ABSTRACT
Debord's suggestive idea about the colourful ageing of life by art is perhaps nowhere better attested than in the beguiling, prismatic sublimation of work - as both motif and pressing social issue - in the avant-garde paintings of Umberto Boccioni and his Italian Futurist colleagues during the decade and a half leading up to the First World War. Taking my lead from Futurism's protracted struggle with colour, dynamism and social action, I am concerned here with some of the intersections and mutual crises staged between emergent modernist theory and traditions of the visualization of labour in the early years of the twentieth century. This period witnessed the overlay and dispersion of a number of key issues in the representation of working places and bodies, as they were taken up by painters associated with the largely Paris-based avant-garde. Rehearsed here in loose chronological order, elements inherited by this discourse include the heroically mundane ruralworker patterned after Millet and his followers; pastoral forms of neoclassicism, such as Puvis de Chavanne's atopical The Poor Fisherman (1881); and frank images of urban labour (Degas' laundresses, and marginal participants in fringe - and mainstream - 'entertainment' industries - Toulouse-Lautrec's bordello workers, Degas' ballerinas, Picasso's acrobats and harlequins). The various forms and contexts that framed these working bodies are legible, of course, only as they are read against the emergent lineage of the modernist image: peopleless landscapes, scenes of bourgeois leisure and amusement, and representations, such as Seurat's La Grande Jatte (1884-85), that assembled both working-and middle-class subjects on a
Sunday, the traditional, if still contested, day of rest. Though contemporary and immediate, such scenes of modernist leisure, and their accompanying landscapes, were associated by the Futurists with the triple evils of stasis (static representation, and life without movement), pacifism and vapid bourgeois recreation. They campaigned especially against the indulgence in museums, and the romanticized countryside, but also criticized recent avantgarde genres of art themselves, up to and including Cubism.
