“If one has a diagram one can understand the futurist art and, when one
understands, he approves. The new arts are simply aids to comparison,
discrimination and inspiration. They have all the delights of
wine-tasting or salad-judging--and some salads are vile.
“The color musician has developed only another exercise in
discrimination. If we were to make mathematics of music we would find
that there is an exact relation between the number of vibrations of
notes an octave apart; a constant relation between the vibrations in the
natural and the sharp; a direct ratio between the vibrations of the
notes in a chord; a formula for harmony and another for discord. It is
an interesting mathematical study, a science as well as an art, and it
proves that our appreciation through the senses is based on natural
mathematical sequences and on well understood ratios, seasoned for
variety’s sake by divergences from type.
“Now the color musician has taken the spectrum and made notes out of it
like the notes on the gamut. He has a color-scale and can do as much on
it for the delight of the eye as a musician can with the musical scale
for the ear. He merely brings out an extra way of enjoying distinctions
and of enjoying that most restful of enjoyable things--conventionality.
The certainty and the satisfaction of the conventional is about the most
assuring thing in all experience. There is no more steadying feeling in
all the world than to know that two and two make four, and that c-a-t
spells cat. The more ways by which we can be assured of the belief we
hold by faith, that there is an uniform, unchanging, all-pervading rule
in the world, arguing an individual, mastering central consciousness and
direction, the happier we are.
“The cubists and the futurists and the color musicians may be faddists,
but they help to drive out old Solomon’s pessimism. They help us to
understand by purely human experience how it is that there may be some
things which even humans cannot understand--but which are.”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ENGLISH
In attempting this bibliography of the modern movement in art, the
search in periodical literature in England, France, and Germany has
been carried back no farther than 1908.
IS ART A FAILURE? by Robert Fowler. Nineteenth Century, July, 1912.
ART, A NEW VENTURE IN. _Exhibition at the Omega Workshops._ Times,
July 9, 1913.
BAKST, LEON. _Art Exhibitions. A Great Designer._ Times, June 17,
1912. Morning Post, June 18, 1912.
BAKST, LEON. _Exhibition._ Athenaeum, July 6, 1912.
BERLIN SECESSION. For short notices on see “Studio”: LI, p. 241;
LI, p. 328; LII, p. 68; LII, p. 153; LII, p. 240; LIII, p. 324;
LIV, p. 84; LV, p. 59; LV, p. 249; LVI, p. 241.
CÉZANNE. _Article by Maurice Denis._ Burlington Magazine, XVI Part
I, p. 207; Part II, p. 275.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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