Politics of Aerodynamic Representation: From Étienne-Jules Marey’s Chronophotography to the Orphic Cubists’ Propellers

The 1912 Paris Air Show influenced Orphic Cubists such as Marcel Duchamp (Bicycle Wheel, 1913) and Fernand Léger (The Propellers, 1918) to portray the imagery of the airplane propeller in their works. For the Aeronautic Pavilion in the 1937 Paris World Exposition, the French government commissioned Sonia Delaunay’s 1937 blue-print like mural paintings that further presented an airplane control panel, engine, and a propeller, which followed Robert Delaunay’s 1923 paintings Propellers. The recurring imageries of the propeller in the avant-garde have been understood as a symbol of the modern mechanical world and the union of art and technical products. This paper shifts the focus from a fascination with machine aesthetics to an interest in enacting an optical sensation as a motivating factor for the Orphic Cubists’ depiction of propellers. I will further trace this interest in probing modern perceptual conditions to Étienne-Jules Marey’s 1899 chronophotography of aerodynamics that informed aerospace engineering experiments and military training. This paper will argue that the modernists’ propellers belong to a lineage of motion studies of air at the turn of the century that were deployed to facilitate combat through accelerated air transportation. By contextualizing the Orphic Cubists’ propellers in the history of the aviation technology that reached its peak in military sectors between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II, this paper will examine the politics of aerodynamic representation and underline the significance of the propellers as transmitting both kinetic energy and military forces.