ladelphia. It shows a man and two women on a balcony.
The straight line of the balcony railing stretches across the foreground
without any modification of its rigid linear effect. The man's figure is
in shadow, barely perceptible as to detail, yet indicated without
uncertainty of drawing or vagueness of any kind, a solid figure the
"tactile values" of which are clearly recognized. One of the women is
bending over the railing in a half-shadow while the other lifts her face
toward the man in an attitude that makes exacting requirements of the
artist's knowledge of foreshortening. The whole is duskily brilliant
in color, full of the sense of form, simple, dignified, sturdy, opulent.
It shows that Miss Cassatt held at the beginning of her career as now,
valuable ideals of competency and lucidity in the interpretation of
life.

[Illustration: WOMAN WITH A FAN

_From a painting by Mary Cassatt_]

MAX KLINGER

III

MAX KLINGER

Max Klinger is one of the most interesting and representative figures in
the art of Germany to-day. Essentially German in manner of thought and
feeling, he has brought into the stiff formality of early nineteenth
century German painting and sculpture a plasticity of mind and an
elevation of purpose and idea that suggest (as most that is excellent in
Germany does suggest) the influence of Goethe. In his restless
interrogation of all the forms of representative art, his work in the
mass shows a curious mingling of fantasy, imagination, brusque realism,
antique austerity, and modern science. The enhancing of the sense of
life is, however, always the first thought with him, and lies at the
root of his method of introducing color into sculpture, not by the means
of a deadening pigment but by the use of marbles of deep tints and
positive hues, and of translucent stones. As an artist, his chief
distinction is this unremitting intention to convey in one way or
another the sense of the vitalizing principle in animate objects. We may
say of him that his drawing is sometimes poor, that his imagination may
be clumsy and infelicitous, that his treatment of a subject is
frequently coarse and even crude, but we cannot deny that out of his
etchings and paintings, and out of his great strange sculptured figures
looks the spirit of life, more often defiant than noble, more often
capricious than beautiful, but not to be mistaken, and the rarest
phenomenon in the art product of his native country. He