It is easy to distinguish a figure drawn in more or less Cubist fashion, at the right--the spectator’s right--of the confused mass of lines; it is quite easy, if the balance of the picture be covered. The confused mass is just so many overlapping figures coming down the stairs. As a child exclaimed one day, “Why, I see them; there’s one on every step.” The Cubist drawing did not bother the child. * * * * * A sympathetic writer says of the picture: M. Duchamp says in effect something like this: “If you paint a girl coming downstairs, on any one step you will not show her moving. If you paint a girl on every step, like Burne-Jones with the ‘Golden Stair’ you have a crowd and still no movement. But if you get the forms down to simplest and most essential, just swaying shoulders and hip and knee, bent head and springy sole--and then show them on every step and between all the steps, passing and always passing one into the next, you give the sense of movement, as with a run of arpeggios on the harp or a cadenza on the violin. You and your friends don’t feel the movement--too bad, my friends and I do.” And pure movement is what, after all, here was sought. Pure movement, it will hardly be questioned, these men can give. [Illustration: BALLA Dog and Person in Movement] Picabia makes the lines in his “Dance at the Spring” leap and swing and flicker like a fiddler’s bow. If he and others want, when they choose, to abandon the last pretense of representation and convey directly to you the way they feel mass and motion, as music conveys inner experience always, who is to stop them? * * * * * Futurism had its beginning in Italy a few years ago. The first exhibition in Paris was held in February, 1912. One of its fundamental notions in painting is a certain theory regarding the painting of motion. It is that in order rightly, scientifically, to indicate motion on a canvas it is not sufficient to paint the figure of a man in an attitude of walking, but a series of more or less clearly outlined figures must be shown overlapping, a sort of cinematograph effect; very much as every painter shows a blur of spokes to indicate a wheel turning, if an individual is in motion there must be a blur of many overlapping individuals. (See the half-tone of the girl with the dog.) The theory is interesting, it is based on recognized optical conditions, and no doubt the experiments will have their value. Some very interesting results have been obtained in photography already. * * * * * The program of the Futurists is, however, far more ambitious than the mere painting of motion effects. They have issued the following formal “Manifestoes”: 1. “Manifesto of Futurism,” February, 1909; written by F. T. Marinetti.[63] 2. “Manifesto of Futurist Painters,” April, 1910.