Prologue. The Crisis of Humanism and the Need for a New Man

"Repairing man," seeking in the experience of the Great War the energy necessary for the refoundation of the Human, such was the paradoxical mission pursued by two major avant-gardes, Futurism and Bauhaus, born respectively in 1909 and (soldiers playing cards), humorous or edifying (combatants without apparent expression of distress, devoted nurses). Based on very rich historical and iconographic documentation, Iveta Slavkova proposes meticulous analyses of the diversions intended to sublimate reality, including the most violent (the bombing of Arras, the trenches). The architectural repertoire of war memorials is also very significant, taking up the codes of ancient temples and the statuary of heroes and Victories, or those of Christian sacrifice and Pietà. The invention of the Unknown Soldier, this unifying, idealized and anonymous archetype, seeks to attenuate the pain of particular bereavements, and to glorify them by linking them to the collective body of the Nation. Letters from teachers analyzed by historians make heard young people who, messengers of republican ideals, carried the high idea of their mission right to the trench terrain, in the hope of a better humanity forged by sacrifice. If there is of course literature that denounces war, most of the books published at the time, in the countries concerned, contribute to the mythification of battles described as an exalting opportunity for self-realization. The Dream, by the veteran Henry de Montherlant, is only one example among others... The author proposes an overview of European writers who participated in the elaboration of the figure of the New Man, often caricatural. Among the greatest, she analyzes Ernst Jünger's "steel humanism," for whom war is a Promethean affirmation against decadence. For most German intellectuals, war is a source of national cohesion between elites and people. For Thomas Mann, it symbolizes the salutary tension between Germanness and Latinity, it ennobles the individual, it is humanist, civilizing, educational. Its grandeur transcends individual sufferings. In France, the manifesto "For a Party of Intelligence" 1919 insists on its spiritual scope. It is signed by the Committee of the Unknown Soldier and by personalities of art and literature such as Paul Bourget, Maurice Denis, Edmond Jaloux, Camille Mauclair or Charles Maurras, who justifies all sacrifices in the name of the sacred triptych: God, Humanity and France. Even Henri Barbusse, a convinced pacifist, accepts "with joy" the gift of self, in the name of fraternity. Curiously the New Man exalts the idea of Nation while claiming a universal dimension; barbaric acts are only contingencies to be relativized in view of superior Ideas. The industrial massacre becomes almost abstract. The Greco-Roman antique model, virile and integral, hovers over a modern war that brings back the Titans. Winckelmann's cult for classical Greek statuary triumphs. The principle of historical fiction practiced by David to embellish the body of the assassinated Marat, in contempt of all realism, is still alive. In Germany, the New Man is declined in the monumental "cyclopean style" of Franz Stassen who, in 1914, represents titan-men against a background of architectural elements borrowed from Jugendstil. Despite the broken faces, this aesthetic will impose itself. The figure of the aviator, Christ descended from heaven or triumphant superman, at the intersection of ancient and modern values, is a glorious avatar of the New Man. Robert Delaunay celebrates aviation in his Homage to Blériot 1914 and other paintings that redesign the world on the scale of a pre-futurist propeller, omniscient spiritual eye of the new humanism. The artist can easily identify with this superior man engendered by war and machines. A famous collage by Carrà, Manifestazione interventista [Interventionist Demonstration] proposes in 1914 a nationalist version of the aviator's panoramic gaze: an aerial view through an airplane propeller diffuses its radiating spindles on a canvas strewn with patriotic "words in freedom." This collage shows how the inhumanity often reproached to futurism (apology of war, of the machine-man and destructive industry, rejection of Enlightenment values) was in fact the culmination of a humanist project of ascension, perfection, totalization, the quest for a Man master of himself and dominant.

Chapter II. The New Man of Futurism, Between Multiplied Hybrid and Absolute Subject

The second chapter of the essay deepens the characteristics of futurist humanism, at the antipodes of Renaissance humanism, despite affinities, which is a paradox for a movement that claimed to make a clean slate of the past and tradition. The futurist New Man is no longer the unified and harmonious central subject of creation. It is a multiplied and hybrid subject, an all-powerful god master of the world and of himself. Nationalism and cosmopolitan modernity get along well, this is a second paradox. Remembering the Risorgimento which had led to an Italian reunification with a bitter taste, because tributary of European powers, futurism dreamed of Pan-Italianism, hence Marinetti's conquering cosmopolitanism. His vitalism and faith in Men regenerated by war to better ensure the unity of the Nation border on fascism, which Iveta Slavkova however nuances by retracing the stages of the relationship between Marinetti and Mussolini until their rupture in 1922. The glorification of War is rooted in an obsession with virility, attested by a multitude of futurist works. Long developments are devoted to Marinetti's legendary misogyny, who nevertheless supported suffragettes, wished for the abolition of woman's domestic status, divorce reform, wage equality, and admired certain emancipated women. Valentine de Saint-Point, like him, does not skimp on contradictions, singer of a sexist misogynist pre-fascist ideology or conversely of a progressivism of liberated woman, masculinized and announcing ahead of time the ideas of "gender." In fact, Marinetti feared the feminine and love, this emollient principle that threatened man's stability. The vulva, trap of warrior virility, inspired him with terror, and parturition with disgust. An in-depth study of Mafarka the Futurist 1909 establishes that this novel, against a background of unbridled sexual fantasies and hallucinated mythological phantasmagorias, is a manifesto for parthenogenesis. Mafarka engenders Gazourmah without sexual act or feminine matrix, by the sole will of his spirit, in a burlesque variant of Christic conception. This son is sculpted in oak wood carved by the stars, and transformed into flesh. Endowed with great steel wings of man-airplane, this tireless being of remarkable beauty, capable of controlling everything, including the natural and mechanical elements that constitute him, is a synthesis of the futurist project of absolute mastery of the universe by a multiplied hybrid subject. This new Icarus, who is not the Man of the Renaissance, nevertheless maintains curious resemblances with him... The innumerable technical manifestos of futurist literature resume, in another register, the theme of the multiplied self, by advocating an exploded writing ("words in freedom") and the abolition of the subject (the "I," the little self) in the name of a consciousness propelled in all directions of the universe and the industrial world, to capture its energies and place them under the tutelage of a reinforced self.

This multiplicity, inseparable from a radical affirmation of mastery, is found in the paintings of Umberto Boccioni, Luigi Russolo, Carlo Carrà, Gino Severini, Giacomo Balla. Iveta Slavkova retraces the evolution of these artists, from their anarchist sympathies of the beginnings to their cult of the Latin "race." Their misogyny emerges in several paintings. All subscribe to the warlike engagement that transforms their canvases into "plastic dramas." The "dynamic sensation" and the sensorial dislocation of vision produce centrifugal or centripetal compositions, violent and mastered clashes of lines, forces, forms, colors, crowds, in short a "heroic rhetoric" of vital impetus. From 1914-1915 onwards, war is explicitly present in "synthesis paintings" constellated with typographic research. The futurist artist is the only one capable of containing cosmic vibrations while avoiding dissolution (decadence, the feminine). The spectator, himself multiplied, is projected to the center of the painting by this "immersive" painting, so well highlighted by the large formats of the Parisian exhibition of [Unique Forms of Continuity in Space]. A hybrid Man launches himself into space, solitary, still stuck in matter. The metamorphosis of elements – flesh or air, full or empty, shadows or lights – is treated with genius there. The absence of arms gives way to embryonic wings that "sleep in man's flesh" (Marinetti). The face of this cruel fighter forms a cross-sword, associating baptism with conquest. The dynamism that carries him forward makes one think of Rodin's Walking Man or even the Victory of Samothrace. The sensation of spatial continuity results from the flows that traverse his body, organic and inorganic like that of Mafarka. The exegesis of Boccioni's theoretical writings allows us to understand the objectives of a "pure plastic rhythm" in resonance with Bergson's thought in Matter and Memory: to make sensitive the prolongation of things in space and the spirit freed by movement, to surpass the notion of space-time in favor of duration, to produce a fourth dimension. This radical novelty cannot mask certain affinities with Michelangelo or Bernini, despite Boccioni's denials. A painting by Severini, Plastic Synthesis of the "War" Idea (1914-1915), illustrates more precisely the relationship of the new futurist humanism to nature: a metallic landscape in which a topographic survey, mathematical and chemical formulas, an electric pole and a factory chimney intersect, is dominated by the word ANTIHUMANISM. Of the various interpretations that have been made of this painting, Iveta Slavkova privileges that of Philippe Dagen who deciphers in it the futurist inscription of a bellicist order and a desire for destruction of nature for the benefit of a renovated race. A Freudian reading of the atheist "dehumanizing" humanism of futurism, built on a dominating self, and tributary underground of Christian mythology and Renaissance spirit, allows it to be interpreted as a defense against unconscious forces, a fantasy of "totalizing integrity of the subject" inducing an authoritarian political model.

Chapter III. Purity, Morality and the Machine: the New Man of the Bauhaus

Chapter III allows us to identify, beyond similarities, the differences between the Bauhaus's New Man project and that of Futurism. To the multiplied subject the Bauhaus opposes a subject who, just as dominating, draws his identity from an Ideal of unity, simplicity, purified creation. The great stages of the Bauhaus, from its foundation in 1919 in Weimar by Walter Gropius to its closure by the Nazis in Berlin in 1933, are envisaged from four major personalities – Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, Johannes Itten, Oskar Schlemmer – and punctuated by the description of magazine covers, drawings and models, reproductions of paintings, photographs. At the Bauhaus everything begins with ancient ideals. The cathedral is the founding symbol of Gropius's ["Program and Manifesto"], whose cover in 1919 reproduces an illustration by Lyonel Feininger, Die Kathedrale, a building of Gothic appearance revisited by contemporary plastic codes: distortions, geometrization, exploded facets in the cubist manner and luminous beams of futurist inspiration. The Gothic cathedral embodies a glorious Germanness, a mystical ideal, but also the way of life of the guilds and corporations of the Middle Ages, which allied the art of construction with principles of collective life. The Bauhaus excels at adjusting tradition to the demands of modern life. Architecture, inseparable from political utopias, occupies a central place there. The school, at its beginnings, sympathized with the "Arts and Crafts" of the English socialist designer and theorist William Morris. Gropius, like Morris, was hostile to blind capitalist accumulation and dreamed of a harmonious life dedicated to manual work and the beauty of objects. But, unlike Morris, he does not condemn industrial production. The Bauhaus's initial sympathy for craftsmanship is moreover a motive for conflict within the school, provoking in 1923 the so-called "constructivist" rupture, pro-industrial, which will embody, in the eyes of posterity, the true identity of the Bauhaus. Innumerable projects of housing and future cities see the light of day, in the name of a collective happiness conforming to the "true" human nature. Gropius aspires to a city made of concrete buildings, well aligned, standardized, guarantors of an egalitarian life.

Hannes Meyer, a convinced Marxist, pushes to the extreme the ideal of standardization of anti-bourgeois housing, thought for an individual inscribed in the collective. The proclaimed equality of citizens and sexes – despite a dominant model of virilized women – underlies his cooperative design projects of the second half of the 1920s: few objects and furniture, identical spaces produced in series, sober forms, purified lines. In Meyer, as in Gropius, architecture has a moral vocation: to restore the living crushed by war, to combat chaos by a necessary catharsis, to sublimate violence. Glass architecture, crystalline material vector of light and truth, perfectly reflects the qualities of the New Man. Influenced by Bruno Taut, designer in 1917 of an ideal garden city and crystal architecture with spiritual connotation, Gropius however regrets his lack of functional thinking: in 1925, the entirely glazed facade of the Bauhaus workshops in Dessau will take into account more earthly needs. Heirs of Adolf Loos's purity, elitist and visionary, the Bauhaus architects consider themselves spiritual masters. Their democratic convictions are undeniable, but their condescension, even their contempt, towards a people that must be enlightened despite themselves, are no less so. And their aspiration to the "Great All" is not devoid of nationalist, theosophical, potentially totalitarian implications.

With Johannes Itten "the guru," charismatic pedagogue, a new part is being played. Unlike Gropius, the Bauhaus does not appear to him as a political and social tool, but as a recruiting ground for supremely gifted artists, designated to perfect their spiritual elevation. A follower of the Mazdean religion based on Zarathustra's (Zoroaster's) teaching, he will seek his ideas for the realization of the New Man in Near Eastern occultism, in the science of proportions and numbers, in techniques of mastery of body and mind to improve the race. His philosophical hermeticism also draws from the "völkisch" current of the early 20th century, a mixture of Germanic neo-paganism and Christianity, ancient German mythology, romanticism, freemasonry, theosophy, biology and darwinism. His Kinderbild [Portrait of a Child], from 1921-1922, synthesizes his aesthetic, esoteric and ideological conceptions. One can see well that Itten prefigures Nazism by claiming the Aryans (the Zoroastrian Persians), ancestors of a superior race and a fusion Nation, "freely" submitted to recognized elites.

Last essential figure of the Bauhaus, Oskar Schlemmer delivers another interpretation of the New Man. Form reigns in his work, as such, and never ceases to purify itself. The demiurge artist has the mission of transposing the laws of the universe into reality by the force of the point, the line, the triangle and the circle. War and its massacres are sublimated by the geometrization of forms, bodies and movement. The official Bauhaus logo designed by Schlemmer in 1921, with variants in 1922-1923 during the "constructivist" transition, is a stylized, geometrized face, playing on black-white contrasts, on the underlying spirituality of a square eye in the shape of a window, prefiguring the standardized metallized units of the Dessau glazing. This New Man, well attuned to concrete architecture, makes one think of Winckelmann's Greek statuary. Der Tänzer [The Dancer], probably an idealized self-portrait from 1923, bursting with whiteness, and a 1926 photograph of the Raumtanz [Space Dance] project summarize Schlemmer's humanist ideal: restrained gestures, quasi-mechanical precision enhanced by horizontals, verticals and obliques, shaved or masked heads, undifferentiated, standardized, anonymous bodies, in costumes and décors themselves stylized or symbolic. An architect-demiurge presides over this homogeneous, egalitarian and universal world. Fascinated by crowds, by individuals who merge into the "Great All," Schlemmer, in his "Mechanical Ballet" of 1917, judges the gymnastics of stadiums and military parades exalting: these geometric executions demonstrate that "man is the measure of all things" (Heraclitus). At the Bauhaus, he devotes his course to Man, studied in an encyclopedic perspective worthy of the Renaissance. Iveta Slavkova compares one of his pedagogical plates from 1928, Mensch im Ideenkreis [Man in the Circle of Ideas], with Leonardo da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man. A runner, captured in profile in full action, abstract and stylized, levitates harmoniously in a circle surrounded by inscriptions corresponding to the major orientations of Schlemmer's teaching: biology, form, philosophy, aesthetics and ethics. The geometric perfection of bodies in these two works, their cosmic architecture, express a transcended vision of man. But there is a great difference: the relationship between body and spirit, dialecticized in Leonardo da Vinci, is symbolized by the navel which, freed from its double negative connotation, Christian and Platonic, is proof of the living, the visceral and sexuality. Schlemmer, by opting for abstraction, for spirit against flesh, for the mathematical perfection of proportions, ignores such dialectical complexity. His spirituality refers to Jakob Böhme and the figure of the androgyne, antithesis of Leonardo da Vinci's "mortal sexed man." Schlemmer's man is an "art figure" (Kunstfigur), a representation rid of all biological contingency. The mechanical laws of the industrial world are introduced into the human body. This systematic aestheticization of life as well as the artist's mystical nationalism, heir to the "völkish," explain that the Nazi salute and the swastika have surreptitiously infiltrated certain of his works decrypted by Iveta Slavkova, who however refuses to accuse of regimentation an artist who rebelled several times against Nazism, tried to reason with Goebbels and stopped painting between 1933 and 1935. From there to occulting his ambiguities, as some of his historiographers have done, there is a margin... Schlemmer incontestably, like the Futurists, contributed to totalitarian ideology through his simplification and aestheticization of History. The dismembered bodies on the battlefields regained form on the Bauhaus stage, new space of utopia from 1921. Schlemmer there prolonged the great scenic principles, rid of their mystical expressionism, of Lothar Schreyer, first master of the Bauhaus theater workshop: refusal of narration, abstract costumes, mechanical gestures of actors-puppets hermetic to History. In his famous Triadic Ballet, mounted in 1922, plastic concerns definitively exclude psychology. The number three reigns over primary colors and geometric forms put at the service of a harmonious social model. Iveta Slavkova reveals step by step the strange complexity of this work that exalts a Man in symbiosis with the eternal laws of art and those of the industrial world. Inspired by Heinrich von Kleist's romantic puppet and Edward Gordon Craig's "super-puppet," Schlemmer gives to see silent bodies, "liberated" by "training," as Éric Michaud explained, protected from the horrors of war and the ills of the Weimar Republic by their machine rigor. The "dehumanization" of puppets, which is not in its principle "antihumanist," on the contrary – man dominates the machine and the latter can help him improve for the benefit of the Great All – has been variously interpreted by subsequent directors. Sociologists, for their part, have analyzed how, by dint of denying the fear of fragmentation, totalitarian desire imported it into Germany between the two wars. Historical traumas were covered over by effigies of dominating men, frightened by the disorders of the psyche, of "becoming woman" and of flesh, in a machine-body under absolute control. These "modern humanist idols" failed to repair the massacre and protect the future...

Epilogue: Repair, Redemption, Becoming

Dehumanization as the result of a humanist project is the astonishing paradox maintained jointly by Futurism and Bauhaus. But while Futurism, thurifer of war, misogynist, racist and anti-democratic, made allegiance to a cruelty it thought inherent in man and creativity, the Bauhaus was globally inscribed in a bourgeois, altruistic, social-democratic tradition, hostile to violence. Futurism aspired to war as a means of self-realization while the Bauhaus saw it as a necessary evil, an ordeal to go through. But the two movements finally joined: all the Bauhaus actors had a part in the war, closely or distantly, and some made pacts with a totalitarian power; with this difference that the domination of the people by the artist meant, for the Bauhaus, a reconciliation of individuals with their deep desires and their "true" nature, often unknown to them...

The "return to order" movement of the 1920s claimed that returning to traditional humanism would make one forget the barbarism of an era. War had been the necessary parenthesis to reconnect with an essential in perdition... "The war over, everything organizes itself, everything clarifies and purifies itself" write Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant in After Cubism 1918. In fact, several avant-gardes perpetuate after the war the mysticism of the New Man. Mondrian's Neo-plasticism considers that spiritualism and abstraction have the vocation to reveal the ultimate depth of things and the authentic nature of man. Russian constructivists develop a totalizing human project, conveyed by communism and a demiurge artist who recomposes forms and allies with industrial production. The similarities are great between Russian constructivism and Hannes Meyer's cooperative design...

The last pages of Iveta Slavkova counterbalance all the rest of the work. It is indeed a question of Dada and Surrealism, these two avant-gardes which, unlike Futurism and Bauhaus, declared their intention to put an end to humanism, the ultimate cause of the Great War. The author offers us a rich overview of texts, works or dadaist manifestations, in Zurich, Paris or Germany, by Tzara, Arp, Picabia, Huelsenbeck or Hausmann, who proclaim loudly their hatred of humanism, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, their disrespect for culture, reason, constructed language and any totalizing ideology. Dada wants nothing, believes in nothing, has no program. The dadaists celebrate the cult of the exploded self, of primitive unconscious, of the fundamental multiplicity of Being. They claim cosmopolitanism and cry their hatred of nationalism. Looking the horror of war in the face, naming it, denouncing it, they make use of art not to "repair Man" but to engage in a great work of deconstruction enunciated in all their manifestos, beginning with Tristan Tzara's Dada Manifesto 1918. These manifestos cultivate sarcastic derision, blasphemy and destruction of forms (phonetic poetry, collage, assemblage). The famous photomontage by Hausmann, ABCD (Portrait of the Artist), from 1923-1924, scrutinized in detail, is an absolute antithesis of Schlemmer's Dancer. Everything is there: wacky face with wide open mouth, screaming or howling with laughter, fragmented body, exploded layout, oversized letters, paper fragments, banknotes and tickets, pieces of starry sky, scientifically drawn uterus and penis perforating a futurist magazine, evocation of discordant sounds and violence, etc. The surrealists following Dada will manifest their disgust for a conception of art whose meaning the horrors of war had abolished. Following Breton, they postulate that "man is perhaps not the center, the focal point of the universe." Antihumanism is relayed, after the Second World War, by numerous philosophers or writers, but this last chapter gives a particular place to deconstruction according to Foucault and Deleuze, to their questioning of the centrality of the human and the subject. Deleuze opposes the totalitarian ambition of Futurism to the chaotic will of Dada, which draws its vitality from the "desiring machines" animating an individual always other than himself.

One can only thank Iveta Slavkova for warning us in a note that the antihumanism of Dada and surrealism is a problematic that will be addressed in a future book. This one indeed seems indispensable to demonstrate that the avant-gardes hostile to an illusory humanist restoration contributed, better than Futurism or Bauhaus, to liberating the future...

Iveta Slavkova's Thesis Position

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