tention. His method is
to choose the ugliest models to be found; to put them into the most
grotesque and indecent postures imaginable; to draw them in the manner
of a savage, or a depraved child, or a worse manner if that be possible;
to surround his figures with blue outlines half an inch wide; and to
paint them in crude and staring colors, brutally laid on in flat masses.
Then, when his grandmother begins to "sit up," she is told with a grave
face that this is a reaction from naturalism, a revival of abstract line
and color, a subjective art which is not the representation of nature
but the expression of the artist's soul. No wonder she gasps and
stares!

It seemed, two or three years ago, that the limit of mystification had
been reached--that this comedy of errors could not be carried further;
but human ingenuity is inexhaustible, and we now have whole schools,
Cubists, Futurists, and the like, who joyously vie with each other in
the creation of incredible pictures and of irreconcilable and
incomprehensible theories. The public is inclined to lump them all
together and, so far as their work is concerned, the public is not far
wrong; yet in theory Cubism and Futurism are diametrically opposed to
each other. It is not easy to get any clear conception of the doctrines
of these schools, but, so far as I am able to understand them--and I
have taken some pains to do so--they are something like this:

Cubism is static; Futurism is kinetic. Cubism deals with bulk; Futurism
deals with motion. The Cubist, by a kind of extension of Mr. Berenson's
doctrine of "tactile values," assumes that the only character of objects
which is of importance to the artist is their bulk and solidity--what he
calls their "volumes." Now the form in which volume is most easily
apprehended is the cube; do we not measure by it and speak of the cubic
contents of anything? The inference is easy: reduce all objects to forms
which can be bounded by planes and defined by straight lines and angles;
make their cubic contents measurable to the eye; transform drawing into
a burlesque of solid geometry; and you have, at once, attained to the
highest art. The Futurist, on the other hand, maintains that we know
nothing but that things are in flux. Form, solidity, weight are
illusions. Nothing exists but motion. Everything is changing every
moment, and if anything were still we ourselves are changing. It is,
therefore, absurd to give fixed boundaries to anything