into a series of ‘vegetable signs’ which,when juxtaposed, aroused in the spectator sensations of visual and optical tension.
From 1956 until the end of 1959, he concentrated upon the problems of con¬secutive movement or ‘persistence of vision’. Appreciating that the physical113

phenomena which he had observed could be given an aesthetic function, hecompleted several works utilizing juxtapositions of trapezoidal forms, which
created shifting rhomboidal structures upon the retina.
Cruz-Diez then set himself the task of using the radiation of colour - aphenomenon which is still the subject of scientific controversy - to enliven theareas immediately next to the painted surfaces. He soon discovered that the same
colour was liable to cause two different types of radiation, sometimes colouring
the neutral zones which lay nearest to the painted surfaces and sometimes
communicating directly and much more intensely to the eye of the spectator.
The next stage in Cruz-Diez’ research was to come in 1959, with his discovery
of Dr Land’s work on polarized light and colour change. In an article for News¬
week, Land had spoken of the filtering of red and green, suggesting that by themere addition or subtraction of these colours it was possible to produce the fullrange of the chromatic spectrum. Although Land’s aim was primarily to improve
techniques of photographic reproduction, Cruz-Diez saw how the principle could
be applied to his own work. He decided to substitute a new notion of painting
space through light for the traditional one of colouring surfaces with paint. He
hoped that it would be possible to obtain a full range of colours simply by
exploiting the properties of the colours red and green.
First of all he made experiments to find the optimum distance between the
strips of card that were to carry the actual colour. His conclusion was that each
strip of 1mm thickness should be 3mm from its neighbours. Acting on thisprinciple, he constructed the first group of works which derived their colour
from the radiation of these card strips placed at right angles to the picture plane.
Next he began another series of experiments to see if colour could be projected
over varying distances. The result was his first Thysichromie’, also dated 1959,
which took the theory of additive colours to a more advanced stage. In effecthe was combining his new technique of regularly spaced card strips with his
earlier discoveries about colour. He retained his previous basic colours - redand green - but added white, the most intense form of light, and black, the very
opposite of this. Now he was able to achieve a subtle interaction between thevery intense reflections from the surfaces turned towards the spectator and theeffects of expanding colour recorded upon the surfaces adjacent to the pigment.
These two types of radiation did not remain distinct, but combined to createa unified impression upon the retina. And yet the colour which was perceived
bore no relation to the actual colours of the separate pigments applied to thesurfaces of the picture.
This distinctive plastic effect which Cruz-Diez had discovered could be variedin countless ways by the use of different materials and by adjusting the size ofthe strips of card. From 1962 his work succeeded in giving some impression ofthis range, through a register that extended from a fairly aggressive use of colour
to a restful softness of tone. Cruz-Diez’ most recent variation on this basic
pattern, already anticipated in 1960, came in 1963 when he began to make super¬
impositions of mobile elements. These particular works created intense effects ofcolour interference, fixing the spectator’s attention upon an atmosphere per¬meated with rich chromatic light.

114

• Virtual movement and the use of different materials

54 Luis Tomasello
Reflexion n° 50 (Atmosphere chromoplastique), 1960, 121 cm. x 151 cm.

Another aspect of research into virtual movement is concerned with the reflectionof light upon metallic surfaces or through transparent materials: in the secondcase a whole range of types of glass and plastic lends itself for the purpose.
This sort of technique was invented and developed by the Constructivists Gabo,
Pevsner and Moholy-Nagy. Members of the Nouvelle Tendance such as Alviani,
Christen and Gerstner have continued in the same line.
Getulio Alviani is primarily concerned with aluminium surfaces, which hecovers with ‘equal curved signs, identical in their basis, but of differing heights
and relative positions.’ An element of spectator participation comes in here, forthe surfaces give back in reflection ‘lines of light which vary according to thespectator’s angle of view.'5
The Swiss painter and draughtsman Andreas Christen tends to use surfaces ofwhite polyester, which reveal plastic elements such as points and lines in par¬ticular light conditions. ‘In my objects,’ Christen has written, ‘there is a processof development which comes into play at the instant in which we pass from thesecond to the third dimension. Points and lines occur on the surface, which isitself given form, so to speak, by points and lines. Light is used as a kind of
aesthetic message.’ Another artist who shows a similar interest in light effects
and the third dimension is the German Uli Pohl. He has chosen to work withthe synthetic material Acryl, which he values for its complete lack of subjective
associations.
A large number of artists of this generation use the techniques of relief toobtain the effects of virtual movement. These differ considerably according to
the materials employed. The Venezuelan artist Debourg creates reliefs in wood,
which he refers to as ‘surfaces animated by a series of elements in relief with aview to a visual statement.’ These reliefs, with their diagonal planes, interact
with the light in a way that is determined by the geometrical organisation.
Camargo, on the other hand, paints his wooden reliefs white, obtaining theimpression of radiation and organic growth as a result of the vibrations of light
across the surface. Another artist who works with wood is Tomasello, whomakes use of the reflection of elements in relief upon a white surface. Since thefacets of these elements which are turned away from us are painted in primarycolours, chromatic shadows are formed upon the adjacent surfaces, moving
according to the angle of natural or artificial light as well as in response to the
movement of the spectator.
Enzo Mari is concerned with aluminium structures, either painted black orretaining their natural metallic colour; he uses them to create a kind of honey¬
comb, in which each internal space is treated successively as full or empty. He
is in fact pursuing a line of research which enables him to discover new possibilities
in the organisation of space in three dimensions. He is concerned both withthe problems of optics and dynamics and with the technological implicationsof a programmed composition made from prefabricated parts. Thus he has
exhibited a work which brings to the foreground the optical and dynamic distor¬
tion of a cube within a sphere, covered with dots in series. The surface of thesphere, like a kind of intervening lens, distorts the image of the inserted cube.
This work by Mari has been produced in an edition of fifty.

115

The English artist Anthony Hill makes use of a wide range of natural andsynthetic materials, such as aluminium, perspex, P.V.C., copper and formica.
His skill in combining elements of these various materials allows him to create
relief constructions which challenge the spectator to a thorough exploration bytactile or by visual means.

• Virtual movement in three dimensions
Let us take in the first instance the Yugoslavian artist Picelj and the Germans
Klaus Staudt and ticker. The former constructs surfaces in relief, while thelatter two cover materials of various different kinds with white paint. Although
the works within this category cannot be firmly distinguished from those in thepreceding section, it is possible to suggest one distinctive feature. With thesethree artists, unlike Mari or Tomasello, the changing effects of light are strong
enough to transform the whole atmosphere of the work, and to create the illusionof immateriality, ticker has in fact worked since 1957 with the aid of numerous- even mechanical - methods in the hope of arriving at what he has called a‘pure integration of light in movement’.
A similar area of research is the investigation of effects of virtual movement
obtained by an interplay of volumes. In the case of Vjeceslav Richter thisenterprise takes on an architectural character. It is perhaps worthwhile tomention at this stage that attempts have been made to draw a parallel between
the experiments of Schwitters and the field of kinetic art. Schwitters certainly
intended the spectator to walk around within the first Merzbau, which dates
from 1924. But this is not to say that he shared the present-day interest in active
participation by the spectator. The way in which the spectator moves acquires
a completely new significance in certain works of today. We may instance theobjects of transparent or coloured perspex by Sobrino, a member of the Groupede Recherche d’Art Visuel of Paris. With these works, the movement of thespectator is calculated to result in a ‘transformation of the plane’, an ‘opticalacceleration’ or an ‘alteration of the interplay of combinations’.
Hugo Rodolfo Demarco aims to discover colour in its most essential form, byreducing it to pure vibration and by setting it off in a series of different planes.
He calls his works Dynamisations, Superpositions spatiales and Reflexions changeantes, and he has written of them: ‘The juxtaposed colours, taken from exactly
opposite places in the chromatic circle, take on an element of real movement.
A struggle ensues and from this there comes about a continual vibration...
Colour as a unique element loses some of its value, to recreate itself once again
in a totality by producing changes of colouring and luminosity in a continual
visual movement.’ In another place, Demarco has given a description of his
working methods: ‘Arising from a group of square forms in reflecting metal(polished aluminium), situated at opposite angles on a plane surface, there
develops an uninterrupted reflecting space. I add to this space a transparent
surface of perspex with a certain number of geometrical forms marked in trans¬parent colours. The function of the colour is simply to give the forms individuality.
These forms adopt different positions and depths in space: saturation of colour,transformations of structure and new intensities of light and colour offer them-116

55 Hugo Rodolfo Demarco
Relief with changing reflections, 1966

selves to the vision. From the basis of this experience, real movement is integrated
with the elements or reflecting bodies which are provided as a mechanical basis,and possibilities of combinations of movement, interrelation of speeds anddirections come to the fore.’ Demarco adds that an additional factor is contributedby the spectator’s movement in front of the work, which ‘transforms the image
and creates active participation on the part of the spectator’.
Several other artists have experimented with illusory volumes. Costa, who
is a member of the Group N of Padua, has constructed a Structure optiquedynamique in polyethylene and wood, which dates from 1961. This gives theillusion of a parallelogram splitting into separate units and multiplying as the
spectator moves. Marc Adrian, an Austrian artist, has constructed a number ofworks in his aim to achieve ‘the highest degree of integration of the spectator in
the genesis of the work of art.’ He realizes this aim through displacing thespectator’s field of action - the work is made up of ‘sixteen fields on four basesof industrial glass’, which are placed before a ground painted in relief so as toallow four different modes of apprehending the movement.

117

Finally there is the work of the German artist Karl Reinhartz, which is
executed in wood, aluminium, perspex and added colour. Lighting is from behind,a feature which lends the character of a relief. Reinhartz’ works are all madeby simple and schematic methods. But the interplay of light rays and the move¬ments of the spectator give rise to a complex reaction on the part of the senses.

• Manipulation by the spectator

56 Joel Stein
Triedre, 1 963-65. Four cells

57 Francisco Sobrino
Transformation instable (interference
structure), 1963

Yet another class of works requires the active participation of the spectator
expressed in the manipulation of their basic elements. In a sense these works
could be said to exist in optical terms before the spectator has been able tointervene. And since the actual movement which is prescribed for the great
majority of these works is only intermittent, we might class them in the categoryof virtual movement. Clearly this poses a fundamental problem in the relationshipbetween the creator, the aesthetic object, the perception and the participationof the spectator. Works of this type are particularly hard to disentangle in termsof their effect. We can, however, make a summary analysis of the works them¬selves.
Works such as the reflecting polyhedrons, with mobile and manipulable ele¬ments, which are characteristic of Joel Stein of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art
Visuel of Paris, must be placed between the category of works in virtual move¬
ment that can be manipulated and the three-dimensional works in real movementthat we call mobiles. This also applies to numerous other products of Stein’sgroup, and to work by the Italian groups T and N.
For the most part, the manipulable works in virtual movement can be related
to the aesthetic of the game. We have already met works of this kind in thecase of Agam. Diter Rot’s works from 1960 are another case in point. They carry
Agam’s title of ‘transformable paintings’.
These works which suggest the aesthetic of the game have a number of clear
antecedents. As early as 1945, Hugo Weber was working in Basle on transformablereliefs composed from balls of wood. And Karl Gerstner, who also came fromBasle, was exhibiting transformable metallic compositions in 1956. Yet another
Swiss artist, Paul Talman, was also concerned with this type of work. He devised
objects in perspex that incorporated coloured balls which could be moved bya mere flick of the hand. Each new initiative by the spectator therefore led toa variation in colour effects, and a change in the composition. Talman held that
this distribution of movable balls on a large or small surface brought out in themost direct manner the ‘tension’ between order and chance.
This is in effect one of the most obvious characteristics of the transformablework, and it applies to a wide variety of artists. Bruno Munari, one of the mostproductive pioneers in the field of kinetic art, exploited a similar effect in his
Strutture continue - works which could be assembled or taken to pieces according
to the principles of a relatively strict code. Sobrino followed rules of this kindin his Structures interferentes of coloured perspex, while the Yugoslavian artist,
Vlado Kristi, has introduced subtle possibilities of variation into a series ofworks which are constructed from wire and paper on a wooden base.
Mortensen made an important innovation at the ‘Mouvement’ exhibition held118

58 Groupe de Recherche d'Art VisuelWorks by Sobrino (on the left), Le Parc
(on the right), at the 1963 Paris Biennale;
under the direction of the architect
Pierre Faucheuxat the Galerie Denise Rene in 1955, when he introduced the principle of thegrooved work which could be manipulated by the spectator. His achievement had
interesting repercussions in England, where Roy Ascott has devised a series ofstatements belonging to very precise fields. In general he exploits the effect of‘familiar objects in an unusual context’, inviting the spectator or pupil to alter
the relationships of the various elements. It is up to the spectator to find out thelatent possibilities contained in each work. Ascott has also worked on the develop¬
ment of an elementary course in art education. It might in fact be said that the
primary concern of all his artistic enterprises, whether they go under the nameof‘change-paintings’ or ‘kinetic constructions’, is with the education and bearingof the spectator. This ties in with the way in which he defines his works as
structures which are subject to the same human pressures and the same like¬lihood of transformation as our purely intellectual notions. Ascott goes on fromthis point to consider the future of art as a ‘cybernetic’ activity or discipline.
Finally we must record the unusual technique of Olson, who obtains anastonishing interplay of colours by making use of the effect of polarisation. He
works with metallised crystals and filters placed between two layers of glass,which are only effective when the spectator changes his position in relation to
the work.

120

6 Three-dimensional works in movement

We now arrive at the class of works which involve real movement. This particular
chapter is concerned with those whose movement takes place in space, as opposedto those which utilize the effects of moving light on a plane surface. The very
fact that these works involve real modifications in space sets them apart fromthose which merely indicate the presence of space in a symbolic or illusionisticway.
The main division within this category is between foreseeable and unforesee¬able movement. The classification may seem arbitrary, but from the point of viewof the spectator it is most important. Does the spectator experience a sensationof predictability in his contemplation of the work in movement, or does he not?
This is the main point, and it dispenses us from approaching the vexed problemof the mathematical predictability of mechanical or cyclical movement. Of
course, the actual cause of the movement is relevant in this connection. The
majority of works which move mechanically, either by direct human propulsion
or through the intermediary of a man-made machine, fall within the predictable
category. The reverse is true in the case of works which are set in motion by
natural forces, with no human intervention. Into this last category would comethe large class of mobiles which respond to wind, heat and other forces beyond
our direct control.
• Machines - Ancestors of real movement

Reference has already been made to the wide range of models, dating fromclassical antiquity to the present day, which can be regarded as precise ante¬cedents of such and such a type of modern work. In connection with kinetic
machines, we should first of all mention the earthenware articulated statuettesof ancient Egypt, which were used as cult objects. Mention should also be madeof the numerous physical demonstrations of Hero of Alexandria, who lived
around 100 AD. Hero made use of processes and techniques like displacementof water, compressed air, turntables and flames which were alternately alight andextinguished. At a later stage the Byzantines and, in particular, the Arabs used
types of automata to distract the attention of guests at a feast. The Arabs also
invented a kind of water clock, which seems to have been the origin of the armed
figure used to sound the hour in medieval clocks, and led eventually, towards theend of the fourteenth century, to the construction of whole scenes illustrating121

59 Jacquet-Droz automaton
Mechanism of the Draughtsman, 1774.
Musee de la ville de Neuchatel

60 Marcel Duchamp

Rotative demi-sphere, 1 925

religious or profane subjects. One of the most famous of these is the legendary
bronze head of Albertus Magnus, placed in the cathedral of Strasbourg around1350. The same building contained a celebrated wooden cock which flapped its
wings and produced sounds.
The story continues up to our own day. Writers of the seventeenth century
sometimes make allusion to the existence of mechanical fountains. The examples
given by Salomon de Caus are particularly interesting in this connection. Me¬
chanical toys and marionnettes have a long history, particularly in the Far East.
And sixteenth-century Europe pioneered the transformable painting, with acomposition on a moveable disc which could be pivoted according to the specta¬
tor’s wish. This was followed in the reign of Louis XIV by the appearance of thefirst animated pictures, which consisted of painted backgrounds against which
the cut-out figures moved in procession. Musical instruments involving mechani¬
cal elements, such as the organ, can be found as early as the fourteenth or fif¬
teenth centuries and reach a very flourishing stage in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
In the seventeenth century we see the development of a new phenomenon, thehuman or animal automaton which imitates lifelike appearances. The celebrated
duck of Jacques de Vaucanson (1709-1786) is now thought to be inauthentic.
But the same inventor has left some remarkable androids, such as his Flute andTambourine Players. Friedrich von Knaus (1724-1789) constructed in 1760 theWriter which can be seen today in the Gewerbemuseum, Vienna. Other extremely
well-known androids, depending on extremely complex mechanisms, are to befound in the Museum at Neuchatel. Entitled the Writer, the Draughtsman and
the Musician, these androids were constructed in 1774 by Leschot and the JacquetDroz family. They are still in good working order. The Timpani Player of 1785,
now in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers at Paris, was built by Kinzing,
while the Writer-draughtsman in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, was begun
by the Jacquet-Droz family and finished by H. Maillardet in London.
During the eighteenth century, the taste for the mechanical toys, marionnettes
and automata which had already existed in classical times was cultivated inprincely and noble circles. At the same time, there was an interesting development
at the popular level. Travelling fairs offered the optical marvels of the ‘phantas¬
magoria’ - a kind of animated tableau depending on the use of illuminated figures
in total darkness. There were also the ‘transparent’ paintings, such as the proverbs
of Carmontelle, which depended on the operation of a light source from behind.
Mechanical pictures with musical accompaniment succeeded animated paint¬
ings in the nineteenth century. At the same time, mechanical toys based on the
power of a spring grew more and more popular. There were the so-called ‘articles
de Paris’, jewel-boxes with singing birds, cylindrical organs, and clocks of allvarieties. All these techniques were available for the transmission of a language
which hovered between the areas of the artist and the craftsman.

• The machine aesthetic and real movement - Archipenko,
Duchamp, Man Ray, Tatlin
We have already considered the question of the artist’s reaction to the coming122

61 Alexandre Archipenko
Archipentura, 1924

of modern machinery, and the development around 1910 of what has been called‘the machine aesthetic’. Foremost in this ‘modernolatria’, or worship of modernity,
were the Italian futurists and, in particular, Boccioni, Balia and Severini. Since
the machine aesthetic was to be closely linked with the origin of three-dimensional
works in real movement, it is important to see which other artists contributed tothe significance of the term.
Mention must be made in the first place of a number of artists who actuallyexperimented with the incorporation of real movement into their works. Aroundthe year 1912, Larionov, Balia, Archipenko and Duchamp all made experimentsof this kind, introducing movement by the use of an electric motor or leaving it
to manual control. There was, in fact, a considerable vogue among young Russian
artists of the time for the introduction of objects or natural phenomena in their
pictures. For this reason the fact that Larionov and David Burliujk included
movable elements in their pictures need not be held to signify a new departurein the plastic arts. With Balia, however, the interest in movement goes deeper.
From examining it purely as a pictorial problem, he proceeded in 1915 to an
attempt at integrating real movement within the work. This can be seen in his
portrait of the Marchesa Casati, and especially in his theatrical presentation,a story of two amorous fishes, which date from 1915 and 1918 respectively.
Archipenko explains that his research into the possibilities of real movement
began in 1912 at Paris, when he constructed the juggler of wood, glass and wire
which was to be called Medrano I and which was exhibited a year later in Budapest.
In the artist’s view this was the first three-dimensional construction in the historyof modern art. For our purposes it stands between the categories of virtual andreal movement, since the juggler’s arm is mobile but the three discs and balloons
indicate the movement in a symbolic way. Archipenko went on from this point
to create Medrano II, a sculpture of similar structure which was made of wood,
metal and glass. He completed this in 1914, but his solution to the problem
involved still left his dissatisfied. He was to take the idea up once again at Berlinin 1922. Finally, at New York in 1924, he crowned a period of intensive technicalresearch with the invention of his Archipentura, an actual machine which wasintended to create an illusion of movement in a pictorial subject through methods
analogous to those of the cinema. This invention, which he finally designed,
patented and constructed in the United States in 1928, consisted of a box roughly
7 x 3 ft in dimensions. On each side there were a number of narrow metal bands
superimposed as in the case of Venetian blinds. An electric motor drove theseround. As successive strips of painted cloth made their appearance, an effect ofgenuine movement was obtained. Archipenko made it clear that the essence of
his invention lay not in the importance of the subject which was chosen, but
in the actual manifestation of change. He did not abandon this point of view,as can be seen from his commentary on the four views of his Revolving figure(1956).
Marchel Duchamp approaches his kinetic experiments in three dimensions froma very different point of view. The first ready-made, which dates from 1913,
was the Bicycle Wheel mounted on a stool. From this use of movement pure andsimple, in an attempt to demystify art and to strip it of its material qualities,
Duchamp began around 1920 to investigate the possibility of producing spatial12362 Vladimir Tatlin
Maquette for the monument of the Third
Internationale, 1919-20

illusions with the use of actual spatial constructions. An air of paradox therefore
dominates the work which he completed shortly after this date, such as thePlaques de verve rotatives and, ultimately, the Rotative Demi-Spheres of 1925
and the Disques visuels of 1935. The Rotative Glass Plaques and the Appareil
rotatif de precision both depend upon an electric motor, which causes them torotate and thereby gives the visual effect of circles changing into spirals. The
Rotative Demi-Sphere is similar in construction, with a hemispherical spiralturning at the centre. The Disques visuels or Rotoreliefs are abstract compositions
which appear to be three-dimensional when placed upon a gramophone turntable.
They were exhibited at the Concours Lepine in 1936.
Duchamp’s work with movement, which went hand in hand with his interest in
the cinema, holds an important place - along with that of Man Ray, Gabo andMoholy-Nagy - in the history of the integration of real movement into thearts on a conscious basis. This must be admitted in spite of the negative andsomewhat intermittent character of his achievement. Perhaps he should be seen
in relation to a number of other artists whose contribution has been of a similar
character - from Giacometti, who created in 1919 ‘a mobile work which was
like a square cloud with a pendulum made of blue smoke’, to Calder in 1932 andfinally to Tinguely, Kramer and Bury in our own period.
Man Ray began his Dada experiments with a series of mobiles incorporating
real movement. These will be examined at a later stage in the chapter. In 1923
he began to use mechanical movement, mounting a cut-out photograph of aneye on the rod of a metronome and calling it ‘objet de destruction’. Tatlin alsobegan his kinetic work with a number of mobiles, but his project for a Monumentof the Third International, which was realized in wood and metal in 1919-20,
involved different types of movement. This monument was intended to be
dynamic in its external form as well as to allow activity in the spaces within.
‘Least of all must you stand or sit in this building,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘youmust be mechanically transported up, down, carried along willy-nilly; in frontof you will flash the firm, laconic phrases of an announceragitator, further on thelatest news, decrees, decisions, the latest inventions will be announced...
creation, only creation.’ In this connection, we should perhaps mention thecomparable case of El Lissitsky’s remarkable ‘Electrical-Mechanical Spectacle’,developed in Moscow 1920-21.

• Gabo and Pevsner - The Realist manifesto: the manifesto of
Moholy-Nagy and Kemeny
The first work which answers all the criteria of this category, both in plastic
and in theoretical terms, is Gabo’s Virtual kinetic volume of 1920. It was thefruit of profound reflection on the problems of movement in art, which Gabo
and his brother Pevsner summed up in the same year in their Realist manifesto:‘We know that every object has its own essential image; chairs, tables, lamps,
telephones, books, houses, men... every one of them is a world in itself, with
its own rhythm and its own planetary path... In place of static rhythms in theplastic arts... we announce the existence of a new element, kinetic rhythm,
which is to be the basis of a new perception of real time.’ ‘Through constructivist

124

63 Naum Gabo
Drawing for a kinetic construction, 1922

techniques we are today capable of bringing to light the hidden forces of natureand realizing psychic events.’
Gabo’s Virtual kinetic volume has also been referred to as Kinetic sculptureor Kinetic model. It consisted of a strip of steel attached to at the base to anelectric motor and so set into rhythmical vibration. The theme was to be the‘interval of vibration’, by means of which Gabo was to produce the spatial effectof ‘virtual volume’. In other words, the rotation of the steel strip according
to a certain periodicity produced the illusion of a rounded volume where thestrip was forced away from the vertical by the speed of rotation. Unfortunately
Gabo made no attempt to follow up this interesting experiment. He consideredthat the motor was an encumbrance and thought that ‘future development in the
study of heat and radio, and the powers released in the process, would makepossible kinetic solutions of a type hitherto unanticipated’. It was purely fortechnical reasons, he insisted, that he made no further investigations into real
movement. We must remember, however, the pioneering work of 1920 was
followed by a Drawing for a kinetic sculpture in 1922. This schema represented
a much more complex interaction of moving elements than its predecessor. Gabo
was in fact to return to projects in which the idea of movement occupied an
important place on several subsequent occasions, such as in 1925, when he madea model in glass and bronze for a monument destined for the Institute of Physics
and Mathematics.
Gabo’s theories on kinetic sculpture were taken up and developed in anotherdirection by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, who wrote his Manifesto on the system ofdynamico-constructive forms with Alfred Kemeny in 1922. For Moholy-Nagy and
Kemeny, Constructivism meant the activation of space by means of a ‘dynamicoconstructive’ system of forces - that is to say, a construction of forces some ofwhich represent the tension of the structure itself in physical space and others
the tensions within the system. They proclaimed in their manifesto, in a passage
reminiscent of the Realist manifesto: ‘We should therefore replace the static
principle of classical art with the dynamic principle of universal art.’ Their
practical plan was to substitute a dynamic construction based on the relationshipof forces and construction for the traditional static type involving relationships
between material and form. They envisaged material simply as a carrier of forces.
Moholy-Nagy and Kemeny were also interested in allowing the spectator amuch more active role by the application of their system. Their plan of procedure
was to begin by setting up experimental apparatuses which would test therelationships between man, materials, forces and space. The results of theseexperiments would then be utilized in the creation of works of art which would
move freely and lack the constraints of mechanical and technical movement.
It was at the same date that Moholy-Nagy began his practical research into
light, space and movement. His Light machine, or Lichtrequisit, was not to becompleted until 1929-30, and was finally exhibited at the Exposition Internationale
du Batiment at Paris in 1930. However it was to undergo some further modifi¬
cations at a later stage. Essentially this machine was a moving sculpture, placedon a circular base, with three distinct spatial cells to allow greater complexityof movement. It was made of polished metal which reflected the light. The threecells were divided up as follows: the first consisted of rectangular pieces of metal125

64 i/^Zf'e<7w°'Ml923-39ov Harvard
university Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

moving in an irregular, undulatory fashion, the second of perforated metal discs
moving vertically up and down and releasing a small black ball, and the thirdof a glass spiral turning and producing a virtual conical volume. The construction
was provided with around 130 electric light-bulbs of different colours whichwere linked together and controlled by a single coil. These gave a complex
spectacle of moving light.
Sibyl Moholy-Nagy has left us a lively description of the Lichtrequisit, which
she considered to be a construction half-way between a machine and a sculpture.
When she first became acquainted with it, this work which was to occupy her
attention for a large part of her life consisted of an amalgam of chromium, glass,wire and metal rods. The very centre of the construction was originally of wood,then of glass and finally of perspex. What struck her immediately was the move¬
ment of light and shade projected upon the walls and ceiling, and also the varying
126reflections upon the metal elements of the construction itself. In effect, the powerof the work depended more on the reflection than on the original.
Experiments of the kind described above have multiplied in number since theend of the Second World War. They all belong more or less to the traditionof Dada and Constructivism. But the most useful way of classifying them is
not in terms of their historical antecedents, but according to the dominant forces
which give each series of works their particular character.
• Works driven by the hand or powered by electricity - Munari, Bury

The class of works which depends on continuous human force, particularly thatof the hand as in the case of marionnettes, can be traced back before 1920 in thecontext ot the modern movement. Sophie Tauber-Arp’s marionnettes date fromfrom 1917. It would nonetheless be true to say that the most significant pioneer
was Alexander Calder, who constructed a Miniature Circus of animated toys
about 1925, before proceeding to his mobiles. This circus was exhibited at theSalon des Humoristes, Paris, in the spring of 1927.
A contemporary artist who is also inclined to use small electric motors in his‘Automobile structures’ is the German Harry Kramer, who worked as a dancer
in various towns throughout Germany before entering the kinetic field. His firstwork was a series of figures for a mechanical theatre. These were used for the
first time in a show of thirteen scenes which took place in the Springer Gallery,
Berlin, in 1955.
Mention has already been made of the part played by Duchamp, Gabo andMoholy-Nagy in introducing electrical forces into the plastic arts. The factthat this link throws together artists of widely differing aesthetic aims suggeststhat there is an element of ambiguity in the majority of works which utilize thisparticular technique. We might say that there is a Dada or surrealist element
even in the works which are constructivist or geometrical in conception, just as
there are frequently geometrical shapes to be found in the work of humorous
artists. In fact admiration and caricature of the machine often go hand in handin the same programme of exploration. A good example of this would be thefirst mobiles of Calder, which were powered with electric motors.
The Italian artist, Bruno Munari, has pursued several parallel lines of researchin connection with the use of real movement. In 1938 he wrote a manifesto ofmachine art in which he claimed that ‘the machine must become a work of art’.
In the same year he himself created a ‘machine which produces art’. Munari’s
work developed in complexity and in 1945 he constructed a number of kinetic
objects whose structure was variable. These were powered by small watch move¬ments. At a later stage he evolved the concept of a ‘programmed art’, that is tosay a form of research in the strict sense whose theoretical postulates preceded
the choice of materials and forms, and even anticipated the mathematical com¬binations involved in the movement. Another feature of his work has been his
distinctive interpretation of the Gestalt theory, especially of the concepts offormal purity and good design. And it is worth recalling that he was the firstkinetic artist to produce works in editions.
Those of Munari’s works which fall within the category of three-dimensional
127

65 Richard Mortensen
Sequel to Ominanda IV, 1964. Galerie
Denise Rene. This relief becomes kinetic
through the movement of the spectator

66 Pol Bury... Bou/es en mouvements, 1963

objects in movement most often take the form of small screens on which unstable
images of form and colour file past. His most recent kinetic creation of this type,the Tetracono, is made up of four cones which occupy the total cubic capacity
available. Each cone is coloured in two equal parts of red and green, which
results in an optical vibration when the power of the four motors is applied.
The same basic programme can be observed in the Tetrafono of P. Grossi, whichis particularly concerned with sound effects.
Harriet Heiner constructed her Kinetic sculpture in 1941, making reference
to both the Dada and the constructivist aesthetics. This work was a sculpture
in rotation made of wire. It incorporated ping-pong balls which gave differing
degrees of movement and different directions of movement when inserted in thework. The result was a combination of unpredictable and predictable movement.
There is some similarity between the preceding work and the Pictorial com¬position of Richard Mortensen, which was completed at Copenhagen in 1944
but has since been lost. Mortensen’s work hovered between imagination andreflexion, between the Surrealism which he was practising before the war andthe Expressionism which he developed after 1939. It was a large picture, measuring
4 x 12 metres, which consisted of geometrical elements quite freely distributed
over the surface. Five of these were in slow movement. In addition, there werefour cages containing white mice, which introduced an element of unpredictable
movement, and an electric motor which set the entire picture into motion. Afilm of this extraordinary spectacle was taken by Metz and Jorgen Roos.
One of the first artists to undertake a series of works which depended upon
the use of electric motors was the Belgian Pol Bury. Impressed by an exhibitionof Calder’s work, Bury began his research with the construction of what hecalled ‘mobile planes’ in masonite. These were sometimes black and white andsometimes coloured. They relied on the spectator for their movement. Bury’s
aim in making them was to replace the traditional picture frame by an axis, orseveral axes, and to modify the composition by means of movement whileinviting the spectator to participate in the elaboration of the work. He exhibitedthese ‘mobile planes’ at the Gallery Apollo, Brussels, in December 1953, ex¬plaining in the preface to the catalogue: ‘By distributing these forms in threesuccessive planes, I managed to give each of them an axis. That of the first plane
was fixed on to the second plane, that of the second fixed on to the third, while
the third was fixed to the wall. It was possible to turn the first plane while theother two remained motionless. This permitted in theory an infinite number of
pictorial combinations.’
The next stage in Bury’s work was marked by his invention of the Multi-planes
in 1957-8. These were constructions similar to the mobile planes, on square slats,
but in this case they were set in motion with the help of small motors (which
Bury had in fact tried out once or twice in the previous series). ‘Returning to
the rectangular surface of the picture,’ Bury explained, ‘I made it up out ofwooden slats of square section placed parallel to one another in a vertical order.
On each of the four faces of these slats, I painted forms which carried on fromone face to another and from one slat to another - there were about ten in all.
There were therefore four large compositions painted on the various facets ofthese slats... As each of the slats was supplied with a cog-wheel of differing128diameter, each had a different speed of rotation. But since there was continuity
in the four dominant compositions, there were no blank spots created by thesedifferences of speed. These works increased my knowledge of real movement.
The slats turned very slowly and transformed the composition of the picturealmost without the spectator’s knowledge. The result was a kind of mixture offorms. But beyond this satisfaction of seeing the painting change continually,
there was a new element of importance. By shifting position in a manner whichbordered upon the imperceptible, the moving slats created a feeling or sensation
over and above what could be expected.’
Bury developed this discovery to some extent in the Ponctuations pneumatiques,
where he made use of an elastic surface. The slats turning at different speeds
were in this case hidden behind a surface of white cloth, which was still sufficient¬ly loose to be sensitive to the slightest touch. Each of them was fitted with small
stalks of rubber, at once rigid and supple. When the work was set in motion,these rubber stalks came into contact with the underside of the cloth and imprinted
on its visible side a kind of relief which appeared and disappeared according to
the rhythm of the slats.
After a short interval in which he studied the movement of points of light,
Bury turned after 1959 to more complicated constructions in various materials,
mainly wood, metal and nylon. These carried to a further stage his exhaustive
research into slow movements of an almost imperceptible, and often very sugges¬
tive, kind. However worthwhile it may be to see the origin of these works in theteeming movements of micro-organisms, or indeed in models of an erotic orsurrealist type, it is quite clear that this exceptionally slow process suggests a
range of kinetic relationships that were almost unexplored before. These strange
interactions of cubes, balls, rectangles, small sticks and large ones are particularly
effective when they suggest that the work is free from gravitational forces.
Bury’s own view is that the source of mechanical movement - the motor should remain invisible. The artist’s task ends with the creation of the work:
after that he should conceal himself behind it. He is anxious that the visible
arrangement of forms should involve as large an element of chance as possible,
and that the movement should become ‘anonymous, silent and supernatural.’ As
far as the problem of interpretation goes, he puts little value upon the purely
subjective reactions and associations which his work stimulates. The spectator
may be reminded of sea urchins or sea anemones in watching the metal or nylon
stalks of some of the works. In others, he may see elements of nature, the city
or interstellar space in the appearance and disappearance of white spots. But
Bury is aware of the completely random character of these impressions andconsiders them to be extrinsic to the work.
His true aim is to present an image of pure movement. This might be called
movement for movement’s sake, so subtle that it can be indicated simply byrelationships of material or texture, as in the case of smooth balls on a roughsurface or vice versa. By this insistence on the slowness and irregularity of
movement, he aims to achieve a new region of existence - a universe whichleaves behind the world of forms and concentrates our attention upon relative
tempi as they are made manifest in plastic organisms composed of very small oreven contradictory elements which carry on their own life according to their130

own rules. Like many kinetic artists, he considers that the traditional divisions
within the plastic arts have been superseded now that movement has come into
use. He explains: ‘Just as the painter benefits from knowing some of the elemen¬tary theories of the laws of colour, I have felt myself obliged to take certain
mechanical principles into account. Since the micro-motors which I use havea limited power, I have been able to exploit the principle of the inclined plane,
for instance, to animate elements whose weight exceeded the capacities of the
motor. This is a long way from painting and sculpture.’• The Dadaist tradition - Tinguely, Kramer
These remarks apply equally well to an artist like Jean Tinguely. Although asuperficial study of his work would merely bring out the elements of anarchism,
Tinguely’s attitude to the machine is a much more complex one, depending ona critical stance which itself can hardly be distinguished from a kind of fascination.
He uses movement at once to stress the properties of the machine and to transcendthem. He is struck by the paradox that the machine is by its very essence utilitarian,and yet reverts to complete uselessness when it is no longer in service. He accepts
the implications of paradoxes such as this, and in fact makes use of them in orderto bring into the open the latent irony, and even monstrosity, of the machine.
One of the paradoxes which is particularly dear to Tinguely has a direct
bearing on the question of movement. He is anxious to show that movement
itself can demonstrate a kind of stability. A lecture which he gave at the Instituteof Contemporary Arts, London, in November 1959 was concerned with thistheme. Tinguely sat motionless and silent on the podium while two tape re¬cordings were played simultaneously. The first involved Tinguely himself
attempting to explain his theory of stability in modern machine movements. He
did so in an atrocious English, and the second tape was of an English woman
making continual interruptions and corrections in an aggressive voice.
As early as 1948 Tinguely had begun to make experiments in the use of
mechanical movement. In that year he constructed a work which was driven by
a motor fixed to the ceiling. The motor itself was designed to revolve in an
unpredictable way, and so create a virtual volume, as in the work of Gabo or
Tatlin. After this Tinguely continued his research with a parallel developmentof motorized movement and movement induced by the spectator. His Cyclograveur challenged the spectator to mount a bicycle seat and produce paintings or
engravings through the action of the pedals. The lecture in London which has
already been mentioned also comprised a second section in which two racing
cyclists on the platform unrolled toilet paper in front of the English public,
while a seductive French woman moved around in the audience.
From Tinguely’s point of view, the machines which he devises are living
creatures which inspire him at one stage with fear, and at another with astonish¬
ment or admiration. He expects this to be so for the spectator as well. One ofthe dominant qualities associated with his work is humour, a quality particularly
apparent in the series of reliefs metamecaniques with which the most important
phase of his career began. These reliefs, which are remarkably delicate in theirworkmanship, take as their starting point the idea of the wheel in rotation. At

131

68 Jean Tinguely
M. K. Ill, 1964
67 Jean Tinguely
Animation of small bulbs, 1962

a later stage, their range is extended to include an element of sound - since for
Tinguely there is a most significant correspondence between the movements of amachine and the sounds which it makes. After this series of works, which carried
the names ‘metamecanique’, ‘metamatique’, and ‘metamecanique sonore’, heproceeded to much larger projects. Making use of the debris of machines, hetransposed on to a different level the spirit of irony and surprise which had always
been his distinctive mark. One of the most important works in this series was thegiant machine Eureka, which dates from 1963 and was presented to the public
at the Exposition Nationale Suisse in Lausanne. With this enlargement of scale,
Tinguely’s machines grew increasingly complex in their movements. But they
were never without that small element of surprise which the artist himself
referred to as the ‘functional use of chance’.
Another aspect of Tinguely’s work has been his exploitation of rapid deteriora¬tion in machines. In March 1960, a number of mechanical elements were assem¬
bled in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, for a Machine
Happening which Tinguely called Homage to New York. Here the element of
surprise was well to the fore, as a fire extinguisher which had been hidden in a
piano threatened to explode and the fire brigade was required to hasten theprocess of auto-destruction.
The German artist Harry Kramer, whose work has already received a passing
mention, was influenced by Tinguely’s early reliefs. He has continued to explore
the subtle possibilities offered by finely judged constructions with a wide variety
of movements. His tiny pulleys, which have a choreographic as well as a purely
mechanical function, help to make up a meticulous mise en scene. Since 1961,

69 Harry Kramer
Ball with opening, 1964.
75 cm. x 120 cm. x 85 cm.

133he has been making kinetic wire sculptures which combine exactitude with poetic
feeling, suppleness with rigidity. His favourite overall forms are the ball, thecolumn, the tower and the pyramid. Gunter Metken has given an excellent
description of their curious effect: ‘Within their bellies, wheels and pairs ofwheels move like constellations, fixed at different levels and in different directions.
Sometimes Kramer installs a small bell, slows down the rhythm or concentrates
his wheels in the upper part of the work, which then appears to float, suggesting
distance or isolation. The overall design, in filigree, of these transparent sculptures
is extremely beautiful, especially when the naked light throws projections of its
delicate moving shadows upon the wall.’Some of Kramer’s sculptures, such as his Crying child - a statuette on wheels- or his Signal and Chronoskop belong to the category of the bizarre. They arein the same family as the Monsters of the Swiss artist, Robert Muller, who began
to experiment with kinetic sculpture in 1953, or the works of Jean-Philippe
Hiquily. We are not far from the spirit of Dada in many of these works, eventhough it must be said that the use of the ready-made or the incorporation ofindustrial waste products is never more than an incidental factor in their aims.
An artist who clearly belongs to the surrealist tradition is the Englishman Bruce
Lacey, whose androids are composite creations that owe a great deal to popularsources of imagery. There is perhaps an affinity in this case with the work of
Foldes, who has incorporated optical lenses in his pictures and collages.

• The constructivist tradition - Schoffer, von Graevenitz, KosiceThis line of research is in clear opposition - on the aesthetic if not on the technicalplane - to the tradition set up by Gabo and Pevsner and maintained throughout
the inter-war years by Moholy-Nagy. The most important contemporary
representative of this tradition is Nicolas Schoffer.
Schoffer’s procedure has been to develop the theoretical and practical implica¬
tions of the ‘active void’ in Gabo and Pevsner: from this he has evolved his own
type of ‘aerated, transparent and penetrable’ construction, supplementing therectilinear metal framework with planes of iron, steel, polished copper and othermaterials. It is important to bear in mind, however, that even at the earliest
stages of this research he was closely concerned with the problems of real move¬
ment. This can be demonstrated first of all by reference to the various theoreticalpronouncements which correspond to the stages of his work. He has always madeextensive use of the concepts of movement and of dynamism in these writings.
They form part of a descriptive vocabulary which also includes the concepts ofspace, time, light, mirror reflection, shadow, and many features of information
theory.
An example of this close parallelism between theory and practice can befound in his association of the notions of space and dynamism in a series of‘spatiodynamic’ works which he began in 1948. At this stage the element of
movement could be manual or mechanical. An example of the latter would be his
two Horloges spatio-dynamiques, functional sculptures which were provided withelectric motors. The next stage was to come in 1951 when he began to use
polychrome mobile elements made of aluminium and plastics. This in-134creasingly wide use of materials was to continue until 1954, when he completed
the large-scale project of a spatio-dynamic, cybernetic and sonic tower as thecentre-piece of the Exposition Internationale des Travaux Publics at the Parcde Saint-Cloud.
Schoffer’s use of movement was already quite original. The great innovation
was to make use of the power of electronics and the possibilities of cybernetics
not only as a means of integrating the music with the rest of the work but also
as a way of subjecting the mobile elements to the influence of external events.
This was in fact the central motif of a subsequent work entitled Cysp 1, whichdisplayed a remarkable range of movements. In accordance with the title, whichstood for ‘Cybernetic + Spatio-dynamisme’, this sculpture was a rightangled construction that moved in response to the instructions of an electronic
brain hidden in the base. Handsomely composed of black steel and polychromealuminium, it engaged in the ‘Nuit de la Poesie’ at the Theatre Sarah Bernhardt
in May 1956, and shortly afterwards displayed remarkable affinities with choreo¬graphy when it was included in Maurice Bejart’s ballet company at the Festivalof the Avant-Garde in the Cite Radieuse of Marseilles.
A further study of the kinetic forces of light in 1957 led Schoffer to advancethe theory of‘lumino-dynamism’, which was to have important repercussions on
his use of mechanical, electro-mechanical and electronic forms of movement inthree-dimensional works. This new approach was to be the basis of his procedurefrom 1960 onwards, since it was in that year that he constructed Chronos /, thefirst of his works to deal directly with the dynamic possibilities of time. Chronos I
was made of nickel steel and plastic, incorporating mirror surfaces and ‘multiple
peripheral projections’.
Schoffer spoke of this work as being ‘electric and autonomous’. As such, it
anticipated the most considerable achievement in applied kinetic art to date his Cybernetic Tower at Liege. This spatio-dynamic and cybernetic tower, which
is 52 metres high and incorporates sound, consists of thirty-seven elements turningon their axes at different speeds of rotation. The individual elements are madeup of sixty-four sheets and blades of polished aluminium cut into different
shapes. These reflect rays of light and, ‘thanks to their incessant movement,
diffuse them in all directions in an incredible variety of combinations. At night,
projectors of multi-coloured light reinforce this impression of animation, whilst
a long-range vertical beam carries the tower further into the sky.’
The various movements connected with this tower are an adjunct to thespectacle, Formes et Lumieres, which appears on the facade of the neighbouring
Palais des Congres. The tower is regulated by an electronic brain which issensitive to such features of the environment as sound, temperature and humidity,
and itself produces an appropriate kind of music, based on such material as
street sounds and recorded bird-song. The public can follow the workings ofthis control unit from outside.
One of Schoffer’s main preoccupations has been the problem of integrating
mobile sculpture into town planning and architectural schemes. While sculpture
remains the centre of his concern, he is anxious to put the question on a moregeneral level by representing the problem as one of incorporating an element ofplastic indeterminism into our urban landscape. That is to say, he would like135

to draw a close connection between town life and the ideas of cybernetics. His
spatio-dynamic towers at Biot and St-Cloud, and his cybernetic tower at Liege,
are still the only large-scale projects which he has carried out. But he has planneda grandiose scheme involving a central electronic brain which would provide
a solution to the problem of‘visual saturation’ - as he has called it. The electronicsystem would be concerned with despatching ‘mobile cybernetic sculptures’ todifferent places, where they would stay suspended in the air like helicopters.
The bewildering variety of Schoffer’s activities should not lead us to forgetthat there is a very close connection between the original introduction of real
movement and his other guiding notions. From 1960, he has been increasingly
concerned with the psycho-therapeutic, physical and metaphysical aspects of the
new temporal concept which he calls ‘microtime’. This can be understood better
if we remember that for Schoffer time represents both a pulsation, which isdistinct from the directional phenomenon of movement, and a material, which
he first attempted to capture and utilize in the multiple images of ‘anamorphosed’
movement which he obtained from the complex distortions of reflecting metal
mirrors. In effect, he composed a series of small sculptures which he referred toas Anamorphoses, which generally involved two different speeds and derived afurther complexity from the spectator’s own movements. It was with the experi¬ence gained from these works that he was able to glimpse the significance of
infinitesimal units of time. He had brought his research close to the preoccupationsof certain branches of science. Now he was to devote his energies to capturing
and controlling ‘microtime’ with an aesthetic end in view.
In a recent publication entitled La Retroaction et le micro-temps, Schoffer has
explained that: ‘simple retroaction is the type of action which takes place when
we are responding to the direct emission of signals between the moment they
are emitted and the moment of perception.’ After this he proceeds to an analysisof micro-time and what he refers to as ‘enriched microtime’. His attitude presumes
that there is great value in aesthetic research. At the same time, he makes it clearthat he by no means rules out the possibility of attaining the realm of transcen¬
dental truth through his research - and, in particular, through the use of kinetic
phenomena. For it is this type of phenomenon - and this alone - that offers
to art, through man’s intermediacy, a substance wihch transcends man. Towards
the end of this essay, Schoffer draws the threads together in a veritable professionof ‘scientistic’ faith. He describes the God who would permit man to ‘leavebehind the mystical confusion of the religions’. ‘This God is intemporal andpermanent, available, acting and retroactive, receivable and emissible, omni¬
directional and aleatory.’
Schoffer has also laid great weight on what he calls ‘the psycho-therapeuticvalue of the arts that are structured temporally’. In his view, ‘aesthetic mutations
in time... comprise an element of pure energy. This is likely to induce within
the psycho-phenomenological field of the individual certain unstructured temporalpulsations which go beyond or stay short of the automatic rhythms oscillating
between agony and pleasure and have no sort of imitative character.’ ‘Art andworks of art are immutable, but techniques are evolving and materials arechanging. Both the evolution and the processes of change are functions of anevolution whose rhythm is dictated by our need for temporal divisions.’

136

The fact that this relationship between aesthetic movement and biological‘rhythm’ can be used in the service of medicine has been attested by Dr Menetrier,
who writes: ‘In raising the threshold of a visual and auditory perception to thelevel of total and indissociable sensation, in introducing a dynamic time into thepresentation of static forms with the aim of instilling evolution and movement,
in providing sculptured, coloured and musical works with an infinite range ofvariations, technique is helping to resolve any problem of saturation and any
partial cause of increasing conditioning.’ With the help of large industrial firms,
Schoffer has already been able to construct works that will serve for medical
purposes.
Schoffer’s contribution to the new art of movement may be summed up under
three principal headings. With his uninterrupted programme of research, he haslent new fullness and richness of expression to the class of works in real movement
which involve an obvious display of mechanical elements. In the second place,
he was the first artist to apply electronics, cybernetics and industrial techniques
in his investigations into the use of real movement. Thirdly, he has given
considerable momentum to the development of a class of works which combine
two and three-dimensional movement, in this way contributing to the break¬down of traditional artistic classifications and presaging the establishment ofkinetic art as a new and distinct category. Finally it must be added that Schoffer
has explored - both on the theoretical and the practical plane - new possi¬
bilities of relationship between time and movement.
The German artist von Graevenitz recalls Schoffer and a number of otherartists who have already been mentioned in his concern for the ‘open’ work,
which is not limited or determined by its figuration. This concern has led him toconsider the possibility of creating works in editions. Yet he differs from mostof the artists whose names occur in this connection in putting the main emphasison the optical factor, and on the new ‘statistical orders’ produced in the process
of movement. This is the case even when the element of real movement is very
pronounced.
The path along which von Graevenitz’ work has developed allows us to pickout a number of obvious influences. Gabo, Moholy-Nagy and Schoffer are
behind his continuous exploration of spatial values, light mutations and, ofcourse, movement itself. He has provided an interesting account of his own
development, explaining why he found it necessary to go beyond the formulae ofConstructivism. He began with various experiments in the use of materials, andprogressed at a later stage to simple progressions. Eventually, after he hadmanaged to incorporate statistical and aleatory principles into the operation of
the work, he arrived at a type of homogeneous structure which could be distin¬
guished quite clearly from the constructivist model. In the latter, it was simply
a case of controlling the plastic form or ‘macrostructure’. For von Graevenitz
and the Nouvelle Tendance there was to be control of the ‘microstructure’ of
the work through statistical methods. In this way, the problem of subject matter
could be avoided, if not resolved completely. The Nouvelle Tendance shared
the constructivist ambition to make the public more intensely aware of visual
phenomena. But they did so through a type of programming that allowed for an
inbuilt indeterminism - an element of personal choice.

137

70 Von Graevenitz
Structures of black blades in motion,
1964. Galerie Denise Rene

While the aesthetic of the Nouvelle Tendance can in most cases be reduced tothat of the game, in von Graevenitz’ case it is the functional value of the workin movement that receives most attention. He has spoken of several of his motordriven works as ‘propositions for a new architecture’. However he holds incommon with the rest of the group a desire to break out from the confines of thestrictly determined form and the closed system, in much the same way as theAmerican action-painters have done. He aims to realise this objective throughinvolving the spectator in the space of the work: it is the relationship between
the movements of the work and those of the spectator that represents for him
the ultimate aesthetic value.
Research of a similarly ‘constructivist’ tendency has led the sculptor Kosice,
who is of Hungarian birth and holds Argentinian nationality, to progress fromelectro-mechanical to ‘hydraulic’ movement. His most original and interesting
works are designed to bring out the aesthetic effects of moving water. It is perhaps
relevant to add that he ascribes this fascination with water to a childhood experi¬ence, when he narrowly escaped drowning. He retained from this episode a vivid
impression of water permeating his whole being.

138

71 Gyula Kosice
Hommage a ma femme Diyi, 1964

Kosice began to take an interest in the sculptural possibilities of real movementin 1944. Several of the works which he exhibited in Buenos Aires in the following
year incorporated mobile or gyratory elements in their metal or wood construc¬tion. His next step was to produce works which relied on an interchange between
movement and transparency. For these he selected as his material Perspex,
which has always been the favourite material of South American kinetic artists.
At a later stage, he made several attempts to introduce neon lighting into his
work. Finally, in 1957, he took the decisive step of introducing the element ofwater. His first ‘hydraulic’ sculptures were exhibited at Paris in 1958.
By his use of water, Kosice was aiming to isolate the very essence of movement.
In works like his Vibration du spectre de Veau (1962-3) and Langage chiffre deVeau (1963), which involved the refraction of light through moving water, thespectator could discover a rainbow of colours by moving past the construction.
In other works, such as the Persistance de la goutte d’eau (1963), the movementof water bubbles was used. Kosice had successfully liberated water from its
obvious associations by animating it in this way.
Since he is both artist and poet, constructive and imaginative, Kosice views
the genesis of the kinetic work of art in two ways. First of all, there is the birthof a virtual form - as is particularly evident in the case of his Demi-spheres d’eau.
Then there is the internal movement of - for example - the drops of water, whichgive rise to a kind of organic movement with no sense of repetition. Kosice has
in fact devised some small experimental works which he calls Une goutte d’eau
bercee d toute vitesse. These are directly poetic in conception, and he considers
that they are untranslatable except in verbal terms - despite the fact that they
have already been transposed into a plastic vocabulary.
Since he regards water (and sometimes air) as the most important vehicle ofplastic and poetic movement, Kosice tends to use the terms ‘hydro-poetry’,‘hydro-space’ and ‘alternancy of hydro-space’. He holds that water is always
in the process of transformation, and that it is water which creates the forms
in his works. But once the form is realized, water must cede to the forces ofinertia and no longer relies on the aid of mechanical force. This transition froma type of movement which is created or circumscribed by man to the natural
movement of the elements is in fact at the centre of Kosice’s concerns as an
artist. He is preoccupied with precisely the same question in his poetic work - ‘thetransformation of one thing by another thing, to arrive at the thing itself’.
Kosice has also explained: ‘I have concentrated in particular upon the problemsof rhythm in space, upon the problem of rhythmic continuity in certain trans¬parent forms - almost always parabolical in shape. You must have noticed thatthe majority of my sculptures were constructed on the basis of a half-curve, ormore recently a half-sphere.’ ‘In plastic terms, I have worked gradually towards
the introduction of movement in my works, movement being taken to mean thedevelopment of a form. I used to take a form from its origin to its final develop¬
ment ... In my first works, the movement was still either frontal or lateral. Now
it is developing in all directions... My personal ambition is to set up a sort ofdialogue between the material plasticity of aluminium, the transparency ofperspex and the many attributes of water.’
Kosice is fully aware that his sculptures tend to be enlivened by the movement139

of the surrounding world. In fact, he is anxious that they should have this
supplementary element. This is perhaps why he likes to speculate on the possi¬
bility of creating large, anonymous works which will make use of the sameelements but become a more integral part of the modern way of life. Among
his projects we may instance the scheme for Buenos Aires airport, and a ceilingfor a suburban house in the same town which has actually been completed.
Recently he has produced a design which is intended to create a link between
architecture and the wider problems of town-planning by the ‘indeterminism’of a vast perspex construction which contains water in continual movement. A
motor hidden in the base turns the axis of the half-sphere through ninety degrees
every four hours. Apart from this mechanical movement, the water is left tocreate its own patterns of rhythm within the half-sphere. Kosice takes issue withthose who are merely concerned with the ‘integration’ of plastic works of art
into architecture and town planning. He feels that there should be a much more
profound connection between the plastic element of movement and what hesees as the ‘increasingly humane qualities of modern social life’.
We should not forget that Kosice’s distinctive use of the element of water
has its precursors, as well as its parallels in the contemporary scene. The thirteenthcentury Polish philosopher Witelo (or Vitellio) used a globe full of water torecreate the colours of the spectrum. Nowadays the artist Liliane Lijn uses
revolving circular perspex containers which display condensation on their internalsurfaces. She picks out the drops of water with a beam of light, and accentuates
the element of movement by allowing perspex spheres to circulate freely on thehorizontal planes.

• Magnetic force - Takis, Boriani

72 V. Takis
Signal, 1956

Kosice is fascinated by the natural elements of water, air and light, which offer
him an infinite number of possibilities. The Greek artist Takis explores thehardly less wide-ranging possibilities of magnetism. Since 1959 he has been
constructing Telesculptures which make direct and obvious use of this previously
neglected force. He began to use vibratory movement in 1955, the year in which
the first of his Signals was completed. For a time he concentrated particularlyon these fine constructions in iron and steel which relied upon chance currentsof air to set them in motion - and gave extremely interesting effects when juxta¬
posed one against the other. But the possibilities of magnetic force were to stir
his imagination much more powerfully. ‘If I could only capture the music of thebeyond with an instrument similar to radar...’ he exclaimed in 1963. ‘The
thought made me forget all the rules of art. What if the object were capable ofcapturing sounds and transmitting them, in its process of rotation... ’Takis’ principal concern in recent years has been that of making meaningful
and perceptible on a human level the ‘mechanical and undulatory forces’ which
dominate the natural world. Obviously he has laid great emphasis on the impor¬tance of movement in pursuing this aim. His Telesculptures, which generally
consist of a magnet and certain parts made of aluminium, iron and steel, and his
Telepaintings, which also involve a magnet and other metallic objects, haverecently been supplemented by a novel use of the kinetic element of light, in this140case diffused by mercury vapour lamps. These blue-coloured lamps flicker all
the time, giving out a light that is aggressive but also poetic in character. Theyare ‘cosmic flowers’, which register energy as a seismograph does.
Takis is therefore trying to capture the natural forces which lie hidden inmetals, and to reveal the energy that is all around us. Some of his most successful
works depend on his ability to control and combine two types of movement,
as when he allows white balls to hang suspended over upturned magnets, hoveringand darting about in response to the conflicting forces of gravity and magnetism.
His interpretation of natural forces is radically different from that of an artist like
Schoffer. Instead of assuming an ideal unit of perception like Schoffer’s ‘micro¬
time’, he prefers to rely on the latent energies of magnetism, and his work acquires
its unusual tension from this unresolved conflict between magnetism and theuniversal forces of gravity.
Magnetism has also engaged the attention of the Italian artist Boriani, amember of Group T of Milan. In 1961, Boriani constructed a series of Magnetic
surfaces which involved magnets fixed behind turning planes: the planes werecovered with a thin layer of metal dust which formed extraordinary patterns in
response to the alternate attraction and repulsion of the magnets.

• Len Lye

73 Len Lye
Steel fountain, 1959

Len Lye - pioneer of experimental cinema and animation between the wars - isone of the most gifted artists to turn his attention to the problems of movement.
In spite of their title, his Tangible Motion Sculptures, which are comparatively
recent in date, belong to the present category of three-dimensional mechanicallyoperated works. This is because Len Lye is simply referring to the visual
impression of tangibility and has no intention of making his works actuallydependent on touch.
Len Lye’s kinetic experiments date back as far as 1918, if we are to allow
the occasion on which he fixed planks within an orange-box in order to support
a collection of handles, rollers and pulleys. His subsequent passion for the cinema
in all its aspects can be sensed in the vibrating sculptures which he makes today.
These are simple constructions, generally made of firm yet elastic steel andmounted on supports that conceal silent motors. The programme of action whichtakes place once the motor is switched on follows a sequence which has beenstrictly determined by the artist. Thus much is made clear in an anonymous
article entitled ‘Forms in Air’ which appeared in Time magazine. The motor
starts up, slowly at first, and then accelerating according to a carefully arranged
cycle. In the mean time, the sculpture begins to trace its outline in the surrounding
space.
This description may not explain the importance of the cinematographic
element in Len Lye’s work. But one of his letters establishes the point beyond
any doubt. He writes: ‘I’ll now get back to my studio corner and be sure that I
can at least mess around with animating steel and exploiting its springy reso¬
nances in terms of controlling energy to compose motion not only of static
objects vibrating and quivering while in motion. This point is analogous to, say,the film editing device of using short cut scenes as visual screen accents (at the142splices). Now if, sound is synchronized with the cuts (or splices), that is one‘step by step’ unity; but, if there is internal action within the scene with whichsound is also used in synchrony, then that’s internal motion of something thatis externally controlled. - Another analogy might be made by likening the torpedo
to an externally set line of motion and a shark with an internally set and directedone.’
Len Lye is primarily interested in the grace and power of movement, rather
than the mere fact of its presence. He sees ‘motion sculpture’ as a distinct categoryof modern art, and the ‘tangible motion sculpture’ as a means of displaying an
infinite variety of ‘fundamental patterns’, in such a way as to bring out the
beauty of movement as such. With this fundamental aim in view, he has ranged
widely in methods and techniques. His Revolving Harmonic is operated manuallyby means of a rheostat which controls the speed at the touch of a button. This
control can be replaced by a fully automatic electronic system. Len Lye isinterested in the possibilities of programming additional combinations, seeing
the artist in this respect as the choreographer of movement. And he allows forthe possibility of chance (or aleatory movement) by incorporating a weight into
the system. In another work, the Oscillating steel fountain, he matches thefluidity of water with the force and flexibility of steel. 120 steel tubes are set into
motion by a comparatively slight force applied at their turning base. Yet another,
the tangible sculpture Roundhead I, consists of four concentric metal rings
animated by mechanical means. The result is a combination of clock-wise andanti-clockwise movement, interrupted by points of rest which occur in accordancewith an ‘audio-visual’ programme.
The works mentioned above give some idea of the range of Len Lye’s visionaryart, which extends from the scale of monumental fountains to that of tiny
‘Mixmasters’. In every case, he is concerned with subtle and complex oscillations
which owe their character as much to the individual frequencies of the metalcomponents as to the requirements of the programme.
Several similar types of work come to mind in this connection. The American
artist, Jose de Rivera, has completed a series of compositions in polished steel,which rotate slowly in response to mechanical force. Charles Eames’ Do-nothingmachine, which dates from 1955, is powered by a motor that derives its energy
from the sun.
It can be stated as a general principle that those three-dimensional works inmotion which give the impression of predictability are mainly operated byactual mechanical movement. But we must still make a distinction between three
distinct methods of utilizing this type of movement. Mention has already been
made of the genuine ‘machines’, in which the mechanical elements are fully
exposed to the spectator, whether they arouse him to admiration or suggest an
ironic or poetic commentary. In this category we may place many of the worksof Moholy-Nagy, Schoffer, Takis, Duchamp and Tinguely. The second main
division comprises the class of works in which all mechanical elements are care¬fully hidden, but can be deduced from the related movement of other threedimensional elements which are directly accessible to the spectator. This would
fit the works of Bury and the ‘tangible’ sculptures of Len Lye. Finally, we musttake into account a third class of animated works which only involve a reflection143

of the mechanical operations. ‘Mixed’ works - such as the sculptures by Schoffer
which incorporate semi-transparent screens - belong partly to this category.
In all these types of work, the motive power is furnished or controlled by
man rather than by nature. This already introduces an impression of predict¬ability as far as the spectator is concerned. Most of the artists who have been
mentioned show readiness to overcome this factor by incorporating elements
of indeterminism, chance, unpredictability - or whatever they choose to call it.
Some of them have tried other ways of resolving the same problem - Kosiceby converting mechanical movement into the natural movement of water, Takis
by concentrating our attention on the magnetic force rather than its electricalorigin, and Schoffer by introducing an element of ‘indifference’ to break up thecycles and bring us into contact with ‘pure’ movement.
There are, of course, a small number of works which cannot very easily beclassed as predictable or unpredictable. The Swedish artist Ultvedt, who makes
use of a motor to give his wooden constructions a rather haphazard kind of
movement, is a case in point. Then there are the mobile machines of Kobachi,
whose Plumbob IV consists of ceramic balls suspended from nylon cords, andthe creations of W. Weber, whose Espace et Temps makes use of a single ballthat is kept in irregular movement by a blower.

• Mobiles
The precursors - Tatlin, Rodchenko, Man Ray
The inventor and dominant figure - Calder

74 Alexander Rodchenko
Suspended construction, 1920

It is almost impossible to suggest a firm point of origin for the class of threedimensional works whose movement is unpredictable. Probable antecedents canbe found in the ‘wind-clocks’ and turning lamps of China, in the vast range ofmarionnettes which are to be found in all countries, and in some of the suspended
objects which play an important part in theatrical design. Then there is a wide
variety of light objects - flags, leaves etc. - which respond to the force of the wind.
These appear to have influenced quite a number of artistic exercises in unpre¬
dictable movement.
In all events, the chief characteristic of all these works which we class as‘mobiles’ is an impression that the force of gravity is being modified. The mobile
is at the mercy of atmospheric forces. It responds to the random pressures of
air and heat.
The majority of mobiles are constructed of light materials and hang suspended
from the ceiling. A few are fixed to stands and go by the name of‘free-standing
mobiles’. The spectator need not intervene to create the initial movement. But
he has the opportunity to do so. The categories become confused at this point,
and it is perhaps necessary to add that a mobile which lends itself to control
by the spectator fulfils precisely the same conditions as the sculptures in virtual
movement - requiring participation by the spectator - which have already been
discussed.
The term ‘mobile’ as such dates from the year 1932. But it is reasonable toapply it to a tradition of works which began as early as 1914-5. Tatlin was
the first artist to create a work which consisted of a series of suspended reliefs

144

- his Contre-Reliefs liberes dans Fespace. Michel Seuphor has explained: ‘Tatlin’s
most original contribution is without any doubt the ‘counter-relief’ which
abandons the stability of the pedestal or even the wall, and stays suspended on
wires that are stretched in various ways within the corners of a room. Apparently
these so-called ‘machines’ which were specially designed to counterbalancecorners have not been imitated by subsequent artists.’
These particular constructions by Tatlin, which gave the impression of being
able to float freely in space, were therefore his most revolutionary achievement.
He had invented a completely new type of spatial form, a rhythm of interlocking
planes whose movements ‘penetrated, cut, embraced, obstructed and pierced
space’. But this invention took place within the framework of a much more
ambitious scheme of research - a prolonged investigation of the interplay between
interior and exterior space which was linked at many points to the exploitationof movement.
Rodchenko, the friend of Tatlin and founder of‘Non-objectivism’, continued
this particular line of investigation with his work on the juxtaposition of materials
and textures. The fruit of this research can already be seen in the interior deco¬
ration of the ‘Picturesque Cafe’ in Moscow, which Yakulov, Tatlin and Rodchen¬ko undertook together in 1917. This consisted in elements of wood, metal andpapier mache which were fixed to the wall. Also in 1917 Rodchenko had com¬pleted some luminous constructions designed to be hung on walls. Three years
later he realised his Suspended construction, a most impressive wooden mobile
which was to serve as the model for his later research.
At roughly the same date, but with a completely different attitude of mind,
Kurt Schwitters included a mobile element in one of his sculptures, which heentitled Joy post (1919). Man Ray was also working in this direction. His Shadefrom 1919 or 1920, is a spiral cut out of paper which hangs from the ceilingand expands and contracts in an unpredictable way as it rotates. This work wasused in the preparation of Man Ray’s film, Le retour a la raison, which dates
from 1924. It was recreated in an aluminium version in 1954. Man Ray’s Objectof Obstruction (1920) is also interesting in this connection. It consisted of a seriesof clothes-hooks suspended in the same way as a mobile. There seems little doubtthat these ready-mades and mobiles of Man Ray had an influence on Calder andthe various other artists who were to explore this field in the 30s.
Apart from the isolated case of Giacometti’s La Boule suspendue of 1931, which
incorporates a kind of sensual movement, we may say that the mobile received
its official consecration in 1932. This was the year of two Calder exhibitions at the Galerie Vignon, Paris, and the Julien Levy Gallery, New York. Marcel
Duchamp seems to have invented the term ‘mobile’ specifically to describe the mo¬ving constructions by Calder which were included in these two exhibitions. The
works in question were in fact propelled by small electric motors or tiny handles.
But Calder was to construct his first air-propelled works very shortly afterwards.
There is still some ambiguity about the term ‘mobile’, but it seems to be gener¬
ally agreed that it can only be applied nowadays to the second category, thatof constructions which move as a result of natural forces and, in particular,
currents of air.
Duchamp compared Calder’s first mobiles to trees in the wind. Calder’s son-in-

145

76 Alexander Calder

Mobile, 1938. Photographed by Herbert
Matter in 1939

law, Davidson, has cited a literary source, ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s mobile - King
Pest’. There is also J. J. Sweeney’s suggestion that Calder may have been influ¬
enced by the Chinese windbells which he would have seen during his childhoodin San Francisco. Besides these rather diverse points of contact, there is theobvious influence of some contemporary artists - Mondrian in particular, andalso Arp and Miro, whose Dada attitudes are reflected in the sheer playfulness ofCalder’s work.
But there is more to Calder than mere playfulness. His fundamental aim is toexpress movement in terms of movement itself, and to avoid at all costs the
problems of imitation. ‘Most of the time,’ Sartre writes, ‘he is not imitating
anything. I know of no art that is less mendacious than his. Sculpture suggests
movement, painting suggests depth and light. Calder suggests nothing: hecaptures real live movements and shapes them for his purposes. His mobiles
do not signify anything, or refer to anything, outside themselves. They are - andthat is all there is to say. They are absolutes.’ Here Sartre is sketching the newmusical and natural vocabulary which Calder created through his distinctive
interpretation of mobility. ‘In a word, although Calder has not made any
attempt to imitate - since his only intention is to create scales and accords of
movement which are not yet known - his works are at once lyrical inventions,
technical - almost mathematical - assemblages, and accessible symbols for
Nature, that huge vague Nature which scatters pollen in all directions andabruptly brings about the flight of a thousand butterflies, about whom we never146know if she is a blind succession of causes and effects or the timid, constantly
retarded, deranged and impeded development of an Idea.’
Calder’s mobiles fall into two main groups: object-mobiles on supports andsuspended mobiles. The first come in all shapes and sizes, from large constructions
whose elements zigzag from the end of metal stalks - themselves held in equi¬
librium on the top of tripods - to small mobiles which hang from long curved
strips or stand away from their slight supports like the precious foliage of orna¬
mental plants. The original suspended mobiles were made from bottle-necks,
glittering fragments of coloured glass and small wooden objects which hung fromflails on the end of long threads. More recent examples are built up from cut-out
sheets in black, red and white, which spin round in response to the slightest
breath. Horizontal blades spread out next to vertical formations which suggest
curtains or fans. Sometimes the dominant impression is of falling, or hanging
like bunches of fruit: sometimes the horizontal elements are like branches,
which ‘scatter through space their twenty-one white leaves’.
Through his happy and playful approach to the use of forms and materials,
Calder has - a little in spite of himself - opened the way to kinetic statementsof a more scientific kind. He has initiated a line of research which leads in one
respect to the opening up of space and the cosmos, and in another way to thedevelopment of a new aesthetic which involves the eclipse of the creator andthe confrontation of the spectator and the living work of art. Yet we must
remember Jean Cassou’s remark that Calder’s art remains on the level of an
extremely individual poetry. Calder’s poetry encompasses joyful and playful
elements, but does not exclude mechanical ingenuity. And, as Cassou puts it,
there is ‘seriousness in this joy’.

• Munari's Macchine inutili - Lynn Chadwick, Kenneth Martin
As early as 1933, Munari was making mobiles which he referred to as ‘Uselessmachines’ (Macchine inutili). These were compositions of silk thread which could
be set in movement by the slightest breath. They were designed to cover acomplete circle and rigorously followed the fixed dimensions of the implied
sphere. Unlike the works of Calder, they were always modelled on a single baseelement, which was repeated, though in different proportions, throughout theother elements. Munari’s passionate interest in movement has survived up to thepresent day. But he has abandoned these suspended mobiles, and now concen¬
trates on the use of virtual movement with active spectator participation. He is
also investigating the movement of polarized light.
Two English sculptors - Lynn Chadwick and Kenneth Martin - stand out
among the artists who have concentrated upon the production of mobiles at somestage in their careers. It was around 1947 that Lynn Chadwick, who had alreadycarried out experiments with different materials on varying scales, constructeda series of wire mobiles which clearly owed something to Calder’s supported
mobiles as well as to the structures of Gonzalez. Chadwick developed twoparticular types of mobile, the first being characterized by the fact that theygave no impression of floating or flying. They were held in a strange equilibrium,
half supported by the air. Abstract forms, kept stable by the base, set up a147

77 Kenneth Martin
Screw mobile, 1956

sinuous, intertwining movement. Chadwick’s second group of mobiles weresuspended from threads or cords and had far more freedom of movement. Theirceaseless arabesques illustrate the truth of the artist’s statement that this art is
not derived from sculpture, which rejects space, but from ‘the borders of space
and the constructions which hedge it in’.
Chadwick’s most important mobile works were completed in 1950-1. His Fisheater, a construction of iron and copper, has been compared to a vertical torpedo
resting on three iron legs and supporting a pivoting iron cage: also to an insect
whose antennae are composed of iron grilles, and finally to the ‘wishbone’ ofa gigantic bird’s skeleton, with its basic structure coloured bright purple. Besides
this central composition, there are delicate mobile discs, stalks, metal threads,
wooden balls and cut-out fish forms in copper. Sound effects from the minglingof the various elements often accompany the purely kinetic effects.
Since 1952 Chadwick has begun to feel the limitations of this method of
expression. He would hold that the imagination is not just canalized but actually
threatened by the inherent restrictions of movement itself. Since that date hehas continued his work as a sculptor along more traditional fines, making someuse of surrealist imagery but abandoning the techniques of real movement.
Kenneth Martin sees the problem of movement in terms of a search for infinity
through calculation. He considers that the evolution of movement and form in
the plastic arts is the result of kinetic principles which relate intimately to fifeand sensation. His chief aim is to provide a definition of space, which has tradi¬tionally been expressed through elements appealing to the spectator’s emotions,
uniquely in terms of the oscillation of objects. These oscillations, which manifest
themselves in rhythms that can be defined mathematically, correspond at thesame time to the calculable rhythms of fife itself. ‘Oscillation’ and ‘spiral’ are
the two words which lend themselves best to the description of movement in
Kenneth Martin’s work.
It is clear that Martin’s experience in architectural techniques and his research
into the juxtaposition of materials have had an important influence on his mobiles
and metallic sculptures. He gives his mobiles individuality by the use of frag¬ments of aluminium, tin, iron, sheets of asbestos and other materials whichreflect fight and colour. These mobiles can be divided into three main groups:
reflecting mobiles, ring mobiles and screw mobiles. The first group is character¬ized by a calm horizontal movement, which enhances the spectator’s sense of
space, and in particular leads him to consider his position in the room in relation
to the plane of the ceiling. Martin often accentuates the circular and ellipticalmovements of this group of mobiles by careful use of chromatic components.
Thus his Mobile reflection (1956) is painted black, white, red and cream, although
the basic materials are aluminium and steel. Martin’s second group, the ringmobiles, consist of oval or figure-of-eight components which describe a horizontal
circular movement. Finally there are the screw mobiles, which follow a relatively
simple pattern of movement but are enlivened by a complex accompanimentof apparent movements. The combined effect of the changing contours, theencircling fines and the shadows cast on to adjacent walls is to introduce limitless
variation into a simple kinetic theme. This is where Kenneth Martin achieves themost satisfactory marriage between the two principles of movement and concen-148

78 George Rickey
Two lines up, 1964

tration which are at the base of his art.
Martin has recently succeeded in combining the principle of the screw form
with that of the unpredictable variation of speeds. This achievement requireda large degree of precision in the construction of the separate elements, and amathematical exactitude in the way in which they were assembled. It would befair to say that his most successful mobiles are almost always derived frommathematical principles which can be sustained on a theoretical level quite apartfrom their success in practice.
The starting point of Kenneth Martin’s kinetic research is the simple form
- the cross or the spiral. From this basis he is able to explore the latent possibilities
which are brought out by the use of movement. The principle applies to hislarge projects as well as to the works which have already been discussed. He
has completed a fountain at the L.C.C. Day College, Brixton, which required
close collaboration with the architect Bernard Lemaire and an engineering
consultant. This consists of stainless steel tubes which allow the water to spout
in precisely calculated and controlled jets. Martin’s own interest in the scheme
was, however, directly linked to his other investigations. He accepted the challengeof applying hydrodynamics (and thus a non-linear mechanics) to the explorationof water as a plastic medium, and he succeeded in creating a pure form.
The Brazilian Marie Vieyra, who began to work on mobile sculpture in 1949*
has similar preoccupations. After her move to Europe in 1951 she continued to
explore the different possibilities of using movement in conjunction with abstract
sculptural forms. Mention must also be made in this connection of the Swiss
sculptor, Walter Linck, who has made use of vibrating springs in several of his
works.

• Rickey, Vardanega, Le Parc, Yvaral, Stein, Morellet
George W. Rickey, the American sculptor and theorist of kinetic art, explores
the subtle possibilities of movement prolonged into space. His stainless steel
mobiles generally consist of two or more elements pivoting upon common joints.
Their titles -Two lines up. Six horizontal lines etc. - already tell us something
about the objectives of Rickey’s methodical research into free movement. A
visitor to a German exhibition which was dominated by three of these sculptures
has described how ‘visitors often stopped to watch the scintillating blades
performing slow and graceful movements against the deep blue of the sky. The
montonous rumbling - in German - of the opening speeches seemed pedestrianand trivial in comparison with the timeless quality of this tranquil celestial
writing.’
Rickey’s method of construction is almost scientific. A long period of experi¬mentation precedes the final work of assemblage. He himself emphasizes: ‘When
you construct an object in movement, you are always surprised by the movement
itself: however well worked out the design may be, the movement seems to comefrom somewhere else.’ Rickey does not think it necessary to use a wide variety
of types of movement. He is content to make his sculptures pitch and roll likeboats. But he concedes that it is possible to establish a theoretical classification
which includes, at the most, six or eight types of movement - all of these being

149

79 Gregorio Vardanega
Deve/oppement d'un cercle a I'infini,1962

taken from aerial navigation and relating in his view to the concepts of maritime
navigation.
Since Rodchenko, wood has often been used in the construction of suspended
mobiles. Transparent Perspex gained equal popularity between the wars with
Moholy-Nagy and Vantongerloo, and since 1944 it has acquired almost universal
favour among the artists of the South American school. From this date, membersof the Invencion, Arturo and Madi groups - directed by Arden Quin, Rothfuss
and Kosice - began to create perspex constructions with mobile elements, in astyle that owed much to Vantongerloo. At a later stage, Gregorio Vardanega,
who belongs to this school although his birthplace was Italy, started to combine
the indeterminate movement of suspended forms with the inherent movement of
the spiral in a series of perspex mobiles. This was a particularly successful
combination, which produced an unusual range of light effects.
Vardanega had in fact been working since 1946 on the superimposition of
sheets of glass or perspex, and he had completed a series of ‘half-spheres’ andstructures of tightened thread. He had tried to come to terms at this early stage
with the problems of transparent colour - space-colour and colour-light. By 1956
he had arrived at a fully integrated work which fulfilled many of his criteria.
It involved a constant variation of aesthetic effects, brought about by a mechani¬
cal arrangement of celluloid ribbons which supplied the motion. In the same
year Vardanega also constructed a Univers electronique, which allowed for the
spectator to intervene and change the colour of the interior space. Four years
later he went on to make a number of Perspex spheres containing other smaller
spheres, which were illuminated by turning projections of coloured light. The
final stage in this development was his group of Spirals, which he described as‘mobiles which utilize different circular structures in symmetrical and asymmet¬
rical displacement ad infinitum’. Vardanega’s interest in the various types ofnatural and artificial light caused him to make a number of further investigations
which will be reviewed in the course of the next chapter.
The aluminium works of Le Parc have no aesthetic pretensions. Like themobiles of other members of the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, they are
not designed to show off the artist’s individual creativity. They are designed
purely as a means of provoking the spectator to action. And even when they are notnecessarily meant to be altered or set in motion by the spectator himself, it is thisdirect relationship between the operation of the work and the physiologicalreaction of the spectator that counts.
Yet this does not mean to say that the spectator will fail to be delighted by
the delicate interference effects created by black lines and translucent materials
in one of Yvaral’s mobile cubes, or that he will miss the spatial subtleties of
the white balls suspended in front of reflecting polyhedrons which Stein has
designed. A large work by Le Parc - such as the Continuel-lumiere of 1962 which
was included in the 1964 Nouvelle Tendance exhibition at the Musee des Arts
Decoratifs, Paris - gives rise almost inevitably to aesthetic considerations. Yet
the description of this particular work which appeared in the exhibition catalogue
was clearly intended to take all mystery out of it, and leave the spectator without
any preconceptions. ‘Suspended over a matt white panel, a number of small
sheets of polished aluminium. These sheets receive the light of a projector which150

80 Francois Morellet
Sphere-trame, 1962

sets up - through reflection and projection - a movement of luminous images.’‘Research into movement, light, contingencies outside the work and the activationof the spectator.’
The spheres-trames of aluminium tubes by Francois Morellet, another memberof the group, also belong to this line of research in which the mobile plays animportant part. These works are particularly interesting, because of their size
- some are over 6ft in diameter - because of the variety of the possible com¬binations which they offer through the suspended movement, and because of
the real ambiguity between artistic and pedagogic intentions.
A number of other artists have produced mobiles at various stages in theircareers. The works of the German sculptor Kricke, though traditional in con¬ception, have sometimes comprised mobile elements. The Belgian sculptor,
Anthoons, completed a series of suspended works in aluminium which werepainted over and could be folded into different shapes. The Brazilian Lygia Clark
has used the same folding principle for her own aluminium constructions, which
are often suspended and so gain an additional range of movements.

152

Jean Peyrissac has been working since 1939 on the problem of spatial rhythmsHe tends to compare his procedure as an artist with that of the musician, andhe also makes use of analogies from pantomime and the movements of Nature.
‘In their mutual relationships,’ he claims, ‘forms in movement are so many
melodies which crowd on top of one another and dovetail with one another, as if
their relationships were prescribed by an orchestral score. However, everything
hinges upon the question of relationships... and it is these that are the connecting
factor. The real difficulty is one of getting the whole into a satisfactory shape,or ensuring the continuity of the melody. A design in Time... Our desire to
put the stamp of movement upon a three-dimensional form is a justification for
abstraction. In this game, abstraction is a unique language, the one which allows
the form full freedom of expression... and yet I am not at all sure that a form
which has plastic pretentions, and is conceived for a precise role, bears any
relation to the abstract, since these movements in fact reveal to us through theirvariety intimate correspondences which we find again in the gestures of Nature
herself.’
The final division of this category of unpredictable mobile works consists of anumber of unusual works which make use of elements of nature such as fire
and water, chemical forces etc. Marta Pan, a Hungarian artist living in Paris,
uses the motive power of water to animate some of her sculptures, which areusually constructed of wood or other light materials. These hinged sculptures
are usually quite bulky and are liable to adopt patterns of movement which recall
physical or physiological events. They harmonize extremely well with the natural
world, as can be seen in the case of Teck, a sculpture which floats and propels
itself over the water on a lake in the grounds of the Kroller-Miiller Museum,at Otterlo near Arnheim.
Richard Lippold, the American sculptor, is the author of a Fire and water
fountain at Akron, Ohio, and of the Expanding Universe in the Sterling Forest
Garden, New York. He also devised the monumental mobile, Orpheus and Apollo(1962), for the Lincoln Centre. Lippold’s important body of works does in fact
border at several points on the field of kinetic art. As early as 1942 he wasconstructing mobiles made from metal thread, which he exhibited at the Willard
Gallery, New York. In 1948 he began a series of sculptures composed of metalthread, tubes and, occasionally, small laminated bars. These were illuminatedmore and more brightly towards the centre, and gave the impression of radiating
light.

• Yves Klein, Aubertin - Pyrotechnics
Yves Klein, whose death at the age of thirty-two cut short an artistic careerthat was remarkable for its visionary quality, foresaw numerous possibilities
of utilizing water and fire as the motive forces in artistic projects. It is probably
his example which inspired Otto Piene to compose a number of ‘fire pictures’
which involve the display of smoke and other effects of combustion.
B. Aubertin has performed some particularly interesting experiments with fire.
He uses matches dotted over a rectangular or disc-shaped matrix to create
pyrotechnical or, as he himself refers to them, ‘pyromaniaques’ spectacles. The

153

performance falls naturally into a number of different phases: the actual lighting,the course of the fire through the rows of matches, and the aftermath of thefire - at which stage the still incandescent matches gradually die down andfinally snuff out. Sometimes Aubertin rotates the discs while this performanceis taking place, which provides an interesting mixture of predictable mechanicalmovement and the unpredictable movement of the fire as it darts along the rowsof matches. Of course this display of lines and sheets of fire passing from thestage of incandescence to calcination is accompanied by sounds of hissing andcrackling. Aubertin is therefore justified in thinking in terms of a performance
which appeals to more than one of the senses.
Aubertin has also constructed Reliefs de feu, which consist of charred balls ofcork, and what he calls Cages rouges de fumee, in which the display is provided
by smoke machines operating within the cages and points of light working in
conjunction with the smoke are used to give the performance some shape. Chance
clearly plays an important role in this process. Apart from the obvious influenceof Yves Klein, Aubertin seems to owe something to the work of P. Manzoni,
another visionary artist who died young. Manzoni had invented pneumatic
sculpture in 1959.

• Metzger: auto-destructive art - Medalla, Haacke
Gustav Metzger, the pioneer of‘auto-destructive’ art, uses hydrochloric acid rather
than fire as his medium. He paints with the acid upon nylon cloth. When hegave the first demonstrations of auto-destructive art, the kinetic element in his
work was still secondary. His performances were conceived more in terms ofpacifist and social protest. But Metzger’s continued interest in new areas ofscientific knowledge has brought him closer to the concerns of the kinetic artist.
As a result, he has added the concept of ‘auto-creative’ art to that of auto¬
destruction. He holds that: ‘A belief in the molecular theory and similar beliefs,
whether they can be defined or not, shared with the scientist or not, can best
be expressed through works of art which transform their materials. Auto¬destructive and auto-creative art are varieties of this.’
Metzger is anxious to get closer to the processes of nature by associating
matter and time. He therefore needs to know a great deal about these two notions.
He also specifies the use of the most advanced techniques in art and, in his
view, this makes the use of destruction inevitable. Throughout his research,he finds movement an essential tool in providing solutions to the various problems
which he encounters. And he is a champion of the aleatory principle, accepting
the element of unpredictability in the work of art without reservations, just as
he accepts it in the universe.
The various stages which a work by Metzger passes through present an inter¬esting parallel to those of the mobile. The process begins with the initial impetusof the artist. But the movement which he sets in operation immediately becomes
autonomous and therefore unpredictable. ‘At a certain moment,’ as Metzger putsit, ‘the work takes the initiative and launches into an action which is beyond
the control of the artist. It rises to a power, a grace, a living force and a transcen¬
dence which the artist cannot attain, except through aleatory activity.’ Theory154

has preceded practice by at least a decade in auto-destructive art. But its placein the evolution of modern art is now assured. As far as the kinetic artist isconcerned, there is no doubt that auto-destructive and auto-creative activity
have enlarged his scheme of social and aesthetic reference, as well as helping
considerably towards the objectivization of the element of movement in art.
The Gutai, a Japanese group under the direction of Jiro Yoshihara, is investi¬
gating aesthetic problems which appear at first sight to be bound up with thedestruction of materials. The dancers of the group pass through screens of paper,
whose torn fragments suggest jasmine blossoms as they fall back into place.
The interplay of the dancers and the movement of the paper combine to form
an unpredictable kinetic spectacle.
The ‘bubble machines’ of David Medalla, a Philippine artist and poet who
lives in England, are boxes filled with a chemical liquid which produces - inresponse to a low electric current - masses of tiny bubbles. These bubbles form
slowly expanding columns which issue out of the boxes and spread along theoutside surfaces. Medalla’s principal aim is to illustrate the principle of aleatory
growth, but his Cloud Canyons, which may seem at first sight to be no more thannaive games, contain a very personal poetic message. They are a baroque ex¬pression which is in many ways typical of the younger generation. And Metzger
has claimed for them that ‘Medalla has shown incontrovertibly that the aleatory
activity in art which transforms materials can take on very complex forms andmovements. But it can also aspire to a higher aesthetic content’.
Hans Haacke has found a great number of possibilities for kinetic expression
in the complex interaction of air and water - or other liquids, coloured or colour¬less. He requires the spectator to intervene in the operation of the work, whichis in fact something that responds to its environment, existing in time rather
than in the timeless world of the traditional work of art. In effect, he is at¬
tempting to articulate natural objects and natural forces: one of his most striking
works is a group of white feathers set into dancing motion.

81 Hans Haacke
Wave /, 1 964. 140 cm. x 20 cm.

155

7 Light and movement

The majority of kinetic works composed on plane surfaces bring white or coloured
light into play. We may therefore assign them in general to the field of ‘luminous
movement’, or more precisely to the aesthetic grouping of‘light and movement’.
There are three principal sources for this group of works: what were known
as ‘colour organs’, the early history of photography and the cinema, and finallytheatrical projections. It was in fact the convergence of these three lines ofresearch which gave rise - originally in the 1920s and for a second time around1950 - to an entirely distinct art of moving light.

• The 'ocular harpsichord' of Father Castel - The 'pyrophone' ofKastner - Scriabin's light keyboard

82 Bainbridge Bishop
Colour organ, c. 1880

The colour organ dates back to the eighteenth century. It was probably theJesuit mathematician Louis-Bertrand Castel (1688-1757) who constructed thefirst model. Castel’s organ was devised in such a way that the keys, as well as
operating hammers to make the strings vibrate, regulated the appearance oftransparent coloured bands. These bands were probably intended to have lightsources behind them.
‘What stranger enterprise could be imagined in the whole field of art,’ wrote
Castel on one occasion, ‘than to make sound visible, to make available to theeyes those many pleasures which Music affords to the ears?’ Again he writes
on the question of comparisons between light and sound: ‘Two years ago I readthe Misurgie (of Father Kircher). It was somewhere there that I came across theidea that, if at a fine concert we were able to see how the air is disturbed by all
the different tremors aroused by voices and instruments, we should discover toour astonishment a sprinkling of the most vivid and well-assorted colours. That
is what I would call a ‘seed of discovery’... The modification of light gives
us colours, and that of sound Tones: the mixture of colours makes painting,that of tones Music.’
Father Castel saw himself as a philosopher rather than a craftsman. But thechief dividend of his system was to be an aesthetic one: ‘to give the colours,
irrespective of their harmonic order, a kind of intensified quality of liveliness andlightness which they inevitably lack upon a canvas without life or motion.’ Heaimed to go beyond the chance effect and adapt ‘pieces of music’ to his instru¬
ment. He would then fix the sounds upon canvas, tapestry, slabs of marble,

156

83 Frederic Kastner
The 'Pyrophone', 1869-73

or pieces of marbled paper. But this use was to be strictly ‘for the ignorant’,
and the knowledgeable could expect greater rewards. ‘This harpsichord is, if I
may say so, a real education for painters, who can use it to find out all the secretsof colour combinations. . . a music without sound..’
There is general agreement that Father Castel’s experiments with candles,
mirrors and transparent coloured papers are of considerable interest. His theoreti¬
cal grounding may have been inadequate, but his attitude to the theories ofanalogy between sound and colour grew more and more scientific. In fact we canclaim with justice that he was working towards a new art of light.
The first half of the nineteenth century was to see the development of other
instruments and theories, but there were no lasting results. Jameson suggesteda system of notation for the new art. His own instrument consisted mainly of
glass receptacles containing liquids of various colours, which acted as filters forlight projections on to a wall covered with reflecting metal plates.
A very unusual invention was the ‘pyrophone’ of Frederic Kastner. This wasa sort of gas organ, which gave out sounds comparable to the human voice, thepiano, and even the full orchestra. Although Kastner placed his main emphasison the union between music and science, it was the visual and plastic value ofthe spectacle that attracted the most notice. The same inventor subsequently
created a curious ‘singing lamp’, which extended the visual aspects of his
previous work by means of an electric lighting device. It was ‘a sort of pyrophonewith thirteen branches, all decorated with foliage and furnished with burners
containing several gas jets, which opened into crystal tubes. These burners werebrought into play electrically, through an invisible wire that connected to a
keyboard in a neighbouring room or street - or indeed another part of the town.’
In America, around 1880, Bainbridge Bishop constructed an instrument which
formed part of an organ and projected combinations of colour upon a small screen.
Bishop was under the influence of the work of Chevreul and Field, and wasapparently aiming for a kind of simultaneity between music and his projections.
He first of all used daylight for the latter, but then switched to an electric arc.
At the end of the nineteenth century, several works on the subject of colour
music were published. Alexander Wallace Rimington (1854-1918) gave public
displays of the colour organ which he had constructed, and published Colour
Music, the art of mobile colour in 1911.
This was also the year in which Scriabin’s Poem of Fire (Prometheus) received
its first performance at Moscow. The Russian composer had taken the remarkable
step of introducing a ‘light keyboard’ or ‘Tastiera per luce’ into his score, sothat the various modulations of his symphonic poem could be accompanied bychanging nuances of colour. Scriabin held that each mode corresponded to aparticular shade of colour, and each modulation to a nuance of this shade.
Changes from the major into the minor could therefore be underlined by strong
contrasts, on a visual as well as a chromatic level. This was one of the mostimportant aspects of Scriabin’s research into new areas of expression. His
imagination had been stimulated by theosophical reading, and he dreamedof lighting up the whole of the concert hall to fit the music which was being
played at the time. But in practice the performances of Prometheus which took
place at the Carnegie Hall, New York, and the Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow, did

157not live up to his ambitions. The projections depended entirely on a small screen
which was placed behind the orchestra, and they made very little impression on
the audience.
Scriabin’s last work, The Mystery, which remained incomplete at the timeof his premature death in 1915, was to furnish a much more impressive demon¬
stration of correspondences between the arts and the senses. It was to comprisemusical, choreographic and dramatic elements, supplemented by grandiosechromatic light effects and perfumes released in profusion. Yet Scriabin was
unable to complete the project for several precise reasons. There were consider¬able technical difficulties - for example, the lack of facilities for continuous
movement in the projections. And there were also the theoretical problems which
Scriabin created by adhering to the old-fashioned notion of a strict correspon¬
dence between the elements of colour and sound.

• Cinematographic projections - Survage, Eggeling, Richter, Leger
Between the years 1912 and 1914 Leopold Survage perfected his Rythmes colores
pour le cinema. Maximilien Gauthier has described the process in the following
terms: ‘In 1912 Survage brought his project for a cinematographic film tocompletion. Five maquettes for this work are in the collection of the Museumof Modern Art, New York. It consisted of a succession of coloured rhythms,
each of which formed a chromatic symphony in which metamorphosis of lightplayed the same role as variation of sound in a musical composition. A numberof similar films followed, but in 1914, when Gaumont were planning to realize
them, the war put a stop to their plans. Survage still deserves the credit forbeing the first artist to reach the conclusion that the spectacle of a cadenced
development of lines and volumes - associated with colours that were themselvesarranged in a free yet balanced orchestration - possessed the same power tomove us as the auditory properties of a musical work.’
Apollinaire identified the source of this art in pyrotechnics, fountains, illumi¬
nated signs, and ‘those fairy-like palaces in every exhibition which accustom
our eyes to the enjoyment of kaleidoscopic shifts in nuance’. ‘So we shall havean art which is outside static painting, outside cinematographic representation,
which we shall not take long to get used to - which will have its own admirers
particularly skilled in responding to movement of colours, mutual penetrationof colours, brusque and leisurely transformations, reconciliations and antipathies.’
We have already mentioned the art of the cinema proper, which is directly
relevant to the course of audio-visual research. After taking into account the role
played by the camera in the analysis of movement and the incorporation ofstroboscopic views into the plastic arts, we must now turn to the experimentswith abstract film which revealed and isolated movement as an essential elementin plastic expression. The new element which arose in these experiments was the
problem of dividing movement into its component parts and then recomposing itby means of the eye, taking account of three important kinetic factors: thedirection to follow, the time or speed to be used, and the sequence of images
to be determined. ‘The connection by superimposition of movements which aremorphologically analogous,’ writes Etienne Souriau, ‘was first used as a major

158stylistic and syntactic procedure (in Le Congres s'amuse). And many of theseconnections recalled the movements of choreography or those of everyday life(the legs of ballerinas, marching soldiers etc.)- This fact alone suggests that there
is an analytic interest in relating the stylized movements of the dance to thatvast gamut of spontaneous, human, animal or cosmic forms of movement which
the art of film takes as its universal datum.’ ‘The presence of music in the artof the cinema,’ he adds, ‘confers on it as a whole a secret choreographic character.
Running and jumping, walking, going down stairs remain themselves in thestudio, but in the film they acquire this choreographic character, once the musicalscore has captured them, organized them, underlined their rhythmic contexture
and, at the same time, dematerialized them.’
This ‘dance of things’, which leads to what has been called the abstract artof the cinema, can be suggested by a parody of humanity - as in Chaplin’s
Gold Rush - or by the objects themselves, as in Leger’s Ballet mecanique. It
is this principle that we must use in getting to terms with the influence of move¬
ment as it appears in the cinematographic works of Eggeling, Richter, Leger- and indeed Duchamp, Man Ray, Len Lye and McLaren - upon the type of
movement which occurs in two-dimensional plastic works.
Miklos Bandi tells us that Eggeling ‘was the first to use cinematography toexpress the rhythmic movement of pure forms.’ He ‘found a fundamental
identity - movement - in the various phases of external life.’ Hans Richter bringsout the principle that particularly needs to be emphasized. ‘On the screen, flightand marching are subject only to the laws of filmic movement... not to themechanical laws of propulsion... So it is not natural movement which gives
expression to the objects in a film, but artistic movement - that is to say, anautonomous rhythmic movement whose variations and pulsations form part ofan artistic plan.’ We should remember that Richter was at the same time apainter and a man of the cinema. In his scroll-paintings, which recall the hiero¬glyphic rolls of the Egyptians and the emaki of the Japanese, he attempted thesame ‘spiritual analysis of the problem of space and time’ as in his abstract films.
The fact that Richter used the term ‘rhythm’ as a title for his first abstract
films testifies to the important place which this term occupied in his programme.
He has written of two of these early films, Rythmus 21 and Rythmus 23: ‘I
consider the film to be a part of modern art, a visual art before all else. There arecertain problems and sensations which are wholly appropriate to painting andothers which are the exclusive concern of film. But there are also problems which
involve a degree of overlap and even interpenetration. Once I supposed that therectangular form of the screen was given, as a formal element, I could concentrateentirely on the orchestration of time (as on form previously) - and on time alone.
The same dynamic principles of kinship in contrast served me here as well. They
brought me to a new area of sensation: rhythm, the essential, primordial element
in all cinematographic expression. There had to be a final break with the absurd
prejudice that problems in the art of our times could only be resolved through oil
painting or bronze.’
Leger saw that plastic art and cinematographic art could run parallel in theirdevelopment towards a new realism. His Ballet mecanique, with its innumerable
kinetic trouvailles, is an apt illustration of this point of view.

159

To emphasize the importance of relationships between the cinema and works ofkinetic art in two and three dimensions, we should return to Len Lye, whostarted making films in Australia as early as 1921, and experimented with thetechnique of drawing straight on to the film in the following year. Len Lye’s
interest in the cinema as an autonomous area of plastic expression led him to
Tusalava, an animated film which had its first public showing in 1928, and Colour
Box, which dates from 1935 and must therefore be regarded as the first directly
drawn film. We have noted previously that Len Lye finally transferred his
attention to three-dimensional works - the Tangible Motion Sculptures. But thisdoes not affect the fact that his cinematographic research - like that of Eggeling,
Richter, Dziga Vertov, Walter Ruttmann, Henri Chomette (see his Jeux dereflets et de la vitesse and Cinq minutes de cinema pur), Marchel Duchamp, Man
Ray and many others - played a most important role in the development of the
branch of kinetic art which involves the use of screens.
It is interesting to consider the way in which two-dimensional, cinematographic
work has been applied to the creation of three-dimensional kinetic objects. For
example, Marcel Duchamp’s film, Anemic cinema, clearly belongs to the sameline of research as his Rotative demi-sphere. Anemic cinema, which dates from
1924, deals with flat shapes in movement passing to the third dimension. Eachpoint in a rotating sphere, to take one example, shifts its position in time as well as
space. The third dimension materializes as a result of the chronological dimen¬sion - that is to say, the movement creates a trompe-Voeil effect and the moving
spirals of Anemic cinema give the impression of being in relief. The Rotativedemi-sphere of 1925, which has a revolving hemispherical spiral at its centre,
follows exactly the same principle. Duchamp to was make further investiga¬
tions in this direction from 1934 onwards, in his series of Rotoreliefs.

• Light and movement in the theatre - Appia, Craig
The work of pioneers in the theatre has had a pronounced effect upon theaesthetic of light and movement in the plastic arts, just as kinetic research in thearts has been reflected in the evolution of theatrical techniques.
A development of particular importance in this connection was the introductionof electric lighting into the theatre, which took place between 1880 and 1885.
This immeasurably increased the role of light in underlining the symbolic anddynamic features of the drama. The stage designer and theoretician Appia began
to apply in practice the view that drama should be conveyed through a rhythmicorganization of space, and that this space should be created through the useof moving light. So, for the first time, theatrical decor was being composed
exclusively through light projections.
Edward Gordon Craig held similar views. He intended that the play of lightshould break up the various angles, and that abstract kinetic techniques - suchas moving light controlled through the manipulation of screens - should be
utilized in the creation of the decor. Movement played an important part in
Craig’s theories, as the following extracts from his published works suggest:‘The only true material for the art of the theatre is light, and by means oflight, movement’.

160

‘The most important thing is that movement, which lies at the base of this artof revelation, should be translated by inanimate forms. Here I am speaking of
movement in the real, not the imaginary sense. Impersonal movement, in thestrict sense, does not exist at all in modern art; nor can it be said to belong to
any other form of art, even in its imaginary sense.’‘Movement will be there for its own sake, for the sake of perfect harmony, justas in music sound is there for its own sake, and for the sake of perfect harmony...
The mind and spirit of the artist, passing by way of this instrument, should
give rise to successive, transformable and ephemeral forms - which changeceaselessly, and even imperceptibly - which eventually arrive at the precisionof their ultimate stage, only to disappear, and then reform again and again, in
an infinite progression.’
Experiments and theories of this kind gave rise to a long series of theatrical
productions in which movement became an integral factor in the drama, and infact replaced the traditional succession of scenes. Mobile decors, revolutionarychanges in choreography, the veil dances of Loie Fuller and the Ballets russes
of Diaghilev - all these in their turn made use of the new principles of lightand movement. Rolf de Mare’s Swedish Ballet engaged in similar experiments.
The date 1920 may be seen as a watershed in the history of kinetic art, since
it is at this stage that these various investigations into the possibilities of light,
movement and colour begin to appear in a single perspective.

• Wilfred: 'Lumia' and the Clavilux - Klein, Baranoff-Rossine,
Hausmann
Thomas Wilfred, who was born at Nestved in Denmark in 1889 and took up
residence in the United States in 1916, completed his first instrument for the
production of visual compositions in 1919. The instrument, which involved noelement of sound, was called the Clavilux. Wilfred chose the title ‘Lumia’ for the
new form of art which he had brought into being.
The fact that the element of sound had been abandoned was the decisive featureof this new system. Wilfred had been struck by the divergences in the ways inwhich Newton and Father Castel treated the distribution of colour in relation
to musical sounds. He noted that Newton’s do was red and his fa green, while
Castel labelled the same notes blue and yellow respectively. He was also awarethat Goethe had firmly rejected the possibility of a direct comparison between
colour and sound, and that the enterprises of Bainbridge Bishop, Alexander
Wallace Rimington and Scriabin had all more or less ended in failure. It waswith these examples in mind that he turned his attention to an art of light inwhich sound and music were either completely excluded or admitted as mere
accessories.
Although Isadora Duncan’s friend Perrine - an American painter and musicteacher - had also made this decisive rejection of all musical allusion, Wilfred
was the first to draw the full consequences of the decision. He had originallybegun work in May 1905, when his components were no more than a cigar-box, asmall incandescent lamp and a few pieces of coloured glass. The next stage
came in Paris, where he was able to utilize several wooden boxes, a few glass161

84 Thomas Wilfred
Two phases of Study in black and white(Lumia composition Op. 26) Art Instituteot Light. First phase: the principal form
emerges from the background, advancing
and descending slowly, growing involume and intensity in proportion to its
progression in a curved orbit. Second
phase: the principal form has turned
towards the left. The secondary groupmounts from the bottom and advances
diagonally towards the exterior across an
arc constituted by the principal form

lenses and a real screen. The Clavilux, which gave its first public recital on
10 January 1922, far exceeded these early experiments in technical sophistication.
It consisted of a large ‘keyboard with five rows of sliding keys and stops that
could be coupled to obtain the colours; a battery of six principal projectors anda certain number of grouped auxiliary reflectors’. When it was permanently
installed in a theatre designed specially for the purpose, it was very similar to anorgan with its pipes. The large keyboard was set up in a separate room, behindthe concert hall, and connected to a series of independent projectors behind thetranslucent screen. There were thirty-two of these projectors at the Lumia
Theatre of New York. Obviously an arrangement of this kind made it easy toinstall new, and better, instruments when necessary. They could be connectedto the keyboard just as new pipes can be added to an organ. In this way, Wilfred
was able to keep each Clavilux to a specific pattern, while revising the opticalprinciples of the system to keep pace with contemporary developments.
Lumia was originally conceived as an art of public performance and inter¬
pretation. It was only at a later stage that Wilfred began to compose works whose
arrangements of colour and light were predetermined in the sense that theyobeyed long cycles of controlled movement and metamorphosis. Wilfred referredto this particular departure, which necessarily resulted in a more intimate formof artistic expression, as a method of registering ‘compositions that were origi¬
nally conceived through the technique of the Clavilux and on the scale of theClavilux’. Over the past forty years he has managed to complete a very large
number of works of this kind. One of the most recent, which Wilfred was working
on in August 1965, bears the opus number 160.
These planned compositions in the Art of Lumia, which are now to be foundin museums and private collections throughout the world, are unique signed
works, just like the traditional painting or sculpture. They are designed tocontinue playing indefinitely, and simply need their electric bulbs replacing
after a certain time. Wilfred has told the author in a letter that his works havejust the same degree of permanence as stained-glass windows. In both media
the fusion of colours across a semi-opaque screen is taken for granted.
One of these individual compositions, which bears the title City Windows,
reproduces in Wilfred’s distinctive manner the impressions which he collectedin the course of a walk through New York on an October night. As he himself
has explained: ‘It begins with a multidirectional weaving of lighted windows,
all with cross-shaped bars and reflected from the lower third of the ‘first field’.
Progressively the windows turn dark blue, as if reflecting a night sky. Gradually
the motion is retarded and the intensity decreased until only one tiny yelloworange frame remains poised high up in a dark field. Very slowly a silhouetteof tall buildings emerges, the sky brightens into pale magenta, and the single
window suddenly goes dark.’
In Abstract, on the other hand, there is no such scheme of reference to theoutside world: ‘a triple radial solo form moves through an elliptical orbit in thevertical plane of the main sightline, while a contrasting double form moves
through a double elliptical orbit in the same plane. The solo form completes
thirteen orbital cycles while the accompaniment, the double form, completes six.
This ratio of progress creates an intricate visual counterpoint, accentuated by162

a complementary colour treatment.’
We can get some idea of the wide variety of ways in which Wilfred uses
movement by examining a few more of his works. In Rhythm in Steel, thespectator is ‘transported’ slowly across a ‘mobile network of characteristic steel
structures’. In Unfolding, the artist’s aim is induce an exuberant or happy stateof mind in the spectator, while in Convolux the forms follow one another rapidly,
growing larger and larger, and finally ‘submerging’ the spectator in an ultimate
climax before disappearing. Some of Wilfred’s most recent works, such as
Multidimensional and Counterpoint in space have very lengthy cycles. Aspirationconsists of a theme which undergoes 397 variations: the cycle of screen projections
is only complete after 42 hours 14 minutes and 11 seconds.
Wilfred’s Lumia suite (Opus 158), which is permanently installed in the
85 Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine
Disque optophonique, 1914-26.
Diameter 49 cm.

Museum of Modern Art, New York, has a screen measuring roughly 1.8 by 2.4 m.
It involves horizontal, vertical and elliptical movement, and works according toan electronic programme which replaces the original keyboard. The spectator
follows its performance in a kind of miniature theatre.
A. B. Klein, whose book Colour-Music is the classic account of the subject,

163

86 Raoul Hausmann
Simplified schema of the 'Optophone',1927

himself constructed a colour projector for the theatre, which he made use of in
his research into the possibilities of coloured light. Klein gave public showingsof his projections in 1933 at the Astoria Cinema, London. The pianist Mary
Hallock Greenewalt also gave public recitals with an instrument which wasarranged to play in unison with an orchestra. This was supposed to have a rangeof 267 different shades and relied on power of 1500 watts. Another experimentof the same kind, which took place between 1920 and 1925, was that of the
Italian Achille Ricciardo, who installed a permanent projector of coloured lightin his Teatro del Colore at Rome. And Theremin, the composer of ‘undulatory
ethereal’ music, and music with gestural accompaniment, was also interested insimultaneous light projections.
Other experiments from the same period bear a closer relationship to advancesin the plastic arts. The Russian painter Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine gave ‘optophonic’ concerts in Moscow, Berlin and Paris, with an instrument that was
intended to project colours with a simultaneous musical accompaniment. The
Dada poet Raoul Hausmann invented an ‘optophone’ with a keyboard in theearly 1920s. Finally, Laszlo, whose book on colour music was published in 1925,
constructed a ‘Sonchromatoscope’ in the same year, and proceeded to write
Preludes for piano and coloured light with the aid of a new system of notation.

• Hartwig, Hirschfeld-Mack, Schwerdtfeger, Pesanek, Fischinger
In Summer 1922, at the Weimar Bauhaus, Joseph Hartwig, Kurt Schwerdtfeger
and Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack were trying out a shadow play which was to begiven at a party, when one of the acetylene bulbs had to be replaced. So it was
through pure chance that they discovered the phenomenon of doubled shadowson transparent paper. The fact that the acetylene bulbs were of different colours
had caused a cold and a warm shadow to appear simultaneously. These threeartists immediately got the idea of multiplying the sources of light by as manyas six times, and placing coloured pieces of glass in front of them. In this way
they laid the basis for what was to be an entirely new method of expression,
involving mobile sources of coloured light and moving matrices.
Their work was demonstrated in public for the first time in May and Septem¬
ber 1924. It had elements both of the theatre and the cinema. The moving forms
acquired a high degree of definition, and, in the case of Hirschfeld-Mack’s group,
they were accompanied by music - generally played on the piano by HirschfeldMack himself. Apart from the fact that the effects of moving light were not
fixed once and for all, but had to be recreated at each performance, the whole
spectacle was very similar to that of an abstract film in colour.
Hirschfeld-Mack has left an interesting score for his Lichtsonate and Farbensonatine, which takes account of the parallel development of music, light andform. This score is chiefly concerned with changes in tempo and movement,
but also indicates variations in the lighting system, which depended upon differ¬ent combinations of lamps.
Kurt Schwerdtfeger created his own Farblichtspiel in which coloured raysfrom mobile light sources shone through aerial forms cut out of cardboard, thus
producing staggered projections on the screen. In this process the colours under-164

went direct modification as well as being transformed by reflection. Schwerdtger accepted a compomise as far as the artistic aspect of his work was concerned.
He was willing to adapt his instrument to both figurative and abstract forms, anddid not specify that sound should be included in, or excluded from, his com¬positions.
During the 1920s the Czech artist, Zdenek Pesanek, was also perfecting a typeof colour keyboard. And Oscar Fischinger, a pupil of Walter Ruttmann - thepioneer of abstract cinema -, had completed his Filmstudien zu Musik by 1929.
Fischinger later invented a system called Color-Instrument-Play, which hepatented in the United States. This allowed the participant to interpret musicalscores on the screen, but required him to design the abstract forms which appearedwith his own hands.

• Laboratory research
The technical innovations which have been introduced since 1930 have led to anumber of more recent experiments in the field which has just been described.
E. B. Patterson, a radio engineer, has described an electronic circuit which
would ‘regulate the sources of coloured light through frequencies and volume ofsound in order to coordinate light and colour with the music’. Several inventors
and industrial firms have made use of the resources of their laboratories to create
instruments which produce large or small displays of colour and light, or more
specialised machines such as fountains which are illuminated through electricor electronic circuits. Commercial firms were of course responsible for the large
number of light organs which operated in pleasure gardens and cinemas through¬out Europe and America in the 1930s.

• Luminous pictures: Palatnik, Malina, Calos, Vardanega,
Martha Boto, Albrecht, Healey

87 Kurt Schwerdtfeger
Farblichtspiel, c. 1923

It has already been mentioned that Thomas Wilfred, the great pioneer of theart of moving light, used his Clavilux partly as a means of discovering successful
patterns of colour andform, which he then applied in compositions on the scaleof the traditional easel picture. The Brazilian Abraham Palatnik has been working
since 1950 on a series of ‘cinechromatic’ compositions which are on the same
scale as those of Wilfred. These involve projections from within a box on to afrontal screen which is accessible to the spectator. The movement on the screen
is generally slow and the large forms which appear are coloured in delicate
pastel shades.
Around 1955 the experiments of the American artist and scientist F. J. Malinaheralded a remarkable renewal in the art of moving light. Malina had been bornin Texas, but spent five years of his youth in Czechoslovakia, where he becameaware of his double vocation as artist and aeronautical engineer. His readingof Jules Verne’s Journey to the Moon may have been important in this connection.
Certainly he sees a link between this early experience and the proposal which
he made as director of an international committee to establish a scientific laborato¬
ry on the moon. This particular project is now well under way.

165

MaJina’s career as a scientist was extremely distinguished. He personallysupervised the design, construction and launching of the first successful Ameri¬can high altitude sounding rocket. The launching took place in 1945. Later hedirected the programme of research into humid and arid zones undertaken by
U.N.E.S.C.O. From 1953, however, his work as an artist began to claim an
increasingly large part of his time. Beginning with a series of pastels, frequently
charged with scientific symbolism, he soon passed to an exploration of the third
dimension. Through reliefs and structures of string, cord, wire and wire lattice,
Malina increased his awareness of the possibilities inherent in different materials
as well as developing his sense of space. In particular, he made the discovery thattransparency could serve as a useful vehicle of expression.
From this stage it was only one step to the use of virtual movement and themoire effect. In a picture like Cosmic ray showers, Malina gives us a study intension, with the lines of force traced by coloured threads. The next stage in thisdevelopment is marked by the appearance of artificial light, first of all in collages
incorporating wire lattices and later in a picture like Jazz, where the lighting
becomes intermittent. Malina’s technique in Jazz was to use thermal interruptors
in the electric circuits. Thus certain areas of the picture were illuminated whileothers became dark, at intervals of one or more seconds. The resultant movement
was sufficiently varied to give the spectator an impression of complete unpredict¬ability.
Malina abandoned this technique in favour of an electro-mechanical system
involving four elements. This was the ‘Lumidyne’ system, which combined
fixed sources of light, circular elements moved by small motors (the ‘rotors’),

158 Frank Malina paints the 'rotors' ofPaths in Space, 1963 ('Lumidyne'
system). The principal composition,
painted on the 'stator', is not visible here166

89 Nino Calos
Mobile lumineux, 1966

a transparent sheet of perspex (the ‘stator’), and finally a translucent screenof the same material. Although Malina has used this system for the majorityof his works in light and movement, he has devised another technique - the‘Reflectodyne’ - for certain small pictures. The reflectodyne also consists of four
elements - a light source, a mobile chromatic disc placed in front of this source,
a number of reflecting surfaces and a screen. In addition to these two basic
systems, Malina has recently developed a technique of making music an integral
part of his pictures. And he has turned to the remarkable properties of polaroid
in a series of works which display an inventive use of geometrical form.
The geometrical emphasis of the polaroid works is uncharacteristic of Malina’s
style as a whole. In general, the forms which occur in his work suggest suchnatural phenomena as coral, diatoms and micro-photographed crystals, and therhythms which they follow can be compared to the rhythmic movements ofatomic, biological and astronomical models. But this distinction is false in
Malina’s terms, since he holds that so-called ‘abstract’ pictures differ fromtraditional pictures ‘only in their subject matter’, and that this subject-mattermay include ‘geometrical shapes,’ ‘unfamiliar views of objects as seen fromaircraft, through microscopes’ etc. This attitude is perhaps most clearly substan¬tiated by the large number of works in which he deals with stars, galaxies andother astronomical phenomena. He has written: ‘I see the work of artists as animportant effort to communicate new visions of the universe as found throughscientific research to the community at large. This seems to me to be highly
desirable especially in societies where new knowledge is rapidly applied intechnology.’ Although the movements which Malina incorporates in his works
are relatively slow, they symbolise on the plane of human perception the prodi¬
gious speeds of the universe.
Luminous kinetic pictures became one of the chief concerns of the Italianartist and poet Nino Calos from 1956 onwards. Calos collaborated with Malina
and adopted his distinctive techniques, but his ‘Mobiles lumineux’ reflect a
personal style which is unmistakeable. In 1965 he referred to his main sourcesof inspiration as ‘flowers, branches, grasses, fruits, oranges, lemons, shells, algae,
coral - and stars’. At the same time he referred to his need for strong colours- ‘red, scarlet, orange, yellow, blue, green and turquoise’. But if this statement
applies exactly to the pictures which Calos had produced up to 1965, it has beensuperseded by his more recent work. The series of impressive panels which heexhibited at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in Summer 1967 wasentirely monochrome, even though its subtle quality of movement was notwholly removed from that of the previous works.
Around 1958, the sculptor Maxime Descombin developed a technique which
he called ‘relief dynamistique’. This involved pieces of transparent coloured
glass which were arranged in relation to chosen architectural features and set
up a fascinating interplay of moving forms in response to the shifting conditionsof natural light.
In the case of Vardanega, whose works in movement have already been
mentioned, pictorial representation derives directly from sculptural discoveries.
Since 1961 he has exploited his distinctive conception of space - with its dominant
symbol, the spiral - in a series of luminous kinetic works on the scale of the167

90 Martha Boto
Structure optique, 1962.
90 cm. x 30 cm., detailtraditional picture. These so-called ‘boxes’ (boites) involve a whole range ofdifferent techniques: superimposition of materials resulting in a moire effect,
and all the combinations and permutations which arise from the diffraction,refraction, interference and reflection of moving light. Often they create a verystrong illusion of three-dimensional space.
The word which Vardanega has chosen to describe these works involving light,
colour and movement is ‘Chromocinetisme’. Martha Boto also classes her work
under this general title, and is chiefly concerned with the same aesthetic objectives
as Vardanega. Yet she differs from him in concentrating upon such features as
rapid movement, circular forms and intense luminous effects. The light source
itself is constantly moving in many of her works, and this results in a strong
impression of contraction and expansion in the interplay of circles and planes,
as well as a tendency for forms to appear and disappear, ranging from intensity
to diffusion. The problem of movement as it is conveyed through repetition lay
at the centre of the programme of the Nouvelle Tendance. Martha Boto has
extended this almost mathematical area of research in many of her recent works.
The same could, of course, be said of Vardanega, with the reservation that
Martha Boto’s investigation leads into the world of reflection whereas that of
Vardanega is concerned with the world of transparency.
Another member of the Nouvelle Tendance, Garcia-Rossi, has produced anumber of extremely subtle works in light and movement which keep to the scaleof the traditional picture. One particular example, which was exhibited in
1964-5, consisted of permutations on the word ‘movement’. The horizontal rowsof letters projected upon the screen were subject to sudden shifts in position, andso assumed a fleeting, immaterial quality.
The German artist Siegfried Albrecht has developed his own use of coloured
light from an idea which he discovered in Goethe’s Theory of Colours. His work
is freer, but no less poetic, than that of the members of the Nouvelle Tendance.
His method is to project, by means of sources of coloured light, patterns ofchromatic shadows upon the wall. By placing cut-out letters of the alphabet in
between the wall and the light source, he manages to create an interplay of
shadows which varies according to the movement of the spectator. Several of
Albrecht’s works have been in the form of ‘boxes’ with screens, which reliedsimilarly on sources of white or coloured light producing coloured forms andshadows according to the shape of the objects arranged in between. The con¬tinuous movement of these works depends on the use of electro-mechanicalmotors.
This particular line of research has recently been developed by a numberof artists, of whom Dadzu is an interesting example. Dadzu’s use of circularforms and soft, subtly assorted colours recalls some of the works of Martha
Boto. But he tends to keep to a two-dimensional pattern of movement, working
upon the surface of the screen rather than exploring illusory depths.
With the Luminous pictures of John Healey, we are on a completely different
scale - and perhaps in a completely new artistic field. Unlike the majority of
the works which have been discussed previously in this section, Healey’s com¬positions are specifically designed to be exhibited in large spaces. The personal
history of Healey is also out of the ordinary. Although he had never at any point168

91 John Healey
Box 3, 1963. Monochrome

received any formal training in art, he began at the age of sixty to invent techni¬ques and design particular works in light and movement. A group of techni¬
cians, working under his direction, carries out the actual execution of these works,
which requires a period perhaps as long as twelve months and rarely less than
two months.
Healey prefers to consider himself as an inventor rather than an artist, but
the works which he produces certainly fall within the field under discussion.
Some of his projections have been adapted to small-scale boxes, but the mostcharacteristic and the most impressive are those which are used in conjunction
with screens of very large dimensions - for instance, 3 m. by 2.4 m. Of course,
the fact that Healey’s compositions can be projected on to a surface of almost
any dimensions places them in a different category from works which are designed
specifically for a domestic interior.

• Hoenich: robot-art
The works of the Israeli P. K. Hoenich are also designed for a wider scale. They
utilize the forces of sun and wind, and their movement is therefore unpredictable.
Rimington had experimented with ways of exploiting the light of the sun in thenineteenth century. Hoenich has studied the statistics relating to hours of sunlightwhich are kept in the Mount Carmel Observatory at Haifa and devised a rational
method of harnessing sunlight to his pictures. He has also studied wind forces,
basing his investigations upon the Beaufort scale, and employs both a direct useof wind - with mobile parts of the works reacting to wind pressure - and an
indirect use, through wind motors which again act upon these mobile elements.

160

Hoenich uses two basic techniques, which he identifies by the two terms‘robot-picture’ and ‘robot-painter’. Both make use of the rays of the sun andthe movement of the earth, but only the ‘robot-painters’ rely upon the un¬predictable element of the wind. Hoenich has described the ‘robot-picture’in the following terms: ‘you build a number of unmoving two- or three-dimen¬
sional projectors, which can be done by a single artist in a relatively short time.
The running time of a robot-picture is from solstice to solstice (six months),
and the picture is visible by sunshine. The movements in the picture are causedby the movements of the planet Earth.’
Hoenich’s aim in exploiting the natural forces of sunlight and wind is to
give the plastic arts two additional dimensions - the dimension of time, andwhat we might call the spiritual dimension.

• Spectacles: Schoffer, DarieIn the winter of 1956-7, Nicholas Schoffer made a remarkable discovery whilearranging coloured pieces of paper in front of a light source. This simple tech¬nique gave rise to a whole range of chromatic lights and shades upon the adjacentwall. Schoffer took this revelation as his point of departure in a series of kinetic
experiments which remained, unlike his other works, on a two-dimensional basis.
His method was to vary the focus of the projector lens and place multicoloured
discs in front of the light source, this being the principle of the ‘phantasmagoric’screen projection.
From 1957 onwards, Schoffer referred to this technique as ‘lumino-dynamism’.
This was also the year in which he gave the first lumino-dynamic spectacle
involving both projections and music at Central Station, New York. Lux /,a moving sculpture whose coloured shadows were captured on a special screen,entered the collection of the Musee National d’Art Moderne in Paris at the samestage. But Schoffer’s most important achievements in the realm of light andmovement were yet to come. It was after introducing the concept of ‘chronodynamism’, or ‘structuring of time’, into his work in 1960 that he went on tocreate the Musiscope, the spectacle Formes et Lumieres and the prototype which
was to make possible the application of his ‘lumino-dynamic’ research on anindustrial scale.
Schoffer’s Musiscope was an instrument for the production of ‘visual music’,
which operated by means of an electronic keyboard. In his own words, it was
to be ‘an instrument which realizes visual music’ and ‘has a place cut out for
it in the concert hall.’ ‘A complete range of buttons (eventually replaced bykeys), grouped together on an electronic keyboard, enable the performer toobtain on the screen - simultaneously or successively - a considerable numberof families of images, colours and light effects, and to combine them or vary theirdegree of definition or intensity. Besides this, there is a rheostat which works
upon the respective speeds of rotation of the coloured filters and the sculpturalelement, allowing the enactment of the images in time to accelerate, slow down
or stop completely.’
The spectacle Formes et Lumieres, which is next to the Cybernetic tower at the
Palais des Congres, Liege, was devised shortly after the Musiscope and completed

170

in 1961. Plastic roller-blinds are lowered over the 1500 square metres of theglass facade of the Palais to form a gigantic screen on which coloured light isprojected. This is the central part of an audio-visual spectacle which includes,
in addition to the illumination of the Palais, two projectors of coloured lightwhich sweep the town itself, and the illuminated tower. Schoffer’s design has
an obvious similarity to spectacles of Son et Lumiere but it remains unique as
an attempt to bring out the properties of a modern building through an extended
display of abstract forms.
A few technical details of this massive work may be of interest. The total
spectacle makes use of 360 projectors, and spotlights of every kind, linked to acomplex system of stops, as with an organ. This impressive battery of effects
takes part in the actual spectacle, which lasts about twenty minutes. Meanwhile
the projections on the huge ‘screen’ are reflected in the waters of the Meuse,
which flows between the spectators and the spectacle itself. The sound comesfrom stereophonic columns equipped with loud-speakers which are arranged in
front of the spectators in such a way that the music gives the impression of
emanating from the light and movement on the screen.
Schoffer’s designs for lumino-dynamic work on an industrial scale have been
put into effect by the scientific laboratories of the Philips Company. His Mur
Lumiere is now on sale by the square metre, while his Tele-luminoscope is in
mass production. The former, which was exhibited for the first time at theMusee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, in 1963 as part of the ‘Objet’ exhibition,
comprises one or more ‘lumino-dynamic cells’ of a standard pattern. Thesecells, which are not at all bulky, contain elements that are interchangeable andtransformable: by modifying the combinations of elements, it is possible to alter
the composition of images and colours at will. Although Schoffer generally uses
these cells to project images upon an area of one metre square, they are devisedin such a way that projections of a much larger area are also possible. And they
can also be used in close conjunction with sound effects, since the rhythm andmovement of the images can be determined by a magnetic tape which at thesame time plays music.
Schoffer’s Tele-luminoscope is ‘an apparatus for making decors of rhythmic
movement for television and the cinema’. In 1961, Schoffer arranged a numberof broadcasts on and with ‘lumino-dynamic variations’ for television, followedby another broadcast which involved the ‘luminoscope’ Z. ‘In this particularbroadcast, the averted profiles of dancers and musicians, varying at the behestof the producer from large-scale, lifelike size to a group silhouette hardly larger
than a postage-stamp, revolved upon a background of moving abstract images or indeed, behind these images or in the middle of them - whilst the figurative
image itself, at times soft, sombre or wavering, at other times bright or firm,
double or triple as well, was gradually modified in the process and transformed
to the extent of becoming abstract in its turn.’
Schoffer has defined his personal aesthetic of light and movement in thefollowing terms: ‘Lumino-dynamism is the exploitation of a surface, or fractionof space - of whatever size - involving the development of plastic and dynamic
elements - whether coloured or not - through real movement or artificial move¬
ment (optical illusion). When it is reflected on a surface, this development goes171

hand in hand with an increase of light by comparison with the surrounding milieu,
producing a differentiation in energy which is measurable in quantitative terms.
If it extends into space, the light penetrates and travels through the spatio- andchrono-dynamic structures, while increasing its luminosity, and in addition
gives rise to a supplementary development - both plastic and luminous - onevery opaque or translucent surface placed before the sculpture.’
Schoffer has made full use of the new techniques involving light - video
circuits, light mixers operating with diverse staggered movements, and thecathode tube: he has adopted the techniques of television, believing the cinema
to be no more than a prehistoric medium in the contemporary world. Yet the
movement which he creates on large or small plane surfaces is directed towards
fulfilling the artistic objective which underlies all his work - that of integrating
moving structures into an aesthetic whole.
Similar considerations have led the Cuban artist Sandu Darie - once a memberof South American groups orientated towards Constructivism - to develop his'transformable structures’. These works, which he began in 1953, were con¬ceived in terms of ‘a spectacle in light and movement, which seeks to communi¬
cate across a transparent screen the new dimensions of a kinetic era, just as if
the spectator were looking through the mirror of the imagination’. Darie’s
research has resulted in the creation of a mobile spectacle which he calls the
Cosmorama. This is a kind of fairground booth which is designed to initiate aslarge a number of spectators as possible into the kinetic branch of the plastic
arts.
Darie’s booth does not require any very sophisticated modern techniques tooperate successfully. It can be dismounted and measures 2.50 x 4 metres infloor area, 2.50 metres in height. The interior contains a circuit of projectors
and motors which give rise to various gyratory movements. The public sees
two transformable structures at the same time, and these are designed to ‘com¬plement one another in a multiplicity of planes, intermixing their evolution’. Darieoriginally controlled the projections and their movements manually, but now he
has installed a ‘governor’ which directs the preestablished programme auto¬
matically. The actual performance depends on the way in which the structures
flatten themselves and grow less complex, a process which gives the illusion ofpassing from the third to the second dimension - and vice versa. The range ofcompositions is very large, since there are so many variable factors - the ways
in which these light structures are articulated and set into motion, the ways inwhich the matrices can be made to change, or the light from the projectors tovary, and finally the effects of what Darie calls ‘mobile transparencies’.
Darie has no hesitation in making use of old materials, industrial waste products
etc. He considers that these elements take on a new life once they have beentransformed into images - ‘a poetic life after their functional life’. He explains:‘I see things as a painter, and what interests me is the picture in movement,a controlled movement and one which alters the emotional effect of the com¬position. .. My objects are really actors, who play their drama in motion andundergo change on the screen. There is the spectacle.’ Although he has carried
his experiments into another dimension by making a film of them, Darie retains
a clear preference for the genuine spectacle which he has defined in the following

172

92 Sandu Darie
Cosmorama, 1966. 'Kunst Licht Kunst'

exhibition, Eindhoven

formula: ‘Electricity + poetry in motion = spectacle.’
There is a certain similarity between the work of Darie and the project com¬pleted by the Laboratoire des Arts for the Third Paris Biennale in 1963. This
enterprise, which was directed by the architect Jean-Louis Renucci, included
the ‘metaform’ projections of Etienne-Bertrand Weill.

• Polaroid: Munari, Dantu
A fairly recent development in the field of light and movement is the use of
Polaroid. Bruno Munari, whose work in another area has already been mentioned,
began his exploitation of moving polarized light for artistic purposes in 1954.
He writes: ‘The aim is to obtain images which change colour according to thelaws of nature and not because of someone’s personal taste. The answer in173technical terms is to use polarized filters and to place colourless materials, invarying numbers of layers, between the two filters. The layers and thicknesses
will determine and define the stretches of colour, while the rotation of one ofthese filters will enable the colours to be modified, through a complete chromatic
cycle... ’ A film of Munari’s experiments in polarized light has been made at
Milan.
The young French artist Andree Dantu has adopted a technique very similar
to that of Munari. Dantu places cut-out pieces of cellophane between two sheetsof polaroid, one of which turns mechanically. The whole apparatus is enclosed
in a kind of box which can be hung on the wall like a traditional picture. As
with Munari, it is necessary to emphasize that the colour effects are obtained
without any sort of application of colour by the artist. Dantu endows her works
with a continuous, regular movement, but provides each of them with a switch
which can be used to ‘fix’ the colour changes at a point determined by thespectator.
Reference has already been made to Salvadori’s three-dimensional works
involving polaroid sheets in motion. Another artist whose work in other fields
has already received attention is Joel Stein, a member of the Groupe de Recherched’Art Visuel of Paris. Around 1962, Stein began to utilize the effects of polarized
light in his slide projections and projections within boxes. He devised a numberof metal cones - in the spirit of the kaleidoscope - which produced the characteris¬tic effects of polarized light when turned in the hand. Stein conceived these small
works in terms of the aesthetic of the game, but his results bear comparison withthe pictures which were mentioned above. Standish Lawder, an American expert
on the history of the cinema, has also used polaroid in projections.

• Valensi: cinepeinture, telepeinture
Livinus: photopeinture, chronopeinture
Screen projections: Muller, Soriano
Another development in the field of light and movement has been the introductionof new methods of animating the cinema screen. Henry Valensi has journeyedto the limits of plastic and cinematographic research in a lengthy series ofexperiments. As a ‘musicaliste’, his constant dream since the first years of the
century has been the introduction of a genuine symphonic musical movement
into his plastic works. It was with this aim in view that he chose the difficult pathof‘cinepainting’ (cinepeinture). As Etienne Souriau has explained: ‘What Valensi
intended was that the picture, itself a preliminary and preparatory moment,
should be wholly composed in view of its further development in the film; thefilm was to be the authentic work, the goal and ideal of the artist’s effort. Certainly
it was a symphony that he dreamed of, and he realized it patiently, image byimage, with the techniques of animated drawing.’
In Valensi’s Symphonie printaniere, the development in time of the season ofspring is indicated in real and direct terms. Through his coloured drawings andsurfaces, Valensi expresses in the language of sensation the way in which theevolution of the season affects time, nature and life - or, to take the titles of thethree sections of the work, ‘The Sky’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Life and Love’.

174

93 Hans-Walter Muller with hismachine M

Shortly before his death, Valensi formulated the theory of another type ofart involving light and movement, which he called by the title ‘telepainting’(telepeinture). ‘He imagined that he saw before him,’ writes Souriau, ‘a colour
keyboard on which the artist could place his hands for an inspired piece ofimprovization, exerting his mastery over pure apparitions of moving colour ona screen, phrasing, in just the same way as a melody is phrased, pauses, repetitions,stretti, sustained chords, silences... Scarcely would the work have been created
before it was recorded by the camera, while still in the process of execution,
to be broadcast urbi et orbi immediately afterwards.’ The technique of telepainting- painting at a distance - involved three essential elements: colour, rhythm andpauses. It also made use of the principle that the six elements of colour, value,
duration, place, direction and form could be used to vary the intensity of anelectric current. In making a direct connection between television waves andcolours (which, for him, were in structure no more than waves and vibrations),
Valensi shows that he was still thinking in terms of a form of colour music on apainterly scale.
From about 1960, the Dutch artist Livinus has been working on his techniqueof ‘photopainting’ (photopeinture), which he describes as ‘a kind of direct
painting making use of proportionate amounts of light on a sensitive film, inwhich the picture becomes luminous as a result of internal lighting. The picture
constitutes an object which, through its spatial perspective, blocks out the wall,and through its radiation fills up the architectural space of the spectator. The
facts of this situation influence everyone in an immediate way, even though they
are taking place outside his brain or outside his direct field of sensory perception.
The intense colours give the radiating painting a brilliancy and a constantanimation that is accentuated by the presence of forms which it would be im¬possible to conceive of in other circumstances.’
Since 1963 Livinus has placed an increasing emphasis on the relationshipbetween light and movement: he has chosen the titles ‘Cinepainting’ (Cinepeinture) and ‘Chronopainting’ (Chronopeinture) for the works which reflect thistransformation. But the work which most conclusively draws together the various
threads of his research remains the Machine lumodynamique, which was begun
in 1960. At its present stage this electronic machine with a screen seems torepresent a synthesis in Livinus’ creative activity. It is a combination of funda¬
mental forms, light reflections and elaborate colour changes, which involves
effects of polarization and filtering at the same time, and is programmed by amechanism that is sensitive to sound.
The German architect Hans-Walter Muller has discovered an intelligent wayof animating white walls or screens with projections of forms and shadows inmotion. His ‘dynamic visual art machine’, which also goes under the name ofGenese, uses a perforated sheet instead of a film. Muller had adopted a fascinating
graphic notation, similar to that of music, to help him in the process of putting
his ideas into effect. The instrument which he prepares with the help of this‘score’, comprises two sheets - one of perspex and the other of board, withperforations covered by variously coloured pieces of cellophane. The two sheets
are of different diameters and produce an effect of varying speeds. The actual
speeds, which are regulated by a motor, can also vary from time to time. The

176

projection takes place from behind these two revolving sheets, and is itself
characterized by interchangeable slides with painted or applied patterns, which
are inserted immediately in front of the light source. The final result on thescreen is therefore the result of the original pattern of the slide, and the shifting
patterns of the two intervening sheets.
Muller’s machines provide a great variety of possible types of movement.
It is worth mentioning that he derived the inspiration for this new mode ofexpression from the experiments which he performed at an earlier stage in a
number of fields bordering upon the kinetic: many of the most interesting
features of his projections can be related to his skill in music, mime and conjuring.
The experiments of Raymond Soriano, who is also an excellent theoreticalexponent of the possibilities of movement, are no less interesting than thoseof Muller. Soriano is aiming for pure projection, that is to say a film projection
taken with an open camera. He is completely uninterested in portraying concrete
objects or using the kind of techniques which have been developed in documen¬taries. The ‘synfilmies’ which he produces are simple studies in the movementof white, or occasionally coloured, squares. From 1953, he has experimented
with the rigorous technique of drawing exclusively by means of the camera andthe movements of the person who is controlling the camera. And in fact he isanxious for these two elements to replace the traditional brushes of the painter.
He has written of the purpose of his ‘man-camera’: ‘My aim is to draw with a
new brush and so to obtain pure colour in motion.’
Behind the formal statement of Soriano’s aims, there is the desire to penetrate
into the secrets of movement - to investigate the biology of movement. Thisrequires the existence of a new category of artists, who are able to work with‘extra lucidity’. Soriano draws a parallel between the art of ‘musique concrete’,
which revealed sounds that were hitherto unknown, and the possibility of anart of movement which would be directed towards revealing qualities of move¬
ment as yet undiscovered. He continues to see a strong connection between
gesture and the actual appearance of movement in the work - both in theoreticaland in practical terms. And he holds that this relationship between kinetic
elements provokes a corresponding sensation in the spectator, placing the artof projection upon an entirely new level.
The connections between cinema, architecture and the plastic arts can hardly
be discussed without reference to the theoretical work and completed projectsof Philippe Jaulmes, who has constructed the so-called Panrama at Montpellier.
This work is a real laboratory in which plastic elements can be set off against one
another, movement being one of the most important of these. It is ‘a method of
projection and cinematographic presentation which is intended to obtain animage projected within a hemispherical construction; the construction being
arranged in such a way as to occupy the whole attention of the spectators.’
The most recent developments in the art of light include an abundant useof fluorescent tubes in the work of European and American artists. The French
painter Martial Raysse achieves a high emotional charge with his use of whiteand coloured neon tubes. In the United States, Dan Flavin makes use of similar
tubes in his ingenious explorations of space, while Chryssa, who is of Greek
origin but lives in America, employs them in his sets of variations upon given

177themes. A whole galaxy of American artists has set to work to explore the newart of light in its most unsensational aspects. Among them are Billy Apple, a
New Zealander by origin, Robert Indiana, Stephen Antonakos, Earl Reiback,Thomas Tadlock, P. McClanahan, Tovish, Leo Rabkin, John Willenbecher andthe USCO group, whose leader is Gerd Stern. Marshall McLuhan’s book,
Understanding Media, is surely not unconnected with this development.
• Light and movement in three-dimensional works: groups in Italy,
France, Holland and Germany

94 Davide Boriani (Group T)

P. H. Scope, 1 964-6

95 Gianni Colombo

Plastic Statement in the environment
created by Group T at the 'Kunst Licht
Kunst' exhibition, 1966

The recent developments in the art of light which relate to the use of the third
dimension as a plastic element and the adjustment of the work to its environment
are principally due to the work of groups of artists. Equipe 57, a Spanish group,
has produced a series of engravings on lighted glass which relate to these two
problems. Group N of Padua (Biasi, Chiggio, Costa, Landi, Massironi) havealso touched upon them in their Spectre cine filet No 1, where the image is pro¬
duced by a number of light rays, constantly changing colour and position, thatare reflected on a white surface. This group also makes use on occasions of acomplex device involving two beams of white light which are split up into thecolours of the spectrum by passing through two fixed perspex prisms, and thenreflected by four prisms turning at different speeds.
The members of another Italian group - Group T of Milan - try to createa similarly positive reaction in the spectator by means of their striking com¬binations of light and movement in a three-dimensional framework. Anceschi’s‘virtual cylindrical structure’ comprises metallic elements animated by electricmotors which are brilliantly illuminated. Boriani’s Hypercube, described as a‘three-dimensional modulator’, is a series of concentric cubes turning at different
speeds which owe much of their effect to the lighting. The aim is to bring out
for the spectator’s benefit a ‘non-uniform dynamic organisation of space’. Throughhis perceptions the spectator is held to take part in this dynamic organization.
Another member of the same group, Colombo, describes his Structure excentrique (1962) as an accessible space bound together by two cellular units turningat uniformly accelerating speeds, in which the aim is to provoke ‘cycles of inter¬mittent light in time with the rhythmic mutation of colours’. Dadamaino’s‘indeterminate optical-dynamic object’ of 1964 is made up of three concentric
circles in which lines are reflected upon ‘mirrored metallic surfaces at the circum¬
ference’. The movement which is introduced results in the formation of a seriesof images which are at once simultaneous and successive. Finally De Vecchi,
another member of Group T, is aiming at spectator participation throughcontinuous dynamism and the ‘spatial invasion’ of a work such as his Structure
rotolineaire, which is constructed of materials which capture and reflect the light.
The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel of Paris must be mentioned once again
in this connection. Aspects of the work of Julio Le Parc have already been
discussed at various points in this study. We should bear in mind that Le Parc’s
transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional works was directly linked
with the problems of colour, light and transparency: that he obtained goodresults at an early stage of his research from experiments with progressive
sequences, displacements and rotations, which he soon extended by incorpo-

178

96 Groupe N (Biasi)
Prisms decomposing and reflecting'Kunst Licht Kunst' exhibition, 1966

rating chromatic sequences - and the effect of four planes - into his original
vocabulary of perspex cubes.
The reliefs and ‘suspensions’ which followed were an obvious developmentfrom the early plastic preoccupations. From projects involving rather rudimen¬
tary techniques - the perspex prisms for the investigation of multiple illuminatedforms, the boxes with images and colours appearing in depth and lending them¬selves to an infinite variety of combinations, and the boxes with ‘continuous
mobiles’ - Le Parc turned to more elaborate methods of expression which
completely transcended the confines of the frame and the studio.
One of the most important dates in this development was 1960, when Le Parc
undertook a systematic study of the multifarious possibilities offered by trans¬parency, movement and light through a use of rotation to combine various
colours - white on white, black on white, black on black etc. - in a more or lesscalculated scheme of probabilities. The crucial factor in this piece of research
was the way in which external elements (the white on white) were incorporated
in the plastic statement. Soon the mobiles were also being affected by elements179

97, 98 Julio Le Parc
Instability, continuel-lumiere, 1962

from the environment, such as effects of light and shade, and partial images
moving at different speeds on surfaces adjacent to the work.
Also in 1960, Le Parc began to bring out the qualities of different surfaces
and different levels in wood and metal reliefs. The progressions of these surface
elements were revealed in their variable speeds by the rotation of regularly
ordered elements. It was the combination of this line of experiment with the one
mentioned previously that presented Le Parc with a significant plastic problem:
how to make use of reflected, interrupted and ‘skimming’ light as a medium of
expression.
In solving this problem, Le Parc was helped by the experience which he had
gained from his Ensembles - mobiles installed before light sources which provokedreflections of light all around the spectator. He was able to develop the use ofskimming light, in particular, until in 1962 he achieved spectacular results withhis ‘continuels-lumiere’ and ‘cylindres’. At the Kunst Licht Kunst exhibition in
Eindhoven (1966), he was able to demonstrate the ultimate refinement of theseparticular techniques. This was particularly appropriate at an exhibition which
represented the flowering of artificial light as a means of expression on an inter¬national scale.
After devising the ‘continuels-lumiere’ in 1962, Le Parc chose to place theaccent upon the visualisation of light in relation to movement. To begin with,light sources were simply placed behind a screen pierced with holes. Le Parc
used this idea in the Labyrinthe constructed for the 1963 Paris Biennale andalso in the one which was constructed at New York two years later. It was in
1963 that the ideal of associating the spectator with the aesthetic process began
to be applied in practice. The spectator’s participation was invited in a numberof different ways: he could affect the work by his own movement, by manipulating
the elements of the work, or he could himself be affected by obstacles placedin his path, or by objects which modified the normal conditions of vision andtouch. This development led to the exploitation of light as a means of provoking
an instant stimulus, and to techniques of surprise movement which relied upon
the instantaneous production of light.
If we turn to Le Parc’s continued experimentation over the past few years,
there is an extraordinary variety of new techniques which extend the possi¬
bilities of spectator participation in several directions. Le Parc has devised unevenpassage-ways composed of rocking wooden blocks: he has constructed a chair
on a spring which lets the unsuspecting visitor down in a hurry, and produced
pairs of eccentric spectacles which give a distorted view of the surrounding
world. It is important to realize that all these new projects - and many more derive directly from the research which Le Parc began with an investigation of
simple geometrical forms and chromatic permutations. And at the same time it
must be stressed that his remarkable effects with artificial light and the use of
mirrors are merely one aspect of an overriding purpose - the pursuit of a funda¬
mental plastic research, orientated always towards the future.
Garcia-Rossi, Morellet, Sobrino, Stein and Yvaral, the other members of
the GRAV, have numerous points of contact with the work of Le Parc. For
instance, Garcia-Rossi’s reduction of subjective choice to an absolute minimum,and his desire to make use of every technical, scientific, perceptual and material180

99 Horacio Garcia-Rossi
Boite lumineuse, 1964

possibility, recall the attitudes of Le Parc in his first period. There is also aparallel to be drawn between Le Parc’s use of light and Garcia-Rossi’s Boite
lumineuse a manipuler, which consists of a mobile cylinder of perforated metalthat gives rise to light vibrations.
The pattern of Morellet’s research corresponds closely to that of Le Parc,
beginning with experimental programmed paintings and leading up to the useof ‘visual shocks’ provoked by intense light. Mention has already been madeof Morellet’s Sphere-Trame, which is suspended so as to allow free movement
and gives multiple shadows and reflections in response to the light of powerfulprojectors.
Sobrino also worked on a number of problems involving the plane surface
before developing his characteristic use of perspex cubes and other transparent
objects, which reflects the group’s general preoccupation with unstable trans¬
formations. In the same way, Stein began his research with a series of essays inform and colour which were directly parallel to the concerns of other membersof the group at the same period, and progressed towards his more mature style
within the framework of group policy. His more recent works are concerned withsuch problems as the movement of suspended objects and the light effects to beobtained from reflecting polyhedrons and kaleidoscopes. Stein carries out thepolicy of the group to the extent that he neglects the object in itself and empha¬
sizes the element of play.
Finally Yvaral, who acquired early experience in the visual properties ofmaterials such as Perspex, india-rubber, and vinyl thread, began by relatingthese materials to the formal problems of superimposition, displacement andacceleration. His subsequent work branched out into the use of transparencies,
cubes, moire effects, structures and games which involved sensations of instabili¬
ty in the spectator when confronted with networks of black and white in ‘opticalacceleration’. Here again there is a close connection between the individual
programme of research and the overall policy of the group.
Obviously the degree of cooperation which has been maintained in the firstfew years of the group’s existence has depended on constant contact between
the various members. Most important of all, it has been vindicated at certain
stages by the mounting of common collections of work, such as the three Laby¬
rinths and the Journee dans la rue, which took place throughout Paris on 19 April
1966. The latter, which involved a display of grouped and isolated objects invarious streets of the city, was perhaps most successful in the phase which took
place in front of the church of Saint-Germain -des-Pres. This item involved thespectator in a particularly interesting way.
The direct antecedents of the Journee were the various Labyrinths of thegroup. Labyrinthe 1, which was inaugurated at the third Paris Biennale in July
1963, and Labyrinthe 3, which was on show at the Contemporaries Gallery,
New York, in March 1965, are perhaps the most important of the series. The
intention of the group was to use these collective exhibitions, with their extreme
variety of perceptual phenomena, as a method of obtaining the highest degreeof participation from the spectator. The dominant aesthetic impression was to be
one of instability - that is to say, the impression that the formal aspects of theseparate items on view could never be precisely localized or identified. For

182

instance, the fifth stage of the July 1963 Labyrinth consisted of a cell with walls
covered in polished aluminium, in which the spectator was surrounded by mobilereflecting plates. The ‘games-rooms’, which covered stages 6 to 16, were fullof different indications of light and movement. Stage 7 consisted of a series oftransparent perspex elements which were worked by the spectator, and stage 9of an open cell with mirrors whose direction could be altered by the spectator- and whose walls were animated by the interplay of ‘transformable reflections’.
The aesthetic of instability reached its final paroxysm in stage 20, where Morellet
had arranged parallel rows of inclined neon tubes, which followed completely
different rhythms of being turned on and off, and yet impressed consecutive
images on the eye of the spectator.
Without going deeply into the various declarations and manifestoes of the
GRAV, it is possible to state that their principal aim is to play down the traditionalsignificance of the individual artist and his masterpiece, and to bring out the
crucial role of the spectator. In their view, the most revolutionary aesthetic
propositions of the past have stopped short at the point of modifying the relation¬
ship between artist, spectator and work of art. Their aim is ultimately the creationof an entirely new situation, in which the work of art is replaced by the ‘plastic
statement’ - representing a line of open research - and the spectator becomes anactor, not simply through his own contact with the work but also through hisobservation of other spectators and his participation in the activity of the group.
The Dutch group Nul and the German group Zero are both indebted to themetaphysical spirit and the monochrome exercises of Manzoni, Yves Klein and
Fontana. Of the Dutch group, Henk Peeters of Arnheim, De Vries of the same
town, J. J. Schoonhoven of Delft and Armando of Amsterdam have all produced
interesting ‘visual statements’ with the use of fight. Their basic attitudes arereflected in the following passage: ‘Pollock, Rothko, Tobey and the monochrome
painters are the precursors, Fontana and Yves Klein make the rupture final.
The signs are everywhere: reduction, limitation or disappearance of contrast,
silence, the sensation of emptiness, decomposition of the surface, and finally
movement and vibration as purely sensory effects. Fontana lays down that the
new synthesis is the sum of the elements, of colour and of movement, all threeof which are perceptible to the senses. A new art results from this synthesis,
based upon time and space. Yves Klein prepares a pictorial art without painting.’
Heinz Mack, one of the founder-members of the Zero group, has left his own
description of the role of light and movement in a text which dates from 1959:‘The dynamic structure of colour and fight is a delight to my eyes, which become
irritated with the static nature of my thoughts; it is this structure that animates
the rhythm of my heart and the rapid respiration of my desires. The beautiful
is in a state of motion and displays the quiet of unquietness as its form. The
dynamic actually becomes a form. But the unquietness of quietness destroys
the form and becomes its opposite. The motionless and the finite tire our visionand deny it in the last resort. Pure movement does not know the relativity offrontiers and measurements; directionless and without actuality, it remains on its
own terms. That is, its vibration, its respiration, its liberty, its vitality and its
metaphysic.’
The aim of Mack’s research is to transpose thoughts such as these into visible

183

100 Heinz Mack
Light object (using Fresnel's lens), 1966

objects, without revealing their secret: he does this mainly through the use oflight. For a number of years, however, he has been preoccupied with the ideaof utilizing vast stretches like the Sahara, where there is an abundance of calm,
space and light, for what he refers to as ‘the other limitless stretch’ of art. In thesecircumstances, works using light - such as the Sahara relief (1961) and the Light
Pyramid (1964) - would have an aesthetic import hardly dreamed of up to now.
A characteristic work by Piene - another member of Group Zero - is the
Luminous ballet, which can be operated in two different ways. In the first case,the aim is to represent or demonstrate, through projectors and matrices, theconquest of space by modulated light. The artist and his assistants transmit theexperiment to the spectators, who immediately try to assimilate the space andbecome active in their turn. In the second stage, the artist relies on projectors
which are automatic though controllable. A small quantity of energy results in atransformation through light, expressed in a coherent manner. The spectators
are then invited to relax.
Clearly the title ‘Luminous ballet’ should be taken in its literal sense. The
light follows a particular order, or choreographic pattern. Yet it is also possible
to note an element of improvisation, since sound is introduced on the same terms
as one of the controlled light sources. Piene has no intention of establishing acorrespondence between optics and acoustics. His aim is to introduce an element

184which is just as noticeable as breathing into the work, so that the articulation oflight will ‘carry it off in the dramatic action against opposition.’ The sound which
he introduces is not musical, but simply serves as a sound accompaniment. It may
sometimes take control of the spectacle and then give place to a period of quietness
in which the light alone holds the field.
If Piene’s work is all directed towards the aim of articulating light, and thus
making it real and perceptible as such, the work of his colleague in the group,
ticker, is no less closely concerned with the realization of form through light.
The virtual or potential movement of his white structures, which is particularly
intense, can become a dynamic interplay of real light and movement if a motor
and a turning disc are installed under the original arrangement of closely packed
white nails.
At the exhibition Documenta III in Cassel (1964), these three members of
the Zero group mounted a Homage to Fontana, which consisted of a room filledwith elements that they had developed since 1960. Many of these were noteworthy
because of their intense luminosity and the variety of the movements which they
performed.
Another German artist, Hermann Goepfert, exhibited a complex work which
he called Optophonium in 1961. This had several characteristics which put itin the class of the spectacle. In 1962 Goepfert exhibited his Lichtrotor.
It is a significant fact that a group of Soviet artists called ‘Dvizjenie’, which
consists of Lev Nusberg, Francisco Infante, Volodja Galkin, Stepanov andseveral others, has recently made great advances in kinetic research through theuse of light. Nusberg, who is himself an artist by profession but directs thework of several technicians who belong to the group, has written of his own
work and the development of ‘Dvizjenie’: ‘Almost from the outset of the more

101 Group Zero
Programmed room at the 'Kunst Licht
Kunst' exhibition, 1966. On the left: thelamp-spectres of Otto Piene seen throughticker's construction; on the right: awork by Mack

185

102 Francisco Infante
Kinetic object Sou/ of crystal, 1 963.
Materials: motors, sources of coloured
light, programmed structure, metal,
perspex, loud-speakers etc.

or less conscious transition in my creative work from painting and literature to>objects in physical space - it was towards the end of 1961 that I began to concern
myself with experiments in movement and materials for the first time in the
USSR since the avant-garde work of the Twenties - I found a constant impulse
towards the creation of a NEW REALITY: in concrete terms, towards thecreation of grandiose kinetic objects, living machines. In general, and for all
sorts of reasons, I did not simply follow the move towards Op art, but set myself
moving and developing in another direction, though my work may have seemedsuperficially akin to the Op art that painters all over the world were alreadybeginning to practise.
‘In our country, up to 1962, the very name of Optical art was unknown. But
all my subsequent activity, including that of the creation of the ‘Movement’(Dvizjenie) group in September 1962, brought into clear evidence the fact that
there were similarities as well as differences between our work and what was
happening in the West. I myself would regard the work of art as a means ora form of contact between human beings, but only on the most subtle level ofassociation.
‘At the present moment I am working on the development of two large projects.
The first is the creation of a World Institute of Kinetism. The second is a project
for a kinetic labyrinth, which will be called ‘Yesterday - Today - Tomorrow’.
This is to be a real labyrinth, about 500 metres long in all, with several ramifica¬
tions. The performances, which are calculated to take two hours, involve a large
number of separate places (with varied forms and colours) arranged in a sequence.
The methods of the cinema, music, pantomime, texts, kinetic-objects, changesof smell, air movements etc. will be used in these separate stages. The idea is thatman should voyage in the world of the stars, turn back on his own personality
and see himself from the outside like a man of the future looking at contemporaryman. But this is not theatre, and certainly not a ‘magic lantern’ show.
‘And now we are hurriedly making kinetic maquettes to serve as sketches for apresentation at Leningrad on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the
USSR.’• Lassus - kinetic objects and the environment

103 Lev Nusberg
Kinetic object F/ower (phase 5), 1965

The research of Bernard Lassus is typical of the vast perspectives which open
up when an attempt is made to find applications for the plastic art of light andmovement. If we take a Boite a lumiere by Lassus, dating from 1958, we findthat the aesthetic purpose is not the only one in the artist’s mind. Lassus hasconstructed this work from three projectors which are fixed separately and atdifferent heights on the interior surface, in front of a cube which is painted blackon the inside and the outside. With three beams of blue, green and red fighthe succeeds in demonstrating the composition of white fight. This is throughthe use of a rotary movement which animates the uneven relief and produces
variation in the way in which these beams are intercepted. Coloured shadows,
superimposing and overlapping with one another in continuous movement,
appear momentarily on the various planes, while the white fight which is notintercepted brightens the other surfaces and falls upon a white-painted area

186

in relief. Lassus’ purpose in devising this fascinating exercise was to demonstrate
the way in which form and colour can operate quite autonomously. And thisdemonstration fitted directly into his programme of experiments as a ‘coloristeconseil.’
It is important to realize that while the work of Lassus and other ‘coloristeconseils’ comes to fruition in the large-scale facades and planned groups ofbuildings which they undertake, the point of departure for the principles which
they apply is their research on the plastic level - in the studio or laboratory.
Lassus’ work at the Centre de Recherche des Ambiances (Centre for Research
into Environment) has led him to create many works which are both spectacles
and experiments. His lengthy investigation of volume/colours and plane/colours
has led him to introduce the apparently paradoxical concept of fixed colour
mobility, which relates to the fixing of colours according to their functions in fullknowledge of the circumstances involved, and brings into focus the mobile
properties of natural and artificial light.
A significant number of kinetic artists, including those who originally took
only a passing interest in expression through light - such as Agam, Pol Bury,and Takis - are now thinking in terms of works which affect the environment
through this remarkable medium. One may mention Gerstner, Lily Greenham,
Dobes, Luther and Kowalski in this connection. An interest of this kind may
take on many different forms, as can be seen from a comparison of works exhibitedby Lily Greenham and Kowalski at the ‘Lumiere et Mouvement’ exhibition,
Paris (1967). While Lily Greenham achieves her effect through the use of brilliant
metallic paints in homogeneous patterns, Kowalski turns the spectator into alaboratory assistant. His hollow gas-fitted balls glowed red or blue as they wereplaced on or near a surface with an electronic circuit, when they were lifted they
became transparent once again.
Among the new perspectives which are opening out in the use of light andmovement, let us bear in mind the particular one which is associated with the‘intermediary’ image - that is to say, the image which is neither object nor
perceptual process, but lies between the two in an environment which has lostits material properties through the operation of light and movement (in Demar¬co’s case, it is ‘black light’ which provides the foil for violent vibratory movement).
In the work of the groups, and especially in the case of Le Parc, this dematerialisa¬
tion is carried out through the use of skimming light, reflected and refracted
light, and direct light: the spectator’s active participation is secured through theuse of complicated passage-ways, invitations to games, different types of struc¬turing, environments that can be altered by the spectator, and the programmingof light effects.
Moving light has therefore proved itself to be a particularly effective meansof acting upon the environment. The spectator feels the challenge of the newsituation in an unusually direct way. Far from being absorbed in the mechanicaluniverse, he is invited to discover - and in a sense to create - through his intelli¬gence and sensitivity, the new connections between physical phenomena, man’senvironment and art.

189

Recent developments in Kinetic art

Recent developments in kinetic art have taken several different directions.
Virtual movement has been explored for its potential application to architecture
and town planning. Actual (three-dimensional) movement has certainly not
yielded up all its secrets: there are still new possibilities of expression which go
beyond the purely technical innovations. One particular field in which there has
been a great deal of progress is that of natural and especially artificial light.
Transparencies, reflections, interceptions and transmissions of light have all been
widely used, as well as the techniques of polarization and the kaleidoscope. But
this does not mean that artists have confined themselves to visual effects. There
has also been an increase in audio-visual research, and in the type of spectacle
which involves more than one of the senses simultaneously or successively. The
attempt to encompass the whole environment has led to entirely new uses of lightand movement, as well as influencing the treatment of traditional features suchas colour.
Another fundamental problem which has been raised by the rapidly evolving
programmes of research undertaken by various artists and groups of artists
concerns the role of the spectator. Now that the spectator is fulfilling a more
active role, the work of art itself is liable to disappear into insignificance bycomparison with the psychological effects which it induces. At the same time,
new aspects of technology, cybernetics, electronics, television techniques and the
production of industrialized multiples play their part in narrowing the gap between
art and science, while the possibility of programming haphazard events con¬tributes towards the prospective integration of the plastic arts into modern life.

• Recent exhibitions
The perspectives which are opening up in the field of kinetic art can be glimpsed
not only in the research of the artists, which is carried on continually, but also
in the various recent exhibitions and other manifestations which serve as land¬marks in the rapidly changing scene. From 1965 onwards, there has been a seriesof more or less comprehensive exhibitions which have attempted to deal withparticular aspects of the field. Virtual movement was the central preoccupationin the exhibition entitled The Responsive Eye which was held at the Museumof Modern Art, New York, in 1965. From this point the expression Op - or
Optical - art came into common use. Three-dimensional movement was the190keynote of the important Directions in Kinetic Sculpture, which took place at
the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966, as it was in the first large-scale
survey of works employing artificial light - the Kunst Licht Kunst exhibitionat the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, which belongs to the same year.
This last exhibition was also devoted to exploring the relationship between
artificial light and our environment, which has subsequently proved to be oneof the most promising - if not the most promising - perspectives in the field.
Environment was one of the important subsidiary themes in the Lumiere et
Mouvement exhibition, held at the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris insummer 1967. Here the main theme was of a more restricted nature, since only
the kinetic artists of the new Ecole de Paris were exhibiting, and they wererestricted to works incorporating both real movement and artificial light. But it
was still possible to single out the more interesting subsidiary themes, such as
the tendency towards spectacle, the introduction of direct action by the spectator
and the prospect of new applications for architecture.
A number of additional exhibitions which have taken place at museums andgalleries during this period have played their part in stimulating the developmentof various trends in kinetic art. The Galerie Denise Rene of Paris presented
their important survey. Mouvement 2, in 1964, and have continued to put on
exhibitions of unusual interest. With the Howard Wise Gallery in New York,
Signals Gallery in London, the (Op) Art Gallery in Esslingen and the Denise
Rene/Hans Mayer Gallery at Krefeld, they have been in the forefront of activity.
The Hanover Gallery of London also presented a general exhibition in 1964.
In the next year, there were exhibitions at the Albright Knox Art Gallery,
Buffalo (Kinetic and Optic Art Today), the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh(Art and Movement), and the Museum of Tel-Aviv (Art and Movement). In
motion, an exhibition mounted by the Arts Council of Great Britain, followed
in 1966, while the Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna, mounted Kinetika
in 1967. There have also been several exhibitions devoted specifically to the artof light - at the Institutes of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and Boston (1965),
the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard, the Addison Gallery ofAmerican Art, Andover, Massachusetts, the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Houston (all in 1966), the Galleria delFObelisco, Rome, the Howard Wise
Gallery, New York, the Walker Arts Centre, Minneapolis (all in 1967) and theCleveland Museum (1968).
The attempt to bring kinetic art out of the galleries and to make it accessible
to the spectator without any need for a preliminary move on his part has madeonly limited progress. Small demonstrations have taken place in Paris and inCentral Park, New York, but it seems likely that the attempt to influence theinner and the outer environment will be most successful when a museum, orother place set aside for cultural activities, can be brought into use. This has
already been done in Europe, especially at the Maison de la Culture, Grenoble(Cinetisme, Spectacle, Environnement), the Kunsthalle, Berne (8 Environments)
and the Documenta 4 at Kassel. All of these exhibitions date from 1968, as does
the comparable show at the Second Buffalo Festival of the Arts, in the Albright
Knox Museum, Buffalo. The Magic Theater exhibition at the Nelson Galleryof Art, Kansas, also belongs to this category.

191

• Visions for architecture - Riley, Leblanc, Cruz-Diez

105 Kenneth Martin
Construction in aluminium, 1 967.
Department of Engineering, Cambridge,
England. Height 518 cm. (17 ft)

Many of the aspects of virtual movement which were investigated intensively,by American and British artists in particular, have now lost their original attrac¬
tion. William C. Seitz adopted a number of different headings to classify theworks which were included in the Responsive Eye exhibition - the colour image,‘invisible’ paintings, ‘optical’ paintings, black and white paintings, moire effects,
reliefs and constructions being among them. But it would seem that these various
divisions only correspond to genuinely new aesthetic possibilities in so far as they
can be subsumed in a wider conceptual framework - that of integration into anarchitectural framework or, on a more general level, functional utilization in
space. What was at once stage an attempt ‘to dramatize the power of static forms
and colours to stimulate dynamic psychological responses’ now acquires sig¬
nificance as a modern experimental method of creating architectural visions- environments in which the element of virtual movement is combined with thoseof manipulation, spectator movement, physical movement and real light.
Bridget Riley has moved some way along this path through increasing the sizeof her statements in black and white, and venturing into the chromatic field.
In a similar way, Albers’ basic investigations into perceptual ambiguity andcolour interaction have been taken up and transposed on to a larger scale by such
American artists as Tadasky, Anuszkiewicz, Poons, Kelly, Stella and Molinari.
The Canadian Molinari, to take one example, applies his strips of colour inrhythmic progressions, exploiting spatial volumes as well as large flat surfaces.
If we remain within Seitz’ categories, the ‘black and white paintings’ can be
identified with the recent work of two English painters, Jeffrey Steele and Peter
Sedgley. The moire effects which have been a vital feature of Soto’s work can berediscovered in the recent experiments of other South American artists such as
Ravelo and Salazar, who are exploiting them as a means of penetrating new
regions of space. Ravelo with his Lumiere fragmentee and Salazar with his
metallic structures are both responding to this challenge, as are Martinez withhis coloured virtual volumes and Padron with his Bottes a metamorphose.
Two artists who have clearly moved far in the direction of a truly architecturalvision are Walter Leblanc and Carlos Cruz-Diez. Leblanc’s ‘mobilo-static’polyvinyl strips constitute an ideal basis for interaction between the ‘optical’statement and elements of colour, light and spectator movement, lending them¬selves readily to transposition into the third dimension. Cruz-Diez’ physichromies
have recently been extended into a genuine spatial analysis of colour. The artist
has combined the results of successive experiments in pure colour in a final
environmental ‘situation’. We shall return to the significance of these experiments
at a later stage in the chapter.
Spatial considerations have therefore become an increasingly important factor
in the most recent kinetic work. A relevant example is the sculpture of Mary
Martin, whose concern is still with virtual movement although her structures
now reach out into space. Like the sculptures and mobiles of her husband
Kenneth Martin, recently crowned by a superb aluminium Construction at
Cambridge, her works are conceived in terms of sequences based on mathematical
relationships.
In spite of this tendency for artists using virtual movement to introduce

192

106 Roger Vilder
Pulsation 7, 79 cm. x 84 cm. x 24 cm.

three-dimensional elements, there has been no lack of research among those who
confine their investigations to real, three-dimensional movement. New materials
and techniques have played an important role here. Among mechanically driven
works, the Pulsations of the Canadian artist Roger Vilder occupy an unusual
place because of their reliance on optical effects. Yet Vilder speaks for a goodnumber of artists of the younger generation when he writes: ‘there is no physicalor moral phenomenon which is static or permanent, whether in the atomic orthe cosmic universe - whether man’s senses can perceive it or not. All is there¬
fore unstable and in motion. But there exists in this instability a repetition, returnor resumption, as with the seasons, day and night, or the waves of the sea. Thesenatural physical phenomena imply notions of time and rhythm, which areintegral features of the cycle. It is this cycle that exists within the overall in¬stability that I am trying to convey in my work through the repetition of certain
optical effects that are obtained through the movement of one unit, and resultin the setting up of a visual pulsation.’In the field of the mobile, which presents notoriously difficult problems to thecontemporary artist, Henri Gabriel - a Belgian artist - has succeeded in devel¬
oping a genuinely new form of movement. Gabriel began, like many kinetic193

artists, from an initial interest in optical work, and continued his research witha series of experiments in superimposition. But his principle aim has been to
employ real movement in the creation of optical illusions. Thus his carefully
constructed mobiles in polished aluminium provide an interplay of four ‘dimen¬
sions’ - space, perception, light, and movement - and through this interplay
establish the illusion of an empty space or volume in rotation.

• New uses of light - Cappello, Sempere, Luther, Gerstner, Megert

107 A. Luther
Optogon, 1 966

The most striking advance in the whole field of kinetic art since 1965 has,
however, taken place in connection with the widespread introduction of artificial
light. This is a development which has radically affected the more elaborate‘environmental’ projects as well as the more traditional illuminated objects andother works involving projected light. It could be argued that this luminous
section of kinetic art possesses an independent status, and various terms - suchas ‘luminocinetisme’ - have been devised to establish it is a separate genre. Whatcannot be denied is that this line of investigation has dominated the more ad¬venturous courses of research, both in Europe and in the United States. This isdue at least in part to the remarkable possibilities of affecting the spectator which
it offers.
The combination of movement and light has proved so fruitful during thepast few years that it seems impossible to classify the works which have been
produced according to the old categories of relative dimensions. Many largescale works must now be assigned to the new class of environmental art. It may
even be permissible to speak of the environmental art of light.
There have been interesting attempts to introduce subsidiary categories into
this field, such as that of Athena Tacha-Spears, who is a fine light artist as well asa stimulating theoretician, and that of Nan Piene, who has extended and developedthat classification which I myself proposed in the catalogue to the Kunst Licht
Kunst exhibition. But for the purposes of this chapter, the most useful classifica¬tion seems to be that which was included in my catalogue for the Lumiere et
Mouvement exhibition.
Among the many illuminated (or light-receiving) objects which have been
produced recently, those of Cappello, Sempere, Goepfert, Luther, Gerstner andMegert deserve to be singled out. All of these form part of a continuous pro¬gramme of research which treats light in connection with movement and space.
They range from low reliefs to structures involving many-sided volumes which
capture the interplay of light and shade. Transparencies, reflections, and kaleido¬
scopic effects play an important part in the overall realization. The Italian
Cappello has concentrated particularly on electro-mechanical movement, in¬volving two distinct tempi. Two examples of his finely finished works are Superficie-spazio: itinerario circolare (1965) and Rotatorio circolare (1967). The
Spaniard Sempere has managed to transpose the principles acquired over many
years of visual research into exercises in the third dimension such as his Movil(1967), which allows a considerable role to the movement of the spectator andthe play of light. Goepfert has continued his ‘optophonic’ research, and has
succeeded in installing an ‘optophonic room’ in a school near Frankfurt. He

194

deserves the credit for seeing that light represented a new and independent
plastic medium at an early stage in his career, and he has continued to put it at
the very centre of his research. But in works like the Lichtwalze, he allows soundto play an integral role, and he has also made considerable use of magnetic fields.
In fact he is one of the artists who, while working away from the limelight,
has extended his control over virtually the whole range of kinetic media. In allof them he continues to be concerned with ‘nature, artistically formulated.’
The purpose of A. Luther’s Lichtschleusen, Glasobjekte, Lichtblenden andAluminiumobjekte is to ‘concretize’ light, or to make it ‘objectively’ accessible
to our perception. Like Goepfert, he considers that light is, in the first place,energy - invisible energy. In order to make it entirely visible, it is necessary to
exploit not only our everyday visual experience of light, but also the realms ofphysics and optics. Materials such as glass, with its transparency and its capacity
to act as a lens or a mirror, enable the spectator to discover light as a transopticalreality.
108JKarl GerstnerLens picture, 1962-5

195

The objects of Karl Gerstner are based on a meticulously elaborated programmeof theoretical and practical research. His role in the general advance of kinetic
art over the past few years has been immense. He has taken an active part in
the work of the Nouvelle Tendance, but his own artistic activity has never been
neglected. His scheme for the permutational exchange of elements possessing
different degrees of brightness and reflective capacity offers as rich a varietyof combinations - if not a richer variety - than the game of chess. Gerstner sees
every structure as a specific order, a unique example from among the multitude
of possible groupings. There are therefore a thousand different types of orderreadily accessible to our perception: but at the same time there are a hundred
thousand different kinds of disorder which we perceive simply as one. This
principle can be illustrated with reference to one particular structure, andGerstner insists: ‘I am only speaking of the abundance of the smallest field: howlarge is the world?’ Works such as his Lens pictures, Prism pictures, Tension
pictures and Texture pictures are an attempt to convey some of this limitless
fascination.
Mirrors and light are the main tools employed by Christian Megert in hisquest for a new vision of space. This new space is not simply an illusory ‘optical’
phenomenon, but a dimension without beginning or end. It can be lived in by
the spectator, who thus becomes himself a creator, and it can also be made to
move, change or come alive by the agent who is in control. Besides the physicalimplications of this situation, there are also quite clearly metaphysical implications.
Megert has followed a strict path of progress in his research. Beginning withcompositions which utilized mirror fragments, he later constructed geometricalcompositions and incorporated light into a series of boxes which he referred toas ‘mirrored rooms for young collectors’. Finally he introduced real movementwith the aid of a zoom mirror - a sheet of reflecting material set in motion bya motor. In these Zoom works, the onlooker experiences spatial sensations of an
unsurpassed originality and flexibility. Megert has made a decisive step towards
the creation of an environmental form. Among the luminous (or light-emitting)works, there are still a large number of light pictures or ‘boxes’, some of which
now involve the introduction of lenses as well as effects of interception, reflection,transmission and interference of light. The pupils and followers of Thomas
Wilfred are still well to the fore in this field, which they continue to term theart of ‘lumia’. Christian Sidenius pursues a vein which is closely related tospectacle in its dramatic form and content. He writes: ‘I derive a curious pleasurefrom the processes of composing a sequence in the theatre, and that is probably
why I do it. Lumia allows me to compose a moving image, develop and control
it... (Lumia technique) provides me with an amazingly large repertoire ofimagery, plus the control of its elements to a very subtle degree.’ The engineer
Earl Reiback has developed the chromatic possibilities of light projection oncollecting screens as well as perfecting an audio-visual component.
The new range of opportunities open to those who continue to work on a limited
scale is well demonstrated by the work of Chuck Prentiss and Valerios Caloutsis.
Prentiss, who belongs to the group of West Coast artists associated with theRobles Gallery of Los Angeles, has developed light boxes which afford entirely
novel illusions of space through the combination of colour and movement.
196

109 C. Megert
Zoom, 1966. Diameter 120 cm.

Caloutsis, a Greek artist living in Paris who held his first exhibition of lightboxes at London in 1968, manages to superimpose degrees of luminosity withimpressive spatial results.
• Luminous objects in three dimensions - Chryssa, Indiana,
Antonakos, Hogle, Tadlock
There has been particularly intensive research during recent years in thefield of three-dimensional luminous objects. American artists have taken aleading role in this development, sometimes making use of the light sourcesin such a way that the frontier between Pop art and kinetic art in their work
becomes uncertain. This is the case with artists such as Chryssa, Indiana,
Antonakos and Billy Apple, who have all incorporated straight or bent glass tubes
filled with neon or other gases and emitting white or coloured light. The allusion
to the environment in these pieces often remains on an anecdotal level, as with
Chryssa’s Times Square Sky or Indiana’s EAT sign. Indiana illustrates thispoint with a fascinating passage that throws some light on the psychological197

110 Steve Antonakos
Hanging neon, 1 965

origins of his work. ‘Signs loomed large throughout my whole life. First there
was the huge round Philips 66 sign that rose high above the flat skyline of myhometown. I saw it and felt it every year of my youth there for it happened tostand, perched on two girders, on the very route that my father took to work each
day for many years. It also just happened that he worked for the very company
that it announced red and green against the blue sky. His sign, my sign - Notlong after came EAT signs. Ubiquitous in that part of America they signal all
the roadside diners (no DINE signs) that were originally old converted railway
cars, taken off their wheels and mounted on blocks amid zinnias and petunias
when the motor bus displaced the railroad in the ’30s, and the cheap cafes(rivalled by cafe signs). Some of the latter were operated with strict ‘home¬cooking’ by my mother when she had to support herself and her son during theDepression when Father disappeared behind the gasoline sign (66) in a westerly
direction, leaving home and family for other signs. The son, burning to be an
artist from the age of six, painted the window signs of those establishments. It
was fitting that the very last word she uttered to him at her death was ‘eat’.’Antonakos’ Hanging Neon arrives at a more direct functional equation withthe surrounding space, while Billy Apple has chosen the medium of neon because
he holds that there is no other way of capturing the experience of pure and vivid
colour in an uncontaminated form.
Artists such as McClanahan, Hogle, Willats and Thomas Tadlock remain closer
to the central trends in kinetic art. McClanahan, for instance, uses light as araw material, just as he might use stone or pigment. All materials, in his view,
can be processed by the artist ‘for better or for worse’. Yet he suggests that light
has a privileged position since it is itself colour, and there is no other mediumof which this could be said. He applies this dictum most ingeniously in a whole
range of different types of statement. In his most recent works, such as Flame On,
One Two Three, Cloverleaf and Star Trees, light is used to produce a chromatic
dematerialization of the aesthetic object in space.
Richard Hogle treats light in a similar way in his plastic Light cubes. Steve
Willats, on the other hand, regards the use of artificial light primarily as a meansof isolating sets of stimuli. ‘Darkness does this most conveniently,’ he writes,‘and enables me to keep my stimuli constant.’ Willats is particularly concernedwith the relationship between the artist and his environment, and with theconnections between artists and the ‘control mechanisms’ of society. He sees
the art object as a means of communicating a particular set of ideas: the observeris placed in a situation where he can identify with an omni-directional object andso temporarily achieves this state himself. When the observer thus becomes anintegral part of the object, the artist is able to isolate certain stimuli and so
provide a controlled reference frame in constant movement, which the observer
is obliged to follow.
The American artist Thomas Tadlock also began his experiments with a seriesof exercises in light and movement. He later developed his Kinetic Light Con¬
structions, which employ patterns of light built up from small squares and rectan¬
gles turning on a central axis and using rotary symmetries. Other works suchas his Marijuana equipment or Freak lights involve various patterns (‘logistic or
illogical’) which are related to musical sound - either in direct synchrony or198purely at random. Tadlock’s research has been painstakingly developed over alarge number of months, and its most recent achievement is the unprecedented
Archetron, which employs electronic devices to produce endlessly changing
fragmentations of the image on a television screen. Here, as in the work of somany other contemporary kinetic artists, the conjunction of image and soundalready borders upon the realm of the spectacle.

• Spectacle - Light/Sound Workshop Leonard, Snyder, Stern, Tambellini

111 Thomas Tadlock
Archetron, 1967-8

There are many different degrees of spectacle, several of which have been
explored in recent lumino-kinetic research. Slide projections, perforated cards
and colour transparencies are some of the many techniques which are involved.
The trend had definitely been towards the introduction of other human senses
besides that of vision, and towards a stage where the spectator himself provides
the element of performance. In England, the Light/Sound Workshop which has
been established by the Hornsey College of Art has been developing techniquesof projection on to an architectural scale. Clive Latimer, Michael Leonard andDennis Crompton have been the main organizers of the programme, which also
involves a large number of students. One of the first completed projects was an
automatic light projection machine which involved various devices for modifying
the image and covered a sweep of 180° in cycloramic projection. Careful study
enabled the group to increase the power of the light sources by successive stages.
The automatic projection head, which is a little similar to that of H. W. Muller’s
Machine M, has been developed for programmed control. The actual machineis dependent on multiple edge-driven discs, which carry the optical material andallow permutations of speed in both clockwise and anti-clockwise directions aswell as a stop-start control. The programmed control also extends to the groupsof linked projectors which provide complex sequential developments.
The Light/Sound Workshop, under Clive Latimer, has exhibited at theMuseum of Modern Art, Oxford, in 1967, where the complete range of theirresearch was on view. Another exhibition took place at the Young Contemporaries
show, London, in 1968. Here the main feature was an assemblage of eighteen
screens arranged in depth and programmed from twelve automatic projectors
according to a fourteen minute time cycle. This work also incorporated synchro¬nized multi-source sound.
Michael Leonard is now experimenting on his own with various light pro¬jection techniques. His Test Rigs have been developed to allow maximum
flexibility in the design of light projections: all elements, including lights, lenses,
and patterns can be moved on three basic axes. Leonard has also built a numberof projection machines, the last of which has a three-way optical head which canbe programmed electronically. His largest machine to date employs no less than
70 projectors which are electronically programmed according to a 15 minutecycle.
Apart from machines of this type, various other methods of projection havebeen practised in the field of lumino-kinetic art. The American artist Don
Snyder has used painted slides of remarkable brilliance which^are projected
simultaneously from two or more machines and dissolve and strengthen in199

programmed sequence. Earl Reiback has projected images from small slides
which are coated with multiple layers of crystalline, organic chemicals. Jackie
Cassen and Rudi Stern have used their ‘psychedelic visuals’ to simulate ex¬perience under LSD in a Trips Festival held at New York’s East Village in 1966,
as well as contributing ‘Kinetic lumia visuals’ to a production of Stravinsky’s
The Rake's Progress, which was presented by the Opera Compnay of Boston in
1967. Gustav Metzger, the English pioneer of autodestructive art, has made useof slides coated with a crystalline substance which is transformed by the operationof the heat from the projector. The German artist Manfred Kage also makes useof chemical action which causes permanent transformations in the coloured
liquids through which he makes his projections.
Other artists who have used slides in a more straightforward way are theAmerican Aldo Tambellini, who uses translucent paint and inks on glass to
produce his images, and Marian Zazeela, who transfers abstracts calligraphic
drawings on to black and white photo transparencies and adds layers of green
and red.

• Involvement of the senses - Dvizdjenije, Goodyear, Martin, Lye, Jones
But the most important step towards the achievement of ‘total’ spectacle liesin the kinetic development of senses such as hearing and smell. The Dvizdjenijegroup of Moscow have been working on this problem for several years, although
their more recent achievements seem to lie more in the field of public spectacles
and theatrical environments. Robert Rauschenberg, who certainly cannot beclassed as a kinetic artist but whose preoccupation with human action andenvironment follows a parallel road, has used the human body as a conductorof electricity. His aim is to make the participant aware of his whole body andhis physical location. Much of the recent work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark,
who received a large retrospective at the 1968 Venice Biennale, is directed
towards a similar objective. A recent demonstration at the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, involved an elaborate arrangement of microphones and soundfilters, which offered electronically controlled light responses to the human bodyin action. Other attempts to involve the various senses, and even the wholeorganism, in the kinetic work include experiments with heat by John Goodyear
and Paul Matisse, with corrosion and fire (Fire Works) by John Van Saun, andwith modular light programming control consoles by Tony Martin. Len Lye is
now looking for a basic correspondence between sound and the qualities of
movement which have preoccupied him up to this point in his kinetic film andsculpture. Howard Jones’ Sonic pieces have achieved a remarkable fulfilment in
the Sonic Games Chamber, which he contributed to the Magic Theater exhibitionat the Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City, in Summer 1968.
Goodyear’s preoccupation with heat is the result of a series of experiments
involving light reflections, moving grid elements and transparent plastic effects.
The gradations of heat in his new works produce an entirely original aesthetic
emotion in the participant who is often taken completely unawares when hetouches the object. Paul Matisse uses heat in a less direct way. Currents areproduced in a liquid which is warmed from the bottom and the liquid eventually200

112 Howard Jones
Skylight Two, 1966

rises. Every once in a while, the heat is turned off so that the flow is reduced
and becomes more eas y to follow. These particular works have been mass-produced
under the title Kalliroscopes (from ‘kalliroos’ — beautiful-flowing and ‘skopein’= to see). Matisse is only interested in reproducing natural effects, in creating
works where the ‘active artist is nature alone, the stage-setter having left thescene’.
The development of Tony Martin is in many ways typical of the careers of
a number of North American artists. He had an initial training in music, began
painting in 1955 and started working with light in 1960. He lived in San Francisco
from 1961 to 1967, where he was able to develop techniques of light composition
with the San Francisco Tape Music Center. Many of his original compositions
were performed at universities and museums in Canada and the United States
during this period. He designed the well-known light shows at the Fillmore
Auditorium, San Francisco, and the Electric Circus, New York, which haveplayed a substantial part in associating research in light and movement with thelife of the community without passing through the accepted cultural channels.
Most of his innovations, including the electronic consoles which he uses for the
programming and control of light, are connected with his deeply serious attempt
to find an imagery which corresponds to sound. The spectator takes his decisions
within an environmental context and according to four parameters which corre¬
spond to the four natural elements - air, earth, fire and water. An integral partof his method is that all these parameters should be detailed in the score. If weconsider the scope of his experiments, it seems hardly surprising that he should
insist on the necessity for large spaces. He hopes to build a Planetarium where
new possibilities could be explored.
Len Lye is planning a similar construction to demonstrate his extremely varied
research into new kinetic media. This is conceived as a ‘temple of lighting’, inwhich the dominant feature would be the hypnotic effect of the presence of
unusual energy. Len Lye thinks that in an environment of this kind the kinetic
and the psychological will become intertwined, and the distinction between thestatic and the kinetic image abolished: instead, it will be the ‘skull which will
resonate.’ The ‘old brain’ will come into its own. In effect, Len Lye’s artistic
philosophy resides precisely in the development of the ‘old brain’ through kinetic
means. He holds that the only source of information for the creative imaginationis the organic and physiological basis of all creation - the genes. He is constantly
conducting experiments to demonstrate the basic correspondences between theresonance and vibration of materials and the properties of sound. But it must not
be concluded that the auditive properties of steel, for example, are the only areasof interest in one of his compositions. The visual effect, which stresses the poiseand balance of the construction, is usually dominant, and the sound is merely aby-product.
While John van Saun attempted to capture ‘the pure essence of electric light’in his original Light Boxes, Howard Jones began in a vein that was not very far
from Pop art. His first works in this medium were sometimes monochrome andsometimes incorporated a painted human silhouette. Elements of sound andflashing lights was also included in the programme. Jones’ Sonic Games Chamberis concerned almost exclusively with sound, although it is the shadow of passing

201spectators that releases the various tracks. Ralph Coe has written: ‘The sonicrange, from screech fragments to thuds to booms, can be controlled by the body
empathy of the participant as he moves in any number of patterns and ways.
The sound-controlled viewer becomes himself the object of a sonic game, andeven steps into his own sound patterns, since he may activate speakers behind
him as well as before him. One hesitates to speculate on the quality and numberof sonic combinations possible within the chamber at varying times.’
It can therefore be seen that developments in audio-visual research, andattempts to combine other senses than that of vision in the kinetic programme,
are leading to new possibilities in the realm of spectacle. The new ‘polysensorial’
art has been demonstrated at a number of manifestations or events - the distinc¬tion between the event and the happening being the crucial point that the event
can only take place after a long period of preparatory research while the happening
is essentially unprepared.

• EAT, USCO, Mefferd, Piene, Durante, Lacroix, Ascott
One of the most important of these events extended over nine successive
evenings in October 1966. The building where it took place was the Armoryof the 69th Regiment on the corner of 25th Street and Lexington Avenue - thesite of the famous Armory show in 1913. The performances were designed todemonstrate the relationship between theatre and engineering, and the chosenmaterials were to be light, movement and sound. Billy Kluver, a physicist
working in laser research, was the leader of the whole project, which involved
the cooperation of Robert Rauschenberg, Oyvind Fahlstrom, John Cage, Steve
Paxton and Lucinda Childs - and others - as well as several highly qualified
engineers. The relationship between art and science was demonstrated in suchitems as Rauschenberg’s aesthetic programming of a game of tennis. In Rauschen¬berg’s, tennis was movement, and in the context of theatre it could be seen as aformal dance. It could also be used to control various sequences of lights andto produce combinations of sound that ressembled orchestration.
This group of performances represented one stage in the development of alarge undertaking known as Experiments in Art and Technology Inc. (EAT).
We shall return to this organization and consider its work in fostering cooperation
between artists and engineers at a later stage in the chapter.
Other manifestations of this kind which could be classed under the general
heading of spectacle are the many performances involving light and movement
which combine slide or film projections with the movements of actors and withmusic. Such enterprises as Pierre Henry’s ‘Pour le temps present’ and La Monte
Young’s concerts in the Theater of Eternal Sound might be mentioned here.
Nan Piene refers to the theatre which Stan Vanderbeek built in his backyard.
Vanderbeek’s ‘Movie-Drome’ is hemi-spherical in shape, and acts as a diffusing
screen for films, moving spotlights and slides. Sound and even ballet performances
can be integrated with this spectacle.
One recent characteristic of kinetic experiments throughout the world is theinsistence on an interplay of strong sensations which the spectator is often expected
to register in a lying position. The intense atmosphere of almost religious con-202

113 Richard Lacroix
Diamond point, 1968. Height 36 cm.
Movement directed by sounds of aerial
traffic

templation contrasts very strongly with the attempt to rouse the spectator tophysical action which tended to be foremost in this field until recently. The
USCO group of New York, which is composed of poets, film-makers, artists
and engineers, defines its communal identity in the following terms: ‘We are
all one, beating the tribal drum of our new electronic environment.’ Many of
their works are enshrined in the USCO tabernacle at Garnerville, New York.
But they have also performed ‘Be-ins’ across the United States, created an
audio-visual multimedia ‘World’ comprising 21 screens in New York, and set
up a Strobe Environment (1967).
The Magic Theater exhibition at Kansas City, from which the project by
Howard Jones has already been described, also involved an unusually penetrating
use of strobe lights. Boyd Mefferd’s Strobe-Lighted. Floor was an entire roomwith an elevated and carpeted floor, from beneath which strobe lights flashedat random through translucent panels. In the words of Ralph Coe: ‘The squaresof light appear in the mind’s eye and travel in sequential directions - to anywhere.
They will travel along the ozite covered floor, rise vertically, rest on one’s
clothing, then pass away. At times they seem capable of being touched. For awhile they can even be recalled to mind. Then they travel off into a mental
existence of their own, having filled the Magic Theater’s thesis of psychic
bombardment.’
The German artist Otto Piene has also been working on plans for a light
spectacle over a number of years. He has actually realized ‘light ballets’ and is atpresent planning a ‘light theatre’.
Naturally this polysensorial aspect of kinetic art requires a large degree ofdisciplined control. This it certainly receives from an artist like Armando Duran¬te, who is primarily interested in the visualization of sound, and utilises a whole
range of very modern techniques - generally programmed electronically - forhis purpose. Durante has, for example, made wide use of television sets, withand without colour effects and direct light or sound. The audio-visual effects
which he obtains are among the most intense to have been produced in this fieldof kinetic art.
In many of these experiments, it is difficult to decide whether it is the elementof polysensorial performance, spectator participation or simply that of the unified
environment which predominates. An artist like Richard Lacroix of Montreal
manages to work successively and even simultaneously in all three directions.
In 1964 he was the co-founder of a local group which included the critic Yves
Robillard and was entitled ‘Fusion of the Arts’. This group produced an im¬pressive kinetic sculpture involving light and sound for the Canadian Pavilion
at Expo 67. In 1968, Lacroix himself designed his Diamond Point, a kinetic light
sculpture extending to fourteen feet in height, whose movements were determinedby the sounds of aerial traffic at Montreal International airport. He has also
completed a number of sculptural and kinetic musical instruments which involve
the active participation of the spectator. These are known as Les mecaniques.
Dorothy Henaut has described them in the following terms in an article forArts Canada: ‘Spotlight on a slowly revolving instrument, the Rodrigal, whose
octagonal delimitation of a circular area is defined only by the sliding action ofscores of metal washers. Coloured lights reverberate on a tall undulating sheet203

114 Richard Lacroix etc.
('Fusion des Arts')
A kinetic light and sound plastic structure,1967

of stainless steel, La Fefeuille, vibrating deliciously as thickly padded drumsticks
beat electrically with studied alternance... Musicians, suddenly inspired, riseup and move on stage from the audience.’
The English artist Roy Ascott provides an interesting basis of comparison
with the work of Lacroix and the Fusion of the Arts group. In Ascott’s view,the trend towards applications which involve all the senses and combine featuresof artistic genres which were formerly separate, can be explained in terms of thegrowth of a ‘Cybernetic vision’. He writes: ‘Modern art is characterized by abehaviourist tendency in which process and system are cardinal factors. As
distinctions between music, painting, poetry etc. become blurred and media are
mixed, a behaviourist synthesis is seen to evolve, in which dialogue and feedback
within a social culture indicate the emergence of a Cybernetic vision in art as inscience.’ His theories were effectively demonstrated in the retrospective exhibitionof his work, entitled Ideas and Edges, which took place at the Laing Art Gallery,
Newcastle-on-Tyne, in 1968.

• Environment - Soto, Cruz-Diez, Hausmann, de Clercq, von Graevenitz,
Oster, Landsman, Bell, Stafford, Haacke
Since 1965 there has been an almost universal tendency among kinetic artists
to enlarge the physical size of their projects, and even to conceive them in directreference to an existing or prospective space. This is how the difficult conceptof the ‘environment’ has come into use. The term can be made to refer to purely
physical dimensions, or it can acquire a psychological flavour. It can be used
in a strictly architectural sense, to designate a narrow internal space, or it canbe extended to cover the cosmos. It may simply refer to the space which encom¬
passes man. But there is always the implication that this space can modify oreven determine the evolution of man’s life and character.
Whichever of these definitions we are inclined to choose, we must recognize
the fact that kinetic artists have found the term environment exceptionally usefulin the theoretical background to their work. They realize that they are not simply
extending their statements to an amplified scale, but also bringing them into
a definite relationship with the movements, actions and reactions of their public.
The space occupied by the work and the space occupied by the spectator are nolonger separate. Thus a subtle game between illusory space and real space,between illusory movement and real movement, is established. The frame which
was the artificial barrier around the plastic arts is completely superseded, andthe way is left open for union with the spheres of architecture and town planning.
The strictly aesthetic areas which artists have investigated in recent years
include those of the interior and the exterior, and the near and the far. Works
have been developed in function of some specific space which the spectator canapproach on his own terms, or even penetrate. Old-established kinetic artists
like Soto and Cruz-Diez have proceeded in this direction, without accepting
all the implications of the term ‘environment.’ Soto’s Penetrables, which areforests of metallic strips that the spectator actually penetrates, are intended toprovide an idea of the totality of relations in the world. Man is thrown into thetotality of space and must accept it as his own element. Mention has already204

been made of Cruz-Diez’ experiments in conditioning and deconditioning
through colour. The spectator is given successive experiences of blue, red andgreen within an area that is free from any other colour stimuli. Finally there isa demonstration of the simultaneous effect of additive, reflective and subtractive
colours, which not only encompasses the spectator but also thoroughly penetrates
his consciousness. Cruz-Diez has therefore rejected the notion of an active
environment as an end in itself, since it runs the danger of becoming merely
decorative or merely ‘psychological’. In place of this, he favours the use of aconfined space to provoke successive situations which are themselves liable togive rise to chromatic events.
These particular examples of the recent work of Soto and Cruz-Diez help todemonstrate that the importance of the ‘Ecole de Paris’ in kinetic art has by nomeans diminished in recent years. If the main emphasis of this chapter rests withthe artists who are working in America and England, this is simply because
the majority of important kinetic artists working in France have already been
dealt with in previous chapters. The latter can be fitted with greater ease into
the historical framework of kinetic art, while the former are dispersed over a muchwider area and necessarily present a more heterogeneous picture.
While Cruz-Diez implicitly rejects the use of light environments for decorative
purposes, an artist like Hausmann is directly concerned with the decorationof an internal space. His work in the theatre at Ingolstadt succeeds in integratinga kinetic statement with the architectural space which serves as a backgroundto the dramatic performances. Gyula Kosice has completed several schemes inArgentina, which achieve a particular impact in their environment. His materials
have in most cases been light and water in motion. Gyorgy Kepes, an important
pioneer in the art of light, completed his Light Mural for the New York offices
of KLM in 1959. The complex array of moving spotlights, fluorescent tubes andincandescent lights, which perhaps suggests night flights over cities, appears
through perforations in a painted aluminium screen.
Hugo de Clercq’s sculptures, which combine elements of vibrating aluminium,
steel and perspex in a natural environment, are characteristic of a number ofother Belgian artists, such as Leblanc, Yves de Smet, and Verstockt. All are
anxious to make a complete break with the enclosed world of the galleries andmuseums, and to apply art more freely in the human environment.
In Germany there have been some notable examples of the application of
kinetic art on an architectural scale. Gerhard von Graevenitz has devised a‘kinetic wall’ which is a thirty-foot long expanse of moving white light. Piene
has completed a successful facade of ‘sculptured’ light, which is operated by aprogramme, for a store in Cologne.
In North America, there have been experiments such as those of Gerald Oster,whose Instant Self Skiagraphy (1967) floods the room with light and subsequent¬ly retains the shadowy impressions of passing objects and people. But the mostinteresting tendency seems to involve the artist in creating a definite space or‘cube’ of light. Dan Flavin can hardly be considered as a kinetic artist, since his
aim is simply to instal a coherent system of fluorescent light. He has no wish
to set up a stylistic or structural development of any significance. Boyd Mefferd,
on the other hand, uses electronic circuitry in an attempt to transcend the spatial

205

limitations of the environment through light. In his view, light is equivalent totime itself. His sequences of light and colour are therefore designed to act directlyon our perception. Mention has already been made of his contribution to the
Magic Theater exhibition.
The American artist Stanley Landsman is also in favour of great purity of styleand condemns what he calls ‘carnival-happening orientated art and cabaret-type
environments.’ Such works as his Fuji Raku and Damte assume environmental
proportions through his use of aluminium-coated mirrors, which multiply thesmall points of electric light to an almost infinite degree. Charles Ross works
with the reflective and refractive properties of light, which he concentrates in
his characteristic prisms. Mineral oils and distilled water can be used to give
particular purity to these devastatingly simple forms, which are usually arranged
in linear or geometrical sequences. Ross’ work is equally effective in outdoor
or indoor space, under natural or artificial light. In both circumstances theenvironment is subtly transformed by the almost unobtrusive presence of theprisms.
Larry Bell works in a slightly different vein, using his cubes to create remark¬able colour effects. The observer first notices a cube composed of plates ofcoloured glass. Each face is different in colour, according to whether it has been
covered with gold dust, platinum or rhodium. But soon the transparent surfacesof the cube allow the hidden faces to appear as well, and a second interplay of
surfaces and colouring is set up. Finally the cube takes its place in the surrounding
space, but the irony of its situation is not lost since the contradictory spatial
clues remain.
James Stafford’s Environmental machine (1966) saturates space with coloured
light, while Michael Hayden has collaborated with other members of the Inter¬systems group of Toronto in producing a series of environmental experiments
which go a long way towards the ideal of a ‘total’ experience. He refers to thisenterprise as the ‘presentation of many artistic expressions within a unifying
bond.’ The environmental element is implied in his concern with working in‘relation to modular area systems.’ For example, he and his colleagues hold thatan art gallery should itself be a work of art. The separate galleries should eachbear a particular relation to the central context. The ‘gallery environments’ which
are thus established within an overall environmental structure are designed toprovide the public with the greatest possible degree of choice. Poetry and music
are both integrally involved in the light projections, which consist of programmedsequences of strobe lights and coloured slides. The entire performance is achieved
with the aid of computers, electronic sound and chemical devices. The Inter¬systems group is also planning a ‘Mind Excursion Centre’ which will make fulluse of modern developments in technology: ‘space that seems to change; soundand lighting that interrelate in strange effects; visual material that ranges frommirror finish to confetti; and even smell and touch.’Many of the North American artists who are using the environment in ways
similar to this owe a great deal to the influence of Allan Kaprow. But it is difficult
to class Kaprow’s experiments within the context of kinetic art as Katharine
Kuh does. For example, the Garage environment (1960) and the Environment
in the courtyard of Martha Jackson Gallery (1961) are only very remotely

206connected with time and movement as they are understood in the plastic arts,
although they have a definite theatrical component. Not even the Four-room
environment created by the USCO group at the Riverside Museum, New York,in 1966 or the Environment created for the Architectural League, New York,in 1967 can be properly associated with the history and development of kinetic
art, or classified under the term kinetic.
Stephen Bann has already drawn attention to the difference implicit in an art
that could be termed environmental between at least two very different types ofwork - the ‘anxious’ object which points to a disproportion between the workof art and our environment and the ‘secure’ object which serves as a naturalextension to our exploration of space. Moreover he makes a distinction between
Environmental art, on the one hand, and environmental Art, on the other. The
former establishes an environment on its own terms, while the latter only ani¬mates the existing environment. Recent work by kinetic artists who use thesecategories has borne out these distinctions and carried them to a further point.
In effect, it may now be possible to sort out the data for a new art of environ¬ment, which would range from the plastic event to possibilities of radicallytransforming the urban landscape. The artists who are working in this field areconcerned with man’s direct and incidental effects on his surroundings, withpossibilities of coming to terms with - and even modifying - the atmosphere, andwith such problems as the investigation of indoor and outdoor space, the nearand the far. For this new art to be genuinely kinetic, it is not enough that optical,
physical or luminous movement should be playing an essential part. There should
also be a degree of precision and functional aptitude in the research and in the
final product. These are characteristics which have marked most of the successfulachievements of modern times, whether in the scientific or in the artistic field.
There is thus an increasingly evident line of demarcation between the ‘environ¬ments’ or happenings which are mounted to demonstrate anecdotal or otherwisehaphazard aspects of everyday life - and frequently involve ‘anxious objects’ and the kinetic art of the environment which, on the contrary, seeks to make useof precise items of knowledge and actual patterns of sensation that can be regarded
as giving change the status of an aesthetic factor in man’s psychology. Kinetic
artists of this type are often chiefly concerned with this kind of relationshipbetween the physical and the psychological phenomenon, which they regard asa means of bringing the spectator as close as is humanly possible to such basic
plastic elements as movement, light and colour. The spectator can then be
induced to pursue his own activities in a space or series of spatial situations which
symbolise his wider environment.
There are, however, interesting borderline cases in the art of environment
defined according to these principles. Hans Haacke, who has already been
mentioned for his work with feathers and balloons - moving in a confined spacein response to the wind of an electric fan - has managed to transpose such smallscale effects into an extensive demonstration held at Central Park, New York,in which the sky-line was modified in an extremely poetic way. In this case
Haacke confined himself to natural phenomena. Filko, on the other hand,
represents the so-called Happsoc (social happenings) exhibitions which havetaken place in Czechoslovakia. There is a strong constructivist tradition in that207

country, represented in particular by the Synthesis group of Prague and Milan
Dobes of Bratislava. Filko moves away from this tendency to some degree in his
Universal Environment, which offers the spectator a modern universe conceived
in his own dimensions and adapted to his basic needs.
• New roles for the spectator — Group Effekt, Cinetisme - Spectacle Environnement at Grenoble
The problem of the role of the spectator is a recurrent subject of interest
for many of the kinetic artists of our generation. For this reason it is perhaps
worthwhile to enumerate several of the most recent solutions to this problem.
But first of all it is necessary to emphasize that the original approaches to the
problem now seem to have been superseded. The methods of activating thespectator which were inaugurated by Agam, taken up in the first projects of themembers of the Nouvelle Tendance, and reflected in the work of such individual
artists as Roy Ascott, have given way to a new phase which is dominated by
the concepts of surprise, instability and - in particular - the game.
Collective works, or confrontations between the group of artists and thegroup of spectators, seem to be best adapted to this new situation. For example,
the Group Effekt of Munich has devised a series of confrontations in which thespectators are able to exercise their physical and intellectual capacities on a wide
front. A new development in this field is the habit of forming groups of thiskind for a single occasion or project. This took place in the planning of theexhibition Cinetisme - Spectacle- Environnement at Grenoble, for which a numberof groups were constituted with a specific project in mind. A Franco-Italiangroup, a Swiss group, an English group, a German group and a group from
Venezuela took part. The Franco-Italian group worked on a series of suspended
statements, which were designed to be placed in the mobile auditorium of the
Maison de la Culture, and went under the general title of Propositions pour unespace en rotation. The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel of Paris, which formed
one half of the group in question, concentrated on a Parcours en movement
continu, which obliged the spectators in negotiating highly-coloured balloons,
aluminium rods and other suspended objects while moving ineluctably forwards.
The Italian team, which consisted of Boriani, Chiggio, Colombo, Devecchi andMari, called their contribution Per cor so a passaggi programmati. Visitors were
obliged to pass through cut-out silhouettes, placed judiciously at varying dis¬
tances, while sounds and flashing lights provided an accompaniment. The public
response to this project was immediate and ‘total’, with very little distinction
between age groups.
• The kinetic artist in modern society - EAT, Centre for Advanced Studyof Science in Art, Kowalski, Tsai, Larrain
It would seem that an experiment of this kind points the way not only tofuture types of spectator participation, but also to the artist’s new role in modern
society. The formation of groups presents many difficulties, on a sociological,
aesthetic and psychological level. But it is probable that the solution lies, atleast on the sociological level, in the cooperation of different artists for a particular208

116 Hans Haacke
Sky line, 1967. White helium-filled
balloons, approx. 250 yards long

-sJ-

m

'v-i" *w**

project. Of course groups of this kind can serve as a model for more radical formsof organization, which might involve scientific, industrial and architecturalrepresentatives. This trend is well illustrated by the evolution of the Czech‘Synthesis’ group, which consisted of ten kinetic artists in 1964, but now com¬prises a composer, a choreographer, an architect, an electronic artist and in¬
dustrial designers among its nine additional members.
Team-work between artists and engineers has in any case already become areality. This is due partly to the artists’ desire to explore the relationship between
art and science, and partly to their wish to harness the new technology in theirresearch. Often the impulse may come from the other side, since many scientists
show great interest in contemporary artistic developments even if others tend
to regard art simply as an emotional domain. A number of successful attempts
have been made to establish permanent relationships between the two fields.
Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT) of New York see their role principallyin the establishment of personal contacts between artists and engineers - what
they refer to as ‘matching.’ They have no intention of setting up libraries orpurchasing equipment, since they consider that existing libraries and laboratories
are quite adequate, and only require to be used more fruitfully. But they areorganizing courses at which artists can acquire the necessary technical and scien¬tific knowledge. They also intend to raise funds which are needed for the use ofcomputers and television equipment. In effect, they are not so much promoting
art as making materials available. As Billy Kluver, the director, puts it: ‘The
system employed in the matching is the constitution of local groups, but oneof the problems lies in the fact that, although by 1968 four hundred engineers
all over the United States were interested in this cooperation, most of the artists
were domiciled in New York. Moreover the different specializations of theengineers did not all correspond to the technical needs expressed by the artists.’
In spite of this difficulty, projects such as the laser research of Denis Darragh,of Vancouver, and Bernard Kahn, of New York, have been helped considerably
by this organization.
Another institution of a similar kind is the Centre for Advanced Study of
Science in Art, of London. The priority in this case has been given to the estab¬lishment of a technically well-equipped laboratory in which artists can work on
special projects. Marcello Salvadori, the founder of this centre, was engaged in1967 on the advanced stages of a kinetic building. This was to have a stainlesssteel structure, in the form of an asymmetrical dodecahedron, and was to becovered with plastic panels. Some of the panels were to be specially treated sothat they produced a sequence of rainbow colours varying in intensity throughout
the day. Others were to be of photometric glass which darkens as the light outside
becomes stronger. Of the other members of the centre, Raymond Connor isusing sound vibrations to produce gratings for use in his three-dimensional work.
He has already completed Artifact, a device which is intended to simulate some
aspects of human behaviour. The behaviour pattern is derived from a suitable
matrix - an array of numbers used in mathematics to specify the transformationof a vector. The observer chooses and imposes his frame of reference on theassembly. Another member, Michael Milne, is engaged on research into thestructure of materials. It should be noted that the centre operates in collabo-210

117 Kowalski
1965. Sculpture produced with the aid ofdynamite charges, Los Angeles

ration with various outside bodies and institutes.
A large number of individual kinetic artists have established direct contact
with laboratories or industrial groups in order to complete special projects or tofurther the general course of their research. In the case of Schoffer and Takis,
the prototype of an art object which can be manufactured industrially has been
the result of this cooperation, This seems to be the most satisfactory route forthe production of the kinetic ‘multiples’ - works that are generally of reduced
dimensions and have tended up to now to be distributed in strictly limited
numbers by private galleries.
The problem of finding an adequate framework for the development of kinetic
research in conjunction with modern techniques still awaits a satisfactory solution.
Artists such as Kowalski, Tsai, Nam June Paik, Gilles Larrain, Gerstner, Luccioni and Couchot are already so advanced in their plastic research that their future
progress can only depend on their having access to an extensive and wellfurnished laboratory. Kowalski’s use of the facilities of the North American
Aviation Company at Los Angeles is an astonishing example of the possibilities
which lie before the modern artist. Adapting their technique of moulding metal
through the force of dynamite explosions, he has been able to obtain polishedsteel structures of up to 7.50 m. in height. The principles of the experiment were,in the first place, to make an absolutely direct use of the source of energy;
secondly, to explore a system that would instantly ‘condition’ an intractablematerial, and thirdly, to show that the kinetic artist can work in any dimension.
These principles are reflected in the whole range of Kowalski’s work, which
illustrates the same basic concept with the aid of a multitude of different materials.
His Manipulator, Oscillograph, high neon sculptures, Sisyphe geometre (involving
different coloured gases), and even his development of the simple plastic themeof the cube, all go to show that he has no difficulty in proving that art andtechnology are based on common premises.
Tsai, an American who was born in China, is moving rapidly in the same
direction. His Kinetic Wall, which was shown at the Amel Gallery in 1965,
consisted of dynamically integrated multiple constructions - in his terms MultiKinetics - to a total of thirty-two units, each of which contained a particularconfiguration of multi-coloured gyroscopic forms. Willoughby Sharp has writtenthat ‘Tsai has created an active environmental field that could be infinitely
extended... By controlling the time sequence of each unit and skilfully com¬posing them, Tsai has used engineering principles to achieve aesthetic ends.’ In
1968, Tsai started to construct Cybernetic Sculptures, consisting of stainlesssteel rods in constant motion in an electronically activated environment filled withhigh-frequency lighting. Here the apparent motion is controlled - as in Rauschen¬berg’s experiments - by the electrical charge of the viewer’s body, as well as by
the volume of his voice. The visual effects range from rapid and agitated motion
to slow undulations. It was noticeable that when these sculptures were exhibitedat the Howard Wise Gallery, New York, in May 1968, they took on the visualcharacteristics of three-dimensional solid forms in slow motion. They appeared
to be merging into one another’s space, ‘making a visual reality out of a physicalimpossibility’.
Another exponent of Electronic art is the Korean, Nam June Paik, who is211

working - like Thomas Tadlock - on the deformation of television images. John
Cage wrote in a preface to his work: ‘What is this thing called Art? TV? (Every¬
thing at once, no matter when/where we are?) On video-recorder Paik records
Pope - validity or raison d’etre for society - making an electronic fact event.’
Gilles Larrain has used plastic, fluorescent paint and mercury lighting;
Gerstner has operated his light sculptures according to a punched-card system;
Luccioni and Couchot have made use of photo-electric cells and electronic
circuits, while Mariano Carrera strongly upholds the view that art objects should
be produced on an industrial scale. All of these artists need to establish a per¬manent liaison with science and industry, and to find a common laboratory
where they can elaborate their electronic and cybernetic devices. But there areimportant signs that the use of the machine in art is giving place to a genuine
art of the machine. Max Bense, Abraham Moles and Kurd Alsleben, among
others, have recently contributed to a book of essays on Computer art. By theend of 1968, two important exhibitions on this theme will have taken place - The
Machine at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Cybernetic Serendipity
at the ICA, London.
Now that these various aspects of contemporary kinetic art have been explored,
it remains open to question which one of them leads most confidently towards
the future. Can we predict with any degree of certainty the further developments
in kinetic art? At least one principle is clear from the outset, although this isnegative rather than positive in its implications. The work of art as we have
known it is becoming less and less applicable in the kinetic field. The art of the
future may enter our experience directly through the perception, as in the caseof Bryan Gysin’s Dream machines, which cause ‘mystical’ experiences throughthe play of interrupted light almost directly on the brain - they are to be lookedat with closed eyes. In the same category are Agam’s Que la lumiere soit and
Schoffer’s recent Effects, which are the direct result of the artist’s ‘idea’. Schdffer’s projected 1150 ft cybernetic light tower for Paris also illustrates this tendency.
But other perspectives open up at the same time. Kinetic art may continue
as an independent art form, develop into a polysensorial art or an art of spectacle,or even emerge as an industrial product with the increased diffusion of plastic
or filmic multiples in unlimited editions. Perhaps the radical transformation inaesthetic values which is taking place may be interpreted in the sense that thework of art is becoming an open statement before it disappears altogether. The
artist is becoming a researcher, while the spectator becomes performer, actor andparticipant. At the same time, the fact that we are moving from traditional‘space’ through architecture and town planning to the wider environment ensuresthat the definitive link between kinetic art and the modern world is preserved.

212

Part 3~N, v *s3e§ki

Vjjfc^ . ..

j^ J

□

118 Joel Stein
Kaleidoscope, with Sobrino, 1963

9 The typology of movement: simple
procedures for the expression of
movement in the plastic arts

There are at least four different ways in which it would be possible to establish
a typology of movement in the plastic arts. In the first place, there might be a
general classification of all conceivable types of movement - linear, circular,
whirling etc. - and these could be compared directly with their counterparts inthe field of art. Another possibility would be to undertake a semantic typology
of movement, or classification of the themes involved. For example, the move¬
ment could be classed according to the different ‘universes’ in which these themes
or motifs are included: the physical universe, whether visible or invisible, themechanical universe, the human physical universe, the human psycho-physi¬
ological universe, the ludic universe, the universe of pure imagination, and theuniverse which is already within the boundaries of aesthetics (as in the case of animage of the dance used to signify movement in the plastic arts.)
Another approach would be to adopt a point of view which was confined
purely to plastic values, and to classify the types of movement according to theplastic elements - colour, line, volume, texture etc. - Each of these three possi¬
bilities would present certain disadvantages. The first approach, for example,
would be too general to take account of the real preoccupations of the artist:
the second and third, even if considered in conjunction, would tend to introduce
a distinction or even a separation between ‘content’ and ‘form’, which is boundto become artificial in any problem relating to the general field of aesthetics.
A fourth approach is possible, and this is the one which will be followed here.
It consists in examining the procedures used by artists to convey, represent,
suggest or introduce movement into the plastic arts. The notion of ‘procedure’is sufficiently general to allow us to deal with the technical, semantic and plastic
aspects of movement. At the same time, is it sufficiently particular to allow us
to make distinctinctions between the various ways in which artists have ap¬
proached the problem.
In establishing the relevant categories, the work of the following has been of
great use: the aestheticians E. Souriau, L. Rudrauf, R. Arnheim, J. Segond,215

Simple procedures for the expression of
movement in the plastic arts

Figuration of movement
1 Academic pose taken up by a model
2 Agitation of the characters
3 Simple figuration
4 Figuration of several successive moments in the same work (enactment)
5 Figuration by signs (symbolic)
6 Figuration by successive scenes
7 Movement denoted by external signs
8 Figuration of instability of characters or objects

Representation of movement
9 The choice of the right moment, reconstruction of before and after
10 Several successive moments in the same character or object (or several
characters or objects synchronized in different attitudes or positions)

Formal suggestions
11 Contrasts between sensible data:a) ‘Values’ (luminosity)b) Coloursc) Formsd) Graphicse) Volumesf) Transparencyg) Texture
12 Contrasts in the composition:a) Cutting out by arabesqueb) Change in sizec) Change in axes (and displacements in relation to the diagonal)d) Change in positionse) Dynamo-plastic arrangementf) Disequilibrium of volumes

216

Precise perceptual suggestions
13 ‘Striving forces’ (the spectator completes the movement)a) ambiguity in structureb) scintillation of colours
14 Perceptual itinerary (viewing)
15 The trace of the instrumental gesture (action-painting)
16 Virtual movement and trompe-Voeil* Photographic’ procedures
17 The snapshot (immobile mobility)
18 Superimpression and superimposition (and juxtaposition)
19 Photographic disjunction (decoupage)
20 Stroboscopic views (decompose and juxtapose)‘Filmic’ procedures
21 Cinematic procedures (decompose and recompose)
22 Filmic animation of a picture
23 ‘Cine-peinture’
24 Techniques of animated drawing

Movement expressed by movement itself
25 Simple mechanical movement
26 Electro-mechanical, electronic, thermal, hydraulic and magnetic move¬ments
27 Mobiles (suspended objects)
28 Projections, reflections, refractions of light (variations in projectedcolours and forms)

Various procedures
29 Animation of the work by the spectator (active participation)
30 Movement through the growth or deterioration of the material
31 Repetition of formal elements (permutational order)217

A. Moles, R. Passeron, M. Scriabin, G. Prudhommeau, M-Th. Poncet, C. Gott¬lieb and M. Wahl, the art historians E. H. Gombrich and S. Giedion, and theartist-theoreticians A. Rodin, U. Boccioni, W. Kandinsky, R. Delaunay, N. Gabo,
L. Moholy-Nagy, J. Itten, J. Albers, C. Lapique and J. Bazaine. Their works
are cited in the bibliography.
The list of simple procedures in this table does not claim to be exhaustive. But
it may be useful in the interpretation of the different artistic phenomena involving
movement. Obviously, there are virtually no works of art in which one single
procedure has been used. It would, however, be reasonable to say that there isfrequently one procedure which dominates the work, whether as a semantic ora plastic element.
In the first group of procedures, which are classed as Figuration of movement,time is not involved. It is either absent, or it cannot be considered apart fromthe figuration. Procedures 1 to 8 require little comment. The ‘academic pose’ (1)has been adopted in both painting and sculpture, while ‘agitation of the charac¬
ters’ is the procedure which was extremely widespread at the time of the Renais¬
sance, and can often be equated with the use of gesture, as in Poussin’s UEnleve¬ment des Sabines. Procedures 3 and 5 are very close to one another. The themeof the rearing horse in Delacroix or of the running horse in Gericault and Degas
could be classed with 3., while the surrealist use of the wheel or Redon’s balloon
might be classed in the other category. Procedure 4 can be illustrated by Breughel’s
Parable of the Blind, Watteau’s U Embarquement pour Cythere (in Gottlieb’s
analysis) and Marchel Duchamp’s Nu descendant Vescalier. Figuration by succes¬
sive scenes (6) is the procedure which has been generally been used in fresco
painting since the Roman epoch. It has been taken up again by some of theso-called ‘naive’ painters. Procedure 7, movement denoted by external signs, canbe illustrated in sculpture by the modification of clothing to give the impressionof people walking against the wind - as in the case of the Winged Victory of
Samothrace. Lastly, the suggestion of instability as an indication of movement (8)is well demonstrated by Degas’ series of Danseuses in both painting and sculpture.
In the general category, Representation of movement, the element of time istacitly understood. E. Souriau holds that a distinction must be made between
the time which is implied within the universe of the work, and the time for the
spectator’s contemplation. Thus, in Rubens’ Coup de lance, a ‘dramatic’ timeis implied by the choice of the particular moment, whilst in the same artist’s
La Descente de croix it is necessary to reconstruct a ‘before’ and ‘after’, which
gives a ‘poetic’ time (9). The essential feature of procedure 10 is brought out by
a perceptive analysis of Rude’s Le Marechal Ney by Rodin. Rodin suggests thatthe passage of the eye from the feet to the raised arm of this statue recreatesthe successive moments involved in the representation.
It would probably be appropriate to introduce a large number of sub-divisons
into the category of Formal suggestions. These would correspond in the firstplace to each individual formal element, and also to the principal combinationsof elements. Colour ‘value’ (or luminosity) as a simple datum lies at the basisof the types of contrast which provide an impression of movement by ‘vibration’.
The pictures of Turner, Whistler, Monet (La Regate par temps gris a Argenteuil)and Redon (his Noirs) are relevant examples. Colour contrasts are frequently218

associated with music. Kandinsky claims that the rhythm of sounds can betransposed into painting, while Seurat attempts a ‘scientific’ juxtaposition ofcolours in addition to his application of the principle of complementarity. The
same type of problem preoccupied Delaunay, who was aiming, in the view of
P. Francastel, for a system of ‘static relationships between elements of colour
which would translate the dynamism of light’, and be realized as an image in the‘dynamic circular rhythm of the colour.’ It is also worth remembering that
Tatlin was anxious to create ‘kinetic’ effects through the juxtaposition of different
materials, possessing different natural colourings (his Counter-reliefs). Mondrian’s
interest in the juxtaposition of colours was directed towards discovering anequilibrium between the static and the dynamic element. At the end of his life,
he made use of the dynamism of ‘scintillating’ colours to express dynamism
in much the same way as Pinturicchio and Veronese had used the technique of
tempo. Herbin and Mortensen both used colours in juxtaposition to create move¬
ment, the former associating them with a kind of symbolism recalling that of
Kandinsky, and the latter attempting to arouse precise psychological reactionsin the spectator.
The ‘suprematist’ work of Malevich is relevant to procedure 11 (c), since
it involves the creation of different arrangements of moving forms around the
diagonal axis, with the aim of establishing ‘pure movement.’
The element of virtual movement in horizontals, verticals and diagonals hasoften been underlined. It still needs to be asked, however, up to what point theso-called ‘psychological’ lines which are held to form the ‘secret geometry’ ofworks really fulfil the function of capturing and directing the vision, and of
obliging it to follow the gesture or glance of a person - rather than simply fallingin with the accepted rules (of perspective, for example). The virtual properties ofline were studied and put into effect by Kandinsky in the majority of his nonfigurative works. They also formed the basis of Klee’s teaching at the Bauhaus,
while the Vorticists took straight lines and geometrical arcs as an expression of‘the energy of the spirit.’ Of course the ‘dynamizing’ power of the arabesque
has been brought into use at all periods and in all stages of civilization. In modern
art, it is the works of Gauguin and Matisse and the various manifestations of
Art Nouveau that are its most eloquent representatives.
Contrast between volumes, which is a frequent feature of modern sculpture,leads to a genuine style of positive and negative, concave and convex volumes,
as in the work of Lipchitz, Henry Moore, Zadkin, Archipenko etc. Contrast
between different types of transparency in materials has also been employed
as a plastic effect since the early experiments of Archipenko, Tatlin and theConstructivists. ‘Synthetic’ Cubism is quite close to this field, in the sense thatit creates movement through contrast of textures.
Besides these various contrasts which are obtained through sense data, there
is another procedure requiring several sub-divisions - that of contrasts in com¬position (12). These contrasts may be set up by a sharp linear division, as in thecase of the arabesque, which has already been mentioned for its dynamic qualities.
This is one way in which personal tempo can be introduced into compositions- for example, those of Delacroix. The various sub-classes of this procedure- change of size, change of axis (especially in relation to the diagonal), ‘dynamo-219

plastic’ arrangement of the figures — are to be found in the technical vocabularies
of innumerable painters. In sculpture, the corresponding field would be theinterplay between equilibrium and disequilibrium of volumes.
This last category has been classified by Gottlieb under the heading of‘Striving
forces’ (13). It belongs half-way between the class of Formal suggestions andthat of Precise perceptual suggestions, in which the ‘psychological’ time of thespectator enters into account. If we suppose that the spectator necessarily
completes the movement, we can accept this classification. But in this case, there
would be a temptation to include several of the procedures already described,
such as the scintillation of colours, the juxtaposition of textures, and the oppositionand division of colours. Certainly the best way to resolve this question would beby experimental means.
Procedure 14, the perceptual itinerary, can be identified also with the intellec¬
tual itinerary which Klee so often provides in his pictures. Some of Raphael’s
works could also be invoked here, as could pictures by Breughel, Rembrandt sAngel leaving Tobias and the work of the Romantic painter C. D. Friedrich,especially if this category is also to include dream journeys.
Two other procedures belong with those that have been mentioned. In Proce¬dure 15, the artist gives an impression of movement by his use of line or brush¬stroke. The origin of this approach lies undoubtedly in the personal gesture of
the painter, which has already become a conscious technique by the time of Van
Gogh. It was to be taken up again by the Expressionist painters and finally by
the Action painters. Procedure 16, by contrast, involves the restatement of what
were, in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, mere curiosities connected withanamorphosis and trompe-V oeil, with the modern purpose of arousing precise
perceptual reactions in the order of movement. This ‘virtual’ movement is above
all created by graphic means. But the works of the modern protagonists of‘virtual’
movement - Vasarely, Agam, Soto - also involve contrasts of colour and volume.
They invite comparison with certain perceptual phenomena that are well-known
in psycho-physiology.
A preliminary remark is necessary before considering the Photographic andcinematographic procedures. There has been an attempt to discover ‘photo¬graphic’ procedures in plastic works before the invention of photography, andcinematographic procedures before the development of the techniques whichwere to make up the art of the cinema. The basic assumption behind theseattempts was that a particular state of mind could exist before the actual inven¬tion of the technique. While this is a possible theory, it seems hardly probable,
and this enquiry at least is confined to historically valid examples. It is equally
implausible on the aesthetic plane that the artists should have limited themselves
to a technique which in a sense ‘fixes’ the eye, without having undergone theinfluence of external events. The fixation of vision which takes place in thephotographic snapshot can therefore be seen in direct relation to our category of‘immobile mobility’ (17). Degas’ La Voiture aux courses (1873), Seurat’s La
Parade and Le Cirque, and the majority of Monet’s temporally treated ‘themes’,such as La Femme a Vombrelle and Les Cathedrales are examples of this particular
procedure.
Procedure 18, which combines superimpression and superimposition (as well220

as juxtaposition), can be identified in Degas’ picture, Aux Courses: Jockeys
amateurs (1877-80), which also involves procedure 19 - photographic disjunction.
The former procedure is also featured in Seurat’s Le Chahut, as well as in
Lapicque, several of the Surrealists and the majority of Futurists.
Stroboscopic views (20), which have the effect of decomposing and juxtaposing
the forms within the work, are at the base of several compositions by Duchamp.
This particular procedure is now the subject of experiment by photographerssuch as Etienne-Bertrand Weill.
The cinematic technique (21), which involves the decomposition and recom¬
position of the picture, has encouraged the temptation to explain sequences ofnarrative images - such as the reliefs from the columns of Trajan and Antonius
at Rome and certain medieval frescoes - in terms of a cinematographic vision.
Hans Richter’s scroll paintings and the permutations on a visual theme which
occupy the attention of a number of young artists seem to derive directly fromthe techniques of cinematography.
The actual animation of the picture according to film technique, that is to
say the invention of a kind of filmic process which develops through methods
based exclusively on movement of the camera and photomontage, has beendeveloped in particular by Luciano Emmer. It puts into question the wholeproblem of the relationship between the plastic arts and the art of the cinema,
since the least intervention by the camera seems to transform the work and place
it in a completely different artistic category. It would therefore be true to saythat Valensi’s cinepeinture (23) and the techniques of animated drawing (24),which have been taken up by painters, belong on the frontier between the two
art forms.
Movement expressed by movement itself has been described as an attempt toincorporate the notion of space-time into the plastic work. The origin of what
has come to be known as ‘kinetic art’ has been ascribed to imitation of the phe¬nomena of movement in nature, to half-artistic, half-natural works like fountains
or fireworks, to works on the boundaries between art and mechanics like androids
and mechanical toys, and also to the continuous evolution and final liberationof the element of movement in the plastic arts themselves.
The automata of the eighteenth century have a direct relationship, in fact,
to procedure 25 in our table - simple mechanical movement. But there seems
little doubt that the modern manifestation of this technique actually derives froma reaction to the machine age, which may take the form of fascination or irony.
Picabia and Duchamp, in the first place, followed by such members of theyounger generation as Tinguely and Kramer, have adopted this procedure inorder to bring out the simultaneous beauty and monstrosity of the machine inmotion. More complex effects can be achieved by the use of electro-mechanical,
electronic, thermal, hydraulic and magnetic forms of movement (26), as in theworks of Schoffer, Kosice, and Takis. This procedure sometimes makes it
possible for the machine to replace the actor or dancer.
Procedure 27 involves a less predictable type of movement, and puts theaccent on the aesthetic of the object or construction, leaving aside any form ofprogramming or mechanical predictability. After Tatlin’s suspended ‘counter¬
reliefs’ and Rodchenko’s mobile constructions. Calder took over the technique221

and gave it a largely playful character, drawing his inspiration from vegetable
forms and from the neo-plastic research of Mondrian. Nowadays, a number ofSouth American artists have taken up the procedure once again, making use of
perspex in particular, since this is a material which lends itself admirably to the
purpose because of its lightness and transparency.
In procedure 28, the main emphasis lies on variations of colour, light andform in projection. The ‘ocular harpsichord’ of the Jesuit Father Castel, whichis the ancestor of the colour organs, dates from the eighteenth century. In thetwentieth century Scriabin, Wilfred, Klein, Pesanek, Hirschfeld-Mack, Schwerdtfeger, Schoffer and Malina have developed the same basic idea in their own ways.
The essential feature of this procedure lies in the changes in colour, form, andluminous intensity, which are usually projected on to a screen. When polaroidis also used, these effects can be multiplied to an astonishing degree, as can beseen in the works of Munari, Dantu and Salvadori.
In the last category of Various procedures, the active participation by thespectator can be a derivative of procedure 16, and result in the actual movementof the spectator in relation to the work. Agam has devised pictures and sculptures
around which the spectator must follow a precise itinerary for the various com¬positions to unfold before his eyes. He also invites the spectator to touch and set
in motion his audio-visual works. The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel ofParis offer an even greater variety of situations involving purely plastic phenome¬na, challenging the spectator to take an active part in the development andappreciation of the works.
Procedure 30 is a rather special category. Gustav Metzger uses the slow
deterioration of a sculpture or the rapid destruction of nylon sheet by hydro¬
chloric acid in his attempt to make the effects of time perceptible. The ‘organic’
growth which is a feature of Medalla’s work belongs to the same line of thinking:the artist makes use of the foam of a chemical liquid which is in a constantprocess of growth and decay.
Finally, we are putting under class 31 a procedure that is very old but has
had an interesting history in recent years. This is the simple repetition of motif,
theme or formal element. This ‘parallelism’ was developed, in one case, byHodler, who aimed to arrive at a unity by the repetition of like parts. The artists
associated with the Nouvelle Tendance have almost made a dogma out of thisprocedure. The order which the glance of the spectator follows in tracing thesequence of like elements is crucial for the appreciation of movement - andwould be an excellent subject for experimental study. It is quite possible toimagine that the kinetic work of the future will be composed by a permutational
machine.
How can our table of procedures be developed further, or used in its present
form? On the historical plane, there are indications that the procedures used
to denote movement in the same period by artists of widely differing aesthetic
positions often possess curious points of contact. For instance, it is possible to
make a study of prehistoric art in so far as it relates to ritual and magical practices
involving the theme of the hunt: to study Egyptian art in its relationship to bothsacred and profane ceremonies, or the art of the Greek vases in relation to thecult of beautiful bodies and attitudes. A similar relationship could be drawn

222between the animation of tympanums, stained-glass windows and frescoes in
the medieval period and the intense religious life of those times, and between
the figuration of movement in the Renaissance and the Baroque and the newconception of human life as drama which arose at this stage in history.
In our own age, the coincidences are particularly striking in the period around
1910, when special attention was being given to the problem of movement andto the machine aesthetic. Cubists, Futurists, Rayonnists, Orphists, Vorticists andExpressionists may be opposed to one another in their theoretical assumptions,but they make use of similar procedures for the expression of movement. Aneven more relevant example for our purposes is the introduction of real move¬
ment into the works of artists which subscribed to entirely different aesthetic
positions - Constructivists and Dadaists in particular. Both Moholy-Nagy andDuchamp created machines, both Rodchenko and Calder devised mobiles, bothMalina and Schoffer have more recently been concerned with lumino-dynamic
projections. These coincidences must surely imply the existence of some common
spirit or Zeitgeist.
As far as the psychology of movement goes, our table is probably useful only
in so far as it may throw some light on the studies of eye movement which are
likely to be undertaken in the future. Psycho-analytic studies, such as that ofAnton Ehrenzweig, have dwelt upon the problem of the animation of the pictorialsurface by unconscious projections, but they also invoke the notion of parallellism
between eye movements and movement in the picture itself. In the field ofexperimental aesthetics, there is interesting research on this particular problem
being carried on at the Institut d’Esthetique et des Sciences de l’Art, Paris, by
Molnar, and at the Cybernetic Centre, Milan, by Ceccato: both propose toestablish a scientific basis for assessing the readability of signs and elementary
forms. J. A. M. Howe has worked in a somewhat different direction, tending toestablish that a plastic statement of rather more complexity gives rise to entirely
random eye movements.

223

jj^J 10 Sketch for an aesthetic of movement

The aesthetic of movement can clearly be approached from several different
directions. As far as this study is concerned, it seems appropriate to follow up
our analysis of a number of works dating from the period which began in 1860with a statement of the aesthetic categories involving movement, and a commen¬tary on these categories drawn from the theory and practice of the artists underconsideration. The question of the spectator will have to be left to a subsequent
study, when there is sufficient evidence of the effects of movement in art on the
public as a whole. But some initial indications can be given from considering thereactions of observers who are also art critics, art historians and aestheticians andwho can therefore be presumed to be reasonably sensitive in their attitudes.
It may be said in parenthesis that, for the conjunction of artistic intentions
and spectator reactions to be of value, the development of the artist’s views andthe fluctuations of popular taste must be followed step by step. For this reason,
any aesthetic analysis or experimental test is only valid in relation to a particular
stage in the research of the artist and the visual education of the spectator. Any
aesthetic research which deals with artistic phenomena should therefore involvea historical factor, the word historical being taken to mean in this sense that an
artistic problem such as that of movement is posed afresh in every period, anda new solution arrived at in accordance with the historical and cultural context.
Quite obviously, the urgency of the problem diminishes each time such andsuch a discovery is made, and the problem then remains dormant until historicalor technical developments bring about a new way of looking at the subject andthe old solution rapidly comes to seem out of date.
Paul Souriau showed astonishing foresight when he posed the problem of
the aesthetic of movement primarily in terms of the scientific study of relation¬
ships between man’s physical movements and those of the animals, on the one
hand, and the perception of movement - and pleasure in movement - on theother. He held a distinctive view of the problem of the expression of movement,
which involved finding up to what point we experience, in our consideration of
movement, the exact counterpart to the emotion of the person who effected the
movement, and what effect this sympathetic emotion might be said to exercise
on our judgement. In these terms the expression of movement could be seenas the expression of ease (or grace) of movement, the expression of force or the
expression of moral feeling. The perception of movement might on occasions
be reduced to the level of pure appearances and subjective judgement, as if in224119 Angel Duarte(Equipo 57) Composition

response to the following question: ‘Does it please me, or doesn’t it?’ But what¬ever the value of appearances, ‘it would be impossible to deny the existence of a
special type of art which undertakes specifically to bring them out.’ As the lastsentence shows, Souriau performed the remarkable feat of anticipating thedevelopment of an art of movement. He also realized that this art would haveto stand on a scientific and rational basis.
The importance of Bergson in this connection can be demonstrated by thequotation of a few passages on the subject of movement which are particularly
significant. ‘Pure change,’ he writes, ‘real duration, is something spiritual or
impregnated with spirituality. Intuition is the quality which reaches the spirit,
duration, pure change... There is however a fundamental meaning: intuitive
thinking is thinking in duration. Intelligence arises ordinarily from the immobile,and constructs the quality of movement as well as it may from juxtaposed
immobilities. Intuition arises from movement, posits it or rather notices it asreality itself, and sees nothing in immobility but an abstract, instantaneous
moment which our mind has singled out of mobility. Usually it is of things - that225

is to say of the stable - that intelligence is given, and change becomes an accident
that is supplied afterwards. For the intuition change is the essential.’ ‘There arechanges, but there are not, beneath change, things that change: change has noneed of a support. There are movements, but there is not an inert, invariableobject which moves: movement does not imply a mobile object.’
Benda has suggested that Bergsonism is the result of ‘equivocation on “mo¬bility”’. He asks: ‘Is it continuity or force that Bergson is looking for? Is it thephenomenon taken in a state of continual change, in its infinitely small variations
as opposed to the phenomenon taken in its very small - but always determinedand established - variations; or is it movement, posited as the indivisible effectof a force, as the irreducible release of a tension, by contrast with any attempt
to compose movement from points in space, with spatial notions (in which casethere is nothing infinitesimal in this “mobility”)’
A defender of the Proustian method, Henri Bonnet, also questions Bergson’s
theory of mobility: ‘Bergson pretends to rediscover quality by plunging us into
mobility, by inviting us to wed within the depths of the self that progression ofstates of awareness which have ceased to be distinguished one from another.
Proust uses exactly the opposite method’ (i.e. involuntary memory, which isoutside time).
A. Chide, sharing the views of Bergson, considers the basic problem of philoso¬
phy to be that of the one and the many, the immobile and the mobile. ‘The
motionless,’ he writes, ‘was once at the very heart of the world, but for modern
science it has become a mere illusion that arises from categories vitiated at theirvery basis.’Friedrich Engels took as his starting point Hegel’s statement: ‘There is nomatter without movement, any more than there is movement without matter.’
From here he developed the view that movement, when applied to matter, is‘‘general change’ and that there is ‘nothing to say about a body which is notin motion.’ In an important letter dated 30 May 1873, he wrote to Marx: ‘The
study of the different forms of movement is therefore the essential object of thescience of nature.’
For Sartre, movement plays an ‘unveiling’ role. ‘It is the speed of our car or
aeroplane that organizes the great terrestrial masses.’ Man’s mediation is there¬
fore necessary: we are the ‘unveilers’ but we are inessential in relation to theobject which is unveiled. ‘The literary object is a strange kind of top, which
only exists in motion,’ since it is reading that makes writing live.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty is ready to affirm the primacy of vision over theconstruction of the mind in so far as the painterly representation of movement
is concerned. ‘My movement is not a decision of the mind, an absolute doing,
which decrees, from the depths of the subjective retreat, some change in position
that is miraculously carried out in extension. It is the natural consequence andthe maturing of a vision.’ Relying principally on the views of Rodin and Michaux,and bringing out the well-known paradox inherent in the distinction between anarrested movement and a photographic snapshot, Merleau-Ponty then launches
into a discussion on the aesthetics of movement which results in a phenom¬
enological explanation, very much in the tradition of Husserl: ‘Painting does notseek the externals of movement - but its secret codes. There are more subtle

226

examples of these than the ones which Rodin mentions: Every kind of flesh,even that of the world, radiates outside itself. But whether, in accordance withthe period and the school, people become particularly attached to obvious move¬
ment or to the monumental, painting is never entirely outside time, because it
always belongs to the carnal.’
For Merleau-Ponty, movement, depth, colour, form, line, contour and physi¬
ognomy are the ‘branches of Being’ and ‘each of them can lead back to the whole
clump; in painting there is no separate ‘problem’ and there are no truly opposing
paths, no partial ‘solutions’, no cumulative processes, and no options which areentirely closed.’
The phenomenology of Gaston Bachelard, which is based upon the emergenceof images and not upon an analysis of discourse, goes further than the continuity
and duration of Bergson. Movement, or rather change, is not situated on the levelof vision, as in the case of Merleau-Ponty, but on the level of the imagination:‘If there is no change of images, no unexpected union of images, there is no
imagination, no imagining action.’ ‘The value of an image can be measured by
the extent of its imaginative aura.’ ‘A psychology of the imagination in relation
to movement would have to determine the mobility of images directly. It would
necessarily lead to the tracing of an actual hodograph for each image, to sum up
its kinetism.’ For Bachelard, the importance of movement lies in the fact that
intimate impressions of mobility create a sympathy for a particular form ofmatter. In the case of the air, he admits that movement has a greater importancethan substance: ‘in that case there is only substance when there is movement.’
Bachelard adopts an uncompromising position in favour of the dynamic viewof movement - as opposed to the purely visual notion. ‘We must take into accountthe fact that the movement which is delivered to us by sight is not dynamized.
Visual mobility remains purely cinematic. Our sight follows the movement too
gratuitously for us to learn to experience it integrally, within ourselves.’ It istherefore dynamic, willed movement - an ascension of the psyche, as with
Nietzsche - that preoccupies Bachelard. Above all it is the intimate transforma¬tion which is the cause of this movement. ‘Explaining change in terms of move¬
ment, quality by vibrations, is taking the part for the whole, the effect for thecause. If metaphysics wishes to explain movement, it will have to undertake theexamination of beings in which the cause of movement lies genuinely in an
intimate transformation.’
The following passage is a fine illustration of Bachelard’s deepest thoughtson the aesthetic of movement: ‘In addition to the purely cinematic descriptionof a movement, it is always necessary - even in the case of a metaphorical move¬
ment - to give dynamic consideration to the material which is being workedby the movement.’• Categories of movement at the present day
According to E. Straus, movement that is lived is not an execution of movement,
and Becoming is not succession in time - just as a situation is not a position.
Straus therefore draws a distinction between lived movement and mechanicalmovement, concluding that the object of physical knowledge is the body that is227

120 Yaacov Agam
Nouveau so/fege, 1966. 1 cm. x 101 cm

moved, whilst the body in motion should be the subject of psychological research.
As far as the categories of movement go, V. Basch - the proponent of sympa¬
thetic imagination - divides the field of aesthetics into the Beautiful, the Sublime,
the Gracious, the Tragic, the Comic, and the particular spheres of art and theartistic imagination. Charles Lalo, who bases his conclusions on the observationof facts - positively observed and methodically elaborated, divides the aesthetic
categories into groups of three. Those dependent on the intelligence are theBeautiful, the Sublime and the Spiritual, those dependent on activity the Gran¬diose, the Tragic and the Comic, and those dependent on the sensibility theGracious, the Dramatic and the Ridiculous.
Raymond Bayer puts the main emphasis on four categories, the Sublime, theBaroque, Grace and Humour, whilst Etienne Souriau has established a ‘compass’with twenty-four categories: the Beautiful, the Noble, the Grandiose, the Sublime,
the Pathetic, the Lyric, the Heroic, the Tragic, the Pyrrhic, the Dramatic, theMelodramatic, the Caricature, the Grotesque, the Satirical, the Ironic, the Comic,
the Humorous, the Fantastic, the Picturesque, the Pretty, the Gracious, thePoetic, the Idyllic and the Elegiac.
Souriau returned to the same problem in 1956, when he either added or
specially singled out the following categories: the Beautiful, the Ugly, the ‘small
categories’ of the Pretty, the Suave, the Graceful and the Elegant, the Tragic andthe Dramatic, the Comic, the Picturesque and the so-called ‘agogic’ categories,
which are particularly relevant to our purpose. In Souriau’s view the agogic or
tempo (with its nuances of andante, adagio, presto, prestissimo etc.) must be
firmly distinguished from the rhythm which only refers to ‘a certain structuralorganization of time, generally realized by a cyclic figure’. ‘The agogic also refers
to nuances of acceleration or slowing down (allegro and andante in music), andthis category is technically almost impossible to explain - fastness and slowness
being simply the response to an impression.’ Two groups can nevertheless be
singled out: values connected with excitation or incitation, and values connectedwith appeasement and calm. Souriau applies this whole range of categories tothe plastic arts, on a very wide scale. He holds that the agogic categories mayachieve the Sublime if they ‘raise themselves to the highest pitch of being’.
R. Bayer suggests: ‘Grace is movement, and a state of ease within movement.’
His view of the aesthetic of movement is expressed in the following terms:‘Phenomena of the aesthetic order are all characterized, in all their registers,by a certain constancy; and this constancy is revealed to us by the study ofrhythms.’
It was Kant who added the category of the Sublime to the traditional systemof aesthetic categories, which centred on the unique value of the Beautiful. As
can be seen from the examples detailed above, the categories have multiplied
since then, and a very long list could be made to cover all the categories whichhave been established - those obeying the criteria of perception and language,
and respecting the different points of view of the aesthetician, the artist and thespectator.

228

• I Categories of the intellect
1

SURPRISE

This is intimately connected with the concept of innovation. The artist is at¬
tempting to discover new domains of vision and feeling. There is a kind ofpleasure associated with this activity of exploration, as there is in the violationof established rules and canons. At the same time, the artist’s intentions may
spring simply from a voluntary or involuntary naivete.
It is very difficult to establish to what extent the shock administered to theSalon-going public of the 1860s by the light vibrations of Manet and Monetarose from the conscious intention of these artists. But it is quite clear that theeffect on the spectator cannot be distinguished from the surprise caused by theelement of movement in these particular works. Modern works in virtual move¬
ment, like Jeffrey Steele’s Harlequinade or Bridget Riley’s Fall, involve boththe pleasure of exploration and a kind of giddy reaction that can easily become
unpleasant.
The ready-mades of Duchamp and Man Ray were the first modern works to
aim primarily for shock - as in the case of Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, a workof art and anti-art. Subsequent works by both Tinguely and the Nouvelle
Tendance obtain shock effects through real movement. The Labyrinths of theGroupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel of Paris cause the surprise of the spectator
to increase as he advances into the confined space.
Another relevant field lies in the movement of worlds which are generally
inaccessible to the human mind. Vardanega and Malina have provided inter¬
pretations of astronomical and astronautical movement, while Tomasini has
evoked sub-aquatic movement.
2 THE HUMOROUS
This can be placed on the borderline between ethical and religious categories.
Or it can be related to the serious, and to the feature of repetition, which Kierke¬
gaard and Bergson hold to be the chosen technique of the humorous. This
repetition can give rise to an aesthetic appreciation of the structure, and does
so in the case of several kinetic artists. Again, the humorous can also be related
to the game - with the laugh becoming a kind of defence against deception.
Bergson held that the comic and, to a certain extent, the humorous as well,
were related to the qualities of stiffness and automatism in movement. His famous
formula for humour was ‘the mechanical grafted on to the living,’ which implies
that the gesture ought to have as much life as the thought which gave rise to it.
Freud held that the source of the pleasure which we feel in humorous move¬ments lay in ‘the saving of an affective expense:’ it was ‘a contribution offeredto the comic by the intermediacy of the super-ego.’
The development of this category can be traced either from the ‘machineaesthetic’ of Picabia, or from the ‘spiritual and dream-like’ works of Klee, bothof which introduce the idea of humour in connection with movement. Thisdevelopment continues with the virtual movement enjoined upon the spectator
in Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau. Cruz-Diez has adopted a humorous and poetic
attitude towards current discoveries in the field of physiological vibration and230

colour mixture, which he puts into practice in his Physichromies. In the fieldof real movement, first Balia, and later Calder, Tinguely and Pol Bury lendirresistible humour to their works in motion.
3 ASTONISHMENT
The marvellous aspects of movement feature particularly in the theatre andchoreography of the seventeenth century. It has been suggested in this connec¬
tion that ‘the marvellous is in its essence dynamic.’
The demonstrations of Rosenstiehl aroused the astonishment of Robert
Delaunay, who later made use of the same colour-scale in his ‘turning disks’.
In the same way, the experiments of Marey which involved human and animal
movement studied on a black background without shadows, astonished painterslike Seurat. This type of astonishment which is aroused by chromatic phenomena
produced by movement has been recently exploited by various artists who makeuse of the still costly material of polaroid. The works of Olson require thespectator to move in front of the sheets of polaroid. Those of Munari, Dantu,
Salvadori, Stein and Malina involve real movement, which is generally suppliedby superimposed turning disks of polaroid.
4 LUDIC AMUSEMENT
This aesthetic category extends from the simple evocation of infancy by theuse of movements reminiscent of games to the swift and alert responses inducedby the ludic rhythms. There is no doubt that the increasing importance of the

121 Yvaral
Instabilite, 1963231

element of movement in the plastic arts has reinforced the link between art andgames, especially when this has facilitated the incorporation of music and thedance. It has been suggested that ‘the fracturing, redoubling and multiplicationof forms - the essential marks of inventions of this kind - provide the notion of
the total image, that is to say, the image which is capable of responding to asituation or milieu that is defined entirely by its festive exaltation.’
Evocation of infancy with the aid of ludic movement is a frequent feature of theworks of the Surrealists and their followers. The painting of Miro, for example,
abounds with it. More recently, Agam, Stein and Cruz-Diez have devised various
types of manipulable work, in which the artist’s intention can only be realized
through the ludic activity of the spectator. Roy Ascott has extended the same
principle for a pedagogic purpose, giving the relationship between the spectator
and the work an environmental scale.
Real movement has been used in the service of the game aesthetic in many ofCalder’s works. Von Graevenitz has relied on the same identification as the basisof his theoretical and practical activity. It is worth noting that the theories of
Guyau and other sociologists who make a direct opposition between the cate¬gories of work and the game have no application in these cases. This is principally
because of the distinctive association of art and technique, which also brings into
question the whole problem of chance - the calculable and the incalculable.
5 THE UNEXPECTED

Artists are able to exploit the effects of chance in nature and in the work of art
by means of the irregularities of movement, as well as through the choice of aparticular obstacle - a fountain, firework display or garden - which will inevitably
operate in an unpredictable way.
In the field of plastic art, the two artists who have done most to stress thequalities of unexpected movement are Arp and Michaux. The irregular move¬ments of the oil lamp were the foundation of Kastner’s research, while a numberof mobiles by Calder and Kenneth Martin make use of both ludic amusement
and the sense of the unexpected. Nicholas Schoffer introduced a mechanicalelement of ‘indifference’ or indeterminacy into his most elaborate work, theTower at Liege, in order to provide a corrective to the sense of predictability
which usually affects our reactions to mechanical and electronic movement.
Studies of mathematical probability have up to now been most inflential in
the field of music, but attempts are being made to apply them to the plastic arts
especially in America. Meanwhile A. Moles and F. Molnar are using the samedata to establish a theory of cybernetic art, to create works in which the tension
between predictable and unpredictable movements plays an dominant part.
6 THE FANTASTIC

122 Nicolas Schoffer
Microtemps, 1966

The entire range of imaginary movements - flight, levitation, falling etc. can be used in the evocation of the fantastic, as can the sensations of strangenessand the extraordinary. Redon’s Balloons and surrealist works such as the marine
pictures of Tanguy are cases in point. In Schwitters’ Merzbau, the surprisingjuxtapositions of materials yield to the impression of pure fantasy when the
spectator moves. German artists of the younger generation, such as Hans
Haacke, have recently allowed the element of fantasy to run riot.

233

7 THE IMPOSSIBLE
This is the dominant category in the so-called ‘Theatre of the Marvellous’.
The impossible may be evoked through the figuration or representation of
movement - for instance, by the impression that physical laws like the lawof gravity are being broken. The impossible can also be used, strangely enough,to reveal the internal structures of nature, the mechanisms of perception or theactual structure of the work of art. Certain works by Picabia, which suggest
movement, were devised in a spirit of revolt with the aim of presenting theimpossible in aesthetic terms. Picasso is not entirely foreign to this type ofenterprise, at any rate in the early part of his Cubist period. Here it was a matterof imaginary movement around and through the object, with the aim of providing
a close analysis of the object in itself. This movement becomes real in the caseof Agam, when the spectator himself discovers the structure of the work, andexperiences an intensified sense of temporality.
Archipenko was probably attempting to force the gates of the unknown in his
sculptures Medrano /, Medrano II and particularly Archipentura. Kosice’s use of
the movement of water to contradict gravitational forces also puts us in thepresence of the impossible.

• II Categories of the environment
8

IDENTIFICATION WITH NATURE

Movement like that of the wind and the sea have always inspired artists. Whistler,
Victor Hugo, Monet, Maillol and Hokusai all attempted to represent the wave.
In the case of Van Gogh, this concern with the forces of nature is combinedwith a desire for identification with the cosmos: the movements are charged withpersonal anguish and yet they convey this desire for communion with natureand the world. A number of Expressionists and Pre-expressionists like Munch,
Nolde and Schmidt-Rottluff have followed the same direction, making use ofvarious forms of natural and emotional movement. There is the same attempt
to participate in natural and cosmic forces in the work of an abstract artist like
Kupka.
Vasarely has often tried to translate the corpuscular and wave movementsof the physical world into aesthetic terms. Takis insists on the spectator identi¬
fying himself with the forces of magnetism. Malina and Vardanega are bothclosely concerned with forces and movements in the cosmos, although theiridentification does not always disclose itself on the level of representation.
Albrecht invites us to take part in the processes of vegetable growth, while
Metzger makes use of destructive and constructive forces in an association ofmatter and time which is dependent on real movement.
9 life (and vitalism)
Movement in the works of Degas and Seurat often gives rise to an aesthetic
sense of identification with life, which can be directly related to the preliminary
experiments in the physiological and photographic fields by Marey and Muy¬
bridge. In the same way, there is often a suggestion of organic growth in thework of Klee. Expressionists, and in particular Marc, have tried to identify

234themselves with nature and the cosmos through the introduction of animal
movement. As far as virtual movement is concerned, the desire to integrate thework of art with the life of the city through the use of kinetic repetition andmimetic devices is a feature of the programme pursued by Vasarely and his
disciples. Pol Bury uses real movement of a biological or organic type, while
Medalla takes organic growth as the basis of his work.
10 THE MACHINE AESTHETIC
The introduction, suggestion and employment of machine movements in art canbe equated with the idea of an identification with the industrial and mechanicaluniverse that is as much within the field of magic as that of aesthetics. The artist
can achieve this identification with the modern world in one of two ways. He
can suggest or employ types of movement which present the technical world interms of the beauty of the machine. Or he can attempt a commentary - more
often than not ironical - on the technological aspects of movement. The aesthetic
quality which arises can range from the vitalism which was discussed in theprevious paragraph to a form of aggressivity which calls for psychoanalytic
commentary.

123 Group T (Boriani, Anceschi)
Maquette for 'Kunst Licht Kunst'
exhibition, Eindhoven, 1966235

A special place must be given to trains, cars, aeroplanes etc., which figuredin the works of the Impressionists and the Futurists, in general, and those of
the Delaunays and Leger in particular. Marcel Duchamp began by confining
himself to the purely formal aspects of machine movement, and later intensified
the spectator’s feeling of identification with the mechanical process by the useof optical devices. Tinguely has developed a wide range of types of real movementin his machines and small assemblages, which are intended to conjure up theanguish of the industrial universe. Schoffer, on the other hand, attempts an
integration with the modern world by the use of types of real movement that aretechnically very advanced.

• III Categories of the sensibility
11 HYPNOSISThe sheer repetition of certain well selected stimuli can give rise to a hypnotic
state. Mention has already been made of the hypnotic effects induced by the
representation of successive scenes in biblical episodes, effects which gain added
strength from the fact that the stained-glass window, with its luminous intensity,
is often the chosen medium. The repetition of figures which is found in Hodler
and the ‘combinatory’ use of unhappy faces in Jawlensky recall this phenome¬
non.
A number of artists achieve hypnotic effects of unusual intensity. Asis does
so with the help of optical effects and repetitions, Morellet by the use of lightstimuli, and Martha Boto through repetition of formal elements. The notion ofrepetition lies at the centre of the doctrine of the Nouvelle Tendance.
The technique of producing successive light stimuli in motion has also been
employed for projections on walls and screens. Soriano’s synfilmies give rise tomarked hypnotic effects, which recur in the Anamorphoses and Microtemps of
Schoffer and have, in his case, been developped for medical purposes.
12 THE IRRATIONAL FACTOR
The subconscious - or unconscious - is a field which provides much evidence
for the existence of irrational movements, and particularly those which occur
in dreams. The daydream, for instance, is of unusual interest to us since it relies
upon the idea and the image of movement. Dadaists, Surrealists, naive painters
and the so-called ‘petits mai'tres de la folie’ have made more or less conscious
use of movements that were irrational in their implications, as have Redon (in his‘Noirs’), Michaux, Pollock, Bridget Riley and Giacometti( in his ‘suspended’
objects). Quite a large number of works involving light and movement succeedin evoking the world of dream or delirium, although they may be calculated andsometimes executed with the greatest degree of logic and precision. Castel,
Kastner, Moholy-Nagy, Schoffer and Hans-Walter Muller come to mind in thisconnection. The line of research which is being pursued by P. K. Hoenich
involves a combination of light projections from the sun and wind movement.
These come together in the ‘robot-painter’.

236

124 Group MID
Generateur no. 8, 1965. Stroboscopic
effects

13 ANGUISH
Such phenomena as the violent transformation of colour, the appearance anddisappearance of rainbows, cloudy skies, impressions of vacuity and all formsof menacing movement, which relate to an actual or potential danger, lendthemselves particularly well to this category. In the work of Pre-expressionist
and Expressionist painters like Munch and Nolde, these effects can be given
unusual power by a violent use of colour and gesture. Later Nordic artists in theexpressionist tradition, such as Appel, carry on this tradition. The artists be¬longing to the Dutch group Nul try to disconcert the spectator by introducing
faint vibrations and almost imperceptible movements into works which areentirely concerned with creating a sensation of emptiness. The monsters ofRobert Muller and the creations of Foldes fall within the field of real movement,
while the destructive choreographic movements of the Japanese group Gutai
create an aesthetic response that is dependent on the disturbing combination of
beauty and destruction.

237

14 DISPLEASURE
This feeling can become valid in aesthetic terms if the spectator’s participationon the psychological level is adequately secured. Effects of light and colour
interference and of continually changing forms have been used with this end inview.
In a picture like Nolde’s Kerzentanzerinnen, the movement is deliberately
ugly in character, and gives the sensitive spectator a feeling of revulsion which
he may transform into feelings of a deeper and more passionate kind. Alechinsky
uses non-figurative methods and, in particular, expressive gestural movements
to force the spectator into the same aesthetic process.
In Cruz-Diez’ Physichromies, the spectator’s vision is deliberately assaulted
by unpleasant plastic effects so that he can achieve a new appreciation of colour.
Through the sensation of displeasure, his attention is awakened. Several of the
Nouvelle Tendance artists have been willing to go beyond this point where
optical effects become positively disagreable in order to stimulate a more active
form of vision. Bridget Riley holds a similar point of view. And an artist like
Metzger, who uses real movement for auto-destructive ends, begins by creating
unfavourable reactions in the spectator and is then able to interest him in the autocreative process which follows.
15 NOSTALGIA‘Nostalgia’, writes Marian Winter, ‘is absolutely necessary in the Theatre of theMarvellous, as are the desire to make journeys, a simple morality, spiritual
uncertainty and aesthetic curiosity.’
Cut-out forms and arabesques in the work of Gauguin - even more so in
the Art Nouveau of Galle in the Nancy school, and the style of Klimt - share thisnostalgic quality. In non-figurative painting, it is the musical associations of
nostalgia and sentimentality that predominate. Kupka and, to an even greater
degree, Kandinsky make ample use of parallels between plastic and musicalrhythm, and are at the same time prone to a nostalgia for the past, the ideal orexperiences that are irrecoverable.
16 PURE SENSATIONThis modern attitude towards movement, which consists in reaching the sensesof the spectator without any intermediary, can easily be traced back to the
Impressionists, and to Monet in particular. The method of suggesting light andmovement by vibrations was taken up by the Neo-impressionists, Cezanne andeventually painters and constructors like Malevich who had abandoned thefigurative basis.
The immediate aim of virtual kinetic art is to reach the spectator’s perception
and so to encourage his participation. South American artists like Soto, Asis andCruxent use the moire effect with this aim in view, while the artists of the Nouvelle
Tendance (in particular those belonging to the Groupe de Recherche d’Art
Visuel of Paris) and Tomasello, with his chromatic shadows, pursue the sameideal of pure and direct sensation.
A whole series of types of research that lie on the periphery of art - startingwith such optical spectacles as Baker’s Panorama (1787) and Daguerre’s Diorama

238

(1822) - can be identified with this line of research. It is also exemplified in themachines of von Graevenitz, the suspended mobiles of Kenneth Martin, andthe supported mobiles of George Rickey, which arouse immediate sensations
through their variety of movement.

• IV Categories of action

17 THE AGOGIC
Since the time of the Futurists, speed has been one of the most favoured themesof modern art. Since the First World War, however, a new generation, with a
new attitude to this phenomenon, has grown to maturity. Kinetic artists who
have had a scientific education, such as Malina, are aware of the speed of lightas an absolute limit.
From a purely artistic point of view, the types of movement used in the fieldof the agogic - whether by mere suggestion or by effective movements - areliable to vary from the extremely rapid (Balia’s Turbine and Orbite celesti) tothe almost imperceptible (Bury). In the work of Delaunay, movement is steadierin pace, but the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel have made an intelligent useof optical acceleration in their Labyrinths. Len Lye has also used tempo in an
intelligent way in his Tangible Motion Sculptures, which involve a varied pro¬gramme of vibrations. Schoffer has succeeded in programming a complex se¬quence of slow and fast movements, which are visible both directly and throughreflection and distortion: the period when the work stops moving altogether isalso part of the programme.
18 SEXUALITY
The movement of the figures in Watteau’s UEmbarquement pour Cythere has
been interpreted as an illustration of the progress of love. A more or less con¬cealed symbolism of sexual movement can be found in Picabia’s La Parade
amoureuse, Duchamp’s Nu descendant Tescalier, and Le Roi et la Reine entoures
par des nus vites, as well as in Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. Obviously the
Surrealists were eager to make their own interpretation of the theories of Freud.
As far as real or virtual kinetic works are concerned, Duchamp’s major work
- La Mariee mise a nu par les celibataires, meme - remains the earliest usage. But
there is clearly an erotic intention in the constructions which Giacometti madearound 1930-32. More recently, Van Thienen has taken his inspiration directlyfrom sexual movement, although his constructions in real movement remain
above all else those of a musician. Malina and Schoffer both make use of typesof movement bordering upon this category, but their intentions are cosmic
and spiritual.
19 GRACE
Castiglione writes in the first book of his Perfect Courtier: ‘Grace should be theaccompaniment of all the actions, gestures and conduct - in fact all the move¬ments - of the courtier.’ Guyau writes, with reference to Spencer: ‘What kindof movement gives us the impression of grace, when we ourselves are performing239

it or when we are watching it? It is the kind of movement in which all musculareffort seems to have disappeared and the limbs work freely, as if supported byair. Hence the supremacy of curvilinear movement... ’This element of grace in movement is present in many manifestations of
Art Nouveau. It can also be found in the works of Soto, where the movement isof the virtual type, and in the mobiles of Kenneth Martin, which are the epitomyof this particular category in the field of virtual movement. Works such as theseaspire to a kind of mathematical infinity through the grace and complexity of
their operations.
20 BALLET, ACROBATICS, SPORT
There is a very distinctive flavour about the way in which artists have given
expression to choreographic movements ever since prehistoric times. The wide
range of movements of this type exploited by Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec
underline the importance and distinctiveness of the category. Cubists andVorticists continued in the same tradition, while Delaunay transposed the
movement into the realm of sport, in his Coureurs and Equipe de Cardiff. Men¬tion has already been made of the influence which Loie Fuller’s illuminatedveils exerted on the art of her times.
In the case of Kramer, we have the personal experience of a dancer being
adapted to the world of machines. With Metzger, the auto-destructive spectacleis accompanied quite consciously by gestures and movements that seem toevoke a strange dance. Schoffer has actually devised a number of cybernetic
sculptures which can themselves take part in choreographic spectacles.

e V Categories of transcendence
21 TIME AND ETERNITY
A large number of the artists who are featured here have intentionally tried toincorporate time or space-time into their works. The sense of time and eternity
was a frequent topic with Rodin. In the modern field of virtual kinetic movement,
Agam makes frequent allusions to the irreversibility of time, as a means of
disclosing the unity and simultaneity of natural phenomena. Calos uses the real
movement of light to evoke a kind of religious feeling which is close to his personal
preoccupations, while Schoffer - whose spiritual concerns are of quite a different
order - seeks to impress time and ‘micro-time’ on our sensibility through move¬ments that are minutely programmed.
22 FREEDOM AND CONSTRAINT
Movements that suggest freedom are usually connected with the artist’s desire
to emphasize the need for escape. By contrast, the impression of constraint in
the work of such artists as Rodin is the result of rigidly disciplined movements orthemes of capture. These two forms of movement are complementary, and suggest
the same area of aesthetic meditation.
Pollock tried to express a sense of liberty in a period which was characterizedby constraint through his use of drip and gesture. Kandinsky aimed to convey
the same sense through a rigorous abstraction of forms, lines and colours which240

give the impression of movement. In the case of Agam, the sense of freedom isclosely linked to the way in which the spectator develops the plastic statements
implicit in the work in terms of his own free movement. One might say that
Bury uses real movement to convey a sense of liberation from physical forces
and so to attain the transcendental.
23 evolution (progress)
This category is connected with the idea of modernity and the myth of modernolatria. The use of movement in the work of the Impressionists - especially thatof Monet - already contains this element, which is taken up by the Neo-impres¬sionists and especially by Seurat, whose vocabulary of themes includes the Eiffel
Tower as an expression of modern life. Delaunay and the Futurists took thenotion one stage further, and Leger provided a more sober equivalent. At thepresent day, the artists of the Nouvelle Tendance put strong emphasis on theuse of new materials as one of the methods of demystifying art. Both Wilfredand Darie are concerned with the poetic reinterpretation of modernity in a
number of their works.
24 RUPTURE
This category would include all linear or cyclic movements which involve a period
of interruption or a sudden change in direction. It is often to be equated with
the notion of progress taking place through a series of revolutions.
This is the quality which is apparent in the crowd movements of Ensor, and,to some extent, in the disconnected brush-strokes of a precursor of Expres¬sionism like Van Gogh. More recently, the members of the Groupe de Recherched’Art Visuel of Paris have experimented with the idea of rupture brought about
by brusque movements.
Tatlin, Gabo and their friends were involved in projects which brought into
clear relief the correlation between brusque movements on the plastic plane andthe notion of rupture or revolution in society. In the case of Duchamp, the same
impulse corresponds to an anarchical interpretation of the world, the feelings
and the intellect. Moholy-Nagy and, in particular, Schoffer have often made useof sudden interruption in plastic movement.
25 SPIRITUAL ENERGY
The concept of spiritual energy, in its accepted sense deriving from Bergson,
ressembles the ‘energy of the spirit’ celebrated by the Vorticists, being basedon the association of ideas between movement as a force and the figurative
representation of movement. Among the Vorticists, Wyndham Lewis andGaudier-Brzeska made use of ‘formalized’ movements in order to stress theelement of pure intellect - the energy of the spirit. It could also be said that theentire work of Kandinsky depends upon an identification between movement
and the image of movement, on the one hand, and the intellectual and spiritualcharacter of art. The element of movement which is understood in Brancusi’s
work depends on much the same identification, while Takis and Kosice go far
beyond this stage in visualizing the hidden forces of the universe.

241

26 SYNTHESISOne of the most well-attested features of movement in art is its tendency towards
the spectacle. We have already referred to the series of theatrical and choreo¬graphic presentations at the Bauhaus, which are associated with the names ofSchlemmer, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy and Farkas Molnar. The reflected lightcompositions of Hirschfeld-Mack and Schwerdtfeger were conceived in thesame spirit. The ideas of Appia and, in particular, Edward Gordon Craig lie
behind these various manifestations, while the ‘synaesthetic’ experiments of
Scriabin belong to the same tradition. Several of the colour-organs created overa long period of time can be related to this rather occult field of research involving
movement and synaesthesia: that of Rimington is a case in point.
The reference to ‘chromatic’, ‘skiachromatic’ and ‘anamorphic’ movements
in several of the manifestoes of Nicholas Schoffer and Siegfried Albrecht alsosuggests the presence of this category. The Italian groups make use of cinemato¬graphic projections and slides while pursuing at the same time their purely
plastic lines of research. The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel attempts toactivate the spectator with a whole range of kinetic devices. But the group has
not yet brought out a satisfactory theoretical statement dealing with the wider
implications of their ‘total’ experiences.
27 THE SUBLIMEIn the West, the notion of the sublime is mainly associated with the physicaland psychological universe, while in the East a philosophy such as that of the
Rasa relates the sublime to aesthetic movement. It is probably because of thewidespread influence of oriental thought on the Western artists of today thatmovement is often associated with an evocation of the sublime and the absolute.
For instance, the abstraction of both Malevich and Mondrian is directed towards
attaining the sublime through a dynamic treatment of forms. The metaphysicalatmosphere of the work of Chirico and Magritte, which suggests an attempt toevoke an ulterior reality, turns upon the absence of movement. In the work of
Tobey, movements, strokes and signs are used to create an impression of emp¬
tiness - the Nirvana of oriental thought - and to encourage the spectator tocontemplation.
The Nul Group in Holland and the Zero Group in Germany have tried toconvey the slightest vibrations in light, and the most insignificant types of move¬
ment and change that are still perceptible to the spectator, in a metaphysicalatmosphere of absolute emptiness and purity: works by Uecker, Henk Peeters,
Reinhardt and Sommerrock are relevant to this point. It is also worth rememberingthat Wilfred’s pure art of light, a radical departure from the tradition of Castel
and Scriabin, was dedicated to the achievement of the sublime through con¬templation, and that Wilfred’s disciples have not abondoned his principles.
Although it is very probable that all or at least some of the categories mentioned
above might be found in a single work, if it was observed for long periods andon several occasions, this does not invalidate the attempt to discover the pre¬dominant categories in the works which are most interesting from the point ofview of movement. The path of future research on this subject lies in a more
intensive study of the correlations between the aesthetic categories of movement,242

the intentions of the artist (whether expressed or not), the different genres of
movement employed or suggested in the works, the critical opinions expressedby qualified spectators (aestheticians, critics and art historians), the perception
and assessment of the element of movement by the public at large (to be dis¬covered through experiment and verified by tests), the procedures and techniques
utilised by artists, the stylistics of movement and finally the study of a selectnumber of important works. There is reason to hope that this synthesis will
one day be made.

243

HU Conclusion

It has been established that the idea and the image of movement - taken ina fairly wide sense with relation to the plastic arts - converge in an extremely
characteristic way after 1860. Obviously movement as a theme or, in a moreconcealed way, as a plastic dimension was at the centre of the artist’s concern
in various other periods. But it is only from the time of the Impressionists thatit has played such an important role. By placing movement in the forefront,
these artists and their successors contributed towards its ultimate liberation,
which was to be the outcome of a dialectical process involving at the same timethe disappearance of the subject and the multiplication of images in art.
We have been able to follow the development of artistic mechanisms andimages - in the widest sense of the word - in terms of the opposition between
objective and subjective movement which recurs within every generation.
Objective movement - or movement perceived directly in nature - could be
identified with the Impressionists, while subjective movement or movement of an
expressive type could be seen as a feature of the works of Redon and Rodin.
At a later stage, the objective movement of the Neo-impressionists, which waspartly influenced by photography and scientific theory, could be juxtaposedwith the subjective movement in the work of Van Gogh, Gauguin, Ensor, Munch,
Hodler, and Bourdelle. Contemporary with the period of the ‘Tragic generation’
were the first signs of abstraction in the graphic movement of Art Nouveau.
Around 1912, in the next generation, an element of intellectual movement thatlay between objective and subjective forms of movement became operative. But
this was the last time that the thematic treatment of movement acquired an
importance equal to that of the plastic expression of movement. Meanwhile theobjective movement of Delaunay and the Cubists could co-exist with the intellec¬
tually conceived movement of the Futurists, Picabia, Duchamp, the Vorticists,
Rayonnists, Suprematists and Constructivists, as well as with the ‘felt’ movementof the Fauves, Expressionists and artists such as Kandinsky and Klee.
To the generation active around 1930, objective movement - especially thatwhich arose from abstract visual effects - could be related to psycho-physiologicalpreoccupations, whilst the intellectual movement of Surrealism drew deeply on
psychoanalysis, the dream world and techniques such as automatic writing. The
subjective movement of the Expressionists, both abstract and figurative, was tolead to a new emphasis on gesture and a tradition of animating the picture throughfree rhythms that was to end with the Action Painters. At this stage, sculpture244

also achieved a greater degree of animation as a result of the use of new materials
such as wire and perspex.
In the course of these four generations, we can see the faint signs of the birthof a new art, based on the use of movement as a real and independent element.
But the origins of this art must be pursued much further, into technological andnatural as well as plastic and intellectual fields. The influence of the other arts is
also of vital importance, while half-artistic and half-technical constructions - suchas hydraulic machines, automata and the cinematograph - also occupy a signifi¬
cant place.
The kinetic art of the present day includes works in virtual and in actual
movement, in two or three dimensions. Each of these four divisions reflects avery different tradition. The source of virtual movement can be traced back to
the exploitation of trompe-Voiel and anamorphoses in Antiquity, the Renaissanceand the Baroque. In more recent times, it falls naturally into several branches ofactivity, which are all based upon the possibilities of abstract designs but differ
according to whether the emphasis is placed on the plastic element of colour,
luminosity, volume etc. Among the artists who have contributed a great deal tothis development are Delaunay, Herbin, Albers and other masters from the
Bauhaus.
We have been able to follow the various stages of this tradition in its mostrecent phase through the works of Vasarely, Agam and Soto, who are at present
the dominant figures. We have also seen that, on many occasions, the purely
optical preoccupations of these artists have given rise to kinetic research ofother types. A sense of movement has been established through the active par¬ticipation of the spectator - principally by his movement in front of the workor by his manipulation of the elements involved in the work. In this way a ludic
and pedagogic dimension has been introduced, and a new relationship between
the artist, the work of art and the spectator has arisen.
In the case of three-dimensional works in real movement, there is an important
division between machines and mobiles, which depends upon their greater orless degree of predictability. This particular trend has been strongly marked
by the so-called machine aesthetic, and has retained the antinomy between
Constructivism and Dada which developed in the years 1910-20. The modernolatria of the Futurists was also converted into the realist and surrealist works of
Duchamp, Tatlin, Gabo, Archipenko and Moholy-Nagy - works which arecentral to the understanding of that branch of kinetic art which expresses the
Zeitgeist either in technological or in purely artistic terms. Theoretical pro¬nouncements like the manifestoes of Gabo and Pevsner, Moholy-Nagy and
Kemeny, played an important part in this development.
The emphasis in this study has been on the forces which activate the works,
at least as far as this category is concerned. The majority of the machines movein response to electro-magnetic forces. But human forces, hydraulic and magnetic
forces, even solar forces and cybernetic devices also play their part. In the fieldof the unpredictable, the mobile work is set in motion either by random currentsof air or by direct manipulation.
The movement of mobiles has not, in general, kept the attention of artists
for very long. However the mobile has its place in the development of kinetic245

art. Calder’s mobile constructions succeeded a series of ‘counter-reliefs’, con¬structions and suspended objects in the Dada vein. In the years that followedvarious light materials such as wood, wire and perspex were exploited to anincreasing degree in the construction of mobiles which derived from a simple
geometrical elements: perspex was particularly useful in giving rise to effects oftransparency. Other forces of the physical universe were also being used in thecreation of works of art that featured unpredictable movement. Water, fire andvarious acids made a somewhat unexpected entry into the field of movement in
art.
The last group of important works within the overall field of kinetic art isconcerned with light and movement. Works of this kind can be traced back tothree distinct sources: the colour-organs, the cinema and the mobile theatre
set. Luminous movement is displayed, almost universally, on a surface such asa screen or wall, and may be accompanied by music. It was effectively around1920 that the changes in colour and form in various types of work were summed
up in what was a genuinely new art. The construction of the Clavilux by Wilfred
and the concerts which he and other inventors gave on instruments of this kindmarked the birth of a particular trend in kinetic art. Around 1950, this means ofexpression had a dramatic renewal, which resulted in the construction of a large
number of important works differing from each other principally on the levelof scale. On a relatively small scale there were the ‘cinechromatic apparatuses’,
the luminous pictures, the ‘chromokinetic’ works and light mobiles, which werein effect the equivalent of traditional paintings in motion. On the scale of the
public sign, there were similar works which suggested immediate functional
applications. On the scale of the public spectacle, there were works such as
those of Schoffer and Darie, which belonged to the context of public performance
just as much as Valensi’s ‘cinepeinture’ - an art lying on the boundaries between
the cinema and the plastic arts.
In making a systematic grouping of the various techniques and processes used
to indicate movement - and in sketching an aesthetic of movement which derives
from the aesthetic categories of the intellect, the environment, the sensibility andthe transcendental world - our aim has been to indicate the future progress ofthe element of movement in the visual arts, in addition to the obvious functionof giving a scientific basis to the research which has been undertaken in thisstudy. Consideration of the way in which each procedure and each aesthetic
category has evolved has helped to demonstrate the possible applications of
movement in the other arts. Synchronized movement, for example, points
towards the development of new forms of the art of spectacle. Plastic works inmotion can be used with particular relevance in architecture, industry and town
planning.
But apart from this speculation about the future there is one fact whichappears to be securely established - that, through various well-defined stages
from 1860 to the present day, the innovators in the plastic arts have exploitedan ever-increasing range of new materials and techniques, and that through aseries of aesthetic investigations which have led them to the very highest cate¬gories, they have transformed the image of movement in art into a genuine artof movement.
246

Appendices

The generations of artists* Names of artists associatedwith the succeeding genera¬tion have been put in brackets.
The forerunners of kinetic
art, mentioned in chapters 5
to 8, are in italics in the lists
for the first four generations.

1. Generation bornc. 1840
1830
1832
1834
1839
1840
1841

1844
1848

Pissarro
Manet
Degas
Whistler
SisleyCezanneRedon
Rodin
BazilleGuillaumin
Berthe Morisot
RenoirRousseau, H.
(Gauguin)

1871

1872
1874
1875
1876
1877

1878
2. Generation bornc. 1860
1848
1853
1856
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863

1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870

Gauguin
HodlerVan Gogh
Cross
Luce
Segantini
SeuratEnsor
SickertBourdelle
Maillol
Klimt
Van Rysselberghe
Munch
Serusier
SignacStuck
Van de Velde
Jawlensky
Seraphine
Toulouse-Lautrec
Vallotton(Kandinsky)(Nolde)Bonnard
ValadonBernardVuillard(Matisse)
Denis, M.,

1879
1880

1881

1882

1883

1884
1885

3. Generation bornc. 1880

125 Gunther Ucker
Flotter flottant, 1959

1866
1867
1869

249

Kandinsky
Nolde
Matisse

1886

Balia
Feininger
Kupka
Rouault
Scriabine
Mondrian
Meyerhold
Schonberg
Uhde
MarquetBrancusi
Duchamp-Villon, R.
GonzalesDesmetDufy
Kubin
Van Dongen
Freundlich
Malevich
Picabia
Klee
Survage
DerainEggeling
EpsteinHartwig
Kirchner
Marc
Carra
Gargallo
Gontcharova
Larionov
Lehmbruck
Leger
Pechstein
PicassoBoccioni
BraqueHerbinLewis, W.
Wouters
Gropius
HeckelMetzinger
OrozcoValensiSeverini
Van Doesburg
Utrillo
Modigliani
Schmidt-Rottluff
De La Fresnaye
Delaunay, R.
Delaunay, S.
Lhote
RussoloTairov
TatlinKokoschkaOzenfant

1887

1888

1889

Permeke
PevsnerRiveraVantongerloo
Archipenko
Chagall
Le Corbusier
Duchamp, M.
Gris
Macke
Schwitters
AlbersArp
Baranojf-Rossine
Bissiere
Charchoune
ChiricoMagnelli
Richter, H.
Ruttmann, W.
Schlemmer
Baumeister
Tauber-Arp, S.
Wilfred, Th.

4. Generation bornc. 1900
1890

1891
1892
1893
1894

1895

1896
1897

Bragaglia, A. G.
Gabo
MacDonald Wright
Man RayMorandiEl Lissitzky
Tobey
ZadkineErnst, M.
Rodchenko
Kiesler
Hirschfeld-Mack
MiroAnnenkoff
BerlewiHealeyNicholson, B.
Prampolini
SoutineJanco
Laszlo, Alex.
Moholy-Nagy, L.
Van Velde, B.
Bloc
MassonSchneider, G.
BeothyDelvaux
Schwerdtfeger
Sevranckx
Vertov

1898

1899
1900
1901

1902
1903

1904

1905
1906

1907

1908

1909

CalderEisenstein
Fautrier
Lapicque
Magritte
Moore, H.
Van Velde, G.
Fontana
Michaux
DomelaTanguyDubuffet
Giacometti
HayterLye, Len
Marini
SeuphorLanskoy
Lohse
BodmerBraunerHep worth
Linck, W.
BazaineEsteveGorky, A.
Hartung
Richier
Martin, K.
Tal Coat
Birolli
Dominguez
Poliakoff
Hajdu
Hoenich, P. K.
KemenyMartin, Mary
MunariRickeyWotrubaBill, M.
Darie
Manzu
PasmoreV. da Silva
Vasarely
Livinus van de Bundt
OlsonSingier

1913

1914

1915

1916
1917
1918

1919
1920

1921

1922

1923

1924
5. Generation bornc. 1920
1910
1911

1912

Kline
Mortensen
Baertling
Cruxent
Deyrolle
LarderaManessierStahlyBaziotes
Cappello
Hoepffner

1925

1926

250

Jacobsen
LutherMalinaMatta
Schoffer
Atlan
ButlerFazzini
Greco
SpindelWols
Chadwick
De Stael
Jorn
Albrecht
Burri
Lippold
Millonzi
Tomasello
Armitage
Cousins
Prassinos
KidnerGabrielOlson, E.
Oster
PenalbaWeber, H.
RabkinSoulages, Vedova
Weill
Clark, Lygia
Consagradi Teana
Zao-Wuki
Cesar
Dewasne
LapoujadeMathieuBury, PolJones, Howard
KrickeVan Thienen
Cruz-Diez
Francis, Sam
FruhtrunkPan, Marta
Soto
Vardanega
Watts
KosicePiceljRiopelle
SempereSidenius
Boto
Debourg
Kramer, H.
Peeters
Takis
Tinguely
Williams, Paul
Antonakos
Breer
Calos

1927

1928

1929

Dadzu
Goepfert
MavignierMetzgerMorelletPomodoro, A.
Stein, J.
Alechinsky
Contreras-Brunet
Lacey, B.
KowalskiSoya
Trova
Wilding
AgamGreenhamIndiana
Klein, Y.
Le Parc
Palatnik
Piene
SalvadoriCremer, S.
Dobes
Garcia-Rossi
Lassus, B.

1934

1935

1936

1937
6. Generation bornc. 1940
1930

1931

1932

1933

AdrianAnuszkiewicz
CamargoDuarte, A.
GoodyearHill, A.
Pomodoro, G.
Sedgeley, Peter
Tambellini
tickerGerstner
Castellani
Katan
Mack
PadronRiley, Bridget
SteeleVanderbeck
Asis
Couchot
DemarcoLeblanc
Mari
Paik
Reinhartz
SobrinoStaudtChryssa
Dadamaino
FlavinMcClanahan
Manzoni,RaveloWeber, W.

1938

1939

1940

1941

1942
1943
1944

Aubertin
CarreraDuranteVon Graevenitz, C
Ramsbott
YvaralZurlo, Donald
Apple
Brandston
Claisse, G.
Costa
GeisslerMuller, H. W.
Pohl
Reiback
Berns
Boriani
Christen
HaackeLevine, Les
MegertRaysseSamaras, Lucas
Seawright
Stern, Rudi
Willenbecher
Biasi
Colombo
Filko
Landi
Massironi
Nusberg
PasquerRoss, Charles
SalazarVarisco
Boehm
CassenChiggio
De Vecchi
Larrain, Gilles
Alviani
AnceschiBell, Larry
Gatti
Hogle
Lacroix
Lijn, Liliane
Luccioni
Van Saun, John
Apollonio, Marina
KriescheMartinez
Zazeela
Zehringer
Dantu
MefferdStafford
Tadlock
HackerSommerrock
InfanteWillats
CareagaClassification of kinetic art

Plastic arts

stat ckinetic

Virtual movement(perceptible spatial
modifications)(comprising chan¬ges in colour lumin¬
osity, texture etc.)\
Predictable
comprising objects
movingmechanically251

Unpredictable
comprising objects
moved by naturalforces

Predictable
comprisingchanges incolour bymechanicalmethods

Unpredictable
comprisingchanges inluminosity
by natural
methods

Movement in art

This table merely indicatesthe main lines of development
and makes no claim to cover
the entire range of work which
has been realized or to repro¬
duce an exact chronologicalorder

ANTIQUITYMIDDLE AGESRENAISSANCEBAROQUEROMANTICISM
1870
1890
1900

Theme

Artistic tradition

Sources close to and outside
the artistic field

Sculpture
Frescoes, tapestries, stained glass
Trompe l’oeil
Painting and sculpture
Painting
Objective movement (Impressionism)
Subjective and sculptural movement (Redon, Rodin)
Objective movement (Neo-impressionism)
Subjective movement (Pre-expressionism)
Art Nouveau

Articulated statuettes, hydraulic automata
Marionettes, Jacks of the Clock
Animated pictures
First colour organs
Human automata
Photography, colour organs

Graphic effects incomposition ormaterials

Light and movement

1910

Bl. Reiter
CubismFuturism
Vorticism
Rayonnism
TatlinPicabia
Kandinsky
M. Duchamp Klee
Schwitters

T920

BIRTH OF KINETIC ART

Abstract
visualinducements

Movement or inter¬
vention by thespectator

LissitzkyBerlewiBauhaus
1930

1950

Itten
HerbinAlbersVasarelyInteraction ofcolour-Three-dimensional
effects

Cinema, theatre projections

Spectacle-1Kupka
Delaunay
Malevich
Mondrian
V. Doesburg

TatlinArchipenko
Boccioni
Duchamp
Vantongerloo

Machines

MobilesLight andmovement

Spectacle andenvironment

Gabo
Duchamp
Moholy-Nagy

Man Ray
Rodchenko
Calder

Wilfred
Klein
Schwerdtfeger

Eggeling
Richter

Pesanek

Munari

Hirschfeld-Mack
Hausmann
ThereminPesanekBauhaus
Leger
Lye

Schoffer
Tinguely
Pol Bury
KramerGroup T
Kosice
Takis
Grav
Lye
KowalskiCarreraLijn
etc.

ChadwickK. Martin
RickeyVardanega
Le Parc
Stein
Yvaraletc.

Wilfred
Palatnik
MalinaSchoffer
MunariSidenius
HealeyCalos
Vardanega
Boto
Gerstner
Dantu
DemarcoMegertMorellet
Garcia-Rossi
Mari
Von Graevenitz
Peeters
Grav
Groups T, N, MID
Zero
Dadzu

Vasarely
Schoffer
Agam
Valensi
Lassus
Darie
H. W. Muller
JaulmesDuranteetc.

Survage
Valensi
Rimington
Hallock-Greenewalt
Balia
DeperoBaranoff-Rossine

DIFFUSION OF KINETIC ART

VasarelyMortensen
Grav
Mari
Riley
Steele
etc.

Agam
Soto
Debourg
Cruz-Diez
MalinaAscottTomasello
Boto
Grav(Stein, Le Parc)
DemarcoGroups T, N
DuarteAlviani
Camargo
Asis
GreenhamSobrino
Gatti
etc.

a

-

.
■'

'

Chapter 1
Movement and the impressionist generation

Chapter 2
Movement in the post-impressionist era

Comte, Auguste, Cours de philosophie positive,

Chevreul, Michel-Eugene, De la toi ducontraste simultane..Pitois-Levrault, 1839

1826-1842
Article from the Spectator, (1842), cited by
Jammes and Scharf, in Art de France, IV, 1964

Ribot, Theodule, 'Les mouvements et leurimportance psychologique'. Revue phi/osophiques,
July to December 1879

Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, Mikrokosmus,

Rood, Ogden Nicholas, Modern chromatics....

Leipzig, 1856-1858

London, Kegan Paul & Co., 1879

Darwin, Charles Robert, On the origin ofSpecies, London, John Murray, 1859

Sutter, David, 'Les phenomenes de la vision',
L'Art, February-March 1880, pp. 74, 124, 147,

195, 216, 268
Fechner, E/emente der Psychophysik, Leipzig,

1860

Souriau, Paul, De Motus perceptione, (these),

Hachette, 1881
Spencer Herbert, First Principles..., London,

Williams and Norgate, 1863

Souriau, Paul, L’Esthetique du mouvement,

F. Alcan, 1889
Marey, Etienne-Jules, Du mouvement dans ies
fonctions de ia vie, Germer Baillere, 1868

Aurier, G.-Albert, CEuvres posthumes, Mercure

de France, 1893

Marey, Etienne-Jules, La Machine animate,

Germer Baillere, 1873

Hildebrand, Adolf von. Das Problem der Formin der bildenden Kunst, Strasbourg, 1 893

Pettigrew, James Bell, Animal locomotion,

London, Henry S. King & Co., 1873
Rodin, Auguste, L'Art, Grasset, 1911
Redon, Odilon, A soi-meme, Journal(1867-1915), 1922
Bazin. Germain, 'Synoptique. Degas et
I'objectifLAmour de /'Art, July 1 931

Signac, Paul, D'Eugene Delacroix au
Neo-tmpressionnisme, 1899
Crane, Walter, Line and Form, London, G. Bell,

1900
Fuller, Loie, Quinze ans de ma vie, F. Juven,

1908

Guerin, Marcel, Lettres a Degas, Grasset, 1931

Barres, Maurice, Greco ou le secret de Tolede,
1911

Brehier, Emile, Histoire de la philosophie,

Eisler, Max, Gustav Klimt, Wien, 1920

Presses Univ. de France, 1938
Brion-Guerry, Liliane, Cezanne et Fexpression
de I'espace..., Flammarion, 1950

Focillon, Henri, 'Trente ans d'art independant','La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, May 1926
Pinder, Wilhelm, Das Problem der Generation,

Sandstrom, Sven, Le Monde imaginaired'Odilon Redon, 1 955

1926
Gauguin, Paul, Lettres a Daniel de Monfreid,

Hamilton, George Heard, 'Cezanne, Bergson
and the Image of Time', Coll. Art J., Fall 1956
Thirion, Yvonne, Le Japonisme en France,

Plon, 1930
Cezanne, Paul, Correspondance recueillie,annotee et prefacee par John Rewald, Grasset,

these de I’Ecole du Louvre, 1958

1937

Huyghe, Rene, Introduction a I'Exposition
itinerante de I'UNESCO, 'De I’lmpressionnisme
a nos jours’, UNESCO, 1959

Bender, E. and Muller, W. Y., Die Kunst
Ferdinand Hod/ers, Zurich, Rascher Verlag, 1941.

Leymarie, Jean, Impressionnisme, Skira, Geneve,

1959

Malingue, Maurice, Lettres de Gauguin a sa
femme et a ses amis, Grasset 1946

Cabanne, Pierre, Degas, Danseuses, 1960

Seligman, Germain, The drawings of Georges
Seurat, New York, C. Valentin, 1947

Hoctin, Luce, 'Degas photographe', I'Oeil, May

Lhote, Andre, Seurat, Braun, 1948

1960
Thirion, Yvonne, Actes du Xl/e Congres
International des Etudes francaises, XIII, 1960
Scharf, Aaron, 'Painting, Photography and theImage of Movement', Burlington Magazine,
May 1962
Homer, William I., Letter 'Concerning

Muybridge, Marey and Seurat', with a reply from
A. Scharf, Burlington Magazine, September 1962
Jammes, Andre et Scharf, Aaron, Le Realismede la photographie et la reaction des peintres'. Art
de France, IV, 1964

255

Rewald, John, 'Extraits du journal inedit de Paul
Signac', La Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
July-September, 1949
Laprade, Jacques de, Seurat, Somogyi, 1951
Vanbeselaere, Walter, Catalogue de /'exposition
James Ensor, Paris, Musee National d'Art

Moderne. February-April 1954
Bourdelle, Antoine, Ecrits sur Fart et sur la vie,

Plon, 1955
Grohmann, Will, Expressionists, New York, H.

Abrams, 1956

Johnson, Lincoln F., 'Time and Motion in
Toulouse-Lautrec', College Art Journal, Fall, 1956

Malevich, Casimir, Die gegenstandslose Welt,
Munchen, 1927

Portmann, Paul, Kompositionsgesetze in derMalerei von Ferdinand Hodler, Winterthur, 1956

Maritain, Jacques, Severini, N. R. F., 1930

Rewald, John, Post-Impressionism, I.
(1886-1893), New York, Museum of Modern
Art, 1956
Haesaerts, Paul, James Ensor, Brussels,,
Elsevier, 1957

Proust, Marcel, Lettres a Bibesco, Lausanne, ed.
de Clairefontaine, 1949
Haftmann, Werner, Paul Klee, Munich,
Prestel-Verlag, 1950
Seuphor, Michel, L'Art abstrait, ses origines, sespremiers maitres, Maeght, (nouv. ed., 1950)

Leymarie, Jean, Van Gogh, Flammarion, 1959
Benesch, Otto, Edvard Munch, London,
Phaidon, 1 960

Mondrian, Piet, Lettre a Sweeney, Art
News, Summer 1951
Grohmann, Will, Paul Klee, Flinker, 1954

Nacenta, Raymond, 'Gauguin', Art et Style,N° 55, 1960

Lewis, Wyndham, The Demon of Progress in theArts, London, Methuen, 1954

Tralbaut, Marc-E., Van Gogh, Hachette, 1960
Van Gogh, Vincent, Correspondance complete(Dutch version, 1952-1954), Gallimard/Grasset,
1960
Haftmann, Werner, Emil No/de, Cologne,
DuMont Schauberg, 1961

Wagner, Geoffrey, 'Wyndham Lewis and the
Vorticist Aesthetic', Journal of Aesthetics,
September 1954
Habasque, Guy, 'Les Documents inedits sur les
debuts du Suprematisme', Aujourd’hui, N° 4,
1955
Kandinsky, Wassily, Essays liber Kunst und
Kunstler, Stuttgart, Hatje, 1955
Verdet, Andre, Fernand Leger, ie dynamisme
pictural, Geneva, Pierre Cailler, 1955
Laude, Jean, La peinture francaise (1905-1914)
et L'art negre, Klincksieck, 1968

Chapter 3
Movement in the arts around 1910

Matisse, Henri, 'Notes d'un peintre', la Grande
Revue, 25. 1 2. 1 908

Chapter 4
Movement in the age of surrealism andgeometrical abstraction

Estienne, Interview with Matisse, Les Nouve/les,
12 April 1909
Allard, R., 'Au Salon d'Automne', Art libre,
Lyon, November 1910
Kandinsky, Wassily, Uber das Geistige in der
Kunst, Munich, Piper, 1911—1912
Gleizes, Albert, and Metzinger, Jean, Du
Cubisme, 1 912
Boccioni, Umberto, in Lacerba, 1. 7. 1913
Cendrars, Blaise, 'La Prose du Transsiberien',
Der Sturm, November 1913

Herzog, Oswald, 'Der abstrakte
Expressionismus', Der Sturm, (Berlin), 1919-1920
Schreyer, Lothar, ‘Die neue Kunst', Der Sturm,(Berlin), 1919-1920
Schwitters, Kurt, 'Die Merzmalerei', Der Sturm,(Berlin), 1919-1920
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo and Kemeny, Alfred,'Dynamisch-konstruktives Kraftsystem', December
1922
Gleizes, Albert, in Abstraction-Creation, N° 1,
1932; N° 4, 1935; N° 5, 1936

Kupka, Frank, in New York Times, 19. 10. 1913
Boccioni, Umberto, Pittura, scultura futuriste,
1914
Leger, Fernand, 'Realisation picturale actuelle',
in Soirees de Paris, June 1914
Lewis, Wyndham, in Catalogue of the
Vorticist Exhibition, London, Dore Gallery,May 1915
Lerat, Pierre, 'Les Recherches Futuristes', in
SIC, May 1917

Herbin, Auguste, in Abstraction-Creation
N° 1, 1932
Vordemberge-Gildewart, Friedrich, dans
Abstraction-Creation.... N° 2, 1933
Breton, Andre, Position politique du surrealisme,
Sagittaire, 1935
Ernst, Max, 'Au-dela de la peinture', in CEuvresde 1 91 9 a 1936, ed. Cahiers d'Art, 1937
Giedion-Welcker, Carola, Modern Plastic Art,
1937; included in Contemporary Sculpture, 1954

Picabia, Francis, in Dits, 1921
Leger, Fernand, 'Correspondance', Bulletin de/'effort moderne, April 1924
Gleizes, Albert, 'La Peinture et ses lois, Bull, de/'effort moderne, March-April 1925

256

Nadeau, Maurice, Histoire du Surrealisme, Seuil,
1945-1948
Michaux, Henri, 'En pensant au phenomene dela peinture', in Peintures et Dessins, Point du Jour,
1946

Sweeney, J. J., Henry Moore, New York,
Museum of Modern Art, 1946

Cassou, Jean, Catalogue of the Mird exhibition,
Musee Nat. d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1962

Moholy-Nagy, L., Vision in Motion, Chicago,
1946

Dupin, Jacques, Alberto Giacometti, Maeght,
1962-1963

Pollock, Jackson, 'My painting', in Possibilities,(New York), N° 1, Winter 1947-1948

Sartoris, Alberto, Catalogue de /'exposition'Baert/ing', Galerie Denise Rene, Paris, March
1962

Carrouges, Michel, Andre Breton et ies donnees
fondamentales du Surrealisme, Gallimard, 1950

Waldberg, Patrick, Le Surrealisme, Geneva,
Skira, 1962

Lapoujade, Robert, Le Mai a voir..., 1951
Rosenberg, Harold, 'The American Action
Painters', Art News, December 1952
Bazaine, Jean, Notes sur la peintured'aujourd'hui, Seuil, 1953
Brion, Marcel, Art abstrait, A. Michel, 1956
Estienne, Charles, Le Surrdaiisme...,Somogy-Gruend, 1956

Wingler, Hans, Das Bauhaus, Bramsche andCologne, 1962
Albers, Josef, Interaction of Color, New Haven,London, Yale Univ. Press, 1963
Mathieu, Georges, Au-deia du Tachisme,
Julliard, 1963
Stalter, Marcel-Andre, L'Expressionnisme
fiamand pendant Tentre-deux-guerres, Paris, 1966
(typed thesis)

Hess, Thomas B., in Art News, 1956
Masson, Andre, 'Une peinture de I'essentiel',
Quadrum, I., 1956
Kochnitzky, L6on, 'MarkTobey', Quadrum, IV.,
1957
Michaux, Henri, 'Vitesse et tempo', Quadrum,
III, 1957

Chapter 5
The origins of kinetic art: virtual movement

Volboudt, Pierre, 'A chacun sa realite', XXesiecie, June 1 957
Juin, Hubert, Sou/ages, Le Musee de Poche,
1958

Gabo, Naum and Pevsner, Antoine, Realist
Manifesto, Moscow, 5. 8. 1920

Lapicque, Charles, Essais, Grasset, 1958

Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo and Kemeny, Alfred'Dynamisch-konstruktives Kraftsystem',(Manifesto), Der Sturm, (Berlin), December 1922

Wilde, E. L. L. de, 'L'art hollandais depuis Van
Gogh', Cat. Musee National d'Art Moderne,
Paris, 1958
Charbonnier, Georges, Le Monologue dupeintre, Julliard, 1959
Hunter, Sam, 'Jackson Pollock et la Nouvelle
Peinture Americaine', Catalogue, Musee d'Art
Moderne, Paris, 1959
Jean, Marcel, Histoire de ia peinture surrealiste,
Seuil, 1959
Michaux, Henri, Paix dans ies brisements,
Flinker, 1959
Pobe, Marcel, Schneider, Le Musee de Poche,
1959
Seuphor, Michel, La Sculpture de ce siecie,
Neuchatel, Griffon, 1959
Various authors, Dictionnaire de la Sculpture
Moderne, Hazan, 1960
Ponente, Nello, Tendances Contemporaines,
Geneva, Skira, 1960
Robertson, Bryan, Jackson Pollock, New York,
Abrams, 1 960
Demarne, Pierre, Rene Magritte, Rhetorique
N° 3, Tilleur-lez-Libge, 'Rhetorique', 1961
Itten, Johannes, Kunst der Farbe, Ravensburg,
Maier, 1961
Jaffe, H. C. L., 'La Peinture neerlandaise entre
Ies deux guerres', Catalogue, Musee de Grenoble,
1961

257

Hulten, K., Vasarely, V., Bordier, R., etc..
Catalogue of the exhibition 'Le Mouvement',(yellow manifesto), Galerie Denise Rene, 1955
Vasarely, Victor, 'De I’invention a la re-creation.
Cat., Galerie Denise Rene, November 1955
Seuphor, Michel, La Sculpture de ce siecie,
Neuchatel, Griffon, 1959
Mon, Franz (ed.), Movens, (contains'Chronologie der kinetischen Kunst nach 1900' by
Wolfgang Ramsbott, p. 179), Wiesbaden, Limes
Verlag, 1960
Fischli, Hans and Rotzler, Willy, Catalogue ofthe exhibition 'Kinetische Kunst', Zurich
Kunstgewerbemuseum, May 1960
Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visuel de Paris,'Propositions sur le movement’, Gal. Denise Rene,
Paris, January 1961
Agam, (Monographie), Neuchatel, Griffon, 1962
Belloli, Carlo, 31 Gesta/ter einer tota/en
visuellen Synthese, Catalogue, Basle, June 1962
Munari, Bruno and Eco, Umberto, Arte
programmata, Catalogue Olivetti, Milan,
May 1962
Vasarely, Victor, Notes, Reflexions, 1962
Ehrenzweig, Anton, Catalogue of the Bridget
Riley exhibition, London, Gallery One,
September 1963
Oster, Gerald and Nishijima, Yasunori,'Moire Patterns', Scientific American, May 1963

Vasarely, Victor, 'Naissances', catalogue of thegallery 'Der Spiegel’, Cologne, 1963
Gombrich, E, H., 'Moment and Movement inArt’, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld
Inst. (London), 1964
Mari, Enzo, 'Libert^ nell'ordine', typescript, 1964
Mestrovic, M., 'Nouvelles Tendances',
Catalogue de Texposition 'Neue Tendenzen',
Leverkusen, March 1964
Nouvelle Tendance - Catalogue of the exhibition(Preface by K. G. [Karl Gerstner]), Musee desArts decoratifs, Paris, April 1964
Oster, Gerald, 'Optical Art', Applied Optics, Vol. 4,
N° 11, novembre 1965, p. 1359
Vasarely, (Texts by the artist, introd. by Marcel
Joray), Neuchatel, Griffon, 1965

Hulten, K. G., 'Bewogen Beweging', Catalogue,
Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, March-April
1961; with some additions and omissions:Roere/se i Konsten , Catalogue, Stockholm,
Moderna Museet, May-September 1961
Bergman, Par, 'Modernolatria' et'simultaneity,
Stockholm, 1962
Habasque, Guy, 'Conversation dans I'atelier:
Kosice', L'ceil, November 1962
Cassou, Jean, 'Calder', catalogue, Musee deRennes, 1 963
Metken, Gunter, 'Harry Kramer' Catalogue,
Gal. Kerchache, 1963
Rickey, George, 'The Morphology ofMovement', Art Journal, summer 1963;
reprinted with some modifications in Kepes (ed.).
The Nature and Art of Motion, New York,
Braziller, London, Studio Vista, 1965
Nicolas Schoffer, monographie, (Textes de Guy
Habasque, Jacques Menetrier et Nicolas
Schoffer), Neuchatel, Griffon, 1963
Catalogue of the exhibition 'Takis, Bury, Soto:
Structures vivantes', Gal. Diderot, 1963
Metzger, Gustav, typed manifesto,
30. 7. 1964

Chapter 6
Three-dimensional works in movement

Metzger, Gustav, Signals (London),
September 1964
'Nouvelle Tendance', Catalogue, Musee des Arts
decoratifs, Paris, avril 1 964

Caus, Salomon de, Les Raisons des Forces
Mouvantes, avec diverses machines..., Frankfurt,
J. Norton, 161 5

Staempfli, George W., Catalogue 'George
Rickey', New York, Gallery Staempli,
October-November 1964

Gabo, Naum and Pevsner, Antoine, Realist
manifesto, Moscow, 1920

Catalogue of the Vardanega-Boto exhibition,
Maison des Beaux-Arts. Paris, March-April 1964

Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo and Kemeny, Alfred,'Dynamisch-konstruktives Kraftsystem'(Manifesto), Der Sturm (Berlin), December 1922

Bury, Pol, unpublished provisional text, 1965

Munari, Bruno, 'Manifesto del Macchinismo',
Milan, 1938; reprinted in Arte concreta,
December 1952

Metzger, Gustav, Auto-destructive Art,
(Roneotype), London, Architectural Association,
1965

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 'Les Mobiles de Calder',Catalogue, Gal. Louis Carre, Oct.-Nov. 1946
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, Vision in Motion,
Chicago, 1947
'Gabo-Pevsner', Catalogue New York, Museum ofModern Art, 1948
Moholy-Nagy, Sibyl, Moholy-Nagy, experimentin totality, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1950
Seuphor, Michel, L'Art abstrait, ses origines, sespremiers maitres, (Nouv. ed.), Maeght, 1950
Bury, Pol, Catalogue, Brussels, Gal. Apollo,
December 1 953
Brugiere, P. G., 'L'objet-mobile de Calder",Cahiers d'Art, N° 29, 1954
Martin, Kenneth, 'Architecture, machine andmobile'. Arts and Architecture, February 1956

Chapter 7
Light and movement

Castel, Louis-Bertrand, 'Lettres', Mercure deFrance, November 1725
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Zur
Farbenlehre, Tubingen, Cotta, 1810
Jameson D. D., Colour Music, London, 1844
Obituary notices on Frederic Kastner, L’E/ectricite,
8 and 15 July 1882.

Anon., 'Forms in Air', Time, 24. 8. 1959

Bishop, Bainbridge, A Souvenir of the Colour
Organ, New York, De Vinne Press,, 1893

Seuphor, Michel, La Sculpture de ce siecle,
Neuchatel, Griffon, 1959

Craig, Edward Gordon, Catalogue, Florence,
1908

Archipenko, Alexander, Fifty Creative Years,
New York, Techne, 1960

Rimington, Alexander Wallace, Colour Music,
London, Hutchinson, 1911-12

258

Survage, Leopold, 'Rythmes colores, Les Soirees
de Paris, July-August 1914

Chapter 8
Recent developments in kinetic art

Hirschfeld-Mack, Ludwig, Farbenlicht-Spie/e,
Weimar, 1925
Laszlo, Alexander, Die Farblichtmusik.
Leipzig, 1925
Klein, A. B., Colour-Music, London, Crosby
Lockwood and Son, 1926; 3e ed.: The Art ofColoured Light, London, 1937
Bandi, Miklos N., 'La Symphonie diagonale deVicking Eggeling', Schemas, February 1927
Richter, Hans, 'Mouvement', Schemas,
February 1927
Wilfred, Thomas, 'Light and the Artist' and'Composing in the Art of Lumia’, Journal of
Aesthetics, June 1947 and December 1948
Souriau, Etienne, 'Filmologie et Esthetiquecomparee'. Revue Intern, de Filmologie,
April 1952
Gauthier, Maximilien, Survage, 1953
Schwerdtfeger, Kurt, Bitdende Kunst undSchule,Hanover, Hermann Schroedel Verlag, 1953
Valensi, Henry, 'La Television, I'Art et Peinture',
Cahiers d'Etude de Radio-Television, N” 17,
1958-1959
Apollinaire, Guillaume, Chroniques d'Art,
Gallimard, 1 960
Richter, Hans and Grohmann, Will, Hans
Richter', Catalogue, Galerie Denise Rene,
March 1 960
Valensi, Henry, 'Cinepeinture et Telepeinture',
Actes du IVe Congres Intern. d‘Esthetique,Athens, 1 960
Hoenich, P. K., Robot-Art, Haifa, Nov. 1962

Bann, Stephen, 'Environmental Art', StudioInternational, February 1967
Bense, Moles, Alsleben et al„ Kunst aus dem
Computer, Stuttgart, Verlag Nacholski, 1967
Brett, Guy, Exhibition catalogue In Motion',
Arts Council of Great Britain, October 1966
Kinetic Art, London and New York, Studio Vistaand Reinhold, 1 968
Chevalier, Denys, Exhibition catalogue 'Art etMouvement', Musee d'Art Contemporain,
Montreal, August 1967
Clay, Jean, Various articles in Robho (Paris),
Nos 1 to 3
Coe, Ralph T., 'Light/Reflections', Catalogue'Light', Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City,
Missouri, October 1967
'Magic Theater Art', Catalogue ‘The Magic
Theater', Nelson Gallery of Art, Kansas City,
Missouri, May 1968
Compton, Michael, Optical and Kinetic Art, Tate
Gallery, London, 1967
Fagiolo dell'Arco, Maurizio and Marcello, 'La
Citta del Sole (artificiale)'. Catalogue 'La Luce',
Galleria L'Obelisco, Rome, 1967
Graf, Otto A,, 'Zur kinetischen Kunst', Catalogue'Kinetika', Museum des XX. Jahrhunderts' July 1 967
Henaut, Dorothy, Arts Canada No 114,
Nov. 1967 (on Richard Lacroix)
Kepes, Gyorgy (ed.), The Nature and Art ofMotion (essays by Karl Gerstner, 'Structure andmovement', Georgy Rickey, 'The Morphology ofMovement', Katharine Kuh, 'Recent Kinetic Art',etc.). New York and London, Braziller andStudio Vista, 1965

Schoffer, Nicolas, 'Le Lumjno-Dynamisme’,Revue des Applications deI'E/ectricite, 4etrimestre 1962

Konecny, Dusan, 'The 'Synthesis' Group of
Prague', Form 7, March 1968

Catalogue of the exhibition ’L'Objet', Musee desArts Decoratifs, March 1962

Mahlow, Dietrich, Catalogue ‘Licht Bewegung
Farbe , Kunsthalle, Nuremberg, April 1967

Popper, Frank, 'Art, Movement and Light,
UNESCO Courier, September 1963

Masters, Robert E. L. and Jean Houston,
Psychedelic Art, New York and London, BalanceHouse and Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968

Nicolas Schoffer, monographie, Neuchatel,
Griffon, 1963
Souriau, Etienne, 'Henry Valensi et leMusicalisme', Catalogue, Musee de Lyon, 1963
Munari, Bruno et Piccardo, M., 'I colori dellaluce', Domus, March 1962
Munari, Bruno, 'Programmed Art', The Times
Literary Supplement, (London), 3 September
1964
Peeters, H., etc., Museumjournaal voor moderne
kunst, (Holland) 1964
Catalogue of the Nouve/le Tendance exhibition,
Musee des Arts Decoratifs, 1964
Bann, Gadney, Popper and Steadman, Four
Essays on Kinetic Art, London, 1 966
Mack, Piene et ticker, 'O', Catalogue,
Hanover, Kestner-Ges., May 1965
Popper, Frank, Catalogue 'Kunst Licht Kunst',
Eindhoven, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, 1966

259

Piene, Nan, 'Light Art', Art in America,
May-June 1 967
Popper, Frank, 'L'art de la lumiere artificielle’,
L'Oeil, December 1966
’The luminous trend in Kinetic Art', StudioInternational, February, 1967
Catalogue 'Lumiere et Mouvement', Musee d'Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris, May 1967
Naissance de Part cinetique, Paris,
Gauthier-Villars, 1967
'Premier bilan de l'art cinetique, ‘Revued'Esthetique, October-December 1967
Catalogue ‘Cinetisme, Spectacle, Environnement',
Grenoble, Maison de la Culture, May 1968
Rickey, George, Constructivism, New York andLondon, Braziller and Studio Vista, 1967
Seitz, William C., Catalogue ‘The Responsive
Eye', Museum of Modern Art, New York,
February 1965
Selz, Peter, Catalogue ‘Directions in Kinetic
Sculpture', Univ. of California Art Gallery,
Berkeley, March 1966

Sharp, Willoughby, 'Luminism', Catalogue'Light/Motion/Space', Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis, April 1967
Tacha-Spear, Athena, 'Sculptured Light', Art
International, Christmas 1967
Wember, Paul, Bewegte Bereiche der Kunst,
Krefeld, 1963

Lapicque, Charles, Essais surI'espace, Fart et ladestinGe, Grasset, 1958
Moles, Abraham A., Theorie de Finformation et
perception esthetique, Flammarion, 1958
Gombrich, E. H., Art and Illusion, London,
Phaidon, 1960
Passeron, Rene, L'oeuvre picturale et les
fonctions de Fapparence, J. Vrin, 1962
Albers, Josef, Interaction of Color, New Haven& London, 1963
Ceccato, S., 'Estetica e cibernetica', in Attidel 12° Convegno Internazionale, Rimini, 1963

Chapter 9
The typology of movement

Gombrich, E. H., 'Moment and Movement inArt', Journal of the Warburg and Courtau/dInstitutes, 1964

Kandinsky, W., Uber das Geistige in der Kunst,
1911

Howe, J. A. M., 'On eye movements',
unpublished thesis, Cambridge, 1964

Rodin, Auguste, L'Art, B. Grasset, 1911

Molnar, Francois, 'Les mouvements
exploratoires des yeux...'. Sciences de/‘Art, 1964

Giedion, Sigfried, Space, Time and Architecture
1941; Cambridge (Mass.), Harvard University
Press, 1946
Rudrauf, Lucien, L'Annonciation,
Grou-Radenez, 1943
Moholy-Nagy, Laszlo, Vision in Motion,
Chicago, 1 947
Giedion, Sigfried, Mechanization takescommand, New York, Oxford University Press,
1948

Scriabine, Marina, 'La representation du temps
dans I'art plastique egyptien’, Sciences de FArt,
1964
Wahl, Marcelle, Creation Picturale et Ordre
Cerebral, 1 964. Also see, Le mouvement dans lapeinture, (new ed.), 1955
Moles, Abraham A., 'Cybernetique et oeuvred'art'. Revue d'Esthetique, April-June 1965

Segond, J., 'Esthetique de la mobilite', Revued' Esthetique, t. I„ fasc. 1, 1 948
Souriau, Etienne, 'Time in the Plastic Arts',
Journal of Aesthetics, June 1949
Bazaine, Jean, Notes sur la peintured'aujourd'hui, Floury, 1948 and 1953
Poncet, Marie-Therese, L’Esthetique duDessin anime, Nizet, 1952
Poncet, Marie-Therese, Etude comparative desillustrations du moyen-age et des dessins animes
Nizet, 1952

Chapter 10
Sketch for an aesthetic of movement

Bergson, Henri, Essaisur les Donnees
immediates de la conscience, 1 889, etc., inoeuvres, Presses Univ. de France, 1959

Souriau, Etienne, 'Filmologie et Esthetiquecomparee'. Revue Internationale de Filmologie,
April 1952

Souriau, Paul, L'Esthetique du mouvement,
F. Alcan, 1889

Ehrenzweig, Anton, The Psychoanalysis of
Artistic Vision and Hearing, London, Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1953

Buchheim, Lothar-Gunther, Die
Kunstlergemeinschaft Brucke, Feldafing,
Buchheim Verlag, 1956

Arnheim, Rudolf, Art and Visual Perception,
Berkeley (Calif.), 1954

George, Waldemar, 'Nathalie Gontcharova',
Catalogue of the exhibition at the Galerie deI'lnstitut, 1956

Prudhommeau, Germaine, La Danse grecque
antique, Paris (1955), 1965, and L'analyse et lasynthese du mouvement (typed thesis.)

Lewis, Wyndham, in Catalogue 'Wyndham
Lewis and Vorticism', London, Tate Gallery, 1956

Rudrauf, Lucien, Le Repas d'Emmaus, Nouv.
Editions Latines, 1955

Seuphor, Michel, Piet Mondrian, Flammarion,
1956

Moles, Abraham A., La Creation scientifique,
Geneva, Kister, 1957

Delaunay, Robert, Du cubisme a Fart abstrait,
S. E. V. P. E. N„ 1957

Delaunay, R., Du cubisme a Part abstrait, ed.
P. Francastel, 1957

Klee, Paul, Tagebucher, Cologne, DuMont
Schauberg, 1957

Boccioni, U., etc., Manifestes du Futurisme,Archivi, Rome, 1958

Larionov, Michel, 'Souvenirs sur Malevitch',
Aujourd'hui, N° 15, 1957

Gottlieb, Carla, Movement in painting'.
Journal of Aesthetics, September 1958

Meyerson, Ignace (ed ), Problemes de lacouleur, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1957

260

Balia, Giacomo, et Depero, Fortunato,
Manifeste 'Ricostruzione futurista dell'universo',
1915, Archivi, Rome, 1958
Giedion-Welcker, Carola, Constantin Brancusi,
Bale, Schwabe, 1958

Bayer, Raymond, Esthetique de la Grace.
Presses Univ. de France (F. Alcan), 1933
Souriau, Etienne, 'Art et Verite', Revuephiiosophique, March, 1933
Basch, Victor, Essais d'Esthetique, Presses
Univ. de France (F. Alcan), 1934

Buchheim, Lothar-Gunther, Oer Blaue Reiter,
Feldafing, Buchheim Verlag, 1959

Bergson, Henri, La Pensee et ie Mouvant, 1934

Golding, John, Cubism, London, Faber & Faber,
New York, Wittenborn, 1959

Bachelard, Gaston, L'Air et les Songes, essai
sur/'imagination du mouvement, J. Corti, 1943

Jean, Marcel, Histoire c/e la peinture surrealiste,
Seuil, 1959

Marangoni, Matteo, Saper vedere, Milan,
Garzanti, 1943

Joyce, James, The Critical Writings, London,
Faber & Faber, 1959

Giedion, Sigfried, Mechanization takescommand, New York, Oxford Univ. Press, 1948

Lebel, Robert, Sur Marcel Duchamp, Ed.
Trianon, 1959

Winter,Marian Hannah, 'Theatre of Marvels',
Dance index, January and February 1948

Leymarie, Jean, Le Fauvisme, Geneva, Skira,
1959

Benda, Julien, De quelques constantes de/'esprit humain: critique du mobi/isme moderne,
Gallimard, 1 950

Arp, Jean, Catalogue of the exhibition at theMusee National d'Art Moderne de Paris, 1962
Gray, Camilla, The Great Experiment: Russian
Art 1863-1922, London, Thames & Hudson,
1962
d'Aubarede, Gabriel, 'Chez Jacques Villon',
Jardin des Arts, April 1 963
Catalogue of the Larionov-Gontcharova
exhibition, Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville deParis, September 1963
Frigerio, Simone, Cat. de /'exposition'Duchamp-Viiion', Galerie Louis Carre, 1963

Desoille, Robert, Psychanalyse et reve eve Hie
dirige, Bar-le-Duc, Impr. de Comte-Jacquet,
Ivanoff, Nicolas, 'Les Symboles stylistiques et
les clefs rythmiques', Revue d'Esthetique,
April-June 1951
Volmat, Dr Robert, L'Art psychopatho/ogique,Presses Univ. de France 1955
Souriau, Etienne, Les Categories Esthetiques,Centre de Documentation Universitaire, 1956
Habasque, Guy, 'Notes on a New Trend:
Multidimensional animated works', Ya/e FrenchStudies, spring 1957-winter 1958

Belloli. Carlo, Cat. de /'exposition '// contributo
russo a/le avanguardie ptastiche , Milan, Galleriadel Levante, 1964

Vinchon, Dr Jean, La Magie du dessin...,Desclee, 1959

Lebel, Robert, 'Marcel Duchamp, Hier et
Demain', L' ceil, April 1964

Schmidt, Steck, etc., Petits maitres de ia folie,
Lausanne, Clairefontaine, 1961

Bergson, Henri, Le Rire, 1900

Winter, Marian Hannah, Le Theatre du
Mervei/leux, 0. Perrin, 1962

Chide, A., Le Mobi/isme moderne, F. Alcan,
1908

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, L' ceil et /'esprit,(1960), Gallimard, 1964

Benda, Julien, Le Bergsonisme, ou Unephilosophic de ta mobiiite, Mercure de France,
1912

Chastel, Andre, Le Jeu et I'Art au XXe siecle’,
Diogene, April-June 1965

Engels, Friedrich, La Dialectique'de /a Nature,(1873-1882), Moscow, 1925

Christout, Marie-Francoise, La Mervei/leux etie 'Theatre du silence', Mouton, 1965

Lalo, Charles, Introduction a I'Esthetique, 1912;
new ed. Armand Colin, 1925

Cornaire, Pierre, 'Patterns, structures etmouvement', Revue d'Esthetique, April-June 1965

Souriau, Etienne, LAvenir de I'Esthetique,F. Alcan, 1929

261

List of illustrations and sources

1 Giacomo Balia : La Bambina che corre sul balcone, 1912. Milan,
Museum of Modern Art. Photo Giraudon.

10

2 Eadweard Muybridge : ‘Chronophotography’ of a horse at the galop,c. 1878. Cinematheque frangaise.

13

3 J.-E. Marey : C hr o no gramme, c. 1885. Cinematheque frangaise.

14

4 Edgar Degas : Danseuse. Photo Giraudon.

15

5 Claude Monet : Rochers de Belle-Ile. Musee des Beaux-Arts, Alger.
Photo Giraudon.

16

6 Odilon Redon : Angelique et Roger. Rijksmuseum Kroller-Miiller,
Otterlo. Photo from museum.

19

7 Auguste Rodin : Les Bourgeois de Calais. Photo Giraudon.

20

8 Georges Seurat : Le Chahut, 1890. Rijksmuseum Kroller-Miiller,
Otterlo. Photo from museum.

23

9 Vincent Van Gogh : La Nuit etoilee, 1889. Museum of Modern Art,
New York. Photo Giraudon.

27

10 Ferdinand Hodler :from museum.

33

Night,

1890. Kunstmuseum, Berne. Photo

11 Kolo Moser : La Danseuse Lo'ie Fuller. Albertina, Vienna. Photo
Albertina.

34

12 Fernand Leger : Skating-rink, 1922.

39

13 Franck Kupka : Planes by colours, 1910-11. Musee National d’Art
Moderne, Paris.

41

14 Robert Delaunay : Disques, 1933. Musee d’art moderne de la Ville
de Paris. Photo Bulloz.

42

15 Jean Arp : Peinture murale abstraite.

44

16 Piet Mondrian: Composition in red, yellow and blue, 1928.

44

17 Sophie Tauber-Arp : Composition verticale-horizontale cercles etdemi-cercles, 1928.

44

18 Umberto Boccioni : Forme uniche nella continuita dello spazio, 1913.
Museum of Modern Art, New York.

46

19 Giacomo Balia : Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio, 1912. Museumof Modern Art, New York.

47

262

20 Jacques Villon : Galop, 1921. Photo Galerie Louis Carre.

48

21 Frank Kupka : Abstraction, 1928-30.

48

22 Jacques Villon : Soldats en Marche, 1913. Photo Galerie Louis Carre.

49

23 Marcel Duchamp descending a staircase. Photo X.

50

24 Marcel Duchamp : Nu descendant un escalier, 1912. Philadelphia
Museum of Art, Arensberg Collection. Photo Editions du Seuil.

50

25 Casimir Malevich : Suprematism, 1916-17.

55

26 Henri Matisse : Le Luxe. Copenhagen Museum. Photo Giraudon.

59

27 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner : A couple of dansers, c. 1913. Folkwang
Museum, Essen.

60

28 Franz Marc : The Great Blue Horses, 1911. Walker Art Center,
Minneapolis.

61

29 Wassily Kandinsky : Theatre set for Moussorgsky’s Pictures at an
Exhibition at the Friedrichstheater, Dessau, 1928. Photo BauhausArchiv, Darmstadt.

63

30 Paul Klee : Tanzt Entsetzen, c. 1925.

65

31 Jean Arp : Drawing ‘according to the laws of chance’, c. 1917.

67

32 Josef Albers : Plate from the album Homage to the square, 1966.

70

33 Olle Baertling : Ogri, 1961. Plate from the album Triangles.

70

34 Auguste Herbin : Clarte, 1961.

70

35 Kurt Schwitters : Interior of the Merzbau, c. 1925.

72

36 Henryk Berlewi : Mecano-facture black on white, 1923.

73

37 Oskar Schlemmer : Metallic Dance, c. 1928. Performed by Karla
Grosch at the Bauhaus theatre. Photo Bauhaus-Archiv, Darmstadt.

74

38 Students from Josef Albers’ class at the Bauhaus, c. 1928. Photo
Bauhaus-Archiv, Darmstadt.

74

39 Max Ernst : Monument aux oiseaux, 1927. Private collection, Paris.
Photo Roche, Editions du Seuil. © SPADEM, Paris.

76

40 Jackson Pollock working in his studio at East Hampton, Long
Island, c. 1945. Photo Hans Namuth, New York.

83

41 Georges Vantongerloo : Chrysalis, 1950. Photo Ernst Scheidegger
through Max Bill.

85

42 Max Bill : Construction with suspended cube, 1935-6.

85

43 Sonia Delaunay : Plate from the album Poesie de mots, poesie decouleurs, 1962.

87

44 Victor Vasarely : IX, 1966.

87

45 Richard Mortensen : Plate from the album Le Ve Chant, on a themefrom the Odyssey.

87

46 Alberto Giacometti : Homme qui marche I. Photo Galerie Maeght.

88

47 Nicolas Schoffer : Lux II, 1957-65. Collection Denise Rene. Photo
Marc Lavrillier.

92

48 Victor Vasarely : IX, 1966.

97

263

49 Victor Vasarely : Tau-Ceti, 1964. Galerie Denise Rene.

99

50 Cruz-Diez : Physichromie no. 260, 1966

100

51 J.-R. Soto : Vibration (La boite), 1962. Photo Marion-Valentine.

107

52 Yaacov Agam : Double metamorphose, 1964.

109

53 Antonio Asis : Spirales en vibration, 1966.

113

54 Luis Tomasello : Reflexion no 50 (Atmosphere chromoplastique,1960). Galerie Denise Rene.

115

55 Hugo Rodolfo Demarco : Relief with changing reflections, 1966.
Galerie Denise Rene. Photo J. Masson.

117

56 Joel Stein : Triedre, 1963-5. Galerie Denise Rene.

118

57 Francisco Sobrino : Transformation instable (interference structure),
1963. Galerie Denise Rene.

118

58 Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel : Works by Sobrino, and Le
Parc, at the 1963 Paris Biennale; under the direction of the architect
Pierre Faucheux.

119

59 Jacquet-Droz automaton : Mechanism of the Draughtsman, 1774.
Musee de la ville de Neuchatel. Photo from museum.

122

60 Marcel Duchamp : Rotative demi-sphere, 1925. Photo Man Ray.

122

61 Alexandre Archipenko : Archipentura, 1924.

123

62 Vladimir Tatlin : Maquette for the monument of the Third Inter¬nationale, 1919-20.

124

63 Naum Gabo : Drawing for a kinetic construction, 1922.

125

64 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy : Lichtrequisit, 1923-30. Harvard University
Museum, Cambridge, Mass. Photo Marc Lavrillier. Courtesy of theBusch-Reisinger Museum.

126

65 Richard Mortensen : Sequel to Ominanda IV, 1964. Galerie Denise
Rene.

128

66 Pol Bury : .. .Boules en mouvements, 1963. Photo Andre Morain.

129

67 Jean Tinguely : Animation of small bulbs, 1962. Photo Leonardo
Bezzola.

132

68 Jean Tinguely : M. K. Ill, 1964. Galerie Iolas. Photo R.
Seynes.

133

de69 Harry Kramer : Ball with opening, 1964. Galerie Denise Rene. Photo
J. Hyde.

133

70 Von Graevenitz : Structures of black blades on motion, 1964. Galerie
Denise Rene.

138

71 Gyula Kosice : Hommage a ma femme Diyi, 1964. Photo E. B. Weill.

139

72 V. Takis : Signal, 1965. Photo J. Hyde.

141

73 Len Lye : Steel fountain, 1959.

142

74 Alexander Rodchenko : Suspended construction,
A.-H. Barr Jr.
75 Man Ray : Shade, 1920.
264

1920.

Archive144
145

76 Alexander Calder : Mobile, 1938. Photographed by Herbert Matterin 1939. From Vision in Motion, by Moholy Nagy. Courtesy of PaulTheobald & Co., Chicago.

146

77 Kenneth Martin : Screw mobile, 1956. Photo J. Pasmore.

148

78 George Rickey : Two lines up, 1964. Galerie Denise Rene.

149

79 Gregorio Vardanega : Developpement Tun cercle a Tinfini, 1962.
Galerie Denise Rene.

151

80 Francois Morellet: Sphere-trame, 1962. Galerie Denise Rene.

152

81 Hans Haacke : Wave I, 1964.

155

82 Bainbridge Bishop : Colour organ, c. 1880.

156

83 Frederic Kastner : The ‘Pyrophone’, 1869-73. Crown Copyright,
Science Museum, London.

157

84 Thomas Wilfred : Two phases of Study in black and white (.Lumia
composition Op. 26). Art Institute of Light

162

85 Wladimir Baranoff-Rossine : Disque optophonique, 1914-26.

163

86 Raoul Hausmann : Simplified schema of the ‘Optophone’, 1927

164

87 Kurt Schwerdtfeger : Farblichstpiel, c. 1923. Photo Bauhaus-Archiv,
Darmstadt.

165

88 Frank Malina paints the ‘rotors’ of Paths in Space, 1963. Photo
Almasy.

166

89 Nino Calos : Mobile lumineux, 1966.

167

90 Martha Boto : Structure optique, 1962. Galerie Denise Rene.

168

91 John Healey : Box 3, 1963.

169

92 Sandu Darie : Cosmorama, 1966. ‘Kunst Licht Kunst’ exhibition,
Eindhoven. Photo Marc Lavrillier.

173

93 Hans-Walter Muller with his machine M.

175

94 Davide Boriani (Group T) : P. H. Scope, 1964-6.

178

95 Gianni Colombo : Plastic Statement in the environment created byGroup T at the ‘Kunst Licht Kunst’ exhibition, Eindhoven, 1966.
Photo Marc Lavrillier.

178

96 Group N (Biasi) : Prisms decomposing and reflecting, 1966. ‘Kunst
Licht Kunst’ exhibition, Eindhoven. Photo Marc Lavrillier.

179

97, 98 Julio Le Parc : Instability, continuel-lumiere, 1962. Galerie DeniseRene
180-18199 Horacio Garcia-Rossi : Boite lumineuse, 1964. Galerie Denise Rene.
Photo Robert David.

182

100 Heinz Mack : Light object (using Fresnel’s lens), 1966.

184

101 Group Zero : Programmed room at the ‘Kunst Licht Kunst’ ex¬hibition, Eindhoven, 1966. Lamp-spectres of Otto Piene seen
trhough ticker’s construction; and a work by Mack.

185

102 Francisco Infante : Kinetic object: Soul of crystal, 1963.

186

103 Lev Nusberg : Kinetic object Flower (phase 5), 1965.

187

265

104 Bernard Lassus : Ambiance 10, 1966.

188

105 Kenneth Martin : Construction in aluminium, 1967. Departmentof Engineering, Cambridge.

192

106 Roger Vilder, Pulsation 7. Photo Szilasi.

193

107 A. Luther : Optogon, 1966. Photo Dorle Cymorek.

194

108 Karl Gerstner : Lens picture, 1962-5.
109 C. Megert : Zoom, 1966. Photo Roland Schneider.

195

110 Steve Antonakos : Hanging neon, 1965. Photo Rudolph Burckhardt.

198

111 Thomas Tadlock, Archetron, 1967-8. Photo J. A. Hamilton.

199

112 Howard Jones : Skylight Two, 1966. Howard Wise Gallery, New
York.

201

113 Richard Lacroix : Diamond point, 1968. Montreal International
Airport.

204

114 Richard Lacroix et al. : (‘Fusion des Arts’). A kinetic light andsound plastic structure, 1967. Canadian Pavilion, Expo 67. Photo
Marc-Andre Gagne.

205

115 Stano Filko : Universal environment, 1966-7.

208

116 Hans Haacke : Sky line, 1967. In Central Park, New York.

209

117 J. Piotr Kowalski : 1965. Sculpture produced with the aid of dyna¬
mite charges, Los Angeles.

211

118 Joel Stein : Kaleidoscope, with Sobrino, 1963.

214

119 Angel Duarte (Equipo 57) : Composition. Galerie Denise Rene.

225

120 Yaacov Agam, Nouveau solfege, 1966.

229

121 Yvaral : Instabilite, 1963. Galerie Denise Rene.

231

122 Nicolas Schoffer : Microtemps, 1966.

232

123 Group T (Boriani, Anceschi) : Maquette for ‘Kunst Licht Kunst’exhibition, Eindhoven, 1966.

235

124 Group MID : Generateur no. 8, 1965.

237

125 Gunther ticker : Flotter flottant, 1959. Photo Studio Lothar Willen.

248

Pages 44, 70, 87, 97 and 232: grateful thanks to the Galerie Denise Rene, whokindly allowed us to use their blocks

266

□ Index

Abstraction 54,71
Abstraction-Creation 72,
74
Abstrait 71
Action painters 138,244
Action painting 83,93
Adrian M. 117
AgamY. 95, 101, 106,108-112, 118, 188, 208,
220, 222, 233, 234, 241,
245
Albers J. 72, 96, 99, 101,
106, 192,218, 245
Albrecht S. 168, 234,
242
Alechinsky 83, 238
Allard R. 38
Alsleben K. 212
Alvard 84
Alviani G. 115
Anceschi 178,235
Anthoons 152
Antiquite 245
Antonakos 178, 197, 198
Anuszkiewicz 192
Appel K. 83,237
Appia A. 68, 160, 242
Apple, Billy 178, 197,198
Apollinaire G. 37, 49, 82,
158
Aragon L. 77
Archipenko A. 66, 67,
122-3,219, 234, 245
Arensberg 50
Armando 183

Armitage 88
Arnheim R. 215
Arp J. 66, 67, 71, 76, 77,
88,146, 233
Art nouveau 24,32, 33,
35, 36, 240
Arturo 150
Ascott R. 106, 120, 202,
204, 208, 233
AsisA. 106, 113,236,238
AubertinB. 153-4
Aurier G.-A. 25, 28

Bach J. S. 48, 111
Bachelard G. 90, 227
Baertling O. 74
Baker 238
Bakst L. 68
Balia G. 43-7, 123, 231,
239
Bann S. B. 207
Baranoff-Rossine W. 95,
161,163, 164
Baroque 220, 223, 245
Barye 19
BaschV. 228
Bauhaus 64, 68, 72, 74,
88, 95, 96, 104, 219, 242,
245
Baumeister 72
Bayer R. 228
BazaineJ. 75
Bazille 11
Baziotes 85
267

Beardsley A. 33
Bejart M. 135
Bell L. 204,206
Benda J. 226
Benner 83
Bense M. 212
Benton T. 80, 83
Benton T. 80, 83
Bergson H. 22, 47, 68,
225-227, 230, 241
Berlewi H. 72, 73, 96
Bernard E. 29, 36
Bernhardt S. (Theatre)
135
Biasi 178,179
Bill M. 85-6
Bille 83
Bing 35
Bishop B. 156, 157, 161
Blake 33,35
Blaue Reiter 31,32,60-1,
65
Bloc A. 86
Boccioni U. 42,43-5,
123,218
Bocklin A. 64
Bodmer 26
Bolshoi (Theatre) 157
Bomberg D. 53
Bonin Mile de 42
Bonnard 34
Bonnet H. 226
Boriani D. 140, 142, 178,
208,235
Bortnyk 96

BotoM. 168,236
Boudin 11,16
Bourdelle E.-A. 35, 36,
89,244
Brancusi 66-7, 241
Braque G. 37, 38, 39, 48,
82
Brauner V, 77
Breton A. 76, 78
Breuer L. 74
Breughel 218, 220
Brixton L. C. C. Day Col¬lege 149
Brooks 84
Briicke 31,32,60
Brunelleschi 23
Buchheim L. G. 60
Burliujk D. 123
Burne-Jones 33
BuryP. 101, 124, 127,
128-31, 143, 188, 231,
235, 239, 241
Butler R. 88

CageJ. 202,212
Calder A. 85, 89, 95, 108,
124, 127, 128, 144, 145-7,
221-2, 223, 231, 233, 246
Callery M. 90
Calos N. 165, 167, 240
Caloutsis, V. 196
Camargo 115
Cappello C. 90, 194
Carmontelle 122

Carnegie Hall 157
Carpeaux 19
Carra C. 43, 47
Carrera M. 212
Carriere 34
CassenJ. 200
CassouJ. 147
Castel (Pere) L. B. 156,
157, 161,222, 236, 242
Castiglione 239
Caus S. de 122
Cercle et Carre 71, 72, 74
Cezanne P. 11, 16, 17, 36,
37, 38, 59, 108, 238
Chadwick L. 88, 147-8
Chevreul 22,40,42, 157
Chide A. 226
Chiggio 178,208
Childs L. 202
Chirico G. 77,242
Chomette H. 68, 160
Christen A. 115
Chryssa 177,197
Clark L. 152,200
Claudel P. 48,81
COBRA 83
CoeR. 202,203
Colombo G. 178, 208
Comte A. 21
Connor R. 210
Constant 83
Constructivism 57, 125,
127, 134, 137,244
Constructivists 57, 127,
219, 223, 244.
Corneille 83
Corot C. 11,14,23
Costa 117,178
Couchot 211,212
Courbet G. 11,14
Cousins H. 90
Craig E. G. 68, 160, 161,
242
Crane W. 35
Crompton D. 199
CrottiJ. 50
CruxentJ. 113,238

Cruz-Diez C. 106,112,
113-4, 192, 204, 205, 230,
233, 238
Cubism 37, 38, 40, 45,
47,71,75,82,219
Cubists 37,47-8, 108,
223

Dada 50, 77, 134, 146
Dadaism 50, 245
Dadaist 72, 76, 124, 127,
131, 223, 236, 246
Dadamaino 113,178
Dadzu 168
Daguerre J. 238
Dali S. 77, 78,239
DantuA. 174,222,231
Darie S. 170, 172, 173
241,246
Darragh D. 210
Darwin Ch. 20
Dasburg A. 80
Daubigny Ch.-F. 29
Daumier H. 26, 29
Davidson 146
DebourgN. 115
DeClercqH. 204,205
Degas E. 11,12,13,14,
17, 29, 34, 49,218,220,
234,240
Delacroix E. 11,12,19,
23, 25, 27,218,219
Delaunay R. 46, 48,49,
71, 96, 99, 218, 219, 231,
236, 240, 241, 244, 245
Delaunay S. 40-3, 71,
236
Delvaux 77
Demarco H. R. 116-7,
189
Denis M. 34
Depero F. 46
Derain 59
DescombinM. 167
De Smet 82, 205
268

De Vecchi 178, 208
DeVries 183
Diaghilev S. 47, 54, 68,
161
Dias (General) 12
Dobes 188,208
Documenta3 185
Domela C. 74
Dominguez O. 78
Donatello 106
Duarte A. 225
Duchamp M. 49-52, 95,
122, 123-4, 127, 143, 145,
159, 160,218, 221,223,
230, 236, 239, 241,244,
245
Duchamp-Villon R. 66
Dufy R. 59
DumitrescuN. 75
Duncan I. 36,161
Durante 202, 203
DiirerA. 18
Dvidjenije 185, 186,200

Eames C. 143
EAT 198,202,208,210
EcoU. 102,104
Ecolede Paris 75, 80,81
Edison T. 95
EggelingV. 158-9
EhrenzweigA. 223
Einstein A. 54
Emmer L. 221
Endell A. 35
Engels F. 226
EnsorJ. 30,241,244
Epstein D. 54
Equipe 57, 178
Ernst M. 76-7,78,239
Esteve 75
Expressionism 30-1,
32-3, 60,61,66, 80, 82-3
Expressionist 43, 59, 60,
77, 82, 83, 223,234
Exter A. 57, 68

Fahlstrom O. 202
FaucheuxP. 119
Faure G. de 35
Fautrier 81
Fauves 32, 58-9, 244
Fazzini 90
Fechner 20
Feneon F. 24
Field 157
Filko, S. 207,208
Fischinger O. 68, 164,
165
Flavin 177,205
Foldes 237
Fontainas A. 29
Fontana 183
FrancastelP. 219
France A. 34
Fresnel’s lens 184
FreudS. 90,230,239
Freundlich 72
Friedrich C. D. 220
Fuller L. 33-4, 161,
240
Futurism 43-7, 61
Futurist 37,40, 42, 43-7
49,50,61,71,76, 123,221,
223, 236, 239,244

Gabo N. 57, 85, 95, 115,
124-5, 127, 131, 134, 218,
241,245
Gabriel, H. 193
Gaillard 35
Galkin V. 185
GalleE. 35,238
Garcia-Rossi 168, 180,
182
Gargallo 86
Gaudier-Breszka 53
Gauguin P. 26, 29-30,
219, 238, 244
Gaumont 158
Gavarni S.-G. 26
Gericault Th. 12,218

Gerstner K. 102,115,
118, 188, 194, 195, 196,

211,212

GuthH. 75
Guyau 233,239
Gysin B. 212

Giacometti A. 77, 88-9,
124, 145, 236, 239
Giedion S. 218
Gleizes A. 38,47,48,75
Gleyre (atelier) 14
GoepfertH. 185, 194, 195
Goethe J. W. von 161,
168
GombrichE. H. 218
Gontcharova N. 54
Gonzales J. 86, 88, 147
Goodyear J. 200
Gorky A. 85
Gottlieb C. 84,218,220
Goya F. 18
Graevenitz von 134,
137-8, 204, 205, 233, 239
Grandville 18
GreenhamL. 113,188
GrisJ. 37,39
Gropius W. 68
Grosch K. 74
Grossi P. 128
Group Mid 237
Group N 117, 118, 178,
179
Group Nul 183, 237,
242
Groupe de Recherched’Art Visuel de Paris(G.R.A.V.) 102-4, 106,
116, 118, 119, 150, 178,
180, 182, 183, 222, 230,
238, 239, 241, 242
Group T 118, 142, 178,
235
Group Usco 178
Group Zero 183, 184,
185, 242
GsellP. 20
Guillaumin A. 11
Guimard H. 35
Guston 85
Gutai (group) 155,237

Haacke H. 149, 154, 155,
204, 207, 209, 233
Hallock-Greenewalt M.
164
hard-ege 74
Hartley M. 80
Hartung H. 77, 80
HartwigJ. 164
Hausmann R. 161,164,
204
Hayden M. 206
Healey J. 165, 168-9
Heckel 60
Heerop 83
Hegel F. 21,226
Heidegger M. 90
HeinerH. 128
Henaut 203
Henry, P. 202
Hep worth B. 86, 88
Herbin 72,96,219,245
Hero of Alexandria 121
Hildebrand A. von 35
Hill A. 116
HiquilyJ. P. 134
Hiroshige 16
Hirschfeld-Mack L. 164,
222,242
HodlerF. 32-3,222,236,
244
HoenichP. K. 169-70,
236
HogleR. 197,198
Hokusai 16, 234
Honegger A. 40
Howe J. A. M. 223
HugoV. 234
HultenK. G. 95
Husserl E. 90, 226
Huszar 57
Huysmans G.-Ch. 18
269

Impressionism 11,12,
31,37, 38,71
Impressionists 11, 12,
22, 24-5, 28, 34, 40, 43,236, 238, 241,244
Indiana R. 178, 197-8
Infante F. 185,186
Ingres D. 11, 24, 29, 65
Invention 150
IttenJ. 72,218

Jacobsen 83, 86
Jacquet-Droz 122
Jameson D. D. 157
Janco 76
Japoneseart 16
Jaulmes P. 177
Jawlensky 30-2, 236
Jones H. 200,201,203
JongkindJ. B. 11,16
Jorn 83
Joyce J. 68
Jugendstil 12, 83

Kabbala 110
KageM. 200
Kahn B. 210
Kandinsky W. 32,42,
57-8, 60-4, 72, 84, 96,
218, 219, 238, 240, 242,
244
Kanisza 105
KantE. 21,228
KaprowA. 206
Kastner F. 156, 157, 233,
236
Kelly 192
Kemeny A. 72, 95, 124
125, 245
Kenkel 105
Khnoplf 34
Kepes 205
Kierkegaard S. 230
Kiesler 95
Kinzing 122

Kirchner E. L. 60, 156
Kiyonaga 16
Klee P. 61,65-6,67,72,
96, 108,219, 220,230,
234,244
Kleen 46
Klein A. B. 161, 163-4,

222
Klein Y. 153,154
Klimt G. 33,34,238
Kline F. 83,84
Kline Y. 183
Kluver B. 202,210
Knaus F. von 122
Knirr 65
Kobachi 144
Korte 105
Kosice G. 134, 139-142,
144, 150, 205, 221,234,
241
Kowalski 188,208,211
Kramer H. 124, 127, 131,
133, 221,240
Kricke 152
Kristi V. 118
Kruchenik 56
Kuh K. 206
Kupka F. 41, 46, 47, 48,
234

Laboratoire des Arts 173
Lacey B. 134
Lacroix, R. 202, 203, 204
Laforgue J. 50
La Fresnaye R. de 47, 48
Lalo C. 228
La Mettrie 50
Lan9on 26
Land (Dr) 114
Landi 178
Landsman S. 204, 206
Lanskoy M. 81
Lapicque Ch. 75,218,

221
Lapoujade 80-1
Lardera 88, 89

Larionov 54,123
Larrain G. 208, 211, 212
Lassus B. 186, 188LaszloA. 164
Latimer C. 199
Laurens 66
Lawder S. 174
Leblanc 113, 192,205
Le Fauconnier 48, 82
Leger F. 39-40,43, 48,
68, 95, 159, 236, 241
Leibniz G. W. 20
LemaireB. 149
Lemud 26
Leonard M. 199
Le Parc J. 102, 103, 119,149, 150, 179-82, 189
Lepine (concours) 124
Leschot 122
LevyJ. 145
Lewis W. 52,53,241
LhoteA. 23
Lijn L. 140
LinckW. 149
Lincoln Center 153
Linke 105
Lipchitz 86,219
Lippold R. 153
Lissitzky El 57, 96
Livinus 714,176
Lotze R. H. 20
Louis XIV 122
Luccioni 211,212
Lumiere (bros) 95
Luther 188, 194, 195
LyeL. 68, 142-3, 159,
160, 200, 201, 239

McClanahan, S. 198
MackH. 183-4
Macke 61
Mackintosh 33
Madi 150
Magnelli 72
Magnus, Albertus 122
Magritte R. 77, 78,242

MaillardetH. 122
Maillol A. 35-6,234
Majorelle L. 35
Malevitch K. 54-8, 96,
98,219, 238, 242
Malina F. J. 106,112,
166, 167, 222, 223, 230,
234, 239
Manessier 75
Manet E. 11, 12,45,230
Mannerists 111
Man Ray 77, 122, 124,
144, 145, 159, 160, 230
ManzoniP. 154,183
Marc F. 59,61,234
MareR. de 40,68, 161
MareyJ.-E. 13,14,21,
22, 95, 231,234
MariE. 102, 104,115,
208
Maria M. 90
Marini M. 90
MaritainJ. 47
MarquetA. 59
Martin K. 147-9, 192,
233, 239, 240
Martin M. 192
Martin T. 200,201
Martinez 192
Marx K. 226
Massironi 178
Masson A. 76, 77
Mathieu G. 80,81
Matisse H. 32,59-60,219
Matisse P. 200-1
Matter H. 146
Me Clanahan P. 178
Me Laren 68,159
Me Luhan M. 178
Medalla D. 154, 155,222,
235
Mefferd, B. 202,203,
205
Megert 194,197
MenetrierJ. 137
Merleau-Ponty M. 226,
227
270

Mestrovic M. 102
Metz 128
Metzger G. 154, 155,
200, 222, 234, 238, 240
Metzinger J. 38,47, 48
Michaux H. 78-9, 226,
233, 236
Michelangelo 35, 65Michel W. 53
Milhaud D. 40
Millet J. F. 26
Milne M. 210
Miranda G. 113
MiroJ. 78-9,83,146,233
MitelliC. M. Ill
Moholy-Nagy L. 56, 68,
72, 85, 86, 95, 115
124-7, 134, 137, 143, 150,
218, 223, 236, 241,242
Moholy-Nagy S. 126
Moles A. 212,218,233
Molinari 192
MolnarF. 68,223,233,
242
Mondrian P. 57, 58, 84,
96, 108, 146,219,222,242
Monet C. 11,14-17,218,
230, 234, 238, 241
Monticelli A. 28, 29
Moore H. 86,219
Moreau G. 18
Morellet F. 106, 149,
152, 180, 182, 236
Morice C. 30
Morisot B. 11
Moronobu 16
Morris W. 33
MortensenR. 74,11819,128,219
Moser K. 34
Moussorgsky M. 63, 64
Muller H. W. 174-7,
199,236
Muller R. 134,237
Munari B. 102, 104, 118,
127, 128, 147, 173, 174,
222, 231

Munch E. 30,31,234,
237, 244
Munich Werkstdtten 35
Murphy 40
Mutt R. 52
Muybridge E. 13, 22, 95,
234

Nabis 30, 34
Naive painters 236
Nancy School 35, 238
Neo-impressionists 24,
25, 238, 241, 244
Neo-plasticism 57
Neue Kiinstlervereinigung
Miinchen 61
Newman B. 85
Newton J. 161
Nicholson B. 74
Nietzsche F. 227
Nijinsky V. 36, 68
NoldeE. 30,31,234,
237, 238
Nouvelle T endance 101,
102, 104, 115, 137, 150,
168, 196, 222, 230, 236,
238, 241
Nusberg L. 106, 185-6

ObristH. 35
Olson 120,231
Orphism 61
Orphists 49, 223
OsterG. 106,113,204,
205
Ouborg 83

Padron 192
PaikN.J. 211
PalatnikA. 165
PanM. 153
Pasmore 74
PasseronR. 218
Patterson E. B. 165

Paxton S. 202
Pedersen 83
Peeters H. 183, 242
Permeke 82
Perrine 161
Pesanek Z. 95, 164,
222
Pettigrew J. B. 21
Pevsner A. 57, 85, 95,
115, 124, 134, 245
PeyrissacJ. 88,153
Picabia F. 49, 50, 221,
230, 234, 239, 244
Picasso P. 37,38,39,48,
53, 77, 82, 83, 234
Picelj 116‘Picturesque Cafe’ 145
PieneN. 194,202
Piene O. 153, 179, 184,
185,203, 205
Piero della Francesca 12,
23
Pignon 76
Pinturicchio 219
Pissarro C. 11,14,16
Plato 31
Poe E. A. 146
Poggendorf J. C. 106
PohlU. 115
Pointillism 23
Poliakoff 75
Pollock J. 80, 83, 84, 183,
236, 240
Poncet M.-Th. 218
Poons L. 192
Pop-art 93
Popova L. 57
Post-impressionism 23
Post-impressionists 22,
26
Poussin N. 218
Prentiss, C. 196
Proust M. 68, 69, 226
Prudhommeau G. 218
Purkinje 105, 106
Puvis de Chavannes P.
28, 34

Quin A. 150

Rabkin L. 178
Ranson P. 34
Raphael 29, 220
Rappard 26
Rauschenberg R. 200,
202, 211
Ravelo 192
Rayonnism 54
Rayonnists 54, 223, 244
Raysse M. 177
Realism 31
Redon O. 17-18,19,24,
26.218, 233, 236, 244
Reiback E. 178,200
Reinhardt 242
Reinhartz K. 118
Rembrandt 220
Renaissance 12, 106, 218,
220, 223, 245
Rene D. (Galerie) 95, 98,
103,120,138
Renoir A. 11,47
Renucci J. L. 173
Ribot Th. 22
Ricciardo A. 164
Richter H. 158, 159, 160,
221
Rickey G. W. 149,239
Riley B. 106, 112, 192,
230, 236, 238
Rimington A. W. 157,
161, 169, 242
Rivera J. de 143
Robillard Y. 203
Roberts W. 53
Rodchenko A. 57, 145,
150, 221,223
Rodin A. 18, 19, 20, 36,
66.218, 226, 240, 244
RoodO. N. 22
Roos J. 128
Ross C. 206
Rosso M. 66
Rot D. 118
271

Rothfuss 150
Rothko 183
Rouard H. 13
Rouault G. 59
Rousseau Th. 29
Roy P. 77
Rubens P.-P. 23,24,218,
RudeF. 19,218
RudraufL. 218
RuttmannW. 160,165

Sacharjin-Unkowsky
M. A. 62
Salazar 192
Salvadori M. 174,222,
210, 231
Sartoris A. 74
Sartre J.-P. 146,226
Saucer 106
Schlemmer O. 68, 74, 95,
242
Schmidt-Rottluff 60,
234
Schmithals H. 35
Schneider G. 80,81
Schoenemaekers 57
Schoffer N. 92, 93, 134,
135-7, 142, 143, 144,
170-2,210,212, 221-3,
233, 236, 239-41, 246
SchoonhovenJ. 183
Schreyer L. 74,80
Schroder 106
Schwerdtfeger K. 164,
165, 222, 242
Schwitters K. 72, 116,
145, 230, 233
Scriabin A. 62, 64, 95,
156-8, 222, 242
Scriabin M. 218
Secession 31
Section d’Or 48, 49, 50
SedgleyP. 192
SegalenV. 29
Segond J. 215
Seitz W.C. 192

Sempere 194
Serusier P. 30,34
Seuphor M. 71
Seurat G. 22, 23, 24, 40,
47,219, 220, 221,231,
234, 241
Severini 43, 47, 48, 123
Sharp W. 211
Sidenius 196
Signac P. 24, 25
SimaJ. 76
Singier 75
Sisley A. 11,16
Sluyters 82
Smith D. 86, 88
Snyder D. 199
SobrinoF. 116,118,119,
180, 182,214,215
Sommerrock H. 113,242
Soriano R. 174, 177,236
SotoJ. R. 101,106-8,
113, 192, 204, 205, 220,
238, 240, 245
Soulages 77, 80,81
Souriau E. 215,218,228
Souriau P. 22, 224, 225
Spakenburg 82
Spencer H. 20, 239
Spoerri 104
Springer (gallery) 127
StaeldeN. 75
Stafford J. 204,206
StaudtK. 116
Steele J. 106, 192,230
Stein J. 118, 149, 174,
180, 182,214,215, 231,
233
Stella F. 192
Stepanov 185
Stepanova 57
Sterling Forest Garden
153
Stern G. 178,199
Stern R. 200
Stettheimer C. 50
DeStijl 57
Straus E. 227

Strawinsky I. 47
Sturm 61,68,80
Styrsky 76
Suprematism 54, 55, 56
Suprematists 244
Surrealism 71, 76,77,
244
Surrealist 127,221,233,
236, 245
SurvageL. 158
Sutter D. 22
Sweeney J. J. 146‘Synthesis’ 210

Tacha-Spears A. 194
Tadasky 192, 197, 198-9,
212
Tadlock T. 178
Tairov 68
Takis V. 140, 141, 143,
144, 188,211,221,234,
241
Tal Coat 81
TalmanP. 118
TambelliniA. 199
Tanguy Y. 77,78,233
Tannhauser (gallery) 61
Tatlin 56, 57, 122, 124,
131, 144, 145,219, 221,
241, 245
Tauber-Arp S. 71, 96,
127
Tavernier 17
Theremin 164
Thorne 105

Tinguely J. 124,131,
133, 143, 221,231,236
Tintoretto 23
Tobey 77,83-84, 183,
242
Tokugawa 16
Tomasello 106,115,116,
238
Tomasini 230
Toorop C. 34, 83
Toorop J. 83
Torres-Garcia 71
Toulouse-Lautrec L.-A.
12, 34, 240
Tovish 178
Toyen 76
Tragic generation 26, 36,
244
Tsai 208,211
Turner W. 11,16,218
Tzara T. 49

Uccello P. 12,23
ticker 116, 185,242
Ukiyo-E 16
Ultvedt 144
USCO 202, 203, 207
Utamaro 16

Valensi H. 48, 68, 174,
176, 221, 246
Van den Berghe 82

272

Vanderbeek S. 202
Van der Leek 57
Van de Velde H. 34
Van Doesburg 57,71
Van Gogh V. 26-8, 29,
30, 220, 241, 244
VanSaunJ. 200,201
Van Thienen 239
Vantongerloo G. 85, 86,
150
Van Velde B. 82
Van Velde G. 74
Vardanega G. 149-51,
167, 168, 230, 234
Vasarely V. 95,96-101,
103, 104, 106, 112, 220,
234, 235
VaucansonJ.de 122
Vedova 81
Velasquez D. 12
Verhaeren E. 49
Veronese 219
Verstockt 205
Vertov D. 160
Vesnin A. 57
Vico 67
Vieira da Silva 75
Vieyra M. 149
Vignon (gallery) 145
VilderR. 193
Villon J. 47,48
Vlaminck M. de 59
Vollard 13
Vordemberge-Gildewart
F. 74
Vorticism 52, 53

Vorticists 52, 53, 76, 223,
240, 244
Vuillard E. 34

Wagner R. 25, 28
Wagner G. 53
Wahl M. 218
Watteau A. 19,218,239
Weber H. 118
Weber W. 144
Weill E.-B. 173,221
Werkman H. 82, 83
Wertheimer 105
Whistler 218,234
Whitman W. 49
Wiegers J. 82
Wiener N. 90
Wilding 113
Wilfred Th. 95, 161, 162,
163, 196, 222, 246
Willard Gallery 153
Willats 198
Willenbecher 178

Yakulov 68, 145
YoshiharaJ. 155
Young 202
Yvaral 106, 113,149,
150, 180, 182, 231

Zadkin 66, 67, 86, 219
Zazeela, M. 200
Ziem 29

1

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