Studio: international art (20.1900)

Studio- Talk

DECORATIVE PANELS BY CONSTANTIN KOROVINE

Decennale in the Grand Palais. The majority
of the painters have preferred to make a selection
from among their pictures which have been most
successful during the past decade, and may there-
fore be expected to make a certain effect at the
Universal Exhibition. In my opinion they are
wrong—those, at least, who stand as representatives
of the new tendencies of French art, as viewed from
abroad—for, taken as a whole, the Decennale is like
a sepulchre, filled with the odours of decay. Never,
I believe, has the pretentious nullity of a certain
set of artists been displayed more strikingly than
here. When will they learn ? Who has the ability

to teach them this absolute truth : that the simplest
piece of honest applied art, logically conceived, is
worth all their canvases put together?

However, there are a few fresh things in the
Decennale Francaise Exhibition, notable among
them being two pictures by M. Charles Cottet—
Jour de Saint-Jean, Procession a Plougastel-Daoulas,
and Nidt de la Saint-Jean, He d'Ouessant—both
powerful in colour and in sentiment. The first—a
canvas of vast proportions—is full of decorative
character of the most striking type, worthy to
rank with Courbet's L'Enterrement a Ornans.

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