point). But these French importations have fallen little by little into the hands of a troupe of helpless monkeys who have managed to arouse a general disgust. A rabble of mediocre painters, men and women scarcely competent to draw Vermouth posters or fashion-plates for the Lettura, have found in the recent tendencies of painting a means of camouflaging themselves as futurists—to put it more plainly, a means of painting without knowing how to paint, and of seeming new without being really new, even in their impudence and falsity.
Thus we have in Italy a thin broth of Van Gogh, Matisse, Picasso, and Boccioni, served up as the last word and the quintessence of pictorial and plastic art. This imported and simulated art has two main divisions. Some of its followers tend to the infantile, to clumsy formlessness, to a barbaric simplification. Others aspire to complexity, to mystery, to inconclusive flourishes, to metaphysical and dynamic geometry. The first group ends in Imbecilism, the other in Hieroglyphicism; but the banner they both bear is that of the great school of False Pretense. We may well admire real children who paint as children, and real savages who carve as savages. We may well admire the hieroglyphics of Egypt and of Persia. We may well respect the pioneers, the courageous creators, who at the cost of seeming to be charlatans seek to discover new
