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But the marriage of art and technology has only recently begun to produce many lively offspring, having long been hampered by anger, doubt and distrust. For the past 60 years, Hulten admits, "we have gone through a period of dramatic evolution in artists' feeling toward the machine. You will find both fantastic devotion and the greatest hatred." Some of the artists most enamored of the machine betrayed extraordinary naivete about it. The Italian futurists loved the speed, the glamour and the individualism of the early automobile, somehow believing it and other machines would revitalize Italy. "A roaring motor car," proclaimed Filippo Marinetti's 1909 futurist manifesto, "is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace." Yet even the handsomest futurist paintings were little more than superficial attempts to capture the illusion of motion.
No Morals. One kalian artist who abandoned paint and canvas altogether was Ettore Bugatti. Instead, he made an art out of building custom automobiles ("A great sculptor," Hulten calls him). His 1931 Royale cost $40,000 and came, naturally, with a lifetime guarantee. Only seven were ever made. The Dadaists used machines to evoke—and provoke—human feelings. Marcel Duchamp's slim, stylish 1913 bicycle wheel, mounted on a stool so that art lovers could spin it, was his first "readymade." It suggested the revolutionary notion that something machine-produced could be elevated to a work of art.
Francis Picabia, a hedonistic, moody French-Cuban painter, visited Duchamp in New York in 1915. Under the spell of his host and America's highly mechanized culture, he became convinced that "the genius of the modern world is in machinery." He used its imagery in poetic drawings in which machines mostly symbolized women (he was enthralled with the notion that machines have no morals). The Berlin Dadaists admired the architectonic art produced by the Russian constructivists under the leadership of Vladimir Tallin. The constructivist philosophy emphasized the simplicity, impersonality and modernity of machine designs, arguing that these were automatically both beautiful and functional. The philosophy was adopted and further developed during the 1920s by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy at the Weimar Bauhaus.
Heroes and Villains. With the Depression, the machines that had once seemed so heroic to the prosperous '20s were suddenly transformed into villains. As production lines slowed to a crawl and millions were thrown out of work, surrealists depicted nightmarish phantom treadmills and airplanes that were trapped like dragonflies. Alexander Calder, around 1935, rejected his cheerfully jigging motorized mobiles, and started making dreamy ones that shifted with the wind. In the U.S., Cartoonist Rube Goldberg poked good-humored fun at what he considered "the futility of big machines" by devising elaborate contraptions to perform absurdly simple tasks. Hulten sees Goldberg as peculiarly American in that "he takes the machine very lightly, with no hang-ups about it."