The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-04-27
NEW AMERICAN SPIRIT
Taking Concrete Form in Amerieal
 Art,

concrete form of late in American art. New men have arisen, saying and do- ing things in paint and clay and with the tools of the craftsman that are more direct and more democratic than much of the art work of even decade ago. In painting, especially, changes of considerable importance have come about. The dominance of the great landscape painters has past. Wyant, Inness and Homer Martin marked out paths that have both guided and baf- fled their successors. Winslow Homer's best marines. those by which he will be remembered, date back ten years or more. John LaFarge has not lately been a vital factor in the painting of easel pictures, so called, though splen- did mural decorations have continued to flow from his brain and brush. Ab- bot Thayer has done little new work lately, and George DeForest Brush s maximum power and beauty seems al- so to have been .reached-both these men are figure painters. Twachtman, an isolated and earnest artist. has left many disciples, but no school. Most of his colleagues among the ten American painters seem to care more for prof. ciency than for creative expression. Tryon has added little in recent years to the code of delicate perceptions and nice adjustments that gave him recog- hilton in the late eighties. Albert P. Ryder, an artist of rare poesy and imagination, sends forth a canvas only at long intervals.
 The landscape school, then, which en- listed most of the foregoing painters, has presented little that Is new or votal since. let us say, the war with Spain, which remains a spiritual as well asta &olitical landmark in Ameri- can history The prophets mantle has fallen indubitably upon group of art ists chiefly concerned, not with the fig ure, as such. but with actual human beings, their emotional life, and the ma terial environment that helps to deter mine their character What other neo pie is there. in American art to-day, that has new themes, or new views of familiar ones. to give us? What other coherent group exists here, of men with something affirmative and stimulating to communicate? The school of Robert Heri, George Luks, William Glaekens, Jerome Myers John Sloan-to name only some of its strongest members n presents phases of life extending from eminent bishops to half-strlpped prize fighters. from men and women of pres tige to the latest batch of newly landed emigrants, from the work and the play of rich and poor, young and old, down to the worn human aspect of decreipt houses on New York's crumbling East Side, or the inherent dignity of ma ternity in a barroom cat with her kit tens, Here Is variety enough, cer- tainly. But there are qualities com mon to all. These painters convince us of their democratic outlook. They seeek what is significant what is real no matter whither the quest may lead them. They give no hint of "slum- ming among either rich or poor-they are at home and at ease no matter what or whom they paint. This Is an attitude healthily American, and so is the optimism that all of them disclose in their pictures. A sturdy strain runs through their body of artists, There is yirillty in what they have done, but virtility without loss of tenderness; a manly strength that worships beauty an art that is eoncetyably true echo of the significant American life about them.
 Some of the newer men gradually found their way into the Academy and Society shows Arthur B. Davies, whom the collectors and a few professional art critics were quicker to appreciate than were the rank and file of his ar tist colleagues, exhibited a few times, but wearied of the struggle against an off1claldom that did not then want him, and gave up sending his finely lmagin- ative and colorful pictures to either so- cety After the French government had bought picture by Robert Henri for the Luxembourg gallery, the two New York organizations began to dis cover some merit in hlm-again the collectors and few critics were in ad- vance of the men who paint-and, as MT. Henri's uncommon gifts as teacher of art also became known, he was made first a society member, and in 1906 a ational Academician. Jerome Meyers's tender and sympathetic trans cripts of East Side street scenes and people were accepted almost from the first; his good fortune was also the Academys William Glackens, now an associate member of the National Aca- demy, became such In exchange for his Society membership at the merger. Glackens, Sloan, Ernest Lawson, loans Lie, Van Perrine, Paul Dougherty. Clifford Beal and other new figure and landscape men have appeared in some exhibitions and been shut out from others.
 Only once in many years, if memory serves, has the Academy or Society ac- cepted picture by George Luks-one of the most original and accomplished painters in America, but still, at forty absolutely unknown to the general art public. Once or twice he has figured in cub loan exhibitions, but the mans own studio is the only place, at present, where one may see much of what he has done Portraits, character studies, absolute folk of the night, wise old Russian Jews sip- ping their coffee in dingy restaurants, children, cabmen, dockrats, children again, children of the very poor or of comfortable East Side shopkeepers-- these are some of Luks' subjects.
 What is to be the academys future attitude toward Luks and Henri and the ever growing throng of new painters with inventive powers which they are