Studio: international art (78.1919)

THE DRAWINGS OF JEAN DE BOSSCHERE

''JEAN DE BOSSCHERE”
WATER-COLOUR BY
EDMUND DULAC

M. Massine's remark, which might, indeed,
have been carried much farther. Take,
for instance, the whole subject of the
Great War—was it not grotesque, this
spectacle of millions of lives lost, endless
talent wasted, boundless resources ex-
hausted, to put a stop to the mad whims
of a few autocratic rulers i How can
the war be rendered, as a subject for art,
if not in the spirit of Goya, who has given
us some of the most convincing pictures of
war ever done, and who himself was a
great artist'of the grotesque i a 0
And yet, among modern artists, very
few have ventured to make use of the
practically inexhaustible resources of cari-
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cature, of grotesque invention; despite
the fact that this particular branch of art
has attracted, at various times, many of the
great masters, for example, Giotto, Leo-
nardo da Vinci, Durer, Holbein, Breughel,
Callot, Hokusai, and others. The reason
why the grotesque is unpopular is that
most artists of to-day are content to draw
and paint according to some too readily
accepted formula, whether they call them-
selves Royal Academicians or Members
of the New English Art Club ; whether
they rank as Impressionists, Cubists,
Futurists, Vorticists, or any other kind
of ists, they are easily classifiable by their
adherence to one manner. In short, they