Chris Townsend

Henri-Martin Barzun’s ‘Simultaneism’ between the Abbaye de Créteil and Futurism: The Individual and the Crowd in Late-Symbolist Art

This essay argues that Futurism’s concept of simultaneism derives in part from the infl uence of the French poet, critic and dramatist Henri-Martin Barzun (1881–1974). This infl uence began with F. T. Marinetti’s encounter with French late-Symbolist poetry and thought in the 1890s and was reinforced by his contacts with the intellectual community gathering at the Abbaye de Créteil in 1907–1908. Although the infl uence of Jules Romains’ poetry and his theory of Unanimism have been widely discussed, little has been written about Barzun and Futurism. I propose in this essay that the ideas promulgated by Romains were, in certain areas, antithetical to Futurist thought, whereas Barzun’s concept of subjectivity in an evolving mass society, and indeed his practice of those ideas within drama and poetry, was more closely aligned to Marinetti’s idea of selfhood. Having distinguished Barzun’s ideas from Romains, the essay also shows that the Futurist notion of simultaneism (simultaneità) differs both conceptually and practically from simultaneism as it was professed and practised by the French avant-garde, whether articulated as simultané (Robert Delaunay) or as simultanéité (Apollinaire). A close reading of Barzun’s Hymne des forces (1912) is paralleled with the visual treatment of time and space in characteristic Futurist paintings by Delmarle and Severini. Finally, Barzun’s theory of polyphony and simultaneity is related to the Futurist assault on the boundary between art and life, especially its performance works that explore and rely on the tensions created by different voices speaking at the same time.

The Purist Focus: léger's theory of the close-up

This paper examines the apparent contradictions between the use of the fragmented close-up in Fernand Légers film Ballet mécanique (1924) and his depiction of the cohesive face in his painting in the early 1920s. I argue that this paradox stems from Légers seeing, in certain pre-war movements whose aesthetics were premised on fragmentation, an endorsement of the supreme value of technology and modernity to the human subject, and of the suborning of that subject to industrial modernity, with all the catastrophic human consequences that were then witnessed in the First World War. These “aesthetics of fragmentation” are then compared and contrasted with Purisms post-war reconciliation of “man” as a cohesive being, achieved through its conservative revision of modernist aesthetics. This critique is effected through the “portmanteau” of Ballet mécanique, which is effectively an assemblage of different pre-war modernist aesthetics contrasted with Purist depictions of cohesive form.