# The Arts/Volume 1/Issue 2/Comment On The Arts

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COMMENT ON THE ARTS
By the Editor
THERE was opened about the middle of December at the Metropolitan Museum a marvelous art exhibit, the most marvelous in certain ways that America has ever seen. The painting on some of the carved figures look as if it had been done yesterday, and yet in reality the little figures are 4,000 years old.
The account of the finding of the treasure chamber in which these works of art were is of the utmost interest. Most of my readers know that the Metropolitan Museum is conducting in Egypt excavations which are of the greatest importance to the history of art and archaeology. By an agreement with the Egyptian Government half the works of art found must be given to the museum in Cairo, the other half to the Metropolitan.
Early in 1920 the workers of the Metropolitan Museum were excavating the tomb of Mehenkwetre, at Thebes, Chancellor of the Royal Palace under King Mentuhotep III, in whose temple his name appears. The digging had been singularly unproductive. Let me give Mr. Winlock's account of the discovery published in the Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum:
"Wednesday, March 17, was the beginning of what we had decided would be our last week's work on the site. In six more days we hoped to get the passages cleared enough to make a plan and then move to the temple site, which was almost ready.
"It was along toward sunset on that Wednesday that Mr. Burton came down from the mountain top where he had been photographing, to dismiss the ​workmen for the night. They had cleared out a good deal of fallen stone from the corridor and when he went into the main entrance he found the air electric with suppressed excitement. One of the men clearing away rubbish had noticed that the chips of stone trickled away from his hoe into a crack in the rock. He and the head-man of his gang scraped away more of the chips with their hands and still more went sliding down into darkness. They had just decided that there must be some large opening behind the crack when Mr. Burton came along and struck a match to light up the darkness in the fissure.
"A scribbled note which he sent down to the house found the other members of the expedition just coming in from the day's work elsewhere and we all went up to the cliffs, skeptically, it must be confessed, but bringing the electric torches which Burton had written for. The sun had set and as we filed into the gloomy corridor our skepticism seemed confirmed. There was nothing for us to see but a ragged hole in the rock between the floor and one side of the passage, but when one by one we lay flat on the ground and shot a beam of light into that crack one of the most startling sights it is ever a digger's luck to see flashed before us.
"At first we hardly realized what we were looking into. It was getting late. We were so surprised; excitement was so quick to spread among us that the exact nature of the place was hard to judge. This much, however, was certain. We had found a small, totally untouched chamber crammed with myriads of little brightly painted statuettes of men and animals and models of boats. Some of us thought that we had seen coffins under them such as had been found at Beni Hassan, and we pictured ourselves rather dolefully spending the next months down in that hole restringing beads in position. Still there was nothing to be done at the time, and therefore we sent to the house for cords and sealing wax and effectively sealed up the chink in the rocks and then went home to spend the evening guessing and theorizing on what we had seen and what was in store for us.
"Thursday morning we started on what turned out to be three arduous days and nights of work. We realized enough of what was before us to make ample preparations. A room was cleared out in the house to hold whatever might be movable in the chamber; drawing boards and instruments for making plans and mirrors and reflectors for illumination were collected together and sent up to the tomb, and then Mr. Burton began to take a series of photographs beginning with one of the crack in the wall as the workmen had first found it. Here it may be said that the uninterrupted success of Burton's photography, taking exposures with sunlight thrown 90 or 100 feet along the corridor from a mirror on to a silver paper reflector, was one of the most satisfactory things about those three days. The rock was in a most precarious condition and our great fear was that fresh air entering into a chamber sealed almost hermetically for 4,000 years would result in a crash of stone on the antiquities. A full record of every fact of the finding was our purpose, but no time was to be lost—and our haste was justified, for rock is falling daily from the walls and the ceiling of the tomb now.
"Among the objects found in the tomb were models of boats and of buildings with little statuettes in wood, the rowers on the boats, the workers within the buildings, a slaughter-house, a stable, a garden. All these things are in wonderful preservation, in better preservation than objects which have been exposed to the atmosphere of New York for two years. Above the tomb of Mehenkwetre there was a pile of linen sheets, carefully folded. Dr. Lythgoe assured me that the sheets were apparently as solid as those that you would buy today, and they looked as strong. The whole exhibit is of rare artistic value as well as of archæological interest."
PENNSYLVANIACHARLES DEMUTH
Daniel Galleries
DIONYSIANSARTHUR B. DAVIES
Montross Galleries
OF the versatility of Arthur B. Davies the exhibition at the Weyhe Gallery gives new evidence. He has a feeling for the beauty of black close in many respects to that of the great Chinese masters. The spotting of the lithographs he is exhibiting is at first sight as beautiful as it is in the work of the great Japanese of the Sixteenth Century. Possibly it is as beautiful, but it is not so inevitable. The black and white spotting in Davies's lithographs is capricious. Caprice is a characteristic of our times even of most of the greatest art of our times. Cézanne is not capricious. He is as inevitable in his art as the Chinese. In a way he is not of our times. He is the last of the great classics. Renoir, Gauquin, Matisse, Picasso are all capricious. So is Rodin. So, too, is our own Arthur B. Davies.
FEW exhibitions have been better than that at the Ferargil Gallery of paintings by J. Alden Weir and Frank Duveneck held in December. The latter part of the month water-colors of New York by Caroline Van H. Bean were also shown. They were largely of the down-town district.
AMONG the new art magazines none seems to me more interesting than L'Esprit Nouveau. It has much food for thought in it. Two tributes are paid by it to America, one to our "movies," the other to our industrial architecture. Photographs are reproduced of types of buildings which were new to me. Just after I received the magazine I went to the exhibition at the Mussman Gallery, etchings by Henry B. Shope and found that he had been inspired by buildings of the same general character, it was interesting to me to see how well he appreciates the picturesque quality of our American architecture. There is no attempt to fit our architecture into a mold made for that of Europe. As with many pioneers his work is largely tentative. He earnestly tries to give the flavor of the American city and does not always succeed. Who is there that does?
AT the Mussman Gallery during the closing days of January there is to be an exhibition of etchings by Allen Lewis, formerly president of the Brooklyn Society of Etchers. Lewis is an etcher whom artists admire. The well-known etchers, Meryon, Whistler, Seymour Haden, were in their youth unpopular except with artists. It will be interesting to see what success the Lewis exhibition will have. Among the successful etchers there is practically a universal feeling that Lewis has not had his due and that with time, his splendid work will gain the recognition he deserves.
On page 42 will be found reproduced an etching by Allen Lewis of Boardman Robinson who at the time lived in a quaint studio overlooking the Seine on the Isle St. Louis.
ART, even decorative art, is the expression of the soul of a people. The art of the North American Indian came from within, not from without, and so it has ever been. There has always been an evolution of the forms of decoration slowly modified through changes in the spiritual life of the people. Each modification came from the people, from within. At times a race borrowed from a race which was akin to it in its ideals, but what was borrowed was adapted, modified.
The promoters of the exhibition of Industrial Art at the Metropolitan Museum, do not consider these facts. They would have the designer a copyist of things shown at our museums, an adapter of the elements found there. They do not appreciate that all art should spring from within, that the designer should first look into his own heart.
Kenneth Conant has faults, but his faults are probably merely the faults of youth. He is at times a little superficial, at times a little careless in his construction. It seems perhaps over-critical to speak of these faults, for Conant is less superficial than any of those who have made their names as draughtsmen of architecture in our days. To find a master who was more conscientious I would have to go back to Meryon or to Bonington. But Meryon in his etchings is greater; Bonington in his lithographs.
Architecture is with Conant a passion. He rejoices in architectural detail as some men rejoice in strong drink. He not only draws existing edifices but he also must give form to the design of some reformer who wishes to restore a building to its primitive beauty. That indicates how he loves his vocation. It is not every father who will clothe the children of his neighbor. Italy, France, Spain, all live again in his drawings, not merely the outer shell but the inner life, the centuries of culture.
JOHN DREWA. D. SMITH
Milch Galleries
THOSE who saw the show of paintings by George and Henriette Amiard Oberteuffer held at Knoedler's last spring will be pleased to know that Mme. Oberteuffer will exhibit at the Arlington Gallery the latter part of this month.
JANUARY the Harlow Galleries is devoting to the lithographs of Whistler. During his lifetime Whistler's lithographs were not appreciated as fully as his etchings. Since his death art lovers feel more and more that the technique of lithography is so simple that the individuality of an artist is revealed by it far more than is possible with the more complicated technique of etching. The grace, the charm, the lightness of Whistler's art is admirably shown in his lithographs.
CCABINET paintings were shown at the Babcock Galleries during the holiday season. It was a show similar to the exhibitions at Macbeth's and Milch's. The painters represented were quite different. Henry S. Eddy and Edward Adam Kramer were the two artists whose work stood out most strongly as being individual. Eddy is a realist, working hard to get the feel of water as it swirls back and forth around sloops and schooners moored to docks. Decoration with him is a secondary consideration. That does not, however, mean that his work is not decorative. It is far more so than that of many men who think of the decorative side first. Kramer is an idealist. To him nature shows her most intimate side, veiled in gossamer mists and shimmering tones of olives and russets. Kramer and Eddy they are as far apart as painters can be, in their ideals, in their methods, in their results. They are only alike in that each is true to his ideal.
The list of the other painters who had good work included such well-known painters as Crane, Daingerfield, Eaton, Lucas, Murphy and Helen Sawyer.
ON November 19th Robert Coady, at a dinner given by the Penguins, outlined a plan for a league of those who believe that culture rather than commercialism should guide us in our relations with our fellow-man. A day or two later Coady was taken ill, pneumonia developed and he died at 104 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, January 6th.
In Rainbow for December there was a remarkable article by Coady from which I shall quote:
"It is time our art, its elements, its character and its purpose, were understood and that we removed the obstacle in the way of its development. It is ​time we did away with the hip-hip-hooray of the politician and the sentimental moralisms of the economist and realized that the 'political center' and the 'economic center' are things of the past and that the cultural center is the pivot of human progress and of human happiness; that man has developed through instinct and intelligence into various degrees of culture; that it is his culture which dictates the kind and amount of his social activities, the kind and amount of the food he eats; the kind and amount of the clothes he wears, and the kind and amount of the shelter he wants; that culture should dictate all political and economic activities and establish national and international worth; that culture is the quality of human happiness, that happiness breeds happiness and that the happiest race, class, group or individual is, by nature, by reason and by right, entitled to dominate—this is the lesson the cannons taught and the shrapnel shouted, the wounded groaned and the dead recite in a litany of stones,
"It is time we got together and took things in our own hands, for the world today is in need of our culture.
"The European tragedy has practically made us the pivot of human progress.
"Our responsibilities are tremendous.
"We are undergoing the acid test.
"Our immediate actions will declare us a great nation or a great abortion.
"What are we going to do about it?"
Few men were more important to the cause of modern art. In recent years he has painted little, but his influence as a writer has been great.
THE Degas, Storrs and Roerich articles crowded out an account of a room decorated by Paul Burlin. The Burlin article will be as timely in the next issue. His work is so good that, like old wine, it does not have to be swallowed down at one gulp.
THERE have been exhibited at the galleries some very lovely paintings, a delightful little Corot at John Levy's; a George Inness as fine as any I have ever seen at the Ainslie Gallery; a choice Renoir, "L'Enfant au Cercuel," at Howard Young's; a great rarity at Hanfstaengl's, an easel painting by Segantini; and a superb early Turner at Knoedler's. All will be found reproduced in this number.
LANDSCAPEGIOVANNI SEGANTINI
Hanfstaengl Galleries
GLEN COOPER HENSHAW had an exhibition at the Touchstone Gallery early in December. Mr. Henshaw has taste, feeling, but his work lacks firmness, competence.
His show was followed by an exhibition of wood block prints and monotypes by Ruth Clements Farrell and paintings by Bernard Gussow. It was a pleasing combination; the more somber compositions of Gussow were an admirable foil to the lightness of Miss Farrell's work.
That in turn gave way to a one-man show—water-colors and pastels by Charles Sarka—largely scenes from the West Indies. Mr. Sarka is uneven in his work. There were a score of strong sketches which gave the heat and light of the tropics. There were a dozen or more of insignificant notes which injured the effect of the exhibition as a whole.
A FEW days ago I was talking with Miss Isabel Whitney about the work of Francis McComas who exhibited a large group of paintings at the Wildenstein Galleries during December. I have always maintained that it is a relatively simple thing to tell whether paintings were true to local conditions even if one has never been to the locality shown. When, several years back, Frederick Ballard Williams brought back a series of paintings of the Southwest no one needed to be told that he might as well have painted them from photographs in a McDougal Alley studio. The local color was completely absent. With Walter Ufer's canvases it seemed to me that there was much local color and perhaps even more local sentiment. Francis McComas has less of Ufer's feeling for the life of the people, but possibly more objective truth of color. Miss Whitney fully confirmed my feeling that the art of McComas is amazingly true. I had no doubt about it, but I had never seen the Southwest. Miss Whitney not only has seen the Southwest, but she has seen it with the eye of an artist.
Francis McComas makes the Arizona desert live. The desert and the little Indian villages seemed so true I knew they must be true to life. A less capable painter would not have been able to bring out the intrinsic harmonies of the Southwestern landscape, for he would have missed the exquisite grays which harmonize what at first sight is a mere riot of color.
Louis Tracy wrote the admirable introduction to the catalogue from which I quote:
"Francis McComas, the Australian artist who has made California his home and the Arizona desert his studio, will open his second New York exhibi​tion at the Wildenstein Galleries in December. Eight years have passed since McComas first brought his really wonderful watercolors from Monterey to Manhattan. That word 'wonderful' is no exaggeration. He seizes and gives permanence to the fleeting moods of the American desert. Expressing with almost incredible color the ruins of prehistoric cities, of crumbling Indian villages perched on precipitous cliffs, of stretches of brilliant and variously tinted sands, and of skies that can only be described as spectacular. After eight years, both critics and the public will find it interesting to note the changes in the artist's work. He exhibits very seldom anywhere, and only when he has something fresh to say."
TO me the success of the Society of Independent Artists is one of the most important elements in the art life of America. I believe that Ingres, whom no one can accuse of radicalism, was absolutely right when he said (in a report to the Commission Permanente des Beaux Arts): "A jury, whatever be the means adopted for its formation, will always work badly. The need of our time is for unlimited admission [to the Salon]. I consider unjust and immoral any restriction tending to prevent a man from living from the product of his work." It is a mystery to me how any man can disagree with this principle, which is that underlying the "no jury" system of the Independent Artists.
Renoir, in an interview published five years ago, said that nothing was more essential to the progress of art than that all artists should be on an equal footing before the public and he urged the abolition of all prizes and awards with their false distinctions. The "Independents" have followed this idea in their second principle, "no prizes."
The Society of Independent Artists as we know it in New York carries out the principle of "no jury" admirably. There is absolutely no jury and for the annual fee of $8 anyone can show his work. The fee is high, the amount of work which can be shown is small. The fee, however, but just covers expenses, and the Society is well administered. The crying need is for a building which it can have free, such as the Grand Palais. Then the fee charged by the Society could be reduced to about $2 a year.
In regard to the second principle, "no prizes," I do not feel that the Society is consistent. The chief value of the prize is the publicity attached to it. The Society gives publicity if it does not give prizes. It sends out to the press, lists of the well-known artists who are going to exhibit. Such a course is absolutely inconsistent with the principles ​on which the Society was founded which gave to every exhibitor equal opportunity. If the Society is to carry out the high aims to which it was dedicated by its founders all such publicity must cease. If the Society cannot get newspaper publicity without giving out lists of the names of the well-known artists exhibiting, let it abandon the attempt to get such publicity. There are other fields open.
That the Society of Independent Artists does not in every way live up to its ideals is no reason for our not giving it our loyal support. The artist who has the money to join and stays out is doing a wrong to the cause of art. He is indirectly aiding officialdom. There is even now a plan on foot to create a Ministry of Fine Arts. With leadership in matters of art in the control of political wire-pullers the outlook would be gloomy.
L'ENFANT AU CERCUELRENOIR
Howard Young Gallery
DURING December the Knoedlers had an informal exhibition of some American paintings of the more modern school. Among the artists represented were Speicher, McFee, Leon Kroll, Bellows and Everett Shinn. Most of the paintings had been exhibited before, but that is as I believe it should be. A room in which every painting is one you have never seen is almost as confusing as a reception where you only know the hostess.
There was also an exhibition of silhouettes and dolls by E. O. Hoppe. The silhouettes were especially amusing. Gentlemen in the costumes of France of the XVIIIth century serenaded ladies in the costumes of Samoa during the same century. The Samoan costume was the more picturesque.
AT the Montross throughout December and over the holiday season there was shown a group of water colors by American painters so good on the whole that I doubt if a finer lot could have been gotten together in any other country. A finer lot could be shown here if Marin and Demuth and Owen Merton participated. Still the exhibition was so good that it is useless to think what it would have been if each and every one of our strongest aquarellists had each sent two or three of his best water colors. Those who exhibited included Arthur B. Davies, Walt Kuhn, Max Weber, Horace Brodsky, Gifford Beal, Wood Gaylor, Hayley Lever, George F. Of, Paul Dougherty, Walter Pach and Maurice Prendergast.
AT the Hotel Majestic is being held an exhibition of paintings of the sunrise by John W. Hawkins, Mr. Hawkins has a studio at the water's edge at Ogunquit. The sun rises over the ocean, but Mr. Hawkins is an earlier riser and catches many a subtle effect which we who lie in bed do not even see.
WILLIAM SARTAIN is the veteran of the group exhibition at the Powell Gallery. If I could have one exhibit and only one in the show I would choose his water color showing a Paris street scene with a picturesque court and houses which look just ready to tumble down. Strange to say, they never do, whereas our buildings which look so solid have a way of falling down at most unexpected moments.
MADONNA AND CHILDITALIAN MASTER
Ehrich Galleries
EARLY in December portrait drawings by Frederick Theodore Weber were shown at the Ehrich Galleries. Mr. Weber is especially successful in bringing out the marks of good breeding. He must be a man of culture himself or he would not recognize its presence in others. He has drawn successfully the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of men and women who were socially prominent in New York and Brooklyn in the days when Wall Street and Fulton Ferries were the chief means of communication between the two cities.
The Ehrich Brothers have a way of giving exhibitions a little out of the ordinary. This year for the holidays they got up a very interesting show, "Paintings of the Madonna." Most of the paintings were of the early Italian School and each had a beauty of its own.
THE ARTS cannot be increased in size indefinitely. The sixty-four pages of the present issue seem to me ideal from the reader's point of view. It is easily read, easily handled. There is not too much reading matter nor too little. It is evident that there will never be room for detailed criticism of many concerts or of opera.
Bodanzky has done wonderful things with the National Symphony Orchestra. He has good taste in his arrangement of the programmes, a fine control over his men. He is inclined to take the tempi a little faster than many other conductors. This tendency was most pronounced when he conducted "Coq d'Or" at the Metropolitan. There is a portion of the second act marked, I believe, in the score "lullaby" which he took at a speed which threw the dancers out completely and rendered that portion of the ballet grotesque. Under Pierre Monteux the entire second act had been a thing of rarest beauty.
Few concerts have moved me more than that of the evening of December 17th when the National Symphony played Beethoven's Third Symphony, the Mozart Concerto for two pianos in E-flat (K. 365) and the Third Leonora Overture. It was a perfect programme, the first number heroic, the second idyllic, the third intensely dramatic. Bodanzky played all the movements of the symphony faster than Muck did. It was most noticeable in the Scherzo. His interpretation was not less convincing than that of Muck and it had an emotional intensity which Muck's lacked.
Good as the concert was it could have been far better. The proportions of the Scherzo were altered in a way which shocked me greatly. There is in Beethoven an absolute balance of contrasts which is as logical as it is beautiful. In the third movement the pizzicato of the strings of the Scherzo is balanced by the flowing melody given by the wind instruments of the Trio. Both Scherzo and Trio are marked to be played through twice before the final repetition of the Scherzo. Bodanzky played the Scherzo through twice, but he did not repeat the Trio. The result was a deformed third movement in which the strings dominated the wind instruments instead of balancing them and in which the nervous, tense character of the Scherzo was not relieved, as it should have been, by the calm flow of the Trio. To alter the fundamental character of a movement of a Beethoven Symphony seems to me inexcusable.
I wished that for the Mozart concerto Bodanzky had further reduced his orchestra and I wished for the clavichord of Mozart's time (which Mahler would have given us) rather than the modern piano. ​How absurd it is to feel that one must furbish up an old opera to make it succeed, to orchestrate it as a composer would orchestrate it today. I heard Monteverdi's opera Orpheus played in Rome with all the old instruments and the audience was most enthusiastic. Orpheus is a hundred years older than The Beggar's Opera for which it was felt necessary to write new music. Had Bodanzky given the Mozart Concerto more as it would have been given in Mozart's time its idyllic quality would have been emphasized. It would have been in greater contrast to the Beethoven Symphony and to the Leonora Overture. Contrast is what we enjoy in modern life.
Bodanzky conducted the Leonora Overture all but faultlessly and so ended a memorable concert.
LANDSCAPEFREDERIC C. BARTLETT
Montross Galleries
IT must have been at Picasso's studio that I first saw work by Matisse—portraits. At the time it was their intense realism which struck me. Here were portraits as living as the Greco-Roman portraits which had recently been found in Egypt. The paintings by Matisse now being shown at the De Zayas Gallery do not strike me at all by their realism, their truth. The impression which I get from them is that they are classical in their beauty of color and arrangement. As the portraits I saw at Picasso's brought to my mind Greco-Roman work, so these recall the art of the great Italian classicists of the sixteenth century—Sebastiano del Piombo, Pontormo, Bronzino. It is a mystery to me that any one should find these paintings of Matisse hard to understand. Their appeal is to our sense of pure beauty.
In the catalogue of the latest exhibition of the Société Anonyme, Matisse is named as one of the four great modern colorists and the names of the other three are given. It seems childish to me to be dogmatic in such matters. Ruskin, whose influence for sanity in art was enormous, had the misfortune to dogmatize. With him there were seven great colorists and El Greco was not one of them. The world is shifting and we shift with it. A few moral conceptions alone remain, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself."
COURBET and Fantin-Latour, Lavery and Zuloaga, George Luks and Puvis de Chavannes all in one show give a piquancy lacking in the exhibitions of the conventional dealer. Mr. Kraushaar is not the conventional dealer. As if these names were not enough Mr. Kraushaar throws in Monticelli, Carrière, Forain, Ménard, Albert Ryder, Gifford Beal, Jerome Myers, and Vincent Tack.
The Courbets are two in number, both early and good. The Fantin-Latour is the "Portrait of Madame Gravier," painted as I remember, the same year as the admirable "Sonia" (1890), in the Duncan Phillips Collection. The Laverys (there are five of them, four landscapes and a figure-piece), are exceptionally good. There are five classical landscapes by Ménard, a lovely Ryder "The Pasture," Vincent Tack's "Metamorphosis," Sloan's "Dust Storm" and a superb little painting by Puvis de Chavannes—"The Harvest."
Sculpture is not lacking to give added interest, bronzes by Bourdelle and Mahonri Young. The exhibition will be open to January 16th.
THE Satinover Galleries have recently acquired two important landscapes by Claude Lorrain. It brings to mind the story of Turner who left two of his large landscapes to the National Gallery, London, stipulating that they should always hang next two paintings by Claude Lorrain whom he had been accused of imitating. Ruskin and a host of British art-lovers loudly proclaimed at the time the superiority of the two Turners, but Claude has had his revenge and to-day the feeling would be that, whatever faults Claude's paintings may have from the purely realistic point of view, we may be sure that they will long remain the highest types of classical landscape.
IF I were called upon to recommend a portrait painter I think that Robert Vonnoh would perhaps be the painter I would choose. He is not a great artist in the sense that Manet was a great artist. He is not a brilliant painter. The great artist, the brilliant painter frequently is helpless when it comes to portraiture. Mr. Vonnoh probably does not always succeed in getting a likeness, but my feeling is that there is probably no painter in the country who so seldom fails. The portrait of Mrs. Vonnoh, for instance, is an excellent likeness, yet we all know how difficult it is to paint those whom we see constantly. Mrs. Vonnoh's portrait is also a beautiful bit of delicate color.
It is rate that a portrait painter is equally at home with landscape. I do not believe that Mr. Vonnoh's landscapes are so uniformly good as his portraits. Such canvases as "Amber and Grey" and "An Autumn Monarch" would hold their own with any of our contemporary landscape.
THERE are epochs in the life of almost every painter during which progress is rapid, in which there is so little progress that we on the outside feel that there has been retrogression. I had felt that Chauncey Ryder had come to the end of his rope. For two or three years there had been no sign of progress. Perhaps the war affected him as it affected so many others. His present exhibition at Macbeth's proves that he has just been through a period of evolution, almost of revolution. The technique is unchanged, but his outlook has broadened ​immensely. Lest Mr. Ryder feel too much set up by his recent progress let him spend a little time in the adjoining room where Miss Howell exhibits "Old Salem Doorways." She has perhaps gained even more than Mr. Ryder. Her subjects are difficult. It is not easy to paint architecture in which the exact proportions of each part of the building are so essential to the beauty of the whole. She found it difficult I am sure, yet, now that it is all over she must be proud of her success.
BOARDMAN ROBINSONALLEN LEWIS
Mussman Gallery
DREAMS! How many times have you in dreams walked off the edge of a high precipice or fallen from a tenth-story window? Miss McAuley has made paintings of her adventures in Dreamland and Mr. Haufstaengl is showing them. If you have ever dreamed, and I presume you have, you will find among Miss McAuley's pictures some which will recall vividly your own experiences.
AT the Babcock Gallery there is an exhibition which is exceptionally harmonious, paintings by Joseph H. Boston and Albert P. Lucas. Mr. Boston's landscapes are all in one key. His paintings of moonlight have as much variety of local color as those which represent the light of day. In one of them the clouds have strong orange lights and purple shadows such as no moon ever cast on clouds, and it is only because of the steamboat with its windows aglow that we know that the painting must represent night. It may be good decoration, but it certainly is not truth.
In strong contrast to the work of Mr. Boston is that of Mr. Lucas. The tonality of his paintings is much the same, the same harmonious cool tones. Mr. Lucas, however, knows that when night descends on the earth the color of each object all but disappears and that is why his moonlights are as true as those of Mr. Boston are false. He is a dreamer, a poet, feeling intensely the beauty of night. A conscientious worker, he does not dash off two or three landscapes before breakfast, but labors over them with love. His interest rises as he paints and so it is that the finished canvas has an intensity which the average modern painting lacks. In showing the work of Albert Lucas, Mr. Babcock renders a service to art.
THE week which began January 10th is in its exhibits the most interesting of the season. At the Durand-Ruel Gallery there has opened an exhibition of landscapes by Sisley. It is an exhibition in which each painting has been chosen with care to give to the whole a sense of intimacy. This sense of intimacy characterized Sisley's work and none of the impressionists, not even Pisarro, was able to paint as simply as Sisley. At the Daniel Gallery Henri, Glackens, Lawson and Prendergast are showing a group of canvases. It is a show of uniform excellence. Glackens, alone of the group, is uneven in his art. "Freyburg Fair" and "Beatrice" show Glackens at his best; "After Bathing" and "The Girl with Red Fox," at his worst.
Albert P. Ryder was as changeable in his work as an April day. He has painted canvases which are masterpieces. There are others which we recognize as being Ryder's work, but which have not the quality of his great paintings. The show at the Ferargil Gallery has a number of these odds and ends, and it has one painting in a class by itself, the "Story of the Cross." Lovers of Ryder should see ​it. Davies is always good. He is in his art far less temperamental than Ryder. He perhaps never reaches the heights attained by Ryder, but he rarely misses fire.
At the Mussman Gallery Matilda Brownell is showing decorative panels. Her early paintings remind one of Chardin in quality, but her later canvases show the influence of more modern work. She has much talent and a fine sense of decoration. At the Milch Galleries is a fine show of work by a group of six painters, each exhibiting four canvases. It is long since I have seen such good work by Dewing. His four paintings have none of that leaden quality characteristic of much of his recent work. Childe Hassam, W. L. Metcalf, Bruce Crane, George De Forest Brush and S. Francis Murphy are all well represented. At Kennedy's the six Boston etchers have given way to an admirable exhibition of old Dutch etchings. There are some very fine Rembrandts in the show, such as the "Three Trees," "Dr. Faustus" and "St. Jerome." It is rare to see so many fine impressions. Then there is the show of paintings and etchings by the late Henry Martyn Hoyt, whose premature death has deprived America of a very promising young painter. Henry Martyn Hoyt, Rex Slinkard, Dennis Bunker, Theodore Robinson—the list of those cut off before their maturity is far too long. Hoyt had a good foundation in his art, far beyond that of most of our young painters. The influences back of his art were all pushing him on to great achievement. His loss is a severe blow to American art. The show at the Folsom Gallery is comprehensive, covering quite a period of years.