Page:Four and Twenty Minds.djvu/232

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216
FOUR AND TWENTY MINDS

experts and of beginners. When the Logbook appeared as a volume, it proved to have lost nothing in interest or in freshness. Its last sections foretokened the complicated structure of the later “lyric compounds.”

The Logbook was not his only contribution to Lacerba. As in the Voce he had been the champion and the theorist of impressionism, so in Lacerba he was the apostle and the exponent of cubism. His limpid, axiomatic articles, now published in book form, are the best European treatment of the most daring experimental schools of painting.

In Lacerba too, from 1914 on, and in the Voce, he published the greater part of those “lyric compounds” and “lyric simultaneities” which have recently come out, under the strange title Bïf§zf + 18, in a strange sort of album which has for its cover a medley of posters colored by Soffici in the brightest blues, greens, yellows, and reds that are to be found in Italy now that the importation of German dyes has ceased.

IV

The book is limited to three hundred copies, costs five lire, and is published in war-time: consequently few will read it. And yet this bizarre volume, which even in the extravagances of its