rény succeeds to an extraordinary degree in realizing a piece of psychic realism in his marvelous portrait of The Composer Bartók, in which the inner radiation of personality is visualized as never before. In its truly terrifying reality his "Golgotha" is the most awe-inspiring interpretation of this great tragedy I have ever The monumental and heroic aspect of the figures in Bertalan Pór's great decoration, "The Worship of Wisdom," recalls certain of the early masters of the quattrocento plus a quality of abstract beauty that is strongly related to Puvis de Chavannes.

seen.

How far all this has strayed from the paths blazed by Bertalan Székely and Lotz is revealed in the academically wrought decorative panels of Sándor Nagy and Körösföi-Kriesch and the latter's talented pupil Ferencz Lipóth, who have preserved a marked respect for traditional practice in their mural decorations and stained-glass windows, in their book illustrations and tapestries executed in the handicrafts colony established by them in Gödöllö. Here art has returned to its ancient ways, placed itself at the service of utility, and been made to adorn a tale, and between Gödöllö and Kaposvár the pendulum of Hungarian art swings both far and deep.

II

MODERN Norwegian art is of comparatively recent origin, and coincides in its development with that of Hungary and America. Prior to 1814, the year of the modern Norwegian Constitution, we had no artistic traditions whatever, and those that we have acquired since then have been imported from Düsseldorf, Munich, and Paris, very much as have the artistic traditions of America and Hungary. However, in the case of Norway as well as Hungary, we have to reckon with a very important factor in their artistic evolution, especially potent in the development of their modern art, which is altogether absent in the art of America; namely, their peasant art. Long before the art of painting was practised in Nor

way, the Norwegian peasant, like his Magyar contemporary, had developed an art that was, and still remains, thoroughly national. The Norwegian peasant art, like that of other countries, is character ized by a primitive purity of color that anticipates the art of to-day, and forms, so to speak, the connecting link that ties the present to the past. If we remember the crude vigor and bold color of this early peasant art, we shall perhaps better understand contemporary Norwegian art.

Temperamentally they are the same. We find in both the same characteristic forthrightness of expression, the same bold, uncompromising design and color. Moreover, both are alike in that the aim of each is to fill a given space with a design that will form a decoration. Much of modern art is in this direction, and contemporary Norwegian art is no exception to this. If this art appears somewhat rough and crude, more forceful and original than polished and ingratiating, it is the fault of the national character rather than of the art itself. We are not a suave people; we are somewhat blunt and direct, and these racial qualities are expressing themselves more and more in our art as it gradually emancipates itself from foreign influences and returns to its basic character.

By what a circuitous route this has been reached will be seen from the genesis of our modern art, which was nurtured in the romantic atmosphere of Dresden and Düsseldorf. Here our first painters received their artistic sustenance, and here Johan Christian Dahl, the father of Norwegian painting, continued to exercise his talent not alone as a creative artist of commanding ability, but also as a highly respected professor whose prestige drew many of his compatriots to the academy at Dresden, where they imbibed the master's love of the grandiose Norwegian scenery. Of these none did more to foster this latent nationalism than the young and highly gifted Fearnley, who, together with Dahl, explored the fiords and mountain fastnesses of their native land. These realistic and remarkably truthful interpre

tations of Norwegian scenery, which attracted wide-spread attention in the early part of the last century, form the basis of an art that has grown increasingly national with the years.

The impulses of nationalism loosened and set in motion by the dissolution of the union with Denmark in 1814 were crystallized in the fervent poetry of our first great modern poet, Henrik Wergeland. In lines throbbing with patriotic fervor he directed attention to our long-neglected heritage of song and story and to the ancient sagas of our sturdy peasantry, who still dwelt among us. It instituted a period of national activity that found fruitful expression in historical research, in various literary and social movements, no less than in the art of such men as Tidemand and Gude, who depicted with sincerity and ability the life and character

of the people as well as the country in which they lived. Colored by the romanticism of the Düsseldorf anecdotal school of painting, in which they were nurtured, the art of these two men nevertheless contributed largely toward a repatriation of the Norwegian people, who for centuries had lived in their own country without really being of it.

There was something so novel in the idea of our own peasants and our own scenery being regarded as fit subject matter for a painter that it stirred our national pride, and Tidemand's genre pieces and Gude's landscapes met with a ready. reception at home as well as abroad. The interest was of course stimulated by the fact that Gude occupied the enviable position of professor in the academy at Düsseldorf, and later in Karlsruhe and Berlin, where he attracted to him students

not only from Norway, but from America and other foreign countries as well. It put the stamp of Continental approval upon our art, and did much to make it respected both at home and abroad. It formed the prelude to that chapter in our history which was destined to fulfil our national aspirations, culturally as well as politically, foreshadowed in the early peasant tales of Björnson and the Viking dramas of Ibsen, and reaffirmed in the naturalistic novels of Garborg and Jaeger.

In art this was preceded by a brief period of pupilage in the academies of Munich, the vigorous, painter-like technic of which supplanted the meticulous anecdotalism of Düsseldorf, and supplied our young painters of the eighties-Werenskiold, Munthe, Kittelsen, Harriet Bacher, Eilif Peterssen, and Skredsvig-with something substantial upon which to expend their ebullient energy. From this to the naturalism of Courbet and his followers was only a step, and our young revolutionaries took it with a bound that landed them squarely in the midst of that realistic movement which was then at grips with the false studio conventions of the academies. Manet was fighting his famous battles, Monet was performing his epochmaking experiments, and Zola was championing the cause of both and incidentally of that realism in literature of which he was the foremost exemplar. Paris was then as now a seething vortex of radicalism in which only the strongest survived.

Needless to say, our sturdy and belligerent young Norwegians reveled in this atmosphere of contention, and even occupied a portion of the stage during their brief sojourn-Paris paused and gazed with open-eyed astonishment at the heroic figures of Thaulow, Krohg, and Björnson as they passed arm in arm down the Bois de Boulogne. But the astonishment of Christiania was even greater when these painters returned with their prismatic canvases, which outraged all the established conceptions of art. For a time the battles of Manet with academic tradition were re-fought in the capital of Norway by Christian Krohg, the social narrator;

Thaulow, the snow painter; Werenskiold, the intimate portraitist; and Munthe, the Norwegian landscape-painter par excellence; and naturalism received its baptism of blood here as elsewhere. With it we reached the final stage of our dependence upon foreign models, and thenceforth our art developed along lines increasingly national and personal. Powerfully augmented and fostered by the fresh and bold virility of Christian Krohg, whose picturesque personality has expressed itself in a varied and colorful realism that has taken all life for its province, this movement has attracted to it some of the ablest of our modern painters. Directly or indirectly it has strongly influenced the art of such men as Edvard Diriks, whose fresh palette and clear vision carry forward the gospel of light and air eloquently propounded by Krohg, to whom also is due in a measure the modernity of the point of view vividly and vigorously expressed in the art of Halfdan Ström and Thorolf Holmboe, both of whom have produced works of more than ordinary interest and power.

Coming as a sort of interlude in our art is the poetic and romantic figure of Harold Sohlberg, who has held aloof from the Impressionist movement of his time. In his serenely beautiful landscapes our eery Northern nature has been presented with a poetry and a veracity that make them at once national in character and general in their appeal. In him the spirit of Norway-its silent winter nights, its mystic midsummer evenings-has found a fit interpreter.

But the most striking evidence of the potential value of this recreating force in our art found expression in the early nineties in the very original personality of Edvard Munch. He is the father of the present movement in Norwegian art which claims the allegiance of the ablest and most promising of our younger paintHis independence has given others courage to be themselves. As a revolutionary, original, and disturbing force he occupies in Norwegian art a position akin to that occupied by Ibsen in Norwegian

ers.

literature, and he has met with a somewhat similar reception in his own country. Accepted and acknowledged abroad as one of the greatest artists of modern times, he is rejected and despised at home by the majority of his own countrymen, who can see nothing but madness and perversity in his masterly revelations of the psychic verities of the soul. Gifted beyond all others with a rare color sense and an instinctive feeling for design, he has enriched Norwegian art with a series of masterpieces that will some day be claimed by the world. Already they have borne fruit in the richer, more resonant palette of the younger generation. That he has the root of the matter in him is clearly shown by the fact that his disciples are even now meeting with acceptance.

Henrik Lund and Ludwig Karsten, the two foremost products of Munch's influ

ence,

are winning recognition where Munch received nothing but derision. Resolutely modern in color and treatment, Lund's portraits and figure pieces have something of the searching, soul-revealing quality of great caricature, expressed with a terse, almost stenographic economy of line and color. This uncommon power of characterization, combined with his extraordinary virtuosity as a painter and his fresh, charming sense of color, gives unusual value and potency to his art. These qualities are brilliantly epitomized in his unconventional portrait of "The Dramatist Gunnar Heiberg and Friends in the Garden," a veritable tour de force of instantaneous Impressionism that has fixed upon the salient traits of character with the utmost certainty and apparent ease. Lund's only rival at present is the inimitable Karsten, unfortunately not represented in this collection. His rich, gorgeous color harmonies, vibrantly alive. with unsuspected nuances that play within the depths of his chords like the flute-like voice heard above the profound bass of an organ, are imbued with a deep seriousness, and have, moreover, a weight and solid amplitude as of some solid body.

Related to these men we find the richly subdued colorist Sören Onsager, whose

"Sleeping Children" deserves a place with the best products of modern Norwegian art, while, of the younger generation, the work of Per Deberitz, Otto Johansen, Henrik Sörensen, and Örnulf Salicath commands attention by reason of qualities of design and color that contain rich promise for the future of Norwegian art. In this connection I should like to mention Pola Gauguin, whose recently acquired Norwegian citizenship, his Norwegian wife, and Danish mother sufficiently identify him with Scandinavia to be considered in any reference to the younger group of Norwegian painters, despite the exotic shadow cast over him by his famous father, who embraced the life and customs of the Tahitians. He is a highly gifted man from whom much may be expected. Perhaps the most accomplished and personal of this younger group is Arne Kavli, whose expressive, self-contained art is the expression of a purist in color. In its delicate, pearly, violet-gray tonalities it bears a strong kinship to the water-colors of Cézanne, who appears to be wielding a growing influence over the younger painters in Norway as elsewhere in the world.

This influence is perhaps more obvious in the art of Per Deberitz and Otto Johansen than in that of any other of our younger artists save Pola Gauguin, who combines something of the rich color sense of his father with a sense of form derived from Cézanne, while the original and vigorously executed designs of Dagfin Werenskiold, cut in wood, introduce into our decorative art something of the bold vigor of line and color of our peasant art. An eye as innocent as theirs and a wrist as strong has shaped these forms and given to them a color the crude richness of which recalls the curiously embellished harnesses of the peasants of Gudbrandsdalen. these richly colored carvings of young Werenskiold the circle of our development is completed. After many and diverse wanderings we have at last returned to our own, assured that in art as in literature and music the accumulated heritage of our race holds for us the richest inspiration.

In