dinary technic has altered. Pamela's compositions were always as surely executed as they were conceived. The medium, that stubborn obstacle which resists and so often defeats the rest of us, has no terrors for her, not even a problem. Crayon, tempera, stone, canvas, ink, oil, gouache-she does not find one harder than the other; each is merely another mechanism to express what at the moment she considers best suited to the particular medium. There is no fumbling here, no hesitancy. One imagines that every line has been shaped, every mass balanced, every contrast and counterpoint arranged before Pamela's certain fingers allow themselves a single stroke.

It would be interesting to digress into general speculations, to examine the intricate relations of the child as artist. What are the forces that impel it, that supply it with backgrounds the child has never known? What directs its candor, sharpens its edges, illumines its clarity? Does the answer lie in its very immaturity? Is the child actually an emotional primitive, still free of superimposed patterns, drawing its substance directly from the unconscious? Knowing beyond knowledge, can it tap that vast source of wisdom at will? But these are questions to which the psychologists have given us only tentative and uncertain replies. And, as a matter of esthetic fact, these creations of Pamela Bianco challenge us on their own high merits, irrespective of the age of their creator.

One is arrested, first of all, by two seemingly contradictory qualities in this work: its delicate, yet vivid, technic; its subtle, yet distinct, idiom, lurking beneath a surface naïveté. One can see at once the obvious relation to the Italian primitives; one can even trace more Oriental influences, though who can ever say what atavism produced the colors of Persian enamels in her brilliant still-life pieces or the reflections of old Chinese paintings in her casually curved branches? But the stamp of the person is always here; these drawings and lithographs are no one but Pamela Bianco. Equally individualized is the range and power disclosed. Mood follows mood with the swift irregularity of adolescence, and every phase of emotion is richly recorded.

The group reproduced in these pages is typical. Here are moments as dramatic and high-pitched as the lithograph of a few roses and a platter of fruit, as quietly poignant as the portrait of a house seen through falling snow, as lyrical as the study of a pot of primulas. And yet, for all the varied interests manifest in the others, the chief glory of this set is the drawing of the single tree. From every consideration it is no less than masterful. It is consummate in its dignity, in its distribution of masses, in its altogether perfect balance of light and dark. It is stylized without being in the least strained. And this, possibly, is the key to Pamela's accomplishment. Here is that rare quality: a craftsman's sophistication that springs somehow from spontaneity. One cannot escape the essential purity of her designs. For hers is knowledge,-learned who knows where?-an uncanny wisdom that has not lost the direct gaze of inno

cence.