The effect is fragmentary and confusing.
Other sculptors, conspicuously Rodin in some of his work, get the effect of atmosphere and environment by detaching the figure or composition only partially from the block of marble or mass of bronze, leaving to the imagination of the observer the finishing of the work, the supplying of both environment and atmosphere.
That would seem to be the finer, the purer, the more abstract way.
In fact, there is an obvious contradiction between the creed of the Futurist sculptor and the Futurist writer.
The former feels impelled to show environment by encumbering his figure with an overwhelming mass of details, houses, railings, sidewalks, petty figures, etc., etc.—all the qualifying objects that happen within his vision, leaving nothing to the imagination of his observer; while the Futurist writer would eliminate from literature all adjectival and adverbial words and phrases, leaving the nouns (the simple figures of sculpture) to stand alone.
Many things can be done in painting that cannot be done in sculpture. A figure may be painted against a background of an entire city, or against the heavens; or it may be painted in the midst of a battle, or a train wreck; the flight of years can be indicated, centuries may be swept into one canvas.
In sculpture this cannot be done save, in a measure, in such crude mixtures of sculpture, relief, and painted scenes as those large circular panoramas so popular twenty years ago, where the spectator stood in the center—where the theory of the Futurist requires him to be—and gazed from life-size figures and objects at his feet across smaller and smaller, until reality imperceptibly joined the painted canvas, which gave a sense of great distance—entire battle-fields.
The Futurist sculptor cannot give this sense of environment and atmosphere by attaching diminutive houses and bits of balconies to the bust of a man.