The realistic manifesto (1920)
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Above the tempests of our weekdays,
Across the ashes and cindered homes of the past,
Before the gates of the vacant future,
We proclaim today to you artists, painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, poets…to you people to whom Art is no mere ground for conversation but the source of real exaltation, our word and deed.
The impasse into which Art has come to in the last twenty years must be broken.
The growth of human knowledge with its powerful penetration into the mysterious laws of the world which started at the dawn of this century,
The blossoming of a new culture and a new civilization with their unprecedented-in-history surge of the masses towards the possession of the riches
of Nature, a surge which binds the people into one union, and last, not least, the war and the revolution (those purifying torrents of the coming epoch), have made us face the fact of new forms of life, already born and active.
What does Art carry into this unfolding epoch of human history?
Does it possess the means necessary for the construction of the new Great Style?
Or does it suppose that the new epoch may not have a new style?
Or does it suppose that the new life can accept a new creation which is constructed on the foundations of the old?
Naum Gabo
In spite of the demand of the renascent spirit of our time, Art is still nourished by impression, external appearance, and wanders helplessly back and forth from Naturalism to Symbolism, from Romanticism to Mysticism.
The attempts of the Cubists and the Futurists to lift the visual arts from the bogs of the past have led only to new delusions.
Cubism, having started with simplification of the representative technique ended with its analysis and stuck there.
The distracted world of the Cubists, broken in shreds by their logical anarchy, cannot satisfy us who have already accomplished the Revolution or who are already constructing and building up anew.
One could heed with interest the experiments of the Cubists, but one cannot follow them, being convinced that their experiments are being made on the surface of Art and do not touch on the bases of it seeing plainly that the end result amounts to the same old graphic, to the same old volume and to the same decorative surface as of old.
Antoine Pevsner
One could have hailed Futurism in its time for the refreshing sweep of its announced Revolution in Art, for its devastating criticism of the past, as in no other way could have assailed those artistic barricades of “good taste”…powder was needed for that and a lot of it…but one cannot construct a system of art on one revolutionary phrase alone.