Sunday, November 23, 2025

how to be a futurist —and the birth of modernist snow

Above A British satirical cartoon about Futurism, published in 1912, one year in advance of the American Armory Show (first US exhibit of Modern Art), and two years before the formation (by the French Army) of a wartime camouflage section. Disruptive camouflage would thereafter be commonly said to have come from Futurism, Cubism and Vorticism.

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Anon, THE SNOWSCAPE: Revelation of Modern Art Not Futurism, Cubism or Other Cosmic Urge, but Phase of Nature, reprinted from the New York Herald in St. Joseph News-Press on January 8, 1923—

The great revelation of modern art is not futurism, cubism, vorticism, or any other of the Freudian cosmic urges. Movements of that sort most always belong strictly to the self-elected heirs of an impredicable posterity.

The revelation of modern art is snow. From the brilliant palette of today a new mantle of pleasure has fallen upon the consciousness of cultivated perception lighter and more lovely than the past ever dreamed.

Snow to the Greeks and Romans was merely something cool to put in a beverage. Among the Italian primitives and through the Renaissance snow scarcely existed save on some background mountain top. Here and there a later Dutchman accepted it as a necessary adjunct to a winter genre. But for the most part art excluded it through a convention almost as rigid as that by which the Japanese printmakers ignored shadows.

The Japanese, of course, loved snow and filled their designs with It. But it was never more than spacing or applied white lead. And the snow blindness of Western art persisted far into the last century. Imagine a snow scene by Corot. Some men, perhaps, were attempting it, especially religious painters, who required it to chill their lost sheep, but only in the Christmas card kind of way until Sisley discovered that Paris streets became in winter an opalescent wonder.

And that is precisely the vital modern discovery—that snow is not white. Faint rose, azure, orchid, lavender, primrose, pearl, or any possible combination in the higher keys it may be, but blank white, never! The sky Itself is not more varied or richer in hue or texture. No one who has ever studied a Redfield, for example. or one of the Swedish, can continue to think of the winter landscape as a dull white sheet of other than a prismatic Persian carpet replete with glorious astonishments.

Modern art has excelled in this alone. Snow is probably the only phase of nature that is being painted better and more sympathetically today than ever before. And because the artist is an interpreter who walks only a few feet ahead of his generation thousands upon thousands of us will look from our windows this winter upon a shimmering rainbow tinted world our fathers never knew.

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