L. S.

“ The futurist parodies Democritus: "Our bodies enter into the canopies on which we sit, the couches enter into our bodies, the autobus hurls itself into the houses it passes, the houses hurl themselves upon the autobus and merge with it"
The second revolution, like the first, ends in the past. The revolutionary painter, seeking the most uniquely modern goal he can imagine, has fallen victim to an ancient hunger—a poetic impatience to rend the veil of appearance, a poignant eagerness to be one with the hidden essence of being. ”

“ It is surprising that painters and sculptors ended with a forlorn sense of the wisdom of ignorance, that, utterly weary of the burden of sophistication, their only ultimate enthusiasm should be for every primitive period of art in which they could regain a sense of seeing with the uneducated gaze of the savage and the childlike eye? ”

“ And each conception is assumed to have the finality of a miracle. In the uproar of rival christenings the accredited Cubist pamphleteer announces "Cubism is painting itself." The Futurist manifesto proclaims; "We inaugurate a new epoch of painting." A Synchromist confided to me, "Ours is the last painters' movement; there can be no other." One conviction, however, they hold in common: art, which has been the courtesan of princes and the holiday playmate of republics, is dead. ”

“ The creative energy of our time is not only exhausted by enthusiastic erudition, but our power of appreciation is itself drained by incessant criticism, the necessity for a continual revaluation of all aesthetic values before we can achieve any aesthetic criterion whatsoever. ”

“ The process of enthusiastic allegiance to some historic type of beauty by which the artist educates his sense of design and form becomes an immense critical labor. Instead of an immediate native tradition there is a bewildering array of historic tradition to choose from. The sculptor, for instance, not only compares Greek statues with Egyptian, Hindu bronzes with Chinese monuments, but he must compare Phidian marbles with archaic Attic bas-reliefs, and later Egyptian monoliths with examples of the first dynasties. He cannot take Greek art in general, or any other art, as his model ”

“ Both are ineffectual and both are significant because they are phases of an inevitable revolt against an unavoidable criticism growing every year more intolerable to the artist.
For the compilation of art history has grown so complete that no one can escape it. ”

“ Well, it is an essentially mediaeval conception of the relation of man to his universe. It is a scholastic's answer to the problem, though the middle ages did not attempt to delineate it in paint. The cubist and the futurist are at best modern monks illuminating with fantastic grotesques the margin of an esoteric manuscript. ”