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FUTURIST ART ON SHIPS in Oakland Tribune (Oakland CA) June 23, 1918—
At last the futurists have found themselves. Rather has the world found them.
Their theories and practice are adopted by the Navy Department to camouflage the ships that go down to the sea, as witness the good ship that rode in the harbor during the week, a potpourri of colored angles, lines and geometric forms that recall visions of that famous room at the Palace of Fine Arts during the [1915 Panama-Pacific International] Exposition—the “My God Room.” You remember it?
Dynamism—movement—is what the perpetrators of the pictures were striving for, movement as opposed to a static state.
And is not that the thing sought for by the Navy—a movement of objects that are disassociated with ships, to the consternation of the gunners who roam the sea?
Objects in movement multiply themselves, becoming deformed in pursuit of each other, like hurried vibrations. Thus does the law work out for the protection of the ships of the Allies, justifying the theories of Balla, Picasso, Picabia and the rest.
The stories of Courbet, and Manet, and Monet and Degas are fresh in mind—the contempt of the people; then their acceptance of the innovators, followed by their standardization, by which the rest of the world of art is measured. Such is the psychology of the mediocre.
Shall the war vindicate the theories of [Giacomo] Balla and his confrerés?
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