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Why did futurism occur in Italy? Because Italy had too much past. It was a country that had, for Marinetti, become a museum; In the US where the real cities of the future were being made there was not futurism, there was the Future. American cities are not represented in a manner that dramatizes their futuristic poential. Georgia O'Keeffe concerns herself with the lyrical and the static, she finds quiet and serenity in the skyscraper as she does in the lily. She was not a 'Futurist'; (though I very much like the fact she and her companion, the photographer Stieglitz, moved into an apartment on the 28th floor of the Shelton Building, the moment it was finished!) She had none of the frenzied mannerism of the Italian futurists or later the Expressionists. Likewise there is a lyrical calm to the city paintings of Hopper, or later Sheeler, the precisionist; or by Richard Estes, proponent of photorealism (whose paintings are curiously almost devoid of people). Of course there was a more energetic, kinetic and expressionist version of the big American cities with paintings such as Duluth, Stella, Marin, and particularly immigrant or visiting painters such as Grosz or Kokoshka who represented New York in an energetically modern expressionistic manner that a European thinks appropriate to the city. Continuing European excitement in the big cities of the new world can be seen in the vast canvases that the German painter Anselm Kiefer produced of Sao Paulo in Brazil.)

London's Futurism as manifested in the work of Nevinson and others is a rather moderate version of a mainland European art movement though the title of one of his Fleet Street pinintgs is wonderfully Futurist: Among the Nerves of the World. But then British Art was never into movements. It was too original, too studded with lone and inspired figures. True, Constable and Turner, (two of our most radical figures, figures who were being emulated by the French as early as the first two decades of the nineteenth century) disappoint when it comes to London; but Constable, in his Opening of Waterloo Bridge gets it right: it may be that London, with its epic untidiness, its variable weather, its dirty unpredictable skies lends itself to something grittier, more painterly, less precisionist; Constable's picture leads on to Turner's paintings of London (but why so few?!) Girtin responds to London only in his Eidometropolis Panorama. But London did find its match: in the paintings of John Bratby, Timothy Hayman, Oliver Bevan, Leon Kossoff. All these painters have, in their very paintwork, managed to reflect the ragged, unplanned, windblown untidiness of London. Perhaps the grey, scumbled paintings of Kossoff have been the last and last possible painterly response to the uncomfortable raggedness of London?

   
 

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