its professors I say nothing, because they are
manifest and admitted. Picasso stands apart: he is the inventor and most
eminent exponent, yet I refuse to call him Cubist because he is so many
other things. Braque, who at present confines himself to abstractions,
and to taste and sensibility adds creative power, is to my mind the
best of the bunch: while Leger, Gris, Gleizes, and Metzinger are four
painters who, if they did not limit themselves to a means of expression
which to most people is still perplexing, if not disagreeable, would be
universally acclaimed for what they are--four exceptionally inventive
artists, each possessing his own peculiar and precious sense of colour
and design.

But besides these pure doctrinaires there were a good many painters who,
without reducing their forms to geometrical abstractions, by modifying
them in accordance with Cubist theory gave a new and impressive
coherence to their compositions. Of them the best known, in England at
all events, is Jean Marchand, whose admirable work has been admired here
ever since the Grafton Galleries exhibition of 1912. Lately he has moved
away from Cubism, but has not become less doctrinaire for that. Indeed,
if I have a fault to find with his grave and masterly art it is that
sometimes it is a little wanting in sensibility and inspiration.
Marchand is so determined to paint logically and well that he seems a
little to forget that in the greatest art there is more than logic and
good painting. It is odd to remember that Lhote, who since the war has
been saluted by a band of young painters (not French for the most part,
I believe) as chief of a new and profoundly doctrinaire school which is
to reconcile Cubism with the great tradition, stood at the time of which
I am writing pretty much where Marchand stood. His undeniable gifts,
which have not failed him since, were then devoted to combining the
amusing qualities of the _imagiers_ (popular print-makers) with the new
discoveries. The results were consistently pleasing; and I will here
confess that, however little I may like some of his later preaching and
however little he may like mine, what Lhote produces in paint never
fails to arrest me and very seldom to charm. Herbin, who was another of
those who about the year 1910 were modifying natural forms in obedience
to Cubist theory, has since gone all lengths in the direction of pure
abstraction: his art is none the better for it. Valloton, so far as I
c