On the three-hundredth anniversary of the death of Van Dyck in Blackfriars in 1641, the artist was the subject of almost the whole of this Magazine’s issue of December 1941 – admittedly a rather thin wartime number. Among the articles is a short appreciation by Sacheverell Sitwell of Van Dyck’s contribution to portraiture, in particular the forging of the image of the cavalier and its echoes through later European art and literature; Leo van Puyvelde writes of how Van Dyck was not at all ‘the docile pupil of Rubens’ of popular myth and in good Burlington style examines the actual wording of contemporary documents to refine the picture of Van Dyck as a precocious painter who would ‘collaborate’ with Rubens, and was no mere studio slave.

FEW MOVEMENTS OF the avant-garde have contributed so much yet been as neglected as Futurism. Launched by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, Futurism embraced mod­ernity, speed and political and cultural change, and, to advance its mission, participants dev­eloped strategies and art forms that loomed large over subsequent movements – the use of the manifesto as an assertive means of identification, the promulgation of experimental techniques, such as words-in-freedom poems and interdisciplinary performances, and the deeply held conviction that art could change society. Yet enthusiasm for Futurism’s exuberance has long been tempered by con­sternation regarding its embrace of violence and war, its repressive, even misogynistic, attitude towards women, and its significant alliance, after the First World War, with Fascism.