ng painters of personal
visionary experience, and as such are entitled to praise for their
genuine gifts in rendering, as well as for a natural genius for
interpretation.

HENRI ROUSSEAU

Not long since, we heard much of naivete--it was the fashion among the
schools and the lesser individuals to use this term in describing the
work of anyone who sought to distinguish himself by eccentricity of
means. It was often the term applied to bizarrerie--it was fashionable
to draw naively, as it was called. We were expected to believe in a
highly developed and overstrained simplicity, it was the resort of a
certain number who wanted to realize speedy results among the
unintelligent. It was a pose which lasted not long because it was
obviously a pose, and a pose not well carried, it had not the
prescribed ease about it and showed signs of labor. It had, for a
time, its effect upon really intelligent artists with often
respectable results, as it drew the tendency away from too highly
involved sophistication. It added a fresh temper in many ways, and
helped men to a franker type of self-expression; and was, as we may
expect, something apart from the keen need of obliviousness in the
great modern individualists, those who were seeking direct contact
with subject.

We have learned in a short space of time that whatever was exceptional
in the ideas and attitudes of the greater ones, as we know them, was
not at all the outcome of the struggle toward an affected naivete
such as we have heard so much about, but was, on another hand, a real
phase of their originality, the other swing of the pendulum, so to
call it. It was the "accent" of their minds and tempers, it was a true
part of their personal gesture, and was something they could not, and
need not, do anything about, as if it were the normal tendency in them
in their several ways. We all of us know that modern art is not
haphazard, it is not hit or miss in its intention at least, certainly
not the outcome of oddity, of whim, or of eccentricity, for these
traits belong to the superficial and cultivated. We have found that
with the best moderns there has been and is inherent in them the same
sincerity of feeling, the same spirit directing their research. The
single peculiarity of modern art therefore, if such there be, is its
special relationship to the time in which it is being produced,
explicitly of this age.

What we know of the men, much or little, proves that they a