“When Solomon staked his reputation for wisdom as well as originality on the assertion that there is nothing new under the sun, he did not think some day the Cubist painter, the Futurist artist, and the color musician would rise in the twentieth century and make him ridiculous. There is something new under the sun even in these departures, and like everything original since the first sin, the innovations are now roundly condemned. “It is the fashion now to condemn the Cubist and the Futurist in art, even as not long ago it was the fashion to condemn the realist, the impressionist and the Post-Impressionist; but it is a peculiar tribute to the authority of an innovation that it requires such a general attack of condemnation. A trivial thing requires mere neglect; a war of condemnation implies some strong and virile thing to be subdued. “These new things have a substantial basis for existence; else they would not exist. Their novelty has caused some extravagant adherents to carry them to unreasonable excess. They have abused the discoveries, not used them. They will pass away but the new principles will survive. “The cubist takes his cue from the idea of perspective itself--carried to excess. No one can imagine anything but straight lines as the basis for ‘vanishing points.’ Curved lines, while apparent and obvious, are not the scientific representations of actualities. The things we see strike the eye on the basis of flat images and our imagination brings out shape and significance. It is but a simple reversal to present flat art and give the imagination equal play in reconstructing real images in the eye. “If we take a half-tone engraving and examine it with a magnifying glass we find it is a series of holes of uniform size but more or less dense on the surface according to the requirements of light, shade and line. Magnify a half-tone 100 times and we have a large grating of black and white circles or squares. That is cubist art. It requires a slight shift in the point of view, a little development and stimulation of the imagination--nothing more. “When Gulliver visited the Brobdingnagians and viewed the complexions of their women at close range, it almost made him sick--yet they were noted beauties. He looked too close. When they looked at him they observed no complexion--they looked too far. Yet each had a concrete complexion and the only trouble was the point of view and the shock of comparison. “The futurists have a very novel and, at this time, an outlandish art. One of them has a full page picture used as an advertisement of the peculiar sound of a horn. It is a picture of a sound that saws its way through other sounds. There is a straight, fan-like picture for a constant, augmenting note, rising in scale. It is gray. There is a black ellipse for a loud varying noise of fairly regular variation of note, and so on. The foreign noise of the horn is shown as utterly unlike in form, intensity, regularity or harmony, any other sound.