International studio (58.1916)

Fakes and Reproductions

and Giotto live its full measure only in the God-
intoxicated atmosphere of their own epoch; and
not all the sumptuousness of a modern art-temple
nor all the finical expertness of modern connois-
seurs can restore them to their original art life,
any more than it can breathe life into the gold-
bedecked breasts of a museum-stored Egyptian
queen.
So that, one may say, art always passes
away with the epoch of its inception—leaving to
posterity a devitalized body, a cadaverous sub-
limity, beautiful, perhaps, in its lethal sleep, but
violating the supremest of all human notions—
that of life.
Now then, returning to New Art: it being
granted that it should be judged in the light of
its causative forces, its plastic manifestations
should appear as expressions of a consciousness
that is passionately bent on a retrieval of the
arch-human, from beneath environmental in-
crustation and traditional sediment—a revelation
of the primal faculties. Thence comes the seem-
ingly atavistic leaning of New Art; its open-eyed
reversion to primitivism; its search for the music-
sensations in art, as being the innermost in our
soul-life. Hence comes its addiction to Expres-
sionism at the cost of a world—full of ob-
jectivity.
Contemplated in this light—as a component of
the New Movement—the Forum Exhibition of
Modern American Painters appeared to me as a
denial of nothing save what is not essentially and
most universally human; as an initiation of a
search for a living truth that is above factional
strife and partisan cannon, above either academic
or secessionist doctrine; as a token of a liberating
affirmation too vast for usurpation by any coterie
of presumptuous beyond-men, or any snobbish
clique of aesthetes, or any caste of life-juggling
priests; as a beginning of a great task that will
claim the best powers of many coming genera-
tions.
In the presence of this great life-retrieving task,
the dickering, anathematizing and scuffling aca-
demic ant-hill and new-art mole-burrow are a
part of the divine humour of history. The tra-
ditional ant-hill seems to its occupants an all-
embracing infinity, while the height of their
mole-hill looms like a trans-celestial altitude to
the new-art acolytes. Meanwhile the cosmic
surge is sweeping on, inundating both the ant-
and the mole-hill.

T^AKES AND REPRODUCTIONS
An exhibition of a kind new to America
is now on view in the Pennsylvania Museum, in
Memorial Hall, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia.
With the purpose of the education as well as the
protection of collectors and the general public
against the tricks of forgers of antiques, Dr.
Edwin Atlee Barber, the Director of the Museum,
has arranged there in a very instructive display,
a collection of “Fakes” and Reproductions,
necessarily confined on account of the limited

Pennsylvania Museum Exhibition of Fakes
AN IMITATION AZTEC JUG


CXVII