International studio (32.1907)

Some Polish Artists of To-day

Manchurian border, where the Great Wall ends in
the Yellow Sea, it is pierced by the northern railway,
and so these things have come about; you can get
from London to Pekin in a few days now, but there
is a price to pay for passing through that Wall that
cannot be settled with Russian roubles.

An impression is abroad that anything will go
down with the visiting foreign devil, who must be
tolerated for the sake of his gold, and tons of costly
rubbish are disposed of to the buyer of small
discrimination, who sees nothing but the highest
art in all things Oriental, and places his orders
wholesale at the showy emporiums of the Treaty
Ports.

Failing a knowledge of, or the time to search for,
the hidden genuine treasure, there is more profit to
be found in roaming about the native bazaars,
groping in dark and dusty corners of tiny shops,
and ransacking the accumulated oddments that
form the stock-in-trade of the obscure native pedlar,
who receives with complacency a tenth of the price
demanded and makes no charge for admission to
the world of magic and enchantment where Aladdin
still lives and has his being.

In such ways one may
store up a host of weirdest
memories that touch the
imagination as lightly as
the hinted contact of a
moth’s wing on the cheek,
and come and go with
the elusive aroma of a
vanishing morning dream.

For it is all a strange, half-
real dream, this probing
into the back centuries,
and it is there to be
dreamed by all who care
to shun the everyday
common - places of the
East where the touch of
the Western hand has
brushed away the bloom ;
a dream to be embalmed
in its native spices, to
endure for all time against
ignoble decay when more
garish surroundings once
more importune the mind.

And the small and in-
considerable treasure and
priceless fabric alike be-
come Magician’s Lamp or

Magic Carpet to waft the “ an uncommon garden ’

imagination at will back among scenes thaEare
lived over again under the mellow influence of^an
old recollection, gradually blending into the myth
and mystery of a people’s inscrutable past.

Inglis Sheldon-Williams.

OTES ON
ARTISTS

SOME POLISH
OF TO-DAY.

To properly understand modern
Polish art one must study it in the land itself, and
have personal’'acquaintance with the artists. The
Poles have suffered much as a nation, and the
sorrow they have endured has not failed to leave
its mark on their art. I speak of them as'a nation,
because the spirit of nationality is very strong in
the Pole, whether he owes political allegiance to
Russia, Germany, or Austria.

In these notes I propose to speak only of some
of the leading artists belonging to Galicia or Aus-
trian Poland. This does not imply that the artists
of one political division of the country hold aloof
from those of others; such is far from being the
case, for the society of artists founded some ten

BY JOSEF VON MEHOFFER

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