Pure movement, it will hardly be questioned, these men can give.
BALLA
Dog and Person in Movement
Picabia makes the lines in his “Dance at the Spring” leap and swing and flicker like a fiddler’s bow. If he and others want, when they choose, to abandon the last pretense of representation and convey directly to you the way they feel mass and motion, as music conveys inner experience always, who is to stop them?
Futurism had its beginning in Italy a few years ago. The first exhibition in Paris was held in February, 1912. One of its fundamental notions in painting is a certain theory regarding the painting of motion. It is that in order rightly, scientifically, to indicate motion on a canvas it is not sufficient to paint the figure of a man in an attitude of walking, but a series of more or less clearly outlined figures must be shown overlapping, a sort of cinematograph effect; very much as every painter shows a blur of spokes to indicate a wheel turning, if an individual is in motion there must be a blur of many overlapping individuals. (See the half-tone of the girl with the dog.)
The theory is interesting, it is based on recognized optical conditions, and no doubt the experiments will have their value. Some very interesting results have been obtained in photography already.