Women -- Suffrage -- Great Britain -- Fiction; World War, 1914-1918 -- Great Britain -- Fiction
He said, "It expresses movement, because it presents objects directly as
cutting across many planes. To do this you have to break up objects into
the lines and masses that compose them, and project those lines and
masses into space on any curve, at any angle, according to the planes
you mean them to cross, otherwise the movements you mean them to
express. The more planes intersected the more movement you get. By
decomposing figures you compose movements. By decomposing groups of
figures you compose groups of movement. Nothing but a cinema can
represent objects as intact and as at the same time moving; and even the
cinema only does this by a series of decompositions so minute as to
escape the eye.
"You want to draw a battle-piece or the traffic at Hyde Park Corner. It
can't be done unless you break up your objects as Mitchell breaks them
up. You want to carve figures in the round, wrestling or dancing. It
can't be done unless you dislocate their lines and masses as I dislocate
them, so as to throw them all at once into those planes that the intact
body could only have traversed one after another in a given time.
"By taking time into account as well as space we produce rhythm.
"I know what you're going to say, Stephen. The Dancing Faun and the
Frieze of the Parthenon express movements. But they do nothing of the
sort. They express movements arrested at a certain point. They are
supposed to represent nature, but they do not even do that, because
arrested motion is a contradiction in terms, and because the point of
arrest is an artificial and arbitrary thing.
"Your medium limits you. You have to choose between the intact body
which is stationary and the broken and projected bodies which are in
movement. That is why we destroy or suppress symmetry in the figure and
in design. Because symmetry is perfect balance which is immobility. If I
wanted to present perfect rest I should do it by an absolute symmetry."
"And there's more in it than that," said Austen Mitchell. "We're out
against the damnable affectations of naturalism and humanism. If I draw
a perfect likeness of a fat, pink woman I've got a fat, pink woman and
nothing else but a fat pink woman. And a fat, pink woman is a work of
Nature, not a work of art. And I'm lying. I'm presenting as a reality
what is only an appearance. The better the likeness the bigger the lie.
But movement and rhythm are realities, not appearances. When I present
rhythm and movement I've done something. I've made reality appear."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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