(Ardengo Soffici, BÃF§ZF+18 simultaneità e chimismi lirici, 1915. Part of A Tumultuous Assembly: visual poems of the Italian Futurists at the Getty. Note this, this (English version), this, and this (English version). You should be able to download those . . .
“. . . . Soon you won’t see anyone but artists in the street and the one thing you’ll have no end of trouble in finding is a man. They are everywhere: the cafés are full of them, new art schools open up every single day. I’ve always wondered how a teacher of painting, unless he teaches a locksmith how to copy keys, has ever been able to find a single pupil since the beginning of the world. People make fun of those who frequent palm-readers and other fortune tellers and never indulge in any irony about the simple souls who go to art school. Can anyone learn to draw or paint, to have talent or genius? And yet we find in these studios big dadoes of thirty or even forty and God forgive me, ninnies of fifty, yes, sweet Jesus! poor old fogies of fifty . . . .
It may be argued that art schools provide painters with heat in winter and a model. And for a true painter a model is life itself. At any rater you can judge for yourself whether a professional model is more alive than the plaster statues people copy in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts; but the frequenters of the Academie Matisse are full of contempt for the pompous deadheads at the Beaux-Arts; why, just imagine: they are turning out advanced art. It is true that some among them believe that art is superior to nature. Yes, my dear!
I am astonished that some crook has not had the idea of opening a writing school.”
(Arthur Cravan, “Exhibition at the Independents” (1914). Reprinted in Robert Motherwell’s The Dada Painters & Poets: An Anthology, p. 4. Translated by Motherwell, I assume.)
(Umberto Boccioni, Visioni simultanee, 1911. Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 69.5 cm. Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal.)
Ken Friedman’s Fluxus Reader, one of the major compilations of Fluxus-related documents has been posted in PDF form to Walter Ciancusi‘s Fluxus Podcast. Also available used here starting at $108.
“It is the architectonic gesture of the Virgin which accomplishes the miracle, as she pulls at her mantle with her left hand so as to enclose herself in an absolute pyramid which turns, an unmoved mover, on a crystalline pivot, until is establishes before us the ideal axis which, etched in the fold on the forehead, runs down the protruding part of the face and descends past the closed edge of the drapery as far as the jutting corner of the pre-Dieu. But the right hand advances at an angle, to test cautiously the possible boundary of the pictorial space; having found it, it halts; while, counterbalancing it, the book slices the air with the sharp blade of its bright page. In the hollow within the column of the neck, there slowly settles the enclosed ovoid of the face, over which turn, as over a planet, broad diagrams of regular shadows.”
(Roberto Longhi, from “Piero dei Franceschi e la pittura veneziana”, quoted (and translated) by David Tabbat in his introduction to Three Studies, pp. xiii–xiv)
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2. Of shoes, etc.: Made to be fastened or tightened with laces.
3. Ornamented or trimmed with lace: a. with edgings, trimmings, or lappets of lace. b. with braids or cords of gold or silver lace.
4. Diversified with streaks of colour. Of birds: Having on the edge of the feathers a colour different from that of the general surface. Of a flower: Marked with streaks of colour.
Mutton was used alone in the same sense. The adj. may mean wearing a bodice, possibly with a pun on the culinary sense
6. Of a beverage: Mixed with a small quantity of spirits. (But see quot. a1700; also 1687 in
397. Of the spokes of a bicycle: Set so as to cross one another near the hub.
9. laced valley (Building): a valley between the slopes of two adjoining roofs in which the end tile of each row abuts against a tile-and-a-half tile laid diagonally on the valley board.
10. Comb., as laced-jacketed, -waistcoated adjs.
“A week earlier I’d returned from Paris where Roland Barthes had told me of a rather disturbing fact that had created a vague feeling of mental claustrophobia, like a feeling you can escape from. From the administration of the Collège de France where he was giving his delightful lectures, he had been sent a list of all the College’s professors, arranged according to the date of retirement. For one of them, extremely young, the retirement date was 2006.
—For me it’s the first time the twenty-first century has put in an appearance—was Barthes’ comment. And in his voice there was all of his habitual irony, yet a little sadness too, which he tried to hide as though the feelings were out of place.”
(Michelangelo Antonioni, “Report about myself” in That Bowling Alley on the Tiber, trans. William Arrowsmith, p. 96.)
(Giorgio Morandi, Still Life (The Blue Vase), 1920. Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf.)
“As for Morandi, he has never been a metaphysical painter. The limit was reached when the prize for metaphysical painting was given unanimously, but probably through the insistence of the modernistologist Professors Roberto Longhi and Lionello Venturi, to their beloved Morandi. Now you, dear reader, if you want to realise the mentality and morality prevailing today in certain circles of modern art and modern culture, think on this fact: an official exhibition, organised in Italy with money from Italian taxpayers, includes the paintings of a very well-known Italian painter without even inviting him and without even informing him, going against all rules of good behaviour and all usual morality. This very well-known Italian painter, who has created a style or a genre, if you wish, of painting, a style or genre which belongs to him and only to him, is exhibited along with works of other painters described arbitrarily and tendentiously as metaphysical, one of whom, as I have said, did no more than plagiarise, while the other has nothing whatever to do with metaphysical painting. Then to cap everything a money prize was even instituted, this prize being given to the man whose paintings had nothing whatever to do with the metaphysical style. Think about it hard,, dear reader, and you will find it impossible to imagine anything more improper and shameless.”
(The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, trans. Margaret Crosland, p. 186.)
“. . . . Then I look towards the west, towards Monte Mario and the dome of St Peter’s, then to the south-west where can be seen the outline of the chariot which supports the roof cornice on top of the Palace of Justice, the so called ‘ugly’ palace. I look farther south where I can see the upper part of the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II, a monument which has always been very much criticised and spoken of ironically, like the Palace of Justice, but in comparison with the wretched things put up by certain modernist architects who proceed with their eyes fixed on the line of the horizon, such as Le Corbusier, Wright, Gropius and others, these two buildings, unlike the aberrations of certain modern architecture, are authentic masterpieces, worthy of a Bramante or a Brunelleschi.”
(Giorgio de Chirico, The Memoirs of Giorgio de Chirico, trans. Margaret Crosland, pp.163–164.)
