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6.

it is to know these beginnings; but we shall not more than mention how few painters concern themselves with anything more than their trade, or if they do make pretensions to nationalism, timeliness, or even universal thought how shoddy, ignorant & prejudiced it is. With all that artists ask in special care one hates to admit that most of their minds are as two dimensional as their pictures, & frequently unframed.

Suddenly the present comes & the ingredients of americanism are the same vigor, the frankness that can range from clumsiness to an auster charm, a willingness for sentiment, the ambition of subject restricted by an impatience with technic, the fetish of loneliness. The various technics have all been taken from a wide range of times and countries. With the present came a shout of nationalism, the european yoke must be thrown aside & people began to avidly talk and paint the american scene. Not only must america be painted eagerly but artists must be encouraged if they do it. Artists who did not study in Europe were second only to those who had never had a lesson.

The plea for the american artist and the american scene was a fight for the first twentyfive years of this century, even now there are bugle calls, but the response has been sufficiently stirred to encourage, make it practical for, the serious artist interested in his country to work at it. He would have anyhow but now he has a happier chance. In the manipulated noise & eagerness shallow work is being praised & bought, murals are being commissioned that as a contemporary record will be more shaming than a Godey Book pattern for a worsted and buckram pipe hanger.

Painting the "american scene" is mistaken largely for painting american. The use of contemporary french technics would be no complaint if the artists were perceiving, knowing, their America deeply enough. An artist conscious of more than the surface America will automatically be less inclined to use alien