, by the way, is worth
considering for a moment and watching for the future. Finely gifted
in many ways, he started work under three crippling disabilities--a
literary imagination, natural facility, and inherited science. The
results were at first precisely what might have been expected. Now,
however, he is getting the upper hand of his unlucky equipment; and his
genuine talent and personal taste, beginning to assert themselves, have
made it impossible for criticism any longer to treat him merely as
an amiable member of a respectable group. What is true of Spain and
Scandinavia is even truer of Poland and what remains of Russia.
Goncharova and Larionoff--the former a typically temperamental artist,
the latter an extravagantly doctrinaire one--Soudeikine, Grigorieff,
Zadkine live permanently in Paris; while Kisling, whom I take to be the
best of the Poles, has become so completely identified with the country
in which he lives, and for which he fought, that he is often taken by
English critics for a Frenchman. Survage (with his eccentric but sure
sense of colour), Soutine (with his delicious paint), and Marcoussis (a
cubist of great merit) each, in his own way, working in Paris, adds to
the artistic reputation of his native country. In the rue La Boetie you
can see the work of painters and sculptors from every country in Europe
almost, and from a good many in Africa. The Italian Futurists have
often made exhibitions there. While the work of Severini--their
most creditable representative--is always to be found _chez_ Leonce
Rosenberg, hard by in the rue de la Baume.

[Footnote A: For this word, which I think very happily suggests
Picasso's role in contemporary painting, I am indebted to my friend M.
Andre Salmon.]

However, most of the Futurists have retired to their own country, where
we will leave them. On the other hand, the most gifted Italian painter
who has appeared this century, Modigliani, was bred on the Boulevard
Montparnasse. In the movement he occupies an intermediate position,
being neither of the pioneers nor yet of the post-war generation. He was
not much heard of before the war, [B] and he died less than a year after
peace was signed. In my mind, therefore, his name is associated with
the war--then, at any rate, was the hour of his glory; he dominated the
cosmopolitan groups of his quarter at a time when most of the French
painters, masters and disciples, were in the trenches. Modigliani owed
something to