The manifesto of the new crowd is too lengthy to reproduce; but here are a few of its tenets:
1st: That imitation must be despised, and all originality glorified. (How novel!)
2d: That it is essential to rebel against the tyranny of the terms "harmony" and "good taste" as being too elastic expressions, by the help of which it is easy to demolish the works of Rembrandt, of Goya, and of Rodin.
3d: That the art-critics are useless or harmful.
4th: That all subjects previously used must be swept aside in order to express our whirling life of steel, of pride, of fever, and of speed.
5th: That the name of "madman" with which it is attempted to gag all innovators, should be looked upon as a title of honour.
6th: That innate complementariness is an absolute necessity in painting, just as free metre in poetry or polyphony in music. Oh, ass who wrote this! Polyphony is not a modern invention. A man named Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, wrote fugues of an extraordinary beauty and clearness in their most complicated polyphony. But polyphony (or many voices) is new in painting, and to the Futurists must be conceded the originality of attempting to represent a half dozen different things at the same time on canvas—a dog's tail, a woman's laughter, the thoughts of a man who has had a "hard night," the inside of a motor-bus, and the ideas of its passengers concerning its bumping wheels, and what-not!
7th: That universal dynamism must be rendered in painting as a dynamic sensation.
8th: That in the manner of rendering nature, the essential is sincerity and purity (more copy-book maxims for us!).
9th: That movement and light destroy the materiality of bodies (a truism in art well known to Watteau, Rembrandt, Turner, and latterly, to Claude Monet and the earlier group of Impressionists). And now for the milk in the cocoanut.