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Mr. Weir always has been sympathetic toward new methods and fresh points of view, without losing the integrity of his own vision. This picture, while distinctly modern, expresses in a wholly personal technic both his poetic imagination and his sanity.

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III

THE PAINTING OF TO-MORROW

A

BY ERNEST L. BLUMENSCHEIN

FORM of art came to the United States a year ago that has had so great an effect upon all people interested in painting and sculpture, and upon the work of so many of our painters, that it must needs be explained to the public, which still seems to treat it more as a freak than as a serious manifestation.

Let me say, to start with, that it is serious, and that I believe the exhibition of Post-Impressionism held at the armory in 1913 may be considered a very healthy affair, the influence of which will work for good in the art of to-morrow.

The movement was born in France shortly after Impressionism was instituted. by Claude Monet, but was not recognized until recently. Why it was recognized at all seems to be the question generally asked, and perhaps I can help to clear up that apparently doubtful matter.

The restless ingenuity of man is a part of the artist's equipment, and, like his brothers in all walks of life, the artist is continually searching and inventing. When at any one period in history he is dissatisfied with the general art atmosphere, then that ingenuity works all the harder to find new ways of expression. Such a moment occurred about 1870, and a group of painters gathered about a man of strong personality, Edouard Manet, meeting twice a week in a café in Paris, where their common beliefs were discussed and developed, and where moral support came during the years when the little band was struggling against all official and traditional France. It was at this time that Claude Monet, one of the group, opened all eyes in regard to light, proving that with every change of light there is a complete change of color. Before this truth became known, painters often sat all day before the trees and hillside they were painting, and, heedless of the fact that every angle of the sun changed the entire color scheme, worked away upon a picture.

Let me say something here about color and how the light affects all objects that

it envelops. Imagine a scene on the stage. The actors are dressed in different colors, the scenery is a green forest. Turn on the red calcium light; the stage becomes a scheme of reds, and even the green forest is mostly red. Turn on the yellow calcium, then the green, then the blue, and each alteration of the light is attended by a complete change in every color on the stage. Let us take our stage and actors out of doors, and turn on the light of dawn. It is not so strong as our calcium, but the principle is the same, and stage and actors, the hills and valleys and sea and sky, the cattle in the fields (here's how we get a purple cow), are under the soft, gray envelop of the light. Turn on the first rays of sun, and the whole world changes in color; the light side. of everything is tinted with rose and yellow, and the shadows of everything are violet or bluish. As the sun rises higher, the color changes; the sky gets bluer, and the earth also. Thus the changing day passes on until the setting sun flashes out golden light, and the shadows become purple.

The truth of light was the religion of the Impressionists who followed Monet, a new and convincing religion, needing a different method of expression. Therefore subdivision of colors, which helps represent the vibration and luminosity of light and air, was used. How people laughed at these freaks! All know how for years a painter who was deemed foolish would be called an Impressionist. Ridicule and jeers and abuse piled on these honest fellows. "One must be strong for such a fight," said Monet. And they were a strong and admirable band, made mighty by the fight; for today no one doubts the high, sincere attitude of these searchers of truth. In their ranks were men we now consider mas

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nized, but to their initiative is due the Post-Impressionist school, which we are ridiculing and abusing and talking about to-day. Before speaking of their ideas, what they seek, and where they differ from the main branch of Impressionism, let me try to show how it was possible for them to change so radically.

road. There are tempting side streets that lead somewhere, and the side streets of Impressionism were explored by Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh, and found to lead, strangely enough, to the primitive in art.

This is not the name of an inn, but it was a comfortable place for these men to reach after walking in a big circle for three hundred years. And here is where the young come now in droves, so many at a time that soon another restless band will leave on another search; but primitive will be freshly branded in their souls.

The true primitive, considered in relation to our realism, is of course decorative. It has to do with large masses of harmonious color-not with the many broken colors of Monet's Impressionism

Suppose, for example, you begin to study a subject you have never seriously considered before, like the reincarnation of souls, or Professor James's ideas on psychic life. For one reason or another you become interested. You are not at all convinced, but the mind is opened, and you wander slowly along the main avenue of this new world. It seems an unlimited world to a man of imagination, yourself; yet you know you have walked only a short distance. But that experience has devel--and with long, harmonious lines, which oped ideas with such rapidity that they overwhelm you with their possibilities, and you grow enthusiastic over the new theme, forgetting all the old petty troubles that formerly occupied much of your time. As you walk along, absorbed with this rich, new field, other avenues that you never dreamed of open, and you say with great delight and surprise: "What, other avenues! And people in them! I'll join them, for they too must be searching." The searchers unite into an earnest band, and the support they give one another is all they get for a long time. So new and different are their thoughts, so far from the conventional, so quickly have they developed on these avenues, which needed only to be entered to yield treasure, that the world cries out in derision: "Madmen! We 'll laugh at these absurdities, for did n't Beethoven and Michelangelo and Homer and Phidias and Mohammed all say

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All these Impressionists walked up the avenues discovered by Monet and Manet, and a new painting field lay before them. Near by, on another avenue, walked the sculptors, and beyond, the musical composers, all a trifle dissatisfied with what they had left behind, all searching. Searching what?" you will ask, especially if you are a man who deals with what the people want or need. I do not believe they themselves could tell you what they were searching. Nevertheless, they do not turn back; and what is more to our point, they do not stay on the main

help to build up a decoration. To paint a decorative picture requires a different kind of imaginative ingenuity than that needed. to analyze the truth of harmony of color. As I write I can see a primitive man on an Indian basket that I picked up in the desert of Arizona. He is a simple figure, with no time wasted on such unimportant details as eyes and fingers. The straight lines jump from joint to joint, from shoulder to elbow, from hip to knee, from crotch to ankle. The great essentials are there, which make him look like a blockedout figure of a man; but the art of it all is that he takes his unobtrusive place in a scheme of decoration that goes around the basket. And the scheme of decoration, the pattern, the design, the composition, seems to be the chief consideration with the Post-Impressionists Gauguin and Van Gogh and their multitude of imitators.

We are being simpler, they say, for dealing with large, flat masses of color is simpler than subdividing a hundred colors to produce one large tone; we are being more decorative and imaginative, for it takes more ingenuity to arrange a design of colors and lines that harmonize into a decorative composition than to state faithfully the exact truth of the color of lights and shadows; and we are getting more of our personal feelings upon canvas, and less of what one is taught to observe by conventional education.

The founders of this movement died without the reward or comfort of appreciation. They had walked too much alone

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