APPROACHES - In The Words Of . . . .
From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.
The Cubist's attempt at a picture fails because it is based on the involution of a discovery of Cézanne's and not on the logical definition process of an evolution. But now the Futurist discovery of recollection and feeling intervenes in the construction of the modern painting.
It is a matter of uniting the concept of space, to which Cubism limits itself, with the concept of time. It is a matter of finding a construction in which the two concepts of space and time are balanced out for the resolution of emotions. It is a matter not only of building objects that are enriched and renewed through the contribution of tactile knowledge and accidental vision, but of creating a plastic environment in which the objects can develop all their emotive plastic potentiality. It is a matter, in fact, of adding to the objective plastic renewal of the French a subjective plastic renewal, of creating consequently a new emotive evaluation that springs forth from the plastic potentiality characteristic of the object. And as the emotive plastic values of the objects vary as much as the objects, that is infinitely, it is necessary to react to this kind of Impressionism, which we will call ethical, and which until today has made us accumulate and analyze inefficient, unnecessary, dissimilar plastic elements in a single picture. It is necessary to create a discipline that coordinates and gives to each element of the picture its own proper function.
This discipline, as I said before, is not fixed but intuitive, and it obeys the mysterious necessity of the picture, it obeys its composition. Once we have accepted the picture as a hierarchy of plastic values, a new horizon opens before us. It is the Impressionist revolution channeled into the dynamic order of Futurism. We are approaching the plastic state of mind. Therefore, the concepts of speed, copenetration, simultaneity through which we Futurists interpret things, make us unite in a single picture the plastic values that struck us yesterday, or a year ago, and the values that push us to look for the brush today and to go to work . . .
Umberto Boccioni: Futurist Painting and Sculpture
[An Exerpt From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988. p. 154]
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