they use form, not to provoke aesthetic emotions, but to convey
information and ideas. Indeed, the published theories of the Futurists
prove that their pictures ought to have nothing whatever to do with art.
Their social and political theories are respectable, but I would suggest
to young Italian painters that it is possible to become a Futurist in
thought and action and yet remain an artist, if one has the luck to be
born one. To associate art with politics is always a mistake. Futurist
pictures are descriptive because they aim at presenting in line and
colour the chaos of the mind at a particular moment; their forms are not
intended to promote aesthetic emotion but to convey information. These
forms, by the way, whatever may be the nature of the ideas they suggest,
are themselves anything but revolutionary. In such Futurist pictures as
I have seen--perhaps I should except some by Severini--the drawing,
whenever it becomes representative as it frequently does, is found to be
in that soft and common convention brought into fashion by Besnard some
thirty years ago, and much affected by Beaux-Art students ever since. As
works of art, the Futurist pictures are negligible; but they are not to
be judged as works of art. A good Futurist picture would succeed as a
good piece of psychology succeeds; it would reveal, through line and
colour, the complexities of an interesting state of mind. If Futurist
pictures seem to fail, we must seek an explanation, not in a lack of
artistic qualities that they never were intended to possess, but rather
in the minds the states of which they are intended to reveal.

Most people who care much about art find that of the work that moves
them most the greater part is what scholars call "Primitive." Of course
there are bad primitives. For instance, I remember going, full of
enthusiasm, to see one of the earliest Romanesque churches in Poitiers
(Notre-Dame-la-Grande), and finding it as ill-proportioned,
over-decorated, coarse, fat and heavy as any better class building by