The Futurist Universe

Giacomo Balla

Any store in a modern town, with its elegant windows all displaying useful and pleasing objects, is much more aesthetically enjoyable than all those passeist exhibitions which have been so lauded everywhere. An electric iron, its white steel gleaming clean as a whistle, delights the eye more than a nude statuette, stuck on a pedestal hideously tinted for the occasion. A typewriter is more architectural than all those building projects which win prizes at academies and competitions. The windows of a perfumer’s shop, with little boxes and packets, bottles and futur-color triplicate phials, reflected in the extremely elegant mirrors. The clever and gay modeling of ladies’ dancing-shoes, the bizarre ingenuity of multi-colored parasols. Furs, traveling bags, china—these things are all a much more rewarding sight than the grimy little pictures nailed on the grey wall of the passéist painter’s studio.