“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.