International studio (23.1904)

Studio-Talk

M. Besnard has been chosen—and the choice is
heartily to be approved—to decorate a portion of
the Petit Palais. He is entrusted with the cupola of
the Vestibule d’Honneur, and he will be paid by the
City of Paris in five annual sums of 12,000 francs.
In due course The Studio will have more to say
on the subject.

I remarked at the Summer Exhibition of the
American Art Association a certain number of
abstentions, notably those of MM. Aid, Frieseke
and Walden. On the other hand, there are now
several new exhibitors—M. Monod, with his
crayons; Mr. Bridgman, with an African land-
scape ; and Mr. Weeks with little Indian scenes.

Close to these are M. Ulmann’s sea-pieces, which
one sees again and again with extreme pleasure;
also Mr Faulkner’s views of Venice, M. Gihon’s
landscapes, and sculptures by Messrs. Spicer-
Simson and Evans.

Frederic Houbron, who has painted Paris and
her streets in so many moods, and has painted
London sometimes too, is in love with these big
cities and the business of their broad rivers. We
reproduce in colours a souvenir of his last visit to
London. H. F.


“ danseuse’

BY LOUIS DEJEAN

VIENNA.—The last Winter Exhi-
bition of the “ Secession,” was
devoted to the works of
Gustav Klimt : a treat long
promised and eagerly looked forward
to by the Viennese lovers of art. Some-
how or other Klimt’s pictures seem to
haunt us and they rise before us like
ghosts, as we commune with ourselves
in the half-light. We see them in the
ceiling pieces which belong to the
government, being destined for the
Aula of the Vienna University—Medi-
cine, Philosophy, and the unfinished
furisprudence, with its allegory of
law, each telling its own story, from
the first to the last stages of its
particular science—and the end is the
same in each. Man, in the person of
Law or Medicine, is powerless to struggle
against the masses of those seeking help.
Hundreds are continually crowding on-
wards to occupy the place of one who
has gone. We see the eager, longing
faces of those seeking aid; the dis-
appointed and bitter expression of the
unsuccessful: we seem to feel all the
joys and all the sorrows of life during
its long journey. And after death, too,
the lifeless bodies, shrouded in their
winding sheets, are imaginatively treated
in Aus dem Reiche des Todes (From the
Kingdom of the Dead): it is an inde-
scribable scene of sadness. Passing
from the dead to the living, the heavi-
ness of our sadness goes from us before
his painting of ethereal women, clad in
voluminous gauzes or some other trans-
parent material. One seems to see clouds