ainting. There is altogether
too much of comfortable art, the art of the uplifted illustration. It
is the reflex of the Anglo-Saxon passion for story-telling in pictures
which should be relegated to the field of the magazines. Great art
often tells a story but great art is always something plus the idea.
Ordinary art does not rise above it.

I often wonder why it is that America, which is essentially a country
of sports and gamblers, has not the European courage as well as
rapacity for fresh development in cultural matters. Can it be because
America is not really intelligent? I should be embarrassed in
thinking so. There is nevertheless an obvious lethargy in the
appreciation of creative taste and a still lingering yet old-fashioned
faith in the continual necessity for importation. America has a great
body of assimilators, and out of this gift for uncreative assimilation
has come the type of art we are supposed to accept as our own. It is
not at all difficult to prove that America has now an encouraging and
competent group of young and vigorous synthesists who are showing with
intelligence what they have learned from the newest and most engaging
development of art, which is to say--modern art. The names which have
been inserted above are the definite indication, and one may go so far
as to say proof, of this argument that modern art in America is
rapidly becoming an intelligently localized realization.

OUR IMAGINATIVES

Is it vision that creates temperament or temperament that creates
vision? Physical vision is responsible for nearly everything in art,
not the power to see but the way to see. It is the eye perfect or the
eye defective that determines the kind of thing seen and how one sees
it. It was certainly a factor in the life of Lafcadio Hearn, for he
was once named the poet of myopia. It was the acutely sensitive eye of
Cezanne that taught him to register so ably the minor and major
variations of his theme. Manet saw certainly far less colour than
Renoir, for in the Renoir sense he was not a colourist at all. He
himself said he painted only what he saw. Sight was almost science
with Cezanne as it was passion.

In artists like Homer Martin there is a something less than visual
accuracy and something more than a gift of translation. There is a
distinguished interpretation of mood coupled with an almost
miniature-like sense of delicate gradation, and at the same time a
something lacking as to a sense of