Part 14

The popularity of the cinematograph lies not in the cheapness of the entertainment, nor in its _novelty_, which wore off long ago, but in the fact that it is _without words_ and each onlooker enjoys his own interpretation; from child to old man, every one in the audience is _his own playwright_, supplying his own dialogue as the scenes flicker on the curtain.

The best of modern plays leave much to the imagination of the audience. Words and bits of business absolutely necessary thirty years ago are considered childishly obvious nowadays, as is amply demonstrated in revivals of old plays.

Apparently the development is toward more action and less dialogue--more cinematograph, fewer words.

Scenery will become less and less obvious--save, of course, where it is intended to be of first importance. In the theater of the future there will be less and less on the stage to interfere with the _play--of the spectator’s_ imagination.

* * * * *

There is a precisely parallel tendency in print--more action, fewer words; more suggestion, less description.

The future novel will leave more and more to be supplied by the reader. Paragraphs, pages, whole chapters now deemed essential, will be omitted.

In books such as histories, philosophical works, scientific treatises, &c., &c., the skill and art of the printer will be exhausted to make the page not only attractive but expressive--_readable at a glance_, instead of, as now, to make the volumes as forbidding as possible.

The much-despised “yellow journal” of America has taught a valuable lesson in the _art of emphasis_, and its effect is seen not only in the make-up of newspapers but of periodicals, and will be felt in the make-up of books.[64]

* * * * *

In America the art of advertising has far outstripped the art of literature. The advertising pages of our periodicals are often more interesting and _always_ more _alive_ than the literary.

A magazine devotes pages to an article or a story every line of which betrays the writer’s evident desire to write as _many words_ as possible. In the advertising pages, to every square inch, the minds not of one but of three or four experts have been concentrated upon the attempt to express an idea in as _few words_ as possible and in such a manner it will stand out and be read with a minimum of trouble.

Why should not stories be told that way? Why should not all literature be written and printed that way?

The proposition may seem a startling one, but the _tendency is_ that way.

We find fault with our plays, our poetry, our fiction, our serious literature; we complain people prefer the _flashy_ periodical; well the word _flashy_ is doubly descriptive--it is commonly used to describe the _quality_ but it also measures _time_.

* * * * *

Meanwhile most of us underrate the intelligence of our readers and use more words than are necessary to carry our meanings.

The Futurists themselves use an abundance of words in advocating their cause, though their examples of Futurist literature contain many lines and pages that are written in strict accordance with their theories.

Marinette says in so many words, “Philosophy, science, politics, journalism, must still make use of the conventional syntax and punctuation; I am myself obliged to use them to explain my ideas.”

* * * * *

March 8, 1910, in the Theatre Chiarella, at Turin, before an audience of three thousand, the Futurist painters launched their first declaration of faith, “which contained,” to follow their own words, “all our profound disgusts and hatreds, our revolts against vulgarity, against academic and pedantic mediocrity, against the fanatic cult of what is antique.”

1. Our desire for the truth no longer contents itself with form and color as heretofore understood.

2. What we wish to reproduce on the canvas is not an instant or a moment of immobility of the universal force that surrounds us, but _the sensation of that force itself_.

3. As a matter of fact everything moves, everything runs, everything transforms rapidly. A profile is never immobile before us, but it appears and disappears without ceasing.

Given the fact of the momentary persistence of the image on the retina, objects in movement multiply, change form and follow like vibrations in space. A running horse has not four legs, but twenty, and their movements are triangular.

4. Nothing is absolute in painting. That which was a truth for the painters of yesterday, is a lie for those of today. We declare, for example, that a portrait should not resemble its sitter, and that the painter carries in his own imagination the landscape he wishes to place upon the canvas.

[On this point the Futurists and Cubists agree.]

5. To paint the human figure it is not necessary to paint the _figure_ but simply to give its _envelopment_. Space does not exist. Millions of miles separate us from the sun, yet that is no reason why the house before us should not be encased in the solar disk. In our work we can secure effects similar to those of the X-ray. Opacity does not exist.

They paint all sides of an object as if they saw through it. They will paint a platter on a table and the part of the table covered by the platter; they will paint the entire collar about the neck so that it is visible through the neck. They ignore not only the ordinary conceptions of space, but time does not exist for them. Where in ordinary painting the box of bonbons that is passed at a baptism may be painted closed on a table, the Futurist shows what is inside the box, also the people assembled to whom the bonbons are given, and the infant to be baptized, and perhaps the marriage of the father and mother, the carriages outside the church, etc., etc.[65]

They illustrate further,

The sixteen persons about us in a moving omnibus are _in turn_ and _at the same time_, one, ten, four, three; they are immobile and yet move; they go, come, bounding along the street, suddenly lost in the sun, then return seated before you, like _so many symbols persistent of universal vibration_.

How often it happens that upon the cheek of the person with whom we are talking we see the horse that passes far away at the end of the street. Our bodies become parts of the seat upon which we rest and the seat becomes part of us. The omnibus merges in the houses that it passes, and the houses mix with the bus and become part of it.

6. The construction of pictures up to this time has been stupidly traditional.

Painters have always shown things and persons _before_ us. We place the spectator _in the midst_ of the picture.

Heretofore we have looked at pictures; it is the idea of the Futurist that we should look _through_ them, that the pictures should give us _new visions_ of life and things, new sensations, new emotions.

We declare:

That one should hate every form of imitation and glorify every form of originality.

That it is necessary to revolt against the tyranny of the words “harmony” and “good taste,” expressions too elastic and with which one might easily condemn the works of Rembrandt, Goya, and Rodin.

That art critics are useless and detrimental.

That it is necessary to brush aside all the subjects already used, in order to adequately express our turbulent life of steel, of pride, of feverish rapidity.

That the name madmen applied to all innovators shall be considered a title of honor.

That the universal force must be shown in painting as a _sensation dynamic_.

Above all, sincerity and purity are required in the portrayal of nature.

That movement and light destroy the materiality of objects.

We are opposed to the use of those bituminous colors by which it is attempted to secure the effect of time on modern pictures.

We are opposed to the superficial and elementary archaism based on the flat tints and linear manner of the Egyptians, which makes painting puerile and grotesque.

We are opposed to the false modernism of the Secessionists and Independents who have built up new “schools” as pontifical as the old.

The nude in painting is as nauseous as adultery in literature.

To explain this last article: There is nothing immoral in our eyes, it is the monotony of nudity that we fight against. Painters possessed of the desire to display on canvas the bodies of the women with whom they are in love have transformed picture exhibitions into galleries of portraits of disreputables. We demand for the next ten years the absolute suppression of the nude in painting.

* * * * *

The first exhibition of Futurist paintings in London was at the Sackville Gallery in March, 1912.

The painters printed by way of preface to the little catalogue a statement of their beliefs and aims. From this statement the following paragraphs are taken:

“We are young and our art is violently revolutionary.”

Speaking of the Cubists and Post-Impressionists generally:

“While we admire the heroism of these painters of great worth, who have displayed a laudable contempt for artistic commercialism and a powerful hatred of academism, we feel ourselves and we declare ourselves to be absolutely opposed to their art.

“They obstinately continue to paint objects motionless, frozen, and all the static aspects of nature; they worship the traditionalism of Poussin, of Ingres, of Corot, ageing and petrifying their art with an obstinate attachment to the past, which to our eyes remains totally incomprehensible.

“We, on the contrary, with points of view pertaining essentially to the future, seek for a style of motion, a thing which has never been attempted before us.

“All the truths learnt in the schools or in the studios are abolished for us. Our hands are free enough and pure enough to start everything afresh.

“It is indisputable that several of the aesthetic declarations of our French comrades display a sort of masked academism.

“Is it not, indeed, a return to the Academy to declare that the subject, in painting, is of perfectly insignificant value?

“We declare, on the contrary, that there can be no modern painting without the starting point of an absolutely modern sensation, and none can contradict us when we state that _painting_ and _sensation_ are two inseparable words.

“If our pictures are futurist, it is because they are the result of absolutely futurist conceptions, ethical, aesthetic, political, and social.

“To paint from the posing model is an absurdity, and an act of mental cowardice, even if the model be translated upon the picture in linear, spherical, or cubic forms.

“To lend an allegorical significance to an ordinary nude figure, deriving the meaning of the picture from the objects held by the model or from those which are arranged about him, is to our mind the evidence of a traditional and academic mentality.

“While we repudiate impressionism, we emphatically condemn the present reaction which, in order to kill impressionism, brings back painting to old academic forms.

“It is only possible to react against impressionism by surpassing it.

“Nothing is more absurd than to fight it by adopting the pictural laws which preceded it.

“The points of contact which the quest of style may have with the so-called _classic art_ do not concern us.

“Others will seek, and will, no doubt, discover, these analogies which in any case cannot be looked upon as a return to methods, conceptions, and values transmitted by classical painting.

“A few examples will illustrate our theory.

“We see no difference between one of those nude figures commonly called _artistic_ and an anatomical plate. There is, on the other hand, an enormous difference between one of these nude figures and our futurist conception of the human body.

“Perspective, such as it is understood by the majority of painters, has for us the very same value which it lends to an engineer’s design.

“The simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art: that is the intoxicating aim of our art.

“Let us explain again by examples. In painting a person on a balcony, seen from inside the room, we do not limit the scene to what the square frame of the window renders visible; but we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person on the balcony has experienced; the sun-bathed throng in the street, the double row of houses which stretch to right and left, the beflowered balconies, etc. This implies the simultaneousness of the ambient, and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of objects, the scattering and fusion of details, freed from accepted logic, and independent from one another.

“In order to make the spectator live in the center of the picture, as we express it in our manifesto, the picture must be the synthesis of _what one remembers_ and of _what one sees_.

“You must render the invisible which stirs and lives beyond intervening obstacles, what we have on the right, on the left, and behind us, and not merely the small square of life artificially compressed, as it were, by the wings of a stage.”

[This feeling of transparency is fundamental to the theory.]

“We have declared in our manifesto that what must be rendered is the _dynamic sensation_, that is to say, the particular rhythm of each object, its inclination, its movement, or, to put it more exactly, its interior force.

“It is usual to consider the human being in its different aspects of motion or stillness, of joyous excitement or grave melancholy.

“What is overlooked is that all inanimate objects display, by their lines, calmness or frenzy, sadness or gaiety. These various tendencies lend to the lines of which they are formed a sense and character of weighty stability or of aerial lightness.

“Every object reveals by its lines how it would resolve itself were it to follow the tendencies of its forces.

“This decomposition is not governed by fixed laws but it varies according to the characteristic personality of the object and the emotions of the onlooker.

“Furthermore, every object influences its neighbour, not by reflections of light (the foundation of _impressionistic primitivism_), but by a real competition of lines and by real conflicts of planes, following the emotional law which governs the picture (the foundation of _futurist primitivism_).

“With the desire to intensify the aesthetic emotions by blending, so to speak, the painted canvas with the soul of the spectator, we have declared that the latter ‘_must_ in future be placed in the center of the picture.’

“We may further explain our idea by a comparison drawn from the evolution of music.

“Not only have we radically abandoned the motive fully developed according to its determined and, therefore, artificial equilibrium, but we suddenly and purposely intersect each motive with one or more other motives of which we never give the full development but merely the initial, central, or final notes.

“As you see, there is with us not merely variety, but chaos and clashing of rhythms, totally opposed to one another, which we nevertheless assemble into a new harmony.

“We thus arrive at what we call the _painting of states of mind_.

“One may remark, also, in our pictures spots, lines, zones of colour which do not correspond to any reality, but which, in accordance with a law of our interior mathematics, musically prepare and enhance the emotion of the spectator.

“We thus create a sort of emotive ambience, seeking by intuition the sympathies and the links which exist between

the exterior (concrete) scene and the interior (abstract) emotion. Those lines, those spots, those zones of colour, apparently illogical and meaningless, are the mysterious keys to our pictures.

“Conclusion: Our futurist painting embodies three new conceptions of painting:

“1. That which solves the question of volumes in a picture, as opposed to the liquefaction of objects favoured by the vision of the impressionists.

“2. That which leads us to translate objects according to the _force lines_ which distinguish them, and by which is obtained an absolutely new power of objective poetry.

“3. That (the natural consequence of the other two) which would give the emotional ambience of a picture, the synthesis of the various abstract rhythms of every object, from which there springs a fount of pictural lyricism hitherto unknown.”

* * * * *

The explanations of two pictures are as follows:

“Leave-taking,” by Boccioni: “In the midst of the confusion of departure, the mingled concrete and abstract sensations are translated into force lines and rhythms in quasi-musical harmony: mark the undulating lines and the chords made up of the combinations of figures and objects. The prominent elements, such as the number of the engine, its profile shown in the upper part of the picture, its wind-cutting forepart in the center, symbolical of parting, indicate the features of the scene that remain indelibly impressed upon the mind.”

“Rebellion,” by Russolo: “The collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force of inertia and reactionary resistance of tradition. The angles are the vibratory waves of the former force in motion. The perspective of the houses is destroyed just as a boxer is bent double by receiving a blow in the wind.”

* * * * *

The theory of the Futurists is vividly illustrated in the following note to a picture called “The Street Enters the House.” “The dominating sensation is that which one would experience on opening a window: all life, the noises of the street rush in at the same time as the movement and reality of the objects outside. The painter does not limit himself to what he sees in the square frame of the window as would a simple photographer, but he also reproduces what he would see by looking out on every side from the balcony.”

To the layman this attitude is almost incomprehensible. For instance, the Cubist, Pierre Dumont, says of his picture, “The Cathedral at Rouen”:

One must not expect to find in this picture an exact representation of the cathedral at Rouen, but rather my idea, my personal perception, of this cathedral as I see it.

In painting my picture I did not paint from a fixed point and always from the same point, but I studied the cathedral and surroundings from all points of view and obtained a personal conception of it, which I reproduced on my canvas.

I only included the details which struck me most forcibly, and thought it necessary to break up the monotony of the roofs in the first plan by one of the most beautiful details of the cathedral--a statue of a saint, who is certainly not in his right place as far as the eye is concerned, but does really occupy the place which he occupies in my conception of what was before me.

* * * * *

That a painter should deliberately attempt to show on one canvas features of all sides of a building, strikes the layman--and many artists--as a “crazy” attempt to achieve the impossible; but it is _not impossible_, as a moment’s reflection shows.

It is, of course, easy to show all sides and all details of a building, interior and exterior, on one sheet or canvas, by drawing or painting, one after another, in panorama effect--that is done in every architect’s drawing-room.

It is also equally possible to _superimpose_ these detached drawings one over the other and _see_ or _feel_ the outlines _through_. That is, the drawing or photograph of the exterior of a cathedral may be so made as to show in outline or shadowy substance the altar within.

Illustrations along these lines are common in fiction--ghostly, shadowy, mystical effects, effects secured only by treating stones and walls and human beings as _semi-transparent_.

In this way every feature of a cathedral that strikes the artist, whether on the outside or inside, whether a feature so permanent as a statue or so fleeting as a wedding ceremony, may be indicated in his picture. By suppressing every detail save the most striking, what purports to be the picture of a cathedral may appear to be fragments of spires, bronze doors, statues, altars, lights, processions, the brilliant color of a priest’s robe, the white note of a bridal veil.

Another man painting his impressions of the same subject might catch glimpses of entirely different features.

If we can _in our mind’s eye_ see what is behind an object; if, for instance, we can picture to ourselves clearly the children playing in the yard back of a house, why may not the painter, if he chooses, suggest to us in his picture of the house the vital feature of the children in the rear?

The feat is a seemingly impossible one. Perhaps neither the Cubists nor the Futurists have accomplished it successfully; but because it is difficult is no reason why the attempt should not be made.

_Theoretically_ there is nothing to be said against pictures which show what both the _eye_ and the _mind’s eye_ of the artist see.

The works of the ultra-modern men can be understood only by the aid of the imagination, by the aid of the _mind’s eye_ to see _through_, and _about_ and _into_ things, to see the _inner_ conditions, happenings, and significance of things.

Stated in other terms, the extreme modern is no longer content to paint what is before his eyes at a given moment and from a given point of view; he is no longer content to act the part of a camera, making reproductions of what is in front of it. He demands the freedom to walk around his subject, fly over it, enter it, find out all about it, and then record on canvas the sum and substance of his observations _and_ reflections. The result may not look like a cathedral, but if done by a genius it may give a fine impression of certain salient features of the building, inside and out, and also a vivid impression of some of its great ceremonies. Why not try to paint the _power_ as well as the proportions?

* * * * *

If the American public found the work of Lehmbruck and Brancusi queer, what would it think of the Futurist sculpture?

The two female figures exhibited by Lehmbruck were simply decorative elongations of natural forms. In technic they were quite conventional. Their modelling was along purely classical lines, far more severely classical than much of the realistic work of Rodin.

The heads by Brancusi were idealistic in the extreme; the sculptor carried his theories of mass and form so far he deliberately lost all resemblance to actuality. He uses his subjects as motives rather than models. In this respect he is not unlike--though more extreme than--the great Japanese and Chinese artists, who use life and nature arbitrarily to secure the results they desire.

I have a golden bronze head--a “Sleeping Muse,” by

Brancusi--so simple, so severe in its beauty, it might have come from the Orient.

* * * * *

Of this head and two other pieces of sculpture exhibited by Brancusi in July, 1913, at the Allied Artists’ Exhibition in London, Roger Fry said in “The Nation,” August 2: