PEOPLE, YEARS AND LIFE
511
was not double-crossing-double-crossing, after all, always proceeds
from either fear or deliberate calculation. I simply didn't believe
very much in the death of art proclaimed by so many, including
myself.
Futurism was born at the beginning of our century in provin–
cial, technically backward Italy. There at every comer you could
see magnificent monuments of the past, while the shops sold Ger–
man knives, French saucepans and English cloth. Factory chimneys
had not yet begun to elbow their way into the polite society of
ancient towers. (The north of Italy can now compete with the most
industrialized countries, but you won't find any more futurists in
Italy who demand the burning of all museums, while the former
futurists Carra and Severini are inspired by Giotto's frescoes or the
Ravenna mosaics. The enthusiasm of Mayakovsky, Tatlin and other
representatives of Russian "left-wing art" for industrial aesthetics
during the first years of the Revolution is quite understandable; at
that time not only lumps of sugar, but even matches were being sold
singly on the Sukharevka.
3 1
In
Mystery Boutte
Mayakovsky
dreamt of the future as follows: "The airy giants of transparent fac–
tories and apartment houses will tower into the sky. Trains, street–
cars and automobiles stand woven in rainbows ..." (When the art–
ist depicts nature or human emotions, his works do not grow old.
Nobody would say that a woman of the twentieth century is more
beautiful or more perfect than Nike of the Acropolis, created
twenty-five centuries before; nobody laughs at Hamlet's anguish or
Romeo's love for Juliet. But the painter has only to take to ma–
chinery and his Utopias are surpassed or refuted by time. Wells was
an extremely educated man, and he thought that he foresaw the fu–
ture, but the discoveries of modern physics have made his Utopian
novels ridiculous. How could Mayakovsky foresee that streetcars
would soon share the fate of horse-drawn buses or that trains would
become an archaic means of communication?)
Picasso's cubist paintings were not born of a longing for ma–
chinery, but of a painter's desire to free himself from superfluous
details in his depiction of man, nature, and the world. Nowadays
few people are interested in the books of Metzinger, Gleizes
or
31. Moscow's
fanlOU5
"flea-market."
