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.