100 Artists’ Manifestos

100 Artists’ Manifestos: From the Futurists to the Stuckists, by Alex Danchev, Penguin Modern Classics, RRP£12.99, 496 pages

“Workers of the mind, unite!” announced the first futurist manifesto, mimicking Marx. Marinetti, Boccioni and co were deadly serious but still the artist’s manifesto is a paradox: an artist works alone, out of his imagination, not according to someone else’s diktat. Yet the writings of Marinetti, Mayakovsky and Tristan Tzara energised entire cultural milieus in Rome, Moscow and Zurich.

The artist’s manifesto was born in the early 20th century for two reasons. First, art had radically rejected tradition and needed to explain itself: Apollinaire became apologist for cubism, Theo van Doesburg for geometric abstraction and André Breton for surrealism.

This left Picasso, Mondrian and Miró free to paint. And although Alex Danchev’s book 100 Artists’ Manifestos makes a valiant attempt to persuade us that “art and thought are not incompatible after all”, few great painters have the sort of minds that codify and analyse.

The second reason is that most early modernists – especially those in unstable regimes such as Italy and Russia – started out believing that painting could change the world. “Standing tall on the roof of the world, we hurl our defiance at the stars”, was Marinetti’s conclusion to the 1909 futurist manifesto. Danchev traces Marinetti’s “adventure of artistic expression”, which shaped all subsequent artist manifestos, back to a “marinade” of 19th-century political, philosophical and aesthetic idealism – Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Zola’s J’accuse, Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, were all influences.

The Italian futurists, with their glorification of war – “sole cleanser of the world” – make hollow reading today. The Russians are more interesting: indeed from Kandinsky in 1912 (“We are standing at the threshold of one of the greatest epochs that mankind has ever experienced, the epoch of great spirituality”), through Larionov and Goncharova in 1913 (“Long live the beautiful East! ... We are against the West, which is vulgarising our forms ... We march hand-in-hand with our ordinary house-painters”), to Malevich in 1916 (“Abandon love, abandon aestheticism, abandon the baggage of wisdom, for in the new culture, your wisdom is ridiculous and insignificant ... We, Suprematists, throw open the way to you. Hurry! For tomorrow you will not recognise us”), one can trace the rising pressure towards revolution, and how the Bolsheviks united vastly differing sensibilities.

The coda, Rodchenko’s 1922 “Manifesto of the Constructivist Group” – “We, artists yesterday, CONSTRUCTORS today, WE PROCESSED the human being” – is both moving as an expression of youthful hope, and chilling as it anticipates the artistic repression to come.

After 1922, there were no more Russian artist manifestos, and soon the political climate in western Europe militated against utopianism too. Marinetti’s 1930 “Manifesto of Futurist Cuisine”, which ranted “above all, we believe it necessary to be rid of pasta, that idiotic gastronomic fetish”, is surely defeatist self-parody.

The postwar period, drenched in irony and individualism, was hardly the era of the manifesto, though Barnett Newman’s “The Sublime is Now” (1948), with its heady echo of Malevich, is an exception. And no one could fail to enjoy Gilbert and George’s tongue-in-cheek “The Laws of Sculptors” (1969): “The lord chisels still, so don’t leave your bench for long.”

Danchev argues that “Marinetti’s antics resonate throughout the century”, but he kills his case by selecting Billy Childish and Charles Thomson of the reactionary Stuckists – some of the worst painters and silliest theorists who ever lived – to conclude his anthology.

The Stuckist mission against contemporary art is not only vapid – it actually contradicts the very spirit of the manifesto, which is forward-looking and rooted in a belief that art is nothing if not conceptual.

That, ultimately, is what the history of ideas owes to Marinetti and Malevich, and why this volume matters.

Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s visual arts critic