Art in its Time: Theories and Practices of Modern Aesthetics

THE RATIONALIZATION OF ART
als, with the least waste, in sum a tendency toward purity.” They do not hesitate
to claim the spirit of “Taylorism”—the time-saving system of “Scientific Management”
promoted by Frederick Winslow Taylor—for the art in tune with the
modern spirit they called Purism. 8
The first decades of the twentieth century saw international enthusiasm for
the speedup techniques and, even more, the ideology of Taylorism, as well as for
the technology of mass production identified with Henry Ford, among people as
varied as French industrialists, the Italian Communist leader Antonio Gramsci,
and the Russian theater director Meyerhold. 9 In numerous countries avantgarde
artists created styles of representation, abstraction, and even product
design intended to embody the spirit of efficiency associated with machine-based
production. As Meyer Schapiro has observed, these stylistic developments
cannot be explained simply as a reflection of the increasing role of machine production:
“Mechanical abstract forms arise in modern art not because modern
production is mechanical, but because of the values assigned to the human being
and the machine in the ideologies projected by the conflicting interests and situation
in society, which vary from country to country.” 10 A German critic made a
similar observation in response to the Erste russische Kunstausstellung that
opened in Berlin in 1922: “A naive striving towards building and constructing
objects, which we have, but which are still lacking in Russian technology, has
led the Russians to a primitive imitation of machines and architecture in their
fine art.” 11 Similarly, Futurism arose in Italy, a technologically underdeveloped
country, although it was rapidly influential in artistic circles throughout Europe.
The development of such styles is to be explained, therefore, by reference to felt
pressures to modernize, and the varying relations of groups of artists to modernizing
elites, or ones unwilling to abandon obsolete technical and managerial
methods.
The complex relation between the idea of rationalization and the idea of art
as the domain of free expression of spirit is particularly striking in architecture,
included, despite its obvious functional aspects, in the modern system of the fine
arts. Classified since the sixteenth century along with painting and sculpture as
one of the arti di disegno, based on drawing, architecture came with the other arts
to be seen as a product of an artist’s inventive genius, to be judged on the basis
8 A. Ozenfant and C.-E. Jeanneret, “After Cubism,” tr. John Goodman, in Carol S. Eliel (ed.),
L’Esprit Nouveau: Purism in Paris, 1911–1925 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art,
2001), pp. 132, 147, 142.
9 See Traute Rafalski, “Social planning and corporatism: modernization tendencies in Italian fascism,”
International Journal of Political Economy 18:1 (1988), pp. 11–64, for the common interest of
Gramsci and fascist thinkers in Fordist rationalization.
10 Meyer Schapiro, “Nature of Abstract Art” [1937] in idem. Modern Art: 19th and 20th Centuries
(New York: Braziller, 1978), p. 207.
11 Cit. (without author or original publication) Christina Lodder, Russian Constructivism (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 133.
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