A Futurist begins right where a Cubist leaves off, and gets worse. The Futurists have already had exhibitions in Paris and London and last Spring they invaded New York. They call themselves art anarchists. Their doctrine is a simple and a cheerful one—they merely preach that whatever is normal is wrong. They not only preach it, they practice it.
Here are some of their teachings:
"We teach the plunge into shadowy death under the white set eyes of the ideal!
"The mind must launch the flaming body, like a fire-ship, against the enemy, the eternal enemy that, if he do not exist, must be invented!
"The victory is ours—I am sure of it, for the maniacs are already hurling their hearts to heaven like bombs! Attention! Fire! Our blood? Yes! All our blood in torrents to redye the sickly auroras of the earth! Yes, and we shall also be able to warm thee within our smoking arms, O wretched, decrepit, chilly Sun, shivering upon the summit of the Gorisankor!"
"COLLISION BETWEEN TWO HEAVENLY BODIES OR PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF A CUSTARD PIE"
There you have the whole thing, you see, simply, dispassionately and quietly presented. Most of us have seen newspaper reproductions of the best examples of the Futurists' school. As well as a body can judge from these reproductions, a Futurist's method of execution must be comparatively simple. After looking at his picture, you would say that he first put on a woolly overcoat and a pair of overshoes; that he then poured a mixture of hearth paint, tomato catsup, liquid bluing, burnt cork, English mustard, Easter dyes and the yolks of a dozen eggs over himself, seasoning to taste with red peppers. Then he spread a large tarpaulin on the floor and lay down on it and had an epileptic fit, the result being a picture which he labeled Revolt, or Collision Between Two Heavenly Bodies, or Premature Explosion of a Custard Pie, or something else equally appropriate. The Futurists ought to make quite a number of converts in this country, especially among those advanced lovers of art who are beginning to realize that the old impressionistic school lacked emphasis and individuality in its work. But I expect to stand firm, and when everybody else nearly is a Futurist and is tearing down Sargent's pictures and Abbey's and Whistler's to make room for immortal Young Messers, I and a few others will still be holding out resolutely to the end.
At such times as these I fain would send my thoughts back longingly to an artist who flourished in the town where I was born and brought up. He was practically the only artist we had, but he was versatile in the extreme. He was several kinds of a painter rolled into one—house, sign, portrait, landscape, marine and wagon. In his lighter hours, when building operations were dull, he specialized in oil paintings of life and motion—mainly pictures of horse races and steamboat races. When he painted a horse race, the horses were always shown running neck and neck with their mouths wide open and their eyes gleaming; and their nostrils were widely extended and painted a deep crimson, and their legs were neatly arranged just so, and not scrambled together in any old fashion, as seems to be the case with the legs of the horses that are being painted nowadays. And when he painted a steamboat race it would always be the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee coming down the river abreast in the middle of the night, with the darkies dancing on the lower decks and heavy black smoke rolling out of the smokestacks in four distinct columns—one column to each smokestack—and showers of sparks belching up into the vault of night.