International studio (58.1916)

An Analysis of Futurism

< N ANALYSIS OF FUTURISM
/\ BY EDWIN S. PARKER
In the Italian Futurist room of the
Exposition one was sure to encounter a
crowd. It was an eager, expectant crowd and
there was a feeling of suspense. No one seemed
able to get the artists’ point of view and though
some scoffed and laughed, most made a genuine
effort to understand, and failed. The artists were
evidently serious—-why are they so universally
incomprehensible and must we blame ourselves?
A glance at the catalogue gives us our first clue.
Twenty-nine pictures out of forty-eight had ab-
stract titles: were graphic (spatial) representa-
tions of non-spatial subjects. How can we trans-
late a pure idea such as dynamism (force) into a
spatial equivalent? How can we solidify non-
matter into matter and make a picture of it?
Their process is a simple one and familiar to
even elementary students of psychology, so let us
take some pure idea and see if we can do likewise,
in fact, paint a Cubist picture. Anger will do
very well for a subject, because we are so familiar
with it. To begin with, an angry man is supposed
to “see red” and red is somehow associated with
anger, so the dominant colour of our painting will
be red. But colour is not enough by itself; we
must have forms just as our Futurist friends have
them, odd and curious though they may be.
What forms shall we use and where shall we
get them?
At some moment of intense anger we have had
impressed upon us certain forms that were before
us at the time, and the remnants of these forms
in our memory, confused and distorted by time
and the intensity of the emotion, are what we
have in our mind’s eye when we think of anger
and it is these that we put upon our canvas. This
faculty of visualizing is strong in some and nearly
absent in others, but it is undoubtedly capable of
development, so if we can’t see such weird and
definite shapes as our Futurist friends it doesn’t
mean that we are to blame, for we probably could
if we kept at it long enough.
This process of visualizing is certainly interest-
ing psychologically but is it significant artistically?
The answer is: No! The language of art must be
largely universal and the pictures before us must
be the result of an organization of the objective
world by faculties in the artist that are largely
the same in all of us. He must see his subject

as beautiful by faculties possessed by us all.
When Corot painted the peace of the early
morning, he saw that peace by faculties by which
we, too, can see peace in an early morning. When
such rapid movement was put into the Winged
Victory, it was done according to universal facul-
ties and to us, too, the figure is flying in splendid
haste. But we get no such feeling of movement
from the many pictures of “Dynamism” and we are
not quite safe in saying that the fault is with our-
selves and our old habits of thought.
Here the Futurist will protest: “I paint the
very essence of speed: Speed itself. I do it in an
abstract and wholly universal language while
classic art was encumbered by the object and was
compelled to represent its idea indirectly.”
But is his language abstract and universal? Ab-
stract it may be, though the abstract is presented
to sense only by accepted symbols, but universal
it certainly is not, because it is dependent upon
the particular images that chance has brought him
and that chance again has selected as the ones that
will be retained in his memory. It is like a poem
written in a language invented by some man and
known only to himself; beautiful doubtless to that
man but meaningless to the rest of the world. The
Futurist picture may be decorative, just as the
poem may have a charming rhythm, but unless it
is intelligible it is beautiful only as the pure de-
sign of a Moorish pavement is beautiful, and this
is not the purpose of their work.
And how about the essence of speed: Speed it-
self? There is certainly a rushing velocity in the
Winged Victory. We feel that it is more rapid
than any figures moving near us. But that rapid-
ity is in our perception of it; in the motor images
it arouses in us, in our empathetic response to it.
Speed is in the “perception” of an “object” and
an abstract representation of speed affects us no
more than the physical equation of velocity:
V=v+a.t. Even that V is always attributed to
some object and physics is certainly cold-blooded
enough.
This, then, is the process by which a larger num-
ber of these Futurist pictures were made: a vis-
ualization of an abstract idea; a phenomenon de-
pendent upon chance association; a particular
and individual rather than universal mode of ex-
pression that has artistic meaning only for the
artist himself. These twenty-nine by their titles
were avowedly of this type; others were partly
so, but this doesn’t include the mass of pictures

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