Judge — May 26, 1928 — page 9: what you’re looking at

What you’re looking at

# "If a Futurist's Models Were as He Paints Them" This Judge cartoon satirizes **Futurism**, an early 20th-century art movement that distorted and abstracted human figures. The caption's joke: if Futurist painters depicted their live models as grotesquely as their finished paintings appear, the models would actually look like the distorted figures shown here—with exaggerated, angular, inhuman proportions. The cartoon shows two caricatured figures in an artist's studio with paintings on the walls and ceiling. The exaggerated body shapes and expressions mock how Futurist art rendered the human form as unrecognizable and bizarre. It's a humorous critique suggesting Futurist artists were so committed to abstraction and distortion that they'd need equally distorted subjects to justify their work. The satire targets the perceived absurdity of modernist art movements.