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I think that this movement towards the Church tradition may be unconscious and instinctive, and would perhaps be deplored by many Communists, for whom grandiose bad Rodin statuary and the crudity of cubism better express what they mean by revolution. But this revolution is Russian and not French, and its art, if all goes well, should inevitably bear the popular Russian stamp.
Put on a fresh track by Cézanne's practice, a group of gifted and thoughtful painters began to speculate on the nature of form and its appeal to the æsthetic sense, and not to speculate only, but to materialize their speculations. The greatest of them, Picasso, invented Cubism.
The artists were disturbed by futurism and cubism, although as neither paid they were forced to devote the greater part of their inspiration to the marketable California scenery. But the writers: potential or locally arrived novelists, playwrights, poets, essayists, were the real intelligenzia!
Not only those who, for all their denials denials that spring rather from ignorance than bad faith owe almost all they have to the inventor of Cubism, but artists who float so far out of the main stream as the Spensers and the Nashes, Mr. Lamb and Mr. John, would all have painted differently had Picasso never existed. Picasso is a born chef d'école.
An oration of his on "Perpetuation of Our Free Institutions," a mere rhetorical "stunt" in his worst vein now deservedly forgotten, so delighted the young men that they asked to have it printed quite as the same sort of young men to-day print essays on cubism, or examples of free verse read to poetry societies.
For all their abjurations most of the younger and more intelligent foreigners, within and without the gates of Paris, know well enough that Picasso is still their animator. Wherever a trace of Cubism or of tête-de-nègre, or of that thin, anxious line of the "blue period" is still to be found, there the ferment of his unquiet spirit is at work.
And yet the ballet was intensely modern; always you were aware that Derain had been right through the movement through Fauvism, Negroism, Cubism. Here was an artist who had refused nothing and feared nothing. Could anyone be less of a reactionary and at the same time less of an anarchist? And, I will add, could anyone be less gavroche?
Already some of them seem to be weary of the barrenness of pure abstraction; they see that any fool can hide his own commonplace in cubism as an ostrich hides its head in the sand; but we would rather have honest chocolate-box ladies than the kaleidoscopic but betraying chocolate-box fragments of the futurist. The Artist and the Tradesman
Of them the best known, in England at all events, is Jean Marchand, whose admirable work has been admired here ever since the Grafton Galleries exhibition of 1912. Lately he has moved away from Cubism, but has not become less doctrinaire for that. Indeed, if I have a fault to find with his grave and masterly art it is that sometimes it is a little wanting in sensibility and inspiration.
Had he kept it there John might never have tasted the sweets of insular renown: he would have had his place in the history of painting, however. The French know enough of Vorticism to know that it is a provincial and utterly insignificant contrivance which has borrowed what it could from Cubism and Futurism and added nothing to either.
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