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STEPHEN SPENDER
community of the alliance between the ballet, architecture, furniture
design, painting, music and poetry, all of them participating in the
movement to revolutionize taste, and at the same time make it an
operative acting and criticizing force in modern life. The way in
which art might revolutionize the environment and hence, by
im–
plication, people .living in it, is explored in many of the manifestoes
of poets and painters early in the century. The famous
Der Blaue
Reiter
(1914), the anthology of the group of painters which was
founded in Munich in 1909, is prefaced with remarks of which
these are characteristic:
"Everything which comes into being, on earth can only have its
beginning." This sentence by Daeubler might stand written over all
our inventing and all our aims. A fulfillment will be attained, some
time, in a new world, in another existence
(Dasein).
On earth we are
only able to state the theme. This first volume is the prelude to a new
theme ... We wander with our passionate wishes through the
art
of
this time and through the present age.
This
is touching, innocent, mysteriously exciting. The same dream
of transforming the world-but this time the world of actuality
in which we live--is expressed by Wyndham Lewis,
a
decade later,
in
The Tyro:
Art, however, the greatest art, even, has it in its power to influence
everybody. Actually the shapes of the objects (houses, cars, dresses and
so forth) by which they are surrounded have a very profound sub–
conscious effect on people. A man might be unacquainted with the
very·existence of a certain movement in art, and yet his life would
be
modified directly if the street he walked down took a certain shape,
at the dictates of an architect under the spell of that movement, what–
ever it were. Its forms and colors would have a tonic or a debilitating
effect on
him,
an emotional value. Just as he is affected by the change
of the atmosphere, without taking the least interest in the cyclonic ma–
chinery that controls it, so he would be directly affected by any change
in his physical milieu.
A man goes to choose a house. He is attracted by it or not, often,
not for sentimental or practical reasons, but for some reason that he
does not seek to explain, and that yet
is
of sufficient force to prevent
