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[[cut off]]ME AMERICAN ARTISTS.

[[image: half of a black and white photograph of a woman]]

the Academy is brought to bed, and twice every year the [[cut off]]ught to light evokes such comparative criticism as "Not [[cut off]]" "A little worse than last year," &c.
[[cut off]] of a year ago reached the high water mark of insigni- [[cut off]]. The whole show might have been painted by Oscar Hammerstein. Not that I know that Oscar Hammerstein paints, but it had his favor, the flam of the pretentious incapable. This year the exhibition is a little better.

What of it?

A little more or less technical finish does not count against the absolute sway of mediocrity.

A serious artist like Mosler, who has won recognition and reward abroad, will find in his compeers at the Academy but the manufactured sentiment of the kindergarten minus the simplicity. 
The obvious moral, the breadth that is shallow, the sentiment that pules--it is for these that Baffometus has built his temple on Twenty-third street. 
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It is not, with one or 
[[cut off]]in the Academy that one finds what is of value in [[cut off]]

[[cut off]]itions are not faultless--hardly--but at least there is no [[cut off]] art. Art that needs fostering will stand killing in hog

[[cut off]]y for the fact that the society has at its head an artist [[cut off]]it would show in the main that the so-called "younger [[cut off]]and appreciative, the question of talent resting, of course, [[cut off]]friends you happen to have in the association 

[[cut off]]pe for American art it is to be found in the fact that men [[cut off]]and George Grey Barnard are willing to give up the sus-[[cut off]]ive atmosphere that they find abroad and live and work [[cut off]]ead-eagle country of ours. If there are limitations to the [[cut off]]ose limitations are to be viewed in the light of the man's [[cut off]]ce it was not to follow in the footsteps of Sargent, Whistler [[cut off]]ave [[cut off]]hat [[cut off]]ere [[cut off]]ient [[cut off]]arge [[cut off]]rtist [[cut off]him [[cut off]]ican [[cut off]]mis- [[cut off]]does [[cut off]]e is

[[cut off]]auti- [[cut off]] its [[cut off]]fail- [[cut off]]art, [[cut off]]e of [[cut off]]lop- [[cut off]] the [[cut off]]him [[cut off]]d in [[cut off]]wer [[cut off]]sub- [[cut off]]lass, [[cut off]]tive [[cut off]]y in- [[cut off]]e as [[cut off]]first 

[[cut off]]s are

[[image]] 

responsiveness. Every tint means something, every tint is a symbol expressing, at least to the artist, the fullness and glory of the nature which it helps to interpret. In the beautiful painting in the Church of the Ascension, for instance, the artist has expressed with a wonderful and mysterious power the Christ-like atmosphere through the medium of his fluent colors. 

Mr La Farge's manufacture of stained glass--he was the first artist in the country to do so--is in a way an aid to the interpretation of the man and the artist; he has turned to church work because he believes by that means he finds a broader audience. How much he has done for this poor artisan overwrought country is unnecessary to say.
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It would have been expecting too much to have looked for anything like a repetition of George Grey Barnard's success here in America. Americans, fortunately or unfortunately, are not built on the Parisian plan; they don't enthuse until they have looked the matter up. They have been fooled so often that the pure glitter of genius brings only the poignant tinge of previous disappointments.

[[image: line drawing of a man with long hair and a thin mustache looking dour]]

Another way of saying the heart is all right, but the mind--plainly there is none. Mr. Barnard was here a year, and then something like appreciation began to show itself, even though such bedrizzled sons of night as John Van Dyke were very willing to shake their venerable locks over Mr. Barnard's voluntary straying from the paths of the conventional. William A. Coffin threw away a fine opportunity in a century, and went over Mr. Barnard's work in a reportorial fashion, evidently more engrossing in turning out copy than in showing the meaning of Mr. Barnard's work.

[[image: drawing of a person's face]]

Of Mr. Barnard's life there is not much to write. It is more crowded with thought than it is with events; it is represented better by his several achievements than by a chronicle of dates. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1863, moving to Illinois with his father, entered the Chicago Art School in 1881 and went to Paris in 1883. Several years later, inspired by the feeling that what he had to do must be done alone, he withdrew from the atelier in which he was studying, and set up for his own studio and worked there alone. There he completed his "Brotherly Love," so dramatic and delicate, so poetic, so real, and his "Two Natures." There he developed his mysticism, his feeling for the absolute. For he is a mystic and a poet, and in his writings, unpublished, unconnected and without literary form as they are, he expressed that same wonderful idealistic vitality. He sees life, but not as others see--it life ennobled in its entirety, both in the past and in the future. When one considers that the sculptor has been but a few years in his thirties; that he is yet a young man; that his greatest work was done some six years ago, one feels with animation the greatness of the future--a future as great for the country as it is for this tireless individual. It seems strange to have among us here in America, where so many attempts at sculptural art have verged on the ridiculous, a man who can, who does and will rank with the greatest. The only trouble is that in having him so near we may not see him in his true light. This is a fear, but is a fear that does not come when one stands be-

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This appears to be a duplicate from page 70.