The History that we make Today

"History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history that we make today."
Henri Ford, Chicago Tribune, 1916

Lyonel Feininger - BarfuesserkircheI - 1924

Georgia O’Keeffe - The Shelton with sunspots - New York - 1926

Tamara de Lempicka - New York - 1929

The Last of its Kind

“What is décadence? It is the keenest sense of organic connection with the monumental legacy of the high culture of the past, along with the painfully proud awareness that we are the last of its kind.”

Viacheslav Ivanov and M. O. Gershenson, Perepiska iz Dvukh Uglov, 1921

quoted by Andrei Ariev in The Intelligentsia without Revolution: The Culture of the Silver Age

Francisco Goya - The Dog - 1819

J. M. W. Turner - Three Seascapes - 1827

J. A. Whistler - Colour Scheme for the dining room of Aubrey House - 1873

Monuments of a Historical Consciousness

“The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years.” 

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, 1940
quoted in Roger Griffin, A Fascist Century, 2008

F.T. Marinetti and Thayaht

Condensed

"Triumph of our I over our Weight, with its treacherous plots to murder our speed and drag it into immobility's ditch. Velocity = scattering + condensation of the I. All the distance covered by a body is condensed in that very body."

F. T. Marinetti, Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility, 1914
Quoted in Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Futurist Re-Fashioning of the Universe, 1996

Joseph Stella - Telegraph Pole - 1917

Lill Tschudi - Fixing The Wires - 1932

Cassandre - Poster for l'Intransigeant - 1925