at pleasure I contradict this. According to latest
reports Utrillo is so far recovered that before long he may be painting
again.]

Perhaps the most interesting, though neither the most startling nor
seductive, of this batch is Segonzac. Like all the best things in
nature, he matures slowly and gets a little riper every day; so, as he
is already a thoroughly good painter, like the nigger of Saint-Cyr he
has but to continue. Before nature, or rather cultivation, with its
chocolate ploughed fields and bright green trees, as before the
sumptuous splendours of a naked body, his reaction is manifestly,
flatteringly, lyrical. He might have been a bucolic rhapsodist had not
his sensibility been well under the control of as sound a head as you
would expect to find on the shoulders of a gentleman of Gascony. His
emotions are kept severely in their place by rigorous concentration on
the art of painting. Nevertheless, there are critics who complain
that his compositions still tend to lack organization and his forms
definition. And perhaps they do sometimes: only in these, as in other
respects, his art improves steadily. [F]

[Footnote F: _Salon d'automne_, 1921: It has again made a big stride
forward. Segonzac is now amongst the best painters in France.]

"Sa peinture a une petite cote vicieuse qui est adorable"--I have heard
the phrase so often that I can but repeat it. Marie Laurencin's painting
is adorable; we can never like her enough for liking her own femininity
so well, and for showing all her charming talent instead of smothering
it in an effort to paint like a man; but she is not a great artist--she
is not even the best woman painter alive. She is barely as good as Dufy
(a contemporary of Picasso unless I mistake, but for many years known
rather as a decorator and illustrator than a painter in oils) who,
while he confined himself to designing for the upholsterers and making
"images," was very good indeed. His oil-paintings are another matter.
Dufy has a formula for making pictures; he has a _cliche_ for a tree, a
house, a chimney, even for the smoke coming out of a chimney. In this
way he can be sure of producing a pretty article, and, what is more, an
article the public likes.

Very different is the art of Kisling. Rarely does he produce one of
those pictures so appetizing that one fancies they must be good to eat.
What you will find in his work, besides much good painting, is a serious
preoccupation with the problem