International studio (60.1916/1917)

In the Galleries

by lantern slides; on Dec. 14, at 4 p.m., W. H.
de B. Nelson, editor The International Studio,
on “Why We Like Etchings”; on Dec. 18, at
4 p.m., a gallery talk by Morris Greenberg on
“Etching Quality and Composition as Exempli-
fied by the Present Exhibition.”
The following is a partial list of the exhibitors:
Ernest D. Roth, Eugene Higgins, Frank S. Ben-
son (of the Ten American Painters), Ernest
Haskell, A. Allen Lewis, Anne Goldthwaite, M.
Paul Roche, Childe Hassam, Charles W. Mielatz,
Roy Partridge (of Seattle), Bertha E. Jaques
(Chicago), Earl Horter, George Senseney (Glou-
cester, Mass.), Everett L. Warner, Dwight C.
Sturges (Mass.), A. K. Gleeson (St. Louis),
Thomas R. Manley, Harry Townsend, Herman
Merrill, Dorothy Stevens (Canada).
Amongst new galleries of recent appearance
must be mentioned Satinover’s, 3 West 56th
Street. A very remarkable and obviously authen-
tic primitive is Peter Aertsen’s Obstacle Race, here
illustrated. There are twelve recognized works
by this master, all in different European museums
excepting this one, which consequently consti-
tutes the only purchasable painting by the founder
of the Dutch School, Peter Aertsen, called the
Lange Pier, born 1506, died 1573. All the figures
represented on this painting appear in his prin-
cipal paintings, especially in the Bauernfest in the
Imperial Museum of Vienna. Two other famous
examples are Egg Dancing in the Rijk’s Museum
at Amsterdam and his Vegetable and Poultry
Market at Frankfort Museum. Seldom that so
important a picture may be seen running loose.
In a previous issue we mentioned how Hamil-
ton Easter Field was planning an exhibition gal-
lery in his Brooklyn residence on Columbia
Heights. The November exhibition was a very
comprehensive loan exhibit of early Japanese
black and white prints. In December were shown
fifty American paintings and drawings, many of
them ultra-modern in their tendency. Robert
Henri had a night scene in a Breton town—the
Fourteenth of July—very rich in quality. Alden
Weir was also represented by a night scene but
it is New York—not the “ Gay White Way ”—
a poetic interpretation of the massed buildings
with their lights. There were two pastels in full
rich colour by Walter Pach, one of which repre-
sents the end of Blackwell’s Island with its rect-
angular buildings. Charles Demuth and John
Marin were most felicitous in their water colours.
Two paintings by Samuel Halpert were broad in

treatment, the flowers possibly a little superficial
but the landscape well understood. Among the
other exhibitors were Maurice Prendergast, Leon
Kroll, Glackens, Leon Dabo, Walkowitz, Maurice
Sterne, Man Ray and Agnes Pelton. There is to
be throughout this month an exhibition of litho-
graphs by Odilon Redon who died last summer,
and of paintings by Bryson Burroughs.
W. Francklyn Paris writes: Cubism is dead
and can be said to have had vitality of a sort only
in Holland. In France there has been and will
continue to be a genuine admiration for Jongkind,
Renoir, Pissarro, Monet, Guillaumin, Cezanne and
Sizley, the creators of the Impressionist School.
In 1871, during the long stay in London,
Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro discovered
Turner and were justly impressed by the bril-
liancy of his coloration. His ability to give
small effects by a multiplicity of brush touches
of different tints, instead of the old-time method
of large splashes of silver white, won them to the
new technique of multi-colour painting.
Monet and Pissarro returning to France found
Jongkind already expressing himself by multitu-
dinous commas deposited in pigment on the can-
vas. So began the Impressionist School.
Where Delacroix had a palette full of compli-
cated colours the Impressionist palette contained
only seven or eight brilliant colours, those ap-
proaching nearest to the solar spectrum.
Because they had few colours they had to re-
constitute their shadings by the crossing and
mixing and juxtaposition of those that they had.
They obtained a splendour of colour which
shocked the public of the period but influenced
men like Edouard Manet. But after Degas,
Gauguin, Mary Cassatt and the other recognized
Impressionists, came another division classed in
France as the Neo-Impressionists. This division
returned to the Delacroix method of painting
with pure tint clearly defined and harmonizing
optically according to sound logic. These men
repudiate absolutely the mixture of colour on the
palette. Orange can be mixed with yellow or
red; violet with red or blue, and green with blue
or yellow, but these are the only elements to-
gether with white of which they make use.
There will always be a cult for Delacroix,
Turner, the Impressionist and the Neo-Impres-
sionist, but there never was anything else but
wonder and stupefaction of the Cubist. They are
a ten-year-long joke at which the art world has
ceased to laugh.

ci