There is a great opportunity for missionary work in this direction. Why should not the many organizations such as “Friends of American Art,” etc., whose disinterested purpose is to advance art, organize a movement the object of which will be to place, by loaning if necessary, pictures and small sculpture in the offices and business haunts of the busy American man, and so create a new demand for beautiful things?
Once fill a man’s office with pictures, he will be reluctant to let them go.
XI
FUTURISM
THERE were no Futurist pictures in the exhibition, but there were several more or less influenced by Futurism, notably the “Nude Descending the Stairs,” by Duchamp.
In many respects this was the least satisfactory of his pictures, because it is neither good Cubism nor good Futurism.
It is easy to distinguish a figure drawn in more or less Cubist fashion, at the right—the spectator’s right—of the confused mass of lines; it is quite easy, if the balance of the picture be covered.
The confused mass is just so many overlapping figures coming down the stairs. As a child exclaimed one day, “Why, I see them; there’s one on every step.” The Cubist drawing did not bother the child.
A sympathetic writer says of the picture:
M. Duchamp says in effect something like this: “If you paint a girl coming downstairs, on any one step you will not show her moving. If you paint a girl on every step, like Burne-Jones with the ‘Golden Stair’ you have a crowd and still no movement. But if you get the forms down to simplest and most essential, just swaying shoulders and hip and knee, bent head and springy sole—and then show them on every step and between all the steps, passing and always passing one into the next, you give the sense of movement, as with a run of arpeggios on the harp or a cadenza on the violin. You and your friends don’t feel the movement—too bad, my friends and I do.” And pure movement is what, after all, here was sought.