As Within So Without: The Painter as Clairvoyant

Daniel Barbiero
April 2019

Stati d’animo I.Gli addii, 1911

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A train station at the turn of the last century: The artificial fog of smoke rising from the exhaust funnels; the projecting forms, round and angled, of steel, iron and wood in motion toward and away from each other; the rhythmic clacking of wheels on tracks; the overlapping beats of engines chuffing; the discordant harmonies of the whistles. On the platform, a confusion of movement of people shouting over the noise—shouting greetings to those who arrive, final goodbyes to those boarding and leaving.

Train travel, with its clashing surfeit of stimuli, is the setting for Umberto Boccioni’s Stati d’animo (“states of mind”), a cycle of three paintings showing Gli addi (“the goodbyes), Quelli che vanno (“those who leave”) and Quelli che restano (“those who remain”). There are actually two cycles of the Stati d’animo paintings, one produced in 1911 and the second in 1912. The earlier set, with its almost expressionist handling of paint and color, is freer in form than the later set which, most likely reflecting Boccioni’s then-recent engagement with the rigorous angularity of Cubism, is couched in a style of broken planes and multiple perspectives. It is the earlier set that I want to address here. Its freer, more nebulous style seems especially well adapted to conveying Boccioni’s meaning.

The subject matter of the trilogy, centered as it apparently is on the high technology of its day, is quintessentially Futurist, one might even say stereotypically so. At one level, the paintings are quite simply about the excitement of high speed travel and the amplification of human mobility through technological means. In the first and third paintings, forms break up dynamically, first in anticipation and then in the realization of the velocity of the train as it speeds forward to its destination. In the first picture, the thickly applied streams of red and white paint suggest the steam fire heating the engine’s boilers and the steam escaping from the funnel; a vaguely oval shape in the middle of the canvas seems to imply the cylindrical profile of the engine’s boiler. Dark figures seem to emerge from the steam and general swirl of activity—presumably those waving goodbye from the platform and from inside the cars. The liquid, coiled shapes snaking across the canvas seem to embody the blurring effects of speed. The third painting shows the train in motion from the perspective of the passengers within; horizontally-sweeping lines of blue, green, yellow and orange, looking like Divisionist dots of color thickened and stretched out, streak by the clusters of houses making up the landscape outside the car’s window. Even the second painting picturing those who stay can be read as showing a certain kind of motion; the willowy, slouching appearance of the figures encodes what we might think of as the slow motion embodied in the slack, effortfully drawn-out movements of the depressed or disappointed.

A paean to speed, then? In a sense, yes. But this interpretation is informed by a more or less conventional view of Futurism as a movement preoccupied by technology and the cult of speed—the “nuova religione-morale della velocità” proclaimed in F. T. Marinetti’s 1916 manifesto of that name. And although true, it is a partial truth. For what Boccioni is trying to depict are, as the title explicitly claims, the thoughts and states of mind of people on the platform, in the passenger compartments or leaving the station to return to their homes. The Futurist preoccupation with the modern technology of travel is there, but merely as a surface phenomenon; this is a picture of internal states projecting out onto, and commingled with, the external world.

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Just a decade before Stati d’animo was painted, a curious book titled Thought-forms was published in England. The book purported to show the colors and shapes of states of mind as seen clairvoyantly by the authors, two leading members of the Theosophical Society in London, Annie Besant and Charles W. Leadbeater. Besant and Leadbeater claimed that thoughts and emotions generated forms of specific shapes and colors corresponding to the types and intensities of the mental activities that caused them. Visible only to clairvoyants, these thought forms would literally color the world with psychic energy. Besant and Leadbeater’s book was a catalogue of exemplary thought forms and contained a series of color plates, produced by three artists under the authors’ direction, which purported to show thought forms the authors observed. These illustrations were to exert a significant influence on early abstract painters—most notably Wassily Kandinsky–as well as other artists.

How direct an influence Thought-forms may have had on Boccioni is an interesting question. We know that Theosophy generally, and Thought-forms specifically, played influential roles in the Futurist world; in Florence and elsewhere, there was much overlap between Futurist and Theosophical circles. The French translation of Thought-forms, published in 1905, was quickly taken up by the Italian spiritual and artistic avant-gardes; it’s possible that Boccioni had read it and had drawn inspiration from it. Certainly, there is a resonance between the ideas and even some of the illustrations of Thought-forms and the subject matter and look of Stati d’animo—a family resemblance that tells of relation with hints of direct descent.

Whether or not he was directly influenced by Thought-forms, Boccioni, like Besant and Leadbeater, imagined a physical world enveloped or intersected by a numinous world full of unseen yet present psychic forces and energies accessible to the adept. It was a world that Boccioni envisaged as the real subject matter for Futurist painting. This becomes rather clear in the lecture he gave to the Circolo Artistico in Rome on 29 May 1911. In the course of his remarks, Boccioni laid out a program for Futurist painting as he saw it; the key to his program was the idea that the Futurist painter would have to be a clairvoyant of sorts—a pittore veggente, or painter-seer.

Overall, Boccioni makes a case for painting as a variety of clairvoyance in which feelings and sensations are depicted directly, though the mediumship of the artist. The artist is able to exercise a “Futurist hypersensibility” that operates as a kind of sixth sense, allowing that artist to “see” or sense the vibrations giving off by people’s states of mind; these vibrations consequently form the subject matter of the painting. In fact, Boccioni is quite explicit that the subject matter of Futurist painting—its “nucleus”—consists in “musical forms, spiritual volume, and the state of mind” and not in the depiction of the “physical appearance in action” of the various modern technologies and their users. Through Futurist painting, “[t]he human eye will see colors as feelings materialized.” In short, if “solid bodies give rise to states of mind by means of vibration of forms, then we will draw these vibrations.” In the notes he prepared for the lecture, Boccioni quite directly set out what might be considered the programmatic statement of task for the Futurist painter: “What needs to be painted is not the visible but what has hitherto been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees.” The object of painting wouldn’t be to depict the surfaces of things, but rather to show the spiritual or psychological reality invisible to the eye: to illustrate, in effect, the moods and emotions—the affective states—that permeate and help constitute the concrete reality of human experience.

Stati d’animo I. Quelli che restano, 1911

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Boccioni’s formal means for depicting states of mind rely on the deft handling of color and line. To begin with the colors: The muted, monochromatic green-blue palette of Quelli che restano, noted above, powerfully conveys a sense of melancholy or depression. The world seen through a melancholy or depressed eye can seem devoid of coloristic subtlety or variety; all washes out into an undifferentiated, dull shade. The painting’s association of a mood with a particular color is congruent with Besant and Leadbeater’s cataloguing of the emotional states, some of them quite specific and finely distinguished, associated with particular shades of color. Interestingly, Besant and Leadbeater attribute sympathy to the green-blue sample they present in a table at the beginning of the book; for Boccioni, on the other hand, the green-blue he uses communicates a much more inward sense of being enclosed in one’s own thoughts.

The importance of line to Boccioni’s rendering of emotion we know from the artist’s own statements. He described his method in some detail in the preface to an exhibition of Futurist work shown first at the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris in February 1912, and later at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco. Although the preface was signed by several Futurist painters, Boccioni was most likely responsible for most of it; he almost certainly was responsible for this:

We thus arrive at what we call the painting of states of mind.

In the pictorial description of the various states of mind of a leave-taking, perpendicular lines, undulating and as it were worn out, clinging here and there to silhouettes of empty bodies, may well express languidness and discouragement.

Confused and trepidating lines, either straight or curved, mingled with the outlined hurried gestures of people calling one another, will express a sensation of chaotic excitement.

On the other hand, horizontal lines, fleeting, rapid, and jerky, brutally cutting into half-lost profiles of faces or crumbling and rebounding fragments of landscape, will give the tumultuous feelings of the persons going away.

Boccioni’s translation of affective lines of force into the painterly language of color and linear form is accomplished with a directness and forcefulness. The boundaries between colors are defined and yet permeable, implying a mutual influence or exchange of affective energy among the scene’s participants.

Take, for example, the thickly-textured Gli addi. The scene is rendered in an agitated swirl of viscous waves of muddy reds, blacks and teal blues. The dark colors predominate and give the painting a certain heaviness—the heaviness of preoccupation, of thoughts of impending separation. In Quelli che vanno, dynamically sweeping lines of blue and green-blue interspersed with yellow and orange are set an angle suggesting swift movement from right to left. These signs of velocity rake over a view of the landscape outside the train window, a scene of buildings jumbled and askew as seen from the perspective of the speeding train. And finally there is Quelli che restano with its dark, slouching ghostly figures dissolving into a vertical haze of semi-transparent, serpentine lines of pale green and yellow-green.

The cumulative effect of the three paintings of the Stati d’animo group is of an experience of emotion as something that engulfs one, that literally colors one’s apprehension of the surrounding world.

Boccioni’s handling of plastic forms does convey the notion of a world shot through with forces invisible to the ordinary eye. In claiming to depict a world permeated by invisible energies and vibrations, he could further claim that he wasn’t portraying anything that recent scientific discoveries hadn’t revealed or implied. This was a common idea at the time among contemporary occultists. The invisible forces and correspondences Besant, Leadbeater and others claimed to see at work in the world were often likened to such recently discovered or theorized physical phenomena as electromagnetic force, X-rays and radioactivity. Roentgen’s discovery of X-rays, for example, was particularly intriguing to occultists, for these invisible rays that could pass through matter offered proof of an unseen reality that could be corroborated and described in scientific terms, and thus would support their own speculations concerning unseen levels of reality. And just as X-rays had been detected by scientific experiment, the energies and emanations claimed by occultists were expected ultimately to be apprehended and accepted by science as well: today’s occult claim would be tomorrow’s scientifically established fact. In fact many scientists of the time, including chemist Sir William Crookes and physicist Sir Oliver Lodge, belonged to associations interested in occult phenomena or undertook investigations of claimed occult manifestations. It’s hardly surprising that Besant and Leadbeater could—and did—claim a kinship between their occult investigations and the advanced scientific thinking of the day. Boccioni and like-minded artists were no different.

For Boccioni, X-rays provided an example of the amplification of ordinary perception—a looking through matter that for all practical purposes represented a kind of sixth sense analogous to the clairvoyant powers the occultists and Futurists alike claimed to possess. In the April, 1910 Technical Manifesto of Futurist painting, Boccioni, along with his coauthors, explicitly drew a parallel between the Futurist painter’s clairvoyance and the penetrating revelations of the X-rays. If X-rays made the invisible visible, they provided an appropriate trope for the Futurists’ “multiplied sensibility” which, they claimed in their Technical Manifesto, allowed them to “intuit the obscure manifestations of mediumistic phenomena…with results analogous to those of X-rays.” What this intuition revealed was a deeper reality in which the solid bodies of plain vision were revealed to be nothing other than “condensed atmospheres,” as Boccioni described them in the Rome Lecture, and apparently empty spaces were in fact traversed by the vibrations of ethereal substances given off by thought, sensation and affect. The X-ray-like vision of the painter-seer did nothing more than reveal this deeper reality undergirding visible reality, which he would then conjure in strokes of paint on canvas.

Stati d’animo I. Quelli che vanno, 1911

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The Futurist painter as seer—as pittore veggente–would, it seems, transpose the psychological realities of the affective states through which the world is disclosed into the material language of painted forms. And Boccioni’s trilogy very neatly puts this theory into practice. Through their play of colors and forms, they depict a world filtered through—literally colored by—the emotional responses it elicits. This may explain in part the Futurist predilection for portraying events or objects provocative of strong emotion or stress: riots, battles, bodies in rapid motion precariously poised at the edge of control. But what of the ostensibly more mundane experience of travel?

As used to them as we may be, the occasions and locations associated with travel—by train or any other means—naturally continue to elicit powerful emotions. The scenes of departure, separation and passage that provide Boccioni with his starting point are scenes of deep emotional meaning for those involved. Thus what Boccioni is attempting to depict, in an explicit way, are the specific emotional meanings that the train station and its network of relationships hold for the people passing through it. These latter occupy different positions with a network of actions and emotions, largely on the basis of what they are doing at the moment and where they are destined to be: leaving to go elsewhere, or staying. The position one holds within that network of action casts the moment of departure in a certain emotional light. Those who stay may be seen to be in a disappointed state of immobility, of literally being left behind and consequently left out of the dynamic adventure of hurtling into the future at speed. Those who leave, by contrast, participate in the thrill of forward motion, of actively pushing forward into a future whose inevitable approach is quickened by modern technology. Relative to those who leave, those left behind are quite simply left—abandoned by those who have departed.

Stripped of any occult claims to clairvoyance and seership, Boccioni’s paintings, along with his program of seership more generally, offers an insight into the way that emotion and mood function as cognitive elements in the human engagement with the world. His series delivers an insight into the way emotional states disclose and at the same time constitute our world as being a certain way for us, as having a certain value. The world takes on structures and significance through our preoccupations, expectations, reservations, attractions and aversions; we organize it according to what we see in it, need from it, expect of it—and whether or not any of those meanings, needs and expectations are met. The affective response that a place, person or event elicits is thus in essence a judgment rendered, a judgment concerning our understanding of it as mattering to us in a concrete way. Through our affective responses the world is grasped as being-for-us in a way particular to us at that particular moment. As a cognitive tool, affective judgment doesn’t supplant rational judgment so much as supplement it; through affect, judgment is transposed from the universal to the particular, from a matter of abstract reason to a matter of the world as concretely lived by a really existing person. If it reveals our reality as made up of indifferent matter, it is indifferent matter we are unable to be indifferent to.

By showing states of mind as being projected out into the world, Boccioni captures another truth about them: they bind us to the world. Affective states may have their sources within us, but at the same time they direct us outward to the world around us—a world they disclose to us as concerning us. They effectively anchor us within a network of relationships that are partly of their own making. We may not literally emanate vibrations to weave a web enmeshing our environment and the people and things within it, but we do—to change metaphors–cast our emotional shadows and let them fall all around us.

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Boccioni’s trilogy, then, is a rendering of experiences rather than of events or objects as such. As a consequence, each canvas represents a synthetic unity of the various emotions surrounding the station, the train and those caught up in the drama of travel; through this unity there arises a kind of super realism–a realism enhanced by an apprehension of the fundamental reality behind the superficial reality of appearances. Not the realism of empirical facts and the visible material world alone, but rather what Luciano Chessa has aptly called “the occult realism of the simultaneity of states of consciousness.” It is an anti-materialist realism that takes the plain sensual world as the occasion for and symbol of the occult reality that surrounds it; it is a realism of occult correspondences, of psychological states rather than objective facts.

The correspondences encoded in these paintings are correspondences in which the analogy is drawn between the external world and the internal, psychological world as revealed by the purportedly clairvoyant painter. As described in the preface to the Bernheim-Jeune show, this latter seek[s] by intuition the sympathies and links which exist between the exterior (concrete) scene and the interior (abstract) emotion. Those lines, those spots, those zones of color, apparently illogical and meaningless, are the mysterious keys to our pictures.

In Boccioni’s occult super-realism, the hard and fast line separating the subjective from the objective—the experience from the experienced—is shown to be in fact a permeable tissue; we are always already outside of ourselves, emotionally involved in the world at the same time that the world is in a sense within us, as an element of our self-conscious and psychological environment.

Thus the role of the train. For all its mechanized power, it plays a symbolic role based on something other than standing as a totem of technological transformation. To depict it isn’t simply to transcribe its external features—its metal skin, sleek angles and moving parts—but to penetrate into what the Futurists would hold is its occult reality. This latter consists in its symbolic function, its function as a term in an equation of correspondences between the material, external world and the world of projected meanings. In this equation of correspondences, the train is a variable whose revealed value consists in its capacity to signify the spiritualization of matter. It was, as Marinetti declared in La nuova religione-morale della velocità, “inhabited by the divine.” The Futurist fascination with the machine and technology thus doesn’t represent a fetishization of technology per se; rather, it was the outward projection of an interest in technical advance as the symbol of human creativity, as the objective-correlate of the spirit. As expressed by the Futurists Enrico Prampolini, Ivo Panaggi and Vinicio Paladini in the manifesto “L’arte meccanica,” the machine is “the most exuberant symbol of the mysterious human creative force.” As such, it was the signifier of a meaning that it embodied and yet that surpassed it at the same time.

As with any system of correspondences, the machine resolves the apparent contradiction between the material and spiritual by standing as an objective symbol of the deeper reality of the will that called it into being in the first place. In the Futurist system of correspondences human will finds its analogue in its own products—in the technology that its creativity gives rise to. The Futurist fascination with simultaneity can also be seen as assuming the correspondence not only between the coincidences of multiple physical bodies in motion, but also, and more significantly, between the coincidence of multiple emotional states—the unseen events and sensations, experienced by multiple people, as revealed to, and subsequently depicted by, the pittore veggente. And it is with this correspondence that Futurism for all practical purposes takes the old Hermetic formula, As Above, So Below and responds with a counter-formula: As Within, So Without.

Works consulted:
Luciano Chessa: Luigi Russolo, Futurist: Noise, Visual Arts and the Occult (UCAL, 2012)
Herschel B. Chipp, ed.: Theories of Modern Art (UCAL: 1968)
Ester Coen: Boccioni (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1988)

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Daniel Barbiero is an improvising double bassist who composes graphic scores and writes on music, art and related subjects. He is a regular contributor to Avant Music News and Perfect Sound Forever. His recent releases include Non-places, with Cristiano Bocci, and Fifteen Miniatures for Prepared Double Bass.

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