The New York herald., 1922-03-26


was once interviewed at some SSS&SS''~S
length by an American newspaper man of
ability about my painting on the western
front, where / was the official artist.
Say" said he. after half an hour of it,
are you painter"
An explanation Of the death of the crit
ical faculty in American art is that nobody
has the facilities to see modern paint
ings. They have facilities to read books.
They have patronage for architects and
sculptors. They have facilities for the
illustrator; for the painter-no. There is
no system of distribution; in all the big
cities of America outside New York there
are not more than fifty dealers. Facilities
do exist, scholarships and art schools, and
so forth, for driving a man into art, but
nothing is done for him when he ought to
be earning his living.
They will say nice words in praise OF
American artists and they will support the
growing chauvinist movement for Amer
lean art. But they will not buy American
pictures; that Is the last step that occurs to
anybody. In this respect the women are
more responsible than their men,
The absence of a critical faculty not only
impels Americans to trust the auction
room, to invest in the gilt edged dead, to
avoid their own native talent. 1t has the
most alarming consequences for the artists
themselves. The real artists of New York,
by whom | mean the adventurers in art,
the creators, have to earn their living as
draymen or walters, achieving their intel
lectual work when they are dead beat with
manual labor.
Despite the astonishing energy which
in America carries one on, the work of
these men of independence necessarily
suffers. Others clear out of the city; the
intellectuals of America seemed to me to
be always on the run. The section who
segregate themselves in Greenwich Village
set up in an inevitable reaction a fake
bohemianism with candles instead of elec
trio light and that sort of thing. This, too,
is a mistake because to succeed in art you
must be alone and you must grind at your
work. Others bury themselves in country
hamlets and try to form an art colony
around the village pump.
Those who have an income of their own
flock to Paris, where the French, in wait
for their money, are perfectly willing to
let them pretend that they are leading the
bohemian life. The French will always be
polite If you pay them, and at this moment
there are hundreds of American students
in Paris substantiating the prevalent
American view that an artist is man
who goes to France and drinks bit and
returns to his homeland to marry though
there is in Paris to-day one American
artist who has refused a fortune to return
to the United States.
And of course every American artist Of
repute eventually comes to London. Look
at Whistler; look at Sargent; look at Ep-
stein. London, for those who know 1t, Is
now the most truly bohemian city in
Europe. Moreover, the critical faculty, so
dead in New York, is here very much alive.
The British public are completely independ-
ent You cannot stampede them into be-
lieving man is good or bad IL they want
to believe otherwise, and this quality
creates the state of thorough independence
in which every English artist works. The
American citizen has much of which he
may be justly proud, but If he would see
art that lives and the artists who create 1t
let him come to London and observe it for
himself.