Geoscience Reference
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and others came across these shattering natural phenomena in
the light of their studies in Copenhagen, Germany and London,
before, during and after the First World War. In those times and
places the undercurrents that they witnessed embraced Cubism,
Expressionism, Vorticism, Futurism and trench warfare. For Joseph
Wright, the gulf between a soft Derbyshire landscape and an
exploding Vesuvius was wide; but nevertheless Wright artfully
places a tree or a rock in his depictions of Vesuvius to maintain
picturesque convention. For the Icelanders a century and a half
later, however, the only reasonable way to convey the enormity
of the noise and fire of Grismvotn or Hekla was to call on the
reinforcements of twentieth-century modernism. In the 1930s
the only metaphor for Grimsvotn was a battlefield cannonade.
Einarsson's Futurist landscape makes a pointed stylistic pair-
ing with
Under the Pergola in Naples
(1914) by Umberto Boccioni
(1882-1916).This is Boccioni in a modest, domestic mood, ex-
perimenting with Cubism, a world away from his violent Futurist
The City Rises
(1910-11, moma, New York). But the analogy is
clear: both artists use fragmentation to shatter their images and
to create through dislocation a real sense of uncertainty and
foreboding. In Boccioni's painting Vesuvius rises above the seated
figures and their quiet lunch, the volcano's sharp triangular form
being repeated among the faceting across the canvas. While
nothing much is happening, the collaged song sheet on the
right, with its corner echoing the volcano shape and its cover
illustrated by a woodcut of an erupting Vesuvius, is a reminder
of the mountain's violent character. The entire broken imagery
suggests that things are about to change, as in that instant
between the shattering of a mirror and the crash of its fragments
to the ground.
Flight from Etna
by Renato Guttuso (1912-1997) of 1940
has, like the Boccioni, multiple meanings. In its form and its
expression of overpowering violence - natural rather than military
- it echoes Picasso's
Guernica
of 1937, and in its political message
it is every bit as pointed. Etna erupted in 1928 and flattened the
village of Mascali, causing thousands to flee. Mussolini used the
event to draw the Sicilian population to his Fascist cause, and
