ART.
THE ITALIAN FUTURISTS.
Thu Italian Futurists have come to town and are now draw- ing the Athenian part of London to the Saekville Gallery in Sackville Street. It is only a year ago since we had the " Pastists " at the Grafton Gallery : one may surely call the Post-Impressionists that, for is not their object to regain the expressiveness of the child and the aborigines, the archaic and the primitive? The Futurists, on the other hand, are concerned only with the future. They are to be the primi- tives of the art that is to come. They "stand upon the extreme promontory of the centuries [their manifesto tells us], and why should they look behind when they have to break in mysterious portals of the Impossible ? " Further, "to admire an old picture is to pour our sensitiveness into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward in violent gushes of creation and action." What must be rendered is "dynamic sensation—that is to say, the peculiar rhythm of each object, its intention, its movement, its interior force." In the series of pictures in Sackville Street the point that is clearest is that the artist is preoccupied, not with the world as it is, but with things as they react immediately on his senses. His object is to find pictorial terms for states of mind. The Futurist idea claims a certain kinship with the modern movement of French music—sensation rather than emotion.
Further, it is the long-delayed protest against the camera
carried to the nth degree. Yet, strangely enough, it is of the cinematograph that one instantly thinks when surveying their pictures. Indeed, Futurism, whatever it may be, appears before us with something very professional in its aspect. Signor Severini's The Pan-Pan Dance, a
dazzling kaleidoscope of bright colours that only partly fit into an indication of a Parisian café scene with Tsiganes dancing, could only have been done by some one who could quite easily have done it in the smartest Salon terms. Signor Russolo's really extraordinary expressive vision of a lit train darting through the night (although the quality of the
paint is poor) is obviously the work of an artist accomplished and inventive beyond ordinary ; and tha drawing of the two giant horses of smoke and fire in Signor Boccioni's epic of The Rising City may be respected by admirers of Gericault. Clearly, these artists—they are all under thirty—
did not take to Futurism to hide incapacity. It has always been a sturdy British trait to assign incapacity of the practitioners as the explanation of any movement in art, but it is not clear that we can fall back on that in thia
case as in any other. It is more easy to believe that the deadweight of two centuries of the world's most admired
art has broken the heart of the modern Italian artist, and that he has sought at any sacrifice to escape to a new pictorial art, or at any rate to believe that a new art is possible.
Is it possible? Can one really by force tines, by ignoring perspective, by. making opaque objects transparent, by invent- ing a synthesis of what one remembers and what one seea.
create a work of art? Signor Boceioni makes the most. desperate attempt in his series Leave-taking, Those .Who.
Are Going Away, and Those Who Remain Behind, In the last "perpendicular lines, undulating and, as it were, worn out, clinging hero and there to silhouettes of empty bodies, express languidness and discouragement." In the second, "horizontal lines fleeting rapid and jerky, brutally cutting- into half lost profiles of faces or crumbling and rebounding fragments of landscape, give the tumultuous feelings of persons going away." In the first all is "confusion of figures and objects and force lines and the number of the engine which remains indelibly impressed on the mind." It is easy to make fun of the Futurists, but it is not perhaps so easy to be sure that out of their extravagance and nebulousness some- thing may not ultimately emerge of the brilliant and earnest spirit of which one gets glimpses in their writings and in their inchoate works. Anyway, we are not sure that the mental pressure that is so desperately seeking through Post- Impressionism and Futurism to make modern art more expressive of our own strange times is all for the bad, Only, most of us feel that it is bard that it should fall to us to have to make the mental effort to find out what it is all. about. And Futurism is especially difficult. Of Post-Impressionism at the Grafton it was said that it had to be seen to be believed ; of Futurism it may certainly be said that it has to be
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