or to admit of
any fixed relations in space. If you are trying to record your
impression of a face it is certain that by the time you have done one
eye the other eye will no longer be where it was--it may be at the other
side of the room. You must cut nature into small bits and shuffle them
about wildly if you are to reproduce what we really see.

Whatever its extravagance, Cubism remains a form of graphic art. However
pedantic and ridiculous its transformation of drawing, it yet recognizes
the existence of drawing. Therefore, to the Futurist, Cubism is
reactionary. What difference does it make, he asks, whether you draw a
head round or square? Why draw a head at all? The Futurist denies the
fundamental postulates of the art of painting. Painting has always, and
by definition, represented upon a surface objects supposed to lie
beyond it and to be seen through it. Futurism pretends to place the
spectator inside the picture and to represent things around him or
behind him as well as those in front of him. Painting has always assumed
the single moment of vision, and, though it has sometimes placed more
than one picture on the same canvas, it has treated each picture as seen
at a specific instant of time. Futurism attempts systematically to
combine the past and the future with the present, as if all the pictures
in a cinematograph film were to be printed one over the other; to paint
no instant but to represent the movement of time. It aims at nothing
less than the abrogation of all recognized laws, the total destruction
of all that has hitherto passed for art.

Do you recall the story of the man who tried to count a litter of pigs,
but gave it up because one little pig ran about so fast that he could
not be counted? One finds oneself in somewhat the same predicament when
one tries to describe these "new movements" in art. The movement is so
rapid and the men shift their ground so quickly that there is no telling
where to find them. You have no sooner arrived at some notion of the
difference between Cubism and Futurism than you find your Cubist doing
things that are both Cubist and Futurist, or neither Cubist nor
Futurist, according as you look at them. You find things made up of
geometrical figures to give volume, yet with all the parts many times
repeated to give motion. You find things that have neither bulk nor
motion but look like nothing so much as a box of Chinese tangrams
scattered on a table. Finally, you have asse