A Power-House as a Futurist Painter Sees It 



The artist sees the energy rather than the generating machinery 



SUPPOSE that you were an artist and 

 that you were asked to paint the 

 picture of a man describing circles 

 with a lighted cigarette held in his left 

 hand in a perfectly dark room. How 

 would you draw the moving cigarette? As 

 a brilliant point of light, as a complicated 

 curve winding in and out? Obviously, you 

 would paint it as a labyrinth of curving 

 glowing lines. Thus you would give the 

 impression of motion. That being so an 

 artist who paints a dancer with one toe on 

 the ground and another pointing skyward 

 is not telling the whole truth. Dancers are 

 constantly moving, and': to express their 

 movements, something more must be done 

 than to transfix them in a single attitude. 

 So we find the futurists striking out in a 

 new direction — trying hard to translate 



Frances Simpson Stevens and her rep- 

 resentation in line and color of the 

 energy in motion in a great power- 

 house. She calls it pictorial velocity 



motion into color and line. You may laugh 

 at their bewilderingly complicated effects; 

 you may be puzzled at their efforts to 

 explain what happens when a horse and its 

 rider jump ov^r a fence; but at least, they 

 have a basic idea behind all their apparent 

 madness. 



Now the futurists have been particularly 

 struck with the possibilities that lie in 

 scientific and engineering subjects. One of 

 the best known of them. Miss Frances 

 Simpson Stevens, has boldly attacked the 

 problem of interpjeting the modern power- 

 house on canvas. To an artist of the older 

 schools the power-house is simply an 

 aggregation of engines, boilers and dyna- 

 mos. He knows that the shafts of the 

 machinery spin around at the rate of 

 hundreds of revolutions a minute; but he 

 makes little or no attempt to 

 give you any idea of what 

 these terrific speeds mean. 

 To the futurist, the machin- 

 ery itself is of no pictorial im- 

 portance; the let-loose spirit 

 of the great dynamos is 

 everything. And so we find 

 Miss Stevens ignoring mere 

 masses as such and actually 

 endeavoring to paint velocity. 

 Let Miss Stevens speak for 

 herself: 



"Here we are, Americans, living 

 in the biggest and most powerful 

 city in the world, during a period of 

 enormous inventions and stupend- 

 ous activity. But there has been so 

 far, no attempt in art to find a 

 method adequate to express the 

 vastness of events to-day. Machin- 

 ery can be made into a harmonious, 

 informal design. A futurist artist 

 in Italy, seeing an ordinary street 

 car go by, realizes the future possi- 

 bilities of power and speed, and he 

 begins tc paint great trains going 

 so fast that they lose their definite 

 form in the lines of direction. Mo- 

 tion and light destroy the solidity 

 of the material bodies. Even those 

 artists who paint mechanical forms 

 have achieved nothing of the life, or 

 force, or purpose of the object. The 

 futurists make their engines move, 

 throb and create. Something is 

 always happening in a futurist's 

 pictures, and the great variety of 

 color and changing lines helps to 

 convey this impression." 



538 



