Poor acanthi! Is it any wonder that they rebelled, formed a Drawing Association of their own, and finally, in 1825, brought into existence the National Academy of the Arts of Design, an institution to be untroubled by the laymen who had largely bedevilled its predecessor, but to be governed exclusively by artists? There is a world of meaning in the slogan of the new body, announced in large capital letters, A DIFFERENT COURSE WILL 'BE PURSUED. The exhibition as a halo surrounding the Sun of Knowledge took on increased luminosity.

IT

[T took about fifty years for the halo to shrink and grow cold, but there is no question about its subsidence. In 1877 discontent with the Academy led to the foundation of the Society of American Artists, and if that didn't last quite so long it at all events enjoyed a fairly pro

tracted existence. I remember it in its prime. Its exhibitions literally made history. The best years of the Academy, surely through no fault of its own, were hardly the best years in modern American art. They represented the rather pedestrian mood into which we had relapsed after Stuart and our brief eighteenthcentury harvest. The group of masters born before the Civil War, men like Inness and La Farge, was not large enough to leaven the lump, nor were we, as a school, as yet aware of the newer European influences. The Society of American Artists came in with these, and its exhibitions worked a positive renovation. Then, little by little, they began to slip and, after twenty-nine years, in 1906, the Society went back into the fold, uniting with the Academy. I sat beside La Farge at the dinner that marked the occasion, and I could not gather from his

talk that he regarded the merger as being other than inevitable, one more demonstration of the eternal nature of things. It is of the philosophy of exhibitions. They wax and they wane, no matter who runs them. There are always malcontents, secessionists. I have witnessed their operations in Paris, London, and Munich, in Italy and Spain. They succeed, they wax, and then they wane in the approved fashion. Only recently here at home we have had further instances of the restlessness of the artist where exhibitions are concerned. The Society of Independent Artists was started in 1917, and annually has shown the works of its members without the intervention of a jury. In 1919 we had the first of the yearly exhibitions of the New Society of Artists, a group of about two score men more progressive in their ideas than the Academy is supposed to be, though some of them still exhibit there. Sometimes these groups last. The Ten American Painters held their first show in 1898, and only of late years have seemed to be lingering with no particular function upon the scene-as an organization. There lies, in fact, the nubbin of the whole situation. In organization, as regards exhibitions, lie the fairly certain seeds of decay.

THE strength of a chain, we are told

by authority, resides in its weakest link. The efficiency of a jury—and juries seem to be inevitable, the Society of Independents to the contrary notwithstanding

resides in the average mentality of its members, and this does not seem to make for the breadth of view which is essential to the maintenance of a high standard in exhibitions. I carelessly alluded, just now, to the philosophy of the subject. I am not really so sure that there is any such thing, unless it lies in the rather obvious principle that the good exhibition is only to be expected when you have a good crop of artists. That was the principle on which the Society of American Artists subsisted. It is for this reason that I cannot sympathize with the conventional judgment on the latter-day proceedings of the Academy of Design. It is generally assumed in this judgment that the Academy had definitely adopted a reactionary

one-man show happened now and then, but you saw everybody that counted at the Academy or at the Society of American Artists. More and more these men went off on their own. I used to annoy artists I knew by asking them why they weren't loyal to their organization, sending their best pictures to its walls, and I've seen some of them wriggle. They couldn't say just why, and yet I don't see why I shouldn't say it for them. In the one-man show, the artist comes right out on the top of the world for all men to see. He has a well-lighted, well-appointed room to himself, he is under the auspices of a dealer who will move heaven and earth to sell his pictures, and if he is a good artist he will, by this process, raise up a public for himself in a tithe of the time usual under the usual conditions. The one-man show gives him, in short, an uncommonly good chance to earn a reasonable living. Who can blame him, then, if he sacrifices the organization to his own interests? As a mere matter of economic self-preservation it is hard to see why he should do anything else. Yet there is a distinction to be drawn. The one-man show ought not to drain the Academy to the extent that it does. Since some men find it possible to exhibit in more than one place, why shouldn't more of them do so? I may cite at random a single good example, that offered by the distinguished landscape-painter, Mr. Charles H. Davis. He is addicted to the one-man show, but he sent to the Winter Academy one of his best pictures. Men win admission to the Academy, get the initials A. N. A. or N. A. to add to their names, and then, in more or less short order, quit. To use the English phrase, it isn't cricket.

Besides this question of a sportsmanlike attitude to the Academy there is the question of the artist's involvement in the duty of that institution to the public. I wonder sometimes how much the artist thinks of the large, patient, long-enduring public. People are asked to "support" art, to give it countenance, to examine, and to buy. One would think that, with this idea current, artists would make every effort to appeal to the public in the right way, to "get up" exhibitions so good that the public couldn't resist them. But if

half the unwritten tales are true, this is the last thing they ever think of. Is there any solidarity among artists? I don't know, for I haven't a statistic in me, but I doubt it. If it figures anywhere it is among the little groups, and even about these, strange rumors of domestic infelicity sometimes get afloat, and I think the detached observer may be forgiven if sometimes he stands, watch in hand, with an eye on a given group, wondering with a chuckle how long its harmony is going to endure.

One cheering fact emerges in this world of exhibitions. What with the organizations and the dealers who give the oneman shows, the American artist gets his chance full measure and running over— despite the sad plight of the unknown whose quandary I mentioned at the outset. It had seemed from the bewildering number of exhibitions in New York that nothing more was needed, yet Mr. Walter Clark went to work and formed the National Association of Painters and Sculptors, in which the subscriptions of the lay members and the works contributed by the artist members carry a great set of galleries in the Grand Central Station and add one more to the innumerable agencies for the sale of American works of art. As I write there opens in the Sculptor's Gallery in East Fortieth Street, formerly the studio of the late Charles Cary Rumsey, an exhibition which Mrs. Rumsey has assembled with the aid of a committee of artists. It presents the works of studio assistants of promise, beginners who have no other way of approaching the public. Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney has for several years shown the same generosity in placing exhibition facilities at the service of the tyro as well as of the man of experience. I don't suppose that anywhere in the world the artist, regardless of his talent or of his lack of it, may be so sure of a public audience, so to say, as in New York. We talk of the miles of canvas in the Paris Salon. New York, in the course of a season, beats the French mileage by several parasangs. The circumstance has its sorry aspects. New York sees in the course of a year quantities of the worst works of art, so-called, in all Christendom, piles of the feeble stuff of immaturity, the tastelessness of vulgarity, and, most de

of individuality, his having a view of life and art that is personal and new and beautiful. Mr. Savage has such a view. Besides painting he thinks. He has ideas. He is interested in themes that have a scriptural or symbolical and imaginative significance. He sets the horses of the Apocalypse plunging across a canvas with a world in ruins beneath their feet. It is a pageant of death and destruction, but in the foreground of this "Recessional," as he calls it, there is an image of living motherhood and behind the horsemen you glimpse in a rose-window the everrevolving wheel of the church. There is allegory here, in this as in all of his pictures; in his "Stabat Mater," in his "Expulsion," in his "Bacchanal" there is a play of mind around some theme touching the universal sympathies of mankind. In that alone, in his elevation and poetic seriousness, Mr. Savage achieves distinction. But what also brings him to mind as illustrating the force with which modern American art from time to time challenges the supremacy of European is this artist's mastery of his craft.

He knows how to draw, and there is kinship between his draftsmanship and his ideas. He draws with a free, flowing line, a line that has strength and dignity, a line that has upon it the accent of style. Obviously he is a careful student of nature, but he draws with the touch of a man concerned to lift realistic truth to a higher power. He gives you the fact, but he gives it to you ennobled by art. His color is the pure color which we associate with the Italian Primitives, and he recalls them also in the frequency with which he introduces passages of flat gold. Like the pioneers of the Renaissance, he proves that a picture having a kind of sweet solemnity may also be innocently, almost naïvely, bright and gay. We have never had a more instinctively decorative painter, and if I owned that fearful wild fowl, a king's ransom, I would promptly use it to obtain from Mr. Savage the embellishment of some such vast spaces as were handed over to the early masters

in Florence, Siena, and Assisi. He would, among other things, make them glow. What he had to say would be recondite and possibly obscure, but it would convey its message even to beholders not much given to abstruse reflection. If they felt nothing else they would feel the beauty implicit in this artist's conceptions and in his fine workmanship.

The beauty in his work, the unmistakable authenticity of his art must be taken first of all as testimony to nothing more nor less than an inborn gift. Mr. Savage strikes me as the kind of painter who would have triumphed over any fortuitous circumstances. But that is not to say that he has evolved his work in a vacuum, that he owes nothing to external influences. On the contrary, he owes a heavy debt to the American Academy in Rome, where he spent three precious years. When the late Charles F. McKim founded that institution he meant it to benefit just such a man as Mr. Savage. Realizing how Rome was saturated in beauty and enveloped in grandeur, he foresaw that if the young American artist of imagination were harbored there during his formative period he would draw unforgettable inspiration from his environment. His belief has been repeatedly confirmed in the architecture of John Russell Pope, in the sculpture of Paul Manship and C. P. Jennewein, in the mural decorations of Barry Faulkner and Ezra Winter. It is confirmed again in the paintings of Eugene Savage. He has not painted pseudo-Italian pictures. He has not wasted himself in the effort to echo Raphael or Michael Angelo, or any of the lesser types of the Renaissance. But contact with them all has spurred him to a keener sense of the rectitude of his craft and has deepened his insight into beauty. From tradition he has caught something of that secret elusive air on which imagination is nourished and through the magical power of which a man's dreams take tangible form. McKim would have rejoiced in this disciple of his ideal.