French Art Of Today

For years all the art roads have led to Paris. It is today the center of the art world, a model of taste, skill and knowledge as well as a hotbed of eccentricities, mannerisnis, stilted affectations and sinall trickeries. It takes in the ■world, takes credit for all its virtues and is saddled with all its vices. It is ruled by the quips and cranks of what at times seerns outrageous fortune; it is magnified and belittled; it is overpraised and underpraised; itseems to be rising to lofty heights at times and then again to be sinking into the mire. It is at once the best and the worst art center in the world, a crucible where all elemeuts mix, all become alloyed, and yet all average up a respectable grade of amalgam. That which keeps it from hopeless debasement is the art genius of the French people. Has that art genius ever reached is apogee? Has it fulfilled its mission and voiced the finer feelings of France, as painting once did in Italy and Snain? Did we accept the exhibit at the World's fair as a criterion we , might think her day was about fluished, ' that her artista had said all there was for them to say, but the representaron was inadeqiiate. The French stand sponsor for all the academie emptiness displayed there, for all the studio recitation, all the exaggerated realism, all the tawdry sentiment, and yet at heart they have little sympathy with them. The academie was foisted upon them early in life by the example of Italy and the misdirected eneïgy of royalty. Poussin or Lebrun was no more French in thought or method than Corneille. The mouarchy upheld the academie because it smacked of heroism and the empire because it fostered the military spirit, but the republic has barely tolerated it, and the radicáis have always hated it. It is the bete noir of French art, against which there has been a long series of revolutions. Why, if not that it faiis to represent the French? They are fond enough of talking about sueh loyalists as Poussin, David, Ingres and Cabanel, but the men they love are the rebels, Watteau, Fragouard, Delacroix, Millet, Corot, Courbet. The vivacious, the decorative, the emotional, the sentimental, the positive - all these they love becauae they are national charaoteristics, but the mock heroic, the grandiloquent, the bombastic, have been more the result of formen imihition than the outcrop of