Viewing page 130 of 169

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

problems of the present, one way or the other, with an attitude of decision and direction. It is all confusion with the money-chasing painters and bewilderment with the spectators and buyers. It is high time to say it, to make clear distinction between nice sport and critical understanding and to let the public encourage our serious critics, especially those of the daily press. An ever-increasing avalanche of books by a new brand of critic-literateur adds to the chaos and noise. How much of the bountiful flood will remain by the end of the century--considering also the fragility of modern technique--beyond a mouldy catalogue mislaid in an auctioneer's forgotten coffin? A low outlook, low standards, have brought about a low tide in the spiritual movements of painting from which the jazz, the speed and machine, cannot elevate it to the ranks of significant music literature, or of its own long-lost leadership. When the mental fabric and the very premises are wrong the purest imagination cannot paint--so to say, a cart horse to look like Pegasus, or a topographical map to look like a Persian rug.
   It would be better to let all of us landscape painters aspire to railroad presidencies, or dig canals for the improvement of the plains, than that we divert linseed oil from manuring the soil, and good paint from preserving tin roofs. A thousand dollar trip  to the Riviera, or through our West will inspire the imagination of an art-lover a thousand times more than "ten thousand dollars" worth of one or a hundred modern landscape paintings--or rather their signature. As for the living day, I would rather collect bad girls than good artists.
   From the highest to the lowest standards of painting, there have been, and are, as many shades and degrees of imagination, subject and ways of painting as there were and are artists and revolutions in the spin of the history of art. But the essential spirit of any given time and society, its psyche,--being the sum of its conditions, labors, and major issues--is not an arbitrary or individual matter of debate. It is one definite substance, whatever be its definition. With art as form, it makes an equation, good for a certain length of time, yet subtly changing all the while. The creative thinker stands in the centre of the equation; on the other hand mere petty, unbridled and undisciplined self expression of every humdrum individual is like the pastime in a kindergarten. Shall the painter express the alcohol or the spirit of our time? Is he to waste paint on ephemeral, insincere, sensational pantomimes--for a "headline" at-any-cost on the level with Barnum, burlesque, jazz, and the "latest" fashions--is he fancy-free? Yes,--if he is built that way. He will find plenty company and customers. Or, again--is the absolute aestetic, abstract beauty, the last word in painting, as some think and do today? In music we have Bach, Schoenberg, etc., but in painting "bach" is merely water, with the reflection of moonshine. To the thinker, there is not such sweet liberty, in which each sparrow may be a super-sparrow, and yet all sparrows are alike--but for him there is the inevitable imperative higher will of the deeper and inner idea of the present. "Talent
6